Disclaimer: These characters belong to more talented world-builders than myself.
A/N: Well, in the past couple of weeks, I've moved to college and gotten a Tumblr. If you have a Tumblr and are interested, you can find me by searching the-lincyclopedia. Also, sorry if this post is a bit short; moving to college has taken most of my attention. But I'm really enjoying writing this story, so it will continue, don't worry.
A note about canon: I started working on this story prior to the release of Sherlock Series 3, so I'm just kind of going to ignore that canon (although I'll borrow from it in an ad hoc way as I see fit). I'm going to stick pretty closely Harry Potter, though. Then again, you don't see much of Remus in the fourth book, so I have a lot of leeway.
By the time the carriage was approaching London, Remus was beginning to have some doubts about his plan. "Will the Muggles see us?" he asked the driver, breaking what was by now two hours' silence.
"Them? Ah, they don't see nuffink. Don't choo worry yourself about them." The driver gave Remus another one of his tooth-deficient smiles.
"I knew a Muggle once who saw almost everything . . . ," Remus mused, mostly to himself.
"Sure 'e was a Muggle, then? Not a wizard in disguise?" Remus wished the driver would look at the road a bit more, rather than turning around to face Remus while he talked.
"Yes, I'm sure he was a Muggle," Remus said. "The smartest Muggle who ever lived. Not a drop of magic in him, but his brain made up for it. More than made up for it. He could do more just by thinking than most witches and wizards can do with their wands."
"Choo in love wi' 'im?" the driver asked, surprising Remus. He was used to the assumption, but generally not from people who dropped their H's. "Nuffink wrong wi' that, mind you, just asking. I'm very liberal-minded, see . . ."
Remus cleared his throat. "No, I'm not in love with him. He's dead, anyway."
"Sorry for your loss," the driver said, still refusing to keep his eyes on the road. The carriage seemed to be weaving in and out of traffic of its own accord, and Remus wondered momentarily what the point was of having a driver. "I've never met a gay fella in real life, t' be honest. Don't see what the big deal is, though. You love 'oo you love and 'oose business is it anyway, tryin' to say if that's right or wrong?"
"No one's business," Remus said, wondering if the driver would agree with that statement if he switched out "become on the full moon" for "love." Probably not, but then you never knew.
"Right. 'Xactly. No one's business."
Silence resumed for a while, and the driver finally turned his attention to the road. This left Remus to think about his bigger doubts, much more pressing than whether any Muggles would notice the magical carriage. (That wouldn't really be his problem, anyway; it would be the driver's.) No, now he wondered about whether Mrs. Hudson still owned 221B Baker Street, and if she had let it to other tenants, and where he would stay if she had, and what Mycroft had made of his disappearance, and where Sirius had gotten by now.
As the streets of London flashed by outside the carriage window, Remus realized that almost everyone he saw was wearing jeans—and he was still in his robes. He tried to remember the spell for transfiguring clothes. It was one of the many things he'd brushed up on as a teacher, because he'd been playing the part of the adult wizard, and adult wizards were supposed to have a huge repertoire of miscellaneous spells at their disposal. What was it again? Remus finally remembered the incantation, pointed his wand at himself, and pictured the clothes he wanted to be wearing: jeans and a red collared shirt. He muttered the words and felt the change immediately. Ouch. The pants were too tight by several sizes and pinched painfully; the shirt was more maroon than red, and it didn't have a collar, although there were two random buttons in the middle.
Maybe trying everything at once was too much. Remus focused on the jeans and mumbled a spell to make them larger. At once, they became incredibly baggy. He racked his brain for a shrinking spell and whispered it, as if the volume of his voice could control the strength of the spell. Whispering didn't seem to help; the pants were now so tight that Remus wanted to cry out in pain. He whispered the enlargement spell again. After several attempts at going back and forth, his pants were finally a somewhat tolerable size, and he decided to give it a rest.
Before Remus had a chance to try to fix his shirt, the driver pulled up at 221B Baker Street and said, "'Ere you are."
"Thanks," said Remus, stepping out of the carriage and gathering his luggage. What on Earth was he going to do with a grindylow at 221B?
"Need 'elp carryin' that in?" asked the driver, pointing to Remus's case.
"No, I've got it. Thank you for the ride." Remus began rummaging in the pocket of his robes, hoping there were a few galleons in there somewhere.
"No need to pay, sir; Dumbledore did that already," said the driver, tipping his blue top hat.
"Right. Well. Thank you again." The carriage pulled away, and Remus began lugging his possessions up the steps to 221B. He had half a mind to put a levitation spell on his case, but it would be just like Mycroft to have a personal security camera outside his brother's old flat, so he carried his things to the landing like a Muggle and then used the brass knocker to announce his presence.
There was no answer. Remus waited nearly a minute before trying again, not wanting to seem too impatient if Mrs. Hudson's hip were giving her trouble again. Eventually, though, he decided he hadn't been heard, so he knocked again, longer and harder this time. After about ten seconds, the door swung open slowly.
Remus wasn't entirely sure what happened next, but it felt like he'd been hit in the chest with a Stunning Spell or something similar. After a few bewildered seconds, he became aware of a strangled sound coming from around the place where he'd felt the collision, and he looked down to see Mrs. Hudson clutching him and crying. "John!" she exclaimed.
It had been awhile since Remus had thought about his alternate name, but now the appellation reminded him of the intensity and wonder and frustration and terror and adrenaline and humor and camaraderie of living here with Sherlock. He smiled and hugged Mrs. Hudson back. They stood like that on the steps for a long time, just as they had the last time Remus had visited Baker Street, before the start of the term at Hogwarts.
Finally, Mrs. Hudson stepped back. "Where have you been? You just up and disappeared!"
Remus smiled wearily. "It's a long story. I got a job out in the country. And it went well for a while, but then it . . . didn't. So now I'm back." Mrs. Hudson's eyes roved Remus's face, and she didn't speak. After a while, Remus broke the silence. "I'm wondering . . . have you let the flat? I just don't really know where else to go right now. I'm not sure where I'll work now that I'm back, so money might—"
Mrs. Hudson waved a hand vaguely. "Oh, don't you worry about money, dear; Sherlock left me plenty. I've been keeping the flat just like it was when you left—couldn't bear to see it change, really. Come inside."
Remus picked up his belongings and followed Mrs. Hudson through the familiar door and up the often ill-used staircase. Everything about the place—the carpet, the wallpaper, even the scent of tea and gunpowder and blood and biscuits—felt like home, and he settled into a strange kind of comfort even during that short climb. Upon reaching the top of the stairs, Remus saw that everything was covered in dust, but otherwise it looked as he remembered it. Some of Sherlock's documents were still on the table, even.
"It'll be a bit of a job to clean the place," Mrs. Hudson said, making a sort of sweeping gesture that encompassed the whole flat. "I can help you, if you like."
Remus set down some of his things and smiled. "Thank you. That would be lovely."
Mrs. Hudson looked closer at one of Remus's boxes. It was, he noticed a bit too late, the one containing the grindylow. "What've you got in there?"
Remus thrust the box behind himself with his foot. "Nothing," he lied, wishing Sherlock were here to come up with a better alibi.
Mrs. Hudson gave a knowing smile. "If you say so, dear. Don't suppose it would be any of those nasty body parts that Sherlock used to bring home, would it?"
"Er, nope, definitely not." One of the advantages of dealing with people who were used to Sherlock was that they had a very high tolerance for eccentricity—or anything that might look like eccentricity from the outside, like magic.
"Well, I'll just let you unpack, then, shall I?" Mrs. Hudson said, making her way toward the stairs. "Let me know if you need anything. We can have dinner around seven."
Remus narrowed his eyes. "I thought you weren't our housekeeper." The our slipped out without any conscious thought on his part. He hadn't fully processed that he was going to be living here without Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson smiled. "I can make an exception for one night. I've just gotten one of my boys back, after all."
Remus smiled back. "Be careful. You'll set a dangerous precedent."
"Somehow we've always managed to have bigger dangers to worry about." Mrs. Hudson disappeared down the stairs.
Remus smiled at the place where she'd been for a moment before sighing and beginning to unpack. Everything magical was quickly stashed in his bedroom. He'd left his Muggle clothing here, like he'd been planning on coming back to this life all along, so he changed into some real jeans and the red collared shirt that he'd been trying to imitate. That felt better. The clothes still smelled like his life here—bagged tea and gunpowder and the antiseptic from Bart's. After dressing, Remus put his nose to his own shoulder for a moment and inhaled. It was good to be back.
After Remus had hidden away all of his magical possessions and placed what little remained in proper places around the flat, he wandered back into the main part of the flat and looked around. He paced a bit, running his fingers through the dust on the mantlepiece, picking up the skull, and ensuring that his favorite kind of bagged tea was still in the cupboard to the right of the sink.
After a few minutes, he found himself drawn to the papers on the table. He picked up the whole pile and sat down at the sofa to have a look. At first, the papers seemed totally random. Some had to do with the Tower of London. A few of those looked like they'd been printed out from Wikipedia, but several of them had a TOP SECRET watermark on them, so Sherlock had probably gotten them from Mycroft. There were similar collections of documents, ranging from the internet-accessible to the highly classified, for both the Bank of England and Pentonville.
Something clicked in Remus's mind. Those were the places that Moriarty had broken into shortly before defaming Sherlock. All of this must have to do with their final case . . . Remus pawed through the information hungrily now, not quite sure what he was searching for but feeling that it was there somewhere. There were biographies about several assassins, starting with an Albanian named Suleimani. Then the Wikipedia page on Richard Brook, along with its editing history. And then the editing history of the editing history. It turned out that page was just as mutable as the rest of them. And then there were a few pages of a biography of Bach, and some really technical information about soil identification, and a bunch of information about modern orphanages, and some art history, and some cryptography, and then—
What?
Now there were diagrams. Remus squinted at them. Was that Bart's?
Lists of dimensions covered an entire page, and then there were more diagrams, some drawn on graph paper, some printed from a computer. They showed Bart's from several angles, focusing on the roof and the first floor—or rather, the pavement outside the first floor. Some that just showed the roof included the roofs of the neighboring buildings, along with some dimensions that Remus was pretty sure denoted height difference. Others labeled the utility compartments on the rooftop. One sketched in a fire escape where Remus was quite certain none existed.
The diagrams of the pavement outside the first floor were even stranger. They were most often drawn from above or at least from an angle, and many of them included the wall across the street. Almost all had some imposter element or another, although what that was changed from page to page. Sometimes it was a trampoline; other times there were crudely drawn human figures with stretchers; still other times there seemed to be various types of padding on the ground.
Remus stared at the diagrams for a minute without letting himself think about the implications of what he was seeing. Then he took a deep breath and looked through the entire stack of papers again, starting with the pages about the Tower of London and progressing to the diagrams once again. And then he paged through a third time, just looking at the diagrams.
The first half of the information was about the last case. That much was obvious. And what came after it was—
How to survive a fall.
The message had been a trick. Remus had known it, even at the time; Sherlock had claimed to have researched him to find out about Harry, when obviously research would not have revealed anything about Remus having a sister. And then Sherlock had claimed that the deductions were a magic trick, when Remus and Sherlock both knew what was and wasn't magic.
But Remus hadn't been thinking clearly, and he'd assumed that Sherlock had been forced to lie and was speaking in code just to convey his innocence. But what if the double meanings concealed within his speech had been meant to presage some kind of double meaning in his actions? What if he'd meant Remus to figure out that the fall, just like his supposed guilt, was a lie?
Remus picked up the papers and clattered down the stairs. "Mrs. Hudson!"
A/N: Reviews are lovely, as always. You guys are seriously blowing me away with the attention you've given me so far. It's awesome. Please keep it up. Thank you!