Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG. Remus gen. Post-OotP.
Disclaimer: JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Warner Brothers own the rights to these characters; I'm just messing about.
Summary: Every morning had started like this, since the battle in the Department of Mysteries: Remus, in the kitchen of a house where he no longer felt as though he had a place, long fingers wrapped around a cup of tea that would be bone-cold by the time he raised it to his lips.

i wandered out in the world for years
while you just stayed in your room
i saw the crescent but you saw the whole of the moon

Harry's 16^th birthday was three days after the full moon, and on that morning, Remus sat in the kitchen of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, with his 132^nd cup of tea (since Sirius fell) going cold in his hands.

Every morning had started like this, since the battle in the Department of Mysteries: Remus, in the kitchen of a house where he no longer felt as though he had a place, long fingers wrapped around a cup of tea that would be bone-cold by the time he raised it to his lips.

No matter how quickly he sipped - once the water was poured from the kettle, his tea was always cold that summer.

He hadn't seen Harry in weeks, before Harry's birthday. The rest of the Order came and went as it pleased them, or more likely as it was necessary for them, and Remus sat in the kitchen - Sirius would say, would have said, that he held court, but Remus did not feel like a king or a judge. He felt like a prisoner, trapped between his own body and a war that did not belong to anyone at all, and the voices that echoed around him were hardly more than ghosts.

When Molly swept through the room, cooking for two dozen, or Tonks sat at the table and chattered at him about Auror things, their voices swept over him unheard. He did not always have a watchdog; there were long hours that passed at the table where he was alone, by himself with the phantoms of another life, and another cold cup of tea. But the people who sat with him were as distant from him as the ones who were long gone, who would never again sit across from him.

The first time that Sirius was gone, the first 13 years that he disappeared, slipped away from Remus like a ghost - the first time, Remus read Muggle poetry. Not constantly, and sometimes not for months, but he would see a dark shadow of Sirius's quirky smirk on someone else's face, passing strangers in Diagon Alley, and he would go home to his cold and quiet flat and run his fingers over the words on the page.

Sometimes he wondered if Muggle poets, the great Muggle poets, had carried little sparks of magic in them. Sometimes, the language was just too fierce and beautiful to be something without magic at all.

Remus watches ghosts and phantoms pass through Grimmauld Place, and he thinks of T.S. Eliot, who was his favorite: In the room the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo. He feels like a ghost in his own life. He stops wondering why everyone he touches draws away from him, as though his touch burned them - it is the opposite of heat, he is freezing to death inside his own body.

He stops touching anyone at all, for fear of freezing anyone else into this prison - though he knows it is a prison of his own making.

The day after Harry's 16^th birthday, in the afternoon, Remus sat at the table with his 135^th cup of tea that would not stay warm, and Ron sat across from him and ate beans on toast.

They had not had a birthday party; Molly had suggested it, and Hermione, in a voice that was too old for someone who still looked so young, had said, "No." There was no arguing with her voice, though Molly had frowned and gone back to the stove, and Ron had scowled and stabbed savagely at his shepherd's pie, and there had been no party.

The morning after Harry's birthday, when he had not come down to breakfast, lunch or dinner, Ron sat across the table from Remus, looking more tired than a sixteen year old should, and said, around a mouthful of beans, "Harry's burning things up in the attic."

"Burning things," Remus said dumbly, trying to remember what the heat of fire felt like.

"Everything," Ron said quietly, reverently, as though it were a tremendous secret. It probably was. Remus vaguely remembered that Tonks had told him that Harry wouldn't let anyone else into the attic; he'd claimed it as his domain, his part of the inheritance that he and Remus had received, unwanted. If Ron knew anything that went on behind the closed door and the windows that Harry did not open, it was more than Remus knew.

Ron shoveled more beans onto a piece of toast rapidly becoming soggy and Remus laced his fingers around his icy mug. When Ron looked up from his plate, his eyes were shuttered as tightly as the windows of the attic, and Remus thought, not for the first time, that the greatest tragedy among all the other tragedies that they were party to these days was that these children had not had a childhood.

Remus had not had much of a childhood, either, but Sirius had always done his best to make it up to Remus - the terrifying incident in the Shack aside.

But Ron and Hermione had chosen Harry, the way Sirius and James had chosen Remus, and now Remus was the only one left standing - he couldn't help the tightening in his jaw when he thought bitterly, I wish, for them, that Harry is not the only one left standing.

Harry was burning up his anger, and if Remus woke to flames licking at his face one night, the anger and grief of a schoolboy raging out of control, he did not know if he would even then be warm.

"You can't save anyone else if you can't save yourself, Ron," Remus said, and it sounded both kinder and more true than Remus had meant for it to.

Ron could not save Harry, and Remus could not have saved Sirius - not the first time, not the second time, and not the third. Remus was alone in the kitchen to save himself, and Harry was trapped in a prison of his own fiery making.

August 31^st was a Wednesday, the moon was waxing, and in the evening Remus sat alone in the kitchen in the dark with his 217^th cup of tea. Molly and Arthur had taken their horde home to the Burrow, and the rest of the Order was working, he assumed - he was left to mind Harry, who didn't seem to want minding at all.

He could have lit a fire, but he was starting to enjoy the cold. Not enjoy - adjust to it, the same way that he had spent thirteen years adjusting to life without Sirius.

He was staring at his hands, wrapped around the mug, and thinking of nothing at all when the door to the kitchen swung open, and Harry, thin and tense, was framed suddenly in the light streaming through from the hallway. Harry, who Remus hadn't seen in weeks. Harry, who, he suddenly realized, was essentially Remus' responsibility now that his parents and Sirius were gone.

Harry, who had been burning up at the top of the house while Remus froze to death at the bottom.

He was skittish when he noticed Remus there, nervous like a first-year about to be sorted, and clearly not expecting to see anyone in the house at all. "Harry," Remus said. And then, "Lumos."

Harry was flushed, and his eyes were ringed with dark bruising. If he'd slept at all in days, or maybe even weeks, Remus would ride Sirius' motorbike. He was twisting his fingers in the edge of his jumper, staring at Remus with frightened-animal eyes, and a bright red patch - burn, Remus thought, an unhealed burn - spread across the back of his right hand, shiny and raw.

"Harry," he said again, and then he stopped, because what was it that he wanted, needed, had to say? Nothing that could heal this grief if Harry didn't want to heal it.

Harry didn't say a word, all bones and angles and his terrible empty eyes, and slipped around the table to Remus' seat, sinking onto the bench at the table beside him. Harry's skin was hot to the touch, scalding against Remus fingers, but Remus stretched an arm around his shoulders and pulled Harry close to him.

Harry shuddered, just once, and then relaxed suddenly and bonelessly against Remus' side, burying his head against Remus' chest and drawing long, shuddering breaths, the heat of his body seeping into Remus' skin. At first it burned - Remus had been cold for so long that the warmth is overwhelming, like plunging frost-bitten fingers into a boiling pot, watching pieces of dead, useless skin float away from the bone.

Remus tightened his arm around Harry, wrapped his other hand around his cup of cold tea, and closed his eyes.

Remus didn't know how long they sat in the dark, Harry grieving and desperate and Remus thawing slowly, but when he opened his eyes, there was steam rising from the cup of tea, cold just a moment before, sitting on the table before him.

Author's notes: 1500 words, 500 words a section. For cee, because. Title and epigraph from the Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon". As per usual, it's all about Sirius, even when it isn't.