Transition

2: Anger

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.
--Louis L'Amour

The full moon comes that night and Bill doesn't realise until he hears Remus screaming why Dumbledore left early. He spends the night pacing in front of the door to the root cellar, cringing at every howl and wondering why a sedate wolf is so enraged.

Morning comes creeping over the rooftops in London around Grimmauld Place, but the moon has not yet set so Bill potters around the kitchen, making tea and an omelet, and waiting. He sets the breakfast table for three.

The moon sets much too late for Bill's liking and he heads over to the root cellar door, waiting for the wards around it to fall and Remus to come out, a bit worse for the wear and dead tired. But time passes and Remus doesn't come out of the root cellar. The wards don't drop and Bill has to pull them down himself. He feels kind of anxious.

The steps that lead down to the dingy root cellar creak underneath him and he hears--barely--a muffled moan. A whispered lumos is all it takes for Bill to see what he fears the most in the back of his mind. Blood is everywhere and, it seemed, so is Remus. His ragged clothes are tossed haphazardly around the room, his wand snapped--snapped!--clear in half on the dirt in front of where Remus is sprawled out, bloodied and broken.

Bill bites back a shriek and sprints up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Madam Pomfrey promises Bill several times that Remus will make it. Bill wants to believe her, he really does, but the root cellar is coated in blood and Remus is still pale and shaking.

Bill keeps a vigil by Remus' bedside for the week he's unconscious. In the back of his head, and sometimes out loud, Bill wonders if this is what it was like when the Potters died. Did Remus' demons eat him alive then, like they are right now, in front of his eyes?

Madam Pomfrey comes every day and forces potions down Remus' throat because if she doesn't, she tells Bill one lazy afternoon, he'll die of starvation.

For some reason, Bill thinks Remus might like it better that way. And he thinks, too, that he'd mourn for Remus like Remus is mourning for Sirius.

Bill comes home on Friday night from an Order meeting and finds Remus in the kitchen, awake and alert. He looks just fine, not like he'd been fighting for his life unconscious in a bed only hours ago. He must have seen the look on Bill's face, because he smiles a little and tells Bill that it happens all the time.

He nods at Remus and notices a box by his feet. He spots a picture--the one that he'd noticed a thousand times on the bedside table--and a bunch of pictures and papers. He asks Remus if he's going through old things.

Remus tells him it's just trash and asks if Bill will please take it out to the curb, or burn it. Bill nods to Remus and takes it instead to the drawing room on the fourth floor. He puts it in the closet, because he knows that Remus isn't right in the head.

He creeps back down the stairs as silently as he could manage. When he hits the landing at the bottom, he cringes at the creek and trains his ears on Remus' soft voice.

"None of this would have happened if you weren't so fucking stupid, Sirius," he says. "I was ready to forgive you until Moony ripped me to shreds and then I realised that you were just a rash, foolish man that never grew up."

Bill slumps against the wall and he hears something that sounds like a cross between a choked sob and a mirthless laugh. "It doesn't matter now, does it?" he says. "You're dead, and a bit of a good riddance, too." Bill hears a teacup shatter into a million pieces. Somehow he knows it's the red and gold one with a little chip in the top. Sirius' teacup.

After Remus goes to bed that night Bill sneaks into the kitchen and mutters reparo. He hopes that everything will look better in the morning.