In November there are many funerals, people interred in the wet ground and put away behind high walls. Not all of them are dead yet, but it makes no matter: they will soon be, and justice is swift, at the end of a war. Later there will be questions, petitions and newspaper articles and in a decade’s distance a book or three written by disinterested scholars. A girl who has just turned two in her mother’s house will pore over old records and expose troubling secrets, quick deals, justice delayed, denied. But all of that is in the future, now there are dirges and drunken wakes, men standing vigil as monuments grow from the ground and shroud themselves from Muggle eyes, a fair-haired woman hesitating before a grave, an infant being raised as a house-elf.
Remus does not visit a single open grave, a single mourning pub. If he were in England he might still have refrained, but he is instead in Normandy, and glad to have the choice taken from him. Le Havre is a beautiful city, old and sprawling and bigger to wixen eyes than to Muggles, and he had been glad to be sent away from England where his friends no longer met his eyes when they met, no longer trusted him.
The news finds him faster than the letter from McGonagall. All of France has been awaiting news of Voldemort, and in Normandy they care more than the rest: so many of the old houses have blood here, mingled through marriage to remedy the thinning of time. He is sitting in the cafe Chaput on the Rue de Paris with Luc and Serge Bonnaire, tired and happy; for years afterwards he remembers the grain of the wood under his left hand and the slippery porcelain in his right and the smile that froze on his face when Anton shouldered through the door, proclaiming victory and Voldemort’s defeat. It is a moment Remus has imagined often, in increasingly improbable ways, though he always imagines it the same. In the event, he is far from home and among strangers and they are too busy easing the cup from his hand before it falls and easing his grip on the chair and holding him tight in four firm hands before he falls. His vision swims, sparkles, goes black.
By the time he wakes Madame Bonnaire has wedged a cushion beneath his head and is frowning at him with a dreadful ferocity while her sons skulk behind her. He tries to sit straight and desists immediately when her glare darkens.
“I told Anton not to be an idiot,” she says, “but would he listen? Do any of them ever listen? No, always they must go barging in and scaring people out of their skins, and it’s not been three days since the full. Idiots. Don’t sit up. I’ll send Luc to fetch Emmeline.”
She feeds him bread crisp from the oven and smeared with sage butter, and holds the back of his neck while he sips chocolate dripping in enervating potions. By the time Emmeline comes in, pale and resolute, he is upright and asking, “Are all my friends dead?”
They trade glances, each to each, and Luc clears his throat self-consciously and says, “Not all, I’m sure.”
“I’m not particularly extroverted,” Remus says wryly, and forces himself to focus on Emmeline, who is conferring anxiously with Madame Bonnaire. “Which of them are dead, then?”
“The Potters,” Emmeline says, and Madame Bonnaire nods.
He wishes he were dead, but he has wished many things in his life, he has wished this many times in his life, some more desperately than this. After a minute, when the numbness has receded from his limbs, he asks, “Sirius?”
“I don’t know,” Emmeline says, “this isn’t from a letter, Remus, you have to understand that. It’s only what they’re shouting and Flooing across Britain and into Calais, that Voldemort is vanquished, and James and Lily are dead, and little Harry Potter is a hero.”
Blood comes rushing into his veins, his arteries, a strange shaking like coming back into life, like changing on the morning after the full. “Harry’s alive?”
“Yes,” Emmeline says, and laughs nervously. “Remus, what should we do? Do we go back tonight?”
“No. Give me a moment, I’ll explain. We stay here, going back right now would be a nightmare, if Voldemort’s been defeated the Death-Eaters will be running riot. We sit tight and wait for further instructions. I’m sorry, Emmeline.”
She’s only about two years younger than him, run right from Hogwarts into the Order, but she’s staring at him as though she’s still a third year waiting for her prefect’s orders. Ridiculous at any time, and more with Emmeline, who has crouched with him in ditches while he bled on her, frantically trying to reverse spells that were far beyond her and tantalisingly just outside Remus’ grasp. She shouldn’t look so earnest and trusting or say, “Yes, Remus,” so easily. Before France and this mission he had nearly forgotten what absolute trust looked like, shining out of a human countenance.
“I’ll get Annette to pack up dinner for the two of you,” Madame Bonnaire says, “and then Luc can take you home. I’d say get some rest, but I doubt either of you’ll sleep a wink tonight.”
Remus levers himself to his feet with one hand tight on the back of his chair and the other tight on the silk of Emmeline’s blouse and tips forward gracelessly to brush a kiss across her lined cheek. “Thank you, Violet.”
Madame Bonnaire, who had once been Violet Eugenie Smith, and gone to school with Remus’ mum, laughs and cups his jaw in one warm hand and tips her head towards the door. “Go.”
They have been living for just over a month in the garret of an apothecary on the Rue de Paris three houses down from the Bonnaires’ home and five from the cafe. It is a strange house, half-disguised in what Remus now categorises as the French way: a small, single-storied pharmacy to Muggle eyes, bordered with trees which are the illusion hiding the rest of the building. The rooms are small and cool and smell pleasantly of pine and resound with bird-song.
On their first morning in the place, he had woken to see Emmeline standing framed in their one window in her nightdress, light streaming in around her, reaching out into the guarded air and saying, in a voice young with surprise, “Remus, it really is a tree and, ow, bloody owww real birds, Merlin fuck, oww.”
They had slammed the window shut and Remus had slammed down the stairs to subject Monsieur Renard to a hostile and slightly frantic interrogation. They were fresh from Calais and a meeting with the Lestrange brothers, and in no mood for more surprises. By the time he had returned, Emmeline had healed herself and was cautiously levering the window open again. They had fallen asleep again, curled close like puppies, with the morning light streaming across the covers.
Emmeline falls asleep, for all of Madame Bonnaire’s prophecies, quickly and neatly, between one word and the next, one outflung hand still clasped around a fragment of meat. They eat sitting at a rickety table, most nights, but Luc had lowered Remus into bed when they arrived and Emmeline had sat at the foot of it to unwrap their dinner and neither of them had cared enough about crumbs to move from the warm nest of blankets.
Remus eases her to one side, removes the remnants of dinner and runs his wand over the sheets to warm them, before drawing the blankets over both of them. Emmeline moves in sleep to rest her head heavily on his arm, and he wraps it about her shoulders. Like puppies from the same litter. Till he had gone to school he had never slept like this with anyone, body to body in a bracketing of warmth, a private world for secrets.
He finds he cannot sleep. James and Lily are dead. He has not met them in months, and now he never will. By the time he returns to England they will have been laid in the cool darkness of the ground, turned inwards, alone through the long ages. Nobody will see Lily’s smile again, or her hair shining in the red light of sunset. She will never smile again, when she picks her son up, or perfects a potion, or downs a Death-Eater with a single well-placed hex. James will never, never again, never anything to delight the heart or vex the mind. It is a chasm ripped in the fabric of reality: his mind shies away from it, the thought of no more, no more, nevermore, his friends dead and done, and alights, hunting and ravenous, on that closest to nothing, the memory of a dream, and so slowly to sleep, wrapped around the ghost-body of Sirius, that splendid night after he’d blurted the truth.
In the morning Emmeline blinks accusingly at him from the bed, fumbles around for her wand, and sends a silencing hex flying at him with commendable accuracy for her bleariness. Remus, struck dumb, realises he had been singing loud enough to wake her, and makes energetic gestures miming penitence and humility.
Released, he skims downstairs and out into the street, skidding past the Muggle transportation and ducking behind the hedge that hides Monsieur Bonnaire’s gate from the dust of the street. Inside all is cool and quiet, the noise of the street dropping to a hum. This house has stood here for centuries, and the streets of Normandy’s biggest port have always been busy. Some Bonnaire in the dusty past had objected to the bustling Muggle world penetrating his sanctuary: though of course they must have had more land around the house then than even this walled garden.
Remus takes a moment by the Flutterby bush to calm himself, setting his fingers amid the blooms and letting them rest their bright petals on his scarred hands. Going up the path again he resumes singing. It cannot disturb anybody now, and if it does he doubts he’ll care overmuch. He cannot untwist his mouth out of its smile, however unseemly.
Luc greets him with a smile and a clap on the back that sends him staggering into the doorpost. He is a tall man himself, but the Bonnaires, father and brothers, overtop him easily by a head and half. There is some blood in the family that isn’t entirely human, that made Madame Bonnaire Floo across the Channel to his mother’s side, when Remus was five and wracked every moon with pain and a beastly hunger: some quick sympathy of mothers with sick and sickening sons. They have been good to him this last month, and in letters of introduction across France the months before: there is nobody among wizards whom the Bonnaires do not know, among those who only pass for human.
“You’ve started early,” Serge says, and goes back to sorting through the post. “There’s a month and more to go till Yule. There, my pretty, that’ll tide you over,” he adds to the owl and feeds her a sausage. She clicks her beak at him and flies out of the open window. “A weary journey that one has, all the way back to Scotland, with the storms coming up.”
“It’s no bad thing to start early on that,” Luc says stoutly, and absently pushes Remus into a chair. “Now, will you have the so-English bacon, or will you eat for once like one of us?”
“Don’t have the bacon,” Serge tells him, “Anton took a bite of it and excused himself, and you know the gut that one’s got, eats everything.”
“Nonsense, there’s nothing wrong with it, and stop teasing, Remus knows as well as I that Anton’s taken to fancying himself a vegetarian after the nasty turn he had with the mouton last week.”
If there is anything wrong with the breakfast Luc dishes up, Remus dares any gourmet to find it: the bacon is crisped to a turn, the poached eggs runny in the yolk, the mushrooms succulent and the tomatoes—fried in bacon grease—tangy and beyond perfect. Remus heaps his fork and moans at the first bite, then blushes horribly and ducks his head. Luc puts one hand, still warm from cooking, on the back of his neck and shakes him gently.
“Perhaps we ought to let Remus enjoy his meal in private,” Serge says, and then puts up his hand in surrender as Luc lazily sends the frying-pan dancing threateningly close to his head. “Ah, very well, it is a good day to be happy. I shall stop the teasing.”
Luc recalls the frying-pan, sets the utensils to scrubbing themselves, and tightens his hold on Remus. “It is good to see you smile.”
“I feel quite a traitor,” Remus confesses, his eyes firmly on his breakfast. The mushrooms must have been cooked in vinegar, they sting his eyes so.
“My friends are dead.”
“But not all of them,” Serge says, gathering his papers. “Luc, come along, we must not embarrass our so-English Remus by making him talk of his emotions before coffee.”
“His ears are redder than my tomatoes,” Luc agrees mournfully.
“Exactement, so we shall go, and leave him to the enjoyment of his food and the perusal of his mail. For you from the McGonagall. I come, my Luc, I come.”
This kitchen has held all the best of his memories this last month, when there has been little enough of anything good. Just now, sitting in a sunny patch with his fork hovering over his sunny eggs, it seems to him dense with the ghosts of every other kitchen he has sat content in. The darkest corners belong to the closeness of his grandmother’s kitchen that have faded to a vagueness of sugar and wrinkled embraces, the sunlight on its stone walls the butter-yellow walls of his mother’s kitchen where he washed and broke dishes and first discovered his magic by repairing a smashed cup before his mother could, the high marble countertops and gleaming oven like Sirius’ house-proud joy in his own home.
The song he has been singing in tuneless snatches all morning is the story of Sirius’ absurdities that Christmas, and has rung in his head since he woke from a dream of Sirius’ body close-held in his arms. It is a dream he has had many times, but it is the first time in months that he has woken from it happy. It is the first time, not in months merely but perhaps even in years that it has become possible to tell Sirius the truth about his secrecies, his disappearances. For the first time, there is time. It spins out in his mind while his eggs cool and congeal on the plate and his bacon melts into grease. He can tell Sirius everything, once he goes home. They will row about it, because shouting is Sirius’ usual way of expressing and working through his emotions, but then he will run out of accusations or his throat will get hoarse and Remus will go up to him and shake him by the scruff and he will melt, just as he always does, and then they will sit and talk and he will feel himself home again, after all this time. And there will be Harry too, to look after. On that point Remus feels himself on solid ground: Sirius will have taken Harry into his charge, it is the one sure thing; he wouldn’t have been able to help himself. So there will be Harry, to help ease them over all acrimonies and discomforts: it is nearly impossible to keep up bitter quarrels while changing an infant’s diaper or shielding oneself from the vigorous flinging around of food to which Harry is regrettably prone.
The war, and before that his furry little problem as James used to call it, have magnified a natural diffidence to such extent as to render Remus hesitant in matters where he knows himself governed by self-interest: he is quick enough to rush in to save others, but for himself he would rather go without than ask. Sirius once, before they were in love or knew it, had caught him up and shaken him desperately and said that he couldn’t be given what he didn’t ask for. Remus had smiled and made some excuse then, because to say that he would rather not be given what he need demand would only mean being the victim of all Sirius’ experiments with potion-making for a fortnight or as long as Sirius held the grudge. But he means to ask for this, to demand or beg for it: his place with Sirius, their place with Harry, his home free from the gossamer traps of suspicion and half-truth.
It is a good little resolution, and it brings the future dancing into the chiaroscuro on the kitchen walls: Sirius sprawled on the floor teaching Harry his first spells, buying him his first broomstick, forcing food down his gullet rather than over his clothes, taking him to Luminaire’s Library at the end of Remus’ shifts, the three of them wandering around the Magical Quarter, coming home to their little flat in Phroog Alley, tucking Harry into bed, and then going to bed themselves but not immediately to sleep. James and Lily are dead, and it will be bitter going at first, but at last there is a path for them, after all the mazes and tangles.
The long war is over, all the silent struggles, all over but the shouting. It is a thought to find joy in, in the bright home of kind strangers. Remus bolts the last of his breakfast, permits himself to think the word ‘wolfs’ with some humour, sets it into sink to start scrubbing and opens McGonagall’s letter, strolling with it out the kitchen door back into the garden.
The sun has moved behind a cloud by the time Luc comes wandering through to find him, and Remus is wedged against the wall behind the Flutterby bushes, the flowers and tendrils cool against his skin.
What about him causes alarm Remus never knows, but Luc kneels in the dirt and catches him up between his great hands, and says, “Is it all your friends?”
“No,” Remus says, it seems to him very loudly though Luc leans close as though he cannot hear, “no, he’s alive. I’ve got to return next week.”
“Then that is a good thing, yes?”
“Splendid,” Remus says, and hauls himself to his feet. Once, while quite young, he had imperfectly deflected a Confundus Charm. It had felt like this, being unable to walk straight or think clearly or speak articulately.
But he had been able to fight it off, in the end, and till then he had gone on anyway, half-blind, half-stunned.