Conversation with a Portrait. HARRY POTTER
Remus talks to Phineas. (Implied slash, if you like.)
PG
Remus stood, and he looked, and he tried, very hard, not to go downstairs and get drunk. He didn’t like getting drunk, but he couldn’t help wondering if, just this once, it might be a good idea.
It said a lot about his current situation that he thought getting drunk was - might be - a good idea.
Remus knew that. He didn’t like what it said. He realized, abruptly, that he was staring into Sirius’s room, had been for the last three minutes. And - if he didn’t stop looking in now - he’d remember the Summoning charm, and wouldn’t have to go downstairs to get the bottle of Firewhiskey in the cupboard. He’d actually started to raise his wand and speak the words, when a dry, patrician voice - he’d grown accustomed to that voice by now, or as accustomed as he’d ever be - spoke up, severing his concentration neatly from the spell he had been about to begin. He was, actually, rather glad that it had happened. Not quite glad enough.
“As you have doubtless gathered by now,” Phineas Nigellus said, with the air of one bestowing a great favor upon a singularly undeserving person, “it would be a very bad idea to summon that bottle of Firewhiskey. Besides,” he added, smirking, “it’s less than one quarter full.”
“You can do a lot with a quarter,” Remus said, a little sulkily.
“I don’t think she meant of whiskey,” Phineas said, more dryly than usual, and more than a little sarcastic. Remus knew he irritated Phineas; it gave him an odd sort of pleasure to know that there was someone who was too wrapped up in being irritated with him to pity him. “You’re keeping in touch with, er, Harry, I trust,” he said airily, eyebrows raised and silk covered hands tapping his arms impatiently. Remus nodded.
“He sends me letters quite frequently,” he said. He didn’t say that the question was needless. They both knew that. It was an opening though, Remus was being offered an opening. It had only, he thought, taken two months. Phineas seemed to expect him to take the opening. Not entirely without reason, perhaps. “He tells me he misses his friends,” Remus told him, not sure if he could say what Phineas needed him to say. Harry had said it though, in the letters to Remus and to Ron and to Hermione.
“Only to be expected,” Phineas said, not unkindly. It struck Remus as a little strange, he remembered Phineas’s opinion of Harry. Of all teenagers, when you got down to it. “I expect he…” Phineas seemed unable to continue his thought, and left the sentence trailing off, his voice rougher than it usually was, faster than it should have been. Remus realized something then, or finished the realization.
"Yes,” he said, “he does.” Phineas seemed glad, he gave Remus a brief nod, and his gaze darted away, looking, perhaps for this portraits regular inhabitant. Remus found himself wondering what Phineas had done to the formidable witch normally inhabiting this particular frame. She had given him a frank examination, he remembered, when he first got here. The smirk she directed at Sirius had spoken volumes. “Takes after his great-uncle in more ways than one,” she’d said to him, her eyes and amusement directed at Sirius. Unnecessarily, Remus had thought. The smirk…
He never had gotten her name. She’d had a beautiful voice. Phineas had a beautiful voice too.
“There are letters in the fifth drawer on the right,” Phineas said. “They’re to you. Well, two of them aren’t. One is to Harry and another is to Dumbledore - but the majority - for you.”
Remus knew how they would end. It was, he thought now, how Sirius should have ended.
“Thank you,” he said.
Original.