Title: "Finite Incantatem."
Disclaimer: All characters and most concepts belong to J. K. Rowling.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG, really
Spoilers: Through Goblet of Fire.
Summary: The elephant in the room (namely, the fact Sirius is staying at his house and he is trying, trying, but really has no idea what to do with him) grows a bit too large for Remus to deal with single-handedly.
Author's Note: I should be studying for finals. Somewhere I think this one went dry in the middle; I like the rest of it, though, and I'm posting it just in case someone might want to read. ) (I return to the internet to post fic only OMG)
They say it fades if you let it.
Love is made to forget it.
I carved your name across my eyelids;
You pray for rain,
I pray for blindness.
- "The Crown of Love," "The Arcade Fire."
Sirius is a paper doll.
The first day is relatively calm; he arrives in the early morning, all bone-dust-dry and darkness, and Remus, the amicable host, offers a shower and clean things and the promise of food. He keeps himself busy, in a line. He organizes and cleans and hums to himself, but is ever-conscious that time is slipping away; Remus is terrified.
He fries the last of the week-old bacon and thinks, in five minutes, in three minutes, Sirius Black will emerge from my bathroom and we will have to look at each other. He doesn't risk imagining speech.
But Sirius sits at the counter and they look at each other and nothing important happens; they speak and while it is not the same as communicating by owl, neither of them dies or falls to pieces or says anything incredibly out of place.
Sirius sleeps most of the day. Remus thinks, I can do this, and bustles about the house with work. It is as if not a thing has changed, excepting the man in his bed neck-deep in covers, and to counter this Remus beds down on the couch.
The descent begins on Wednesday.
There is a point at which Remus realizes there isn't much left to arrange within the house, and Sirius recognizes this, as well; the other's eyes follow him about, waiting. The rooms are silent but Remus can hear clocks ticking.
Around two in the afternoon they sit facing each other and Remus fidgets, fidgets, looks at everything.
Sirius says, "You look well," which he said yesterday and internally Remus screams bloody murder.
"You look better." He winces a smile because they're both lying.
It continues in this way in varying degrees of superficiality until Remus remembers something to do, and rises.
That night is when Remus hears the nightmares for the first time. He is walking from the bathroom when Sirius whimpers or groans or makes just enough noise for him to pause.
Remus knows about Azkaban because he's read probably everything there is to read on the prison in the space of twelve-thirteen-a million years. He could think words like residual and haunted and analyze if only that wasn't someone he'd known as a boy, someone he'd loved, behind a closed door alone and sleep-screaming. And he imagines the animagus Black as vulnerable, and squints.
He opens the door. Sirius should notice but doesn't, doesn't at all. Instead, he shivers and curls inward.
Remus stands in the corner. He thinks, wake him up wakehimwakehimwakehim.
He does not do this. Remus watches, and is angry.
Thursday, dawn, Remus drinks tea because he has not even tried to sleep. He has read the same sentence in the Prophet over and over before Sirius emerges, wraith-like, and sits on the same stool as always. "Always" has become "two days," yet Remus still reads.
Cornelius Fudge made the
Sirius says Good Morning.
This is inappropriate after the night Remus has witnessed. He feels sick. He believes he might throw up on the counter, if only to find a sufficient reply.
Cornelius Fudge made
"Where is the tea," Sirius growls, not unkindly but not a question, tired, exhausted, drained, dying -
"I'll get you a cup."
Remus does this, and Remus does this, and says nothing when the man cannot keep hold of the teacup and it smashes into four separate pieces on the floor. He cleans it up. He sits back down.
Cornelius Fudge made the following
All sound rushes into Remus' ears. "Sirius, the nightmares."
It's there, then. It has been said and the link made between the midnight hours and this early morning has been made concrete.
Sirius looks through him or over him. This is normal, too. Remus doesn't expect him to answer and yet he does; he speaks to himself as if neither of them are there, and still they are painfully aware of each other.
He says, hollowly, "They aren't nightmares. I have them in the day, too - I just - they come for me in the night when I can't defend myself."
Remus accepts this explanation but not without taking note of his tone of defeat. He is torn. He thinks, this man has suffered more than any other man. He thinks, this man was Sirius Black, and look how he has faded!
Remus does not allow his thoughts to become too poetic. But the house has become Azkaban, and he must leave.
He rinses the teacup and moves outdoors to garden. He's let it go for a few days and all the weeds are poking through.
The moon is coming. Remus knows this because he feels inhuman, because on Thursday afternoon Sirius grows restless and his first thought it to force him into submission. To this, however, Sirius seems oblivious and Remus would rather keep it that way.
Sirius says, "Where are my things?" As if he expects them to be there. Remus is tempted to say something catty in return before he sees the man's face - there's the truth of it, pinned and pallid, and so Remus goes to find the box.
He has placed it in the cupboard by the laundry, somewhere one would expect to find art supplies or linen but which he has filled with papers, stacked haphazardly into bins, forgotten. The box is square and unmarked, like all the others, but isn't taped shut; there's just a lid and in felt-tipped pen in the corner, "Sirius." And he dumps out the contents over the living room rug.
Sirius, the real Sirius, doesn't make a sound. It's this that Remus fears the most, even if he's been trying to act so calmly. It's the unpacking of something packed, the explanation of burial to the once-dead. Sirius' fingers move over pictures and objects and bits of everything and Remus is guilty, guilty, filled with bile.
The question is asked: "You put all of it away, then?"
This is a dead question. It should be a rhetorical one but Remus' answer is different. He wants to say, no I didn't I kept it with me for years Sirius believe me but is too tired to speak.
Friday is the full moon. Remus wakes before dawn, as he has done every day since Sirius' arrival, and feels for a moment he hasn't slept at all and only blinked. He chooses to self-remedy the way he always does - with chocolate - if only to escape from just sitting there, an action which usually leads to thinking.
It sets in anyway. There is a sense of debauchery in the candies and by the time Remus has eaten ten pieces he feels blurry around the edges (the desired effect) and closes his eyes. This is when his mind betrays him.
He hears it - reaching - a ghost limb - across large bodies of water, intangible. Sirius (dead Sirius, Sirius of a quick wit and sharp tongue) says, "Chocolate's bad for dogs, Moony," and always beneath the hypocritical, licks a smudge of the stuff from boy-Remus' nose. They blush in unison; Remus eats another chocolate. (Eleven).
Remus wonders if perhaps he isn't the perfect image of a teen-aged girl on her period and is slightly emasculated. He thinks, I have stopped aging. I am to be stuck as a seventeen-year-old forever, but immediately realizes this is not true.
And Remus eats one more chocolate (twelve) before shoving the box away.
Even with his normal use of the Wolfsbane Potion, Friday night sees his most docile transformation. Remus has secretly worried all day that he might attack Sirius after so long, when they are shut up for the night in the basement of Remus' house. This does not happen. The next morning, Remus will question as to why he allowed Padfoot to join him in the first place, eventually coming to the conclusion that he was too tired, too worn-out to ask.
During the long hours of the night, nothing happens. Remus transforms back unmarred to find Padfoot curled in a corner, watching. The position is impressed upon Remus' mind and he thinks, He has been there all night followed by and I haven't moved, either.
Remus uses the trapdoor to his bedroom and goes to beckon the still-transformed Sirius to follow when he notices he has been rendered mute. A soft recognition, Oh, and Remus knows the wolf has been howling the entire time, Remus' anguish magnified over and over into the pouring out on his missing packmate, now returned.
He is glad he is mute for the time being. He is glad. And collapses on the rug by the window, because his whole bleeding bed smells like Sirius Black.
At 6:53 P.M., Saturday evening, Sirius touches him for the first time. He remembers the details because he has dragged himself out of bed - always a struggle, never lying down, never stopping - to eat something or maybe have a glass of juice, and the clock above the sink shows 6:59. He has set it six minutes fast on purpose so he's never late. Remus compensates through subtraction.
Remus has pretended not to notice the fact Sirius is sitting on his usual stool, watching him. He no longer feels tired or sore because all he can sense is the man at his counter, the glass from his cupboard, the blue-green almost-darkness. And Sirius is rising.
His pulse rate is rather ridiculous. Remus sips at his water, which he's settled for, until he finally understands this is Sirius' hand on his hip and Remus shivers.
He jerks quickly away. Sirius' eyes are emotionless and Remus grows angrier than he has probably ever been. He thinks, I am already hurt and you were dead to me, I fixed it, you were in a place you could never come back from, and now you come into my home and you dare to touch me? It is different, he decides, than the embrace in the Shrieking Shack, because this means nothing; a year ago he was emotional, not as accepting, and Sirius was seemingly real.
Remus says nothing but never wants to be touched again. To save both of them, he leaves the room and goes to take a shower, letting the water run for minutes or days before actually removing his clothes. And then, all he does is stand with his back to the wall. Remus does not weep or sing or indulge in sexual fantasies as one would expect him to do; Remus thinks.
He knows that when he finally leaves the bathroom Sirius will still be in his house, but also knows he will not be waiting for an answer, for a reason. Remus understands the situation could disappear if both of them tried hard enough to make it do so. He knows, too, this will not happen because Remus cannot let it happen. One of them will die if it continues: Sirius out of disinterest (or maybe Remus would kill him), himself in an implosion or explosion of some sort.
Remus passes a hand over his eyes and thinks, isn't it odd? Isn't it odd they way the broken werewolf became the caretaker? That James died and Lily died, and Peter died at some point metaphorically? What was Sirius, then? And maybe Remus should have died, too. Perhaps that was the noble thing.
And Remus understands. His fingers prune under the shower-water and he smells steam and soap and wet hair, and he thinks, I am the one who has stayed alive. In the "last man standing" way of things, the wolf has always been the leader - no one ever said it, not James with his honor or Sirius, with his bad-egg-pride or Peter with his sense of humor - and this is why Remus is forced to be the last Marauder. Sirius is in the living room because Remus is the only one left.
He is not proud of this. He suffocates beneath the pressure - he cannot do this, not at all - and imagines the house bowing with it as well.
Sunday morning is when he decides his ultimate course of action. He spends the night ignoring Sirius' dreaming, even if he camps out by the door long after he has gone to sleep. Remus is possessed of a strange need to protect him and so he sits with his back to the wall, wand in hand, haggard.
Remus moves only to brush his teeth but catches his reflection by mistake; he thinks, I look like him and he and Sirius could be interchangeable. Fragmented, he wonders if Sirius isn't perhaps some sort of Dementor, human enough to get past his defenses and drain - but dismisses it immediately as being highly improbably. Remus hears Sirius' - his - bedroom door open and grips the sink. His eyes in the mirror are tired (with reflection staring back at him in fear of discovery, the guest barging in to find him in such a state, true form) and yet he can still see it... right... there. The thing he found in the outer ring of his left iris in third year, that little speck or gleam which made him a Gryffindor. Indignation or perhaps courage, and though the house and colors mean nothing to him now - a lie - he still sees what separates him from Sirius Black. The thing the Dementors took away.
Remus thinks, this is all wrong and decides in a moment that the man in his home is a stranger and Remus wants him to leave. This is his course of action.
Remus doesn't expect, of course, to find the Black-family heir sat cross-legged on a braided rug surrounded by wizarding photographs, and he most definitely doesn't expect to find him crying. Or, well, Sirius does not do this so emotionally, no drawing-back of the wingbones or exaggerated shudders, no gasping breaths. Sirius merely sits, hair in face, and weeps without sound.
It is a minute or so before Remus realizes he is facing Sirius' back but can dissect his slightest movements, but when it hits him he feels like murder. Fleetingly Avada Kedavra appears on his tongue and he imagines raising his wand, something with green light, something with a soft fall, transfigured bone of Bartemius Crouch.
Remus does not do this because Sirius has turned around and offered a hoarse, "Good morning," and it is not a good morning at all. He finds, instead, the nearest object in his hands - it's a book he found at at thrift shop two weeks ago, published in 1901 with ten pages missing in the middle (209-219) - and he lobbs it at Sirius' head. It would be comical, the way Sirius topples over near the red armchair, if only Remus hasn't found himself so excruciatingly angry.
He says, "Get up." And Sirius does so. His eyes are child's eyes, wide and unblinking; Remus wants to gouge them out. When Sirius makes as if to speak he pushes him into the chair and there is silence.
Remus flounders. "What are you doing here," he half-yells, "if not - to just - hide? To drink my tea and sleep in my bed and say good-sodding-morning!"
The man before him is breathless. "Remus."
He continues, unabashed. "You aren't dead, Sirius! James died! Lily died, but not you! I know - Azkaban - I know - or, well, I can't, but I've read a hundred books on the subject - they didn't. With Harry, in the Forbidden Forest, they tried but they didn't take your soul. You still have it. Why can't you - " It dies. Remus realizes he doesn't know how to finish the sentence and at the risk of prolonged incoherency digs the heel of his palm into his eye and waits.
"Remus, do you want me to leave?"
He is five. He is a grubby-fingered child.
On the ground, underfoot and so near to the surface, supported by hundreds of miles of earth and stone and living things, Remus discovers that in his ministrations he has crushed something. It has creased in the corner but eventually the characters return to the frame of the photograph to pose.
It is the one Sirius had been watching. And Remus can find the two of them in the foreground, himself blushing with a well-placed straightening of the shirt, the Sirius Remus has long-since ceased to need to remember, beaming. Occasionally they will kiss or lean on one another, occasionally they will yawn or sigh and their expressions change enough for him to notice - happiness? No, not really. Just... well, comfort.
Remus is a thing with stitches and he bleeds through them. He probably should have slept last night - outbursts like this are so unlike him - he sways slightly forward but not enough to fall, and Sirius steadies him just a little.
"Remus?" There is worry in Sirius' voice.
His cheeks are wet. He thinks, have I been crying? but just looks Sirius Black in the eye.
"That's the first time you've used my name since you've been here," Remus says, and furrows his brow.