Chapter Text
Knockturn Alley was a winding, cobbled street with steps to every door and cramped nooks containing any number of things that might tumble out without warning. It was no place for a wheelchair and it wasn’t much easier with crutches either. Sirius’s hand at the small of Remus’s back was the only thing keeping him steady through far too many close calls. Were it up to Sirius, they wouldn’t have even come out but Remus had exhausted every other option either of them could come up with trying to find a way to deal with the horcrux latched onto their son. This was their last resort.
Their destination was a shop tucked out of the way around so many bends that Remus felt almost dizzy trying to remember how far they’d walked. There was a faded sign hanging above a dark doorway by rusty chainlinks when they finally found it, cracked paint reading The Coffin House . It was a really on the nose kind of name for an establishment dealing with necromancy, among other things, and Remus genuinely wasn’t even sure what to expect as they hesitantly stepped inside. It was the last place he wanted to be yet it was the only place that met the requirements for where he needed to be.
A pale young woman looked over from a counter beside the door when a bell above chimed to signal their entrance. She was dressed in layered dark fur robes adorned with various bones that Remus hoped weren’t human. Her curly red hair was braided with them as well, pulled back out of her face by a surprisingly colorful scarf. She raised an eyebrow as she looked over the two of them in muggle attire, her pale eyes catching on the custom-designed braces Remus wore atop his jeans from his hips to his ankles.
The wall behind her was lined with shelves holding any number of oddities that Remus couldn’t begin to identify alongside a handful of different skulls and bottles with labels he couldn’t read. The far wall, ironically true to the name of the shop, was lined with coffins of assorted sizes and shapes with a sign indicating that more were available in the backroom, the door to which was open beside the display. The wall opposite the counter had a long bookshelf with locked glass doors. Some posters that Remus didn’t bother to read hung in the window that took up the front of the room. Somehow, the window didn’t appear to be letting any light inside even though he could see through it just fine. The middle of the room was open and empty but for a couple of round tables with chairs around them and an iron chandelier hung overhead, giving the whole shop a juxtaposed warm glow. They were, however, the only ones in the shop.
Where to even begin…
“Are you both lost, by chance?” the woman asked, sounding genuinely confused by the encounter. She watched the two of them look around from the doorway before Remus looked at her properly.
“Well…” He frowned a little. They weren’t lost, no, but he had no idea how to just ask for what it was they needed.
“We need someone who is well versed in the magicks of necromancy,” Sirius answered for him, guiding him forwards and towards the counter with gentle pressure on his back. Sirius’s voice was far more confident than Remus knew him to be. They’d argued for weeks before he finally gave in to coming here.
“I do not mean to come across as rude but you do not strike me as the typical kind of customer to a place like this,” the woman answered evasively, eyeing the pair of them with wariness in her eyes.
“Oh trust me, we’re probably not,” Sirius answered and Remus could hear the sardonic smile in his voice.
Remus looked properly at the woman now that he was closer to her and no longer focusing so much on keeping upright on his crutches. Her outfit was jarring but it was her eyes that really captured his attention. Though she looked and sounded young, her pale blue eyes told a different story. She looked at him with the gaze of a woman several times his age.
She seemed to consider them both for a long while before she slowly smiled. “Perhaps you are in the right place after all.” She rested her hands atop the counter. “Welcome to The Coffin House. My name is Isabelle. Tell me what you need and I’ll assist you in finding it, should it exist within these walls.”
“What do you know about horcruxes?” Remus asked instead. If she was willing to talk to them about necromancy, it was best to just come outright and say it, consequences be damned. They were out of options and they needed help.
Isabelle’s expression immediately darkened into something akin to disgust as she regarded him and then Sirius. “I will have no part in that. You may leave now.”
Remus shook his head quickly but Sirius was the one to answer, his voice sharp. “We already know how to make them. We’re trying to break one.”
Isabelle paused as she considered this, looking slowly between the two of them. She didn’t answer at first and her tone was guarded when she finally did. “Why do you know how to perform such heinous magic?”
“Because we’re trying to break them,” Sirius repeated, his own tone clipped like he was trying to hold his temper.
“We have encountered them. Neither of us would dream of creating one,” Remus added with a shudder at the thought. He was worried they were about to be thrown out anyway and, honestly, knowing what they knew about horcruxes, he wouldn’t blame her for doing it. She clearly knew enough of what it took and was obviously of the same mindset as they were concerning the ritual. Remus still had nightmares about everything they’d learned, not to mention what they went through to deal with it. It genuinely amazed him that Sirius was still there at his side after all of that.
“Destroying a horcrux requires magic that is irrefutable,” Isabelle told them slowly. She frowned at them both. “Its host must be destroyed beyond a hope for repair.”
“What if the host is a living person?” Remus asked with a frown. Destroying their son was not an option and everything they’d already discovered had given the exact same answer Isabelle had just told them. They needed something more.
Isabelle’s eyes widened just a little. She said nothing and instead walked over to the window to turn the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’. Remus felt wards ripple around them and narrowed his eyes as Isabelle gestured at one of the tables in the middle of the room. “Please, have a seat. I feel this may be a more in depth discussion than standing at the counter will allow for.”
Remus looked at Sirius beside him. Steel grey stared back at him, almost unreadable. They were both wary of this but when they’d finally agreed upon the decision to come out explicitly seeking more information about necromancy, they’d decided they would have to be honest with whoever they found. It was terrifying to put it out there that their little boy was hosting a horcrux but if they were to have any hope of removing it from him, the people helping them needed to know the full truth of what they were dealing with.
“Please, tell me your names,” Isabelle prompted as the pair finally chose to sit down with her at the table. It felt good to get off his feet and Remus obliged her, as did Sirius while he pulled his chair close enough to settle his hand on Remus’s leg. Remus wasn’t sure if it was more to ground himself or to ground him.
Isabelle got right to the point and looked at them both in turn. “Are either of you the host to this horcrux you wish to destroy?”
“No,” Sirius replied. “It’s our kid.”
“We don’t think it was intentional,” Remus added with a little frown when Isabelle’s expression darkened again. He could only imagine where her thoughts were going. How could anyone intentionally put a child through the process of making a horcrux, for all the horror it entailed? Making one from an inanimate object was horrendous enough but a baby would be unlikely to even survive the rituals had it been done on purpose.
“A horcrux is a very deliberate piece of spellwork involving the severing and re-tethering of the soul. It is complicated magic that can and has killed those who partake in it. To do so unintentionally would be nigh impossible,” Isabelle told them, folding her hands onto the tabletop and watching each of them closely. Remus met her gaze when she put it to him but found himself faltering the longer he tried to hold it. Sirius, on the other hand, didn’t back down.
“His mother invoked a blood bond and gave her life to protect him. We think that caused the killing curse to ricochet back at the caster and create the horcrux by mistake from the severed soul. Remus has been researching how the curse actually works and that’s our running theory,” Sirius explained, his voice steady even while his hand was flexing fingers on Remus’s knee.
There was an uncomfortable pause before Isabelle spoke again. Remus settled his hand atop Sirius’s while they waited for recognition to dawn in her eyes, indicated only by a slight widening that lasted but a second. She still didn’t immediately speak, instead looking between the two of them while she seemed to consider her response. She finally settled on looking at Remus when she answered them.
“It would appear that you have a deeper understanding of necromantic practice yourself than you first left on. I did not think it was still taught at Hogwarts, but perhaps I jumped to presume your educational background or even your age too quickly.”
Remus didn’t quite know what to make of that and chose not to really respond to most of it. There was no way he could be much older than he looked, even with the weariness he carried around. He could maybe pass for thirty if he tried but Hogwarts hadn’t taught necromancy in well over a century. “I’m self-taught,” he told her.
“Impressive,” Isabelle complimented. “The flaw in your theory, however, is that the killing curse alone does not create a horcrux and the caster’s severed soul would just move beyond the veil upon being hit by a rebound of the spell. That is to say that… Voldemort… is dead.”
Remus nodded, some of his nerves falling away now that they were speaking of magical theory. He could speak to that for hours, given the opportunity. Isabelle had obviously determined who they were talking about if her name-drop just then was anything to go by so Remus chose to stop speaking in hypotheticals. “If Harry were the only horcrux, that would make sense. However, he’s not. There were, so far as we are aware, five others before Voldemort attempted to kill him.”
“Five?!” Isabelle shook her head after a moment and pursed her lips after allowing far more emotion into that single word than she had so far in anything she’d said. “One horcrux leaves the soul in an unstable state, broken into two parts when it should be whole and intact. To have broken it further would introduce more instability each time. I believe… that your theory has some credence to it.”
“So what do we do about it?” Sirius asked, bringing the conversation back to the original point of coming into the shop in the first place.
“Necromancy, at its heart, is the magic of the soul. In this particular case, it appears that you are dealing with your son’s soul tangled with that of a horcrux. A horcrux tethers itself to the host through each of the rituals performed to create it, each creating a separate point that must be destroyed. Even without those rituals having been performed, I would imagine that there are multiple tethers in place, more organic than deliberate in nature. To remove it, you will have to locate and sever each of those tethers.” Described technically like that, it sounded like an easy process. Find the connections and break them. How were they supposed to root around their son’s soul and break off all the dark bits that had been attached to it, though?
“How?” Sirius pressed. His hand on Remus’s leg now squeezed his knee in building frustration. Remus nudged his own underneath it and entwined their fingers instead. He didn’t look at Sirius beside him, though, and instead just waited on whatever answer they might get.
“Nothing like this has ever been documented. To remove a horcrux from a living host without also killing the host is unheard of. In fact, living hosts are exceedingly rare. So, in short, I do not know,” Isabelle told them. There was no indication in her voice that she felt any sort of sympathy for that but her eyes gave a little away before she once more put up the careful wall she’d been hiding behind.
“So what you’re saying is that you can’t help us,” Remus surmised, his heart sinking even as he kept his voice steady. What now? This was their last ditch effort to get some sort of lead and so far, all that they’d been told was a confirmation of what they’d already figured out on their own. He and Sirius both looked at each other, the cracking facade of barely concealed panic mirrored back at him in steel grey eyes.
“Not necessarily,” Isabelle corrected slowly. “Just that it will take further time to discover a solution to your rather unique dilemma.” Both of them snapped their eyes back to her. “The answer you seek will not be written in some text. Heinous as it is, the process of creating a horcrux has been performed and recorded, as I am certain you have already found. This, however, will require a deeper knowledge of the intricacies of necromancy and how magic interacts with the soul, that which has not been neatly compiled within a single scroll or tome.”
“How do we even begin?” Remus asked, his voice flat. This wasn’t exactly the answer they wanted and while there was a possibility of gleaning something more, he didn’t yet dare to be hopeful.
“You already have,” Isabelle replied with a careful smile. Her eyes dropped the mask again when she looked at him. Again, Remus was struck with the sense that she was far older than she appeared. She didn’t say anything else on the matter, just gazed at him like his professors at Hogwarts would while waiting for him to catch onto something. As long as it took, they would wait him out to determine the answers to his own questions, sometimes nudging him in the right direction but never outright telling him when he was on the cusp of understanding something.
Sirius squeezed his fingers to prompt a response. Remus glanced sidelong at his partner. There was an internal war in his gaze. He and Sirius had argued at great length about whether getting into necromancy was really something they wanted to do. It was dark magic, plain and simple, but Remus had started to recognize in the past few years that labeling magic as dark and light was not quite so cut and dry. Magic was magic, a tool and a force to manipulate to a wizard’s will. What they chose to do with it was what determined its morality. Sirius countered that magic pertaining to death could only be morally corrupt and pointed to the horcrux itself as proof of this. Remus understood where he was coming from. His family was deep in the darker side of magic and certainly didn’t have any qualms about using it in ways that kept the monikers of light and dark alive if it meant getting what they wanted. Sirius had been raised with that particular twist of morality and, while he had always bucked against his parents and their treatment of him and his brother, he had only truly learned what it felt like to be faced with opposing ideals when he went to Hogwarts. Sirius had done a complete one-eighty and took the exact opposite stance, leading to their current strife. It had taken a lot to convince him to even come out to Knockturn Alley today and he clearly picked up on the unspoken offer that Isabelle was implying.
Remus gave him a small apprehensive smile and brushed his thumb against the back of Sirius’s hand. Then he put his focus back on Isabelle.
“Will you teach me?”