If Remus Lupin has learned one thing in all his thirty-something years, it's that life is one knife in the ribs after the other, and one such nasty surprise is sitting on his kitchen counter when he walks in that night, sprawled over the breadbin and eating the last of his green candyfloss grapes.
And that's where the trouble starts.
"I was going to have those for breakfast," he says, leaning against the doorframe.
Sirius glances up at him. His hair's gotten very mullety as of late, and the black tangles of it hang thick around his narrow face. "I'll make pancakes?" he offers.
"I'd accept if you were staying the night, which you're not."
"Oh, piss off." Sirius hops down onto the floor, skulking to the medicine cabinet to poke around for painkillers. The plastic punnet of grapes sits abandoned beside the dishwasher.
"This is my flat," Remus says, a little helpless. "Piss off where?"
"What we have, we always share," Sirius says dutifully. "Oh, paracetamol? Yum. My favourite."
Remus raises an eyebrow as he watches Sirius swallow four little white pills dry. "You're only meant to take two of those at a time."
"And how many do you take?"
"Five," Remus admits, "but I'm not a person, so it doesn't count."
"Piss off," Sirius says again. He squints at him. "You're home late."
"How do you know my schedule?"
"I watch you," Sirius says. He wiggles his fingers at him. "I creep around London, following strangers, making shady deals, smuggling contraband, not talking to my friends, holding grudges against my exes, being a rather unsavoury fellow and scowling at everybody I pass. Oh, wait, that's you."
"Doesn't answer my question," Remus persists.
"Do you need an answer?" Sirius shrugs showishly. "I know you. Better than you think, Moony. Even now."
"Don't start with this. I seriously don't have the energy."
"Right. Well, I got kicked out by my landlord, so we should head to bed."
Remus stares. "Again?"
"Yeah?"
"That's the third time this year. It's October."
"Well, apologies for my lack of social skills," Sirius snipes.
"You've got more social skills than the entire Order put together, Sirius," Remus sighs. "That's not it. Do you need money? Is that why you're here?"
"Am I not allowed to want to spend time with you? You can be so mean, sometimes. And I really did get kicked out."
"Given our current circumstances, I think I have the right to be," Remus says firmly. "You can take the sofa in the living room. But for one night, okay, and that's it. I can't afford a houseguest right now. I get enough trouble trying to leave undetected. This place is being watched."
"It's not my problem you can't go two seconds without getting on someone's bad side."
"It's not my problem you waste all your money on coke."
They glare at each other for a bit, before it seems to get too tiring.
"Thanks for the painkillers," Sirius mutters, and shoves past him into the living room. "And I used all your hot water."
"I don't know why I put up with you."
"It's because you're madly in love with me. One of these days, you'll ask for my hand and whisk me off to sunny Guadalajara. I'm just waiting for you to scrape together the funds for a decent engagement ring. You wouldn't want to disappoint me."
Remus sighs very heavily. "Don't muddy the sofa. I got it cleaned a few months ago."
Sirius' voice rings out from the living room. "Sure doesn't smell like it!"
"Probably because you've got your grubby paws on it already!"
"I'd show you how grubby my paws can get, except I can't, because I've been relegated to your sofa!"
Remus wanders through the kitchen, shucking off his heavy black coat and shoving his wand into his back pocket. He needs to put a wash in tonight, he reminds himself.
"I'm making a cuppa," he raises his voice to shout to Sirius. "You want one?"
Sirius' sickly pale face peers back in. "Knew that you loved me," he says. "Lots of milk, one sugar, leave the teabag in-"
"For five minutes. I know how you take your tea."
"I should hope so." And he disappears again.
Catching up over tea feels almost too easy. Remus cups his own mug (black, two sugars, too bitter and too sweet at the same time) and waits for the other shoe to drop. Wind whips against the apartment block, through the narrow streets of their city. It's the sort of night that bruises you.
Sirius seems to have no such reservations about tonight or any other night. "You know," he says, on his second cup already, "I've missed being in here. Just... to talk about stuff. London can feel too big sometimes, y'know? We don't catch up enough."
They have this conversation every time they see each other. It has yet to get tired (or, it has yet to get more tired than everything else is). Outside, a bird perches on the windowsill and Remus waves his wand to make the window fly open, smacking the crow off the ledge.
"Yeah," he says, putting his wand back in his pocket, after closing the window again. "Yeah. You say that a lot."
"What have you been up to? Aside from the aforementioned." Sirius wrinkles his nose. "The things they say about you, honestly. You'd think the Order had a little more..."
He trails off. Tact, perhaps. Security.
"I've been the same," Remus says. "I take care of the street. I watch our sources."
"I see."
"I wouldn't think you saw much of the Order at all anymore."
Sirius looks mildly hurt at that. His bony fingers fiddle in his lap. Sometimes when Remus sees him, he looks miles away from how he was when they were kids, and each time he thinks, perhaps now he's grown up. It doesn't last, though; evidently it never sticks, because now, Sirius just looks fifteen again, angry at his parents and scared of growing up into someone he doesn't know.
"Yeah," he says eventually. "Yeah, not much, lately. Minnie said she'd get me on another job soon, though."
"I see."
"And for your information, I don't spend all my money on coke." Sirius sniffs. "I've been sober for two days."
Remus stares. It makes sense now, he thinks - the odd, sickly look to Sirius' skin, the dull ferality in his eyes. Why he's here in the first place, when they haven't had a real conversation about their feelings in five years or more.
"Ah," he says.
"Yeah," Sirius says. He juts out that aristocratic chin, almost brutish. Not almost, actually; he's swayed right over the line and landed solidly in challenging. "I'm doing this."
"I see."
"So can I sleep in your bed?"
"No," Remus sighs. "You finished your tea. Another?"
Sirius watches him as Remus pours them both another mug of tea. Remus has this awful habit of not refilling glasses once he's drunken from them, even if they've only just been filled, so their used mugs pile up in the sink, chipped, all of them mismatched. Remus got half of them in a car boot sale in Hounslow when he first moved in half a decade ago, and the rest he's picked up over the years - a 'BEST BOSS' mug Dorcas got him for Christmas one year, a congratulatory teacup for completing a charity race that he didn't actually partake in, the yellow mug the London chapter of the AA gave him when he graduated out of their ninety day program in sweet 1992, bright as a street sign. He hasn't touched whiskey since. Remus doesn't have many things in this world. An addictive personality isn't one of them, and thank god, he supposes, as he looks at Sirius.
Whatever. He slides the AA mug across to Sirius, who snorts. "Did that place even help you?"
"They're nice enough."
"Almost anybody's nice enough for you."
Remus doesn't bother to correct that as he sits back down at the table. If it gives Sirius comfort to think he's the same person he was when they were teenagers, he can go right on and do it. "Did you hear about Emmeline?"
"Emmeline Vance?" Sirius frowns. "No."
"She's missing."
"Oh fuck. Since when?"
"Yesterday morning." Remus rubs his aching head with both hands. "They think it was the death eaters."
"Bastards."
"Right. Well, we've got no leads yet. They've got me keeping an eye out for her."
"I'll let you know if I hear anything," Sirius promises.
Remus nods once. "Right. Do that." He hesitates. "She's been... doing okay, actually."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Got married last year. Some actress from Bexley."
"Oh, wow," Sirius says, and he grins. "That's great. Well. Less great with the context..." He trails off. "They'll find her, I'm sure. It's not hunting season."
"Well," Remus mutters. "Not yet."
They started calling them hunting seasons back in '86, when the war still felt fresh and Remus hadn't fucked up his hip yet. It began as an in-joke between them both and spread like a plague out through the ratty remains of the Order. It's not the most one-one allegory (real seasons are consistent; hunting seasons aren't; you can predict summer, but you can't predict a knife in the back). Right now, though, Sirius is half right. They've been clinging onto a period of relative peace for about a year. Off-season for higher-borns. It won't last much longer, but neither of them mentions that.
"You heard the statement the muggle minister made the other day?" Sirius offers. They're staying with the pleasant subject matter, then.
Remus sighs. "Dangerous terrorists and the protection of British values. London under siege by foreign threat. 'Course I bloody heard it. You'd think since they haven't slashed the Statue of Secrecy just yet, his people would be a little more eager to conceal themselves."
"They consider it demeaning."
"They consider everything demeaning."
"That makes three of us."
"You don't find me demeaning."
Sirius shrugs. "Suppose I've not got the patience anymore."
Remus inclines his head. He's been fighting in this war since he was seventeen, just a few shy of twenty years now. None of them have much patience for anything anymore, outside of surviving and fighting.
"You should get some rest soon," he says. "Since you're really doing this."
Sirius tries every other week to get sober. It's the first time he's come to Remus in a while, though, so maybe that'll help. It's better than when he last stayed here and he padded the whole apartment out with bad weed smell and left shreds of aluminium foil all over the floor, and threw up on Remus' favourite sweatshirt. At least he's trying this time.
"Yeah," Sirius says, and yawns. He downs the last of his third cup of coffee. Maybe he's trying to get enough sugar in him to replicate a high. "I guess." He hesitates. "I'll try to keep the apartment clean and not, uh, get in the way."
"Right," Remus says, amused. In this area of Camden, there's no point in trying to keep much of anything clean. It'll find a way to dirty itself somehow anyway. "Do you need me to pick up your prescription from Kensington? I'm headed to Wes'minster City tomorrow. I can stop by." Sirius has been on this one muggle brain medication since James died. Remus always forgets the name.
"Been off that for six months," Sirius says absently. "I'm all natural. Tea-total."
"Oh."
"You could pick me up a packet of Ginger Nuts though. The McVitie's ones. They've got them in the little Tescos. There's one down the road."
Remus sighs. "I'm strapped for cash right now, too, you know."
"They're only 90p!"
"90p too much for you." Remus is only half joking. "I'll see if they're on sale."
Sirius grins. "I'll make breakfast."
"I don't really have food here."
He waves Remus off. "I'll figure something out. You look like you need some rest, too. Bed?"
"Sofa," Remus reiterates.
Sirius washes all the mugs for him. It's as close to 'thank you' as either of them is going to get for now.
With the sort of inevitability that makes magnets come together, they wake up in the same bed the next morning. Remus feels like an idiot as he lies there, Sirius breathing hot bad morning smell into his face, for thinking it would end any other way. If there's one thing about them that hasn't changed since school, it's this - it's heat, proximity, eventuality. They don't really know how to exist in any other way.
"Hey, Moony," Sirius murmurs into the pit of his throat. He shifts closer to Remus under the covers. They're both still half-clothed, so that's something.
"Happy day three," Remus mutters. "I said sofa."
"Ha."
"You need to get up."
"Or, what?"
Remus closes his eyes and takes a very deep breath, then lets it out through his teeth. "Sirius, I have a job."
"That makes one of us," Sirius says. He stretches long. He's shorter than Remus, but he's better proportioned, longer legs and a narrower chest. If god had made man of clay, he would've made something that looks and smells like Sirius Black.
And Remus rolls over into him. "I can't keep doing this," he whispers. "We can't keep doing this."
"Who says we can't?" Sirius whispers back. And his breath really does stink.
"A long history of failure," Remus mutters. With a burst of startling willpower, he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He's not so bad at this.
"That's not necessarily a game-changer," Sirius says, lolling against the headboard. The smell of his cold sweat is taste-it strong on the air. "I mean, tons of stuff with a long history of failure is still worth pursuing. True love. Literature. Communism."
"Get out of my bed, Padfoot."
"If you want me to take all the hot water again, sure."
"On second thought," Remus snorts, despite himself, "stay there."
The last thing he sees before he steps out into the hallway towards the shower, zipping up his fly, is Sirius stretching out in the linen sheets, out and out towards the sun, which streams through the window over his pallid face. Remus honestly thinks Sirius could die on his bed this morning and it wouldn't be the most unexpected thing that's happened to him this week.
Like every day, there is work to be done and no time to waste. Remus locks the front door of his flat (if Sirius wants to get out, he can bloody well break out), pulls his long, dark overcoat around his shoulders and disapparates in the stairwell, wand in one hand, briefcase in the other.
Long gone are the days they all ran around in cloaks. It's funny to even think about those times now. How ridiculous they all must have looked, when staying undiscovered was about convenience, not survival.
When the world solidifies into a singular mass again, Remus is standing on a busy street in Hammersmith. Down the road, a market is already bustling, two stalls selling bread and vegetables opening. Reddish-orange sunlight streams across the high rooftops of buildings on both sides of the road. The biting cold of autumn has cast the concrete at Remus' feet into stark, bright silver.
Coat billowing out behind him, Remus steps out into the street and strides into the cold, headed south. Muggles give him a wide berth. Most of them (most) still don't know about magic or wizards or other such nonsense, but a climate of fear has gripped the city for years now, so unsavoury sorts like Remus himself are generally avoided. He's surprised he's been able to keep his flat this long. It's a bit of a punch in the gut, even now, to be mistrusted by wizards and muggles alike.
Still, he supposes, boot crunching through a plate of ice frozen over a drain. He doesn't exactly make an effort not to look intimidating. Sirius once told him that between the mafioso jacket and the scars, he looks like somebody you wouldn't want to mess with. At the time, Remus hadn't known how to reply. It had still been the eighties then, and they were fucking every Friday night, not every few months.
A narrow turning swings past, a gaggle of teenagers clustered inside, smoking and laughing in the pale light. One of them eyes Remus as he passes and he eyes them right back. You never know who's worth watching. A pigeon in the pavement at Remus' feet goes squawking, rising into the cold air as Remus steps too close to it. He watches it rise. Not an animagus, he doesn't think, but he still keeps an eye on it until it's a tiny, dark dot against the blue sky.
"Paper?" a muggle man hounds him, as he crosses the market. "It's 50p."
"All bad news," Remus replies grimly.
"Still worth reading!"
"I'd rather start the day right."
"Then I'll keep you back a copy of the evening edition, sir."
Remus pauses. "Which paper?"
"Daily Mail. People's voice."
"Hah." Remus starts off again. Forget bad news; muggles have a way of making even good news taste sour in your mouth.
By the time he reaches the warehouse, stuck onto the end of the Hammersmith industrial swathe like a rotten sore, Remus' face is stinging with cold. It's a hulking iron thing, hollow and dark in the centre, the air chewy with the smell of iron and tobacco. Remus isn't certain who's paying the rent to keep the land this particular juncture of the silk road sits on, but it's certainly not him.
A cloud slips from its place before the sun and a sheet of brilliant orange sunlight descends over the world. Remus clambers through the brambles to the back entrance and kicks the door once with his foot, then again.
The man who answers has a name, but Remus hasn't the time to remember stuff like that.
"Oh," he says. "It's you."
"It's me," Remus says, a little nastily. "That time of the month again."
"Suppose you could tell us all about times of the month," the man, greying at the temples, mutters. "Come in."
Remus steps over the threshold and into the dappled gloom. Inside, the warehouse is airy and high-ceilinged, morning light dripping down through the corrugated iron patched lengthwise across the roof. Half a dozen crates are piled against the back wall, and to the west, somebody's hauled in a huge chunk of white marble, blocky and about ten feet long and creased in sharp lines down one side, flecked with bronze.
"Ha," Remus says mildly, realising what it is. "Are those the steps up to Gringotts?"
"Not like anybody 's using them," the old man scoffs. "One of our guys apparated them here after they got blown off in the attack in August. Since nobody bothered to clean them up. Figured we could sell them back to some of the Goblins who've been doing liaison work from France."
"I doubt they'd pay for stairs."
"It'll catch us something. We do need to eat, you know," the man says, and that bit is very pointed.
"I'm aware," Remus says, touching on dry. "I'm doing my best to keep you all in styles to which you can become accustomed, but I might remind you, we're in the middle of a war."
"Trust me," the man snaps, "chief, it's hard to bloody forget it."
"Good luck with the stairs, then," Remus says promptly. "I need to see your reports for every transfer in and out for the past month. Order's orders."
"Why do they care?"
"Because most of that stuff is theirs," Remus sighs. They have this conversation, or some approximation of it, every time he comes here. "And they'd rather know who's siphoning a little off the top so they can send me after him."
"For all you lot complain about surveillance, you seem to rely on it."
"If you think this is surveillance," Remus says, "I'll have to remind you of it when they start following you home every night, which they would already be doing if it wasn't for us. Can I get those reports?"
Under the dim, greenish light from the ceiling, the man looks quite ill. Londoner through and through, Remus estimates. Sick and claustrophobic in the way Sirius is. You can only spend so long in a city like this before it poisons you, long and slow, a drop of it every day. Those of them who moved here when the war started have clung on, but every wizard raised in this city seems to have rotted a little.
"Alright," the man says, after a bit. "Stay here. Sit on the bloody steps, for all I care."
Remus laughs faintly at that, measured and clipped. The man totters off to the little operating room on the bottom end of the warehouse and he stays where he is, crunching through the gravel as he paces slowly. He buries his hands in the pockets of his trousers and keeps his head low.
Life has been like this for a while. When the war started — when it was still all five of them, and James and Lily were here and Peter hadn't turned — they'd all still had plans for the future. Sirius wanted to be a cursebreaker, Remus remembers. James wanted to move to America to take an apprenticeship with a spell inventor. Lily wanted to be a potioneer; Peter wanted to work in the Ministry, some bureaucratic middle management position. Remus had been content to imagine following any of them anywhere, which feels stupid in retrospect. Then again, his job prospects have hardly improved.
A faint heat, near the top of his chest. Not ceasing in his striding, Remus reaches into the inside pocket of his coat and pulls out a muggle moleskine notebook, peeling through to the seventh page, which stays blank for a moment before briefly flashing its message out into the dull light.
20:00 - 12GP.
Then, beneath it:
Bring a plus-one.
Remus sighs, glancing around to ensure he's unseen. All of them have had to get good at recognising disillusionment charms. As far as he can tell (and he really is quite good at telling), he's alone. He shoves the notebook back into his coat.
Well, that fucks up his evening plans. In the back of his head, he shuffles around his schedule. He'll have to visit Figley next Tuesday, and rent is due in another week, so he'll have to find another time slot to pop by Davies' place another time. The hardest part of it all will be dragging Sirius out of bed. How the Order even knows he's with Remus, he'll have to ask them.
A faint noise at the back of the warehouse. Remus turns on his heel, waiting for the man to return. He'd very much like to go back to sleep. Maybe he could snag an extra hour. Sirius might actually make breakfast…
The man doesn't come back out of the operation room. Remus stares for a few moments. No other sound emerges.
Very slowly, he raises his wand, tight to his ribs as to make disarming harder. The tricks of the trade. Remus takes four, five, six steps towards the other end of the room, praying he's just being paranoid, and then kicks the op room door open with one foot.
The man is slumped over the unused old control panel. It would've once been used to operate a crane, which has long since been sold. Standing a few feet beyond him is a dark-haired woman in a white mask.
"Fuck," Remus grunts, and whips back around the doorway for cover.
Not a moment too soon. Milliseconds later, chunks of shredded metal tear loose from the wall with a metallic shriek and lash out at him; Remus transfigures them with a flick of his wand into a swarm of sharp black birds, which lurch away from their foundations and soar up towards the ceiling and tear through it in chunks.
The death eater comes hurtling out after him and then they're duelling. She throws a stinging jinx which Remus bounces back at her with a nifty shield charm he learned a few months ago; she sweeps a foot across the gravel ground and chunks of rock lurch into the air and fly at Remus; he waves his wand and they melt into searing, red-hot droplets, which hiss as they hit the walls, tearing holes in the warehouse through which bright sunlight pours.
"Die!" she screams, and the walls echo with it in an unholy chorus. She waves her wand and with a bright, high howling sound, they curl in towards them both, shrinking around them, support beams lunging towards Remus like grasping hands.
"Not today," Remus shouts back. He kneels and presses his wand to the floor, which lurches up in a wave, throwing the death eater off balance. She staggers backwards and Remus' birds pierce through the wall behind her; she whips around to shield against them but a few make it through, and as metal walls leer in on Remus' sides, he watches one of the iron birds tear through her shoulder.
She shouts with pain but does not relent. In a blur of motion, she tears around in his direction, hair whipping; she lashes out her wand; a cutting jinx, a disarming spell, a lash of fire burst at Remus in quick succession. He parries, leaning low to the ground, head reeling with adrenaline. He whips around in a whirling circle, coat flying out around him, and conjures a tide of wind which hurtles towards his opponent. She stumbles but does not fall, and then shields with a levitated chunk of gravel against his cruciatus, which ricochets against the walls in a dizzying burst of fire.
Together, they stagger out of the torn-up back door and into the orange sunlight, breath fogging around their faces in silver trails. Cars roar along the road to their left, out of sight through a thicket of brambles, loud and fierce as lions. The nettles around Remus' feet lash out at him, curling around his black boots, trying to pin him down. In retaliation, he waves his wand and hollers an incantation he doesn't have to think about. Black flowers grow in thick-rooted, white-stemmed mass from her black curls, worming under the death eater's mask. The woman screams and claws at her face, wand clutched precariously against her palm with two pale fingers. Remus takes his chance and disarms her, chucking her hot wand over the hedge and into the road.
"Did you kill him?" he asks. Then, before she can answer, "Diffindo."
Scarlet blooms across the death eater's chest. She chokes and gargles and collapses into the singing nettles. Remus doesn't lower his wand until he's sure she's dead, and even then, he doesn't slump. Doesn't relax.
She was here for him, he realises faintly. She knew he'd be here.
Glancing around, Remus reaches into his jacket and pulls out his moleskine again. He scrawls on the tenth page, They're onto me. Body outside Hammersmith SR Warehouse. A prod with the toe of his boot rolls her over and he spies her white forearm. Marked.
Not a moment later, there's a sharp crack. Remus whirls around and he's wand-to-wand with a similarly tense Bill Weasley, eyes large in his broad, pale face.
"Ah," Bill says, and doesn't lower his wand. "Alright, Lupin?"
"Legillimens," Remus snaps. A flash of Arthur Weasley's gaunt form. Fireworks over the moors in Cornwall. The burrowing pain of worry that keeps you awake at night. Thick smell like gravy and goose fat, sizzling heat. The snarl of a tangled rune.
Bill shoves him off. "You get the picture," he snaps, and then gives it to Remus right back; and it's a rush, and then, snap of Sirius' sweaty scent, blood in his mouth after a moon, the crunch of bone against Remus' fist, the cottony inside of his coat, the scent of gasoline that haunted him for weeks through the winter of 1981.
"Out," Remus commands. They stare at one another for a moment, disentangled from one another's heads. In unison, they nod.
They all learned some time ago that safety questions aren't failsafe. The last time they made that assumption, Dearborn lost three fingers for it, and Burbage lost her life.
"Well," Bill says, stepping around Remus to peer down at the body. "Was the fight long?"
"No," Remus says.
"Are you hurt?"
Remus takes stock. One of the malformed support beams boxed him right in the shoulder and it aches like the touch of god. "Nah," he says. "Nothing I can't fix."
"Right. Word has it Black's staying with you?"
"Turned up last night," Remus replies flightily. "He's…" He trails off.
"Okay," Bill says. "Stay here for a sec, let me get her out of here and back to Haringey." He grabs onto a fistful of the corpse's hair, and with a crack, he disappears.
In the quiet, Remus leans against the side of the warehouse. The walls of the great hulking mass are all twisted up like scrap now, groaning with new tension. The wind whipped up by the road curses across his face. He needs a smoke, he thinks faintly, but he's not so cruel as to track tobacco smell back into the apartment when Sirius is there, so he resists the urge.
Bill reappears. "Routine questions."
"Aye."
"Where did you apparate in from?"
"Camden."
"When?"
"Half an hour ago. Perhaps a little more."
"And where to?"
"Alleyway near the marketplace," Remus says. "Ten minute walk south of here."
"I know the spot," Bill agrees. He notes something down in a spiral pad held in the crook of his arm.
In the brief quiet, Remus folds his arms. "How are your family?"
"Surviving." Bill sighs heavily. "Reeling, with dad's… well. We always figured he'd get sick sooner or later. The long and short of it is that he's been sick for a long time, now. Guess it was only a matter of time. Muggle doctors say it's cancer."
"My condolences."
"He's not dead yet."
"Still no word on your youngest?"
"Second youngest," Bill corrects absently. "And, uh, no."
"How many years it is now?"
"Since '91."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want your apologies, Lupin," Bill Weasley says. "Give Black my regards. He owes me a drink."
"And your wife owes me her life," Remus says waspishly. "You don't see me calling in favours."
Bill laughs bitterly. "Seems like all you ever do, quite honestly. I'll finish up questions this evening." And he disapparates.
Back at the flat, Sirius is awake, sausages sizzling in the pan.
He rolls his eyes at the look Remus gives him. "It's not like they'd notice anything!" he says, flipping one of them over with a fork. "Cloak on, in and out. A pack of sausages and a block of butter and one of those little dispenser packets of tea sweetener that only costs 10p. Really, Moony. I'm not exactly a hardened criminal."
"Yes you are," Remus says tiredly. He shucks off his coat and collapses into a chair.
"Are you okay?"
"Just fine."
"What happened?" Sirius flips another sausage, jumping when the oil spits at his hand. He's wearing one of Remus' jumpers.
"Killed a death eater," Remus says. "She followed me to that, ah, warehouse. The one on the edge of the Hammersmith industrial estate. Behind the, uh, carpet factory?"
"Oh," Sirius says, whipping around. "Oh, Moony… oh, poor love…"
Remus shrugs him off. "Don't you start."
"Are you okay? Can I help?"
"Piss off."
Sirius cracks up laughing. "Ha. Your face." He turns back to his sausages. "Seriously, though. Did you get hurt? I stole aspirin too. I'll let you have one if you kiss me."
"I'll survive without it, in that case," Remus says. He plonks his head down on the tabletop. "Didn't even recognise her. By the accent, I think she was some brand of Nordic."
"I see."
"Almost thought she was one of your lovely cousins for a moment. Had the hair for it."
"I wouldn't have been surprised if one of them hunted you down," Sirius agrees.
"Nah. Bellatrix is too high up. I'm small fish."
Sirius shrugs. "Us Blacks get our hands dirty," he says.
"Right. I'd forgotten you were working class icons."
"And proud of it!"
Remus laughs faintly. He feels raw all over like a nerve. Sirius has killed people before, he's quite sure. Remus himself certainly has. It doesn't get easier, but the hurt of it does get more dull. Here, though, in the mould smell and under the stained ceiling, it stings a little worse than usual. He can almost hear James in the back of his head saying, we can't be like them, Moons. We just can't. It isn't right.
Sirius spears three swollen sausages onto a china plate. Remus watches him cut each of them into little pieces meticulously with the side of a fork he nicked from a soup kitchen last year, the virgin mother superimposed on the handle. Then, he puts the saucepan in the sink and brings Remus the plate, shoving it across the table at him.
"Eat," Sirius instructs. He spears a fork through one of the pieces and leers it at Remus' face.
"Shove off," Remus mutters. "I'm not hungry."
"You haven't had breakfast!"
"Like you care."
Sirius pauses. "'Course I care," he says. "C'mon. Is this about the death eater thing?" His cadence swaggers over into uncomfortable. "We can talk about it if you want…"
Remus sighs. "It's fine."
"Then eat."
Remus glances up at Sirius and figures he'll lose this battle, just like he loses every other one. Slowly, not breaking eye contact, he leans forward and pulls the sausage off the fork with his teeth. Sirius fries stuff in oil, where Remus fries it in butter, and Sirius' method gives it a harder, richer taste. The grease and sop and fat fill the back of Remus' gums as he chews. Golden morning sunshine streams across the back of Sirius' head through the window, backlighting tendrils of his stringy hair.
"Good?" Sirius says more than asks, voice very soft.
Remus still doesn't break eye contact. "Good," he says.
"Another," Sirius says. And he skewers another piece, orange oil bleeding onto the plate from its greyish pockety flesh, and dutifully, Remus lets Sirius feed him.
When they're halfway through the plate, Remus leans back in his seat. "They want you to come with me to the Order meeting tonight," he says. "Maybe Minnie's got that job for you."
Sirius pauses, staring down at the tabletop. "Oh," he says.
Remus wants to say, didn't you want this? He also sort of wants to say, pull yourself together or get out of my house. But this breakfast is the first one he's eaten in about two months, so instead, he says, "You don't have to give me an answer yet. If you want I'll just tell them you passed out in the bathtub."
"You don't have a bathtub."
"They don't know that."
"They know tons of stuff," Sirius mutters. He glances up at Remus and forces a smile. He really does look unwell. Remus thinks of Arthur Weasley and his muggle cancer and wonders if all of them are becoming less magic and more person every passing year.
"I'm sticking out my neck for you here," Remus says.
Sirius blithers. "I'll think on it," he says. "We're not done."
"You need to eat something too."
He wrinkles his nose up in that way that almost seems to make him as handsome as he used to be. "Nah," he says. "It'll just make me nauseous when I'm like this. Or it'll disagree with me and I'll be up all night with the shits."
"Pleasant," Remus grimaces. Outside, London goes septic.
(Sirius is nothing if not predictable. When Remus gets home later, he finds him curled up under his linen sheets, tucked into a tiny ball like heaven has fucked him wide open, tense all over and raptured with muscle spasms. There are loud, purplish dimples in his skin.
"Sorry," Sirius groans, when he processes that Remus is kneeling in front of him. In another life, Remus thinks he could have been religious, for all the time in his thirty-something years he has spent kneeling for Sirius Black. "Day three always sucks."
"You can give up now, if you want," Remus offers.
"I'm doing this," Sirius grunts. "Ah, fuck. Fuckin'. Kill me."
Remus supposes he'll be going on his own.)
"If we're going to do this," Harry announces on the morning he plans to kill Sirius Black, "we should get used to it first, right? Murder, I mean."
Curled up under an old rug in the corner, Neville peers up at him. "You said I could sleep in today. You promised we'd sleep."
"Yeah, but…" Harry trails off. "I lie all the time, dunn'i? Anyway, it's a big day. You can stay here if you want. Just thought you would want to be involved."
Neville scrambles out of bed. Well. Off the floor. "Of course I do," he says. "Are you telling the others?"
"Yeah. 'Course."
"What do you want to do?"
Harry chews his lip. "We should kill something," he says. "Just to see what it's like. Y'know. So we're not surprised at the actual thing."
"Like what?"
"Like an animal or something."
"Harry, we…" Neville stares around nervously, like he's waiting for a teacher or a cop to come leering over one of the windowsills. "We can't just kill an animal."
"Why not?"
"We don't have wands!"
"I don't need a wand," Harry says, bristling.
"Still! We can't just- we couldn't-" Neville seems to struggle for words for a moment. "We can't," he finishes emphatically.
"He killed my parents," Harry says. "And he's a person. Are you saying I can't kill him?"
"That's different!"
"How so's it different?"
"It's…" Neville seems to realise he's not going to win this. "I just don't want to," he says.
"Then stay here."
"No!"
"Then watch," Harry snaps. He plops down on the mattress and starts lacing up his boots angrily, tearing at the red shoelaces. He and Neville are the same age, both fifteen and a few months, their birthdays in the same week. Sometimes, Neville feels like a baby compared to him, Harry thinks. Like he never properly grew up.
Neville hesitates near him, then sits next to him. The mattress sags. "Sorry," he says.
"It's fine."
"Nah, it's not. I know it means a lot to you."
"I just want to know that I can do it," Harry says lowly, and then shakes himself. "Nah. It's not that. It's more like… a warmup."
"Right."
"Getting me pumped up, like."
Neville's fingers fiddle in his lap. When Harry first met him, his skin looked healthier, well-kept. Now he's got fat black lines of grime under each of his fingernails and he always looks a bit grey.
"C'mon," Harry says, to fill the silence. He stands up, boots hugging his calves. He found them in a charity shop a year ago and scarpered with them and they're his most prized possession, big tall clunky things, shiny and black, and they come all the way up to under his knees. They're too big and they rub, leaving blisters, but they're stompy and thick. He feels like he could tread all over the world and break its bones when he wears them.
Neville stands too. He's in a big thin Adidas windbreaker with red speed stripes. It makes him look intimidating, Harry imagines. Like a cool sidekick.
"We're going to get them?" Neville asks.
Harry nods. The walk from their Dagenham squat to the others' place isn't too far. Ron and Hermione are living in a youth hostel that Harry got kicked out of last month for fighting. Neville volunteered to come with him to find somewhere new to stay. At the time, Harry hadn't known why. He still doesn't, really.
This area isn't too rough, though, considering all the places the lot of them have lived over the four years they've been in London. It's the first time he's lived alone with Neville.
Halfway out of the broken window, it hits him. He slides back down into the squat and almost kicks Neville in the face. "I've got it."
"Got what?" Neville demands.
Harry turns to grin at him. He imagines it's perfectly vicious. "Ron's got a rat."
Half an hour later finds the four of them sitting in a tight circle on a flat, grey rooftop a few streets away, on the edge of Barking. The high-rises down the Thames, towards the inner city, stab the sky on the horizon, jutting dark into the grey mist. Orange sunlight spills over the concrete.
"Nah, mate," Ron says. "We should do this. You're right." He still looks a little nauseous, though. "Not like he does more than sleep, anyway."
"He's lived way too long for a normal rat," Hermione agrees. Her knee brushes up against Harry's. She smells like a broken radiator: smoke, metal, gummy heat.
"So he should die soon anyway," Harry agrees.
Between them all, dark against the grey-gold morning, Ron's sleeping rat sits on the concrete, breathing faintly. Its white ribs press against the translucent, veiny grey skin of its midriff. He's had it since that first day on the Hogwarts Express before the world ended, Harry remembers. That sort of stings. There isn't a lot in this world that any of them have been able to keep since that time.
"Well," he says, and fishes into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a sharp rock. "Guess we should get on with it, then."
"You still haven't explained how you're going to find this guy," Neville says quickly. Maybe to stave off the inevitable. "Black, I mean."
"I've got my sources," Harry says imperiously.
"Like what?"
Hermione shoves Neville with her shoulder, giving him a meaningful look.
Comprehension dawns on Neville's face. "Oh…"
"I've been told he's staying with a friend now," Harry says. He tosses the rock from hand to hand. "In Camden, few miles from Cedarwood Street. Turned up there last night. I'm gonna go in through the window."
"If he kills you?"
Harry puffs out his chest. "He won't."
"He'll have a wand, Harry," Neville moans.
"He's got a point," Hermione says. Her eyes search Harry. She's gotten skinnier and rougher over the years, hair shorn down, knees bruised. "I don't think you can kill him with a rock."
"I can and I will," Harry snaps. "I'm not here for advice."
"If he says he can do it, he can do it," Ron agrees, though he looks uncomfortable.
Fuck discomfort. They've all been uncomfortable for years now. Fear can't control him, nor will Harry let it. The last time he let himself feel afraid, he was still living in a cupboard, and even despite everything, this is a marked improvement. The city has urged him not to be afraid, so Harry refuses to be.
"Okay," Neville says, chewing his lip. "Sorry."
"It's alright, mate," Ron says, before Harry can reply.
Harry scowls at the ground. "Alright," he says shortly. "Let's get this over with."
Hermione shuffles back a little, maybe to keep from getting blood on her shoes. Neville whimpers and sits back against her side, hiding his head behind her shoulder. Wind whips around them all like a prophecy.
Harry raises the rock high above his head, clutched in both hands. He draws in a deep breath and lets it out.
You can do this. You could kill god if you wanted to. And he swings the rock down.
"Wait!" Ron shouts.
Harry freezes, inches over the thing. "What?!" he shouts back reflexively.
He looks up. Ron is wiping his reddening eyes with the back of his sleeve. Pussy.
"Can I…" Ron sniffs. "Can I say goodbye?"
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Harry snaps.
"Sorry." Ron scoops the mangy thing into his hands, holding it against his chest tenderly, a finger stroking gently through the matted grey fur. "Bye, Scabbers. You've been a good rat." He stifles a sob.
"You don't have to kill him, Harry," Neville says desperately.
"I'll find something else if none of you want to help," Harry snarls. "I'll find somewhere else to live, too. See if I care."
"No," Ron says quickly. He shoves Scabbers back onto the concrete. The rat is still sleeping, dead to the world but for the rise and fall of its tiny chest. "No, do it, Harry. We're not kids anymore. We should be able to do something like this. Right?"
"Right," Hermione says, though she looks very disapproving. "If you think it'll help."
"I do," Harry says shortly. He raises the rock again.
Neville draws a deep breath, clutching Hermione's arm. Ron squeezes his eyes shut. Hermione watches.
Imagining the rat's body is Sirius Black's face, Harry hurtles the sharp end of the rock down into it. With a crunch-squelch, he crushes the stupid thing. The rat squeals and then goes silent, ribs mashed into a pink-red paste. Blood spurts up against the sleeves of Harry's jacket.
"Ha," Harry says distantly. He throws the rock down and stands up, wiping his sleeves.
Ron leans over and throws up on the concrete. Neville's almost crying. Hermione just sighs, staring out over London, eyes faraway.
Yeah, Harry thinks. Yeah, he could kill a man.
Life has been like this for a while.
The others had families, before Hogwarts. They don't talk about that stuff often (not at all, if they can help it), but Harry's picked up on details. Hermione's got a mum and a dad in Oxfordshire, who she grew up with, and they love her dearly. She hasn't seen them since she was eleven but she still writes them letters and sends none of them. They think she's dead, she told Harry once.
Ron's got a big wizarding family out in Devon. He wants to go back there someday, if he can ever get out of London. Neville's got a grandmother, a witch, who was mean to him growing up, but not as mean as some people can be to their kids. Both of them seem to regard their upbringings with some amount of fondness. It must've been great, growing up with magic and people who love you, which seems just as fanciful as magic itself, Harry thinks most days.
It's not so bad. Harry hasn't seen Vernon Dursley since September 1st 1991, when his uncle dropped him off outside King's Cross and drove off without another word. Harry still hasn't figured out whether that day was the best or worst of his life. He's sure he'll wrap his head around it someday. They have food most of the time, and beds some of the time. It's still sunny some days, even if they're numbered in a way they weren't before London.
Regardless, it usually goes like this: they find a new place to stay, they start to get comfortable, one of them (usually Harry) fucks it up, and they leave.
In the rare instances it isn't one of them who messes it up, it's one of the masked men coming after them, banging on the door or smashing the windows. Hunting season, Harry heard somebody call it once, eavesdropping on a pair of witches having a hushed conversation in a backstreet in Harrow. When the masked men swarm in, stalking the streets, killing muggles who look at them wrong, hunting for magic people. Stretches of months when none of them can breathe wrong without being paranoid they'll be found. Like when they were all thirteen and one of the masked men broke Ron's leg as the four of them sprinted through the underground to get away.
It's been peaceful this year. 1995 has been grey and oppressive, a heavy chill sitting over the city. They spent the first half of the year sleeping in the basement of a wizard in Bexley who offered them a place to stay in exchange for running his supplies over to Greenwich, and when he kicked them out, they jumped between hostels for a while before ending up split between that and a squat. It's not glamorous living, but it's about all they can afford. For four runaway magicians living on stolen time, it could be worse.
There are rules, most of them simple: if something strange happens, like unusual hair growth or odd weather, run, because they can find you if you use magic, even if you don't mean to. If you feel like you're being watched, you probably are. If one of them dies, leave the body and hide. Don't trust a word anybody says, even each other.
Harry has adjusted well, he likes to think. All his life has been one long series of various denominations of fighting to stay alive and that's alright with him.
That afternoon, the four of them sit in the pit of an abandoned skate park on a street corner in Havering, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet. All the muggle kids are in school, and the streets are quiet but for the occasional car or van, and at one point, the rag'n bone man passes, blaring out requests of scrap and wood through speakers on the back of the rickety old trailer.
Harry smokes, Ron sleeps with his back curled against one of the smooth grey slopes of the pit, Hermione reads (some second hand muggle book), and Neville rolls a yo-yo back and forth across the ground. Harry's been smoking for two years now. It started as a way of seeming intimidating. He would save up for packs of pre-rolled fags and smoke them at the metro entrances and scowl at rozzers. Now he's fifteen and smokes rollies and reuses his filters. It's become a bad habit.
"You're doing it tonight, then?" Hermione asks as the sun dips behind a cloud.
"Yeah," Harry says. "Yeah, I'm gonna take the tube to Camden."
"You don't think you could stop off at Hackney for me on the way, do you?" Hermione puts her book down, resting it on her chest, and squints at him. "I've got a friend out on the council estate there, near Stoke Newington Central, owes me twenty quid."
"They'd take my word for it?" Harry asks.
"Yeah. I'll give you a note."
"Kay," Harry agrees. "Which flat?"
"311D," Hermione says. "It's near the outskirts. If you climb the fence near the electricity box from the main road, near the Indian takeaway, it should be quicker than going the whole way round."
"Cool. Will do."
"Thanks."
They slip back into quiet again, Hermione resuming her reading. After some time, Neville gives up on his yo-yo and sighs, lying back with his head rested on Harry's ankle. Harry has half a mind to push him off but doesn't. He's soft like that. One of these days, he'll grow out of it.
"You don't have to do this, y'know," Neville says after some time. "We can forget it was ever the plan and just… go back to normal. Y'know."
There isn't a normal. Harry sighs and jiggles his foot around. Neville doesn't sit up. "I have to," he says. "And even if I didn't have to, I want to, so that's that."
"But he's… and you're…"
"What?"
"We're kids," Neville says, like that means anything. "You're fifteen. We should tell somebody. Like the bobbies or something."
"Pssh. What, 'hey'," Harry imitates, "'there's a dark wizard who killed my parents fourteen years ago by selling them out to another dark wizard who is also controlling London, I've finally got his name, can you get 'im arrested, please? He lives in fuckin' Camden. Thanks.'"
"Not like that. We could censor it for muggles, I mean," Neville says indignantly. "Like, give them the… abridged version of it. We could."
"And would they be able to catch him?"
"No, but they'd look! It'd make his life harder if all the mets was looking for him. None of us are getting out of London anytime soon."
"Okay," Harry says. "Sure. I'll consider it, Nev."
"Thanks," Neville replies stiffly, not seeming to notice the sarcasm.
Hermione rolls her eyes at Harry. He rolls his eyes right back at her. She's the only one out of their lot that seems to understand why this means so much to him, and she lords it over him like nothing else, real mean about it, because apparently that gives her the right to. She acts like she knows him better than he knows himself most of the time. If he had the energy for it, Harry would argue with her, but nowadays he doesn't.
There's still a bit of rat gore stuck under his thumbnail. Harry scrapes it out and flicks it at her. She wipes it off her arm. "You can be so immature sometimes."
"I'm really mature," Harry snaps. "You just say that because."
"Because?"
"Because."
"Right," Hermione sighs. She stares up into the grey sky, flecked blue. "Because," she whispers.
Camden is a shithole, and not just because it's where Cedarwood Street is. Harry stops at the little Tescos down the street from Black's apartment block and nicks a half-price spanner and a Mars Bar. Nobody stops him. The roads are all congested with traffic, and the smog of car fumes hangs on the air with a rusty sort of taste. It's nighttime, but the orange sky is light enough that it feels like evening, underlit with a texture like lightning, the distant highrises of downtown, of Southwark and Greenwich, stabbing up at the clouds. Haze consumes the glow of street lamps and diffuses it into an orange glow.
The apartment block Harry's looking for is three storeys high. Black's staying on the second floor, he was told. Could be better, could be worse. Harry finishes his Mars Bar and throws the plastic wrapper into the road, where it skitters into a drain, before climbing over the back fence and dropping down into the weeds. He gets a thorn stuck in the top of his cheek and rips it out, blood on his fingers.
There's a big heavy plastic bin shoved up against the back wall of the grubby block. By the nighttime light, Harry climbs up atop it, feeling it wobble under him, then kicks the drainpipe - it creaks but doesn't come loose. It should hold.
Taking a deep breath, he starts to climb.
Smooth plastic against skin hurts like a bitch if it's the only thing holding you up, hot and gripping against your palms, dragging your skin away from the bones. Harry curls the sides of his feet around the pipe and shimmies up two, three, four feet, before sticking his leg out at an angle to clamber onto the ledge of a second-storey window. Hanging precariously over open air, he swings outwards; the world swims under him, and he scrabbles one hand against the outside of the window pane for purchase, digging his fingernails under the soft black plastic lining. One of them snaps.
The ledge holds. Harry pulls his other hand off the drainpipe and clutches the lip of the concrete slab under him, crouching uncomfortably. The twenty quid from Hermione's friend, all in shrapnel, jingles in one of his pockets. Night air screams across his face. His boots feel too tight.
"Okay," Harry whispers to himself. He shuffles up into a half-standing position, back bent, and peers into the window. It's a kitchen, empty and with the light off. An oily pan sits in the sink. Nada.
Taking a deep breath, he shuffles across the ledge sideways like a crab. Harry stretches a hand out to his left and grasps onto the ledge of the next window, leaning far over from his own, and then lands his left foot on the next ledge. Stretched out like a star over the gaping black jaws of the world under him, he steels himself, then swings in a full circle on his left foot to plant his right foot on the ledge, too. His boots slip against the concrete and he crouches and grabs the ledge with both hands.
Fuck. Close one.
The cold glass of the window presses against his back. Harry peers over his shoulder. It's a bedroom, he can make out, similarly unlit. At first, he thinks the bed is empty, the sheets rumpled into a pile in the middle, but then, heart leaping, he sees it. A mess of stringy black hair splayed out over the pillow.
He feels himself grin. Bingo.
Above, at the roof, the skirting of the building trembles with wind. Harry, too, feels like he might come apart. An inch from falling, he turns around, gathering his feet under him, crouched low.
Then, he pulls the spanner out of his pocket, clamps his other hand on the ledge, raises it high and smashes it down through the window.
Glass goes flying - bits of it stick into his knuckles. Harry jabs his elbow through the hole in the window, tearing at the glass around it, then hurtles through the crack and hits the floor of the bedroom in a heap. Glass is scattered like small stars on the carpet around him. He drags himself to his feet using the radiator, then fishes in his pocket for the rock.
On the bed, the lump groans faintly but doesn't move. I've got you.
Harry brushes glass off his arms and out of his hair. It rains down onto the floor around him and he crunches through it as he advances on the bed. With one hand, he wrenches the covers off.
Sirius Black is surprisingly unintimidating. He's quite short (not as short as Harry, but small nonetheless), with matted black hair and a sickly look to him. He's in a woolen sweater and dark knee-length shorts. The sharp white lines of his limbs are narrow and boxy. As the covers leave him, he shivers, eyes cracking open.
And then he and Harry stare at each other. Harry watches the man's dark eyes peel wide and then he's sitting up, swaying.
"James?" Black asks breathlessly.
Harry lets out a roar and hurtles onto the bed. With one mighty swing, he cracks the rock down on Black's awful face and with a crunch, breaks his nose. Black yells out and Harry strikes again, and he feels the rock crunch through bone, and when he raises it again, there's a thick dent in Black's skull and he's bleeding from the nose and mouth.
"James," Black groans again, and then he goes still, head lolling.
Sitting on the bed, blood spilling onto the fitted sheet, Harry stares. He lets the rock drop and it hits the mattress and rolls off.
He didn't expect it to be that easy.
Harry tries to summon some feeling of victory. A sort of release. All that comes to the surface is a sick sort of nausea that sits on his throat.
Black doesn't move. His eyes are closed now, and he's entirely still, and very cold when Harry reaches out to touch the side of his gammy face.
"Shit," Harry murmurs to himself. It's too loud in this room. He slips off the bed and lands in a heap on the floor next to the rock. The sound of it thumps down into the floor and he wonders if the neighbours heard anything.
Dead. Black's dead. Just like that.
C'mon. You did it. Feel something.
Nausea rises like a well, like the red fucking sea. Harry's nine again, reading biblical kid's stories in primary school in Surrey. He curls around his stomach to keep the bile in there. Wind lashes through the broken window. He watches specks of broken glass scatter over the grubby carpet like moondust.
The clock on the bedside table ticks. Harry doesn't know how long he sits there. It must be half an hour, probably, maybe a little less. After some time, he stands up, clutching the hot radiator to keep steady. He doesn't look back at the body.
He's done it. He's killed Sirius Black.
Out in the apartment hallway, a door opens.
A hovering, tremulous moment of silence. Then Harry bolts for the window, scrambling out through the cagey glass and taking the leap down onto the plastic bin, which skitters and rolls and tilts under him, and then falls, throwing him onto the concrete. Heat scorches across the side of his face as he scrapes it on the ground.
Harry scrambles to his feet on the ground and sprints for the fence, diving over it. He hits the pavement and runs and doesn't look back. Terror and the wind whip up around him in equal measure. He knows, as he runs for the metro station, racing the cars, that there isn't anything left he wouldn't be willing to do. The realisation of it almost scares him.
Almost.