The Sea of Faith

“Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.”

- Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold

~

“Don’t cry for me,” it said.

1. Shadow

When the tender cloud-petals of the summer’s even are stained in the sky, he starts to walk away. When the air he breathes in is so profuse with mist, so abundant in tear, unsure of whether to mourn or rejoice, he starts to walk away. When the unfurling wind strikes him as cruel, he doesn’t look back. His heart started as a mere note, an abandoned tone, a sound in the lost wind’s roar, and to be alone he’d realized, was his fate even from the beginning.

For things to end the way they did, he isn’t too sure, but seems like a mistake. And perhaps with further thinking, it is his mistake; or maybe he did more than err, more than betray.

The day they died was a cold day, a rainy day; one that fell rather abruptly like a nightmarish breath. And sometimes still, in his most precious dreams—what he would not say to anyone else—he watches himself drown, gag, and drown, wolfed by the bitter rainwater down to some hellish underworld.

He doesn’t know what it is that’s eating him from the inside. It could be guilt, it must be guilt.

So he stands tall and black-robed against the dusk, casting his eyes down to the ground where grass rolled sleek and dark, the wind cold, the sky grim—and there is nothing in his eyes save shadows, save the falling of souls and ghosts beside him.

Remus used to wonder if anyone else knew him for what he truly is: a dark creature, innately and incorrigibly so. Blood is the intuition of a wolf, being neither malicious nor overtly evil. And yet it just seemed natural that he felt at ease among the crowd of Death Eaters, being promised something magnificent for his insatiability, being given the opportunity to betray, kill.

Their recruitment was blatant (or at least it seemed to be,) targeted and effective. It appealed to the deep corners of his mind, where dark things brewed and stirred—much akin to the animalistic luster of the blood-cold eyes—fanged things, beastly things. Desperation and envy drove him into it, along with the smothering note of malice, of conscientious calculations that had no other name than that of evil.

Sly eyes were everywhere, peering over shoulders and waiting for the unspoken command.

But how strange that the flow of water is the pattern of pain and anger. Remus had once stood outside, feeling for the design of temperature, the dome of the clouds, and searching inside him all the intensity churning into passion. It was pure power, really, to feel all that heat in your body, twisting and serpentine, burning every thought as it went its course.

It caressed the edges of the mouth, holes of the heart.

2. Lust

It was raining that night too, although gentler and slier, with more mysticism and more romance. It was after moonrise, when the stars were shinning over the night-spread canopy, sweet as the evergreen hawthorns through the winter-branched ceiling. Moonlight lined James’ face, his bed-sheets, his hand, and it struck Remus then that his heart was thudding faster.

James was fumbling for his glasses when he saw Remus standing over him.

And Remus couldn’t tell if they were his own hands that reached downwards to the collars of James’ nightshirt—when the glasses fell with a dull thump onto the hardwood floor and James’ arm went limp at once. Their fingers were mismatched—fitting awkwardly—but they didn’t much care, they were kissing but their lips didn’t touch, they were dreaming but the touches were real. When they opened their eyes, it was but empty foams that carried them so high—so wantonly light.

If it only had ended at that, Remus would have been happy with an adjourned dream; but desire tasted sweet once in his tongue, bitter twice by the ear.

Hands came to him, admitting defeat, admitting desire. His fingers traced warily James’ careful form, where his replyless breaths lied wreathed in lighthearted sounds. And James’ careless eyes were searching, reiterating, hair strands detailing, fingers freeing the tenseness of passion, awash with frozen rain.

But who knew then, that the boy was planning murder?

So passed the night, a dim reflection in his mind, ineffable and profoundly sea-like. Who knew then that he was falling in love…

But afterwards, from a meticulous denial, Remus insisted that love is a harder thing than it looks, being meretricious even by nature with an elusive indication of folly. Because it’ll someday turn out that everything Remus trusted was more or less a pasquinade, made for someone else’s mirth.

Reason itself had settled in the branches of his lungs and barred him from breathing any longer. So he remembered his Promise, his Oath (and the oath-breaker’s sufferance) and let the Shadow-Inside take over.

3. Clout

Remus’ Mark was on his back as he had specifically requested—for easier concealment. Remus was sure that the Lord had his special pleasure in the thought of the physical segregation between the human and the half-human.

What lured him in was the money and the promise of a normal life, mended by some dark charm; and yet both blinded by the imminent sense of hope and the overmastering of the wolflike evilness, he was scarcely sure that he’d just committed a sure suicide.

But what drove him into it was a darker matter. It was envy mixed with rage, subdued only by the subtle workings of a stronger mind (although Remus wasn’t too sure whose mind was stronger;) something spiteful, something dark. It was admiration mixed with hate, tainted with lust; resigned but impersonal still. It was the innate response to a deeper wound, a bitterer betrayal, a war of the heart and emotion that unfolded as swiftly as grassland fire.

The Lord’s desire was clear: to ensure absolute trust and absolute ignorance, which, Remus supposed, were in close correlation with one another. But it was an easier task that what he’d imagined, for it seemed that once gained, trust wasn’t easily lost, especially with a close friend (or lover,) perhaps because the mind is an insecure thing that sees truth in lies.

Betrayal now is more dulcet that it sounded—against his conscience, he felt—satisfying the pang in him that said otherwise.

It rained all day and all night, and the Baby was crying. Then came the Green Light, and all was over.

4. Worth

When Remus came back to the childhood lake, James was there, ethereal and corporeal all at once, which confused Remus because he couldn’t tell if he was really a ghost or a memory. Whatever he was, he was just as he’d remembered him—perhaps a bit paler around the eyes, more translucent in the skin—tall and strong and proud.

He was laughing, though, laughing like a madman—with that edge of insanity around the iris like how Sirius looked when they locked him away—he was talking about their childhood times, asking if Remus was still true then.

Remus expected to fume, but he didn’t; instead there was warmness around the rims of his eyes.

“Don’t cry for me, you don’t deserve to,” the pale James said.

He couldn’t reply to that.

“Do you regret what you did?” he had asked, without even a vestige of irony or mockery.

Suddenly, Remus’ eyes hardened, his heart hardened. “I don’t know.”

It didn’t break the heart—not like how Remus thought it would, anyway—unexpectedly, but seemed to give the eye a yellower hue. It seemed to have split the mind, though, into two consciousnesses, two consciences, two entities. And it baffled Remus how much the human mind can lie to itself while still trusting. “Doublethink,” Orwell called it, and Remus didn’t realize what it had meant until James’ marriage, when he was loving James and hating James at the same time, and he felt so paradoxical and meaningless that he might have even exploded.

5. Perpetuity

Now means now.

Forever means forever.

The Death Eaters lost their war, but only Remus knows whose side he was on.

~

“Don’t cry for me,” it said.