[FIC] Common Woodbrown, Part IV
He arrives at Grimmauld Place at quarter of four the next day. It is a horrible sort of afternoon - all rain and cloud and heaviness that sinks deeply into his bones and seems to makes the world trudge, full of effort, through its own dealings. Headlamps from the rare circling automobile reflect off the surface of the concrete; bounce off the dead, dark windows of No. 11 Grimmauld. They are tall, flat sort of buildings, with even, square windows and dull-looking facades. He stands, as he has been instructed to - by Narcissa Malfoy’s hand - at the curb of the traffic circle, between two rubbish bins, and an innocuous iron fence. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his thin coat, and ducks his head to keep the dusting rain out of his eyes.
He jumps, suddenly, when there is a clattering of tin behind him - and he just catches the fleeing culprit out of the corner of his eyes: a rangy calico, with matted fur. He follows it with his gaze as it skitters through the yard of No. 13 and through the iron railing of the fence, and out into street. It disappears into the gloom, somewhere between the yawing gape of two trees.
His heartbeat has just settled again, when there is a startling hiss at his ankles, and a tug of his trouser-leg. His hand is halfway to his wand when he looks down, and sees the dark, lumpy shape of an unfamiliar house-elf, with rat-bitten ears and large, phlegmy eyes.
“Oh - ” he starts. His fingers release, very slowly, on the handle of his wand. “Are you.”
The creature hisses again, and tugs on his trouser with a kind of upsetting distaste. “You - ” it says. “You are the man my mistress will be seeing.” Its voice is like wet sandpaper.
“Yes.” He lets his hand fall to his side. “Yes, I’m. I’m Remus Lupin.”
The elf hisses again, large lips curling. There is the glimmer of yellowed teeth; Remus grits his own jaw and swallows down a thin lump of fear. Is this, he thinks - is this, had Sirius ever mentioned anything like this strange little creature as part of his life?
The elf tugs at his trousers again, and turns toward the entrance of No. 11. “Then Remus Lupin will come this way,” it grunts. His name is formed on its lips with the utmost contempt.
He follows it up the walkway, slowly, and wonders - strangely - if this place, this odd, dark little street was really the place of Sirius Black’s childhood. He can hardly imagine that boy, that man that he thought that he knew, in this kind of yard, in this kind of house, with this kind of thing as a possible playmate or companion. Maybe, he thinks, as the elf halts at the steps and looks over its shoulder up at him, maybe that was the point. That he never did fit, clearly, whatever Narcissa Malfoy nee Black had said about that.
The elf raises its long-fingered hand, and suddenly, in front of them, No.11 Grimmauld Place seems to shudder, quiver, and pull back on itself from the side. It squeezes, like a frightened little animal, and No. 13, to their right, makes an answering kind of tremble. Between the two, something erupts. A house. Another house, he marvels, though he supposes that he should have expected something like that all along. It just pushes right between them, to center itself as if it had always belonged. The knocker is large, and silver-wrought. The shape of a serpent. There is a number, over the door, in large black iron. 12.
He starts to breathe again, slowly, when the house-elf pulls itself up the battered-looking steps to the porch, and reaches up to the wood of the door with one hand. The door - after a long pause - swings open, as if with reluctance. The elf pauses, and looks back at him.
“Remus Lupin will enter,” it says. “And it will wait in the drawing room up the stairs.”
He starts forward, up the stairs.
“It will not touch anything,” the creature hisses.
“No,” he murmurs, pausing as he takes in the dimly-lit interior of the corridor. The long hallway and the portraits, the gilding, the grandeur that seems - oddly - so half-faded. The enormous staircase, curving up and to the left. “I suppose not.”
“The drawing room,” the house elf mutters again, and disappears into the shadows of the corridor. The door shuts of its own accord, behind them.
The house is plunged into a sudden, strange light. Half silver, half golden. All edged and ringed by deep, heavy shadow. He takes the stairs very slowly, palm just grazing the smooth, polished railing. The carpet is very soft under his feet, but it seems to be fraying, in the corners, here and there. There is a grotesque line of portraits, and stuffed house-elf heads, halfway up to the landing. Remus swallows back another fearish lump in his throat, and takes the last few steps.
The drawing room must be, he realizes, the room at the end of the landing, with the half-open door. His footsteps seem to be swallowed up by the shadows, as he makes his way to the threshold, and pushes it open with the flat palm of his hand.
Mrs Black is sitting upright in a high-backed armchair. Her eyes are the first things he sees: utterly dark, and heavily piercing. Deep-set, like Sirius’s. Arching eyebrows. A beautiful, high forehead. A thin mouth, and that utterly powerful, aristocratic nose. Her skin is pale - paler than Sirius’s ever was. Paler even than what he remembers of Regulus. Her expression is almost dead, except for those eyes - eerily bright. Her hair is parted down the centre - deep black and spilling over her shoulders and over her breasts, falling almost to her waist. Her hands look disconcertingly wrinkled and old-looking where they rest, on either arm of the chair.
She regards him from where she sits; she does not rise to greet him. The illness, he thinks. She must be - unable?
“Hello,” he says, into the room. “I’m Remus Lupin.”
“I know who you are,” says Mrs Black. Her voice is steady, but full of age - it is ripped to shreds. It sounds like the creaking of an old room, like the way the Shack used to shudder and groan around them in the midst of a storm. “My niece asked that I speak to you.”
“Ah,” he says. “Yes.”
“You may come in,” she says. She lifts a hand, very slightly, from where it rests on the arm of the chair. As he steps inside, Remus gets the sense that that little movement was a great effort.
“Sit,” she says. She sounds so much like Narcissa, he thinks. The little inflections of life as a noble.
“Thank you,” he says, and settles himself into the smaller armchair, feeling suddenly, horribly enclosed.
“Are you pure of blood?” she asks, with a very small lifting of a dark eyebrow. “Who were your parents?”
“My - ” he clears his throat, begins again. “My father was a wizard. Many, many generations back. From France, originally, I believe. He was - a professor. A scholar.”
“Your mother?”
“A Muggle,” he says, and summons the courage to say it with a kind of pride. “English, from a small town in Shropshire.”
Mrs Black snorts. Utterly, completely dismissive. A thick silence descends, and Remus presses his tongue up against the roof of his mouth and knows, somehow, that if he speaks now he will never get the chance he came here for.
Mrs Black is watching him with sharply narrowed eyes. Her chin is pointed slightly upwards, and the shadows of the flickering candles catch the wrinkles in the corners of her face. Her breathing, he realizes, is very short, and very laboured.
She is dying, he thinks. If he lets himself, he can almost smell it. The way the necrosis of her flesh is just beginning from the inside-out, like the half-faded rot of an old bouquet of flowers scented from across the room. Something that should have been tossed in the rubbish bin days before.
“You spoke to my niece,” she says, finally.
“Yes,” he says.
“About my sons,” she says. It sounds so odd, somehow, to see her thin mouth make that word.
“Yes,” he says.
“You knew him,” she says. It is not a question. “When he was at school.”
“Yes,” he says.
“You were the reason he abandoned his family, the reason he defected to that little band of rag-tag blood traitors and Muggle sympathizers. The reason he forced our hands. The reason he is no longer a Black.”
He knows that the answer is yes. Perhaps. Perhaps, he thinks, perhaps only maybe.
“You have no reply?” her head tilts on her neck, very slightly.
“None that would please you, Ma’am.”
She snorts again. “My pleasure is utterly persona non grata, Mr Lupin, at the very presence of a person like you in my home.”
He bites his tongue; forces himself to keep his eyes on hers.
“Why have you come?” she says, the words so clearly grating on her throat. “To torment me with memories of my losses? To force me to recall the greatest sorrow of my life - losing one son to his own selfishness and ingratitude, and the other to death?”
“No Ma’am,” he whispers. “But perhaps - if you will allow it - I might say that I think I understand this loss.”
“Rude!” she snaps - her voice gaining a kind of shrill strength. “You are out of line, Mr Lupin.”
“My apologies,” he says. “But Sirius - Sirius was a loss I deeply felt as well. I was - I believe I was betrayed by him. We all were, it appears, at some point in our lives.”
Her eyes narrow. Her head sways gently, very slightly, on her neck, like a serpent. “How do you mean.”
“I mean,” he opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “I mean to say that Sirius - we all trusted him. Many of us, his friends, we trusted him with our very lives. And - and if what happened is true, really is true, then you and I, Ma’am, we share that certain kind of loss.”
She snorts, again. “He was not your blood kin. How can you even compare the two?”
“James,” he whispers, clears his throat. “James Potter. He - they were like brothers.”
“Then you should have been aware how easy it was for him to find that concept so utterly easy to cast aside.” Her breath wheezes through her teeth; there are sickly spots of colour beginning to appear on the high bones of her face.
He stays silent, a knotted coil of discomfort growing in his belly. He lowers his eyes from her face.
“He loved his brother,” she says, suddenly, and so quiet. When he lifts his face again, he sees that her eyes are closed, casting deep purple-bruised shadows across the whiteness of her skin. “When they were young. When they were young, they were. He kept him safe.”
“Safe?” he whispers.
The room creaks around them; there is the sound of the rain spattering against the hard, opaque glass of the windows.
“Just this past fortnight,” she whispers, and it is abundantly clear that she is gone from this place. “Just this past fortnight - Regulus has been sick again, you see. A fever. The Healers, came. Worried.”
“Oh,” he manages, voice stuck in his throat. He feels, oddly, as if he has stumbled inside someone else’s dream. “I’m so sorry.”
Her chin dips, almost resting against her neck. “He wouldn’t - wouldn’t let them in. Kept them at bay, at the door - like a common mongrel. Earned him twenty lashes.”
God, he thinks.
“Twenty lashes, and all he did was bite his tongue. Bite his tongue and return to his brother’s room, and sit at the edge of his bed. Refused supper. Refused sleep. Stayed there until Regulus woke.”
This is - he thinks, wildly. This is wrong.
“Ma’am?” he reaches across the thick space between them, with his hand outstretched. “Mrs Black.”
She spasms. Her hands startle on the arm of the chair, and her hair flies back from her face when her head jerks up. Their eyes meet, briefly, and he sees the exact moment when her pride and reality come back to her, filling her up and shooting through her veins.
“What,” she snarls. “What enchantment?”
“Ma’am,” he leans back, sharply. “Not that - are you feeling - ?”
“Out,” she cries. It rises, like a roar of bubbling water, into a scream. “Kreacher! Out of my house! Kreacher!”
The house elf finds him halfway down the stairs: its yellowed teeth bared close to lunging out and biting at his calves.
“Out!” it shrieks. It echoes her screams that follow him down the stairs, through the hall, and out into the wet and shaking evening light.
--------
Now, every night since Grimmauld Place, he dreams that he has been in Azkaban.
Someone is calling him, down a long corridor. There is no light, and there is the sensation of cold fingers on the back of neck.
He wakes to the feeling of spiders skittering down his legs, disappearing through his toes. And he sits on the edge of Harry’s bed, watching his sleeping face until he is able to stop the trembling in his fingers.
Some nights, he dreams that he is in Azkaban, and there are bars at his face. There are bars lashing at his face, at his skin, and someone’s human hand is gripping at his wrist, trying to pull him in.
Other nights, he dreams that he is in Azkaban, and Sirius Black is standing in a pool of red light, under a thick sunset, watching him without a face.
Who are you, he screams. Because he has no voice, the Sirius Black with no face just laughs, without a mouth.
At the very end of the month, he dreams that he has been in Azkaban. He dreams that he is walking the corridors with a hoard of Dementors at his back, with their cold skeleton-hands and their slimy, rotting fingers pressed along his spine and his shoulder and his elbows, guiding him forward. He dreams that he hears distant screams of sorrow, like the howling of wolves and the squeal of dying prey. He dreams that there are iron bars around him - that it is dark. So dark.
He dreams that he is sitting in an armchair across from Bellatrix Lestrange. She looks half-young, half-old, this imagined crease of space and time. He dreams that he sits across from her, and when she opens her mouth to speak, the full moon presses open her jaws from the inside-out, flies out of her throat and hangs above them like a lantern.
Do you know Sirius Black, he asks her.
Do you know Sirius Black, she echoes.
Do you know Sirius Black, says the full moon. It sounds like Albus Dumbledore.
From somewhere down the corridor, the sound a baby crying. It is Harry, he thinks.
Harry, he says.
Harry, says Bellatrix Lestrange.
Harry, says the full moon.
Do you know Sirius Black, he asks her, again.
Do you know Sirius Black, she echoes, again.
Sirius Black, says the full moon. Do you know him?
I know him, he says.
The full moon howls, and Bellatrix Lestrange reaches out with both hands and grabs the full moon and cradles it to her suddenly bare breasts like small, nursing child.
Wolf, says the full moon. Monster. What do you know.
What do you know, says Bellatrix Lestrange.
He knows smell, says the full moon. He knows smell and blood.
I need him, he says. He says it, but he knows that he doesn’t, because his throat is full of the ocean and the setting sun, that all he can taste is salt and burning light.
You need the beginning, says the full moon, which is now Fenrir Greyback the way he looked all those years ago, before he was Fenrir Greyback, when he was a man pressing Remus - child Remus, small Remus, whole Remus - up against the rough wooden wall of a barn, and shoving his thick hands down around Remus’s thighs and licking at his straining neck with a mouth that smelled like gasoline and rotting fish. And then, when he was a wolf, biting at the thin, snap-able ribs of Remus’s skeleton.
You need to go back to the beginning.
No - he tries to stand, he tries to stand and leave and run out of this place that he has arrived to, that he has brought himself to the edge of, and he feels as if he is crying. Not you not you not you. Not you.
He wakes, with a horrifying shudder - and a shout halfway through his throat - with the sound of Bellatrix Lestrange’s terrible laughter in his head.
--------
He spends the day in a daze. At first, halfway through his morning tea, with Harry happily chatting beside him, he chalks it up to that night’s full moon: to that fact that this month has been more stressful than most, perhaps, and that he is very tired.
But that afternoon, when he and Harry step out of the Weasley’s Floo, and Harry slips all too easily out of his hand to go find Ronald and show him his new toy boat and the box of drawing pencils that Remus purchased him in a fit of guilt, and the Weasley children are hurtling around him, screaming with all the excitement of the trip to Platform 9 and ¾ tomorrow, with the advent of the new school year and all the preparations that have happened that day - even with all that, all he can think about is the fact that he has been smelling Fenrir Greyback on his skin in a way that he has not since he was fifteen, and learned the name of him.
Molly looks appropriately frazzled: her hair coming loose from her braided bun, and her small daughter at her hip, her arms out to catch a wildly screaming young Weasley boy with spectacles, as he goes ripping past her legs in pursuit of an older brother.
“Muuuum! Mum, mum, Bill’s got Scabbers, he says he’s going to - ”
“Percy,” she scolds. “We have company, don’t act like such a crazed animal!”
“Mum!” the child wails - Percy. “Mum, Bill’s - Bill’s taken Scabbers, it’s my rat and he’s taken it and he says he’s going to take it with him to school tomorrow and that’s not - I want - that’s not fair!”
“Percy!” she says, sternly. “Remus, I’m so sorry.”
“No - ” he starts, but a teenaged Bill is screaming from the top of the long, twisted stairwell.
“My rat died! I want this one! If I go back to school without one, everyone will - ”
“It’s not your rat, William Arthur Weasley! You give it back to your brother immediately!”
“Mum!”
“This instant! Remus - ah, I’m so sorry.”
“No, I’m. I’m sorry to have to - ”
“Nonsense,” smiles Molly, strikingly calm despite the fact that there is a struggling child trying to wrench free of her grasp. “We completely understand. It’s no trouble at all to take Harry with us to the station tomorrow, too - the whole brood usually comes anyway, and it’s so exciting for the children to get to see the train, even if they’re not getting on it, Merlin help us when they do!”
“I can’t thank you - ”
“Nonsense,” says Molly, with a kind of sternness normally devoted to her own children. “Now get going - I don’t want to have to keep you any longer than we have.”
He calls to Harry before he steps outside to Apparate, but Harry, it seems, is long gone, wrapped up in some game in one of the topmost rooms. There is something gnawing at his insides, he realizes, as he closes the door behind him. It is not, guilt, he thinks. It is not failure, he thinks. It is not the moon, he thinks. It was - it was that dream.
He pulls out his wand.
I’m so close, he thinks, at the very moment that the act of Apparation pulls him under.
When he spills out into the grounds of Hogsmeade - he smells it, immediately. It is there, on the wind, in a way that is entirely unable to be a coincidence. It is there, in the air. That horrible, glorious scent.
Greyback.
He hisses it out into the air. I’m so close.
Back to the beginning?
Back to the beginning, said the moon that had been Albus Dumbledore that had been Fenrir Greyback that had been himself, after all.
He takes off toward the flickering outskirts of the Forbidden Forest, in a way that he never has, in a headlong run. The sunset is at his back, hurtling him through the world.
--------
He finds Rubeus Hagrid dozing by the fire in the middle of the small Groundskeeper’s hut. He has fallen in the pumpkin patch, scrambling - half-dazed - to the steps, and he is sure (somewhere, in the rational side of himself, long-distant now) that he looks an utter mess, bleeding from the forehead and panting in the onslaught of the suddenly chill air.
“Wassat - ” Hagrid starts, rousing halfway from the chair, and Remus holds out a hand, still catching his breath.
“Rubeus - ” he pants. “Rubeus, I need - ”
“Lu - Lupin?” Hagrid rubs at his grizzly face, rubbing at his eyes with his great mitt-like hands.
“Listen to me,” Remus pleads, sharply. “Snape - Snape said, last month, that - that there were animals, creatures being pushed out of the forest. Into the grounds. Is that - is that true?”
“Wha’ - I - ” Hagrid blinks unsteadily.
“Is that true?” He hisses.
“Wha’ - yeah. Yeah, bu’ - ”
“It’s him,” Remus grinds out. “I need - ”
“Lupin,” Hagrid is clearly more awake now. “They - the centaurs - they think it’s - yeh know.”
“Werewolves,” he says, with the pounding of blood in his ears.
Hagrid just stares. “Wha’ - how did yeh - ”
“The motorbike,” he says, before he knows that he is speaking. “I need it. Please.”
--------
It has been stored under a thin dropcloth in the back of Hagrid’s shed for years now. When he pulled back the cloth, a shower of dust erupted, and dislodged a lumpy, black mass of fabric that fell to the floor of the shed with a dull thump.
What - he had started to say, to the empty room, when he leaned down to retrieve it, and had his fingers jolt at the utterly familiar sensation of soft, beaten leather under his fingers.
Sirius’s jacket.
He is wearing it, now, as he hurtles through the forest on the motorbike, too close to skidding out at every turn, his pulse screeching in his ears, with the last vestiges of the light thudding through the whistling trees. The motorbike shudders underneath him; he feels crazed, vaguely sick to his stomach, but he knows it. He knows that this is what he’s meant to do. This is the beginning - it could even be the end.
I could know, he thinks, as the sun dips even lower on the horizon. I could know tonight if Sirius were innocent.
I could speak to this thing of evil - because he was, because we knew he was - he was one of them, and he will know, the thought swells up inside him like a howl of triumph. He has to know, if Sirius is -
Something like a solid shadow leaps across the forest floor in front of him, and he grabs at the brakes reflexively, the motorbike screeching with the effort of the sudden stop, and his weight tilts, and he goes skidding to the ground with dizzying force.
He is panting, wincing as he extracts one leg from underneath the toppled bike, and the shadow streaks across the corner of his vision again - his heart skitters in his chest. His breathing is loud, open-mouthed, and echoing in the creaking forest.
He pulls his leg free, staggering to his feet, and he clutches at his head when he feels that tug of vertigo, the unsteadiness of his own human body. He clenches his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut.
Not yet, he grits his jaw, and tries to hang on to the edges of his own flesh, his own bones - which are all bursting to be something else. Please, not yet I’m not ready I need to find him I need to, not yet.
When he opens his eyes again, he is surrounded.
They are naked, mostly. A few scraps of fabric hanging from their limbs, here and there, but mostly naked. They are still human, however vaguely. One of them is wearing a rabbit skin: he smells the blood, sweet, and gamey, and wheaty like the wet husks of a sown field. Their hair is overgrown, matted with leaves and dirt and the pure scent of themselves. In the eerie, dappled light, he can almost see all of their shining bodies, that they are all patterned with the cartography of silvery scars.
There is a young girl among them. Her body looks so young and whole. Her skin looks oddly serene - smooth. She stands with her shoulders straight, and she looks at him with narrowed, dark eyes. When she opens her mouth, to breathe the air with the flat surface of her tongue, he sees that her teeth have been filed into points.
He hisses, involuntarily, at the air. I am really here, he thinks. God - god, I’m here.
He smells him. Like the point of a knife slicing through the air. Greyback is there. Greyback is behind him.
“Remus Lupin.”
Greyback’s voice is at his ear; Greyback’s fingers are pressed against his neck, pushing up into his hair, holding at the back of his head. Greyback’s nose is pressed up against the shell of his ear; Greyback’s voice is licked against his jaw.
“Know that sweet smell anywhere.”
He fights to keep his eyes open. The girl’s face seems caught somewhere between laughing and screaming - with her tongue out, and those teeth.
“Wish we’d had you, at that young.”
“You did,” he says, finally. The tug of the moon - growing hot and fat beyond the horizon, burgeoning - makes his throat rusty, his voice full of the dust of his grinding bones. “I was so much younger.”
“But I never had you,” says Greyback. Regretful, sweet.
It is the gentleness he remembers. When he first hit puberty, at thirteen, he had three months of horrifically confused, desperate dreams. The first time he made himself come, he thinks, half-asleep and terrified, buried underneath a Gryffindor coverlet, it was to a twisted memory of Greyback’s palm-paw pressing against his bared stomach, just before the teeth scraped his neck.
“Not the way you wanted, I suppose,” he says. “No.”
Greyback laughs. “No.”
“He’s not one of us,” comes a voice, from the edge of the shadows.
Greyback snarls; he feels the lips drawing back, the baring of teeth, against his temple.
“I am,” says Remus, and he feels the sudden shudder of Greyback’s body against his, when he says it. “I am one of you.”
“Such words,” Greyback purrs, pressing a hand up against the back of Remus’s skull, sifting through his hair. “I don’t believe you. You stink like them. You stink like you want a fucking human thing.”
“What if I do?” he whispers, turns his head slightly, into Greyback’s hand.
“We could kill you,” says Greyback, softly. So gently.
“You could,” he swallows. “But then you wouldn’t have me.”
A silence. A rustle in the leaves. From somewhere, a voice starting its groan, the weight of its body too much for it.
“Have you?” hisses Greyback.
“I’ll change with you,” he grits out, panting with the resistance against the tug of the moon. “Tonight - I’ll - I’ll be with you tonight.”
“And?”
“And tomorrow - you,” he pauses, gathers himself. “You answer a question for me.”
Greyback laughs, a rusty howl. He leans in, presses his lengthening teeth to Remus’s neck, and whispers it - “Deal.”
Remus has never felt more grateful for the pain of his body ripping itself apart. The moon, at that moment, when it rises into being over the edge of the world, is like a wash of benediction, like the soothing touch of rain on his parched skeleton and his bared skull.
--------
The light of the morning tugs at him, from under his closed eyes. He groans, softly, into the air, and tastes his chapped lips, and the remnants of gristle in his teeth, warm blood coating his throat. His body feels so old, but so purely aware of itself, coated in its painful newness.
He groans again, and opens his eyes. The sun pierces him, down to his ribs. He squints up into the swaying treetops, and feels the rough pulse of a tree-root digging into his spine. There is the heavy warmth of someone’s arm slung across his waist, someone’s hot breath ghosting over the crook of his elbow.
He remembers - with striking clarity - the freedom of that night, just past behind him. The push and pull of other bodies: of knowing that he was reassured and guided and fed by the pounding hearts and pounding feet of this sort of kin. He feels a sudden welling of nausea, and scrambles for a handhold, as he leans up and over the tree root, and vomits in a pile of dead leaves.
“Lovely,” croaks someone, just to his left.
He wipes his mouth, shuddering, feeling the little retching remnant-shudders of his body slowly dissolve back into his spine. He turns his head, hand still pressed to his lips, and focuses blearily on the naked form of Greyback just beside him.
He wets his lips - still tastes blood there. He cannot speak - only makes a hoarse, disgusted sort of noise.
“Wild hog,” says Greyback, with a blurry, full-toothed smile. His fingers press against Remus’s bare stomach. “Not our favourite, but good enough. Suppose.”
Remus heaves himself to sitting with a gasp of air, vertigo tugging at his temples. He takes several throat coating inhales of cool, early morning air, and focuses again on Greyback’s face, which is so strange when lit by something other than the shadows and the moonlight.
“Our deal,” he rasps.
And Greyback laughs. For a sick moment, Remus entertains the thought that he has been fooled: that he is doomed, now, to have this experience deep within himself like all the others, as a failure of his own soul.
“Our deal,” echoes Greyback, and his lips pull back in that half-gentle smile - with all the canines exposed. “Have you earned it?”
“Have I?” he whispers.
Greyback makes a thick, deep noise in his throat, and pulls himself to sitting: large, scarred hands pressed palm down on those old-man knees. “You stayed with us,” he says.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?” he manages.
“Yes,” Greyback grins, eyes flickering to Remus’s face. “I always thought you were my greatest failure - however sweet it was to take you.”
Remus feels saliva building in the back of his throat; his teeth clench together to keep the nausea down again. “But,” he whispers.
“You proved me wrong,” murmurs Greyback. “Somehow.”
He shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, to try and clear a fuzziness that has settled there. “I don’t.”
“You are - ” Greyback’s voice seems very far away. “Powerful. It’s impressive. You embrace it - for one so long with them. You are unashamed.”
“I - ” I am, he wants to say. I am, so. But.
The jacket. It is there, by his naked feet. He reaches for it, suddenly, gathers it up into his hands, balls it up and holds it to his chest. He looks at Greyback, who looks at him, with narrowed, sleepy eyes.
“This - ” he holds it out. Extends it to Greyback, who takes it with a battered-looking hand. “This belonged to someone. Someone that I.”
Greyback is looking at it, very close to his face. Remus holds back a wave of nausea. So close.
“When you were near - near He Who Must Not Be Named. Did you ever smell - did you ever scent that person? The person that owned that jacket?”
Greyback presses it against his face. His eyes drift closed, so easily. There is a long silence. The wind presses through the trees and sends a chill up Remus’s spine. He cannot find breath to fill his lungs.
“No,” says Greyback, and holds the jacket out to him.
He takes the jacket back, with shaking hands. His stomach sinks, somehow. It sinks into the very bottom of his being, and empties him out. It means - he looks down at his naked lap, at his bare legs and his knotted fingers gripping the black leather. It means nothing. It means only that they were never close. It proves, he thinks - absolutely nothing.
“I smelled a rat,” says Greyback. He opens his eyes and finds Remus’s face with his jaundiced gaze.
“I know.” He presses a hand to his forehead, willing away the first edges of an ache. Willing away the first niggling thoughts that he has proved himself useless, that there is nothing left to know, nothing concrete that can save what he thought needed to be saved. “We knew - we knew there was a spy.”
“No,” says Greyback. “I smelled a rat.”
He lifts his head. “What?”
“You heard me,” says Greyback, and he smiles, very slow. “A nasty little rodent. Scent was wrapped all ‘round his feet.”
“Whose feet,” he hisses. His head is pounding. He feels the first rays of sun on his face, and the light finds its way through the trees and it dissolves Greyback’s face into pure, white blindness.
“Voldemort’s,” hisses Greyback, in return.
No, he thinks, slowly, straining into the sun. It couldn’t be -
“Smell him now,” says Greyback.
“What?” The world comes snapping back to sanity. Something deeply unsettling throttles at Remus’s gut. He starts to feel his mind whirling, the wheels clicking into motion, the pieces - all falling very, very slowly, into place.
“You’ve been around him,” says Greyback. “Smell it on you too - the rat. The same one, ‘cause it was never like any of the others - smelled dirty. All mixed-up. Not a good rat. Not a whole rat. A half thing.”
“I’ve - ” he stares. “I haven’t.”
“You have,” says Greyback, and stretches his long, thick-boned arms, the joints popping. “Not close, no. But recent. Same one.”
“I don’t - ” he grabs blindly at Sirius’s jacket, pulls it to his chest. “I don’t have a - ”
Muuuum! Mum, mum, Bill’s got Scabbers, he says he’s going to -
No - he thinks. No, not -
Oh, god, he thinks.
“Peter,” he snarls. He feels it rise up in his chest like a wail - like an expulsion of toxins, like vomit - it comes from a place of pure hatred, and it is uncontrollable, and it is making him shake.
“Oh, god,” he says.
And Greyback laughs.
--------
He is half-crazed by the time he reaches the edge of the Hogwarts’ grounds. The sun is almost on its way back down again, from the crest of the sky. He’d left the motorbike wherever it lay when he was ambushed last night; no time to find it. He’d scrambled for his clothes - what was left of them - and wrapped Sirius’s jacket around his shoulders. He’d left the naked, slumbering bodies of his fellow monsters behind him without a second thought; his mind was one beat with his heart: Pe-ter pe-ter pe-ter pe-ter pe-ter.
He limps through the forest - the trees growing thinner now - the sound of Greyback’s laughter at his heels, and the horrific, gnawing sensation of his own brain trying to fit the scattered pieces back together. Was it? he thinks, panting, leaning on the trunk of an old, knotty oak to catch his breath. Was it even possible?
He hadn’t gone to the funeral. Nothing much left to bury, said Mundungus Fletcher, one night. Insensitive, but not unkindly.
Nothing much to bury, he thinks, and swallows, starting out again on his screaming, aching feet. Except -
That rat, he thinks. That rat - is it possible? Could it be. So close, all this time, and I never knew - I never thought, even once, that it could be -
He tries to remember when he first saw the young Weasley child clutching the rat to his chest. Not - not before James and Lily, he thinks. No. He is certain. Not before. It was after. It was after. It could have been - he chokes, on a stroke of nausea at the back of his head, and an upsurge of saliva in his mouth. He drops to his knees in the wet grass - free of the forest, now - and presses his forehead to the ground - the soft, sweet ground - and tries to breathe.
Harry wasn’t two, yet, he realizes, with a low groan. The timing, he thinks. It’s perfect.
In the distance, there is the rattle of wood and iron, and the Hogwarts Express announces its arrival with the beginning of the sunset. A low, coiled wail.
He raises his head. He lets his hatred surge up through his spine. He lets his anger carry him to his feet. He lets it all urge him forward, up the hill.
--------
He is so dizzy. He stumbles into the Grand Entrance: his shoulder throbbing from where he shoved it against the enormous, heavy wooden doors, his hands too leaden to lift them to push it open. There is the soothing, dark-warm light of the Grand Hall, the low, mellifluous, utterly familiar hum and chatter of young voices from down the corridor, where he imagines the Welcome Feast has just begun. He takes three steps, and almost collapses against a marble statue of a griffin, holding the thick body of an eagle in its mouth.
Someone grips his arm.
He bats at them - dazedly. No. So close.
“Lupin.”
Snape.
“What on earth - ” Snape is gripping tighter at his arm now, hauling him to his feet. “Where is Potter?”
“We - ” he tries, shakes his head. His mouth is only full of one sound. One sound only. “Peter,” he hisses, against Snape’s arm.
“What?” Snape makes a disgruntled, sharp noise, jostling his arm. “Where have you - ”
“Severus - ” he pants, desperately; tries to raise his eyes, and only manages to raise his forehead off of Snape’s bicep. “Severus, listen to me - there’s been. Peter. Peter Pettigrew.”
“Have you gone mad?” Snape tugs at his arm, he stumbles a few feet down the corridor. The noise of the children fades slightly. “Are you - ”
“He’s alive,” Remus hisses, and digs in his heels, as best he’s able. His head swims, with the effort. “Please - please, you have to. You have to believe me. He’s there - inside, one. One of the children, has him. He’s a rat, Snape. He’s an Animagus, they - they, James and Sirius and Peter, they turned into animals, so they could - they could - ”
“Help you,” says Snape, evenly. He sounds coldly unsurprised.
“Yes,” he swallows, blinks back tears of exhaustion. “Yes - except - I don’t think. It wasn’t Sirius - it was Peter - he’s alive, and. And. And he’s inside - there. One of the Weasley boys. B-Bill? Bill Weasley. A rat. His pet rat.”
There is a long silence. He feels his legs crumpling underneath him, and tightens his fingers on Snape’s arm to keep himself upright. He chokes, on his own breath. His heart is pounding.
“Stay here,” Snape hisses, in his ear, and deposits his shaking body against the statue of the griffin. He grips at its large, cold-marble paw, rests his head against the strong flank, and takes ten long, shuddering, even breaths.
It helps. He is either, he thinks, with a shattered smile tugging at his lips, going to be carted off to St. Mungo’s in the next few minutes, or Severus Snape will appear with Bill Weasley and the little rat, and then he will know. He will know.
“M-Mr Lupin?”
His eyes snap open. Bill Weasley, all fifteen years of him, is standing with Snape’s long-fingered hand clutching his shoulder, his bag held tightly to his chest.
“Bill - ” he nods. “Bill, please. I need to see. See your brother’s rat. Did you bring it with you?”
“My mum - ” Bill Weasley is white-faced, and vaguely green around the eyes. “Did she - I swear I didn’t.”
Remus laughs: it sounds cruel and dry in his throat. “Bill,” he croaks. “Bill - for the love of god, give me the rat.”
“Please don’t tell her,” Bill Weasley whispers. “She’ll send me a Howler, and - ”
“Weasley,” barks Snape, at his back, and Bill jumps, dark eyes narrowing.
“All right - I - ”
The bag is opened. Bill reaches in with both hands, and draws out - cupped in his palms - the shaking, squealing form of Scabbers the rat.
He knows it. From the moment he sees that little, trembling, furry body: those black-bright eyes, those little half-bitten ears, he knows.
Wormtail.
“It’s him,” he breathes.
“How do you know?” Snape’s fingers tighten on Bill’s shoulder.
“I know him. I’d know him anywhere.”
Wormtail screeches, high-pitched, and tries to bite Bill’s fingers with little, yellowed, gnashing teeth.
“Get Bill out of here,” he whispers, reaching forward to press a gentle hand to Bill’s shoulder. “Severus - please. I. You need to hold it - and. And I’ll.”
“Not here,” Snape says, sharply. “Back, Weasley. And not a word of this until we’ve spoken to the Headmaster. Understood?”
Bill stumbles away a few steps, and he winces, when Wormtail lets out a particularly high squeal, struggling in Snape’s grip.
“Back,” Snape snarls, even as he grabs Remus’s arm with his free hand, and drags him along the corridor, leaving a stunned and silent Bill Weasley looking after him.
“Where - ” Remus stumbles along after him, his fingers itching to dig into that matted fur and just wring that dirty little neck. If he could only -
“Anywhere but in front of the children, you stupid clod,” Snape hisses, dragging him into an empty classroom: darkened except for a single candle on the empty teacher’s desk, and a small pot of fairies on a shelf in the very back of the room. “If you insist on dragging me into your madness because you cannot see fit to make a coherent sentence, you will at least do so out of bloody sight of the rest of the world.”
Wormtail squeals, again: writhing and twisting, his long naked tail lashing in the air. Snape grunts, and redoubles his grip.
“Now, Lupin - ” he insists, eyes narrowed, skin even sallower in the pale, limited light.
Remus struggles to right himself to standing, putting the solidity of the teacher’s desk at his back. He draws his wand, very slowly. I remember this, he thinks, as his pounding heart fills his head with blood, his vision swimming. I must remember this. This spell.
He raises his wand. He points it at the rat shuddering in Snape’s fingers.
I know you, he thinks, and the room erupts with white-blue light. A flash. And Wormtail drops to the floor with a meaty little thud - utterly still, for the briefest of moments.
And then, the change.
It comes in parts: first the fingers, then the ears, then the nose, the neck, the ribs, the legs lengthening and sprouting and the spine shifting and growing and curving and the face pulling out from itself and the fur retreating into pale, blubbery skin, and the eyes - he knows those eyes. And suddenly. Suddenly it is the half-naked body of Peter Pettigrew, crouched at his feet.
“Well,” he croaks. “Hullo, Peter.”
“R-remus,” says Peter, in a voice that has been utterly misused - more animal than human. “Remus, my old. My old friend.”
Snape makes a noise like his throat has closed up.
His hands are so steady. He feels, suddenly, utterly serene. “Been a while.”
“R-Remus.”
“Don’t move,” Remus says, gently. “Or I’ll kill you.”
“K-kill me - why, why would you - ” Peter reaches for his feet, trembling, curled hands begging for a soothing touch.
He steps back, feels his lip curl in disgust. “I got your letter, Peter.”
“M-my letter?”
“The night James and Lily were killed,” he murmurs, wand still extended. “You sent me a letter. You told me something was wrong.”
“S-Sirius - Sirius was - ” Peter pleads, suddenly, and it sends white-hot flash through Remus’s spine. He lunges forward, grabbing Peter by the fleshy, flabby neck, and hauling him back against the wall, pinning him there.
“Lupi -” Snape starts to protest, but Remus snarls, in spite of himself.
“Say it,” he growls, against Peter’s face - his wand jerked right under Peter’s jaw, digging into the folds of his neck. “I know what you did - what you did to James and Lily - what you did to Sirius - I want to hear you say it.”
“I don’t know what you - ”
“I’m going to kill you, Peter, either way,” he hisses, and his wand jerks in his hand when Peter swallows, gasping. “Save what little of your soul you have left.”
“Lupin,” Snape hisses at his ear. “A body is not a confession.”
“In this case,” he hisses back. “A body is still evidence enough!”
Peter squeals. “Please! Please don’t - don’t - I’ll tell you, but please don’t - don’t. Don’t. James - James never would have. He never would have wanted you to - to become a murderer.”
It hits him, like a stinging slap. His fingers spasm against Peter’s throat.
“Like you did?”
Peter bursts into tears. “What - what could I have done?” he wails, clutching at Remus’s arm with both his hands. “The Dark Lord - the Dark Lord - he was so - so powerful. You have no idea. When - When Sirius came to me - suggested that I - that we switch, that we switch Secret Keepers, it was all because the Dark Lord had - the Dark Lord had. He already had me. Remus. Remus. He - he would have killed me, and I - ”
“Then you should have died,” Remus whispers, blood pounding in his ears. “You should have died.”
Peter lets out a low wail, and struggles once more - like the last spasm of a dying moth.
Avada Kedavra, he thinks.
Remus chokes. Bile in his throat. Pure anger in his veins. He can hardly see. He drives his wand against Peter’s throat - the words are almost in his mouth.
Avada Kedavra, he thinks.
It could be so simple. It would be pure revenge. So delicious. So simple, he thinks, and I would be right, in doing it.
I was right, he thinks, suddenly. I was right. Sirius. Sirius was - Sirius is innocent.
Avada Kedavra, he thinks.
Sirius, he thinks, and his eyes threaten to drift closed with pure release, pure exhaustion. Sirius can be free.
His wand jerks, in his hand.
“Stupefy,” he whispers.
And he hears Snape exhale behind him in pure relief, as Peter Pettigrew’s unconscious body slumps to the ground.
--------
The sea is empty. The sky is full of golden clouds, and bright cherry-crimson light. Azkaban is a thick, black smudge on the horizon. It bleeds shadow like spilled ink. It has no form, from the shore: at this time of day, when everything is absorbed in light and reflection and light and reflection, and Remus can't make out where the ocean ends and the sky begins, because everything has fallen into the same collapsed space of breathing, seeing, waiting.
He is sure that the wind is picking up now, now that the sun is setting. He is sure that it will get quite cold, here on the north shore of some forbidden and forgotten beach, the shove-off for the last bit of real life those poor soul will ever see, he thinks. It must be cold, he thinks. But he can't feel it. He feels -- he searches for it. Exhausted, he thinks. I can't stop, he thinks. If I close my eyes, he thinks, I don't think I'll be able to wake up again - but it's not over, yet, and I can't stop until it is.
He tugs at the collar of his coat. He squints at the sunset. The sea is still empty.
"Are you sure -- " he turns his head, to look at Dumbledore, who is beside him. His throat is utterly raw - his voice sounds horrendous. He winces; curls his fingers around the top button of his coat, knuckles pressed up under his jaw. "They really will -- "
"I am sure they will," says Dumbledore. "However reluctantly."
He opens his mouth to wet his lips, and he feels the air rushing into his lungs - over the crest of his tongue, filling his cheeks, spiraling down his throat - tasting like salt and cold light. It jars his nerves. He hasn’t slept, he thinks, in - it must be days, now.
He misses Harry, dreadfully. The last time he saw him - yesterday, in the early hours of the morning, when he slipped in the door from another marathon pardoning session at the Ministry - Arthur Weasley was asleep on their lumpy little couch, and Harry was sitting awake in his room, drinking a glass of water he had cleared poured for himself. He had stood in the doorway of Harry’s cheery little bedroom, dark with shadows, and Harry had looked at him, silently, with those solemn, dark green eyes. It meant he was still half-terrified. And rightly so, he’d thought, and he’d traced the span of morning light across the wood floor until it washed across the skin of Harry’s bare ankle.
Hi, he’d said, finally. Couldn’t sleep?
I was sleeping, said Harry. I just woke up.
Oh, he’d said. Harry -
Are you okay? Harry had asked.
He hadn’t known - he hadn’t known what to say. He hadn’t known how to say it.
He had crossed the morning light scattered on the wood floor, and he had sat down on the edge of the bed next to Harry’s small-and-growing body, and he had pressed his palm down on Harry’s bare ankle, and Harry had let out this perfect little sigh - the kind that said it’s all right, you know, if you’re not, and he had pressed his side up against Remus’s side, and tucked his head down against Remus’s chest, and pulled his arm over Remus’s waist, and Remus felt his eyes growing heavy, and his arms were wrapping around Harry’s thin shoulders, and his face was buried in Harry’s hair.
And then he was crying - very quietly and all of a sudden.
I’m okay, he’d said, after a while, and then he’d made them waffles.
"How did this happen?" he says, watching the sun-coloured sea lick up onto the sand, frothing at the edges. "How did you -- "
"Me?" Dumbledore's voice is almost carried away by the wind. "Are you under the impression that this was my doing?"
He shakes his head. "You told those -- none of this would have been possible without you -- what you asked them to do, to even speak with me. I can't believe that any of them would ever have agreed to it, without your intervention."
"You seem to think that all I do, Remus, is collect favours from unsuspecting victims? I assure you, that is not entirely the case."
He frowns at the empty red skyline - the soft swell of the sea. A sudden gust of wind, and his robes whip around his ankles, and the air sends salt stinging against his skin, his eyes.
"It wasn't only for me," he says, hoarsely. "You know that."
"Do you?"
His jaw clenches. "It was for Harry. And for James and Lily. And for everyone who fought with us -- who always thought that we might still be able to win, even when. When things didn't look that way."
"And it was for you," says Dumbledore. His long white fingers appear from the woolen folds of his sleeves, knotting in the skirts of his robe, gathering them up. "To deny yourself that satisfaction, I think, is to ignore the fact that this would not have been possible without you."
He feels a hot, chalky knot forming in his throat. He shakes his head.
"Without your considerable commitment to the man on that boat."
He raises his eyes to the skyline. "What -- " he starts.
And then, oh. He sees it. It is fragmentary - minuscule - a dipping little speck of darkest black that Azkaban has spit into the red water of the sea. It rides the crest of a wave, and disappears behind a swell, and his heart seizes up into his throat, and his ribs clench around his belly, and his lungs fill up with salty, ocean-whipped air, and his hands are shaking, suddenly, where they grip the collar of his coat.
He thinks -- he thinks he can smell it. Sirius's skin, from across the waves. Sirius's being - his long body folded in the prow, his black hair in the wind, his large palms gripping at the wet, splintering wood of the keel. The weight of some dark life - dark years full of madness and hurt and small windows and the smell of despair mixed with the sea - the weight of it all wrapped around those shoulders. The shoulders he remembers carrying the weight of all of them, of their courage and their sadness and their heady adolescent, all buoyed up onto the form of Sirius Black. At times, he thinks, at times, carrying - oblivious - the love of those people around him, who knew what Sirius Black meant to them - even those who were never so brave as to say it with their mouths and their words.
The sun slips behind Azkaban, and rings it with a halo of blood-coloured light.
The boat pushes through the waves like a black arrowhead.
He can see -
He finds himself at the edge of the water. He is pushing into the foam, he is pushing into the cold, into the wet, into the dark, mirrored surface that was the separation, the thing, the world that had meant all of the lies he had told himself - how easily he had let himself believe. He is pushing it away with his body, to meet this arrival.
He can see -
Is that - he thinks. The man in the boat raises his head. Is this -
The cold seawater eddies around his knees. It laps at his fingertips. Even in the glare of the dying sun’s crown, he feels -- he feels un-blinded. He feels un-bound. And when he reaches out a hand to catch the prow, he feels - here, in the world - the solidity of himself.
--------
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