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remix_redux2007-04-15 11:54 pm
dr-darth.livejournal.com) wrote in remix_redux2007-04-15 11:54 pm
Fic: Ways of Not Speaking (Poetry In Motion Remix) [HP; Remus, Harry, Tonks; PG-13]
Title: Ways of Not Speaking (Poetry In Motion Remix)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
loneraven
Summary: Up there in heaven, the pubs never close.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Remus, Harry, Tonks.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: All belongs to JK Rowling.
Original story: Secrets, Lies and Guiness Pies, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
gunderpants.
The thing about Dylan fucking Thomas is that he’s fucking dead, isn’t he? Somewhere behind the veil, he and Sirius are probably having a merry old pint or two of Scotch together, raising glasses to themselves, to this fine heavenly establishment, to poetry and the beauty and relevance thereof, to whiskey, oh, yes to whisky, to themselves again for good measure, and then, in the rising light of the wee small hours, because it wouldn’t be heaven if they had last orders, Sirius is raising a glass, a long, slow, luscious glass, and he’s drinking to Remus Lupin on the emerald earth below.
The poet will ask, “And who’s he, then?”
“A poor old sod I used to know,” Sirius will answer, smiling his sweet cunning smile, and then they’ll drink themselves into the dawn.
Remus tells Tonks all this through a haze of alcohol and something that would have been genuine, heartfelt feeling if you’d caught him ten years earlier and wrung it out of him for later use, but as it is, is just the emotional equivalent of the dry, cracking sob, nothing to feel and no relief from feeling it.
“Shut up, Remus,” she tells him briskly, and lets him pass out cold, because, honestly, she sort of loves him and she sort of wishes he were dead, and in any case the world’s a marginally better place when those large, frightening eyes of his are safely closed.
Fuck it, she sort of loves him. It shouldn’t be happening like this, so she puts a blanket over him, clambers up beside him and falls asleep herself to the sound of his breathing getting slower and slower beside her head.
*
When Harry was very young, on a walk with Aunt Petunia and Dudley, he saw a house being demolished. He remembers being scared of the noise and the choking dust, but also of the destruction – the gap in the lines of the world where there was none before. Dudley thought it was marvellous and played “Dudley Wrecking Ball vs. Harry House” for weeks afterwards, but that’s not the part Harry remembers.
This time around, the roof is intact, the walls are standing where they’ve always stood. But the gap is there regardless, a jagged-edged hole in how things ought to be, and a house falling down around it. It’s at the dinner table he feels it most. You can see it clearly then, gaps in time, conversations out of step, and a hole in space on the chair no one sits in, so when Lupin asked him to skip dinner and come out with him and Mundungus Fletcher, Harry sort of said yes without thinking about it.
Now, in the cauterising light of day, he wonders if that was a good idea. He should have known, of course, that going anywhere with Mundungus is never a good idea, and Lupin, well. Tonks has told him, and anyway he knows, that Lupin’s not what he was, or failing that, more what he was than he was, if that makes any kind of sense at all; he knows that the soft-spoken eccentric has become a soft-spoken lunatic (“Lunatic,” Tonks said, “sorry, no pun intended.”) unless, of course, that’s how he always was, silent and gentle with that black-dog madness always there and sharp in him.
Still, it started off all right. Harry went with them to the Dead Donkey, a Muggle pub off Fulham way, and it took a few drinks pushed in his direction (and, from Harry’s perspective, also a general blurring of the world) but eventually even Mundungus got them all a round in. And Harry sat there, with Lupin, drinking slowly, and it was a bit weird, bit surreal, but it was okay. It didn’t feel like there was a ghost there, or, worse, that there ought to be one.
Lupin looked at him, sidelong out of heavy-lidded eyes. “How are you feeling, Harry?”
“Dunno. All right, I guess. Bit sick.”
“Well, that's to be expected. It is your first experience, of course. You'll get used to it with time.”
Harry remembers wondering right then if it really was a matter of time, if much more of his life was going to be spent drinking into oblivion in pubs. The wizarding world could fall to the dark when he’s eighteen, he supposes. That’d take care of his life plans.
“Right,” he’d said, thinking about the future as a sequence of light-boxes, each with a pint-glass in. “Lupin... I can't bloody remember what I was going to say.”
“You're getting legless. I'm so proud of you. Your dad and Sirius would be most pleased.”
“I feel sick.”
“Sirius particularly,” Lupin went on. “I can hear him in my head, telling me to do right by you. ‘Poor little bastard, sixteen and still hasn't done lines off a dead tart's body? He'll grow up warped!'”
It’s true, Harry thought, he really is mad, and ran to the toilets to throw up. That bit is fairly blurry: he remembers there was lots of orange gunk – fuck, Mrs. Weasley’s spag bog – and, most clearly of all, Lupin, there holding him up and wiping him off and dragging him carefully back to their table. He was miserable, and so was Lupin, he knows, but it counts, who’s looking after who. Harry’s sure of that.
He knows he was crying into his glass by this point. Dung was hanging on to his hand, telling him some bollocks about how it’s all a part of life, and Lupin was being… well, himself. “Once you've been sick,” he was saying, “you do feel a fair bit better. At least you don't get a hangover if you throw up.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, himself blurring into the blurred world, but grateful all the same. And because that was the sort of night it was, the sort of night where you hugged the knife to yourself and twisted, “Did Sirius... did he...?”
“Let me tell you something about Sirius Black, Harry. He carried vodka around school in a water bottle, constantly needed James and I to keep him upright when walking, and once passed out naked on a park bench in January because he was too lazy to walk home. But he would never sit back and let a friend throw up drunkenly alone. He was the kind of friend who'd be besides you, throwing up in unison.”
Harry wasn’t crying really, then, he was laughing because of the nudity, the park bench, the alcohol, and Dung had disappeared – to see a man about a bloody enormous tab – and then Lupin, fucking Lupin who saw so much with so much fizz in his blood, said, “Are you all right, Harry?”
Harry looked up, and asked conversationally, “Are you upset, at all?”
Because, suddenly, he was pissed off. Suddenly he was crying into the shoulder of a man who’d known Sirius longer than he, Harry, had been alive; he was sitting on the centre of a spinning-top world and it wasn’t fair, somehow, it wasn’t fair, to be drunk and alone when the whole world should be down in the dark with you.
Lupin said, “Well, of course I am...”
“Then why are you so bloody cheerful all the bloody time? What's the matter with you?”
“I have to admit, Harry, I have a very strange way of coping with loss…”
Of course you do – and Harry remembers thinking that, too. (“Do you think it was an accident?” Tonks had said. “Do you think it was an accident that he had a black dog following him all those years?”)
“Harry... believe me when I say that people have different coping mechanisms. You're coping with rage. Molly Weasley is coping with overcompensation. I handle things my way.”
“Yeah, like a bloody bastard.” Harry isn’t sure he said this, but he thought it, and then he thought he might be having the first childish tantrum of his adult life.
Lupin looked at his glass, then pushed it away. “Whatever you want to talk about, talk. Anything. I don't care. Have a good go, go on. Take a swing. I don't care.”
Harry thought about breaking Lupin’s nose. About shattering that perfect composure, the fragile, calm lines of his face. About just, somehow, inflicting damage.
He didn’t. He said, “What?”
“One day when this is over, I’ll let this all happen in my head, I promise. I’ll go down deep with the best of them. When I have the time, the inclination, the padded cell. Until then, I already have a ravenous beast taking charge of me once a month, and so...”
Inside Harry’s head, Tonks was swearing through tears. Out loud, he said, “I don’t want to drink any more.”
“You don’t have to.”
They left before they got chucked out, stumbled across the street and down the steps somehow, and Harry tried not to shield his eyes in the ticket hall. But there was something comforting about the Underground, the clean light, the curves of the tunnels, no sharp edges or straight lines to hurt Harry’s head, and as yet, no noise: only litter skittering down platforms in the down-draught of the coming train. It took them swiftly north, picking up rattling speed through dark, dank tunnels. Harry hadn’t been on the Underground enough to find it less than disconcerting, this frantic movement so far below civilisation, but Mundungus had fallen blithely asleep against a window and Lupin, curled up feline-fashion across two seats, looked almost comfortable.
“Hey,” Harry said.
Lupin looked up, his eyes reflecting red and blue roundels. “Watch it, Harry, I have a headache that’s acquiring sentience. Y’all right, our kid?”
Harry smiled, wanly – the shift into dialect was perfect – and thought about it. “My eyes,” he said. “My eyes feel like sandpaper.”
Lupin nodded. “It happens, when you cry like that. It’s a slow-burning thing.”
Harry didn’t ask what he meant. “You know what it feels like, then.”
Lupin nodded, stretching his feet out. The train drew up at a station, sudden silence apparent through the doors. They were the only people in the carriage.
Harry stared at the floor, wondered whether the train was moving or if it was the whole world, looked up again. “What were you crying about?” he asked, with the whole scene something out of a late-night film, surreal and half-forgotten by morning, and he wonders now why he even asked, but it was like picking a scab, wasn’t it, it was like dropping a plumb line into the dark, hoping you’d hit bottom if you just kept going.
Lupin smiled. “Which time?”
Dancing across his mental theatre, Tonks screamed and slammed her hand into mahogany oak doors. Harry blinked and said, “The first time.”
“Ask Moody, some time, about the first time he met me. The next time wasn’t until a lot later, but that involved a girl and I doubt you’re old enough to hear about that.”
“I’m sixteen!”
“So was I.” Lupin grinned, curling back up. “To begin with, anyway. And she was a lovely girl.”
“Bet she wasn’t,” Harry said glumly, thinking of Cho. His reflection looked at him accusingly, distorted in the curve of the windows and blurring with Lupin’s shadow cast against the roaring dark.
“Oh, no,” – Lupin’s voice was getting dreamy – “I have the feeling you would have loved her quite a lot. I know you would, in fact. It doesn't matter though, Harry. It really doesn’t.”
“How can it not matter?” Harry remembers being quite sure at this point that he was drunk; this wasn’t him, this wasn’t Lupin, they did not rattle through the darkness talking about this, it was through things like this, small trickles of dust and falling pebbles, that houses fell. “How can your life not matter?”
“Because there are more important things.” His head was in his hands all of a sudden. “I give myself to a greater cause. I’m all I have left, after all, and I can do without me. Excuse me.”
The train was slowing down. “This station is King’s Cross St. Pancras,” said the announcer as the doors slid open, and Lupin, eyes wide with purpose, strode straight out. Harry, with an eye on the sleeping Mundungus, lingered. “Change here for the Circle, Northern, Metropolitan and Piccadilly Lines, and main line services.”
“Oh, and,” continued the driver, cutting off the automatic voice, “to the man in the cape throwing up on the end of platform 2, that’s London Underground property. Please ask the attendant for a mop and bucket.”
Harry was running down the platform against the train, building up speed as it did, noise and speed and roaring momentum building to higher and higher pitch, and then the silence of a vacuum as he knelt down beside Lupin, the two of them on the ground facing down towards the track.
“Rats,” Lupin murmured, and Harry stared down mutely at the tiny creatures flitting out between the electric rails. Lupin rolled over and groaned. “Remind me not to do that again.”
Harry nodded, and awkwardly, painfully, got down to join him. What people there were turned to look, but he ignored them, and eventually, even the movement of litter in the draughts flickered into silence. They stared at the curving roof of the tunnel as the orange counter flicked downwards, announcing the next train in eight, seven, six minutes. “You okay?” Harry asked, eventually.
“I’m flat on my back on a station platform about two hundred feet below ground. Yes, I’m just fine, Harry, why do you ask?”
Harry closed his eyes. “Sorry. Forget I asked.”
“No” – and Lupin sounded honestly apologetic – “I’m sorry. Sorry about the whole bloody thing. Particularly that you had to see me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Drunk. Maudlin. Messy.”
Harry smiled, surprising himself. “Why shouldn’t I have done? You saw me.”
“I do hate to bring out the old chestnut, Harry, but the fact remains that I did change your nappies. And I’m supposed to be a responsible, stuffy old bastard. And you were my student.”
“I’m not any more,” Harry said, simply. And because he couldn’t help himself, “You changed my nappies?”
“Of course.” Harry couldn’t see Lupin’s face, but there was something like laughter in his voice. “I heated up your bottles, I stuck my elbow in your bathwater. There were a lot of nights, back then, when neither you nor I could sleep, and I used to carry you out with me, walking through the city until we were both too exhausted to keep our eyes open.”
“I wish I could remember,” Harry said honestly. “I wish I’d known you then.”
Lupin did laugh, that time. “I wish you had too. I really do. But, well. You’ve got me now.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, and there was some meaning to that, something grounding them between each stretching expanse of dark. The display flicked from one minute to none, and Lupin sat up and pulled Harry back a few inches, holding him away from the next southbound train, a red-liveried dragon flying through into the light.
One or two people alighted, aiming straight for the yellow Way Out gleam, paying no attention to man and boy huddled together on the ground. No one did, not until the last arriving passenger in the other direction, an ungainly and very angry drunk. “Only went to fucking Highbury, didn’t I!” he yelled. “Only fucking Highbury! Had to get the train back! Talk about letting a man sleep his way to doom!”
“Come on, Harry,” Lupin said softly, “here comes the Angel Islington.”
Dung was still spitting blood about fucking Highbury and fucking Islington all the way up to street level, but Harry was thinking about the clean, comforting light again, about the fragile lines of Lupin’s profile one step below on the rising escalator, about finding help in unlikely places, even in dark, hot tunnels far below the world, and about looking for the way back home.
Standing here, in the shaded room in the shadowed house, he knows he hasn’t found it yet.
*
Tonks wakes up with Remus in her bed, curled naked and wasted around the layers of blankets. He’s left her cold, and she pulls back at him, rolls him over and wakes him up. His hair smells of alcohol. She kicks him. He bites back. “This is all getting sadomasochistic,” she says, aloud, and is rewarded by his opening his eyes.
“One of my many dirty secrets,” he says lazily, and she hates how perfectly modulated his voice always is, how his rough edges are always smoothed away by consciousness. She’s seen him wake up too many times.
He’s thinking the same thing, clearly. “Tonks… we didn’t do anything, did we?”
She grins. “What do you think?”
“I think I’m not wearing any clothes.”
“That was all your fault, anyway.” She sits up and rubs the sleep from her eyes. Underneath her touch her hair turns orange; she can’t see it, but it’s her very least favourite colour and this is starting out like that kind of day. For the hell of it she adds china-doll eyes, wide blue and scary. “You stumbled in late at night, pretty much hysterical, and smelling of grease, I don’t know why. I got your clothes off and locked you in here so you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
He sinks back beneath the covers. “I couldn’t hurt anyone, not without…”
She rolls her eyes, to herself, and gets out of bed. When she goes downstairs he pads behind her, wearing a pair of Ron’s old trousers and what’s left of their sheets. The effect of the drapery is humourless, falling and curving over the lines of his bones, and Tonks turns to the fridge.
It’s empty. “Cheese or beetroot?” she asks, sure it was someone’s turn to do the shopping. Remus looks hesitant. “I’ll fry you some cheese,” she decides, and watches it agglutinate in extra virgin olive oil.
The smell etches itself into the walls as Remus paces around the table looking faintly ridiculous, finally settling into a chair with the grace of an emaciated house cat. “Several questions present themselves,” he says after a while. “First of all: what time is it?”
”Just after eleven,” she answers, not looking up from the yellow gloop. Off his expectant silence, she adds, “In the morning.”
“Second of all: what the hell is going with these trousers?” He lifts a bare foot to emphasise the point, and the trousers rustle obligingly. They’re a peculiar shade of yellow that Tonks has to admit she hasn’t previously seen in a non-emergency-services context.
“Ron says they’re the coolest trousers in London. Apparently Ali G wears them.”
“But isn’t he being ironic?”
“He is, Ron isn’t. Cheese is up.” She slaps it onto a plate which she then slaps on the table. He looks at it with something she can only describe as joy because there are no better words for it, and takes a bite.
“Mmm. If I don’t die of cirrhosis, it’ll be of heart disease.” He lifts a fork in salute. “Bring on the coronary!”
“You’ve taken up smoking as well, haven’t you?” she asks, shoving the pan at the sink and coming to sit beside him.
“Taking it up again,” he corrects through a mouthful of cheese. “I gave up for a while, but it scarcely seems worth it. I know what’s going to kill me, or at least I can narrow it down to a limited number of possibilities, so bring on the nicotine, too.”
“Why don’t you just slit your wrists, it’ll be quicker.”
She didn’t mean to say that.
“I didn’t mean to say that.” She’s looking straight at him, watching the fork descend as if in slow motion, down into the plate, rattle on china, squish on gloop, then the silence of him looking back out of those eyes she wishes would just close, now, so she wouldn’t have to look.
He smiles, slowly, picks the fork back up, takes another bite. “Too messy,” he says after a while. “Positively inelegant.”
“Fuck, you need help.” She did mean to say that. “You need help almost more than you need a rocket up your arse. Professional help.”
“What with?”
“You’re kidding, right?” She wants to kiss him and kill him with about the same intensity, right now; either that, or she wants to go back in time and make a grab at that fucking veil and just, just, just fucking fix this. “Pretending it never happened and imagining that this is as good as it gets isn't accepting and grieving, it's being pathetic. And so's taking out a teenage boy and getting him drunk to project your stupid repressed expression of emotion.”
He doesn’t say anything. She picks up his empty plate and determinedly rinses it, getting rid of every scrap of coagulated grease, putting her elbows into it. “Go on, then,” she says, over her shoulder. “Go back to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Well, neither am I, and I’m not talking to you until you get some sense knocked into you.”
She throws the plate down with a clatter and petulantly extinguishes all the lights in the kitchen. A surprised gesture from both his hands ignites them all again, and then he’s following her out and into the library, and she tries, she tries to hide from him behind the pages of The Economist, but it’s all crap and useless and she has to talk to him.
“Remus. Do you know how long you locked yourself up in this study, reading stuff and not even acknowledging that he'd died?”
She’s surprised when he merely shakes his head, offering no wisecrack, no denial, for now.
“A month and a half. Do you know how everyone else was doing during that time?”
He shakes his head again.
“Well, I'll fill you in. Molly Weasley burst into tears every time something minor happened, like a book being slammed shut noisily or dropping a fork onto the ground. Ginny got freaked out by the concept of curtains, and ripped them all down. Harry's been sitting in that front room, just like you were in here, and Ron and Hermione have been tiptoeing around the house, trying to pretend they weren't there just so he wouldn't yell at them. And do you know what I was doing?”
He doesn’t say anything, and for a moment she wants to tell him – nineteen-hour days at work, mostly, putting in the hard grind, finding Moody’s sympathy more painful than his shouting – but she stops, thinks about it instead. “You know, there’s a couple of birds living in a tree out the front. Well, there were. One day one of the eggs fell out, smashed on the ground. The parents never saw their little one, but they stayed with it, until it got dark, until it got cold, until the poor thing died without ever having lived. The moral of the story, Remus? Birds grieve. They grieve for what they’ve lost.”
He’s walking around the room, hands on head, the draped sheet morbid and flowing around his body, and under his mane of dusty, unkempt hair, his eyes are closed.
“There wasn’t any memorial service. We were going to leave it to you to arrange, because there was no one closer to him than you. Why, I can’t tell you.” She’s following his movements through the shadows at the edges of the room, and this is the sort of thing war does to you, what grief does: you measure your life by what damage you can still inflict. “Why did you let yourself love him, and no one else? If he were here, he’d have sorted you the fuck out, I reckon. But I couldn’t and Molly couldn’t and no one could, and we would have held you up as long we could, Remus. Given you whatever you wanted. But I guess what you wanted was the bottom of the bottle.”
That’s hypocrisy, that is, and she knows it – there’s a half-full bottle of Smirnoff Norsk under her bed, for the times when seeing life through a blue-tinged lens is the only way, and cider for common-and-garden night terrors – but then again, she’ll damage him any way she can if it means an end to his silence.
He’s looking away from her now, only vaguely making his way through the still air, becoming insubstantial. His voice, when it comes, has vestiges of calm perfection, a sequence of self-contained notes. “Do you hate me?”
“Of course. We all do.”
There’s a silence, then: a silence in which she wishes she could take that back, maybe, and say no, no, that’s not true, no, I’ve never hurt anyone I didn’t love. But she doesn’t say it and as the minutes tick by, it’s all too late.
“Several questions present themselves.” Remus has snapped back into focus, suddenly; his face is clearly visible in the landing lights. “If you hate me so very much...”
“What, Remus?” she asks, more gently than she’d meant to.
“Then why didn’t you let me drown in my own vomit?”
She says nothing.
“Why did you fry me some cheese?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “Thank you.”
“For the cheese?” – and she’s coming out of a dream.
“For the divine realisation.”
He goes out of the room, quiet step by quiet step. She can’t hear him padding back upstairs, though she strains to listen, and the silence of the house settles around her in the dark.
*
“Why are we here?” Harry whispers into Tonks’s ear.
“I don’t know,” she replies in her normal tones, because she doesn’t, none of them do, except Remus, and he’s not telling. He’s barely speaking, except to comment on the view; the English scenery, even windswept and whipping past at thirty miles an hour, has a strange, grey beauty that he is the first to notice. Tonks wondered how and why she didn’t, how she stared listlessly out the window and didn’t even register the picture-postcard bleakness, the geometrical waves of migrating swallows. But then Remus was always like that, always; she remembers the nights before the veil, the wee wand-lit hours where he’d lean back in his chair and tell her, slowly, of being lost, of wandering the world, of nights running wild in Eastern Europe and roaming the souks and bazaars of the Twin Kingdoms, of sleeping rough on the Lower East Side and finding tulips in the morning, and while he’d tell her of the ancient, exotic beauties of faraway places, she’d wonder how’d he’d been eating, how he’d been hiding, how he’d been making it from day to day, and he wouldn’t say and after a while she wouldn’t ask.
Harry still wonders where they are and what they’re doing here. Why, exactly, they’re in a rotten little car driving down the coast road, with Tonks curled cat-like on the back seat, avoiding Mundungus, and Lupin flicking through the endless static on the radio. And because there’s something encroachingly normal about all this – at least, Lupin is more like he remembers, more the gentle eccentric, less like a wire about to snap, and Tonks, too, has her hair a reassuring bubblegum colour – Harry brings himself to complain about the music.
“The radio’s stuck,” Lupin explains. “Golden oldies or static, I’m afraid. Or Radio Four.”
“Radio Four!” chorus Tonks and Harry, but Lupin smiles happily at them.
“Sorry, darlings” – his cod American accent is quite good – “this is my car. It’s my music, and what’s more, I feel absolutely no guilt for inflicting it on you.” And he forces them to listen to the Beatles and the Smiths alternately for what feels like five hundred miles down the coast, but Harry endures it with good humour. From Tonks’s expression, he suspects she might even be enjoying it.
“What are wizarding bands like?” he asks after a couple of hours and one or two spirited renditions of This Charming Man. “I’ve only ever heard the Weird Sisters.”
“Awful,” Lupin says, and Tonks grins. “It is a wizarding rule that every single band must feature an accordion, obscure Eastern-European flute, or a lute, and if the lyrics don't involve trying to rhyme 'spell' with 'girl' the song is to be discarded immediately.”
Harry laughs, surprising himself. He watches the landscape change from rolling patchwork fields to sharp-edged fells, industrial chimneys, then heather-strewn moorland, with dirty snow showing below the ground like the ribs of a giant animal. North, he thinks. North, away from London and Surrey, towards Hogwarts and the only real world he knows, north and further north, and now he’s on the way home he can sleep.
They’re back on the coast. The sea is rising in vicious swells, grey-green and impenetrable to the eye, and Tonks takes in all the details; she’s learned from Remus, learnt his way of looking at the world, and as they draw to a halt two miles from St Andrews, her head is full of the beauty of the oncoming storm. She wakes Harry gently, ignoring his sleepy protests, and Mundungus trails after them both as they follow Remus down the falling lines of the shore.
Only when they are all there in a row, looking out at the flashes of lightning on the far horizon, does she ask, “What are we doing here?”
Remus smiles again – she’s not seen that in a while, the old smile with wryness and dryness but still a smile, still real – and gestures with the long wooden object in his hands. “Beech, ten inches,” he says. “Well-loved, well-used, covered in muck and chewing gum. Engraved with the name of its owner by means of a drawing pin.”
He hands it over, briefly – she takes a quick look, lets Harry take his time running a finger down the wobbly Sirius Black lettering. And then Remus takes it back and throws it, one glorious gesture, a gift to the waves.
“Why...” Harry begins, but he’s not angry, he’s curious. Lupin’s gone sane again, he knows. Strange that it should happen here, out in the wild wind and waves where he’d more generally expect the reverse, but he thinks he likes Lupin’s way of never quite doing what’s expected of him.
“Because.” Lupin sits down on the edge of the water and takes off his boots. The water must be freezing on his bare feet, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Because this is where Sirius came ashore from Azkaban. The night I left Hogwarts, we came here, both of us, and sat all night watching the tide fall away from us. We hadn’t spoken in twelve years and we weren’t really speaking then. There’s more than one kind of not speaking.”
He gets up, takes two steps into the water, walks back out again. “We were walking back up to the car, see, because he wanted the drive, and I figured it'd be safe if we disillusioned him, and it was late at night and all. And there was this aluminium rubbish bin near the railing at the car park. He took this bit of broken railing that was lying on the ground, and he just mauled right into the bin, beating it, kicking it. He eventually broke it off the post it was on, and he just kept attacking it, screaming, just screaming nonsense. I couldn't stop him, and I didn't even try. I'd never seen him like that. I've never even been that vicious during the moon. And he... he turned and he said...”
“What?” Tonks asks, and she’s gentle, gentle, because she doesn’t want to lose him to the sea-salt and the winds. Harry understands a little bit, because he’s on the other side, he’s walking into the waves, he’ll give Remus a bloody nose before letting him come to any harm.
“He said... he said he didn't know why he'd lost twelve years of his life. He said that he'd never felt so disgusting, and cheated, and insulted, and he kept going on about being so sad and angry that he'd just walk back out onto the beach and make a hole in the ocean that was his size.”
Remus looks up, looks right at Tonks, and smiles again, sweet and strange. “There’s more than one kind of not speaking.”
The mood shifts with him. Between them they begin to throw the rest of Sirius’s possessions out to the sea, terrible rubbish most of it, or at least Harry thinks so; his godfather apparently had terrible taste in music, in films, and in –
“Porn,” Lupin says, chucking it out into the ocean. “Only Sirius Black would have dirty video tapes at Hogwarts without any means of actually viewing them. We never asked how Filch knew what was on them.”
The last thing is a cask of white wine, also horrible stuff in its way, or at least according to Lupin, whose dimmed eyes indicate a lifetime of past experience. “I felt that it would only be fair that I do for you what Sirius did for me, and introduce you to a life of cheap liquor and painful tomorrows.”
“Tomorrow isn’t painful enough already?” Harry asks, and Lupin laughs.
“You’re better at this than I ever was,” he says, and it’s starting to get dark, all of a sudden. They’ve only thrown the things that will sink, except the wand. Harry hopes it washes ashore some day, somewhere with bright sunshine and sparkling ice, the name ground away by salt and water until it’s clean and ready for a new beginning.
Harry sits down beside him, in the cold, and says, tentatively, “I hate memorial services.”
“Me too.” Lupin doesn’t look at him. “Oh, how I hate them. I’ll tell you something, Harry, which I’m not the first person to say, and I won’t be the last. 'After the first death, there is no other.’”
Harry stands up. “I think I’ll go for a walk.” He suits the action to the word, and it’s not that he needs lessons in grieving, he’s doing just fine, and right now he wants to walk alongside the sea, the sea with its refreshing inhumanity, ever-shifting contours and no memory.
“And yet,” Tonks says quietly, watching Harry go. Remus is still and quiet on the sand. She leans over and kisses his hair, a tiny caress that falls softly, unnoticed, into the livid twilight. “Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again, though lovers be lost love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.”
Harry walks along the sea’s edge as the stars come out, one by one, and the shadows lose their edges into the dark. Presently, Tonks and Lupin follow him along to where they’ve left Mundungus and the car, and there’s no black dog to be seen.
*
The thing about Dylan Thomas, Remus supposes, is that he tried to draw lyricism from death, to put sense and beauty where none belonged. But if the only alternative is the silence of the grave, he’ll take the poetry.
Somewhere else, he’s sure Sirius agrees, and now all that’s left is the burn of sea-salt raw on his tongue, and the sea-coast curving south, and the way home.
Author:
loneravenSummary: Up there in heaven, the pubs never close.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Remus, Harry, Tonks.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: All belongs to JK Rowling.
Original story: Secrets, Lies and Guiness Pies, by
gunderpants.The thing about Dylan fucking Thomas is that he’s fucking dead, isn’t he? Somewhere behind the veil, he and Sirius are probably having a merry old pint or two of Scotch together, raising glasses to themselves, to this fine heavenly establishment, to poetry and the beauty and relevance thereof, to whiskey, oh, yes to whisky, to themselves again for good measure, and then, in the rising light of the wee small hours, because it wouldn’t be heaven if they had last orders, Sirius is raising a glass, a long, slow, luscious glass, and he’s drinking to Remus Lupin on the emerald earth below.
The poet will ask, “And who’s he, then?”
“A poor old sod I used to know,” Sirius will answer, smiling his sweet cunning smile, and then they’ll drink themselves into the dawn.
Remus tells Tonks all this through a haze of alcohol and something that would have been genuine, heartfelt feeling if you’d caught him ten years earlier and wrung it out of him for later use, but as it is, is just the emotional equivalent of the dry, cracking sob, nothing to feel and no relief from feeling it.
“Shut up, Remus,” she tells him briskly, and lets him pass out cold, because, honestly, she sort of loves him and she sort of wishes he were dead, and in any case the world’s a marginally better place when those large, frightening eyes of his are safely closed.
Fuck it, she sort of loves him. It shouldn’t be happening like this, so she puts a blanket over him, clambers up beside him and falls asleep herself to the sound of his breathing getting slower and slower beside her head.
When Harry was very young, on a walk with Aunt Petunia and Dudley, he saw a house being demolished. He remembers being scared of the noise and the choking dust, but also of the destruction – the gap in the lines of the world where there was none before. Dudley thought it was marvellous and played “Dudley Wrecking Ball vs. Harry House” for weeks afterwards, but that’s not the part Harry remembers.
This time around, the roof is intact, the walls are standing where they’ve always stood. But the gap is there regardless, a jagged-edged hole in how things ought to be, and a house falling down around it. It’s at the dinner table he feels it most. You can see it clearly then, gaps in time, conversations out of step, and a hole in space on the chair no one sits in, so when Lupin asked him to skip dinner and come out with him and Mundungus Fletcher, Harry sort of said yes without thinking about it.
Now, in the cauterising light of day, he wonders if that was a good idea. He should have known, of course, that going anywhere with Mundungus is never a good idea, and Lupin, well. Tonks has told him, and anyway he knows, that Lupin’s not what he was, or failing that, more what he was than he was, if that makes any kind of sense at all; he knows that the soft-spoken eccentric has become a soft-spoken lunatic (“Lunatic,” Tonks said, “sorry, no pun intended.”) unless, of course, that’s how he always was, silent and gentle with that black-dog madness always there and sharp in him.
Still, it started off all right. Harry went with them to the Dead Donkey, a Muggle pub off Fulham way, and it took a few drinks pushed in his direction (and, from Harry’s perspective, also a general blurring of the world) but eventually even Mundungus got them all a round in. And Harry sat there, with Lupin, drinking slowly, and it was a bit weird, bit surreal, but it was okay. It didn’t feel like there was a ghost there, or, worse, that there ought to be one.
Lupin looked at him, sidelong out of heavy-lidded eyes. “How are you feeling, Harry?”
“Dunno. All right, I guess. Bit sick.”
“Well, that's to be expected. It is your first experience, of course. You'll get used to it with time.”
Harry remembers wondering right then if it really was a matter of time, if much more of his life was going to be spent drinking into oblivion in pubs. The wizarding world could fall to the dark when he’s eighteen, he supposes. That’d take care of his life plans.
“Right,” he’d said, thinking about the future as a sequence of light-boxes, each with a pint-glass in. “Lupin... I can't bloody remember what I was going to say.”
“You're getting legless. I'm so proud of you. Your dad and Sirius would be most pleased.”
“I feel sick.”
“Sirius particularly,” Lupin went on. “I can hear him in my head, telling me to do right by you. ‘Poor little bastard, sixteen and still hasn't done lines off a dead tart's body? He'll grow up warped!'”
It’s true, Harry thought, he really is mad, and ran to the toilets to throw up. That bit is fairly blurry: he remembers there was lots of orange gunk – fuck, Mrs. Weasley’s spag bog – and, most clearly of all, Lupin, there holding him up and wiping him off and dragging him carefully back to their table. He was miserable, and so was Lupin, he knows, but it counts, who’s looking after who. Harry’s sure of that.
He knows he was crying into his glass by this point. Dung was hanging on to his hand, telling him some bollocks about how it’s all a part of life, and Lupin was being… well, himself. “Once you've been sick,” he was saying, “you do feel a fair bit better. At least you don't get a hangover if you throw up.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, himself blurring into the blurred world, but grateful all the same. And because that was the sort of night it was, the sort of night where you hugged the knife to yourself and twisted, “Did Sirius... did he...?”
“Let me tell you something about Sirius Black, Harry. He carried vodka around school in a water bottle, constantly needed James and I to keep him upright when walking, and once passed out naked on a park bench in January because he was too lazy to walk home. But he would never sit back and let a friend throw up drunkenly alone. He was the kind of friend who'd be besides you, throwing up in unison.”
Harry wasn’t crying really, then, he was laughing because of the nudity, the park bench, the alcohol, and Dung had disappeared – to see a man about a bloody enormous tab – and then Lupin, fucking Lupin who saw so much with so much fizz in his blood, said, “Are you all right, Harry?”
Harry looked up, and asked conversationally, “Are you upset, at all?”
Because, suddenly, he was pissed off. Suddenly he was crying into the shoulder of a man who’d known Sirius longer than he, Harry, had been alive; he was sitting on the centre of a spinning-top world and it wasn’t fair, somehow, it wasn’t fair, to be drunk and alone when the whole world should be down in the dark with you.
Lupin said, “Well, of course I am...”
“Then why are you so bloody cheerful all the bloody time? What's the matter with you?”
“I have to admit, Harry, I have a very strange way of coping with loss…”
Of course you do – and Harry remembers thinking that, too. (“Do you think it was an accident?” Tonks had said. “Do you think it was an accident that he had a black dog following him all those years?”)
“Harry... believe me when I say that people have different coping mechanisms. You're coping with rage. Molly Weasley is coping with overcompensation. I handle things my way.”
“Yeah, like a bloody bastard.” Harry isn’t sure he said this, but he thought it, and then he thought he might be having the first childish tantrum of his adult life.
Lupin looked at his glass, then pushed it away. “Whatever you want to talk about, talk. Anything. I don't care. Have a good go, go on. Take a swing. I don't care.”
Harry thought about breaking Lupin’s nose. About shattering that perfect composure, the fragile, calm lines of his face. About just, somehow, inflicting damage.
He didn’t. He said, “What?”
“One day when this is over, I’ll let this all happen in my head, I promise. I’ll go down deep with the best of them. When I have the time, the inclination, the padded cell. Until then, I already have a ravenous beast taking charge of me once a month, and so...”
Inside Harry’s head, Tonks was swearing through tears. Out loud, he said, “I don’t want to drink any more.”
“You don’t have to.”
They left before they got chucked out, stumbled across the street and down the steps somehow, and Harry tried not to shield his eyes in the ticket hall. But there was something comforting about the Underground, the clean light, the curves of the tunnels, no sharp edges or straight lines to hurt Harry’s head, and as yet, no noise: only litter skittering down platforms in the down-draught of the coming train. It took them swiftly north, picking up rattling speed through dark, dank tunnels. Harry hadn’t been on the Underground enough to find it less than disconcerting, this frantic movement so far below civilisation, but Mundungus had fallen blithely asleep against a window and Lupin, curled up feline-fashion across two seats, looked almost comfortable.
“Hey,” Harry said.
Lupin looked up, his eyes reflecting red and blue roundels. “Watch it, Harry, I have a headache that’s acquiring sentience. Y’all right, our kid?”
Harry smiled, wanly – the shift into dialect was perfect – and thought about it. “My eyes,” he said. “My eyes feel like sandpaper.”
Lupin nodded. “It happens, when you cry like that. It’s a slow-burning thing.”
Harry didn’t ask what he meant. “You know what it feels like, then.”
Lupin nodded, stretching his feet out. The train drew up at a station, sudden silence apparent through the doors. They were the only people in the carriage.
Harry stared at the floor, wondered whether the train was moving or if it was the whole world, looked up again. “What were you crying about?” he asked, with the whole scene something out of a late-night film, surreal and half-forgotten by morning, and he wonders now why he even asked, but it was like picking a scab, wasn’t it, it was like dropping a plumb line into the dark, hoping you’d hit bottom if you just kept going.
Lupin smiled. “Which time?”
Dancing across his mental theatre, Tonks screamed and slammed her hand into mahogany oak doors. Harry blinked and said, “The first time.”
“Ask Moody, some time, about the first time he met me. The next time wasn’t until a lot later, but that involved a girl and I doubt you’re old enough to hear about that.”
“I’m sixteen!”
“So was I.” Lupin grinned, curling back up. “To begin with, anyway. And she was a lovely girl.”
“Bet she wasn’t,” Harry said glumly, thinking of Cho. His reflection looked at him accusingly, distorted in the curve of the windows and blurring with Lupin’s shadow cast against the roaring dark.
“Oh, no,” – Lupin’s voice was getting dreamy – “I have the feeling you would have loved her quite a lot. I know you would, in fact. It doesn't matter though, Harry. It really doesn’t.”
“How can it not matter?” Harry remembers being quite sure at this point that he was drunk; this wasn’t him, this wasn’t Lupin, they did not rattle through the darkness talking about this, it was through things like this, small trickles of dust and falling pebbles, that houses fell. “How can your life not matter?”
“Because there are more important things.” His head was in his hands all of a sudden. “I give myself to a greater cause. I’m all I have left, after all, and I can do without me. Excuse me.”
The train was slowing down. “This station is King’s Cross St. Pancras,” said the announcer as the doors slid open, and Lupin, eyes wide with purpose, strode straight out. Harry, with an eye on the sleeping Mundungus, lingered. “Change here for the Circle, Northern, Metropolitan and Piccadilly Lines, and main line services.”
“Oh, and,” continued the driver, cutting off the automatic voice, “to the man in the cape throwing up on the end of platform 2, that’s London Underground property. Please ask the attendant for a mop and bucket.”
Harry was running down the platform against the train, building up speed as it did, noise and speed and roaring momentum building to higher and higher pitch, and then the silence of a vacuum as he knelt down beside Lupin, the two of them on the ground facing down towards the track.
“Rats,” Lupin murmured, and Harry stared down mutely at the tiny creatures flitting out between the electric rails. Lupin rolled over and groaned. “Remind me not to do that again.”
Harry nodded, and awkwardly, painfully, got down to join him. What people there were turned to look, but he ignored them, and eventually, even the movement of litter in the draughts flickered into silence. They stared at the curving roof of the tunnel as the orange counter flicked downwards, announcing the next train in eight, seven, six minutes. “You okay?” Harry asked, eventually.
“I’m flat on my back on a station platform about two hundred feet below ground. Yes, I’m just fine, Harry, why do you ask?”
Harry closed his eyes. “Sorry. Forget I asked.”
“No” – and Lupin sounded honestly apologetic – “I’m sorry. Sorry about the whole bloody thing. Particularly that you had to see me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Drunk. Maudlin. Messy.”
Harry smiled, surprising himself. “Why shouldn’t I have done? You saw me.”
“I do hate to bring out the old chestnut, Harry, but the fact remains that I did change your nappies. And I’m supposed to be a responsible, stuffy old bastard. And you were my student.”
“I’m not any more,” Harry said, simply. And because he couldn’t help himself, “You changed my nappies?”
“Of course.” Harry couldn’t see Lupin’s face, but there was something like laughter in his voice. “I heated up your bottles, I stuck my elbow in your bathwater. There were a lot of nights, back then, when neither you nor I could sleep, and I used to carry you out with me, walking through the city until we were both too exhausted to keep our eyes open.”
“I wish I could remember,” Harry said honestly. “I wish I’d known you then.”
Lupin did laugh, that time. “I wish you had too. I really do. But, well. You’ve got me now.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, and there was some meaning to that, something grounding them between each stretching expanse of dark. The display flicked from one minute to none, and Lupin sat up and pulled Harry back a few inches, holding him away from the next southbound train, a red-liveried dragon flying through into the light.
One or two people alighted, aiming straight for the yellow Way Out gleam, paying no attention to man and boy huddled together on the ground. No one did, not until the last arriving passenger in the other direction, an ungainly and very angry drunk. “Only went to fucking Highbury, didn’t I!” he yelled. “Only fucking Highbury! Had to get the train back! Talk about letting a man sleep his way to doom!”
“Come on, Harry,” Lupin said softly, “here comes the Angel Islington.”
Dung was still spitting blood about fucking Highbury and fucking Islington all the way up to street level, but Harry was thinking about the clean, comforting light again, about the fragile lines of Lupin’s profile one step below on the rising escalator, about finding help in unlikely places, even in dark, hot tunnels far below the world, and about looking for the way back home.
Standing here, in the shaded room in the shadowed house, he knows he hasn’t found it yet.
Tonks wakes up with Remus in her bed, curled naked and wasted around the layers of blankets. He’s left her cold, and she pulls back at him, rolls him over and wakes him up. His hair smells of alcohol. She kicks him. He bites back. “This is all getting sadomasochistic,” she says, aloud, and is rewarded by his opening his eyes.
“One of my many dirty secrets,” he says lazily, and she hates how perfectly modulated his voice always is, how his rough edges are always smoothed away by consciousness. She’s seen him wake up too many times.
He’s thinking the same thing, clearly. “Tonks… we didn’t do anything, did we?”
She grins. “What do you think?”
“I think I’m not wearing any clothes.”
“That was all your fault, anyway.” She sits up and rubs the sleep from her eyes. Underneath her touch her hair turns orange; she can’t see it, but it’s her very least favourite colour and this is starting out like that kind of day. For the hell of it she adds china-doll eyes, wide blue and scary. “You stumbled in late at night, pretty much hysterical, and smelling of grease, I don’t know why. I got your clothes off and locked you in here so you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
He sinks back beneath the covers. “I couldn’t hurt anyone, not without…”
She rolls her eyes, to herself, and gets out of bed. When she goes downstairs he pads behind her, wearing a pair of Ron’s old trousers and what’s left of their sheets. The effect of the drapery is humourless, falling and curving over the lines of his bones, and Tonks turns to the fridge.
It’s empty. “Cheese or beetroot?” she asks, sure it was someone’s turn to do the shopping. Remus looks hesitant. “I’ll fry you some cheese,” she decides, and watches it agglutinate in extra virgin olive oil.
The smell etches itself into the walls as Remus paces around the table looking faintly ridiculous, finally settling into a chair with the grace of an emaciated house cat. “Several questions present themselves,” he says after a while. “First of all: what time is it?”
”Just after eleven,” she answers, not looking up from the yellow gloop. Off his expectant silence, she adds, “In the morning.”
“Second of all: what the hell is going with these trousers?” He lifts a bare foot to emphasise the point, and the trousers rustle obligingly. They’re a peculiar shade of yellow that Tonks has to admit she hasn’t previously seen in a non-emergency-services context.
“Ron says they’re the coolest trousers in London. Apparently Ali G wears them.”
“But isn’t he being ironic?”
“He is, Ron isn’t. Cheese is up.” She slaps it onto a plate which she then slaps on the table. He looks at it with something she can only describe as joy because there are no better words for it, and takes a bite.
“Mmm. If I don’t die of cirrhosis, it’ll be of heart disease.” He lifts a fork in salute. “Bring on the coronary!”
“You’ve taken up smoking as well, haven’t you?” she asks, shoving the pan at the sink and coming to sit beside him.
“Taking it up again,” he corrects through a mouthful of cheese. “I gave up for a while, but it scarcely seems worth it. I know what’s going to kill me, or at least I can narrow it down to a limited number of possibilities, so bring on the nicotine, too.”
“Why don’t you just slit your wrists, it’ll be quicker.”
She didn’t mean to say that.
“I didn’t mean to say that.” She’s looking straight at him, watching the fork descend as if in slow motion, down into the plate, rattle on china, squish on gloop, then the silence of him looking back out of those eyes she wishes would just close, now, so she wouldn’t have to look.
He smiles, slowly, picks the fork back up, takes another bite. “Too messy,” he says after a while. “Positively inelegant.”
“Fuck, you need help.” She did mean to say that. “You need help almost more than you need a rocket up your arse. Professional help.”
“What with?”
“You’re kidding, right?” She wants to kiss him and kill him with about the same intensity, right now; either that, or she wants to go back in time and make a grab at that fucking veil and just, just, just fucking fix this. “Pretending it never happened and imagining that this is as good as it gets isn't accepting and grieving, it's being pathetic. And so's taking out a teenage boy and getting him drunk to project your stupid repressed expression of emotion.”
He doesn’t say anything. She picks up his empty plate and determinedly rinses it, getting rid of every scrap of coagulated grease, putting her elbows into it. “Go on, then,” she says, over her shoulder. “Go back to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Well, neither am I, and I’m not talking to you until you get some sense knocked into you.”
She throws the plate down with a clatter and petulantly extinguishes all the lights in the kitchen. A surprised gesture from both his hands ignites them all again, and then he’s following her out and into the library, and she tries, she tries to hide from him behind the pages of The Economist, but it’s all crap and useless and she has to talk to him.
“Remus. Do you know how long you locked yourself up in this study, reading stuff and not even acknowledging that he'd died?”
She’s surprised when he merely shakes his head, offering no wisecrack, no denial, for now.
“A month and a half. Do you know how everyone else was doing during that time?”
He shakes his head again.
“Well, I'll fill you in. Molly Weasley burst into tears every time something minor happened, like a book being slammed shut noisily or dropping a fork onto the ground. Ginny got freaked out by the concept of curtains, and ripped them all down. Harry's been sitting in that front room, just like you were in here, and Ron and Hermione have been tiptoeing around the house, trying to pretend they weren't there just so he wouldn't yell at them. And do you know what I was doing?”
He doesn’t say anything, and for a moment she wants to tell him – nineteen-hour days at work, mostly, putting in the hard grind, finding Moody’s sympathy more painful than his shouting – but she stops, thinks about it instead. “You know, there’s a couple of birds living in a tree out the front. Well, there were. One day one of the eggs fell out, smashed on the ground. The parents never saw their little one, but they stayed with it, until it got dark, until it got cold, until the poor thing died without ever having lived. The moral of the story, Remus? Birds grieve. They grieve for what they’ve lost.”
He’s walking around the room, hands on head, the draped sheet morbid and flowing around his body, and under his mane of dusty, unkempt hair, his eyes are closed.
“There wasn’t any memorial service. We were going to leave it to you to arrange, because there was no one closer to him than you. Why, I can’t tell you.” She’s following his movements through the shadows at the edges of the room, and this is the sort of thing war does to you, what grief does: you measure your life by what damage you can still inflict. “Why did you let yourself love him, and no one else? If he were here, he’d have sorted you the fuck out, I reckon. But I couldn’t and Molly couldn’t and no one could, and we would have held you up as long we could, Remus. Given you whatever you wanted. But I guess what you wanted was the bottom of the bottle.”
That’s hypocrisy, that is, and she knows it – there’s a half-full bottle of Smirnoff Norsk under her bed, for the times when seeing life through a blue-tinged lens is the only way, and cider for common-and-garden night terrors – but then again, she’ll damage him any way she can if it means an end to his silence.
He’s looking away from her now, only vaguely making his way through the still air, becoming insubstantial. His voice, when it comes, has vestiges of calm perfection, a sequence of self-contained notes. “Do you hate me?”
“Of course. We all do.”
There’s a silence, then: a silence in which she wishes she could take that back, maybe, and say no, no, that’s not true, no, I’ve never hurt anyone I didn’t love. But she doesn’t say it and as the minutes tick by, it’s all too late.
“Several questions present themselves.” Remus has snapped back into focus, suddenly; his face is clearly visible in the landing lights. “If you hate me so very much...”
“What, Remus?” she asks, more gently than she’d meant to.
“Then why didn’t you let me drown in my own vomit?”
She says nothing.
“Why did you fry me some cheese?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “Thank you.”
“For the cheese?” – and she’s coming out of a dream.
“For the divine realisation.”
He goes out of the room, quiet step by quiet step. She can’t hear him padding back upstairs, though she strains to listen, and the silence of the house settles around her in the dark.
“Why are we here?” Harry whispers into Tonks’s ear.
“I don’t know,” she replies in her normal tones, because she doesn’t, none of them do, except Remus, and he’s not telling. He’s barely speaking, except to comment on the view; the English scenery, even windswept and whipping past at thirty miles an hour, has a strange, grey beauty that he is the first to notice. Tonks wondered how and why she didn’t, how she stared listlessly out the window and didn’t even register the picture-postcard bleakness, the geometrical waves of migrating swallows. But then Remus was always like that, always; she remembers the nights before the veil, the wee wand-lit hours where he’d lean back in his chair and tell her, slowly, of being lost, of wandering the world, of nights running wild in Eastern Europe and roaming the souks and bazaars of the Twin Kingdoms, of sleeping rough on the Lower East Side and finding tulips in the morning, and while he’d tell her of the ancient, exotic beauties of faraway places, she’d wonder how’d he’d been eating, how he’d been hiding, how he’d been making it from day to day, and he wouldn’t say and after a while she wouldn’t ask.
Harry still wonders where they are and what they’re doing here. Why, exactly, they’re in a rotten little car driving down the coast road, with Tonks curled cat-like on the back seat, avoiding Mundungus, and Lupin flicking through the endless static on the radio. And because there’s something encroachingly normal about all this – at least, Lupin is more like he remembers, more the gentle eccentric, less like a wire about to snap, and Tonks, too, has her hair a reassuring bubblegum colour – Harry brings himself to complain about the music.
“The radio’s stuck,” Lupin explains. “Golden oldies or static, I’m afraid. Or Radio Four.”
“Radio Four!” chorus Tonks and Harry, but Lupin smiles happily at them.
“Sorry, darlings” – his cod American accent is quite good – “this is my car. It’s my music, and what’s more, I feel absolutely no guilt for inflicting it on you.” And he forces them to listen to the Beatles and the Smiths alternately for what feels like five hundred miles down the coast, but Harry endures it with good humour. From Tonks’s expression, he suspects she might even be enjoying it.
“What are wizarding bands like?” he asks after a couple of hours and one or two spirited renditions of This Charming Man. “I’ve only ever heard the Weird Sisters.”
“Awful,” Lupin says, and Tonks grins. “It is a wizarding rule that every single band must feature an accordion, obscure Eastern-European flute, or a lute, and if the lyrics don't involve trying to rhyme 'spell' with 'girl' the song is to be discarded immediately.”
Harry laughs, surprising himself. He watches the landscape change from rolling patchwork fields to sharp-edged fells, industrial chimneys, then heather-strewn moorland, with dirty snow showing below the ground like the ribs of a giant animal. North, he thinks. North, away from London and Surrey, towards Hogwarts and the only real world he knows, north and further north, and now he’s on the way home he can sleep.
They’re back on the coast. The sea is rising in vicious swells, grey-green and impenetrable to the eye, and Tonks takes in all the details; she’s learned from Remus, learnt his way of looking at the world, and as they draw to a halt two miles from St Andrews, her head is full of the beauty of the oncoming storm. She wakes Harry gently, ignoring his sleepy protests, and Mundungus trails after them both as they follow Remus down the falling lines of the shore.
Only when they are all there in a row, looking out at the flashes of lightning on the far horizon, does she ask, “What are we doing here?”
Remus smiles again – she’s not seen that in a while, the old smile with wryness and dryness but still a smile, still real – and gestures with the long wooden object in his hands. “Beech, ten inches,” he says. “Well-loved, well-used, covered in muck and chewing gum. Engraved with the name of its owner by means of a drawing pin.”
He hands it over, briefly – she takes a quick look, lets Harry take his time running a finger down the wobbly Sirius Black lettering. And then Remus takes it back and throws it, one glorious gesture, a gift to the waves.
“Why...” Harry begins, but he’s not angry, he’s curious. Lupin’s gone sane again, he knows. Strange that it should happen here, out in the wild wind and waves where he’d more generally expect the reverse, but he thinks he likes Lupin’s way of never quite doing what’s expected of him.
“Because.” Lupin sits down on the edge of the water and takes off his boots. The water must be freezing on his bare feet, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Because this is where Sirius came ashore from Azkaban. The night I left Hogwarts, we came here, both of us, and sat all night watching the tide fall away from us. We hadn’t spoken in twelve years and we weren’t really speaking then. There’s more than one kind of not speaking.”
He gets up, takes two steps into the water, walks back out again. “We were walking back up to the car, see, because he wanted the drive, and I figured it'd be safe if we disillusioned him, and it was late at night and all. And there was this aluminium rubbish bin near the railing at the car park. He took this bit of broken railing that was lying on the ground, and he just mauled right into the bin, beating it, kicking it. He eventually broke it off the post it was on, and he just kept attacking it, screaming, just screaming nonsense. I couldn't stop him, and I didn't even try. I'd never seen him like that. I've never even been that vicious during the moon. And he... he turned and he said...”
“What?” Tonks asks, and she’s gentle, gentle, because she doesn’t want to lose him to the sea-salt and the winds. Harry understands a little bit, because he’s on the other side, he’s walking into the waves, he’ll give Remus a bloody nose before letting him come to any harm.
“He said... he said he didn't know why he'd lost twelve years of his life. He said that he'd never felt so disgusting, and cheated, and insulted, and he kept going on about being so sad and angry that he'd just walk back out onto the beach and make a hole in the ocean that was his size.”
Remus looks up, looks right at Tonks, and smiles again, sweet and strange. “There’s more than one kind of not speaking.”
The mood shifts with him. Between them they begin to throw the rest of Sirius’s possessions out to the sea, terrible rubbish most of it, or at least Harry thinks so; his godfather apparently had terrible taste in music, in films, and in –
“Porn,” Lupin says, chucking it out into the ocean. “Only Sirius Black would have dirty video tapes at Hogwarts without any means of actually viewing them. We never asked how Filch knew what was on them.”
The last thing is a cask of white wine, also horrible stuff in its way, or at least according to Lupin, whose dimmed eyes indicate a lifetime of past experience. “I felt that it would only be fair that I do for you what Sirius did for me, and introduce you to a life of cheap liquor and painful tomorrows.”
“Tomorrow isn’t painful enough already?” Harry asks, and Lupin laughs.
“You’re better at this than I ever was,” he says, and it’s starting to get dark, all of a sudden. They’ve only thrown the things that will sink, except the wand. Harry hopes it washes ashore some day, somewhere with bright sunshine and sparkling ice, the name ground away by salt and water until it’s clean and ready for a new beginning.
Harry sits down beside him, in the cold, and says, tentatively, “I hate memorial services.”
“Me too.” Lupin doesn’t look at him. “Oh, how I hate them. I’ll tell you something, Harry, which I’m not the first person to say, and I won’t be the last. 'After the first death, there is no other.’”
Harry stands up. “I think I’ll go for a walk.” He suits the action to the word, and it’s not that he needs lessons in grieving, he’s doing just fine, and right now he wants to walk alongside the sea, the sea with its refreshing inhumanity, ever-shifting contours and no memory.
“And yet,” Tonks says quietly, watching Harry go. Remus is still and quiet on the sand. She leans over and kisses his hair, a tiny caress that falls softly, unnoticed, into the livid twilight. “Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again, though lovers be lost love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.”
Harry walks along the sea’s edge as the stars come out, one by one, and the shadows lose their edges into the dark. Presently, Tonks and Lupin follow him along to where they’ve left Mundungus and the car, and there’s no black dog to be seen.
The thing about Dylan Thomas, Remus supposes, is that he tried to draw lyricism from death, to put sense and beauty where none belonged. But if the only alternative is the silence of the grave, he’ll take the poetry.
Somewhere else, he’s sure Sirius agrees, and now all that’s left is the burn of sea-salt raw on his tongue, and the sea-coast curving south, and the way home.
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I never thought someone would take my first fic - my crappy, jossed-by-canon, anachronistic first fic - and do with it what I aimed to at first but with the artistry and sincerity it needed.
This is the first time in a long, long time that I've cried reading a fic. That it was to a fic I've known for years makes it even more surprising.
I know this feedback is short, but honestly it's because I'm a little shocked out of my skin. It makes me feel like my own writing is complete crap and I really, REALLY hope you're considering writing as a career.
Just... thanks.
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One thing I really liked was that you condensed a three-chapter shortfic into a oneshot really seamlessly while playing around with the structure of the story. The setting and dialogue was all still there but I just loved reading it.
I hope you don't mind if I add you as a friend, because you seem like a really awesome writer to keep an eye on.
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I've read exactly one HP book, I think, but god, this is beautiful prose. And sharp, witty, believable dialogue, too, which makes it doubly impressive: that you can shift from the poetry of the narration to these characters' voices, colloquial or inarticulate or enraged or whatever, with no effort. I don't know these people, not really, but I felt bereaved with them here, because this story is so infused with loss. Specific loss, but also the normal losses that go along with daily life. And you put, as you say, "sense and beauty" into those losses.
Gorgeous. Seriously.
PS: I laughed so hard at the Ron/Ali G "isn't he being ironic?" bit that I choked.
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And of course, thank you so much for reading, and feedbacking, and being so nice to me. *loves*
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