The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I never wrote HP before...

The Searching Remus motif, I borrowed from copperbadge , unintentionally -- but still visibly after the fact, so thank you!

She is sharp, this one, all angles, darknesses, creature of muscle and well-schooled flight. Her long hair, ink-colored, sheet is spilling over the edge of Luna's bed, and Luna who can never find her parchments or stop sucking the edge of her quill can suddenly very much, very much concentrate on this, her, now, here. No one out there in their world would bookend the two of them, and they fuck in stolen time after Quidditch practices (Luna has nevermuch anything to anyhowdo) --
And for Cho it's this, for a moment, to let slack her grip and yet fly.

In Copenhagen, in the harbor, there was a statue of a girl on a rock. It wasn't a mermaid, not if you'd ever seen a mermaid, and Sirius amused himself that summer holiday trying out his long-distance hexes from the hotel window in Merwedeplein, trying to get her into something a bit more... squamous. Regulus did lascivious things to fried eels, on the terrace, and the A. P.'s sunned themselves and pretended anyone who was anyone was still ignoring the outside world. In the subtitled Der Wizaerde Vaelt, shadowy hints masked in bad translation told of a gathering darkness over the island they'd left to come and summer here.

They walked, Sirius, Regulus, on the canals, trying to find their reflections in the water. The straight unflinching heat of summer, even here at the tip of the North where fir trees and fjords were just across the water, cast up foul fumes and brought mangy cats down to the canal-edge. It was a not a world Reg could get his head around. He listened to Sirius talk -- listened rather -- and skipped Orangina caps along the water. (He had started the fondness for the Muggle drink as an affectation, but Merlin in a Speedo, it was hot.)

"You, um, you'll think about what I said, yeah?" Sirius, nervous, one uncertain hand on his brother's arm. "Be careful who you --"

"You sound like Dad," Reg said, and they didn't talk, after that, and the bottle-caps clinked and made wavelets and rusted when they sank down.


You could find anything here.
Not what he wanted to find.
Among the sleek black harbor-rats and the gloaming white sewer-rats, he hoped and searched and cursed and got his fingers bitten -- well, the human in him didn't much matter, as diseases went -- looking for a common, brown, British-back-area rat.
And it was null.
Remus sprawled on a bed in a room above the Thai Me Up Noodle Bar, a joint for the very blackest paint of tourist, and breathed out into air so thick and wet he could have blotted it from his scarred skin. Still a week from the low red moon that owned him, and he felt the urge on him to find something small and weak and snap its neck in his teeth.
He wondered if it was the squalor of the country he was in, the bowl-of-water-with-cabbage poverty, the crowding and the cholera that made him seek Pettigrew here. He wondered how many more places there were on earth to look.
Well, he had time. Remus sat up, and accio'd a folded and re-folded city map. He'd bought it for a few grubby baht -- all right, if it meant giving up a bowl of soup and noodles, he could go a bit longer on no food -- outside a temple built as shrine and sanctuary for rattus rattus. He ran his hands up through the brindle-fawn-gray of his hair, and considered his course.
He had time.

They called it the Pastures of Heaven. It was a green, purple, blue, white, black-shot ocean of land, where the mountains shrugged to hold up the sky. It was snowing again, the first snow of the year, July, and Hermione was out on the steppe on a scrub-pony's back, breathing the earth-and-herbs air and searching through Scythian tombs. She had found a witch's tomb, with its cache of bronze, of horn, of horses; she had shot through seventeen rolls of wizarding film.

It had all kept her busy, and her tutor and his beloved approved. There was a felt tent at the bottom of the blue bowl that was the sky -- Sirius thought, once or twice, it might even still be tethered to the ground -- and inside it on fulled-wool mats woven in patterns of blossoms and warriors and fever-dream creatures, he had not left Remus' side in what seemed like days. It was warm where they were, and safe. A small fragrant fire burned in a brazier. They kissed, and talked, and Remus' pale hand never left Sirius' shoulder, hipbone, hair.

"They say a man who comes this far, and stands under these mountains..."

Remus looked up at Sirius. He had never spoken, before, in a voice like this, a voice that held anything.

"...they say that the sky takes him, and he will never die."

On the Muse-Gifted Writing front, the selkie riff still persists, and I am notebooking the Queer Regency, and notebooking too Jesus-Judas. No that was not a slash. Pervs and wankers, you all.