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We ought to love life's long hours of sickness
and narrow years of longing
like the brief moments when the desert flowers.
(Edith Södergran, Nothing. Transl. by David McDuff.)
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1 The Ashes
Remus Lupin is thinking of dust and ashes.
He is thinking of the dust in the rooms of the old Black family house. The fluffy rolls of it prowling sleepily under the ponderous, gloomy furniture; the thick layers of it resting on the large books squashed onto the shelves; the mountains and plains of white-grey ashes in the fireplaces. He is thinking of animal-sized clouds of dust and human-sized piles of ashes and their facelessness, their namelessness. Nothing tells now whether the dust originates from the clattering shoes of an important visitor in the distant past, or from the velvet drapes of a four-poster where a sleepless inhabitant once writhed without rest; or whether the ashes are the remains of a tree marked with someone's initials, or perhaps of a letter written in bitter or longing words.
Dust and ashes have been deprived of their own stories, Remus thinks, that is why they don't have a face. They are all that is left when the soul is ground away. Anonymous particles blocking space and time.
They have been cleaning in the house since the morning, chasing away the stuffy coldness and sticky reek of the past, making space for light and life corner by corner. Yet the claws of the memories are deeply hooked into the flesh of the house, and darkness is unwilling to leave a place it has grown used to call home.
Sirius Black is sitting on the heavy green bedcover of a four-poster. Remus notices the dark hem of Sirius's robes is light with dust and that there's a sprinkle of ashes in his hair. Remus reaches out to brush the ashes away, letting his hand linger in the coarse, black hair. He feels Sirius's breath on his forearm, studies the movements of the bright eyes, and is almost certain Sirius shivers slightly.
Remus is playing, and he isn't playing alone. It has been going on for weeks, their common game of observation and furtive touches and unspoken want. They look at each other more often and longer than necessary, and their fingers rest in the folds of the robes or even daringly, fleetingly on the skin as if unnoticed, and sometimes their faces almost touch and they sense the warmth emanating from each other. But they haven't broken the limits yet, not their own, not each other's. They haven't yet pushed aside time: the mute years that stand between them, deformed by efforts to exist without the other. And these past months that have been quivering like air above fire, full of efforts to understand that while years behind cannot be undone, moments ahead are still theirs to shape.
Remus is thinking he should probably leave for his own place, because outside the light is diminishing, and Sirius is looking weary. But he is also thinking of Sirius's taste and wondering if it has changed, or if it still has the same sharply sour aroma of salt. He is looking at Sirius and thinking and the moments are growing longer with shadows.
After some time, in this lightless room, in the middle of dust and ashes, Sirius speaks.
"Those tattered robes of yours, Moony", he says, "make you look bloody old. Take them off."
The grin on Sirius's face is suddenly bright enough to glow in the dark, and it doesn't taste like ashes on Remus's lips, but like flames.
And so Remus stays.