fic: Three Card Monte [2/2]
---
“So what are we stealing then - and what are you stealing?”
“You’re breaking in to the vaults. Riddle likes everything simple and easy to hoard. Everything the casino makes in a night, and all the money to back up the percentage of chips required is in the same safe. Under the floor of the safe are ledgers, which we also need you to bring along.”
“Ledgers?”
“Yes. They’re the most important part.”
“And what are you stealing?”
“A piano.”
“What?”
“Exactly what I said. It’s of particular sentimental value to me, and it’s Riddle’s most prized possession.”
“Why are we doing this again?” Gideon asks, voice echoing and bouncing oddly off the metal walls of the heating vents. Tonks is farther ahead; being smaller than Gideon is in several directions, it’s not so difficult for her to slide through the crawl space.
“The magnets have to be placed on the outside of the vault as well as the inside, otherwise the EMP pulse won’t negate the doors on the system,” Remus offers.
“And now remind me why couldn’t we just use the elevator shafts?” He sounds breathless like a man near suffocation.
From behind, Remus replies, “The elevator system is designed like a labyrinth to confuse potential thieves, whereas the vents are laid out like a city grid. The assumption is that no one who’s strong enough to open the grates at the end of the tunnels could also fit through the smaller tunnels up ahead. Luckily, they didn’t take into account butter.”
“Oh no,” Gideon says, freezing and doing his best to shift around to glare at Remus, “I knew I should have asked you what was in that shopping bag. You are absolutely not allowed to coat me in butter and shove me through an air vent. No.”
“You’re the only one of us strong enough to open the grate, Gid.”
“Yeah, Gid…” Tonks calls back to them, “I’m so eager to see you all oiled up and doing heavy lifting.”
Remus laughs a little behind them. “See, I’ll even let Tonks do the butter if you’d like.”
“Well she sure fits right in to the lets-destroy-Gideon’s-life club, didn’t she,” Gideon grumbles and scoots himself a few more feet down the shaft.
When Gideon finally knocks the grate open, Remus and Tonks drop down to the floor. “Your turn, Tonks.” Remus whispers, glancing down the corridor. The voices of the two vault guards can be heard faintly from around the corner. Tonks’ face twists suddenly with a hint of doubt. “You look absolutely ravishing,” he promises her, smiling kindly. “You won’t have an ounce of trouble.”
Tonks flushes softly making her cheekbones appear delicate and high. The natural blush is a contrast to the slinky red feather dress and lurid lipstick she wears. She turns away from him and starts off down the hall, rounding the corner. Just as she is out of view, Remus starts off after her. He stops when he can hear her conversation with the guards perfectly.
“Hey,” says the first of the two, “You don’t look like you should be down here, have you got ID?”
“ID?” Tonks asks innocently, edging on vapid. “What do I need ID for? I’m Lucinda. I dance in Club Horcrux. Isn’t this the marketing office? I’m supposed to do photos for the promotional posters.”
“Honey, you have made a serious wrong turn somewhere,” the second guard says, sounding a little sleazy. “The marketing office is three floors above this one. You can’t even get down here without a badge.”
“Oh,” Tonks says. Remus cranes his neck around the corner just enough to see that Tonks is ducking her head ashamedly. “I don’t know. I just pressed the button in the elevator, and this is where it took me.”
“Damn,” the first guard says, “It’s the new IT guy, probably. I always say you shouldn’t trust a man with a glass eye. He’s clearly a nut case. He probably set the whole thing malfunctioning. Jim, can you remember the codes? I’ve forgotten them.”
“That IT guy shouldn’t have access to this part of the building,” Jim says.
Tonks giggles, “Maybe it was just an accident. Could you fix it? I need to get up to the office.”
“We’ll see what we can do.”
Their footsteps start to fade as they walk away from Remus down the hall away from Remus. He hears the sound of the elevator being called, then their voices cut off as the elevator doors slide shut. Remus sprints down the hall and stops in front of the innocuous door the guards were watching over.
He slides a plain key James had spent three days carefully plotting to steal into the door. On the other side is a huge safe door, black and stark and dripping with mechanisms. Remus digs in his pocket and pulls out four small round metal bolts and evenly spaces them around the safe code pad. Then he turns, locks the plain door and bolts back down the hallway just as the elevator doors begin to slide back open with a pleasant ding.
-
“When I say to you that these jewels are priceless, Madam,” McGongall says, one hand on the lithe tortoiseshell cat perched on her lap. “I am not being hyperbolic. These jewels are worth more money than this casino will ever make.”
“Miss McGrady, I understand that your possessions are very important to you, but unfortunately I cannot offer them a place in the casino’s main vault. Only items personally approved by Mr Riddle are allowed there.”
“Do you know who you are speaking to, you impetuous girl?”
“Miss McGrady…please…”
“I am the heir to the oldest and most noble family in Scotland. I am the product of thousands of years of blue blood. I am the cousin of Kings and Queens, and I am asking that you place my possessions, which were once part of the crown jewels of Great Britain, in your measly safe. These possessions are accustomed to travelling with an accompaniment of royal guards, and you want me to deign to speak to the owner of a mere hotel. I have power and I intend to use it, if necessary.”
“I’ll see what I can do Miss McGrady,” the receptionist pinches the bridge of her nose tiredly and then picks up the phone at the side of the desk.
“Johnny,” she says, “Hi, yeah, it’s Susie. Look, I know this is against protocol, but the McGrady family wants to hold something down in the big vault. I know you’re taking some cash machines down later. Could you bring this along too? Thanks….No, yeah, sure….I owe you.”
McGonagall pulls her lips into a thin, regal smile.
“You’re in luck, Miss McGrady. Someone will be up to collect your jewels in a moment.”
“Why, thank you ever so much, my dear.”
McGonagall clicks open the case the supposed jewels are stored in. She adjusts the egg-sized amethyst and topaz and, subtly, the four small round metal bolts resting beneath the velvet lining.
-
“Hello?”
“Hi, yes, my name is James Planter and I’m interested in renting a helicopter. The smallest model you have, most likely.”
“Yes, that sounds perfect. Tell me, would it be capable of carrying, say, a grand piano? In an air lift fashion, I mean.”
“That’s great. Yeah, sure...yeah, we’ll take it.”
---
“The most important key to your success is dealing with the Death Eaters.”
“That sounds grim. Death Eaters?”
“You must know of them - they’re Riddle’s inner circle.”
“So who are these people?”
“There are a lot of them, but you only need to worry about Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, Fenrir Greyback, Peter Pettigrew and Severus Snape. Now, Snape is not so loyal as the others; most of our inside info comes from him, but he and I do not get along particularly well, to say the least, so I’d steer clear.”
“And how do we deal with them?”
“Lily, James, Remus and I will take that, allowing you to complete your various tasks undisturbed. Except, we’ll have to work around Peter. He’s been playing right hand man, and Riddle will notice if he disappears. We know Peter’s tricks, though.”
“Narcissa?” Lily asks, her hand on the top of Harry’s head. It’s growing dark, and Lily’s a little out of breath from running half way across the parking lot to catch up with Lucius Malfoy’s wife.
“Sorry, do I know you?” she asks. The words are rude, but her voice is pleasant, and inquisitive. She’s strapping a small blond boy into a car seat in the back of the car.
“Indirectly,” Lily says, twisting her mouth down into a nervous half smile. “Some of my family knows some of your family, if you understand my meaning.”
“Oh,” Narcissa says tightly, turning away. She frowns and finishes buckling her son into his seat. Harry glances up at Lily and then to the boy. He stretches away from Lily’s grasp and leans against the car door. “What’s your name?” he asks seriously.
“Draco,” says the boy, “What’s yours?”
“Harry. I’m five,” he offers.
“Me too!” Draco crows, as though this coincidence is one to rival fateful meetings from all history. “Do you like Transformers?”
“Yeah,” Harry says. “I got an Optimus Prime at home.”
Narcissa turns away from the boys, after looking down at Harry with an oddly wistful twist to her mouth. “Look. I don’t know what you mean by coming over to my son and me here, but I do my best to stay out of my husband’s business. I want no part in it for my family, and if you continue to bother me, I will perceive it as a threat.”
“Oh, that’s not what I meant at all! Oh dear!” Lily says, looking fearful and apologetic. “I know exactly what you mean…. I mean, it’s the same way for me. That’s why I’ve come to talk to you. My husband…mentioned something the other day. Your name came up. The question of your safety came up.”
“I am not gaining confidence in you,” Narcissa says, shortly.
“I’m sorry. Just please listen. I’m not supposed to be here, but I knew you had a little boy, and I couldn’t bear to see a child hurt in the course of… business. I just wanted to warn you that Vegas isn’t a good place for your family the next few days. If I were you, I would convince your husband of the need for a vacation, and I would leave. It’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Narcissa stares hard at Lily and the minute stretches long and tight. She lets out a sad breath finally, and opens the door to her seat. She presses her hand to her mouth, and Lily can see that it’s shaking just the slightest bit. “Thank you,” she says, softly. “I understand you took a risk telling me this.”
Lily nods firmly, “We mothers have to look out for each other,” she says, and leans down to pick Harry up, turning and walking away without looking back.
-
“Bellatrix, it’s been a long time.”
Bellatrix Lestrange does not scare easily. She never has, even before she half lost half her mind, and with it that essential part of a human that makes them care about things. The too-familiar voice from the dark corner of her suite above the Horcrux Club makes Bellatrix laugh short and high. Her stomach drops to her feet.
“Sirius?” she asks, pulling a snide mask over the nervous surface of her words. “It has been a long time. Perhaps too long. I barely recognise you.”
“You can’t see me, Bella, dear. It’s too dark. You and I always got along best in the dark. Do you remember when you taught me to play hide-and-seek at my father’s fortieth birthday party? I broke a china vase and then you taught me how to lie?”
“No,” Bellatrix replies, though she remembers. She remembers like an ice flow crashing across her back and feeling what she felt then with sudden hurt. Sirius’ young eyes wanting everything new and exciting, all the time, bright like sparks.
The heat of Sirius’ gaze on her now and in her memories makes Bellatrix almost shiver. You’re just drunk she promises herself, but the fact of the matter is that Sirius has always made her feel too much. “Tom warned me you’d come around,” she says. “He said you’d be back. I told him I didn’t think you’d show your face again. I told him: ‘Sirius is a coward and a disgrace to the Black family name, but he’s a Black nonetheless. Blacks aren’t fools.’ Tom is always right, though. I should have known.”
“To be frank, Bella, I’m not at all interested in what Riddle has to say about anything.”
“Let’s cut to the chase then, honey,” Bellatrix says, voice sickly sweet and affected. She smiles coyly into the shadows where Sirius is still just out of her sight.
“Here’s the deal,” Sirius says. “The Will…my lawyer and I discussed it recently…everything goes to you. It was supposed to go to Regulus after I was written out, and now it’s going to you and I don’t like that, not at all, but luckily for us, I’m sure we can come to some kind of understanding.”
“Oh, an understanding?” Bellatrix says, slowly. “What have you got in mind?”
“I don’t think this is the time or place. I’ve come to ask your attendance to a meeting. New York in two days. I’ve left the address. I’ll have something you want, Bella. I promise.”
There was a rustling and suddenly the room was empty again; just Bellatrix and the dark. His sudden disappearance seemed impossible. She looked around, trying to spot even the hint of an exit strategy. There didn’t seem to be anything. The only evidence that he’d been there at all was a small slip of paper with the address of an apartment in Red Hook scrawled sloppily across it.
She thought about how many ways this was not at all like something Sirius would do and how much this smelled like a bad attempt at a trap. Then she thought about how much smarter she was than Sirius and about how many things she wanted that Sirius had. If he thought he was going to play her, he had another thing coming, and she’d show him just that.
-
“Here’s where you’re going wrong,” Remus says, adjusting Tonks’ fingers around the face card. “You’re trying to flip them like you do when you play it clean, with only three cards, but here you have four cards. The point is to slip it up your sleeve, right?”
“Sure,” she says, distractedly, watching Remus’s fingers gentle on her wrist. “Okay.” Her voice is soft and sweeter than how she talks usually.
It’s about ten thirty, and they’re in Sirius’s suite on the fourteenth floor of The Voldemort. Lily and James are playing with Harry in the bedroom and McGonagall is having a complicated argument with Caradoc about China’s economic infrastructure. Remus is supposed to be leaving in fifteen minutes to go deal with one of Riddle’s ‘Death Eaters’ so he won’t be around to mess up the game on Saturday night.
Tonks had seen the way he glanced at the clock and at his hands and stood up on a chair and sat back down. She’d never seen Remus look nervous, and now that she had she wanted it to stop. “Teach me how to play Three Card Monte, properly. Please?” Remus had smiled obligingly and Tonks’ had made herself swallow the butterfly feeling that jumped up into her throat at the gentle curve of his lips.
“Give it another try, then,” Remus says. Tonks shuffles the cards quickly across the surface of the table preparing to slide the face card up her sleeve, but the door to the hotel room bursts open, and Remus turns away from her. Sirius is so wet with sweat that Tonks can see it drip all the way across the room.
“What the hell happened to you?” Caradoc asks.
“I had to slip out of Bellatrix’s room via the air vents, but they went right through the south boiler room,” Sirius replies, making his way towards the bathroom and shaking his dampened hair out of his eyes.
Sirius leaves the door cracked half open as he turns the shower on so he can still talk to the rest of them. Remus leans casually against the wall outside the door, like he’s used to doing just that. He listens, humming soft answers in response to Sirius’s chatter.
“Did it go alright?” he asks.
“Sure, it was fine,” Sirius replies. “Bellatrix might have been smart once, but she’s just a glorified, greedy whore now. I knew how to play her when I was a kid, and it’s only gotten easier.” The sound of shuffling and muttered curses filter out from the crack. Sirius laughs as he says, “Fuck, Moony, help me undo this zipper. Whose idea was it to wear these stupid suits anyway? We aren’t a lot of freaking ninjas.”
“They’re dashing! They’re burn proof for the air vents if they turn the heating on! They’re brilliant!” James hollers from the bedroom, defensively.
Remus pushes the door open with his foot. From where Tonks is sitting she can just make out the edge of Remus and Sirius’s reflections in the bathroom mirror. They speak quietly to each other, so that Tonks can only hear their words indistinctly. Remus unzips the back of Sirius’s long, dark, skin-tight suit with a peculiar kind of familiarity. It falls away from his skin with lazy grace. Remus brushes his thumb across the back of Sirius’s neck, slow and precise -- almost intimate. Tonks stares hard. Accident… she thinks. She can’t imagine what else it might have been. It’s not the sort of touch that happens between friends. Sirius turns around, and his face twists into something like frustration.
“You’re scared!” he says, voice raising enough so that Tonks can hear them again, “You should have told me you don’t want to deal with Greyback. Gideon could probably have done something, or even McGonagall.”
“I’m not scared,” Remus says reproachfully. “It’s too late now. I’ve sent him the letter to tell me to meet him in the parking lot ten minutes from now. And I’m not scared.”
“Oh, I can see it all over you. Look at you, you’re even biting your lip. You only ever bite your lip when you’re freaking out about something.”
“I don’t like him,” Remus says, flatly.
Sirius snorts. “Understatement of the year,” he says. “I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t come with me,” Remus says. “That would ruin the whole angle. The point is that…”
“I know the point. I do not like the point. There is no way I’m letting you go into a situation that might make you feel out of control. You know what might happen. I won’t let him see me, but I’m not sending you alone. I never wanted to and now I know I shouldn’t.”
It’s too cryptic a conversation for Tonks to even bother trying to figure out what they’re talking about. She goes out onto the balcony and looks down across the carefully manicured garden and the fountains and beyond that, the bright, hot lights of the Strip flooded with people and their money and their hunger to win something for nothing. She thinks It took me three hours to notice Remus was worried. It took Sirius thirty seconds. Not for the first time since she started the job, Tonks wishes she could understand the connections between these people. Especially that elusive line linking Sirius and Remus. Not for the first time, Tonks realises that she knows a lot less about anything than she ever thought before.
When she comes back inside, Remus and Sirius are already gone. She watches three old Jeopardy reruns, and falls asleep on the sofa.
She wakes when Remus and Sirius come back in. The clock now reads one thirty in the morning. McGonagall, Lily, and Harry are gone. Caradoc is watching the history channel, stretched out on the other sofa. Fabian has come back from doing surveillance on the head of security, Dolohov, and he’s stretched out next to Caradoc, pressing his face into the warm, dark space between the sofa cushions and Caradoc’s chest. Their legs are tangled together. James is talking softly on the phone in the door to the bedroom.
“Yeah…okay,” James is saying. “Actually,” he continues, looking up as the door cracks open, “Remus and Sirius just got back, so I’ll be over soon. Love you, Lils…. Bye”
Remus and Sirius both look wrecked. Remus’s shirt is ripped in three places, and missing every button, as though it had been torn from him. He has a split lip, and red rings around both his wrists, that look like they might bruise into finger shapes. Sirius, for his part, has the beginnings of a black eye and a spreading bruise on his chin. A scratch mark of three ragged lines across his upper arm bleed sluggishly.
“Did it not go to plan?” James asks, crossing the room and leaning down to examine the scratches on Sirius.
Remus glances at Sirius with a pointedly angry look, but there is also something about the way he holds his mouth that says he isn’t mad at all. In fact, perhaps he’s the opposite of angry.
“It went perfectly to plan, until Greyback tried to kiss me, and Sirius flipped, jumped out of the shadows, and attacked him. He was supposed to try to kiss me. That was the point.”
Sirius is making a face that Tonks would call a pout if she didn’t know Sirius well enough to expect he never pouted. She can’t help but stare at them openly. Kiss Remus? she thinks, shocked. What were they doing?
“I just couldn’t let him, Remus. He shouldn’t touch you. He’s an utter shit, and I couldn’t let him touch you.”
“You didn’t move a muscle when he ripped off my shirt and shoved me against the wall and held me there by my wrists,” Remus says, sounding exhausted, and maybe a little bemused.
Sirius sighs, and captures Remus’ hand in his own, bringing it up to face level so he can easily examine the bruising. “I didn’t want him to touch you...like…like…I touch you.”
“I know,” Remus says, softly. “But, Sirius, you knew what he’d do going in. I sent him a note that said I was dropping you to go back to him, and you knew what he was like with me back then, so I don’t see why you thought it would be different. I had it under control. I was in control.”
“Moony,” Sirius whispers, leaning his forehead against Remus’. “I know you were. I didn’t say I was being rational or that I was right. I’m just saying I couldn’t let him touch you.”
Remus smiles that little quirk of a smile that’s only ever for Sirius and presses his lips to Sirius’s cheek once, dry and chaste.
Tonks looks between the two of them frantically. What the fuck? she thinks. But Remus was… And then there isn’t any way to finish that thought, because he wasn’t hers, if that’s what she wanted. He wasn’t hers at all. She’d clearly not understood anything, not even the slightest bit. She looks to James, and then to Fabian and Caradoc on the sofa to see if they are being shattered by the same revelation that had just been dropped devastatingly into her own world. They look nonchalant and relaxed and it cuts her a little when she realises that this is all old news.
“So is it botched?” Fabian asks, rolling out of Caradoc’s arms just enough to be heard across the room.
“No,” Remus says. “We salvaged it. I had to punch Sirius in the face though. I pretended he’d followed me out. Sirius punched Greyback once or twice and calmed down enough to regain his fucking sanity. He pretended to pass out after Greyback caught him on the chin right there. I told him to meet me Saturday night in the same apartment in Red Hook Bellatrix is going to. If we’re lucky, those two psychos will kill each other in confusion.” He laughed once, bleakly. “I’m so tired.”
Sirius looked at him and a little flash of worry dropped across his face. “What kind of tired?” he asked, some kind of inflection in his voice that suggested it was a loaded question.
“Just normal tired, Padfoot. Don’t worry. I told you that I had it under control. I’m fine.”
Sirius smiled, mollified. “Okay, let’s go to bed then. Are you guys still working in here?” He asked, directing the question to Caradoc and Fabian.
“Yeah,” Caradoc replied. “We’ve gotta go through the tape of Dolohov in the street-fight from last week, just in case, so we know the weak points. We were just taking a break. The stuff is all set up in your bedroom, sorry. Do you want to use our suite? It’s three doors down.”
“Sure,” Remus said, scrubbing his hand over his face and half-yawning. He took the key from the coffee table and led Sirius out the door with a thumb through Sirius’ belt loops.
Tonks was staring blankly at the history channel. Grainy black and white footage of bombs sinking into the ocean shivered across the screen. Her heart felt just the same way. James shut the door behind Remus and Sirius and came to sit down on the sofa next to her.
“Remus didn’t know you had a bit of a crush on him, Tonks,” he said, gently. “Just like he doesn’t realise that he was flirting with you, sometimes. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He just doesn’t pay any attention to anyone but Sirius when it comes to things like that.”
“It’s not a crush,” she says, immediately, and sounding like a dumb kid even to herself. She’s mad, suddenly, but more with her own stupidity than with Remus or anyone else. Why would someone like her attract Remus, anyway. She’s not half the thief the rest of these people are yet, and she’s not half so interesting either.
“Hey, hey,” James says, soft. He scoots closer to her and slides his arm around her back slowly, pressing Tonks into his shoulder. “When people say “it’s not you, it’s him” it’s very rarely true, but this time I can promise you it is. Remus and Sirius have been together for almost fifteen years. They know each other better than they know themselves. When I say together, I mean they can’t love anything in the world as hard and deep and fast and close as they love each other.”
Tonks sucks in a shaky breath, promising herself that she won’t cry. James brushes his hand over her hair soothingly. She’d wondered before how someone like James could be married to someone like Lily, could have a child and such responsibility, and now she gets it.
“But, I didn’t know for so long,” she whispers. “Do they hide it? Why didn’t I know? I don’t understand.”
“They weren’t hiding it. They just don’t feel the need to show it off.”
“I didn’t know they’d hooked up until about two years after the fact,” Fabian said, laughing a little. “I mean, I suppose I suspected. They acted like a couple, but they just didn’t do anything to confirm it. Personally, I think they forget that people don’t automatically know by looking at them. Loving each other is a fact for them like their names are facts.”
“I don’t understand any of you,” Tonks said, softly, sadly. “You’re all a mystery wrapped up together. How do you know each other? How do you know the Death Eaters and Riddle? How did you all get mixed together like you are?”
James sighed. “The story, in its entirety, it far too long and complicated for tonight. I’ll tell you a little, though.”
James leans back on the sofa after smoothing his hand over her shoulder one last time. “When Sirius and Remus met, they were both in a bad state. You must know a little about Sirius from your mother. He was another in a long list of runaways trying to escape the legacy of the nastiest, wealthiest most powerful aspects of criminal life, which linger over the Black family. But Sirius wasn’t just some cousin twice removed…he was their heir to the family business. He’d been raised to it. The Blacks were not happy when he ran.”
James looks over at her before continuing. There is a hard expression on his face that seems to imply he feels it’s important that Tonks know these things, but not that he should have to explain them. “So Sirius was jumping from distant acquaintance to distant acquaintance, trying to pull a few cons here and there to keep himself off the streets where his parents might find him and take him back home to teach him a lesson…and…”
“And what?” Tonks asks. James doesn’t want to say whatever he needs to.
Finally, Fabian cuts in. “Remus was a sixteen year old manic depressive running small time drug deals, cocaine, mostly…. Greyback had dragged him off the street two years before. He used him; for something to hurt, for sex. Remus was a just kid, and he needed clothes and food bad enough to take whatever Greyback dealt out.”
Tonks’s hand flies to her mouth involuntarily. She thinks about her own childhood. Her boring parents who work in the garden on Saturdays and do the crossword puzzles every morning and sometimes, perhaps they steal a piece of medium valued art and sell it off, and that’s the only excitement. She’d loathed it, and she is momentarily disgusted with herself for that.
James picks the story back up again, “He met Sirius when he was selling to one of the people Sirius was staying with. For all I know, it was love at first sight. All I’m sure of is that they pulled a job together and it didn’t go particularly well. They met me a few months later, I introduced them to Dumbledore-he’s a our backer”
“And that’s that?” Tonks asks, voice on the embarrassing side of feeble.
“Well, not exactly. I mean, Remus was a real mess, and Sirius wasn’t too good himself. They cleaned up, though. I’ve never seen two people willing to save each other but not themselves they way they did.”
“But why this job? Why ruin Riddle?”
“Well,” James says, “That’s also complicated. It has to do a lot with Sirius’s family, and a lot of other things. Sirius was running a long con with Lily, Peter Pettigrew, Remus and me, and Riddle screwed us over using Peter. At the same time, he was running a few high profile scams, which were hurting a lot of people who didn’t have the money to survive it. We found out and tried to fight it, but didn’t succeed much. Regulus, Sirius’s little brother, was one of Riddle’s people, but he didn’t agree with what Riddle was doing. He threatened to tell authorities, he got offed, Sirius flipped…the rest, as they say, is history.”
“The rest is history?” Tonks says, forgetting for a moment that she doesn’t have the right to want more knowledge than what if offered to her.
“That’s it,” James says. “That’s the short version, anyway. Two kids had a shit life, found each other, fixed each other, sometimes they ran into bad spots. You should get some sleep, Tonks. We’re bringing a man’s life down around his ears in less than forty-eight hours.”
---
The last time Remus visits Sirius in prison it’s a Sunday. They don’t known yet that Sirius is going to be let out on good behaviour three years early, and that he’ll be pulling an Ace of Hearts out of the collar of Remus’ jacket in less than a month. Remus looks worse than Sirius now. Exhausted to the bone. He tries not to look depressed, but that isn’t the kind of thing he can hide from Sirius.
“Are you taking your meds?” Sirius asks. Remus is starting to dream of Sirius speaking with that distant crackled phone voice. He’s starting to remember him as blurred around the edges, like he’s always been on the other side of a glass wall.
“Of course I am, Padfoot, but you know perfectly well that they don’t work miracles. Lily calls all the time, anyway. If I have an episode, she and James will notice I’m messed up and come right over.”
“What if you hallucinate again?”
“I haven’t had anything that bad since I was seventeen, and you know it. I’m just lonely, Sirius.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says suddenly, looking down.
Remus blinks, “What? What for?”
“I’m sorry you’re here, waiting for me and wanting me all because I was so fucking stupid handling the situation with Riddle and Pettigrew and not telling anyone the right things at the right times. I’m sorry…I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” Remus says, quietly angry, “The fact is, I’d be dead by now if I’d never met you, so don’t be sorry for anything--”
“You don’t know that…”
“Yes I do,” Remus promises. “Drug overdose, suicide, a bad con with some real idiots, maybe Greyback might have hit me just a little too hard. There were a million ways I could have gone that you saved me from, Sirius.”
Sirius breathes out slowly. His breath makes a white cloud on the surface of the glass and he reaches out his hand to paint a heart with his fingerprint. Remus smiles genuinely.
“You’re such a sap,” he murmurs, laughing as he digs around in his pockets and pulls out a pack of cards. He picks off the top three and shows them to Sirius. The middle card is ace of hearts.
Sirius finds it every time. Remus throws the card in what he feels is a completely random pattern. He knows his own tells, and he controls them perfectly. Sirius always guesses when Remus has thrown the card, though. He’s magic like that.
“I miss you,” he says, finally, just before he leaves.
“I love you,” Sirius replies.
Remus goes home and curls up into a loose ball on the bed. He shuffles the deck of cards through his handles over and over again. It feels wrong. He glances through all the cards. Counting them and he throws them in a pile. The ace of hearts is missing.
It’s the only con Sirius ever pulls on Remus.
It’s the only con Sirius ever pulls where Remus never learns the trick.
---
Sirius talks to Mr Riddle in the Overlord Bar and then goes to the third elevator off the casino corridor with all the cheap slot machines. He presses the call button. Mad-Eye’s voice crackles over the microphone in his ear. “Alright lad,” Mad-Eye says, “We finally got it cracked this morning. Ride this one up to the top floor you can access, and then once you’re there, take the small elevator across the hall next to ice machine five-two-eight. It looks like a service elevator except it has a solid gold call button.
Sirius scoffs. “That is so pretentious.”
Remus is waiting for him on the fiftieth floor. “Shall we?” he intones.
“Certainly,” Sirius says, resting his hand on the arm Remus extends.
“Okay,” Mad-Eye says, “The sequence for the call button spells out ‘hallow’ in Morse code.”
“Cheers, Mad-Eye, now go help out the kids in the vault.”
Riddle’s private penthouse is large and almost desolate with clean silver and grey and black modern lines. There is no art on the walls, not even something to exhibit excessive wealth. There are no books anywhere, either. Sirius thinks of their apartment, filled to the brim with stolen paintings they never intended to fence, shelves of old books, and the quilts Mrs Weasley makes them every year for Christmas.
They find the piano in the dining room. It doesn’t fit in with the apartment, not even a little bit. The wood is all worn with a thousand antiqued refinishing attempts. Sirius rubs his thumb over the spot where he carved his initials into the surface when he was ten and hiding from his mother in the shadow of the black and white keys. Beneath his clumsy young letters, are three newly printed, spelling out R. A. B. Sirius closes his eyes and swallows thickly. He sits at the bench and picks out the first few notes of Fur Elise from memory.
“Call Riddle now,” Sirius says, leaning into the sound of the notes springing up from his fingers. It’s out of tune, just slightly, and Sirius feels a shiver of pure rage boil up under the surface of his skin, like the treatment of this piano, his brother’s piano is too much of a metaphor to ignore.
He doesn’t pay any attention as Remus says into the phone, “Mr Riddle, I’m just calling to let you know that we’re retrieving our piano. No need to send movers, though. We can handle it.”
Remus holds the phone out, letting Sirius’s music fill the earpiece. He remembers Regulus at the bench next to him, guiding his fingers gently into a scale. He stops abruptly and stands, sending the bench scraping across the marble floor.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Remus nods once, and goes out onto the balcony. The helicopter is hovering about a hundred feet in the air above the hotel, but as Remus goes out, it begins to descend. Remus comes back inside where Sirius in laying the moving blanket from his bag out on the ground.
“Lift with your knees,” Sirius says. Remus rolls his eyes affectionately and follows Sirius’s advice. It’s so windy on the balcony now that Sirius’s hair is instantly whipped up around his head in an inky froth. He looks beautiful and so young. Young like he must have looked before Remus ever knew him, before he’d had his heart broken by his family, before he’d had his heart broken by seeing Remus for the first time, bloody-lipped and so dull-eyed with sadness trying to sell him cocaine in a basement apartment owned by a washed up thief who never even asked Sirius his name, before he’d had his heart broken by four years of a glass wall between them.
Lily is hanging on to the end of the piano harness, and she jumps off as they carry the piano out to the helicopter. “Ready boys?” she asks, affixing the last of the safety ties. “I want to get back up in the cockpit. James can’t really be trusted to fly properly without supervision.”
Sirius and Remus nod together. They allow themselves to be raised up to the helicopter and then they are going up, up, up in the air. As the piano clears the hotel roof, Sirius looks back and catches sight of Riddle, standing on the balcony with a spill of every security guard and police officer he could possibly find fanning out behind him. He’s just staring with an expression on his face that almost looks perplexed. Sirius grins.
They pass over the hotel and then Sirius looks again, this time spotting the red painters van pulling away from the deliveries entrance. There is a green flag tapped to the radio antenna, and Sirius sighs as he leans back against his seat, adjusting his earmuffs. Remus grins next to him, and leans across the space between them. He presses his mouth, warm and sweet and jittery against Sirius’.
They set the piano down cautiously in the front yard of the safe-house in Great Basin National Park. The red truck pulls in approximately an hour later. It’s followed closely by an old silver Volvo. Sirius and Remus are already sprawling across each other on the sofa as the rest of the group shuffles in through the front door. Lily takes Harry from McGonagall who’d been watching him while Lily helped with the piano.
They don’t look happy. Sirius is feeling high on adrenaline and a sense of accomplishment, but none of them look at all happy.
“What happened?” Remus asks, not wanting to wait for bad news.
“It’s the ledgers,” Gideon says, collapsing into one of the practically broken wooden chairs crowded around a wooden table.
Sirius’ face goes flat and emotionless. “What do you mean?”
“We pulled them all up from right where you said,” Tonks says.
“Fab and I even looked around to be sure there weren’t any somewhere else,” Gideon adds.
“What happened?” Sirius says, tightly.
“They’re just blank. Eight volumes of nothingness.”
“Fuck,” Sirius says. His joy fades out, and he goes to sit back in his corner of the room, where he’d been chatting before. He looks like a mess now, all the light that made his tangled hair and tired face seem satisfied is gone.
Suddenly, on his sits straight back up again. “I’ve got an idea.”
He goes across the room to the piano, and then with gentle care, he presses every single key. Of course, Sirius is never wrong, and so there is a key that sounds broken or confused or stuck. They open up the piano. All eight books are stacked up just so, in a neat pile between the hammers of the piano strings, wedged between the potential music.
“What are they?” Tonks asks like she has more and more questions waiting on the wings of her words.
Sirius mouth twists into disgust as he replies. “Riddle keeps a few brothels out in the desert with girls who don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into. They keep them on drugs so they don’t run off, and they’re not exactly willing. These are the ledgers for them.”
They call Riddle again the next day.
“We have your money, and your piano,” Sirius says, voice sing-song. “But the best thing is the books, by far.”
Riddle can’t hide the panic in his voice even as he says, “What do you think you’re going to do with those? Go to the police? With the ledgers you stole from my casino along with millions and millions of dollars?”
“Oh no, no, no,” Sirius says, laughing. “That would be kind. I am going to hand them over to Don Sangrini, who has a few things to say about the kind of man who opens a brothel in his territory with girls who aren’t even half-willing and doesn’t deal in the rules the Sangrini family so kindly makes us all aware of.”
Riddle doesn’t say anything more.
---
It’s four thirty-six in the morning and no one in Vegas is sleeping. The lights in the hotel room are dim and burnish Sirius’s skin cream and buttermilk gold. Remus has that warm lasting ache under his skin, and Sirius is sprawled out like he feels it too, which he must.
Remus lays out three cards on the bed between them, pulling the duvet across his legs so he doesn’t chill. “Follow the Ace of Hearts,” he murmurs. He doesn’t show Sirius where the cards start out. Sirius is rubbing circles in the skin of Remus’s ankle, small gentle circles, tracing patterns. Remus hums with pleasure under his breath as he flips the cards across each other. When he lays the last one down, he looks up at Sirius through his lashes, biting his lip red.
“Which one?” he asks.
Sirius picks the right one. Of course he does. He picks the right one three more times.
“How do you do it?” Remus asks finally, shuffling the cards back together and setting them on the side table before lying across the bed with Sirius and aligning so their thighs and shoulders and ribs all touch. Sirius rolls to look down at Remus, propping himself up on his elbow.
“It’s the way you touch them as you set them down,” Sirius says. “You touch the one you want me to pick like you touch me.”
Remus runs his fingers over Sirius’s collarbones, and down his back, across the bumps in his spine, pulling them together tightly. Sirius leans into the embrace, releasing himself to Remus’s arms and closing his eyes, breathing. On the other side of their hotel curtains, dawn is painting the indigo sky yellow against the mountains; gentle, gentle-and everything is new.
Sleep in peace when day is done
That's what I mean
And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me
fin
RETURN TO (PART ONE)
Some more notes: My beta would like to inform you that the way I describe prison IS INACCURATE. SO DON’T USE THIS FIC FOR RESEARCH. But, you know, jeeeze, if you are getting your factual knowledge from fanfic, go read some real books.
(Thanks to synaereses by the way ;) I’d like to mention that the most embarrassing error I can ever remember making: “MADE-EYE” all the way through the fic as opposed to “MAD-EYE” was totally my fault. Very logically, synaereses mentioned that I sometimes was writing “Mad-Eye” and sometimes “Mad Eye”, and that consistency is key, and so I used ‘replace all’ like a lazy fool and then, because it was four o’clock in the morning, I didn’t go back and read the fic again like a careful SENSIBLE person would. Okay, I’m rambling now, but I was SO ANNOYED WITH MYSELF, I feel that a public apology is needed.)
Also,
I’d really like to thank everyone who commented on this fic at the rs_games posting, and for your voting and such also. And the organisers of the games and everyone who went out of their way to help team-mates or make the games great. I was pretty much a failure of a team member seeing as I was totally absent from the team community and totally late with my fic. (I HAVE EXCUSES. RL LIFE ONE, I PROMISE.) But yeah. Thanks.
OMG OMG IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS, I will be watching the new film *___*
Shutting up now, thanks and goodnight.
(x-posted to remusxsirius rs_games)