We Cannot Cage
That summer, their interludes were generally nearly silent affairs in stuffy, nearly forgotten rooms. They couldn't be loud, of course, because it would bring upon them the shouts of various ancestors, not to mention the house-elf, who only needed more fuel for the fire of his hatred. The gods only knew what else there was to be woken in this damn house.
Remus hated quite nearly every minute of it, because they were both distracted and frightened and worried, and the peace after orgasm did not last nearly long enough to calm them. Nor did they have the time for much that was long or involved, instead a touch, a kiss, a breath here and a stroke there, and it would be over in minutes, for both of them know too well what would bring the other over the edge quickly.
Remus hated feeling as though they were back at Hogwarts years ago, hiding from James, Peter, the teachers and everyone else in the goddamn castle.
The heat made them both sweat; their clothes were nearly always damp in many places and sometimes soaked through in a few. The rooms they did this in were always dusty, like so much else was here at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, dusty and stifling in their ancient, musty heat. They did not belong there, just as they had not belonged in empty classrooms, locker rooms and broom closets.
Remus left the top couple of buttons on his shirt undone as he and Sirius walked downstairs again on a miserable mid-July morning, with no discernible difference in their respective gaits.
"I'm getting a beer," Sirius said, heading for the kitchen and opening the door to the cellar. "You want one, Remus? Or anything else, for that matter?"
He shook his head. "No. I'm fine, thanks."
The cellar was the only truly cool place in all of this dignified, stale-aired old house most of the time, but it was the worst, really. It was quiet and heavy and dark, deep underground and cool and dry. It put them both in mind of death and stone prison cells and tombs, and that was far, far worse than the oppressive heat. At least in the heat there was sunlight and the sense of life, even if it was of the most primordial form of life.
Remus tapped his front teeth on the tip of his quill (which had no tufts left along the top inch or so, he had owned it for so long and chewed on it so many times), trying to focus in the heat, with Kreacher muttering somewhere on the floor above him. He could not hear Sirius down in the cellar, so thick was the floor beneath his own feet. It startled him when Sirius, having padded back up the stairs in his bare feet, sat down next to him at the table. He cast a disinterested glance at Remus's work, but it did not hold him in the least.
It did not come to him in a flash of insight, but Remus knew then that he could not take another moment of this, and, appropriately, he rose, setting the quill carefully down and getting his parchment in order. He didn't relish the thought of putting on his cloak in the summer weather, but there wasn't much to be done about that; secrecy, of course, was of the essence in this place.
"Where are you going?" Sirius asked, clearly trying to be casual about the whole thing.
"Out," Remus answered, trying to think of a way that he might say that he hated every second of this without hurting Sirius, who was, of course, no happier here than his lover. "Just... out."
Sirius, he knew, must have been even more miserable than Remus was, for Sirius did not have the option to leave whenever it got to be too goddamned stifling, as Remus did.
"Oh," Sirius said, and looked back down, his face hard and tense and deeply, deeply miserable. The look on it was the look that Sirius always got when he thought he was doing such a fine job of hiding his anger, and really he was about two minutes away from putting his fist through something. "Yeah, fine, well, have fun," he added, and the tone to his voice was that tone. It was a tone tone that Sirius always got when he thought he was being so cool, so ŒI don't give a fuck, there are lots of girls here and a mouth is a mouth in the dark', and everyone, except for (or possibly especially) he knew the reality of the situation, which was that he would be getting more and more drunk and snarling at anyone who came near.
There were no girls here, nor Tonks (undisclosed location), nor Vance (same), nor Molly (Diagon Alley) nor even Ginny or Hermione (Diagon Alley with the rest of the Weasley brood, who were not due for two weeks), and there was nothing here that was not so old and strong that it would only break Sirius's knuckles if he tried to put his fist through it.
Remus put his hand on the doorknob and then paused. He turned as quickly as one could in this heat, and walked to the table that Sirius was sitting upon, and pressed a clumsy kiss against the corner of Sirius's mouth. The other man's mouth twitched reluctantly, flashed for a moment of a little smile, but he said nothing, and did not respond in any other way. Remus sighed, turned back around again, and left the house before anything else could pass between the two of them.
He had forgotten just how much he hated it when they were teenagers. He had not even then realized then how much he really hated it. At the time, just as he had overlooked Sirius and James's obviously less stellar moments out of the simple joy of having friends at last, so too had he overlooked the inconveniences and the feeling that he ought to be ashamed for the amazement of how it felt to be kissed and to kiss in return, the shock that being touched there like that could make him feel like this.
Only later, when they had been able to live on their own for those precious few years, had he realized just how much he hated the ways they had to be together while at Hogwarts.
It had to be better for Sirius than Azkaban, for here, at least, there were friends and food and beers and Remus, but it was a prison nonetheless.
He ended up wandering to the nearest grocer's. Remus always kept about twenty-five pounds in his pocket; most of the Order knew how to vanish into a Muggle crowd if they needed to, and money for a bus or a coach or a train (no cabs; they were too easy to track) made it even easier. He eyed a few things with halfhearted interest -- the younger Weasleys got laughs out of the boringness of Muggle sweets before devouring them regardless, and they were running out of fresh produce -- and finally walked out with a plastic bag of apples and no idea why he had wanted them at all.
One of these he ate as he wandered just as idly back towards the square. They were quite good, these -- it was a risk with apples, for their utter commonness meant that there were nearly infinite possibilities for bad as well as good samples of the fruits. He threw the core into some shrubs as he walked, picking up his pace now. Something was in his mind, something that felt like an idea, and he did not worry at it (that would do no good) but neither did he forget about it.
The summers, he remembered as he walked back through the door of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the summers he had shared with Sirius had nearly always been like this, if for no other reason than because they moved with the lazy misery of heavy-coated dogs in the summer. Their summer lovemaking -- for it had not the passion nor the fervor to be called anything more dangerous -- happened slowly but was somehow over quickly. Like dogs who dragged and panted and whined in the summer but would spend hours romping happily through the snow, they found their spirits again in the winter.
Sirius was nowhere to be seen when he first walked in -- up in his mother's bedroom, most likely, sulking with Buckbeak. That was best for now, really, because Remus knew for certain that this was indeed an idea, and he did not want to have to share it just yet. The fact was, while Remus went to work on this, he would rather Sirius was out of the way. And if it was because he was in the attic sulking with a hippogriff as his only company, well, then, let him sulk. He would be over it in a few hours' time, by which time Remus's work on this spell would have been long finished.
He had done this a few times before, or something similar. This was on a rather larger scale than he had worked the spell in the past -- he had chosen one of the unused, empty rooms on the third floor, in part because its lock looked like one of the most trustworthy -- but it was only a few illusions, really.
It took him about forty minutes, all told, to recall the proper spells (he'd always had a good memory for this sort of thing). Illusory saplings were already beginning to sprout along the walls. Remus looked up at the ceiling, and it showed a clear blue sky. The room felt no colder yet, but, then, it was a gradual process.
That was why he had not told Sirius about this; Sirius was not a patient man, and Remus did not want him sticking his head in every half-hour or so "just to see how far it's come", nor did he want to ruin the illusion by doing much of anything in here until it was complete.
It would be tomorrow morning before the room really had the feel of a forest clearing in the dead of winter to it, and the illusion would not last for much longer than four or five days -- a week, if he had done the spell exceptionally well and they had a little bit of luck, but while Remus was a decent enough wizard, he did not think that they had that much luck. But if it lasted for much longer than that, it would certainly be found by someone else in the Order, and they did not need to explain to any of them, let alone the kids -- or, the gods help them, Severus -- just why they had needed this room.
Maybe, for those few nights, they could set up a tent. They could camp here, in the imaginary snows and under the quiet low clouds, lost in their own small beautiful false winter, ward the door against the elf or ghosts or boggarts or any they didn't want to be inside their sanctuary, and let it serve as something of a holiday without leaving the house.
When the spell was complete, the room would have become a snowy clearing, about the same size as the floor's area. There would be no hint remaining of what it really was -- one more room in a once-grand, now-crumbling old house.
A pessimistic soul might have said that Remus was only postponing the inevitable, that he was simply trying to deny the truth of the heat wave this summer and the misery of this house that Sirius could not leave and that Remus, then, was bound to some extent as well. Remus did not know whether he himself might disagree with that statement; the end of summer was still a long way off, and even if it had not been, Sirius was still bound to this house.
He knew, however, that the stifling air and the dark, narrow hallways were somehow infinitesimally less miserable for the knowledge of what they would have in a matter of hours, even if it was only a few days for which they would have it. He knew, also, that it felt good to have done something new, newer than anything else they had done in this house.
On his way down the stairs again, Remus paused, then turned, and headed up instead, towards the attic. "Sirius," he called, knocking on the door.
"Yeah?" came a muffled but unmistakeably angry voice from within.
"Can I come in?"
"'S a free country," Sirius answered.
Remus rolled his eyes, but walked inside anyway. He acknowledged Buckbeak first of all, of course, and the hippogriff inclined its head in response. "Here," Remus said, having nearly forgotten about the apples. He pulled one out of the bag and offered it to Sirius, who looked at it, then at Remus, and smiled before taking it from him.
He sat down next to Sirius on the floor and pulled another apple out. The two of them stayed there in silence, waiting, each of them waiting in muffled unhappiness, for something they could not explain. Slowly, the afternoon lagged on.