Fic: And in Darkness Bind Them Epilogue
Title: And in Darkness Bind Them (Epilogue)
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sirius Black, James Potter, Lily Potter, Remus Lupin, Lenka Myskova
(OC), Ivanka Myskova (OC), Mrs. Myskova (OC), Peter Pettigrew, Harry Potter, Various Order Members
Pairings: James/Lily, Sirius/Lenka(OC)
Warnings: Sexual Themes and Issues, Mentions of Violence
Summary: Sirius Black has always been the one to keep going and going, but finally meets someone who makes him pause.
Word Count: 4,629
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
The dawn came bright and cold on the early December morning in the village of Yetholm, Scotland, the only sounds the sleepy bleat of sheep as they ate their morning grain, and the occasional yawn from the odd puffy-eyed teenager going about their chores. Birds and other small animals scurried about the long frosty grass coating the fields, chittering quiet warnings to one another when a sheep or cow’s hoof wandered too close.
The villagers of Yetholm had had very little to look forward to other than the semi-annual Youth Dance at the community center for many years. The village sat in the bottom of a wide valley, surrounded by always-damp, rolling hills, and was almost always bathed in fog during the summer. In the late-fall and winter, frost clung to every blade of grass, making for quite the surprise when stepping on the uneven terrain to retrieve the paper in the morning. Once a bustling and cheery sort of place, with a small cinema and everything, Yetholm had shrunk in population and fallen into general disrepair.
General consensus among the more elderly villagers, if one were to ask about their opinion on the most eventful thing to happen to the village in their living memory, had to be when an army surgery had been stationed in the cinema during the second World War. To the working adults, it had been the flood five years ago that had destroyed the fields and roads, rendering them unyielding and impassable for seven months. To the teenagers it was the memorable year the village had tried for a Christmas festival and parade (to get tourists attracted to the area), but there hadn’t been enough people in the village to operate the floats and attend. But the children who had been in Yetholm the shortest time and had the shortest memories, all agreed that the very most exciting thing to happen to the village was when New Lady appeared.
New Lady seemed to have appeared out of the mist itself one blatantly unremarkable day, like a ghost or a genie, without any warning at all. She wore secondhand clothes and had a haircut like a boy, but she moved into the biggest house in the valley. The old place had been abandoned for years, ever since a rowdy-looking young man had swept in on his motorbike and bought it. “For tax reasons,” he said at the time, and hadn’t returned since. The villagers pondered that the young woman could be his wife, and the child she carried on her hip his. She kept mostly to herself, and at first the villagers respected that, but not for long.
The teenagers teased the New Lady, for they claimed that she was one of them, and was too young for a child of her own. They hissed insults at her when she went about her shopping, rode past on their bicycles to splash mud on her ankles, and threw pebbles at the windows of her house until finally they broke a window and their mothers demanded they stop.
The mothers - not the ones with teenage children, but the young mothers - took her in much more kindly than her own peers had. They practically dragged her along to the Wednesday night village meeting to introduce her to the town, and rather forcefully invited her to the Wednesday afternoon playgroup with their children. Every week a different mother hosted, and they put young Lenka’s name into the rotation straight away.
Because she was the only new thing to come to Yetholm since last summer’s caterpillar infestation, Lenka Myšková, and the mystery of her private life, was the main topic of conversation for weeks among the people who knew everything about each other.
“She comes from France,” claimed a stout old man with a generous moustache at the pub, a full month after her arrival.
“No she doesn’t,” insisted another man clear across the bar from him, “I know a Swede when I hear one, Smith.”
“I heard that her husband died of cancer, the poor dear.”
“I heard that she killed him!”
“Nonsense, David!”
“You see that little girl of hers?” interrupted a rather obnoxious young woman who had a knack for inserting herself where she had not been invited. “Nasty, red as a lobster, she is!”
“Them’re scars, dear,” droned an old veteran in his slow baritone, nodding along to his own words. “Burn scars. That tot was in a fire, and not too long ago, I reckon.” No one had the nerve to question him, as almost his entire platoon had burned to death.
No one gossiped about the new woman after that night.
Life in the village continued as it always had, even after the brief unrest, and Lenka blended easily into the little society. She found the clothes, the thick wool sweaters and stockings, and sturdy boots, rather to her liking, and within weeks had picked up a bit of the lingo. Ivanka was getting on smashingly with the other little children, even if she wasn’t able to play as roughly as them yet. So far the shrunken family had attended four of the Wednesday afternoon play groups, and each time Lenka had felt more at ease among her new neighbors. Though she was still very shaken up after the events of the past two months, and didn’t think she would ever really recover.
One sleepy morning, cold and sharp and still very quiet, Lenka was awoken by a pounding on the front door of the house that was much different from that of her neighbors popping in for an early visit. She sat up straight in bed, ran a hand through her hair (making it stick up in all sorts of directions), and shuffled down the steps toward the ceaseless banging. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the now slightly-crumpled piece of parchment Sirius had pressed upon her on the night before Halloween.
“Do you have somet’ing for me?” she called cautiously through the door, running one hand along the handle of her wand.
The pounding stopped abruptly, and she could hear a man’s heavy breathing on the other side of the thick wood. “I…I’d like to offer you a subscription to Witch Weekly,” came a slightly familiar hoarse voice, though it was trembling violently.
She threw the door open and Remus Lupin staggered into the foyer, ashen-faced and uncontrollably shaking. She had barely opened her mouth when he seized her by the collar of her nightshirt and shook her. “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!” he screamed, his breath hot on her face. His eyes were bloodshot and wild as he grappled with her attempts to wiggle free from his grasp.
Lenka slid out of his fingers and fell to the wooden floor with a thud, staring up at the young man who looked quite wild, now that she had a chance to properly look. He was thin as a refugee, with purple shadows under his eyes and an immeasurable amount of filth on his skin and robes, looking as though he had just been to Hell and back.
“What happened?” she asked incredulously, trying to figure out what all the shouting was about.
Remus howled with an almost inhuman agony, as if all of the suffering in the world had been closed up inside of his lean body, tried to kick something in his frustration, but was so weak that he collapsed on the floor beside her. He pulled at his thick dark hair and rocked back and forth, face-down on the floor, looking quite deranged.
“I woke up…in a cage…” he choked out between gasps for air, as he was now openly weeping with shock. “Kane was killed by Ministry officials…unregistered wolves arrested…I was let go…had my papers… Went to report to Dumbledore this morning…he told me…he told me! Voldemort gone…Lily and James…Harry…Sirius, Sirius! Oh, God!”
He dissolved again, and Lenka very cautiously moved to kneel at his side. He jerked slightly when she warily touched his shoulder, but didn’t attack, which was a great relief. Doing only what she would have wanted if it were her in such a state, Lenka wrapped her arms around whatever part of Remus she could reach and hugged him to her, his head on her chest. “Remus, Remus, Remus…” she murmured, running a hand over his tangled, dirty hair in an attempt to calm him. “I don’t…I don’t know what happened…I’m so, so sorry…”
She could hear Ivanka beginning to stir upstairs, though she had probably a full half hour before she would have to go tend to her, and so she kept rocking the man on the floor like he was the small child.
After ten of those minutes Remus finally calmed down long enough to straighten himself and lean against the wall. Still white as a sheet, there were two small red blotches high on his damp cheeks, and his wet eyes overbright. “Lily and James are dead,” he croaked weakly, two fat tears rolling down his nose. Though she did not visibly react, Lenka felt a great shock to her system that made her skin burn. “They died on Halloween night, and Harry went to live with Muggle relations. H-he lived, somehow, and Voldemort is dead, or they say he is.”
Lenka tried to smile at the news of Voldemort’s fall, but found her muscles were not working properly. Halloween…possibly only hours after… “What about…you said…Sirius?” she forced out painfully.
Incredulous and struck momentarily dumb, Remus merely gaped and shook his head. “What was happening, those last days?” he asked instead. “How could you have not seen this coming? Why are you here, in the Order’s safehouse?”
Lenka folded her legs beneath herself and tried to tell him everything, without sparing details.
Sirius had, of course, rushed out in the middle of the night and she, frightened, crept into his room to wait and fell asleep. When he came back they discussed this Order business (Remus scoffed) and went to bed shortly after. In the morning he had gotten a letter which seemed to disturb him greatly (she left out the bit where they talked about Remus), and he later spotted the “tubby little Death Eater” watching the house.
Remus sat up a little straighter, brow furrowed with thought.
The next day, Wednesday, had been spent watching Sirius pace wildly around the house, reinforcing all of the protective charms with a manic gleam in his eyes that unsettled her. She had never seen him looking so frantic before. Though there was no sign of “the enemy” in the front garden Sirius begged her not to leave, held her arms so tightly they bruised, nearly broke into tears when he saw what he’d done, and sat with his head in his hands for a full hour before taking refuge in his bedroom for the rest of the night.
She had very briefly considered sneaking out of the house and making a run for it that night, privately terrified by his near-manic episode, but quickly decided against it. Where else had she to go, since the Potters were in hiding and Remus, the only other Englishman she had met outside of the party on July 31st, was out of the country?
On Thursday morning Sirius got another letter and spent half an hour poring over its sparse contents.
“Invisible ink?” she had suggested in a forcibly light tone, trying to bring back some measure of normalcy.
Sirius snapped his head up as though he had just been roused from a light sleep, letting out an enormous sigh and kneading his face with his white knuckles. “I’m sorry. Merlin, Lenka, I’m sorry. I’ve not been myself, have I?”
At the shake of her head, cradled between her hands, Sirius smiled. “I’ll work on it. I promise.”
For the rest of the day he had seemed almost back to normal, playing with Ivanka just as attentively as he had before she had been injured, but by the time they had put Ivanka to bed he was sulking again. He kept reading and re-reading the notes he had gotten on Tuesday and that morning, sinking onto the sofa as he became lost in thought again.
In another attempt at getting him back, Lenka knelt in front of him on the floor and tugged the rolls of parchment from his hands, putting them on the floor beside her. “What?” he asked, turning a bit red around the collar.
She, also beginning to feel a bit warm, but determined, put her hands on his face and leaned in so they were eye-to-eye. “Sirius, what is going on?” He averted his eyes, and she rose up to sit on the sofa beside him. “You can’t tell me?”
“I can’t,” he said hastily. “I’m sorry, I wish I could but…I’m magically bound to hold my silence.”
“Unbreakable Vow?”
“Fidelius.”
Trying to wrap her mind around the complex Charm that she had been expected to learn in her sixth year of school, Lenka nodded as she thought. “I see.”
“Do you?” retorted Sirius shortly. Lenka sat back slightly. “The lives of three of the people I hold most dear to me are in my hands, Lenka. And He knows, I’m sure He knows that I’m Secret-Keeper because James and I have been like brothers since we were children, and…I shouldn’t be saying any of this.”
Lenka had lain awake longer than usual that night, not only kept up by the strenuous and maddening task of trying to remember what had happened to her the night her mother had died (being told the facts and actually remembering were two completely separate planes), but now with the worrisome sensation in her gut that something bad was going to happen.
(“You felt like something bad was coming?” asked Remus sharply, his pointed pale featured thrown into dark relief with the sun creeping across the front room.
Lenka nodded her head. “I…I think I did. It was difficult, because I was so caught up in bad feelings left over from the fire, but…this was a different bad feeling. I’m sure of it.”)
She had been woken up by Ivanka, holding the bars of her crib and rocking back and forth noisily, eager to be up and about. Lenka supposed it was meant to be a good sign of her daughter’s health, but all she wanted at the moment was to roll over and drift back to sleep for just a few more moments. Ivanka, obviously, had other plans, and whined so loudly that she, Lenka, had to tend to her before the whole neighborhood woke up.
Just as Lenka was dragging herself up Sirius’ voice rang in her ears, saying, “Go back to sleep, love. I’ve got her.”
Lenka sank back down with a sleepy sigh, kneading at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “You sure?”
“Well, as I’ve already got her…” retorted Sirius lightly, and when Lenka looked up she saw that Ivanka was already settled on his hip. She sheepishly smiled, but he merely grimaced painfully and took ‘Vanka to the kitchen to make breakfast.
Sirius was not quite as jittery as he had been in the days before, but his condition still worried Lenka deeply. He would not smile and seemed almost grimly calm as he went about his business. His face was pale tinged with gray and rigid with nerves.
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
Lenka squashed down a rush of sudden guilt for her extra ten minutes while Sirius had apparently been up all night pacing about his room. “You should go sleep a while, I’ll look after things here.”
Sirius turned his bloodshot eyes onto her narrowly and shook his head, not saying a word. Lenka found herself oddly irked by his stony behavior. “What? You don’t think I can?”
“I don’t think you should,” snapped Sirius, looking as though he had tried very hard not to say it at all.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” she shot back, surprised to feel heat rising in her face.
“It’s just-” Sirius ground his teeth, a muscle jumping in his jaw. A night without sleep was not agreeing with him.
“What?”
“You’re from Durmstrang!” he howled as though someone had hit him. “All of this trouble started after you showed up; how do I know you haven’t-you don’t-”
Without thinking, without taking even a moment to consider how scared he was for the safety of his friends and his own life, Lenka swung back and hit him across the face. She didn’t have to say a word to make his face go white, other than the scarlet outline of her hand on his cheek, then bright red to match.
“Lenka, I-”
“Never mind,” she snapped, pulling Ivanka from her high-chair so harshly the little girl cried out. Her burns were no longer painful, but still tender. “I should leave if you’re so worried, put your mind at ease.”
She marched with Ivanka on her hip to the front room and opened her bag one-handedly, throwing her scattered clothes into it even as tears welled up in her eyes. Where would she go? She had no one, but she couldn’t live here if Sirius was thick enough to think she was passing on secrets to Death Eaters. She didn’t even know any secrets, they had both taken precautions against her finding out anything she oughtn’t.
Only when she reached for more clothes, realized there was nothing more to reach for, and burst into angry, bitter tears, did Sirius carefully pull Ivanka from her crushing hold, put her in her crib, and wrap his arms around her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it, not a word. Please don’t go.”
She pulled herself together with shocking ease, as she had learned to do when her mother had begun to get impatient with her many emotional outbreaks during her pregnancy, and pulled herself away from him, wiping away the stray tears from her face. “It’s not like I could leave, even if I wished to,” she admitted in a small voice.
Sirius, however, was looking thoughtful again, just as he had when he’d gotten the note on Tuesday.
That evening, before he set off for some secret business with the Potters, Sirius had taken her hand and bade her sit with him on the sofa that had served as her bed for so many weeks.
“I’m not telling you to do anything you don’t want to,” he began slightly breathlessly, “but I don’t know…I don’t know what’s going to come after tonight. I’m going to have to lie low for a long time, and I couldn’t ask you to go into hiding, not with a little girl to look after.”
“But I already told you, I haven’t-”
“-anywhere to go?” interrupted Sirius with a smile and a shake of his head. “I know a place. I had completely forgotten about it, but I know it.
“A few years ago, when the Order was between headquarters, I used some of the money left to me by my uncle to purchase new premises, up in Scotland. We used it for a few weeks before finding a more convenient place, but I kept it, just in case anything like this came up, to use it as a safehouse for Order members. I’ve a man on hire to keep the place up; it should be in good shape.”
Lenka blinked at him bemusedly. “You want me to go?”
Shaking his head, Sirius put his hands on her shoulders sadly. “I want nothing more than for you to stay, but it wouldn’t be fair to you, and especially unfair to Ivanka, as she’s got no say in any of it.”
“You want me to go.”
“I want you to be safe.”
She thought about it for a long time before answering. A safe place, one where she could raise Ivanka without worrying about who was a Muggle or not? Where she could focus on the reason she was in England to begin with, finding her father? It sounded like somewhere a bit west of heaven, but still comfortable. “How long?”
Sirius shrugged his shoulders, still holding her gently. “It could be weeks, maybe longer. As long as it takes for Dumbledore to finish off this war. I don’t think it’ll be more than a year, and of course I completely understand if you don’t want to sit around waiting that long…”
Lenka moistened her lips quickly before pressing a kiss to his cheek, very near the corner of his mouth. “I’ll wait as long as I can. I’ve no one else to wait for.”
He had already written down the coordinates of the little town of Yetholm, Scotland, and the physical description and address of the house. It was not, as she had expected, under the protection of Fidelius any longer, as the maintenance man still had to putter about, but it could be set up at any time of need. Her things were already packed from her little fit earlier, but Ivanka’s few things (many of which had been donated by the Potters, and so they were all boys’ clothes) were still strewn about, though collected quickly.
“I’ll be along as quickly as I can, as soon as I set up the new arrangement with the Potters and make sure everyone’s settled safely,” promised Sirius, wrapping a thick traveling cloak around her shoulders even as she squirmed reluctantly, rather like a child. “You, young lady, keep your nose clean and your head down, okay?”
“Because I’m such a hindrance to society?” she grinned from beneath the wooly hat he forced upon her head next. He smiled, almost back to his old self, and gave her nose a little swat with his pointer-finger.
“I’m serious. Be safe. Please be safe. For my own peace.”
“Of course.”
He put his hands on her face, and for a moment she wondered if something was going to happen, but then he took her hand and walked her down the street past the Anti-Apparition wards, his wand out all the way. He looked as though he were bursting to say something on his mind, and she watched him all the way to a little patch of grass under a streetlamp, their destination.
They stood stationary for what felt like a long time under the lamp while Ivanka tugged on her short hair absently. “So,” she began, feeling an odd tightness in her chest and suddenly unable to go one.
Sirius nodded quickly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “So,” he agreed, still looking as though he were having a hard time swallowing.
Her pulse was suddenly pounding in her ears, and the bag in her hand began to tremble slightly. “I suppose…this is…”
“Lenka,” Sirius blurted out, face stark and white in the fading light, his chin quivering. “Lenka, I wanted to tell you, just in case…I…I…”
Lenka was alarmed to see tears glittering in his eyes as he watched her breathlessly, chest heaving. She knew suddenly what he had to say in one of those shocking moments of understanding that seemed to pass between them regularly. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand to stop him, but her hands were full, and she was too terrified to reach out to him. Instead she shook her head slightly and forced a shaky smile. “I know, Sirius. I know.”
Before she lost all her nerve and broke down completely, she hugged Ivanka tightly to her and Disapparated.
And that was that. It had been six weeks since that night, and now Remus was here telling her that the Potters had been murdered the night after her departure. Remus was staring at her thoughtfully, the lines in his young face twice as deep as the day she’d met him.
“What was he going to tell you?” he asked, “What did you ‘know’?”
She shook her head. That was private.
Remus seemed to understand that their last conversation had not been war-related. He nodded quietly. “It’s time you knew, then.”
By the time he had finished telling her what had happened, Sirius’ betrayal, Peter and the Potters’ deaths, Harry’s near-imprisonment with his horrible Muggle relations (she thought to be offended until he described the people to him), the inexplicable disappearance of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Lenka had her head in her hands and the weak sunlight had flooded the foyer. Silence filled them.
“It can’t be right. There was a mistake.”
“There was no mistake, Lenka. Si-Black was double-crossing all of us.”
At the sound of his best friend using Sirius’ surname to distance himself from the traitor she let out a little squeak against her will. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be. How had the man who had housed her in her time of need, helped her daughter learn to walk again, shown her such affection and…love, commit such a treacherous act right under her nose?
Before she was aware of the tears running down her face Remus had wrapped his arms around her and they were both crying and Ivanka was yelling from her crib and the ladies with their children were outside ringing the bell and everything was ending and yet it was also some sick beginning.
The first snow of the season fell that day, and Lenka insisted that Remus stay with her. The old biddies on the street would talk, but she didn’t care. They were wounded souls, finding solace in one another’s company.
He stayed for five weeks, and in the third week, he informed her of his lycanthropy only because he would be transforming a mere five days later. It was only a small slap to the face compared to everything else they had been through.
They slept together once, and it wasn’t anything she would call special or cathartic, just something they did to further share the depth of their separate, and yet shared, hurts. They didn’t talk about it.
Remus kept mostly to himself and his grief, and she took her cues from him. She took care of Ivanka and the house, dismissing the maintenance man for the time being because she cleaned when she was upset as a sort of cleansing. If everything around her was clean, her soul felt clean. By the time the house was gleaming she felt no better, if not tired and achy.
On the day he left Remus handed her a piece of parchment with an address scribbled down on it in his neat scrawl. He departed before she could ask about it, without a goodbye.
The address was that of a man named Cyril Myška. Her father.
Things were so strangely hopeful and the future so bright that Lenka found herself befuddled by the way the world was turning. She still woke up in the middle of most nights, drenched in sweat and dreaming of the smell of smoke even as the memories of the night failed her again and again. The rest of the time she awoke in the mornings with her arms outstretched toward a man who didn’t and never would lie next to her. So many holes. So many things lost. And yet she had an address for her father, and Ivanka was going to be alright, and she had friends in this new place. So many beginnings. So many frayed knots all interconnected in a tangled web of life’s mystery.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sirius Black, James Potter, Lily Potter, Remus Lupin, Lenka Myskova
(OC), Ivanka Myskova (OC), Mrs. Myskova (OC), Peter Pettigrew, Harry Potter, Various Order Members
Pairings: James/Lily, Sirius/Lenka(OC)
Warnings: Sexual Themes and Issues, Mentions of Violence
Summary: Sirius Black has always been the one to keep going and going, but finally meets someone who makes him pause.
Word Count: 4,629
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
The dawn came bright and cold on the early December morning in the village of Yetholm, Scotland, the only sounds the sleepy bleat of sheep as they ate their morning grain, and the occasional yawn from the odd puffy-eyed teenager going about their chores. Birds and other small animals scurried about the long frosty grass coating the fields, chittering quiet warnings to one another when a sheep or cow’s hoof wandered too close.
The villagers of Yetholm had had very little to look forward to other than the semi-annual Youth Dance at the community center for many years. The village sat in the bottom of a wide valley, surrounded by always-damp, rolling hills, and was almost always bathed in fog during the summer. In the late-fall and winter, frost clung to every blade of grass, making for quite the surprise when stepping on the uneven terrain to retrieve the paper in the morning. Once a bustling and cheery sort of place, with a small cinema and everything, Yetholm had shrunk in population and fallen into general disrepair.
General consensus among the more elderly villagers, if one were to ask about their opinion on the most eventful thing to happen to the village in their living memory, had to be when an army surgery had been stationed in the cinema during the second World War. To the working adults, it had been the flood five years ago that had destroyed the fields and roads, rendering them unyielding and impassable for seven months. To the teenagers it was the memorable year the village had tried for a Christmas festival and parade (to get tourists attracted to the area), but there hadn’t been enough people in the village to operate the floats and attend. But the children who had been in Yetholm the shortest time and had the shortest memories, all agreed that the very most exciting thing to happen to the village was when New Lady appeared.
New Lady seemed to have appeared out of the mist itself one blatantly unremarkable day, like a ghost or a genie, without any warning at all. She wore secondhand clothes and had a haircut like a boy, but she moved into the biggest house in the valley. The old place had been abandoned for years, ever since a rowdy-looking young man had swept in on his motorbike and bought it. “For tax reasons,” he said at the time, and hadn’t returned since. The villagers pondered that the young woman could be his wife, and the child she carried on her hip his. She kept mostly to herself, and at first the villagers respected that, but not for long.
The teenagers teased the New Lady, for they claimed that she was one of them, and was too young for a child of her own. They hissed insults at her when she went about her shopping, rode past on their bicycles to splash mud on her ankles, and threw pebbles at the windows of her house until finally they broke a window and their mothers demanded they stop.
The mothers - not the ones with teenage children, but the young mothers - took her in much more kindly than her own peers had. They practically dragged her along to the Wednesday night village meeting to introduce her to the town, and rather forcefully invited her to the Wednesday afternoon playgroup with their children. Every week a different mother hosted, and they put young Lenka’s name into the rotation straight away.
Because she was the only new thing to come to Yetholm since last summer’s caterpillar infestation, Lenka Myšková, and the mystery of her private life, was the main topic of conversation for weeks among the people who knew everything about each other.
“She comes from France,” claimed a stout old man with a generous moustache at the pub, a full month after her arrival.
“No she doesn’t,” insisted another man clear across the bar from him, “I know a Swede when I hear one, Smith.”
“I heard that her husband died of cancer, the poor dear.”
“I heard that she killed him!”
“Nonsense, David!”
“You see that little girl of hers?” interrupted a rather obnoxious young woman who had a knack for inserting herself where she had not been invited. “Nasty, red as a lobster, she is!”
“Them’re scars, dear,” droned an old veteran in his slow baritone, nodding along to his own words. “Burn scars. That tot was in a fire, and not too long ago, I reckon.” No one had the nerve to question him, as almost his entire platoon had burned to death.
No one gossiped about the new woman after that night.
Life in the village continued as it always had, even after the brief unrest, and Lenka blended easily into the little society. She found the clothes, the thick wool sweaters and stockings, and sturdy boots, rather to her liking, and within weeks had picked up a bit of the lingo. Ivanka was getting on smashingly with the other little children, even if she wasn’t able to play as roughly as them yet. So far the shrunken family had attended four of the Wednesday afternoon play groups, and each time Lenka had felt more at ease among her new neighbors. Though she was still very shaken up after the events of the past two months, and didn’t think she would ever really recover.
One sleepy morning, cold and sharp and still very quiet, Lenka was awoken by a pounding on the front door of the house that was much different from that of her neighbors popping in for an early visit. She sat up straight in bed, ran a hand through her hair (making it stick up in all sorts of directions), and shuffled down the steps toward the ceaseless banging. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the now slightly-crumpled piece of parchment Sirius had pressed upon her on the night before Halloween.
“Do you have somet’ing for me?” she called cautiously through the door, running one hand along the handle of her wand.
The pounding stopped abruptly, and she could hear a man’s heavy breathing on the other side of the thick wood. “I…I’d like to offer you a subscription to Witch Weekly,” came a slightly familiar hoarse voice, though it was trembling violently.
She threw the door open and Remus Lupin staggered into the foyer, ashen-faced and uncontrollably shaking. She had barely opened her mouth when he seized her by the collar of her nightshirt and shook her. “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!” he screamed, his breath hot on her face. His eyes were bloodshot and wild as he grappled with her attempts to wiggle free from his grasp.
Lenka slid out of his fingers and fell to the wooden floor with a thud, staring up at the young man who looked quite wild, now that she had a chance to properly look. He was thin as a refugee, with purple shadows under his eyes and an immeasurable amount of filth on his skin and robes, looking as though he had just been to Hell and back.
“What happened?” she asked incredulously, trying to figure out what all the shouting was about.
Remus howled with an almost inhuman agony, as if all of the suffering in the world had been closed up inside of his lean body, tried to kick something in his frustration, but was so weak that he collapsed on the floor beside her. He pulled at his thick dark hair and rocked back and forth, face-down on the floor, looking quite deranged.
“I woke up…in a cage…” he choked out between gasps for air, as he was now openly weeping with shock. “Kane was killed by Ministry officials…unregistered wolves arrested…I was let go…had my papers… Went to report to Dumbledore this morning…he told me…he told me! Voldemort gone…Lily and James…Harry…Sirius, Sirius! Oh, God!”
He dissolved again, and Lenka very cautiously moved to kneel at his side. He jerked slightly when she warily touched his shoulder, but didn’t attack, which was a great relief. Doing only what she would have wanted if it were her in such a state, Lenka wrapped her arms around whatever part of Remus she could reach and hugged him to her, his head on her chest. “Remus, Remus, Remus…” she murmured, running a hand over his tangled, dirty hair in an attempt to calm him. “I don’t…I don’t know what happened…I’m so, so sorry…”
She could hear Ivanka beginning to stir upstairs, though she had probably a full half hour before she would have to go tend to her, and so she kept rocking the man on the floor like he was the small child.
After ten of those minutes Remus finally calmed down long enough to straighten himself and lean against the wall. Still white as a sheet, there were two small red blotches high on his damp cheeks, and his wet eyes overbright. “Lily and James are dead,” he croaked weakly, two fat tears rolling down his nose. Though she did not visibly react, Lenka felt a great shock to her system that made her skin burn. “They died on Halloween night, and Harry went to live with Muggle relations. H-he lived, somehow, and Voldemort is dead, or they say he is.”
Lenka tried to smile at the news of Voldemort’s fall, but found her muscles were not working properly. Halloween…possibly only hours after… “What about…you said…Sirius?” she forced out painfully.
Incredulous and struck momentarily dumb, Remus merely gaped and shook his head. “What was happening, those last days?” he asked instead. “How could you have not seen this coming? Why are you here, in the Order’s safehouse?”
Lenka folded her legs beneath herself and tried to tell him everything, without sparing details.
Sirius had, of course, rushed out in the middle of the night and she, frightened, crept into his room to wait and fell asleep. When he came back they discussed this Order business (Remus scoffed) and went to bed shortly after. In the morning he had gotten a letter which seemed to disturb him greatly (she left out the bit where they talked about Remus), and he later spotted the “tubby little Death Eater” watching the house.
Remus sat up a little straighter, brow furrowed with thought.
The next day, Wednesday, had been spent watching Sirius pace wildly around the house, reinforcing all of the protective charms with a manic gleam in his eyes that unsettled her. She had never seen him looking so frantic before. Though there was no sign of “the enemy” in the front garden Sirius begged her not to leave, held her arms so tightly they bruised, nearly broke into tears when he saw what he’d done, and sat with his head in his hands for a full hour before taking refuge in his bedroom for the rest of the night.
She had very briefly considered sneaking out of the house and making a run for it that night, privately terrified by his near-manic episode, but quickly decided against it. Where else had she to go, since the Potters were in hiding and Remus, the only other Englishman she had met outside of the party on July 31st, was out of the country?
On Thursday morning Sirius got another letter and spent half an hour poring over its sparse contents.
“Invisible ink?” she had suggested in a forcibly light tone, trying to bring back some measure of normalcy.
Sirius snapped his head up as though he had just been roused from a light sleep, letting out an enormous sigh and kneading his face with his white knuckles. “I’m sorry. Merlin, Lenka, I’m sorry. I’ve not been myself, have I?”
At the shake of her head, cradled between her hands, Sirius smiled. “I’ll work on it. I promise.”
For the rest of the day he had seemed almost back to normal, playing with Ivanka just as attentively as he had before she had been injured, but by the time they had put Ivanka to bed he was sulking again. He kept reading and re-reading the notes he had gotten on Tuesday and that morning, sinking onto the sofa as he became lost in thought again.
In another attempt at getting him back, Lenka knelt in front of him on the floor and tugged the rolls of parchment from his hands, putting them on the floor beside her. “What?” he asked, turning a bit red around the collar.
She, also beginning to feel a bit warm, but determined, put her hands on his face and leaned in so they were eye-to-eye. “Sirius, what is going on?” He averted his eyes, and she rose up to sit on the sofa beside him. “You can’t tell me?”
“I can’t,” he said hastily. “I’m sorry, I wish I could but…I’m magically bound to hold my silence.”
“Unbreakable Vow?”
“Fidelius.”
Trying to wrap her mind around the complex Charm that she had been expected to learn in her sixth year of school, Lenka nodded as she thought. “I see.”
“Do you?” retorted Sirius shortly. Lenka sat back slightly. “The lives of three of the people I hold most dear to me are in my hands, Lenka. And He knows, I’m sure He knows that I’m Secret-Keeper because James and I have been like brothers since we were children, and…I shouldn’t be saying any of this.”
Lenka had lain awake longer than usual that night, not only kept up by the strenuous and maddening task of trying to remember what had happened to her the night her mother had died (being told the facts and actually remembering were two completely separate planes), but now with the worrisome sensation in her gut that something bad was going to happen.
(“You felt like something bad was coming?” asked Remus sharply, his pointed pale featured thrown into dark relief with the sun creeping across the front room.
Lenka nodded her head. “I…I think I did. It was difficult, because I was so caught up in bad feelings left over from the fire, but…this was a different bad feeling. I’m sure of it.”)
She had been woken up by Ivanka, holding the bars of her crib and rocking back and forth noisily, eager to be up and about. Lenka supposed it was meant to be a good sign of her daughter’s health, but all she wanted at the moment was to roll over and drift back to sleep for just a few more moments. Ivanka, obviously, had other plans, and whined so loudly that she, Lenka, had to tend to her before the whole neighborhood woke up.
Just as Lenka was dragging herself up Sirius’ voice rang in her ears, saying, “Go back to sleep, love. I’ve got her.”
Lenka sank back down with a sleepy sigh, kneading at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “You sure?”
“Well, as I’ve already got her…” retorted Sirius lightly, and when Lenka looked up she saw that Ivanka was already settled on his hip. She sheepishly smiled, but he merely grimaced painfully and took ‘Vanka to the kitchen to make breakfast.
Sirius was not quite as jittery as he had been in the days before, but his condition still worried Lenka deeply. He would not smile and seemed almost grimly calm as he went about his business. His face was pale tinged with gray and rigid with nerves.
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
Lenka squashed down a rush of sudden guilt for her extra ten minutes while Sirius had apparently been up all night pacing about his room. “You should go sleep a while, I’ll look after things here.”
Sirius turned his bloodshot eyes onto her narrowly and shook his head, not saying a word. Lenka found herself oddly irked by his stony behavior. “What? You don’t think I can?”
“I don’t think you should,” snapped Sirius, looking as though he had tried very hard not to say it at all.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” she shot back, surprised to feel heat rising in her face.
“It’s just-” Sirius ground his teeth, a muscle jumping in his jaw. A night without sleep was not agreeing with him.
“What?”
“You’re from Durmstrang!” he howled as though someone had hit him. “All of this trouble started after you showed up; how do I know you haven’t-you don’t-”
Without thinking, without taking even a moment to consider how scared he was for the safety of his friends and his own life, Lenka swung back and hit him across the face. She didn’t have to say a word to make his face go white, other than the scarlet outline of her hand on his cheek, then bright red to match.
“Lenka, I-”
“Never mind,” she snapped, pulling Ivanka from her high-chair so harshly the little girl cried out. Her burns were no longer painful, but still tender. “I should leave if you’re so worried, put your mind at ease.”
She marched with Ivanka on her hip to the front room and opened her bag one-handedly, throwing her scattered clothes into it even as tears welled up in her eyes. Where would she go? She had no one, but she couldn’t live here if Sirius was thick enough to think she was passing on secrets to Death Eaters. She didn’t even know any secrets, they had both taken precautions against her finding out anything she oughtn’t.
Only when she reached for more clothes, realized there was nothing more to reach for, and burst into angry, bitter tears, did Sirius carefully pull Ivanka from her crushing hold, put her in her crib, and wrap his arms around her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it, not a word. Please don’t go.”
She pulled herself together with shocking ease, as she had learned to do when her mother had begun to get impatient with her many emotional outbreaks during her pregnancy, and pulled herself away from him, wiping away the stray tears from her face. “It’s not like I could leave, even if I wished to,” she admitted in a small voice.
Sirius, however, was looking thoughtful again, just as he had when he’d gotten the note on Tuesday.
That evening, before he set off for some secret business with the Potters, Sirius had taken her hand and bade her sit with him on the sofa that had served as her bed for so many weeks.
“I’m not telling you to do anything you don’t want to,” he began slightly breathlessly, “but I don’t know…I don’t know what’s going to come after tonight. I’m going to have to lie low for a long time, and I couldn’t ask you to go into hiding, not with a little girl to look after.”
“But I already told you, I haven’t-”
“-anywhere to go?” interrupted Sirius with a smile and a shake of his head. “I know a place. I had completely forgotten about it, but I know it.
“A few years ago, when the Order was between headquarters, I used some of the money left to me by my uncle to purchase new premises, up in Scotland. We used it for a few weeks before finding a more convenient place, but I kept it, just in case anything like this came up, to use it as a safehouse for Order members. I’ve a man on hire to keep the place up; it should be in good shape.”
Lenka blinked at him bemusedly. “You want me to go?”
Shaking his head, Sirius put his hands on her shoulders sadly. “I want nothing more than for you to stay, but it wouldn’t be fair to you, and especially unfair to Ivanka, as she’s got no say in any of it.”
“You want me to go.”
“I want you to be safe.”
She thought about it for a long time before answering. A safe place, one where she could raise Ivanka without worrying about who was a Muggle or not? Where she could focus on the reason she was in England to begin with, finding her father? It sounded like somewhere a bit west of heaven, but still comfortable. “How long?”
Sirius shrugged his shoulders, still holding her gently. “It could be weeks, maybe longer. As long as it takes for Dumbledore to finish off this war. I don’t think it’ll be more than a year, and of course I completely understand if you don’t want to sit around waiting that long…”
Lenka moistened her lips quickly before pressing a kiss to his cheek, very near the corner of his mouth. “I’ll wait as long as I can. I’ve no one else to wait for.”
He had already written down the coordinates of the little town of Yetholm, Scotland, and the physical description and address of the house. It was not, as she had expected, under the protection of Fidelius any longer, as the maintenance man still had to putter about, but it could be set up at any time of need. Her things were already packed from her little fit earlier, but Ivanka’s few things (many of which had been donated by the Potters, and so they were all boys’ clothes) were still strewn about, though collected quickly.
“I’ll be along as quickly as I can, as soon as I set up the new arrangement with the Potters and make sure everyone’s settled safely,” promised Sirius, wrapping a thick traveling cloak around her shoulders even as she squirmed reluctantly, rather like a child. “You, young lady, keep your nose clean and your head down, okay?”
“Because I’m such a hindrance to society?” she grinned from beneath the wooly hat he forced upon her head next. He smiled, almost back to his old self, and gave her nose a little swat with his pointer-finger.
“I’m serious. Be safe. Please be safe. For my own peace.”
“Of course.”
He put his hands on her face, and for a moment she wondered if something was going to happen, but then he took her hand and walked her down the street past the Anti-Apparition wards, his wand out all the way. He looked as though he were bursting to say something on his mind, and she watched him all the way to a little patch of grass under a streetlamp, their destination.
They stood stationary for what felt like a long time under the lamp while Ivanka tugged on her short hair absently. “So,” she began, feeling an odd tightness in her chest and suddenly unable to go one.
Sirius nodded quickly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “So,” he agreed, still looking as though he were having a hard time swallowing.
Her pulse was suddenly pounding in her ears, and the bag in her hand began to tremble slightly. “I suppose…this is…”
“Lenka,” Sirius blurted out, face stark and white in the fading light, his chin quivering. “Lenka, I wanted to tell you, just in case…I…I…”
Lenka was alarmed to see tears glittering in his eyes as he watched her breathlessly, chest heaving. She knew suddenly what he had to say in one of those shocking moments of understanding that seemed to pass between them regularly. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand to stop him, but her hands were full, and she was too terrified to reach out to him. Instead she shook her head slightly and forced a shaky smile. “I know, Sirius. I know.”
Before she lost all her nerve and broke down completely, she hugged Ivanka tightly to her and Disapparated.
And that was that. It had been six weeks since that night, and now Remus was here telling her that the Potters had been murdered the night after her departure. Remus was staring at her thoughtfully, the lines in his young face twice as deep as the day she’d met him.
“What was he going to tell you?” he asked, “What did you ‘know’?”
She shook her head. That was private.
Remus seemed to understand that their last conversation had not been war-related. He nodded quietly. “It’s time you knew, then.”
By the time he had finished telling her what had happened, Sirius’ betrayal, Peter and the Potters’ deaths, Harry’s near-imprisonment with his horrible Muggle relations (she thought to be offended until he described the people to him), the inexplicable disappearance of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Lenka had her head in her hands and the weak sunlight had flooded the foyer. Silence filled them.
“It can’t be right. There was a mistake.”
“There was no mistake, Lenka. Si-Black was double-crossing all of us.”
At the sound of his best friend using Sirius’ surname to distance himself from the traitor she let out a little squeak against her will. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be. How had the man who had housed her in her time of need, helped her daughter learn to walk again, shown her such affection and…love, commit such a treacherous act right under her nose?
Before she was aware of the tears running down her face Remus had wrapped his arms around her and they were both crying and Ivanka was yelling from her crib and the ladies with their children were outside ringing the bell and everything was ending and yet it was also some sick beginning.
The first snow of the season fell that day, and Lenka insisted that Remus stay with her. The old biddies on the street would talk, but she didn’t care. They were wounded souls, finding solace in one another’s company.
He stayed for five weeks, and in the third week, he informed her of his lycanthropy only because he would be transforming a mere five days later. It was only a small slap to the face compared to everything else they had been through.
They slept together once, and it wasn’t anything she would call special or cathartic, just something they did to further share the depth of their separate, and yet shared, hurts. They didn’t talk about it.
Remus kept mostly to himself and his grief, and she took her cues from him. She took care of Ivanka and the house, dismissing the maintenance man for the time being because she cleaned when she was upset as a sort of cleansing. If everything around her was clean, her soul felt clean. By the time the house was gleaming she felt no better, if not tired and achy.
On the day he left Remus handed her a piece of parchment with an address scribbled down on it in his neat scrawl. He departed before she could ask about it, without a goodbye.
The address was that of a man named Cyril Myška. Her father.
Things were so strangely hopeful and the future so bright that Lenka found herself befuddled by the way the world was turning. She still woke up in the middle of most nights, drenched in sweat and dreaming of the smell of smoke even as the memories of the night failed her again and again. The rest of the time she awoke in the mornings with her arms outstretched toward a man who didn’t and never would lie next to her. So many holes. So many things lost. And yet she had an address for her father, and Ivanka was going to be alright, and she had friends in this new place. So many beginnings. So many frayed knots all interconnected in a tangled web of life’s mystery.