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That stupid bint Margaret Chudnofsky started it all. They were just having a girls’ night out at Browley’s pub down the street from Belinda’s flat, celebrating the last week of internship with a bottle of white. And maybe they did get a little sloshed, but what of it? And then Margaret said, ‘You know, they are only keeping one of us. The best.’ She smiled, the smug bitch, and proceeded to suck down her slimy oysters.
Rita couldn’t just let it go, could she? She said, ‘And who would that be?’
And Margaret said, ‘Oh please! We all know who actually did something noteworthy during this internship.’ She was talking about that time she got lucky and interviewed the captain of England’s Quidditch team – emphasis on lucky.
Rita said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, it’s not over ‘till it’s over.’
Belinda just watched in wonder and wouldn’t take sides.
And Margaret said, ‘Ha! You can always try and beat my upcoming interview with the broomstick racing champion Andy MacGilligan.’
She might have had a point, what with Andy MacGilligan being the heartthrob of half the witches in the United Kingdom, but Rita was too far gone by then.
She said, ‘You’re on.’
And Margaret just rolled her eyes and said, ‘Special investigative reporter for the Daily Prophet Margaret Chudnofsky – come on, say it, bitch.’
It just sort of escalated from there. And this is how Rita Skeeter ended up in Mexico.
“Me need help!” she says to a local mediwitch, wriggling her toes for emphasis. She hexed them herself not ten minutes ago behind the hospital, and now they are lemon yellow in colour and three times the normal length, like giant banana slugs on her feet. “Me cursed. Pow-wow.” She waves her hand in the air like she is holding a wand.
The mediwitch – Mercy Briones, according to her nametag – looks at her like she has lost her marbles. Which Rita hasn’t. Hey, she has to explain herself to the locals somehow; not her fault they speak no English.
“Okay,” says Mediwitch Briones. “It’s a busy night, but it shouldn’t be more than an hour before someone’s here to see you.”
Rita opens her blue eyes wide and goes for her best puppy look. “Remus Lupin,” she says. “Englishman, mmm, so handsome!”
She would not exactly call Remus Lupin handsome; he is not ugly either, just plain and not her type, even if she was attracted to Dark Creatures, which she isn’t, thank you very much. Rita managed to dig up four pictures of him, and she carried them in her handbag all the way across the world and committed the face to memory. There is a picture from the Werewolf Registry of a sulky small child with bloody scratches on his cheek; there is another one from Hogwarts, from years later, of a shy teenager who blushes and won’t look her in the eye. There is the one she obtained through her Magical Law Enforcement connections, depicting a pale young man with dead eyes who does not care if she looks at him at all. And then there is the latest photograph, of a slightly older man, thinner, darker and with sun-bleached hair; he hates it when she looks at him, so he scowls and tries to turn away all the time. The last photograph came with a file proclaiming him to be a graduate student of magizoology at Altiplano University of Magic.
It’s a shame how little some countries care about the wellbeing of their citizens. So many of those half-civilized places won’t even check for Beast and Creature registration marks at the border. That unfortunate fact made the man ten times more difficult to trace, but trace him she did.
The mediwitch is still staring at her. “Mercy,” says Rita patiently. “Need Remus Lupin now please.”
“Honey, you need a healer. Remus Lupin is not a healer.”
Rita lets her lip quiver and prepares to cry. Bugger all, she has come a long way for this. She has blisters on those slug-like toes.
When the mediwitch goes to fetch Lupin, Rita sits back on the cot and indulges in a brief moment of celebration. She eyes a garland of dry herbs and garlic hung in the corner, wondering what it’s supposed to repel. The whole place is, admittedly, clean but severely lacking in modern-day elegance that distinguishes St. Mungo’s back home.
Remus Lupin, when he walks in, is somehow not like she imagined. He is tall but very thin, and for some reason, she expected him to be larger. She recognizes the brown hair, the freckles and a faint scar on the bridge of his nose – the same face she made herself memorize. And yet, somehow, she was expecting more from the best friend of three heroes and one notorious – and dashingly handsome – criminal.
Speaking of which, such a pity she wasn’t allowed into Azkaban.
“Miss--?” Remus starts.
“Skeeter.”
“Miss Skeeter.” He sits down on a low stool and eyes her deformed toes. Thank god he is half-animal because Rita would hate to show herself in such a state to a real man. “The head mediwitch said you wanted to see me specifically.” There is an implied question at the end of that sentence.
“Ah, yes!” She twists a lock of her blond hair between her fingers. “Forgive my silly whim, Remus – may I call you Remus? – but I so wanted to see a fellow countryman after all this time here.” Rita has been in Mexico since this morning, but who cares?
“Miss Skeeter…”
“Oh, please! Just Rita.”
He frowns, looks down at her feet again. “Alright, Rita. As you were probably told, I am not a healer. I’m a student and what passes for a veterinarian here. So how can I help you?”
Rita would not be where she is now if it wasn’t for her quick wit. “Well,” she says. “My grandfather was a centaur.”
****
An hour and a half later, her toes are back to normal and Rita is about to get kicked out of the hospital without getting her interview. The same mediwitch from before is leading her towards the exit with a gentle but strong arm.
“But wait,” Rita says. “I still have this… these warts… I have to…”
“Honey, go back to your hotel and get some sleep,” says the woman. “You’re fine. There is nothing wrong with you.”
Rita digs in her heels, Mediwitch Briones tightens her grip, and at that moment Remus Lupin appears in the lobby. Rita yells the first thing that comes to mind, “Lupin! Sirius Black says ‘Hi’!”
And oh, does that get his attention.
****
Rita Skeeter has never been naïve. The only two things in the world capable of beating Andy MacGilligan were a political scandal and Harry Potter. Due to the lack of the former, Rita went after The Boy Who Lived, only to discover that wherever Dumbeldore hid him, he hid him well. She was not discouraged. She kept asking, kept pestering all friends, colleagues and relations of the Potters that she could find, until one day she accidentally hit pure gold.
Margaret Chudnofsky did not stand a chance.
Turns out, James Potter had three close friends from Hogwarts: Sirius Black, imprisoned in Azkaban since 1981 and quite inaccessible, Peter Pettigrew, killed by the aforementioned Sirius Black in 1981, and Remus Lupin, who left the country in February of 1982 and whose current whereabouts remained unknown.
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to trace you?” He snorts at that, obviously not appreciating the effort. “I had to tell Professor Diaz you were my long-lost brother.” She is actually proud of that one. Rita has always had a soft spot for the Brazilian soaps that they show on wizarding channels.
“You seem to have managed just fine,” he says. “And for what, for a stupid story? It was all over the papers back in ’81.”
“Sure, but all of it was just witness statements, speculations and parts of Auror reports. I am looking for a first-hand account from someone who knew the Potters as close as you did. The interest in the fate of little Harry Potter has not diminished back in England, you know.”
Remus finally looks at her. “I don’t know where Harry is.”
Rita sighs. “Fine. Just tell me something about the War, about the Potters, Black and Pettigrew.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh Merlin!” Rita rolls her eyes. “What do you think Professor Diaz would say if he knew his student was a Dark Creature himself? I mean, they don’t bother checking those records at Altiplano, but what if? And what about the hospital administration?”
That gets him interested. He gives her a look as if he is seriously considering turning her into a banana slug. The kind with brown spots. Eww!
“Look, Remus.” She touches his arm. He tenses and stares at her fingers. He wouldn’t bite them, of course he wouldn’t. “Look, I have nothing against you. You save animals, and you seem like a nice bloke. Not your fault you’re a werewolf. I don’t want to ruin your life, I just want to build a career.”
He is quiet for a long time. Rita feels like she is getting wet just from sitting outside in this humid air, but she does not ask to go back inside and she lets the silence stretch.
“Did he really?” Remus says.
“What?”
“Did he really say ‘Hi’? Have you been to see him?”
“Sirius Black?”
“No, fucking Voldemort.” His lips twitch and he looks momentarily embarrassed, like he wants to apologize for his mouth, but he does no such thing.
“Yes,” Rita says quickly. “I mentioned that I was going to look for you, and he asked me to say ‘Hi’ to you.”
“Huh. How did he look?”
How indeed would somebody look after five years in Azkaban? “Ragged,” she ventures. “Um, really hairy?”
“You haven’t been to see him. Of course you haven’t.”
“Alright, maybe not, but I still want to hear about the War. I’ll throw something else into the deal: maybe you want something from England?” She thinks about her home and of all the precious things they have there. “Toffee?”
She can see it in his face that she won.
“Music,” Remus says. He finally looks straight at her. “Muggle, not Celestina Warbeck, Weird Sisters and their likes. And you take the werewolf thing with you to your grave.”
“Deal.” Rita offers her carefully manicured hand.
****
Sirius’ London flat is an oddity – some kind of architectural bastard that only he could pick out and love. It’s stuck in a corner, under the very roof of a five-story building populated with Muggles. The walls of the building look like the Industrial Revolution never quite washed off of them. The kitchen window was probably built for defense: wide enough to shoot a crossbow out of it, but not wide enough for barbarians to squeeze through. There is a staircase leading up to a half-room, half-landing without a door that Sirius claimed as his bedroom because he fell in love with an alcove window up there that opens onto a flat stretch of roof. He keeps his potted orange tree in the alcove, and in the summer, the window stays open all the time so that the entire flat smells like sun-heated tar and orange blossoms.
It’s the most ridiculous flat in the city. A man can stumble down those stairs in the middle of the night and end up in the loo if he overshoots by one step, because the hallway is that narrow. The day Remus moves in, Sirius specifically points out that staircase to him and proclaims it the height of architectural genius.
“I’m telling you, Moony, it’s perfect. You’ll see: when I’m old and frail, I’m going to ice those stairs to save myself some effort on the way to the morning shower. Whoosh! – and I’m inside.”
“I don’t know about that.” Remus gives the stairs a doubtful look. He actually agrees but damned if he’s going to admit to it. If he argues, Sirius might just be tempted to try the trick. “You might break your elderly arse upon landing.”
Sirius looks offended. “Oh, ye of little faith, watch me.”
Remus mentally congratulates himself.
It takes Sirius half an hour to charm the stairs. Remus, being the son of a magical engineer, is duly impressed with the speed and complexity of the spellwork. If only all this energy could be applied to something useful!
“Watch me!” Sirius says again. By the look on his face, he fully realises the stupidity of his idea but he left himself no room to back down. Remus clenches his fists, tempted to start biting nails.
Sirius gives him a meaningful look, something like Watch after my brother if I kill myself. Remus returns it: I won’t tell him how you died. Sirius puts his foot down on the top step, and the entire staircase flattens into a slide. Remus squeezes his eyes shut and turns away a second before a resounding crash shakes the whole flat.
****
Rep: What was it like for you – living with Sirius Black?
RL: Well… Just like living with any other person, I suppose. You cut the showers short, take turns cooking, all that. We blasted music together and watched games on the weekend.
Rep: Had you ever noticed anything strange about him?
RL: What, like human hearts in the freezer?
Rep: Ooh, where there any?
RL: …Not that I can recall.
Rep: But you must have noticed something strange about him, living in such close quarters! There must have been signs.
RL: I’m sorry, am I fucking with your story?
Rep: Oh, bother. This is hard. But you’ve had your differences, right?
RL: Sure. He liked Star Trek, and I liked Star Wars.
****
Remus returns home in the evening to find his four friends gathered at the table. They have two bottles of whisky, untouched, and six glasses. A black-and-white Muggle photograph is propped up against one.
Remus says, “Huh.” He walks over to the table and starts unloading his pockets – small foreign coins turning green, gray and brown with age; a handful of very boring seashells; a couple of volcanic stones; a bullet; and other bits of rubbish that he handles like treasure.
Peter pours whisky.
“Grandpa Forrester,” says Lily, raising her glass to the picture of a young man in the RAF uniform.
“Grandpa Forrester,” everybody echoes.
James says, “Someone needs to say something appropriate for the moment.”
Remus sits down, puts his legs up on an armrest of Sirius’s chair and pretends to be deaf and dumb. He runs his fingers over the seashells that his grandfather brought from China decades ago. When Remus was little, his mom would never let him play with those, awed by their foreign origin. But Grandpa used to say, Let him. They’re just seashells.
Sirius makes a solemn face and recites in a clear tone of someone who had to sit through one public speech lesson too many, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.” Everybody bows their heads except for Remus who has taken to staring at the red lampshade above the table. “Neither will mourning, nor crying, nor pain be anymore, for former things have passed away.”
Amen, Remus thinks, unsure if it’s appropriate. Nobody says it, but he sees Peter’s lips move.
Peter pours the next round. Grandpa Forrester gets saluted again.
“No, no, shut up.” Remus stands up almost too quickly. Sirius reaches out automatically to catch him, but there is no need. Remus walks to a record player and starts sorting through LPs. “He would not want all this – the Bible quotes and the amens and crying – in case anybody was planning.” He finally finds the record he’s looking for and pulls it out of its case. “He would want alcohol, some war stories, and maybe you two can shag afterwards to celebrate his life.” The last part is addressed to James and Lily.
“At home, please,” Sirius adds quickly.
“Moony,” says James solemnly. “Your grandpa can always count on me.” Lily rolls her eyes.
They all fall silent and, at that moment, Jim Morrison takes a breath. Be-fore you slip into unconsciousness…
“Shut up,” Remus says again, to no one in particular. “He loved this song, used to say the music was the best thing that happened in his old age.”
…another flashing chance at bliss, another kiss, another kiss…
“I say we move on to the war stories.” Sirius is half-lying on the table, long fingers playing with a few old coins from Singapore.
Remus picks up his glass and falls into an armchair in the corner. The whisky, downed on an empty stomach, is making his head spin, and he thinks the room is swaying with the music.
“When Grandpa retired from the Air Force,” he begins, “he moved to the country and got a job flying a crop duster. I think he just wanted to fly at lower-than-regulation altitude.”
“A man after my own heart,” says Sirius.
Remus closes his eyes and pictures the settings of the old story he heard dozens of times growing up. He sees it as a scene from the early days of colour cinema – a farm field, a light airplane, and a man in a bomber jacket next to it, only in his alcohol-infused imagination, the half-familiar face of a young man from the photos becomes the face of Sirius Black. And that makes sense: Sirius would love one of those flying machines.
“Sirius, shut your mouth,” says Lily, misinterpreting Remus’s silence. “Go on, Remus.”
“No, you comment, please.” He takes a sip from his glass and tries to gather his thoughts; it’s like catching tiny beetles with fingers the size of Hagrid’s. “Well, anyway… One day, during a routine check, a mechanic fucked up. My granddad got into that plane and took it over farm fields. It was going well until he tried to make a turn, and the plane just plunged into the ground.” Peter sucks in air through his teeth – he has always been scared of heights. Grandpa Forrester, Remus thinks, I hope you can see this. Your old story is getting a good reaction.
“It’s not like in the films,” he explains. “Airplanes don’t explode like that. They fall apart. The wings were full of pesticides, and Grandpa got drenched. Well, pesticides are poison, and not just to bugs.” He tries to imitate the theatrical pause that his granddad always placed there, but he is too drunk to judge the timing right.
“And then what happened?” James asks when he overstretches it.
“Oh.” Remus wakes up from the stupor in which he was imagining Sirius in an old movie, in watered-down colours, with his face overexposed and his smile blinding. “A farmer saw the crash, dragged my grandpa out of the wreckage and got them both into a shower. That’s what saved Grandpa Forrester’s life – washing off those pesticides right away. The first time he told me this story was after I had that cauldron of Clucking Potion spilled all over me on the last day of Year One, remember?”
“Ah, do I remember!” James says sweetly. “A whole day on the train with you clucking like a psychotic chicken.”
Sirius, who has been staring intently into his glass, raises his head. He is wearing a white shirt but no bomber jacket, which throws Remus off for a moment. A pale scar shows on his clavicle through an open collar where some creature – Which one was it? – bit him during class for some long-forgotten offense. Sirius delivers his observation, frowning, “That sounds poofy.”
Lily smacks his shoulder while Remus chokes on whisky. James, who shares the same unfortunate sense of humor, dissolves into a fit of mad cackling.
“Sirius, for fuck’s sake!” Peter groans.
Remus suffers an involuntary mental image and wants to throttle Sirius, but then he is laughing so hard his eyes water because this, this right here is exactly what Grandpa would have wanted: not to be taken too seriously, not to be sent off with pious speeches and long faces.
“He wasn’t some sad old man,” says James.
“No.” Remus wipes his eyes. The song is over, and the record just hisses quietly, turning. “No, he wasn’t.”
“Play it again,” says Sirius. “Play it for me, Sam.”
****
Rita can’t sleep. It’s no wonder, really: she lives in a room above the hospital, one of those that mediwitches use sometimes for naps. Every once in a while, somebody forgets she is staying there and tries to open the door, which can happen at any hour, day or night. As if that isn’t enough, Rita keeps finding some crawly things with too many legs in her room. The mirror is tiny. She has to use the staff shower and bathroom. Rita has never felt so dirty and disgusting in her entire life.
It does not help that the mediwitches keep telling her local stories, and even they can’t separate Muggle superstitions from fact because magic runs feral in Mexico. There are no laws that require every witch and wizard to receive proper education, and there are no scholarships for poor students. She hears about kids in remote areas that grow up with untamed magic in them. She hears about monsters being raised as house pets. She hears about half-human witches that turn into animals, steal children and eat the dead, leaving trunks of banana trees in the graves.
Rita does not touch bananas for days. She lies awake at night, smelling the damn things all over the room and hearing night birds cry outside. The mediwitches did mention that ghouls can turn into birds.
Like hell she is going to abandon this project.
Sometimes she goes out into town to buy some food and souvenirs. People stare at the pretty blonde, even point at her, and that makes her forget that she hasn’t washed her hair since the previous day and her clothes are soaked with sweat. She smiles coyly and tries on jewelry that matches her eyes.
Remus Lupin comes to her room late. Usually, his hair is wet and he smells fresh, which she appreciates.
“Are there a lot of magical animals to treat?” she asks one night.
He looks surprised. “Quite a few, actually, as of late. There is some large predator in the jungle, I think. When it’s quiet, I do research. Besides, it’s not just beasts: anything that’s not quite human comes to me.”
“Like werewolves?”
He winces a little. “It’s not as if one of those is going to walk around announcing what he is.” He changes the topic before she can ask more. “Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look so well.”
Rita is, again, thankful that he is half-animal: if a real man told her that, she would die. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she admits. “The mosquitoes in this place are savage. I have to renew repelling charms every day.”
He makes some vague noise and stares at the floor for a while. “Rita, let me ask you something…”
Rita giggles and twists a lock of her hair – out of habit. “I’m the reporter here.”
“Of course. How did you get here?”
Rita rolls her eyes so hard that for a second she is afraid to have dislocated something in her head. “Oh my God! I took a portkey to Mexico City, and from there I had to get on this awful, awful Muggle bus, and you can’t imagine…”
“No, no, I mean, how did you follow my trail all the way here? The Prophet could not have covered all the expenses for an intern.”
Rita is, all of a sudden, embarrassed for no reason. Remus is looking at her, waiting for an answer. “My family left me some money a few years ago,” she says.
His eyebrows shoot up. “You spent your inheritance to chase me around the world because you wanted to ask me if Sirius Black used to bathe in infants’ blood or something?”
Rita shrugs. “You lied to get into the Altiplano, and I don’t even know how you got into Hogwarts. You do what you have to, and so do I.”
The next night, he brings her a cat – a mangy-looking animal that appears to have been washed recently to make its fur more presentable, but it’s still very obviously a stray. At least it’s white and a female.
“People say that nightmares happen because the Devil is bothering you,” Remus explains, depositing the animal on Rita’s blanket. “Cats make him count hairs on their tails when he comes, and until he’s done, he can’t touch you. But when he is almost finished, the cat flicks its tail. The Devil loses count and has to start all over again.”
Rita sleeps like a baby that night, and the next morning she isn’t sure if she should be relieved or scared. She names the cat Bianca and decides it’s stuck with her for life.
****
“I am going to grow old here,” Sirius says one night when he and Remus are having a midnight snack of sandwiches in the kitchen.
“You are going to grow old here. You bought this flat, remember? And you love it, so you’re probably stuck with it.”
“Fuck you, Moony. That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
Remus shrugs. It’s four days before the full moon and he can’t sleep again. On nights like these he gets angry too easily and, because he can never tell whether it’s justified wrath or the insomnia wearing his nerves thin, he prefers to bite his tongue.
Sirius’s wireless is mumbling in the background. Remus feels like his eyes are full of sand. He closes them and starts singing with the music without realizing what he is doing, “Sing with me, it’s just for today, maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away…”
Sirius listens, his head tilted to one side in a canine manner.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says a familiar voice suddenly, interrupting the song. Remus freezes with a sandwich halfway to his mouth. “This is Peter Pettigrew, and you are listening to Wizarding London. I am sorry to interrupt the music, but I have just received the news of another Death Eater attack in the city. Everybody is strongly advised to stay inside and to check their protective wards. A Muggle-born family in Islington…”
“Christ!” Sirius drops his own sandwich. “In bloody Islington, Moony! They attacked in the middle of the city! This is exactly what I’ve been on about.”
Remus listens as Peter goes on about the attack and the victims, killed in their beds.
They thought they would graduate and be thrown into a war; instead, it’s impossible to fight in the war because it can never be found. Where do they go, where do they enlist? There is no official army to join, no office where volunteers are gathered. The signs of war are everywhere – a group of sullen Aurors glimpsed in an alley one early morning, smoke billowing from an Underground station, the damn green snake and skull floating in the sky at night – but the thing itself slips away. Sirius enlisted in Magical Law Enforcement, but so far, it has been nothing but training sessions. James chose a different route – the Magical Law School and an internship at the Ministry. They tried to ask Alastor Moody about joining some sort of resistance group because there are rumors of one, but he just growled at them.
Remus thinks of Grandpa Forrester in his RAF uniform, leaning out of an open cockpit. What would you think of me now? Grandpa Forrester just smiles. Would he think his grandson a coward who won’t stand up for his country’s freedom? Would he think his grandson a thick-headed idiot who imagines a war to be some sort of grand adventure?
“You have a point,” he tells Sirius.
“Damn right I do.”
Only there is nothing more to say, which is why Remus hates this endless argument. Talking about it does not change a thing: they are still not allowed to fight.
Aerosmith comes on again.
There must have been magic in the sandwiches because later that night, Remus almost sleeps. He actually falls asleep for about an hour before Sirius creeps into his bedroom and presses a palm to his mouth. Remus gasps and flails.
“Fuck, Pads,” he hisses when the palm is removed. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Sirius’s face is more alive in the semi-darkness than it has been for weeks. Emotions run through it, one morphing into another – excitement and worry and anger and bliss. Remus, who was honestly going to hit him, hesitates.
“Be quiet. Follow me, quickly. Leave the lights off.”
As he tiptoes out of the room, Remus notices that he is fully dressed. He pulls on the nearest set of clothes, grabs his wand and steps quietly into the hallway. Cold floorboards send a chill up his legs and to his lower spine, and it makes him shudder. Sirius is waiting at the top of the stairs leading to his own tiny bedroom. “Hurry up,” he mouths.
Remus joins him there and eyes the open window. It’s November, and nothing but moonlight illuminates the roof. A four-story drop separates them from the pavement below.
“Mind my tree,” Sirius whispers as he climbs out of the window. Remus follows and drops on his belly because that’s what Sirius is doing.
As soon as he reaches the end of the roof and looks down, he understands. Sirius points silently, unnecessarily, towards a house across a courtyard. There are four masked and hooded figures in front of it, two more in the back, another one on the roof, and those are just the ones that Remus can see; there might be others.
I thought only Muggles lived around here, he wants to say. This is so stupid – a Death Eater attack, the war practically in their backyard.
Remus slowly begins to shiver, a violent shaking that he cannot control. Sirius looks at him, almost annoyed, then peels off his own jacket and throws it over Remus’s shoulders. A sharp smell of leather and metal stings his nostrils. “Sirius,” he begins.
“I’ll take the four up front, you get the one on the roof and those in the back.” He raises his wand. “Ready?”
“No, not ready, you stupid fuck!” It’s not easy to yell and whisper at the same time, but Remus gives it his best. Sirius turns to him with a look of honest surprise. “Get them with what? What are you going to throw at them?”
“They don’t know we’re here. If we’re quick, we can stun—“
“There are seven of them, Padfoot! That we know of! And they are, they are – what? They are just going to stand there and wait for us to stun them one by one?”
Sirius narrows his eyes. They have forgotten the streets and are staring at each other, so close that Remus can smell Sirius’s toothpaste. “Listen, Moony, they will kill somebody. We have to stop them.”
Remus breathes in large, panicked gulps. The jacket’s zipper is scraping against his ear, and he still hasn’t stopped shaking. He can hear Sirius’s teeth clattering and it’s probably not from the cold.
“Call Aurors.”
“What? Moony, they’re going to kill somebody before I even get my arse down to the fireplace. We have to—“
Remus grabs his collar and shakes him as hard as he can manage from this position, with both of them flattened against the roof. He can no longer recall any words, so he just hopes that physical violence will conduct the message. Surprisingly, it does. Sirius swats his hand away and disappears into the bedroom window again. The sound of him crashing down the stairs is audible, even outside.
Down and across the courtyard, windows shatter. Fuck, Remus thinks, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, fuck, fuck, fuck! He tries to remember some spell that would be large enough and powerful enough and he casts the first one that comes to mind.
It’s not his most brilliant move, really. It’s not at all heroic and it’s definitely not going to save anybody. Remus casts a fireworks spell before he can think, causing a red-and-gold Chinese dragon to pour out of his wand and into the street below. It sparkles and glitters as it rolls past the house and past the Death Eaters, its booming laughter making the windows shake in surrounding buildings. The lights begin to come on all over the neighborhood. Remus bites his hand so hard he tastes blood. The dragon starts singing dirty limericks that James wrote in Year Four, before it rounds the corner and rolls on toward the Thames.
It was stupid, but hopefully it bought a few seconds. Then Aurors start appearing around the house, and Remus hasn’t seen any green lights from inside yet. He can hear Muggle sirens wailing a few blocks away.
Remus stands up just as Sirius climbs back out of the window. “What the bloody hell, Moony?” he says. “Was that our Dirty Dragon I just heard?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I panicked.”
Sirius wheezes and coughs and makes some other strange noises that resemble hysterical laughter. He grabs the front of Remus’s sweater and throws him against the wall, knocking the breath out of him. Remus looks in his face and thinks, Oh god. But Sirius either forgets what he was going to do or thinks better of it, and they just slump against each other and laugh until their stomachs hurt. Somewhere in the city, the Dragon goes on and on about Snivellus’s underpants because that topic never got old.
****
On the night of the new moon, Remus finds himself in a cemetery with a shovel. Somewhere in the distance, the ocean thunders against rocks. The insect choir in the jungle is almost as loud as night traffic in London, and the thought makes him freeze for a moment when it crosses his mind. It must be Rita’s presence that’s making him think of England again.
He straightens up, waist-deep in an open grave. There is a tiny, shy thought wandering in the back of his mind, something about being homesick. He just knows it’s going to be back with a vengeance soon.
“Remus,” a woman whines from a nearby cluster of wild banana trees. The night breeze plays with her skirt and her long hair, the shadows of giant leaves flutter on her face, making her look less solid. “I’m sorry, honey, but I’m just so hungry. My stomach’s going to collapse on itself if you don’t hurry up.”
“Right,” he says. He readjusts his grip on the shovel and starts digging again. “How is the tree coming along?”
“Done.” She kicks aside cut-off branches and drives her axe into a tree trunk lying on the ground. “There.”
“So why do you have to leave banana trees in the graves?”
It’s a game they play every new moon, and he sees her smile in recognition – a glimpse of sharp teeth in the weak starlight. He digs up graves, then tries to put everything back the way it was; in exchange, she tells him about feral magic that is still strong in Mexico.
“I’m not really sure. That’s what my mother taught me, and what her grandmother taught her, and so on. They said that if I don’t, the dead will come back and claw my belly out.”
“‘Give me back my heart’, that sort of thing?”
“I suppose.” Now that she is done, she fidgets. Her shape morphs into that of a giant bird, then of a cat, then of a woman again. “Thank you, sweetie, I know you don’t like doing this, and I know you feel bad when someone discovers what we’ve done. I won’t forget.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” More and more people have been placing protective charms inside the coffins to ward off ghouls. After he is gone, she will have to go back to stalking out cemeteries for days in advance, looking for unprotected graves and starving herself out of caution.
There are things you have to do for a friend, he knows. Like teach yourself an illegal spell or dig up a grave. He wonders what he would have done for Sirius if it weren’t James and Lily and Peter that got killed.
“So, this reporter,” she says. “How much do you tell her?”
“I leave out details. She wants to know about the war, so I talk about the war, about how we tried to fight Voldemort.”
“Ah. So you don’t tell her the love story?” She twirls under the trees. “Before you slip into unconsciousness…”
Remus’s blood runs cold. The woman feels him staring at her and stops. “How do you know any of that?”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to pry. I’m just so hungry right now. I can’t exactly hear what you’re thinking, but I pick up some things…” Her silhouette crumples and becomes that of a huge black dog.
“Stop that,” he says.
She becomes a woman again and sits down on the banana trunk, folding her hands on her knees like a good schoolgirl. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really hungry, pumpkin. Like in those zombie films you like – so hungry. Please hurry.”
****
Rep: Was there ever a special woman for Sirius Black?
RL: Well, he always said that Professor McGonagall… No-no-no, scratch that, don’t even look at me like that, I didn’t mean it like that. Bad joke. No, he didn’t have a girl.
Rep: Was it, perhaps, because he couldn’t keep them for long? Was he, you know, disloyal?
RL: Disloyalty is about the last thing I would ever suspect of him.
Rep: But he did betray his friends.
RL: Well, shows what I know.
Rep: Look, Remus, there is no juice in this story. There must have been something about him, something that you noticed…
RL: And would he have been able to pull it off if somebody had noticed?
Rep: So why do you think he did it?
RL: I haven’t the faintest idea.
****
Lily stretches out her legs and crosses her ankles, and Remus thinks, How did Prongs ever get so lucky?
“James is late,” she says. Then she turns to Peter, completely changing the subject. “You know, Pete, you are quite a star at St. Mungo’s. The night mediwitches love you, apparently, for your ‘quick wit’ and ‘sensual voice’. You have to make some autographs for me one of these days, so I can trade them for favours.”
Remus cackles. Peter mumbles, “Merlin” and thumps his forehead on the table just as Sirius returns from the bar with their beers.
“What’s that?” he says. “Wormtail is a porn star?” He drops his hand casually on Remus’s shoulder as he squeezes past him to his seat. Remus feels his fingers – slightly moist from something – touch the bare skin on his neck. He almost jumps. The fingers move along his spine, no more than a couple of inches down, and the next moment they are gone and Sirius flops into his seat.
“Piss off, Padfoot,” says Peter. “You know, Lils, they might give me a daytime slot in a couple of years if I do well. That would be grand.”
“Sometime you will have to explain the nicknames to me.”
Before Sirius can spit out whatever distracting line he had prepared, James arrives. And right then Remus understands that something is wrong because James is flushed, with his hair in greater disarray than usual, and he might be hyperventilating just a little bit.
“What?” Lily says, straightening up.
James sits down, steals Remus’s beer and drains half the glass. “I think my boss is a Death Eater,” he shares, quietly. “I was just dropping off some papers for him, and he had this bloke in his office…”
“And?” Sirius urges, leaning in. It’s hard to hear James in the noisy pub, and the five of them almost bump their heads as they draw closer together.
“I don’t know. They had a silencing charm on the office, but there was something in the way they talked, the way their faces were…” He waves his hands helplessly in the air, bumping Peter on the nose by accident. “Pads, am I jumping to conclusions? Moony?”
“All right,” Peter says. “Do we report it?”
“Report what, that I saw my boss, a Ministry barrister, talk to somebody in his office?”
“You have a point,” says Lily.
Remus exchanges a quick glance with Sirius, both of them thinking about the night on the roof and the Dirty Dragon. Sirius has a pleading look in his eyes. He knows, of course, that he should have called the Aurors before waking Remus up that night, and now he is desperate not to make the same mistake again, but oh, James is right.
I know, Remus tries to scream at him telepathically. Not your fault, and nobody died in the end, and I don’t think less of you.
“Lads,” James goes on, “Lily, I want to do something about this. There might be an underground resistance group, or there might not be, but the point is: we are not in it and no one would let us join.”
“Oh, James,” Lily whispers, and Remus can’t tell if she is scared for him, or proud of him, or thinks he is being childish.
“No-no-no,” Peter says. “I can see where this is going. Fuck no.”
“Fuck yes,” says Sirius.
“Thank you, Padfoot.” James reaches across the table to clasp Peter around the shoulder. “Pete, man, we have to.”
“No,” Peter whines.
“Yes. We have to investigate this thing ourselves, and if we find tangible proof, then we’ll go to Sirius’s boss. But if we can’t prove anything until they go and attack somebody, then we have to stop them.”
“I have a mom and five sisters and no dad, you fucking John Wayne wannabe.” Peter shakes off James’s hand. Sirius stares at him like he just sprouted a second head. “I am fat, James. I am fat, I can’t run, I’m scared of heights and I am shite at combat magic. I will get torn to shreds, and who will protect my family then?”
“Everybody has a family, Pete,” James says evenly. “I have parents, so does Lily, only hers are Muggle. Moony has a dad and Pads has a brother in a household of lunatics.”
Sirius thumps Remus on the shoulder and makes a vague gesture in front of his mouth. Remus fishes out his cigarettes and pulls two from the pack. James is too distracted to even notice or tell them to take their poison outside, like he usually does.
“Only there is a war going on,” James is saying, “and we’ve all been saying how we want to fight. Well, maybe this is it. Maybe this is how we get involved. I know one thing for sure: we are not going to hide like a bunch of mice.”
Remus gasps and chokes on smoke. Sirius looks worried, but James does not pick up the topic of mice again.
Peter says, “Great. This is just wonderful.”
“Moony?” James asks.
“Sure.”
It is a mutual unspoken agreement to get drunk that night. Peter, who has to go to work later, still drinks three beers, figuring that he can play songs sloshed. James ends up proposing to Lily; she laughs and refuses to take him seriously even though he keeps repeating it. The music in the pub grows louder and louder, so do conversations, and halfway through the evening, after Peter has left, somebody puts The Doors on.
Before you slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss…
Would you be proud of me now, Grandpa? And then, I don’t want to die a fucking virgin. No, scratch that; I don’t want to die, period.
“You know, Moony, this is a really weird song to be associating with your granddad,” says Sirius in his ear, leaning on his shoulder.
“Sod off,” says Remus. “He liked it.”
James and Lily are talking about something that Remus can’t hear over Jim Morrison’s singing and Sirius’s breathing in his ear. They are probably still going on about the drunken proposal.
“I want to tell you something,” says Sirius.
“What?” Remus tries to turn to him, but Sirius pushes his face away and leans closer.
“No, don’t look at me, look over there. It’s… uh… I…” He drops his head on Remus’s shoulder. “Bugger. Do you know what I want to say?”
Remus can feel Sirius’s face heating up. “Not necessarily,” he says. His own skin is beginning to burn, particularly on the back of his neck. The ear that Sirius is speaking into is probably scarlet, he thinks.
“Yes you do. Moony, I… Oh fuck, come on, Moony, you know what I’m trying to tell you.” Sirius kisses his ear then, practically slobbers all over it, too wet and horribly uncomfortable. James and Lily are still not looking at them.
“Yeah, all right, I know,” he says hurriedly. “Christ, Padfoot.”
Sirius pulls away an inch. Remus’s ear is wet now, making him ten times more aware of Sirius’s breathing on it.
“And?”
“Me too.”
“Moony, you are the absolute best sort of friend, you know that?”
“Ah,” he says. “Is that what they call it now?”
Back at home, the radio stays on all night. Peter does not talk once and only plays music – loud, angry songs at first, then sad and melancholic ones. He plays Hey Jude twice, shortly before the end of his broadcast, as if trying to pull himself out of the black mood. He follows it up with Since I’ve Been Loving You to indicate that he has failed.
Remus does not go into his own bedroom at all that night. He sleeps only a little, in snatches, and he dreams that his head is a tunnel and that The Beatles, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin all drag on and on through it, like trains through the London Underground.
Sirius tries to make a sheets-and-pillowcases angel in bed. He throws his arms wide open, he pulls Remus to his chest, turns up the volume on the wireless and howls with Zeppelin, arching his back to the guitar chords. The lights from outside paint his face in red and green and make him almost unbearably beautiful.
“Do you remember, mama, when I knocked upon your door? I said you had the nerve to tell me you didn’t want me no more…”
Remus wants to hear Crystal Ship again, but Peter won’t put it on. As he licks a trail along Sirius’s thigh, Remus prays to his made-up deity, Play it for me, Sam.
****
Remus still owns a book from the ‘70s, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories with a faint inscription in pencil inside the back cover: I really, really would rather not die, Sam.
****
On the second day of November, the Muggles make food and build altars and talk about their dead. Rita walks to town and watches them in fascination. She is amused at first, but when she returns to the hospital in the afternoon, Mercy Briones is setting up an altar in the lobby.
“What are you doing? It’s just a silly Muggle festival, isn’t it?”
The mediwitch looks at her like Rita is the one acting weird. “Oh, honey,” she says. “You are so British. It’s the Day of the Dead, and people have died in this hospital before. Everybody has their dead.”
“Yes,” Rita says. “But if they were still around, we would see their ghosts.”
“It’s not about that.”
People keep turning up with food and candles for the altar. A few of Rita’s friends bring home-baked bread, and she is left completely speechless because they are highly educated witches and this is a Muggle superstition.
“My mother died ten years ago,” Mercy says. “Hunters killed her. She never came back as a ghost, but that does not mean that I’ve forgotten her.”
Rita gasps. “Sweet Merlin, you have witch hunters here?”
But Mercy just shakes her head and lights the candles. Remus comes, too, with a bottle of Scotch and an LP by The Doors, which he leaves on the altar. He smiles at Rita – a kind of serene smile that makes her forget for a second that he is half-animal and see a young man that she might like to flirt with. She hopes it’s not an early onset of zoophilia, or anything.
She watches him set down his gifts and thinks of the story he told her, in which Peter Pettigrew does not make heroic speeches and Sirius Black seems like a completely normal person. Worst of all, there are no swapped babies, nobody is raised by the wolves and nobody lusts after his best mate’s girl. It is, in fact, a very ordinary story.
No, no, wait, Rita thinks. I can make it better.
****
Sirius can feel when the Azkaban inspection is about to start by how warm the prison suddenly becomes. There are still drafts and stone walls, and the never-ending cold from the sea below, but the grave chill of Dementors’ presence is gone. He feels like he could almost bask in December sun.
It will take about an hour for the Minister to circle the prison while Aurors stand guard. Sirius knows exactly what he wants to do with the time. He feels like a man standing in front of an enormous feast, barely knowing where to start because everything just looks too good.
He closes his eyes. In his imagination, he hears an LP whisper as it starts to turn. The quiet hiss is perfect, exactly like it used to sound a long time ago in a fifth-story flat in London.
Back in Black is the most beautiful thing that has gone through his head in months.
He goes through his old music collection from left to right, the way the records used to be stored in his old flat. He picks them up mentally and finds his favorite songs on the sleeves before he sets them to play. Then he waits through the wonderful pause for a song to start. He replays seven before hitting The Crystal Ship.
“Play it again, Sam,” someone says.
Sirius feels as if he touched a live wire. He sits up on his cot so fast his head spins, and he has to put his hand on the wall for a moment. Minister Bagnold is standing outside his cells, tapping a folded newspaper against her hip. Two Aurors Sirius doesn’t recognize lurk in the shadows behind her.
“What?”
“I just said that you don’t look so handsome, not anymore.”
“Ah.” Sirius’s head is still ringing with music. Sam, he thinks. Moony used to pray to Sam. Only he could make up a god and pick such an impossible name for him. “I thought I heard something else.”
She smirks at him. “You should read this story the Prophet published about you, Mister Black. It’s fascinating.” She offers the paper through the bars, and Sirius takes it before she can change her mind. “Enjoy,” she says, and moves on. The Aurors give him another careful look but walk away after her.
Sirius unfolds the paper, savoring the half-forgotten smell of fresh ink. He doesn’t care much about what the Prophet has to say about him, but he figures there must be something good in the paper – the crossword, if nothing else.
…Remus Lupin’s dark past that pushed him into this profession of saving animals…
Sirius stops and backtracks. The line is still there. He flips through the paper, hoping for a photograph, but there isn’t one, so he returns to the article. It’s written by someone named Rita Skeeter.
“Like somber voices of trumpets, the tragic story of four friends and one beautiful woman reached my ears…”
“Fuck me,” Sirius whispers.
The article takes up three pages. There is an old picture of him from Hogwarts, along with the one taken on the day of his capture. Sirius reads in horrified fascination about their first year out of school, when they were still in their late teens and Dumbledore did not want to take them into the Order; only in Rita Skeeter’s retelling, the story gains a whole new dimension. She writes things like “their friendship grew in new and unexpected ways, like cacti bloom in a desert”, spends a paragraph describing Sirius’s eyes and keeps making references to some mysterious tension between him and Remus. She compares things to a Mexican sunrise. She mentions the bloody cacti again. She goes on and on about someone’s broken heart. By the time Sirius realises what Rita is hinting at, he is halfway through the article.
He stops reading again. “You didn’t tell her,” he says to the empty hallway. “Of course you didn’t. No way in Hell.” He finishes the article and then sits quietly, digesting. “I’m in the middle of a bloody Mexican soap.”
Sirius hides the paper away. He ignores the sounds of the prison and lets the music flow through his head – only now it’s primarily The Doors, the Stones and Aerosmith. Everything that Remus loved. He wonders what else could have been written in the past five years. He thinks of Remus picking out new records in some store – in Mexico, of all places – and playing songs that Sirius has never heard before in a room by himself.
Mexico is so far, far away.
In the last few minutes before the Dementors are let back into the hallways, Sirius lies back on his cot and thinks hard about blooming cacti, sunrises over a desert, dust devils and mustachioed Mexicans downing tequila in sketchy bars. He sees Remus – the way he was in ’78 – smiling and saying, Don’t make fun of my god.
Watch over my Moony, Sam. Deliver him from evil and send him some good music.