Title: "In Pace Requiescat."
Disclaimer: All characters and most concepts belong to J. K. Rowling.
Pairing, characters: Remus, Dumbledore, Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG, really
Summary: Albus Dumbledore knows Remus is hiding someone in the Shrieking Shack, but he doesn't know who.
The first time Albus follows him it's because he's curious and the soles of his shoes are picking out the pathway and he just can't help it. It's a curious thing because it isn't even near the full moon and so why, really, why would Remus be going to the Shrieking Shack? This is what Albus thinks when he thinks the werewolf probably doesn't think very much anymore, now that everyone's left.
The thing is, someone is hiding out in the shack, because Albus can hear Remus talking and holding conversations and they're familiar, the conversations, and he isn't having them by himself.
On Tuesday they're quiet, as if the person is sick or sleeping. He would venture closer, would look, but there's something private about this. He doesn't want to violate Remus' little circle of quiet. And so when the man-child, this person he has known since he was, oh, he was ten years old, says, "I wish I could tell you it will be all right," Albus just crouches in the stairwell beneath the tree and listens.
"I wish I could tell you, you know, everything will be the same way it was before all of this happened, but I'm uncertain. We're still healing. I'm still healing. And it isn't like it doesn't hurt."
It's pained, the way he says it; it shouldn't be disturbed. As if in reverence, the person will not respond to these monologues - Albus can hear him pacing, can hear the floorboards creak as Remus treads them.
He says, "I won't abandon you like Sirius did," and Albus knows he can't abandon anything anymore.
When it is night Remus will burn candles like at vigil, sulphur smell of matches and thin wasps of smoke wafting throughout the universe. There will be silences for long whiles in the dark punctuated by echoes of howling, wind and dark creatures and Remus transforming in the past. Albus will be near to sleep, exhausted from surveillance and worry and wishing not to be discovered, when Remus will break the plaster mold of quiet with a whisper.
"But I'm better," he'll say, some sort of enjambment, "and so it's different now. I'm not how I used to be when all of this first happened. There's a lot to be considered, actually. We're at war, you know. I don't care if the Dark Lord was a boggart someone laughed off. He isn't, I don't think he's wholly gone, not after the Chamber. I can't think that for your sake, anyway."
It's clipped, Albus thinks. How terrible, how five-years-old.
Remus does not show up, as he would expect, on the full moon, but neither does he (merely in the interest of the other man, of course; he's always been a bit sensitive about transforming). He learns this, a muted and sore fact, two afternoons later.
"I can't do that here," Remus tells his patient, his invalid. "You have never seen that part of it, not with your own eyes, and with both of us helpless it wouldn't be proper. I don't want you to know what it was like."
This is someone from the past. Albus thinks, do I know them, this person? but won't check. It doesn't matter. Voice-dream-invisible Remus knows them and the old wizard collects his words as they drain downward funnel-like into his pensieve-wracked mind, and they fill in the holes of it. It is him the man is talking to. He can't imagine what Remus could be doing to the mute refugee to nurse them back to health but it's irrelevant because his talking and talking cures things in Albus Albus didn't know needed to be cured.
There is calm as Remus offers the truth. It is as if the broken house and ever-silent resident have been waiting for it, the truth, before explosion or collapse or disintegration, but for right now all the little particles of noise have stilled to allow him passage. At the same time as, two months later, Harry Potter will be eating (if he lives) in the Great Hall after the Chamber incident, Remus' voice cracks into several pieces and emits something close to, "I thought you should know I'm doing this for myself, but it's because of him. Always because of him, though, wasn't it?"
A shift of clothing or position.
"I know you don't want to hear this. Not the gory details, of course, never those. But when you consider the fact more than a decade has passed and parts of me still don't work like those of a normal human being - think about, that, when you weren't born yet, and then you were ten years old, your entire life happened. Nothing lives up to that, I suppose. But you keep on living. And I've kept on living, and -" a beat. caesura. a pause. "Oh, just say the name, Remus. I've said it before, but not in the right places. But when you come down to it, it's 'Remus Lupin has lived and Sirius Black has lived albeit barely and separately and Remus Lupin still loves him.'"
Albus never disagrees with him; they never argue. When Remus says to the confessor he isn't heartbroken because he'd need a heart for that, Albus thinks he's a bit heartless himself if he wants to be honest. If he's very honest, he's jealous of the pain in the other man's voice (pain and exhaustion and an undercurrent of survival) because it's complex. Albus Dumbledore has never been anyone but Albus Dumbledore to anyone. He has hurt, yes, he has been pained and saddened and has burnt himself to a crisp with anger, but he has never partitioned like Remus has partitioned. Because Remus is all of that. And he has kept it hidden.
On an evening or a morning or in the middle of the night Remus says to his companion, "There was a time when all of us were happy," and Albus knows it is the truth, and that it's only, only true in past tense.
He can remember beginnings and the ends of beginnings. Remus, long-gone Remus, is a boy Albus found broken one day somewhere he hasn't been for years. Location and time are no longer important. He remembers the look in the boy's eyes after the strange man - and how strange, he thinks, how familiar I was - crouched to stare him in the face and said, "So, young Mr. Lupin. It seems you are not always quite what you seem, hmm?" and took hands and joined and traveled. Then ten-year-old with the tea-stain eyes.
But Remus talks of Sirius, of all of them, like they've been dead for hundreds of years. "He was a bloody mess, you know, the last time I saw him." They're an archaeological dig. "Definitely, no, not the same man. Something must have broken in him that day." 17th century metaphysical poetry. A chemistry textbook. "It was the eyes, I'm almost certain. The order has told me for years it was Sirius, but I can't ever believe them. That wasn't Sirius with those eyes." (and so many restrictions)
It's an extensive monologue. After yawning, talking until the hidden person must be asleep or deadened by the werewolf's constant murmuring, Remus says in his most haunted voice, "Even when we were unhappy we were happy. Do you remember? Well, you were a bit preoccupied, I'd say, but Sirius and I were so... lazy. And it was always desperate - never enough money - there's never - and of course we suspected each other. We were playing a game. Tag, really. You know, I'm sure, what I'm talking about. And now -"
He cuts it off and Albus thinks, now what? There's only silence. There isn't any now. The old wizard will crumple inward in the hallway like foil and yes, they're right back where they ended the last time, the only time. Harry has, will always have, the scar. Something he can see in the mirror. But Remus' scars - Albus', Remus-Albus, the man he is at night, when Remus speaks to fill him? those aren't - they aren't -
Remus says in finality: "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be able to come here anymore."
And neither of them can.
The last night, Albus unfolds the invisibility cloak from where it's been stored and readies the pensieve. He sits behind boxes of lemon drops and triads of metallic baubles; the chiaroscuro lighting drips over him like tapestry and there's the cloak, threading through his fingers, then kissing the backs of his tired hands. You see them, you don't see them; they aren't there.
And under the willow it's soft and quiet, nature waiting for something to happen. At the sound of Remus' voice Albus pauses because it isn't soft or quiet, the voice - it's forced, harsher. Strained.
"Well, as I told you, I can't come here anymore. I'd always felt, I hope you know, you were my best friend. Because the other - never counted, really. Or - well, you understand."
Albus cannot resist any longer and, drawn into action by the hyphae of the other man's long goodbyes, dons the cloak and creeps upward. Remus, if he were looking, would not be able to see him. The shack cannot see him and no-one can see him and Albus thinks, I am not here. This is a memory which will have happened for no-one, to be dragged out at the tip of his wand and drowned among all other things in the pensieve, the grave of what everyone remembers but never speaks of.
"I feel, well, when it comes down to it I feel rather silly for having done this. Oh, what an old man I am. Never as old as Dumbledore, of course. You see - I'd thought - for years, I'd thought, and - that... Sirius would come back. Somehow. That he'd slip through the bars, however guilty... Well. I can't think of it anymore. I've - I've waited too long as it is."
The inarticulate, the incoherent stream leaks down the last remaining step to where Albus is standing. He's shuffling forward now, he's at the doorway. And this is when he sees it.
The tattered-pocket room, not even a room, at first glance is empty. Solemn and terrified and ancient and perfectly, perfectly calm, Albus just waits for his eyes to adjust. And then he's frozen. He will not, cannot, won't disrupt the natural habitat.
Remus, alone and sat against the wall, draws close his knees and rests his elbows on them. "I've wasted so much time, James," he says. Somewhere by his feet is a bit of movement - oh. He's knocked it over, the photograph. James and Lily, spinning. "You've moved on, in death -" (spit out. a frozen word, "death") "- and Lily, too. Sirius is. Well. I can't wait for Sirius anymore. Not anymore, not when the Dark Lord's back."
He's covering his face with his hands. Albus strains forward, stretches to hear the dropped words. He thinks, he thinks - this is the last generation.
"It's just me that's left alive, after that," Remus says, bowing inward. "And Peter, well, Peter's gone now..."