trans_9 | [Closed][Bendy timed to shortly after the podpop before last]

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[Closed][Bendy timed to shortly after the podpop before last]

It hadn’t been long since Sirius had woken from podsleep. He had gone exploring but somehow he kept coming back to hydroponics. It was so different from the rest of the ship. He’d heard that the entire ship was alive but it felt smothering, not like it was here where everything was vibrant and colorful. Here he felt truly free.

Sirius sat against a tree. His legs ached. He had spent too long in Azkaban (although apparently not as long as he should have). His muscles had not withered completely but he was still weak. For now it was enough to rest here and gaze at his surroundings, so unlike the cell he’d left behind.

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Sirius wasn't the only wizard who favored Hydroponics. Though Lupin was surely visible to Sirius before the other way around, owing to the fine robes that clothier had so kindly made him, Lupin spotted him after just a few moments.

How odd, he thought, as he considered his friend. Not the Sirius he had seen so recently, and yet closer to the Sirius he somehow expected to see. All those years had passed without his old friend's image changing, in Lupin's mind.

What an odd path their lives had taken down.

Without ado, Lupin walked towards the tree, with the intent of joining Sirius beneath it.

"Remus." Sirius tried to smile but the truth was as happy as he was to see his old friend he was afraid.

There was so much to explain, so much to apologize for. James and Lily were dead because Sirius had thought Remus was the spy. It was his fault that Harry was an orphan. It was his fault that Remus had spent all these years alone. Sirius wondered how many lines on that familiar face were because of him.

"I can't- I can't tell you how sorry I am."

Lucky, then, that Sirius hadn't seen him a year or two ago, before Hogwarts and this ship. He'd looked a fair sight worse. But for now... under those lines, Lupin had never looked better. Not even in their glory days at Hogwarts. Amazing what not going through an agonizing transformation on a monthly basis could do for a man.

He held up a hand as he sat down, smiling over it. "There is nothing to be sorry for. Not for me. I was a fool too... we all were."

Sirius couldn't see past the lines yet. Something of Azkaban still lingered inside of him. For now he saw what he felt: pain and misery.

Sirius knew that was what Remus would say. Harry also told him there was nothing to forgive. Yet Sirius didn't think he could ever forgive himself. He couldn't argue with Harry, not when the boy still blamed himself for Sirius's death. Remus, on the other hand, had been Sirius's friend. There was a time they'd known each other inside and out and if that was ever going to happen again Sirius had to make him understand.

"There's everything to be sorry for. I talked James into switching. If it had been me they never would have- If we were all fools then I was the worst."

"No, Sirius," he said, quietly but with conviction, the sort of voice he should have used as a prelate, but had finally learned something of as a professor. "The worst fool of us all was the one who threw away our friendship out of cowardice. Blame Wormtail, not yourself. I would have, I do, forgive you for not trusting me. I know what I am," he said, looking down at his hands with a wry smile, "I never pretended otherwise, not that I could have. But if Peter had kept the secret as faithfully as you or I would have..."

Their friendship would have triumphed, no matter how foolish any of them had been. Lupin believed that. He had been a fool himself, to doubt Sirius all these years, no matter what the evidence.

Sirius flinched at the mention of Pettigrew's name. But after Remus finished speaking he put his hand on his old friend's shoulder.

"I know what you are. You're one of the best friends I ever had, you and James and I-" He had repaid them both so poorly. "I'm sorry I couldn't see it then."

"The war made fools of us all." He reached out his own hand to Sirius's shoulder in turn. "All England, I think. Fear and paranoia and mistrust, and we weren't so old. But we have a chance to forgive and make amends, and I do forgive you. Don't let it haunt you, it's the past." He squeezed Sirius's shoulder, then, after a moment.

"It's the past for you, Remus, but not for me." He looked at Remus as if seeing him for the first time. "How long has it been for you?"

"Actually, well..." The question gave him a chance to lead more gracefully into the events in the Shrieking Shack, and he seized it hastily. "Fourteen years. Less, really, Harry's fourteenth birthday was close on its way."

"Fourteen..." Sirius repeated slowly. "What happened?" He was afraid to ask outright how many of those years was spent in Azkaban. It was a self centered question, in any case. So much had happened to everyone else.

"I will probably confuse us both telling you this, because you're in this story quite a bit," he said, settling himself down against the tree a little more. "You'd just escaped from Azkaban, and at the same time, Professor Dumbledore asked me to take the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Out of a lack of other options, but still very flattering, and you can imagine I was happy to accept. That... was also when I met Harry for the first time." He trailed off, reflectively.

"Escaped from Azkaban?" Of course. He should have realized it. That was why Cedric still thought he was a criminal. His name hadn't been cleared and he hadn't been freed. He would have had to do it himself.

"Bloody hell, Moony. I am brilliant." He smiled but the core of his voice was still hollow. "But you teach at Hogwarts? That's great. The position isn't cursed any more?" Not that that hypothesis had ever been confirmed but when the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher's office had been a revolving door ever since he could remember it was a solid guess.

"Taught. I resigned, Sirius," he said, with sadness but no real regret. "I could have seriously injured a student. We took precautions, I drank a potion that kept me from losing my mind when I changed, but even so, I missed a dose and nearly killed Harry and his friends. And spoiled any number of things." There was the regret and self-recrimination, quiet and subdued though they might be.

Sirius's eyebrows went up.

"There's a story behind that. What is it?"

Remus had always been careful about his transformations, at least when Sirius and James weren't goading him into running around like idiots. He couldn't believe that Remus would have ever put himself in that position where he could hurt Harry of all people.

"You escaped Azkaban because you'd seen a picture. Of Harry's friend Ronald Weasley, or more particularly, Ron's pet rat Scabbers. Who you recognized the moment you saw him," Lupin said darkly. "What was it you'd told me... He blew up the street you found him on, and went so far as to leave behind his own finger to frame you in his murder?"

"Peter?" Sirius stammered. "He was some boy's pet?" No, worse than that, he was the pet of one of Harry's friends. Now he was starting to see what had happened, why he had been driven to escape.

"He was at Hogwarts?"

"That was what you said in your cell at Azkaban, more than once," Lupin said with some wry humor, "and Fudge himself was convinced that you meant Harry. The greatest supporter of Voldemort, escaping to finish the Boy Who Lived. He tipped off the Muggles about you, in terms they could understand, that's how afraid they all were. The Ministry even stationed dementors around Hogwarts."

He could find some amusement in it, in retrospect, though the fact that he was sitting here telling a Sirius who had never done these things what had happened -- what he had done, or would do, however that would play out -- helped lighten the mood of what really was a solemn matter. He couldn't help but think, looking at his younger friend, that Sirius might have really enjoyed causing such a stir, if it hadn't been for such grim reasons.

Sirius snorted. "Voldemort's greatest supporter? I shouldn't be surprised with the way they treated me." A life time in Azkaban with no trial.

Oh, it was comforting to hear how brilliant he was. He always liked to hear that. But he wouldn't be celebrating this.

"The Dementors didn't stop me, did they?" As terrifying as the mere thought of them was, Sirius knew that they wouldn't have stopped him from trying to get to Pettigrew. He didn't know if anything would.

"They did not, not for the longest time in any case. The minds of animals are much less keen to them than those of wizards... and of all things, you had the help of a cat who'd sniffed out Wormtail for who he really was. Though you did very little to help your case, I might add. Slashing the Fat Lady, honestly, Sirius." Again, the sheer remoteness of the situation -- here on this alien ship, talking to a Sirius who had never done that deed -- made the whole story more amusing than it should have been.

Oh yes, it was sounding rather amusing. In fact Sirius couldn't help himself from making a joke.

"The Fat Lady? Did I cut off any pounds? She should thank me for that."

"You really went more for the horizontal," he said, miming the slash of a knife. He shouldn't have been joking about this, it really was serious, but... even after all these years he just couldn't shake that effect Sirius (and James) had on him, to quiet that sensible part of his brain. "And she wouldn't come back to work till they fired Sir Cadogan and hired a pair of trolls to guard her. Which chain of events put a complete and total end to my nostalgia for the tower, I might add."

"That must have been a sight." After a moment Sirius's smile faded. The jokes were just a distraction from what he really needed to know.

"Did I get him?"

And there it was. The question he knew had been coming, which meant the answer he had been dreading.

Lupin folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them as if they were fascinating beyond measure. Words took a moment to come.

"You dragged him -- Ron -- into the Shrieking Shack. Peter was with him, changed. I'd been watching our map, it showed everything, and when I saw all that I came at a run. Harry and Hermione were there, too. We explained everything, we forced Peter to change back, and they believed us. We --"

He didn't want to say we should have killed him right there, because even though that would have changed everything, Harry had been right. "Harry told us... and I think he is right in this, Sirius, that James wouldn't have want us to become murderers, not for Peter. We agreed to take him back, to prove your innocence..."

He had skipped over a number of things in this explanation, glossed over others, but details such as Ron's injury or even Severus's presence were trivial compared to what he was about to say. He looked back up at Sirius, the picture of misery. "It was a full moon that night, Sirius. I had forgotten to take my potion. When we left the tunnel to the Shack..."

"He got away?"

Sirius didn't know what this potion was. They must have made some discoveries while he had been in prison but right now that wasn't his concern. Pettigrew escaped.

"Was anyone hurt? Harry was fine when I saw him." And he hadn't mentioned any of this.

Peter got away after everything. After Sirius had been so close to killing him Peter had escaped a second time.

Lupin looked down again, heaving a mighty sigh. "You interposed yourself, of course. But Peter changed while we were busy, and of course out there in the open, catching a rat..." He shrugged bleakly. "You were captured, but... Harry and Hermoine rescued you, with a hippogriff of Hagrid's that was also to be unfairly executed. So, you were free, and Dumbledore knows the truth now. What happened after that, well, you'd be best to ask Harry about that. He's older than I knew him, the same way I'm older than you knew me. He'd be able to tell you more, no doubt."

Meaningless words, mostly, spoken just to keep the conversation going; afraid that if he stopped, he would have to endure Sirius's anger.

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[Closed][Bendy timed to shortly after the podpop before last]

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...why would you post when I never hit post comment?!

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