As Water Loves

As Water Loves

There was a time when Remus would have given anything to see Sirius Black dead.

i.

2 November 1981

At half-past one by the ivory-rimmed clock fixed over Gringott's gleaming entrance, Remus gave a musty sigh of defeat, and pulled himself towards the brick wall, out of Diagon Alley, to home. His hair - trimmed neatly for the occasion - was beginning to fall into his eyes in its old untidy manner, and he was half-certain it had grown a little more gray from the morning's efforts.

When he ducked into the dim interior of the Leaky Cauldron, he stopped, squinting in the sudden darkness and hesitating, fingers feeling the bottom of his emaciated money pouch and lips moving in anxious calculation, before squaring his shoulders and heading to the bar purposefully. Remus asked for a glass of firewhiskey, his ink-smudged copy of the Daily Prophet's Want Ads still clutched disconsolately in his fist.

He'd crisscrossed Diagon Alley that morning, silently rehearsing answers to possible interview questions, and desperately hoping all the while that they'd neglect to ask for his registration papers from the Ministry of Magic.

NAME: Remus J. Lupin.

EDUCATIONAL HISTORY: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Prefect, Gryffindor House; 9 O.W.L.s; 9 N.E.W.T.s. (Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Care of Magical Creatures, Charms, Herbology, Muggle Studies, Potions, Arithmancy, History of Magic). Graduated with Honors and special recommendation from Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

An exceptional document thus far, until one reached the text just above the margin, which read

Social Status: -- warning in flashing red ink that burnt a hole in the parchment -- Werewolf. REGARD WITH EXTREME CAUTION.

By noon Remus had been turned down fourteen times, and his well-worn shoes had acquired two new holes.

He grudgingly doled out five Sickles for a drink he could ill-afford, and retreated to a grimy corner table with his glass, his crumpled copy of the Want Ads taunting him with its fourteen crossed-out circles of red ink.

He hooked one foot over his knee, and had discreetly begun attempting a mortifying Patching Spell on his worn sole, when he overheard the rising murmur that began from Tom at the bar, swiftly spilling over the customers in the seedy pub and bubbling ever higher and harder.

Remus eavesdropped absently; gossip in the Leaky Cauldron was never very informative.

"You-Know-Who gone... and the Potters dead! Yes, all of them.... Heard it from Dedalus Diggle last night...."

Remus felt his heart turn to stone and sink slowly, coldly, to the pit of his stomach. His lungs were dry leaves blowing through the abrupt, howling emptiness in his ribcage.

" Such a fine family too, and the little boy was taken.... Such a shame, then. Absolutely no one knows where he is."

The tide of words washed over him, violently excited, reveling in the scandal, salt-stung and cruel.

" Yes, but You-Know-Who gone!"

The wave drew back, gathering itself like an animal about to pounce, and fell upon him again, leaving him sea-washed and empty; devoid of any emotion but a fierce and freezing incredulity.

"Isn't it loverly?" someone crowed. "Never has there ever been a better day than this."

Long after Tom had clambered up onto the bar and joyfully proclaimed every drink was on the house, long after the customers had begun cheering and dancing and hugging one another indiscriminately, long after they had upturned the tables and danced frenzied reels and blew sparklers and dragon-headed firecrackers, Remus sat silent in his lonely corner, one foot still held in a loose palm.

~~~

1 September 1970

When Remus first started at Hogwarts, he hadn't quite known where to put himself.

He stood -- a nervous, peaky boy who jumped at small noises and whose fingernails were gnawed to the quick -- in the midst of the cheerful chaos at Platform Nine and Three Quarters. His mother stood behind him, smoothing his hair over and over fretfully, which he wished she wouldn't do, while his father unearthed and reread the Acceptance Letter from the Headmaster as though he could hardly believe it were true, even though the parchment threatened to fall apart if it were unfolded and folded one more time.

Some of the people at the station were dressed in Muggle clothing, while others, like his own parents, wore normal wizard robes. Three meters away was a middle-aged woman whose black silk train was looped regally over her arm, her other hand gripping the shoulder of the boy who stood beside her. She peered shrewishly over her fur collar at the other people on the platform. Remus was only vaguely aware of her presence, until he heard the woman say: "I do hope you'll have the good grace not to associate with any filth while at school, child."

"Yes mother," the boy agreed dryly. "I'll be certain to restrict my associations with filth only to the holidays."

Now Remus studied the boy more carefully; his parents, absorbed in their anxiety, seemed not to have overheard the peevish exchange. The boy was tall for his age, dark-eyed and dark-haired, and dressed so immaculately it was almost prattish. He looked as though he were going to a small dance, and looked as though he knew it and would rather have gone fishing instead; Remus supposed he would have been handsome for his age if his face weren't knotted into the most ferocious scowl he had ever seen. Before the woman could produce a suitable retort, the boy pushed her hand off his shoulder non-too gently. "I'll take my bags onto the train, now," he said resentfully, and stalked off trailing a trolley of matching dragon leather trunks.

Remus broke away from his parents as well, hauling his old-fashioned domed-lidded trunk onto the train gingerly, because one of the buckles was apt to snap open at inappropriate moments, and the last thing he wanted was to have his spellbooks and underwear spewed over the platform.

As he paused, uncertain how to get both ends of the trunk onto the train without pulling up one end or the other first and setting off the troublesome buckle, somebody tapped his shoulder. "Need help with that?" the person said, and Remus turned to find the black-haired boy smirking down at him in a faintly amused, friendly fashion.

Without waiting for a reply, the boy doubled over, looping his arms around one end of the trunk while Remus caught up the other, and they hauled it onto the train together, pushing it further inward for good measure. They climbed on board after it, and began the long process of kicking it down the corridor towards an empty compartment. "Pureblood, eh?" the boy remarked, nodding at Remus' robes. "Worse luck." At Remus' startled look, the boy explained: "It'd please my mother, you see, and I try to avoid that unhappy circumstance as often as I can. You seem all right though, so you can stay in the compartment with James and me, if you like.

"Got a name then, Pureblood?"

Remus found himself grinning uncontrollably. "Remus," he supplied hastily. "Remus Lupin."

The boy grinned back, giving the trunk a particularly vicious kick.

"Pleased to meet you," he said. "I'm Sirius Black."

~~~

2 November 1981

Godric's Hollow was serene in the twilight, calm as a frozen river with the rapids tumbling beneath the ice.

Remus emerged from a curtain of ivy spilling over the wall of a manor house, carelessly untangling himself from the snarl of leaves. He looked left then right, cautious from sheer habit, before pushing the clinging vines from his faded robes and striding up the street and around the corner. A cricket chirped somewhere in the waterfall spill of leaves behind him.

Two more corners, he thought. Two more until the warm certainty of the Potter's house glowing in the twilight, until he rapped at the front door with his familiar double-knock and James came to open it in welcome, or Lily perhaps, with the tiny dark-haired baby yawning in her arms.

He really shouldn't have come this late, he thought contritely, wildly. It was well past Little Harry's bedtime and Lily would be tired from feeding times, and James would be exhausted from meetings with the members of the Order....

Remus turned the last corner, faced a row of dilapidated cottages, and waited for the houses to shift; for the Potter home to nudge itself into existence.

There was nothing at first between the Muggle cottages that leapt aside like startled deer. Remus peered through the growing dark, fighting down the strange iciness spreading through his body. There was nothing, nothing at all. The house had vanished entirely. Then he looked down, and saw forsaken rubble, piles of brick and fragments of wood, and James lying open-eyed and still where the entrance hall would have been. His glasses had been knocked askew, dangling off his slack, grey face.

He found Lily where the nursery had once been.

As Remus dug through the debris that blanketed half her body this had happened two days ago how could Dumbledore have not told him where was Sirius where was Peter why had the Order not told him Prongs was dead oh god dead he came upon a fragile silver star, one of the dozen that had once hung from the mobile that had been Sirius' present during the baby's christening, when he had been named Harry's godfather.

Sirius, he remembered, had also been named James' and Lily's Secret-Keeper.

~~~

10 June 1974

There was a small, private party in Gryffindor Tower the night after the O.W.L.S. that year. At least, it had started out small. But after Gareth Jordan had begun passing out butterbeers, laced sight unseen with firewhiskey, then the noise level had no alternative but to bubble higher and wilder.

Remus stood helplessly next to the fireplace, ducking the occasional schoolbook chucked into the fire by an overzealous student. Dorcas Meadowes, one of the older prefects, had draped herself over an armchair and was giggling hysterically at whatever Dewin Murdoch was whispering into her ear. There would, evidently, be no help from that quarter. Lily was nowhere to be seen.

"Give it up, mate," Prongs hooted, emerging at his left to press a Filibuster Firework into his hand. He had corkscrew streamers hooked in his messy hair, and his glasses were beginning to slip off his nose. "Even prefects have to cut loose once in a while, or didn't you get the memo?"

Padfoot appeared on his right, pressing his half-finished butterbeer into Remus' other hand. "You're fighting a losing battle there, Moony" he yelled affectionately into Remus' ear. "Wouldn't we have loads more fun if you just gave in?" He slung his arm about his friend's shoulders and squeezed companionably.

Remus shrugged amiably, finally surrendering to higher wisdom. He tossed the firework into the fireplace behind him, launching a Catherine wheel that revolved over their heads and showered violet and tangerine sparks over the three laughing boys, and raised the half-empty bottle of butterbeer to his lips.

At first, licking at the rim of the bottle, he thought that the unfamiliar tanginess over the fizzy sweetness came from Gareth's firewhiskey, and berated Padfoot afterward for having Mickey Finned him. Then later he had another, and another, and realized he could not find the strange flavour in any of the other bottles.

Then, much later, in a stolen instant sheltered behind his closed bedcurtains, drunk and dizzy and licking into the warm wetness of Padfoot's mouth, Remus understood where the taste had come from.

~~~

3 November 1981

The next day, Remus fished a discarded newspaper out of a bin in Diagon Alley, and discovered his friend's handsome face laughing at him from the front page. Sirius Black, he read, had been arrested the previous day, and had immediately been given a life-sentence at Azakaban, without trial.

Remus, in his long and troubled life as a werewolf, had never before felt such fierce and predatory joy.