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FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH –
Remus pulled the printout from the machine. Lily was leaning over his shoulder with a joint.
“Don’t ash on it,” he said. But it was too late, and a spiral smeared grey, and a tiny ember burnt a crisp neat hole then fell dead and black through and smudged charcoal on Remus’s jeans.
“Another one,” said Lily.
Remus stood, hitting his head, and the ceiling dripped ice water down the back of his neck. “Your patching charms are shit, Lils. Is Ulysses back?”
“Fuck you. And no, he’s not. The old man won’t send him back out here in the weather.” All day long it had been beating rain upon the failing thatch roof above their heads and Remus had not ventured even a peep out the dusty blown-glass window upon the windblown brown grases and beyond them the stretching liquorice sea. His bones had begun to creak like an old rocking chair with the storms and the tide and otherwise. Meanwhile Lily had been out in the yard in the morning doing sun salutations in a spelled bubble; she had done it every morning since they had been consigned to the island, and in even the winter rain she wouldn’t quit, mostly on principle. “Isn’t Finnegan here?”
“He flew away again right after I fed him yesterday.”
“It can keep til tomorrow, then. Take a hit of this and let’s put a tape on. I can heat up a curry.”
“We’re supposed to – ”
“That’s the third identical read in as many days,” Lily shouted. “You wanna Apparate off this island? If my patching charms are so shit? Be my fucking guest! I’m not following behind you with your Splinched bits!”
There was nowhere to storm off to in the tiny room so Lily just stood there staring at him. If she was an Animagus she’d turn to a bull, he thought, gender be damned. “I just hate having them in here cause they’re creepy as hell.”
“Do an Impervio on it and put it outside under the flowerpot,” Lily said, and Remus laughed. “Or give it here and I’ll roll us another spliff in it.”
--
Sirius had sent Finnegan with a cassette tape and a letter the day before, which had been Lily’s night to use the tape player and headphones before bed. She was into music that scared most of them and he could hear its muffled crashing even from across the room. Remus had read the letter immediately after its receipt whilst Lily bent over the machines to perform their weekly magical calibration, attentive to her turning toward him because his face and ears were burning. In bed in the storm attuned to the swaying wash of tide against the far beach he waited until he heard Lily’s snores before he put the headphones on and fiddled in the dark with the tape in the box. It was Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud. Sirius had neglected to rewind it fully, possibly on purpose, and it started directly in the middle of a song titled “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
Muggles are wild, Sirius had written in the mildest portion of the letter, which Remus read again now by wandlight. They don’t believe in extraterrestrial life whatsoever. It’s funny in an extremely dark way to watch them try very hard to debunk all this stuff that is happening – or blame it on the Russians – when it is obviously real communication!!!! I am supposed to keep the very sensitive readings from their purview and Oblivate when necessary. I have had several near misses. Dumbledore would fucking kill me if he knew how badly I have almost royally fucked up – and how many times. But he doesn’t have to know because I keep fortuitously saving my own ass at the last possible minute!
These guys already think I am fucking weird as hell. Because I didn’t know how to use the water fountain, or the telephone, at first. And in the toilet I kept staring at the mirror waiting for it to tell me how I looked. Also because most of what I do is hover over folks’ shoulders and see what prints, and run interference if they shouldn’t see it – and they have been told I have some special Muggle certification called a P.H.D. and they ask me very regularly about my “dissertation…” It’s like, I royally halfassed a final paper for Transfiguration on one of the elemental laws which I now can’t even recall on account of we were about to graduate and celebrating every night with assorted magical libations… Anyway I am lucky in that most of the communication we get between seven and eight PM anyway when usually I can try to be alone with the data (in a way as very sensual as it sounds)
Which brings me to my real reason of writing which is to send you this tape. I know you will never concede the superiority of the blues because you love Joni Mitchell so much but I will attempt – until the day I die. You may not want to listen in the company of our gentle flower, to preserve your / my dignity (tell her I’ve sent you some SOOTHING AMBIENT SOUNDS). Which brings me to my REAL REAL reason of writing which is that, I will tell you as per our agreement, I think you’ve truly really finally destroyed my brain (after all your juvenile attempting) – I spend so much time – lying in bed – listening to Scott Walker – wanking to the thought of you coming with your head on my shoulder! And your hair, which was very long at the time, and sticking to my neck, and your forehead, and your lips (Jesus fuck) – which were very red – like, I had never understood red! Before your lips. And how I had been thinking about it for so long, and by IT I mean of course touching your cock – but it was rather better even than I had imagined before – because of how warm your skin – and because of the sounds you made which I had never really thought about. Because your silencing charms were the best of all of ours in school DAMN IT which was a source of some frustration for me for many years.
You are SO – you are like a seascape or like fog in the early morning. I walk around and I think of the Waste Land, and I have my little Muggle tape player so I listen to all your SHITTY, FOLKY Dylan – and I feel like weeping for a second because I am so overwhelmed by this sense of you you you and you are not there! And FUCK, you are in the Hebrides!
The handwriting was scarcely legible and the quill had punctured the paper several times.
If I had you back here I would not just fuck you but – I don’t even know. Whatever it is I know I will spend all day doing it. This is fucking weird. I never allowed the imagining to get past mutual wanking when I thought I would never touch you. And even then I always thought I would treat you like a conservator with a Velazquez. Now I am not sure because I know from my limited experience you would be shouting at me to get on with it which I cannot even THINK about because I am AT WORK and will not be able to stand up now regardless for like another half hour’s solid thinking about Snape in a jockstrap… Allow Muddy Waters to communicate for me, I JUST WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU, etc…
His handwriting slowed its rushedness and was lighter now upon the page.
It kind of gets me off to think that I could send you a letter this raunchy in the Muggle post!! Maybe next time / when they move you to somewhere altogether less FUCKING RIDICULOUS
Then:
I think you will see me rather sooner than you likely expect.
--
With his owl the next day Dumbledore requested the honor of one of their presences in the Floo for a meeting later that afternoon. Remus and Lily drew straws and Remus lost so Lily helped him fold a quilt up on the flagstones and kept an eye on the machines while he shoved his head in the fire. The old man was sitting at the head of the table in his chambers at Hogwarts; beside him was James (who looked resoundingly disappointed that the head in the fire belonged to Remus), and beside him was Peter. There were a few others – Vance, Meadowes, one of the Prewitts. “Hullo,” said Remus from the fire, mouth full of ash.
“How goes it on Mingulay,” said Peter.
Remus had not known the island even had a name. “Fine,” he said. “We’ve gotten frightful printouts of late.”
“Is that so?” said Meadowes, leaning toward him so her evil eye necklace slipped from the collar of her shirt. It was only then that Remus realized perhaps something very much larger was at stake than he suspected. He looked to Dumbledore, whose vivid blue eyes were grim. Then he looked back to Meadowes – her wide eyes, her ashy robes, her motorcycle boots. “Pete and I’ve gotten hardly nothing in Hayle,” she said.
“Indeed,” said Dumbledore. “Norfolk reported these readings last week and now it’s moved onto Mingulay and Gravesend.”
“No more of it at Norfolk now then?” said Remus from the fire.
No one spoke and instead they looked at each other across the table. Peter and James were attempting detailed conversation with eyes. No one would so much as look at Remus in the fire until Moody clunked into view from wherever dark corner, puffing on his corncob pipe. “No more nothing at Norfolk now, Lupin.”
His stomach clenched. “How’s that?”
“No one’s heard hide nor hair of Fenwick or McKinnon since last week,” said James. “They quit sending owls. We went out there yesterday and poof.”
“Place is leveled,” said Peter. “To the ground.” He’d lost weight, Remus saw even the haze of ash, perhaps a great deal; his face seemed hollow, and his arms crossed tightly across his chest, as though he were cold to the bone. “They cut one of your circles in the far field.”
“We were going to owl you two straight off,” said Meadowes, “but the weather. There’s one on the way with the runes for translation.”
Remus needed desperately a cup of tea or a joint or a fuck – the latter best of all – to straighten his brain out from the fearful confused tangle but with his head in the fire he could not even take a deep breath lest he swallow ash. “Does Sirius know?”
Someone coughed into the extending silence. Moody said “He’s been updated.”
“Alright,” said Remus, “Well.”
Dumbledore: “Can you tell me any more about the quality of the signal you’re receiving?”
“It’s quite broad,” said Remus. “They must cast it over most of Scotland.”
“We’ve got nothing, though, from the folks in Rosehearty.”
“Right,” Remus continued, “Western Scotland, then… Still, it’s not coming to our exact position.”
“The last transmissions forwarded from Norfolk were pinpointed to their exact longitudinal position,” said Dumbledore. “And they were addressed to Benjy and Marlene by name.”
A chill swept up Remus’s spine and around the table like a ghost.
“It is our present position that until you receive transmission of this ilk you may consider yourself safe, as it were. And if you do receive such communication you must immediately take precaution to Floo or Apparate to safety. If you will pass this on to Miss Evans.”
“Yessir.”
“And if you will translate, Remus, those runes upon your receipt of them.”
Remus said again “Yessir.”
“I suppose that’ll be all, then, unless – ”
From across the table James shot a hand up for possibly the first time in his life and when Dumbledore acknowledged him he turned cherry red. “Professor, Headmaster sir. I meant to ask – well. It’s nearly Christmas.”
When Remus emerged red-faced and hacking ash-black coughs from the fire Lily was holding a sopping wet owl by one foot as its shaking feathers scattered rainwater, struggling to untie the parchment bound there containing at least one sleepless night’s worth of translation work.
--
Indeed Remus did not sleep at all that night, and likely he wouldn’t have even if not for the runes. The moon was low and white against the sea and waxing, tugging hard at the grist of him. His joints ached and he was ravenous with hunger and even as he yearned for sleep something else screamed in his gut to run outside in the windy wet grass – stalk the indignant birds and suck the juice from their eggs. Chase the surf against the far beach and the spray against the rocks. But instead he sat at the desk working in wandlight with his battered Herr’s Runeography as Lily slept.
He got through half the translation then set it aside and wrote to Sirius.
I liked that tape. I think I’ve heard Bo Diddley do “Mannish Boy.” Come to think of it you probably played that for me in school. Probably on someone’s 17th birthday in which case I was too drunk / stoned / both to recall much detail about it. I don’t know if you ever told me how you got into American music? I would like to hear that story. It’s funny to think. I got into folk music because when I was a kid my mum would take me with her to buy vinyl at rummage sales and it was always sad looking women singing old English folk songs. Then we would sit together and listen to it and she would make tea. We did this early in the day when as you know etc etc and after that we did not ever really do it – perhaps a lot of this for me is about nostalgia and like, trying to get my fingernails under the before-time – like, to prove there was a before-time. It makes me calm, and an almost kind of good sad – I wouldn’t know how to talk about it with anyone. I think you can hear the feeling in the music but perhaps that’s just me.
I miss you like hell. Most nights I dream the content of which you can guess and go out in the freezing night wrapped in a blanket to wank in the outhouse which I have to laugh thinking of… and I know you are laughing thinking of it – and I am laughing thinking of you laughing…
I wish you would come on the full moon and be Padfoot with me and in the dawn – I think about it all the time. You coming here and taking care of me like you used to or not like you used to. I think about – when I can’t sleep I think about when I would wake up in the shack and you would put me in bed and sit with me until you had to go and I would be halfway between sleeping and waking and I wouldn’t recall what was a dream and what wasn’t. Lily puts the wolf out and lets it run – it’s not so bad and she’s a dab hand at pain potions. But it’s not the same… I want to wake up naked with you in the dew in the grass – and I want you to take care of me (interpret how you will) – all day and all the night following – and I ache for it every minute. In my heart and elsewhere. In my bones where all the aches are.
--
Another sodden owl arrived in the morning and when Lily read the tightly rolled parchment it carried – addressed to her in James’s handwriting – she turned bright pink and would not discuss the contents with Remus. By noon he had finished the translation, the rain had moved off, and the morning’s owl had recovered. They bound to its leg three parchment rolls – the translation, heading off the Dumbledore, Lily’s response to James, and Remus’s letter to Sirius (he kept the cassette). Then they went out into the bracing wind and walked in the ruins of the old village about the scattered sheep’s bones and birds’ nests. Lily’s hair blew wildly – vivid red tangle like spiderwebs upon fallen leaves. They let the owl go and it listed on its heavy leg and disappeared East across the water. “James invited me to his parents’ for Christmas,” Lily said.
“In the Floo yesterday he was practically begging Dumbledore on one knee to let you take a vacation.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Lily said, “alone, with the moon.”
“I’m always alone with the moon.”
“Liar,” said Lily. “That sounds like some shitty Keats line. You shouldn’t be alone. We could see if Sirius could come.”
He would deny the warm shivery feeling that congealed in his gut and spread warm against the cold wind and the salt spray like cream of wheat. “I don’t know if he can, I mean logistically.”
Lily had this tiny grin in her lower lip only. “Ask him and see.”
“Maybe I will.”
She pressed her sharp elbow gently against the soft part in his side. “He would drop everything and Floo here like a man possessed if you asked him.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Why?” said Lily.
If she had never known she was a witch she would have gone to university and studied English, Remus thought, not for the first time. She thirsted for patterns. And to answer her he knew would be incriminating. It is all going faster than I thought it would, he could say. Everything has accelerated to a point I did not know was physically possible. And now I am wondering when the end of the world happened that I did not see. And I am wondering how much longer I have – and I am wondering how much worse I have made my own inevitable suffering. Beyond suffering – bereavement. I have made it, the death of my lover. The disappearance of my lover. In all likelihood the interstellar vivisection of my lover. All that is left to do now is to run interference in the dark.
He also knew that if he told Lily the first thing she would say would be, get the fuck over yourself.
--
The translations of the runic crop circles that had been appearing in English fields since 1976, whose elucidation constituted Remus’s seventh-year final project in Ancient Runes, six weeks’ research at the end of which he had begun hallucinating due to lack of sleep and had to be locked in the dormitory by James and Sirius and Peter:
6 May, 1976: TITHE
25 June, 1976: SURRENDER TITHE
19 August, 1976: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
4 November, 1976: YOUR TIME BORROWED
17 November, 1976: YOUR POWER BORROWED
2 February, 1977: YOUR LANDS BORROWED
30 April, 1977: EXCHANGE MAGIC BLOOD
21 July, 1977: SECURITY FOR MAGIC BLOOD
4 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
6 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
10 September, 1977: FLIGHT OF DEATH
24 November, 1977: PURITY OF BLOOD
6 December, 1977: POWER OF BLOOD
25 December, 1977: SACREDNESS OF BLOOD
1 January, 1978: POWER IN ANCIENTNESS OF BLOOD GENESIS OF MAGIC BLOOD BEYOND YOUR RACE YOUR HISTORY GIFTED AND FORESAKEN TITHE SURRENDER TITHE
11 February, 1978: YOUR POWER BORROWED BEYOND YOUR HISTORY
6 March, 1978: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
9 March, 1978: ONE MILLION MAGIC BLOOD
25 April, 1978: YOUR TIME BORROWED AND BORROWED
6 July 1978: FLIGHT OF DEATH
8 July 1978: FLIGHT OF DEATH
10 July 1978, accompanied, for the first time, by radio signals received in the observatory in Gravesend which Sirius would later infiltrate, seized by the Ministry and then by the Order, Oblivated from the minds of at least forty Muggle scientists: NO MORE NOISE NOW
--
How it went between Remus and Sirius: Remus had come over for a conciliatory pint late in 1978, shortly after being denied from by far the shittiest Wizarding job conceivable (as a stockboy at a disgusting owl-order potions warehouse in Leeds) and wound up sleeping on the couch for six months assisting Sirius in spending an inadvisable chunk of his inheritance and attempting to grow marijuana plants in a closet despite his abysmal herbology OWL. Remus wrote freelance for a couple crackpot publications – magic and Muggle – concocting bullshit horoscopes and writing scathing record reviews of obscure noise cassettes, and he made enough to keep himself in canned vegetables.
Sirius’s brother disappeared in April 1979 corresponding with at least 17 other recorded disappeared witches and wizards in Manchester, where he had been working at the time as a dealer of Dark antiques. They sat at the table and all night they drank the bottle of Old Ogden’s Remus had picked up (overdrawing his bank account) until at dawn it was empty. Between them they passed a joint against the rapidly building nausea. “Dreadfully sorry about,” Sirius said into the spreading silence. “In school. I feel like.”
They had never spoken about it once. “It’s alright.”
“I just. I never wanted to – embroil you in rumors.”
“Better that one than – I mean, you know, the real one.”
“Right. Right, better that they all thought you and I – rather than the, rather than your furry little problem.”
“I didn’t mind it honestly.”
“Well nor did I if we’re being honest.”
“Right.”
“The number of times James.” Sirius laughed, and then he covered his mouth with his fist, against the bile. “Christ Jesus.”
Remus helped him up and they went to the bathroom and took turns vomiting for most of the morning. “What did you mean,” Remus said around eleven, feeling newly sober and completely drained, raw throughout, like he was just born. He was lying at the foot of the toilet studying the patterns in the dust around the base of it. Yellowing urine splotches, vivid red mold. “You didn’t mind it.”
Sirius was leaning against the tub, face bloodless, vomit in his hair. “Thought it was right fucking obvious.”
“No.”
“You daft shithead.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’d kiss you,” Sirius said, “but. My mouth – your mouth.”
They both fell asleep on the tile floor. Hours later Remus woke with a booming headache and a terrible crick in his neck and Sirius was hovering closely over him as if trying to confirm he was still breathing. Then they kissed, slow and deep, and Sirius’s lips were chapped from being sick but his mouth was very warm. Four days later they were summoned to Hogwarts to join the Order.
--
Lily was up on the roof adjusting some of the equipment when Dumbledore’s head appeared in the fire around lunchtime. Remus’s back was turned and he jumped, wand halfway out of his sleeve, when Dumbledore called his name crackling amidst the charcoal. He looked unslept and there was a cold twist in the corner of his mouth. “I think you had better put your head in.” Then he disappeared.
Remus’s heart had begun to run in his stomach, churning like a faulty car engine. He called Lily down from the roof – her hands and face were smeared, rather beautifully, with oil – and when he rummaged in the nearly-empty tin of Floo powder he saw his hands were shaking. Then, the nauseous twisting of fires upon fires – like going over a waterfall in a barrel full of ash. In Dumbledore’s office, when it developed amidst the embers, most of the usual suspects were gathered around the table, grim, spines stiff with fear or shock. In a corner he saw a shadow pacing illuminated by the glow of a cigarette – James. “What happened,” Remus said, embarrassed by the shake in his voice.
“How’s your communication this morning Lupin,” Moody barked from the darkness.
“We just keep getting flight of death, flight of death. What happened?”
“Nothing odd, then,” Moody said. “Nothing new. Nothing scary.”
“No,” said Remus. Then again, like a spell (he recalled, inanely, getting Protego for the first time, in second year Defense Against the Dark Arts, after two failed attempts in which he had been struck in the face with the cushion he was supposed to be blocking, thrown of course by Sirius with dastardly aim): “What happened?”
“Gravesend was attacked this morning,” said Dumbledore, and the great vivid red bird shifted upon his shoulder. In the fire Remus’s ears started ringing. His heart a siren, cutting and cutting a sudden stiff heavy humidity in his brain, treacle to wade through to a realization he could not yet fathom. “Just a few hours ago,” Dumbledore was saying in the living world, “they received targeted messaging addressed to the lead Muggle researcher Dr. Chandra Kapoor and to our Mr. Black.”
Peter was looking at him from Dumbledore’s left hand to see what he would do, lower lip between his teeth, eyes very dark, and Remus was looking over all their heads into the portraits whose subjects watched at him in turn. “We had started evacuating,” said Meadowes, lighting a cigarette (her motorcycle boots on the table peeling mud). “We had an MLE squad and waiting vans with Oblivators and we got some out. Then – well, some folks said they saw it. I didn’t.”
“Saw what?” said Remus’s voice from his mouth.
“The ship,” Moody said. “Or, one of their ships. It lost its cloud cover just for a second, dipped, blew the observatory to bits. Long enough for a few Muggles with cameras.”
Blew, he had said, to bits, like something on a Muggle TV show, or their scary local news.
“BBC’s picked everything up,” said Vance. “Mayor’s office is cooperating and they’re saying it was a gas explosion. But still I can just see this whole thing evolving into Dr. Strangelove.”
Someone had begun talking about perhaps it had become necessary to contact the Chairman of the Russian Council of Magic and tell him to start taking precautions, but – “Did they get Dr. Kapoor out,” said Remus’s voice from his mouth again, too fucking loudly, “and, and Sirius.”
The silence seemed altogether too long. Empires had risen and fallen in shorter silences. It was like the silence he recalled when his own mind was subsumed by the wolf’s – a silence that lasted a handclap and also an eternity, bookended by two viscous and devouring wastelands of pain. Across the room James lifted his head ever like his stag self, scenting the wind.
“Did they get,” said Remus again from the fire, “did they, did they get Sirius.”
“They did get Sirius,” said James. “Not Dr. Kapoor. They got fifteen people out. Out of a hundred.”
Remus thought he might vomit in relief and horror and horror at his relief when there were eighty-five dead. “Oh, God,” he said, knees weak against the flagstones.
“You need to pull them,” said James to Dumbledore. “We need them off Mingulay like, yesterday.”
“A witch and a wizard will have an easier time evacuating their stations than an observatory of Muggle scientists, Mr. Potter,” said Dumbledore. James was spluttering like he often did and Remus remembered with a bitter nostalgia the days when it used to be funny. “We need as many folk in the field as we can muster. Now perhaps more than ever.”
“You’re not the only station getting that message now,” said Meadowes to Remus in the fire. “Four more reported just today and I daresay it’s all beginning to seem rather fishy.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Dorcas, your conspiracy theorizing’s been off the charts since McKinnon evaporated.”
Two months previous Peter raising his voice anywhere in Meadowes’ vicinity would have been the stuff of his tall tales. Now it was another brand new and – to say the least – deeply odd thing Remus found himself reckoning with. Dorcas was in the same boat apparently – “Say that again and I’ll evaporate you, Pettigrew.”
“I’m just saying they clearly have tech – ”
“I literally could give two shits, motherfucker!” Peter shrunk back, muttering under his breath, and Dorcas turned to the rest of the table, straightening her back. In school she was always someone you wanted to do a project with, especially if you had to present in class at the end of it. She was also someone you wanted to have your back in a fight, what with the sharp tongue and the Quidditch muscle. “It’s not probable that they are discovering us all at once like this. Every station is warded and warded differently, and there’s absolutely no geographic pattern that connects them. Someone is leaking information. And now we are paying for it, in blood.”
“Hence,” said James, “We need to get Remus and Lily off Mingulay.”
“I hesitate to withdraw anyone from a station where they are still safe,” said Dumbledore. “Every moment – every reading, every transmission is useful to us. And we have no other recourse.”
“How do you know they’re safe?” James asked, voice near a shout. The heel of his hand slammed on the table centimeters from Peter’s wrist, cigarette a glowing shred between two fingers, and beside it Peter’s hand sealed into a tight fist.
Ever kindly, Dumbledore deflected. “We should probably stop talking about something that so directly concerns Mr. Lupin as though he is not here.”
He was in the fire collecting himself still from where he had been scattered and he was very accustomed to people speaking about him as though he were not there and he wanted very much to remind Dumbledore that he himself had long been among the worst culprits. He could not muster the fear for himself. He had never had much of it and now especially he did not know quite where it had gone to. “I can stay,” he said. “Get Lily out and I can stay.”
“Fuck,” said James very softly. He of course would claim the bargain was Faustian but Remus suspected he felt otherwise, at least in the unmappable recesses of his soul.
“Very well,” said Dumbledore. His eyes twinkled; God, Remus hated that. “Send her in. I’ll have Mr. Black join you once he’s been approved by St. Mungo’s Psychowizards.”
Remus nearly laughed imagining Sirius being interrogated as to his fitness for duty – which had always in fact been relative and would not have flown in peacetime in the slightest – but instead he said “Yes, sir.” He pulled his head out of the fire, and then he did laugh, and sometime in the laughing, when Lily had begun to rub his back across the shoulders, he thought, I am hysterical. This is hysteria.
He pulled himself together, again, though it had been increasingly difficult of late. “Lils,” he said, “you’re going to eviscerate me alive, are you ready?”
--
He told Lily she would be going home and predictably she threw several things at him including a shoe, one of her bras, a massive instruction manual for one of their machines, and his Beggars Banquet cassette. “Fuck you,” she cried, “you self-sacrificing fuck!”
“It’s safer, Lily, I mean, you don’t want to die – ”
“Of course I don’t, you shit,” she yelled, “but neither do you!” She was throwing all her things haphazardly in her backpack. “You sexist pigs! With your false chivalric bullshit! I hope at least you get off on your own inferiority complex, Remus, you fucking shit!”
“James will be really – ”
She turned to him, seething. “I am going to kill James.” Then she turned back to her bunk. “I’m taking all the weed.”
“Lils, come on, don’t do that – ” But he stopped at her look, which might’ve turned him to stone. Perhaps he was compelled by it to toss her a juicy tidbit: “Dumbledore’s sending Sirius out here with me.”
Her eyebrows shot about six inches up her forehead. “You’re setting me up, Remus, I do hope you know, you’re setting me up for like, a fucking home run here.”
“Do it,” he said. “God knows I deserve it and you wouldn’t be wrong.”
She just looked at him and her eyes softened a little slowly by increments while she thought of what to say. And she did her pattern matching like a puzzle in her own mind while she looked for the evolution of it, for the lines and the clues. Then she took her little mason jar of weed from her backpack and opened it and put the largest nugget on the table beside the computer keyboard. “I’m very upset with you,” she said.
“I know.”
“You need to figure your shit out,” she said. “I think you would value yourself more if you could get it through your apparently selectively thick skull that other people value you and they value you a lot. But like I said I also think you get off on your own inferiority complex.”
“Perhaps so.”
“I only tell you this because I love you. For some fucking reason.” She leant forward and kissed his cheek, then she went to the fireplace and scrounged for the Floo powder. “I’ll kill you if anything exciting happens now that I’ve left.”
“If anything exciting happens I’ll be dead anyway,” said Remus, but Lily gave him another bitter look. “No,” he said then. “Probably just shagging.”
Lily laughed, raw and wild, then the fire glowed green and she was gone.
--
Sirius stepped out of the fire a half hour before moonrise as Remus chain-smoked on the stoop. His joints ached with such violence Remus couldn’t rise to meet him and Sirius stalked to his side, casting his leather bag upon Remus’s bunk with a thump, and crouched beside him, long fingers combing through his hair, coaxing the give from the knots in his shoulders. He smelled like hospital and library and old fear and his sweat bittersweet and he had been eating chocolate in the none-too-distant past. “Moony Moony Moony,” he said, “give us a drag,” and he put his hand out to receive Remus’s damp stub of cigarette. “Is there weed in this?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know what it’ll do to the wolf.”
“We can smoke after then,” Sirius told him. “How much longer have you got?”
“Another twenty minutes maybe.”
“Right.” He sat beside Remus on the stoop, pressed them together by the thighs, and passed back the cigarette. “And then we can run together and then I can spend all tomorrow rubbing your back and several other parts of you.”
Remus laughed weakly. In the blue velvet crush of evening the sea had begun to show an orange harvest glow at the rim of it heralding the coming moon and its tidal pull sharpened all the spines beneath his skin. All the foreign bones assembling and the grist braiding together and the deep rabid hunger at the heart of him dragging like some undertow. He ground the cigarette out with the toe of his boot and pressed his forehead to his knees and hugged his shins and Sirius stroked his hair and his neck and his shoulders where he knew it hurt. Sirius had done all this even before and inside the pain and the fever rush ringing his ears Remus heard him say, over and over again, sweetest soothing nonsense; Moony, Moony, Moony, Moony.
Sirius helped him get his clothes off and folded everything neatly for some reason and locked and warded the cabin door and hid his wand beneath the flowerpot on the stoop containing something very long dead. Then they sat together arse-naked in the cold sea wind teeth chattering until the moon threw a slant of light just right that lanced through Remus and upwards like a knife. It flayed him open – Caesarian birth – to let the other out. He heard the dog’s sympathetic whine and then nothing.
--
He woke up in bed with his head in Sirius’s lap as Sirius rolled a joint atop the battered copy of Finnegans Wake Lily had thrown at Remus before abandoning. “Alright, love?” said Sirius, then he licked the seam and sparked the end of it. “Could you use a hit?”
“Yeah,” Remus croaked, “give it here.”
They smoked and Sirius got up, gingerly when he shifted out from under Remus, to put a tape on. “What do you want to listen to?”
“I would say – but I don’t want to listen to you bitching.”
“I’m not gonna bitch,” said Sirius, as thought he had never in his life bitched about Remus’s musical choices. He was hilarious, naked, stoned, filtering through the scattered cassettes on the floor, tiny bruises, paper cuts, a red friction scuff on his thigh, as though there were not a war on, as though none of what just happened had happened at all. “Do you want me to put on Bringing It All Back Home?”
“Yeah,” Remus said, laughing, “yeah I do.”
“I can stomach that one,” said Sirius, and he put on. He came back to bed and put Remus’s head in his lap again and looked through the tracklist. “Or I guess I can stomach most of it.”
Remus laughed, though it hurt the more he did. “Fuck you.”
The one song Sirius knew enough to sing softly was Maggie’s Farm. Remus fell asleep again in the middle of it and woke a little later when Sirius got up at the start of Mr. Tambourine Man to fetch a glass of water. He was still stoned enough Remus called after him, “This song always reminded me of you.”
“God,” said Sirius, mock staggering. “Did you just propose to me.” Remus laughed so as not to answer. “You’re very sweet. I used to lie in my bed and listen to Whole Lotta Love on Pete’s walkman and think about fucking you senseless.”
“Pete’s walkman?”
“Yeah and I hardly knew how to use it…”
“I’m surprised he let you borrow it.”
“He up and gave it to me after a while.” He sat on the end of the bed. “Anyway to answer your question from your letter that was how I got into old blues music because I was listening to all these sexual Zeppelin tunes and fantasizing about you and then I realized they had ripped everything off from all the old American bluesmen.” He smiled his most richly suggestive smile. “So all thanks to you really. You brought all this upon yourself.”
“Yeah, how so?”
“Sucking on your quill in History of Magic,” said Sirius, “obviously. And when you would stretch your legs on the back of James’s chair. I could go on,” he said, “another time. Let me rub your back?”
This was an elaborate setup, Remus understood. He turned over gingerly, still aching, muscles in knots, and just beneath his skin the scintillating memory of pain, bright and cold. Sirius rubbed his back and his shoulders and down to his hips and kissed his neck and down his spine bump by bump tracing teeth and tongue and callused fingers that spanned his waist and tucked against his belly, his bones, butterfly ridges, backgammon set of ribs, soft hollows. “We could shag later if,” he said, but he was hard, and so was Remus, and something had gotten set alight in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go out. He had waited in fact a very long time for this, a compendium of aching loneliness and erotic epistolary and embarrassing outhouse wanks, and it would soothe the scattered pains, he knew, to surrender his own mind for a while. One line of Dylan crept into his mind despite the fact the tape was long over – “Let me forget about today until tomorrow…”
“It’s alright,” he said, shifting deliberately, “now’s alright.”
There was much kissing, and Sirius seemed to have compiled in the interim since they had last been naked in one another’s company a veritable menu of ways to debauch Remus, and he almost forgot for a while that they were all hunted by vengeful aliens, and that there was a vicious hellbeast living inside him, and that they could tell nobody they were in love.
--
He woke again at dusk to the soft staccato drumming of owl talons upon the window. Over the past year he had become so attuned to that sound it woke him almost instantly. In the dim light he saw it was Peter’s bird Eveline (he had been the first and the only one of them with a complete lack of irony to name his owl after a James Joyce novel), who was looking quite a bit more grey about the wingtips than she had when he had last seen her, and who was carrying like unlucky prey a bloody red envelope from whose folds a noxious black smoke spiraled.
He dove out of bed and threw on the first sweater he could find and ran outside to open the letter before it exploded. When he plucked it, hot as coffee, from Eveline’s foot she took off toward the settling clouds at a good clip and he could hardly blame her. When he opened the Howler with shaking fingers the wind took the ashes, and the brunt of the sound.
NOW I KNOW WHY THIS WHOLE TIME THEY LIKED YOU MORE THAN ME! AND EVEN WITH YOU LIKE YOU ARE! THAT YOU WOULD HAVE EATEN ANY OF US ALIVE ONCE A MONTH AND STILL THEY WOULD HAVE FETCHED THE MOON DOWN FOR YOU ALMOST FUCKING LITERALLY! FUCK YOU REMUS! I EXPECTED THAT YOU WOULD NOT SHUNT EIGHT YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP BY THE WAYSIDE IN FAVOR OF SEX BUT EVIDENTLY I SHOULD NOT HAVE!
FUCK YOU. HONESTLY FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. IT IS ALWAYS YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT THAT RUINS EVERYTHING! I THOUGHT YOU AND I HAD MADE SOME ALLIANCE – TO BE OVER AND ABOVE THEIR IMMATURITY! BUT NOW I SEE YOU ARE JUST AS BAD AS THEM OR WORSE. AND THAT YOU NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY YOU DID FOR THEM – AND THAT THEY NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY THEY DID FOR YOU! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU WOULD DO THIS TO US!
The last sentence echoed about in the skeletal wreckage of the old settlement. “Well,” Sirius said from the doorway where he stood, cup of cold tea in hand, naked but for the wool blanket he had thrown about his shoulders. “I had hoped he might have cooled down a pinch.”
All he could wrestle out was a pathetic-sounding “What the fuck.”
“Dumbledore sent Pete to St. Mungo’s to tell me I was coming out here with you and I must’ve looked – I don’t know. So he asked me for about the seven millionth time what was going on with you and me and I didn’t have the heart to say nothing this time. His reaction was, um, not dissimilar.”
“Fuck,” said Remus again. Something was draining off like cold dishwater in his heart. “Fuck, does James know?”
“I mean,” said Sirius, “it didn’t seem fair, don’t you agree?”
They sat again together on the stoop. There was still a shred of sunset left to the West over the sea, orange and pink and dulling like bleeding dye as the light faded against the heavy clouds. “I guess,” Remus said.
“James took it a great deal better but then again I think he suspected for a while that I. Well. That I wasn’t – or that it was very real, I mean, that when people would joke about us, it wasn’t funny, and I wasn’t laughing.”
“I noticed that too.”
“Well, I guess Pete didn’t.”
Remus rested his forehead against his knees. “I never meant – I had hoped we wouldn’t end up on some Brideshead Revisited, Black and Lupin contra mundum trip together. Or at least not so soon.”
“I had hoped too,” said Sirius. “Black and Lupin contra this mundum and all the apparent others.” He pulled his blanket tighter about his shoulders. “For what it’s worth James is alright. And Lily will be alright if she doesn’t know already. And Pete will come around, you know; he always does. Every other stupid idea we’ve ever had he came around to in the end.”
“What if he doesn’t.”
“Then fuck him.”
“Sirius.”
“I’m not kidding. If he doesn’t – it’s on him. It’s not our fault.”
They watched the sun slip under the waves. Remus said “I think I’ll write to him.”
“Send him your own Howler. I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU CAME TO THIS CONCLUSION…”
Remus laughed weakly. “I don’t know how he doesn’t believe we really like him.”
“He certainly doesn’t make it any easier on himself.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? He can’t send you something like that and then say, oh Moony, why won’t you come out to the pub with me anymore.”
“He’s just scared shitless.”
“Well, so am I. Aren’t you?”
“Usually.”
Sirius paused then he leant and kissed Remus at the temple. “Brave man. I love you dearly.”
“Whatever happens?”
“Yes, obviously.”
They went inside and Sirius started the Bringing It All Back Home cassette over again from the beginning and set about heating a curry and Remus calibrated all the machines and then sat at the desk and began several times to write to Peter in many varying tones before he realized it was all bullshit. And his head hurt, and all his joints still, and dinner smelled good, and the music kept distracting him.
It’ll keep, he thought, for another day, it’ll all keep – and it would be just fine to play as though it were just the two of them against this world and every other, for however long they could bargain from the universe. Who knew if it would ever be again? And it was almost Christmas.
--
Remus woke to sound. In the dim light through the opaque windows his skin felt aglow where it pressed against Sirius. The sound was not him breathing or his heartbeat – blood thrum, white noise, in the meat of his shoulder beneath Remus’s ear – because it was coming from the machines on the table.
Bad fucking timing, Remus thought, and carefully he sat, and he picked up Sirius’s old fisherman’s sweater (stolen from James’s dad) from the floor and wrestled into it backwards, and he stood, feeling shaken out but good, everything new, reassembled like a train set. That was, until he went to the computers, and saw what they had printed.
REMUS LUPIN
Dear living fuck. The jolt went through him cold and electric and before he could even think of rational next steps his fingers had fallen upon the keyboard and he had transmitted a return message upon the frequency –
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
He did not have to wait at all very long and he thought he heard in the fever ringing of his ears some horrible cosmic laughter.
WE WANT WHAT YOU HAVE
Stillness but for the waves. He looked at Sirius in the bed and then he looked at his own hands and the brutal compendium of scars where at sixteen he had torn most of the skin from the bone in his desperate and nearly fulfilled hunger. And for that he had forgiven everybody involved except himself.
NO YOU DON’T, he sent.
And in another moment: YOU ESPECIALLY
He found his jeans on the floor and his wand half in the pocket and went to Sirius in the bed and he said, come on, let’s go let’s go, outside outside, there isn’t enough Floo powder for the both of us, we have to Apparate. Sirius was not a morning person whatsoever and he never had been and there was sleep in the corners of his eyes and he had little Remus mouth shapes bruising all over his neck and chest and Remus loved him to an insane degree and perhaps there were mere seconds left in both their lives and he was saying, come on, come on, shoes on, we have to go, we have to get out now now now. Like he had practiced when he was young with his mother and father in case the townspeople ever found out and came upon the house with pitchforks. Have you got your wand? Come on, come on. Little pats upon the back and there were strong hands holding both his own –
Sirius began to ask what was happening but in the procurement of his pants he laid eye upon the machines which were printing rapid festive blocks and vomiting scroll upon scroll of paper in a clinical white reading:
REMUS LUPIN
YOU ESPECIALLY
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
They went outside together into the vivid white dawn and the sea spray and the wild winter grass blowing colorless and the ocean like a desert featured in charcoal and from the clouds before them had descended – did it matter? It displaced the rain and the sea itself and the wind it cast like a spell was warm and metallic and shifted like snakes in the grass. He could not think to fear. It passed overhead and Sirius took his hand – warm and solid – as he had been doing or trying to do since they were very young. And again inanely on some cassette loop Dylan filled his head, another cosmic broadcast: “In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you…”