Remus has prepared as he always does for a visit to Grimmauld Place by bringing along a supply of snacks and cleaning products. As usual, after three hours in the gloomy old mansion, he realizes he hasn't brought quite enough of either. After three years of trying to battle this horrible old place into submission, he's starting to doubt that there's enough chocolate and bleach in the world to cleanse all the moldy corners of the place.
Tackling Sirius' childhood home has been a family project since Sirius finally got around to revisiting it when Harry turned 11. Sirius has had possession of it since he was released from Azkaban when Harry was 6. When Remus learned about this, he just wanted to sell it. Sirius' recovery from Azkaban had been a long and winding road and Remus suspected that revisiting the site of his childhood misery would be another setback. He wasn't entirely wrong - the first time they'd entered and Sirius' mother's portrait screamed at them, Sirius grabbed Remus' arm so tightly he left bruises. Kreacher had also been no help at all; if Remus hadn't convinced the elf that working at Hogwarts was a noble pursuit his mistress would have approved of (no mean feat considering the slurs Kreacher kept slinging at him), he's not exactly sure what Sirius would have done with him.
But Sirius also seemed to take a certain amount of pride in cleaning the place out. Sirius said he wanted to sell it but didn't want to risk handing it off with any dark relics hidden in any corners. (Remus' financial sensibilities, molded by a rather lower middle-class upbringing, cringe at owning a townhouse in London and just letting it sit there uninhabited.) Sirius finds exorcising it invigorating, but his enthusiasm for attacking the place typically lasts about one week in the summer. Remus would rather rip off the bandaid and get rid of the place, but if Sirius is finding some healing going through it, he guesses it's okay to take their time about it.
This summer there's at least the added help (and entertainment) of several of Harry's friends joining them. The kids consider the house a spooky adventure, and they'd also been slightly bribed by the promise of dinner out in muggle London after an afternoon of cleaning. Harry, Ron and Hermione are 14, having just finished their third year at Hogwarts. (The school year had been uneventful, though there are whispers at the edge of their society that make Remus ache with worry.) Luna and Ginny have joined as well. They are currently spread around the second floor drawing room. Sirius is at a massive old desk going through some papers, Harry and Ron at the windows, wrestling with heavy green curtains, and the three girls are exploring the contents of a china cabinet. Remus is going through the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He's not usually one for book burning, but he's taking a certain amount of pleasure in tossing titles like Purity: A Magickal Heritage and A Case for the Eradication of Halfbreeds into the grate.
"What's this?" Luna asks, drawing Remus' attention to her. She's sitting on the floor by the china cabinet, wrapped up in an exquisite mink-lined cloak that she found in the hall closet. It dwarfs her, and it takes Remus a moment to see the ivory box she's holding out to him. She's wearing gloves; they all are, as a precaution, although Sirius and Remus had swept through the room before letting the kids enter, tossing several particularly horrible objects in a warded wooden chest for safe disposal.
Remus takes the little box, noting the intricately carved rose on the top. He cracks the lid open cautiously, away from his face. "Face powder, I think. Victorian, maybe."
"Chuck it?" Luna asks.
"I think so. It seems alright, but just to be safe, I'd rather we weren't fooling around with any loose powders or liquids," Remus says, pointing toward the rapidly filling garbage bag in the middle of the room.
"Okay," Luna says cheerfully. She wraps her mink tightly around her shoulders and drags it with her across the room to deposit the little box. Remus notices Sirius watching her with a slight smirk. The cloak had been a gift from his father to his mother on their 25th wedding anniversary. Sirius has already told Luna she can keep it, and she's been excitedly asking Hermione if she can help her figure out how to dye it rainbow.
"What about this?" Hermione asks, holding out a hairbrush to Remus. Remus starts reaching for it before catching its scent. When it hits him - pungent and sharp like ammonia - he pulls his hand back quickly, and the brush clatters to the floor. Hermione looks at him in confusion.
"Silver," Remus says, smiling apologetically.
"Oh, I'm sorry!"
He's giving her a reassuring smile, but she looks mortified, blushing deeply red as she scoops the brush off the ground. Hermione is a relatively new addition to this group and Remus senses that she is a little intimidated by the others' familiarity and dreads doing things that draw attention to her newness. (The others have known each other since early childhood, and this is the first time Hermione's come to stay with them for an extended time.)
"Just give him the shiny metal things," he says, smiling and pointing at Sirius. (Remus is wearing gloves, but they're not quite enough to save him from a burn if he touches silver, and having more than a few pieces of jewelry within arm's reach makes him queasy.) "I can handle everything else."
"I'm sorry," Hermione says again. She looks miserable.
Remus would like to brush past this and feels mildly exasperated when he sees Sirius standing up from the desk and coming over to them. "Sorry, Remus, thought I'd got all of it," he says, frowning and looking over the contents of the china cabinet.
Sirius' attention to this is drawing Ginny and Luna's, too. Luna returns from the garbage bag, draping the cloak on the couch along the way. Ginny, kneeling in front of the cabinet, scrutinizes a tarnished goblet.
"Can you tell just by looking at it, Sirius?" she asks.
"Eh… There are some things to look for," Sirius says. He takes the goblet from Ginny and the hairbrush from Hermione. He turns the hairbrush over in his hands for a moment before pointing to a spot on the handle. "See that stamp? Bit hard to make out, but it's a hippogryph head. Real silver generally has a stamp like that somewhere."
"Has the goblet got one?" Luna asks.
"Pewter," Sirius says, shaking his head.
"But you didn't even look," Luna says.
"Mm. That's on account of having an otherwise fairly useless talent."
Remus resigns himself to a conversation about silver and says, "I'd hardly call a knack for alchemy 'useless.'"
Sirius glances at him, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "Gracious of you."
"You know alchemy?" Hermione says, academic curiosity banishing the embarrassed flush from her face.
Sirius shrugs again, eyes on the metal in his hands. "A knack I haven't pursued, but, yes, I at least have a good sense for different metals, I guess. It's a branch of transfiguration, which I was always decent at in school."
Remus thinks this is an understatement - sure there aren't many 15-year-olds who managed to become animagi. He watches as Sirius handles Ginny's next discover, a dark wooden jewelry box. Sirius takes it from her and begins picking through its contents, a jumble of necklaces, rings and earrings. Hermione leans in, frowning at the jewelry, clearly determined already to address her deficient silver-spotting skills. Remus takes half a step backward; he can smell silver from where he is three paces away.
"I think alchemy's fascinating," Hermione says. "Why didn't you go into it, if you're good at it?"
Sirius sighs a little and asks a seemingly unconnected question. "You haven't come across the origins of my surname in all your reading by any chance, have you?"
Hermione bites her lower lip in thought. "I know the Blacks are one of the oldest wizarding families in Britain. They had large fiefdoms in the Middle Ages, right?"
Sirius snorts slightly. "What book was that?"
"A Most Magickal History of These British Isles, by Vega Quitrell."
"Mm. Beware authors with celestial names. That's a great aunt of mine; she embellished a bit."
Hermione looks both scandalized and intrigued by this information. "What do you mean?"
"Black. Comes from 'Blacksmyth.' I think they dropped the 'smyth' sometime in the 1600s in an attempt to distance themselves from a working class background. We were just blacksmiths."
"Really?"
"Yes. Well. Talented blacksmiths, I'll admit," Sirius mutters while frowning in distaste at a particularly gaudy necklace. He drops it back in the box. "The family had nothing on goblins, obviously, but were quite good for wizards. They eventually became jewelry workers and traders; there's supposed to be a genetic predisposition for talent with metal charms and transfiguration. My feel for metals might be a remnant of that history… Wasn't til the 1600s that the family really hit their stride, though."
"What happened then?" asks Luna. All three girls are paying rapt attention now, and the boys, still working on the curtains, are quiet, too, clearly listening.
"I don't know how much Binns gets into this," says Remus, knowing where Sirius is going, "but part of the wizarding response to the pressure of witch hunts was to attempt to control those they felt were drawing unwarranted attention from muggles. Fellow wizards could largely be talked into going underground, but others were… harder to wrangle."
He smiles gently; the kids are all looking rather somber. He never personally needed to be educated about wizarding cruelties and hypocrisies, but he remembers the indignation of friends like James upon learning the grimmer aspects of their history.
"We like to blame the population decline of giants, merpeople, dragons and others on muggles," he continues, "but the truth is more complicated than that. People with different abilities or ailments were targets, too. Metamorphagi, vampires, werewolves..."
"Which is where the Blacks come back in," Sirius says with a sigh. "Made our money the old fashioned way: weapons manufacturing. Silver mostly, for nets, thread, projectiles. The family outfitted generations of wolf hunters."
This is a fact that has always existed in Remus and Sirius' lives but it is new to Hermione and Luna (the others have heard this story before), and Remus can see the star-crossed lovers tale hooking into the girls like those stories always hook teenagers. It makes Remus uncomfortable. Sirius might see this, too, because when he speaks again his tone is lighter.
"Long story short," he says, "alchemy is the family business, Hermione, which was enough for me to rule it out. Does come in handy sometimes, though."
"Definitely saved me multiple burns," Remus agrees in the same tone. "Though it's also gotten us banished from several of the choicier society parties."
Hermione frowns. "Banished-?"
"For a while he made a party trick out of transmuting our hosts' silver sets into pewter," Remus says mildly.
Harry laughs. Ginny grins, looking at Sirius. "Really?"
Sirius smirks, still going through the jewelry box.
"But that's really hard!" Hermione says, gaping slightly at Sirius. "That's very advanced alchemy, isn't it?"
Remus nods. "It's also essentially impossible to reverse. There are a handful of people who can do it, but the prices they charge… might as well just buy another set. Definitely tweaked a few noses."
Sirius shrugs. "If people didn't want their noses tweaked, they shouldn't have invited the 'foremost advocates of werewolf rights' over and then put out the fine silver."
Ginny and Luna are laughing. "Fair enough to turn it, I think," says Ron. "Sounds like they're either thick or horrible."
"A lot of people just forget," Remus says evenly, not wanting to veer off into bashing lunaphobs. "Perhaps I'm being too generous, but-"
"Aha!" Sirius interrupts, sounding delighted. They all look at him and find him smiling at a pale, silvery ring, one he's clearly just pulled out of the jewelry box in his other hand. Outside of a few keepsakes in his childhood bedroom, Remus has never seen him look at anything in the house this happily.
"What is it?" Harry asks. He sounds as surprised as Remus is by Sirius' reaction to the ring.
Sirius blinks and looks at his godson. "Oh, you remember my Uncle Alphard?"
"Mhm."
"It was his. I thought it'd been lost."
Sirius sets down the jewelry box. Harry takes the ring for a moment on his way towards his friends, inquisitive as ever, but apparently finds nothing too intriguing, hands it back. Sirius turns the ring over in his hands a few times before pulling off his gloves and sliding the ring onto his left ring finger. Remus watches him curiously as the kids' attention is redirected by Ginny's next find (a stack of tea cups painted with small, moving scenes of Victorian wizarding London). Sirius pulls the ring back off, glances at the distracted kids, and walks over to Remus.
There's a slow smile on Sirius' face and Remus returns it, still feeling a bit confused. Sirius holds out the ring to him and Remus, trusting that this means it can't possibly be silver, reaches out to let him drop it in the palm of his hand.
"White gold," Sirius says. "I can resize it."
Remus blinks and smiles uncertainly.
"I'm sorry, are you proposing to me?" he asks quietly enough that they're not overheard. "After 20 years? In this drawing room?"
"18," Sirius corrects him, smiling but also looking a little confused. "I've told you about this ring, haven't I?"
"I don't remember it," Remus says.
"Um… hm," Sirius says, frowning in thought at the ring in Remus' hand. Remus looks down at it, too - it's handsome, heavy and intricately carved with art deco scrolls. Remus pulls off his gloves, fingering the ring a little cautiously.
"Hm, maybe I didn't," Sirius says thoughtfully. "I do remember… Well, when Alphard died some of his personal effects were mailed here, not sure why, but of course my mother wouldn't let me come collect them. I cornered Reg once after class, tried to make him get this for me at least, but he never did."
"You 'cornered Reg after class' to try to get this back?"
"Uh… yes?"
Remus thinks about 17-year-old Sirius with a rush of affection that brings a lump to his throat. "You… You wanted to give me a wedding ring in school?"
Sirius blushes. "I'm not sure it's a wedding ring."
Remus grins at the blush. "Yes, it is."
"He wasn't married."
"Ehm, that 'flatmate' of his-"
"Okay, fine," Sirius says, smirking, though there's something warm and a little vulnerable about the look in his eyes. "You don't have to wear it if you don't want to."
Remus smirks, meets his eye and slips the ring on. "I do."
Sirius lets out a bark of laughter.
"Smooth," Sirius says, grinning, eyes bright.
"You set me up," Remus answers.
"I-"
Remus leans forward and kisses him, sweet and light. Sirius' hand comes up, his fingers brush along Remus' jaw before he pulls back. They smile at each other and Remus thinks it is incredible that Sirius can still make him feel this way, shy and new.
These are the memories Remus finds himself clinging to in the chaos of the next three years. Whenever his heart seems to stop in fear, he pulls these moments back to him - Sirius' relaxed smile, Harry's laughter. He thinks of them and summons a patronus, throws up a shield spell and pleads with a higher power he's never quite believed in. He finds himself bargaining desperately for one more day, one more hour. He forces himself to go on.
20 years. By the end, he has been fighting this war for over 20 years.
He misses several moments at the end of the war, though, because when he sees Hagrid carrying his child out of the Forbidden Forest, Remus just collapses on the ground. His will deserts him, his mind refusing to process what he's looking at. He can't remember why he's supposed to care anymore. His memory of that scene is fragmented: McGonagall screams, Bellatrix laughs, Sirius stands so still above him he might be a statue.
Of course, the fear and grief he felt then were unwarranted, but that moment lingers in Remus' nightmares for the rest of his life. Sirius never completely escapes his night terrors, either, but they've long since grown used to reaching for each other's hands in the dark.
After the war, Remus strives to be grateful for the series of miracles that have gotten him here, but how realistic is that? There is something beautiful in acting like it's normal to have this life with his loved ones. There's something delicious, eventually, about taking it for granted, because maybe that means he finally believes he deserves it.