Chapter 4
Friday February 28th, 1986
They had finally scheduled a press conference, and Remus was narrowing down questions that he believed would be both concise and thought provoking, to potentially catch any of the Black’s ears, or at least pester them enough to provoke an interesting headline. He typically was not a proponent of heckling when reporting, but he was also hyper aware that every tabloid in all of London would be in attendance, and even if his beat was not crime or scandal, he could play by their rules on their turf.
With just under four hours until he had to be at the police station, as the Black Family had declined to release any statements of their own, Remus was shins deep in Black Family history. He knew the year that they had immigrated from France, he knew the policies both Orion and Walburga Black had used in their numerous political campaigns, he knew about distant cousins and less distant inbreeding between second and even first cousins. Being impartial was a core component of his work, but those people seemed to be working overtime to keep anyone from coming away from them without a sour taste in their mouth.
Marlene stopped at his desk and tapped the paper he was skimming relentlessly until he looked up.
“Dumplings?” She offered, quirking an eyebrow at his hellscape of a desk.
“No, but I’ll take a rain check for Monday.”
“I might not want dumplings on Monday.” As much as he loved Marlene, his patience was thin, and it had been thinning since his meeting with Cuffe. Remus was being asked to prove himself, and more than that, someone’s life was on the line. The Black Family wasn’t a group he was particularly interested in seeing succeed, but he felt some sense of responsibility for doing more than a passable job with this article. He shot Marlene a look that he hoped conveyed his fraying nerves but apologetic nature. He was sure it fell short.
“Well then I’ll take a rain check for next time you want them.”
Marlene sighed, and Remus felt himself itch to snap at her. He was already losing precious minutes, she of all people knew what it was like.
“Why is it so important I go today? I’ve got to be at Gresham Street by two thirty.”
Marlene’s huff turned into a laugh, even if it was a bit exasperated. “Remus, it’s noon. And the tube from here to there is what? Fifteen minutes? Less?”
When Remus didn’t respond, she hummed a small, “Hmm?” by way of driving home her point.
“Eleven minutes.” He grumbled.
“Alright then, come on! You’ve already been here later than the rest of us. Yesterday I thought you’d fall through the gap cause you wouldn’t take your nose out of a stupid editorial.”
“Marlene-” he started, but she had swept the paper he was reading from under his nose.
“I know you think this is some kind of test, and it is, I guess, but you’re not going to fail,” he parted his lips to disagree, but Marlene raised her voice and pointed an accusatory finger at him. “But you will fail if you don’t eat and you pass out at a press conference and cause a scene because you look like you haven’t eaten anything except microwave ramen and cigs for the past three days.”
“Fuck, McKinnon.” A small chuckle forced its way up his throat, to his own dismay.
“Dumplings. Now. And that new copy editor is coming too. Her name’s Lily.”
Sighing, Remus stood, and found his agitated mood lifting, despite being read for filth where any other coworker could plainly see. He reached for his paper, but Marlene deftly shoved it into her bag, with little care for the fact that Remus had been borrowing it from a local library’s archives.
“You’ll get it later, Remus. Take a breath you wanker.”
* * *
Lily Potter was the exact person Remus had been hoping would be recruited by The Daily Mail , despite him not knowing he had been hoping for someone like her.
Instantly, he was drawn to her in a childlike way. She had a bubbly laugh and round, blushed cheeks and an appetite that put both him and Marlene to shame. Upon meeting outside the hole in the wall restaurant Marlene and Remus had been frequenting since their internship days, Lily pointed at him. He was beginning to feel very singled out today.
“ You, ” she started, “are my favorite reporter I’ve ever worked for.”
Remus, a bit taken aback, grinned dopily and furrowed his eyebrows. “Thank you?” He answered, grabbing the door for both women.
“I’ve yet to find an error in anything you’ve turned in. Honestly, you’re making me feel a little bit crazy, or maybe redundant, but you should know that we’re all impressed over in editing.”
Turning to look at Marlene, Remus found he was unable to wipe the smile from his lips. The flattery was too much.
“Thank you.” He repeated, sliding into their usual booth.
* * *
Remus was thankful that he had, much to Marlene’s disappointment, set an hour-long timer on his watch to make sure that he still had time to put the final touches on his questions and head over to the City of London police department with plenty of time to spare. Although their food had been effectively put away mere minutes after they had been served, the three had lounged in the dimly lit back of the shop, chatting and joking until Remus couldn’t tell if the stinging in his chest was from laughing for such a long period of time, or because of the egregiously spicy quality of the food. Lily, upon taking the first bite, had erupted into a smile that could have shook the earth.
Through a mouthful of noodles, she gestured wildly, “Oh I have to bring James here.”
Remus arched an eyebrow as a question, and Lily held up a finger, chewed, and swallowed.
“My husband. He’s Indian, and he’s always complaining about the lack of flavor in, well, everything. Not that I can blame him. Now that he’s effectively rearranged my palette I taste it everywhere too.”
Marlene laughed and Remus nodded, though he would not admit openly that he always quietly ordered the mildest flavor himself.
“Bring him around some day for lunch, you said your son’s in school?” Marlene asked. The two had obviously already found an easy and comfortable rapport.
“Year two, yeah.” She beamed. Remus reminded himself to keep his face straight. Lily couldn’t have been much older than the two of them, if at all, and year two meant her son would be around six. At twenty five, Remus still felt like he was figuring himself out as a human being, and he couldn’t imagine also having to figure out the life of someone only twenty years his junior.
If he hadn’t already decided, he was absolutely certain at that moment that he not only liked Lily Potter, but respected her.
“But James is so incredibly posh,” she continued, waving her chopsticks for dramatic effect, “he’d be scandalized by this place. I’ll get him a takeaway first, lure him into it.”
The rest of lunch passed the same way, and somehow, Remus left the shop not only with a weight of the conference lifted from his shoulders, but loose and polite plans to have dinner with Marlene and the Potters at their house. He was, as with everyone in his life, eager to please, but conversely, Remus was terrified of how his all too English stomach would handle traditional Indian cuisine.
Not only had he been glad for Lily’s company, but Marlene had pressed a folded over piece of paper into his hand after remembering it in a hurry halfway through their hour. When Remus had asked what it was, Marlene had simply pressed him to open it. As he did, she tried to suppress a grin. Perplexed, he held up the photo she had printed: a blimp set alight in the sky, slowly careening earthword.
“Have you developed a mania to commit terrorist actions on large oval shaped aircrafts? Is that what you’re trying to tell me with this?” He turned it so Lily could see, and the two of them puzzled at it together.
“No! No, I guess I should have explained it a bit.”
Remus hummed an agreement, nodding.
“You said you were looking for more subtle tattoo ideas.”
He stared at her blankly. “A blimp? Lily,” he looked to her, “do blimps seem particularly rock and roll to you? Or is Marlene taking the piss?”
Lily shook her head, smiling softly.
“It’s a zeppelin , you prat. I found it in the archives. I figured if you did it as linework it may be interesting, and then the fire you could have filled in.”
“Oh,” Remus started, with the intention of mocking, looking closer at the picture. But he found the more he looked at it, the more metal it seemed. Maybe not in a tough-man sort of way, but in an anarchist sort of way. He bit away a smile at the corner of his lips. “Oh, I guess I do see it–”
“Well thanks,” Remus could practically feel Marlene’s eye roll pushing him out of the booth.
“No, no, I like it. It’s subtle. Not too flashy. I just keep looking at things and I can't find anything that’s not… tacky. The Queen logo’s so big, the Zeppelin Icarus is too recent, and I don’t think I exactly have the build to be sporting roses and lions.”
“And thank god for that,” Marlene muttered. And with that, all three of them burst into laughter.
* * *
Stepping onto the platform at Bank, all the nerves of the press conference ran their way back into Remus’s chest. Clutching his messenger bag and feeling for a pencil (as if he could have forgotten one when he had packed six) he had to remind himself that he had done this all before, just with a different subject in mind.
Though, he thought back to what Marlene had said on the way back to the office, having jostled his shoulder.
“You know, you do this all the time. Any policy piece is about informing people about potential change, every exposé you do on a shitty person running for office is just like informing the public about someone that’s gone missing. You’re thinking about this too much.”
“I think about everything too much.” He had mumbled back.
“Exactly.” Marlene chided.
So how different was it really?
Very different. He decided. Policy was one thing. Something that could change. God knew politics shifted enough in Britain as it was, sometimes even he wished they would slow down. But a missing person’s case, that was something he had a real stake in. People would, for the most part, believe what they wanted to believe about politics. But here he was, heading to a press conference for a man whose family didn’t even want to release their own statements. So Remus was going to have to dig, and dig well, if there was any chance of him making any kind of difference.
Flashing his press badge was the easy part. Remus knew well enough that he should have his notebook in his hand before he entered the press room, but was surprised to find upon arrival that everyone that had come earlier than he had (and he had come early) were merely seated politely in the folding chairs laid out. He glanced around, and realized each seat had an assigned paper taped to the back. The Daily Mail was in the second row from the front, which Remus had no problem with, thanks largely in part to his height.
He sat and waited, flipping through his notepad and as the minutes clipped slowly toward two thirty. As the minute hand on his watch struck the six, a man walked out onto the raised platform that Remus recognized immediately as the chief of police. The other reporters sprang to attention, some even began to yell questions before the man had reached the microphone. When he finally did, there was a squealing from the poorly rigged sound system as the man plucked the microphone from the stand, and said in a cool, ridgid tone:
“Take your seats and quiet down or we will have you all removed. We’re here only to give you the information that we have. On behalf of requests from the Black family, there will be no Q & A.”
Remus was ashamed of the relief that he felt, but that emotion was quickly and utterly smothered by confusion. Nothing about this case was going to be easy, it seemed.
* * *
It was stupid, and he should have thought about going to the Black family townhouse earlier, but Remus had been holed away all week like Marlene had said. Plus, Angel was only three stops from Bank, so after the press conference, he made his way to the Northern Line, etching out a rough idea of what the blurb would look like in tomorrow’s edition. Like Cuffe had said, it didn’t need to be anything large. Not this time. He would keep the hackles raised once every other news outlet had moved on to more eye catching matters, so for now, all he needed to relay was the information that every other reporter had been salivating for in that press room.
It was a remarkably small amount of information, even for a family that didn’t want to raise any eyebrows. In many more words, the police chief had effectively communicated that The Black Family was not worried about the disappearance, and were refusing to call it such, instead stating that Regulus Black would resurface of his own volition, that he was a grown man would could do what he liked and did not have to be followed. When The Telegraph’s blonde representative had barked up at the stage asking why the case was even open then, the police chief had sent her a scathing look, a final warning for the rest of the room.
“Not one, but two removed members of the family have reached out to express concern for his well being. Officers were sent to do a Safe and Wellness check, but the family refused to allow them inside. A concerning voicemail was also left on the answering machine of one of the removed individuals.”
The room went silent, save for the clicking of audio recorders and the scribbling of pencils on flimsy handheld notepads.
“Given the standing of the family, the City of London police believe it is their duty to look at this incident not merely as a runaway or flight, but as a missing person’s case.”
Remus was highly aware that every reporter in the city, and outside of it, would be locating those two individuals as soon as they possibly could, if they hadn’t already. And Remus was doing all he could to not curse himself out in broad daylight on the tube for not having already tracked down family members who had been removed from the line.
It didn’t matter, he told himself, all that it meant was that he was going to be spending another late night at the office.
He was still sketching out a rough closing statement for the blurb when he stepped up to leave the compartment, which was precisely what caused him to fully collide with someone entering from the Angel station.
Notepad skittering out of his hands and onto the cement platform, he finally did release his pent up curses and bent to pick it up, the pages flapping in the wind that ceremoniously rolled his favorite pen into the gap and below the train.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered, grasping his notebook as the stranger muttered genuinely embarrassed apologies and pulled their hand back from the other side of the notebook.
Remus could have sworn he was making those dark tattoos and chipped nail polish up. For a moment, he nearly laughed, before pulling himself up to standing and realizing that he was standing face to face with Sirius.
Behind him, other passengers pushed in and out of the tube, and a woman with a stroller even shot the two of them a well deserved menacing look. Or, as menacing as you could get with a Londoner.
“Oh,” Remus started, wondering if Sirius was going to push past him and into the car he was trying to make. But Sirius didn’t, and, looking up and finally realizing who Remus was, his lips quirked in some way that was rather melancholy.
“What are the odds?” He asked. Remus took a single step forward as Sirius took two steps back. The door closed, and after another moment, the car departed.
“Didn’t you have to be somewhere?” Remus asked, gesturing to the tube and the tracks.
Sirius shrugged and backed away further, beckoning for Remus to come join him standing next to the wall. “Haven’t got anyone for a bit. And I set the hours. I’ll take the next one.”
Remus found it hard to believe that at four on a Friday afternoon an eclectic-punk tattoo shop had no appointments, and the owner could be a half hour tube ride away, exactly where Remus had been meaning to go. But he kept his mouth shut on this front. Goodness knew he had already embarrassed himself enough.
“I guess that’s true.”
“How’s the healing?”
Remus beamed, not meaning to, and turned his face away to at least try to conceal it, busying himself with securing his notepad into his bag. “Great. Barely had any itching, and the color bleeding was a lot better than I thought it would be.”
Sirius nodded, obviously pleased with either himself, or Remus’s answer. Or both. “Put any more thought into what you want next?” He drew his hand into the deep pockets of a weathered leather jacket. “I’ve got my schedule on me, and we’ve got…” he looked up to the train times sign, “six minutes.”
Remus chuckled lightly and started to shake his head before stopping. “Actually, Marlene brought me something today she thought might be interesting. Hold on.”
One of Sirius’s brows peaked, and Remus went back to fishing in his bag. Meanwhile, Sirius pulled the organizer from his pocket– a smaller one than the binder at the shop– and began to flip through it absentmindedly.
“I’d have to think on it a bit more, but I like the subtlety of this.” Remus mused, pulling Marlene’s print from his bag and unfolding it, being sure to hold tight to the edges.
As Sirius looked down at the blimp on fire, Remus let his eyes linger on the two small studded spikes that now decorated the left side of Sirius’s face. One just below and just above the arch of his eyebrow.
Fuck. It did look good. Remus was at once jealous and annoyed with himself for caring.
“No, I like this. Linework?”
Remus nodded, his previous emotions instantaneously washed away. “Yeah, but a bit thicker than traditional, if possible, and then some color in the flames, I’m not sure I’m looking for something realistic though.”
“Maybe pop art?” Sirius suggested.
Remus shrugged. “Yeah, maybe, I dunno.”
Sirius looked back up at him, shaking hair from his face nonchalantly. Remus couldn’t tell if it would have been worse for Sirius to have tried to wrangle it, or to have left it like this. And by worse he meant more distracting.
“Do you mind if I hold onto this? I’m nearly booked for next week, so I could get you in now, but don’t worry if you’ve gotta cancel. Just twenty four hours' notice would be good.”
Remus wanted to squirm under his gaze, but instead, bit the inside of his cheek once and nodded. What the hell. It would be better to have a spot and cancel than to not have a spot at all. “When do you have?” He asked.
“Thursday the sixth at eight or Sunday the ninth from ten in the morning to noon.”
“Hm,” Remus paused, watching the clock accounting for when the next train was set to arrive. “Thursday would be great.”
Sirius gave him a knowing look that Remus furrowed his eyebrows at. Whatever Sirius was thinking of, he clearly hadn’t caught on. “Makes sense, Sunday morning’s usually pretty slow. No one wants to miss a night at the pub when they could just book on Monday.” He produced the world's smallest and stubbiest pencil from a pocket and drew down Remus’s name in that impeccable scripted font.
Thankful for the elaboration, Remus responded with a nod, a small “Oh,” and a soft chuckle. “Glad I caught you then.”
It was then that Sirius caught Remus looking up at the train schedule, and slouched his hands snuggly into his deep pockets, having taken the reference with him. “Haven’t you somewhere you were headed? Don’t reckon you run your own business that you can close whenever you like as well?”
Remus blinked, immediately reminded of what he was doing here, and the fact that he was still arguably on the clock. “No, no– just out on assignment.”
Sirius raised his newly pierced brow as if to question, but just as he seemed ready to ask, the tube pulled in: a long, squealing, metal grinding sound encompassing the station. He looked from Remus to the compartment and grinned. “Well, I guess I’ll find out when I see you next!” He called over the rush of passengers. “Call if you change your mind. We’ll figure something out.” And then Sirius sauntered his way into the crowd and onto the car, like the encounter had never happened.
Remus exited the station, pushing to one of the walls upon emerging. Fishing his notebook and his second favorite pen from his bag, he scribbled down the words “march sixth, eight o'clock” just above the header that read “Regulus Black”.
* * *
Standing in front of Grimmauld Place, the Black Family manor, Remus was unsettled more in appearances than he had ever been when reading through facts on the family history. The address emanated an ancient hatred. If he had passed it as a regular civilian, he may have felt compelled to cross the entire street. The front gate had been repainted recently enough that Remus would have guessed it had happened in the last day or so, and when he drew closer, he could spot the speckled flecks of stray spray paint riddling over the steps to the residence. He wasn’t sure exactly what he hoped to gain from showing up here, as a photographer had been sent to take a picture the day before, but Remus couldn’t help but feel that absorbing the moldy atmosphere of the place was important for his work.
The next couple of minutes he spent simply observing the townhouse, calming his nerves with a cigarette. Not a single curtain drew back in any window, and not a single light appeared to be on. The place appeared ominous, yes, but it also seemed entirely uninterested in the outside world. Or, at least, as if it was trying to make the rest of the world feel as if it was uninteresting. Multiple times, he read over the small metal sign that had been chained to the fence which simply read: “The Black Family feels no need to comment on their member’s activities.” Which, although minorly cryptic, did not reveal anything. The best lawyers in England would be crafting every sentence released by Walburga and Orion for however long the media was interested in Regulus’s disappearance, and then even after that.
That meant that either Remus could either find a crack in the plaster, or wait them out. Lucky for him, he was both incredibly detailed and incredibly patient.
* * *
Back at the office, Remus realized that he had missed Marlene clocking out. It made sense, and goodness knew it meant he could focus better, but he had been giddily hoping he could have relayed the tube incident to her. He chided himself for how absurd he was sounding, and instead turned to the archives and the number of a genealogist friend from Uni.
Luckily, the friend hadn’t left his desk for the night, and audibly faltered when Remus brought up that he was hoping to look into Black Family history, specifically in removing and disowning family members.
He replied that he would fax over what he had in his possession, and that Remus would have a field day if he wasn’t already.
With that, Remus put his other sources aside and made his way across the floor, busy with preparing tomorrow’s issue. Standing at the fax machine, Remus smoothed back his hair and waited, pulling the documents page by page as they printed. The fact that there was more than one page was rather alarming, and, true to character, he had to admit.
Andromeda Black was the first name that Remus recognized. He blinked, trying to remember why the name was ringing a bell. Something about marrying into a rival political party years back. He flipped past her, but not without noting her mailing address. Walking back across the office, he dodged a sleep-deprived intern by mere centimeters, before finding his way back to his desk.
And that was when he saw it.
Ten years ago at the age of sixteen, one Sirius Orion Black had been disowned by Walburga and Orion Black. The inked part of Remus’s arm began to burn, if only as a phantom sensation.
What were the odds?