Never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.

-- Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

PART V:
FLIGHT

Asleep on a train again. He dreamed that same old dream, that he was reaching through silver bars for Lily's hand. It was strange. Why never James' hand? Why never Peter's hand?

Why never Sirius' hand?

He didn't know, although he was privately glad that it was never Sirius he was reaching for. Remus had long since passed the point where thinking of him brought on a thick sense of horror. The horror was leaner now, though he still dreamed of Sirius from time to time. The dreams were never fully pleasant, but he never expected them to be.

He did not dream about other people, save his mother and occasionally Snape or Harry, or what he imagined Harry must look like now. All the other beings in his dreams were not quite human, real-but-not, anonymous, worthless. Sometimes they suggested other people, but they never mattered. Those dreams were quickly forgotten.

He was dreaming that he was reaching through sturdy silver bars for Lily Potter's hand. Whether he was reaching into or out of the cage was always unclear, and the whole dream was shrouded in a preternatural darkness. The silver made him think he was inside, instead of out, but it was entirely impossible to tell.

Usually, he continued to grope for Lily's smooth, white hand, though he could never see it. A bronzy black filled the spaces around the bars and swallowed up anything beyond them. The silver burned his arm, and often by the time he woke from the dream, his forearm was blistered and bleeding. The hissing sound of burning flesh was often the only sound that accompanied this dream.

But, this time, it was different. There were soft voices, children's voices, maybe. They were a low, pleasant murmur as he reached futilely for Lily's hand. Slowly, the darkness around the cage lifted, and the bars seemed to melt away.

Remus found himself standing in the dim half-light of a hallway in Hogwarts. He was facing out into a dull light, which slowly revealed itself to be diffuse sunlight shining through cloud cover. He realized that he was looking out into the courtyard, where the archaic fountain stood directly before him, pointing straight into the white sky, portentous.

He stepped out, into the courtyard, towards the fountain, which was not running. He wondered if it was winter, but he remembered the water falling there even when it was snowing.

Somebody said his name and he turned, but there was no one there. The sound of the voice fell flat, without a single echo, and he did not dare speak. He was worried, and peered back into the dim hallway. The doors swung shut just with a heavy bang and Remus awoke to a frigid train car, familiar even in darkness, still as death and even more foreboding.



He woke halfway to Portsmouth, his hand empty of the book he had been reading. He leaned down, searching for it, groping around on the bumpy, synthetic carpet. It turned up under his seat, but he had lost his page. Every page of his book looked miserably similar to the one before it, and he could not tell where he had left off.

Weak, ugly light leaked down from the fluorescents on the ceiling, and the sound of the train passing along the tracks was heavy. There was a plump young woman with short, red nails sitting next to him. She was dressed in Muggle clothing, but he recognized her vaguely from Hogwarts. He didn't know what year she'd been in -- perhaps a year or two above him, perhaps below -- nor did he remember her name.

She, too, seemed to have some vague recollection of his face. When he stopped thumbing hopelessly through his book, she said, We ought to be there soon.

he said.

You slept for a good long while. She smiled, a small, pleasant expression. But you didn't snore, if that's what you're worried about.

He did not look at her again and watched the scenery flash by instead. The sky was threatening snow again. He did not want to talk to her. He did not want to look at her soft round Hufflepuff face or her white hands and cherry-red nails. Her knees stuck out from under the hem of her blue dress, he had noticed, and it made her seem like a little girl. He did not want to think that such a girl could be in the same position as he was. The thought was repulsive, that someone with such pale, round, bare knees could know what it was like to lose loved ones, to see ashy houses, to be caught up in a loneliness so great it had driven people to madness.

The world beyond the thick, foggy window shuddered by, alternately dull green and dull grey. He did not bother wiping away the condensation on the glass. It could not look so vastly different.

Remus was tired. His trip home last night -- this morning, more aptly -- had been ugly and quick. He had Disapparated home just after dawn and made tea. The day before, he had cleaned up all the scattered newspapers on the kitchen floor and thrown them out with no ceremony at all. He had told himself that he would never cry, and, most times, it was not an especially difficult promise to keep. Certainly, old newspapers were nothing to cry over.



He did not see the girl from the train again. Once they'd retrieved their baggage, she disappeared into the terminal, and he was glad of it. He did not want to see her again, and, in fact, planned on erasing her completely from his memory. Some days, he wished he could simply Obliviate the last fifteen years of his life from his mind.

He carried his luggage -- one wrinkly, brown leather portmanteau -- out of the train station. A cold wind was pulling pearly clouds across the sky as if by a string. There was no end to them, no gaps between them filled with blue sky. There had been a threat of snow in London, but now the clouds seemed to have lost this power over the earth and were content to be tugged along by the wind, impotent.

It would have been a short trip by Floo, but he had decided that he would rather travel by boat over the Channel. He wanted to see France approach on the milky horizon, wanted to see the shoreline where Napoleon's sculpted face had once stared out at England, ravenous. There was something familiar in that painful hunger, something he knew very well indeed. He felt he might belong in a place where such voracious men lived. He felt he might be able to open his mouth in such a place, and not be blamed for trying to swallow the world whole.

He boarded the boat and a narrow man in a yellow slicker took his ticket from him. The man then informed him that there was a cabin, should he wish to go inside, and that there were lavatories there, as well. Remus thanked the man blandly, and went to stand at the front of the boat. He was early, although a few people from his train had come on board after him. He recognized their coats and luggage, but not their faces, and he did not look any harder. If he closed his eyes, Remus could imagine them all away.

He did not close his eyes, however, and instead stared out at the dull horizon, at France in the distance, at the dirty, thick clouds. He stood there, hands wrapped neatly around the metal railings, for upwards of a half an hour before the ferry's engines rumbled underfoot. Finally, the chains holding them down to the dock were thrown off and they broke away.

The wind as they made their languid way towards Cherbourg was just as cold as it was in Portsmouth, just as cold as it had been in London. It made him hope that, high up in the North Sea, somewhere without a real and concrete location, the wind was even colder. He fixed his eyes on the horizon and pulled his coat more tightly around him.



Remus rented a cheap hotel room that night, and lay under the bright, dry light until very early in the morning. He tried to make plans as he stared up at the white ceiling, but he found he could not think of anything at all.

The sound of hot air blowing through the vents was an unfamiliar and ugly sound. Somewhere in Cherbourg, not very far away, there was the sound of sirens. Remus imagined that some nearby building was on fire, slick smoke pouring from its windows into the dark sky. He thought that if he were to open his own small window, he would be able to smell it. He fell asleep thinking of this anonymous burning building, and dreamed he was being burned alive.

He watched as his mother stepped into the ashes of his pyre. She bent down, scooping his bone-white remains into a wooden box. She picked up something hard and grey and shaped like a fist. Remus knew the moment he saw it that it was his heart.

His mother turned to him, her eyes glassy, and said, Nous ne pouvons pas connaitre personne. Nous ne pouvons pas connaitre un homme apres un moment, un jour, apres dix ans, vingt ans. Non -- nous ne pouvons pas connaitre personne.

he said.

She shook her head and said, and shut the box containing his ashes. A glass table materialized out of nowhere, without a spell or a wand or even a single breath drawn. His mother set the box on the table and produced an old, iron key from the pocket of her dress, which she used to lock to box up tightly. She replaced the key and put her hand on top of the box, palm flat against the smooth wood. Je vais ce jeter dans le rive.

With that, she picked up the box and turned sharply. She threw it into a river he hadn't even noticed before. There was a splash, and he ran towards the river, desperate to see his own remains one last time. The box had opened upon impact with the water, and his ashes were floating on the inky water like chalk dust. He saw his heart bobbing along towards some mysterious destination like a stony ship.



Originally, he had planned to go to Paris and stay there until he'd spent most or all of the money he had with him, save enough for another train ticket.

But Remus did not leave Cherbourg, not once he'd spent all of his savings, nor for a long time afterwards. He continued to keep the tacky little hotel room. He stayed away from the Wizarding part of town and took French classes twice weekly. He got a job as a bellboy at a little inn and found that he liked the silence of the job, the fact that it required no intimate personal contact and only a rudimentary understanding of the French language.

The classes had, after six months, done very little to decode his mother's words to him in his dream. As the weeks went by, he remembered less and less of what she'd said. He knew that she had spoken, and he could recall the tone of her voice, but he eventually forgot the actual words she'd spoken completely. Never again did he dream in French -- except for the dreams in which Sirius appeared as a crow and told him, Je t'aime. That didn't count, though, because every romantic in the world knew what that meant.

He did not have the energy to move away. It felt as if he'd used up all his momentum on the trip from London. Instead of packing up his few things and leaving, he took to sitting on a bench at the harbor and watching the ships. Sometimes he would buy a meal and sit out on the wooden bench and eat straight from the wrapper. On the whole, he tried to spend as little time as possible in his room, which was not difficult. He didn't mind wandering the streets, even when it was cold or raining. It soothed the restlessness in him, this constant walking. He would window shop, or wander through the public parks. When he felt he had money to spare, he would go to a museum and walk around all day, until he was so hungry that he had to go and eat.

On full moon nights, he Apparated back to his family home and locked himself in the sturdy cage in the basement. He always let himself in through the front door, because he liked walking through the empty house. Somehow, seeing the place gather dust was satisfying.

He knew these monthly visits made his exile incomplete, but he didn't care. Only he and the concierge at the inn knew about them, though it occurred to him that there was no one else left to know. Nevertheless, he always felt like a fugitive when he returned to his little hotel room early in the morning. There was often a thin fog clinging to the streets outside when he collapsed into his bed and slept for a day straight. He would return to work the next afternoon, and the concierge would ask how his poor grandmother was doing. Remus would mumble something in broken French and shrug at any further questions, unsure of how to respond.

It was in Cherbourg that he began to dream about reaching for Lily's hand. He reached and reached until his arm was raw and throbbing, but still could not even see a glimmer of Lily's white skin. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was Lily's hand he was trying to take hold of, and that if he could grasp her hand, everything would be set right again.



What he appreciated most about France was that there was little there to remind him of his youth. He thought about days past as his youth, as if it had been decades since he'd last seen James and Lily and Peter. Sure enough, his hair was greying. Every morning, when he looked in the mirror, it seemed there was more grey than there had been the previous day. Sometimes, however, he would come across something that reminded him violently of his Hogwarts days, or of the time he spent living with Sirius.

Today was such a day. He was looking at a poster for a second-run Muggle movie, and here it was again, the words La Guerre Des Etoiles aligned in blocky text. He's seen it the first time the summer of 77, when they were all fresh out of school, flushed with success and youth and perhaps even love. He would Apparate almost every day to Brighton, where Sirius and James were staying. They spent full days on the boardwalk that summer, doing absolutely nothing, glorying in their freedom.

July came around, and James left for a vacation with Lily and her family in Germany. Remus and Sirius spent the days during James' absence in the backs of dark cinemas, kissing and groping, and occasionally watching a film. There was something surreal about it, about the flashing colors ahead of them, about the soft whirring noise of the projector overhead, and the feel of the cheap plastic arm rest digging into his side as they kissed.

He stood on the sidewalk, malcontent March wind tugging at his hair and making his cheeks pink. He was strangely moved by the poster, for no good reason.

All the same, he remembered the grainy fabric of the cinema seats, the cool, neat air with an intense fondness. He remembered the sticky taste of of soda on Sirius lips, too, and it almost -- almost -- brought tears to his eyes.

At that moment, someone ran into his shoulder from behind. He jerked and turned, but the man was already passing him. The huge, dark figure went by him, murmuring a subtle Pardonnez moi, his black coat fluttering in the wind. He must have been seven or eight feet tall, it seemed to Remus, and he watched the man disappear around a corner in awe.



Another memory, fresher and bitter like lemon juice:

He was chopping cheap, fatty pork into thin slices. They couldn't always afford it, and often went without it for weeks. We don't need meat, Sirius had said with a shrug. We're being healthy. Remus had frowned, consumed by the fact that they were not in the least healthy, only extremely poor.

It was the year after they graduated, the summer warm and lazy. It had been late in the day, the sun a fat, golden disk hanging in the darkening sky. He could see it as he cut the meat, descending brilliantly across the city skyline. Occasionally, a black shadow of a bird would swoop across its brightness, making Remus' eyes swim with the contrast.

The pain that blossomed across his hand was sudden and shocking, and he dropped the knife to see that he'd sliced his palm open. It was bleeding heavily, and he swore under his breath.

Sirius rose from his chair and crossed to him like wildfire. He'd no sooner muttered the words than those tough hands were at his wrist, wrapping a tea towel around his hand. Sirius held him there, pressing tight to staunch the blood flow, looking at Remus intently.

You're so careless, he said.

I'm not.

What were you looking at out there?

Remus' blood was soaking through parts of the towel, red and thick and menacing. His hand throbbed, and he could feel Sirius' pulse through the cloth. You shouldn't touch me. I can take care of it.

You were just standing there, staring at it, Sirius protested.

If you'd given me half a second--

What's the problem, Moony? Why can't I help you?

Remus replied, trying to snatch his hand back. Sirius would not let go of Remus' wrist. I'm bleeding all over you. Let go.

Let me help you.

He pulled again, harder, and freed his hand from his lover's grasp. He held it close, pressing the tea towel to his skin. It stung against the wound, and parts of it were already soggy. I can do it! he said. He hated the shrill sound of his voice, but adrenaline and fear were still tingling in his veins. I'm fine, Sirius. I'll do it.

Fine, do it yourself. You're a stupid twat, you know that? Fine. Sirius sounded cruel, unbearable, like a harpy.

Shut up! he said sharply, clutching his hand tight. Shut up. You don't understand anything.

Sirius paused, looking at him. His jaw was tense, his mouth a tight, frustrated line. He let out a sigh and tried again, more gently. So tell me, he said evenly.

I can't. But every time, Sirius -- Every time something like this happens, I worry. There are things the people who write the books just can't know. There are things I don't know -- Things I feel. I know I'm dangerous. I know it. Nobody has to tell me that.

You aren't-- Sirius began, but Remus cut him off sharply.

Shut up, Sirius. You aren't in any positions to tell me whether or not I'm dangerous. I'm dangerous and I know it and I can feel it. And there things I feel -- I feel like my blood is dangerous. There's magic in me that's not in you, Sirius, no two ways about it, and it's magic you don't want.

He walked into the bathroom and proceeded to clean his hand. He wrapped it in a strip of Madam Motley's Healing Gauze, and rinsed the dirty towel in the sink until the water in the bowl ran a pale pink.

He went back to the kitchen, his bare feet silent on the linoleum floor. He found the counter clean and Sirius back at the table as though nothing had happened, reading the Daily Prophet once more. The headlining article was about a strike at Gringott's, and forty-some-odd goblins glared at him from the large picture on the front page. After enchanting the salad to toss itself, Remus dumped the meat and vegetables into a pan and lit the range.

In the near-silence of the kitchen, with only their breathing and the hissing sounds of cooking meat for company, Remus tried to discern whether he had been forgiven or if the matter had been shoved into some corner of Sirius' mind in the company of various other spats. It seemed sometimes that Sirius collected arguments and kept them locked up to treasure like gold. It seemed sometimes that Sirius loved to hold a grudge.

But that night, they made love quietly and Sirius said I love you in the late night dim of their bedroom. Remus kissed his face and knew that in the morning, his wound would be healed and things would be fully restored to their rightful positions.