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“Mr Black?” the unfamiliar man asked Remus when he opened the door.
“No, I’ll go get him — who should I say is at the door?” Remus asked. He didn’t recognise the man, who was dressed in the navy robes of a Ministry employee.
“Marcus Bellwater from Wizengamot Administration Services,” he said, not offering his hand to shake.
“Could I ask what this is about?” Remus was getting absolutely no clues from his demeanor — he was very serious, but perhaps that was just his general vibe.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the matter with unrelated parties,” he said, only worrying Remus further. Had something happened? Sirius couldn’t be in trouble if the Ministry had sent someone from WizAdmin. Remus honestly wasn’t sure what exactly WizAdmin did.
“Wait here a moment,” Remus said, wary of inviting this man into their home and then leaving him alone, even though realistically this wasn’t any better.
“Padfoot, there’s someone from WizAdmin at the door for you?” Remus said, ducking his head into the study. Sirius was sitting at the desk, three different books open before him and pieces of coloured paper sticking out of them at various points as bookmarks. He had a splotch of ink on his nose and his hair was in a messy bun.
“What?” Sirius asked, putting his quill down. Remus could see only incomprehensible notes about cats and the word ‘catnip’ with seven question marks after it. He decided not to ask.
“A Marcus Bellwater from WizAdmin for you at the door. He said he wasn’t allowed to talk about it with me.”
Clearly Sirius didn’t know what it was about either, judging from his expression that Remus would describe as eighty percent confusion and twenty percent fear.
As Remus followed Sirius back to the door, he noticed there was a hole in the Wimbourne Wasps shirt he was wearing — Remus’s Wimbourne Wasps shirt. It was a little tight around the shoulders and he looked a sorry sight in contrast with Mr Bellwater at the door.
“Yes?” Sirius said coolly, showing none of the confusion or fear Remus had seen in the study.
“Marcus Bellwater, Wizengamot Administration Services,” the man said, offering his hand for Sirius to shake. Sirius took it and gestured for him to come inside.
The three of them sat in the living room, Bellwater sitting on the edge of the seat of the armchair uncomfortably. Remus wasn’t sure whether he should also sit, given Bellwater had said he wasn’t permitted to discuss it, but Sirius made a gesture at him that he should sit next to him, so Remus did.
“I’m here as the executor of Walburga Black’s will,” Bellwater said without preamble.
“Sorry?” Sirius said, blinking a few times. “I wasn’t aware I was even still in — hang on,” he said, turning to Remus for some reason. “You only get an executor of your will if you’re dead, right?”
Remus shrugged. He had no idea.
“You were not aware she’s deceased?” Bellwater said. Remus would have thought that WizAdmin would employ people with more empathy for this sort of thing, but apparently they employed Bellwater instead.
“... No,” Sirius said after a moment, his voice steady but his hand finding Remus’s next to him.
“Ah, I was under the impression you were. My apologies, and I’m sorry for your loss.”
Sirius didn’t reply, so Bellwater continued. “Right, well, you are not named in the copy of the will that was current at the time of her death — you were written out in…” Bellwater flipped through several pieces of parchment, and Sirius interrupted him instead of waiting for him to find it.
“1976, I know,” Sirius said tightly. “When did she die?”
“Two weeks ago. Usually things are dealt with quicker, but there was some delays as no one she had appointed or named is still alive, but there are assets bound by blood magic. My colleague is actually currently in St Mungo’s, as we did not realise the house was still—” Bellwater stopped talking at the glare Sirius was giving him.
“How?”
“How did my colleague end up in St Mungo’s?”
“No, you twit, how did she die?”
“I… don’t have that information,” Bellwater said, looking increasingly uncomfortable.
“What have I inherited?”
“Everything in the Black family vault — here’s the key — and the house and contents of number twelve Grimmauld Place. There’s no key for that, the wards should let you in with your wand.”
“I know,” Sirius said. “Is that all?”
“That’s quite a lot, actually — Gringotts wouldn’t allow us to estimate the value of the assets in the vault, but it’s believed to be quite a fortune.”
Sirius looked like it was physically paining him not to bodily throw Bellwater out of their house. “Is that all you are here to tell me,” he said, his tone completely flat. “I have actually been inside the Black vault, unlike you, so out of the two of us I probably know more than you do.”
“Ah, right, um,” Bellwater said, flicking through his stack of parchment again. “I believe that is all I have to tell you? There’s an itemised list of your inheritance here,” he put a piece of parchment on the coffee table, apparently unwilling to pass it to Sirius directly, “but apart from that I think I’m done.”
“Good. You can leave then.”
“Right, yes, I’ll, uh, yes.” Bellwater shuffled some more pieces of parchment, put them in his briefcase and stood. “Thank you for your time.”
Remus considered seeing him to the door, but Bellwater left the room in such a hurry that he didn’t see the need.
Instead, he focused on Sirius, who was sitting very still on the sofa next to him, staring at the parchment on the coffee table but making no move to pick it up.
“Are you alright?” Remus said, feeling foolish for asking the question even as the words were coming out of his mouth. Of course Sirius wasn’t alright.
“Yeah, of course I am. Good riddance,” Sirius said, but he didn’t make any move to look at Remus and he forgot to smile.
They sat in silence for a minute or so before Remus made another attempt. “D’you, uh, want a tea, or something—”
“Fuck’s sakes, Remus, I’m fine,” Sirius snapped.
Instead of arguing the obvious point, Remus got up and made himself tea, knowing that if he got one for Sirius anyway it would just annoy him. When he returned, Sirius hadn’t moved, but as he sat down Sirius said abruptly, “Fucking hilarious that she tried to write me out of the will and I still get everything.”
Remus made a small sound of agreement. He was still working under the assumption that Sirius was a volcano that could blow at any moment.
“She’d be furious — demanding Bella inherit it, although she’s in Azkaban, so perhaps she’d want it to go to Narcissa instead. Seems like the kind of thing she should’ve sorted out, she’s had nine years.”
Remus drank his tea.
“I wonder how she went. Hope it was painful.” Sirius let out a slightly hysterical bark of laughter. “I hope she was alone. She probably was, spiteful old hag only had friends in Azkaban. Maybe Kreacher was there, fawning over her. God knows what he’s doing now, pottering around in that stupid house. He’s attached to the house, right, not her?”
“I think so,” Remus said, though in all honesty he had no idea how house elf contracts worked.
Sirius, he noticed, had begun to shake. He was holding himself very stiffly upright, his jaw tense, and was clenching his hands into fists as though that would do anything to obscure their trembling. For all that he didn’t want to agitate his partner any further, Remus was becoming more and more concerned with every passing second.
“Padfoot—” he said softly, placing a gentle hand on Sirius’s knee.
“How — I didn’t even know,” Sirius said, making some kind of aborted gesture with his hands, as if he only realised halfway through that he had nowhere to put them. “I was — I was free. I’d escaped. I thought I’d escaped.” His voice broke on ‘thought’, and when Remus put his arm around him, he leant into it a little, though he was still holding himself stiffly.
“You did escape,” Remus said, rubbing his thumb against Sirius’s shoulder. “This is proof of that — our home is proof of that. You’re not in Azkaban, you’re not one of them, you aren’t a blood supremacist. You’re free.”
Sirius took a shuddering breath, and Remus kissed the top of his head, wishing he could do more to help.
“I’m not, though, I have to — I swore I’d never set foot in that house again, and now I’ve been… shackled to it, like it’s some kind of ball and chain I drag around for my crimes. Hah. For my blood.” He stood up suddenly, jerkily, and began pacing the room.
“I’ll have to — oh god, I’ll have to go through all the shit and get rid of all the illegal Dark objects,” Sirius said with rising panic. “And you can’t even help, every second thing is made of silver, all the cutlery, all the — and Regulus’s things, and I’ve got to… I don’t even know what to do with Kreacher, I suppose give him clothes? I — It’d be impossible to get rid of all the blood magic and god knows what the house did to the Ministry employee in St Mungo’s, and—”
Remus couldn’t sit there watching Sirius work himself up, and he stood, putting a hand on Sirius’s arm. Sirius stopped as if Remus had frozen him. “It’ll be alright, I promise. Sit down?”
Sirius stared at him for a moment as if Remus had been speaking Mermish and then sat mechanically next to him. For a moment, Remus wasn’t sure whether he should touch him — Sirius was always desperately seeking physical contact (“Deprived of it in my childhood,” he’d said with a twisted grin once, at school, and no one had pointed out he was still a child as he said it), but he held himself so stiffly on the sofa that Remus didn’t immediately go for it.
A few moments of watching Sirius was too heartbreaking, and Remus pulled him into a hug, his head falling against Remus’s shoulder. No one said anything, but the tension bled slowly out of Sirius’s body and Remus just held him, stroking his thumb against his shoulder and pressing occasional kisses to the top of his head. Sirius’s breaths were ragged, as if he were trying not to cry and not entirely succeeding.
“You don’t have to do any of that,” Remus said quietly. “You can just give Kreacher clothes and then lock up that place forever. Let it rot. You don’t owe your family anything, and you don’t owe that house anything.”
“It just feels—” Sirius said, choking up and taking a moment to compose himself, as if they did not both know he was a hair’s breadth from crying. “It feels like a weight around my neck. It’s not as easy as just letting it rot; the Malfoys will probably try to sue me for it if I do that, and I don’t want the house but I want the Malfoys to have it even less. God knows what they’d do with it. And you know that when houses steeped in that much magic get left alone, things…” Sirius paused, and Remus didn’t need to see his face to imagine the grimace he made. “... get weird. And it’s already unpleasant, so I hate to think what it would become.”
Remus made a small noise of agreement. Sirius would know more about old magic than he did — the magic in the house he himself grew up in was minimal in an effort not to interfere with his mother’s muggle comforts like the telly. (When he’d last gone home a few months ago, she’d very proudly shown him the brand new telephone, and expressed sadness that he didn’t have one. Instead, she called the phone box a block away every Saturday afternoon at four o’clock to contact him, even though he could have just gone around for tea instead.)
“I can come with you, then,” Remus said, trying to make it sound like he thought nothing of it. To be honest he was a little worried about what the house could possibly contain — plenty of Sirius’s concern was probably just history, but being in a house full of silver made Remus nervous.
“You don’t have to,” Sirius said, his voice wobbling.
“I want to. I want to help you, Padfoot. You’re allowed to ask for help. If you and Prongs and Wormtail forced me to learn that at school, I’m going to force you to learn it now.”
“Alright,” Sirius said quietly. For a beat Remus thought he had successfully averted any and all disaster, but then Sirius began to cry, as if some dam had broken. It was wet and snotty and not the most pleasant experience Remus had had, but he just readjusted Sirius so Remus could stroke his hair and murmur softly to him until he cried himself out.
They’d get through it. James could help with the silver, and between the two of them they could make sure Sirius never had to be alone in the house he thought he’d left forever.
He held Sirius tighter as the winter sunset darkened the room. They could face it together.