*FIC: Numquam*
This is just a random Remus angst fic that's been floating round in my head for so long that it's poisoned my brain...it was originally appalling and is still patchy at best in parts, but I'm posting it anyway... =P
It's also about to be x-posted to a helluva lotta comms, so bear with me. ^_~
Numquam
by S_Star
Disclaimer: No characters, settings, etc, are mine; they belong to JK Rowling and various lucky publishers. The worm quote was from a random friend, but supports what Rowling herself said about the origin of the name. Oh, and many of the words belong to the extremely talented minnow_53. *points at AN*
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Remus waited twenty-five years too long to say the words 'I love you'.
AN: This was absolutely appalling in its initial 'completed' state, so I'd like to give many heartfelt thanks to minnow_53, who practically ghostwrote the bloody thing. ^_~
Numquam
I was going to tell him in First Year. I was so young and vulnerable then, and though I knew nothing of romantic love at that age, I knew there was something special about the dark haired boy with stars in his eyes, who lessened my fear of the cold full moon.
I'd never really been around other boys my age before; especially not the sort of boy who sneaked illegal broomsticks into school and spent hours telling completely fictitious stories about pranks he'd pulled on his perfectly awful family. I was as much in awe of his radiance as Peter was of the attention he and James attracted everywhere they went.
But I was only eleven, and friendship and Sirius were new to me. Besides, what would he do? Laugh, run away, refuse to speak to me? It would be worse than death to lose my first friend so soon, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Second Year. I was still young, and still didn't quite understand how love was meant to work, but I could sense something magnetic in the boy who hugged me close and asked if I really thought he'd abandon me.
He didn't care what I was, didn't care that once a month I would be more likely to kill him than let him copy my Charms essays, and he somehow made sure that James and Peter would feel the same. He was more intelligent than they were, although James was very close behind, and he not only figured out the reason for my monthly disappearances but exactly the right way to tell me he knew; exactly the right words to use.
Although he’d guessed I was a werewolf, there was no way he could fully understand what it meant; not that it mattered. My relief at sharing my secret, at our new closeness, was so great, that I didn’t want to complicate matters further - after all, I was still just twelve years old -- so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Third Year. I was slightly more sure of myself by then, but still confused about the boy who suddenly, and uncharacteristically, took to spending hours in the library, before delightedly telling me he'd found a way for my friends to spend the full moon with me.
From then on, he read with a passion he rarely showed with regard to schoolwork, and I found lists of potion ingredients and basic charms written in his familiar, scribbly writing, strewn all over the dorm, and rarely saw him without a quill and parchment in his pocket ready to take down notes. Even the teachers were astounded at his sudden studiousness, especially McGonagall, because Transfigurations was obviously the most relevant subject. For a while, the pranks died down, and I saw a different side to Sirius, which just made me more curious about him: was he was doing all this purely for my sake, or was it just another of the passing obsessions he pursued with such fervour?
Though my feelings for him never wavered, I was anxious about him all the same. When the novelty of my condition wore off, would he grow distant? Would he abandon his dreams of us running together as a pack and return to researching hexes to turn Snape bald, uglier, spottier? I watched from a distance as he read and scribbled and did his research, not daring to distract him in case he changed his mind. So I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Fourth Year. I was beginning to understand better how my hormones worked, and paid extra attention to the boy who somehow managed successfully to juggle his duties as Beater for the Gryffindor Quidditch team with Animagus Practice (as he called it), his status as resident Magical Mischief Maker, and his schoolwork. Sirius would probably have put the Quidditch last, if pressed. Though he was a natural on a broom - the first time I watched him in action I felt so dizzy that I had to go inside and lie down - he didn't practise as much as James and the rest of the team because he claimed he didn't need to and had better things to do. The Captain didn't mind; she wasn't going to drop Sirius Black.
I normally did his homework for him, and was rewarded with the brilliant smile that twisted my heart so painfully, and had half the girls in our year lusting after him. He had more or less completed the Animagus research, and he, James and Peter were beginning the practical work of transforming. They now spent most of their free time reciting complicated incantations and sneaking ingredients from the potions store.
James received an Invisibility Cloak that Christmas, and we embarked on the seemingly impossible task of mapping out every passageway of the castle for him to explore.
Fourth Year was also the year Sirius, James and Peter started talking about the girls they liked (all of them, Lily Evans, and 'that blonde Hufflepuff', respectively) and relating in excessive detail what their parents and siblings had told them about sex. I was slightly confused because the three of them were the only people I could happily look at for any length of time, and I still thought that Sirius's starry eyes were more beautiful than any girl's, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Fifth Year, when the wolf in me smelled something it liked in the big, black dog who ran beside me under the full moon, freed me from the confines of the Shack I hated and reintroduced me to the night sky.
He was so excited to be the dog, the one closest to me; and he and I often ran together while James trotted to catch up, with Peter on his back. He called me Moony, ostensibly because I was always mooning over something, and I called him Padfoot because he liked to sneak up on me as I worked and track muddy pawprints over my pristine essays. James was Prongs because the first time he transformed in the Dorm his antlers drove right through my bedcurtains and he kept accidently stabbing things, and Peter was Wormtail because the first thing I thought when I saw him was how my mother hated rats because their tails looked like 'horrible, wriggly worms'.
In Fifth Year, my father finally explained sex to me. He told me that the wolf would choose the strongest female to be the other Alpha, and mate with her for life. Dad added, 'While humans get the luxury of picking and choosing as many partners as they want, the wolf guides you, and wolves mate for life. You will find one person and she' - I'd smiled inwardly - 'will be the only one, whether she returns your feelings or not.' He'd laughed then. 'Make sure you choose wisely; I'd hate to have a Slytherin for a daughter-in-law!'
Sirius was far from female, but he and I walked at the head of the pack, tails proudly in the air, I felt that our animal forms at least were physically compatible. At times, when the moon was waxing, I could feel the wolf inside pushing me to throw him down and mount him, human or not.
He was already dating about three girls a month by then, and I knew he thought that the world in which he was Sirius Black, desirable newcomer to the Hogwarts market, was completely separate from the mysterious, dark one in which he was Padfoot, and hunted by night with his secret allies, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Sixth Year, before it all fell apart. I knew by then that there was no-one in the universe I could feel for as I felt for the boy who spent his days sitting with me discussing the ingredients for a potion to make Snape talk in dirty limericks for a week and his nights trying to imitate my howling in the deepest parts of the Forbidden Forest.
At the start of the year, we finally put the finishing touches to what we had titled 'The Marauder's Map', named for the passageway we'd stumbled upon behind a carving of Merrick the Marauder, a wizarding pirate who liked to play tricks on his crew when seas were clear: he had been killed when he'd mixed up itching powder and sugar, and Sirius loved to retell the gruesome tale of how he'd tried to scratch out his intestines using a blunt cutlass.
Sirius was more vibrant than he'd ever been. The excitement of his two extraordinary achievements -- the transformation and the catalogue of every room and passageway in Hogwarts -- had ignited in him a spark that was impossible to put out. Even as a prefect, I was unable to do anything but laugh at his exploits, and I overlooked his and James's arrogance, as well as their recklessness and their relentless bullying of Severus Snape.
And then, Sirius pulled The Prank; the act of boundless stupidity that should have been the end of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs He betrayed my trust, he betrayed James's and Peter's trust, and he nearly got both Snape and me killed just because he got carried away. I was deaf to his apologies, blind to his pleading glances; completely numb. I couldn't understand why he would have done such a thing; whatever Snape may have said or done to him, and I felt I had to be able to comprehend it before I could forgive it and accept Sirius again. The wolf was in agony the first full moon after that; enraged at being trapped inside, not understanding why his companions had left him alone. I came to myself again the next morning in more pain than I'd ever experienced during or after a transformation.
I spent the day alone, but at least I was allowed to go to bed in my own dormitory, as soon as dinner was over. After a night of terrible dreams, I was woken at dawn by a heavy, black dog jumping on to my bed, a physical shape that seemed to echo the chasms of horror in my mind. I tried to push him away, but Padfoot whined and licked my face, burrowed under the covers and curled up beside me, with his vast head on my chest, gazing up at me with eyes that seemed so full of sorrow and regret that I was convinced they might begin to overflow with real tears.
Even then, I was never quite sure how deeply Sirius’s feelings went, but mine ran so deep that I was instantly charmed, as no doubt Sirius had intended. I made another token pretence at pushing him away, but soon afterwards I drifted back to sleep again, with my arm around his neck, and dreamed that we were mated for life, running together through forests and fields, under a benign and smiling moon.
When I woke up, Sirius was back in his human form, in his own bed, but he knew that he was well and truly forgiven.
All the same, his betrayal remained between us for a while, sensed but never mentioned. It was not the right time to tell him, not while the wound was still healing over, and I couldn't bring myself to risk this tentative renewal of our friendship, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell Sirius during the holidays, after I’d endured two weeks at home without seeing or hearing from him: his absence had never hurt so badly, but then, we had never before parted on less than excellent terms.
I was planning to pack a case and catch the Knight Bus to Sirius’ house, but I left it too late. Sirius ran away from home that summer, and was taken in by the Potters, where he remained until term started.
Peter and I spent a few days at the Potters’ as well, but by then I was relieved that I hadn’t given in to my impulse. There was very little privacy at James’s place - his parents were wildly hospitable, and witches and wizards dropped in constantly - and it was impossible to get Sirius on his own. I certainly didn’t want anyone but Sirius to know how I felt about him, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Seventh Year. I felt I understood it all completely by then, when the boy who'd captured my heart had become a man and we were on the verge of joining the real world.
James was head boy, to our amazement: he hadn’t even been a prefect, but he had matured over the summer, possibly because Lily had been one of the regular visitors to the Potters’. Lily was head girl, and suddenly they were a couple, seeming very grown up compared to the squabbling pair of the year before. Though Lily never transfigured, she was now a member of our pack, and I felt like a proud parent watching his children grow and blossom before his eyes.
There was war on our doorstep, and The Prophet was full of doom and gloom. We were all much more serious during that year: we knew that we would have to fight as soon as we left the safety of Hogwarts Castle, and Sirius decided this was a reason to explore the concept of serial monogamy.
'We're living on borrowed time, Moony,' he confided, 'and I want a chance at love before this whole thing crashes down around us.' I was his confidant, the one he came to for advice, reassurance, or simply to talk to. I knew that relationships had been forged from less, though I sometimes remembered, wistfully, the two First Years who hadn’t shrunk from physical contact.
But every time I opened my mouth I saw the way his eyes followed Cassie Sinistra across the Entrance Hall, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not make the words come out, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the year after we left Hogwarts, when we were swept up in the whirlwind of wedding plans and Lily and James's obvious love for each other acted as a counterweight to the evil looming on the horizon.
For the time being, the four original members of the pack were still together, living in rooms above a quill shop in Diagon Alley, with our own house elf to do the cooking and cleaning: Sirius paid the rent with money his uncle had given him after he left home.
I was working part-time at Flourish and Blotts: the owner’s son was also a werewolf, so he hadn’t shrunk from hiring me, as most other employers would. The pay was bad, but I didn’t care, because life was exciting. We all joined the Order of the Phoenix as soon as we were settled in our new quarters, and I had the task of rounding up as many werewolves and associated dark creatures as possible, and persuading them to join our army.
During those first months out of school, Peter paired up with a former Hufflepuff, who worked at the Leaky Cauldron, and Sirius pursued his plan of trying to bed a different girl every night. God knows how he managed it, because his Order of the Phoenix tasks were more exacting than mine: he had to tread the thin line between being a member of the Black family and working for Dumbledore’s side. I think he was officially a spy, trying to keep us one step ahead of the Death Eaters.
The busier he got, the more manic his search for willing girls became - and they were willing, believe me, because Sirius’s magnetism increased as he got older. He dragged me on double-dates with Muggle airheads and ex-Slytherins, among others; and pestered me about finding my soulmate before it was too late. During one grueling evening, with a pair of blonde twins who were obviously hoping for a foursome, I pretended to be off to the loo, escaped through a window, and legged it home. Lily was there, waiting for James, and I found myself telling her everything.
Lily was sympathetic, as usual. She brewed me a cup of gillyflower tea, and made sure I drank it all. ‘Poor old Moony! It must be hard seeing him with all those girls. But you see, he hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and perhaps he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for yet.’
My heart was thumping so hard, in spite of the calming tea, that I hardly dared ask her. ‘You mean he could feel the same?’
Lily hesitated a little too long. ‘Yes, he could. And what have you got to lose by telling him? There’s a war on, remember. None of us knows how much time we have left. Wouldn't you rather take a chance on happiness than wake up every morning for the rest of your life wondering what he would have said? He does love you, Moony...not necessarily like that, but who am I to say? I’m not a man. You have to at least try...oh, there’s James now!’ She rushed up to meet him at the door.
It was good advice, I know, and I really wanted to take it, but then Sirius brought home both blonde twins, and I had to do a Deafening spell on myself to block out the sounds from his room. I was sick and disgusted, with him and with myself, and so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when James and Lily were married, at a Muggle ceremony in Surrey. Muggle clothes suited Sirius, who looked so beautiful that I could barely keep my eyes off him for a second. He was James’s best man, and managed to make a speech without a single mention of magic. Another side of Sirius, a socially sensitive one: I was impressed by his tact. He danced with all the bridesmaids, the bride herself, Minerva McGonagall, the groom, and somehow even managed to persuade Lily's sister to do an impromptu tango with him.
I spent most of my time at the bar, and the rest trying to pacify the panicking Muggles when Albus Dumbledore Apparated unexpectedly into the middle of the hall where the reception was being held, in full, purple robes, with a jovial grin on his face and Fawkes the phoenix on his shoulder. Lily’s sister, Petunia, and her fiancé, Vernon, looked daggers at him: we all knew how much they feared and despised wizards. But Dumbledore was unconcerned.
He stood with me for a while, humming along to the band, tapping his foot as if he were dying to dance: and he probably was, but of course none of the Muggle women there would have dared go within a mile of him. He smiled at James and Lily as they sat and gazed at each other, as if they were learning each other’s faces by heart.
'In times like these,' he said after a while, 'it is good to have an interlude, a happy moment that gives one hope for the future. My own path has never included marriage, but it must be comforting to know that there's someone there for you, must it not?'
I nodded and tried not to look too obviously at Sirius...a difficult task when he was at that moment making faces at me over Petunia Evans's shoulder.
Dumbledore surveyed the guests with curiosity. 'Oh, look, there's Frank Longbottom. I must confess, I wasn't expecting to see him here: he had a nasty run-in with a dustbin last week. Tried to gnaw his leg off.' And, with a wink, he swept away and Sirius was beside me with a wistful and - though I might have imagined it -- expectant look on his face.
But it was Lily and James's wedding day, and I didn’t want to risk a scene in front of Lily’s Muggle relatives - not after Dumbledore’s sudden appearance -- so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in 1980, when Harry was born and Voldemort was terrorising the wizarding community.
Some nights, Sirius would go out for hours, chasing information now, not girls. As the danger intensified, there were times when I was certain that he would walk out of our rooms and never return. I used to mumble ‘Bye’, after his retreating back, trying to keep my voice casual so I could convince myself he was just going for a harmless walk round the block.
For a while now, Voldemort had been leading a charmed life, evading carefully planned manoeuvres, escaping supposedly seamless assassination attempts. Sirius was especially frustrated, convinced that someone was feeding him misinformation, while there were mutterings in the Order that there must be a traitor among us.
Until James and Lily died, I never dreamed it could be Sirius, but he didn’t give me much reason to trust him. I hated it when he came in at about three in the morning with no explanations and stinking of blood and sweat; I hated that he hardly spoke to me anymore, or to anyone. I hated to think that he might think the fifth columnist was me.
When Harry was born, there was a month when the pack fell back into its old formation. I have a photo of us then, Peter holding Harry, very clumsily, Sirius looking down at the baby with an expression I had never seen on his face before, but which I hoped might one day be directed at me, James and Lily beaming so hard that they seemed to glow.
But nothing lasts forever. Soon, that brief respite ended and we were back to being distrustful and distant. I reasoned that this was a bad time; the new, suspicious Sirius would hardly be open to my protestations of love. I figured that we’d know soon enough who the traitor was, and as it wasn’t either of us, there’d be plenty of time for me to tell Sirius later, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in 1981, because the end of the wizarding world seemed to be at hand.
I was scared about him being Lily and James’s Secret Keeper, scared that the information might be tortured out of him, that he might be killed, that my last chance would be snatched away. I thought that if I expressed some doubt about it to Lily and James, they might reconsider, hand over the responsibility to somebody else. Callous, yes, but at that stage I was too anxious about Sirius to care.
One afternoon before the Potters moved to Godric’s Hollow, I tried to persuade them to switch Secret Keepers, but the words came out clumsily, as my words about Sirius so often did, and Lily was convinced I was trying to tell her that I thought he was the spy. She looked a bit puzzled, then obviously decided I had outgrown my unrequited passion, because she gave me a rather forced smile and said, ‘Actually, Sirius thinks it’s you.’
I knew that. I’d known for ages. But all the same, Lily’s words finally made it real. I felt like something was crushing my lungs, like they’d somehow forgotten how to perform the simple task of taking in air. Because in my heart, I always trusted Sirius, no matter what my head told me. And now I had proof that I had never come anywhere near touching Sirius’s heart, not even after all our years of friendship.
I have never felt so alone in my life.
And then came the morning of November first, when I woke up after the full moon all alone in a locked cellar, covered in wounds from the previous night; and saw Dumbledore standing at the entrance, a grave look on his face.
I saw Sirius once before he was imprisoned: he was being dragged out the Ministry of Magic building by a group of Dementors, and he looked me straight in the eye and choked, ‘Moony,’ before he was borne away. I nearly yelled it out then, in front of everyone, just to find out whether he cared, whether this had all been some horrible mistake.
But no matter how much I tried to deny it, I was finally convinced that Sirius had betrayed us all, and the words would no longer have been true.
~
I did manage to tell him once during the next twelve years.
When his photo appeared in the Prophet above a story about Cornelius Fudge’s recent visit to Azkaban prison, I choked on my toast and said bitterly, ‘I love you, Sirius Black.’
The day after that, his screaming, manic face was staring out of not only the Prophet but half the Muggle newspapers, too, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I somehow felt he’d heard me tell him at last, and that he was going to come after me, either to repent and ask for a fresh start or to kill me, too, and put me out of my misery.
I tried to say the words again, just to see what would happen, but the picture in the Prophet opened its mouth and snarled, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the moment I realised he was innocent, when we were gathered in the dust of the Shrieking Shack, but words escaped me.
I was speechless with the wonder of it all, the sudden clarity of my vision, the image of him, Sirius Black - Padfoot - lying in front of me with a bloody cat on his chest and grinning like the little First Year he’d once been. I was dangerously close to tears, moved beyond measure to find that miracles could happen and that my love, had not, after all, been extinguished by his apparent betrayal, had somehow survived those twelve painful years of his incarceration.
We had to explain to the children and then go to Dumbledore before we could relax, but it didn’t matter because everything was finally right with the world again...at least to my eyes.
But in my Sirius-induced daze, I’d forgotten to take my potion, and so I transformed, and ruined my life, Harry’s life, and possibly Sirius’s life as well.
At least I knew that Sirius was still alive, but by the time I recovered from that wild night, he was on the run again. I hadn’t left my confession so long just to tell him via Owl Post, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when he came to ‘lie low’ with me after his sojourn in a cave near Hogsmeade.
His hair was long again, then, as he always wore it when things were going badly, and so unkempt that his younger self would probably have passed out at the sight of it.
He was so thin that I could count his ribs and vertebrae: he told me he’d lived mostly on rats, ironically, but during the last year he’d been bold enough to steal food from the villagers. He also mentioned how ‘care packages’ had mysteriously appeared every month behind a conveniently nearby rock, and I laughed at Dumbledore’s astounding lack of subtlety, and then laughed even more when I realised that I hadn’t laughed in nearly fifteen years.
He didn’t like being the only person in the house, and spent an inordinate amount of time running round as Padfoot, letting me pet him and tease out the knots in his fur, not shying away from my touch as he would in his human form.
But after his years in prison and all we’d suffered, I wouldn’t have felt right coming out with it at that point. He was too fragile, and I was scared of breaking him. So I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him while we were at Grimmauld Place; when he didn’t want to be alone and practically begged me to come along and ‘keep me company, just like the old times.’
Of course, now that the Order were back together, I was once again having to go back and forth to obscure wizarding settlements all over the country to hunt down vampires and hags to join us, and he was still left by himself with only Buckbeak and that awful Kreacher for company. When I got home after these missions -- and it was ‘home’ to me, because home was wherever Sirius was -- I was hurt to hear him talk about how he wished Harry had been expelled because then he wouldn’t be so lonely all the time.
I wanted to just hold him, something I would never have dared do, and tell him that I was here; I wasn’t leaving anytime soon; and that we’d always be Moony and Padfoot, always.
But we were still in shock as the history of our youth seemed to repeat itself, as Voldemort silently gathered his forces, and I couldn’t even form the words in my head. I still thought that maybe, somehow, there would be blue skies at the end of our journey, better times when love could thrive rather than burn away, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the morning before he fell through the veil.
At that stage, Sirius was restless and discontented; after his fire talk with Harry about James, he began to spend hours shut in with Buckbeak even when I or one of the other Order members was in the house, and he'd developed a tendency to snap at people rather than joke or even shout normally, as he always used to do. I walked in to number 12 that morning after a week in some remote hamlet in Wales to find him drawing back the curtains around his mother's portrait just to start a screaming match with her. I took his arm and pulled him away, letting him yell at me instead.
When he’d shouted himself to a standstill, he looked disdainfully down his nose at me, like a true scion of the house of Black, and said coldly, ‘You know what I hate about you, Moony? It’s impossible to fight with you. You're so goddamned tolerant all the time!'
I shrugged, tightening my grip on his wrist. 'Sirius, I understand exactly what you’re going through, and ---‘
He wrenched his arm away. 'That's what I mean! You never get angry, you never get sad...it's like you can't feel any emotions at all. And you don’t understand a thing. You couldn’t even begin to imagine what I went through for twelve years in that hellhole - twelve years, Remus! You don’t even care, do you?’
I wanted to say it, then; I wanted to say it so badly I was shaking, on the verge of losing my self-control, though I knew I couldn’t afford to let the wolf in me rise to the surface, especially so close to the full moon. But nothing mattered any more, because I was finally there, and the words were tumbling, racing out of my mouth: ‘Actually, I've loved you for nearly twenty-five years, Sirius; so don't try to tell me what I do and do not feel.’
And as I spoke, it felt like the sun had come out in my head, until I looked up to see his reaction, and found that Sirius had gone, had run back up to Buckbeak’s room, and I had spoken the most important words of my life to thin air and a glowering portrait.
I shall never know if I could have said them again, because the two-way mirror that Dumbledore had issued to all the members of the Order started to emit a low hum, and I didn't have time to tell Sirius anything, except to call up to him that Harry was at the Department of Mysteries.
He came downstairs at once, called a quick 'Sorry' to me on the way out of the room, and that was the last thing he said to me directly. I replied with a smile, and if I'd known then how much the moment would mean, I would somehow have managed to tell him to his face.
But I didn't know, and at that moment Harry's safety was the most important thing in the world, so no one objected when Sirius insisted on coming along to the Departmart with us; and even though he had an almost feral glint in his eye and Disapparated with too much haste, I didn't reflect that maybe he should calm down. I thought that this outing, however terrible its purpose, would take the edge off his endless days alone in that house, and that maybe when we got home I would get to speak to the more rational side of Sirius, the side that appeared so rarely now, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when I heard Harry's scream in the Department of Mysteries; but it was all happening too quickly and I couldn't get the words to leave my mouth in time for him to hear them.
~
I was going to tell him as I held Harry back from the veil and told him Sirius was gone, but my voice cracked and I couldn't hear anything but the blood pumping through my veins and the sound of Harry's screams mingling with endless streams of hexes from behind us.
~
I was going to tell him as we left the chamber; as I turned back and stared at the archway and imagined him stepping out from behind it and saying, 'Gotcha!' But there was still a battle going on upstairs and I didn't have time to mourn my loss.
~
I was going to tell him at the funeral; kneel down by the slab engraved only with his name and whisper it, sob it, so that his spirit could hear me, wherever it was, but everyone had to stay strong for Harry, and it wouldn't do to break down in front of so many people and embrace the patch of earth where his body didn't even lie.
~
I was going to whisper it through the veil, or shout it out to his star in the clear summer sky, or ask Tonks to wear his face so I could say it in person, but it’s far too late - I waited too long to tell him, and now he’ll never know.
~fin~
It's also about to be x-posted to a helluva lotta comms, so bear with me. ^_~
Numquam
by S_Star
Disclaimer: No characters, settings, etc, are mine; they belong to JK Rowling and various lucky publishers. The worm quote was from a random friend, but supports what Rowling herself said about the origin of the name. Oh, and many of the words belong to the extremely talented minnow_53. *points at AN*
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Remus waited twenty-five years too long to say the words 'I love you'.
AN: This was absolutely appalling in its initial 'completed' state, so I'd like to give many heartfelt thanks to minnow_53, who practically ghostwrote the bloody thing. ^_~
Numquam
I was going to tell him in First Year. I was so young and vulnerable then, and though I knew nothing of romantic love at that age, I knew there was something special about the dark haired boy with stars in his eyes, who lessened my fear of the cold full moon.
I'd never really been around other boys my age before; especially not the sort of boy who sneaked illegal broomsticks into school and spent hours telling completely fictitious stories about pranks he'd pulled on his perfectly awful family. I was as much in awe of his radiance as Peter was of the attention he and James attracted everywhere they went.
But I was only eleven, and friendship and Sirius were new to me. Besides, what would he do? Laugh, run away, refuse to speak to me? It would be worse than death to lose my first friend so soon, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Second Year. I was still young, and still didn't quite understand how love was meant to work, but I could sense something magnetic in the boy who hugged me close and asked if I really thought he'd abandon me.
He didn't care what I was, didn't care that once a month I would be more likely to kill him than let him copy my Charms essays, and he somehow made sure that James and Peter would feel the same. He was more intelligent than they were, although James was very close behind, and he not only figured out the reason for my monthly disappearances but exactly the right way to tell me he knew; exactly the right words to use.
Although he’d guessed I was a werewolf, there was no way he could fully understand what it meant; not that it mattered. My relief at sharing my secret, at our new closeness, was so great, that I didn’t want to complicate matters further - after all, I was still just twelve years old -- so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Third Year. I was slightly more sure of myself by then, but still confused about the boy who suddenly, and uncharacteristically, took to spending hours in the library, before delightedly telling me he'd found a way for my friends to spend the full moon with me.
From then on, he read with a passion he rarely showed with regard to schoolwork, and I found lists of potion ingredients and basic charms written in his familiar, scribbly writing, strewn all over the dorm, and rarely saw him without a quill and parchment in his pocket ready to take down notes. Even the teachers were astounded at his sudden studiousness, especially McGonagall, because Transfigurations was obviously the most relevant subject. For a while, the pranks died down, and I saw a different side to Sirius, which just made me more curious about him: was he was doing all this purely for my sake, or was it just another of the passing obsessions he pursued with such fervour?
Though my feelings for him never wavered, I was anxious about him all the same. When the novelty of my condition wore off, would he grow distant? Would he abandon his dreams of us running together as a pack and return to researching hexes to turn Snape bald, uglier, spottier? I watched from a distance as he read and scribbled and did his research, not daring to distract him in case he changed his mind. So I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Fourth Year. I was beginning to understand better how my hormones worked, and paid extra attention to the boy who somehow managed successfully to juggle his duties as Beater for the Gryffindor Quidditch team with Animagus Practice (as he called it), his status as resident Magical Mischief Maker, and his schoolwork. Sirius would probably have put the Quidditch last, if pressed. Though he was a natural on a broom - the first time I watched him in action I felt so dizzy that I had to go inside and lie down - he didn't practise as much as James and the rest of the team because he claimed he didn't need to and had better things to do. The Captain didn't mind; she wasn't going to drop Sirius Black.
I normally did his homework for him, and was rewarded with the brilliant smile that twisted my heart so painfully, and had half the girls in our year lusting after him. He had more or less completed the Animagus research, and he, James and Peter were beginning the practical work of transforming. They now spent most of their free time reciting complicated incantations and sneaking ingredients from the potions store.
James received an Invisibility Cloak that Christmas, and we embarked on the seemingly impossible task of mapping out every passageway of the castle for him to explore.
Fourth Year was also the year Sirius, James and Peter started talking about the girls they liked (all of them, Lily Evans, and 'that blonde Hufflepuff', respectively) and relating in excessive detail what their parents and siblings had told them about sex. I was slightly confused because the three of them were the only people I could happily look at for any length of time, and I still thought that Sirius's starry eyes were more beautiful than any girl's, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Fifth Year, when the wolf in me smelled something it liked in the big, black dog who ran beside me under the full moon, freed me from the confines of the Shack I hated and reintroduced me to the night sky.
He was so excited to be the dog, the one closest to me; and he and I often ran together while James trotted to catch up, with Peter on his back. He called me Moony, ostensibly because I was always mooning over something, and I called him Padfoot because he liked to sneak up on me as I worked and track muddy pawprints over my pristine essays. James was Prongs because the first time he transformed in the Dorm his antlers drove right through my bedcurtains and he kept accidently stabbing things, and Peter was Wormtail because the first thing I thought when I saw him was how my mother hated rats because their tails looked like 'horrible, wriggly worms'.
In Fifth Year, my father finally explained sex to me. He told me that the wolf would choose the strongest female to be the other Alpha, and mate with her for life. Dad added, 'While humans get the luxury of picking and choosing as many partners as they want, the wolf guides you, and wolves mate for life. You will find one person and she' - I'd smiled inwardly - 'will be the only one, whether she returns your feelings or not.' He'd laughed then. 'Make sure you choose wisely; I'd hate to have a Slytherin for a daughter-in-law!'
Sirius was far from female, but he and I walked at the head of the pack, tails proudly in the air, I felt that our animal forms at least were physically compatible. At times, when the moon was waxing, I could feel the wolf inside pushing me to throw him down and mount him, human or not.
He was already dating about three girls a month by then, and I knew he thought that the world in which he was Sirius Black, desirable newcomer to the Hogwarts market, was completely separate from the mysterious, dark one in which he was Padfoot, and hunted by night with his secret allies, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Sixth Year, before it all fell apart. I knew by then that there was no-one in the universe I could feel for as I felt for the boy who spent his days sitting with me discussing the ingredients for a potion to make Snape talk in dirty limericks for a week and his nights trying to imitate my howling in the deepest parts of the Forbidden Forest.
At the start of the year, we finally put the finishing touches to what we had titled 'The Marauder's Map', named for the passageway we'd stumbled upon behind a carving of Merrick the Marauder, a wizarding pirate who liked to play tricks on his crew when seas were clear: he had been killed when he'd mixed up itching powder and sugar, and Sirius loved to retell the gruesome tale of how he'd tried to scratch out his intestines using a blunt cutlass.
Sirius was more vibrant than he'd ever been. The excitement of his two extraordinary achievements -- the transformation and the catalogue of every room and passageway in Hogwarts -- had ignited in him a spark that was impossible to put out. Even as a prefect, I was unable to do anything but laugh at his exploits, and I overlooked his and James's arrogance, as well as their recklessness and their relentless bullying of Severus Snape.
And then, Sirius pulled The Prank; the act of boundless stupidity that should have been the end of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs He betrayed my trust, he betrayed James's and Peter's trust, and he nearly got both Snape and me killed just because he got carried away. I was deaf to his apologies, blind to his pleading glances; completely numb. I couldn't understand why he would have done such a thing; whatever Snape may have said or done to him, and I felt I had to be able to comprehend it before I could forgive it and accept Sirius again. The wolf was in agony the first full moon after that; enraged at being trapped inside, not understanding why his companions had left him alone. I came to myself again the next morning in more pain than I'd ever experienced during or after a transformation.
I spent the day alone, but at least I was allowed to go to bed in my own dormitory, as soon as dinner was over. After a night of terrible dreams, I was woken at dawn by a heavy, black dog jumping on to my bed, a physical shape that seemed to echo the chasms of horror in my mind. I tried to push him away, but Padfoot whined and licked my face, burrowed under the covers and curled up beside me, with his vast head on my chest, gazing up at me with eyes that seemed so full of sorrow and regret that I was convinced they might begin to overflow with real tears.
Even then, I was never quite sure how deeply Sirius’s feelings went, but mine ran so deep that I was instantly charmed, as no doubt Sirius had intended. I made another token pretence at pushing him away, but soon afterwards I drifted back to sleep again, with my arm around his neck, and dreamed that we were mated for life, running together through forests and fields, under a benign and smiling moon.
When I woke up, Sirius was back in his human form, in his own bed, but he knew that he was well and truly forgiven.
All the same, his betrayal remained between us for a while, sensed but never mentioned. It was not the right time to tell him, not while the wound was still healing over, and I couldn't bring myself to risk this tentative renewal of our friendship, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell Sirius during the holidays, after I’d endured two weeks at home without seeing or hearing from him: his absence had never hurt so badly, but then, we had never before parted on less than excellent terms.
I was planning to pack a case and catch the Knight Bus to Sirius’ house, but I left it too late. Sirius ran away from home that summer, and was taken in by the Potters, where he remained until term started.
Peter and I spent a few days at the Potters’ as well, but by then I was relieved that I hadn’t given in to my impulse. There was very little privacy at James’s place - his parents were wildly hospitable, and witches and wizards dropped in constantly - and it was impossible to get Sirius on his own. I certainly didn’t want anyone but Sirius to know how I felt about him, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in Seventh Year. I felt I understood it all completely by then, when the boy who'd captured my heart had become a man and we were on the verge of joining the real world.
James was head boy, to our amazement: he hadn’t even been a prefect, but he had matured over the summer, possibly because Lily had been one of the regular visitors to the Potters’. Lily was head girl, and suddenly they were a couple, seeming very grown up compared to the squabbling pair of the year before. Though Lily never transfigured, she was now a member of our pack, and I felt like a proud parent watching his children grow and blossom before his eyes.
There was war on our doorstep, and The Prophet was full of doom and gloom. We were all much more serious during that year: we knew that we would have to fight as soon as we left the safety of Hogwarts Castle, and Sirius decided this was a reason to explore the concept of serial monogamy.
'We're living on borrowed time, Moony,' he confided, 'and I want a chance at love before this whole thing crashes down around us.' I was his confidant, the one he came to for advice, reassurance, or simply to talk to. I knew that relationships had been forged from less, though I sometimes remembered, wistfully, the two First Years who hadn’t shrunk from physical contact.
But every time I opened my mouth I saw the way his eyes followed Cassie Sinistra across the Entrance Hall, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not make the words come out, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the year after we left Hogwarts, when we were swept up in the whirlwind of wedding plans and Lily and James's obvious love for each other acted as a counterweight to the evil looming on the horizon.
For the time being, the four original members of the pack were still together, living in rooms above a quill shop in Diagon Alley, with our own house elf to do the cooking and cleaning: Sirius paid the rent with money his uncle had given him after he left home.
I was working part-time at Flourish and Blotts: the owner’s son was also a werewolf, so he hadn’t shrunk from hiring me, as most other employers would. The pay was bad, but I didn’t care, because life was exciting. We all joined the Order of the Phoenix as soon as we were settled in our new quarters, and I had the task of rounding up as many werewolves and associated dark creatures as possible, and persuading them to join our army.
During those first months out of school, Peter paired up with a former Hufflepuff, who worked at the Leaky Cauldron, and Sirius pursued his plan of trying to bed a different girl every night. God knows how he managed it, because his Order of the Phoenix tasks were more exacting than mine: he had to tread the thin line between being a member of the Black family and working for Dumbledore’s side. I think he was officially a spy, trying to keep us one step ahead of the Death Eaters.
The busier he got, the more manic his search for willing girls became - and they were willing, believe me, because Sirius’s magnetism increased as he got older. He dragged me on double-dates with Muggle airheads and ex-Slytherins, among others; and pestered me about finding my soulmate before it was too late. During one grueling evening, with a pair of blonde twins who were obviously hoping for a foursome, I pretended to be off to the loo, escaped through a window, and legged it home. Lily was there, waiting for James, and I found myself telling her everything.
Lily was sympathetic, as usual. She brewed me a cup of gillyflower tea, and made sure I drank it all. ‘Poor old Moony! It must be hard seeing him with all those girls. But you see, he hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and perhaps he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for yet.’
My heart was thumping so hard, in spite of the calming tea, that I hardly dared ask her. ‘You mean he could feel the same?’
Lily hesitated a little too long. ‘Yes, he could. And what have you got to lose by telling him? There’s a war on, remember. None of us knows how much time we have left. Wouldn't you rather take a chance on happiness than wake up every morning for the rest of your life wondering what he would have said? He does love you, Moony...not necessarily like that, but who am I to say? I’m not a man. You have to at least try...oh, there’s James now!’ She rushed up to meet him at the door.
It was good advice, I know, and I really wanted to take it, but then Sirius brought home both blonde twins, and I had to do a Deafening spell on myself to block out the sounds from his room. I was sick and disgusted, with him and with myself, and so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when James and Lily were married, at a Muggle ceremony in Surrey. Muggle clothes suited Sirius, who looked so beautiful that I could barely keep my eyes off him for a second. He was James’s best man, and managed to make a speech without a single mention of magic. Another side of Sirius, a socially sensitive one: I was impressed by his tact. He danced with all the bridesmaids, the bride herself, Minerva McGonagall, the groom, and somehow even managed to persuade Lily's sister to do an impromptu tango with him.
I spent most of my time at the bar, and the rest trying to pacify the panicking Muggles when Albus Dumbledore Apparated unexpectedly into the middle of the hall where the reception was being held, in full, purple robes, with a jovial grin on his face and Fawkes the phoenix on his shoulder. Lily’s sister, Petunia, and her fiancé, Vernon, looked daggers at him: we all knew how much they feared and despised wizards. But Dumbledore was unconcerned.
He stood with me for a while, humming along to the band, tapping his foot as if he were dying to dance: and he probably was, but of course none of the Muggle women there would have dared go within a mile of him. He smiled at James and Lily as they sat and gazed at each other, as if they were learning each other’s faces by heart.
'In times like these,' he said after a while, 'it is good to have an interlude, a happy moment that gives one hope for the future. My own path has never included marriage, but it must be comforting to know that there's someone there for you, must it not?'
I nodded and tried not to look too obviously at Sirius...a difficult task when he was at that moment making faces at me over Petunia Evans's shoulder.
Dumbledore surveyed the guests with curiosity. 'Oh, look, there's Frank Longbottom. I must confess, I wasn't expecting to see him here: he had a nasty run-in with a dustbin last week. Tried to gnaw his leg off.' And, with a wink, he swept away and Sirius was beside me with a wistful and - though I might have imagined it -- expectant look on his face.
But it was Lily and James's wedding day, and I didn’t want to risk a scene in front of Lily’s Muggle relatives - not after Dumbledore’s sudden appearance -- so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in 1980, when Harry was born and Voldemort was terrorising the wizarding community.
Some nights, Sirius would go out for hours, chasing information now, not girls. As the danger intensified, there were times when I was certain that he would walk out of our rooms and never return. I used to mumble ‘Bye’, after his retreating back, trying to keep my voice casual so I could convince myself he was just going for a harmless walk round the block.
For a while now, Voldemort had been leading a charmed life, evading carefully planned manoeuvres, escaping supposedly seamless assassination attempts. Sirius was especially frustrated, convinced that someone was feeding him misinformation, while there were mutterings in the Order that there must be a traitor among us.
Until James and Lily died, I never dreamed it could be Sirius, but he didn’t give me much reason to trust him. I hated it when he came in at about three in the morning with no explanations and stinking of blood and sweat; I hated that he hardly spoke to me anymore, or to anyone. I hated to think that he might think the fifth columnist was me.
When Harry was born, there was a month when the pack fell back into its old formation. I have a photo of us then, Peter holding Harry, very clumsily, Sirius looking down at the baby with an expression I had never seen on his face before, but which I hoped might one day be directed at me, James and Lily beaming so hard that they seemed to glow.
But nothing lasts forever. Soon, that brief respite ended and we were back to being distrustful and distant. I reasoned that this was a bad time; the new, suspicious Sirius would hardly be open to my protestations of love. I figured that we’d know soon enough who the traitor was, and as it wasn’t either of us, there’d be plenty of time for me to tell Sirius later, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him in 1981, because the end of the wizarding world seemed to be at hand.
I was scared about him being Lily and James’s Secret Keeper, scared that the information might be tortured out of him, that he might be killed, that my last chance would be snatched away. I thought that if I expressed some doubt about it to Lily and James, they might reconsider, hand over the responsibility to somebody else. Callous, yes, but at that stage I was too anxious about Sirius to care.
One afternoon before the Potters moved to Godric’s Hollow, I tried to persuade them to switch Secret Keepers, but the words came out clumsily, as my words about Sirius so often did, and Lily was convinced I was trying to tell her that I thought he was the spy. She looked a bit puzzled, then obviously decided I had outgrown my unrequited passion, because she gave me a rather forced smile and said, ‘Actually, Sirius thinks it’s you.’
I knew that. I’d known for ages. But all the same, Lily’s words finally made it real. I felt like something was crushing my lungs, like they’d somehow forgotten how to perform the simple task of taking in air. Because in my heart, I always trusted Sirius, no matter what my head told me. And now I had proof that I had never come anywhere near touching Sirius’s heart, not even after all our years of friendship.
I have never felt so alone in my life.
And then came the morning of November first, when I woke up after the full moon all alone in a locked cellar, covered in wounds from the previous night; and saw Dumbledore standing at the entrance, a grave look on his face.
I saw Sirius once before he was imprisoned: he was being dragged out the Ministry of Magic building by a group of Dementors, and he looked me straight in the eye and choked, ‘Moony,’ before he was borne away. I nearly yelled it out then, in front of everyone, just to find out whether he cared, whether this had all been some horrible mistake.
But no matter how much I tried to deny it, I was finally convinced that Sirius had betrayed us all, and the words would no longer have been true.
~
I did manage to tell him once during the next twelve years.
When his photo appeared in the Prophet above a story about Cornelius Fudge’s recent visit to Azkaban prison, I choked on my toast and said bitterly, ‘I love you, Sirius Black.’
The day after that, his screaming, manic face was staring out of not only the Prophet but half the Muggle newspapers, too, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I somehow felt he’d heard me tell him at last, and that he was going to come after me, either to repent and ask for a fresh start or to kill me, too, and put me out of my misery.
I tried to say the words again, just to see what would happen, but the picture in the Prophet opened its mouth and snarled, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the moment I realised he was innocent, when we were gathered in the dust of the Shrieking Shack, but words escaped me.
I was speechless with the wonder of it all, the sudden clarity of my vision, the image of him, Sirius Black - Padfoot - lying in front of me with a bloody cat on his chest and grinning like the little First Year he’d once been. I was dangerously close to tears, moved beyond measure to find that miracles could happen and that my love, had not, after all, been extinguished by his apparent betrayal, had somehow survived those twelve painful years of his incarceration.
We had to explain to the children and then go to Dumbledore before we could relax, but it didn’t matter because everything was finally right with the world again...at least to my eyes.
But in my Sirius-induced daze, I’d forgotten to take my potion, and so I transformed, and ruined my life, Harry’s life, and possibly Sirius’s life as well.
At least I knew that Sirius was still alive, but by the time I recovered from that wild night, he was on the run again. I hadn’t left my confession so long just to tell him via Owl Post, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when he came to ‘lie low’ with me after his sojourn in a cave near Hogsmeade.
His hair was long again, then, as he always wore it when things were going badly, and so unkempt that his younger self would probably have passed out at the sight of it.
He was so thin that I could count his ribs and vertebrae: he told me he’d lived mostly on rats, ironically, but during the last year he’d been bold enough to steal food from the villagers. He also mentioned how ‘care packages’ had mysteriously appeared every month behind a conveniently nearby rock, and I laughed at Dumbledore’s astounding lack of subtlety, and then laughed even more when I realised that I hadn’t laughed in nearly fifteen years.
He didn’t like being the only person in the house, and spent an inordinate amount of time running round as Padfoot, letting me pet him and tease out the knots in his fur, not shying away from my touch as he would in his human form.
But after his years in prison and all we’d suffered, I wouldn’t have felt right coming out with it at that point. He was too fragile, and I was scared of breaking him. So I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him while we were at Grimmauld Place; when he didn’t want to be alone and practically begged me to come along and ‘keep me company, just like the old times.’
Of course, now that the Order were back together, I was once again having to go back and forth to obscure wizarding settlements all over the country to hunt down vampires and hags to join us, and he was still left by himself with only Buckbeak and that awful Kreacher for company. When I got home after these missions -- and it was ‘home’ to me, because home was wherever Sirius was -- I was hurt to hear him talk about how he wished Harry had been expelled because then he wouldn’t be so lonely all the time.
I wanted to just hold him, something I would never have dared do, and tell him that I was here; I wasn’t leaving anytime soon; and that we’d always be Moony and Padfoot, always.
But we were still in shock as the history of our youth seemed to repeat itself, as Voldemort silently gathered his forces, and I couldn’t even form the words in my head. I still thought that maybe, somehow, there would be blue skies at the end of our journey, better times when love could thrive rather than burn away, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him the morning before he fell through the veil.
At that stage, Sirius was restless and discontented; after his fire talk with Harry about James, he began to spend hours shut in with Buckbeak even when I or one of the other Order members was in the house, and he'd developed a tendency to snap at people rather than joke or even shout normally, as he always used to do. I walked in to number 12 that morning after a week in some remote hamlet in Wales to find him drawing back the curtains around his mother's portrait just to start a screaming match with her. I took his arm and pulled him away, letting him yell at me instead.
When he’d shouted himself to a standstill, he looked disdainfully down his nose at me, like a true scion of the house of Black, and said coldly, ‘You know what I hate about you, Moony? It’s impossible to fight with you. You're so goddamned tolerant all the time!'
I shrugged, tightening my grip on his wrist. 'Sirius, I understand exactly what you’re going through, and ---‘
He wrenched his arm away. 'That's what I mean! You never get angry, you never get sad...it's like you can't feel any emotions at all. And you don’t understand a thing. You couldn’t even begin to imagine what I went through for twelve years in that hellhole - twelve years, Remus! You don’t even care, do you?’
I wanted to say it, then; I wanted to say it so badly I was shaking, on the verge of losing my self-control, though I knew I couldn’t afford to let the wolf in me rise to the surface, especially so close to the full moon. But nothing mattered any more, because I was finally there, and the words were tumbling, racing out of my mouth: ‘Actually, I've loved you for nearly twenty-five years, Sirius; so don't try to tell me what I do and do not feel.’
And as I spoke, it felt like the sun had come out in my head, until I looked up to see his reaction, and found that Sirius had gone, had run back up to Buckbeak’s room, and I had spoken the most important words of my life to thin air and a glowering portrait.
I shall never know if I could have said them again, because the two-way mirror that Dumbledore had issued to all the members of the Order started to emit a low hum, and I didn't have time to tell Sirius anything, except to call up to him that Harry was at the Department of Mysteries.
He came downstairs at once, called a quick 'Sorry' to me on the way out of the room, and that was the last thing he said to me directly. I replied with a smile, and if I'd known then how much the moment would mean, I would somehow have managed to tell him to his face.
But I didn't know, and at that moment Harry's safety was the most important thing in the world, so no one objected when Sirius insisted on coming along to the Departmart with us; and even though he had an almost feral glint in his eye and Disapparated with too much haste, I didn't reflect that maybe he should calm down. I thought that this outing, however terrible its purpose, would take the edge off his endless days alone in that house, and that maybe when we got home I would get to speak to the more rational side of Sirius, the side that appeared so rarely now, so I decided to wait.
~
I was going to tell him when I heard Harry's scream in the Department of Mysteries; but it was all happening too quickly and I couldn't get the words to leave my mouth in time for him to hear them.
~
I was going to tell him as I held Harry back from the veil and told him Sirius was gone, but my voice cracked and I couldn't hear anything but the blood pumping through my veins and the sound of Harry's screams mingling with endless streams of hexes from behind us.
~
I was going to tell him as we left the chamber; as I turned back and stared at the archway and imagined him stepping out from behind it and saying, 'Gotcha!' But there was still a battle going on upstairs and I didn't have time to mourn my loss.
~
I was going to tell him at the funeral; kneel down by the slab engraved only with his name and whisper it, sob it, so that his spirit could hear me, wherever it was, but everyone had to stay strong for Harry, and it wouldn't do to break down in front of so many people and embrace the patch of earth where his body didn't even lie.
~
I was going to whisper it through the veil, or shout it out to his star in the clear summer sky, or ask Tonks to wear his face so I could say it in person, but it’s far too late - I waited too long to tell him, and now he’ll never know.
~fin~