In the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

2 - Dawn, Brooms

Remus tugs Sirius out of bed to help him clean. They talked about his earlier, but Sirius has forgotten, or is pretending to have forgotten. They both wanted to sweep the house for creatures, for things that bite, before the children wake up and start to help. Remus could do this alone, and he hates to wake Sirius, but he doesn't like the empty rooms, and he doesn't like the way dawn looks in them. It's the gray of old parchment. Bleary and low-contrast like smudged newsprint. The portraits wake up and watch you. Nothing moves. Sirius finally swats Remus away and lopes out of bed, yanking the curtains apart. More grayness, a lighter shade. Shadows are flushed under the furniture.

"Ickle Ron's afwaid of spiders," Sirius says. It's plain he's in a bad mood. His eyes are still slits, stung by the new light, and he's grimacing as he dresses. "Better check the corners for him. Wouldn't want any new stains on the carpet." Remus watches him with thin lips and says nothing. There are times when he doesn't love Sirius.

They take the second floor first. The first one has been so well-used that most of the nasties have fled or been found already. Sirius levitates the settees and armoires and other bits of useless furniture while Remus peers underneath them, prodding the napping, dusty carpet with a long-handled broom. They find Dust Bunnies and Bundimum, mostly. Remus kills all the spiders he finds, though he knows it will only produce a surplus of fruit flies. Sirius looks bored.

"S'go back t'bed," he mumbles, sidling up to Remus from behind, taking him around the waist, startling him as he squints into the darkness behind a mirrored vanity. Sirius presses his mouth to Remus' neck, taking a pinch of skin between his teeth, drawing, sucking. It's not a love-bite; it's a lamprey, mindless, heartless, heedless, feeding.

"Lumos," says Remus, thrusting his wand behind the vanity. Sirius detaches, leaving a hot welt on Remus' throat and a cold void against his back.

"Poofters," mutters the portrait of a young, sullen-looking boy in knickerbockers. Sirius laughs, satisfyingly barklike, but Remus is in no mood to admire his consistency right now. He finds a Crooswinkle braced between the vanity and the wall, arachnoid but more, more legged, more jointed, more fanged, more frightening. He zaps it with a pale yellow jolt from his wand, and it crumbles to dust, hissing down the wall and into the shadows. When he turns Sirius is staring at him, standing in the middle of the room with his feet apart and at odd angles, as if he's deciding whether or not to leave. After a brief, blank moment Remus brushes past him and out the door. He is halfway down the hall before he hears Sirius follow.

Remus will remember this morning and think, what a shock it must have been for him, my refusal. Wordless and indefinite as it was. Sirius was the one who had moods, not me. Sirius was the one who said yes and no. I said okay. I said if you want. He will hate Sirius for an instant, which he has done before, and then he will hate himself. Which he has done nearly every day, for nearly as long as he can remember.

Sirius hangs in the doorway of the narrow study. Remus levitates the sofa himself, sweeping under it with the inanimate, unenchanted broom. He hits a family of dust bunnies and they collapse, sending up a puff of motes, spreading gray across the carpet. He feels a sting of remorse, a cold spike of something in his belly. He must stare at the floor for too long, because Sirius huffs indecipherably behind him.

"Grieving, Moony?" Sirius asks. When he has decided to be cruel, his words curl up at the ends like charred parchment. "We used to make a sport of them, remember? Underneath our beds in the North Tower -"

"I'm not James," blurts Remus. Sirius falls silent, with a sound like a chop, the rest of his memory falling silently to the ground. Remus turns around, the sofa still bobbing in the air behind him. Sirius' mouth has slapped shut, the corners are turned down, and he is staring at Remus with eyes so huge they don't fit his face anymore, they seem to overlap the edges, spill into his hair. . Remus feels a sick, dizzying rush, a wave of satisfaction at what he has done.

"I didn't -" he says. "You -" he says. His eyes narrow to slits. "No," he says. "You're not." He turns and goes.

Remus will remember and think, nobody can bring good all the time. He knew that. Of course he knew that.

He goes after Sirius almost immediately; still, Sirius is gone from the hallway by the time Remus gets there. He calls out that he's sorry, he begs him to come back, he doesn't care who hears him. Upstairs, where the children are sleeping, the floor begins to creak.