Hand-me-Downs

Once Dumbledore began discussing the Order's plans, they talked for hours, until it was very late and the sky was full dark outside the windows; Sirius never came back down to the kitchen, not even for dinner. Molly sent a tray up the dumbwaiter, but when Albus had finally left and Lupin went upstairs, it was still there, untouched. Remus picked it up and took it to the bedroom, where he found the door fully shut. His robe had been taken down from the top corner, but brushed along the floor as he opened the door; it was hung up inside on the knob.

The room was completely bare of furniture. Sirius sat in front of the roaring fireplace with only a small pile of wooden bits left beside him. "Hey, Moony. How do you feel?"

"Better." After several hours of the salve working, the burns were much improved. "You finished all the furniture?"

Sirius nodded. "I used the Herculius Charm once; hope that didn't hurt anything."

"No," Remus assured him; he put the tray down on the floor and settled to a seat.

"Did anything interesting happen after my great scene?"

"Talk about what to do from here..." Lupin hesitated for a moment. "Albus suggested casting the Fidelius charm on this place as our headquarters."

Sirius let out a single, bitter laugh. "And he'll be the Secret-Keeper, no doubt."

"That was the suggestion, yes..." He looked over at Sirius, who gazed distantly into the fire. He'd been charged with finding out if Sirius would agree to the plan--the Fidelius charm required the participation of everyone who knew the fact to be concealed, so it couldn't be cast without Sirius's consent, and his recent air of rebelliousness caused some concern among the others. Not to Lupin; he trusted Sirius's word that he wouldn't let his feelings sabotage the Order's work, but had dreaded having to tell him. After what had happened to James and Lily--after they had turned down Dumbledore as their Secret-Keeper in favor of Sirius, only to be betrayed and killed when he passed the duty to Peter instead--for Sirius, this must feel like a slap in the face. "He's only being pragmatic," Lupin assured him.

"I know. I'll go along, don't worry. Maybe when it's done, Albus will do me a favor and not tell me where this house is. Anything else?"

"It looks as if Voldemort is after the Prophecy. It's still safe for the moment, but there seems to have been a break-in at the Department of Mysteries, and with the Ministry resolutely looking away, we can't depend on them to protect it. Some of us will have to begin guarding it ourselves."

"But not me," Sirius surmised unhappily. "Getting caught there would be even slightly worse than being stuck in this house."

"Starting tomorrow, Alastor will be working on that, not here, so he's trying to finish with those robes tonight," Remus said. "After a few more days to get the house on its way, I'll be taking shifts there, also."

Sirius turned to him suddenly. "Do you think--? Can't the others handle it? You know better than I do what will happen if they catch a werewolf in there."

"It has to be done, and everyone who guards it is running a risk: six months in Azkaban. For me it would probably be longer, but... Six months or a year, maybe it doesn't make any difference. Either way it's forever."

"It would make a difference to me."

Remus showed a brief, sad smile. "Even so, I can't go avoiding everything that becomes more dangerous because... because of my condition. Except Bill and Charlie, it's too soon to be sure of any new members, and in the meantime we're rather short of hands..."

"I can see that," Sirius said. "But you ought to be reminded now and then that you don't have the monopoly on concern."

The thumps of footsteps came up the stairs and into the hallway. Charlie looked into the room. "Sirius, you want to go and get Bucky?"

"Right," he said, then got up and left with Charlie. They were already gone before Remus realized that Sirius still hadn't touched his food.

He set the tray on the mantel, tossed the last few broken bits of the furniture into the fireplace, then conjured a broom to sweep up the dust and splinters from the floor and put them in, too. With that done, he sat down in front of the fire again, waiting for it to burn itself down and for Sirius and Charlie to get back with Buckbeak. As he sat there so long in the still, quiet room, the warmth of the hearth-fire began to weigh on his eyelids. At last he gave in to temptation and lay down in front of it, slightly curled on his side.

Without opening his eyes, Remus felt a shaft of white light from the doorway pierce the almost-darkness left by the coals in the fireplace. Shadows moved across that light, tall as trees, and their voices came to him thunderous but indistinct, as if he were hearing them underwater. He was too asleep to understand what they were saying, but knew them as familiar voices. Sirius... Alastor...

"Just throw them on the floor for tonight," Sirius's voice poured over him from directly above. Remus felt a body leaning over him, something moving in his pocket, a moment of stillness and then the pop and hiss of a match... Setting up the Castle. With that realization, he let himself sink down again, let the lights and sounds flow by for what could have been a second or an hour, until he felt hands on his shoulders, lifting him up.

"Let's see if it's been long enough... Herculio."

Remus tried to rouse himself and say something--he didn't even know what--but only managed a drowsy "mwuh?" sound.

The tip of a wand lightly tapped his forehead. "Morpheosa."

Even as Sirius lifted him from the floor, he was sinking again, under soft, warm blankets of sleep that the charm brought flooding in on him. His slight hold on consciousness was swept under them and melted against his friend's shoulder.

Lupin was dreaming. He woke up in Sirius's old bedroom; his Castle in the Sky was nowhere to be seen. He found the entire room--walls, floor, and cieling--already painted in a blue so bright that the edges of the walls were lost in the flood of color and clouds actually seemed to drift across the resulting azure dome. However, all the old furniture that he and Sirius had burned was back, and it was the old bed that he rose from. He curiously peeked inside the wardrobe and found the main compartment full of nothing but school robes, red-and-gold ties and scarves, and five hats floating atop them like kites. The top drawer at the side shook impatiently, and he hastily shut the wardrobe again.

When he opened the bedroom door and looked out, Lupin found that he could see past intervening walls and cielings and into the floors below him, as into a doll house. He was looking down across the second floor balcony into the entry hall, which glowed with stately polish in the light of floating candles, even as they also threw menacing shadows around all the family portraits, who muttered darkly among themselves. A small knot of flesh and blood wizards and witches remained at the door exchanging tense pleasantries. One of the old men even wore a bejeweled sword, the old-fashioned ornament of a rich and well-born wizard patriarch. All but one, they smiled and spoke pleasantly, but flitted out the door into the night, leaving the last purple-bedecked witch standing alone to latch the door behind them. As she turned and ran wailing back up the entry hall, Lupin recognized her from her portrait--Estelle Black, Sirius's mother.

She ran up the stairs, weeping and cursing with rage, behind and beneath Lupin and through a needle's eye in the doll-house architecture to dart across the hallway beside him and into the master bedroom. He couldn't see through the door once she'd slammed it behind her, but a moment later he clearly heard her throw herself screaming upon the bed.

The floor under his feet gently swallowed him downward; his body was lost in the passage but he barely noticed. He became only a viewpoint, an invisible pair of eyes floating freely just below the drawing room ceiling. Below, the room had clearly been set for a grand society party. A buffet table stretched one long side of the room, appointed with only the finest food and drink, enough untouched that the party had obviously been cut short. The fireplaces at each end of the drawing room crackled merrily, and a huge chandelier overhead lit the room brightly as day. Lupin's floating view came to nest somewhere amid the tangled branches of the chandelier, and like a star he looked down on two boys standing below.

Even from the back, even so much younger, Lupin knew the dream-figure of Sirius the moment he saw him. He was wearing the horrible purple dress-robe that he'd been certain to burn, and the ruffles at the neck didn't quite know what to do when presented with the tapered back of his old short haircut. He stood at the buffet table, idly picking at a cluster of white grapes. Lupin recognized Sirius's now-dead younger brother, Regulus, standing behind him; the colors of his robes were perhaps more tasteful, but the design was even more dreadfully ostentatious--he was clearly dressed to be the center of attention, but now the room was silent except for the two of them and he was reduced to screaming at his brother from behind.

"It's YOUR fault to start with, and then you have to go and make a scene and RUIN EVERYTHING! You ALWAYS RUIN EVERYTHING!!"

The young Sirius ate a grape and didn't seem to hear him.

"ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME!?" Regulus drew back a fist.

Sirius lazily took his wand from his sleeve and cast an armoring charm, then tucked it back. When Regulus threw his punch, the charm stopped his fist an inch or so short of connecting, and he cried in pain as if he'd hit a solid object. Sirius didn't seem to feel it at all; he plucked another grape and scrutinised it.

"FATHER!" Regulus screamed down the length of the room. "HE CAST A SPELL!"

"Sirius, whatever you're doing, stop."

Only at the sound of a mellow yet sonorous voice did Lupin realize that there was a third person in the room. Following Regulus's gaze, he saw Sirius's father, Orion Black, standing in front of one of the fireplaces and apparently staring at the mantelpiece. His back was to his two sons and the unseen dream-observer. With his black hair just long enough in back to hide his neck, wearing a midnight-dark velvet robe, holding his hands in front of his body, he would've looked like nothing more than a shadow if not for the golden embellishment of the sword at his hip.

"Do you want me to hit him back instead?" Sirius asked.

"No."

One of the doors swung open and a panicked house-elf scurried into the room; she had the same upturned spade of a nose as Kreacher, but larger eyes and more rounded ears, and she wore her crested tea-towel wrapped around her and pinned at the shoulders like a tunica. "Oh, Master, oh, Master!" she cried, "Oh, My Lady! Oh, it's terrible!"

Mr. Black whipped around at last. "What's happened?"

"My Lady was so upset, Master, she told Meecha to get her something to calm her nerves, Master," the house-elf sputtered, wringing her ears hard all the time, "and Meecha tried to give just a little bit of sleeping potion, Master, but My Lady-- but My Lady, she took it away from Meecha and she drank it all, Master!"

Regulus's hand sprang to his mouth. "Mummy!"

Sirius gave a disdainful sniff. "It has been a few months, hasn't it? She was due for that at least once this holiday..."

"You--!!" Regulus drew back his fist again but stopped, gave a cry of vexation, and ran from the room.

Sirius turned and watched him go with a touch of cynical smirk. "Meecha, go tell Mum that if she wants to scare me like that she'll have to die just one of these times."

The house-elf trembled at the thought, but it was an order from a member of the household... "Y- yes, Young--"

"Belay that," Mr. Black declared. He had silently crossed the room and now stood over the hapless servant with a grim, stony face. "Tell me why you didn't stop her."

"Oh, Master!"

"Tell your Master why you didn't stop his wife from drinking that potion."

"Meecha tried, Master! Meecha wanted to stop My Lady so much, oh, please, Master!"

"But you didn't stop her. Now, tell me why."

"My Lady told Meecha not to, Master! She told Meecha to leave her, so Meecha ran here to tell, Master!"

Sirius tossed the grapes aside and took a sip of his currant juice. "That's the whole reason she does it anyway," he remarked bitterly, "for us to hear about it and go coddle her, and me to think 'Oh, Mummy's going to die and it's all my fault for--'"

He was cut short by a silvery hiss and a high, terrified squeak as his father drew the sword from his belt and brought it down on the cowering house-elf; Mr. Black didn't handle the weapon like a true swordsman, but it was enough. With another sweep of the blade he tossed the body aside--Meecha was clearly not one of the heads mounted in the entry hall.

Lupin's mind reeled. The glass fell from Sirius's hand; when it hit the floor, half the rim broke off in one clean crescent. Dark red juice splashed. He looked down at it--a splattered pool, like the other crimson pool across the room...

"What do you have to say for yourself?"

Sirius looked up. His father had turned on him, his face still grimly set, the sword still in his hand, drops of thick currant juice falling from it one by one... Lupin wrapped around him protectively; cheek-to-cheek, he felt the young Sirius's breath coming shallow and fast as he was frozen on the spot, eyes wide. He tried to keep looking at his father's face, which remained hard and dark as iron, but his eyes kept being pulled down to the blood-smeared sword. His breath was the only sound or motion between the three of them for a long time, then finally he coughed out a tense laugh that opened the way for his fear to pour out in laughter, as if this were one of he and James' more inspired pranks. Still laughing, he walked down the buffet to get himself another drink.

"Do you find this amusing?" his father asked, following him.

Looking over the collection of bottles, Sirius gave a shrug and poured a goblet full of a strong and sweet chocolate liqueur. "It is funny, when I think of it," he chuckled. He took a sip and grimaced at the burning sensation of the alcohol. "How many inches do you have to climb, in the end, to get from house-elves to blood-traitor sons?" he asked, "or is that even going up? Oh, I always knew Regulus was going to get everything one way or another, may as well have it good and tidy. I don't suppose it'll look very good to the Ministry after the scene I made... But at least you know," he said, turning around with a fresh burst of laughter, "I won't tell anyone!" He took another drink from the goblet, still grinning, but Lupin knew he wasn't just telling jokes. Sirius sincerely thought his father was about to kill him.

Instead, Mr. Black's face was suddenly thrown open with shock. The sword fell from his hand. Even as it rang against the floor, he bore down on Sirius, knocked the goblet out of his hand, and seized both his arms with a savage grip. "What do you think you're saying!?"

"Let go of me!!" Sirius shouted.

His father shook him hard. "What are you thinking of, to say that to me!?"

"LET ME GO!"

Sirius wrenched out of his father's grip and punched him in the chest. Mr. Black stood head and shoulders above his son and barely flinched; his fist shot out, reacting like a snake. If the armoring charm hadn't worn off yet, it wasn't enough to stop this. The blow to the face knocked Sirius back against the edge of the buffet table, and he fell to the floor with a cry of pain.

Lupin tightened his hold on Sirius and squeezed his eyes shut. No, I can't watch this--! The next thing he knew, it was finished. He was aware that there had been several more blows in the meantime, but the dream had mercifully skipped them over. Mr. Black again stood still, facing away. Sirius was picking himself up from the floor and wiping blood from his lip; he still clung to his defiance. "Are you finished? I think you missed a spot," he muttered at his father's back.

"Be quiet."

"Yes, Master. Sirius will be quiet now."

Mr. Black seemed to give just the slightest shudder. He wandered urgently out one of the doors and shut Sirius alone in the drawing room behind him.

Night silence fell, strange in the daylike light of the chandelier. Sirius scanned the room for a long moment, still unable to see his friend watching him. Alone, he poured himself one more dollop of the chocolate liqueur and swallowed it, then picked up the basket of grapes and dumped it out. Walking along the buffet table, he tucked various bits of food in the basket--biscuits, cheese, finger-sandwiches, fruit, and the bottle of currant juice. Packing a basket of food was such a storied "running away from home" gesture as to be darkly comical.

Lupin's viewpoint kept floating at his shoulder as he stealthily took his basket up to the fourth floor and came to a locked closet, down and across the hallway from the sitting room. He rattled the lock, tried some simple spells to open it, then looked around to make sure no one was watching--but someone was watching. The sitting room door was open just a crack and a low pair of eyes looked out at him. "Kreacher, open this," Sirius said.

The house-elf that came forward at the request was indeed a somewhat-less-leathery, somewhat-less-wrinkled Kreacher. "Kreacher cannot open, Young Master. Kreacher was told not to open for any except--"

"Tell me who locked it."

"My Lady locked this closet, wanted to keep Young Master out of it."

Sirius was already ignoring him by the end of the sentence. He touched his wand to the lock. "Toujours Pur," he said--the family motto, 'Always Pure.' The lock sprang open. "That woman... Most idiotic password ever..." He opened the closet to reveal it full of various enchanted items and vehicles, but he was interested only in the brooms, and took the longest, straightest one.

He turned around just in time to catch Kreacher heading for the staircase. "Don't you tell," he said. "Don't even let on to anyone that you saw me tonight after the party."

"Young Master always breaks his Mother's heart," Kreacher grumbled. "Will break My Lady's heart when she finds what Young Master is doing..."

"She hasn't used that since I was in the crib, so I don't know why she ought to be so upset," Sirius said, locking up the closet again. "If Regulus did it, she'd probably give him a biscuit. Well, if I bother her so much, she should be happy this time..." He frowned at the ruffled cuffs of his dress robe, and he hid the broom just inside the attic before coming back down. Kreacher followed, eyeing him watchfully. "Just leave me alone, and don't touch that broom," Sirius hissed. The house-elf disappeared down the hallway.

Sirius went down to his room; the sky-painted walls were now black and dotted with stars. In the dimness, he tossed the basket onto the bed and peeled off the horrible party clothes before opening the wardrobe and taking out a simpler robe, trousers, and a black cloak. The top drawer rattled again as he was fastening the last few buttons and he pulled it out, but there was no boggart. He only tipped its contents onto the bed and started tucking things into the basket. Lupin recognized trinkets he and James and Peter had given to Sirius for his birthday and Christmas in their first years of school.

When Sirius picked up a rectangular hand-mirror with a carved wooden backing--his one family heirloom, the Talking Mirror--he looked at himself in it and frowned to see a black eye forming. For a moment he tried to brush his long fringe over the bruise with his fingers before giving up and packing the mirror.

He had just done that when the door opened and a shaft of white light shot across the room. Even in silhouette against it, there was no mistaking Alastor Moody. He held up another almost-humanlike shape; it looked chillingly like the shadow that had been Mr. Black in the drawing room, his back to his quarreling children...

"I did everything I could think of to these, couldn't find a problem," Alastor said. "I'd still burn 'em if I were you, but it's what you want to do..."

"Just throw them on the floor for tonight," Sirius answered. The shadows hit the floor with a phumph and the shaft of light slid shut as Sirius turned and reached down toward Lupin, taking him in his hand like a doll and making to tuck him into his basket of things to run away with.

Being lifted like that was dizzying; it made Remus's stomach lurch like a hippogriff ride, and he wrenched up to find himself in bed. Raising his arm, he could feel the rough wall of his Castle, but his brain was still fogged, and he felt something weighing on his body where the Dream-Sirius had taken hold of him, where his thumb had lain across Lupin's chest... Looking down at it he could see only a black blot in the dark, but when he put his hand to it, he understood--a large, furry head leading to a snout with jowly upper lips... It was Sirius in dog form, laying with his head resting on Lupin's chest. At being touched, he gave a sleepy snort and resettled himself, licking his nose and unconsciously laying one of the eponymous pad feet over his friend's arm.

Remus fell back onto the pillow, his mind now clear and wide awake. Now he could remember... The summer before his third year at Hogwarts, when they were all thirteen years old, James and Sirius had come to Hogsmeade and visited him once--even dragged him along to sneak a look at the Shrieking Shack, although he'd insisted that it wasn't so grand. They told the story that earlier that summer, Sirius had shown up on the Potters' front porch one morning before dawn, broomstick in hand, and simply stayed there ever since. When school started again, the rumor mill had been all abuzz that Sirius Black had run away from home, and that much seemed true. As far as Lupin knew, Sirius had in fact never set foot in his parents' house from the time he appeared on James' porch until bringing the Order of the Phoenix there a few days ago.

But no one had ever told him why. The stories raging through the school that year had run the gamut from an unlikely friendship between the Potters and the Blacks, all the way to Sirius having attempted to kill his brother--one eccentric Slytherin girl claimed he had succeeded and that the Regulus Black who was Sorted into her House that year was a lookalike--and been thrown out of the house or forced to flee his parents' vengeful wrath.

But what he'd seen in the dream seemed more like the Sirius he knew than any of those theories: never so distressed as to drop his biting wit, never so defeated as to lose his willful air, even the way his terror turned to laughter, as when the Ministry's Hit Wizards had dragged him away to prison laughing uncontrollably. Was it possible to dream oneself into someone else's memories? He'd heard of dreaming oneself into someone's future--although Divination was well outside his expertise--but never into their past. Someone who knew more about Legilimency might be able to answer the question, but the only such person who came to mind was Dumbledore, and Lupin hesitated at the thought of discussing it with him. If he had come into Sirius's memory, he wanted to keep it in confidence, and was unsure he could do that while talking the matter over with the Headmaster.

The notion of even bringing it up to Sirius gave him pause. How could one just ask it? "I think I might have dreamed a memory of yours; did your father beat you when you were young?" Better just to think of it as if it were only a dream...

He lay still so as not to disturb the sleeping dog, but it seemed like hours and still he couldn't fall asleep again. He stared at the ceiling and idly rubbed one of Sirius's ears. Images and sensations from the dream kept replaying themselves before his eyes until they had long since stopped making sense: Sirius trying to cover his black eye with his hair, Mr. Black's back looking like just a shadow, the liqueur being knocked out of Sirius's hand, the dead house-elf tossed onto the floor...

It was only a dream... Treat it as if it were just a dream...

The next morning, Sirius picked up his father's old robes from the floor where he'd had Alastor drop them, and put on one in black-green velvet covered with swirls of couched gold braid. The robe itself was quite handsome, but its effect was stiff and overly formal; on Sirius, it made him look as if his head and hands had been pasted onto a picture of someone else. Maybe if he could lose the haggardness left from Azkaban... No, Lupin thought, that robe would still look foreign on him.

His long, unkempt hair kept snagging in the gold braid, and he was picking it out for what seemed like the seventh time when the dumbwaiter bell rang and Molly called them down to breakfast.

"Tell me it doesn't suit me," Sirius said as they descended the stairs.

"It really doesn't," Remus assured him.

When they arrived at the kitchen, Bill was seated at the table, and Molly was just dishing out plates of bacon, eggs, and toast. Before sitting down, Sirius crossed to the sink, freed his hair from the robe again, and swept it forward over one shoulder into a single thick tail in his fist. He took one of the kitchen knives from the drainboard and began sawing it through with a tearing sound.

Molly turned to stare at him.

"It's been bothering me," he said flatly.

"I could get you some shears..." she offered.

But he was already flipping his shorn hair across his neck to cut the other side as short as the first. He tossed the cuttings into the stove and was just taking a seat when Charlie came in.

"Remus, I got something for you," he said, and held out a long, dappled silver feather. His arm was striped with beak-marks.

"Thank you very much," Lupin said, taking the feather appreciatively. "You didn't have to--"

"Charlie!" his mother cried. "You pulled a feather out of--!? You could've been killed!"

"He wasn't going to kill me, Mum," Charlie explained as he sat down. "Hagrid's right about Bucky, he's really a sweetheart. Just had to look me over after that and overdid it a little, that's all. Besides, he was only mouthing; if he wanted to hurt me, he'd use the talons."

"Relax, Mum; Charlie's used to dragons, remember?" Bill said.

"Well... I suppose..."

"So what are we all up to today?" Charlie asked. "Since we got Bucky moved in, I can help here in the kitchen or up in the bedroom--"

"Or switch off between the two, relay back and forth so Mum and Sirius can argue," Bill suggested.

His mother blushed a little. "Well, about that, I..."

"Uh, oh, I had to open my mouth..."

"I was just thinking..."

"Not now, Molly; I don't feel like getting into it," Sirius said into his glass of juice. "Albus will decide what he decides, anyway..."

There was a long pause. "All we have left to do in the bedroom is strip the wallpaper and paint it all," Lupin said at last. "Sirius and I should be able to do that..."

"You'll get paint on that nice robe," Molly warned Sirius.

"Good, it could use it. It's not as if I'm going anywhere in it..."

"Once the room is painted and ready I'd like to get everyone in to cast protection charms, bring furniture in, sort of rechristen it generally," Lupin said, "But that will probably be a few days..."

"Well, then, I'll be helping Mum in the kitchen if you need me," Charlie offered.

"And you shouldn't have any trouble finding me, either," Bill said, with a look over at the dumbwaiter he planned to work on. "Just follow the din of rusted cogwheels..."

Lupin took the last bite of his eggs and toast and got up from the table. "Thank you for breakfast, Molly. It was very good."

"Oh, don't think a thing of it."

As he left the kitchen, Sirius got up and followed him upstairs. When they came to the bedroom, an image at the corner of Remus's vision gave him a chill of deja vu and he turned. The door to the master bedroom was open just a fraction of an inch, and, just like the sitting room door in his dream, a low pair of eyes was watching them through the crack.

Sirius saw it, too. "Do you need something?"

"No, Master. Kreacher is working, has everything Kreacher needs..."