The Shoebox Project

Part Two: Six Records, Three Photographs and Two Memories, '75

Remus can tell when the clouds knit together that the storm is a Siriusbinger.

A Siriusbinger, for those unused to Remus' world, is like a harbinger, only far more dangerous, loud, and unsubtle.It's a shift in the weather, a change of humidity, a darkening or even brightening of the sky, or a new direction of the winds which bears with it a certain smell, imperceptible to most noses, but something Remus has long since trained himself to recognize. In his room, book propped open on his bent knees, hair uncombed, Remus pauses with a halfway bite into his sandwich. He strains to look out the window. Somewhere just beyond his reach is a rumble of thunder, low beneath the thick clouds but rolling closer, louder. The wind is shaking through the trees. The end-of-summer heat has a chill edge to it that signals rain. Remus knows that any sensible young man in his position
would roll down the window and lock the shutters, but the storm isn't a Siriusbinger for any one of those sensible young men.

Remus finishes his bite of the sandwich, chews exactly twenty-two times, and swallows.

The clouds break. He lifts his nose to the smell of rain, which he likes, and listens for the rumble of a motor -- more
distant than thunder, and harder to hear, but there, unless his instincts have failed him. It's only a simple matter of
time.

***

Sirius leans in close over the handlebars, the rain-thick wind whipping his hair into ropes around his face. They were twenty miles from the Welsh coast when the rain started, at the time warm and gentle, drumming gently on Sirius's skull and making round, comical sounds on James's helmet; now the rain roars around them in glassy sheets, and thunder rips the sky out magnificently on all sides of them, and they are so bone-soaked they almost can't tell they're wet anymore.

He spits out water and grins ferociously into the mouth of the storm, gunning the bike into an even higher gear.James, behind him, lets out a tiny yip of muffled horror and tightens his grip on Sirius's stomach. If it were anyone else behind him Sirius might be more cautious, but it's a summer's end storm and this is James with his knees digging into Sirius's hips and they haven't seen Remus in months, and it would be pointless to wait five extra minutes and save their hypothetical necks. Ahead of him, gray through the wild lines of rain, he can almost make out the crooked little shadow of Remus' house, pinned against the edge of its little village like a fly on paper, and he thinks of how Remus will yell at them when he sees them. Well, he won't yell exactly; Remus never yells. But he'll get that look on his face like the two sides of his mouth are trying to squirm in opposite directions, that look he gets when he's trying to be serious and wanting to laugh, and he'll give them some very pointed words; and even so he will have to turn around, as he always does, as if to keep Sirius from seeing that warm, incongruous, goofy smile breaking out over his face.

As they draw closer Sirius squints through the lashes of rain and sees, suddenly, like a wink, the small gray figure lean up in the yellow window; and he whoops and waves and swoops in to him.

***

The easy answer is: Sirius Black is trying to kill him. But when, Remus admits, isn't Sirius Black trying to kill him?
There was the time Sirius tricked him up onto a broomstick and then sent him whizzing off, utterly alone, into the
afternoon, so that he lost all his lunch and half his breakfast when James finally rescued him. There was the time
Sirius decided it would be a grand idea to jump out at Remus halfway through Remedial Potions, just as Remus was adding the key ingredient, causing the cauldron to explode, singing Remus' eyebrows off so he looked like some sort of albino rat waiting for them to grow back in. There was the time Remus doesn't think about, which was
worse than killing, which doesn't factor in to any of his equations -- a variable he calmly and methodically erases from each and every list his life has to offer. And now there's this time, Sirius swooping toward his small, hapless,
helpless bedroom window, gutting motor oil and rain onto his mother's pristine curtains, and nearly smashing the window frame into the comic shape of a motorbike: big and brassy and made up of smooth circle lines, admittedly
attractive, if you're into that sort of thing.