Prompt 11 - Over 30 Years Old
@wolfstarmicrofic July 11, word count 863
Sirius was sulking on his mother’s bed, slowly stroking the soft feathers on Buckbeaks neck. Dumbledore had told him again he was not to leave Grimmauld Place for any reason. He’d only wanted to see Harry off to Hogwarts from platform 9 3/4. He’d missed four already and didn’t want to miss another one. But Dumbledore was waiting for him when he returned to the house and warned him that if he left the house again without permission, he would be on his own and, with Padfoot being known to the death eaters and the entirety of Britain, wizards and muggles alike, knowing the face of the escaped convict Sirius Black he’d be caught within a week.
Sirius had yelled and argued, but Dumbledore had infuriatingly ignored him.
“Stay, Sirius,” He’d ordered before sweeping out of the house, his purple robes swishing behind him. So Sirius had stormed upstairs away from the order members milling about on the lower levels. At least Buckbeak never told him off.
A soft knock at the door woke him from where he’d fallen asleep against Buckbeak’s side.
“Yeah?” His voice was cracked and croaky with sleep.
‘Can I come in?” Remus asked through the door.
“If you want,” He grumbled, curling up closer to Buckbeak. Remus came in and closed the door behind him. He waved his wand, putting up a silencing charm around them.
“Hey, so what’s going on?”
“Dumbledore treating me like a child. Being locked up in this house…” Sirius couldn’t finish. He buried his head in Buckbeak’s feathers. He heard Remus sigh.
“Get up, let’s go,” Remus ordered. Sirius pulled his face away from Buckbeak and looked up.
“Where are we going?” He asked, not sure what Remus wanted him to do.
“I’m breaking you out of here,” He grinned mischievously, holding out his hand to Sirius. Sirius didn’t hesitate and took the proffered hand. Remus hauled him up off the bed and snuck him down the stairs towards the front door. “Here,” Remus said, pulling a thick travel cloak from the cloak hooks and draped it over him. “Cover yourself completely.” Sirius pulled the cloak around his head, obscuring his face, so no one would recognise him and followed Remus out of the front door. They walked out onto the street and as soon as they were free from the magic surrounding the house Remus grabbed his arm and apparated him away.
They arrived at a secluded beach. Sirius pulled the cloak away from his face and stared around. The cliffs behind them were sheer, there was no way anyone was getting down to this beach without magic. Remus took a step forward, his wand raised as he chanted a spell under his breath. Sirius watched as blue light flowed out of the end of Remus’s wand and spread out above them, rendering them invisible from above. Remus bent down and picked up a stick from the sand. “Wanna play?” He asked, tossing the sick up in the air and catching it. Sirius grinned from ear to ear as he transformed into Padfoot and took off running. Remus threw the stick, and Padfoot leapt into the air, catching it in his jaws. He trotted back to where Remus waited for him and dropped it at his feet.
They had a wonderful afternoon playing on the beach. He chased the waves away from the shore and danced about Remus’s feet when he went for a walk down the narrow, sandy stretch. They ended up sitting on a pebbled area and Padfoot curled up beside Remus, dropping his heavy head into his lap. Remus dug his fingers into Padfoot's fur and scratched him behind his ears. When the sun began to dip below the waves, Remus stood up and said they should go. Sirius transformed back and made sure the cloak was tugged firmly around his face. He looked out at the ocean sorrowfully and let Remus apparate him back to Grimmauld Place.
“Thank you for today,” He told Remus quietly as they walked back through the front door. A shiver shook through him as the front door shut.
“You go up to your bedroom, and I’ll get us some food,” Remus told him as he walked into the kitchen, where Sirius could hear voices chattering. He trudged up the stairs and went into his room and jumped up onto his bed. Remus returned with bowls of warm stew and two thick slabs of chocolate cake. He placed them down on the bed before crawling up to sit opposite Sirius. He waved his hands in front of Sirius like one of those muggle magicians and pulled a bottle of firewhisky from inside his robes. Sirius barked out a laugh and dug into his dinner.
“It’ll get better love,” Remus said gently as they snuggled together once they’d finished eating.
“You promise?” Sirius mumbled, his words slightly slurred from the whisky.
“I do love,” Remus murmured, pressing a kiss into the top of Sirius’s hair. “Just you wait,” They fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms like they used to do as teenagers. Sirius was happier than he had been for a long time.
68 notes
·
View notes
Over 30
@wolfstarmicrofic
Word count: 470
***
Remus apparated outside Grimmauld Place the day he heard that Sirius had taken up residence there.
It was that day that he saw him for the second time in around fourteen years. It was also that day that he realized that Sirius had changed.
Whereas before, he was loud and took up the whole room, now he just… didn’t. He still took up space in the room. But it was simply less. He still spoke, but now he was quiet and more thoughtful. It disconcerted Remus, to say the least. The image of Sirius he had in his head was wildly different than the Sirius that he saw now. It was as if it had been a still-drying painting, and someone had run a brush through the middle. You could still discern it, but it was smudged.
For the first week, they tiptoed around each other. Then one day, while Remus was drinking his tea, Sirius came up to him. He put his head on his shoulder and said a small, “Hello love.”
Since then, Remus had been sleeping in Sirius’ room. Nothing had happened, per say, but it helped both of them to have someone there after not having anyone for so long. They talked sometimes. Sometimes, they just lay together until sleep finally came.
“You’ve changed,” Remus whispered one night.
Sirius was quiet for a moment, contemplating. “That’s what that place is supposed to do, I suppose. Chip you until there’s nothing left.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “There were people there, Remus. They were there, but they were also… gone.”
Remus felt his eyes filling with tears. “But you survived. You’re here.”
“I think it was because of Padfoot. Being Padfoot instead of, well, me, it saved my life.” Sirius continued, “Y’know, you were the reason I became an animagi. It was all for you. So in a way, it was you who saved me.”
Remus was fully sobbing now. He saw a few tears slip down Sirius’ face, and it only made him cry even harder. He knew he had a habit of bottling up his emotions, and fourteen years was a lot of time where he hadn’t let the bottle open. It was like shaking up a can of soda: you knew what was coming, but you did it anyway. He’d waited so long, shook the can so much.
Speaking of waiting, they’d both done a lot of that. It felt nice to not have to anymore. Remus knew their time together was too good to be true. He felt it. Maybe that made their time even more precious.
And maybe that had to be enough.
Sirius wiped away his tears in a fruitless effort, since more came streaming down afterwards anyway.
“Oh, my moon. I’m so glad I could be your star.”
53 notes
·
View notes
FLUXES [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies]
Example: "DOCTOR, The"
[Image description, courtesy of @quailfence: a series of pictures of text, alternated with screencaps and gifs from Doctor Who.
1: Text: Fluxes: [Celestis: Engineered Participants/Technology] Individuals transposed backwards in time but not too far in space, using a very high chaotic limiter setting and tied to their home period by a thread of biodata
2: The Eleventh Doctor stands in the future corpse of his TARDIS, looking and a pulsing stream of light that has replaced the console. He says, "That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space."
3: Text: He raised a finger. 'Look. There.
Now she could just make out the thread in the moonlight. It was just a faint reflection, maybe a foot or two long, about a metre off the ground. A taut strand of spiderweb hanging in the air, not attached to anything.
'What is it?' Fitz asked.
'It's only partially rotated into three dimensions,' he said. He pushed his finger right through the glimmering line, without affecting it. 'That's why it looks one- or two-dimensional. The rest is still perpendicular to what we can see - woven into higher space, or the time vortex…'
'Yes,' said Fitz, 'but what is it?' 'It's what your friend mistook for a ley line.' The Doctor was scuttling around the silver thread, peering at it from every angle, getting more and more agitated. 'It's part of the fabric of space-time itself. What DNA is to your genetic code, this stuff is to biodata. And it's all just exposed here now. Personality, history, memory, perception, all vulnerable…'
'I'm going to have to ask you again, aren't I?' said Fitz.
The Doctor said, 'It's me.'
4: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth doctors in the TARDIS. 14: "But you're fine?" 15: "I'm fine, because you fixed yourself. We're Time Lords, we're doing rehab out of order."
5: Text: The subject is turned loose in his or her own history, and the limiter setting allows tiny actions taken by the future version to have considerable effects on the past version. The biodata link then transfers these changes to the future version, which alters it, and thus alters the changes made to the past version. Therefore, the individual's history is kept constantly in flux.
6: The Fugitive Doctor says, "Let me take it from the top: Hello, I'm the Doctor."
7: Text: Let me finish. Think back to that time when you went to see your previous selves.
8: Ten, Eleven, and War talk to each other. Ten: "You're not actually suggesting that we change our own personal history?" Eleven: "We change history all the time. I'm suggesting far worse."
9: Text: 'Maybe there's no one home on Gallifrey,' said the boy softly. There was just the one of him.
The Doctor looked at him, cupping the small white cube in his hands. The boy said, Maybe they all left. Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment.
10: The TARDIS by the ruins of Gallifrey
11: Text: 'It's impossible,' said the Doctor. 'It's impossible for my people. Our past is unreachable. What's written can't be unwritten.'
'Who said your history can't change?'
Another boy answered, 'Someone from his history.'
And another: 'Maybe it's the second-biggest lie in Time Lord history.'
12: Dhawan!Master tells Thirteen, "You are the Timeless Child."
13: Thitreen stares at a ruined house. Swarm whispers in her ear and tells her, "All the memories you've lost, all the people you've been. It's all in there, contained within that house."
14: Text: And it was like the Doctor's home. As if his ship understood the loss of the House and had compensated to fill the emptiness. Shadowy corridors, alcoves and stairways, a secret at every turn. Like being in the Doctor's head. Like his life, for that matter, the details of which were strewn like flotsam across the floor.
15: Text: 'Sweet,' said the little boy. 'That's my favourite of your origin stories, too.'
The Doctor opened his eyes. He had been laughing, he realised, he felt that lightness in himself. The boys had all moved away, behind him, leaving him facing the empty dark of the warehouse.
'What do you mean?' he asked. His voice sounded very small.
'Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?'
'Feel free to believe either of them,' snapped the Doctor, 'or both of them, or neither of them. If you're curious about my past, I want there to be as many wrong answers as possible.'
16: The Eighth Doctor tells someone, "I'm half human. On my mother's side."
17: Text: 'Well he's a hybrid, you know that. A Gallifreyan not born of Gallifreyan, the one who unites the two races and brings good old human niceness into their alien society. Aliens need that, y'know.'
'A human hybrid? She saw the contempt in his curling lip. 'Pseudoscientific nonsense. There's no evidence,' he repeated.
'He's allowed to be different. He's got a prophecy and everything.'
18: Lady Me says, "By your own reasoning, why couldn't the Hybrid be half Time Lord, half human?"
19: Text: Someone giggled. 'Let's play pin the tale on the donkey.'
'Maybe you didn't use to have a father.'
'Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there -'
The Doctor shouted, 'I'm not listening!'
'- who's rewriting you when you're not looking!'
'Maybe you weren't always half human.'
'But now you've become always half human.' 'Maybe you weren't always a Time Lord.'
But now you've always been a Time Lord.'
'Maybe you originally came from some planet in the forty-ninth century. Fleeing from the Enemy who'd overrun your home -'
'I said I'm not listening! Laa laa laa laa laa -'
'- and you've just been written and rewritten and overwritten, ever since.'
'Pin the tale!'
'How d'you know it's not true?'
'How could you know it's not true?'
The voices crowded in. 'How would you know, huh?'
'How would you know?'
'How would 'How would you 'How 'How would you know? you know? you know? know?'
'Why would I care?' shouted the Doctor.
The boy fell silent.
20: Lady Me asks, "Am I right? Is it true?" Twelve replies, "Does it matter?"
21: Text: However, the one group from the Homeworld which has excelled at flux-engineering is the Celestis.
22: Two asks the Time Lords, "Now then… what about me?"
23: Tecteun tells Thirteen, "Which is ehy we engineered the Fluyx: Shut the universe down and you within it."
24: Text: Even Mictlan itself can be considered a kind of enormous flux, an endlessly-shifting realm so cortosive to the rest of history that its heartland has to be kept on the outer skin of the universe
24: The Fourteenth Doctor tells Donna, "I invoked a supersition, at the edge of the universe, where the walls are thin and everything is possible."
25: The space station from Wild Blue Yonder
26: Text: There are suggestions of a stable middle-ground between the two fates, in which the physical matter of the flux is lost but the meaning of the subject/ victim is retained, a series of memetic connections with no flesh to support it. Yet this entity exists only on a purely theoretical level, relying on the perceptions of others to survive at all.
27: The Twelfth Doctor walks up to the TARDIS console. He says, "Can't wait to hear what I say." Glancing at the viewer, he adds, "I'm noting without an audience."
28: Text: You know what Sam represents. If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Stop me if I'm getting too abstract here, but if a Time Lord saves the world and nobody witnesses him doing it, does history care? She's your witness. The thing you need to make you whole.
29: The First Doctor looks at the viewer and says, "Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!" End description.]
[Plain text: Fluxes [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies] Example: "Doctor, The". End plain text.]
@dw-described
308 notes
·
View notes