The Fall of the House of Black (1/2)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BLACK
Summary: Remus Lupin has heard not a single word from his old friend Sirius Black since Sirius retreated to his family’s ancestral home, abruptly and without explanation, twelve years ago. Now Remus receives an urgent letter from Sirius, begging him to visit the House of Black.
Characters: Sirius, Remus, Regulus, Kreacher
Words: 16,000
Notes:
I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and about the “Noble and Most Ancient House of Black,” and how delightfully they might map onto one another: two grim houses, one gothic tale! But in this one, perhaps there’s romance to be had as well…
(This is an AU and a fusion with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but you don’t in the least need to have read that story to enjoy this. Though if you have read it, I hope you’ll get a kick out of spotting the parallels!)
Written for the 2017 Remus/Sirius Games (Team Sirius, Day 21; prompt: picture of a stack of old books with a glass jar on top).
I’ve also created a music playlist to accompany this story (see the end notes for links to individual songs).
Thanks so much to huldrejenta for betareading!
Read here below or on AO3.
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It was a dull, dark day in autumn when a letter arrived for Remus Lupin.
A dusky owl dropped the envelope beside his plate at the staff table in Hogwarts’ Great Hall, then winged silently away. Remus snatched up the letter and stared at the elegant scrawl of black ink that graced the front of the envelope, proclaiming Remus’ name across heavy, cream-coloured paper.
Remus knew that handwriting. He would know it anywhere.
With mumbled excuses to his colleagues, Remus made his way down from the staff table and through the throngs of students chattering over their breakfasts. He pushed open the oaken doors of the castle, seeking a solitude that was hard to come by within the castle walls.
He found a somewhat secluded seat on a rock beside the lake, under a brooding sky. The air was clammy, hinting at coming rain, and fallen leaves shuffled restlessly about his feet. It was fitting, somehow, that this letter should arrive now, of all seasons of the year. For Remus, autumn always brought to mind lost friends.
He breathed in and slid one finger under the envelope’s flap. The paper came apart smoothly, as Remus had known it would do. How often had he watched just this sticking charm cast by the same hand that had written Remus’ name in such an elegant, careless scrawl across the envelope he now held?
Remus suppressed a shudder of terrible nostalgia, and slid free a single parchment sheet.
The letter indeed proved to be from Sirius Black. The famously reclusive Sirius Black who’d lived shut away from society these last twelve years, speaking to no one but an old house-elf people said still tottered around the grand old country house Sirius had inherited from his pure-blood family. That crumbling mansion had passed down through so many generations, from sire to son of the aristocratic Blacks, that eventually the family and the estate came to be known by the same name, both referred to simply as the “House of Black”.
The letter Remus held was brief. There were no explanations, no apologies for the long years of silence. Sirius simply entreated his old friend, in words that failed to hide a state of high agitation, to come to the House of Black as soon as possible. Sirius made vague mention of some illness and alluded cryptically to its urgency, but seemed disinclined to commit more detail than that to paper.
He signed the letter:
Your friend,
Sirius
Were they friends? Remus wondered, staring out over the Hogwarts lake without taking much notice of the chill waters or the wind that soughed across the surface, whipping tips of white to the scudding waves. They’d been inseparable, of course, here at Hogwarts: Sirius, James, Peter and Remus. But all that had changed twelve years ago, with Peter’s betrayal and James and Lily’s deaths. And then, in the terrible days after that shattering loss, when Remus had most needed his only remaining friend, Sirius had departed abruptly to his family’s old country estate, the ancestral home he’d previously renounced. He’d given a vague explanation about needing to put something in order there and said he would be back soon. But he’d never returned, and Remus was left standing suddenly and utterly alone.
Remus had carried on, yes. What else could he do? He scrounged up what little work he could find despite the necessities of concealing his lycanthropy; he looked out for Harry from afar; he kept putting one foot in front of the other, walking through a drab world so different from the one he’d known in those too-brief days when he’d belonged to a band of merry boys. If Remus was not happy, precisely, there were at least occasional bright spots. He’d been grateful indeed to receive Dumbledore’s invitation to teach at Hogwarts this year. But the friends he’d once had were gone: two dead, one in Azkaban, and one a self-styled exile who’d never had the decency to tell Remus why.
And yet, even after all this time of bitter silence, Remus knew he couldn’t ignore Sirius’ summons. Not when he wrote in such evident agitation. To have reached out after so long, Sirius must be in very desperate need. And a friend’s need was something Remus had never been able to resist - nor would he want to.
Resolute, Remus stood from his seat on the rock beside the lake, only now noticing the chill that had seeped from the air into his bones. He would request a few days’ leave of absence from his teaching duties and pack a bag immediately.
The next morning, so early the grass beneath his feet was still damp with dew and the sun was barely struggling out from behind a bank of clouds on the horizon, Remus stood atop a low rise of land, his small travelling case in hand, gazing across a dark tarn at the imposing sight that was the House of Black.
He’d Apparated to the nearest village, a dour collection of half a dozen low-roofed houses huddled in a hollow between two forbidding stone tors, then he’d come the rest of the way by foot, crossing some five miles of desolate, uninhabited land. And now Remus stood looking at the House of Black for the first time in his life.
It was a grim old place, gloomy and dark, its walls crumbling beneath a matted layer of ivy, and yet somehow its ruined splendour made the place all the more imposing. There it hulked, a great bulk of bleak stone with rows of narrow windows staring out from its walls like so many malevolent eyes. Crippled old trees surrounded the building, their gnarled trunks groping inwards at the house, hemming it in with their branches.
Remus remembered Sirius saying once, in that falsely careless voice he’d always adopted when speaking of his family, that some ancient ancestor of his line had considered establishing the family seat in London, but in the end had chosen instead this far-flung, desolate reach of countryside.
“Even the grimmest parts of London would have been too cheerful a place for us Blacks,” Sirius had said, with a forced, too-bright attempt at a laugh. He’d always hated talking about his family. He was weighed down even then, even before the worst of the war, by his family’s reputation for Dark magic and pride and pure-blood mania. He’d never let any of them visit him at home, not even James, although Sirius had come to all of their houses as often as he could manage, painfully eager to spend the school breaks anywhere else but his own home. He was always muttering that one of these days he was going to run away from his family for good.
He’d even managed it, for a time. So why had he returned?
Remus felt cold at the thought that the forbidding edifice before him was where Sirius lived - Sirius, who in their schooldays had always been so full of life and laughter. For twelve years now, Sirius had locked himself away in this bleak place. Could grief do that to a person, twist him so badly that he shunned everything that might still have had the power to bring him happiness? Or was it guilt, guilt that he’d failed to recognise when Peter had turned traitor to them all?
Remus, too, knew that guilt. He’d lived with it for the past twelve years.
The tarn - a small lake - lay between him and the house, its waters unmoving. The House of Black was reflected in that water, its inverted image even darker and more forbidding than the house itself. Looking at that doubled image, Remus felt a thrill of terror without knowing why. He couldn’t be afraid of a mere house, could he? Sirius’ parents had by all accounts been cruel people, but they were long dead now, as was Sirius’ brother, all of them killed near the end of the war that had engulfed so many lives on both sides of the conflict. There was no one here now but Sirius.
Summoning his determination, Remus trod with firm steps down the slope that led to the House of Black.
Remus rapped the tarnished brass knocker, then stood waiting a long while. At last, a wizened house-elf with a snout-like nose opened the door.
“Good morning,” Remus began, attempting to start off with politeness despite the elf’s heavy scowl. “I’m here to see -”
“The stranger is here to see the master, no doubt,” the elf grouched in a froggy voice, seemingly addressing his attention to Remus’ knees. “The master has always done as he pleases, yes, and now he invites riff-raff into his mother’s noble house, a house fit for the eyes of only the purest of wizards, this great and justly famous House of Black.”
“Er,” said Remus. Not having grown up in a home with house-elves he always felt a little unsure of the proper mode of address, but this conversation did seem a tad unusual already.
“Oh, my poor mistress, what would she say if she could see the contempt her first-born son shows for her noble home! If she could see his ingratitude!” the elf cried, his voice booming with his disapproval. But he hobbled away down the house’s long corridor, leaving the front door flung open, so Remus cautiously followed.
The corridor began with a high, Gothic archway and stretched deep into the house. It had a ceiling of carved woodwork and walls draped in intricately woven tapestries so imposingly old, Remus feared they might crumble if he accidentally brushed against them as he passed.
Following the grumbling house-elf, Remus turned down one dimly lit passageway, then another, working to maintain his sense of direction within the labyrinthine hallways of the house. Abruptly, the elf stopped in front of an apparently unremarkable door, no different from many others they had passed.
“The master sees fit to spend his time in the old library, even while his noble father’s elegant study stands empty all these years,” the elf muttered under his breath, addressing his remarks to somewhere under the doorknob. “The master has no respect for tradition, oh, if only his poor father knew!”
Remus wondered if he was meant to make some response to this idiosyncratic declaration, although the elf didn’t appear to require Remus’ participation in his one-side conversation, nor even to pay any regard to Remus’ presence.
But then the door in front of them opened and Remus’ words died on his lips.
Sirius stood framed in the doorway, dust motes swirling around him in what little light filtered down from the room’s high, narrow windows, creating a faint halo about his dark head. Remus stared.
As a boy, Sirius had possessed an unearthly beauty, with his high cheekbones, his silky dark hair and his mesmerising grey eyes. Girls and boys alike had thrown themselves at Sirius in their time at Hogwarts, but he’d worn his princely looks lightly and laughed off anyone who tried to take him too seriously as any sort of teenage heartthrob. In fact, when Remus thought of the Sirius of those days, the good days before the war, before Peter’s betrayal and James and Lily’s deaths, he remembered Sirius always laughing, his head thrown back and his gorgeous face in profile.
The man who stood before Remus now was terribly changed. His face was almost cadaverous in complexion, as if he hadn’t ventured into the sunlight in all these twelve years. His eyes, always striking, now took up an inordinate amount of space in his pale, drawn face, and his dark hair hung lank about his shoulders. It was only by his patrician nose and the surpassingly beautiful curve of his lips that Remus was certain this was indeed Sirius Black.
“Remus,” the man in the doorway said, and his voice, at least, was the same as Remus remembered, still thrillingly rich, despite a hoarseness that spoke of disuse. The sound of it sent a shiver along Remus’ skin.
Sirius moved as if to embrace Remus in greeting, but at the last moment dropped his arm and stilled himself, stopping in the doorway. Instead he said to the house-elf lurking at Remus’ elbow, “You can go, Kreacher.” The elf skulked away down the corridor, still complaining under his breath.
Sirius stepped aside, allowing Remus to enter the room. The old library, as the elf had called it, was large and lofty, a grand room despite clearly having fallen into disrepair. Sun-faded curtains drooped beside narrow windows set so high in the walls that only a few squibs of autumn sunlight struggled down to meet the oaken floor, tracing strips of pale light across the otherwise gloomy expanse.
Dust covered nearly every surface: the long wooden tables and the heavy chairs, the ornate iron wall sconces and candelabras, and a dark draped cloth that concealed the unmistakable curving bulk of a grand piano. And of course there were shelves upon shelves of books, by the look of it a collection to rival the library at Hogwarts itself. And yet despite this wealth of knowledge and opulence, the room inspired only melancholy in Remus. It showed no sign of Sirius’ presence except for a stack of books perched at the end of one long table, and a dust-free track worn on the floor by his comings and goings between the table and the door.
But, incongruously, an inviting fire crackled in the hearth, and two squashy red armchairs were pulled up close beside the grate.
“Thought you might want to sit by the fire, since it’s a chilly day,” Sirius said gruffly. “Makes it a bit like Hogwarts, evenings in the common room and all.” He rubbed a hand nervously through his unkempt, overlong hair and stared at Remus with those mesmerising eyes.
“Right, yes,” Remus said. “Yes, of course.” He set down his travelling case beside the door and followed Sirius into the room, as if there hadn’t been a gap of twelve years since the last time they’d lounged in front of a fire together.
They sat, Sirius throwing himself into the chair to one side of the fire and Remus perching awkwardly on the edge of the other. The cushion was comfortable and the merrily crackling fire was warm, but Remus could not seem to slow his racing heart. Here was Sirius, sitting across from him, Sirius Black whom he had thought he would never see again.
No sooner had Sirius sat than he flung himself up again and began to pace back and forth across the thick carpet in front of the fire. Remus pulled his legs to the side so Sirius wouldn’t trip over them.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’ve come,” Sirius said, his voice pitched so low that Remus had to lean forwards to hear him. “After so long, I didn’t know if you - that is -”
He reached one end of the carpet, spun on his heel, and stalked back, his intense grey stare once again fixed on Remus.
“This house!” Sirius burst out, and Remus startled back in his seat. “This house, it makes people go mad, not that my family weren’t mad to begin with - ha - you remember, don’t you? But back then I was foolhardy enough to think I’d escaped all that!” Sirius laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of mirth.
He rushed forwards and dropped onto the arm of Remus’ chair, now suddenly, disconcertingly close. “Remus,” he said, his voice low like it had been when it was sometimes just the two of them talking late into the night in Gryffindor Tower.
Remus shivered despite himself. But it would not do to get swept away in memories. He was here to help Sirius with whatever trouble had befallen him, that was all. Not to grasp vainly for signs of the boyhood friendship that had once been.
“It’s such a solace to see you again,” Sirius said, still low and intense and far too close to allow for clarity of thought. And although the words hardly sounded like something Sirius would have said at seventeen, there was no mistaking the earnestness behind them. Remus swallowed and forced himself to meet the gaze boring down at him from Sirius’ perch on the arm of his chair. “I think you’ll be able to help me,” Sirius went on. “I’ve about reached the end of my wits and I don’t know what I’m going to -”
At the far end of the library, a door opened. Barely discernable through the gloom there in the recesses far from the windows and the fire, a figure stepped into the room, plucked a book from a shelf, then once more disappeared, closing the door and departing as silently as it had come. The figure had been a human, not the house-elf, but more than that Remus had not been able to make out.
Sirius’ reaction was immediate and extreme. He jolted up from the arm of the chair, sprang to his feet and lunged forwards several steps as though he would pursue the figure, although it was already gone. Then he stopped just as suddenly and turned back to Remus with vividly conflicting emotions on his face. He looked very much as though he were about to try to deny that anyone had entered the library at all.
Illness, Sirius’ letter had said, but Sirius did not seem ill. He seemed to be isolated, behaving strangely, and harbouring a mysterious houseguest despite the public rumours that had him living alone aside from the house-elf all these years.
“Sirius,” Remus said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
For a few moments more, Sirius simply stared, as though he really would try to pretend that nothing was amiss.
Then he rushed back as fast as he had first dashed away and flung himself to the floor at Remus’ feet, dropping his head with wild abandon onto Remus’ knee. It was a posture of such abject submission and utter trust that Remus’ heart stuttered in his chest.
“You’re right,” Sirius rasped. “I can’t conceal this from you. I need your help and what’s more I need your sanity, because I swear to you we’re going mad here, both of us.”
Both, Remus wondered. Who was both?
Given Sirius’ state of agitation, he must try to ask gently. And perhaps he’d better start more generally with the background of the situation, because right now Remus was utterly at sea.
“Sirius,” he began, in the calm tone of voice that often served him well with frightened first-years, “why don’t I tell you what I thought I’d understood, when we were younger, and you can tell me when I begin to go wrong. This is your family’s ancestral home, right?”
Almost imperceptibly, his head still resting against Remus’ knee and a tangle of hair obscuring his face, Sirius nodded.
“I know you hated this place,” Remus said. There was no kinder way to put it, so he said the words but said them gently, and had to trust Sirius would know even after all this time that he was never trying to be cruel. “You ran away from here when we were still in school and you swore you would never come back. But then, at the end of the war, after -” Remus stumbled over James and Lily, even now. It was too painful to speak aloud of the excruciating emptiness where they should be but were not. Instead, he hastily substituted, “You came back here, after your parents and Regulus -”
Sirius’ whole body stiffened against Remus’ leg. He lifted his face now, but it was with the frozen terror of an animal caught in a predator’s gaze.
Cautiously, Remus backtracked and tried again. “Your parents both died before the end of the war,” he began.
Sirius nodded, unperturbed. Though he’d been in constant conflict with his parents when they were alive, they were clearly not the source of his distress now. It must be something about Regulus, then.
“And your brother… I know he was a Death Eater, and I know you lost contact with him after you left home. Later, after everything, I heard he’d been killed for trying to defect from Voldemort’s side. I’m sorry, Sirius. I know you didn’t get on with him, but still, I’m so sorry.”
Sirius’ eyes staring up at Remus were two pools of tragedy. He seemed hardly to breathe. Finally he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “He’s not dead.”
Remus shuddered. Sirius, pressed so tightly against him, must have felt it too. “What do you mean?” Remus managed. “You always said it yourself, serving Voldemort was a life term. No one escaped him and survived.”
“I don’t know how he did it! I think he must have had Kreacher help him. Voldemort believed he was dead, I’m sure of that. He wouldn’t have been allowed to live otherwise. But he got out, and he came back here, and I - I found out just after -” Sirius couldn’t speak of James and Lily’s deaths any more than Remus could. His gaze up at Remus was tortured. “He’s my little brother. He seemed half mad from whatever they’d done to him as a Death Eater, and he was in such danger. If word had got out that he was still alive, he’d have been at risk from everyone. From our side because he’d been a Death Eater, even if he did renounce them in the end, and from Voldemort’s supporters because he’d dared to leave…” Sirius seemed to steel himself, then went on: “I hadn’t been able to save them, Remus. It was too late for James and Lily, but I thought at least I could save Regulus. So I let the rumour stand that he was dead, and stayed here where I could watch over him.”
They stared at each other. It was a shock to think Regulus was alive, Sirius’ brother whom Remus had hardly thought of in twelve years. But it made a terrible sense of the way Sirius had left everything behind in the wake of the war.
For he’d left truly everything: his life, his flat in London, all the rest of their friends and acquaintances. And he’d left Remus alone in those terrible days of their shared grief over losing James and Lily, who’d been like family to them both. James and Lily, who’d unhesitatingly made Remus a part of their lives, lycanthropy and all, and only laughed and hugged him when he’d asked if they were sure they still wanted him around once they had a baby. James and Lily, who’d made Sirius godfather to that same child. Yet here Sirius was, absent from Harry’s life without a word for the last twelve years.
“I didn’t want to leave, Remus,” Sirius said, his voice rough. “After - after losing - James and Lily -” His eyes dropped to the floor and he breathed raggedly for a moment, before he pulled his gaze back up to Remus. “My heart was broken,” he said fiercely, “and there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to be in London with -” Once again he broke off, pressing his lips together, looking almost in pain. “But I was going…I can’t describe it, I felt I was going mad as soon as I returned to this house. I wasn’t fit for the world anymore. And Regulus needed me. And he went on needing me, and it only got worse, and now I’m afraid of what he’ll do next. There’s some kind of madness in him,” Sirius whispered. “And now I’ve gone mad too, locked up in this evil house. All my family were, and now it’s happening to me.”
Remus’ heart ached. That had always been Sirius’ fear, unspoken but not well hidden, that he would become like his family despite his desperate struggle to be as unlike them as possible. How badly Remus wanted to assure him that of course he wasn’t mad, and of course he was nothing like his parents.
But what did he know? He hadn’t seen Sirius in a dozen years. Empty reassurances from someone with no grounds for offering them would offer little consolation.
Instead, though it was a flimsy, second-best kind of help, he said, “Tell me about Regulus. What is it that’s wrong? And why now more so than before?”
Sirius lifted his head, but rested one hand against the side of Remus’ knee. A part of Remus thrilled at that touch, despite knowing very well that Sirius meant nothing by it. Sirius had always been free with his physical expressions of affection, roughhousing with James or flinging an arm around Remus as they talked, and perhaps that was still true even after all these years apart.
“He talks about things that are…impossible. But he believes them utterly. Dark artefacts he insists he has to destroy… He doesn’t seem to know that Voldemort is gone, Remus. He still thinks the ‘Dark Lord’ has got to be taken down, and that he’s the only one who knows how to do it. But when I press him on what he means, he goes silent. He does strange experiments, dangerous things, and lately he comes over in violent fits of frustration when they don’t go how he wants. I’m afraid he’ll do something terrible. Or that I’ll do something terrible to stop him.”
He gazed up at Remus, his eyes so piercing that for a moment Remus couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Just when he thought he might burst with the longing to do something foolhardy - perhaps reach out to touch that altered yet still so very dear face -
Sirius leapt to his feet and said in his low, enthralling voice, “Let me show you something.”
He rushed to one of the library’s shelves, his fingers scanning along it until they reached a small book tucked more deeply within the shelf than the others.
Remus, watching his graceful movements, was awash in memory.
He’d always admired Sirius, certainly - with all his passion and all his beauty, how could Remus not? But as for anything more than that…Remus hadn’t allowed himself even to think it. Oh, there’d always been something there, some electric, undefined current between him and Sirius. As much as James and Sirius were best mates for life, chosen brothers who fiercely watched each other’s backs, it was Remus and Sirius who often laughed at the same joke before anyone else even knew there was a joke, or stayed up through the night talking, long after all the others in the dorm had gone to bed. Talking until Remus’ eyes burned with tiredness but still he didn’t want to give up that feeling of being alone in all the world with Sirius, the two of them sprawled at either end of a wide window seat, looking out from Gryffindor Tower as the hush of dawn broke over the Hogwarts grounds.
But Remus had always had the clear impression that Sirius didn’t want it to be more than that. Maybe Sirius had had his own fears about allowing himself to get close - the same way that Remus as a werewolf, a Dark creature, didn’t wish to inflict the dangers and hardships of his life on anyone else. Or perhaps Sirius simply hadn’t felt the pull as strongly as Remus did.
No, it was useless to speculate why their friendship had never taken on a dimension beyond friendship. It hadn’t, that was all. There was no use in ruminating on bygones.
Sirius brought the book he had fetched from the shelf back to the two armchairs by the fire, this time sitting in the other chair and handing the book across to Remus. It was very old, bound in black leather with ornate, raised detailing along the spine, and surprisingly heavy for its small size.
“All the Black family history, it’s all in there,” Sirius said. “But don’t look at any of that, it’s awful. Just read the poem on the first page.”
Carefully, aware he was handling a relic, Remus opened the cover. On the first page of parchment, written in faded ink by an ornate hand, were four stark lines:
The House of Black, eternal glory,
Never shall be felled by foe,
Unless some son’s unhallowed story
Cast his heart to depths below.
Remus looked up to see Sirius intently watching him as he read. “Practically the family motto,” Sirius growled. “Eternal glory! Never to be felled by foe! Our parents used it on us as a dire warning, making sure we knew our lineage would be glorious forever, as long as we didn’t do something to screw it up.” He leaned forwards in his seat, elbows perched on his knees, his eyes burning once again. “But what if it’s not just some mouldy old bit of doggerel? What if it’s a prophecy, and Regulus is the ‘unhallowed’ one who’s going to do something so awful it brings this whole place crashing down? Or what if I’m the one?”
Remus looked into Sirius’ gaunt face and asked, “How can I help?”
He’d meant it as a staunch expression of support, but the words came out more plaintive than he’d intended. He was moved that Sirius had thought to seek out him of all people after all these years, but he also deeply doubted he would be able to provide what Sirius needed. If there had been a dangerous creature in the attic or a spell gone rogue and in need of containment, then Remus might have brought his expertise to bear. But he knew nothing of pure-blood families and ancient curses.
“Just be here,” Sirius said urgently. “I don’t know what will happen next, but I have such an awful feeling. Can you stay, even for a day or two?”
Remus thought of Hogwarts, where he’d requested a few days’ leave from work. Family emergency, he’d said and Dumbledore hadn’t questioned him, although he knew perfectly well that Remus no longer had any family living.
But even if Dumbledore hadn’t granted permission, could Remus have refused Sirius now? When he was staring at Remus with such terror, but such faith that Remus could shield him from what he believed was coming?
“Of course,” Remus said. “Of course I can stay.”
“Excellent!” Sirius cried, and leapt to his feet in one of the sudden, mercurial shifts of mood that Remus was coming to recognise were characteristic of him now. “Let’s have some music, then, to pass the time.”
They spent the rest of the day together in a fashion Remus could only call surreal. Sirius did indeed sweep away the cloth covering the grand piano that stood along one wall of the library, sending up a tremendous cloud of dust, and took his place before the keys.
Remus had vaguely known that Sirius could play - it was the sort of skill all sons of noble houses seemed to accrue effortlessly - but he’d had no idea he played so well. Sirius was a sensitive musician who poured himself into his playing and Remus listened in awe, transported by the music and by the passion behind it. If ever a person had believed in the melody he produced, it was Sirius.
But as the afternoon passed, Sirius grew increasingly edgy. Finally he admitted that, although he was loath to be such a poor host as to leave Remus alone, he needed to excuse himself for a time to check on his brother. But he insisted that Remus had the run of the house, should go wherever he liked, and Sirius would find him again in a bit.
So, while Sirius departed for Regulus’ rooms in one far wing, Remus explored, trying to fathom this place. He still struggled to reconcile the vivacious friend he’d known at Hogwarts with these solemn rooms and endless dark corridors.
There was a grand ballroom that clearly hadn’t seen the flicker of candlelit chandeliers or the whirl of dancers in many long years. There were drawing rooms and sitting rooms and parlours, so many spaces devoted to entertaining guests, yet all were cold and unwelcoming. Each room Remus peered into left him feeling keenly his status as an interloper.
Sirius had suggested Remus fetch himself something to eat, so he descended a staircase barely illuminated by shuttered wall sconces, to the basement kitchen. Here below, the sconces burned a little brighter - the house-elf Kreacher must have decided it was necessary to compromise on the house’s dour aesthetic in order to be able to see about his work - but it was still a grim and chilly space, with its cold stone walls. Remus thought of the cheerful Hogwarts kitchens, with elves always bustling in and out, and felt a moment of surprisingly stark pity for the disagreeable Kreacher, bound as he was to this place along with Sirius and Regulus.
From the larder, Remus gathered some cheese, nuts and a loaf of bread. He saw unexpected items, too, on a small table to one side of the room: a tiny heap of some fine, white powder sat next to a squarish glass phial of elixir, as though someone had walked away in the middle of gathering ingredients for potion-making.
Difficult, though, to say who was least likely to be devoting time to brewing potions: Sirius, the house-elf, or Sirius’ supposedly deranged brother. Perhaps Remus was wrong and these were simply items for cooking.
Remus looked up at the sound of an irritated grunt from the kitchen doorway. The house-elf himself had appeared and was eyeing Remus with suspicion.
“The master’s guest makes very free with the hospitality of the House of Black,” Kreacher grumbled in his froggy voice. He didn’t make eye contact with Remus, but again appeared to be speaking to his knees. “He pokes his nose where it does not belong, oh yes. My poor mistress, if she could see her house, overrun by lowlife scum!”
Remus was not terribly surprised that an elf loyal to a family such as this one would consider him scum, half-Muggleborn and werewolf as he was, but “overrun” did seem a bit strong when there was only one of him. Still, the kitchen was Kreacher’s domain, and he was indeed trespassing on it. “I was fetching something to eat, but I’ll take it back upstairs with me,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality, Kreacher.”
Remus thought he saw the elf blink at him in confusion as Remus turned and ascended the stairs to the main part of the house.
There, he managed to find a room that was a little less forbidding than the rest: a small parlour on the ground floor, so far to the end of one wing that it felt as if the rest of the house had forgotten it was there. A rug on the floor softened the bleakness, and two chairs were pulled up beside the narrow windows, where weak afternoon sunlight filtered in. Here Remus sat to eat his bread and cheese.
Sirius found him soon after, as evening fell, and joined him by the windows. They talked desultorily, Sirius propping his head against one hand and his elbow on the windowsill, and for the first time in all this strange day the years fell away and conversation came easily. They might have been back in the common room at Hogwarts, talking into the night for no better reason than that they were young and carefree and thought they had all the time in the world.
The autumn dark had long since swept across the desolate countryside outside the window, and Sirius had lit the wick of a little lamp that stood on a narrow-legged table beside Remus’ chair. A comfortable lull fell between them, then Sirius said, an uncharacteristic hesitance in his voice, “And…Harry? Is he well?”
Remus thought of the boy he’d at last begun to know, in the scant time since he’d taken up the teaching post at Hogwarts. He couldn’t help but smile.
“Yes,” he said honestly. “Despite everything, I think he is. He has friends, he seems happy… He also has a remarkable propensity for getting into scrapes, but with the help of his friends somehow he always gets back out of them again.”
He glanced at Sirius, expecting news of his faraway godson would gladden him, but stopped short at the sight of the pain twisting Sirius’ face.
“I should have been there for him,” Sirius whispered. “Damn it - Remus, I know I failed Harry. I should have been there all these years. James and Lily expected me to look after him. And I meant to, truly I did. There was nothing that mattered to me more. But then there was Regulus, and this cursed house … I can’t explain it, how my thoughts started twisting as soon as I came back here. It must be the house that causes it, what else could it be? But soon all I could see was how I’d failed everyone I loved. It’s still true, it’s what I think about every day. That I can’t be trusted. And I thought surely Harry would be safer if I stayed well away.”
Remus’ heart was breaking at the anguish in Sirius’ face. He wanted to offer a thousand reassurances and didn’t know where to begin. “Oh, Sirius -”
The door to the small parlour where they sat burst open.
Though Remus hadn’t seen him in a decade and a half, the man who stood framed there could only be Regulus. He had Sirius’ striking features and Sirius’ dark hair, likewise gone long and unkempt, but his eyes held a caged wildness that Sirius’ did not. Seeing Regulus, Remus understood why Sirius was so afraid for his own grasp on sanity. Sirius wasn’t mad, or at least Remus didn’t think so. But looking at Regulus’ frantic fervour every day, seeing himself in the reflection of his brother… Remus shivered, thinking of the two of them pent up alone together, for years, feeding on each other’s worst fears.
Regulus grasped the doorframe to both sides of his head. “The Dark Lord will rise again,” he intoned in a harsh rasp. “Though his body lies dead, his soul waits these many years, scattered, kept secret and safe. Who will gather up the pieces and destroy them? Who will conquer the Dark Lord once and for all?” His hands reached convulsively for his own throat, and Remus caught a glimpse there of something that glinted, a thin line of golden chain that looped around Regulus’ neck then disappeared beneath his robes, obscuring whatever object hung from it.
Sirius lunged forwards, casting one despairing look of apology back at Remus. “What are you doing here?” he hissed at his brother. “I thought you were in your room. Back to bed now, go!”
Sirius bustled Regulus out of the room, calling back to Remus hurriedly, “I’ll come back - wait here - sorry -”
Remus waited there in the small parlour, in the little pool of lamplight and the greater darkness that surrounded it. In his mind, echoes of Regulus’ words clanged like a dreadful prophecy. Regulus had sounded desperate…and utterly certain that the words he spoke were true. But perhaps that was simply a sign of how fully he’d lost his grip on reality?
Sirius soon returned and flung himself back down in the chair opposite Remus. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I thought he would keep his distance.”
“You don’t have to apologise. Sirius, do you think he -” But Remus stopped himself.
What, exactly, did he plan to ask? Do you think he might be right about Voldemort returning? That was nonsense, certainly, an aftereffect of Regulus’ time with the Death Eaters, which must have been a scarring experience for someone as young as Regulus had been then. And Sirius looked so weary. Twelve years of having to listen to wild pronouncements about long-dead Voldemort rising again - Sirius undoubtedly knew how to handle this situation better than Remus did.
“Do you think he’s going to sleep now?” Remus asked instead.
“Yeah,” Sirius said, sounding tired. “And we should probably do the same. I’ll show you your room.”
He led Remus up staircases and along corridors, until finally they stopped in front of a door of dark wood.
“My room is just down the hall, if you need anything at all during the night,” Sirius said, and pointed. “I mean that. I’m sure I’m supposed to tell you to bother Kreacher if you need something, but don’t do that. Get me.”
For a moment as he said that he looked so young, as if even after all these years he expected his mother to burst from behind a tapestry and berate him for his breach of etiquette.
“I’ll do that,” Remus assured him. “Please don’t worry about anything.”
Still Sirius hesitated, not yet saying good night, and Remus found himself hesitating too. He’d thought Sirius gone from his life forever. As strange as this whole day had been, there was a part of Remus that didn’t want it to end.
At last Sirius darted forwards quite suddenly and grasped Remus’ hand. “Thank you for coming here,” he said, his voice gone husky. “It means the world to me.” For only a fragment of a second, he pressed Remus’ hand to his chest. Then he dropped the hand and stepped away. “Good night. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well.”
Without looking back, Sirius turned and strode down the dark corridor to his own bedchamber. Remus watched him go, and watched the door swing shut behind him.
It was mercurial Sirius, nothing more than that, Remus reminded himself. Sirius had always been grand in his gestures. The warm clasp of his hand was an expression of worry over his brother and of gratitude at having another person in the house at last; it was not to be taken as an indication that he had missed Remus with the same raw fierceness with which Remus had missed him.
Remus turned away, from both the man and the thought, and entered the bedroom in front of him.
(Continues in part 2 here... This was not actually meant as a section break; LJ just won't post all of it in one post!)
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Summary: Remus Lupin has heard not a single word from his old friend Sirius Black since Sirius retreated to his family’s ancestral home, abruptly and without explanation, twelve years ago. Now Remus receives an urgent letter from Sirius, begging him to visit the House of Black.
Characters: Sirius, Remus, Regulus, Kreacher
Words: 16,000
Notes:
I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and about the “Noble and Most Ancient House of Black,” and how delightfully they might map onto one another: two grim houses, one gothic tale! But in this one, perhaps there’s romance to be had as well…
(This is an AU and a fusion with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but you don’t in the least need to have read that story to enjoy this. Though if you have read it, I hope you’ll get a kick out of spotting the parallels!)
Written for the 2017 Remus/Sirius Games (Team Sirius, Day 21; prompt: picture of a stack of old books with a glass jar on top).
I’ve also created a music playlist to accompany this story (see the end notes for links to individual songs).
Thanks so much to huldrejenta for betareading!
Read here below or on AO3.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It was a dull, dark day in autumn when a letter arrived for Remus Lupin.
A dusky owl dropped the envelope beside his plate at the staff table in Hogwarts’ Great Hall, then winged silently away. Remus snatched up the letter and stared at the elegant scrawl of black ink that graced the front of the envelope, proclaiming Remus’ name across heavy, cream-coloured paper.
Remus knew that handwriting. He would know it anywhere.
With mumbled excuses to his colleagues, Remus made his way down from the staff table and through the throngs of students chattering over their breakfasts. He pushed open the oaken doors of the castle, seeking a solitude that was hard to come by within the castle walls.
He found a somewhat secluded seat on a rock beside the lake, under a brooding sky. The air was clammy, hinting at coming rain, and fallen leaves shuffled restlessly about his feet. It was fitting, somehow, that this letter should arrive now, of all seasons of the year. For Remus, autumn always brought to mind lost friends.
He breathed in and slid one finger under the envelope’s flap. The paper came apart smoothly, as Remus had known it would do. How often had he watched just this sticking charm cast by the same hand that had written Remus’ name in such an elegant, careless scrawl across the envelope he now held?
Remus suppressed a shudder of terrible nostalgia, and slid free a single parchment sheet.
The letter indeed proved to be from Sirius Black. The famously reclusive Sirius Black who’d lived shut away from society these last twelve years, speaking to no one but an old house-elf people said still tottered around the grand old country house Sirius had inherited from his pure-blood family. That crumbling mansion had passed down through so many generations, from sire to son of the aristocratic Blacks, that eventually the family and the estate came to be known by the same name, both referred to simply as the “House of Black”.
The letter Remus held was brief. There were no explanations, no apologies for the long years of silence. Sirius simply entreated his old friend, in words that failed to hide a state of high agitation, to come to the House of Black as soon as possible. Sirius made vague mention of some illness and alluded cryptically to its urgency, but seemed disinclined to commit more detail than that to paper.
He signed the letter:
Your friend,
Sirius
Were they friends? Remus wondered, staring out over the Hogwarts lake without taking much notice of the chill waters or the wind that soughed across the surface, whipping tips of white to the scudding waves. They’d been inseparable, of course, here at Hogwarts: Sirius, James, Peter and Remus. But all that had changed twelve years ago, with Peter’s betrayal and James and Lily’s deaths. And then, in the terrible days after that shattering loss, when Remus had most needed his only remaining friend, Sirius had departed abruptly to his family’s old country estate, the ancestral home he’d previously renounced. He’d given a vague explanation about needing to put something in order there and said he would be back soon. But he’d never returned, and Remus was left standing suddenly and utterly alone.
Remus had carried on, yes. What else could he do? He scrounged up what little work he could find despite the necessities of concealing his lycanthropy; he looked out for Harry from afar; he kept putting one foot in front of the other, walking through a drab world so different from the one he’d known in those too-brief days when he’d belonged to a band of merry boys. If Remus was not happy, precisely, there were at least occasional bright spots. He’d been grateful indeed to receive Dumbledore’s invitation to teach at Hogwarts this year. But the friends he’d once had were gone: two dead, one in Azkaban, and one a self-styled exile who’d never had the decency to tell Remus why.
And yet, even after all this time of bitter silence, Remus knew he couldn’t ignore Sirius’ summons. Not when he wrote in such evident agitation. To have reached out after so long, Sirius must be in very desperate need. And a friend’s need was something Remus had never been able to resist - nor would he want to.
Resolute, Remus stood from his seat on the rock beside the lake, only now noticing the chill that had seeped from the air into his bones. He would request a few days’ leave of absence from his teaching duties and pack a bag immediately.
The next morning, so early the grass beneath his feet was still damp with dew and the sun was barely struggling out from behind a bank of clouds on the horizon, Remus stood atop a low rise of land, his small travelling case in hand, gazing across a dark tarn at the imposing sight that was the House of Black.
He’d Apparated to the nearest village, a dour collection of half a dozen low-roofed houses huddled in a hollow between two forbidding stone tors, then he’d come the rest of the way by foot, crossing some five miles of desolate, uninhabited land. And now Remus stood looking at the House of Black for the first time in his life.
It was a grim old place, gloomy and dark, its walls crumbling beneath a matted layer of ivy, and yet somehow its ruined splendour made the place all the more imposing. There it hulked, a great bulk of bleak stone with rows of narrow windows staring out from its walls like so many malevolent eyes. Crippled old trees surrounded the building, their gnarled trunks groping inwards at the house, hemming it in with their branches.
Remus remembered Sirius saying once, in that falsely careless voice he’d always adopted when speaking of his family, that some ancient ancestor of his line had considered establishing the family seat in London, but in the end had chosen instead this far-flung, desolate reach of countryside.
“Even the grimmest parts of London would have been too cheerful a place for us Blacks,” Sirius had said, with a forced, too-bright attempt at a laugh. He’d always hated talking about his family. He was weighed down even then, even before the worst of the war, by his family’s reputation for Dark magic and pride and pure-blood mania. He’d never let any of them visit him at home, not even James, although Sirius had come to all of their houses as often as he could manage, painfully eager to spend the school breaks anywhere else but his own home. He was always muttering that one of these days he was going to run away from his family for good.
He’d even managed it, for a time. So why had he returned?
Remus felt cold at the thought that the forbidding edifice before him was where Sirius lived - Sirius, who in their schooldays had always been so full of life and laughter. For twelve years now, Sirius had locked himself away in this bleak place. Could grief do that to a person, twist him so badly that he shunned everything that might still have had the power to bring him happiness? Or was it guilt, guilt that he’d failed to recognise when Peter had turned traitor to them all?
Remus, too, knew that guilt. He’d lived with it for the past twelve years.
The tarn - a small lake - lay between him and the house, its waters unmoving. The House of Black was reflected in that water, its inverted image even darker and more forbidding than the house itself. Looking at that doubled image, Remus felt a thrill of terror without knowing why. He couldn’t be afraid of a mere house, could he? Sirius’ parents had by all accounts been cruel people, but they were long dead now, as was Sirius’ brother, all of them killed near the end of the war that had engulfed so many lives on both sides of the conflict. There was no one here now but Sirius.
Summoning his determination, Remus trod with firm steps down the slope that led to the House of Black.
Remus rapped the tarnished brass knocker, then stood waiting a long while. At last, a wizened house-elf with a snout-like nose opened the door.
“Good morning,” Remus began, attempting to start off with politeness despite the elf’s heavy scowl. “I’m here to see -”
“The stranger is here to see the master, no doubt,” the elf grouched in a froggy voice, seemingly addressing his attention to Remus’ knees. “The master has always done as he pleases, yes, and now he invites riff-raff into his mother’s noble house, a house fit for the eyes of only the purest of wizards, this great and justly famous House of Black.”
“Er,” said Remus. Not having grown up in a home with house-elves he always felt a little unsure of the proper mode of address, but this conversation did seem a tad unusual already.
“Oh, my poor mistress, what would she say if she could see the contempt her first-born son shows for her noble home! If she could see his ingratitude!” the elf cried, his voice booming with his disapproval. But he hobbled away down the house’s long corridor, leaving the front door flung open, so Remus cautiously followed.
The corridor began with a high, Gothic archway and stretched deep into the house. It had a ceiling of carved woodwork and walls draped in intricately woven tapestries so imposingly old, Remus feared they might crumble if he accidentally brushed against them as he passed.
Following the grumbling house-elf, Remus turned down one dimly lit passageway, then another, working to maintain his sense of direction within the labyrinthine hallways of the house. Abruptly, the elf stopped in front of an apparently unremarkable door, no different from many others they had passed.
“The master sees fit to spend his time in the old library, even while his noble father’s elegant study stands empty all these years,” the elf muttered under his breath, addressing his remarks to somewhere under the doorknob. “The master has no respect for tradition, oh, if only his poor father knew!”
Remus wondered if he was meant to make some response to this idiosyncratic declaration, although the elf didn’t appear to require Remus’ participation in his one-side conversation, nor even to pay any regard to Remus’ presence.
But then the door in front of them opened and Remus’ words died on his lips.
Sirius stood framed in the doorway, dust motes swirling around him in what little light filtered down from the room’s high, narrow windows, creating a faint halo about his dark head. Remus stared.
As a boy, Sirius had possessed an unearthly beauty, with his high cheekbones, his silky dark hair and his mesmerising grey eyes. Girls and boys alike had thrown themselves at Sirius in their time at Hogwarts, but he’d worn his princely looks lightly and laughed off anyone who tried to take him too seriously as any sort of teenage heartthrob. In fact, when Remus thought of the Sirius of those days, the good days before the war, before Peter’s betrayal and James and Lily’s deaths, he remembered Sirius always laughing, his head thrown back and his gorgeous face in profile.
The man who stood before Remus now was terribly changed. His face was almost cadaverous in complexion, as if he hadn’t ventured into the sunlight in all these twelve years. His eyes, always striking, now took up an inordinate amount of space in his pale, drawn face, and his dark hair hung lank about his shoulders. It was only by his patrician nose and the surpassingly beautiful curve of his lips that Remus was certain this was indeed Sirius Black.
“Remus,” the man in the doorway said, and his voice, at least, was the same as Remus remembered, still thrillingly rich, despite a hoarseness that spoke of disuse. The sound of it sent a shiver along Remus’ skin.
Sirius moved as if to embrace Remus in greeting, but at the last moment dropped his arm and stilled himself, stopping in the doorway. Instead he said to the house-elf lurking at Remus’ elbow, “You can go, Kreacher.” The elf skulked away down the corridor, still complaining under his breath.
Sirius stepped aside, allowing Remus to enter the room. The old library, as the elf had called it, was large and lofty, a grand room despite clearly having fallen into disrepair. Sun-faded curtains drooped beside narrow windows set so high in the walls that only a few squibs of autumn sunlight struggled down to meet the oaken floor, tracing strips of pale light across the otherwise gloomy expanse.
Dust covered nearly every surface: the long wooden tables and the heavy chairs, the ornate iron wall sconces and candelabras, and a dark draped cloth that concealed the unmistakable curving bulk of a grand piano. And of course there were shelves upon shelves of books, by the look of it a collection to rival the library at Hogwarts itself. And yet despite this wealth of knowledge and opulence, the room inspired only melancholy in Remus. It showed no sign of Sirius’ presence except for a stack of books perched at the end of one long table, and a dust-free track worn on the floor by his comings and goings between the table and the door.
But, incongruously, an inviting fire crackled in the hearth, and two squashy red armchairs were pulled up close beside the grate.
“Thought you might want to sit by the fire, since it’s a chilly day,” Sirius said gruffly. “Makes it a bit like Hogwarts, evenings in the common room and all.” He rubbed a hand nervously through his unkempt, overlong hair and stared at Remus with those mesmerising eyes.
“Right, yes,” Remus said. “Yes, of course.” He set down his travelling case beside the door and followed Sirius into the room, as if there hadn’t been a gap of twelve years since the last time they’d lounged in front of a fire together.
They sat, Sirius throwing himself into the chair to one side of the fire and Remus perching awkwardly on the edge of the other. The cushion was comfortable and the merrily crackling fire was warm, but Remus could not seem to slow his racing heart. Here was Sirius, sitting across from him, Sirius Black whom he had thought he would never see again.
No sooner had Sirius sat than he flung himself up again and began to pace back and forth across the thick carpet in front of the fire. Remus pulled his legs to the side so Sirius wouldn’t trip over them.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’ve come,” Sirius said, his voice pitched so low that Remus had to lean forwards to hear him. “After so long, I didn’t know if you - that is -”
He reached one end of the carpet, spun on his heel, and stalked back, his intense grey stare once again fixed on Remus.
“This house!” Sirius burst out, and Remus startled back in his seat. “This house, it makes people go mad, not that my family weren’t mad to begin with - ha - you remember, don’t you? But back then I was foolhardy enough to think I’d escaped all that!” Sirius laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of mirth.
He rushed forwards and dropped onto the arm of Remus’ chair, now suddenly, disconcertingly close. “Remus,” he said, his voice low like it had been when it was sometimes just the two of them talking late into the night in Gryffindor Tower.
Remus shivered despite himself. But it would not do to get swept away in memories. He was here to help Sirius with whatever trouble had befallen him, that was all. Not to grasp vainly for signs of the boyhood friendship that had once been.
“It’s such a solace to see you again,” Sirius said, still low and intense and far too close to allow for clarity of thought. And although the words hardly sounded like something Sirius would have said at seventeen, there was no mistaking the earnestness behind them. Remus swallowed and forced himself to meet the gaze boring down at him from Sirius’ perch on the arm of his chair. “I think you’ll be able to help me,” Sirius went on. “I’ve about reached the end of my wits and I don’t know what I’m going to -”
At the far end of the library, a door opened. Barely discernable through the gloom there in the recesses far from the windows and the fire, a figure stepped into the room, plucked a book from a shelf, then once more disappeared, closing the door and departing as silently as it had come. The figure had been a human, not the house-elf, but more than that Remus had not been able to make out.
Sirius’ reaction was immediate and extreme. He jolted up from the arm of the chair, sprang to his feet and lunged forwards several steps as though he would pursue the figure, although it was already gone. Then he stopped just as suddenly and turned back to Remus with vividly conflicting emotions on his face. He looked very much as though he were about to try to deny that anyone had entered the library at all.
Illness, Sirius’ letter had said, but Sirius did not seem ill. He seemed to be isolated, behaving strangely, and harbouring a mysterious houseguest despite the public rumours that had him living alone aside from the house-elf all these years.
“Sirius,” Remus said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
For a few moments more, Sirius simply stared, as though he really would try to pretend that nothing was amiss.
Then he rushed back as fast as he had first dashed away and flung himself to the floor at Remus’ feet, dropping his head with wild abandon onto Remus’ knee. It was a posture of such abject submission and utter trust that Remus’ heart stuttered in his chest.
“You’re right,” Sirius rasped. “I can’t conceal this from you. I need your help and what’s more I need your sanity, because I swear to you we’re going mad here, both of us.”
Both, Remus wondered. Who was both?
Given Sirius’ state of agitation, he must try to ask gently. And perhaps he’d better start more generally with the background of the situation, because right now Remus was utterly at sea.
“Sirius,” he began, in the calm tone of voice that often served him well with frightened first-years, “why don’t I tell you what I thought I’d understood, when we were younger, and you can tell me when I begin to go wrong. This is your family’s ancestral home, right?”
Almost imperceptibly, his head still resting against Remus’ knee and a tangle of hair obscuring his face, Sirius nodded.
“I know you hated this place,” Remus said. There was no kinder way to put it, so he said the words but said them gently, and had to trust Sirius would know even after all this time that he was never trying to be cruel. “You ran away from here when we were still in school and you swore you would never come back. But then, at the end of the war, after -” Remus stumbled over James and Lily, even now. It was too painful to speak aloud of the excruciating emptiness where they should be but were not. Instead, he hastily substituted, “You came back here, after your parents and Regulus -”
Sirius’ whole body stiffened against Remus’ leg. He lifted his face now, but it was with the frozen terror of an animal caught in a predator’s gaze.
Cautiously, Remus backtracked and tried again. “Your parents both died before the end of the war,” he began.
Sirius nodded, unperturbed. Though he’d been in constant conflict with his parents when they were alive, they were clearly not the source of his distress now. It must be something about Regulus, then.
“And your brother… I know he was a Death Eater, and I know you lost contact with him after you left home. Later, after everything, I heard he’d been killed for trying to defect from Voldemort’s side. I’m sorry, Sirius. I know you didn’t get on with him, but still, I’m so sorry.”
Sirius’ eyes staring up at Remus were two pools of tragedy. He seemed hardly to breathe. Finally he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “He’s not dead.”
Remus shuddered. Sirius, pressed so tightly against him, must have felt it too. “What do you mean?” Remus managed. “You always said it yourself, serving Voldemort was a life term. No one escaped him and survived.”
“I don’t know how he did it! I think he must have had Kreacher help him. Voldemort believed he was dead, I’m sure of that. He wouldn’t have been allowed to live otherwise. But he got out, and he came back here, and I - I found out just after -” Sirius couldn’t speak of James and Lily’s deaths any more than Remus could. His gaze up at Remus was tortured. “He’s my little brother. He seemed half mad from whatever they’d done to him as a Death Eater, and he was in such danger. If word had got out that he was still alive, he’d have been at risk from everyone. From our side because he’d been a Death Eater, even if he did renounce them in the end, and from Voldemort’s supporters because he’d dared to leave…” Sirius seemed to steel himself, then went on: “I hadn’t been able to save them, Remus. It was too late for James and Lily, but I thought at least I could save Regulus. So I let the rumour stand that he was dead, and stayed here where I could watch over him.”
They stared at each other. It was a shock to think Regulus was alive, Sirius’ brother whom Remus had hardly thought of in twelve years. But it made a terrible sense of the way Sirius had left everything behind in the wake of the war.
For he’d left truly everything: his life, his flat in London, all the rest of their friends and acquaintances. And he’d left Remus alone in those terrible days of their shared grief over losing James and Lily, who’d been like family to them both. James and Lily, who’d unhesitatingly made Remus a part of their lives, lycanthropy and all, and only laughed and hugged him when he’d asked if they were sure they still wanted him around once they had a baby. James and Lily, who’d made Sirius godfather to that same child. Yet here Sirius was, absent from Harry’s life without a word for the last twelve years.
“I didn’t want to leave, Remus,” Sirius said, his voice rough. “After - after losing - James and Lily -” His eyes dropped to the floor and he breathed raggedly for a moment, before he pulled his gaze back up to Remus. “My heart was broken,” he said fiercely, “and there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to be in London with -” Once again he broke off, pressing his lips together, looking almost in pain. “But I was going…I can’t describe it, I felt I was going mad as soon as I returned to this house. I wasn’t fit for the world anymore. And Regulus needed me. And he went on needing me, and it only got worse, and now I’m afraid of what he’ll do next. There’s some kind of madness in him,” Sirius whispered. “And now I’ve gone mad too, locked up in this evil house. All my family were, and now it’s happening to me.”
Remus’ heart ached. That had always been Sirius’ fear, unspoken but not well hidden, that he would become like his family despite his desperate struggle to be as unlike them as possible. How badly Remus wanted to assure him that of course he wasn’t mad, and of course he was nothing like his parents.
But what did he know? He hadn’t seen Sirius in a dozen years. Empty reassurances from someone with no grounds for offering them would offer little consolation.
Instead, though it was a flimsy, second-best kind of help, he said, “Tell me about Regulus. What is it that’s wrong? And why now more so than before?”
Sirius lifted his head, but rested one hand against the side of Remus’ knee. A part of Remus thrilled at that touch, despite knowing very well that Sirius meant nothing by it. Sirius had always been free with his physical expressions of affection, roughhousing with James or flinging an arm around Remus as they talked, and perhaps that was still true even after all these years apart.
“He talks about things that are…impossible. But he believes them utterly. Dark artefacts he insists he has to destroy… He doesn’t seem to know that Voldemort is gone, Remus. He still thinks the ‘Dark Lord’ has got to be taken down, and that he’s the only one who knows how to do it. But when I press him on what he means, he goes silent. He does strange experiments, dangerous things, and lately he comes over in violent fits of frustration when they don’t go how he wants. I’m afraid he’ll do something terrible. Or that I’ll do something terrible to stop him.”
He gazed up at Remus, his eyes so piercing that for a moment Remus couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Just when he thought he might burst with the longing to do something foolhardy - perhaps reach out to touch that altered yet still so very dear face -
Sirius leapt to his feet and said in his low, enthralling voice, “Let me show you something.”
He rushed to one of the library’s shelves, his fingers scanning along it until they reached a small book tucked more deeply within the shelf than the others.
Remus, watching his graceful movements, was awash in memory.
He’d always admired Sirius, certainly - with all his passion and all his beauty, how could Remus not? But as for anything more than that…Remus hadn’t allowed himself even to think it. Oh, there’d always been something there, some electric, undefined current between him and Sirius. As much as James and Sirius were best mates for life, chosen brothers who fiercely watched each other’s backs, it was Remus and Sirius who often laughed at the same joke before anyone else even knew there was a joke, or stayed up through the night talking, long after all the others in the dorm had gone to bed. Talking until Remus’ eyes burned with tiredness but still he didn’t want to give up that feeling of being alone in all the world with Sirius, the two of them sprawled at either end of a wide window seat, looking out from Gryffindor Tower as the hush of dawn broke over the Hogwarts grounds.
But Remus had always had the clear impression that Sirius didn’t want it to be more than that. Maybe Sirius had had his own fears about allowing himself to get close - the same way that Remus as a werewolf, a Dark creature, didn’t wish to inflict the dangers and hardships of his life on anyone else. Or perhaps Sirius simply hadn’t felt the pull as strongly as Remus did.
No, it was useless to speculate why their friendship had never taken on a dimension beyond friendship. It hadn’t, that was all. There was no use in ruminating on bygones.
Sirius brought the book he had fetched from the shelf back to the two armchairs by the fire, this time sitting in the other chair and handing the book across to Remus. It was very old, bound in black leather with ornate, raised detailing along the spine, and surprisingly heavy for its small size.
“All the Black family history, it’s all in there,” Sirius said. “But don’t look at any of that, it’s awful. Just read the poem on the first page.”
Carefully, aware he was handling a relic, Remus opened the cover. On the first page of parchment, written in faded ink by an ornate hand, were four stark lines:
The House of Black, eternal glory,
Never shall be felled by foe,
Unless some son’s unhallowed story
Cast his heart to depths below.
Remus looked up to see Sirius intently watching him as he read. “Practically the family motto,” Sirius growled. “Eternal glory! Never to be felled by foe! Our parents used it on us as a dire warning, making sure we knew our lineage would be glorious forever, as long as we didn’t do something to screw it up.” He leaned forwards in his seat, elbows perched on his knees, his eyes burning once again. “But what if it’s not just some mouldy old bit of doggerel? What if it’s a prophecy, and Regulus is the ‘unhallowed’ one who’s going to do something so awful it brings this whole place crashing down? Or what if I’m the one?”
Remus looked into Sirius’ gaunt face and asked, “How can I help?”
He’d meant it as a staunch expression of support, but the words came out more plaintive than he’d intended. He was moved that Sirius had thought to seek out him of all people after all these years, but he also deeply doubted he would be able to provide what Sirius needed. If there had been a dangerous creature in the attic or a spell gone rogue and in need of containment, then Remus might have brought his expertise to bear. But he knew nothing of pure-blood families and ancient curses.
“Just be here,” Sirius said urgently. “I don’t know what will happen next, but I have such an awful feeling. Can you stay, even for a day or two?”
Remus thought of Hogwarts, where he’d requested a few days’ leave from work. Family emergency, he’d said and Dumbledore hadn’t questioned him, although he knew perfectly well that Remus no longer had any family living.
But even if Dumbledore hadn’t granted permission, could Remus have refused Sirius now? When he was staring at Remus with such terror, but such faith that Remus could shield him from what he believed was coming?
“Of course,” Remus said. “Of course I can stay.”
“Excellent!” Sirius cried, and leapt to his feet in one of the sudden, mercurial shifts of mood that Remus was coming to recognise were characteristic of him now. “Let’s have some music, then, to pass the time.”
They spent the rest of the day together in a fashion Remus could only call surreal. Sirius did indeed sweep away the cloth covering the grand piano that stood along one wall of the library, sending up a tremendous cloud of dust, and took his place before the keys.
Remus had vaguely known that Sirius could play - it was the sort of skill all sons of noble houses seemed to accrue effortlessly - but he’d had no idea he played so well. Sirius was a sensitive musician who poured himself into his playing and Remus listened in awe, transported by the music and by the passion behind it. If ever a person had believed in the melody he produced, it was Sirius.
But as the afternoon passed, Sirius grew increasingly edgy. Finally he admitted that, although he was loath to be such a poor host as to leave Remus alone, he needed to excuse himself for a time to check on his brother. But he insisted that Remus had the run of the house, should go wherever he liked, and Sirius would find him again in a bit.
So, while Sirius departed for Regulus’ rooms in one far wing, Remus explored, trying to fathom this place. He still struggled to reconcile the vivacious friend he’d known at Hogwarts with these solemn rooms and endless dark corridors.
There was a grand ballroom that clearly hadn’t seen the flicker of candlelit chandeliers or the whirl of dancers in many long years. There were drawing rooms and sitting rooms and parlours, so many spaces devoted to entertaining guests, yet all were cold and unwelcoming. Each room Remus peered into left him feeling keenly his status as an interloper.
Sirius had suggested Remus fetch himself something to eat, so he descended a staircase barely illuminated by shuttered wall sconces, to the basement kitchen. Here below, the sconces burned a little brighter - the house-elf Kreacher must have decided it was necessary to compromise on the house’s dour aesthetic in order to be able to see about his work - but it was still a grim and chilly space, with its cold stone walls. Remus thought of the cheerful Hogwarts kitchens, with elves always bustling in and out, and felt a moment of surprisingly stark pity for the disagreeable Kreacher, bound as he was to this place along with Sirius and Regulus.
From the larder, Remus gathered some cheese, nuts and a loaf of bread. He saw unexpected items, too, on a small table to one side of the room: a tiny heap of some fine, white powder sat next to a squarish glass phial of elixir, as though someone had walked away in the middle of gathering ingredients for potion-making.
Difficult, though, to say who was least likely to be devoting time to brewing potions: Sirius, the house-elf, or Sirius’ supposedly deranged brother. Perhaps Remus was wrong and these were simply items for cooking.
Remus looked up at the sound of an irritated grunt from the kitchen doorway. The house-elf himself had appeared and was eyeing Remus with suspicion.
“The master’s guest makes very free with the hospitality of the House of Black,” Kreacher grumbled in his froggy voice. He didn’t make eye contact with Remus, but again appeared to be speaking to his knees. “He pokes his nose where it does not belong, oh yes. My poor mistress, if she could see her house, overrun by lowlife scum!”
Remus was not terribly surprised that an elf loyal to a family such as this one would consider him scum, half-Muggleborn and werewolf as he was, but “overrun” did seem a bit strong when there was only one of him. Still, the kitchen was Kreacher’s domain, and he was indeed trespassing on it. “I was fetching something to eat, but I’ll take it back upstairs with me,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality, Kreacher.”
Remus thought he saw the elf blink at him in confusion as Remus turned and ascended the stairs to the main part of the house.
There, he managed to find a room that was a little less forbidding than the rest: a small parlour on the ground floor, so far to the end of one wing that it felt as if the rest of the house had forgotten it was there. A rug on the floor softened the bleakness, and two chairs were pulled up beside the narrow windows, where weak afternoon sunlight filtered in. Here Remus sat to eat his bread and cheese.
Sirius found him soon after, as evening fell, and joined him by the windows. They talked desultorily, Sirius propping his head against one hand and his elbow on the windowsill, and for the first time in all this strange day the years fell away and conversation came easily. They might have been back in the common room at Hogwarts, talking into the night for no better reason than that they were young and carefree and thought they had all the time in the world.
The autumn dark had long since swept across the desolate countryside outside the window, and Sirius had lit the wick of a little lamp that stood on a narrow-legged table beside Remus’ chair. A comfortable lull fell between them, then Sirius said, an uncharacteristic hesitance in his voice, “And…Harry? Is he well?”
Remus thought of the boy he’d at last begun to know, in the scant time since he’d taken up the teaching post at Hogwarts. He couldn’t help but smile.
“Yes,” he said honestly. “Despite everything, I think he is. He has friends, he seems happy… He also has a remarkable propensity for getting into scrapes, but with the help of his friends somehow he always gets back out of them again.”
He glanced at Sirius, expecting news of his faraway godson would gladden him, but stopped short at the sight of the pain twisting Sirius’ face.
“I should have been there for him,” Sirius whispered. “Damn it - Remus, I know I failed Harry. I should have been there all these years. James and Lily expected me to look after him. And I meant to, truly I did. There was nothing that mattered to me more. But then there was Regulus, and this cursed house … I can’t explain it, how my thoughts started twisting as soon as I came back here. It must be the house that causes it, what else could it be? But soon all I could see was how I’d failed everyone I loved. It’s still true, it’s what I think about every day. That I can’t be trusted. And I thought surely Harry would be safer if I stayed well away.”
Remus’ heart was breaking at the anguish in Sirius’ face. He wanted to offer a thousand reassurances and didn’t know where to begin. “Oh, Sirius -”
The door to the small parlour where they sat burst open.
Though Remus hadn’t seen him in a decade and a half, the man who stood framed there could only be Regulus. He had Sirius’ striking features and Sirius’ dark hair, likewise gone long and unkempt, but his eyes held a caged wildness that Sirius’ did not. Seeing Regulus, Remus understood why Sirius was so afraid for his own grasp on sanity. Sirius wasn’t mad, or at least Remus didn’t think so. But looking at Regulus’ frantic fervour every day, seeing himself in the reflection of his brother… Remus shivered, thinking of the two of them pent up alone together, for years, feeding on each other’s worst fears.
Regulus grasped the doorframe to both sides of his head. “The Dark Lord will rise again,” he intoned in a harsh rasp. “Though his body lies dead, his soul waits these many years, scattered, kept secret and safe. Who will gather up the pieces and destroy them? Who will conquer the Dark Lord once and for all?” His hands reached convulsively for his own throat, and Remus caught a glimpse there of something that glinted, a thin line of golden chain that looped around Regulus’ neck then disappeared beneath his robes, obscuring whatever object hung from it.
Sirius lunged forwards, casting one despairing look of apology back at Remus. “What are you doing here?” he hissed at his brother. “I thought you were in your room. Back to bed now, go!”
Sirius bustled Regulus out of the room, calling back to Remus hurriedly, “I’ll come back - wait here - sorry -”
Remus waited there in the small parlour, in the little pool of lamplight and the greater darkness that surrounded it. In his mind, echoes of Regulus’ words clanged like a dreadful prophecy. Regulus had sounded desperate…and utterly certain that the words he spoke were true. But perhaps that was simply a sign of how fully he’d lost his grip on reality?
Sirius soon returned and flung himself back down in the chair opposite Remus. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I thought he would keep his distance.”
“You don’t have to apologise. Sirius, do you think he -” But Remus stopped himself.
What, exactly, did he plan to ask? Do you think he might be right about Voldemort returning? That was nonsense, certainly, an aftereffect of Regulus’ time with the Death Eaters, which must have been a scarring experience for someone as young as Regulus had been then. And Sirius looked so weary. Twelve years of having to listen to wild pronouncements about long-dead Voldemort rising again - Sirius undoubtedly knew how to handle this situation better than Remus did.
“Do you think he’s going to sleep now?” Remus asked instead.
“Yeah,” Sirius said, sounding tired. “And we should probably do the same. I’ll show you your room.”
He led Remus up staircases and along corridors, until finally they stopped in front of a door of dark wood.
“My room is just down the hall, if you need anything at all during the night,” Sirius said, and pointed. “I mean that. I’m sure I’m supposed to tell you to bother Kreacher if you need something, but don’t do that. Get me.”
For a moment as he said that he looked so young, as if even after all these years he expected his mother to burst from behind a tapestry and berate him for his breach of etiquette.
“I’ll do that,” Remus assured him. “Please don’t worry about anything.”
Still Sirius hesitated, not yet saying good night, and Remus found himself hesitating too. He’d thought Sirius gone from his life forever. As strange as this whole day had been, there was a part of Remus that didn’t want it to end.
At last Sirius darted forwards quite suddenly and grasped Remus’ hand. “Thank you for coming here,” he said, his voice gone husky. “It means the world to me.” For only a fragment of a second, he pressed Remus’ hand to his chest. Then he dropped the hand and stepped away. “Good night. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well.”
Without looking back, Sirius turned and strode down the dark corridor to his own bedchamber. Remus watched him go, and watched the door swing shut behind him.
It was mercurial Sirius, nothing more than that, Remus reminded himself. Sirius had always been grand in his gestures. The warm clasp of his hand was an expression of worry over his brother and of gratitude at having another person in the house at last; it was not to be taken as an indication that he had missed Remus with the same raw fierceness with which Remus had missed him.
Remus turned away, from both the man and the thought, and entered the bedroom in front of him.
(Continues in part 2 here... This was not actually meant as a section break; LJ just won't post all of it in one post!)
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