"You can wear a mask and paint your face.
You can call yourself the human race.
You can wear a collar and a tie.
One thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside."
-John Lennon, Crippled Inside
Lily exited the building surrounded by a small cluster of people, none of whom she seemed to be particularly interested in talking to. Severus approached, and sat on a bench, betting on the fact that she'd been too absorbed in the book she was reading while walking to notice him. He lifted a newspaper he pretended to read, no Death Eater was stupid enough to be obvious about their whereabouts. He knew some others, such as Rosier, had their own agenda, and he was careful to avoid the public eye as much as possible. It felt good now to live in the shadows, feared by those who knew who they were dealing with. No one would dare to laugh at his hooked nose anymore, and he reveled in his newfound power.
He looked up and noticed Lily had stopped to talk with someone, a girl he remembered from a news article from a while ago, something about Sirius Black's new girlfriend. Severus tried not to let his disappointment show, and crumpled the sides of his newspaper, gripping it too tightly. He'd missed his chance, but it still wasn't too late to get on the bus with them and see where Lily lived now, for future reference. It was probably to avoid him that she'd vacated her old flat. Severus had felt a twinge of sadness when he'd noted that, but he simply resolved to double his efforts to find her and talk to her.
She needed to know. He couldn't accept Lily was hanging around James and the Marauders for anything else than material gain. He was sure she could provide him information from the wealthy of England directly. He could show her that she could come back to him, and it would be like before, only Lily and him. Severus slipped into the back of the bus, head bowed, one eye trained on Lily chatting to the blond girl whose name still escaped him. He knew she'd change her mind after what he had planned in the afternoon. Lily was sure to change her mind, and reconsider her affiliation with the Marauders. A crooked smile twisted his face underneath the curtain of dark hair.
Remus' sprawling, wall-sized bookcase was the closest he could get to paradise. He trailed his hands over the fiction section, in alphabetical order of course, searching for a book to kill the evening. Usually he was against the ideology of "killing time," always considering there was too much to do and too little time. He knew when he was feeling melancholic when his vision of the world flipped, and there was too much time and not enough to do. That's when Remus would always opt for picking up a book to drown out his doubts and worries.
He had his own stash of guitars, like both James and Sirius, his were hanging neatly on wall mounts, perfectly lined up, in order of their sizes. Remus could walk around his flat blindfolded and pick the right one without hesitation, which he'd once tried on a dare after too many drinks one night, and he'd won a pony from each of the others who had so little rationality left to bet on something as surefire and Remus' sense of organization.
Remus cringed whenever he saw Sirius' flat, a mess of things on the floor, his favorite bass thrown carelessly on his couch, and a few pictures of Marlene and him hanging crookedly on the wall, and the smell of month-old cigarettes pervading the cluttered area.
A strangled scream woke him from his reverie, a musty Jack London book still in his hand. It dropped out of his hand as he moved towards his window, his street-level flat giving him a perfect view of the sidewalk. He saw a slumped figure against a street light and rushed outside.
The police cars drove in silently as he stooped next to the girl. Her eyes were closed and long lashes covered them. Her hair was a short ruffled mess, a red so pale it was almost blond, and freckles covered the bridge of her nose. She was very still, and her hand still trailed from it the latest Marauders album and a pen that had been dropped in a hurry. The blood had already congealed around the wound in her chest, most likely caused by a stab wound.
"Mr. Lupin?"
Remus stood up, wincing. He'd worked so hard to distance himself from the fans, and now it had worked. He felt oddly calm, and empty, but empty was better than the alternative. His voice answered the policeman, sounding far away. "I heard the scream and called, I think she wanted me to sign the album." He pointed to the album. The record inside had shattered; dark shards peeked out of the sleeve.
He watched as they picked up her body and followed the policeman numbly when he was brought in for further questioning on the circumstances of her death. The one thought Remus could formulate properly was how she'd found him.
"It's done," Dolohov said, wiping the blood from his knife with a rag. The abandoned shop was a good anonymous meeting place. Dolohov proudly held the merit of discovering the place.
Severus turned slightly in his chair. "I'm curious. How did you do it?"
"Seems she couldn't resist my charms," Dolohov smirked, moving into the light of the bare bulb. His well-defined features contrasted sharply in the lighting, his day-old stubble becoming more dramatic. "I pretended to be her friend. She'd let me into her house, you know, Antonin this, Antonin that."
"And her father?"
"Didn't suspect a thing. I got some important documents from right under his nose." He snorted. "They all trusted me so much. You should've heard her when she saw the knife. 'Antonin! Why are you doing this? We were friends,'" he simpered.
"Did you move the body after?" Severus asked.
"No, I did it right there. She came right along, trying to get her album signed." Dolohov chuckled, shaking his head. His hair fell in front of his face, as his face broke into a wild laugh.
It had been a few minutes since the questioning was over, and now they were sitting in the room, having reached a sort of stalemate, and now it was simply a matter of who would speak first.
This inspector had something odd about him, his beard and hair were close-cropped and graying, but he seemed to have wisdom hundreds of years old. He spoke softly, and asked Remus strange and seemingly irrelevant questions such as which songs he'd written on the album the girl had been holding. On the desk was a nameplate bearing, "Inspector Albus Wulfric."
Now Remus was looking and the strange, spindly, silver trinkets that seemed to line shelves and shelves in the office, and the walls that were claustrophobically lined with black-and-white pictures of what seemed to be other police inspectors, maybe the man's predecessors. As Remus' eyes wandered around the room, he had a feeling the inspector's eyes were trained on his.
"Sir, we've found an identity for the victim," a policeman appeared in the room and the inspector looked up. For an older man, he moved with surprising agility, and picked up the small square of paper, looking at it critically.
He set it on the table, and Remus looked at the picture, the image of her corpse flashing in his mind as he saw a picture of her, eyes open and a smile on her face.
"Tammy McDonald. Nobody," the policeman said. Remus stood up.
"She was somebody," he said firmly. The inspector looked at him, his beard hiding any trace of emotion he might have had.
"Inspector Wulfric," he said, nodding at the man. He left the police station in a sort of daze, the address of the swimming around in his mind. He got back to his flat in an understandable state of agitation. He tried flicked off his reading lamp he'd left on, and heard a scream. Spinning around faster than he thought was possible, he saw Tammy McDonald's body slumped against his wall, lying brokenly under his row of guitars. He turned the light back on and it disappeared. It was a long time before he worked up the courage to move again, and carefully sat onto his bed. It squeaked under his weight and he saw something out of the corner of his eye, something sitting on the ground against his bookshelf, but before he could turn his head to look properly it was gone. Remus took a deep breath. This was post-traumatic stress; he'd read about it. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the darkness, and he let a nervous smile onto his face, until the pieces of the broken record appeared in his mind's eye, and before he knew it he was running across his flat, flipping switches and lightly up the place much more than was needed. When he was finished, and the light was so intense to as to make him squint slightly, he sat on his couch. He was completely still for hours, until he lost feeling in his arms and legs.
He dragged himself into his bed around three in the morning and laid there, his eyes open and somehow unseeing, staring into the flawless wall painted a muted orange-hued yellow, not unlike Tammy's hair.
He woke up early the next morning and made an unreasonably large amount of tea for himself. He poured liberal amounts of sugar and milk into his cup and took a bar of chocolate from his cupboard to satisfy his everlasting sweet tooth. While he sipped at his tea, his eyes wide from lack of sleep, he made a decision. He left his flat ten minutes later, but he wasn't going to Dumbledore Studios.
