"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was
standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton
One
The wind caught the dust from the pavement, swirled into a tiny tornado and ribboned across the deserted street, catching up pieces of lost detritus, oddments and tweak…before twirling around into a tangle of waste paper and dirt. He watched it with dead eyes, seeking the amusement, the procrastination of crossing the road by observing the only movement in an otherwise still neighbourhood. The tiny whirlwind gave a final flourish, trailing an old ripped Quidditch poster in its wake before finally dying down only to become a melange of waste once more.
Remus limped across the road, his cane, its rubber tip long gone, tapping against the cobbles. These ancient catsheads would soon be flattened, he had heard, razed, for cobbles were ancient, old fashioned and this was a new age that had no time for such quaintness, no time for tradition, no time for time, in fact. Muggles would, Redqueenlike, slice off their heads, tarmac the streets, paint the edges of the roads in yellow stripes which stood for danger, the camouflage of wasps, broad white lines, in case you didn't know where the middle was and where now there were catsheads, there would be catseyes, and the Muggles would say that it was good.
They had already condemned most of the houses. All except those that had been in good structural repair. They had done something called "Listing" to them. Grade II and Grade I. "National Treasures" he had heard being bandied around, "Tudor masterpieces", "crumbling ruins", "national disgrace." Windows, which had in turn been mullioned, and then blasted, gaping holes, were now blank, dead eyes, covered with boards that looked like flattened cornflakes. Doors nailed shut, and yellow plastic ribbons wound around the houses, looking for all the world so much like huge presents that one expected there to be a bow, somewhere in the ribbon, if one walked around the house to look.
Remus has seen it all before, this rape of the town, but he looks at it every day, because someone has to. Someone has to remember that it is not, as the Americans think, who come through here sporadically, bulging in their pastel sportswear and ubiquitous baseball hats, not a film set. Not a folly built by a "Scotch Lord," not a Scottish Portmeirion. This once was a living, breathing town, filled with people and life and commerce. Now it is being erased, wiped from the face of the earth and will become like every other town in Britain, standardised, homogenised. He passes a derelict site, completely boarded off, plastered with posters for bands he has never heard of.
Here is where the Post Office once stood, filled with owls and the smell of feathers. In its place he’s heard there will be a supermarket, running backwards from here as far as the railway line. Zonko’s too has gone; it had tried to remain resolute to the tsunami of change, but it fell eventually, defeated so easily by regulations and bureaucracy, when it had been a bastion of resistance in the darkest times.
Honeydukes still stands, but a sign hangs askew upon the door, "Closed while premises is inspected by Department of Health." Mr Honeyduke can be seen, wandering aimlessly around in his empty shop, looking as grey as the bare shelves, shell-empty vacuum, like his shop. The vibrant glow of the candy canes, the sugar mice, the huge treasure barrels of jewelled sweets, rainbow-pigmented that had once lit up the faces of generations of eager, greedy children , all gone, all taken for inspection by men in grey suits and white overalls.
Most traders have given up, their strength to resist sapped, strength that had stood up to the Death Eaters, fought the Dementors, withstood a battle that had raged here for five days. Beaten into cowering submission finally by men with clipboards, and Muggle laws. A few resolute mavericks remain. The pet emporium stands proud, the only shop on the bottom end of the High Street, flanked by the sentries of rubble and despair, reduced to selling rats, hamsters, mice and rabbits. All, to the owner, who goes through the motions of caring for the tiny creatures as if in a trance, bafflingly non-magical, while the Government confiscates the magical creatures for tests, assessments and categorisation.
The wind whips at Remus’ robes as he limps painfully down the street and pushes open the much-repaired door of The Three Horseshoes. Madam Rosmerta had, with the fire and determination of a Thatcher, a Boudicca, refused to leave, arching like a quivering reed in the typhoon of the Muggle onslaught. Remus had seen her weeping when her stocks had been taken, heard her screaming at the Weights and Measures officials, had helped her install the new equipment for lagers and together they had learned to wire plugs and install fridges for things called Alcopops. The pub was the only establishment that seemed to be thriving, for the tourists loved it, thinking it was some kind of theme pub, and not a remnant of a civilisation that was being eaten alive.
He sank gratefully onto a wooden barstool and leant his cane against the bar. His leg, always aching, always a reminder, felt like it was breaking all over again, the bones seeming to grate against each other, complaining of the cold and exercise. Rosmerta, her face pale and pinched, drew her cardigan around her like a shield, turned away from some Australian backpackers and poured Remus a tot of rum.
"You’ll get into trouble if they see you covering it up," Remus said, hairs on the back of his neck rising at the risk she took.
"No-one here today," she said, tying her cardigan up with its belt. She glared bitterly at the minuscule amount of spirit in Remus’ glass. "I’ll never get used to these measures," she said, bitterly, "let me put you another one in there."
Remus put his hand over the glass, "You know you can’t," he said, with a sad smile, "and you take too many risks as it is."
Rosmerta sat down on a barrel, straightened the hideous towelling bar mats. "You can take the girl out of the resistance, but you can’t take the resistance out of the girl, my family have been in the pub trade for 500 years, and if the Government couldn’t stop us importing brandy from France in 1700 and something, then I’ll be damned if I’ll play their damned tune now." There was a silence, punctuated only by the sound of the fruit machine in the corner, Rosmerta’s only concession to entertainment. The Australian boy was winning, and well too, by the sound of the coins being spewed into the paying out slot.
"Why do they call them fruit machines?" asked Remus, looking over at the black monstrosity, which seemed to be themed around a popular Muggle cartoon character.
"Don’t ask me. The Brewery insisted it go in. It was either that or a Duke-box, and I’m not having aristocracy in here." Remus knelt down to scratch the ears of the pub dog, to hide his smile. As he straightened, the blood rushed to his head and he had to rest his arms against the bar to prevent himself passing out. Rosmerta was all solicitude. "You’re still not eating enough," she said, coming around the bar and attempting to feel his ribs. He pushed her away with something approaching a snarl, for his personal space was so very precious to him, she knew that, for he guarded it on an everyday level like Cerberus did Hades. Yet Hades was not as violated. She touched his cheek, her eyes tragic; "I know why you try to make a stand, and I stand with you, shoulder to shoulder," she said, "but in the end, we will all have to go, for there is no-where here for us anymore. Don’t you think?"
"No." he said shortly, "if I thought that, I'd …" He put two pound coins on the bar and stood up. "See you tomorrow," he said, "see you tomorrow." Like a mantra, like an order. Something he had to believe. His leg creaked and groaned, used to more rest than he'd given it today but he pushed on, a driven, bitter, salt and pepper man; angry with Rosmerta, angry with himself for losing his equilibrium, angry with impotent rage at the whole damned mess. On his way back down the street he didn't look to the left or right, there was nothing to see here, and there never would be again, until tomorrow.
The path back to the castle was neglected, as it never had been under Hagrid's great red hands; weeds grew in the centre of the gravel and cinder covering, potholes sprouted seemingly overnight, and the sides of the track, once grazed by centaurs, were choked with year upon year of the proof of indifference.
Remus climbed the stairs, painfully, one step following the other, each one a triumph and a sadness, his eyes cast down, concentrating, willing himself to reach the doors without shame, knowing he was watched and hating his exhibitionism. The policeman in front of the doors said nothing, but handed him a tube. Remus blew into it, and handed it back. Their eyes didn't connect - they had nothing to say, and no common ground over which to say it, but all the same, Remus knew the look the man was giving him, as clearly as if he was looking him full in the face. The great door opened and clenching his jaw muscles to stop himself tearing the policeman to pieces he walked through the hallway and to the great staircase. Looking up, his eyes filled with the unshed tears he had been holding back for two years, crucified himself with the sight of progress. It hit him like a poison every time he saw it, the same bile filled emotion every time; and if Remus ever wondered to himself what was the point of walking out of the castle to struggle to the village and back, he only had to return here to give himself the answer.
Portraits destroyed, burned. Suits of armour, recycled - recycled! To make cars and planes. The moving flights cemented down so securely that sometimes at night Remus imagined he could hear the very stones of the castle crying in their imprisonment. Electric glaring lights which tore into the retina and left trails of ice white heat on the sight for minutes afterwards, the weathered floors bowed from centuries of pupil's feet iced over with wood and carpet.
With a vicious smile he made it across to the potions corridor, or rather what used to be the potions corridor and descended, stopping on the first landing, and pushing open the door to his room. He barely made it to the chair before his legs gave out, and he sat for a long while with his head in his hands. When the loathing subsided he struggled to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. His other self regarded him with such a blank look from the mirror he wondered if he'd really lost his mind this time, and he hoped so, he really did. One hand carded through the grey hair, whilst the other, with fingers fluttering like an arthritic butterfly touched the red "W" and the wolf's head badge he had to wear at all times.
~
They had all been fooled. Driven on by the words of old men and the blind hope of a prophecy, that evil would either fall, or triumph, that Harry or Voldemort would overcome and a new world order would emerge.
They had all been fools. How, thought Remus a million times a week, his mind cluttered with the same noxious thought, poisonous as wolfs bane, cold as the Kiss. How could they all have been so naïve? Now, when it was far too late, they learned the truth that Muggle children already knew; that life is not delineated in pretty Ying yang patterns of light and dark. The myth that evil is counterbalanced by good is just that, a pretty story to tell the children, so they could believe in the messiah, so that they believed that a child marked by fate would already know, be ingrained in his very genes, his culture, his make-up, the though-crime that messiahs existed and they always came from the most unlikely of places. Didn't every fairy story reinforce this? Remus, and everyone else, had realised with a shockwave that had swept their lives away, that they had all been living in a fairy story and there was no happy ever after.
Well, they'd got their new world order. It just wasn't either of the choices they had been expecting.
Morning came; another curse of birdsong, for another daybreak meant you were living. Or at the very least alive. Remus had learned the two were not mutually exclusive. Habits long forged from ennui and training, made his body react reflexively; for though the soul rebelled, the flesh knew the motions, and dragged him, shuddering-reluctant, into another day of denial. Feet on floor, traitorous lungs forcing chary blood to course around the body. Then wash, dress, assume the badges of shame and walk down, head high, eyes low to the kitchen. Where the wizards ate.
Rosmerta’s words percolated his brain; you are still not eating enough. A bitter smile unseen as it slid beneath the trailing curtain of grey gold hair. How could anyone be expected to eat enough? The ration elf, its collar, blue black-stark against the white uniform it had to wear moved among them, collecting their ration slips, stopping short of Remus as ever, perched on the end, as its chain didn’t allow it to reach quite so far. Remus stood and slipped one thin paper chit into the elf’s gloved hand. The elf, who looked so much like Dobby it broke Remus every morning to see it, put the chit carefully, like precious china, into a small leather bag it had slung around its neck.
He took a piece of black bread from a basket that the elf held out and watched it as it slunk back to the wall where the chain was riveted.
Mugglesense.
It had become a phrase they all used. Mugglesense. Encapsulating the things that Muggles did, thinking they did well, which was so horrifically wrong.
The new formed RSPC(M)A had given the elves clothes, shocked at the rags and tea-towels they swathed themselves in, unknowing the damage, irreparable, devastating they unwittingly caused. And they stood and watched in horrified incomprehension as elves in their hundreds killed themselves in any way they could. They were "a protected species" now; the first time Remus had heard that he had laughed so hard and for so long that it took two nurses to sedate him.
Trying to ignore the shaking of his hands, he picked up a carton of milk and attempted to prise it open, failing so miserably that he was unaware of the movement of air beside him and the scent of patchouli and ether as it permeated his senses, as natural to him as the air itself.
~~~
Two
Hands that once were the envy of gods, hands that once could terrify a classroom with just a twitch of a finger, ivory and alabaster, tinged with a colour all their own, reached across him and gently, forcibly took the carton from him. Remus watched his hands with a kind of hunger, saw the abrasions, the bumps, the scars, the terrible damage wreaked upon a man whose hands were his life. The hunger he felt, incomprehensible to his surface self, was a tearing need to reach out and touch those hands, to take each one in one of his own, and to hold them to his mouth. To beg forgiveness for the fact that it was as much as Severus could do to hold the carton in both fists.
Remus watched, his stomach churning at his impotent failure to manage something so basic; even though he had never yet managed a milk carton, he tried, daily, in the same blind-stubborn way that he had fought throughout the war, never accepting that he was beaten, that they were all dead men until, shattered and broken on the Last Battlefield he couldn't crawl the five short yards to reach his wand without leaving most of his body behind
A rare smile touched his lips as Snape gave up fairly swiftly, his broken hands unable to make any headway to the deviousness of the innocent carton. He took a butter knife and gave it a heartfelt stabbing
"Here," he said, holding out the carton, his breath gusting Remus’ cheek. Remus grasped the plastic mug but found his own fingers were shaking so much he could hardly hold it still. Snape’s covered his hands with one of his own, and together, two wizards who now hardly made one man, managed a manual task they would once have done with magic
The werewolf just blinked at him, knowing it was enough, that thanks would be sneered at, and that Snape, if thanked, would walk away. It was funny, thought Remus, that he even craved Snape’s company. Maybe it wasn’t his company. Maybe it was just someone that he had history with, something more than a passing acquaintance. It’s not as if there was anyone else. Anyone at all. But it was Snape that was here. Snape who had survived that last day.
The devastation of that final battle was the final straw; each side became more desperate, and so angry that the prophecy remained unfulfilled, that the habits of secrecy, so stringently enforced within the wizard world, remembered and adhered to as easily as breathing, slipped in the blood baths, as the administrators were the first to fall, and began to be forgotten
The morning after, as they counted the costs and tried to put the genie back in the bottle, it was already far too late. The secret spilled over to a waking world via tabloids and a BBC helicopter that, steel blue vulture-circled, scenting the blood of circulation in a frozen sky. First came the curious, the journalists and then at last, when the fighting finally began in a half hearted struggle, the Muggle army arrived, and in the blink of an eye, the world was laid bare, all mystery stripped from it like bleach through blotting paper. Even the few Death Eaters that were left, panicking, retreating - their leader having fled - were no match for bullets, tanks and shells. All they could do was to send Avada Kedavra, over and over, firing into a line of iron, camouflage and steel. True, a few soldiers were killed, but a spray of bullets can do more harm than even the most perfectly aimed hex, and a tank’s cannon is decimatory, not discriminatory. Wizards, Order members, schoolchildren, Witches. Cut down like grass before the peacekeepers’ flail.
With a slowness that could almost be misconstrued for sensuality, or at least from anyone that wasn't Severus Snape, the gnarled hands were drawn back, excruciatingly over Remus' flesh, and all Remus could do was to stare at the matched red "W" stark against the black of the shabby-genteel frock coat he still wore.
They didn't speak, for such a simple act needed no effusive praise, it was a nothing, an everyday kindness that both hoarded, for different reasons. The silence wasn't quite companionable, but wasn't awkward either.
One by one the others ate their meagre breakfasts and disappeared but even after Remus had finished his bread, he felt loathe to leave. He leaned down onto the table and rested his head on his arms, husbanding his energy for another day, feeling that he was drawing warmth and strength from the man sitting bolt upright beside him, drumming his long misshapen fingers on his plate. No.. Not his plate, Remus realised with a shock that cooled with blood in an instant, a book. Pushing himself up, he turned on the bench, looking around him as if he was the one breaking rules.
"Sit still, Lupin," black sibilance slid over him as if he were Longbottom fidgeting in class, unless you want to be the one that attracts attention?"
Remus shook his head, his headache returning with a vice-like intensity. "Why take the risk?" he whispered.
"A whisper," said Snape in a tone all his own, hardly heard, no more than an exhalation, "can you heard easier than normal speech, you should realise that."
Remus pitched his own voice to suit the reprimand. "You didn't answer the question."
"Because everything needs a beginning," he replied, not taking his eyes from the volume. It was slim, and covered in a tan leather, its pages distorted and uneven, as if it had been in water. "Like a potion, everything must be added in exactly the right amounts and at the right time, or the result is disappointing."
"Or downright dangerous." Muttered Lupin, "you could do that in your room."
"And when they found out, I would be accused of being subversive, treacherous, plotting an overthrow of the government. Whereas I hide nothing here, I merely read something that has been my wont to read all of my life. I would be considered a threat, perhaps forgetful."
"And you would lose the book."
"There is that, of course," Snape put the volume down and turned his eyes to Remus at last. He looked, apart from being thinner, like all of them were, much the same as he always did save for his hands, which when he wasn't eating, or reading were tucked inside his robes, hidden away, his only vanity. But his eyes, always hypnotic in their sheer infinity, held something now so indefinably fine that once he gifted Remus with these rare contacts, he could never break away from it until Snape, always in control, chose so do to. "I would not appreciate that, so perhaps the small act of rebellion should wait until I am finished with it." He tucked the book in his robes, with a little difficulty. Remus' eyes echoing the shame of the ineptitude.
It was a mistake; Snape merely sneered at him. "Sorry for me, werewolf? Save your pity for yourself." The eyes with bitter spears of accusation, broke the chains between them, as Snape swung over the bench, and he was gone as silently as he had arrived.
~~~
Three
Soft muffled footsteps, for they all trod softly now their dreams were gone, and the gust of air caused by moving robes. A scent of earth, and the purge smell of the bonfires of destruction.
"Remus?" He shook his head and focussed, as Pomona Sprout and Edmund Vector came into the kitchen. He frowned at the luggage they had clutched to them, like secrets, carpet and leather, nestling incongruously with a Marks & Spencer carrier bag bulging with seedlings. "We've come… We've come to say goodbye."
Blood drained from his all-too pale face as he took in what they were saying. He found himself unable to speak. Pomona glanced at Vector, nervously who nodded at the woman and said,
"Go on."
"We've had the all clear, in fact," she said, tangling her fingers in her shawl, unable to meet the trust of Remus' brown gaze, "we had it about six months ago…" she faltered, looking up to Vector's equine face for some sort of inspiration.
"We would have gone then, Remus," continued Vector, smoothly, "there was no reason for us to stay. Other than for you, but now…"
"Now what?" Remus looked between the two of them, his glance showing a little of the lost boy he had put aside, "nothing has changed. This…this is your home!"
Edmund picked up the carrier bag with a sigh, the sound the world shared. "It has not been since Albus fell," he said. Remus found it bitterly amusing that they still spoke of that, as if Albus' death had caused all this, and not his life.
"It's no-one's home," said Pomona quietly. "Least of all yours." Remus balled his hands into fists and shoved them into his robes to stop himself from grabbing the pair of them, begging them not to go.
"Where?" Is all he can find to say. His voice sounds dead, even to him, the hope leaching from it like heat through a broken roof. "Not…"
"Oh, Remus," Edmund said, "it's about time you stopped with your conspiracy theories and blind prejudices…"
"Edmund!" said Pomona, her face, once round, now collapsed like a crab apple left in an orchard for too long, was pale and shocked, watery eyes flickering between the two men.
"I'm sorry my dear," the former Arithmancy teacher said, a nervous tic showing in his face at this uncharacteristic boldness. "But Remus has been badmouthing the Isle of Wight since its inception, with no facts or figures on which to base his claims." He whirled about on Remus who was fisting his hair in his hands, his head down. "It's a smaller world, granted, but it's all ours. We've been promised it…."
"You've been promised…" Remus' voice came soft, almost subliminally from the depths of his lungs, "promised…" slowly, with a tone to his voice that made the hairs on your arms stand, his voice raised. "Yes, we've all been promised, and yet you still believe their promises after everything you've seen around you in the last 18 months? Where are they? Where - Are - They?"
Ignoring his impassioned question, Edmund went on. "There has to come a time," Edmund spoke in that maddeningly rational tone that made Remus want to kill him, "when trust has to be unilateral; we have shown little trust so far, and they have acted accordingly."
"Paracelus!" exploded Remus. "Unilateral? How can it be anything else? What good is latent, wandless magic? We are sitting ducks, Edmund, and if we are not all sitting in the same pond, we have a chance of survival!"
"We've heard your arguments, ad finitum!" yelled Edmund, his nervous tic increasing until he was almost deformed, his left hand crabbing up to his distorting face. "Resistance, passive or active; it will only result in our never being accepted! They don't trust us!"
"And they never ever will!" said Remus, the growl in his voice taking over, "we have to restore…"
"Stop it! Stop it!" shouted Pomona, tears running down her face, "I can't stand to have you at each other's throats!" She stopped, instantly, her handkerchief to her mouth as Remus rose with a speed and a grace that he so rarely displayed.
"Don't worry," Remus said, his voice returning to a calm glaze of brittle ice. "If I were to tear your throat out, Edmund, you'd be dead before you knew it was happening."
"I'm sorry," whispered Pomona, taking Edmund's hand.
"You will be." Remus said, taking his cane from the wall. He turned to the door to find a young girl in a white dress and shoes, her face as pale as her clothes, holding a clipboard in shaking hands. "It's all right, Ms Bright," he said, his voice returning to the tired tones of defeat he usually used. "Two weeks until full moon." He rested a hand against a wall, his back to the others. "Keep in touch," was all he said, before following the girl out of the kitchen and up the grand staircase to where he spent most of his time these days.
At the door, double sealed with rubber and steel and with incomprehensible signs and markings on the reinforced glass, he stepped into a small outer room and removed his clothes, shivering slightly in the chill air. His eyes closed as he forced himself to breathe through his mouth to try and deaden the days, weeks, months of the scent of his own despair, here in this room. It didn't help. It never did, for the scent-memories clung to his taste buds, rancid and bitter. He didn't need to look up at the wall opposite, he'd seen it every day for the past 30 days, and this was no different except this day was the last day of the month, and all this month they had been using light.
This month.
No voice prompted him, but like a tiger in a circus ring, he needed not the whip or the goad to tell him what to do; he sat, knees cracking, balls chill, drawn up, on the metal stool in the centre. Waiting.
The lights turned on, wall of artificial coruscating blaze which hurt his eyes and brought his headache back faster than the sight of the policeman on the door, with the special crossbow. He raised his hand to his face to shield his eyes but two doctors, moving fussily from a hidden wall on the left moved to his side and pulled his hand down roughly, while one attached electrodes to Remus' pale goosepimpled skin from a panel that opened up in front of him
One examined his eyes, the other his teeth, he knew the drill, for it was always the same. He used to talk, but it had only been talk to convince himself that he was there, was sane, not for any companionable reason. And pointless, for they took as much notice of him as if he were not there, less, for an invisible man would be more remarkable than a werewolf who wouldn't turn for their experiments.
"This is basically just a repeat of the 15th," said the one with the moustache, Remus knew his name was Antony, but he thought of him as the Walrus. One had to focus the mind on something when you were being examined like a bug in a jar. A naked bug in a jar.
"No, in smaller increments," said the fat one, Simon something, but necessarily the Carpenter. "475nm moving to 480nm over four hours in 1nm units, whereas on the 15th it was…" He checked his clipboard.
"470nm to 475nm in 10nm units, yes, yes. So it can't be light. Not just light."
"You say that, but nothing else has worked, tides, magnetism, centrifugal force, heat, UV, w...."
"It makes no sense, even the folk tales must have a basis in scientific fact," he sounded exasperated as the blue faux moonlight beat down on a stubbornly unchanging Remus. "Moonlight isn't even moonlight, after all, it's sunlight."
The Carpenter replied with some technobabble, a term Remus had learned from one of the ladies who ran the library, and as they confunded each other with science, he quietly let his thoughts run on to the unpleasant scene in the kitchen. He'd long ago wondered why no-one asked him.
The Isle of Wight; it was wrong; rotten meat, guano, cats hair, implicit violence. It made something in his brain revolt, something that he could not access, not explain, that called forth a subliminal vision of the first closed door, the first trap, the first denied werewolf howling against the uselessness of stone. Tipping his head back, he closed his mouth and let the scents of the room wash over him. Mistake. Scent memory too strong to deny, there on the very hairs of his nostrils from what Pomona had been holding, scent he knew. Widening his nostrils to the chill-scent filled air, he sampled it to make sure.
A letter, visions of sun-kissed faces and red hair. From the Weasleys. They'd taken their remaining tribe with them when they'd gone, and all his remonstrations, all of his rhetoric had slid from them like snow from a spring roof. Molly had her mouth set in that line which meant she would never back down, and they'd helped Harry into the coach, his arms outstretched as in supplication, feeling his way in the dark, as he always had done in the light, his seeing hands reached for the sanctuary of the stairs.
The last memory Remus had of Harry was green-blank eyes staring onto a world he would not want to see as the bus took him away.
He was pleased they'd written, and he wished now he'd found out what they'd said. If only for news of Harry.
The Carpenter pulled the electrodes off his chest, and made a few final notes, pressed a button on the console and the airlock opened. As Remus moved towards the door, his very bones aching from the cold, the Walrus called out, "supplies want to know, does it have to be sterling silver?"
Then Remus knew what the next month had in store.
~~~
Four
The shocks, one after another were a domino-spiral, tumbling one after another, until his thoughts tangled tight like broken knitting. Headache came back laughing at his frown lines as he stumbled down the stairs gasping for fresh air and the one unit of alcohol he was allowed daily. Mugglesense.
He pushed the instinctive primal terror from his mind, made difficult, as the afternoon sun sparkled everything in a silvery sheen, wet from the rain of morning. He kept his face turned downward, striding as fast as ruined path and stiff limbs would allow, splashing through puddles, ruining silvery ripples; forcing his thoughts away from the jeering of the metal to come. Mugglesense
Blind to his progress, he bumped into Severus without even seeing he was there.
Remus waved a hand in apology, unwilling to trust his voice to the air, and hurried on; it was not until he reached the shattered gates that he realised that Severus was still with him. He stopped and leaned against the pillar that had once held one of the huge flying boars. "Why are you following me?" he said, wearily.
"I assure you, Lupin, that if I choose to walk in the same direction as you, and I was, you will remember, on the road before you, it can hardly be construed as following."
"It looks like it, to me, and it will look like it, to Them."
"Your famed paranoia knows no bounds, does it?" Snape said with a twinge of the old snark. "Why would they be interested in where we are going, after all this time?"
Remus knew that Snape had a point. It wasn't as if they could go anywhere. Without magic they would have been picked up before they had gone half a mile. There was a circle of steel around Hogsmeade, people came in, but no-one who lived here left, not without a ton of bureaucracy. He walked on, his leg aching, into the village, Snape silent by his side, his hands tucked inside his robes. Silence between them, usually easy, sometimes even companionable stretched to screaming point in Remus' ears. After all this time, Snape did not suddenly decide to accompany him. He'd never seen the man in the village, not once since the demolition began. Snape never did anything on a whim.
Save your pity for yourself. The echo of Snape's voice ricocheted through his mind. The reached the pub, and as Remus put his hand on the doorknob he muttered quietly.
"You know, don't you?"
"Many things," said Snape pushing past him into the bar, leaving Remus standing there feeling pathetic, and only able to trail after him. Rosmerta was talking to a man in a suit, and seeing that, the men, as one, moved to the other side of the pub near the fire, hardly realising they were flocking together in adversity. "Sit down, Lupin," Snape said, with an edge of irritation, black fingernails on rust, "you really are so obvious, and you think after all this time you would have learned to mask it."
Rosmerta gave a laugh like brittle sugar, the chattering warning of a blackbird, and swept over to see them, the marks of her shame red and obvious on her blouse for all to see today.
"Professor Snape," she said, "how nice to see you again."
"Not Professor," he said, a smile on his face which was more frightening to Remus than any expression he'd seen the man use before. "Two pints of Guinness, if you would be so kind." Remus looked up at him, with a look of concern,
"I can't…I'm.."
"Not allowed more than one unit, yes, I am aware. Do you really think that I spend my entire life in my potions laboratory blind and deaf to all that goes on? No. Please don't bother to answer that." He touched Remus on the knee to bring his attention back to him and it worked as well as if Snape was using magic. Which he couldn't be… could he? "Please don't keep staring at our friend over there, believe me, he seems far too interested in Rosmerta's ample and most distracting, or at least to him, bosom."
Rosmerta put the pints on the bar and Snape retrieved them as she gave an excellent impression of never wanting to stop flirting with the Suit. As he put the drinks down between them he leant forward as if inspecting the foam on the top of the pints, "The breathalyser they use can easily be fooled. All you need to do is wait a certain amount of time, or eat."
"How?" Remus asked, already realising the answer.
"Experimentation," he said simply, "they may be Muggle devices, but still chemical, and subject to the laws of science, which govern both our worlds," he pauses and takes a sip of the Guinness with a grimace. Which doesn't seem to apply to this noxious beverage. I would kill for a decent pint of Hogsmeade Horntail, but of course the Muggles have little sense of humour, and breathing fire after a pint, albeit one small puff, didn't amuse them."
Remus gave a hesitant smile, always feeling wrong-footed, off centre when he was alone with Severus, and wondering if that was quite the longest speech he'd heard the man make that didn't involve potions ingredients.
"Now," Severus said, turning his face to the fire in a casual manner and throwing a log on the pessimistic fire, the crackles of the green logs masking his voice, "silver..." Remus watched the flames bring the unaccustomed colour of warmth and life to his face, making his lips shine under the evil word, and the velvet depths of his eyes sparkle with the vastness of space. "I think the main thing we have to do is find out how they intend to test you with it."
"Just about any way they can, I would imagine," Remus said, his mouth hovering around the lip of his glass, mouth looking as if it were just about to take a sip of the black liquid. He wondered briefly why Muggles drink black drinks, how did they make them black, without magic? "They usually begin with …"
Rosmerta came over with a bowl of peanuts and a clean ashtray, and Severus interjected swiftly. "Yes, the beginning is beautiful, but I rather feel that by the third Act Mozart has got bored with it himself," Remus looked on with some amazement as Severus took the peanuts from Rosmerta and gave her what he obviously thought was a winning smile. "The Magic Flute, Rosmerta," he said, smoothly. "Have you ever seen it?"
"No, can't say that I have, Professor," Rosmerta said, dusting down the table. "My music tastes are rather more low-brow, don't think I've ever managed more than two suites of any opera before falling asleep."
"Acts, Rosmerta, acts," Severus said in a supercilious manner, "I believe suites is a ballet term."
The landlady left them alone and to make his hands do something other than clench and unclench in worry, he ate a few peanuts.
"You don't trust Rosmerta, do you?" he said, trying to catch Severus' eye.
"I find it easier to trust no-one," he answered, his fathomless pupils sparking red in the fire's glow. "You were saying?"
Remus swallowed, and pretended to inspect a hole in his robes as Severus fished a few peanuts out of the bowl with difficulty. "They usually begin with scratch tests." He rolled his sleeve up and showed a criss-crossing of lines on the inside of his pale wasted arm. Severus did something then he'd never done before. His eyelids fluttered, and he grasped Remus' forearm with fierce predatory fingers poring over the scars and lesions with a studious air. With staccato bark-like commands he ordered Remus to explain which scars related to which test substance. Remus had often wondered what it would be like to have those ruined hands touch him. It had been a very, very long time since other hands, careless, beautiful aristocratic hands had traced other scars. Remus was a tactile soul and his very being had been in hibernation without the feel of skin on skin. Especially when the only touch he had had in recent times was not the sensuous sliding of delicate fingertips over a dusting of hair, tempting and arousing and promising of delights, but rubber-gloved harshness and the impersonality of the laboratory.
Severus finished his gentle inquisition, and his grip slid away from his arms, but gradually, like the gentle recession of the tide, slipping in a manner, had it not been afternoon in a damp Hogsmeade that could, had it not been Severus Snape, be misread. It was the second time in one day that Severus had touched him, the second time that he'd wondered if it was a touch, or a reaching out. He knew he could never ask; nothing would make Severus retreat back into his adamantine shell faster than being questioned on something he thought was obvious. With Severus one had to act on blind faith. Remus wondered if he had that much faith left in his heart. His eyes watched the hands retreat, helplessly, being too much of a coward to catch them in his, fearful of the scorn he might unleash if he were wrong.
He had to be wrong.
Severus continued to quiz him, asking about various methods used to test him, and as Remus talked of the light boxes, the holy water, the garlic, (gaining a tut from Severus), the full moons when all the tests were done to the wolf, not the man, Severus' expression changed, but so infinitesimally, that it was only noticeable to one who had watched him for so long. Remus realised he'd never spoken like this to another soul. The other professors had known he was prisoner there, would never get the "all clear", would never be "safe" but they had never asked him what happened behind that glass and steel door. They kept their eyes down and they spoke of other things. Anything, but to admit a member of their family was being systematically tortured in the name of science.
Finally he ran down, having still, from self preservation, skirted around the worst of it. Severus was silent for a while. When he spoke, it was the potions master who reacted, the man who could see the beauty of a melding of ingredients even before the first berry was picked, the first root dug up, the first wing plucked.
"It probably can be countered, there are potions that can form a barrier to the skin, and if they make you ingest it, there are ways to help the body reject it swiftly. After all, they won't go further than that; it is not as if they will kill you."
Remus raised his shaggy head, and eyes older than a primal scream looked at the child that was Severus.
"Why not? They've killed me seven times so far."
~~~
Five
It was worth spilling the secret that he'd kept, closer to him than skin, closer than sweat, for fear of frightening others. It was worth it to see the flicker in Severus' eyes. A black, midnight glitter and an almost-but-not-quite imperceptible microsecond of shock. Remus had never seen Severus react like that to anything. Not when he'd had news that Lucius Malfoy had been killed, not when he'd learned of Harry's blindness, not even when he'd been told that Albus had vanished, along with Voldemort. Remus had wondered if the man could be shocked, or impressed, about anything.
He was secretly gratified that he could, and that he, Remus had done it.
As quickly as it flickered on, it was gone, and the mask was back. "Come on," he said, leading the way out of the pub. Remus followed, and could not have refused, though afterwards he wondered if Severus had invaded his mind, because the way he had snapped to his aching feet had been reflexive, the command in his thoughts more powerful than the want to stay by the fire, to stay away from Hogwarts.
Back on the bomb damaged street the wind had picked up again, stinging his cheeks with the dust from the building sites and whipping their robes into sheets of dark. Silently they walked back away from the pub, Remus falling into step beside Severus, being gratefully aware when the man slowed his pace to allow him to keep up. Who ever would have thought that Severus was kind? Only Remus, he was sure of that, and he held the feeling that such small tokens gave in his hands like a warmer, wondering if he was actually making too much of it, whether Severus had always been like this, only in their world before, everyone had been too wrapped up in themselves to notice.
Had Severus ever twitched a blanket over a first year as he turned in his bed and uncovered himself? Had he ever taken pity on quivering children who came to him with excuses – and had he forgiven them? Had he had a core of sweetness all along? Remus somehow doubted it, and the ambivalence he felt; hoping that Severus was really kinder than he appeared and wanting these careful moments to be only directed towards himself, confused him utterly.
They approached Honeyduke’s and Severus stumbled, causing Remus to glance sharply at him, then was beside him as he crumpled and slid to the ground, as if he’d suddenly had the legs cut from under him.
"Severus?" The panic rose in Remus’ voice before he could assess his own reaction. The man was rolled into a ball and Remus had to literally turn him over before he could see his face, paler than milk, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. "Severus!"
Two soldiers were marching down the streets towards them, black and green, their berets incongruously red, clowns' hats perched on shaven heads. Everything went terribly quiet in Remus’ head; the wind stilled, the birds quietened, even the ever present roar of the tanks in the army camp seemed muffled as he fought with the fear that something was horribly wrong and that this, this choking bleeding face, these crippled hands clutching at his robes, might be his very last memory of Severus Snape.
What little sound he had been hearing stopped, a sudden deafness as the blood rushed to his head and his pulse roared in his ears, causing him to feel dizzy and sick. A scent of rain muddled his sinuses and with a clarity that was razor sharp, just as everything else in his life had been a thick, blanketing fog, he understood what the fear meant. Only once before had he felt this sudden nausea, only once before had the fear for someone else’s life taken precedence over his own.
He cared about Severus. More than that; he cared desperately about Severus.
The world snapped back into focus, in the gunshot of a soldier’s bark. "What’s the matter with the wizard?" Remus spun round, a snarl of a feral creature standing over its fallen mate. The word "wizard" had been said in the same way people had once said "nigger." The soldier, even though armed with an SA80 rifle, instinctively took a step backwards, which only made both of them raise their rifles and point them at Remus.
"Hellfire, it’s the fucking werewolf," drawled the other squaddie. The wind changed direction and fat drops of rain spotted their uniforms, made the dust of the ravaged road bounce upwards, splattering Severus' face with nascent mud.
"What's the matter with him, we asked you, Mutt," sneered the first one, poking his rifle into Remus' thin arm.
"I don't know," muttered Remus, without thinking as he dropped to his knees and cradled the pale face in his hands,
"You don't know WHAT?" shouted the second squaddie. Remus was thrown sideways as the butt of the rifle caught him across the back and he landed face down in the filth of the street. The soldier turned to his colleague, "Christ, they never learn do they, still wearing their stupid clothes, still can't accept they are dying out."
"…Sir," gasped Remus, tasting blood coppery warm in his mouth and wishing it was fresh from the jugular of the bastard who had hit him. He was saved from another beating when a bell sounded and a voice, unmistakably the plummy tones of Honeyduke, came quavering through the tension-filled air.
“Professors?” Pudgy hands reached past Remus and lifted Snape, wraith-slim and impossibly boneless, “I’ll deal with this, gentlemen. We look after our own.”
Whether it was the timbre of his aristocratic voice, worn-shabby, frayed as the once opulent robes he wore, or whether it was that a small silent crowd of tourists had slowly gathered around them, Remus never knew, never cared, all he cared was that Snape was taken inside the empty shop and laid carefully on the counter. Remus was bent over him, wiping the blood from his mouth and pushing Honeyduke away, muttering nonsense in his terror.
The black eyes opened, not in a flicker, or a glazed “where am I kind of look,” but a sly glance at the door and then at the sweet shop owner, who looked decidedly unworried.
“Gone?” Severus said in a voice so normal that Remus’ fists balled and he wanted to smash the man in the face until there was nothing recognisable but splintered bone. Hot blood rushed to his face and he looked from Honeyduke to Severus and back again.
"Gone," said Honeyduke, "but you don't have long, they'll check the pub, then they'll check here. When they come back I'll tell them you've gone on already." He lifted the flap to the counter which had once groaned under Fizzing Whizbees and Sugarmice, now burdened with nothing but an over application of beeswax, "So be quick. Don't prove me a liar. You take a risk having him with you anyway.”
He pushed his fat frame through the gap and Severus, to Remus' amazement effortlessly unfolded his limbs from the counter and followed the shopkeeper without a moment's delay. It wasn’t until Remus did not follow that he turned back,
"Oh, for Merlins' sake," he said, and then seemed to want to qualify his statement, but didn’t, and headed down the steps to the cellar. Remus, blood dripping from his palms, followed, angrier than he remembered ever being as a human.
“When I saw the Watcher go into the pub earlier I was beginning to think that Rosmerta wouldn’t be able to tip you off,” he heard Honeyduke say incomprehensibly, and to Remus’ highly attuned ears he heard a shade of something like relief but tinged with fear. “You certainly took your time.” They reached the bottom of the steps and Honeyduke, to Remus’ amazement pushed aside a barrel and lifted the trap door.
Honeyduke looked over at Remus, “Didn’t think I knew? I didn’t, for a long time, although I often wondered at how often certain students were turning up and buying sweets.”
“How did you find out?” Remus said, following him down the stone steps. Scent memory tripped his mind into overdrive, the tang of spun sugar and mould, the dank walls, earth floor sloping gently downwards…
”How much further, Sirius?”
“I don’t know.” Body warm, strong arm round waist, fingers tucked just inside his waistband, fingers burning skin. “New to me too, remember?”
As they walked along the passageway, there came a scent of home on the foetid air, warm yet shuddering with want, a smell which sang to the wolf of loss and promise, and an unfulfilled need.
“How did you find out?” he said, urgently, but not knowing why he was so desperate to know. Snape, leading the three of them, stopped suddenly, his palmfire flickering in the tunnel and half turned, his hair flipping round his face in that old familiar way that Remus hadn’t seen for what seemed like an eon. Snape pointed at what appeared to be sacking upon the bare floor.
“He told me,” he said, and the hackles on Remus’ neck rose as the scent of filth and mud and sweat separated out and the sacking moved.
“Professor Lupin?” said a voice, unmistakably Ron’s, “I got him back...” His voice broke. “I got him out.. we...” The voice lost control and retreated into bitter sobs.
“I think,” said Harry’s voice, and Remus recognised the amount of control it took the young man to speak in such a normal voice, because it was control he used himself every day, “that we were only ones to get out. They’re dead. All of them.”
~~~
Six
When one is shocked, time does funny things. Sometimes there is a frozen moment, a second which takes control of time and stretches it, underlining whatever tragedy or horror that is occurring at the time. Some people might say that Fate, or God, has a sick sense of humour. All Remus could do was stare, and it took Severus, the man who loathed Harry for being the boy who wasn't James, to kneel down and look the boy over.
"I'm all right," Harry said impatiently, although he clearly wasn't. Both boys' skins were verging on yellow, but whether that was the light, illness or dirt, Remus was unable to determine. Harry attempted to push Snape's hands away, which only brought a snarl of sarcasm to Severus' lips.
"You always know better than your betters, Potter," he sneered, "keep STILL." As he gently but firmly removed Harry's filthy cloak and jumper, Honeyduke beat a retreat back to the shop. Remus snapped out of it, dropping down next to Ron, and mimicking Severus' actions. The air of the tunnel was damp, and both boys were shivering, although judging by the furnace of Ron's skin, Remus didn't think it was just the chilly atmosphere.
Ron was seemingly worse off than Harry, thinner (Remus thought he could guess why that was) although both young men wore marks, terrible to see, marks of physical abuse. Ron, after his initial outburst, seemed to have retreated into a world of his own, submitting mutely to Remus' examination, but Severus was all but fighting with Harry, the boy's arms flailing, as he attempted to push off the attentions he could not see. In the end, Severus stood up, his face pale and livid.
"Have it your way, Potter," he spat. "Walk six hundred miles in the dark, and then refuse the aid you so obviously need."
"Harry," said Remus. It wasn't until both boys looked up sharply he realised that he'd allowed himself to speak far more aggressively than he intended. "If you've come for our help, then bloody well accept it. Severus is, and has always been, less reliant on wands than most of us, and if you need healing…"
"I don't," he said, his stubbornness surfacing, "and I don't need him prodding me. I don't want anyone touching me. Not ever again." The last words were spoken with such feeling that Remus' blood went cold.
Remus looked at Severus to see the man fighting an inner battle; probably because he thought that, as Harry couldn't see him, and Ron was next to insensible, that was all that mattered. Remus was touched and he knew then that they had passed some invisible osmotic barrier. But like osmosis, once breached, there was no going back. He watched as he saw Severus do something he'd never seen him do before, run his crippled fingers through his hair, and instinctively he reached out a hand and touched the other man's arm. If he had thought about it, he wouldn't have done it. But it was reactive. Instinctive. The call of the master. To try and stop his arm from moving forward would have broken it.
Remus watched as Severus tore his eyes from the dim greenness of Harry's face and turned to look into his own. He hardly realised he was holding his breath as his life teetered between future or never, until the miracle happened and it was over so quickly there was only the memory to savour instead of the sensation of hand on hand. But it was enough, and Remus railed against the injustice of time that had made the moment now and here instead of somewhere dark and personal.
As if Remus had never offered him his heart, Severus became business-like; "Get down the passageway, we'll make sure there's no-one on the third floor corridor…don't worry about how, boy, we are quite able to make a diversion without wands. From there get to the room where Fluffy was kept and down the trap door."
"But the Devil's Snare!" Ron wailed.
"If you can't create a wandless palm fire at your age, Mr Weasley," spat Severus with utter contempt, "then you might as well call yourself a squib"
Ron didn't reply but bit his lip, and Harry's dead eyes pointed at Severus, dead eyes, yes, but with all the normal loathing shown in his face.
"And you'll join us where?" Harry asked, bitter, disbelieving, his faith in everyone gone.
"Where the chess-set was. The Muggles can't see the trap door, they have no idea the room is any thing more than it looks. Wait there. As soon as we can get there, we will." Honeyduke reappeared with a bag of food which Ron took, suddenly seeming older than his years and assuming the mantle he had voluntarily chosen, that of Harry's guide. Remus' eyes stung at the tenderness Ron showed, and how Harry accepted it only from his best friend. Ron helped Harry to his feet, muttering words of encouragement,
"Not long now, and we can sleep, Harry, both of us - imagine that…" Remus watched the boys walk down the darkened corridor, then turned to Severus and said, "Ron doesn't know the way."
"Harry does, he's done it enough times to do it in the dark," Severus said viciously, and Remus, with a jolt that tugged at the strings of his cock, realised he'd never heard Severus say 'Harry' before. "The witch is broken, you won't need magic to open it at the other end."
Remus howled in the cold silence; he longed to know how-when-why Harry had told him about the humpback witch, but he dared not ask. Severus' eyes were already vacuums of loathing, watching the two boys as they disappeared into the dark; Remus didn't want them turned upon himself.
When Remus next looked over at Severus he was already stalking back to the steps to the trapdoor and was up into the shop in no time at all. All Remus could do was to follow as best he could, his mind shutting out the story that he'd likely be hearing today. Without further speech the two men made their way back to the castle, the breathalyser test was borderline, the guard saying nothing, but making ominous notes in a small black notebook.
As they entered the hall, Severus muttered quietly, "Not both of us, we'd never get away with it, give me five minutes, then slip into the corridor,"
"What are you going to do?" Remus said, an icy hand encircling his heart, "Severus?"
"You know better than to ask," snapped the man, but there was no real rancour in his voice, which melted the ice, a little - if not completely. Remus knew without any uncertainty that Severus was going to take a risk, calculated or otherwise (although how, knowing Severus, could it be anything but?) Knowing that he was going to do it for a boy he hated filled Remus with a warm glow that not even the worry of what he had yet to learn could dissipate. He made his way up to the corridor, labouring with the stairs slightly more than usual, making heavy weather of it, stopping at every landing to catch his breath and rest his leg.
When the "distraction" did come, Remus was pleased he was resting, for it was well worth watching. From the potions corridor came a boom and a crash of glass that would surely be heard all over the main school. A green cloud of gas - shaped like an enormous snake, filled the hall and slid its coils into every corridor that led off the huge foyer. Severus, right on cue, came out coughing and choking, crawling on his hands and knees, and as much as Remus wanted to stay and watch, he didn't dare - guards, orderlies came charging into the hall, racing down the stairs, some already pulling gas masks from their belts. Remus glanced up, the stairwell guards had all gone, and he quietly slipped into the third floor corridor, opened the trap door in Fluffy's old room and dropped down in the Devil's Snare, made it release him, and hurried into the old Chess set room.
Harry and Ron were slumped in a corner, eating like they'd never seen food before, their cheeks fat as hamsters, their faces, Ron's eyes (if not Harry's) a little brighter. Remus sat on the broken pedestal of a knight and waited. When they'd finished eating, Ron pulled a filthy blanket from his sack and put it over the pair of them, rested his head on Harry's shoulder. It was a gesture that touched Remus. It spoke of the gentle trust these two had built up and a familiarity he hadn't seen anyone use with another since the war ended. Everyone was too paranoid to be gentle with each other.
Without prompting, Ron touched Harry's hand. "Do you want me to tell Remus?" His voice was strange, tentative and with a hidden subtext that stated that Ron didn't, really didn't want to, but he would, if Harry asked him.
Harry squeezed his hand; his voice was slightly surprised as his face jerked around like he was attempting to see what he never could again, not without magic, at least. "Just Remus? No. It's all right." He stopped for a second, and raised those opaque eyes to the ceiling as if wondering where to start, then looked back at his lap, his voice starting almost in a whisper and gaining confidence as his spoke.
"I don't remember most of the journey down. Ron tells me that I was still having problems with my memory, it wasn't until we'd been there for a week or so that everything clicked back into place, but the battle... and …well, you know, I don't remember any of that, only what Ron's told me."
He paused and Remus nodded, realising too late how pointless that was. Wasn't surprising the boy couldn't remember, he and Voldemort had been inside each other's mind when the bullets hit them both; the shock of the separation must have been unlike anything Remus could imagine. It was a miracle he had any mind left at all. He wondered how much the boy had been told.
"And the Island," Remus prompted, "was it real?"
"Oh, yes," Harry said, his face tipping up. "It was real. Quite big, or so I was told, although I never went far out of the town where I arrived. When I'd recovered we spent a lot of time on the beach. That was nice. I'd never been to the beach before." Remus frowned, wondering how an 18 year old boy, living in an island as small as England could have never been to a beach, and now he'd still never seen the colour of the sea, the endless windgames of the seagulls, the white horses and the sails in the sunlight. They'd all failed him, so badly.
"The food was good and plentiful, better than when they kept us here, and they let us grow our own vegetables as well some "level one" magical plants." Harry spat the government's classification out, as if the memory tasted bad. "Neville was given a whole greenhouse and I don't think he'd been so contented for years." Harry smiled, but there were tears already coursing down Ron's face. "We were all monitored, of course, they had Muggle devices that set off an alarm if we crossed out of town, but inside the fences, we were free to come and go pretty much as we wanted. . They assured us that it was a temporary arrangement, until they had had the rest of the Island evacuated - then, they told us, we could take whichever houses we wanted and scatter throughout the island - make it our own. I liked Alum Bay. I never saw them, but the cliffs were all made of different coloured sands." He reached into an inside link and pulled out a bundle of rags, carefully unwrapping something, holding it out to Remus in a callused palm. "One of the guards gave me this." Remus reached out and gently took the small glass object from Harry's palm, it was a simple test tube filled with layers of different coloured sands. Ron stood up abruptly and walked away towards the room with the flying keys. Harry followed the movement and sound until it faded and Remus looked at the tragedy of Harry's eyes and wondered if he ever cried.
"Everything was good for a while, or at least, better than here. They gave us postcards and airmail letters - encouraged us to write to as many of the others as we could, to tell them that the Land Act was a reality, and the Island was going to be ours."
Remus wasn't surprised that neither he nor Severus had received a letter.
"Minerva kept liaising with the government and they promised and procrastinated and Minerva kept nagging and they kept promising. Deadlines slipped and still the Island was full of Muggles and we were still in Alum Bay."
"It was Colin Creevey who noticed it first. He'd been allowed to keep his camera as it was Muggle, and he'd taken to wandering further than most of us, along the shoreline, and over the countryside, taking pictures of red squirrels and seabirds. He came to me and Ron, told us that the boundaries had moved but when we told the others - "
“Don’t tell me, they didn’t believe you.” Remus voice was as dark as the corners of the cavernous room.
“Some of them did. They remembered what you had said, and how hard you’d argued against going. About half of them, headed up by Hagrid and Shacklebolt – Merlin, how he hated being in that chair – went out to the gates and tried to get out, demanded to come back here….” Remus noticed Ron standing in the shadows, his face streaked with tears. Ron sat down with Harry, and took over,
“Hagrid lost his temper when the guards started threatening them with guns. He kept shouting that it wasn’t right that a man like Dumbledore, who had come through so much, should have died that way.” Remus could imagine the big man’s impotent rage and smiled, in memory of another old friend he’d never see again. “One young idiot panicked – stupid – Hagrid wouldn’t have hurt anyone, not unprovoked, he was just angry – he’d lost so many people already – Dumbledore was a father-figure to him, and he’d heard terrible rumours about what was happening to Grawp, and when that idiot fired – hit Hermione between the eyes, well, Hagrid just lost it, an’ I don’t blame him neither.” Ron wiped his nose on his sleeve.”
Harry put an arm round Ron and continued, “Hagrid killed the boy without thinking – it was almost a reflex. And…” Harry couldn’t finish the story either. Remus closed his eyes, wondering how many bullets it had taken to kill a half giant.
“After that, everything changed. The beach was off limits; they put wire round the camp. Firenze was taken away, I’ve heard he’s in some zoo somewhere. Any attempt to continue lessons finished. Anyone who didn’t look completely human was taken away – we never saw them again. There was silence from the government for 2 weeks after that, no-one would speak to us. One or two tried getting out, but they were shot. We were trapped. You were right.
“It wasn’t until they started taking people “to work on the mainland” that Ron said we had to get out, but I delayed – I couldn’t see, we were on an island – even then I couldn’t believe what people were suspecting, that no-one was being taken anywhere, other than to their deaths. We were being wiped out – 10 at a time.”
“So how the hell DID you get out?” Remus said, frowning, now the story was out, he wanted to get past it, he didn’t want to hear of the slaughter of the innocents. They had already died, over and over again in his head.
Harry gave a short bitter laugh, “They gave us entertainment while they were performing mass genocide. It was a Muggle film that gave Ron the idea. Some film about knights in space, with wand-swords that could cut off people’s arms. There was one bit where the old teacher takes the rebel boy and his two machines to a town and he uses some mind control on the guards so they don’t see them. Ron said to me, ‘Shame you’re not a Jedi, we could get out of here.’ And we shouted like idiots. I tried it on one of two of the guards inside the camp and it worked like a charm.”
“Mum tried to stop us,” Ron said, “but I put my foot down, said that we had to get someone to help us, before there were none of us left that we’d get help…Was pointless really, they took her and Dad, that same day.” Ron twisted his hand in his robes like a baby. “For some reason they seemed to be leaving me and Harry, perhaps till last. I don’t know.”
~~~
Seven
Remus didn't remember getting back to his room. Somehow his feet must have remembered the twists and turns, somehow his hands had clawed onto the walls, for afterward he found score marks in the stones. The first thing he was aware of was the feeling of someone holding his hair back as he retched second- hand Guinness, blackening his vision just as it darkened the water, circles of coloured sands blurring his thought and balance.
"Easy," said that-silk frayed voice, hands crabbed on his shoulders. A phial, holding a bright yellow liquid was held in front of his face. "Take this." His Master's Voice; and Remus obeyed with shaking fingers. Severus helped him up, assured of his skill that the potion would allay the symptoms immediately, and moved him over to the bed, sat him down and, Remus was amused to see, arranged his own robes carefully as he sat down on a chair opposite him, his eyes dark as Remus had ever seen them and just as unreadable.
As the world whirled back into place, Severus sat and watched him, and didn't speak, even when Remus got up and moved back into the bathroom to clean his teeth. Remus didn't know what to say. "Thanks" seemed inadequate somehow. At least to that particular man. He brushed his teeth so hard the tang of blood trickled into his mouth and he knew he'd never touch Guinness again, for there would be too many faces in the shadowy liquid.
He leant against the sink, the stainless steel cold and reviving, his eyes closed. So much loss. When he opened them, Severus was standing behind him.
"As bad as you feared?"
Remus closed his eyes in answer. It didn't help. The darkness behind his eyes would never be empty again. I feared? Was it only me? He couldn't answer. There weren't enough words.
"You tried."
"I didn't try HARD enough." The bitterness turned into a growl. "They didn't believe. I should have…I should have taken the mantle Albus left behind. I should have made them… I should have...! Stupid! Loony! Lupin!" He smashed the mirror with an angry fist, unable to meet his own eyes, completely unable to meet the expression never before seen in Severus' face. The mirror broke into four jagged pieces, which further shattered as they hit the unforgiving sink, leaving Remus' hand bleeding.
"You were held in a cage for weeks, Remus," Severus said smoothly. "You didn't have access to them, and by the time they let you out, a lot of them had already gone - and the rest had either made their minds up, or were being persuaded by Mo… most of the others."
Remus turned, his eyes going blank. "Molly…" A well meaning word with a world of stupidity within it. "Oh …Merlin."
Severus' voice was a corn-crake rebuke, bringing hysterical first-formers to heel. "Stop it. Stop. It! When has self pity ever achieved anything? Damn you, Remus!" Something like a snarl broke from the thin lips and Remus frowned, instantly on the defensive. "We have to go on - it does no good wailing about it, like some pathetic Hufflepuff…"
Remus pushed him backwards, hardly remembering to shield his strength, and Severus spun across the room, a puppet with his strings cut, "How dare you!" Remus shouted. "I've just lost everyone, EVERYONE I hold dear to me, apart from those two boys, and you tell me to stop mourning - before I've even had a chance to begin?" There was a lingering feel on his hands of shoulders, too bony, under robes that hid an emaciation he hadn't known about, but his temper was almost out of control. Anger does not allow us to pick and choose who we hurt. "What the hell have you done - apart from fucking collaborate?"
There. The words whiplashed their way out of his mouth at last. All the suspicions of a year, all the whispers in corridors, all the unvoiced accusations. The redeemed, never quite clean, never quite able to brush the mud of a past that stuck to his life, or sweep away the ever-renewing cobwebs of malicious gossip.
Severus had hit the wall, awkwardly and had fallen sideways, knocking his arm on a sideboard, grazing his hand. He lay at the base of the wall, never taking his eyes from Remus, and Remus glared back, his breathing burning his lungs watching the tarpits of Severus' accusative eyes, sharp as the shards in the sink, dark and deep as the loneliness he'd carried with him since the day a boy screamed in his arms and his world fell into the abyss.
"You. Think… That." Severus said, each word a knife edge hovering above their nascent friendship.
"…I...It's just..oh fuck.." Remus grabbed the heavy chair next to the window and smashed it against the wall with a violence he rarely felt in the middle of the lunar cycle. The wood crunched against all of the years shoring up the castle, but Remus didn't stop, his inner strength driving him on as the rage within him grew, it was almost as if the wolf was attempting to burst its way out, two weeks early. Somewhere, the small seed of Remus' calm knew this was impossible, hadn't that been proved in innumerable tests? But if it wasn't the wolf, then this pure rage, never seen by anyone before, was pure Remus Lupin. A Remus Lupin who had never tried to fit in. A Remus Lupin who had never had the kind of patient parents who had taught him to control his temper, A Remus Lupin who had never, ever been a prefect, a Remus Lupin in fact, that no-one knew, not even Remus Lupin.
The sound that came from his throat sounded nothing like he'd ever heard himself make before, hollow, desperate, tearing his vocal chords. It was no inhuman pre-dawn howl of a creature in the darkness. It was the cry of a human male who had lost everything, beaten into a bloody pulp by life and circumstances, the cry of man about to give in.
The next thing he knew he was on the floor, and his face was wet and he didn't remember crying, didn't remember falling. He put a hand to wipe away the tears but his hands were covered in blood, so he sat there and stared at them stupidly, these hands that looked like they belonged to someone else. The anger had washed over him, and razed its way through his emotions, and now there was nothing left, nothing but a blank feeling that he'd forgotten to do something important, and the first creeping horror of shame.
There was a breath on his neck, capable hands lifting him out of the debris, and when he looked back, hours later, he found that he could smile at that simple but true image. But it couldn't be Severus, could it? Because Severus wasn't that gentle, Severus didn't have that timbre of voice, now murmuring at his ear - a hypnosis that could lull a child to sleep, or to create a hardness Remus thought was lost. Severus didn't support the fallen. Severus had never run his hands through a man's hair with a concentrated look, as if it were spun gold. Had he?
Remus was a tinderbox dog with eyes as wide as soup plates, frozen in a intake of breath, terrified to do so much as blink in case he'd found that he'd knocked himself out and the hand in his hair, the lips too close to his were merely phantasms of the day as they had recently haunted his nights. Involuntarily, Remus' lips moved to speak - oh why couldn't he just shut up? - but Severus stilled him with a look, and Remus felt the command right down to his toes. He couldn't remember when the air had started to feel thick, so tangible that he didn't think he'd be able to push through it to bring them closer together.
He didn't need to.
Then Severus' broken fingers, were they shaking? were touching his cheek, his lips; and Severus' sarcastic mouth was on his and it was all Remus could do to keep breathing. In-out-in out - whoever said breathing was a mere reflex was a fool. His control broke, and years of loss and loneliness came crashing down, a weight he hadn't even known he'd been carrying sliding from his shoulders. Severus' mouth demanded entrance and he gave him it, not with passive permission, but with a violence that part of his mind said was too much not enough, never enough but once unleashed, he could not again rein it in without reaching some kind of conclusion; he was on a journey he had no control over.
To his delight, Severus matched him, muscle for muscle, tongue to tongue. They moved as one, stumbling over the broken furniture, hands grasping at robes so thin they gave way under the violence, fingers reaching skin, hands cupping hipbones that had seen too few meals. Somewhere between when and wherever, between lost and found, Remus was pulling the last of Severus' clothes from him, and hadn't even noticed that he'd shed his, a skin that was one too many in the rut of the moment.
All Severus did as he fell back on Remus' narrow bed was reach up, and grabbing Remus' hair, pulled him down on top of him. The connection of warm skin was thunderous, rending the world apart as they knew it and leaving the sky open for the new. Remus broke the kiss only when Severus' hands went around his waist, seemingly searching for every pore and hair. Pushing himself up onto his elbows, his eyes raked over the man beneath him whose eyes were glittering with such life Remus hadn't seen for years. Severus' body was long and lean, not quite as thin as his own, but still, the stomach was flat and taut, and the first few ribs were clearly visible. His skin was paler than Remus had imagined it, like ancient parchment, but smooth, his chest hairless and broad, the irresistible trail of soft dark hair beginning at his navel and sweeping down to shiny darkened curls guarding a cock that made Remus' mouth water.
There was little enough time to acquaint himself with the sight. Severus, surprising him again with his urgency, pulled him down into a deep kiss, his knee pushing Remus' legs apart and rubbing, painfully - beautifully, between his thighs. Cock grated against cock, and it was then that Remus realised that he was going to come, come like a schoolboy with his hands in his pants if he didn't slow it down.
"Bloody hell, Remus," growled Severus, "it's taken me months to get you here, what you do want, an engraved invitation?"
"Too.. long…" Remus murmured. Severus, to Remus' annoyance, had the cheek to give a lopsided grin, and leaning up, he whispered a sibilance of lust into his ear,
"Come, then, come for me, Remus…." He accompanied the deadly words with action-fingers, ohmylordtooclumsy wrapping themselves around Remus' knife-edged cock, and Remus gave a short groan as his body obeyed without further thought, his balls drawing up, pumping his seed into Severus' hand in bursts of bone-shuddering, embarrassing pleasure.
~~~
Eight
Remus went to pull away, biting the inside of his cheek, hating to have lost control not just once but twice in the space of half an hour, but Severus still had one hand in his hair and held fast. Like an experienced lover, he slid to one side and let Remus sink down beside him.
He was still smirking.
As Remus' heart gradually returned to its normal rhythm, Severus stroked the fine hair on Remus' chest, causing his nipples to harden, but Remus had his face turned away. How could he have done that? With the boys hidden away - with the world ending? As if Severus had read his mind, he spoke, as though talking to himself, his hand drifting across the scarred skin with such concentration - like a blind man, learning and committing to memory something precious he may never encounter again.
"It's a perfectly normal reaction, Lupin," he said, in a conversational tone that he might have used sitting at the refectory table. "Death often provokes a sexual response. The Muggles have rationalised it as a primal need to repopulate, but," cool lips grazed over Remus' left nipple and Remus felt heat flooding his arteries, re-awakening flesh he would have thought would have slept for an hour at least, "there's much more magic to it than that."
Remus rolled over, pinning Severus' arms just above the elbows, "Shut up," he growled. "And it's Remus, Remus. And damn you for making me want to live." He leant down and kissed Severus hard, his erection now fully compliant, heat-seeking its twin. The kiss, first savage, evolved through iron ages and then into a soft exploring civilisation, mouth leaving mouth and moving over the muscles and sinews of Severus' neck. Remus felt Severus tense minutely and he tongued the hollow of the man's neck in supplication. "You taste like saltpetre,"
"Hardly surprising," Severus said, and it sounded as if he were trying to sound dark and sarcastic, but instead it was breathy and broken and far too arousing for a man who was starved of such sweet sensations. "I'm making them…"
"I said," Remus said, clapping a hand over Severus' mouth, "shut up. Time enough…" Using lips, teeth and tongue he migrated southwards, leaving Severus free at last. Severus did taste of saltpetre, but he also tasted of menthol and peppermint, camphor and strangely, of something reminiscent of the sea. A windblown taste of salt that triggered a scent memory of seagulls and two canines in a mad romp along a moonlit autumn beach. Another Country.
As he teased from navel to hip, Remus delighted in the discovery that the man was ticklish. He wondered how much Severus' pupils would have paid for such a nugget of information. Severus' cock, tempting him since first he'd seen it, now waved desperately for attention, and as Remus reached his goal, Severus' hands were once again in his hair, his hips almost off the bed in a need that Remus wanted to savour - just for a little while longer. In the country of the past, only one other had wanted him like this, someone who had tasted of cigarettes and sealing wax and engine oil and love. And it had been far too long.
Lips, starved for such contact, touched the rigid stem almost reverentially, worshipping the pulsing warmth in a benediction of dry kisses.
Something full of fury was kicking with hobnailed boots at the back of his mind, something was screaming at him that this was - Snape, enemy, hated - Snivellus… Moooony!!!! - this was full of a wrongness that held no redemption, but now, with the scent and feel of Severus eclipsing everything he'd lost, Remus knew he owed nothing to Sirius. Severus was right. They went on. Ghosts held no dominion. There were exorcists which dealt with them in these Mugglesense days.
He traced the blue vein with his tongue and the groan that tore from the depths of Severus' soul wiped away any doubt. This was real, and no phantasms could deny it. Greedily he swallowed Severus' length, slipping his hands behind the man's back for leverage, and kneading the spare-muscled cheeks, flicking his tongue back and forth rapidly over the head and tracing the sensitive crown. Severus was, for once in his life, incoherent, and this spurred Remus on, the strangled sounds that Severus made were all the encouragement he needed. The world became flesh; senses sharpened into intensity by the darkness of closed eyes. He was driven on, existing only in a dark vortex of lust, every sound, taste, touch and smell uniquely Severus and catalogued, remembered, treasured. He rocked over the body beneath him, devouring every sensation as if it were his last.
It wasn't until Severus put a hand on his head, as the world swum back into alignment that he was even aware that Severus had come, the taste of semen bitter and alkaline in his throat, Severus' cock softening in his mouth.
"Careful," came a voice, more throaty than usual. "Thought you were going to drain me,"
Remus looked up, seeing scratches and bite marks that hadn't been on the pale skin before and Severus was pulling him up, tangling his legs in his and running his hands over Remus' chest. "I hadn't imagined you to be so hairy," he murmured, "I think I like it." Remus groaned as Severus pinched his nipples, and shifted up to whisper in his ear. "We need to get all three of you out of here," he said, unexpectedly, "and soon."
"How the…" Remus began, but Severus dug his nails into Remus' chest and clutched him tighter.
"Now you shut up," he said in a lover's voice, "and take a look at the cupboard in the corner." Each word was accompanied by kisses and a soft sliding of hands into tender places. "See the glint of light above it?" Remus grunted an assent. "Muggle camera."
Remus' erection wilted in panic wondering who was watching, and what they were thinking. "Then we shouldn't talk about this now, then," he said, making to pull the sheets up. He was suddenly confused. Had Severus orchestrated this whole…seduction…just to be able to speak like this in private? Was the passion faked? He rolled out of the bed, feeling pathetically hurt in spite of the fact that Severus had probably done it for an altruistic reason. For a few precious minutes, Severus had made him feel alive, had made him hope for a future, and now it seemed that it was simply a ruse.
He knew he was acting unreasonably as he caught a glimpse of the scornful sneer on Severus' face, but he'd wanted something real, his world had been built of shifting sand since the day he'd been riddled with bullets and found that he couldn't die as easily as the bodies falling around him. Severus caught up with him before he'd gone four steps, ripping the sheet from his body and pulling his mouth to his. Remus resisted for a second, but his flesh was lonely, unused and weak.
"You fool," muttered Severus. "Always over-reacting. Don't you see that this is the one place where we are as safe as we are ever going to be? They don't care about our so-called perversions. In fact," he grabbed Remus' growing erection and fisted it, causing Remus to groan with want, "they are probably waiting to see if you will fuck me when you are a wolf. Personally, I'd rather you did not. Now, come back to bed before they get suspicious. With luck they'll think it was a lover's tiff."
He allowed himself to be led back to the bed, and Severus took the lead, but now Remus knew it was all pretend. He cursed himself for being fooled even once. He pulled the sheet up around them, his teeth clenched tight in disappointment, to hide the fact that his cock was not responding as much as modesty. Severus was impressive; so much so that Remus wondered how many times he'd used this device to arrange rendezvous in front of the spying eyes. He curled next to him, whispering arrangements into Remus' ear, whilst to the camera above them, its tiny red light flashing, it looked liked two lovers making up.
Remus knew he could play his part.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Two days later, Remus was playing another part, writhing around his bed again, being the great pretender in a much more deadly role. Something which had been set up by Severus in the room where Harry and Ron hid, crouching together like caged chimps.
"Drink one of these each hour for three hours before the tests. I haven't time to explain them to you, and you wouldn’t understand most of it anyway,” Severus had said, back to his waspish form, the lover disappeared forever. Remus missed him. “Worst case scenario - they will start with scratch tests, they wouldn’t make you ingest it this early on. If we are really lucky they will start even easier than that, and simply place silver on your skin, so…"
"Simply?" Remus had snarled. "Remind me to bite you and then give you a silver bangle and then you can tell me how simple that is.”
Severus had given him a look then, what used to be called an “old fashioned look,” the sort of look that his mother had given him when he was being deliberately obtuse. He handed him several racks of tiny vials. "It's up to you to act out what you are not feeling."
Remus nodded. It might hold the stronger tests back a few days, at least, while they attempted to decide what the reaction was - it wasn't as if they took any credence from screaming, it was the body's reaction in which they were interested - blood, skin, ears, teeth. Remus knew that once started down this pathway, there would be no return. Any silver triggered a lupine response. This is what Severus was hoping to retard. There had been no time for rehearsal, all Remus had been able to do was swallow the potions and trust.
To his surprise, if not to Severus’, the tests began almost negatively. While the Carpenter made notes, the Walrus squirted him with water in which silver had been allowed to blacken. Remus had flinched, his faith wavering, but whilst the skin blistered, the surface pain was deadened and his throat did not constrict, the marrow in his bones did not burn. Nothing lengthened, nothing changed. At the end of the day, Remus was almost optimistic, and allowed Severus to rub healing salves and olive oil into his skin as he lay naked on his, (he still did not dare call it their), bed. Severus was painstaking, and pedantically slow, unable to flex his fingers to their pre-war perfection, he used his knuckles for the most part, going over the blisters, rubbing them back into scarless tissue. He grumbled at Remus in amicable ire, cursing the incompetent Healers who had allowed the werewolf scars to mar what he called Remus’ perfect skin.
Hearing Severus praise him was enough to make Remus hard, and somehow, Severus knew, turned him over, straddled his cock and rode him with a look of such joy and abandonment that Remus could believe, if only for a little while, that it wasn’t just for show.
~~~~~~~~
Nine
"I don’t trust him."
The boys’ reactions were identically voiced, although Ron was standing and glaring and Harry was strangely introverted, hiding his blank stare by facing the wall, fingers clawing at the green mould. Remus was at the edge of his patience, his control as thin and twitchy as his tortured skin.
"Harry, we must…" Remus began, but Ron overrode him.
"We must nothing," he snapped, and Remus wondered when Ron had got to be as tall as himself. "Harry must – NOTHING! That bastard is still out there somewhere, still powerful, still sighted and still with a fucking wand, thank you very much, and the prophecy still stands! If you think I’m going anywhere on Snape’s underground and if you think I’d let him go, you are very much mistaken!"
Remus closed his eyes to gather his next remark, biting back the one he wanted to make, that he was one who hadn’t been mistaken from the first, except there had been others who were even more clear sighted, and had done instead of simply failing to prevent. And now he was failing to convince the boys, and he knew it was because part of him didn’t trust Snape either, not totally. Snape was too good at his deceptions, with years of practice the bitterness tasted as bad now as it had from the start. He took a deep breath, looked at them both with pain and compassion, assuming once more the guise of their gentle Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.
"Well, then," he said in an enquiring tone, as he leant against the wall with his arms folded, "I’m open to suggestions."
"We stay here." Ron said stoutly. "It’s still safe enough, we have you, and Snape – who we know we can trust enough to fight, if not to have us packed off to some other place they’ll try and kill us."
"And what makes you think it’s safe here?" Remus said, his voice giving nothing away, but his eyes, unseen by the one who could have read them, were predatory and focussed.
"The Muggles wouldn’t have known how to take the protection spells down, would they?"
Remus sighed, and Harry looked up at Remus with a heartbreaking smile. "You can hear her too, can’t you?" Ron gave Harry a sharp look. "It’s like she’s standing right here. For goodness sake, Ron! " Harry said in a high voice. "You haven’t the brains of that owl!" Harry reached out in his darkness and touched Ron’s arm. "They found the castle, mate, which means there aren’t any protection spells on it, not anymore. They dropped when Dumbledore did. I’m sorry, Ron, it’s no safer here than anywhere else, and if he came looking, he’d find us here, even if the Muggles can’t."
Ron went so pale his freckles were livid on his face, and he dropped down and clutched Harry in his arms as if he could stop the future with his body. It was unbearable. Harry spoke again, his faced tipped up to Ron’s, running his fingers over his lips, but speaking to Remus. "What do you advise, Remus? Do you trust Snape?"
Remus was glad the boy was blind. Words were easy.
Do you trust Lily?
Yes.
Do you trust Peter?
Yes
Do you trust Sirius?
Y……
Practice made perfect.
"Yes." The word hung in the air, almost visible, at least to Remus; Harry was very still, looking up at Ron, his long fingers mapping the contours of the freckled, frazzled face.
"It’s good enough for me."
"Harry!"
"It’s good enough for me." Harry repeated, gently. He smiled up and pulled Ron down for a soft kiss, bumping noses. "Remus is right, we can’t stay here, and neither can he. And if we haven’t got Remus, we are in Snape’s power completely."
~~~~~~~~~
Remus was getting used to the Masquerade, as he’d dubbed it. The week, an endless span of tests, was nearly out, and thanks to some sterling acting performances (sterling silver he joked to himself, on a good day),the testers were so confused by the range of "reactions" Remus was showing, from shivering to paralysis, (both easy to fake), the tests were still in the skin phase. They had completed the blackened water tests, after which they had covered a patch of his skin with several sheets of foil. Remus learned through listening that two were silver leaf, one was silver foil (aluminium) and one was another base metal as a test.
"Its skin goes pink, every time," the Carpenter called out.
"Then it’s not Arygria, even psychosomatically induced Arygria."
"Obviously." The Walrus riffled through his notes. "Is the wolf’s skin black all over?"
"Mainly, there are patches of pink on a few pads and on its chest."
"Then we need to test his skin too." Remus cocked a mental eyebrow at this snippet of information, but did not react facially. It meant they weren’t going to kill him off for the next four days at least. He found it amusing that they considered the wolf to be a separate entity, and that the mild mannered man naked and face down on the metal bench was still only a creature to them, simply not the same one. He wondered how they could be so short-sighted.
The Walrus approached with a strange device in his hands, strapped it over Remus’ face without any warning.
~~~~~~~~
"Lie still." Severus’ voice cut through the bile miasma; hands pushed him down onto ...wherever he was. He retched and was expertly turned, cleaned up, and rolled on his back. His stomach felt it was being carved out from the inside and his lungs burned so hard he could see it, even in the darkness. He was just beginning to thing he might be dead, and then was terrified he might not be. He couldn’t see, could hardly hear, and his breathing sounded as though he had been running a marathon.
He was only vaguely aware of a soothing cool liquid trickling down his throat, and he brought his hand up in a dog-like reflex to find tubes in his mouth and nose. He tried to speak, but started to choke. Hands touched his face, why couldn’t he see? and lips were at his ear.
"Please, Remus, please. They are only allowing me to do this because they don’t want the Red Cross in here." The voice was urgent, but had a tinge of desperation, and sounded a long, long way away. There was that illusive scent of seaweed again and a feeling of warmth in his veins, warmth and hope. It was all he remembered for a long time, but he slept and dreamt of a beach he thought he’d forgotten.
The next time he remembered waking, he could open his eyes, although it was little use, as it was black as pitch, and he couldn’t move his right arm. He felt around with his left, encountered the unmistakable feel of Severus’ head resting on it, seemingly asleep. The man woke with a start, and there were those hands on his face, this time unmistakably tender, which seemed pointless if they weren’t being watched.
Remus felt his face and body, the tubes were all gone, and he appeared to be fully dressed, in Muggle clothes. Severus’ voice was drifting in and out, as if he was moving about. "Concentrate on regaining your strength. Eat this." Meat, unmistakable to his senses, bloody and rare was pushed into his hands, "We have very little time, four hours at the most before they miss us, I may loathe and despise Potter…"
"The feeling’s mutual, Snape," came Harry’s voice from the darkness.
"… but I would never have got you out without him."
The impossible… He tried his voice, finding it harsh and painful, "Out? How long?"
"Since the idiots made you breathe silver-dust? Three days. You have been drifting in and out of consciousness since then. I’m informed by your torturers that it was "only a little" and they were frankly delighted by their findings. Evidently you changed on the table – an effect I would not have anticipated."
"Changed?" He sat up, his joints fighting against themselves, confirming with every screaming tendon what Severus had said. "Shame I didn’t rip them to pieces."
"You were unconscious even as a wolf and you changed back when I ripped that bloody mask off your face. They panicked, called for me, and they didn’t dare repeat the experiment, thank Merlin, as word of your eventual….vivisection…had leaked through to the Muggle media. It seems that we are not without some supporters. Not before time," he said, viciously. "Your testing was halted while an investigation was started, and you were put into the hospital wing. From there it was an easy jail break, using Mr Potter’s and my own hidden talents."
"You'd have been lighter as a wolf," Ron grumbled.
Remus ate the meat in silence as part of him listened, and another part of him became aware of a cavernous space somewhere behind him, with a breeze that spoke of the chase, storm clouds and the white of seagulls.
"We’re near the sea," he said, sniffing. The clues coalesced in a blurring jigsaw. Full moon. Tomorrow. "Well, our timing could be better."
"We'll have time." Ron's his words tumbling over each other in Weasley profusion. "Honeyduke has the boats. All we need to do …"
"Yes, thank you, Mr Weasley." Severus' voice whiplashed in the dark, ever the tutor, and, to Remus' ears, still loving to be so. "I think you would do better to get some sleep, don't you?"
There was no sight-adjustment, the dark was relentless, but Remus could hear the squeak of bedsprings and the soft mutterings of the boys which meant they were near, but not near enough to hear their whispers, or have theirs be heard. Severus slipped onto the bed and Remus shifted over, unnamed fears taking him. He was surprised when Severus began to push his hands into his robes, silenced when Severus' mouth sank onto his, and swept away into an unchartered haven as Severus brought him to a desperate happiness he was learning to rely on. Remus lay awake for a long time, Severus heavy in his arms, the taste of Severus on his lips. There were no cameras down here.
~~~~
And then, as if he'd known it would end on a beach, here it was. The end of all things. Life was strange, to give you a reason to live, and then deny you the chance of living. Better that the man clinging to him in the soul-battering wind and he had never connected. But then. If they hadn't - perhaps Harry would not be on his way to the Portkey on the second buoy.
"We have to go," Severus said, his feet crunching over the shattered timbers of the useless dinghy, they glanced up at the line of men on the dunes.
"Why." Remus said. It wasn't a question. Both of them knew there was no point going anywhere. They'd been betrayed.
"I'm staying with you." Severus said, his lips on his ear. "I want you to know, I want this. This. THIS is where I want to be. You need to know that. You must try and remember one thing."
"I can't see the boat," Remus said, his heart racing, and knowing he was unable to admit he can't even see the waves. "Tell me what you can see."
Severus' arms tightened around him in the twilight. "They are beyond the surf. It won't take long to get to the buoy." Severus' lips were on the back of his neck and he put a hand behind him, tangling his fingers in Severus' hair. The salt stung his eyes. It was the salt. It was.
"There's always hope," Remus said, looking up, as the moon crawled out of the cloud. "He's alive…"
"And that's all that matters. We did that."
"Yes." He felt the hand in his, but he'd lost control of his fingers.
The ice burned into his ankles and toes, cramping his calves and wrists, and he kept control by breathing fast and shallow. No, keep your mind. Keep. Your. Mind.
"Remus." Severus' voice was as dim as if he were at the end of the beach as the blood pounded. He could hardly hear him for the blood churning around his ears stretching… "Remus! Remember."
All he could do was pant out a sound like a pregnant woman hyperventilating, he had no words now. The familiar white-out started behind his eyes. Everything he should have said, should have been said. And he hadn't been able to say it. The only sounds from his mouth now were muffled with the throat in his jaws.
The men came down the dunes, slipping and sliding, keeping their weapons raised. And the world slowed; the wolf felt sleep coursing through it as the flight reflex failed, and its hindquarters scrabbled for purchase in the shingle.
As the nets fell over them both, and the first to reach them pried the wolf's jaws from the man, a little boat bobbed empty on a heaving sea.
~The End~