CHAPTER THREE

Remus walked for a long time through the rolling Yorkshire fields, finding the stiles and breaks in the fences by instinct, after so many such walks. It was a dark night, the moon barely a sliver and already long since set behind the hills.

As he walked, Remus thought about Sirius, then he thought about James and Lily. Then he tried to think of nothing at all, but simply to become blank and empty and new.

Lily was right – or, that was to say, the imagined Lily in his head was right, the one that was so often Remus' voice of reason. In the end, it didn't matter who had failed whom more, who had made the most fatal mistake. They both should have thought, sooner or later, to suspect Peter. Neither of them had.

Neither of them could change that.

The past was the past. But they were both here now.

When Remus returned to the cottage, after what felt like many hours but was likely only one or two, he let himself in through the recalcitrant front door as quietly as he could. Passing through the small living room, he stopped when he heard a soft snuffling sound.

Sirius, transformed into Padfoot, was asleep in front of the battered old sofa. Not on the sofa, but in front of it, on the tattered rag rug that covered part of the wooden floor.

"Pads," Remus said. "Padfoot. Sirius. Why aren't you in bed?"

The dog snorted, then whuffed.

"Sirius." Remus went over and gently shook Padfoot's shoulder, or what would have been his shoulder, had he currently been in human form. "Come on, wake up."

Padfoot sneezed.

"Sirius."

The dog blinked twice. Then it was Sirius lying there, curled up in a decidedly uncomfortable-looking position on the floor.

"Whuh?" Sirius said, and Remus couldn't help but smile.

"You daft nutter, what are you doing on the floor? Let's get you to bed."

Still blinking, Sirius pushed himself up from the rug. "Huh, right, yeah," he muttered.

"Come on," Remus said, and steered him back towards the guest bedroom. Sirius stumbled as he went through the door, still mostly asleep.

"G'night," he muttered. "Thanks, Moony."

"Good night," Remus said, and damn it all if he wasn't smiling fondly as he watched Sirius fumble his way to bed.

In the morning, by the time Remus made his way to the kitchen, Sirius was already at the table and wide awake.

"What about you?" Sirius asked, as soon as Remus stepped into the room.

"Sorry?"

"What about you? Like you said last night, you didn't have someone there to scapegoat. I suspected you, but you knew it wasn't you. Who in the Order did you suspect? For that matter, why didn't you, at least, suspect Peter?"

Remus stopped and leaned against the worktop, at the furthest end of the small room from Sirius. He hadn't been prepared to resume this conversation. Not before a cup of tea, at least.

"Really, Remus," Sirius pressed. "I know all too well what I was thinking during those last months. I want to know who you thought it was."

"I didn't want to believe it," Remus muttered, ashamed.

"Believe what?"

"That there was a spy. I didn't want to believe there was a spy." Remus forced himself to look at Sirius. "It was clear there was someone keeping close track of our movements, but I'd got myself mostly convinced it was someone watching us from outside, someone not in the Order. Not one of us. My same old failing – I just wanted for us all to be friends."

When all was said and done, his failure had been the worse one. Rather than suspecting the wrong person, he had failed to see that he should be suspecting someone at all.

"I couldn't bring myself to think that of any of you," Remus said, his gaze once again directed at the scuffed wooden boards of the kitchen floor. "If I had done, if I had taken the threat more seriously – they might still be alive."

"Remus–" Sirius said.

"So don't think that I blame you," Remus said in a rush. "Or if I do, know that I'm wrong to do so. You're not to blame any more than anyone else."

"I–" Sirius said, sounding confused. "I– Thank you. I mean, I disagree, and you're wrong, you're not to blame, but…thank you."

"I am to blame," Remus said. "I wasn't blinded by anything else; there's no excuse for me not to have seen what Peter was doing, how he played us all. How he always had such a tidy story prepared to explain everything he did."

"Fucking Peter and his fucking excuses!" Sirius burst out.

"Yes," Remus said. "New girlfriend, so in love, always running off to see her…"

"Yeah, some girlfriend," Sirius growled. "Voldemort was his fucking girlfriend. I'm such an idiot. Don't know how I let him fool me for even a second."

"Yes, you do," Remus said. "He was able to fool you because he was Peter, and that's what he did. A word of praise here, a compliment there… 'Oh, you're so good at that spell,' he'd say. 'Would you teach it to me?' Getting you to help him, so you'd feel you had a kind of responsibility to him." Bile rose in Remus' throat at the very thought of it. All the times he'd let Peter flatter him into feeling protective and benevolent.

Sirius' eyes widened in recognition of what Remus was saying. "He did, didn't he? 'Sirius, it's amazing how you stand up to people,'" he mimicked. "'I wouldn't have had the daring to leave my family like that, but you just went for it. How do you do it?'"

"'Great match today, James!'" Remus added. "'Amazing flying! You've got to teach me that dodging move sometime!'"

Sirius' expression was darkening by the minute. "'Lily, I'm so hopeless at Potions, and you're such a genius at it. I would have failed for sure if you hadn't helped me.'"

"You can't blame yourself," Remus said. "I failed to see it just as much as you did."

"We should have killed him," Sirius spat. "We had the chance, we had the chance to wipe that scum off the face of the Earth, and we just handed it away."

Remus blinked at the sudden vehemence in Sirius' voice. "We didn't just 'hand it away,' Sirius. We agreed not to do it, at Harry's request."

Sirius peered out at him through the dark curtain of his hair and for a moment, he looked every bit as deranged, every bit as much the escaped murderer, as he had that night in the Shrieking Shack. "Oh, you didn't hear?" he asked.

The chill in his voice sent a shiver down Remus' spine.

"Hear what?" Remus asked carefully.

"How it was that Voldemort got himself back to power so suddenly. He didn't pull that off alone. He pulled it off because when we let that rat live, he scuttled straight back to his master and nursed him back to health, got him all the things he needed so he could get himself a body again. That fucking rat was in the graveyard that night. Harry saw him."

Remus felt the blood drain from his face. He leaned one hand against the worktop behind him. "We did suspect he would do that," Remus suggested faintly.

"Yeah, well, and now he has. Thanks to you and me, he's alive and now Voldemort is back and in the flesh."

Remus swallowed. "Still. It was Harry's choice to make. Harry didn't feel James would have wanted us to become murderers for his sake."

"Then Harry was wrong."

"We can't know that," Remus said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter now, Sirius! What's done is done. We have to move on. We just do everything we can from here on."

Sirius sucked in a long, hard breath. He looked like he was working hard not to fly apart completely. Finally he said, "All right, yeah. Yes. But I tell you what, Dumbledore better write back soon and tell us what we can start doing."

Looking at him, Remus believed it. Another few days of this frustration and waiting, and who could say what Sirius might get it in his head to do.

For a few moments, they both just breathed, Sirius trying to get himself under control, and Remus biting his tongue against admonishing him, against saying anything about just where Sirius' propensity for rash action had got him in the past. Anything he could say, Sirius already knew, and surely thought about every day.

"Sirius," he said finally, tentatively. "I know this is frustrating, I know this doesn't seem like an ideal situation right now, but – I'm glad nonetheless that you're here. I'm glad you got out, I mean. That you're back here with the rest of us."

Sirius gave him a startled, wry smile. "Yeah. It's been good to see you again, too, Remus."

Taken by surprise, Remus thought, Yes. He had meant he was glad for Sirius' sake that he was finally out of Azkaban; glad for Harry's sake, too, that he could finally know his godfather.

But, yes – Remus was glad for his own sake as well. Could he ever have imagined he would one day be here, chatting with Sirius Black in the kitchen of an old cottage in Yorkshire as if it were the most normal thing in the world?

Remus smiled at the strangeness of it, yet the ordinariness of it, too. Sirius was gazing into space, thoughtful, so Remus stepped the rest of the way into the kitchen and began fixing himself breakfast and a cup of tea.

"Would you pass the sugar, Padfoot?" he asked, as he poured boiling water into an old chipped mug, and Sirius caught his eye and then they were both smiling at the sheer delightful banality of it.

He could get used to having a friend again, Remus mused, as he walked into the village for his day's tutoring sessions. He could get used to sharing his space with someone, eating meals together, bickering good-naturedly over whose turn it was to cast a few cleaning charms around the place. Being friends. It was a surprisingly easy thing to slip back into, even after all these years.

Remus arrived back at the cottage after his day's work to find late afternoon sunshine slanting through the trees and Sirius pacing in front of the doorstep.

"Remus!" Sirius said, as soon as Remus stepped into the clearing. "Look!"

He waved the unfurled scroll of a letter in Remus' direction, too quickly for Remus to catch anything more than an impression of familiar, spidery handwriting.

"We're to head to Grimmauld Place immediately," Sirius said, focused and intent, when Remus reached him. "Tonight. We should leave tonight. It won't take long to pack everything up, right? It's not like there's much we need to bring along."

"We?" Remus asked.

"Yes, obviously, we. You weren't going to stay all the way out here, were you? When there's work to be done for the Order? You're going to come live at the old house with me, didn't I say? There's more than enough room. It'll be our headquarters, Dumbledore's agreed. He's coming by there tomorrow to start getting everything set up. There's so much to do, Remus, don't just stand there!"

But Remus did just stand there, for a moment, in the clearing between the trees in the afternoon light, looking at Sirius fired up with purpose and energy, more alive than Remus had seen him in years.

So many years. As he stood and watched Sirius grinning madly into the sunlight, Remus felt all that time kaleidoscope around him, the early years at school, the later years with the Order. Happy memories of laughing together with James and Lily, tense memories of battles, heartache, loss.

He thought of Dumbledore, calling them aside late in their seventh year to tell them of a secret organisation he was creating, and that they were invited to join it as soon as they'd finished school. He thought of Harry, surprised and disappointed to learn that Remus would not be returning to teach the next year at Hogwarts.

He heard Lily's voice in his mind, saying, Does it matter, really? You're both here now. And James grinning ear to ear, exulting, No, seriously, Remus, he's been here almost three full days and you haven't swatted that great mangy mutt with a newspaper even once?

Remus felt a smile breaking across his face. He caught Sirius' eye.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, all right. It might be completely daft, but yes, why not? Let's pack up and leave tonight."

Sirius grinned back. "That's the spirit, Moony. Go pack your suitcase. I'll wait here."

Remus stepped past him into the house, and in the cool, quiet shade inside the doorway, he stopped and closed his eyes for just a moment.

The Order was reconvening. There was work, at last, important work to be done. Sirius would be there, and Harry, and Dumbledore, and many other people Remus respected and cared about.

Despite the dire situation growing around them, Remus couldn't help think that maybe, just maybe, there were also a few small things that would be all right.

Who could say what this next year would bring?