Fic: Silvery Moon
Author: Bitterfig
Title: Silvery Moon
Pairing: Remus Lupin/Alice Longbottom (Remus/Sirius implied.)
Summary: October, 1981. An unexpected dalliance between two members of the Order of the Phoenix. Who knew Neville’s mom was such a bombshell?
Beta Reader: Nzomniac
Ratings: NC-17
Warnings: Remus cheating on Sirius--with a woman. Infidelity, adultery, heterosexual situations, and violence.
Word Count: 2029
Author’s Notes: Written for the lj community Remus Reads prompt # 3 - Remus has a one night stand with a friend’s partner (the friend is oblivious).
Silvery Moon
“Lovely shiner, Moonchilde,” Alice greeted him. “Been mouthing off to Sirius, have we?”
She was the only one who called him Moonchilde. Somehow she had taken Moony, the name his mates used, and changed it about so it felt like something secret and special between them. Alice Longbottom had a way of taking things and making them her own. Like her rhinestone studded cats eye glasses or the dress she was wearing, an antique thing of silvery taffeta that clung to her substantial, post-natal curves.
Remus Lupin touched his eye, winching at the tenderness. He’d meant to heal it earlier. It was a simple enough spell, but then an owl had flown in with the letter from Alice saying she needed him right away. In his haste to join her, he’d forgotten all about the argument with Sirius and the purple mark on his face.
Alice tended to have that effect on him--not unlike a Confundus Charm. Her mere presence threw him seriously off balance. He assumed it was because he was something of a novice when it came to women. His mother had been frightened of him after he became a werewolf at six and kept herself distance thereafter. He’d had no sisters, few female friends and certainly no girlfriends. At the age most boys began to be drawn to the opposite sex, he’d lost himself in Sirius Black. In the Order of the Phoenix, he found himself working closely with women in a way he hadn’t since he was a very small boy.
He had watched Alice Longbottom and Lily Potter’s seemingly synchronized pregnancies with a rapt fascination. After giving birth to her son, Neville, the past July Alice had almost immediately returned full-force to the Order of the Phoenix--going on missions, patrolling and actively engaging with the Death Eaters. No one cared to see a new mother placed in danger, but she was desperately needed. She was after all an Auror, certainly much more qualified than Remus or Sirius in dealing with the Dark Arts.
Remus had his own reasons to be glad of her return. Her willowy girl’s body was now a woman’s, her arms round and firmly muscled from carrying her son. In the midst of the increasing chaos of Voldermort’s steady ascension towards power, Remus found her presence, her body remarkably reassuring. He was sure it was nothing, some kind of displaced mother longing--though, at times, it felt like something else, secret and special between them.
“Sirius has been under pressure lately,” Remus said, his fingers still lingering on his eye.
“Oh, it’s quite understandable, then,” Alice said sarcastically. “Bit of pressure will do it. Why, just last night, I bloodied Frank’s nose and tossed Neville across the room.”
“His cousin’s family is being targeted by the Death Eaters, Alice. He’s on edge.”
“No need to make excuses,” she said primly. “If you don’t mind him being a rat bastard to you, why should I?”
“What happened to Frank? You usually patrol with him,” Remus said lamely just to change the subject.
“Yeah, sorry to ask you to fill in at the last moment. Something came up with Mother Longbottom, so Frank decided to ditch patrol. What’s a war compared to Mother Longbottom’s comfort and well-being?” There was bitterness in her voice and a dark look crept over her usually open face. Then, just as quickly, she was herself again. “Have you got your broomstick?” she asked.
“Yes,” Remus said. “I do.”
Remus had to admit he was less than thrilled with her decision to patrol on broomstick. He’d never been much of a flyer. Maybe it was the wolf in him, but he preferred to keep his feet on the ground and since learning to Apparate when he was seventeen, the only time he touched a broomstick was to sweep. Alice, on the other hand, was a natural. Wrapped around her broomstick, her heavy fall of white blonde hair trailing out behind her, she was completely at ease in the air. At Hogwarts she had been Seeker for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. Remus could only dimly remember watching her play as she had been five years ahead of him, but he couldn’t imagine her being anything less than spectacular.
As the sun set and the sky turned from coral pink to violet and the silver crescent moon appeared, they circled and watched, paying special attention to the house where Sirius’ cousin, Andromeda Tonks, lived with her husband Ted and eight year old daughter, Nymphadora. That Andromeda Black, daughter of the proudest of the pureblood houses, was married to a Muggle and raising a half-blood child was more than enough to run afoul of the Death Eaters. According to Dumbledore’s most reliable source, some kind of action would be taking place against the Tonks’ within the next few days. The family had been sent away for their safety; the house remaining empty as a decoy. They might never be able to come back. The Death Eaters seemed to be growing stronger everyday. It was no wonder Sirius had been so easily upset. No wonder he had gotten so angry.
“It’s them,” Alice whispered leaning intently from her broomstick; her eyes narrowed, fixed on something he could not see. “They’re making their move. I’m going to dive them, Moonchilde. Be ready to cover me.”
“You’re going to dive them?” Remus repeated dumbly but she was already gone, plunging downward at breakneck speed. Ignoring his nausea, he followed her.
As they zoomed in, he saw there were five Death Eaters approaching the house. Remus and Alice were badly outnumbered but surprise was on their side. When Alice bowled over two of the masked figures, the cries and confusion from the others was a clear indicator that their presence was totally unexpected. Remus managed to stun one of the standing Death Eaters, but another caught Alice with a hex that knocked her from her broomstick as she swung around for another pass.
Remus jumped off his broom. Landing between Alice and the Death Eater, he countered a second hex before it could strike her.
“Expelliarmus,” a woman’s voice shrieked. Their wands were jerked away from them. Heart-stopping panic stabbed through Remus, the absolute vulnerability at being disarmed choking his breath. Alice, on the other hand, was undeterred. She swung her broom into the Death Eater woman with such speed that there was no time to cast another spell.
As Remus moved to retrieve their wands, Alice sprang at the Death Eater woman and the two of them grappled frantically through Andromeda Tonks’ rose bushes, so entangled he couldn’t hex one without striking the other. Not that he needed to worry, Alice Longbottom was quite the scrapper. About the time she ripped off Bellatrix Lestrange’s mask, Remus realized with an excitement indistinguishable from terror that he was going to be kissing her at the first opportunity.
“Ta, going after your own sister, Bellatrix?” Alice growled. “I’m afraid nobody’s home tonight.”
“Unhand me, you bloody cow,” Bellatrix spat. “Brawling like Muggle trash. I’ll show you how a self-respecting witch deals with her enemies.” She raised her wand but Alice snatched it away.
“Not with this, you won’t,” she said and snapped the slender ebony stick in two. Bellatrix gave a bloodcurdling howl.
“You’re going to suffer for this, Alice Longbottom,” she shrieked with feral intensity. “You’re going to suffer horribly.” Strengthened by her rage, she broke free from Alice, Apparating away before Remus’ hex could catch her. The other Death Eaters followed her, disappearing into the night.
Alice uttered a string of curses, her fists clenched. “Bloody hell, I thought I’d nabbed her. What a prize that would have been.”
He kissed her then on her fierce, foul mouth. She was sweet as milk but burned liked pepper, and the tongue she had been swearing so fluently with was stronger and more like velvet than he’d ever dared to imagine. When she drew away, he expected her to protest. For her to tell him she was a wife and a mother.
“Not here,” she said. “They might be back.” She grabbed his hand and Apparated them somewhere else. An old graveyard surrounded by a stone fence. A throng of crumbling monuments, statues of angels carrying lambs. She fell on him as ferociously as she had pounced on Bellatrix.
“We ought not to, Alice,” he said groping at the zipper of her dress. “You’re a wife and a mother.” He said it because he felt it should be said, because it was the right thing to say, the sane and reasonable thing to say. He wanted desperately to be a decent person but passion for him had always been a kind of madness.
Even with Sirius. Especially with Sirius.
He’d never touched a woman, not really. Brushed against, bumped into, extended a hand to, perhaps even hugged Lily once or twice, but never before explored. There were so many extraordinary things to discover about Alice Longbottom. The swell of her breasts, the way she sighed and her face grew hazy when he caressed them. The heavy satin texture of her thighs and the slick, unexpectedly cool cleft between them. She pressed his hand there, moved against it until he knew how to move it himself. Then she moaned and she stiffened and twitched till he feared she was having some sort of a seizure. He would have stopped but she said, “Don’t you dare,” as her thighs clenched around him, and he realized she had been climaxing.
She undid his trousers, straddling him, guided the head of his cock where his hand had been. He felt her convulsions around him, the rhythmic jerks of her hips. It seemed almost unbearable, unendurable, but she drew him further inside her, all the way in, her legs wrapped around him, her heels biting into him, spurring him on as they fused in a strange, mourning ecstasy.
“Don’t regret this, Moonchilde,” she said zipping up her dress as he lay panting on a long granite slab overgrown with moss. “I know you well enough to know you will, but this is what people do when they’re at war. They kill and maim over abstractions and philosophical differences. And when they find something akin to affection, they embrace it with all the strength they have.”
She was right, of course. That sane, rational part of him that wanted so badly to be decent and do right could scarcely comprehend what they had done.
It wasn’t because of Sirius. Sirius could be wildly possessive. Remus had learned that sixth-year when his illicit crush on Severus Snape had almost gotten the other boy killed. Even so, Sirius had little regard for fidelity. He did what he pleased secure in the knowledge that Remus belonged to him. He had been with other people since they had been together. Remus almost welcomed this. It allowed him to justify those few times, those rare moments when he’d lost himself--the reeling, blood-soaked night nearly two years before when he’d seduced Sirius’ little brother; a dark, baffling incident six months before that he still couldn’t understand, that sometimes seemed like rape and sometimes seemed like a surrendering of himself, sacrificing himself to the needs of one of his oldest and dearest friends; and now this incredible, silver blonde woman he had been mad to have, who he had thought of only as secret and special to him, but who was in fact someone else’s wife, a friends wife.
“What about Frank?” Remus asked.
“Frank is a good husband,” Alice said. “A good father and a good son. He’s all those things before he’s a solider. Maybe someday I’ll be Mrs. Frank Longbottom and Neville’s mom first, but right now I’m in this fight and I scratch and I claw and I grab and I hold on.”
“And you were magnificent,” he said. “Against the Death Eaters, and with me.” She smiled and touched his scarred check with her strong, pale hand. “Magnificent,” he whispered again not dreaming that within the month, she would be a hollow shell, empty as the crescent of the silvery moon.
Title: Silvery Moon
Pairing: Remus Lupin/Alice Longbottom (Remus/Sirius implied.)
Summary: October, 1981. An unexpected dalliance between two members of the Order of the Phoenix. Who knew Neville’s mom was such a bombshell?
Beta Reader: Nzomniac
Ratings: NC-17
Warnings: Remus cheating on Sirius--with a woman. Infidelity, adultery, heterosexual situations, and violence.
Word Count: 2029
Author’s Notes: Written for the lj community Remus Reads prompt # 3 - Remus has a one night stand with a friend’s partner (the friend is oblivious).
Silvery Moon
“Lovely shiner, Moonchilde,” Alice greeted him. “Been mouthing off to Sirius, have we?”
She was the only one who called him Moonchilde. Somehow she had taken Moony, the name his mates used, and changed it about so it felt like something secret and special between them. Alice Longbottom had a way of taking things and making them her own. Like her rhinestone studded cats eye glasses or the dress she was wearing, an antique thing of silvery taffeta that clung to her substantial, post-natal curves.
Remus Lupin touched his eye, winching at the tenderness. He’d meant to heal it earlier. It was a simple enough spell, but then an owl had flown in with the letter from Alice saying she needed him right away. In his haste to join her, he’d forgotten all about the argument with Sirius and the purple mark on his face.
Alice tended to have that effect on him--not unlike a Confundus Charm. Her mere presence threw him seriously off balance. He assumed it was because he was something of a novice when it came to women. His mother had been frightened of him after he became a werewolf at six and kept herself distance thereafter. He’d had no sisters, few female friends and certainly no girlfriends. At the age most boys began to be drawn to the opposite sex, he’d lost himself in Sirius Black. In the Order of the Phoenix, he found himself working closely with women in a way he hadn’t since he was a very small boy.
He had watched Alice Longbottom and Lily Potter’s seemingly synchronized pregnancies with a rapt fascination. After giving birth to her son, Neville, the past July Alice had almost immediately returned full-force to the Order of the Phoenix--going on missions, patrolling and actively engaging with the Death Eaters. No one cared to see a new mother placed in danger, but she was desperately needed. She was after all an Auror, certainly much more qualified than Remus or Sirius in dealing with the Dark Arts.
Remus had his own reasons to be glad of her return. Her willowy girl’s body was now a woman’s, her arms round and firmly muscled from carrying her son. In the midst of the increasing chaos of Voldermort’s steady ascension towards power, Remus found her presence, her body remarkably reassuring. He was sure it was nothing, some kind of displaced mother longing--though, at times, it felt like something else, secret and special between them.
“Sirius has been under pressure lately,” Remus said, his fingers still lingering on his eye.
“Oh, it’s quite understandable, then,” Alice said sarcastically. “Bit of pressure will do it. Why, just last night, I bloodied Frank’s nose and tossed Neville across the room.”
“His cousin’s family is being targeted by the Death Eaters, Alice. He’s on edge.”
“No need to make excuses,” she said primly. “If you don’t mind him being a rat bastard to you, why should I?”
“What happened to Frank? You usually patrol with him,” Remus said lamely just to change the subject.
“Yeah, sorry to ask you to fill in at the last moment. Something came up with Mother Longbottom, so Frank decided to ditch patrol. What’s a war compared to Mother Longbottom’s comfort and well-being?” There was bitterness in her voice and a dark look crept over her usually open face. Then, just as quickly, she was herself again. “Have you got your broomstick?” she asked.
“Yes,” Remus said. “I do.”
Remus had to admit he was less than thrilled with her decision to patrol on broomstick. He’d never been much of a flyer. Maybe it was the wolf in him, but he preferred to keep his feet on the ground and since learning to Apparate when he was seventeen, the only time he touched a broomstick was to sweep. Alice, on the other hand, was a natural. Wrapped around her broomstick, her heavy fall of white blonde hair trailing out behind her, she was completely at ease in the air. At Hogwarts she had been Seeker for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. Remus could only dimly remember watching her play as she had been five years ahead of him, but he couldn’t imagine her being anything less than spectacular.
As the sun set and the sky turned from coral pink to violet and the silver crescent moon appeared, they circled and watched, paying special attention to the house where Sirius’ cousin, Andromeda Tonks, lived with her husband Ted and eight year old daughter, Nymphadora. That Andromeda Black, daughter of the proudest of the pureblood houses, was married to a Muggle and raising a half-blood child was more than enough to run afoul of the Death Eaters. According to Dumbledore’s most reliable source, some kind of action would be taking place against the Tonks’ within the next few days. The family had been sent away for their safety; the house remaining empty as a decoy. They might never be able to come back. The Death Eaters seemed to be growing stronger everyday. It was no wonder Sirius had been so easily upset. No wonder he had gotten so angry.
“It’s them,” Alice whispered leaning intently from her broomstick; her eyes narrowed, fixed on something he could not see. “They’re making their move. I’m going to dive them, Moonchilde. Be ready to cover me.”
“You’re going to dive them?” Remus repeated dumbly but she was already gone, plunging downward at breakneck speed. Ignoring his nausea, he followed her.
As they zoomed in, he saw there were five Death Eaters approaching the house. Remus and Alice were badly outnumbered but surprise was on their side. When Alice bowled over two of the masked figures, the cries and confusion from the others was a clear indicator that their presence was totally unexpected. Remus managed to stun one of the standing Death Eaters, but another caught Alice with a hex that knocked her from her broomstick as she swung around for another pass.
Remus jumped off his broom. Landing between Alice and the Death Eater, he countered a second hex before it could strike her.
“Expelliarmus,” a woman’s voice shrieked. Their wands were jerked away from them. Heart-stopping panic stabbed through Remus, the absolute vulnerability at being disarmed choking his breath. Alice, on the other hand, was undeterred. She swung her broom into the Death Eater woman with such speed that there was no time to cast another spell.
As Remus moved to retrieve their wands, Alice sprang at the Death Eater woman and the two of them grappled frantically through Andromeda Tonks’ rose bushes, so entangled he couldn’t hex one without striking the other. Not that he needed to worry, Alice Longbottom was quite the scrapper. About the time she ripped off Bellatrix Lestrange’s mask, Remus realized with an excitement indistinguishable from terror that he was going to be kissing her at the first opportunity.
“Ta, going after your own sister, Bellatrix?” Alice growled. “I’m afraid nobody’s home tonight.”
“Unhand me, you bloody cow,” Bellatrix spat. “Brawling like Muggle trash. I’ll show you how a self-respecting witch deals with her enemies.” She raised her wand but Alice snatched it away.
“Not with this, you won’t,” she said and snapped the slender ebony stick in two. Bellatrix gave a bloodcurdling howl.
“You’re going to suffer for this, Alice Longbottom,” she shrieked with feral intensity. “You’re going to suffer horribly.” Strengthened by her rage, she broke free from Alice, Apparating away before Remus’ hex could catch her. The other Death Eaters followed her, disappearing into the night.
Alice uttered a string of curses, her fists clenched. “Bloody hell, I thought I’d nabbed her. What a prize that would have been.”
He kissed her then on her fierce, foul mouth. She was sweet as milk but burned liked pepper, and the tongue she had been swearing so fluently with was stronger and more like velvet than he’d ever dared to imagine. When she drew away, he expected her to protest. For her to tell him she was a wife and a mother.
“Not here,” she said. “They might be back.” She grabbed his hand and Apparated them somewhere else. An old graveyard surrounded by a stone fence. A throng of crumbling monuments, statues of angels carrying lambs. She fell on him as ferociously as she had pounced on Bellatrix.
“We ought not to, Alice,” he said groping at the zipper of her dress. “You’re a wife and a mother.” He said it because he felt it should be said, because it was the right thing to say, the sane and reasonable thing to say. He wanted desperately to be a decent person but passion for him had always been a kind of madness.
Even with Sirius. Especially with Sirius.
He’d never touched a woman, not really. Brushed against, bumped into, extended a hand to, perhaps even hugged Lily once or twice, but never before explored. There were so many extraordinary things to discover about Alice Longbottom. The swell of her breasts, the way she sighed and her face grew hazy when he caressed them. The heavy satin texture of her thighs and the slick, unexpectedly cool cleft between them. She pressed his hand there, moved against it until he knew how to move it himself. Then she moaned and she stiffened and twitched till he feared she was having some sort of a seizure. He would have stopped but she said, “Don’t you dare,” as her thighs clenched around him, and he realized she had been climaxing.
She undid his trousers, straddling him, guided the head of his cock where his hand had been. He felt her convulsions around him, the rhythmic jerks of her hips. It seemed almost unbearable, unendurable, but she drew him further inside her, all the way in, her legs wrapped around him, her heels biting into him, spurring him on as they fused in a strange, mourning ecstasy.
“Don’t regret this, Moonchilde,” she said zipping up her dress as he lay panting on a long granite slab overgrown with moss. “I know you well enough to know you will, but this is what people do when they’re at war. They kill and maim over abstractions and philosophical differences. And when they find something akin to affection, they embrace it with all the strength they have.”
She was right, of course. That sane, rational part of him that wanted so badly to be decent and do right could scarcely comprehend what they had done.
It wasn’t because of Sirius. Sirius could be wildly possessive. Remus had learned that sixth-year when his illicit crush on Severus Snape had almost gotten the other boy killed. Even so, Sirius had little regard for fidelity. He did what he pleased secure in the knowledge that Remus belonged to him. He had been with other people since they had been together. Remus almost welcomed this. It allowed him to justify those few times, those rare moments when he’d lost himself--the reeling, blood-soaked night nearly two years before when he’d seduced Sirius’ little brother; a dark, baffling incident six months before that he still couldn’t understand, that sometimes seemed like rape and sometimes seemed like a surrendering of himself, sacrificing himself to the needs of one of his oldest and dearest friends; and now this incredible, silver blonde woman he had been mad to have, who he had thought of only as secret and special to him, but who was in fact someone else’s wife, a friends wife.
“What about Frank?” Remus asked.
“Frank is a good husband,” Alice said. “A good father and a good son. He’s all those things before he’s a solider. Maybe someday I’ll be Mrs. Frank Longbottom and Neville’s mom first, but right now I’m in this fight and I scratch and I claw and I grab and I hold on.”
“And you were magnificent,” he said. “Against the Death Eaters, and with me.” She smiled and touched his scarred check with her strong, pale hand. “Magnificent,” he whispered again not dreaming that within the month, she would be a hollow shell, empty as the crescent of the silvery moon.