Fic: Evening Empire (part 1/2) for marc_duork
Title: Evening Empire
Author: ghosttt
Recipient: marc_duork
Rating: PG-13
Contents or Warnings (highlight to view): *language, casual drug use, mentions of sex, sex offscreen*
Word Count: 8069 (sorry!)
Summary: Dylan cassettes, certain death, erotic epistolary; Christmas contra mundum.
Notes: thank you marc_duork for this amazing prompt, which ended up being more aliens than anything else. thank you cevennes for the quick and excellent beta! thank you to everyone reading this for putting up with how long it is... and thank you especially to the mods for a great fest, and for helping me through my seemingly endless screwups.
FLIGHT OF DEATH - FLIGHT OF DEATH - FLIGHT OF DEATH - FLIGHT OF DEATH -
Remus pulled the printout from the machine. Lily was leaning over his shoulder with a joint.
“Don’t ash on it,” he said. But it was too late, and a spiral smeared grey, and a tiny ember burnt a crisp neat hole then fell dead and black through and smudged charcoal on Remus’s jeans.
“Another one,” said Lily.
Remus stood, hitting his head, and the ceiling dripped ice water down the back of his neck. “Your patching charms are shit, Lils. Is Ulysses back?”
“Fuck you. And no, he’s not. The old man won’t send him back out here in the weather.” All day long it had been beating rain upon the failing thatch roof above their heads and Remus had not ventured even a peep out the dusty blown-glass window upon the windblown brown grases and beyond them the stretching liquorice sea. His bones had begun to creak like an old rocking chair with the storms and the tide and otherwise. Meanwhile Lily had been out in the yard in the morning doing sun salutations in a spelled bubble; she had done it every morning since they had been consigned to the island, and in even the winter rain she wouldn’t quit, mostly on principle. “Isn’t Finnegan here?”
“He flew away again right after I fed him yesterday.”
“It can keep til tomorrow, then. Take a hit of this and let’s put a tape on. I can heat up a curry.”
“We’re supposed to - ”
“That’s the third identical read in as many days,” Lily shouted. “You wanna Apparate off this island? If my patching charms are so shit? Be my fucking guest! I’m not following behind you with your Splinched bits!”
There was nowhere to storm off to in the tiny room so Lily just stood there staring at him. If she was an Animagus she’d turn to a bull, he thought, gender be damned. “I just hate having them in here cause they’re creepy as hell.”
“Do an Impervio on it and put it outside under the flowerpot,” Lily said, and Remus laughed. “Or give it here and I’ll roll us another spliff in it.”
--
Sirius had sent Finnegan with a cassette tape and a letter the day before, which had been Lily’s night to use the tape player and headphones before bed. She was into music that scared most of them and he could hear its muffled crashing even from across the room. Remus had read the letter immediately after its receipt whilst Lily bent over the machines to perform their weekly magical calibration, attentive to her turning toward him because his face and ears were burning. In bed in the storm attuned to the swaying wash of tide against the far beach he waited until he heard Lily’s snores before he put the headphones on and fiddled in the dark with the tape in the box. It was Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud. Sirius had neglected to rewind it fully, possibly on purpose, and it started directly in the middle of a song titled “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
Muggles are wild, Sirius had written in the mildest portion of the letter, which Remus read again now by wandlight. They don’t believe in extraterrestrial life whatsoever. It’s funny in an extremely dark way to watch them try very hard to debunk all this stuff that is happening - or blame it on the Russians - when it is obviously real communication!!!! I am supposed to keep the very sensitive readings from their purview and Oblivate when necessary. I have had several near misses. Dumbledore would fucking kill me if he knew how badly I have almost royally fucked up - and how many times. But he doesn’t have to know because I keep fortuitously saving my own ass at the last possible minute!
These guys already think I am fucking weird as hell. Because I didn’t know how to use the water fountain, or the telephone, at first. And in the toilet I kept staring at the mirror waiting for it to tell me how I looked. Also because most of what I do is hover over folks’ shoulders and see what prints, and run interference if they shouldn’t see it - and they have been told I have some special Muggle certification called a P.H.D. and they ask me very regularly about my “dissertation…” It’s like, I royally halfassed a final paper for Transfiguration on one of the elemental laws which I now can’t even recall on account of we were about to graduate and celebrating every night with assorted magical libations… Anyway I am lucky in that most of the communication we get between seven and eight PM anyway when usually I can try to be alone with the data (in a way as very sensual as it sounds)
Which brings me to my real reason of writing which is to send you this tape. I know you will never concede the superiority of the blues because you love Joni Mitchell so much but I will attempt - until the day I die. You may not want to listen in the company of our gentle flower, to preserve your / my dignity (tell her I’ve sent you some SOOTHING AMBIENT SOUNDS). Which brings me to my REAL REAL reason of writing which is that, I will tell you as per our agreement, I think you’ve truly really finally destroyed my brain (after all your juvenile attempting) - I spend so much time - lying in bed - listening to Scott Walker - wanking to the thought of you coming with your head on my shoulder! And your hair, which was very long at the time, and sticking to my neck, and your forehead, and your lips (Jesus fuck) - which were very red - like, I had never understood red! Before your lips. And how I had been thinking about it for so long, and by IT I mean of course touching your cock - but it was rather better even than I had imagined before - because of how warm your skin - and because of the sounds you made which I had never really thought about. Because your silencing charms were the best of all of ours in school DAMN IT which was a source of some frustration for me for many years.
You are SO - you are like a seascape or like fog in the early morning. I walk around and I think of the Waste Land, and I have my little Muggle tape player so I listen to all your SHITTY, FOLKY Dylan - and I feel like weeping for a second because I am so overwhelmed by this sense of you you you and you are not there! And FUCK, you are in the Hebrides!
The handwriting was scarcely legible and the quill had punctured the paper several times.
If I had you back here I would not just fuck you but - I don’t even know. Whatever it is I know I will spend all day doing it. This is fucking weird. I never allowed the imagining to get past mutual wanking when I thought I would never touch you. And even then I always thought I would treat you like a conservator with a Velazquez. Now I am not sure because I know from my limited experience you would be shouting at me to get on with it which I cannot even THINK about because I am AT WORK and will not be able to stand up now regardless for like another half hour’s solid thinking about Snape in a jockstrap… Allow Muddy Waters to communicate for me, I JUST WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU, etc…
His handwriting slowed its rushedness and was lighter now upon the page.
It kind of gets me off to think that I could send you a letter this raunchy in the Muggle post!! Maybe next time / when they move you to somewhere altogether less FUCKING RIDICULOUS
Then:
I think you will see me rather sooner than you likely expect.
--
With his owl the next day Dumbledore requested the honor of one of their presences in the Floo for a meeting later that afternoon. Remus and Lily drew straws and Remus lost so Lily helped him fold a quilt up on the flagstones and kept an eye on the machines while he shoved his head in the fire. The old man was sitting at the head of the table in his chambers at Hogwarts; beside him was James (who looked resoundingly disappointed that the head in the fire belonged to Remus), and beside him was Peter. There were a few others - Vance, Meadowes, one of the Prewitts. “Hullo,” said Remus from the fire, mouth full of ash.
“How goes it on Mingulay,” said Peter.
Remus had not known the island even had a name. “Fine,” he said. “We’ve gotten frightful printouts of late.”
“Is that so?” said Meadowes, leaning toward him so her evil eye necklace slipped from the collar of her shirt. It was only then that Remus realized perhaps something very much larger was at stake than he suspected. He looked to Dumbledore, whose vivid blue eyes were grim. Then he looked back to Meadowes - her wide eyes, her ashy robes, her motorcycle boots. “Pete and I’ve gotten hardly nothing in Hayle,” she said.
“Indeed,” said Dumbledore. “Norfolk reported these readings last week and now it’s moved onto Mingulay and Gravesend.”
“No more of it at Norfolk now then?” said Remus from the fire.
No one spoke and instead they looked at each other across the table. Peter and James were attempting detailed conversation with eyes. No one would so much as look at Remus in the fire until Moody clunked into view from wherever dark corner, puffing on his corncob pipe. “No more nothing at Norfolk now, Lupin.”
His stomach clenched. “How’s that?”
“No one’s heard hide nor hair of Fenwick or McKinnon since last week,” said James. “They quit sending owls. We went out there yesterday and poof.”
“Place is leveled,” said Peter. “To the ground.” He’d lost weight, Remus saw even the haze of ash, perhaps a great deal; his face seemed hollow, and his arms crossed tightly across his chest, as though he were cold to the bone. “They cut one of your circles in the far field.”
“We were going to owl you two straight off,” said Meadowes, “but the weather. There’s one on the way with the runes for translation.”
Remus needed desperately a cup of tea or a joint or a fuck - the latter best of all - to straighten his brain out from the fearful confused tangle but with his head in the fire he could not even take a deep breath lest he swallow ash. “Does Sirius know?”
Someone coughed into the extending silence. Moody said “He’s been updated.”
“Alright,” said Remus, “Well.”
Dumbledore: “Can you tell me any more about the quality of the signal you’re receiving?”
“It’s quite broad,” said Remus. “They must cast it over most of Scotland.”
“We’ve got nothing, though, from the folks in Rosehearty.”
“Right,” Remus continued, “Western Scotland, then… Still, it’s not coming to our exact position.”
“The last transmissions forwarded from Norfolk were pinpointed to their exact longitudinal position,” said Dumbledore. “And they were addressed to Benjy and Marlene by name.”
A chill swept up Remus’s spine and around the table like a ghost.
“It is our present position that until you receive transmission of this ilk you may consider yourself safe, as it were. And if you do receive such communication you must immediately take precaution to Floo or Apparate to safety. If you will pass this on to Miss Evans.”
“Yessir.”
“And if you will translate, Remus, those runes upon your receipt of them.”
Remus said again “Yessir.”
“I suppose that’ll be all, then, unless - ”
From across the table James shot a hand up for possibly the first time in his life and when Dumbledore acknowledged him he turned cherry red. “Professor, Headmaster sir. I meant to ask - well. It’s nearly Christmas.”
When Remus emerged red-faced and hacking ash-black coughs from the fire Lily was holding a sopping wet owl by one foot as its shaking feathers scattered rainwater, struggling to untie the parchment bound there containing at least one sleepless night’s worth of translation work.
--
Indeed Remus did not sleep at all that night, and likely he wouldn’t have even if not for the runes. The moon was low and white against the sea and waxing, tugging hard at the grist of him. His joints ached and he was ravenous with hunger and even as he yearned for sleep something else screamed in his gut to run outside in the windy wet grass - stalk the indignant birds and suck the juice from their eggs. Chase the surf against the far beach and the spray against the rocks. But instead he sat at the desk working in wandlight with his battered Herr’s Runeography as Lily slept.
He got through half the translation then set it aside and wrote to Sirius.
I liked that tape. I think I’ve heard Bo Diddley do “Mannish Boy.” Come to think of it you probably played that for me in school. Probably on someone’s 17th birthday in which case I was too drunk / stoned / both to recall much detail about it. I don’t know if you ever told me how you got into American music? I would like to hear that story. It’s funny to think. I got into folk music because when I was a kid my mum would take me with her to buy vinyl at rummage sales and it was always sad looking women singing old English folk songs. Then we would sit together and listen to it and she would make tea. We did this early in the day when as you know etc etc and after that we did not ever really do it - perhaps a lot of this for me is about nostalgia and like, trying to get my fingernails under the before-time - like, to prove there was a before-time. It makes me calm, and an almost kind of good sad - I wouldn’t know how to talk about it with anyone. I think you can hear the feeling in the music but perhaps that’s just me.
I miss you like hell. Most nights I dream the content of which you can guess and go out in the freezing night wrapped in a blanket to wank in the outhouse which I have to laugh thinking of… and I know you are laughing thinking of it - and I am laughing thinking of you laughing…
I wish you would come on the full moon and be Padfoot with me and in the dawn - I think about it all the time. You coming here and taking care of me like you used to or not like you used to. I think about - when I can’t sleep I think about when I would wake up in the shack and you would put me in bed and sit with me until you had to go and I would be halfway between sleeping and waking and I wouldn’t recall what was a dream and what wasn’t. Lily puts the wolf out and lets it run - it’s not so bad and she’s a dab hand at pain potions. But it’s not the same… I want to wake up naked with you in the dew in the grass - and I want you to take care of me (interpret how you will) - all day and all the night following - and I ache for it every minute. In my heart and elsewhere. In my bones where all the aches are.
--
Another sodden owl arrived in the morning and when Lily read the tightly rolled parchment it carried - addressed to her in James’s handwriting - she turned bright pink and would not discuss the contents with Remus. By noon he had finished the translation, the rain had moved off, and the morning’s owl had recovered. They bound to its leg three parchment rolls - the translation, heading off the Dumbledore, Lily’s response to James, and Remus’s letter to Sirius (he kept the cassette). Then they went out into the bracing wind and walked in the ruins of the old village about the scattered sheep’s bones and birds’ nests. Lily’s hair blew wildly - vivid red tangle like spiderwebs upon fallen leaves. They let the owl go and it listed on its heavy leg and disappeared East across the water. “James invited me to his parents’ for Christmas,” Lily said.
“In the Floo yesterday he was practically begging Dumbledore on one knee to let you take a vacation.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Lily said, “alone, with the moon.”
“I’m always alone with the moon.”
“Liar,” said Lily. “That sounds like some shitty Keats line. You shouldn’t be alone. We could see if Sirius could come.”
He would deny the warm shivery feeling that congealed in his gut and spread warm against the cold wind and the salt spray like cream of wheat. “I don’t know if he can, I mean logistically.”
Lily had this tiny grin in her lower lip only. “Ask him and see.”
“Maybe I will.”
She pressed her sharp elbow gently against the soft part in his side. “He would drop everything and Floo here like a man possessed if you asked him.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Why?” said Lily.
If she had never known she was a witch she would have gone to university and studied English, Remus thought, not for the first time. She thirsted for patterns. And to answer her he knew would be incriminating. It is all going faster than I thought it would, he could say. Everything has accelerated to a point I did not know was physically possible. And now I am wondering when the end of the world happened that I did not see. And I am wondering how much longer I have - and I am wondering how much worse I have made my own inevitable suffering. Beyond suffering - bereavement. I have made it, the death of my lover. The disappearance of my lover. In all likelihood the interstellar vivisection of my lover. All that is left to do now is to run interference in the dark.
He also knew that if he told Lily the first thing she would say would be, get the fuck over yourself.
---
The translations of the runic crop circles that had been appearing in English fields since 1976, whose elucidation constituted Remus’s seventh-year final project in Ancient Runes, six weeks’ research at the end of which he had begun hallucinating due to lack of sleep and had to be locked in the dormitory by James and Sirius and Peter:
6 May, 1976: TITHE
25 June, 1976: SURRENDER TITHE
19 August, 1976: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
4 November, 1976: YOUR TIME BORROWED
17 November, 1976: YOUR POWER BORROWED
2 February, 1977: YOUR LANDS BORROWED
30 April, 1977: EXCHANGE MAGIC BLOOD
21 July, 1977: SECURITY FOR MAGIC BLOOD
4 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
6 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
10 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
24 November, 1977: PURITY OF BLOOD
6 December, 1977: POWER OF BLOOD
25 December, 1977: SACREDNESS OF BLOOD
1 January, 1978: POWER IN ANCIENTNESS OF BLOOD GENESIS OF MAGIC BLOOD BEYOND YOUR RACE YOUR HISTORY GIFTED AND FORESAKEN TITHE SURRENDER TITHE
11 February, 1978: YOUR POWER BORROWED BEYOND YOUR HISTORY
6 March, 1978: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
9 March, 1978: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
25 April, 1978: YOUR TIME BORROWED AND BORROWED
6 July 1978: FLIGHT OF DEATH
8 July 1978: FLIGHT OF DEATH
10 July 1978, accompanied, for the first time, by radio signals received in the observatory in Gravesend which Sirius would later infiltrate, seized by the Ministry and then by the Order, Oblivated from the minds of at least forty Muggle scientists: NO MORE NOISE NOW
--
How it went between Remus and Sirius: Remus had come over for a conciliatory pint late in 1978, shortly after being denied from by far the shittiest Wizarding job conceivable (as a stockboy at a disgusting owl-order potions warehouse in Leeds) and wound up sleeping on the couch for six months assisting Sirius in spending an inadvisable chunk of his inheritance and attempting to grow marijuana plants in a closet despite his abysmal herbology OWL. Remus wrote freelance for a couple crackpot publications - magic and Muggle - concocting bullshit horoscopes and writing scathing record reviews of obscure noise cassettes, and he made enough to keep himself in canned vegetables.
Sirius’s brother disappeared in April 1979 corresponding with at least 17 other recorded disappeared witches and wizards in Manchester, where he had been working at the time as a dealer of Dark antiques. They sat at the table and all night they drank the bottle of Old Ogden’s Remus had picked up (overdrawing his bank account) until at dawn it was empty. Between them they passed a joint against the rapidly building nausea. “Dreadfully sorry about,” Sirius said into the spreading silence. “In school. I feel like.”
They had never spoken about it once. “It’s alright.”
“I just. I never wanted to - embroil you in rumors.”
“Better that one than - I mean, you know, the real one.”
“Right. Right, better that they all thought you and I - rather than the, rather than your furry little problem.”
“I didn’t mind it honestly.”
“Well nor did I if we’re being honest.”
“Right.”
“The number of times James.” Sirius laughed, and then he covered his mouth with his fist, against the bile. “Christ Jesus.” Remus helped him up and they went to the bathroom and took turns vomiting for most of the morning. “What did you mean,” Remus said around eleven, feeling newly sober and completely drained, raw throughout, like he was just born. He was lying at the foot of the toilet studying the patterns in the dust around the base of it. Yellowing urine splotches, vivid red mold. “You didn’t mind it.”
Sirius was leaning against the tub, face bloodless, vomit in his hair. “Thought it was right fucking obvious.”
“No.”
“You daft shithead.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’d kiss you,” Sirius said, “but. My mouth - your mouth.”
They both fell asleep on the tile floor. Hours later Remus woke with a booming headache and a terrible crick in his neck and Sirius was hovering closely over him as if trying to confirm he was still breathing. Then they kissed, slow and deep, and Sirius’s lips were chapped from being sick but his mouth was very warm. Four days later they were summoned to Hogwarts to join the Order.
--
(part 2)