Musings On A Birthday

Musings on a Birthday

These mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again
If you only try turning around...

Remus had just stepped off the Tube at King's Cross when he saw it out of the corner of his eye--the large, shimmering silver shape sitting (almost) patiently by a rubbish bin by the far wall.

Interesting how it found him so easily--Remus normally never used the trains if he could help it, except this latest mission had him networking with the Squib community outside of Cornwall. Dumbledore thought the Squibs would be approached by the Death Eaters; Squibs were part of the Wizarding world but not considered on equal footing by most of the Purebloods as they had the genes, but no powers. Some of the Squibs had broken away from the Wizarding community and formed their own village in a hollow just a few miles outside the city. Dumbledore wanted assurances the Squibs would remain neutral if not allied with the Order.

The Squibs thankfully didn't care if they met with a werewolf; if anything they were rather more sympathetic to his plight than most. So he didn't Apparate into or out of the community, out of respect to the Squibs; they had accompanied him to the trains in Cornwall to see him off. This time, Remus was cautiously optimistic on returning to Grimmauld Place as the mission seemed to be successful; he had their assurances that they would provide support to the Order where they could.

This silver apparition though, couldn't be a good sign and his pleasant mood soured somewhat as he steeled himself for yet another unknown confrontation. He crossed over to the bin to greet the visitor, anxious and looking around furtively; he didn't want anyone to notice he was talking to odd indoor clouds, especially anyone who might be a Death Eater. Even if it were the London Underground where almost anything went and no one cared if a shabby greying lunatic dressed in a tattered overcoat conversed with rubbish bins.

"Welcome back, Moony," the shape murmured; the voice transmitted directly into Remus' mind. "Be a good chap and stop off for curry on the way home, yeah? Got a surprise for you there." Then it grinned, its huge silver tongue lolling.

Remus gaped, then grinned widely in return at the message and shook his head. Only Sirius Black would harness the Order's main means of communication to request an order for take-out curry. Since he couldn't just nip out himself anymore...

"Do you want nan too?" he joked.

"Garlic. As much as you can carry," Sirius' voice retorted. "See you soon."

The shape lifted its leg against the bin in full defiance of the placard posted on it (No Dogs Allowed) before it dissipated into the surrounding air. Remus shook his head again fondly, and a little sadly. Even Sirius' Patronus seemed to recognize and relish freedom (and civil disobedience) of any sort. Remus joined the milling throngs on their way to the exit.

Late April meant ubiquitous mist and fog slicking the streets in the city, and since he couldn't Apparate in the middle of London, he was stuck walking through the rain to the little East Indian take-out just off King's Cross. He picked up the order, nodding and speaking pleasantly to the young girl in her violet sari behind the small cramped counter; her father stood with his arms crossed and scowling at him from the kitchen doorway. Remus grinned when the man started to speak in Hindi, admonishing him for daring to flirt with his daughter. The girl blushed, then her eyes widened when Remus replied with a near-flawless accent, genially assuring him that in no way did he have any design on her because he was already spoken for, thank you. He left the proprietor spluttering in surprise as he turned the corner to the dingy garbage-strewn alley beside the take-out and Apparated to Grimmauld Place. He grinned to himself--the time he'd spent in India was useful on occasion.

The air inside Twelve Grimmauld Place was thick with the smell of freshly-baked vanilla cake when he let himself in. He inhaled, savouring the rich sweetness while at the same time wondering what occasion warranted Molly baking a cake here today? There was no Order meeting this evening so it would be just him and Sirius in the house tonight. He smiled inwardly at that thought; they didn't spend nearly as much time together as they should, and he sorely missed him these past few days. Perhaps tonight, after tea, if Sirius were in a good mood... He made his way to the downstairs kitchen.

"Sirius, I'm back--" he announced.

He stopped short at the threshold, his jaw dropping in utter shock.

The bags of take-out dropped from his slackened grip and tumbled to the floor, one container bursting open. The pungent spice of spilt chicken curry wafted from his feet, and the bile rose in his throat.

Why was the body of Peter Pettigrew lying on the table?

"What the FUCK--?" Remus gasped, legs wobbling. He felt faint--

Sirius sauntered in from the pantry, wiping his hands on a damp tea towel. "Moony, you're back! Here, let me take--" He stopped short himself, surveying Remus about to faint, the curry sauce flowing on the floor, and his dumbstruck expression. He rushed to Remus' side to steady him.

"Here, Moony, it's OK. That's not Peter on the table. It's simply his effigy," he soothed, leading Remus to the closest chair and settling him down. "Let's sit down and recover a bit, shall we?"

Remus bent over double in the chair, holding his head between his knees until the nausea passed and his breathing calmed. Sirius knelt beside him and patted his back. Remus then slowly raised his head with a stunned glassy look.

"You all right there, old man? Looked like you were going to have a heart attack there for a minute," Sirius murmured.

Remus stared at Sirius for a moment, and then turned to look in horrified fascination at the life-size effigy of Peter on the table.

"Sirius, what in hell did you do--?"

"I made a cake. It's Peter's birthday today, Moony, and I thought we should celebrate in the appropriate style. You know, with a birthday cake for him and all."

"Yes, but--but you--you made a cake of Peter!" Remus spluttered.

In the back of his mind, he realized he'd forgotten that indeed today, April the twenty-fourth, was Peter's birthday. He'd forgotten, for the first time in fourteen years. Any residual guilt over that vanished though, in the face of this--this--whatever he should call it.

"I made one of Wormtail too, that one's in the pantry. I made that one with rats. Not for us, though I daresay Padfoot would appreciate it," Sirius replied casually.

"Whatever possessed you--?" Remus asked weakly. "Are you completely round the twist? An--an EFFIGY of Peter?"

Sirius shrugged. "It's common in some primitive cultures in the Amazon rainforest to make effigies of one's enemies and eat them. Usually out of honour and respect or to gain their strength for upcoming battles."

Remus got to his feet to better study the figure under the flickering lamp-light. It was a not-bad facsimile of Peter Pettigrew, in fact it was decidedly eerie--the rounded body, the small watery-looking eyes, the pointed nose and rat-like features, even to the thinning blond hair, all outlined in coloured frostings. Sirius had dressed cake-Peter, rather maliciously, Remus thought, in Slytherin colours, not Gryffindor, and for some reason that rankled. Secretly he wondered at Sirius' culinary skills to have been able to build the cake-Peter--it would have taken hours just to frost it. From the appearance of the sideboard, scattered with several small bowls containing various amounts of frosting, it looked like he had done most if not all of it by hand, just to ease the boredom.

A faint memory from his Defense Against the Dark Arts stirred, and Remus turned to look at Sirius, mouth twisting in revulsion. "It's also an ancient Wizarding custom that became a Dark Arts ritual. That uses flesh of the person mixed in the effigy to gain power--"

"Relax, Remus, this is entirely harmless. I don't have any flesh of him to add anyway, it's all cake. How would I be able to obtain any, stuck here? Besides, do you honestly think I would stoop that low to perform a "Comedocarpere" charm?" he said with a sardonic smile, his eyes wary.

"I don't know sometimes, Sirius, what you get up to here when I'm away," Remus retorted with a little more irritation than he wanted.

Sirius shot him a vicious glare that could have spit firebolts, but he didn't answer. He turned away to clean the spilt curry with a sharp "Scourgify!", picked up the dropped bags, then cleared the sideboard with a sweep of his hand, sending the frosting bowls flying to the sink, and spoke with forced cheer. "Anyway, Moony, I'm starving, so let's just--"

"I'm not hungry now," Remus said quickly. That was true; his appetite had completely withered when he saw the cake effigy.

Sirius Summoned a spoon and opened one container of curry. "Too bad, the more for me then. I'll try to save you some but I don't know, I'm that famished--"

"You know Sirius, you may have subsisted on rats all last year in Hogsmeade and you may catch them for Buckbeak now, but don't expect me to go along with this," Remus said peevishly, any good mood evaporated now.

"Really, Remus, I don't know what you're going on about," Sirius said around a mouthful of chicken curry and nan. "It's just cake. This is really quite excellent curry, is it from that place near King's Cross--?"

"I can understand your reasoning for wanting to destroy all the rats you could when you lived in the cave by Hogsmeade, and I sympathise, but I'm not going to eat any effigy of Peter, even if it is cake," Remus answered. "Peter is part of us, part of our story whether we like it or not."

Sirius lowered his take-out container and set it on the table. The box smeared into the frosting on cake-Peter's arm.

"You do know that on top of everything else he's done, Peter is serving the Dark Lord now?" Sirius' voice was deceptively calm, but with an underlying chill that froze the air around them.

"That's not the point."

"Then what is? If you don't like the cake--"

"I think even Peter deserves a little more consideration--"

"The same consideration he showed for James and Lily, or for Harry--?"

"The same consideration that we should give him out of respect for our past. You can't just wipe him clean from our history! Because we all had our roles in what happened, Sirius."

Sirius gaped at him in disbelief. "Are--are you saying we--James, you, me--we drove him to it then? That it's our fault he betrayed us?"

"I--well--" Remus stammered, at a loss for words. Sirius stared at him with such burning intensity that Remus felt himself almost char around the edges. Finally he recovered his voice and his thoughts. "No. Maybe--I don't know, Sirius. It could've been anything." Remus spread out his hands in a placating gesture. "It could have been something any one of us said or did when we were younger. Or something we didn't say or do. Maybe it was--was the sum of everything, a thousand little things, maybe there was no one particular reason that turned him. I just don't know."

Remus sighed. The old wounds didn't hurt, really, because they were so well calloused by now, but they still twinged when he poked at them so he tried not to do that if he could help it. His voice softened and grew wistful, looking at the floor. "Sometimes, when you and James got on with the pranks, it was like we weren't really there, Peter and I. Sometimes we wondered, why you even let us hang around with you. Why you kept us around when it was obvious you didn't need us."

Sirius looked genuinely stricken at that. "We never intended that, Moony. Never. It's just once James and I--"

Remus nodded. "I know that now, Padfoot. But back then sometimes we weren't too sure. I--I guess I didn't expect to be part of the group anyway, because I considered myself lucky just to know people who didn't fear my lycanthropy. But Peter--all he wanted was for James to notice him once in a while, but all James had time for was you."

Sirius nodded slowly, looking pensive.

"It did get better while you three were learning to become Animagi--you let us in. After that, all of us together, at least one night a month, and more often in the day--it was grand. And once we got the Map going--"

Sirius nodded with a fond smile. "Aye, that was our greatest work, wasn't it? I will admit Peter was invaluable there--"

"Because he could get into places neither of you big oafs could wiggle into. Not that you didn't try."

"Usually because I was chasing the little rat, eh?"

Remus snorted. "He got his own when he could. I think he was secretly terrified of you as a boy even as he idolised James. As a rat he had a lot more gumption. Thing is, all of us underestimated him."

"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "No wonder he was targeted by the Death Eaters, for whatever reason--he was perfect in the background."

They sat on opposite sides of the table, with the cake effigy between them. The butter frosting had now acquired an air-hardened gloss that reflected the lamp-light in odd angles, making it glow somewhat with a life-like mien. The likeness of cake-Peter's visage was so disconcerting that Remus had to avoid looking at it.

Remus sighed finally and shook his head. "Peter was too much a part of my life to be so cavalier about this, Sirius. He was part of us, part of the Marauders, and after 1981, I thought he was a hero when he'd never been before. It's not easy to overcome that."

Sirius looked at him askance, tension simmering beneath a barely-controlled calm. "Yes, you spent twelve sodding years idolising the rat for his 'service to bravery' while I rotted away--" he started with biting sarcasm.

"What the hell else was I supposed to do?" Remus snapped back.

"You could have found a way to clear my name!"

"Dumbledore was sure--"

"Fuck Dumbledore! It's not about what he thought, it's about what you thought! So why, Remus? Why? I want to know why you believed him over me without question?"

"All the evidence--"

"That no one bothered to examine--"

"--pointed to you--"

"Did you really think I would have--?"

"Why not? You'd already betrayed one secret in the past!" Remus shouted.

The scathing words echoed around the kitchen, leaving stunned silence in their wake.

Sirius recovered first. "Just how long do you hold your grudges, Moony?" he whispered with an edge of bitterness.

Remus ran his hand through his shaggy greying fringe, his heart stinging at the chill in the old endearment. "I got over that a long time ago, Sirius. A long time ago. But it is a point of fact that you betrayed my secret once--"

Sirius opened his mouth to retort but Remus continued, shushing him.

"--so at the time it was the logical conclusion that you betrayed James and Lily. At--at first I couldn't believe you'd ever betray James either but the evidence was convincing enough for Dumbledore not to pursue it further, so I assumed--"

"You assumed. You ASSUMED. You weren't even there half the time on your super-top-secret missions for Dumbledore--"

"You suspected me anyway, Sirius, just as I suspected you. It wouldn't have mattered. And James was dead, so there was no way he could have let me know. Peter played all of us for dupes, yes that's true. He knew how each of us thought and he used it against all of us. Only I didn't realize it until I saw his name on the Map June before last."

"Only twelve fucking years too late to undo any of the damage he caused," Sirius snapped. "Even then we didn't get to carry out what we should've--"

"That's not fair. Harry was right--James wouldn't have wanted it!"

"As if anything that's happened since, is fair?"

Remus stood up, knocking over his chair. "For Merlin's sake, Sirius, I'm tired of fighting with you!"

Sirius stood up too, brandishing his wand, and aimed it at Remus. "SOUVENI!" he shouted before Remus could react, and sent a furious purple bolt flying just past his arm.

Remus' arm tingled from the proximity of the charge. The bolt ricocheted off the stone wall back towards Remus; he whirled and whipped his wand from his belt, firing a solid yellow one to deflect it. Eyes ablaze, he turned back to Sirius. "What the FUCK--?"

Sirius was shaking, white and trembling with righteous rage. "You don't get it, do you? Are you willfully that blind? Look at what Peter did to YOU, Remus! He wronged you as much as anyone! He ripped everything away from you--everything! Everyone you cared about, obliterated in the blink of an eye! When you never had much to begin with. For someone who was supposedly on your side, he let you suffer probably the most of all of us. I deserved Azkaban for my own stupidity, but you--" His voice trailed off to a whisper.

It wasn't all for naught, Remus wanted to protest, thinking of the conversation he had with the Indian take-out proprietor earlier this evening. I made do. But-- "He was our friend once." Remus finally spoke through clenched teeth, chest heaving, struggling to control his voice.

"Once. And what does he do? He kills all of us. ALL of us in one fell swoop and condemned those of us lucky to have survived to a living hell. Because I don't know about you, but I don't consider this sustained incarceration 'life'."

"Sirius--"

"And you forgive him now--"

"I never said I did, I stood beside you ready to kill him and I'd do it again--"

"Just like that. Because he was our fucking friend once upon a time." Sirius' voice fell flat, roiling with bitterness.

"We can't change what happened. What's done is done." Remus' voice was brittle.

"Believe you me, don't you think I know that?" Sirius snapped.

The self-righteous tone in Sirius' voice was too much, and Remus snapped. He flew into an incandescent rage, seeing only white-hot fury. "INCENDIO!" he yelled, aiming at the cake. The effigy on the table exploded into a sugar-fueled fireball.

Then Remus turned on his heel and stormed from the kitchen, not caring if the house burned down around them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Remus couldn't sleep.

Though it wasn't from lack of trying.

He'd retired to bed soon after he'd stormed out of the kitchen. He lay shaking and staring at the dingy cobweb-draped ceiling for a good two hours, trying to ignore the white roar of anger in his ears; then he tried to read for another two hours, although he was unable to see any more than thorned squiggles on the page.

Finally he gave up, slammed the offending book to the floor, extinguished the table lamp with an explosive Nox and tossed and turned, trying to find some comfortable position. If he were honest with himself, he would admit he was secretly waiting for Sirius to come to bed too, so he could at least try to make up and smooth things over. They hadn't fought like this for a long time--since December or so? He was, he admitted (if a little grudgingly) to himself, in the wrong too this time. Sirius had nailed his conflicting feelings about Peter with his usual mix of biting perception and exasperating candour. There was a reason he kept them all bottled up. But Sirius simply had a way of drawing them out, to pull him by the hair and force him to examine them. Infuriating--and oddly relieving in a way. It actually allowed him to be open for once, something only now he realized he could appreciate--because Sirius knew, had been there, understood.

Sirius however, did not come, and Remus only felt more at odds with himself. But he must have fallen asleep eventually at some point, because Remus woke with a start from a restless slumber. He blinked to accustom his bleary eyes to the lack of light, trying not to remember the hazy sensation of rats crawling on his bed, or the fluttering breaths from one particularly large one sleeping curled on his pillow by his ear. From the play of shadows on the walls it was about two in the morning. He realized he was bloody freezing even with the several layers of thick blankets on the bed. He reflexively slid his palm out across the mattress to encounter smooth, cool, un-slept-in bedsheets.

Damn it.

His heart sank. When Sirius wasn't in bed with him, there was usually one reason why. But it wouldn't even be worth hunting Sirius down in the godforsaken house now, he'd only be piss-drunk and passed out somewhere. Remus was still too vexed to grant him anything approaching forgiveness.

But sodding Merlin, Sirius was right--the bastard. He hadn't checked things out for himself, he'd believed blindly because Albus Dumbledore accepted that Sirius had betrayed them all. Peter had wrenched away all he loved and had left him to wander alone in the proverbial desert for twelve years--

He hated himself for believing Peter's innocence, for his own tacit approval of Sirius' wrongful punishment, and that he could indeed have done something if he hadn't been led--

And sodding Merlin, he despised himself perhaps most of all for wanting, and missing Sirius' warmth in bed right now.

Remus lay shivering in the bed trying to go back to sleep, to no avail. After another hour or so of fruitless attempts to rest, he found himself, against his will, sliding out of the barely-warm bed and into his worn slippers and dressing-gown to have a look.

Creeping downstairs, he peered into every gloomy nook and cranny where he thought Padfoot would hide. Remus' incipient peevishness multiplied as each survey came up empty-handed. A house this quiet meant Sirius was plastered. Perhaps the worst part was that when Sirius got drunk, the dog did too, and if Sirius tried to transform then Padfoot would get sick, and the stench of dog bile never seemed to leave anything. He sometimes mused that Animagi should be prohibited from drinking to save their animal forms the pain of the subsequent hangover. That he couldn't smell the nauseous, permeating odour was cold comfort; it meant only that Sirius was probably too far gone to transform.

Remus found Sirius sitting on the ledge of the bay window in the drawing room, swinging one bare foot back and forth, with an unopened bottle of Firewhisky dangling from his fingers, and staring out at the fog-muddled London skyline.

Remus' barely-bottled anger nearly boiled over right then and there at the sight. Fuck but he was so tired of being right about Sirius all the time. He loved this man but he was just so tired--

(He loved this man...)

But when Sirius turned to look at him, gazing with peculiar intensity at Remus' face, Remus realized with stunned shock that he was stone-sober. His ire melted away, quickly replaced by crushing guilt--with a sick dropping sensation in the pit of his stomach, he realized he'd jumped to conclusions yet again. He ran shaky fingers through his fringe. Neither could afford it anymore. They needed each other too bloody badly. He needed Sirius, as vexing and thick-headed and churlish as he was sometimes (most times, his snarky inner voice whispered)--and if he didn't admit it, he would be alone again, completely alone, and he couldn't bear that anymore.

Yet both knew neither man was especially brilliant at offering apologies either, so extending the olive branch was yet another thing Remus knew he had to muddle through.

"How was Padfoot's cake?" he offered finally.

Sirius shrugged, avoiding his gaze. "He didn't want it. So I fed it to Buckbeak."

Remus raised his eyebrows. "I daresay Buckbeak enjoyed it?"

"Immensely."

Sirius' eyes darted to Remus' face, and then both men looked away in the awkward silence. Words clotted thick in Remus' throat. I'm sorry, Sirius. Forgive me, Sirius. I need and love you too bloody much to fight anymore, Sirius... Congealed though, they wouldn't budge.

"We were all hard on the little rodent, weren't we?"

Remus stood flummoxed, mouth agape at the sudden admission, and the apologetic tone in Sirius' hushed voice.

Sirius turned and spoke softly to the fog-shrouded stars outside the window. "Maybe I've eaten too many rats in the past, Remus. I think I've had more than my fill of them now."

Remus blinked, then went to stand beside him at the window. "I--So--so you're calling a truce then?" he asked slowly.

Sirius' face was expressionless in the shadowed half-light. "Peter led Voldemort to James and Lily. He left Harry an orphan; he put me in Azkaban and left you to wander alone for twelve lonely years. Not only that, he hurt Harry to bring Voldemort back to power. For all that he deserves to pay." His voice was even, with no trace of anger; just a bone-deep weariness that Remus shared. "For all that, if he were here right now, I'd kill him where he stood, and I daresay you would too."

Remus opened his mouth to reply, but Sirius continued, cutting him off. "But you know in the end, wherever Peter is, he's much worse off than we are. Far worse. Because we may be stuck in our hell here to pay our debt," he gestured, sweeping his hand around the moldering room, "but at least we're stuck in it together, yeah?" Sirius' voice softened almost to a whisper, and he met Remus' gaze full on. "Peter's in his hell alone. That's a fate worse than death. I know because I've been there, Remus. And you have too. I don't wish that on anyone any more. Including him."

Remus nodded and blinked again, this time in stunned agreement. "I--see. I--yeah." His hand reached out to squeeze Sirius' shoulder.

Sirius sighed and leaned his forehead against Remus' chest. Remus' other hand automatically patted Sirius' hair to smooth it, and closed his eyes. At the end of everything at least they still had this semblance of comfort, this surety of mutual need to draw on in their shared hell.

Maybe, in the end, they had Peter Pettigrew to thank for bringing them together, even when once he'd torn them apart.

After a while, Sirius drew back, and both men turned to stare at the shimmering fog from the window. Presently, Sirius Summoned two crystal brandy glasses from the side tray service and uncorked the flask of Firewhisky. He poured and handed a generous glass to Remus, then a second, surprisingly smaller one for himself. "A toast then, to Peter and old times," he announced gravely, with no trace of irony. They turned back to the window and raised their glasses to the near-dawn sky.

"Happy birthday, Wormtail, wherever you are," Remus said.

"Happy birthday, Peter," Sirius responded.

The chink of crystal clicking together rang through the silence as they drank.