Work Text:
The thing about curse breaking was that it was, in Sirius’s professional opinion, brilliant ninety-five percent of the time.
The other five percent was paperwork.
He’d been back in London for three weeks after a six-month stint in Egypt, and Gringotts had very politely informed him that he could not return to the field until he had filed, reviewed, and signed off on approximately four hundred pages of incident reports, hazard assessments, and — his personal favourite — a formal written apology to the Cairo office for what he maintained was a completely justified use of a Blasting Curse in a residential area.
He needed somewhere quiet to work. Somewhere that wasn’t his flat, which smelled like takeaway and contained James Potter, who had taken to visiting unannounced ever since Lily had put him on “responsible adult” probation for reasons Sirius felt were wildly exaggerated.
Hence: the library.
A muggle library, specifically, because the wizarding section of the British Library required an appointment, and Sirius had never made an appointment for anything in his life.
He pushed through the door at half past ten on a Tuesday morning, a dragonhide satchel over one shoulder — he’d forgotten, again, that the texture was slightly wrong by muggle standards, and resolved to remember this later — and a coffee in each hand. One for him, one as a peace offering for whatever librarian he was about to inconvenience. He’d found, in life, that pre-emptive coffee solved most problems.
The man at the front desk didn’t look up immediately. He was frowning at something on the desk in front of him, the tip of a pen pressed to his lower lip, sandy hair falling across his forehead in a way that managed to look both rumpled and devastatingly intentional. He had the kind of face that was interesting rather than conventionally handsome — sharp jaw, a scatter of faint scars along his cheek, warm brown eyes when he finally glanced up —
Oh, Sirius thought. Hello.
“Can I help you?” the man said. His accent was soft, just slightly French at the edges, like he’d spent long enough somewhere else that England hadn’t entirely reclaimed him.
Sirius put both coffees on the desk. “I need a table. Somewhere quiet. I have a lot of paperwork and my flatmate keeps trying to teach me to play chess.”
The man looked at the coffees. Then at Sirius. “You brought two coffees.”
“One’s a bribe.”
“For me?”
“That depends. Do you have a quiet table?”
A pause. Something shifted at the corner of the man’s mouth — not quite a smile, but the shape of one, held back on principle. He picked up one of the coffees. “Section C. Biography. Nobody ever goes there.” He took a sip, then added, almost as an afterthought: “You’re not supposed to have drinks in the library.”
Sirius picked up his own coffee and smiled his most disarming smile. “I know.”
His name was Remus.
Sirius learned this from the laminated badge on his cardigan — Remus, Staff — and confirmed it forty minutes later when a small child ran in yelling REMUS REMUS REMUS about a lost book on dinosaurs, and Remus produced one from behind the desk with the calm efficiency of someone who had predicted this exact emergency.
Sirius watched this over the top of his incident report.
He was not, technically, getting any work done.
This was partly Remus’s fault, and partly the fault of the small nagging feeling Sirius couldn’t quite shake. Something about the man was slightly off — not in a bad way, more in the way of a picture hung a degree askew. The cardigan was very convincing. The reading glasses were very convincing. But there was something too deliberate about how normal Remus seemed, like a person doing a careful impression of someone who belonged entirely in a muggle library.
Sirius, who spent considerable effort doing his own careful impression of someone who belonged entirely in the muggle world, recognised the particular quality of that effort.
He told himself he was imagining it. He filed three pages.
He got slightly more work done in the afternoon, when Remus disappeared into the stacks for an hour. He filed six pages, rewrote his Cairo apology letter twice, and ate a sandwich he’d smuggled in his satchel. When Remus reappeared, pushing a cart of books to be reshelved, he paused by Section C.
“Still here,” he observed.
“Lots of paperwork.”
“What do you do?”
Sirius hesitated for only a fraction of a second. “Finance,” he said. It was what James had suggested. Nobody asks follow-up questions about finance, Pads, they’re too afraid of being bored. “Consulting. Lots of international travel.”
“Mm,” said Remus, in a tone that was perfectly neutral. He looked at the dragonhide satchel for just a moment — barely a glance, gone before Sirius could be sure of it — and then pushed his cart onward.
Sirius looked down at his satchel. Then back at Remus’s retreating cardigan.
Hm.
He came back on Wednesday.
“Biography again?” Remus said, without looking up.
Sirius put a coffee on the desk. “Is there a frequent visitor card?”
“This isn’t a coffee shop.”
“And yet.” Sirius nodded at the coffee. Remus picked it up. Sirius went to Section C.
He actually got work done on Wednesday. A solid three hours. There was something about the quality of the silence in the library — punctuated by the soft thump of books, the occasional murmur of conversation, the distant sound of Remus patiently explaining the cataloguing system to a confused elderly gentleman — that Sirius found, against all odds, genuinely settling.
He was nearly done with the hazard assessments when his pen ran out of ink.
He stared at it. He looked around. Section C was, as advertised, entirely empty.
He turned the pen over in his hand and gave it one small, precise tap with his index finger under the desk — ink levels restored, nobody the wiser — and kept writing.
From somewhere in the stacks, he heard the faint sound of a book sliding off a shelf by itself and landing neatly on a cart.
Sirius stopped writing.
He looked toward the stacks. There was nobody in the stacks. He’d watched Remus go into the back office ten minutes ago.
He looked back down at his paperwork.
He wrote three more words and then stopped again.
The book on the cart had not been on the cart before. He was nearly certain of it.
He picked up his pen — his perfectly, inexplicably refilled pen — and thought about the satchel, and the glance, and the way Remus’s accent drifted slightly when he wasn’t concentrating, like he’d learned English somewhere it wasn’t the primary language and occasionally forgot to account for that.
Finance consulting, Sirius had said.
Remus had said mm.
Sirius, who was good at his job precisely because he was good at reading situations, had a sudden and very strong feeling about this situation.
He did not act on it. He filed eleven more pages instead, which was nearly a personal record.
On Thursday, Sirius arrived to find Remus in quiet, focused argument with the library’s self-checkout machine, which had apparently jammed.
“I can have a look,” Sirius offered.
“It’s fine,” Remus said, in the tone of someone who had already considered and rejected seventeen solutions. “It just needs—” He pressed something. The machine beeped mournfully. “—a moment.”
Sirius watched him. Remus’s jaw was set. His hand rested on the side of the machine with a very specific kind of stillness.
The machine whirred. Clicked. And then, with great reluctance, resumed functioning.
Remus stepped back. Smoothed his cardigan. “There,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Impressive,” Sirius said.
“It just needed a moment,” Remus said again, and looked Sirius very directly in the eye in a way that meant, Sirius was now quite confident, something entirely different from its literal content.
Sirius smiled. “Right,” he said pleasantly. “Coffee’s on the desk.”
Remus looked at him for a beat too long. “Thank you,” he said carefully.
Sirius went to Section C. He was grinning at his paperwork the entire way there and didn’t bother to stop.
On Friday, Sirius’s pen rolled off the table.
He didn’t catch it. He let it fall, hit the floor, and roll under the bookshelf. Then he got up, crouched down, and retrieved it the old-fashioned way, because two could play at this game and he wasn’t going to be the one to blink first.
He sat back down. Remus appeared at the end of the aisle with his cart.
“You dropped your pen,” Remus said.
“I noticed.”
“You could have—” Remus stopped. “You could have asked me for another one.”
“I managed.”
They looked at each other. Remus’s mouth pressed flat in what Sirius had come to understand was suppressed amusement. Sirius kept his face perfectly, pleasantly neutral.
“Finance consulting,” Remus said, after a moment.
“That’s right.”
“Lots of international travel.”
“Egypt, most recently.”
“Mm.” Remus pushed his cart forward a step. “I studied abroad, myself. France. Came back and found I preferred — quieter work.”
“I can see the appeal,” Sirius said, looking around Section C, looking back at Remus. “Of quiet.”
Something passed between them — quick and light and warm, like a spell that didn’t need words.
“Same time Monday?” Remus said.
Sirius picked up his pen. “Section C will be available?”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
He pushed his cart away. Sirius watched him go, then looked back down at the Cairo apology letter, the last remaining item between him and his return to the field.
He thought about Egypt. He thought about how much he had, until approximately four days ago, been looking forward to going back.
He picked up his pen and wrote, slowly and with great deliberateness: I acknowledge that the structural damage caused by the incident was suboptimal.
Then he put the pen down.
Monday, he thought, was not very far away. But it was also not close enough.
He was going to have to find more paperwork.