Chapter Text
Remus doesn't even bother shaking the smoke from his threadbare jacket as he trudges into the flat. Commentators burble indiscriminately and the front room, the largest and darkest of them, flickers with blue remnants from the TV screen.
"Back, my boy?" His father's voice, ageing mahogany and spilling with drink, fills the air. "Six nations tonight, Wales verse England - match for the bloody ages." A beer bottle joins three others, empty, on the cluttered coffee table. "GWOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAN!" The man suddenly erupts, and Remus jumps, cowering in the front hall as the shadow of his dad billows into that of a brown bear. "Ah, piss. Little'un fumbled an easy pass, That's a try down the drain. Eh, Remus? Right cock up that was."
Remus hums noncommittally, treading quietly through the room to the kitchen as the navy echo of Lyall Lupin on the wall shrinks back down into nothing. Remus's room is to the right of the kitchen which gives him one of the peeling bay windows overlooking the street. It's a dire view, and silence is a quaint concept over rushing cars and whirring streetlamps. People drift and swill through the parade like coffee grounds and Remus sleeps under the drafty frame, eavesdropping on all of it, overseeing the minutiae of the tiny lives playing out below.
He unfurls a scrap he'd stuffed into the torn lining of his coat in a hurry earlier that day. It's an a4 sheet of printer paper folded hastily and inaccurately in half, already with a splash of tea or coffee on it, warping the page further. He traces the tip of his index finger over the buckling leaf, reliving the already faint rush of his fumbling hands snatching up the first piece of paper he could find, skittering in short rows across it, copying out a poem which had lit him up. He reads over underlined passages, eyelids drooping in rapture.
All childhood is an emigration. This was the line which first caught in his throat. Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar, leading to unimagined, pebble-dashed estates… I remember my tongue shedding its skin like a snake…
"Oh - Remus! We're fresh out of milk, you reckon you could pop out?"
His head jerks up, snapping out of the lines of prose, dazed.
"Yeah, can do," he sighs, re-settling his jacket and leaving his room, mind still trailing over the Carol Ann Duffy poem lying fizzing on his desk.
"And a four of Carling, if you would."
For the first time today Lyall turns to look at his son, holding out a crinkled tenner, smiling gormlessly. Remus's lips curl down into a frown but he nods, takes the note. His dad turns back to the telly.
"Get yourself a treat - you like chocolate, don't you? Just drop the change back in my work fleece, ta."
Remus's tired eyes drift over the gray mountain range of his father's slumped body as the man lies sprawled over the sofa, half looking like a set of battered old couch cushions himself, and he wonders how a man named Lyall ended up washing windows in Wembley.
Those gentle flowing musings of Duffy flash in the front of his mind. My parents' anxiety stirred like a loose tooth in my head. I want our own country, I said.
He pulls a small, spiral-bound notebook from his deepest pocket, flips the cover which still has a greying price label on it and lays bare a fresh lined page. His eyes bounce around the room and he clicks the top of a black biro, scribbling in tight, spidery script.
The rolling hills of his name light him up like a foreign stamp. He does not seem to belong here. The black soot from the a40 which leaves dismal halos around photo frames and phone stands could have crept straight from his skin; coal, glittering anthracite, seeping from his pores in fine film, acrid, suffocating, life-leeching. He sits, atrophy in action, like a bronze cast of himself. Eyes vacant.
The gritty, sparkling anthracite coal of Welsh mines is about the only context Remus has of Wales as a place or people, because a small lump of it takes pride of place on the mantle - the only item over the barren fireplace which isn't destined to be swept into a binbag. It shines at him from across the room, from its nest of crumpled cans and crisp packets, like a dream. He's picked it up once or twice and it left black streaks across his pale palms, and washed off far too easy for something so solid, so striking.
He tucks the notebook back into his pocket and heads out the front door.
Do I only think I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space and the right place? Now, where do you come from?
—
The off-license sign blares white and royal blue in the shadowless twilight. It's a slow day, March creeping into April - that dreary stretch of early spring when the sky is a stubborn gray-white and turns pitch dark at 6pm. Remus keeps his head low, smiles idly at the clutter of stickers all across the glass storefront, enters.
"Hiya," the girl behind the counter chirps, her lurid pink hair glaring through the bluish bracken.
"Evenin', Tonks," Remus smiles. He's a big fan of Tonks, she's one of those steady characters he could always rely on, however small her part may be in his life. Her short, bitten nails tap dully on the counter, chasing air bubbles trapped forever under the sticky-back plastic of its surface.
He heads right for the back of the shop, to the column of milk bottles by the door to the back room. The refrigerator units sing in a constant low lazy hum, like a nanosecond of beehive ambience looped to infinity, and it gets immediately on his nerves. Hoping his dad wanted skimmed and not bothered enough to care, he plucks out one with a red cap and heads further along the row.
The front door swings open and loud, tumbling voices fill the room, smacking of booze. Remus curses under his breath and hooks a four-pack of cans as quick as possible. The two drunks occupy the beer fridge as soon as Remus vacates the aisle, and he lets out a sigh of relief. The counter and its smiling attendant have never been such a welcome sight.
"Just these?" Tonks asks, hands moving deftly and unconsciously to scan the items he sets down.
Remus trails a hasty eye over the perspex-lined sweet shelves at his waist, and goes for a wispa, sliding it toward her. "And that one, please."
"Knew you'd do that. You're a chocoholic, you know that? Never leave this shop without buying something with the word 'Cadbury' on the wrapper."
"Oi!" He chides playfully, hand dipping for the ten pound note burning a hole in his pocket. "Kit-Kats are made by Nestle. Different brand."
"Oh, I'm convinced. My point is shut down, refuted, bugger," Tonks drawls, shaking out a blue bag. "Probably owned by the same supercompany, anyway, s'what dad says. All in eachothers' pockets. You buy toilet paper and the money goes to coca-cola."
Remus has met Tonks's dad many times, a jolly but jaded Pakistani man of around forty-five, the owner of the offie and until a few years ago the main cashier. He's got old knees, though, and drafted his daughter - too young, even now and definitely then, to be selling alcohol, really - to take the day shifts. His condition must be worsening, Remus muses, for her to still be on duty after dark. He can almost hear the words from the man's mouth now - I'll stop smoking the day Big Tobacco takes its money out of cancer research.
As she's sorting over his change, the tinny speaker over the door switches from muffled, rapid-fire adverts to a little radio jingle, fading into the start of a song. It's a waltz, but the guitar twangs and the drums crash, and Remus is intrigued. Then the first lyrics emerge, an airy exhalation which melts into the instrumental like butter, and he feels that electric shock of something important.
"You got my receipt?" He rushes, scooping the pile of coins into his hand and dropping them loose into his pocket.
"Yup, here," Tonks hands it over, a single crease buckling it in the middle. He grabs it and fumbles for his pen, nearly dragging his notebook out with it as he unsheaths the biro with a rattle from its spine. A rapid click and he's scribbling again, frantic, and the words are almost unreadable.
Libraries gave us power
Then work came and made us free
"Oh, the song? You not heard it?" She's leaning over, puzzling over him. Remus is a bit strange, but she likes strange.
Remus can only shake his head, spine unnaturally straight as he loses himself in the verse.
"New Manics album out - this is the big single, I think."
"It's gorgeous." His words are distant, breathed. His eyebrows shoot up as the chorus starts, great arching shapes flashing in mind as the voice goes up and the guitar goes down, as the chord progression peaks at a minor seven and the vocalist seems to be tumbling, screaming, tossed around by the vicious waves of his own art. An entire orchestra of strings creeps in somehow, weaving into the torrent of noise, and it's almost suffocating. Remus's left hand begins to shake at his side - a back-and-forth tremor, precise, urgent.
The second verse has him snatching up his pen again, drifting further down the waxy receipt.
I wish I had a bottle
Right here in my pretty face
To wear the scars
To show from where I came
There is so much to unpack in this but he files that thought for later as his hand pauses, clenching so hard around his pen that the plastic cracks a little. The strings do something so magical that he actually gasps out loud, and his nearly-shut eyes snap open. Tonks stares entranced at them, shining with life like she'd never seen before.
"What??" She asks, sounding almost irate, but truthfully she wants desperately to hear his thoughts out loud, to understand the drive behind his sudden and blinding passion. He drops his biro and laces his fingers together, shaking his joined hands up and down, rocking back and forth on his toes.
"Did you not hear that? It was fantastic!" He gushes. The second chorus fades out and the music lulls, and he leans forward, all social inhibition forgotten. "Listen, they're about to do it again, listen!"
He traces the falling-leaf trajectory of the music with his swaying face, chin nearly on the counter before the highest strings cut back in and he jerks his head up, a huge beaming smile invading his lips involuntarily, hands flying apart and grasping at his sides for nothing. Tonks listens this time, notes the soaring of it, the contrast of the beautiful violin and the ruthless growling guitar, the ripping of the singer's voice, and a grin graces her own face. It's more for Remus's complete intoxication with it, though - he looks like he could be in the pews of a gospel church, exalting to God himself.
Remus doesn't stop bouncing up and down, wringing his hands until the last of the song has faded. He's dazed, enough euphoria rushing through him that he feels he could tip a horse, unable to keep himself from grinning maniacally. "Fucking brilliant," he beams, snatches up the receipt, glances over his own crazed font. Tonks grins back, bewildered, her eyebrows sloping up into a peak.
"You are bizarre, love."
"Thankyou."
She goes to say something further but something clatters deeper into the shop and they both whip round, and Remus realises with a start that one of the drunks from earlier - much younger than he'd expected, probably around his own age - is standing stock still and staring at him. He's sleek, well-built, clearly from another world, by his timelessly beautiful face and his torn but decadent clothes. His eyes, almost silver gray under the bleaching lights, are burning holes in Remus's shirt. But his hair under the buzzing, flickering strip light is what floors Remus the most - for a split second he's back in the living room staring at that chunk of coal, layers and layers of shiny black sediment flashing under light never meant to reach it.
A second, taller boy swerves around the corner, stooped and stumbling. "Thanks for the bloody hand, Padfoot, no need to help old Jamesie lug your drink around," he grumbles, slurring his consonants, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He observes the three other entities before him, and shuffles to a stuttering standstill just behind his friend. "Everything alright here? S'goin' on?"
Remus is torn between looking at the still-silent witness and Tonks, desperate to leave whatever this psychological stalemate is but unwilling to leave her - fifteen years old, though she'll stress nearly sixteen now - with two (albeit harmless-looking) drunk men.
To his relief, she is the one to steer. "Wotcher, Sirius, you alright?" She grins toothily at them, and the spectre finally stirs, blinking with dark lashes.
"Ted not well?" He murmurs, distant. Something like shock runs rivers all through Remus. The boy's lips barely move. He's like a porcelain doll. There's something almost absurd about him standing between the battered beige shelves of crisps and biscuits, like he's been cut from a fashion magazine and glued in over a newspaper feature on the world of the working classes.
"Run himself off his feet. You know how he gets. You sure you're feeling well? You look all spacey."
"Little Prince is fine and dandy, just tired and soberin' up - nice to see you too, Dora," the bespectacled one announces, stumbling jovially to the counter and thumping two tall cans of cider down next to Remus's wilting plastic bag.
"Call me Dora one more time, Potter, and I'll ram this can of cat piss so far up your scrawny arse you'll taste it." She scans the ciders with her most impeccable customer service smile. Remus snorts and has to contort his mouth to keep from laughing, turning his head into the shadows. Potter clearly takes issue with this, but cannot for the life of him manage to come across as any more intimidating than a stunned deer.
"Oi, Mister Corduroy, I know I'm funny, no need to look embarrassed," he snarks, rifling through pockets for change. Remus side-eyes him, amused and unimpressed, and reaches for his bag.
"You gonna be alright with these?" He mutters to Tonks, nodding imperceptibly at the two clowns. She beams for real this time, ruffles his hair just the slightest bit - barely brushing the parts that stick up at the back.
"Lovely boy. Sirius there, the zombie, he's my cousin, and this one's James, his best mate. They're in all the time - they're a laugh when they're sober, I promise. You head on out - your old man watching the rugby?"
"Yep." The bag rustles as he pulls it from the counter and steps back, tucking his pen back into the spine of his notebook. James swings to occupy the entire till and spills a fistful of coins onto the lino, pushes his glasses up and squints and the rattling mess, dragging them around and mumbling outlandish sums under his breath. Remus raises a playful eyebrow. "See you soon, cheers."
"Get home safe!" Tonks trills with a wince, rolling her sleeves up to help the bumbling fool count his money.
Sirius's eyes can see only one shape. The boy in the scuffed brown jacket pats himself down to check he's not missing anything. His receipt crinkles in his hand and he glances down at it, eyes running once more over his own writing. His lips turn up into a gentle smile, eyes glittering, and he rolls it up, tucks it somewhere under his coat, ducks out of the shop. The door squeals behind him.
Sirius shuffles to the door and presses his palms against the cold glass, peering out between the vinyl stickers to try and keep his eyes on the other. "Who was that, Tonks?"
"Regular customer. Lives local I'd imagine. Lovely fella, always says hi. Why?" Tonks scoops half of the sea of coins, meticulously counted, into her deft palms and yanks the change tray out to sort it into the register. James, after shovelling the excess cash back into his coat, turns to squint at Sirius through his fingerprint-smeared lenses. He frowns, then groans.
"For heavens' sake, Sirius, give it a rest."
"What?" Tonks asks, casting a curious eye at her cousin, who is still pawing at the glass.
"Sirius has his 'just fallen in love with a stranger' face on."
"Piss off, Prongs," Sirius mumbles, but his head is in an entirely different place. Tonks recoils.
"You're joking! That kid's got enough whizzin' around in his head without you sniffing about, Sirius, don't even try."
"I'm not that bloody bad," Sirius mumbles. The other two look at each other doubtfully. "He was doing this little dance, almost, and he had this smile…"
"Fuck's sake," James groans, leaning his forehead on the counter. "You've barely just shut up about Rotherhide. I'm begging you, Sirius, give it a miss this time around."
Sirius finally snaps out of it and whips around, scalded. "I'll admit, alright, Rotherhide was a mistake. But the heart wants what the heart wants, Jim - you should know all about that, slobbering at Evans despite the fact she can't stand to look at you." He rushes towards Tonks, his hands clasped together in preparation to beg. "What's his name? What did he write on that receipt? Do you know where he lives? What's his deal?"
She flicks him hard on the tip of his pointy nose, and he yelps. "He was writing down lyrics from the song playing on the radio - not seen him quite so excited before but he does that, always taking notes. No clue what his deal is. As for the rest of the questions you asked, I'm not giving you any more ideas. Focus on yourself for once, Sirius, get some self-development in."
"Are you trying to tell me this," Sirius gestures up and down himself, "needs developing? I'm right where I want to be, cheeky sod. Can't put me off that easily, Cous, no need to hog him."
"Ha ha." She slams the till shut with an air of finality. "Are you going to track shite through my shop all night, or?"
"Mate, we only even came down here cause I wanted to see the stadium! It's pitch dark out already, it'll be all lit up," James suddenly gasps, and hooks his arms under Sirius's, lifting just clear enough of the floor that the tips of his pristine DMs squeak on the linoleum tiles.
"Put me down, you yakubian ape!" Sirius snarls, flailing wildly. He's still quite drunk and the sudden movement is prompting concerning lurches deep in his gut. "Christ, next time I try to drink McKinnon under the table just punch me, it'd end better in the long run."
And though they return to their usual effortless rapport, tripping over each other and talking loud into the night, a threadbare jacket and honey-brown irises linger in Sirius's mind as he squints in the direction the other boy might have gone.