Quo Animo:

The fifth and sixth bits.

Remus

Our relationship can only get so awkward before we melt into puddles of painfully angsty, overdramatic teenage goo. Figuratively speaking, of course. Then again, this is Hogwarts. Anything is possible, so I suppose that we could literally melt into puddles, but I'd really rather not think of that. I can't imagine it would be very comfortable and the puddles would likely be toxic to anyone unlucky enough to inhale in their general vicinity.

We haven't spoken since that night. Actually, I've been perfectly willing to talk but I've decided that you're calling the shots on this one, so it would be more accurate to say you haven't spoken to me since that night.

It's okay for now. It's not like we've been unable to be in the same room or anything. In fact, at the moment we're seated across from each other enjoying a rather nice breakfast, such as Hogwarts is wont to provide. Peter and James are having a contest to see who can stuff the most bacon in his mouth without swallowing it and you're judging. I'm reading the Daily Prophet and pretending that I can't hear it when you tell Peter things like "if you didn't have a gag reflex you'd have this thing in the bag." It makes me think entirely too much about… things that are undignified to think about.

That's not to say there's any more dignity in doing it than in thinking about it, but—

The flow of my thoughts is interrupted when I turn the page in the paper. Words are easy to interrupt. Thoughts are harder. There are not many things that would interrupt my very thoughts. This is definitely among those blessedly few things. I feel my eyes prickling at the corners before I excuse myself politely and calmly walk to the Gryffindor Common Room where I proceed to uncharacteristically kick a couch before going up the stairs to the dorm. Here, I set a quick silencing charm on my bed after having drawn the curtains and indulge in a very unmanly scream.

Lately, things have been getting pretty bad. I don't just mean with me, I mean with the whole wizarding world. This peculiar cult (rather pretentiously calling themselves the "Death Eaters" har har) has been showing up all over the place vandalizing shops and terrorizing people. Lately there have even been some disappearances. All of it is duly reported to the prying ears of the public.

All of that can be dealt with.

It's awful, certainly, but I'm somehow removed from it. I don't mean to be callous, but I don't shop at the stores that are being vandalized. I don't personally know anyone who's disappeared. Because of this, it doesn't seem like it's actually happening on some level.

What is real and terrible for me to have to look at is his face staring out at me from some page on the Prophet. I see him there, snarling for the photographer with his hair falling out of place despite the slickness of the gel and sweat meant to be holding it back, blood dribbling down his chin, a mad glint in his eyes… but all I can see are the memories.

I don't even remember properly meeting him, I was too young to remember, but I know that he owned me on some level. He owned me with his stupid smile and his stupid laughter and his stupid chocolate. I know that, when I woke up in St. Mungo's broken and confused and scared out of my mind, I asked my mom when he was coming to visit me.

I remember that she cried.

The worst part of it is that, even after all of these years of hating everything about him, some part of me feels absolutely sick to see him in that state. Even though I hate him, that can't change the fact that he was like family to me when he was around. There were several years when, even though I intellectually knew that he was bad I still just wanted him to come back. Those were the years when, even if I knew it was wrong, I knew that I would still do anything he told me to, because I was a good, obedient child like that. Like I still am.

Now the hate has had enough time to boil all of the obedience away, but not all of the sentimentality. I've finally spent a sufficient time despising him to know that I'm not powerless to go against anything that he might ask, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still something there.

He still owns me.

Fenrir Greyback owns a piece of my soul.

I haven't even read the article, just looked at the picture. It has to have run twenty times by now: Snarl right in the lens, pull away from the people trying to contain him, large glop of blood mixed with feral drool slides off his chin and settles on his shirt, neck becomes exposed as he throws his head back to howl at the sun in the sky as if it will listen to his pain like the moon does, and then it all repeats. Over and over and over and over…

My gaze is stuck on it. I can't shake it off. The smiling memories in my head and the snarling man on the page in front of me mesh in some sort of an ungodly medley. He smiles for the camera, teeth shining, blood dripping out of his smiling mouth, the moon above him not even doing me the courtesy of coming out from behind the silver lined clouds.

"I'm sorry, Remus," he says.

"Fenrir," I say.

Child's hands reach toward him, foolishly trusting as they always have.

He smirks as he runs away, awkward half-human body stumbling as he leaves.

I don't realize I'm asleep until you shake me awake. Your hand is tentatively on my shoulder like you're not sure if that's okay anymore.

Hell, I'm not sure if that's okay anymore. But I let you do it, because you're calling the shots.

I can't see his picture, now. You've got my paper folded up and shoved under your arm. I want to demand it back, but I don't. Because you're calling the shots.

"What happened?"

The first words you've spoken to me in three days and they demand so much. You haven't warmed me up with a bit of your normal humor, haven't tried to make this easier with a smile or anything. The concern in your face orders me to answer like the glow of the moon commands a response from the Wolf.

Hoooooooowwwwwwwwl.

I wordlessly point at the Prophet. My mouth doesn't quite feel up to opening at the moment.

I take stock of myself as you flip through the pages and I notice that my eyes are swollen. I must have started crying at some point.

How embarrassing.

You inevitably find the right page and stare at the picture, reading the article underneath. Then you stare at me with more confusion than before. "This one?"

I nod.

"What's the problem? Greyback was one of the bad guys. It's good they finally caught him."

I can only make a garbled choking noise in my throat. I hadn't even read the article. I didn't know what it was about. But then, I didn't care.

I don't care.

The emotions swirling around in my chest, crawling over my heart, filling my lungs, settling like sludge in my belly, make me want to scream. I know that I should be happy. On one hand I even am. They finally caught the bastard and I hope they put him down just like they always do with feral animals. But on the other hand, in the childish part of me that still clings to some stupid hope that he couldn't help it, the part of me that he owns, I'm torn to pieces.

And you don't even know that he's the one who turned me.

So I look at you, eyes wide as they'll go in their current swollen state and pat the space beside me on the duvet. You take the offered place and wrap your arm around my shoulder, pulling my body into yours.

I guess that no matter how awkward we get, serious distress will always bring us back here.

"C'mon. Why don't you tell me what's wrong."

And even though my blood crawls at even just the thought of saying any of it aloud, I do. Because this is what you want, and you're calling the shots.


Sirius

"He'd been friends with my parents for years," you tell me as you watch his photograph snarling in my lap. It's obvious that you see more in that picture than I do. The graphic itself is certainly disturbing and therefore somewhat distracting, but that doesn't account for how captivated you are. I start to move it away because you seem to be in some sort of distress, but you make this little keening noise in your throat and, not only can I not move the paper, I can't make myself move at all.

"He'd come over for dinner, you know. And he'd babysit me. He was always around. He lived in the apartment just below ours. It felt like he was my uncle or something and he'd always bring me chocolate. I was obsessed with it even then. My mum would never give me chocolate. She said it wasn't good for me, but he always had some. Always kept it around," you mumble. You're speaking in clipped half sentences and you're rambling and it's not like you at all. The muscles in my arms tighten until I almost have you sitting in my lap, but you're not quite there. That would put you on top of the paper, and I get the feeling that touching it is something that you are not going to do under any circumstance.

"Just for me, he said," you continue softly. "He kept it around just for me, and mum and dad would just smile like there was nothing they could do to help it and they'd let me eat his chocolate. Because he was 'Uncle Fen' and so it was okay," I don't notice your voice break when you say his name. Well, I do, but I'll say I didn't if you ask later. I can't, however pretend you don't whisper it like it's a secret. I just sit and listen to you talk. I think that you really just need for someone to listen, right now.

"And we never knew about him," you say incredulously, your voice showing the most emotion that you've had since you started speaking and yet your gaze never leaves his visage. "Never knew a thing. He wasn't always around, you see. We'd see him every two or three days and sometimes we let him stay in the guest bedroom because his apartment got flooded out or the plumbing burst or something like that so he got to stay over and I remember going into his room when I was four and I sat at the foot of the bed until he woke up and then we laughed all night and he took out a flashlight from somewhere and made shadow puppets until the sun came up. So we couldn't make them anymore," you pause to take a breath and a hot tear creeps down your face. When it falls on my arm it's cold. "The sun made it too bright for shadows, you know. You can't make shadow puppets in the daytime," the last sentence is whispered as if sacred.

I have never seen you like this before in the entire time I've known you. You have never been this upset. I've seen you yell once, a little under two weeks ago, and that's it for this emotional sort of thing. That I at least know something of what to do with. Shouting I can understand. This puts me at a loss. You're always the one with the infuriatingly calm reason and logic even when the shit really hits the fan. I feel like I'm comforting a child instead of an almost fully grown man, but that's okay. Everyone has to break down sometime.

Almost as if you realize how you've been acting and come back to yourself, you take a shuddering breath in and a similar breath out, your back straightening at the same time. Your eyes, however, do not move from his face.

"You know how, even though you might hate your family, they're still your family and even if you wish they were dead it still kills you to let them down?"

I don't need to respond. You already know the answer. The parallel between your past and my own is sufficient enough for the line of questioning to be dropped with no further mention.

"He was like a second father to me," you insist. "And I hate him. You know that, don't you? I hate him," another tear rushes down your cheek. "I trusted him so much," you say more softly before taking another shuddering breath to calm yourself. But it doesn't work. You hunch over to grab the copy of the Prophet and you fling it angrily to where it lands, unfortunately, face up on my bed, the picture of Fenrir Greyback still facing toward us.

And you still can't look away.

"He was my Uncle Fen," you whisper insistently against the shell of my ear sounding so painfully young that I can't help but pull you closer.

Until this point I'd just been passively listening, but pieces suddenly start to fit together in my mind and the blood runs cold in my veins as I truly give you my full attention.

"Mum said that it was bedtime, that I couldn't go out in the dark because it wasn't safe for 'good little boys like me' to be out when the sun wasn't. But he said he had something to show me," your attention suddenly leaves the newspaper, as if I'm suddenly the most important person in the world. You're lucid again. I can tell because the look that you're giving me is so heavy that I suddenly can't breathe. "It wasn't uncommon to meet him after dark, you know. We'd take out the ladder, or he'd take out the ladder because seven-year-olds don't have the muscle to lift that kind of weight, and we'd sit on the roof and he'd point out constellations to me. Sirius was my favorite, you know," your general aura of intensity briefly flashes "lust" and I hear my heart thump in my chest. It leaves as quickly as it came. "But not that night. That night, as I was sitting out on the steps waiting for him to come with the ladder, I heard this scrabbling at the dirt, and then panting… labored breath. I was convinced that he was hurt, and so I ran out to find him… but I didn't find him."

Your eyes dart away from mine and I feel somehow bereft, but then they're back and you're more intense than ever despite the wry twist to your lips. "He found me."

I want to say something. Anything. But I can't. You hold me hostage in your gaze and, despite the vastly different circumstances, I am reminded of our encounter a few days ago. Though the meaning behind the looks wasn't even remotely the same, the intensity could hardly be more similar.

When you crawl out from behind your books and masks of "The Mild-Mannered Man" you're really a very intense sort of person, Remus. We mere mortals don't stand a chance against you.

"So, when I see that picture of him, in so much obvious distress, finally captured after all of these years of waiting and hating and indecision…" you trail off. "I know that I should be happy. I should feel free for the first time in years and I should feel vindicated. And I do on some level. But on another level entirely, I can't," the intensity leaves as quickly as if someone had cut the bottom off of a Styrofoam cup filled with it and the clarity that it brought is instantly clouded with frustration and confusion. "I can't…"

I know with an obscene amount of certainty that you don't have anything else to say, so all I do is pull you to my chest, rubbing soothingly at your back and whisper that "it's okay." I hold you just as I held you all those weeks ago when I first caught you cutting away at your skin. But this time, it's you that needs it instead of me.

I hold you for almost an hour before I'm ready to let you go.


A/N:

Hey, just like last week con-crit is awesome and if there are any typos please point them out. This chapter hasn't been edited and re-edited as many times as my chapters usually are, so there might be some awkward wording and/or typos that need to be fixed asap. So point that out if you see it. Also, know that reviews give me warm fuzzy feelings inside and do with it what you will.

I know that it's been FOREVER since I first posted this and this update is a long time coming and is not as long as the other chapters have been. It's probably not as good, either. But, this is largely because I actually didn't originally have this chapter included at all, so I inserted it here after the next one had already been written because the other one didn't make as much sense as I would have liked. And now it makes more sense, but the writing style isn't exactly appropriate given this newly introduced information. You probably don't care about most of that, but (in case you missed it) this means that the next chapter is already written! Yay!

So, it will be up on Saturday the 25th at approximately five o' clock Mountain time.

I know, I know. "If you have it, why don't you post it now?" The answer, my lovelies, is simply that, since this chapter is what it is and was written after the next chapter, a few modifications need to be made to the next one. And then I need to read it over a few more times to make sure that it doesn't suck, and there isn't too much awkward phrasing, and I haven't made any spelling or grammatical errors, and it flows okay and it fits well enough with the new turns, and... stuff.

'Cause I'm sort of OCD like that.

So, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and super thanks to neenabluegirl, Lady Annikaa, moonfoot13, and Sad eyed Lady of The Low Life for reviewing last time. I hope you haven't lost interest because I've taken three months to finally get the next bits posted.

Thanks for reading,

Misprocuous