In Living Memory

In Living Memory

Harry Potter woke in a strange bed on the morning of his sixteenth birthday with a familiar heaviness about his heart.

Several members of the Order had called for him at Privet Drive the day before and taken him to their new headquarters, a remote farmhouse called Spinners End that belonged to Professor Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth. Ginny and Tonks had been burning incense in an attempt to get rid of the overpowering odor of goats, but so far they’d only succeeded in making the house smell like goats that had been dipped in patchouli, which Harry was not entirely sure was an improvement.

He went down to breakfast, but he didn’t feel like eating much. The trouble with being back in the wizarding world was the constant reminders of things that he would just as soon forget. This time last year, he thought, the others would all have been at Grimmauld Place with Sirius, and he would have been at the Dursleys waiting desperately for news and fuming because he’d heard nothing. He’d had no idea how lucky he was. He would give anything to have had that time back again.

Mrs. Weasley looked sharply at him when she noticed his lack of appetite, but said nothing. Harry made an elaborate show of unwrapping the presents that stood beside his plate: broom polish and a sack of Fizzing Whizzbees from Ron, a woolly hat from Hermione (her knitting was improving, but unfortunately the only kind of hat she knew how to make had slits in the top for house-elf ears). A tube of what looked like hair gel from Fred and George; the card warned that you would grow donkey’s ears if you used it, so Harry supposed it would come in handy in case he ever felt like wearing the hat.

He thanked everyone mechanically and went straight back to his own room after breakfast, shutting the door behind him. Really, he just wanted to be away from people for a while, and he was mildly annoyed when a quiet, hoarse voice on the other side of the door called, “May I come in?”

Harry opened the door. Professor Lupin stood there, still in his frayed dressing gown. He looked wan and shaky after the full moon, and he was carrying a sort of stone bowl that was plainly very heavy. Instinctively, Harry took the object from him and set it down on the windowsill without looking at it too closely.

“It’s a birthday present from Sirius,” Lupin explained. “Something he made before he died. I honestly don’t know if it’ll make things better or worse, but I know he wanted you to have it.” He reached into the pocket of his tatty dressing gown and took out an envelope, which he handed to Harry. “He wrote a letter that explains about it. You’d better read it first.” He looked around the room a little awkwardly and added, “And, Harry? If you want to talk, I’ll be right here.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“Happy birthday.”

After Lupin had gone, Harry took a closer look at the object. He saw that it was a basin carved all around with ancient symbols and filled with an ethereal silvery substance. He recognized it as a Pensieve, although it was rather smaller than the one Dumbledore owned. But why would Sirius think he needed a Pensieve? Perhaps it was meant to help him with Occlumency?

Puzzled, he opened the letter.

1 May 1996

Dear Harry,

It’s been a few weeks since you told us what you’d seen in Snape’s Pensieve, but I’ve had a hard time getting it out of my mind. I wish we’d had more time to talk that night, because there were so many things I would have liked to tell you. You didn’t see any of us at our best, you know. Snivellus hasn’t changed a bit, he’s still an absolute git and I wouldn’t put it past him to have left that memory out for you on purpose – but your father certainly did, and I want you to know what sort of man he was, and a little about the good times. So I made this for you out of some of my favourite memories. Hope you enjoy, and don’t worry about returning them – I’ve had them all to myself for years.

All my best,

Sirius

P.S. If you thought your date with Cho went badly, check out Moony and Bertha Jorkins. I think it’ll amuse you.

The silvery surface of the basin rippled and shimmered hypnotically. Harry leaned forward, took a deep breath, and steeled himself for the cold black plunge into the Pensieve. He fell down, down into the swirling mist of memories.

 

                                                            *          *          *

He was in the Three Broomsticks, huddled in a very cramped position beneath a table, almost on top of his father and Sirius. They looked about fifteen years old, and if he craned his neck backward and looked out from under the table, he could see a very young Madam Rosmerta, no older than twenty, standing behind the bar. Nobody in the pub seemed to notice James or Sirius, and Harry realized that they must all be under the Invisibility Cloak, although he could feel neither the silky surface of the cloak or the rough stone of the floor.

A young Remus Lupin was sitting at another table. He was holding hands, rather awkwardly, with a plump girl who was wearing a scarf in the Hufflepuff house colors, and doing his best to evade a very pointed line of questions about why he spent so much time in the Hospital Wing.

James nudged Sirius. “What was that line from the Muggle television program he was telling us about? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition?”

Sirius snorted. “Well, if he’s going to go on a date with Bertha Jorkins, he should’ve expected it. Looks sort of like a deer caught in front of the Knight Bus, doesn’t he?”

Harry shifted his weight and leaned forward to listen. (It was weird, huddling under an Invisibility Cloak with two dead people who didn’t know he was there, especially when one of them could have been his twin brother but was, in fact, his father.)

At last Bertha Jorkins changed the subject. “Why do you and your friends have such strange nicknames?”

Remus choked on his butterbeer and muttered, “Long story.”

“Ooh,” cooed Bertha. “Long stories are my favorite kind. Do tell.”

“All right.” Remus looked as if he were doing some very fast thinking. “Well, we call Peter Wormtail because he has – an opossum fetish. Draws pictures of them all over his notebooks, sleeps with a stuffed one, even dreams about them. Last Sunday he woke up shouting Yes! Baby! I love that prehensile thing you do!”

Bertha giggled. Underneath the Invisibility Cloak, James and Sirius’ shoulders were shaking as they struggled not to make any noise.

“And James?” Bertha asked. “Why do you call him Prongs?”

“Oh, er, because there was this unfortunate incident in Muggle Studies one time. Professor O’Malley was showing the class how to use a plug, and James decided to practice with his nose as a socket, and he ended up getting both prongs of the plug wedged up his nostrils. It took Madam Pomfrey three hours to dislodge it.”

“Wow,” said Bertha, wide-eyed. “James really isn’t very bright, is he?”

 

“Hey!” whispered James fiercely. “Isn’t this slander or something?”

Sirius lay flat on the floor of the pub, limbs twitching with barely suppressed mirth. “Well, she’s spot-on about the ‘not very bright’ part, anyway.”

James scowled and punched him in the arm. “Just wait ‘til it’s your turn, mate. Let’s see what he says about you.”

Both boys fell silent and strained to catch the rest of the conversation. Remus had warmed to his subject by now and was plainly enjoying himself. “... And Sirius is ‘Padfoot’ because his auntie sent him a pair of fuzzy bat slippers for Christmas when we were first-years, and he liked them so much he wore them day and night for a month. He went to classes and everything in fuzzy bat slippers. McGonagall finally got so sick of them she Transfigured them into pink bunnies, but he still refused to take them off...”

Sirius glowered. “This has gone far enough.”

“Agreed,” said James.

They crawled out from under the table and swept off the Invisibility Cloak with a single swift motion, just as Bertha was saying, “And what about you? Where does ‘Moony’ come from?”

“It comes from the time he decided to moon the Ravenclaw girls’ dormitory,” Sirius announced.

“Really?” said Bertha. “I thought boys weren’t allowed in the girls’ dormitories.”

“They aren’t,” said James. “That’s why he had to do it by broomstick – ”

“– riding backward –”

“– with his ar- ... er, posterior smack up against the window –”

“He was going for sort of a pressed ham effect, you see –”

“Only then the window broke, and we had to spend the rest of the weekend digging shards of glass out of him –”

“And his rear end just hasn’t been the same since. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

This was evidently an understatement, because Remus had gone beet red and was staring at the floor as if he hoped it would swallow him up. Bertha Jorkins seemed torn between fascination, pity, and utter disgust. Mercifully, the latter won out.

“I’ve just remembered. I told Florence I was going to meet her in Madam Puddifoot’s. ‘Bye now. Um, I’ll get in touch.” She got to her feet and scuttled out of the pub as quickly as possible.

“Thanks, guys,” spluttered Remus as soon as she had gone. “What did I do to deserve that?”

“Fuzzy bat slippers,” said Sirius.

“And plugs up the nose,” said James. “Anyway, sorry for interrupting, mate, but you’ll thank us later.” He clapped Remus on the shoulder and did his best to look sage. “Let’s face it, some dates really need to be put out of their misery.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Harry spent most of the day wandering through the Pensieve. Another Hogsmeade weekend: his parents, a few years older now, were sitting at a table with Sirius and a girl he didn’t recognize; they were all laughing, and he could tell his mother didn’t object to his dad’s company at all. One of the early Order meetings: everybody looked very young, and while they all were discussing the war, there was a general air of hope and good fellowship. His father pulling his mother into a slow dance at their wedding (a black-haired girl of about six tried to do a highly uncoordinated dance of her own in a corner, crashed into one of the tables, and ended up with a face full of wedding cake; Harry smiled, recognizing little Nymphadora Tonks). His own christening, attended only by his parents, Sirius, and an elderly priest; his mother’s face was thinner, and everyone looked solemn. Himself as an older baby, taking his first shaky steps across a green lawn spotted with daisies in front of a little stone house that looked oddly familiar.

The last memory took him back to Gryffindor Tower. It was nighttime and Remus was stretched out in front of the common room fire, reading a book that Harry recognized as the standard text for N.E.W.T.-level Charms.

Sirius strode into the room with a couple of broomsticks tucked under his arm. “Let’s go flying,” he said abruptly.

Remus shut the book. A flicker of something that might have been suspicion crossed his face, but it lasted only for a second. “Won’t Prongs want to come?”

“Lover-boy went out for a walk with Evans. It’ll have to be you and me.”

“All right.” But Harry thought there was still something faintly uneasy about his manner.

The carried the brooms to the top of the tower; Harry wasn’t quite sure how he would manage to follow them, but somehow he found himself balanced on one of the broomsticks just behind an oblivious Remus. The night wind was cool on his face, and as Remus kicked off from the castle window he felt the little thrill of joy he always experienced when he flew.

They soared over the Forbidden Forest, sometimes looping high over the treetops, sometimes weaving in and out among them as closely as they dared. “Race you!” called Sirius over his shoulder, and Remus leaned forward, flying faster. (Instinctively, Harry tried to do the same, before he remembered he wasn’t really there at all.) Hogsmeade was a blur beneath them as they sped past; beyond it, the lake stretched out black and ruffled by the wind.

Remus pressed closer, nearly flattening himself against the broomstick. Suddenly he shot out underneath the other flier, ahead by a few yards as they reached the deserted expanse of moorland that lay beyond the castle and the village. Both boys slowed and banked suddenly, pulling away before the stronger winds of the wild country could send them spinning out of control.

“Good flying.” Sirius commented as he steadied his course.

“Thanks,” said Remus breathlessly. “You too.”

“D’you want to stop by the Marauder’s Cove on the way back? It’s early yet.”

“Sure. Haven’t been there since fifth year.”

“Me either. Too much ... stuff going on since then, you know.”

The Marauder’s Cove turned out to be a small recess in the lakeshore, inaccessible except by broomstick because of the brush and swampland on either side. There was a small stretch of sandy beach, and a fallen tree that served as a makeshift bench.

Sirius removed a flask from the pocket of his robes, took a long swallow of something, and handed it to Remus.

Remus drank, coughed, and said, “That’s good stuff. Ogden’s, right? How’d you smuggle it past Filch?”

“Same way we got here. Broomstick.”

“Remember when we used to think we were so cool for sneaking butterbeers out here?”

“Yeah. And the time we tried to smoke home-cured mandrake leaves?”

“Ugh. I think that took about ten years off my life, and it was your idea.”

Sirius laughed, and they passed the flask back and forth a few times in silence.

“Moony, there’s something I need to tell you. It’s about ... that night.”

“It’s over. Done with. You said you were sorry, and I forgave you. We don’t need to talk about it any more.”

“We do. Because you keep giving me this look whenever we’re alone together, like you don’t trust me. And maybe you’re right, but there’s something I want you to know.” Sirius took a gulp of the firewhiskey and turned his face toward the far shore of the lake. “I did some research about the Noble and Most Ancient House. Dear old Mum would be so proud if she knew.”

Remus waited.

“Did you know that at least a third of the Blacks have been insane when they died? And I don’t mean a little bit touched, I mean raving. Padded walls and all that. There’s some story about an ancestor of ours in the twelfth century who cursed the family with it, but I reckon it’s in the genes ... I caught my cousin Bellatrix sticking pins and needles in her arms once when we were kids. She was laughing, like it didn’t hurt her at all. And my mother used to scream at night and wake the whole house – said she could hear banshees coming after us all, and my father couldn’t make her understand all the screeching and wailing was coming from her...” His voice trailed off.

“Sirius – that’s awful, but it hasn’t got anything to do with you. You’re not made of the same stuff they are.”

“But I am. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s – why it happened.”

“Are you saying you weren’t in your right mind?”

“I – I think I wasn’t, honest to God. I don’t remember that afternoon very well, I only know he said something about how if I was going to be friends with half-blood filth I’d better keep an eye on where they were sneaking around to at night. He said some other things too that I wouldn’t repeat for a hundred Galleons. And then it was like ... like I was staring down the black walls of a tunnel that was closing in around me until there was only a little spot of light at the far end, and the only thing I could see was Snape and how much I hated him ... I wasn’t thinking about what would happen to you if he found you, or – thinking at all, really. There was just the tunnel, and a feeling like my brain was on fire ... The next think I remember after that was Prongs hitting me in the face and asking me how I could be such a blinking idiot. That must have been hours later.”

“What did James say when you told him all this?”

“I’ve never told him. Only you. Because, well, I reckon you must know a little about what it’s like... and you’re not going to pat me on the back and tell me it’s all my imagination and everything’s going to be all right, or anything naff like that.”

“No. It’s never exactly all right, is it?”

“I keep waiting for it to happen again. Wondering if I really will kill somebody next time.”

Remus nodded, and hesitated a moment before he spoke. “Yeah. I do have a pretty good idea how it is. But if it’s anything like what I’ve got, it’s the sort of thing you can fight – and win. With help from all of us.” He paused again, as though weighing whether this was a promise that could be kept, and added, “And we’re always going to be there, no matter what. You know that, don’t you?”

“Thanks, Moony.”

“None needed. It’s what you did for me.”

Sirius took a last swallow of firewhiskey and threw the empty flask out into the lake, its path a silvery arc in the starlight. The two boys gathered up their brooms and soared out into the open sky in silent, unhurried flight.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Harry remained on the lake shore, troubled by a sudden and very definite feeling that he’d had a little too much. He realized that he had never found his own way out of a Pensieve before, but had always been pulled out by some adult’s hand, and he wondered if it was possible to get lost inside one for good. Battling vertigo, he groped with both hands until he felt what he was almost certain were the sides of the stone basin, and pushed with all his strength ...

He landed on his feet in his own bedroom, dazed and disoriented and suddenly flooded with thoughts of Sirius, Sirius as a teenager and as a laughing young man at his parents’ wedding. Sirius at Grimmauld Place, growing more and more dispirited and withdrawn. He suppressed a mad desire to dive back into the luminous mist of the Pensieve and not come out, ever.

If you want to talk, I’ll be right here.

Very carefully, Harry set the Pensieve on the top shelf of his wardrobe and shut it away. He stepped tentatively out of his room, into a house that seemed very empty and very still. The late afternoon sun was streaming through the wide windows, and he could see Tonks and most of the Weasleys playing pickup Quidditch in the open fields outside.

He found Lupin curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea, still looking tired, but with a little more color in his face than he’d had in the morning.

He set aside the book he was reading and gave Harry a small half-smile. “Good present?” he asked.

“Yeah. That is – I think so.” Harry caught his breath; ever since he’d come out of the Pensieve, he’d had a strange splintery feeling in his chest.

“Sit down.” His former professor drew up his feet and made room for him on the sofa. He watched Harry closely as he sat down. “Is it anything in particular?”

“No.” Harry toyed with the fringe on a pillow and thought about how he was never, ever going to be able to thank Sirius. “Yes. I can’t believe he gave up all his good memories for me. I feel like – like a dementor.”

Lupin shook his head and placed a cautious hand on Harry’s shoulder. His touch was light but steady. “You’re not in the least like a dementor. This was something he chose to do for you. The worst thing dementors take away from people is their freedom to love ... and to give. You did just the opposite. You were one of the things that kept him sane over the years.” He added after a moment, “Or as sane as he ever was. You know about that now, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” Harry wondered for a fraction of a second how Lupin knew that he knew, and then it dawned on him that he had seen that last memory from Lupin’s perspective, when everything else had been from Sirius’ point of view. “That memory was yours, wasn’t it? Not his?”

“Yes.” Lupin turned his face toward the window, as if looking at something very far away, and said, slowly, “I don’t know whether he would have shared that with you. But I thought it was something you ought to know about him ... He never gave into it, he fought it with everything he had – but all the same, it was a big part of who he was, and something you would have had to face sooner or later if he were alive ... Did I do right?”

Harry nodded. “It didn’t really surprise me, to tell you the truth. I think I already knew.” He was silent for a moment, remembering once again his godfather’s fits of moroseness and the smell of stale liquor that had hung about the house in Grimmauld Place, but also thinking of a pair of callused hands tying Father Christmas beards on the house-elf heads, and a voice more loud than tuneful, singing God rest ye merry, hippogriffs, let nothing you dismay ... He found himself humming along under his breath: O tidings of ferrets and joy, ferrets and joy... He remembered that it was July and stopped abruptly, embarrassed. It was the sort of thing Luna Lovegood would do.

Lupin’s mouth twitched. “Don’t you start singing that. It’s seven months since Christmas, and I’ve only just been able to get it out of my head.”

“Sorry.” Harry laughed, a little shakily because of course nothing was really all right, because Christmas seemed a million years away, because both of them missed Sirius too much even to talk about it; but the raw edges of grief were beginning to soften and he was starting to see Lupin not just as his favorite Defence professor, but as a boy who had been on an appallingly bad date with Bertha Jorkins, and who had shared firewhiskey and confidences with his godfather under a starlit sky.

He remembered the sweep of the night wind on his face in the last Pensieve memory, and the way seventeen-year-old Remus had leaned forward until he became almost a piece with his broom, in a way that spoke of hours of racing practice. “You really like flying, don’t you?” he asked. “The same way I do?”

Lupin pushed a few strands of hair out of his eyes and smiled, looking much younger suddenly – the way he ought to have looked, Harry thought, if everything had been different. “Yes. I do.”

“I’ve been thinking of taking the Firebolt out, now that I’ve got it back and all. Would you like to come with me sometime?”

“Thanks. I’d like that, Harry.”

“And, um...” Harry wasn’t quite sure how to phrase his other question. It had struck him forcibly that he would never be able to ask Sirius who his date for the Hogsmeade weekend had been or where his parents’ house had stood, and now he felt a sense of urgency that was probably better left unspoken – a feeling that he’d better ask Lupin while he still could. “Could you tell me more about my parents?”

“Sure. Tell me what you’d like to know...”