[FIC] Common Woodbrown, Part II
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Hogwarts swallows him up. It is full of that quiet, emptying buttery light of deep night - when everyone is sleeping except the candlesticks and the dying hearths. On the inside, he feels suddenly very small again: like a useless little lumpy bit of sinew and blood and unusable, prepubescent magic inside the yawing expanse of time and stone that knit together the walls and the stairs and the tapestries and even the shadows in the corners. He holds Harry tighter, as Hagrid leads them down a corridor and the torches on the walls flicker at the moment of their passing. It was how he felt at eleven, the first time he set foot in the doors - awed and overpowered and so happy to be so terrified of everything, suddenly, because everything was so mysterious with its own potential - before he was tripped by a boy with coal-black hair and very expensive-looking shoes.
Oi, the boy had said. Watch where you're going.
You tripped me, Remus said, to the boy's shoes.
I know, the boy had said. And I said, watch where you're going, didn't I.
Right, Remus had said, and realized that punching a stranger in the mouth would probably be the exact opposite of Keeping a Low Profile, which had been what he had promised his Da, and his Mum, and the Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. He'd felt only a mild sense of retribution when only a few hours later, the boy was sorted into Gryffindor, and looked utterly miserable about it.
Hagrid mutters the password at the old stone gargoyle, at the bottom of the stairs. When the staircase opens up to them, the scrape of stone and mortar makes Harry stir, shifting against Remus's shoulder, a sweaty fist pushed just under Remus's adam's apple, against the stubble on his throat. Remus's arms are a little numb: it has been months since he last saw Harry, maybe much more since he last held him. I've forgotten, he thinks, how heavy other people's bodies can be, however small. But Harry sleeps as they climb the stairs; he continues to rest his fat cheek on Remus's collarbone, and breathe very deeply against Remus's heart.
He feels daunted, at the door. Hagrid reaches over his shoulder to knock, twice - and very loudly - and there is no response. He shifts Harry in his arms, and puts an open palm to the dark wood, and pushes, very slightly. The door swings open, soundless, skimming the carpet and the stone: cutting a smooth arc through the air.
The office is mostly dark, lit only at the very back by a row of haphazard candles, and a lantern on the large desk. Remus stills in the doorway - his eyes adjust slowly, to the darker haze - and there is the Headmaster, half-turned to the door, with his head bare and his spectacles very low on the bridge of his nose, and an unreadable sternness on his face.
“Oh, dear,” says Dumbledore, very quietly.
“Beggin’ pardon, professor,” Hagrid rasps, from over Remus’s shoulder. Remus feels him push forward, and Remus stumbles into the room, Harry still tight against his chest. “Lupin, here, he found me in Diagon Alley, and I though’ - he said you’d owled ‘im.”
“I did no such thing,” says Dumbledore, still staring directly at Remus, who feels a spine-jarring shiver run up the length of his body.
“Bu’ - ” Hagrid makes a rough noise, turning.
“Peter,” rasps Remus, finally. “Peter owled me. He said - he said something was wrong. And Rubeus said - James. And Lily?” His voice skitters, over the sound of their names. Somewhat distantly, he feels Harry’s tiny fist gripping at the front of his shirt.
Dumbledore straightens, his shoulders very square, and his beard very long and very white. Behind him, a thick mass of red and gold-maroon feathers shifts, and makes a downy-rustling sound: Fawkes opens one bright, coalstone eye.
“Sit down, Mr Lupin,” says Dumbledore.
“No,” he manages; it sounds sharper than he feels. “No - I won’t. Is it - how on earth is it possible?”
“In the simplest of ways,” says Dumbledore, and his gaze finally drops: down, to the soft tuft of Harry’s dark head.
“What does that - ” Remus shakes his head, feels something rattle against his temple. “What does that mean.”
“It means we have been betrayed,” says Dumbledore.
The room is silent. There is a long expanse of night sky in the open window behind Dumbledore’s broad shoulders; purplish-black sky that seems too deep, too open, too far-away and too soft, and too-bright stars pricking at Remus’s eyes. There are sheer curtains hanging limp at the edge of the window. The thick night has swallowed the breeze; it is cool, and still, and utterly quiet. Remus feels, for a moment, as if he is forbidden to breathe.
“There was a spy.”
“There was a spy,” says Dumbledore.
“Who - ” It is Hagrid who speaks - his large face contorted, his hands knotted together in front of his chest, tugging at the buttons of his tweedy waistcoat, the furry collar of his coat.
“Pardon me?” says Dumbledore. “Hagrid - I am not at liberty to make conjecture to anyone, not at the moment.”
“They were under protection,” Remus whispers. “They went into hiding. There’s only one person it could be.”
Dumbledore looks to him again - it is sharp and sad; the tiniest flick of his eyebrows are the only sign of it. “Your logic, Mr Lupin,” he says. “Is unfortunately sound.”
“Who,” he echoes. “Who was their Keeper?”
A beat. Fawkes shifts in his cage.
“It was Sirius Black,” says Dumbledore.
“No,” he says, firmly: immediately. No.
Dumbledore is silent. He looks weary - and it makes Remus irrationally angry - hot under the skin, as if something scalding were poured down his throat and was coiling in his belly, radiating out through sluggish veins and half-severed nerves. How dare he, he thinks, Spare me your bloody worldliness, he thinks, savagely, and he shakes his head.
“You’re wrong,” he says.
“I am not,” says Dumbledore, in a voice edged with limited patience.
“He - ” says Remus. “He would never.”
“You are in no position, I think, to make any judgments on what Sirius Black has done in the past six months, Mr Lupin. We are both aware enough of that.”
It is cruel, however true.
“Fuck you, sir,” he snaps, hoarsely.
Hagrid gulps, and makes a move as if to cover Harry’s ears.
“If we are going to resort to crudeness, Remus, please drop the pleasantries,” murmurs Dumbledore. “It hardly suits you.”
He swallows down a hot surge of bile. Something is buzzing in his ears again. “Imperius - ” he manages.
“Possible,” says Dumbledore. “Though we have not the time for those complex speculations, I’m afraid.”
He feels his lip curl, involuntarily, chill air searing the point of his eyetooth. His mouth is very dry. “Time,” he parrots. “ - what d’you mean - time. They’re. They’re already dead.”
“The last time anyone saw Sirius Black,” says Dumbledore, briskly, folding up his hands into the sleeves of his robes, and crossing to his desk - finally, finally, turning his back on Remus. “He was at the ruins in Godric’s Hollow, handing over his motorbike to Hagrid, and requesting that he take Harry with him. Hagrid prudently - for the time being, at least - followed my instructions that, were anything to happen to Harry, he was to be delivered under my supervision to his aunt and uncle in Little Whingeing. Considering we still have very little in the realm of concrete information, I think it prudent to continue on the assumption that Harry is very much still in danger, and that before we act on pursuing Sirius Black, Harry should be placed safely with his aunt and uncle.”
“What aunt and - ” Remus feels a distinct tightening in his chest, the fleeting sensory experiences - hazy with wedding wine and Sirius Black’s fingertips against his forearm - the smell of a thick, flaking cigar, too much perfume, a sharp jawbone and thick, black, pudgy-looking eyes.
“No,” he says. “Not them.”
“There is no alternative, I’m afraid.” Dumbledore turns again, watching him over the rims of his spectacles.
“No alternative?” He knows he is squeezing Harry too tightly. “What about you - here? Or, Hagrid - or - ” A choking pause. He won’t say it. He can’t seem to get it past his thickening tongue, the cracking of his lips.
“You?” Dumbledore murmurs.
“Yes,” he rasps. “Yes. I could - ”
“You could not,” says Dumbledore.
“They can’t even do magic - ” he clears his throat; tries again. “How on earth could they keep him safe against - ”
“Prejudice?” Dumbledore eyes look highly unamused, whatever his tone might suggest. “From you, of all people.”
“It’s not prejudice, it’s reality,” he insists. “What good will they be against an - an army of murderous wizards?”
“Indeed,” says Dumbledore. “What good were we all.”
It has been hitting him very slowly, since the moment that Hagrid lifted the edge of the sheet and showed him Harry Potter's resting face. It has been coming in a long, slow thread - the realization of things, How Things Are Now - a little coil of nausea, worming its way up from his groin, into his throat. It is starting to solidify. He is tasting bile, now. His eyes feel worn, scratched at. His throat is stuck up with something thick and heavy. His limbs feel numb.
What good were we all, he thinks, and blankly considers where the best place to vomit might be, were it to happen sooner than he expected.
“Mr Lupin,” says Dumbledore.
He realizes he has been staring. He blinks, once, and drops his eyes. He sees, immediately, the dark hair of Harry’s small head.
“Please,” he says.
“No,” says Dumbledore. “I’m afraid not.”
“After everything,” he says, feeling the tug of bile again. “After all that’s happened, now - with Harry, and. You knew they suspected me.”
“Yes,” says Dumbledore.
“Did you?” Remus says. “Did you think it was - you must have thought it was me.”
Dumbledore folds his fingers together, across his chest. “I think that is an unfair assumption, Mr Lupin.”
“How is it unfair?” Remus begins to feel a tightening in his chest; a hot irrationality hammocking heavily under his ribs. “It’s. It’s not.”
“Because I’ve never said as much. I think - ”
“No, you - you let them think it was me,” he snaps. “After all your posturing about my relative equality, after all your help and what you did for - and - you let them chase me out of London, out of my life, however poor it was. Who cares what you think.”
The candles flicker. The air in the room has gone very cool - the hairs on his arms prickle and a shiver runs up his spine. He is very still. He thinks if he stays very still, perhaps Dumbledore will not have heard him. Harry fusses softly in his arms, and Dumbledore is watching him with steady, unblinking eyes.
“I do not owe you Harry’s safety as an apology,” says Dumbledore, finally. “I will not endanger him as a gesture of goodwill towards your person.”
“Pardon me,” Remus hisses. “Goodwill? I don’t need your goodwill, sir. You’ve been reaping my goodwill for more than a decade. That I owe you everything, this isn’t in - that’s not something I’m going to bloody dispute with you. We’re - we’re all aware of how you opened up a world of opportunities to a poor, futureless werewolf child, and let a monster cavort around the grounds of the school in the interests of equal education. We’re all aware, sir, of how you let him stay, even after he almost killed another student. If I had any more of your goodwill, I’d be very under serious misconceptions of my own ability.”
“Your ‘abilities’ are not at stake here,” Dumbledore murmurs, quite softly. “In fact, you should take comfort in the fact that I do not question them, as most everyone else in the Wizarding World would.”
Remus snorts hoarsely against Harry’s hair; it ruffles against his chin. “But it concerns you.”
“Of course it concerns me,” says Dumbledore, brow sharply furrowing. “Harry will not be safe with you.”
“Why? If not because of what I am, then why.”
“I assure you, I would be resistant to release Harry to anyone who was not his direct blood relative, be they werewolf or pureblood au pair.”
“I don’t understand,” Remus exhales, trying to release some of the tension in his clenched teeth. “Have - have you met these people? His aunt and uncle?”
“Indeed,” says Dumbledore. “I’m aware of their relative - inhumanity.”
“Then - I. I don’t. Sir, I just want - I just want Harry’s. He’s James’s child, and I owe more to himthan anyone, yourself included, sir.”
“Believe me, Mr Lupin,” says Dumbledore. “I am far too old to be dealing in new debts. You are free, however, to feel as though you have evened your score with the recently dead, at no concern of mine.”
“But. I love him, I love - I love Harry - ” he feels drawn very thin, his muscles weakening, exhaustion seeping indelicately into his bones. “Why would you take him from that? Into - into that.”
Dumbledore goes very still; the air in the office seems to follow suit. Remus breathes, three times - inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale - and Dumbledore has not moved, the air has not moved, Fawkes has not moved, the curtain in the window has not fluttered, the candles ringing them with dull and yellow light have barely flickered. And Dumbledore is looking at him - at him holding the sleeping body of Harry Potter, having told this space that this child in his arms is all he has left in the world that he loves. That this child will receive all the love he has inside him, because there is nothing else. It feels - in the moments that Dumbledore is silent, and watching him - that it has been minutes, but he knows it must be shorter.
“I - ” he says, the silence tugging at his tongue, to dispel the growing heat in his cheeks.
Behind him, the door swings open - he feels the rush of air at his back; hears the rustle of Hagrid’s heavy wools and tweed as he turns behind him. He smells something familiar - dark black tea leaves, a faint oxidization, the oiliness of India ink - he turns his head, catches the sweep of McGonagall’s dark robes in the corner of his eyes.
She looks harried - and far less surprised to see him present in Dumbledore’s quarters than Dumbledore himself was. The sleeves of her robes are rolled up to her elbows, revealing a long line of pearl buttons at her wrists, and her hat is slightly askew, a wisp of grey hair pulled free from her bun, tangled in the arm of her spectacles.
“You said midnight, Albus,” she snaps, with a perfunctory glance at Remus, before her eyes seem to settle on Harry’s bundled, resting form, and she pauses, mid-stride.
“Is that - ” she starts.
“I’ve had an unexpected guest,” says Dumbledore, calmly.
“Lupin,” she says - her face looks on the verge of crumpling entirely: something Remus has seen only once, and it is as unpleasant and unsettling now as it was at sixteen.
“Hullo,” he manages. “Professor.”
“Remus has just been describing to me his overwhelming qualifications for stewardship of young Harry,” says Dumbledore, looking directly past McGonagall’s left shoulder, into Remus’s eyes again.
“That’s not what I,” says Remus. “I didn’t mean.”
“Oh, yes. I’m quite sure,” says Dumbledore, and smiles. It does not feel particularly reassuring; it has an edge, like the slit of the moon waxing, discomfort all around.
“I’m sorry,” he says, feeling a coldness creeping into his skin, a heaviness encircling his bones.
“This is a trying time for all of us,” says Dumbledore. His smile is gone - the candlelight throws deep grooves of shadow across his face. “Perhaps we would be best served in withholding judgment against everyone, myself including, until we are able to know for certain whether Sirius Black is responsible for the murder of Harry’s parents.”
Behind him, McGonagall makes a tight noise somewhere in the back of her throat. Remus thinks he must have heard a version of that sound - disappointment, disbelief, disgust - at some point over the seven years worth of various experiences in her office, perfecting faux innocence and pleading the case of James Potter. Of pleading the case for Sirius Black. He feels ill.
“Mr Lupin?” Dumbledore’s voice is a little distant. The light is blurring.
“I’m going to sit down,” he says, and does: at the edge of one of the armchairs. Harry presses a sweaty infant fist against his collarbone.
“A wise choice,” says Dumbledore, who is suddenly crouching in front of his knees, who is raising a wrinkled, long-fingered hand to rest against the dark hair of Harry’s head. Remus fixes his eyes at a distant point just beyond Dumbledore’s temple.
“Albus,” says McGonagall.
There is a long pause. He closes his eyes. He feels Harry breathing, heavy and gentle, against his own chest. It puts strength in his own lungs.
“Yes,” says Dumbledore. There is the sound of rustling robes as he stands, a vague wisp of air - smelling of sandalwood and old wool. “Yes, a wise choice, for now, I think. Mr Lupin, for the moment, I think you and Harry had best stay here - we will make space for you away from the students - until we know more.”
He breathes: once, twice. He thinks, thank you. He thinks, thank god, thank you.. But he does not say it.
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Harry cries through the last hours of that first night. Remus has transfigured one of the small, rickety bookshelves into a crib, which rocks from a fulcrum of Rudyard Kipling (the rest of the books remain stacked haphazardly on the floor). And, for the first few hours, Remus sits on the floor amongst the pile, and rocks the crib with one hand, with his eyelids drooping, and listens to Harry crying. It’s absolutely mad, he thinks, and almost admirable, that this tiny incapable body can produce the loudest, most perfect, completely interrupted noises of grief for hours and hours and hours and hours.
The rocking, he thinks, doesn’t help. When he finally gets to his stiff and aching feet, and picks Harry up with his stiff and aching arms, it doesn’t help. Harry just buries his small, snotty nose into the front of Remus’s jumper and makes little fists against his chest and cries: loud, perfect, completely interrupted. When he fixes a warm bottle with one arm and the help of a little magic and the slightly dated, mostly sexist Dr. Margaret Tubpipe’s Essential Guide For The Young Wizarding Mum, it doesn’t help. Harry just drools warm milk over the snot-spots already dotted over Remus’s jumper, and only opens his mouth to cry some more.
Don’t you know me? Remus wants to say, at one point past three in the morning, when he has bounced Harry in his arms for more than three quarters of an hour. Don’t you understand we’re all we’ve got, why are you doing this why are you punishing me, I had nothing to do with this, I know how you feel.
But he can’t speak. Harry is taking up all the space in the world, it seems. It seems like Harry’s is the only voice, the only thing that could ever make a sound worth making, and his own voice won’t dare impose, it couldn’t. So he can’t, and he won’t. He only can rock, and stand, and try to soothe with a hand on the back, on the head, under the small legs, he can only - when the dawn finally comes - sit on his small bed with his back against the wall, and hold Harry curled against his chest, while the crying gets hoarser, but stays just as strong.
And he reaches, blindly, bleary-eyed, for the book on the top of the nearest floor-stack, cracks it open on his bent knees, behind Harry’s shaking, curved back, and squints at the spindly, blurring type swimming over the pages.
i, he whispers, because he cannot have a voice above Harry’s, but this might, for now, he thinks. i carry your heart with me. (i carry it in my heart.)
And in the first eerie blue light of the very early hours, they sleep together, finally. Finally, they sleep together and are quiet against each other’s chests, with someone else’s words of love so slow-slowly building up the walls around them.
He does not dream. He has memories, instead: and worse than nightmares. He is sitting in the chair with Harry sleeping against his chest. And his eyes are closed. And the world that is past grows around him, slowly, like a growing blanket of mist, until finally it is so real around him he can almost feel the heat of Sirius’s bare arm, when they sat together on the tiny juliette balcony with the iron railings, which you could only get to by climbing out the window of the kitchenette, while trying not to snag your shirtsleeve on the loose nail, just there.
He can almost smell the cigarette Sirius was smoking. He can just taste the thin coat of gin on the back of his tongue, his throat. He can see, behind his closed eyelids, the way Sirius’s hair - grown far too long that summer - grazed the razorsharp edge of his clavicle, vaguely damp with sweat.
It’s a nice place, Remus had said. He’d mostly meant it. He almost mouths the words into Harry’s hair.
You’re a fucking liar, said Sirius. It’s smaller than James’s fucking loo.
Oh, shut up, Remus said. You love it.
Sirius had smiled, slow and enraptured, eyes closed, face raised to the orange-painted sky of London at sunset.
I love it, he’d said.
“I like that,” Remus whispered, slipping his fingers from his knees to pluck the cigarette from Sirius’s dangling hand. “I like that you love it.”
Sirius looked at him, a long, drawn-out drag of his gaze from the sky to Remus’s face. His cheekbones were slicked with pink and orange, a shining highlight of pure white on the highest edge of his temple.
“Why?” he asked.
Remus shrugged and looked at his bare toes, sucking smoke into his lungs, feeling too acutely the dirt under his fingernails, the film of dried sweat on his skin, the last time Sirius had kissed him: three hours ago, when he woke up on Sirius’s couch.
“You seem,” he said, finally. “You seem sure.”
“Sure of what?” Sirius grinned. “Of my own blissful ignorance and relative uselessness to the world at large.”
“Of yourself,” Remus muttered. “Wanker.”
“I’m sure of your mum’s fanny,” said Sirius, and Remus whacked him soundly in the back of the head with his open palm, and Sirius wrestled him for the cigarette until Remus found himself wedged between the windowsill and the iron railing with his knee shoved up against Sirius’s gut and his ankle twisted painfully under Sirius’s thigh, and Sirius’s sun-warmed hair shoved up under his chin, with the cigarette held at arm’s length, out of harm’s way.
“Augh,” he’d choked out. “Fine - fine! I give.”
“You do not,” said Sirius, voice tickling against his collarbone. “That’s no fun.”
“Your idea of fun is very harmful to my soul and my ribs.”
“And your idea of sure of yourself,” said Sirius, with his fingers wriggling along Remus’s spine. “Is not hating yourself all the time because you tend to get rather hairier than normal once every thirty-one days.”
“Er,” said Remus. “Well, yes. But the flat helps.”
“The flat helps,” Sirius parroted, a little nastily, raising himself off of Remus with aggrieved, exaggerated effort. “Christ.”
Oh, what, Remus wanted to say. He wanted to grab at Sirius's lanky, overgrown hair and pull him forward with both hands to kiss him hard enough to shut them both up for a good, bloody long while. He thinks that he did - that he pulled Sirius in for a kiss, and that it was sort of lovely, after all.
There is something, suddenly, that doesn't belong. He remembers the touch of Sirius's fingertips against his jawline, the way his palm would sometimes make that solid gesture of ownership: palm down, fingers spread, on the curve of his neck. He remembers the smell of concrete and iron and Sirius's hair, and the way the sun was dying, and leaving orange streaks all over everything, and the air in the city was so hot and so still. The air, he thinks, in London - this day, that day - it wasn't. It was so still. It wasn't moving, he thinks. But he feels a breeze against his cheekbone. He feels a fluttering there, just above his temple, like there is a small wind whispering over the balcony railing. There was no wind, he thinks. He realizes, oh.
He opens his eyes.
The light has grown soft and white-blue. The room swells slowly into sight, from the darkness. He can see, fuzzily, the outline of the transfigured crib, and the scattered pile of books, and the small writing desk by the window, and the fluttering of the curtain by the open window. He feels Harry breathing against his chest; when he tilts his head downward, his nose pushes into the soft, black hair crowning Harry's head.
There is a breeze. A breeze, he thinks, it woke me. I was dreaming, he thinks. Of course. Of course, he thinks.
He turns his head, slowly; Harry doesn't stir. There, just above his temple, between him and the window, is a small, black envelope, held aloft by its own magic. Its edges are slightly bent, beating slowly at the air.
"Oh," he says, to no one in particular. I know, he thinks, I know what this is.
James had one, he remembers. When his parents died, James got two black envelopes in the air, the morning after. He didn't open them, but Peter did, after Sirius left the room in disgust and pinned Remus back with a stare that said if he even tried to come console him in the garden with a cigarette Sirius would consider him a traitor and a Gigantic Girl's Blouse. And he had sat there, fingers knotted over his knees while Peter gently folded back the creases of the black paper on Mrs Potter's bedspread and read aloud: We Regret To Inform You -- of the passing of Mr Henry James Potter, on May 5th, 1978. As Direct Kin, this Notice of Death has been Ordered into Existence by the Well-Respected Traditions of the Goode & Ancient House of Pervell and its Descendants.
He plucks the envelope from the air. It flutters once, between his fingers, before it falls still. Remus holds it out, at half-arm's length, and breathes in: once, and very slowly. It is addressed to Harry - his full name written out in thin golden ink. He knows what it will say.
He will not open it. He will keep it as it is, he thinks, for Harry and for later.
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On his second birthday, Harry speaks for the first time since his parents died. They are in the kitchen of the cottage in Iffley that Dumbledore secured for them after three weeks of living in the spare storage cupboard in Hogwarts’ East Wing. It is a darling place. Almost sickly with its own preciousness: a bright blue door, and four heavy stone walls, and a cool dirt cellar out in the small yard where Remus keeps the jars of preserves and pickled fish and beans and thick carrots with green fronds, and there is a large willow tree by the front door which almost hides the entire thing from view. It has been a very good place; he is usually inclined to consider it home. If only for the people in it, he thinks; and the routine that they have.
He and Harry share the small bedroom, and most of their days. He does bits of work here and there for Dumbledore, and keeps the cottage from accumulating too much dust, and Harry plays very seriously, usually with his green toy dinosaur, or his box of crayons, or his rather pitifully incomplete - Remus thinks, ashamed - train set, and then usually they will go for a walk down to the river and Harry will bring his little plastic boat with the red smokestack, or they will go to the graveyard of the old church, and sometimes stop into a shop for biscuits or veg or bread, or to look at the model trains in the window, and every now and then, they will spend a special day in Oxford feeding pigeons in a square.
He has become accustomed to the general silence. He speaks to Harry in full sentences and expects - as he comes to, after only three months or so - no answer, only Harry’s full bright eyes, or a slight dip of his small nape.
Would you like toast? he will ask, in the morning.
And Harry might nod, and Remus will get the butter and jam from the cupboards. Or, if it is a different day, Harry might not make any motion, one way or the other, and Remus will get the milk and brown sugar instead, and they will have porridge.
He has come to know Harry through his silences, through his avoidance of black beans and his ability to finish three cups of pumpkin juice, and the way he falls asleep on Remus’s lap when Remus reads this book or uses that quill, or his unhappy restlessness otherwise.
He only worried for a while, when it was still fresh, and he was still convinced, as most would be - he assumed - that Harry had suffered something fully irreversible. Some now-seeded, germinating internal injury that was destined to destroy him, slowly, from the core outwards. After three months, or maybe four, he resigned himself to waiting, instead. He is, he thinks, more aware than most of the resilience of traumatized children.
Every night, he reads to Harry, and every morning, he leans over Harry’s bed to kiss his forehead and say, good morning, and Harry will always rub his eyes and blink up at him sleepily, and sometimes he will smile, and he is always an attentive listener, always a generally polite child, with large, solemn-looking eyes (that are, as everyone says, is starting to say, has always said, look so much like his mother’s, & etc), and a head of wild, coal-dark hair, that is stick straight and very soft. He is affectionate, but untrustworthy of strangers. He holds Remus’s hand very tight when people stop to talk to them on the road. He does not like visitors. (Neither does Remus, for that matter, but Remus knows he is far too old at this point to retreat to his room and scribble happily on large bits of parchment with a fat, blue crayon, however attractive that might be, when Rubeus Hagrid squeezes himself through the tiny hearth Floo with an armful of papers and lemon candies and a small bag of this month’s Galleon contribution, from Dumbledore.)
It is late in the morning. Harry is helping to decorate the cake, which will be for after dinner, and after gifts, and Remus’s hands are covered in crumbs and icing, which is blue, as according to Harry’s very well-considered selection made yesterday morning, with all the possible icing colours fanned out in front of him on the floor of the sunny kitchen (with the chairs pushed back against the wall to make room for the slightly dismembered rainbow).
“Pass me the towel, please, Harry?” Remus gestures, with his elbow, waggling his fingers in Harry’s direction.
Harry does, but he is clearly more interested in candle placement.
“Ta,” says Remus, absently. He wipes his hands. He moves to place the cake pan into the sink basin. “Want to help me clean up, when we’re done? And then maybe we could go to the river, if you’d like?”
“Okay,” says Harry, and white-vanilla cake crumbs scatter over the kitchen tile, when Remus drops the pan.
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A week before Harry’s third birthday, Remus fixes him a small lunch, hands him his toy boat, and drops him off at the Weasley Burrow. He leaves Harry there, with a few tears, and he Apparates to the outskirts of Hogsmeade just as the day is ending, to the top of the hill just north of the Shack.
After all these years, he thinks, as climbs the incline in the shadows of overgrown pines and chestnuts, it is a place where time refuses to move. It is a place of absolute stillness, he thinks, where you open that door, or come through that passageway, and the world becomes a place of dust and filtered light. He is always eleven, here, he thinks, and takes the stairs. I am always what I started as, and I am everything I am when I was here, but I am never more than that. The Shack refuses it. It gives primacy, he thinks, to that grateful regression. To that helpless, crumbling nostalgia.
Nothing has changed, beyond what the wolf has shredded, and they once added. There is the bed. There is the small Victrola. There is the broken piano. There are the remnants of bottles, and a watering can in the kitchen. There are some playing cards spilled across one corner. There is the scattered detritus of nature littering the floor and the walls. It grows and it withers, and it rots, all around this room, and it does nothing to penetrate the little core of space, here: the place where memory stomps its foot and screams its presence.
He sets his small bag down in the centre of the floor, as he has done for years now. He inhales, once, deeply. He sets about unbuttoning his shirt. He removes his trousers, and his underwear. He folds it all, and sets them down on the floor beside his satchel. He sits on the edge of the bed, and closes his eyes.
The Shack captures things. It holds full conversations in the creaking of its ribs. It holds the shining naked skin of young men in the way the light slats through the shredded eaves. It keeps real laughter in its floorboards, and the halting, scratched waves of music in the trumpet of the old Victrola, when the wind moves right.
He places his hands palm down on his legs, one on each thigh. He feels the heat of the day leaving the air, the push of blood under his skin, and the nervous jittering of his skeleton, the rising acuity in his nose and in his ears. The tightness in his gut, in his legs, pushing up from his knees. It feels like a fever. It feels like - he inhales, once, sharply. Arousal.
He grits his teeth, and squints into the darkness of his own closed eyes. Not now, he thinks, vaguely desperate. I don’t need this, he thinks. I need some kind of forced serenity. I need bloody composure. I need - he thinks - good christ, I may be a monster, but I am an adult.
He hisses, into the creaking slowness of the Shack. The air sears at his skin. His thighs itch: his fingers dig into his flesh, and he holds down a groan. He knows if he opens his eyes, he will see his own erect penis pushing up at the air. He will want to touch it. He will want to wet his own palm with his saliva and wrap his fingers around it and stroke his own cock in time to his breathing. He will want to think about another body. He will want to think about the first time Sirius Black pushed three fingers up inside him with the wet ‘o’ of his mouth just circling the tip of his erection, and he will come with horrifying guilt staining his body, like the blood from his bitten tongue.
No, he thinks, fiercely.
It has been months, he thinks - years, since he came to the thought of Sirius Black. It has been months at least since he came at all. I am an adult, he thinks, and I have a child. I am not entertaining this sickness, he thinks. He tries. He wills. I am not -
Oh, god, he thinks, because he can almost feel the press of Sirius’s mouth against that little pulse-point on his neck. The small, slick trail of spit against his jawline, cooling in the air, when Sirius took his face with both hands and kissed him hard. Pressed him back against the mattress in the middle of the floor of his stupid, dreadful flat when they were seventeen and utterly free, and kissed him for the first, second, maybe third time?
Hard, he thinks. He. Oh - fuck.
What, he’d said. Half-drunk and horrifically betrayed, and so aroused, he’d only been able to stare up at Sirius’s flushed, open-mouthed face. What - are.
Please, Sirius had whispered, with that strange little desperate hitch in his voice. Don’t - don’t say anything. I just.
“I - ” he’d started. And stopped, because Sirius’s fingers had tightened on his wrist. He’d felt so raw.
“I just wanted to,” Sirius had said. His mouth had been so wet. My mouth - he had thought, wildly - my mouth has been there. On your mouth. “I just wanted to.”
“Oh,” he’d said. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t swallow.
“Moony,” said Sirius.
He couldn’t speak.
“Moony,” Sirius had said - and his voice had been breaking like he was thirteen again. Those three weeks in the middle of third year, when he didn’t speak at all, because James would become absolutely inconsolable with laughter and then Sirius would spend the rest of the day in a horrific sulk, and it had just been the worst thing in the world to live with.
“Stop,” he’d said, breathless, and Sirius had balked, flinched as if slapped. “Stop - if you don’t - I keep thinking. You have to do something or I’m - ”
“Do - ” Sirius’s eyes had glinted; they had had this sharp, desperate little spark. “Do something - like?”
And Sirius had bent his head, very slowly, and their noses had bumped together, and their foreheads were just barely touching. And Sirius had breathed, very slowly, over Remus’s mouth - their lips were so close, and his mouth was so wet, and Remus was paralyzed; he had felt utterly pinned back, by this shuddering little moment, by the inch of air between them.
“Like this?” Sirius had whispered.
“Are you teasing me,” he had blurted, half-hysterical. “Seriously. Are you teasing me. Now? You’re teasing me now?”
Sirius had smiled, and kissed him. He had kissed him. He had been kissed, by Sirius Black. By his smile.
And it was so lovely, he thinks. I had been so happy.
He comes, there on the edge of the bed in the middle of the empty Shack, when he presses the fingertips of his free hand to his mouth, and feels the exact resonance of Sirius’s lips.
--------
On the afternoon of Harry's fourth birthday, Remus is sitting on the stoop of the Iffley cottage with last Thursday's copy of the Oxford Times and a cup of lukewarm tea, and Harry is playing in the shade of the crabapple tree just behind the corner of the house. It is very warm, and there are crickets just beginning to hum in the taller grasses across the lane, when there is a sickening crack of wood that splits the air, and then a meaty sort of thud that sends Remus's stomach plummeting into his knees.
"Harry?" He is on his feet and skidding rounding the corner of the cottage, when Harry starts to cry: big, choking gulps of air.
Harry is crumpled by the tree trunk, his face bright red and smudged with dirt; he is gripping at his arm with one small hand. Remus's first wild thought - absent of any context besides his own thudding pulse and the sick feeling in his stomach when he kneels in the dirt and sees the unnatural swelling of Harry's wrist, the way the set of his hand looks so off - his first wild thought is that they have been attacked: that someone, those people have finally come for Harry. That Dumbledore wasn't such an old paranoid fool, after all.
“Oww,” whines Harry, reaching for him, and he gathers Harry up into his arms, half-frantic, pushing his way through the front door of the cottage with his shoulder, while Harry starts to cry in earnest.
His heart is thudding wildly in his chest as he sets Harry down on the small couch, and Harry wriggles, his hand still clamped down on the warped line of his wrist. His face is still hot and flushed, and he kicks his legs out in response to the pain when Remus tries to take Harry’s injured arm in his hands.
“Don’t - ” he soothes. “It’ll be fine, Harry, I promise. Just - let me look at it.”
Harry squirms, whining: he pushes at Remus’s arms with all the force of his small body, turning his head away, his teeth digging into his lower lip.
“Harry,” he insists, but Harry only cries harder, and manages to wedge a knee in the side of Remus’s ribs.
“Harry!”
“No!” Harry is half-screaming.
"Oh, good god," says Snape, from the fireplace.
He whips around, in his seat - and Harry gulps noisily.
“Stupefy,” murmurs Snape, arm extended - and Harry slumps back against the cushions, utterly gentle.
He can't speak; horrifically, he feels a hot sting behind his eyes, and he blinks rapidly to will it away. “What - ”
"I was under the impression that this was serious," says Snape, and crosses his arms.
"He's - " says Remus, hoarsely. "He fell. From a tree."
"Which is what children do, Lupin. They fall from trees because they are horribly inept at governing with their own actions with the slightest bit of common sense."
"I don't even understand how he got up there -- "
"Really. It wasn't because you weren't watching him?"
"Wasn't -- " he bristles, automatically. "If you've been sent only to insult me, you can leave."
"Believe me, I'd find the greatest pleasure in it," Snape mutters. "Move aside."
"What -- what. No." Remus finds himself gripping at the couch cushions with almost fabric-shredding strength. He swallows, exhales, and tries to relax the tension radiating from his chest.
Snape's mouth twitches in a slow sneer. "By all means, then, continue to helpfully blubber over his unconscious body. I'm sure you'll send for a healer in due time, and Dumbledore will not at all be displeased that you've revealed your position so necessarily to the Wizarding World at large."
"Dumbledore," he manages, taking one more steadying breath. He feels the pounding of his blood start to slow, in his veins. "Dumbledore sent you?"
"One of the protection wards went off," says Snape, finally raising his eyes to glance around the interior of the small room. Remus can't seem to tell if there is any judgment registered on his face - it seems to be all cool cataloguing - a swift, efficient record of the place. "It registered Potter as being in pain. Albus was indisposed - he sent me in his stead."
He exhales, slowly. "He'll be fine," he says. He realizes, of course, that it's true. "Thank you. For coming."
Snape snorts, and crosses the carpet, sweeping his arm to motion that Remus should move aside with the billow of his black sleeve. Remus does, reluctantly, keeping a palm against Harry's cheek. He notices a small scrape there, just above his temple, and his rubs his thumb over it: feeling the raised and ragged skin, the thin waft of blood against his nostrils.
"A simple break," says Snape, with the tip of his wand pressed to Harry's wrist. "I'll owl you a vial of Skele-Gro upon my return to Hogwarts. Follow my directions precisely."
"Er," says Remus. "Yes. Thank you."
Snape stands, brusquely. There is a moment where he looks at them - simply, appraisingly - and Remus can’t resist the urge to raise his chin: defiant in the face of that black gaze.
“We’ll be fine,” he says.
Snape does not respond. His exit is as quiet as his arrival: a simple swirl of black fabric, and the breathless sigh of the fireplace Floo. The cottage seems unbelievably large and empty, in the aftermath. He sits on the edge of the couch, with Harry’s head in his lap, and his hand palm down on Harry’s soft hair, and Harry’s slow, even breathing seems to be, incredibly, the only sound in the world. It fills his own ribs. It is the thing, he thinks, that is keeping his own heart beating at the pace it should be. It is the very thing that keeps him happy, most days.
It used to be, he thinks, that he thought he could be happy on his own. That he could go about the world and not depend on other people for an appreciation of his life. And yet, he thinks, maybe it was never that way at all. Maybe, he thinks, I’ve never been anything without other people’s breathing, other people’s beating hearts.
He closes his eyes. He leans his head back against the cushions. He feels Harry’s body against his own; the weight of his head on his thighs. He remembers what it was like to wake into the thin light of the Shack, his head swimming and his body stinging with the regrowth of his skin and the reknitting of his bones. He remembers what it was like to sit up against the tattered headboards with the sunshine filtering in all around him, and have the heavy weight of Padfoot’s body over his legs. To see - through blurred vision - James curled up in the corner with a thin blanket over his body, and Wormtail’s small form snuggled into a corner of the bedsheets.
He remembers what it was like, then, to dig his aching fingers into the warm and living fur of Padfoot’s ruff, and squeeze gently, and Padfoot would snuffle into the crook of his knee, and he would press his fingers slowly up through the muscles of Padfoot’s strong neck, and curl his palms around the soft, silly ears, and feel that particular comfort. That particular comfort, he thinks, that undeniable happiness of shared space and support.
He opens his eyes. He looks down at Harry’s sleeping body. The reddening swell of that small wrist. There is a twinge, somewhere in his gut.
I will give you that, he thinks, desperate and suddenly, so sad. Everything I can, but that above everything else.
I will try, he thinks. With everything I am.
--------
On Harry's fifth birthday, Remus hunches down in the tall, July-dry grass behind Arthur's workshed, and sneaks a cigarette. There is a glass of pumpkin juice - freshly made by Molly this morning - at his ankle. He rolls the tobacco himself, over his knees, with papers drawn from a dusty pouch he retrieved from a shoebox that morning, before they left. It was a whim. But he was feeling it - the heightened edge of things. The way the light hit his eyes too hard, in the dawn; the way the dull clink of Harry's spoon against the cereal bowl felt like china breaking between his ears. The way Harry's skin seemed pulsatingly warm, and how he had avoided touching it, for fear of biting his own tongue and tasting blood. His shoulders creak inside his skin. His wrists are shaking, when he lights it. Harry is five today, he thinks, slowly with the inhale, and tonight I will have to leave him. I will go halfway across England to turn into a monster, and I will not be there when he wakes up tomorrow.
Inside, there is cake and puddings and laughter. He can hear them; if he strains, he can almost make out every word. He closes his eyes, and lets his head tip back against the wooden slats behind him. He lets the shade touch his skin. He exhales.
"Oh-ho."
"Sorry," says Remus, automatically, his wrist jumping against his knee, when he startles; his eyes open to the sun. It is Arthur, leaning against the corner of the shed, his expression mostly hidden by the shade. "Sorry - did. Does Molly need me?"
"Ah, no," says Arthur. "Molls doesn't need any help - not from us, at any rate."
He smiles, glances down at his cupped hands. "No, suppose not."
"Budge up, then," says Arthur, with a grin in his voice, and Remus shifts slightly to the right; Arthur settles beside him with the sigh of a middle-aged sort of father. Someone settling in for a Talk, Remus thinks, with the kind of disgust that is well hidden behind a smoke.
"All right?" he asks, without much interest.
"Should be asking you, then, shouldn't I," says Arthur, calmly. "If you need to go, Molly'n I can handle it, you know."
He shakes his head - scratches at the back of his neck (his spine is tingling, unpleasantly). "No, it's. I've more than six - er seven - hours. I'll be fine."
"Hm," says Arthur.
"Ta," says Remus, somewhere in the direction of his knees. "Again. I mean. I honestly don't know what I'd do without your help."
Arthur snorts. "I imagine you'd find a way."
"Mm," he says. "Though perhaps not so pleasant."
"Nor so well-fed," grins Arthur.
"Mm," he says, again. He feels the tension in his teeth, now; talking is making his jaw ache. Arthur is silent beside him; he knows he's being watched. For five years, he thinks, everyone who is worth anything, and far more that aren't worth anything at all - they've all been watching. This dark little secret they've all decided to share in, he thinks, this little kindness to a poor, wretched blight on society. Waiting to see if he can fill their hearts with any more self-love, with how little he's managed to screw it all up, so far. He feels his lip curl over his eyeteeth, and cups his hands against his chin, bites the tip of his thumb, and watches the smoke snarl up into the dry air.
"He's a good lad," says Arthur.
Here we are, thinks Remus.
"Even Molly's impressed," says Arthur. "Which is saying something in and of itself, I suppose."
"Fantastic," says Remus. (He winces slightly, at the taste of malice on his tongue.)
"Remus," says Arthur.
"Sorry," says Remus, swiping ash from the top of his shoe. "I didn't. I'm not ungrateful."
"Never said," says Arthur.
He can feel it, rising in the back of his throat. It has a pressure - like nausea - making his eyes water and his tongue curl, and the membranes in his cheeks soak with saliva. It tastes vaguely metallic, oxidized, this rush of things he's wanted to say, these things he's feared for years, since he woke up one morning and felt Sirius Black's open palm resting on the small of his back: the moment he realized he was doomed to the same failures as the rest of humanity, only it was so much more terrifying, that he had no room for error, and so much more to lose. Trust, he'd thought, as he'd wanted to pin Sirius back against the bed with his knees and cup that stupid grin with his fingers and press his mouth there, to breathe inside this other body everything that made him feel heavy and weak and foolish, but was too real to ignore. Love, he'd thought, and pressed a hand against his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, to keep from turning where he was and grasping the back of Sirius's neck to pull him in so he had to listen, when he said I love you, I love you, please don't make me regret this, please. Just --
"I was five," he says. It spills over his fingers, into the air.
Arthur is silent.
"I was Harry's age," he says. "When I was. Bitten. And after that, everything was - well. Different, obviously. And my parents, they did. They did everything they could." He takes a breath - the air feels cold and sharp against his hot teeth, his tongue, the back of his throat. "I think it ruined them."
They loved you, he remembers someone saying. It's what everyone says. It's how they explain it all.
"I've been thinking, a lot," he says. "About sacrifice."
"Hm," says Arthur, and the way he says it means he must know, it isn't dramatic, it's just what it is, when they are yours: children.
"I'm worried," says Remus. He feels the words shake the base of his spine - a quiver that coils all the way up and out his limbs to his wrists and ankles. "That I can't keep Harry safe. Not like this."
"You're not alone," says Arthur. "You know."
"I want to be - " he starts. Normal. Alive. Strong, he thinks, and not this slowly-dissolving wraith, destined for some rotting, creaking body that gives out at thirty-nine because I didn't do, he thinks, all that I could to be here for him. "I don't know."
Arthur sighs: gruff and short, the flap of lips, the ruffle of a mustache. It reminds him of the way his Da used to snort at something he might've been reading - not funny enough to share, but too much to let it just sit around inside - sometimes he would be taking the stairs to his room, and he would hear it from the den, and he would smile.
"Come on, lad," says Arthur, and presses a hand to Remus's shoulder, as he stands. "Oof."
Remus tips the cigarette in his knuckles, grinds it slowly into the sole of his shoe. The heat dissipates from his fingertips, ash scattering to the grass. Inside, he knows, he will kiss the top of Harry's head, and place both hands on Harry's shoulders, and Harry will smile up at him, and they will open gifts with everyone, and Remus will still be nervous about whether or not Harry will like what he's managed to get him, and after Harry has fallen asleep on the floor, Remus will carry him to bed and tuck him in. And he will tell him, very quietly, that he loves him very much. And then he will leave the Burrow while the sun is setting, and he will Apparate to Hogsmeade, and he will climb the hill to the shack in the dead light. And he will spend the night without thoughts, without the over-tortured cynicism, without the relentless, shackling woe-is-me, without memories of loss or lust or silk scarves or cold cereal or memories of anything at all.
And in the morning, he thinks, he will be resolved. There are things yet to be done in this world, he thinks, in the name of love.
--------
Part III