Fic: Lethe and Mnemosyne (part 1/4)
Title: Lethe and Mnemosyne
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
A month after they moved in, Sirius’s cigarettes disappeared. In itself this wasn’t unusual, as he was prone to losing them to the murderous and possibly sentient couch along with loose change and lighters and memorably a pack of bubblegum-flavored Muggle condoms which they didn’t need but which he’d thought would be hilarious (it was); sometimes houses and the things in them developed a personality or a certain malicious quality nurtured by magic, spun into being by the very molecular threads of it imparting life where there wasn’t any. Already their coffeepot had begun complaining about the quality of Remus’s coffee and the Muggle rotary telephone in the hallway sometimes rang just to say hello, which all made Sirius wonder what things might be like in ten years, when the walls knew them and the threshold of the doorway waited for them to come home.
Upstairs he checked his nightstand and then Remus’s just in case. Everyone who thinks they know anything will tell you that you don’t really know a person until you’ve lived with them, which is a fucking lie, but more importantly he’d known Remus since they were both eleven years old, and sometime around fifth year his habit of stealing Sirius’s clothes out of the laundry had taken on an endearing sexiness even when Sirius knew he was going to meet Dearborn in them later on, and thus he reasoned there wasn’t much they could do to truly despise each other-roommate-wise, at least. Several years of waking up naked in various outdoor locales with each other’s blood on their teeth and occasionally puking together in the milky-blue rime of dawn had also cured them of a certain amount of mystique where the other was concerned. Once you’ve told someone about your family’s extensive collection of magical torture instruments in the basement (still in use for select medical procedures) and let them throw up on your feet, there’s really no going back, and the golden umbilical thread of it stretched ineffably between them was such that Sirius would never have wanted to.
Still-his cigarettes weren’t ensconced anywhere between the cushions and Remus didn’t smoke menthols. He’d been rolling his own since seventh year because it was cheaper, and although he’d often grab Sirius by the back of the head and kiss him after he’d just taken a drag he said they burned his throat. Sirius himself had offered on numerous occasions to buy them for him among a great many other things, truly he would have blown half his inheritance happily on anything Remus wanted just to see the smile unabstracting on his face, but such offers were usually met with glacial rebuffs or an affronted retreat back into the impenetrable nautilus shell that was his tortured soul, or more likely his bruised ego, coaxed out again only with an apology and/or food. That had changed as so many things had and so many things hadn’t in the wild whirlwind rush since they’d started fucking a year ago, but Remus had always been fairly adamant about hating everyone else’s cigarettes as some perverse point of pride.
“Did you take my cigarettes?” Sirius asked him anyway.
“Why would I take your cigarettes.”
“Maybe you finally gave up the charade of extreme pretension. Or maybe you lost your rollies, I don’t know.”
Remus was sitting on the couch trying to untangle a strand of Christmas lights for the tree, which they’d just put up earlier that morning. Last year they hadn’t bothered with one but it seemed important now, given the permanence of having been in love for so much longer than they knew it and the steady disintegration of the reeling world, the cocktail of which was the impetus for their move all the way to Cornwall in the first place. The whole cottage smelled like pine and woodsmoke and the lavender they were growing on the windowsill for potion-brewing after the full moon, which Sirius had also taken to baking into shortbread in the sharpening cold weather; with everything unpacked it was almost disconcertingly domestic save for last night’s Ogden’s Old on the coffee table and the lone sad marijuana plant Disillusioned on the bookshelf, struggling under the collective weight of their dismal herbology skills. On the television a silent movie was playing, the sepia candle-flare flicker of the film giving the room a kind of submarinean glow.
“It’s not pretentious if you know what you’re doing,” said Remus, working out a knot in the cord. The moon was in two days and the wide brimming gyre of it seemed always to hum inaudibly to Remus’s bones like a primal tinnitus from which all the other pains fed and grew, slouched in on himself as if to push it deeper down. Sirius sat down next to him and rubbed his shoulders and his neck where he knew it hurt until he could feel him unsharpening, all the edges of him flowing back into Sirius’s hands as if he could really reach far enough inside to take the blossoming hurt of it away. “And your cigarettes taste like lighter fluid. Have you checked-”
“They’re not under the cushions although who fucking knows what happens to everything that falls in there. And I don’t hear you complaining when you’re yanking me down by the hair for a taste.”
“Yes, well. I like your mouth,” said Remus, smiling into it, as if that was some kind of revelation. Still, he didn’t always elucidate the quieter voices, or maybe the screamingly loud ones, so when he did Sirius committed them to the warp and weft of his memory with the fervor of a historian and spun them on repeat like a DJ with a stack of records. “We’ve got to get eggs later anyway and we’re nearly out of bread and your stupid Darjeeling. And if you were feeling especially festive I guess we could like, look for a cookbook or something.”
“You could buy me that Raincoats record,” said Sirius, pressing his thumbs into Remus’s spine notch by notch and feeling the tight spool of him shiver and melt, “if we’re getting into the jolly old spirit early this year. Don’t act like you weren’t just working your way up to ask me to cook you dinner.”
“I might’ve been but you’d do that anyway,” said Remus. That he was certain of it was either a testament to the all the miraculous, mutilated miles they’d come together or the burgeoning horrorshow of the world tearing away all certainties but the ones they found in the solidity of each other, depending on who you asked and when. Possibly it was both. In the spirit of it he leaned forward and kissed the top ladder-rungs of Remus’s spine down to the collar of his flannel, where he could feel the narrow strength of him thrumming like a love song in the spaces between his teeth. “Have you seen my Joan Baez records by the way? I can’t find them anywhere and I’d like to hope you’re not asshole enough to hide them under something disgusting in the cellar. You whine about them enough.”
Sirius laughed as if he was not indeed asshole enough to have entertained variations on that exact idea and had never in their entire history together complained loudly and frequently about Remus’s Joan Baez records. “I didn’t touch the things but I’ll buy you new ones if that’s what it takes so I have any chance of getting laid sometime in the near-ish future.”
“So selfless,” said Remus, slurring sweetly, “my bloody hero.” One of Sirius’s hands had strayed completely accidentally to his inner thigh and beneath it Remus pulled his knees apart. “I must’ve lost them in the move,” he said.
“Maybe they found their way to some ageing hippie in need of some protest songs for Christmas to go along with the bad incense and the dirty feet. Actually maybe that’s what you’ll end up like in another thirty years-it’s sort of sexy when you think about it. You with like, a huge beard and the uncombed Joplin look.”
“I could start teaching with Sibyll Trelawney. Part-Humans in Magical Society. The syllabus would just be me.” In lieu of better options Remus had been doing underpaid freelance writing and editing for textbooks and various magazines for a year, and pseudonymous reviews of bad punk tapes for obscure publications for even longer. Sirius loved them and often provided suggestions for crackpot false names.
“Burning palo santo and becoming one with nature and letting the kids bum cigarettes after class.”
“If you think making fun’s going to get you laid either,” said Remus as he took Sirius’s hand and pressed the palm of it between his legs, where he was already half-hard in his jeans, and as it turned out making fun did in fact get Sirius laid.
It was the first occasion they had any inkling that something was afoot but nothing much registered at the time except the fruit of Remus’s mouth and how their skin smelled like new snow and lavender, the winter light lancing golden through the single-paned windows and the sparse trees illuminating all the things that were theirs, the yearning that came from the places where their bodies touched. All of this would be important later as a sort of punchline in the hilarious cosmic joke that was the bullshit trajectory of their whole lives to date, strung along always like unwitting chess pieces in someone else’s apocalypse gamble. The next morning Sirius would remember none of it.
-
The cottage was a bright birdhouse of a thing set on the winding granite moor like a fixture of the ancient landscape itself, sloping gently from the roof to the stone foundation into the earth as if it had been born there with the heather and the bilberry tangles where it had crowned the wide bowl of the Cornish sky with the scattered cairns and the tors since time immemorial. In the yellow kitchen there was a woodstove they lit in the evenings and a stone fireplace in the living room they’d only just gotten connected to the Floo network, where they could see the lake a mile away from the unshuttered front windows where the hills curled up greenly beyond the stone fence. Their bedroom was a loft above the kitchen with a big cloud-fuzzy window on the far wall and a treacherous ladder leading down to the stone tile; they’d strung up two strands of round Muggle lights between the walls which they spelled back into place whenever they went up or down, a necessary safeguard given that there was neither a door nor railing and both of them were likely to bust their heads open on the floor and/or fry themselves on the woodstove while drunk or trying to navigate down the ladder to piss in the night. Outside the kitchen window Sirius had hung a birdfeeder, and in the mornings when they made coffee they would watch the birds flit happily back and forth from the clothesline to the feeder to the trees, finding in the nearness of it all an echo of sweetness he normally only got from music or a certain pitch of laughter he pulled out of Remus, resonant as magic.
Certain of their friends had been moving away from London for nearly a year, eager to escape any number of spectres-the fear, the confinement, the death, the past, the present, themselves-and in autumn of ’79, after funerals and nightmare flights late at night and a series of Order-delegated infiltrations where they increasingly fought for their lives (Remus landed in St. Mungo’s after one of them) they started talking about getting out of the city for a while as a pseudo-vacation from the grief, as if a change of scenery might help compensate for the fact that they had become ancient seemingly over the course of a year and a half. That summer James and Lily had moved into a small house in Essex and Peter was trying to hammer the estate he’d inherited in Cheshire into something presentable; Frank and Alice had eloped for some incomprehensible reason (they’d be divorced by twenty-three, he and Remus wagered unkindly) and taken off to Cambridge, Vance and Macdonald had left for St. Andrews and Yorkshire respectively, Shacklebolt had headed for Leicester, even Dearborn had scattered into Shropshire, which was possibly the most un-Dearborn place in the whole of the green earth. McKinnon and Meadowes were still living together in Somers Town and unlikely to leave, which left Sirius and Remus, the other common knowledge couple whispered about after Order business had concluded, dreaming scandalously of playing house in the countryside.
Dumbledore had approached them in October on behalf of a friend of his who was looking to rent out a cottage in Cornwall way out on the moor with a striking stone’s-throw view of the lake. Remus had grown up in the West Country, in an old crooked farmhouse in Somerset with an abandoned apple orchard surrounding the backyard in a crescent; as a teenager Sirius had fallen in love with it while visiting in the summers when they would all four take long walks and leave their apple cores for the birds or swim in the pond or go to the Muggle record store or the arcade in town. Down by the river Remus had taught him to fish, and both of them sometimes helped his mother with dinner while James and Peter looked through Remus’s records upstairs, Remus out of a sense of obligation, Sirius out of fascination with Muggle kitchen appliances and also with Remus’s mother, who he loved, who often played Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Ida Cox while she was cooking, feeling jealous and entranced. At the time it seemed ideal, even magical in the cosmic sense, and later they would realize that accepting all of this at face value from Albus “Ulterior Motive” Dumbledore, renowned puppetmaster extraordinaire, was mistakes number one through eight hundred, but for now, all of that was in the future. They said yes. The rest was history.
Immediately after Hogwarts they had moved together into a two-bedroom flat in Kentish Town, ostensibly to pool their resources and split rent between them but mostly because they hardly knew how to be without each other. Between his inheritance from his Uncle Alphard and his starting salary as a junior cursebreaker Sirius didn’t need help with rent and often paid in full anyway, which usually prompted Remus-potions stockboy, bakery assistant, hack astrologist, post office owl cage cleaner, freelance pest wrangler, Cambridge reject, professional bitter stoner permanently attached to the very meat of Sirius’s heart and soul et cetera by some manifest spiritus mundi-to blow an inadvisable chunk of his bank account on ingredients for a lavishly rich dinner or tickets to noise shows in retaliation, or otherwise hide the weed and not speak to him for three days. He had begun to suspect around fifth year that his increasingly obsessive feelings for Remus were not actually brotherly, or not only brotherly, especially after he walked in on him with Dearborn in a disused third-floor classroom in the brittle-boned January of that year; he’d known what Remus looked like naked since they were twelve but he had not known the taste of his mouth, the warm hallowed space between his hipbones, his arms reaching, his face open and drunk with wanting. This became several hysterical magnitudes worse when they moved in together: at first they had both shared Sirius’s bed because Remus hadn’t yet bought one, and although they slept top to tail for the duration their long limbs did often wander.
It necessitated a truly humiliating amount of masturbation in the hallway bathroom late at night, which didn’t stop when Remus got his own bed as it had not stopped since the idea had stuck in his head like a burr sometime well before the episode in fifth year. He went out with Remus or on his own and pulled men and sometimes women before he gave up completely; he envied Remus his certainty during their talk after the Dearborn incident (he hadn’t exited the room as discreetly as he had thought), telling Sirius with a wild and fractious edge-of-the-bed nervousness not unlike the revelatory confrontation in second year that he wanted men and only men, his hands clenched between his knees to hide how badly they were shaking, bird-boned, ready to cut and run or maybe wanting a fistfight. Understanding the same of himself took Sirius the remainder of his Hogwarts years and some fraught time after, plus a whole fucking lot of disappointing orgasms. Combined with his preoccupation with Remus like an exalted illness that had overtaken him it felt royally pathetic; if he really applied himself during his drunkest agony soliloquies he could blame his parents for that, too.
Remus never brought men home but Sirius knew he spent nights away and suspected strongly that he still hooked up with Dearborn from time to time when he came home smelling like the wood-heady cloves Dearborn smoked. On those nights Sirius got stoned in bed listening to too much Talking Heads and Magazine, searingly jealous and not as guilty about it as he maybe ought to have been, reading Rimbaud and composing scathing verbal eviscerations in his head for the next time Dearborn blatantly hit on Remus in front of him at Order functions, but as he never wrote them down he always forgot everything in the throttling hangover wreckage of morning, save for select bits of genius that usually ran along the lines of fuck you andvery very and if you really cared about him you wouldn’t make him listen to fucking Pink Floyd all the time and I’ve seen it and it’s like the size of my ring finger actually. That last one was slightly cruel: Dearborn’s cock was a little bigger than Sirius’s ring finger, as Sirius had discovered when he slept with him just out of Hogwarts to see if he was some kind of sexual messiah and if so maybe he could pick up a few things. It wasn’t the worst sex he’d ever had-that was with Leandra Sapworthy, who kicked him bodily out of her bed after a graduation party, hissing Are you a fucking queer or something after a detached five minutes of attempted fucking followed by thirty seconds of attempted fingering, which he laughed about hysterically in the shower-but sexual messiah Dearborn resoundingly was not, and Sirius was left wondering, insanely, unendingly, fever-hungry, whether Remus had ever had a good blowjob in his life.
Sometime in early September of ’78 he’d gone to see Lily at the Lambeth flat she was sharing with James, looking to cajole information and/or advice via a bottle of Scotch, though things veered off course almost immediately when he ended up waiting on the steps until she got off her shift at Gringotts and let him in. She seemed genuinely happy to see him, if mildly suspicious, and set about making Scotch coffee while Sirius overcame the needling splinter of guilt at having sought her out on her own for the first time for such selfish reasons. Nonetheless it didn’t stop him from bringing the conversation swiftly around to what, exactly, Remus had been doing lately, and had she seen Remus lately, and did Remus seem a bit morose and preoccupied lately, but he hadn’t finished the sentence before Lily slammed the coffeepot down, rattling the dishes in the cupboard and sloshing water from the counter to the floor, and fixed him with a copper-green glare that would’ve done a basilisk proud; her patronus would change within the year, he decided.
“Oh my God,” said Lily, her jaw working, yanking down her red braid where she’d pinned it up that morning, “you’re just, you’re fucking unbelievable, Black, you know that? Yes, I’ve seen Remus, and yes, fine, I’ll tell you the same thing I told him, which is that if you two want me to be your confidant-cum-shrink-cum-advice columnist, you’re damn well going to start paying me like one. I’ve got better things to do than change Remus’s nappies 24/7 and I’m sure as fuck not going to do it for you.”
“No one ever changed my nappies, the nanny used magic,” said Sirius, the smile shriveling a dead insect when he saw the look on Lily’s face. He never knew what murderous was before he met Lily; even so much sorrow later, after he’d fled people who were trying to kill him and after his hands had learned the shapes of spells to kill them too, he would sometimes look into their livid white faces in the thick of it and think, coward, coward, you don’t know a fucking thing. “I mean I’m sorry, I just figured-”
“That I’m a woman and I’m sympathetic to your plight so you’d come ply me with Scotch and your woe-is-me romantic ineptitude and leave as soon as you got what you wanted because clearly I think of nothing but men and their idiot problems,” she said. “You never would’ve come here and played James the same way. Neither of you.”
Sirius thought about arguing for a single split second but it was true. He’d never told James (whether it was any of her business or not, Lily was generally more inclined to say something outright if she noticed, which she had, very quietly, once or twice), and he knew Remus hadn’t either, though James had suspected it of Remus since third year and had doubtlessly heard rumors about both of them in school; sometimes he joked about it in an off-pitch way that wasn’t really a joke, and Sirius never knew how to feel about it and didn’t think James did either. After everything, after childhood and scintillating adolescence and love and pain and death and forgiveness and revelation and and life life life, this was something Sirius did not-could not-share with James.
“Alright. I’m a prick and I really am sorry. Remus is a prick too. You can keep the bottle and I’ll pick up a curry for you if you like, or if you want to scare James I’ll even play along when he gets home and pretend we’re fucking around.”
“Tempting, but let’s wait until he’s really pissed me off for that,” said Lily. “You’d think two people who live together could manage to talk to each other once in a while without expecting the nearest woman to clean up all their messes for them. Get me the milk, would you?”
“Long day in the gold mines?”
“These creeps came in three times on behalf of that pureblood club, the one in Chelsea? Wanting to make enormous withdrawals and giving me this horseshit about ‘expanding their influence in the public sphere.’ You know they’re all just sitting around jerking it now that Lucius Malfoy and Yaxley and all those fucks got in the Ministry. Then there was a security breach down in the catacombs that turned out to be a niffler. And like, a thousand million tourists.”
“You really need to start doing the drive-thru thing like at Muggle banks,” he said, pouring an altogether inappropriate amount of Scotch into both their mugs, “those things are wild. I cashed a check at one of them and went through it on foot because I didn’t have the bike and they thought I was weird as hell but it was incredible. They could do it like, on broomsticks, with the suction tunnels Muggles use.”
“You are weird as hell,” said Lily. “But I don’t think anyone in Merrie Olde Magical England is going to be incorporating Muggle ideas anytime soon.”
Lily had gotten into Oxford during their final term at Hogwarts but decided fairly quickly to take a year off to work for the then-fledgling Order of the Phoenix; that year off was looking increasingly likely to last indefinitely, and just a month earlier several professors had resigned over the university’s refusal to expand security measures in the wake of an attack on Muggleborn students. Still Lily rode her bicycle past the Westminster Society for Traditional Magic and spat on the lawn on the way to work every morning out of sheer spite. “Christ Lily, I used to have dinner with these types. They can’t even admit Muggle music is vastly superior to anything we’ve ever done and they’re all inbred at least eight times over and they think they’re meant to inherit the world,” said Sirius. “It’d be nice if we could have a single iota of certainty about anything whatsoever lately.”
“Wouldn’t it just,” said Lily, and passed him the sugar.
September shivered into October and then November blue, the trees showing their bare-boned branches through the shroud of fog outside the flat while he and Remus either argued over nothing or talked about nothing and mostly sort of avoided each other in the same rooms as they settled into an awkward unknowing. One morning Remus came back with a hickey on his pale neck where he’d left his collar unbuttoned and stared back at Sirius when he caught him looking. After his explosive and deservedly fruitless trip to see Lily both of them seemed to sense that something had shifted in the patchwork tectonic anatomy they shared between them; when he was Padfoot sometimes he swore he could catch the scent of it in the moon-mornings, omen-sharp like gunpowder or distant smoke, both of them bruised and naked and too loopy with unsleeping to remember their cornered-animal unease. They took turns in the bath and he rubbed runic patterns into Remus’s back while he puked and after they’d both gone to bed in the rush of dawn Sirius stared into space for hours, worrying that the careful, timeworn net they’d woven through years of friendship-mended so many times, sewn stronger, threaded deeper, scarred over-had been irreparably damaged by their gutless emotional bullshit. He took to leaving his door cracked slightly open while the moon sucked the light from the stars into its widening mouth, a thin bolt of nighttime gloaming underneath like hope, but Remus never came to him.
Sitting on the couch in Cornwall reading record reviews after they’d gotten home from a Muggle movie in the village-the soles of their boots had stuck to the theater floor-it seemed almost distant. So much smoldering what-if to chew on in the dead of night, so much sturm und drang over words and phrases and looks and touches and what it meant that Remus slept in Sirius’s shirts and kept playing “Ball and Chain.” In the sunlight of retrospect it seemed very obvious and yet still against all odds, as if the only place it could logically have led was to their couch with his long legs spread out audaciously in front of him and Remus’s feet in his lap, the colorful rugs on the wood floors, the mushroom pot pie they’d attempted in the oven, the dirty dishes in the sink and the scattered records and their bed piled with dark flannel and a few scarves the size of blankets, all the pieces them shoved into every ecstatic corner. Time seemed frozen here, even when they came home with blood on their clothes or half-sick with anger or fear, which was maybe what started it all. The past portends the future, however much we pretend otherwise. You could never truly get away from where you’d been.
-
Two days after the full moon Sirius woke to an infernal nightmare slamming that was still there when he blinked the dreams out of his eyes in the dark. Remus had a hand around his shoulder and was shaking him harshly in case he wasn’t yet awake; he was a much lighter sleeper than Sirius although both of them usually woke at least once in the night since they had learned late in ’78 what it meant to run literally for the sake of life or death. He sat up fast with his heart beating under Remus’s clammy hand on his bare shoulder and reached for his wand on the nightstand but the noise stopped suddenly after a shattering violent blast that shook the bones of the whole house, quiet hanging shrill on the air, as if it had never been at all. Beyond the muzzy yellow string of lights separating the bedroom from a bone-breaking fall onto the kitchen tile nothing moved.
“What,” hissed Remus, still clutching at Sirius’s arm, “what was that?”
“How did they get past the wards,” Sirius said. His breath was coming too quickly and there was cold sweat on his brow. “We should send a patronus, but-” His voice was hoarse with sleep and the fear was rising in a nauseous wave up his throat. “Do you hear-”
“No,” said Remus, not letting go, “no, nothing.”
“Let me,” said Sirius, getting out of bed and struggling into the wrinkled t-shirt lying on the floor, “you’ve got your wand?”
Together they descended the narrow ladder into the kitchen, where Sirius turned on the lights and peered cautiously out the window into the black nothing-night while Remus checked the bathroom; straining his ears he could hear the wall clock in the living room and even the alarm clock on Remus’s nightstand in the bedroom above but no whisper of movement or sound crossed his senses. Before they got to the living room from the cramped precipice of the hallway Remus turned all the lights on with a spell muttered under his breath, and already the vicious fearful thing he got about him when he was cornered was in his every jagged movement, but he didn’t jump when Sirius put a hand between his shoulderblades and spread the fingers out in a nervous wave as they stepped forward together, aware in unspoken terror-transfer that their guts could be painting the walls in the next three seconds if they weren’t careful.
But-nothing. They shook the curtains and shined their wands up the chimney and Remus pulled the cushions off the couch-Sirius’s cigarettes still weren’t there but a key he didn’t recognize and three sickles were-and looked up the branches of their lopsided Christmas tree. Fear and swelling panic gave way to bewilderment; he cranked open one of the windows and stuck his head out to listen, feeling the blunt edge of the moorland winds slice against his face until Remus yanked the collar of his shirt and pulled him back inside by the scruff of his neck, rolling the window shut again.
“You suicidal shithead. What are you doing,” he said, trying to look livid but mostly just looking scared. Sirius could almost feel his hackles raising. “If there is something out there you’re going to get your throat ripped out just showing it like that. You’re a dog and you still don’t even know that.”
“Well I can’t hear anything. If someone was out there and didn’t Apparate I might’ve heard something, don’t be daft.”
“If they’d Apparated we would’ve heard it. We’d have felt.”
“Yes.”
“The wards,” said Remus, touching the tip of his wand to the edge of the ceiling where the spell was illuminated in spiderwebbed blue ink, the walls made of words. “These are fine. Would you-I’ll get the kitchen, just check the bedroom, would you?”
Sirius did, but immediately Remus followed him through the kitchen and stood at the bottom of the ladder, ready to leap up if need be. The walls glowed blue-veined like glacial sculptures when Sirius touched them, murmuring voltaic under his fingertips; through the curtain he could see just beyond the stone border in the low lemon-drop moonlight where the ancient oak tree on the path leading to the disused barn was shivering in the wind with a spindly hunger, the claw of it creeping sickly shadows across the lawn.
“Alright up here,” he said. Hovering at the bottom of the ladder Remus stepped aside to let him back down, his green eyes big with unslept red underneath. “We’ll have to check outside, and no, I know, I know, I’m not going out there right now so get that look off your face. Although I think whoever it was is gone. Maybe they were lost.”
“We don’t even have neighbors,” said Remus, warily, which was right. The nearest other house was three miles away down the gravel road, the closest village six. “Who’d be out here wandering around on the wild and windy moors at,” he paused to look at the clock, “almost four in the morning?”
“Very Wuthering Heights when you think about it. I always figured I’d do that to you-drive you mad, be with you always via endless haunting to the end of your days, all that. You’d make a good Heathcliff.”
“It kind of loses its potency when all I’d want is for you to haunt my every step. Knowing both of us we’d be trying to have ritual sex with ghosts,” said Remus, though he was smiling lithely. “Besides I think we’re both Heathcliff.”
“I’m probably more likely to slam my head against a tree on purpose out of ravaging unendurable love.”
“Funny.”
“I thought so. If we really tried we could probably outdo both of them.”
“You don’t think it could’ve been an animal?”
“I don’t know what kind of animal would do that,” said Sirius, trying to remember where lethifolds tended to congregate and not feeling any better at all.
“A-I don’t know, Sirius. Some sort of feral magic?”
“It sounded like something very solid to me,” said Sirius. He wondered if Remus thought it might be Greyback-he’d been spending more and more time infiltrating packs in the south both unaffiliated and aligned with Voldemort-though if it was Greyback he’d likely have left something dead on the doorstep or thrown it down the chimney and wouldn’t have cared about setting off all their wards. In ways it was easier to be a non-entity in the city than it was out here with no shield and no gauzy veil of light and concrete and sound to vanish into; he took Remus’s wrist, feeling the familiar time signature of his pulsebeat under his thumb. With all the lights in the house lit they went back to the living room and fixed the couch cushions.
Deep in his chest something had begun to tighten but he couldn’t place the feeling; it was the same spreading pinprick-pang that constricted sometimes after a fight or a colossal fuckup or something otherwise terrible had happened, or was about to happen, and he often wondered when he felt the burn of it if it was yet another genetic malady courtesy of his black blood-his Black blood. Wonderingly and perhaps naïvely he had always thought that part of himself could match Remus tear for tear: all of your life lived with the inexorable presence of another festering inside you not as a pleasure or a beloved twin but as your every fear scorching and screaming somewhere you could never reach. No one made potions for this. No one could spell it or cut it or love it away.
Listening to the ball-lightning crackle at the back of his neck he went to the front door, where he could feel it settle into the spaces between his spine-rungs like an itch. Trying not to let the feeling overcome him he took a breath and let it sift like a conduit into his fingertips and reached for the doorknob; it turned right through and the door came wide open with the cold shrill-glass wind and the moon-dimmed Cornish stars.
“Holy fuck,” said Remus. At the threshold Sirius pointed the light from his wand into the dark beyond the yard light but saw nothing except for the strange perpetual glow of the boathouse on the island at the very faraway center of the lake, and when he stepped back inside and locked the door tight the magic had diffused in a static shudder down his spine.
“I locked it,” he said, feeling his stomach drop out. They’d gone for a short walk in the twilight gold after he’d gotten off work and when they’d come home Sirius had locked the door behind them. “I know I locked it.”
“I saw you do it,” said Remus, fear in it again, “before we started the fire, we brought some wood in and then you locked it, I-Jesus-I was watching you because you said you secretly liked my awful folksy Baez a little bit.”
“First minute there’s any hint of light at all we have to Floo the old man. And I like it when you sing it all under your breath while you’re attempting cleaning spells or applying for jobs that don’t deserve you, there’s just, there’s a massively sexy difference, Moony. I’ll be happy to explain it when my guts don’t feel like someone just jumped rope with them.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re tired and you thought we might die five minutes ago.”
“No, I’m saying it because it’s true and it’s in like my top twenty favorite things you do, along with the thing where you try so hard not to laugh at my bad jokes but you always do. You’re so easy.”
“I’ll hold you to that. Coming from you it’s practically a proposal.”
“Please do,” said Sirius. “Do you want to just stay down here with me? There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep and I’m still not sure I’m not going to send a patronus to Dumbledore, it’s not like he’s never woken us up for nothing at least five times before.”
“Let’s hold off til morning. D’you want some whiskey?”
Sirius did, and after they checked that the back door was still locked they turned off the lights and ensconced themselves on the couch with the afghan they kept draped across the back of it and their coffee cup whiskey, leaving the lamp at the end table on. Around five Remus dozed off on Sirius’s chest while some old black and white movie was playing on mute, his too-long limbs and his coppery hair and his eyelids fluttering with unquiet dreams, all of him wound around Sirius like ivy vines; occasionally he talked in his sleep, just a word or a hallucinatory phrase, which would’ve been a welcome distraction from the feeling that someone was watching them, peering through the windows or standing in the darkened mouth of the kitchen, following the runic movement of his hand on Remus’s back and in his hair for whatever secret could be found there. A few times he turned his head towards the doorway expecting to find someone staring but of course nothing was there.
They got up before dawn having slept miserably and made coffee and slightly crusty scrambled eggs with tomato and mushroom and goat cheese though neither of them was very hungry. As soon as the sky lightened enough for it they went outside and checked the wards around the stone gate and the border, which were as intact and undisturbed as they were when they had cast them more than a month ago, the same day they moved in. When they looked at the front door they found nothing-not even a scratch where it had been beaten hard enough to rattle the whole cottage, so that it might as well have been a shared nightmare.
Way off in the distance from the doorway he could see the funny phosphorescent window light of the island boathouse. He was not sure how he had never noticed before, but it had the uncanny feeling of an eye staring, like a lighthouse looking impotently but faithfully out to sea or an animal waiting hidden in the trees for prey.
“Do you think anyone lives in that thing?” he asked Remus, jerking his head towards the lake while they examined the windows and the bright paint-chipped shutters.
“According to Dumbledore, no,” said Remus, but his brow furrowed slightly. He was wearing his blue thrift store coat and Sirius’s fisherman’s sweater and the red wool scarf he’d had since Hogwarts, which made him look like a man cobbled together haphazardly but extremely appealingly from a deranged sewing machine. “Were all the lights on like that when we moved in?”
“I don’t remember,” said Sirius. The wind blew his tangled dark hair in his eyes and when he blinked he could see the milky afterimage gleam of it like an evil omen.
When they crouched down on the stone of the fireplace to Floo Dumbledore the old man was immediately fascinated if strangely unsurprised by the ordeal and knelt down to better see them, his cornflower eyes twinkling in a way Sirius had decided recently that he did not like after Remus had come home soaked through with blood from the botched job attempting a liaison with vampires who had already pledged themselves to Voldemort, and in St. Mungo’s needing a transfusion he’d still seen fit to ply information from Remus’s blue mouth. Particularly he picked at the exact moment when it had stopped, seeming not to care about the unbroken wards or the unlocked door or the fact that they had been scared shitless for hours or whether Death Eaters had developed cloaking spells of deadly magnitude; he asked if they had noticed anything else amiss, and Sirius, exhausted and impatient and tired of the cloak-and-dagger questioning, interrupted him for the first time he’d ever dared.
“We want to talk to the landlord,” he said, his voice running full-force over Dumbledore’s in a way that felt monumentally wrong. “If there’s something going on with the house we need to know about it. I want to know if he owns that old boathouse too, because it looks like someone’s staying in it and I can’t remember seeing anything over there before.”
“That boathouse has been unattended for decades,” said Dumbledore, “and the owner of your humble abode is currently ill. Winter is a difficult time for him, I’m afraid, which I believe I told you when I showed you the house on his behalf.”
Stupid stupid stupid idiot motherfucker, he told himself bludgeoningly. Never ever once had they actually met the landlord, an ailing Mr. Kilburn who lived at an unlikely-sounding address in Cumbria where they owled their rent checks; it had been Dumbledore who showed them the house when he heard they were looking and negotiated the lease. Yet again Sirius was thinking dramatically of Yeats-turning and turning in the widening gyre-and something cold in his gut slotted at last into place and bottomed out. This is how it is now, he thought, no silver lining without a cloud, no favor done without the exchange of blood, tugged along forever unwittingly by some unseen hand.
“Right,” said Sirius. Beside him he could see Remus’s clenched jaw, his rigid shoulders. “Is there anything else you want to deign to tell us, sir?”
Dumbledore looked at him shrewdly over the rim of his spectacles and Sirius braced himself against the ganglion-plucking of legilimency that never came. “Thirty-five years ago the occupants of your house disappeared inexplicably in the middle of dinner. There were several articles in the Prophet and an MLE investigation that led nowhere-Remus, if you are free today, you might head up to London and see what you can find in the archives-but it has been occupied several times since then with no apparent issue. I do wonder at the timing.”
“You think it’s something dark,” said Remus, a horrible acid edge in his voice, “and you knew.”
“I think it is one of many things, my dear boy. Certainly if it is dark it would be of profound interest and I daresay use to our enemy. I will check back this evening and the same time tomorrow morning if it suits you gentlemen.”
“It’s not like we have a choice,” said Sirius.
“On the contrary, Sirius. We always have a choice,” said Dumbledore, infuriatingly, just as Remus switched off the Floo and they stood up with soot in their hair.
“Well I guess I’m going to London,” said Remus. They looked at each other, angry and scared and exhausted with nauseous adrenaline but together. Sirius had ash on his cheek and his black jeans and Remus wiped at it with the sleeve of his flannel. “I’ll meet you back here at four?”
“Afraid to leave me alone for like ten minutes after work?”
“Please. Like you’re not thinking the same thing. I can hear you, you’re so loud.”
Over his dead body would he leave Remus alone in the house but of course it didn’t need saying. He threaded his arms around Remus’s waist and reeled him in by the belt loops, dragging their mouths together in a hard kiss, feeling Remus’s lips open against his in a slow bloom and flicking his tongue between the wet slide of them. “Fuck this bullshit,” he said when they’d pulled apart long enough to share a breath. In his arms Remus laughed and flowed against him like a willow branch, rubbing his mouth against Sirius’s unshaven jaw.
“Brave man,” said Remus. “All I want is to get in bed with you and sleep all day and maybe get takeout for dinner.”
“You realize some malevolent murderous whatever stole your Joan Baez records.”
“Maybe it’ll be inspired to take up a cause,” said Remus. “Suppose I ought to get some Christmas shopping done anyway. Could you pick up some curry on your way home? Or falafel, or both.”
At four o’clock with the sun bleeding low into the wooly clouds he Apparated to the end of the lane loaded down with takeout and the brittle winter dusk getting through his red-patterned Pendleton coat like needles as he walked up to where Remus was sitting on the rock wall staring back at the relentless eye on the lake, holding several sheets of Xeroxed pages presumably containing evidence of and potential solutions to their haunting and/or malicious curse and/or dark magic landmine, and when he saw Sirius he got up and kissed his cold lips and Sirius put his hand presumptuously in the back pocket of his jeans. Everything was quiet here in a way that had at first been hard to get used to after the marvelous music of the city, but he’d fallen in love with it at once the same way he had with their flat when they both laid awake those first June-warm nights thrumming with the newness of it; Remus pressed into him while he dug his keys out and he recalled like a scent the memory of the shack in the winter, seventh year, the snow blowing in under the door and articulated chain of Remus’s spine underneath the blanket, his head in Sirius’s lap and all the hairs on the back of his neck standing up underneath his palm while the pale sunbeams slanted through the bars catching the dust in the air, and Sirius loved him worse than anything. Of late he’d wondered if they could have anything like that again, the sweet unknowing holiness of it, free of the choking overhang of pain and loss and horror.
Still entertaining random flashes of memory he opened the door and felt his insides go to ice and spread in tandem through both of them at the threshold. Every single light in the house was on and when they went together into the kitchen they found both places at the table set elegantly; in the middle was the milk glass cake stand Remus had inherited from his mother and never once used. Candles had been lit at both ends dripping wax onto the oak and in the darkening daylight it felt like they’d walked into a wake.
“Hate to let it go to waste but it’s too early to eat,” said Sirius. Neither of them laughed. It took them another hour to find the note on the coffee table, written in a steady, blocky hand: You trespass.
They sat on the couch with food they couldn’t eat in the refrigerator and waited for Dumbledore to Floo, listening to the moment crawl on and on and on until it began to feel abstract and finally they had to get up to close the curtains. Inside it felt like the world was ending; outside it had begun to snow.
Part 2
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
A month after they moved in, Sirius’s cigarettes disappeared. In itself this wasn’t unusual, as he was prone to losing them to the murderous and possibly sentient couch along with loose change and lighters and memorably a pack of bubblegum-flavored Muggle condoms which they didn’t need but which he’d thought would be hilarious (it was); sometimes houses and the things in them developed a personality or a certain malicious quality nurtured by magic, spun into being by the very molecular threads of it imparting life where there wasn’t any. Already their coffeepot had begun complaining about the quality of Remus’s coffee and the Muggle rotary telephone in the hallway sometimes rang just to say hello, which all made Sirius wonder what things might be like in ten years, when the walls knew them and the threshold of the doorway waited for them to come home.
Upstairs he checked his nightstand and then Remus’s just in case. Everyone who thinks they know anything will tell you that you don’t really know a person until you’ve lived with them, which is a fucking lie, but more importantly he’d known Remus since they were both eleven years old, and sometime around fifth year his habit of stealing Sirius’s clothes out of the laundry had taken on an endearing sexiness even when Sirius knew he was going to meet Dearborn in them later on, and thus he reasoned there wasn’t much they could do to truly despise each other-roommate-wise, at least. Several years of waking up naked in various outdoor locales with each other’s blood on their teeth and occasionally puking together in the milky-blue rime of dawn had also cured them of a certain amount of mystique where the other was concerned. Once you’ve told someone about your family’s extensive collection of magical torture instruments in the basement (still in use for select medical procedures) and let them throw up on your feet, there’s really no going back, and the golden umbilical thread of it stretched ineffably between them was such that Sirius would never have wanted to.
Still-his cigarettes weren’t ensconced anywhere between the cushions and Remus didn’t smoke menthols. He’d been rolling his own since seventh year because it was cheaper, and although he’d often grab Sirius by the back of the head and kiss him after he’d just taken a drag he said they burned his throat. Sirius himself had offered on numerous occasions to buy them for him among a great many other things, truly he would have blown half his inheritance happily on anything Remus wanted just to see the smile unabstracting on his face, but such offers were usually met with glacial rebuffs or an affronted retreat back into the impenetrable nautilus shell that was his tortured soul, or more likely his bruised ego, coaxed out again only with an apology and/or food. That had changed as so many things had and so many things hadn’t in the wild whirlwind rush since they’d started fucking a year ago, but Remus had always been fairly adamant about hating everyone else’s cigarettes as some perverse point of pride.
“Did you take my cigarettes?” Sirius asked him anyway.
“Why would I take your cigarettes.”
“Maybe you finally gave up the charade of extreme pretension. Or maybe you lost your rollies, I don’t know.”
Remus was sitting on the couch trying to untangle a strand of Christmas lights for the tree, which they’d just put up earlier that morning. Last year they hadn’t bothered with one but it seemed important now, given the permanence of having been in love for so much longer than they knew it and the steady disintegration of the reeling world, the cocktail of which was the impetus for their move all the way to Cornwall in the first place. The whole cottage smelled like pine and woodsmoke and the lavender they were growing on the windowsill for potion-brewing after the full moon, which Sirius had also taken to baking into shortbread in the sharpening cold weather; with everything unpacked it was almost disconcertingly domestic save for last night’s Ogden’s Old on the coffee table and the lone sad marijuana plant Disillusioned on the bookshelf, struggling under the collective weight of their dismal herbology skills. On the television a silent movie was playing, the sepia candle-flare flicker of the film giving the room a kind of submarinean glow.
“It’s not pretentious if you know what you’re doing,” said Remus, working out a knot in the cord. The moon was in two days and the wide brimming gyre of it seemed always to hum inaudibly to Remus’s bones like a primal tinnitus from which all the other pains fed and grew, slouched in on himself as if to push it deeper down. Sirius sat down next to him and rubbed his shoulders and his neck where he knew it hurt until he could feel him unsharpening, all the edges of him flowing back into Sirius’s hands as if he could really reach far enough inside to take the blossoming hurt of it away. “And your cigarettes taste like lighter fluid. Have you checked-”
“They’re not under the cushions although who fucking knows what happens to everything that falls in there. And I don’t hear you complaining when you’re yanking me down by the hair for a taste.”
“Yes, well. I like your mouth,” said Remus, smiling into it, as if that was some kind of revelation. Still, he didn’t always elucidate the quieter voices, or maybe the screamingly loud ones, so when he did Sirius committed them to the warp and weft of his memory with the fervor of a historian and spun them on repeat like a DJ with a stack of records. “We’ve got to get eggs later anyway and we’re nearly out of bread and your stupid Darjeeling. And if you were feeling especially festive I guess we could like, look for a cookbook or something.”
“You could buy me that Raincoats record,” said Sirius, pressing his thumbs into Remus’s spine notch by notch and feeling the tight spool of him shiver and melt, “if we’re getting into the jolly old spirit early this year. Don’t act like you weren’t just working your way up to ask me to cook you dinner.”
“I might’ve been but you’d do that anyway,” said Remus. That he was certain of it was either a testament to the all the miraculous, mutilated miles they’d come together or the burgeoning horrorshow of the world tearing away all certainties but the ones they found in the solidity of each other, depending on who you asked and when. Possibly it was both. In the spirit of it he leaned forward and kissed the top ladder-rungs of Remus’s spine down to the collar of his flannel, where he could feel the narrow strength of him thrumming like a love song in the spaces between his teeth. “Have you seen my Joan Baez records by the way? I can’t find them anywhere and I’d like to hope you’re not asshole enough to hide them under something disgusting in the cellar. You whine about them enough.”
Sirius laughed as if he was not indeed asshole enough to have entertained variations on that exact idea and had never in their entire history together complained loudly and frequently about Remus’s Joan Baez records. “I didn’t touch the things but I’ll buy you new ones if that’s what it takes so I have any chance of getting laid sometime in the near-ish future.”
“So selfless,” said Remus, slurring sweetly, “my bloody hero.” One of Sirius’s hands had strayed completely accidentally to his inner thigh and beneath it Remus pulled his knees apart. “I must’ve lost them in the move,” he said.
“Maybe they found their way to some ageing hippie in need of some protest songs for Christmas to go along with the bad incense and the dirty feet. Actually maybe that’s what you’ll end up like in another thirty years-it’s sort of sexy when you think about it. You with like, a huge beard and the uncombed Joplin look.”
“I could start teaching with Sibyll Trelawney. Part-Humans in Magical Society. The syllabus would just be me.” In lieu of better options Remus had been doing underpaid freelance writing and editing for textbooks and various magazines for a year, and pseudonymous reviews of bad punk tapes for obscure publications for even longer. Sirius loved them and often provided suggestions for crackpot false names.
“Burning palo santo and becoming one with nature and letting the kids bum cigarettes after class.”
“If you think making fun’s going to get you laid either,” said Remus as he took Sirius’s hand and pressed the palm of it between his legs, where he was already half-hard in his jeans, and as it turned out making fun did in fact get Sirius laid.
It was the first occasion they had any inkling that something was afoot but nothing much registered at the time except the fruit of Remus’s mouth and how their skin smelled like new snow and lavender, the winter light lancing golden through the single-paned windows and the sparse trees illuminating all the things that were theirs, the yearning that came from the places where their bodies touched. All of this would be important later as a sort of punchline in the hilarious cosmic joke that was the bullshit trajectory of their whole lives to date, strung along always like unwitting chess pieces in someone else’s apocalypse gamble. The next morning Sirius would remember none of it.
-
The cottage was a bright birdhouse of a thing set on the winding granite moor like a fixture of the ancient landscape itself, sloping gently from the roof to the stone foundation into the earth as if it had been born there with the heather and the bilberry tangles where it had crowned the wide bowl of the Cornish sky with the scattered cairns and the tors since time immemorial. In the yellow kitchen there was a woodstove they lit in the evenings and a stone fireplace in the living room they’d only just gotten connected to the Floo network, where they could see the lake a mile away from the unshuttered front windows where the hills curled up greenly beyond the stone fence. Their bedroom was a loft above the kitchen with a big cloud-fuzzy window on the far wall and a treacherous ladder leading down to the stone tile; they’d strung up two strands of round Muggle lights between the walls which they spelled back into place whenever they went up or down, a necessary safeguard given that there was neither a door nor railing and both of them were likely to bust their heads open on the floor and/or fry themselves on the woodstove while drunk or trying to navigate down the ladder to piss in the night. Outside the kitchen window Sirius had hung a birdfeeder, and in the mornings when they made coffee they would watch the birds flit happily back and forth from the clothesline to the feeder to the trees, finding in the nearness of it all an echo of sweetness he normally only got from music or a certain pitch of laughter he pulled out of Remus, resonant as magic.
Certain of their friends had been moving away from London for nearly a year, eager to escape any number of spectres-the fear, the confinement, the death, the past, the present, themselves-and in autumn of ’79, after funerals and nightmare flights late at night and a series of Order-delegated infiltrations where they increasingly fought for their lives (Remus landed in St. Mungo’s after one of them) they started talking about getting out of the city for a while as a pseudo-vacation from the grief, as if a change of scenery might help compensate for the fact that they had become ancient seemingly over the course of a year and a half. That summer James and Lily had moved into a small house in Essex and Peter was trying to hammer the estate he’d inherited in Cheshire into something presentable; Frank and Alice had eloped for some incomprehensible reason (they’d be divorced by twenty-three, he and Remus wagered unkindly) and taken off to Cambridge, Vance and Macdonald had left for St. Andrews and Yorkshire respectively, Shacklebolt had headed for Leicester, even Dearborn had scattered into Shropshire, which was possibly the most un-Dearborn place in the whole of the green earth. McKinnon and Meadowes were still living together in Somers Town and unlikely to leave, which left Sirius and Remus, the other common knowledge couple whispered about after Order business had concluded, dreaming scandalously of playing house in the countryside.
Dumbledore had approached them in October on behalf of a friend of his who was looking to rent out a cottage in Cornwall way out on the moor with a striking stone’s-throw view of the lake. Remus had grown up in the West Country, in an old crooked farmhouse in Somerset with an abandoned apple orchard surrounding the backyard in a crescent; as a teenager Sirius had fallen in love with it while visiting in the summers when they would all four take long walks and leave their apple cores for the birds or swim in the pond or go to the Muggle record store or the arcade in town. Down by the river Remus had taught him to fish, and both of them sometimes helped his mother with dinner while James and Peter looked through Remus’s records upstairs, Remus out of a sense of obligation, Sirius out of fascination with Muggle kitchen appliances and also with Remus’s mother, who he loved, who often played Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Ida Cox while she was cooking, feeling jealous and entranced. At the time it seemed ideal, even magical in the cosmic sense, and later they would realize that accepting all of this at face value from Albus “Ulterior Motive” Dumbledore, renowned puppetmaster extraordinaire, was mistakes number one through eight hundred, but for now, all of that was in the future. They said yes. The rest was history.
Immediately after Hogwarts they had moved together into a two-bedroom flat in Kentish Town, ostensibly to pool their resources and split rent between them but mostly because they hardly knew how to be without each other. Between his inheritance from his Uncle Alphard and his starting salary as a junior cursebreaker Sirius didn’t need help with rent and often paid in full anyway, which usually prompted Remus-potions stockboy, bakery assistant, hack astrologist, post office owl cage cleaner, freelance pest wrangler, Cambridge reject, professional bitter stoner permanently attached to the very meat of Sirius’s heart and soul et cetera by some manifest spiritus mundi-to blow an inadvisable chunk of his bank account on ingredients for a lavishly rich dinner or tickets to noise shows in retaliation, or otherwise hide the weed and not speak to him for three days. He had begun to suspect around fifth year that his increasingly obsessive feelings for Remus were not actually brotherly, or not only brotherly, especially after he walked in on him with Dearborn in a disused third-floor classroom in the brittle-boned January of that year; he’d known what Remus looked like naked since they were twelve but he had not known the taste of his mouth, the warm hallowed space between his hipbones, his arms reaching, his face open and drunk with wanting. This became several hysterical magnitudes worse when they moved in together: at first they had both shared Sirius’s bed because Remus hadn’t yet bought one, and although they slept top to tail for the duration their long limbs did often wander.
It necessitated a truly humiliating amount of masturbation in the hallway bathroom late at night, which didn’t stop when Remus got his own bed as it had not stopped since the idea had stuck in his head like a burr sometime well before the episode in fifth year. He went out with Remus or on his own and pulled men and sometimes women before he gave up completely; he envied Remus his certainty during their talk after the Dearborn incident (he hadn’t exited the room as discreetly as he had thought), telling Sirius with a wild and fractious edge-of-the-bed nervousness not unlike the revelatory confrontation in second year that he wanted men and only men, his hands clenched between his knees to hide how badly they were shaking, bird-boned, ready to cut and run or maybe wanting a fistfight. Understanding the same of himself took Sirius the remainder of his Hogwarts years and some fraught time after, plus a whole fucking lot of disappointing orgasms. Combined with his preoccupation with Remus like an exalted illness that had overtaken him it felt royally pathetic; if he really applied himself during his drunkest agony soliloquies he could blame his parents for that, too.
Remus never brought men home but Sirius knew he spent nights away and suspected strongly that he still hooked up with Dearborn from time to time when he came home smelling like the wood-heady cloves Dearborn smoked. On those nights Sirius got stoned in bed listening to too much Talking Heads and Magazine, searingly jealous and not as guilty about it as he maybe ought to have been, reading Rimbaud and composing scathing verbal eviscerations in his head for the next time Dearborn blatantly hit on Remus in front of him at Order functions, but as he never wrote them down he always forgot everything in the throttling hangover wreckage of morning, save for select bits of genius that usually ran along the lines of fuck you andvery very and if you really cared about him you wouldn’t make him listen to fucking Pink Floyd all the time and I’ve seen it and it’s like the size of my ring finger actually. That last one was slightly cruel: Dearborn’s cock was a little bigger than Sirius’s ring finger, as Sirius had discovered when he slept with him just out of Hogwarts to see if he was some kind of sexual messiah and if so maybe he could pick up a few things. It wasn’t the worst sex he’d ever had-that was with Leandra Sapworthy, who kicked him bodily out of her bed after a graduation party, hissing Are you a fucking queer or something after a detached five minutes of attempted fucking followed by thirty seconds of attempted fingering, which he laughed about hysterically in the shower-but sexual messiah Dearborn resoundingly was not, and Sirius was left wondering, insanely, unendingly, fever-hungry, whether Remus had ever had a good blowjob in his life.
Sometime in early September of ’78 he’d gone to see Lily at the Lambeth flat she was sharing with James, looking to cajole information and/or advice via a bottle of Scotch, though things veered off course almost immediately when he ended up waiting on the steps until she got off her shift at Gringotts and let him in. She seemed genuinely happy to see him, if mildly suspicious, and set about making Scotch coffee while Sirius overcame the needling splinter of guilt at having sought her out on her own for the first time for such selfish reasons. Nonetheless it didn’t stop him from bringing the conversation swiftly around to what, exactly, Remus had been doing lately, and had she seen Remus lately, and did Remus seem a bit morose and preoccupied lately, but he hadn’t finished the sentence before Lily slammed the coffeepot down, rattling the dishes in the cupboard and sloshing water from the counter to the floor, and fixed him with a copper-green glare that would’ve done a basilisk proud; her patronus would change within the year, he decided.
“Oh my God,” said Lily, her jaw working, yanking down her red braid where she’d pinned it up that morning, “you’re just, you’re fucking unbelievable, Black, you know that? Yes, I’ve seen Remus, and yes, fine, I’ll tell you the same thing I told him, which is that if you two want me to be your confidant-cum-shrink-cum-advice columnist, you’re damn well going to start paying me like one. I’ve got better things to do than change Remus’s nappies 24/7 and I’m sure as fuck not going to do it for you.”
“No one ever changed my nappies, the nanny used magic,” said Sirius, the smile shriveling a dead insect when he saw the look on Lily’s face. He never knew what murderous was before he met Lily; even so much sorrow later, after he’d fled people who were trying to kill him and after his hands had learned the shapes of spells to kill them too, he would sometimes look into their livid white faces in the thick of it and think, coward, coward, you don’t know a fucking thing. “I mean I’m sorry, I just figured-”
“That I’m a woman and I’m sympathetic to your plight so you’d come ply me with Scotch and your woe-is-me romantic ineptitude and leave as soon as you got what you wanted because clearly I think of nothing but men and their idiot problems,” she said. “You never would’ve come here and played James the same way. Neither of you.”
Sirius thought about arguing for a single split second but it was true. He’d never told James (whether it was any of her business or not, Lily was generally more inclined to say something outright if she noticed, which she had, very quietly, once or twice), and he knew Remus hadn’t either, though James had suspected it of Remus since third year and had doubtlessly heard rumors about both of them in school; sometimes he joked about it in an off-pitch way that wasn’t really a joke, and Sirius never knew how to feel about it and didn’t think James did either. After everything, after childhood and scintillating adolescence and love and pain and death and forgiveness and revelation and and life life life, this was something Sirius did not-could not-share with James.
“Alright. I’m a prick and I really am sorry. Remus is a prick too. You can keep the bottle and I’ll pick up a curry for you if you like, or if you want to scare James I’ll even play along when he gets home and pretend we’re fucking around.”
“Tempting, but let’s wait until he’s really pissed me off for that,” said Lily. “You’d think two people who live together could manage to talk to each other once in a while without expecting the nearest woman to clean up all their messes for them. Get me the milk, would you?”
“Long day in the gold mines?”
“These creeps came in three times on behalf of that pureblood club, the one in Chelsea? Wanting to make enormous withdrawals and giving me this horseshit about ‘expanding their influence in the public sphere.’ You know they’re all just sitting around jerking it now that Lucius Malfoy and Yaxley and all those fucks got in the Ministry. Then there was a security breach down in the catacombs that turned out to be a niffler. And like, a thousand million tourists.”
“You really need to start doing the drive-thru thing like at Muggle banks,” he said, pouring an altogether inappropriate amount of Scotch into both their mugs, “those things are wild. I cashed a check at one of them and went through it on foot because I didn’t have the bike and they thought I was weird as hell but it was incredible. They could do it like, on broomsticks, with the suction tunnels Muggles use.”
“You are weird as hell,” said Lily. “But I don’t think anyone in Merrie Olde Magical England is going to be incorporating Muggle ideas anytime soon.”
Lily had gotten into Oxford during their final term at Hogwarts but decided fairly quickly to take a year off to work for the then-fledgling Order of the Phoenix; that year off was looking increasingly likely to last indefinitely, and just a month earlier several professors had resigned over the university’s refusal to expand security measures in the wake of an attack on Muggleborn students. Still Lily rode her bicycle past the Westminster Society for Traditional Magic and spat on the lawn on the way to work every morning out of sheer spite. “Christ Lily, I used to have dinner with these types. They can’t even admit Muggle music is vastly superior to anything we’ve ever done and they’re all inbred at least eight times over and they think they’re meant to inherit the world,” said Sirius. “It’d be nice if we could have a single iota of certainty about anything whatsoever lately.”
“Wouldn’t it just,” said Lily, and passed him the sugar.
September shivered into October and then November blue, the trees showing their bare-boned branches through the shroud of fog outside the flat while he and Remus either argued over nothing or talked about nothing and mostly sort of avoided each other in the same rooms as they settled into an awkward unknowing. One morning Remus came back with a hickey on his pale neck where he’d left his collar unbuttoned and stared back at Sirius when he caught him looking. After his explosive and deservedly fruitless trip to see Lily both of them seemed to sense that something had shifted in the patchwork tectonic anatomy they shared between them; when he was Padfoot sometimes he swore he could catch the scent of it in the moon-mornings, omen-sharp like gunpowder or distant smoke, both of them bruised and naked and too loopy with unsleeping to remember their cornered-animal unease. They took turns in the bath and he rubbed runic patterns into Remus’s back while he puked and after they’d both gone to bed in the rush of dawn Sirius stared into space for hours, worrying that the careful, timeworn net they’d woven through years of friendship-mended so many times, sewn stronger, threaded deeper, scarred over-had been irreparably damaged by their gutless emotional bullshit. He took to leaving his door cracked slightly open while the moon sucked the light from the stars into its widening mouth, a thin bolt of nighttime gloaming underneath like hope, but Remus never came to him.
Sitting on the couch in Cornwall reading record reviews after they’d gotten home from a Muggle movie in the village-the soles of their boots had stuck to the theater floor-it seemed almost distant. So much smoldering what-if to chew on in the dead of night, so much sturm und drang over words and phrases and looks and touches and what it meant that Remus slept in Sirius’s shirts and kept playing “Ball and Chain.” In the sunlight of retrospect it seemed very obvious and yet still against all odds, as if the only place it could logically have led was to their couch with his long legs spread out audaciously in front of him and Remus’s feet in his lap, the colorful rugs on the wood floors, the mushroom pot pie they’d attempted in the oven, the dirty dishes in the sink and the scattered records and their bed piled with dark flannel and a few scarves the size of blankets, all the pieces them shoved into every ecstatic corner. Time seemed frozen here, even when they came home with blood on their clothes or half-sick with anger or fear, which was maybe what started it all. The past portends the future, however much we pretend otherwise. You could never truly get away from where you’d been.
-
Two days after the full moon Sirius woke to an infernal nightmare slamming that was still there when he blinked the dreams out of his eyes in the dark. Remus had a hand around his shoulder and was shaking him harshly in case he wasn’t yet awake; he was a much lighter sleeper than Sirius although both of them usually woke at least once in the night since they had learned late in ’78 what it meant to run literally for the sake of life or death. He sat up fast with his heart beating under Remus’s clammy hand on his bare shoulder and reached for his wand on the nightstand but the noise stopped suddenly after a shattering violent blast that shook the bones of the whole house, quiet hanging shrill on the air, as if it had never been at all. Beyond the muzzy yellow string of lights separating the bedroom from a bone-breaking fall onto the kitchen tile nothing moved.
“What,” hissed Remus, still clutching at Sirius’s arm, “what was that?”
“How did they get past the wards,” Sirius said. His breath was coming too quickly and there was cold sweat on his brow. “We should send a patronus, but-” His voice was hoarse with sleep and the fear was rising in a nauseous wave up his throat. “Do you hear-”
“No,” said Remus, not letting go, “no, nothing.”
“Let me,” said Sirius, getting out of bed and struggling into the wrinkled t-shirt lying on the floor, “you’ve got your wand?”
Together they descended the narrow ladder into the kitchen, where Sirius turned on the lights and peered cautiously out the window into the black nothing-night while Remus checked the bathroom; straining his ears he could hear the wall clock in the living room and even the alarm clock on Remus’s nightstand in the bedroom above but no whisper of movement or sound crossed his senses. Before they got to the living room from the cramped precipice of the hallway Remus turned all the lights on with a spell muttered under his breath, and already the vicious fearful thing he got about him when he was cornered was in his every jagged movement, but he didn’t jump when Sirius put a hand between his shoulderblades and spread the fingers out in a nervous wave as they stepped forward together, aware in unspoken terror-transfer that their guts could be painting the walls in the next three seconds if they weren’t careful.
But-nothing. They shook the curtains and shined their wands up the chimney and Remus pulled the cushions off the couch-Sirius’s cigarettes still weren’t there but a key he didn’t recognize and three sickles were-and looked up the branches of their lopsided Christmas tree. Fear and swelling panic gave way to bewilderment; he cranked open one of the windows and stuck his head out to listen, feeling the blunt edge of the moorland winds slice against his face until Remus yanked the collar of his shirt and pulled him back inside by the scruff of his neck, rolling the window shut again.
“You suicidal shithead. What are you doing,” he said, trying to look livid but mostly just looking scared. Sirius could almost feel his hackles raising. “If there is something out there you’re going to get your throat ripped out just showing it like that. You’re a dog and you still don’t even know that.”
“Well I can’t hear anything. If someone was out there and didn’t Apparate I might’ve heard something, don’t be daft.”
“If they’d Apparated we would’ve heard it. We’d have felt.”
“Yes.”
“The wards,” said Remus, touching the tip of his wand to the edge of the ceiling where the spell was illuminated in spiderwebbed blue ink, the walls made of words. “These are fine. Would you-I’ll get the kitchen, just check the bedroom, would you?”
Sirius did, but immediately Remus followed him through the kitchen and stood at the bottom of the ladder, ready to leap up if need be. The walls glowed blue-veined like glacial sculptures when Sirius touched them, murmuring voltaic under his fingertips; through the curtain he could see just beyond the stone border in the low lemon-drop moonlight where the ancient oak tree on the path leading to the disused barn was shivering in the wind with a spindly hunger, the claw of it creeping sickly shadows across the lawn.
“Alright up here,” he said. Hovering at the bottom of the ladder Remus stepped aside to let him back down, his green eyes big with unslept red underneath. “We’ll have to check outside, and no, I know, I know, I’m not going out there right now so get that look off your face. Although I think whoever it was is gone. Maybe they were lost.”
“We don’t even have neighbors,” said Remus, warily, which was right. The nearest other house was three miles away down the gravel road, the closest village six. “Who’d be out here wandering around on the wild and windy moors at,” he paused to look at the clock, “almost four in the morning?”
“Very Wuthering Heights when you think about it. I always figured I’d do that to you-drive you mad, be with you always via endless haunting to the end of your days, all that. You’d make a good Heathcliff.”
“It kind of loses its potency when all I’d want is for you to haunt my every step. Knowing both of us we’d be trying to have ritual sex with ghosts,” said Remus, though he was smiling lithely. “Besides I think we’re both Heathcliff.”
“I’m probably more likely to slam my head against a tree on purpose out of ravaging unendurable love.”
“Funny.”
“I thought so. If we really tried we could probably outdo both of them.”
“You don’t think it could’ve been an animal?”
“I don’t know what kind of animal would do that,” said Sirius, trying to remember where lethifolds tended to congregate and not feeling any better at all.
“A-I don’t know, Sirius. Some sort of feral magic?”
“It sounded like something very solid to me,” said Sirius. He wondered if Remus thought it might be Greyback-he’d been spending more and more time infiltrating packs in the south both unaffiliated and aligned with Voldemort-though if it was Greyback he’d likely have left something dead on the doorstep or thrown it down the chimney and wouldn’t have cared about setting off all their wards. In ways it was easier to be a non-entity in the city than it was out here with no shield and no gauzy veil of light and concrete and sound to vanish into; he took Remus’s wrist, feeling the familiar time signature of his pulsebeat under his thumb. With all the lights in the house lit they went back to the living room and fixed the couch cushions.
Deep in his chest something had begun to tighten but he couldn’t place the feeling; it was the same spreading pinprick-pang that constricted sometimes after a fight or a colossal fuckup or something otherwise terrible had happened, or was about to happen, and he often wondered when he felt the burn of it if it was yet another genetic malady courtesy of his black blood-his Black blood. Wonderingly and perhaps naïvely he had always thought that part of himself could match Remus tear for tear: all of your life lived with the inexorable presence of another festering inside you not as a pleasure or a beloved twin but as your every fear scorching and screaming somewhere you could never reach. No one made potions for this. No one could spell it or cut it or love it away.
Listening to the ball-lightning crackle at the back of his neck he went to the front door, where he could feel it settle into the spaces between his spine-rungs like an itch. Trying not to let the feeling overcome him he took a breath and let it sift like a conduit into his fingertips and reached for the doorknob; it turned right through and the door came wide open with the cold shrill-glass wind and the moon-dimmed Cornish stars.
“Holy fuck,” said Remus. At the threshold Sirius pointed the light from his wand into the dark beyond the yard light but saw nothing except for the strange perpetual glow of the boathouse on the island at the very faraway center of the lake, and when he stepped back inside and locked the door tight the magic had diffused in a static shudder down his spine.
“I locked it,” he said, feeling his stomach drop out. They’d gone for a short walk in the twilight gold after he’d gotten off work and when they’d come home Sirius had locked the door behind them. “I know I locked it.”
“I saw you do it,” said Remus, fear in it again, “before we started the fire, we brought some wood in and then you locked it, I-Jesus-I was watching you because you said you secretly liked my awful folksy Baez a little bit.”
“First minute there’s any hint of light at all we have to Floo the old man. And I like it when you sing it all under your breath while you’re attempting cleaning spells or applying for jobs that don’t deserve you, there’s just, there’s a massively sexy difference, Moony. I’ll be happy to explain it when my guts don’t feel like someone just jumped rope with them.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re tired and you thought we might die five minutes ago.”
“No, I’m saying it because it’s true and it’s in like my top twenty favorite things you do, along with the thing where you try so hard not to laugh at my bad jokes but you always do. You’re so easy.”
“I’ll hold you to that. Coming from you it’s practically a proposal.”
“Please do,” said Sirius. “Do you want to just stay down here with me? There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep and I’m still not sure I’m not going to send a patronus to Dumbledore, it’s not like he’s never woken us up for nothing at least five times before.”
“Let’s hold off til morning. D’you want some whiskey?”
Sirius did, and after they checked that the back door was still locked they turned off the lights and ensconced themselves on the couch with the afghan they kept draped across the back of it and their coffee cup whiskey, leaving the lamp at the end table on. Around five Remus dozed off on Sirius’s chest while some old black and white movie was playing on mute, his too-long limbs and his coppery hair and his eyelids fluttering with unquiet dreams, all of him wound around Sirius like ivy vines; occasionally he talked in his sleep, just a word or a hallucinatory phrase, which would’ve been a welcome distraction from the feeling that someone was watching them, peering through the windows or standing in the darkened mouth of the kitchen, following the runic movement of his hand on Remus’s back and in his hair for whatever secret could be found there. A few times he turned his head towards the doorway expecting to find someone staring but of course nothing was there.
They got up before dawn having slept miserably and made coffee and slightly crusty scrambled eggs with tomato and mushroom and goat cheese though neither of them was very hungry. As soon as the sky lightened enough for it they went outside and checked the wards around the stone gate and the border, which were as intact and undisturbed as they were when they had cast them more than a month ago, the same day they moved in. When they looked at the front door they found nothing-not even a scratch where it had been beaten hard enough to rattle the whole cottage, so that it might as well have been a shared nightmare.
Way off in the distance from the doorway he could see the funny phosphorescent window light of the island boathouse. He was not sure how he had never noticed before, but it had the uncanny feeling of an eye staring, like a lighthouse looking impotently but faithfully out to sea or an animal waiting hidden in the trees for prey.
“Do you think anyone lives in that thing?” he asked Remus, jerking his head towards the lake while they examined the windows and the bright paint-chipped shutters.
“According to Dumbledore, no,” said Remus, but his brow furrowed slightly. He was wearing his blue thrift store coat and Sirius’s fisherman’s sweater and the red wool scarf he’d had since Hogwarts, which made him look like a man cobbled together haphazardly but extremely appealingly from a deranged sewing machine. “Were all the lights on like that when we moved in?”
“I don’t remember,” said Sirius. The wind blew his tangled dark hair in his eyes and when he blinked he could see the milky afterimage gleam of it like an evil omen.
When they crouched down on the stone of the fireplace to Floo Dumbledore the old man was immediately fascinated if strangely unsurprised by the ordeal and knelt down to better see them, his cornflower eyes twinkling in a way Sirius had decided recently that he did not like after Remus had come home soaked through with blood from the botched job attempting a liaison with vampires who had already pledged themselves to Voldemort, and in St. Mungo’s needing a transfusion he’d still seen fit to ply information from Remus’s blue mouth. Particularly he picked at the exact moment when it had stopped, seeming not to care about the unbroken wards or the unlocked door or the fact that they had been scared shitless for hours or whether Death Eaters had developed cloaking spells of deadly magnitude; he asked if they had noticed anything else amiss, and Sirius, exhausted and impatient and tired of the cloak-and-dagger questioning, interrupted him for the first time he’d ever dared.
“We want to talk to the landlord,” he said, his voice running full-force over Dumbledore’s in a way that felt monumentally wrong. “If there’s something going on with the house we need to know about it. I want to know if he owns that old boathouse too, because it looks like someone’s staying in it and I can’t remember seeing anything over there before.”
“That boathouse has been unattended for decades,” said Dumbledore, “and the owner of your humble abode is currently ill. Winter is a difficult time for him, I’m afraid, which I believe I told you when I showed you the house on his behalf.”
Stupid stupid stupid idiot motherfucker, he told himself bludgeoningly. Never ever once had they actually met the landlord, an ailing Mr. Kilburn who lived at an unlikely-sounding address in Cumbria where they owled their rent checks; it had been Dumbledore who showed them the house when he heard they were looking and negotiated the lease. Yet again Sirius was thinking dramatically of Yeats-turning and turning in the widening gyre-and something cold in his gut slotted at last into place and bottomed out. This is how it is now, he thought, no silver lining without a cloud, no favor done without the exchange of blood, tugged along forever unwittingly by some unseen hand.
“Right,” said Sirius. Beside him he could see Remus’s clenched jaw, his rigid shoulders. “Is there anything else you want to deign to tell us, sir?”
Dumbledore looked at him shrewdly over the rim of his spectacles and Sirius braced himself against the ganglion-plucking of legilimency that never came. “Thirty-five years ago the occupants of your house disappeared inexplicably in the middle of dinner. There were several articles in the Prophet and an MLE investigation that led nowhere-Remus, if you are free today, you might head up to London and see what you can find in the archives-but it has been occupied several times since then with no apparent issue. I do wonder at the timing.”
“You think it’s something dark,” said Remus, a horrible acid edge in his voice, “and you knew.”
“I think it is one of many things, my dear boy. Certainly if it is dark it would be of profound interest and I daresay use to our enemy. I will check back this evening and the same time tomorrow morning if it suits you gentlemen.”
“It’s not like we have a choice,” said Sirius.
“On the contrary, Sirius. We always have a choice,” said Dumbledore, infuriatingly, just as Remus switched off the Floo and they stood up with soot in their hair.
“Well I guess I’m going to London,” said Remus. They looked at each other, angry and scared and exhausted with nauseous adrenaline but together. Sirius had ash on his cheek and his black jeans and Remus wiped at it with the sleeve of his flannel. “I’ll meet you back here at four?”
“Afraid to leave me alone for like ten minutes after work?”
“Please. Like you’re not thinking the same thing. I can hear you, you’re so loud.”
Over his dead body would he leave Remus alone in the house but of course it didn’t need saying. He threaded his arms around Remus’s waist and reeled him in by the belt loops, dragging their mouths together in a hard kiss, feeling Remus’s lips open against his in a slow bloom and flicking his tongue between the wet slide of them. “Fuck this bullshit,” he said when they’d pulled apart long enough to share a breath. In his arms Remus laughed and flowed against him like a willow branch, rubbing his mouth against Sirius’s unshaven jaw.
“Brave man,” said Remus. “All I want is to get in bed with you and sleep all day and maybe get takeout for dinner.”
“You realize some malevolent murderous whatever stole your Joan Baez records.”
“Maybe it’ll be inspired to take up a cause,” said Remus. “Suppose I ought to get some Christmas shopping done anyway. Could you pick up some curry on your way home? Or falafel, or both.”
At four o’clock with the sun bleeding low into the wooly clouds he Apparated to the end of the lane loaded down with takeout and the brittle winter dusk getting through his red-patterned Pendleton coat like needles as he walked up to where Remus was sitting on the rock wall staring back at the relentless eye on the lake, holding several sheets of Xeroxed pages presumably containing evidence of and potential solutions to their haunting and/or malicious curse and/or dark magic landmine, and when he saw Sirius he got up and kissed his cold lips and Sirius put his hand presumptuously in the back pocket of his jeans. Everything was quiet here in a way that had at first been hard to get used to after the marvelous music of the city, but he’d fallen in love with it at once the same way he had with their flat when they both laid awake those first June-warm nights thrumming with the newness of it; Remus pressed into him while he dug his keys out and he recalled like a scent the memory of the shack in the winter, seventh year, the snow blowing in under the door and articulated chain of Remus’s spine underneath the blanket, his head in Sirius’s lap and all the hairs on the back of his neck standing up underneath his palm while the pale sunbeams slanted through the bars catching the dust in the air, and Sirius loved him worse than anything. Of late he’d wondered if they could have anything like that again, the sweet unknowing holiness of it, free of the choking overhang of pain and loss and horror.
Still entertaining random flashes of memory he opened the door and felt his insides go to ice and spread in tandem through both of them at the threshold. Every single light in the house was on and when they went together into the kitchen they found both places at the table set elegantly; in the middle was the milk glass cake stand Remus had inherited from his mother and never once used. Candles had been lit at both ends dripping wax onto the oak and in the darkening daylight it felt like they’d walked into a wake.
“Hate to let it go to waste but it’s too early to eat,” said Sirius. Neither of them laughed. It took them another hour to find the note on the coffee table, written in a steady, blocky hand: You trespass.
They sat on the couch with food they couldn’t eat in the refrigerator and waited for Dumbledore to Floo, listening to the moment crawl on and on and on until it began to feel abstract and finally they had to get up to close the curtains. Inside it felt like the world was ending; outside it had begun to snow.
Part 2