Chapter Text
(i)
There are rats in the wall, rats tiptoeing over hay and straw. Their scratching and scrabbling wake him and tease his ears; Padfoot has instinct to contend with, instinct that goes well with the human hatred that never really simmers down. He launches himself from his makeshift nest in the straw in an explosion of dust, and it's almost too easy. The rat squeals, Padfoot's powerful jaws close around its small, wriggling shape - crunch. The dog's stomach makes happy noises and the man's mind sings in chilly glee.
He eats all of it down to the bald tail, the wormtail, enjoying the crackling of small bones in his mouth, the taste of warm blood. He licks his chops carefully after, every drop of blood and smear of grease, thinking about catching another one. He decides against it. It's morning.
His breath is a cloud in front of his nose when he pads outside into the pale dawn. Frost gilds every straw of dry grass and every naked branch; his paws burn with cold until he gets used to it. If he runs, he'll feel better, stay warmer. Padfoot isn't sick or tired or worn down. Padfoot never changes.
A startled whinny catches him unawares, and he skitters closer to the wall. There's a horse in the yard, a sleek bay with a blanket thrown over her back. A whip-thin girl in jodhpurs and a baggy jumper clings to her halter, feet skidding over the frozen ground.
The horse rears and snorts, the girl pleads and Padfoot turns quickly and lopes around the barn, out of sight. He hopes the girl didn't see him or she'll send her father out with a rifle to hunt down the stray.
Fields, patches of snow, the frosty grass crackling under his paws. The wind is biting his skin through thick fur. His muzzle twitches when he catches new scents - warm, earthy smell of rabbits, bitter clash of diesel fumes from a tractor, dry hay, fresh manure, sweet temptation of home cooking and woodsmoke. Sirius, buried under the rubble of impressions, wishes to be himself and free of instincts and animal senses, just himself and human thoughts, one by one.
But he runs, close to the ground in great, powerful lopes, his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, his breath freezing into icicles in the fur on his muzzle.
More houses, more roads, more cars and more Muggles everywhere, and it gets harder to move. A woman screams and throws a metal bucket at him when he tries to cut across her yard. He skips on three legs for a mile before he finds a relatively safe place under a small merry-go-round in a deserted playground. He licks the cut on his haunch and wishes to be Sirius and walk, no, fly - he wants his motorcycle, or if that's not possible (so few things are possible now), a good broom. Harry's Firebolt, something fast and sleek that can grow into him like wings. Riding Buckbeak was like clinging to an aeroplane; irresistible force sometimes choosing to go your way. Buckbeak is in the Forbidden Forest - it's big enough to house fugitives, disreputable enough to keep nosy parkers out. London can't swallow a hippogriff like it can swallow a man with a famous - infamous - face.
Padfoot twitches and whines in restless sleep and Sirius, under doggy thoughts of rabbits and rats, dreams a man's dreams of revenge and hope.
London can just barely swallow a dog, and finally, finally, when there's more macadam than grass, more houses than fields, more people than cows, he stands behind a petrol station and shrugs out of his furry skin, through the short shift when it feels like his bones have turned to molten glass, and into tattered robes and greasy hair. He hunches down and makes sure to mutter and snigger to himself - dirty, crazy people are slippery: eyes slide off them, thoughts slip around them.
It's cold. He's hungry. He can't think clearly - he knows where he's going, but not the way there. Muggle skills seem to have deserted his brain and all he can remember is don't look back, don't look back, don't look to see if they're coming.
The muttering is only half faked, and he shivers and pulls the robes closer around his shoulder. His legs ache and tremble and he can smell himself, grease and dirt and despair. He wants a bath, a cup of coffee, a cigarette. He wants one of the rats he eats to be Peter, little Peter only a lump in his belly, taking off his head, legs one by one, leaving the scabby, scaly, wormy tail for dessert, and then Remus will be the only one of them still alive.
Sirius stumbles and stubs his toe through the paper-thin leather of his boot. Hissing in pain, he remembers, surprised, that he's alive too. Free. Alive.
Thoughts are overrated, human form is overrated - he forgets this when he's Padfoot: all he remembers are the good things, whatever they are.
Padfoot catches a rabbit behind a row of cottages, swoops down on it like an eagle, delicious crack of its spine breaking, and ahhhhh, the taste of it, miles ahead of rat, sweet, sweet, warm, filling, soft meat blood fat--
He lies under a bare-branched plum tree in the back garden, letting his swollen belly rest. He hears a door slam, a car start. Everything is quiet.
There's a dog flap in the back, but the smell in the yard is old and frozen. The dog is gone, but he left his way in, and Padfoot squeezes through, bigger than whoever the flap was built for, far bigger, almost stuck but he pushes and scrabbles on the clean linoleum floor and falls into a narrow hallway.
He stops and cocks his head. Silence. Sirius pushes Padfoot aside and takes off his dirt-caked boots, pads barefoot around the house, helps himself to half a loaf of bread. Upstairs, bathroom, mirror, and he flinches from his own reflection.
He'd seen the papers in Dumbledore's office, the photographs they'd shown on Muggle television. He hadn't recognised himself.
He barely remembers how to turn on the water, how to clean himself. He finds nail scissors and cuts off his hair slowly, cropping it into a strange, spiky, uneven shape. He still doesn't look like himself, but if he squints, he doesn't look like a raging lunatic.
Just a thin, sickly man with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. Who is this? Remus had looked just like himself, the lines on his face in just the places they were meant to be, the grey in his hair blending into the brown without jarring. Sirius looks like someone meant to be dead, and he turns away from the mirror.
Muggle jeans, the kind he liked when he was a teenager and wanted to show off his long legs and shapely backside, and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a picture of a horse on the chest, a heavy coat of some sort of slick, rustling canvas, his old boots on and down on all fours and Padfoot crawling out the dogflap again.
When he rounds the house, he goes human again and for the first time in longer than he cares to remember, feels human.
The frost-bitten morning turns into a rainy afternoon, pelting liquid ice into his hair, seeping into his boots and turning his hands into numb, useless clumps. The city is too busy for a dog; he can't hide in Padfoot's sturdy body, has to make do with this scrawny human shape that shivers and stumbles through the puddles. The rain is, at least, an excuse to keep the collar of his stolen coat turned up to hide his face from the cold, from curious eyes. There is a map on a wall, marked with an I, a small, red dot to say you are here.
"Thank you," he mutters at the map, but it's a Muggle map and doesn't reply. He follows the unfamiliar streets through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. He knows the Tube or a bus would take him closer, faster, but he has no money and no wand to charm the Muggles into giving him a ride, so he walks and walks. There are uniformed policemen in the streets here, and he doesn't dare steal anything. The papers show him no pictures of himself, so he walks taller. He's tired of cowering like a sick cur.
It's still hard to dig out the good memories - what the Dementors couldn't find he's hidden so deep that even he can't search them out. He'd rather not think than remember the bad things.
He notices jolly red and green and gold in the display windows along the street, and realises that Christmas is coming. Or here already. He's not even sure what month it is. He remembers another Christmas in London, a young, red-cheeked Remus next to him, James' laughter, cramming dirty snow down the back of Lily's coat, arms catching him and swinging him around.
James' voice saying, "Oi, Sirius, you slag!"
To stop himself from thinking about James - how can thirteen years disappear like a mist and the return pain bright sharp cold clawing through him - he thinks about Harry. Lily's eyes in a face that's softer and prettier than James' ever was, but the hair is Potter hair and those same glasses that Remus and Lily said made him look like one of the Beatles. Sirius can't remember the names of the Beatles. Remus must know. He can ask. Soon.
*
(ii)
Remus detoured to avoid the Divination classroom and the stench that made him want to choke-admittedly, the lake was a bit of a long detour-and got the smell of crushed grass well and truly stuck to his sneakers. When he re-entered the building the hem of his robe was damp, sparkling with bits of living green confetti, and the whole hall was pungent with the perfume of green chlorophyll, the blood of plants-it pleased him to think of it that way. Vaguely scandalous, sort of spiritual, but not really-violent. Not really blood, either.
He pushed his fingertips, inside his pockets, against the worn spot in the corner where he could feel the scratchy wool-blend of the robes through the cotton pocket. It would be worn through into a hole soon, the kind that loose change could fall out of. That would make three sets of robes, counting his dress ones, with holes (though he had mended those, when Lily insisted).
There was no better reason for him to like the feel of the cotton almost-giving around his finger, the stretch and pull, the impression of the threads on the sensitive tip of his finger where he'd gnawed a nail to the quick this morning to stay awake in Primitive Magic: An Anthropological Review-than there was for Lily to like the dusty scent of old books, or whatever it was she liked about the library. Certainly, not the thrill of almost-being caught. Or, perhaps not certainly. They had discussed it over the summer, high or almost-high, or still-partly high (when hadn't they been?). "The library, Remus," she had said, and giggled and leaned over to press her mouth to his, open and warm and wet, sloppy lazy kisses tasting of burnt sugar. Then, breaking the kiss, "It's so, so." And dissolved into giggles. "The LIBRARY!" and they they'd both been giggling again, although really, he didn't know what was funnier-the musty smell of the books, the spines pressing into his back-or Lily's shining eyes.
She snatched his arm when he walked past the third shelf (Arwegian's Floo Powder A-Z to Brisbane and the Cult of the Occult). With his hands in his pockets, a stumble would have made him fall over but for Lily's body against the shelves. She gripped his forearms to steady him and stopped a laugh before it could more than twitch at the corners of her mouth. "You're so disreputable," she said happily, "just think of it, walking just normally down the hall with your hands in your pockets and you might pass by Severus, or Dumbledore, or anybody and they wouldn't know you were on your way to--"
Remus laughed. "Your summer was definitely misspent."
"I keep a disreputable kind of company," she replied matter-of-factly, and kissed him in the same manner, her hands sliding steadyingly to his hips through the worn wool-blend. It was a familiar and comforting sort of kiss, tasting of scones and Earl Grey.
"I meant," he said, pulling back--and quickly dropped his voice to a whisper at her frown-- "I meant your activities."
She mimed smoking and grinned at him. "You never know what sort of black perversions werewolves will lead you into."
He raised his eyebrows, "Indeed." Lily had taught him to roll the joints, but she did it much more deftly. He remembered looking up to see her climb out of her window, silhouetted against the moon, with a damp breeze prickling the back of his neck. He'd told her when they were already high, or maybe as they came down, he couldn't remember. The moon hadn't been full yet, but he had felt it like an itch in the middle of his back even in the shadows under the darkest trees.
She'd been silent for a full minute at least before she said, "My parents even want me to be a witch!"
He'd waited patiently. Somehow he had known he would get this reaction. She'd taken another drag and handed the roach to him. "That's so much cooler, really wild," she'd said finally, and rolled over on top of him in the damp cold grass, so the white smoke twisting from her nostrils wreathed his face. He'd tried not to cough and smiled through it and she'd patted the top of his head, sisterly, and said, "Are you okay? I mean--"
And what was there to say to that? What use was there, even at thirteen, in being anything but okay?
"Should I lead you astray, um, further from the front of the library?" Remus suggested, covering her hands with his. It was nice and comfortable. Lily had pink lipstick, now smeared a little in the corners of her mouth, and eyeliner smudged under her eyes. She also had narrow tapering fingers with dimples at the knuckles from leftover baby fat, and neat-trimmed nails, all the same length, if not entirely clean.
She dropped her head onto his shoulder and giggled. Her hair smelled of rosemary--so she hadn't been smoking that morning. With Lily, silliness could mean a joint, or it could mean just... Liliness.
Near the restricted section, there was a stain on the floor that constantly (well, repeatedly) made Lily wonder if someone more daring than them ("Like Sirius," Remus had said dryly the first time last spring, and her eyes had widened before she fell back against the bookshelf, blinking and trying not to laugh out loud) had had the same idea. Lily dropped to her knees, grinning, and pulled her favourite book off the shelf, Jean-Pierre Marsters and the French Art of Animated Interior Furnishing. "Just don't read it out loud," he said, with, he thought, great restraint. The book made him wince. This bit of the library had always been a particular Thing he had with Lily, but sometimes he wondered wistfully about what Sirius--or James--would say.
She ignored him, of course. "A simple Transfiguration charm might be sufficient to achieve this result, however, our designer has something more complicated in mind: an armchair that not only responds to voice prompts and carries on conversations, but is capable of sexual excitement..."
Oh, by Merlin's beard--. "Lily, how long have you been a fourteen year old girl?"
"Remus," she retorted, "how long have you been a stuffy thirty-year old professor?" And dropped the book, and pushed her tongue in his mouth and her cold fingertips in the neck of his robe, to take the sting out of it.
He had been one of those for as long as he could remember, really. He barely remembered at all being little child, before the wolf bite whose silver scar he could still feel. "Why don't you check it out?" He asked curiously, when they were leaving the library again. Lily casually rubbed lipstick off his jawline with the cuff of her robes, leaving a garish pink smear. "Thank you. I mean, if you like it so much."
She said, "I don't know. It's no fun, that way."