Secret Keeper
Chapter 5
Three nights following the decision to formally and ridiculously court Lily Evans, Remus found himself standing on a dew-encrusted lawn with nothing but swirling dark clouds enveloping the world above him and the world within. Around him, his fellow partners-in-crime readied themselves for the upcoming event. Sirius lounged luxuriously against the castle wall, a sly smile playing on his lips. Kneeling close by was Peter, his eyes occasionally searching the surroundings as if some sort of monstrosity were to jump forth and ruin the entire game. James was nowhere to be found, and the designated time was drawing near.
Remus was pacing despite himself. His role to play in this was vital, despite all his protests, and he knew that everything relied on his quick thinking and levelheadedness. Pacing seemed to be the only thing that would relieve the tension straining from within him. He had realized, from the time of the meeting to right at that moment, the entire situation not only depended on a cool nature, but it also demanded that he release the one thing that he had strived to keep secret: his love. The only way for James to win the girl of his dreams was for Remus to admit his feelings verbally, and have all the words escape from James’s mouth as if they were his own. The task seemed nearly impossible to Remus, who found that he could not bear to admit anything; even if it was to seem as if he felt nothing at all and was simply plucking the words from thin air. In a sense he was, but his heart screamed otherwise. Not only did his heart scream, but it also felt like it had somehow broken a rib bone from Remus’s body and used its own rhythm to create a jackhammer effect. This effect was currently in the process of shattering his entire frame, from the chest down. That meant quite a few things for the entire situation, and Remus knew all of them ended with him walking away wrecked and broken. However, as he had been reminding himself since the first day, he would gladly risk all forms of pain for the happiness of his friends. This night would prove it, whether he lived through it or not.
Soon the wee hours of the morning drew closer and still James was no where to be seen.
“Perhaps he got cold feet?” suggested Peter.
“James doesn’t get cold feet,” Sirius instantly defended as he slid down the wall to lay along it, his body in a complete reclining position complete with hands folded behind his head. “This is important to him. He’ll be here.”
Ironically it was what Remus would have said, and because of this he stared at Sirius with a mixed look of amusement and awe. It seemed the renegade was finally growing up.
True to his word and expectations, James skidded around the corner. His speed sent him sliding across the wet ground as he did so and he almost fell had it not been for his Quidditch reflexes and balance. He grasped two pieces of parchment and two silver quills in his right hand. When he reached Remus out of breath, he shoved the four objects into his hands and sunk to the ground, gasping for air.
“You would not believe “ (gasp) “ the trouble “ (gasp) “ I had to go through “ (gasp) “ to get those bloody things.”
Remus examined them as Sirius rose from his position. He came close and stood beside James, conjuring him a tall glass of water as he did so. James took it gratefully, and Remus’s eyes widened.
“How, in Merlin’s name, did you come across this?”
“We made the Marauders’ Map,” James answered once he had guzzled the water and wiped his chin with the back of his sleeve. “We have bewitched mirrors. That would have been a piece of cake had it not been for Snivellus interfering.”
“What did the git do this time?” Sirius inquired, his expression anxious for James to answer and give him a reason to cause more havoc to the Slytherin. His excuse of boredom was getting old.
“He poured erasable ink on both pieces of parchment once I was sure I had gotten them working. Snuck up behind me in the library, the snake. I had to recreate everything.”
“Still, it’s not like you to put things off for last minute,” Remus commented. “So what really took you so long?”
James stared at Remus for a few moments, gauging the situation, before finally lowering his head. “I was trying to think of something to say to her that I haven’t already.”
“Any success?” asked Peter.
“Nothing worthy of her,” he shook his head.
“With statements like that, it’s hard to believe you need my help.”
James gazed at Remus pleadingly. “You’re not backing out on me, are you?”
“No,” was all he said, though she secretly wished he really could leave and forget the entire situation.
“Good!” Sirius clapped his hands together and hauled James to his feet. “Then let’s get this bloody over with so we all can go to bed and laugh about it in the morning.”
“Thanks so much for the vote of confidence!” James smiled before turning to Remus. “You know how those work?”
Remus sighed. “You have one, I have the other. I write what you’re to say on mine, it’ll appear on yours, and you’ll read everything out loud. It’s not the Department of Mysteries, James.”
“Just checking, just checking,” James held up his hands in mock defeat. “Saves the trouble of explaining.”
“You needn’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” said Remus as he handed over one of the quills and parchment. “Just be sure you read the right words.”
Sirius cocked an eyebrow. “You sure you’re okay, Moony? You’re acting ””
“I’m fine.”
His screaming internal voice would have told otherwise, but none could hear it, so the subject was dropped. Silently, the four took their respected positions. Sirius and Peter leaned against the tower wall, watching both James and Remus intently as James picked a spot to ensure his visibility yet still leave things to the imagination, while Remus backed off into the shadows somewhere close to the first two. He needed to see everything, and from that vantage he could, especially James and the window where Lily was to be.
For a moment, a tiny second as time stopped, Remus found half of himself wondering whether it would be a bad thing if all did not go well that night. In that brief time, he imagined a life where things did go wrong, and where things went right between him and Lily. He envisioned Lily’s warm smile greeting him each day, her face as she soothingly brushed aside his bangs on the days when he had to lie on a hospital wing mattress, her eyes as they were filled with concern and assurance, and with love in the very back of them. He thought of a life outside Hogwarts, a small home deep within a forest, far from anywhere else yet close enough to town for Lily to live her own life. And lastly an auburn-haired boy ran across his vision, laughing joyously and without a care.
In that moment, in that treacherous moment, he contemplated sabotaging everything.
But it passed, and another thought came to him. Another vision. He saw the young boy, a wide and bright smile displayed across his face, suddenly become scared and panicked. And he saw a wolf-like creature lunge at the boy. And then everything went red, then black, and the vision was no more.
The treacherous moment passed, replaced with one of complete certainty. He knew what he had to do.
As time started to right itself, Remus watched sullenly as James raised his wand and cast a bolt of light up toward the Gryffindor girls’ dormitory, toward a specific window, toward a specific someone. A few minutes passed of tense silence, and he cast another one. This time they got a response.
“You don’t give up, do you?” Lily’s voice called from above.
Remus saw James’s gaze lower to the parchment, in mock humility, and he knew it was time.
‘For you, never.’
James repeated the words.
“And still I have to wonder why,” said Lily. “This had better be good, Potter, if it couldn’t wait until tomorrow.” Apparently she was still in a foul mood.
“Some things can’t wait,” James read. “There’s something I must tell you, and if I hold it back… the consequences will be dire.”
“Dire?”
“Yes.”
“How so?”
“Which answer would you prefer? The sanity of a young man being jeopardized or the fact that I’ve prepared for this night?”
“Both will do, I guess.”
“Will you allow me to speak to you?”
“You haven’t given me much choice, now have you?”
There was a tiny amount of chuckling, mostly from James, and Remus glanced around him to see Sirius and Peter stifle their own laughter. Or rather, their own snickers. The situation must’ve looked ridiculous to them, but James wanted to be romantic, and so they all had to put up with it.
“Lily, I’ve realized that there are times when desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes.” Remus found himself fighting for words. He could not seem to make them come as smoothly as they should have been, so the pauses between James’s reading were suspiciously long. Remus also had to fight to make his hand write what was in his heart when he knew that he was giving them away for another use. He was certain that he could never use these words for himself, he had given ownership of them away.
“Are these desperate times, James? In this sense?”
“Yes, they are…in this sense… Right now I don’t care about the rest of the world… only this one here and now. … I’m afraid… that if I don’t say something, I’ll lose you.”
“You will lose me? You see me everyday.”
James forced a chuckle, as his parchment told him to. “Seeing someone from a distance, even if they’re close by, and truly seeing someone are two completely different things. I see you every day, yes, but that’ll end once we leave. What then? I’m afraid I won’t see you after Hogwarts.”
“It’s a small country, James, you will probably see me. And knowing you, you’ll go out of your way.” Her head turned then and she grinned behind her. All of them realized then that she was not the only person awake and listening to their conversation.
“I would… more than likely… but before then I want you to know something,” read James.
Remus stopped then and searched for the appropriate words. Here was the hard part, the one that had to be treated with the utmost delicacy or else the entire thing would fail.
“Lily…” James paused for there was nothing else yet on the parchment. “How much do you think you mean to me?”
Lily laughed then, sighed audibly, and looked at James with a bemused expression on her face. “Don’t even start with that, I knew you were going to. Honestly, James, you’re beginning to bore me.”
There was another pause, this time a longer one. Remus panicked. He felt his blood freeze inside him and his entire body went rigid. Only now had it hit him how truly difficult this was, and how she could probably see through everything. As he stood there, wracking his brain for something, anything to say or write to make the situation better, James began to experience the same symptoms. The problem with his, Remus knew, was that his panic originated from his dependency on Remus and the possibility that everything was too overwhelming and that he had given up. Soon, the fear spread to the entire group as minutes of silence ticked by.
“What do I say?!” Remus whispered frantically to Sirius and Peter as James spun and silently asked the same question from yards away.
‘You know how I feel about her,’ the words formed on Remus’s parchment with James’s scrawl. ‘Help me out here. You’re better at putting words to things than I am.’
Remus stood as still as stone with Sirius and Peter both staring at him expectantly, quietly forcing him to write. He could feel their will pounding on him and was sure that if he completely let go, their thoughts alone would have been able to lift his arm and write for him. Regaining his sense of mind, and his sense of fear and uncertainty with it, he looked helplessly between a trusting James and the annoyed silhouette that represented Lily. Remus turned to his friends beside him, receiving only growing grins of support and a few thumbs held high in return.
Taking an enormous gulp and a shuddering breath, and feeling all the emotions he was trying to push away come bubbling to the surface, he looked up to the window once more before shakily beginning to write.
‘(Call her name.)’
“Lily?”
‘(After this statement, say what I write as I write it. No matter what it may say.)’
“Back then, are you?” she said. “I don’t know why you don’t just give up. Nothing you say will ””
Remus gulped. ‘I love you.’
“I love you, Lily.”
“I knew that already.”
“Remus!” Sirius hissed from beside him. “What’re you doing? That was the worst thing to say!”
“Get in there and say the right thing!” Peter added.
“Look, James, I ””
“I’ve always loved you,” James continued, ignoring the whispering from the sidelines and reading unquestioningly from the trembling parchment in his hands, glancing up from time to time as if he were giving a formal speech to an assembly of his peers and professors. As he read, his voice grew in strength, for Remus knew that what he wrote not only applied to him alone, but to them both, and therefore was more of a statement of fact rather than a shot in the dark.
“Ever since the day I first saw you,” James read, his tone altering to fit the words. “From the moment we met on the train to now, I have loved you. I always will.”
“If I recall correctly,” she answered just as strongly. “You used to call me names and pull my hair. I believe once you tried to light fire to it because you said the flame reminded you of its color and would therefore hardly be seen because they blended so perfectly.”
“… The obnoxious musings of a child in order to receive attention… I assure you.” James paused then, and Remus knew he had sent him a glare. Nevertheless, he continued to write, mechanically and as if his hand were moving of its own accord, everything he felt deep within his heart.
“I loved you even then… though I did not know the meaning of the word,” said James, his voice never betraying any irritation he may have felt.
She was silent for a few seconds while all those on the grass (and in the tower) held their breath, thinking that she had become bored and frustrated with their game and left.
“Your voice is different,” she said quietly and a brief second later, light shown down from her window and cast upon James. In what could only be Quidditch-born reflexes, he raised his arms and concealed his face from view, simultaneously hiding the parchment, turning as he did so and sending her conjured light bouncing off the Head boy badge on his chest as he moved. The reflected light vanished once his back was to her. Now all Lily saw of him was a dark figure.
“Why won’t you let me see you?” she asked slyly. “And why is your voice different? Perhaps you’re not who you say you are.”
Remus stood his ground, as did Sirius and Peter, fearful that any movement from them would alert her of their presence. His heart froze in mid-beat as his mind raced for an appropriate answer. James had altered his voice too greatly in order to fit the situation, something he should not have done.
“Believe me,” he wrote on the parchment, from which James deftly read. “I’m the only one who would admit my affection this way.”
“And your voice?”
“I’m… afraid . . .” James paused, allowing the words to scribble across the page. “I’m afraid that many sleepless nights at the thought of you have damaged my voice a bit, leaving it altered and at times unrecognizable…. Those nights have also left me with sensitivity to the light…. That is why I dare not look at you, for you far outshine the brightest star even in mid-day. And you are blinding in the night, putting her most brilliant stars to shame.”
“So you’re saying I’m better than Sirius?” she asked, a small indication of amusement in her voice.
“A thousand times over again.”
“He should be annoyed to hear that.”
“I am annoyed to hear that,” Remus heard Sirius growl. “James… you actually rea ””
Remus placed his hand over Sirius’s mouth for a moment, glaring at him as he did so.
“James,” Peter called out as loudly as he dared. “Keep it up. I think ”” The light went out. “I think you’re getting to her.”
Remus took in a deep breath of air and returned his attention to the task at hand, burying his own emotions deep within him self and lighting them ablaze, desperately trying to be rid of them so his friend, his brother, could be happy. His gaze once again rested upon the designated window and as he stared, his hand flew across the paper again.
“Lily?” James called, obediently reading the order from the paper.
“I’m still here.”
“I…” he paused again, almost as if the words terrified him and should he dare utter them, lightning would fall from the sky and strike him dead. “I… I want you to know that…” He took a very audible shuddering gasp for air, letting it out just as shakily as he took it in.
“Say it,” Remus gritted through his teeth, fighting back his own tears and simply wanting everything to be done and over with. “Say it, curse you, or you are on your own from here.”
Even if James could not hear them properly, the enormity of what Remus said weighed so heavily on the entire operation that the feel of it reached him in time. “I can’t breathe without you,” he said as he exhaled, almost adding effect to the statement.
Now it was Lily’s term to falter. “….W-what?”
“What?” Sirius and Peter asked as one, the thought of reading what Remus wrote before it was said never once previously dawning on them. Remus couldn’t tell what they did after that; in fact, everything around him faded away as he concentrated solely on not crying or screaming out in pain, but giving himself away completely without any one around him realizing.
“I can’t breathe without you,” said James. The words came with renewed strength, as if saying them the first time erased any doubt and unease that might’ve come. “Every day is not complete unless I see you. Every time I know you are to be somewhere, and you’re not, I feel… incomplete.”
“So now you’re stalking me?”
“No! Of course not. What I mean is…” James let out a natural frustrated sigh. “I…” and then he did what Remus did not expect. He went off on his own.
Remus watched as the parchment fluttered to the ground, soaking in the dew as it came to a rest. Wet spots adorned the parchment held within Remus’s hands and he, too, let it fall.
“I rely on your presence. Your smiles, your actions, even your words of contempt. All of it, all of you, I rely on. You’re a part of my day, Lily, a part of my night. I’m comfortable when I know you’re merely a few rooms away. I’m content with you walking down halls that are the entire length of the castle away from me. Just the fact that you’re there, that you’re safe, I’m okay. But… lately… even that is not enough. I’ve had my fill and I’m now addicted.”
Silence filled the night air and everyone excluded the two in conversation took a gulp.
“Addicted?” Lily inquired flatly.
“Yes. You don’t know how special you are, Lily. How rare. Out of all the girls in Hogwarts, in the whole of Britain, I would want for none other. You’re one of a kind… and you’re the only one worth caring so much for. I would do anything to please you. Even if…” he paused. Remus could feel the tension in James’s throat. He knew the sensation all too well and recognized it instantly.
“Even if…” he tried to continue, and Remus found himself mouthing the words, including the ones he knew were to come.
“Even if… it means… I should disappear.”
“What?”
“If you want me gone… if you want me out of your life… if you never want to know of me or hear of me ever again… I would do that… for you.”
“James…”
“If that’s what it took to prove to you… that I love you…. that everything I say is true… and always will be true… If that is what it took....” His voice trailed off then and did not return.
Again silence reigned over the evening, the only sound coming from a slight breeze. Clouds parted and sent patches of moonlight traveling across the lawn, but none of it touched the party. None of it reached the eyes of Remus; nor could they, for his eyes were squeezed shut and full of tears. His fists were in balls and his nails dug deep into his skin, sending warm trickles of blood inching their way down his hands before slowly dripping to the ground. He didn’t feel the pain, he was beyond it. He grew numb from his writhing internal agony, especially once the words escaped James’s mouth. His own words, and not Remus’s.
It was a long time before either of them spoke again.
“Did you mean it?” Her voice was soft and shaky, and Remus knew she was walking a fine line between two answers. All James had to do was seal the deal.
“Of course I meant it, Lily. Every word, every breath used, every heartbeat that gave me life and time to say it all, it was for you and you alone. I love you.”
Remus felt his knees begin to buckle and a cry rising within his throat, but he said and did nothing. He simply stood there, waiting.
“But James… Everything you’ve done before now, even this, how can I ignore it?”
“Lily, listen to me. I’ve tried to make up for all my mistakes, but that doesn’t matter now. All that matters to me is this night and your answer. I’ve kept this bottled up inside for so long that should I hold it for another day, I’m sure to burst. Not a day passes that I don’t regret doing all those things to make you angry or annoyed with me. If all this night was good for was to apologize to you, proclaim the truth, and bid you a final goodbye, then so be it. I have told you all I can put into words. I love you.”
“Oh, James…”
That was all he needed. James conjured his broom to his side and Remus watched, crestfallen, as he flew up towards the dorm windows, towards his angel; their angel. He had poured all his heart out and his best friend won her instead, rising above and adding to everything to make it better. She had fallen for the words, the emotion held within them, not the wizard he first portrayed but knew to be true. Yet there she was, undoubtedly kissing James this very instant; James and not him. All the while, Sirius and Peter, both of whom had been grinning their bloody heads off during the entire spectacle, never even noticed as Remus stalked away alone, forgotten, and unloved.
He did not get very far, as his legs had slowly turned to lead beneath him. He stood, barely ten feet from where he began, his eyes watering the roots that planted him firmly to the ground. Reaching up with the back of his long sleeve, one slow and pitiful swipe rid him of the cold and drying tears that refused to cease appearing. He had lost.
Very quickly thereafter, in the form of a misguided apology and gesture of condolence, the sky finally parted enough for a bright white light to smile down upon him. At that same time, Sirius came to his senses and finally took notice of Remus’s leave. He became concerned instantly, glancing about to find him. Find him he did, as did James and Peter when the same light caught their eyes. It was then, they realized, that they had all forgotten.