DreamTime (Anniversary)

The moon tonight is soft and yielding behind a gauze of scudding clouds. From the comfort of our pillows I can see out of the white French windows and past the balcony railings to the garden, where pale half-moon light washes over the symmetric gravel curves of the rockery. I shift on the pillows, the linen sheets rustling softly as though in protest. I close my eyes. I breathe soft night air. I count.

My little digital clock chimes quietly on the chrome nightstand. Midnight, it announces, April 12th, and I take a deep breath of another, personal year.

It's our anniversary.

The obvious question would be "which" anniversary? We have so many, Severus and I. We have had a myriad of epochal, significant or even silly events to mark in what I think of - with a lift of unexpected pride - as //our// life together. And this cool, dark new morning marks the most recent - and perhaps the most important - of all our anniversaries.

No, I revise this estimate - not the most important. The most important of them was 100 years ago, when I met my future partner on the fourth day of boarding school at Hogwarts. We were eleven years old, mere children, when we first set eyes on each other. I've never forgotten his pale, smooth child's face, and well-brushed, jet-black hair, a nose which disliked me and his adult eyes. He said he remembers "my sheer beauty" which I very much doubt because we didn't like each other, even at that first, completely innocent meeting. Who were those two scowling boys to know that they would grow up to love and to hate: to call down furious curses and fierce blessings on each other's heads, to learn more than school lessons together - like how to reach for each other without shame - and, at the end of their sometimes painful journey (if ever there is an end), truly, yes... to grow old together. To spend nights at peace, ensconced in a soft, white-linened bed under the light of a tolerant half-moon. The two of us dreaming in tandem. A hundred years. I can't help smiling as I turn it over in my mind. A whole century of knowing my Severus. Not always being with him, or even loving him, but a whole century - the rise and fall of a generation - of knowing him. That, as Albus would say, is something.

It is also something, I think, to have spent the better part of that century - 74 years, to be exact - actually living with Severus. Indeed, later this year, in June, there will be the chance to celebrate our "living together" anniversary. When Severus and I came to the full possession of our power as a couple, as two partners rather than two warring individuals. It felt like each of us had been building a bridge over a chasm, from opposite ends, and we had finally reached out and touched each other's fingers. Stood up and found we were on firm ground. Of course, the fourteenth of June is also supposed to mark the actual day we moved into the Knightsbridge flat.

I close my eyes, recall with total clarity the smell of the newly painted living room, the sight of our boxes and crates of shared belongings strewn across the floor (Severus' voice shouting, "The first bloody thing to do, Remus, is unpack the box with the //carpets//."). How unfamiliar we were with each other in these surroundings, constantly colliding and brushing against each other as we moved between the boxes, in the awkward spaces of the flat. Fixing the chandelier and hanging paintings in the Muggle way, with one of us perched on a small stepladder and the other holding him tightly, lovingly, around the waist and thighs. Ah.

The unusually bright, golden sunlight as we sat among half-unpacked crates, conjured a miscellany of food and cold Butterbeer and surveyed what we had done so far. The sight of Severus sitting on the floor, eating with his fingers, drinking out of a bottle, toasting me with it. Smiling like sunlight. I remember my overwhelming desire to worship him. Our crowning moment that day came with the entrance of our neighbours - a chic young couple, who brought tea and "do you need any help?". Severus showing them civilly into the clutter, introducing them to "my partner, Remus", for the first time in my presence. Both of us falling asleep in dead exhaustion on a crookedly-positioned bed with half-made sheets, Severus wound around me, his long beautiful fingers tangled in my hair. Closing my eyes happy. Those were absolute glory days.

I open my eyes. The clouds have shifted now, leaving the moon clear in the velvet night. Its light is stronger. How does memory affect it? I have lived in its silver thrall for more than a hundred years. Surely there are some good things we share together.

Yes, there are. I push the covers back, careful not to disturb them too much, and climb from the bed. The French windows - half open - swing easily back on their hinges. I stand in the cool light on the wide balcony, looking down into the garden. It was there, beside the rockery, that Severus and I succumbed to sentiment, embraced underneath the crescent moon - wine swirling deliciously in our veins - and made whispered, half-kissed pledges, topped off with two gold rings. I strive to remember how long ago it was - roughly sixty years now. As long ago as that? Severus never lived it down, being the cynic that he always was, but we were //proud// of what we had done. And we still are - I stroke the worn, faded gold circle on my left hand.

Its partner is just as faded, and perhaps a little thinner, because Severus is lefthanded. I remember the feel of his ring as it slid with his fingers over my fur, under this same moon. Oh, there are plenty of //those// memories. Our love was founded on Severus' terrible hatred of my lycanthropy, and it would be ridiculous to believe otherwise. In fact it was years before he could stop himself from bringing it up - like some unbearable personal habit of mine - during our quarrels. And years before I could understand that he did this because he was frustrated that he couldn't help me - he couldn't cure me. Perhaps the only failure in his entire, brilliant career. "Of course," he said to me when he (finally) retired, "It would be failure in the one thing which //mattered//."

It mattered so much in those days. I would spend the full moon stretched out across the bed, asleep on his feet. I would always wake up - as I do now - in the middle of the night to find him sitting beside me, stroking my fur, not smiling. We would go for walks together in the woods, during those nights. I would sit beside him on the picnic cloth and watch him eat something. Lay my head in his lap and feel cool night breeze in my fur.

Once he spent a whole evening in summer, a whole drowsy delightful evening doing nothing but brushing my fur until I felt like I was made from polished silver, and I think, judging from his eyes, that I looked like it. He had even brushed my tail until I switched it into his face because it tickled.

Nowadays, of course, I //am// a silver werewolf. And it has been a long time since my darling had to exchange all his black robes for grey in order to remain colour-coordinated. I can't help myself, I laugh into the perfect silence on the balcony. Silver hackles rise in cool air - reminding me that I am too old to be hanging about nude on balconies, and sending me thankfully back inside to our bed, to warmth and memory and content.

The moon was not there that summer night. It was raining silkily, and there were tiny jeweled stars, but they were hidden behind the closed French windows and the drawn organza drapes. Nearly forty years ago I lay in this same bed, in a nest of soft pillows and rustling linen, and said, "I'm in bed with a pensioner." and Severus scowled, lifted his dark eyes and said, with such love in his voice, "You utter bastard." We both laughed. I twined his sleek grey hair in my fingers, lifted it to my lips like pale silk. Earlier in the evening we had discovered that my beloved's very last remaining strand of black hair had given up the ghost. An instant anniversary! We kept the lights on, our amber bedside lamp casting us in a bubble of luxurious comfort, showing us every perfect detail of our mutual decrepitude. He traced all my silver hairs that had used to be mouse brown - the ones that had been silver in my youth having gone completely white. I touched his face, all the worry lines, the frown lines, the love lines. The laughter lines. He looked at me. "I don't care." he said, gruffly. "I don't //care//.... Except about your double chin." And then my turn to call him names.

All our anniversaries. The moon and I recall them. We are aged and yet ageless in memory. Severus and I have been together so long, our bones melded to one another, two binary stars orbiting each other. Perhaps the moon envied us.

One year ago, to the day, I woke to the clear light of morning, of a breaking dawn - and looked into the face of death. My angel, still lying beside me with the blankets drawn close round him, had deserted me in the night. His eyelids would not lift to my kisses. I put my arms round him, but the body was already cold.

He was my heart, was now a thing which had to be disposed of in ceremonies. My mind simply refused to accept this. How could I not have smelt his death in the night? He was my //life//... my working week and my Sunday rest. Mine to keep and quarrel and sleep with - and I slept beside him without a qualm as he gradually ceased to breathe, as he cooled on our sheets and became inanimate.

Every day, every morning I wake to nothingness, reach sleepily, half-blindly over empty sheets for absence. Why am I always surprised not to find his warmth? Surely I should have expected death to come one day. We were over a hundred... we should have been prepared. But this is not something you can prepare for - at //any// age. And so I reach for my darling, automatically, whether or not I know he is dead.

I roll over, into the empty clean space on the other side of the bed. Raise myself on one elbow to look at the nightstand. The portrait stands upright next to my wire-rim glasses in their ivory case, in the spot where Severus' own spectacle-case used to sit. It's a handsome one, with a black frame worked in deep green malachite and dull gold. I smile, lift my hand to touch the picture of my lover. I remember it was taken a few years ago - on another anniversary. What was it, now? Oh yes - one of our last "living together" celebrations. We had Sirius to dinner. I took the photograph in the early evening, when Severus was inspecting the gratin (//my// gratin), tasting the wine, and annotating the final draft of a foreword for someone's book.

Now I run my fingers softly over his face in the dimness. He smiles back at me, the whole of his mobile, aristocratic face lifting. Incredible how his entire look changes, his eyes soften and his expression becomes warm. He raises his hand, to touch the places where my fingers meet the glass of the photograph frame. A whole year since last we touched each other.

I lift the picture off the nightstand, cradle it in my arms and sink back against the pillows. Soothed by the sweep of moonlight, I whisper lovers' nothings, and old men's nonsense to the stillness of the bedroom. After all, what is there to regret? My cup was empty, was filled to the brim, and I have drained it freely and unhesitatingly.

In the dimness, I weep unbearable tears - of hungry loneliness, and the sweetest joy.

== end ==
Thank you for reading this fic, and I hope it wasn't too sappy for you. As usual with all my fics, please review (if you wish to) for *other readers*, rather than me or my ego.