Only the lonely little room would do. Digital light from the vanity split the twilight from outside, made the space feel warmer, intimate. Remus curled in the hard womb of his grandmother’s bathtub and picked open the cuffs of his shirt. Soft moon at the window, a winter moon. Summer skies he’d seen from here, but never winter. To be at the cottage now, in wet December, seemed almost sacrilege; and where there should be dust there was sand. When arriving yesterday for his grandmother’s funeral, his mum had touched his collar, traced his ear.

    “Your hair’s getting so long,” she said.

    The faucet dripping water on his dirty shoe, a clean black line pooling thick at the bottom of the tub. The feathery trail of Sirius’s stomach making cricket sounds under his fingers two nights since- Remus could hear them now. Cricket sounds, spark sounds, a cracking match in the dark.

    “You should see it. James and his little wife, playing house together- everybody’s hero. So bourgeois. Can you believe Lily actually made me move the bike out to the garden shed? Headquarters is stuffed with archaic rubbish- like Dumbledore dumped the whole of his attic there. A bloody museum. They should get Gringotts to insure the place,” Sirius laughed. “Can you imagine my father running that kind of show? His chequebook’s as tight as a rat’s arsehole.” He gave up his laughter to wonder, “We never see Peter anymore, do we?”

    They were on the floor of Sirius’s flat, watching a 45 drop onto the spindle. “I asked Prongs if he ever felt guilty, what with wasting the Potter fortune. ‘Piss off’ he said. ‘Piss off,’ and he meant it too.” Sirius returned the previous record to its sleeve. “We were at the Faust, with all those wheezing old farts, still talking about Grindelwald as though that was still going on. One bloke had a chunk gone out of the back of his neck -this -big. And Prongs, he’ll bloody listen to them now, and nod his head like he understands. He thinks he’s ready to die, but he’s not. I know him.” Sirius turned away, ran a knuckle over the floorboards. “I-I can’t tell him, Moony.”

    Another evening, this one not as quiet. He and Sirius had been wrestling, laughing, downing an entire bottle of fire whisky between them. Sirius would not remove his jacket- something of armor about him.

    “This is the Wizard Wireless News, Ian Scuttle reporting. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named today announced a campaign of recruitment amongst Dark Creatures throu… skzzz… ted Kingdom. A spokesperson from the Ministry… ffzzz… emergency legislation in response. We take you now to… skkzz… Ministry spokesman Arnold Connor… skzzz… and no one, I repeat, no law-abiding wizard or witch is in any danger. If I had my way, we’d bring back the camps…fttzzz… lock the lot of them away… skzzz…”

    Sirius’s flat had never been able to receive a clear wireless signal, and following this announcement the station fizzled off again into static. Before the interruption he had pinned Remus with his forearm. A sticky bridge leaked between their jeans; the waistline equator had not yet been breached.

    “One of these days I’m going to storm the steps of Erumpent & Castle and drag you out of here for good.” Sirius’s eyes were closed, his mouth but a hand’s breadth from Remus’s own. Parted in the dark it seemed a wound. Remus reached to hold Sirius’s cold head against his own.

    “Sirius… I don’t need to be rescued.”

    Behind his grandmother’s cottage cut a crumbled lane, and land laced through the trees. He had taken it that afternoon on errand for his mum; as it tumbled down the hill, the lane grew wider, its eye-teeth stones larger- until the whole of it spilled into the village looking like sea foam. Earlier that morning he had found a volume of fairy tales and legends, stashed behind back issues of Ellery Queen. In a corner, he studied the book’s pages, along with the delicate grotesques that illustrated each tale. Most of these stories began with little more than an ephemeral flicker: the Otherworld opened from the sky or earth, and out would come great beasts to be battled. How dark and strange it must have been for the heroes of the day, for just as suddenly as it had appeared, this unearthly mouth would close and heal, leaving only a scorched scar on the ground.

    “And when the tides peel back, you can see the very tops of the spires, like a cutlass rising from the sea. It’s where they tossed Excalibur, in Llyn Llydaw, in Cymru, and don’t let them other lads tell you any different.” Gwlad Hud a Lledrith. This was his grandmother. Though a Muggle, she had known these stories and songs- of submerged forests that were once kingdoms. The day was very dim and green; it clouded in his eyes. At the edge of the lane- St. David’s Charity Shop, cradled between two buildings of clapboard and wood lace. Its window displayed plastic treasures and old lady rubbish, things no one made anymore. Placed atop the counter inside St. David’s a snow globe of the cathedral, the dome half-filled with brown water. In his backpack Remus carried his grandmother’s small library. He had wanted to take something back to Sirius, but knew Sirius would scoff over detective stories bound in mildew.

    Between Sirius and Lily a sort of antagonistic show-and-tell had developed regarding their record collections. Sessions of squabbling and crowing as each piece was scrutinized and every cover memorized. When he and Sirius were alone, they would sit together in the shadows, touching at the shoulders, listening: some bluesy pop number from the states, or a forgotten chanteuse with love loss beading on her lips. A man yearning for the wife of a friend. That the man wanted to be shattered like a glass, a million pieces, vulnerable to all things, and still he loved the person who did this to him. These songs broke as waves did, the ease with which they could articulate their longing and resignation and love. Then Remus would feel odd belts of heartbeat in his chest, and turn to find Sirius watching him, almost smiling.

    “Yeah, I like that one too,” Sirius would say.

    Perhaps here, in the last chance haven of St. David’s, he could find something for Sirius that shattering, that beautiful. Watch Sirius’s hands as he smooth the record from its tissue shell and blew dust off its glossy surface. But St. David’s had neither records, nor anything from the latter half of the twentieth century. Instead, buried beneath the carcasses of acrylic jumpers, he discovered a set of Muggle encyclopedias. Though outdated even for Muggle study, they nonetheless contained many color photographs, cool and smooth under his fingers.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica Ma-Mu. Remus drew it from his bag and studied the dirt-thickened tomb. Magician. Outside he heard the hollow strike of his father’s mallet driving the handmade “For Let” sign into the yard. No one would want it, this saggy-bottomed cottage with the curious hidden basement room. Too far from the resorts to satisfy the tourist crowd, too ravaged by woodlice to survive as a home.

    “Salt just eats it on one side, little bugs chewing away at the other,” his mum had once said. “Should’ve been a stone foundation, this close to the water. But she was happy here, and we got in a few good holidays together.”

    Morocco. Musculature. Anatomy crashed with the coast of Gibraltar, its great rock a beacon, a kingdom not yet hidden under the sea. Immigrants came in small boats or swam, puckered by the distance. Upon this coast they died, fighting the black weight of the water. Modern Warfare. Order members, survivors of previous campaigns, talked of Crucio and Avada Kedvada in confidential tones, so as not rouse the interest of the younger set. They knew what was coming; they had lost friends before.

    Does a soul drift like a skiff on the sea? Or was death more like a thunder crash, branch cracking from a tree? When his time came, would he feel it, Dark Creature that he was termed, and thus become the monster of the storybook and swallowed back into the earth?

    No. He felt nothing of the wolf; his spirit needed no body, no personification- he was set adrift in books, the skin on Sirius’s shoulder. The room grew darker; he took scissors to the first page. Remus pulled the curtain closed and settled into the crux.

*****

    From the stoop, Sirius watched the many envelope slippers and saris dash past, the sugar brown girls clamoring up the temple steps. Spangled sour pinks and cream, like the plumes of birds, and the white alcoves of Lakshmi Temple concealed dovecotes, echoing their songs and games. So lovely, these temple girls, their laughter could crack even the pavement and take root. Remus had come home from the funeral yesterday, looking gloomy and spiritual in his Muggle suit. They reunited on the rooftop garden of Erumpent & Castle.

    “No friends,” Remus told him. “No friends, and no family either, only those who could be bothered.” Remus drew a joint from his pocket. “House will never sell to Muggles. It’s just sitting there now- waiting. So close to the shore, someday the sea will just swallow it up. Dissolve in the water like one of those tablets for your stomach.” The glass hothouse they sat against was warm, a little soap bubble under the sun. They made plans to meet again tonight.

    "There's something I want to show you," Remus had said.

    “Al-chee-mee. What’s that?” One of the temple girls stood beside him now. She pointed to his book; her companions passed conversation between their fingers. Sirius only smiled, more like a smirk.

    He was an instinctual alchemist. Sirius knew ordinary mementos to hold a precious afterlife- even the smallest thing became a universe. Nowhere had this been more apparent than in the halls and parlors of Grimmauld Place. Daily adventures kindled in the low light of his room. A black-feathered hatpin became an ominous bird; punctured clouds, let out rain. Two spider’s webs set sail on the dust beneath his bed. For him it was an ocean, and the low murmurs about him the tide. This was music before the discovery of the Muggle turntable, melody defined in strange undertones. Cancreous scrolls discovered in the library opened upon forlorn shores and voyages to these lands were performed again and again. Beneath one furious chipped dragon scrolled the axiom “Here Be Monsters”, which possessed a wonderful promise. Sirius whispered those words again and again, rounded from his lips and spoken into his hands. He alone breathed life upon his little ship and told no one.

    His mother noticed. One morning she handed him a button and wand, dropping instructions in his ear. A moment later emerged a moth, trembling its way out of his dark, pink palm. She watched it quietly, the humble creature alighting on his fingers.

    “The kingdom is yours Sirius,” she whispered. And the tenderness of this discovery opened within him a terrible joy. Terrible that he was not alone in seeing the bedstead sea; and those thoughts that had been kept so dear were now open and ordinary. Superstition no longer attended objects. Their captivity was of little consequence. He had no faith in cluttering his life with leftover bits. That distinction belonged to Remus.

    Remus had made landscapes of his walls. Scraps of print composed runaway hills and waters; a knot of vegetable advertisements pieced into the foliage of trees, a Ministry decree against Dark Creatures cut to resemble a grinning canine- Sirius supposed it an effigy of Padfoot, though he didn’t ask. At first he had attempted to read the various news accounts until Remus shook his head, smiling.

    “They’re not meant to be read.”

    “Then why bother?”

    Remus studied one drift of white print, fashioned like an iceberg. He touched it with his wand. “I look at them in the dark. Helps me sleep.” He walked his fingers across the dim expanse of the Atlantic. From its paper waves grew tentacles, the horned back of an unknown sea creature. Remus’s fingers sunk into the wall- fingers, then palm, all the way to the wrist; submerged a cloud of skin under the water. The waves carried across the wall, and from their breath came wind, caught in broccoli leaves. A simple spell, and yet the effect was beautiful, intricate. Remus pulled out and flicked his wet hand at him.

    “Sight better than what the last tenant left behind. Pink striped- like living with a permanent sunburn.” Remus wiped his hand on his trousers. “Here, you try.”

    Sirius flipped through Creem, not looking up. “I don’t care. It’s your wall.” Remus returned to his desk and began to write.

    When Remus wrote, the whole of his body seemed involved: knee working like a piston, toes hammered under the white column of his foot. Once the random inspiration struck him his leg would still, and small exclamations would pass from his lips; sounds so soft they ceased being words but intimation of thought. There was nothing new about Remus, yet he wore mystery like a coat, like a dream. Whatever he withheld, Sirius wanted; wanted into the strange fruit of Remus’s mouth and taste those half-spoken utterances from the inside out. Or deeper still, to those random, crystallized visions displayed in the scenes on the wall. Sirius wondered from where these thoughts came, and when Remus had learned to conceal such things- like a stone sunk in water, a little sea in his soul.

    Sirius’s sea was kept in the pocket of his jacket: a Quidditch clipping from James, a lock-breaking key and two Muggle pounds. Remus had insisted, put them in Sirius’s palm and closed his hand around it. “You’re two notices away from losing your Apparating license. If you need it, this’ll get you here.”

    Sirius moved to the window. The day had been all rain, the sky now an anemic dusk.

    “I hate the city,” he said suddenly. “I hate… street lamps. Power lines. Hate that it doesn’t get properly dark.” He pressed his finger upon the glass, blotting out the lights of the Alley below one by one. “Seems I’d be used to it, but I’m not. I remember the best place in the world, before going to Hogwarts, was the aviary on the roof of my parent’s house. It’d get quiet enough I suppose, even with the birds. We didn’t have that many to begin with- only a half-dozen hototogisu, and they’re nothing special. Up there, it just got-” he paused again, and lay his brow upon the pane. “Dark.”

    “Ghost birds, or some such rubbish. The dead calling out to their families. You’d think such an animal would be all brilliant and red and gold or something, but they’re really just plain brown. Cuckoos with a fancy name. My father, he’d jinxed them so they couldn’t fly too far from the house or else-” He made a soft sound and fanned his hands. “Sayonara hototogisu. Bastard. Like to see him offed that way. Step too far off the curb? Sorry my good man- there’s your head. He’ll probably get hit by a car- such a Muggle way to go. Serve him right, too. Now she- she wouldn’t be so easy.”

    The quill in Remus’s hand had stilled, though he did not turn. Sirius continued.

    “Him first, not her. If he goes first, I can deal with her. All of her drama, all of her noise- shut her right out. Ah, but if she dies before him? No such luck. He’d just mope about pathetically- moan and complain the whole time. Get feeble. Need nappies. And then I might actually feel sorry for him and go back there.” He watched Remus scroll up his parchment and rise from the chair. “You and me, we were always good friends, right?”

    “C’mon.” Remus hooked a finger through his belt loop, pulling him away from the window. The tightness in Sirius’s cock became a hard knot, harder still under his jeans. Above their heads stretched Remus’s Muggle world map, marked by faint lights. “C’mon,” Remus said again, this time looking him in the eye, curving beside him on the bed.

    Sirius only wanted to contain, save himself from giving in entirely. The pleasure of yielding was unknown to him. The back of Remus’s knee, a long salt plane stretched up the thigh, he drew it closer. The envelope of foreskin slid under his grip like a leaf unfurling. The hint of the purple head beneath it, dark and sweet, seemed too intimate a discovery; he could not watch. Constellations on the map, pulse points, they glowed.

    “You won’t tell me,” Sirius whispered. “You won’t tell me anything. We’re friends, right?”

    Remus motioned to a tail of land above them. “There’s a place- I looked it up. Valle de la Luna. Someday I want to go. They say it’s brighter than the moon. That the sky’s clearer there, reflects off the crevices of dunes. And the water is silver beside it. Be there, on a little boat- it’s the end of the world. I want to go. Go with me?” Remus’s breath stung his face, slipped about Sirius’s neck as he spoke. Sirius drew his wet hand to his mouth. It tasted like the sweet scum that congealed on fruit.

    “Yes.” He pushed back Remus’s hair to answer; a mantra of yes and yes again until the word had dissolved into breath. Sirius closed his eyes.

    He was on a ship, a gray ship that moved like a spilled stream of water. In the night, he could not distinguish the line of land and thus wondered, was he about to fall off the edge of the earth? The sky was endless, but so was the sea. He did not believe what winged and wired instruments told him- that there was nothing beyond the ocean floor. Past this surface were many coiled tunnels that bore deeper, dark sills, tiny, fitting only his finger- a warm reach of space. He pressed further. Felt silt and weeds and the glide of film, crest with each run of his hands- diffident explorer, pilgrim in the wormhole. He saw himself an Atlantic specimen, shed of skin with veins fanned coral. Against the green, against the tide, giving himself over to hands struggling down his jeans. Remus called to him dimly, an echo of his name threaded across the ocean. Sirius rose to the surface and tasted a mouthful of saltwater.

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