[FIC] To Sit a Dead Man Between Us: Part VI
Title: To Sit a Dead Man Between Us, Part VI
Author:
PART VI
The Poetry Is In The Pity
It is early spring, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and Sirius is fourteen years old when he steps through the front doors of Grimmauld Place, still wearing his school tie, which means that his Father will not touch him, and that the foyer portrait of Grandfather Pollux makes a sound of disgust, and spits on the frame.
“In his room, Sirius,” says Father. “Mind that you aren’t in the way.”
And Sirius takes the stairs one-by-one-by-one-by-one, and he does not take off his boots, so that he can still be shouted at later, if he feels like it, for making an awful, unnecessary racket (and generally existing, ha-ha, he thinks).
For six hours, he sits at the end of the bed and watches Regulus sleep. A Healer with a peaked, grey cap and a big glass eye takes Regulus’s temperature three times, feeds him a potion twice, and runs scabby-looking palms over the back of Regulus’s neck. He knows that Mother stops once outside the door. He hears the ghoul upstairs shuffle morosely through the corridor and kick its heavy, chained feet against the door to the attic. And Kreacher brings a cup of tea and a bowl of broth for Regulus, and Sirius lets them go cold, and he reads a bit of James’s letter, which arrives just after sundown, and he counts the number of times Regulus shifts in his sleep. He supposes that he would get awfully tired of being so sick all the time, too, if it were him, and if they were all so concerned as to actually demand him here (and existing), it must be enough to make someone sleep for days and days.
Kreacher comes to collect the untouched dishes, and makes a gurgling, hissing noise at Sirius, when he looks at him.
“Oh, go suck a doxy,” says Sirius. “How long has it been?”
“Master Regulus has had a fever for six nights,” hisses Kreacher. “Since he was retrieved from Hogwarts.”
“They say he’s going to die,” says Sirius, with James’s letter in his hands.
Kreacher’s eyes turn the colour of rotted bark, of dead skin and oil, and he disappears with a crack that shakes the walls.
Regulus wakes just after midnight, when Sirius has just started to make spitballs out of James’s letter (he has seriously maimed three vicious-looking floral patterns on Regulus’s wallpaper).
“What,” says Regulus, and it sounds like torn paper.
Sirius glares at him. “They told me to come back,” he says. “I’ve come, so.”
Regulus’s hair is plastered, damp, to his temples, and is sticking straight up in the back where it has been lying skewed on the pillows. “Have I missed class,” he asks.
“What,” Sirius sighs. “Are you even - “
“Sirius?”
“Shut up, all right?” he snaps, and presses his palm against Regulus’s ankle, over the blankets. “Just, shut up, you’ve no clue what you’re - “
“I want to - “ says Regulus, and lifts a hand, lifts his body, and his skin is so thin Sirius thinks he can see through it, to the bone and blood and out the other side.
He leans forward. “I don’t care,” he says. “Keep your stupid head on, all right? It’s fine.”
“I need to get up,” says Regulus, solemn; glassy eyes fixed firmly on Sirius’s face, and it makes his chest tight with anger.
Sirius snorts. “You can’t even speak in full sentences,” he mutters.
“But I can,” whispers Regulus, fiercely, fingers tight on Sirius’s arm, the knuckles gone white. “I can stand.”
“Bloody hell you can,” says Sirius, and takes his elbow, and he wants to smack him across the back of the head or across his face until that awful, stupid, tepid, opiated look is shaken right out of him.
“I could stand,” he whispers, as if truly, truly believes every inane word coming from his chapped lips and dry tongue and heat-addled brain. “And be - “
“I don’t care,” Sirius snaps. “Will you just shut up, you’ll wake everyone and I’ll get hell for it, won’t I?”
“Be more than this,” he says, and he has not heard a word that Sirius has said, and his fingers are still pressing painfully into Sirius’s arm, and it is the first time since last summer, Sirius thinks, probably, that they have touched.
“I’ll show you,” says Regulus. “Please.”
Sirius frowns; Regulus is looking past him, looking at something over his shoulder, in the sort of way that makes his hair prickle on his wrists and nape.
“Fine,” he spits. “Fine, if it’ll just. If you’ll just stop - “ he takes Regulus by the elbow and by a damp fistful of his nightshirt and hauls him up to sitting, and Regulus - with his stupid wobbly spine and his idiotic, fever-pink face and hot, ashy skin - pushes on Sirius’s shoulders, on his chest, and on his forearm, until he is standing by the bed, with someone else’s body for support.
“There,” says Sirius, sleepless, irritated, and ill-practiced in being careless, he thinks. “There, fine, you’re up. Now back to bed, you - “
Regulus exhales, heavily. “Wait,” he says, and he sounds almost sane.
He looks to the window, where the heavy drapes are drawn-halfway, and through the sliver of sight there is the night sky and the hazy, spelled-distant streetlamps of London, and the smoke curling from chimneys and the sounds of cobblestones, of bells, of crabgrass growing in-between sidewalk cracks, of gulls and pigeons, and spiders and mice, of the moon, of the skitter of wind on the shingles of other people’s houses, of the barking of a dog and a train, somewhere.
“All right,” he says, finally, quietly; his spine seems to sag slightly inside his skin, eyelids closing. “All right. I think. It will be fine now.”
Sirius has his hands on his brother’s shoulders; he is holding him up, and Regulus has just told him it will all be fine, now, and this is an odd moment, he thinks, where they can pause and hear the world, and the world sounds only like their own syncopated breathing and their own simple heartbeats, and Regulus’s surprising, feverish conviction in the rightness of it. And Sirius thinks, how do you know.
He thinks, how could you ever trust anyone with that.
He thinks, how could you ever trust yourself, like that.
It is late fall. It is even early winter, now, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and Remus is twenty-one years old when he climbs the stairs. It has been two months or so. Two months or so of a slow and steady bleed-out of his carefully-cultivated resistance to headlines, to celebrations, to revelry and happiness and carousing to the deafening tune of New Freedoms and a New Era. And it has been two months or so, of memorializing inane objects, like dishes and cutlery, and pieces of lint and ugly furniture, of packed boxes and picture frames, of two, sharp-fat pieces of moonlight, of fever, momentary insanity, of steadfast denial.
But it has been two months or so. The end is near, they say. Alastor Moody said it, today, in the buttercream-light of the Three Broomsticks, behind a thick curtain of scars and freshly-cropped hair. Lad, he'd said, Almost over now.
Remus had wanted to say, I don't know what that means. He'd wanted to say, will I have to see him, if I go. Will I have to go, he'd wanted to say. He wanted to say, what if, what if I'm there, and everyone else is there, and there are people standing in the pews of justice with that already-verdict in their throats, and in my throat there's nothing but that verdict, too, or there's nothing but nothing like it. What if I'm there, what if I stand there, he thinks, and what if he looks at me.
What if he looks at me, he thinks, when he climbs the stairs, and it's not over at all.
He rents a small room from a old woman, now. it is vaguely dark but vaguely happy; the mirrors laugh at him, and the wallpaper seems to be doing its best to make him vomit, most of the time, but there are oil paintings of dancing wood nymphs in the stairwell, and the kitchen is painted yellow, as if it is trying very hard. And it proceeds accordingly, like he had started to wish for, on the odd day or night or speck of spinning time when he would look at the kettle, or an old jumper (full-of-moth-holes-and-smells), or a piece of familiar toast-with-cheese left half-eaten on his plate, and then he would look at his own hand, his own wrist, his own ankle or freckled thigh and think, oh.
His days are very simple. It has been two months or so of very simple days. He will wake, and stand under the shower, and towel himself off, and wrap himself in a dressing gown, and brush his teeth, and comb out his hair, and go out into the tiny room with the vomitous wallpaper and the tiny window with the sprawling view of London's crooked, quirking rooftops, and he will drink a cup of tea. Some days, it takes longer than others. Some days, it takes no time at all, and then sometimes, before he is even dressed, he will realize that it is suddenly early evening, and the sky is gone, and London is a strange and dark and strangling blur outside his window.
And some days, the rising hot-white-winter sun over the chimneys lets him know that today - this moment, today - would be the perfect sort of morning to pull on his coat, wrap his scarf around his neck, walk out the door, storm the cliffs of Azkaban, and kill Sirius Black himself.
But today, this today, he sheds his hat and boots in the doorway (and he doesn't read the Prophet, he doesn't pick it up from the table where it sits, until he will toss it in the bin, tomorrow morning). And here, today, he stands by the window in his stocking feet, with his hands in his pockets, with the image of Alastor Moody's rolling eye gouging out the last scraps of his collected sanity, with the taste of chips and ale still on his teeth, and the thought of facing the world, just this once-and-for-all, to say: He did it. It was him. He did it, and it's done.
And it stops him there. It doesn't go on from there, he thinks. How can it go on from there, what is it that's left once that's done, once that's said? Maybe it will be over, and maybe it won't, and maybe the day after that, I'll still be Remus Lupin climbing the stairs to the room with the ugly wallpaper. Or maybe I won't, and I won't know anything at all. It had been so ephemeral, after all. The strange weeks where he would look up from a book or the table or open a door and he would be so stunned, simply; the world would have to slink away into the cracks of his head: stealing heatbeats, breathing, the simple machinations of left-right-left-right, this is a tree, a rock, a door, the sky, this is a chair, this an apple, this is your body, that is a thought about Sirius Black. That every thought is a thought about Sirius Black.
And the almost over, that edge of possibility, he realizes, he knows, he thinks, it's never that it is almost: it just never is, it never will. It's always, he thinks. From the moment that a small boy turned to another small boy on the staircase of Gryffindor Tower, and said, Oi, aren't you the one - well, he thinks, that was where almost could have been. And from the moment that a slightly-taller boy turned to another slightly-taller boy and said, We know, you know, it's all right, we don't care, it's only you don't have to lie about it, for christ's sake, you know - that, he thinks, was where they beat almost to the ground: a bloody, writhing, dying pulp of possibility. And when a taller-still boy turned to another taller-still boy again, and hissed, I would have killed for you! - well, he thinks, that was the end of poor, old almost, after all.
What a cruel measure of character, he thinks. How badly I failed, he thinks. Whoever invented second chances should be stabbed in the back of the knees and left to rot, he thinks. You can never forget enough to begin again, he thinks. You can distill your life to the points of an obituary, he thinks, and there will still be those things that you can never change: That he was born, once. That he continued to grow older every year. That he knows a hero by name and the smell of his baby-skin. That he knows a villain by his touch and his existence spelled out in malevolent anagram. That he knows a monster by the shift of his heartbeat at sunset and the gothic-English print of a government manuscript and old exam questions. That he has heard stories, cries, laughs, obedience, lies, anger, apologies, spells, insults, niceties, prophecies, eulogies. That he has always been rather bad with goodbyes.
That once, weeks ago, he had looked at a photograph of Harry Potter sleeping in his crib, with his tiny thumb in his tiny mouth, and was full of hatred. Like a pinpoint of stillness, like the particular clarity when the mind is dulled by age or amnesia; it was that he had hated every bone in that small body, every pulse and strand of hair. It was not anger. It was not twisted empathy. It was that he could feel the scream on the inside of his teeth.
(Everything that has been taken from you was mine first!)
It should have been mine, he thinks.
It should have been mine, first.
And so he thinks he has learned his lesson, after all.
“So,” he says, standing by the window, which is closed, and slightly cool; London is purple and soulless and existing, in the dusk outside. Let’s give this a try, he thinks. There will be a time later, he thinks, won’t there be. So practice, he thinks. For the crowd. For me. For your last bits of life. For later. So.
“I love you,” he says, to the empty.
“So,” he says, and presses a hand to the windowpane, smudging his life into the barriers of it all. “So, there's that.”
(end)
Author:
PART VI
The Poetry Is In The Pity
It is early spring, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and Sirius is fourteen years old when he steps through the front doors of Grimmauld Place, still wearing his school tie, which means that his Father will not touch him, and that the foyer portrait of Grandfather Pollux makes a sound of disgust, and spits on the frame.
“In his room, Sirius,” says Father. “Mind that you aren’t in the way.”
And Sirius takes the stairs one-by-one-by-one-by-one, and he does not take off his boots, so that he can still be shouted at later, if he feels like it, for making an awful, unnecessary racket (and generally existing, ha-ha, he thinks).
For six hours, he sits at the end of the bed and watches Regulus sleep. A Healer with a peaked, grey cap and a big glass eye takes Regulus’s temperature three times, feeds him a potion twice, and runs scabby-looking palms over the back of Regulus’s neck. He knows that Mother stops once outside the door. He hears the ghoul upstairs shuffle morosely through the corridor and kick its heavy, chained feet against the door to the attic. And Kreacher brings a cup of tea and a bowl of broth for Regulus, and Sirius lets them go cold, and he reads a bit of James’s letter, which arrives just after sundown, and he counts the number of times Regulus shifts in his sleep. He supposes that he would get awfully tired of being so sick all the time, too, if it were him, and if they were all so concerned as to actually demand him here (and existing), it must be enough to make someone sleep for days and days.
Kreacher comes to collect the untouched dishes, and makes a gurgling, hissing noise at Sirius, when he looks at him.
“Oh, go suck a doxy,” says Sirius. “How long has it been?”
“Master Regulus has had a fever for six nights,” hisses Kreacher. “Since he was retrieved from Hogwarts.”
“They say he’s going to die,” says Sirius, with James’s letter in his hands.
Kreacher’s eyes turn the colour of rotted bark, of dead skin and oil, and he disappears with a crack that shakes the walls.
Regulus wakes just after midnight, when Sirius has just started to make spitballs out of James’s letter (he has seriously maimed three vicious-looking floral patterns on Regulus’s wallpaper).
“What,” says Regulus, and it sounds like torn paper.
Sirius glares at him. “They told me to come back,” he says. “I’ve come, so.”
Regulus’s hair is plastered, damp, to his temples, and is sticking straight up in the back where it has been lying skewed on the pillows. “Have I missed class,” he asks.
“What,” Sirius sighs. “Are you even - “
“Sirius?”
“Shut up, all right?” he snaps, and presses his palm against Regulus’s ankle, over the blankets. “Just, shut up, you’ve no clue what you’re - “
“I want to - “ says Regulus, and lifts a hand, lifts his body, and his skin is so thin Sirius thinks he can see through it, to the bone and blood and out the other side.
He leans forward. “I don’t care,” he says. “Keep your stupid head on, all right? It’s fine.”
“I need to get up,” says Regulus, solemn; glassy eyes fixed firmly on Sirius’s face, and it makes his chest tight with anger.
Sirius snorts. “You can’t even speak in full sentences,” he mutters.
“But I can,” whispers Regulus, fiercely, fingers tight on Sirius’s arm, the knuckles gone white. “I can stand.”
“Bloody hell you can,” says Sirius, and takes his elbow, and he wants to smack him across the back of the head or across his face until that awful, stupid, tepid, opiated look is shaken right out of him.
“I could stand,” he whispers, as if truly, truly believes every inane word coming from his chapped lips and dry tongue and heat-addled brain. “And be - “
“I don’t care,” Sirius snaps. “Will you just shut up, you’ll wake everyone and I’ll get hell for it, won’t I?”
“Be more than this,” he says, and he has not heard a word that Sirius has said, and his fingers are still pressing painfully into Sirius’s arm, and it is the first time since last summer, Sirius thinks, probably, that they have touched.
“I’ll show you,” says Regulus. “Please.”
Sirius frowns; Regulus is looking past him, looking at something over his shoulder, in the sort of way that makes his hair prickle on his wrists and nape.
“Fine,” he spits. “Fine, if it’ll just. If you’ll just stop - “ he takes Regulus by the elbow and by a damp fistful of his nightshirt and hauls him up to sitting, and Regulus - with his stupid wobbly spine and his idiotic, fever-pink face and hot, ashy skin - pushes on Sirius’s shoulders, on his chest, and on his forearm, until he is standing by the bed, with someone else’s body for support.
“There,” says Sirius, sleepless, irritated, and ill-practiced in being careless, he thinks. “There, fine, you’re up. Now back to bed, you - “
Regulus exhales, heavily. “Wait,” he says, and he sounds almost sane.
He looks to the window, where the heavy drapes are drawn-halfway, and through the sliver of sight there is the night sky and the hazy, spelled-distant streetlamps of London, and the smoke curling from chimneys and the sounds of cobblestones, of bells, of crabgrass growing in-between sidewalk cracks, of gulls and pigeons, and spiders and mice, of the moon, of the skitter of wind on the shingles of other people’s houses, of the barking of a dog and a train, somewhere.
“All right,” he says, finally, quietly; his spine seems to sag slightly inside his skin, eyelids closing. “All right. I think. It will be fine now.”
Sirius has his hands on his brother’s shoulders; he is holding him up, and Regulus has just told him it will all be fine, now, and this is an odd moment, he thinks, where they can pause and hear the world, and the world sounds only like their own syncopated breathing and their own simple heartbeats, and Regulus’s surprising, feverish conviction in the rightness of it. And Sirius thinks, how do you know.
He thinks, how could you ever trust anyone with that.
He thinks, how could you ever trust yourself, like that.
It is late fall. It is even early winter, now, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and Remus is twenty-one years old when he climbs the stairs. It has been two months or so. Two months or so of a slow and steady bleed-out of his carefully-cultivated resistance to headlines, to celebrations, to revelry and happiness and carousing to the deafening tune of New Freedoms and a New Era. And it has been two months or so, of memorializing inane objects, like dishes and cutlery, and pieces of lint and ugly furniture, of packed boxes and picture frames, of two, sharp-fat pieces of moonlight, of fever, momentary insanity, of steadfast denial.
But it has been two months or so. The end is near, they say. Alastor Moody said it, today, in the buttercream-light of the Three Broomsticks, behind a thick curtain of scars and freshly-cropped hair. Lad, he'd said, Almost over now.
Remus had wanted to say, I don't know what that means. He'd wanted to say, will I have to see him, if I go. Will I have to go, he'd wanted to say. He wanted to say, what if, what if I'm there, and everyone else is there, and there are people standing in the pews of justice with that already-verdict in their throats, and in my throat there's nothing but that verdict, too, or there's nothing but nothing like it. What if I'm there, what if I stand there, he thinks, and what if he looks at me.
What if he looks at me, he thinks, when he climbs the stairs, and it's not over at all.
He rents a small room from a old woman, now. it is vaguely dark but vaguely happy; the mirrors laugh at him, and the wallpaper seems to be doing its best to make him vomit, most of the time, but there are oil paintings of dancing wood nymphs in the stairwell, and the kitchen is painted yellow, as if it is trying very hard. And it proceeds accordingly, like he had started to wish for, on the odd day or night or speck of spinning time when he would look at the kettle, or an old jumper (full-of-moth-holes-and-smells), or a piece of familiar toast-with-cheese left half-eaten on his plate, and then he would look at his own hand, his own wrist, his own ankle or freckled thigh and think, oh.
His days are very simple. It has been two months or so of very simple days. He will wake, and stand under the shower, and towel himself off, and wrap himself in a dressing gown, and brush his teeth, and comb out his hair, and go out into the tiny room with the vomitous wallpaper and the tiny window with the sprawling view of London's crooked, quirking rooftops, and he will drink a cup of tea. Some days, it takes longer than others. Some days, it takes no time at all, and then sometimes, before he is even dressed, he will realize that it is suddenly early evening, and the sky is gone, and London is a strange and dark and strangling blur outside his window.
And some days, the rising hot-white-winter sun over the chimneys lets him know that today - this moment, today - would be the perfect sort of morning to pull on his coat, wrap his scarf around his neck, walk out the door, storm the cliffs of Azkaban, and kill Sirius Black himself.
But today, this today, he sheds his hat and boots in the doorway (and he doesn't read the Prophet, he doesn't pick it up from the table where it sits, until he will toss it in the bin, tomorrow morning). And here, today, he stands by the window in his stocking feet, with his hands in his pockets, with the image of Alastor Moody's rolling eye gouging out the last scraps of his collected sanity, with the taste of chips and ale still on his teeth, and the thought of facing the world, just this once-and-for-all, to say: He did it. It was him. He did it, and it's done.
And it stops him there. It doesn't go on from there, he thinks. How can it go on from there, what is it that's left once that's done, once that's said? Maybe it will be over, and maybe it won't, and maybe the day after that, I'll still be Remus Lupin climbing the stairs to the room with the ugly wallpaper. Or maybe I won't, and I won't know anything at all. It had been so ephemeral, after all. The strange weeks where he would look up from a book or the table or open a door and he would be so stunned, simply; the world would have to slink away into the cracks of his head: stealing heatbeats, breathing, the simple machinations of left-right-left-right, this is a tree, a rock, a door, the sky, this is a chair, this an apple, this is your body, that is a thought about Sirius Black. That every thought is a thought about Sirius Black.
And the almost over, that edge of possibility, he realizes, he knows, he thinks, it's never that it is almost: it just never is, it never will. It's always, he thinks. From the moment that a small boy turned to another small boy on the staircase of Gryffindor Tower, and said, Oi, aren't you the one - well, he thinks, that was where almost could have been. And from the moment that a slightly-taller boy turned to another slightly-taller boy and said, We know, you know, it's all right, we don't care, it's only you don't have to lie about it, for christ's sake, you know - that, he thinks, was where they beat almost to the ground: a bloody, writhing, dying pulp of possibility. And when a taller-still boy turned to another taller-still boy again, and hissed, I would have killed for you! - well, he thinks, that was the end of poor, old almost, after all.
What a cruel measure of character, he thinks. How badly I failed, he thinks. Whoever invented second chances should be stabbed in the back of the knees and left to rot, he thinks. You can never forget enough to begin again, he thinks. You can distill your life to the points of an obituary, he thinks, and there will still be those things that you can never change: That he was born, once. That he continued to grow older every year. That he knows a hero by name and the smell of his baby-skin. That he knows a villain by his touch and his existence spelled out in malevolent anagram. That he knows a monster by the shift of his heartbeat at sunset and the gothic-English print of a government manuscript and old exam questions. That he has heard stories, cries, laughs, obedience, lies, anger, apologies, spells, insults, niceties, prophecies, eulogies. That he has always been rather bad with goodbyes.
That once, weeks ago, he had looked at a photograph of Harry Potter sleeping in his crib, with his tiny thumb in his tiny mouth, and was full of hatred. Like a pinpoint of stillness, like the particular clarity when the mind is dulled by age or amnesia; it was that he had hated every bone in that small body, every pulse and strand of hair. It was not anger. It was not twisted empathy. It was that he could feel the scream on the inside of his teeth.
(Everything that has been taken from you was mine first!)
It should have been mine, he thinks.
It should have been mine, first.
And so he thinks he has learned his lesson, after all.
“So,” he says, standing by the window, which is closed, and slightly cool; London is purple and soulless and existing, in the dusk outside. Let’s give this a try, he thinks. There will be a time later, he thinks, won’t there be. So practice, he thinks. For the crowd. For me. For your last bits of life. For later. So.
“I love you,” he says, to the empty.
“So,” he says, and presses a hand to the windowpane, smudging his life into the barriers of it all. “So, there's that.”
(end)