Fic: The Box of Memories for anasuede
Title: The Box of Memories
Rated: PG
Word Count: 2,500
Pairing: Remus/Harry, Remus/James/Sirius (vague mention of Remus/Tonks and Neville/Luna)
Warnings: Character Death, General Angstiness,
Summary: After Remus’s death, Harry takes on the task of going through all that Remus saved over the years.
Notes: for anasuede, who didn’t actually request anything, but gets this anyway as a thank you gift for all her help with SNS! When I asked Fi if it’d be okay if I killed Remus off for this fic, she replied, "Go ahead, De’s such an angst whore!" Thanks to L for the look-over and to D and C for the hand-holding.
Remus saved every letter, every memento from his past, and over the years, his house became a box of memories. There are sheets of parchment, carefully folded and held together with ribbons untied from gifts and the coarse string that held together parcels and sometimes those elastic bands that come wrapped around Muggle newspapers. There are shelves of photo albums, some carefully organized and labeled and bound with care, and others thrown together haphazardly and wedged in the shelf so photos slip out and drifted to the floor if anyone removes it from its home. There are boxes of menial gifts, matchbooks from restaurants and hotels, ticket stubs from trains and boats and Muggle cinemas, ale-stained coasters with notes written on them, old essays written at Hogwarts and even a few very carefully pressed and dried flowers hidden in the pages of a book, staining the imprisoning chapter with a permanent imprint of shell-pink petals.
Memories fill the attic and the closets and spill into the living room, stacking under tables and chairs, inside unused cupboards, and filling the dozen or so bookcases that line the walls. Harry had found it claustrophobic, once. He’d tried to convince Remus to clear out some of the insignificant things that Harry didn’t think were much worth hanging onto for so any years, but now Remus’s cluttered house feels like a blanket, surrounding him in the warmth of memories
It has been nearly a month since the funeral, and Harry is finally ready to step foot back inside Remus’s home. It feels freeing, almost, to no longer have the cloying scent of St. Mungo’s in his nose when he tries to sleep at night in an empty bed, to no longer have to worry if Remus is in pain, or hold back tears every time he slips his hand into Remus’s near-skeletal fingers. When Remus finally let go, it felt like Harry had been grieving already for months, watching helplessly as Remus slowly wasted away. Death itself was anticlimactic, because they’d already said their goodbyes more times than Harry could count.
It was easy to forget, even a few years ago, that lycanthropy is a terminal disease. Every full moon had stolen a bit more of Remus’s life until there was nothing left for him to lose, and he was gone.
It is time, Harry thinks, to sort out the boxes of memories, because Remus’s house should not be a graveyard for lost friends: for Harry’s parents, for Sirius, for Dumbledore, for Tonks and too many others that Harry never got the chance to meet.
The first box is the most familiar, not dusty and filled with yellowed parchment like the others. Harry knows its contents well. There is a soap wrapper from the hotel they stayed in on their trip to Seville, after Remus had admitted he was sick, and a tiny vial of sand from the day he took Remus to the coast to watch the sunset. There are dozens of letters that Harry wrote to him - one-sided conversations, the other half of which lay carefully filed away in Harry’s desk.
He puts those letters back into the box and seals it with spellotape. There will come a time later when he'll want these, but right now, it's too fresh to bear.
~o~
Dear Remus,
When are you going to realize that it doesn’t matter to me? I spent too much time afraid to love because I thought that my quest to kill Voldemort would end in my own death, and I missed out on so much. Maybe you don’t have much time, but that doesn’t mean you should waste it being lonely.
Love,
Harry
~o~
It takes Harry nearly a week to get up to the attic. Six days of filling a box for Tonks's mother of all the photos and letters from Tonks, after carefully extracting the more lurid ones. Harry was jealous of her once. He felt like a replacement for the body that lay in a mausoleum, never again to sprout hot pink hair and a cheeky grin. But that faded with the wisdom that one could love many souls in one's lifetime, each just as much as the last. He was third in line for Remus's heart, but he didn't get any less of it.
There is a box for Kingsley, and one for Minerva, and a box of things he simply didn't know what to do with, like photos of Peter Pettigrew, his round face grinning up at Harry, oblivious to the lives he would ruin. Harry thought to burn those, but he can't bear to destroy the others in the photos. Sirius, young and carefree; his parents, looking so in love; Remus, healthy and unaware of what would come.
Harry found letters from Alice and Frank Longbottom, from before their minds were stolen away, and an envelope of photos of baby Neville, pink-cheeked and chubby. One has the caption, isn't our boy handsome? written in feminine script on the back. Those, he saves for a gift for Neville's wedding to Luna, just a few weeks away. It's strange, Harry thinks, to be sifting through a dead lover's belongings as your friends prepare to marry and start families and move on with new joy in their lives.
He brought Hermione in yesterday to give her first pick of Remus's books, and watched her gasp and caress the leather spines as she lovingly chose the texts she wanted. The rest have been boxed for donation to various magical and Muggle libraries. Harry kept only a few for himself - some defence texts he didn't own already, and a stack of Muggle paperbacks that he'd read aloud at Remus's bedside when Remus was too weak to turn the pages himself: Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, Vonnegut, Whitman, Thoreau, Conrad, Yeats.
The attic, a dusty room that seems to get bigger the further that Harry steps into it, contains nearly as much as the whole house. The smell of must invades Harry's nose, almost choking him with stale air, and every move he makes kicks up more dust particles, sending them glittering across a shaft of light from the tiny window. He passes boxes and shelves, old furniture and cabinet brimming with papers, and finally stops upon reaching a wooden trunk with what must be twenty-five years of dust collected on the lid. He swipes his hand across the lid, revealing a faded Hogwarts crest and "Remus J. Lupin" scrawled across it in uneven gold letters.
Harry casts a simple cleaning spell and the dust disappears, leaving the trunk clean, but in need of a good polish. The spell used to lock it is juvenile, and he removes it easily, revealing thick bundles of parchment and photos, textbooks, Remus's now-tarnished prefect's badge, a faded Gryffindor tie, and countless other things beneath.
Each layer is like a window into Remus’s school years, what Harry imagines were the happiest of his life - what happened before the weight descended on his shoulders. He uncovers these reverently, like carefully peeling the layers from an onion, because this is Harry’s history too. Remus had told him a few stories about his parents, but always seemed to hold back, probably because it pained him too much to remember the dead. But this trunk was like a book: Hogwarts: A History in paperback form.
~o~
Written, unsigned, on a scrap of crumpled parchment:
Remus,
Does it make me a poofter if I want to kiss you again?
~o~
Harry smiles at the note; he knows this feeling well. There was a time when he thought that he would marry Ginny and live happily ever after with lots of redheaded babies, but somewhere along the way that faded. As Remus once told him, you love who you love, no matter who or what they are.
Sirius’s hand is easily-recognizable: elegantly-trained script almost too pretty for a boy’s. It was he who wrote the lettering on the Map because his was the best of the four. Remus’s hand is also ingrained into Harry’s mind. His letters come in short, staccato strokes, sharp peaks that are at times barely legible to the untrained eye. Wormtail’s is more like a scrawl, strangely awkward and uneven, in places almost stuttering, and full of inkblots where he scratched out a word or phrase to replace it with another.
But this note was not written by any of them. The handwriting is hurried and nervous, but still distinct, with large loops and miss-crossed t’s. Harry wonders who it was; what other boy’s heart did Remus unknowingly capture?
There are more notes in that same scrawl, some as innocuous as comments about professors or upcoming quidditch games, and others that unfold into the story of something illicit and beautiful.
~o~
What if I want this, Remus? It can’t harm anything. All I know is that it feels so bloody good.
~o~
Do you think Sirius would want to join us?
~o~
Remus,
I know I said I wanted it to stop, and I love her - I do! - but it’s not the same without you and Sirius. I think about it all the time. It’s just fun between friends, right? She doesn’t have to know what happens between us; it would only hurt her to find out what’s gone on already. Is it wrong that I feel left out when I see you two together?
~o~
Beneath the letters is a packet of photos, carefully tied together with string. Harry opens it reverently, and finds the smiling faces of Remus, Sirius and his father, standing in a row with their arms around each other’s shoulders. When Harry was young, people would tell him that he was the spitting image of his dad, and as he’s grown, the resemblance is still there, but weaker. A small lump rises in Harry’s throat as he realizes that he’s now lived more years than his parents did.
Harry pushes the sad thought away - he’s gotten good at that in the past weeks and months. Instead, he just looks at the photo, the way Sirius turns and grins at James, and the mischievous smile on James’s face. They look so happy together. There are more photos, some with Harry’s mum, and some with Peter, and some with other students Harry doesn’t recognize. Harry once thought that Wizarding photographs were strange, because he’d grown up with the unmoving Muggle variety, but now, he can only think of how grateful he is to see these tiny glimpses of his past fleshed out a little bit more.
One photo inexplicably draws him. It’s of Remus and Harry’s dad, sitting together in their dorm. At first they just mug for the camera, and Harry can make out the words “Hello Sirius” on his dad’s silent lips. Then James turns to Remus and murmurs something in his ear as he trails a finger down Remus’s arm. The gesture is intimate, too much so to be anything else, but it is the look on Remus’s face that puts a twist in Harry’s gut. It’s not a look of shock or disgust; it’s a look of raw arousal. Even on a younger Remus’s face, Harry could recognize that look anywhere.
He watches it again, in case he’d seen it wrong, but it’s exactly as the first time. The first things that pops into his head is Did my dad write those notes to Remus? He doesn’t know whether to laugh or to be sick , but maybe, just maybe it’s just a fluke. He rifles though the rest of the box, searching for proof that it’s not true, and instead finds the opposite. A letter in that same hand, this time more carefully written, but it’s unmistakable.
~o~
Mr Moony,
I sit here, abandoned and alone as you and Padfoot frolic in the fields or whatever-it-is that one does on a farm. I hope you are getting into proper amounts of mischief so that I don’t need to steal all your pants when you get back to teach you a lesson.
Lily wrote me yesterday. I think she’s finally seeing the error of her ways in rejecting my courtly gestures. This time, she wrote “please” when she asked me to stop writing her. Politeness! That’s one step away from love, I tell you!
Don’t have too much fun without me. I at least expect to hear about how your summer was ruined by not being able to see my handsome visage, and that mischief was just not the same without me.
Toodle-oo,
Mr J. Prongs Potter
~o~
The letter drops to the floor, and Harry takes in a deep breath of dusty air that sends him into a coughing fit. This is unfathomable. Harry’s dad was Remus’s lover. Harry’s dad was Remus And Sirius’s lover.
Harry picks up the letter and puts it back into the trunk as his whole world collapses before his eyes. He has to get out of here, he has to breathe. The trunk falls closed in a cloud of dust as Harry rushes down the stairs and pries open a window to suck in some fresh air.
A thousand emotions swirl in his head. He’s angry at Remus for never telling him this, he’s shocked, he’s vaguely horrified, he’s almost amused at the irony. But, most of all, there is a growing dread in the pit of his stomach. What if all he was to Remus was a replacement for his father? If Remus loved James, was that why he loved the man who was practically James’s mirror image?
He turns away from the window and leans back against the sill as he looks around the living room. It’s missing the clutter that he’s slowly etched away at this past week, but Remus’s touches are still there: the worn sofa that Remus refused to replace, an arrangement of ever-blooming dahlias on the coffee table, and a framed photo on the nearly bare bookshelf. This one, Harry remembers fondly. It’s from before Harry knew how sick Remus was, when they were still tentative and Remus hadn’t quite given in yet. Harry was smiling for the camera; Hermione had taken the photo one evening. Remus sat next to him, giving the camera a smile, and then looking at Harry with a more intimate smile, his eyes filled with warmth. This photo is similar, in tableau, to the one he found of Remus and his father, but it’s very much different.
No matter what his fears are, Harry realizes, he is not his father, and Remus knew that. He looks again out the window, watching the breeze steal orange-red leaves from the tree in the front yard and holds tight to the notion that he and his father did have one thing in common: sharing Remus’s love, but cut short by fate’s fickle hand.
Rated: PG
Word Count: 2,500
Pairing: Remus/Harry, Remus/James/Sirius (vague mention of Remus/Tonks and Neville/Luna)
Warnings: Character Death, General Angstiness,
Summary: After Remus’s death, Harry takes on the task of going through all that Remus saved over the years.
Notes: for anasuede, who didn’t actually request anything, but gets this anyway as a thank you gift for all her help with SNS! When I asked Fi if it’d be okay if I killed Remus off for this fic, she replied, "Go ahead, De’s such an angst whore!" Thanks to L for the look-over and to D and C for the hand-holding.
Remus saved every letter, every memento from his past, and over the years, his house became a box of memories. There are sheets of parchment, carefully folded and held together with ribbons untied from gifts and the coarse string that held together parcels and sometimes those elastic bands that come wrapped around Muggle newspapers. There are shelves of photo albums, some carefully organized and labeled and bound with care, and others thrown together haphazardly and wedged in the shelf so photos slip out and drifted to the floor if anyone removes it from its home. There are boxes of menial gifts, matchbooks from restaurants and hotels, ticket stubs from trains and boats and Muggle cinemas, ale-stained coasters with notes written on them, old essays written at Hogwarts and even a few very carefully pressed and dried flowers hidden in the pages of a book, staining the imprisoning chapter with a permanent imprint of shell-pink petals.
Memories fill the attic and the closets and spill into the living room, stacking under tables and chairs, inside unused cupboards, and filling the dozen or so bookcases that line the walls. Harry had found it claustrophobic, once. He’d tried to convince Remus to clear out some of the insignificant things that Harry didn’t think were much worth hanging onto for so any years, but now Remus’s cluttered house feels like a blanket, surrounding him in the warmth of memories
It has been nearly a month since the funeral, and Harry is finally ready to step foot back inside Remus’s home. It feels freeing, almost, to no longer have the cloying scent of St. Mungo’s in his nose when he tries to sleep at night in an empty bed, to no longer have to worry if Remus is in pain, or hold back tears every time he slips his hand into Remus’s near-skeletal fingers. When Remus finally let go, it felt like Harry had been grieving already for months, watching helplessly as Remus slowly wasted away. Death itself was anticlimactic, because they’d already said their goodbyes more times than Harry could count.
It was easy to forget, even a few years ago, that lycanthropy is a terminal disease. Every full moon had stolen a bit more of Remus’s life until there was nothing left for him to lose, and he was gone.
It is time, Harry thinks, to sort out the boxes of memories, because Remus’s house should not be a graveyard for lost friends: for Harry’s parents, for Sirius, for Dumbledore, for Tonks and too many others that Harry never got the chance to meet.
The first box is the most familiar, not dusty and filled with yellowed parchment like the others. Harry knows its contents well. There is a soap wrapper from the hotel they stayed in on their trip to Seville, after Remus had admitted he was sick, and a tiny vial of sand from the day he took Remus to the coast to watch the sunset. There are dozens of letters that Harry wrote to him - one-sided conversations, the other half of which lay carefully filed away in Harry’s desk.
He puts those letters back into the box and seals it with spellotape. There will come a time later when he'll want these, but right now, it's too fresh to bear.
~o~
Dear Remus,
When are you going to realize that it doesn’t matter to me? I spent too much time afraid to love because I thought that my quest to kill Voldemort would end in my own death, and I missed out on so much. Maybe you don’t have much time, but that doesn’t mean you should waste it being lonely.
Love,
Harry
~o~
It takes Harry nearly a week to get up to the attic. Six days of filling a box for Tonks's mother of all the photos and letters from Tonks, after carefully extracting the more lurid ones. Harry was jealous of her once. He felt like a replacement for the body that lay in a mausoleum, never again to sprout hot pink hair and a cheeky grin. But that faded with the wisdom that one could love many souls in one's lifetime, each just as much as the last. He was third in line for Remus's heart, but he didn't get any less of it.
There is a box for Kingsley, and one for Minerva, and a box of things he simply didn't know what to do with, like photos of Peter Pettigrew, his round face grinning up at Harry, oblivious to the lives he would ruin. Harry thought to burn those, but he can't bear to destroy the others in the photos. Sirius, young and carefree; his parents, looking so in love; Remus, healthy and unaware of what would come.
Harry found letters from Alice and Frank Longbottom, from before their minds were stolen away, and an envelope of photos of baby Neville, pink-cheeked and chubby. One has the caption, isn't our boy handsome? written in feminine script on the back. Those, he saves for a gift for Neville's wedding to Luna, just a few weeks away. It's strange, Harry thinks, to be sifting through a dead lover's belongings as your friends prepare to marry and start families and move on with new joy in their lives.
He brought Hermione in yesterday to give her first pick of Remus's books, and watched her gasp and caress the leather spines as she lovingly chose the texts she wanted. The rest have been boxed for donation to various magical and Muggle libraries. Harry kept only a few for himself - some defence texts he didn't own already, and a stack of Muggle paperbacks that he'd read aloud at Remus's bedside when Remus was too weak to turn the pages himself: Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, Vonnegut, Whitman, Thoreau, Conrad, Yeats.
The attic, a dusty room that seems to get bigger the further that Harry steps into it, contains nearly as much as the whole house. The smell of must invades Harry's nose, almost choking him with stale air, and every move he makes kicks up more dust particles, sending them glittering across a shaft of light from the tiny window. He passes boxes and shelves, old furniture and cabinet brimming with papers, and finally stops upon reaching a wooden trunk with what must be twenty-five years of dust collected on the lid. He swipes his hand across the lid, revealing a faded Hogwarts crest and "Remus J. Lupin" scrawled across it in uneven gold letters.
Harry casts a simple cleaning spell and the dust disappears, leaving the trunk clean, but in need of a good polish. The spell used to lock it is juvenile, and he removes it easily, revealing thick bundles of parchment and photos, textbooks, Remus's now-tarnished prefect's badge, a faded Gryffindor tie, and countless other things beneath.
Each layer is like a window into Remus’s school years, what Harry imagines were the happiest of his life - what happened before the weight descended on his shoulders. He uncovers these reverently, like carefully peeling the layers from an onion, because this is Harry’s history too. Remus had told him a few stories about his parents, but always seemed to hold back, probably because it pained him too much to remember the dead. But this trunk was like a book: Hogwarts: A History in paperback form.
~o~
Written, unsigned, on a scrap of crumpled parchment:
Remus,
Does it make me a poofter if I want to kiss you again?
~o~
Harry smiles at the note; he knows this feeling well. There was a time when he thought that he would marry Ginny and live happily ever after with lots of redheaded babies, but somewhere along the way that faded. As Remus once told him, you love who you love, no matter who or what they are.
Sirius’s hand is easily-recognizable: elegantly-trained script almost too pretty for a boy’s. It was he who wrote the lettering on the Map because his was the best of the four. Remus’s hand is also ingrained into Harry’s mind. His letters come in short, staccato strokes, sharp peaks that are at times barely legible to the untrained eye. Wormtail’s is more like a scrawl, strangely awkward and uneven, in places almost stuttering, and full of inkblots where he scratched out a word or phrase to replace it with another.
But this note was not written by any of them. The handwriting is hurried and nervous, but still distinct, with large loops and miss-crossed t’s. Harry wonders who it was; what other boy’s heart did Remus unknowingly capture?
There are more notes in that same scrawl, some as innocuous as comments about professors or upcoming quidditch games, and others that unfold into the story of something illicit and beautiful.
~o~
What if I want this, Remus? It can’t harm anything. All I know is that it feels so bloody good.
~o~
Do you think Sirius would want to join us?
~o~
Remus,
I know I said I wanted it to stop, and I love her - I do! - but it’s not the same without you and Sirius. I think about it all the time. It’s just fun between friends, right? She doesn’t have to know what happens between us; it would only hurt her to find out what’s gone on already. Is it wrong that I feel left out when I see you two together?
~o~
Beneath the letters is a packet of photos, carefully tied together with string. Harry opens it reverently, and finds the smiling faces of Remus, Sirius and his father, standing in a row with their arms around each other’s shoulders. When Harry was young, people would tell him that he was the spitting image of his dad, and as he’s grown, the resemblance is still there, but weaker. A small lump rises in Harry’s throat as he realizes that he’s now lived more years than his parents did.
Harry pushes the sad thought away - he’s gotten good at that in the past weeks and months. Instead, he just looks at the photo, the way Sirius turns and grins at James, and the mischievous smile on James’s face. They look so happy together. There are more photos, some with Harry’s mum, and some with Peter, and some with other students Harry doesn’t recognize. Harry once thought that Wizarding photographs were strange, because he’d grown up with the unmoving Muggle variety, but now, he can only think of how grateful he is to see these tiny glimpses of his past fleshed out a little bit more.
One photo inexplicably draws him. It’s of Remus and Harry’s dad, sitting together in their dorm. At first they just mug for the camera, and Harry can make out the words “Hello Sirius” on his dad’s silent lips. Then James turns to Remus and murmurs something in his ear as he trails a finger down Remus’s arm. The gesture is intimate, too much so to be anything else, but it is the look on Remus’s face that puts a twist in Harry’s gut. It’s not a look of shock or disgust; it’s a look of raw arousal. Even on a younger Remus’s face, Harry could recognize that look anywhere.
He watches it again, in case he’d seen it wrong, but it’s exactly as the first time. The first things that pops into his head is Did my dad write those notes to Remus? He doesn’t know whether to laugh or to be sick , but maybe, just maybe it’s just a fluke. He rifles though the rest of the box, searching for proof that it’s not true, and instead finds the opposite. A letter in that same hand, this time more carefully written, but it’s unmistakable.
~o~
Mr Moony,
I sit here, abandoned and alone as you and Padfoot frolic in the fields or whatever-it-is that one does on a farm. I hope you are getting into proper amounts of mischief so that I don’t need to steal all your pants when you get back to teach you a lesson.
Lily wrote me yesterday. I think she’s finally seeing the error of her ways in rejecting my courtly gestures. This time, she wrote “please” when she asked me to stop writing her. Politeness! That’s one step away from love, I tell you!
Don’t have too much fun without me. I at least expect to hear about how your summer was ruined by not being able to see my handsome visage, and that mischief was just not the same without me.
Toodle-oo,
Mr J. Prongs Potter
~o~
The letter drops to the floor, and Harry takes in a deep breath of dusty air that sends him into a coughing fit. This is unfathomable. Harry’s dad was Remus’s lover. Harry’s dad was Remus And Sirius’s lover.
Harry picks up the letter and puts it back into the trunk as his whole world collapses before his eyes. He has to get out of here, he has to breathe. The trunk falls closed in a cloud of dust as Harry rushes down the stairs and pries open a window to suck in some fresh air.
A thousand emotions swirl in his head. He’s angry at Remus for never telling him this, he’s shocked, he’s vaguely horrified, he’s almost amused at the irony. But, most of all, there is a growing dread in the pit of his stomach. What if all he was to Remus was a replacement for his father? If Remus loved James, was that why he loved the man who was practically James’s mirror image?
He turns away from the window and leans back against the sill as he looks around the living room. It’s missing the clutter that he’s slowly etched away at this past week, but Remus’s touches are still there: the worn sofa that Remus refused to replace, an arrangement of ever-blooming dahlias on the coffee table, and a framed photo on the nearly bare bookshelf. This one, Harry remembers fondly. It’s from before Harry knew how sick Remus was, when they were still tentative and Remus hadn’t quite given in yet. Harry was smiling for the camera; Hermione had taken the photo one evening. Remus sat next to him, giving the camera a smile, and then looking at Harry with a more intimate smile, his eyes filled with warmth. This photo is similar, in tableau, to the one he found of Remus and his father, but it’s very much different.
No matter what his fears are, Harry realizes, he is not his father, and Remus knew that. He looks again out the window, watching the breeze steal orange-red leaves from the tree in the front yard and holds tight to the notion that he and his father did have one thing in common: sharing Remus’s love, but cut short by fate’s fickle hand.