Chapter Text
I ask Dad what afflicted means and he says, Sickness, son, and things that don't fit.
Frank McCourt
Dublin, 1970. 14 Henrietta Street.
Someone came up the stairs bleeding. This would stain the wood for many years to come. Their feet were badly placed, or a leg had been injured, and so this person dragged with each step (climp, clomp, clomp, clomp). The blood sloughed off their fingers onto the railing, but this railing here had been bled on before and would be again and again.
Upstairs, behind the top left door on the second floor, they were speaking low and quick in Irish. Eight were seated. Ben O'Toole, old for a very long time now, sat at the end of their table with their ledgers and his diaries spread in front of him. Kara Cosgrave sat beside him still wearing her rain bonnet. Morri O'Dunne was across from her, with her glasses on and her cane in her lap, while Dermot MacMurrough sat with a silver coin between his fingers. Hugh O'Byrne and Aisling O'Toole were further along, both watching. Roger O'Dunne had a dagger in his right hand and turned it over and under his knuckles. Kevin Kinsella sat at the far end, one foot up on the chair beside him.
"Heard he's calling himself Lord of Britain now," Hugh O'Byrne said.
"Heard he's killing children," Aisling O'Toole said.
Four of them were standing. Owen Cosgrave had put his weight against the stove, arms folded. Kenny Kinsella stood at the window with one finger hooked under their gauze curtain, lifting it an inch to peer down at the street. He had lost the one eye entirely. The socket where it had been once was a detail this room had learned to welcome the same way it welcomed the damp, for the damp was everywhere in Ireland, along with the dust, the creosete from the chimney and their tobacco that clung to the plaster and the plaster that they scraped back and painted over and scraped back again and again, until there is nothing left but the damn bone of the wall.
Kenny turned from the window. "This isn't our war," he said, one eye was narrowed, his silver teeth showed. "Let the Brits kill each other off. Ministry bastards, they'll come crawling soon enough."
Roger's blade spun on the table, faster now.
"The O'Neills want Antrim back for it," Kara said. "They're shaking over this Lord."
"We gambled," Duncan said. "And we lost. That's the way of it." Duncan Kavanagh did not sit. Duncan Kavanagh had never once sat at this table. He stood near the door, still in his long black wool coat, with his hands behind his back and watched his people talk.
"They want parley," Dermot said, nearly scoffed. "Asking for terms."
"You don't parley when you're holding nothing but ash," Duncan said. "They played their hand. We're not here to play rescue."
"Thought Turlough was your best friend," Kevin said with a snort.
Duncan looked down at him, saying. "In our world, there are only players. Some better than others."
Roger flipped the knife casually, end over. "But what of this dark one?" His dark black eyes glittered with amusement. "A bastard making moves across Britain?"
Owen Cosgrave's wand tapped their kettle to a boil. His movements were wary as he settled his backside to the edge of their stove. "He's clever," Owen said. "Cleverer than they think. He's not interested in Britain. Not really." His eyes rolled up to a crack forming from their lifted paint on my ceiling. "Though he's not interested in much else except for Britain."
Aisling's brows lifted. No one in this room noticed her. The same way they didn't notice the blood they left all over my floors.
"What then?" Dermot asked.
Owen looked at Ben, and the old Listener drew a flattened scroll forward from the diaries in front of him. "His name is Tom Riddle," Ben said. "Human father, witch mother. Grew up in an orphanage. Albus found him." He turned the parchment so the room could see it, though the room could not read his shorthand any better than anyone else's. "At sixteen his entire family is murdered. Morfin Gaunt confesses, goes to Azkaban, and Marvolo Gaunt's ring disappears." He shook his head once. "Worked at Borgin and Burkes after that, collected artefacts, powerful ones, then disappears." Ben sighed. He had been their Listener for longer than listening was good for the body. "He went looking for what they call the Dark Arts. Came back calling himself Voldemort. Tried to become a professor at Hogwarts. Albus refused him twice."
From the window, Kenny Kinsella chuckled. "Now he's out for blood."
Rob O'Dunne stood on the far side, in the corner where their gaslight failed to reach. "Marvolo Gaunt's ring," he said. He leaned out of the shadow, making the boards under him creak. "I've met that man. He claimed he was a Peverell, showed me the ring to prove it." He lifted one shoulder, and the weight transferring from one part of the body to the other was again noted by the floor under its feet. "He was, if that ring was truly theirs."
"There could only be one thing in that ring," Morri rasped. She removed her glasses, what was behind them was discoloured, the rot that came from a disease consuming the eye from the inside.
The stairs went silent, and the bleeding figure emerged at the doorway. This was Keera Kinsella, the youngest of them, walked in with blood on both palms and sat down in their armchair by the door, away from their table. She laid her hands on the armrests and looked at her father.
"Are you hurt?" Kevin asked.
She shook her head.
"Is it done?" he asked.
She nodded.
Duncan turned toward her. He gave her a nod. She returned it with a smile.
"We're not saints," Morri said. She had put her glasses back on. "We're not meant to sit in paradise drinking sweet wine while the world burns."
"True." Rogger put all his fingers on the dagger. "Profit. Power." He gave the dagger all his might. "Play."
Duncan looked at Roger first, second at Roger's mother, Morri.
"We deal on our terms," Kara said. "Only ever have."
"And when they break it," Kenny said from the window, "we break it on our terms too."
"Then we hold our cards," Dermot said. He set the coin down on the table, covering it with a hand. "Let people bluff. Eventually, they'll show their hand."
Their kettle on the stove screamed. They had never used the stove for anything else except tea. There was no milk or sugar in the house. Tea had always been drunk black here, and it would continue being drunk black for as long as milk and sugar and tea were sold in separate little containers. Downstairs, someone was cleaning the blood off the railing, or tried to. This wood was darker where the hand had been, and would be darker there for a long time.
The Hogwarts Express, 1 September 1971
"This one's empty," someone called from the corridor, followed by a whistle.
Peter had been sucking on a lollipop, cherry, from the bag his mother had packed in the outside pocket of his trunk, the pocket she had told him was for emergencies, and watching the houses fly past out through the window. He had been sitting alone, pleased with it too, until the compartment door slid open and he looked up to find two grey-blue eyes looking back. He looked away as fast as he could.
"Never mind," the boy said, releasing the door. "This one's full."
A second hand pushed the door back open. "There's plenty of room. We're not going to stand," said another boy, around Peter's age, who stepped past the first and sat down opposite him. "Sit or keep looking," he told his friend. The friend sighed but came in and sat.
A third person entered. A girl. Peter saw her in such order: first, the hair (brown-ish-black, to her waist), second the robes (red silk, threaded with silver, gemstones set into the fabric in quantities that were surely not standard school uniform), third the quiet (her steps made almost no sound on the compartment floor), and, worst of all, she seated herself right next to him.
He pulled his sleeves down over his palms. The sweat from his hands was already showing through the cloth. The jumper was secondhand and pilled. He had thought last night how it would sweat like this and thought about it now over and over again. The lollipop was in his mouth. His tongue darted out and licked it.
"I'm Nott, Edmund," said the boy who had sat down first. Peter stopped his tongue. They looked at each other - Edmund's gaze steady, Peter's wide and startled - and the flinch was not what Peter had wanted to do and his neck went red, which was not great, so he looked away.
"What's wrong with him?" said the first boy.
"Leave it, Evan," Edmund said.
"What's wrong with him?" Evan said again, his nose scrunching. "Is he a mute?"
"Maybe he doesn't want to talk," Edmund said with a shrug.
Peter sank further into the cushion. His heartbeat was in his ears and his palms were wet, wet, wet. His teeth cracked down on the lollipop with a big crunch. He hoped no one could hear it. But all Peter could hear was the girl's robes clinking mockingly every time she breathed. He resumed his chomping slowly.
"Why? Why doesn't he want to talk to me?" The boy Evan whined now. "Too good for me, are you?"
Peter shot up. His foot caught the girl's ankle as he went and she made a yelp sound like ow! or ouch! He hadn't really been paying attention because he was trying to wrench the door open. The boy called Evan laughed and clapped and Peter was in the corridor and moving and the laughter chased him but he kept going and going.
The bathroom was at the end of the third carriage. He locked the door. He knelt on the floor and held the sides of the toilet and dry-heaved once, twice, and on the third time something came up, mostly the lollipop and what was left of his breakfast. The sound of it in the metal basin was the worst sound he had heard today. He heaved again but nothing came up. He spat. He flushed. He scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and wiped that hand on his trousers. He found a comfy position with his back to the lavatory door.
He sat there and counted his breaths - one, two three - and the train rocked beneath him which helped. After a while he reached into his pocket and took out another lollipop - orange, this time - and put it in his mouth. The sugar spread on his tongue and the world became a bit more bearable. Then he remembered- his toad and his trunk! Both of them were still in the compartment with the boy who had clapped, the girl in the red robes and the one called Nott who had been polite. He groaned. He shut his eyes and knocked his head back against the door. As his stomach quivered again, someone knocked from the other side.
"One second," he called. He gave the floor a check and unlocked the door to an older student in a purple tie. "Sorry," he murmured and slipped past them.
He did not go back for the toad. The toad was lost. For now he went compartment to compartment, looking through each window, finding each one fuller than the last, until he reached one at the far end of the train with a single occupant. He tapped on the glass. A boy inside glanced up - lanky, sandy-haired - and looked like he had been alone. Peter got the door open. He fiddled with the orange lollipop between his fingers, his neck and ears going red again. "Hello," he said. "D'you mind if- I got kick -" He looked at his feet. He had been going to say kicked out and had lost his nerve halfway through. "Couldn't find anywhere else," he said instead.
"Help yourself," the boy said.
"Thanks."
Peter took the seat in the furthest corner. They watched each other from the edges for a moment.
"I'm Remus," the boy said. He smiled a toothy smile, the first thing Peter had seen all day that appeared to mean what it looked like.
"Peter."
"Nice to meet you, Peter."
"Lollipop?" Peter asked and pulled another from his pocket.
Moments Before Peter
Remus, with his forehead pressed against the cool glass, stared in awe as the train's rumble rattled his teeth. He had been watching London leave. The station had given way to brick, factories first, massive things with chimneys going up and up and ended in nothing but sky, and after the factories became houses, bunched together terraces ran alongside the track, racing and losing against him. Some of the houses had window boxes. Some had windows missing their glass and had been patched with newspaper. This was curious because someone must have stood in front of that broken window and decided the newspaper was the solution. He wondered what they read first. Whether the news on the outside was different from the news facing in.
His father would have said filthy. In truth, his father had said filthy two hours ago as soon as they had stepped out of the pub on to Charing Cross Road with his tweed jacket buttoned wrong. "Filthy," Lyall Lupin had said. Remus had nodded. Agreeing was easier than not-agreeing and left more of his attention free for looking, exactly what Remus wanted to be doing.
Remus had looked at everything. King's Cross was the loudest place he had ever been in, and that was not a very competitive title given the loudest place before it had been the auction at Llangefni, but at the sheep auction he could hear individual sounds, like a bleat and the auctioneer's numbers falling. But if chaos had a name, it was King's Cross Station. Hundreds of people exited and entered at the same time, their eyes glossed over and peering over into a far distance, barely stepping away from his path. He had tipped his head back to look at the impossibly high ceiling and had gone tumbling into a woman's suitcase.
"You're gonna hit something if you keep lookin' up like that," his father had said seconds before the woman and her suitcase.
Remus had hurried along but kept his eyes up. The ceiling was filthy with a century of soot but the light still came through it. Nobody seemed to mind this or think this was remarkable, everyone simply walked under this ruined ceiling and considered it ordinary. He put this thought in his pocket for later as two men had come passed them near Platform 9, walking fast, jackets done up with safety pins, hair cut short and dyed a green which had faded to the colour of dead seaweed. One of them had boots with steel in the toes. Remus had stared. "Are they wizards?" he had whispered. His father had taken his elbow and hurried them along faster.
Later, though not much later, he had pushed the trolley through the barrier between Platforms 9 and 10 and arrived on the other side into a different chaos, one with a scarlet engine at the centre of it, and the noise of it puffing out steam. He had found an empty compartment at the far end of the train and sat in it, making sure not to take up too much space in case someone came along to sit with him. No one had. The city had gone, too. Green was coming in fields and the occasional cow standing with the stupidity of an animal with nowhere to be. He had A History of Magic open on his lap. He had tried to read it, except he kept losing his place because the window was more interesting than Bathilda Bagshot. His father's owl, Oakmuggins, sat in her cage on the seat beside him, intermittently rearranging her feathers with a look of contempt he suspected was directed at him.
This was, so far, fine. He had been alone for most of his life because children who live in the countryside are alone as a matter of geography. His parents were the world, and he had never known anything else. Within it he had read every book in the house twice and knew every footpath within his mother's shouting distance from the front door. He had also named the cormorants on the rocks at Penmon Point, though he did not know that other eleven-year-olds had not named the cormorants. He would soon find out what other eleven year olds did.
A lump formed in his throat. He tucked the book between him and Oakmuggins. Outside, a church spire went past and was gone before he could decide whether it was beautiful.
He had promised his mother he would try when she had held him against her chest the night before and said, 'Think of it as an adventure, hm,' and he had agreed with his mother because his mother just wanted to make him feel better about things that could not be fixed and agreeing helped with that. The promise had a reality under it that neither of his parents had named in front of him, though he had heard them through the wall often enough. He had been bitten at four, and in the seven years since, they had moved three times. Each time his father would say 'this is the last one,' then his mother would start packing the boxes, and they would arrive at a new house a little more quiet and a little further from anyone who might notice the boy disappeared once a month and came back with new scars.
One day over the summer, Albus Dumbledore had written. After which, his father had sat at their kitchen table for a very long time. And so Remus had promised he would go and try and he would not be what he was, or at least he would be it at the prescribed times, in the prescribed place. The rest of the time he would be a boy, an ordinary boy, the kind who sat in a compartment on a train, reading A History of Magic and did not tip his head back to stare at ruined ceilings or at men with green hair. He suspected he was going to be very bad at being ordinary.
He sat back from the window. A single tap on the compartment glass brought his head around.
The Sorting
"KAVANAGH, EVE!"
A whistle rose from the table under the red banners. Gryffindor. Remus found the source, Sirius Black, one of the first sorted, squinting at the girl walking toward the stool. Remus lifted his chin to see her better. Dark hair, very long, and straight, swaying with each step. Dry forehead, dry hands. She turned to face the Hall and looked at none of them.
"Who's that?" an older student squawked at the Ravenclaw table.
"Daughter of Ireland's Master of Coin," another answered. Diagonally from where he sat, a boy looked to him with a smirk, repeatedly rubbing his thumb over the tip of his thumb against his first two fingers. Money, a lot of it.
"She'll place Slytherin, I'll bet a galleon on it," one of them commented to the witch sitting next to him.
"I'd bet twenty, if I could," added the boy who had made the finger gesture.
"She's as Slytherin as it comes… You know, her mother was Slytherin Head Girl a hundred years ago? Reckon they've her portrait up in there and all."
"SLYTHERIN!" the Hat shouted after a full minute of nothing. Students in green stood for the ovation, hooting and whistling as the young witch left her place to gain a new one by their side.
"What'd I say?" the money boy asked, but no one answered him as they awaited the next name.
"LUPIN, REMUS!"
He froze in his own bones. The blood went out of his face and down to his feet. It took a full second to understand what to do next. Peter helped, put a hand on his arm and pushed him forward. Remus got one foot in front of the other until he reached the stool, where he made a point not to look at anyone. The Sorting Hat was placed onto his head, and the hall fell silent. For a second, there was nothing, then, a voice in his head began to mumble. His breath halted, coming to a standstill as it scavenged his memories. 'Hm, I see here love for scholarship- indeed, Ravenclaw would do you well, wouldn't it? But, let's see, oh, what a tragedy, indeed, and yet- here you are… Curious, very curious, hmm… Already making friends, are we? Very well…'
And then came the shouting: "GRYFFINDOR!"
The Gryffindor table stood and cheered, for him. He couldn't quite believe it. A grin broke across his face before he could stop it. He hopped off the stool and walked toward the hands waving him over.
A red-haired girl who'd been sorted earlier called out. "Here, next to me." He nodded and took the place beside her. "I'm Lily-Lily Evans, by the way." Green eyes. She stuck out her hand. He noted the freckles on it.
"Remus. Remus Lupin," he said and took the hand.
"Where're you from, Re-"
"And I'm Sirius. Sirius Black."
But Remus had learned his name. There'd been something wrong about his Sorting. It had gone on longer than anyone else's. Sirius had grinned and winked his way through it. Chin held high, chest puffed out as he dared anyone to say anything, anything at all, as the Hat screamed out, 'Gryffindor!' And after the Hat shouted 'Gryffindor,' there was nothing. Unlike every other person who had come before, the entire Hall had fallen silent. There was no ovation for Sirius Black. "By the way, Lupin, you don't want to be friends with her." Remus smiled, not sure what else to do with himself. "She's got a wand stuck so far up her bunghole-"
Lily gasped, her chin jutting forward as she stared, open-mouthed, at her new housemate.
Remus curled his lips inwards, biting down on the lower flesh as his eyes darted between the two.
At the end of the day, he was only 11 years old.
Loftus Hall, County Wexford, 1974.
She was combing her hair in the Tapestry Room. It had been a dead woman's room before the tapestries had been brought in to fill it. The mirror on the vanity in here was old enough to have dark spots in the corners of the glass where the silver had gone. The comb was silver too, and heavy in the hand, with a design on the handle that rolled into her palm. The bristles needled against her scalp and hurt if pushed down. Her eyes were wrong. She had always had brown eyes, the colour of forest floor they called it. What looked back at her from the glass was darker. The brown had gone to something close to black, and in the low light of the room it was hard to tell where her pupils ended and her irises began. She blinked. She blinked again, harder, in case her eyes were tired.
The ache had started behind her ear.
It came with a pressure as though the floor were dropping, the whole house going through the ground. She put the comb back on the vanity. Her fingers went behind her ear and pressed in small circles, searching for the root of it. She closed her eyes. The pain had a sound in it, such as the one from a radio tuned to a station that is not there, except the sound was coming from inside her or from very far beneath he or from both maybe. Her forehead came down against the edge of the vanity. What are you, she asked, and the sound answered by becoming louder. One moment, a dull ache. The next, a rushing in the blood and the world tilting all around her.
Something in the dark of the room made a sound like a cork pulled from a bottle - POP! - and she was seized. The vanity was gone. The comb struck the floor. She did not hear it fall for she was no longer in the room. Her eyes were open and there was water. Salt water. The sea came into her mouth and her lungs. She realised she was screaming. Part of her reached for her own throat and part of her looked up toward the light above the surface and tried to breathe and scream at the same time. The sea came in and the salt burned her eyes as the currents of St George's tore at her. Still she screamed.
Beneath it, when her mind went grey, she could hear them. At the bottom. The static had words in the static. They had been there all along, and they were saying something she could almost-
Dark.
"Mistress must not scream," said Dipsy.
The house-elf's arms were no thicker than kindling and somehow those arms dragged the girl from the water onto the sand. She stood over her mistress and stared down with eyes too large for her face, shining and bulging, and in them was a worry from a love that had been built, not born, and gave comfort to no one. Eve coughed and seawater came out of her.
"Mistress must go before Mistress screams. Mistress mustn't scream. Mistress has no choice."
Eve turned on her side. The water kept coming up. Her hair dragged through the sand. Her eyes were red from the salt, and the wind hit her from one direction and then from another. Dipsy saw the goosebumps along the girl's arms and snapped her fingers. The sand around them lifted, a small disturbance in the air, and the water drew off the girl's skin and clothes and hair and was gone, leaving dry linen and salt.
"The Kavanagh Curse," Dipsy whispered.
"What curse?" said Eve. Her lips were purple with the cold.
8 August 1977. Early Morning. The Catacombs, Finborough Road, Earl's Court, West London.
Alexander Sykes had been dancing for what he assumed to be three hours, though such assumptions under such chemical circumstances were, he knew from experience, quite unreliable. The speed had come on about fifteen minutes after the last dab, off a key from a boy in a vest who had spoken to him in Portuguese. Alex hadn't understood a word of it but had agreed enthusiastically with whatever he'd said. Ever since, the question of time had become circumstantial.
The basement was cement-floored and sweating from the condensation streaming down the walls and faces in rivulets that captured the coloured light and fragmented it into a thousand glittering diamonds. The DJ had put on Donna Summer's I Feel Love for the millionth time that night. Nobody seemed to mind, probably because listening to music in daylight was an entirely different affair from how they were listening to music in this basement. He had opened his shirt to the navel as part of that affair. A black silk thing he'd found in a shop on the King's Road that made him look like he hadn't tried while making it clear he had spent actual money on not trying. He had, in fact, spent nine pounds. At Hogwarts this shirt did not exist, but a great many things about Alexander Sykes did not exist at Hogwarts, a feat of crafted suppression that had held up beautifully for six years and would, he was increasingly sure, collapse in some spectacular and unsurvivable fashion before his seventh was out, though this would be September's catastrophe.
Ooh, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows
He was surrounded by eighty or ninety bodies in varying states of undress, all of them moving with a shared understanding of what this basement was for and what the rest of London was not for. He had spoken to perhaps twelve people since arriving. He had danced with at least four, one of whom had put his hand on the back of Alex's neck. This had been the finest thing to happen to him all summer. His mouth was dry and taste of the gin he kept buying and not finishing. His jaw ached and, like his lower spine, had not stopped moving.
Ooh, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love
The Catacombs had been Kenneth Williams's place once, or so he had decided to believe because it improved every conversation. He sashayed down the stairs from Finborough Road and he was in it before he could articulate what it was. What with the speakers stacked against the far wall, the press of men who had each, individually, been some version of the same act Alex had taken a role in, it was: Is this worth what it would cost if the wrong person saw me walking in? The answer had been yes every time he'd come back since the end of June.
Ooh, fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free
The speed was funny because it made everyone in the room appear to be the most interesting person he had ever seen. Alex knew this was a chemical opinion, but he appreciated it all the same, because the reality, being that most people were adequate and a handful were extraordinary, was rather less fun at half past two in the morning. A man in front of him caught his eye and grinned. Alex grinned back. They were both grinning at the song and the same private understanding of what it meant to be in a basement in Earl's Court doing this instead of whatever the rest of their respective worlds assumed they were doing tonight.
He closed his eyes. The bass rung in his skull but this did not last long for he snapped them open again. Something in the corner of his vision had snagged on a light that burned too bright. His body had glimpsed the problem before his brain caught up (the speed was useful for that). He looked again, and he saw, leaning against the wall by the exit in a long black coat that had absolutely no fucking business being in this building or indeed in this postcode, smoking, a person he recognised.
Fuck, thought Alexander Sykes.
The ember of the cigarette flared as the boy drew on it, and in the quick orange light his face was unmistakable, looking simultaneously forty-five and thirteen that only a lifetime of poor and unrepeatable choices could produce. He was the most conspicuous person in the room by a factor that defied measurement.
Fuck!, Alex thought again.
What was Mundungus Fletcher doing in Muggle London? What was Mundungus Fletcher doing in this part of Muggle London, in this basement, at this hour? Because the Catacombs at Finborough Road was not merely an unlicensed club in a basement. It was an unlicensed club in a basement frequented almost exclusively by men who were there for the, outside these walls, prosecutable reason that they preferred the company of other men. his entire operation depended - had depended since June and every time Alex came down those stairs - on the wrong person not walking in.
Alex moved through the crowd, although under these circumstances, the experience felt closer to wading through warm treacle while his heart attempted to vacate his chest via his throat. The speed had been his friend ten seconds ago, now it had turned traitor. The second problem with amphetamines was that they did not discriminate between the desire to dance and the desire to commit assault. He shouldered past a shirtless man, stepped on someone's foot, didn't apologise for either acts. The entire time, Mundungus watched him come with absolute boredom.
"What the fuck are you doing here, Fletcher!?" Alex shouted over the music, the words arriving faster than he could arrange them because the speed was still going and spit flew off the consonants in a rather uncontrallable manner. "Why the hell are you here!? Lurking! Like a fucking - like a - you're just standing there! Stop looking at me! D'you hear me!? Stop fucking looking at me!"
Mundungus raised one eyebrow. He took a final drag of the cigarette and dropped it on the cement floor and put it out with his shoe. "We need a word," he said.
Alex stared at him. His heart was going at a rate that was either the speed or the terror. It could have been some creative collaboration between the two as well. He was, he realised, closer to crying than he had been in months, which was an act he would keep for later because he certainly did not intend to act upon the impulse in a basement in front of Mundungus bloody Fletcher.
"Come on, then," Mundungus said, and turned towards the exit because apparently they had somewhere to be.