Dirty laundry!
It's Coming Out of the WIP Closet Day. Showcase the crap that's been rotting on your hard drive, kids! I have the attention span of a gnat with ADHD, so I have... too many. Cookies follow:
Untitled Bill/Fleur (mostly gen)
A/N: Veela are cool. I made up an evolutionary backstory and social history for them before being distracted by something shiny.
Fleur considers herself lucky to be only part-veela. She has full Wizard status, for one thing, and can legally carry a wand; unlike her Grandmother, who tended bar in Paris during the Grindelwald war and kept a string of Wizard lovers who could do magic for her, should she ever have needed it. (J'ai détesté cet endroit, she would always say. "All the girls were Veelas. It was a glorified zoo. And the men! The things they would do -" And then Fleur’s mother would usually interrupt.)
Untitled, Christmas-themed Sirius/Remus
A/N: Teh fluff.
"Ah," says Remus softly, picking up his pace. "I’d thought I saw a stand of them around here."
They emerge suddenly into a snowy clearing, and there are shafts of gray light filtering through the canopy overhead, and Sirius sees what they’ve come here for: a weak little stand of fir trees, dusty green-gray and drifted with crackled, sparking snow. Remus circles around them, with his head tilted again (maybe it’s just a habit, after all) and stops to run a gloved hand over one that stands about as tall as him. Snow rains off of it in a hiss, and sticks in clumps to his glove, which he brushes absently against his robes.
"This really isn’t necessary," Remus demurs, for the third time that afternoon. It must strike him how silly it is to say that when they’re already a mile into the Forbidden Forest, because he drops his chin to his chest and laughs. His hair falls forward into his eyes, and there’s a little snow in it.
"Course it is," says Sirius, grinning. "Everybody needs a Christmas."
Remus looks up at him with a startling darkness in his eyes, as if he knows something Sirius doesn’t; in that moment he looks older than Sirius by a decade.
"I’ve missed Christmas before," he says. "It was the day after the full moon a few years ago. It was fine."
Sirius shakes his head. There’s something he wants to say; that it’s not fine, that he’s sorry Remus thinks it is. That he doesn’t understand how something to which he feels so entitled can embarrass Remus so, as if it’s a decadent, ostentatious thing.
But he only says, "How do we get it down?"
"Severing Charm should do it." Remus pulls his wand out his sleeve and crouches low upon the snow. "I’ll cast, you catch."
Sirius frowns for a moment before he understands what Remus means. Then he moves opposite Remus and opens his arms, his large hands cupped and ready.
"Abscido," Remus whispers, tapping the trunk once with his wand, and the tree creaks and leans toward Sirius. Remus always whispers his spells, crisply, precisely, in a crystalline hiss. Not like James, who mumbles them absently, and with a quick flick of his wand: the lazy confidence of a pureblood. Nor like Peter, who enunciates loudly and slowly, as if magic is a foreign language, one he’s struggling to learn.
"Abscido," Remus says again, the tree emits a startling crack and sways in an arc, toppling. Sirius throws out his hands to catch it, but it stops and hangs at a forty-five degree angle, shivering and dropping snow.
The Golden Girls go to Howarts - a screenplay
A/N: I just... I'd forgotten about this one, and when I found it I actually screamed. Blame Lisa.
Dorothy: This is even more exciting than the time we won tickets to see Burt Reynolds!
Blanche: Even more than the time I wrote the great American novel!
Sophia: Even more than the time Mario Zepponi burnt down the neighboring village in an attempt to get an edge in the following day’s inter-village Bacci championship!
Rose: Even more than the time Sven Gundlafsen’s prize pig had quintuplets!
Peter Pan - Wendy/a Mermaid
A/N: Peter Pan = sex.
And there’s a hand, wet and webbed, over her own, and it’s warm, not cold. This thing is not a fish, chill and empty, and it has a face. Hard black eyes. Wendy stares into them, and the lightheaded thrill of everything she’s seen tonight ebbs away, and there’s suddenly such perfect calm in her that her heart nearly breaks, as she knows it will whenever it knows perfection, like this mermaid’s skin.
Untitled Narcissa gen
A/N: This was supposed to be this whole fucking in-depth psychological whatever before I decided I didn't actually care that much about Narcissa. Eh.
No one ever believes Narcissa when she tells them her wedding to Lucius Malfoy was a simple ceremony. They think she’s being modest, or that her reckoning of "simple" is a touch different from most people’s. But it was simple, and relatively cheap - much to the disgust of the elder Malfoys. They were married at the Blacks’ summer villa in Bordeaux, on one of the wide, sloping lawns. At her mother’s request, an arching tunnel of climbing roses had been charmed and cropped into existence, and underneath it they took their vows. Narcissa remembers feeling oddly detached that day, removed from the weight and loadedness of it all. She nearly made herself late for the ceremony when she spent an unmeasured lapse staring at herself in the mirror, resplendent and half-dressed, missing her veil and her circlet and most of her petticoats, her hair glued and dried into a cathedral of curls that looked as though they would be painful to touch. Her head felt heavy, and kept wandering lazily from side to side, as if she had a fever. She stared as if frozen, thinking of nothing in particular, admiring the patrician arch of her nose from one angle, the slight weakness of her chin from another. She turned and tilted her face back and forth, up and down, looking for an angle from which he was perfect: her flaws hidden, her pretty parts in full view. Her Maid of Honor, Ivy Baddock, came knocking before she found it.
"Cissy, what are you doing?" she cried, rustling over in her huge, rose-blush dress, with her cleavage propped up to her collarbone and jiggling vulgarly. "We’ve got, what, twenty minutes? Pull your underthings on!" Narcissa blinked at her, as if snapping out of something, and went to the bed on which her petticoats lay. First a layer of satin, then another of thick wool, then a crisp, spiky frill of netting that propped her skirts out like an umbrella, then another layer of wool, trimmed with lace, to soften the sharpness of the wiry net.
"Good," Ivy cooed, like an impatient governess. "Where are your head things? Your veil?"
Narcissa found them on top of her vanity and Ivy helped her put them on, sticking in tiny, enchanted pins that wound and curled through her hair like vines, pulling painfully in a few places. Narcissa didn’t wince; she was used to this, the beauty rituals, the hurts that came with them. Her mother had put it this way: she had gotten her beauty for free, but she would have to pay to keep it. A straightforward, pay-as-you-go transaction. An absolute bargain, in her opinion. Narcissa found this acceptable. Her mother always seemed to know the value of things.
"There," said Ivy breathlessly, holding her by the shoulders and scanning her with wide, wet eyes. "You look stunning."
She felt dizzy. Her hair seemed to be giving off fumes. She imagined if she fainted, her dress, full of wires and meshes and bones, would keep her standing. Propped at an awkward lean like a porcelain doll. She wondered if the guests would be able to smell her coming down the aisle.
Ivy had to lead her down the stairs, because of the veil. It made everything look overexposed, like stepping from a dark house into a too-bright day. She could hear herself breathing inside it.
She remembers these things better than she remembers the vows, or the reception. There was her family on the right, mostly beaming. Bellatrix looked sullen because she was older than Narcissa and still unmarried. Narcissa tilted her head as she passed Bellatrix, taunting her with a beatific smile. There were the Malfoys on the left, with their elfin chins and long noses and heavy, old-fashioned furs. The look on Mrs. Malfoy’s face sparked a glow of pride in the center of Narcissa’s chest: half-lidded eyes, a faint smile. Acceptance. She was acceptable.
And there was Lucius, his shoulders held back, his hands folded behind his back, his chin jutting high. He was older than she was but still hadn’t grown into his face; his nose still seemed rodent-like, his cheekbones too heavy for his chin.
He’s certainly improved with age, she reflects proudly as she sips Earl Grey out of a bone china cup - a wedding present from the Malfoy side. An aunt, she thinks, but she doesn’t remember which. Lucius would know, but would be quite the faux pas to ask him. The cup was part of a set of eight, though now there are only six. The china is so fine that when she drinks from it, she can see through the bottom a the glow of the sun setting through the conservatory window.
My current WIP - Remus/a portrait of Sirius
A/N: Please Jesus let me actually finish this one. This is about a third of what I've got so far.
"He was a good man, Remus."
Dumbledore’s office is hushed and sparkling, filled with lovely and fantastical things. The diffused yellow light, and its shifting crystalline glint off of all of Dumbledore’s delicate, beautiful things, and the low seashore whisper of the portraits on the walls makes Remus faintly sleepy, and he settles back into his chair with his hands warm in his pockets and lets Dumbledore talk to him, counsel him, medicate him with that dusty-soft ancient voice. To Remus his voice feels herbal, soft and leathery and veined, covered in a fine sharp-smelling dust, possessed of all manner of talents. The ability to heal, or enhance, or poison. His voice is a drug.
One of the dead Headmasters gives a quick, jarring sniff, and Remus realizes that he’s on the edge of sleep. He sits up straight and crosses his legs, frowning slightly as if deep in thought. Dumbledore has paused, and is regarding him with his fingers steepled under his long, crooked nose.
"Don’t you think so?"
Remus blinks. "That Sirius was...?" Dumbledore gives a tiny nod. Remus hesitates, then says, "No. We are none of us good men, anymore."
Dumbledore tilts his head to one side. "Are you to be the judge of that, Remus?"
Remus smiles bitterly. "No more than you are, Headmaster." He waits for Dumbledore’s reaction, but there is none. Dumbledore stares at him with inscrutable blue eyes, his face the same placid mystery it always is when he is not smiling. Remus sighs. "We’ve all... fought. That’s all we’re good for, anymore. We’ve all done things, and thought of doing things, and wanted to do things that… good is not a word that applies to us anymore. Nor any other word like it. We pick people to kill and people to save. We wear our bodies and our morals out destroying things to protect other things. We’re mushy inconsistent things that eat and walk about and speak and sneeze and - if we’re lucky - laugh and fuck and -"
He stops and brings the tips of his thin fingers to the bridge of his nose.
"You are a good man," says Dumbledore simply.
Remus slips his hands back into his pockets and lets his head fall back until he’s looking at the ceiling. "When Sirius went through, the second thought I had was that Harry was going to go in after him, just run and dive. And I grabbed him and held him and he fought me so hard." He clears his throat; his hands have bunched into fists against his thighs. "The first thought I had was that I was going in after him. I’d just... follow him. And even as I was hanging on to Harry I wanted - I wanted to push him down and leave him there and just walk in after Sirius. I was thinking... that would be the end of all the bad things, all the worry. I had no objections to just... giving up." He lifts his head and looks at Dumbledore, his eyes narrow. "I no longer fool myself that I’m good, Headmaster. I know myself too well for that."
"You didn’t, however." Remus frowns. Dumbledore spreads his hands. "You didn’t let Harry go, and you didn’t go through after Sirius. You held on -" He raises his eyebrows. "- in more ways than one. You loved Sirius, and you gave him up because the only other option was an unconscionable one. That, Remus, makes you a good man."
Remus lips thin, and his expression grows repressive and tight. "Yes, Headmaster," he says, and winces internally at how meek and boyish he sounds. Dumbledore’s face turns a fraction of an inch to one side.
"Is there something you wish to say, Remus?"
Remus smiles tightly. "No. I think I’d better get - get back." He had been about to say home.
Dumbledore smiles benevolently, but Remus has already stood and turned away. As he walks out of the office and down the stairs, he hears one of the portraits say, "My, bitterness certainly doesn’t -"
The door shuts and cuts the dead wizard off. Remus removes his hands from his pockets and flexes his fingers.
*
At Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, the noble and most ancient house of Black, the filthy, moldering lair of the toujours pur, Remus throws himself down on a downstairs sofa and curls into a ball. The house is empty, but there’s an undertow of rustlings. Rodents in the walls, and the idle shifting of portraits, and - Remus imagines - the network of dark magic over the place, taut and discreet like a spider’s web, glimmering in the gray shafts of sunlight under the closed velvet curtains, in the many tarnished silver trinkets that Sirius had never gotten around to getting rid of, in Mrs. Black’s malevolent, shining eyes...
He finally falls asleep.
He dreams that he’s woken by a sound, and he isn’t sure what it is at first, but then he hears it again: Sirius is calling him. He bolts off the sofa and stands utterly still in the middle of the room, listening. It’s coming from the kitchen. He runs in, but there’s no one there, and Sirius is still crying out. It’s too faint to tell what he’s saying, but Remus, so familiar with Sirius when he’s wordless, when he’s moaning or sighing or screaming, knows absolutely that it’s him. He follows the sound to Kreacher’s cupboard, vacant now but still sour with the smell of him. In the baseboard there’s a hole, and Remus reaches into it. It’s too narrow to fit him, he thinks, but suddenly he’s falling in, falling in complete darkness. "Sirius?" he calls out as he falls, and he has just long enough to feel awkward about the silence the follows before he hits the ground without a sound.
He isn’t injured. He stands up and listens, and when another cry comes it’s louder, and a distinct word now: Remus! Remus starts toward it with his hands out in front of him, as it’s still dark. His fingers brush against a wall, and he feels long it until he finds the crack of a door, and then a doorknob. It’s locked, but when he hears Sirius cry out again an angry sort of desperation surges through him and he punches at it with all his might. It tears like paper. He walks through it, and is in the gardens of the Black house, drenched in sun. Sirius is sitting at the lip of a cool, babbling fountain, and Remus calls out to him: "Sirius! Do you need me?" Sirius doesn’t respond. Suddenly Remus thinks, there isn’t any garden. There’s no garden at this house.
He wakes up. There is a loud rattle in the kitchen, and Remus starts badly. Tonks’s voice hisses, "Sorry!"
There is deep, rumbling laughter, Kingsley’s. "Probably woke up Sleeping Beauty."
"Yes," Remus calls. His voice is gravelly.
Tonks leans out of the kitchen. She is blonde today, in ringlets, with an oddly unattractive button nose. "Sorry," she says sheepishly. "Why don’t you sleep in your - in a bedroom? It’d be darker, and quieter."
"Didn’t mean to fall asleep out here," Remus lies. "Are you starting dinner? I’ll help." He heaves himself achily off the sofa. Several joints crack.
*
"How far’s the full moon?" asks Tonks over dinner. Kingsley clears his throat conspicuously.
"Fortnight," says Remus, pouring himself another glass of wine.
"Spending it here?"
"Yeah."
"Oh."
Kingsley hunches over his plate, staring intently at Tonks.
"When’s Harry coming back, then?"
"Month or so."
"Brill! Miss the little swot, don’t you?" Her voice lowers and softens. "Don’t suppose he’s having a good time of it, is he? I mean, none of us are. But him especially. Gotten any owls from him?"
"Yeah." Remus finishes his glass in a great, bitter gulp and opens another bottle.
"Quiet round here with Kreacher gone," Tonks says. The words hang like an odor in the air.
"Tonks," says Kingsley, finally. "What was that you were telling me about the Hit Wizards?"
Tonks turns to Kingsley, startled. With a sidelong glance at Remus, she stammers, "I... well, it was just that... some of these senior Hit Wizards seem to think they can do whatever they like, you know, cursing everybody who looks at ‘em wrong, and I know they used to have a lot more power but times have changed, you know...."
Remus shoots Kingsley a grateful glance, but Kingsley doesn’t see it.
*
Remus silently collects the dishes and levitates them into the kitchen sink, keeping his back turned to Tonks and Kingsley, hoping they will move into the parlor and let him slip away. His legs are slightly wobbly as he does the dishes; he’s had too much wine. When he turns around, Tonks is waiting at the mouth of the kitchen, fidgeting, shifting her weight from foot to foot and clearly miserable.
"Oi, Remus," she begins, and winces inexplicably. "Look, I don’t mean to be like... it’s just that I’m arse at this sort of thing. I mean, talking to people after... after they’ve..." She sighs. "You know. I just never know what to say."
Remus nods mutely. Tonks shifts uncomfortably and studies the pantry door beside her, knitting and unknitting her fingers.
"It’s fine," Remus says after a moment. He doesn’t like how cold his voice sounds. "I hadn’t even noticed." He smiles in a way that feels like it must look creepy, but Tonks grins back, relief in the looseness of her posture and the brightness of her face. She nods and ducks out of the kitchen, still smiling. For a moment Remus just stands there, trying to decide whether it’s fitting or ironic for a Metamorphmagus to be so transparent, so hopelessly overexpressive. Then he grabs the last unfinished bottle of wine and goes upstairs.
He is halfway into the bedroom before he realizes what he’s doing. The door falls shut behind him, and Remus backs up against it.
It’s still there, on the wall, where he left it, covered by a bedsheet. (Of course it bloody well is, he thinks angrily. Did you expect it to get up and go to pub while you were gone?) Its breathing is slow and deep, as if sleeping.
The bedsheet is stained, and Remus has only just realized it, and it makes his throat tighten and his stomach twist up, as if he’s swallowed sour milk.
"I’m sorry," he says quietly. There is a sudden indrawn breath.
"Who’s there?" it says. There’s a dissonant strain in its voice, fear. After a pause, it speaks louder, with bravado. "Tell me where I bloody am. Now."
Remus backs up against the door. It’s scared, it doesn’t know where it is, and what has Remus done?
It’s not an it, it’s not an it, it’s him. For God’s sake, it’s him.
It takes him an eternity to fumble the door open, and he stumbles backwards through it, clumsy and slow like in his nightmares, reaching out as a frantic afterthought to shut it.
He walks numbly down the stairs, distantly surprised that he doesn’t miss a step, and collapses on the sofa. In seconds he’s asleep, tipping a trickle of forgotten wine into the carpet.
He dreams that it’s raining, and the roof is leaking, and Mrs. Black is crying, and there’s water running down the walls.
*
When he wakes up the house is dark, but that’s no indication of what time it is. The place is shrouded in heavy curtains and boxed in by a hedge. Light is deceptive. He wonders dizzily if it’s still raining, and if it’s time to empty the pots and buckets he’s left around the house to catch the leaks. He can’t hear Mrs. Black anymore; he wonders if she’s drowned.
He rolls off the couch, stepping in cool puddle with a squelch. Missed one, he thinks. He’s halfway up the stairs to check the buckets in the attic before he realizes that he only dreamt the rain. He stops halfway to the landing and leans against the banister. His head feels like it’s been stuffed too full of something. Wet rags, something heavy. His mouth tastes foul.
All night, he thinks. His head snaps around to look up the stairs, at the guiltless bedroom door on the landing. I left him there all night.
Again.
He grips the banister tightly, using it to push himself up the stairs. He feels as if he’s moving through water; his joints and muscles ache. It’s probably just a hangover.
The doorknob is cold. The door swings open with a plaintive creak, and beyond it, the room is silent.
With a weird jolt Remus remembers the wetness on his foot, and bends with a frown to look at it. His sock is stained a deep red. He curses faintly; he’s probably tracked wine all over the carpet. He pulls the sock off and throws it into the hamper in the corner, which is overflowing. He hasn’t done wash in weeks.
He can’t keep his eyes off the wall, off the stain, the shame of that graying sheet, the oblique lines of the thing underneath it. He feels a surge of rage at it, at what a bollocks he’s made of it, that it can’t be undone. He wants to close his eyes, squeeze them tight, open them again, and have this all gone, have things back the way they were. It’s not the first time he’s felt this way. It’s like a trick, like torture, that he can’t.
He goes to it without a spare regret for how he wanted this to be, how he’d dreamed and planned and promised himself he’d do it. His jaw clenches, and reaches up to pull the sheet away.
Now I feel sad.
Untitled Bill/Fleur (mostly gen)
A/N: Veela are cool. I made up an evolutionary backstory and social history for them before being distracted by something shiny.
Fleur considers herself lucky to be only part-veela. She has full Wizard status, for one thing, and can legally carry a wand; unlike her Grandmother, who tended bar in Paris during the Grindelwald war and kept a string of Wizard lovers who could do magic for her, should she ever have needed it. (J'ai détesté cet endroit, she would always say. "All the girls were Veelas. It was a glorified zoo. And the men! The things they would do -" And then Fleur’s mother would usually interrupt.)
Untitled, Christmas-themed Sirius/Remus
A/N: Teh fluff.
"Ah," says Remus softly, picking up his pace. "I’d thought I saw a stand of them around here."
They emerge suddenly into a snowy clearing, and there are shafts of gray light filtering through the canopy overhead, and Sirius sees what they’ve come here for: a weak little stand of fir trees, dusty green-gray and drifted with crackled, sparking snow. Remus circles around them, with his head tilted again (maybe it’s just a habit, after all) and stops to run a gloved hand over one that stands about as tall as him. Snow rains off of it in a hiss, and sticks in clumps to his glove, which he brushes absently against his robes.
"This really isn’t necessary," Remus demurs, for the third time that afternoon. It must strike him how silly it is to say that when they’re already a mile into the Forbidden Forest, because he drops his chin to his chest and laughs. His hair falls forward into his eyes, and there’s a little snow in it.
"Course it is," says Sirius, grinning. "Everybody needs a Christmas."
Remus looks up at him with a startling darkness in his eyes, as if he knows something Sirius doesn’t; in that moment he looks older than Sirius by a decade.
"I’ve missed Christmas before," he says. "It was the day after the full moon a few years ago. It was fine."
Sirius shakes his head. There’s something he wants to say; that it’s not fine, that he’s sorry Remus thinks it is. That he doesn’t understand how something to which he feels so entitled can embarrass Remus so, as if it’s a decadent, ostentatious thing.
But he only says, "How do we get it down?"
"Severing Charm should do it." Remus pulls his wand out his sleeve and crouches low upon the snow. "I’ll cast, you catch."
Sirius frowns for a moment before he understands what Remus means. Then he moves opposite Remus and opens his arms, his large hands cupped and ready.
"Abscido," Remus whispers, tapping the trunk once with his wand, and the tree creaks and leans toward Sirius. Remus always whispers his spells, crisply, precisely, in a crystalline hiss. Not like James, who mumbles them absently, and with a quick flick of his wand: the lazy confidence of a pureblood. Nor like Peter, who enunciates loudly and slowly, as if magic is a foreign language, one he’s struggling to learn.
"Abscido," Remus says again, the tree emits a startling crack and sways in an arc, toppling. Sirius throws out his hands to catch it, but it stops and hangs at a forty-five degree angle, shivering and dropping snow.
The Golden Girls go to Howarts - a screenplay
A/N: I just... I'd forgotten about this one, and when I found it I actually screamed. Blame Lisa.
Dorothy: This is even more exciting than the time we won tickets to see Burt Reynolds!
Blanche: Even more than the time I wrote the great American novel!
Sophia: Even more than the time Mario Zepponi burnt down the neighboring village in an attempt to get an edge in the following day’s inter-village Bacci championship!
Rose: Even more than the time Sven Gundlafsen’s prize pig had quintuplets!
Peter Pan - Wendy/a Mermaid
A/N: Peter Pan = sex.
And there’s a hand, wet and webbed, over her own, and it’s warm, not cold. This thing is not a fish, chill and empty, and it has a face. Hard black eyes. Wendy stares into them, and the lightheaded thrill of everything she’s seen tonight ebbs away, and there’s suddenly such perfect calm in her that her heart nearly breaks, as she knows it will whenever it knows perfection, like this mermaid’s skin.
Untitled Narcissa gen
A/N: This was supposed to be this whole fucking in-depth psychological whatever before I decided I didn't actually care that much about Narcissa. Eh.
No one ever believes Narcissa when she tells them her wedding to Lucius Malfoy was a simple ceremony. They think she’s being modest, or that her reckoning of "simple" is a touch different from most people’s. But it was simple, and relatively cheap - much to the disgust of the elder Malfoys. They were married at the Blacks’ summer villa in Bordeaux, on one of the wide, sloping lawns. At her mother’s request, an arching tunnel of climbing roses had been charmed and cropped into existence, and underneath it they took their vows. Narcissa remembers feeling oddly detached that day, removed from the weight and loadedness of it all. She nearly made herself late for the ceremony when she spent an unmeasured lapse staring at herself in the mirror, resplendent and half-dressed, missing her veil and her circlet and most of her petticoats, her hair glued and dried into a cathedral of curls that looked as though they would be painful to touch. Her head felt heavy, and kept wandering lazily from side to side, as if she had a fever. She stared as if frozen, thinking of nothing in particular, admiring the patrician arch of her nose from one angle, the slight weakness of her chin from another. She turned and tilted her face back and forth, up and down, looking for an angle from which he was perfect: her flaws hidden, her pretty parts in full view. Her Maid of Honor, Ivy Baddock, came knocking before she found it.
"Cissy, what are you doing?" she cried, rustling over in her huge, rose-blush dress, with her cleavage propped up to her collarbone and jiggling vulgarly. "We’ve got, what, twenty minutes? Pull your underthings on!" Narcissa blinked at her, as if snapping out of something, and went to the bed on which her petticoats lay. First a layer of satin, then another of thick wool, then a crisp, spiky frill of netting that propped her skirts out like an umbrella, then another layer of wool, trimmed with lace, to soften the sharpness of the wiry net.
"Good," Ivy cooed, like an impatient governess. "Where are your head things? Your veil?"
Narcissa found them on top of her vanity and Ivy helped her put them on, sticking in tiny, enchanted pins that wound and curled through her hair like vines, pulling painfully in a few places. Narcissa didn’t wince; she was used to this, the beauty rituals, the hurts that came with them. Her mother had put it this way: she had gotten her beauty for free, but she would have to pay to keep it. A straightforward, pay-as-you-go transaction. An absolute bargain, in her opinion. Narcissa found this acceptable. Her mother always seemed to know the value of things.
"There," said Ivy breathlessly, holding her by the shoulders and scanning her with wide, wet eyes. "You look stunning."
She felt dizzy. Her hair seemed to be giving off fumes. She imagined if she fainted, her dress, full of wires and meshes and bones, would keep her standing. Propped at an awkward lean like a porcelain doll. She wondered if the guests would be able to smell her coming down the aisle.
Ivy had to lead her down the stairs, because of the veil. It made everything look overexposed, like stepping from a dark house into a too-bright day. She could hear herself breathing inside it.
She remembers these things better than she remembers the vows, or the reception. There was her family on the right, mostly beaming. Bellatrix looked sullen because she was older than Narcissa and still unmarried. Narcissa tilted her head as she passed Bellatrix, taunting her with a beatific smile. There were the Malfoys on the left, with their elfin chins and long noses and heavy, old-fashioned furs. The look on Mrs. Malfoy’s face sparked a glow of pride in the center of Narcissa’s chest: half-lidded eyes, a faint smile. Acceptance. She was acceptable.
And there was Lucius, his shoulders held back, his hands folded behind his back, his chin jutting high. He was older than she was but still hadn’t grown into his face; his nose still seemed rodent-like, his cheekbones too heavy for his chin.
He’s certainly improved with age, she reflects proudly as she sips Earl Grey out of a bone china cup - a wedding present from the Malfoy side. An aunt, she thinks, but she doesn’t remember which. Lucius would know, but would be quite the faux pas to ask him. The cup was part of a set of eight, though now there are only six. The china is so fine that when she drinks from it, she can see through the bottom a the glow of the sun setting through the conservatory window.
My current WIP - Remus/a portrait of Sirius
A/N: Please Jesus let me actually finish this one. This is about a third of what I've got so far.
"He was a good man, Remus."
Dumbledore’s office is hushed and sparkling, filled with lovely and fantastical things. The diffused yellow light, and its shifting crystalline glint off of all of Dumbledore’s delicate, beautiful things, and the low seashore whisper of the portraits on the walls makes Remus faintly sleepy, and he settles back into his chair with his hands warm in his pockets and lets Dumbledore talk to him, counsel him, medicate him with that dusty-soft ancient voice. To Remus his voice feels herbal, soft and leathery and veined, covered in a fine sharp-smelling dust, possessed of all manner of talents. The ability to heal, or enhance, or poison. His voice is a drug.
One of the dead Headmasters gives a quick, jarring sniff, and Remus realizes that he’s on the edge of sleep. He sits up straight and crosses his legs, frowning slightly as if deep in thought. Dumbledore has paused, and is regarding him with his fingers steepled under his long, crooked nose.
"Don’t you think so?"
Remus blinks. "That Sirius was...?" Dumbledore gives a tiny nod. Remus hesitates, then says, "No. We are none of us good men, anymore."
Dumbledore tilts his head to one side. "Are you to be the judge of that, Remus?"
Remus smiles bitterly. "No more than you are, Headmaster." He waits for Dumbledore’s reaction, but there is none. Dumbledore stares at him with inscrutable blue eyes, his face the same placid mystery it always is when he is not smiling. Remus sighs. "We’ve all... fought. That’s all we’re good for, anymore. We’ve all done things, and thought of doing things, and wanted to do things that… good is not a word that applies to us anymore. Nor any other word like it. We pick people to kill and people to save. We wear our bodies and our morals out destroying things to protect other things. We’re mushy inconsistent things that eat and walk about and speak and sneeze and - if we’re lucky - laugh and fuck and -"
He stops and brings the tips of his thin fingers to the bridge of his nose.
"You are a good man," says Dumbledore simply.
Remus slips his hands back into his pockets and lets his head fall back until he’s looking at the ceiling. "When Sirius went through, the second thought I had was that Harry was going to go in after him, just run and dive. And I grabbed him and held him and he fought me so hard." He clears his throat; his hands have bunched into fists against his thighs. "The first thought I had was that I was going in after him. I’d just... follow him. And even as I was hanging on to Harry I wanted - I wanted to push him down and leave him there and just walk in after Sirius. I was thinking... that would be the end of all the bad things, all the worry. I had no objections to just... giving up." He lifts his head and looks at Dumbledore, his eyes narrow. "I no longer fool myself that I’m good, Headmaster. I know myself too well for that."
"You didn’t, however." Remus frowns. Dumbledore spreads his hands. "You didn’t let Harry go, and you didn’t go through after Sirius. You held on -" He raises his eyebrows. "- in more ways than one. You loved Sirius, and you gave him up because the only other option was an unconscionable one. That, Remus, makes you a good man."
Remus lips thin, and his expression grows repressive and tight. "Yes, Headmaster," he says, and winces internally at how meek and boyish he sounds. Dumbledore’s face turns a fraction of an inch to one side.
"Is there something you wish to say, Remus?"
Remus smiles tightly. "No. I think I’d better get - get back." He had been about to say home.
Dumbledore smiles benevolently, but Remus has already stood and turned away. As he walks out of the office and down the stairs, he hears one of the portraits say, "My, bitterness certainly doesn’t -"
The door shuts and cuts the dead wizard off. Remus removes his hands from his pockets and flexes his fingers.
*
At Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, the noble and most ancient house of Black, the filthy, moldering lair of the toujours pur, Remus throws himself down on a downstairs sofa and curls into a ball. The house is empty, but there’s an undertow of rustlings. Rodents in the walls, and the idle shifting of portraits, and - Remus imagines - the network of dark magic over the place, taut and discreet like a spider’s web, glimmering in the gray shafts of sunlight under the closed velvet curtains, in the many tarnished silver trinkets that Sirius had never gotten around to getting rid of, in Mrs. Black’s malevolent, shining eyes...
He finally falls asleep.
He dreams that he’s woken by a sound, and he isn’t sure what it is at first, but then he hears it again: Sirius is calling him. He bolts off the sofa and stands utterly still in the middle of the room, listening. It’s coming from the kitchen. He runs in, but there’s no one there, and Sirius is still crying out. It’s too faint to tell what he’s saying, but Remus, so familiar with Sirius when he’s wordless, when he’s moaning or sighing or screaming, knows absolutely that it’s him. He follows the sound to Kreacher’s cupboard, vacant now but still sour with the smell of him. In the baseboard there’s a hole, and Remus reaches into it. It’s too narrow to fit him, he thinks, but suddenly he’s falling in, falling in complete darkness. "Sirius?" he calls out as he falls, and he has just long enough to feel awkward about the silence the follows before he hits the ground without a sound.
He isn’t injured. He stands up and listens, and when another cry comes it’s louder, and a distinct word now: Remus! Remus starts toward it with his hands out in front of him, as it’s still dark. His fingers brush against a wall, and he feels long it until he finds the crack of a door, and then a doorknob. It’s locked, but when he hears Sirius cry out again an angry sort of desperation surges through him and he punches at it with all his might. It tears like paper. He walks through it, and is in the gardens of the Black house, drenched in sun. Sirius is sitting at the lip of a cool, babbling fountain, and Remus calls out to him: "Sirius! Do you need me?" Sirius doesn’t respond. Suddenly Remus thinks, there isn’t any garden. There’s no garden at this house.
He wakes up. There is a loud rattle in the kitchen, and Remus starts badly. Tonks’s voice hisses, "Sorry!"
There is deep, rumbling laughter, Kingsley’s. "Probably woke up Sleeping Beauty."
"Yes," Remus calls. His voice is gravelly.
Tonks leans out of the kitchen. She is blonde today, in ringlets, with an oddly unattractive button nose. "Sorry," she says sheepishly. "Why don’t you sleep in your - in a bedroom? It’d be darker, and quieter."
"Didn’t mean to fall asleep out here," Remus lies. "Are you starting dinner? I’ll help." He heaves himself achily off the sofa. Several joints crack.
*
"How far’s the full moon?" asks Tonks over dinner. Kingsley clears his throat conspicuously.
"Fortnight," says Remus, pouring himself another glass of wine.
"Spending it here?"
"Yeah."
"Oh."
Kingsley hunches over his plate, staring intently at Tonks.
"When’s Harry coming back, then?"
"Month or so."
"Brill! Miss the little swot, don’t you?" Her voice lowers and softens. "Don’t suppose he’s having a good time of it, is he? I mean, none of us are. But him especially. Gotten any owls from him?"
"Yeah." Remus finishes his glass in a great, bitter gulp and opens another bottle.
"Quiet round here with Kreacher gone," Tonks says. The words hang like an odor in the air.
"Tonks," says Kingsley, finally. "What was that you were telling me about the Hit Wizards?"
Tonks turns to Kingsley, startled. With a sidelong glance at Remus, she stammers, "I... well, it was just that... some of these senior Hit Wizards seem to think they can do whatever they like, you know, cursing everybody who looks at ‘em wrong, and I know they used to have a lot more power but times have changed, you know...."
Remus shoots Kingsley a grateful glance, but Kingsley doesn’t see it.
*
Remus silently collects the dishes and levitates them into the kitchen sink, keeping his back turned to Tonks and Kingsley, hoping they will move into the parlor and let him slip away. His legs are slightly wobbly as he does the dishes; he’s had too much wine. When he turns around, Tonks is waiting at the mouth of the kitchen, fidgeting, shifting her weight from foot to foot and clearly miserable.
"Oi, Remus," she begins, and winces inexplicably. "Look, I don’t mean to be like... it’s just that I’m arse at this sort of thing. I mean, talking to people after... after they’ve..." She sighs. "You know. I just never know what to say."
Remus nods mutely. Tonks shifts uncomfortably and studies the pantry door beside her, knitting and unknitting her fingers.
"It’s fine," Remus says after a moment. He doesn’t like how cold his voice sounds. "I hadn’t even noticed." He smiles in a way that feels like it must look creepy, but Tonks grins back, relief in the looseness of her posture and the brightness of her face. She nods and ducks out of the kitchen, still smiling. For a moment Remus just stands there, trying to decide whether it’s fitting or ironic for a Metamorphmagus to be so transparent, so hopelessly overexpressive. Then he grabs the last unfinished bottle of wine and goes upstairs.
He is halfway into the bedroom before he realizes what he’s doing. The door falls shut behind him, and Remus backs up against it.
It’s still there, on the wall, where he left it, covered by a bedsheet. (Of course it bloody well is, he thinks angrily. Did you expect it to get up and go to pub while you were gone?) Its breathing is slow and deep, as if sleeping.
The bedsheet is stained, and Remus has only just realized it, and it makes his throat tighten and his stomach twist up, as if he’s swallowed sour milk.
"I’m sorry," he says quietly. There is a sudden indrawn breath.
"Who’s there?" it says. There’s a dissonant strain in its voice, fear. After a pause, it speaks louder, with bravado. "Tell me where I bloody am. Now."
Remus backs up against the door. It’s scared, it doesn’t know where it is, and what has Remus done?
It’s not an it, it’s not an it, it’s him. For God’s sake, it’s him.
It takes him an eternity to fumble the door open, and he stumbles backwards through it, clumsy and slow like in his nightmares, reaching out as a frantic afterthought to shut it.
He walks numbly down the stairs, distantly surprised that he doesn’t miss a step, and collapses on the sofa. In seconds he’s asleep, tipping a trickle of forgotten wine into the carpet.
He dreams that it’s raining, and the roof is leaking, and Mrs. Black is crying, and there’s water running down the walls.
*
When he wakes up the house is dark, but that’s no indication of what time it is. The place is shrouded in heavy curtains and boxed in by a hedge. Light is deceptive. He wonders dizzily if it’s still raining, and if it’s time to empty the pots and buckets he’s left around the house to catch the leaks. He can’t hear Mrs. Black anymore; he wonders if she’s drowned.
He rolls off the couch, stepping in cool puddle with a squelch. Missed one, he thinks. He’s halfway up the stairs to check the buckets in the attic before he realizes that he only dreamt the rain. He stops halfway to the landing and leans against the banister. His head feels like it’s been stuffed too full of something. Wet rags, something heavy. His mouth tastes foul.
All night, he thinks. His head snaps around to look up the stairs, at the guiltless bedroom door on the landing. I left him there all night.
Again.
He grips the banister tightly, using it to push himself up the stairs. He feels as if he’s moving through water; his joints and muscles ache. It’s probably just a hangover.
The doorknob is cold. The door swings open with a plaintive creak, and beyond it, the room is silent.
With a weird jolt Remus remembers the wetness on his foot, and bends with a frown to look at it. His sock is stained a deep red. He curses faintly; he’s probably tracked wine all over the carpet. He pulls the sock off and throws it into the hamper in the corner, which is overflowing. He hasn’t done wash in weeks.
He can’t keep his eyes off the wall, off the stain, the shame of that graying sheet, the oblique lines of the thing underneath it. He feels a surge of rage at it, at what a bollocks he’s made of it, that it can’t be undone. He wants to close his eyes, squeeze them tight, open them again, and have this all gone, have things back the way they were. It’s not the first time he’s felt this way. It’s like a trick, like torture, that he can’t.
He goes to it without a spare regret for how he wanted this to be, how he’d dreamed and planned and promised himself he’d do it. His jaw clenches, and reaches up to pull the sheet away.
Now I feel sad.