Chapter Text
Hogwarts Years
Padfoot
The Sacred Twenty-Eight uphold themselves through rites of passage, never mind all the inbreeding. Purity is a symbol: you learn to worship it, and then you become it.
From the moment you’re born, every family relationship is a ritual, so the genealogical way of thinking, now ingrained in your young mind, reproduces itself. Then, when you become of age – which, if you’re a boy, means the last night of the year you turn sixteen – you go through a liminal moment of transition, a radical change of status into just what you were born to be, along with all the other pureblood boys your age.
What truly goes down: a secret, unspoken. All that is known is, if you make it to the morning, you’re bonded for life. You’ll become one of these men, one with these men; you’ll move towards the interests of the collective, and you’ll behave the same way: you’ll look down on your wives and hex your children and starve your house-elves and you’ll love each other, kill and die for the shared, spilled blood. You’ll become the very symbols that bred you, the very religion you worship, the very beliefs that guarantee you power over others.
You’ll need each other, to make it through the night. Loyalty is sown in the womb. Purity is mystified so its political authority upholds.
Boys are mostly excited for it; Sirius Black knows he is an anomaly, him and his deep-set fear. He’s terrified of it at eight-years-old, when Evan Rosier tells every boy at his birthday party Sirius Black is queer (before he even knows what it means; long before he starts sorting all those things out), and they all join forces to shove him into the ladies’ room, laughing meanly. Sirius is very, very, terrified of it at eleven, when he is sorted into the wrong house.
By the time he is thirteen and three quarters, he has downplayed it: he’s unstoppable, unbeatable, he’s a fucking genius, he’s king of the Castle, fucking come get him, rite of passage, I’d like to see you try.
At sixteen, bright morning of January first, shaking hands tucking his hair behind his ears, he thinks: I need out. The Greengrass boy is dead, and the other six boys staring at him from the other side of the room are a clique now. They decided as such, they decided to leave him and Greengrass to fend for themselves, and he’s alive by mistake, by the off-chance of being an illegal Animagus, by the sheer dumb luck of being best of friends with Remus.
Remus, who is looking down at him, face crooked in sternness.
“You said you’d be in the library. We have to work on our project”, he reminds him. He crosses his arms and then uncrosses them, self-consciously.
“You’ll do things your way anyway, so might as well just go ahead and do it yourself”, Sirius grumbles.
“No”, he says, but he’s smiling, that upside-down sort of grin he does when his joke is best delivered evenly. “I need you to give ideas, so I know they’re bad and not to be carried out”
Sirius huffs, raises a lazy middle finger. “I’m going to have a lie-in”
“The fifth consecutive one. You don’t have to be so dramatic; you’ve done quite enough of brooding. Consider your point”, he sighs, but he sits by Sirius’ feet on the windowsill, cracks the window open, “set across”
“On top of being a nuisance, I have an actual, continuous headache”, he says, stealing Remus’ cigarette from his fingers as soon as it’s lit.
Remus watches him through the smoke, foggy and murky, eyebrow raised in endearing concern. He has minor bruising on his cheek, a scar raised from where he picked on a stubborn pimple, and his hair is static-messy, unwashed going on, Sirius would guess, three or four days.
“Walk you to Pomfrey?”
Sirius shakes his head. It’s horrible, it’s humiliating, really, but he wants Remus to know; he wants his horrors vindicated, continually forgiven, his small secrets kept. So he takes his cold hand by his skinny wrists, brings his long fingers to his burning nape, where his mother had yanked at his hair, hard. She had grumbled words, some of which could have been a curse, Sirius is none the wiser, the only thing he knows is the throbbing pain, sometimes a dull ache, sometimes sharp radii of torment.
“Shit”, Remus inhales. He sinks his fingers into his hair, feeling how far it goes. “Sirius”
He shrugs, despondent, head bent down. Remus opens his palm over where it hurts. He holds him in place, and then he moves the pads of his fingers in circles, gentle, unknotting the dark magic. Sirius lets him. James hadn’t known what to do, but Remus is probably familiar with it, scars made of hatred.
He gets closer, more comfortable, and Sirius rests his temple on his shoulder. He toys with Remus’ red-and-gold tie, and the collar of his robe, worn soft, while his cold, skilled fingers and their primal magic alleviate the agony. He likes the solidity of Remus’ witchcraft, of Remus’ chest.
He calms down – probably the exhaustion taking over him. He has been on high alert ever since he ran away, in case somebody comes to get him, in case he has to fight. Mollified, he closes his eyes for the first time in weeks, breathes evenly.
He feels blood blossoming, trailing down the back of his neck, warm, and then Remus’ thumb wiping it off, a slow drag in the opposite direction. He brings the black-stained thumb to his mouth and sucks the blood off it, Sirius watches him do it, and then seal the wound seamlessly.
“We can come back to this later”, he offers, light fingers back-and-forth on Sirius’ neck, his eyelashes slow and heavy as he blinks.
Sirius nods. “I feel better already”, he says.
Remus falls back, regards him with a tilt of his head.
“Raid to the kitchens?”
He grins, and he finds it is not all-that forced.
Moony
He can’t eat anything on the day of the full – he thinks of Yom Kippur, the Jewish fasting from sundown to sundown on the Day of Atonement, the day in which their fate will be sealed, Moses when he received the Ten Commandments and Elijah when he encountered God before the anointing of Elisha and Jesus when tempted by Satan, But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen, the Hindu training of the mind to endure all hardships and to perservere under difficulties, Fasting is prescribed on all Ekadasi days. Ekadasi is a Sanskrit word that refers to the 11th day of the lunar fortnight, twice a month, Ramadan, the renouncing of the appetites and desires of the flesh during the day time for an entire month, and the believer knows that Allah will love them when they are ready to abandon for Allah’s sake the things they most desire, O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, in order that you attain piety. The kind of self-restraint learnt from fasting is capable of strenghtening the will to a better and purer life in this world, which in turn will lead to an eternal life of hapiness, oh God-consciousness, the blossoming forth of goodness and virtue in life.
“Just eat something”, Sirius says, body pressing against his, one hand holding dessert over his thigh and the other one threading through his hair, oh he can’t stand it when he is so close and he can’t stand it when he is any further away, feverish thoughts of getting him nakednakednaked so it’s skin on skin.
“I will”, Remus laughs hoarsely, “I will get fucking sick”
“By God, you are annoying”, a declaration while he shoves cake in his mouth, fingers touching mouth for half a second (at this point in the evening his mouth is only partly his). He takes the cake and places it on the window sill, the second sacrifice, before the big one.
A sacramental meal, one shared by the deity (rising over the horizon at any moment) and the worshippers. In the Greek thysia and the Jewish zevah one portion of the oblation is burned upon the altar and the remainder eaten by the worshippers in joyful communion; Yoruba special meals are offered to the deity, and upon acceptance, disclosed through Divination, a portion of the foor is placed before their shrine; in Vedic India, monthly sacrificies, at the new and full moons, were of cakes or cooked oblations to sundry deities, especially the storm god Indra; the daily offering of cooked rice and vegetables, after its consecration, is distributed by the Hindu priests to the worshippers as the deity’s prasada; in Dahomey wandering dogs consume the consecrated food oblations on behalf of the trickster deity Eshu. Sometimes the worshippers consume the divine (oh and he sometimes thinks he could swallow it whole, moon made of green cheese), the Hindu press the soma plant, identified with the god Soma, for its intoxicating juice, ritually consumed right after, and the Aztecs twice a year made dough images of the sun god Huitzilopochtli that were consecrated to the god and thereby transubstantiated into his flesh to be eaten with fear and reverence by the worshippers, and Eucharist as the anamnēsis of the Passion of Christ.
in light of Christ’s perfect love in the sacrificing of His life for us, we willingly lay down all that we are for Him. Our bodies being offered as living sacrifices is our act of worship, and this looks like denying the world with its passions for the purpose of doing and knowing God’s will! Remus’ God is the moon, and he lies down, tries to loosen his joints, his God is coming to take all that she is owed and he will let her. He is so fragile like this, if he wants a chance at survival he better kneel and fucking beg for it. this is love completely lavished upon us, giving us freedom to choose submission. what love He gave that we may now be liberated from the bondage of our old selves! we sacrifice the old self with all of its desires, and we receive all of that which is the resurrection life of Christ!
Worship is a reaction to a experience of the sacred; a giving of self to the transcendent reality upon which man feels himself dependent; each full moon, Remus gives up something valuable (the life he had up until that point) in order that something more valuable might be obtained (a new life, a rich harvest).
The first-fruits sacrifice recognizes the divine source and ownership of the harvest and has the effect of desacralizing the crops and making them available for profane consumption, reconciling the man with the vegetational, chthonic powers from whom he takes sustenance. He recalls human sacrifice so that edible vegetation might grown from the body, replenishing the sacred potencies of the earth depleted by the harvest and thereby ensuring the continued regeneration of the crop – a spirit that dies so it might be reborn in a new crop, the primordial act of creation.
In a sense, what is always offered in sacrifice is, in one form or another, life itself. Through sacrifice, life is returned to its divine source, regenerating the power or life of that source; life is fed by life. Through Remus’ sacrifice, the moon lives, and as such she grants him another month on Earth, keeping the flow of divine life-force that ties them together alive like magic.
He screams in agony – it always hurts, (The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God), the ruthless jaw cracking and back breaking of asking for mercy, of staring at all that threatens to reap your life in the eye and try to bargain with it, oh, how much blood is spilled in the plead for life. The Vedic offered Indra, the bull of heaven, a bull, and Surya, the sun god, a white goat. The ancient Greeks sacrificed black animals to the deities of the dark underworld, swift horses to the sun god Helios; pregnant sows to the earth mother Demeter, and the dog, guardian of the dead, to Hecate, goddess of darkness. The Syrians sacrificed fish, regarded as the lord of the sea and guardian of the realm of the dead, to the goddess Atargatis and ate the consecrated offering in a communion meal with the deity, sharing in the divine power.
Remus spine cracks, his nose bleeds, and he thinks of accounts of human sacrifices in ancient Abydos, a city in southern Egypt that served as the civilization’s capital and was the cult center for Osiris, the god of the underworld. A seal in Monhenjo-Daro, an important city of the Harappan civilization, in modern-day Pakistan, containing an image of a person kneeling before a deity, a human head on a stool next to them. In Greece and in India oblations were drowned in sacred lakes and rivers to appease the water gods. The Norse cast both humans and animals over cliffs and into wells and waterfalls as offerings to the divinities dwelling therein. A celtic ritual involved the sacrifice of a woman by immersion, and among the Maya, in Mexico, young maidens were drowned in sacred wells. He is telling Peter all of this. Three child mummies were found near the remains of a shrine at Mount Llullaillac and researchers said that they were given maize beer and coca leaves before their death. Remains of sacrificed individuals have also been found in Huaca de la Luna, Moche, Peru – the Shrine of the Moon, how fitting, he is not the first and he won’t be the last to die devoted to her.
His mind takes always a few seconds longer than his body to transform – it comes out as an howl, as he says that in Mexico the belief that the sun needed human nourishment led to sacrifices in which as many as 20.000 victims perished annually in the Aztec and Nahua calendrical maize ritual, and that to praise their god Xipe Totec the Aztec would shoot people people to death with a bow and an arrow. Abraham / Ibrahim was ready to sacrifice Isaac / Ismail, a bravery now celebrated through the sacrifice of a sheep, cow, goat, buffalo or camel during Eid al-Adha. The judge Jepthtah sacrificed his only child in fulfillment of a vow to Yahweh – he thinks of his father’s inexpressive gaze and then he’s gone.
-
He’s back in his body, hours later, alive. His ribs ache but his chest feels light – the humbleness and the grace in suffering, the certainty that as long as he keeps his homages, even as his devotion wavers, the moon won’t keep him for too long.
Peter helps him up, gives him a glass of water and a loopsided smile.
“Water, like blood, has been widely used in purificatory and expiatory rites to wash away defilements and restore spiritual life. It has also, along with wine, been an important offering to the dead as a revivifying force”, Remus whispers to him, voice hoarse.
“Japanese kamizake pilots crashed their planes into Allied ships during World War II. Some of the planes had images of cherry blossoms, which histoically symbolized a samurai who gave his life for the emperor” Peter tells him. “If that is a human sacrifice, is war their god?”
Remus cracks a smile at that.
Wormtail
Peter has always been fascinated by power.
He likes how it reproduces order, how it’s inherent, unspoken: how his mother obeys his father, and he obeys his mother, not unsimilar to how James follows Sirius, and he follows them and Remus follows him, just because of something as simple as who they are in relation to each other, undisputable. He likes the permanence, the unity, the safety in it.
He likes how power protects human relationships from its own fragilities, mitigating conflict: just as his mother nods and lowers her head when his father says unkind things, Peter and Remus have learned how to do the same with their friends; even James has adhered to it lately, simply tutting when Sirius lashes out at him. Sirius shuts down all tries at retaliation with one cold look, and is there anything more admirable than that?
It's a relief, for Peter: he was afraid that Sirius would shrink, when disowned. He knows of pureblood family trees and blood ties, the intricacy of it, how it's woven with the most primal of magic, how it holds the wizarding world together. When Sirius came back with bruising under his eyes and a darkness in his grip, he spent every waking moment thinking: how did he get out? He itched to know, what had happened that had been so catastrophic, what had Sirius done, but he could never ask, the mention of the Black family still feeling like infringing, even after all these years.
Mostly, he worried: what happens to one who rips their veins out in such a way? Who are you, once you’re adrift, uprooted, lost? He was afraid their solidity would crumble without Sirius’ sureness.
He needn’t worry about that, as it turned out. See, Peter’s favorite thing about power is how it fights entropy.
The thing about power is that it needs a certain reciprocity: his father buys his mother nice jewelry and indulges her ceramic fancies, and Sirius loves James with a bottomless ferocity, and they shower him with affection and attention, an arm around his shoulders on their way out of class, strident laughter as he shows them a new spell, friendship a gift so great his chest swells with it, and he’s only grateful to be so loyal, so he treats Remus in kind.
It had been him precisely who had upset the balance, by forgetting to be grateful for Peter’s camaraderie, by trying to cut the line; he would talk over him, or pretend he didn’t listen to something Peter said so he could ignore it, or look bored when they’d be paired up together for a project, and Peter’s hands would shake with anger. After they had mastered the Animagus, he started talking with James as if they were equals, as if he could ever be as smart or as cunning or as fun as James, as if he could question what James said was, and oh, don’t get him started on Sirius, and Remus’ bizarre possessiveness, his out-of-touch jealousy fits.
Power fights entropy. It puts dissidents back in their place. And that’s what Sirius did.
Had it been nice? Certainly not. But it had been effective; now Remus lowers his eyes when talking to Sirius, and he follows Peter around, has endless patience for his whims.
It gets a little distressing sometimes, a little pitiful, Remus wiping tears with the sleeves of his robes before they roll down his cheeks during History of Magic, but he forgives Sirius anyway, because that’s how power works, what hierarchy does, it protects a relationship from collapsing in on itself.
a playlist woooooo