Previously in the Darklyverse: Mary got injured and landed herself in the hospital attempting to domesticate the basilisk she bred for its venom. After getting free of the Imperius Curse, Emmeline took off to hunt Horcruxes with Dumbledore, while McGonagall took over as Interim Headmistress and Sirius covered her Transfiguration lessons. Alice and Frank got divorced. Remus and Sirius formed an uneasy truce.

xx

April 15th, 1982: Remus Lupin

Cattermole isn't happy when Mary breaks the news to him that she'll be staying with Remus and Alice for the next couple weeks. Remus can't exactly blame him—from Cattermole's perspective, everything was fine, and then suddenly his wife was in the hospital with a mysterious creature bite that mangled her arm and she wouldn't tell him anything about where she'd gotten it. Remus steps out of the room to give them some privacy for the conversation, but he can still hear Cattermole shouting all the way down the hall, and Mary always says that Reg never shouts.

It's not like Mary and Cattermole are going to end up divorced over this—Mary seems to have resigned herself to a lifetime in the closet, and as far as Remus can tell, Cattermole is crazy about Mary and is willing to put up with a lot. But it's bound to add strain when Mary won't tell him what she's up to or why.

When it becomes apparent that Mary and Cattermole's argument isn't going to end anytime soon, Remus slides down the wall and leans back against it once he's sitting down, drawing his knees up to his chin. It's a few minutes before someone passes him whom Remus recognizes—Alice—and he tells her, "Don't go in there just yet. They're still having it out about Mary not wanting to come home."

Alice startles—she must not have looked closely at the figure sitting here on the floor—but she recovers quickly and joins Remus down on the ground. "How's her arm?" she asks.

"I don't think it hurts much anymore, but she's going to lose at least some motor function, the Healer says. Her hand is more the problem than her arm is at this point—she still can't write anything or hold her wand steady with her wand hand."

"And she's still insisting on trying to socialize the basilisk?"

"Kind of. She keeps calling it Hatcher and talking about not wanting to cause it any pain, but it's not like she's figured out how to stop it being venomous, and where's she going to put it when she's done with it? It's not like we can keep it in Em's room forever. I think she knows that, even if she doesn't want to."

Alice sighs. "She ought to go home to Cattermole—it's not like there's much of anything she can or should be doing at our place before the basilisk reaches three weeks old. We can feed the thing without her being there—just send rats in without taking down the barrier. I should have fought harder with her, but—I don't know. Maybe the flat just seems too empty with Em gone and I feel like I need Mary there more than I should."

He knows what she means. Remus misses his late-night ice cream dates with Em, her sarcastic jokes, even the way she wakes him up during the night when she stomps out of her room to bang around cabinets and graze on stuff in the kitchen at two in the morning. He likes living with Alice, too, but Alice is so—proper all the time. Remus can't really act like a Marauder around her, and with how much time she spends in her bedroom, the flat is too quiet.

Between going under the Imperius Curse and promptly running off with Dumbledore after she broke out of it, Emmeline feels totally inaccessible to Remus lately. The last time he talked to her and really felt like she was there was when he was inside her mind, after she'd accepted that she wanted to get free and was struggling with it, and he—said some things he maybe shouldn't have to try and motivate her. He feels guilty about it now—wonders if all the things he and the others said to her when she was in that condition are keeping her up at night the way they're keeping up Remus.

"Sirius talked to Andromeda and Sturgis," she says, and Remus tries to snap himself out of his thoughts, "and they're good to join him at Hogwarts to get the artifacts out of the Sorting Hat after we get the basilisk's venom. I haven't talked to Frank yet—I kind of want to just avoid him altogether and have Sirius ask Kingsley instead, but…"

"You feel like you should loop him back into your life in some way? That's understandable."

"He's the father of my child. I ran out on him. The least I can do is not keep any more secrets from him."

"Yeah," says Remus, his brain still stuck on Sirius ever since Alice mentioned him.

"The shouting sounds like it's over," says Alice. "Before you go back to Jonker's, do you have time to come to the snack trolley with me? I was going to get Mary something better to eat than that dreadful cabbage soup they serve here for dinner."

xx

St. Mungo's discharges Mary on late Saturday afternoon, and Remus, who's just woken up for the day, is there to Side-Along-Apparate her back to his flat. The Healers say it's unlikely that Mary will ever fully regain control of her right arm and hand, and you'd think it wouldn't matter much whether you cast spells or Apparate with your wand in your weak hand instead of your wand hand, but apparently it does. He wonders if they might have been able to do something more for Mary if they had known they were dealing with a basilisk bite, but honestly, it may not have helped much: nobody, to Remus's knowledge, has dealt with a basilisk bite for at least several centuries, and the things usually kill you before they have the opportunity to maim you.

To keep the basilisk contained as it grows, Alice has put an Undetectable Extension Charm on the dome inside Emmeline's bedroom. When they arrive at the flat, Mary doesn't go in there, staying in the living room where she practices casting simple spells with her wand in her left hand, but Remus keeps catching her looking in the direction of Em's room with a look of something like longing on her face. "You did what you could, Mare," he finally says after about an hour of this. "You can't feel badly for that."

"I could have done more. I could have been more careful, tried harder."

"You spent, what, four days on and off with that thing, for hours at a time? You've done enough."

"He's not a thing," Mary grumbles.

Remus doesn't bother to argue. "So, um, I was going to swing by Hogwarts to see Sirius tonight. Are you going to be all right here with Alice?"

Mary rolls her eyes—at herself, Remus thinks, for her shoddy attempt at a Levitation Charm—and sets down her wand. "Yeah, I'll be fine," she says dismissively. "Go get your person."

"Sirius isn't my—"

"He's totally your person, and you should go and get him."

He doesn't answer at first. "Can I help you with that?" he finally asks, nodding at the feathers spread out on the coffee table in front of them that are stubbornly refusing to levitate at Mary's commands.

"I think I've almost got it," she says, her face changing immediately. "If I could just—"

But it takes Mary another twenty minutes of effort before she's able to raise a feather the way she wants to without it dashing off in odd directions. By the time Remus Flooes to Hogwarts hours later, she's still only graduated to third year-level spells, her tongue stuck out in concentration and a look of rage in her eyes.

It's not like he's been hanging out with Sirius every day for the last few months—they sit together at Order meetings, and Remus drops by Hogwarts maybe once or twice a month—but Remus still feels like Sirius is everywhere. It's hard with them all living in different places, Peter long gone, James essentially exiled from Britain, and Sirius reluctant to leave the castle except for Order business in case something comes up with a student. Usually when he sees Sirius, there's no one else around to act as a buffer: it's just Remus's breath and Sirius's mingling in close quarters.

"Make yourself at home," Sirius says when Remus climbs out of the fireplace, and he hands Remus a sack of Cornish pasties he nicked from the Great Hall during lunch.

Remus curls up in one corner of the sofa and digs into a pasty so that he doesn't have to speak just yet. Sirius's quarters are relatively generous for a teacher—behind the student-facing office, he's got a living area with an icebox and a dining table pressed up against the wall, a bathroom with a tub and shower, and a king-sized bed in the bedroom. But Remus still feels like there's no room to breathe between himself and Sirius every time he comes here.

Sirius ignores the large armchair conveniently located away from Remus and crowds right up into Remus's space on the couch. They're not touching, but Remus can feel the warmth of Sirius's thigh through his robes. The fingers of Sirius's right hand splay out in the free space between them, and Remus carefully pulls his hands into his lap.

"How's Mary? With school going on, I never had a chance to get out to St. Mungo's to see her. I swear, it makes me want to take back… maybe not every prank we ever pulled, but at least a quarter of them."

"You? Take back pranks?"

"Do you remember little Meredith McKinnon's best friend, Helen Brown? She's going to be the bloody death of me. She gives Filch hell, which means Filch gives me hell. You don't even want to know what she did Mrs. Norris the other day—it puts the camel humps we gave her to shame. It sort of makes me feel bad for what we must have put McGonagall through."

Remus smiles. "What's Filch bugging you for? She's a Slytherin, right? You're not her Head of House."

"Yeah, but I'm the faculty advisor for War Stories, and she's leading it from the student end of things this year. At least she doesn't really direct shit at Muggle-borns, even if my pureblood Gryffindors do come complaining to me about her all the time. I still can't believe McGonagall named me Interim Head of House. What were she and Dumbledore thinking?"

Haltingly, Remus allows his hand to drop from his lap back down onto the couch cushion. His fingers don't touch Sirius's, but it's close—too close for Remus's own good.

"Well, it's only temporary, isn't it?" he says quickly. "When Dumbledore and Em get back, and all of this is over, he'll go back to being Headmaster, and McGonagall will take over Gryffindor House and Transfiguration lessons again."

Sirius glances around the room then, as if suspicious that somebody's around to overhear them. Ridiculous, of course, in his private quarters. "I don't know if Dumbledore is coming back. It's sort of a suicide mission, isn't it, chasing Horcruxes? What happens if and when Voldemort notices any of them missing?"

"He hasn't yet, has he? It's a race against time. He hasn't noticed the ring they found being missing yet. We'll get the four Hogwarts artifacts in one fell swoop, and assuming that all four of them are Hocruxes, that just leaves the diary Snape's going to get from Lucius Malfoy. If anybody's at risk of Voldemort catching them, it's not Em and Dumbledore—it's Snape. He's the only one who's going to be meddling directly with one of the Death Eaters."

Sirius thinks on this for a moment. "All of this was so much easier when Voldemort was just a distant threat," he says finally. "Remember how frustrating we thought it was to be sidelined when we were students? Now that we're in the thick of it, I just—I don't regret any of it, but at least we didn't have to worry about all of our friends dying on one bad raid any night of the week."

"It's like—we can't afford to slow down," says Remus. "How much has any of us talked about Marlene since they killed her? I know I haven't thought about her anywhere near as much as I should have."

"I think about her a lot. I… think it's just easier to focus on keeping those of us remaining alive. Mary was wrong about her: she wouldn't have wanted us to stop fighting just because we got scared."

Remus has to bite back his retort—Marlene wouldn't have wanted the two of them to be spending any time together, either, and Sirius isn't heeding that wish of hers. It occurs to him that maybe it's different now that she's dead, that she wouldn't want Sirius to pine over her forever, that she wouldn't want him to put the rest of his life on hold for her—but no, on second thought, that's exactly what Marlene would want. Her spirit, wherever it landed after death, is probably watching over them right now, cursing loudly every time Sirius's fingertips edge closer to Remus's.

"What is it?" says Sirius quietly, and Remus realizes that he's broken the flow of the conversation.

"Nothing. Marlene would just—she'd be pissed at us for all of this, that's all."

It's Sirius's turn not to talk, and Remus immediately regrets voicing his thoughts. The peace between them is fragile, after all, and he ought to be more careful not to spoil it by dredging up pains from the past. But then Sirius says, "I'm sorry she got hurt. I am. But I'm not the villain she made me out to be, and just because she's dead doesn't mean I owe it to her to do what would have made her happy."

Remus doesn't know what to say to that. "That's harsh," he finally answers.

"Harsh, but fair," says Sirius.

But Remus is already drawing back his hand and settling it in his lap again. Sirius may not care about respecting the wishes of a dead woman, but Remus has enough guilt for the both of them.