Silver

Author's Note: Because I don't want to study for finals, and because this week's challenge was just too tempting to skip, I present you with my newest HPFF, Silver. It's very trippy, Postwar!fic with crazy Remus Lupin. Oh the wonder. Once again, hope it's not too painful, and if it must be, I hope it's painful in a pleasant sort of way.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and Jesus Christ aren't mine. Boohoo.

i.
Molly had visited him a total of five times since the war was over, each time sincerely concerned about him and his disheveled style of living. Remus had repeatedly and politely declined all the help she had tried to offer. He found that he rather liked it like this. He didn't mind the mess much; in fact, he found his trinkets comforting, like friends, like family. After all, Remus loved his silvers. He kept them scattered about the house; next to the sink with its water-stained mirrors, under a stack of aged Prophets, wedged between pages in an old copy of "Quidditch Throughout the Ages." He liked surrounding his life with them, picking one up at one corner and setting it down at another, all the while remembering. They were in every imaginable corner, waiting patiently for their turn. Remus liked to think that with them around, he'd never be alone.

ii.
A sword for Sirius.

He found this one in a book, with spine soft and edges frayed. The title of the book was no longer legible, but when he opened the first page, the spiny and childish scribble splayed across the inside cover, Sirius Black.

Sirius as a child tugged at his sleeves, a wolfish smile on his face. Remus smiled at the child and gave him a lunch bag filled with lollipops and spiders. Sirius danced away happily. Behind him thorns flourished and clouded over until it filled the span of sky through the broken wall. Remus Lupin took a sip of his coffee.

He rolled the silver figurine between his fingers and brought it to his lips, remembering, remembering, remembering. Sirius the sword. Sirius, the protector of the Chosen One. Sirius, who had oh so conveniently taken a stab at the mound of strawberry syrup pancake and never quite chewed as he swallowed it down. Gulp.

Sirius with his chest squared and body tilting, tilting, tilting back with his eyes growing wider and wider until his body sank beneath the almost solid air around the veil. The world screamed with his blood wailing through his veins. He thought he could hear the sound of sand, invisible and raining down his face, trickling into a puddle of mud.

Remus left the silver sword next to his lukewarm mug of coffee to pick up a silver arrow.

iii.
Nymphadora Tonks, the arrow.

The head of the arrow was always kept sharp. He found that it reminded him of her, the way her teeth felt on his skin as she scribed with his blood as ink.

A lake turned into a stream turned into a delta and into a hand. It lay close to the floor yet stretched toward him with swollen fingers. Remus chuckled and reached down to shake it and was greatly amused by color of perspiration that clung to his fingers.

Remus Lupin used to read volumes and volumes of books. Now Remus Lupin stares at numbers and letters and makes the ink jumble together to form pretty pictures in his mind. Nevertheless, he still reads the Daily Prophet every morning.

He transferred the arrow tip to the palm of his hands and licked his bleeding fingers as he closed his eyes. Tonks the little girl, Tonks the warrior, Tonks who chewed her upper lip as she read the morning papers, her hand reaching up to grasp a lock of stray magenta hair to tuck behind an ear. Her nose would twitch as the lock tumbled back down to where it once was. Every time Remus watched her do this, he fell in love with her all over again. And she knew, so she kept up the routine every morning for him.

Tonks with her neck at an awful angle and sprawling on the floor. The maggots that emerged were an offish brown and rolled merrily in the puddle of gelatinous blood. The Death Eater dungeon had been long evacuated and they had only arrived a month too late. Alastor Moody had dragged him away before he tried to turn her into an Inferi. Remus Lupin had spent six months in the hospital, listening and counting the grains of sand that slowly accumulated to his neck, waiting patiently for it to cover him so all he would know would be silence.

Remus Lupin lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling through the glass of his table. There was a silver there, too. It looked like it was mounted onto the ceiling rather than the table. He found that he preferred this.

iv.
A cross for Harry.

He was allowed to keep this cross after three years in St. Mungos. He had requested it when he left; after years of treatment, he no longer tried to claw out his eyes at the sight of one.

He never understood the words of the hymn, but he sang along anyway. Sometimes he wondered if anyone else could hear them. The blood that dripped down the cross spread and flowered into an apple tree so Remus sat beneath it, playing with its leaves and eating its fruits.

Remus Lupin liked telling stories to the silver cross. He would rasp out words and fragments that made perfect sense in his mind and tell it to the cross so that maybe it wouldn't be so lonely. He would tell it stories of Harry the Seeker, Harry the nosy little brat, Harry who liked chocolate on his ice creams. Sometimes Harry would skip the ice cream and go straight for the chocolate.

Remus liked seeing Harry with ice cream. It meant that for that moment, or at least that second, Harry was happy. He always told Harry that when everything was over, he would serve him chocolate every morning in bed and maybe, if he was good, he would have some ice cream to go with it.

Harry with his arms spread wide, crucified and turned upside down. The blood trickled from the hole in his abdomen and onto his clothes, drawing angry squiggles down his face and into his hair, landing with a soft pitter-patter onto the grimy pavement. Remus brought his body down and hid it in a cave. Three days, five days, a week later and still no Harry emerged. He camped out next to the giant boulder just in case Harry had trouble getting out. A month passed before the guards from St.Mungo's came to haul him away.

v.
Remus Lupin loved his silvers. He liked running into them, like old friends, and staying with them for a while before he found another. His house was full of memories; sometimes he wasn't even sure if they were real memories, or simply morbid manipulations of his mind.
At the end of the day, when Remus Lupin finished running through his collection, he would sit on the edge of his bed and cry.

End.

Alright I hope that was okay and that you're not writhing out of agony. I really must study for finals now or I'll be forced to annhilate a small country.