Chapter Four: A Moonlit Stroll
Series title: Runaway: A Story About Sirius Black and Remus Lupin
Series summary: During the sweltering summer of 1976, Sirius Black leaves one family, joins another, and falls in love.
Series authors: The Runaway Writers
Installment title: Chapter Four: A Moonlit Stroll
Installment author: expositionary
Word count: 1,970
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen | Twenty | Twenty-One | Twenty-Two | Twenty-Three | Twenty-Four | Twenty-Five | Epilogue
Chapter Three: Debut
A/N: Much love to sazzlette for the last-minute reassurance & beta -- and for the title. ♥ paulamcg mentioned wanting to see the portrait dragon again, so he has a cameo. Oh, and I actually managed to work in a prompt; the song Sirius' mother sings is inspired by day six. :O Sorry for it being so late.
*
Sirius is sprawled in the parlour window-seat when the click of a door closing jolts him out of his doze. For a moment he's disoriented, taking in the feel of starched fabric against his skin and the view of a broad, paved street as he opens his eyes.
Memory mingles with the vestiges of a dream, and he can feel the sensation of sand beneath his toes, and see a beach stretching out in front of him -- the flash of light in Remus' hair, bringing out the threads of gold and red -- it's gone, now, the lingering warmth fading into the darkness of the room.
Strange that there was no James or Peter, Sirius realises as he sits up; he rarely dreams of one of his three friends without dreaming about the rest. All June, he and James had planned to wreak havoc here, but Sirius hasn't seen anything of him yet: the Potters and the Blacks aren't invited to the same types of dinner parties.
Ah. The dinner party. Sirius does up the top button of his dress shirt and tries to banish the image of Regulus' simpering to Important Figures from his mind. At least Mother had been all right; hopefully this spell would last a few more weeks.
He can hear the steady tick of a clock in the background, and realises that it must be past midnight by now; he'd stumbled downstairs at about eleven, unable to sleep, and ended up watching the moonlight out of the window.
"You ought to know," says a low, dignified voice from the entrance, "that your mother has just left out of the front door."
Sirius lurches to his feet. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he hurries to the front entrance as he tries not to trip over anything in the near-darkness. He's half-expecting to see one house-elf or another, hard at work scrubbing the gleaming wooden floor, but none of the house-elves he knows speak like that ...
Turning the corner, Sirius stops, and comes face-to-face with a huge portrait of a smirking dragon, rendered in every shade of colour imaginable. It's something of an assault on the eyes.
"Might want to hurry it up," the dragon says, lashing his tail lazily, "she was walking rather quickly."
At that, Sirius blinks, and wakes up fully.
The rational part of his mind supplies that Mother could just be out for a moonlit walk, but his common sense points out that it could be ... something else.
Admittedly, Sirius pays very little attention during Father's dinner-table talk of pureblood propriety, but he's heard enough to know that if anyone saw Mother during one of her bad states, especially what with all of the important families here.
"What's she wearing?" Sirius asks, thinking quickly.
"A nightdress, and not much more." The dragon winks. "Out on a little midnight tryst, hmm?"
"No," Sirius says, shortly. -- It's safest to assume the worst, then. He has his shoes on and is closing the door behind him within moments.
For half a second, as he pads down the wooden steps and out into the empty street, he considers waking Father. Then, pausing, he mentally tallies up the number of times he saw Father's wineglass refilled this past evening: no, too many. Better that he do this on his own, then.
If he and Regulus have learned anything at Twelve Grimmauld Place, it's how important it is to keep Mother away from Father, when she's in one of her states and he's had a little too much to drink -- not for Father's safety, but for hers.
*
"... bring me home to safety ..."
There's a low, rich voice echoing through the silence, and Sirius is following it.
He turns a street-corner, scowling: if this was familiar territory, he would have already found Mother and brought her back to Pen y Bryn. He never lost to Regulus at Hide-and-Go-Seek back when they were boys, and only Remus had been better than him at navigating particularly tricky Hogwarts passageways.
(He wishes that Remus was with him now: Remus is always the first one to get his bearings in a new area.)
"... and return me to the sea ..."
The houses and shops are quiet and dark, and Mother is somewhere to the left, he judges: perhaps beyond that cottage.
Mother would never sing in public, Sirius knows, which leaves no doubt to as what sort of state she's in. As he walks quickly past a little corner shop and skirts the edge of a forest, Sirius is half-glad of this: if it doesn't wake anyone up, he can at least follow the sound of the song.
Back when she was better, she used to sing lullabies to him and Regulus in that voice, he remembers. Things had only got bad after Regulus left for Hogwarts.
Sirius walks down a winding path by a clump of cottages -- the houses are smaller in this area of town, more modest, the flowers planted in the gardens common things instead of exotic imports -- and he can hear the lap of waves in the distance.
He thinks determinedly of what lies to tell Father in the morning, and tries to keep the panic from setting in. There's no time to be angry, or to think of the fun Remus and James and Peter must be having, while he starts off his summer chasing --
"... for when the life is said and done ..."
Sirius continues to follow the voice, looking around furtively as he quickly cuts though someone's flower garden and vaults their little gate without breaking stride. The path ends where the grass begins to break into rocky area and descend towards the ocean: the coast isn't smooth and sandy as it is near Pen y Bryn; instead, there's a steep drop with jagged rocks.
"... I start from where I came from ..."
Not too far away, he sees the form of his mother, picking her way unsteadily over the sharp stones towards the water, and quickens his step.
"Mother!" Sirius half-shouts, half-whispers into the darkness.
Mother starts and turns, losing balance, and Sirius swears as she topples out of sight. For a few moments, there's a silence: and then she starts to wail.
"Sirius?"
Sirius turns and stops in his tracks. Standing in front of him, hair glinting in the weak moonlight (the full moon is next week, Sirius recalls sharply), is Remus: pyjamas hanging off of his hips, shirtless, and looking altogether puzzled and endearing as he squints at Sirius in the darkness through sleep-hazy eyes.
"Er," Sirius says, unable to stop staring. He wishes he had a Portkey to transport him out of this nightmare -- it has to be a nightmare. "Er. Remus. Hello. I think I just stepped on your mum's flowers."
"I was going to drop by tomorrow," Remus says confusedly, covering a yawn as he opens the gate and walks towards Sirius, stopping when he's an arm's-length away. He stops, and inclines his head; he must have heard it. "What's that?"
Looking away, Sirius thinks furiously, but even the great Sirius Black can't think himself out of this one, so he tells the truth. "My mother. There's, there's a reason I didn't want any of you to visit last summer, Moony." He grins, but knows that it falls flat.
Remus doesn't say anything, just looks at him thoughtfully.
"You'd better get back inside," Sirius continues, averting his eyes. "I'll tell you tomorrow. I've got to --" He forces himself to turn away and begins picking his way down the rocks.
"No," Remus says, "I'll come with you, hang on." Sirius glances back: Remus is hopping on one foot, fastening the lace of his shoe, quite unselfconscious, and he can't help but smile a bit, even in the light of everything else. "Are you going to tell me what's going on, Pads?"
"Rather not," Sirius mutters, then stops when he sees a form huddled on the ground, rocking back and forth.
Mother has her knees drawn to her chest, and her head buried on top of them, curls of black hair tumbling over her bare shoulders. "Orion," she moans softly, "I did not, I did not, stay away, nothing's the matter, I --"
"Mother, it's me." Sirius keeps his voice quiet, reaching forward hesitantly, but she flinches away when his hand touches her arm, and begins to sob. Helpless, he looks back towards Remus; Regulus is the only one who can manage to quiet her without the use of any spells, and he didn't think to grab his wand. "'M sorry, when she gets like this ..."
Remus frowns, his brow furrowing in the way that means he's thinking very quickly. "Can I try?"
Sirius shrugs. Give him Slytherins, he'll hex them; give him test papers, he'll pull the highest mark in his class. But this: he has no idea what to do, with his mother here falling apart on the beach, and here's Remus, and none of it really fits together properly, it's almost unreal.
Carefully, Remus moves forward, murmuring low, soothing things under his voice, the way Sirius sees him do when he's wearing his Prefect badge and first-years come crying to him with broken bones and sorrows. "Don't worry," Remus murmurs as he bends at the knees, putting one hand on either of Mother's shoulders. "Whatever's troubling you, it'll be fine."
"Had to get out," she murmurs meekly, "had to get away from him, he, who thinks I can't handle things on my own, and -- and when I can't --" Her head snaps up as her eyes narrow, and a little bit of the usual steel comes into his voice. "Who are you, boy?"
"I'm one of Sirius' friends from school," Remus replies calmly, keeping the same tone as he slowly draws Mother to her feet, "And Sirius is right here; you -- he. He probably shouldn't be out this late."
(Distantly, Sirius realises that Remus doesn't speak to her like a child, the way some of the house-elves do -- it only angers her further, but how did Remus know that?)
Nodding decisively, Mother straightens and focuses on Sirius. "Yes. He shouldn't be out this late. I'll take him back. Come, Sirius." Primly, she removes her arms from Remus' grasp and sweeps past them both, back up towards the winding pathway into town.
And Sirius is left standing by the rocks of the shore, looking at Remus incredulously.
"It's all right," Remus says, slightly awkward, and reaches forward to put a hand on Sirius' shoulder before he can speak. "You don't need to -- I get it."
If it were James standing here instead, Sirius would have to explain, and rationalise, and probably punch him, before it got through. So he thanks Merlin that this is Remus, instead.
It's probably just the moonlight, and the madness, and the fact that he really doesn't know what to think, but Sirius realises that he really wants to hug Remus. And so, for the second time in a week, he does. Remus' skin in warm, even though he's shirtless and there's a breeze coming off of the ocean, and his hair smells like forest.
"I think your mum's waiting," Remus mumbles into his shoulder, pulling back and looking down; Sirius can't tell if he's blushing, but he sounds like he is. Then, with a smile, Remus meets his eyes, and says, "Tomorrow," like some sort of promise.
"Tomorrow," Sirius repeats, and watches as Remus walks back up to his cottage, looking back only once.
Once Remus has disappeared, closing the door behind him, Sirius follows his mother's retreating back up the pathway. They walk quietly down the streets, Sirius remaining silent as Mother scolds him in scandalised tones for being out so late; he's thinking about moonlight, and Remus.
Chapter Five: Tennis and the Menai Bridge
Series summary: During the sweltering summer of 1976, Sirius Black leaves one family, joins another, and falls in love.
Series authors: The Runaway Writers
Installment title: Chapter Four: A Moonlit Stroll
Installment author: expositionary
Word count: 1,970
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen | Twenty | Twenty-One | Twenty-Two | Twenty-Three | Twenty-Four | Twenty-Five | Epilogue
Chapter Three: Debut
A/N: Much love to sazzlette for the last-minute reassurance & beta -- and for the title. ♥ paulamcg mentioned wanting to see the portrait dragon again, so he has a cameo. Oh, and I actually managed to work in a prompt; the song Sirius' mother sings is inspired by day six. :O Sorry for it being so late.
*
Sirius is sprawled in the parlour window-seat when the click of a door closing jolts him out of his doze. For a moment he's disoriented, taking in the feel of starched fabric against his skin and the view of a broad, paved street as he opens his eyes.
Memory mingles with the vestiges of a dream, and he can feel the sensation of sand beneath his toes, and see a beach stretching out in front of him -- the flash of light in Remus' hair, bringing out the threads of gold and red -- it's gone, now, the lingering warmth fading into the darkness of the room.
Strange that there was no James or Peter, Sirius realises as he sits up; he rarely dreams of one of his three friends without dreaming about the rest. All June, he and James had planned to wreak havoc here, but Sirius hasn't seen anything of him yet: the Potters and the Blacks aren't invited to the same types of dinner parties.
Ah. The dinner party. Sirius does up the top button of his dress shirt and tries to banish the image of Regulus' simpering to Important Figures from his mind. At least Mother had been all right; hopefully this spell would last a few more weeks.
He can hear the steady tick of a clock in the background, and realises that it must be past midnight by now; he'd stumbled downstairs at about eleven, unable to sleep, and ended up watching the moonlight out of the window.
"You ought to know," says a low, dignified voice from the entrance, "that your mother has just left out of the front door."
Sirius lurches to his feet. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he hurries to the front entrance as he tries not to trip over anything in the near-darkness. He's half-expecting to see one house-elf or another, hard at work scrubbing the gleaming wooden floor, but none of the house-elves he knows speak like that ...
Turning the corner, Sirius stops, and comes face-to-face with a huge portrait of a smirking dragon, rendered in every shade of colour imaginable. It's something of an assault on the eyes.
"Might want to hurry it up," the dragon says, lashing his tail lazily, "she was walking rather quickly."
At that, Sirius blinks, and wakes up fully.
The rational part of his mind supplies that Mother could just be out for a moonlit walk, but his common sense points out that it could be ... something else.
Admittedly, Sirius pays very little attention during Father's dinner-table talk of pureblood propriety, but he's heard enough to know that if anyone saw Mother during one of her bad states, especially what with all of the important families here.
"What's she wearing?" Sirius asks, thinking quickly.
"A nightdress, and not much more." The dragon winks. "Out on a little midnight tryst, hmm?"
"No," Sirius says, shortly. -- It's safest to assume the worst, then. He has his shoes on and is closing the door behind him within moments.
For half a second, as he pads down the wooden steps and out into the empty street, he considers waking Father. Then, pausing, he mentally tallies up the number of times he saw Father's wineglass refilled this past evening: no, too many. Better that he do this on his own, then.
If he and Regulus have learned anything at Twelve Grimmauld Place, it's how important it is to keep Mother away from Father, when she's in one of her states and he's had a little too much to drink -- not for Father's safety, but for hers.
*
"... bring me home to safety ..."
There's a low, rich voice echoing through the silence, and Sirius is following it.
He turns a street-corner, scowling: if this was familiar territory, he would have already found Mother and brought her back to Pen y Bryn. He never lost to Regulus at Hide-and-Go-Seek back when they were boys, and only Remus had been better than him at navigating particularly tricky Hogwarts passageways.
(He wishes that Remus was with him now: Remus is always the first one to get his bearings in a new area.)
"... and return me to the sea ..."
The houses and shops are quiet and dark, and Mother is somewhere to the left, he judges: perhaps beyond that cottage.
Mother would never sing in public, Sirius knows, which leaves no doubt to as what sort of state she's in. As he walks quickly past a little corner shop and skirts the edge of a forest, Sirius is half-glad of this: if it doesn't wake anyone up, he can at least follow the sound of the song.
Back when she was better, she used to sing lullabies to him and Regulus in that voice, he remembers. Things had only got bad after Regulus left for Hogwarts.
Sirius walks down a winding path by a clump of cottages -- the houses are smaller in this area of town, more modest, the flowers planted in the gardens common things instead of exotic imports -- and he can hear the lap of waves in the distance.
He thinks determinedly of what lies to tell Father in the morning, and tries to keep the panic from setting in. There's no time to be angry, or to think of the fun Remus and James and Peter must be having, while he starts off his summer chasing --
"... for when the life is said and done ..."
Sirius continues to follow the voice, looking around furtively as he quickly cuts though someone's flower garden and vaults their little gate without breaking stride. The path ends where the grass begins to break into rocky area and descend towards the ocean: the coast isn't smooth and sandy as it is near Pen y Bryn; instead, there's a steep drop with jagged rocks.
"... I start from where I came from ..."
Not too far away, he sees the form of his mother, picking her way unsteadily over the sharp stones towards the water, and quickens his step.
"Mother!" Sirius half-shouts, half-whispers into the darkness.
Mother starts and turns, losing balance, and Sirius swears as she topples out of sight. For a few moments, there's a silence: and then she starts to wail.
"Sirius?"
Sirius turns and stops in his tracks. Standing in front of him, hair glinting in the weak moonlight (the full moon is next week, Sirius recalls sharply), is Remus: pyjamas hanging off of his hips, shirtless, and looking altogether puzzled and endearing as he squints at Sirius in the darkness through sleep-hazy eyes.
"Er," Sirius says, unable to stop staring. He wishes he had a Portkey to transport him out of this nightmare -- it has to be a nightmare. "Er. Remus. Hello. I think I just stepped on your mum's flowers."
"I was going to drop by tomorrow," Remus says confusedly, covering a yawn as he opens the gate and walks towards Sirius, stopping when he's an arm's-length away. He stops, and inclines his head; he must have heard it. "What's that?"
Looking away, Sirius thinks furiously, but even the great Sirius Black can't think himself out of this one, so he tells the truth. "My mother. There's, there's a reason I didn't want any of you to visit last summer, Moony." He grins, but knows that it falls flat.
Remus doesn't say anything, just looks at him thoughtfully.
"You'd better get back inside," Sirius continues, averting his eyes. "I'll tell you tomorrow. I've got to --" He forces himself to turn away and begins picking his way down the rocks.
"No," Remus says, "I'll come with you, hang on." Sirius glances back: Remus is hopping on one foot, fastening the lace of his shoe, quite unselfconscious, and he can't help but smile a bit, even in the light of everything else. "Are you going to tell me what's going on, Pads?"
"Rather not," Sirius mutters, then stops when he sees a form huddled on the ground, rocking back and forth.
Mother has her knees drawn to her chest, and her head buried on top of them, curls of black hair tumbling over her bare shoulders. "Orion," she moans softly, "I did not, I did not, stay away, nothing's the matter, I --"
"Mother, it's me." Sirius keeps his voice quiet, reaching forward hesitantly, but she flinches away when his hand touches her arm, and begins to sob. Helpless, he looks back towards Remus; Regulus is the only one who can manage to quiet her without the use of any spells, and he didn't think to grab his wand. "'M sorry, when she gets like this ..."
Remus frowns, his brow furrowing in the way that means he's thinking very quickly. "Can I try?"
Sirius shrugs. Give him Slytherins, he'll hex them; give him test papers, he'll pull the highest mark in his class. But this: he has no idea what to do, with his mother here falling apart on the beach, and here's Remus, and none of it really fits together properly, it's almost unreal.
Carefully, Remus moves forward, murmuring low, soothing things under his voice, the way Sirius sees him do when he's wearing his Prefect badge and first-years come crying to him with broken bones and sorrows. "Don't worry," Remus murmurs as he bends at the knees, putting one hand on either of Mother's shoulders. "Whatever's troubling you, it'll be fine."
"Had to get out," she murmurs meekly, "had to get away from him, he, who thinks I can't handle things on my own, and -- and when I can't --" Her head snaps up as her eyes narrow, and a little bit of the usual steel comes into his voice. "Who are you, boy?"
"I'm one of Sirius' friends from school," Remus replies calmly, keeping the same tone as he slowly draws Mother to her feet, "And Sirius is right here; you -- he. He probably shouldn't be out this late."
(Distantly, Sirius realises that Remus doesn't speak to her like a child, the way some of the house-elves do -- it only angers her further, but how did Remus know that?)
Nodding decisively, Mother straightens and focuses on Sirius. "Yes. He shouldn't be out this late. I'll take him back. Come, Sirius." Primly, she removes her arms from Remus' grasp and sweeps past them both, back up towards the winding pathway into town.
And Sirius is left standing by the rocks of the shore, looking at Remus incredulously.
"It's all right," Remus says, slightly awkward, and reaches forward to put a hand on Sirius' shoulder before he can speak. "You don't need to -- I get it."
If it were James standing here instead, Sirius would have to explain, and rationalise, and probably punch him, before it got through. So he thanks Merlin that this is Remus, instead.
It's probably just the moonlight, and the madness, and the fact that he really doesn't know what to think, but Sirius realises that he really wants to hug Remus. And so, for the second time in a week, he does. Remus' skin in warm, even though he's shirtless and there's a breeze coming off of the ocean, and his hair smells like forest.
"I think your mum's waiting," Remus mumbles into his shoulder, pulling back and looking down; Sirius can't tell if he's blushing, but he sounds like he is. Then, with a smile, Remus meets his eyes, and says, "Tomorrow," like some sort of promise.
"Tomorrow," Sirius repeats, and watches as Remus walks back up to his cottage, looking back only once.
Once Remus has disappeared, closing the door behind him, Sirius follows his mother's retreating back up the pathway. They walk quietly down the streets, Sirius remaining silent as Mother scolds him in scandalised tones for being out so late; he's thinking about moonlight, and Remus.
Chapter Five: Tennis and the Menai Bridge