Veilfic, Part 4
Here's the conclusion of the Pensieve scene--and the appearance of Erotomaniac Sirius, finally. Again, this is unbeta'ed. Any suggestions for improvement would be welcome.
Sirius awoke--if that was precisely the right word when he was inhabiting another person's memories--lying on the cold stone floor of what looked like the dusty and virtually unfurnished interior of a small cottage.
Remus was lying beside him, pretending, Sirius suspected, that he was asleep. Sirius doubted if he could see or hear anything that Remus hadn't been--or wasn't--aware of.
Standing by the empty fireplace across the room, and smiling blissfully at Remus, was the other Sirius.
He's handsome, Sirius admitted. A bit too thin--which was probably the result of hospital food--but still attractive. The thick black hair was too long, as most men in the early 'eighties were wearing their hair short, but Sirius thought that long hair looked good on his younger self. So, for that matter, did the white Irish-knit wool jumper and the too-tight blue jeans that left nothing to the imagination.
Most important, young Sirius' dark eyes were clear. Untroubled. Sane.
I knew it! exulted Sirius. I--he--didn't do anything. It's all been some horrible frame-up. Dumbledore and Remus probably really believe that this world's Sirius Black is a homicidal maniac, and all this time it's been Voldemort. Or Snape. Yes, I'll bet that Snape had a lot to do with this.
Young Sirius glanced at Remus, cocked his head to one side in a Padfoot-like way, and shook his head. "Remus," he said in an indulgent tone. "Open your eyes. All the way, not just a crack. I know you're awake."
Remus hesitated, then slowly opened his eyes fully. "I hate to resort to cliches," he said tonelessly, "but where the hell am I?"
"Just a place." Young Sirius sighed. "Oh, all right. A shepherd's bothy, if you must know."
"Scotland?" said Remus in disbelief. "You Apparated us all the way to Scotland? Over eight hundred miles? Do you have any idea how many things could have gone wrong, Apparating over that kind of distance?"
"I don't think you'd have wanted to stay in Godric's Hollow much longer," young Sirius said with a shrug. He walked over to Remus' side, knelt, and brushed a stray piece of brown hair out of Remus' eyes. "We need to talk."
"Talk?" Remus' voice escalated as he cringed backward, away from young Sirius' touch. "What do we have to talk about? And where's Harry?"
"Harry?" Young Sirius frowned, plainly puzzled.
"Harry," said Remus urgently. "The baby. My godson."
Young Sirius smiled beatifically. "Oh, that. I got rid of that for you. Gave it to someone who wanted to take care of it. It'll be fine."
"You killed him." Remus' hazel eyes were blazing with feral light. "My God, how even you could kill a baby..."
"Of course I didn't kill it," said young Sirius in an aggrieved tone...remarkably, Sirius thought uneasily, like the one he had used earlier. "What do you take me for? I gave it to someone who wanted it."
"Who?"
Young Sirius smiled, a mischievous, devil-may-care-but-I-sure-don't smile. "You know who."
"You know...Voldemort?" Remus gasped. "You handed a one-year-old over to Voldemort?"
"Well, not exactly," muttered young Sirius, sulking. "He and his Death Eaters were hunting Peter Pettigrew, but I didn't know that, did I? I didn't know that the Dark Lord wanted to know where the Potters were. Not until after Peter was dead."
"You murdered him."
"I eliminated him," corrected young Sirius sternly. "He was evil. He was keeping us apart. And I punished him first, so that he would know never to do that again. It's wrong to stand in the way of true love."
"You murdered him," repeated Remus, his voice filled with so much loathing that it made the elder Sirius' skin crawl. "Just like you murdered James and Lily!"
"I did not murder Lily!" Amazingly, young Sirius sounded indignant...almost insulted.
"I saw what you did to her."
Young Sirius took a deep, deep breath. "I didn't kill her," he said patiently, as if explaining the facts of life to a very small child. "I punished her. She was still breathing when we left. Anyway, it was her own fault. If she had just told me where you were, I wouldn't have had to punish her."
"Yes," said Remus bitterly. "I'm sure she stood over you with a wand and threatened you with Avada Kedavra. If you wanted her dead, why didn't you just make it a clean kill, instead of leaving her like that?"
"Are you in love with her?" Young Sirius stood up abruptly, scowling as he flicked a wand--Remus' wand, the elder Sirius noted with a sinking feeling--out of a belt sheath and began toying with it. "You'd better tell me...or-or I'll turn the floor you're lying on to solid silver."
"No!" Remus screamed. "For God's sake, no! She was just a friend!"
"There, now," said young Sirius, his face suffused with joy. "See how much better it is when we're honest with each other?"
He bent low and pressed a kiss against Remus' unwilling mouth. "I never understood why you were so reluctant to let yourself love anyone. Not until Peter told me the truth. It all makes sense now. A person of your caliber being a werewolf..." The elder Sirius thought he saw tears in the younger one's eyes. "It's not fair. And how hard you've tried to protect me, shrinking away every time I come near." He pulled Remus to his feet. "Remus, it's all right. I don't care. You could bite me and turn me into a werewolf and I wouldn't care. You're everything to me. You're my life. You're my magic. You're my God."
Remus glared at young Sirius. "Right. I'm so much to you that you would slaughter your parents, your brother and three of my best friends. Not to mention handing a helpless baby over the personification of all evil!"
Young Sirius clapped his hands over his ears and squinched his eyes shut. "You're spoiling it!" he wailed. "Don't say things like that! We're finally together. You're supposed to love me now!"
Remus stood stock still, eyeing the bothy's door.
"All right," said young Sirius after a few moments. He took several deep breaths. "It's not impossible. You just don't understand the depths of your friends' evil. You can't believe that anyone could love you as much as I do. It's not your fault."
He appeared to mull something over for a minute, then addressed Remus in a reasonable tone. "I'll try to answer your questions about your friends. How would that be? All the books say that you should be open and loving when you're in a romantic relationship."
Remus opened his mouth--to say something about the lack of romantic relationship, the elder Sirius was sure--but the younger Sirius pulled him into a tight embrace and kissed him, deftly slipping his tongue into Remus' mouth.
Remus twisted sideways in young Sirius' arms, crushing the other man's instep, driving his right elbow into young Sirius' ribs and shoving him backwards.
Young Sirius' face crumpled. "Why did you do that? I was only loving you." His lower lip trembled as if he were about to cry. "I don't want to punish you. I don't. But you're making it very hard for me not to."
"You offered to answer some questions of mine," said Remus in the slow, soothing tones he'd used to calm Harry earlier. "It's a bit hard for me to ask you anything when your tongue is in my mouth."
"Oh, all right." Young Sirius pouted. "What do you want to know?"
"What did you do to James and Lily?"
"Nothing. I just made them tell the truth." Young Sirius frowned. "See, James said that you were his blood, his and Lily's. So I had to open their veins and search for you, didn't I? And Lily said that she hadn't seen anyone, least of all you. I couldn't let Lily lie. I knew she had seen me at least, because she was standing there looking at me. So I decided that whether or not she'd seen anyone before, she was never going to see anyone again. And that way she couldn't ever lie about it." He glanced at Remus hopefully, as if seeking approval.
If you can't see the truth, Sirius Orion Black, Mrs. Black whispered, in the elder Sirius' memory, to her recalcitrant eight-year son, then you're blind. And I'll show you what it's like to be blind. Te caeco!
"You killed James."
"Yes, of course," said young Sirius with an expression of wide-eyed surprise.
"Why didn't you kill Lily?" Remus' voice was thick and choked. "You could have."
Young Sirius looked sulky once again. "I wanted to. But after Peter died, the Death Eaters found me and brought me to Him." The elder Sirius could hear the capital letter in the word. "He said He wanted Lily alive when He asked her to give Him the baby. He said that some sacrifices couldn't be taken--they had to be given. So I just punished her. And she and the baby were alive when we left, because He said to leave them alone."
He paused for a moment, regarding Remus' pale, stern face. "And he promised that he'd heal Lily if she gave him the boy freely. He promised, Remus."
"And you believed him?"
"As long as she was gone, I didn't care," Young Sirius said, shrugging indifferently. "I'm tired of people getting in the way. We've loved each other since I was sixteen, but people. Keep. Interfering. And I have to keep punishing them to make them stop." He glanced at Remus appealingly. "You could make them stop. With just one word. I know you really love me. Why don't you say it?"
Sirius looked at the desperate face of his murderous younger self, and then at the cold, set face of Remus. "Remus," he whispered in the werewolf's ear, "for God's sake, bluff!"
Remus' expression didn't shift one millimetre. "I do not love you. I have never loved you. No matter what you believe, and no matter why you believe it, I have no romantic interest in you. I never will. Now. Leave. Me. Alone."
Sirius buried his head in his hands and groaned. "You idiot...you're going to get yourself killed."
On the other hand, what chance did Remus have to get out of here alive? He'd been kidnapped by a killer. No one knew where he was. If, as young Sirius had claimed, this was a shepherd's bothy, then Remus was somewhere in rural Scotland, at least five miles from the nearest post office and probably thirty from the nearest village. There were no owls in residence that might have been persuaded to deliver a message, nor even a Muggle telephone. Remus didn't even have his wand; young Sirius had taken it when he was unconscious.
Perhaps he's trying to goad--me--into killing him in a fit of rage, Sirius thought bleakly. He'd die, of course, but at least it would be quick. Not like James. Or Lily.
Disconcertingly, young Sirius didn't appear to be insane with rage. He looked more as if he were doing a slow burn. "It's Snape, isn't it? That slimy, obnoxious, greasy git..."
"No," said Remus evenly. "There's no one."
"Except for me."
"No one," repeated Remus. "Including you."
A minute passed. Two minutes. It felt like a thousand minutes.
Without warning, young Sirius exploded. He rushed at Remus, his hands outstretched.
"No! You're not hurting him!" And with that, Sirius shoved young Sirius to one side with all his might...
...only to pass harmlessly through the raging maniac as if the maniac were a ghost. As if he himself were a ghost.
Young Sirius, meanwhile, had landed atop Remus and now had his hands fastened about the other man's neck. He was shouting incoherently, and Sirius could only make out bits:
"Why, why won't you admit it, why won't you say it, why, why do you keep torturing me, why do you want to hurt me this way, what do I have to do, what do I have to be, what, what do you want, what do you want me to be, what do you want me to give you to show I mean it, I'll give you my star, I'll give you all the stars, the sun, the moon--"
"I don't want the moon," Remus rasped, prying the fingers away from his throat. "I hate it." He staggered to his feet, bracing himself against the bothy wall. "If you really want to give me something," he continued in a hoarse voice, "then let me go."
"That's not what's meant to be, Remus," whispered young Sirius in what the elder Sirius considered to be an overly dramatic fashion. "The fates will punish you if you leave. We're destined to be together."
Remus' expression said clearly that if this was so, he was going to have to kick Destiny's arse. Repeatedly.
He rubbed his throat, coughed two or three times and sagged against the wall. Young Sirius crept close to Remus, then grabbed his right arm.
Remus twisted his arm free, snatched his wand from young Sirius' grasp and waved his wand with a flourish. "Petrificus Totalus!"
Young Sirius' arms and legs straightened, stiffened and froze. He toppled to the ground, landing face-down, his nose splintering against the stone floor.
Without looking back, Remus flung the door to the bothy open and fled. The elder Sirius followed after him.
Remus bolted from the cottage, running hard and fast, speeding as fast as ever he could with no goal in mind save getting away. He didn't bother to look for trails or macadam roads; he simply ran, scrambling, almost falling in his haste to get to the bottom of the hill on which the bothy stood.
Sirius barely had time to register a ring of metallic things circling the base of the brae. They glistened dimly in the starlight.
Remus never noticed anything at all.
Bear-trap jaws of iron bit deep into Remus' leg, chewing through flesh, blood, muscle and bone.
Teeth of iron...lightly tinged with silver.
Remus screamed.
***
Sirius was howling a fervent prayer. He didn't know to whom he was appealing, or what he was begging for, but that didn't seem to matter.
A strong hand seemed to be shaking him. A kind old voice was speaking to him. "Mr. Black. You must return now. It is time."
Sirius tried to tell the speaker that returning wasn't important, that time wasn't important, that the only thing that mattered was stopping Remus' suffering. Only, for some reason, his lips seemed to have weights of lead attached to them, and he couldn't speak the words.
The kind old voice addressed him again, this time in sterner tones. "Mr. Black. You must open your eyes now."
It took a tremendous effort, but Sirius opened his eyes.
Dumbledore's office.
Dumbledore was regarding him with somber concern. Snape looked...well, not pleased or smug. Perhaps 'vindicated' was the right word.
Sirius dredged through his emotions, trying to find some form of rage or hate that he could use against Snape. All he could feel was a blind weariness that he had laughed about Remus' torment at first. Laughed.
He forced himself to face Remus' chill, stony gaze. He wanted to say he was sorry for everything his other self had done.
Some things were too monstrous for 'I'm sorry.'
Sirius bowed his head, fighting to breathe. He felt as if he were suffocating.
After a long pause, Remus spoke. "There's one more thing you need to know," he said, his voice utterly drained of emotion. "Look at me. I'm not going to repeat this."
Sirius lifted his head, and looked at Remus. As little as possible.
Remus bent almost double at the waist for a moment, then reached down to the floor. Bracing himself against Dumbledore's desk, he stood up, and very gently placed something on the portion of the desk closest to Sirius.
A leg. A pink, plastic, prosthetic leg.
Sirius gawped at it. This made no sense. Healers could grow back bones, render burns and scars nonexistent...why couldn't they have healed Remus' damaged leg?
"Part of it was the silver," said Remus wearily, answering Sirius' unspoken question. "Silver's poison to my kind, after all. And part of it was what--he--did to the traps. There were more than a hundred of them waiting for me, in any direction I went. He'd cursed them so that the wounds could never heal magically." His shoulders slumped. "He wanted to make sure that I would never run from him again."
The inescapable, mad logic was the last straw.
I did this to him.
Me.
I killed James with a Dark spell I learned in childhood.
I blinded Lily with curses my mother used to punish me with.
I left her alive for Voldemort to slaughter.
I abandoned Harry so that I could be with the man I love.
I crippled Remus so that he would never leave me again.
Because the other Sirius is me as well.
He never heard Remus don the artificial leg once more; he never saw Remus and Snape exit Dumbledore's office.
An odd, indescribable sound, like a cross between a human wailing and a dog howling, burst from him. He barely had time to think, Not in front of Snape, Merlin's beard, he'll mock me forever, before his body was convulsed by anguished sobs.
He was never sure how long he wept before he heard Dumbledore speaking once more. "Yes," he said quietly, surreptitiously placing a cotton handkerchief in Sirius' hand. "Now you understand."
***
Incidentally, Remus' unequivocal refusal of Erotomaniac Sirius is based on Gavin de Becker's suggested unconditional and explicit rejection in his book The Gift of Fear, pp. 200-201.
Sirius awoke--if that was precisely the right word when he was inhabiting another person's memories--lying on the cold stone floor of what looked like the dusty and virtually unfurnished interior of a small cottage.
Remus was lying beside him, pretending, Sirius suspected, that he was asleep. Sirius doubted if he could see or hear anything that Remus hadn't been--or wasn't--aware of.
Standing by the empty fireplace across the room, and smiling blissfully at Remus, was the other Sirius.
He's handsome, Sirius admitted. A bit too thin--which was probably the result of hospital food--but still attractive. The thick black hair was too long, as most men in the early 'eighties were wearing their hair short, but Sirius thought that long hair looked good on his younger self. So, for that matter, did the white Irish-knit wool jumper and the too-tight blue jeans that left nothing to the imagination.
Most important, young Sirius' dark eyes were clear. Untroubled. Sane.
I knew it! exulted Sirius. I--he--didn't do anything. It's all been some horrible frame-up. Dumbledore and Remus probably really believe that this world's Sirius Black is a homicidal maniac, and all this time it's been Voldemort. Or Snape. Yes, I'll bet that Snape had a lot to do with this.
Young Sirius glanced at Remus, cocked his head to one side in a Padfoot-like way, and shook his head. "Remus," he said in an indulgent tone. "Open your eyes. All the way, not just a crack. I know you're awake."
Remus hesitated, then slowly opened his eyes fully. "I hate to resort to cliches," he said tonelessly, "but where the hell am I?"
"Just a place." Young Sirius sighed. "Oh, all right. A shepherd's bothy, if you must know."
"Scotland?" said Remus in disbelief. "You Apparated us all the way to Scotland? Over eight hundred miles? Do you have any idea how many things could have gone wrong, Apparating over that kind of distance?"
"I don't think you'd have wanted to stay in Godric's Hollow much longer," young Sirius said with a shrug. He walked over to Remus' side, knelt, and brushed a stray piece of brown hair out of Remus' eyes. "We need to talk."
"Talk?" Remus' voice escalated as he cringed backward, away from young Sirius' touch. "What do we have to talk about? And where's Harry?"
"Harry?" Young Sirius frowned, plainly puzzled.
"Harry," said Remus urgently. "The baby. My godson."
Young Sirius smiled beatifically. "Oh, that. I got rid of that for you. Gave it to someone who wanted to take care of it. It'll be fine."
"You killed him." Remus' hazel eyes were blazing with feral light. "My God, how even you could kill a baby..."
"Of course I didn't kill it," said young Sirius in an aggrieved tone...remarkably, Sirius thought uneasily, like the one he had used earlier. "What do you take me for? I gave it to someone who wanted it."
"Who?"
Young Sirius smiled, a mischievous, devil-may-care-but-I-sure-don't smile. "You know who."
"You know...Voldemort?" Remus gasped. "You handed a one-year-old over to Voldemort?"
"Well, not exactly," muttered young Sirius, sulking. "He and his Death Eaters were hunting Peter Pettigrew, but I didn't know that, did I? I didn't know that the Dark Lord wanted to know where the Potters were. Not until after Peter was dead."
"You murdered him."
"I eliminated him," corrected young Sirius sternly. "He was evil. He was keeping us apart. And I punished him first, so that he would know never to do that again. It's wrong to stand in the way of true love."
"You murdered him," repeated Remus, his voice filled with so much loathing that it made the elder Sirius' skin crawl. "Just like you murdered James and Lily!"
"I did not murder Lily!" Amazingly, young Sirius sounded indignant...almost insulted.
"I saw what you did to her."
Young Sirius took a deep, deep breath. "I didn't kill her," he said patiently, as if explaining the facts of life to a very small child. "I punished her. She was still breathing when we left. Anyway, it was her own fault. If she had just told me where you were, I wouldn't have had to punish her."
"Yes," said Remus bitterly. "I'm sure she stood over you with a wand and threatened you with Avada Kedavra. If you wanted her dead, why didn't you just make it a clean kill, instead of leaving her like that?"
"Are you in love with her?" Young Sirius stood up abruptly, scowling as he flicked a wand--Remus' wand, the elder Sirius noted with a sinking feeling--out of a belt sheath and began toying with it. "You'd better tell me...or-or I'll turn the floor you're lying on to solid silver."
"No!" Remus screamed. "For God's sake, no! She was just a friend!"
"There, now," said young Sirius, his face suffused with joy. "See how much better it is when we're honest with each other?"
He bent low and pressed a kiss against Remus' unwilling mouth. "I never understood why you were so reluctant to let yourself love anyone. Not until Peter told me the truth. It all makes sense now. A person of your caliber being a werewolf..." The elder Sirius thought he saw tears in the younger one's eyes. "It's not fair. And how hard you've tried to protect me, shrinking away every time I come near." He pulled Remus to his feet. "Remus, it's all right. I don't care. You could bite me and turn me into a werewolf and I wouldn't care. You're everything to me. You're my life. You're my magic. You're my God."
Remus glared at young Sirius. "Right. I'm so much to you that you would slaughter your parents, your brother and three of my best friends. Not to mention handing a helpless baby over the personification of all evil!"
Young Sirius clapped his hands over his ears and squinched his eyes shut. "You're spoiling it!" he wailed. "Don't say things like that! We're finally together. You're supposed to love me now!"
Remus stood stock still, eyeing the bothy's door.
"All right," said young Sirius after a few moments. He took several deep breaths. "It's not impossible. You just don't understand the depths of your friends' evil. You can't believe that anyone could love you as much as I do. It's not your fault."
He appeared to mull something over for a minute, then addressed Remus in a reasonable tone. "I'll try to answer your questions about your friends. How would that be? All the books say that you should be open and loving when you're in a romantic relationship."
Remus opened his mouth--to say something about the lack of romantic relationship, the elder Sirius was sure--but the younger Sirius pulled him into a tight embrace and kissed him, deftly slipping his tongue into Remus' mouth.
Remus twisted sideways in young Sirius' arms, crushing the other man's instep, driving his right elbow into young Sirius' ribs and shoving him backwards.
Young Sirius' face crumpled. "Why did you do that? I was only loving you." His lower lip trembled as if he were about to cry. "I don't want to punish you. I don't. But you're making it very hard for me not to."
"You offered to answer some questions of mine," said Remus in the slow, soothing tones he'd used to calm Harry earlier. "It's a bit hard for me to ask you anything when your tongue is in my mouth."
"Oh, all right." Young Sirius pouted. "What do you want to know?"
"What did you do to James and Lily?"
"Nothing. I just made them tell the truth." Young Sirius frowned. "See, James said that you were his blood, his and Lily's. So I had to open their veins and search for you, didn't I? And Lily said that she hadn't seen anyone, least of all you. I couldn't let Lily lie. I knew she had seen me at least, because she was standing there looking at me. So I decided that whether or not she'd seen anyone before, she was never going to see anyone again. And that way she couldn't ever lie about it." He glanced at Remus hopefully, as if seeking approval.
If you can't see the truth, Sirius Orion Black, Mrs. Black whispered, in the elder Sirius' memory, to her recalcitrant eight-year son, then you're blind. And I'll show you what it's like to be blind. Te caeco!
"You killed James."
"Yes, of course," said young Sirius with an expression of wide-eyed surprise.
"Why didn't you kill Lily?" Remus' voice was thick and choked. "You could have."
Young Sirius looked sulky once again. "I wanted to. But after Peter died, the Death Eaters found me and brought me to Him." The elder Sirius could hear the capital letter in the word. "He said He wanted Lily alive when He asked her to give Him the baby. He said that some sacrifices couldn't be taken--they had to be given. So I just punished her. And she and the baby were alive when we left, because He said to leave them alone."
He paused for a moment, regarding Remus' pale, stern face. "And he promised that he'd heal Lily if she gave him the boy freely. He promised, Remus."
"And you believed him?"
"As long as she was gone, I didn't care," Young Sirius said, shrugging indifferently. "I'm tired of people getting in the way. We've loved each other since I was sixteen, but people. Keep. Interfering. And I have to keep punishing them to make them stop." He glanced at Remus appealingly. "You could make them stop. With just one word. I know you really love me. Why don't you say it?"
Sirius looked at the desperate face of his murderous younger self, and then at the cold, set face of Remus. "Remus," he whispered in the werewolf's ear, "for God's sake, bluff!"
Remus' expression didn't shift one millimetre. "I do not love you. I have never loved you. No matter what you believe, and no matter why you believe it, I have no romantic interest in you. I never will. Now. Leave. Me. Alone."
Sirius buried his head in his hands and groaned. "You idiot...you're going to get yourself killed."
On the other hand, what chance did Remus have to get out of here alive? He'd been kidnapped by a killer. No one knew where he was. If, as young Sirius had claimed, this was a shepherd's bothy, then Remus was somewhere in rural Scotland, at least five miles from the nearest post office and probably thirty from the nearest village. There were no owls in residence that might have been persuaded to deliver a message, nor even a Muggle telephone. Remus didn't even have his wand; young Sirius had taken it when he was unconscious.
Perhaps he's trying to goad--me--into killing him in a fit of rage, Sirius thought bleakly. He'd die, of course, but at least it would be quick. Not like James. Or Lily.
Disconcertingly, young Sirius didn't appear to be insane with rage. He looked more as if he were doing a slow burn. "It's Snape, isn't it? That slimy, obnoxious, greasy git..."
"No," said Remus evenly. "There's no one."
"Except for me."
"No one," repeated Remus. "Including you."
A minute passed. Two minutes. It felt like a thousand minutes.
Without warning, young Sirius exploded. He rushed at Remus, his hands outstretched.
"No! You're not hurting him!" And with that, Sirius shoved young Sirius to one side with all his might...
...only to pass harmlessly through the raging maniac as if the maniac were a ghost. As if he himself were a ghost.
Young Sirius, meanwhile, had landed atop Remus and now had his hands fastened about the other man's neck. He was shouting incoherently, and Sirius could only make out bits:
"Why, why won't you admit it, why won't you say it, why, why do you keep torturing me, why do you want to hurt me this way, what do I have to do, what do I have to be, what, what do you want, what do you want me to be, what do you want me to give you to show I mean it, I'll give you my star, I'll give you all the stars, the sun, the moon--"
"I don't want the moon," Remus rasped, prying the fingers away from his throat. "I hate it." He staggered to his feet, bracing himself against the bothy wall. "If you really want to give me something," he continued in a hoarse voice, "then let me go."
"That's not what's meant to be, Remus," whispered young Sirius in what the elder Sirius considered to be an overly dramatic fashion. "The fates will punish you if you leave. We're destined to be together."
Remus' expression said clearly that if this was so, he was going to have to kick Destiny's arse. Repeatedly.
He rubbed his throat, coughed two or three times and sagged against the wall. Young Sirius crept close to Remus, then grabbed his right arm.
Remus twisted his arm free, snatched his wand from young Sirius' grasp and waved his wand with a flourish. "Petrificus Totalus!"
Young Sirius' arms and legs straightened, stiffened and froze. He toppled to the ground, landing face-down, his nose splintering against the stone floor.
Without looking back, Remus flung the door to the bothy open and fled. The elder Sirius followed after him.
Remus bolted from the cottage, running hard and fast, speeding as fast as ever he could with no goal in mind save getting away. He didn't bother to look for trails or macadam roads; he simply ran, scrambling, almost falling in his haste to get to the bottom of the hill on which the bothy stood.
Sirius barely had time to register a ring of metallic things circling the base of the brae. They glistened dimly in the starlight.
Remus never noticed anything at all.
Bear-trap jaws of iron bit deep into Remus' leg, chewing through flesh, blood, muscle and bone.
Teeth of iron...lightly tinged with silver.
Remus screamed.
***
Sirius was howling a fervent prayer. He didn't know to whom he was appealing, or what he was begging for, but that didn't seem to matter.
A strong hand seemed to be shaking him. A kind old voice was speaking to him. "Mr. Black. You must return now. It is time."
Sirius tried to tell the speaker that returning wasn't important, that time wasn't important, that the only thing that mattered was stopping Remus' suffering. Only, for some reason, his lips seemed to have weights of lead attached to them, and he couldn't speak the words.
The kind old voice addressed him again, this time in sterner tones. "Mr. Black. You must open your eyes now."
It took a tremendous effort, but Sirius opened his eyes.
Dumbledore's office.
Dumbledore was regarding him with somber concern. Snape looked...well, not pleased or smug. Perhaps 'vindicated' was the right word.
Sirius dredged through his emotions, trying to find some form of rage or hate that he could use against Snape. All he could feel was a blind weariness that he had laughed about Remus' torment at first. Laughed.
He forced himself to face Remus' chill, stony gaze. He wanted to say he was sorry for everything his other self had done.
Some things were too monstrous for 'I'm sorry.'
Sirius bowed his head, fighting to breathe. He felt as if he were suffocating.
After a long pause, Remus spoke. "There's one more thing you need to know," he said, his voice utterly drained of emotion. "Look at me. I'm not going to repeat this."
Sirius lifted his head, and looked at Remus. As little as possible.
Remus bent almost double at the waist for a moment, then reached down to the floor. Bracing himself against Dumbledore's desk, he stood up, and very gently placed something on the portion of the desk closest to Sirius.
A leg. A pink, plastic, prosthetic leg.
Sirius gawped at it. This made no sense. Healers could grow back bones, render burns and scars nonexistent...why couldn't they have healed Remus' damaged leg?
"Part of it was the silver," said Remus wearily, answering Sirius' unspoken question. "Silver's poison to my kind, after all. And part of it was what--he--did to the traps. There were more than a hundred of them waiting for me, in any direction I went. He'd cursed them so that the wounds could never heal magically." His shoulders slumped. "He wanted to make sure that I would never run from him again."
The inescapable, mad logic was the last straw.
I did this to him.
Me.
I killed James with a Dark spell I learned in childhood.
I blinded Lily with curses my mother used to punish me with.
I left her alive for Voldemort to slaughter.
I abandoned Harry so that I could be with the man I love.
I crippled Remus so that he would never leave me again.
Because the other Sirius is me as well.
He never heard Remus don the artificial leg once more; he never saw Remus and Snape exit Dumbledore's office.
An odd, indescribable sound, like a cross between a human wailing and a dog howling, burst from him. He barely had time to think, Not in front of Snape, Merlin's beard, he'll mock me forever, before his body was convulsed by anguished sobs.
He was never sure how long he wept before he heard Dumbledore speaking once more. "Yes," he said quietly, surreptitiously placing a cotton handkerchief in Sirius' hand. "Now you understand."
***
Incidentally, Remus' unequivocal refusal of Erotomaniac Sirius is based on Gavin de Becker's suggested unconditional and explicit rejection in his book The Gift of Fear, pp. 200-201.