A Constellation’s Just a Picture in the Sky (2/7)
A CONSTELLATION'S JUST A PICTURE IN THE SKY
Summary: There’s a war on and all is not easy for the young members of the Order of the Phoenix, but Remus - nineteen, in love and sharing a flat with Sirius - is happier than he ever thought it possible to be. …Until one morning a knock at their door heralds an unexpected visitor from Sirius’ past, begging help with a desperate mission.
CHAPTER TWO
Pale stone columns and vaults stretched away in both directions. The room was narrow but long, and the ceilings unexpectedly high. Pale light filtered in from somewhere, perhaps from the stones themselves. Remus gazed around, a little awed despite himself. The whole effect of the place was grand, far too grand to fit beneath the little church Remus had seen aboveground. He suspected tastefully executed Enlargement Charms.
The air was cool and quiet and smelled pleasantly of old rock, not musty as Remus had expected it to be. Their footsteps sounded softly on the worn stones.
Beside him, Sirius’ voice came out harshly sarcastic, and the walls returned a muffled echo of the sound. “Doesn’t it make you want to go ahead and bite it just for the honour of getting stashed here? Look up.”
“What?” Remus asked, confused by this abrupt shift.
Sirius stepped closer, his body a warm and welcome presence amidst all the cool stone, and gently caught Remus’ arm. He leaned in and nudged Remus’ chin with his own. “Go on, look up.”
Remus did so, and gasped. The entire Northern Hemisphere night sky soared above him, every detail of it, even the faintest star, picked out in delicate gold paint against a high, vaulted ceiling of Egyptian blue. It was astonishingly life-like. The stars seemed even to twinkle in the wan light of the crypt, as did the gossamer-thin lines that sketched out the shapes of constellations. Instinctively, Remus’ eye sought out familiar shapes, starting with the North Star and working outwards.
“There I am,” Sirius whispered, his breath warm in Remus’ ear, stretching one hand up to point at the brightest star in the constellation neatly labelled Canis Major. The dog star, in the dog constellation, beside the unmistakeable shape of Orion the hunter. “Forever faithfully trotting at Orion’s heels,” Sirius muttered, and Remus shivered. Orion: a random of collection of otherwise unrelated stars called after a Greek hero, and the name of Sirius’ estranged father.
Remus knew Sirius’ name had been burned off his family tree. Sirius had told him so in a rare, maudlin moment of openness about his family. And that knowledge made Remus perversely glad to see that at least Sirius hadn’t been scrubbed away here, from the family’s constellation chart - even though that probably had nothing to do with Sirius himself. Probably the star that bore his name was allowed to remain only because the Sirius in the night sky really did exist, and even the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black wasn’t powerful enough to wish it away. Still, Remus felt fiercely glad to see Sirius’ painted star still shining.
“That’s the thing about being part of a constellation,” Sirius murmured, his voice a ghost of breath against Remus’ ear. “You try and you try to run, but no matter how far you go, those little lines are still binding you.”
A footstep sounded, far away at the end of the vault; both Remus and Sirius spun towards the sound, wands extended. In the dim light, they could see Regulus picking his way towards them between the rows of coffins.
Regulus looked terrible, Remus thought. He didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to feel anything about Regulus except a determination to get him away from Sirius again as soon as possible. But he couldn’t help seeing Regulus’ pallor and the dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and he wore long dark robes, despite the mild summer weather. Long enough to hide the Dark Mark that surely adorned his left arm.
“Brother,” Regulus said, stopping a few feet away from them, his arms extended to his sides and his hands empty in the universal gesture of the unarmed. “I came alone like you said, but I see you’ve brought back-up.”
Remus saw Sirius’ hand tighten even more firmly on his wand. “Regulus,” Sirius spat. “What do you want?”
“I place myself at your mercy,” Regulus said, a sardonic snarl belying the formality of what Remus suspected must be ritual phrases. “I come unarmed and defenceless, in humility. Hear my words.”
“Yeah, all right,” Sirius said through clenched teeth. “We’re here. We’re listening.”
“I’m not going to do anything to you. You can lower your wands.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Sirius growled, “seeing as the last time we met you tried to curse me.”
“I don’t have a wand. I don’t know what you expect me to do without one,” Regulus snapped.
“Sirius,” Remus said softly. “It’s easy enough to check. Shall I?”
Sirius nodded tightly, gaze and wand still sharply focused on Regulus, so Remus pointed his own wand and murmured, “Magicum Revelio.”
Spidery lines of light danced across Regulus’ body, but they didn’t collect in any one spot as they would have done if he had been carrying a magical object, and they faded away as soon as Remus lowered his arm.
“It’s true,” Remus said. “He’s not carrying a wand.”
“They broke it,” Regulus said, hands still spread wide, tightly harnessed fury in his voice. “They broke it when I - anyway, they broke it.”
“Fine,” Sirius said, but he didn’t lower his wand. “You sit over there. We stay here.”
Regulus backed away and perched gingerly against the edge of the coffin Sirius had indicated. His dark eyes burned in his sallow face, even in the low light.
“Now talk,” Sirius said.
Regulus glared at him, but he spoke. “The Dark Lord - he’s done something awful. It’s horrible to talk about. It’s -” Regulus swallowed, then abruptly asked, “Do you know what a Horcrux is?”
Remus gave an involuntary gasp. He’d come across the term in the Restricted section of the library back at Hogwarts, doing advanced research with a special note of permission from that year’s Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. As soon as he’d realised what he was reading, Remus had shoved the book back onto the shelf, sickened. He felt sick now, too. “Voldemort’s made a Horcrux?”
Regulus winced at the name, but nodded. “Yeah. And I know where it is.”
Sirius was frowning angrily. “He’s made a what?”
Remus looked over at him. “It’s a…vessel, something to hold a piece of his soul. He’d have had to commit murder, which I suppose he does often enough anyway, to rip his soul. Then there’s a complicated and awful magical process to put that piece of the soul inside an object, somewhere apart from the body. It makes him immortal, basically, because even if you kill his body, his soul is still there.”
Regulus glanced at Remus with grudging respect on his face. “That’s right,” he said. “I don’t know how you know that, but it’s right.”
“Too much reading,” Remus mumbled, and Sirius barked out a laugh, half humoured and half horrified.
Eyes on Regulus, Sirius demanded, “So where’s this Horcrux? And why are you telling us about it? I would think you’d want old Voldy to live forever, since you adore him so much.”
Regulus twitched at Sirius’ disrespectful tone, and seemed to have to fight against an urge to dispute it. But instead he said, “He tried to kill Kreacher.”
The sentence hung in the air, and Remus racked his brains for when he’d heard Sirius use that name. One of the family’s house-elves, was that it?
Regulus hugged his arms around himself as though he were very cold, although the crypt was no more than pleasantly cool, and the words began to tumble out. “He made this Horcrux, and he found a hiding place for it, and then he wanted to test out the hiding place to make sure it really worked, so he made me loan him Kreacher. He used Kreacher as his test and then he just left him to die. If I hadn’t ordered Kreacher to come back to me afterwards, he would have died. And I’m - I’m going to get the Horcrux and destroy it. And I need your help.”
Regulus stopped talking, and Sirius exhaled harshly into the sudden silence. He still hadn’t lowered his wand, which was aimed at his brother’s heart. “Why should I believe you?” Sirius demanded. “What’s to say you’re not spying for them right now, trying to trap me and Remus into something, or use us to lead you to the Order of the Phoenix?”
“Because I’m not a Death Eater anymore,” Regulus said, and reached over with his right hand to roll up his left sleeve. “I told my mates - I mean - the others about what happened, and I asked them didn’t they think it was wrong to hurt someone who was on our side, who was only trying to help us, and they…” With a last, flurried motion, he flung his sleeve the rest of the way up and thrust his left arm towards them.
Where Remus had expected to see a Dark Mark was instead livid flesh. A chunk of Regulus’ arm had been gouged out and partially, inexpertly healed with amateur charms, so that the wound was more or less closed, but the skin around it was misshapen and inflamed, still clotted in places with dark blood. Remus, accustomed though he was to wounds of every kind, nearly gagged at the unexpectedness of it.
“They cut it out,” Regulus said dispassionately. “They said questioning the Dark Lord’s ways was betrayal and I didn’t deserve to be one of his Death Eaters anymore.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you,” Sirius replied. His voice had gone curiously flat.
Regulus sneered in his direction as he carelessly shoved his sleeve back down over the horrible wound. “You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you? Save you the trouble. Well, they tried to. And they broke my wand. But I got away before they could get me. And I’m going to destroy that Horcrux whether you help me or not, and I really don’t give a Hippogriph’s arse whether you believe me.”
Remus slid his gaze sideways at Sirius. It was Sirius’ choice. He could send Regulus away this moment, and Remus certainly wouldn’t rebuke him. It wasn’t his place to make decisions about Sirius’ life.
Very slowly, Sirius lowered his wand. For an endless moment he stared his brother down, and Remus, beside him, could hardly breathe.
“All right,” Sirius said at last. “I’m not saying I necessarily believe you, but you can show us the hiding place of this Horcrux and then we’ll see what to do about it. Stand up.”
His eyes locked the whole time on Sirius, Regulus stood up very slowly from the coffin, hands again spread in surrender.
“We’ll take you to the Order,” Sirius said. “You can tell them what you’ve told us, and they’ll decide what the best thing is to do.”
“No!” Regulus’ hands scrabbled frantically for the wand he didn’t have, and he pressed back against the coffin behind him. His eyes rolled in fear, like a cornered animal. “No, don’t make me go to them!”
“Regulus,” Remus said, startled. He stepped forward, then thought better of it when Regulus flailed away in a frenzy at his approach. “Nobody in the Order of the Phoenix is going to hurt you. If anything, they can offer you more protection than just the two of us would be able to do.”
“No, no, no,” Regulus moaned, cowering against the coffin. “Don’t make me, don’t make me. They’ll kill me.”
Remus turned to Sirius, who looked back at him, equally confused and looking suddenly out of his depth. It occurred to Remus very forcefully that Sirius knew how to be angry at his brother, knew how to react to Regulus’ rage, but he didn’t know how to deal with this fear and vulnerability.
“Okay,” Remus said gently, trying to make himself as physically unthreatening as possible. “Regulus, nobody’s going to hurt you. We won’t take you to the Order. It’s just us, Sirius and I, and we’ll help you. You can come back to our flat for the night, and we’ll figure it out tomorrow. All right?”
“To our flat?” Sirius hissed. “What, so he can kill us in our sleep?”
Keeping one eye on the panicked brother and one eye on the furious one, Remus gave a huff of frustration. “Look, can you think of a better option? He’s terrified of the Order, he obviously can’t go back to wherever he was living before, and he’s exhausted. He’s going to fall over where he stands if you don’t let him sleep somewhere.”
It was true, Regulus was swaying on his feet, clutching his arms around himself. The cool, disdainful young man was gone, replaced by a terrified child from the moment the Order of the Phoenix was mentioned.
Sirius ground his teeth. “Fine. But I’m locking him up in the guest room. He’s still a danger, no matter what change of heart he’s supposedly had.”
“All right,” Remus said soothingly, no longer sure who he was trying to comfort. “We’ll do that. Let’s do that.”
Sirius stared at his brother with unfathomably dark eyes. “Come on then,” he said. “You’re coming home with us.”
(Continue to CHAPTER THREE)
Summary: There’s a war on and all is not easy for the young members of the Order of the Phoenix, but Remus - nineteen, in love and sharing a flat with Sirius - is happier than he ever thought it possible to be. …Until one morning a knock at their door heralds an unexpected visitor from Sirius’ past, begging help with a desperate mission.
CHAPTER TWO
Pale stone columns and vaults stretched away in both directions. The room was narrow but long, and the ceilings unexpectedly high. Pale light filtered in from somewhere, perhaps from the stones themselves. Remus gazed around, a little awed despite himself. The whole effect of the place was grand, far too grand to fit beneath the little church Remus had seen aboveground. He suspected tastefully executed Enlargement Charms.
The air was cool and quiet and smelled pleasantly of old rock, not musty as Remus had expected it to be. Their footsteps sounded softly on the worn stones.
Beside him, Sirius’ voice came out harshly sarcastic, and the walls returned a muffled echo of the sound. “Doesn’t it make you want to go ahead and bite it just for the honour of getting stashed here? Look up.”
“What?” Remus asked, confused by this abrupt shift.
Sirius stepped closer, his body a warm and welcome presence amidst all the cool stone, and gently caught Remus’ arm. He leaned in and nudged Remus’ chin with his own. “Go on, look up.”
Remus did so, and gasped. The entire Northern Hemisphere night sky soared above him, every detail of it, even the faintest star, picked out in delicate gold paint against a high, vaulted ceiling of Egyptian blue. It was astonishingly life-like. The stars seemed even to twinkle in the wan light of the crypt, as did the gossamer-thin lines that sketched out the shapes of constellations. Instinctively, Remus’ eye sought out familiar shapes, starting with the North Star and working outwards.
“There I am,” Sirius whispered, his breath warm in Remus’ ear, stretching one hand up to point at the brightest star in the constellation neatly labelled Canis Major. The dog star, in the dog constellation, beside the unmistakeable shape of Orion the hunter. “Forever faithfully trotting at Orion’s heels,” Sirius muttered, and Remus shivered. Orion: a random of collection of otherwise unrelated stars called after a Greek hero, and the name of Sirius’ estranged father.
Remus knew Sirius’ name had been burned off his family tree. Sirius had told him so in a rare, maudlin moment of openness about his family. And that knowledge made Remus perversely glad to see that at least Sirius hadn’t been scrubbed away here, from the family’s constellation chart - even though that probably had nothing to do with Sirius himself. Probably the star that bore his name was allowed to remain only because the Sirius in the night sky really did exist, and even the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black wasn’t powerful enough to wish it away. Still, Remus felt fiercely glad to see Sirius’ painted star still shining.
“That’s the thing about being part of a constellation,” Sirius murmured, his voice a ghost of breath against Remus’ ear. “You try and you try to run, but no matter how far you go, those little lines are still binding you.”
A footstep sounded, far away at the end of the vault; both Remus and Sirius spun towards the sound, wands extended. In the dim light, they could see Regulus picking his way towards them between the rows of coffins.
Regulus looked terrible, Remus thought. He didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to feel anything about Regulus except a determination to get him away from Sirius again as soon as possible. But he couldn’t help seeing Regulus’ pallor and the dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and he wore long dark robes, despite the mild summer weather. Long enough to hide the Dark Mark that surely adorned his left arm.
“Brother,” Regulus said, stopping a few feet away from them, his arms extended to his sides and his hands empty in the universal gesture of the unarmed. “I came alone like you said, but I see you’ve brought back-up.”
Remus saw Sirius’ hand tighten even more firmly on his wand. “Regulus,” Sirius spat. “What do you want?”
“I place myself at your mercy,” Regulus said, a sardonic snarl belying the formality of what Remus suspected must be ritual phrases. “I come unarmed and defenceless, in humility. Hear my words.”
“Yeah, all right,” Sirius said through clenched teeth. “We’re here. We’re listening.”
“I’m not going to do anything to you. You can lower your wands.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Sirius growled, “seeing as the last time we met you tried to curse me.”
“I don’t have a wand. I don’t know what you expect me to do without one,” Regulus snapped.
“Sirius,” Remus said softly. “It’s easy enough to check. Shall I?”
Sirius nodded tightly, gaze and wand still sharply focused on Regulus, so Remus pointed his own wand and murmured, “Magicum Revelio.”
Spidery lines of light danced across Regulus’ body, but they didn’t collect in any one spot as they would have done if he had been carrying a magical object, and they faded away as soon as Remus lowered his arm.
“It’s true,” Remus said. “He’s not carrying a wand.”
“They broke it,” Regulus said, hands still spread wide, tightly harnessed fury in his voice. “They broke it when I - anyway, they broke it.”
“Fine,” Sirius said, but he didn’t lower his wand. “You sit over there. We stay here.”
Regulus backed away and perched gingerly against the edge of the coffin Sirius had indicated. His dark eyes burned in his sallow face, even in the low light.
“Now talk,” Sirius said.
Regulus glared at him, but he spoke. “The Dark Lord - he’s done something awful. It’s horrible to talk about. It’s -” Regulus swallowed, then abruptly asked, “Do you know what a Horcrux is?”
Remus gave an involuntary gasp. He’d come across the term in the Restricted section of the library back at Hogwarts, doing advanced research with a special note of permission from that year’s Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. As soon as he’d realised what he was reading, Remus had shoved the book back onto the shelf, sickened. He felt sick now, too. “Voldemort’s made a Horcrux?”
Regulus winced at the name, but nodded. “Yeah. And I know where it is.”
Sirius was frowning angrily. “He’s made a what?”
Remus looked over at him. “It’s a…vessel, something to hold a piece of his soul. He’d have had to commit murder, which I suppose he does often enough anyway, to rip his soul. Then there’s a complicated and awful magical process to put that piece of the soul inside an object, somewhere apart from the body. It makes him immortal, basically, because even if you kill his body, his soul is still there.”
Regulus glanced at Remus with grudging respect on his face. “That’s right,” he said. “I don’t know how you know that, but it’s right.”
“Too much reading,” Remus mumbled, and Sirius barked out a laugh, half humoured and half horrified.
Eyes on Regulus, Sirius demanded, “So where’s this Horcrux? And why are you telling us about it? I would think you’d want old Voldy to live forever, since you adore him so much.”
Regulus twitched at Sirius’ disrespectful tone, and seemed to have to fight against an urge to dispute it. But instead he said, “He tried to kill Kreacher.”
The sentence hung in the air, and Remus racked his brains for when he’d heard Sirius use that name. One of the family’s house-elves, was that it?
Regulus hugged his arms around himself as though he were very cold, although the crypt was no more than pleasantly cool, and the words began to tumble out. “He made this Horcrux, and he found a hiding place for it, and then he wanted to test out the hiding place to make sure it really worked, so he made me loan him Kreacher. He used Kreacher as his test and then he just left him to die. If I hadn’t ordered Kreacher to come back to me afterwards, he would have died. And I’m - I’m going to get the Horcrux and destroy it. And I need your help.”
Regulus stopped talking, and Sirius exhaled harshly into the sudden silence. He still hadn’t lowered his wand, which was aimed at his brother’s heart. “Why should I believe you?” Sirius demanded. “What’s to say you’re not spying for them right now, trying to trap me and Remus into something, or use us to lead you to the Order of the Phoenix?”
“Because I’m not a Death Eater anymore,” Regulus said, and reached over with his right hand to roll up his left sleeve. “I told my mates - I mean - the others about what happened, and I asked them didn’t they think it was wrong to hurt someone who was on our side, who was only trying to help us, and they…” With a last, flurried motion, he flung his sleeve the rest of the way up and thrust his left arm towards them.
Where Remus had expected to see a Dark Mark was instead livid flesh. A chunk of Regulus’ arm had been gouged out and partially, inexpertly healed with amateur charms, so that the wound was more or less closed, but the skin around it was misshapen and inflamed, still clotted in places with dark blood. Remus, accustomed though he was to wounds of every kind, nearly gagged at the unexpectedness of it.
“They cut it out,” Regulus said dispassionately. “They said questioning the Dark Lord’s ways was betrayal and I didn’t deserve to be one of his Death Eaters anymore.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you,” Sirius replied. His voice had gone curiously flat.
Regulus sneered in his direction as he carelessly shoved his sleeve back down over the horrible wound. “You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you? Save you the trouble. Well, they tried to. And they broke my wand. But I got away before they could get me. And I’m going to destroy that Horcrux whether you help me or not, and I really don’t give a Hippogriph’s arse whether you believe me.”
Remus slid his gaze sideways at Sirius. It was Sirius’ choice. He could send Regulus away this moment, and Remus certainly wouldn’t rebuke him. It wasn’t his place to make decisions about Sirius’ life.
Very slowly, Sirius lowered his wand. For an endless moment he stared his brother down, and Remus, beside him, could hardly breathe.
“All right,” Sirius said at last. “I’m not saying I necessarily believe you, but you can show us the hiding place of this Horcrux and then we’ll see what to do about it. Stand up.”
His eyes locked the whole time on Sirius, Regulus stood up very slowly from the coffin, hands again spread in surrender.
“We’ll take you to the Order,” Sirius said. “You can tell them what you’ve told us, and they’ll decide what the best thing is to do.”
“No!” Regulus’ hands scrabbled frantically for the wand he didn’t have, and he pressed back against the coffin behind him. His eyes rolled in fear, like a cornered animal. “No, don’t make me go to them!”
“Regulus,” Remus said, startled. He stepped forward, then thought better of it when Regulus flailed away in a frenzy at his approach. “Nobody in the Order of the Phoenix is going to hurt you. If anything, they can offer you more protection than just the two of us would be able to do.”
“No, no, no,” Regulus moaned, cowering against the coffin. “Don’t make me, don’t make me. They’ll kill me.”
Remus turned to Sirius, who looked back at him, equally confused and looking suddenly out of his depth. It occurred to Remus very forcefully that Sirius knew how to be angry at his brother, knew how to react to Regulus’ rage, but he didn’t know how to deal with this fear and vulnerability.
“Okay,” Remus said gently, trying to make himself as physically unthreatening as possible. “Regulus, nobody’s going to hurt you. We won’t take you to the Order. It’s just us, Sirius and I, and we’ll help you. You can come back to our flat for the night, and we’ll figure it out tomorrow. All right?”
“To our flat?” Sirius hissed. “What, so he can kill us in our sleep?”
Keeping one eye on the panicked brother and one eye on the furious one, Remus gave a huff of frustration. “Look, can you think of a better option? He’s terrified of the Order, he obviously can’t go back to wherever he was living before, and he’s exhausted. He’s going to fall over where he stands if you don’t let him sleep somewhere.”
It was true, Regulus was swaying on his feet, clutching his arms around himself. The cool, disdainful young man was gone, replaced by a terrified child from the moment the Order of the Phoenix was mentioned.
Sirius ground his teeth. “Fine. But I’m locking him up in the guest room. He’s still a danger, no matter what change of heart he’s supposedly had.”
“All right,” Remus said soothingly, no longer sure who he was trying to comfort. “We’ll do that. Let’s do that.”
Sirius stared at his brother with unfathomably dark eyes. “Come on then,” he said. “You’re coming home with us.”
(Continue to CHAPTER THREE)