Fic: Turning Tragedy into Teachable Moments for paulamcg
Title: Turning Tragedy into Teachable Moments
Author: woldy
Recipient: paulamcg
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2300 words
Summary: The past is full of lessons, but Remus and Sirius choose what they learn.
Author's notes: Written for paulamcg ’s prompt 2: “So we just hold on fast / Acknowledge the past / As lessons exquisitely crafted” and Eric’s Song by Vienna Teng. I really hope you like it! Many thanks to the lovely brighty18 for betaing.
After James and Lily died, it rained for four days.
The rain splashed on Remus’ face when the Aurors hauled him away for questioning, and when they released him, Remus curled up in bed and listened to it drumming against the roof. He barely slept, a few snatched minutes here and there before being accosted by nightmares that, upon waking, turned out to be true.
Remus watched the rain running down the window, and imagined it falling on the devastated remains of James and Lily’s home. He thought of the water swirling down streets, rivulets washing away whatever tiny fragments of Peter’s body were left after Sirius’ murderous curse. He imagined the water rising and rising until everything was swept away.
It felt like the end of the world.
On the fifth day, the rain stopped. Remus wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper, and pulled himself out of the bed. In the silence, his footsteps seemed to echo through the empty flat - no, not empty. The flat was filled with things that belonged to Sirius and stuff they had owned together, all still in place as though waiting for Sirius to return.
Remus changed his socks and, on reflection, the rest of his clothes. Then he went out into the weak autumn sunlight and walked to the shop. He bought milk, bread, a tin of soup; the things one needed to keep on living.
On the way back, he paused outside the charity shop, its window display filled with books, clothes and a selection of trinkets. The door dinged as he pushed it open.
"Will you collect?" he asked the woman at the till.
The woman looked up. Remus didn’t know what she saw in his face, but her expression turned sympathetic. "We can arrange to, if there’s a lot of material," she said hesitantly. "It can be best to wait a while before deciding if you want to keep-"
"There is a lot of material, I’m afraid," Remus interrupted. "The sooner you can come the better."
A van arrived the next day and it took several hours to empty the flat into it. The driver didn’t ask any questions and Remus didn’t volunteer anything. Quietly, efficiently, they removed everything associated with Sirius: Alphard’s old sofa, the bookcase from Andromeda and Ted, the bed they bought together, the chest of drawers from a second hand shop.
Remus didn’t hesitate until he came to the red lamp that James and Lily gave him and Sirius last Christmas. It was heavy and elegant, by far the nicest thing in the flat, and Lily had charmed it to work with both electricity and magic.
He thought back to the lumpy sight of it in wrapping paper beneath the tree, and the way James and Lily smiled when Sirius tore the parcel open.
"How did you get it to work with electricity?" Sirius had demanded. "You can’t transfigure electrons into magic, that’s one of the exceptions to Gamp’s-"
"Just because you don’t know how to do it, Sirius, doesn’t mean it can’t be done," Lily said, turning away, and Remus saw the sparkle in her eyes.
If she’d told Sirius how it worked then he would probably have forgotten within a few hours. By refusing to tell him, Lily had ensured that Sirius would do everything he could to find out. A teachable moment, Remus thought, remembering what Dumbledore had told the Prefects. There were lessons everywhere, if you looked.
Remus took a deep breath and placed the lamp into a box of books, before carrying it into the truck. After they loaded the final few items, struggling over the heavy dining table, the driver turned to Remus.
"You sure about giving away all this?"
The man’s eyes passed from Remus face to his old jumper and worn shoes, pegging him as the sort of person who bought from charity shops instead of donating to them.
"Yes, thank you," Remus replied, because the alternative was to burn it all. He would like to think that someone, somewhere, could benefit from this.
He closed the door as the man drove away, and sat down on his old school trunk to scribble an apologetic note for the landlord. Then, taking the handle of his trunk in one hand, Remus closed his eyes and thought of a small, desolate village with waves crashing against the coast. He Apparated away, and left nothing behind.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
At first, Sirius marked each day with a line on the wall, and when ten days had passed he scratched a circle for the moon. He expected Remus to come any day now, before the next moon, and it wasn’t until the third full moon rose in view of his window that it occurred to him that Remus might not be coming.
Sirius stared at the moon, which looked ominous behind the wispy clouds, and wondered what Remus was thinking. He couldn’t imagine how Remus could reconcile the Ministry’s account of what Sirius had done with the decade they had spent together, sharing air and sunlight as they grew like trees with entangled roots.
He shivered, the wall cold against his back, and thought about how bruised and bloody Remus would be after a night of transforming alone. The thought of how Remus must feel, believing himself unable to judge or trust, was almost worse than what Peter had done to James and Lily.
As the months passed, Sirius watched the moon through its phases and learned not to hope.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
Remus couldn’t see much point in replacing the furniture, because he didn’t stay anywhere for long. People would get suspicious, he told himself, and the last thing he wanted was to answer questions. Leaving grew easier with practice, until it only took a wave of his wand for all Remus’ belongings to pack themselves neatly into his trunk.
It was two years after James and Lily’s deaths before Remus touched a man again, hands sliding down his back with intent. After that, he brought Muggles back to his rented apartments, tumbling onto sofas where the springs dug into your back and rolling on beds that rocked and squeaked. For a few minutes he could almost, almost, forget about Sirius.
Five years later, as the guy pulled his trousers back on and Remus avoided his eyes, he realised that his history wasn’t something he could move beyond. Nobody would ever replace them, and there was no way of becoming the person he would have been if without those friendships, love and betrayal. The absences of James, Lily, Peter and Sirius, always Sirius, carved out the shape of his life.
The pain at any reminder of his friends faded slowly to a dull ache. When Remus unfolded the Prophet over breakfast and read that Harry was starting at Hogwarts, it took only a few seconds before he remembered to breathe. He read the paper front to back as usual, skipping over the Quidditch scores, and tried to ignore the tremble in his hands. With luck, he thought, that would be the end of it.
"Mum says you knew them," came the sudden announcement from one of the children he was tutoring, "the Potters and Sirius Black. Did you?"
The kids looked at him intently, as though knowing the Potters made someone strange and exciting, qualitatively different from the man who’d been teaching them Latin for weeks.
"It was a long time ago," Remus said tightly. "There’s no point worrying yourselves about that."
The kids exchanged looks, disappointment written on their faces. They know I’m lying, Remus thought, and their crestfallen expressions were seared into his mind so deeply that half a bottle of Firewhiskey didn’t remove the image.
Remus woke with an appalling headache, his flat stinking of alcohol, and resolved to tell them the truth. The kids were growing up in a world shaped by his generation, both their achievements and their failings, and his reluctance to face up to the past was no excuse.
"Yes, I knew the Potters and Sirius Black," Remus told them during the next lesson, clasping his hands together beneath the table so that the children wouldn’t see them shake. "We were at Hogwarts together. If you’d asked me back then, I would have said Sirius was my friend."
The children stared for a moment before launching into a dozen questions, and Remus was surprised to find that it became easier the more he talked. That’s the nature of teaching, he thought wryly, the need to explain something forces you to resolve it yourself.
The next morning Remus put on his warmest coat and exchanged some Sickles for pounds at Gringotts before embarking on a tour of the country’s charity shops. It took the best part of a week to trawl through them, sifting though piles of junk in musty rooms, before he found the lamp.
He Apparated home with the red lamp, plugged it in and watched it blink into light. Pulse racing, Remus raised his wand - and then slowly lowered it. It might just be a lamp from the same manufacturer, not Lily’s at all, and if so he didn’t want to know. It was better to hope.
Months later, when Remus absentmindedly muttered "Lumos" while fumbling for his wand in the dark, the lamp lit instantly. Remus turned slowly to look at it, the heavy red base a little scratched over the years, but indubitably his lamp and still intact.
His mistake in getting rid of the lamp had been to let the memory of Sirius trump that of James, Lily and Peter. Yes it hurt, everything associated with Sirius hurt, but there was love, too, and bonds he could neither deny nor forget.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
The address Remus sent him took Sirius to a row of indistinguishable terraced houses on a quiet road. Sirius padded up to front step, considered standing on his hind legs to reach the doorbell, and then scratched at the door.
Within seconds, Remus pulled the door open and gestured him inside. The hallway wasn’t wide, but it was warm, and Sirius took a moment to enjoy the heat seeping through him.
"You didn’t have any trouble finding the place, then," Remus said, and ruffled the fur on Sirius’ head with one hand. It took a conscious effort for Sirius not to lean into the touch.
There was so much left unsaid between them, things which perhaps didn’t need to be voiced. In Sirius’ view, actions spoke louder than words, and their embrace in the Shrieking Shack said everything that was needed: I’m sorry; I missed you; you’re forgiven. Remus had invited him and he was here; he knew their friendship was all right.
It was harder to know whether they could pick up a relationship that shattered a decade ago, but that decision would come with time. They slipped from friendship to lovers then, and Sirius wasn’t going to force things now.
With the familiar sensation of a full-body sneeze he transformed, pulled off his cloak and hung it on one of the hooks beside the door.
"No trouble at all."
"The sitting room is in here," Remus said, pointing through a door, and Sirius looked inside. It was far cleaner and more orderly than his flat with Remus had ever been, and Sirius realised with a jolt that he shouldn’t be surprised, that this was the house of a man in his thirties, not a kid barely out of school.
The room barely seemed lived in and the sofa was new, if Sirius was any judge. Amidst all the items in the room only two were familiar: Remus’ trunk, which stood discreetly in the corner, and the red lamp on the table.
Sirius smiled at the sight of the lamp, recalling the last Christmas he had celebrated. They’d all been at James’ house, and he remembered playing on the floor with Harry, helping him to pull a Zonkos cracker and seeing Harry laugh when it tore open with a puff of smoke. There had been too much food, plenty of wine, a momentary escape from the war, and then his memory yielded up Lily’s refusal to explain how she’d charmed the lamp. Perhaps now he would have time to find out.
He realised that Remus was watching him stare at the lamp, but if Remus saw anything strange in that behaviour he didn’t mention it.
"Your bedroom is along the hall," Remus said, gesturing in that direction. "I don’t know if you’d like a shower or something, but there are towels in the bathroom. I can cook if you’re hungry-"
"Remus," Sirius interjected, but Remus kept talking.
"There are some lamp chops, or pasta, or just toast if you’d like-"
"Remus," Sirius said, laying a hand on his arm, and Remus fell quiet. "You don’t need to look after me, I can find my way around."
For a long moment, they looked at one another.
"I know that, "Remus said quietly. "I just meant that you’re welcome here. I don’t want you to feel like you’re intruding."
"I don’t," Sirius replied, and decided to chance his intuition, because the place was a little too neat, even for Remus. "Besides, it looks as thought you’ve just moved in."
Remus mouth curled at the corner, a lop-sided smile that acknowledged Sirius had won a point.
"All right, yes. I wanted something bigger and somewhere that..."
"Somewhere we could move into together."
"Yes."
Sirius pulled him into a hug, burying his head against Remus’ neck and feeling the wooly jumper scratch against his cheek. "I’m so glad to see you," he murmured, and Remus’ arms curled warm and secure around his back.
Remus said, "Welcome home."
Author: woldy
Recipient: paulamcg
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2300 words
Summary: The past is full of lessons, but Remus and Sirius choose what they learn.
Author's notes: Written for paulamcg ’s prompt 2: “So we just hold on fast / Acknowledge the past / As lessons exquisitely crafted” and Eric’s Song by Vienna Teng. I really hope you like it! Many thanks to the lovely brighty18 for betaing.
After James and Lily died, it rained for four days.
The rain splashed on Remus’ face when the Aurors hauled him away for questioning, and when they released him, Remus curled up in bed and listened to it drumming against the roof. He barely slept, a few snatched minutes here and there before being accosted by nightmares that, upon waking, turned out to be true.
Remus watched the rain running down the window, and imagined it falling on the devastated remains of James and Lily’s home. He thought of the water swirling down streets, rivulets washing away whatever tiny fragments of Peter’s body were left after Sirius’ murderous curse. He imagined the water rising and rising until everything was swept away.
It felt like the end of the world.
On the fifth day, the rain stopped. Remus wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper, and pulled himself out of the bed. In the silence, his footsteps seemed to echo through the empty flat - no, not empty. The flat was filled with things that belonged to Sirius and stuff they had owned together, all still in place as though waiting for Sirius to return.
Remus changed his socks and, on reflection, the rest of his clothes. Then he went out into the weak autumn sunlight and walked to the shop. He bought milk, bread, a tin of soup; the things one needed to keep on living.
On the way back, he paused outside the charity shop, its window display filled with books, clothes and a selection of trinkets. The door dinged as he pushed it open.
"Will you collect?" he asked the woman at the till.
The woman looked up. Remus didn’t know what she saw in his face, but her expression turned sympathetic. "We can arrange to, if there’s a lot of material," she said hesitantly. "It can be best to wait a while before deciding if you want to keep-"
"There is a lot of material, I’m afraid," Remus interrupted. "The sooner you can come the better."
A van arrived the next day and it took several hours to empty the flat into it. The driver didn’t ask any questions and Remus didn’t volunteer anything. Quietly, efficiently, they removed everything associated with Sirius: Alphard’s old sofa, the bookcase from Andromeda and Ted, the bed they bought together, the chest of drawers from a second hand shop.
Remus didn’t hesitate until he came to the red lamp that James and Lily gave him and Sirius last Christmas. It was heavy and elegant, by far the nicest thing in the flat, and Lily had charmed it to work with both electricity and magic.
He thought back to the lumpy sight of it in wrapping paper beneath the tree, and the way James and Lily smiled when Sirius tore the parcel open.
"How did you get it to work with electricity?" Sirius had demanded. "You can’t transfigure electrons into magic, that’s one of the exceptions to Gamp’s-"
"Just because you don’t know how to do it, Sirius, doesn’t mean it can’t be done," Lily said, turning away, and Remus saw the sparkle in her eyes.
If she’d told Sirius how it worked then he would probably have forgotten within a few hours. By refusing to tell him, Lily had ensured that Sirius would do everything he could to find out. A teachable moment, Remus thought, remembering what Dumbledore had told the Prefects. There were lessons everywhere, if you looked.
Remus took a deep breath and placed the lamp into a box of books, before carrying it into the truck. After they loaded the final few items, struggling over the heavy dining table, the driver turned to Remus.
"You sure about giving away all this?"
The man’s eyes passed from Remus face to his old jumper and worn shoes, pegging him as the sort of person who bought from charity shops instead of donating to them.
"Yes, thank you," Remus replied, because the alternative was to burn it all. He would like to think that someone, somewhere, could benefit from this.
He closed the door as the man drove away, and sat down on his old school trunk to scribble an apologetic note for the landlord. Then, taking the handle of his trunk in one hand, Remus closed his eyes and thought of a small, desolate village with waves crashing against the coast. He Apparated away, and left nothing behind.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
At first, Sirius marked each day with a line on the wall, and when ten days had passed he scratched a circle for the moon. He expected Remus to come any day now, before the next moon, and it wasn’t until the third full moon rose in view of his window that it occurred to him that Remus might not be coming.
Sirius stared at the moon, which looked ominous behind the wispy clouds, and wondered what Remus was thinking. He couldn’t imagine how Remus could reconcile the Ministry’s account of what Sirius had done with the decade they had spent together, sharing air and sunlight as they grew like trees with entangled roots.
He shivered, the wall cold against his back, and thought about how bruised and bloody Remus would be after a night of transforming alone. The thought of how Remus must feel, believing himself unable to judge or trust, was almost worse than what Peter had done to James and Lily.
As the months passed, Sirius watched the moon through its phases and learned not to hope.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
Remus couldn’t see much point in replacing the furniture, because he didn’t stay anywhere for long. People would get suspicious, he told himself, and the last thing he wanted was to answer questions. Leaving grew easier with practice, until it only took a wave of his wand for all Remus’ belongings to pack themselves neatly into his trunk.
It was two years after James and Lily’s deaths before Remus touched a man again, hands sliding down his back with intent. After that, he brought Muggles back to his rented apartments, tumbling onto sofas where the springs dug into your back and rolling on beds that rocked and squeaked. For a few minutes he could almost, almost, forget about Sirius.
Five years later, as the guy pulled his trousers back on and Remus avoided his eyes, he realised that his history wasn’t something he could move beyond. Nobody would ever replace them, and there was no way of becoming the person he would have been if without those friendships, love and betrayal. The absences of James, Lily, Peter and Sirius, always Sirius, carved out the shape of his life.
The pain at any reminder of his friends faded slowly to a dull ache. When Remus unfolded the Prophet over breakfast and read that Harry was starting at Hogwarts, it took only a few seconds before he remembered to breathe. He read the paper front to back as usual, skipping over the Quidditch scores, and tried to ignore the tremble in his hands. With luck, he thought, that would be the end of it.
"Mum says you knew them," came the sudden announcement from one of the children he was tutoring, "the Potters and Sirius Black. Did you?"
The kids looked at him intently, as though knowing the Potters made someone strange and exciting, qualitatively different from the man who’d been teaching them Latin for weeks.
"It was a long time ago," Remus said tightly. "There’s no point worrying yourselves about that."
The kids exchanged looks, disappointment written on their faces. They know I’m lying, Remus thought, and their crestfallen expressions were seared into his mind so deeply that half a bottle of Firewhiskey didn’t remove the image.
Remus woke with an appalling headache, his flat stinking of alcohol, and resolved to tell them the truth. The kids were growing up in a world shaped by his generation, both their achievements and their failings, and his reluctance to face up to the past was no excuse.
"Yes, I knew the Potters and Sirius Black," Remus told them during the next lesson, clasping his hands together beneath the table so that the children wouldn’t see them shake. "We were at Hogwarts together. If you’d asked me back then, I would have said Sirius was my friend."
The children stared for a moment before launching into a dozen questions, and Remus was surprised to find that it became easier the more he talked. That’s the nature of teaching, he thought wryly, the need to explain something forces you to resolve it yourself.
The next morning Remus put on his warmest coat and exchanged some Sickles for pounds at Gringotts before embarking on a tour of the country’s charity shops. It took the best part of a week to trawl through them, sifting though piles of junk in musty rooms, before he found the lamp.
He Apparated home with the red lamp, plugged it in and watched it blink into light. Pulse racing, Remus raised his wand - and then slowly lowered it. It might just be a lamp from the same manufacturer, not Lily’s at all, and if so he didn’t want to know. It was better to hope.
Months later, when Remus absentmindedly muttered "Lumos" while fumbling for his wand in the dark, the lamp lit instantly. Remus turned slowly to look at it, the heavy red base a little scratched over the years, but indubitably his lamp and still intact.
His mistake in getting rid of the lamp had been to let the memory of Sirius trump that of James, Lily and Peter. Yes it hurt, everything associated with Sirius hurt, but there was love, too, and bonds he could neither deny nor forget.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooO
The address Remus sent him took Sirius to a row of indistinguishable terraced houses on a quiet road. Sirius padded up to front step, considered standing on his hind legs to reach the doorbell, and then scratched at the door.
Within seconds, Remus pulled the door open and gestured him inside. The hallway wasn’t wide, but it was warm, and Sirius took a moment to enjoy the heat seeping through him.
"You didn’t have any trouble finding the place, then," Remus said, and ruffled the fur on Sirius’ head with one hand. It took a conscious effort for Sirius not to lean into the touch.
There was so much left unsaid between them, things which perhaps didn’t need to be voiced. In Sirius’ view, actions spoke louder than words, and their embrace in the Shrieking Shack said everything that was needed: I’m sorry; I missed you; you’re forgiven. Remus had invited him and he was here; he knew their friendship was all right.
It was harder to know whether they could pick up a relationship that shattered a decade ago, but that decision would come with time. They slipped from friendship to lovers then, and Sirius wasn’t going to force things now.
With the familiar sensation of a full-body sneeze he transformed, pulled off his cloak and hung it on one of the hooks beside the door.
"No trouble at all."
"The sitting room is in here," Remus said, pointing through a door, and Sirius looked inside. It was far cleaner and more orderly than his flat with Remus had ever been, and Sirius realised with a jolt that he shouldn’t be surprised, that this was the house of a man in his thirties, not a kid barely out of school.
The room barely seemed lived in and the sofa was new, if Sirius was any judge. Amidst all the items in the room only two were familiar: Remus’ trunk, which stood discreetly in the corner, and the red lamp on the table.
Sirius smiled at the sight of the lamp, recalling the last Christmas he had celebrated. They’d all been at James’ house, and he remembered playing on the floor with Harry, helping him to pull a Zonkos cracker and seeing Harry laugh when it tore open with a puff of smoke. There had been too much food, plenty of wine, a momentary escape from the war, and then his memory yielded up Lily’s refusal to explain how she’d charmed the lamp. Perhaps now he would have time to find out.
He realised that Remus was watching him stare at the lamp, but if Remus saw anything strange in that behaviour he didn’t mention it.
"Your bedroom is along the hall," Remus said, gesturing in that direction. "I don’t know if you’d like a shower or something, but there are towels in the bathroom. I can cook if you’re hungry-"
"Remus," Sirius interjected, but Remus kept talking.
"There are some lamp chops, or pasta, or just toast if you’d like-"
"Remus," Sirius said, laying a hand on his arm, and Remus fell quiet. "You don’t need to look after me, I can find my way around."
For a long moment, they looked at one another.
"I know that, "Remus said quietly. "I just meant that you’re welcome here. I don’t want you to feel like you’re intruding."
"I don’t," Sirius replied, and decided to chance his intuition, because the place was a little too neat, even for Remus. "Besides, it looks as thought you’ve just moved in."
Remus mouth curled at the corner, a lop-sided smile that acknowledged Sirius had won a point.
"All right, yes. I wanted something bigger and somewhere that..."
"Somewhere we could move into together."
"Yes."
Sirius pulled him into a hug, burying his head against Remus’ neck and feeling the wooly jumper scratch against his cheek. "I’m so glad to see you," he murmured, and Remus’ arms curled warm and secure around his back.
Remus said, "Welcome home."