Our lives will run like / Sparks through the stubble, Parts IV-V
Our lives will run like / Sparks through the stubble, Remus/Sirius. 5 parts. [ao3]
[ Parts I-III, Parts IV-V]
Part IV. Black milk
7.
For the first two years of his time at Hogwarts, Remus told his friends that his mother was sick and he had to visit her every month. She's bed bound, he muttered when they gathered around him. No the healers have no clue. She's quite weak most of the time. Is it magical? No. It isn't. Sorry, I have to go.
His friends, a clever and resourceful bunch, tried to deduce the exact circumstance of his familial tragedy only to come smack upon the truth-the secret nature of him, that perhaps he lived doubly, lived secretly, was cursed and each month disappeared to meet his other self.
But when his mother did get sick, it came much too quickly.
For the last few months of his time at Hogwarts, there were vague signs: My Remus, I am feeling a bit ill and your father is quite busy at work so we can't meet you at the station for Easter when you arrive. But if you would go to the Ministry by tube and meet your father, you can both Floo home. Love, Mum. Dear Remus, I'd hate to bother you during NEWT revisions but your mother is rather unwell. It seems she has a pain in her head. I was assured that it is just exhaustion by the clinic doctor. I've half a mind to take her up to St. Mungo's but you shouldn't worry, my boy. I just thought you ought to know. Good luck on your exams. Love, Dad.
The cancer began inside her brain and like a Gemino curse replicated itself until all there was was the cancer, all through her body. She had sporadic headaches at first, and then dizzy spells. Remus visited sometimes and she seemed to him tired but fine. It went like this for a year until suddenly one night in late November, 1978, his father’s owl pecked the windowpane near his transfigured bed (Remus was on-and-off crashing in James’s new flat) at an awful small hour. He opened the window and untied the parchment. It was a mangled piece of scribbling from his father, not in his usual precise hand: Remus, Come at once your mother collapsed during the night we’re at the Llandough Hospital. Don’t bother replying. When he ran all the way up three flights of the hospital stairs into the ICU she was already in a coma. In the morning her heart had failed, her brain was numb, her body was blind, blind, blind.
His father held her still-warm hand for a very, very long time. Remus had no words.
Sitting on James's couch, several days later, after he failed to answer every single owl that came, from James, Lily, Sirius, Peter, Sirius, Sirius, Sirius (in that order), he explained in his most even voice that he needed a break from his Order duties, please will someone tell Albus this.
It happened too fast.
-It happened so fast. I didn't even tell her-
-I'm sorry, Remus. James's eyes were bright. Merlin. I-I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry. She was one of the nicest people I knew.
James grabbed him very tightly across the shoulders, and Lily knelt and wrapped her arms around them both. The three of them huddled, gripping each other as Lily audibly sobbed, in James’s dimly lit living room. It was indescribable, being held by their steady presence while grief sank into him like a small round stone.
That night the moon was cleft perfectly down the middle. One side was round as a glass marble and the other a graded, straight line.
Two days after his father was dead the moon was almost full. It was only missing a small sliver, almost symmetric. Remus dressed in his best blacks and sat in the front row of the funeral house. Not many came to the service-a few wizard-tolerant Muggle relatives on the Howells side and some distant Lupins who gave him short smiles and whispered amongst themselves. Afterwards he sat in a bench on the pier in Penarth in the rare winter sun, drinking from a fifth of whisky.
He watched the ships go by in Cardiff Bay. He thought of listening to the shipping forecast as a child, how his mother would explain what all the words meant, and how it was one of the only things that lulled him into sleep, even in school with his magic radio, the announcer's calm voice washing in waves into his fevered mind.
A man in a blue denim workshirt nodded to Remus as he walked by, carrying a rod and a bucket full of splashing fish.
-All right there, lad?
-Aye.
The whisky, cheap but effective, unknotted him and elided his grief. Pelicans dove into the ocean like a priest at mass, bathing his hands.
The ablutionary gesture, for Remus intimately connected with Christmas, seemed to have unlatched his mind.
-What the fuck, Black. Put me down you little cocksucker. Ignatius Avery bellowed. He was doing his best to keep his head from dipping into the toilet bowl while Sirius and James levitated his feet.
-One day I'm going to massacre you and all your-bloodtraitor-
-Oh come on, Avery. You love it. Sirius cackled.
-You just watch your mouth Avery. James said, genuinely furious.
-You-rrlll-re-gret-ahhhh-
-Do tell us how much you love it.
Remus held back Mulciber with an impediment jinx. They were fourteen or so. Avery had called Lily Evans and Mary MacDonald a pair of mudblood bints. James had grabbed his wand and ran down the corridor, and instantly Avery floated feet-first into the air.
Lily ran in a few second later, shouting at James and Sirius: You put him down this instant Potter! Avery sputtered in the water. McGonagall came in and echoed Lily Evans almost exactly. They all got detention until Christmas break.
The first time Remus was left alone with Sirius they were supposed to write their transfiguration essay in the common room. It was their last assignment due before Christmas but James had landed a last-minute detention. This was beginning to approach the pattern they would come to expect in the later years, but it was only their first term, and Sirius seemed quite cross.
Remus didn’t quite know what to say to Sirius. James had been their mediator, a conduit of good will between them. Without him Remus felt he didn't belong. Sirius, usually gregarious, fell into a resentful silence.
-So... How's your family? What're they doing for Christmas?
Which is the wrong thing to say, Remus immediately realized. There was some boarding school boys' code that forbid talk about families. Sirius glared at him.
-Dunno.
But then he looked away and laughed. It was a small bark of a laugh.
-But my family-they're gits.
Remus was taken aback.
-How'd you mean?
-Oh you know, Blacks. We're this long line of blood purist wizards.
-You mean, they really care about whether you're descended from Muggles?
Sirius peered at him oddly.
-Yeah. They believe in loads of other rubbish too.
-Oh. And you?
Sirius narrowed his eyes at him.
-How d'you think?
Remus froze. I think that we wouldn't talk like this if you really knew...
-What, of you? I think nothing yet.
Sirius regarded him closely for another moment, but then his expression opened, and he grinned at him, almost sweetly.
-You know, you're all right, Lupin.
Sirius Black, days after his mother’s funeral, brought him two four packs of lager. They watched each other as they stood at the door to James’s flat, Sirius’s eyes shining bright. Wordlessly they reached for each other, and embraced like two halves, like a single lithe creature.
A week later Remus agreed to move into the Flood St. flat, feeling like a stray being taken in from the rain. Rain it did, though for a while it was all right, it was bliss.
Sitting on the bench on the pier at Penarth, with the Bristol Channel churning its green surface, with his limbs growing numb with cold, his mind wandered back to what seemed like the central question of his life, the question to which in the months after Halloween he'd return again and again.
Where where where where where could I have seen it all through-through the whole hopeless mess? How had the man that he became live in the boy that he was? Had there been some terrible reason somewhere at the end, or had a traitor’s beautiful eyes always been watching them, wearing himself like an actor inside a mask?
The Order kept its records and dossiers in the Longbottoms' attic, the location of which by 1981 was secret-kept by Dorcas Meadowes. There was a magic posting board that Dumbledore had made which self-sorted any relevant files according to the names and connections you shouted at it.
After Voldemort vanished Remus had offered to clean up the house and clear away the remaining records for safekeeping in Dumbledore’s office. The Longbottoms were still under intensive care at St. Mungo’s. When he got there he stood in front of the board and said in a voice smaller than he’d meant to: Sirius Black, and papers and photographs flew out of folders and cabinets and tacked themselves on the board like the pieces of a map.
8.
In the black Edinburgh night in the summer of 1979 where Alastor Moody lost his eye, Remus Lupin saw Sirius Black hesitatingly look back towards the unconscious body of his unmasked cousin as he disapparated.
They weren't as prepared as they should have been. It was supposed to be a fact-finding kind of mission. An Englishman named Tucker was supposed to take them to a loch in the highlands where suspicious gatherings have been rumored, where sometimes appeared marks in the sky that resembled the Death Eater's insignia. Moody had planned to investigate the place and possibly put up surveillance wards. Remus was not originally slated to come but tagged along because he was good at encryption charms.
But the black Edinburgh night into which they'd apparated was a trap.
Two Death Eaters swirled into their sight. Moody was in the vanguard and was hit with something fiery. Remus immediately stepped into the blast, flinging a salvo of curses while Sirius cast defensive charms around Moody. One of them cackled and shouted AVADA KEDAVRA as Remus ducked from the light. Thank Merlin there were three of them. One eventually disapparated but the other one, whose sleek black hair flew into view as the hood fell back, caught a stunner that Moody threw. Sirius crept over to the body and tipped back the mask with his boot.
-LEAVE HER, Moody shouted. We can't take prisoners. NOW, BLACK! And Lupin, what in Circe's name has gotten into you? Do you want to be killed?
They took Moody to the Prewetts' and came back home still bloodied. Sirius's hands were grimy and rank when he vomited into the sink in the servant's side of the suite. Remus was applying dittany to the gash on his shoulder. To be honest he had gotten off easy. He summoned some bandages from his transformation supplies and was about to take care of Sirius's leg but Sirius was not listening, his mind was somewhere else-
-Sirius.
-Sirius.
Remus called after him, but Sirius was staring at the water draining down the sink, his own sick flowing in bits down the hole.
-Sirius, listen to me. You are not them.
-Of course I bloody well am not them. Fuck, Remus, is that what you think?
But had Sirius Black really said that? Or is this the Sirius of my own making, inserting clauses of self-defense slyly into every conversation? Or had Sirius not spoken at all, or even looked up in that cramped little anteroom?
-Yes of course. I'm sorry. But you know what I mean.
He means that Regulus had not been seen for a while now. This, in and of itself, was not surprising since they ran in diametrically opposed circles. But what ate at Sirius, Remus also knew, was that no one had any word, not Mundungus who can weasel into every alleyway conversation (and to whom Sirius kept pushing drinks and trinkets every Order meeting to keep him interested enough), not Tom at the Leaky Cauldron, that garbage collector of information, not their informants in Hogsmeade, not even Orion Black with whom Sirius dined one night out of sheer desperation. No one. No word.
Several days' worth of the Prophet lay untouched on the drawing room table.
Dirty bacon-greased plates were stacked on top of them, next to their warding spellbook and scrolls and scrolls of protection runes.
The thing is, the war (and war it was) only came to be a war post factum. No one declared anything. When Voldemort made his first move it seemed to have happened so quietly that he rose into history out of smoke. First there were a few suspicious deaths during Remus's fourth year, mentioned in an obscure Muggle-interest section of the Sunday Prophet that hardly anybody read. When a witches' and wizards' meeting was attacked in Dorset, it was reported as an isolated tragedy carried out by a severely confunded young man. Nowhere was it mentioned that the meeting was connected to an Muggle-outreach activist organization seeking to normalize wizard-Muggle relations. But they didn't understand murder yet, the rest of them, not until one morning in sixth year when Remus vomited bile into a corner of the Shrieking Shack until he was shaking. Even when Mulciber cursed Mary MacDonald in the greenhouse, it had caused relatively minor damage and was let go of by the media immediately. Lily Evans was the only one who saw it for a sinister sign. Rumors were dismissed as rumors. Calls for investigation were put down as muckraking. If one were to look through the archives of the Prophet or official Ministry records, until 1979 there would be just a string of unrelated deaths, chaotic attacks on innocent citizens, though in more sinister circulations "innocent citizens" was replaced with "Muggles," "mudbloods," "non magics," "Muggle lovers," etc.
The resistance had to find each other and knit itself together, after those first deadly skirmishes and political shutouts, so blind were they when it came to their enemy and so inertial was the public. Even Dumbledore, it seemed, was outmatched.
By the time Remus graduated James connected him with a job working part-time as the assistant at an extremely small (there were three of them) London printing press, to the chagrin of his father who no doubt would have preferred a more low-profile profession for his lycanthropic son. They put out the Magical Resistance, a small magazine that during the 40's had "bridged wartime wizarding and non-wizarding public discourse," and which eventually folded under pressure from the Ministry for publishing "radical and incendiary demagoguery" in late '78, when it denounced in a series of exposés the rise of the Death Eaters and their sympathizers and the whitewashing propagated by the Prophet. By that time Remus had already left to work full-time for the Order, subsisting on a small stipend Albus Dumbledore kindly offered. In the spring of 1979, both editors were murdered, Aldous Hutchinson in a Muggle pub in Newcastle and Amelie Russell a while later in the French Riviera.
In hindsight he realizes that for him the war was a hopeless war from the very beginning. That's how he fought it, each day expecting to pay his goddamned sacrifice. But for the Longbottoms, for James and Lily, who held onto each other, who consciously decided to have children, for them it must have been a different war, a better war, something you had to push through, and see to the other side.
But there they were, and here he is, alive, whole, sitting by the table in his small room, thumbing through his box of papers, in which were all his letters, his notes, and his copies of the Resistance. What is left in the world, if you dissolve justice, if you dissolve hope, if you dissolve love, and let all those decomposed words float up into the air?
Sirius Black was looking at him, his face still pale, his unbandaged leg sticking to his pant, the blood shining as black and glossy as his hair. Remus tries to remember what he could read in those eyes-whether he could see the cruelty burning through them, no matter how good an actor he was, whether he could see a madman-but all he remembers is the magical sadness shifting beneath them, churning like the green surface of Bristol Channel, and he got the impression that Sirius was trying to say something to him, ask him something, something important, something very important.
The wallpaper peeling its leaves. Fog. Fog,
In the attic; this pod of black milk. Anymore,
Only a road like August approaches.
Sometimes the drawers of the earth close;
Sometimes our stories keep on and on.
-Elegy ("Who keeps the owl's breath"). David St. John.
Part V. Delphinium
9.
Remus knew a painter who once showed him in watercolor how the admixture of indigo blue and burnt umber creates an entire palette of limpid, luminous greys. Give it a try-right on the paper. A very versatile combination: the dark veins of flowers, downy light, brass buttons on the pinafore.
Is that so, he said. He dipped his finger into the cold, metallic-smelling paint, and gathered it onto his hand.
On his father’s bedside he held his hand, palm to palm, as gently as he could. After all, there is no such thing as a peaceful way to die, Remus thought. His father sputtered hoarse sputum into a white enamel pan.
The fever never broke, not even with the chilling charms the healer cast, and his father's organs had started to fail one by one. He did not utter a single complaint of pain. Instead, he had visions of his late wife, groaning under their weight, turning in his bed while Remus gripped his hand. Whether he went happily Remus could not say.
After the Potters' and Peter's funerals he went through the things at Flood St. and took all his things in a handle bag-the same one he'd arrived with. The flat was so bare of his personal presence he really did not need to gather much-a scarf hanging on the chairback in the kitchen nook, his magic umbrella in the entryway, matches for his singleton socks underneath the couch.
Then he stood in the middle of Sirius Black’s drawing room. On the fireplace mantlepiece the wedding and baby pictures glided, unknowing, from one moment to the next. In his head he pictured the Potters’ cottage in Godric’s Hollow, torn from its secret alcove, little Harry who had crawled up his legs and nibbled on his fingers, crying in his crib. And for the first time in his adult life he felt like he could not control his magic, like objects were quivering uneasily in their high places, waiting for his command to unlatch them. His wand thrummed. His stomach shook as he crouched down and waited until his fury dissipated.
Among the words of The Fall hid Camus, in Paris after the war, in the separate arms of young lovers while his pregnant wife, Francine, the drowned woman, waited in Lourmarin. In The Just Judges, all the jeweled men and their dappled horses are looking away to the right. Their gaze is carried away by love-the lamb was born in another city. Metaphors float gently up, filling his sentences.
He walks on the folded streets, no longer sure-in the West, in the East, in Barnstaple where they first embraced, in Penarth where his parents lie. Chelsea. Hogwarts. Berlin Berlin Berlin the collector of cities.
The first time he slept with Sirius Black he pretended that he'd done it before. That he knew what to do with his hands. He put his palm flat on Sirius's chest, and slowly slid along his flank until he could tuck it under the T-shirt. He pulled it up to the chest. He didn't know what to do with the bunched up fabric and he felt suddenly shy. He tugged. Sirius obliged. Sirius looked at him with a face like a question. Remus pretended to be brave. -Is it that obvious? Remus said raspily. Sirius smiled, and smoothed his hair. -Oh Moony, what are you so worried about? It's only me. Sirius treated him with not exactly experience but an infinite tenderness he didn't think him capable of.
They touched each other with their hands, slicked by a tricky little spell. Remus found the angle awkward for his wrist and he was so nervous his body stayed taut and he couldn't come. Sirius pushed him down on the couch and sucked him off. It was beyond good or bad. When Remus finally came, all in a flood, it was almost painful.
-We'll have to practice that, was what Sirius said.
He had said nothing.
Kiss me again, on the mouth, on the lips, again, and again, never enough.
Sirius Black waking him with a gentle knuckle on his cheekbone, on the fuzzy hair at his temple. Sirius Black standing with his back to the blind alleyway, laughing, laughing. Black anger a lump of coal.
Black anger a cold sea.
-Remus, take good care of yourself-for her.
His father had said while they stood side by side, not facing each other, spying into their separate darkness. The priest had left. All the family had gone back for the reception. His mother's name, Hope Howell Lupin, glistened on the stone from the light rain. Remus wanted his father to look at him, to acknowledge this. Sodding Englishmen, he thought. Savages, all of them.
-You have to promise me, son.
Sirius Black's hand was caressing his knee. They were lounging by the window, smoking, naked under the blanket. Sodium light from the streetlamps diffused in the London fog like untended globes over the Thames-unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn-Sirius's hair, cropped closer to his ear than Remus could remember in a long time, was puppy-soft.
-Moony.
-Hmm?
-Lily's pregnant.
The dream breaks.
Suddenly he is awake. The day is still very early. A crow caws on a power line and another one, its voice echoing down the block, answers in reply. The paint, luminous grey on the soft pressed paper, has dried in black streams on his hand.
Sirius Black would often not return to his flat by the winter of 1980. The Prewett brothers died in an ambush. Marlene McKinnon’s location had been betrayed to the Death Eaters. Albus, desperate, had restructured the operations of the Order so that they no longer held large meetings, gathering instead in small subgroups that exchanged information separately from each other, reporting only to Dumbledore himself. Remus started to operate alone, going into the storm drains and tube tracks to track down where the werewolves lived. He didn’t know where Sirius went those nights he didn’t come back, and neither did Sirius him. When he noticed, Sirius was on the other side.
He likes Berlin best at night, in the disconsolate, trembling night, when he can walk unmolested in the rough darkness, eliding years into mere seconds. In the pale morning he has to contend with uncompressed time, with streets that are dark doubles leading into nowhere places.
Sirius Black is everywhere in Berlin.
Sirius Black, wading through Potsdamplatz like a heron in a waste land, his black boots splashing the sickly water, parting the weeds. Sirius Black, asleep on the U-Bahn with his arms over his chest, his head drooping into shadow. Sirius Black, hunched like a hound over his motorcycle, weaving between cars across the bridge, disappearing onto Kottbusser Damm. Standing a few places ahead of him in queue at the cinema, reading a book. Slouched at the bar, his leather bomber jacket waxed and gleaming, flirting with the barmaid in fluent German. Sulking in the back corner at SO36 when The Fall played, in his hand a beer bottle, his sullen, bright eyes peering out of the parted hair as he stomped a cigarette out on the metal plate floor.
Remus clutches his wand, unsure which spell he should have used.
He can see the wall, the slouching guards like black crenula in a maze of wire. The spell is listless like the past, invisible and incomplete.
But the morning breaks over the Spree like a slack ribbon of light. All the city wakes around him. Colors seep into the grey, in everything, everything.
10.
Where is Pete, the berk? He's missed our rendezvous-
The motorcycle touched down and skidded to a stop, the rubber burning black into the tar road. Sirius, braced to be thrown, instead jumped from the seat at the last minute. He didn't quite land on his feet and tumbled into the street while the motorcycle landed itself.
A light was flashing on and off a few houses down. The street was silent.
Sirius scrambled up and ran.
Something was wrong. Someone was crying. Harry. Harry was crying, but there was no mark in the sky oh god oh god oh please god-what happened-I need to- The door was torn off its hinges. A pumpkin grinned toothlessly in the foyer. Something fleshy peered from the other side of the jamb.
Sirius stopped dead.
-no no no no no no no-
It was James. He looked like he was sleeping, or just about to wake. His eyes were lazily ajar, his face frozen in an inexplicable expression, between surprise and- Sirius knelt by him. He could not speak. Time shrunk into an infinitesimally small point. Tentatively his hand reached out. His fingers were shaking. Just hours before they had hugged and said good-bye. The house was decorated in Halloween pageantry. James's glasses were askew on his face-he reached out to fix them-to smooth the hair-
-what have I done? How had it gone so wrong-
The kitchen light whined and flickered on and off.
Harry's sharp voice shrieked inconsolably. Mama-MAMA-MAMA-
He wanted to go up the stairs. He wanted to take Harry, to soothe him, to gather up the body, to tidy the mess-but he could not waste time-where is Pete that bloody treasonous bastard-how would he, a fucking coward after all-why did I think he could be-oh Remus what have I done.
He stumbled into the living room. He wiped his face with his hands. He grabbed a handful of powder from the jar on the mantlepiece and threw it into the cold hearth.
-LEAKY CAULDRON!
It was quiet for All Hallow's Eve, though it was not surprising. Only a few scattered groups gathered in the tables near the window, whispering amongst themselves. Tom was sitting at the bar with his chin in his hands, tuning a knob on the wireless.
-Blimey, didn't see you there, Black. Havin' the usual or something nice for All Hallow's?
-Have you seen Pettigrew?
-Not since yest'rday. Tom wiped his hands on his apron. Though now that you mention it I might have seen him at the Alley a while ago-we didn't talk-
Sirius turned on the spot and ran. That house on Knockturn Alley-that must be where he’s gone-gone to gloat to his fucking Death Eater mates, now that his goddamnned master’s godammned killed-I'll make him pay-
He caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. Someone was just stepping out of a door, someone rather short-his hair tied back in a tail by his neck-
Sirius bolted.
Peter turned around. His face froze. He apparated on the spot but it was too late. Sirius had already ran headlong into him. They both tumbled into a Muggle alleyway.
Peter, though he had just been tackled to the ground, was surprisingly quick to get to his feet. But when he looked around he realized he was cornered.
Sirius grabbed him by the collars and slammed him against the metal dumpster.
-No, Sirius, it wasn’t me! IT WASN’T ME! He made me do it I swear Sirius-
-Oh Peter Peter Peter, that’s not how the charm bloody works IS IT?
-You don’t understand, Sirius.
-I think I fucking understand perfectly, you scum.
-No you don’t, you really don’t, Sirius, you’re not-
-I WOULD HAVE DIED THAN BETRAY MY FRIENDS!
Sweat gathered on Peter’s forehead in beads. A wind gusted up and ruffled through the garbage bags next to them.
-You don’t understand-he’s so powerful-
-I understand perfectly. I’m going to make you pay. And when you think you’ve tasted hell, I’m going to make you wish you could crawl back to Voldemort.
-Don’t-
-don’t say his name.
-Why, you don’t like the sound of the bastard’s name? What, you’re so fucking afraid of your own master-
Sirius’s face split into a grin. He would deal with Peter, the way he’s always dealt with Peter.
But Peter’s features were scrunched up together, not in remorse but in concentration. Too late Sirius looked down at the stub of a wand peering out from Peter’s too-long sleeves. Strontium red light was expanding from its tip-Peter’s arms shrinking-his blue eyes turning into beady black spheres-
Too late. Too late. As he was blown back by the blast he saw the storm drain grates, a rat tail wriggling through. Too late too late too late too late-
He remembered none of the pain. He thought he heard someone laughing.
The year slips on the calendar
Your kiss flares
A match struck in the night
Flares and dies
My slumber broken
Kiss me again
Kiss me
Kiss me again
And again.
Never enough.
-Blue (1993). Derek Jarman.
-finis.