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The Sudden Light and the Trees, Part 2
“Your hands are shaking.”
They were. Remus set down the nut-brown teapot and laid his callused, greying hands flat to the edge of his trunk, the makeshift table. The wood was gouged from years of use, and even his numbed skin found the shifting of splinters left by feral nights spent alone. His mug lay to the left, with a pouch of tea and no water. He knelt on stone by the bed, his knees also trembling at the growing coolness. The padding of dirt his trousers had acquired in the garden was not enough to stave off this newest chill.
“It happens at my age,” Remus replied, to which Sirius, standing by the stove with his revenant feet half-buried in the ground, wrinkled his nose.
“Surely you’re not that old.”
“For my kind, yes.”
Sirius did not look pleased. Remus understood. Though wraith-like, it was evident time had only been kind to Sirius - or perhaps only Remus’s own waning vision, and his own distance from that whole other era, was the real force behind the way Sirius’s face seemed to be reacquiring its youth. It was a strong face, and proud, and entirely out of place in the smallness, the lowness, the meanness of the hut. His dark hair bowed to shape his cheekbones, and the rest fell loose and light, effortless, just at his broadened shoulders. Sirius’s arms were folded across his chest; he studied Remus with a look sharp as Hogwarts, and all their long-ago time there.
“So when are we, then? And where are we?”
“Northumberland, England.”
The tremors in Remus’s knees would not subside. He sat back on his calves a moment, shutting his eyes, and then pushed himself up to the bed. He leaned over the lip of the mattress to handle the teapot, pouring himself a cup as if expecting both pieces to break. As if looking forward to the mess.
“Where’s everyone else?”
Remus’s lip curled; he did not look to Sirius as he drew the cup to his face and inhaled. “You expected more than a hermitic old fool?”
Sirius looked to one of the shut windows, peering as if to bridge the blockade of wood. The hard twist of his mouth, the narrowing of his eyes, betrayed his failure. The wind was heavy on the sparse thatch roof, which quivered in place but held. The door was still restless in its frame, and the shutters rattled with fiercer gales, but there remained a persistent sense of distance even from the weather; inside, only the soft knock of dry apples hanging by the stove conveyed the draft. The hut was dark, as the evening was dark, and the silence between them carried longer in the breadth of these details than in actuality.
“Not sure I expected anything, really. I couldn’t. It’s not that you stop caring once you go, you just…” He fell silent and drew his shadowed gaze to the bed where Remus lay hunched in his blanket, sipping at his tea. Sirius shook his head, and the rest of the explanation fell away. “But I’m surprised you’re still drinking that shit.”
Remus frowned. “Says the man who hasn’t had a drink of any kind since - ” Sirius raised an eyebrow expectantly; Remus faltered, biting his lower lip. “Anyway, it’s not important.” He paused, his own gaze straying low over the floor before he crooked an awkward smile. “And don’t expect me to make any jokes about spirits. I’m afraid you’ll find humour sorely lacking here as well.”
“There’s a lot lacking here.” Sirius studied the small iron frying pan on the dirt by him, and then the mottled walls. Remus set down his cup and folded his hands in his lap, tucking the blanket tighter over his shoulders and drawing his slack and hairy feet to the bed, still in his dirty trousers but too tired to care.
“Will the room always be cold while you’re here?”
“Only until you are.”
Remus closed his eyes. “I’m cold now.”
“Not enough,” said Sirius, his expression falling grave and upon Remus now; there was something darker in his eyes, something fiercer as he studied him. “But soon. You must know when, to have called me.”
Remus inclined his head with a sigh. The bed creaked as he shifted more of his weight over it, drawing the other blankets around. The thick country musk steeped in the sheets assailed him as he lay down, but the added warmth was minimal, and he shivered. “Out of the four, I don’t think any expected I’d be the only one to do this properly.”
“Out of the four, I doubt the rest of us could even begin to imagine age like you did. You’ve been an old man since sixteen.”
“If I have you had some part in it, I’d expect.” Remus opened his eyes to turn sunken face to Sirius, lips curled in a scar-splitting smile. “You always had a way of making the rest of us feel older. Likely because you never matured much yourself.”
Sirius shrugged. “Times were, we could all have done with a bit more good fun. I see no reason to apologise for that.”
“No, no you wouldn’t.” Remus sighed, and his sigh became a yawn. “No apologies. Not then, not now. Not from you, at least.”
“And from you?”
From the bed Remus could watch the low orange flicker in the stove, the shifting of dark blues at the windows, and the undeniable ash-white outlining Sirius’s form. Beyond these, the room was brown, dim and fuzzy at the edges, in the distance. Everything was in shade. The room spun with shadow. “From me, yes,” he agreed, and his bones felt heavy with the accession. “I expect it’s a long story, and maybe not one I'm ready to tell.”
“Or maybe one you are. Maybe one you must,” Sirius countered, his expression grown harder, more sombre. Remus closed his eyes again, the shivers in his old body subsiding. “That is, after all,” Sirius continued, “Why you called me here.”
But Remus was beyond agreement. The August wind whipped up the fields and chased the grass to the hut. It scraped the walls and strayed over the thatch, rattling at the doors. Sirius listened, a fondness growing in his eyes as he heard whispers in its movements no living creature could begin to comprehend. There would be only the wind, and the wind's own, to entertain him now, till morning, and no answer at least till then for his speech.
Remus, his chest a shuddering rise and fall under the stiff and scratchy blankets, had fallen to a lesser sleep.