Charmbreaker
If I say anything it'll come out wrong, and I'll be trying to explain this all day*, so instead without any ado whatsoever:
*(This was based on a challenge for remus_reads, #31- Remus is forced to leave school after the Prank. I feel this should be mentioned, and I encourage everyone to check out that community for other authors' work.)
Charmbreaker
They smile and tell him that he’s grown, as if this were a real reunion; which is funny because he feels that he’s been shrinking, and that he won’t stop until he has reduced himself to nothingness, like a star.
November, 1976.
A leaf is rotting between the loamy footprints of three boys, all of whom have passed this way. They went underground like ripe, paper-skinned bulbs do, but not to bloom. Everywhere is darkness and blood and the smell of overturned earth. The wolf and stag stand rampant and opposing.
Remus wakes alone. He remembers dreaming of a feast, and a table piled high with buttered bread and sweet suckling pig; though the apple was in his own mouth.
They gave him time, which was cruel. He would have preferred that it all happen in one day, throwing things into trunks and running through the crowds of students gathered at the door and hurtling onto the train. He could have slept on the way home, been exhausted; and not been expected to speak to anyone, to do anything.
Instead it's Sunday, and his train is Wednesday. He does not have to attend classes in the meantime (in point of fact he will not actually be allowed) and he is lying in bed, staring up at the vaulted windows of the infirmary that he will sleep beneath for three more nights, and then never again. He cannot imagine what will be said of him tomorrow at breakfast. Picturing the table, laden with scones and half-done homework, Sirius's elbow knocking over a mug of juice, makes his his head spin.
James is waiting outside the door, in the spot he has been occupying since Saturday morning. Peter sat for a while, silent and terrified, waiting for someone to blame him as well; but now he's gone back to the dormitory and is probably eating ice mice in the gloomy silence. Poppy asks Remus if he will see him, finally. Let him go to bed.
"Yes."
James enters like a man condemned, though he stood between Remus and a cage two nights ago. It doesn't make Remus feel better to see his misery, only worse. He is ashamed of what he is, and what he's done, and how he didn't see it before.
"Remus, mate. You're looking alright today." It's a kind lie. Remus hasn't looked in the mirror, but he can feel the angry welts he raised across his face and neck, and the ones unseen along his belly and thighs. "I, well I told everyone I'd- I mean, I ought. Bugger. I've no idea what to say."
"Neither do I." Remus looks at his hands, folded across his lap. "I should thank you."
"No, it's okay." James's hair is smelly and uncombed, still he can't keep his fingers from messing it about nervously. "I didn't do anything."
"You saved-"
"Nothing. I fixed nothing at all. You're leaving and Sirius... so. No thanks necessary." He could be right.
"Severus is alive."
"Much good may it do him." Unspoken between them is this: Severus has owled the Ministry. It's his condemnation that reached their desks just heartbeats before Dumbledore's well-intentioned message. He is probably gloating in his rooms, or hiding there in fear of James. Remus for an instant wonders what James will do in retaliation, because he cannot imagine what Sirius will do, or where he is, or- he touches the marks that band his wrists, naming his rosary. Forgive me, he thinks, I thought that I could have all of this, and pay nothing.
"He was right to do it. I shouldn't have been here in the first place."
"What ?"
"I'm a monster."
"Don't be stupid." James says, and the angry intensity with which he speaks has Remus almost convinced. It's all a mistake, and he's really just a boy. An innocent boy. But if that's so- well, he doesn't follow that. At the moment he would rather believe that he is the monster, and that the world is fair.
"Go away, James." he rolls over on his side, despite the agony it causes him, so that he is no longer facing his friend. James is holding his breath. Remus can hear him standing there, surprised, and he shuts his eyes. His eyelids are dark gold, facing the sunlight beaming through. "Goodbye."
His mother and father meet him at King’s Cross, their eyes hooded and sad. His mother has been crying, but she’s not now. Not in front of him. They smile and tell him that he’s grown, as if this were a real reunion; which is funny because he feels that he’s been shrinking, and that he won’t stop until he has reduced himself to nothingness, like a star. There’s little to carry, just a carpetbag and an old steamer trunk. When his father lifts it, bracing for the weight, he is surprised to find that it feels nearly empty.
“Have you forgotten anything ?” he asks, quietly. They seem to think that Remus packed in a rush, that he spent most of his time saying goodbyes and getting addresses. He is happy to let them continue thinking this. “I mean, it’s awfully light.”
“It's fine.” He does not shy away from his mother when she puts an arm around his shoulders. They walk out into the crowded sidewalk, three lonely figures against the tide of commuters in sensible gray overcoats.
Lily visits him when the year is over. It's hot now, but not as hot as it will get this summer; drought is coming. Her father drives a blue sedan down the gravel road while she hangs out the window, waving cheerfully, yelling, "HULLO, HULLO !" In the kitchen their parents make small talk over meringues; labor strikes and the decline of popular music. Lily and Remus sit upstairs with the door open, listening to the records she's brought. She has a photo album as well, and James is everywhere, elbowing everyone to be in front. Sirius is conspicuously absent.
"You look happy. Do you and James-"
"James is a prat." Lily twirls a strand of red hair around her fingers, and gives him a smile so slight that it shines like a sliver of moon. "Mostly. But I am happy."
"You're going to be Head Girl."
"Yes. Oh, I don't know what Dumbledore's thinking. I'm so nervous about it. I don't want to ruin some first year's life by telling him the utterly wrong thing, you know ? They take everything so seriously. I wish you were Head Boy, you'd be splendid at it."
"Yes, because I'm so splendid at everything." Something in the way he says it, sprawled on his back, flicking the rug tassels off of his hair, makes her laugh. She laughs and laughs, and doesn't stop. Remus is reminded why he loves her. Quietly, in the way that one loves flowers and good china; and other beautiful things.
"I'm never coming back." he tells her as she's leaving, and she ruffles a hand through his hair.
"Dumbledore will fix it," she says. Still confident in the grown-up world. "And you'll be back in September. I know it. I'll even save you a seat at the feast."
She does; but he can't, and so he isn't.
Public school, thankfully, has remained precisely the same as when he last attended. It is loud and obnoxious and not unlike a sanitary prison with shorter inmates. Everybody here knows what he is, which is poor; and nobody cares that he is a werewolf, which is impossible. He misses a few days of class every month because his “grandmother is ill”, and no teacher ever makes a fuss because he is the only boy in his year who wears a proper tie.
The tie, at first, is a mark that encourages a boy named Jaime to knock him over behind the dumpster during lunch. Remus dusts himself off and asks politely to be left alone, and Jaime knocks him down again. He gets up. A dark-haired boy walks across the schoolyard, swinging a jean jacket over his shoulder. When Remus is punching Jaime in the stomach he can almost see Sirius standing behind him, laughing, and he forgets what happens next.
He is put on a probationary period, during which he eats lunch under the eye of the principal. Jaime is given an icepack and a bandage and quietly told not to be such a rotting ass to the new kids. The tie is never mentioned again.
Remus wins the school a prize in science, which goes up in the hall display case with the tennis trophy. He is dared, perhaps in response to his academic successes, to put a tack on a teacher’s chair. Remus thinks about it for a moment, and catches a dark-haired boy looking at him from the third row of seats. When he turns his head, it’s a girl, with straight brown hair. He does not put the tack on the teacher’s chair. Rather, he transfigures a tack into a spiny echidna in the boy’s lavatory, and puts that on the chair. When the screaming dies down, it’s clear that no culprit can be clearly identified. He becomes inexplicably popular with the lesser element of the school.
He goes to a few parties and kisses a girl named Angela on the mouth for the first time. The ex-prefect drinks a beer and smokes a first cigarette sitting on the wall above the canal. In the summer he helps his mother out with her pet business, bottling and selling healing potions. When she catches him drawing a coughing snake on the labels, she pulls his left ear.
It was a point of pride that he attended Hogwarts, so every hope isn’t scuttled at the bottom of some personal ocean. He is a still a wizard, and a talented one. Remus's mother makes certain that he keeps up with his magic, and every year she sneaks into Diagon Alley and buys what would be his schoolbooks. Practicality wins out over wishing though, in the case of his father; who is coaching him for prep school.
Remus does keep up, though mostly he unravels things; now that he is allowed to drop divination and potions and care of magical creatures, he does. Charms and arithmancy were always his best subjects, and he stays up at night reading pages of books that he is not supposed to read any longer. He uses his mother’s wand, because she has locked his up until his majority arrives.
“It’s a stupid rule, and easy enough to get around.” she says. “I won’t give them any excuse to bother you.” She says them instead of the Ministry, and every time she is made to say the Ministry, she spits like a superstitious fishwife. It is her only dirty habit. Remus secretly adores her for it.
She creates spell puzzles and gives them to him to unlock, carefully, breathing magic into the wards and finding their holes, where the seams of word and will join together. The patterns of a spell are like people, like families or friendships, lovingly bound in places, separated at points. He can find where they are weakest and knock them into oblivion. Remus is very, very good at it. He makes and unmakes invisible cat’s cradles of wards around his schoolroom, charming them to blow papers off a desk or dull a pencil point when they are crossed.
On the surface, Remus does well. He eats, he sleeps, he breathes, he doesn’t think, except about chemistry and history of England and bread pudding on second Thursdays. He knows he'll never be an auror now, but he could be a banker or a librarian or a train engineer. So he graduates. Remus’s father takes a picture of him in his somber black gown with a real camera, and frames it to hang over the mantle.
They are proud of him, whatever he is now; muggle and man and beast and child, half-and-half in so many ways.
He's not angry anymore, exactly; sad would also be the wrong word to describe what rags have knotted up the center of his chest, left him so soured. He knows that he still has friends, and he realizes that he could make new ones.
James and Lily write to him, and Peter sometimes adds a PS in his scribbly handwriting. Dear Remus where does toast actually come from, James says it grows but I don't believe him any more. Remus reads these letters, and for a minute or two he really is feeling the glory of a last-minute manuever on the pitch, or gagging down pumpkin juice. Remus you ought to have seen Rodney's face when they smelt the dungbombs on him he looked like a crying bulldog. They're like beloved books. He escapes into them, but never for long enough. I'm going to be an auror since school's over. Lily says no more pranking but I say we can all do as we like now, eh ? His answering letters are full of hilarious stories of living amongst the muggles; he tries to sound kind, and not to feel like a liar.
Sirius writes, too. These letters Remus does not read, but also does not throw away. At night he dreams of what they contain. He glues them, still sealed, into the inside of the steamer trunk. They stare at him accusingly like the thousand tiny nails on a fakir's mattress.
October, 1978.
Remus is enrolled in the library sciences program, rapidly running out of funds, when a school friend of his mother's invites him to lunch. In between the salad and the soup-plate of lamb stew, Richards asks him to come along on a dig. From the look of the gold watch dangling out of his vest pocket, it isn't ditches.
"A dig ?" he asks, feeling at once intrigued and mistaken for somebody else. "Muggle archaeology ? I admit, I've always had an interest."
"Well, it's muggle archaeology so to speak. What we need is somebody of your talents, to help clear the way." Remus thinks at once, werewolf, and must visibly bristle because the man claps him on the shoulder in an apologetic manner. "Not what you're thinking. We need someone who can bring down the wards, so my muggle associates don't think the whole damn place is cursed and turn it into a sideshow. I'm crap at defense, more of an ancient runes man. Generally I'd get a Ministry charmbreaker but this isn't, strictly speaking, Ministry business." The twinkle in his eye is unmistakable.
"You're a tomb robber." Richards dabs at his mouth with a napkin edge, and the ruby set into his ring flashes.
"The dead don't want anything but the happiness of the living, I've always thought. You up for it ?" My poverty but not my will consents, Remus thinks first, and then, fuck it.
"Yes."
The site isn't as exotic as he'd imagined; there aren't any temples with hawk-faced gods, or gigantic diamonds set between the breasts of a savage queen. It is, at first glance, just a very large, very cold rock in Wales. What Richards has discovered is a tunnel beneath it, which may or may not widen into a larger chamber. Presumably filled with something that has market value. "That's a fairly unusual floor plan for a simple burial mound."
"Nothing but bodies under these, mostly." Richards unfolds a parchment map on the dirt between them, in the unsteady light of an old-fashioned gas lantern. Some yards away, a pair of shifty-eyed young men are sitting in a pickup truck, huddling against the radiator and awaiting orders. "But this isn't a real one. It's wizard-made, built old-style this way to fool the muggles. And it's worked so far."
The 'associates' manage to uncover the tunnel leading down, and a crude path leading into darkness. Remus notices the gentle curve of the steps cut into the rock and earth. There is something there, humming, buried but awake.
"I'll go." he says, and takes the lantern. "If there's trouble, I'll yell."
"And we'll run." Richards smiles. He looks like more of a weasel at night, and Remus not for the first time wonders what in God's name his mother did at school. "Kidding, boy. We'll be here. Good luck."
Once out of view, Remus sets down the lantern and lights his wand, murmuring a heating charm. The walls are mostly earth in the higher ground, but as he walks they suddenly become stone and mortar. He halts before the entrance and takes stock. There are carvings set at eye-level, runes of some kind which are nearly unreadable, and he wishes he'd spent more time on the subject. Cupping his hands, he whispers a spell with one breath, opens his fingers, and blows out along the floor.
Trails of light fall across the cracks in the floor like snowflakes, tracing ancient spellwork, more delicate and complex than any modern stuff he's ever seen. Someone spent long hours in this tunnel, lovingly warding the walls, the floors, the very air he's breathing.
"God." he murmurs, though there's no-one to see his surprise. Tracing his wand above his head, he makes a circle of lumos corolla. The light hovers over him as he works.
Some variation on circumretio, a casting net commonly known as fisher's snare, was used here, and he's grateful for that. It's more loosely woven than casses plagana, the spider. He can pluck and pull at it, casting one counter-curse after another in quick succession to avoid tripping it all the way down the passage. He gains a few feet, and a few more, unraveling, sinking into the spell and rising again like a modest wave.
There are always booby-traps in such a place, and this was no exception. A particularly nasty spell, meant to apparate the offender's head to several feet away from the offender, was coaxed from its embedded state in the floor, and defused. There were more like that, but not many. The smell of decay increased with the depth, and so did the weakness of the magic. It was rotting away in places, which made sense- the man who'd formed these enchantments was dead long ago, and his will was fading from the world.
Remus could see a door ahead, and it was excitement that led him to a careless mistake.
The ward on the door was older than anything in the tunnel, and infinitely more cruel. It radiated misery and loss, the scope of which Remus couldn't begin to imagine. He felt himself slipping down to the floor, the haze of his makeshift corona fading, falling into sleep. He would lie here a moment, be still. His arms wrapped around his torso, feeling for the first time the chill of the deep earth. His hands stretched around his back, reaching for his spine, his head tucking into his chest, and- "DISSOLVO!" Remus scrambled backwards along the tunnel floor, gasping for breath. This was a constriction charm, a horrible one. Completed, he would have dislocated his own joints and crushed himself to death.
Best to stay awake for now. He smiles and goes back to work. Halfway through, he sends a signal flare out, back through the passage, to let Richards know that it's time to start down. The greedy thing won't want to miss the opening of the door.
As it turns out, Richards does miss the opening, but only because he's running in the opposite direction; screaming like a schoolgirl.
Remus, I wish you'd write more often. I never know where you're going to be anymore. You say you're at school but then suddenly you're in Cornwall, fixing an enchanted seawall or something. With the registration you'll never be certified as a charmbreaker, and that means no benefits and no long-term contracts. You've got to think about yourself sometimes, what's best for you. My father knows a man in the clerk's office at Oxford who can get you a good position, boring maybe but steady work. I know it's muggle stuff but you've never been ashamed of that like other people (stupid people ! I'm sorry, James says I shouldn't get so angry). I don't mean to be so hard on you. I wish you'd come up and see us, the new house really is something. And by something I mean small and drafty and full of James's quidditch garbage, but anyway we love you. We miss you. Come round.
His share of the profits isn't mind-boggling, but it's a larger sum of money than Remus has ever seen before in one place. He suspects that Richards didn't skimp mostly out of gratitude for his silence about that night's events; the boggart that was waiting in the inner chamber, though initially terrifying, was easy to deal with. Remus even watched it for a moment or two, his greatest fear. It's the only time he gets to see the full moon.
Coincidentally, Richard's greatest fear is being disemboweled by a werewolf, which is embarrassing for everyone; and Remus decides that it's best they don't partner up again. He feels a moment's pang for the ill-gotten nature of the funds and then remembers how good sandwiches taste when they're eaten on the day they're actually made.
The money goes towards setting up a small office in one of London's shabby but quiet wizarding neighborhoods. The landlord doesn't even ask to see his papers, or the numbers on his arm. He rents the building and lives in it; and outside the bottom floor he puts up a sign, which is his life's pinnacle of recklessness so far: CHARMBREAKER. NO TASK TOO DANGEROUS.
Business, amazingly, is good.
May, 1980.
He is certainly aware of what his friends do, and the thankless nature of the task they’ve set before themselves. Nearly every day the paper screams about more bodies, more death, more secrets, more conspiracy. He’s offered himself and his services to James’s cause more than once, and more than once James has smiled his rueful boy’s smile and said “No, thanks; I don’t want you dragged into it.”
Really James is too good to say Lupin, mate, what you are doesn’t matter to me, but it matters to them, and they can’t accept it. It makes him sad and proud to know that they don’t want him to face that hateful exposure again. So he reads the paper, and he keeps an eye out; but mostly he trusts James, and he trusts Lily, and he trusts their better world.
The life isn't boring. He enjoys his work, and the hours he sets (for himself) and the superior he answers to (no-one). He has time to travel, sparingly, sleeping upright in the train car. The ocean was seen this way, and the ruins in Rome. Souvenirs are still too expensive; he therefore takes none except for the pleased surprise written on James and Lily's faces when he makes an appearance.
The things people bring to a charmbreaker are varied as the facets of a quartz outcropping. Remus has a locket in the back of the shop, belonging to a young muggle lady. Her ill-tempered wizard beau had charmed the locket to display his smiling face whenever she opened it; but it had been deployed at an unfortunate moment, as another young man declared his affections for her. Now the locket flies apart at socially crippling times and screams a string of invectives fit for sailors and goatherders. It’s a beautiful piece of work when silent, engraved with silvery doves and set with a small diamond, not something to be parted with lightly, and therefore worth the cost of disenchantment.
And here’s where Remus’s unlicensed status becomes the selling point. Typically, Ministry-registered charmbreakers are required to make periodic reports; and any interaction with the muggle world is typed in triplicate and monitored by a separate department. This young non-magical woman was referred by a friend who wishes to keep it as discreet as possible. What Remus offers is cheap, confidential service; with a charming smile added in for free.
The customers think him dangerous, more dangerous at least than the dark objects they tend to bring in wrapped in old blankets. Instead of prejudice he recieves total disinterest for his well-being. Much to be preferred.
Once or twice a year he gets a rock with a note thrown through his window, WERWULF GO HOM or an equivalent phrase scrawled on. Where they believe his actual home to be is beyond his imagining. He’s modified a pixie-trap in an attempt to snare the culprit and has had some modest success. In general the regular money more than makes up for the harassment; as does the satisfying sound of the rock-thrower being caught and dangled upside-down.
He's finishing up inventory one afternoon, when the bell at the edge of his desk jingles ever so softly. Someone has stepped across his welcome mat. He looks up at the front door, which is shut and shuttered, and realizes that he has locked the door but not yet turned over the closed sign. A flick of his wand remedies that, and he calls out in his most apologetic voice, “Sorry, we’re closed. Back for business at eight tomorrow morning.”
“Remus Lupin.” the man calls out, muffled through the glass and wood. “I’ve come to see Remus Lupin.”
“And you’ve found him, but we’re closed.” Remus repeats; but an odd and nearly imperceptible shift has taken place in the wards around the door. Having formed them, he can feel their subtle crackling around something out of place, unwelcome. He pushes out of his chair and goes to the door, lighting on the wards along the floor and wall as he walks. They spring up in his wake, alive. He draws his wand. “Is it important ?”
“Very much so.” Remus sees movement through the gaps in the shuttered glass. He is certain, now, that this is no late customer. Better to bring him inside, onto home ground, where the wards will hold.
“Alright, alright.” He unlocks the door and steadies himself. “Come on in.” The doorknob turns, the late afternoon sunlight makes a sharp slant into the coolness of the shop. A hand is extended, either in greeting; or as a warning, a plea. The door swings shut. Remus breathes in and tastes the bitter tang of sweat and decay in the back of his mouth- a hunted man, this one. He‘s tall, with a rounded, well-scrubbed grin and sandy hair. His cloak is of poor quality.
And then something happens; the air seems to hesitate around his face, and there is the metallic smell of a glamour in the air. Arrested in surprise, Remus watches as the ruddy, weathered hand slips out of its shape and into the smooth, slim aristocratic hand-
-of Regulus Black.
Remus catches an unforgivable in his throat and falls to one knee, slamming his hand onto the board floor so hard that it breaks the skin. The wards are of sturdy pattern; and he’s taken the care, over several months, to painstakingly strengthen them using his own blood. Considering the contents, it's proven remarkably volatile. As his bruised palm touches the floor, a blast of furious energy shoots out of a sigil now illuminated, towards the man before him; it knocks him backwards and he stumbles into a pile of books. Before he can utter a countercurse he’s wandless and immobilized.
Noted, admired and teased alternately for his use of the language, Remus cannot find a way to speak. “Murderer.” he chokes out at last. “Murderer.”
Lily tells him in the kitchen, when she’s certain that James is really gone to the market; hands jammed into his jacket pockets, his eyebrows knitted in baffled, undirected fury. She closes the curtains and sits in the chair beside his, and takes his hands in hers.
“It was three weeks ago.” she starts, hanging her head. A lock of hair drifts down across her eyes, and she looks scared and young, as he’s seen her once before. “He came to us afraid, almost shaking. He and James, they locked themselves into the study and yelled for ages; and when it was over they were hugging, trying not to look like they were crying. They’d forgiven each other, finally, the pig-heads. He was still nervous, though, and he kept opening and shutting the cupboard doors, and walking around. He wouldn’t take his shoes off. I told him- I told him I was going to have a baby, and James was so proud, and he was laughing and everything, so excited. We were happy, and I know that things aren’t right for you two, but I thought that day, that maybe things would change, that maybe now they finally could.”
It’s here that Lily breaks down into tears; and Remus gets down on his knees and wraps his arms around her. He wishes for a moment that he were James, or the mother they took from her, or somebody who knew how to love her better. She’s too thin even now, to possibly be sustaining the life growing inside, though she is the strongest person he’s ever known.
“I’m sorry.” he says into her hair. “I’m sorry, it’s my fault, I couldn’t forgive.”
“No, no, it’s all of our faults. It’s all of our faults. We were children, and we were afraid. We didn’t think of anything.” Lily rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “You know that he went home after school, with his brother ? To that horrible place ? He’d had nowhere else to go. It’s so awful. I really thought that it would be over at last, everything, be fixed. Stupid. And then we got the news, James and I- that he’d gone missing.”
“Missing ?” The blood in his veins slows, thickens into syrup. “Missing ?”
“Gone, vanished; we thought he’d gone into hiding, we remembered how skittish he’d been. It came out at last, that he’d been on our side, working for us, even though. Even though. And then that scene in the street- Remus, there was blood everywhere, not even a body. Just blood- and things. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know how to tell you. I know that you didn’t only hate him, like everyone thinks- I know about the letters. I know that you missed him.”
“Lily.” He feels a sharp stab of disgust for himself, like an edge of shattered bone pressing against his chest. Hatred for the stupid boy, the fifteen-year-old judge and jury, who couldn’t forgive his best friend. The stupid man who wasted time. “Lily, tell me.”
“Sirius is dead.” she says; and the bone goes through his heart. “He’s dead, and his own brother is the one that did it.”
There are worse things than death: blighted love, betrayal, enslavement to an evil cause, loss of one's will. A catalog of sins and sorrow. Remus knows them all, the wicked things that foolish men leave behind to seal their tombs, not wishing to be disturbed; not realizing that the price they pay for safety will be their very souls.
He's considered the endless varieties of torment available for the brother-killer, the man who finished the job that he himself started. Between one bottle of Ogden's Guilt and another, he's imagined himself binding Regulus's mind to a stone and hurling it into the ocean to rot, feeding his body to spiders, trapping him in a living death. It worried him, the detail of these fantasies. But now that the choices are before him, there isn't any question. Only death will do. Real death, simple death, old death; Remus wants him banished out of memory and out of breath, plunged into the good earth and made silent. He wants to forget. Wants him forgotten.
It's hard to be looking into that face, which is so like the other. He sees the same pride boxed in at the angles of the jaw, the large intelligent eyes; but he remembers humor and easy grace and gentleness, where there's none.
"I'm going to kill you." he says, and Regulus visibly blanches. "You came looking for a monster, and so you've found him. Are you stronger now from what you've done, higher in your lord's esteem ?"
Regulus's mouth is moving slightly, the soft scrape of tongue against teeth. He's trying to speak. Remus can see that it isn't a curse. It could be mine... remind.. behind. Behind you. The crack of apparition sounds behind his ears; Remus turns, raising his wand, as the dust settles on Sirius's shoulders. There's not even time for a thought of defense. Remus falls quietly as a hex hits his chest, asleep before he touches the ground.
Sirius looks well, for a dead man, though his left hand seems somehow shriveled and grey. On his right hand he bears a strange ring.
Remus doesn't dream.
Instead he wakes into a living one; his back is jutted against something hard and sharp, like a book's spine, or a ruler. His cheek is pressed against a sheet of parchment. Above him, all is bright light. Sirius's face appears like an eclipse; and with the shadows collecting along the ridge of his brow, down his nose, to his narrow, handsome chin; he could be thirty, or thirteen.
"Pads." Remus is suprised to hear that ancient word not forgotten, nor the easiness dimmed by time. "Pads, you're dead."
"Maybe so." Sirius stretches out a hand, which Remus takes, and helps him to his feet. "And maybe not. It'd keep the grocery bills down." They stand facing each other, Remus still a little taller, a little more slight. This is no imperious, no specter, no trick. From the fall of his shoulders to the nervous tic of the left foot, this is the authentic item, and very much alive. Remus casts a glance at Regulus, who despite the full-body bind manages to convey both disgust and boredom.
"I don't understand."
"I know." Sirius smiles, looking very tired. "He's alright, I vouch for him. The murder was a fake, for cover, we planned it together. You can release him if you want; otherwise he'll be a frightful baby about it later."
"No, I don't think so." Remus feels the chill creeping back into his chest, and almost imperceptibly takes a step backwards. "You'll have to give me more than that."
There is a knot in the board below his feet, and Sirius seems to be staring at it. From inside his pocket, he withdraws his hand; it looks like the work of a fire, or mummification. The flesh is twisted and the nails peeling, and at the crest of his middle knuckle there is the sheen of bone.
"Pretty, right ?" he shakes his head. "You'll want the short version of this, because the long version- well. Reg and I have been working on something for a bit; but we've hit a wall. We came here for your help, if you're willing. Have you ever heard of a thing called a horcrux ?"
Sirius was always clever with words; he could say in a wink and a glance what took other people the better part of an essay to get across. He doesn't spare the details now. The smell of death lingers in the air as he speaks. The full-body bind is dropped, and Regulus dusts off his backside, swearing in Latin and casting Sirius hateful looks.
"Even-tempered, logical. Right." He sniffs condescendingly in Remus's direction. "Your friend's got talent at least, which we'll need."
We're not friends, Remus almost says out loud. They aren't, they couldn't be, not with all the distance of years between them, and that night still dangling, unfinished. But the arguments seem strangely pointless. He is absurdly grateful to find that Sirius is alive.
"I don't know that I can help you. I'm no expert. And you've destroyed one without me."
"Yes, and that turned out so very well." Regulus seems on the verge of stamping his feet. "Look, this wasn't my idea. It was his. He's convinced that you'll make it work. So, Sirius- this is up to you. I'm going to get the item. When I come back, he'd better either be joining up, or dead."
"Excuse me ?"
"Nothing personal. But this is goddam serious business, and I'm not leaving a trail." He nods, and gives Remus what might almost be a friendly smile.
Regulus disapparates; and they are left alone.
"It's been hard, not telling. I'm terrible at excuses." A nervous laugh comes out of his mouth, and he hides his cracking, scabbed cheeks with a hand. It's Sirius who takes a hand in his, so deftly that it's almost unconscious, warming the bandaged fingers.
"You really are," he says. "Nobody's odd enough to have fourteen grandmothers, all dying at monthly intervals. But I'm glad that I know now, that you- yeah."
"That I ?"
"That you trust me."
Remus thinks about all the things that they've done since they met- the sneakoscope raids, the pilfering of trifle and sausages, the time that Sirius charmed the night sky to shine on their dormitory ceiling, and the thousands of passed notes that got him through History of Magic. When he told Sirius what he was, he didn't run, or shout. He just said that it was fine, and would he like another bandage on his ear ? Did it hurt much, had he ever eaten a rabbit ?
"I do trust you," he says, and means it completely. "I always will."
"What you're doing is right," he says at last, when the breaking point of silence seems to be reached. If Remus has been looking for a way to help, this is it, his way into the war. It's odd to think that only Sirius keeps an absolute faith in his usefulness.
"I believe so."
"I'll help you."
"Thanks."
"Look, Pa- Sirius. I didn't read the letters." Remus says quietly, and Sirius doesn't look at him. Instead he looks at the floor again, and the window sill, and the stack of disturbed scrolls hanging gamely onto the desk. "I didn't read them," he repeats. "But I know exactly what they'd say."
It's as if there are two shadows drifting between them, listless and circling; as they step forward into each other's orbits, they seem to disappear. Sirius manages a grin.
"Good, then. Saves us some apologies."
He hopes that Sirius will be able to forgive him for his foolish pride and stubborness. For a moment Remus can see the darkness pierced, the tide turned, the world put sideways on its head. The axis righted. They are not standing together, and they are not standing apart.
There's been a rhythm to this- this losing and finding again, this series of losses and gains. He can't be a child at school any longer; any more than Sirius can play the guitar. They fucked up somewhere along the way, when they were meant to keep a steady path. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. He isn't sorry. Forgiveness doesn't arrive only when a thing is undone. That would miss the point.
Remus has unraveled things so well, for such a very long time; but at this moment he is beginning to see how some things might be put back together.
We face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.
R.A.B.
S.R.B.
R.J.L.
*(This was based on a challenge for remus_reads, #31- Remus is forced to leave school after the Prank. I feel this should be mentioned, and I encourage everyone to check out that community for other authors' work.)
Charmbreaker
They smile and tell him that he’s grown, as if this were a real reunion; which is funny because he feels that he’s been shrinking, and that he won’t stop until he has reduced himself to nothingness, like a star.
November, 1976.
A leaf is rotting between the loamy footprints of three boys, all of whom have passed this way. They went underground like ripe, paper-skinned bulbs do, but not to bloom. Everywhere is darkness and blood and the smell of overturned earth. The wolf and stag stand rampant and opposing.
Remus wakes alone. He remembers dreaming of a feast, and a table piled high with buttered bread and sweet suckling pig; though the apple was in his own mouth.
They gave him time, which was cruel. He would have preferred that it all happen in one day, throwing things into trunks and running through the crowds of students gathered at the door and hurtling onto the train. He could have slept on the way home, been exhausted; and not been expected to speak to anyone, to do anything.
Instead it's Sunday, and his train is Wednesday. He does not have to attend classes in the meantime (in point of fact he will not actually be allowed) and he is lying in bed, staring up at the vaulted windows of the infirmary that he will sleep beneath for three more nights, and then never again. He cannot imagine what will be said of him tomorrow at breakfast. Picturing the table, laden with scones and half-done homework, Sirius's elbow knocking over a mug of juice, makes his his head spin.
James is waiting outside the door, in the spot he has been occupying since Saturday morning. Peter sat for a while, silent and terrified, waiting for someone to blame him as well; but now he's gone back to the dormitory and is probably eating ice mice in the gloomy silence. Poppy asks Remus if he will see him, finally. Let him go to bed.
"Yes."
James enters like a man condemned, though he stood between Remus and a cage two nights ago. It doesn't make Remus feel better to see his misery, only worse. He is ashamed of what he is, and what he's done, and how he didn't see it before.
"Remus, mate. You're looking alright today." It's a kind lie. Remus hasn't looked in the mirror, but he can feel the angry welts he raised across his face and neck, and the ones unseen along his belly and thighs. "I, well I told everyone I'd- I mean, I ought. Bugger. I've no idea what to say."
"Neither do I." Remus looks at his hands, folded across his lap. "I should thank you."
"No, it's okay." James's hair is smelly and uncombed, still he can't keep his fingers from messing it about nervously. "I didn't do anything."
"You saved-"
"Nothing. I fixed nothing at all. You're leaving and Sirius... so. No thanks necessary." He could be right.
"Severus is alive."
"Much good may it do him." Unspoken between them is this: Severus has owled the Ministry. It's his condemnation that reached their desks just heartbeats before Dumbledore's well-intentioned message. He is probably gloating in his rooms, or hiding there in fear of James. Remus for an instant wonders what James will do in retaliation, because he cannot imagine what Sirius will do, or where he is, or- he touches the marks that band his wrists, naming his rosary. Forgive me, he thinks, I thought that I could have all of this, and pay nothing.
"He was right to do it. I shouldn't have been here in the first place."
"What ?"
"I'm a monster."
"Don't be stupid." James says, and the angry intensity with which he speaks has Remus almost convinced. It's all a mistake, and he's really just a boy. An innocent boy. But if that's so- well, he doesn't follow that. At the moment he would rather believe that he is the monster, and that the world is fair.
"Go away, James." he rolls over on his side, despite the agony it causes him, so that he is no longer facing his friend. James is holding his breath. Remus can hear him standing there, surprised, and he shuts his eyes. His eyelids are dark gold, facing the sunlight beaming through. "Goodbye."
His mother and father meet him at King’s Cross, their eyes hooded and sad. His mother has been crying, but she’s not now. Not in front of him. They smile and tell him that he’s grown, as if this were a real reunion; which is funny because he feels that he’s been shrinking, and that he won’t stop until he has reduced himself to nothingness, like a star. There’s little to carry, just a carpetbag and an old steamer trunk. When his father lifts it, bracing for the weight, he is surprised to find that it feels nearly empty.
“Have you forgotten anything ?” he asks, quietly. They seem to think that Remus packed in a rush, that he spent most of his time saying goodbyes and getting addresses. He is happy to let them continue thinking this. “I mean, it’s awfully light.”
“It's fine.” He does not shy away from his mother when she puts an arm around his shoulders. They walk out into the crowded sidewalk, three lonely figures against the tide of commuters in sensible gray overcoats.
Lily visits him when the year is over. It's hot now, but not as hot as it will get this summer; drought is coming. Her father drives a blue sedan down the gravel road while she hangs out the window, waving cheerfully, yelling, "HULLO, HULLO !" In the kitchen their parents make small talk over meringues; labor strikes and the decline of popular music. Lily and Remus sit upstairs with the door open, listening to the records she's brought. She has a photo album as well, and James is everywhere, elbowing everyone to be in front. Sirius is conspicuously absent.
"You look happy. Do you and James-"
"James is a prat." Lily twirls a strand of red hair around her fingers, and gives him a smile so slight that it shines like a sliver of moon. "Mostly. But I am happy."
"You're going to be Head Girl."
"Yes. Oh, I don't know what Dumbledore's thinking. I'm so nervous about it. I don't want to ruin some first year's life by telling him the utterly wrong thing, you know ? They take everything so seriously. I wish you were Head Boy, you'd be splendid at it."
"Yes, because I'm so splendid at everything." Something in the way he says it, sprawled on his back, flicking the rug tassels off of his hair, makes her laugh. She laughs and laughs, and doesn't stop. Remus is reminded why he loves her. Quietly, in the way that one loves flowers and good china; and other beautiful things.
"I'm never coming back." he tells her as she's leaving, and she ruffles a hand through his hair.
"Dumbledore will fix it," she says. Still confident in the grown-up world. "And you'll be back in September. I know it. I'll even save you a seat at the feast."
She does; but he can't, and so he isn't.
Public school, thankfully, has remained precisely the same as when he last attended. It is loud and obnoxious and not unlike a sanitary prison with shorter inmates. Everybody here knows what he is, which is poor; and nobody cares that he is a werewolf, which is impossible. He misses a few days of class every month because his “grandmother is ill”, and no teacher ever makes a fuss because he is the only boy in his year who wears a proper tie.
The tie, at first, is a mark that encourages a boy named Jaime to knock him over behind the dumpster during lunch. Remus dusts himself off and asks politely to be left alone, and Jaime knocks him down again. He gets up. A dark-haired boy walks across the schoolyard, swinging a jean jacket over his shoulder. When Remus is punching Jaime in the stomach he can almost see Sirius standing behind him, laughing, and he forgets what happens next.
He is put on a probationary period, during which he eats lunch under the eye of the principal. Jaime is given an icepack and a bandage and quietly told not to be such a rotting ass to the new kids. The tie is never mentioned again.
Remus wins the school a prize in science, which goes up in the hall display case with the tennis trophy. He is dared, perhaps in response to his academic successes, to put a tack on a teacher’s chair. Remus thinks about it for a moment, and catches a dark-haired boy looking at him from the third row of seats. When he turns his head, it’s a girl, with straight brown hair. He does not put the tack on the teacher’s chair. Rather, he transfigures a tack into a spiny echidna in the boy’s lavatory, and puts that on the chair. When the screaming dies down, it’s clear that no culprit can be clearly identified. He becomes inexplicably popular with the lesser element of the school.
He goes to a few parties and kisses a girl named Angela on the mouth for the first time. The ex-prefect drinks a beer and smokes a first cigarette sitting on the wall above the canal. In the summer he helps his mother out with her pet business, bottling and selling healing potions. When she catches him drawing a coughing snake on the labels, she pulls his left ear.
It was a point of pride that he attended Hogwarts, so every hope isn’t scuttled at the bottom of some personal ocean. He is a still a wizard, and a talented one. Remus's mother makes certain that he keeps up with his magic, and every year she sneaks into Diagon Alley and buys what would be his schoolbooks. Practicality wins out over wishing though, in the case of his father; who is coaching him for prep school.
Remus does keep up, though mostly he unravels things; now that he is allowed to drop divination and potions and care of magical creatures, he does. Charms and arithmancy were always his best subjects, and he stays up at night reading pages of books that he is not supposed to read any longer. He uses his mother’s wand, because she has locked his up until his majority arrives.
“It’s a stupid rule, and easy enough to get around.” she says. “I won’t give them any excuse to bother you.” She says them instead of the Ministry, and every time she is made to say the Ministry, she spits like a superstitious fishwife. It is her only dirty habit. Remus secretly adores her for it.
She creates spell puzzles and gives them to him to unlock, carefully, breathing magic into the wards and finding their holes, where the seams of word and will join together. The patterns of a spell are like people, like families or friendships, lovingly bound in places, separated at points. He can find where they are weakest and knock them into oblivion. Remus is very, very good at it. He makes and unmakes invisible cat’s cradles of wards around his schoolroom, charming them to blow papers off a desk or dull a pencil point when they are crossed.
On the surface, Remus does well. He eats, he sleeps, he breathes, he doesn’t think, except about chemistry and history of England and bread pudding on second Thursdays. He knows he'll never be an auror now, but he could be a banker or a librarian or a train engineer. So he graduates. Remus’s father takes a picture of him in his somber black gown with a real camera, and frames it to hang over the mantle.
They are proud of him, whatever he is now; muggle and man and beast and child, half-and-half in so many ways.
He's not angry anymore, exactly; sad would also be the wrong word to describe what rags have knotted up the center of his chest, left him so soured. He knows that he still has friends, and he realizes that he could make new ones.
James and Lily write to him, and Peter sometimes adds a PS in his scribbly handwriting. Dear Remus where does toast actually come from, James says it grows but I don't believe him any more. Remus reads these letters, and for a minute or two he really is feeling the glory of a last-minute manuever on the pitch, or gagging down pumpkin juice. Remus you ought to have seen Rodney's face when they smelt the dungbombs on him he looked like a crying bulldog. They're like beloved books. He escapes into them, but never for long enough. I'm going to be an auror since school's over. Lily says no more pranking but I say we can all do as we like now, eh ? His answering letters are full of hilarious stories of living amongst the muggles; he tries to sound kind, and not to feel like a liar.
Sirius writes, too. These letters Remus does not read, but also does not throw away. At night he dreams of what they contain. He glues them, still sealed, into the inside of the steamer trunk. They stare at him accusingly like the thousand tiny nails on a fakir's mattress.
October, 1978.
Remus is enrolled in the library sciences program, rapidly running out of funds, when a school friend of his mother's invites him to lunch. In between the salad and the soup-plate of lamb stew, Richards asks him to come along on a dig. From the look of the gold watch dangling out of his vest pocket, it isn't ditches.
"A dig ?" he asks, feeling at once intrigued and mistaken for somebody else. "Muggle archaeology ? I admit, I've always had an interest."
"Well, it's muggle archaeology so to speak. What we need is somebody of your talents, to help clear the way." Remus thinks at once, werewolf, and must visibly bristle because the man claps him on the shoulder in an apologetic manner. "Not what you're thinking. We need someone who can bring down the wards, so my muggle associates don't think the whole damn place is cursed and turn it into a sideshow. I'm crap at defense, more of an ancient runes man. Generally I'd get a Ministry charmbreaker but this isn't, strictly speaking, Ministry business." The twinkle in his eye is unmistakable.
"You're a tomb robber." Richards dabs at his mouth with a napkin edge, and the ruby set into his ring flashes.
"The dead don't want anything but the happiness of the living, I've always thought. You up for it ?" My poverty but not my will consents, Remus thinks first, and then, fuck it.
"Yes."
The site isn't as exotic as he'd imagined; there aren't any temples with hawk-faced gods, or gigantic diamonds set between the breasts of a savage queen. It is, at first glance, just a very large, very cold rock in Wales. What Richards has discovered is a tunnel beneath it, which may or may not widen into a larger chamber. Presumably filled with something that has market value. "That's a fairly unusual floor plan for a simple burial mound."
"Nothing but bodies under these, mostly." Richards unfolds a parchment map on the dirt between them, in the unsteady light of an old-fashioned gas lantern. Some yards away, a pair of shifty-eyed young men are sitting in a pickup truck, huddling against the radiator and awaiting orders. "But this isn't a real one. It's wizard-made, built old-style this way to fool the muggles. And it's worked so far."
The 'associates' manage to uncover the tunnel leading down, and a crude path leading into darkness. Remus notices the gentle curve of the steps cut into the rock and earth. There is something there, humming, buried but awake.
"I'll go." he says, and takes the lantern. "If there's trouble, I'll yell."
"And we'll run." Richards smiles. He looks like more of a weasel at night, and Remus not for the first time wonders what in God's name his mother did at school. "Kidding, boy. We'll be here. Good luck."
Once out of view, Remus sets down the lantern and lights his wand, murmuring a heating charm. The walls are mostly earth in the higher ground, but as he walks they suddenly become stone and mortar. He halts before the entrance and takes stock. There are carvings set at eye-level, runes of some kind which are nearly unreadable, and he wishes he'd spent more time on the subject. Cupping his hands, he whispers a spell with one breath, opens his fingers, and blows out along the floor.
Trails of light fall across the cracks in the floor like snowflakes, tracing ancient spellwork, more delicate and complex than any modern stuff he's ever seen. Someone spent long hours in this tunnel, lovingly warding the walls, the floors, the very air he's breathing.
"God." he murmurs, though there's no-one to see his surprise. Tracing his wand above his head, he makes a circle of lumos corolla. The light hovers over him as he works.
Some variation on circumretio, a casting net commonly known as fisher's snare, was used here, and he's grateful for that. It's more loosely woven than casses plagana, the spider. He can pluck and pull at it, casting one counter-curse after another in quick succession to avoid tripping it all the way down the passage. He gains a few feet, and a few more, unraveling, sinking into the spell and rising again like a modest wave.
There are always booby-traps in such a place, and this was no exception. A particularly nasty spell, meant to apparate the offender's head to several feet away from the offender, was coaxed from its embedded state in the floor, and defused. There were more like that, but not many. The smell of decay increased with the depth, and so did the weakness of the magic. It was rotting away in places, which made sense- the man who'd formed these enchantments was dead long ago, and his will was fading from the world.
Remus could see a door ahead, and it was excitement that led him to a careless mistake.
The ward on the door was older than anything in the tunnel, and infinitely more cruel. It radiated misery and loss, the scope of which Remus couldn't begin to imagine. He felt himself slipping down to the floor, the haze of his makeshift corona fading, falling into sleep. He would lie here a moment, be still. His arms wrapped around his torso, feeling for the first time the chill of the deep earth. His hands stretched around his back, reaching for his spine, his head tucking into his chest, and- "DISSOLVO!" Remus scrambled backwards along the tunnel floor, gasping for breath. This was a constriction charm, a horrible one. Completed, he would have dislocated his own joints and crushed himself to death.
Best to stay awake for now. He smiles and goes back to work. Halfway through, he sends a signal flare out, back through the passage, to let Richards know that it's time to start down. The greedy thing won't want to miss the opening of the door.
As it turns out, Richards does miss the opening, but only because he's running in the opposite direction; screaming like a schoolgirl.
Remus, I wish you'd write more often. I never know where you're going to be anymore. You say you're at school but then suddenly you're in Cornwall, fixing an enchanted seawall or something. With the registration you'll never be certified as a charmbreaker, and that means no benefits and no long-term contracts. You've got to think about yourself sometimes, what's best for you. My father knows a man in the clerk's office at Oxford who can get you a good position, boring maybe but steady work. I know it's muggle stuff but you've never been ashamed of that like other people (stupid people ! I'm sorry, James says I shouldn't get so angry). I don't mean to be so hard on you. I wish you'd come up and see us, the new house really is something. And by something I mean small and drafty and full of James's quidditch garbage, but anyway we love you. We miss you. Come round.
His share of the profits isn't mind-boggling, but it's a larger sum of money than Remus has ever seen before in one place. He suspects that Richards didn't skimp mostly out of gratitude for his silence about that night's events; the boggart that was waiting in the inner chamber, though initially terrifying, was easy to deal with. Remus even watched it for a moment or two, his greatest fear. It's the only time he gets to see the full moon.
Coincidentally, Richard's greatest fear is being disemboweled by a werewolf, which is embarrassing for everyone; and Remus decides that it's best they don't partner up again. He feels a moment's pang for the ill-gotten nature of the funds and then remembers how good sandwiches taste when they're eaten on the day they're actually made.
The money goes towards setting up a small office in one of London's shabby but quiet wizarding neighborhoods. The landlord doesn't even ask to see his papers, or the numbers on his arm. He rents the building and lives in it; and outside the bottom floor he puts up a sign, which is his life's pinnacle of recklessness so far: CHARMBREAKER. NO TASK TOO DANGEROUS.
Business, amazingly, is good.
May, 1980.
He is certainly aware of what his friends do, and the thankless nature of the task they’ve set before themselves. Nearly every day the paper screams about more bodies, more death, more secrets, more conspiracy. He’s offered himself and his services to James’s cause more than once, and more than once James has smiled his rueful boy’s smile and said “No, thanks; I don’t want you dragged into it.”
Really James is too good to say Lupin, mate, what you are doesn’t matter to me, but it matters to them, and they can’t accept it. It makes him sad and proud to know that they don’t want him to face that hateful exposure again. So he reads the paper, and he keeps an eye out; but mostly he trusts James, and he trusts Lily, and he trusts their better world.
The life isn't boring. He enjoys his work, and the hours he sets (for himself) and the superior he answers to (no-one). He has time to travel, sparingly, sleeping upright in the train car. The ocean was seen this way, and the ruins in Rome. Souvenirs are still too expensive; he therefore takes none except for the pleased surprise written on James and Lily's faces when he makes an appearance.
The things people bring to a charmbreaker are varied as the facets of a quartz outcropping. Remus has a locket in the back of the shop, belonging to a young muggle lady. Her ill-tempered wizard beau had charmed the locket to display his smiling face whenever she opened it; but it had been deployed at an unfortunate moment, as another young man declared his affections for her. Now the locket flies apart at socially crippling times and screams a string of invectives fit for sailors and goatherders. It’s a beautiful piece of work when silent, engraved with silvery doves and set with a small diamond, not something to be parted with lightly, and therefore worth the cost of disenchantment.
And here’s where Remus’s unlicensed status becomes the selling point. Typically, Ministry-registered charmbreakers are required to make periodic reports; and any interaction with the muggle world is typed in triplicate and monitored by a separate department. This young non-magical woman was referred by a friend who wishes to keep it as discreet as possible. What Remus offers is cheap, confidential service; with a charming smile added in for free.
The customers think him dangerous, more dangerous at least than the dark objects they tend to bring in wrapped in old blankets. Instead of prejudice he recieves total disinterest for his well-being. Much to be preferred.
Once or twice a year he gets a rock with a note thrown through his window, WERWULF GO HOM or an equivalent phrase scrawled on. Where they believe his actual home to be is beyond his imagining. He’s modified a pixie-trap in an attempt to snare the culprit and has had some modest success. In general the regular money more than makes up for the harassment; as does the satisfying sound of the rock-thrower being caught and dangled upside-down.
He's finishing up inventory one afternoon, when the bell at the edge of his desk jingles ever so softly. Someone has stepped across his welcome mat. He looks up at the front door, which is shut and shuttered, and realizes that he has locked the door but not yet turned over the closed sign. A flick of his wand remedies that, and he calls out in his most apologetic voice, “Sorry, we’re closed. Back for business at eight tomorrow morning.”
“Remus Lupin.” the man calls out, muffled through the glass and wood. “I’ve come to see Remus Lupin.”
“And you’ve found him, but we’re closed.” Remus repeats; but an odd and nearly imperceptible shift has taken place in the wards around the door. Having formed them, he can feel their subtle crackling around something out of place, unwelcome. He pushes out of his chair and goes to the door, lighting on the wards along the floor and wall as he walks. They spring up in his wake, alive. He draws his wand. “Is it important ?”
“Very much so.” Remus sees movement through the gaps in the shuttered glass. He is certain, now, that this is no late customer. Better to bring him inside, onto home ground, where the wards will hold.
“Alright, alright.” He unlocks the door and steadies himself. “Come on in.” The doorknob turns, the late afternoon sunlight makes a sharp slant into the coolness of the shop. A hand is extended, either in greeting; or as a warning, a plea. The door swings shut. Remus breathes in and tastes the bitter tang of sweat and decay in the back of his mouth- a hunted man, this one. He‘s tall, with a rounded, well-scrubbed grin and sandy hair. His cloak is of poor quality.
And then something happens; the air seems to hesitate around his face, and there is the metallic smell of a glamour in the air. Arrested in surprise, Remus watches as the ruddy, weathered hand slips out of its shape and into the smooth, slim aristocratic hand-
-of Regulus Black.
Remus catches an unforgivable in his throat and falls to one knee, slamming his hand onto the board floor so hard that it breaks the skin. The wards are of sturdy pattern; and he’s taken the care, over several months, to painstakingly strengthen them using his own blood. Considering the contents, it's proven remarkably volatile. As his bruised palm touches the floor, a blast of furious energy shoots out of a sigil now illuminated, towards the man before him; it knocks him backwards and he stumbles into a pile of books. Before he can utter a countercurse he’s wandless and immobilized.
Noted, admired and teased alternately for his use of the language, Remus cannot find a way to speak. “Murderer.” he chokes out at last. “Murderer.”
Lily tells him in the kitchen, when she’s certain that James is really gone to the market; hands jammed into his jacket pockets, his eyebrows knitted in baffled, undirected fury. She closes the curtains and sits in the chair beside his, and takes his hands in hers.
“It was three weeks ago.” she starts, hanging her head. A lock of hair drifts down across her eyes, and she looks scared and young, as he’s seen her once before. “He came to us afraid, almost shaking. He and James, they locked themselves into the study and yelled for ages; and when it was over they were hugging, trying not to look like they were crying. They’d forgiven each other, finally, the pig-heads. He was still nervous, though, and he kept opening and shutting the cupboard doors, and walking around. He wouldn’t take his shoes off. I told him- I told him I was going to have a baby, and James was so proud, and he was laughing and everything, so excited. We were happy, and I know that things aren’t right for you two, but I thought that day, that maybe things would change, that maybe now they finally could.”
It’s here that Lily breaks down into tears; and Remus gets down on his knees and wraps his arms around her. He wishes for a moment that he were James, or the mother they took from her, or somebody who knew how to love her better. She’s too thin even now, to possibly be sustaining the life growing inside, though she is the strongest person he’s ever known.
“I’m sorry.” he says into her hair. “I’m sorry, it’s my fault, I couldn’t forgive.”
“No, no, it’s all of our faults. It’s all of our faults. We were children, and we were afraid. We didn’t think of anything.” Lily rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “You know that he went home after school, with his brother ? To that horrible place ? He’d had nowhere else to go. It’s so awful. I really thought that it would be over at last, everything, be fixed. Stupid. And then we got the news, James and I- that he’d gone missing.”
“Missing ?” The blood in his veins slows, thickens into syrup. “Missing ?”
“Gone, vanished; we thought he’d gone into hiding, we remembered how skittish he’d been. It came out at last, that he’d been on our side, working for us, even though. Even though. And then that scene in the street- Remus, there was blood everywhere, not even a body. Just blood- and things. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know how to tell you. I know that you didn’t only hate him, like everyone thinks- I know about the letters. I know that you missed him.”
“Lily.” He feels a sharp stab of disgust for himself, like an edge of shattered bone pressing against his chest. Hatred for the stupid boy, the fifteen-year-old judge and jury, who couldn’t forgive his best friend. The stupid man who wasted time. “Lily, tell me.”
“Sirius is dead.” she says; and the bone goes through his heart. “He’s dead, and his own brother is the one that did it.”
There are worse things than death: blighted love, betrayal, enslavement to an evil cause, loss of one's will. A catalog of sins and sorrow. Remus knows them all, the wicked things that foolish men leave behind to seal their tombs, not wishing to be disturbed; not realizing that the price they pay for safety will be their very souls.
He's considered the endless varieties of torment available for the brother-killer, the man who finished the job that he himself started. Between one bottle of Ogden's Guilt and another, he's imagined himself binding Regulus's mind to a stone and hurling it into the ocean to rot, feeding his body to spiders, trapping him in a living death. It worried him, the detail of these fantasies. But now that the choices are before him, there isn't any question. Only death will do. Real death, simple death, old death; Remus wants him banished out of memory and out of breath, plunged into the good earth and made silent. He wants to forget. Wants him forgotten.
It's hard to be looking into that face, which is so like the other. He sees the same pride boxed in at the angles of the jaw, the large intelligent eyes; but he remembers humor and easy grace and gentleness, where there's none.
"I'm going to kill you." he says, and Regulus visibly blanches. "You came looking for a monster, and so you've found him. Are you stronger now from what you've done, higher in your lord's esteem ?"
Regulus's mouth is moving slightly, the soft scrape of tongue against teeth. He's trying to speak. Remus can see that it isn't a curse. It could be mine... remind.. behind. Behind you. The crack of apparition sounds behind his ears; Remus turns, raising his wand, as the dust settles on Sirius's shoulders. There's not even time for a thought of defense. Remus falls quietly as a hex hits his chest, asleep before he touches the ground.
Sirius looks well, for a dead man, though his left hand seems somehow shriveled and grey. On his right hand he bears a strange ring.
Remus doesn't dream.
Instead he wakes into a living one; his back is jutted against something hard and sharp, like a book's spine, or a ruler. His cheek is pressed against a sheet of parchment. Above him, all is bright light. Sirius's face appears like an eclipse; and with the shadows collecting along the ridge of his brow, down his nose, to his narrow, handsome chin; he could be thirty, or thirteen.
"Pads." Remus is suprised to hear that ancient word not forgotten, nor the easiness dimmed by time. "Pads, you're dead."
"Maybe so." Sirius stretches out a hand, which Remus takes, and helps him to his feet. "And maybe not. It'd keep the grocery bills down." They stand facing each other, Remus still a little taller, a little more slight. This is no imperious, no specter, no trick. From the fall of his shoulders to the nervous tic of the left foot, this is the authentic item, and very much alive. Remus casts a glance at Regulus, who despite the full-body bind manages to convey both disgust and boredom.
"I don't understand."
"I know." Sirius smiles, looking very tired. "He's alright, I vouch for him. The murder was a fake, for cover, we planned it together. You can release him if you want; otherwise he'll be a frightful baby about it later."
"No, I don't think so." Remus feels the chill creeping back into his chest, and almost imperceptibly takes a step backwards. "You'll have to give me more than that."
There is a knot in the board below his feet, and Sirius seems to be staring at it. From inside his pocket, he withdraws his hand; it looks like the work of a fire, or mummification. The flesh is twisted and the nails peeling, and at the crest of his middle knuckle there is the sheen of bone.
"Pretty, right ?" he shakes his head. "You'll want the short version of this, because the long version- well. Reg and I have been working on something for a bit; but we've hit a wall. We came here for your help, if you're willing. Have you ever heard of a thing called a horcrux ?"
Sirius was always clever with words; he could say in a wink and a glance what took other people the better part of an essay to get across. He doesn't spare the details now. The smell of death lingers in the air as he speaks. The full-body bind is dropped, and Regulus dusts off his backside, swearing in Latin and casting Sirius hateful looks.
"Even-tempered, logical. Right." He sniffs condescendingly in Remus's direction. "Your friend's got talent at least, which we'll need."
We're not friends, Remus almost says out loud. They aren't, they couldn't be, not with all the distance of years between them, and that night still dangling, unfinished. But the arguments seem strangely pointless. He is absurdly grateful to find that Sirius is alive.
"I don't know that I can help you. I'm no expert. And you've destroyed one without me."
"Yes, and that turned out so very well." Regulus seems on the verge of stamping his feet. "Look, this wasn't my idea. It was his. He's convinced that you'll make it work. So, Sirius- this is up to you. I'm going to get the item. When I come back, he'd better either be joining up, or dead."
"Excuse me ?"
"Nothing personal. But this is goddam serious business, and I'm not leaving a trail." He nods, and gives Remus what might almost be a friendly smile.
Regulus disapparates; and they are left alone.
"It's been hard, not telling. I'm terrible at excuses." A nervous laugh comes out of his mouth, and he hides his cracking, scabbed cheeks with a hand. It's Sirius who takes a hand in his, so deftly that it's almost unconscious, warming the bandaged fingers.
"You really are," he says. "Nobody's odd enough to have fourteen grandmothers, all dying at monthly intervals. But I'm glad that I know now, that you- yeah."
"That I ?"
"That you trust me."
Remus thinks about all the things that they've done since they met- the sneakoscope raids, the pilfering of trifle and sausages, the time that Sirius charmed the night sky to shine on their dormitory ceiling, and the thousands of passed notes that got him through History of Magic. When he told Sirius what he was, he didn't run, or shout. He just said that it was fine, and would he like another bandage on his ear ? Did it hurt much, had he ever eaten a rabbit ?
"I do trust you," he says, and means it completely. "I always will."
"What you're doing is right," he says at last, when the breaking point of silence seems to be reached. If Remus has been looking for a way to help, this is it, his way into the war. It's odd to think that only Sirius keeps an absolute faith in his usefulness.
"I believe so."
"I'll help you."
"Thanks."
"Look, Pa- Sirius. I didn't read the letters." Remus says quietly, and Sirius doesn't look at him. Instead he looks at the floor again, and the window sill, and the stack of disturbed scrolls hanging gamely onto the desk. "I didn't read them," he repeats. "But I know exactly what they'd say."
It's as if there are two shadows drifting between them, listless and circling; as they step forward into each other's orbits, they seem to disappear. Sirius manages a grin.
"Good, then. Saves us some apologies."
He hopes that Sirius will be able to forgive him for his foolish pride and stubborness. For a moment Remus can see the darkness pierced, the tide turned, the world put sideways on its head. The axis righted. They are not standing together, and they are not standing apart.
There's been a rhythm to this- this losing and finding again, this series of losses and gains. He can't be a child at school any longer; any more than Sirius can play the guitar. They fucked up somewhere along the way, when they were meant to keep a steady path. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. He isn't sorry. Forgiveness doesn't arrive only when a thing is undone. That would miss the point.
Remus has unraveled things so well, for such a very long time; but at this moment he is beginning to see how some things might be put back together.
We face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.
R.A.B.
S.R.B.
R.J.L.