10. He had been a knight in his time, centuries ago, now long lost and buried in the forgotten room that Time had assigned for all maudlin remembrances, visited only by dust that wouldn't settle, that wanted no part of this slow death. He knew the young ones, those carelessly secure in the bloom of invincible youth, thought him insane – Sir Cadogan who sprinted madly from painting to painting, yelling out challenges and speaking in tongues unintelligible to them. And he would perhaps concede that he was … boisterous, but that energy was an inevitable product of age – it was the only thing that would remind the world outside his gilded frame that this ghost of him, this painted ghost of memory and thought, was nevertheless still a ghost of brilliant hues and daring shades.

It then made sense that he should find his home now in Hogwarts, in this castle of whispers and shouts, in which those who were just beginning to live life were taught their rites, and those who have lived and longed to do so again watched over them. This was how he came to think of himself as a knight-errant of Hogwarts, keeper of secrets that passed through its hallways, that belonged to students who would always walk the corridors with him, long after they have flown this childhood nest. For there were the birds whose wings inevitably took them home, who could never shed the imprints of blood and saliva from their plumes, whose compass would always point true towards the awaiting West. He was never surprised to see them return – as parents welcoming their tittering young home for the vacations; as Order members sweeping noiselessly into the Headmaster's office, late at night when only owls hunted; and the one who returned as a professor, his eyes unreadable, the golden flints in them like molten silvers of glass, the shadows he cast fleeting like blackbirds, like the blackbird of a boy who he was never without in their youth.

Cadogan knew of the crimes that blackbird boy committed – betrayals as Black as his name, and Blacker than Cadogan found it possible to believe of him. For Sirius Black was a knight of the tallest order – valiant in his daring, an unflinching friend to those whom he has pledged his allegiance, and a dangerous enemy to those otherwise. No, Cadogan would never allow himself to believe in the impossible truth – because he remembers a certain late night, when the hallways murmur only with ghosts, and this fearless laughing boy, strayed from his sleeping friends, stifling sobs so violent they broke Cadogan's heart of veneer and acrylic. It was a Sirius Black the waking world could never know – Hogwarts, lit that morning by the unforgiving summer sun, that only saw a foul-mouthed Black, dodging hexes from his younger sibling, scarves of green and gold defiant against flushed skin, and angry against the hurting bruised grey of their eyes, small similarities between these two brothers divided by their blood.

In that night of heavy shadows, Cadogan found that he understood Sirius Black – who loved and wanted and needed with desperate selfishness, and who hurt for it in the dark, exacting punishments from himself as cruel and painful as the lies of hate and anger he spat at his little brother in the morning. Cadogan would take this secret with him to his grave, when his painting ceases to work under charms, when he returns to the inevitable. Yes, Cadogan knew Black's betrayal could only be a lie, because he kept the boy's truth, the fact that Sirius Black loved his friends with the same ferocity with which he loathed himself, his own life easily forfeit for the three who distracted him from himself.

But Life keeps its secrets from Love, because Remus Lupin, now back home in this castle that could no longer hold any magic for him, was a broken man, a stray cut loose from the world that no longer wanted him. Lupin's eyes were blind pools of gold, burnt a dark ocher by the unshed tears he refused to acknowledge, and he could only see the lie before his feet – that the blackbird boy he let into his bed was nothing but dark feathers and blood in the morning, a disappearing love, a trick of the heart, like those in fairy tales of lost wanderers, waiting forests, and whispering magic that he had so loved.

Prehaps he was drawn to tragedy, but Cadogan found himself watching over this silent man, moving into an empty frame directly outside Lupin's offices. Within a week, Cadogan had re-learnt all he had assumed to be true about Lupin – the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, as he had been in his youth, was a polite man who spoke little, but in his face was the map of his soul, a map that spilled glowing dust from its folds, that dared eyes to look but refused to expect that they would. But somebody did look, and read this man for who he was, for the map was a map that was impossibly creased by hands that held fast to his heart, and still did. Within a week, Cadogan realized that Remus Lupin did not hide from the world – it was the world that hid from him.

And then it was easy to tell that Lupin was still mourning his losses, this man who walked so rapidly through the hallways, pursued by ghosts only he could hear and see. Sometimes Cadogan wondered if those ghosts included Lupin as a young man, if Lupin had not, after all, died when James Potter and Peter Pettigrew did. Cadogan had been the one to take the Headmaster's orders to Lupin that evening when Sirius Black had advanced on the Gryffindor Tower with a knife. He had seen Lupin pale, had seen the terrible flicker of hope and loathing in the werewolf's eyes before he raced towards the seventh floor landing, carried by a purpose that grieved Cadogan to even imagine. Remus Lupin was indeed haunted by ghosts, but it was a ghost of flesh and blood, who brought him to his knees late that night, sobbing aloud his name, and brokenly cursing his memory.

It would be weeks before Cadogan would see Lupin again, the moon already in her second cycle of waxing when the two crossed paths. Lupin was wearing sleeves long over his arms, hiding scars from the last full moon, silver moonlight frozen still in his eyes, terrible to behold in their loneliness.

"Are you alright, lad?" Cadogan had asked, on impulse, his voice raspy in the struggle to disguise the pity he felt.

And Lupin had merely smiled, quiet and unspeaking, and continued on his way. Thinking about it in retrospect, Cadogan understood that his question had been impossible to answer, and that Lupin, in his own way, had given him the only answer he could.

And then, on a night completely ordinary, the oldest magic defied its own laws, bringing wolf silver to dance once again in hopelessly black skies. The door to Lupin's offices had been open that night, a small irregularity that should have warned Cadogan of the unexplainable that was soon to be inevitable. But Cadogan was lured by the full moon, by its white fury as it struggled to reign, even as its retainers of dark clouds whispered patience. At sunset, Lupin moved to his open window, watching as the lake pulled the sun towards home, drowning in a pool of blood that flashed golden as the skies prepared for the night. Lupin was unmoving even as darkness fell, his back a straight line, a portrait of deceptive calm but for his tightly clenched fists, the knuckles white as they rested on the window sill. When Lupin finally returned to his desk, Time exploded from the bracket of quiet it had been forced into, passing the next few minutes in the sharp draw of breath and floating parchment, and then Lupin was sprinting past Cadogan's frame. It would be the first time Cadogan had found it impossible to read Lupin, as the werewolf walled himself from the outside world, his heart his own for blind hope, and for the life that would depend on it.

What happened that night would forever be a mystery to Cadogan, for the next morning only brought about Lupin's resignation from the school. The castle was still asleep when Lupin took his farewells, and it was a quiet lull that echoed and echoed in Cadogan's ears. The ex-Professor had paused outside his office, directly before Cadogan's frame, his chocolate eyes impossibly silver in the dawn, sticky with some unspoken emotion as they stared out to the horizon that awaited.

"Where will you go, lad?"

He had asked the question before he could stop himself, concern and alarm evident in every note. But the man who turned to him was a man beautiful in this soft peach of the morning, whose smile was as soft as his words when he murmured them.

"Home."

Life, Cadogan mused as he watched Lupin's back disappear from view, was wickedly reasonable in its madness, creating a home out of hurt and need, for those who have always orbited around each other in universes robbed of gravity. For these were the ones who fell, who have always been falling, as only lovers and strays could.