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What Fell Apart


“That’s when everything started falling apart.”

“What fell apart, exactly?” James asked as he inched closer and put an arm about Remus as he looked so sad that it just shattered James’s heart to see him look like he did. The wind was getting cooler that later it was getting and Remus was starting to shiver so James shrugged off his Gryffindor sweater and hung it over Remus’s shoulders. He sat in with just his oxford and feeling quite cold himself, but Remus was telling him this story and it was worth being cold for - he just didn’t want Rey to suffer at all for it.

“I wasn’t feeling well after the full moon - worse than usual… I didn’t know what was going on. I mean, Professor Veigler said once that it gets harder and harder for werewolves as we age and I thought I was maybe experiencing a new effect, like maybe even after the moon I would get sick for awhile now or something? And I had a fever and my stomach hurt so much, like this constant ache in my belly and I couldn’t eat or relax and Sirius kept trying to force me to eat and I felt like he was disappointed in me when I didn’t want to do things with you lot - but I just felt awful. Like he’d throw a party and I’d go down for a few minutes, but - oh James, you know I hate parties. I never know what to do with myself at them after the first maybe thirty minutes or so. I don’t dance very well and I don’t like drinking too much, and Sirius always is up on that table, center of attention, and he’s multiple times hauled me up there and I hate that, I hate people looking at me and all that…” Remus flushed.

“I know, Rey.”

“So I go sit on the stairs or I go to the dorm or something…. And I was particularly inclined to stay out of sight at this point, too, because there were rumors going about the castle because of Sirius’s patronus, that Sirius was a werewolf, or else a Death Eater, or a follower of Fenrir Greyback. They were saying that Sirius probably had the Dark Mark on his arm. And people were talking about my scars, James. You’d overheard McKenna telling Carly she shouldn’t be hitting on Sirius because look what he did to Remus Lupin’s face and Carly arguing that she was fairly certain I’d always had those marks and that the rumor about Sirius was tosh.”

James’s eyes widened, “Bloody hell. You must’ve been terrified, Rey.”

“So terrified, James,” Remus said thickly.

“I’m sorry.”

Remus looked down, his lower lip trembled just a bit, “So that’s why I didn’t want to be the center of attention then. And this one night, not long after Valentine’s Day, I left a party Sirius was throwing and he’d had loads to drink and he came upstairs and I guess Carly Shaw had offered to snog him and there’d been insinuation that she wanted… maybe a bit more than that… and Sirius came up to brag about it. She’d told him that she didn’t care if he was a werewolf like the rumors said, that danger was fun and she told him he could play at biting her and she made fun of the whole rumor thing, calling the Dark Mark a tattoo, as though it were something someone elects to have for the fun of it. Sirius was telling me about it, and he was being so… so horribly casual about it, as though it were funny that the castle was whispering about us, as though it wouldn’t matter if they found out, and he was drunk, James, it scares me when he’s drunk because you never know what he’s going to say, what he’s going to shout, and it’s like a ticking time bomb with him sometimes… What if he decided it wasn’t a big deal if people knew and he decided to shout out something about his gay werewolf boyfriend or something?”

As much as James hated to - he could actually imagine it happening. He could almost see it in his mind, Sirius so drunk he was nearly falling off the table, tripping over his own two feet, sloshing about the common room and going on and on about how grand his werewolf boyfriend was… “He didn’t, did he?” James asked, terrified for Remus.

Remus shook his head, “No. But when I said that to him, he got pissed, James. We had a huge row in the dormitory. Absolutely massive. He started screaming and yelling at me that I didn’t trust him and I yelled at him that I couldn’t when he was drinking like he was - every night, nearly, and he said he didn’t like being sober, that it hurt too much to be sober because of Achyls, which is what he’d started referring to the dementor in his chest as - his depression, that is - and he broke a bottle of firewhiskey against his bedpost, he was so angry and I yelled at him that he had to talk to Dumbledore or Minnie or Pomfrey or somebody who could help him with the depression, who could make him better… and he said, You think I’m going dark like my family. You think I’m becoming a Dark Wizard? and I told him no, but he didn’t believe it. He kept going on about how horrid I thought him and I got angry he kept repeating it - no matter how I tried to tell him I didn’t think that at all, and finally, I shouted Well you’re being pretty horrid right now!”

James hated this story.

Remus looked up at the stars. “He broke up with me again. He went from the room, screaming that he didn’t need a boyfriend, that he didn’t need me, that I didn’t understand him, that his life was rubbish and I didn’t understand why he needed the firewhiskey, why it was the only thing that could help him fight Achyls.”

James shook his head.

“I wasn’t very good to him, either, James, in that fight. As he went out the door screaming all that, I screamed after him that it was fine he was leaving, fine if he didn’t want to be with me anymore, because I was sick of dealing with him, of putting up with it and always having to be the patient one. I told him that I didn’t give a fuck if he drank every bottle of firewhiskey in the world, to go on and stay drunk and alone and sad for all of his life if that’s what he wanted.” There were huge tears in Remus’s eyes, silently sliding over his cheeks, as though his eyes - which were rich green - were bleeding raindrops.

James reached into his robes and took out a handkerchief, handing it to Remus.

Remus wiped his face. “When he asked for the ring back the next morning, I told him no. He begged me, James, he got on his knees and begged me to forgive him… but I told him he couldn’t have it back ‘til he was better, and that he had a choice - he could go and talk to somebody about what was bothering him and have the ring back and I’d forgive him for everything or else he could go on with what he was doing and I’d have to - to refuse him.” Remus’s voice choked. “I thought he would pick me, James.”

James hugged Remus hard. He would have thought Sirius would pick Remus, too, in that situation. And he realized that Sirius’s depression was eons worse in this timeline than it had been in his own and he wondered what was different.

“Has Sirius been doing potions tutoring with Lily Evans?” he asked.

“What? No,” Remus replied through his tears.

“No wonder he’s worse,” James whispered.

Remus looked up.

“In my timeline, he was depressed and all, but he was doing better lately, he’d been starting to be anyway. He wasn’t quite so angry as he sounds like he’s been in your timeline… but he’d been taking tutoring with Lily Evans and they were becoming really good friends and he was talking to her about his depression. She was getting quite close to all of us in my timeline, Rey.”

Remus frowned. “See? That just proves it that he needs to talk to someone!” He sounded so frustrated, “I hate that I can’t make him understand that. I hate it.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to end up killing himself, James. Whether by accident or on purpose. Have you see the scars on his wrists?” Remus continued, when James had shaken his head no, “There’s loads of them James. He’s been cutting himself open and healing it back up. He talks about the Black family blood like it’s poison that needs to be let out.” Remus stared at the ground for sometime, then, “I couldn’t let him keep doing that. I told McGonagall.”

James closed his eyes. This wasn’t going to end well.

“Well Minnie got really worried and she went immediately up to the dorms and she found Sirius half drunk and she grabbed his arm and ripped back his sleeve and -- James, it was really unfortunate because she took his left arm, and Sirius accused her of checking him for the Dark Mark and he bellowed at her, James. He screamed at Professor McGonagall, called her all sorts of terrible names. She saw his scars, though, and she sent him up to the hospital wing so Pomfrey could get him some potions to held his mind… She was so upset James. She took a week off from teaching because of it.”

“McGonagall did?”

Remus nodded. “Dumbledore lectured us in the next Transfiguration class.”

James couldn’t stand the thought of Minerva McGonagall, hurt so much that she would elect not to teach a class. The thought of it physically sickened him.

Remus sighed, “Well… then we found out, through Regulus, who had started the rumors.”

“Severus Snape,” James said.

Remus nodded.

“He did in my timeline, too. Bastard. I can’t believe this. All of this, his fault.”

Remus bit his lips. “That’s what you and Sirius agreed on about it. You were both really angry… and you started to bullying him every chance you got. Peter, too. He’s helped on many occasions as much as Peter can...Like if you saw him in the hallway, you’d charm his shoelaces together so he’d trip, or you’d rip the seam of his book bag. Sirius gave him boils once. One of you glued his arse to the bench in Potions.”

“Brilliant.”

“No, not brilliant. He did things back to you lot, too. He gave you a seizure once in the dungeons hall, and he transfigured Sirius into a great fat slug one time during a fight - and Sirius nearly got stepped on by Mulciber!” Remus shook his head, “Severus knows a lot of hexes - things they’d never teach us here, James, I don’t know where he’s learned them. And he creates spells of his own, you know. Lily was saying once in Charms that he’s created one called muffliato where you can speak without anyone around you hearing anything you say except for the people you intend to hear you.”

“That’s a handy charm.”

“Yes, but if he can do that, he can invent terrible things. Somebody said that he invented that spell that he hit you with at Christmas last year, the sectumsempra.”

James rested a palm over his chest. He still bore great lashing scars from that. He frowned. “Well he’s a terrible person. He deserves everything that Sirius and I did.”

“You aren’t wrong, he is terrible, but -- I don’t know. It’s like we’re all nearly adults now and --” Remus sighed. “I don’t know, it just seems like us attacking him for it is just as horrible as him having done it in the first place and that is exactly how wars start, how hatred infests. I just feel like there’s enough suffering and hatred without -- without us spreading more about.”

James looked down.

Remus said, “Anyway, then Sirius came up with the idea of -- of telling Severus how to get into the tunnel. You fought with him about it, apparently, that’s what you told me later. That you and Sirius had a row over it… and Peter ended up agreeing to help him do it because you wouldn’t. Sirius claims his plan was to be in the tunnel halfway, in his animagus form and to just scare and bite Severus without Severus ever getting all the way to the Shack. I don’t know. I don’t know what Sirius was thinking… But he made a production of accidentally letting slip about how to get into the tunnel and Peter was to be there in rat form to help stun Snape if something went wrong…

“Well something did go wrong. Something went very wrong. Because Sirius got himself a detention on his way down to the tunnel and he was in with McGonagall, who’s been really harsh on him ever since he’d bellowed at her, and for good reason, and he used the two way mirrors to tell you what he’d done. He said that maybe it’ll be even better than if he scared Snape, that maybe I would kill Snape and we’d be done with having to worry about him. Like he didn’t really mean it, he was saying it the way Sirius says everything he says, thoughtlessly. He didn’t even really think Snape was going to go out to the tunnel at all, he almost hadn’t even mentioned it to you. But you had to go and stop Snape from going and getting himself killed by me. You had to fight him in the tunnel and you both came out of it with quite a few bruises and you had a fat lip and he had a broken nose and -- but at least you were safe, both of you. I couldn’t believe it when I heard the next day what happened.”

James shook his head.

“I got into another fight with Sirius about it. He just was so infuriating because he kept saying why are you angry about something that didn’t happen and you betrayed me to Minnie so now we’re even. He made me so mad, James. I…” Remus stopped. The next few words were bitter in his mouth.

“You what?”

Remus whispered, “I told him I hated him.”

James said, “I’m sure he knew it was just in the heat of the moment, that you don’t truly hate him.”

Remus shook his head. “He doesn’t. He keeps saying it. And he went through another horrible bout of depression and drinking doubled again. He --” Remus looked at his loafers, “He said he hated me back. And he didn’t bother coming to the last full moon. Said he didn’t fancy spending time with a monster, and that… that he didn’t even mean because I was a werewolf, that the wolf in me is nicer than… than me… and..” Remus started crying again.

“Rey.” James hugged him again. “Blimey. I really fucked things up. I’m so sorry.”

Remus was shaking, “And it’s just been little things since - little jabs between us. Like mean spirited things… both of us are guilty of it. I’ll make a snide remark, he’ll make one back… At the party two days ago… he got up on the table and he sang You’re So Vain to me. Screaming the lyrics at me.”

“Bloody hell, you are the opposite of vain.”

Remus shrugged.

“No, mate. I’m vain. Sirius is vain.” James grabbed onto Remus’s shoulder. “But you, Rey -- you are so not vain and it’s horrible Sirius did that to you. I’ll talk to him. You want me to talk to him? I’ll bloody give him a what for.”

Remus shook his head. “No, James. Just let it go.”

“He can’t treat you like that.”

“I don’t believe he means to, that’s the hardest part for me. He doesn’t realize, really, what it is he’s doing.”

“Of course he does!” James said, defensive over Remus even though he wasn’t defensive over himself.

“I don’t think he is. I mean he is, but he isn’t. I’ve read loads of books on massive depression, James, and the chemical stuff going on in his brain is… it’s terrifying, it’s worse than any dark magic could ever do.” Remus looked over at James with the saddest expression. “If he’d just… get help…” He sighed. “I don’t want to be like this with him. I love him, James. I love him so much and I miss him... I just want to go back to snogging in the night, and sneaking away to the Trophy Room Passage or the Shrieking Shack so we can be alone together. I want to feel his touch on my shoulders and his kiss on my mouth and I want to be back together with Padfoot, with My Sirius - not this horrible, depression-controlled zombie that’s possessed him.”

James sighed. “There’s a lot that needs fixing.”

“Loads,” Remus nodded.

James looked at his hands. “If only we could get a hold of that time turner again - and… and change whatever’s bothering Sirius, if only we could fix it, so that Sirius was okay, that none of that rubbish ever happened, that --”

“James, no.”

“What?”

“No more meddling with time. Haven’t you learned that already? It’s a terrible idea, Dumbledore never should have recommended it.”

“But Sirius was dead, Rey.”

Remus was quiet a long moment. “He sort of is now, too, isn’t he?” he asked at last. It hurt even saying it. He looked at James, but James didn’t know what to say.

They were both silent.

A star shot through the sky, far overhead in the inky blackness that was the night.

“Well, at least there’s hope now,” James said. “And I intend to set things right. The real way, the right way. Even iif it takes me the rest of my bloody life, Remus, I will get us all back to where we belong before I’d fucked it all up. I will. I swear it.”

Remus didn’t say anything… but his eyes found Sirius in the stars and stared.