Hand-me-Downs

Lupin spent the afternoon watching and occasionally assisting as Dumbledore picked through Regulus Black's cache of dark items. Most of the phials he lay aside for Prof. Snape to examine. Many of the parchments contained Regulus's notes from spying on Lupin's circle of friends in their later school years, and it all stirred up unsettling memories. Worse yet, Dumbledore found one of the Death Eaters' blacklists scrawled on a particularly worn piece of parchment and activated it with Voldemort's name. Among the entries made on it so long ago, "Remus Lupin" and "Sirius Black" turned the violent red that meant "kill," but what Lupin felt nearly overcome by was the sight of "James Potter," "Lily Evans"--this list had been written even before their marriage--and other old friends and Order members' names scratched out: dead.

One of their more useful finds was a hand-copied textbook of sorts, full of dark spells favored by the Death Eaters. The Unforgivable Curses, the Dark Mark, Magical Blades, a simple technique to make a wand spurt blood rather than sparks or flowers... None of it strayed far from the themes of fear, torture, and death. The book turned out not to have any magical properties in itself, and Lupin asked to take it to study, as a guide to what to prepare for.

When he returned to the Black House through the kitchen fireplace, he brought the book, as well as the iridescent green ink Dumbledore had promised and some parchment he sent along. Remus still felt a little shaken, but he was greeted by the sight of a brown paper sack sitting on the kitchen table, folded over several times at the top and secured with a clothespin. He recognized it as something Arabella would send, and judging by the oil-spots on the sack, it contained some sort of food.

Molly Weasley looked up from cooking dinner. "Arabella tossed that through the Floo for you earlier," she confirmed. "Tibbles came after it and Bill had to chase him down and send him back home."

"Thank you." Opening the sack, he found a note folded on top of a collection of home-baked peanut butter cookies and butterbeer biscuits; it read "Remus - Stop by after your watch. I'll give you some things for the house. ~Arabella."

"Where is Sirius?" he asked.

"Still upstairs painting I expect; haven't heard a peep out of him since you left," Molly said. "It's getting about time if you'd fetch him for dinner. --Oh, but before you go..." She left the pot simmering and came over to Lupin. "Well, I wanted to tell you... Remus, I'm sorry."

"Hm?"

"About earlier. You were being kind to me, and well... I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. It's just the way one's raised, you know..."

He nodded in understanding. "Don't think a thing of it. I was careless; it's all right."

"No, it's not all right." She shook her head and then, very intentionally, took his hand that was still on the sack of biscuits and squeezed it with motherly roughness for a moment. "Better save those for after dinner," she said, retreating to more comfortable ground.

"I'll only take one," he said, and they shared a smile as he did so and headed upstairs.

He broke the biscuit in half and ate one piece on the way up. When he got to the Blue Room and opened the door, sure enough, Sirius was still there painting. He'd finished the ceiling and started the floor--with a stripe across the side nearest the door. He and Remus looked at each other for a long moment across the river of blue paint.

"I knew I'd forgotten something."

Lupin laughed. "I wouldn't worry. When Full Moon comes around, if we have any paint left, we ought to pour it out on the floor and cover the house in blue pawprints." That idea sounded like Padfoot or Prongs' voice in his head, but it had somehow fallen to him to say it; maybe the cookie was effecting him. Reminded of it, he held up the other half and shook it beckoningly. "Biscuit?"

Sirius took the invitation with a grin. He turned into the great black dog and bounded over to Lupin, who gave him the treat and a brisk rub around the ears. They went down to the kitchen with Sirius still on four feet, wagging his tail and leaving a trail of blue pawprints.

Even once there, Sirius seemed half-intent on having his dinner off a plate on the floor, but Molly insisted that he turn human again and wash the paint off his hands before sitting down to eat, and he again did so in silence. On the way back upstairs, over handfuls of Arabella's biscuits, Lupin decided to work as late as he could so he could sleep through the next day and rest up for his watch, and Sirius made clear that he would go along, as if it weren't even a question.

They finished the bedroom floor and painted the bright blue door as a finale, one of them on either side of it. Again they kept each other alert and entertained with lively conversation. When it was finished, Sirius looked back into the room and again declared that it was certain to cause fish dreams; Lupin admitted that one of those had actually flitted through his mind when he'd fallen off the ceiling, and it gave him a good laugh.

Next they turned their attention to Regulus's room. When Sirius touched the curtains of the canopied bed, they seized his hand and tried to drag him over to one of the massive posters while the sheet stretched itself into a long, thin strip to tie him up to it. A "Finite" took care of the curtain, but Remus didn't dare try that on the sheet--a bit of it had gotten around Sirius and he was afraid that ending the spell might return it to shape and tighten it. A flurry of severing charms from the two of them sent the linen ribbon crumpling to the ground in pieces. Using sheet-scraps and bits of the smashed wardrobe, Remus made up the fireplace to receive the debris while Sirius set about dismantling the bedstead.

During one of their frequent breaks, Lupin took a leftover quarter-can of paint and began brushing positive runes, symbols, and words on the walls. Sirius couldn't watch that for long without joining in, a wide-awake but rather silly mood took hold as a result of the unusual sleep schedule, and when Regulus's room was thoroughly peppered with painted figures, they doused the fireplace and continued out into the hallway. Remus said that any image with a friendly aspect would be beneficial, and soon they'd opened more cans and were painting whatever took their fancy: stars, birds, landscapes with lollipop trees and a shining blue sun... Neither of them was much of an artist, and the broad brushes in their hands were hardly meant for drawing, so the images all had a childlike quality, but that only seemed to increase the fun and charm.

Sirius was finishing a blobby dog that seemed to be a self-portrait when Remus ventured into the master bedroom. He had just dipped the brush and was reaching for the wall--thinking to make a circle and draw a blue, outsize Snidget--when a brown shape suddenly flew at his arm out of the bedcurtains and yanked him back. He cried out in surprise, was jerked off balance and fell, and just as Sirius dashed in, he recognized Kreacher. The house-elf had tackled Remus's right arm to the floor and pinned it, ranting to himself with great agitation. "My Lady's House! My Lady's magnificent room!!! Bad enough Young Master's room! Bad enough the hallway! Kreacher never lets--!!!"

"Yes, you will!" Sirius declared.

"Oh, Master!" Kreacher cried desperately. "Please not My Lady's room! Please no mongrel trash painting garbage on My Lady's beautiful--!!"

"We will paint this house any way we please, and you'll let us!"

Kreacher burst into tears and bolted from the room screaming. Sirius and Remus were just gathering themselves again when a few small crashes sounded downstairs.

"SIRIUS LUCIEN BLACK!!!"

"I thought you told him--"

"I said not to touch her or her curtains. He must have started throwing things at her," Sirius groaned.

Lupin looked around at the room, still hearing Mrs. Black scream below. Kreacher's outburst had certainly deflated the happy energy that had been carrying him. "Do you think we can paint in here and keep up the proper mood?"

Sirius thought about it for a moment. "I'd better not try," he said. "I'll see what I can do in the right-hand stairway..."

As Sirius left, Lupin didn't think he could recapture the proper mood either, but this room needed something. He painted a triangle of three stars--an auspicious symbol in a lucky number--on the wall facing the foot of the bed, added one more on the door, and moved on to the other stairway, where he wrote "Expecto Patronum" along the banister in large, lopsided italics.

Sirius and Remus met up again in the fourth floor hallway and painted a few symbols there--Remus was particularly pleased with a tree that had a giant bird sitting atop it--before finally stopping work for the night. They pulled back the thick curtains of the sitting room's huge bay window, revealing a powdery dawn glow creeping up behind the London skyline, then cleared enough floorspace for Lupin's Castle. After a trip to the kitchen to finish off the biscuits, they settled in to sleep before Lupin's guard at the Ministry of Magic. He felt very tired but not sleepy, and he lay awake for some time, strangely comforted to be pinned against the wall of his little cabin again.

"I wonder what Molly will think when she sees the walls," Sirius said with an audible smile. Apparently he wasn't falling asleep easily, either.

"That's one reason I wanted to be in bed before she came."

"I don't know, I think I'd like to see the look on her face. Maybe have a hidden eye there, so I could see it without having her get into it with me..."

Remus turned over, although that meant wedging his shoulder into Sirius's back. Ordinarily, "getting into it" with the person involved would be one of Sirius's favorite things about such a situation. "Please forgive me, but I must ask..."

"Hm?"

"Why are you talking only to me?"

Sirius paused at the question. "I don't know what you mean."

"As long as I've known you, you've never been shy about telling anyone what you think, not even if they had a wand pointed at your heart," Remus said. "Now these last few days, you hardly make a sound if anyone is there to hear it except me."

"I don't imagine anyone wants to hear it, anyway."

"I'm sure that isn't true," Remus persisted. "Besides, it's the first time I've known that to bother you."

"Well... It's the first time I can't do anything more than talk. Can't leave the house... Maybe just as well to leave the talking to the people who can do what's talked of..."

Remus thought his friend wasn't attached to that theory, that he was just casting about for something to say. Probably he didn't understand it himself. "Seems a terrible waste," he said. "In the moment of truth, the stronger mind very often trumps the stronger hand. The Order can't afford to go throwing away anyone's ideas; especially not when we're talking about one of the most brilliant troublemakers any of us have ever known," he added with a smile.

A long moment of silence. "That was a long time ago."

"You're still Padfoot," Remus said. He couldn't lay still and listen to Sirius say that. It seemed his words weren't enough, so he turned again, lay an arm over his friend from behind, and gently nudged the back of his head. "A more scarred, more mature version, yes, but still our brilliant Padfoot."

"I suppose," he admitted.

"I know."

Remus held on like that for a long time, still and quiet with his nose and forehead resting against Sirius's roughly-shorn hair. He had just begun to drowse off at last when he distantly heard footsteps and voices from the floor below.

"My goodness!" Molly cried out. "What in the world--!?"

It took a moment to recognize the gravelly noise that followed as Alastor laughing. "That Lupin's a piece of work! Arabella taught him right, that's for sure!"

Remus smiled into Sirius's hair and let himself relax back toward sleep.

Alastor insisted on giving Lupin an extended confidential briefing that evening before guard duty. When he handed over his Invisibility Cloak, he even cast the Portkey spell on a couple of coins and put them in the pockets: one to take Lupin to the Ministry, and the other to take him--at his request as per the note--to Arabella's house in Little Whinging. "Left pocket to get in, right pocket to get out, don't mix them up, and don't forget and fiddle in the pockets during the night."

The task itself proved thankfully unremarkable. When he touched the coin in his left pocket, he was whisked off to a plain if beaurocratically imposing hallway to guard a black door at the end, whose mundane appearance belied what lay beyond it. Everything stood in the strange darkness of an office building with the lights shut off. It seemed the light was hiding--a potential charge inside every blue shape, a ghost stretching itself along the polished floor--waiting in the silence to spring back out at the flip of a switch. In the silent darkness every tiny sound, every natural creak of the walls became loud and threatening. Lupin stood at the plain black door watching and listening assiduously all night, and struggled not to let his mind wander outside this hallway, onto his strange dream or Sirius's uncharacteristic silence.

Thankfully, blue shadows were all that he saw and natural creaks were all that he heard until morning. Alastor had also lent him a precisely-set watch, and when he saw it nearing the hour for the first people at the Ministry to arrive at work, he made certain the Invisibility Cloak was wrapped securely and completely around him, keeping his hand ready over the right pocket. Hidden by the cloak, he waited until the very moment the lights flashed on and touched the coin as he squeezed his eyes shut against the brightness...

A rushing sensation--his next breath had the cabbage-and-ammonia smell of Arabella's house, and also the scent of water. He opened his eyes to find himself in her bathroom. Of course Alastor would land him there, he realised; it was the hardest part of the house to see into from outside. Even before he took the cloak off, a few cats ran in and stroked themselves against his legs.

"Remus!" Arabella greeted, looking in at him from the warmly-lit kitchen. "Come on out, dear, have a seat." She pulled up a chair at the table. Having been raised in traditional wizard garb, she'd never been able to get used to Muggle clothes, and so was dressed in a housecoat.

He folded the Invisibility Cloak neatly and draped it over an extra chair as he sat down. Soxie, a small black-and-white cat, jumped up onto his lap. "You wanted to see me?"

"So formal!" the old lady clucked, pouring cups of tea. He didn't even have to tell her to add milk and sugar; she knew how he liked it, although she had to rummage through some stacked-up tins of catfood to find the sugarbowl. "I thought we could visit awhile if you're not too tired."

"No, not at all."

"Always staying here, well, sometimes I don't know as much about what you dears are doing as I'd like." She handed him his teacup and sat down. "Now, I want you to tell me all about the house."

He described everything they had been doing to rehabilitate the Black House, and she listened intently with frequent nods of approval. She especially liked the Blue Room, and laughed like Alastor had at the pictures on the walls. Burning the furniture was prudent, she agreed, since there wasn't time to "reclaim it," but she suggested saving one room aside to do that--simply use it until it became theirs, furniture and all. Something good was lost, she said, in cutting out too much of a house's history, even if it was a history of bad things.

Very soon the conversation turned from the house to the people in it. She shook her head sadly at the Weasleys' troubles, but agreed that probably time would bring them back together. "What about Sirius?" she asked. "How is he getting along?"

Lupin was taking a sip of his tea and hesitated to say. "Oh, well enough, I suppose."

"Oh, my, that bad..." she said, and settled in closer as if he'd begun to confide something.

"I didn't..."

"Your face says it, sweetheart. Now, why don't you tell me what's the trouble."

It was no use resisting when Arabella had him like this. "He's been acting strange... Only the past few days, but it worries me. I knew that going through his family's house would bother him, but... At first he handled that well enough. He was upset when Albus first came to the house and said that Harry should stay here with his aunt and uncle and not with Sirius..."

"He wanted Harry to move in there?"

"Very much, once we had the house ready. You didn't hear about it?"

"No... Albus didn't mention it when he told me about that meeting..." she said, knitting her brows.

"But that's not the trouble. Or maybe it is; it started at just about that time... How has Harry been, by the way?"

"Oh, bearing up, but about Sirius."

That seemed a bleak description, but she wasn't letting him change the subject. "Well, when talk of Harry came up, he was sharp with Molly and then with Albus, even stormed out of the meeting after that... He sulked and acted bitter, but he seemed himself. In a bit of a temper, you know, but..."

"I know Sirius, dear," Arabella assured him. "He was in your class, after all."

"I suppose it started just after that. He's been... withdrawn since then. He chats with me, but he once cut off when someone else came to the door. He's quiet at meals... When he and I are alone, he tells me what he thinks, but when the Order met again, he scarcely said a thing. It was at the end of that meeting that Arthur and Molly told us about their troubles, and Sirius got up and left without a word!"

"That is strange!" Arabella agreed. "Have you spoken to him about it?"

"A little. I don't think he understands it himself. He talked of feeling useless, cooped up hiding in the house, but I don't think it's really that... I don't know." He sipped his tea thoughtfully. "Maybe it's the house... Maybe he's missing Harry..."

"I'm afraid I couldn't say..."

"You said Harry was only 'bearing up'?" Remus questioned.

"Oh, it's always like that when he's here..." Arabella sighed. "Vernon and Petunia, well, I fear they're the sort that gives Muggles a bad name. It's chafed Harry something terrible ever since he was small, and now that he's in school it gets worse every summer... Their boy Dudley is quite a brute, too, which doesn't help, but I can hardly blame him, seeing how they raised him..."

"I don't dare tell Sirius that..."

"And of course, poor Harry doesn't know about me," she continued. "I've been trying to ask him over for tea, even tried to hint to him when Sirius was here, but he's been avoiding me. Can't blame him for that; I always had to make a nuisance of myself before... Vernon and Petunia would have tried to keep him away from me if they thought he enjoyed my company, and heavens help him if they knew I was a witch! ...Albus said he thought Harry would be safer here?"

Remus nodded.

Arabella worried at a whisker on her chin. "I'm not so certain... I worry sometimes..."

"Hm?"

"Well, when James and Lily passed away--good rest their souls--everything was in such a state, I can see where his mother's blood was the best thing Albus could think of, but... Well, sometimes I think blood without love is thinner than water," she said. "Vernon and Dudley are simply awful to him, and it's strange... I can't say Petunia has turned her back totally on the fact that he's her sister's child, but she acts every bit as bad. In an unhappy house, I think there's always a little danger hidden away in a corner..."

"And the Dursleys have an unhappy house?" Lupin questioned.

"It's never been a happy house for Harry. Oh, it's enough to keep him safe, and you know I do everything I can, but better than with Sirius?" she questioned rhetorically. "After the way he climbed the walls while you were gone for Full Moon? Between fretting about you and wanting to see Harry, I thought he'd tear himself in two, bless his heart! He does love that boy."

"You think Sirius could actually keep Harry safer?"

Arabella sipped her tea, then looked him in the eyes. "I'll say it like this: If what I have set up here were to utterly fail, and You-Know-Who came knocking on the Dursleys' door... Well, Petunia might cry about it, but they'd hand Harry over."

Remus gave a start.

"Now Sirius, on the other hand... I don't know him as well as you do, but I think if that happened, and there was nothing else for him to do, that he'd do what James and Lily did."

Lupin was too stunned at what she was saying to respond, but he knew that she was right. He knew that Sirius would die to save Harry. So would Molly. So would I. And no one at the Dursley home would? Dumbledore thought that a safer place for him? Surely Albus must have a good reason, but how could anyone fault Sirius for being angry?

And then another thing occurred to him. Maybe Sirius's strange behavior was because of the disagreement over Harry, or maybe it wasn't, but Remus suddenly felt convinced that Harry could help. Whatever it was that had taken hold of Sirius, Harry's presence would certainly give him strength to fight it, if nothing else.

"Whatever is the matter with him, it says a good deal that he's still talking to you," Arabella said, breaking the pause. "You take good care of him, dear. He must trust you about himself, so you trust yourself about him."

He sat back and frowned. Soxie tried to nudge her head against his teacup, so he put it aside and stroked her. Trusting himself about Sirius could place him in opposition to the Order's plans, but like Sirius, he was still very aware of the importance of their work... "That could become complicated..."

"I'm sure it's nothing that Moony can't handle," Arabella assured him, patting his hand. "Oh, dear me! I asked you over to give you some things for the house, and then I got to chattering and forgot all about it..."

She gave him as much as he could hold in his arms: a bedspread and several doilies crocheted by hand, some old wall-hangings and knick-knacks--one specially to go over the fireplace in the Blue Room, since she knew they couldn't paint that--as well as garden vegetables, homemade bread, and even a whole chocolate cake still in the pan, with a rough layer of icing spread over it. By arranging the other things in the paper sacks with the bread and vegetables, somehow he managed it all as she saw him off through the Floo, shooing cats away from following.

"Good morning, Molly," Remus greeted as he emerged into the kitchen of the Black House. He could just see the top of her graying red hair over his load.

"Shh!"

He put down the sacks to get a clear view; Molly took her finger from her lips and pointed. Sirius was asleep at the kitchen table, his head resting on his folded arms. There was a little spot of drool on the velvet sleeve.

"He was waiting for you," Molly whispered. "Now that you're back, I'll fix breakfast..."