a fragile line
Sirius hated this town with a passion. He had thought now that he had left for University he had finally seen the last of it. But here he was, around the corner from his old high school, two blocks away from his first boyfriend’s house (if you could even call him that), and worst of all, within the same post code as his parents.
The things he did for James Potter.
Sirius and James had returned home to the Potter’s for a week because James’ dad had taken a fall and the doctor had told him to stay off his feet. The injury wasn’t bad, and Euphemia was more than capable of looking after him and the house all by herself. But James, ever the chivalrous bastard, had insisted on coming home to help out, and Sirius, ever trying to replay the Potter’s kindness after they took him in, had offered to come as well.
This, unfortunately, left Sirius and James to be in their hometown on Halloween night, 1982.
How this led to James miraculously planning a last minute Halloween party with their old high school friends Sirius will never know. One second he was helping Mrs Potter cook dinner and the next James was racing into the kitchen begging Sirius to go.
“Come on Sirius, the Prewetts are hosting.”
“I barely spoke to the Prewetts in school.” Sirius protested, he didn’t look up from the carrots he was chopping, Potter didn’t need to be encouraged with something so dangerous as eye contact.
“You totally had a crush on Fabian.” James counted.
“Did not.” Sirius scrapped the chopped carrots into a bowl, “besides, I’m pretty sure Gideon is the gay one.”
“Well, loads of people you know will be going.”
Sirius didn’t even dignify that with a response, most of the people that Sirius knew in this town he rather wished he didn’t. He picked up another carrot and started chopping.
“Come on Sirius, you love getting dressed up.” James pleaded.
“I didn’t bring anything to wear.”
James let out a sigh, “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
“Why do you even want to go?” Sirius asked, “you hate most of the people in this town just as much as I do.”
“That’s not true,” James protested. “Also, well, Lily may or may not be coming.”
Of course, Lily. Lily Evans. Sirius should have known. A situation like this is bound to have Lily written all over it. All through high school James was at Lily’s beck and call, she would say jump and he would say how high. But Lily had never given him the time of day. Until their final year when she agreed to go on a date with James, and it had crashed and burned, as hard as Sirius, and everyone else in this town, and probably the next two over, had predicted it would.
Sirius had been left to pick up the pieces of James’ fragile little heart, and he really, really, didn’t want to do it again. But the only thing worse than witnessing James see Lily again after their break up (if you could call it that) would be to let him go alone.
James must have taken Sirius’ silence as further protest because he began to switch tactics, “please, Sirius, I really want to, no, no, need to go.”
Sirius was about to open his mouth to respond but James kept talking, “oh! and it’s at the haunted house, that could be fun, yeah?”
The haunted house? THE haunted house?
Sirius had heard about the haunted house, everyone in Godric’s Hollow had. The stories surrounding it were the stuff of local legend, murder and betrayal, ghosts and ghouls, screaming echoing through the rafters on full moon nights and scratches under the floorboards.
Sirius’ parents had always forbid him and Regulus from going anywhere near it (“There is a fragile line between the living and the dead,” Sirius’ mother would say, “you’ll do best not to cross it.”), so Sirius never had. But there was a part of him that had always felt drawn to it. The same little morbid part of everyone that draws them to the supernatural and the disturbed, probably.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the haunted house. Having a party there seemed disrespectful. But he didn’t believe in ghosts, so really, what was the harm in getting drunk in some dusty old manor anyway.
Besides, he was doing it for James.
“Yeah, alright,” he said, “I’m in.”
***
The haunted house sat at the end of a long, meandering drive, half overgrown with weeds and shrubbery. The manor estate was the largest in town at the time of its construction, the second largest now, as the Black’s refused to be outdone by anyone, even rivals long dead and buried.
It was in better condition than Sirius excepted, the windows were boarded up, and there was definitely a few holes in the roof, but it was a lot more inviting than Sirius was led to believe, as if it had only be abandoned recently and not last century.
The story of the manor house’s first haunting dated back as far as 1896, although many of the towns people believed that it had been cursed for far longer than that. What exactly happened to the residents of the house was widely contested throughout town, all that was known for fact (or as close to fact as you could get from idle village gossip), was that the groundskeeper’s son had died, and within two years all of the manors residence simply vanished, without a trace. Some people say that they had all been killed by the groundskeeper in a fit of anger and revenge, buried somewhere in the property in unmarked graves where no one would ever find them. Others say they were driven out, by the ghost. The ghost of who exactly varies between who you ask, most people (of those that hold the ghost point-of-view) believe it’s the groundskeepers son, but there are a few particularly strange residents that theorize the ghost is a long dead relative of the manor’s owners.
More likely than not, the manor’s residence simply up and moved and didn’t leave a forwarding address. Sirius could understand that, the Blacks had lived in the town at the time, he certainly wouldn’t want them to know where he had gone.
The problem with having a Halloween party in a house that was abandoned in the 1890s is that no one had paid the power bill in a very long time. When Sirius and James entered they had to blink several times to adjust to the dim lighting of the grand living room. The Prewetts had set up portable battery-operated spotlights on the floor, and lit candles decorated every elevated surface. It did very little to improve the lighting situation, but Sirius had to admit it added a certain spooky element to the house.
As soon as they entered James immediately gravitated towards where the Prewetts were standing, front and centre as their guests played some drinking game or another around them, and Sirius gravitated towards the drinks table. If he had to be at this party, he wasn’t going to be at it sober.
Now don’t get him wrong, Sirius loved parties. Usually he was the life of the party, getting people involved in drinking games, egging James on to do riskier and riskier dares, but not here, not in this town, with these people that judged him far more than they did anything else.
***
Sirius had been at the party for almost an hour when he decided he needed a break. He had spent the last ten minutes awkwardly trying to escape a conversation with an ex-classmate who was trying to pitch his start up and definitely thought that Sirius was still loaded with his parents money. The drink he’d been nursing ran out two minutes ago, and he couldn’t bring himself to go refill it at the risk of running into the girl by the refreshments table that was looking at him shamelessly from across the room.
The business-pitcher, John, or something, seemed to have finally clocked on to the fact that Sirius’ eyes had glazed over and he wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in the projected revenue of whatever it was that he was selling. He said a final word then made a hasty retreat across the room to harass some other unsuspecting trust fund kid.
Sirius could finally make his escape. A quick glance at the smoke drifting outside proved that the front porch was already filled with stoners and nicotine addicts alike, and as much as Sirius would love a cigarette right now, standing out in the cold and having to make small talk just wasn’t worth it. The drinks table was still being circled by the girl with the eyes, who seemed to be drinking a concoction made of at least 90% alcohol and struggling to stand on her own.
James wasn’t an option either, he was over in a corner, talking to Lily with their heads ducked low towards each other. As much as Sirius hated it he wasn’t going to interrupt them.
This left Sirius with only one option of retreat, to head up the stairs.
Sirius made his way up the rickety staircase, the floorboards creaking so loudly he could hear it over the music echoing across the room. Once he was upstairs the music seemed quieter, there were no artificial spotlights in the hallway, the waxing moon through the windows the only source of light.
He made his way down the hallway, opening doors as he went and slowly meandering through the pieces of history that remained clinging to the manor.
After he opened a door to find Fabian Prewett with his tongue down a girl’s throat, an image that was now firmly burnt into his retinas, he decided to only walk through doors that were already open. Which is what lead him here, to the last opened door in the hallway.
Sirius stepped inside, immediately surprised to find an almost wholly intact library, and perhaps, even more surprising still, that the room was already occupied.
He sat on the ground, long legs stretched out in front of him with a book balanced in his lap. He looked up briefly as Sirius entered before his gaze shifted back to the book in front of him.
Sirius struggled to suppress a gasp. Sitting before him was quite possibly the most beautiful boy he had ever seen. He had curly, brown hair and a big nose and pretty eyes and scars running across his face and he was dressed as some kind of old-timey person and he was just perfect in every way imaginable.
“Sorry,” Sirius said, watching the boy’s head whip up in surprise like he hadn’t just seen Sirius walk into the room, “I didn’t realise anyone was here, I can go if you like?”
Sirius really hoped the pretty boy wouldn’t tell him to leave.
“No,” he said, and god, even his voice was beautiful, “no, you can stay.”
Sirius expected him to go back to reading his book, but the boy’s eyes remained glued on him, a wide-eyed expression on his face as is he wasn’t quite sure that Sirius was here or talking to him. Sirius decided to take that as a positive, and not a sign that he should retreat as quickly as possible.
“Thank you, Prince Charming.” He said, taking a step further into the room.
“Pardon?” The boy furrowed his brow and tilted his head to the side, his shocked expression seeming to slip away in favour of a confused one.
”Your costume?”
“Oh.” He said, a ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “I was going more for Victorian peasant.”
“Well your time period is a little off.” Sirius quipped, before considering that maybe his response was a little rude.
But the boy didn’t look annoyed, if anything he looked amused, the slight smile on his face beginning to grow, and god was it pretty. “Is it?”
“And you look far too nice to be a peasant.” Which was definitely true, but probably came out of Sirius’ mouth more flirtatious than he meant it to.
The boy didn’t say anything in response, just looked down at the vest and loose button up shirt he wore as if contemplating if he did look too nice to be a Victorian-era peasant. Sirius could have sworn he saw a blush form across his cheeks.
After a moment that simultaneously felt like a long time and no time at all, the boy spoke again:
“And what exactly are you supposed to be?”
Sirius spread his arms out, showing off the black leather jacket and matching boots he wore atop an all-black outfit (or basically: what we wore every weekend, he hadn’t exactly packed a Halloween costume). “I’m a biker.”
”A biker?” The furrow was back in the boy’s brow.
“Do I not look like a biker?” Sirius crossed his arms, faking indignation.
“No, no I’m sure you do.”
Sirius smiled, moving to sit down beside the boy, who he was glad to see shut his book and moved it away, angling his body towards Sirius.
“My name’s Sirius, by the way.”
”Remus.”
***
Sirius and Remus talked for what felt like hours, and Sirius found himself opening up to Remus about all sorts of things. He told him about trivial things, mostly, like James’ infatuation with Lily that had persisted even with kilometers and years between them, about Mr Potter’s fall and his terrible singing that he had been subjected to all week. He told Remus all about his adventures at university and his course and how even this far through he still wasn’t quite sure if he was really doing what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Talking to Remus was just easy, simple, as if they had met and something between them had just slotted into place.
He didn’t learn quite so much about Remus in return. He learnt that he was from out of town (he could have ascertained that himself, there was only one school in town, and Sirius would have remembered a boy like Remus), they were the same age, although Sirius would technically be a year older than him in a few days, and he liked to read.
Remus really, really liked to read. He read all the old books, some Sirius knew about, ones he’d been forced to read in English class, and so many that Sirius had never even heard of. While Remus didn’t share much information about himself he could seemingly talk for hours about the books he read, for every situation Sirius could think of, Remus could name at least three books where something similar could happen.
Sirius had learnt that Remus knew most of Shakespeare’s works by heart and he was just in the process of trying to convince him to deliver a dramatic monologue from Macbeth when a figure appeared in the doorway.
“There you are, Sirius,” It was James, a look of concern etched into his features, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Before Sirius could think to do or say anything James was speaking again, “come on, let’s go home.”
“Yeah,” Sirius said, looking between James and Remus as James started to make his way out the door, “I’ll be there in a second.”
”Are you sure?”
”Yes, I’ll meet you downstairs.”
As the sound of James’ footsteps faded down the hallway, Sirius turned to face Remus, who quickly covered up the crestfallen look on his face with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Remus…” He began.
”It’s okay,” Remus interrupted, “I know you have to go.”
“No!” Sirius said, “well, yes. But before I go, I wanted to ask you if…”
Remus raised an eyebrow as Sirius trailed off, silently encouraging him to continue.
“I was wondering if you would like to go out with me, sometime, whenever, while you’re still in town?”
Sirius watched as Remus’ expression dropped, realising that maybe he had read the situation very, very wrong indeed.
“Oh, Sirius I’d like to but I-”
”No, no,” Sirius cut him off with a wave of his, “you don’t need to make excuses, I understand, I get it.”
He reached down to give him what he hoped was a reassuring, friendly pat on the knee, but retreated his hand instantly when he felt Remus flinch beneath him.
“Sorry.”
He stood up. Remus was staring down at his knee with an unreadable expression.
“I’m just going to go, it was nice meeting you, Remus.” He smiled at the boy who still wouldn’t look up at him, before walking out the door, wondering how he managed to fuck that up so badly.
“Sirius, wait!”
Sirius had barely made it through the doorway before he felt a hand on his wrist, pulling him back in.
He and Remus were eye to eye now, standing much closer than they had been when they were sitting. It wasn’t until he had stood up that he realised just how beautifully tall Remus was.
“I’d uh-” Remus said, the ghost of his breath drifting across Sirius’ face, he still hadn’t let go of his wrist, “I’d like to see you again. Tomorrow? Here?”
“Here?” Sirius asked.
”What?” Remus scoffed, “afraid of the big, bad, haunted house?”
“No,” Sirius smiled, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”