Remus Lupin is definitely too pretty to die. (lykanthropos) wrote in find_horcruxes, @ 2010-02-26 12:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | remus lupin, sturgis podmore |
RP Log: Sturgis & Remus
Who: Sturgis Podmore & Remus Lupin
When: 26 February, 1980; morning
Where: Sturgis's swanky room in St. Mungo's
What: Remus gets to high-five Sturgis. His life is now complete.
Rating: Someone likes to swear. It is not Remus.
Status: Complete!
One of the healers on duty gave him an extended look after gesturing to a room just up the corridor, but Remus was able to nod a thank-you and press on before she could ask the question he was certain she was about to ask. Actually, she was halfway through. "Are you feel --" "Yeah -- no, I'm fine," Remus protested, already stepping away. He knew all too well that having been drained of a good amount of blood, being shot, and having the lunar cycle sapping him was not making for a pretty picture. Some of the patients looked better than he did, which was possibly a bit harrowing. Still, chin up and march on. "Thanks," he called back, suddenly realising that he hadn't said such a thing and, Merlin, where were his manners? The healer jumped a bit, but eventually righted herself, giving a small (albeit worried) smile in return. And that was roughly the most excitement Remus felt he needed for the remainder of the day, moonrise non-withstanding. Two nights before was more than enough for the rest of the month, even. How he and Sturgis crawled out of that on alive was not a question on Remus's mind. Instead, he preferred to accept that they were alive, as it was an overall smart reason to be chuffed over. Living was definitely one of Remus's favourite past times, although it only took a few rattling experiences to grasp that fact. In the end, he liked living, and he could only hope that living liked him in return. It was the thought on his mind as he reached the designated door, having been assured that Hitwizard Chief Inspector Sturgis Podmore was receiving visitors. Hand out, handle grasped, breath taken, exhale, and... All right, so he perhaps hadn't sorted out what to say first to Sturgis upon entering. That was probably why the words that ended up tumbling out of his mouth before he could think of something better were: "Morning, Chief." A somewhat crooked smile followed. Sturgis was not operating on full brainpower at the moment. He'd been on large doses of pain potions before, enough to know when he was on the good stuff, and sweet Merlin on a pogo stick, this was the good stuff. He felt somewhat like he was floating above his body, which was more than likely a boon because the few times he did get twinges of his body, it hurt. A lot. Apparently getting shot three times in the chest did a wizard no favours. Still, Sturgis was with it enough to squint at the pale teenager who'd knocked on his door. Lupin looked like he'd... well, been attacked by werewolves and was about to turn into one himself, truth be told. Shit timing, really. Sturgis couldn't gripe about looking ugly, though - he knew he was just as ragged, ripped apart, and charmed back together. He raised an eyebrow at the greeting that Lupin had used, voice raspy and accent a little more obnoxiously London than usual: "...'Chief''s new. Si'down." Remus did precisely as ordered, and hooked the nearest chair to sit in. No arguments there. If he was left to stand, he'd only start pacing, and that would probably make Sturgis dizzy, and that was not the reason for stopping in. "I think after a while 'sir' gets old," Remus returned, noticing all too well how the Hitwizard seemed to be pretty saturated with potions. He sounded a bit loopy. Looked a bit... well. Remus decided to pass on describing that one. "Given that half the planet uses it now. It is your title, isn't it? Chief Inspector?" "Thank fuck someone's remembered it," Sturgis muttered with a snort, but the snort dissolved into coughing and it didn't matter how many pain potions a bloke was on, that hurt. "Good--" he cleared his throat, and tried again. "Good to see you running around. Didn't catch any trouble with any Death Eating fuckheads or DMLE sorts on your way out, did you? You got shot," he explained, as if Remus might've had the occasion to forget. "And take it from me - getting shot isn't fucking fun. It's worse than the opera or getting strangled by panty-hose." "Got back to my place, had Morgan patch me up -- no trouble other than, you know, not sleeping at all." He had to cringe at Sturgis's fit of coughing, but tried to curb how much of it carried onto his expression. The muscle spasms involved probably were not conducive to healing up a chest wound. "I don't know if I want to even ask about being strangled by panty-hose, but I will say that you didn't have to show me up." Remus managed a wry grin, knowing that Sturgis could probably handle a bit of gallows humour. "I would have gladly defended your title of being the toughest of our lot without --" He waved vaguely around. "This." "Yeah, I guess this is the time when I tell you thanks for saving my ass?" Sturgis supposed sheepishly. He pulled out a file and waved it in the air, already in possession of his own file. Apparently being Chief Inspector was good for a lot of things, reading-material included. "Severing charm on the wrist of the werewolf who'd been shooting me? Yeah, I'm guessing his fucking hand just didn't fall off. Nice!" he said with a big ol' shit-eating grin. "Very nice. That's fucking-- wait for it-- handiwork right there! AHAHAHA!" Sadly, he probably would've said the same joke had he not been on pain potions. "Anyway," Sturgis managed after a moment, that laughing spell having really-bloody-hurt, "you did better-than-good, Lupin. 9 werewolves, mate. That's fucking stellar." It was merely a grin etched across Remus's face, at least until Sturgis's boisterous laughter pushed him over the ledge, and he finally gave up to laughing along. It was an awful joke. A bloody horrible one, actually, but that hardly mattered. There were worse things to be doing than sitting in St. Mungo's and being able to find something worth snorting out laughter over, after all. "I think I remember you saving me first, so -- call it even?" Remus gave up a half-shrug with his one fully-operating shoulder. Although his wound on the other was far better than the night before, it was still giving its fair share of trouble. "I mean, we did all right, didn't we? That's..." Some quick maths were tackled. "That's at least a sixth of the full pack. I'd safely say that Greyback is swearing up a storm somewhere right now." "I hope he's wetting his frilly knickers over it," Sturgis answered, eyes narrowed, smile on the violent side. "Fucking bitch, pun intended. Don't know if they'll get 'em to talk, but even if not, it's gonna help. And what's better, we got them through the DMLE. Processing. Newspapers. We're sending a message." The sides of his mouth continue to curl up even as his eyes provided satisfied vengeance. "They tried to kill my girlfriend. They got her brother, your mum. Brianna Hale. It's time to fucking wallow in it, Lupin. We deserve a goddamn day of being smug and high-fiving each other." He stuck out a hand obligingly. Remus had been momentarily hung up on the canine joke, squinting off to the side as he tried to vacate any such image of Greyback in frilly knickers from his mind. He didn't even know why he started wondering about it. As if Greyback himself wasn't an unnatural occurrence in the universe, the women's bloomers that had materialised on his person were -- Anyway. "So, it's 'Lupin' now, then?" Remus asked as he reached out a hand and deposited five into Sturgis's with a satisfying clap. Why not be smug? Everything the Hitwizard said was true. Those werewolves were in cahoots the ones that got his mother. This was worth a high-five. "I feel like I'm moving up in the world." "You pretty much kicked arse. I say that's worthy of a last name," Sturgis answered brightly. "I'm surprised at you, Lupin. You try your damnedest to be the bookish one of your group of miscreants, but you're not a bad dueler, and clearly you're deranged enough for the DMLE. Why didn't you ever think about going in it? Besides the obvious, of course." Sturgis wasn't stupid. He knew that the life of an Auror or Hitwizard was rough, cruel, and not for everyone. Most people had difficulty keeping their emotions in check, in not-bringing the cases home, or how the work tended to alienate them from other people. The thing was... Remus was already pretty even-keeled, and he tended to steer clear of people regardless. He was smart and responsible and clearly gave a damn about the state of the world. All good qualities for an Auror or Hitwizard. He had to take a moment to process the question and its preceding statements, but the truth was that Remus had already considered roughly as much. Maybe 'deranged' wasn't his choice of term, but all the work for the Order so far had (by his best estimate) been on par with the work the DMLE did. It was something that was hard to not wonder at the end of the day, especially since his path seemed to be colliding more and more frequently with the Hitwizard's. Trouble was, for all the thinking, Remus didn't actually have an answer for it. "Probably because the obvious kept me from even thinking about it in the first place." Remus picked his foot up, propping it on the opposing knee and settling back into the chair with a pensive air. "I took what I could get for a job, and that was... well, that was that." He pulled a slight frown. "Aside from my not even realising that I was apparently mad until I joined up with all of this," he added as an afterthought. Sturgis grunted something in acknowledgement. "To be honest, I sorta don't get people who's lifelong dream was being a hitwizard, or being an Auror. Ed was that way - knew it from the start. I just stumbled into it outta school. It was that or Merlin help me, bartending. No offense to bartenders, but I don't have the sweet temper for it. Fuck other people's problems and bad beer selections." He shrugged his shoulders and then swore quietly under his breath in a strangled gasp - yeah, shouldn't have shrugged his shoulders. That sucked. "How's your arm? That can't be fun changing over into big bad wolf." "I always assumed it was -- I don't even know what I thought. I suppose that you were legacy, or raised to it because I think the only time I've ever seen you not being a Hitwizard was the one time at the pub." Remus squinted vaguely, breathing in and out, trying to keep his thoughts lined up. It was always harder this close the full moon. "With the pie," he clarified, although it probably wasn't necessary. "And my arm is still attached," Remus replied, lifting his arm just enough to prove that it was still functional. "It's not that horrible. I've seen worse, and I'm still sitting here annoying you, right? Besides, I have help during the night." He waved the matter it off with his other hand. "How are you?" A pause. "Besides the obvious, of course," he added, borrowing some of Sturgis's earlier phrasing. "Legacy?" Sturgis snorted. "Couldn't be further from the truth." Not that this was his opportunity to launch into the sepia-drenched recollections of his rather shitty childhood and adolescence. He may have had a ton of potions rattling his brain, but he wasn't an idiot. "But yeah, I get what you mean. The job sorta sinks its teeth into you, after a while. It's hard to not be a hitwizard off the clock, at least in my position, where I get called in at a moment's notice quite a bit. But I love it, regardless." He smirked at the other man for a moment. "You're not annoying me. If you were, I'd be blustery and bitching and would throw my bedpan or something at you. And I'm fine," he added, "and that's not me trying to be manly or shit. Bullets, eh. If they don't kill you in the first fifteen, they're generally not going to with our magic. I am in a strop over being out of commission during the full moon," he added with a scowl. "But thank fuck, it's been quiet." "You love it minus the werewolves," Remus amended for him. He allowed his view to saunter around the room, which was typical Mungo's fare, although he stopped to take note of the framed picture on the wall which held cheery spring-ish sort of scene within the carved wooden border. As he watched, a rabbit hopped across the bottom and into a thatch of grass in the corner. He had to shake himself back to his senses from waiting for it to hop back out. "And it's hard to be manly in a hospital gown, either way --" Remus paused, just to be certain that the bedpan wasn't going to go soaring across the room at him. "-- but I can accept an 'I'm fine' at face value. Granted, then you get to hospital food, and 'fine' gets to be a really relative sort of concept." Somewhere, on some level of hell, hospital food had been created, and that was roughly the most Remus could think of the stuff. And, really, he didn't at all want to think of the stuff. It was all too easy to change the gears of his tracks, and to shift back to the original point. "Do you figure they'll try those werewolves? Azkaban sentencing, or...?" Sturgis made a face, and that was all he wanted to say about hospital food. Nearly as bad as the fact that he couldn't smoke for another month again until they were sure that his lungs were healthy. Fuck. "First comes the plea-bargaining," he explained, sounding a little more like himself. "That when we try to get them to take veritaserum of their own accord, so we can find out more about the rest of the pack. If they don't do that, then unfortunately, most of their testimony's bullshit, so we try them based off of what we do know. At the very least, they're werewolves who didn't turn themselves in when their files went missing-" He gave Remus a rather thick expression at that particular point, "and they'll be tried for that. From what I've heard, though, one has already confessed to attacking you and Caoimhe, and another's confessed to--" Here's where things got a little bit more difficult. Sturgis slowed down his monologue, giving Remus a quick glanceover. "Another's confessed to killing your Mum," he concluded more quietly. That only hit like a ten-tonne force, and Remus opted to give a silent nod, trying to recover from how every other single thought had dropped out of his skull upon impact. He had a somewhat hazy consideration of how the pack was intertwined, and while he hadn't counted on getting the ones -- one of the ones -- responsible for that, there was good faith in that the legs would be swept out from beneath Greyback for a bit. They could at least take some of his brand out of play, and that was the best hope Remus had for everything that could have happened. "No regrets here, then. Not that there ever were, but..." There would be more than enough time to think that over when he caught a moment to really process it. Remus lifted a slight smile-ish variety of expression, ever keen to keep the conversation moving. "I was thinking about running out to get something edible to humans before I go try to drown myself in work," he picked right back up with, as if it had always been the next logical thing to say. "Any requests? I mean, I know you have connections with folks that actually know how to cook and bake, but just say the word." "Something greasy," Sturgis said decisively. "Something I'm not supposed to have. The fucking atom bomb of baked goods. Pub food. Chips. Something like that. Use the powers that the gods gave you, Lupin, and get me something so goddamn unhealthy that Sirius Black would run away screaming." It wasn't that he was immune to the shellshocked expression signifying Remus's quiet acceptance of the capture of his mother's killer. It was just that Sturgis did a lot better at joking about things than he did comfort - and really, the thought that they'd caught the sonuvabitch was as good as anything Remus could ever hope to have in that regard. Sturgis leaned forward with a pained wince and gave Remus a pat on the back. "Thanks for visiting. Get some sleep, you hear me? Don't let those ruffian friends of yours take you out to the pub tonight; you'll just fall asleep on the bar and drool, and no one likes a fucking drooler, mate. Or worse - you'll get maudlin. Repeat after me, Lupin: 'I will not be maudlin, because it makes me a dozy tosser.'" "Cripes. Set the bar a little higher, why don't you?" Right, so chips. That would be easy enough, and the rest would probably be up to whatever snagged his attention once he got out onto the London streets. All told, it wasn't solely about Sturgis because Remus was vastly certain that his stomach was about to go to work on eating itself if he didn't scram in the near future to find sustenance. Tea and a biscuit wasn't exactly working with a just-about-twenty-year-old male werewolf's somewhat destructive appetite. Remus scooted the chair back, clambering to his feet, and still not really letting the last bit of Sturgis's news sink its hold -- although the offer Lily had posed just the other day about if he needed to talk did crop up. He filed it away. Something to come back to later. "I'll try to stay out of trouble, if you promise to try to not scare the orderlies too badly," Remus offered, glossing over the request for repetition almost entirely save for a brief, wry look. He then gave a nod and a slight salute sort of a wave of his hand at the threshold of the room. "Give me a few, and I'll be back with something, Chief." "Thanks, Lupin. I don't care what they say about you. You're an all right human being," Sturgis decided, and in lieu of Remus actually repeating what he wanted to, he added: "Wait, wait, wait! Instead of being maudlin, here's what you need to do: open up your journal, ward to the Order, and write about how goddamn kick-arse you were taking out half a goddamn werewolf pack. Write it up all action-shot-ish. Birds love that sorta thing." Because goddammit, someone was going to have to make sure that Remus stopped taking things so seriously when the other Marauders weren't around. "And don't eat anyone unless they ask you to!" Sturgis advised as the kid started to leave. "Looking a little peckish there, Lupin. Pastries, mate. Pastries!" "I --" He was about to insist that there was no way he would go off boasting -- if anything, he'd gladly recount the events as they happened, conclusions of any such 'goddamn kick-arse' qualities be left to the Order -- but Remus was cut off by the furthered advice. For a short, silent moment, he averted his eyes off to the side. His mouth wobbled, as if a laugh was trying to break through, but he held tight to his self-control. It was a small smirk. "Pastries. Right." There was a gesture, Remus's thumb drawn through the air and signalling the corridor. "I'm... I'm going to go now. I'm walking away now." And just to prove it, he backed out the door, nearly collided with a healer passing by, and pardoned himself with a flurry of apologies before picking up step toward the exit. |