(Continuing my efforts to break out of my writer's block...sad Remus & Lily content)
It's hard, seeing someone you love—the first person you ever loved—in pain. He wasn't used to it, not like Lily was. She saw him in misery every month, visited him in the Hospital Wing with a sack of sweets and a thermos of heavily honeyed tea for his scream-raw throat. But Lily never let her hurt show, not when Snape betrayed her confidence, not when people called her names, not when Death Eaters fired off lethal curses around her.
But she's in his arms now, broken, sobbing. It's not quiet. It's loud and gasping and a deep, unending pain, and Remus knows it. Knows it so keenly, he can barely stand to be here with her. But he must. He will. No one can bear this alone. Remus had Sirius. Lily normally has James. But they're on a Mission, and even the news of his wife's mother dying was not reason enough for Dumbledore to bring James home early.
Remus has long since started to see the heartlessness behind their general. Perhaps it's necessary. Perhaps it's what they need to do to win against a ruthless, genocidal maniac. Or perhaps he's just too focused on the mechanics and not the cogs making it run.
His shirt is soaked with salty tears, and Remus would do anything to lessen her pain. He gathers Lily closer, kisses the top of her head, her forehead, her cheeks, and briefly, chastely, her lips. She tastes like salty tears, too. It's not sexual. It's just…comfort. She sighs against his mouth and buries her face into his neck after a few seconds, crying silently now save for a hiccup or two.
Remus rubs her back in soothing circles, though it seems pointless. He can't do anything to help. A cheering charm would only force laughter and a smile, but her heart would still be breaking behind it, a hollow, jagged mockery of the true emotion.
"What am I supposed to do?" she whispers when the sun has gone down and the moon rises, fat and heavy in the sky. It's not full, but close, and Remus hopes Sirius will make it back before then. Make it back at all. Lily's voice is frail and torn, hoarse from her crying. Her scent is sour, misery and anguish and fear, but Remus doesn't shy away from it, overwhelming as it is.
"I don't really have an answer for you, love," Remus admits. His mother died a few months ago and he still wakes up with wet, tear-streaked cheeks. He still thinks about visiting her in Dover, but remembers she's buried in the neighboring town as he's pulling on his coat. And his dad, well…he's fucked off to Merlin knows where. Left behind an absolute mess in the house, vanished into thin air. Maybe he's dead, like Lily's dad. Maybe he's just trying to disappear. Remus wants to, sometimes. Just get up and run and run, outrun the horrors that plague him.
They've lost so much this year. Friends, family, sleep, innocence. Remus has committed sins he can't even tell Sirius about, and the knowledge of that haunts him like a ghost.
Lily is quiet for a long time, but Remus senses she has something she wants to say. "Your dad…" She clears her throat and looks up at Remus, her fair eyelashes clumped together, cheeks wet. "His library, he-"
"Lily." Remus cuts her off with a sharp shake of his head. "No, it's not-"
"It's not fair! I don't- I won't…I wouldn't do anything, I just… I just want to know if it's possible."
Remus sighs and rests his chin on her head. "It's possible." He'd read through everything. The loose leaves of parchment scattered around his dad's library that spoke of reanimation, resurrection. Necromancy. The theory was sound. Remus immediately checked that his mother's remains were still undisturbed after, and was relieved that his dad hadn't gone through with it. Or hadn't yet.
"Can I just-" Lily bites her lower lip and pulls back to look up at him again. "Please? I just… to pretend. Just for a little while. That I could…that she could be here."
Remus closes his eyes, fighting the drowning pull of her grief. He's never been good at saying no to her, and has been even more rubbish at denying the allure of the darker magics. They both share that, the appreciation for the mysterious, the forbidden. Maybe it's how they were raised. Maybe it's the dark creature in Remus. Who's to say.
"... Alright. Get your coat. I'll show you everything."
