Fic: Voyage Sentimental
Voyage Sentimental
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: R/S
Era: Summer 1985/summer 1979: plenty of R/S interaction.
Summary: Remus returns to a French resort where he once stayed with Sirius.
Rating: PG-13
Thanks: To astra_argentea for the quick read-through.
AN: The lyrics quoted in the story are from 19 by Paul Hardcastle.
Crossposted to the_kennel and remusxsirius.
Voyage Sentimental
The train rounded a bend, and Remus got his first view of the coast, the distinctive red rock jutting out far into the Mediterranean, a white stucco villa perched, like an afterthought, right at the edge.
His carriage practically emptied at Toulon, the first stop of the long journey, but soon filled up again. The train became local then, with new passengers embarking to go just one or two stations down the line. That seemed strange to Remus, who had got on in Paris and endured seven hours of sitting in his cramped seat, dozing or trying to read, staring out of the window as the tame northern landscapes gradually grow wilder and less populated.
At Cannes, a woman with a dog settled down opposite him. The dog was shaggy, black and friendly, wagging its tail in a horribly familiar way. Remus did a double-take, flinched, and stood up to lift down his case, relieved that he was getting off at the next stop.
He could have Teleported, of course: the war was over, and you could travel freely between countries again. But he wanted to do things the way he and Sirius had before. He’d saved up for months to afford two nights, which would give him only one full day in the resort, though he really had no idea why he felt compelled to come back. Generally, he tried to avoid places where he and Sirius had been happy.
This time round, he wasn’t staying in one of the grand hotels on the front but had booked a room at a modest pension in the town’s main shopping street, just one block from the sea. He could only remember it very vaguely, but he had some idea that it would be noisy all night, and had taken care to bring plenty of Sleeping Potion. He’d always found it hard to sleep, now more than ever.
On the hot station concourse, he tried to charm a taxi to come to him out of the muddle that was French town traffic. He muttered a spell, two spells: a taxi pulled up in front of him, and he said in perfect French, ‘Hotel Draguignon, s’il vous plait.’
‘You speak French well,’ the taxi driver, not fooled, said in English.
Remus didn’t say, ‘Of course I do. I’m a wizard.’
The driver switched on his radio, which was playing the song that seemed to be everywhere that summer. It even sounded familiar to Remus, one of the Muggle hits that kept catching his attention as he wandered through London.
In inininininin Vietnam he was 19
n n n n nineteen...
The taxi driver turned the knob on his radio, so the end of the verse blared out,
I wasn't really sure what was going on
I wasn't really sure what was going on.
*
He and Sirius were nineteen too (n-n-n-n-nineteen, Remus’s brain chorused as he sat in the taxi six years later) when they rode down the streets he was riding down now, totally enthralled, pointing out landmarks to each other. ‘Hey, Padfoot, there are still people swimming! At seven o’clock!’
It was 1979, the Year of the Sheep: the Divination textbook defined it as a fallow year, a year to relax, to be creative and depend on others.
Remus and Sirius, the wolf and the dog, came to call it the Year of Escape. They spent most of the spring and summer dodging articles of doom in the Prophet, ignoring Dumbledore’s elegiac owls fluttering down on the breakfast table every few days. He was speaking of mobilising their strengths, recruiting all the recent school-leavers in the fight against the dictator who was rumoured to be gathering strength: rumours the Ministry of Magic alternately confirmed then denied.
Sirius, reading yet another article about the need to be extra vigilant in Diagon Alley, said, disgruntled, ‘I think this is the least relaxed year I’ve ever known. Oh, well, you can never trust astrology, even Chinese astrology.’
‘This war isn’t really going to happen,’ James said, whenever they saw him: not often, because he was engaged to Lily, and they were occupied with weddings and invitations and lists of presents from Lily’s Witch Bride magazine. When Remus said, ‘We shouldn’t hang round to find out,’ James replied, ‘It would be quite exciting, though, wouldn’t it?’ And then, warming to the subject, ‘You know, if these Knights of Walpurgis or whatever they’re called really exist, I bet Snivellus will join them. I hope I get the chance to beat his arse one of these days.’
‘For this you saved his life?’ Remus said, with mock solemnity, and Lily chimed in, ‘I really, really do not want to know,’ and Sirius said, ‘Who wants another drink? Prongs, your round, I think.’
When the news was pessimistic, Sirius would get indignant. ‘I don’t know why we can’t just go in there and Avada Kedavra this Voldemort bloke.’
‘I think people have tried,’ Remus said. ‘The Prophet last week said that anyone spotting him shouldn’t try to duel but call the Aurors immediately.’
‘I bet I could kill him,’ Sirius boasted.
‘Bet you couldn’t.’
‘Stop bickering,’ James said, and they subsided; though Remus thought that if anyone could beat Voldemort it would be Sirius, with his streak of wildness and extraordinary talent for hexes. But of course he wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of saying so: in those days, he occasionally felt as if he and Sirius were rivals, though for what he couldn’t say. For glory, perhaps, for casting the best charm, for singing better - nonsensical things. They weren't really in competition; it was just some symptom of their age, or their hormones, or the times they lived in.
*
At the hotel, Remus paid the taxi with unfamiliar Muggle money. He hadn’t handled this currency since he and Sirius set off in the train back to Paris and then home, and he suspected that he must have given too big a tip, because the driver drove off grinning, probably shaking his head at ‘ces Anglais’, who were so fearful in a foreign country, so damn generous.
He carried his case to reception, and was given the key to his first-floor room. The receptionist was chatty, perhaps given his good French, and perhaps because she felt safe with him. Women did seem to like confiding in him, he’d noticed. He obviously had a kind face, though he didn’t feel kind.
‘You will want to do an excursion, no?’ she suggested. ‘There are trips round the bay, and there’s the little train.’
Remus had had enough of trains for one day, but he smiled and nodded, and took the proffered brochure.
Up in his small, functional room, he opened the curtains and the window and stood for a moment watching the street outside. It was already well after six, and he decided to go and have a drink before he unpacked: after all, he was on holiday. It was so hot, too. He needed some refreshment.
He didn’t go down to the front but walked down past the English church to the pedestrian precinct, where the cafés with their awnings were welcoming early diners and drinkers. The shops had strange hours here in the south, languid hours, ten till twelve, three till seven, and most of them were still open.
He and Sirius had discovered a great many Muggle equivalents for Butterbeer and Firewhisky, and he racked his brains to remember the things they’d liked particularly. One of them was kir, as he recalled, a mixture of white wine and cassis: Sirius had been a bit dubious about whether it was the sort of thing blokes should be drinking. Remus countered that it tasted good and got you drunk, and what more could you want?
He sat on a cane chair under a maroon awning, ordered, and the waiter brought him his drink, dishes of crisps, peanuts and olives, an ashtray.
‘Is it taken?’ A woman slightly older than him hovered at the seat opposite. He really didn’t want to share his table, but when he looked round he saw that the café was actually full, so he reluctantly nodded at her to sit down. He hoped she’d realise that he had no intention of engaging in any sort of conversation with her.
But it seemed she wanted to practise her English. She ordered her drink, then said to him, ‘You are on holiday here, yes?’
‘Oui,’ Remus said, stubbornly sticking to French. But then, because sometimes he felt overwhelmed by the pressure of having no-one to talk to, he caved in and said in English, ‘I’ve been here before, though. With a friend. A while ago.’
Understanding leapt in the woman’s face, and pity too. He was used to that: he didn’t think he looked particularly melancholy, but he did seem to evoke a lot of sympathy, which he certainly didn’t want.
‘Ah, you had a, how you say. Chagrin d’amour?’
He could see girls in her eyes, or rather, one girl, a small, mouse-like girl who wasn’t quite the prettiest but pretty enough, who’d left this sad-looking man for another boy and broken his heart.
‘You were happy here,’ she persisted. ‘So you’ve come back to recreate this, this affaire, non?’
Remus didn’t reply, but downed the rest of his kir, and motioned the waiter to order a second one. He couldn’t see his way out of ordering a drink for her too, simply from good manners, though he was mentally gritting his teeth now. It was one thing for him to remember being here with Sirius, quite another to be grilled about it.
He said, ‘Yes, I was.’
The woman sighed and said, ‘I was here with my husband once, dans le temps. That means - how d’you say? Once upon a time? In the day,’ she translated, and fell silent, obviously ruminating on her own lost love.
He really didn’t want to know about her husband, who was probably dead or had run away with a younger woman. He smiled vaguely at her, willing her to finish her drink and go, stop projecting on to this open-looking stranger. She obviously had no idea that he was locked and bolted and had thrown away the key.
All the same, he couldn’t help thinking of his own once upon a time, the days when it was him and Sirius, before Sirius was put under the Imperius - because there was no way otherwise he would have betrayed the Potters and killed Peter. There was a sharp division between those days and the dreary period of now, of Sirius in Azkaban where visitors weren’t allowed, with its five-mile owl exclusion zone so you could neither write to prisoners nor they to you. Remus would have liked to hear Sirius’s side of the story, but of course he never would.
*
The summer they were nineteen, before the war started in earnest, they still didn’t realise how bad things would get. Otherwise, Sirius, the old Sirius, the real Sirius, would never have said, ‘Let’s go away for a while.’ He was reading the Prophet’s Sunday supplement, which had moving pictures of girls in bikinis lying by swimming pools, handsome wizards waving their wands.
Remus assumed he meant somewhere in England, simply because he didn’t think they could go anywhere else. The Teleports were all heavily guarded that year, so nobody could leave the country, except a few high-up ministers. The Ministry assured its population that this was for their safety, and some of them still wanted nothing more than to believe it.
‘Cornwall’s nice,’ he said a bit dubiously.
But Sirius, with his triple-starred Outstanding in Muggle Studies NEWT, said, ‘I don’t think I want to stay in England at the moment. I’ve heard that the South of France is pleasant at this time of year. We’ll travel the Muggle way, by plane.’
The plane seemed to Remus more terrifying than a whole deputation of Dark Wizards, so they compromised on the train, because that would be no worse than the Hogwarts Express.
They decided on a destination by closing their eyes, aiming their wands at Remus’s Wizarding Atlas, and choosing the point in the middle, landing with almost exact arithmantical precision on a famous seaside resort.
In spite of his high mark, Sirius found that Muggle travel was more complicated than he’d imagined. With the help of his school textbook, he and Remus managed to create passports for themselves: the main problem was fixing the little photos so they wouldn’t wink or smile.
Then, they had to book tickets, because it seemed that Muggle transport filled up fast, and you weren’t allowed to travel if you hadn’t reserved a seat. They’d have to catch a ferry and cross the channel. They’d have to spend half a day sitting in the train. What was more, they couldn’t create their own tickets, because of something called double-booking. But really it was quite an adventure, going to Victoria Station and talking to a man in a little booth, passing over unfamiliar pound notes, taking the ungenerous tickets, tiny cardboard rectangles that got lost so often that Remus took to Accio’ing them without even thinking about it, whenever they were needed.
Sirius took the journey very seriously. To pass the time, he created two tiny boxes with earplugs. ‘The Muggles call this sort of thing a Walkman,’ he explained to Remus
In fact, the slim, white machines with their soft earplugs were streets ahead of the current Muggle technology, small enough to slip into a robe pocket, yet designed to contain as much music as you wanted.
‘I’ve charmed yours to play Blodwyn Bludd’s collected hits,’ Remus said spitefully, because he was jealous that he hadn’t dreamed up the miniature musical boxes himself.
Sirius wrestled him to the ground for that, and they had a fairly vicious scuffle.
‘Anyway, you didn’t come up with the original concept,’ Remus pointed out, and Sirius sighed exaggeratedly.
‘I’m not an inventor, Moony. Look in your crystal ball. In thirty years’ time, every Muggle will own one of these.’
Their fight didn’t last long, not with all the excitement of making their plans. Once they were safely across the channel, they hugged each other, relieved, laughing, because they were running away and had nearly made it. Neither of them wanted to mention that they’d have to go back at some stage, when their money ran out; or when the full moon came.
Remus sometimes wondered whether they’d have stayed forever if it hadn’t been for his affliction. But he’d got used to factoring it in to his fate, and the fate of anyone involved with him, so he never wasted too much time, or pain, on speculation.
He didn’t remember much about the journey. He and Sirius listened to music, ate big red cherries that they’d bought at a stall near the Gare de Lyon: twice the size of the cherries you could get in England that year, or any year. They didn’t quite hold hands. It was hot, though, like now, so hot that the sweat was running down his face and neither he nor Sirius quite dared take out their wands to do a cooling charm.
There was, he recalled, a woman staring at them. Sirius nudged him and muttered, ‘I think she fancies you,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ sarcastically, because how would any woman fancy him when Sirius was sitting beside him?
*
Feeling like a seasoned traveller this time round, Remus said a firm ‘Bonsoir’ to the woman at his table and, slightly drunk from his three kirs, strolled back to the hotel. He unpacked his case, hanging his Muggle clothes neatly on the black plastic hangers, had a shower, using his wand to make the water run at exactly the right temperature, then went out to find somewhere to eat.
The tables on the pavements with their parasols were crowded, people laughing and chattering, and Remus realised he was hungry.
He sat down at the fullest, most popular restaurant, a trick Sirius had taught him, and ordered a jug of wine.
A few tables away, two boys in their late teens sat facing each, talking animatedly. Remus amused himself trying to guess whether they were lovers or just friends. He even wondered whether they weren’t actually ghosts, younger versions of him and Sirius stuck forever on what could have been termed a honeymoon, if you were sentimental and girlish, which neither of them had been.
The dark, better-looking boy said something to the fairer, more nondescript one, and they both burst out laughing, so loudly that everyone turned to stare at them. Not ghosts, then. Remus found himself watching them covertly, checking to see whether they looked into each other’s eyes for too long, or touched hands, or smiled as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. He wondered whether anyone had watched him and Sirius like that. Probably, but they’d been too absorbed in each other to notice, too much in love, he realised, now that it was far too late; now that Sirius had been utterly destroyed and would never come back.
They didn’t talk about love when they were nineteen, of course. Boys didn’t. They argued, or they discussed the war and the Order, James and Lily, Peter’s extraordinarily rapid promotion at the Ministry, magic and Quidditch. They talked about sex, sometimes, in a context of its own.
*
The beaches here weren’t sandy, but shingled like English beaches: some property of the Mediterranean, it seemed, of the generally rocky terrain. The tides were gentle, possibly too gentle to have eroded the stone into sand over the millennia.
In 1979, he and Sirius put hardening charms on their feet so they could run up and down the beach to the sea, getting rid of some of the energy that had been coiled up inside them with the frustration of being unable either to fight or retreat.
They were staying at the smartest hotel in town, a historic building on the front, so luxurious that even Sirius was taken aback when they were shown to their room. It had a swimming-pool, of course, but they also had access to its private beach, the best beach, with its sun-loungers and parasols. They lay in the sun all day, ordering fancy drinks with varying amounts of alcohol, so by evening they were pretty well drunk even before starting on the wine with dinner.
No, love was never mentioned in those days. They were two boys trying their best to be decadent, and succeeding pretty well, making good use of the wide twin beds in their room. It was really far too hot for sex, but there were cooling charms and icy showers, and they’d both been sparked by their escape, their own initiative and daring.
On the beach, they checked out the French girls, who tended to be slight and thin, the sort of girls Sirius had dated when he was sixteen, the sort of girls that Remus had often gazed at longingly, out of his league.
It would have been Sirius who suggested they pick up one of the friendlier-looking ones and bring her back to the hotel, but Remus agreed at once. It wasn’t too difficult to persuade one of the girls from the beach to go along with them: perhaps it was true what Sirius said, that girls were just as avid for new experiences as blokes were.
‘It’s for you,’ Sirius whispered as they went up in the lift.
Before Remus, Sirius had had plenty of experience with girls, but Remus hadn’t ever slept with anyone but Sirius. He understood that this was a present, a means of losing his virginity in the accepted sense, and he was drunk enough to find the thought both generous and arousing.
When they were safely upstairs, with the Ne Pas Déranger sign on the door, the three of them had more to drink from the fridge, which was kept well-stocked. Their drinks, Remus reckoned, would probably cost almost as much as the room.
The girl looked round curiously, taking in the thick carpet, the giant television, making an excuse that she needed the loo to have a look at the bathroom, which contained a tub so big that he and Sirius always shared it. Remus’s whole loo and shower in the modest Hotel Draguignon would be dwarfed just by that bath.
He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever even known it. She was blonde and deeply tanned, pretty without being remarkable. She wore a short dress over her bathing-suit, and once she’d satisfied her curiosity about the room, she kept casting longing glances at Sirius, who ignored her. ‘C’est pour mon ami,’ he explained, in his impeccable, Babel Spell French, and she shrugged as if to say ‘too bad’, but seemed quite happy when Remus rather clumsily removed her clothes. Sirius lay beside him, encouraging him. ‘You’ll really like it, Moony,’ he promised, and Remus did, that sensation rather like drowning, like being pulled in by the gentle Mediterranean tide. He’d slept with a couple of girls since then, but neither of them had come anywhere near giving him as much pleasure as the first one.
His enjoyment could have had something to do with Sirius too. Afterwards, he said, ‘Was that okay?’ and Remus said, ‘It was amazing,’ and they kissed until Remus felt dizzy. The girl beside them grew restless, probably expecting her turn with Sirius then, but it wasn’t destined for that particular evening.
He felt the bed lightening as she heaved herself off - strange how a slim French girl could make such a weight on the soft mattress - with a sigh of exasperation and she said, in English, ‘You waste your time with me.’
By the time they’d finished, she was sitting looking out of the window, yawning, a can of beer from the fridge in her hand. Her expression was unreadable, but Sirius eventually stirred himself and pressed what looked like a fifty-franc note into her hand. Remus was worried about that, considering the enormous bills they’d already run up, but he didn’t say anything, because Sirius got cross when he went on about their finances.
After she’d gone, he said tentatively, ‘It was better with you, though.’
‘I know,’ Sirius said. He looked happy and satisfied and slept with his arms round Remus, grumbling whenever Remus shifted.
*
This year, Remus was restricted to the public beach, where the poorer tourists lay on towels on the stones, which seemed to have grown much sharper during the past six years.
He bought three postcards at the shop on the front, though he didn’t have anyone to send a card too, and went down the steps to claim a place close to the water. The stones weren’t so bad if you were a wizard, of course, and knew sixteen softening spells, one of which made him feel as if his towel was on a bed of the softest feathers.
Stripping off his t-shirt and jeans and turning on to his stomach, he took out a card depicting the Promenade des Anglais, the main artery of the town, with the smart hotels and shops on one side, the sea on the other. Realising that he only had quills in his canvas bag, he discreetly Transfigured one of them into a biro and scrawled:
S, here I am again! Do you remember walking by the sea with me? And saying that we should just stay here forever? But we didn’t. And I do so wish that we’d been cowards instead of good Gryffindors. Well, I had grand ideas of heroism, and so did you. I miss you. R.
He put it in his bag, wandering if there were any magic that could waft it to Azkaban. There wasn’t, of course, and even if there had been, what would be the point? The Imperius took people over, changed them not just for a while but forever. Sirius under his curse would sneer no doubt at the thought of that stupid holiday, when his stupid boyfriend had deluded himself that they were happy; and safe, just for a couple of weeks.
The sun beat down, and on his own he felt restless and bored, in a way he could never have imagined when he and Sirius were together. He wished he still had his white box with headphones, but he didn’t have a clue where it was. He thought it must be in a trunk somewhere, in the attic of his parents’ house, together with all his other souvenirs of the days with Sirius. Not that he needed it: the couple next to him had their radio tuned to an English pop channel, and Remus recognised once again the song from the taxi, with its distinctive stuttering chorus, its lyrics about death and d-d-d-destruction and soldiers whose average age was nineteen.
In Vietnam the combat soldier typically served a twelve month tour of duty but was exposed to hostile fire almost everyday...
He shivered for a moment under the blazing sun. Of course, he knew the song wasn’t about their war, but it could have been. Actually, the average age of Voldemort’s victims would have been far higher than nineteen: or maybe not. Regulus, just for one, had only been eighteen or so, James and Lily not long past twenty-one. He couldn’t be bothered to do the maths: it was hardly important anyway.
He shook his head and decided to go for a swim to clear his mind.
A group of women with small children was playing at the edge of the sea, dipping the giggling toddlers into the shallow water, occasionally expostulating. French woman seemed to talk to their children as if they were small adults, unlike English women, who were addicted to baby talk.
‘Mais, dis-donc, ne faut pas manger les cailloux!’ one woman was saying, tapping a tiny child on its leg. She was blond and tanned, and Remus wondered for a moment whether she was the same girl he’d slept with six years ago, having since fulfilled her biological imperative and given birth.
Perhaps one of the children playing there was his... Not bloody likely, his sensible self chided him. For a start, they all looked under three, even to his inexpert eye. Anyway, he’d remembered to cast a post-conception charm on the girl while she was walking out the door, her slim hips swaying.
The children started cheering as a couple of paragliders took off from the beach. He and Sirius had tried paragliding a few times. ‘Not as good as a really fast broomstick,’ Sirius had pronounced as they were wafted up on the yellow parachute, ‘but good enough. For a Muggle thing.’ Sirius looked round haughtily as they floated through the air, but even he’d cried out involuntarily as they were dropped down into the water again.
*
Remus bought lunch at a café, a rather stale baguette with sweating ham, more worthy of King’s Cross than Nice, and went for a walk. He had a specific destination in mind, slightly away from the centre, a memorial to the victims of two Muggle wars.
It was an imposing, art-deco marble monument with the names of the dead from the town, and he imagined, superimposed on top, the names of the dead in the war against Voldemort, who had no cenotaph, no remembrance day, no poppies.
If he were to design such a monument, it would also have a section for the living dead, for those who had been damaged forever by the war. The Longbottoms would be on it, and Harry Potter, and Sirius Black.
He gazed at the edifice for a while until the edges shimmered and blurred in the sunshine, then blinked rapidly a few times and turned away.
Strolling back down the Promenade des Anglais he passed a park across the road to his right, which boasted a wonderful double-decker carousel. It probably dated from the twenties or thirties, a sparkling jewel of gilt and mirrors, with dazzling artificial lights. A handful of children were waiting with their mothers for the next ride to start.
Remus had forgotten the carousel, had forgotten Sirius, who never had a real childhood and could therefore be such a child, pleading for them to have a ride on the painted horses. ‘Come on, Moony. You know you want to.’
‘I don’t.’ Remus thought it was totally uncool for two nineteen year-olds to be seen on a children’s merry-go-round, and he still did. It was the sort of thing girls went in for, and he told Sirius so.
Sirius snorted and said, ‘Well, exactly. Right up your street.’
Remus remembered wanting to punch and bite Sirius then, hurt him. He was sensitive about being with Sirius, even tempted to retort, ‘Well, it was me who slept with the girl the other night.’ However, he had enough sense to swallow the words unsaid.
Sirius said dismissively, ‘I’m going anyway. You’ll have to wait.’ He turned away and joined the queue, where, far from thinking him uncool, the women with their children seemed to be chatting with him, friendly and open.
In the end, Remus reluctantly ambled over and joined Sirius in the line, throwing hard glances at the women, daring a single child to snigger at him. Nobody did, of course, because he had his handsome, magic shield, the fearless boy who climbed up to the top deck of the wonderful carousel, dragging him by the hand, and perched on a horse, looking like a beautiful warrior going to fight in the crusade against goblins. In a way, Remus wished he’d stayed down in the park so he could drink in Sirius properly, from a distance, as he went round on his blue and silver steed; maybe take a photo. Still, to his surprise, he enjoyed the ride too. The Muggle device with its tinkly music wasn’t quite as good as the magic roundabouts of his childhood, but it was more of an adventure.
Sirius thought so too. ‘We might have fallen off,’ he said, blazing with excitement. ‘Not a single sticking spell! That was amazing, Moony, wasn’t it?’
And for the rest of the day, Sirius hummed the tinny song that had been playing as they went round, up and down, a tune that sounded rather like Hot, Sweet Cauldron of Love, only a bit jauntier.
*
In the evening, he went to a different restaurant, a café-bar, and ate mussels and chips washed down with beer. He felt as if he’d been here forever: perhaps he and Sirius had never left, and the intervening six years had been a dream. Or perhaps it was because he was on his own that the past twenty-four hours seemed to have gone so slowly. He wondered whether this was how his existence would now unfold, slowly, with no new experiences, only old ones to haunt him.
‘But you did have new experiences,’ the perverse little voice in his head remarked. ‘Sirius would never have gone to see a war monument. He’d have been bored. He’d have wanted to go on to the old town, and the castle, and on boat trips.’
‘We did all that anyway,’ Remus said mentally, hoping to Merlin that he hadn’t spoken aloud, that he wasn’t going to end up a crazy old man talking to himself. He dipped a chip in mayonnaise and put in firmly in his mouth to shut himself up.
In fact, they’d gone on several boat trips, because Sirius was obsessed with sailing. Remus booked all the expeditions, as he was better at dealing with the unfamiliar money. On their last day, they did their fifth, and final, trip round the bay. ‘What they call a voyage sentimental,’ Sirius said: he knew enough French by now not to need a spell, unlike Remus, who was slow at languages. ‘So we won’t forget it.’
‘I managed to use the rest of our loose francs,’ Remus said that morning, as they sat at breakfast in the vast, beautiful dining room that reminded him of a cathedral.
‘We’ll make a Muggle of you yet,’ Sirius teased. Coming from him, that was a compliment, but Remus remarked, ‘I’d rather not. My grandmother actually washes dishes by hand, with a cloth.’
‘Well, she’s a bit old-fashioned, isn’t she? Lily told me they have machines to wash dishes,’ Sirius said, gesturing to the waiter for more butter. Sirius always used loads of butter: it drove Remus mad, the way he slathered it on to his croissants, with just a smear of apricot jam on top.
‘You won’t be able to taste anything,’ he said, feeling the words a bit prim in his mouth but unable to take them back.
‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s delicious.’ Sirius started on his third croissant, and added, ‘We should be like those French people in cafés, drinking brandy for breakfast.’
‘Yeah, but just think how bad you’d feel by lunchtime.’ Anti-hangover charms were reliable, but you had to be in a fit state to use them preventively. Three nights ago, he’d been so drunk that he forgot to cast the spell before he went to sleep. He never again wanted to experience anything like the pounding in his head when he woke up the following morning. Of course, he’d managed to stop it almost at once, but he now understood why the other tourists didn’t seem to drink even a quarter as much as he and Sirius did.
Later on, they stood at the railings of the boat, watching the sea part in its wake, and Remus felt faintly sick again, the way he had after that drinking spree. It didn’t really have anything to do with the motion of the craft, or the guide droning on about the hills of Provence, the cyprus and olive trees, the vineyards... It was more about the waxing moon, the return tickets tucked safely in his wallet, the dread of what they would find when they arrived home.
*
In his rather smaller pension, he ate his last breakfast in the little courtyard with its fountain. He had several helpings of rolls and jam: he probably wouldn’t be able to afford much else until he got back to London.
At least his homecoming would be more predictable this time: not to a barrage of owls about the Order of the Phoenix, not to the news of seven deaths, of strange marks seen in the sky. In the Leaky Cauldron on their first evening back, James hugged Sirius fiercely, saying ‘Where the hell have you been?’ and Lily said, ‘You two look brown,’ and then burst into tears and wept as if her heart would break. When Remus asked, puzzled, ‘The wedding isn’t off or anything, is it?’ she shook her head, unable to speak.
Peter, who was buying his round, came back with four firewhiskies and a gin, and James said firmly, ‘No more gin for Lily, or she’ll never bloody stop crying,’ and drained the glass himself. As far as Remus could recollect, Lily was so dumbfounded that she actually did stop. But the memory was subsumed by Sirius’s look of utter dismay, no doubt mirroring his own; the rest of the evening had disappeared into oblivion. And the next day was the full moon, and the next two years were hell.
So was the rest of his life to date, truth be told, but of course no sane human being could stop completely: the truism that life went on was exactly that, an immutable, if clichéd, fact.
He was alive at least, unlike James and Peter. He wasn’t destroyed by the Imperius, unlike Sirius, and he was free. ‘Free to do what?’ the niggling voice in his head asked, but he ignored it. He was free to work when he could, and to come here on holiday. He was free to remember the past, and even to plan for the future, bleak though it may sometimes seem.
He finished his second cup of coffee and went upstairs to pack: not that he had much to pack. For a few minutes, he debated whether he shouldn’t, after all, take a trip round the bay for old time’s sake, but decided that he couldn’t risk missing his train. Come to think of it, he and Sirius had cut it pretty fine back then, arriving at their platform about thirty seconds before the train was due to leave. Sirius had been forced to do a Freezing Spell on the guard as they clambered aboard.
He did go for a final walk down to the sea, where the beaches were filling up for another hot day: but he felt strangely detached, as if part of him had already left. The sunbathers seemed thin and insubstantial, and he had the irrational thought that if he looked at them any longer they would disappear.
Suddenly anxious to get as far away from here as possible, Remus almost sprinted back to the hotel to pay his bill, order a taxi to the station.
‘But your train isn’t until eleven,’ the receptionist chirped, counting out the notes he’d thrust across at her.
Remus shrugged. It was none of her business, but all the same he lied, ‘I’m meeting a friend at the station. For a drink.’
‘Ah!’ The receptionist beamed, relieved, happy even, to hear it. Well, it was her job to respond to clients, wasn’t it? Rather like being an actress, he supposed. And even if the friend was apocryphal, he could always have another coffee, buy a paper, read all the news from the Muggle world, if any.
Instead, he went to the buffet and ordered a double brandy, just like the French people Sirius had mentioned that morning. Not that morning, he chided himself: years ago, back in 1979. Dans le temps, he thought, in the day, wishing that sad little phrase hadn’t lodged in his mind. To exorcise it, he breathed deeply and went over to the jukebox, rather unsteadily, put in a coin, selected the song he wanted to hear.
According to a Veteran's Administration study
Half of the Vietnam combat veterans suffered from what psychiatrists call
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder...
Remus drained his glass and wished he could afford another. Still, he felt good, carefree even, as he mouthed the words. He wasn’t bothered that a few of the other patrons were looking at him curiously.
Slightly woozy, he stumbled on to the train ten minutes before it was due to leave and sat in his reserved seat, looking out at the station with its baskets of flowers, so calm beneath the flawless blue sky. He’d arrive in London around eleven that night, Apparate directly to his room under the eaves in a converted Victorian terrace. He’d probably sleep until midday the following morning, but it didn’t matter. He had nothing to wake up for: no job, no friends, no girl, no Sirius. No doubt there’d be the usual handful of owls from Dumbledore to respond to. Remus groaned inwardly at the thought.
The guard blew his whistle, the air-brakes were released, and the train creaked away. Remus had assumed that he’d doze off, but he found himself gazing out of the window, watching the outward journey unfurl in reverse, as if he were climbing back through the looking-glass. They stopped at Cannes, at Toulon: soon afterwards, the train rounded a bend, and the sea and red stone abruptly disappeared, swallowed up by fields and valleys, a suddenly overcast sky from which rain would eventually fall.
End
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: R/S
Era: Summer 1985/summer 1979: plenty of R/S interaction.
Summary: Remus returns to a French resort where he once stayed with Sirius.
Rating: PG-13
Thanks: To astra_argentea for the quick read-through.
AN: The lyrics quoted in the story are from 19 by Paul Hardcastle.
Crossposted to the_kennel and remusxsirius.
Voyage Sentimental
The train rounded a bend, and Remus got his first view of the coast, the distinctive red rock jutting out far into the Mediterranean, a white stucco villa perched, like an afterthought, right at the edge.
His carriage practically emptied at Toulon, the first stop of the long journey, but soon filled up again. The train became local then, with new passengers embarking to go just one or two stations down the line. That seemed strange to Remus, who had got on in Paris and endured seven hours of sitting in his cramped seat, dozing or trying to read, staring out of the window as the tame northern landscapes gradually grow wilder and less populated.
At Cannes, a woman with a dog settled down opposite him. The dog was shaggy, black and friendly, wagging its tail in a horribly familiar way. Remus did a double-take, flinched, and stood up to lift down his case, relieved that he was getting off at the next stop.
He could have Teleported, of course: the war was over, and you could travel freely between countries again. But he wanted to do things the way he and Sirius had before. He’d saved up for months to afford two nights, which would give him only one full day in the resort, though he really had no idea why he felt compelled to come back. Generally, he tried to avoid places where he and Sirius had been happy.
This time round, he wasn’t staying in one of the grand hotels on the front but had booked a room at a modest pension in the town’s main shopping street, just one block from the sea. He could only remember it very vaguely, but he had some idea that it would be noisy all night, and had taken care to bring plenty of Sleeping Potion. He’d always found it hard to sleep, now more than ever.
On the hot station concourse, he tried to charm a taxi to come to him out of the muddle that was French town traffic. He muttered a spell, two spells: a taxi pulled up in front of him, and he said in perfect French, ‘Hotel Draguignon, s’il vous plait.’
‘You speak French well,’ the taxi driver, not fooled, said in English.
Remus didn’t say, ‘Of course I do. I’m a wizard.’
The driver switched on his radio, which was playing the song that seemed to be everywhere that summer. It even sounded familiar to Remus, one of the Muggle hits that kept catching his attention as he wandered through London.
In inininininin Vietnam he was 19
n n n n nineteen...
The taxi driver turned the knob on his radio, so the end of the verse blared out,
I wasn't really sure what was going on
I wasn't really sure what was going on.
*
He and Sirius were nineteen too (n-n-n-n-nineteen, Remus’s brain chorused as he sat in the taxi six years later) when they rode down the streets he was riding down now, totally enthralled, pointing out landmarks to each other. ‘Hey, Padfoot, there are still people swimming! At seven o’clock!’
It was 1979, the Year of the Sheep: the Divination textbook defined it as a fallow year, a year to relax, to be creative and depend on others.
Remus and Sirius, the wolf and the dog, came to call it the Year of Escape. They spent most of the spring and summer dodging articles of doom in the Prophet, ignoring Dumbledore’s elegiac owls fluttering down on the breakfast table every few days. He was speaking of mobilising their strengths, recruiting all the recent school-leavers in the fight against the dictator who was rumoured to be gathering strength: rumours the Ministry of Magic alternately confirmed then denied.
Sirius, reading yet another article about the need to be extra vigilant in Diagon Alley, said, disgruntled, ‘I think this is the least relaxed year I’ve ever known. Oh, well, you can never trust astrology, even Chinese astrology.’
‘This war isn’t really going to happen,’ James said, whenever they saw him: not often, because he was engaged to Lily, and they were occupied with weddings and invitations and lists of presents from Lily’s Witch Bride magazine. When Remus said, ‘We shouldn’t hang round to find out,’ James replied, ‘It would be quite exciting, though, wouldn’t it?’ And then, warming to the subject, ‘You know, if these Knights of Walpurgis or whatever they’re called really exist, I bet Snivellus will join them. I hope I get the chance to beat his arse one of these days.’
‘For this you saved his life?’ Remus said, with mock solemnity, and Lily chimed in, ‘I really, really do not want to know,’ and Sirius said, ‘Who wants another drink? Prongs, your round, I think.’
When the news was pessimistic, Sirius would get indignant. ‘I don’t know why we can’t just go in there and Avada Kedavra this Voldemort bloke.’
‘I think people have tried,’ Remus said. ‘The Prophet last week said that anyone spotting him shouldn’t try to duel but call the Aurors immediately.’
‘I bet I could kill him,’ Sirius boasted.
‘Bet you couldn’t.’
‘Stop bickering,’ James said, and they subsided; though Remus thought that if anyone could beat Voldemort it would be Sirius, with his streak of wildness and extraordinary talent for hexes. But of course he wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of saying so: in those days, he occasionally felt as if he and Sirius were rivals, though for what he couldn’t say. For glory, perhaps, for casting the best charm, for singing better - nonsensical things. They weren't really in competition; it was just some symptom of their age, or their hormones, or the times they lived in.
*
At the hotel, Remus paid the taxi with unfamiliar Muggle money. He hadn’t handled this currency since he and Sirius set off in the train back to Paris and then home, and he suspected that he must have given too big a tip, because the driver drove off grinning, probably shaking his head at ‘ces Anglais’, who were so fearful in a foreign country, so damn generous.
He carried his case to reception, and was given the key to his first-floor room. The receptionist was chatty, perhaps given his good French, and perhaps because she felt safe with him. Women did seem to like confiding in him, he’d noticed. He obviously had a kind face, though he didn’t feel kind.
‘You will want to do an excursion, no?’ she suggested. ‘There are trips round the bay, and there’s the little train.’
Remus had had enough of trains for one day, but he smiled and nodded, and took the proffered brochure.
Up in his small, functional room, he opened the curtains and the window and stood for a moment watching the street outside. It was already well after six, and he decided to go and have a drink before he unpacked: after all, he was on holiday. It was so hot, too. He needed some refreshment.
He didn’t go down to the front but walked down past the English church to the pedestrian precinct, where the cafés with their awnings were welcoming early diners and drinkers. The shops had strange hours here in the south, languid hours, ten till twelve, three till seven, and most of them were still open.
He and Sirius had discovered a great many Muggle equivalents for Butterbeer and Firewhisky, and he racked his brains to remember the things they’d liked particularly. One of them was kir, as he recalled, a mixture of white wine and cassis: Sirius had been a bit dubious about whether it was the sort of thing blokes should be drinking. Remus countered that it tasted good and got you drunk, and what more could you want?
He sat on a cane chair under a maroon awning, ordered, and the waiter brought him his drink, dishes of crisps, peanuts and olives, an ashtray.
‘Is it taken?’ A woman slightly older than him hovered at the seat opposite. He really didn’t want to share his table, but when he looked round he saw that the café was actually full, so he reluctantly nodded at her to sit down. He hoped she’d realise that he had no intention of engaging in any sort of conversation with her.
But it seemed she wanted to practise her English. She ordered her drink, then said to him, ‘You are on holiday here, yes?’
‘Oui,’ Remus said, stubbornly sticking to French. But then, because sometimes he felt overwhelmed by the pressure of having no-one to talk to, he caved in and said in English, ‘I’ve been here before, though. With a friend. A while ago.’
Understanding leapt in the woman’s face, and pity too. He was used to that: he didn’t think he looked particularly melancholy, but he did seem to evoke a lot of sympathy, which he certainly didn’t want.
‘Ah, you had a, how you say. Chagrin d’amour?’
He could see girls in her eyes, or rather, one girl, a small, mouse-like girl who wasn’t quite the prettiest but pretty enough, who’d left this sad-looking man for another boy and broken his heart.
‘You were happy here,’ she persisted. ‘So you’ve come back to recreate this, this affaire, non?’
Remus didn’t reply, but downed the rest of his kir, and motioned the waiter to order a second one. He couldn’t see his way out of ordering a drink for her too, simply from good manners, though he was mentally gritting his teeth now. It was one thing for him to remember being here with Sirius, quite another to be grilled about it.
He said, ‘Yes, I was.’
The woman sighed and said, ‘I was here with my husband once, dans le temps. That means - how d’you say? Once upon a time? In the day,’ she translated, and fell silent, obviously ruminating on her own lost love.
He really didn’t want to know about her husband, who was probably dead or had run away with a younger woman. He smiled vaguely at her, willing her to finish her drink and go, stop projecting on to this open-looking stranger. She obviously had no idea that he was locked and bolted and had thrown away the key.
All the same, he couldn’t help thinking of his own once upon a time, the days when it was him and Sirius, before Sirius was put under the Imperius - because there was no way otherwise he would have betrayed the Potters and killed Peter. There was a sharp division between those days and the dreary period of now, of Sirius in Azkaban where visitors weren’t allowed, with its five-mile owl exclusion zone so you could neither write to prisoners nor they to you. Remus would have liked to hear Sirius’s side of the story, but of course he never would.
*
The summer they were nineteen, before the war started in earnest, they still didn’t realise how bad things would get. Otherwise, Sirius, the old Sirius, the real Sirius, would never have said, ‘Let’s go away for a while.’ He was reading the Prophet’s Sunday supplement, which had moving pictures of girls in bikinis lying by swimming pools, handsome wizards waving their wands.
Remus assumed he meant somewhere in England, simply because he didn’t think they could go anywhere else. The Teleports were all heavily guarded that year, so nobody could leave the country, except a few high-up ministers. The Ministry assured its population that this was for their safety, and some of them still wanted nothing more than to believe it.
‘Cornwall’s nice,’ he said a bit dubiously.
But Sirius, with his triple-starred Outstanding in Muggle Studies NEWT, said, ‘I don’t think I want to stay in England at the moment. I’ve heard that the South of France is pleasant at this time of year. We’ll travel the Muggle way, by plane.’
The plane seemed to Remus more terrifying than a whole deputation of Dark Wizards, so they compromised on the train, because that would be no worse than the Hogwarts Express.
They decided on a destination by closing their eyes, aiming their wands at Remus’s Wizarding Atlas, and choosing the point in the middle, landing with almost exact arithmantical precision on a famous seaside resort.
In spite of his high mark, Sirius found that Muggle travel was more complicated than he’d imagined. With the help of his school textbook, he and Remus managed to create passports for themselves: the main problem was fixing the little photos so they wouldn’t wink or smile.
Then, they had to book tickets, because it seemed that Muggle transport filled up fast, and you weren’t allowed to travel if you hadn’t reserved a seat. They’d have to catch a ferry and cross the channel. They’d have to spend half a day sitting in the train. What was more, they couldn’t create their own tickets, because of something called double-booking. But really it was quite an adventure, going to Victoria Station and talking to a man in a little booth, passing over unfamiliar pound notes, taking the ungenerous tickets, tiny cardboard rectangles that got lost so often that Remus took to Accio’ing them without even thinking about it, whenever they were needed.
Sirius took the journey very seriously. To pass the time, he created two tiny boxes with earplugs. ‘The Muggles call this sort of thing a Walkman,’ he explained to Remus
In fact, the slim, white machines with their soft earplugs were streets ahead of the current Muggle technology, small enough to slip into a robe pocket, yet designed to contain as much music as you wanted.
‘I’ve charmed yours to play Blodwyn Bludd’s collected hits,’ Remus said spitefully, because he was jealous that he hadn’t dreamed up the miniature musical boxes himself.
Sirius wrestled him to the ground for that, and they had a fairly vicious scuffle.
‘Anyway, you didn’t come up with the original concept,’ Remus pointed out, and Sirius sighed exaggeratedly.
‘I’m not an inventor, Moony. Look in your crystal ball. In thirty years’ time, every Muggle will own one of these.’
Their fight didn’t last long, not with all the excitement of making their plans. Once they were safely across the channel, they hugged each other, relieved, laughing, because they were running away and had nearly made it. Neither of them wanted to mention that they’d have to go back at some stage, when their money ran out; or when the full moon came.
Remus sometimes wondered whether they’d have stayed forever if it hadn’t been for his affliction. But he’d got used to factoring it in to his fate, and the fate of anyone involved with him, so he never wasted too much time, or pain, on speculation.
He didn’t remember much about the journey. He and Sirius listened to music, ate big red cherries that they’d bought at a stall near the Gare de Lyon: twice the size of the cherries you could get in England that year, or any year. They didn’t quite hold hands. It was hot, though, like now, so hot that the sweat was running down his face and neither he nor Sirius quite dared take out their wands to do a cooling charm.
There was, he recalled, a woman staring at them. Sirius nudged him and muttered, ‘I think she fancies you,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ sarcastically, because how would any woman fancy him when Sirius was sitting beside him?
*
Feeling like a seasoned traveller this time round, Remus said a firm ‘Bonsoir’ to the woman at his table and, slightly drunk from his three kirs, strolled back to the hotel. He unpacked his case, hanging his Muggle clothes neatly on the black plastic hangers, had a shower, using his wand to make the water run at exactly the right temperature, then went out to find somewhere to eat.
The tables on the pavements with their parasols were crowded, people laughing and chattering, and Remus realised he was hungry.
He sat down at the fullest, most popular restaurant, a trick Sirius had taught him, and ordered a jug of wine.
A few tables away, two boys in their late teens sat facing each, talking animatedly. Remus amused himself trying to guess whether they were lovers or just friends. He even wondered whether they weren’t actually ghosts, younger versions of him and Sirius stuck forever on what could have been termed a honeymoon, if you were sentimental and girlish, which neither of them had been.
The dark, better-looking boy said something to the fairer, more nondescript one, and they both burst out laughing, so loudly that everyone turned to stare at them. Not ghosts, then. Remus found himself watching them covertly, checking to see whether they looked into each other’s eyes for too long, or touched hands, or smiled as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. He wondered whether anyone had watched him and Sirius like that. Probably, but they’d been too absorbed in each other to notice, too much in love, he realised, now that it was far too late; now that Sirius had been utterly destroyed and would never come back.
They didn’t talk about love when they were nineteen, of course. Boys didn’t. They argued, or they discussed the war and the Order, James and Lily, Peter’s extraordinarily rapid promotion at the Ministry, magic and Quidditch. They talked about sex, sometimes, in a context of its own.
*
The beaches here weren’t sandy, but shingled like English beaches: some property of the Mediterranean, it seemed, of the generally rocky terrain. The tides were gentle, possibly too gentle to have eroded the stone into sand over the millennia.
In 1979, he and Sirius put hardening charms on their feet so they could run up and down the beach to the sea, getting rid of some of the energy that had been coiled up inside them with the frustration of being unable either to fight or retreat.
They were staying at the smartest hotel in town, a historic building on the front, so luxurious that even Sirius was taken aback when they were shown to their room. It had a swimming-pool, of course, but they also had access to its private beach, the best beach, with its sun-loungers and parasols. They lay in the sun all day, ordering fancy drinks with varying amounts of alcohol, so by evening they were pretty well drunk even before starting on the wine with dinner.
No, love was never mentioned in those days. They were two boys trying their best to be decadent, and succeeding pretty well, making good use of the wide twin beds in their room. It was really far too hot for sex, but there were cooling charms and icy showers, and they’d both been sparked by their escape, their own initiative and daring.
On the beach, they checked out the French girls, who tended to be slight and thin, the sort of girls Sirius had dated when he was sixteen, the sort of girls that Remus had often gazed at longingly, out of his league.
It would have been Sirius who suggested they pick up one of the friendlier-looking ones and bring her back to the hotel, but Remus agreed at once. It wasn’t too difficult to persuade one of the girls from the beach to go along with them: perhaps it was true what Sirius said, that girls were just as avid for new experiences as blokes were.
‘It’s for you,’ Sirius whispered as they went up in the lift.
Before Remus, Sirius had had plenty of experience with girls, but Remus hadn’t ever slept with anyone but Sirius. He understood that this was a present, a means of losing his virginity in the accepted sense, and he was drunk enough to find the thought both generous and arousing.
When they were safely upstairs, with the Ne Pas Déranger sign on the door, the three of them had more to drink from the fridge, which was kept well-stocked. Their drinks, Remus reckoned, would probably cost almost as much as the room.
The girl looked round curiously, taking in the thick carpet, the giant television, making an excuse that she needed the loo to have a look at the bathroom, which contained a tub so big that he and Sirius always shared it. Remus’s whole loo and shower in the modest Hotel Draguignon would be dwarfed just by that bath.
He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever even known it. She was blonde and deeply tanned, pretty without being remarkable. She wore a short dress over her bathing-suit, and once she’d satisfied her curiosity about the room, she kept casting longing glances at Sirius, who ignored her. ‘C’est pour mon ami,’ he explained, in his impeccable, Babel Spell French, and she shrugged as if to say ‘too bad’, but seemed quite happy when Remus rather clumsily removed her clothes. Sirius lay beside him, encouraging him. ‘You’ll really like it, Moony,’ he promised, and Remus did, that sensation rather like drowning, like being pulled in by the gentle Mediterranean tide. He’d slept with a couple of girls since then, but neither of them had come anywhere near giving him as much pleasure as the first one.
His enjoyment could have had something to do with Sirius too. Afterwards, he said, ‘Was that okay?’ and Remus said, ‘It was amazing,’ and they kissed until Remus felt dizzy. The girl beside them grew restless, probably expecting her turn with Sirius then, but it wasn’t destined for that particular evening.
He felt the bed lightening as she heaved herself off - strange how a slim French girl could make such a weight on the soft mattress - with a sigh of exasperation and she said, in English, ‘You waste your time with me.’
By the time they’d finished, she was sitting looking out of the window, yawning, a can of beer from the fridge in her hand. Her expression was unreadable, but Sirius eventually stirred himself and pressed what looked like a fifty-franc note into her hand. Remus was worried about that, considering the enormous bills they’d already run up, but he didn’t say anything, because Sirius got cross when he went on about their finances.
After she’d gone, he said tentatively, ‘It was better with you, though.’
‘I know,’ Sirius said. He looked happy and satisfied and slept with his arms round Remus, grumbling whenever Remus shifted.
*
This year, Remus was restricted to the public beach, where the poorer tourists lay on towels on the stones, which seemed to have grown much sharper during the past six years.
He bought three postcards at the shop on the front, though he didn’t have anyone to send a card too, and went down the steps to claim a place close to the water. The stones weren’t so bad if you were a wizard, of course, and knew sixteen softening spells, one of which made him feel as if his towel was on a bed of the softest feathers.
Stripping off his t-shirt and jeans and turning on to his stomach, he took out a card depicting the Promenade des Anglais, the main artery of the town, with the smart hotels and shops on one side, the sea on the other. Realising that he only had quills in his canvas bag, he discreetly Transfigured one of them into a biro and scrawled:
S, here I am again! Do you remember walking by the sea with me? And saying that we should just stay here forever? But we didn’t. And I do so wish that we’d been cowards instead of good Gryffindors. Well, I had grand ideas of heroism, and so did you. I miss you. R.
He put it in his bag, wandering if there were any magic that could waft it to Azkaban. There wasn’t, of course, and even if there had been, what would be the point? The Imperius took people over, changed them not just for a while but forever. Sirius under his curse would sneer no doubt at the thought of that stupid holiday, when his stupid boyfriend had deluded himself that they were happy; and safe, just for a couple of weeks.
The sun beat down, and on his own he felt restless and bored, in a way he could never have imagined when he and Sirius were together. He wished he still had his white box with headphones, but he didn’t have a clue where it was. He thought it must be in a trunk somewhere, in the attic of his parents’ house, together with all his other souvenirs of the days with Sirius. Not that he needed it: the couple next to him had their radio tuned to an English pop channel, and Remus recognised once again the song from the taxi, with its distinctive stuttering chorus, its lyrics about death and d-d-d-destruction and soldiers whose average age was nineteen.
In Vietnam the combat soldier typically served a twelve month tour of duty but was exposed to hostile fire almost everyday...
He shivered for a moment under the blazing sun. Of course, he knew the song wasn’t about their war, but it could have been. Actually, the average age of Voldemort’s victims would have been far higher than nineteen: or maybe not. Regulus, just for one, had only been eighteen or so, James and Lily not long past twenty-one. He couldn’t be bothered to do the maths: it was hardly important anyway.
He shook his head and decided to go for a swim to clear his mind.
A group of women with small children was playing at the edge of the sea, dipping the giggling toddlers into the shallow water, occasionally expostulating. French woman seemed to talk to their children as if they were small adults, unlike English women, who were addicted to baby talk.
‘Mais, dis-donc, ne faut pas manger les cailloux!’ one woman was saying, tapping a tiny child on its leg. She was blond and tanned, and Remus wondered for a moment whether she was the same girl he’d slept with six years ago, having since fulfilled her biological imperative and given birth.
Perhaps one of the children playing there was his... Not bloody likely, his sensible self chided him. For a start, they all looked under three, even to his inexpert eye. Anyway, he’d remembered to cast a post-conception charm on the girl while she was walking out the door, her slim hips swaying.
The children started cheering as a couple of paragliders took off from the beach. He and Sirius had tried paragliding a few times. ‘Not as good as a really fast broomstick,’ Sirius had pronounced as they were wafted up on the yellow parachute, ‘but good enough. For a Muggle thing.’ Sirius looked round haughtily as they floated through the air, but even he’d cried out involuntarily as they were dropped down into the water again.
*
Remus bought lunch at a café, a rather stale baguette with sweating ham, more worthy of King’s Cross than Nice, and went for a walk. He had a specific destination in mind, slightly away from the centre, a memorial to the victims of two Muggle wars.
It was an imposing, art-deco marble monument with the names of the dead from the town, and he imagined, superimposed on top, the names of the dead in the war against Voldemort, who had no cenotaph, no remembrance day, no poppies.
If he were to design such a monument, it would also have a section for the living dead, for those who had been damaged forever by the war. The Longbottoms would be on it, and Harry Potter, and Sirius Black.
He gazed at the edifice for a while until the edges shimmered and blurred in the sunshine, then blinked rapidly a few times and turned away.
Strolling back down the Promenade des Anglais he passed a park across the road to his right, which boasted a wonderful double-decker carousel. It probably dated from the twenties or thirties, a sparkling jewel of gilt and mirrors, with dazzling artificial lights. A handful of children were waiting with their mothers for the next ride to start.
Remus had forgotten the carousel, had forgotten Sirius, who never had a real childhood and could therefore be such a child, pleading for them to have a ride on the painted horses. ‘Come on, Moony. You know you want to.’
‘I don’t.’ Remus thought it was totally uncool for two nineteen year-olds to be seen on a children’s merry-go-round, and he still did. It was the sort of thing girls went in for, and he told Sirius so.
Sirius snorted and said, ‘Well, exactly. Right up your street.’
Remus remembered wanting to punch and bite Sirius then, hurt him. He was sensitive about being with Sirius, even tempted to retort, ‘Well, it was me who slept with the girl the other night.’ However, he had enough sense to swallow the words unsaid.
Sirius said dismissively, ‘I’m going anyway. You’ll have to wait.’ He turned away and joined the queue, where, far from thinking him uncool, the women with their children seemed to be chatting with him, friendly and open.
In the end, Remus reluctantly ambled over and joined Sirius in the line, throwing hard glances at the women, daring a single child to snigger at him. Nobody did, of course, because he had his handsome, magic shield, the fearless boy who climbed up to the top deck of the wonderful carousel, dragging him by the hand, and perched on a horse, looking like a beautiful warrior going to fight in the crusade against goblins. In a way, Remus wished he’d stayed down in the park so he could drink in Sirius properly, from a distance, as he went round on his blue and silver steed; maybe take a photo. Still, to his surprise, he enjoyed the ride too. The Muggle device with its tinkly music wasn’t quite as good as the magic roundabouts of his childhood, but it was more of an adventure.
Sirius thought so too. ‘We might have fallen off,’ he said, blazing with excitement. ‘Not a single sticking spell! That was amazing, Moony, wasn’t it?’
And for the rest of the day, Sirius hummed the tinny song that had been playing as they went round, up and down, a tune that sounded rather like Hot, Sweet Cauldron of Love, only a bit jauntier.
*
In the evening, he went to a different restaurant, a café-bar, and ate mussels and chips washed down with beer. He felt as if he’d been here forever: perhaps he and Sirius had never left, and the intervening six years had been a dream. Or perhaps it was because he was on his own that the past twenty-four hours seemed to have gone so slowly. He wondered whether this was how his existence would now unfold, slowly, with no new experiences, only old ones to haunt him.
‘But you did have new experiences,’ the perverse little voice in his head remarked. ‘Sirius would never have gone to see a war monument. He’d have been bored. He’d have wanted to go on to the old town, and the castle, and on boat trips.’
‘We did all that anyway,’ Remus said mentally, hoping to Merlin that he hadn’t spoken aloud, that he wasn’t going to end up a crazy old man talking to himself. He dipped a chip in mayonnaise and put in firmly in his mouth to shut himself up.
In fact, they’d gone on several boat trips, because Sirius was obsessed with sailing. Remus booked all the expeditions, as he was better at dealing with the unfamiliar money. On their last day, they did their fifth, and final, trip round the bay. ‘What they call a voyage sentimental,’ Sirius said: he knew enough French by now not to need a spell, unlike Remus, who was slow at languages. ‘So we won’t forget it.’
‘I managed to use the rest of our loose francs,’ Remus said that morning, as they sat at breakfast in the vast, beautiful dining room that reminded him of a cathedral.
‘We’ll make a Muggle of you yet,’ Sirius teased. Coming from him, that was a compliment, but Remus remarked, ‘I’d rather not. My grandmother actually washes dishes by hand, with a cloth.’
‘Well, she’s a bit old-fashioned, isn’t she? Lily told me they have machines to wash dishes,’ Sirius said, gesturing to the waiter for more butter. Sirius always used loads of butter: it drove Remus mad, the way he slathered it on to his croissants, with just a smear of apricot jam on top.
‘You won’t be able to taste anything,’ he said, feeling the words a bit prim in his mouth but unable to take them back.
‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s delicious.’ Sirius started on his third croissant, and added, ‘We should be like those French people in cafés, drinking brandy for breakfast.’
‘Yeah, but just think how bad you’d feel by lunchtime.’ Anti-hangover charms were reliable, but you had to be in a fit state to use them preventively. Three nights ago, he’d been so drunk that he forgot to cast the spell before he went to sleep. He never again wanted to experience anything like the pounding in his head when he woke up the following morning. Of course, he’d managed to stop it almost at once, but he now understood why the other tourists didn’t seem to drink even a quarter as much as he and Sirius did.
Later on, they stood at the railings of the boat, watching the sea part in its wake, and Remus felt faintly sick again, the way he had after that drinking spree. It didn’t really have anything to do with the motion of the craft, or the guide droning on about the hills of Provence, the cyprus and olive trees, the vineyards... It was more about the waxing moon, the return tickets tucked safely in his wallet, the dread of what they would find when they arrived home.
*
In his rather smaller pension, he ate his last breakfast in the little courtyard with its fountain. He had several helpings of rolls and jam: he probably wouldn’t be able to afford much else until he got back to London.
At least his homecoming would be more predictable this time: not to a barrage of owls about the Order of the Phoenix, not to the news of seven deaths, of strange marks seen in the sky. In the Leaky Cauldron on their first evening back, James hugged Sirius fiercely, saying ‘Where the hell have you been?’ and Lily said, ‘You two look brown,’ and then burst into tears and wept as if her heart would break. When Remus asked, puzzled, ‘The wedding isn’t off or anything, is it?’ she shook her head, unable to speak.
Peter, who was buying his round, came back with four firewhiskies and a gin, and James said firmly, ‘No more gin for Lily, or she’ll never bloody stop crying,’ and drained the glass himself. As far as Remus could recollect, Lily was so dumbfounded that she actually did stop. But the memory was subsumed by Sirius’s look of utter dismay, no doubt mirroring his own; the rest of the evening had disappeared into oblivion. And the next day was the full moon, and the next two years were hell.
So was the rest of his life to date, truth be told, but of course no sane human being could stop completely: the truism that life went on was exactly that, an immutable, if clichéd, fact.
He was alive at least, unlike James and Peter. He wasn’t destroyed by the Imperius, unlike Sirius, and he was free. ‘Free to do what?’ the niggling voice in his head asked, but he ignored it. He was free to work when he could, and to come here on holiday. He was free to remember the past, and even to plan for the future, bleak though it may sometimes seem.
He finished his second cup of coffee and went upstairs to pack: not that he had much to pack. For a few minutes, he debated whether he shouldn’t, after all, take a trip round the bay for old time’s sake, but decided that he couldn’t risk missing his train. Come to think of it, he and Sirius had cut it pretty fine back then, arriving at their platform about thirty seconds before the train was due to leave. Sirius had been forced to do a Freezing Spell on the guard as they clambered aboard.
He did go for a final walk down to the sea, where the beaches were filling up for another hot day: but he felt strangely detached, as if part of him had already left. The sunbathers seemed thin and insubstantial, and he had the irrational thought that if he looked at them any longer they would disappear.
Suddenly anxious to get as far away from here as possible, Remus almost sprinted back to the hotel to pay his bill, order a taxi to the station.
‘But your train isn’t until eleven,’ the receptionist chirped, counting out the notes he’d thrust across at her.
Remus shrugged. It was none of her business, but all the same he lied, ‘I’m meeting a friend at the station. For a drink.’
‘Ah!’ The receptionist beamed, relieved, happy even, to hear it. Well, it was her job to respond to clients, wasn’t it? Rather like being an actress, he supposed. And even if the friend was apocryphal, he could always have another coffee, buy a paper, read all the news from the Muggle world, if any.
Instead, he went to the buffet and ordered a double brandy, just like the French people Sirius had mentioned that morning. Not that morning, he chided himself: years ago, back in 1979. Dans le temps, he thought, in the day, wishing that sad little phrase hadn’t lodged in his mind. To exorcise it, he breathed deeply and went over to the jukebox, rather unsteadily, put in a coin, selected the song he wanted to hear.
According to a Veteran's Administration study
Half of the Vietnam combat veterans suffered from what psychiatrists call
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder...
Remus drained his glass and wished he could afford another. Still, he felt good, carefree even, as he mouthed the words. He wasn’t bothered that a few of the other patrons were looking at him curiously.
Slightly woozy, he stumbled on to the train ten minutes before it was due to leave and sat in his reserved seat, looking out at the station with its baskets of flowers, so calm beneath the flawless blue sky. He’d arrive in London around eleven that night, Apparate directly to his room under the eaves in a converted Victorian terrace. He’d probably sleep until midday the following morning, but it didn’t matter. He had nothing to wake up for: no job, no friends, no girl, no Sirius. No doubt there’d be the usual handful of owls from Dumbledore to respond to. Remus groaned inwardly at the thought.
The guard blew his whistle, the air-brakes were released, and the train creaked away. Remus had assumed that he’d doze off, but he found himself gazing out of the window, watching the outward journey unfurl in reverse, as if he were climbing back through the looking-glass. They stopped at Cannes, at Toulon: soon afterwards, the train rounded a bend, and the sea and red stone abruptly disappeared, swallowed up by fields and valleys, a suddenly overcast sky from which rain would eventually fall.
End