bakerstreet | thursday pic prompt

thursday pic prompt

the picture prompt meme

i. COMMENT WITH CHARACTER
ii. OTHERS LEAVE A PICTURE (OR TWO OR THREE....)
iii. REPLY TO THEM WITH A SETTING BASED ON THE IMAGES.

THIS POST WILL BE IMAGE HEAVY.

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There are limits to freedom, and they go like this:

Never assume that you are safe. Never assume you're not looked for. Curfews. Closed curtains. Meals at home. Avoid villages and public spaces. Keep indoors if possible. If you must go out, charms. And never stay out for long.

But Sirius has long had his own disguise, better than charms or false beards or anything like that. It's what got him out of Azkaban--that, and the bleak knowledge of his own innocence, a poor sort of talisman to hold against darkness unfathomable.

Remus hasn't said how he came by this cottage. Sirius hasn't much pressed the issue. He doesn't know that he wants to know the answer. Thinking of it in those terms feels like bedding down in a corner somewhere, turning nose to tail, turning inward. This is also something he has had a long time to practice at.

It's the company he finds himself most unused to. There is only one bedroom, and one bed. They trade off. Sometimes Sirius makes a joke about it. Sometimes he sleeps under the bed, or rather, Padfoot does. The narrow sofa in the parlor is covered in black dog hair and sags rather more in the middle than it used to. When Sirius wakes up, it's usually with a start, with the bedsheets stuck to his chest with sweat. And then the smell of tea, which is something so clean and simple he barely knows what to do with it.

Crossword puzzles, awful ones, out of the muggle newspapers Remus fetches from the village. Trying out this shit and borrowed wand. One afternoon, rather late, Sirius is going through the cupboards because he can't stand doing nothing any longer, because he's wearing a tract in the floorboards, and while he's rummaging he finds a bottle of brandy.

"Is it yours?" He turns around and presents the bottle to Remus, who is sat across the room. "Didn't take you for having grown up to be a brandy man, Lupin."

Lupin is easier to say than Moony, sometimes. If he thinks about it. The bottle is dusty. Sirius swipes a thumb across the label and reads it aloud. "'Dragon Barrel'. A man of middling taste, anyways."

This isn't the first time Sirius has interrupted his routine, but it isn't the same. They aren't the same. The last time it had been full moons and forests and turning the worst nights of his life into some of the best, taking his very small world and making it more — more than just calendars and locked doors and waiting and hiding.

Sirius's world is no longer bigger than his. Now he's the one with access to the world and to living, and he can't do anything to return the favor. The best he can do is this: teach Sirius how to follow calendars and to lock doors and to hide and to wait, how to survive in a cottage at the edge of everything else. Teach him how to pretend that will ever be enough. He keeps him company, too, but the realization that his company isn't half as liberating as James and Sirius' had been for him is a dry, sharp thing.

Watching Sirius pace the room only makes it sharper, so he doesn't. He distracts himself with the newspaper, but that's a short reprieve, the usual cursory scan for reports of disasters or attacks or deaths that bear a familiar dark mark. There's nothing. There hasn't been anything for a week, which is good; but that simply means whatever's happening is happening quietly, which isn't.

"Middling is a bit generous."

Middling would require an income. Remus lowers the newspaper to give Sirius his attention, and the sight of him standing there with a bottle of found liquor is bizarrely nostalgic. Completely wrong — wrong house, long hair, too old — but still. Some things never change. Remus weighs his options for a moment, then he abandons the paper and stands.

"Not up to your taste, certainly, but I should think you can brave it."

Interrupted in part by the sound of a cupboard door as he steps into the kitchen (or across the room, really, which is hardly even a handful of steps) and retrieves a pair of mugs. Not exactly brandy material, but they're lucky to have more than one glass at all. The sound they make when he places them on the counter is too loud, the cottage too empty and quiet for it to be anything else.

"I've always been generous." In case Remus needs a reminder. It is quite the distance stretched out between this Sirius and that Sirius, as if they're two different people looking over a chasm. The description feels particularly apt, some days more than others.

At the moment, with this distraction, he can force it, blend the disparate images. So can Remus, which is why he plays along now. Quite different and quite the same; it's easier to pretend at the sameness when they can, while they still can. Living in bloody isolation has to be good for something.

Sirius turns the bottle around again to regard it fondly. The label is peeling; he smooths it down with his thumb, watches it roll right back again as soon as that little pressure is released.

"You'll be braving it as well," he calls to Remus. The amount of clinking going on in the kitchen suggests at two mugs at least, so he hardly needs to say it. Says it anyways in case Remus is thinking of begging off. The brandy sloshes in the bottle when Sirius tosses it in the air and catches it again. "Can't let a man drink alone, you know."

Remus glances over at the sound of the bottle being tossed, like he's half expecting Sirius to drop it and make a mess. It wouldn't be the first time.

"I wouldn't dream of it."

Speaking of dreams, alcohol is probably a bad choice, or at the very least a risky one. There are the good outcomes — blacking out and thinking of absolutely nothing, which would probably be the best sleep Sirius has had in a while. Taking the edge off. Then there are the bad outcomes, like lucid dreams and runaway thoughts and losing control.

They've dealt with enough of that already, though it might be better to say Sirius deals with it and Remus pretends not to notice in the same way Sirius has always pretended not to care about his scars. Remus thinks it's what he wants. He doubts it's what Sirius needs, but he's still working on crossing that bridge — maybe with a bit more courage, maybe over drinks and after Sirius has lost some of that edge.

All of which is considered in the time it takes Remus to cross the room and join Sirius by the cabinets he's just raided. None of it's said, and he makes his choice when he lifts one of the cups to Sirius, offering it up for him to either take or start pouring.

"What would you have taken me for?"

He doesn't actually care about the answer, and he somehow doubts Sirius has really thought about what alcohol Remus would or wouldn't go for in old age. It's just banter, a little rote and unpracticed. It isn't that it's hard to feel warmth or be playful when speaking to Sirius; it's just that it's different, all more wry or bitter or wistful than it had ever been before. Which makes sense, of course. So are they.

"Depends." Sirius unscrews the top of the bottle easily and pours out. The lip of the bottle tinks against the mug; brandy sloshes out, in a quick enough stream that some of it spills over the edge onto Remus' fingers. The smell blooms up right after, a heady warm perfume. "But taking your recent occupation into consideration, I'd say you kept a bottle of Ogden's Old top drawer of your desk and got into that after every class let out."

After it's been said, Sirius realises belatedly how raw a wound he's pressed on. He doesn't look at Remus when he realises it, and he doesn't take it back or apologise. In another time, he would have something bracing to say: that working for the Order means more than putting up with a load of kids, that Hogwarts--brilliant as it is, brilliant as Dumbledore is--would have to be a shit place to work, and look at the bright side, Moony, you no longer have to share the staff room with Snivellus. You're well clear of that. Let's have a toast to your freedom.

Sirius thinks each of these things in turn, and he lets them die unsaid. They are, all of them, true. And in opposition is the truth that Remus must have appreciated that job more than he would ever say or admit. It must have felt like the bloody hand of fate intervening on his behalf, for once. Who knows where the hell he was before Dumbledore looked him up and offered him a job at Hogwarts, which still stands in Sirius' mind as the one place he loves, the only thing that remains in a past that's now clouded over.

They were happy there. Merlin knows he was, desperately, ridiculously happy, and surely the same is true for Remus, who now looks peaky and strung out and unhappy, and Sirius hates himself for mentioning it, and he hates himself for being the cause, Remus quit because the school governors found out what he was, as if that mattered at all, as if it made him any it less than a brilliant wizard and an excellent teacher, and they found out because he didn't take his potion, because he was so fucking busy going after Sirius, because he kept Sirius' secret long after he should have, and now this, and Sirius looks up to throw a violent glare at the cottage at large. This. How can he tell Remus that it's better to be of use to the Order when his current use is bloody babysitting Sirius Black, escaped convict, liability, wanted man, useless as tits on a lethifold.

"S'ppose it doesn't matter what I'd have taken you for." The brief dark silence goes unacknowledged. Sirius knows he should try harder, pull himself out of this shit mood. Then again, why try at all. "You're a brandy man now, Lupin, out of necessity." He lifts the bottle of brandy and touches its lip pointedly against the side of Remus' mug. "Cheers, mate."

The only thing he drank at his desk that was stronger than tea was the potion, of course, up until the day that he didn't. Sirius dodging his gaze doesn't much matter when Remus isn't looking at him. His eyes drop to the mug at the comment, guarded and fixated and waiting it out — waiting for the silence to pass, maybe, though he doesn't do anything to end it.

It was always going to be temporary, and there's no point in dwelling on the inevitable. Same as any other trouble they got up to, all the rules they broke: there's always the chance of being caught out.

Remus reminds himself of that as he ignores the twist in his chest and the bitterness in his throat, and he looks very close to unbothered when he looks up, tips his mug carefully enough not to lose more brandy over the sides — but it's still only close, and close doesn't undo the bitterness of years. He looks no less weary or unhappy for it.

"Cheers, old friend."

None of it reaches his voice. It's a little rough, as always, and tired. The only thing beneath that is kindness, patient and stubborn and built on what things used to be instead of what they are, or the thousand ways they've gone wrong. He even manages a smile, though it's weak, more nostalgic than it is honest and chased off a beat later as he takes an unhurried drink. He's frowning when he lowers his mug, swallowing the aftertaste and eyeing the label between Sirius's fingers like he doubts its authenticity.

"More than a bit generous, in retrospect."

Sirius drinks from the bottle first, pointedly. The swig stings briefly at his throat, warm, weirdly cleansing. Chases that first sip with a second, quicker, and it's better. Doesn't do much to cheer him, but it does turn down the volume on his sudden despair.

Which means he's very nearly joking when he smiles, wryly, at Remus. "You're just trying to soften me up."

Admittedly a gamble on Remus' part, since Sirius could just as easily turn that nostalgia around. He wants to and he doesn't. What's the use in being nasty to Remus, who is stuck with him, confined to a house arrest that he didn't ask for. Sirius is largely incapable of directly his anger properly, especially these days, walking a brittle edge, one foot in front of the other.

He decides in that moment to try. Mostly because, even beneath his self-loathing and preoccupation, he can still feel needling displeasure at the quick death of Remus' stupid smile. Because he has always been, in his way, eager to please--or not to please, exactly; that smacks of a desperation that Sirius does not feel. He
likes to please. Rebellious to everything except his friends, who he would die for, and let's not go down that road again just yet. Down there is Peter Pettigrew in the Shack, in the street, blasting away a load of muggles to escape his own fate. You should have died. Not James.

Sirius sets his jaw. Then he takes the second cup from Remus and pours himself a brandy. A gesture of mannered peace, in a way. No more drinking from the bottle. This will be a conversation, for as long as he can make it last. "You never have thanked me properly for the madrake leaf."

The mention of the leaf begs another small smile. More like before, this time, young and amused, muted more out of respect than exhaustion. The image of Sirius and James and Peter holding leaves in their mouths (and it had taken Peter even longer to manage it, of course, because he was only half as stubborn) is easy to call up. It should be, considering that it'd had a month to sink in.

But it shouldn't be a good memory. Not knowing what he knows now about Peter, and James — now that he knows that mandrake leaf is the only thing that's kept Sirius alive and, hopefully, sane. It should all be coloured by what came after, burnt at the edges. He's naive to think he can keep it all separate, or desperate; possibly both. The familiar tug of guilt at having kept all of it from Dumbledore is there, as always, given a bitter twist by the realisation that the only thing Remus really regrets is that he'd probably do it all again, exactly the same way. He hasn't really changed.

He's still keeping secrets. Still kept Sirius's when it put others at risk. Hadn't it been the same for Peter? Knowing how quickly fear could slip into betrayal and still trusting, blindly, always assuming the best —

Remus tips his mug up to avoid thinking or talking, and the sharpness of the brandy does a good job of chasing out thought. He turns away from Sirius when he does speak, attention shifting to the fireplace and drawing it to life with a stray thought. Light flickers over their features as it crackles to life, heat quick on its tail.

"Nonsense. I've bought you this brandy."

Carefully serious in delivery, obviously bullshit.

Perhaps it's a sort of desperation that gets Sirius to smile. Perhaps he shouldn't think so hard about it. Remus was often funny, is often funny. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have lasted. Straight humour, delivered in an even tone, deadpan to the end. Brief spells of mania are just that, these days: brief. Sirius has become better suited to these quiet sort of jokes.

"Ah." Very serious in return. "So it was intended for me, and now you're only drinking it as a gesture of noble politeness. Not outside your character" --without adding a politer no offense; they're friends, old friends, they don't need to soften blows-- "but still, Lupin. You could have gone a bit more upscale, if it's meant to be repayment."

That's not to say he won't keep drinking, because he will. Proof to the point, Sirius takes another swallow as he turns to cross the room and take up by the fireplace. There's chairs, a sofa. He opts instead for the floor, sprawled out somewhat ungainly but with his mug of brandy still unspilled; the bottle on the floor beside him, ready for refills--and, once settled, gives his mug a cultured sort of swirl, twist of the wrist--more obvious bullshit, as well as a gesture weirdly anachronistic with, you know. His everything.

Remus doesn't rush to follow, though he does, of course; as always. He doesn't join Sirius on the floor, instead pulling one of the lighter chairs a bit closer to where he's sat in front of the fire, a rickety old wooden one that creaks when he sits down. He leans forward, elbows on knees, smiling lightly at the image of Sirius appreciating the not-so-fine brandy.

He still looks like a mess. That's probably to be expected, given that he's spent weeks of near-isolation out here, in the middle of nowhere — and given that he's been a dog for half of it. Remus studies the worn edges on his clothes and the lines on his face, wondering absently if his appearance would be more improved with more comfortable circumstances.

Probably not. There isn't much that can erase a decade in Azkaban.

"Thank you."

Offered simply, though there's nothing about such an honest and heavy remark that's simple. Remus doesn't dwell on it, taking a shallow drink and turning his gaze to the fireplace.

"Dumbledore's been eyeing your old place." A beat, unhurried, like this is a very casual and not at all touchy subject. Remus knows it is, though he isn't sure just how touchy; Sirius's past is much more than just family disagreements, now. "He thinks it'll make a good safe house."

The first thought Sirius has, your old place, is his flat. The incongruity of the image is nearly enough that he laughs: the swayback sofa that he and James had floated up the stairs, the waterstain on the ceiling like a map. Order business conducted in the narrow kitchen, where you couldn't have the refrigerator and the stove open at the same time. Dumbledore perched on the spare square of countertop, the silver of his long beard threading with gold in the light from the tiny window over the drainboard.

It's not a moment after the thought comes to him that Sirius puts together what Remus actually means. "Yeah?" When looks around, there's a little more of a dog in the hunch of his shoulders and his narrowed eyes. Wary, hackled. "Then he's mental."

Goes without saying, of course. They used to throw the fond suggestion of that madness around like a quaffle: mad, but brilliant. This is different. This is Grimmauld Place. Sirius huffs something that's nearly a laugh as he takes up his mug again.

"And just what's put him on to thinking of my ancestral manor? Since you're in his confidence on the subject."

Somehow. Despite being sat here, with Sirius, behind shutters and closed doors most times. Sirius tries to let the warmth of the brandy flush some of that bitterness out of him, but it rises quickly in his throat again, like bile or worse. Colours everything these days anyways, why not this as well.

Edited (meaningless edits i'm sorry) 2016-09-30 03:43 (UTC)

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thursday pic prompt

hey there fellow grandpa

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tags this first bc samples, decency