Title: Keep Going…Stop
By: Woodgie
Disclaimer: JK owns what she owns, I own the rest
Rating: M…well, there's nothing graphic, but some swearing…oh! And RLSB Slash!
Summary: After the deaths of the Potters, Remus tries to keep going.
He doesn't want to stop, because stopping means thinking and thinking means accepting; it's an equation that, for the moment, he cannot fathom completing, and so he doesn't. Instead, he keeps moving, pushing past the pre-moon weakness of his youthful body and the trembling exhaustion caused by a month's worth of insomnia with a kind of blinkered determination that he has never really applied to anything else.
In the first few days after everything happened, Remus had plenty to do to keep him occupied, to prevent him stopping. First, there were all the interviews and statements to complete, being piloted around from room to room inside the great, foreboding walls of the Ministry by grim-faced Aurors and grief-stricken comrades. Between the interviews, there were legal obligations to fulfil, going through wills, informing relatives, signing the necessary papers and receiving the proper stamps, enough to keep his body moving and his mind blissfully blank. After that, there were the funerals to organise, hours spent flipping through macabre catalogues of coffins, pointing at the correct flower colours, types, arrangements, choosing songs that could never properly express anything about the lives that had been lost. There was conversing with oblivious ministers, consoling anguished friends, writing hollow eulogies, sorting through un-owned possessions and the endless, mindless responding to enquiries after his feelings, his thoughts, his future.
And he went through it all without once stopping.
With adept, unconscious ease, Remus slipped into a state of cataleptic nothingness, sleep-walking through the hours, days, weeks. In the midst of everyone else's grief, rage and joy, the werewolf did not shed one tear, spit one spiteful slur or crack one relieved, if not saddened, smile. He didn't think, he didn't even think about not thinking and he most definitely did not stop, and he did it all without active desire. There was no voice in the back of his mind cajoling him into sorrow, coaxing him to drop his pokerfaced façade and to let his pent up emotions out. There was no illusory 'Remus' jumping about inside his thoughts desperately trying to force the real, physical man to break down and fall apart, nor was the 'wolf' part of him howling at the loss or betrayal of it all. If anything, they were as stunned into emotionless inertia as the actual Remus was.
There simply was no thought, no feeling.
Now, however, it's getting harder and harder for him to not stop. The customary period of public outrage and grief has passed now and it's left to those who actually knew and loved the lost to deal with the dull throbbing of their muted anguish. Now, its time for 'moving on' and attempting to live with that broken void that can never be mended or filled, for each person to go about their own, individual ways of dealing and surviving. The flurry of movement and activity surrounding a sudden and inexpressible loss always, inevitably, leads to an anticlimax of thinking and feeling and just stopping.
But he doesn't. Remus now fills his days with meaningless but incessant activities, spending hours pouring over paperwork that doesn't require even a tenth of such attention, moving around furniture so that he can dust and clean every surface once, twice, three times over, reorganising his books into alphabetical order by author name, by title, by name again and then by thickness. He visits relatives and does odd-jobs for those who insist that their broken shelves can wait or that their squeaky doors don't really matter and he prepares for the full moon in minute, precise detail, sorting clothes, food, medicines and everything else that he already, always, has prepared anyway. Even when there is actually nothing for him to do, the young werewolf keeps moving, going for a run in the middle of the night around the park, his mind focusing on the steady pulsating rhythm of his heart or the taste of the crisp air on his tongue as he breathes, the impact of feet on dew-dappled grass.
But it's becoming difficult.
Every day it becomes so much harder to avoid the looming storm of thought and feeling. As he waves goodbye to Peter's grateful mother he finds himself swallowing a lump of sadness in his throat. When Dumbledore steps through the fireplace to enquire thoughtfully after one of his favourite ex-pupils, he feels something inside him lunge forward with the desire to talk and let go. Whilst he darts after Gnomes in his parents' garden, memories begin to trickle through his mind of a grinning, bespectacled youth reclining in the warm grass during summer, of a laughing-eyed redhead and a slumbering child with a lightening scar.
Then, that moment he unwittingly unravels a crumpled wad of paper found behind the couch and sees Sirius' hasty scrawl, the dam bursts, the heavens open, the entire world crumbles beneath his feet and he feels like he's springing to life and dying all in that one second.
Without realising it, Remus crumples to his knees, the hand now clenching the wrinkled note pressing hard against the urgent beat of his chest and the other hand clasping tightly against his mouth as the first violent sob is wrenched from deep inside his throat. He gasps haltingly, breaths coming in fast and faltering patterns, leaving him feeling as though he isn't really breathing at all and making the hand against his chest tighten almost desperately. Squeezing his eyes shut, his sobs increase and tears start to spill fourth in hot, pouring streams, wetting his flushed cheeks and dripping onto the wooden floor in quick, quiet succession.
Weak, he falls forward slightly, both hands now palm-flat against the floor as he slowly bows his head, rocking on his knees as a tremulous deluge of aguish and agony and anger twists and ruptures inside him. He sucks in another strangled breath and it works to thrust out more hiccupped sobs, driving out every curbed feeling with a force that makes the werewolf cry out in a primal, raw display of heartache even as more tears trail salty paths down his face and neck.
"Oh, G-God," his voice is rough and the pain-filled words feel like needles inside his throat "God, please…please no, p-please…oh god, n-not them"
Just as his heart made the unconscious decision to freeze and wither those many weeks ago, it now cannot not help or stop the tears that split it open, releasing all the images, thoughts and feelings that Remus has neither felt nor thought of since the night he lost everything and everyone he'd held so cherished and so close to him. With one last terrified, apologetic struggle, his heart and soul splinters beneath the pain, pouring out everything and leaving the werewolf crying desolately into the stark, heavy hush of his flat, feeling as though the universe had folded in on him.
Memories flicker behind his eyes and he falls the rest of the way down to the floor, lying on his side with his head against the cold wood. James' eyes flash before him, bright and smiling and the werewolf whimpers brokenly as he realises he'll never see them again, he'll never feel the warmth and affection of that friendly gaze on him again. Lily's benevolent smile will never fall his way again, he will never hear her voice again. God, he'll never know their son, never have the chance to explain to him, to tell him the wonderful stories of his brave, beautiful parents.
"God, H-Harry," he whispers wretchedly, his own pain doubling at the thought of the child who will never know his parents "I'm s-sorry"
He thinks of Peter, poor, trusting Peter whose last moments of life had been wrought with agony and terror and he retches roughly at the tide of nausea the image causes within him, shivering against the floor as the icy chill of the flat bites at his damp face.
And, oh God, that sick feeling swells as memories of his ebony-haired lover spark and flare behind his eyelids and he chokes out another acute sob, his hands rising up to clutch at his aching head. The realisation of Sirius' betrayal surges around him, inside him, through him and the werewolf fists his hands deeper into his hair as he screams into the silence, one deep, horrifying scream that seems to shatter and rip the last few chains of his detachment. Every face and facet of his mind and heart comes together now and their voices ring in his ears, they all scream for revenge and cry out with harrowing vehemence at the sheer and complete destruction that falls when one is betrayed by a love one. But other parts of him twist and shake in denial, unwaveringly protesting their disbelief, that Sirius loves him, loves James, Lily, Harry and Peter, that there has to be something, anything, to show it's not true.
Remus scrambles again to his knees, leaning forward and clasping both hands to his mouth. His tears still fall, his eyes stinging from the burning heat of such a torrent and his breathing comes faster, harsher as the acerbic impact of Sirius' treachery hits him like a thousand, foul kicks to the gut.
"Bastard," he spits the word through his angry gasps, the crumpled note clutched so tightly in his hand that his fingers start to fade to white and his nails bite bloodily into his palm "you fucking, God-damned traitor," he smears the continuous trail of his tears with one arm, cursing his pain "I hate you, God, you bastard, rot…rot, you tr-…you…G-God, you t-traitor!"
But even as he speaks it, he's torn by it. Piercing hatred wells and bubbles in him and he wishes for one, endless moment that he could kill the ebony-haired man who's cursed him with a lifetime of friendless, excruciatingly painful days and sleepless, tear-filled nights. For one moment, he is electrified by the sheer intensity of his emotions whilst simultaneously struck by the cool notion that there is actually nothing left for him to live for. Love and hate battles inside him and he kneels, gasping and trembling as the crisp, cold stab of anguish, loss and loathing is smoothed over and washed away by a searing rush of shame and guilt.
He still loves him.
He groans desperately and lifts the note to his face, feeling the warm, wrinkled paper against his hot, wet cheek and feeling as though he can absorb some of his lover's soul from it, feeling as though the Sirius who wrote this one, simple, meaningless note was someone separate from the Sirius that had murdered his only family. And, though he tries to push it away, he cannot stop feeling grief for Sirius too, can't erase the anguish of imagining his love wallowing away in madness deep in the grim heart of Azkaban. He can't stop loving the man who has devastated his life more than anyone else ever could, and the shame of it tarnishes and stains him far, far more than anything else.
All at once, he doesn't feel alone anymore, he feels haunted and, God, it feels so much worse. He knows that he's lost everyone he loved, their deaths, the pitiful, needless waste of their lives will always be there, stuck onto the sides of his heart even as the treachery of his love clogs his throat, making him gasp for breaths that he doesn't even want to take.
So he just stops.
He just stops and kneels now, letting every emotion and thought flow and dash through him as they wish, letting himself cry and scream and hate and love and grieve even if he knows he can never move on. He can never stop, not now, and he wonders how he'd kept going for so long before.