Work Text:
You winced as Aberforth crashed through the door to his room. “Those DAMN wolves-” he growled, wiping his brow.
“What happened?” you asked, pulling your brush away from Ariana’s portrait. You had just finished the first layers of her underpainting. A rush of concern gathered in her eyes, causing the hair on your arms and neck to raise.
“Other night I saw them out there- prowling- wanting my bloody goats. But they can’t have them!” Aberforth slurred, his face red. You swallowed thickly.
“Have you had trouble with wolves before?”
“Many years ago… twelve years or so- there was one or two that always tried to get close enough.”
You wiped the excess paint from your brush onto a rag, looking between Aberforth and Ariana’s portrait.
“Well go on!” Aberforth snapped, “I’m spent.”
You jumped and nodded. “Right!” you replied quickly, ducking out of Aberforth’s way as you passed him. “Have a good night, Aber-”
He closed the door as soon as you stepped through.
You slipped through the dark bar, moving past the sharp table corners and to the exit with practiced familiarity. The lights were lit in the cabin. You walked up the path, smiling to yourself. As you got near you could smell butter and garlic in the air, the soft clatter of tableware rang in your ears as you approached the door.
Sirius had finally gained some weight, in large thanks to the vault’s worth of chocolate bars Remus had purchased from Honeydukes. When he saw you walking through the door a frown flickered over his face.
“What’d he do this time?” he asked, a wry smile on his lips as he placed a glass pitcher of water on the table.
“You two need to be more careful.” You called out, shrugging off your apron and setting down your paints. “He’s paranoid you’ll eat his goats.”
If Remus knew you could see him in the kitchen, he probably would not have smiled as triumphantly as he allowed himself to.
“It’s the little joys in life.” Sirius hummed, grinning back at Remus.
Remus gestured for you to sit at the table as he brought over the last of your summer vegetables, baked with salted butter and fresh thyme, warm bread, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. He kissed the top of your head as he took a seat beside you, and then immediately slapped Sirius’ wrist as Sirius tried to pick a particularly good looking carrot from the dish with his fingers.
“A fork, Padfoot, please.”
“Incredible.” Sirius said, leaning back into his chair. “We’ve been playing house all summer and I still haven’t learned my manners.”
“So,” you chuckled, grabbing a piece of bread, “Where are you two trying next?”
“Alfannyah.” Remus spoke through a large bite of food.
“Remus!” Sirius exclaimed, mocking offense. “Chew your food before you speak, my boy!”
“Excuse me-” Remus cleared his throat, glancing darkly at Sirius, “Albania. Everything we’ve been able to gather points to a forest there. Muggles think it’s haunted, wizards have avoided it for a coincidental amount of time…”
“If we can’t find Peter- a bloke who didn’t even know how to stop a broom at seventeen years of age- before Peter can sort out where Voldemort is then we lost long ago.” Sirius joked, though his voice was bitter.
You reached over the table and squeezed Sirius’ hand.
“You’ve gotten used to apparating here?” you asked, pouring yourself some water.
“We’ve practiced over and over.” Remus reassured, Sirius nodded.
You looked over at the moon chart you’d drawn out and pinned to the wall. “Okay. You’ll have three weeks… And in the meantime I’ll continue to get Grimmauld Place sorted. I managed to get the front door open, though your old house elf keeps trying to barricade the entrance. And when I crawled inside a painting started to scream at me.”
“Please,” Sirius groaned, “I’d all but forgotten about that.”
“Oh yes, your dear mother.” Remus recalled, rolling his eyes as he took a large bite of bread.
“If you can’t get that painting unstuck from the wall, no one can.” Sirius moaned, “I don’t care if we have to blast the wall down. She’s got to go.”
Your interest was piqued. “I’ll do my best.” You said, eyebrows raised. There was a long pause in conversation as the three of you enjoyed your supper.
“We’ve really got a shot at this.” Remus said, sounding confident but also a little surprised.
Sirius nodded eagerly. “Thanks to you.” he said, kicking you under the table.
You shook your head dismissively.
“Yes-” Remus and Sirius both said fiercely in unison.
“I’m halfway to whole.” Sirius said, his voice warm and uneven. “Because of you.”
“And I’m…” Remus started, and paused. He shook his head. You tilted your head, looking at him attentively. Remus met your gaze, his eyes brightened by the golden light of the table candles. Uncertain expressions flickered over his face before he sighed in surrender, and smiled at you in complete and total adoration.
-X-
When you were first told that you were magic, the world opened up before you, brightly, blinding and overwhelming, an abyss of limitless potential. You were relieved that you hadn’t been wrong, that your eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on you when your childhood drawings came to life.
You were grateful that you had already begun making art and used to staring at a blank canvas, used to looking at nothingness and only feeling excitement and curiosity over what could be. That sensibility that could only come from understanding how art was made. To create shapes that you willed emotion into, all in the hopes to communicate, to tell a story that would capture hearts. Before you knew magic you were an artist. A maker. You, unlike most, looked into nothingness and were not intimidated.
You had learned how to stay vulnerable, how to make changes and grow, all for your craft’s sake. You met your best and worst qualities every time you put pen to paper, brush to linen.
Not only did you know how to welcome newness, you knew how to build much from it.
And that was why you were holding down carrow spiders in your kitchen, quickly and cleanly slicing through them with a copper knife. You were getting faster at this, better at preserving all of the ichor you could press out of their abdomen.
You put the last two carrow spiders back in their terrarium, boiled your glass jars with water that bathed in last month's full moon, and mixed the carrow ichor with vinegar and myrrh, sealing the jar tightly so it could pickle.
That’s why you knew just how much Mercury and sulfur to mix with aloevera and cow's milk. how to combine them, grate it all down with mortar and pestle until it turned black.
You were warned it was difficult and expensive to make. You were told any mistake rendered the Wolfsbane ineffective, even dangerous. But why would that have stopped you? You, who had crushed earth with linseed since you could hold a brush? You, who had lain eyes on the most complex paintings, and layer by layer, achieved their likeness?
If it was ineffective, then you and Remus were where you had been if you hadn’t tried, and that was already manageable. How discouraging could making wolfsbane be, when the prize was the health and safety of the person you loved? No level of difficulty would deter you. It was a small thing when compared to seeing Remus healthy. Compared to a new scar, or bruise, being exceptional and odd. Difficulty versus your love was no metric at all.
The first time you mixed a skin tone you had assumed you would forever understand how to replicate the result. But that was untrue. Every person had their uniqueness, an undertone, different chroma under different light. Some colors had to be tinted with paint made from crushed bones while others had to be flushed with red pigment made of coastal rocks from the Italian south.
To others, this would seem unsolvable. To you, it was a step that you had taken hundreds of times and intended to take a hundred times more.
You learned with time which paints were naturally transparent, which were opaque, and how to cause them to change into the other. You learned how to brighten, how to trick the eye to see depth, see light, You didn't falter when stepping back from a canvas, and notice that you had gone wrong, over brightened, over complicated. You pushed on. You added layers, you wiped layers away, you spoke to your hands, filled with skill, until it would all bend to your will, and fall into place.
You had been so surprised to see how such thinking could be applied to potion making. Every time you carefully harvested Aconite from your garden it had its own character. Every forage for giant moonwort came with its own challenges.
“My god-“ People would gasp, looking at the paintings you had made, “I can hardly draw at all, you have so much talent!”
And you would thank them and smile, because you knew that the only thing more fickle than magic was talent itself. They hadn’t seen the sketches you erased, the master copies you had fixated upon, the paintings you abandoned. They hadn’t seen the time taken from others, as you focused inwardly, and heard laughing from other rooms. They haven’t seen the toil, felt the sore knuckles, experienced eyes bleary and unfocused from staring at a fixed point for too long. For layers and layers, as you found your way and went on.
Talent would not have made you a painter, brought you to Hogwarts twice over, or made a life for yourself. Your skill did. And that was partly why, even though you were not Damocles Belby, or Severus Snape, Remus was experiencing for the first time in his adult life what it felt like to be well rested. What it felt like to not wake up, muscles torn and blood bruised, to fresh, contaminated scars. It was why, for the first time, he began to think of the month ahead, then the year, and then the decade.