Chapter Ten
To Rowan,
Thanks for the list of books for Hagrid although can I remind you I am an actual real teacher with access to actual reading lists and I HAVE GOT THIS COVERED.
I will admit that ‘Power, Politics and Wand Possession’ is an excellent addition though, and it’s been mysteriously left off the official Hogwarts list.
It’s been a tough first month - you may have heard already but Lucius Malfoy’s boy got Hagrid into some hot water over a hippogriff.
Side-note: do you know any case studies where hippogriffs have been allowed to live after attacking a student??
Hope you’re well. I miss you. And Kitty and Tarun and everyone. But mostly you.
Love, Remus
To Remus,
A Hippogriff attacked a student?? More details please…
To Rowan,
Good to catch up via floo this week. The case studies you sent are really helpful, Rubeus and I have been going through them all. I miss our forest rendezvous’ though… any chance you can tell me where you are?
Remus
To Rowan,
Can’t come back for the next meeting. Sorry. Don’t want to leave Harry in the castle on his own… just in case. There’s so much I should tell him, and that I should tell you too. Please reply, when you can.
Yours,
R
To Remus,
Eloise here! I’ve been making AMAZING progress on the old family recipe. It is still extremely toxic but when I made it I just felt like it was the right colour, and that brought back a memory for me, so we’re moving with it!
Is it meant to smell of juniper at all? Please let me know
Yours,
Eloise
PS. Rowan is on a mission, I thought he told you but there’s a collection of owls from you that are unopened at the shop, so thought I’d mention.
Remus smiled at ‘the old family recipe’. It was what they’d agreed to call Wolfsbane in case of interception. He made a mental note to pay attention to the smell of his next batch.
Rowan’s mission was concerning him more. He was used to secrecy, and knew they had to keep their owls vague. But why hadn’t Rowan mentioned anything to him when they last met? He’d started to think that Rowan was hiding something from him, but thoughts of Black were starting to consume him, filling him up and causing everything else to spill out. He was focusing really, really hard on trying to hate Black. He avoided even thinking of his first name, or his nickname. It was easier to separate him into three people, neatly split by his different names. Black, Sirius, Padfoot. For a while, it was easier than accepting they were all one and the same person.
Black’s escape seemed to have brought a change to Snape too. Where before he’d seemed stagnant, only holding onto the merest ghosts of the snark he’d had as a child, Black’s escape seemed to have reignited something in him. It wasn’t quite passion, but it was a sense of purpose, and the rest of him came alive around it.
Remus found himself seated next to Severus in the Great Hall. Snape had passed him his wolfsbane potion without any of the usual pantomime created to try to draw attention. Remus breathed it in, trying to detect if there was juniper for Eloise.
“It’s cardamom.” Remus nearly jumped at being addressed by Snape. “I add it right at the beginning, at the base of the cauldron. It helps to temper the taste, and lowers toxicity.”
Snape stood up and left the table, leaving Remus open mouthed in his wake. He couldn’t fathom why Severus would have offered this information so unprompted, and barely recognised his voice without the sneer that was so intrinsically linked with his character. He puzzled over it, trying to understand things from Snape’s perspective.
Of course, Remus knew why Snape had switched sides in the war. The guilt he carried, and the burden he must bear for as long as he lived. Remus wasn’t so centred in his own grief, that he could have failed to recognise Snape’s own when Lily died. Now that Black was out, Snape finally had the opportunity to avenge her death. He had a reason to live. His hatred of Remus retreated as all the anger was drawn out to focus on Black. The night Black escaped, Snape shared in none of the fear of the rest of the wizarding world. He simply knew his destiny was drawing closer. Apparently, he’d decided their common enemy was worth becoming allies for.
A younger Remus would have decked Snape for even hinting at this. Snape, after all, had been the catalyst to James and Lily’s deaths, and that was unforgivable. Who knew how many other members of the Order had died by his hand or deeds, and never thought of again because he didn’t happen to have a creepy obsession with any of them? How dare Snape look at Remus, like they shared the same loss?
Yet Remus held himself back. How many deaths was he responsible for himself, through the trust he’d placed in Black? By being blinded all those years, thinking himself in love? He was more of a fool than Snape.
*
Determined to make up for the initial boggart incident, Remus began to give Harry lessons in fighting Dementors. He scoured the castle until he located one, and sent Harry a message to let him know. In truth, he missed all the time he’d got to spend with Harry over the Summer. He’d let Harry know that he was there for him if he needed, but, being a teenager, Harry would usually rather be with his friends. So Remus scheduled their lessons during Hogsmeade visits, hoping that it would be a distraction to what he was missing out on.
It wasn’t exactly a pleasant bonding experience for either of them, but they were getting through it, together. The first time Harry tried the spell, he’d ended up passing out again. Remus patiently brought him round with chocolate.
“I heard my dad that time” Harry admitted, with something like excitement in his voice. “As well as my mum”
Remus looked at him intensely, feeling an uncomfortable sense of longing. What he wouldn’t give to hear those voices again, even in their final moments. It should be a terrible thing. But from the look in Harry’s eyes, Remus knew that they both shared in this feeling that would be alien to anyone else in the world. They’d take the pain, willingly, just for a taste of what they’d lost.
*
To Rowan,
Black came to the castle last night. Castle in lockdown. The thought that we were both in the castle at the same time again after all this -
Why couldn’t I feel that he was near?
I don’t know what to do.
Dementors continue to swarm the Hogwarts grounds. They nearly killed Harry last week. He told me that when they are near him, he can hear James and Lily in their final moments. It breaks me being here. It breaks me lying to him about who Sirius is was to me.
Remus put down his quill. He didn’t have the words for what he was feeling, and Rowan seemed to have vanished off the face of the Earth anyway. He read the mess of a letter back, and noticed he’d started saying ‘Sirius’ again, instead of ‘Black’. He didn’t know how to stop blurring his boundaries.
All around him, the wizarding world was in chaos, and all he could think about was how Sirius had been here, in the castle; in Remus’s present just like he was in his past. He’d broken into the very same common room where they’d sat as teenagers, arms around each other, legs casually pressed together, feeling like the whole world began and ended within those walls. Had it been a lie from the beginning? Or had his family pulled him back into their folds later on? The questions burned within Remus, and the sense that he would never be able to feel he could trust his memories. He thought back to that night when Sirius tricked Severus into coming to the Shrieking Shack. Would he really have let Remus kill Snape? Remus had been a complete wreck for weeks after, not speaking to Sirius, hardly able to be in the same room as him. But Sirius had wheedled his way back in. Holding him, their tears mixing together as their faces pressed against each other. Apologising, touching his arm, his hair, his neck. So Remus had relented. He was so easy to manipulate, back then. All his life, people had seen him either as a monster, or as a weapon to be used for their own ends.
He scrambled through his mind for people in his life who were exceptions to this. His mother; Hope. Hagrid. Rowan? But he felt Rowan drawing away from him; and he couldn’t make himself care, because he was consumed, fully, by the same thing that it always came back to. His heart was taken already.
He thought back to the beginning; that charming smile - those worried eyes. Sirius had gone straight for the heart, embedding himself like a fish hook that had pulled Remus along, through heaven and hell, until it was just hell. But his heart had calcified around the hook, and the line was never cut. So even after everything, he kept stumbling on, not knowing where the end was dragging him.
“He was their friend… and you knew, didn’t you?”
The voice made Remus jump. Harry. He stepped out of the shadows, and held Remus in his gaze, wearing an expression Remus hadn’t seen on him since the night he picked him up from the Dursleys. It was pure contempt, and he carried it through his entire body.