icarus

“Oh Minerva, I’ve never felt so powerless as a healer. Merlin, not even when you told me he was coming – not even when I brought him back up from his first!”

“Because Albus chickened out of telling you straight, as I remember it,” another woman’s voice, decisive. “I had no problem with it, and I’m not even straight.”

“Minerva!”

“It’s the truth!” McGonagall laughed, turning towards her wife with a sage but sympathetic smile. Pomfrey, overwhelmed by all the sorrow and crisis and laughter and anger and community and unabashed love – by every human emotion juxtaposed in one, precarious morning – burst into sobs.

Remus, lucid enough now to notice that (1.) muggle bandages and salve are covering his whole body, (2.) he’s in a lot of pain, more than even he’s used to, and (3.) it is not normal for Madame Pomfrey to cry, tried to match the rhythm of his breath to the stiff fabric of sleeves rubbing each other; a tender hand grazing a back, up and down; the most practical wives now lovers wrapped tightly in a hug. His head of house healing the healer who continued to heal him.

“Don’t worry anymore, my love,” McGonagall whispered, sharp edges swapped for tenderness, “He is stable now.”

Stable. Supported, surely; by a chosen family big enough to fill up every generation of a write-in family tree from muggle London. The question at hand – the wondering of what happened to me? – barely had a chance to pass through Remus’ mind before the potions, the pain, the love, and the peace drew him back to the land of sleep.

Remus next awoke to another voice. He could identify it anywhere, even from his current place wrapped in the fog of a sleeping potion still half-baked, a scratchy hospital blanket, and a sense he couldn’t explain that he was burning. It was Sirius, humming. No words, and the melody was unfamiliar to Remus, but the sound of his lover’s voice making music so calm – the eye in the storm of chaos he was perceiving – was the cut of rope he needed to pull himself the rest of the way into the conscious world.

Ow.

“Yeah, don’t try and readjust yourself,” Sirius said, almost whispering, “Those burns you’ve got are still open. It’s gonna hurt.”

Burns? That would explain the burning feeling. But –

“How? What . . . happened?” Remus croaked before realizing that his voice, too, was rather out of commission. Smoke inhalation?

“The Shack was on fire,” Sirius said bluntly. His posture was worried, but he smiled as ever, “Moony didn’t seem to know what fire was. Felt it through the wall; wanted to find it. None of us could get you to leave it – ”

“Don’t tell me any of you got hurt,” Remus interrupted with a growl, “Moony would’ve handled it.”

“And he did!” Sirius placated, before shifting his tone to something decisive and firm, though he didn’t know yet that his insides felt anything but decisive, “But Remus? Am I wrong to question, lately? The Remus I see in front of me isn’t the usual morose and stodgy Moony dipping every syllable in sarcasm before he serves it to the Great Hall. This Remus is sad and scared and depleted, and I don’t think it’s because of the moon.”

Remus let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Half-asleep after he was apparently badly burned in a fire he couldn’t remember, he seemed to have more self-knowledge than he’d had in years.

“You know how my dad worked in construction for a while, after I first got bit? Before they let him go because he insisted on being home each month to care for me?” At the steady bobbing of Sirius’ greasy, tired curls, Remus continued, “He came home from the site early once, after a big storm hit and stopped the work. It was pretty near the moon and I was little, so I was aching and laying on the couch. He sat next to me and told me how he was home because of something they called a force majeure – something that delayed construction through no fault of the crew or the owner of the site or anybody else. A force of nature. An act of a God.”

“Like a fire?” Sirius piped in, curiosity in his voice.

“Like a fire. If one of dad’s old crews were doing renovations on the shack – Merlin knows the shack could use them – this morning they’d be complaining about a force majeure,” Remus confirmed. “And if I’m honest with you, I’ve been harboring a secret wish for a force majeure of my own. Something blameless and completely random to slow my life enough that I might have a fighting chance at catching up.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Icarus – so ambitious in the building and using of wings that he flew too high and the sun melted the wax he’d used to attach them. Suddenly without wings, he fell to the earth and died. I’m doing so much, Sirius – graduation, NEWTS, who knows what a career as a werewolf will look like, and. . . the fear. But it never feels like enough. Even though I can live this way now, I know I can’t do it forever.”

Sirius’ face lit up with understanding, thinking back to yesterday evening’s cryptic conversation with Remus and McGonagall after transfiguration. “This . . . force majeure,” he said, testing the words on his lips, “Will it do? Will it . . .”

“Let me catch up with my life? I’m not sure,” Remus replied, “I’ve started to think that ‘catching up’ isn’t a reasonable expectation. And a force majeure does, apparently, cause problems.” He laughed then, wincing at the pull on his stomach and glancing at the bandages across his body.

“Yes, Remus, they do,” Sirius nodded, “but I think I understand what you mean. And I think I’ve been there too.” Then he rose from his stool and padded to the back of Remus’ bed, hugging him lightly from the top. It was the one angle he could reach without painfully rubbing his lover’s bandages.

It might’ve been two minutes they spent like that and it might’ve been two hours. But eventually, Pomfrey sent Sirius back to his dorm for privacy to re-dress Remus’ wounds, and Remus for his part obediently took the potions for pain and sleeping that he was offered. When he awoke the next morning, the sun poured loudly through the curtains.