Jul. 14th, 2011 02:12 pm
Fic: These Four Kings (Summer 1/2)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fox_confessorTitle: These Four Kings (Summer 1/2)
Author: Dani (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
escribo)
Word count: 2104
Rating: PG-13
(Pairings: in the future will be Remus/Sirius, Lily/James)
Timeline: July 1977
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended. I've not made nor seek any profit.
Year 1: one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven
Year 2: one/ two/ three/ four
Year 3: one/ two/three/four
Year 4 (coming in the future when work quits eating my brains! Sorry for the out-of-order-ness)
Year 5 one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven/ eight
Year 6 one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven/ eight/ nine
Sirius had been silent all morning and James was tired of the sound of his own voice. It was nerves, he knew, on both their parts. They hadn't seen Remus since right before they'd left Hogwarts for the year, Madame Pomfrey promising he was recovering but that his mother didn't want him to have visitors. For once, Sirius had listened, refusing James' offer of the invisibility cloak, saying only he'll ask when he's ready. James had thought that was bollocks. The trouble had already gone on long enough and James had decided that despite his history, he didn't much like trouble--not this kind, at least. So he owled Remus with a formal request, stuffing in as many forthwith's and posthaste's as he could manage before scrawling across the bottom, please owl back and say it's all right, Moony. Pads won't come otherwise. He had received a two word message back that same afternoon by return owl that said simply, All right.
Remus' house was the same as it always had been, though James had only been twice before and both times when Remus' father had been alive. The porch sagged in the middle and the blue paint was faded and peeling in places. There was a tangle of morning glories that twined their way over the posts, their flowers wilting in the early afternoon heat. James started up the creaking steps when Sirius shook his head and tugged on his arm, pointing him along a dirt path through a wild garden to where Remus sat sprawled on an old wooden chair beneath a spreading oak tree.
Remus was barefoot, his cotton trousers shiny at the knees and the cuffs rolled up several inches above his bony ankles. He was wearing a faded red t shirt that pulled tight across his thin chest, one James had bought in the stalls of a Muggle market and given to Sirius at least two Christmases ago. There was a battered cane at his feet, tossed there by an owner clearly reluctant or resentful to use it. He had an equally battered book face down on his thigh, its paper spine split so that James couldn't read the title at all.
"Hey Moony," James said quietly, as if Remus was a kind of bird that James was nervous about frightening off, and he quickly cleared his throat, knowing Remus would hate the image with its implication of fragility. Remus opened his eyes and blinked up at him, and then looked past James to where Sirius had stopped to wait at the corner of the house.
"My mum sent these for you," he said, shaking the tin of biscuits in his hand, and Remus mustered a smile that stopped at his lips. His eyes were as dull as old knuts, weariness etched into the lines of his face. He looked years older than seventeen and James remembered what Dumbledore had said the night of The Trouble, as he had dubbed it in his thoughts--that Remus had seen too much, lived too long, longer than most children who had been bit. That his life would be hard, harder than either of the other boys could understand. That he had to be protected. James felt the stirring of guilt twist his guts-- he was sure he had failed at that.
"I thought your mum would be keeping you to your bed," James said as he squatted on the ground next to Remus' chair, setting down the tin of biscuits, and smiling up at Remus. He could see the still healing wounds on Remus' skin, bright pink scratches that marred his face and neck and the deep red marks that gouged his arms, disappearing beneath the sleeve of his shirt. There would be others, he knew, worse ones on his chest and across his back, on his leg. Madame Pomfrey had said many would fade over time but some he would always carry.
"She's gone into the village with my aunt. They should be back soon."
"If Sirius had known that, he'd have likely come as Padfoot. He only didn't because he didn't want to scare your mum."
"She's more afraid of him just as he is."
"She knows, then, about--"
"No. She doesn't much care for you, either. It's just--" Remus fluttered his hand in the air and James saw that it was still bandaged from the moon only now just a few days past. "Wizards. That's why they went to the village. I told them you'd both be coming today."
"Oh." James wasn't sure what to say to that, only just knew that he didn't want to ask what that meant for Remus. He suspected he knew already. "Are you alright?" he asked instead.
Remus nodded once, hard, but didn't say anything so James stood, walked around the chair to the tree, and picked at the bark with his thumb. He could see Sirius still at the side of the house, his arms crossed over his chest as he stared at his feet. It had taken James nearly an hour to convince him that Remus' all right had extended to him, too. "Can I tell him to come over?"
Remus shrugged and picked at the shredded paper on the spine of his book. The apples of his cheeks were faintly pink and James bit his lip, trying to remember if they'd been that way when they walked up. He'd never been as good at reading Remus as Sirius always had been. "He wants to apologize. Properly."
"I told him--"
"I know what you told him. He wants to do it anyway and he wants you to say you forgive him. He needs you to do that."
"There's --"
"Don't say it, Moony. You know how he is. You know what he came from. Just let him, yeah?"
"Tell me what happened at the Shack first."
James dropped his hands to his hips, looking away to where the wild tangle of flowers and weeds gave way to a sparse wood, and sighed. Remus turned his head slightly, enough to see James, James was sure, and James moved to sit on his heels at Remus' feet.
"Pomfrey said that I was lucky. She didn't understand how I survived. She doesn't just say things like that. It was bad. Did you do something?" Remus asked, and James shook his head. "Sirius?"
"You were dying."
"So what did he do? A spell?"
"Yeah."
"What did it do?"
James dropped to one knee and looked over his shoulder at Sirius, who was staring at them now, before he looked back to Remus. Sirius had made James promise not tell Remus, reasoning that it would be only just one more burden to a friendship already buckling under. James decided in that moment that he was done with secrets and promises that tore them apart rather than bind them together, and he looked back at Remus. "It was a resurrection spell. He gave you three years off the balance of his own life."
Remus paled, the scattering of freckles across his nose standing out on his suddenly bloodless face before twin splotches of red stained his cheeks. "Why?"
"He loves you," James said, and Remus looked up at him sharply. "We both do."
"If you'd been caught--"
"We weren't, but even if we had been, we'd do the same. He would."
"It doesn't change--" Remus said haltingly, his voice shaking as he tried to order his thoughts and his words.
"Of course it does," James said with more confidence than he felt. He stood and placed his hand on Remus' shoulder. "We made a pact, remember? Sirius was honoring that, even with what he did with Sniv-- with Snape. He wasn't trying to hurt you."
"I know."
"And you can forget any of this rubbish about protecting us from yourself. That's rubbish. You're our friend," James said with enough finality in his voice that Remus looked up to meet his eyes. "He's not going to say it but it was really stupid what you did, going after Grayback."
"I know."
"You could have told us. You didn't have to be alone with it."
"You've already risked enough for me, James. You all have."
"A bit of illegal magic? It was a lark." James let his voice go dismissive--flippant, though he knew that Remus knew better. "If you want to pay us back, let him make his apology and then accept it."
Remus held James' eyes for another minute and then nodded. James grinned at him, motioning for Sirius to come over and join them beneath the tree. He did so slowly, loping over with his hands buried deep into his pockets and his eyes on his feet. He stood there, his shoulders rounded and his hair falling into his eyes, looking every bit like Padfoot with his tail tucked when he'd been caught digging in Hagrid's garden. He hadn't had a good reason for that, either.
"You could have died," Remus said, his voice shaking but clearly determined to give Sirius no quarter. "What if you were meant to die next year?"
Sirius narrowed his eyes as he looked sidelong at James. "I'm not going to die," Sirius said when James wouldn't look back.
"You don't know that. You can't."
"Then I suppose neither of us would have made it."
"Was it dark magic? The spell you used."
"I remembered reading it in a book from my father's--at the library in Grimmauld Place." Remus sucked in a breath, knowing that was as good as an admission. Sirius ignored him, tilting his chin up rebelliously. Remus tugged at the leg of Sirius' jeans and then slid his bandaged hand into Sirius' when Sirius reached for him, even as he was falling to his knees at Remus' feet.
"I wasn't going to let you die," Sirius said, the defiance gone from his voice as he folded himself over Remus' lap, clutching as his hand.
"Promise me that you'll never use the dark arts again," Remus said. Sirius was silent, unwilling, James thought, to make such a promise if it meant admitting what he'd done was wrong. Sirius, James knew, would sacrifice himself, first, sacrifice his soul rather than let his friends suffer. James put his hand on Sirius' shoulder and squeezed, giving him what courage he could, and then, as James watched, Remus leaned forward in his chair to push Sirius' hair from his eyes, to lift his chin. "Promise me."
Sirius looked up and away, then back to Remus, his mouth a hard line. He seemed to spot the familiar lump beneath Remus' shirt at the same time that James did, and reached to slide his fingers beneath Remus' collar, to tug free the cord that held the misshapen tin knight with its raised sword. James knew that Sirius had given it back, tucked it into Remus' trunk before they'd left for the summer. Now, Sirius touched it, lifted it to balance on his fingertips, pressing the back of his fingers against the pulse point in Remus' throat. "I promise," he whispered, then cleared his throat. "I'll promise anything to you, Remus."
Later that night, Sirius was silent again, sprawled across James' bed as they listened to the charmed record player, but James let him be as he contemplated writing an owl to Lily. Things weren't exactly the way they had been before but they were getting better, he was sure of that, and he wanted her to know--wanted to confide in her in a way he didn't quite understand. The words wouldn't come, though, and instead he wrote a quick note to Peter, inviting him to stay later in the summer, saying that Remus would be there, too.
When he was finished and his owl, Aether, had raised her wings and taken flight through the window, he finally turned to Sirius and tugged on his ankle. "I'm going to see if there's any cake left. Do you want some?"
"Yeah." Sirius stretched and rolled to sit on the edge of the mattress but didn't make any move to get up when James stood. Instead he stared out the open window to where the moon had just risen. James sat next to him, quiet again, until Sirius shook himself from his mood and gave James' a small smile, the first bit of happiness that James had seen on Sirius' face in a long time, before Sirius turned to worrying at the cuticle on his thumb. "Thanks, Jamie," he murmured after a bit and James nodded. It was the last they would ever talk about it.
next
Author: Dani (
escribo)Word count: 2104
Rating: PG-13
(Pairings: in the future will be Remus/Sirius, Lily/James)
Timeline: July 1977
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended. I've not made nor seek any profit.
Year 1: one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven
Year 2: one/ two/ three/ four
Year 3: one/ two/three/four
Year 4 (coming in the future when work quits eating my brains! Sorry for the out-of-order-ness)
Year 5 one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven/ eight
Year 6 one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven/ eight/ nine
Sirius had been silent all morning and James was tired of the sound of his own voice. It was nerves, he knew, on both their parts. They hadn't seen Remus since right before they'd left Hogwarts for the year, Madame Pomfrey promising he was recovering but that his mother didn't want him to have visitors. For once, Sirius had listened, refusing James' offer of the invisibility cloak, saying only he'll ask when he's ready. James had thought that was bollocks. The trouble had already gone on long enough and James had decided that despite his history, he didn't much like trouble--not this kind, at least. So he owled Remus with a formal request, stuffing in as many forthwith's and posthaste's as he could manage before scrawling across the bottom, please owl back and say it's all right, Moony. Pads won't come otherwise. He had received a two word message back that same afternoon by return owl that said simply, All right.
Remus' house was the same as it always had been, though James had only been twice before and both times when Remus' father had been alive. The porch sagged in the middle and the blue paint was faded and peeling in places. There was a tangle of morning glories that twined their way over the posts, their flowers wilting in the early afternoon heat. James started up the creaking steps when Sirius shook his head and tugged on his arm, pointing him along a dirt path through a wild garden to where Remus sat sprawled on an old wooden chair beneath a spreading oak tree.
Remus was barefoot, his cotton trousers shiny at the knees and the cuffs rolled up several inches above his bony ankles. He was wearing a faded red t shirt that pulled tight across his thin chest, one James had bought in the stalls of a Muggle market and given to Sirius at least two Christmases ago. There was a battered cane at his feet, tossed there by an owner clearly reluctant or resentful to use it. He had an equally battered book face down on his thigh, its paper spine split so that James couldn't read the title at all.
"Hey Moony," James said quietly, as if Remus was a kind of bird that James was nervous about frightening off, and he quickly cleared his throat, knowing Remus would hate the image with its implication of fragility. Remus opened his eyes and blinked up at him, and then looked past James to where Sirius had stopped to wait at the corner of the house.
"My mum sent these for you," he said, shaking the tin of biscuits in his hand, and Remus mustered a smile that stopped at his lips. His eyes were as dull as old knuts, weariness etched into the lines of his face. He looked years older than seventeen and James remembered what Dumbledore had said the night of The Trouble, as he had dubbed it in his thoughts--that Remus had seen too much, lived too long, longer than most children who had been bit. That his life would be hard, harder than either of the other boys could understand. That he had to be protected. James felt the stirring of guilt twist his guts-- he was sure he had failed at that.
"I thought your mum would be keeping you to your bed," James said as he squatted on the ground next to Remus' chair, setting down the tin of biscuits, and smiling up at Remus. He could see the still healing wounds on Remus' skin, bright pink scratches that marred his face and neck and the deep red marks that gouged his arms, disappearing beneath the sleeve of his shirt. There would be others, he knew, worse ones on his chest and across his back, on his leg. Madame Pomfrey had said many would fade over time but some he would always carry.
"She's gone into the village with my aunt. They should be back soon."
"If Sirius had known that, he'd have likely come as Padfoot. He only didn't because he didn't want to scare your mum."
"She's more afraid of him just as he is."
"She knows, then, about--"
"No. She doesn't much care for you, either. It's just--" Remus fluttered his hand in the air and James saw that it was still bandaged from the moon only now just a few days past. "Wizards. That's why they went to the village. I told them you'd both be coming today."
"Oh." James wasn't sure what to say to that, only just knew that he didn't want to ask what that meant for Remus. He suspected he knew already. "Are you alright?" he asked instead.
Remus nodded once, hard, but didn't say anything so James stood, walked around the chair to the tree, and picked at the bark with his thumb. He could see Sirius still at the side of the house, his arms crossed over his chest as he stared at his feet. It had taken James nearly an hour to convince him that Remus' all right had extended to him, too. "Can I tell him to come over?"
Remus shrugged and picked at the shredded paper on the spine of his book. The apples of his cheeks were faintly pink and James bit his lip, trying to remember if they'd been that way when they walked up. He'd never been as good at reading Remus as Sirius always had been. "He wants to apologize. Properly."
"I told him--"
"I know what you told him. He wants to do it anyway and he wants you to say you forgive him. He needs you to do that."
"There's --"
"Don't say it, Moony. You know how he is. You know what he came from. Just let him, yeah?"
"Tell me what happened at the Shack first."
James dropped his hands to his hips, looking away to where the wild tangle of flowers and weeds gave way to a sparse wood, and sighed. Remus turned his head slightly, enough to see James, James was sure, and James moved to sit on his heels at Remus' feet.
"Pomfrey said that I was lucky. She didn't understand how I survived. She doesn't just say things like that. It was bad. Did you do something?" Remus asked, and James shook his head. "Sirius?"
"You were dying."
"So what did he do? A spell?"
"Yeah."
"What did it do?"
James dropped to one knee and looked over his shoulder at Sirius, who was staring at them now, before he looked back to Remus. Sirius had made James promise not tell Remus, reasoning that it would be only just one more burden to a friendship already buckling under. James decided in that moment that he was done with secrets and promises that tore them apart rather than bind them together, and he looked back at Remus. "It was a resurrection spell. He gave you three years off the balance of his own life."
Remus paled, the scattering of freckles across his nose standing out on his suddenly bloodless face before twin splotches of red stained his cheeks. "Why?"
"He loves you," James said, and Remus looked up at him sharply. "We both do."
"If you'd been caught--"
"We weren't, but even if we had been, we'd do the same. He would."
"It doesn't change--" Remus said haltingly, his voice shaking as he tried to order his thoughts and his words.
"Of course it does," James said with more confidence than he felt. He stood and placed his hand on Remus' shoulder. "We made a pact, remember? Sirius was honoring that, even with what he did with Sniv-- with Snape. He wasn't trying to hurt you."
"I know."
"And you can forget any of this rubbish about protecting us from yourself. That's rubbish. You're our friend," James said with enough finality in his voice that Remus looked up to meet his eyes. "He's not going to say it but it was really stupid what you did, going after Grayback."
"I know."
"You could have told us. You didn't have to be alone with it."
"You've already risked enough for me, James. You all have."
"A bit of illegal magic? It was a lark." James let his voice go dismissive--flippant, though he knew that Remus knew better. "If you want to pay us back, let him make his apology and then accept it."
Remus held James' eyes for another minute and then nodded. James grinned at him, motioning for Sirius to come over and join them beneath the tree. He did so slowly, loping over with his hands buried deep into his pockets and his eyes on his feet. He stood there, his shoulders rounded and his hair falling into his eyes, looking every bit like Padfoot with his tail tucked when he'd been caught digging in Hagrid's garden. He hadn't had a good reason for that, either.
"You could have died," Remus said, his voice shaking but clearly determined to give Sirius no quarter. "What if you were meant to die next year?"
Sirius narrowed his eyes as he looked sidelong at James. "I'm not going to die," Sirius said when James wouldn't look back.
"You don't know that. You can't."
"Then I suppose neither of us would have made it."
"Was it dark magic? The spell you used."
"I remembered reading it in a book from my father's--at the library in Grimmauld Place." Remus sucked in a breath, knowing that was as good as an admission. Sirius ignored him, tilting his chin up rebelliously. Remus tugged at the leg of Sirius' jeans and then slid his bandaged hand into Sirius' when Sirius reached for him, even as he was falling to his knees at Remus' feet.
"I wasn't going to let you die," Sirius said, the defiance gone from his voice as he folded himself over Remus' lap, clutching as his hand.
"Promise me that you'll never use the dark arts again," Remus said. Sirius was silent, unwilling, James thought, to make such a promise if it meant admitting what he'd done was wrong. Sirius, James knew, would sacrifice himself, first, sacrifice his soul rather than let his friends suffer. James put his hand on Sirius' shoulder and squeezed, giving him what courage he could, and then, as James watched, Remus leaned forward in his chair to push Sirius' hair from his eyes, to lift his chin. "Promise me."
Sirius looked up and away, then back to Remus, his mouth a hard line. He seemed to spot the familiar lump beneath Remus' shirt at the same time that James did, and reached to slide his fingers beneath Remus' collar, to tug free the cord that held the misshapen tin knight with its raised sword. James knew that Sirius had given it back, tucked it into Remus' trunk before they'd left for the summer. Now, Sirius touched it, lifted it to balance on his fingertips, pressing the back of his fingers against the pulse point in Remus' throat. "I promise," he whispered, then cleared his throat. "I'll promise anything to you, Remus."
Later that night, Sirius was silent again, sprawled across James' bed as they listened to the charmed record player, but James let him be as he contemplated writing an owl to Lily. Things weren't exactly the way they had been before but they were getting better, he was sure of that, and he wanted her to know--wanted to confide in her in a way he didn't quite understand. The words wouldn't come, though, and instead he wrote a quick note to Peter, inviting him to stay later in the summer, saying that Remus would be there, too.
When he was finished and his owl, Aether, had raised her wings and taken flight through the window, he finally turned to Sirius and tugged on his ankle. "I'm going to see if there's any cake left. Do you want some?"
"Yeah." Sirius stretched and rolled to sit on the edge of the mattress but didn't make any move to get up when James stood. Instead he stared out the open window to where the moon had just risen. James sat next to him, quiet again, until Sirius shook himself from his mood and gave James' a small smile, the first bit of happiness that James had seen on Sirius' face in a long time, before Sirius turned to worrying at the cuticle on his thumb. "Thanks, Jamie," he murmured after a bit and James nodded. It was the last they would ever talk about it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
BOYS.
*sniff*
I really can't even begin to express how much I still and always will love this series. It is just so perfectly paced and written and... the pacing is just brilliant, let's stick to that. The way you've paced the relationship over the course of the years, as well as the way that you pace the reader in the chapter, interrupting dialogue with bits of detail, drawing out the important bits until the right time.
SO GOOD, basically. SO GOOD.
no subject
Thank you for reading!
no subject
no subject
You also have an excellent ear for dialogue. Everything sounds natural and real, never forced or contrived. That's a rare talent.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I wasn't gonna do this, but...
Aaaaanyway. Some points that stood out:
-I really find it noteworthy that I had slept for 10hours straight, woke up to snooze my alarm, saw that [this was up], and read this on my mobile, with sleep shit in my eyes not even turned crusty yet EW, and you still managed to put me RIGHT back in as if I'd been reading the preceding chapters. I felt the butterflies in my tummy at mini references and all.
-you have somehow turned me into a patient human being who is fine with the slow burn of this fic. I could NOT get through the Shoebox Project (for other reasons too) mainly because there wasn't enough to keep me going. You have put the perfect amount of R/S in here the whole way, without it crossing the line into properly acknowledging it. Does that make sense? Like, I'll read fluffy fanfic, that has them as bfs since 3rd year, and it's sweet and awwwwww, but it'll be AU in my head. But yours marauders are so perfectly boyish, but so caring (in the way no one ever gives boys credit for. They are compassionate humans like the rest of us after all). Conscientious, but not anachronistically so, and thickheadedly brave like Gryffindors but not to the point where all of them are retarded (lol, I guess one should hope not).
-Peter. I find myself sometimes, getting irritated with the people, like on
-I love the fingers touching his neck; I felt like I could imagine the feeling in Remus' tummy at the contact in such an erogenous place, after so long without anything because of the 'Prank'.
-I like that James is calling it 'The Trouble' because they aren't removed enough yet for them to be able to acknowledge it in cold-blood...
In conclusion (lol): I loved it, and I feel like Harry did in the 5th book when they had the DA to get them through the shittiness of Umbridge. :-D
K BYE
Re: I wasn't gonna do this, but...
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
simply amazing.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
MY HEART
There's so much here that mentioning it all in a comment would be useless. Just know that Merlin's beard and Wizard God above, I love your puppies. And your James.
<3 <3 <3
no subject
no subject
I could say sooo much more, so I'll leave you with the biggest love possible for your Remus/Sirius and the Marauders as a whole, and Lily and Regulus, ohmygoodgracious dear Regulus.
Now please tell me how to set up alerts so that I'll receive emails for more.
no subject
If you go to my profile and click on "tracking" in the upper right side then you can set to receive emails when I make a new post. I do write in other fandoms but rarely and most of my posts that aren't These Four Kings are other remus/sirius stories, so not likely to spam your inbox terribly... Hope that helps!