Loupseule

He ran away with his hair dyed a chestnut brown. He told himself it was a chance to start over. He felt as if it was a chance to drown. In June, he rented a damp, empty apartment at the end of a crime-ridden street on the west side of the city. It had one window and one skylight, which was cracked down the center and badly patched with bits of once white plaster that had begun to turn a moldy black and flake off onto the wood floors. When it rained, droplets of reeking brown water from the rusty tiled roof trickled in through the widening crack, leaving a dark warped shape on the wood floor.

And he thought, "I will fold the burnt edges of myself away slowly, like a waxing moon."

In July he bought three gallons of black paint and covered the walls in dark reflections of his eyes, of the night sky, of silky black fur. By August, deciding he did not want to be reminded of Sirius ever again, he purchased four gallons of gray, and repainted.

For the musty apartment he bought a used mattress. A desk. An old leather chair. A bucket for the dripping skylight. 317 Preway became home.

He moved into the one-room studio without luggage. That is to say, there were no duffle bags, no suitcases, no pieces of antique furniture, or cardboard boxes of silverware and wool sweaters. In fact, he left even his razor behind, and two weeks later noticed the err when he caught his reflection in the glass of a window. Besides his newly acquired furnishings, there were two boxes situated at one end of the makeshift kitchen, the smaller sitting centered on top of the larger, and both dusty and neglected, even as the months passed.

When the sun rose, Remus lay in the empty, sagging mattress on the floor and stared at the cracked ceiling, rising occasionally to drink cold tea or eat the food he bought from the grocer around the street. His diet was simple now, mostly citrus fruits and bread. He'd given up meat; he didn't know exactly why. On some days he sat at the desk and wrote letters to James and to Peter, to Lily. His fingers hit the keys of the typewriter in sharp staccato pecks that resounded through the barren apartment with an almost agonizing emptiness. Occasionally, he wrote to Sirius. The habit was strange, each letter always ripped and hurled to the floorboards to fall into the layer of dust that had begun to form there. These were letters they would never receive; no one would ever receive. Not even Remus would dare to read them again, and they would lay forgotten in piles and crumpled heaps around the dirty flat. At night he fell back into the mattress again, continuing another perpetual and seemingly endless stretch of the same foggy days.

The first of the two boxes which had accompanied Remus to 317 Preway was unduly heavy, as the mover had noted as he wheeled it up the stairs in the windy July. Occasionally it was a mystery to even Remus as to why he had bothered to bring it along. It was a trunk of books. Old literature from his school days mostly, potions tomes and volumes on defense and transfigurations and astronomy. Others too, several novels, one or two rolled magazines he'd kept for various reasons, some long forgotten.

Transformations were done alone. After all, he was alone. It was those moments the most when he wondered if Sirius thought about him. He had a vision of what he imagined an Azkaban cell would be like, black with mold and mildew and moss, and dripping, oozing, seeping with filth over cold, hard stone. There was the vision of a hunched, emaciated Sirius, braced against a corner. At first he'd tried to keep his mind from those thoughts, he'd blocked them and pounded and squeezed them, and still they returned. There was the reoccurring word that haunted him. Murderer.

In September he went to the grocer at the end of his street for oranges and a stale baguette, and caught a strand of music drifting through the window of a parked car. He recognized the symphony, it was a muggle one. Sleepy, with out of tune violins and a soloist who seemed to have forgotten the notes of e minor. He plodded through most of the fall until the last of his money ran out and the electricity was shut off in his lonely apartment. It was November.

When it rained particularly hard one evening, the skylight began to leak again with new resolve, and he dragged the second crate that had accompanied him from his past life under the skylight, and threw the skylight bucket on top of it to catch the muddy rainwater. The bucket leaked, and the filthy water seeped down into the cracks of the box. Remus watched it without emotion.

November was too cold to be without electricity. Heat. Warm water. It was so much harder then he had imagined it would be to become an anonymous muggle. Magic was a crutch he'd never thought about losing. Money was something he'd never concerned himself with.

In December his two weak hands found a pair of muggle jeans and pulled them on to what had become a thin and starved frame. A t-shirt, two socks, a ripped sweater with a dark brown stain across its middle. He found that it had become an effort just to stand. In five months, he'd forgotten why he existed. Is there an answer for that? Whispered a parched voice in his swimming head. He didn't answer it.

The bar was behind a large wooden door with black iron handles and massive blackened bolts, down a long, extremely narrow hallway of red brick which was tinged black as if fire might have at sometime caressed its baked stones. He found the owner sweeping a broom across the muddy floor.

The place was bathed in blue light from several blue glass sconces nailed into the brick and a curving florescent track light, which overlooked a curving zinc topped bar. There was a stage and a few tables. It was almost desolate. On one of the brick walls was painted a Starry Night-esque mural of a black night sky. Gazing at the foggy depiction he felt the nudge of a memory; flashes of James and Sirius drinking butterbeer on top of the astronomy tower hit him with an icy cold. God, so long ago.

"What's your name?" The middle aged, blue-haired manager asked as he finished stacking the chairs onto tabletops.

Quietly: "Remus."

"You can start tomorrow if you like, Remus. You have a last name?"

Remus looked into the dark mural on the cracked wall, "Loupseule." He said.

In the darkness of some February night, Remus opened his eyes to see Sirius sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, back eyes watching him sleep, "What was in your dream?" Sirius said.

In his memory, Remus sat up on the feathery Gryffindor bed and leaned back against one of the high bedposts. The curtains drawn around the bed made it hard for him to see Sirius' face clearly, but it was an intrigued one, youthful curiosity. And something else.

"You were moaning." Sirius said.

Remus closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wooden post. Words didn't form.

In a rowdy department store he bought black pants and a dark blue button up shirt. On the way home, be bought a razor.

Standing shaven in the new clothes, he thought about combing his hair, and then remembered that he didn't have a comb. A little prod in his mind wondered how he looked, and he remembered he didn't own a mirror. It was ten-thirty. He went to the bar.

The long brick passageway into the place seemed longer this time, it was chilly in November already, and he didn't own a coat. There was a woman already turning on lights and opening up when he arrived into the blue-bathed room. She smiled when she saw him arrive and came around from behind the counter with blue-nail polished hand extended. She was young, he thought, to be working in place like this, not more than nineteen or twenty. He wondered if he was aging; she seemed almost adolescent to him.

Her hair was blond and streaked with a blue that matched the barstools and glass sconces. It framed her face and fell to her shoulders in a gentle way that reminded Remus how long it was since he'd been around anyone female.

Her eyes were a striking azure as she looked up at him and shook his hand with an un-callused palm. "I'm Iris," She said, "you must be Remus. The band needs help setting up."

Three or four men were carrying amplifiers onto the small stage at the back of the bar, and Remus lent a hand, feeling lost with the cords and plugs. He took three minutes trying to force the prongs of the extension cord plug into the outlet. Magic seemed so simple in a world of electricity and extension cords. He hurt for his wand, and for floo powder, and for the feeling of sickles and knuts in his palms instead of the muggle money he could barely count.

God it was hard, so hard, to be around people again. He worked the bar while Iris waited the few tables that scattered the room. When he was younger he'd listened to muggle music occasionally, not frequently, but often enough to know the song that was wandering through the room. Why was it, he wondered, that everything reminded him of Sirius?

"They walked along by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burnin' bright.
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate."

In the dim light of the bar, every black haired head was James; each red haired woman, Lily. In every man he rested a glass in front of he saw Peter's eyes, and his own seemed to sting too often with the tears he brushed away.

"He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see them anywhere.
He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate."

People laughing made his stomach turn over. His mind felt so removed from laughter. It was something so foreign, so distant; he couldn't even remember how to make the sound. The lead corners of his lips wondered how to curve like that, how to smile. He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled.

Yes, he could.

He had helped Lily to spread the sheets onto the queen-sized mattress. It was the last time he saw her alive. She grinned at the smell of fresh sheets and the feel of the sunlight as it drifted, dappled through the open windows and into the new house. Her stomach was large and beautiful, and she leaned on the windowsill as he finished tucking the sheets into the corners. He'd felt compelled to visit her that day. Such a beautiful day for someone to be alone. And someone should be with her constantly now he felt. She was getting so big. It wouldn't be long before the child came now, someone should help her with these chores. She was working too much on the new house, and James worried too. It was odd to sit there on the huge mattress with her leaning to look out the window into the spring air. Her red hair blew behind her and she turned around to smile at him with her clear green eyes. It was so hard to imagine how bad things could be happening in the world as they stood in that airy bedroom, sunlight illuminating the sweet air. It was hard to imagine that they had been hiding there, that it was a last resort. A last escape. Oh, Godric's Hollow.

"People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within.
I still believe he was my twin, but I lost the ring.
He was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate."

Days swept by. Nights lingered. Alone in his apartment he lay on the mattress and looked at the wooden box under the bucket of dirty water dripping from the skylight. He fell asleep in the dark cold apartment, and alone he wrestled with each thought of Sirius, blocked memories of the dark man away, willed them to disappear. He trained himself to serve the drinks without seeing the people there; the bodies so alive they made him feel dead. Sometimes that seemed as if it might be easier.

NOTE: lyrics by Bob Dylan, A Simple Twist of Fate.

At the wedding Remus sat in the spare bedroom in his rented tuxedo, Sirius was straightening his bow tie in the mirror. It was spring and the air itself was glad. Outside the day was sunny, and a hired band was tuning up and throwing a few cords across the sunlit field. Sirius looked handsome in the suit, his shaggy black hair tied back with a piece of twine. There was something older about him as he stood fumbling with the tie, lines more set around his face, a finer jaw. They weren't school students anymore, something about that seemed strange.

Remus stood and covered the distance between them, reaching to push Sirius' clumsy hands out of the way and knot the bow tie with his steadier fingers.

"God. James getting married. It's wild, isn't it? I can't even breathe. Thank Merlin it's not me walking down the Goddamn aisle." Sirius said it with a grin across his handsome face. He was rocking up and down on the balls of his feet with the nervous energy that was so distinctly Sirius.

"Dance with me." He said suddenly, and Remus felt his hands being grabbed into Sirius' sweaty palms.

They whirled around the airy bedroom, hearing the band's soft music floating from the sunny lawn. Sirius pulled him closer and Remus looked up into the man's wild eyes; dark brown with a fierce circle of black outlining the shadowy irises. They stopped dancing.

Christmas. Carols and snow and hot chocolate. Tinsel and customers buying drinks all around for men who were suddenly their best friends. And mistletoe. Remus drifted quietly in and out of the feeling of gingerbread and cinnamon, and bought a winter jacket from a salvation army down the street. It was not because he couldn't afford a nice coat, a down jacket in some trendy color from the brightly lit GAP two blocks away. Several months of steady pay, and a stomach that barely ever felt the need to be fed left him more money then he needed. No, it wasn't that at all.

He got lost in the dark walls of his apartment, in the deep gray and the watery light that fell into the room through the cracked skylight. He sat on the hard mattress and looked at the dirty crate underneath the skylight bucket, the black stains creeping out of the cracks between the pieces of wood, but he couldn't throw it away. In some small quadrant of his heart this was all he had left, these letters in this dark, wet box. He rolled over and found the bag of tobacco he had begun to carry in the last months. He rolled the cigarette slowly, and it calmed him.

He imagined he was wrapping bits of his past away in each roll, lighting them on fire, blowing them away in the dark smoke that fell from his mouth and nostrils. And at the same time he knew he was not blowing them away. They clung to his lungs and the taste lingered on his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and Sirius was there more than ever in every desperate puff.

At the bar Iris had kissed him underneath a piece of well-used mistletoe over the bar as they closed up. He'd pushed her away rather forcefully, without meaning to, and she'd looked hurt as she put on her coat and locked up the doors.

He wondered how long it would take to heal the wound that Sirius had left bleeding in his chest, it had been almost thirteen years. But moving on meant learning to breathe and walk and see again and he wasn't ready. Thirteen years, he thought, how could it have been so long? In his shadowy mind it was yesterday that he'd opened the door to find a breathless Minerva standing there, asking to come in. Minerva who had never been breathless before.

He'd been up all night waiting for news, waiting for someone to tell him where they were taking Harry, where Sirius was. And now here she was, and the words that came out of her mouth seemed to soak into him like water and then freeze suddenly with the chill of it. The ice expanded and cracked his body into pieces like so many shards of broken glass and he'd fallen to his knees with the blow. Sirius was being arrested for the murder of Peter Petegrew and the secret betrayal of James and Lily Potter. Each word was like an icy blade, and he shattered.

Remus sat on the cold floor of the Hogsmeade cellar and watched Sirius smoke the cigarette. Sirius didn't smoke much, but the constant arguments with his family seemed to have beaten him back into the habit. He was leaning against a keg of butterbeer, and as he blew out the smoke he closed his eyes.

Howlers had been coming for weeks and other black enveloped letters that he would stuff into the pocket of his jeans and make off with to a bathroom or closet to read alone.

Remus didn't question him about these, he knew what the family of Black was, and he knew also what Sirius was. It was as a burnt tree with one small living branch that grew doggedly from the black wood. But the wind and weather and the black burnt wood threatened to stifle it, and Sirius smoked his cigarette.

Remus drank from a bottle of butterbeer and watched the candle wax melt into the cracks of the cement floor. Sirius put out the cigarette suddenly and leaned forward to stoke the flame with his index and middle finger. Remus watched the way the flame darted away from this dark man, afraid to burn him perhaps. He looked into Sirius' dark eyes and felt lost there, inside those bottomless depths of darkness and shadow where the flame seemed not to reflect.

But instead he'd watched Peter die.

He'd watched Peter die.

Deep breathes. In and out, in and out, keep the tears back; keep the feeling back, mix the pain with hot coffee and cheap tobacco. James is dead. Lily is dead. Peter. Flashes of life. Peter studying late in a dark library. James landing on the muddy green grass of the pitch, hands high in the air as he waved the golden ball wildly above him. Lily's green eyes. Drinks on the astronomy tower, kitchen raids, midnights under the full moon. James dazzling white body frolicking across the lake. Peter playing beneath his paws. Sirius running beside him, the long pink tongue lolling from his sharp white teeth. Peter's eyes as he laid his hands on Lily's pregnant stomach. Peter's smile as he told her what an uncle he would make. James laughing. Lily throwing the white sheet into the air, letting it settle slowly onto the mattress. Making a guest bed no one would ever sleep in. James laying on the living room floor sprawled out as he and Sirius finished a game of chess. James' rook making a block. Sirius' attack from behind. Hidden bishop, secret treachery. Sirius smoking a cigarette in the dark basement behind a solitary melting candle. His dark eyes. Dark eyes.

And Remus broke. Like the cork in a bottle a champagne. Like a stretched rubber band. He was the string of an old violin, the mandrake pulled from the ground.

He felt the water splash his face and soak his clothing as he kicked the box with all the strength he had left in his suddenly passionate body. The wet wood cracked and the bucket flew to the air. Molding paper slipped across the wood floor, black water seeped into the floorboards. Squelched letters like rotten fruit burst from the decaying wood. Ghostly water, reeking paper.

His knees hit the floor first, deficient of the strength to stand. Water soaked into his jeans and up his cold legs. Blood trickled from where a stray nail from the box had entered his leg. He collapsed to the fetid floorboards and lay among the soaking mass of pulpy ink and sodden paper. He cried out and his tears flooded into the ocean of filthy water and naked letters, bright red blood. The waste. The squander, the could have beens, the I Love Yous, and Forever Yours. He closed his eyes tightly like a child trying to shut away the world. He screamed the cry of someone who has lost everything, a lone wolf on a starless, moonless night. Blood and India ink. His dark eyes behind the red flame of a melting candle.

Somewhere in the world, a black dog slipped by a dark cloaked figure, unnoticed, and left an empty cell behind. Albus Dumbledore tied an envelope to the leg of a ruffled brown owl, and a black-haired boy woke alone in the night. Remus lay on the floor and thought he was dead.