Hands

Hands

He stares at his hands a lot these days, looking them over, one by one. He always starts on the left and moves his way right, and he studies them, examining them as a scholar might analyze an ancient text. He memorizes every scar, every raised bump of skin, every crevice and line, until he can map them out in his mind. Then, to everything, he attaches a story. It might be real, such as the incident in fourth year in which Sirius accidentally stabbed him in the back of the hand with a quill, or it might be the product of wistful fantasy. He takes special note of the life line running across his palm, remembering when he had hoped that he was blessed with a long one. Now, he wishes it would shorten - or, should a higher being mercifully intervene, disappear from his hand altogether.

He cannot sit there any longer, and his hands crave action. So he stands up, fighting the lingering effects of last night's alcohol. He clutches at the wall in the futile attempt to stand up straight, to walk like the upright man of his past. It isn't working. Thus, he simply settles himself with stumbling towards the bench, gaping at the beautiful thing in front of him.

It is rare in such times to find anything of value. The Dark Lord had laid waste to the British Isles and his influence was starting to spread onto the Continent as isolated pockets of supporters relished his victories and, in turn, found each other. The gloried wizarding communities of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam...all fell victim to incompetent governments and increasingly frequent riots. How long these storied outposts of wizarding civilization will last, he does not know (longer than London, he hopes). A mass exodus occurs everyday with hundreds fleeing across the ocean or the Urals. But he knows he is safe here, here in the soft Mediterranean coasts and winds of southern France, confined to a one-room cottage, his only friends the clouds, the sea, and the piano before him.

He turned to it out of desperation, the instrument of his childhood. In his dreams, he recalls his mother bent over it, the tips of her white fingers stroking the trills and thirds from the keyboard, her eyes closed in the ecstasy that seizes any musician in the thralls of his art. He recalls the time she spent with him, shaping the arch in his fingers to grasp the keys, applauding when he played through his Czerny etudes without flaw.

His mother is dead now, her hands and eyes no more than a part of the carnage that defines Britain. He sits down on the bench, tilting his head backwards. She died at their hands, guilty, like so many others, of simply...simply being.

The piano mocks him. It always does. Its chipped black varnish, its broken middle C string challenge him to withstand the swirling changes and jibe him for running away when his friends perished willingly in the defense of a world gone. Yet the piano comforts him. It is never difficult with him; it bends to his every caprice, every incontrollable surge of emotion. When he feels his wrists might melt with the effort, hears the tortured harmonies tearing through the stale air, and sees the birds in the apple tree outside fly away, he knows he has lost one more burden.

So he sits before it for hours a day, painfully resurrecting the great works of the Muggle masters: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. He likes Debussy, personally. The sonatas and rhapsodies, the preludes and concertos, they are all riddled with errors. He misses chromatics, forgets time signatures, ignores the existence of tempos, or butchers them altogether. Sometimes, he has no patience for scores and music and can do no more than bang out dissonant chords and forceful glissandos until the bottle of firewhiskey atop the piano rattles and his fingers are red and raw.

Then gets up, moves elsewhere, and slumps back against the thick glass of the dirtied windows, and Remus looks at his hands once more.