cxxxvii. twelve years of ruin

Twenty minutes after finishing his breakfast tea and a second buttered scone, Remus Lupin stood in a rose garden with his wand pointed at a serial killer.

It was not the way he'd expected his morning to go.

In the dark hours of night when he couldn't fall asleep, Remus had sat up in bed, staring at the wall or out the window, thinking of all the things he'd say if he ever encountered Sirius Black again. Most of the delusions ended with bloodied knuckles and vivid flashes of green, but more often than not, his ideas existed in the abstract, in a tangle of emotion and pain he could not decipher logic from. There was no coherent speech. Just a lot of screaming.

If he'd come upon Sirius Black a year ago, Remus thought he might have thrown himself at him, not caring at all if the bastard had a wand and if he ended up dead, so long as he got to throw his fist into his face and make him bleed. That had been a year ago though, when Remus had been living in a shoddy Knockturn flat, scraping out a living by part-timing in the Muggle world. Now, in contrast, he had a career and a purpose and a desire to live long enough to teach Harriet and…Elara. To see them grow up and get married if they wanted. To have families or careers or both.

So when he stumbled across a familiar shadow in the dormant rose garden, he didn't rally or rage; Remus took out his wand, his hand shaking, and put it to the man's neck.

"Don't. Move."

Black stiffened, and aside from the slightest tip of his head, held himself still. Even in the lowlight, Remus thought he looked like hell. Chilblains covered his dirty hands, his hair and beard both a matted, greasy tangle, his skin waxy, sunken, and raw from exposure. His eyes, though, both familiar and dreaded, didn't look different. They found Remus' face and widened.

"Remus?" Black rasped. "Wha—Morgana's knickers, what are you doing here?"

Remus doubled his grip on his wand until his knuckles were white. "I am a professor," he replied, voice cold and distant in a way that he didn't feel. A few students were across the courtyard, but they were otherwise alone and obscured from casual observation by the hedges. A mad thought flitted through his head, wondering if he could kill Black there and bury him under the roses—but Remus didn't want him here, not in any manner whatsoever, not even as a corpse rotting in the ground.

"A professor?" A slow smile spread across Black's haggard face, his teeth surprisingly clean and white. "Well, holy shit. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Congratulations!"

Remus drove the wand a little harder into the man's neck. At the moment, he felt like a Niffler who'd caught a Thunderbird by the tail; namely, he was uncertain of what to do next. Not summon the Dementors, no. He needed to alert Professor Dumbledore, but that would mean removing his wand from Black's person.

Stun him, you blundering baboon!

He sucked in a breath to do just that when Black said, "Wait," and his hands fidgeted. "Wait. Please, Moony—."

The wand jabbed harder into his pulse.

"Wait, for fuck's sake, I'm—I'm not here to hurt anyone, I swear—."

"I'm not inclined to believe you," Remus retorted through clenched teeth. "Not after you slaughtered twelve Muggles and Peter."

Like a thundercloud, Black's expression darkened and twisted, madness nibbling at the edges. "The fucking rat!"

Flames burst from the end of Remus' wand and Black moved, avoiding the worst of the damage, a wand finding its way into his shaking hand. Remus cursed himself for a fool as he found himself in a standoff with a wizard half tangled in the brambles, a nasty burn descending from his shoulder toward his chest, though his aim remained steady. Like the robes, Remus assumed Black had stolen the wand from somewhere. It wasn't challenging to find a spare—usually of dubious origins—floating about places like Knockturn Alley. Remus himself had one tucked into the very bottom of his luggage, given to him when he'd had to do some less than legal couriering in his truly desperate years.

"Listen to me—." Black hissed, eyes darting about as if checking for more wizards lurking in the verge.

"I think not."

"Will you just—?"

"You've said more than enough to me for one lifetime."

"I wasn't the Secret Keeper," the felon rushed to say, burying Remus' objections. "I wasn't. I haven't killed a bloody soul—not yet. I swear it, Remus, I swear it on Elara's life—."

The blood drained from Remus' face. Another unvoiced spell propelled itself from his wand, and Black blocked it, barely, sliding on his knees over the coarse earth. Remus expected return fire, expected for this to ramp up into a violent, fevered duel—but then Black stopped, grimacing, and threw his wand on the ground. Remus stared at it.

"Just listen to me," Black croaked, hands held up. "For five minutes. If you ever trusted me, you'll give me just those five minutes to explain myself, then you can call the Headmaster or the Dementors or the whole fucking Ministry for all I care."

He shouldn't bother. Remus should ignore him—hex him—and shut the book on this torrid chapter of his meandering life. Sentiment lurched, painful and forbidden, in the deepest recesses of his mind. Dumbledore had given him a reason to exist, a chance at being something more than just a tatty werewolf scrambling about society's fringe, and if he allowed himself to falter for even five minutes, he would be spitting in the face of everything Dumbledore had done for him.

If you ever trusted me—.

Sickness burned in the back of his throat, his eyes stinging.

I wasn't the Secret Keeper.

But he was, Remus reminded himself, the memories spiraling against his perception, the low, prickling ache of old hurt at being denied the Secret himself. At not being trusted. Sirius Black had been the Potters' Secret Keeper. He knew that. He knew it. Then why am I hesitating?

I wasn't the Secret Keeper.

Hope kissed his heart like the fluttering of moth wings—not as garish as a butterfly, just plain and off-white, more a pest than anything else, and yet delicate and fragile all the same. He should not have hope. More than a dozen bodies slept beneath the earth because of this wizard.

I haven't killed a bloody soul.

Remus needed to fight. He needed to find the Headmaster, take whatever this lingering emotion was, and relegate it to the past, to the person he was before 1981 tore him to pieces.

I swear it on Elara' life.

Bristling, Remus Summoned the dropped wand into his hand, resisting the urge to snap it then and there. "Stand up," he ordered, and slowly, Black did so, wariness plastered to his face. "Turn around and walk ahead of me. If you do something I do not like, I won't hesitate to curse you in the back."

Black flashed him a cocky—if strained—grin over his shoulder. "When did I ever do anything you didn't like—?"

The answering hex caught him high across the shoulders, knocking the wind from his lungs hard enough to force a wheeze from his throat.

"Keep walking."

He didn't lead the felon far; the bells for class had rung, but not everyone would be attending or have lectures to teach, so he settled for a narrow, windowless stone passage off the cloister that must have been intended for servants in some bygone age. Remus bolted and warded the door at his back, then slashed his wand at the shuttered vents higher up on the wall. The wood crackled and complained but forced itself up, allowing thin, patchy bars of sunlight inside, illuminating motes of dust and Sirius Black's hunted expression.

"I wasn't the Secret Keeper," Black reiterated, leaning back into the stone wall, his hands still raised.

Remus narrowed his eyes. "You've said that. If you're just going to lie, I can spare you the trouble of spitting nonsense through your teeth for five minutes and call Dumbledore now."

"I wasn't the Secret Keeper!" Black snapped, louder.

"They picked you! Dumbledore himself cast the Charm, and unless you expect me to believe the Headmaster has been lying for all these years—?"

"No, he—." He grunted in his throat and gave his head an agitated scratch. The hope in Remus' chest began to wither once more. "Yes, Dumbledore cast the spell."

"Then what—?!"

"And every single sodding twat kissing You-Know-Who's arse knew that, didn't they? Or at least guessed it. You knew that—you lived it, Moony. Every wizard and witch he had out looking for the Potters was after me."

Remus hesitated. Sirius had been a primary target of Voldemort for many reasons by late 1980, those reasons not exclusive to the Dark Lord's hunt for Harriet, and Remus could recall more than one evening in which Sirius stumbled through the front door bloodied and beaten, taken unawares by an impromptu duel in the streets.

"Dumbledore cast the Fidelius Charm and used me as the original Secret Keeper. As far as he knows, I always was. I did a damn good job of it, too, for a few months." Black dragged a grubby hand over his face. "I told Lily and James—."

"Don't say their names. You don't deserve to—."

"I told LILY AND JAMES that I would rather die than tell that murdering prick where they and Harriet were hidden," he shouted. "And I would have! I would have gone to my grave gladly! But they were worried about me getting bloody captured because everyone was on my tail."

"You cannot force a Keeper to give up a Secret. We learned that in Charms, if you care to remember."

"Yeah? And how many impossible things d'you think You-Know-Who did before breakfast every morning?" Sirius spat on the floor. "They were worried I'd get captured and he'd manage to circumvent the Charm somehow, so they decided to change the Keeper to someone no one would expect. Lily understood the Charm well enough to know how to change the Keeper without the caster present—not because they didn't trust Albus, but because the old man had enough targets on his back as it was. Lily wanted to use that—do you remember that ghoulish, greasy creep, Snape? She wanted to use him." Black sneered, colorless eyes glinting in the dark, and Remus spared a thought for the Potions Master. "James managed to talk her out of it. Not that it did much good, in the end."

"If you weren't the Keeper, who do you want me to believe was?"

"Peter."

Remus couldn't help himself; he laughed. "Peter? How convenient, then, that he's too dead to corroborate this—this ridiculous story!"

Black reached for his robes, and Remus' stance stiffened, another curse lingering on the cusp of his lip. Slowing, Black kept his gaze on Remus but kept sliding his hand into the interior of his dirty robes, withdrawing it just as slowly, revealing a battered bit of newspaper clipping. He held it out to Remus, and Remus Summoned it from him, grimacing.

"What is this?" he demanded, glowering at a black and white photo of a family. He recognized them as the Weasleys after closer inspection, the whole lot of them standing in the foreground before the pyramids in Egypt. Magic crackled over the thin paper, an Impervius Charm laid into it at some point, but constant folding and touch had weathered the edges.

"Look at the boy," Black seethed. "The boy there, see him? See the rat?"

Remus did not, in fact, see the rat, and needed further coaching to find it perched upon Ronald Weasley's shoulder. He swallowed.

It…it looks like Peter. But no, it couldn't be—how long has it been since I saw him last transform? Thirteen? Fourteen?

"It's a common garden rat. It means nothing."

"Look at the paw."

"What?"

"Look at the paw, Remus!" Black made as if to lunge forward, gripped by some sudden mania, and Remus jabbed him right in the burn with his wand, sending the wizard back against the wall once more. Closer scrutiny revealed the rat on Ron's shoulder was missing a toe.

The only piece of Peter they could recover was a finger. Remus had gone to the funeral—had been the only one there aside from Peter's poor, distraught mother. He never knew why no one else bothered to come, but then, Peter hadn't been well-liked. The memory of the coffin holding only one finger being lowered into the earth remained visceral in his nightmares.

"…you can't be serious."

Black cackled, throwing his head back. "Funny thing, mate. I'm always serious."

Remus fancied himself an intelligent man when he wasn't scratching and biting and howling at the moon, and now pieces of information, half-thought ruminations and theories collaborated during drunken hazes, seemed to align too perfectly in his mind. Twelve years ago, when they told him Peter Pettigrew had died in a blaze of glory after confronting the nefarious Sirius Black, his reaction had been one of uncharitable confusion, because Peter Pettigrew had never confronted anything or anyone in his entire life. Remus had been ashamed of his disbelief, but it didn't refute the truth of Peter being limp and malleable. When they said Sirius Black had betrayed the Potters, Remus remembered the nights Black came home bloody and wondered, but why did he wait so long? He was Secret Keeper for months! before that question got buried in the grief.

Tiny inconsistencies in the framework of what he believed to be true suddenly resembled fault lines threatening to tumble reality—but did Remus dare believe in this? How could he? It couldn't be true.

As Remus stood frozen, deliberating, Black turned his attention to the door, and his gaze became inexplicably wistful. "I saw them," he whispered. "Just for a second. Harriet and—Elara. She's…alive. I—."

Rage overcame Remus, burying his befuddled incredulity as he bore his teeth. Red rose from his neck and inched into his face. "No thanks to you."

Black's gray eyes tightened. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Moony?"

"It means her being alive is no thanks to you! You told me she was dead!"

"I thought she was dead! The Aurors said no one made it out of the fire! You saw the house!"

"She shouldn't have been in that house to begin with!" Remus fired a Cutting Curse at Black, and the flash of light sliced the arm of his robes, a bright, glinting line of blood splattering the wall behind him as Black swore. "You tell me to trust, and yet you haven't any clue what that means!"

"Bullshit."

"Is it? You made an awful lot of plans on your own in those days, it seems, and I heard about none of it." Remus couldn't stop his hands from shaking. "You sent my daughter away without telling me! You never trusted me!"

"But that's the fucking point, isn't it?!" Black snarled, striking his burnt chest. His face had gone red from the strain of yelling and holding himself upright. "I trusted you! Trusted you with every bleeding inch of my worthless hide, trusted you more than I trusted myself most days—and we couldn't afford it! Someone was feeding You-Know-Who more and more information every day, his fucking agents tailing me down to the corner market every morning—goddamn it, Remus, I couldn't trust anyone! I didn't trust you or James or Lily with her, I—."

"You trusted Marlene!"

"She was her mother!"

"And I was her father!" Remus roared, sparks erupting from the end of his wand. "Or was that just another joke to you as well?!"

The accusation bounced in the barren, cold room, and Black's response came low and raspy, whispered through the damning echo. "Don't you dare," he said. "Don't you dare think for one bloody moment, Moony, that anything between us wasn't real. That I didn't love you—."

Remus interrupted the sentiment with a disgusted growl. "You sent her away without a word to me. You took my daughter from me and didn't say a thing. That is not love."

"Our daughter." Black looked at him with pale, haunted eyes, then coughed, breathing heavily. "Marlene and her family were going to go under the Fidelius, just like James and Lily. Once that happened, I wouldn't know where they were—you wouldn't know, no one would have known. Flitwick was going to cast it but—." Another hard, dragging breath lifted his sunken chest. "He didn't get the chance."

Remus' fingers tightened around his wand, a terrible ache twisting in his middle. He couldn't believe him. He shouldn't. He needed to Stun the bastard before he could say anything else—.

"You ruined my life."

Black laughed, then coughed again. "Moony, I ruined everything I ever touched."

"If you had come to me, if you'd said what you meant to do, I would have agreed. To any of it—all of it! About the Secret Keeper, or sending Elara to Marlene under the Fidelius. Did that never occur to you?!"

"How was I supposed to know that? How was I supposed to know you wouldn't—?!" Sirius stopped and grit his teeth. When he spoke again, he did so with considerable effort devoted to keeping his tone level. "If You-Know-Who had gotten ahold of Elara, I would have given every Knut in the bank, every Galleon to the Black name, to get her back. That was what he wanted. That was what he'd wanted ever since I jerked the estate out from under Walburga and disowned Reg."

"And you thought I'd try to dissuade you from protecting our daughter?"

"I didn't know what to think. It's a fucking failing of mine, innit?" He snorted, a miserable, dejected sound. "We knew someone close to us was a traitor."

"And you thought it was me."

Black lifted his gaze to the rafters. Pain filtered across his unhealthy face, and he shut his eyes, still breathing too heavy, blood dripping from his hand. "Why not? It would have been stupid of me not to consider it. You were perfectly placed, trying to recruit other wolves to the Order—how was I to know you hadn't been recruited in turn?" His chin dropped toward his chest, lip curling in derision. "And you thought I betrayed Lily, James, and Harriet, and killed thirteen people. How's that for trust, eh?"

Remus took a step back, uncertain what to say in response. He wanted to defend himself, wanted to point out how everyone had believed him a murderer, not just Remus—but then, Remus hadn't been everyone to Sirius Black, had he? He'd been his lover, his—well, he would have been Sirius' husband, had the laws and circumstances and prejudices been different. Marlene had been the surrogate for the daughter they wanted to raise together, and yet, when the Aurors took Sirius, when they suspended habeas corpus for the massive influx of Death Eaters and violent sympathizers, Remus hadn't protested or asked questions. He had, in essence, washed his hands.

He had not trusted his partner, and his partner had not trusted him.

Again, Remus stumbled, his eyes burning. "The war ruined us," he muttered.

"The war ruined everything, Moony. But there's one thing I plan to make right." Black met his gaze and, straightening his shoulders, walked forward. He walked until the tip of Remus' wand was pressed to his sternum, and Remus could smell the awful state of his breath. He could also see the sincerity blazing in those dreaded gray eyes, the familiar fringe of black lashes, his resolve so bright and vivid it felt almost warm. "It's been more than five minutes. Make a choice. Go ahead and send me back to Azkaban—but if you do, swear to me you'll find that fucking rat, Remus. Swear to me you'll kill Peter for what he's done to all of us."

Remus' hands continued to shake, and his mind whirled, emotion and logic warring together like waves against the rocks, eroding each other piece by piece. All he had was a newspaper clipping and a rat with a missing toe. All he had was the sudden, nebulous belief of something more, something indefinable, and twelve years of grief pressed upon him like the boulder Sisyphus rolled up the mountain. Merlin, the ponderous back and forth of his hope and nihilism clawed at him, agony and anger twisting about his heart.

Make a choice.

And if I choose wrong? He could condemn an innocent man, a man he once loved more than his next breath, a man he'd loved since he'd been little more than a boy, to a fate worse than death. Or, he could be betraying James and Lily, letting them down one last time, dooming their only daughter to a terrible end. He might be the sentimental traitor Snape kept telling him he was.

Or he might not.

Remus held his breath. He opened his mouth—and chose.

A/N: So here's a rough timeline of events to keep things straight (dates are approximate): June,1980 - Snape gives V prophecy. Snape goes to Dumbledore. July, 1980 - Harriet born. November 1980 - Snape swears Unbreakable Vow. December, 1980 - Potters go under Fidelius. Elara sent to Marlene. January, 1981 - McKinnon fire. October, 1981 - Peter becomes Secret Keeper. Potters betrayed.

Sirius: *flirts, makes pun*

Remus: "Is this really how you want to die?"