Chapter 1: Inventory
Item: one cabinet, ebony, glass-fronted, containing a silver snuffbox that bites, a set of Black family christening spoons engraved with the motto Toujours Pur, and a mummified thing Remus has decided not to identify. Condition: hostile.
Item: one embroidered family tree, wall-length, drawing room, east wall. Permanent Sticking Charm. Several burn marks where faces used to be. Condition: unchanged, and likely to remain so until the house falls down around it.
Item: one Sirius Black, aged thirty-seven, asleep on the drawing room floor with every lamp in the room lit and a cushion from the settee under his head. Condition: Remus doesn't have a word for it yet.
He stands in the doorway with the clipboard against his chest and does not write that last one down. He never does. It is the fourth week of the inventory, which Kingsley asked for back in August and which Remus volunteered for because it was something to do with his hands. The Order doesn't need headquarters anymore. The Ministry wants a list of every object in the house that could kill a person, and Remus has filled forty pages so far, and he is only halfway through the second floor.
Sirius sleeps on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, as though the lamps are too bright and he would rather suffer them than turn them off. He hasn't slept in a bed since the spring. He hasn't slept in the dark since he came back.
Came back. That is the phrase they all use, Molly and Tonks and Kingsley, as if Sirius went on a long holiday. Remus remembers it differently. He remembers the Death Chamber, the stone tiers, the old ragged curtain in its arch, and Sirius laughing as Bellatrix's spell caught him in the chest. He remembers lunging. He remembers his fingers closing around a wrist that was already half gone, the cold of it, like putting his hand into a river in February, and hauling until something gave.
Sirius came out of the veil gasping and grey-lipped and alive. He had been on the other side for perhaps four seconds. He said, afterwards, that it had felt considerably longer than that.
Remus steps around a stack of Walburga's correspondence and lowers himself onto the arm of the settee. The floorboards creak. Sirius doesn't stir.
The war ended in April. Everyone in Britain knows the story now, or the version the Prophet printed: the locket found in a cabinet in this very house, the cup, the diadem, the final battle in the spring rain. Fewer people know that the locket was only found because Sirius, newly alive and unbearably restless, tore the house apart looking for something to hit, and Kreacher, sobbing, finally showed him what Master Regulus had left behind. A year early, Hermione Granger calculated once, with the sort of exactness that made Remus want to sit down. They had won a year early because Sirius couldn't keep still.
Now it is October and there is nothing left to win, and Sirius still can't keep still, and neither of them knows what to do about it.
Remus turns a page on the clipboard and starts a new entry for the writing desk by the window. Item: one bureau, walnut, three drawers, the top one locked. He gets up quietly and tries it with his wand. The lock clicks. Inside are quills, a dried-up pot of ink, and a stack of letters tied with black ribbon in a hand he recognises as Regulus's. He writes Personal effects, R. A. Black and leaves them where they are. Sirius will want to decide about those. Or he won't, and they'll sit there another decade, and that will be its own decision.
"You're doing it again."
Remus doesn't jump. He has had a lot of practice at not jumping. "Doing what?"
"Standing over me with a clipboard like a Healer who's about to say something grim." Sirius lifts the arm off his face. His eyes are grey and heavy-lidded and very awake. "How long have I been out?"
"About three hours. I let you be. You were snoring."
"I was not."
"Like a Hippogriff with a cold." Remus sits back down on the arm of the settee. "Buckbeak would have been embarrassed for you."
That gets him a laugh, short and hoarse, the old bark of it worn thin. Sirius sits up and pushes his hair out of his face. It's long again, past his shoulders, and clean now, black with a few new threads of grey he pretends not to have noticed. Most of the Azkaban hollowness has gone out of his face. Not all of it. Remus suspects not all of it ever will, the way his own scars have faded to silver without ever quite deciding to leave.
"What've you found?" Sirius asks.
"Regulus's letters." He nods at the drawer. "I haven't read them."
Sirius looks at the bureau for a long moment, then away. "Kreacher will want them."
"They're yours, Padfoot."
"Everything in this bloody house is mine. That's rather the problem." He gets up, stretches until his spine cracks, and goes to the window. The street outside is wet and orange under the lamps, and the Muggles at number eleven have put a pumpkin on their step. "I don't know what to do with a Tuesday, Moony."
"It's Thursday."
"There, you see? I don't even know which one it is." Sirius presses his forehead to the glass. "Twelve years in a cell, I knew what day it was. I scratched them into the wall. Then a year on the run, then a year locked in here, then the war, and I always knew exactly what I was for. Now I wake up on the floor and Kreacher brings me eggs and I sit about waiting for someone to owl and say there's a Death Eater in Dorset, and nobody does."
"That's peace," Remus says. "It's supposed to be dull."
"It's horrible."
"Yes." Remus finds he's smiling. "I think it's meant to be horrible for a bit. Then it's meant to be nice."
Sirius turns from the window and looks at him with an expression Remus remembers from a very long time ago, from a flat in Camden with a broken boiler and a record player, from Sunday mornings when neither of them had to be anywhere. It's the look of someone measuring a distance. Then it's gone.
"Is it nice for you?" Sirius asks. "Peace?"
Remus considers lying and finds he hasn't the energy. "I've got a cottage in Wales I haven't been to since March. I've got a job offer from the Ministry I haven't answered. I've been counting snuffboxes in your mother's house for a month because you're in it." He shrugs. "So, no. Not yet."
Sirius goes very still.
He has said too much. He knows the exact shape of what he's said, the way you know the edge of a step in the dark. They haven't talked about it. Not once since Sirius came back, not once in the three years before that, when Sirius was a fugitive and then a prisoner of this house and there was always a war in the room with them. They haven't talked about Camden, or the boiler, or the record player, or what they were to each other in 1981 before a night in October took all of it away.
"Moony," Sirius says.
"I should finish the second floor." Remus stands. "Your mother's dressing room isn't going to catalogue itself. Though I wouldn't put it past it."
He doesn't wait for an answer. He goes up the stairs past the row of house-elf heads on their plaques, which Sirius keeps threatening to take down and never does, and he lets himself into Walburga Black's dressing room and stands in the dark with the door shut behind him, breathing in the smell of old powder and mothballs and something faintly metallic, and tells himself he is a grown man of thirty-seven who survived a war and does not need to hide in a cupboard.
They eat together that evening, because they always eat together. Kreacher, who has softened toward Sirius by inches since the locket, serves a shepherd's pie that is genuinely good and a gravy that is genuinely poisonous to look at. Sirius does most of the talking. He has a letter from Harry, three pages of Quidditch and Ron and something about a girl, and he reads the best bits aloud and does the voices. Remus laughs in the right places. It's easy. It has always been easy with Sirius, the talking. It's the quiet that's difficult.
After dinner, Sirius goes back to the drawing room and his lamps, and Remus goes up to the small bedroom on the third floor that he has been using since the summer. It used to belong to some long-dead Black cousin. The wallpaper is green and sinister. The bed is too short. He has left his trunk at the foot of it, half unpacked, because unpacking it all the way would mean admitting he lives here.
He's reading in bed when there's a knock.
"It's open," he says.
Sirius leans in the doorway in a jumper that's too big for him. It takes Remus a moment to realise it's his, an old brown thing with darned elbows that he hasn't worn in years. "I'm freezing," Sirius says, unapologetic. "This house has no heating. I took this from your trunk. I was looking for socks."
"You have socks."
"I have socks that belonged to my father. I'm not putting my feet in my father's socks." He comes in and sits on the end of the bed without being asked, the way he used to, the way he has not done once since he came back. The mattress dips. Remus keeps his eyes on his book and does not read a word of it.
"Something was in the pocket," Sirius says.
Remus looks up.
Sirius is holding a small box. It's dark blue velvet gone bald at the corners, the kind of box jewellers in Diagon Alley used to sell before the war, the first war. The clasp is tarnished. Remus has not opened it in sixteen years. He has moved it from flat to flat, from rented room to rented room, from the pocket of one jumper to the pocket of another, and he has never once opened it, and he has never once thrown it away.
The book is suddenly very heavy in his lap.
"I didn't look inside," Sirius says quietly. "I wanted to. I didn't." He turns the box over in his long fingers, and there's a scar across the back of his hand Remus doesn't remember, from Azkaban or after. "But I can count, Moony. That jumper's from before. You were wearing it the week before Halloween. You were wearing it the last time I saw you before they took me."
Remus says nothing. There is nothing in his throat that will come out as words.
Sirius holds the box out across the blanket between them, palm flat, the way you'd offer something to an animal you didn't want to startle.
"So," he says, and his voice cracks down the middle. "What's this?"