Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns.
Summary: She kisses him. He is not alone, and this is not going the way he had expected.
Alarming is the way he stands there like an idiot when she catches him staring at her, because he never can come up with something clever to say, and when she's smiling at him like that he finds himself completely incapable of looking away.
He wonders if she likes coffee. He could ask, but his mouth doesn't seem to be working at the moment. So he just stands there smiling.
And she smiles back.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way she hurtles through the door, calling apologies to Sirius for waking his mother, and apologies to him for being late, and what must he think of her, she swears she never meant to stand him up, but evildoers were being irritatingly persistent tonight. She takes his hand and pulls him out into the night, where the leaves are rustling and it smells of winter. He puts his arm around her shoulders beneath a quarter moon, and for four dates further than he thought they'd ever get, it's really not so bad at all.
They dance their way down an empty street. She says she doesn't like to indulge in clichés, but he convinces her. Secretly, he has never liked clichés either. Before tonight.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the breath that catches in his chest when he wakes to find her there. She is sitting at his bedside watching him, with papers strewn about her chair and a mug of tea by her feet as if she had been working while he slept. There is a bottle of smoking potion on the table, and a tightness in the skin around his eye that suggests a ferocious new scar there.
He yanks the blanket to his chin and winces, because his ribs are bruised as well.
There are words of horror and apology on his lips, but the way she is looking at him with her orange hair tied back and a quill behind her ear makes him feel sick and hurt and suddenly too full of something that must be emotion, and the words die on his tongue.
She doesn't ask how he is feeling, just reaches out to brush the hair from his forehead.
"You should have more potion on that."
And suddenly he is very angry with her and with himself, because he didn't ask her to be here, he didn't want her to be here, and doesn't she have somewhere she is supposed to be today? And yet here she sits, as if this is okay, as if this is normal, offering her boyfriend potions for the pain of bones tearing and teeth lengthening and claws, for God's sake, claws. As if sitting next to a werewolf is somewhere she had ever wanted to be.
He opens his mouth, but her finger is now against his lips and she is watching him wearily.
"Shut up, Remus," she tells him.
"You know—"
"Shut up."
Sirius hums his way through the door with two mugs of coffee and the outline of blue teeth marks up his neck, and she props her feet up on his bed and settles back in her chair, leafing through a stack of parchment.
The mug is pushed into his hands as Sirius sprawls on the bed beside him, promising that the next time he goes for his face, he'll wake up castrated. He looks over and she is smiling down at her papers.
Suddenly he is smiling too. A small smile, but easy and unforced, and he doesn't know why.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the colours she chooses for her hair, and the way he loves to run his fingers through it. Those strands of rainbow slipping through his fingers, and the feeling that for once in his life he seems to have a hold on something incredible.
An urge to quote Lord Byron niggles at his throat, but there is something warm and glowing about the silence in the still air and the rain against the library window, and he thinks she may have fallen asleep in his lap, anyway.
Thunder rolls. She cracks an eye and says, "'S storming."
"Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life."
He can't help himself. She smirks and tosses her book to the floor, settles further into him and goes back to sleep.
He never was much of a poet, but around her everything just comes out in verse.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way her fingers run across the scars on his chest, and how he knows it isn't kindness, or delicacy, or even affection that has her tracing that old and particularly painful bite mark on his forearm while her lips ghost across the tangible proof of his inhumanity. Rather, she just isn't bloody bothered.
So he holds her that much tighter and her fingernails dig channels in his skin, and the sound that is dragged from him is not so much a moan as a question of "Where have you been?"
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way he walked out of the Ministry with nothing more than a few scratches, and still he feels ripped apart. There is a hot knife in his chest and someone is cutting and cutting and he is screaming and screaming, God how loudly he is screaming at them to stop but they won't. They just keep cutting.
There should be a point where the cuts run out, because how many pieces can a man be torn into before he stops being a man? Before he stops screaming and stops hurting, because there is nothing left in him with which he can feel?
Can't you see? he wants to ask the Healers, can't you see that I am dying?
But he is not dying—he knows much better than that. Dying is leaving, dying is nothing, dying is the absence of feeling and of hurt and of pain, and he knows that he is not dying. Because he is still very palpably here, and so very palpably in pain that how could he be anything but alive?
By all rights after Sirius he should be empty. If everything had gone according to plan, there would be no one left to lose. He would be completely alone, and at last so wonderfully indifferent.
Except for Harry. Except for her.
And sitting at her bedside, staring at the pale bruises in her pale skin, the pale scar across her pale neck, her pale hands on the pale blankets in a pale room that screams the threat of taking her away, he is very acutely aware that he has piled all of his remaining eggs into one basket.
A basket that the Healers are "optimistic will make it through the night".
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way he finds her, covered in flour and cursing Mrs Black and her penchant for hexing everything she owned. The flour jug is attacking her shins, and somewhere on the floor above, Walburga is cursing her back.
Together they manage to subdue it, and for the first time in what feels like forever, they laugh. They laugh at the flour and each other and this house and themselves and all the things that they haven't laughed at for the last two weeks. Then she sighs and says she has to be at work in ten minutes, and she was only really looking for a box of cereal when she was ambushed in the pantry. She dusts her hair off and grins at what a spectacular entrance she will make in the Auror office this morning.
He is smiling at her.
He is so accustomed to grief, and he knows perfectly well how life after Sirius is meant to go. He is left behind and he moves on, that much more broken and that much more alone.
She kisses him. He is not alone, and this is not going the way he had expected.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way she stares him down when he tells her that he's leaving, and how his carefully prepared speech falls apart at the seams in the face of her indignation. His winning words, so thoughtfully chosen, like old and poor and dangerous fall flat, and she just watches him with narrowed eyes. He had expected tears. Instead he gets her finger in his chest and her eyes boring into his and the scoff of "I dodged two killing curses before lunch, Remus," and "you overestimate yourself—you're not the most dangerous thing by far", and how could he have failed to come up with an argument for that?
So he does what is both the easiest and the hardest thing. He turns around and leaves. He steps out of the door and into the breeze of the midsummer evening and the breeze of things that are about to go horribly wrong and Disapparates. And when he gets back to Grimmauld Place he sinks to the floor and holds the hole in his chest and stares at the walls, unmoving, because for once in his life he is the one doing the leaving.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the energy that spreads throughout the camp the day before a full moon. Whether it is the excitement or the heavy fear that sickens him, he isn't sure.
He leans against a tree and watches the half-hearted snowfall and thinks of her, unwillingly. He hopes she had a nice Christmas. Alone.
He is consolidating information quietly in his head, writing up his weekly report in his brain, and watching two skinny children attack each other with teeth and nails across the field. Greyback has plans (Greyback always had plans), I've convinced a few (that he wasn't entirely mad), but their feelings for Voldemort won't easily be changed.
It isn't going to work, he realises he is thinking. His brain and all of the things he has Not Been Admitting have been getting the better of him lately. Across the field the first child throws a punch that knocks the other down.
He lets his head fall back against the tree with a sigh. They are going to join the Death Eaters and they are going to die like so much worthless canon fodder. He would stand here and try to save them, one at a time, but they would go in droves to the wizard who promised them everything. And how could he blame them.
They had asked him once, if he'd had a woman back in the world of the undamned. He hadn't really considered, just told them yes. The werewolves had leered. He hadn't meant it in the way they did.
The irony of the whole thing strikes him as he pulls his coat more tightly around himself. He thinks of her, but mostly he thinks that honestly, this operation might be futile. He thinks that Dumbledore may have been wrong. He thinks he should probably go back. It's a sudden realisation.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way she clings to him. She was never one to cling.
"You're a prat," she tells him breathlessly, "You are such a prat." And he kisses her and kisses her and backs her up against the door and kisses her, because yes, he is, he is an absolute bastard and he doesn't know what else to say.
Her hair is brown and she looks awful, and he knows from the way she swallows as her hands run across his prominent ribs that he must look the same. He buries his face in her shoulder, and when her fingers find the vicious gash at his collarbone and the scars that streak up his neck, she makes a sound in the back of her throat and he wonders for the thousandth time tonight if he is doing the right thing.
Dumbledore would have been happier than anybody to think that there was a little more love in the world.
She had told him quite plainly — with a handful of his jumper and a hint of desperation in her voice and Merlin that was scary too — that if he didn't trust his own advice, the least he could do was take Dumbledore's. So he had kissed her. He is still kissing her. It's a good default, he thinks — kissing her.
They are down the hall and in her bedroom and falling onto her bed, and she is pulling at his jumper and he is scrabbling with her belt. And nothing is confusing or convoluted or painful and it is so disgustingly easy to just be that he wants to kick himself for making it anything but.
There are two places he has ever been okay, he thinks: at Hogwarts and with her. The decision is suddenly very easy.
And it's all very alarming.
Alarming is the way he hears himself say the words in the darkness, and the feeling that he knows he means them but damn it Remus what do you think you are doing. She's sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, and he wouldn't be able to see her expression even if he'd wanted to because it is so very, very dark in the bedroom, and outside the window and everywhere. So he stares at the ceiling and prepares himself with a sickeningly eager resolve to hear the derision in her "No", because this, if anything, will teach him to hope for the normality in life that he doesn't deserve.
Instead she pulls the socks off his feet and stretches herself over him and kisses him. And when he finally, finally is the one to pull back, she's smiling so wildly that he feels the heat of it radiate off his face.
"Yes," she says, and has to flick his nose because he is staring at her in something that shouldn't be shock and terror and astonishment and joy, but doesn't feel like anything else. The rest of his life hovers over him with that amazing bright hair that she has only managed, she says, to conjure up in the weeks he has been back. Because of him.
Now he has been saddled with that responsibility forever. He likes the way it feels in his chest.
And it is all so terrifically, deliciously, beautifully alarming.
(fin)