Over After The First Time
Tanabata '03 Drabble Challenge: helvetius
Remus was afraid to die, once.
What it means to grow up: children know they will never die. Remus has been an adult his entire life, except for certain nights of the full moon, running for the joy of sensing his packmates fleet as shadows at his side. A year, two years, and death came to take the children. But never him. He had to bear witness to the waste.
There are no more enchanted forests.
They cannot run, he and Sirius. Outside there is asphalt and concrete, the letter of the law, and the banal reality of evil. So they pretend they have a choice: they lie down together before the fire and close their eyes. Muzzles to the flagstone, nose to nose, tail to tail. The nocturnal cacaphony of Muggle London enfolds them, dampened only minutely to animal hearing by mortared layers of stone. The fire crackles. Grimmauld Place settles on its creaking timbers, weighted with age and secrets.
He listens to Padfoot breathe. But for the beast-longing in his blood, it is not much different from when he would wake in the Griffindor dormitory, limbs aching with monthly wear; it makes him think, safe, and not yet.
Not yet.
Death passes you by once too often, and even hope looks like a steel-mawed trap.
But when he wakes there is a pillow under his head and a blanket over his legs, and the weight of Sirius's arm slung carelessly across his heart. Sirius who draws him unknowingly close, breathing warm and slow against his collarbone. Enough, or nearly. The wolf is feral and unremembering; it is the human whose scars never healed clean.
Remus has much to do, and he would not give up this moment. But one lifetime, he now thinks, is all he can take.
A lifetime spent in a river of mud
Isn't so bad either
As long as it's over after the first time
— The Seatbelts, "The Real Folk Blues"
— Montreal, July 2003
