Part 5

The hand cream is what did it. You could confuse the other senses easier. A cold thing can feel hot to the touch, like burning. The shadow out of the corner of your eye is only and only ever was a chair. Taste would be too complicated and take too much preparation and sound… Sound. If he breathed the wrong way in a quiet room, he could make out the faintest sound of screaming somewhere in the distance. The hissing of air out of his own nostrils had made him get up on several occassionas to find where the sound was and it was him all along. Smell could not and never did this. He knew that. He had never had a hallucination related to smell. It only mattered the distance away from a thing producing it and some smells couldn't be reproduced, even with magic. So, he chose to use smell.

He could use the hand cream to settle into or be dragged back out of a memory but that might be dangerous since he had memories tied to it. He would need to find something else. He gave the woman some money to pick out several perfumes she liked, not too many, three or four of her favorites. Her eyes widened. Either Alastor Moody did not know the going price for perfume or he was very generous. Here was her rent for a couple of months. He had waved off her mentioning bringing back the change.

"Just make sure I don't smell them yet. I want it to be a surprise." He smiled and kissed her before leaving.

-
Lupin was not called by the Wizengamot to testify or to document what had happened leading up to his last friend killing so many people in such a spectacular fashion. He would not have believed any of it but there was Sirius laughing on the cover of the paper sent special delivery, just the one sheet printed and sent via owls so they arrived by evening with more news forthcoming. Sirius killing Peter and those muggles resulted in the Daily Prophet and other papers dropping their muggle death-toll counters which had started a little before the hit on the muggle bank almost a year prior This was blatant and out in the open. No one could deny what Voldemort was trying to do now or how he intended on doing it. Lupin paced the room they had shared trying to figure out when Sirius would have even had the time to plan all of this. That's why the argument had felt so strange, Lupin thought. Sirius had done it on purpose.

Sirius had started a fight to throw Lupin off his scent, so to speak. They had looked deep into each others' eyes and Lupin tried to tell him that he was the same person he had always been. That there wasn't anything Sirius could say to break Lupin's loyalty for him or Peter or James but Sirius had looked at him not with disgust but as if it weren't a forgone conclusion. He looked at Lupin, finally, as he looked at so many people, as if he were so much beneath him that it didn't merit further discussion. Then the Potters were killed and Sirius fell apart. He acted like he was somehow personally responsible for it, which was hardly strange at the time. All of them had felt something like that at some point. All of them had taken something personally and for Sirius and Lupin and the remainder of the Order this was. He was inconsolable, until and this was the strange part, he wasn't.

It had been a little bit of a relief Lupin thought that night staring at the ceiling though it was dark. It had finally happened. They had never been friends. He must have imagined it all. What Lupin was wasn't even just a man but something else and he knew that and Sirius knew that. That would be the same for him though, no? Said a small voice. He is also something else. Lupin shushed the voice by choice and through work and effort but the voice tried to interject, still, gently and earnestly. It is not the same thing. Lupin rolled over and squeezed his eyes. Fighting back or trying to bring up tears he wasn't sure.

-
Alastor was at the woman's house again. Whats her name? Did he know her name? Her house was his favorite because she didn't ask too many questions. He waited until he thought she was asleep, drew himself a bath and placed the perfume in a neat row just outside of the tub with the hand cream. He situated himself so his head might remain above water if he lost consciousness, in case he lost touch with reality but if he did, maybe literally drowning in one's own thoughts would not be the worst way to go, if he had any say what those thoughts might be. He chuckled. He had been warned against doing this very thing but what could one do? He brought his wand to his temple and pulled out, like a magnet, a thin wisp of blue light. He flicked his wand upward and let the wisp fall back into his head through his skull.

In his memory he had rearranged the birthday party. He had gone back and altered slightly the first time he had realized that he might have certain feelings for her. Many of the women he had been with since those memories were most heavily altered. He replaced her smile on other people's faces, he put scars on women's backs where he knew there were none. He wasn't so depraved to put her in them completely though he had considered it. His vigilance kept him from altering too many memories too many times, from wiping what actually happened. He wasn't altering these in a penseive. If he did this enough times not only would they be indistinguishable from his truest memories, they would start to effect how he saw and understood the world but unlike a real memory that worldview would have no reference but itself. He would lose trust in his own memory, and himself and by extension the world and then he would spiral. So he did the complicated justification of creating several memories. A memory of something remembered which can be its own memory and altering his own dreams. No one would ever need those, he justified incorrectly. One of his favorite memories, left completely untouched, the one he was sinking into now was the morning Lupin made breakfast and that song came on.

He heard the opening as he felt himself sinking into a warm embrace of the melody.

"You don't know this song?" he heard through the sound of the blood in his own brain. Her and Lupin dancing. Lupin raising his eyes at him. Sorry, they seemed to say, jokingly. Alastor had been in this memory so many times he knew the steps, now but he would only observe this one. He had felt so happy, she had looked so happy. He had taken those steps and placed them in the birthday where in his memory he had decided to stay longer instead of leave early. In his memory, he is whole not just his body but his mind. He seems so young even though it was not that long ago. It will be harder to alter the earlier parts because he is observing and is the person he'd like to change in his own memory. It's risky. He'd like to give a better speech but that's not why he's here. The night wears on and he can use the scaffolding from earlier in the memory to build this one. In the real one, he will soon leave the party anyway. The music plays and that song starts. "The night we met I knew I-". He asks her to dance, she says yes. She's thrilled to dance. This is her favorite song, it is her birthday and they dance and soon they are the only people in the room. The song turns to something else or maybe gets quiet and she looks at him not as she did as an apprentice, with awe and fear. Not as she did with everyone in the Order including him, with warmth and sometimes barely there tolerance and not with the drowsy look of physical satiety that the women he's using to get rid of the pain of guilt for having been the reason she finally left but with the look that he couldn't give her when she was alive. The look his mother and father shared quietly with each other. A look of partners not only in love but luck and gratitude; a look that says I have found my home in you.

He pulls out a little glass vial from his pockets and the turns it over in his hands. It's getting clearer and as it does so he knows it will be harder to leave. She has to leave. She reminds him it's getting late. That she'll miss him and that he knows he'll be back soon. The gravity gets heavier my the minute, grounding him, trapping him in his own thoughts. He almost wants to sit down but knows he can't. He starts the long swim up to the surface of his mind. He can see the the tile of the bathroom and part of the ceiling from the other side of his own eyes. The light of the bathroom different from the memory he was emerging from. The song hasn't ended or maybe it has. He remembers it being tens of minutes long even without altering the memory and so it is.

He is back in the bathtub in the flat. He neglects the perfumes and he opens the twist on the hand cream and he inhales deeply shuddering. He can feel the last threads of the memory dissolve back into his mind. He checks with himself, where is he? What year is it? Which part of that memory were real?

He wakes the woman in the bedroom. Where does she get music from? He hums the song and her eyes go wide.

"I didn't know you knew muggle songs."

He shrugs and smiles a little. She lives for that smile. That smile is why she allows him to keep coming back even though her best friend doesn't think it's a good idea but she wouldn't tell him that. When the friend finds out she is agog. Alastor Moody? The woman misunderstands. The friend isn't impressed but terrified. She reads the papers. Alastor Moody was famous already but since the war ended something in him has snapped or come back together, she can't tell. He's on a rampage. It seems like every other person sent to Azkaban is a direct result of his intervention, that he is capturing witches and wizards single handedly.

"Break it off now," the friend urges trying to temper her fear.

"He's not dangerous…"

"The people who want to come after him, whose families are locked up in Azkaban might be."

"I shouldn't have even told you. I was just excited! You know how hard the break-up was for me and…"

The friend hangs her head in defeat. That's why she specializes now, she thinks. So she doesn't have to do the dirty work of talking people away from the steep, slippery ledge of denial. The friend thinks the woman is being naive and out of her depth but, also that Alastor Moody is reckless and playing games.

"What about his reputation?"

"He treats me just fine. He treats me better than that. I feel, when I'm around him that…"

The friend wants to scream. Everyday people come into St. Mungo's with rarer and stranger magical ailments and here she is arguing about one of the oldest and most difficult to cure: self-delusion over a man. She can't tell anyone else about her friend or the great and gifted best auror in a century Alastor Moody (which personally she never understood the appeal or the fuss about outside of his work) because news travels too fast. She would know, she works in the St. Mungo's wards and her sisters would be a flutter with gossip if she said anything so all she can do is sit and listen and hope the rumors are true and that he moves on quickly to another woman. She can take care of the crying and the heartbreak later, there are several effective potions for both.