Work Text:
1981
There is moisture on the walls, droplets swelling and slipping every once in a while; Remus keeps his eyes resolutely on one and refuses to think of anything else.
“So you insist that you knew nothing of Black’s defection?” says the redhead Auror sitting across the desk from him.
Remus stares into the far corner, wondering why there is no moss or even mold growing on the stones.
“Yes. Nothing.”
“Have you ever suspected he might turn to You-Know-Who?”
Say “Voldemort”, Remus prays. Say it, damn you; just don’t say the other name.
“I never would have thought that of him. He was always very firmly set against his family and their ways.”
The room is cold, and even though there is a silver Patronus pacing by the door and Remus knows the chill is not coming from dementors, he still imagines they are crowding on the dungeon stairs. He has no idea what they find edible in this place; how can anyone be capable of a single cheerful thought or warm memory inside Azkaban’s walls, dementors or not?
The Auror’s quill is scratching on the parchment. The witness is denying ever knowing or suspecting, Remus thinks. The witness, is it, or is it the suspect? For the first time, he wonders if he will end up down the hall from him, and is surprised by the lack of reaction.
There is a twisting pain in his chest that has been there for hours, for days even.
“What was your relationship with Black?”
Remus’s heart gives a painful jerk, and he tears his gaze from the wall and looks at the Auror. The man meets his eyes without an expression, waiting. But he can’t possibly know, Remus thinks, trying to quiet an old fear that Magical Law Enforcement knows absolutely everything, and if they don’t, they have their devious ways of finding out.
“We were friends since school, and we shared a flat after,” he says. The Auror waits. Remus is scared now that he would have to talk about that, would have to describe and explain—No. “We were close.”
The Auror nods and starts writing down his words. And while he is momentarily distracted, Remus’s eyelids slide shut, and the images and memories explode in the darkness. He sees a window seat with its worn blue cushions and the snow piling high outside; he sees a dinner table and the unwashed dishes in the sink; he sees a bed with crumpled covers. He sees himself lying on the floor, staring upside down at the window and wishing the snow would just keep piling and clinging magically to the glass until the entire window is blocked. Sirius Black is resting with his head on Remus’s stomach as he listens to one of his records. Sirius is frowning at his coffee; Sirius is making a face at the mount of dishes; Sirius is closing his eyes and licking honey from baklava off his palm; smirking, wincing, laughing, gasping, laughing again off the front page of the Daily Prophet, Sirius, Sirius Black, Sirius…
Remus is now convinced something is wrong with his heart. It hurts a lot.
“Mister Lupin?” asks the Auror.
“My chest hurts,” he hisses.
Ten minutes later he is sitting on a wooden bench outside the room with a Muggle tablet under his tongue while the redhead Auror is talking to his superior through a charmed seashell out of earshot. The hallway to his right is open and empty; he can probably make it to the corner before the Auror fires a stunning curse, but who would be mad enough to run inside Azkaban? The leopard Patronus is the only guard, and Remus does not want to stray anywhere far from it.
It was an idea of one of the Ministry’s barristers, to hold all interrogations in Azkaban, “to give a suspect a glimpse of what might await him”. Remus sucks on his nitroglycerin and silently and passionately hates the man.
He turns his head as the Auror approaches.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Remus says. His chest does not hurt anymore, at least.
“You are free to go,” the Auror says. “Follow me, and stay close.”
“Thank you,” he says, although he is not grateful and wants to be rude, but years of enforced politeness are hard to shake off.
It would be a horror unimaginable, he thinks, to spend a lifetime in this place.
The silver leopard runs ahead of them. When they are finally out of the dungeons and heading towards the exit, a neat little plate next to a stairwell catches Remus’s eye. To the cells, it says.
Before the thought consciously settles in his brain, before the Auror even registers him move, Remus takes one giant leap to the bottom of the stairs.
“Sirius Black!” But he really does not know what to shout next, and his throat closes up. The echo takes his yell and carries it upstairs, bouncing off the walls. Maybe they are too far to be heard from the maximum security ward anyway.
The stony shore is completely bare except for occasional patches of lichen. A wet stretch exposed by the tide is littered with broken shells. Remus stands in the shadow of the Azkaban prison while the Auror is summoning their boat from behind a cliff, and his neck hurts from the effort of not looking up. He can tell that the other man wants to get out of here nearly as much as he does.
But Remus does turn around on the way back, bobbling on the waves in a charmed boat. “Fuck,” he says under his breath. He can clearly see a white face peering out from behind the bars in one of the windows.
****
1984
Sirius Black is in possession of a treasure.
The Ministry is giving a feast in honor of the new Minister, and ruined food from the kitchens is sent to Azkaban. Somebody there for sure has an itch to gloat, but Sirius is not the one to complain. He has grilled ribs; well, they are more charred than grilled, but nevertheless, they are former ribs. After being converted to vegetarianism much against his will three years ago, the very thought of meat makes him feel like he is going to have a seizure from excitement. Or it did before the dementors got a whiff of it. There is barely any meat to speak of, as most of it is charcoal, but that’s all right, because there are at least bones for Padfoot to gnaw, and the dog in him is very cautiously wagging its tail.
But there is one thing that makes Sirius forget about the bones and the traces of meat: the black, burnt smudge. It is utterly unreasonable how much he want to write something, anything.
He crawls up to the wall and pauses with a rib in his hand.
Innocent. It’s more of a series of smears, but he knows what it says, and that’s good enough.
Prongs. The bone scratches against the stones; his knees are now covered in charred flakes.
Fuck D Umbridge. That is for the sake of old times and to piss off whatever Ministry official will be searching this cell after he escapes, somehow. He wants to add an illustration, too, but there is barely enough writing material left.
RJL. Sirius sits still, looking at the letters, and then slowly presses his lips to them.
****
“Sister Helen! Sister Helen!”
It is one of the local girls who help around the hospital, the plump one with small eyes that all but disappear inside her face when she smiles, though it’s still a heart-warming smile. Now there is a worried expression on her face, and she fiddles with a towel that she brought with her for whatever reason.
“Yes, what is it?”
“The men just returned from the jungle. One fell sick, like that sickness you told me to look out for.”
Sister Helen jumps up from the low yard bench where she’s been sitting mending a pair of old trousers – probably for one of the patients, the girl thinks. How sweet of her.
“Have any of the other sisters seen him yet?” asks the nun. She is already walking towards the hospital in her unwomanly long strides, and the girl – whom the nuns christened Adeline, or Addie for short – has to hurry to keep up.
“No; I went to fetch you right away.”
“Good girl.”
They cross they garden almost at a run, pass the living quarters and enter the common room of the hospital where the beds are separated from one another with white screens. There, Sister Helen stops and turns around, facing the girl.
“Addie,” she says. “Be a darling and find me some dressings and stitching supplies.”
After the girl disappears, eager to please, Sister Helen approaches the patient in the far corner. The man is pale and sweating and sending violet sparks flying out of his nostrils with every exhalation; he looks absolutely terrified.
“Let me see,” says the nun, switching to Spanish. “It’s okay,” she says, “you’re going to be okay.”
“The Devil is in me!” sobs the man, showering her with sparks.
Sister Helen pulls up the man’s bloody trouser leg and reveals a blackened bite mark on his calf.
“Where were you?” she asks.
“In the jungle.”
“Yes, but where in the jungle?” Addie is about to come back any second and Sister Helen does not have much time to waste.
The man gives an anguished cry and shakes his head; the sparks scatter across the floor, winking out.
“Oh, bugger this,” whispers the nun. She pulls a wand from inside her robes and casts a few spells. The sparks shower stops and the blackness dissolves around the wound. She touches the man’s head. “Obliviate.”
She tells Addie he fell asleep, the poor soul, as she stitches his wound shut. She asks the girl to keep this incident as another of their little secrets, tells her to get herself a piece of plum pie from Sister Louisa in the kitchen and leaves to gather the trousers she was working on.
The shadows are growing longer; it is too late to go into the jungle and look for the venomous plant that has been attacking foragers from the surrounding villages. Sister Helen returns to her tiny room which has a bed, a wooden cross on the wall and a small desk with a ridiculously huge stuffed parrot. The nun lights a lamp and settles down to work on her research.
It was really a stupid accident. Remus – now shamelessly disguised as a nun – has always believed that he had more morals than pride. But there was this village that he was trying to reach; only it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He traveled along the edge of deeper jungle for four days before he came across a small hospital and school for locals run by nuns. I’m starving; can you please spare some food? How hard was that to say? Instead, he cast a sloppy Disguising charm that any trained wizard would have seen through. He needed a job, not just one meal, and he was used to lying in order to get one. The Herbology research fell into his hands three weeks later when a man came in breathing violet sparks.
These days, he keeps correspondence with American Herbology up north, doing occasional Spanish-to-English translations and writing a column on South American native species. He is convinced that the aggressive thing growing in the jungle is a previously unknown species of magical plant.
He wants to name it Sirius.
When he is convinced that every self-respecting nun is asleep, he pulls a bottle of local moonshine from underneath his bed and heads up to the roof. The road to the hospital is empty, lit up by the moon that is still a quarter from full. The jungle rustles and chirps with insect voices in the distance. Remus flops down onto the roof and looks up at the sky speckled with silver. The constellations of the Southern Hemisphere are making his head spin. Up there, perhaps hidden by the curvature of the Earth but ever-present, is the Dog Star.
He is almost half-way into the bottle when he hears someone climb onto the roof. Remus sits up.
“Oh,” says Addie. “Good evening, Sister Helen.”
Remus tries to inconspicuously move the bottle behind his back.
“Hello, Addie. What are you doing up here?”
“I like to come here.” She shrugs and sits down beside him. “It’s a clear night; I wanted to look at the stars. Do you like the stars, Sister Helen?”
“Not so much,” says Remus, trying to exhale through the nose. She can probably still smell the alcohol.
Addie is rather fond of Sister Helen. The nun is very educated and lends her books sometimes. She is good with patients; she insists on personally attending to the sufferers of the most bizarre ailments. She talks funny, not like the others, and sometimes her voice sounds masculine if Addie happens to wake her in the night, but the girl does not see it as a flaw. Sister Helen is quite flat-chested, but she is very thin, so that’s not surprising. Her face is, admittedly, not very feminine; Addie does not mind and still finds her a very attractive woman.
Addie knows who she wants to be like when she grows up.
Remus thinks how much he hates Halloween and silently prays for the girl to go away so he could get drunk and stupid.
“Sister Helen,” the girl says cautiously after a few minutes. “Have you been drinking?”
“Well.” He considers his options, and there aren’t many, so he opts for the truth. “Don’t tell anybody; especially not Sister Clementine.” Remus is always surprised how easy it is to just admit to something and let it go. He pulls the moonshine from behind his back, takes a swig and passes the bottle.
She takes it, her cold fingers brushing against his.
“Why?”
“Hm?” There are too many stars, and his head is beginning to swim.
“Why are you getting drunk?” Addie is now trying to move the bottle as far away from the alleged Sister Helen as possible.
“Well. You see, three of my very dear friends died three years ago today.” He hears a quiet gasp but does not turn his head. “I miss them awfully.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl mumbles.
“I—” he says. “It’s been three years…” The stars are spinning above his head, the jungle sings all around, and he thinks he can hear waves crushing on the rocky shore. The white speck of a face in a distant window is his Dirty Little Secret hidden right next to the Furry Little Problem.
I am in love with a horrible, horrible man, he thinks. What does that say about me?
“Addie,” he says out loud. “You go to sleep. I will be down soon.”
She wishes “Sister Helen” good night and leaves, taking the bottle with her. Remus swears when he realizes that but does not get up.
Fine, he thinks. Loads of people have loved bad men. Fine, I don’t care, I give up, you traitorous piece of shit.
Azkaban really is a terrible place to spend three years in.
Between pain for his friends and love for Sirius, Remus does not know how to make his brain quiet for just one moment. He presses his palm as hard as he can against his ears, squeezes his eyes shut and thinks of how he wants to Obliviate himself.
****
Three days before the full moon Remus falls sick. He thinks it was probably the water, though he always tries to drink it boiled. He is running a high fever and sweating all over the hospital sheets. Addie sits by her hero’s bed all this time, handing him water, fixing the blankets and helping him stumble to the bathroom or hold a spoon. His Disguising charms hold, but the voice-altering potion needs to be taken daily, so he talks in his real voice; Addie is blaming it on the disease.
Remus is half-delirious. He dreams of James and Lily’s wedding, of the time when the guests left and all five of them Apparated into the Shrieking Shack. They took turns playing the piano – which was out of tune and sounded like it was having a hysterical fit – got drunk and fell asleep on the dusty bed in their wedding clothes. He dreams of Sirius’s hands on the keys and of Sirius’s stupid slurred voice singing Angie and substituting “Jamie” for “Angie” every time he remembers to. In his dreams, Remus is leaning on the piano, laughing and dropping cigarette ash on the yellowed keys and the starched cuffs of Sirius’s shirt. He sees Peter dancing with a large bottle of firewhisky by the window. James and Lily are swaying to the music together, a little wobbly on their feet, and James is nearly cross-eyed with love, and Lily’s white dress is sweeping the dust off the floor.
He looses track of days, but on the morning of the full moon he can feel it coming. Panic gives him strength, and he stumbles to his room and locks himself in, using the most complicated spells he can think of on the door.
“You stay away,” he tells Addie. “It’s very important that you don’t come anywhere near my door.”
“But Sister Helen, you are delirious! What are you saying?” The girl is on the verge of tears.
“I’m bloody not! In the morning, I’ll let you in.”
He puts Silencing charms on the room and falls asleep again. This time, he dreams of a Lethifold slithering towards his bed and settling on his chest. The creature lowers its hood and reveals the face of Sirius Black. He wakes up briefly with a line from some old book stuck in his head and scribbles in the corner of his research papers: Oh no, a lethifold has got me. He folds it, writes Dumbledore’s name on it and tries to hand it to the stuffed parrot.
“Take this to Dumbledore,” he says. “Come on. He’s at Hogwarts.”
The bird silently stares at him with its glass eyes.
****
The first thing he hears is a distant voice of Sister Anna coming through the window from the low school building. She is talking about mathematics. Remus feels a cool breeze on his skin and smells the remainders of night rain in the air. There is also a strong odor of blood. His fever seems to have broken overnight.
He opens his eyes and surveys the once tidy room, now covered in shredded paper, feathers and blood. The parrot is no more; neither are the pillow and his Herbology research.
Remus finds his wand and puts a few cleansing and stitching spells on his injuries. He gets to the scratched door, wobbling slightly, opens it and looks outside. At first, he thinks that someone left a bizarre piece of furniture right by his door, but then he rubs the sleep out his eyes and realizes it’s a plump girl in a dark dress who is curled up by the wall in a protective fetal position.
“Addie?”
One eye peeks out from behind the curtain of unwashed, messy hair. There is a long silence as she looks at his bare chest, at the dried blood and the array of scars. Finally, she looks into his real face for the first time and slowly untangles her arms and legs.
“I thought you would be thirsty during the night,” she says. “So I brought you water. But there was a beast. I could not hear it, but I could feel it slamming into the door, and I could smell animal. It wanted to get to me.”
“Why didn’t you run?” says Remus.
She does not answer but continues to stare. Remus shuffles his feet and self-consciously rubs his arms, wishing he could get rid of the stale fever sweat.
“You turned into an animal,” Addie says in an accusatory tone. “Then you turned into a man. Are you the Devil?”
Remus remembers that she could not read or write until she was twelve, and that her entire education is composed of what the nuns teach at the school and the superstitions she was raised with, and that she is a Muggle who has absolutely no trouble seeing men breathe violet sparks. Remus’s teacher instinct sinks its teeth into him. He sits down next to the girl.
“Addie,” he says. “Addie, listen to me…”
But she backs away from him, leaps to her feet and takes off down the hallway yelling for Sister Clementine, Sister Anna, Sister Katherine, Sister Dominique, Sister…
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Remus turns and Disapparates.
****
It’s a bright April morning in 1978, and the sun is pouring in through high windows of an old building at the docks of Liverpool. Inside, it smells like seaweed, rotting wood and engine oil. The Order recruits are sitting on empty crates and some suspicious-looking barrels in a semi-circle in front of Alastor Moody who is talking about Apparation.
“Normally,” he says, “when you splinch yourself, the severed body part remains where you started. And if anybody thinks he can leave as much as half a pinkie lying around for the Death Eaters to find, he can go back to his mommy’s house right now, because Polyjuice Potion is the most harmless thing your flesh can be used for.”
Behind him, Dumbledore smiles benignly and starts cleaning his glasses on the sleeve of his robes. He looks extremely pleased with himself.
“I don’t care if you splinch your arse down the middle,” Moody goes on. “But if you do, I want both halves safe and away from the place you are trying to escape.”
The day promises to be nice. A ray of sunshine is warming the side of Remus’s face, and Sirius is making eyes at him from across the room.
“I am going to show you boys and girls a modified Apparation technique,” says Moody. “The backup loop of the spell is rather primitive. It will find a place inside your head that you mentally visit more than any other or feel very strongly about. It will take that as a command and send your missing bits there.” He notices what Sirius is doing and without interrupting his speech, hexes him with a local stunner. Sirius’s face freezes in a ridiculously coy grimace. “Be aware of what that place is, because believe me, you don’t want Auntie Sarah to find your ears in a cabinet a week later.”
Peter looks troubled. He is probably thinking of his house crowded with female relatives, and of the kitchen filled with pleasant smells, and of what’s going to happen when his ears land there. Remus closes his eyes and thinks of Sirius’s flat in London, of the palm tree that Sirius accidentally killed, and of the yellow mug he left on the coffee table this morning.
****
A November storm is brewing. The sky has a sick yellowish color, reflecting in the unnaturally calm sea, and the air itself seems murky. It’s going to be cold again. Sirius, wrapped in a thin blanket, leans on the window bars and dangles one arm outside, hoping to catch the first droplets of rain.
In the short-term ward, some stupid git scratched his own eyeball out half an hour ago; Sirius can hear him bawling two floors below. That’s where all the dementors are, enjoying the feast of emotions, and Sirius is up here, enjoying the peace by himself.
As he looks out the window, a small object suddenly materializes several feet above the water and goes plonk into the waves. Sirius blinks. He cranes his neck, trying to see a bird that might have dropped it, but the sky is empty.
****
The driver’s name is Nick, and Remus loves the simplicity of it like he loves the dusty red pickup with a passenger side mirror secured by duct tape and cigarette ashes on the seats. There is a surfing board tied to the roof and a cup of fresh black coffee sitting in a holder. Remus rolls down the window and lets the ocean-smelling wind tug at his hair.
“…So she tells me, ‘It’s my body, I can do whatever I want with it,’” Nick is saying. “But I mean, how am I supposed to feel about some guy’s face tattooed on her ass?”
Remus feels a genuinely happy smile stretching his lips. Maybe he can settle down in California and be a surfer, too, he thinks lazily. He sips his own coffee and rolls his head to let the wind caress his throat. Nick is about his age, good-looking and hopelessly heterosexual, with sun-bleached hair and a short beard. This could have been an interesting trip for both of them, but in the end, Remus thinks, they are just going to enjoy the chat, eat hamburgers for supper and continue on their way north in the morning after an uneventful night.
Loads of people have loved dictators, and mass murderers, and psychopaths, and traitors, he tells himself. And maybe I will never get over it, and maybe I will.
“And she says, ‘He’s my hero.’” Nick is doing the parts of his girlfriend in a high squeaky voice, but there is no malice in his tone, only amusement and bewilderment. “She tells me he’s been dead for almost a hundred years. Like it’s supposed to make more sense. But dude, why does she want a dead guy’s face on her ass? You know?”
Remus has never been a “dude” in his life before and he thinks he likes it.
“Women,” he says with a sympathetic grin.
His bag is in the back seat along with the cane. He puts his right leg with the missing big toe up on the dashboard and tries to massage his sore calf. Skele-Gro and muscle restoring potions are making his leg ache all the way up to the thigh, but that can hardly be helped for the next three weeks, according to a Healer down in Mexico. It would have been a lot easier, the Healer told him, if he had the toe with him. Remus wonders where it went. He had not thought of the old flat in months and can’t remember what color were the walls in the bathroom.
He stubbornly does not think of the grey rocks far out in the sea, and of the prison, and of the white face in the window.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” says Nick.
“No.”
“Huh. Why not?”
Remus smiles and shrugs and thinks, A lethifold has got me.
Epilogue
When Remus walks into his small kitchen in the morning, Sirius is already up and sitting at the table with a scone in one hand and the June issue of Exotic Magical Plants in the other.
“Hey Moony!” he says when he sees Remus in the doorway. “Did you know they have a plant in Ecuador called Sirius? It’s very territorial; it bites you and makes you breathe violet sparks.” He looks as though he absolutely loves the idea and wants to plant one of the buggers in his mother’s garden.
“Well,” says Remus, struggling to keep his poker face. “As a matter of fact, I did know that.”