Title: "Now Her Part is Over"
Author: Mala
E-mail: malisita@yahoo.com
Fandom: HP (OoTP, spoilers)
Rating/Classification: 'R', Molly/Sirius, Sirius/Remus, angst.
Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own them.
Summary: After "Silent Scream" and before "Paint it Black". What does it mean to live in "domestic bliss"?
Notes: Thank you so much to Scy for helping me figure out the way this fic
was supposed to be.
"Give me these moments back.
Give them back to me.
Give me that little kiss.
Give me your hand."
--Kate Bush.
Perhaps the greatest change after the night in the drawing room comes from the cease fire in their constant war over Harry. She no longer shouts loud
enough to wake up his mother's ghastly portrait. He no longer casts cold,
sidelong, glances at her as she heaps Tonks's plate full of currants and ham. Instead, they work in nearly-companionable silence. Going from room to room in Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, and scrubbing it, thoroughly, for the Christmas holidays. A flick of her wand...a wave of his hand as Kreacher slinks from beneath a rattling bureau...onwards.
He passes on her warnings, word-for-word, to the children and she can't
help but smile as she stands in the doorway and watches him speak into the
flames. He mimics her with startling accuracy...and without malice. When
he brushes past her on his way upstairs, she can feel the press of his slender body beneath his voluminous robes and she makes note to slip him an extra potato at dinner.
When she pauses on the stair well after midnight, she can hear him
speaking in soft tones to Buckbeak and pictures him stroking the hippogriff's neck with the same gentle, tender, fingers that curved into her hair.
She does not wonder if he pauses on the stair and listens to her cry out,
unabashedly, in Arthur's arms.
She cannot.
Perhaps the second greatest change after the night in the drawing room
comes from knowing what he tastes like. Smoke and firewhiskey and tart misery. And knowing that she'll never take another helping. An extra morsel. Because she must leave enough for someone else.
***
Most of the time, they are alone in the house. Save for, of course, the
portraits with their painted-on hatred and the house elf who would sooner slit their throats in their sleep than listen to his "Master." Everyone converges for breakfast and then scatters like pollen in the wind. And then there are solid hours of quiet, of nothing, punctuated by Sirius telling her, low-voiced, that there is a new doxy infestation in the boys' rooms or that he's fixed whatever was wrong with the stove.
They are not, by far, the romantic mumblings of someone besotted by one misguided kiss.
For that small favor, she is grateful.
She still cries about Percy. Sitting on the drawing room floor in the
middle of the afternoon, she stares at the desk cabinet and thinks that she doesn't need a boggart to play her worst fears any longer. Not when they've been made flesh. One son, it seems, is already dead to her.
And no amount of pleading will bring him back.
Sometimes, Sirius sits with his back to the odious Black family tapestry, denying the scorch marks that have erased him from existence, and that is that. Silence. In this, their place of pain. She reaches over and takes his hand, knowing that somewhere outside the dingy, dilapidated, house, the men they care for are facing things that are far more dangerous...but no more real.
Sometimes, his lips linger too long on her forehead. Whispering regret
like the swoosh of robes. "Go on with you, Molly Weasley," he whispers before he shifts and a great black dog lowers his head into her lap so she can stroke and stroke and stroke until her hands fall limp and she can face the day again.
"Go on with you, Sirius Black," she laughs, softly, pushing the lumbering
beast towards the front door when it needs tending to. And when he returns, panting happily, tail wagging, with an exhausted Remus, all she can do is rise and put on the tea kettle.
She's not besotted either.
For which, she knows, they are grateful.
***
When they emerge from the same bedroom in the mornings, it is as casual as the twins lumbering down the stairs at the Burrow for breakfast. Only the sleepy, gentle, smiles are far louder than George's boisterous cries of
"Geroff me, you git!" and Fred's, "Oy, Mum...have you seen my wand?" There
is always a hand on a shoulder...legs brushing close enough to trip one another... before they break apart, regretfully, and Remus slips, unobtrusively, out the door on Order business.
She can only imagine the screams, the shouts, if the hateful portrait they all pointedly avoid rousing were allowed to vent its nonexistent
spleen. That Sirius has not only infested the Noble House of Black with blood traitors and half-breeds but he is bedding down with them, with abominations.
There is nothing of abomination in Sirius Black and Remus Lupin's bond.
Perhaps it would be easier if there were.
But when she flicks her wrist and vanishes a pile of maps of the Ministry that Bill left out on his last visit, she knows that they are, in their way, as married as she and Arthur. That the years separating them did nothing to break the ties they forged at Hogwarts as children and where Sirius is hard and cold, Remus is soft and warm. Where one is angry, the other is calm. Where one begins, the other ends.
So, when she kissed one in the drawing room and he clung to her, hands
sliding around her waist as he trembled and hung on the edge of sanity...she kissed the other, too.
They taste the same to her.
Bittersweet.
--end--
June 23, 2003.