Song Of Songs

by Mad Martha

Part 7

Waking in the morning was not a pleasant experience.  Remus was human again, and he hadn't done as much damage to himself as he could, but that was the best that could be said for the matter.  The sudden, violent change had left him with brutally sore muscles and joints, and his first attempt to move threw him into multiple cramps in his legs and shoulders that made him cry out in agony.

Sirius wasn't much better.  The aggression shown to Padfoot by Moony in those first fifteen minutes after the change had left him with bruises all over his body, and some pretty nasty aches and pains of his own.  He was still in a better case to move than Remus and at his partner's cry he got up to help him rub the afflicted limbs. 

The cramp passed off, but Remus was still in no position to get up.  Sirius crawled to his feet and collected their clothes and wands from the shelf.  He pulled his jeans and outer robe on, forced his feet into his shoes, then, as gently as he could manage under the circumstances, he dressed Remus in his outer robe.  Remus, all but comatose, mumbled a protest.

"Lie still," Sirius told him.  "I'm going to levitate you out of here."

The first attempt made Remus groan in pain.  "Body … bind," he wheezed.

Muttering apologies, Sirius cast a full body-bind and tried again.  This time he was more successful, and once the wards were down and the door unbarred, he eased Remus out of the cellar.  It wasn't until he reached the hallway, however, that he paused.  It wasn't going to be possible to get Remus back to the cottage until he was back on his feet, and from the look of things that wasn't going to happen for hours.  They were going to have to stay at Grimmauld Place for the time being.

The thought gave Sirius the creeps, but there was no way around it.  Remus had to have somewhere to rest while he recuperated, and Sirius knew from past experience that any attempt to Apparate or portkey him while he was in this condition would only make his discomfort much worse.

He grimaced, but realised he had no choice but to let it go.  Doing a quick mental review of the bedrooms in the house, he decided that he might as well take Remus up to his own old room.  At least it had once been his, filled with his own things, and there were fractionally fewer bad memories associated with it.  If they had to stay in this damn house, that was as good a place as any.

They hadn't lingered over the bedrooms the day before, and his own room in particular he hadn't wanted to look at after being confronted with Regulus's.  As he unlocked the door and shoved it open, another cloud of dust greeted him, which he cleared away with a couple of forceful charms.

Then he came face to face with his teenaged rebellion.  Some things were similar to Regulus's room - the heavy four poster bed and matching ebony furniture, and the brass light fittings hanging from the ceiling.  The room was slightly bigger, however, and the colour scheme was the complete opposite.  Sirius recalled a series of days over one summer when, confined to his room for some misdemeanour, he had angrily set about redecorating everything.  The colour scheme - changed from the family's midnight blue and silver colours to Gryffindor scarlet and gold - had really taken very little effort.  The devil had been in the details, modifying the shape of the brass fittings on the furniture, changing the patterns in the textiles.  He never quite managed to get rid of the family crest on the headboard of the bed, or the little decals of it on the wallpaper, so he'd plastered over those with posters and pictures cut from magazines; motorbikes and Quidditch players and - just in case his parents had felt a need to poke around in there - a small handful of semi-naked women, gleaned from Muggle magazines.  The faded images stared down at him as he cast a quick cleaning spell over the bedspread and gently set Remus down there.

The sheets were the finest Egyptian cotton and the bedspread a thick, heavy velvet.  The bedspread was also scarlet and gold to match everything else, although the teenaged Sirius had to fix the colour on that one every time it came back from the laundry.  The adult barely took note of the colour as he removed the body-bind and tucked his partner under the covers.  Remus didn't notice it at all; he was already asleep and would probably stay that way for some hours.

Sirius would happily have rolled into the bed beside him and was, in fact, on the verge of doing so when he remembered that while sleep was the best thing for Remus now, when he awoke he would need food and drink … and there wasn't any left in the house.  There were vegetables and other groceries at the cottage, of course, but no meat, and Madam Pomfrey's prescription for Remus after a change had always been heavy on meat, on account of the change taking a huge amount of energy out of him.

Sirius stepped back, scratching the back of his head uncomfortably as he watched Remus breathe.

They had no meat, and it couldn't be transfigured out of something else.  There was cheese, eggs and vegetables, of course, but they didn't have all of the nutrients Remus needed.

He could send Kreacher out to get supplies, perhaps.  Sirius wrinkled his nose at the thought.  Kreacher was mad and unreliable.  Also, Sirius had no money here.  He was going to have to go back to the cottage to collect his moneybag.  Or he could roast Kreacher over the kitchen fire, perhaps.  This had a certain attraction, although not a culinary one.

Sirius sighed.

He had no excuse, really.  If he was going to go back to the cottage to collect his money - and the rest of their food - and some replacement clothes for himself and Remus - then it made no sense at all to send Kreacher out to do the shopping.  Especially as he had other things to buy which Kreacher couldn't get for him, such as an owl for Ron Weasley and a new wand, one which didn't fight him at awkward moments.  He could perfectly well do the shopping himself.  The fact that he didn't want to, and was in fact afraid to do so, had no bearing on the matter.  He couldn't keep hiding behind Moony, especially right now when Moony needed him to be in control of the situation.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there and dithered, but eventually Sirius realised that if he was going to take control and do the things that needed to be done, then he was actually going to have to leave Remus and go out - alone - to do it.

It took perhaps another fifteen minutes for him to get it straight in his head what he was supposed to do.  It was ridiculous and he knew it, but it was incredibly hard to take the first step towards leaving the house, as little as he liked Grimmauld Place.  He was going to have to go to Diagon Alley and that meant people.  Lots of people.  People who knew who he was, who would recognise him and stare at him and judge him, and possibly even cause the kind of confrontation they'd had in Hogsmeade.  The thought made him sweat.

He could go to a Muggle shop for the food instead, perhaps, and leave the owl and wand for later.  That might be easier.

Not quite trusting Kreacher (or the orders his mother's portrait might be giving him), Sirius warded the room as he left and wasted another quarter of an hour giving the elf explicit instructions on what he was and was not to do while Sirius was gone, most of which involved staying well away from the bedroom.  Then he went out into the small back courtyard and Apparated to the cottage.

The previous night he'd had one clear objective, which had been to collect the meat for dinner.  This time things were a little more complicated, especially as he was already anxious about the proposed programme for his trip.  This anxiety was ramped up when he emptied his moneybag onto the kitchen table and discovered that he had almost no Muggle money left from their earlier clothes shopping spree.   He had no choice but to go to Diagon Alley now.

For several minutes Sirius sat at the table and stared at the pool of mixed coins winking back at him.  He was distantly surprised that his hands, resting on the wooden surface before him, weren't shaking, for he felt remarkably shaky inside and his brain was running skittishly over what he was going to have to do again.  He was going to have to deal with people, lots of people, strangers, on his own.  He was going to have to interact with them, speak to them, look them in the face and possibly even touch them.  They were going to do those things to him.  And there wasn't going to be anyone there to help him out if anything went wrong - like him screwing up.

The tightness in his chest and the walls closing in on him sent Sirius racing outside once more, to sit on the bench and take deep gulping breaths of salt-laden air.  The irony of his constant need for open air combined with his fear of encountering people was not lost on him.  At this rate Harry was going to be perfectly safe living with him and Remus, because they would be living in the middle of the Arctic tundra, as far from the rest of humanity as they could get -

Harry.

Sirius squeezed his eyes shut and slowly bent forward until his forehead was practically touching his knees.

And I can really come and live with you?

That's the plan.

Some plan!  What bloody use was he going to be to Harry, or anyone else for that matter, if he couldn't even go out and do the shopping?  He had to be the provider in this relationship - of a roof over their heads and food on the table - because wizard law made it difficult if not impossible for Remus to do it and Harry was only a boy, reliant on his guardians for the basic necessities of life.  He couldn't be that provider if he couldn't face the world on his own two feet.

He was ashamed of how long it took to do it, but Sirius finally managed to straighten up again and breathe normally.  Then he got to his feet - steadily - and went inside to gather up his money and other bits and pieces.

There was work to be done.

~~~

The day after the full moon, in sharp comparison to the day before, was a day of pain, exhaustion and dulled senses for Remus.  If he was very lucky - if he had eaten well beforehand, was unstressed, and the change was reasonably gentle - it might be possible for him to get up, treat his injuries and get dressed by mid-morning.  Those sorts of changes had been few and far between in the years since the deaths of the Potters and the end of the war.  A more common occurrence was to go into a change short of food (despite being his highest priority, there had been more than a few occasions when he was reduced to one lean meal a day) and overwhelmed with worries, and consequently the harm to himself afterwards had been bad.  Werewolves were tough, their injuries and illnesses healing quickly, but recovery still took time ... time that even the most lenient of his Muggle employers had been unable to overlook for long.

Today he awoke without clear knowledge of where he was.  As usual he had to adjust to the sudden wash of colour and light around him, and the dulled sounds, smells and tastes on his tongue.  Every joint and muscle ached with a vengeance.  And yet he didn't feel as bad as he had mentally braced himself to feel.  There were no searing wounds where he'd torn at himself with his own teeth, no dislocated joints or fractures. 

And even the dullest human nose would twitch when it was assailed by the smell of freshly-cooked bacon.

"Fancy some lunch?" Sirius's voice said.

Christ in glory.  Sirius!  It had all been a bad dream; he was going to open his eyes and find himself back in their preposterous queen-sized four-poster bed at the flat in Harrow.  And Sirius would be there, youthful and slender and handsome in his ridiculous Muggle fashions, grinning crookedly and waving a bacon sandwich under his nose to tempt him ...

Well ... almost.  Sirius was certainly there, with a large plateful of sandwiches in his hands, slender and dressed in Muggle-style clothes under his wizard robe, and Remus was lying in a four-poster bed, but this was not their flat and Sirius looked older and everything was wrong, the smells, the colours ...

With an effort Remus made the mental adjustment.  Of course they weren't back at the flat.  Years had passed since then and this was the older Sirius who had been innocent and escaped from Azkaban, and had been exonerated of any crime.  And while he wasn't one hundred percent sure of where he was, this must still be Grimmauld Place as he was sure he vaguely recalled something about a cellar and rather rare steak.

Of all things Remus most detested the disorientation after a change.

"Lunch?" Sirius prompted him again gently, and just as he had when they were younger, he saucily waved one of the sandwiches under Remus's nose.  The rich aroma of bacon made the saliva run in his mouth.

"Please ..."

"I'll give you a hand to sit up," Sirius said matter-of-factly, and he set the plate down on the bedside table while he propped Remus up on the pillows.  Then he plopped the plate down on Remus's lap and put a sandwich into his hand.  "Eat," he recommended, grabbing one himself and taking a huge bite.

It was an effort to get the sandwich to his mouth, but not one Remus begrudged.  The bacon was cooked to perfection, not too crisp and full of flavour, there was some kind of tangy relish or pickle on the bread, and the bread itself was sweetly fresh, the crusts crisp and the crumb soft and springy.

"S'good," he mumbled contentedly around a mouthful, and Sirius grinned at him just as he had in the old days.

"There's tea as well," he said.

"Fab," Remus said with a little sigh, giving in to the urge to use one of his pupils' bits of slang.  It might have been slang when he was young as well; he couldn't quite remember.  "You've been busy."

"You've no idea," Sirius said, waving his wand casually.  There was a tea-tray at the end of the bed, and the teapot and milk jug sprang to attention at the gesture.  Remus watched with rather dreamy interest as the china cups - all bearing the Black family crest - filled and drifted over to them on a charm.

"What have you been up to?" he asked, catching his cup and taking a sip.  Then he frowned.  Dulled tastebuds or no, this tea was not the blend he'd bought the other day for the cottage.  And now he came to think about it, he didn't remember there being any bacon left and the bread wouldn't be this fresh now, even with a preserving charm on it, nor did he recall buying any sandwich relish.

"I've been shopping," Sirius said, and there was a triumphant note in his voice that definitely got Remus's attention.

"You have?"

"Yep."  It was impossible to miss how pleased with himself Sirius looked as he said this.  "Went into Diagon Alley."

By himself?  Amid all the hustle and bustle of an average weekday in the wizard metropolis?  Remus blinked at him, surprised and impressed.  Only a day ago he'd have been ready to swear that Sirius was in no way ready to deal with the world by himself.

"Any trouble?"

Sirius shrugged.  "A few idiots staring.  It wasn't a big deal."

Remus suspected it had been a bit more dramatic than that, but he wasn't about to rain on Sirius's parade, not when it was quite obvious that handling the trip by himself had given him a much-needed boost to his confidence.

"That's brilliant.  So - what else did you buy?"

Sirius held up his wand.  "New wand!  The other one was giving me some trouble, which I suppose isn't surprising seeing whose house I nicked it from.  Ollivander gave me a bit of a fishy look, but he saw me all right - this one's blackthorn and dragon heartstring, like my old wand, but it's about half an inch shorter.  Works a treat."

"It's good to have the right wand," Remus agreed, smiling a little.  "What else?"

"I found a couple of good owls - "

"A couple?"

"I thought we could do with an owl of our own," Sirius explained.  "He's a barn owl with a bit of mischief in him - reminds me of Digger a little."  He smiled reminiscently.

"Does he now?" Remus murmured.  He remembered Digger, Sirius's owl from their school days, rather well and "a bit of mischief" was something of an understatement.  "Does he have a name?"

"I was thinking of Loki."

The corners of Remus's mouth began to twitch irresistibly.  "I see.  What about the other one?"

"I've already sent him off to Ron Weasley, but I had to send his cage by express owl - he was a bit small to manage it himself.  I hope the lad likes him."  Sirius's brow furrowed for a moment.  "Smallest owl I've ever seen, you could fit him in one of these teacups with room to spare!  Keen as a dragon though."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah."  Sirius fished in the pocket of his robe and pulled out a brown glass bottle with a wax-sealed cork in the top.  "Looks like the apothecary shop just inside Karne Alley has closed down, but I think this muscle rub should be a good substitute for the one I used to get for you.  Want to find out if it works?"

Remus looked at him, amused and a little disbelieving.  It would have been a straightforward question if it hadn't been for the tiniest hint of an eyebrow waggle as Sirius said it.  He might have thought he was imagining it, actually, if it hadn't been for the matching spark of mischief in Sirius's eyes.

"You choose the worst possible moments to proposition a person," he said, his voice quivering with laughter.

"Don't know what you're talking about," Sirius said, but his grin gave the game away.  "Come on, mate, I'll give you a rub down and see if it doesn't help a bit.  This stuff says - " he paused to peer at the label.  "Guaranteed to soothe and warm sore muscles and joints after strenuous activity.  The strenuous activity'll have to wait for another day, but it can't hurt to loosen up your muscles."

"I don't know," Remus said doubtfully.  The way he felt at that moment made the thought of even the gentlest massage a daunting one.

"How about I start with your feet?"  Sirius took his robe off and pushed up the long sleeves of his t-shirt.

Remus wavered.  Perhaps a foot-massage would be bearable.  Admittedly, he was swayed somewhat by memories of the foot-rubs given to him by Sirius in the past; it was an odd thing, but it was something he was extremely talented at, so much so that Lily Potter had more than once expressed great envy.  (James had accused his friend of having a foot fetish, which Sirius had mischievously never denied.)

He made a feeble protest all the same.  "I don't know ... everything really hurts ... and you don't want to really, do you ...?"

Sirius ignored him, finding a towel in the chest of drawers by the window and matter-of-factly turning back the covers to uncover Remus's feet.  He settled himself at the end of the bed and lifted Remus's left foot gently into his lap.

"Tell me if this hurts," he instructed him.

It couldn't help but hurt, really, but Remus gritted his teeth and gradually the kneading fingers brought some relief to the sore and over-stretched muscles and tendons of his feet - so much so that he didn't object when Sirius moved on to his calves.

"You're really very good at this," he mumbled contentedly a while later, when Sirius was working on his shoulders.

"Just as well.  I'll probably need to get a job at some point to support us all, so it might as well be something I'm good at."

"Mm," Remus said, not really registering the words.  He was so drowsy and comfortable ...

"Sleep," Sirius said, very amused, and he ruffled Remus's hair.  "We don't have to be anywhere."

"You sleep too," Remus said, rolling laboriously onto his back as Sirius tugged the covers up around him.

"All right."

He didn't get under the covers, but he did stretch out next to Remus, which was good enough.

~~~

By early evening Remus felt well enough to get up and dress, but although Sirius had planned to make dinner for them both back at the cottage, this idea was quickly scuppered.

"Is the Floo here working?" Remus asked him, as they sipped tea at the kitchen table.

"It is and it isn't," Sirius admitted.

Remus raised a brow at him.  "Meaning?"

"It's the wards on the Floo," Sirius explained.  "Mother's restricted it to outgoing traffic by a limited selection of people that doesn't include us.  Why?"

Remus smiled wryly and rubbed his eyes.  "I'm wondering how we're going to get back to the cottage."

"I'll Apparate you - "

"Pads, I'm really not up for Apparition at the moment, even side-along - you know what it feels like, even to a perfectly healthy person.  And if we have to take two or three different fireplaces to get home, I'm not going to be able to Floo either.  One direct trip I could manage.  Anything more could land me in someone's hearth in Inverness, in a messy heap."

Sirius looked blank.  "Then how are we going to get back there?  I can't risk an unregulated portkey, I bet they'd love me to do something like that just after I've been released!"  He brightened again just as quickly.  "I could take the Floo to Hogsmeade and get my bike from Hagrid, and we could fly - "

"You'd still have to fly it from there to here first," Remus pointed out.  "Even if you went now, you'd never get back before midnight and then we'd still have the trip to Devon to do."  That stumped Sirius, but Remus could see him frantically trying to think of an alternative.  "We could stop here for another night," he said gently, too drained even to brace himself for his partner's reaction.

"No!"

"Yes.  Sirius, what choice do we have?  And you managed well enough last night and today.  Will one more night really make so much difference?  Surely it was much worse in the cellar?"

"I was a dog in that cellar, and I was too busy being beaten into the floor by the wolf to take much notice of the surroundings!"

Remus flinched.  That tone he recognised of old and he hadn't missed it at all; the vicious snap like a cornered dog when Sirius felt frightened and under pressure.  Part of him was a little surprised that he hadn't heard it already, given how stressed Sirius had been over the past few days.

There were any number of retorts he could have made, but in the end he went with his bone-deep exhaustion and simply looked at Sirius until he flushed and looked away.  In an odd way that was endearing of him, for it was all too like his teenaged self when he realised he'd said something that was beyond the pale and yet was still being forgiven for it.

"I do appreciate how much you loathe this house," Remus said gently after a moment or two.  "I know you think I can't, but I do.  I've learned to live with a lot of horrors while you've been gone … and so have you.  If we can't defeat your demons here then we're not the Marauders we thought we were."

"I swore I'd never spend another night under this roof," Sirius muttered.

"I swore I'd never eat pea soup again," Remus said dryly, "but I swallowed my pride and did it - I'm not mocking you," he added more sharply when Sirius raised angry eyes to his face.  "I'm pointing out that we all make oaths when we're young that don't hold up to scrutiny when we're adults.  I know you better than most, Sirius, so I know some of this is your pride speaking, because you walked away from your family and swore you'd never come back to them.  Well, I'm telling you that four walls and a roof don't make a family.  It's just a house.  A rather grotty house with some extremely unattractive features and an unappealing past, but still just a house.  If you're hell bent on making a point to your family, most of whom are dead or in Azkaban, then I've no patience with you.  If, on the other hand, you're up for thumbing your nose at them and proving you're the better man, then I'm behind you all the way.  So let's start right away and reclaim this house as our own, in the face of your mother's portrait."

Kreacher chose that moment to wander through the kitchen, hitching up his filthy loincloth with one hand and plucking at his yellowing ear-hair with the other.  He shot them a look of blistering contempt and loathing, and muttered "Scum!" as he passed them.

"I have to admit that the house-elf is a bit much, though," Remus said levelly.

~~~

A few days later Remus returned the keys to the cottage to his parents.

"I've left everything as we found it," he told his mother, as she put them back on the hook inside the pantry.

"Where will you live?" she asked him, eyeing him worriedly.

"We're staying at Sirius's parents' house for now," he replied, "although I don't think we'll stay there in the long term.  Sirius has some very bad memories of the place - it doesn't do him any good."

"Is that the Manor?" his father asked abruptly.  "The Blacks had some sort of big house in the country, they say, a manor house.  Kind of thing their sort would have."  He was concentrating on refilling his pipe when Remus looked at him.

"No - at least, yes, there is a manor house, but there's a house in London too and we're staying there.  I think Sirius might sell it eventually, but it's in rather poor shape.  We're going to try to put it into some kind of order."

Romulus snorted sourly and turned away, shaking his head.  Remus watched him leave the kitchen with a familiar heavy-hearted sense of regret.

"He only worries about you," his mother said unexpectedly.

There were a lot of replies Remus could have made to this, but there was no point so he smiled at her.  "There's really nothing to worry about, Mum.  We'll be fine."

"You look tired," she told him.

He felt tired.  Sirius had accepted that staying at Grimmauld Place was the best course of action at present but it didn't make him happy and, worse, it did make him have nightmares.  That one brief moment of friskiness after the full moon had slipped away, leaving him a weeping, shivering wreck for part of each night.  But Remus knew he probably would have had nightmares even at the cottage.  He hoped that in time Sirius would talk to him about them, but at the moment he was stubbornly denying there was anything wrong.  It was completely like him, but it made for a very poor night's rest for them both.  In fact, the only positive point was that he was less jumpy sharing a bed.

Remus had no intention of telling his mother that though.

"There's a lot to do," he said instead, and she nodded.

"Been closed up all these years, has it?  You've a job of work on your hands then."

"Haven't we though!"

"Got everything you need?"

He was touched by this, but thought it best to decline.  "Thank you, yes.  In some ways we have almost too much," he added ruefully.  At her questioning expression, he explained, "There's a house-elf, but he's become a little … strange.  Too long on his own with no one to talk to but a portrait of Sirius's mother.  And she's even more insane than the elf."

"I've always said it's better to make do for yourself in life," his mother said dryly.

~~~

Kreacher, of course, was not the worst part of the problem, although he certainly didn't help matters.

On balance, the worst part was probably the portrait of Sirius's mother.  Remus had vaguely hoped that because she was obviously a very elderly lady she might be hard of hearing.  No such luck.  On the contrary, she had very acute hearing, which meant that unless they kept noise in the hallway and on the staircases and landings to a minimum, she would wake up and start screaming.  This had the effect of making Sirius scream quite a bit too, and generally speaking it was rather nerve shattering for all concerned - except for Kreacher, who would observe these frequent altercations with malicious enjoyment.

Unfortunately, one really nerve-shredding afternoon spent enduring her high-decibel insults while they worked on her frame only served to confirm something the two men had feared: the portrait had been fixed to the wall with a Permanent Sticking Charm and there was no way of removing it.  This had the effect of putting Sirius into another roaring temper, not that Remus could blame him.

Besides Mrs. Black, there were a number of other portraits in the house.  Most of them were hanging on the walls of the staircase and nine times out of ten would be woken up by Mrs. Black's shrieks only to join in themselves.  They at least could be silenced without too much difficulty, and in a few cases removed entirely, but they liked to make comments which meant that Sirius spent a lot of time arguing with them, no matter how many times Remus tried to persuade him to ignore them.

Then there was the tapestry.  It was in the drawing room and took up most of one wall; it was a family tree.  According to Sirius, most of the First Families had one just like it.  Remus would have found it interesting if it hadn't been for the charred little holes on it here and there where an unfortunate family member had been violently erased.  One of those holes obliterated Sirius's own name, while another wiped Andromeda Tonks from between her two sisters.  A third, in the previous generation, was apparently Sirius's Uncle Alphard who had left him his inheritance.

"Badge of honour," Sirius said with an ugly laugh, fingering the blackened spot where his name should have been.

"Do you want to take it down?"

"Hell, yes!"

Except that they couldn't.  More of Mrs. Black's Sticking Charms fixed it securely to the wall, and it resisted all attempts to shift it.  Remus expected Sirius to lose his temper all over again, but his partner merely stared at the tapestry in wordless dudgeon.

"Not a surprise, then?"

"Not really.  This thing meant more to her than the family members it represented."

"I see."

It was rapidly becoming evident to Remus that they needed to work out a plan for dealing with the house.  At present they were just drifting from room to room, trying to fix the most obvious and irritating problems, but if they were going to make this place saleable (which, he had to admit in the privacy of his own mind, was beginning to seem unlikely - but one never knew) then they needed to destroy any infestations, clean everything up, get rid of anything dangerous and generally try to make it presentable.  Although he was inclined to think that the best they could hope for was to strip it down and sell it as "in need of significant renovation", which would knock a sum off the value but couldn't be helped.

At least it wasn't haunted.  According to Sirius, all the family ghosts were at the Manor - something that Remus couldn't view with anything but misgiving after encountering the portraits at Grimmauld Place.  Unfortunately, "not haunted" was the best that could be said for it, and after a particularly trying afternoon, when they'd tried to clean out the old glass-fronted cabinets in the drawing room while fending off Kreacher (who made many poorly-disguised attempts to interfere) and the aggressive contents of the cabinets themselves, even Remus reached the end of his patience.

"Merlin, Padfoot, how the devil did any of your ancestors survive long enough to keep the family line going?" he demanded, after being bitten by a snuffbox and chased around the sofa by a pair of silver sugar-tongs.

"I always assumed they were like poisonous snakes," Sirius explained, "immune to their own venom, you know?"

"Well, one thing's for sure - we can't bring Harry here to live.  It'd be a great thing if we protected him from stray Death Eaters only to have him eaten by one of the rugs."

For the first time that day Sirius grinned at him.  "Can you imagine Dumbledore's face, though?"

Another important job was modification of the wards.  If the house was to be sold - or even to be used with any ease - some of the more elaborate and specific protections would need to be removed.  Neither of them wanted to do this without first discovering how those protections worked, though, and in particular Remus wanted to be able to replicate some of them.  The Misdirection Charm that prevented people finding number 12 Grimmauld Place was particularly elegant in its execution, as was the unusually powerful Unplottable Charm that made the house virtually invisible.  Remus could think of only one other spell quite so effective and that was the Fidelius Charm, but he avoided mentioning this to Sirius who was sure to be sensitive on that subject.

They spent over a week sitting on the hallway tiles surrounded by scraps of parchment and quills, periodically renewing Mrs. Black's silencing charms and breaking for tea, while they examined the ward plate under the mosaic.  How the charms had been executed was simple enough to work out.  Removing them would be another matter.

"What did you say to Dumbledore about blood magic essentially being malign?" Remus asked wearily, at length.  He was sitting with his back against the wall and let his head fall back until he was staring up at the cobwebby, snake-shaped gaslights above.

"Now you know why I said it," Sirius replied.  He was lying flat on his stomach, contemplating the ward plate pensively.  "This kind of thing was my mother's forte.  She knew a lot about blood magic and death magic - she and my father made a pretty horrifying partnership between them."

"What was his speciality?"

There was a long pause, then Sirius sighed.  "Animation."

"Really?"  Remus was astonished.  "That's an incredibly rare gift!  The only other Animator I know of is Professor Flitwick - he's a master."

"So was my old man.  He was head of the Brotherhood of Animators for a while."  Sirius grimaced.  "It was one of the things we quarrelled about."

Remus looked at him.  "What do you mean?"

"It really burned him.  It's a family gift but Reggie didn't inherit it, you see - I did.  And no way in hell was I going to apprentice myself to my father, because I knew the kind of Animation he practised.  He got the Brotherhood into all sorts of trouble with the International Confederation of Wizards before his term as the Grand Master was up.  That was one of the reasons we fell out."

He sat up slowly and scratched the back of his head, rumpling his hair wildly.  His expression was impossible to read, but Remus could guess that "fell out" was a severe understatement.

"You never told me," he said softly.  "It explains a lot, mind you - how you managed to make the bike fly, for one thing, and a bunch of your tricks at school.  But Pads, Flitwick would have apprenticed you and you could have trained properly - why didn't you talk to him?"

"Because I liked him and I didn't want him to lock horns with my father - or worse, with my mother - "

"MISBORN BRAT!  UNGRATEFUL, UNDUTIFUL, UNFEELING - "

Remus cast the Silencing Charm on Mrs. Black's portrait without a second thought and turned back to his partner.  "I don't know what to say," he admitted.  "Did James know?"

Sirius shrugged.  "I don't remember talking to him about it, but he probably did.  We're distantly related through one of my female relatives so the gift was in his family too.  He didn't have it - at least I never saw him Animate anything - but his father definitely had a touch of it."  He raised his brows thoughtfully.  "I suppose Harry could have it.  Do you think?"

"Impossible to say.  He's a strong wizard, certainly, with or without it."  Remus made a face.  "Animation has a bit of a tarnished reputation this days."

"Yeah, that'd be my dad's influence."

"That being the case, perhaps it's as well if it passed Harry by.  He has enough to cope with, without people comparing him to someone like your father."

"Good point."  Sirius sighed and tucked his wand into his sleeve.  "Well, getting back to the original issue - my mother clearly sealed all of the wards and charms on this house with blood, and while I can wipe out the ones relating to most of the dead relatives, she obviously did something extra special to the Unplottable and Misdirection Charms.  I can think of a couple of ways of removing them - using blood magic to wipe the ward plate clean or burning it in the kitchen stove until the runes are seared off.  Or we could smash the ward plate completely.  The problem with these methods - "

"- Is that any of them will leave the house completely unprotected," Remus finished for him, and he sighed.  "Marvellous.  You realise that using blood magic will probably involve washing the damn thing in a couple of pints of your own?  And since it's almost certainly illegal, it'll probably bring the Aurors down on us and send you straight back to prison, especially seeing as they'll be able to find the house once you've done it."

Sirius grinned, but there wasn't a lot of humour in it.  "I can see we're going to have to do some research, because I refuse to accept that those are our only options.  But until then ..."

"The house is going to stay unsold."

~~~

At school, the Marauders had made a career out of bending and circumventing rules, and Sirius in particular had never taken kindly to being thwarted in any way.  It took no genius whatsoever to understand that his childhood had set him up for a lifetime of confrontations with authority, both overt and covert (something which had proven an interesting challenge on both sides when he was apprenticed to Mad-Eye Moody as an Auror), and that any kind of restriction placed upon him by a family member, especially his mother, was inevitably going to prove intolerable to him.

So it came as no surprise to Remus that his partner, having received one check from the ward plate, would promptly start looking at other ways around the wards, starting with the kitchen Floo point.

"You know, this seems like an odd sort of place to have the Floo in a house like this, now that I come to think of it," Remus remarked, watching as Sirius removed the facing plate from the controls on one side of the fireplace.  Adjusting Floo settings was a ticklish business that most people preferred to leave to the officials of the Floo Regulation Authority, but Sirius, of course, was not most people.  "Why not the drawing room?"

"There was always a Floo point in here," Sirius said.  "I don't know why, especially as it was mostly restricted to outgoing traffic anyway.  The main Floo point was in the drawing room, but I looked at that one the other day and it's been disabled - the controls have been taken out entirely.  Now, you can force a connection without proper controls - remember when we managed to open up the Gryffindor Common Room fireplace for an afternoon that Christmas? - but it's pretty unstable, even if a Floo engineer does it, and you can't guarantee it'll drop you in the fireplace you asked for."

"You could just get an engineer to come and open up this one for you properly," Remus pointed out, a little amused.

"We'd have all the hassle of getting him into the house in the first place, and there's no guarantee he'd be able to fix this.  I'm willing to bet ..."  Sirius paused, poking something carefully with his wand.  "Yep, I thought so.  She's warded the Floo through the controls.  Never one to take chances, my mother.  Now let's see how she did this ..."

It took him nearly three days to modify the restrictions on the Floo to allow them to travel in and out by it.  It did make things a little easier, Remus had to admit, bypassing the Misdirection Charm which had made leaving the house (and more importantly, returning) a serious aggravation for him.  That was good enough for them, but allowing access by anyone else took a couple more days' work and a lot of swearing on Sirius's part.  Even then he was limited to setting up 'ward exceptions' for anyone he wanted to allow through the Floo, which would mean getting each individual to donate a drop of blood onto the ward plate inside the Floo controls.

"And you know what?" he told Remus in disgust, when he finally made it to bed.  "None of it'll guarantee you access to anyone's fireplace at the other end!  I can think of half a dozen people off the top of my head who'll have their fireplaces closed to anyone coming from this house."

He flopped into bed next to his partner and let out a long sigh that was more of a groan; he'd worked until nearly midnight to achieve this rather minor success.

Remus couldn't help a wry chuckle.  "I have to admire your mother's determination, Padfoot.  She didn't leave a stone unturned in her determination to isolate herself from the rest of us squalid dregs of humanity."

"It was probably what did for her in the end," Sirius retorted.  "Anyway, we should be able to get to and from places like Diagon Alley, so that's something.  I'll call on Andromeda tomorrow and see if she wants access too."

He looked terribly tired and Remus rubbed his arm gently.  "Relax and enjoy your triumph," he advised.

"It doesn't feel like a triumph."

"I'm not talking about the Floo."  Sirius raised his brows at him questioningly and Remus smiled, a hint of a tease in the curl of his lips.  "I'm about to admit I was wrong about something and you were right."

Sirius rolled onto his side to face him, beginning to grin.  "Go on."

"You were right - we can't possibly live here.  In fact, I really don't want to.  Battling with aggressive clocks and trinkets, constantly putting up with insults from your mother and your house-elf, exterminating doxies, giant spiders and chizpurfles, cleaning everything without any hope of it ever really being clean, and fighting the wards - it's all finished me off.  I'm begging you, take me to live in a ditch with you somewhere before I go mad!"

Sirius let out a muffled snigger and they collapsed against each other, laughing until they were weak.

"Though I don't know why we're laughing," Sirius said presently, when they'd calmed down a little.  "So much for being able to sell this damned heap of mildew and dustballs!  Not only can we not live in it, but neither can anyone else.  What's to laugh about in that?"

"Because it's better than the alternative," Remus told him affectionately.  "I'm damned if I'll give your ancestors the satisfaction of seeing us rage about it!"

"There's that, I suppose."

They lay there for a while and Remus marvelled at how calm Sirius seemed at that moment, in spite of everything - for despite his determination to attack the house's ills, and the focussed way in which he'd worked on things like the wards and Floo, he'd been extremely tense for many days now, angry and depressed by turns, and his dreams had been restless and unhappy.  Remus readily admitted to himself that part of his own desire to leave Grimmauld Place now encompassed his anxiety for Sirius's state of mind, although there was no denying that everything else he'd said had been quite true.  It was astonishingly wearing to deal with constantly being muttered at and insulted by the portraits and house-elf, and a mischievous desire to wind them up by engaging them in arguments had quickly worn off.  The elf was pitifully insane (Remus could still pity Kreacher without wanting to tolerate his behaviour indefinitely) and the portraits, by their very nature, were inexhaustible.

But for the moment Sirius was miraculously relaxed and calm, the bed was actually warm for once (although only hot bricks wrapped in flannel achieved that), and the house was peaceful and quiet.  And Remus was overcome by an impulse he hadn't felt for some time.

"Forget the house for now," he said quietly, and Sirius quirked a brow at him.

"A bit difficult when we're in it, Moony."

"Then imagine we're back at the flat in Harrow," Remus said, refusing to be deflected, and he reached out to dim the lamp in the bracket above the bed until nothing beyond the velvet curtains was distinguishable.

"If we were back at the flat in Harrow - "

Remus silenced him with a kiss.