“ There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog.
Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for.
Unbelievable that there were other trees which looked like it here.
It had loomed in my memory as a huge lone spike dominating the riverbank,
forbidding as an artillery piece, high as the beanstalk.
Yet here was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur. ”
-John Knowles, A Separate Peace
“ Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour,
pretending that this skin is your skin,
these hands your hands,
these shins, these soapy flanks. ”
-Richard Siken, Dirty Valentine
***
The air smells of old money and burnt toast. Conversations live buried in hedges, revolving around lacrosse practice, excited whispers of professions deep in the night, ridiculous pinky promises, glances and refusal to act upon thoughts. Summer light filters through the open window, shining in Remus’ scanning eyes, which are (as they have been for the past four hours) glued to the pages of his book, avid. ‘The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of a masculine partner that evening…’.
“Lupin, will you leave that already,” a drawling orchestra pulls away his attention, momentarily, and he looks up to find Sirius Black with a frown on his otherwise perfect face (if a daisy meadow could be a face, if happiness and joy had to combine and make a human, if).
“I, unlike some,” this is spoken with a pointed eyebrow raise, “prefer to indulge in the academic aspects of life. And I have to finish this for tomorrow. In fact, so do you.”
Sirius sighs with fondness coated in exasperation, collapsing his body on the small single bed which occupies his cluttered side of the room, packed with socks and posters for T-rex concerts and vinyl sleeves and pressed flowers. The trees outside Devon flitter with excitement. Sirius Black is about to speak again. It seems as if nature is holding its breath, waiting for his reply.
“Bollocks. Utter bullocks! Why sit around like a ponce reading Tess of the whatever-the-fuck,” (“Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, Remus coughs) “When you could be out with me, swimming in the lake and playing games of who can hold his breath for the longest. I mean, you’d have to be a fool to miss out on that one, if you ask me.” By this point, Black has stood up on his bed, gesticulating, a world leader addressing a distressed nation.
“I don’t swim,” he replies, although he deftly closes his book, folding down the corner. “I have told you this so many times, I feel as if I should purchase a billboard and plaster it on my wall. One that says, ‘REMUS LUPIN DOESN’T SWIM’.”
Sirius clicks his fingers, exasperated, fizzing with energy. He is energy. Personified.
“Okay, then we won’t swim. But you can take that,” he points towards Remus’ walking stick, where he himself had previously carved ‘sirius rulez’, “and we can stroll around the gardens, or something like that. Please?”
He has jumped on his bed again, this time slightly jogging on the spot. Remus thinks that he doesn’t know of anyone else who possibly moves as much as Sirius does. He also thinks of how every picture of him is slightly blurry, because of his non-stop movement. It makes him seem unreal.
“Sure.”
He’s been wanting to walk outside for a while, anyways. To see the remaining saturation which comes along with a Devon summer. Today, he is okay. The pain in his right knee makes him want to rip his hair out, but he has grown so accustomed to it that he’d rather try and focus on something else—like walking with Sirius, yes, sure, why not, go ahead, I’ll desert my reading for you, fucking hell, I can’t stand you.
As he’s putting on his shoes, Sirius sits down next to him. He smells of oranges. His foot is tapping along to some frenetic rhythm which only he can hear.
“If you can’t, you shouldn’t worry about it, though. I mean, I know how bad the pain can get, and-” he begins, but Remus throws his head back, sighs, and shakes his head.
“No, you don’t know. And that’s okay. Let’s just go. But slow down, okay?”
Slow down. As if Sirius Black could ever do that.
***
The sun is brighter, outside. Fuller. As if she were built just for him, and everyone else bathing in her light doesn’t belong there. Hello, she says. Thank you for coming out and paying me a visit. He’s at his best when the sun is hitting his face—revealing freckles which otherwise get lost in his dark sepia skin.
Next to him, akin to a puppy who just got given a branch off the nearest tree, Sirius is yapping his ear off about some thing or another. “Have you spoken to Potter yet? Have you? No? Damn. Heard his mum died over the holidays. Grim.”
“Who?”
“Potter.” A look of disbelief.
“Doesn’t help.”
“You’ll know him when you see him. He’s like… like Pandora’s box only if it was filled with wonderful things and sugar and dimples and jam and patterned socks and apples,” he spreads out his fingers, taps them each individually, cartwheels on the spot, does a handstand and frowns comically. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re upside down, mate.”
Remus leans slightly on his walking stick, and blinks a couple of times. It takes him a few seconds to truly understand Sirius’ train of thought, sometimes. His mind seems to run at a speed unparalleled to anyone else’s.
“It’s a shame,” Remus speaks, his voice carried by the stiflingly hot air, “that you don’t put any effort into your schoolwork. You’d be a great writer, y’know?”
Sirius springs away from his handstand, now walking in front of Remus, head slightly cocked to the side (even when he’s still his hand is moving, fingers cracking, always moving, always, a boy in motion, a boy running away from time). His hair, with its thin bangs which he came back from the holidays sporting, claiming his brother cut them and ‘it’s fashion, Lupin, you wouldn’t get it!’, is waving in the slight breeze.
“Thing is, that’s just not what I want to do. I want to run around with the lads on the lacrosse team, or go rowing and be the damn best rower Devon has ever seen. School—in the grand scheme of things,” he’s gesturing now, “is slightly irrelevant. Like a stone in my shoe. Hey, speaking of inconveniences, are we going to Pettigrew’s party?”
The abrupt change in conversation gives Remus no time to process his previous sentence, of course. What a preposterous suggestion. He nods, because something deep (very deep, buried beneath every one of his slimy pink organs, beneath blood cells and wet bones) within him has just realised something, and he refuses to speak, because then it might just slip out of him.
Something which, if pondered on, could potentially turn violent. For a second, Remus looks at Sirius and sees not comfort, but a threat, an obstacle, a competitor of sorts (a thorn in an otherwise unblemished rose, Remus thinks, who wrote that? maybe he did in one of those hour-long stupors in which he takes his quill which has survived and will survive longer than he will and lets out every thought growing old in his brain).
Perhaps the relentless nagging to go on walks and swims hides something. Something, some-thing, cruel-thing, mean-thing, un-Sirius-like-thing, thing, thing. A plan, some sort of twisted plan to put a damper on Remus’ studies, which would in turn make him look better: Sirius Black, the best student in his class, the best athlete in Devon history, the best (INSERT HERE) in (INSERT HERE AGAIN, THE GOLDEN CHILD AND BEST FRIEND WHOM YOU WILL NEVER LIVE UP TO, GOT IT?). The constant flurry of activity he is subjected to could be a shoddy excuse to drag Remus away from his books, weakening him, thus making Sirius stronger; of course, he has never studied for an exam in his whole life and yet has excelled in all those he has taken.
However, Remus is always one step ahead of him, in some way or another, when it comes to lessons. Nights in which he has read hungrily and ravenously under his covers have payed off in lessons, where the teachers brighten at his enthusiasm and praise him—“An absolute pleasure to have in class”, they echo. He always tries harder than anyone else, presumably, knowing that learning is a complicated process which deserves both his respect and time. Sirius has never agreed with this philosophy of life, though, doodling in his margins during class and attempting to become friends with the teachers with his quick-witted remarks when the classroom falls silent for a brief moment. It seems as if the world of academia is a joke to him; described perfectly by him now. A stone in my shoe. The mere idea of being able to treat the school system as some sort of throwaway aspect of his life is absolutely ludicrous to Remus. Then again, everything about Sirius Black is absolutely ludicrous.
***
Walking back to the main Devon building, Remus silent and Sirius not, he is reminded of last May, in the Devon swimming pool, on the hottest day of the month. The older boys (legends back then, classmates now) had left for the month, on study leave for their A-levels, leaving certain facilities completely deserted.
Thus, the Devon pool.
Remus doesn’t swim, for many reasons. The main one being that his body isn’t his. His chest is not his, or his hands, or practically every single aspect of his body that lies under his neck. His body belongs to someone he used to be; before he discovered he was a boy (Devon boy, Maximum omnium doctrinarum), before his life was peppered with all sorts of doctors and foreign words like ‘blockers’ and ‘hormone therapy’ and other word scrambles that made him dizzy. He also doesn’t swim because his legs will start hurting to such an extent that he’s afraid he’ll completely forget how to swim and sink to the bottom like a poor imitation of Ophelia. His doctor (a large portion of his life, in retrospect, seems to involve doctors and their faceless heartless emotionless reassurance) has told him many a times that swimming is technically not forbidden, but also technically not recommended. This is why he’s always on the side-lines when Sirius swims, which happens with such frequency that these pool trips always blend into one another.
This occasion, however, Remus remembers especially, as he was already drowsy because May sun sun sun sun May sun almost summer sunshine, and the gentle sloshing of the water as Sirius glided through the blue water put him in a particular state of relaxation which he has not been able to replicate since.
“D’you see that?”, a voice had snapped him out of his daze. Sirius was resting his hands on the edge of the pool, hair slicked back, his long eyelashes dripping with water. He nodded his head towards something behind Remus, eyebrows raised. Remus turned to find a gold plaque, slightly worn and rusted, but the letters still clear.
Devon School Record for the 100 Yards Free Style
Frank Longbottom—49.1 seconds
“Longbottom,” Remus had said to Sirius, stretching out the vowels and tasting them on his tongue.
Sirius looked back at him, with a stare so ferociously charged with—with something, that Remus had had to look away, still speaking, “I’m not familiar. ‘S he your rowing teammate or something?”
Sirius’ reply reverberated around the pool, the tone in his voice suggesting that an idea was forming.
“Nah, no clue who he is. You know what this means, though, right,” the magnetic pull which has always united them had forced Remus to look back at him. Those fucking eyes. Always sparkling, always vibrant, just like him, his eyes tell his story, once upon a time, the fairy-tale lens through which he views life. Before he could think of replying, though, Sirius interrupted, a smile spilling onto his face.
“Lupin, this means that this award has sat here, bored, for the entirety of our school career, without us knowing! It demands to be beat! I’m the chosen one, he who must defeat Longbottom, the boy who swam!”
The ends of his sentences were emphasised by him splashing water everywhere around him, the image of a broken fountain. Thinking back on this memory (which is clouded with nostalgia, as most are), Remus can’t think of how exactly things escalated from there. He does remember them stealing an old stopwatch from Slughorn’s office, rolled eyes and barks of laughter serving as a reply, looks of mock-concentration, a pretend clipboard, a moment of silence pierced by moving water, the number 46.8 beeping on the brown stopwatch. That, he does remember. The feeling in his stomach which felt like the instant before throwing up; the knowledge that, if he wanted to, Sirius could do anything. Beat anything, and then shrug off the mere suggestion that he should tell the school about it. He had been sitting next to Remus, using his towel to dry off stray water droplets which had pooled in his collarbone, when Remus suggested this.
“Why would I do that,” came the reply.
His voice had suddenly gone sharp, unfamiliar, and yet reassuring—here, Remus had proof that not even Sirius Black was perfect, that he, too, had violence buried beneath him, something unspeakable, present in all their conversations. Why would I do that. The scorn in his voice dampened anything else which Remus had been feeling, like water poured on a fire. As if this was an inconceivably stupid idea, as if everything he had ever said was an inconvenience to him. He wondered how much it would hurt if he jumped, hard, into the shallow end of the pool. If he was split open, like the anatomy figure in their peeling Biology classroom, with his blood and guts spilling out, then maybe he’d finally feel okay. No body meant no pain, no mouth with which to make comments that made Sirius curl his lip, no more boredom which drew him near to tears every time he was alone. Maybe (maybe), if the pool turned into a crimson bath in which his brain floated in, a ship lost, then Sirius could look in and feel relief. That he’d never have to hear from him again. He’d swim in it, his perfect backstroke. He’d beat the record.
***
Pettigrew’s party (or, pathetic excuse for a party, as it consists of their entire sixth form class and a couple of teachers milling about and eating forgettable canapes) makes him wish he had ended it all, back at the pool. Every conversation he has is a poorly recycled version of his previous one. How is your father, Lupin? How are lessons? You still the best in Literature? Do you think we’ll win the championships this year? Where’s Black?. Black is, in fact, breezily chatting to Professor McGonagall, who is pointedly not looking at him, instead fixing her gaze on a far-off point in the Devon gardens—though her mouth is fighting a smile, faint wrinkles tightening around her lips. Remus catches fragments of their conversation, something about changing the rules to allow there to be an option for a pink uniform. Something about freedom of expression, breaking social norms, Sirius’ usual bullshit. His gestures are louder than his words, the tea in his cup threatening to spill over. Everyone in the room is aware of him. When Sirius Black enters a room, Remus thinks to himself as he sips from his Devon-branded mug, he and that same room become one. He puts a spell on everyone; entices them, the pied piper, and who is Remus but one of the village people, blindly following him?
Pettigrew sits down next to him, sighing as if he is Atlas and the weight world has conveniently just been displaced to someone else. Remus raises an eyebrow. They haven’t spoken much, he and Pettigrew. He knows that his family is wealthy, sure, (one of the wealthiest, Sirius told him, once), and that his sister was once the Foreign Secretary’s treasurer, or something along those ridiculous lines. Pettigrew’s green eyes latch onto Sirius (pied piper, Remus thinks), who has moved on from his and McGonagall’s conversation, and is now fervently whispering with—with someone Remus does not recognise.
It’s strange. Apart from Remus, Sirius considers himself to be friends with very few other people. Fabian and Gideon, the slightly older twins, equal to him in terms of thirst for mischief, whom with he routinely sneaks off with to pour olive oil on the staff room’s doorhandle, making it impossible to open in the morning. Then, of course, there are those who he knows from his childhood—a nod or smile, gifted to different boys, nameless, faceless. And his brother. Regulus Black, of the same name, same descent, same blood, same face, different hair, though if Remus squinted his eyes and tilted his head they’d look the same. The Black brothers both share the same eyes (deep-set and the colour of the ocean when the sun sets), hands (long and thin, like twigs that could snap at any given moment), and voice (melodic, memorable). They are mirror images of one another, one hazier than the other. However, however, Regulus prefers the calm over the quiet, he is a child who sits and watches all with eager eyes, from what Remus can tell. It’s strange, how Sirius is an open book, and Regulus is a firmly closed one, or perhaps he is still unwritten, his story not yet an idea in his author’s mind. He knows something else they share, though, dark and unspoken, knows it through Sirius’ whispered stories in the middle of the night, his cryptic letters.
This is what makes the sight of this new boy so- well, so jarring, really. His dark russet face (he’s smiling, Remus realises with horror. the boy is smiling as he’s speaking) is repulsively close to Sirius’, defined jawline moving frantically, matching the speed of Sirius’ own stream of thought. With a feeling that is akin to being punched in the gut, Remus realises that Sirius may have just found someone who works at the same speed as him. Who he won’t have to wait for. Who’ll jump into the pool and swim with him. Perhaps it is not too late to find the tallest point in Devon and throw himself off it, while he has the chance.
“Jealous?”
He had forgotten about Pettigrew, whose focus is now directed on Remus. He’s smiling, the bastard. Trying to resist from either slapping him brutally across the face or crying with anguish, he decides on laughing sharply, a sound which is drowned out by the other boy’s cackle of glee from across the floor. Remus speaks his next words carefully.
“Why would I be jealous,” he picks on a loose thread on his deep-blue sleeve, attempting to avoid any eye contact with the boy sitting next to him. He can smell his sickly-sweet cologne. It makes him want to throw up.
“Ah,” the smile in Pettigrew’s voice is obvious, present, “well, I thought you’d noticed how your boyfriend seems to be currently shagging someone else?”
It’s a remarkable thing how Remus manages not to kill Peter Pettigrew, in that moment. It would be so easy, too. A champagne flute to the head, the shards of glass shredding him to bits, fireworks of blood going off on his face, head, across his body. Oh, so terribly sorry, well, it was an accident, rest in peace, what a lovely child, he was so angelic, truly a horrible loss. Your boyfriend. There comes the sick feeling again.
“Kindly fuck off, Pettigrew,” he rolls his eyes heavenward and leaves the table, hands shaking, acting cool, detached from the situation, his demeanour exuding an attitude of ‘why should I care?’. He leaves the party determinedly, ignoring Sirius’ confused calls of ‘Remus? Remus? Lupin?’, and shuts himself in a bathroom which is often used for smoking and secret rendezvous, and he cries. He cries until the sun goes down, and he wishes he were the sun, wallowing in its own self-pity, no longer bright. There is someone new in Sirius’ life. A threat.
***
The threat, it seems, has a name. Aadav James Potter, meaning The Sun James Potter, meaning a fucking dickhead. He struts around Devon School as if everyone should bow down to him, as if he fucking bought the place with daddy’s money—knowing what Sirius has told him, he could afford it—and never sparing a second glance for Remus, who often has the violent urge to bite him, drag him somewhere far away, far from Sirius. Sirius, who is attempting to reassure him that no, he isn’t getting replaced, what a preposterous idea, Lupin, really.
Still, still.
“He was born and raised here,” Sirius rolls himself a cigarette and scrambles for a lighter, given to him begrudgingly by Remus, “but his parents are both from India, though they met in York, ‘cos they went to the same university. Anyways, his mum, Euphemia, I think, died over the holidays.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I told you about this, remember? No? He’s heartbroken, poor lad. It really is a shame, because he must be just about the sweetest thing on this planet, I mean, even his fucking name, Lupin; the sun! The bloody, God-honest, blinding sun. Never has there been a more well-fitting name, though he goes by James instead, which is a pity... anyways, have you met him yet?”
He shakes his head in response, broodily rolling himself his own cigarette, then deeply inhaling the sour smoke. It tastes like the words neither him nor Sirius want to say out loud, for fear it’d break them, or, it tastes like the moon, solitary, milky, and guiding, or, it tastes like the lingering trail of stardust after a meteor shower, or, it tastes like the back of his teeth when he’s angry, or, well, maybe it just tastes like a regular cigarette. He looks at Sirius through the veil of smoke separating them, and, for just a millisecond, wishes he could step inside his skin; drape his hands over his like gloves, roll back his shoulders which would consequently clash with his own pointy shoulder blades.
Sirius says nothing in reply, just looks back at him. He slightly moves forward, as if drawn by a weak magnet, but stops himself.
They smoke together.
***
The hating-James-Potter situation stops mid-September. Explicitly, it stops on the sixteenth of September, at precisely 18:34, sitting, yet again, in Peter Pettigrew’s garden, whilst being offered a dish of disgusting-looking lobster bites.
“No, thanks,” he tells the caterer, who sneers at him in return and waltzes away to attempt and poison someone else with his—probably outdated—seafood.
“Good choice,” speaks a voice from behind him. It is almost hilariously posh, reeking of ski trips and lake houses in Sweden. He turns quickly and is, sadly, met with the grinning face of James Bloody Fucking Potter. Today, he’s wearing a maroon jumper, which infuriatingly suits him perfectly, the red of the soft cotton complimenting his dark skin in a way that Remus thinks is deliberately insulting. The colour makes him think of blood.
“And you are?” he feigns disinterest.
“James Potter. I hate lobster, too, ‘ve never trusted their beady eyes,” he puts out a hand, which Remus shakes. Damn him.
“Remus Lupin. I only refused it because it’s not kosher,” Remus explains, digging through his onion-like layer of clothes to find his gold-plated Star of David necklace, and showing it to Potter, who is saying something along the lines of ‘cool’. His heart warms, like melted chocolate on a stove turned all the way up. They chat some more, about tea preferences, Remus’ family and then James’ (he swiftly avoids speaking about his mother, so Remus does not inquire), life at Devon, and, of course, Sirius.
It turns out that they both feel sort of the same way about him, though Remus privately thinks that his own emotions are more guttural, and James’ are more outspoken. He’s the funniest/most accepting/kindest/strongest/sweetest/craziest person I know plays on repeat, like an annoyingly broken record player. James laughs multiple times, his eyes swirling pools of hazel and—yes, the sun. Now, Remus feels like he gets Sirius, albeit momentarily, for speaking with James Potter feels like winning the lottery a million times over, and he can’t believe that he was so stupid as to hate this lovely boy, who is trying to get through it all, just as he is. Potter smiles. Somewhere in the distance, a flower blooms.
Their conversation is cut off clumsily by a windmill of bones nicknamed Sirius Black, whose eyebrows have shot up so far up his fringe that he looks like an idiot, Remus thinks, but he can’t bring himself to truly feel it, instead focusing on how the wind tousles said fringe, sending whispers through it, as if threading invisible threads of gold through his long black hair.
Every time Remus sees Sirius, he feels sick. It’s tough to describe, so tough that when he writes about his day in his journal ‘spoke to Sirius’ becomes synonymous with ‘threw up’. It’s not that he doesn’t like him, it’s the opposite of that (a word rings unsaid in his brain, but he can’t say nor think it, not yet, not when everything is so unsure, when he takes a shared look and turns it into a sonnet, he cannot think of those four letters for he will crumble once they become untrue); it is simply the fact that whenever Sirius Orion Atsuki Black smiles with his canines showing, Remus’ stomach swoops onto his feet, so smoothly he stumbles over himself to catch it, bones creaking, fingers grasping at the slippery organ, where he finds the unsaid word imprinted in four mocking, giant, menacing letters. However. Like a seed growing in soil drenched with long-awaited rainwater, something fantastical blooms, something otherworldly. However. There are words that Sirius writes, sometimes, in his own journal, which incline Remus to believe that maybe, maybe he feels the same. Maybe it is not all in vain, perhaps his own name is, too, perhaps, imprinted somewhere in Sirius’ own body, buried. Remus devours these words the moment he hears Sirius’ rhythmic breathing which signifies sleep (or, signifies the green light for him to silently stretch his arm across the room and carefully pick up his beating, living, notebook), and squints his eyes in the dark to attempt and decipher the star’s code—there are words upon words written in Japanese, 月 appears most of all, though no amount of encyclopaedia-reading gives Remus an answer on what it means, and he always finishes his entries with a paragraph constituted of the phrase je souhaite, meaning I wish in French, which he decides not to dawdle on. There is no time, not when there are a smattering words in English. These are the ones which Remus plays over and over and over and over and over and over in his head until he knows them inside out, because who could ‘the sight of his eyes across the room make me feel like I’ve jumped off something high’ be referring to, if not Remus?
***
Death, to Remus, has always meant the woods. That is, after all, where he was raised—the Lupin cottage, cosily nestled between Nothing and Nowhere, with an address so wondrously Welsh in its consonants that he still struggles to spell it out—so it only makes sense that it’s where life should end, too. Hope Howell, with her steaming dishes of doro wat which she’d make every Sunday, memories of Lyall’s hearty laugh, a thick comb making its way through Remus’ hair, his father’s ticking wristwatch showing four minutes past eleven, dishes with designs composed of Hope’s hand painted constellations, the distant shuffle of paperwork followed by a loaded sigh, the brown-streaked-white cat which would often slink quietly into their garden and stick its nose up, sniffing, long walks to their nearest synagogue, the sickly sweet air of summer, utter silence, slamming doors which made the walls of the house vibrate, contentment, a life made of three people, a family portrait, until, until, until.
Death, to Remus, has always meant the woods, because that’s where his mother died, their family tree cut short, down to two. At first, there were two, then three, now there are two again, the other buried, never to be seen again. May her memory be a blessing is heard around him, the repeated bridge to a song he forgot the words to. When he thinks of death, if he ever does, his mind flicks languidly through images of thick bushes and overpowering crickets chirping and gentle streams and fallen pinecones and his mother’s now useless handkerchief.
There is a vast forest in Devon. He does not go in. Bars his mind from straying to its enticing branches. This is until, as he often does, Sirius Black twists everything in on itself and makes him change his mind.