The Artisan of the Downfall

Artisan of the Downfall

"I never had a light in my eyes anyway,

maybe things are different these days."

-- Counting Crows, "Chelsea"

There is an art to self-depreciation, a beauty in the proper mix of personal loathing and quiet despair. This is his art, his dance, his most practiced accomplishment, this steady stare into the mirror at a bisected face, too old for his years, every scar shown by the too-harsh glare of the cheap lighting of hotel bathrooms. In the other room he can hear the steady breathing of someone whose name he won't remember tomorrow, and whose worth was only measured they distraction he - or she, it didn't really matter - could provide.

An artist of the downfall, was Remus Lupin. Artisan of the multitude and multifaceted ways a man could fail. Even there he failed, in his very existence. Because he wasn't a man. He was a beast. A shadow of a thing caught between the primal and the ineffectual and useless at both.

The boy on the bed was only just old enough to be legal. He wasn't quite beautiful, but then Remus had high standards for beauty. Beauty was dark-haired and aristocratic, pale and arrogant. It was messy haired and squint-eyed with laughing mouths. It was red hair and temper and long, long legs and smells of summer peaches and cut grass.

Beauty was something dead, in Remus' eyes.

The boy slept the boneless sleep of the very young. The kind of sleep that didn't wake full of aches and pains and half-remembered moments that dreaming had remembered and waking never could. There was a bruise, deep and purple and hand-shaped along his hip. Remus hadn't put it there. He didn't care enough to wonder who had, or enough to mind the future written in the shadows beneath the boy's eyes and in the white powder that had tipped from his pocket when Remus had shoved down his jeans.

He knew the signs. Knew what would happen. Six months from now if he looked for this boy again, he'd not find him. A year at most. Remus had been doing this a long time.

When Albus had found him, he'd said that it was time for Remus to come back from hiding and remember who he was. Inside he'd wanted to tell the old man to shove it. To sod off and leave him to his slow-fall toward a bad end. To leave off with the dropping of new salt on old wounds and the only name that he could still feel a reason to care about. But he didn't. He'd ducked his head and caught the reflection in the glass window behind Albus' head, seeing that the grey amidst the brown was edging its way toward becoming the brown amidst the grey and wondering why time was never his friend. Too slow when he wanted fast and hard and then a splash and a finish, and lightning fast - a flash of light and gone - where he might have lingered for an age and been content.

He'd been sorted into Gryffindor, with the bright and the shining and the foolhardy, and he'd never fit, save with them. He was too careful, too slow to move, too wary of touch and force and words that didn't shape the proper syllables to make him sound like he belonged. It had mattered to him, belonging. Blending.

Even then he'd been hiding.

It hadn't mattered to them. James and Sirius were born to stand out and shine and stand on stairwells starkers reciting Shakespeare because Sirius had never mastered the art of a poker face, and James wouldn't let him stand his rounds alone. He and Peter had been kin, there, in their dimness, their liking for lingering in the shadows the bright shine of James and Sirius had cast. Peter had wanted to belong too. Worse than Remus, maybe.

This had been life, since then. The slow parade of faces through his bed to drown out the ones in his dreams. Life without options or hope of betterment. It became a ritual, a part of his art.

He would writhe within them, beside them, around them and thrust and slide and gasp and in his head the cold and the gray that never quite ebbed would list the ways that they weren't enough.

A slide of thigh alongside his own and the murmured hiss that the smooth skin doesn't catch the light right, doesn't take it in and make it shine. Refracted light from pale skin and a shine that never dimmed. Wasn't capable of dimming.

Tongue against his, tangling, teasing. Whispers that it wasn't rough enough or smooth enough. That it didn't send tingling gooseflesh across his skin as it traced his lips.

Soft hair beneath his hands, and his memory betrayed him with tactile remembrance of hair that had been softer, that had tangled his fingers and claimed them.

A slow thrust of hips and a curving arse. A smile teasing his lips as the voice reminded him that there had been one less round, too bony, imperfect, and more perfect because of it.

A thin laugh in his ear and the certainty that there was no wild edge of immortality and crushing ferocity in the body that strained against his own.

They were doomed, the ones he chose. He had an eye for them, for the holes in their arms and the shadows in their eyes. The too-bright haze to their gaze and the hands that waved near their nose, as if holding in the high and the beauty and the reality that was and was not real. There was allure in the fading, in the doomed. There was nothing more anonymous, more deeply impersonal than shagging a fading beauty as they slipped down the path that would end them, eventually. He kissed them and he fucked them, and he left them, and if he'd ever wanted to look, they wouldn't be there when he tried.

He'd never had the urge to try, but he liked knowing that, and knew that made him something sick and sad all at once.

It went on. It was how he lived. And when they were spent and he was sated but too coherent for the blissful numb, he went to the bathroom, to the cheap lights, to the mirror that was as cruelly truthful as Sirius could be at his most hatefully honest. Once Remus had loved the intricate security of falseness, the comfort of a lie that was prettier than the truth it hid. Now he pushed away all the lies except the biggest one - the one he had to keep - and cherished the slow burn and pain of the truth.

He stared in the mirror and forgot the body on the bed behind him that hadn't been enough, and he dwelt in the eddies of memory and counted all the ways where he hadn't been enough.

When Albus had come he'd gone back. He'd put on the old lies that were worn thinner than the trousers he'd once spilled tea on when James threw an apple at his head. He pulled them about him and waded in and the sea of faces he'd left in hotel rooms melted away into one face of beautiful, androgynous imperfection that was never what he wanted and always more than he deserved and as impermanent as any life, but more immediate in its decline.

He'd watched over Harry and tried not to let the awkward shuffle of his feet when he was nervous remind him of James, who couldn't hold still when he knew Lily watched him. He lingered in the hallways and tried not to remember whispered outings of too-close scuttling under an invisibility cloak, breath hot on his neck and a laugh bubbling up out of his throat that he had to fight to keep from escaping while James' elbow poked bony and insistent into his side. He drank the swill that was half miracle and half poison and kept him half a monster, instead of a whole, and ignored Severus' sneer and the faint memory that was stored somewhere deep inside of when he'd licked the man's blood from his paws and the scent and taste of human had set his claws against his skin in a furious demand for more.

And then the map showed him Pettigrew and Sirius returned, mad and raving and filthy and ragged, beauty erased like the doomed, androgynous no-one in his mind, rotting somewhere beneath the earth. Only Sirius wasn't dead. He was alive. Broken and dimmed. A thing of shadows now, all his light sucked away.

He was like Remus, now.

And the chaos and the wolf and Sirius vanished again into the night as Remus left, suitcase in hand and lies already too see-through to be of use. He went back to his hiding. To cheap hotels and the family house he'd been left and rarely used. To the parade of nothings in and out of his bed to make him forget the beautiful things of his youth and the broken things that lived now. The wolf, the dog, the rat - twisted, scarred remnants of youth. Peter and Remus were kin, again, a kinship of shared betrayal and hate that Remus knew he should feel, but couldn't quite remember how to let emotion surge strong enough to. They had never been beautiful, he and Peter. It was as strong a tie as any, and Remus didn't think any were that strong.

He couldn't imagine the pain of a mirror's truth if he'd looked in it with the face Sirius had once worn, and then with the one he wore now and seen the erosion of all that he was. The scars on his face and the ache of his changeable bones seemed mild in comparison.

He hid in his truth, and his litany, and recited his rituals like prayers inside his head as he fucked. Remus had never believed in god, but he believed in god in man. In goodness and wholeness and light and things that were meant to be and cut down too early to be fair. It was them he prayed to, the shade of James and Lily and the shadow of Sirius-that-was. For forgiveness he didn't deserve and wisdom they'd always seemed to think he had, when he never did.

And in the mirror he read his truth and counted all the new-old ways he'd failed.

He hadn't believed enough.

He hadn't trusted enough.

He hadn't loved enough.

He hadn't fought hard enough.

He hadn't been strong enough.

He'd given up too soon.

He'd left him there. A rat in hiding and a friend in prison for what he could never, ever have done. And he'd left them. He'd believed what was in front of his eyes instead of what his heart should have said. He'd believed in the name of Black instead of the person.

If it had been different. If James had lived and Remus had died, James would never have left him. James would have fought. James would have BELIEVED.

He hadn't had enough faith.

He hadn't had the courage to be someone without them to light his way. He'd faded away because that was easiest, and he did it now, again, because he was afraid. Because the hell you knew was better than the one you didn't.

He'd never shone enough to be anyone's light.

He'd closed away and hidden in his lies so well that they couldn't trust him. That they trusted Peter instead.

He'd never seen the truth of what Peter was.

He'd let them all go, and he hadn't fought to keep them.

The mirror stared back with its too-grey hair and its too-tired face and it echoed the truths as he mouthed them.

In the other room the girl had red hair and too much eyeliner, tonight. He rarely brought them back to this house, that had been his parents' before they slipped quietly away, old before their time and mourning a son half-lost when he was still a child, and vanished the rest of the way while still alive. But he knew he'd be called on, now and he stayed near home. Dutiful Lupin, who helped when he was needed but did just enough to get by.

She didn't wake when the claws raked at the door and the black dog stepped carefully into the hall, shaking rain from his coat - thinner than it once was - and showing the hard line of his rib-cage as he shifted. The dog was mangy where he'd once been robust and grim where he'd once been charming.

The man was little different. Gaunt and dark eyed with a blankness to his gaze that hinted at how much the Dementors had taken. He said a name Remus hadn't thought of as belonging to him since the dark mark gleamed over Godric's Hollow, and they watched each other with a strange sort of wary familiarity. Strangers with ties of brotherhood.

He took him to the kitchen and fixed him food he barely ate, unused to the sensation of chewing and swallowing and not gagging at the rot and decay of his meal. The red haired girl crept by and out the door without a word, the cash from Remus' wallet in her pocket and a bottle of pills from his medicine cabinet in her bra. He pretended not to notice as he locked the door behind her.

That night he brought Sirius clothes that wouldn't quite fit and watched him stare into a mirror at a face that wasn't his own, and wondered what ritual Sirius would make to recite as the mirror broke his heart and showed him how far he'd fallen.

Remus didn't reach for his lies again, but he knew he was done hiding. Done being no one and nothing.

This would end badly. All of it. There would be pain and death and hurting and screams in dark nights where mothers and children should be deep asleep and dreaming. There would be war. And in the end, there would be an end that wasn't an end because there were no happily ever afters when people died.

He wouldn't survive this time.

But he would die being what James and Sirius had once taught him he could be, at least. He spoke, quiet and unsure. "I'll make waffles in the morning."

Sirius looked at him, and a smile flickered over his face. Foreign and misplaced but for just a moment there was a glimmer of light in him again, and a shadow of the boy he'd been. "I like those."

Remus smiled back. "I remember."