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The Sudden Light and the Trees, Part 1
It was time for the early potatoes. Up Paddaburn Moor the wind, a wild hay sweet, swept over the limestone garden wall to toy at the low and scrappy cabbage greens. The onions, too, were due. Remus prodded the cool earth with his cane and peered at the beans still inching their way up the poles: late this year, or just not meant to grow more. Remus understood.
He knelt by the lean, thick onion leaves, setting the ashwood cane aside and pushing his fingers grey knuckle-hair deep in the dirt. His fingertips were hard, blunt things; he clenched his hands in the soil and shut his eyes. The day was dark and the wind continued to scrape over all his gravel paths, to nudge at the raw and beaten underside of his back door until it tapped, a soft breath of welcome, of entreaty, at its frame.
Remus could never tell if the hut was restless or just old. He could never tell if the shifting and falling of thatch was a plea to leave or let die. The shutters creaked on their hinges, and the unpainted garden gate strained at its own, and Remus’s eyes snapped open at a slight and sudden lurch in the barometric pressure, the faint but distinct ring of forewarning. An animal sensibility, he quelled the disquiet in his stomach and blinked, but his ears pricked to the garden, to the hut, to the broad expanse about it, just to be sure.
Seconds engraved themselves on the heavy spread of rock and mossy browns. Then the verdict: nothing. Only the wind. Only the door. Only the soft swaying of August harvest. Remus’s heart, losing patience for such excitements, was calmed, and he stood, slow on his own hinges, to tug at the stalks of onion and garlic. A creeping disappointment filled the lull, as he did his fraying basket with the dirty bulbs. They fell an enviable, fleshy weight against the wicker and his hands came away shaking. Only the wind. Only the door. He brushed his trembling palms to some semblance of a lesser brown on his trousers, and picked up his cane. His trousers, rough and tattering, hung loose on his sharpened hipbones, the long fall of numb, marked skin and coarse stomach hair.
He furrowed his unkempt grey brows to the cooling horizon; a windstorm approached, perhaps, but no rain. His hands were still not through their tremors as he reached for the basket. The laying of too many lines these months and years past had worn them quicker to the shortcomings of senescence, though the rest of him should have had, by the measure of pure men, far longer to catch up. Remus leaned over his cane as he retreated into his hut, its dubious shelter. There was little point in harping over anything lost now.
To the northwest sat Black Knowe, little more than a slip of a hill with both a bleak and beautiful view. Little Hangleton, the nearest wizarding village, sat north nine months every twelve, dancing a little to the east the other three on account of winter storms. Chirnsike Lodge rested southeast, and the only real threats to Remus’s isolation lay in Whygate, by Shepherdsfield, and Bower, both thankfully some ways east. It was a careful arrangement, one actually made some months before Remus found himself booted from the last flat, a single bag in hand and an absolute lack of coin.
Remus set his basket inside the door and let his cane fall to rest by the slightly crumbling wall. The hut was a small affair, with a tempermental pot-belly stove for a kitchen in the centre of a narrow room that fell sometimes to stone, sometimes to wood, and sometimes to dirt for a floor. His books, worn and often without cover, sat in stacks on a single, broad plank pressed to one of the walls; the plank in turn rested at tentative peace on two stark grey concrete blocks. Remus's robes and common clothes he kept in a small trunk by the small bed; the sheets held the mustiness of the house, and had faded with time, but they had few holes and fewer bugs, and for this Remus was grateful enough. The dark, slightly scuffed trunk doubled as a table; on it now were his nut-brown teapot and a plate with the crumbs of breakfast’s toast.
He had one chair, with legs held together more by magic than by glue. The windows held no glass, the meagre toilet, a slanted and rickety structure, stood outside, and the thatch roof parted both for chimney pipe and anything else that begged entrance. His sealing charms failed weekly, a fact that might have made him fret some many moons ago, before the wolf, upon awakening one night, found itself as helpless as the man - as prone to an inconstancy in the limbs and reflexes, and just as plagued by the longing to rest. Then it no longer mattered if the beast might want to leave; it couldn’t - a slight but welcome positive on a list daily growing thin.
An unexpected draft sped through the scant front passage, and Remus shivered now with his whole body, reaching for the heavy wool-knit blanket folded at the edge of his bed. His shoulders, thick more with scar tissue than living skin, bore the warmth unsteadily; Remus sank to the slumping white mattress, a hand gripping hard at the bedsheet as he draped the piece down to his knees. His chest was tight again; it always was these days, falling like the moor wind in waves, ever present even at its lowest. He bid himself breathe, wondering at the current of air when his holding spells, though weakening, had been reapplied only yesterday, and could surely not be so poor already.
But if they were, so be it. New waves overcame Remus: exhaustion and indifference. He closed his eyes and the draft rose to brush at his ear, to catch in his hair. Only the wind. Only the door. The door was shifting again in its frame. For kilometres upon kilometres there were only hayfields, wildflowers, rock and sky. Only the wind. Here Remus kept himself from others, and others from him. Only the door.
The draft subsided. The door fell silent. Even the thatch stilled its plaintive rustling.
Remus opened his eyes, taking his time to adjust to the light. His heart was calm as he studied the thin and wispish form before him, the figure standing with arms and hands loose at clean trousers. The dark hair was almost lost in the dimness of the hut, but the dark grey eyes, even in the greyness of the matching face, were not.
“Hallo,” came the still-distant voice.
Remus smiled, a rare gesture that turned most all the wrinkles at his mouth, and some very many of the fine white hairs over scar tissue, too. It was easier than expected to match the mild tone, though some time had passed since Remus last spoke aloud, even to himself. But his chest lost its tightness with the words and a welcome resignation took hold, and Remus quickly forgot about the strangeness of speech. Forgotten too was the harvest, and the wind, and the nails on the wood flooring that needed another tamping down.
Forgotten was everything but certainty - certainty that this moment had been far too long in coming.
“Hallo, Sirius,” he said, softly, softly. “Hallo.”