The Red and the Black (The Neverland Remix) 1/3 [Harry Potter; Sirius Black, Remus Lupin; PG-13]

[kool-momo-dee.livejournal.com]

Title: The Red and the Black (The Neverland Remix)
Author: daphnaea
Summary: Sirius is reading The Communist Manifesto. Somehow, Remus knows, this will end in disaster.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Original Story: “Marked” by elucreh
Notes: Many thanks to my beta, such_heights, without whom I would have torn much more of my hair out, for pointing out mistakes and also telling me that I could do this.

“A spectre is haunting Europe” - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

It was going around like a disease, Sirius thought, throwing himself down on his bed and spelling the curtains shut with a petulant flick of his wand. Like the bloody dragon pox. Except worse. And possibly – horrifyingly – permanent. This was the trouble. If it could just be written off as a temporary craze, some sort of experimental phase like the ones where they’d tried putting honey on everything they ate, or shaving all the hair off their arms and legs to improve their Quidditch performance, then he could have laughed it off. But it had been months now, and his mates were only getting deeper into it, and he had no idea how to fix them, how to inoculate them against the spreading infection of maturity. The symptoms were everywhere.

One would have expected it from Remus, who’d been able to appear forty since he turned twelve, but there had been something reluctant about it before. As if he wished he could be a real boy, a roughhousing skinny-dipping careless boy, and he’d secretly watched the others splashing about from the side of the lake whilst pretending to read his book. But he didn’t sneak those longing glances any more. He no longer seemed to need anything not encompassed within the Hewey Heximal System. As a first-year, Sirius had been shocked and awed by his dormmate’s self-possession. He’d had to work to decode the small chinks in Remus’s armour, the sideways glances and twitching eyebrows that had given him away. But now he was ensconced behind a blank wall of mild irony against which Sirius’s best histrionics ran uselessly aground. Where he had once charmed, now he merely amused. And Remus was there, all the time, right now, reading a book, five feet away but untouchable, unreachable. There was something in his face, sometimes, an expectation, as if he was waiting for something, waiting for Sirius to produce the golden key that would unlock his gates, but Sirius had no idea what his friend wanted. Only that he probably didn’t have it, and that he couldn’t possibly ask what to do. He could demand and assume and cajole – that was what Blacks did, after all – but he had forfeited the right to ask Remus for anything.

But where growing up had been rather predictable of Remus, it was an outrageous betrayal coming from James. James, who’d always walked in step with him, always matched him joke for joke and blow for blow, had suddenly set off on a path of his own. James, the original Marauder, now talked about setting a good example and responsibility and (horror) once we have jobs. Or at least, that’s what he talked about if he was around at all, and not off trying to coax Lily the Traitor into storage cupboards and empty classrooms. Once, over the winter hols, James had actually told him, scathingly, “Oh, grow up!” and Sirius had desperately wanted to storm off and go home, except that he’d run away from home the year before and had nowhere to go to beyond the Potters’ third guest room. He’d briefly considered paying Remus a surprise visit, but he’d not been invited that year, and Remus was already worried about N.E.W.T.s and would no doubt only say something worse. So Sirius had withdrawn to the attic and sulked for two hours, until he’d discovered a box of really interesting Potter family heirloom magical music boxes (some of which had been Charmed to sing naughty lyrics) and temporarily forgotten his grievance.

Even Peter had succumbed – Peter, who’d seemed constitutionally incapable of maturity, who’d always seemed so much younger, now put on cologne and chased after Cassandra Clearwater and chewed with his mouth closed.

Only one conclusion could be drawn – the end of the Marauders was nigh, and Sirius was the only one who cared. Oh, it was no secret that they were leaving school in June, and then things would change, but he’d never thought they would change too much. He’d imagined the four of them sharing a flat off Diagon Alley, full of dirty dishes and rickety furniture and good humour, spending the weekends playing pickup Quidditch and eating takeaway and having belching contests. But now James was talking about proposing to his red-headed Delilah, and Peter was being summoned back to his family beekeeping business up north, and Sirius had (while searching for a lost sock) found a brochure under Remus’s bed for an Advanced Defensive Magic Certificate Program. In Calcutta.

Sirius felt, increasingly, that the rest of the world was moving at a different speed than he was. That everyone else was accelerating in dangerous directions when he wanted nothing more than to put on the brakes. They were rushing to throw away the only things that meant anything to him – fun and friendship and adventure – and move on to terrifying, musty, stuffy grownup things that involved business robes and mortgages. In another year, they’d all meet once a week at the pub for a quick pint after work and then rush back to their stupid dreary independent lives. Sirius had thought they were something other than a schoolyard pastime, had thought they were a band of brothers. The dog in him saw them as a pack, a single thing with four bodies, indissoluble. But apparently the rest of them hadn’t gotten the memo.

Sirius chewed his lip. It was not in his nature to accept defeat. It was clear, therefore, that something had to be done. He was a Black, even without his family, and Blacks were known for a certain noble steadfastness (some called it going nutters). He would find a way to turn back the tide. He would bring his friends back together. There was no choice. They were the only thing he had.

“All children, except one, grow up.” – J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Remus instinctively lifted his novel closer to his face when Sirius stormed into the room, but rather than approaching him, his friend disappeared into his own bed in a flurry of huffy red curtains. Remus exhaled slowly and blinked at the page in front of him, lowering the book back to its proper position. It wasn’t that he was avoiding Sirius, he told himself. Or that he didn’t want to talk to him. It was just that he was so moody lately, slouching about with the self-absorbed melancholy of a Byronic hero, which in anyone else would have looked like a teenager putting on absurd airs but in him was unquestionably and disturbingly sincere. He’d even begun growing his hair out again, and that was never a good sign. Sirius viewed the end of school as a modern apocalypse, and he never did anything half-heartedly. It was his indefatigable bloody-mindedness that made him both the best possible friend under extreme circumstances and an utter pain in the arse on a day-to-day basis. In a pinch, he would die for you (and, a small voice reminded Remus, expect you to kill for him), but the rest of the time you mainly wanted to strangle the boy.

It had seemed terribly impressive, once. The intensity with which Sirius felt and did everything had once made him seem more real than other people. He took up all the air in the room. He bent the light differently than anyone else. But Remus wanted some space to himself. They’d be leaving Hogwarts soon, and he needed to practise being on his own. For him, fading into the background was a survival skill, but he knew it made him forgettable as well. Dispensable. He wasn’t as much the sort of person one missed painfully as the type one didn’t think of at all until, five years later, one stumbled across his name on a note tucked between the pages of a dusty textbook and wondered, whatever happened to him? And the answer, most likely, would be “Nothing in particular.”

Remus pushed Sirius out of his head and returned his attention to his book. He had an addictive personality, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his relationships with books. A halfway decent novel would keep him up all night. He had no self-control. He simply could not force himself to do anything else until he knew the whole story. In order to keep his pleasure reading in check as he studied for his N.E.W.T.s, Remus had decided to only reread old novels. That way, there was less urgency to find out how it all ended, and he could put a book down after a few pages and get back to his revision. The previous night he’d finished The Horse and His Boy and he was just beginning Peter Pan. The last time he’d read it he’d still been a child, and he mainly remembered fairies and crocodiles and flying. Back then, Hogwarts had been his Neverland. They had all been lost boys, parentless, adventuring, battling piratical Slytherins to the death but always home in time for tea. But now it all meant so much more. I couldn’t fly now, Remus thought, not with buckets of fairy dust. The curtains to his left twitched irritably. But he could.

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

It was six minutes into his promised ten-minute-long civil conversation with Lily the Traitor, and silence had fallen again. Sirius was having difficulty thinking of anything to say that didn’t involve putting his hands around her throat and demanding to know why she’d had to go and ruin everything by actually agreeing to date James, after over six years of perfect and unmitigated rejection. He’d gotten on fairly well with her, before, in a squabbling-siblings type of way. They’d respected one another’s consistency, he felt. But then she’d turned into Kali the Bleeding Goddess of Destruction, the Destroyer of Worlds, and now he looked at her and saw nothing but chaos personified. With stupid symbolic red hair.

Red-headed Chaos giggled. He suspected she might be giggling about him, which was somehow no longer acceptable even though she’d laughed at him for years without upsetting him in the slightest. “What?” he demanded as graciously as possible, because much as he hated this, if it degenerated into an argument Remus wouldn’t let him back in the dorm and he’d have to sleep on one of the couches in the common room again. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to appoint Remus the Marauder in charge of Locking spells.

“Oh, I was just thinking what the Muggles might make of all this red.” She gestured around the crimson-decked common room.

Sirius found his temper derailed. The colour red had not yet been covered in his Muggle Studies class. He’d no idea they even had a particular view of it. “And?” he asked.

She glanced at him. “Well, you know, they’d think it was a den of Communists. Reds. Out to subvert the dominant paradigm, foment revolution, all that.”

“I didn’t know those commune thingies were all red,” he said, struggling to remember the pictures in the magazines Lily sometimes left in the common room, strange motionless Muggles with long hair and colourful outfits and lots of flowers. He couldn’t remember a preponderance of red in them.

Lily giggled again. “No, not communes, Communists. People who believe in Communism. Like they have in Russia. Where they overthrew the government and abolished private property and all have to call each other Comrade.” She spoke the word with a bad accent.

Something in this piqued his interest. “Explain this ‘Communism,’” he said imperiously.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, going into Lecture Mode. “Well, these blokes called Marx and Engels thought up this new system of government, which is called Communism. They thought it wasn’t fair that the people who worked hardest weren’t the people who got ahead – because a few really rich Muggles owned most of the factories and whatnot and everyone who worked for them didn’t get paid much and were really poor and had horrible injuries while making sausages and whatnot and then lost their jobs and starved,” she frowned briefly. “Or maybe that bit was from something else. Anyway, Marx and Engels thought that the people who did the work ought to own the factories and get the profits, and that everyone should be taken care of and not starve, even if they had lost their hand in a sausage factory. So they wanted to have a revolution, so that no one would have private property, and everything would belong to the state, and the state would divide it all equitably. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’ And in Russia they had a revolution and killed all the aristocrats and now they’re Communists and they all have to do what the Party says and their flag is mostly red, so that’s why the Communists are called Reds here in the Free World.”

“Oh right,” Sirius said. “I knew about the revolution part. My fifth cousins in St. Petersburg had to go to France.”

She smiled condescendingly. “Of course they did.”

“If I were them, I wouldn’t have left,” he decided. “Communism sounds brilliant. All for one and one for all!”

Lily glowered. “That’s from The Three Musketeers. They weren’t Communists. They didn’t even have Communism then.”

Sirius waved a hand. “Obviously they would have been, if they’d known about it. Instead of being oppressed by that poncy king of theirs.”

“They weren’t oppressed, they – never mind. It’s beside the point. Communism doesn’t work properly anyway. Everyone just ends up being oppressed by the Communist Party instead.”

“But how can it not work?” Sirius demanded. “All for one and one for all. They must not be doing it right.” His face lighted up alarmingly.

She narrowed her eyes and shifted further towards her end of the couch. “I should never have lent you my Dumas collection,” she muttered. “It doesn’t work because when you get paid the same whether you work or not there’s no point in working, and because the people who make the decisions are corrupt and kill the people who disagree with them and because without the free market there’s no way to tell how much of what ought to be made and where and so on and it’s a horrible inefficient mess with secret police and famine and they’re not even allowed to listen to rock music on the wireless.”

Sirius nodded decisively. “Exactly,” he said. “They’re doing it wrong. Because they lack the spirit of true chivalrous brotherhood. Which is just like the Russians, I have to say, my fifth cousins are practically a pack of wild nogtails.” His brow furrowed. “Though I must admit that they have extremely nice silverware.”

Lily scowled. “I am not having this conversation with you. You have no concept of the far-reaching consequences of practical politics and the intricacies of human nature. And I have an essay for Charms due in the morning.” She picked up her books and flounced off upstairs.

Sirius, lost in thought, didn’t even bother wondering what’d gotten into her knickers. Communism, he reflected. To share everything. The corner of his mouth twitched. It’s perfect. Communism will save us all. He looked up. The warm tones of the common room had taken on a new portentous meaning. Clearly, it was a sign. A sign of hope and the future world to come, in which Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs would be brothers bound together for the betterment of all, world without end, amen.

He bounded up off the sofa. It was time to tell them the good news.

“Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.”

It was rather difficult not to laugh at the spectacle of Sirius Black, stomach down on his bed, bare feet kicking absently at the air, nose buried in The Communist Manifesto. Admittedly, Sirius always had a flavour of the week, whether it was a girl (whose name, chances were, he couldn’t even spell accurately), a comestible (woe upon the day he’d discovered pork scratchings) or an idea. Still, Communism was one that Remus certainly hadn’t seen coming.

Sirius, given to flights of rhetoric he was sure would someday succeed in charming him out of detention with McGonagall, had been on for days about “showing the Russians how it’s done” and “the sacred, splendorous brotherhood of the communal environment,” and Remus wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep a straight face. In the abstract, he understood that his friend had a profound weakness for ideologies, demonstrated by the fact that to discover Sirius’s opinion on anything, one had only ascertain the Black family line and then invert it, as well as his blind hatred of Slytherins in general and Snape in particular.

But the subject of Slytherins was, like anything with Sirius, more complicated than it initially seemed. Though the feud had begun directly after their Sorting on their arrival at Hogwarts, it hadn’t initially gone much beyond the typical Gryffindor-Slytherin rivalry, with a side-helping of familial bitterness. And it wasn’t as if he’d been on good terms with Narcissa to begin with. Then the older Slytherins had taken to tripping Remus in the halls and shoving him into doorways, partly because he was shabby and unpopular, and partly because he was at least nominally in Sirius’s circle, and Sirius himself was both unafraid of using dark hexes and never seen without James Potter by his side. Remus didn’t bother to complain about the bullying, because it wasn’t nearly as bad as full moons, and he hadn’t ever expected to get on with the other students anyway.

But one day Sirius had happened upon Evan Rosier holding Remus down as Severus Snape bent one of his fingers back until he had to beg him not to break it. Remus had been so distracted by Sirius’s arrival at the door of the fourth floor boys’ bathroom that he’d forgotten to beg, and Snape had been so distracted that he forgot to stop pushing, and the tableaux broke with the snap of Remus’s left middle proximal phalanx. Sirius’s face had contorted as if he was the injured party, and he’d shot off every hex he knew at the two Slytherins, who were abruptly too busy writhing on the floor trying to keep their facial features from coming off to fight back. Then he had helped Remus step over the bodies, guided him down to the Hospital Wing, and sat with him as Madame Pomfrey administered a pain potion and mended the bone.

“If they ever touch you again, I’ll kill them,” eleven-year-old Sirius had said, upon their return to their dorm. And Remus had believed he meant it.

It was this, rather than his prefect’s badge, that held Remus back when Sirius and James tormented Snape. The knowledge that it was, in no small part, because of him – for him, even. He’d never expected to have friends at all, much less one who really would try to kill for him.

This had necessitated forgiving Sirius for a great deal, over the years, forgiving until the forgiveness wore thin and turned into something slightly less generous. Just now, it necessitated not laughing when Sirius demanded that they pool their money and chocolate, because the alternative was saying “Sod off, we’re not brothers, we’re not workers, Pete eats enough of my chocolate as it is and Communism always ends in poverty and mass murder anyhow.” So he had handed over his pitiful savings and most of his chocolate and retreated back behind his curtains without saying anything at all.

Any time now, Sirius would throw the book aside and demand that they go on a kitchen raid, or climb onto the roof and put a good dent in their (now communal) supply of firewhiskey.

Any time.

“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other…”

It wasn’t until the second time he read the line that Sirius understood the true importance of his endeavour. There had been another mention of the disappearances in the Daily Prophet that morning – a Muggle-born witch and her whole family gone, and no one’d noticed for over a week – nothing but a hurried paragraph sandwiched between an article about the opening of a new wizarding beach resort in Brighton and an opinion piece castigating the Ministry for its inattention to the growing scourge of drunk Apparition.

Two great hostile camps. That was it. Except the smaller, darker one operated like a military boot camp, and the larger, vaguer one like a summer camp without counsellors, children wandering off unprotected into the woods one by one, whilst the others, oblivious, played Shuntbumps and learnt to Transfigure string into useless, colourful bracelets. What they needed was something to wake them up, to bring them together, to inspire them. What they needed was a revolution.

Despite Dumbledore’s increasingly ominous beginning of the year speeches, the looming war had remained distant from Sirius. There was a second-year in the tower whose cousin had gone missing, and Sirius felt exactly the way any proper Gryffindor ought to about it, but it was only beginning to occur to him that nothing was being done. That the Aurors weren’t making progress, that the Ministry had its head in the sand, that despite Dumbledore’s significant looks and mysterious absences, the crime rate continued to soar. And the faint edge of fear that had begun to permeate Hogsmeade was only making things worse. It hasn’t been anyone I know, public sentiment seemed to suggest, and maybe if I don’t say anything it’ll stay that way. But this attitude was only feasible because witches and wizards viewed their brethren as expendable, as acceptable sacrifices.

What they needed was a shining example of unity – a group of courageous young people joined together in solidarity, reminding one and all that the wizarding world could only fall if it was divided against itself, poisoned from within by greed and fear. What they needed was a new banner to follow, to rally around – the red banner of glory, of courage and brotherhood and shared blood, of Gryffindor and Communism.

“If he thought at all, but I don't believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water, and when they did not he was appalled.”

Remus blamed the third-years. If it hadn’t been for them, Communism could have been contained to the seventh-year boys’ dorm, where Sirius would have collected and redistributed chocolate and Arithmancy answers for a while, realized that nothing had actually changed, and then found some other way to amuse himself. But then that trio of bright-eyed boys had trooped in and asked for advice on their own communal regime, and Sirius had suddenly been the leader of a movement. And from that moment on, everything had changed. Recruitment took off. A bizarre mob mentality swept through the tower. No one wanted to be left out. All the cool kids were going Red. And Peter proved to be damnably persuasive – everyone wanted more of something after all, money or butterbeer or Potions notes or chocolate frog cards, and Pete had a gift for highlighting what could be gained through the abolition of private property, neglecting to mention what might be taken away.

Sirius’s proclivity for showmanship stood him in good stead – in nightly meetings, he would collect and display the riches of Gryffindor – mountains of coins and chocolates that made everyone feel rich. “All of this belongs to each of you,” he would say nonsensically, “given to you by your Comrades and from you back to them. This is what we have accomplished by joining together and working toward the common good, rather than selfishly hoarding for our personal gain.” And the eyes of the younger students would be wide with pride and greed, and it didn’t matter how small each of their daily allotments turned out to be, as long as that pile on the table kept growing, a ripening promise of an unspecified someday of unlimited plenty.

Remus waited for something to go wrong. It nearly had already, on just the second official day of the communist regime, when James brought in Lily and the other seventh-year girls.

“They can’t join,” Sirius said flatly, planting himself between James (lounging on his bed reading a Quidditch magazine) and the door (outside which, presumably, hordes of young women were gathered, intent on giving away all their earthly possessions).

James lifted an eyebrow, but not the rest of his face. “Course they can. It’s all sorted.”

“No, it’s not. They can’t join. It’s not for bloody girls, it’s just for – men of action,” he finished.

Remus, poring over his History of Magic textbook at his desk, caught the hesitation. Just for us, he was going to say. If James had been anyone but James, so stubbornly pleased with everything that one would actually have to produce signed testimony to convince him that one of his friends could resent his happiness, and even then might think it a joke, he would have heard the note of undisguised bitterness in Padfoot’s voice.

Sirius’s newfound vicious jealousy of Lily was the worst kept secret in the history of Hogwarts, so utterly transparent that not even Lily could take his hostility personally. He would have hated a puffskein if it’d been what took James away from him. And much as Remus wanted to smack him for it, he couldn’t entirely say that Sirius was wrong. Lily was monopolizing a great deal of James’s time and attention. Things had changed. The Marauders didn’t really maraud any more. The Map was used mostly for finding convenient locations to snog. James no longer bothered to chafe Sirius out of each of his sulks, no longer stayed up late in the dorm conspiring to humiliate the Slytherins, and (perhaps the worst of it) didn’t seem to recognise that he’d given anything up at all. In Remus’s opinion, these developments were both inevitable and probably for the best. But he also understood why Padfoot was so set on having something just for them again, something in which he wouldn’t have to share James with anyone but Remus and Pete, who didn’t really count.

“She’s already in,” James repeated. “It’s set – you can’t very well expect me to not share with her – what else do I want things for?”

Sirius, apparently so disgusted by this sentiment that he lost his powers of speech, stared mutely as James flipped a page.

“But Prongs,” he said finally, “what’s she even got to share with us? Lip gloss?”

“She has brilliant Charms notes,” Peter put in. “I vote for Lily.”

“Two to one, Pads,” James said triumphantly.

Sirius shot Remus a pleading glance.

Remus hunched further over his desk and pretended not to see it.

Sirius had tackled James then, apparently deciding that if he couldn’t lure him back from his red-haired siren, he could at least give him a fat lip.

In the end, everyone joined, even little Priscilla MacIntyre, who cried for two hours after giving up her ice mice, which she’d kept for months because she thought them too cute to eat.

Pete got Lily’s notes. Lily got her choice of everyone’s quills, because it was in the people’s interest for her to write clearly. James got custody of the Map except for when someone else was planning a shag. Remus got extra chocolate, because the moon was coming up. Sirius got a hat – a huge Russian fur hat, Transfigured from Natalie Goldstein’s beret, that necessitated personal Cooling Charms and that he wore to every single Party meeting. It should have looked ridiculous but didn’t quite, and Remus would have hated him for being able to carry off the silliest garment since his Aunt Jackie’s sequined gold lame miniskirt, except that hating Sirius for his looks was a bit like hating water for being wet. Sirius didn’t even work at it, beyond running a brush through his hair most mornings. And it wasn’t as if having everyone looking at him, wanting things from him, thinking they knew him because they knew the curve of his lip, the freckles in his eyes, did him a lot of favours, in the end. Remus thought of all those hungry gazes turning on him and shuddered. Sirius could keep the hat.

It was the beginning of a new era in the Gryffindor tower, and everyone was happy, even Remus, despite his suspicions of where it all might lead, because he had too much trouble permanently on his personal horizon to worry much about an extra cloud or two.

“But every class struggle is a political struggle.”

The raids and searches began as a kind of joke, really. It was a Wednesday afternoon, an hour after the last class let out, and half of Gryffindor was in the common room, the younger students playing gobstones and exploding snap, the older ones gossiping or reading. A cluster of girls experimented with nail colouring Charms.

Sirius was busy mocking James for having let Lily turn his toenails purple until Marlene McKinnon’s rather shrill voice pierced their conversation.

“You’re holding out on us,” she accused Daniel Connelly, a sixth-year. “I saw you last night.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” he replied quickly. “I turned over mine just like the rest of us. Everyone saw me – Frank, Isobel, you saw, didn’t you?”

“But you didn’t hand over everything, did you, you greedy little capitalist.”

Daniel clutched his bag closer to his chest. “Shameful slander! You can’t prove a thing!”

“Oh can’t I? Just –”

“What’s going on here?” Sirius demanded, stepping between them. “This is no way to treat your comrades, is it?”

“He’s a traitor to the cause! He’s got a secret stash of chocolate!”

“Have not!”

“Have so!”

“I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding,” Sirius interrupted. “We’re all Gryffindors, we’d not hold out on each other. Look, my good man Connelly here has nothing to hide, does he?” Connelly shook his head vigorously. Sirius laughed. “See? Whatever he ate must have come from his regular allotment.” He casually took Daniel’s bag. “There’s nothing in here but quills and parchment and –”

The last item to be pulled from the bag was a large box of Honeydukes’ chocoballs.

“I wasn’t holding out,” Daniel explained hastily. “I just forgot I had them, they were under my bed, I was going to give them up at the meeting tonight, I’m not a capitalist pig, I’m Red as they come, Comrade Black, Sir.”

Marlene glared. Marlene, Sirius had noticed, glared a lot.

Sirius frowned uncertainly. “See there? It was just a misunderstanding. Connelly just made a bit of a mistake. Nothing to get worked up about.”

“It was not,” she insisted. “I saw him eating three last night, which he shouldn’t have done because it’s not his, it’s all of ours. He’s a filthy bourgeois swine, and he’s not the only one!”

“Is this true?” Sirius demanded of the room in general, eyeing the crowd that had gathered round. A number of averted eyes were his only reply. “Oi, comrades!” he bellowed, drawing the attention of the few of his housemates not already gawking. “It has come to my attention that some of you may have forgotten to turn over some reserves of chocolate or other goods to the Central Party. I would like to emphasize that the abolition of private property was not the abolition of most property, it’s all property. This is not a thirty per cent revolution or even a ninety per cent revolution – we are in this together or we have failed! You must give to the Party to receive from the Party. You must trust the Party to be trusted by the Party. At tonight’s meeting there will be a general amnesty during which anyone can freely bring forward anything they may have previously neglected to share. After that, anyone caught holding back will go without chocolate for a week.” Some of the younger boys gasped. “Now I suggest that each of you returns to your dorm and thinks very hard about whether there might be something hidden in the bottom of your trunk which rightfully belongs to the whole of Gryffindor.”

The common room emptied, except for Sirius, James, and Marlene.

“I have held nothing back. I don’t need to check, Comrade Black,” Marlene said, puffing her chest out.

“That’s good, then,” he said awkwardly, feeling slightly afraid of her.

“And I know about the fudge at the bottom of your trunk,” James whispered, cocking an eyebrow that, between the wild hair and glasses, made him look rather like a maniac.

“Don’t be a berk, Prongs,” Sirius said witheringly. “That’s been pre-allotted for Moony. He has imminent need, you know.”

James glanced automatically out the window, as if the cloudy afternoon sky would reveal the current state of the moon.

“I can’t believe you still use those ridiculous nicknames,” Marlene said. “Prongs.” She sniggered.

They both stared at her, wondering why she was still there. “That’s Comrade Prongs to you,” James said rather stuffily.

She choked back a snort of laughter.

Sirius tossed his hair back to resettle his dignity, then grinned at James. “Have I complimented you lately on those stunning toes of yours, Miss Potter?”

James knocked him down and put his feet on Sirius’s face.

The rest of the afternoon passed peacefully, and Sirius had almost forgotten about his ultimatum by the time the Party meeting came around after dinner. But as soon as he called the group to order and requested the surrender of any new acquisitions, comrade after comrade slunk forward to deposit liquorice wands jelly slugs and handfuls of knuts on the table. Sirius stared at the growing piles, aghast at this evidence of selfishness. Why would they do it? he asked himself, filled with a patrician disdain for stinginess. Why would they want to keep things from their proletarian brothers? It was beyond his understanding.

Once everyone was seated again, Sirius looked from his housemates to the table and back again. “I can’t help feeling saddened and disappointed by this,” he said at last. “I believed we were past miserly, capitalist hoarding. But I can see that true enlightenment takes time. We must each work to beat back the monster of greed within ourselves. We must each struggle to remember that communal gain is personal gain. Communism is not just a word, or an ideology, it is a feeling we have for one another. It is our higher nature. Only in recognizing our interdependence and joining together unreservedly and wholeheartedly can true progress be made. When you own nothing you will want for nothing. Tonight has been a lesson in how far we still have to travel together. The Party wants to trust you, but you must earn that trust. The Party wants to believe in you, but you must believe in it. Who believes in the Party?” The crowd sent up a rousing cheer. “In Communism?” Another roar. “In Gryffindor?” The crowd went wild. “Together we stand, and together we will triumph over the capitalist swine who seek to undermine our brotherhood. You must each be on guard against the traitors among us. Be vigilant. Watch your dormmates, your brothers and sisters, your friends. We must help one another remain true to the cause. We must not tolerate selfishness or greedy clinging to the dead bourgeois values of the past. A future of glory and justice lies before us. It is up to you to seize it!”

Sirius grabbed the hat off his head and held it aloft. The common room echoed with cries of approbation. Girls stared up at him with stars in their eyes. We can do this, he thought, heart hammering with pride and exultation. We’ll show them all. He didn’t bother wondering just who “they” were.

“Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very over-rated persons.”

At half four the following afternoon, Remus reported to the Hospital Wing. He sat down on a bench in the waiting area and fiddled with the cuff of his jumper, then noticed what he was doing and forced himself to hold still. He managed to keep steady for two minutes before he began scuffing at the floor with one foot.

It was Thursday. He’d eaten a light lunch, fidgeted through Ancient Runes, visited the library to finish up the Transfiguration essay due in the morning, and returned to the dorm to drop off his books and wand. A thick wedge of Honeydukes’ fudge, wrapped in translucent waxy paper, waited on his pillow. He smiled, reflecting that’d not seen anything like it handed out at the Party meetings. It was nice to know that some things hadn’t changed. His friends didn’t like it when the moon rose before they could sneak out, but he’d forbidden them from missing dinner on his account – it would only draw attention to his own absence.

He stuck the fudge into a pocket in his robe and headed down to meet Madame Pomfrey. He couldn’t imagine eating – his stomach, as always, was in knots – but the weight and smell of it were comforting.

At four forty, he and the matron struck out across the grounds. It was February, and the sun was nearly setting behind a bank of low clouds. The moon might not even show its face that night, not that it would matter. Snow crunched under his boots. The needling wind smelt of ice and something sharper, like smoke or metal. Remus shivered.

Pomfrey prodded at the knot on the Whomping Willow herself, as if Remus was already incapacitated. She led the way through the tunnel, perhaps guarding him from spiders and dangling roots. He liked walking behind. It felt less like he was a prisoner being escorted to the dungeons that way. Not that it was fair to associate Pomfrey with the torture that lay ahead. None of it was her fault, and she tried to be kind.

They arrived at the Shrieking Shack at five oh three. The sun was gone. Madam Pomfrey cast Warming Charms on the room and waved her wand over Remus, checking his health. As if it would make a difference if he had a sore throat, or one bruise more or less.

At five fifteen, she patted him on the arm and left, sealing the room both physically and magically behind her. He hated the sound of the lock turning. It never failed to make his heart pound, to make him want to beat on the door and demand to be let out. As if the wolf wouldn’t be able to find him in the forest. Remus did not beat on the door. He did not scream. He allowed himself to pace for a few minutes. Pomfrey’s Warming Charm had not entirely dispelled the winter chill, which lingered in the cracks in the floor, the shadows in the corners, but Remus began to sweat nonetheless. He didn’t know if that was a harbinger of the wolf or just a human response to fear. It didn’t matter.

At five forty-five, Remus stripped off all his clothes, folded them neatly, and put them into the high, latching cupboard that the wolf couldn’t access. He retreated to the bed and curled up to conserve warmth. He wondered what his friends were doing. Five forty-nine. About to head down to dinner. James running a comb through his hair as if Lily would be able to tell the difference. Peter dashing up to the owlery to post a note to his mother. Sirius petting his hat absently, perhaps checking the time, perhaps thinking, five more minutes. Five fifty-one. Pomfrey back in the Hospital Wing now, sipping tea and checking on some second-year with orange boils. She always left well in time to be out of the tunnel before the moon rose. He oughtn’t feel bitter about that. It was for his protection, too. It was just that everyone else could get away from it. Dinner in a few minutes. Probably roast leg of lamb, crusted in salt and rosemary, hot juices dripping down onto the platter. Why was he thinking about meat like that? Was it the wolf? Was it in his mind already? What would it try to eat that night? Sometimes when his pack roamed the forest the wolf ate rabbits, once a gosling at the edge of the lake. Once he’d vomited up rabbit bones and fur whilst in the Hospital Wing the morning after. Sirius’d had to Transfigure it into pink sludge. He’d been impressed that Sirius knew a spell for Transfiguring regurgitated rodent. Or maybe he’d just made it up. The drying sweat was cold on his back. He shivered. He could feel something rising up inside him. It felt wrong. He couldn’t fight it. A sharp ache in his bones. He tumbled awkwardly off the bed. Transforming on the bed was a bad idea, if he wanted to have anything to lie on in the morning. The floorboards were rough, but too worn and old for splinters. He couldn’t feel his feet. He wished the rest of him would go numb too, but it didn’t. The cold on his skin broke apart into fire.

Five fifty-six. The moon rose. Remus set.

When he came to again, predawn light trickled through the cracks in the walls. His mouth tasted of blood and dog hair. He was half warm and half cold and something was moving warmcold on his arm. That was Padfoot, licking. Padfoot was also the source of the warmth. He shifted closer to the dog, which whined softly and resumed licking the bite mark on his forearm. That shouldn’t have made it feel better, but it did. It was a good thing, he thought vaguely, that dog smelt a lot like wolf, or else Pomfrey might have gotten suspicious.

Remus didn’t mind the mornings after, so much, any more. It was getting harder to remember what it’d been like, before, alone and cold and bleeding, struggling to wrap himself in a shredded sheet as he waited for help to arrive.

Now there was dog hair and the scritch of rat feet and James, who always transformed back first because a large stag was pretty useless in a small room, prodding at his injuries and fetching his clothes. This was the time when he loved his friends most, when they were not full of noise and bad ideas, when they felt more truly like family than his sad, struggling parents did. He could forgive them anything, in these moments, just because they were there, because of what they’d done to be there, something no other wizards had done for any other werewolf in all of recorded history. He knew. He’d checked.

It was such a morning when he’d forgiven Sirius, after that night, the previous year. Two months of utter silence, and then Sirius had muttered, “Could Padfoot come, tonight?” low enough that if he wanted, Remus could pretend not to hear.

“Yeah, all right,” he’d answered, not looking at the other boy, not because things had changed but just because it’d been wrong, the previous moon, without him.

He’d woken up the next morning wrapped in dog, and had not wanted to pull away. It was a stupid reason to forgive someone, maybe – not because he was sick of hurting Sirius, but because he was sick of hurting himself, but at least it had settled things, more or less.

But this moon there was nothing in particular to forgive, and Remus allowed himself to doze against Padfoot’s ruff until Peter’s Detection Spell announced Pomfrey’s approach, and his three friends retreated to the far corner and hid under James’s cloak, Pete still in rat form for the size advantage.

Once in the room, Pomfrey cast a new Warming spell (the old one had worn off hours ago) and checked Remus for damage. “Not such a bad one, then,” she said encouragingly, and hit him with a few Healing spells for the bites and aches. And it was true – there were no broken bones, no bits of him hanging on by a thread. He merely felt as if something had taken him apart and then shoved the pieces back together with little thought for accuracy or comfort. Which, of course, something had.

Once he was adequately patched up, Remus dressed himself. His fingers were clumsy and Pomfrey hovered anxiously nearby, looking as if she wished she could do the buttons up for him but knew better than to try.

The return trip through the tunnel was slow, as always. Eight thirty-two in the morning. Somewhere above ground, the sun was starting out on its hike up the sky. Twenty-eight wolf-free nights, now. A lump of something in his pocket banged against his thigh as he walked. The fudge. Suddenly hungry, he stuck a hand into his pocket and scooped some out with one finger. It tasted like summer afternoons and new books and a warm arm slung around his shoulders, and faintly of dog as well, because his hand was none too clean. And now he’d made it sticky as well. He wiped his fingers on the fabric of his robe, and followed Madame Pomfrey up towards the light.

“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.”

Sirius stumbled into the great hall behind Pete and James, propelled not by energy but by sheer need for caffeine. If he got to the table there would be coffee. If he kept moving his feet he would get to the table. If he kept his eyes open, he could move his feet without falling over. His eyes felt like someone had reupholstered them with sandpaper (which was not, as he’d once thought, the crisp layer that sometimes formed across the beach, but something Muggles used to make things smooth. Moony had explained this once, with practical demonstration, after Lily had said someone ought to take sandpaper to James’s ego), but soon there would be coffee.

When they finally got to the Gryffindor table, there was (along with coffee) a spectacled owl waiting by his customary seat. Sirius blinked his sandpaper eyes and wondered if it wasn’t too late to go back down the tunnel to the Shack and spend the day curled up under the bed. But no. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Even if “them” was only his stupid family’s stupid solicitor’s stupid owl. Expending the last of his strength on his best aristocratic, sneering swagger, he dropped gracefully into his seat, plucked the letter from the owl’s beak, dropped it into his pocket without looking at it, and waved the bird away before it could snatch any of his breakfast.

Breakfast. Sirius knew he ought to eat – running through a forest all night used up a lot of energy – but none of the platters of food on the table seemed appetizing. He cast a quick Engorgio on his teacup and filled it with coffee, liberally doctored with milk and sugar. In the Black household, tea was served with breakfasts. Blacks did not sweeten their tea after the age of six. Blacks did not eat jellied eels or chips or chicken tikki masala. Blacks did not get sorted into Gryffindor or associate with werewolves or cry when their grandmothers died. They did not get Ramones songs stuck in their heads or allow themselves to be groped by Hufflepuffs in the broom shed or turn into big slobbery dogs. Not even black ones.

Sirius took another gulp of coffee. Pomfrey had been slow that morning, so they’d been late to breakfast. In another few minutes they’d have to run to class. He didn’t know if getting the letter just after the moon made it better or worse. Those nights always left him outside himself, pushed by exhaustion and adrenaline and animal joy until he barely felt human, until the shapes of leaves and spoons and shadows seemed to have their own life and power, until he felt like an object himself, a Sirius-machine mimicking the motions of personhood. Nothing much mattered but the hot cup in his hands. Sometimes it was a lonely thing, having nothing matter.

James was nattering at Lily. Pete buttered his toast like there was a N.E.W.T. on even spreading technique. No one had said anything about the letter. Everyone knew what it meant. He hated that, hated the pity implicit in their tact. Hated that they expected it to mean something, as if it wasn’t what he’d wanted, as if he was still some snivelling little firstie hoping for his mum to send him biscuits and soppy letters. It ought to be a joke by now – “Oi, Black, what’d they disinherit you of this month?” – and instead they were trying to be kind. Well, they could all just sod off. Them and their ridiculous toast and ridiculous girlfriends and ridiculous happy proud families.

Sirius did not finish his coffee before they had to run to Transfiguration. He did not open his letter until he was in the washroom between his morning classes. He was not ten minutes late to Arithmancy because of how long he sat in the stall, staring at the solicitor’s angular writing. His hand did not shake at all as he signed the document by which he for ever relinquished any claim to the Black family hereditary seat on the Wizengamot. It was not because of the letter that he’d forgotten to nick any oranges at breakfast for Remus (who liked citrus after transformations, because he said it cut through the taste of the potions Pomfrey fed him). It was not because of the letter that he failed to satisfactorily Transfigure his carp into a toothbrush for McGonagall (though he was briefly distracted by wondering under what circumstances he would have access to carp but not toothbrushes). The letter did not make him edgy or irritable, and was not responsible for the itchy restless feeling that made him squirm in his seat as if trying to evade some watchful, judging eye. It had nothing to do with him wanting to yell at his friends every time they looked as if they understood him and every time they looked as if they didn’t. It did not remind him of how many people he’d disappointed.

It was not the fault of the letter that he hexed Amanda Pool at the Party meeting that night after it was revealed that she’d gotten a whole package of EverInky Quills in the post from her parents and then hidden them in her trunk for a week.

The letter had nothing to do with the way he stared at himself in the mirror that night, trying to see what he might be, if he wasn’t a Black, and it certainly wasn’t why he decided to sleep as a dog, curled up on the foot of his own bed. It was just that Padfoot had nicer dreams, sometimes, and could ensure nocturnal security by turning around several times in place before settling down.

“It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there never was a cockier boy.”

Remus glanced over at the circle of dog on Sirius’s bed, which whuffed softly and settled its nose more firmly into its hindquarters. He watched for a moment, trying to tell if Padfoot was asleep, then shrugged and returned his attention to his book, in which Peter had just had his shadow reattached.

There was nothing, Remus thought, more banal than comparing Sirius to Peter Pan. He’d heard every Muggle-born in their year say it one time or another, and it generally made him want to smack them. Not because the connection was without merit, but because it was such a shallow, obvious reading. Sirius was Peter all right, but he was also Captain Hook and Tinkerbell and George Darling and Tigerlily and Slightly and even Nana. He was everyone bravely foolish and loyally forgetful, everyone better than he should be and worse than you would want.

Padfoot shifted, curling more tightly in on himself. Once the dog had slept on Remus’s bed, sometimes, after a bad day. Not because he was more beloved than James but because he was safer, as he had a monster of his own. Sometimes it helped, Remus knew, to be near someone else who understood what it was like to be torn apart from the inside out. To be afraid of what the monster, when it emerged, might do. So Remus had never said anything about the occasional dog hair on his blankets. But then there had been that night last year, and since then Padfoot had kept to his own bed, most likely unwilling to presume. And Remus had no idea how to invite him back, or if he really wanted to. They had never talked of it. It was just one of the things the dog did, like begging to be petted or snapping at falling leaves in autumn, because Sirius as a boy could not.

But lately the dog had been more subdued, tending to look as if it’d just been kicked. The wary look in those round eyes, the hunched furry shoulders – they gave away too much about Sirius, but never quite enough to suggest a cure. Or perhaps Remus was simply too ungenerous to offer what was needed. Perhaps he was waiting to be asked, for that proof of trust, that humbling confession. Maybe he should just go over to Sirius’s bed. He could read there as well. Just for a while. But what if Padfoot was asleep? It wouldn’t do to wake him, not after he’d been up all night in the forest for the moon. Perhaps he could say something tomorrow instead. Ask about that letter that still poked out of the pocket of Sirius’s robes. Tell him he still had a family, that he always would. Write up a last will and testament making him the sole heir to Remus’s record collection. Except that would seem a bit wet. He’d say something, though. Once he thought of it.

Part 2

Part 3