Path of Certain Destruction

Breakfast at Grimmauld Place on 21 January was not a pleasant affair. Sirius was staring into his cup stonily, Tonks was perpetually knocking the sugar bowl over, and Remus's pancakes were coming out rather oddly-shaped. He frowned, and prodded the flame with his wand, which only made it rise up to sear the pan. Muttering "Opprimo," he put out the fire and retrieved a loaf of bread from the cupboard. Sirius gave a grunt.

Tonks rose from the table and rummaged around in the cutlery drawer for a knife, remarking, "Well, seems like a good day. Old man Wilmington still has influenza, so I'm not going to get any new cases for a while, and I'm almost finished with this recent assignment. I still have to do a bit of a background check on this one shady sort of chap involved . . . " She trailed off, seeing the glazed looks of her audience. "Anyone up for eggs?"

"We've run out," Sirius replied.

"I can stop and buy some on my way home, if you'd like."

"Don't trouble yourself. You wouldn't have today's Prophet, would you?"

"Why'd you want to read that rubbish anyway?" asked Tonks.

"I don't. I just want the crossword."

Remus tossed him a copy. Sirius looked at the front page, snorted, then turned to the crosswords, grabbing a quill and inkwell. He tapped the end of the quill against the table and let out a sigh. "What has nine letters and is 'a slimy, foul-smelling potion ingredient'? 'Snivellus' fits, but then the letters are all wrong for number twenty-three down."

"How about 'toadstool'?" suggested Tonks, grimacing as she pulled a moldy loaf of bread out of the cupboard. She glanced at the clock and did a double take. "Damn, I'm supposed to see Kingsley in five minutes! Well, nice breakfast. Oh, Sirius . . ." She hesitated briefly. "I . . . well, Mum . . . knows . . . about you. Dumbledore told her . . . I think it was only last weekend. I don't . . . I don't think that I've seen her that happy since I was accepted into the Auror program." She smiled. "I thought that you'd like to know."

Sirius only nodded, but just for an instant, he looked ten years younger.

After Tonks Disapparated, Sirius threw down the crossword.

"Still no word from Harry?" ventured Remus.

"No."

"That Umbridge . . . woman," he said, looking as though he had eaten something unpleasant, "she's closely monitoring all the channels of communication in and out of Hogwarts, or so says Minerva."

"I admire your restraint, Remus."

"Hm?"

"You can say whatever you like about her, you know. I'm the only one here . . . well, Kreacher and I are the only ones here. Do you think that there would be a headline in the paper? 'Moony Loses Cool, Calls Umbridge a Foul-Smelling Hag'?"

Remus looked at the ceiling. "I shan't allow myself to stoop to her level," he said, affecting a very prim-and-proper accent.

Sirius groaned. “I remember when you used to do that. It drove James batty.”

Remus grinned. "Not as much as 'Our most noble Godric inspires me to better things.'"

"You know, I still feel guilty whenever you say that."

"Have you done anything to feel guilty over?" said Remus, pretending to be stern.

"Well, I nicked the last bar of Honeydukes chocolate – "

"Padfoot!"

"It's for your own good, you know. Too much of that clogs your arteries."

"I think I'd be willing to risk it."

"Live on the wild side, eh, Moony?"

"As always, Padfoot."

Sirius picked up the crossword and resumed his hunt for eighteen across.

"'Dodo'. Ye gods, this is becoming far too easy." He wrote 'DIRICAWL' in the appropriate blanks.

"Not all of us took Care of Magical Creatures."

"Just because that one little salamander . . . "

"That was no little salamander. I haven't a clue what Professor Kettleburn did to it, but I do know that something suddenly more massive than the upper half of my body is not little."

"Oh, was ickle Moonykins scared by the big lizard?"

"I shall follow the example of the most noble Prongs and request that you shut up."

"I'm stung."

"I'm sure you’ll recover."

Sirius rolled his eyes in the exaggerated manner he loved to use back at Hogwarts when he was particularly bored by one of Professor Binns' lectures, then sank back in his chair, and his eyes glazed over, as though he was looking into somewhere very far away. He often did that now; to Remus, it seemed as though he preferred the comforts of his memories, memories he was denied for twelve years, rather than to wallow in present occurrences. It was as though he was looking somewhere very far away for tranquility. That isn't quite right either, Remus thought. It's the other memories that are bothering him, the ones he was forced to relive over and over . . .

It's a great deal easier to sit at a coffee table and remember all that happened from fourth year during the bewitched pudding fiasco than it is to discuss – well, all of it, amidst afternoon tea.

He hasn't ever really talked about Azkaban . . . I would hardly expect him to. It's how I would behave. He smiled to himself. It's how I do behave.

Yet . . .

When we run out of memories, will we still have anything to say to each other?

"Should have taken Tonks up on her offer . . . I don't think I've had a decent poached egg in six months," mused Sirius, suddenly coming back to the present. He picked up the Daily Prophet for the third time, flipping to the crosswords yet again. He seemed to change his mind after a few minutes, though, casting his quill aside and flipping to a page where a smiling witch headlined a column reading "Olivia's Offerings – essential advice for any witch or wizard." He let out his bark-like laugh.

"I don't believe this." He mimicked a middle-aged witch. "'Dear Olivia – My husband and I simply cannot resolve our differences over the most trivial matters. Frustrated, I finally decided to slip him a Forgetfulness Potion in his firewhisky after he and I had a terrific row on how to de-gnome a garden. Well, I got my way in that spat, but ever since, he keeps on forgetting things – like where he placed the Floo Powder or at what time he needs to report to work. He even came downstairs yesterday to my dinner party in a dressing gown and oversized slippers! My solicitor tells me that we cannot end the marriage until his memory is fully restored. Olivia, what should I do?' Try being slightly less thick, for one. Moony, you were wise to stay a bachelor."

"I'd call it less of a choice than a side effect of lycanthropy."

Sirius's grin was devilish. "I'm sure that the women would flock to you. You just exude that 'All I need is love' air. And ladies just adore an animal."

"What, pray tell, do you know about the way women think?"

"Must run in the family. Come to think of it, that's incorrect – if Father knew how to attract a decent woman, he wouldn’t have married dear old Mum. He'd have had one look at her thoughts and fled to the Continent." His laughter was harsher this time, the bark more pronounced than before.

There was a distinct lull. Sirius continued to peruse the advice column as Remus pulled a roll of parchment from a drawer and painstakingly began to copy the symbols onto a fresh roll. Sirius, clearly bored, glanced over his shoulder.

"That doesn't look pleasant. Unless I’m misinterpreting those runes, they appear to say something about living metal . . ." he paused to glance at the runes more closely, "'that burns with the intensity of . . . a searing desert'? Pleasant people, the Death Eaters. Who owned that lovely scrap of parchment?"

"Nobody's sure, and that’s the problem with it. It was recovered at a suspected meeting place, but it doesn’t quite match any of the known Death Eaters' specialties. The spell does seem to require several expensive oils – quite a bit of saffron, I think, is needed – so Lucius Malfoy and several of his wealthier colleagues, like Tiberius Nott, seem to be indicated. It's quite nasty, though. I thought that we could see if your mother’s books had anything like this, or if any counterspell is mentioned."

"Well, if it allows me to do something for once, I propose that we get started on our reading."

***

Up on the third floor at Grimmauld Place was a fairly roomy study, with bookshelves lining the walls. The shelves were filled with a variety of books, none of which would be displayed in a front hall. There were a few particularly old tomes inside a glass case that Sirius and Remus couldn't yet access – the wards on the case were very tricky. Judging by the pictures on the covers, and by Sirius's educated guesses, all of them were rather nasty. The room was lit by four dim globes of light, enchanted to “turn on” when somebody spoke the words "Toujours pur." Sirius claimed that the password was invented for his inconvenience.

"Do you feel like having another go at that case?" asked Sirius.

“Not quite . . . I spotted something called Magical Runes for Malediction on the top shelf that seems worth looking over.”

Two hours and seven books later, Sirius uttered a noise of disgust.

"All I'm getting are fragments of this bloody thing. The segments I can puzzle out seem to be giving me a cure for more stubborn forms of spattergroit."

"I haven't fared much better on my end, if that helps you. The first passage – " he tapped it with his wand " – seems fairly clear. The actual instructions must be included in the second passage, but I can't see any of the markings that would denote a ritual."

Sirius glanced at the parchment. "It looks Sumerian – at least, parts of it do – but then there are a few symbols that don't even look Mesopotamian in origin." He grimaced. "Amazing that I can still remember that – I suppose that Ancient Runes with Professor Cyrillus didn’t count as a happy memory." He halted abruptly, as though shocked by what he had just said, and roughly pushed a Sumerian codex off his lap.

Remus remained silent, quietly hoping that this wouldn't trigger one of Sirius's moods again. Finally, he returned the codex to its proper place on the shelf and pulled Sirius to his feet. It shocked him how light Sirius was – he tried to ensure that Sirius had three proper meals a day, but he couldn’t supervise the man all the time.

"I think," he said, speaking slowly and clearly, "this is enough of runes for the day. Emmeline is far better at deciphering them than you or I, and there are other assignments I need your help with; furthermore, falling into a fit of despondency won’t help you."

"Please, Sirius," he added.

Sirius shook his head as if he was trying to clear it, and followed Remus down the steps to the kitchen.

****

"Remus?"

"Hmm?"

"Do you remember James's sixteenth birthday?"

Remus chuckled. "I doubt I could forget that disaster."

"It wasn't a disaster." Sirius paused. "Was it?"

"Well, there was the matter of the numerous bruises you received when attempting an Entrancement Enchantment on Lily Evans . . . it wasn't your finest hour."

Sirius smiled slowly. "I'd forgotten that. There was a cake, too, wasn’t there? Peter tried to make it do something . . ."

"He tried to make it dance. It ended up waltzing out of the Common Room."

"He always was a bloody idiot."

There was a pause.

"It's almost time for dinner," Remus said, effectively changing the subject. "Nymphadora should stop by for dinner, and she promised to bring along something appetizing."

Five minutes later, Tonks, clutching what looked like a very large bag of food, stumbled through the fireplace. She set it down on the floor with an audible "thud." "Wouldn't believe the crowd at Dilliger's Market today . . . it was like every witch in Britain was there. I managed to grab a nice steak, though. Remus, would you mind cooking it?"

"Not at all."

Halfway through the meal, they were interrupted by a pop! as a phoenix feather with a scrap of parchment attached appeared in the middle of Remus’s plate. He opened the parchment and read.

Remus –

I believe you have some prior knowledge of Jacint Vitaros, the head of The Abbas Faction, a fairly powerful confederation of werewolves in Eastern Europe. Though the Abbas Faction is known for their message of separatism and lycanthropic superiority, they have assisted us in the past with efforts against Grindelwald and Lord Voldemort. Vitaros is slightly more radical than those leaders who have given us assistance before, but he has agreed to come to London and to meet with a representative from the Order of the Phoenix to discuss rekindling our former alliance. You will be our representative, naturally.

Severus informs me that Lord Voldemort has been sending envoys to prominent clans of werewolves and vampires in Eastern Europe. If we win their allegiance, however, Lord Voldemort will find his Dark Army substantially limited. Gaining their allegiance to our side is crucial in thwarting Lord Voldemort's recruitment attempts among Dark Creatures. Many lesser clans in Europe look to the Abbas Faction and those like them for guidance; they will follow their lead in this matter.

Vitaros will meet you in two days at The Silver Fang in London, at seven o’clock.

Take care.

Remus folded the slip of parchment carefully and put it in the pocket of his robes. Shortly after, a thick leather-bound book came shooting out of the fireplace and landed in the center of the table. The title was written in elegant gold lettering: On the Struggles of the Abbas Faction, From 1273 to the Present. Remus took the book and excused himself to Sirius and Tonks, saying that it appeared he had a substantial amount of reading to do.

****

Two days later at six-fifteen, Remus entered a dark, smoky pub. Glancing around, he saw many cloaked visitors gathered around small wooden tables, rapidly talking in low tones. An attractive young barmaid smiled at him, revealing a set of gleaming fangs.

Hardly the most savory place for a business meeting, he thought.

He ordered a small glass of Madame Bellevue's Beguiling Brew and sat down at the bar, keeping his eyes opened for Vitaros as he sipped his drink.

A few minutes later, he heard a voice.

"Lupin? Remus Lupin?"

He turned around, but the person who had called for him wasn’t Jacint Vitaros. His eyes widened in mild surprise.

He hadn't expected to come across Nathan White here.