Destruction Where You Stand

Chapter Seven: Between the Dawn and the Day

"I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the school-boy's brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.""

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, My Lost Youth

Remus still takes the Prophet, though he's considered giving it up more than once. He has spent the war watching the faces of friends and acquaintances move over its pages and then move on - to death, to Azkaban, to Voldemort's side, the entire world passing away while headlines scream destruction and smear black ink onto his fingertips. The ink turns up later, smudged from his fingers onto lightswitches and china and the edges of pages, tragedy transferred like bruises from surface to surface while Remus tries not to wonder whose death-notices live on in the various blurs scattered darkly around his flat.

Today the headline reads 'Justice Served' in two-inch type, and Remus' breath catches in his throat with a nauseated gravity that feels familiarly like terror, especially when he sees the words 'Dementor's Kiss' immediately below the headline. The idea that Sirius, too, is about to vanish into columns of newsprint and one last photograph is almost too much to bear, but he forces himself to open the paper anyway, and ignores the tremors in his hands.

His relief at seeing the name Lestrange - not Sirius, it's not Sirius - is profound enough to weaken his knees, and he sits down hard on one of the kitchen chairs, closing his eyes against a shudder of delayed reaction.

After a minute he opens them again, and picks the paper back up. "Dementor's Kiss Administered to Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange," he reads.

Below the headlines, Bellatrix looks expressionlessly back at him, Rodolphus blank and docile beside her. Both of them look faded, wiped slate-clean, and sit so still that Remus might have thought the photograph taken with a Muggle camera if Barty Crouch were not sitting sharp and smug in the foreground, throwing occasional looks of triumph over his shoulder at the pair of them. The gloating expression on his face is almost worse than the emptiness on his prisoners'.

Bellatrix's heavy-lidded eyes look rain-washed, empty and strangely colourless, with all of their sparkling malevolence gone. Remus finds this vacant, no-longer-Bellatrix more unsettling than the woman he remembers from either Hogwarts or the long years of the war. It is too easy to see Sirius' face in hers now that she is no longer behind it: to note the similarities of high cheekbones and full-lipped mouths, of delicate eyesockets and glossy black hair, to imagine Sirius' vacated gray eyes staring sightlessly at him from undeniable newsprint lines, and he puts the paper on the table unread before rising and crossing his flat to the bedroom.

He dresses quickly, and is about to slip quietly out his front door when a tapping at the window stops him. He pushes aside the curtains. Instead of the usual owl, though, it is Fawkes waiting on the other side of the glass, a brilliant splash of colour in the gray morning. He opens the window and lets the phoenix in, and Fawkes waits patiently as Remus unties the message from his leg, bumping his plumed head once against Remus' wrist before flying off.

The message is of course from Dumbledore, and Remus wastes no time in Flooing to the Headmaster's office as requested. Moody is already there when Remus arrives, his scarred face dark with anger and frustration. Dumbledore looks up with a smile as Remus picks himself up off the carpet and brushes soot out of his clothing.

"Remus," he says, "thank you for coming. Would you like a biscuit?"

Remus would like Dumbledore to stop offering him sweets as if he were still a child, though he can't help feeling a little petty about it, especially after Dumbledore gives him a knowing smile and says:

"Alastor's had two already."

"Oh, give it a rest, Dumbledore," an unfamiliar voice says sharply. "Time and place, please."

"There is always time for biscuits, Phineas," Dumbledore says serenely, and Remus realizes that the Headmaster is addressing the portrait directly across from his desk.

When the portrait sees Remus looking, he lifts one dark eyebrow in sardonic greeting. Remus nods at him politely.

Phineas Nigellus has the same colouring and aristocratic bone structure as the rest of his family, and Remus winces internally at the sight of yet another face that is not quite Sirius'. It strikes him suddenly that this portrait of a man nearly sixty years in his grave is now more alive than Bellatrix is, more alive than Sirius will be if the Dementors catch him, and he shudders in renewed horror at the memory of the empty faces in the Prophet that morning.

"All right, lad?" Moody asks gruffly.

"I'm fine," Remus says. "What's happening? Is there news of Sirius?"

"Only in the sense that there isn't any news of Sirius," Moody answers. "We've got another problem at the moment. I turned my badge in last night."

"What!?" Remus demands, trying hard to keep the incredulous dismay out of his voice. From the quick, hard look that Moody directs at him, he's not doing a very good job of it.

"Crouch would have taken it either way," Moody growls. He is furious, and he isn't bothering to hide the fact. "Damn it, the man brought Dementors into my interrogation room! He let them Kiss my prisoners! What else was I supposed to do?"

Remus bites back the instant retort on his tongue. He would have stayed through anything for Sirius' sake, but it isn't fair of him to ask the same sacrifice of Moody.

"What sort of hearing were they given?" he asks instead.

"Hearing?" Moody asks scornfully, "I had fifteen minutes in an interrogation room with the two of them - does that count? Crouch could have asked for any sentence he wanted, Kiss included, and gotten it - but you know how he is. He acts as though he's on some holy crusade to end the practice of Dark magic once and for all. Once he makes up his mind as to what's right, he acts before anyone else has a chance to, and steamrolls anyone who might be in his way. Bagnold certainly wouldn't have authorized the Kiss like that without Crouch egging her on." He snorts in disgust. "Bellatrix was the Dark Lord's favourite. Merlin only knows the sort of information we could have gotten out of her. Unfortunately, using Veritaserum on prisoners doesn't play as well in the press as sentencing two Death Eaters to the Dementor's Kiss does."

"No," Remus murmurs. He knows that the Ministry is publicity driven; after nearly twenty years of encounters with the Werewolf Support Unit, he knows it better than most wizards ever do, and he thinks that Moody is probably more surprised by this latest incident than he is.

"None of this addresses the main problem at hand," Phineas Nigellus says, his voice a slightly altered echo of Sirius at his most impatient. "We've got no inside link to the Aurors, which means that we've got no way to hold off the Dementors, even if we've got Pettigrew with us in chains, and Sirius is growing more hot-headed and impetuous by the day."

"You're in contact with him?" Remus asks. For some reason, that idea hadn't occurred to him. Phineas Nigellus rolls his eyes.

"I thought you were supposed to be the smart one, Lupin," he says dryly. "Of course I'm in contact with him - though if he goes running off in a fit of impatience that's likely to change."

"How is he?" Remus asks, for once not caring if his voice reveals too much. Phineas gives him a sharp look, but answers civilly enough.

"Worried. Angry. Grieving. He's going after Pettigrew with no regard for his own safety, and no matter how much everyone else is blaming him for your friends' deaths, he's blaming himself more."

"Does he know that we're trying to help him?" Remus asks.

The look on Phineas' face is answer enough, and Remus pushes down the upswell of anger that rises in him suddenly. The full moon is still a week away, but he's been angry and scared for too long, and he's feeling its pull already.

"Tell him," Remus says shortly. He can hear the anger vibrating in his voice, and doesn't trust himself enough for long words. "Tonight. As soon as you see him, tell him."

Phineas gives him a considering look through narrowed gray eyes, his expression intense enough that Remus finds himself wondering whether or not portraits can practice Legilimency, even though he knows for a fact that they can not.

"I can do one better," he says, after a long moment, "if you don't mind the risk." His voice suggests that he already knows the answer.

"What?" Remus demands.

"The house itself is Unplottable, but I can probably persuade Sirius to go and fetch you, if you wait somewhere in town."

"And the risk?" Moody asks.

"Being hunted down by the Dementors," Phineas answers. The 'obviously' remains unspoken. "If Lupin disappears, how long do you think it will take Crouch to figure out where he's gone?"

"Not long," Moody grunts. "He's more paranoid than I am these days." He turns to Remus. "Black could use the help, I'm sure - not to mention someone to keep an eye on him - but if we don't catch Pettigrew, you'll most likely end up as much of a fugitive as he is."

"I don't care," Remus says. He knows Sirius well enough that he'd heard what Phineas hadn't said. Sirius is reckless when he's angry, and with no one there as a tempering influence he might very well get himself caught and Kissed.

Remus can almost picture him shoving aside his emotions, burying them in spellcasting while the need to act builds up inside of him. Sirius has been grieving James and Lily alone, without even Moody's gruff words of comfort, and Remus finds that the thought of him trapped and mourning inside one of the ancestral tombs his family considers a home is almost physically painful.

Remus doesn't mind the idea of becoming a fugitive, as long as he's with Sirius: besides, there's only so much he can do if he remains in the public eye, due mainly to Ministry restrictions on werewolves and his own lack of contacts with anyone of importance. Even without his badge, Moody has favours he can call in, and Dumbledore's influence is as far-reaching as it is subtle. Remus will be more help at Sirius' side than he will here, and the relief he feels at the idea of getting out of his too-empty flat is so deep as to be nearly profound.

"Remus," Dumbledore says, "are you certain that this is what you want to do?" There is a dizzy moment in which Remus wonders just how long the three of them had been sitting there before he arrived, and how much of the conversation had been planned in advance: then, he decides that it doesn't matter whether or not he's being manipulated as long as he gets to Sirius.

"I'm certain," he tells Dumbledore, and the glance that the three older wizards exchange confirms his suspicions. "You could have asked me the minute I walked in," he says, and watches as Dumbledore beams at him, Moody looks vaguely embarrassed, and Phineas Nigellus gives him an approving look that he nearly misses. "When do I leave?" he asks Phineas.

"As soon as we've finished here," the portrait answers.

"What more is there to discuss?" Moody growls. "Lupin's going to join Black, and I'm going to-"

"You're going to do nothing," Phineas says curtly. "If Crouch finds out what we're up to, it will make our task nearly impossible, particularly if he knows that you're involved."

"That still doesn't give us an ear inside the Ministry!" Moody protests. "There are still Aurors that will tell me what we need to know, and not making use of them is stupid. Shacklebolt-"

"Kingsley Shacklebolt," Dumbledore says calmly, "has been listening outside the door for the past fifteen minutes." He gestures, and the door swings open to reveal a shame-faced Kingsley Shacklebolt.

Remus reaches surreptitiously for his wand. He likes Kingsley, but he'll hex a dozen Aurors to keep them from catching Sirius.

"I really must change my password system," Dumbledore muses.

"Shacklebolt," Moody roars, starting to his feet, "what are you doing here?" Kingsley squares his shoulders and looks, half-apologetically, half-sternly, at his former superior.

"I am in charge of the Black investigation, sir," he says, "and if you recall, I did try to ask you about Pettigrew last night."

"So you follow me, and listen in on a private meeting," Moody scowls. "That's good initiative, lad. Do you mind if I ask what you're planning on doing now?"

"Asking for clarification," Kingsley says cooly, turning to Dumbledore. "Peter Pettigrew is alive - am I right?"

"You are," Dumbledore says.

"And Black? Was he or was he not the Potters' Secret Keeper?"

"He was not. Peter Pettigrew performed that function."

"And Pettigrew was behind the Swindon massacre as well?"

"He was," Dumbledore confirms, and the tension drains from Kingsley like a long exhalation of breath.

"Sirius is innocent, then," he says, and the relief in his eyes finally convinces Remus to put his wand away. "And Crouch has the Dementors after him." He shakes his head. "I'm in."

"Excuse me?" Moody asks.

"I'm in," Kingsley repeats. "Sirius is a friend, and I don't have so many left that I'm willing to stand by and watch him get killed when there's something I can do to prevent it."

"Thank you," Remus says, and Kingsley gives him a look full of understanding. Surprisingly, it doesn't rankle.

"Marjorie Bingham said that you were a very nice young man, Lupin," he says. "That was what originally set me on your trail," he explains, turning to Moody. "Bellatrix's asking questions about Pettigrew was curious, but not conclusive. When Mrs. Bingham said that she'd spoken to someone matching Lupin's description, though, I knew that something else was going on - and that it most likely involved Black. Your interview with Bellatrix was the final touch. When I followed you today - well, I had to be certain. The only thing I want to know now is - how?"