Archive of Our Own

SIRIUS

i. EARLY JUNE, 1995, SPAIN

When Sirius was born, or so the story goes, Walburga had refused to let him out of her sight for seven months.

It wasn’t a lack of parental attention that did him in. That conclusion had puzzled the mind healer, back in the early days of his imprisonment. She had, despite his unwillingness to talk, despite her presence being a court-sanctioned formality, approached her assignment with a borderline desperate dedication. She had shown up, once, with a file full of photos: Walburga, resplendent, the young pureblood bride, the mother with one boy at her hip, another at her hand. Walburga, crouching in a family photo to put her face alongside Sirius’s, while Orion stood proudly behind, his private smile reflected on Regulus’s face, leaned up against his father’s shoulder. Walburga, taking Sirius out for a waltz in the midst of a ball, never mind that at thirteen he was still a full head shorter than her. Their twirling through the picture can’t compare to how the world had spun with the glass of wine Sirius had stolen from Bella sloshing in his stomach, his mother breathily whispering gossip hot in his ears.

The healer might have kept pressing, might have investigated until she saw through the veneer and excavated the sensational trauma that had transfigured Sirius Cygnus Black III  from cherished child to the infamous mass murderer deserving of the Dark Lord’s highest honor, if not for one last image. One that wasn’t captured by any camera; one that, though it haunts Sirius’s dreams, is so rigidly clear within the haze of his despair he cannot be certain if he saw it or was told, later. Things tend to blur like that when you are trapped in a prison that calls forth memories and nightmares indiscriminately.

The scene: Walburga, stalking through the halls of Azkaban with the same confidence that she might take on Lady Rosier’s annual Easter luncheon.

“There is nothing wrong with my son,” she announces to the healer in unmistakable dismissal. “And he won’t be requiring your services any longer. And if there is so much as a whisper of the theories you have been concocting ending up in print, the legal retribution brought down on you with the full force of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black will be the least of your concerns.”

After that, there'd been no more visits from the healer, though it had been years before Sirius noticed.

He didn't notice much, in Azkaban; everything came together like ingredients brewing down to the oily sheen of an untraceable poison. Perhaps somewhere in the administrative archives kept in the base of Azkaban there is a record of how many times his mother had visited before spite or grief or the last surge of the dragon pox epidemic left her to rot alone in the lonely townhouse in London. Whatever the count, it would be off, too many or too few compared to Sirius’s memories, such that they are.

“Oh, Sirius,” she’d once said, pitying, patronizing, as he sat in his cell and shivered, the fire of his anguish not yet burned down to coal. “Did you really think you could just walk away, when Black is in your blood?”

He hadn’t cried when they told him she was gone. Hadn’t felt much of anything. No sorrow left to spare when the dementors had taken most everything good. No relief, when his prison was much more solid than a name, in the end.

But Sirius is reminded of her now as he sees Narcissa’s face. It’s not the physical features—though even with her pin-straight, silvery blond hair, she has aged into the eyes, the bones; a family resemblance is unavoidable when you’re descended from a legacy of incest that makes Narcissa Sirius’s first and third cousin both. But it’s really the way she tilts her head at his approach, the ridiculously floppy hat doing nothing to conceal that private, knowing smile, like she’s been waiting for him. Like he hadn’t spent the last three days scoping out all the villas along the coastline trying to locate the private beach where one of the last remaining members of his family was unexpectedly and abruptly rumored to be on a solitary retreat.

“Cousin,” she says mildly, not bothering to lift herself up off the sunchair she is draped across, swathed in something gauzy and white to keep the light from ever actually reaching her pale skin. Heaven forbid it ever turn: someone might accuse her of doing labor.

“Cissy,” he replies.

She wrinkles her nose, either at the name or the gruffness of his voice. He doesn’t take his eyes off her for a moment, of course. She’d never been the strongest of the three Black sisters, but she was the fastest and the cleverest and the most vicious when incensed, and she wouldn’t need but a moment’s distraction to bring him a world of pain.

“I dare say you are as much in need of a holiday as I am,” she says. “Haven’t had enough sun, recently?”

“More than your sister.”

If he were a dog, now, he would be able to hear the beating of her heart or smell if she’s at all distressed. People are… more difficult to read than he remembers, and Narcissa’s been playing politics with fucking Lucius Malfoy for the last thirteen years while Sirius has been off being spiritually disemboweled by dementors. If she believes what the Ministry spread about him, or if she sees him as a madman who escaped prison on a mission of vengeance—the truth, ironically—then there’s a chance that behind her put-upon sigh she might be afraid, and that might be enough to press some answers out of her before she manages to call the Spanish aurors down on him… 

“Is that how you want this conversation to go, cousin?” she asks. “You track me down, disrupt my peace and quiet, just to throw taunts over how you abandoned my sister to captivity?”

…or she might just demonstrate how the last thirteen years have shaped her into the mother of a teenager. The kid had seemed less like a Black than a poor caricature of his pretentious flobberworm of a father when Sirius had spotted him in Hogsmeade, but in the greenhouse, he’d wielded magic with all the reckless entitlement Sirius has known in his parents, his aunts and cousins, uncles and brother, and, yes, himself. If that prejudiced, self-centered, spiteful brat clinging to Snape like a lovesick limpet has half the will of a Black, Narcissa has spent more than a decade mastering a mother’s condescension, while Sirius is still remembering when to speak out loud.

—Careful, Sirius. Wouldn’t want to go muddying the waters by starting a fight.

“I’m not here to taunt you,” he says. “You just happened to be here, one of the few British witches in the entire country, at the moment, and I don’t believe in coincidence.” Not when people like her are involved.

“What,” she drawls, with obvious delight, “you think it’s fate?”

“I think,” he says, ignoring her patronization, “that I am looking for an old friend, one who would rather stay dead, and I have followed him to this town where my cousin just so happens to be taking a discreet holiday—”

“A last-minute diversion.” Her smile widens as she cuts him off, just daring him to interrupt her in return. “I’ll be back to work in Paris in the morning, but one does not just ignore the opportunity to see family again, after so many years. Do they, Sirius?”

For whatever reason, after thousands of years of social evolution, humans now regularly bare their teeth, and it's commonly accepted not as a threat but a signal of positivity—but sometimes it's a threat, too. Sirius hadn’t noticed until he’d spent about a quarter of his life with the mind of a dog and slowly adapted to the converse instincts, but smiling is outright bizarre, as far as body language goes. Of course, it might occasionally be positive among animals as well, the same way Narcissa’s glistening grin is positive: the unsheathing of the weapons that will make short work of fresh meat.

The wand the Weasley kid gave him vibrates in his pocket—it’s as thirsty for vengeance as Sirius is, and a bit less focused in its scope. Whatever sort of person the broom-bent bean sprout of a kid he remembers Charlie Weasley as had grown up to be, his old wand is just itching for a fight.

Not yet. Not her. You’re here for Peter.

“Just tell me if you’ve seen him, Cissy?”

“I would have to know who you’re looking for. And why.” She eyes him skeptically. “The Minister was exceptionally vague in determining why you were at Hogwarts, if not for the Potter brat. Rumor has it, you were looking for an old friend there, too, and you nearly blew up that mudblood Snape while you were at it.”

‘That mudblood Snape,’ she says, carelessly, like her husband hasn’t been shagging the git since before they were married—or so everyone had always assumed. Either way, she’s fishing. Trying to draw him out with the slur, laying bait with someone she knows he despises. Meaning she either hasn’t seen Peter, doesn’t know he’s alive, or she has and does and is playing Sirius for the fool.

Meaning his shit luck continues. Well, it had been worth a try.

“Too bad for you I didn’t succeed,” he says, beginning to step back. Now for the real test: the retreat. He hasn’t seen her wand yet, but he wouldn’t put it past her to curse his back the moment he turns. And while there’s a chance she might not tell the aurors if he shifts—they are family, after all—he isn’t prepared to risk that gamble.

“Yes,” she says, sitting up at last and narrowing her eyes until he stops moving. “You’ve backed me into a terribly awkward position, you see. Somehow, you’ve managed to create the possibility that I might actually owe Severus Snape my son’s life.” 

The chill from her voice races down Sirius’s spine, shocking in the Spanish heat. There it is. The proof that his caution is more than paranoia.

“You do know I loathe the thought of that mudblood having anything to hang over my head,” she goes on. “Or Draco’s. But if you intend to pursue him…”

…then stopping Sirius now would be a quick way to shake the debt. Moreover, swift revenge for daring to endanger her property. Sirius knows all too well the type of mother she has grown to be.

“I have more important things to deal with than Snape,” he says, trying to mimic her haughty scorn, trying to pretend the sweat tracing down his neck is solely from the sun. “And I have no reason at all to—”

He hesitates, thinking as fast as he can. He was never any good at choosing his words carefully, and that was before, when he was in practice with the whole talking to people thing. “—endanger your kid,” he settles on. “And you know I’m not the type to go after children. Let alone family.”

'Family' is quite a stretch for how he is willing to consider the spawn of Lucius Malfoy, even if Cissy is half of what made him. And she, of all people, knows that family is less an honor than a threat, for Sirius Black. Still, he’s gratified to see her lips purse, her predatory glare shift back to a distance. Judging, perhaps, between the limited information the ministry’s cover-up had provided, the report that her kid was well—he’d been fine when Sirius left them, unless you count the brain damage required to voluntarily put himself within spitting distance of Snape—and her memories of a boy who had refused on principle to practice curses on his brother, had taunted Bella to keep her violent temper on him, had thrown himself before his parents’ wrath to keep Regulus safe… not that Regulus had responded with anything less than scorn, in the end. Narcissa knows, probably more than anyone else left, that his life is a nearly comic fable of how closely love and hate can be entwined in a family like theirs.

“What does it say,” she finally asks, “that you only finally recognize the bonds of blood now, when it’s convenient? What am I supposed to make of that, Si?”

He doesn’t miss the old endearment, but he’s not sure what it means. “That I have no score to settle with you. That your son is a kid, that Snape isn’t worth my time. Neither is your husband, for the moment.”

She inclines her head, and slowly relaxes, adjusting the drape of the white cloth as though that’s all this moment is: an idle shift to maximize her comfortable afternoon of lazing without care.

“Your old toy Remus Lupin was also in the greenhouse that night,” she says idly. “And he quit his position to chase his own vengeance across the continent. With a hunting dog, of all things. It would be a pity if the beast were to catch his quarry’s scent.”

Fishing, again? Or… a warning? One received, even if not as intended: people are watching.

If she’s gotten this close on her own, the aurors can’t be far behind.

Remus—

He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.

But what if he—

Don’t even suggest it. He always was the best of us, remember? We won’t make the same mistake twice.

Narcissa peers up at him. In this blinding sunlight, with her white clothes and her fair features and pale eyes, she looks almost like a ghost.

“He always liked dogs,” Sirius replies, hoping it doesn’t give anything away.

She harrumphs as she settles back onto the wicker sun lounge, angling herself like a pointillist’s painting, brim of her hat blocking most of her face from view as she reaches down to pluck a shimmering glass of sangria from her other side. As she drinks, Sirius does not linger, but backs up to where the villa’s manicured lawn crests onto the beach. When he’s over the swell, he’ll have some cover to turn and run. It’ll be a dash for the gate he left ajar; there’s an alley just beyond it where he will apparate, and—

“If he’s not of interest, perhaps… Ludo Bagman was last seen in Albania after he disappeared from Turkey,” Narcissa says, just as his left foot hits the grass. “I’ve always wondered what dark things people chase in the forests there. Or maybe it’s just a distant place to hide? I wouldn’t know.”

ii. LATE JUNE, 1995, NORTHERN FRANCE

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black was once the most far-reaching of any of the old blood of Great Britain. Surely even now, with some effort, enough hours spent in archives checking marriage and birth announcements and immigration records and the like, one could trace the blood out to the farthest ends of the earth. When Sirius was a child, his grandfather told him about the branches that had married into the Russian aristocracy and then spread East and South, the explorers who had colonized Africa and the Americas and slowly diffused across those distant shores, the religious few who had taken positions of piety in Italy and left more bastards than legitimate kin but a trail of blood nonetheless. So diffused, perhaps the main house’s penchant for incest played right into their twisting of logic: if anyone and their mother could claim to be a Black, how could any one branch claim to be the true core of the family, if not by ensuring its members were Blacks several times over?

And look where that pathological grasping at power brought them. Sirius Black, the only viable heir, sits on the floor of a crumbling manor tucked away within a defunct vineyard in northern France, hedging his bets on his pursuers not coming back here a third time, especially when Remus Lupin has made clear his intention to stake it out. The aurors would prefer someone else to find him, after all, for his body to be dropped on their doorstep and for the Black name to fade into obscurity and for the muggleborns who share it coincidentally to give it new meaning in some distant future.

Not yet. Sirius has wanted little more than to be free of the name since he was seven years old, but not yet. Not until Peter is dead.

“Captured,” Remus says, after a long spell of silence.

“That first,” Sirius allows.

“You promised Harry you would see him brought to justice.”

“And if there is any justice in the world, I’ll see him kissed.”

Remus hums. Sirius thinks that tone is agreement, but that’s another sense deadened after too long languishing in Azkaban. There, all he had heard was the wind and the sea, the drumming of his own heart, and the occasional wails as someone below had a lucid enough moment to feel agony. The first time he heard music again, it made his heart race with such confusion he’d sicked up the meal he’d managed to scrounge. He remembers nights in Gryffindor tower, James’ record player and Peter’s collection, muggle things Mr Pettigrew had left behind, but the only reason there is enough left to remember is because they are tainted now, stained with James’ vacant expression in death and Peter’s darting eyes as he calculated the fastest means to the bloodiest end.

“Have you written him, in the last day or two?”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

Sirius eyes Remus, lowering the chipped China plate holding some sort of baked good Remus had found in town down to his knee. “Writing him every day would probably annoy him,” he says, the only thought that’s held him back so far. “He’s a teenager. James—” He still chokes on the name after thirteen years. “—only bothered with his letters if it’d been at least a month, remember?”

Amazing, that he can remember that. He’s not sure when it came back to him.

“Well, Harry is not James,” Remus says. “And considering Albus wrote to say he’s run away from home, you might be just the person he should hear from.”

It’s still bloody weird to hear Remus call the headmaster ‘Albus’. Even when they were in the Order, none of them ever broke the habit of calling him ‘Professor’. Stranger, though, to imagine Harry running away from home—but Sirius still pictures Harry at Godric’s Hollow, and that house hasn’t been anyone’s home for thirteen years.

“He's run away?” Sirius demands. “Why?”

Following in his Godfather’s footsteps, you think?

“Why do you think?” Remus shakes his head. “You remember—that man, Lily’s brother-in-law, the one James got in a pissing contest with at the wedding? I had the pleasure of meeting him again last summer.”

He pauses, as if to let Sirius remember—but this time he doesn’t. The silence of absence is unsettling, but what he does remember about the wedding, seeing James so happy, before everything went to shit, has been so drained of substance it’s like it happened to someone else.

It’s alright—

But it’s not . You don’t just forget something that important. I was there, damn it—

You didn’t forget it, it was taken from you. Stop moping and pay attention.

“Albus,” Remus finally goes on, “asked me to pick Harry up, take him to Diagon Alley, maybe answer some questions about James and Lily. He didn’t tell me Harry wasn’t looking forward to it. He didn’t tell me he was sending me because Harry didn’t trust him, so he hoped Harry would be more open to someone who didn’t work for him. I…” He scratches his head. “I admit, I made a bit of a fool of myself, thinking he was just shy. Or unsettled by all the magic—you know how some muggles get, and Albus had, at least, warned me that he’d only just been told about Hogwarts, magic—any of it.”

“He… hadn’t known?” Sirius turns that thought over in his mind. He might not remember Lily’s muggle relatives, but the picture Remus is painting is a nasty one. Magic had been a part of his life from the minute Sirius was born—and Harry’s, too, up until Hagrid pulled Harry from Sirius’s hands and Sirius and took off after Peter.

"It's difficult to say. He's smart. Terribly clever—”

“Of course he is.”

“—Maybe not as academic as Lily or as, uh, tutored as James—he has more sense than any of us did at that age. I'd find it hard to believe if he didn't notice something… But he'd not been told about magic. Certainly not that there's a whole world of us out here." He pauses. "Albus said…"

What?

Remus shakes his head, sighs. "Well, he was sending me because I knew James and Lily. Harry had never been told anything about them. Anything real—stop that."

It takes Sirius a moment to realize he's pressed his thumb into one of the jagged edges of the china plate, and now the finely painted blue petals and leaves have started to wither away from him. Remus has already said, five times if not five hundred, that Sirius hasn't had a chance to grow up from being twenty-two, but accidental, temperamental magic like this makes his gut turn. He snatches up the pastry and shoves it into his mouth, chewing at an intentionally arhythmic beat to the drumming of his heart as he tosses the plate aside. He thinks of his mother. He thinks of Bella, and Uncle Cygnus. The Black blood ran wild in them. Regulus never had it, which to Mother was a fault. But Sirius, as far as he ran, as tightly as he learned to control it, shape it to his will, until he could transfigure and charm with such attention to minutiae that even when he'd managed to royally get under the brim of Professor McGonagall's hat she could not help but admire his work— he’d never really been free of it. Mother, at least, had never seen value in developing skill and technique when cruelty and fiery rage had carried her so far, but because Sirius did, when he lost control the magic at his fingertips was that much more devastating. He'd redirected it towards the war, but if he hadn't had James at his back, covering and reining him into control, his trip to Azkaban might have come much sooner, and might have followed a crime he had actually committed.

And that had been before. Along with everything else they'd devoured, it seems the dementors took with them the greater portion of his control. If not them, then thirteen years in isolation, too weak to even think about trying to engage his own magic, had done it. And now, Remus is here, acting more like a chaperone than a fellow vengeance-seeker.

Can you blame him? Someone’s got to look out for you.

That was always your job.

But I’m not there.  

“—Sirius?”

He looks up and finds Remus staring at him, brows raised but only as a poor mask for his concern, and it takes Sirius a moment to realize he’s stopped chewing but forgotten to swallow. He does, trying not to wince at the feel of it—too much, only partially chewed, like a rock being forced down his gullet. “So, where’d he go, then?” he asks. “His friend’s, ah, Hermione’s place? Neville’s? Ron’s?” He’s only written Harry two letters, and only had one in return, carried with Remus when he caught up to Sirius in Spain, but he’s at least committed the names of the people who had been with Harry in the Greenhouse. To memory But his face twists with a horrid thought: “Not with Cissy’s boy, surely…”

“Draco is with Severus in Germany, I told you,” Remus says. “So even if they were friends, which is… I doubt they are, but if they were, while I imagine Harry would be more than capable of figuring out how to get to Germany on his own, the aurors who are likely tailing them wouldn’t have to report Harry’s whereabouts, because Severus would contact Albus the moment he saw him.”

“Severus?” Sirius mimics.

“I’ve told you,” Remus repeats, a little more firmly. “He’s drawing the aurors’ attention. While they’re watching him—”

Sirius scoffs. “He’ll give them the slip, mark my words, long enough to get up to something nasty…”

“Sirius.”

Sirius looks up, and there it is again. That look, like—no, it’s not concern, this time. It’s exhaustion. He rubs his chest as it tightens again, the pastry sinking in his gut. “Look,” he says. “If he’s really so—so deep in Dumbledore’s pocket at you say, it still means he’s a traitor, he can’t be trusted—”

“You don’t think people can change?” But Remus is shaking his head before he even finishes saying it. “I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“Of course people can change,” Sirius argues. “But there’s some things—like swearing yourself to the bloody Dark Lord—that are a—”

“Like being born a Black?” Remus asks. “Like being a werewolf?”

See? He’s right. People can change. He’s finally started to stand up for himself.

Sirius shuts his mouth so hard that the clack of his teeth—still sore from the regrowth potion Remus brought for him—jars his whole skull. Maybe Sirius wasn’t the one to turn traitor, but the only reason they’d chosen Peter was that Remus would never have suspected James would pick Peter over Sirius, and it was Remus they thought they couldn’t trust. Remus, who had less cunning than a golden retriever, who’d finally started to branch out, to connect with people dealing with the same things that he was—people who were werewolves, and the Dark Lord started to court the cause of clemency right before they determined there was a leak…

“I’m sorry,” Remus says, abruptly. “That was… a false equivalency. I shouldn’t have.”

But Sirius looks back to meet his eyes. “No, you’re not,” he says, and he finally stands.

It’s too much, all of this. Too much. He can’t—he can’t bear it—

But then he can. It's as easy as falling. Even if anyone had known Sirius was an animagus—even if Remus had told them, when they’d locked him up—no one would have ever believed Sirius would’ve been capable of the transformation under such circumstances, without a wand, his soul being sucked away. But the harder part was always waking from a fitful sleep and realizing that in some nightmare he had changed back. He would rather be a dog, where things are uncomplicated, his emotions simplified by the limited stages of processing, but in his dreams, not being able to speak, to apologize, to beg and accuse and scream in violent rage was apparently reason enough to change back.

Not so in the waking world.

I wasn’t always joking when I said you should stay that way.

Wasn’t?

Now, you have things to do. Harry to protect. You promised me. 

He does. But Harry’s not here—who knows where Harry is, run away from home, and what is Sirius doing to protect him? But he—he has to find Peter. Then… Then he will be exonerated. Then he will be free. Then he will be the one to throw open his doors and give Harry safe harbor, the way James and his family once did for him.

But now, he shakes his way into his skin, stray fur floating down in the air around him, and sinks—like falling—into himself. Into Padfoot. He doesn’t have to even think about breathing.

Remus smells like cinnamon, dusted on his robes from the pastries, and yeast from the bakery he had retrieved them from. He smells like stale sweat, the burden of a man whose body runs hot, with not enough money for clothes to warrant washing or scouring them as often as he might. He smells like he stood near someone smoking a muggle cigarette earlier, and too many traces of unfamiliar humans to count, and like petrol fumes, and like urine—he'd come through Paris, he'd said. And he smells like the musk and black pepper of disappointment, and the acid of anxiousness. His breath shakes as he sighs, and he slumps as Padfoot sniffs the room once more, just to be sure, then treads over to the fire and flops back down, dropping his head onto his paws, relishing in the heat. The fur of his tail is still singed from the first night Remus had lit the fire—it hadn’t even occurred to Sirius to make one, while he was pursuing Wormtail on his own.

Of course it hadn’t. Remus is the one who takes care of him, now. Thinks of things like that.

“Sirius,” Remus says from across the room, followed by something long and low and mournful. After a few minutes of this, Remus sighs and stands up, going into the next room, and then the next—checking the windows. He comes back to stand at the doorway, and then the soft steps on the stone approach Padfoot. He leans down, and scratches Padfoot just behind the ear—oh, Christ, he’d forgotten what a feeling that is—he leans in, but it’s only a moment.

Remus says something else, and Sirius forces himself to listen.

“Tomorrow,” Remus says. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, Padfoot understands: not now. Tomorrow, Sirius understands: never. Remus will lose his nerve, he will lose his anger. He thumps his tail against the floor a few times, listens to Remus walk away, and gazes into the coals, waiting for sleep.

iii. MID-JULY, 1995, NORTHERN FRANCE

Sirius comes in, shaking his head, trying to get rid of the wet around his face, and Remus is on him in a heartbeat. 

“Did they get anything on you?”

“No, no,” he says. “I’ve still got it—”

“You’re sure? Turn around.”

He’s got his wand out, waving through a series of detection charms. Sirius sighs, and does a twirl, stopping at the end to curtsey, which Remus ignores, the git. “It’s fine,” he says, batting aside one of Remus’s charms with the slightest wave of his hand: Remus is clearly flustered, and his charms were always shit when he felt the pressure. It would be comforting to see, since Remus has been obnoxiously in control of himself—even when confronted with Peter, it had only taken a word from Snape —no, Harry—to stop himself. “Honestly, Moony; have some faith. I’ve been giving aurors the slip since I was eleven.”

“They aren’t sending patrolmen after you, Sirius,” Remus says. “These are hit wizards—did they confirm it was you?”

“They must have,” Sirius says. He tears off the long coat, intending to toss it aside, but remembers at the last moment that it’s one of only three that came out of Remus’s battered trunk, and goes to hang it by the fireplace, stretching once he’s free of the weight of it—who knew it could rain so hard in July? He crouches down to prod the dying coals back to life. “I don’t know how long they were following me. One of the muggles must have recognized me and called—I signaled when I noticed them, but….”

“They’ve put out a fresh notice out on you—look. I picked this up in Lyon. I… thought we could start a scrapbook.”

He sounds so miserable Sirius almost laughs. The paper Remus brought him is muggle, the headline reporting still on an incident in Bosnia, but there, off to the side, is that awful mugshot. His face, haunted and skull-like in the grainy black and white muggle photo someone had taken of the original wizarding image, stares back at him.

Remus’s French has always been awful, so Sirius scans the caption beneath it and hisses through his teeth. “I was spotted when I went through Toulouse last week, apparently,” he says. “Blast.”

“And now in Lille—they’ll know you’re here.”

“It’s practically Germany,” Sirius points out. “It plays into your story.”

Remus raises an eyebrow. “I suppose I should contact Severus, then,” he says slowly. “See if he can set up a diversion…”

Sirius shakes his head. It’s not only the thought of seeking help from Snape, though that is a heavy deterrent. It’s more Narcissa might not see through the lie, and if she thinks Sirius has changed his mind, there won’t be much sense in running. She’ll find him.

But Remus looks so strung-out on anxiety, Sirius isn’t about to get into another argument with him that will inevitably turn to fucking Snape anyway. It’s a waste of time, and… He’s not sure Remus could take any more excitement. He’d made sure to let Remus know what was going on when he’d had the briefest moment to risk casting, but from the looks of it, Remus had come straight back to the manor and then spent the whole afternoon pacing back and forth across this musty-smelling room.

Maybe Sirius shouldn’t have sent him a message at all. Remus had made him promise he would, though. And if Sirius hadn’t said anything, it would’ve put him out of his mind with worry when Sirius failed to make their usual meeting time.

Besides, seeing the paper, he must have already been on edge. Sirius glances at the paper again, and sighs, reaching up to prod at the damp ends of his hair, which had slipped free of the tie he'd tried to restrain it with this morning. Not even a full bottle of Sleek-Eazy would be enough to save it at this point, and Sleek-Eazy, as James so often bemoaned, only lasts about seven hours. “I suppose I should cut this,” he says. “Throw them off.”

“It might help,” Remus agrees. “Most everyone in Europe’s seen that picture. You were even on the BBC.”

Not exactly the fame we dreamed about. 

Sure, the four of them had talked big about being internationally recognizable someday, but it was just that: the four of them, together, an unreachable dream even before James was gone.

“But the picture is old,” Remus goes on. “Trim up your scruff a bit, cut your hair, keep it orderly—”

“I’ll look like an old man.”

You are an old man.  

Remus smiles, but it’s tired: they’re in their thirties now. Sirius’s godson is almost fifteen.

He holds back a moan, saying, “I suppose it’s better than looking like a neanderthal,” as he drops the paper. He looks around the room, pulling open drawers until he finds one filled with cutlery, and grabs two knives. Back in front of the fire, where he can see clearly, he draws the Weasley boy’s wand. It’s still like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, attempting transfiguration, but the stone must at least have some clay in it, because he manages to fashion functional—if inelegant—shears.

They both stare at them, though. It's hard not to. It’s like looking at a poorly-drawn caricature, the blades razor-sharp triangles, the finger loops lacking any sort of ergonomic consideration. But transfiguration like he was once capable of requires an end goal to impose upon the materials, an image composed of one’s memories and imagination, and for the life of him, after thirteen years in a stone cage, he can’t remember a single pair of shears to draw upon, to refine the basic concept.

I guess the dementors were really getting desperate if your memories of shears were considered happy.

But he can never remember, is it happy memories or the bad ones the dementors feed off? After a few years—days?—it’s hard to tell the difference. He can recall, in that vague, disconnected way, how quickly he realized that everything that he might have taken shelter in hurt like he was being torn apart. The wedding, before it had gone, was barbed by Peter’s drunken flush, by the faces of everyone who had died or turned since—and then those had faded, too, leaving behind nothing but the despair of wondering, in his more lucid moments, if he would still be himself when all the memories had faded. And now—with every minute Sirius spends with him the details of Remus are brought into sharper focus, but who knows how much the slowly brightening memories are being written over. Did Remus always have that scar? Wasn’t his hair longer—or was that just his, long before that awful photograph was ever taken?

Even James’ voice, he forgot. It’s only since Harry spoke to him—Harry, with James’s hair and Lily’s eyes—that there’s been more than a featureless whisper.

You know now. 

But does he? Had hearing Harry speak really shaken off the cobwebs, or just painted over what had faded away? Is any of what he is beginning to remember real, or is it all just a desperate attempt to build an identity from the bare bones facts he's pulled together from other people's words?

Remus crouches down to pick the shears up off the floor, slides his fingers into the loops, and scissors the blades open and shut a few times. "They'll do," he declares. "Though you might take off an ear if you're not careful."

"Can't have that."

"Mm. My healing never got any better. It'd be a nasty scar." He searches Sirius's face, then stands, without putting down the shears. "Maybe I'd better…"

Sirius puts up a token dispute, citing how Remus has the fashion sense of a medieval portrait, as Remus moves to fetch one of the more in-tact of the chairs from the dining room, transfiguring the wood so that it won't collapse under Sirius's weight, though when the spell fades there will be nothing but a pile of soft splinters left behind, if it follows the pattern of the first few chairs they tried. They stay here, in what was once the kitchen, not out of any homeliness or practicality save that the floor is solid stone and the chimney over the fireplace is more solid than the wooden beams in most of the walls. Without anyone visiting to maintain the house spells, the decay held back for generations is setting in at a rapid pace. Like Sirius, the magic of this place has waned, slipped away with all the whimsy and charm a house as this was surely once full of. Sirius can only imagine the state of Grimmauld Place, let alone Grandfather's estate in the Lake District.

This manor, at least, was never a permanent residence for anyone in the family. If anyone had ever been employed for upkeep, perhaps their contracts had run out, or perhaps when they realized they were under the employ of a murderous Death Eater, they had left. By this time next year there will be plants growing up through the rotted floorboards. Remus had tiptoed about the upper story putting the forgotten china bowls to use under persistent leaks, but with rains like this, they will surely overflow. And soon enough there won't be anyone here to empty them again, either.

In the kitchen, however, with its solid stone floors and that powerful hearth, and in the present, with the fire cracking and rain muffled by the thick walls, Sirius sits on a transfigured chair and eyes the blurred, warped reflection of Remus coming up behind him cast in the kettle resting on the mantle. It takes all of his will not to leap up when he feels Remus drawing closer, his skin pickling and his shoulders tensing no matter how he urges himself to relax. 

He can feel, at first, the shifting of his hair as Remus does something—tries to comb it out with his fingers, perhaps, though it doesn’t take long for him to give up that futile task; even after he’d talked Sirius into a bath to take out the worst of the grime, the strands seem more intent on knotting together into a particularly ugly knit cap than flowing as hair should. In the moment of silence that follows, it’s easy to picture Remus standing there, a tight pinch between his brows and his mouth ever so slightly open as he assesses and strategizes his plan of attack.

He’s only a teenager in that image, though. James across the room offering shit advice, Peter rolling with laughter at the whole ordeal.

At last, there’s the draw of metal across metal, and it’s so close to Sirius’s ear that he startles.

“Sorry—didn’t knick you already, did I?”

The shears weren’t anywhere near Sirius’s skin, he knows it, but he says, “Bit cold,” and Remus lets it slide.

He seems to be going terribly slowly, for how long this ordeal seems to stretch. Bits of hair drop around the chair and prick at Sirius’s neck, and as Remus works the length away, inch by careful inch, his fingers draw closer and closer to Sirius’s scalp. 

They’re hot. Wonderfully, terribly hot.

When Sirius reached the shore, having swum all the way from Azkaban, his body shaking with the exertion and the cold, he ran. He ran, and he ran, and he didn’t stop. It was like a nightmare: you have to keep running, because if you don’t keep running, that something looming behind you will catch up. But it wasn’t a nightmare. Sirius has known nightmares, but he has known running, too, running as far and fast until you can find safe harbor, and it wasn’t a nightmare: there was the sun, for the first time in thirteen years, burning at his black fur; there was the asphalt beneath his feet, burning at the pads of his four paws, wearing away the nails that had grown long with only a single cell to pace the length of.

He ran, and he kept running, not because someone would catch him, but because if he stopped, he knew he wouldn’t be able to start again. His paws struck the ground one after another, as he ran past exclamations of surprise and pity and fear, from barren coast to dense city and back out again, the sun always before him, kept on his feet not by the scraps he could scrounge but the image of Peter, clutched in the hand of one of Arthur Weasley’s boys, by James’ voice in his ear, whispering—

God, Sirius, what will I do if I can’t be there for Harry? I have to—no, you, you have to keep him safe. It isn’t right—him being brought into this, a world where we don’t even know who we can trust? But he’ll—you’ll be there for him, if I’m not, right? You’ll keep him safe. I know you will.

He ran until he reached the sea. Then, staring out, standing still at last, he finally had the thought that if he was going to find his way to Devon, he was going to need to find a sign.

Is his sign now the heat of Remus’s fingers burning across his scalp, or the rain rolling free as he runs them through Sirius’s hair—this time, much more successfully—startling Sirius out again, cool as it traces down his brow? Is it the way his hands feel as he tilts Sirius’s head, first to the left, then to the right, brushing away the clippings as they dust Sirius’s ear? Is it the way, when he speaks, it takes Sirius a moment to remember to listen?

“What was that?”

Remus’s hands pause, as if the sounds of the shears were what stopped Sirius from hearing. “I was asking where you think we should go next.” He snips a few more times, then moves back to the other side, pauses again: “Even if they’re drawn to Germany, I don’t think we should linger here, Sirius. I’ve checked with every lead I’ve had, and—did you find anything, today? Any record of him?”

“No,” Sirius admits. “But Peter’s spent thirteen years in hiding, I don’t think he’d start showing his face carelessly now.”

“We’ve got about a week until the full moon.”

His voice is quiet. Remus will need somewhere safe to transform, and Sirius will need somewhere safe to cast the ritual again. It’s hard to tell which one Remus is more disappointed by. Not that the ritual is particularly evil, though it is illegal in the UK—can hardly have people going around sacrificing animals to track people down., after all. It isn’t fashionable. But the fact that it’s old magic, magic born more out of intuition and the harnessing of emotions than the arithmantic equations at the root of more modern charms work means that even as Sirius is, he’s able to cast it, and even transformed into a rat Peter won’t be able to hide.

Remus comes around at last, folding his arms to consider his work. “Well,” he says. “No one will recognize you, at least. But you need to trim that beard.” He turns away, takes half a step, and then pauses. “Do you want me to do that, too?”

Sirius’s skin feels like a patchwork of spots where Remus touched him. Yes, he longs to say. Please. He knows he should balk at it, at the thought of letting someone aim a cutting charm at his jugular, let alone a man who, in the bursts of anger that are coming through more and more the further they get from Azkaban, he’s had the nasty thought left him to rot in a prison cell for thirteen years. But—hell, as strange as all this is, being here with Remus, the fact that it’s Remus actually has little to do with it. The last kind touch he felt—no, the last human touch he felt, as the aurors had only ever touched him with magic—was Harry, crying against Sirius’s chest as they staggered away from the rubble of Godric’s Hollow and Lily’ and James’s cooling bodies.

“Let me go get a mirror,” Remus says in his silence.

It’s a gift. He could summon it from down the hall, and it wouldn’t take him but the flick of a wrist.

“You should do it,” Sirius manages, when Remus returns, running his hand over the nape of his neck. “Dunno how you’ve cut this—I don’t think I’ve ever had hair this short. So you’d better complete your image, artiste .”

“Alright.” Remus drops the mirror in Sirius’s lap as he takes on that agreeable, too tolerant tone. He’s found something so heavy the tarnished frame of it might very well be made from lead, and the surface is too coated in dust to see into. “Don’t blame me if I do my job well, though. Look up?”

It’s much faster for Remus to trim his beard—no wonder, he’s got thirteen years of practice that Sirius missed out on; he could probably cast the charm in his sleep by now, and he’s not limited by the awful shears. He sets his hand on Sirius’s shoulder as he draws the point of his wand first across one cheek, then the other, then more carefully up the neck in five steady lines, and finally around his mouth and chin. And then he lets go, and steps back, assuming a much more natural distance between them.

“Well,” he says when Sirius doesn’t move. “Not so bad, I think. Have a look.”

Even with the damp of his sleeve, it takes Sirius a good deal of force to scrub the glass clean enough to see. And what he does see, he doesn’t recognize in the slightest. He was right—this is the shortest his hair has ever been, cut into the same shape he’s seen hundreds of muggle men wearing in the streets of Paris. And the beard… He’d had a mustache, for a bit, just after James’s wedding. He’d tried before, but Lily’d said that her first act as a Potter would be to disown Sirius if he had shown up at her wedding with even a hit of scruff. Sirius might’ve said it was only because she fancied him so much without it, and got his face hexed baby-smooth for his good humor. But even after the wedding, he’d never had a beard. Not intentionally, at least. He’d remembered the whole business and nicked a razor from a Tesco on his way back up towards Hogwarts; it had been stupid, and got him spotted, but he’d had a terrible thought that Harry would somehow have inherited Lily’s distaste for it and hate him on sight. Now, though, he looks like… a bureaucrat. Someone who has spent far too many hours in the office, propped up on coffee and nothing else.

There couldn’t be a better disguise, for anyone who knew him.

“Jesus, Moony,” he says. “I look like I could be your brother.”

“No, you don’t,” Remus replies. “Uncle, maybe, or…”

Sirius stares at it a moment longer before his eyes are drawn up to Remus’s face, all scrunched up.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“C’mon, Moony…”

“You don’t want to hear it.”

“Bet you I do.”

Remus crosses his arms. “Alright, then—are you related to Barty Crouch, by any chance?”

The worst thing is, that ticks all the boxes: overworked bureaucrat? Check. The arse barely even said a word to his own son the one time he came and visited at Azkaban. Junior was right down the hall from Sirius, the two of them high-profile mental cases with a special grudge from the Ministry—the difference being that Barty Crouch Jr actually was a Death Eater, presumably. Sirius can remember him hanging around Regulus’s crowd at Hogwarts, so there’s no reason to doubt it. If not… well, Barty Sr had clearly only visited at his wife’s insistence, and then Junior gave out only a few days later, and no one came for his body. The dementors dragged it right past Sirius’s cell, on the way to be buried. If Junior wasn’t a Death Eater, he rotted in Azkaban all the same, and Barty Sr did nothing to stop it.

But that suits his M.O., or at least how it was back in the war. Sirius doesn’t really remember being dragged in front of the Wizengamot, but he knows Crouch is the one who got him thrown in indefinitely for insanity, trial not pending, because…

“His mother was a Black,” Sirius admits. He can’t quite quash his mother’s voice, annoyed that, as Crouch was not a Black by name, his Grandfather refused to disown him. Charis may have been a Black, but Barty certainly wasn’t, or Sirius would never have faced such confinement, and he’d never have let the family name be disgraced with an insanity plea.

“Then I suppose I should have asked for the terms of the bet,” Remus says lightly, and looks away as Sirius scowls. “It’s for the best, though. I don’t think even Peter will see you coming.” He pauses. “Even if you do look like someone’s grandfather—”

“Oh, piss off.” Sirius brushes past him, and drops the mirror face-down beside the kettle on the mantle, turning around Remus’s coat while he’s at it. Judging by the puddle on the hearth beneath it, it won’t be dry any time soon. He’d forgotten how much of a pain it is to be that drenched; he would have stopped and bought an umbrella if he hadn’t come out of the city hall and seen a flash of a very particular shade of red out of the corner of his eye. He’d only paused long enough to step into an alley and send a message to Remus; the rest of his afternoon had involved two hours of walking casually in open areas until he could find somewhere to give them the slip, and then another two hours huddled as Padfoot in a back alley. Quite enough excitement for one day—maybe he is an old man.

Told you so.

But it’s terribly tense here. The haircut, that had been a fine distraction, but now… Now he’s standing too close too the fire. The burning heat of it is as much of an addiction as being touched. 

Remus treads back over to his trunk, propped up against the wall by the door to what had once been a pantry. Sirius listens to him rustling about, filling in the blanks of what he isn’t seeing with something that might be a memory: Remus hunting desperately for his homework through piles upon piles of research amassed on the work desk they had reclaimed from a storage room and smuggled into their dormitory. In that memory, Remus eventually would have let out a Ha! as he finally found the precise scrap of parchment he was hunting for, and his attempt to pry it free would have upended the whole teetering mess—but the lid of Remus’s trunk closes on that distant past with a resounding thud.

“Six days until the full moon,” Remus says as he sits down on top of it. Sirius turns just enough to identify the actual source of the sound of flipping papers: a small book—a day planner, perhaps, or pocket almanac. 

Professor Lupin, indeed . 

Remus doesn't notice Sirius's snort, licking his finger to turn a thin page. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to spend another day at Peter's grandmother’s cottage, for you, and I’ll… take a stroll around Paris.”

“Switch that,” Sirius grunts. “Your French is horrible.”

“My French is exactly what they expect from me, and they don't care so long as I make a good effort. People are going to be on the lookout for you, even more than before. You know that.”

“That’s what the haircut’s for, isn’t it?”

“There’s plenty of security spells that won’t be fooled by a haircut, and you know it,” Remus says. “Please, Sirius. One week with your head down, and then…”

And then Sirius will do the ritual, and he’ll have the pull, and at least some idea of the general direction where Peter has headed, at least for the few days before it wears off. Maybe longer if he can manage a bit more splendor to it, this time.

And then…

Then what? He’s never tracked anyone down before, outside of the hypothetical, and their process of winging it doesn't seem to be working. To be clear, most of the auror training he received during the war was focused on how to signal to others that you’ve hit danger, codes for if you think someone’s been stuck under the Imperius Curse, long lists of curses approved for use during combat, informal lectures held in hushed tones on the types of spells the bigwigs sitting cozy in the Wizengamot would never approve of but might have a chance at saving your life and bringing down another of the Dark Lord’s lackeys, that sort of thing. Supposedly, back in our day, as the instructors always said, auror training used to involve preparation for the more normal types of things investigators might need to know in governing the masses, but by the stage the war had reached when Sirius, James, and Lily had signed on—and Peter was rejected—it was generally assumed by the public that you were better off cursing someone for petty crime than trying to call the aurors. It wasn't as though they would have time to show up to bring you in, either. According to Remus, though, the aurors now all have that sort of training, and there’s hit wizards besides. Would that they were the ones chasing after Peter, but that isn’t going to happen. Unless a third party shows up with Peter at the Ministry, there’s no way the public’s going to believe the truth.

If the aurors were the ones chasing Peter, they might have found something to go off of. Sirius and Remus are only here in France because it would have been the easiest place for Peter to reach, because the last ritual pointed Sirius towards Europe, and because Peter at least had some connection here. But France is a big country. Europe is even larger.

Peter could be anywhere. He could be in Siberia. He could have run all the way to Africa, or snuck onto a plane to New Zealand, or…

“Cissy said Ludo Bagman was last spotted in Albania,” Sirius recalls idly.

“Ludo Bagman?”

“What’s there in Albania?”

“Mm… Trees. One of the largest stretches of untouched magical forest in the world, protected by standing stones as old as the ones at Hogwarts. It’s habitat to a good number of endangered species, but… there’s not much else.”

“Hm.”

“Why did she mention it?”

That’s the thing—it only stuck with Sirius because it came from so far over the pitch. “I suppose Bagman’s quidditch career really took off if he was famous enough for Cissy to know about.”

“Actually, he retired before he could fall from grace. He went on to become the head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports.”

“And then… disappeared in Albania.”

“You didn’t see him in the paper, after you got out?”

“Wasn’t exactly my highest priority, no, and they were mostly focused on me, weren’t they? I saw some while in Hogsmeade…”

“Well,” Remus says. “Supposedly, he got in the bad graces of the Goblins, had to flee the country... not that it would really protect him if the Goblins were tracking him down. He was found in Turkey, half-out of his mind, and some people were trying to make accusations on the Goblin nation…”

“Riveting. Goblin politics,” Sirius groans. “Do they ever change?”

“Decisively, no,” Remus says. “Regardless, there was another article that he’d gone missing from where he was in Turkey. I hadn’t heard anything about Albania.”

“If he got into politics, he was probably balls-deep in Lucius’s pocket. It would be their business to know.”

Remus considers this, and looks over towards Sirius, though he’s squinting into his memory more than studying Sirius’s face. “I don’t know much about the forests in Albania,” he finally says, “only that they are a protected wildlife reserve, and no one would enter them without an extremely good reason. Some of it is the usual nonsense, fear of untamed beasts—I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not a local legend or two about werewolves. But some of it is superstition about hauntings, ghosts; if you go in, you won’t come out, that sort of thing. I don’t suppose…”

“What?”

“Draco Malfoy always had a flair for the dramatic in class, especially when it came to anything that might possibly be hiding in the Forbidden Forest,” Remus says. He flips through his book a bit more, then snaps it shut, puts it in his pocket, and stands up from the trunk, looking around the room until he spots something to tidy. The house might be rotting, but that hasn’t stopped Remus from tidying. “I’m not trying to make assumptions here, but Sirius… are you sure this isn’t…”

“A trap?” Sirius finishes when Remus doesn’t. “Of course I’m not. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though, if it is— Why would Cissy bother sending me to Albania when she could have just called the aurors then and there?”

“You didn’t tell me why she brought up Bagman in the first place.”

“Fucked if I ever knew what was going on in her head. She married Lucius Malfoy, for Christ’s sake; that takes a certain kind of twisted logic…”

“So why are you considering following her lead?”

‘She’s my cousin’ wouldn’t make any sense to someone outside the family. Especially not Remus, who would just think of all the times he saw Sirius after a run-in with one of his cousins—the other end of a Black’s wand is a nasty place to find yourself in. But when it comes down to it, any Black who dares bear the name will always have their family members’ interests at heart, in some way or another. It’s undoubtedly pathological. Sirius was never suicidal enough to change his name, and Cissa had called him ‘cousin’, and… Try explaining that to someone who watched you run away from home.

“Look,” he says, watching as Remus picks the dishes up from the sink and carries them back to the china cupboard. Even without water in the pipes, Remus has insisted on doing the dishes the muggle way—for sanitary reasons, or some other excuse Sirius hasn’t gotten to the root of. “I don’t think Cissa ever was, but we both know Malfoy was in deep with the Death Eaters. Whatever she thinks might be in Albania—she said something like, she wonders why do so many people go there, what do they expect to find…”

“You think by ‘people’ she means ‘Death Eaters’.”

“I don’t know—I can’t imagine Bagman as a Death Eater, unless he really changed… but something shady— If Peter’s looking for ground to run to, I’d say the place where Cissy, a Death Eater’s wife, maybe suggested there might something suspicious going on is a reasonable enough spot to check out.”

Remus turns towards Sirius and crosses his arms as he thinks about this, and he doesn’t say anything, but Sirius can hear his voice faintly still: Genius, Padfoot, stretching that thought until it snaps, are we. “Look,” Sirius says again. “Maybe I do the ritual, and we find out Peter’s had the brilliant idea to go back to the UK. But if he’s left France and is too far for more than the tiniest suggestion of a direction, and if that direction is somewhat close to Albania, then maybe stopping through and seeing if anyone’s seen a rat missing a toe running around the woods isn’t worse than any of the other ideas we’ve got, which is, by last count, a big fat zero.”

Remus still doesn’t say anything—actually, he stares like he’s waiting for Sirius to keep talking. Or like he can’t believe he’s stopped, maybe—or, hell, maybe like he’s remembered he was supposed to be getting them food while he was in Lyon, for all Sirius can really say. It’s not entirely new, this not having a clue what Remus is thinking, and Sirius knows it was always an entirely mutual confusion shared between them, but it certainly hasn’t gotten any better in the last thirteen years.

That’s what makes the four of us work, James used to say, whenever there was some rift or fight—assuming James wasn’t one of the offended parties. We’re four numbskulls who make no sense apart, but then come together as one horribly brilliant super-organism—

You know Lily meant that as an insult, right? And there was no ‘brilliant’ when she said it.

It was implied!

“Well,” Remus finally says. “When I go to Paris, I’ll see what I can find about Albania. We’ll go from there.”

Yes, that’s Remus, alright. Can’t lie to save his life, not a bone of malice in him—Peter’s betrayal triggering the glaring exception—but he’s always been a mothering nag. Remus goes to Paris and Sirius sits around outside Peter’s grandmother’s place in the middle of nowhere, but then Sirius ‘gets his way’ and they move on to Albania.

Hope your cousin isn’t trying to get you murdered.

It really is a distinct possibility… and more than a bit unsettling, especially when Cissa knows that Remus is in some way connected to Sirius’s presence. Either she knows Remus is here with Sirius, and sending the pair of them into a trap is just killing two birds with one stone, or she doesn’t, but if word gets to her that Remus is looking into Albania, then… then…

“I’ll look into it in Paris,” Sirius counters. Though he’s not quite sure how the dots between Narcissa, Remus, and Albania connect, they’re sure to form a spider web he does not want to be caught in. “If you’re seen asking for information on Albania, and the aurors think you’re after me, they’re going to want to know why—”

“And if they see you asking for information on Albania, it won’t matter if there’s anything there or not!”

“No one’s going to see me looking like this and think its—”

“Sirius!” Remus chokes out, and it’s the way his voice breaks that cuts Sirius off. Remus’s breath shakes as he turns away, hands coming up to opposite elbows. “You spent the last thirteen years in Azkaban—well, I spent the last thirteen years thinking everyone I cared about was dead, or as good as.” He turns even more, and starts to walk across the room, but stops halfway, like he’s realized he’s got nowhere to go. After a moment, he turns back, but can’t bring himself to look at Sirius, not really. “You know I’ll follow you wherever you go,” he finally says, halfway between accusing and pleading. “Albania, Narnia, Timbuktu, the second star to the right—I’ll follow. But Azkaban—if they take you there, if they don’t just kill you on sight— If they catch you, Sirius, I don’t know there will be anything left of you to follow.” 

Remus shakes his head, hunching forward, and looks, for a moment, like that horrible stage in his transformation that Sirius remember so well, as the beast breaks through, tearing Remus apart. “Of course, it’s always been like this…” he goes on, his bitterness at last unveiled. “Don’t you have something to say?”

“I don’t know what I could,” Sirius replies. “What do you want me to say, Remus? That I’ll be content to hide myself away, while Peter is still out there? That I could stand to be constrained, anymore?”

“I want you to say that you can trust me to do my part!”

“And what did—”

But Sirius stops. After a moment, he pulls himself away, at last, from the fire, and staggers over toward the closest bit of wall. It isn’t fair, he knows, to demand why Remus hadn’t done anything for the last thirteen years: he hadn’t known Peter was still alive, hadn’t had any reason to suspect that anything other than the official story had taken place. He’d even kept that Sirius is an animagus secret, though perhaps less out of kindness and more out of not wanting to remember that Sirius and James and Peter had only achieved such a feat of magic so young for his sake.

Sirius isn’t going to say it, but that leaves them in silence. Remus, at least, manages to compose himself, to straighten up, back into the form of the man who has survived the last thirteen years even in his loneliness, as Sirius slides down to the floor, barely holding on to his own humanity.

“It comes down to this,” Remus says, still not turning to face him. “I don’t want you to go, but I can’t stop you. Maybe I don’t have the right, but—damn it, Sirius. If not me then—then Harry. He’s only just met you. If you’re captured, if you’re killed, how is that fair to him?”

“That’s a low blow.”

“It’s not a—it’s the truth, Sirius, Christ! It’s his birthday next week, you want his birthday present to be your face in the papers, a funeral announcement?”

His birthday. The end of July, then—another month gone. Every day, Peter slips farther from their sight. Every day, Harry’s alone somewhere in the UK— It’s safe, don’t waste time worrying about me— when Sirius, now that he’s out, should be there for him.

Sirius closes his eyes, leans back. His hair, shorn into the shape of some stranger’s, brushes across his ears; his shirt, picked up by Remus from a second-hand shop, peels slowly away from his skin as it dries. The rough stones of the floor under his fingertips might well have been carved from the same mountain as Azkaban’s.

“I’m going,” he says, “to Paris.” He pauses, long enough to give Remus a chance to reply, but no response comes. “But I’ll go… with you. Your hunting dog, trained to follow someone’s magic.” He opens his eyes again, staring up at the firelight dancing across a stain of black mildew or mold right in the middle of the ceiling. “I won’t be set aside or locked in a box,” he says. “I won’t sit around waiting, or resign myself to a leash.”

“No,” Remus finally says. “You… won’t.”

“No. Does that satisfy your fear?”

Remus doesn’t respond for a moment, but turns, going to retrieve the china bowls he had only just put away and the last of the soup from the night before. He divides it up into their two bowls, and brings one to Sirius, crouching right in front of him and meeting Sirius’s gaze head-on. “If that’s what you’re willing to compromise on, then I’ll take what I can get,” he says.

“Good,” Sirius says. He wants to say more, to secure his position, but all things considered, this victory seems to be standing at the cliff’s edge, a strong wind away from being pyrrhic, so what he says, again, is: “Good.”

Remus stands, retreating to the counter and his own bowl. “I’ll have to go to Lille tomorrow,” he says. “If you want to do this, you should come with.”

“Fine.”

“And then Paris the day after that.” He picks up his spoon. “And then…”

The full moon. The ritual. Albania, maybe—or any other end of the earth, it doesn’t matter.

“And then, we find Peter,” Sirius finishes. “And then I go home, a free man.”

And you tell Harry you avenged me, and you keep your promise and take care of him.

I will. Of course I will. 

 —