Author's Note: No note! Just more Remus! You WIN!
Erm, actually, there is a note. I wrote much and edited all of this after an all-nighter. Self-explanatory, I think.
Oh, and I saw the Order of the Phoenix movie today, which probably explains why it's so emo.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shattered
There was something not-quite-right about the next Friday night. The broom wouldn't make its usual transformation into a microphone, and there was almost a bit of malevolence in the glint of the mirror over the bar. Remus was as efficient as possible going about his closing duties. He just wanted to get out. And this time, he kept all the lights on.
He had just finished sweeping the floor when he heard it--the unmistakable crash and tinkle of shattered glass.
"Velox ventosus," he whispered, flicking his wand. A breath of wind rushed forth from its tip and swirled around the perimeter of the room, extinguishing the candles in a single swoop. Even as the last flame flicked out of being, Remus dove behind the counter and stayed there, trying to stem his panicked breathing.
More glass smashed, closer this time, followed by an eruption of raucous laughter.
Remus bit his lip hard, looking intently at the bottles arranged in the shelves on the inside of the bar counter, memorizing details in an attempt to force himself to focus. Did he run for his life? Did he stay and protect Rosmerta's livelihood?
Or did he huddle here in indecision, wishing some benevolent higher power would sent a bolt of courage straight into him?
Then the storefront window exploded inward, and a waterfall of glass rained to the floor in a grand symphony of discord and destruction. Remus cringed, cowering lower in the corner. He'd washed that window last weekend, painstakingly. Rosmerta had been overjoyed, telling him it looked just like new.
And now it was spread out on the floor in a million glittering pieces.
The laughter burst out again, hearty and unrestrained, guttural and unsavory.
"Knock, knock," a voice called caustically. "Anybody home?"
The signature crunch of shoes on glass rang a like a death knell in Remus's ears. If he ran now, they'd see him for sure.
"There weren't any lights on, Avery." Avery. It sounded familiar. Did he know an Avery? "Let it go. The bitch'll be pissed enough to see her window broken."
"Yeah, well, I swore I saw lights on a minute ago."
Remus choked.
"You didn't."
"I did so."
Cold sweat ran down Remus's back in rivers.
"Well, there's no one here now. Let it go. We've got more fuckin' damage to do."
Avery didn't sound convinced, but, to Remus's giddy relief, he dropped it. "Yeah. Yeah, all right, fine." Glass crinkled and cracked under his feet again, and then two sets of footsteps faded away in the distance, punctuated occasionally by the ear-splitting demise of another storefront's wide pane of glass. Remus waited, shivering in the frigid breeze that howled in through the broken window, until there was nothing to hear but his own ragged breathing. Then he waited a little more before getting to his feet and peeking over the edge of the counter.
Shards of glass decorated the floor like confetti, all of them glinting and sparkling in the weak starlight. Dust drifted and twirled in the wind that poured in through the jagged mouth of a hole, its maw open wide and lined with razor teeth. Remus drew a few deep, steadying breaths, and then he ran.
He was panting so hard by the time he reached Gryffindor Tower that it took him three tries to gasp out the password to the Fat Lady. Clutching his protesting heart, he lurched into the common room and, as all eyes within landed upon him in astonishment, managed to choke out a few more words.
"Floo... anybody...?"
Lips pressed together, Lily jumped up from yet another list and went straight up the stairs toward her dorm. Remus had time to collapse in front of the fireplace, chest heaving, head spinning, and count to fifteen before she returned and handed him a small leather pouch filled with green powder. He dragged himself into a sitting position, struggled to wheeze something close to "Thank you," and tossed a pinch of the precious dust into the fire.
A very deep breath made his "Madame Rosmerta" mostly understandable, and then he squeezed his eyes shut and plunged his head in.
"Wh... Remus?"
A shadowy shape collected itself off of the bed and, shrugging on a bathrobe and holding it closed, knelt in front of the fireplace. Rosmerta's voluminous dark hair was in disarray, and suspicion and deep concern mingled in her eyes.
"The--the Three Broomsticks--"
"What about it?" There was a sharpness in her voice that he'd never heard before. He wanted to wilt away from it.
"These two men--they were smashing windows all down the street--"
"They broke the window?"
"They didn't take anything, but--"
"But they broke the window?"
He took another trembling breath. "Yes. Yes, they did."
Rosmerta's face hardened. "And what were you doing?"
Remus felt a hot flush of shame creeping up his cheeks. Yes, Remus, he thought scathingly. Where were you while all this was going on? "Hiding," he answered miserably. Yes, Ma'am, his mind went on cruelly as Rosmerta paused, watching him astutely. The big, brave Gryffindor was quaking in a corner while the treasured business to which you have dedicated your life was destroyed.
To his surprise, Rosmerta then nodded slowly. "Windows," she said, "can be replaced. People can't."
It was probably the kindest thing Rosmerta had ever said to him that didn't involve Sirius. He wasn't quite sure how to react.
Fortunately, Rosmerta's face was set, and she was already getting up and moving on, tightening her robe around her. "Go ahead and get some sleep, Remus," she suggested. "I'll need help cleaning up tomorrow. I'm going to go down and lock everything up tight."
"Most of the stock was in the storeroom," he reported weakly. "Where it always goes." Vaguely he discerned that he was holding tight to the old, comforting routine, clinging to the consistency, digging his heels and fingernails into the way things had been and should be. The fragile balance had been abruptly violated, and he didn't have any idea how to clamber back onto the tilting platform again. That uncertainty sent him scuttling back to the familiar--the familiar and obsolete.
"Well done, Remus," Rosmerta said next. He blinked at her as she stood and smoothed down the front of her robe and nightgown--largely unnecessarily, as far as his bewildered eyes could see. Again she paused, and again she met his eyes a little too keenly. "Thank you, Remus," she added. "You did splendidly. Just go on keeping your head on straight and your wits about you, and you'll do fine."
Personally, Remus felt that the head that he drew out of the fireplace was screwed on backwards and upside down, and his wits seemed to be scrambled and strewn across the floor not unlike the fragments of glass had been. The mental image made the befuddled head in question ache a little more, and he put a hand to it distractedly.
"Remus," Sirius said, his voice deadly cold and quiet. "Who broke into the Three Broomsticks?"
"They didn't--didn't break in, exactly," Remus managed.
"Then what exactly did they do, Remus?"
"Well, they--they broke the window, but they didn't really want anything... inside..." Remus faltered. "Except--"
"Except what?"
"Except they wanted to know if there was someone there."
"Why?"
The throbbing pain in Remus's head suddenly flared, and he winced. "I don't know."
A hesitant glance confirmed that Sirius's gray eyes were on him, frozen a dark, muddled color like a murky pond in the depths of winter. "Don't give me that shit, Remus."
"Sirius--" Lily began indignantly.
"Who were they?" Sirius demanded, talking over her. "And why the hell did they break the window?"
"I don't kn--"
"You going to tell me they took your memory and your nerve? You must have seen something. Heard something."
Remus felt tears pricking his eyes and hated them--hated them almost as much as he hated himself, almost as much as he hated the truth stabbing into his ears. "I don't know, Sirius, all right?"
It was only when everyone went silent for a long moment that he realized he'd said it louder than he'd intended--a cry bordering on a shout.
Momentarily nonplussed, Sirius recovered quickly and set a hand firmly on either of Remus's shoulders, holding him fast, pinning him where he still sat, cross-legged on the floor. There was a strange and unnerving fire in Sirius's eyes now, white-hot and barely rational.
"Remus," he repeated slowly, "listen to me." He spoke as if addressing a skittish child--a comparison that came a little too close to reality for Remus's liking. "If you don't tell us anything, we can't very well nail the bastards responsible, now, can we?" The humor went out of his voice when he paused, leaving it cold again when he recommenced. And yet there was something like profound and genuine worry in his turbulent eyes. "Were they Death Eaters? You must have--"
"I didn't see," Remus insisted once more, doggedly, shaking his head as if the motion might clear the ringing and cement his point at once. "I heard--all I heard was that one of them called the other 'Avery.'"
"Eugenius or Cyrus Avery?" Sirius pressed.
"I don't--"
"Cyrus was just two years ahead of us; graduated last year; you must know his voice."
"He didn't say much--"
Sirius gave him a shake, hard enough to make him feel as though the dislodged contents of his brain were tumbling haphazardly around within his skull. "You must know something," he went on.
"I'm sorry I'm not you!" Remus heard himself hurl back, jerking himself free. "I'm sorry I don't lurk around corners learning people's secrets! I'm sorry I don't know how to stop trouble only because I'm so often at the root of it! I'm sorry I'm not reckless and senseless and mad, like you are!" His legs had unfolded beneath him, raising him to his feet, but he wasn't steady on them just yet. Faintly he swayed, but no one moved to help him. His voice, however, didn't waver--rather, it sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone hard, determined, and angry. "If it had been you, you'd have called them over and egged them on and hit them with a spell, but it wasn't you, Sirius! And I was a little more concerned with surviving than with figuring out who to blame! You don't even care what happened, so long as you can find out who's at fault! You can't look at the effect without thinking about the cause!"
Somehow his shaking legs carried him out of the common room, up the stairs, and into the dorm, where he collapsed fully-clothed on his bed and buried his face in the pillow. If he was lucky, perhaps it would smother him, and he wouldn't have to face them all again. At that particular moment, he would rather have amputated his own hand with a hacksaw than looked Sirius Black in the eye. The unfamiliar, unnatural fury that had possessed him had summarily decamped and fled, leaving behind a gaping space that yawned hollow and sinister in the pit of his stomach. Regret churned poisonously at the bottom, hissing and spitting like James's cauldron on a bad day in Potions.
At once fervently and morosely he began to wish, as the desperate tend to do. He wished he hadn't been so weak as to cave in to the swift, superfluous spite that had sought his voice for its own. He wished that he hadn't stepped into the Three Broomsticks this evening, idly daydreaming alternately about a pay raise and an imaginary audience chanting his name. He wished he hadn't taken refuge there at all, wished he hadn't accepted the job offer and embroiled himself in the intricacies of Rosmerta's idiosyncrasies and the lunacy of Saturday afternoon traffic.
He wished he hadn't come to this school, with its tacit rules and its unfathomable hierarchies. He wished he had never been bitten--never screamed, thrashing wildly, listening to the shrill reediness of the sound with something like wonder and something like mortification; never felt the hot blood running from the mangled wound, never stumbled and staggered and crawled back home alive. Something like alive. Preserved only at a terrible cost that no sane man would continue to pay; a toll that would grind his soul to dust one full moon at a time.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Remus didn't know how much later it was that the footsteps labored their way up the stairs. It could have been minutes or hours--or possibly days. He had been breathing into the pillow for a long time. His hope of suffocation was seeming slightly more realistic.
The mattress springs creaked like a door hinge in a horror movie as they bore the weight of a sixteen-year-old boy. The silence endured a few seconds more, and then Sirius spoke.
"You're right," was what he said, and Remus knew that it wasn't an easy thing for Sirius Black to admit. He had forsaken his family's values, but pride was more deeply-ingrained than any motto. "I was wrong to approach it that way. I know I shouldn't give any excuses, but I've got a few ready in any case." Tentatively a hand came down on Remus's shoulder. "We're brothers, Remus, and sometimes I think there's more wolf in me than in you. When I saw the way you were--what had happened to you as a result of it--I had to know what had made you that way. What had been done. And I got preoccupied with figuring that part out, when I should have been thinking about how to fix the current problem, not the one that had already taken place. I got distracted. I got excited about the idea of wreaking bloody revenge on whoever had done that to my brother--so excited that I forgot all about helping my brother, which was the whole point in the first place."
He paused and cleared his throat.
"I'm scared, Remus. I'm scared as hell that something's going to happen--to one of you, to the only real family I've got. Jesus, Remus, I don't think I could take that--take losing one of you. And I'm scared shitless that I'm going to find out very soon whether I can or not. When I saw you come in paler than a sheet and go stammering off an explanation to Rosmerta--tell her how they're out in the middle of town, just smashing things up for the hell of it--the first thing I wanted to know was how to stop it. How to stop them, and how to get them back for it. How to make sure they get what's coming to them. Because no one does that to my brothers. Not on my watch."
The pressure of Sirius's hand lifted. Slowly Remus raised his head and looked at the boy who called him brother, who had folded his hands, his elbows on his knees.
Ruefully, with that careful hint of irony that frequented his face, Sirius smiled. "Can you, Moony," he said, "find it in your capacious heart to forgive me?"
Remus rustled up a watery smile in return. "Perhaps if there's some money involved," he replied. "Bribes are a remarkably good motivator."