![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ghosttt.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
small_giftsTitle: Evening Empire
Author/Artist:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ghosttt
Recipient:marc_duork
Rating: PG-13
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *language, casual drug use, mentions of sex, sex offscreen*
Word count: 8069 (sorry!)
Summary:Dylan cassettes, certain death, erotic epistolary; Christmas contra mundum.
Notes: thank youmarc_duork for this amazing prompt, which ended up a lot more "aliens" than anything else. thank you cevennes for the quick, amazing beta! thank you everyone reading this for bearing with how long it is. and thank you to the mods for dealing with my ceaseless screwups.
Lily was up on the roof adjusting some of the equipment when Dumbledore’s head appeared in the fire around lunchtime. Remus’s back was turned and he jumped, wand halfway out of his sleeve, when Dumbledore called his name crackling amidst the charcoal. He looked unslept and there was a cold twist in the corner of his mouth. “I think you had better put your head in.” Then he disappeared.
Remus’s heart had begun to run in his stomach, churning like a faulty car engine. He called Lily down from the roof – her hands and face were smeared, rather beautifully, with oil – and when he rummaged in the nearly-empty tin of Floo powder he saw his hands were shaking. Then, the nauseous twisting of fires upon fires – like going over a waterfall in a barrel full of ash. In Dumbledore’s office, when it developed amidst the embers, most of the usual suspects were gathered around the table, grim, spines stiff with fear or shock. In a corner he saw a shadow pacing illuminated by the glow of a cigarette – James. “What happened,” Remus said, embarrassed by the shake in his voice.
“How’s your communication this morning Lupin,” Moody barked from the darkness.
“We just keep getting flight of death, flight of death. What happened?”
“Nothing odd, then,” Moody said. “Nothing new. Nothing scary.”
“No,” said Remus. Then again, like a spell (he recalled, inanely, getting Protego for the first time, in second year Defense Against the Dark Arts, after two failed attempts in which he had been struck in the face with the cushion he was supposed to be blocking, thrown of course by Sirius with dastardly aim): “What happened?”
“Gravesend was attacked this morning,” said Dumbledore, and the great vivid red bird shifted upon his shoulder. In the fire Remus’s ears started ringing. His heart a siren, cutting and cutting a sudden stiff heavy humidity in his brain, treacle to wade through to a realization he could not yet fathom. “Just a few hours ago,” Dumbledore was saying in the living world, “they received targeted messaging addressed to the lead Muggle researcher Dr. Chandra Kapoor and to our Mr. Black.”
Peter was looking at him from Dumbledore’s left hand to see what he would do, lower lip between his teeth, eyes very dark, and Remus was looking over all their heads into the portraits whose subjects watched at him in turn. “We had started evacuating,” said Meadowes, lighting a cigarette (her motorcycle boots on the table peeling mud). “We had an MLE squad and waiting vans with Oblivators and we got some out. Then – well, some folks said they saw it. I didn’t.”
“Saw what?” said Remus’s voice from his mouth.
“The ship,” Moody said. “Or, one of their ships. It lost its cloud cover just for a second, dipped, blew the observatory to bits. Long enough for a few Muggles with cameras.”
Blew, he had said, to bits, like something on a Muggle TV show, or their scary local news.
“BBC’s picked everything up,” said Vance. “Mayor’s office is cooperating and they’re saying it was a gas explosion. But still I can just see this whole thing evolving into Dr. Strangelove.”
Someone had begun talking about perhaps it had become necessary to contact the Chairman of the Russian Council of Magic and tell him to start taking precautions, but – “Did they get Dr. Kapoor out,” said Remus’s voice from his mouth again, too fucking loudly, “and, and Sirius.”
The silence seemed altogether too long. Empires had risen and fallen in shorter silences. It was like the silence he recalled when his own mind was subsumed by the wolf’s – a silence that lasted a handclap and also an eternity, bookended by two viscous and devouring wastelands of pain. Across the room James lifted his head ever like his stag self, scenting the wind.
“Did they get,” said Remus again from the fire, “did they, did they get Sirius.”
“They did get Sirius,” said James. “Not Dr. Kapoor. They got fifteen people out. Out of a hundred.”
Remus thought he might vomit in relief and horror and horror at his relief when there were eighty-five dead. “Oh, God,” he said, knees weak against the flagstones.
“You need to pull them,” said James to Dumbledore. “We need them off Mingulay like, yesterday.”
“A witch and a wizard will have an easier time evacuating their stations than an observatory of Muggle scientists, Mr. Potter,” said Dumbledore. James was spluttering like he often did and Remus remembered with a bitter nostalgia the days when it used to be funny. “We need as many folk in the field as we can muster. Now perhaps more than ever.”
“You’re not the only station getting that message now,” said Meadowes to Remus in the fire. “Four more reported just today and I daresay it’s all beginning to seem rather fishy.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Dorcas, your conspiracy theorizing’s been off the charts since McKinnon evaporated.”
Two months previous Peter raising his voice anywhere in Meadowes’ vicinity would have been the stuff of his tall tales. Now it was another brand new and – to say the least – deeply odd thing Remus found himself reckoning with. Dorcas was in the same boat apparently – “Say that again and I’ll evaporate you, Pettigrew.”
“I’m just saying they clearly have tech – ”
“I literally could give two shits, motherfucker!” Peter shrunk back, muttering under his breath, and Dorcas turned to the rest of the table, straightening her back. In school she was always someone you wanted to do a project with, especially if you had to present in class at the end of it. She was also someone you wanted to have your back in a fight, what with the sharp tongue and the Quidditch muscle. “It’s not probable that they are discovering us all at once like this. Every station is warded and warded differently, and there’s absolutely no geographic pattern that connects them. Someone is leaking information. And now we are paying for it, in blood.”
“Hence,” said James, “We need to get Remus and Lily off Mingulay.”
“I hesitate to withdraw anyone from a station where they are still safe,” said Dumbledore. “Every moment – every reading, every transmission is useful to us. And we have no other recourse.”
“How do you know they’re safe?” James asked, voice near a shout. The heel of his hand slammed on the table centimeters from Peter’s wrist, cigarette a glowing shred between two fingers, and beside it Peter’s hand sealed into a tight fist.
Ever kindly, Dumbledore deflected. “We should probably stop talking about something that so directly concerns Mr. Lupin as though he is not here.”
He was in the fire collecting himself still from where he had been scattered and he was very accustomed to people speaking about him as though he were not there and he wanted very much to remind Dumbledore that he himself had long been among the worst culprits. He could not muster the fear for himself. He had never had much of it and now especially he did not know quite where it had gone to. “I can stay,” he said. “Get Lily out and I can stay.”
“Fuck,” said James very softly. He of course would claim the bargain was Faustian but Remus suspected he felt otherwise, at least in the unmappable recesses of his soul.
“Very well,” said Dumbledore. His eyes twinkled; God, Remus hated that. “Send her in. I’ll have Mr. Black join you once he’s been approved by St. Mungo’s Psychowizards.”
Remus nearly laughed imagining Sirius being interrogated as to his fitness for duty – which had always in fact been relative and would not have flown in peacetime in the slightest – but instead he said “Yes, sir.” He pulled his head out of the fire, and then he did laugh, and sometime in the laughing, when Lily had begun to rub his back across the shoulders, he thought, I am hysterical. This is hysteria.
He pulled himself together, again, though it had been increasingly difficult of late. “Lils,” he said, “you’re going to eviscerate me alive, are you ready?”
--
He told Lily she would be going home and predictably she threw several things at him including a shoe, one of her bras, a massive instruction manual for one of their machines, and his Beggars Banquet cassette. “Fuck you,” she cried, “you self-sacrificing fuck!”
“It’s safer, Lily, I mean, you don’t want to die – ”
“Of course I don’t, you shit,” she yelled, “but neither do you!” She was throwing all her things haphazardly in her backpack. “You sexist pigs! With your false chivalric bullshit! I hope at least you get off on your own inferiority complex, Remus, you fucking shit!”
“James will be really – ”
She turned to him, seething. “I am going to kill James.” Then she turned back to her bunk. “I’m taking all the weed.”
“Lils, come on, don’t do that – ” But he stopped at her look, which might’ve turned him to stone. Perhaps he was compelled by it to toss her a juicy tidbit: “Dumbledore’s sending Sirius out here with me.”
Her eyebrows shot about six inches up her forehead. “You’re setting me up, Remus, I do hope you know, you’re setting me up for like, a fucking home run here.”
“Do it,” he said. “God knows I deserve it and you wouldn’t be wrong.”
She just looked at him and her eyes softened a little slowly by increments while she thought of what to say. And she did her pattern matching like a puzzle in her own mind while she looked for the evolution of it, for the lines and the clues. Then she took her little mason jar of weed from her backpack and opened it and put the largest nugget on the table beside the computer keyboard. “I’m very upset with you,” she said.
“I know.”
“You need to figure your shit out,” she said. “I think you would value yourself more if you could get it through your apparently selectively thick skull that other people value you and they value you a lot. But like I said I also think you get off on your own inferiority complex.”
“Perhaps so.”
“I only tell you this because I love you. For some fucking reason.” She leant forward and kissed his cheek, then she went to the fireplace and scrounged for the Floo powder. “I’ll kill you if anything exciting happens now that I’ve left.”
“If anything exciting happens I’ll be dead anyway,” said Remus, but Lily gave him another bitter look. “No,” he said then. “Probably just shagging.”
Lily laughed, raw and wild, then the fire glowed green and she was gone.
--
Sirius stepped out of the fire a half hour before moonrise as Remus chain-smoked on the stoop. His joints ached with such violence Remus couldn’t rise to meet him and Sirius stalked to his side, casting his leather bag upon Remus’s bunk with a thump, and crouched beside him, long fingers combing through his hair, coaxing the give from the knots in his shoulders. He smelled like hospital and library and old fear and his sweat bittersweet and he had been eating chocolate in the none-too-distant past. “Moony Moony Moony,” he said, “give us a drag,” and he put his hand out to receive Remus’s damp stub of cigarette. “Is there weed in this?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know what it’ll do to the wolf.”
“We can smoke after then,” Sirius told him. “How much longer have you got?”
“Another twenty minutes maybe.”
“Right.” He sat beside Remus on the stoop, pressed them together by the thighs, and passed back the cigarette. “And then we can run together and then I can spend all tomorrow rubbing your back and several other parts of you.”
Remus laughed weakly. In the blue velvet crush of evening the sea had begun to show an orange harvest glow at the rim of it heralding the coming moon and its tidal pull sharpened all the spines beneath his skin. All the foreign bones assembling and the grist braiding together and the deep rabid hunger at the heart of him dragging like some undertow. He ground the cigarette out with the toe of his boot and pressed his forehead to his knees and hugged his shins and Sirius stroked his hair and his neck and his shoulders where he knew it hurt. Sirius had done all this even before and inside the pain and the fever rush ringing his ears Remus heard him say, over and over again, sweetest soothing nonsense; Moony, Moony, Moony, Moony.
Sirius helped him get his clothes off and folded everything neatly for some reason and locked and warded the cabin door and hid his wand beneath the flowerpot on the stoop containing something very long dead. Then they sat together arse-naked in the cold sea wind teeth chattering until the moon threw a slant of light just right that lanced through Remus and upwards like a knife. It flayed him open – Caesarian birth – to let the other out. He heard the dog’s sympathetic whine and then nothing.
--
He woke up in bed with his head in Sirius’s lap as Sirius rolled a joint atop the battered copy of Finnegans Wake Lily had thrown at Remus before abandoning. “Alright, love?” said Sirius, then he licked the seam and sparked the end of it. “Could you use a hit?”
“Yeah,” Remus croaked, “give it here.”
They smoked and Sirius got up, gingerly when he shifted out from under Remus, to put a tape on. “What do you want to listen to?”
“I would say – but I don’t want to listen to you bitching.”
“I’m not gonna bitch,” said Sirius, as thought he had never in his life bitched about Remus’s musical choices. He was hilarious, naked, stoned, filtering through the scattered cassettes on the floor, tiny bruises, paper cuts, a red friction scuff on his thigh, as though there were not a war on, as though none of what just happened had happened at all. “Do you want me to put on Bringing It All Back Home?”
“Yeah,” Remus said, laughing, “yeah I do.”
“I can stomach that one,” said Sirius, and he put on. He came back to bed and put Remus’s head in his lap again and looked through the tracklist. “Or I guess I can stomach most of it.”
Remus laughed, though it hurt the more he did. “Fuck you.”
The one song Sirius knew enough to sing softly was Maggie’s Farm. Remus fell asleep again in the middle of it and woke a little later when Sirius got up at the start of Mr. Tambourine Man to fetch a glass of water. He was still stoned enough Remus called after him, “This song always reminded me of you.”
“God,” said Sirius, mock staggering. “Did you just propose to me.” Remus laughed so as not to answer. “You’re very sweet. I used to lie in my bed and listen to Whole Lotta Love on Pete’s walkman and think about fucking you senseless.”
“Pete’s walkman?”
“Yeah and I hardly knew how to use it…”
“I’m surprised he let you borrow it.”
“He up and gave it to me after a while.” He sat on the end of the bed. “Anyway to answer your question from your letter that was how I got into old blues music because I was listening to all these sexual Zeppelin tunes and fantasizing about you and then I realized they had ripped everything off from all the old American bluesmen.” He smiled his most richly suggestive smile. “So all thanks to you really. You brought all this upon yourself.”
“Yeah, how so?”
“Sucking on your quill in History of Magic,” said Sirius, “obviously. And when you would stretch your legs on the back of James’s chair. I could go on,” he said, “another time. Let me rub your back?”
This was an elaborate setup, Remus understood. He turned over gingerly, still aching, muscles in knots, and just beneath his skin the scintillating memory of pain, bright and cold. Sirius rubbed his back and his shoulders and down to his hips and kissed his neck and down his spine bump by bump tracing teeth and tongue and callused fingers that spanned his waist and tucked against his belly, his bones, butterfly ridges, backgammon set of ribs, soft hollows. “We could shag later if,” he said, but he was hard, and so was Remus, and something had gotten set alight in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go out. He had waited in fact a very long time for this, a compendium of aching loneliness and erotic epistolary and embarrassing outhouse wanks, and it would soothe the scattered pains, he knew, to surrender his own mind for a while. One line of Dylan crept into his mind despite the fact the tape was long over – “Let me forget about today until tomorrow…”
“It’s alright,” he said, shifting deliberately, “now’s alright.”
There was much kissing, and Sirius seemed to have compiled in the interim since they had last been naked in one another’s company a veritable menu of ways to debauch Remus, and he almost forgot for a while that they were all hunted by vengeful aliens, and that there was a vicious hellbeast living inside him, and that they could tell nobody they were in love.
--
He woke again at dusk to the soft staccato drumming of owl talons upon the window. Over the past year he had become so attuned to that sound it woke him almost instantly. In the dim light he saw it was Peter’s bird Eveline (he had been the first and the only one of them with a complete lack of irony to name his owl after a James Joyce novel), who was looking quite a bit more grey about the wingtips than she had when he had last seen her, and who was carrying like unlucky prey a bloody red envelope from whose folds a noxious black smoke spiraled.
He dove out of bed and threw on the first sweater he could find and ran outside to open the letter before it exploded. When he plucked it, hot as coffee, from Eveline’s foot she took off toward the settling clouds at a good clip and he could hardly blame her. When he opened the Howler with shaking fingers the wind took the ashes, and the brunt of the sound.
NOW I KNOW WHY THIS WHOLE TIME THEY LIKED YOU MORE THAN ME! AND EVEN WITH YOU LIKE YOU ARE! THAT YOU WOULD HAVE EATEN ANY OF US ALIVE ONCE A MONTH AND STILL THEY WOULD HAVE FETCHED THE MOON DOWN FOR YOU ALMOST FUCKING LITERALLY! FUCK YOU REMUS! I EXPECTED THAT YOU WOULD NOT SHUNT EIGHT YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP BY THE WAYSIDE IN FAVOR OF SEX BUT EVIDENTLY I SHOULD NOT HAVE!
FUCK YOU. HONESTLY FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. IT IS ALWAYS YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT THAT RUINS EVERYTHING! I THOUGHT YOU AND I HAD MADE SOME ALLIANCE – TO BE OVER AND ABOVE THEIR IMMATURITY! BUT NOW I SEE YOU ARE JUST AS BAD AS THEM OR WORSE. AND THAT YOU NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY YOU DID FOR THEM – AND THAT THEY NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY THEY DID FOR YOU! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU WOULD DO THIS TO US!
The last sentence echoed about in the skeletal wreckage of the old settlement. “Well,” Sirius said from the doorway where he stood, cup of cold tea in hand, naked but for the wool blanket he had thrown about his shoulders. “I had hoped he might have cooled down a pinch.”
All he could wrestle out was a pathetic-sounding “What the fuck.”
“Dumbledore sent Pete to St. Mungo’s to tell me I was coming out here with you and I must’ve looked – I don’t know. So he asked me for about the seven millionth time what was going on with you and me and I didn’t have the heart to say nothing this time. His reaction was, um, not dissimilar.”
“Fuck,” said Remus again. Something was draining off like cold dishwater in his heart. “Fuck, does James know?”
“I mean,” said Sirius, “it didn’t seem fair, don’t you agree?”
They sat again together on the stoop. There was still a shred of sunset left to the West over the sea, orange and pink and dulling like bleeding dye as the light faded against the heavy clouds. “I guess,” Remus said.
“James took it a great deal better but then again I think he suspected for a while that I. Well. That I wasn’t – or that it was very real, I mean, that when people would joke about us, it wasn’t funny, and I wasn’t laughing.”
“I noticed that too.”
“Well, I guess Pete didn’t.”
Remus rested his forehead against his knees. “I never meant – I had hoped we wouldn’t end up on some Brideshead Revisited, Black and Lupin contra mundum trip together. Or at least not so soon.”
“I had hoped too,” said Sirius. “Black and Lupin contra this mundum and all the apparent others.” He pulled his blanket tighter about his shoulders. “For what it’s worth James is alright. And Lily will be alright if she doesn’t know already. And Pete will come around, you know; he always does. Every other stupid idea we’ve ever had he came around to in the end.”
“What if he doesn’t.”
“Then fuck him.”
“Sirius.”
“I’m not kidding. If he doesn’t – it’s on him. It’s not our fault.”
They watched the sun slip under the waves. Remus said “I think I’ll write to him.”
“Send him your own Howler. I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU CAME TO THIS CONCLUSION…”
Remus laughed weakly. “I don’t know how he doesn’t believe we really like him.”
“He certainly doesn’t make it any easier on himself.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? He can’t send you something like that and then say, oh Moony, why won’t you come out to the pub with me anymore.”
“He’s just scared shitless.”
“Well, so am I. Aren’t you?”
“Usually.”
Sirius paused then he leant and kissed Remus at the temple. “Brave man. I love you dearly.”
“Whatever happens?”
“Yes, obviously.”
They went inside and Sirius started the Bringing It All Back Home cassette over again from the beginning and set about heating a curry and Remus calibrated all the machines and then sat at the desk and began several times to write to Peter in many varying tones before he realized it was all bullshit. And his head hurt, and all his joints still, and dinner smelled good, and the music kept distracting him.
It’ll keep, he thought, for another day, it’ll all keep – and it would be just fine to play as though it were just the two of them against this world and every other, for however long they could bargain from the universe. Who knew if it would ever be again? And it was almost Christmas.
--
Remus woke to sound. In the dim light through the opaque windows his skin felt aglow where it pressed against Sirius. The sound was not him breathing or his heartbeat – blood thrum, white noise, in the meat of his shoulder beneath Remus’s ear – because it was coming from the machines on the table.
Bad fucking timing, Remus thought, and carefully he sat, and he picked up Sirius’s old fisherman’s sweater (stolen from James’s dad) from the floor and wrestled into it backwards, and he stood, feeling shaken out but good, everything new, reassembled like a train set. That was, until he went to the computers, and saw what they had printed.
REMUS LUPIN
Dear living fuck. The jolt went through him cold and electric and before he could even think of rational next steps his fingers had fallen upon the keyboard and he had transmitted a return message upon the frequency –
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
He did not have to wait at all very long and he thought he heard in the fever ringing of his ears some horrible cosmic laughter.
WE WANT WHAT YOU HAVE
Stillness but for the waves. He looked at Sirius in the bed and then he looked at his own hands and the brutal compendium of scars where at sixteen he had torn most of the skin from the bone in his desperate and nearly fulfilled hunger. And for that he had forgiven everybody involved except himself.
NO YOU DON’T, he sent.
And in another moment: YOU ESPECIALLY
He found his jeans on the floor and his wand half in the pocket and went to Sirius in the bed and he said, come on, let’s go let’s go, outside outside, there isn’t enough Floo powder for the both of us, we have to Apparate. Sirius was not a morning person whatsoever and he never had been and there was sleep in the corners of his eyes and he had little Remus mouth shapes bruising all over his neck and chest and Remus loved him to an insane degree and perhaps there were mere seconds left in both their lives and he was saying, come on, come on, shoes on, we have to go, we have to get out now now now. Like he had practiced when he was young with his mother and father in case the townspeople ever found out and came upon the house with pitchforks. Have you got your wand? Come on, come on. Little pats upon the back and there were strong hands holding both his own –
Sirius began to ask what was happening but in the procurement of his pants he laid eye upon the machines which were printing rapid festive blocks and vomiting scroll upon scroll of paper in a clinical white reading:
REMUS LUPIN
YOU ESPECIALLY
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
They went outside together into the vivid white dawn and the sea spray and the wild winter grass blowing colorless and the ocean like a desert featured in charcoal and from the clouds before them had descended – did it matter? It displaced the rain and the sea itself and the wind it cast like a spell was warm and metallic and shifted like snakes in the grass. He could not think to fear. It passed overhead and Sirius took his hand – warm and solid – as he had been doing or trying to do since they were very young. And again inanely on some cassette loop Dylan filled his head, another cosmic broadcast: “In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you…”
--
Author/Artist:
ghostttRecipient:
marc_duorkRating: PG-13
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *language, casual drug use, mentions of sex, sex offscreen*
Word count: 8069 (sorry!)
Summary:Dylan cassettes, certain death, erotic epistolary; Christmas contra mundum.
Notes: thank you
marc_duork for this amazing prompt, which ended up a lot more "aliens" than anything else. thank you cevennes for the quick, amazing beta! thank you everyone reading this for bearing with how long it is. and thank you to the mods for dealing with my ceaseless screwups.Lily was up on the roof adjusting some of the equipment when Dumbledore’s head appeared in the fire around lunchtime. Remus’s back was turned and he jumped, wand halfway out of his sleeve, when Dumbledore called his name crackling amidst the charcoal. He looked unslept and there was a cold twist in the corner of his mouth. “I think you had better put your head in.” Then he disappeared.
Remus’s heart had begun to run in his stomach, churning like a faulty car engine. He called Lily down from the roof – her hands and face were smeared, rather beautifully, with oil – and when he rummaged in the nearly-empty tin of Floo powder he saw his hands were shaking. Then, the nauseous twisting of fires upon fires – like going over a waterfall in a barrel full of ash. In Dumbledore’s office, when it developed amidst the embers, most of the usual suspects were gathered around the table, grim, spines stiff with fear or shock. In a corner he saw a shadow pacing illuminated by the glow of a cigarette – James. “What happened,” Remus said, embarrassed by the shake in his voice.
“How’s your communication this morning Lupin,” Moody barked from the darkness.
“We just keep getting flight of death, flight of death. What happened?”
“Nothing odd, then,” Moody said. “Nothing new. Nothing scary.”
“No,” said Remus. Then again, like a spell (he recalled, inanely, getting Protego for the first time, in second year Defense Against the Dark Arts, after two failed attempts in which he had been struck in the face with the cushion he was supposed to be blocking, thrown of course by Sirius with dastardly aim): “What happened?”
“Gravesend was attacked this morning,” said Dumbledore, and the great vivid red bird shifted upon his shoulder. In the fire Remus’s ears started ringing. His heart a siren, cutting and cutting a sudden stiff heavy humidity in his brain, treacle to wade through to a realization he could not yet fathom. “Just a few hours ago,” Dumbledore was saying in the living world, “they received targeted messaging addressed to the lead Muggle researcher Dr. Chandra Kapoor and to our Mr. Black.”
Peter was looking at him from Dumbledore’s left hand to see what he would do, lower lip between his teeth, eyes very dark, and Remus was looking over all their heads into the portraits whose subjects watched at him in turn. “We had started evacuating,” said Meadowes, lighting a cigarette (her motorcycle boots on the table peeling mud). “We had an MLE squad and waiting vans with Oblivators and we got some out. Then – well, some folks said they saw it. I didn’t.”
“Saw what?” said Remus’s voice from his mouth.
“The ship,” Moody said. “Or, one of their ships. It lost its cloud cover just for a second, dipped, blew the observatory to bits. Long enough for a few Muggles with cameras.”
Blew, he had said, to bits, like something on a Muggle TV show, or their scary local news.
“BBC’s picked everything up,” said Vance. “Mayor’s office is cooperating and they’re saying it was a gas explosion. But still I can just see this whole thing evolving into Dr. Strangelove.”
Someone had begun talking about perhaps it had become necessary to contact the Chairman of the Russian Council of Magic and tell him to start taking precautions, but – “Did they get Dr. Kapoor out,” said Remus’s voice from his mouth again, too fucking loudly, “and, and Sirius.”
The silence seemed altogether too long. Empires had risen and fallen in shorter silences. It was like the silence he recalled when his own mind was subsumed by the wolf’s – a silence that lasted a handclap and also an eternity, bookended by two viscous and devouring wastelands of pain. Across the room James lifted his head ever like his stag self, scenting the wind.
“Did they get,” said Remus again from the fire, “did they, did they get Sirius.”
“They did get Sirius,” said James. “Not Dr. Kapoor. They got fifteen people out. Out of a hundred.”
Remus thought he might vomit in relief and horror and horror at his relief when there were eighty-five dead. “Oh, God,” he said, knees weak against the flagstones.
“You need to pull them,” said James to Dumbledore. “We need them off Mingulay like, yesterday.”
“A witch and a wizard will have an easier time evacuating their stations than an observatory of Muggle scientists, Mr. Potter,” said Dumbledore. James was spluttering like he often did and Remus remembered with a bitter nostalgia the days when it used to be funny. “We need as many folk in the field as we can muster. Now perhaps more than ever.”
“You’re not the only station getting that message now,” said Meadowes to Remus in the fire. “Four more reported just today and I daresay it’s all beginning to seem rather fishy.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Dorcas, your conspiracy theorizing’s been off the charts since McKinnon evaporated.”
Two months previous Peter raising his voice anywhere in Meadowes’ vicinity would have been the stuff of his tall tales. Now it was another brand new and – to say the least – deeply odd thing Remus found himself reckoning with. Dorcas was in the same boat apparently – “Say that again and I’ll evaporate you, Pettigrew.”
“I’m just saying they clearly have tech – ”
“I literally could give two shits, motherfucker!” Peter shrunk back, muttering under his breath, and Dorcas turned to the rest of the table, straightening her back. In school she was always someone you wanted to do a project with, especially if you had to present in class at the end of it. She was also someone you wanted to have your back in a fight, what with the sharp tongue and the Quidditch muscle. “It’s not probable that they are discovering us all at once like this. Every station is warded and warded differently, and there’s absolutely no geographic pattern that connects them. Someone is leaking information. And now we are paying for it, in blood.”
“Hence,” said James, “We need to get Remus and Lily off Mingulay.”
“I hesitate to withdraw anyone from a station where they are still safe,” said Dumbledore. “Every moment – every reading, every transmission is useful to us. And we have no other recourse.”
“How do you know they’re safe?” James asked, voice near a shout. The heel of his hand slammed on the table centimeters from Peter’s wrist, cigarette a glowing shred between two fingers, and beside it Peter’s hand sealed into a tight fist.
Ever kindly, Dumbledore deflected. “We should probably stop talking about something that so directly concerns Mr. Lupin as though he is not here.”
He was in the fire collecting himself still from where he had been scattered and he was very accustomed to people speaking about him as though he were not there and he wanted very much to remind Dumbledore that he himself had long been among the worst culprits. He could not muster the fear for himself. He had never had much of it and now especially he did not know quite where it had gone to. “I can stay,” he said. “Get Lily out and I can stay.”
“Fuck,” said James very softly. He of course would claim the bargain was Faustian but Remus suspected he felt otherwise, at least in the unmappable recesses of his soul.
“Very well,” said Dumbledore. His eyes twinkled; God, Remus hated that. “Send her in. I’ll have Mr. Black join you once he’s been approved by St. Mungo’s Psychowizards.”
Remus nearly laughed imagining Sirius being interrogated as to his fitness for duty – which had always in fact been relative and would not have flown in peacetime in the slightest – but instead he said “Yes, sir.” He pulled his head out of the fire, and then he did laugh, and sometime in the laughing, when Lily had begun to rub his back across the shoulders, he thought, I am hysterical. This is hysteria.
He pulled himself together, again, though it had been increasingly difficult of late. “Lils,” he said, “you’re going to eviscerate me alive, are you ready?”
--
He told Lily she would be going home and predictably she threw several things at him including a shoe, one of her bras, a massive instruction manual for one of their machines, and his Beggars Banquet cassette. “Fuck you,” she cried, “you self-sacrificing fuck!”
“It’s safer, Lily, I mean, you don’t want to die – ”
“Of course I don’t, you shit,” she yelled, “but neither do you!” She was throwing all her things haphazardly in her backpack. “You sexist pigs! With your false chivalric bullshit! I hope at least you get off on your own inferiority complex, Remus, you fucking shit!”
“James will be really – ”
She turned to him, seething. “I am going to kill James.” Then she turned back to her bunk. “I’m taking all the weed.”
“Lils, come on, don’t do that – ” But he stopped at her look, which might’ve turned him to stone. Perhaps he was compelled by it to toss her a juicy tidbit: “Dumbledore’s sending Sirius out here with me.”
Her eyebrows shot about six inches up her forehead. “You’re setting me up, Remus, I do hope you know, you’re setting me up for like, a fucking home run here.”
“Do it,” he said. “God knows I deserve it and you wouldn’t be wrong.”
She just looked at him and her eyes softened a little slowly by increments while she thought of what to say. And she did her pattern matching like a puzzle in her own mind while she looked for the evolution of it, for the lines and the clues. Then she took her little mason jar of weed from her backpack and opened it and put the largest nugget on the table beside the computer keyboard. “I’m very upset with you,” she said.
“I know.”
“You need to figure your shit out,” she said. “I think you would value yourself more if you could get it through your apparently selectively thick skull that other people value you and they value you a lot. But like I said I also think you get off on your own inferiority complex.”
“Perhaps so.”
“I only tell you this because I love you. For some fucking reason.” She leant forward and kissed his cheek, then she went to the fireplace and scrounged for the Floo powder. “I’ll kill you if anything exciting happens now that I’ve left.”
“If anything exciting happens I’ll be dead anyway,” said Remus, but Lily gave him another bitter look. “No,” he said then. “Probably just shagging.”
Lily laughed, raw and wild, then the fire glowed green and she was gone.
--
Sirius stepped out of the fire a half hour before moonrise as Remus chain-smoked on the stoop. His joints ached with such violence Remus couldn’t rise to meet him and Sirius stalked to his side, casting his leather bag upon Remus’s bunk with a thump, and crouched beside him, long fingers combing through his hair, coaxing the give from the knots in his shoulders. He smelled like hospital and library and old fear and his sweat bittersweet and he had been eating chocolate in the none-too-distant past. “Moony Moony Moony,” he said, “give us a drag,” and he put his hand out to receive Remus’s damp stub of cigarette. “Is there weed in this?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know what it’ll do to the wolf.”
“We can smoke after then,” Sirius told him. “How much longer have you got?”
“Another twenty minutes maybe.”
“Right.” He sat beside Remus on the stoop, pressed them together by the thighs, and passed back the cigarette. “And then we can run together and then I can spend all tomorrow rubbing your back and several other parts of you.”
Remus laughed weakly. In the blue velvet crush of evening the sea had begun to show an orange harvest glow at the rim of it heralding the coming moon and its tidal pull sharpened all the spines beneath his skin. All the foreign bones assembling and the grist braiding together and the deep rabid hunger at the heart of him dragging like some undertow. He ground the cigarette out with the toe of his boot and pressed his forehead to his knees and hugged his shins and Sirius stroked his hair and his neck and his shoulders where he knew it hurt. Sirius had done all this even before and inside the pain and the fever rush ringing his ears Remus heard him say, over and over again, sweetest soothing nonsense; Moony, Moony, Moony, Moony.
Sirius helped him get his clothes off and folded everything neatly for some reason and locked and warded the cabin door and hid his wand beneath the flowerpot on the stoop containing something very long dead. Then they sat together arse-naked in the cold sea wind teeth chattering until the moon threw a slant of light just right that lanced through Remus and upwards like a knife. It flayed him open – Caesarian birth – to let the other out. He heard the dog’s sympathetic whine and then nothing.
--
He woke up in bed with his head in Sirius’s lap as Sirius rolled a joint atop the battered copy of Finnegans Wake Lily had thrown at Remus before abandoning. “Alright, love?” said Sirius, then he licked the seam and sparked the end of it. “Could you use a hit?”
“Yeah,” Remus croaked, “give it here.”
They smoked and Sirius got up, gingerly when he shifted out from under Remus, to put a tape on. “What do you want to listen to?”
“I would say – but I don’t want to listen to you bitching.”
“I’m not gonna bitch,” said Sirius, as thought he had never in his life bitched about Remus’s musical choices. He was hilarious, naked, stoned, filtering through the scattered cassettes on the floor, tiny bruises, paper cuts, a red friction scuff on his thigh, as though there were not a war on, as though none of what just happened had happened at all. “Do you want me to put on Bringing It All Back Home?”
“Yeah,” Remus said, laughing, “yeah I do.”
“I can stomach that one,” said Sirius, and he put on. He came back to bed and put Remus’s head in his lap again and looked through the tracklist. “Or I guess I can stomach most of it.”
Remus laughed, though it hurt the more he did. “Fuck you.”
The one song Sirius knew enough to sing softly was Maggie’s Farm. Remus fell asleep again in the middle of it and woke a little later when Sirius got up at the start of Mr. Tambourine Man to fetch a glass of water. He was still stoned enough Remus called after him, “This song always reminded me of you.”
“God,” said Sirius, mock staggering. “Did you just propose to me.” Remus laughed so as not to answer. “You’re very sweet. I used to lie in my bed and listen to Whole Lotta Love on Pete’s walkman and think about fucking you senseless.”
“Pete’s walkman?”
“Yeah and I hardly knew how to use it…”
“I’m surprised he let you borrow it.”
“He up and gave it to me after a while.” He sat on the end of the bed. “Anyway to answer your question from your letter that was how I got into old blues music because I was listening to all these sexual Zeppelin tunes and fantasizing about you and then I realized they had ripped everything off from all the old American bluesmen.” He smiled his most richly suggestive smile. “So all thanks to you really. You brought all this upon yourself.”
“Yeah, how so?”
“Sucking on your quill in History of Magic,” said Sirius, “obviously. And when you would stretch your legs on the back of James’s chair. I could go on,” he said, “another time. Let me rub your back?”
This was an elaborate setup, Remus understood. He turned over gingerly, still aching, muscles in knots, and just beneath his skin the scintillating memory of pain, bright and cold. Sirius rubbed his back and his shoulders and down to his hips and kissed his neck and down his spine bump by bump tracing teeth and tongue and callused fingers that spanned his waist and tucked against his belly, his bones, butterfly ridges, backgammon set of ribs, soft hollows. “We could shag later if,” he said, but he was hard, and so was Remus, and something had gotten set alight in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go out. He had waited in fact a very long time for this, a compendium of aching loneliness and erotic epistolary and embarrassing outhouse wanks, and it would soothe the scattered pains, he knew, to surrender his own mind for a while. One line of Dylan crept into his mind despite the fact the tape was long over – “Let me forget about today until tomorrow…”
“It’s alright,” he said, shifting deliberately, “now’s alright.”
There was much kissing, and Sirius seemed to have compiled in the interim since they had last been naked in one another’s company a veritable menu of ways to debauch Remus, and he almost forgot for a while that they were all hunted by vengeful aliens, and that there was a vicious hellbeast living inside him, and that they could tell nobody they were in love.
--
He woke again at dusk to the soft staccato drumming of owl talons upon the window. Over the past year he had become so attuned to that sound it woke him almost instantly. In the dim light he saw it was Peter’s bird Eveline (he had been the first and the only one of them with a complete lack of irony to name his owl after a James Joyce novel), who was looking quite a bit more grey about the wingtips than she had when he had last seen her, and who was carrying like unlucky prey a bloody red envelope from whose folds a noxious black smoke spiraled.
He dove out of bed and threw on the first sweater he could find and ran outside to open the letter before it exploded. When he plucked it, hot as coffee, from Eveline’s foot she took off toward the settling clouds at a good clip and he could hardly blame her. When he opened the Howler with shaking fingers the wind took the ashes, and the brunt of the sound.
NOW I KNOW WHY THIS WHOLE TIME THEY LIKED YOU MORE THAN ME! AND EVEN WITH YOU LIKE YOU ARE! THAT YOU WOULD HAVE EATEN ANY OF US ALIVE ONCE A MONTH AND STILL THEY WOULD HAVE FETCHED THE MOON DOWN FOR YOU ALMOST FUCKING LITERALLY! FUCK YOU REMUS! I EXPECTED THAT YOU WOULD NOT SHUNT EIGHT YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP BY THE WAYSIDE IN FAVOR OF SEX BUT EVIDENTLY I SHOULD NOT HAVE!
FUCK YOU. HONESTLY FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. IT IS ALWAYS YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT THAT RUINS EVERYTHING! I THOUGHT YOU AND I HAD MADE SOME ALLIANCE – TO BE OVER AND ABOVE THEIR IMMATURITY! BUT NOW I SEE YOU ARE JUST AS BAD AS THEM OR WORSE. AND THAT YOU NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY YOU DID FOR THEM – AND THAT THEY NEVER CARED FOR ME THE WAY THEY DID FOR YOU! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU WOULD DO THIS TO US!
The last sentence echoed about in the skeletal wreckage of the old settlement. “Well,” Sirius said from the doorway where he stood, cup of cold tea in hand, naked but for the wool blanket he had thrown about his shoulders. “I had hoped he might have cooled down a pinch.”
All he could wrestle out was a pathetic-sounding “What the fuck.”
“Dumbledore sent Pete to St. Mungo’s to tell me I was coming out here with you and I must’ve looked – I don’t know. So he asked me for about the seven millionth time what was going on with you and me and I didn’t have the heart to say nothing this time. His reaction was, um, not dissimilar.”
“Fuck,” said Remus again. Something was draining off like cold dishwater in his heart. “Fuck, does James know?”
“I mean,” said Sirius, “it didn’t seem fair, don’t you agree?”
They sat again together on the stoop. There was still a shred of sunset left to the West over the sea, orange and pink and dulling like bleeding dye as the light faded against the heavy clouds. “I guess,” Remus said.
“James took it a great deal better but then again I think he suspected for a while that I. Well. That I wasn’t – or that it was very real, I mean, that when people would joke about us, it wasn’t funny, and I wasn’t laughing.”
“I noticed that too.”
“Well, I guess Pete didn’t.”
Remus rested his forehead against his knees. “I never meant – I had hoped we wouldn’t end up on some Brideshead Revisited, Black and Lupin contra mundum trip together. Or at least not so soon.”
“I had hoped too,” said Sirius. “Black and Lupin contra this mundum and all the apparent others.” He pulled his blanket tighter about his shoulders. “For what it’s worth James is alright. And Lily will be alright if she doesn’t know already. And Pete will come around, you know; he always does. Every other stupid idea we’ve ever had he came around to in the end.”
“What if he doesn’t.”
“Then fuck him.”
“Sirius.”
“I’m not kidding. If he doesn’t – it’s on him. It’s not our fault.”
They watched the sun slip under the waves. Remus said “I think I’ll write to him.”
“Send him your own Howler. I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU CAME TO THIS CONCLUSION…”
Remus laughed weakly. “I don’t know how he doesn’t believe we really like him.”
“He certainly doesn’t make it any easier on himself.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? He can’t send you something like that and then say, oh Moony, why won’t you come out to the pub with me anymore.”
“He’s just scared shitless.”
“Well, so am I. Aren’t you?”
“Usually.”
Sirius paused then he leant and kissed Remus at the temple. “Brave man. I love you dearly.”
“Whatever happens?”
“Yes, obviously.”
They went inside and Sirius started the Bringing It All Back Home cassette over again from the beginning and set about heating a curry and Remus calibrated all the machines and then sat at the desk and began several times to write to Peter in many varying tones before he realized it was all bullshit. And his head hurt, and all his joints still, and dinner smelled good, and the music kept distracting him.
It’ll keep, he thought, for another day, it’ll all keep – and it would be just fine to play as though it were just the two of them against this world and every other, for however long they could bargain from the universe. Who knew if it would ever be again? And it was almost Christmas.
--
Remus woke to sound. In the dim light through the opaque windows his skin felt aglow where it pressed against Sirius. The sound was not him breathing or his heartbeat – blood thrum, white noise, in the meat of his shoulder beneath Remus’s ear – because it was coming from the machines on the table.
Bad fucking timing, Remus thought, and carefully he sat, and he picked up Sirius’s old fisherman’s sweater (stolen from James’s dad) from the floor and wrestled into it backwards, and he stood, feeling shaken out but good, everything new, reassembled like a train set. That was, until he went to the computers, and saw what they had printed.
REMUS LUPIN
Dear living fuck. The jolt went through him cold and electric and before he could even think of rational next steps his fingers had fallen upon the keyboard and he had transmitted a return message upon the frequency –
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
He did not have to wait at all very long and he thought he heard in the fever ringing of his ears some horrible cosmic laughter.
WE WANT WHAT YOU HAVE
Stillness but for the waves. He looked at Sirius in the bed and then he looked at his own hands and the brutal compendium of scars where at sixteen he had torn most of the skin from the bone in his desperate and nearly fulfilled hunger. And for that he had forgiven everybody involved except himself.
NO YOU DON’T, he sent.
And in another moment: YOU ESPECIALLY
He found his jeans on the floor and his wand half in the pocket and went to Sirius in the bed and he said, come on, let’s go let’s go, outside outside, there isn’t enough Floo powder for the both of us, we have to Apparate. Sirius was not a morning person whatsoever and he never had been and there was sleep in the corners of his eyes and he had little Remus mouth shapes bruising all over his neck and chest and Remus loved him to an insane degree and perhaps there were mere seconds left in both their lives and he was saying, come on, come on, shoes on, we have to go, we have to get out now now now. Like he had practiced when he was young with his mother and father in case the townspeople ever found out and came upon the house with pitchforks. Have you got your wand? Come on, come on. Little pats upon the back and there were strong hands holding both his own –
Sirius began to ask what was happening but in the procurement of his pants he laid eye upon the machines which were printing rapid festive blocks and vomiting scroll upon scroll of paper in a clinical white reading:
REMUS LUPIN
YOU ESPECIALLY
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
NO MORE NOISE NOW
They went outside together into the vivid white dawn and the sea spray and the wild winter grass blowing colorless and the ocean like a desert featured in charcoal and from the clouds before them had descended – did it matter? It displaced the rain and the sea itself and the wind it cast like a spell was warm and metallic and shifted like snakes in the grass. He could not think to fear. It passed overhead and Sirius took his hand – warm and solid – as he had been doing or trying to do since they were very young. And again inanely on some cassette loop Dylan filled his head, another cosmic broadcast: “In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you…”
--
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-12-21 05:44 pm (UTC)But this:
But it’s not the same… I want to wake up naked with you in the dew in the grass – and I want you to take care of me (interpret how you will) – all day and all the night following – and I ache for it every minute. In my heart and elsewhere. In my bones where all the aches are.
Yup, crying. And the end, how it all fell apart at once and they never got to clear the air with Peter and James. Just rip my heart out. Go ahead. Such a perfect re-purposing of the trials of war.
This was amazing in the most painful sort of way. Absolutely wonderful!
no subject
Date: 2015-12-27 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-22 05:32 am (UTC)It's just, you've made the surreal and horrific so beautiful, from the gorgeous tumble of your language and the incredible dialogue (they come together with such perfect drunken indelicacy, I love it) to the last chill the ending gave me. This fic tugged my heart in ten directions at once and there are honestly so many good things to say about this I can't fit them into an LJ comment; this is staggering, and so, so impossibly beautiful. Thank you for blessing our eyeballs with something this singularly amazing. ♥♥♥
no subject
Date: 2015-12-27 02:51 pm (UTC)thank you for your beta - honestly invaluable - and for being such a great and reliable reader and friend :) it means a lot to me. i can't wait to read your story for this fest!
no subject
Date: 2015-12-22 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-27 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-25 12:20 pm (UTC)Do I praise your beautiful, haunting language and the way every word has so much meaning and gives me goosebumps? Or do I declare you as my sworn nemesis for that ending?
Or compliment you on your excellent use of my prompts, and for working them into such an original, intriguing, fascinating story? Or do I hunt you down and destroy you for that fucking ending?!
Am I stunned at how well you develop the story and explore all the characters without clunky exposition, and how good you are at leading us through the story, hanging on every word to gather information? Or am I horrified by that beautiful motherfucking ending??!!
For real though, I loved this. I loved their relationship and I especially love what you did with Lily and Peter, and I'm just so god damn intrigued by this whole AU setup. Imma illustrate this. Thank you so much. Merry Christmas ghosttt!
no subject
Date: 2015-12-27 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-25 11:45 pm (UTC)I agree that there needs to be more it. I would read a novella based on this world. Lily was fantastic, especially, and I always love stories in which they smoke pot. It seems so right for the pressures and the times. And Peter was interesting, too; nicely rounded and more nuanced than we often encounter.
I am in awe
no subject
Date: 2015-12-27 02:57 pm (UTC)maybe i'll try to put more together... no promises but i do have some ideas for what happens after. i'll keep you posted :) perhaps not a novella but a little something might happen!
no subject
Date: 2016-01-15 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-16 11:20 am (UTC)