On a Windswept Cliff (6/9)
Aug. 8th, 2014 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarON A WINDSWEPT CLIFF
Summary:
On the cliff top where the fearsome Lord Black once stalked, an outcast man meets a big black dog, and things are not as they seem.
Or: The Remus/Sirius gothic romance AU.
CHAPTER SIX
Sirius came the next night, and the next, and the next. They tumbled into bed, delighting in each other, learning each other, each time more intoxicating than the last.
Later in the night, they would lie together, squeezed in close in the narrow bed, laughing and talking.
The only things they never talked about were their own secrets. Sirius never said anything more about his family or his past, where he lived or how he spent his days. Remus didn’t ask.
And Remus didn’t tell him about James and Lily, the best friends he’d allowed to die, or about their son Harry, the godson Remus had abandoned. He didn’t tell Sirius about his parents and how he’d caused their deaths – unintentionally, but he was responsible all the same. He was terrified of what Sirius would think of him if he knew.
His other fear, that deep certainty that anyone he cared too much about would eventually come to harm, he tried to push down, tell himself it didn’t apply here, because Sirius could clearly fend for himself. But it ate at him, in the hours when they were apart.
Perhaps Sirius would eventually tire of him anyway; that would be best. Yes – they could enjoy each other’s company now, until that inescapable point when they would go their separate ways, putting Sirius safely beyond Remus’ reach.
It made Remus’ chest ache to think it.
But when he was with Sirius, he was able to forget everything else. Every night that Sirius came to him was a night Remus was happier than he’d believed possible. He lost himself in Sirius, in the richness of his laugh and the sweep of his hair and the warmth of his hands. Remus had never known one person could hold such endless fascination.
It was always Sirius who came to him. He never invited Remus to his home, and he never suggested they meet by day, but Remus took whatever he was offered, greedily, for as long as he was allowed to have it.
He never neglected his duties that kept the abbey safe – never again would Remus neglect duties of that sort – but the rest of the time he was helplessly distracted. It amazed Remus that Molly didn’t seem to notice he was love-struck and absentminded, his body carrying on with sorting papers and performing tasks, but his head far away over the hills somewhere with Sirius, wherever he was.
“Tell me about Durmstrang,” Remus asked late one night.
The moon was full again, but for once Remus didn’t feel the need to try to escape himself by walking as far as he could over the hills. He’d never felt as safe as he did there in the warmth of Sirius’ arms.
He hoped he wasn’t asking too much. Talking about school seemed, if not neutral, then at least somewhat less fraught than questions of family. “Surely it wasn’t all terrible. Did you have friends there?”
Sirius snorted, his breath gusting gently over Remus’ hair. “With all those little Death Eaters in training? Not likely.”
Remus pictured Sirius, young and lonely and out of place in a world all wrong for him, and ached at the thought. Sirius should have been at Hogwarts. How he would have blossomed there.
“Besides,” Sirius said, shifting so his face was more fully hidden behind Remus’ head, “I never finished school. I left when I was sixteen. There was…something I needed to do. I knew I was the only one who could do it, and it needed to be done.”
His tone was desperately serious, but when Remus tried to turn and look at him, Sirius held him in place where he was.
“Don’t ask me about it, Remus,” he begged. “Please don’t ask.”
“All right,” Remus said, startled and sad. “Of course. I won’t.”
“Thank you,” Sirius whispered into his hair, and Remus felt his own chest expanding with a confusion of grief and fierce protectiveness. He’d never thought he would meet someone even lonelier than himself.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said to Sirius, who was still managing to avoid his eyes. “Your past doesn’t matter to me. Just be exactly who you are.”
Sirius stayed silent a long time, his arms still and tight around Remus’ chest, then suddenly he flung them both around so they were facing each other and kissed Remus with single-minded intensity, the thread of the conversation quickly lost in the heat of their embrace.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Remus’ life became a starkly divided thing.
Nights were wild and warm and Sirius; nights he could be himself in a way he’d never been before, and be adored for it.
Days, he was pleasant, mild-mannered, helpful Remus Lupin, who played with the children, and occasionally went to dinner at Molly and Arthur’s place, and kept a careful eye on the building under his charge.
One afternoon he caught and neutralised a Baffling Hex that had started to work its way free from the stone wall near the former crypt entrance, stopping it almost before it had begun. Molly was terribly pleased with him and declared that she was going to write Dumbledore – again – to say what a treasure Remus was.
When Remus told Sirius about it, laughing over Molly’s effusive praise, Sirius just went still in his arms and said, “I hate it that stuff like that still happens. This whole place ought to be burned to the ground.”
Not for the first time, Remus wondered what exactly connected Sirius to this place. He’d said his family came from the area, but his reactions to any mention of the abbey or its history often seemed excessively personal even for that. A couple of times Remus had woken in the middle of the night to find Sirius leaning against the window, peering up at the abbey ruin that loomed above the little cottage and brooding.
It wasn’t the kind of thing they talked about.
Remus had toyed with the idea of asking Molly, casually in conversation sometime, about any old wizarding families known to have lived nearby, but he always shied away again. Sirius’ privacy was his to keep, not Remus’ to pry at.
And if Remus wished there were some way his daytime and his nighttime lives could join, well, he ought to just be satisfied with what he had.
One evening as it was getting towards dusk and Remus was doing a last circuit of the abbey walls, Molly dashed up to him, eyes wide with panic.
“Remus–” she gasped. “Oh, it’s the twins, they’ve run off, they get away if I don’t keep my eye on them every second, and it wouldn’t matter, but they’ve got their new Unsinkable Enchantment toy boat and they keep trying to sneak off to the water to play with it, but they’re too little to be around water alone, they can’t swim yet, and I only turned round for a moment and–”
Remus reached out and gripped Molly’s shoulders to stop her panicked flow of words. “Molly. Where is it you think they’ve gone?”
She stared at him, trying to focus past her fear. “The beach. Or the river. It could be either, and I can’t check both at once. I’ve sent a message to Arthur, but it hasn’t reached him yet!”
“I’ll go to the beach. You check the river. Go.”
He gave her a gentle push in that direction, towards town, and she ran.
Remus ran, too, to the edge of the cliff, then hurried down the steps that descended the face of the rock. Already he could see the slanting light of the setting sun glinting off the bright red heads of two little boys, up to their waists in the water with their toy boat.
“No, no, no,” Remus whispered as he picked his way down the stones as fast as he could. The waves were too rough here for a child to wade in.
He reached the beach and ran towards the boys, but they’d seen him coming and the more daring of the two – Fred? – laughed and plunged a couple steps further out, with the boat held up teasingly in one hand –
Then the boy stumbled, got a mouthful of water and went down. His brother screamed in fright and stumbled after him, buffeted by an incoming wave even as the water carried the other boy further out.
There was no question of what to do. Remus knew he could swim faster and stronger in his Animagus form. He hated all that his animal form represented – his parents had been killed by a werewolf, and it had been Remus’ own naïve curiosity that had drawn the werewolf to them – but this was no time for Remus’ pride.
Fighting down the guilt that surfaced every time he did it, Remus transformed into a wolf.
He plunged in, the cold waves drawing an involuntary yip of surprise from his wolf’s muzzle even as his powerful forelegs cut through the water. He hadn’t been in his wolf body in so long. His limbs revelled in the freedom of it, even as his human mind rebelled.
He paddled hard, straight towards the twin who had gone down first and was further out. The boy was flailing and coughing, but somehow keeping his head above water for now. When he saw a wolf coming at him, though, he panicked and screamed, getting another mouthful of water, and his head disappeared as the next wave broke over him.
Remus dove and snapped and got his wolf’s jaws firmly fixed on the boy’s T-shirt, dragging him upwards again. The boy – Fred – spluttered and coughed, but he was breathing. Now, to get him to shore.
But George, the other twin, was still in the water too, panicked and wide-eyed and in danger of getting knocked under by each successive wave. Remus couldn’t afford to leave him alone there for even a minute while he brought his brother to shore, but he couldn’t hold onto both boys at once.
The agony of indecision felt endless, as Remus stared helplessly from one to the other of his charges and hoped desperately for some sign of what to do.
And then a shaggy black blur streaked past him and there was the dog, the big black dog, paddling past Remus, the last rays of sunlight flashing off his wet fur as he got his jaws firmly around George’s upper arm and dragged the boy back to shore.
Weak-limbed with relief, Remus followed, paddling hard until he touched bottom again and could drag Fred safely up onto the sand.
Panting, Remus transformed back into his own form. Fred was coughing on the sand at his feet and George was crying, but that meant they were both breathing and alive. The sun was gone now, had set somewhere behind the cliff, but it had left the sky was a brilliant orange, strange and beautiful, and it felt so good to be alive – Remus turned, in a dreamlike confusion, to look for the dog that had inexplicably come to their rescue–
And instead, standing across the sand from him, on the other side of the two boys, was Sirius.
The last of Remus’ sense of reality fizzled out and left him behind.
Where was the dog?
How had Sirius–
Oh.
Oh.
For one long moment, Sirius just stared at Remus, anguish etched deep in his face. Then he ducked his head, turned and pelted away down the beach.
“Sirius!” Remus shouted, but Sirius was already disappearing towards the far end of the beach, where a second path led up to the cliff, and the boys were crying on the sand at Remus’ feet, and he knew his duty was here.
“Shh,” Remus said, kneeling and gathering both boys to him as well as he could. “You’re safe now, you’re all right.”
The boys sniffled and coughed and pressed themselves against Remus’ chest, and as he held them he could feel their wildly fluttering heartbeats, like two tiny, scared birds.
Remus felt much the same, and utterly confused as well.
“Remus!” Molly was running towards them, crossing the sand from the steps that descended the cliff, Arthur just behind her. Tears streamed down her face. “Oh, Remus, you found them, are they okay?”
“They’re fine, Molly, perfectly fine.”
Molly fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her sons. Remus pressed them into her arms and stepped back, as Arthur knelt and wrapped his arms around all three of them, his wife and sons, with eyes for nothing but his twin boys.
Unbidden, Remus saw James and Lily, the two of them leaned in close together with their arms around Harry, cooing and laughing over him, and a hard lump rose in his throat. He took another step back.
Molly looked up. “Remus–” Her voice was broken with fright and relief. “How can I ever thank you?”
“It wasn’t just me.” He looked around, but Sirius was gone. “There was–” What was he supposed to say? This was Sirius’ own secret to tell or keep. Had the boys seen him transform back into a man? “The dog was here, that black dog. He pulled George out of the water while I had Fred.”
Molly rose unsteadily to her feet, one of the boys still wrapped tightly in her arms, while Arthur held the other.
“You saved the boys,” she said. “I still – I can’t believe it. Truly, how can we thank you?”
“Don’t mention it,” Remus said, already feeling wrong to be here, wrong to be part of this family scene of deliverance and relief.
“He can find our boat,” piped up Fred, apparently recovered enough to be back to his usual self. “Mum, the boat’s gone!”
Remus had learned early on to recognise the moment when Molly began gearing up to give one of her children a good talking-to.
“Fred Weasley!” she began. “Do you have ANY IDEA–”
Arthur touched her arm. “Molly. The boys are soaked through, and it’s getting dark. Let’s get them home first, all right?”
Molly visibly drew herself together. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
She pulled out her wand and deftly cast a drying charm on each of the boys, then one on Remus for good measure. With Fred still balanced on one hip, she squeezed Remus’ arm with her other hand and said again, softly, “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said awkwardly. “Really, don’t mention it.”
He saw Molly and Arthur and the boys safely down to the village, then turned back up the hill, declining their offers of something warm to drink at their place.
He needed to be alone.
Remus returned to his cottage in the falling dark and paced back and forth outside it, too full of anxious energy to sit still, but not wanting to go too far away, lest Sirius should come by and Remus missed him.
Sirius was the big black dog.
The black dog was Sirius.
What did it mean? Was he an unregistered Animagus, too? But if so, why the depths of fear in his eyes when he knew Remus had seen him in that form? He’d watched Remus transform, too, and he surely knew Remus wasn’t about to turn him in to the Ministry.
Sirius hadn’t looked like a man who’d transformed by choice. He’d looked like a man caught out at exactly the wrong moment, as the dusky colours of the sunset reflected in his anguished eyes.
The legend of an evil lord who became a big black dog.
An old wizarding family, mysterious and pure-blood, that Sirius refused to talk about.
His visceral reaction to any direct mention of Grimmauld Abbey or its history.
My family were from around here, Sirius had said. They’re all dead now.
Don’t ask me about it, Sirius had said. Please don’t ask.
Remus paced all night outside the cottage, but Sirius didn’t come.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(continue to Chapter Seven)
Summary:
On the cliff top where the fearsome Lord Black once stalked, an outcast man meets a big black dog, and things are not as they seem.
Or: The Remus/Sirius gothic romance AU.
CHAPTER SIX
Sirius came the next night, and the next, and the next. They tumbled into bed, delighting in each other, learning each other, each time more intoxicating than the last.
Later in the night, they would lie together, squeezed in close in the narrow bed, laughing and talking.
The only things they never talked about were their own secrets. Sirius never said anything more about his family or his past, where he lived or how he spent his days. Remus didn’t ask.
And Remus didn’t tell him about James and Lily, the best friends he’d allowed to die, or about their son Harry, the godson Remus had abandoned. He didn’t tell Sirius about his parents and how he’d caused their deaths – unintentionally, but he was responsible all the same. He was terrified of what Sirius would think of him if he knew.
His other fear, that deep certainty that anyone he cared too much about would eventually come to harm, he tried to push down, tell himself it didn’t apply here, because Sirius could clearly fend for himself. But it ate at him, in the hours when they were apart.
Perhaps Sirius would eventually tire of him anyway; that would be best. Yes – they could enjoy each other’s company now, until that inescapable point when they would go their separate ways, putting Sirius safely beyond Remus’ reach.
It made Remus’ chest ache to think it.
But when he was with Sirius, he was able to forget everything else. Every night that Sirius came to him was a night Remus was happier than he’d believed possible. He lost himself in Sirius, in the richness of his laugh and the sweep of his hair and the warmth of his hands. Remus had never known one person could hold such endless fascination.
It was always Sirius who came to him. He never invited Remus to his home, and he never suggested they meet by day, but Remus took whatever he was offered, greedily, for as long as he was allowed to have it.
He never neglected his duties that kept the abbey safe – never again would Remus neglect duties of that sort – but the rest of the time he was helplessly distracted. It amazed Remus that Molly didn’t seem to notice he was love-struck and absentminded, his body carrying on with sorting papers and performing tasks, but his head far away over the hills somewhere with Sirius, wherever he was.
“Tell me about Durmstrang,” Remus asked late one night.
The moon was full again, but for once Remus didn’t feel the need to try to escape himself by walking as far as he could over the hills. He’d never felt as safe as he did there in the warmth of Sirius’ arms.
He hoped he wasn’t asking too much. Talking about school seemed, if not neutral, then at least somewhat less fraught than questions of family. “Surely it wasn’t all terrible. Did you have friends there?”
Sirius snorted, his breath gusting gently over Remus’ hair. “With all those little Death Eaters in training? Not likely.”
Remus pictured Sirius, young and lonely and out of place in a world all wrong for him, and ached at the thought. Sirius should have been at Hogwarts. How he would have blossomed there.
“Besides,” Sirius said, shifting so his face was more fully hidden behind Remus’ head, “I never finished school. I left when I was sixteen. There was…something I needed to do. I knew I was the only one who could do it, and it needed to be done.”
His tone was desperately serious, but when Remus tried to turn and look at him, Sirius held him in place where he was.
“Don’t ask me about it, Remus,” he begged. “Please don’t ask.”
“All right,” Remus said, startled and sad. “Of course. I won’t.”
“Thank you,” Sirius whispered into his hair, and Remus felt his own chest expanding with a confusion of grief and fierce protectiveness. He’d never thought he would meet someone even lonelier than himself.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said to Sirius, who was still managing to avoid his eyes. “Your past doesn’t matter to me. Just be exactly who you are.”
Sirius stayed silent a long time, his arms still and tight around Remus’ chest, then suddenly he flung them both around so they were facing each other and kissed Remus with single-minded intensity, the thread of the conversation quickly lost in the heat of their embrace.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Remus’ life became a starkly divided thing.
Nights were wild and warm and Sirius; nights he could be himself in a way he’d never been before, and be adored for it.
Days, he was pleasant, mild-mannered, helpful Remus Lupin, who played with the children, and occasionally went to dinner at Molly and Arthur’s place, and kept a careful eye on the building under his charge.
One afternoon he caught and neutralised a Baffling Hex that had started to work its way free from the stone wall near the former crypt entrance, stopping it almost before it had begun. Molly was terribly pleased with him and declared that she was going to write Dumbledore – again – to say what a treasure Remus was.
When Remus told Sirius about it, laughing over Molly’s effusive praise, Sirius just went still in his arms and said, “I hate it that stuff like that still happens. This whole place ought to be burned to the ground.”
Not for the first time, Remus wondered what exactly connected Sirius to this place. He’d said his family came from the area, but his reactions to any mention of the abbey or its history often seemed excessively personal even for that. A couple of times Remus had woken in the middle of the night to find Sirius leaning against the window, peering up at the abbey ruin that loomed above the little cottage and brooding.
It wasn’t the kind of thing they talked about.
Remus had toyed with the idea of asking Molly, casually in conversation sometime, about any old wizarding families known to have lived nearby, but he always shied away again. Sirius’ privacy was his to keep, not Remus’ to pry at.
And if Remus wished there were some way his daytime and his nighttime lives could join, well, he ought to just be satisfied with what he had.
One evening as it was getting towards dusk and Remus was doing a last circuit of the abbey walls, Molly dashed up to him, eyes wide with panic.
“Remus–” she gasped. “Oh, it’s the twins, they’ve run off, they get away if I don’t keep my eye on them every second, and it wouldn’t matter, but they’ve got their new Unsinkable Enchantment toy boat and they keep trying to sneak off to the water to play with it, but they’re too little to be around water alone, they can’t swim yet, and I only turned round for a moment and–”
Remus reached out and gripped Molly’s shoulders to stop her panicked flow of words. “Molly. Where is it you think they’ve gone?”
She stared at him, trying to focus past her fear. “The beach. Or the river. It could be either, and I can’t check both at once. I’ve sent a message to Arthur, but it hasn’t reached him yet!”
“I’ll go to the beach. You check the river. Go.”
He gave her a gentle push in that direction, towards town, and she ran.
Remus ran, too, to the edge of the cliff, then hurried down the steps that descended the face of the rock. Already he could see the slanting light of the setting sun glinting off the bright red heads of two little boys, up to their waists in the water with their toy boat.
“No, no, no,” Remus whispered as he picked his way down the stones as fast as he could. The waves were too rough here for a child to wade in.
He reached the beach and ran towards the boys, but they’d seen him coming and the more daring of the two – Fred? – laughed and plunged a couple steps further out, with the boat held up teasingly in one hand –
Then the boy stumbled, got a mouthful of water and went down. His brother screamed in fright and stumbled after him, buffeted by an incoming wave even as the water carried the other boy further out.
There was no question of what to do. Remus knew he could swim faster and stronger in his Animagus form. He hated all that his animal form represented – his parents had been killed by a werewolf, and it had been Remus’ own naïve curiosity that had drawn the werewolf to them – but this was no time for Remus’ pride.
Fighting down the guilt that surfaced every time he did it, Remus transformed into a wolf.
He plunged in, the cold waves drawing an involuntary yip of surprise from his wolf’s muzzle even as his powerful forelegs cut through the water. He hadn’t been in his wolf body in so long. His limbs revelled in the freedom of it, even as his human mind rebelled.
He paddled hard, straight towards the twin who had gone down first and was further out. The boy was flailing and coughing, but somehow keeping his head above water for now. When he saw a wolf coming at him, though, he panicked and screamed, getting another mouthful of water, and his head disappeared as the next wave broke over him.
Remus dove and snapped and got his wolf’s jaws firmly fixed on the boy’s T-shirt, dragging him upwards again. The boy – Fred – spluttered and coughed, but he was breathing. Now, to get him to shore.
But George, the other twin, was still in the water too, panicked and wide-eyed and in danger of getting knocked under by each successive wave. Remus couldn’t afford to leave him alone there for even a minute while he brought his brother to shore, but he couldn’t hold onto both boys at once.
The agony of indecision felt endless, as Remus stared helplessly from one to the other of his charges and hoped desperately for some sign of what to do.
And then a shaggy black blur streaked past him and there was the dog, the big black dog, paddling past Remus, the last rays of sunlight flashing off his wet fur as he got his jaws firmly around George’s upper arm and dragged the boy back to shore.
Weak-limbed with relief, Remus followed, paddling hard until he touched bottom again and could drag Fred safely up onto the sand.
Panting, Remus transformed back into his own form. Fred was coughing on the sand at his feet and George was crying, but that meant they were both breathing and alive. The sun was gone now, had set somewhere behind the cliff, but it had left the sky was a brilliant orange, strange and beautiful, and it felt so good to be alive – Remus turned, in a dreamlike confusion, to look for the dog that had inexplicably come to their rescue–
And instead, standing across the sand from him, on the other side of the two boys, was Sirius.
The last of Remus’ sense of reality fizzled out and left him behind.
Where was the dog?
How had Sirius–
Oh.
Oh.
For one long moment, Sirius just stared at Remus, anguish etched deep in his face. Then he ducked his head, turned and pelted away down the beach.
“Sirius!” Remus shouted, but Sirius was already disappearing towards the far end of the beach, where a second path led up to the cliff, and the boys were crying on the sand at Remus’ feet, and he knew his duty was here.
“Shh,” Remus said, kneeling and gathering both boys to him as well as he could. “You’re safe now, you’re all right.”
The boys sniffled and coughed and pressed themselves against Remus’ chest, and as he held them he could feel their wildly fluttering heartbeats, like two tiny, scared birds.
Remus felt much the same, and utterly confused as well.
“Remus!” Molly was running towards them, crossing the sand from the steps that descended the cliff, Arthur just behind her. Tears streamed down her face. “Oh, Remus, you found them, are they okay?”
“They’re fine, Molly, perfectly fine.”
Molly fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her sons. Remus pressed them into her arms and stepped back, as Arthur knelt and wrapped his arms around all three of them, his wife and sons, with eyes for nothing but his twin boys.
Unbidden, Remus saw James and Lily, the two of them leaned in close together with their arms around Harry, cooing and laughing over him, and a hard lump rose in his throat. He took another step back.
Molly looked up. “Remus–” Her voice was broken with fright and relief. “How can I ever thank you?”
“It wasn’t just me.” He looked around, but Sirius was gone. “There was–” What was he supposed to say? This was Sirius’ own secret to tell or keep. Had the boys seen him transform back into a man? “The dog was here, that black dog. He pulled George out of the water while I had Fred.”
Molly rose unsteadily to her feet, one of the boys still wrapped tightly in her arms, while Arthur held the other.
“You saved the boys,” she said. “I still – I can’t believe it. Truly, how can we thank you?”
“Don’t mention it,” Remus said, already feeling wrong to be here, wrong to be part of this family scene of deliverance and relief.
“He can find our boat,” piped up Fred, apparently recovered enough to be back to his usual self. “Mum, the boat’s gone!”
Remus had learned early on to recognise the moment when Molly began gearing up to give one of her children a good talking-to.
“Fred Weasley!” she began. “Do you have ANY IDEA–”
Arthur touched her arm. “Molly. The boys are soaked through, and it’s getting dark. Let’s get them home first, all right?”
Molly visibly drew herself together. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
She pulled out her wand and deftly cast a drying charm on each of the boys, then one on Remus for good measure. With Fred still balanced on one hip, she squeezed Remus’ arm with her other hand and said again, softly, “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said awkwardly. “Really, don’t mention it.”
He saw Molly and Arthur and the boys safely down to the village, then turned back up the hill, declining their offers of something warm to drink at their place.
He needed to be alone.
Remus returned to his cottage in the falling dark and paced back and forth outside it, too full of anxious energy to sit still, but not wanting to go too far away, lest Sirius should come by and Remus missed him.
Sirius was the big black dog.
The black dog was Sirius.
What did it mean? Was he an unregistered Animagus, too? But if so, why the depths of fear in his eyes when he knew Remus had seen him in that form? He’d watched Remus transform, too, and he surely knew Remus wasn’t about to turn him in to the Ministry.
Sirius hadn’t looked like a man who’d transformed by choice. He’d looked like a man caught out at exactly the wrong moment, as the dusky colours of the sunset reflected in his anguished eyes.
The legend of an evil lord who became a big black dog.
An old wizarding family, mysterious and pure-blood, that Sirius refused to talk about.
His visceral reaction to any direct mention of Grimmauld Abbey or its history.
My family were from around here, Sirius had said. They’re all dead now.
Don’t ask me about it, Sirius had said. Please don’t ask.
Remus paced all night outside the cottage, but Sirius didn’t come.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(continue to Chapter Seven)
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