Fic: Lethe and Mnemosyne (part 4/4)
Title: Lethe and Mnemosyne
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
Late in fifth year, after the Incident (the Fuck-Up, the Event, the Cataclysm , the Mistake, the Faux-Pas), he had gone with Remus to the Shack before moonrise, watching the green unfurling world through the iron-bar slats in the windows, the hills lush with life as if there had been an imperative promise breathing there even in the tomb of midwinter where everything died, worn threadbare and erased underneath the new snowfall. He hadn’t been alone with Remus much in the two months since and he had never been with him right before because Remus didn’t want it, and as Sirius watched him shivering naked at the end of the creaky bed with the wounds from the last full still unhealed red and his whole body trembling with the dirge of poison he thought he understood why. A nightbird called from somewhere outside, bearing up its longing or its pain into the mouth of the moon, beautiful without solace or solution.
“Moony,” he had said, worthlessly. He felt like all the blood had been drained out of him and he was naked and freezing and for the first time in his life he wanted to get on his knees and suck the ancient wound around Remus’s ribs where it had grown over him like moss over a tree, leech the poison out. Instead he stood a few feet in front of the bed and shivered while the moon got into Remus’s mouth and down his throat.
“Is this what you wanted,” said Remus, bitten off between his clenched teeth. He got up quick and crossed the room to where Sirius was standing like an effigy and dug his nail-bitten fingers into Sirius’s arms hard enough to draw blood; his hair was tangled in the filmy yellow eye of gloaming like a crown of thorns and he was shaking, shaking both of them apart. “Is it? Did you want to see it happen so fucking badly?”
It started not in his blood but in his bones, or not in his bones but somewhere deeper, unmappable, inextricable, something estranged yet uncontainable. From there Sirius could feel it fan out into a spinal shatter through his limbs, ribs shifting, arteries re-wiring, back bowing, shoulders snapping, skin burning with the horrible inviolable crush of light at the very rim of the horizon. There was blood between Remus’s teeth and he was panting with the umbilical pain of it, his spine cracking when his knees buckled and he dragged Sirius to the floor with him, not letting go, not letting go. Still Sirius would not change. He watched until he couldn’t any longer and felt that at some point he had started crying but he had no idea when it had happened; in front of him Remus was gasping like something newborn struggling for breath, his shoulderblades realigning under Sirius’s hand where he found his heartbeat where it had always been, beating Remus Remus Remus, Moony Moony Moony, pressing up against his own where they were almost, almost the same.
They woke up in the forest where it had rained sometime in the night, Sirius first and then Remus who watched him pick soggy leaves out of his hair in the reeling blue dawn, neither of them speaking. Together they stood up and walked back to the Shack in the amnesiac morning, stumbling through the fog with their open wounds, their first breaths hanging on the scrolling fog like tracks in new snow.
-
Much later, when Sirius thought about all the ways the world had changed and unchanged in his fractured patchwork lifetime, he would always circle around to Christmas Eve ’79, sitting on the couch with Remus listening to The Slits and Low and looking out the big front window into the snowy sunset moor where nothing moved in the searching light of the boathouse, thinking how desolate it really was, how lost to the world they were. Part of the reason they had come out here was for the softness, to find a place that could swallow them up and all their history and birth them together free of ghosts, beholden to nothing but themselves and to each other-to see the wasteland bear fruit again. Even then they knew the world was hardening and that it would not stop; looking out the window with Remus he could feel them have the same thought stretching like smoke between them: something had set in the earth and it would not change again. He thought of Remus’s parents’ home in Somerset, the belly of the woods and the river, apple cores in the weedy pasture and Remus’s mother playing Ida Cox in the kitchen in the summertime. Nostalgia was a potent anesthetic but still he could not shake the feeling that the world had skipped forward like a scratched record into something dark and warped, and they could not find the exact note where it had left them behind.
They’d wrapped each other’s gifts and spent about an hour the night previous at Peter’s, who was condescending to speak to them again very suddenly for reasons still unclear and had asked them round to a small Christmas party hosted at his new girlfriend’s flat in Leeds. It had been intensely awkward at times and they had left with James and Lily after Lily claimed a headache following a conversation with Ivor Nettlebane, and they’d come home to the window in their bedroom wide open, the curtains billowing with infrequent snow, everything thrown off the bed and the only photo of them they kept out-a Muggle photograph from early spring taken by McKinnon, who had caught them unaware while they were waiting to ride the Tube for shits and giggles, Remus holding a cigarette and laughing at something Sirius had said while Sirius took his wrist and leaned in for a drag, smiling-missing from its frame on the mantel. In the night he woke to a faint scratching at the door and strange slamming far off in the distance, like a fist opening and closing on the moor.
Across the lake they could see something flitting in front of the windows of the boathouse even this far away, bright as a lighthouse now, as if it had blotted out the winterlight from the sky and the earth or else it was eating everything the way the moon did when it began to swell with voracious cyclical ritual in the sky every night. At times the ink-blot shape of it seemed to change: first a person, then hunched like an animal, then huge, unmoving, swallowing light.
“So what are we gonna do when it’s-I don’t know, when it’s finished,” Remus had wondered, finally closing the curtains when it had moved out of sight when they blinked. “After it’s done the gestation thing or whatever kind of sick magic’s going on over there.”
“Better we find it than it find us. Since apparently it’s insatiable,” Sirius had said. “Maybe we need to have a good ritual fuck outside in the snow.” That had been three days ago; they’d laughed, but he knew without asking that they both understood what it meant, that the unquestionable fight or flight was why Dumbledore had put them out there. Black and Lupin against the world, in life or in death. Happy fucking Christmas, et cetera.
As a sort of last-ditch attempt to pretend the center was holding they’d gone grocery shopping and bought good wine and fresh bread and cheeses and pomegranates and spices for mince pie, chocolate to attempt truffles, big potatoes for baking chips, a chicken to roast; the truffles contained an excessive amount of rum and had actually turned out in what was possibly their only Christmas miracle to date, which had given Sirius some hope that the rest of it would go smoothly and he might even get to seduce Remus over dinner as an early present, though he was trying not to let it show in case the slouching infernal whatever could read minds. Lately it felt like drowning every time they came home: everything dimmed, everything roared, yet it all moved very slowly, the minutes and the hours sticking like taffy. He was beginning to understand how people lived in the midst of ruin. How do you escape immolation if not through one other?
When the record shuffled over at the end of the side he got up to take it off and put some tea on the stove with clove and orange peel, listening to the wind rattle the shingles on the roof, the trees bowing in the red dusk unlight. Remus had put a pot on the woodstove with cloves and a few cinnamon sticks he’d stolen from the decorations at Peter’s Christmas party and the whole cottage smelled warm and charmed, like something well-loved; he imagined it like this always, the two of them and everything they could make between them, worn soft with time and with love and the shape-shifting that came with both. He imagined them growing old here, imagined all the years unlived, thinking of all the places where they had found each other: the kitchen counter, Tube stations, the bathroom sink, Camden pubs, unlit Hogwarts corridors, the Shack, the bedroom, the foyer in the flat, the shore of the river where Remus grew up, the left side of the bed, takeout lines, the middle cushion of the murderous couch, the stove, assorted closets at parties, the hallowed shattering minutes before moonrise, the Hogwarts Express, thresholds, dreams.
“Didn’t we have Fun House?” Remus was asking him when he came back into the living room. He was looking through their vinyl and his knuckles were slightly chapped from the cold like Sirius’s. “If nothing else I guess it’s got good taste.”
“Raw Power is better. Lust for Life is better too.”
“Snob,” said Remus. “You love Fun House. I forgot to tell you-Lily swears she conceived the baby to ‘Golden Years’ and she was joking about naming it Ziggy as a kind of honor but James apparently thinks she’s serious and he’s losing it trying to figure out how to explain it to his parents. He was going to ask you but he figured you’d laugh in his face instead of behind his back.”
“I would’ve.”
“I did, too.”
“That does sound like James though. Aladdin Sane would’ve been better but if you really tried you could make it sound almost pureblood, I mean, add a few suffixes and just pretend it’s the third or fourth in its line and every kid in the Great Hall would turn their heads to see Ziggius James Lily Potter III, Esquire.”
“I turned my head to see you,” said Remus. He’d given up trying to find the vinyl and was rolling a cigarette on Sirius’s copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, smiling sweetly. “I was eleven years old and I already thought you were very handsome, not that I thought about it quite like that. It was more-you were so,” he paused, brow smudged slightly in memory, licking the seam of the paper, “it was hard to look away from you, even if I hadn’t met you on the train I couldn’t have. Not to blow your ego or anything but I don’t think I ever had a chance of like, not having sex dreams about you by the time I was fourteen.”
“You know I was pissed when James took the bed between yours and mine that very first night. I tried to be a good boy and not be an obvious asshole about it,” said Sirius, feeling loopy, going to sit next to Remus on the couch with his arm slung across the back of it. He could remember nights in fifth and sixth and seventh year, lying on his bed behind the curtains with a silencing charm cast all around and Benjy Fenwick’s borrowed Walkman, listening to Remus’s Ege Bamyasi tape and wondering what it meant that he was a dog and thinking Remus Remus Remus, saying it out loud occasionally just to hear what it sounded like in his mouth on his bed, feeling infiltrated and flooded through with terrified, still-uncomprehending bliss. “I used to say your name in the dark sometimes,” he said, supposing he ought to continue the confessional thread. “In school, I mean. Now whenever I do that you get to hear.”
“I always used to get this weird whole-body thrill when you said my name, or when I said yours. Sometimes I still do.”
“West Country boy,” said Sirius, his nose pressed into Remus’s neck. “I wanted to know everything about you, like every single piece of you, even what I couldn’t have. After we found out about the wolf I couldn’t stand the thought of you being alone and I used to turn into an asshole about it every month. You remember how it was.”
“I do,” said Remus, taking a drag and then another. In the corner of his mouth he was smiling like it had gotten stuck there. “Maybe we’re both sort of creepy now that I think about it.”
“We’re the creepiest people I know. And every friend group needs at least one intense homoerotic friendship that’s the subject of salacious rumors for years to come so I think we outdid everyone in our year. Maybe all of them for like the next decade.”
“I’m glad it was us and it was all absolutely true and then some in the end, except maybe the thing I heard about Majorca and the beach house seventh year,” said Remus, leering gleefully as Sirius got up. “Come back here, I’m cold.”
“The kettle’s whistling,” said Sirius, letting his fingers trail unnecessarily along Remus’s thigh as he got up, “I’ll take care of you in just a minute.”
“Two sugars,” Remus called after him.
“How long have I been making tea for you,” said Sirius, mildly outraged. Once he’d turned off the stove he came back with their mugs and then turned on the wireless, trying to catch the weather between Celestina Warbeck’s Christmas album atrocities. During the forecast-no snow, more wind, sunless dawn-the radio began to crackle strangely, hissing from the inside, static sparks sawing along the music until he thought he could almost make out a voice in it, or many, tongueless words trying to form in a mouth that could not speak.
Throat tight he leaned forward to hear, reaching out and taking Remus’s hand, fingers seeking the pulse in the blue vein-branches underneath the tearing scar around his wrist, feeling in the map of it everything he’d ever loved beating and beating up against his own heartbeat, spreading through his chest and down to his frantic hands as if they were the same miraculous creature, too grand to confine to a single body. On the radio the voice grew louder, wailing torturous unearthed fury called up from the bowels of hell itself, and with it the walls began again to move like blood, the breath of the plaster muttering its nightmare-rattle across the foundation; outside he could hear the death-march moan spreading out centrifugal from the very heart of the lake, unmistakable now as his own beating heart.
BLACK, said the voice, LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK. LET ME IN.
The cold searing jolt reverberated through them both and he could feel his fingernails bitten past the quick digging into Remus’s hand. Part of him was thinking, now or never, now or never again. They had their wands and they had each other still in one piece and he was scared shitless and sideways and yet there was something in them-not love, or not only, and not magic or not only, but an unconquerable, invincible truth, a thing born of history and time and loving and hating and wanting and running and finding and unknowing and unbreaking, born of every step he had ever taken towards Remus. He knew, with a rare and invulnerable certainty, that they would come back to this house tonight. He knew with every part of him that had ever mattered and every piece of himself that had ever loved anything that they would find their way. They would come back to each other. They would come back to each other.
If he’d said it out loud he figured Remus would either have started a fistfight with him on the spot-imminent agonizing death be damned-or Stunned him and dragged him out of the house to the Apparition point or said it was just like Sirius to assume they were the heroes of their own story with a happy ending to wait out, and as he’d have been infuriatingly fucking correct Sirius didn’t say anything. Tugging on Remus’s hand he stood until Remus stood with him, the house grinding its teeth in the floorboards, the voice on the radio howling moaning screaming its monstrous death-trip dirge:
YOU FORFEIT WHAT YOU HAVE. GIVE IT TO ME. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN-
“I think you were half-right,” said Sirius, yanking Remus towards their coats, “I think, Jesus bloody motherfucker, it wants us. It wants-”
Remus stared at him, pale like he normally only got when the moon was just on the wane, spat out of the earth and newborn in the brimming metallic womb of dawn. Understanding splashed across his bright lovely face like cold water. “Those-the other ones, the ones who disappeared. They let it in. They thought they could just lock the door and make it go away but they let it in.”
“Remember? The Aurors found the door open. The just-they let it come to them, Remus, we can’t, we have to do something. It wants-this, us. Everything.”
“Well it’s not fucking getting it,” said Remus. Sirius dragged a hand through his dark hair and pulled him towards their coats on the wall and their boots but Remus stumbled backwards to the coffee table, reaching for his tea.
“What the fuck are you doing? Moony we have to go, come on-shoes-come on, now.”
“If I’m going out I my goddamn tea first.”
We are insane, Sirius thought, wild blood-burst frenzied crush of love, this is insane, we are insane, hence we will be back before the tea goes cold. “Remus,” he said, “Moony. Moony love.” He took the cup out of Remus’s hands and put it back on the coaster, coaxing him back to the door while the floor shuddered awake beneath their feet. “We’re going to come back,” he said. In the kitchen he could hear the shutters on the window slamming against the house; they tied their boots quick and stepped into their coats running, the door already open for them. “We have presents and mince pie and not to ruin anything but I really did buy an eighth of weed. It’s been in my sock drawer for five days and so far I’ve stayed out of it so you can extol my incomparable patience when we get home. We’re coming back.”
“You fucking nutcase,” said Remus, laughing without breath. By now they were running side by side, wands held out cutting into the nightmare curtain hanging all along the moor to the boathouse, lit like a second moon on the lake, swallowing light, swallowing life, swallowing time. “Why do I believe you,” said Remus, and in the dark-arms outstretched blind on a tightrope he reached out in love and took Sirius’s hand, holding on tight, strung along by their uncontainable heartbeat-pulse to anywhere, anywhere.
Buried among the snow and decades of brush was an old wooden fishing boat with no oar. Together they dug it out and set it in the water, sure at first that it would sink even after they cast Impervius a few times, but it did not; across the deep gleaming water on the matted pelt of land was forever, was the end, was what had always been, was every step he and Remus had ever taken together, every fuck-up and every peal of irrevocable nighttime laughter and every touch and every displaced yearning welling up a hundred miles away in letters and sleepless loveless nothing-nights and music and dreaming and desire, the always-desire for all the life and all the time and all the love they had yet to give each other. The boathouse smoldered like a bad wound, and in the window something watched them, waiting, a person or a wraith or a shade of dark magic; they would unmake it, he knew, they would erase its place in the world, though he still felt the bottom drop out of him, as if he had fallen and all his pieces hadn’t landed in the right order.
Remus turned to him with their boots in the water, their reflections rippling sepulchral on the water beneath the glacial light of their wands. On his face was a sort of terrified bliss, his mouth open and his eyeteeth showing over his bottom lip, that famished look Sirius loved; he grabbed Remus by the shoulders and kissed him hard, fever-hot, blood in it, and honesty, and music. Within him he’d sometimes thought there was an image or a map of Remus, what he’d need to get back, what he’d need to find his way home again no matter how far or how long he had wandered, no matter how lost to each other they had become.
“I love you,” he said, his breath all smoke, stroking Remus’s cheekbones with his freezing thumbs where Remus’s hands had come up to cover his own, strong, like driftwood, warmth in it. “I love you to a degree that is probably classifiable as its own very specific insanity, and you are all-you’re so-fuck, I love you, Remus, I love you better than I love anything, I’d give up magic or, or fucking anything, when Muggles say that thing, would you jump off a cliff if so-and-so did it, well yes, if you did it, yes I would. It’s that much, it’s just-I loved you before I knew you, I swear it, I was always going to-”
He knew he must look royally unhinged but so did Remus, who pulled his hair and kissed him again, not letting go, not letting go. “When we get home I’m going to tell you how horribly I love you like jumping off a cliff et cetera, because it’d be me jumping after you,” said Remus. Against him Sirius’s heart quickened and he worried briefly at the swill of blood that he might have a heart attack before they could exorcise any dark magic from the moor. “I’m also going to absolutely fucking-I’m going to blow your mind when we get home. But let’s,” he said, “let’s go, Sirius, let’s,” and steered them toward the boat, pointing them towards the far shore of the nightmare.
They got in the boat and sat until it steadied, using a spell to propel it slowly across the water, the unpeeled rind of the scythe-moon blurred to a candle-flame flicker by the light coming off the lake, the trees and the leggy cattails and the sediment all murmuring, the shadow blading across the window into the deep water as the boat hit land, both of them shielding their eyes against the light burning high like a dying star. Cold snow on their boots, shallow water, the owl-calls in the murky middle distance reminding him that there was something beyond this, that it would be over soon, that there was tea and an empty bed waiting for him at home after all the miles and miles they had left to go.
When they got out of the boat into the water where wood was rotting under the moss, Remus held his hand against the strange current where nothing else mattered but their breathing bodies, their clockwork connection; this was what he was for, he realized. This was what he was for. Blind but sure-footed they stepped forward together into the monstrous mouth of the night, magic spilling golden and unbidden between their fingers, for better or for worse. Life was inescapable, absolute, everywhere.
-
The tea turned out to be lukewarm.
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
Late in fifth year, after the Incident (the Fuck-Up, the Event, the Cataclysm , the Mistake, the Faux-Pas), he had gone with Remus to the Shack before moonrise, watching the green unfurling world through the iron-bar slats in the windows, the hills lush with life as if there had been an imperative promise breathing there even in the tomb of midwinter where everything died, worn threadbare and erased underneath the new snowfall. He hadn’t been alone with Remus much in the two months since and he had never been with him right before because Remus didn’t want it, and as Sirius watched him shivering naked at the end of the creaky bed with the wounds from the last full still unhealed red and his whole body trembling with the dirge of poison he thought he understood why. A nightbird called from somewhere outside, bearing up its longing or its pain into the mouth of the moon, beautiful without solace or solution.
“Moony,” he had said, worthlessly. He felt like all the blood had been drained out of him and he was naked and freezing and for the first time in his life he wanted to get on his knees and suck the ancient wound around Remus’s ribs where it had grown over him like moss over a tree, leech the poison out. Instead he stood a few feet in front of the bed and shivered while the moon got into Remus’s mouth and down his throat.
“Is this what you wanted,” said Remus, bitten off between his clenched teeth. He got up quick and crossed the room to where Sirius was standing like an effigy and dug his nail-bitten fingers into Sirius’s arms hard enough to draw blood; his hair was tangled in the filmy yellow eye of gloaming like a crown of thorns and he was shaking, shaking both of them apart. “Is it? Did you want to see it happen so fucking badly?”
It started not in his blood but in his bones, or not in his bones but somewhere deeper, unmappable, inextricable, something estranged yet uncontainable. From there Sirius could feel it fan out into a spinal shatter through his limbs, ribs shifting, arteries re-wiring, back bowing, shoulders snapping, skin burning with the horrible inviolable crush of light at the very rim of the horizon. There was blood between Remus’s teeth and he was panting with the umbilical pain of it, his spine cracking when his knees buckled and he dragged Sirius to the floor with him, not letting go, not letting go. Still Sirius would not change. He watched until he couldn’t any longer and felt that at some point he had started crying but he had no idea when it had happened; in front of him Remus was gasping like something newborn struggling for breath, his shoulderblades realigning under Sirius’s hand where he found his heartbeat where it had always been, beating Remus Remus Remus, Moony Moony Moony, pressing up against his own where they were almost, almost the same.
They woke up in the forest where it had rained sometime in the night, Sirius first and then Remus who watched him pick soggy leaves out of his hair in the reeling blue dawn, neither of them speaking. Together they stood up and walked back to the Shack in the amnesiac morning, stumbling through the fog with their open wounds, their first breaths hanging on the scrolling fog like tracks in new snow.
-
Much later, when Sirius thought about all the ways the world had changed and unchanged in his fractured patchwork lifetime, he would always circle around to Christmas Eve ’79, sitting on the couch with Remus listening to The Slits and Low and looking out the big front window into the snowy sunset moor where nothing moved in the searching light of the boathouse, thinking how desolate it really was, how lost to the world they were. Part of the reason they had come out here was for the softness, to find a place that could swallow them up and all their history and birth them together free of ghosts, beholden to nothing but themselves and to each other-to see the wasteland bear fruit again. Even then they knew the world was hardening and that it would not stop; looking out the window with Remus he could feel them have the same thought stretching like smoke between them: something had set in the earth and it would not change again. He thought of Remus’s parents’ home in Somerset, the belly of the woods and the river, apple cores in the weedy pasture and Remus’s mother playing Ida Cox in the kitchen in the summertime. Nostalgia was a potent anesthetic but still he could not shake the feeling that the world had skipped forward like a scratched record into something dark and warped, and they could not find the exact note where it had left them behind.
They’d wrapped each other’s gifts and spent about an hour the night previous at Peter’s, who was condescending to speak to them again very suddenly for reasons still unclear and had asked them round to a small Christmas party hosted at his new girlfriend’s flat in Leeds. It had been intensely awkward at times and they had left with James and Lily after Lily claimed a headache following a conversation with Ivor Nettlebane, and they’d come home to the window in their bedroom wide open, the curtains billowing with infrequent snow, everything thrown off the bed and the only photo of them they kept out-a Muggle photograph from early spring taken by McKinnon, who had caught them unaware while they were waiting to ride the Tube for shits and giggles, Remus holding a cigarette and laughing at something Sirius had said while Sirius took his wrist and leaned in for a drag, smiling-missing from its frame on the mantel. In the night he woke to a faint scratching at the door and strange slamming far off in the distance, like a fist opening and closing on the moor.
Across the lake they could see something flitting in front of the windows of the boathouse even this far away, bright as a lighthouse now, as if it had blotted out the winterlight from the sky and the earth or else it was eating everything the way the moon did when it began to swell with voracious cyclical ritual in the sky every night. At times the ink-blot shape of it seemed to change: first a person, then hunched like an animal, then huge, unmoving, swallowing light.
“So what are we gonna do when it’s-I don’t know, when it’s finished,” Remus had wondered, finally closing the curtains when it had moved out of sight when they blinked. “After it’s done the gestation thing or whatever kind of sick magic’s going on over there.”
“Better we find it than it find us. Since apparently it’s insatiable,” Sirius had said. “Maybe we need to have a good ritual fuck outside in the snow.” That had been three days ago; they’d laughed, but he knew without asking that they both understood what it meant, that the unquestionable fight or flight was why Dumbledore had put them out there. Black and Lupin against the world, in life or in death. Happy fucking Christmas, et cetera.
As a sort of last-ditch attempt to pretend the center was holding they’d gone grocery shopping and bought good wine and fresh bread and cheeses and pomegranates and spices for mince pie, chocolate to attempt truffles, big potatoes for baking chips, a chicken to roast; the truffles contained an excessive amount of rum and had actually turned out in what was possibly their only Christmas miracle to date, which had given Sirius some hope that the rest of it would go smoothly and he might even get to seduce Remus over dinner as an early present, though he was trying not to let it show in case the slouching infernal whatever could read minds. Lately it felt like drowning every time they came home: everything dimmed, everything roared, yet it all moved very slowly, the minutes and the hours sticking like taffy. He was beginning to understand how people lived in the midst of ruin. How do you escape immolation if not through one other?
When the record shuffled over at the end of the side he got up to take it off and put some tea on the stove with clove and orange peel, listening to the wind rattle the shingles on the roof, the trees bowing in the red dusk unlight. Remus had put a pot on the woodstove with cloves and a few cinnamon sticks he’d stolen from the decorations at Peter’s Christmas party and the whole cottage smelled warm and charmed, like something well-loved; he imagined it like this always, the two of them and everything they could make between them, worn soft with time and with love and the shape-shifting that came with both. He imagined them growing old here, imagined all the years unlived, thinking of all the places where they had found each other: the kitchen counter, Tube stations, the bathroom sink, Camden pubs, unlit Hogwarts corridors, the Shack, the bedroom, the foyer in the flat, the shore of the river where Remus grew up, the left side of the bed, takeout lines, the middle cushion of the murderous couch, the stove, assorted closets at parties, the hallowed shattering minutes before moonrise, the Hogwarts Express, thresholds, dreams.
“Didn’t we have Fun House?” Remus was asking him when he came back into the living room. He was looking through their vinyl and his knuckles were slightly chapped from the cold like Sirius’s. “If nothing else I guess it’s got good taste.”
“Raw Power is better. Lust for Life is better too.”
“Snob,” said Remus. “You love Fun House. I forgot to tell you-Lily swears she conceived the baby to ‘Golden Years’ and she was joking about naming it Ziggy as a kind of honor but James apparently thinks she’s serious and he’s losing it trying to figure out how to explain it to his parents. He was going to ask you but he figured you’d laugh in his face instead of behind his back.”
“I would’ve.”
“I did, too.”
“That does sound like James though. Aladdin Sane would’ve been better but if you really tried you could make it sound almost pureblood, I mean, add a few suffixes and just pretend it’s the third or fourth in its line and every kid in the Great Hall would turn their heads to see Ziggius James Lily Potter III, Esquire.”
“I turned my head to see you,” said Remus. He’d given up trying to find the vinyl and was rolling a cigarette on Sirius’s copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, smiling sweetly. “I was eleven years old and I already thought you were very handsome, not that I thought about it quite like that. It was more-you were so,” he paused, brow smudged slightly in memory, licking the seam of the paper, “it was hard to look away from you, even if I hadn’t met you on the train I couldn’t have. Not to blow your ego or anything but I don’t think I ever had a chance of like, not having sex dreams about you by the time I was fourteen.”
“You know I was pissed when James took the bed between yours and mine that very first night. I tried to be a good boy and not be an obvious asshole about it,” said Sirius, feeling loopy, going to sit next to Remus on the couch with his arm slung across the back of it. He could remember nights in fifth and sixth and seventh year, lying on his bed behind the curtains with a silencing charm cast all around and Benjy Fenwick’s borrowed Walkman, listening to Remus’s Ege Bamyasi tape and wondering what it meant that he was a dog and thinking Remus Remus Remus, saying it out loud occasionally just to hear what it sounded like in his mouth on his bed, feeling infiltrated and flooded through with terrified, still-uncomprehending bliss. “I used to say your name in the dark sometimes,” he said, supposing he ought to continue the confessional thread. “In school, I mean. Now whenever I do that you get to hear.”
“I always used to get this weird whole-body thrill when you said my name, or when I said yours. Sometimes I still do.”
“West Country boy,” said Sirius, his nose pressed into Remus’s neck. “I wanted to know everything about you, like every single piece of you, even what I couldn’t have. After we found out about the wolf I couldn’t stand the thought of you being alone and I used to turn into an asshole about it every month. You remember how it was.”
“I do,” said Remus, taking a drag and then another. In the corner of his mouth he was smiling like it had gotten stuck there. “Maybe we’re both sort of creepy now that I think about it.”
“We’re the creepiest people I know. And every friend group needs at least one intense homoerotic friendship that’s the subject of salacious rumors for years to come so I think we outdid everyone in our year. Maybe all of them for like the next decade.”
“I’m glad it was us and it was all absolutely true and then some in the end, except maybe the thing I heard about Majorca and the beach house seventh year,” said Remus, leering gleefully as Sirius got up. “Come back here, I’m cold.”
“The kettle’s whistling,” said Sirius, letting his fingers trail unnecessarily along Remus’s thigh as he got up, “I’ll take care of you in just a minute.”
“Two sugars,” Remus called after him.
“How long have I been making tea for you,” said Sirius, mildly outraged. Once he’d turned off the stove he came back with their mugs and then turned on the wireless, trying to catch the weather between Celestina Warbeck’s Christmas album atrocities. During the forecast-no snow, more wind, sunless dawn-the radio began to crackle strangely, hissing from the inside, static sparks sawing along the music until he thought he could almost make out a voice in it, or many, tongueless words trying to form in a mouth that could not speak.
Throat tight he leaned forward to hear, reaching out and taking Remus’s hand, fingers seeking the pulse in the blue vein-branches underneath the tearing scar around his wrist, feeling in the map of it everything he’d ever loved beating and beating up against his own heartbeat, spreading through his chest and down to his frantic hands as if they were the same miraculous creature, too grand to confine to a single body. On the radio the voice grew louder, wailing torturous unearthed fury called up from the bowels of hell itself, and with it the walls began again to move like blood, the breath of the plaster muttering its nightmare-rattle across the foundation; outside he could hear the death-march moan spreading out centrifugal from the very heart of the lake, unmistakable now as his own beating heart.
BLACK, said the voice, LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK. LET ME IN.
The cold searing jolt reverberated through them both and he could feel his fingernails bitten past the quick digging into Remus’s hand. Part of him was thinking, now or never, now or never again. They had their wands and they had each other still in one piece and he was scared shitless and sideways and yet there was something in them-not love, or not only, and not magic or not only, but an unconquerable, invincible truth, a thing born of history and time and loving and hating and wanting and running and finding and unknowing and unbreaking, born of every step he had ever taken towards Remus. He knew, with a rare and invulnerable certainty, that they would come back to this house tonight. He knew with every part of him that had ever mattered and every piece of himself that had ever loved anything that they would find their way. They would come back to each other. They would come back to each other.
If he’d said it out loud he figured Remus would either have started a fistfight with him on the spot-imminent agonizing death be damned-or Stunned him and dragged him out of the house to the Apparition point or said it was just like Sirius to assume they were the heroes of their own story with a happy ending to wait out, and as he’d have been infuriatingly fucking correct Sirius didn’t say anything. Tugging on Remus’s hand he stood until Remus stood with him, the house grinding its teeth in the floorboards, the voice on the radio howling moaning screaming its monstrous death-trip dirge:
YOU FORFEIT WHAT YOU HAVE. GIVE IT TO ME. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN-
“I think you were half-right,” said Sirius, yanking Remus towards their coats, “I think, Jesus bloody motherfucker, it wants us. It wants-”
Remus stared at him, pale like he normally only got when the moon was just on the wane, spat out of the earth and newborn in the brimming metallic womb of dawn. Understanding splashed across his bright lovely face like cold water. “Those-the other ones, the ones who disappeared. They let it in. They thought they could just lock the door and make it go away but they let it in.”
“Remember? The Aurors found the door open. The just-they let it come to them, Remus, we can’t, we have to do something. It wants-this, us. Everything.”
“Well it’s not fucking getting it,” said Remus. Sirius dragged a hand through his dark hair and pulled him towards their coats on the wall and their boots but Remus stumbled backwards to the coffee table, reaching for his tea.
“What the fuck are you doing? Moony we have to go, come on-shoes-come on, now.”
“If I’m going out I my goddamn tea first.”
We are insane, Sirius thought, wild blood-burst frenzied crush of love, this is insane, we are insane, hence we will be back before the tea goes cold. “Remus,” he said, “Moony. Moony love.” He took the cup out of Remus’s hands and put it back on the coaster, coaxing him back to the door while the floor shuddered awake beneath their feet. “We’re going to come back,” he said. In the kitchen he could hear the shutters on the window slamming against the house; they tied their boots quick and stepped into their coats running, the door already open for them. “We have presents and mince pie and not to ruin anything but I really did buy an eighth of weed. It’s been in my sock drawer for five days and so far I’ve stayed out of it so you can extol my incomparable patience when we get home. We’re coming back.”
“You fucking nutcase,” said Remus, laughing without breath. By now they were running side by side, wands held out cutting into the nightmare curtain hanging all along the moor to the boathouse, lit like a second moon on the lake, swallowing light, swallowing life, swallowing time. “Why do I believe you,” said Remus, and in the dark-arms outstretched blind on a tightrope he reached out in love and took Sirius’s hand, holding on tight, strung along by their uncontainable heartbeat-pulse to anywhere, anywhere.
Buried among the snow and decades of brush was an old wooden fishing boat with no oar. Together they dug it out and set it in the water, sure at first that it would sink even after they cast Impervius a few times, but it did not; across the deep gleaming water on the matted pelt of land was forever, was the end, was what had always been, was every step he and Remus had ever taken together, every fuck-up and every peal of irrevocable nighttime laughter and every touch and every displaced yearning welling up a hundred miles away in letters and sleepless loveless nothing-nights and music and dreaming and desire, the always-desire for all the life and all the time and all the love they had yet to give each other. The boathouse smoldered like a bad wound, and in the window something watched them, waiting, a person or a wraith or a shade of dark magic; they would unmake it, he knew, they would erase its place in the world, though he still felt the bottom drop out of him, as if he had fallen and all his pieces hadn’t landed in the right order.
Remus turned to him with their boots in the water, their reflections rippling sepulchral on the water beneath the glacial light of their wands. On his face was a sort of terrified bliss, his mouth open and his eyeteeth showing over his bottom lip, that famished look Sirius loved; he grabbed Remus by the shoulders and kissed him hard, fever-hot, blood in it, and honesty, and music. Within him he’d sometimes thought there was an image or a map of Remus, what he’d need to get back, what he’d need to find his way home again no matter how far or how long he had wandered, no matter how lost to each other they had become.
“I love you,” he said, his breath all smoke, stroking Remus’s cheekbones with his freezing thumbs where Remus’s hands had come up to cover his own, strong, like driftwood, warmth in it. “I love you to a degree that is probably classifiable as its own very specific insanity, and you are all-you’re so-fuck, I love you, Remus, I love you better than I love anything, I’d give up magic or, or fucking anything, when Muggles say that thing, would you jump off a cliff if so-and-so did it, well yes, if you did it, yes I would. It’s that much, it’s just-I loved you before I knew you, I swear it, I was always going to-”
He knew he must look royally unhinged but so did Remus, who pulled his hair and kissed him again, not letting go, not letting go. “When we get home I’m going to tell you how horribly I love you like jumping off a cliff et cetera, because it’d be me jumping after you,” said Remus. Against him Sirius’s heart quickened and he worried briefly at the swill of blood that he might have a heart attack before they could exorcise any dark magic from the moor. “I’m also going to absolutely fucking-I’m going to blow your mind when we get home. But let’s,” he said, “let’s go, Sirius, let’s,” and steered them toward the boat, pointing them towards the far shore of the nightmare.
They got in the boat and sat until it steadied, using a spell to propel it slowly across the water, the unpeeled rind of the scythe-moon blurred to a candle-flame flicker by the light coming off the lake, the trees and the leggy cattails and the sediment all murmuring, the shadow blading across the window into the deep water as the boat hit land, both of them shielding their eyes against the light burning high like a dying star. Cold snow on their boots, shallow water, the owl-calls in the murky middle distance reminding him that there was something beyond this, that it would be over soon, that there was tea and an empty bed waiting for him at home after all the miles and miles they had left to go.
When they got out of the boat into the water where wood was rotting under the moss, Remus held his hand against the strange current where nothing else mattered but their breathing bodies, their clockwork connection; this was what he was for, he realized. This was what he was for. Blind but sure-footed they stepped forward together into the monstrous mouth of the night, magic spilling golden and unbidden between their fingers, for better or for worse. Life was inescapable, absolute, everywhere.
-
The tea turned out to be lukewarm.