Warning for death, mention of suicidal thoughts, angst


The portrait of Sirius is up in the attic draped in a sheet and the first thing it does when Remus uncovers it is run its hand though its glossy black hair, sneering. There's a fine dust of moustache over its lip and he must have been sixteen when it was painted because it's wearing that widecollared motorcycle jacket with the silver zips. Remus has to put the sheet back on immediately. There are other portraits up there of cousins and aunts and they beg him from under their sheets to take them too. Their voices are reedy with panic.


When he says nothing and turns to go down the stairs they beg him instead to set them on fire and end this insensate walleyed boredom forever. They have the gall to appeal to his humanity. The real Sirius would have laughed. Remus silently bundles the portrait out of the house at Grimmauld Place, which he has broken into because it's been four days since Sirius fell through the veil and Remus is sure that he cannot walk through all the rest of his days on earth without ever seeing those bright black eyes and hearing that jagged snigger again.


He takes it to his mildewed squat in Yorkshire and leans it against the wall and goes to Saint Mungo's to end things with Tonks. She rages so fiercely the Healers have to bodybind her to the bed; Remus goes home and takes the sheet off the portrait and lies down across from it on his couch and stays there a week. It takes two days for portrait-Sirius to understand that this harrowed old man is Moony. It doesn't know what happened to Lily and James. It doesn't know what happened between Remus and Sirius, or that Sirius is dead.


Sirius never looked at him like he was ill, piteous, contaminated. The portrait Sirius doesn't want to talk about that. It yawns and asks Remus if he's read the latest Wizard Wheels Weekly, a motorcycle magazine Remus never read and which went out of print in 1983. So when Dumbledore asks Remus to go and hide amongst his fellow animals, he wraps the portrait back in its sheet and deposits it in his vault at Gringott's. Before he locks the door he whispers to it I'll be back. Don't forget me. There are things I need to tell you still.


But Remus is gone a year and then Dumbledore is dead and the war's as good as lost but Tonks is alive and pulling at him with her warm hands. Tears are in her bright brown eyes. In the sickening blur of a summer he is married and she is horribly with child. Remus too is as good as lost; when Harry refuses him he thinks about walking into the sea. He walks back to Tonks's house instead. When the pleading and shouting are done, mystifying happiness crowds every other thought from his mind, every other longing from his heart.


The little bluehaired boy likes to sleep on Remus's chest and snore with a softness that makes his heart thrum. It's late April and warm enough to cuddle on the porch. Remus doesn't know that the two of them will always be strangers. Or that in a week he and Tonks will be locked into their dark little boxes and laid down forever on the the wrong sides, opposite the way they sleep in their bed. Or that years from now, when Remus is long dust, the portrait of Sirius will still be in the vault, under the sheet, waiting.