[FIC] Common Woodbrown, Part III
It is two days later - when the cramping in his left leg seems to have mostly dissipated, and the scratches on his arms are less visible - when he drops Harry off with Arthur and Bill, and the youngest Weasley boy. (There is a Cannons match near Uttoxer; the tickets were a birthday gift for Harry from the Weasley clan. Remus knew better than to mention the cost or Chudley’s horrific record, and graciously accepted on Harry’s behalf). He Apparates from the Burrow to the Diagon Alley entrance, a bagged lunch of sliced meats and cold potatoes from Molly stuffed in his coat pocket, and does the most innocuous of his errands first: a little banking, a debt paid off at the stationer’s, a new bottle of black ink.
He saves the Apothecary for last. To get to Knockturn, he avoids the most obvious route. When he was little, and Alastor Moody turned his family’s attention to the Apothecary that was - lightly put - not as likely to pass judgment on the potential “unsavoriness” of its clientele as perhaps its competitor on Diagon would be, Moody had showed him and his father the small iron-wrought gate behind Flortesque’s rubbish bins. He still takes it as an adult - out of habit rather than shame. Pulvis Bumbrate, Apothecary, knows him now, after all, his specific sort of needs included; for his first three years at Hogwarts, Bumbrate had even shipped salves to Madam Pomfrey at the expense and request of his parents.
It is a dark building: constructed of flat stones and thick mortar. There is no name on the sign, just the chemist’s symbol on the sun-bleached board hanging from rusty chains, and the bottles gathering dust in the window. It is just beginning to rain when he reaches the door; when he opens it, the hinges squeak, and Pulvis Bumbrate’s beady eyes find his through the dusky light.
“Ah - Lupin!” says Bumbrate, from where he stands at the register. When Bumbrate speaks his short, broom-bristle beard does all the movement: his mouth is hidden behind the mass of dark hair. He always wears a greasy-looking smock over his tweed suit and shirt-sleeves; since Remus can remember his hands have been stained saffron-yellow, and the smell wafting from the curtained backroom was always thickly noxious, or disconcertingly sweet.
There is someone else at the counter, wearing deep black robes from high-collared neck-to-toe, and Remus pauses just past the threshold.
“Punctual as always,” says Bumbrate. The other figure at the counter does not move.
“If you’re busy - ” he starts. He keeps his hand on the door handle behind him: he has always preferred the shop to be empty.
“Not at all - Mr Snape and I were just finishing up. Be with you in a moment - your shipment’s already arrived.”
“Ah,” he says, because Severus Snape has turned his head: he can see the hook-nosed profile and the side-long glance, the deep-set eyes.
“Just a moment - just a moment,” says Bumbrate again, turning back to the register. There is the clinking of galleons, the soft rustle of paper.
He approaches the counter; his footsteps make the floorboards creak.
“Severus,” he says. His fingertips reach out, touch the edge of the oily-smooth wood of the countertop.
Snape does not speak, but Remus catches a slightly inclination of the head, out of the corner of his eye.
“You know, Lupin - quite a coincidence, your turning up just now - ” Bumbrate’s yellowed fingers are busy with a quill, scratching on an order pad.
“Oh?” Remus lets his eyes wander to a row of pickled newt livers just at eye level, on the opposite wall.
“Ah,” says Bumbrate, handing Snape the inked paper. “Well - Mr Snape here was just speaking to me about some interesting advances being made in the field of bestial-chemical sciences.”
“I’m sorry?” He feels his fingers curl, his nails digging at the wood.
“Well, it’d be particularly of interest to those of your - ah - ” Bumbrate pauses and looks up, the monstrous little betrayal just dripping from the edge of his tongue, as if he didn’t deal in questionable characters with deeply-shrouded secrets every day of his life. “Oh.”
"It's fine," says Remus, tongue pressing against his top teeth. He tries not to sigh. "Severus is -- a friend."
"Ahm," Bumbrate clears his throat; glances briefly at Snape. Remus decides not to think about whether he looks disappointed at Remus’s admission. “Well, we've heard - you might want to keep your ear to ground, as it were. Some of my friends at the Ministry, you know, heard about some recent money going into the Experimental Potions Grant. Could be big developments in the future, you know, for -- er, your condition. You might want to look into signing up for experimental trials, you know - might even be reimbursed."
"Oh, I doubt it," says Remus, trying for kindly.
"At any rate - I'm sure they'd be excited for a subject that wasn't just pulled from that madhouse that's the cells in the Beasts and Being Divisions, eh?"
"Oh, I'm sure," says Remus, feeling kindly slip away, and quite quickly.
"Er," says Bumbrate. "Well, hold on a tic, if you will? I'll just slip back and get the -- er. Your things."
"Ta -- very much," says Remus.
Bumbrate disappears behind the back curtain; his plodding little footsteps fading into silence. He thinks, briefly, of glancing over at Snape, but thinks better of it. He keeps both his hands palm down on the smooth wood counter, and thinks of what he and Harry might make for dinner.
"You'd do well not to listen to him," says Severus.
Perhaps some of that ham, thinks Remus. The ham from Molly, yes.
"Hm?" he says.
"Not the Ministry Grant," says Snape, again. "Those fools have no interest in anything but the advancement of their own careers. Particularly at the expense of others."
"Ah," says Remus. "Yes."
Snape shoots him a look - he can feel it against the side of his face - he knows his cheeks are flushing.
"Lupin," says Snape.
"I heard you," he says. "Thank you for your opinion."
"Don't insult me," Snape sneers. "Those men he’s referring to are no more my friends than they would purport to be yours.”
“You can sleep soundly, Severus,” he sighs. “Your name is clear.”
Severus snorts. “And your attitude is as juvenile as ever. It was meant as pure advice. Do with it as you wish.”
"Mm, and unsolicited, too - " Remus feels himself testing the waters further than he might be comfortable - were the day different; were he less committed, he thinks. "How out of character."
"Bumbrate wasn’t speaking idly - I have seen their general proposals," Snape says, sharply. "It's inhuman."
"Well, that shouldn't be a problem then, should it?" The words feel bright, and pleasingly sharp, against his tongue.
"I beg your pardon."
"I'm not - " he swallows; resists the urge to roll his eyes. "It was a joke, Severus."
"And in poor taste," Snape snarls. "Whether or not you see yourself as deserving of supremely ill treatment does not give others the right to deem your life expendable."
He blinks. He finds himself looking at Snape before he can help it. Not this, he thinks. Not this again.
You are who you are, Sirius had said. Sirius had said that, more than once. Maybe he'd said that all the time. He can't remember. It seems like -- it seems loud in his ears, in the way that Sirius used to say it: vaguely accusing, sort of superior, but so -- it was what he'd said. He thinks maybe it hadn't meant much to him then. He thinks it means less to him now.
“Fine,” he says. He feels his resolve harden. He thinks of the map well-hidden at the Iffley cottage, between two pages of his mother’s copy of Ulysses: the space between Barrow Mere and the sea circled in faded red ink. “Fine. Thank you.”
Snape snorts again and turns away, as Bumbrate returns from behind the curtain, his sickly-coloured hands clutching the small, familiar brown paper bag, tied together with sticky, frayed twine.
“Here you are, Lupin,” Bumbrate smiles at them with his greying teeth; his tongue flickers briefly against his bottom lip, as if tasting the tension bred between them in his absence. “Ah, still here, Mr Snape?”
“Just leaving,” says Snape, brusquely.
“Always a pleasure,” Bumbrate murmurs.
As he hears the floorboards creak under Snape’s retreat; at the screech of the door hinges, Remus is suddenly gripped by the urge to reach out and snatch at Snape’s elbow, to pull him back and either punch him across the mouth, or demand that Snape remain at his side and talk him out of this - this - thing that he is about to do. He will demand, he thinks, to have that acerbic voice of selfishness and cold-hearted rationality at his ear at all times; he will shout into the stagnant and dusty air of the shop that he thinks he is going slowly mad, in the silent space of his own head, with only his own voice convincing him that he is not what he is - that he could possibly be something else, that he could be normal, that he could be whole.
The door shuts.
He hands Bumbrate the money - 4 galleons, 3 knuts.
“Well,” Bumbrate is saying, scratching on the order pad: all bristle beard and black ink and yellow, cracking fingerpad skin. “I think you’d do well to think it over, Lupin - if it comes to anything, might be the best thing for your kind yet, no?"
“Hm,” says Remus. “No receipt, thank you.”
“Of course,” says Bumbrate, and his eyes flicker briefly over Remus’s shoulder, to the dusty, rain-streaked window. “Well - until next month, eh!”
“Ta,” he says, and feels his heart start to pound. After this, he thinks. After this little errand, he thinks, I am going to Common Woodbrown.
He can’t quite make out the shape through the fogged, dirty window, but it appears at though Snape has not gotten very far. When he has shut the door behind him, he thinks perhaps it is only because of the rain - that it is coming down too hard now, and Snape would rather for a break in the weather before venturing out beyond the shop’s awning. But when he emerges, closes the door behind him, Snape takes a step out, onto the cobblestones.
“Next month,” he says.
“Beg pardon,” Remus sighs, tucking his brown bag into his coat pocket, alongside the potatoes and cold meats.
“I am indisposed this month,” says Snape. “The overgrown wretch that is the charge of the Hogwarts’ grounds is making far too many demands of me.”
“Hagrid?” he feels a genuine pang of worry. “He’s not - ?”
“Not ill,” Snape snorts. “But his plants are in anguish, and his chickens keep dying of fright. It is not any of my concern that his incompetence has allowed there to be some kind of grand upheaval in the Forbidden Forest. It is not any of my concern that there are all manner of gigantic hairy beasts and uncontrollable fauna spilling out past their normal boundaries, onto the Hogwarts’ grounds, but Dumbledore has charged me with the duty of all preparing all conceivable varieties of calming potions, until the ogre can bumble his way to a solution.”
Remus blinks, slowly. “I’m sorry?”
“Not this month, but the next - you are to come to Hogwarts.”
“Under whose orders.”
“Under the force of your own common sense,” Snape sneers. “You play the rebel badly, Lupin. If you want to utilize what the sophisticated art of potions-making might offer as a solution, you should do so with the respect it deserves.”
His mouth feels very dry; there is a heaving sort of ache growing under his ribs. He can’t speak.
“If you insist on giving those murderers scientific credibility with the permission to use your blood and body as they see fit, I shall have no recourse but to speak to Albus of it.”
“I,” he says.
“You understand,” says Snape, and looks at him. “That your continued health and general existence is no longer a low-stakes bet. This has been made abundantly clear to me.”
He nods. He swallows, and feels raindrops settle on his wrists. He watches Snape’s heavy, black-draped shoulders disappear into the rain. He taps his umbrella against the cobblestones, and squints out from under the awning, into the cloud and the drizzle, and the looming chimneys and slate roofs, all stained dark-grey by the water. Somewhere beyond the boundaries of Knockturn, a clock tower rings in the hour, and still he can’t seem to move. He has come to hate these spaces - these spaces where memory digs its claws in, and roots him to the ground.
They tried to fix you.
Yeah.
There had been a long silence. It had been raining, like this - cold and sharp. It had been raining that day, and James had stumbled in from Quidditch practice with his face and hands and arms streaked with mud, his teeth flashing eerily white in the firelight of the common room. They were still not at the point where it was acceptable for James to Talk About Quidditch, with Sirius still feeling the brunt of his punishment for that thing, that thing that had happened, which was not so bad as to have anyone killed or carted off to a juvenile detention center for young and dangerous creatures of the night, but was still horrible enough to have Sirius be removed from his position on the Gryffindor team.
He had not yet expressed to Sirius how no longer being able to beat people’s heads in with careening Bludgers was the very definition of getting off easy - he can’t remember now, if he ever did. Maybe once, he thinks, when I was drunk and poor and tired of living off of other people’s floor and generosities. But it wasn’t then. I hadn’t told him then, he thinks, how much I hated him. How much I hated myself because I couldn’t hate him enough to stop wanting him there.
“You don’t have to write this, you know,” Sirius had said, when James had finished tracking greasy, grassy footprints over the carpet and up the staircase, and Sirius was absently spelling away two distinctly purposeful muddy fingerprint stains James had made on the sleeve of his jumper.
There had been an essay. It had been raining, and they had been sitting in front of the fire, and there had been an essay about the history of the creation of the Ministry’s Beast, Being and Spirit Departments, and Sirius had been oddly hyper-sensitive, considering the infamous Question Ten had been a riotous joke twelve months ago.
“I’ll write it,” Sirius had said. “For you.”
“It’s fine,” he’d said.
“But, didn’t you - ” Sirius had started, and then stopped short.
He hadn’t asked him to clarify. He was poised on a forgotten edge of a sentence; his quill was bleeding ink at the tail of a ‘t’- he couldn’t remember what word he was supposed to be writing after 1876, Theius Goldsnout introduced the contractual agreement t -
“They tried to fix you,” Sirius had said. “I thought. Your parents.”
“Yes,” he’d said, and he’d looked up then - because the sentence was obviously a lost cause.
Sirius had looked as if he was chewing on something, tongue working in his mouth, poking at his drawn-in cheeks, the skin on his face was full of shadows and the bits of marrow-coloured light that got through the rain.
“Least with,” said Sirius, finally, and then stopped, shook his head. “I dunno. I mean, with mine, it’s all different. Of course they’d want to fix me. I’m a bloody great blight on their fruitful existence.”
“It’s not that different,” he’d said.
Sirius had narrowed his eyes at him.
“It’s not,” he’d said.
“Yeah, but yours - ” Sirius looked as if he were tasting something unpleasant: nose wrinkled, brow drawn in, his lips edging on a curl. “They were - they loved you something fierce, mate. It’s only to. It’s not because they hate you.”
“I think they do, sometimes.”
He didn’t know why he’d said it. It just came out that way. It felt cold, on his tongue, the words, like little silver ball bearings tripping over his tongue and clicking against his teeth with the cool, watery rush of enamel and oxide.
Sirius snorted.
He’d felt hot; ashamed. He picked at the edges of the parchment and looked down at his scarred, bony ankles, bare under the hems of his trousers. Sirius’s warm arm was pressed against his side and making his stomach contact in small, knotted curls of vague panic.
“I ruined things,” he’d said, finally. “I don’t even remember if it was my fault, anymore. Actually being, you know. Out there. But I. I just know it changed things, and they. They really wanted me to be normal again, you know. I think. I think they knew they’d be happier again if I were cured, somehow.”
“Of course,” Sirius’s elbow had shifted, jabbing his thigh. “We’d all be fucking happy if we were all fucking perfect. Christ.”
“It’s not about being perfect - ” He’d protested.
“Yes, it is,” Sirius had snapped. “If you want it to be the same fucking thing, then it’s the same fucking thing. All it is is people expecting everyone to be what they want them to be, not what they actually are."
"You don't have to be cross about it," he'd said. He hadn't liked the way it made him feel, how it changed the mellowed light of the evening, to hear Sirius's voice sharpen like that, readying for the words that would hurt.
"Yes I do," said Sirius. "Otherwise you'll never learn."
"I'm not going to hear you any better if you shout, you know," he mumbled. He'd tried to shift so there wasn’t so much of Sirius’s warm body pressed against his leg.
"You never hear me," Sirius snapped again, and five spread fingers went down on Remus's thigh: an open palm holding him in place, the hunch of his shoulders putting weight into it. "No matter what. You don't fucking listen."
"I - " he said. "I do. I do listen."
"You don't," said Sirius.
He felt angry: irrational, and hot under the thin layer of his skin. I do, he wanted to say. I listen to everything you say, I listen to you all the fucking time. I listen to you even when I don't want to anymore, because I can't seem to do anything about it.
"Christ," said Sirius, softly. "I can't believe they. You wouldn't even be the same person."
"That was the point, I'd wager," he'd said, somewhere in the direction of his own knees. He remembers what it felt like, then, to have Sirius's fingers grip like five hot points on his thigh.
"Don't fucking joke about that," said Sirius. "I'll break your fucking nose if you actually think that's funny."
"I don't," he'd said. "But it's true."
"Doesn't mean you get to be fucking flippant about lobotomizing your soul," said Sirius, and he'd pulled his hand away.
The fire snapped, and Remus felt the heat of it on his face too suddenly - crawling along his cheeks and down his neck like shame. He bent his head to roll up the parchment, essay unfinished, gut twisted, and Sirius leaned forward into the light of the fire - his whole body swallowed up by silhouette.
"That's not what it was," he'd said.
"Then explain it," said Sirius, sourly. The high, bunched line of his shoulders meant he was rapidly losing patience. "Properly. And not like a fucking book, either."
"I don't know," he'd said. "I was young - I don't really, I mean. I don't really remember much."
"Bullshit," said Sirius.
He smoothed out a wrinkled corner of the parchment, uneasily. He recalled the scent of the day - hot grass and fetid moss, the creaking, salt-crusted pine boards and dusty brick. Mildew, and the pickled fish hanging from the eaves of the small shop. The terrifying smell of the Lethecary's skin, like something empty, and faintly chemical, oxidized: the way it tugged at his nostrils and made him dizzy, made him breathe heavier, with the absence of itself. Like he was half-burned away.
He'd rubbed at his nose, and blinked at his hands, holding his half-finished essay.
"It wasn't just a potion," he'd said. "It was - like a process. I didn't know what a pensieve was, at the time, but I suppose it was sort of like that. It seemed -- complicated. A lot of steps, and all these silly ritualistic things were supposed to happen."
"What, like ablutions?" Sirius snorted.
"And old magic," he'd said. "And. Well, I suppose that's why it's been illegal for so long. It didn't seem particularly safe. Or, you know, particularly domestic. Even if it was impossible."
"Of course it's impossible," Sirius said, suddenly. "You'd probably've died, if you went through with it."
Maybe, he thinks. And then, again. Maybe not. "You don't know that."
"I do, that," Sirius insisted. "Believe me, there's enough of that shite in my family for me to know when something looks too bloody good to be true, all right? Nothing like that comes without a price."
"A price."
"What, you think any old werewolf off the street could just pop in and expect that the only trade-in for a un-cursed soul is a few dozen galleons? Not likely."
"Look, I'm not stupid about it," he'd said. "But you can't assume that's how it works. It's not -- it's not everything I am."
"So?" Sirius had snapped. "You are who you are, and that's part of it."
"Part of what?"
"Part of -- christ," Sirius's hand had flapped in the air: exasperated. "Of you. Because we know you. Everything about you - even the. Even the parts that want to eat my intestines and maybe gnaw on my brains for breakfast, all right, that part too. I know that part too."
There had been silence. There had been the crackling of the fire - the shifting of the logs, and the thin beating of the raindrops on the stones and on the windowpanes.
"It didn't happen," Remus said. "So it doesn't matter, does it."
"It does matter," Sirius had said. "Because you can't -- you can't go around thinking that magic is the cure-all. Magic can't do shite to fix the things we really want."
He'd narrowed his eyes; Sirius's silhouette went blurry and slanted. "You use magic to tie your shoelaces, Pads."
"So? Shoelaces are -- those are shoelaces. They're just -- they're the kind of thing what magic was meant for, aren't they? I mean. Christ, it won't. It won't bring back the dead. It won't let you be someone else. It won't let you live forever. It won't get you real money, or love, or - you know. It doesn't do that. You still have to do the best with what you've got. And that means - it means knowing who you are. Even if it's - painful, or. Something you don't like. You just have to know that about yourself."
He’d closed his eyes. He remembers, then, what it felt like, to be surrounded in darkness and Sirius Black’s voice telling him that love was something human. That love and death were things that escaped magic itself. That they were made you what you were - what you were supposed to be. When he’d closed his eyes then, and Sirius Black had placed his hand, palm down, on his thigh again, and there had been a dim spark of firelight somewhere in the darkness, he had felt forgiven.
And now, he just feels so angry. I’d give anything, he thinks. Anything to be free. To be totally free of that part of me, that you had all that fucking power over. I couldn’t even own my own soul, because what little I had, I owed to you. I hate you, he thinks, desperately. I hate you. I hate you. I hate that I will never stop thinking about you.
He opens his eyes. Knockturn Alley curves away into grey and shadow and rain. He knows that by the time he arrives at where he is going to, the sun will be setting again over the shore of Common Woodbrown.
--------
He stands at the doorway. He has a bag of cold meat and potatoes in one pocket, and some salve for his aching shoulder in the other, and there is rainwater drying in his hair, and he knows what it is like to feel as though the world has entirely left him behind, and he knows what it is like to feel unconditional love for a tiny body, and he has more scars along his face and wrists and legs and belly, now - but he feels as if he is nine years old again. His heart is thudding against his ribcage; he can taste the way the rattling of his skeleton sets his teeth on edge.
At his back, there is the sea. There is the dying sun: it is as though this town cannot exist without the exacting light of a fading day, where everything solid eventually fades into the same ethereal spark at the edge of the ocean. It smells the same: rotted salt and the flesh pulled freshly from the curls of the sea.
It is as though the moon has never touched this town, he thinks. Something else must govern the tides, he thinks. It’s all blood and ancient wood and heat, he thinks. It tastes unnatural, he thinks. It smells unnatural. It looks unnatural - cloaked in the way that night never seems to fall and the sun never seems to be anything more than pure light, diffused.
He stands at the doorway.
It was foolish, he thinks, to even consider the possibility that the Lethecary would still exist.
He stands at what used to be the doorway. He remembers it as a doorway. When he reaches out to touch the edge of the opening in front of him, he remembers the gleaming shine of the wood - catching the light of the sun. He remembers the smooth, golden sighing of the door when it opened in front of them. After all these years, he can still remember these things, where now there is only a dull, mossy hole. Clods of peat at his toes, and a dilapidated yawing of a door. Where he remembers the singed light of the interior - the blinding reflections of the sun against the surfaces, the gilding, the mahogany and the cherrywood, the tin bowls and the jewelry on the Lethecary’s long fingers - there is a only a deathly still, light-swallowing darkness.
He steps inside. He wipes away a cobweb, and he stumbles against a broken chairleg.
He expects the Ministry must have sent Aurors to shut it down not long after they had first been there - his Mum, his Da, and him. They must have shut it down. It was illegal, he thinks. It can’t have been long after, he thinks. The dust and mud and dried salt looks at least a decade deep on the walls.
There is a pile of stagnant driftwood where he had once stood, where the Lethecary had taken his face in those long-fingered hands, and he had felt the heat of those jeweled rings against his flesh, almost all the way through his cheeks, to his tongue. He kicks it - the driftwood - with a disaffected toe, and thinks about how hungry he is.
The stone basin is gone.
He clears away a bit of the broken furniture in a corner, and wipes some of the dust and salt from one of the unbroken panes of glass in the window that faces the sea. He turns a small table right-side up, and he finds a small scarred stool in what he supposed was the Lethecary’s bedroom - a tiny room with one window and a mangled, rusty iron skeleton of springs that once was a cot.
He sets the stool next to the table, and sheds his coat. He sits on the stool, and he takes out the lunch that Molly has packed for him, and he unwraps it carefully in front of him, on the table. He eats it slowly, methodically. When he is finished, he folds up the loose paper and twine, and he looks down, and sees his shaking hands.
Oh, he thinks.
I’ve failed, he thinks.
I was willing, he thinks. And I was too late.
I would have done it, this time, he thinks.
“I would have done it,” he says, to the sunset.
He closes his eyes, because he feels something like Sirius’s hand - palm down - on his thigh.
Fuck you, he thinks.
“Fuck you,” he whispers. “Fuck you.”
“I would have done it,” he says.
Why, says something like Sirius’s voice.
“I don’t know,” he says.
You don’t need to, it says.
“Why not,” he says. “Why not. I’m - I’m just so tired.”
You don’t need to, it says again.
“Why not,” he whispers.
Because I know you, it says.
“You don’t,” he hisses. “You don’t. Because I thought I knew you.”
There is silence. There is the hissing of the waves. There is the pumping of his own monstrous blood in his own monstrous veins and his own monstrous brain expunging thoughts and his own monstrous lungs breathing thick monstrous breaths, and his own monstrous heart still hopelessly in love with horrible monstrous things.
You do, it says.
He opens his eyes. He hasn’t realized that he had closed them.
His hands have stopped shaking.
“What,” he whispers, to the dying light.
Oh, he thinks.
There is nothing there. It is only him, and the sunset, and the waves, and the refuse of something false he had believed, beyond all the doubt screaming in his bones, to be true.
The sun disappears behind the horizon, and he stands. He thinks, oh, my god, and the world plunges into sudden clarity.
He thinks: Sirius.
--------
Harry falls asleep at the kitchen table, halfway through a sentence about the Golden Snitch. Remus sips his tea for another minute or so, before he sets down the mug and gathers Harry into his arms. He carries him slowly up the stairs to the small bedroom, and gently tucks him into bed. Harry only wakes once, when Remus is buttoning up his pajama top.
“Remus?” he asks.
“Yes,” says Remus. And that’s all. Harry is asleep again.
He pulls the coverlet up, against Harry’s chin, and he sits on the edge of the mattress and smoothes Harry’s hair back from his forehead. He leans over, and kisses the bridge of Harry’s nose.
After tonight, he thinks. After tonight, he thinks, things might change forever, for us.
And he turns out the light, and he goes downstairs to the kitchen again to his cooling cup of tea, and he gathers a piece of parchment and a pen and he writes a letter to Dumbledore.
I would like to see you, he writes. As soon as possible, he writes.
Thank you, he writes. He signs it, and sends it, and he spends the rest of the night sitting up awake, unable to sleep, watching the moon slide across the kitchen floor.
--------
Dumbledore arrives by Floo, shortly past ten the next morning. Remus is thinking about finally changing his clothes while cooking waffles for Harry, and Harry is drinking pumpkin juice at the kitchen table, when there is the soft whistling of the hearth, and Dumbledore strolls into the room.
“Good morning, Harry,” says Dumbledore. “Happy belated birthday.”
“Hi,” says Harry, wide-eyed.
Remus feels his tongue go thick, unsteady. He puts down the spatula and methodically wipes his hands on a dishtowel.
“Thank you,” he says. “For coming so quickly.”
“Not at all,” says Dumbledore.
“Would,” he says. “Would you like a waffle?”
“Delightful,” says Dumbledore. “Do you mind, Harry?” He gestures at the empty place setting at Harry’s side.
“No,” says Harry.
Dumbledore settles calmly in the chair, his long sleeves pooled around his clasped hands, where they rest on the table. “Might I trouble you,” he says, genially, “for a glass of pumpkin juice?”
“Ah,” Remus reaches for the refrigerator, feeling half-blind and suddenly childish. “Of course.”
His hands, he notes, are remarkably steady as he hands Dumbledore the glass.
“Much obliged,” says Dumbledore.
“I think,” he says. “I think mistakes have been made.”
“Oh?” says Dumbledore. His eyes have taken on that familiar, steely glaze; Remus steadies himself against the edge of the sink.
“What if,” he says. “I mean, what if we’ve all managed to make a horrible mistake?”
“Mistakes are - unfortunately - made far more often than most of us would care to admit,” says Dumbledore. He raises his glass, and takes a slow sip. Harry is watching him with wary, curious tilt of his head. “And all the more often in times of war and deep unrest, I think. Which says little inspiring about the human condition except for the fact that we seem to be, still, quite human.”
“Albus,” he says. “I think Sirius is innocent.”
Don’t test me, he thinks, as he meets Dumbledore’s eyes through the silence. Don’t you dare test me. This isn’t a goddamned joke, he thinks. This isn’t a trick. Don’t you fucking test my loyalty, he thinks, and presses a palm back against the countertop, to keep his vertigo at bay. He feels, distinctly, a press of warmth, like someone else’s hand, on the top of his fingers, and he takes a deep, rib-emptying breath.
“The waffles!” cries Harry, as a plume of black smoke erupts from the direction of the stove-top.
“Bloody - ” Remus leaps for the skillet, snatching up the spatula and clicking off the flame, just in time to save the entire mess from a severe burning. “Sorry - sorry, Harry - it’s all right. I’ll have this one, okay? I’ll just make you another.”
“Nonsense,” says Dumbledore, from behind Harry’s head. “I’ve always preferred my breakfast to be slightly charred.”
Remus stares at the half-blackened mess in the pan. “I couldn’t - ” he starts.
“Why would you think that?” says Dumbledore, evenly.
“Think what,” he whispers.
“That Sirius Black is not guilty of the crime of which he has been convicted. To which he has confessed?”
It takes all the effort he has left in his body not to look directly into Harry’s eyes at that moment. And it feels as though it actively weakens his spine, to have to ignore him, to talk over him, about the murder of his parents.
“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. “Yet.”
“You don’t know why,” repeats Dumbledore.
“I don’t know yet. I only know,” he says. “I only know that. That if I don’t do something about this - this feeling - it’s going to be. It would be an insult - to. To James and Lily.”
“You had none of these reservations four years ago,” says Dumbledore.
“I know,” he says. “Except that we all thought he wasn’t. That he couldn’t have.”
“Time does strange things to the mind,” says Dumbledore. “And the mind does strange things to memory.”
“Harry,” he says, and he looks at him. “I’ll bring you your waffles in the other room, all right?”
“Okay,” says Harry, scrambling down from his chair. “Can I take my juice?”
“Ah,” he grips at the edge of the counter again. “Of course - just. Of course. I’ll be in in a moment.”
Harry turns the corner, and disappears from view. Remus waits until he hears the soft creak of the old springs in the sofa, and he closes his eyes. He closes his eyes, and he waits, and he feels the sunshine filtered in through the checkered curtains on the raised planes of his face, and he thinks of how insane he must look, of how - if he tried - explaining his actions to Dumbledore would make him seem utterly mad.
“It doesn’t - ” the words come before he is fully aware of them, it seems. “It doesn’t add up. When you think about it, now. It doesn’t make any sense. Why - why would James and Lily have - we all thought there was someone, someone who was passing information. But none of the signs pointed to - ” he swallows. “They all pointed to someone like me, didn’t they? Someone already at the fringes. Someone just holding on to the edges of the Order. The Order that you crafted. With your own hands, no less. It - it never looked like it could have been - not someone like Sirius. If you had had the slightest doubt - the slightest doubt that Sirius could have betrayed your trust right under your nose, you know - I know - you never would have allowed him to be James and Lily’s Keeper.”
Dumbledore remains silent.
“If I’m wrong,” he whispers. “If there’s - if I’m wrong. What harm is there is trying to know the truth?
“A great deal, I’m afraid,” says Dumbledore. “But none more concrete than the feelings currently guiding you, I fear.”
“Not concrete?” He feels the bristling starting, deep and slow, under his skin. He feels the heat rising, in his cheeks. “I trusted him. I trusted him with more than my life.”
“Trust is a fragile thing,” says Dumbledore softly. It sounds vaguely sad.
“But not love,” he says.
“Ah,” says Dumbledore, and - for the first time - he looks away.
“I knew - ” he says. “I know him.”
On the table, Dumbledore’s fingers slowly unknit, re-knit, unknit again, to lay flat on the surface. “What do you need?” he says.
“His trial,” he says, hoarsely. “The one he never had.”
“It is far too late for that,” Dumbledore raises his eyes again.
“But - ”
Dumbledore holds up a hand; the words stop short in Remus’s throat. “If you are looking for a jury of his peers, however, I believe you already know where to begin.”
“What,” he starts, and then stops. There, in the morning sunlight in the kitchen, with Albus Dumbledore drinking a glass of his pumpkin juice, about to take a mouthful of half-burned breakfast, he knows. It makes his stomach sink, slightly - in the way he used to feel obscenely, nauseously excited at the very beginning razor’s edge of the planning of some particular prank, or that night before they finished the Map, or the first time he leaned across the distance between their two bodies and kissed Sirius Black on the mouth.
“Delightful,” says Dumbledore, wiping his mouth. “If it’s agreeable with you, I believe I’ll just take this with me.”
“Sir,” he starts.
“Always a pleasure, Remus,” says Dumbledore, as he stands. “Harry looks very well - you should be proud.”
He clenches his teeth; nods. “Sir.”
“Expect her Floo address by owl very shortly,” says Dumbledore, and he Apparates from the kitchen with a sharp snap of air - waffle already tucked away in his robes.
Her? thinks Remus, senses buzzing.
But when the owl arrives an hour later, it begins to coalesce. He unrolls the small bit of parchment with Harry sitting distractedly at his side, while the owl pecks at the remains of Harry’s (unburned) breakfast, and he runs his fingers slowly over the words inscribed in Dumbledore’s own hand. Implicit permission for this wild chase:
Narcissa Malfoy
Malfoy Manor Estates, Wiltshire
East Wing, Blue Rose Antechamber
Second-smallest fireplace, iron mantle, below the bust of Delphi.
And then, just below:
I have told her to expect you.
III. The Crossing
--------
I’m so sorry, he’d said, hands stuffed deep into his pockets, feeling like a petulant child. I’m so sorry, Molly. I feel as though I’ve been -
Nonsense, said Molly Weasley, briskly. We love having Harry with us. And she had smiled, and asked if he had eaten breakfast.
Of course, he’d said, don’t trouble yourself. I promise, he’d said, I’ll be back to pick up Harry in a few hours. Only a few hours, he’d said. It’s just - it’s a quick errand.
You know, Molly had said, into his ear, as she hugged him goodbye. I know this lovely girl, absolutely lovely girl - you should really perhaps start to think about -?
He laughs, now, at the thought of it. He stands at the threshold of his own fireplace in Iffley Cottage with a handful of Floo powder, and laughs at the thought of Molly Weasley finding him a nice girl to settle down with. It used to be so much easier, he thinks, to beg werewolf, rather than have the first thought be I’m so sorry, it’s just that I’m in love with Sirius Black, and I think I have to go free him from prison, if you’ll just excuse me.
He looks down at his closed fist, at the slightly-frayed sleeve of his robes, at the blue veins of his wrist, at his thin skin, and he takes a slow, deep breath. He takes a slow, deep breath, and he steps into the fireplace, and he lets the powder fall to his feet.
The Floo spits him out in an airy room, full to the ceiling with sunshine and the faint scent of lilies. There isn’t a speck of ash at his feet, and he picks gingerly at a sleeve, seeing the smudgy remnants of the Iffley cottage’s less immaculate hearth. He presses a hand to the mantle: cold iron, wrought vines. Translucent blue roses climbing the wallpaper. To his right, a marble bust of an oddly androgynous head. Drapes turned half-sheer and golden by the sifting sunlight. Delicate, lacy upholstery on the high-backed chairs. A small, cherry-wood table, set with sparkling china.
Narcissa Malfoy, in the doorway, dressed in green silk.
“Ah,” he says. “Good morning.”
Her head tilts, very slightly. Her chin still has that way of staying just this side of upright, so that even though she was always the smallest of the Black sisters, she never seemed to look up at anything or anyone. He remembers it most vividly from a photograph. She was young - her sisters were young, they looked at you with dull, dark eyes, and once and a while, Andromeda would flash the edge of a smile. It had been winter - they were wearing furs, and Narcissa’s cheeks had the beginnings of a flush. Sirius had had the photograph for a year, tucked against the inside of the lid of his trunk. After April of first year, it disappeared.
“Dumbledore - ” he starts.
“I would like to make it clear,” she interrupts him, unfolding her arms, and crossing to the high-backed chairs. “That this conversation will be over the moment I decide it to be so.”
He presses his tongue against the inside of his teeth, and tries not to wince. Not that he had thought this would be particularly easy -
“Is that understood?” Her eyebrows arch perfectly - not a wrinkle in her face.
“Of course,” he says.
“Sit,” she offers one of the chairs to him: her palm upturned with the flash of diamonds, at her wrist. “Please.”
“Ah,” he sits, carefully, tries not to follow her eyes as she tracks the trail of Iffley cottage ash that follows him. “Thank you.”
She crosses her legs, when she sits across from him; she offers him tea, wordlessly. He can only shake his head, mouth dry - his pulse is racing again; he can’t - why, he thinks. Why am I here, have I gone absolutely mad, is this -
“This is not out of any obligation to you,” she says; she pours herself a cup, eyes lowered but hardly demure. “That I am agreeing to speak with you.”
“Then - ” he wonders, madly, if her husband is aware that he is here. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I do,” Narcissa says, raising her eyes. “And as it’s none of your concern, I don’t feel the need to explain.”
He folds his hands in his lap, tightly. “Of course,” he says. “I’m not entirely sure what Dumbledore has said to you. I have - some questions.”
“About my cousin,” she says, teacup halfway to her painted mouth.
“Yes.” It sounds braver than he feels.
“You aren’t an Auror. You certainly aren’t involved with the Ministry in any capacity I’m aware of - as Lucius would certainly be aware if there were any investigations being made, considering how thoroughly our names were - rightly - cleared after the Inquiry.”
“That’s - ” he clears his throat. “This has nothing to do with the Ministry.”
“Then why?”
“You’re his family.” The words come to him before he is aware. Ah, he thinks. Again, Dumbledore, he thinks, forcing all of our hands. “You knew him - you’ve known him for his whole life.”
She smiles, over the rim: it is a slow sweep of red. “We have not been ‘family’ for some time now, as I’m sure you’re completely aware, Mr Lupin.”
“What I meant, was - ”
“I know what you meant.” She lowers the cup. It clinks softly against the saucer. She holds it just so: half a foot from her navel, balanced on her palm. “Have you really come all this way to ask me what I think about Sirius Black?”
“Perhaps,” he smooths a crease from his lap. “In a manner of speaking.”
“I make no assumptions of your ‘manners’, Mr Lupin. You may ask me directly, or may not ask me at all.”
“Well - ” From beyond the drapes, the windows, perhaps in the gardens, there is an eerie cry - the scream of a peacock. “That’s. Certainly fair.”
She takes a sip of tea; when he looks to her again, he sees that her eyes have not left his face. He feels the slight, involuntary twitch of his ribs, the hyper-awareness of his own body; how it must appear to those people that are not himself, out there in the world. How his nose is rather large, and eyes are plain and creased at the edges, how his hair is streaked with grey and how his face and neck bear the traces of his own claws, he thinks.
And then, unbidden: how Sirius once called him beautiful. How it almost stopped his heart from beating, for that moment. How he had sat where he was in the single chair in the middle of Sirius’s kitchen, with dry toast halfway to his mouth, and crumbs and newspaper ink on his fingers, and had to deal with the fact that this objectively gorgeous young man was looking at him, and calling him beautiful.
And you’re daft, he had said. What of it.
Was that a lie, he thinks. Was that a lie, too? On top of everything else - he thinks, on top of all those things we thought, those things we thought we knew about - was that moment -
He closes his eyes. He opens them. Narcissa Malfoy is still watching him.
Well, he thinks. Well -
“Do you believe he was working for - for He Who Must Not Be Named?”
“No.” She has been expecting the question, clearly.
“No?”
“Do I believe he was capable of betraying his allies and dearest loved ones? Certainly.”
“What - ” His vision narrows. He feels - wildly, for only a moment - that he should have a quill and parchment in hand. “How - how do you mean?”
“Sirius didn’t have a single ounce of courage in his body, Mr Lupin. It takes courage to be truly loyal to the ones you love - in the face of so much - adversity. His brother was the courageous one. Always.”
“- His. Regulus?”
A thin boy. Slytherin green and Black eyes. Always a pale pallor to his skin. Small fingers. A sun-blinking glimpse of him, caught in the air, high on a broomstick. A shadow in the corridors. A heavy pull on Sirius’s heels, he remembers.
“Yes. Regulus.” When she speaks, he smells the very faintest push of very female blood - a quick pulse of it suddenly raised to the surface of the air. There is the slight bleed of colour, in her cheeks. “I don’t care to know what you thought of him as schoolchildren, but if you came here for my opinion, that is it. Regulus was twice the man Sirius will ever be - even as his dreadful, wasting life continues behind the walls of Azkaban, and Regulus’s was cut cruelly short.”
“I don’t understand,” he says, carefully.
"No, I don’t suppose you could," she says. "Since we are born into what we are."
His lips feel chapped. I should have taken that tea, he thinks, when it was offered. "Sirius used to say that that didn't matter. To him."
"He was a fool," she says. "It's in his blood."
It chills him, to hear it. He feels the ice radiating out from his lungs, his chest, out through his limbs, to his fingertips. His knits them together more tightly, kneading at his palm with a stiff thumb. "What is," he asks. "This -- you think this was inevitable, what he did?"
Her eyes narrow - the blue almost disappears completely. "It has nothing to do with that. The moment he chose to deny himself - publicly, privately - he made himself a coward. It's as simple as that. To commit his entire being to putting on a show for the world - of course it would drive him to madness, possibly. Or worse."
"A coward?"
"Do I offend you, Mr Lupin?" She sets down the cup and saucer with small, precise movement of her fingertips.
"Not me," he says. "No."
"You've come to ask me what I thought of him, haven't you?"
"Ah," he says. "Perhaps. Yes."
"Then that is it. My cousin, Sirius Black, was a coward. He was incapable of love, because he tried too hard to love only himself. He was incapable of peace, because he fought himself at every turn."
“Then. Then, why would he do it?”
“Because he has a selfish soul,” Narcissa whispers, sharply. “It is all I know of him, and it is the only answer I have for you.”
“You never heard - ”
“What would I hear?” she snaps, fingers tightening on the arm of her chair. “Where would I hear it?”
He swallows, tightly. “I never meant to imply.”
“You certainly did.”
He feels his lungs fill with air again, slowly. “My apologies.”
Her fingers loosen, gradually. He sees the porcelain in her skin again - the flush of her neck and cheeks fading away - and the well-crafted steadiness come into her gaze.
“Only one of them ever did anything worth remembering,” she says. It sounds like a wisp of steam; it sounds like the secret he may have come for, if he came for anything at all. “And it is clear now that it will never be remembered. And it was certainly not Sirius who did it.”
It doesn’t make sense, he thinks. Sirius, he thinks, was too brave for his own good. Sirius, he thinks, whatever he was - was he that? Had he been - truly - terrified his entire life? Could that possibly have driven him to -
“His brother - ” he says, before he realizes the words are surfacing. “Regulus. When he disappeared - we were. I only heard about it, afterwards.”
It is clear she is wary - watchful. Her neck has that tilt again, her chin on the rise.
“We never spoke of it.”
“He wasn’t at the service,” she says, plainly. “He was not welcome.”
“His mother - ”
"She's ill," says Narcissa. "And I hardly expect she'd agree to speak with you even if she weren't."
There is a long, thin silence. Outside, in the sky, the sun slips behind a veil of clouds, and the room goes strangely dull. Half-dark, no longer lit from the outside-in, everything falls into a cold sort of greyish being - his own hands in his lap, the porcelain on the mantle, the weft of the tapestries, the lines of her face, turned away. The gilding on the portrait frames have gone dull. He thinks he sees a thin sifting of dust on the windowsill.
"She misses them."
He feels his heart skip - involuntarily.
"She slips from sanity, sometimes." Her voice has gone quite flat - all heavy, old lace. "The Healers are convinced its a natural process. But it's wrong, to hear her talk about them as if they're still alive. As if she still thinks of them the way she used to when we were children. As if she still cares for him."
"She is his mother," he says.
She looks at him. Her fingers are pressed against the rim of the small cherry-wood table, grazing the edge of the china saucer. Her knuckles are white, the tips of her nails flushed pink with the collection of blood there - the force of her thinking.
“We’re done,” she says, finally. Her lashes lower. “Mr Lupin.”
He stands - his knees feel like water. “Thank you.” He tries for gracious, and ends up only feeling the vertigo rattle soundly in his skull. “For your time.”
--------
A letter arrives one week later, via the talons of a proud-looking Great Grey. Harry asks if he can pet it, and Remus staunchly refuses, after catching a particular gleam in its eyes when it notices the size and general plumpness of Harry's fingers. They put a bit of cold chicken on a plate for it instead, and Remus leaves the letter tucked in his pocket for the rest of the evening, because he and Harry are almost finished Wind in the Willows, after all.
When he opens it, finally, it is by a single candle in his bedroom and well past midnight.
If you go tomorrow at four o'clock, it says, in thin, swooping lines of ink. She will see you.
--------
Part IV