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starfishstarSummary: There’s a war on and all is not easy for the young members of the Order of the Phoenix, but Remus – nineteen, in love and sharing a flat with Sirius – is happier than he ever thought it possible to be. …Until one morning a knock at their door heralds an unexpected visitor from Sirius’ past, begging help with a desperate mission.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sketches and schematics covered the living room floor to the point that Remus couldn’t cross the room without shifting or scrunching something that wasn’t meant to be shifted or scrunched. So he perched on the edge of the sofa and watched instead. Morning sunlight streamed in the window, and Sirius and Regulus were sitting on the floor in the middle of the chaos, glaring at each other.
“So you know there’s a cave, but you know nothing about how to get into it, and you haven’t even been there yourself? What kind of reconnaissance is that?” Sirius demanded, staring at Regulus over a swath of parchment spread across the floor, on which Sirius was attempting to create yet another sketch from Regulus’ second-hand descriptions.
Regulus glared back, and snatched the quill away from Sirius. “I don’t know ‘nothing’. I know exactly how to get into it, because Kreacher described it to me. What, you don’t trust Kreacher?”
“About as far as I could throw him,” Sirius muttered, yanking the quill back.
“Look, just because he didn’t show a respectful attitude of servitude towards you – for good reason, I might add –”
“Do you even hear yourself? You’re all up in arms because Voldemort was unkind to your house-elf, but still the thing that matters to you most is whether the house-elf is subservient enough?”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten after all these years of living in unrefined poverty, but the fact is that house-elves choose to serve wizards, because –”
“Oh, don’t tell me you still believe all that crap!”
“Just because you –”
“BOYS,” Remus interrupted, and both heads of dark hair swivelled in his direction. “Do you think maybe we could come up with a plan sometime today, and leave the political argument for later?”
“He wants to burst in there completely unprepared!” Sirius protested.
Despite the gravity of the situation, Remus had to bite his lip against a smile at the thought of Sirius Black, master of the half-baked plan, complaining that someone else was too impetuous.
“And YOU aren’t listening!” Regulus bellowed back. “I’ve told you exactly how it’s got to go. There’s a cave, with a blood sacrifice at the entrance to open it, then a lake. There’s a boat that goes across it to an island, where there’s this basin with a potion that’s got to be got rid of before you can get to the thing itself. Then you take the Horcrux, which is disguised as a locket at the bottom of the basin, and you get out, take it away and destroy it.”
“Vague,” Sirius snapped. “Dangerously vague. What obstacles are in place to stop anyone getting in and out? What guards the lake, what guards the island?”
Regulus snatched the quill back from his brother yet again, and started scribbling notes at the edge of the parchment. “There are Inferi in the water, loads of Inferi, but they don’t come out unless you disturb them, and anyway all you have to do to stop them is Conjure fire. I assume even you are capable of a simple fire-Conjuring spell?”
Sirius glowered, but didn’t deign to answer that jibe. “And the potion?” he demanded. “How do we get rid of that? I’m guessing it’s not as easy as just tipping it over and pouring it out. Does it curse the person who touches it or something?”
Regulus’ eyes shifted to the side and he busied himself with the parchment he was writing on. “No, it doesn’t curse them. And I’ll deal with it when we get there, okay? Don’t worry about that part. You just have to make sure to get the Horcrux and get it out of the cave.”
Sirius glared at him suspiciously, but dropped the matter for the moment. Remus wondered what he was thinking. What both of them were thinking, really. There were so many half-told plans and hidden objectives in this room, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like the way neither of the brothers seemed willing to admit any kind of whole truth to the other.
“Fine,” Sirius said finally, slapping his hand down on the parchment impatiently. “We’ll go tonight, and we’ll hope your information is as good as you seem to think it is. And you stay within my sight the whole time, do you hear me? It’s the two of us all the time, or nothing.”
“The three of us,” Remus interjected from the sofa, and again both of them looked up like they’d forgotten he was there.
“Remus –” Sirius objected.
Remus fixed him with a glare of his own. “Seriously, are we going to have this argument again? You’re not going there alone. It’s all three of us or nothing.”
Their gaze caught and held for a long moment.
Then Sirius shoved himself up from the floor in a sudden rage, kicking the parchment away from him. “Whatever, fine, you all want to get yourselves killed? See if I care. See if I fucking care.”
He stormed across the room to the bedroom and slammed the door behind him so hard that a pair of forgotten wineglasses, abandoned atop the shelves where they kept their record collection, rattled and clinked against each other.
And Remus was left alone in the uncomfortable silence with Regulus.
“Er,” Remus said, unhelpfully, and Regulus looked similarly alarmed. What did one say, anyway, to one’s lover’s estranged and formerly evil or quite possibly still evil brother? Especially when one was a half-Muggle secret werewolf offering shelter to a known pure-blood supremacist?
Remus cast his mind back for any conversation he’d had with Regulus, ever, maybe back at school before things had got quite so awful between Sirius and his family, but he came up blank. Even when Remus was just Sirius’ friend and Regulus was just Sirius’ irritating little brother, Remus was pretty sure they’d never so much as exchanged two words. What would they ever have had to talk to one another about, aside from Sirius?
Right, of course. They had Sirius in common.
“It’s good you came to him,” Remus said quietly. Regulus, who’d been casting his eyes around the room like he was hoping to find an excuse to simply pretend Remus wasn’t there, looked up in surprise. “This is too dangerous to do alone. It’s good that you came to ask Sirius to help you.”
“I almost didn’t come here,” Regulus admitted, still looking shifty-eyed and confused about how to hold a conversation with this unknown quantity that was his brother’s boyfriend. “I thought about asking Kreacher to go back with me, since he knows the way, but I couldn’t ask Kreacher to –” He broke off. “Anyway, it’s too dangerous. It’s not right to order an elf to do something like that. It should be a person, who can make their own decision.”
Remus blinked. Signs of incipient house-elf liberation sentiment? Remus knew better than to mention that to Sirius, though – he’d just launch into another tirade, and now really wasn’t the time.
“Are you…” Regulus asked hesitantly. His normally pale face was going red. “Are you and he…”
“Yeah,” Remus said quickly, hoping to save them both embarrassment. He really, really hoped Regulus wasn’t about to ask for details.
Instead, to his surprise, Regulus burst out, “I knew it! I always thought so, at school. My mates…” He was blushing in earnest now, then went a sudden, ugly, chalky white, maybe as he remembered what those same “mates” had recently done to him. Remus saw his left arm twitch. “Anyway, they said stuff, at school, about Sirius. I used to defend him, tell the blokes they were being idiots, but really, I always thought so, too.”
Remus had nothing to say to that. Sirius’ sexuality was his own to define. And Sirius’ sexuality had always been quite all encompassing. Not that Regulus needed to know quite that much detail.
“Anyway, it’s good,” Regulus muttered, staring very hard at the scrap of parchment nearest to him, his face again unmistakeably red.
“It’s – what’s good?” Remus asked, baffled. He was starting to wonder if it was a family trait, these bizarre, extreme shifts between emotions.
“It’s good he’s got you,” Regulus mumbled almost inaudibly, his cheeks flaming. “He was always so unhappy, yeah? And now he seems happy.”
Remus opened his mouth, then closed it again. He wondered where in all the shouting of the last day Regulus had managed to pick up the impression that Sirius was happy.
But then – it was true, wasn’t it? Even at his angriest, Sirius had some kind of balance about him these days he hadn’t possessed a few years ago, when he’d first run away from his family. Or when he’d played the most awful prank of all, the one that had nearly got Severus Snape killed and Remus expelled. Remus still felt anger shoot through him when his mind grazed over that memory. Sirius had been so cruel, so thoughtless, so selfish. A boy had almost died, all for the sake of Sirius’ petty desire to gain the upper hand in a schoolboy rivalry. And Remus – well, Remus’ life would have been over from that moment onwards, if James hadn’t intervened.
Sirius had apologised, abjectly, over and over, and Remus had accepted those words, because he knew Sirius meant them. But his stomach still curdled with terror when he thought about that night.
Yes, Sirius was a much more stable person these days than he had been then.
But it never would have occurred to Remus to attribute that change in Sirius to his own influence. He thought so often about how much Sirius gave him, Sirius who was so vibrant and wonderfully alive, and he wondered what he, poor and damaged and dangerous as he was, could possibly give in return.
Across the room, the door to the bedroom squeaked open, and Sirius stood framed in it. He was so beautiful, even when looking as abashed as he did now.
“Sorry for shouting,” Sirius said, his eyes finding Remus across the room. “Of course you should come with us.” His body hunched unhappily, like he couldn’t stand the thought of Remus going into danger for his sake. Remus could see him struggling, could see how much he hated this plan, even as he gave in and agreed to it because it was what Remus had asked of him.
Remus stood up. He cast a quick glance at Regulus, still sitting on the floor amidst all the scattered parchment and watching both of them. Then he decided he didn’t care, and crossed the room and kissed Sirius anyway.
(Continue to CHAPTER FIVE)
