Fic: Broceliande for oh_peccadillo
Title: Broceliande
Author/Artist: ghosttt
Recipient: oh_peccadillo
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drugs and drinking, mentions of violence*
Word count: 4,345 words
Summary: Penrith, 1978. At the Blacks' most squalorous remaining estate, Sirius and Remus make an attempt to escape the war.
Notes: thank you oh_peccadillo for this amazing prompt and license to do something kind of crazy. much of the scenario beyond the prompts was inspired by withnail and i. elsewhere, broceliande is a legendary medieval forest connected to arthurian romance.
Upon their midnight arrival at Broceliande, the most squalorous of the remaining Black “estates,” Sirius went intrepidly questing for whatever wines could be discovered in the house which were neither poison nor vinegar. Meanwhile Remus whose Muggle mother had put him through two years of Boy Scouts before the diving badge came up and Questions began to surface from the rest of his troop busied himself building a fire in the hearth with wet wood. Neither attempt was much successful so they fucked for warmth on the moth-eaten, three-headed bearskin rug before the fireplace, which was ashy and sort of greasy and whose shriveled eyes seemed to move a little, so they rolled it up, naked, shivering, and shoved it in a closet, and fucked on the bare frigid flagstones.
--
Fucking, Sirius thought. He walked on the heath in the blackish fog. There was a song stuck in his head he didn’t think existed yet. As a child he had come to this place with his mother, who had hated it, and with his father, who he sensed had a nostalgic connection possibly having something to do with the lingering Dark signature about the house and grounds, and with his brother, who had spent much of the time sick with fear in bed upstairs. It was the same bed, likely, Sirius thought, in which Remus slept presently having been fucked silly more than once in the night. Possessed, he guessed, by erotic nightmare.
It had not been as such for very long. But possibly he was kidding himself. Good God. Most of the time he found his hands were shaking. He had found himself, more than once in the past weeks, missing his stop on the tube because of the memory / imagination and because of his unsleptness. He thought if anyone managed to Leglimance him he would be sent to prison for public indecency. But it was either he think about fucking or he think about the war.
--
Remus had somehow found a case of wine in the basement and had unpacked it proudly and was busy over the sink using possibly all the knowledge he had retained from his Hogwarts potions classes (Sirius knew for a fact he had failed his O.W.L.) in order to test its drinkability.
“What in heavens’ name are you doing.”
“I’d like to get drunk,” said Remus. He was wearing his big fisherman’s sweater (there was a bloodstain at the hem) and navy plaid boxer shorts and wool socks he had pulled halfway up his calves and his kneecaps were raw (slate flagstones) and he looked unslept (adventures in fucking) and he was playing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” on his record player (clearly, with interest in further adventures in fucking), which he had brought with him to Broceliande having shrunk it down along with selections from his collection so it would fit in his backpack. “There’s nothing else to do. I tried to open the wizarding chess box but it bit me.”
“I told you not to touch anything,” said Sirius, observing the wound, which was shallow; Remus had healed it with one of the many medicinal potions and ointments he had on his person at any given time.
“I didn't come here with you to languish in the four poster bed and be your kept man.”
“That is not in the slightest what I had had in mind and the simple fact that it’s entered your mind is indicative of your own perversion, I would suggest.”
“Fuck off,” Remus said. He had pressed the tip of his tongue into his lip in unnecessary concentration whilst he measured droplets of a poison-testing solution into a thimbleful of wine in a dusty crystal glass. “You went walking on the wild and windy moors without me.”
“Searching for the grail beyond the forest, et cetera.”
“What exactly did you have in mind for us to do here?” Remus asked. Artfully he swirled the crystal glass to mix the poison tester.
“Rejuvenate, I suppose.”
Remus laughed. Sirius smiled at him, kind of uncertain, but he laughed and laughed.
--
The war, Sirius thought. He walked in the upstairs halls imagining it was fifty years down the line and he was haunting the suite in which he had been sexually murdered. Downstairs he heard Remus - Sirius knew he was trying to get around the Laws of Elemental Transfiguration enough to make palatable soup - playing Talking Heads’ cover of “Take Me to the River” over and over again. Good God but that boy was insatiable.
When the window at the end of the hall had been unshattered and thus hadn’t been boarded over the light had streamed through almost touchably thick as it would in a painting. The walls had been lined with portraits and tapestries which had either been sold or brought to Grimmauld Place or Slaughter Hall in the Cotswolds, or had been covered with thick black velvet curtains which were moth-eaten and tearing with age. Some of them Sirius surreptitiously lifted to find the frames empty; he was only shrilly screamed at twice. He remembered walking in this hall as a child with his brother listening to the orchestra of criticism and attempting Silencing Curses, nevermind he was nine or so and wandless and had a temporary lisp due to the recent loss of his two front teeth, so the spellword sounded like thilenthio.
The war. As ever it was back to the war. It was the cold snake stirring in his belly wrapping up around his inside. It walked behind him almost all the time breathing down his neck and he was certain it was even in the room, the voyeuristic pervert, when he and Remus had sex. They ate and drank and breathed the war. He made love to the war in his dreams and woke up feeling guilty. Sometimes he wondered if he had made a decision inspired by anything else since his graduation from Hogwarts.
--
The wine was unpoisoned. They brought downstairs the blankets and pillows from the spare rooms and made a kind of nest before the hearth and at last, mostly with magic, they managed to build a fire. Soon it was so hot they were obliged to get naked and jerk off watching each other. Afterward Remus put his underwear and his boots and his big black wool coat on; Sirius dressed similarly, and they went outside to smoke a joint only to find it was snowing. The pale ring of light from their wands illuminated not much beyond the garden gate in the sudden whiteout and Sirius couldn’t even ascertain if Peter’s car, which they had borrowed without really asking, was still there. The cold was a brutal blue-crisp and burned Sirius’s throat (or perhaps this was the joint) and there were goosebumps rising on Remus’s chest and not one but two hickeys and still, though Sirius hated to see it, the reddish ghost of the whiplash-weal from the fight on Thursday. He touched it, knowing his hand was cold, and Remus started a little, but he didn’t move away. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said.
(The spell had wrapped his chest and neck like a vine or a tentacle or something but made of light, and had tugged him forward, and after that there was a red print on his shirt, and his eyes were wet and huge with pain, but he didn’t say anything, and Sirius had been too frightened to ask.)
They went inside again, stoned. It was hellishly hot, so they put the fire out, stripped, lay on the bare flagstones naked and sharing a bottle of wine. Sirius lit candles and with some flash of nihilism he put the Doors on Remus’s turntable. The whole room cast apocalyptic red-orange shadow and the snow had begun to gather on the windowsills where the windows wouldn’t fully close. Remus had propped himself up on his elbows to light a cigarette and the whole scenario seemed to Sirius something out of a homoerotic Kubrick feature. Naked on the floor in the dense bloody light was his beautiful werewolf friend who after condescending to a few handjobs at sixteen had bailed on the complete endeavor, questioning Sirius’s “sincerity,” when Sirius had tried to touch his bum, and who now let Sirius touch his bum and else besides. (To think all it had taken to convince him was horror and wartime.) Jim Morrison was singing, “this is the end… my only friend…”
He wondered if maybe he should dance and almost wanted to. He felt possessed, or conducted, like a marionette, in the heat and the light - and Remus’s cheeks hollowed around the cigarette. He bent his knees up in what plainly seemed an invitation and Sirius felt a sort of primal directive to oblige him. He tasted like wine and smoke and snow and his skin was warm but his hands were cold and Sirius chased with his mouth the warm red weal-mark up his chest and around his neck, and Remus clung to him, lips close, searching; exactly what he was looking for Sirius had never quite been able to tell.
--
They slept on the floor. Sirius woke with nightmares which dispersed when he sat up. The candles had all gone out and the wind was howling and in the moonless nightness Sirius was briefly certain he had been hexed into blindness by some lingering curse his family had left upon the property, which altogether he should have expected. But he spelled the flame he usually used to light cigarettes into his fingers and found the world unchanged. Remus beside him whose dreaming breath was steady and easy as a dog’s. And the record player sliding over the empty playout groove in hypnotic monotone.
--
In the morning they could not get out the door so much had it snowed and Remus spent about an hour while Sirius shivered and bitched trying to clear the snow out of the flue with magic and a broom handle so they wouldn’t asphyxiate themselves keeping warm. Outside the day was bright-blue and clear through the smudged windows. Remus rolled a joint just past 10am and proceeded to beg off sex on account of the new moon, which Sirius couldn’t help but feel put out over.
He put his cold hands against Remus’s warm belly under his fisherman’s sweater and Remus stayed still looking off over Sirius’s shoulder at the broken cuckoo clock on the wall or some other kitschy antique with no doubt a Black history of evil bewitchment and perversion.
“Remus,” he tried.
“I don’t want to move. Let’s just stay like this. D’you want a hit?”
He pressed the joint against Sirius’s lips and held it there. His fingers were callused and smelled like shortbread. It was a bad idea to get stoned because high Sirius found he wanted sex even more desperately. If Remus didn’t want to move Sirius could just move him.
Instead he put the Doors back on the turntable and went into the kitchen and frustratedly, with much clanging of pots and pans, made tea and an omelet.
--
In Summer 1969 toward the tail end of the extended Black dynasty’s annual sojourn at Broceliande Sirius’s uncle Alphard recruited him as accompaniment on an errand to town. Alphard was famously the family’s most talented cook, and he had befriended the magical butcher and grocer in Penrith; toward the close of every summer he roasted about six yearling nifflers on a spit in the backyard and served the purplish steaks with pickled dragon tongue and a bewildering salad of lovage and other intoxicating herbs. Sirius, who sought psychedelic experiences even at a young age mostly in attempt to escape from his dismal reality, considered the end-of-summer feast as most children consider Christmas, was eager to help Alphard and for any excuse to get away from his mother.
They drove together down to Penrith in Alphard’s old Citroen. Sirius was rarely allowed to ride in the car, because it was a Muggle car, and because Alphard was always listening to radio stations most of the other Blacks deemed inappropriate - wizarding wireless channels that played a mix of magical and Muggle music in infernal miscegenation. When they got in the car a song was on the radio which Alphard turned up. Sirius had never heard anything like it before in his life, which wasn’t saying much because at home they mostly listened to wizarding chamber music with lots of devil’s intervals.
This music was loud and sharp. It put a chill up his spine which felt almost like a physical touch. It scraped like ice over stone. Alphard saw his face and turned it up even a little louder and it shook through his bones.
“What is this?”
Alphard smiled. “It’s rock and roll.”
So messed up
I want you here
In Penrith before they went to the butcher’s they went to the Muggle record store and Alphard bought him the record - the self-titled LP by the Stooges - and several others, by the Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and a tiny record player, and then they went back out to the car and Alphard cast a spell which shrunk the whole bag down to a tiny pouch Sirius put in the pocket of his shorts. “Don’t let your mom and dad catch you with that,” Alphard said, “and if they do you must keep my name out of it at all costs. Understood?”
“Understood.”
This was much how he would later feel when he discovered sex, or pot, or how drunk one could get on shitty wine. Delicious and forbidden. They went to the magical butchers’ and picked up the butchered nifflers, then they drove back to Broceliande in the vivid sun off the lakes like dropped jewels caught yellow in the grass. Alphard put the window down and had a cigarette. The radio played a song Alphard said was on one of the records he’d bought for Sirius.
Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet boy…
When he went to Hogwarts he found he abstractly envied Remus whose father was obsessed with David Bowie and actually owned a test pressing of Hunky Dory and whose mother loved Patsy Cline and Judee Sill and Janis Joplin. Remus had grown up with rock and roll and as such was in the position to take it for granted which to Sirius seemed a kind of grave sin. After all it was how he had learned there was anything magical in the world beyond the narrow conceptualization into which he had been born.
--
What’s to stop us pretty baby but what is and what should never be…
Sirius had managed to force his way through one of the first-floor windows and had gone for a walk on the tarn in the cold and blinding blue wash of sky and sunlight like thrown jewels upon the snow. He returned to find Remus had not moved from his position on the couch to tend the fire, which had gone out, nor to bring his dishes to the kitchen, and indeed it seemed probable he had only gotten up to put Led Zeppelin II on, or perhaps he had done that with magic. Sirius was freezing and soaked through which nominally was his own fault, as he had decided to make snow angels (he was still a little stoned), and Remus had cast a great number of warming charms, but he stomped around dislodging the snow from his boots perhaps louder than was necessary. Then he went and sat on the couch with Remus and put his frozen hands under Remus’s shirt again.
“Knock it off, Pads,” Remus said, but he didn’t move. His eyes, which were just open, seemed very green.
“Have you even gotten up since I left?”
“No. Can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“Not, like, with relish.”
“To think you are almost certainly the first werewolf to willingly set foot on the grounds of the Black estate at Broceliande. And all you want to do is sit on the couch and get stoned.”
Remus fixed him with eyes. “You’re such a dog.” He shifted some, and under his shirt Sirius thumbed his lowest rib. His heartbeat was there - methodical pacing - and his chest expanding when he breathed, and the old scar tissue Sirius could not so much feel as he knew incontrovertibly where it was and what it looked like. It was rather impossible to mistake for anything else. “This is,” Remus said. “I feel hollow inside.”
“Well I could - ”
“Oh my God,” Remus said. He folded the inside of his elbow over his eyes long-sufferingly. “Stop it. You can’t always get what you want.”
The Stones song entered Sirius’s mind as it always did when Remus said that, which was often. “Can’t I, though.”
He thought he’d almost meant it as a bit of a joke but not really, and certainly Remus didn’t take it as such. “If you honestly think that you have another thing coming,” he said, lifting his elbow from his eyes, which were reddish about their green and very tired. “From me and from the bloody universe.”
Sirius made a face. He was about to say something perhaps kind of cruel about how Remus had generally obliged him on one thing or another since they were eleven years old. But he bit his lip, and Remus went on.
“Can’t you feel that we’re winding down to the end of something.”
“No,” Sirius lied. “You’ve gone paranoid with pot and cabin fever.”
“I was feeling like this even before.” He was looking over Sirius’s shoulder again at the joint between the ceiling and the wall where no doubt there were cobwebs and/or the nests of assorted magical pests. “Back in London. Before Thursday. This feels like - ” He passed his hand between himself and Sirius. But then he stopped.
“What does it feel like.”
“Like how people dying of tuberculosis go crazy fucking.” He swallowed. “Would you honestly have - were it not for the war.”
Yes, he probably should have said, I’ve always loved you etc., beyond any kind of juvenile speculative imagination about your body or your sex, beyond any notion of brotherhood or propriety, I’ve always wanted you desperately, more than I had you, more even than I have you now. But even if all of it was true which was itself questionable it didn’t answer what Remus had asked.
“You don’t have to,” Remus said. “I wouldn’t’ve either. It’s conditional - ”
Sirius kissed him mostly to shut him up. Remus tensed for a moment, and his fists were pressed between them, but then he opened his mouth, and Sirius felt (tasted) him unspool a little, press up, and his cold hand eventually rested at the nape of Sirius’s neck threaded in his hair… the war was in the room with them, watching, and between them sometimes, like a ghost or a song; it was in everything they did, and perhaps it had always been. It was the filter or the membrane through which everything processed. There was never nothing between them even when they pretended they were alone, naked, safe, in love, in love - it was why they never performed contrition nor attempted forgiveness when they hurt each other.
--
His mouth was open at Remus’s jaw where his heartbeat tasted like burnt sugar slamming quick. Sometimes it got like this between them by accident. He wasn’t sure how or why. Like a candleflame that was purely blue. And very slow. Achingly, achingly tender. He didn’t dare to move though he didn’t remember when he last had. Remus’s heel was at the small of his back, callused and cold, holding him inside.
“Let me,” he said, against Remus’s neck. His voice cracked, humiliatingly. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to. “Come on.”
Remus didn’t say anything. He shifted and he sighed. He was so electrically open. I want to crawl inside you, Sirius thought; this isn’t enough. Even this. But he chased the thought away.
--
He woke up in the early morning when Remus got up and disentangled and dressed, and he woke up again a half hour later when Remus brought him a cup of coffee and a fried egg on toast. Kissed him chastely on the upper lip. They ate and didn't talk and in the quietude Sirius could hear Remus breathing and the meltwater outside dripping from the rafters. The wind in the draughts in the shutters and the boards and the fireplace. Remus’s knees cracking when he stood. The ceramic sounds in the sink when he cleaned the dishes the Muggle way as he always did. The light was streaming through the kitchen window like in a painting by a Dutch master illuminating the complete static chaos of Remus’s hair and his swollen lips and the vivid rose-petal suck-bruise at the joint of his neck and jaw. His wet hands and the dish soap bubbles catching prismatic light.
Sirius dressed and they worked together to shove the door open against the blown-high snowdrift and in the gathering wind (and the clouds above the lake blowing and building stitching pulling darkness together like a quilt, a tapestry) they walked together on the bare highland, jumping stone walls, as though none of the world were owned, as though they were alone in it. They screamed and yodeled and laughed to hear the echo in the long valley and the pressing clouds. After not so very long there was no sun. For a while they held hands inside Remus’s pocket until Remus lost his balance because of it and fell in a snowdrift. Sirius tackled him and they kissed for a while in the pressing frozen silence until their teeth started chattering together symphonic in the wind.
They walked together back to the cottage silently shivering under a weak warming charm and when they arrived it had begun again to snow. There was an owl waiting for them on the stoop with a letter addressed to Remus which nipped him in vengeance for the wait when he went to free the roll of parchment from its foot with trembling frozen-white fingers.
Altogether it was what Sirius felt he should have expected. Things fall apart / the center cannot hold… He built the fire back up, and Remus read the letter, which was not very long, several times. Then he passed it wordlessly to Sirius.
Remus, my boy. I would entreat you to return to London as soon as travel permits. We have received certain intelligence and further investigation in this regard could provide the Order with a much-needed awareness of the Dark Lord’s plans. Simply put this further investigation is a job for someone with your unique identity alone. It may very well allow us to end this before it has even truly begun.
Let me know as quickly as possible when you can meet. I cannot overstate the importance of this matter.
Sincerely, Albus Dumbledore
--
Later when Sirius was in his thirties spelunking the library at Grimmauld Place with nothing better to do, a few months out from the infinite, wavering upon the threshold and altogether uncertain he was even still alive, he learned from marginalia in the family’s Darkest tomes that select among the Blacks (eg. his French cousins, the Lenoirs, and possibly Sirius’s father and grandfather) had indeed killed people at Broceliande, likely Muggles, likely drifters, though it had been long before his time. Chances were their bones had been in coffers in the basement rotting to white ash whilst Sirius, 19, 1978, dry-mouthed with yearning and residual adrenaline, spelunked by wandlight for unpoisoned wine. What remained of their blood was set like paint or glue into the flagstones. However, luckily, any magic those prior Blacks had managed by ancient murder ritual had either failed or dissipated long before he and Remus knocked in the boards upon the door.
--
He woke up alone at dawn in the upstairs bed, staring at the ceiling, haunted by dreams. Remus had Apparated the night previous to London. In four days’ time, not long after Sirius had managed at last to dig Peter’s car out of the snowdrift and force it, mostly with magic, over miles of ice and mud to the paved road, Remus would get on the Muggle train to Calais, and from there he would take another Muggle train to Paris, where he would meet the informant who had provided Dumbledore with information that Fenrir Greyback was gathering a pack of European werewolves in support of Voldemort in the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Two months after, Sirius himself had undertaken his own death-wish trial for the Order among his elderly relatives who still lived at Slaughter Hall in the Cotswolds, and Remus returned by Portkey to London, mostly dead; even after they had healed the wounds as best they could, even after a month in St. Mungo’s and another on bed rest in Sirius’s flat in Clapham, he was never so much the same. About this Sirius and the rest of the Order made conclusions that seemed necessary but they were wartime conclusions (the filter, the membrane…) and from then on when Sirius and Remus made love the room was the war and the bed was the war and their skin was the war. London was the war and England was the war. The wind and the snow and the rain was the war and the news was the war and the fog was the war, the moon in the clouds was the war; music was the war, drugs were the war; they fucked in the apartment hallway on the couch on the floor, in the bathtub, crying, water was the war and air was the war, sex was the war, food was the war, magic was the war, love was the first and last and only war.
--
Author/Artist: ghosttt
Recipient: oh_peccadillo
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drugs and drinking, mentions of violence*
Word count: 4,345 words
Summary: Penrith, 1978. At the Blacks' most squalorous remaining estate, Sirius and Remus make an attempt to escape the war.
Notes: thank you oh_peccadillo for this amazing prompt and license to do something kind of crazy. much of the scenario beyond the prompts was inspired by withnail and i. elsewhere, broceliande is a legendary medieval forest connected to arthurian romance.
Upon their midnight arrival at Broceliande, the most squalorous of the remaining Black “estates,” Sirius went intrepidly questing for whatever wines could be discovered in the house which were neither poison nor vinegar. Meanwhile Remus whose Muggle mother had put him through two years of Boy Scouts before the diving badge came up and Questions began to surface from the rest of his troop busied himself building a fire in the hearth with wet wood. Neither attempt was much successful so they fucked for warmth on the moth-eaten, three-headed bearskin rug before the fireplace, which was ashy and sort of greasy and whose shriveled eyes seemed to move a little, so they rolled it up, naked, shivering, and shoved it in a closet, and fucked on the bare frigid flagstones.
--
Fucking, Sirius thought. He walked on the heath in the blackish fog. There was a song stuck in his head he didn’t think existed yet. As a child he had come to this place with his mother, who had hated it, and with his father, who he sensed had a nostalgic connection possibly having something to do with the lingering Dark signature about the house and grounds, and with his brother, who had spent much of the time sick with fear in bed upstairs. It was the same bed, likely, Sirius thought, in which Remus slept presently having been fucked silly more than once in the night. Possessed, he guessed, by erotic nightmare.
It had not been as such for very long. But possibly he was kidding himself. Good God. Most of the time he found his hands were shaking. He had found himself, more than once in the past weeks, missing his stop on the tube because of the memory / imagination and because of his unsleptness. He thought if anyone managed to Leglimance him he would be sent to prison for public indecency. But it was either he think about fucking or he think about the war.
--
Remus had somehow found a case of wine in the basement and had unpacked it proudly and was busy over the sink using possibly all the knowledge he had retained from his Hogwarts potions classes (Sirius knew for a fact he had failed his O.W.L.) in order to test its drinkability.
“What in heavens’ name are you doing.”
“I’d like to get drunk,” said Remus. He was wearing his big fisherman’s sweater (there was a bloodstain at the hem) and navy plaid boxer shorts and wool socks he had pulled halfway up his calves and his kneecaps were raw (slate flagstones) and he looked unslept (adventures in fucking) and he was playing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” on his record player (clearly, with interest in further adventures in fucking), which he had brought with him to Broceliande having shrunk it down along with selections from his collection so it would fit in his backpack. “There’s nothing else to do. I tried to open the wizarding chess box but it bit me.”
“I told you not to touch anything,” said Sirius, observing the wound, which was shallow; Remus had healed it with one of the many medicinal potions and ointments he had on his person at any given time.
“I didn't come here with you to languish in the four poster bed and be your kept man.”
“That is not in the slightest what I had had in mind and the simple fact that it’s entered your mind is indicative of your own perversion, I would suggest.”
“Fuck off,” Remus said. He had pressed the tip of his tongue into his lip in unnecessary concentration whilst he measured droplets of a poison-testing solution into a thimbleful of wine in a dusty crystal glass. “You went walking on the wild and windy moors without me.”
“Searching for the grail beyond the forest, et cetera.”
“What exactly did you have in mind for us to do here?” Remus asked. Artfully he swirled the crystal glass to mix the poison tester.
“Rejuvenate, I suppose.”
Remus laughed. Sirius smiled at him, kind of uncertain, but he laughed and laughed.
--
The war, Sirius thought. He walked in the upstairs halls imagining it was fifty years down the line and he was haunting the suite in which he had been sexually murdered. Downstairs he heard Remus - Sirius knew he was trying to get around the Laws of Elemental Transfiguration enough to make palatable soup - playing Talking Heads’ cover of “Take Me to the River” over and over again. Good God but that boy was insatiable.
When the window at the end of the hall had been unshattered and thus hadn’t been boarded over the light had streamed through almost touchably thick as it would in a painting. The walls had been lined with portraits and tapestries which had either been sold or brought to Grimmauld Place or Slaughter Hall in the Cotswolds, or had been covered with thick black velvet curtains which were moth-eaten and tearing with age. Some of them Sirius surreptitiously lifted to find the frames empty; he was only shrilly screamed at twice. He remembered walking in this hall as a child with his brother listening to the orchestra of criticism and attempting Silencing Curses, nevermind he was nine or so and wandless and had a temporary lisp due to the recent loss of his two front teeth, so the spellword sounded like thilenthio.
The war. As ever it was back to the war. It was the cold snake stirring in his belly wrapping up around his inside. It walked behind him almost all the time breathing down his neck and he was certain it was even in the room, the voyeuristic pervert, when he and Remus had sex. They ate and drank and breathed the war. He made love to the war in his dreams and woke up feeling guilty. Sometimes he wondered if he had made a decision inspired by anything else since his graduation from Hogwarts.
--
The wine was unpoisoned. They brought downstairs the blankets and pillows from the spare rooms and made a kind of nest before the hearth and at last, mostly with magic, they managed to build a fire. Soon it was so hot they were obliged to get naked and jerk off watching each other. Afterward Remus put his underwear and his boots and his big black wool coat on; Sirius dressed similarly, and they went outside to smoke a joint only to find it was snowing. The pale ring of light from their wands illuminated not much beyond the garden gate in the sudden whiteout and Sirius couldn’t even ascertain if Peter’s car, which they had borrowed without really asking, was still there. The cold was a brutal blue-crisp and burned Sirius’s throat (or perhaps this was the joint) and there were goosebumps rising on Remus’s chest and not one but two hickeys and still, though Sirius hated to see it, the reddish ghost of the whiplash-weal from the fight on Thursday. He touched it, knowing his hand was cold, and Remus started a little, but he didn’t move away. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said.
(The spell had wrapped his chest and neck like a vine or a tentacle or something but made of light, and had tugged him forward, and after that there was a red print on his shirt, and his eyes were wet and huge with pain, but he didn’t say anything, and Sirius had been too frightened to ask.)
They went inside again, stoned. It was hellishly hot, so they put the fire out, stripped, lay on the bare flagstones naked and sharing a bottle of wine. Sirius lit candles and with some flash of nihilism he put the Doors on Remus’s turntable. The whole room cast apocalyptic red-orange shadow and the snow had begun to gather on the windowsills where the windows wouldn’t fully close. Remus had propped himself up on his elbows to light a cigarette and the whole scenario seemed to Sirius something out of a homoerotic Kubrick feature. Naked on the floor in the dense bloody light was his beautiful werewolf friend who after condescending to a few handjobs at sixteen had bailed on the complete endeavor, questioning Sirius’s “sincerity,” when Sirius had tried to touch his bum, and who now let Sirius touch his bum and else besides. (To think all it had taken to convince him was horror and wartime.) Jim Morrison was singing, “this is the end… my only friend…”
He wondered if maybe he should dance and almost wanted to. He felt possessed, or conducted, like a marionette, in the heat and the light - and Remus’s cheeks hollowed around the cigarette. He bent his knees up in what plainly seemed an invitation and Sirius felt a sort of primal directive to oblige him. He tasted like wine and smoke and snow and his skin was warm but his hands were cold and Sirius chased with his mouth the warm red weal-mark up his chest and around his neck, and Remus clung to him, lips close, searching; exactly what he was looking for Sirius had never quite been able to tell.
--
They slept on the floor. Sirius woke with nightmares which dispersed when he sat up. The candles had all gone out and the wind was howling and in the moonless nightness Sirius was briefly certain he had been hexed into blindness by some lingering curse his family had left upon the property, which altogether he should have expected. But he spelled the flame he usually used to light cigarettes into his fingers and found the world unchanged. Remus beside him whose dreaming breath was steady and easy as a dog’s. And the record player sliding over the empty playout groove in hypnotic monotone.
--
In the morning they could not get out the door so much had it snowed and Remus spent about an hour while Sirius shivered and bitched trying to clear the snow out of the flue with magic and a broom handle so they wouldn’t asphyxiate themselves keeping warm. Outside the day was bright-blue and clear through the smudged windows. Remus rolled a joint just past 10am and proceeded to beg off sex on account of the new moon, which Sirius couldn’t help but feel put out over.
He put his cold hands against Remus’s warm belly under his fisherman’s sweater and Remus stayed still looking off over Sirius’s shoulder at the broken cuckoo clock on the wall or some other kitschy antique with no doubt a Black history of evil bewitchment and perversion.
“Remus,” he tried.
“I don’t want to move. Let’s just stay like this. D’you want a hit?”
He pressed the joint against Sirius’s lips and held it there. His fingers were callused and smelled like shortbread. It was a bad idea to get stoned because high Sirius found he wanted sex even more desperately. If Remus didn’t want to move Sirius could just move him.
Instead he put the Doors back on the turntable and went into the kitchen and frustratedly, with much clanging of pots and pans, made tea and an omelet.
--
In Summer 1969 toward the tail end of the extended Black dynasty’s annual sojourn at Broceliande Sirius’s uncle Alphard recruited him as accompaniment on an errand to town. Alphard was famously the family’s most talented cook, and he had befriended the magical butcher and grocer in Penrith; toward the close of every summer he roasted about six yearling nifflers on a spit in the backyard and served the purplish steaks with pickled dragon tongue and a bewildering salad of lovage and other intoxicating herbs. Sirius, who sought psychedelic experiences even at a young age mostly in attempt to escape from his dismal reality, considered the end-of-summer feast as most children consider Christmas, was eager to help Alphard and for any excuse to get away from his mother.
They drove together down to Penrith in Alphard’s old Citroen. Sirius was rarely allowed to ride in the car, because it was a Muggle car, and because Alphard was always listening to radio stations most of the other Blacks deemed inappropriate - wizarding wireless channels that played a mix of magical and Muggle music in infernal miscegenation. When they got in the car a song was on the radio which Alphard turned up. Sirius had never heard anything like it before in his life, which wasn’t saying much because at home they mostly listened to wizarding chamber music with lots of devil’s intervals.
This music was loud and sharp. It put a chill up his spine which felt almost like a physical touch. It scraped like ice over stone. Alphard saw his face and turned it up even a little louder and it shook through his bones.
“What is this?”
Alphard smiled. “It’s rock and roll.”
So messed up
I want you here
In Penrith before they went to the butcher’s they went to the Muggle record store and Alphard bought him the record - the self-titled LP by the Stooges - and several others, by the Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and a tiny record player, and then they went back out to the car and Alphard cast a spell which shrunk the whole bag down to a tiny pouch Sirius put in the pocket of his shorts. “Don’t let your mom and dad catch you with that,” Alphard said, “and if they do you must keep my name out of it at all costs. Understood?”
“Understood.”
This was much how he would later feel when he discovered sex, or pot, or how drunk one could get on shitty wine. Delicious and forbidden. They went to the magical butchers’ and picked up the butchered nifflers, then they drove back to Broceliande in the vivid sun off the lakes like dropped jewels caught yellow in the grass. Alphard put the window down and had a cigarette. The radio played a song Alphard said was on one of the records he’d bought for Sirius.
Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet boy…
When he went to Hogwarts he found he abstractly envied Remus whose father was obsessed with David Bowie and actually owned a test pressing of Hunky Dory and whose mother loved Patsy Cline and Judee Sill and Janis Joplin. Remus had grown up with rock and roll and as such was in the position to take it for granted which to Sirius seemed a kind of grave sin. After all it was how he had learned there was anything magical in the world beyond the narrow conceptualization into which he had been born.
--
What’s to stop us pretty baby but what is and what should never be…
Sirius had managed to force his way through one of the first-floor windows and had gone for a walk on the tarn in the cold and blinding blue wash of sky and sunlight like thrown jewels upon the snow. He returned to find Remus had not moved from his position on the couch to tend the fire, which had gone out, nor to bring his dishes to the kitchen, and indeed it seemed probable he had only gotten up to put Led Zeppelin II on, or perhaps he had done that with magic. Sirius was freezing and soaked through which nominally was his own fault, as he had decided to make snow angels (he was still a little stoned), and Remus had cast a great number of warming charms, but he stomped around dislodging the snow from his boots perhaps louder than was necessary. Then he went and sat on the couch with Remus and put his frozen hands under Remus’s shirt again.
“Knock it off, Pads,” Remus said, but he didn’t move. His eyes, which were just open, seemed very green.
“Have you even gotten up since I left?”
“No. Can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“Not, like, with relish.”
“To think you are almost certainly the first werewolf to willingly set foot on the grounds of the Black estate at Broceliande. And all you want to do is sit on the couch and get stoned.”
Remus fixed him with eyes. “You’re such a dog.” He shifted some, and under his shirt Sirius thumbed his lowest rib. His heartbeat was there - methodical pacing - and his chest expanding when he breathed, and the old scar tissue Sirius could not so much feel as he knew incontrovertibly where it was and what it looked like. It was rather impossible to mistake for anything else. “This is,” Remus said. “I feel hollow inside.”
“Well I could - ”
“Oh my God,” Remus said. He folded the inside of his elbow over his eyes long-sufferingly. “Stop it. You can’t always get what you want.”
The Stones song entered Sirius’s mind as it always did when Remus said that, which was often. “Can’t I, though.”
He thought he’d almost meant it as a bit of a joke but not really, and certainly Remus didn’t take it as such. “If you honestly think that you have another thing coming,” he said, lifting his elbow from his eyes, which were reddish about their green and very tired. “From me and from the bloody universe.”
Sirius made a face. He was about to say something perhaps kind of cruel about how Remus had generally obliged him on one thing or another since they were eleven years old. But he bit his lip, and Remus went on.
“Can’t you feel that we’re winding down to the end of something.”
“No,” Sirius lied. “You’ve gone paranoid with pot and cabin fever.”
“I was feeling like this even before.” He was looking over Sirius’s shoulder again at the joint between the ceiling and the wall where no doubt there were cobwebs and/or the nests of assorted magical pests. “Back in London. Before Thursday. This feels like - ” He passed his hand between himself and Sirius. But then he stopped.
“What does it feel like.”
“Like how people dying of tuberculosis go crazy fucking.” He swallowed. “Would you honestly have - were it not for the war.”
Yes, he probably should have said, I’ve always loved you etc., beyond any kind of juvenile speculative imagination about your body or your sex, beyond any notion of brotherhood or propriety, I’ve always wanted you desperately, more than I had you, more even than I have you now. But even if all of it was true which was itself questionable it didn’t answer what Remus had asked.
“You don’t have to,” Remus said. “I wouldn’t’ve either. It’s conditional - ”
Sirius kissed him mostly to shut him up. Remus tensed for a moment, and his fists were pressed between them, but then he opened his mouth, and Sirius felt (tasted) him unspool a little, press up, and his cold hand eventually rested at the nape of Sirius’s neck threaded in his hair… the war was in the room with them, watching, and between them sometimes, like a ghost or a song; it was in everything they did, and perhaps it had always been. It was the filter or the membrane through which everything processed. There was never nothing between them even when they pretended they were alone, naked, safe, in love, in love - it was why they never performed contrition nor attempted forgiveness when they hurt each other.
--
His mouth was open at Remus’s jaw where his heartbeat tasted like burnt sugar slamming quick. Sometimes it got like this between them by accident. He wasn’t sure how or why. Like a candleflame that was purely blue. And very slow. Achingly, achingly tender. He didn’t dare to move though he didn’t remember when he last had. Remus’s heel was at the small of his back, callused and cold, holding him inside.
“Let me,” he said, against Remus’s neck. His voice cracked, humiliatingly. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to. “Come on.”
Remus didn’t say anything. He shifted and he sighed. He was so electrically open. I want to crawl inside you, Sirius thought; this isn’t enough. Even this. But he chased the thought away.
--
He woke up in the early morning when Remus got up and disentangled and dressed, and he woke up again a half hour later when Remus brought him a cup of coffee and a fried egg on toast. Kissed him chastely on the upper lip. They ate and didn't talk and in the quietude Sirius could hear Remus breathing and the meltwater outside dripping from the rafters. The wind in the draughts in the shutters and the boards and the fireplace. Remus’s knees cracking when he stood. The ceramic sounds in the sink when he cleaned the dishes the Muggle way as he always did. The light was streaming through the kitchen window like in a painting by a Dutch master illuminating the complete static chaos of Remus’s hair and his swollen lips and the vivid rose-petal suck-bruise at the joint of his neck and jaw. His wet hands and the dish soap bubbles catching prismatic light.
Sirius dressed and they worked together to shove the door open against the blown-high snowdrift and in the gathering wind (and the clouds above the lake blowing and building stitching pulling darkness together like a quilt, a tapestry) they walked together on the bare highland, jumping stone walls, as though none of the world were owned, as though they were alone in it. They screamed and yodeled and laughed to hear the echo in the long valley and the pressing clouds. After not so very long there was no sun. For a while they held hands inside Remus’s pocket until Remus lost his balance because of it and fell in a snowdrift. Sirius tackled him and they kissed for a while in the pressing frozen silence until their teeth started chattering together symphonic in the wind.
They walked together back to the cottage silently shivering under a weak warming charm and when they arrived it had begun again to snow. There was an owl waiting for them on the stoop with a letter addressed to Remus which nipped him in vengeance for the wait when he went to free the roll of parchment from its foot with trembling frozen-white fingers.
Altogether it was what Sirius felt he should have expected. Things fall apart / the center cannot hold… He built the fire back up, and Remus read the letter, which was not very long, several times. Then he passed it wordlessly to Sirius.
Remus, my boy. I would entreat you to return to London as soon as travel permits. We have received certain intelligence and further investigation in this regard could provide the Order with a much-needed awareness of the Dark Lord’s plans. Simply put this further investigation is a job for someone with your unique identity alone. It may very well allow us to end this before it has even truly begun.
Let me know as quickly as possible when you can meet. I cannot overstate the importance of this matter.
Sincerely, Albus Dumbledore
--
Later when Sirius was in his thirties spelunking the library at Grimmauld Place with nothing better to do, a few months out from the infinite, wavering upon the threshold and altogether uncertain he was even still alive, he learned from marginalia in the family’s Darkest tomes that select among the Blacks (eg. his French cousins, the Lenoirs, and possibly Sirius’s father and grandfather) had indeed killed people at Broceliande, likely Muggles, likely drifters, though it had been long before his time. Chances were their bones had been in coffers in the basement rotting to white ash whilst Sirius, 19, 1978, dry-mouthed with yearning and residual adrenaline, spelunked by wandlight for unpoisoned wine. What remained of their blood was set like paint or glue into the flagstones. However, luckily, any magic those prior Blacks had managed by ancient murder ritual had either failed or dissipated long before he and Remus knocked in the boards upon the door.
--
He woke up alone at dawn in the upstairs bed, staring at the ceiling, haunted by dreams. Remus had Apparated the night previous to London. In four days’ time, not long after Sirius had managed at last to dig Peter’s car out of the snowdrift and force it, mostly with magic, over miles of ice and mud to the paved road, Remus would get on the Muggle train to Calais, and from there he would take another Muggle train to Paris, where he would meet the informant who had provided Dumbledore with information that Fenrir Greyback was gathering a pack of European werewolves in support of Voldemort in the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Two months after, Sirius himself had undertaken his own death-wish trial for the Order among his elderly relatives who still lived at Slaughter Hall in the Cotswolds, and Remus returned by Portkey to London, mostly dead; even after they had healed the wounds as best they could, even after a month in St. Mungo’s and another on bed rest in Sirius’s flat in Clapham, he was never so much the same. About this Sirius and the rest of the Order made conclusions that seemed necessary but they were wartime conclusions (the filter, the membrane…) and from then on when Sirius and Remus made love the room was the war and the bed was the war and their skin was the war. London was the war and England was the war. The wind and the snow and the rain was the war and the news was the war and the fog was the war, the moon in the clouds was the war; music was the war, drugs were the war; they fucked in the apartment hallway on the couch on the floor, in the bathtub, crying, water was the war and air was the war, sex was the war, food was the war, magic was the war, love was the first and last and only war.
--