Fic: Butterfly, Dreaming
Butterfly, Dreaming
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairings: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Ron/Hermione implied.
Rating: PG
Genre: AU
Era: April 1998
Summary: Sirius POV: Harry is in a coma and not expected to survive.
Thanks: To astra_argentea for the beta.
Warnings: Not happy R/S fluff. Check out the genre, era and summary.
On my journal, and crossposted to the_kennel, hp_whatif and remusxsirius.
Am I a man...who dreamed that I was a butterfly?
Or am I a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man?
(Matsuo Bash, The Chuang Tzu, Chapter 2.)
Butterfly, Dreaming
He can see how tired she is, but she isn’t going to close her eyes, hasn’t slept for more than an hour at a time since the accident. All the same, she’s laid her head on her arms and is nibbling the nail on the little finger of her right hand, the last nail intact.
‘Lily.’ He tries to say it gently, softly, but she jumps all the same. Her focus has been entirely on the boy in the hospital bed with the tubes jutting out of his body, the machines recording each jagged line of his heartbeat and brain activity.
‘Hey, time you had something to eat,’ he says, and Lily replies, ‘Please, Sirius. I’m not hungry, honestly.’
‘Come on, I'll watch Harry while you're gone. Just a cup of tea. And a cigarette.’ He knows that will get her. Lily gave up smoking when Harry was born and hasn’t touched a cigarette since; not until James passed the lighted Silk Cut to her outside Accident and Emergency, while they were waiting to hear whether their son would live or die, or could at least be patched up a bit. Lily took it and sucked at it like someone taking her first ever breath, and her shoulders relaxed and for a moment she nearly smiled.
Sirius sometimes wonders, in his more abstract moments, whether she’s at all grateful that the accident has given her an excuse to smoke again. His own love affair with cigarettes resumed after Remus, but that’s fairer. Unlike Lily, he hasn’t got anyone else. Lily’s got a daughter who’s tearful and upset at the absence of her beloved brother and the sudden complete withdrawal of her parents’ attention. She has a husband needing solace so badly that, like her, he’s hardly slept or eaten since Harry was admitted.
Lily capitulates. The urge for a cigarette does that, will push away every other consideration. Sirius is glad of it now, because James would be irrationally angry if he found that Lily hadn’t had at least a five minute break. James, who used to be his best friend, his brother, is now ratty and snappy and blames him for all the ills of the world.
‘For goodness’ sake, Sirius, if she won’t leave him, just tell her to. It’s hardly rocket science.’
Sirius could reply, ‘Excuse me, James, I’m very busy and I’m giving up every free second I have to help out,’ but he doesn’t. Anyway, psychiatric outpatients is just a couple of corridors away from Harry’s room. Besides, he understands, and he just squeezes James’s shoulder and says, ‘Okay, mate, take it easy. It’s okay.’
‘Always the fucking shrink! You’re really patronising, you know that?’ James is being biting, by his own lights, and Sirius is tempted to pat him on the head and say, ‘There, there.’ He doesn’t, of course. He loves James. Instead, he says simply, ‘You know I’ll look after her as far as I can.’
‘He’s locked Harry’s bedroom,’ Lily confides in Sirius later, tearful, which is unusual, because she’s been dry-eyed until now. ‘I wanted to go in just to...well, his football kit’s in there and I’m sure it needs washing. I can’t cope with James too, I simply can’t. And Peter keeps dragging him out to the pub, which makes him even worse.’
The private hospital room is bright, with red, blue and yellow striped curtains open round the bed. The blind has been raised to let in the sunshine. Outside the window, an apple tree flaunts its pink blossom. Sirius, irritated, yanks down the shade, cutting off the view.
Most of Harry’s friends have been to see him, though he’s completely unaware of their presence: it’s a sign of how serious his condition is that he’s allowed visitors pretty well round the clock. The doctors have a faint hope that someone, at some point, may speak the words to bring him to himself, suggest a CD that will resonate. Though he can’t respond to anyone, he’d probably appreciate his room being filled with flowers, get well cards, fruit that James takes home for Sally, chocolates ‘for when he’s better’. Even the unpopular Chemistry master has sent a card, signed ‘Mr Snape’.
Hermione’s been visiting Harry at lunchtime every day, running the risk of being late for afternoon school. Her frizzy hair, which she usually straightens ruthlessly, is now curling round her face: prettily, Sirius thinks, though Hermione looks so pale and drawn at the moment that he hardly recognises her. He wonders if she always comes at this time in order to avoid Lily, in case of recriminations. Hermione has an exaggerated sense of responsibility, though she certainly can’t take a fraction of the blame for this one. Harry was with his mother and Sally on the way to a dentist’s appointment. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, she’s a bit earlier than usual, possibly because it’s the weekend. ‘Ron and I thought the flowers we sent him would be a bit dead by now.’ She holds out a big bunch of orange lilies. ‘I brought him some to replace them. I know he can’t see them, but...’ Her voice fades away.
Sirius volunteers to find a vase and fill it with water for her, a job he’s done several times for Lily. It always amuses him to act the orderly in a hospital where he’s usually treated with the utmost respect.
When he gets back, the boy on the bed is twitching and groaning as his motor reflexes kick in briefly. It’s happened several times now, and it’s always a shock, even to Sirius. Hermione is obviously shaken, but stands her ground.
‘I want to ask a doctor something. One of Harry’s doctors, but you’ll be able to tell me, I suppose.’
Sirius tries to look encouraging, probably not successfully.
‘It’s about his exams.’ Hermione’s face is concerned, anxious even. ‘He will be all right to take them, won’t he? Only, he was so looking forward to university.’
Sirius is momentarily lost for words, then rallies, keeping his voice as calm as possible. ‘The doctors are doing all they can. But it’s early days. We’ll have to wait and see.’
There’s really no point trying to puncture the girl’s denial; she’ll find out the truth soon enough. No doubt her parents have been rather glossing over Harry’s condition, are determined not to endanger her provisional place at Cambridge. Sirius, in his professional capacity, is pretty sure she’s not going to blow it out of grief for Harry or a mistaken sense of injustice that she’s alive and able and he isn’t. If anything, she’ll do even better than she would have otherwise, as if she’s taking A-Levels for both of them.
Nobody but Hermione would dream of mentioning A-Levels at the moment, or the conditional place at Bristol that Harry’s just accepted, after several major arguments with James about which university to put second. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with Warwick,’ James told Sirius, exasperated, after one flaming row. ‘He keeps saying he’ll decide later, but there is no later. The deadline’s in a week.’
As always happens in these cases, Harry’s friends and relatives have forgotten his faults, like they’ve been wiped out overnight. His stubbornness about the university application was just one example, but now Sirius too is hard-pushed to think of anything bad. His aunt Petunia has actually rung the hospital four or five times to ask after him, though she hasn’t spoken to Lily for years now, and used to say she was far too soft on Harry and spoilt him rotten.
In James and Lily’s eyes at least, Harry always has been the perfect child: good at sports, intelligent, hard-working, with hardly an adolescent hiccup so far. Sirius suspects that Harry’s smoked dope once or twice, possibly slept with his girlfriend, though that’s purely speculation. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Harry hasn’t even been that rebellious.
Remus used to say, in that faintly amused voice, that he couldn’t wait to see if Harry turned out like his father. ‘Now he’s a teenager. Remember how wild James was?’
‘And how tame he is now.’ James at thirteen was the sort of boy who’d try to persuade his friends to come joy-riding with him, though he never got quite as far as stealing a car. Sirius egged him on a lot too, was even worse at times, something he doesn’t altogether regret, now they’re getting middle-aged and dull.
The nurse coming in to take a blood sample nods at Hermione, who's picked up Lily’s magazine and is absorbed in the problem page, or pretending to be. She greets Sirius rather more effusively, because she used to work in the oncology department and they know each other well. Seeing her now has a flavour of déjà vu: Sirius sometimes finds it hard not to compare this vigil with the similar one four years ago, in the same hospital, in an almost identical private room, with the blinds permanently down and the steady hum of machinery keeping someone alive.
Of course, with Remus it was an act of God, not an act of man. With Remus, it was diagnosed, expected, laid out with a prognosis that was correct almost to the day. Six months, six months from the morning Remus complained, ‘I’m really tired’: six months, during which Remus grew so weak he couldn’t even lift a tea cup. Once, with his occasionally macabre sense of humour, he said, ‘I avoided AIDS for this? Honestly, Sirius, we should have gone out and slept around while we had the chance.’
The words stung, though they were meant as a joke, though Remus would never have uttered them if he’d had the faintest inkling they’d hurt Sirius in any way. But he was in such pain by then, stuffed with drugs, exhausted yet so on edge: rather like James is on edge now, though James isn’t terminally ill.
Sirius hopes, he really does, that if the worst happens, he’ll manage to be as supportive towards James and Lily as they were to him. After Remus went, there were a few weeks when he was completely out of it. The hospital gave him an indefinite period of compassionate leave - after all, he’s a consultant psychiatrist, he’s got options, he doesn’t have to work within the NHS - and he spent a chunk of it sitting staring at the empty fridge, not thinking, not moving, trying, he now realises, not to breathe at all.
But of course, the Potters wouldn’t let him be on his own. Sometimes, it’s good to mourn alone, as he knows, but sometimes it’s bad. In his case, he’d probably have been found months later, a skeleton sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea in front of him, the milk thick with green mould.
Sirius fondly remembers Harry, not yet fourteen and all boyish concern, asking Sirius to help with his football practice, taking him out to the back garden of the Potters’ house to act as striker while Harry took his favourite position in defence. Sally, of course, was goalkeeper. Harry was always too good just to play at the game: he’d get carried away, and beat Sirius hollow every time, so Sirius’s own childish desire to win was thoroughly thwarted.
If Sirius were the sort of person to make bargains with God, he’d do it. He’d invoke the past. ‘Please, God. You took Remus away, so please don’t take Harry.’ It’s not like he has to choose between them, anyway. Remus is gone, buried under a black marble slab with just his name and dates: nothing to indicate that he was dearly loved and is sorely missed. Sirius takes flowers to his grave every week without fail, hasn’t missed once, even managed to get there yesterday. So perhaps he’d choose Remus after all, if there was a choice. He doesn’t know. He prefers not to speculate, not to make himself uncomfortable.
Harry stirs and mutters, as if in protest at Sirius’s thought, and Hermione jumps and drops the magazine. Fortunately, his spasm subsides before the tentative knock on the door, and Ron peers round it like a little kid scared of intercepting Santa on Christmas Eve.
Sirius hasn’t seen Ron at the hospital yet, and is curious to know how he’s coping. He’s had a soft spot for the boy since he first met him on Harry’s tenth birthday, when he dropped by to give his godson a present and found, rather to his horror, a full-scale party going on. Lily insisted he join in. ‘Come on, Sirius. We’re going to have cake and ice-cream.’ He sat next to Ron at the party tea, incongruous as the only adult among children, and Ron, making a great effort to be polite, chatted to him solemnly about his cat. ‘Her name’s Muffin,’ he confided, slightly at a loss as to what to say to this strange man.
Sirius has occasionally heard Ron’s mother call him ‘the changeling,’ because he’s the only member of his large family who isn’t musically gifted. Today, Harry’s the changeling, and Ron, who’s usually so ebullient, looks as strained as Hermione. His red hair is dull, his eyes swollen with crying, and after he’s examined the boy on the bed for a moment, he turns away and blows his nose on a pink tissue. He then asks Sirius, ‘How are you?’ an almost painful attempt at adult politeness that reminds Sirius of the ten year-old boy making conversation over his jelly and sausage rolls.
‘I’m fine. How’ve you been, Ron?’ A pointless question to someone obviously suffering, but there’s no reason to make things worse.
‘Fine.’ Ron swallows, looks down, as if he wishes he hadn’t been fine, as if he wishes he were the one in the bed, not Harry. He’s too young to realise that seventeen year-olds simply aren’t expendable.
‘Sirius,’ Hermione asks, hesitant, pulling at a strand of her hair, ‘can Harry hear us? Is he dreaming or is he just, well, not there?’
Sirius notes that this is the first time Hermione has directly acknowledged Harry’s condition. He can’t answer, of course, but he says, ‘Some patients in comas come back and say they’ve been through a process very similar to dreaming. But it’s impossible to tell, really.’
‘I hated it when he groaned,’ Hermione says. She must have been totally freaked out, Sirius realises a bit too late: he should have reassured her. Not that he had much chance, once she started asking about Harry's exams.
‘He said something like ‘vol’.’ Hermione’s lip trembles a bit. ‘I can’t bear to think he’s having a nightmare and can’t get out of it.’
‘What’s so weird is that he’s still himself,’ Ron says. ‘He’s still Harry. And that makes it even worse, doesn’t it?’ He sits on the bed and tentatively puts his hand out to touch the scar on Harry’s forehead, the little lightning-brand shape marking Harry’s miraculous escape from a boating accident when he was only three. ‘He got saved then,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘He’ll be okay now, won’t he, Sirius? He hasn’t used up all his luck, has he?’
‘It’s good for him to have his friends here,’ Sirius says, avoiding the direct answer. ‘He can probably hear you. The trick is not to leave him alone, not to let him go.’
Sirius is sure that it’s Lily’s four a.m., one-way conversations that are anchoring Harry to life. James has offered to take over the night shift, just to give Lily a chance to go home and sleep in a comfortable bed, but much as he loves Harry, he hasn’t got Lily’s sheer will and intensity. Lily is determined to bring Harry back from whatever limbo he’s in. She reads the sports pages to him, Sirius knows, though they bore her silly, tells him fairy tales and sings: a maternal Scheherazade fighting for someone else’s life rather than her own.
Ron gets off the bed, patting Harry’s hand awkwardly. ‘We should be getting home soon. I’ve got coursework to do for Monday.’
Sirius thinks how touching it is that the kids have given up part of their Saturday for Harry, just as he has, come to think of it, especially if they’ve had to get here by bus. Molly Weasley probably has better things to do than drive them to and from the hospital in her 4x4, and he doesn’t think either of them has a licence yet.
That’s unfair and untrue he finds out a minute later when Molly comes in with Lily. The small room seems overcrowded with five people, and Lily frowns, goes over and sits by Harry’s bed again and takes his hand, ignoring the other two children.
Molly sniffs loudly and says, ‘I’ve just come to fetch Ron and Hermione.’ She goes over and smooths back Harry’s hair. In some ways, she’s seemed fonder of him than of her own son Ron, especially as Harry taught himself the guitar a couple of years ago, during his ‘I’m gonna join a rock band’ phase. He’s always been in the choir, too, the school choir that’s Molly’s pride and joy.
‘I didn’t want to bother you, Lily,’ she says. ‘But you know, like I’ve already said... Just give me a call if you need anything. James and Sally can come and stay any time. There’s always plenty of food, and we can rustle up a couple of spare beds.’
She then asks Sirius if he’d like a lift home. She’s probably not expecting him to say yes: everyone knows he prefers his motorbike to any other form of transport. But the bike’s in the garage at the moment, waiting for a new carburettor, and Sirius has been running up an outrageous taxi bill. Remus was the one who drove, a rather tatty Vauxhall Corsa that still sits forlornly in the garage at home.
’Thanks. I’d love one.’ If ever there was a time to build bridges, this is it.
He glances back as they leave. Lily remains unaware of anything but her son in his coma; she’s gazing at him intently, her lips moving slightly.
Sirius has had a few run-ins with Molly. She never approved of his relationship with Remus, though that’s now been taken care of by a higher power. Whenever she sees him, she purses her lips, an unconscious gesture that Sirius resents all the same. He suspects that she’s defiant rather than hostile, as if she’s scared that he can look into her head, guess all her guilty secrets.
When the children were younger, when Remus was around, Harry and his friends often came over to the Black-Lupin house just to hang out, to get away from their parents and the many pressures on them. It was relaxing there, and they were allowed to watch anything they liked on TV, make messy snacks in the kitchen. Molly has probably gleaned at some point - she isn’t a stupid woman - that Dr Black thinks Ron, the cuckoo in her otherwise tuneful nest, has been a bit sidelined by his family, if not exactly neglected.
Today, though, Sirius and Molly are on best behaviour, courteous and pleasant, and Sirius comments favourably on the new Range Rover, polished till it gleams. It’s the sort of car most people hate, and Molly is probably the archetypal school-run Mum, or would be if she weren’t ferrying so many children and didn’t actually teach at the place.
Before she goes into gear, she switches on the CD player, and tasteful chamber music floods the car. It’s soothing, Sirius will give her that. It’s the sort of music his parents used to go to hear at concerts.
‘There was a special assembly yesterday,’ she informs him as they turn out of the hospital grounds. ‘We had prayers for Harry, and the choir sang Adiemus. D’you remember Harry doing the solo on that, children? Of course, that was before his voice broke.’ She smiles fondly, not concentrating properly on the road ahead, cutting up a Micra moving to turn right. Sirius has an urge to grab the wheel. ‘And the Headmaster read a passage from that book Harry likes so much.’
Sirius notes the present tense, and Hermione chimes in, ‘Lord of the Rings. He always loves the bit when the Ringwraiths first come in. ’
God alone knows what Ringwraiths are after him at this second, as he lies poised between life and death in the narrow bed. Sirius shudders.
He doesn’t register at first that Molly’s pulling in to the drive of the Weasleys’ house, a big, thirties house covered with creeper and set in a fair amount of land.
‘I thought you could do with a proper meal,’ she says firmly. ‘Lily says you’ve been giving up your lunch-hours for Harry. It seems the least I can do.’
He follows her in through the back door - the front is used exclusively for the family’s musical soirées, which Sirius has often attended in the past, because Remus also taught at the school and got regular invitations to Molly’s functions. The Weasleys collect old music-stands and piano stools the way other big families pile up coats and Wellingtons, and the utility room even boasts an actual piano, an ancient upright long past its best days.
‘Ron, take Sirius’s jacket,’ Molly orders, and Ron obediently hangs it up in the lobby. Sirius notes that Hermione seems very much at home, fetching a glass from the kitchen cupboard and filling it with water.
‘Have some tea, dear,’ Molly suggests. ‘Or some juice. There’s a carton somewhere.’
Molly ushers Sirius into the breakfast room, really a music room, where Ron’s twin brothers are practising a duet on their violins. This is nothing unusual: there’s always someone playing an instrument in the house. The twins don’t falter for a second as the others go through to the drawing room. Sirius has heard that they’ve recently won scholarships to the Royal College of Music, where Molly’s husband, Arthur, studied.
Ron and Hermione have disappeared upstairs. ‘You could do with a drink,’ Molly says, pouring him a generous sherry. ‘Of course, I don’t like to mention it in front of the children, but I just cannot imagine what Lily’s going through. She’s so brave. ’
Sirius knows he’s expected to say something, so he settles for, ‘I think she’s a bit numb at the moment. It’s hard to take in.’
‘Oh, but surely by now?’ Molly looks disapproving again, and Sirius’s heart sinks. Damn, why can he never talk to the woman without rubbing her up the wrong way?
The Weasleys’ au pair, Winnie, who doubles as occasional cook, rings a gong in the distance somewhere. They must be the only family in England, Sirius thinks, who still summon their members to meals with a gong. Every time he eats here, he expects a butler to come in and announce that there’s a body in the library.
‘Lunch,’ Molly says briskly, probably as relieved as he is that their conversation has been interrupted. ‘It won’t be very elaborate, I’m afraid. It’s Winnie’s afternoon off.’
Various Weasleys are already seated in the dining-room, helping themselves from the dishes on the table. The twins have abandoned their duet and are sitting next to each other, talking in low voices, no doubt about crotchets and quavers. Sirius knows Ron’s younger sister, the only daughter, by sight, and there’s that slightly older boy, Percy, the one Harry dislikes, who’s in his last year at the Conservatoire and home for the holidays. He’s hunched over a copy of the Telegraph, reading the foreign news.
Arthur’s at the head of the table just starting his meal, but when he sees Sirius he gets up and gives him a clumsy, one-armed hug. ‘All right? How’s James bearing up?’
‘Well, you know...’ Sirius shrugs, rather helpless. Molly fills a plate for him with ham, cheese, baguette, and places the butter dish in front of him.
Ron and Hermione are looking a lot more cheerful, and they’ve both piled their plates high. Sirius tries to turn off his professional radar, tries not to replay in his head the sessions he’s had with teenagers who can’t deal with the loss of a friend. He tells himself sternly that Harry won’t die. Next time he comes here, it’ll be one of the musical evenings. Harry and Ron will stifle their giggles when Ron’s little sister sings - she has perfect pitch, of course, but the two boys don’t appreciate it - and get tipsy on Molly’s fruit punch, which is always spiked heavily with vodka. Lily and James will be happy and smiling, delighted that fate has granted them a reprieve.
‘You know the Malfoy boy, don’t you, Ron?’ Molly’s saying when Sirius glances up from his plate, and Ron looks skyward. ‘Yeah, unfortunately. Why?’
‘DRACO Malfoy to you,’ Hermione interjects, and she and Ron both snort with laughter.
‘Bloody pretentious name,’ Arthur mumbles, and Molly says, ‘Well, they’re such a rich family. I suppose they can get away with it. And Malfoy’s a really gifted flautist. I’m hoping he’ll perform here next time we have a concert.’
‘You must know his parents, Sirius,’ she adds. ‘They endowed a Physiotherapy wing at the hospital a few years ago. ’
Sirius has a vague memory, but it was around the time Remus got ill and he wasn’t really paying much attention to anything else.
‘He’s such a git, Mum,’ Ron says. ‘Him and Harry had a huge fight once, remember, Hermione? When Harry broke Draco’s nose? Served him right.’
‘Harry never fought, surely,’ Molly says, scandalised, and Sirius notes that she’s now slipped into the past.
‘He provoked Harry,’ Hermione says quickly. ‘What did he call him, Ron? Oh, okay. Well, it was very rude, anyway.’
Sirius assumes Ron must have kicked Hermione under the table, and also notes her slight flush.
‘They should both have been expelled.’ Percy folds his paper, takes off his glasses and slips them into their case. ‘In my day, boys weren’t allowed to fight.’
‘In your day all of three years ago,’ Ron says, at the same time Hermione says, ‘I don’t know how you could even talk about expelling Harry! Not now, anyway.’
There’s a long silence, and Sirius puts his napkin on the table and says, ‘I really must be going, Molly.’
Molly insists on taking him home, and drops him off right at the gate. They’re largely silent during the drive, but he feels a sudden, unprecedented warmth towards her and waves as the Range Rover screeches off, reluctant for a moment to turn the key and let himself in.
The house is stuffy and silent: he’s forgotten to switch off the heating, and the late April heat has caught him unprepared. The place is far too big, now Remus is dead and the children have grown up and moved on; when you’re seventeen and eighteen, you want to go to clubs and hang out with your friends. It would be weirder if the kids still did visit. He doesn’t know when, exactly, they stopped coming round; probably soon after Remus got sick.
He isn’t in a hurry to sell, though, find somewhere smaller and closer to the hospital. Remus is still here, in his paintings scattered all over the house, in the tiled Victorian fireplace they found in a junk shop to replace the one taken out by the previous occupants: Remus called them ‘the vandals.’ Remus installed the fireplace himself one weekend, and it was perfect, looked as if it had been made for the big, square room with windows opening on to the lawn. It wasn’t an easy job, even in retrospect. Sirius remembers that Remus, who never swore, said, ‘Fuck,’ six times on that occasion, trying to manoeuvre the fireplace into position, and wore an ostentatious plaster on his cut thumb for a week afterwards. He could be very childish sometimes.
In the kitchen, he puts on the kettle for tea, then switches it off and gets out the whisky bottle instead, pouring himself a stiff measure and raising his glass in an ironic toast, to what he doesn’t know. The pre-lunch sherry has long since worn off, and he drains half the drink in one gulp.
If Remus were still alive, Sirius would be looking forward, even in the circumstances, to relaying all the details of his encounter with Molly and her family. In fact, he still makes up anecdotes for Remus, even now, still talks to him in his head.
‘I know I shouldn’t find anything funny at the moment, but Molly’s driving... She’s so pushy. Just the sort of woman who’ll succeed in getting four-wheel drives banned. I had to close my eyes a couple of times while she was battling her way across a junction. But she means well, and she pours a killer drink. They didn’t have wine at lunch, though. I suppose that Percy boy would disapprove. He really is a dreadful prig.
‘Anyway,’ he continues, moving through to the sitting room and examining himself in the mirror over the fireplace, ‘I did need a decent meal, I suppose.’ He sits on the sofa and switches on the television without the sound. ‘I’m more worried about Harry’s friends at the moment. Hermione’ll be okay, but Ron... Harry was the only person who made him feel important, like he really mattered to someone.’ He thinks of his fleeting impression of Ron and Hermione, and wonders if that’s still true now.
In his head, Remus answers, ‘But even when Harry’s dead, he’ll have made a difference, Sirius. Ron isn’t going to forget him, after all. You haven’t forgotten me.’
Now Remus has said it, though only in his imagination, Sirius finds himself moving a bit further towards the realisation that it would take a miracle to bring Harry out of his coma: and even Lily’s love can’t work miracles. Harry will die in the most frustrating way possible, with James and Lily having to make the decision to turn off his life support, a decision no parent should ever be faced with.
No partner, either. At least Remus died naturally: or nearly. One of Sirius’s colleagues, on an afternoon when the pain was more than either Remus or Sirius could bear, gave him a tiny bit too much morphine. It was a wonderful way to go, Sirius is sure, falling asleep into a gilded universe free of suffering.
He knew for certain that Remus’s dreams were good at the end. ‘There is an upside,’ Remus said once, during his brief remission, after that first stay in hospital, at a time they thought the bone-marrow transplant might work. ‘The morphine is wonderful. I can understand how easy it would be to get addicted. Not just physically, but because everything looks a bit grey, after that.’
During the month before he got ill again, Remus stood at his easel painting feverishly, trying to capture light in the same way as the Impressionists he loved. He always said that one day he’d stop teaching art and practise it instead, but that day never came. Sirius still feels cold inside when he reflects that Remus was only just thirty-four when he died: too young to die without having achieved anything lasting, unless you can count their relationship. Sirius often feels it’s been interrupted rather than ended, especially at times like this, when Remus seems so near.
Now, Remus’s easel and those last paintings are stored in the attic. Sirius means to bring them down some day and frame them, hang them on the walls, perhaps hawk them round a few of the London galleries: he could at least do that for Remus. Unfortunately, he hasn’t managed to yet. For all the bright sunshine in them, they remind him too much of death and loss.
Pouring his third whisky, Sirius wonders how long the ordeal of Harry dying is going to stretch out; after just a few days, it already feels interminable. Harry may perhaps be in a golden haze, but for Lily and James, for Sirius, for his friends, life has become an arid desert stretching as far as the eye can see. It could be months, years even; could be forever, if Lily can’t bear to let go.
He falls asleep in his armchair around five, after one glass too many. Before he finally loses consciousness, he asks, a bit drunkenly, for an omen, a sign that everything will be all right. But when he wakes, just before dawn, there are no phoenix feathers or magic wands, no owls hovering with parchment in their beaks; only the unutterably dreary sound of a tap dripping in the kitchen.
End
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairings: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Ron/Hermione implied.
Rating: PG
Genre: AU
Era: April 1998
Summary: Sirius POV: Harry is in a coma and not expected to survive.
Thanks: To astra_argentea for the beta.
Warnings: Not happy R/S fluff. Check out the genre, era and summary.
On my journal, and crossposted to the_kennel, hp_whatif and remusxsirius.
Am I a man...who dreamed that I was a butterfly?
Or am I a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man?
(Matsuo Bash, The Chuang Tzu, Chapter 2.)
Butterfly, Dreaming
He can see how tired she is, but she isn’t going to close her eyes, hasn’t slept for more than an hour at a time since the accident. All the same, she’s laid her head on her arms and is nibbling the nail on the little finger of her right hand, the last nail intact.
‘Lily.’ He tries to say it gently, softly, but she jumps all the same. Her focus has been entirely on the boy in the hospital bed with the tubes jutting out of his body, the machines recording each jagged line of his heartbeat and brain activity.
‘Hey, time you had something to eat,’ he says, and Lily replies, ‘Please, Sirius. I’m not hungry, honestly.’
‘Come on, I'll watch Harry while you're gone. Just a cup of tea. And a cigarette.’ He knows that will get her. Lily gave up smoking when Harry was born and hasn’t touched a cigarette since; not until James passed the lighted Silk Cut to her outside Accident and Emergency, while they were waiting to hear whether their son would live or die, or could at least be patched up a bit. Lily took it and sucked at it like someone taking her first ever breath, and her shoulders relaxed and for a moment she nearly smiled.
Sirius sometimes wonders, in his more abstract moments, whether she’s at all grateful that the accident has given her an excuse to smoke again. His own love affair with cigarettes resumed after Remus, but that’s fairer. Unlike Lily, he hasn’t got anyone else. Lily’s got a daughter who’s tearful and upset at the absence of her beloved brother and the sudden complete withdrawal of her parents’ attention. She has a husband needing solace so badly that, like her, he’s hardly slept or eaten since Harry was admitted.
Lily capitulates. The urge for a cigarette does that, will push away every other consideration. Sirius is glad of it now, because James would be irrationally angry if he found that Lily hadn’t had at least a five minute break. James, who used to be his best friend, his brother, is now ratty and snappy and blames him for all the ills of the world.
‘For goodness’ sake, Sirius, if she won’t leave him, just tell her to. It’s hardly rocket science.’
Sirius could reply, ‘Excuse me, James, I’m very busy and I’m giving up every free second I have to help out,’ but he doesn’t. Anyway, psychiatric outpatients is just a couple of corridors away from Harry’s room. Besides, he understands, and he just squeezes James’s shoulder and says, ‘Okay, mate, take it easy. It’s okay.’
‘Always the fucking shrink! You’re really patronising, you know that?’ James is being biting, by his own lights, and Sirius is tempted to pat him on the head and say, ‘There, there.’ He doesn’t, of course. He loves James. Instead, he says simply, ‘You know I’ll look after her as far as I can.’
‘He’s locked Harry’s bedroom,’ Lily confides in Sirius later, tearful, which is unusual, because she’s been dry-eyed until now. ‘I wanted to go in just to...well, his football kit’s in there and I’m sure it needs washing. I can’t cope with James too, I simply can’t. And Peter keeps dragging him out to the pub, which makes him even worse.’
The private hospital room is bright, with red, blue and yellow striped curtains open round the bed. The blind has been raised to let in the sunshine. Outside the window, an apple tree flaunts its pink blossom. Sirius, irritated, yanks down the shade, cutting off the view.
Most of Harry’s friends have been to see him, though he’s completely unaware of their presence: it’s a sign of how serious his condition is that he’s allowed visitors pretty well round the clock. The doctors have a faint hope that someone, at some point, may speak the words to bring him to himself, suggest a CD that will resonate. Though he can’t respond to anyone, he’d probably appreciate his room being filled with flowers, get well cards, fruit that James takes home for Sally, chocolates ‘for when he’s better’. Even the unpopular Chemistry master has sent a card, signed ‘Mr Snape’.
Hermione’s been visiting Harry at lunchtime every day, running the risk of being late for afternoon school. Her frizzy hair, which she usually straightens ruthlessly, is now curling round her face: prettily, Sirius thinks, though Hermione looks so pale and drawn at the moment that he hardly recognises her. He wonders if she always comes at this time in order to avoid Lily, in case of recriminations. Hermione has an exaggerated sense of responsibility, though she certainly can’t take a fraction of the blame for this one. Harry was with his mother and Sally on the way to a dentist’s appointment. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, she’s a bit earlier than usual, possibly because it’s the weekend. ‘Ron and I thought the flowers we sent him would be a bit dead by now.’ She holds out a big bunch of orange lilies. ‘I brought him some to replace them. I know he can’t see them, but...’ Her voice fades away.
Sirius volunteers to find a vase and fill it with water for her, a job he’s done several times for Lily. It always amuses him to act the orderly in a hospital where he’s usually treated with the utmost respect.
When he gets back, the boy on the bed is twitching and groaning as his motor reflexes kick in briefly. It’s happened several times now, and it’s always a shock, even to Sirius. Hermione is obviously shaken, but stands her ground.
‘I want to ask a doctor something. One of Harry’s doctors, but you’ll be able to tell me, I suppose.’
Sirius tries to look encouraging, probably not successfully.
‘It’s about his exams.’ Hermione’s face is concerned, anxious even. ‘He will be all right to take them, won’t he? Only, he was so looking forward to university.’
Sirius is momentarily lost for words, then rallies, keeping his voice as calm as possible. ‘The doctors are doing all they can. But it’s early days. We’ll have to wait and see.’
There’s really no point trying to puncture the girl’s denial; she’ll find out the truth soon enough. No doubt her parents have been rather glossing over Harry’s condition, are determined not to endanger her provisional place at Cambridge. Sirius, in his professional capacity, is pretty sure she’s not going to blow it out of grief for Harry or a mistaken sense of injustice that she’s alive and able and he isn’t. If anything, she’ll do even better than she would have otherwise, as if she’s taking A-Levels for both of them.
Nobody but Hermione would dream of mentioning A-Levels at the moment, or the conditional place at Bristol that Harry’s just accepted, after several major arguments with James about which university to put second. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with Warwick,’ James told Sirius, exasperated, after one flaming row. ‘He keeps saying he’ll decide later, but there is no later. The deadline’s in a week.’
As always happens in these cases, Harry’s friends and relatives have forgotten his faults, like they’ve been wiped out overnight. His stubbornness about the university application was just one example, but now Sirius too is hard-pushed to think of anything bad. His aunt Petunia has actually rung the hospital four or five times to ask after him, though she hasn’t spoken to Lily for years now, and used to say she was far too soft on Harry and spoilt him rotten.
In James and Lily’s eyes at least, Harry always has been the perfect child: good at sports, intelligent, hard-working, with hardly an adolescent hiccup so far. Sirius suspects that Harry’s smoked dope once or twice, possibly slept with his girlfriend, though that’s purely speculation. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Harry hasn’t even been that rebellious.
Remus used to say, in that faintly amused voice, that he couldn’t wait to see if Harry turned out like his father. ‘Now he’s a teenager. Remember how wild James was?’
‘And how tame he is now.’ James at thirteen was the sort of boy who’d try to persuade his friends to come joy-riding with him, though he never got quite as far as stealing a car. Sirius egged him on a lot too, was even worse at times, something he doesn’t altogether regret, now they’re getting middle-aged and dull.
The nurse coming in to take a blood sample nods at Hermione, who's picked up Lily’s magazine and is absorbed in the problem page, or pretending to be. She greets Sirius rather more effusively, because she used to work in the oncology department and they know each other well. Seeing her now has a flavour of déjà vu: Sirius sometimes finds it hard not to compare this vigil with the similar one four years ago, in the same hospital, in an almost identical private room, with the blinds permanently down and the steady hum of machinery keeping someone alive.
Of course, with Remus it was an act of God, not an act of man. With Remus, it was diagnosed, expected, laid out with a prognosis that was correct almost to the day. Six months, six months from the morning Remus complained, ‘I’m really tired’: six months, during which Remus grew so weak he couldn’t even lift a tea cup. Once, with his occasionally macabre sense of humour, he said, ‘I avoided AIDS for this? Honestly, Sirius, we should have gone out and slept around while we had the chance.’
The words stung, though they were meant as a joke, though Remus would never have uttered them if he’d had the faintest inkling they’d hurt Sirius in any way. But he was in such pain by then, stuffed with drugs, exhausted yet so on edge: rather like James is on edge now, though James isn’t terminally ill.
Sirius hopes, he really does, that if the worst happens, he’ll manage to be as supportive towards James and Lily as they were to him. After Remus went, there were a few weeks when he was completely out of it. The hospital gave him an indefinite period of compassionate leave - after all, he’s a consultant psychiatrist, he’s got options, he doesn’t have to work within the NHS - and he spent a chunk of it sitting staring at the empty fridge, not thinking, not moving, trying, he now realises, not to breathe at all.
But of course, the Potters wouldn’t let him be on his own. Sometimes, it’s good to mourn alone, as he knows, but sometimes it’s bad. In his case, he’d probably have been found months later, a skeleton sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea in front of him, the milk thick with green mould.
Sirius fondly remembers Harry, not yet fourteen and all boyish concern, asking Sirius to help with his football practice, taking him out to the back garden of the Potters’ house to act as striker while Harry took his favourite position in defence. Sally, of course, was goalkeeper. Harry was always too good just to play at the game: he’d get carried away, and beat Sirius hollow every time, so Sirius’s own childish desire to win was thoroughly thwarted.
If Sirius were the sort of person to make bargains with God, he’d do it. He’d invoke the past. ‘Please, God. You took Remus away, so please don’t take Harry.’ It’s not like he has to choose between them, anyway. Remus is gone, buried under a black marble slab with just his name and dates: nothing to indicate that he was dearly loved and is sorely missed. Sirius takes flowers to his grave every week without fail, hasn’t missed once, even managed to get there yesterday. So perhaps he’d choose Remus after all, if there was a choice. He doesn’t know. He prefers not to speculate, not to make himself uncomfortable.
Harry stirs and mutters, as if in protest at Sirius’s thought, and Hermione jumps and drops the magazine. Fortunately, his spasm subsides before the tentative knock on the door, and Ron peers round it like a little kid scared of intercepting Santa on Christmas Eve.
Sirius hasn’t seen Ron at the hospital yet, and is curious to know how he’s coping. He’s had a soft spot for the boy since he first met him on Harry’s tenth birthday, when he dropped by to give his godson a present and found, rather to his horror, a full-scale party going on. Lily insisted he join in. ‘Come on, Sirius. We’re going to have cake and ice-cream.’ He sat next to Ron at the party tea, incongruous as the only adult among children, and Ron, making a great effort to be polite, chatted to him solemnly about his cat. ‘Her name’s Muffin,’ he confided, slightly at a loss as to what to say to this strange man.
Sirius has occasionally heard Ron’s mother call him ‘the changeling,’ because he’s the only member of his large family who isn’t musically gifted. Today, Harry’s the changeling, and Ron, who’s usually so ebullient, looks as strained as Hermione. His red hair is dull, his eyes swollen with crying, and after he’s examined the boy on the bed for a moment, he turns away and blows his nose on a pink tissue. He then asks Sirius, ‘How are you?’ an almost painful attempt at adult politeness that reminds Sirius of the ten year-old boy making conversation over his jelly and sausage rolls.
‘I’m fine. How’ve you been, Ron?’ A pointless question to someone obviously suffering, but there’s no reason to make things worse.
‘Fine.’ Ron swallows, looks down, as if he wishes he hadn’t been fine, as if he wishes he were the one in the bed, not Harry. He’s too young to realise that seventeen year-olds simply aren’t expendable.
‘Sirius,’ Hermione asks, hesitant, pulling at a strand of her hair, ‘can Harry hear us? Is he dreaming or is he just, well, not there?’
Sirius notes that this is the first time Hermione has directly acknowledged Harry’s condition. He can’t answer, of course, but he says, ‘Some patients in comas come back and say they’ve been through a process very similar to dreaming. But it’s impossible to tell, really.’
‘I hated it when he groaned,’ Hermione says. She must have been totally freaked out, Sirius realises a bit too late: he should have reassured her. Not that he had much chance, once she started asking about Harry's exams.
‘He said something like ‘vol’.’ Hermione’s lip trembles a bit. ‘I can’t bear to think he’s having a nightmare and can’t get out of it.’
‘What’s so weird is that he’s still himself,’ Ron says. ‘He’s still Harry. And that makes it even worse, doesn’t it?’ He sits on the bed and tentatively puts his hand out to touch the scar on Harry’s forehead, the little lightning-brand shape marking Harry’s miraculous escape from a boating accident when he was only three. ‘He got saved then,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘He’ll be okay now, won’t he, Sirius? He hasn’t used up all his luck, has he?’
‘It’s good for him to have his friends here,’ Sirius says, avoiding the direct answer. ‘He can probably hear you. The trick is not to leave him alone, not to let him go.’
Sirius is sure that it’s Lily’s four a.m., one-way conversations that are anchoring Harry to life. James has offered to take over the night shift, just to give Lily a chance to go home and sleep in a comfortable bed, but much as he loves Harry, he hasn’t got Lily’s sheer will and intensity. Lily is determined to bring Harry back from whatever limbo he’s in. She reads the sports pages to him, Sirius knows, though they bore her silly, tells him fairy tales and sings: a maternal Scheherazade fighting for someone else’s life rather than her own.
Ron gets off the bed, patting Harry’s hand awkwardly. ‘We should be getting home soon. I’ve got coursework to do for Monday.’
Sirius thinks how touching it is that the kids have given up part of their Saturday for Harry, just as he has, come to think of it, especially if they’ve had to get here by bus. Molly Weasley probably has better things to do than drive them to and from the hospital in her 4x4, and he doesn’t think either of them has a licence yet.
That’s unfair and untrue he finds out a minute later when Molly comes in with Lily. The small room seems overcrowded with five people, and Lily frowns, goes over and sits by Harry’s bed again and takes his hand, ignoring the other two children.
Molly sniffs loudly and says, ‘I’ve just come to fetch Ron and Hermione.’ She goes over and smooths back Harry’s hair. In some ways, she’s seemed fonder of him than of her own son Ron, especially as Harry taught himself the guitar a couple of years ago, during his ‘I’m gonna join a rock band’ phase. He’s always been in the choir, too, the school choir that’s Molly’s pride and joy.
‘I didn’t want to bother you, Lily,’ she says. ‘But you know, like I’ve already said... Just give me a call if you need anything. James and Sally can come and stay any time. There’s always plenty of food, and we can rustle up a couple of spare beds.’
She then asks Sirius if he’d like a lift home. She’s probably not expecting him to say yes: everyone knows he prefers his motorbike to any other form of transport. But the bike’s in the garage at the moment, waiting for a new carburettor, and Sirius has been running up an outrageous taxi bill. Remus was the one who drove, a rather tatty Vauxhall Corsa that still sits forlornly in the garage at home.
’Thanks. I’d love one.’ If ever there was a time to build bridges, this is it.
He glances back as they leave. Lily remains unaware of anything but her son in his coma; she’s gazing at him intently, her lips moving slightly.
Sirius has had a few run-ins with Molly. She never approved of his relationship with Remus, though that’s now been taken care of by a higher power. Whenever she sees him, she purses her lips, an unconscious gesture that Sirius resents all the same. He suspects that she’s defiant rather than hostile, as if she’s scared that he can look into her head, guess all her guilty secrets.
When the children were younger, when Remus was around, Harry and his friends often came over to the Black-Lupin house just to hang out, to get away from their parents and the many pressures on them. It was relaxing there, and they were allowed to watch anything they liked on TV, make messy snacks in the kitchen. Molly has probably gleaned at some point - she isn’t a stupid woman - that Dr Black thinks Ron, the cuckoo in her otherwise tuneful nest, has been a bit sidelined by his family, if not exactly neglected.
Today, though, Sirius and Molly are on best behaviour, courteous and pleasant, and Sirius comments favourably on the new Range Rover, polished till it gleams. It’s the sort of car most people hate, and Molly is probably the archetypal school-run Mum, or would be if she weren’t ferrying so many children and didn’t actually teach at the place.
Before she goes into gear, she switches on the CD player, and tasteful chamber music floods the car. It’s soothing, Sirius will give her that. It’s the sort of music his parents used to go to hear at concerts.
‘There was a special assembly yesterday,’ she informs him as they turn out of the hospital grounds. ‘We had prayers for Harry, and the choir sang Adiemus. D’you remember Harry doing the solo on that, children? Of course, that was before his voice broke.’ She smiles fondly, not concentrating properly on the road ahead, cutting up a Micra moving to turn right. Sirius has an urge to grab the wheel. ‘And the Headmaster read a passage from that book Harry likes so much.’
Sirius notes the present tense, and Hermione chimes in, ‘Lord of the Rings. He always loves the bit when the Ringwraiths first come in. ’
God alone knows what Ringwraiths are after him at this second, as he lies poised between life and death in the narrow bed. Sirius shudders.
He doesn’t register at first that Molly’s pulling in to the drive of the Weasleys’ house, a big, thirties house covered with creeper and set in a fair amount of land.
‘I thought you could do with a proper meal,’ she says firmly. ‘Lily says you’ve been giving up your lunch-hours for Harry. It seems the least I can do.’
He follows her in through the back door - the front is used exclusively for the family’s musical soirées, which Sirius has often attended in the past, because Remus also taught at the school and got regular invitations to Molly’s functions. The Weasleys collect old music-stands and piano stools the way other big families pile up coats and Wellingtons, and the utility room even boasts an actual piano, an ancient upright long past its best days.
‘Ron, take Sirius’s jacket,’ Molly orders, and Ron obediently hangs it up in the lobby. Sirius notes that Hermione seems very much at home, fetching a glass from the kitchen cupboard and filling it with water.
‘Have some tea, dear,’ Molly suggests. ‘Or some juice. There’s a carton somewhere.’
Molly ushers Sirius into the breakfast room, really a music room, where Ron’s twin brothers are practising a duet on their violins. This is nothing unusual: there’s always someone playing an instrument in the house. The twins don’t falter for a second as the others go through to the drawing room. Sirius has heard that they’ve recently won scholarships to the Royal College of Music, where Molly’s husband, Arthur, studied.
Ron and Hermione have disappeared upstairs. ‘You could do with a drink,’ Molly says, pouring him a generous sherry. ‘Of course, I don’t like to mention it in front of the children, but I just cannot imagine what Lily’s going through. She’s so brave. ’
Sirius knows he’s expected to say something, so he settles for, ‘I think she’s a bit numb at the moment. It’s hard to take in.’
‘Oh, but surely by now?’ Molly looks disapproving again, and Sirius’s heart sinks. Damn, why can he never talk to the woman without rubbing her up the wrong way?
The Weasleys’ au pair, Winnie, who doubles as occasional cook, rings a gong in the distance somewhere. They must be the only family in England, Sirius thinks, who still summon their members to meals with a gong. Every time he eats here, he expects a butler to come in and announce that there’s a body in the library.
‘Lunch,’ Molly says briskly, probably as relieved as he is that their conversation has been interrupted. ‘It won’t be very elaborate, I’m afraid. It’s Winnie’s afternoon off.’
Various Weasleys are already seated in the dining-room, helping themselves from the dishes on the table. The twins have abandoned their duet and are sitting next to each other, talking in low voices, no doubt about crotchets and quavers. Sirius knows Ron’s younger sister, the only daughter, by sight, and there’s that slightly older boy, Percy, the one Harry dislikes, who’s in his last year at the Conservatoire and home for the holidays. He’s hunched over a copy of the Telegraph, reading the foreign news.
Arthur’s at the head of the table just starting his meal, but when he sees Sirius he gets up and gives him a clumsy, one-armed hug. ‘All right? How’s James bearing up?’
‘Well, you know...’ Sirius shrugs, rather helpless. Molly fills a plate for him with ham, cheese, baguette, and places the butter dish in front of him.
Ron and Hermione are looking a lot more cheerful, and they’ve both piled their plates high. Sirius tries to turn off his professional radar, tries not to replay in his head the sessions he’s had with teenagers who can’t deal with the loss of a friend. He tells himself sternly that Harry won’t die. Next time he comes here, it’ll be one of the musical evenings. Harry and Ron will stifle their giggles when Ron’s little sister sings - she has perfect pitch, of course, but the two boys don’t appreciate it - and get tipsy on Molly’s fruit punch, which is always spiked heavily with vodka. Lily and James will be happy and smiling, delighted that fate has granted them a reprieve.
‘You know the Malfoy boy, don’t you, Ron?’ Molly’s saying when Sirius glances up from his plate, and Ron looks skyward. ‘Yeah, unfortunately. Why?’
‘DRACO Malfoy to you,’ Hermione interjects, and she and Ron both snort with laughter.
‘Bloody pretentious name,’ Arthur mumbles, and Molly says, ‘Well, they’re such a rich family. I suppose they can get away with it. And Malfoy’s a really gifted flautist. I’m hoping he’ll perform here next time we have a concert.’
‘You must know his parents, Sirius,’ she adds. ‘They endowed a Physiotherapy wing at the hospital a few years ago. ’
Sirius has a vague memory, but it was around the time Remus got ill and he wasn’t really paying much attention to anything else.
‘He’s such a git, Mum,’ Ron says. ‘Him and Harry had a huge fight once, remember, Hermione? When Harry broke Draco’s nose? Served him right.’
‘Harry never fought, surely,’ Molly says, scandalised, and Sirius notes that she’s now slipped into the past.
‘He provoked Harry,’ Hermione says quickly. ‘What did he call him, Ron? Oh, okay. Well, it was very rude, anyway.’
Sirius assumes Ron must have kicked Hermione under the table, and also notes her slight flush.
‘They should both have been expelled.’ Percy folds his paper, takes off his glasses and slips them into their case. ‘In my day, boys weren’t allowed to fight.’
‘In your day all of three years ago,’ Ron says, at the same time Hermione says, ‘I don’t know how you could even talk about expelling Harry! Not now, anyway.’
There’s a long silence, and Sirius puts his napkin on the table and says, ‘I really must be going, Molly.’
Molly insists on taking him home, and drops him off right at the gate. They’re largely silent during the drive, but he feels a sudden, unprecedented warmth towards her and waves as the Range Rover screeches off, reluctant for a moment to turn the key and let himself in.
The house is stuffy and silent: he’s forgotten to switch off the heating, and the late April heat has caught him unprepared. The place is far too big, now Remus is dead and the children have grown up and moved on; when you’re seventeen and eighteen, you want to go to clubs and hang out with your friends. It would be weirder if the kids still did visit. He doesn’t know when, exactly, they stopped coming round; probably soon after Remus got sick.
He isn’t in a hurry to sell, though, find somewhere smaller and closer to the hospital. Remus is still here, in his paintings scattered all over the house, in the tiled Victorian fireplace they found in a junk shop to replace the one taken out by the previous occupants: Remus called them ‘the vandals.’ Remus installed the fireplace himself one weekend, and it was perfect, looked as if it had been made for the big, square room with windows opening on to the lawn. It wasn’t an easy job, even in retrospect. Sirius remembers that Remus, who never swore, said, ‘Fuck,’ six times on that occasion, trying to manoeuvre the fireplace into position, and wore an ostentatious plaster on his cut thumb for a week afterwards. He could be very childish sometimes.
In the kitchen, he puts on the kettle for tea, then switches it off and gets out the whisky bottle instead, pouring himself a stiff measure and raising his glass in an ironic toast, to what he doesn’t know. The pre-lunch sherry has long since worn off, and he drains half the drink in one gulp.
If Remus were still alive, Sirius would be looking forward, even in the circumstances, to relaying all the details of his encounter with Molly and her family. In fact, he still makes up anecdotes for Remus, even now, still talks to him in his head.
‘I know I shouldn’t find anything funny at the moment, but Molly’s driving... She’s so pushy. Just the sort of woman who’ll succeed in getting four-wheel drives banned. I had to close my eyes a couple of times while she was battling her way across a junction. But she means well, and she pours a killer drink. They didn’t have wine at lunch, though. I suppose that Percy boy would disapprove. He really is a dreadful prig.
‘Anyway,’ he continues, moving through to the sitting room and examining himself in the mirror over the fireplace, ‘I did need a decent meal, I suppose.’ He sits on the sofa and switches on the television without the sound. ‘I’m more worried about Harry’s friends at the moment. Hermione’ll be okay, but Ron... Harry was the only person who made him feel important, like he really mattered to someone.’ He thinks of his fleeting impression of Ron and Hermione, and wonders if that’s still true now.
In his head, Remus answers, ‘But even when Harry’s dead, he’ll have made a difference, Sirius. Ron isn’t going to forget him, after all. You haven’t forgotten me.’
Now Remus has said it, though only in his imagination, Sirius finds himself moving a bit further towards the realisation that it would take a miracle to bring Harry out of his coma: and even Lily’s love can’t work miracles. Harry will die in the most frustrating way possible, with James and Lily having to make the decision to turn off his life support, a decision no parent should ever be faced with.
No partner, either. At least Remus died naturally: or nearly. One of Sirius’s colleagues, on an afternoon when the pain was more than either Remus or Sirius could bear, gave him a tiny bit too much morphine. It was a wonderful way to go, Sirius is sure, falling asleep into a gilded universe free of suffering.
He knew for certain that Remus’s dreams were good at the end. ‘There is an upside,’ Remus said once, during his brief remission, after that first stay in hospital, at a time they thought the bone-marrow transplant might work. ‘The morphine is wonderful. I can understand how easy it would be to get addicted. Not just physically, but because everything looks a bit grey, after that.’
During the month before he got ill again, Remus stood at his easel painting feverishly, trying to capture light in the same way as the Impressionists he loved. He always said that one day he’d stop teaching art and practise it instead, but that day never came. Sirius still feels cold inside when he reflects that Remus was only just thirty-four when he died: too young to die without having achieved anything lasting, unless you can count their relationship. Sirius often feels it’s been interrupted rather than ended, especially at times like this, when Remus seems so near.
Now, Remus’s easel and those last paintings are stored in the attic. Sirius means to bring them down some day and frame them, hang them on the walls, perhaps hawk them round a few of the London galleries: he could at least do that for Remus. Unfortunately, he hasn’t managed to yet. For all the bright sunshine in them, they remind him too much of death and loss.
Pouring his third whisky, Sirius wonders how long the ordeal of Harry dying is going to stretch out; after just a few days, it already feels interminable. Harry may perhaps be in a golden haze, but for Lily and James, for Sirius, for his friends, life has become an arid desert stretching as far as the eye can see. It could be months, years even; could be forever, if Lily can’t bear to let go.
He falls asleep in his armchair around five, after one glass too many. Before he finally loses consciousness, he asks, a bit drunkenly, for an omen, a sign that everything will be all right. But when he wakes, just before dawn, there are no phoenix feathers or magic wands, no owls hovering with parchment in their beaks; only the unutterably dreary sound of a tap dripping in the kitchen.
End