Salt and Pepper Fest: Being Not Normal
Mar. 11th, 2022 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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hp_goldenageTitle: Being Not Normal
Author:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
PaulaMcG
Characters/Pairings: Argus Filch/the Fat Lady, Argus Filch/Albus Dumbledore, Argus Filch & Mrs Norris, Argus Filch & Remus Lupin, Remus Lupin/Sirius Black
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,000
Content: PoA missing scenes/retelling, Portraits, Late-life romance, Asexuality spectrum
Summary: Argus has lived to mature years before he realises that he lacks something else besides magic. There's still more for him to learn about rats and pranksters, about restoring paintings, and about himself.
A/N: Thank you for the beta, j! Thank you for the fest, mods!
Read on AO3 or below:
This afternoon Mrs Norris caught three mice and a rat.
I confiscated only a few Dungbombs (nothing more interesting). My report has now been completed too easily, too early.
I don't want to return to the corridors until after the curfew. Better do my prowling at night. More useful and rewarding: catching rulebreakers. Or else peaceful, just a short round whenever I need it so as to pass my time and to get sleepy. My cat companion is naturally active when it's dark, and I often struggle to fall asleep.
Or I keep waking up. Must be the age... what I feel in my knees, too: can't go on climbing staircases for hours on end. I hear that Muggles retire before they turn seventy, and here I am, and I can only hope there's a bit of magic in me to help me keep going.
So here I was at my desk, staring at the filing cabinet and at the unused chains hanging from the ceiling, and trying to remember some pinnacles in my long career. That's when my sweet leaped up to my lap. I thought fondly of the kind pair of witches, Pomona and Poppy, who comforted me last year and finally revived her.
And I thought: why not pick another roll of parchment and write a report on her behalf, too.
She ate the first mouse. Showed it to me first, of course. The other two she played with only a bit, didn't hurt them much. We took them to Minerva. She can nurse them back to full health. Uses them for Transfiguration exercises, and takes care that they suffer no permanent harm.
I'm not sorry I can never do that kind of magic. They call it animate to inanimate. I find it revolting. Particularly when I catch a student practising and half failing. No, I'm not writing about... That... Gives me nausea. A student can deserve a harsh punishment, but an innocent animal... No.
Minerva, she's strict as should be, and fair. Another witch I feel comfortable around. Also because I've got reason to believe that she, Poppy's first partner, will never look at me or any man with expectations of... intimacy.
She'd be happy about a rat, too, I thought as soon as I came to Mrs Norris and noticed that she had not cornered an unruly brat, but had a handsome animal under her paws. But then she lets me take the prey in my hands, and...
I can see it's a pet. A normal rat. (Normal meaning magical, of course.) Bigger than mere mundane rats.
A student's parents must have paid a lot for it, I'm thinking as I'm caressing its back. When I look at it more closely, I grasp I've seen it before. It's got these pink round ears and small watery eyes of an unusual colour for a rat: blue eyes. It's shaking, and it looks pathetic for a magical creature. It's got bald patches in its greying fur. Do I recognise... just myself in it? No, there's the defective front paw: a toe missing. I remember this rat, in a better condition, mind, from... A couple of years ago?
Yes, that was it! Now I knew it belonged to the Gryffindor pranksters, the ginger twins, or their brother.
I was happy to take it back to the Gryffindor Tower, where it belongs.
The portrait hole's always open for me if I need that. Not that I often have a reason to look into the common room, let alone enter. I prefer the entrance closed, the pretty painting fully visible and the lady idle and calm, and I always hope no students will come or go when I'm passing by and I stop for a polite conversation.
Today I had the big old rat in my hands.
"Yes, he belongs here. One of my Gryffindors," she said.
She and I have more in common than I've dared hope. She respects all innocent creatures.
Maybe she also realised the same about me today.
My lady smiled at me.
Late last night my sweet guided me to a bunch of troublemakers.
I still sometimes play with the thought that the uncanny connection between Mrs Norris and me is based on some magic also in me. Something in my bones, if not my mind, seems to respond to her... senses? When I've found myself hurrying to a specific place, it usually turns out she's seen or heard or smelled something suspicious. There have been some occasions when I spot nobody but end up following perhaps a cold trail with Mrs Norris, and more often than not it leads to the Gryffindor Tower.
Now that I think about it... I never catch the worst pair of Gryffindors unawares. Gred and Forge Weasley, yes, that's how they proudly surrender their names whenever they are openly selling questionable sweets in the middle of the Entrance Hall, or setting a trap...
Last night the trap was for Lupin, just outside the door to his rooms, and the pranksters were six Slytherins. I heard them when my legs had persistently carried me up the staircase and I was creeping along the corridor, trying not to wheeze.
"A Stripping Trap," the wee one says in his child's voice and arrogant tone, unmistakably a Malfoy's. "For the pauper prof," he says.
I don't bother to declare that he and the five big blokes – the two bulky ones, and three taller ones, perhaps fifth-years – are in trouble. And my sweet doesn't bounce on them. She enjoys approaching stealthily, slipping under the hems of the robes, and perhaps she finds bare legs to brush her graceful, sleek body and long, bushy tail against, as... The wee one lets out a satisfyingly shrill yelp.
Lupin opens his door, and he hardly looks like a respectable wizard, let alone a professor, in his tattered Muggle sleepwear. But he flicks a wand, obviously undoing the trap jinx easily, without a spoken incantation.
"Thank you, Argus... Mrs Norris," he says. "I can take it from here."
We retreated. However, after we heard Lupin just take off some House points and send the pure-blood brats to bed, we escorted them all the way to their dungeon dormitory, fortunately not too far from our rooms.
My sweet has nothing against Lupin. We know what he is. That makes him rather more appealing to us. There's no need ever to fear him. Severus's potion takes care of that.
The animal in Lupin fascinates us. That magic in him. I'd say he is more – or better – than normal. Still, he's been treated as if he were less – like me. And he treats me, too, with respect. I've felt tempted to try and make friends.
But I'm wary because of what happened with Albus. That was fifteen years ago, and I'd rather not remember... I must, because he taught me what more is wrong about me. Lupin might have been a less harsh teacher, but I don't need one of any kind now. I've learnt why I can't have a lover. Don't have what it takes.
How stupid must one be to live to mature years without figuring it out! Then again... how could one comprehend a feeling one never feels?
It was natural to assume that what others felt in their romances and lovemaking was the same as I felt and would feel one day when finally... That was surely no matter of magic, and I knew of no way of being not normal in that respect. I was just shy and, even years and years after coming of age, inexperienced because I'd never had school mates, not having been invited to Hogwarts... Until the Headmaster came to talk to our neighbours.
That was in the late '60s, and I was a confirmed bachelor. I still lived in my parents' house. Had a separate wing I'd built, visible to Muggles, and did odd jobs for them, and...
Yes, it was summer 1969, and I was 45, when Albus Dumbledore arrived to explain to a family that their daughter was a witch. I knew she was. I'd seen her doll dance with her.
There I am, doing a painting job on these neighbours' back porch. Mixing paints, I've just started to get the dizzy feeling I enjoy, and my paintbrush is leaping along the railing in bold strokes, guided by my deft hand, my strong arm. Manual labour has made me muscular and still keeps me fit. And at that moment I'm actually aware of some self-confidence, even pride in what a looker I am with my fashionable sideburns, and my long hair pulled to a ponytail.
That's when I see him materialise next to an appletree, and I recognise him immediately. As I greet him politely by his name, he turns fully towards me and starts to walk closer, tilting his head. He looks more enchanting than in his Chocolate Frog card. Not only looks.
I don't only see the twinkle in his eyes, and the glint of silver and copper in his hair and beard, and his extravagant periwinkle robes. There is a deliciousness about him, more alluring than the incense I've smelled at another, hippie neighbour's house. I feel immediate fondness for him, like for no one before except my family and – confusingly, alarmingly – the eleven-year-old witch.
Because, due to shame, my parents have isolated me from the wizarding society, I've had no chance to encounter other wizards or witches. I soon realise that what I'm sensing now – what I find so captivating – is magic.
But I can't understand what this famous warlock, in turn, sees or otherwise senses in me. Why, having concluded that I'm a Squib, he asks at once if I want to work at Hogwarts.
I couldn't possibly say no, and I've got no regrets. Since that August, I've lived here, surrounded by creatures who have magic.
My bond with Mrs Norris is something I didn't dare hope for, and I must be grateful. But I'm glad I don't have to thank Albus, who's never admitted that he had anything to do with a new kitten starting to follow me soon after he crushed my hopes for a human partner.
Employing me didn't make much sense. I soon learnt that the house-elves – admirable, enviable creatures – had superior magic for handling any caretaker's duties. When I pointed that out, I got a flippant answer.
"Yes, house-elves master art, too, and you can restore the paintings with them. But they don't want to be seen most of the time when they perform their tasks," the headmaster said. "I want the students to see you – just the right type: a hermit, grim, scary – keeping an eye on them. And to see you toiling..."
He winked, and I thought he wanted me as a warning: a living sign of what kind of prospects those not qualified in magic had.
Until, several years later, one night he caught me having just caught a pair of teenage wizards caressing each other. That's when he revealed that he'd brought me here because he wanted to watch me, maybe more than watch... "My type," he said about me, assuming I was happily surprised.
He must have considered how much he wanted... or maybe he'd been busy with something else, perhaps someone else. He found it amusing that he'd picked me like that from a Muggle neighbour's porch, on a whim.
Now when he was curious to try an alternative to a powerful wizard as a lover, he had suitably just got confirmation for what he'd already sensed in my amorous gaze on that summer day when we first met. My visible enjoyment in watching young Black and Lupin left no doubt, he said, that I, too, was into wizards.
Back then I still had some hope that he was right.
I'd held hands with some witches, even been kissed by one in Puddifoot's and by another one in the Hog's Head. The first time, after my lips had rested for a beautiful moment on an enchanting woman's lips and I'd inhaled her magical breath, she stared at me expectantly for a moment, then blushed and started talking about her plans to move to London. The second witch took me to a room upstairs and undressed me.
Now Dumbledore does the same.
"Albus, say Albus," says he.
And the magic embracing me is intoxicating. I'm naked in front of him, and as hard as when I read the Quibbler in bed and choose to stare at moving pictures of magical folk in their wizarding finery, and imagine someone loving me.
But then he grabs me, and I cringe. He brushes my chest with his fingertips, and I flinch, ticklish. He kisses me, and pushes his tongue into my mouth, and I finally realise I'm supposed to do something, but I don't feel like...
I don't feel what I should. What normal people do, what even other Squibs do.
Albus suggests that perhaps Squibs don't – perhaps they are all frigid like me. He doesn't know quite everything, hasn't cared to find out about Squibs.
In the Hog's Head I've heard Figg boast and describe how his Squib wife is insatiable. I don't even enjoy listening to such talk.
Why I was interested in spying on Black and Lupin was because at first one of those two boys had clearly struggled to enjoy the intimacy.
I'd first seen them holding hands when they were fifth-years, and one had shivered when the other had drawn a finger along the line of his eyebrow and over his cheek, down to chin. That time when Albus startled me by whispering in my ear was a year later, after the debacle of Black tricking both Lupin and Snape, whom they had kept bullying, to the dangerous Willow, and Lupin getting badly hurt. I was excited to see these Gryffindors as friends again, and more than friends, actually kissing each other on the mouth.
In their final year that pair and the other two Gryffindor pranksters were hard to catch red-handed, even though my darling kitten seemed to mysteriously help me find other rulebreakers.
But one June evening, when the corridors were almost deserted...
When I'm all wistful, looking out a window at the young people milling around the grounds in merry company, I sense the peculiar urge in my feet to take me up to a third-floor corridor. I can hear Black and Lupin before I see them, because they're standing behind a statue, the one of a humpbacked witch.
"You've learnt so well," one says.
"You've taught me so well," says the other. "Made me believe it's been hard just because of what was done to me by... Fuck them!"
And the first one laughs. "No, I'll fuck you. One day when we've healed each other well enough and you want me to."
And I lose my last hope, because no wrongs like that were done to me. I was never broken by anyone. I'm not broken in a way that could be fixed.
I can't resist taking a step closer, and I see the enviable eighteen-year old lovers in a tight embrace. At the moment when they notice me, I turn my eyes down – and spot the piece of parchment on the floor.
As a snatch it, I think I see some words on it and my attention is caught by what looks like my name.
"Mischief managed!"
The two of them said it in a duet.
Another day with little to report so far.
It's become easier to write here about the recent events and about the long-ago ones, too. Perhaps I can be good with words. Not in the way witches and wizards use words for their magic, but still...
After checking that the students leaving for Hogsmeade had permission from their parents, I hoped to get a chance for a longer uninterrupted chat with my fair lady. But she was in a slumber.
"Happy Halloween," I said, and I felt like touching the canvas where her pretty hand was resting and wrinkling the rosy silk of her dress, as if I could have smoothed its folds, revelling in its cool, slick softness.
She mumbled something about the Potter boy waking her up twice, and started snoring.
Potter! I didn't see him again on my way down, and he had replied that he was doing nothing. But he's like his father, never up to nothing.
Now that I think about it, old memories surface and I remember seeing that lauded James Potter – a champion Chaser, the Head Boy, and a saviour for his friend and for the boy he bullied – hurrying to point his wand on a piece of parchment, not unlike the one I confiscated just before he finished school. And did I once or twice spot him also with a fat rat at his feet? What is it with pranksters and pet rats?
In any case, when the students return, there will be forbidden items to confiscate, some morbid Halloween-themed ones, but probably nothing I haven't seen before, nothing to place in the particular drawer my eyes keep turning to as I sit here, petting my sweet, who hasn't caught anything spectacular today, either.
Confiscated and Highly Dangerous. It's mainly items that I find suspicious because the magic I've sensed in them is invisible to me. There's no reason for me to look at them.
I've considered now returning that piece of parchment which once only flashed its mischievous words to me before turning blank. I might be rewarded with an explanation of what it is.
But perhaps that would be far from a considerate and wise step towards a friendship. Lupin will probably not be happy to be reminded that I know how intimately close he was with the wizard who later turned into a traitor and a murderer. And I must avoid giving the wrong impression that I want sex with him. Albus certainly wasn't considerate, inviting Lupin to teach this year, when we all fear the escaped prisoner, and for Lupin it must be worse than for anyone else.
He arrived at breakfast late this morning. Arrived in any case, perhaps because Albus had told him to appear as normal as possible. Or because he needed to eat.
That's what he looked like, so haggard, although he's fattened up a bit in his two months here. Of course, I wasn't surprised.
This year the whole staff pay attention to the phases of the moon and we're supposed to help him hide from the students that he's a werewolf. I reckon in the '70s only Albus and Poppy knew.
Anyway, there I am in the emptying Great Hall, mopping up some spilled pumpkin juice, when Lupin walks in slowly, stiffly, and greets the students and me with simple hellos, not with Happy Halloween. He's definitely not happy, but he succeeds in smiling.
The smile widens when he reaches his usual seat and notices the owl who's waited for him patiently, because the parcel is addressed to Professor R. J. Lupin, the staff table, the Great Hall, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He tears his toast – deplorably cold, for sure – in half and, after handing one piece to the owl and stuffing his mouth with the other, opens the parcel.
I can't repress my curiosity. Pushing the mop in front of me, I step closer and crane my neck.
He doesn't mind, on the contrary. "Look," he says.
And I look into his tired and gleaming amber-coloured eyes before admiring the set of self-cleaning hogshair paint brushes of finest quality.
The two of us do have an interest – more, a passion – in common. He, too, loves paintings.
And he also paints. "Yes," he says. "Did you not remember?"
Yes, I must have seen the pale boy working on a portrait of my kitten. With watercolours? And now he squanders his salary on art equipment and materials while he still dresses like a mendicant.
Landscapes, that's what he paints now. But perhaps he'd like to take a tour and examine the treasures on the castle walls with me, and to share thoughts about portraiture, too. As we're trapped in this ominous atmosphere and in our solitudes, perhaps something like that could cheer up us both a little.
It's started. This time not my sweet, but my fair lady is the first victim. She was so brave, didn't let the murderer in.
That wizard's truly insane now. Didn't realise that the Potter boy wouldn't be in the Gryffindor rooms, but down, in the Halloween feast. And that a knife would not help him get in.
A knife! It gives me nausea... to still see it in my mind: the strips of canvas on the floor.
That sight made it hard to believe that my lady could have managed to run away to other paintings, but Peeves had seen her and heard her name the attacker, and this time the bloody demon didn't fool us. My sweet and I went looking for her. Albus gave that task to me, and I was to take part in searching the castle for Black only after finding her.
He's disappeared. No one else has seen him. Just my lady.
She's distraught. "One of my Gryffindors," she says, crying, when my sweet's finally spotted her where she's taken shelter among the trees of a dense copse in a desolate landscape, and I've approached her cautiously so as not to scare her further.
The people in other pictures have barely been able to guide me. She's avoided entering their frames.
"Are you..." I'm breathless and I manage not to blurt out: all right (of course not), or hurt (of course). "Are you wounded?"
Only now can I see, under her elaborate, partly unravelled hairdo, the whole of her handsome face. To my relief, there are no signs of violence on its skin.
"Just some scratches on my arms," she tells me, "not bleeding much. But he shredded the dress."
And she refuses to show me. That's when I fortunately come up with the suggestion that I fetch her friend Vi. By the time Violet has come, wrapped a shawl around my lady, and returned with her to the frame in the small chamber behind the Great Hall, I've asked the other painted inhabitants to take temporary residence elsewhere, so as to secure the requisite privacy.
Tomorrow I'll take the damaged painting there. Albus has ordered me to restore it. I don't know how I can possibly manage even with help from house-elves.
It's done. I must try to write down how it happened. And to comprehend... what has started now.
All right. In the morning I decide to ask Lupin if he's willing to help me. I'm planning to mention the piece of parchment. To try and find out first if he minds seeing it. I'm hoping he'll be only happy to get it back. That can make him more eager to cooperate with me, and to become a friend.
But I can't find any parchment among the Highly Dangerous items. I could swear I saw that piece only... a year ago? Or five years ago.
It's my age again. Any recent event turns out to have been five or more years ago.
In any case, that particular confiscated item, perhaps some other ones, too, must have been pilfered by a bloody prankster, not so soon that it could have been Lupin or one of his mates, but... Another bold rulebreaker, someone waiting for punishment here. Using manacles really shouldn't be forbidden.
So I go to Lupin's door empty-handed. He looks like he hasn't slept a wink since his transformation. Still, he gives me a small lopsided smile and says immediately that Albus has told him to help me with the Fat Lady's restoration only if I ask him to.
He calls her like that, and I should admonish him with more than a frown. But he Summons his palette, his tubes of oil paints, and the new paint brushes, without waiting for any request from me, implying perhaps that he wants to defy Albus's orders.
We don't need to remove the canvas from the frame, because Lupin can easily levitate the whole thing down the corridors and staircases, all the way to the small chamber. Walking in front of him, carrying his excellent materials and equipment, and with Mrs Norris circling my feet, I feel hopeful.
My lady's sitting in Violet's painting, beside her friend, wearing some of her friend's petticoats, I assume, in addition to the shawl. She raises a hand and gives me a timid wave. She looks so sweet, vulnerable and resilient at the same time, and calm enough...
Until she's agitated by the arrival of her painting. And of Lupin, who guides it to lean against a wall.
"You!" she says. Her eyes fill with angry tears.
Lupin greets both ladies politely and explains that the two of us are now going to take care of the restoration, but my fair lady won't relent.
"You invented the name that all the students still use," she says. "And that's the least of it all!"
He apologises, saying, "I can't ask you to forgive me... us. No one among us was faultless, ever. We used slurs, not only against you, and committed worse... other offences. Still, I dare hope you'll let me assist Argus."
He promises from now on to call her the Fair Lady, even mentions he got that idea from me.
She finally nods, and asks Violet to leave the four of us alone (and I'm pleased she doesn't ignore Mrs Norris).
Lupin takes off the cardigan, and rolls up the sleeves of his robes, revealing scarred arms. I'm reminded of what Poppy's said about this werewolf having hurt himself, not others. Can he possibly think it's his fault that his partner hurt him and so many others, now my lady, too?
She's hiding her arms under the shawl while she watches intently how he uses his wand to repair the canvas where it's been slashed to shreds.
His magic looks effortless, and the effect is immediate and neat. I step closer and reach out a hand, glancing at him.
"You may touch it," he says, "if the Fair Lady agrees."
"Please do, Mr Filch," she says, and she stands up and steps out of Violet's frame.
The surface is whole again, with no blemishes. I press lightly first my fingertips, then my palm on the canvas where it's got a palest tint of pink colour, completely even.
"Look, my lady!" I say. He can mend all clothes perfectly, and heal any wounds fully, except his own... But no, I don't say any of that aloud.
I'm not sure she could hear me in any case. I can see her within her own frame, but out of focus, only as a shimmer in the depth of her background.
"We don't need house-elf magic," I say. "Or... do we?"
"That's an alternative," Lupin says. "We can call an elf, if you prefer – or if our lady prefers. But in case... It looks like that's the case: she agrees to a human connection, and you're willing to attempt it. I'll try to help you make it work."
We start mixing paints on his palette. Looking for the right skin tone for her arms, and the darker shades of rose for the folds in the silk...
"You know this fair lady better than I do," Lupin says. He trusts my views.
He suggests that I do some of the painting, too. I don't trust my skill.
But soon I see that his hand's trembling with fatigue. He lifts the paintbrush from the canvas, and after our eyes have met, I accept it.
Sitting on the floor next to me where I've knelt to work, he follows closely the cautious movements of the brush along the lovely skirts, and I follow his tentative instructions so as to recreate the details, which I do remember better than he does. I gradually venture to let the brush caress the length of each arm, too. At some points he asks me to hold the brush still, and he uses his wand.
"Adunamendium," he whispers. "Adunamendium," he says again and again.
And finally, when I've stopped the paintbrush on a delicate curve of a wrist, at the last one of those spots that I've feared I couldn't depict realistically enough and also without a sign of the real harm my lady has suffered... That's when Lupin speaks a word more forcefully.
Fiercely! "Regeneradium!"
And he places the fingers of his left hand on my knuckles. Perhaps to secure the immobility of the paintbrush?
I try to stay as still as possible, and focus on our hands. Hers, as she had it first painted in the prime of her life, at the age of fifty or fifty-five, as I've concluded from her stories, while one obviously never inquires a lady's age, and as I've tried my best to recreate it with the whole grace of her soft skin. Mine, roughened by years of working in a mundane way. And Lupin's, with his skin aged almost as much in fewer but harder years, but all the same, a hand that's oddly... more powerful than normal.
Now I feel the power of his odd magic pierce me, reach my lady, and connect me with her.
Lupin draws a shuddering breath and lifts my hand and the brush from the painting.
There's scarcely strength left in him for using the wand for one more spell – for speeding up the drying of the paint. I'm suddenly aware of my aching knees, but I'm the one to help him stand up.
He needs to go and get the potion Severus brews for him, claiming he must drink it on a couple of days both before and after the full moon.
"You'd better stay with your fair lady," he says.
I sit back down in front of the portrait and welcome Mrs Norris to my lap to wait with me. My lady's lovely waist, her bosom and shoulders, her neck and head are soon in focus again, her eyes closed at first, as she's slowly stirring.
When she opens her lids and her gaze meets mine, she smiles immediately. Only after that does she look down at her dress and her arms. And as she now lifts a hand, it's to beckon me to come ever closer.
To touch her?
"Yes, I believe you can hold my hand now, and I'd love you to," she says.
Now, seven months after that previous entry, something's happened that makes me return to this reporting I started to neglect so soon.
I spent all the long dark winter evenings with my lady. From the beginning of November until early February she stayed in Violet's chamber, and I was a welcome visitor. We enjoyed chatting and gossiping, all three of us together, but Violet also left my lady and me in our privacy to hold hands and to learn to understand better what we had in common and what was the highest pleasure for us.
My lady had a husband back in her life (which, including her name, she wanted to discard), and had first thought that every wife found the marital obligations repulsive. Later she'd regarded herself as an anomaly. A hopeful curiosity had arisen in her when she'd heard gossip about my frigidity. Frigid is definitely not a term we'd use to describe ourselves or anyone now that we know that we – the two of us and most probably others, more or less like us – can reach the warmth of affection and of passion in our own way, and share it, too.
Anyway, I had to wonder if I needed to be grateful to Albus, after all, for starting the rumour about me. Of course, I wouldn't express that to him, as he already looked irritatingly pleased with himself when I explained that the restoration process still needed some time to be completed.
When a week before Valentine's Day my lady's substitute, bloody plundering Cadogan let Black into the Gryffindor Tower, she insisted on returning to duty. Fearing seriously for her safety now, I claimed that she was still so nervous that she demanded some trolls to guard her. I took care of that task myself regularly, whenever I wasn't busy checking any crack that Mrs Norris had found in the castle walls, boarding the cracks temporarily, and reporting them for my magical coworkers to fix.
I barely had the mind to care when Lupin told me he'd got that old piece of parchment back – found it on Potter. That must have been around Valentine's Day, too. Yes, around the same time when one of the Hippogriffs was sentenced to death.
So many bad things happening, and the threat hanging over us all spring, and still... The joy of having found a partner in my lady shone only brighter against that gloom.
After this morning's news I know we are safe, for now at least. While my lady is sharing a bottle of Fairy Fizz with Violet, I want to take the time to close the story which these notes have turned into.
The first thing I hear on my way to mop the Great Hall floor after breakfast is that the Hippogriff has escaped.
"And not been eaten by our resident werewolf, who's been careless and on the loose last night," Hagrid recounts to me cheerfully, as I come across him in the Entrance Hall, "and who's been sent packing."
I rush to see Lupin, and he's barely packing anything. He's got only his battered old case open on the desk. He's in a hurry to leave, and he seems oddly excited. Genuinely happy I've come to say goodbye. He wants to leave his painting equipment and materials to me.
"Practise, and consider painting a self-portrait," he says in a hoarse voice, "and hiring someone proficient in the Magic of Images to perform the spells to make it into a real, moving portrait, and someday you'll be able to join your lady in a new way."
"I don't know... how to thank you, and I'm sorry you have to..."
"I'm glad to go," he cuts in, and launches into explaining in a rush, faltering only at the beginning, "and try to join... whom I should never have believed guilty. Last night I saw a living proof that I'd been wrong. The Ministry wouldn't accept testimony from a werewolf and three underage students. And Albus has decided to keep it all a secret. I want to let you know, and you can share it with your fair lady. And I truly don't mind that she's inclined to gossip. She'll also understand well how this can be true, because she'll realise the rat is the same one she used to see with me and two of my friends. And...
"Mrs Norris..." He crouches to caress my sweet with a long stroke along her back. "I doubt you'll see the old rat around again, but if you do, catch him, and take him to Argus, and Minerva, rather than Albus."
Standing up, he bites his lip, perhaps due to his aches or some hesitation.
"This is what helped me start seeing who had to be the traitor, and who had been imprisoned unjustly," he says, pointing at the piece of parchment on the desk. "Thank you for not destroying it back when... and for cooperating with me on the portrait. One of the best moments this past year. A memory I'll treasure."
He proffers a hand, and I shake it, trying to find words to thank him.
Just before the door closes behind me, I hear him clear his throat and speak.
"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."
Author:
Characters/Pairings: Argus Filch/the Fat Lady, Argus Filch/Albus Dumbledore, Argus Filch & Mrs Norris, Argus Filch & Remus Lupin, Remus Lupin/Sirius Black
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,000
Content: PoA missing scenes/retelling, Portraits, Late-life romance, Asexuality spectrum
Summary: Argus has lived to mature years before he realises that he lacks something else besides magic. There's still more for him to learn about rats and pranksters, about restoring paintings, and about himself.
A/N: Thank you for the beta, j! Thank you for the fest, mods!
Read on AO3 or below:
This afternoon Mrs Norris caught three mice and a rat.
I confiscated only a few Dungbombs (nothing more interesting). My report has now been completed too easily, too early.
I don't want to return to the corridors until after the curfew. Better do my prowling at night. More useful and rewarding: catching rulebreakers. Or else peaceful, just a short round whenever I need it so as to pass my time and to get sleepy. My cat companion is naturally active when it's dark, and I often struggle to fall asleep.
Or I keep waking up. Must be the age... what I feel in my knees, too: can't go on climbing staircases for hours on end. I hear that Muggles retire before they turn seventy, and here I am, and I can only hope there's a bit of magic in me to help me keep going.
So here I was at my desk, staring at the filing cabinet and at the unused chains hanging from the ceiling, and trying to remember some pinnacles in my long career. That's when my sweet leaped up to my lap. I thought fondly of the kind pair of witches, Pomona and Poppy, who comforted me last year and finally revived her.
And I thought: why not pick another roll of parchment and write a report on her behalf, too.
She ate the first mouse. Showed it to me first, of course. The other two she played with only a bit, didn't hurt them much. We took them to Minerva. She can nurse them back to full health. Uses them for Transfiguration exercises, and takes care that they suffer no permanent harm.
I'm not sorry I can never do that kind of magic. They call it animate to inanimate. I find it revolting. Particularly when I catch a student practising and half failing. No, I'm not writing about... That... Gives me nausea. A student can deserve a harsh punishment, but an innocent animal... No.
Minerva, she's strict as should be, and fair. Another witch I feel comfortable around. Also because I've got reason to believe that she, Poppy's first partner, will never look at me or any man with expectations of... intimacy.
She'd be happy about a rat, too, I thought as soon as I came to Mrs Norris and noticed that she had not cornered an unruly brat, but had a handsome animal under her paws. But then she lets me take the prey in my hands, and...
I can see it's a pet. A normal rat. (Normal meaning magical, of course.) Bigger than mere mundane rats.
A student's parents must have paid a lot for it, I'm thinking as I'm caressing its back. When I look at it more closely, I grasp I've seen it before. It's got these pink round ears and small watery eyes of an unusual colour for a rat: blue eyes. It's shaking, and it looks pathetic for a magical creature. It's got bald patches in its greying fur. Do I recognise... just myself in it? No, there's the defective front paw: a toe missing. I remember this rat, in a better condition, mind, from... A couple of years ago?
Yes, that was it! Now I knew it belonged to the Gryffindor pranksters, the ginger twins, or their brother.
I was happy to take it back to the Gryffindor Tower, where it belongs.
The portrait hole's always open for me if I need that. Not that I often have a reason to look into the common room, let alone enter. I prefer the entrance closed, the pretty painting fully visible and the lady idle and calm, and I always hope no students will come or go when I'm passing by and I stop for a polite conversation.
Today I had the big old rat in my hands.
"Yes, he belongs here. One of my Gryffindors," she said.
She and I have more in common than I've dared hope. She respects all innocent creatures.
Maybe she also realised the same about me today.
My lady smiled at me.
Late last night my sweet guided me to a bunch of troublemakers.
I still sometimes play with the thought that the uncanny connection between Mrs Norris and me is based on some magic also in me. Something in my bones, if not my mind, seems to respond to her... senses? When I've found myself hurrying to a specific place, it usually turns out she's seen or heard or smelled something suspicious. There have been some occasions when I spot nobody but end up following perhaps a cold trail with Mrs Norris, and more often than not it leads to the Gryffindor Tower.
Now that I think about it... I never catch the worst pair of Gryffindors unawares. Gred and Forge Weasley, yes, that's how they proudly surrender their names whenever they are openly selling questionable sweets in the middle of the Entrance Hall, or setting a trap...
Last night the trap was for Lupin, just outside the door to his rooms, and the pranksters were six Slytherins. I heard them when my legs had persistently carried me up the staircase and I was creeping along the corridor, trying not to wheeze.
"A Stripping Trap," the wee one says in his child's voice and arrogant tone, unmistakably a Malfoy's. "For the pauper prof," he says.
I don't bother to declare that he and the five big blokes – the two bulky ones, and three taller ones, perhaps fifth-years – are in trouble. And my sweet doesn't bounce on them. She enjoys approaching stealthily, slipping under the hems of the robes, and perhaps she finds bare legs to brush her graceful, sleek body and long, bushy tail against, as... The wee one lets out a satisfyingly shrill yelp.
Lupin opens his door, and he hardly looks like a respectable wizard, let alone a professor, in his tattered Muggle sleepwear. But he flicks a wand, obviously undoing the trap jinx easily, without a spoken incantation.
"Thank you, Argus... Mrs Norris," he says. "I can take it from here."
We retreated. However, after we heard Lupin just take off some House points and send the pure-blood brats to bed, we escorted them all the way to their dungeon dormitory, fortunately not too far from our rooms.
My sweet has nothing against Lupin. We know what he is. That makes him rather more appealing to us. There's no need ever to fear him. Severus's potion takes care of that.
The animal in Lupin fascinates us. That magic in him. I'd say he is more – or better – than normal. Still, he's been treated as if he were less – like me. And he treats me, too, with respect. I've felt tempted to try and make friends.
But I'm wary because of what happened with Albus. That was fifteen years ago, and I'd rather not remember... I must, because he taught me what more is wrong about me. Lupin might have been a less harsh teacher, but I don't need one of any kind now. I've learnt why I can't have a lover. Don't have what it takes.
How stupid must one be to live to mature years without figuring it out! Then again... how could one comprehend a feeling one never feels?
It was natural to assume that what others felt in their romances and lovemaking was the same as I felt and would feel one day when finally... That was surely no matter of magic, and I knew of no way of being not normal in that respect. I was just shy and, even years and years after coming of age, inexperienced because I'd never had school mates, not having been invited to Hogwarts... Until the Headmaster came to talk to our neighbours.
That was in the late '60s, and I was a confirmed bachelor. I still lived in my parents' house. Had a separate wing I'd built, visible to Muggles, and did odd jobs for them, and...
Yes, it was summer 1969, and I was 45, when Albus Dumbledore arrived to explain to a family that their daughter was a witch. I knew she was. I'd seen her doll dance with her.
There I am, doing a painting job on these neighbours' back porch. Mixing paints, I've just started to get the dizzy feeling I enjoy, and my paintbrush is leaping along the railing in bold strokes, guided by my deft hand, my strong arm. Manual labour has made me muscular and still keeps me fit. And at that moment I'm actually aware of some self-confidence, even pride in what a looker I am with my fashionable sideburns, and my long hair pulled to a ponytail.
That's when I see him materialise next to an appletree, and I recognise him immediately. As I greet him politely by his name, he turns fully towards me and starts to walk closer, tilting his head. He looks more enchanting than in his Chocolate Frog card. Not only looks.
I don't only see the twinkle in his eyes, and the glint of silver and copper in his hair and beard, and his extravagant periwinkle robes. There is a deliciousness about him, more alluring than the incense I've smelled at another, hippie neighbour's house. I feel immediate fondness for him, like for no one before except my family and – confusingly, alarmingly – the eleven-year-old witch.
Because, due to shame, my parents have isolated me from the wizarding society, I've had no chance to encounter other wizards or witches. I soon realise that what I'm sensing now – what I find so captivating – is magic.
But I can't understand what this famous warlock, in turn, sees or otherwise senses in me. Why, having concluded that I'm a Squib, he asks at once if I want to work at Hogwarts.
I couldn't possibly say no, and I've got no regrets. Since that August, I've lived here, surrounded by creatures who have magic.
My bond with Mrs Norris is something I didn't dare hope for, and I must be grateful. But I'm glad I don't have to thank Albus, who's never admitted that he had anything to do with a new kitten starting to follow me soon after he crushed my hopes for a human partner.
Employing me didn't make much sense. I soon learnt that the house-elves – admirable, enviable creatures – had superior magic for handling any caretaker's duties. When I pointed that out, I got a flippant answer.
"Yes, house-elves master art, too, and you can restore the paintings with them. But they don't want to be seen most of the time when they perform their tasks," the headmaster said. "I want the students to see you – just the right type: a hermit, grim, scary – keeping an eye on them. And to see you toiling..."
He winked, and I thought he wanted me as a warning: a living sign of what kind of prospects those not qualified in magic had.
Until, several years later, one night he caught me having just caught a pair of teenage wizards caressing each other. That's when he revealed that he'd brought me here because he wanted to watch me, maybe more than watch... "My type," he said about me, assuming I was happily surprised.
He must have considered how much he wanted... or maybe he'd been busy with something else, perhaps someone else. He found it amusing that he'd picked me like that from a Muggle neighbour's porch, on a whim.
Now when he was curious to try an alternative to a powerful wizard as a lover, he had suitably just got confirmation for what he'd already sensed in my amorous gaze on that summer day when we first met. My visible enjoyment in watching young Black and Lupin left no doubt, he said, that I, too, was into wizards.
Back then I still had some hope that he was right.
I'd held hands with some witches, even been kissed by one in Puddifoot's and by another one in the Hog's Head. The first time, after my lips had rested for a beautiful moment on an enchanting woman's lips and I'd inhaled her magical breath, she stared at me expectantly for a moment, then blushed and started talking about her plans to move to London. The second witch took me to a room upstairs and undressed me.
Now Dumbledore does the same.
"Albus, say Albus," says he.
And the magic embracing me is intoxicating. I'm naked in front of him, and as hard as when I read the Quibbler in bed and choose to stare at moving pictures of magical folk in their wizarding finery, and imagine someone loving me.
But then he grabs me, and I cringe. He brushes my chest with his fingertips, and I flinch, ticklish. He kisses me, and pushes his tongue into my mouth, and I finally realise I'm supposed to do something, but I don't feel like...
I don't feel what I should. What normal people do, what even other Squibs do.
Albus suggests that perhaps Squibs don't – perhaps they are all frigid like me. He doesn't know quite everything, hasn't cared to find out about Squibs.
In the Hog's Head I've heard Figg boast and describe how his Squib wife is insatiable. I don't even enjoy listening to such talk.
Why I was interested in spying on Black and Lupin was because at first one of those two boys had clearly struggled to enjoy the intimacy.
I'd first seen them holding hands when they were fifth-years, and one had shivered when the other had drawn a finger along the line of his eyebrow and over his cheek, down to chin. That time when Albus startled me by whispering in my ear was a year later, after the debacle of Black tricking both Lupin and Snape, whom they had kept bullying, to the dangerous Willow, and Lupin getting badly hurt. I was excited to see these Gryffindors as friends again, and more than friends, actually kissing each other on the mouth.
In their final year that pair and the other two Gryffindor pranksters were hard to catch red-handed, even though my darling kitten seemed to mysteriously help me find other rulebreakers.
But one June evening, when the corridors were almost deserted...
When I'm all wistful, looking out a window at the young people milling around the grounds in merry company, I sense the peculiar urge in my feet to take me up to a third-floor corridor. I can hear Black and Lupin before I see them, because they're standing behind a statue, the one of a humpbacked witch.
"You've learnt so well," one says.
"You've taught me so well," says the other. "Made me believe it's been hard just because of what was done to me by... Fuck them!"
And the first one laughs. "No, I'll fuck you. One day when we've healed each other well enough and you want me to."
And I lose my last hope, because no wrongs like that were done to me. I was never broken by anyone. I'm not broken in a way that could be fixed.
I can't resist taking a step closer, and I see the enviable eighteen-year old lovers in a tight embrace. At the moment when they notice me, I turn my eyes down – and spot the piece of parchment on the floor.
As a snatch it, I think I see some words on it and my attention is caught by what looks like my name.
"Mischief managed!"
The two of them said it in a duet.
Another day with little to report so far.
It's become easier to write here about the recent events and about the long-ago ones, too. Perhaps I can be good with words. Not in the way witches and wizards use words for their magic, but still...
After checking that the students leaving for Hogsmeade had permission from their parents, I hoped to get a chance for a longer uninterrupted chat with my fair lady. But she was in a slumber.
"Happy Halloween," I said, and I felt like touching the canvas where her pretty hand was resting and wrinkling the rosy silk of her dress, as if I could have smoothed its folds, revelling in its cool, slick softness.
She mumbled something about the Potter boy waking her up twice, and started snoring.
Potter! I didn't see him again on my way down, and he had replied that he was doing nothing. But he's like his father, never up to nothing.
Now that I think about it, old memories surface and I remember seeing that lauded James Potter – a champion Chaser, the Head Boy, and a saviour for his friend and for the boy he bullied – hurrying to point his wand on a piece of parchment, not unlike the one I confiscated just before he finished school. And did I once or twice spot him also with a fat rat at his feet? What is it with pranksters and pet rats?
In any case, when the students return, there will be forbidden items to confiscate, some morbid Halloween-themed ones, but probably nothing I haven't seen before, nothing to place in the particular drawer my eyes keep turning to as I sit here, petting my sweet, who hasn't caught anything spectacular today, either.
Confiscated and Highly Dangerous. It's mainly items that I find suspicious because the magic I've sensed in them is invisible to me. There's no reason for me to look at them.
I've considered now returning that piece of parchment which once only flashed its mischievous words to me before turning blank. I might be rewarded with an explanation of what it is.
But perhaps that would be far from a considerate and wise step towards a friendship. Lupin will probably not be happy to be reminded that I know how intimately close he was with the wizard who later turned into a traitor and a murderer. And I must avoid giving the wrong impression that I want sex with him. Albus certainly wasn't considerate, inviting Lupin to teach this year, when we all fear the escaped prisoner, and for Lupin it must be worse than for anyone else.
He arrived at breakfast late this morning. Arrived in any case, perhaps because Albus had told him to appear as normal as possible. Or because he needed to eat.
That's what he looked like, so haggard, although he's fattened up a bit in his two months here. Of course, I wasn't surprised.
This year the whole staff pay attention to the phases of the moon and we're supposed to help him hide from the students that he's a werewolf. I reckon in the '70s only Albus and Poppy knew.
Anyway, there I am in the emptying Great Hall, mopping up some spilled pumpkin juice, when Lupin walks in slowly, stiffly, and greets the students and me with simple hellos, not with Happy Halloween. He's definitely not happy, but he succeeds in smiling.
The smile widens when he reaches his usual seat and notices the owl who's waited for him patiently, because the parcel is addressed to Professor R. J. Lupin, the staff table, the Great Hall, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He tears his toast – deplorably cold, for sure – in half and, after handing one piece to the owl and stuffing his mouth with the other, opens the parcel.
I can't repress my curiosity. Pushing the mop in front of me, I step closer and crane my neck.
He doesn't mind, on the contrary. "Look," he says.
And I look into his tired and gleaming amber-coloured eyes before admiring the set of self-cleaning hogshair paint brushes of finest quality.
The two of us do have an interest – more, a passion – in common. He, too, loves paintings.
And he also paints. "Yes," he says. "Did you not remember?"
Yes, I must have seen the pale boy working on a portrait of my kitten. With watercolours? And now he squanders his salary on art equipment and materials while he still dresses like a mendicant.
Landscapes, that's what he paints now. But perhaps he'd like to take a tour and examine the treasures on the castle walls with me, and to share thoughts about portraiture, too. As we're trapped in this ominous atmosphere and in our solitudes, perhaps something like that could cheer up us both a little.
It's started. This time not my sweet, but my fair lady is the first victim. She was so brave, didn't let the murderer in.
That wizard's truly insane now. Didn't realise that the Potter boy wouldn't be in the Gryffindor rooms, but down, in the Halloween feast. And that a knife would not help him get in.
A knife! It gives me nausea... to still see it in my mind: the strips of canvas on the floor.
That sight made it hard to believe that my lady could have managed to run away to other paintings, but Peeves had seen her and heard her name the attacker, and this time the bloody demon didn't fool us. My sweet and I went looking for her. Albus gave that task to me, and I was to take part in searching the castle for Black only after finding her.
He's disappeared. No one else has seen him. Just my lady.
She's distraught. "One of my Gryffindors," she says, crying, when my sweet's finally spotted her where she's taken shelter among the trees of a dense copse in a desolate landscape, and I've approached her cautiously so as not to scare her further.
The people in other pictures have barely been able to guide me. She's avoided entering their frames.
"Are you..." I'm breathless and I manage not to blurt out: all right (of course not), or hurt (of course). "Are you wounded?"
Only now can I see, under her elaborate, partly unravelled hairdo, the whole of her handsome face. To my relief, there are no signs of violence on its skin.
"Just some scratches on my arms," she tells me, "not bleeding much. But he shredded the dress."
And she refuses to show me. That's when I fortunately come up with the suggestion that I fetch her friend Vi. By the time Violet has come, wrapped a shawl around my lady, and returned with her to the frame in the small chamber behind the Great Hall, I've asked the other painted inhabitants to take temporary residence elsewhere, so as to secure the requisite privacy.
Tomorrow I'll take the damaged painting there. Albus has ordered me to restore it. I don't know how I can possibly manage even with help from house-elves.
It's done. I must try to write down how it happened. And to comprehend... what has started now.
All right. In the morning I decide to ask Lupin if he's willing to help me. I'm planning to mention the piece of parchment. To try and find out first if he minds seeing it. I'm hoping he'll be only happy to get it back. That can make him more eager to cooperate with me, and to become a friend.
But I can't find any parchment among the Highly Dangerous items. I could swear I saw that piece only... a year ago? Or five years ago.
It's my age again. Any recent event turns out to have been five or more years ago.
In any case, that particular confiscated item, perhaps some other ones, too, must have been pilfered by a bloody prankster, not so soon that it could have been Lupin or one of his mates, but... Another bold rulebreaker, someone waiting for punishment here. Using manacles really shouldn't be forbidden.
So I go to Lupin's door empty-handed. He looks like he hasn't slept a wink since his transformation. Still, he gives me a small lopsided smile and says immediately that Albus has told him to help me with the Fat Lady's restoration only if I ask him to.
He calls her like that, and I should admonish him with more than a frown. But he Summons his palette, his tubes of oil paints, and the new paint brushes, without waiting for any request from me, implying perhaps that he wants to defy Albus's orders.
We don't need to remove the canvas from the frame, because Lupin can easily levitate the whole thing down the corridors and staircases, all the way to the small chamber. Walking in front of him, carrying his excellent materials and equipment, and with Mrs Norris circling my feet, I feel hopeful.
My lady's sitting in Violet's painting, beside her friend, wearing some of her friend's petticoats, I assume, in addition to the shawl. She raises a hand and gives me a timid wave. She looks so sweet, vulnerable and resilient at the same time, and calm enough...
Until she's agitated by the arrival of her painting. And of Lupin, who guides it to lean against a wall.
"You!" she says. Her eyes fill with angry tears.
Lupin greets both ladies politely and explains that the two of us are now going to take care of the restoration, but my fair lady won't relent.
"You invented the name that all the students still use," she says. "And that's the least of it all!"
He apologises, saying, "I can't ask you to forgive me... us. No one among us was faultless, ever. We used slurs, not only against you, and committed worse... other offences. Still, I dare hope you'll let me assist Argus."
He promises from now on to call her the Fair Lady, even mentions he got that idea from me.
She finally nods, and asks Violet to leave the four of us alone (and I'm pleased she doesn't ignore Mrs Norris).
Lupin takes off the cardigan, and rolls up the sleeves of his robes, revealing scarred arms. I'm reminded of what Poppy's said about this werewolf having hurt himself, not others. Can he possibly think it's his fault that his partner hurt him and so many others, now my lady, too?
She's hiding her arms under the shawl while she watches intently how he uses his wand to repair the canvas where it's been slashed to shreds.
His magic looks effortless, and the effect is immediate and neat. I step closer and reach out a hand, glancing at him.
"You may touch it," he says, "if the Fair Lady agrees."
"Please do, Mr Filch," she says, and she stands up and steps out of Violet's frame.
The surface is whole again, with no blemishes. I press lightly first my fingertips, then my palm on the canvas where it's got a palest tint of pink colour, completely even.
"Look, my lady!" I say. He can mend all clothes perfectly, and heal any wounds fully, except his own... But no, I don't say any of that aloud.
I'm not sure she could hear me in any case. I can see her within her own frame, but out of focus, only as a shimmer in the depth of her background.
"We don't need house-elf magic," I say. "Or... do we?"
"That's an alternative," Lupin says. "We can call an elf, if you prefer – or if our lady prefers. But in case... It looks like that's the case: she agrees to a human connection, and you're willing to attempt it. I'll try to help you make it work."
We start mixing paints on his palette. Looking for the right skin tone for her arms, and the darker shades of rose for the folds in the silk...
"You know this fair lady better than I do," Lupin says. He trusts my views.
He suggests that I do some of the painting, too. I don't trust my skill.
But soon I see that his hand's trembling with fatigue. He lifts the paintbrush from the canvas, and after our eyes have met, I accept it.
Sitting on the floor next to me where I've knelt to work, he follows closely the cautious movements of the brush along the lovely skirts, and I follow his tentative instructions so as to recreate the details, which I do remember better than he does. I gradually venture to let the brush caress the length of each arm, too. At some points he asks me to hold the brush still, and he uses his wand.
"Adunamendium," he whispers. "Adunamendium," he says again and again.
And finally, when I've stopped the paintbrush on a delicate curve of a wrist, at the last one of those spots that I've feared I couldn't depict realistically enough and also without a sign of the real harm my lady has suffered... That's when Lupin speaks a word more forcefully.
Fiercely! "Regeneradium!"
And he places the fingers of his left hand on my knuckles. Perhaps to secure the immobility of the paintbrush?
I try to stay as still as possible, and focus on our hands. Hers, as she had it first painted in the prime of her life, at the age of fifty or fifty-five, as I've concluded from her stories, while one obviously never inquires a lady's age, and as I've tried my best to recreate it with the whole grace of her soft skin. Mine, roughened by years of working in a mundane way. And Lupin's, with his skin aged almost as much in fewer but harder years, but all the same, a hand that's oddly... more powerful than normal.
Now I feel the power of his odd magic pierce me, reach my lady, and connect me with her.
Lupin draws a shuddering breath and lifts my hand and the brush from the painting.
There's scarcely strength left in him for using the wand for one more spell – for speeding up the drying of the paint. I'm suddenly aware of my aching knees, but I'm the one to help him stand up.
He needs to go and get the potion Severus brews for him, claiming he must drink it on a couple of days both before and after the full moon.
"You'd better stay with your fair lady," he says.
I sit back down in front of the portrait and welcome Mrs Norris to my lap to wait with me. My lady's lovely waist, her bosom and shoulders, her neck and head are soon in focus again, her eyes closed at first, as she's slowly stirring.
When she opens her lids and her gaze meets mine, she smiles immediately. Only after that does she look down at her dress and her arms. And as she now lifts a hand, it's to beckon me to come ever closer.
To touch her?
"Yes, I believe you can hold my hand now, and I'd love you to," she says.
Now, seven months after that previous entry, something's happened that makes me return to this reporting I started to neglect so soon.
I spent all the long dark winter evenings with my lady. From the beginning of November until early February she stayed in Violet's chamber, and I was a welcome visitor. We enjoyed chatting and gossiping, all three of us together, but Violet also left my lady and me in our privacy to hold hands and to learn to understand better what we had in common and what was the highest pleasure for us.
My lady had a husband back in her life (which, including her name, she wanted to discard), and had first thought that every wife found the marital obligations repulsive. Later she'd regarded herself as an anomaly. A hopeful curiosity had arisen in her when she'd heard gossip about my frigidity. Frigid is definitely not a term we'd use to describe ourselves or anyone now that we know that we – the two of us and most probably others, more or less like us – can reach the warmth of affection and of passion in our own way, and share it, too.
Anyway, I had to wonder if I needed to be grateful to Albus, after all, for starting the rumour about me. Of course, I wouldn't express that to him, as he already looked irritatingly pleased with himself when I explained that the restoration process still needed some time to be completed.
When a week before Valentine's Day my lady's substitute, bloody plundering Cadogan let Black into the Gryffindor Tower, she insisted on returning to duty. Fearing seriously for her safety now, I claimed that she was still so nervous that she demanded some trolls to guard her. I took care of that task myself regularly, whenever I wasn't busy checking any crack that Mrs Norris had found in the castle walls, boarding the cracks temporarily, and reporting them for my magical coworkers to fix.
I barely had the mind to care when Lupin told me he'd got that old piece of parchment back – found it on Potter. That must have been around Valentine's Day, too. Yes, around the same time when one of the Hippogriffs was sentenced to death.
So many bad things happening, and the threat hanging over us all spring, and still... The joy of having found a partner in my lady shone only brighter against that gloom.
After this morning's news I know we are safe, for now at least. While my lady is sharing a bottle of Fairy Fizz with Violet, I want to take the time to close the story which these notes have turned into.
The first thing I hear on my way to mop the Great Hall floor after breakfast is that the Hippogriff has escaped.
"And not been eaten by our resident werewolf, who's been careless and on the loose last night," Hagrid recounts to me cheerfully, as I come across him in the Entrance Hall, "and who's been sent packing."
I rush to see Lupin, and he's barely packing anything. He's got only his battered old case open on the desk. He's in a hurry to leave, and he seems oddly excited. Genuinely happy I've come to say goodbye. He wants to leave his painting equipment and materials to me.
"Practise, and consider painting a self-portrait," he says in a hoarse voice, "and hiring someone proficient in the Magic of Images to perform the spells to make it into a real, moving portrait, and someday you'll be able to join your lady in a new way."
"I don't know... how to thank you, and I'm sorry you have to..."
"I'm glad to go," he cuts in, and launches into explaining in a rush, faltering only at the beginning, "and try to join... whom I should never have believed guilty. Last night I saw a living proof that I'd been wrong. The Ministry wouldn't accept testimony from a werewolf and three underage students. And Albus has decided to keep it all a secret. I want to let you know, and you can share it with your fair lady. And I truly don't mind that she's inclined to gossip. She'll also understand well how this can be true, because she'll realise the rat is the same one she used to see with me and two of my friends. And...
"Mrs Norris..." He crouches to caress my sweet with a long stroke along her back. "I doubt you'll see the old rat around again, but if you do, catch him, and take him to Argus, and Minerva, rather than Albus."
Standing up, he bites his lip, perhaps due to his aches or some hesitation.
"This is what helped me start seeing who had to be the traitor, and who had been imprisoned unjustly," he says, pointing at the piece of parchment on the desk. "Thank you for not destroying it back when... and for cooperating with me on the portrait. One of the best moments this past year. A memory I'll treasure."
He proffers a hand, and I shake it, trying to find words to thank him.
Just before the door closes behind me, I hear him clear his throat and speak.
"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."