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Hi guys. It's been years. How are you!
I come here today with weird new AU fic teasers! R/S, post-hogwarts, first war.
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"You've been after me for weeks." Lupin shifts his weight slightly, a flash of pale light from the dark circles under his brows.
"Months," he says.
A beat. Oh. Lupin's mouth twitches, bordering on the sound.
"I thought I had you in Nice," says Sirius.
Lupin's shoulders rise, tautly; a rustle of wool. "You did," he says.
A brief flash, in Sirius's mind, of a face -- congealed, congenial, placid and unremarkable, in its unremarkableness. The strange sensation of his open palm on an insubstantial shoulder. I'm sorry, I thought you were -
"That wasn't --" he starts.
"It was," says Lupin. The flash of an eyetooth.
He wants to snarl, suddenly. A hot flush in his face, and he can't distinguish anger from embarrassment.
"A glamour."
"Something like that," says Lupin, with a soft lift of his shoulders.
"You --"
"I thought you'd notice," Lupin continues, chin tilted slightly up and away; the low light of the room catches the strange mottling of scars along his neck.
"A glamour." He growls, this time.
"Honestly," says Lupin. "Honestly, Auror Black. My face. Is everywhere."
There is the quiet hiss of the candle on the bedside table as it snags a bit of dust into its heat. The curl of the edge of a newspaper slices through the dark: yellowed and fading type-faces in thirteen different European tongues. The image of Lupin's crippled right hand leafing through his own descent into below-the-fold, into the back pages and rumor.
"But not tonight," he says.
"Obviously," says Lupin, humoring his ploddering, sputtering ignorance; he wants to grab him by the throat.
"Why," he says, although he knows.
Lupin turns his head and looks at him. "You were going to find me eventually."
"You wanted me to find you, eventually."
"Ah," Lupin's smile is snagged by the dead edge of the scar that bisects his cheek. "There we are. Almost."
"Almost?"
"We're running out of time, Auror Black. Perhaps you should call for back up." Lupin's face is cruel, tight.
"It's just me," he snaps, through clenched teeth. "It's just me -- isn't that precious. After all those months of full-blown manhunts, running you ragged through the fields and the backroads of England, you thought you could get off scot-free after four years, you let your guard down, or you thought you'd play with me --"
Something in Lupin's body stops him short. There is a crumpling of the heavy brows, an implosion of the hardset line of his mouth, a softening of the crevasses of his forehead, a blurring of his sharp eyes. Lupin's shoulders gather up, his hands clutch at the collar of his heavy coat and pull it up and around his neck; he looks, suddenly, like a mound of dark shadows, of dissolving force. His eyes look almost sad; Sirius marvels, despite it all.
The candle hisses again - the soft air from Lupin's shift against the weight of the bed.
"Auror Black," says Lupin. "I had rather hoped you would have arrested me by now."
He never imagined it like this. He imagined catching Lupin by the arm, by the neck, by the scruff of his hair and jabbing the end of his wand into the soft divot of his throat. He imagined finding Lupin dead in a pool of his own blood in an Estonian hovel, half-wolf and half-man, his deformed spine like a demented sail piercing the air, caught and petrified on the devious, damaged edge of the last ruinous transformation. He imagined finding Remus Lupin in a cafe in Florence, sipping an appertif and smoking a long, thin, faggoty-sort of cigarette. He imagined Remus Lupin then as a friend and as a stranger, as an anomaly to the last four years of reality in poor-old-Wizarding-England, as someone who just slipped simply off the edge of common knowledge, and was so surprised, so thrilled to see him. He imagined killing Remus Lupin in seventeen different ways, in seventeen different places. In Bruges, in the shadow of a medieval alley, adorned with the crumbling edges of crucifixes dripping dust onto his bare hands. In Scotland, on the buffeted edge of a stony bluff, the bleating edges of the cold wind catching and carrying away his own screams. In the deadened, stifling, heated breeze of Cyprus in mid-summer. In East Germany, in a dying cell of concrete communal living. In Siberia. In Egypt. In Spain. In London. Etcetera. He never thought that Remus Lupin was rich enough -- forget resourceful, forget ruthless -- to get himself to America. But he imagined catching him and killing him in San Francisco all the same.
"Arrest you for what," he whispers.
Lupin is looking at him, fingers still clutched in the collar of his heavy coat. His eyes are bright and his mouth is thin: a line made by the set, clenching bones of his jaw. He seems on the verge of words. He seems as if he is trying to make sounds.
"Wrong." It comes through slitted, grinding teeth.
He never imagined it like this. This is not what he imagined.
"Wrong question," Lupin tries again, grating up through some blockage in his throat.
"Is it true?" he snarls.
"Is what true," Lupin snarls back, like he is losing patience.
"Did you kill James and Lily?" He clutches, sweaty-palmed, at his wand, snaps it flat against his own thigh. "Did you betray them to Voldemort?"
Lupin laughs. Like it is involuntary. Like someone has reached inside him, fisted his inner organs and twisted them firmly in a heavy, human palm. His shoulders twitch, like a shrug.
"That," he says, into the dark. "Is still the wrong question, Auror Black."
yeats is gonna help me with this, right? :z