XII
Harry puts down his silverware and stands up so suddenly, someone gives a little gasp. There’s a maniacal glint in his eye that reminds Remus so much of Lily, it sends a chill through him.
“We have a very important bit of business to attend to,” he says with mock self-importance, gesturing between his peers and himself.
“Ewww, you sound like Percy,” Says Fred as George snorts. Mrs. Weasley, fortunately, is out of the room and doesn’t hear this, and Arthur only sighs, but doesn’t look too upset. Perhaps this is because Percy, while yet again failing to celebrate with his family, had still sent a very mildly worded and diplomatic Christmas card to his parents by owl that morning.
“Ummm- Professor Lupin?” Says Hermione, she leans in to whisper directly in his ear. He laughs.
“Understood,” he agrees, and she smiles, looking satisfied, and follows Harry out of the room, not waiting for Ron, who is stowing bread rolls in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He hurries after them, muttering about cutting dinner short (despite having sat down over an hour ago), and calls back to his father “Tell mom thanks, it was all really good!” Shaking his head fondly, Arthur stands, and he, Tonks, and Moody move to the sitting room to continue their conversation about ministry affairs over a brandy.
“What was that all about?” Sirius asks, miming Hermione’s whispering. Remus laughs.
“I’m to keep you out of the way. The foyer is out of bounds.”
At this, Sirius looks a little disgruntled.
“That’s what they said earlier. I hope they don’t piss off that fucking portrait. She’s been asleep for days, it’s a Christmas miracle.”
They listen intently, as if expecting to hear the telltale shrieks of one of Walburga’s tantrums at any moment, but none come. They share a bemused look and both shrug.
“They’re in the sitting room, Molly,” says Remus genially when she returns, swinging a dishrag over her shoulder.
“Oh, right,” she says, drawing her wand. Dishes begin to levitate into neat stacks. “Will you be joining them? You don’t have to wait for me, you know.”
Sirius shoots Remus a panicked look. After all, it’s been a busy evening, and his exposure to society has been decidedly limited outside of Order meetings and the occasional group of guests. With a pang of regret, Remus remembers a Sirius that couldn’t stand quiet and would use any excuse to throw a party. Still, Remus had never liked crowds and excitement, so he understands well the need for a moment’s calm and privacy.
He assumes his diplomatic teacher’s persona as easily and naturally as pulling on another sweater over his clothes.
“Oh, no, we’ll take care of it Molly, you’ve been cooking for hours. Please, I won’t take no for an answer.”
She smiles, charmed, and sets a hand to her hip.
“Always the gentleman. If only Fred and George took a leaf out of your book once in a while- I don’t think they’ve ever offered to help with housework. Come to think of it, maybe they ought to-.”
“No, no, we’ll be just fine, the two of us,” Remus assures her before she can beckon for her children.
“Really, go ahead, rest and enjoy.”
She smiles graciously and warmly, thanks them, and slides out of the formal dining room to join the rest of the adult company.
“Thanks,” Sirius mutters, smiling gratefully.
“No problem. Getting kind of loud for me too, actually,” says Remus nonchalantly.
They draw their wands silently and in unison. Remus’ well-oiled cypress gives off the same comforting and slightly spiced aroma it always has. It gleams just a little red in the yellow light and he wonders how Ollivander ever managed to stain such a light wood the dark, rich color of old world mahogany.
Sirius’ is a temporary arrangement, Alder and dragon heartstring, and frequently gives him trouble. This doesn’t come as a surprise given the honey colored wood’s notorious dislike of stubborn personalities. The dragon heartstring is a curious complication however. Despite being the same core material as Sirius’ original wand, this one seems to fight with him ceaselessly, subject to almost constant blockages and accidents, as if both parties are too temperamental to work in accordance with one another’s wishes.
As the thin China plates clink delicately, Remus wonders if he can hazard a trip to Ollivander’s to find his friend a better wand. As usual, however, a multiplicity of objections arise. Even if he could afford one (which he can’t), Sirius would have to be there for the right wand to find him, which is obviously out of the question, and the risk of describing Sirius to the wand maker would be far too great for the small chance that Remus would procure an even remotely satisfactory wand. He could try and find something with similar specifications to his first wand, but Sirius is so far from the mischievous eleven year old boy who wreaked havoc with an energetic and playful dogwood wand.
He shakes his head to clear it and with a flick of his wand, the small crumbs of turkey and pudding and gravy convalesce in the center of the table, where they become a bar of soap. Sirius laughs.
“That’s… unique,” he says, eyebrow quirked. Remus gives his wand a casual spin.
“Gotta use everything you’ve got. Waste not want not and all that.”
Sirius rolls his eyes.
“Yes, because in this house, we were always so careful to avoid frivolity at all costs,” he says, pointedly levitating a sparkling crystal chalice with the black crest etched on the side.
Remus opens his mouth to reply, but is silenced quickly by a loud bang in the other room, followed by an almost unbearable buzzing sound, as if an army of insects is hammering against the adjacent wall. Sirius jumps and the cup he’s been levitating shatters into a sparkling rain of glass and dust.
Remus sees Sirius’ mouth form the word “Repairo!”, but the chalice doesn’t reappear. If anything the larger pieces of glass seem to fracture a little more. Noticing the pink flush that dusts Sirius’ high, haughty cheekbones, Remus decides to step in sooner rather than later, and quickly repairs the chalice on the pretense of reaching Sirius, and shouting in his ear, “IS THAT MUFFILIATO?!?! I HAVENT HEARD THAT SPELL SINCE SEVENTY SEVEN.”
Sirius chuckles, looking less vexed and setting the chalice on a high shelf.
“LETS GET THIS DONE AND OVER WITH SO WE CAN FUCK OFF SOMEWHERE QUIETER, YEAH?”
They clear the table in a hurry, Remus’ transfigured bar of soap washing the dishes on its own accord, and the pair are drying them within two minutes of the onset of noise.
Looking around, Sirius flicks his wand at a dish towel which at first curls up stubbornly, but eventually lays flat enough to stack the dishes on top of. Remus jogs his foot while waiting for the rag to submit to Sirius’ spell, but he knows better than to try and do everything for him.
Sirius smiles grimly, apparently satisfied, and grabs Remus’ hand. To his surprise, Sirius leads him not to the doorway, but to the old fashioned pot-bellied stove in the corner of the kitchen. Brow knitted in concentration, he traces a curling pattern on the aged black metal, and with a scrape, the tile underneath it rotates until a small manhole is revealed below.
Remus quirks an eyebrow in disbelief, and Sirius only grins and eases himself down into the floor with his forearms. He quickly moves out of the way so that Remus can follow.
When his feet hit the ground, he registers that the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. Wherever they are, it’s adjacent to the cellar and incredibly quiet once the stove slides back into place, the buzzing as quiet as a distant memory.
“Lumos,” Remus murmurs, hoisting his wand a little higher so he can see down the narrow corridor they find themselves in. The hall has brass sconces on the walls, floral patterned wall paper, and an ornate carpet. It looks a great deal like the rest of the house, but there’s a shabbiness about it that belays disuse. Everything has attained a heavy coating of dust and cobwebs. It reminds Remus of pictures he had seen once in a magazine, of old houses long submerged in the ocean, rooms eerily preserved among the fish and barnacles.
“Where are we?” He asks in awe, and his voice sounds strangely quiet in his ears after the blaring charm.
“Eh, it’s ummm- shit, c’mon, c’mon- it’s the un-renovated bit of the house,” Says Sirius, shaking his wand furiously until it produces a reasonably bright lumos charm.
“The house elves used that kitchen portal to get down here and do maintenance. Not surprised Kreach hasn’t been keeping up with it, of course. If he’s going to go on about the house all the time like it’s God’s fucking gift he could at least dust.”
From what Remus can see, this floor is every bit as opulent as the one above, and he wonders what renovations Sirius could be referring too. Thinking of the house’s elf heads mounted in the upstairs corridor, he decides not to ask what other eerie additions the ancestral Blacks saw fit.
“Anyway, my parents hardly ever even remembered it was here, so I’d hang out down here sometimes- leads right up by the front door, too. I don’t think any of the other Blacks have used it since the London Blitz. I asked Uncle Alphy once.”
Remus’ neck prickles with unease. The stuffy, isolated underground passages hardly seem like a place for a child to be roaming around all alone- then again, he knows the rest of the house had presented a much darker environment for his childhood friend.
“Cozy,” he says. “Can’t believe you didn’t take me down here when we were kids. Sleepovers at Grimmauld Place.”
Sirius gives a good natured snort.
“And after the first thirty minutes of interrogation on your pedigree, you might’ve been kicked out, if you were lucky.”
“And if I was unlucky? Bet they would’ve hexed a werewolf to high heaven, given the opportunity.”
A strange, humorless smile plays at the corners of Sirius’ mouth. His gaunt face looks ghoulish in the wand light.
“Nah. James, they would’ve cursed, if they knew I was hanging with him- and me, of course, to teach me a lesson. They would’ve just killed you.”
Remus knows that detached, casual tone well enough to know that Sirius isn’t joking. He feels guilty for even bringing it up.
“Well, good thing I had you to protect me.”
“Har. Couldn’t protect Reg, could I?”
Remus can’t think of anything to say to that.
They pass a dusty old larder, empty save for a few ancient peels of onion skin, and turn into an old library with a bar in the corner. Remus can easily envision its past as a glamorous speakeasy for wealthy, influential purebloods.
Still, there’s a strange collection of objects that don’t seem to belong. A corner full of muggle books, magazines, and vinyl records; A selection of old school pictures hanging above them; a very humble scattering of eyeliner and mascara tubes; an ancient glass pipe, the bowl of which is blackened with use and the rest, covered in dust.
“Spend a lot of time down here, did you?”
Sirius hums, digging through the albums, setting aside The Ramones, The Talking Heads, and The Clash.
“God, you would’ve loved the eighties,” Remus remarks regretfully. “Just- took all your favorites and built on them, really.”
The pronouncement sounds dangerously somber, but Sirius offers a barking laugh.
“That’s what I’m coming to find out. Replacements, Femmes, Dexy- what a time to…”
“Be alive?” Remus suggests. To his alarm, Sirius gives a noncommittal grunt; and sighs.
“I don’t really think I am alive is the thing, though. Not really.”
He tosses it out so casually, as if he were considering a change in jobs or foreseeing a bad turn of weather. A very concerned Remus is suddenly at his side.
“Why would you say that?”
Sirius tries to keep looking though the albums, but Remus gently grips his wrists.
“Why would you say that? The veil?”
Sirius, for once, looks a little relieved to be talking, to be getting something off of his chest. He chews on his cheek, in deep thought. His eyes are wide and uncertain.
“No. Well, no and yes. When I fell in, it didn’t feel any different than usual. But I was dead right? You’d think death would feel different. Maybe that means I’ve just been dead a really long time.”
“Pads… stop this. You didn’t cross all the way through, that’s all.”
The other looks unsure.
“When I got close, I could’ve sworn I heard them. Lily and James. But I fell through, and there was just… nothing. Do you think there’s nothing, Remus? After?”
Remus shuts his eyes against the question, which he cannot seem to assume the responsibility of answering.
“I don’t know, Padfoot. I really don’t,” he admits tiredly. “But I do know that you didn’t die. You didn’t pass all the way through that veil, or I wouldn’t have you here with me right now. I don’t think it was death you experienced, so… try not to worry about what it felt like for now? Maybe?” It seems like such weak advice, but Sirius visibly calms, the way a mother’s mere shushing works wonders on a weeping child. The comfort is simple and incomplete, but somehow it gives the other the confidence that things are, for now, alright.
“I hate this house,” Sirius says in a hoarse whisper.
“I know,” Says Remus, his throat tight. “I’m sorry.”
“If there was just. Just a little wind, you know? Just… something, anything here that wasn’t so still, so… dead- maybe I would feel a little more alive, too.”
Remus considers their current position, sitting in a pool of long-past memories, in a forgotten room, covered in dust, underground where the sun could never find them.
He takes Sirius by the hand; Takes a deep breath.
“I’m a fool,” Remus tells him sharply. “A right idiot, and if something happens, I will never forgive myself.”
Sirius quirks his head to the side, confused, waiting.
“But?”
“But, I need you to sneak back upstairs and grab our jackets.”
At first, Sirius can only stare at him in shock and disbelief. Then slowly, very slowly, when he realizes that he couldn’t possibly be misinterpreting Remus’ words, his face breaks out into an elated grin and he sprints back down the hallway to the kitchen.
A few quick moments later, he’s back, laughing breathily, eyes bright, a coat in each hand. Remus takes his own plaid wool coat and Sirius dons a beat up denim jacket, lined with sherpa that’s slightly yellowed and compressed with age.
“You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure, Moony?” Sirius asks dubiously.
“Because I don’t think I can handle it if you change your mind.”
“I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I wasn’t sure, Sirius,” he assures him.
They dash off down the passage, the opposite way than they came, until a small set of dilapidated, carpeted stairs faces them. Above their heads, an iron ring is embedded in the ceiling.
Pushing it open, the lamentable buzzing yet again fills their ears. Shifting the rug to one side and lifting themselves out of the floor, they manage to knock over the horrible troll’s foot umbrella stand, but it’s so loud in any case, no one hears it fall.
Sirius puts his hand on the door knob and for a moment he turns sheet white. Then he grins maniacally at Remus and twists it sharply. They explode out into the night like divers coming up for air, and they’re greeted by a playful, cold winter wind. Sirius closes his eyes and groans happily, stretching his fingers out so that the breeze flows between them.
Then, they’re running down the abandoned night time street, too clotted with fresh fallen snow to be slippery from the ice underneath.
Sirius is Padfoot, then himself, then Padfoot again, throwing snowballs, wooping in delight, and snuffling at the powdery white in turns, overcome by glee. Remus, as if inspired back into childhood along with him, throws snowballs back, and once even tackles Padfoot in the snow.
After a few short minutes they slow down. Sirius is back on two feet, with a laugh that turns into a cough. He covers it with his sleeve. As always, there’s a wetness to that cough that frightens Remus, but he pushes his concern momentarily to the side. This is about escaping their problems, if only for a moment, not fixating on them. Plenty of time for that later.
Sirius is leaning against a brick wall at the mouth of an adjacent alleyway, staring up at the stars with wonder and euphoria. It really is brilliantly clear after the snowfall, and Remus joins him, taking in the vastness of the sky that London usually tries so hard to conceal with petrol and light pollution.
“This would be perfect with a smoke, you know,” Sirius says with a mischievous glint in his eye. Remus can tell he’s not referring to cigarettes, and rolls his eyes wanly.
“You uh… smoke? at all? lately? Moony?” Sirius presses with a mock air of casual curiosity and a sheepish and expectant smile. Remus snorts.
“Sirius, I’m a thirty-six year old retired teacher and werewolf who practically needs to glue a job to his hands to hold onto it. When do you think is the last time I smoked some pot?”
Sirius scoffs with a raised eyebrow.
“Give me a little more credit than that, Reems. I’ve known you a long time after all.”
Remus chuckles tiredly and pulls a joint and a battered box of matches from his coat’s breast pocket.
“Matches? Really?” The other laughs incredulously. A flame flickers to life between his long, elegant fingers, and he proffers it pointedly, a useful trick he picked up in Azkaban. Remus shakes his head.
“You always used to say it tasted better this way, when you lit it with matches. I think you were just copying your muggle bands though.”
Sirius snorts. “Almost certainly, insufferable little git that I was.”
They share an enjoyable moment of silence, save for Lupin’s steady, measured exhales and the almost undetectable scorching sound of the thin, brown paper.
“How did you remember that?” Sirius asks quietly, wonderingly.
Remus tilts his head, confused and a little concerned, but Sirius waves a hand dismissively.
“No, no, I know your memory didn’t go on a bender or anything like mine did but- those tiny little details you always seem to remember. Those aren’t coming back for me. But actually- I don’t think most people remember little things like that. So how do you?”
Remus, to Sirius’ surprise, goes a bit red. He hands the joint over and leans against the cold wall, watching a rat skitter past a banged up old metal dumpster. He wonders if it’s keeping warm. It takes him a while to force the words out.
“I took them out, Pads. Almost everything with you in it. So they would stay… well you know.” His brow is furrowed, searching for the right words. In his mind’s eye, he sees his own shaking hands corking tiny bottles full of silvery-blueish mist. “I didn’t want the way things ended up to twist those memories for me. I took them out so they… would stay perfect.”
Sirius’ inhale turns sharp, and he ends up with lungs full of far more smoke than intended, especially after a fifteen year hiatus. Once he starts coughing he can’t stop.
Remus grins in a very prongs-ish way.
“Amateur,” he says, as Sirius coughs himself to tears, hands on his knees.
“Gotta cough to get off, Moons.”
“God you’re such a child,” Remus chuckles.
“Keepin’ you young Moon- or should I say, Professor Lupin.”
The silence returns for a moment. It’s pregnant but not foreboding. Sirius regains control of his lungs, and wipes tears from his eyes, laughing at himself, but it seems he hasn’t forgotten Remus’ earlier explanation.
“Perfect, huh? What does Remus Lupin consider a perfect memory I wonder?”
“Ohhhh let’s see. You, piss-drunk, standing on a table at James’ and Lily’s wedding, singing ‘Let’s Make This Precious’. You had a way of dancing that didn’t quite suit the- erm- delicate sentimentalities of all in attendance.”
Sirius grins.
“Wish I could remember the look on that prick Dursley’s face,” he says with relish.
“I’m sure he was horrified.”
“Disgusted, more like. He called you a fag.”
Sirius snorts.
“Did I deck him?”
A strange little smile tugs at Remus’ lips.
“No actually. You… you grabbed me by the tie and shoved your tongue down my throat. Supposed it got the same point across.”
Sirius stares. He looks genuinely surprised, but it doesn’t hide the tension, the confusion, in that gaze. His high sharp cheeks are pink, almost hidden by the shadow of night- almost. Remus realizes with a jolt that Sirius is trying to remember if they were together back then, and if he had just forgotten. But the other doesn’t say this. Instead he let’s out a low whistle.
“I was one bold little bastard, then, ay? Didn’t even know if you had feelings for me, actually.”
Remus offers a wry smile, and nods soberly.
“Well, you guessed right though.”
Their eyes meet for one intense moment. He can swear he sees Sirius’ vulnerable gaze flicker to his own mouth.
With difficulty, Remus clears his throat.
“I’ve been putting them back a couple at a time, the memories. I have a feeling seeing them all at once would drive me a little mad.”
Sirius hums in agreement, but let’s the other continue.
“There’s so many. It’s like opening presents on Christmas, to be perfectly honest.”
Sirius smiles ruefully.
“I haven’t celebrated Christmas in a while, so I may be mistaken, but don’t you usually open everything on Christmas morning? All at once?”
Remus rolls his eyes, laughing. The other is just as impossible as when they were young.
“That would be an awful lot of twenty year-old boy hormones to sort through all in one go. I just got you back, I’m not about to scare the shit out of you by trying to jump your bones like a horny teenager.”
Somehow, impossibly, Sirius doesn’t guffaw or look surprised. He only smiles gently, shyly even. In mock seriousness, he grips Remus’ shoulder and stares into his eyes, trying not to laugh.
“I would be honored and delighted if you would jump my bones,” he replies, straight faced, but there’s a twinkle in those steely eyes. When had the dull slate there become such molten silver again, the way it always had been, the way that made Remus’ heart flip with excitement and joy and adoration?
He finds that he’s placed a hand on Sirius’ face, and the other is smiling bashfully into his palm. Remus’ thumb works across the pale surface of the tired, gaunt cheek, and he finds that the skin there is smooth and soft and every bit as wonderful to touch as it had been that night so many years ago, kissing under the flimsy pretense of pissing off Vernon Dursley.
Remus recalls placing his hands on the others hips then, feeling the hard edges and soft muscle, and he does so now, and finds that it doesn’t feel so terribly different- or if it does, he doesn’t care. He’s falling in love with the feeling of Sirius now, not the memory of Sirius then, and the comparisons begin to lose all meaning as he closes the distance between them.
One hand climbs to Sirius’ neck where he can feel the hot blood coursing under his fingers, the pulse that means more than anything to him. He feels cool hands slide underneath his own jacket and shirt, gripping and smoothing over the contracted muscle wrapped so tightly over his sore spine. Those hands travel south and slip into his back pockets and something lurches in Remus’ stomach, something between chaos and ecstasy. He gently grips Sirius’ jaw and brings their lips together. The hotness or breath, the graze of sensitive skin, rises like a violent crescendo.
Someone whistles and laughs shrilly. Heart pounding at a pace to match Sirius’ heaving lungs, Remus looks up, attempting to find the source of the noise, flushed and dazed, his hand instantly on the wand in his coat pocket.
It comes again, further down the street this time. It’s only the benign chorus of drunken carousing and merry-making, some other people from some other life taking advantage of the night’s magic, wonderful and wild and discreet. Here, in their alley, these sounds don’t mean a thing, and whoever is making them hardly exists. But Sirius is still a wanted man, and Voldemort is still at large, and they know in their throbbing hearts (still warm with the memory of passion and contact) that it’s time to return home.
Sirius blinks slowly, dolefully, with those inky black eyelashes dusting the skin above his cheeks, and he laughs softly, almost breathlessly. Remus can’t help but join him.
“Can’t catch a break, can we?” He says, and Sirius looks at him with an emotion too big to put a name too. But his eyes are dusky, and his lips are parted and dear god is Remus so utterly fucked.
“Let’s put them back. All of them,” the other suggests conspiratorially. He meets Remus’ hand as if pressing his own to a mirror, and then entwines their fingers tightly together.
“Let’s put them all back, together, and then let’s make even better ones.”
“I love you,” Remus says helplessly.
Sirius looks shocked, then thrilled. A single tear blooms out of nowhere and drops down Sirius’ lovely, thin face, and he grins more brilliantly than the surface of the sun.
“I love you too.”
>>>
They’ve scarcely returned and shut the front door closed quietly behind them, when Harry appears, flushed and jubilant, around the corner. His hair is even more of a mess than usual, and there’s a smear dirt on his nose.
“Oh, there you guys are!” He says brightly, and they owe it to his excitement that he doesn’t notice their cold-reddened faces and donned outer wear.
He grabs Sirius around the wrists, and leads him as a young child would their parent, saying “close you eyes!”.
They take off down the hall and make a sharp turn into the foyer, and Remus follows more slowly, puzzled by the bits of dust and what looks like plaster that fill the air and coat the floor.
He hears Sirius cackle with glee, and almost every single one of the children says some variant of “Ta Da!!!!” And he can resist no longer. He clears the remaining distance in two long strides and peers into the room.
George has a black eye, Ginny is covered in black, powdery soot, and Hermione’s already voluminous hair is being raised to alarming heights by static. Ron and Fred alone seem unscathed, and it’s no wonder when Remus rounds the corner.
Chunks of wall and timber and plaster are everywhere, along with shredded bits of paint and wood varnish. There’s some kind of foul, gooey secretion splashed from the foot of the stairs to the place where a wall used to stand, now a ragged, gaping hole straight through to the sitting room, and the sludge snaps and pops menacingly, like some kind of corrosive acid.
“What the f-.” Remus begins, and then he understands all at once, and lets out a shocked laugh, slapping one hand to his mouth.
“No one thought to put a sticking charm on the wall,” Hermione says in a matter-of-fact tone that does nothing to hide both pride and excitement.
“Happy Christmas, Sirius,” says Harry, beaming shyly, and Sirius envelops him in a bone-crushing hug as they all stand admiring the place where Walburga Black’s portrait used to be.