f: With Him Where Ever (R/S)
With Him Where Ever, 375 words, R/S with Fenrir (blah), nothing offensive for a slasher. No beta. Could use an honest one, by which I mean one who does not know me, like me or care about hurting my feelings, which, yes, are easily hurt, but never too deeply. Oh. And. The song. It's "Do You Love an Apple?", originally sung in 1975 by the Bothy Band.




“This is all you brought?” Fenrir asks, and Remus has to bend his neck back 30 degrees to look him in the eye and say, “It’s all I have.” Fenrir reaches out anyway and unfastens the clasps so the suitcase swings open, and Remus watches his papers and books and change of clothes soak up muddy water while Fenrir pushes around the contents with his boot.

Fenrir picks up his wand and Remus can too easily imagine it snapping between his thick fingers, but instead it slips into his pocket. “All right, then,” he growls, and leaves a footprint on the bared white pages of The Wasteland. Remus waits until the onlookers leave before he drops to his knees and salvages what he can.

The first letter arrives two nights later. Moony, it begins, and I miss you; I’m sorry, it ends. Remus reads it twice, then feeds it one ink-cramped page at a time into his fire. The last words crumble just as Fenrir sits beside him and flashes his pointed teeth. “You’re a professor, then?”

“No, that was just a joke,” Remus says with a shake of his head, as if it doesn't matter, as if it happened a lifetime ago; later, curled tightly in his tent, he traces a finger over the letters on the case and stops shivering.

The second letter (Moony, I’m sorry, where?) is shorter. The third (Remus, please, anything.) is nothing at all, so Remus keeps it, folded into a thin strip and tucked beneath the waistband of his trousers, against his hip and the bone-deep memory of Sirius’s fingers. This is all he has, this and Sirius’s alcohol-heavy breath lingering in the shell of his ear, the echo of his raspy whisper singing, ridiculous, do you love an apple do you love a pear do you love a? He plucked the wet curls at the nape of Remus’s neck like harp strings and smiled, sleepy, with his lashes lowered so Remus couldn’t see his eyes.

It’s cold here, Remus writes on a fraying scrap of parchment, already ruined by rain and smudged with dirt, and signs it R.J. Lupin.