Chapter Text
‘And Moony said you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ Sirius Black says.
The empty room echoes back his words as the laptop in front of him whirs to life. Outside the window, rain is falling, hard, and he can hear it drumming against the windows. He puts on the headphones – a last minute purchase from Curry’s when the speakers on the laptop had sounded too tinny – and lets them settle over his ears, dampening out the sound of the rain.
It’s a weird sensation. He can still smell the tea steaming beside him, his fingers can feel the keyboard, and when he takes a sip of the tea – ouch, that’s hot – he can taste it, or at least the part of his tongue he didn’t just scald can taste it. His ears are the only thing not working properly. Suddenly a musical note blares through the headphones, nearly deafening him, and the dark screen flares into colourful life. He nearly sloshes tea all over the keyboard but keeps it together; Remus had warned him about this. He waits the requisite minute that Remus had ordered him to give the machine time to get started, and then uses the little pad below the keyboard to choose the Skype icon. The screen fills up with a square with some writing in it that he scans anxiously, looking for Remus’s screen name. He’s got a page of notes – all in Remus’s precise handwriting – on what to do. He’s ready.
‘I didn’t get an E on my Muggle Studies O.W.L. for nothing,’ he announces, and the room echoes it back.
After Voldemort had revealed himself in the Ministry, the Order’s situation had degenerated rapidly. Sirius had missed the start of this unravelling – he’d been unconscious in St Mungo’s for over two weeks following the combination of Bellatrix’s Cruciatus curse and the veil wreaking havoc on his body – but the impacts had completely changed the nature of his, and everyone else’s, war. Apparition had become risky business: the Death Eaters had developed a spell to rip Apparators out of the ether mid-flight if they weren’t extremely skilled and careful. The Floo Network was facing constant attacks and had been limited to Ministry business only. Owls, always a bit of a dicey communication system in the best of times due their tendency to be distracted by small game on the ground, were being struck dead and their letters taken and read. The Order had a cipher system for their communications, but ciphers could be broken and more pressing was the issue of owls simply never reaching their destinations. Patronuses could be used for emergency communication, but for simple information sharing, such as reporting back from an intelligence gathering mission, there didn’t seem to be a good solution.
At an Order meeting that Sirius had not been at – being conscious by then, but still weak and still in St Mungo’s – Remus had suggested some Muggle technology that had been summarily rejected by everyone except Dumbledore. After the meeting, when Remus had come to Sirius’s hospital room to discuss what had happened, Dumbledore had arrived.
Sirius sometimes still feels like a naughty teenager about to be sentenced to a lifetime of detentions whenever he is around the Headmaster; Remus, as always, is the more mature of them and so when Dumbledore had stepped into the room and said, without preamble, ‘Remus, I think we should try your idea,’ Remus had responded with a calm affirmative while Sirius had pretended to be asleep.
When Sirius had gotten out of hospital and was feeling mostly recovered, Remus had taken him to a shop called Curry’s and they’d bought a small computer – a laptop, Remus had called it. They’d spent a lot of time laughing about the strange Muggle things in the shop and alienating the bored teenagers who worked there before settling on this one, and that night they’d set it up and Remus had made Sirius watch a Muggle comedy television show on it called The IT Crowd that was nominally about computers and Muggle things but that somehow he’d still found funny. After that, whenever something went wrong, no matter if it was Muggle or magical, they would repeat a particular catchphrase from the show to one another: ‘Did you try turning it off and then on again?’
On the screen, Remus’s name turns green, and a second later, the computer starts making a ringing noise, like a Muggle telephone. Sirius checks the notepad, takes a deep breath, and clicks on “Accept”. A second later the screen fills up with a grainy image of Remus. He is in a small room with the generic look of a lower-end bed and breakfast; that is as expected. The fact that he is bathed in a cold blue light and is just mouthing words is surprising though.
‘Hi!’ Sirius says. He sees that a smaller box has appeared on the screen – windows, he believes those are called – that shows his own image. He waves at Remus and sees himself wave back. Remus mouths something. ‘What? I can’t hear you.’
Another box pops up. This is all getting to be quite a lot. Sirius realises a second later that the new box is filling with words. He squints at it.
It says: ‘You’ve got me on mute!!!’
And a second later: ‘Click on the picture of the microphone with the line through it.’
‘Uhm,’ Sirius says aloud. Remus points emphatically at something that appears to be behind Sirius, but that makes no sense, because all of the parts of the computer are right here. Then Sirius sees the stylised microphone with the line through it on the screen and clicks on that.
‘—and I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain what…’ Remus’s voice trails off. ‘Oh, you got it figured out.’
‘You thought I wasn’t going to get it!’ Sirius says in mock outrage.
Remus raises his eyebrows. His grainy image is stabilising and Sirius finds that he’s ridiculously happy to be talking to him, even though Remus only left two days ago. ‘It isn’t that I don’t think you’re clever…’ Remus says, voice dripping with scepticism.
Sirius laughs and says, ‘Shut up.’
‘Now that you’ve learnt how the mute button works, I assume you can do that for yourself,’ Remus replies.
‘How’s the b and b?’ Sirius asks, making a face to indicate that he’s choosing to be the bigger man and ignore Remus’s jabs. ‘How was the journey? Have you… how’s the mission?’
Remus smiles. ‘Everything’s as good as can be,’ he says reassuringly.
Sirius puts his hands to the sides of the headphones and tries to press out the slight metallic tang that the sound of Remus’s voice has through this strange device. ‘You sound like you’re talking to me from very far away,’ he says.
‘I guess it’s kind of like how when you’re Flooing with someone you can hear the fire crackling,’ says Remus.
‘And you used to use this “Skype” thing all the time?’ Sirius starts fiddling with the wire connecting the headphones to the computer. Remus had described cords to him as being like a wand: they channel the energy required to perform actions. He tries to feel the thrum of the energy the way he can with a wand but it’s not there.
‘I did,’ Remus confirms. ‘Before I taught at Hogwarts, I had a Muggle job where we used it to communicate every day.’
Sirius hums agreement, now running his hand down the wire heading into the wall.
‘Don’t touch that at the wall, by the way,’ Remus adds, some urgency in his voice. ‘You’ll electrocute yourself.’
‘Oh right,’ Sirius says brightly. ‘Electricity. Muggle magic.’
Remus laughs. ‘You know, there’s this Muggle who said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I always thought it was a stupid saying since of course we understand quite a lot about how magic works, but right now, I feel like I’m suddenly seeing it from the Muggle perspective.’
‘You know what,’ Sirius barks, but there’s no bite behind it. Remus grins at him and he grins back.
Grimmauld Place had been rumbled, obviously, by Kreacher’s treachery. Sirius hasn’t been back; sometime during those weeks in St Mungo’s, someone had retrieved his scant belongings and moved them to Ted and Andromeda Tonks’ place. Sirius had been grateful for their offer of a place to stay indefinitely once he was out of hospital, but he’d found it stifling after thirty six hours. There was something wrong with him (probably more than just one something, really) since Azkaban and he’d found that he needed to be alone or else have Remus there to be a calming presence and to mitigate the effects of other people.
He had been contemplating his escape from the Tonks’ when Remus himself had turned up on the doorstep. Sirius had been almost pathetically grateful to see him; if he’d been in dog form, he probably would have wagged his tail so hard that his legs would have fallen out from under him. In the Tonks’ cosy but well-appointed sitting room, over a cup of tea, Remus had suggested that Sirius and he share the rent on a flat in Oxford. Order members were going to ground, scattering and heading into hiding, now that they were so well known amongst the Death Eaters.
‘So it’s a ground floor flat in a nice house with a gar-‘
‘Great, fine, let’s take it,’ Sirius had said.
‘-den,’ Remus had finished, and his lips had quirked at the edges like he’d wanted to smile. ‘Don’t you want to know how many bedrooms?’
Sirius had looked around the sitting room, lowered his voice, and said, ‘I’ll sleep on the bloody floor as a dog, I don’t care.’
‘Are they beating you or something here?’
‘Just…’ Sirius had hesitated and met Remus’s eyes. ‘You know. It’s a lot.’
‘I do know,’ Remus had said. He paused, took a sip of tea. ‘We can sign the lease tonight, if you want.’
Sirius had nodded. He very, very much wanted.
‘So anything I can report back to Dumbledore?’ Sirius asks slightly-blurry screen Remus.
‘When are you going to start calling him Albus?’
‘When his name doesn’t make me feel about sixteen years old.’
Remus rolls his eyes. ‘You should have thought of this before you did all those bad things at school.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Sirius huffs and flicks his teacup with his fingernail. ‘You know me. Practically a seer.’
‘Oh god,’ Remus says, ‘don’t bring up prophecies.’
Sirius starts laughing and almost can’t stop. ‘What a waste of fucking… everything, right?’
‘Honestly,’ Remus says, ‘if you’d died, I probably would have gone out and murdered a seer in retaliation for how incredibly stupid even the idea of prophecies is.’
‘Luckily everyone was all right,’ Sirius says. They’re solemn and silent for a second and then he says, ‘I wonder how Harry is.’
‘Haven’t you been writing to him?’
‘I have. He’s not the most communicative letter writer. I can’t believe that Dumbledore – Albus – god, it’s easier for me to say Voldemort than to say that – but I can’t believe he won’t let Harry come stay with us.’
‘We know why, though,’ Remus says, and Sirius sighs, because Remus is always so, so sensible.
‘But James…’
‘Preaching to the choir, I promise you,’ Remus says, and there’s a slight delay on the screen as he puts his hands up. ‘But I’m going to trust Albus. He’s gotten us this far.’
‘It’s like every time you say Albus I have to stop and think about who you actually mean.’
‘Oh grow up, Padfoot,’ says Remus, but there’s a lot more fondness in it than annoyance, Sirius thinks. ‘And I haven’t got anything to report, I’m sorry to say. I just got here and made contact this morning, you know.’
‘I don’t,’ Sirius says pointedly. ‘I don’t even know where you are.’ He’s just the messenger here, the vessel to collect the data and pass it on to Dumbledore in person, so Death Eaters can’t intercept it. He feels like he’s being kept in the dark again – but at least he’s not being literally kept in the dark, inside of his miserable family home, so that’s something anyway.
The financial arrangement between them had required more negotiation.
Sirius has a lot of money; an embarrassingly large amount of money, in fact. His father, for all his faults in that department, had been a smart investor and, at a time when many of the old wizarding (and for that matter Muggle) families had been going bankrupt, the already massive fortune of the Blacks continued to grow. Shortly after the end of the Triwizard Tournament, Dumbledore had come to Remus’s – they had been staying in the cottage that Remus grew up in and had inherited from his parents – and had asked to speak to Sirius. The conversation had been delicate but to the point: the Order did not have money, but it needed it. Sirius was a wanted man and couldn’t go out much. Perhaps he could work on solving this money problem. Sirius had not gotten the point, initially, and had asked Remus over dinner that night how guerrilla organisations generally funded themselves. After the first fall of Voldemort, Remus had travelled extensively and at some point had been kidnapped in Peru by a guerrilla group – maybe he’d picked up some tips there.
‘Hm,’ Remus had said, putting down his fork and frowning. ‘Well, I think there are three traditional methods.’
‘Which are…?’
Remus had ticked them off. ‘Drug running, money laundering, usually associated with the drug running, and popular support.’
Sirius had cocked his head. ‘Do you think Dumbledore wants me to set up some kind of illegal operation for funding the Order?’
Remus had burst into laughter. ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘No, no, no. Did he come talk to you today about this?’
Sirius had nodded, mystified.
‘Popular support, Padfoot,’ Remus had said, and he’d raised his eyebrows when Sirius had shaken his head. ‘You know, the people who support the organisation…’
Sirius had caught on then. ‘You mean wealthy people.’
‘Right. So, you. You know that James and Lily financed a lot of it the first time.’
‘I didn’t know that, no,’ Sirius had said.
He had wondered then – and still wondered now – if he should have known it, somehow. As a Black, he rarely thinks about money. If he wants something, he just draws on the Gringotts account that has had his name on it since before he was born. Even in the years when he’d been a runaway, cut off from his parents’ support, he’d had his inheritance from his uncle to fall back on – and now that he is the last of the Blacks, he’s able to do things like buy his godson a Firebolt without a thought. Money is like an endless well into which he can always dip his hand and draw up cold, perfect water.
Remus had smiled at his naivety, and had even helped him work out his books and set up an easy way to transfer funds to the Order when it needed them, but the whole incident had made Sirius a lot more aware of the fact that he had money and Remus didn’t. When they’d signed the lease on the flat, Sirius had tried to be sensitive to the price, but he’d had no idea if it was a good one or not and would have taken any number within an order of magnitude higher. After signing the lease, they’d gone to Tesco together – Sirius is thrilled, now that he has a pardon, to be able to do things like go out to the shops, which always makes Remus laugh – and Sirius had allowed Remus to choose things from the Tesco own brand line and hadn’t even made a face when Remus had gotten some inferior biscuits because they were on offer. For two weeks, Sirius had lived with this inferior biscuit regime, but he’d been trying to think of a tactful way to get Remus to let him pay for everything when the problem had sorted itself.
Sirius had been out for a little walk – at the start of their time in Oxford, Remus had been working as a tutor and so was often gone, and Sirius likes time to himself now, but he also likes to come home to Remus being in the house so he takes a walk in the evening to get that feeling of excitement when he walks through the door and knows he’s not alone – and when he had come back on that particular evening he had found Remus sitting on the couch, staring out at the garden, looking pensive.
‘How’s it?’ he’d asked.
Remus had sighed and said, ‘Not great.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Sirius had asked, instantly on high alert. ‘What’s happened? Is everyone ok? Is there bad news?’
Remus had shaken his head quickly. ‘Nothing to worry about, I promise,’ he’d said. ‘Albus wants me to take a mission that will mean having to give up my tutoring commitments, that’s all.’ And he’d gone back to looking out the window.
‘What’s the mission?’ Sirius had asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Not supposed to share, of course,’ Remus had said dully. ‘Eliminate possibilities for spying, all that.’
‘Yeah,’ Sirius had said, and he’d sat down on the floor in front of Remus and smiled. ‘You know me, high risk for being a spy.’
Remus had smiled back and exhaled, a half laugh, and Sirius had seen his opening. ‘Well, don’t you worry about the rent,’ he’d said.
Remus had been silent for several seconds, and then he’d focused on Sirius and had said, in a tense voice, ‘I don’t like charity.’
‘That’s not very nice,’ Sirius had quipped. ‘Charities do great work.’
‘Sirius…’
‘Oh shut up with the pride, Moony,’ Sirius had said. ‘I haven’t got any left with you, that’s for damn sure. You’ve seen me at my absolute worst these past few years.’ Remus had sighed, but he hadn’t looked convinced, so Sirius had added his final, and most convincing, argument. ‘Anyway, I’m the financial backer of the Order, so you’ll be on my payroll.’