i see a darkness
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1.
(then)
When he looked back later, he would say (not having any idea whether it were true or not) that it all started going bad around the time of James and Lily's wedding, even that very day. Yes, he had stood there at the reception, laughing with them and with an arm around each one, for all the pictures Remus hadn't been in because he was taking them, and he looked at the picture later and knew that in it he had been happy, or at least thought he had been. But something had been wrong. His laughter had seemed wilder and hollower the longer it had gone on, and he'd tried twice as hard to push something false but more convincing into its place, gone slinking back behind his eyes as the room had seemed to get bigger and brighter and more crowded. He had started closing his eyes to keep from having to look in people's faces, at all the colors in their clothing. Eventually he managed to excuse himself, still laughing with no idea what he was laughing at, and escaped. Later he somehow ended up at the bar, and stayed there until Remus had come to find him and they had gone home.
What had assailed him suddenly, for no good reason and stronger than made any sense, was the sensation of dancing in the dragon's jaws -- that they had spun themselves into a fragile, beautiful bubble at the heart of a hurricane, and inside it they were surrounded by light and music and laughter and hardly even noticing the winds that were tossing them all the while. It was a thought that made him terrified and sick and angry at all of them, and that made him angry at himself; why couldn't his friends be happy, for heaven's sake?
So what if they were all in danger? Didn't that make the wedding all the more valuable? This wasn't the time to fall apart and cower down separate holes, waiting for the end; it was a time to be together. It was a time to be in love. To cling to the one person you needed and wanted more than all others, and to fight back as two against the end of the world.
Unless of course you were a werewolf, and apparently not even entitled to have that one person love you back.
He wasn't sure when he switched from the wine to the firewhiskey, but by the time they got back to the flat he was drunk enough not to keep his mouth shut, so it had been soon enough. "Do you ever want that?" he'd asked, from where he'd sat on the bed, watching Remus undo all the elaborate articles he'd just done up that morning. Sometimes it seemed like a waste getting dressed at all. "A ... big do like that, I mean."
Remus glanced back at him over his shoulder, with an ironic smile. "I'd look a bit funny in the dress," he'd said, and Sirius had laughed as he was expected to.
After a pause, Remus had shrugged, turned toward the mirror again so that Sirius had his back. He was at the wrong angle to see Remus's reflected eyes, too, and he hadn't bothered to shift himself so that he could. "Not really," Remus had said. "I suppose I realized, early on, that all that sort of thing -- the weddings and rings and forevers -- it wasn't really meant for... people like me." Only after a few moments more, as he was folding his trousers over his arm and preparing to hang them up, did he look at Sirius, and Sirius found himself looking away. Not wanting to see the neutrality in Remus's eyes. "Do you?"
"No," Sirius had said.
"Let's go to bed," Sirius had said, some time later.
Yes. That day. That might have been it.
----------------------------------------
2.
(now)
Remus's hands did not shake as he picked up the letter the owl had dropped on the kitchen table (narrowly missing his cup of tea). It wasn't even a surprise. It would have been more of a surprise if they had. He couldn't exactly say he'd been expecting it, but it certainly had been a possibility, and...
Tearing open the envelope took considerably more concentration and effort than, in his experience, tearing open envelopes normally did.
-
Room for a stray?
-
Apart from those words, the letter was unsigned, unmarked, and unmistakable. He closed his eyes for a moment, turned the parchment over, and scrawled one word on the back -- ballpoint pen against quill. Then he held out his arm, and the owl hopped genially enough down off the windowsill and onto his sleeve, offering its leg. He thanked it before sending it on his way, without even realizing it. In its absence his dim, shabby kitchen seemed very empty, and very quiet, and he made himself go shopping and start tidying up and every other little chore about the house he could find before he could simply settle in to wait.
Life went on, after all. There was nothing so shattering that the pieces could not eventually be fit back together, even if they didn't quite go in the same order as they had before. He had never been afforded the luxury of being undone before, and hardly expected it to start now. Life just had to go on.
But maybe not just yet.
The day after the next one, he opened the door late in the evening with it in mind to walk down to the market, and found a large black dog occupying the majority of his front step. Padfoot looked about three-fourths asleep, filthy, and starved, and had dried blood matted in his fur in several places. When Remus opened the door, at first only his eyes moved; they quirked up to look at Remus, deep brown and mournful, and then his thick, matted tail began to thump weakly on the WELCOME mat.
"Lucky for us my landlord allows pets," Remus said, doing his best to smile and actually not finding it all that difficult. "Come in."
The dog lumbered up to his feet and swayed inside after Remus, who shut the door behind them. As soon as he'd done so, the dog padded over to where Remus stood and simply leaned his furry bulk heavily against Remus's knees, closing his eyes and letting out a soft canine sigh. Remus stroked his ears, and said nothing for a long moment.
"Would you like a bath?" he asked at last, and Padfoot's tail gave a few more feeble wags. "Something to eat?" Wag. He smiled, and knelt down so that their heads were at least closer to level, stroking back the knotted fur from Padfoot's eyes. The dog's shaggy head kept hanging limply forward, eyes closed. "All right, then. Let's get you cleaned up."
At least he didn't have to be too concerned about the line of slightly muddy pawprints, straggling its way across the kitchen tile; it wasn't as if they were much worse than the existing decor. If he had been lucky in only one thing, it was probably that the building hadn't been condemned while he'd been at Hogwarts.
The next hour or so saw Remus kneeling on his bathroom floor with his sleeves rolled up, washing the worst of the dirt and grime and blood out of Padfoot's fur; it was a long job even with the dog sitting meek and semi-conscious in Remus's dingy tub, closing his eyes against the shampoo suds and letting his head hang down. He was a particularly pathetic picture that way, especially as he was also soaking wet, which had always made him look so much smaller. He flinched a couple times as Remus's hands worked their way close to new bites and scratches (new bites and scratches that Remus knew very well who was responsible for, and tried not to think about it), but made no sound. It was as much worrisome as it was a relief.
He had to refill the tub twice, after the water had gotten too filthy to be useful, and his guest merely waited for him with that same heavy look to his eyelids. Finally the last shampooing left the water clear, and he drained the tub, leaving only a sodden, sleepy dog and a thin scum on the porcelain in its wake. Padfoot waited obediently until Remus had closed the shower curtain before shaking off, spraying drops of water onto the tile and curtain in a brisk rainfall-patter, and then Remus bundled him into an old graying towel and helped him climb out onto the crumpled bathmat, so he could be dried off. When at last towel was damper than dog, down on his knees, Remus paused and just wrapped his arms around the towel around Padfoot, not minding the wet stains on the front of his shirt, nor the wet dog smell. He pressed his face into significantly cleaner fur, and just breathed.
"I'm glad you're all right," he murmured, and couldn't think of a thing he'd ever said before that sounded stupider.
They stayed like that for several minutes, and then finally he was rewarded with a wet tongue lapping his cheek. Smiling, he pulled back to find Padfoot grinning a dog's grin back at him, looking still sleepy but a bit more alive.
"I imagine you feel better now, don't you?" he inquired, and this time Padfoot let out a low bark in answer, as well as wagging his tail. Remus got up off first one knee, then the other (wincing all the way; he'd been kneeling longer than his joints liked), and hung the towel over the bathroom doorknob on the way out, gesturing Padfoot through ahead of him. "Come on, then. I'll find you something to eat."
He supposed it should have been strange, Sirius not changing back into a person -- at least to bathe himself and express a preference as to food -- but it wasn't. In a way, though he hated to admit it even to himself, he found he preferred it; it was so much easier to think of what to say to Padfoot than it would have been to Sirius. It had already occurred to him to wonder whether that had been Sirius's intention in choosing not to change back, or if it were simply that exhaustion had left him incapable of making the transformation. Both possibilities seemed equally likely.
He'd bought some hamburger shortly after getting back, and he cooked it up on the stove while Padfoot sprawled out like a monstrous dog-shaped rug at his feet, occasionally sniffing the air and closing his eyes in an expression of sublime pleasure. It didn't seem like a very balanced meal, and Remus thought briefly of adding some vegetables, but he wasn't sure how a canine digestive system, particularly one that had been under duress, would do with those. Hamburger, then. At least there was a lot of it. He poured the meat into a steaming mound on a plate, took out a mismatched bowl and filled it with water, and set them both on the floor before Padfoot, who dug in with every sign of savage and rapacious delight. It was strangely wonderful to watch.
It was a weary but full dog that Remus led across the flat to his bedroom, and who rumpled up the blankets turning himself about three times, before settling in on the narrow bed beside Remus's legs. Remus reached down to scratch his ears and found Padfoot already fast asleep. He smiled, and had perhaps half a thought about getting up and changing out of his day clothes, and then before he knew it he had joined his companion.
And at some point in the middle of the night he woke up in the darkness with a human Sirius beside him in the bed, shaking with racking sobs, trembling, asleep or awake Remus couldn't tell, and mostly asleep himself Remus turned to him and pulled him close, into his arms, and murmured comforting things that maybe half made sense until finally at some other point they were both asleep again.
He woke with morning light sneaking in the windows, stretched out on his back with Sirius tucked up on his side in the circle of Remus's arm, to find Sirius just beginning to stir, and struggled to keep his eyes open and focused long enough to watch the other man wake up. It was not the same process it had once been, it seemed: as a young man Sirius had always taken hours, if he could spare them, to negotiate the terrain between sleeping and waking, rolling from side to stomach to back, opening one eye and then closing it again, burrowing under blankets and pillows; and now, today, there was little more warning than that brief change in breathing Remus had heard before Sirius's eyes snapped open, sharp and awake at once, hunted and haunted. When he caught Remus's, his gaze stayed blank for a brief moment, and at first Remus's stomach inexplicably sank -- and then Sirius smiled, a small, tentative, sheepish smile, and pulled himself decorously away from Remus's body to sit up. His eyes were still a little red.
"Good morning," Remus murmured, and reached behind his head to pull a pillow under his shoulders, to afford himself at least a little more dignity. Sirius offered him another brief, flickering smile, and scratched at his beard as he looked somewhere else.
"Good morning." He glanced at one corner of the small, bare room, then another, then at the ceiling, before giving up on the whole business and looking back at Remus. "I, er..." And for a moment Remus thought he could see Thank you and I'm sorry and I hate to be an imposition but shuttling through Sirius's mind as though his skull were a glass display case, each one picked up and discarded again in its turn. It startled him a bit, all things considered. He hadn't remembered Sirius being so easy to read. "D'you mind if I borrow your bathroom for a bit longer? Only there's some things one can't quite get at, being a dog."
And Remus smiled back at him, and sat up. "Just let me use it first for a moment, before you move in," he said, and Sirius chuckled. "Is there anything in particular you need?"
Sirius scratched at the back of his hair this time, and his smile managed to get a little more sheepish. "I don't suppose you have a toothbrush I could completely destroy?"
Remus laughed out loud, surprising himself a little; surprising himself even more with how good it felt, and how inappropriate and awkward all at the same time. "I have a spare one." But that was no good; it made it sound like he had people here all the time who ended up needing to use a toothbrush in the morning -- "Er, a new one, I mean. I'd bought it to replace the one I've got, but it's really not that old yet, so I haven't used it -- the new one, I mean -- " and now he was babbling -- "so it's brand new, you're welcome to it. In the medicine cabinet."
"Thanks," Sirius said, and they sat in the most terribly awkward of silences before Sirius cleared his throat slightly and made an indefinite gesture with his hand. "Well, ah... be my guest."
"Ah. Yes. I'll -- just a moment." And he got up and went out to the hallway, not looking behind him, not even to reassure himself that Sirius was still there and on the bed and not something he had dreamed, not forgetting to close and lock the bathroom door behind him. It took him little more than seconds to come, and he stood gasping with his one hand braced against the dingy tile wall and his other curled around his softening cock, trying to remember the last time that had happened, and knowing, deeper down, exactly when it had been.
---
Sirius's innocence had always been the one possibility he had never so much as allowed himself to consider, the one fantasy so enticing and so improbable that he had never so much as allowed himself to entertain it. Even the wildest dream, Remus had sensed, would crush him with its eventual falsity.
At first, when the initial storm of shock and grief had receded at least enough that he could think again, he had tried, however feebly, to fight; had gone so far as to strike out for the Ministry of Magic with a head gone numb and a petition for at least a fair trial, they could at least manage that much, couldn't they? He had gotten as far as the front foyer before Dumbledore had appeared to intercept him, with a grave and solemn look pointed over his spectacles as he took Remus aside. Remus had been so exhausted by even that much denial that he had simply stood and listened, with his head down. This at least negotiated what he felt to be an entirely inappropriate difference in their heights.
I am afraid we do not have the luxury of believing Sirius to be innocent, was what Albus Dumbledore had told a grieving young man who couldn't so much as look him in the eyes, as morning commuters passed through the hall around them with clacking heels and barely a curious glance to spare. Private sorrow had become a frequent visitor to even the most public of places in the last, worst year. The evidence is not in his favor, and neither is the mood of the Ministry.
And Remus had tried to protest, and had choked on it -- but surely a trial? Perhaps they couldn't believe Sirius was innocent, but did that mean they had to rule out any other possibility? Unable to speak, he had breathed and listened to the sounds of parchments rustling, of muted morning greetings and laughter. He was indifferent to the air of celebration; it was the thought that life went on just as it had before, as though nothing had changed, as though the world had not ended and James and Lily Potter had not died and Sirius Black had not been their eventual murderer, that was all but unbearable.
What Dumbledore had said next he couldn't remember and supposed it didn't matter, it had been more of that clever alloy of euphemism and allusion and misdirection that Dumbledore had perfected in order to share exactly as much information as he chose with the rest of the world, but what Dumbledore hadn't said he remembered with perfect clarity, and more or less it had been this: Haven't our losses been high enough, that we should have to lose you too, and for the sake of a traitor? Look at yourself: a werewolf, already Sirius Black's lover, with no money and no support. Where exactly do you think demanding a trial for him will get you? (There have already been several calls for investigations into your own person, Dumbledore had said, with that grave look that Remus could only feel. So far I have been able to defeat them.) He doesn't deserve it, and you don't deserve the consequences it will have for you. The water is deep; he is far too heavy for the likes of you to hold. Let go while you can still save yourself.
And Remus, undone by the sincere sympathy with which all of this good advice had not been delivered to him, had done just that.
He had caught a few discomfiting looks of regret aimed his way from Dumbledore in the last few days before he had left Hogwarts, but had avoided any conversation it might have led to. He could hardly hold Dumbledore responsible for anything, after all; his own mind had already been made up well before that morning at the Ministry, and Remus supposed he knew it. He had never so much as paused to consider that Sirius might not have done what he'd been accused of; indeed, the moment he had received the first owl, the moment he had read the parchment clutched in his white-knuckled hands and then not dropped it on the kitchen table as though it were on fire but put it down in a very calm, slow, reasonable fashion, the idea that Sirius had been a traitor had resonated perfectly with something of which he had always, in a deep unexamined place, been certain. Not something about Sirius, even (or so he told himself), but something about himself; something about both of them, something cracked and tragic and true. The best he had ever allowed himself to hope for was that Sirius had gone insane. Certainly it seemed to fit with all reports, and the idea that the madness that had claimed Sirius's father had come for the son as well -- albeit a bit earlier in life -- was at least a little more comforting than the idea that Remus had lived the three whole years since school with a man he had never known.
And all of this just made talking to Sirius again just a little more difficult, didn't it? It was the source of the relief that was the hours Sirius spent in the bathroom, in which Remus didn't have to look him in the eye, only to fight a losing battle to tidy up the flat and to eventually deem the robes Sirius had tossed out behind him beyond any salvation. Oh, they had forgiven each other in the heat of a very tense moment, certainly, but there was still no stopping himself feeling that he owed Sirius an explanation he was ill-prepared to give; there was no way to say I tried to trust you but the risk was just too great. Please understand, it wasn't that I ever believed that of you, but that it's the way things are in my life. Disappointment and pain and being alone and trying to go on the best I can are the only things I have any context for. There's never been any room for miracles.
And yet somehow, the one thing Remus had never let himself hope for, the one dream too sweet and sad and silly to even begin, had turned out to be nothing more than the unvarnished truth.
Remus could have handled a Sirius who had never cared for him, who was fleeing Azkaban back to Voldemort, who had forgotten him and most everything else in the wilds of his own mind. But for this, for something that approached perfect wish fulfillment, he found himself completely unprepared.
---
He was equally unprepared for the tattoos, but that was another issue entirely.
Sirius returned to the bedroom damp and with wet hair straggling around his face, wearing a sheepish expression and a towel slung around his hips. Uncovered, his body looked like little more than wires of wasted muscle strapped to a skeleton, his skin sunken into the hollows of his chest and arms and hipbones and stretched out over the small distended pot of belly half-starvation had lent him. Other than that, though, he looked better; in the neighborhood of clean, at least, with his nails cut and his face shaven, and he'd apparently just gathered his hair to the back of his head and hacked off the tail with Remus's scissors, possibly out of pique. Remus wasn't looking at any of that, however.
Remus was trying not to stare but finding it difficult. He'd seen the ones on Sirius's neck and chest, of course, but only peripherally, and he hadn't realized they weren't the end of it. They were far from the end of it, in fact. There were several more beyond the edge of where Sirius's robes had concealed (that he could see, but it wouldn't do to think about that), abstract whorls and geometric shapes, a spiked semicircle whirling out around Sirius's navel, thrust forward by the unnatural curve of his stomach. There were more on his arms, a circlet around his bicep and a gauntlet of what looked like lettering on one forearm, and of course the rings and numbers traced on his hands and fingers. Remus didn't quite dare look any lower.
"Thanks," Sirius said, with a small awkward smile, and Remus nearly jumped out of the way as the other man padded across the floor, to retrieve the spare clothing Remus had laid out on the bed. Now he rather wished he hadn't. As Sirius came past him he could see his back, and that nearly made him stop breathing -- it was what looked like an entire protective circle, hand-drawn certainly, but elaborate and concentric, filling all the available skin --
"Those are amazing," Remus managed, making Sirius glance up with a small frown and a shirt in his hand. He gestured vaguely at Sirius's chest; Sirius actually glanced down at himself for a second before looking back up with a tiny laugh, as if to say oh, those, I'd forgotten. "Did you -- ? I mean... never mind, I'm certain you'd rather not -- "
"It's all right." Sirius shifted his weight, just enough to remind Remus that he was, in fact, starting this conversation with Sirius wearing only a towel, and that was probably not a very good choice on his part. "The numbers on the neck and this one -- " he tapped the mark at the top of his chest with his handful of shirt -- "are Azkaban markings. I did the rest."
"How?" Remus's eyes couldn't seem to stop following the traceries of black lines, but he did manage to tear them away long enough to catch another little half-smile from Sirius. "If you don't mind."
"Burnt," Sirius said simply. "I didn't have a wand, but if I concentrated hard enough I could char flesh under the skin, a tiny bit at a time. Very tiny -- I think the back took me almost four years."
A mental image tried to flitter into Remus's mind, conjured by this description, and he refused to let it. It was more than he might ever want to even try to imagine. "Didn't that hurt?"
Sirius nodded, cheerfully enough. "Quite a lot." He glanced at Remus, and shrugged one shoulder. "It was something to concentrate on, at least."
"I can't imagine," Remus murmured, and then stopped and let the tail end of that fall into a long and very awkward silence. No, it said. He couldn't. "Well. Ah. I'll leave you to get dressed, then -- I don't know how well any of that will fit you, but it may be the best I have. Sorry."
"It's all right," Sirius was saying, but Remus was already out of the room before he was entirely finished.
His suspicions were unfortunately proven correct, though; Sirius emerged with Remus's clothes hanging like sails from his emaciated frame, the pants cuffed several times over and belted and the sleeves of the shirt -- which were long, too warm for this weather, but Remus owned a serious dearth of short sleeves -- covering a significant portion of his hands. He stared at Sirius for a moment, struggling and biting his lip in an agony of whether it would be all right to laugh or not, until Sirius made the decision for him. It was a weak, dry, embarrassed laugh, a fraction of what he might have once expected from Sirius, but it was good to hear all the same, and even better to join.
"Well, you needn't slop around in those if you'd rather not," Remus managed, at last, leaning back against the wall of the hallway. "I can go out and try to find something..."
"It's all right," Sirius said again, and when Remus looked at him he smiled with such sincerity that it almost hurt to look at it. "Really, it is. I can't thank you enough."
There seemed to be no good answer for that, so Remus only stuttered for a moment before Sirius came to his rescue, scratching at the ragged line of his hair with an uncomfortable look. "Although... I don't suppose you'd help me finish the job I started on this. It's driving me mad."
And ignoring how there was something so strongly reminiscent of Sirius at sixteen or so in that gesture that it made his chest ache, Remus only smiled and said, "I'll do my best."
---
They began to talk a little, haltingly, as Remus cut Sirius's hair and then made breakfast, and as they ate and got on with the day; they at least talked more than they had been, although topics were still perilously limited. Anything before the moment Sirius had arrived as a dog the previous night seemed to be entirely off-limits, as did the midnight breakdown Remus still wasn't quite sure he hadn't dreamed, which left them with little more than the weather and the future.
"I can only stay a few days," was Sirius's somewhat unexpected comment on the latter, as Remus was scrambling the eggs (by hand; he had never gotten entirely comfortable with preparing food by magic, despite everything else he had come to use it for), making him glance back with eyebrows raised at the table where Sirius was sitting. Sirius shrugged and looked away, scruffing at the back of his neck, where Remus imagined some of the cut hair had caught and was itching now. "Buckbeak's safe not too far from here, with some good hunting, but I'll need to get back to him and get on."
Remus nodded, and went back to the eggs. "I'd thought as much." Neither of them spoke what both of them were thinking: that especially after the business at Hogwarts, this might be one of the places the search would turn first.
"And I hate to impose on you," Sirius added instead. Remus glanced at him, with another small smile, but Sirius neither met it nor his eyes. And busying himself with pulling the skillet off the stove, Remus supposed that was it: they were friendly strangers now, who owed one another nothing.
All in all, it was like having a ghost in the house. Every now and then Sirius would say something that made him seem almost the same as he had ever been, and it would make Remus reel, feeling dizzy and unstuck in time; but between those tiny moments hours stretched out where Sirius was silent and haunted and strange, jumping at tiny noises, sometimes even seeming to go out of his way to avoid being caught in the same room as Remus. It was hard to imagine that he had ever been the man Remus had known before -- or even that Sirius could be the man he occasionally still was now, at odd intervals. Sirius, the real Sirius, was like metal buried in sand; he was all but gone, but sometimes the light hit him just so...
With that strange, decorous distance between them, they didn't share a bed the second night, and each then insisted the other take the bed until finally Remus, too exhausted to keep up the absurdly polite not-quite-argument, gave in. He saw Sirius settled in on the couch, exchanged clumsy goodnights, and again was shut into his own room no more than a few moments before the memory of those tattoos became too much for him.
He couldn't even begin to think of whether Sirius was having the same problems. For one thing it was doubtful, he hated to think it but he wasn't even sure if Sirius could function after twelve years in Azkaban, but for another every time he tried to picture it he only made matters worse for himself. It was all unpleasantly like being seventeen again. Or pleasantly; he still wasn't sure. Oh, granted, there had been a moment, an odd moment when he had been standing up from one end of the couch to make a pot of tea, and telling Sirius he would be right back he had patted a hand on Sirius's knee, just a friendly gesture, but the look Sirius had given him, and the sudden cable of tension that had pulled itself taut between them... well, he didn't know. But while he didn't know, he didn't want to hope -- and particularly not when he wasn't even sure he wanted to want to hope. He hadn't forgotten the size of the hole Sirius had left in his life the last time, and he had no desire even now to make it any larger. At least, he thought he didn't.
The question, however, was rapidly becoming whether he had any choice.
---
It was about four in the morning on the night after that when the owl came; another nondescript, anonymous owl, of which there had been a surfeit in Remus's life lately. They were both lucky that it was so warm he'd been sleeping with the window open -- although when he thought of it later, he very much doubted that this particular owl would have been discouraged by a simple pane of glass.
As it was, he woke in the darkness to insistent hooting and the dusty fluttering of wings around his head, which was rather terrifying until he scrambled away to turn on the light. Relaxing (but only a little; at this time of night it wasn't likely to be good news), he held out his hand to where the owl perched at the edge of the bed, but it only stuck out its leg at him in an urgent fashion. And no sooner did he retrieve the message than it took off again, flapping back out the open window and leaving him staring at all the night that had closed back over it.
No reply, then. When he recognized Dumbledore's handwriting that made a bit more sense.
-
Professor Lupin:
If you've seen any stray dogs in recent memory, I suggest you send them on their way. A few dogcatchers may be investigating your area shortly.
A.D.
-
Remus stared at these lines for only a few seconds before retrieving a saucer and his wand from the bedside table, placing the parchment in the saucer and murmuring, "Incendio." It was gone in a single flash of flame, leaving only the slightest of char-marks. Then he got up and hurried out into the living room, kneeling down by the couch.
"Sirius?" he whispered. The light from the bedroom was dim, but enough for him to see that sudden, total waking pierce Sirius's face again. The other man sat up in a jerk, and both of them would try to convince themselves it wasn't a recoil, wasn't automatic fear.
"Remus?" He rubbed at his eyes, seemed to notice the darkness, and frowned. "What's the matter?"
"You need to get out of here," Remus said, with the same quiet intensity. And without getting up from his position beside the couch, but he hadn't quite noticed that yet. "Someone's on their way now; who knows when they'll be here. You should be as far away as possible before they do."
Some quality of the light shifted behind Sirius's eyes, and he swung his legs off the couch, pushing aside the blanket. "I won't argue with that."
Remus nodded, and they both stood up. "You get ready; I'll pack up a few things for the trip." He paused, and just before they could split up in their opposite directions, added, "I wish you could've stayed longer."
And Sirius turned back from where he'd half-turned away, with the only tiny, haunted smile he could seem to manage resting again on his lips. "So do I," he said.
And that was something, wasn't it? Even though then they were busy and then he was gone, and they made awkward attempts at goodbye through the horrible knowledge that there was no way of knowing if they'd ever see each other again and all this time might just have been wasted... all the same, that was something.
It was a little less than an hour after the sun rose that same morning that they came to Remus's door -- Aurors, at least, not dementors, which was a visceral relief if nothing else. They were cordial, if not friendly, and he let them search the house without a murmur of protest.
"Bit of mud tracked in on the floor, isn't there?" one of them said, as he passed through the kitchen. It was possible that it was just an innocent comment. Remus followed with his eyes to where the man was pointing, and then looked up with a small smile.
"Ah, yes." He even allowed himself an equally small chuckle. "I brought home a stray dog recently, and he was a bit of a mess. He's moved on now, but I thought he could use a good meal."
The man glanced up at Remus, with a bland expression that Remus thought (hoped?) was unfeigned. "I like cats, myself," he said, and then shrugged. "But to each his own."
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3.
(then)
It wasn't a war. They called it a war later, and even sometimes at the time, and looking back upon the casualties it certainly seemed like it had been, but it wasn't a war, not really. Sirius knew perfectly well what a war was like; he'd never seen one firsthand, but he'd heard about them in classes, either with his head down on his desk and staring out the window in History of Magic, or with slightly more interest in Muggle Studies. In a war there were armies, and the armies faced each other in fields or castles or trenches or occasionally on the astral plane, and they fought. And from time to time there were great and sometimes suicidal acts of heroism, and battles were won, and lost, and people fell, and sometimes the good guys almost lost, but they pulled together at the last moment or got a fresh wave of troops or Transfigurers, or the Americans finally decided to join in, or something, and in one last explosive victory someone won, and then there were the treaties and economic reparations and trade agreements and all the stuff Sirius stopped paying attention for.
Wars made sense. In a war you were fighting for something, and you knew who was fighting against it, and you went out and tried to kill them until they stopped fighting. Sometimes you did kill them, and sometimes they killed you, but in a war that meant you were packed up off the battlefield and sent home to your grieving family for a hero's burial. You didn't just disappear one day on your way home from work, and leave them aching and on edge for months until enough remains turned up for someone to identify.
In a war you could see your enemy, or if it was too dark or smoky or astral to see them, you at least knew who they were. You could at least hear the gunshots or the firebolts.
In a war you had a battlefield, and then you had home, and at one you were in danger and at the other you were safe, or at least relatively so, at least unless your enemy decided to be really unsporting about things. In a war you didn't just have to go about your daily ordinary life except for the Order meetings every other night, looking over your shoulder the whole time and knowing by the time you heard somebody mutter an Unforgivable Curse it would be too late.
In a war you saw your friends fall and die right beside you, but at least then you knew where they went.
A war could decimate the country and everyone in it for years to come, but at least then everyone could admit in public that it was actually being fought.
It wasn't a war.
Remus was attending graduate-level courses in Dark Creatures and Magical Theory at the time, working in the afternoons, and Sirius had been living as a gentleman of leisure off his inheritance ever since the thing with the Aurors. As things heated up, though, he threw all his free time, rather manically, into performing tasks for the Order; anything they would give him, anything he could do, he did like a man possessed, swinging wild into the shadows, because if he had to be afraid that someday Remus would leave the flat and never come home, then he had decided Remus was damn well going to have to be afraid for him, too. Drinking was his secondary activity during those times, a sort of an extracurricular, perhaps, and an entertainment only slightly lesser than trying to get himself killed. As time went by he found himself thinking about it as what he titled -- privately and, he thought, rather sacrilegiously -- The Fight Against The Death Eaters Drinking Game. The rules were fairly flexible, but it more or less went like this:
- When you hear of the death of someone you remember from school, take a drink.
- When someone you only remember vaguely from school, because he was five years ahead of you and in Ravenclaw and besides that kept to himself, comes home to the house where he'd left his wife and children and finds a Dark Mark hovering over the gables with that stupid snake poking out like a fucking five-year-old blowing a raspberry, ha-ha got you, and he ghosts around the corners of things pale and silent for a week before he disappears too, take a drink.
- When one of your best friends in the whole world, the one you've lived with since school, deserves a lot better than you, especially now, and seems to be too stupid to realize it, take a drink.
- When you never even find a trace of Caradoc Dearborn, not even the few fragments that have turned up of other people, and his wife, his Muggle wife, who didn't even know what was going on until afterward and still doesn't understand, can you believe he never told her, well yes you can, but still -- when she starts seeking you all out, accosting you at home or on the street with her frayed halo of graying hair and her dark shiny swollen eyes and begging you in a growing shrill scream to at least tell her what they've done with his body, take a drink. Or two.
- When you finally get to see Lily and James again, for a few brief days in a heavily warded house over the holidays, and you look at the swell that's beginning to distend the front of Lily's dress but you're too tired and a little hung over to summon happiness about all the wondrous joy that is new life in the world so that what comes to your lips is almost Are you insane, finish the champagne in the kitchen after everyone's gone to bed.
- When you insist on moving to a new flat for the third time in the last year because you thought you saw someone following you down the street from the store, take a drink and try not to think about your father.
- When you realize just how easily these people could probably find you, regardless of the moves, get in, get past you, take Remus from under your nose or just kill him there, if they wanted him, maybe without even waking you depending on how much you'd had to drink at the time, take a drink anyway.
- And when you find yourself in the worst, darkest parts of your mind wondering if there might be a reason they don't, forget how much you've had already and finish the bottle, you horrible bloody fucking bastard.
In a war your enemies had faces, so you didn't have to start assigning them ones at random.
When he wasn't guarding or retrieving important things and people, or tallying up and imbibing the day's points, he mostly spent his time sleeping, unless it was night. He lay down in the darkness but couldn't seem to close his eyes, and lay listening instead to Remus's breathing and to his own, waiting for a third set of lungs, waiting for a false note, waiting for either the soft rasp of Remus's or the heavier whuff of his own to take on words and beat out traitor, traitor, traitor like a siren or alarm, waiting; waiting for morning to come.
----------------------------------------
4.
(now)
The noise made Remus jump. He had only just sat down with a cup of tea and the classified section of a local Muggle paper (it was getting to be that time of year again, and he'd been having even less luck than usual working among wizards) when the thump came against the front door, and then the sound of an animal whining and scratching. Starting to his feet again, he reflected that it was just a good thing he'd been in the kitchen.
The black dog shook off a drizzle's worth of rainwater before stepping into the kitchen, and this time hesitated no longer than it took to shut the door before turning back into Sirius. He looked all right; tired and thin and bedraggled again, certainly, but nowhere near the wreck he'd been when Remus had last seen him. Some of the light seemed to have come back on in his eyes.
"Sorry to turn up on such short notice," he said, scruffing a little more of the water out of his shaggy hair. "I would've sent ahead if I could have."
"It's all right." Remus pulled out a chair at the table, frowning. Sirius had written that he was heading up to Hogwarts, and seeing him here and in this brisk, businesslike mood was worrisome. "Has something happened? Sit down."
Sirius did, and leaned forward across the table toward Remus with an earnest, grave expression. He did seem better; the haunted look had, if not left him, certainly receded, and something of the man he had been, the essential Sirius-ness of him, had come back into face and his movements. Harry was good for him, Remus thought, just before Sirius began, "Before I explain anything else, I should tell you -- Harry's all right."
Remus paused, staring at him, for several moments, and then sank back into his own chair. "Oh, god, Sirius, what's happened?"
And Sirius told him, as best he could and as quickly, what he'd heard from Harry and from Dumbledore. Remus stopped him only at Cedric Diggory's death ("I remember him," he said, eyes closed and his head on his folded hands. "I had him in class. He worked hard, and... He was a good boy, a -- sweet, likable boy."). When Sirius reached the part where Harry had spoken of seeing echoes of James and Lily, his voice came over a bit shaky, and Remus, who wouldn't have trusted himself to speak either just then, reached out across the table to touch his hand. Sirius's wrapped around it and clasped it tightly, with obvious gratitude, and as he went on he began to sound steadier.
When he had finished, Remus sat back in his chair, only then delicately disengaging their hands. "So that's that," he said. The calm in his voice was somehow grotesque. "He's back."
Sirius nodded. "Dumbledore's sent me round for the old crowd -- or at least the ones he trusts to believe I'm innocent. I made a few stops on the way; Arabella Figg's in, of course, and I caught Mundungus in Knockturn Alley -- I know Dung isn't anyone's favorite, but he'll be as useful as ever he was." He paused. "Harry was with Molly Weasley when I left -- "
"Oh, good. I imagine she'll be good for him just now."
"Most likely. She was, ah, a bit surprised to see me, but no real harm done." Still, Sirius's small grin might have looked a trifle uneasy. "She said Arthur will start spreading word in the Ministry -- he'll have to do it quietly, but if he can pull anyone from the Aurors..."
Remus was frowning again, and set his cup of tea aside so that he could lean on the table himself. "Why will he have to do it quietly?"
"Oh." Sirius scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and then settled it over his mouth, completing the frank, weary look he gave Remus. "Cornelius Fudge was also around for the end of all this; he was up for the tournament. It's all right, the worst he saw was a dog in a hospital room. I'd say he didn't take it well, but the fact of the matter is he didn't take it at all. He was acting like a lunatic -- flailing around, trying to make it out that Harry and Dumbledore were making the whole thing up." He sat back in his chair, glowering down into the tabletop. "I suppose he could come round, but he'd have to take his fingers out of his ears first."
"Well, who can blame him?" Remus pointed out with only a slight effort, and Sirius looked up at him and snorted.
"I'd like to volunteer." They traded wan smiles, and then Sirius sighed and scrubbed at his face again. "Anyhow... Dumbledore told me to start gathering who I could, and then come l -- " He cut off and restarted in the space of no more than an instant, as if reconsidering a choice of words. " -- come stay with you for a bit. That is, if you don't mind -- ?" And then, business matters left behind, some of that confidence was gone; the past year had taken some of the fey and haunted air from him, it seemed, but not quite that odd, almost-shyness that seemed so out of place on Sirius Black. It finally occurred to Remus to wonder if Sirius were like that with anyone else.
"Of course not," he said for now, though, and smiled, getting to his feet. "You're always welcome. Are you hungry?"
Sirius looked surprised for a half-second, then laughed a little. "Starved," he admitted. "I hadn't even noticed."
Remus only nodded, heading over to investigate the refrigerator. "I don't blame you for that, either," he said over his shoulder. "It's hard to believe we're doing this again, isn't it?"
"I don't know." He glanced back at Sirius, but Sirius was staring across the other side of the table, into space. "It keeps getting harder for me to believe we ever stopped."
---
Over the next few days, messages began to pile in, most of them delivered by other means than owl; bland, meaningless greetings to Remus, inquiring after the state of his health, wondering if they might see him soon, signed by old members of the Order -- or, in a few cases, people neither he nor Sirius had heard of. They looked over the growing collection over tea at Remus's table, the parchments lying in the center between their mugs. At the moment Sirius had them fanned out and turned around halfway between them, so they both sat with their heads craned around to read.
"Let's see, who do we have," Sirius muttered, cupping his hands around his mug in a loose wrap. "Elphias Doge, Dedalus Diggle... bloody hell, ought to be a couple of pensioners by now, not getting called back into action... And Emmeline Vance, good, I was wondering how she was getting on... us, of course, Arabella, Mundungus, Sturgis, Mad-Eye... I don't know Hestia Jones, do you?"
Remus, who had been scanning elsewhere, shook his head absently and tapped a broken seal on one of the letters. "It looks like Arthur made good -- two Aurors. Kingsley Shacklebolt -- "
"I remember Kingsley," Sirius broke in, frowning. "He was a good sort, a few years behind us. Wasn't in the old Order, though."
"No, he was too young. He graduated from school the same year it all ended."
"Ah." Sirius looked back to the parchments, frowned again, and then broke into a strange sort of smile. "And another new face -- Nymphadora Tonks. I'll be damned; she's my cousin Andromeda's daughter, remember?"
Remus had been frowning, but as soon as Sirius finished saying this his head lit up with recognition. "That's right, I remember they wrote you when she was born..."
Grinning, Sirius shook his head at the letter, and uncraned his neck to look at Remus. "An Auror, eh? Last time I saw her she was about the size of a Christmas ham, and her favourite hobby was seeing how much of her feet she could fit in her mouth."
Remus turned back to the parchment with the corners of his own mouth twitching. "Well, let's hope time has improved her." Sirius laughed, but by then they were both already reading again. "I assume the bit about meeting up means everyone wants to know when we'll have new headquarters. ...That's going to be a bit rough, isn't it? Considering the Ministry isn't going to want to hear a peep out of us, and of course anywhere near Hogwarts is out of the question."
"Hmm." He glanced up at Sirius, and found the other man staring into the pile of parchments with furrowed brow, his chin propped up in his hand. "Well, I suppose first we have to know what exactly we're looking for."
"Well..." Remus steepled his own fingers beneath his chin, considering. "A fairly central location would be helpful, I imagine. Perhaps even London, or somewhere in the area."
Sirius was nodding already. "In among Muggles would probably be best, actually. Plus Unplottable, shielded, warded enough times around to set off alarms if a pigeon hiccups on the roof, empty..." And on that final word he trailed off suddenly, Remus thought at first merely to indicate the size of the problem.
"Naturally. So the question is, do we know anyone at all, let alone anyone sympathetic, who owns a property like that?" He finally glanced up then, and was startled to find Sirius staring at him with a most peculiar look on his face -- an expression somewhere between horror and hilarity, the look of a man who has no idea whether to laugh or scream. "...Sirius?"
"As a matter of fact, we do," Sirius said.
---
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Remus murmured, for approximately the fourth time, to the large black dog that stood beside him on Grimmauld Place, eyeing the baleful front of number 12 between the thumping stereo on one side and the broken glass on the other. It was approximately three o' clock in the morning, and yet the music -- if you could call it that -- was turned up to what must have been ear-rupturing volumes on the inside. Remus wondered vaguely if their neighbors ever brought up noise complaints, then thought of his own neighborhood and reconsidered.
His companion looked up at him and wagged his tail, albeit in a rather half-hearted fashion. Remus pressed on nonetheless. "If at any point you don't, you know, it's all right. I know what it means to you to have to come back here. It does seem ideal, of course, but I'm certain that something else could be found if it's too much -- "
He was interrupted at that point by a loud, chuffing bark that he could swear sounded impatient -- and a little grateful. From one of the windows of the neighboring houses, someone suggested in a roar of barely-comprehensible vernacular that Remus might perhaps like to shut his dog up.
Remus glanced toward the house, then back at Padfoot. He was looking back with a wide canine grin. Remus rolled his eyes, trying not to smile.
"Oh, very well," he said, and held out the butt-end of his wand to the dog, who accepted it into a very careful grip of teeth. He trotted up to the front door, drew his head to the side, and swung it forward to give the wood a clumsy tap with the wand-tip. They'd talked about recalibrating the door's enchantments later, of course, so that everyone could get in on their own, but right now there was no reason to tempt fate.
The door swung open into blackness, and the two of them stepped inside.
The front hall looked much as Remus had remembered it, not counting a few odd new decorations here and there, nor the substantial layer of dust that gritted under their feet as they took their first few steps inside, leaving one track of footprints and another of paw-prints that suddenly became the shape of human boots. With the door closed, the gloom was almost impenetrable; but the rain of doom that Remus had been half-expecting, to greet the return of this house's prodigal and his half-breed companion, continued to fail to come, and finally Remus relaxed.
"It seems all righ--" he said, and then the portrait started screaming.
---
"Well," Sirius said, as they stood catching their breath on the first landing. "That was bracing."
"Sirius, I'm so sorry," Remus was already saying, as he had been in urgent whispers ever since they'd gotten the curtains shut again. "Really, that was foolish of me, I should have realized -- "
"You weren't to know." Sirius pushed back his hair and smiled, picked out in the faint blue light from Remus's wand. He looked tired and a little like someone had recently punched him. "It's all right, Remus, it really is, it was just -- startling." He shook his head. "I wonder when she had that done. Quite a good likeness."
Remus allowed himself a wan smile in answer. "It's not quite the way I remember her," he said. Sirius glanced at him, and chuckled. It didn't sound good.
"No, nor I. I don't think losing Regulus agreed with her. Or my father, for that matter."
"Or you," Remus suggested. He wasn't certain he should say it, or even what had made him do so, but Sirius just waved it off, pushing himself off from the banister he'd been leaning on.
"Not a bit; she probably hired a band and broke out the good wine. 1566 vintage at least." He tried the knob that led through to the second floor hallway, found it locked, and borrowed Remus's wand without their having to exchange a word. "Are you sure about staying here tonight? It's bound to be rough -- if you'd rather go back to your place, I'll understand." The door swung open with a creak so loud Remus winced and glanced over his shoulder, toward the entrance hall, but of course -- mercifully -- it was too far to wake Mrs. Black.
"No, it'll be fine. Best not to have you out on the streets more than absolutely necessary." Framed in the dark doorway, Sirius glanced back at Remus, a wry, rueful smile twisting his mouth.
"No -- I meant, if you want to go back to -- "
"I know what you meant," Remus said. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Sirius's lips curved and grew into a true smile, and before Remus could give away how warm all through his chest it made him he made himself look ahead into the darkened hallway. He had a vague idea where they were -- "What are you thinking?"
"Just that my room would have been sealed up well before the house was empty," and as he spoke he took Remus by the wrist in a way that slammed Remus's mind back to sixteen years old so hard it left him dizzy, and started leading him into the hallway, holding the glowing wand ahead, "and so would Reg's, I imagine, and neither of us had much of anything powerful or dangerous in there -- Mother wouldn't have it. So as bad as the rest of the house may have gotten, they'll probably be all right, at least enough for us to kip down there for tonight."
Remus nodded, not minding that Sirius was several steps ahead and couldn't see him. "That's a good idea." And not even one, but two rooms. How eminently sensible. How conveniently nonthreatening.
They reached what had been Regulus's door first from the stairs -- Remus remembered that much -- and Sirius let go of him to open the door. This was the work of several minutes, and the undoing of a number of magical seals and wards, as well as the slightly simpler work of unlocking it and pulling off the few boards that had been nailed across the frame. They both peered around inside by the faint blue glow for a moment, and then Sirius snorted a little at himself, muttered, and the gas lamps on the walls sprang to life. Remus winced, blinked, and then took another look. The room was covered in a layer of dust that must have been inches thick, bare-walled and empty, but there was still a bed, and no telltale sounds or odors of anything dangerous. It smelled of mildew and age and emptiness, and that was all. For a few seconds Remus could almost be sorry for the loss of the boy who had lived here, no matter what else he had come to be.
"Looks all right," Sirius said, breaking the silence, and they turned to each other in relief. "Let's try mine."
Sirius's room was much the same, although Remus could have sworn the layer of dust was even perceptibly thicker, and some of the furniture had been removed; no noticeably different ethic had been applied to its maintenance, however, and not for the first time Remus wondered how thoroughly Mrs. Black had convinced herself that she had not one but two dead sons, and how well she had really taken that. Here as well, though, that enormous bed was still standing; it was still sheeted and blanketed, for that matter, and unmade, as if a teenaged Sirius had just rolled out of it to protect his friend from his mother's wrath this very morning.
God, if being back in the Black house were this strange for him, what must it be like for Sirius?
"You're welcome to this one," Sirius said by his shoulder, and Remus turned back to him gladly. "I'll take R... the other."
Remus tilted his head. "Are you sure you don't want it? I mean, it was your room." The smile Sirius offered him was slight and distracted.
"No, that's all right," he said. "I think it would be -- sort of weird."
"Ah. Yes. I can understand." He couldn't, of course, not really, but neither of them was about to bring that up. "Well, ah... good night, then."
And yes, Sirius was lingering, reluctant to return the words, reluctant to leave him and go into separate rooms and shut the doors... but most likely it was just this house, and who could blame him? Remus didn't think he'd want to be alone here either if he were Sirius. He didn't know that he wanted to be alone here anyway.
"Good night," Sirius said finally, too fast and off-rhythm, and their smiles and his exit came out jerky and awkward and wrong. Remus shut the door feeling the same way he always did now after leaving the same room with Sirius -- like he'd just left a party filled with the most important people in all the world, where everything had been depending on him to say just the right things.
He left the lamps burning, and did no more than kick off his shoes before blasting the worst of the dust off the bed and lying down on it. He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. This house, this room... From what he'd heard about that summer, Sirius had left home the same day that Mrs. Black had come down on Remus, and he had never come back. The last time Sirius had slept in this bed, it had been with Remus beside him, curled up on his chest. They'd done nothing but touch each other all the afternoon before, and even that night he remembered that Sirius had gathered him close and started kissing his neck, and any inclination he might have had to protest that he was tired was gone when Sirius had murmured I missed you in his ear, because Sirius had been saying that all day with such feeling that Remus had halfway convinced himself that Sirius was saying it in place of something bigger, something more...
Those boys were ghosts now in this empty house, but the hand that fisted itself around his cock did so in memory of them, and if it was only Remus's own what did it matter? He could close his eyes and pretend the bed still smelled like Sirius, even though it only smelled of dust and old fabric; he could think of going next door and knocking, saying I couldn't sleep, can we talk?, of touching Sirius's mouth to his at least once more, no matter the consequences. He could imagine the dusty darkness of Regulus's old room, just on the other side of this wall, with Sirius maybe lying awake in the bed that stood there, too, maybe doing the same thing Remus was, maybe also thinking of the ghosts of those beautiful stupid boys they had been, and of who had been beside him the last time he had lain where Remus was lying now.
He might not be able to go back, but the remembering still belonged to him and it always would. And he lay on his back in Sirius's old bed, his head arched back into the musty pillows, his lips parted, straining and restless and clutching the blanket, with all his new scars and his old, and he remembered. Even if Sirius had forgotten, even if Sirius wanted to forget and even if he himself did too, he remembered; kissing, laughing ghosts lay tangled in the bed beside him, holding on to one another like they had all the time in the world.
He came, and breathed, and slept, haunted.
---
There was a game Remus had played with himself a great deal in his younger years, particularly in his first year at school. He had called it "How Would This Look To A Normal Person?" at first, although later that last part of the title had been reconsidered to "Anyone Who Didn't Know What Was Going On," and then finally to "A Muggle." Given where his first year of school had taken place, the answer to the game's posed question had more often than not been, "Like we've all gone completely insane."
It was difficult to say what exactly it was about standing in an empty guest bedroom, watching Sirius stand leaning on the wall, banging on the gilded edge of what appeared to be an empty picture-frame, and roaring "PHINEAS! I KNOW YOU'RE THERE!" at it that had made him think of this.
Only after a good ten minutes of this and a high temper worked up on Sirius's part did faint footsteps sound from beyond the edge of the painting, accompanied by a muttering voice: "--ven't been back to this portrait in years, if it's that bloody house-elf again I'll -- "
Both footsteps and voice reached full pitch just as a thin wizard dressed in green and silver strode into the frame, saw Sirius, and stopped. He had a pointed beard and a thin, shifty sort of face, which only registered his extreme startlement for a fraction of a second before assuming an oily veneer of mingled dislike and smugness. Remus didn't even begin to wonder why his portrait hung in this house; aside from the Slytherin colors, there was something in the color of his hair and the set of his features that made the portrait seem like, if not a mirror of Sirius's face, then at least some twisted echo.
"Well, if it isn't my extremely sought-after great-great-grandson," Phineas Nigellus sneered, adjusting his slightly disheveled robes. "How strange -- it seems to me the last time I saw you, you were storming out in a fit of adolescent pique, and swearing never to return. What on earth could have caused a man of such integrity to renege on his promise, I wonder?"
"Hello, Phineas," Sirius said in a tone of grim, stretched calm. "Believe me when I say I'm no more pleased to be back than you are to have me. I need you to carry a message for me."
"Ah, I see." Phineas sniffed; he was still inspecting the folds of his robes. "Everyone seems to have needs nowadays. My fellow portraits need to come and go at all hours, Dumbledore needs to call in favors from from the most unsavory sorts, you need me to carry messages for you, and I -- I daresay I need more rest and the services of a significantly more talented painter. This robe had a simply glorious serpent embroidery round the collar, and look, he's reduced it to blobs and nonsense; why, in my day -- "
"Phineas." Sirius's ancestor looked up, finally, at the tone in Sirius's voice, and he was no longer bothering to so much as mingle his dislike. "I don't want to play games with you. I know your other portrait hangs in the headmaster's office, and I want you to deliver a message to Dumbledore for me. I don't think that's beyond your capabilities, is it?"
More grimacing than smirking now, Phineas sketched a disdainful little bow in the air. "Why not at all; surely my wish is your command. And what would that message be?"
"Tell him we've found a place for the Order to meet," Sirius said, and Remus caught the little twitches at the corner of his mouth at Phineas's expression; the man looked suddenly like he'd swallowed a live frog. "Don't say anything more. If it comes from you, he'll know where I mean. Probably kick himself for not thinking of it sooner."
"Indeed," Phineas said. He'd managed to recover some measure of his dignity, but still looked as though Sirius had announced his intentions to also use his great-great-grandmother's grave as a lavatory. He glanced past Sirius briefly, at where Remus was standing in the room behind him, and then his gaze returned and brought with it a small, sour smirk. "Shall I also advise the headmaster that the noble house of Black has become a haven for stray animals?"
Remus threw a quick look at Sirius; he was half-expecting some sort of outburst at that, but Sirius's expression never wavered -- although the calm in his voice when he spoke was somewhat of the deadly kind. "Is that any way to speak of a guest of the master of this house?"
Whatever attempts at decorum had been maintained for this conversation so far, that ended them; Phineas's sneering politeness dropped away so fast Remus could fairly hear it shatter on the floor, and the look he gave Sirius was cold and ugly. After a moment he barked a single ringing laugh.
"You, the master of this house," he repeated. "You. Indulge me a moment, and imagine a great and glorious kingdom. War befalls it, and in a single attack the entire castle is reduced to ruin: the king and queen and the entire royal family slaughtered down to the last distant relative, and then their every servant and all their court, and then the castle itself is burnt to the ground, so that there are no survivors -- but for a single horse, escaped and run wild from the royal stables. Tell me, Sirius... is the horse then king?"
But when Remus glanced at him, somehow, Sirius was almost smiling.
"As far as the horse is concerned?" he said.
Though Phineas's expression did not flicker, he apparently did not deign to answer this question; instead, he simply straightened his robes, straightened his posture, and offered a dismissive sort of sniff. "I'll carry your message to Dumbledore, as you say," he said. "But in the future, young master Sirius, I do suggest you find other beasts of burden. My service is sworn only to the headmaster and to those who are truly of the noble house of Black; and to fulfill the latter requirement, I am sad to say, you have never and shall never possess the necessary qualities."
"Why thank you, Phineas," Sirius said, still with that almost-smile on his lips. "I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
And when Phineas sidled out of the picture-frame again, Remus saw that it was with what appeared to be an expression of grudging respect. He didn't know if he'd ever be sure quite what to make of that.
Sirius remained leaning on the wall over the frame for a moment, and then seemed to gather himself and turned back to Remus, with a bland, pleasant expression. "I think I've grown into him," he said. "You think that's bad, try it when you're eleven years old and worrying about your first day of school."
"How was I to know new first-years were no longer forced to pass trial by fire to prove their worthiness to learn?" came Phineas's sneering voice from the empty picture-frame. "One does hope the school will not deteriorate when one's guidance has passed..."
Without turning, still looking at Remus, Sirius said, "Phineas, go or yours is going to be the first portrait I take off the walls, and it won't be in a way you'll enjoy."
There was a pause. "You wouldn't dare," Phineas's voice said at last.
"Remus, would you hand me that box-cutter?" Sirius said, in exactly the same tone.
"Certainly," Remus replied.
Silence. After several moments of it, Sirius threw one last glance back over his shoulder, smirked, and turned back to Remus.
"What box-cutter?" Remus murmured, when he thought it was safe. Sirius shushed him, but with a grin, and then clapped him on the shoulder.
"Come on. Let's go see just how badly this place wants to kill us."
---
The answer turned out to be 'quite badly,' but they managed to get a number of high-priority spaces cleared enough for habitation in the week or so before the new Order turned up for its first meeting: kitchen and dining room, essential hallways, toilets, bedrooms, and a vinegar-smelling but heavily protected wine cellar for the upcoming full moon. Sirius held up well, better than Remus might have expected, especially as long as Remus stayed with him in the house -- but as time went on, every now and then Remus caught him casting baleful looks around at the walls of the Black mansion, as though he were thinking that he wasn't sure he'd meant to just trade in one prison for another. On the fourth day or so Remus discovered Kreacher, largely by tripping over him and then nearly having a heart attack, and the house-elf's appearance, coupled by his outraged mutterings as he lurked around wherever they were working, did nothing to improve Sirius's mood.
As the first meeting date was set and then began to draw closer, though, he became increasingly skittish and agitated, stepping up his pace with the repairs to the house far beyond where Remus could keep up with him, especially this close to the full moon. He jumped at noises, checked the date a little too often, and worried constantly about the condition of the house's living spaces, and became very irritable when Remus finally told him, wearily, that no one in the Order would die if they had to listen to a ghoul bang around in the cupboards. He could understand Sirius's anxiety, of course, but it was exhausting just to watch him.
Then the night of the meeting came, and Sirius made some excuse to remain upstairs; not wanting to force the issue, Remus shrugged, agreed, and went to wait in the foyer, listening to the soft snoring of the portraits in the front hall.
And then, of course, the doorbell rang.
"Werewolf! Conspirators! Collaborators! Making the house of my fathers a home for filth and half-breeds!"
After a very shocked-looking Arthur Weasley had helped Remus wrangle the curtains shut over Mrs. Black again, Remus turned to the straggling clutch of Order members staring at the place where she had been and murmured, "In the future, could you please just come in, and not ring the doorbell?"
He led them in to the foot of the stairs, deep enough into the house that they could at least talk, even if he wasn't quite sure where they should be going yet. When he indicated it was safe, the members of the old guard who were present began a round of "Lovely to see you again, Remus," and "How have you been? We'd all wondered what had become of you," in tones so sheepish that he was quite sure none of them had spared so much as two thoughts for what had become of him in the intervening years. But he smiled and greeted them back, because he could hardly blame them. He'd always had a way of slipping people's minds. He also noticed, looking around in the pale gaslight, that Dumbledore wasn't in among this particular huddle, but that hardly came as any surprise, and nor did Moody's absence: Remus imagined he was still recovering, as a year of being kidnapped was a bit much for someone of his age, even someone who happened to be Mad-Eye Moody. What was more surprising, however, was the way he could have sworn Sirius's -- second cousin? first cousin once removed? he'd never been sure how that worked -- was giving him a particularly long, thoughtful look, and the wink she gave him when he caught her at it. She was not what he might have expected, either; unlike Phineas, she looked nothing at all like Sirius, and she was hardly more than a teenager, with a short punky hairdo that was currently an alarming shade of teal.
It was, not surprisingly, Minerva McGonagall who finally asked the question Remus imagined most of them had been thinking: frowning around at the hallway, she said at a lull, "But Professor Lupin, where is our host?"
Remus opened his mouth to say something that probably wouldn't be Hiding out upstairs, but before anything could leave it, Sirius's voice said from the stairs above them, "He's right here."
They all turned to look up at him in nearly a single motion; if a slight cringe hadn't crossed Sirius's face at all the sudden attention, Remus would have suspected an overactive sense of drama. Looking embarrassed, he raised a hand in greeting, and then turned and made his way, step by hesitant step, down to face a pack of old friends who had spent some thirteen years believing him to be a murderer and a traitor.
There was a long, extremely awkward silence.
This time it was Kingsley who broke it; he stepped a little forward, out of the tight throng of the assembled -- over most of whose heads he towered anyway -- and held out his hand. "Hello, Sirius," he said, in his deep, rumbling voice. "Good to see you."
And the look of relief on Sirius's face, as he came forward to shake it, was almost more than Remus could bear.
Kingsley had broken the ice now, and the rest of the witches and wizards began to gather in, greeting and welcoming Sirius first tentatively, then with increasing warmth and excitement; handshakes turned to embraces, and claps on the back, and before long Sirius was at the center of the new Order of the Phoenix like he had never left it. He had thought life and light were returning to Sirius's face before, but looking at it now, Remus had the distinct impression of witnessing some magic that was the exact opposite of a Dementor's Kiss: a man's soul, long lost, at last restored to him.
----------------------------------------
5.
(then)
The last year was the worst; at the time they might not have known that it would be the last, but they knew full well that it was worse than it had ever been before. Too bad, in fact, although it took them some time to realize it. Worse than could be readily explained. Suddenly more of them were dying, a lot more, the quiet disappearances turning into explosive last stands and massacres. Suddenly Voldemort's followers seemed to know not just who the sympathizers were -- which they always had -- but who the Order members were, and where they could be found defenseless regardless of how well they had hidden themselves and their families. Suddenly the Death Eaters were as masked as they had ever been and the Order of the Phoenix was exposed and raw. Nobody said the word spy aloud, nobody seemed to want to, but a silence grew even between the members of the Order, and in the cracks of their separation something like despair began to grow.
Lily and James were moving from place to place too much lately for Sirius to spend as much time with them and with his godson as he might have liked, but then it was probably just as well; the days were getting fewer and fewer he felt up to talking to anyone at all unless he had to, let alone entertaining a three-month-old baby. He saw them a few times, once in a rented cottage way out in the country, once in a dark little railroad-track apartment in London, sometimes with Remus, and spent some good and patient afternoons as a dog letting Harry take special delight in grabbing fistfuls of his tail, but after a while the visits just petered out. He worried about Harry, vaguely, when he thought about it at all. Harry was a calm baby and seemed to take it in stride, but all the moving around couldn't be good for him.
On one of his visits, one when Remus had been too buried in classwork to come, he had sat in the living room with James while Lily put Harry down for a nap, and James had gotten Sirius a coffee and himself a cup of tea, and they'd sat in a brief, comfortable silence for a moment before James turned to Sirius and said, "Do you really think you'd be all right taking care of him? If anything happened, I mean."
Sirius didn't know what his expression must have looked like, but whatever it was it had made James look away and put down his tea. "You know I don't mean that I don't trust you with him," James had said. "I only mean... I worry about you taking this on, you know. I wouldn't want anyone else to be Harry's godfather, but -- hell, you have enough to do."
"It's all right, James," he'd said, not because it was, but because it was something to say. "I can handle it. If anything happens, Harry will be fine. I promised you and I'll promise you again: I'd die before I'd let anything happen to him."
And that, at least had been true. And while James had only smiled and patted Sirius's arm and not said that's what I'm afraid of, he hadn't needed to.
It had been mid-January, and flakes of snow had been brushing half-heartedly up against the windowpanes outside. Lily had come back downstairs and pronounced the baby asleep, and then she enlisted their good-naturedly grumbling help in taking down the Christmas decorations, playing some of her old records low and singing along under her breath while they did. She was wearing a long green corduroy dress and her hair pinned up on one side with a tiny barette, and she looked tired and frightened and very beautiful. While she was in the room, James never quite stopped touching her; his hand was always at her elbow, or his fingertips on the small of her back, or brushing her hair. At least once she just stopped what she was doing and leaned on him for a moment, and then went back to taking ornaments off the tree like nothing had happened.
When your twenty-year-old best friend is making plans for his death, go home and take a drink.
Nobody said the word spy. Nobody told anyone else where he was staying. Nobody saw each other for months at a time, until there was a mission to run or a funeral to go to. Except for them. Except for Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs, and of course Mrs. Prongs and Prongs Junior. They stayed as close-knit and trusting as ever, and of course Sirius never thought about blackmail liabilities or what might happen if some terribly powerful Dark wizard came up with the supposedly impossible cure for lycanthropy, because if you couldn't trust your friends, who could you trust?
It shouldn't have been as bad as it was, but it was, and he found out just how bad firsthand when he took the assignment to round up support in Scotland with Gideon and Fabian Prewett, and another woman he didn't know. He told himself later that he would have scented something wrong with the rendezvous point immediately if he hadn't been quite so tired, but in truth he probably wouldn't have; the old derelict castle was only as dark and convoluted as one would expect an old derelict castle to be, and none of them suspected ambush even for a second until the first spell knocked out the mortar over their heads.
He had no memory of the firefight later except that it had happened; not before the point when he had somehow gotten separated from the Prewett brothers in the twisting corridors (the unfamiliar woman had been rendered a corpse at some point, charred and her face still locked in a scream-shape, and they had had to leave her body), and had taken shelter behind the casements of a narrow passageway, where he would be able to snipe off anyone who came around the far corner. He remembered crouching in the darkness, trying to keep his breathing silent, counting off the seconds and waiting for them to come for him. Long minutes, maybe even an hour, had passed before he had realized no one was coming.
He had run back cursing them and cursing himself, and had found the Death Eaters gone and what was left of the Prewetts sprawled in a doorway. They must have converged on the brothers; their bodies bore the marks of maybe a half-dozen murderers. He never knew why they hadn't come hunting for him after finishing with the other three. Maybe they had known he was too far ahead and would get the drop on them. Maybe they hadn't seen that there was another person in the dark. Maybe they knew they would kill everyone in the Order eventually, and just hadn't cared.
Sirius walked alone and unmolested out of the castle, into a cold, clear night.
Watching his breath on the hillside, he thought for a few moments of going home, of ferrying their bodies home for those all-important heroes' burials, and his mind had revolted at the image so badly he had nearly thrown up. He couldn't tell the story. Couldn't be the survivor, not again, not now. Not yet. Someone would find them; the collaborators they had been meant to meet would come and discover the bodies, or someone else would, and word would get back and so would they. But he couldn't go. Not now, not yet.
He wandered into the nearest Muggle town, found a place to get drunk, and did so. He stayed that way for the better part of two weeks.
When you can't even fucking die properly, take a drink, and don't stop.
Then he went home.
He walked in the front door of the flat to find Remus half-dressed in the kitchen, staring at the label on the plastic wrap of a loaf of bread. Remus jumped so badly he dropped the bread when Sirius walked in, which made Sirius jump when it thudded off the counter, and then he stopped and stood there with the door still open behind him because Remus was staring at him with huge fixed eyes.
"Sirius," Remus said, and he sounded perfectly calm and ordinary, and then he didn't say anything for a while, and then he said it again and sounded less calm and ordinary, and he tried to say something else, but didn't quite succeed, because then he had flung himself onto Sirius and he was shaking and sobbing and unable to say anything. His weight nearly dragged both of them to their knees, and Sirius had marks later where Remus's fingers had dug into his shirt so hard that in places they'd caught his back instead.
Word had come back that everyone who had gone on the assignment had been killed in an ambush. Dumbledore had come to deliver the news to Remus personally. Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated; behold, I went to the grave but rose again two weeks later, albeit with a hangover.
He spent all afternoon sitting with Remus and murmuring soothing things and finally prodding a few shaky laughs out of him, with the sort of gentle jokes he would have used at school to distract Remus from the pain of a transformation, or cheer him up after the word MUDBLOOD turned up slashed in red quill-ink across the back of one of his books. That night they had fierce and silent sex and then he lay beside Remus in the bed and pretended to drift peacefully into sleep, and after perhaps an hour or perhaps two, when he surely thought Sirius asleep, Remus's voice whispered I love you into the darkness.
The next night Sirius went out to the pub, got smashed, and fucked a girl he'd never seen before up against the ragged brick wall out back in the alley, with her legs wrapped around his hips and her robes hitched up between their waists, and tried not to wonder which one of them he was trying to punish.
----------------------------------------
6.
(now)
"Microwave dinner?" Tonks read off a box in the freezer case, with her head tilted all the way over to the side to read it so that her current thatch of tiny rainbow-colored braids spilled over. Straightening, she wrinkled her nose. "My dad's got one of those microwave things, but I can't imagine fitting much of a meal in those tiny boxes."
Remus smiled, although he could tell how distracted it must look, without looking up from the bag of frozen spinach he was considering. "Most of them aren't much of a meal," he agreed. "Cheap and quick, though. Spinach, do you suppose, or the medley?"
Tonks shrugged, leaning over again. "I dunno." A pair of frumpy-looking older women in summer dresses cast her dirty looks as they passed by with their shopping carts, and she waved at them with a sideways cheerful grin; they both snapped their eyes away again and quickened their pace. "Why are Muggles so mad about doing everything as fast as they can?" Remus was gratified that she at least lowered her voice for this. "I mean, it's always quick this and quick that. That's what microwaves are all about, isn't it? What are they in such an awful hurry for?"
"A bit funny coming from a wizard, what with the number of things we do instantaneously." Remus frowned at the spinach, started to put it back, and then gave it another long look. "Is the kitchen all in working order again?"
"Yeah," Tonks said, at last giving up on the freezer cases and returning to Remus's side. Standing next to him, she came up approximately to his sternum. "Molly was having a bit of an argument with the stove the other day, but I think it's fixed now."
Remus paused a moment, looked up at Tonks, and then said at last, "You know, if we lived in any other house," (another middle-aged woman cast him a scandalized look, which took him a few seconds' processing to understand before he realized who he was talking to and how old she was, and he resolved to lower his own voice,) "I would have assumed that you meant that Molly was having a bit of trouble getting the stove to work. However, all things being as they are, I realize that what you meant was, in fact, that Molly was having a bit of an argument with the stove." Tonks was grinning by now, and nodded.
"That's another thing. I think wizards tend to be a lot more literal. One time when I was seven, my dad was talking to my mum when I was in the kitchen, and he was in a real temper about some car troubles, and he said something about 'that machine's turning into a money-eating monster,' and, well, you can just imagine what I thought at first..."
Remus wasn't entirely certain how he and Tonks had ended up on grocery shopping detail together, but it wasn't as though he minded; as they slowly got to know each other, he found that he liked her a great deal. She was extremely inquisitive and possessed of an apparently limitless reserve of energy, neither of which qualities he might have found appealing in certain people, but Tonks had shown herself more than capable of keeping from being prohibitively irritating. It was probably a good thing, too, considering how firmly she had latched on to him for some reason. All of which was in addition to the fact that she was far safer to bring into a Muggle grocery than most anyone else in the Black house at the moment.
The Weasleys had fully moved in by now, as had a few other Order members if only for odd nights, and Molly -- Remus suspected out of sheer horror rather than enthusiasm -- was swiftly taking over all operations related to its cleanliness and the care and feeding of its inhabitants. Sirius seemed more than happy to let her, for that matter; having so many people and so much activity had cheered him at first, but more and more ever since the house seemed to be getting to him. He was all right mostly, but had fits of being moody and snappish for no good reason, and others where he seemed listless and tired all the time. Everyone else seemed to be more worried about this than was Remus, who could not find a polite way to say that he'd seen worse. Actually, Sirius's sulks and bad moods were more like normal emotional responses than anything Remus had seen from him since Sirius had come back from Azkaban. He found them almost comforting.
Not that this was to say that he didn't worry, or feel badly for Sirius being trapped there again, both of which he did. In point of fact, that was why he'd been standing with this bag of spinach freezing his fingers for the last five minutes. This sort of behavior he couldn't even defend to himself, and had given up trying.
As Tonks strode by Remus, still telling stories, to continue down the freezer aisle, she plucked the spinach out of his hand and threw it into the shopping cart with an air of decision, and a pert, challenging look to meet his raised eyebrow. Remus sighed, and after only one more glance at the case where the medley was still sitting, followed.
Meat was another struggle, though, and after watching him waffle between the lamb and the pork loin for some interminable length of time Tonks finally sighed and said, "The grocery will still be here after we leave, you know. It's not cursed, or unstuck in time, or anything."
Remus glanced at her and offered a small smile, before turning back to the meat. "Perhaps some of us are young enough to waste the time on two trips..." He leaned in a little, and paused. "Which do you think -- everyone would like better?"
"I don't know which one Sirius would like better," Tonks said in a flat, amused voice, and he didn't turn to see her expression. "Definitely not any better than you do, at least."
Clearing his throat seemed like the only possible way to respond to that. Finally he said, with a slight note of apology, "Well, he can't get out to choose for himself, can he? I just feel badly."
"You want to go out and owl him?" Tonks asked. She was still keeping a straight face, but only barely. "I mean, you can hardly be expected to make decisions this important yourself."
"Nymphadora," Remus said in his most dignified warning tone, and was gratified by the glare that earned him.
"I'm just saying, you're not his wife, are you?" Remus did his absolute best not to let his expression change, but by the way she faltered and began backpedaling immediately he could tell he had not succeeded. "I mean -- it's not going to kill him if he doesn't like dinner one night."
Remus sighed, and turned away from the meat toward her. "I know." He lowered his voice, with a glance around; the butcher was nowhere to be seen, fortunately. "But not only can he not get out to decide for himself, he can't get out at all. He was trapped in that house for the first sixteen years of his life, and then he was trapped in Azkaban for twelve more, and now he's trapped in the house again; I can't imagine how frustrating this must be for him, and neither can you, or any of us. I just... don't want to give him any reason to be more miserable than he already is."
"Well, on behalf of all of us who've had to spend time with him lately, I applaud that decision," Tonks said in a dry tone that made Remus smile in spite of himself, "but on the other hand, Remus, if you take half an hour to select every single item, we are never going to get out of the grocery."
Remus paused for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. "Your point is well taken." He cast another glance back at the meat case, and opened his mouth, but she cut him off before he could say a word.
"Lamb," she said. "Pork loin's fine for everyday, but lamb's a bit of something special."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome. And I'll go find some mint, then. There's a spice rack in the kitchen, but I wouldn't go near it, probably all powdered baby skulls or something -- "
She disappeared -- not literally, fortunately -- and returned with the promised mint. After depositing it in the cart, she then tilted her head to look up at him, and said with absolutely no preamble, "My mum told me you and Sirius had a bit of a thing before he went to Azkaban. Is that true?"
Remus stood looking at her with a handful of wrapped lamb, nonplussed. Her gaze was polite and curious, and after a minute he bent to put the lamb in the cart in hopes of avoiding it. "I don't know if you'd call it that," he said in the most measured tones he could manage, keeping his head down to rearrange the vegetables. "We did live together for some time after school -- "
"And you were shagging?" Tonks finished the sentence for him. He jerked his head up so fast he almost stumbled over the cart, which would have made them even for the number of times they'd each upset it that day.
"Tonks!" It was a lost cause, though; she was already laughing.
"What? I'm a big girl, you know."
"Perhaps," Remus said, attempting dignity as he began pushing the cart away from the counter, "but I, on the other hand, am elderly and infirm and extremely old-fashioned." He didn't have to have Mad-Eye's magical eye to know she was rolling her eyes behind his back, but chose to ignore it.
"So you were?" she pursued, trotting along after him. He tried not to sigh.
"None of your business. Yes."
"Thought so." He risked a weary glance back at her, and found her expression a surprise: a far gentler, more sympathetic smile than he might have expected. At his quizzical look, she clapped him on the back -- on the small of the back, for practicality's sake -- and said simply, "Takes one to know one."
He let the cart stop rolling, and stared at her for perhaps longer than he should have trying to work that one out, because finally she sighed and flapped her arms. "I'm a dyke, Remus. I like girls. Honestly, I thought everybody knew."
"Well," Remus said, because there didn't seem to be much else to say; his eyebrows were high enough that he could feel them stretching one of his scars. "I see."
Tonks shrugged, coming around him to hover beside the cart. "Speaking of things wizards are weird about, eh? At least Muggles have got words for it, but most of the time that just means they've got names they can call you. But you know, when it comes down to it, I'd rather be a horrible deviant than not exist at all." When Remus had no response for this either, she soldiered on, turning away to idly pick up a can of beans from a pile that were on special. "I've never told my dad -- I can't, he'd be really upset... My mum's no help either, she knows but she's always banging on that fun's fun when you're a girl at school but now that I'm growing up to be a proper lady I ought to be finding a husband and popping out children and all." She glanced back at him, with a small exasperated grin. "Can you imagine me being somebody's mother? I'd drop the poor baby on its head first thing."
That actually surprised a laugh out of Remus, and he found it felt good. Amazingly good. Of all the unexpecteds...
"So I know how it is," Tonks concluded, putting down the beans and shoving her hands in the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. "And I won't tell anyone, I was just curious. I mean, we've got to stick together, right?"
"I suppose so," Remus said, and he could tell that his smile was very warm indeed, if only by the pleasure and surprising relief with which she returned it. "I... well, I had no idea. I've never really -- known another before."
"'Course you have. You just haven't known you did. Could be neither did they, for that matter." Remus thought of arguing the point, but she was moving on already, and in the end he only followed. "There's a few of us in the Ministry, younger people mostly, who think Muggles might have the right idea about things on this one -- just about the categories, mind, but still. We've formed a group, actually, we meet every other week. You should come sometime."
He cleared his throat, trying not to give away how boggling this very concept was, to say nothing of the thought of himself participating in it. And resisting the urge to ask whether they also held bake sales and poker games. "I can't imagine I would fit in very well," he tried to demur, but Tonks just waved her hand.
"Of course you would! But it's all right if you don't want to, I just thought I'd ask." He opened his mouth to offer something more polite, but she was talking again. "So, you and Sirius, are you, you know, back now?"
"No."
Tonks nodded. "I didn't think so. Not from the way he looks at you."
Remus was considering protesting this entire line of conversation again, but that managed to stop him in his mental tracks, and he looked at her with a frown furrowing his brow. "What way he looks at me?"
She turned to walk backwards ahead of the cart, something he could not imagine would end well. "Oh, you know," she said, in airy tones, grinning. "I believe 'pining' is the word..."
This was far too painful for amusement, but he didn't quite have the heart to be irritated. He settled for something in between. "He does no such thing."
"Does so. What, you haven't noticed?"
"No, I haven't noticed, because it is impossible for me to notice a product of your fevered imagination." He paused. "What do you mean, pining?"
Tonks rolled her eyes. "I mean pining, and not in the sense of trees, either. He clings on to you, he follows you all about -- "
"Well, he knows me, I'm familiar -- "
" -- you're the only one who can get him to do anything, or stop sulking," she went on doggedly over his protests, "he's all shy and nervous around you -- "
"He's like that with everyone. It's -- Azkaban, of course he's bound to be different."
"He's not like that when you're not around, Remus," Tonks said, in a slightly more serious voice, stopping next to him. "I wouldn't know, but Kingsley said he's all but back to normal most of the time. It really is just you."
Remus stared at her, his brow furrowing even more deeply -- hadn't he been wondering just that very thing himself not so long ago? But -- "Don't be absurd," he said at last. "Possibly he feels guilty, or I've put him off somehow..."
"Remus!" Tonks was glowering at him by now, arms crossed over her chest, though not without a smile pulling at her lips. "What do you do, stay up all night thinking of ways not to believe the obvious?"
And because that was in its own bizarre way far too close to the truth for comfort, some fine thread of Remus's temper snapped. "Tonks," he said in a low, sharp voice, taking his hands off the cart to turn to face her, "Sirius and I were never in love. We lived together for nearly four years, and I loved him very much, but he never reciprocated my feelings. The war was very hard on him, in particular, psychologically, and by the end he was drinking very heavily and I believe going more than a little mad. He -- I can't even say he cheated on me, because we never had what anyone would call a relationship, but he was certainly seeing women, or a woman, I don't know, behind my back, and things fell apart so badly between us that we were each able to believe the other a spy for Voldemort. So I doubt very much that Sirius is pining for me, and I would appreciate it if you would leave the subject be, if it's all the same to you."
And, without pausing to read her expression, he turned back to the cart and resumed walking it back toward the front of the store, taking much longer strides than necessary.
She caught up only by trotting, and sounded slightly out of breath as well as mortified. "I'm sorry, Remus. I didn't mean -- "
"No, don't be." He slowed down and then finally stopped, feeling very tired. When he looked at her, her cringing expression managed to make him feel even more ashamed of himself. "Don't be," he repeated, and tried a smile. "I should be apologizing. I shouldn't have snapped at you."
Tonks shook her head, the braids scattering like birds around her face. "Nah, I know I'm really nosy." She shrugged, and answered his tiny smile with one of her own. "I'm told it's very annoying."
"Perhaps a bit," Remus allowed, smiling honestly this time, and rested a hand on her shoulder briefly. "Are we done here?"
She glanced around the store and then back at him, and nodded. "Think so. The spinach is melting anyway." He nodded back, and turned the cart back toward the cash registers, but her voice stopped him again. "I want you to know I mean it, though, Remus." He turned back to look at her, and found her facing him with an earnest, sad look. "There's something... I really think he wants you back."
Remus stood looking at her for a long moment, and then allowed something that was not quite a smile across his mouth.
"He never lost me," he said.
---
Of course, cooking by hand became a less reasonable prospect when one was cooking for nearly ten, and on Remus's turn to make breakfast he found himself managing a wide array of skillets and pans with wandwork as he talked to Sirius, while the stove grumbled disconsolately under its breath. Sirius, for his part, sat at the kitchen table, leaning his chin on his hand; he looked tired and drawn, and Remus wondered, not for the first time, if he'd been sleeping all right lately.
"Hestia's got him this week," Sirius was saying, rubbing a finger at the corner of one eye, "and Dung's on next, and Arabella's still backup, of course." He sighed, and sat back in his chair. "I just wish I could take a turn. At least get a chance to see him for a little while."
"It's probably just as well that you can't, you know," Remus pointed out, and smiled when Sirius scowled at him. "You wouldn't be able to resist letting him know you were there, and then the barrage of questions would come, and you'd end up telling him everything."
Sirius looked halfway mollified, and halfway put out. "Maybe," he muttered at the floor, before looking back up at Remus. "But only because I still think he deserves to know. He must be going mad, stuck there with no word about anything. He's been more and more upset in his letters."
"I can imagine." He could also imagine why Sirius might be particularly sensitive to the issue at present, although he wasn't going to bring that up. "I'm certain he's fine, though. Could you hand me the bread, please?" Sirius picked the loaf up from the table and brought it over to Remus, who took out a few slices and began toasting them with his wand while the eggs were cooking.
"I know he is," Sirius said at last, as he sat back down. "I'm just sick of hearing it secondhand. I'm supposed to take care of him, aren't I?"
Remus cast another small smile over his shoulder at that, before returning his attention to the food. "I think you do," he said. Sirius offered a wan smile, but said nothing. "Really, Sirius. You and Harry have developed a real bond. I think it's wonderful."
"I suppose. I just wish we spent a little more time within shouting distance of one another."
"I know." Sending the bread sailing over into a neat stack on the plate, he turned his attention to the eggs. "I am sorry that you have to be stuck here, Sirius."
Sirius sat up a little straighter at that, and for some reason his brow knotted into a vague expression of guilt. "Oh... no, don't worry. I mean, I don't really mind..." At Remus's raised eyebrow, he paused, and then let out a halfhearted little laugh. "All right, of course I mind, but what I mean is, it isn't all that -- bad. That is, you're here, most of the time, and that's... well, I..." He fumbled for a moment, and then gave up. Still prodding at the eggs, Remus just smiled, and looked somewhere else.
"It's all right, Sirius. I'm not offended."
"No, I mean it," Sirius insisted, with more energy behind it than Remus had heard from him in a while. "All right, I bloody well hate this house, but I'm really grateful that you're staying here, I truly am. I don't think I've told you that enough, and I'm sorry."
Remus turned back to him again, finally, finding a smile on his lips that he hadn't expected to be there. "You don't have to. I don't mind, you know."
"I can't imagine how," Sirius muttered, pushing hair out of his face. Remus chuckled a little, and left Sirius looking at the floor to tend to another skillet.
The silence that followed was long, but it didn't seem uncomfortable to Remus; if he'd turned around, he later imagined, he might have known otherwise, but he was thinking of the food, most of which was thankfully still turning out all right, and for once not of Sirius, or how the other man was suddenly staring fixedly into the stone kitchen floor for longer than his last gesture could readily explain. All of which was probably why he barely heard Sirius when he finally spoke.
"I missed you, you know," Sirius said, or that was what he thought Sirius said, and if there was an odd note in his voice, Remus's ear had grown accustomed to scrolling past Sirius's odd notes. He turned to look at Sirius again, raising his eyebrows, a little touched.
"I missed you too."
But Sirius shook his head, still looking at the floor, and finally seemed to take in a deep breath before raising his eyes. "No," he said, a little louder and clearer, with the tone of a man taking his first step off a cliff. "I said, I miss you."
If Remus's mind did not stop at that statement, it at least slowed to a leisurely crawl. For a moment all he could do was stand and stare at Sirius, his wand dangling from one hand, half of him -- he hated to realize -- waiting for the punchline, even now.
Sirius seemed to have shrunken a little inside himself at Remus's silence, and he wasn't looking at Remus anymore, but he kept talking nonetheless. "I don't know what that means," he said, again to the flagstones. "To you or me. I don't know whether you'd want me to be that much a part of your life again or not, and frankly I've been too much of a coward to ask. I don't even know..." He trailed off, sighed, and looked into Remus's eyes again. God, Sirius's eyes. "I don't expect anything from you, not at this stage. But there it is."
Remus took a long, slow breath, and let it out again. He waited until he was sure Sirius was done speaking, and then said, "I love you," which was not what he'd expected to say, but it seemed appropriate to the situation once he'd said it. "I always have. I never stopped."
Sirius's hand had gotten pressed across his eyes somewhere in the last three sentences, and he looked wearier than ever. "I'm sorry," he said, with something not entirely unlike a laugh in the middle. Remus shook his head, which Sirius couldn't see with his hand across his eyes, but never mind that.
"Don't be. I'm not." Sirius let his hand fall away, gradually, although he still wasn't really looking at Remus. "It doesn't make me unhappy, Sirius. There've actually been times when -- loving you has been the only thing that's made my life worth living. Don't be sorry to me for that."
"Then I'm sorry I wasn't there," Sirius said, after a moment. Remus smiled, although it felt vague and distant, somehow.
"And I accept that apology." He let silence hang for a few seconds longer, and then tried again. "I didn't think you would... Azkaban, obviously, and... well, I didn't know. And to be honest, I don't know how much I want you to be a part of my life again either." Sirius clearly tried to hide his wince at that, but did a terrible job of it. Remus took another deep breath. "But as long as I'm being honest, I can't deny that I miss you too."
"So what do we do?" Sirius asked into another long silence, at last making a sort of rueful eye contact. It was Remus's turn to look away.
"I don't know," he said. The words seemed to come out very slowly. "I suppose the question is what we want to do."
"I want to kiss you," Sirius said, without hesitation. "A lot, in fact. How do you feel about that?"
Remus would have answered, but on the other hand, it was really amazing how fast he could get across a kitchen.
A tiny huff of breath slipped through Sirius's lips just before Remus's got to them, and feeling the warm tickle of it on his mouth managed to lend matters a new, shocking reality; that was Sirius's breath that had touched his face, and that was rasping trapped against his mouth and tongue now, it had been inside Sirius's body and made the trip all the way back just to see if it could make Remus jealous. But then that was also Sirius's mouth, and Sirius's tongue, and Sirius's shaky hand clamping too tight on the back of his neck and pulling Remus halfway down and himself halfway up out of the chair to meet in an uncomfortable middle, and maybe the breath bit didn't matter so much after all.
Maybe this would work better if he were closer. Sirius's tongue was now doing a sort of soft lashing inside Remus's mouth, with an edge of hesitance to it that was both charming and somehow all the more head-swimming, and he wanted to make it as easy as possible for Sirius to do that. He tried to move in closer, did it too fast, and banged his hip on the corner of the table, which he supposed was something he should have been expecting. But then Sirius made a soft noise and his other hand moved to cover the site of the injury, to wrap around it and protect it from further harm, so it was probably worth it. It occurred to him that his wand was still dangling from his free hand. He couldn't imagine what Moody would say about that. And good God, was this not the time to think about Moody. This wasn't the time to think about anything, come to that, particularly not the string of inanities that seemed bent on rumbling through his head like freighters through a trainyard.
See? Like that one. Trainyard?
Not now. Not when Sirius was pulling him down and in, when Sirius's slight hint of stubble was rasping against his cheek, when Sirius's tongue was soft and warm and wet between their lips and against his own; not when the fabric above the thin bunched muscle and bone of Sirius's shoulder crumpled up into Remus's hand, when Sirius's pulse seemed to be thudding through his body so hard Remus could feel it through his lips, when something on the stove was burning.
Remus pulled back from the kiss as though breaking up from water, complete with the soft gasp of air, and looked into Sirius's eyes. "Bacon," he said.
Sirius stared at him. His color was high, his mouth still parted and his eyes wide. And quite blank. "What?"
When Remus turned to hurry over the stove, Sirius let out a breath and said, "Oh." He laughed a little, in a rather dazed-sounding way. "Right. Sorry..."
"Not your fault," Remus said, and his voice came out sounding a bit higher than it normally did, but otherwise all right. He nearly burned himself taking the bacon off, but it didn't look too bad; only a couple pieces in the center had been blackened. After he'd saved what he could and disposed of what he couldn't, he turned back to Sirius -- just as the unmistakable sound of Weasley children thundering down the stairs carried into the room.
They glanced at each other, and exchanged sheepish grins; then Sirius sat up straighter and, with a small cough, made a few adjustments to the way his robes fell across his lap. Remus turned back to the stove to pretend he hadn't noticed this, and found himself wishing he dressed in robes a little more often himself, rather than trousers.
Within minutes the kitchen was packed, filled with talk and laughter, and Remus was filling plates, and they both threw themselves into the conversation as though it would help them evade each other's eyes. Finally Sirius got up to help Remus collect the dishes and carry them to the sink, and as they stood removed from the rest of the activity, turned a slight, shy smile toward Remus.
"Do you -- maybe want to come by my room lat -- " he said in a low murmur, but that was as far as he got before Remus cut him off.
"Yes." They looked at each other, and then Sirius grinned, and Remus smiled, and they both looked away. "I promised to help Molly with a few things today, and I'll be cleaning up after dinner, but after that...?"
"I'll wait." He looked at Sirius, and Sirius was looking back, and there was a look in his eyes that made Remus want to check a clock, just to make absolutely certain it couldn't already be this evening yet, that it couldn't already be time.
Then Molly bustled in between them to get at the dishes, and they moved apart to let her through in an entirely natural movement. "And what are the two of you whispering about?" she asked, although it was with a bit of a smile. Remus chuckled, and shook his head.
"Just planning out the day," he said in his best good-natured tone, patting a hand on her shoulder. And by the time he looked around again, somehow, Sirius had slipped from the room.
---
The rest of the day, it turned out, took at least another fourteen years to go by. Remus spent it, as promised, helping Molly clear out a few trouble spots in the house, removing some of the more fiercely stubborn portraits, and subduing a carnivorous door on the fourth floor -- none of which tasks were made any easier by his seeming inability to think of anything but the morning that had come before, and the evening that was coming later. Sirius had apparently chosen to spend the day sequestered in his room, and after a while Remus found himself envying Sirius the luxury of experiencing his distraction privately, without anyone asking him whether he was all right or why he was staring into space like that.
Dinner came at long last, during which he barely saw Sirius before the other man escaped again, and cleaning the kitchen seemed to take both an unjustifiably long time and not nearly long enough. At last he made his good-nights and headed up the several flights of stairs to what had once been Sirius's father's room, where Sirius had settled as the house had begun to fill up. This probably took at least another twenty years. At this rate he was going to die of old age without so much as another kiss.
He knocked at the door and immediately heard a loud thud and the sound of Sirius swearing in a strained voice from the other side, and bit his lip hard to keep from laughing. Well, at least he still wasn't in the worst shape.
The door swung open, and Sirius stood in the gap, slightly out of breath and possibly a bit wild about the eyes. "Hello," he said, a little too airily. "Well. Ah. Come in."
He turned and darted back into the room, and Remus followed him inside as he was bid. It was an enormous room, of course, with a monstrous and elaborate bed neither of them was looking at, and the torches in the wall sconces had been doused in favor of small forests of candles on every available surface; Sirius looked around at these with an air of suddenly dawning panic, muttered and waved his hand, and they went out and the torches burst back into light. Sometime between dinner and now he had changed into a nicer shirt and trousers, shaved, and Remus suspected taken a shower, but the total effect was somewhat impaired by the way Sirius kept bumping his elbows into things and nearly getting tangled in his own feet. Remus was reminded of Tonks, and found himself biting his lip again.
After a moment's awkward silence, in which neither of them particularly looked at each other or at anything else, Sirius made a vague gesture behind him. "Would, ah... you like a brandy? The decanter's probably been here since before I was born, but it still smells all right. I suppose. I'm not entirely certain what brandy's supposed to smell like."
Remus smiled. "Nor do I. But if you'd like one, I'll join you." Sirius glanced at him, and let out a small, breathless laugh.
"I think I could use one," he admitted, which Remus chose neither to confirm nor deny. Still, they smiled at one another for a beat before Sirius turned away to fill the glasses; Remus could hear glass chattering on glass as the neck of the decanter touched the rim. He looked around, but there was really nowhere to sit down except on the bed, so after a few seconds' convincing himself he went ahead and did so. Sirius's expression didn't change when he turned around again, holding the glasses, but Remus did think he saw him swallow. Nor did he trust Sirius's grip, particularly while Sirius was sitting down on the bed beside him, and he wrapped a steadying hand around Sirius's around the glass for a moment before he took it, without even really thinking about the gesture. Sirius's hand was very cool to the touch, and seemed to be vibrating slightly.
This all seemed very backward somehow, like they were actors who had switched parts mid-script. If there was one emotional state the Sirius Black he had known never, under any circumstances, achieved, it was precisely this sort of jittery nervous tension. And his own serenity in the face of it seemed equally strange -- although he knew, even if (he hoped) Sirius didn't, he didn't feel anywhere near as calmly as he was behaving.
Taking a sip of brandy seemed safer than trying to start up any kind of conversation, so he did that instead; Sirius, he saw to his mingled amusement and concern, matched the sip by downing his own entire glass of brandy in one gulp. "Is it good?" he asked, when Sirius seemed capable of speech again. "I'd compliment it, but I'm afraid I wouldn't know."
Sirius huffed a small laugh, swirling the very small amount of dregs that remained in his glass. "Nor would I, but I'm sure it is, or my father wouldn't very well have had it in his bedroom." He looked at his glass for a moment longer, then set it down on the floor with an air of sudden decision, and straightened to look around the room. "I, er... sorry about the candles, I mean, I don't really know what I was thinking, it just seemed like a really good idea and then it seemed like a really stupid idea, and, well..." He cast a quick glance at Remus, and jumped a little. "Or -- unless you'd prefer the candles, that is, I could -- "
"Sirius," Remus said, fortunately with only a bit of a smile, "shh." He wrapped his hand around Sirius's again, which seemed like a good opportunity to set his own glass aside. "It's all right. It's only me."
Sirius took a deep breath, in the course of which he seemed to force himself to relax, and finally met Remus's gaze with a small, sheepish smile. "I know," he said. "That's why it's so important."
Remus was spared trying to formulate a response to that by another kiss, and he was grateful.
It went on quite a bit longer than the first one, and in time they ended up stretched out on their sides somehow, side by side and taking up no more than a third of the bed all told. As cool as Sirius's hands had been, the rest of him felt nearly feverish, pressed up against Remus's chest; his shirt was hot from the skin beneath it, and his face seemed too warm. He didn't even notice the first few buttons of his shirt undoing themselves at lazy flicks of Remus's fingers, but when he did his small laugh puffed around Remus's mouth, and he pulled back just enough to look down. "Not fair. You were always better at that sort of thing." Remus smiled, and rolled toward Sirius, against him; obliging, Sirius shifted onto his back, letting his eyes drift half-closed while he watched Remus's fingers.
"And how is that not fair?" he asked. Sirius smiled a little, distractedly, and let his hand drift down the nape of Remus's neck and the line of his shoulder.
"Well, I can't do anything that sexy to you, can I?" His laugh still sounded a little nervous, a little breathless, and Remus put a steadying hand on the revealed skin of his chest while the other kept working. It didn't stay a comforting gesture for long, though; there was far too much in the way of tattoo there to be explored.
"You know, I sincerely doubt that."
Finally Sirius's shirt fell open around his chest, and he reached up to pull Remus down to him again; bare skin, not to mention a few still-prominent ribs beneath it, pressed against Remus's shirt as their tongues flicked and slid together. In this position Sirius's erection was unmistakable, and the feeling of it rubbing hot and stiff against Remus's thigh very nearly undid him. Well, so much for Azkaban leaving Sirius incapable. That was good to know.
When his hand skimmed down Sirius's belly between them, Sirius arched with it as though an invisible cord were pulling him up from the center, breaking the kiss only to mutter on a long sighing breath, "Remus... fuck, Remus..."
In the second that his hand faltered above the waistband of Sirius's trousers and the shudder worked its way all through him, Remus thought of telling Sirius this was not going to last very long if he didn't shut up, but in the end changed his mind. With any luck, it wouldn't matter how long this lasted, anyway. Sirius's hand came to rest on top of his, not pushing or guiding but just following it, staying out of the way as Remus unfastened his trousers. The non-magical way; the rasping, shaking sound of Sirius's breath kept robbing him of his concentration, and the way Sirius's other hand kept kneading in the back of his shirt wasn't helping.
Sirius's cock seemed almost to press itself into his hand of its own accord, and when he clasped it in his fingers Sirius thrashed his head to the side, strewing his hair all over, pressing his face into Remus's shoulder and breathing in wet, muffled gasps. Remus gathered an arm under his shoulders and pulled him close. Stroking Sirius was luxurious, his cock lying silken and hot and heavy in Remus's hand, perfect. He felt like he could have taken hours just doing it over and over, just as slow, just discovering him again, except then Sirius spread out and braced his legs and tilted his head to whisper "Please, Remus, fuck, I missed you" into Remus's throat, and that no longer seemed like such a good idea. While a slow, sensual reunion did have its own appeal, there would be time for that later, and after fourteen years there was probably also something to be said for just taking the edge off.
The room was warm, and quiet, far enough removed from the rest of the house that what few sounds continued downstairs at this hour seemed to belong to another world entirely. Sirius was everything important now, a small private pocket of heat and movement, golden and tense in the light of the torches. As he came closer he began to go still and gasp his breath in, his hand clutching harder into Remus's shirt, and finally Remus gave up propping himself up and folded down to rest his head on Sirius's chest, with the other man's heartbeat and breath a muted thunder in his ears. He was shifting, raising his hips, there was a familiar depth to the way he was breathing; so fast, he'd never known Sirius to come this quickly... Shh, he whispered, below where there was even sound to it, only breath that just barely touched the skin of Sirius's chest, shh, Sirius, I've got you, I'll never let you go, and Sirius's next ragged breath turned into a long moan of begging so incoherent it was almost wordless, and that was it, that was the end, he abandoned everything and set to pumping Sirius's cock so hard from root to glans that it left them both struggling for breath and as Sirius clung to him and shuddered he could only manage "Re -- Rem -- "
Licking off his hand afterward felt very natural, for something he hadn't done in such a long time. At least Sirius had curled up to Remus's chest with his eyes closed to get his breath back, which spared him any concern for how this might be received.
The following moments, holding Sirius to him on the bed and breathing in rhythms that fell in and out of time with one another, might possibly have been some of the best of his life.
Finally Sirius opened his eyes, and squinted up at Remus with a small, utterly contented smile. It was followed with a small, utterly contented kiss, which Remus thought he answered calmly enough, considering -- and then Sirius broke it with a small laugh, as he flipped over onto his side to prise at the buttons of Remus's shirt.
"Going to have to do this the old-fashioned way," he muttered, and Remus laughed a little, and Sirius joined him. The buttons seemed to be getting the better of Sirius anyway, however; after several long minutes of fumbling, he burst out laughing again, shaking his head. "Are you sure these are -- the regular type of buttons?"
Remus couldn't help laughing, despite his breathlessness; it was contagious, and they kept setting each other off. "As opposed to...?"
"I don't know, some new, horrible kind that won't -- ah, there we go." Sirius glanced up at him, and they both cracked again. "Only, what, six more to go? It's going to be a long night..."
"Well, I won't lie -- I did think of adding a Permanent Sticking Charm, just to put your resources to the test." Sirius burst into another fit of laughter that made him have to give up on the buttons altogether for a moment, and he looked up with the big canine grin that Remus felt like he hadn't seen in ages.
"You're a hard man, Remus Lupin."
"Oh, you've no proof of that just yet." If possible, that made Sirius's grin grow larger; there'd never been any better way to make him proud than for Remus to make a dirty joke.
"I'm working on it," he grumbled, unconvincingly, "and I have my suspicions -- "
And Remus just laughed, feeling like he hadn't done it in ages, as Sirius worked his way down with his shoulders shaking, pausing every now and then to scrape hair out of his eyes. He did win out eventually, to his credit.
It wasn't until Remus's shirt had come entirely open that his laughter began to dry up; with the lattice of scars revealed, he was suddenly too self-conscious to maintain his humor. Sirius didn't seem put off in the slightest, though, but he'd always been peculiar that way. He just hovered for a moment, looking transfixed and with all traces of his own laughter gone, letting his eyes drift down and up again until Remus sort of wished he wouldn't, and then finally returned his eyes to Remus's face -- although not meeting his eyes. It took Remus a few seconds to realize what he must be looking at, before Sirius actually reached out to touch it. Remus closed his eyes, and Sirius's fingertip just barely brushed the skin of his forehead, following the diagonal line down across the bridge of his nose.
"The first moon after you were gone," he answered the question Sirius hadn't asked, without opening his eyes. He didn't really want to see Sirius's face. "I think it happened early in the night; by the time I woke up they'd almost stopped bleeding. I never bothered fixing the scars."
Sirius's finger left off tracing down Remus's face, and he opened his eyes just in time to be caught into a fierce hug. "I'm sorry," Sirius murmured, muffled in his shoulder.
"No, Sirius, don't -- "
"I am." His hug tightened briefly, and then he'd pulled back again, propping himself up over Remus on his elbow with a serious expression. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there."
"It wasn't exactly your decision," Remus pointed out, but Sirius was giving him one of his looks, halfway between amused and annoyed.
"Will you quit not letting me apologize for things? I'd think you'd approve of the trend in my behavior." Remus smiled in spite of himself, and reached up to touch Sirius's cheek.
"I just don't want you to beat yourself up," he said quietly. "I'm sure you've had plenty of time to do that already."
Sirius snorted. "Well, you're not wrong about that." He sighed, and pulled hair out of his eyes again; it seemed to get everywhere these days. "I'm not beating myself up about it, Remus, I'm just... sorry. I just want you to know that I realize what you've gone through, and I feel badly about it. Can we allow that, at least?"
The only possible answer to that seemed to be to slip his hand around to the back of Sirius's neck and pull him in to kiss him, so Remus did that. "I suppose so," he murmured in Sirius's ear, and felt the answering smile next to his cheek.
"Good." After a minute Sirius disengaged again, and returned to the exposed terrain of Remus's chest; his fingertips this time found a long, ragged scratch-scar that ran nearly parallel below Remus's collarbone, twisting up at the shoulder into a puckered, purplish curl. "That's new..."
Remus glanced down, and smiled, although a bit more tightly. "Not to me. That one's almost eight years old, I think."
Sirius glanced up at him, then back down at the scar, still tracing the little hook at the end with his fingers. He gave it a long, thoughtful look, so deliberating that Remus expected him to speak again -- and then, with no warning, he bowed his head forward so that his hair brushed Remus's skin and ran his open mouth along the line of the scar, dragging his tongue down the ridge.
Remus hissed and bucked hard enough to startle even himself; his hand dove into Sirius's hair and clutched there, tight enough that it shook. It wasn't even that it felt good: it was scar tissue, nerveless, it didn't feel like much of anything. But the gesture, the intent behind it -- and the heat of Sirius's tongue on his skin --
Sirius did it again, and he shut his eyes and moaned. And then Sirius's mouth was traveling, making its way down Remus's chest in a series of kisses that completely disregarded the fine skim of hair, one for each scar Sirius had never seen and now seemed to be trying to claim. It was a slow, leisurely process, taking in everything, wandering all the way down to a long jagged curve just under Remus's navel... and no, he wasn't, he couldn't possibly be --
He was. He had Remus's cock out a second later, and his wet, open mouth touched to that too, and Remus could hardly credit that the thin breaking noise he made just then had come out of his own mouth.
Even amid everything else they'd done as younger men, Sirius had never offered this, and Remus had never dared think of asking him; he'd assumed the idea had had been distasteful to Sirius, and it had always seemed fairly slight as disappointments went, all things considered. It certainly didn't seem distasteful to him now, though. He dove his head down to let Remus's shaft slide between his wet lips with a complete lack of hesitation that suggested, if he hadn't done this before, he must have thought about doing it at some length, which was a thought Remus needed to banish immediately from his mind or this was going to be over before he even got a chance to enjoy it.
He'd had enough lovers in the interim -- though all right, lovers was a pretty strong word for what he'd had -- to be able to tell that Sirius was not experienced, but to say that Sirius was not good would have been quite a different matter. Gradual experience had taught him that in point of fact, barring teeth or severe catastrophe, there weren't many ways one could go wrong at this, and even if Sirius had actually been dreadful the experience might still have counted as a good one, by sheer virtue of being the first blowjob Remus had ever received from a man he'd been in love with since he was approximately eleven. And Sirius wasn't dreadful in the slightest; he was enthusiastic and focused, and his tongue was hot and slick as it shifted side to side under where Remus's head pressed into it, and when Remus let his eyes slit open to look down he moaned involuntarily and had to shut them again, against the image of Sirius pulling up his open mouth and drawing on him, leaving Remus's cock glistening in the wake of where his lips had been.
He only lasted a few more moments before the temptation to look again became too strong, however, and when he did he let out a small, strangled cry. Sirius's hand -- the one that wasn't drifting in patterns over the light ginger hair on the insides of his thighs and now and then his balls, and he was going to go mad if Sirius didn't stop doing that -- reached up from his hip to offer itself, and Remus took it in a murderous grip. "Sirius," he tried to whisper, halfway choking on it, "Sirius, I'm -- " Fair warning, he doubted Sirius wanted to go as far as that --
But Sirius, the second he heard this, slammed his mouth down onto Remus's cock as far as it would go and sucked him, as though to pull the orgasm right out of him, his tongue lashing crazily in all directions --
He seemed to come endlessly, for hours, so hard his eyes watered and he had to shove his hand over his mouth to keep from shouting fit to wake the whole house, including the portraits downstairs. When he had finally collapsed again, panting and suddenly sweat-soaked, it occurred to him that it would serve Sirius's mother right, and though his lips curved upward around the breath he was panting he was too drained even to laugh.
Sirius's weight flopped back onto the mattress beside him, and an arm wrapped over his chest; without bothering to look around Remus rested his hand on the one that settled over his heart, and squeezed it once. Again he had a moment's haunted, sliding deja vu: time contracted and pitched him back into the body of one of two teenagers, lying side by side holding one another and learning how to breathe again, waiting until the moment when one of them would say Are you tired? and the other would say No, and they would roll together to start it all again.
He opened his eyes. The torches on the walls were still burning, the bedroom they showed still dusty and ornate and unfamiliar. Sirius's head was tucked to his chest, and messy black hair obscured his vision of their bodies beyond it; smiling to himself, Remus lifted his head enough to kiss the top of Sirius's head, and got a little squeeze in return.
"Are you tired?" he murmured, after a moment. Sirius hesitated, and then a chuffing, sheepish laugh warmed Remus's chest.
"Yes," he admitted, tilting his head up toward Remus. Remus smiled.
"So am I." Sirius laughed, and Remus did too, a little, and took the chance to press another kiss to Sirius's lips. Sirius seized it when he did, and stretched it out a bit longer than he'd intended, but not quite like he would have at seventeen. That was all right. Leave time travel to the experts; they were fine where they were.
He dangled his feet over the side of the bed long enough to kick off his shoes (all of this and they hadn't even managed to get off his shoes?), and then wrangled himself and Sirius under the covers, curling together again. Sirus muttered and flapped his hand at the torches, which went out, and the two of them lay together in the darkness, listening to the sound of each other's breathing.
"I love you," Remus murmured at last. It seemed as natural as it had the first time, and though he supposed he shouldn't really keep saying it, he doubted once more could hurt. Sirius shifted, moving himself so he could wrap his arms a little tighter around Remus.
"I know." He paused, and added after a long time, in a much softer voice: "I'm glad."
And Remus smiled. That was the end of it, most likely, but he could live with that. It was more than he had hoped for, and it would be enough to go to sleep to in the dark, with Sirius beside him.
"Good night," he whispered, and at some point Sirius slept, and at some point he did too, and he had dreams that he didn't remember in the light of the next morning.
---
Remus woke up with, at first, no idea why he should feel so impossibly good. Then he realized that his arm was asleep. After a moment's fuzzy consideration, he decided that this was probably not the source of the good feeling, but it might conceivably be related. Upon opening his eyes, he found his suspicions were confirmed: his arm was asleep because Sirius was on it. And also asleep. They made a good team, Sirius and his arm.
He spent several pleasant moments blinking at the ceiling, clearing his eyes. He wasn't in any particular hurry to have his arm back, particularly since its occupation was so enjoyable, but he supposed the blood loss would be bad for him, so after a while he started making gentle efforts to free himself from Sirius's body. Sirius made a small murmuring sound and stirred after a few seconds of this, despite his best efforts, and then he was awake just as quickly as he had been the last time Remus had shared a bed with him; not quite as instantly alert, however, and he peered up at Remus through bleary slits, smiled, and closed them again.
Remus craned his head forward to kiss Sirius's forehead, eliciting another small contented noise. "Sirius?"
"Mmm." The tiny slits opened again, just barely. "Shh. Don't wake me up. 'M having this really good dream."
It was impossible not to smile, and Remus didn't try, as he brushed strands of hair out of Sirius's eyes. "Oh? What dream would that be?"
Sirius let his eyes slip closed again, and rested his head on Remus's chest, the picture of bliss. "The one where I wake up in the morning and you're in the bed next to me." He was starting to sound less blurry now, but only a little. "It's my favorite. I don't want to wake up."
Remus considered this for a long moment. At last he tugged Sirius a little closer to himself, and said, "You've a terrible temper. You become rude, sullen, and, I must say, rather adolescent when you're frustrated. You can't do simple arithmetic in your head no matter how you try. You never remember to do laundry until the last moment, and even then it's unreliable. Your cooking skills leave much to be desired, your housekeeping skills even more so, and whoever told you that haircut was a good idea?" He glanced down at Sirius, and found that the other man was wide awake now, and giving him a raised-eyebrow, incredulous look that might have been indignant if it weren't for the suppressed smile. Beaming at him, Remus bent down to plant another kiss on Sirius's forehead. "You see, you're awake," he surmised. "Dreams never say those sorts of things."
"What's wrong with my hair?" Sirius demanded after a pregnant pause, although there was more than a little laughter hiding in his voice. Remus smirked.
"Oh, nothing, if your last point of reference on style was a young David Bowie..."
"Who?"
"Never mind."
"And I suppose that little mustache is the height of fashion, is it?" Sirius asked, reaching up to tap on Remus's lips as he did; he was already laughing by now, and it was contagious.
"I thought it made me look older," Remus said, attempting dignity, which was difficult when he was laughing too. "Less youthful, more distinguished."
"That, or like you've glued a caterpillar to your lip -- "
"I've changed my mind, go back to sleep so I can hold a pillow over your face -- "
And Sirius hugged him, and after a moment they gave up and just laughed. And not long after that they were kissing and laughing in between, chuckling across each other's lips, and finally settled down in one another's arms again.
"We probably ought to get up," Remus said at last, little though he wanted to. Sirius made a truculent noise and burrowed under the covers, and he smiled. "Really. It'll be time for breakfast soon."
Sirius yawned, and nuzzled his face against Remus's bare chest. His shirt was a rumpled mess from sleeping in it all night; Sirius's had somehow come off entirely in the course of sleeping, and Remus didn't dare imagine where it had gotten to. "Or we could stay here all day, and have sex many times."
"Hmm." Remus thought about that, and his prick offered its input in the form of a slow, sleepy flood of warmth. "...That won't help if we get hungry, though."
"We could Summon food," Sirius suggested. "We wouldn't even have to get up." Remus pictured a pan of bacon and eggs soaring up the stairs and clanging off the bedroom door, and grinned in spite of himself.
"Seems a bit dangerous. And besides, you realize we are going to have to leave the room eventually." Sirius yawned, with an air of disgruntlement, and flopped over on top of Remus's chest.
"That's your problem, you know, Moony. No imagination."
And trying not to show the warm rising bubble Sirius's casual -- and probably unconscious -- use of that name had started growing in his chest, Remus just smiled, and leaned his head back. "Well," he said, "what if I were to practice by imagining the two of us going to take a shower?"
Sirius cracked an eye open again to peer at him, and the visible corner of his mouth curled up in a slow smile. His voice muffled in Remus's tangled shirt, he allowed, "It'll do for a start."
----------------------------------------
7.
(then)
He thumped in the door to their flat that night in a shambling, bleary panic: Karloff's Frankenstein monster faced with fire. Falling half-blind into the bathroom, he brushed his teeth three times, shed his clothes and left them puddled on the floor, and threw himself into the shower to scrub the stink of sex and alcohol and smoke off his skin and out of his hair. Satisfied that he smelled normal again, that he didn't even seem that drunk, relieved at the perfection of his crime, he crept into the dark bedroom and lay down beside Remus. Who, he noticed two seconds later, was wide awake, lying with his eyes open and staring into the shadows.
"Do you want me to leave?" Remus asked, in a quiet, calm voice, before Sirius could come up with a single word. He didn't sound in the slightest as though he'd been crying. "If you want me to leave, tell me. I can go tonight."
"What?" It wasn't hard to pretend not to understand; it wasn't at all what he'd been expecting, at least. He'd anticipated -- maybe, in some inexplicable way, relished the thought of -- anger, recriminations, smouldering resentment. If he'd imagined this at all, it'd been as an ultimatum. "Don't be daft -- why would I want you to leave?"
Remus hesitated, perhaps thrown, and Sirius seized the opportunity to lay an arm across his waist; Remus stiffened, but didn't pull away. Not yet. "I thought..."
"Of course I don't want you to leave." He pressed his face forward into Remus's hair, which smelled dry and innocent and righteous. He'd been stupid to think a shower would do it. The stench on him was in much deeper than that. "Remus, shh, go to sleep... we'll talk about it in the morning, all right?"
They didn't. Remus went to an early class and Sirius woke up with a vague hangover and the taste of the girl's quim still in his mouth, and he brushed his teeth three more times just to be certain. And Remus came home and started making a late lunch without saying much of anything, and he leaned his head back and sighed when Sirius slipped up behind him in the kitchen and shoved a hand down the front of his trousers, and he made no sound beyond his harsh breath while Sirius fucked him over the counter, throwing back his head and gripping the edge in the light streaming in from the window above the sink. Then he buttoned up and went upstairs to his room, and spent the rest of the afternoon there, perhaps cried. Sirius didn't know for certain. He never even knocked on the locked door.
The smell wouldn't leave his skin; the taste wouldn't leave his mouth. He did the same thing the next night hoping it would make him forget what he'd done the night before. James had told him once, maybe only half-jokingly, that people said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. He'd never thought that was entirely fair. Especially not when doing all sorts of different things so frequently achieved the same results.
That was the rest of the last year: women he didn't know, pubs he did, coming home to Remus's silent turned back, trying at first to clean himself up to something near presentable before he went to bed and then, as he came home later and later, not even bothering. News about James and Lily grew steadily more dire until they were no longer even safe to speak of, and when Dumbledore brought up the Filius Charm, he volunteered without hesitation. They all met together to set the charm, and Dumbledore kept frowning at Sirius over his glasses until Sirius started avoiding his eyes. He was almost positive Dumbledore had been trying to convince them not to use him in the interim, and thoughts of Dumbledore telling his best friend that he was too unstable, too weak-willed, too untrustworthy to be given the secret of their location made him ashamed and furious. He was right, maybe, but Sirius could do this. Would do this. He would never let them down.
The spell set an unpleasant thrumming beneath his skin that he tried and failed to ignore, and his resolution that a Secret-Keeper should be too responsible to go out drinking all the time lasted perhaps an hour. That night he crawled in still drunk, probably reeking, caring only that he was sorry and frightened, and reached clumsily for Remus; Remus pushed his attentions away only twice before standing up from the bed altogether, leaving in silence for his own room. Sirius tried to call after him and then changed his mind, and fell back to the bed, feeling suddenly sober and sick and unbearable. He slammed his fist into the wall above the pillows, and it left a mark he never bothered to repair. The rest of the last, worst year.
He didn't realize that he was no longer in control of himself, had not been for some time in fact, until the night when, after being away from the flat and lost in himself for nearly three whole days, he chanced to look up at the window of the whore's crib he was occupying, and saw a round full moon, staring in at him like a baleful eye. Swearing and snarling, he jerked himself up from between her legs, dressed haphazardly and sprinted from the room, ignoring her cawing cries of first surprise and then outrage. It was too late, of course it was too late, but still he risked Apparating home for speed's sake, just hoping maybe somehow --
It didn't matter; none of it mattered. He bolted to the door to the crawlspace, the one that was just barely big enough for a wolf and an outsize dog, almost slammed into it bodily, and found it pent shut against him. Behind it he could hear snarling and whining, rage, sorrow, thuds and punished flesh. He couldn't have opened the door even if it hadn't been sealed.
Too late. The first moon in six years that he could have made and hadn't. Because he'd been drunk and fucking a stranger so that he could escape his pain. Because pain, naturally, was something Remus knew nothing about. Something a poor, misunderstood bastard could never possibly share.
He punched the wall, slid down the door with his back to it to crumple on the floor, and ended up sobbing like an infant into his fisted hands for what despair made seem like forever. The emptiness that yawned inside him was a trapdoor into the floor and the earth beneath it, a hole in the world, one that went all the way down. He fell into it. Eventually, he fell asleep.
When he woke up, it wasn't long after sunrise; the door was open behind him, and the crawlspace empty. Remus must have had to step over him to get out. He was still drunk, the nasty, bitter kind, buzzing behind his skull like nests of hornets in his temples. He could hear splashing and soft sounds in the bathroom.
He stood in front of the door for a long time, raising his hand, opening his mouth, stopping again. The splashing sounds continued, and there was the occasional thick mutter of pain. Behind that door Remus was putting himself back together, cleaning away the blood from his wounds, making himself ready to be a human being again. Maybe it was a trick he could teach Sirius. Maybe he could go in and help Remus clean up and put his head down on Remus's knees and sob out everything --
The sound he made slumping against the door, pressing his face into the wood and digging in his hands, was almost none at all. The splashings never faltered.
Yes. Certainly. He would go in there, offer a bandage, and sling around Remus's shredded shoulders all his own burdens from the last few years, all the panic and rage and desperation that were piling up inside him. Of course he had the right to do that. Of course he could look Remus in the eye after tonight, and declare that he was the one who needed help. Why shouldn't he? Wasn't a Black entitled to the very best that life had to offer? Wasn't that what love was for?
He went to his bedroom, the one they shared, and lay down on the bed. Didn't go back to sleep. He would wait for Remus to finish, and Remus would come to bed, and they would talk. He would not fall apart on Remus, he would not offer his burden to be lifted, but they would talk, and he would tell Remus that he was sorry. He'd look at Remus's wounds and see if there were anything more he could do. He would make it be all right. The thought of it soothed him, and lying awake, waiting, became an almost pleasant comfort. And finally the bathroom door opened, and Remus's footsteps sounded down the hallway, and they continued right to the open door to the bedroom; and with barely a hesitation, they crossed to the bedroom that was nominally Remus's, and the door shut behind them.
Sirius lay staring into the grey dawn light, frozen, learning how to hate him.
Finally he made himself get up, and knocked at Remus's door; Remus's voice told him he could come in, and he did, and sat beside Remus in the bed and touched Remus's hair and looked at his wounds, and he told Remus he was sorry, and Remus seemed to accept it. But nothing felt all right, and he couldn't make it that way, and he went to sleep beside Remus in the narrower, unused bed with the memory of that dull, shocking hatred squeezing him deep in his chest.
When he woke up again late that afternoon, Remus was already gone, and the sound of running water was drifting through the open door from the kitchen. He came in to find Remus dressed and washing the dishes in the sink, and he stood in the doorway to watch, neither of them speaking to the other.
Finally Remus turned off the water, and picked up the towel, and without looking at him said, "I think I should go, Sirius."
"Remus," Sirius tried to say, but Remus was still talking.
"This isn't good for either of us," he said, still to the towel, which he hadn't quite found his way to using on the dishes yet. "And I don't want to be responsible for causing you pain."
"Remus -- " He went to war with the impossibility of words, the enormity of hopelessness. "I'm sorry about last night, it'll never happen again, I swear to you -- "
Remus was shaking his head. "I'm not making demands, Sirius," he said, and Sirius bit his tongue to keep from shouting Why not? "I'm just... trying to do what's going to be best for all concerned. I think you would be better off if I weren't here."
"Of course I wouldn't be!" His voice cracked, and he bit down, trying to calm down, trying to pull the tightrope taut again between where he was and where Remus was waiting, on the canyon's other side. "Remus, come on, don't be ridiculous, you're not hurting me -- " I'm hurting you, his brain finished, but by then Remus was giving him an awful dull pitying look and he couldn't keep talking.
"Stop," Remus said quietly. "Just stop."
He put down the towel. Somewhere overhead, an airplane was going by, releasing a low moan into the atmosphere.
"I'm in love with you," Remus said. It came out flat and conversational, a comment on the weather. If your voice shook sometimes when you were talking about the weather. Maybe it wasn't like that at all. "The way James and Lily love each other, that's the way I feel about you. I didn't intend to, but it's happened, and -- " He paused, ran a hand across his forehead, and fixed his eyes on the floor. "I know that isn't the way you feel about me. And I don't mind that, Sirius, I don't," yes you do, don't you lie to me again, don't you lie to me now, "but I can tell that you do, and I don't want that to be so hard on you. If I just left -- "
"It wouldn't change anything," Sirius cut across him; his voice was shaking too, although for different reasons. He hated it, finding this sudden anger in himself, a nasty jack springing up from a rotting red box. "Except that we'd both be alone and probably dead in a week. If that's what you want, by all means, go on and leave for my own good."
"Sirius -- " and how he fucking hated the sound of Remus trying to be gentle, and hated almost as much the fists balled up by his sides.
"I can't help it." And it was coming, someone help him, everything was coming loose, he was going to let go and heaven only knew what would become of it all without him holding onto all the threads, making sure not a single piece slipped out of place -- "It should be so easy, and I've tried, I just can't do it. It's not you, Remus; if I were going to be in love with anyone, I would be in love with you, but I'm not. I don't know why, but I'm not." The sunlight fell in a pane across the linoleum floor, blinding him as he stared at it. "I want to but I can't, I'm wrong somehow, I don't know what's wrong with me. Remus..."
And he waited for Remus to come, to take him into his arms, to tell him to let go and he would listen; he waited to be set free. But Remus didn't come. He stayed standing by the sink, looking at the towel hanging over the edge of the counter, far away, and not offering freedom, and really by now he shouldn't have expected it. You don't punch the doctor in the face, you don't spit at the lifeguard. It's just common sense.
But that didn't stop it hurting: that Remus did not, would not save him.
"Nothing's wrong with you," Remus said. Low and controlled, now. Passionless. "It isn't your fault. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Sirius."
"It is." He swiped at his face, and looked at the floor. "It's my fault, and it's my fault I'm so selfish that I don't want the only person in my whole sorry fucking life who's ever loved me as much as you do to leave me."
Remus sighed. "Sirius, don't -- "
"Yes, it is. For fuck's sake, Remus, it is. It's my fault. All right?"
And Remus looked at him. Across the slanting afternoon sunlight from the window, across the tiny kitchen of this tiny flat in the middle of London in the middle of a war nobody could see, Remus looked at him, with eyes he didn't dare look at, with a tiny, hurt smile that made him want to scream, and nobody who really loved him could do to him what Remus was about to do. Nobody who really meant what Remus had said could fail to understand, could fail to see, that what seemed like kindness was actually the worst curse possible when you gave it to somebody who knew exactly what he deserved.
"I don't blame you," Remus said.
He left. Walked straight out of the flat. Made some feeble excuse to Remus, didn't bother to take a coat, although there had been frost on the ground at least one night already. He got on the underground, not trusting his ability to transport himself, walked a few blocks from the stop with the wind throwing hair across his eyes. And when Peter opened the door, concern written across his round, guileless face, Sirius crumpled. There was no warning at all; he looked at Peter and the world came tumbling down, and there was nothing he could do to even try to hold it up.
"Peter, I can't do it," he was already gasping, and the hot stinging in his eyes he had been too tired to give in to for years now suddenly came. "Peter, I can't -- It's too much, I can't do it anymore, I can't keep, can't -- "
And he knocked his shoulder against the doorframe and slumped against it, too heavy for his legs, too big to fit inside his own chest and his own head, and then little, earnest Peter had a supporting arm around his shoulders and was leading him inside, and the gratitude and the relief were so great that he really broke down this time. He wept hunched over in Peter's soft armchair for almost an hour, while Peter made helpless, uncomfortable attempts at soothing him, brewed tea and hovered, and somewhere in between there he managed to stumble out his plea for Peter to take his place, for Peter to be James and Lily's Secret-Keeper, to take just one thing off his back so that maybe that hole through the middle of the world wouldn't eat him alive.
And Peter was solicitous and kind, in his awkward way, and said of course he would, Sirius, you don't even need to ask, and later he remembered being so grateful for Peter, so warmed by the presence of someone so reliable and constant, so sorry that Peter was so easily forgotten. Later he remembered how raw he had been, how completely he had given up, and how glad he had been that Peter had been so understanding. Later he remembered how Peter had smiled, and patted his shoulder, and handed him tissues, and sent him home feeling emptied out and maybe even better. And later he thought how thrilling it must have been for Peter, how satisfying, to discover that one of his friends that he had always so admired and envied was at least twice the coward that Peter had ever been.
If one thing really haunted him over the next twelve years, if one thing remained all through his time in Azkaban that gnawed at him and would not let him go, it was Peter. As much horror lay in everything else he had to think about, at least the rest of it he understood; but the mystery of why Peter had done it, of what justification he could possibly offer, ate away at him with a special fervor. Before all but the essential parts of him began to melt away, and the desire for vengeance overwhelmed all other considerations, what he found he really wanted to do most was just talk to Peter; just ask him, Why? If you were that angry, why didn't you just have a good shout at us? If you were that frightened, why didn't you say so? None of us would have let anything happen to you; we would have died to protect you. We would have done it in an instant, if you had only bothered to ask.
And what frightens me, Peter, what bothers me, is the thought that maybe you knew that. That maybe that's the answer I'm looking for. That maybe if we were going to die for you you wanted it to be on your terms, and that maybe day by day Peter the murderer was becoming an easier man for you to face in the mirror than Peter the coward, and Peter the humble helpful forgotten friend, Peter the second-best. And if all of that's true, Peter, then what in the hell does it say about me, that I ever thought you were a human being worth knowing?
But Peter did not answer; Peter was gone. And that night when autumn was first beginning to bite down with splintery teeth, Sirius walked home from his friend's house to where his flat and Remus were both waiting in silence, aware only that, actually, he felt a little better.
----------------------------------------
8.
(now)
The year:
He didn't know whether to be proud of or exasperated with Sirius after the meeting ended; Sirius was obviously sullen, staying seated and staring straight ahead of him for long moments after everyone had gotten up and started stretching and collecting notes and parchments, a muscle working in his jaw, but he was also obviously trying not to be when he looked up at Remus and forced a smile across his lips. Heavy and insincere though it was, Remus felt it ought to be rewarded somehow.
"It should only be for a few weeks," he said as Sirius finally stood up, keeping his voice so low it was almost under his breath; he'd already caught Severus eyeing them with a slight sneer curling his lip at least once during the meeting, and while he could really hardly care less what Severus Snape happened to think of them, he didn't exactly want to take out an ad in the Daily Prophet, either. "I'll go and talk with them, and we'll work out an arrangement -- or we won't, in which case it'll be done even faster -- and I'll come straight home."
Sirius shrugged, and walked ahead of Remus to disperse with the rest of the Order. And as they reached the hallway said, abruptly, "Well, it doesn't matter, because I'm coming with you. As Padfoot, I mean. Hell with Dumbledore, I'll keep well out of sight -- " He turned back to Remus, sporting a growing, honest grin -- which fell away completely when he saw Remus's expression.
"You'll do no such thing," Remus said, more sharply than he'd meant to, and knew immediately he shouldn't have. Sirius's expression went bad, ugly even, at an alarming rate.
"You know, Remus, I don't recall you having the authority to dictate my behavior -- " His voice kept climbing in pitch as he was speaking, and finally in desperation Remus pulled him off to one side of the hallway, smiling weakly back at Kingsley's studied failure to shoot them a curious look.
"I am not dictating anything to you, Sirius," he said, although to the side of Sirius's face, where the muscle was twitching again. How he just wanted to shake Sirius sometime, just to shout at him, Don't you understand, don't you understand anything? Sirius still didn't look at him, although now he was looking at the floor, hair falling in his eyes; Remus sighed and released Sirius's arms before the urge became too great. "I'm only asking you. I would think, after what happened when you saw Harry to the station... I just wish you would be more careful sometimes, I wish you would think."
If he expected that to mollify Sirius, which he believed he might have done, he was disappointed. "If you don't want me to go with you, you could just say so," Sirius muttered, still not looking at him. For a moment Remus could do nothing but gape at him, and then his temper flared so suddenly it took him by surprise.
"All right. I give up. When you're prepared to discuss this like an adult, would you please let me know?" He brushed by Sirius toward the stairs, not even bothering to look at the expression Sirius was facing him with now, and he could hear Sirius storming after him.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" his voice demanded from behind. Remus sighed, stopped, and turned back around.
"That you know perfectly well that I would love for you to come with me," he said, again lowering his voice. "And that I only ask you not to out of concern for your well-being. If you came with me to Romania, you'd be caught, regardless of your admittedly enormous capacity for cleverness, and then I wouldn't be seeing you again in only a few weeks, and I don't know what I'd do without you."
That seemed to soften Sirius at last, after a brief struggle showed itself in his expression, and he let his head hang down for a long moment before speaking. "I know," he said at last, grudgingly. "I just..." He sighed himself, and looked up at Remus, pushing hair out of his face again. "I hate for you to be going off and running around -- getting into danger, and talking to vampires and whatnot, when I can't be there to protect you."
Remus raised an eyebrow at that, but it was more amused than accusatory. "I can look after myself, you know."
Sirius half-smiled. "You know I didn't mean you couldn't. I've just gone so much time without being able to do it for you. I miss it."
Against which Remus really had no defense, and he leaned in to kiss Sirius's forehead without even bothering to check for other Order members bustling through the hallway. "Thank you," he murmured. "But for my sake, can you go a little longer?"
And to his relief, he felt Sirius nod.
---
He did his best not to wake Sirius as he slipped into the room, but his exhaustion got the better of him; he barked his shin on a low table on the way in, and swore under his breath, and that was all it took to have Sirius sitting up in bed in an instant, squinting at him in the stripe of light from the door. "Remus? When did you get back? Are you all right?" He turned on the torches with a muttered word. Heaving a small sigh, Remus shut the door behind him, and dropped his suitcase in the corner before shrugging out of his cloak.
"About two minutes ago, and yes, just very tired." He kept his back to Sirius as long as possible, unbuttoning his jacket as well; he wasn't looking forward to how he knew the rest of this conversation was going to go.
A creak told him Sirius had left the bed, and then he was being pulled into a slightly desperate embrace, which he returned, despite the circumstances, with no little pleasure. "Are you sure?" Sirius pulled back just enough to frown up at his face, which he knew was too pale, and just hoped the light would hide it. "What happened? Why are you so late? You missed the moon; I was so worried..."
He took Sirius's hands from his shoulders and folded them into his own for a moment, by way of being a gentle shooing-off gesture. "That was why," he admitted, returning to taking off the jacket. "They wanted to see me change; they wouldn't believe me otherwise."
Sirius sighed, and wandered back over to sit on the edge of the bed. "Are you all right?"
"As I told you the first time, yes." He turned to smile at Sirius before the other man could look hurt, and undid his tie and let it hang while he went for the buttons of his shirt. "It went quite well; they tied me up, I transformed, and their leader -- their prince, I think they call him, my Romanian isn't what it could be -- observed and pronounced me legitimate." Shrugging out of the shirt as well, he went over to sit down next to Sirius to take off his shoes. "Then there were some contractual matters to be settled, and I came home straightaway."
Sirius was staring at the side of his face, with a growing excitement that brought him no small relief. "Contractual matters -- then they're in?"
He turned his head to smile back at Sirius, and nodded. "They are."
Sirius gave a brief laugh of delight, and flung his arms around Remus again; he smelled like Sirius, and Remus let his eyes close and relished it. "Good show! Oh, Remus, that's wonderful... I knew if anyone could -- what's that on your neck?"
Well. That was one of the things he hadn't been relishing explaining spotted.
"That would be a bite," he said, in the calmest, most reasonable tones he could manage, and took off his other shoe. Sirius was staring at him again, but this time it was considerably less pleasant.
"A bite from what?" Remus tried to stretch out on the bed, but it was made very difficult by Sirius still sitting over him.
"Could we talk about this in the morning, please? I'm very tired -- "
"No, we bloody well couldn't, a bite from what, Remus? Did one of those things bite you?"
He opened his eyes again, just enough to shoot a reproving gaze at Sirius, who to his credit looked instantly apologetic. "Those things happen to be demi-humans, you know, which I might remind you is a category to which I also belong -- "
"I know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean -- "
" -- and yes," he cut Sirius off, "one of them did bite me, in fact more than one, that's just the only one that hasn't healed." Sirius's look was far more appalled than he really felt was reasonable, and sighing, he scrubbed a hand across his eyes. "It's a ritual for them, Sirius, it's not an attack -- it's a sign of respect, wanting to share blood. They weren't trying to hurt me, I swear to you, and they asked my permission beforehand. I didn't want to seem ungrateful."
"Bloody hell, they couldn't just shake your hand?" Sirius muttered. He still looked shaky, but Remus allowed him a wan smile, his hand getting tired in the midst of scrubbing and coming to rest on his forehead.
"They couldn't make me a vampire anyway, so it's hardly any danger; infectious demi-human conditions are only one per customer, it seems. And that one -- well, it was from the prince; it's a great honour, I'm told..." He coughed. Another explanation he hadn't been looking forward to. "He, ah, he actually seemed rather taken with me, if the truth be told, which I think helped a bit. Kept inviting me to the orgies, no matter how I tried to persuade him that I wasn't interested."
Sirius had managed to find a whole new wellspring of outrage, although this one Remus could allow himself to find a bit funnier. "He bit you and then invited you to orgies?"
"Well, I don't recall whether it was in precisely that order," Remus said, his lips twitching against his will. Sirius gave him a glare that might have been frightening if he hadn't found it rather adorable.
"I knew I should have come with you," he grumbled. Remus thought there might have been a grudging glint of humor behind his eyes as well by now, though, but he certainly was trying not to show it. "Bloody vampires chewing on you and coming on to you right and left. A few bulbs of garlic would sort them right out, and no mistake."
Remus was laughing by now; he couldn't help it, and he thought that Sirius might be fighting back a smile. "Which is precisely why I couldn't have brought you even if you weren't on the run from the law, you know," he pointed out. "And I'll have you know I told the prince right away that I was very flattered, but I had someone very important to me at home to whom I was extremely faithful." He paused. "He was a bit confused, I think -- they're very free, vampires -- but he did leave me alone about the orgies after that."
"I should hope," Sirius snorted. "Bad enough you let one poncy vampire bite you on the neck..." Remus rolled his eyes.
"I assure you, Sirius," he said, smirking at him a bit, "there is only one ponce I ever want biting me on my neck." Sirius's eyes narrowed, but by now he couldn't hide his smile.
"Will you shut up and get under the covers?" As he was doing so, Remus thought he heard Sirius add something very like 'vampire harlot' in a mutter, and burst out laughing so hard he forgot what he was doing for a moment.
They were well settled and in darkness again, holding on to each other, before Sirius finally brought up the last item of discussion he hadn't been looking forward to. "You haven't told me how long you're back for," Sirius's voice came quietly out of the darkness, and Remus closed his eyes.
"Two days," he said, almost too low to be heard, after a long, pregnant pause. He could feel Sirius stiffen beside him, and braced for the outburst.
"Two days -- " But it wasn't an outburst, not really; it was a miserable, crushed and feeble protest with no strength behind it, which left him feeling many times worse than he would have if Sirius had simply made a scene. His arms tightened around Sirius's middle, and after a moment the other man's tension relented.
"But it really will be for only a week this time," he continued, with a forced lightness in his tone he hated, "and then I'll be back again and you'll have me for a good while, apart from guard duty. At least a few weeks or so."
Sirius sighed, and Remus didn't even bother to open his eyes; he was so tired, he was going to fall asleep without properly reassuring Sirius if he wasn't careful. "I know," he said at last. "And I'm grateful for all the time you spend here, you know. Just... shit, Remus, so soon."
"I know." He gathered Sirius a little closer to him, kissed the top of his hair. "But you know what that means, don't you?"
He could hear the rustling motions of Sirius craning his head up to look at him. "Mmm?"
And he smiled, despite how tired he was, despite knowing that Sirius probably couldn't even see it in the dark. "We'll just have to make the most of it," he said.
And Sirius laughed in his throat in a way that made heat turn over lazily in Remus's lower belly, and they began to kiss, and five minutes later with no warning whatsoever Remus had fallen dead asleep.
He wasn't allowed to forget that one anytime soon.
---
The year:
In his flurry of preparations for hosting Christmas at the Black house, Sirius made another attempt on the life of the tapestry in the drawing room; Kreacher, who was clearly infuriated by the proceedings, could not be banished from skulking around the hallway outside the room, but fortunately even his baleful mutterings couldn't seem to dampen Sirius's mood at the promise of so much company. When Remus arrived on this scene from his most recent round of guard duty, Sirius was frowning at a corner of the fabric he was attempting to lift, and outside Kreacher was clutching his wrinkled gray head and whining imprecations to himself that seemed, as far as Remus could tell, to cast certain unwarranted aspersions on Sirius's relationship with Buckbeak.
"Any luck?" he asked Sirius, shrugging his cloak off and throwing it over one arm, and Sirius answered with a slow shake of his head.
"There's an antidote to the Charm, but it involves making up a really nasty potion, and I'll set the whole room on fire before I go asking Snape to mix it." He sounded cheerful enough, though, so Remus decided he'd let the comment slide. "Ah, well -- perhaps I can put a Christmas tree in front of it or something, block the view even if I can't get rid of it."
"Master is not a tenth the wizard Mistress was," Kreacher's voice muttered at an increased volume from the hallway, with clear malicious pleasure. "Can't even break Mistress's common household spells, imagine, if only she could see what's become of Master now, the shame of it would break her heart -- "
"Thanks for that, Kreacher," Sirius called toward the doorway, with no apparent loss of good humor. "Are you still out there? An entire house to decorate and you don't have anything better to do?"
Kreacher's head appeared in the doorway, and then he came limping into the room, bending his head again as he did in a dogged show of servility. Remus tried to look at something else. "Kreacher lingers only to fulfill Master's commands," the house-elf said, before adding his usual rider at exactly the same volume: "What a terrible son Master is, unworthy of Mistress, how he made her cry."
Sirius rolled his eyes at this, and made a weary negating gesture with his hand. "I didn't mean you should come in."
Kreacher's snout curled up in an ugly twist for a moment, and Remus almost thought of chiding Sirius; he couldn't say he cared for Kreacher either, but sometimes... But then he was busy listening, as Kreacher muttered as he shuffled back toward the door of the room, "And so nasty Master is, to poor Kreacher and even to the blood traitors he calls friends, no mistake, none of Mistress's kind heart in him, why Kreacher still remembers the day Mistress tried to fix Master's name back on the tapestry, even after all Master had disappointed her and scorned her... Wept, she did, oh Kreacher's poor Mistress, wept and said how much she missed him..."
Remus looked back at Sirius a little too quickly, startled, afraid to see how this information might have affected him; Sirius, however, was looking at Kreacher with his eyebrows raised, but with a slight, amused twist to his mouth that only grew as he turned his gaze to Remus.
"He really has gone round the bend, if he believes that rubbish," he said, without a great deal of interest, and shrugged. "I'll get some of the holly, see if I can't at least brighten it up a bit in here..."
He pushed past Kreacher and through the door, barely disrupting the house-elf's determined slow-motion lope to leave the room. Remus hesitated for a moment after he'd gone, and cast a glance back at the tapestry before asking quietly, "Did she, Kreacher?"
Kreacher froze, nearly at the doorway; without turning about, he muttered faster, "Kreacher won't tell anything to the werewolf, ask all the nasty questions it wants, Kreacher won't tell, Mistress threw the werewolf straight out of her house when she found it here, Kreacher remembers, oh yes, and back it comes strutting about like -- "
"That's all right, Kreacher," Remus cut him off, attempting a smile, although he didn't know why he was bothering with Kreacher's back still turned. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I was only curious."
He'd never know what it was that made Kreacher pause at that, or shuffle himself around in a circle to fix Remus with his wide, watery stare; perhaps it was out of perversity, or even malice, or simply that he was thrown by being offered the right to want something. Whatever the reason, Kreacher remained silent for a moment, and then said finally, "Master's brother had just died, and then Master's father, and Mistress was alone. Came to this room, Mistress did, and wept, and tried to fix the hole where Master's name had been... Mistress even called for Kreacher, and told him to open up Master's old bedroom and air it out again, because, she said, Master must be coming home again very soon. And Kreacher did it, oh yes, Kreacher always did as his Mistress told him, and he was pleased to do it, but poor Kreacher did not dare say to his Mistress what he knew, that Master would not be coming home again, not soon, not ever."
He paused, his gaze darting around the room, seemingly gathering his thoughts; such a recitation was more talking than he'd been called upon to do in some time, and his already froggy voice was beginning to get even more hoarse. It took him a moment to pick up his thread again, although Remus sensed it was more from deliberation than confusion. "When Master first ran away from home, Mistress came upstairs all in a rage straight away, and burned his name from off the tapestry, but then the days went by and Mistress was calm again, for Kreacher's Mistress was of a very gentle nature, and she began to say 'Never mind, he'll come home when he gets hungry' and 'He'll come home when he needs a place to sleep,' and Kreacher never would have contradicted his Mistress, not Kreacher, but he knew Master would sleep on the ground and starve before Master came home again." He blinked at Remus, as though checking the impact of this statement, and then went on. "Master is a terrible son, yes, and not fit to touch the ground that Mistress walked on, but Master is still Mistress's son, and as proud as she, although Master is a small vile worm and his pride is undeserved. Kreacher knew Master would stay away, because if it had been Kreacher's Mistress who left a place in such a rage as Master did, Kreacher knew she would never have come back. But Mistress always hoped, until Master went to Azkaban and Mistress knew he would never come home."
Remus stared at Kreacher for several long moments of silence, with no idea how to feel about any of this; Kreacher coughed a few times, fixed his unsettling stare back on Remus, and said at last: "Mistress loved Master much more than Master deserved. Master's brother loved Master much more than Master deserved. Even Master's father probably loved Master more, so much more, than Master deserved, before Master's father had to be shut away."
And drawing himself up to his full height as best he could, Kreacher concluded with apparent relish, "No matter. Kreacher will not forget what Master deserves."
And then, finished, he limped out of the room and off to parts unknown, leaving Remus to stand staring after him in his wake.
---
The year:
There were no towels in the bathroom again, and he emerged still damp into the bedroom, glancing around from the doorway. "Does Kreacher go about hiding towels for sport, or are you just a terrible slob?"
Sirius was currently sprawled out the wrong way on the bed with his legs hanging off the side, also naked except for one corner of the sheets that had fallen across his thighs; by the time he lifted his head, Remus was wondering if that didn't answer his question by itself, and trying to suppress a smile. "Hmm?"
"Towels."
"What about them?"
"I was just commenting that there never seem to be any in the bathroom -- ah." He spotted one lying across the chair on the other side of the room, and was about to go for it, when he noticed Sirius propping up on his elbows, smiling. "What?"
"Just having a look," Sirius said, with an air of contentment. Remus rolled his eyes, trying to look more amused than turned on, but he was certain his body was already contradicting him -- particularly when he could see Sirius's cock begin to swell and thicken against his belly as his gaze swept down Remus's body.
"Oh, is that so?" Sirius nodded, eyes half-lidded, looking pleased with himself; he looked even more so when his line of sight lingered a moment on Remus's groin. Well, as long as he was looking...
The way Sirius's eyes widened, when Remus curled a hand around his cock and began stroking it all the way hard, made it difficult not to look obnoxiously pleased with himself right back. In a matter of seconds Sirius was breathing much faster through parted lips, his eyes flicking between Remus's hand and his face, and the gradual process of his getting hard had been rushed to completion; his cock was now so erect that it seemed to be trying to stand away from his body on its own, dark and heavy against the pale skin and fine hair.
Remus leaned on the doorway, as much for practical reasons as to try and be seductive; watching Sirius watch him touch himself was making it hard to stay standing. "You look like you're enjoying yourself, at least." He wasn't even certain where the words were coming from, just that suddenly it seemed so much easier to talk than to stay silent, wanking off and letting Sirius watch him. Sirius's response was more than enough reward, at any rate; his wide eyes fell half-shut again, smoky and hungry now, and he'd started squirming around on the bed, his hips pressing up against nothing in a silent entreaty. It was hard to say no to that, but Remus decided he could let him go a bit longer. It felt good, stroking himself, being able to drive Sirius mad. "Shall I come over and help you take care of that?"
The moan that tore itself out of Sirius's lips seemed to shoot right into his spine, shivering down it straight to his groin. Sirius arched his head back, exposing the thin line of his neck and the faint numbers banded across it, still looking at Remus; he stretched out his hand from the bed, toward Remus, and though his whisper was so low that Remus couldn't actually hear it, he knew what it was: Please.
When he crossed the few feet to take Sirius's hand, Sirius scooted forward so that his hips hung off the bed as well, and thrust his legs apart to pull Remus between them, in the most obvious invitation Remus had ever seen. He paused, leaning over the bed with his free hand planted by Sirius's hip; the other had already been pulled to Sirius's mouth, and had two fingers inside it, Sirius's tongue laving around them in quick circles.
"Are you certain?" he murmured, and Sirius seized his hip, pulling him closer so that the tip of Remus's cock bumped and slid up against his balls and the base of his own.
"Of course I am." He had to take Remus's fingers out of his mouth to answer, but at least he was audible this time. With one last lick, he gave them back to Remus, already slick and ready. "Don't be stupid. Fuck me."
For once, Remus didn't have to be told twice.
A day later he had to leave again, with a small team of Order members headed for Italy, and Sirius saw him off in whispers from the front hallway. They embraced, and he started to pull away; and then Sirius caught his arm and pulled him close again and kissed him without even sparing a glance for the others assembled in the hallway, and whispered in his ear before letting him go to come back safe.
---
The year:
Harry's head disappeared so abruptly from the fire that they just kept looking into it for a moment, and then finally turned to each other with frowns of misgiving. "I hope he's all right," Remus said, as Sirius was getting to his feet; he offered Remus a hand up as soon as he had, and Remus accepted it.
"I'm sure he will be."
"I'm not," Remus said, still staring into the fire. "I'm going to have to talk to Severus right away... " Sirius was scowling already as he spoke, shaking his head in a way that made him look remarkably like an irritated dog.
"I can't believe him," he snapped, and Remus glanced at him with an ironic twist to his mouth.
"Which one of them?" Sirius glanced back at him, looking prepared to keep being angry, but somewhere along the way it got lost in a grin. Remus didn't answer it. "It isn't funny, Sirius."
Sirius coughed, and shook his head again. "No, I know -- just, the way you sounded just now -- " He shrugged at Remus, with a slightly more apologetic grin. "I don't think I'm the only one he reminds of James sometimes."
Remus tried to keep looking stern, but eventually his smile won out. "He's far too sweet, for that age," he allowed, after a long moment. "Maybe James when he wanted something." Sirius laughed, and turned to head back upstairs, and Remus followed him.
"Yeah, I know. He's -- Harry." He paused, and glanced over his shoulder at Remus, waiting a moment to let Remus catch up beside him. "Not that I haven't thought about how good it would be to really have James back, mind you." Remus chuckled, already seeing where he was going with this; it hurt a little, but not in a way he couldn't bear. "I'd bet you in ten minutes he'd have had Mother's portrait down off the wall, and bewitched to shout nasty things about herself instead."
"I'd give him five," Remus said, and they cast warm smiles at each other and looked away again. "And Lily always picked up housekeeping spells so easily; she'd have all the old silver polishing itself, and dustcloths flying around in all directions -- "
"All the furniture looking like it was bought five minutes ago," Sirius agreed, grinning, as they mounted the stairs. "You remember that little dump under the railroad tracks they had that one time, where everything looked like secondhand plywood when they moved in? Two days later I didn't even recognize it. She was uncanny, that woman."
Remus nodded. "I remember." The words hung with a peculiar weight in the air, and he cleared his throat to try and get past the lump forming in it. "I wish they were here, too."
Sirius's arm snaked around his waist, and they went the rest of the way up to their bedroom in silence.
Sirius seemed deep in thought as they arrived, and as he held the door open for Remus; Remus didn't think much of it, though, until Sirius shut the door behind them, stopped with his back against it, and said, "I love you, you know."
Remus turned back, eyebrows raised, to look at him, and Sirius looked back with an expression he couldn't read. "And I don't mean that in the 'you're my best friend, I love you a lot,' way, either," he continued. "I mean, I love you. I have for a long time, I think; it just... never seemed like the right time to tell you."
Well, there was the lump back again. Fortunately he was still too taken aback for it to really embarrass him. He stood staring at Sirius over his shoulder for a long moment, and then finally turned around to face him again, clearing his throat. "Well. I... No. I didn't know that."
Sirius's smile was sad and wry. "No," he said. "I know you didn't." He reached out, first to touch Remus's hand, and then to take it. "I spent a lot of time, thinking about what I said to you, that last time before everything -- about how I wasn't, but if I were going to be in love with anyone, I would be in love with you." He paused. "And after a while I realized that that didn't make any sense."
Remus frowned. "No, it does..."
"No, it doesn't. Listen to me." He sat down on the bed, still holding on to Remus's hand, and after a moment Remus followed him. "I said that because... I didn't know what being in love with someone was supposed to be like. I figured you just knew -- I don't know what I was expecting, bells or explosions or a big flashing sign, YOU ARE NOW IN LOVE -- but I knew I didn't really feel that much different than I ever had." He took a breath, scratched at his hair. "It never occurred to me that that was it; that it's not a big, exciting moment, it's a gradual thing, a little bit every day, and only at the end can you look back over your shoulder and go, oh, yeah, I guess I am then.
"See, you can't get as far as 'if I were going to be in love with anybody, I would be in love with you,' and not be there already. I mean, you've pretty much already decided, haven't you? If you can say that much and mean it -- and I did -- then you've already gotten to the point where you've figured out this one person is more important to you than any other in the world, and you want to stick with them for good, and you're presumably wishing this because you're interested in having a certain kind of relationship with them that's not like any others that you've got, and once you've got that much, as far as I can tell, you're more or less there. All the other bits -- being willing to give up anything for them, being half of a whole larger something, compromising and setting up a life -- nobody's born with that stuff. Those are the things you learn, once you've gotten that first spark to get you started. If you want to get started, then the spark is already there; and you just have to calm down and let it guide you. And that's all there is to it, really."
At this point, he paused, looking at Remus, and then finally released his hand to turn away and go looking through the bedside table. After a moment, he produced an elderly handkerchief, which he handed to Remus without saying anything, and Remus accepted it and began wiping his eyes without saying anything back.
"Well, I think," Sirius finished at last, lamely. "I mean... I've never done it before."
And with some of his dignity restored, Remus let the handkerchief fall back to his lap, and just smiled at him. And Sirius smiled back, and took his hand again.
"So," he said. "Is that all right by you?"
And Remus actually snorted a burst of shaky laughter, and wiped at his own face again, and kissed him; and then neither of them said anything for a while.
The year, drawing to a close.
----------------------------------------
9.
(then)
He didn't know what made him stop by the abandoned shop that Peter was using as his hiding place on his way home that night; there was just something nagging at the back of his head, and whether it was actually premonition disguising itself as worry, he would never know. If it was, though, he would think later, it could have shown up a bit sooner, couldn't it?
The nag started to turn into an alarm bell the second he came down the alley the old store opened out of, and saw that the door was ajar.
Just slightly, not enough that a casual passer-by would notice it, but he was a lot more than casual at this point, and he saw the dark crack between the door and the jamb as though it were big enough to fall into. Heart hammering, he pulled out his wand with a numb hand, put his fingertips against the dusty glass pane in the wood, and pushed it the rest of the way open with a protesting creak.
"Peter?" he called into the darkness, and then took a step inside. The store was dark, empty, the only light spilling in from the streetlights far behind him, and slipping in through cracks here and there in the building's ceiling. Off in the shadows, he could hear scufflings, the occasional tiny squeak. That was what Peter had said he would do, turn into his rat self and run about among them, with nobody the wiser -- but even then, he'd answer, wouldn't he? He'd come, wouldn't he? "Peter? Are you all right?" Knowing, already knowing, and still calling, holding his wand in front of him and telling himself it was for the light.
Nothing. Only the sound of rats in the walls.
He walked the place from corner to corner, searching, trying to catch more than a fleeing tail with the glow of his wand. Nothing. His boots gritted in unstirred dust. There was nobody here, and no sign of struggle; and the door had been ajar, and Peter was gone.
And knowing, and knowing, and trying for all he was worth not to know, he went back out and got back on his bike, and headed for James and Lily's.
He could see the ruin smoking from the air when he was still a good two miles away. He set down just next to it and swung his leg over the bike, staring, seeing and not seeing the massive form that was already shifting through the charred remnants. Nothing permeated. He was made of stone and paper.
Still, the sound of a baby wailing ahead of him made his stomach lurch hard enough to break it all apart.
"Harry!" He took off running, stumbling over bits of burning wreckage, crashing into things, feeling a few dry sobs tearing loose from his chest. Hagrid turned at the sound of his voice; in the starlight he could see the runnels of tears heading down the big man's cheeks into his beard. "Harry -- Harry, Hagrid, is he -- "
"He's fine," Hagrid said, sounding both gruff and trembling; he held out the squalling bundle that looked like a doll in his enormous arms, and Sirius just barely kept kept from pitching headfirst into both of them. Panting, he pulled back the top edge of the blanket, revealing Harry's pinched red face. Red for more than one reason, he saw: there was a cut on his forehead, still bleeding. "A bit upset, but he'll be all righ'."
Sirius let his fingertips lie on the baby's soft down of dark hair for a few seconds, and then nodded and pulled back. He could feel how much he was shaking, but it seemed like a very abstract issue, something that was happening to someone else. Probably all of this was happening to someone else. Probably it was a dream from which he'd wake up in a few moments, to find himself still lying beside Remus, or still in his bed at Hogwarts, or still a baby himself, dreaming in his crib. "What happened?" he asked, his voice jittering all over the place, now that he had let the shaking free he would never get it to go away again. "Was it him?"
"Aye." Harry screeched again, thrashing his small arms, and Hagrid made a weak soothing noise, jogging the baby as gently as he could against his chest. "Other'n that, dunno. He -- went for Harry too, 'sfar's I can tell, but it bounced back on 'im somehow. Nobody knows jus' wha' happened."
"He killed Lily and James?" It was the hardest thing he'd ever had to say, and his voice sounded like a stranger's. Hagrid nodded, matter-of-factly enough, although his eyes were welling up again.
"Aye."
Sirius stared at the ground. It went out of focus after a moment, lost all its shapes and meaning in a senseless black blur. He thought that it might be nice to just lie down in the ruins of James and Lily's house, and go to sleep there. Maybe the fire would spread, and it would take him too, and then he could sleep forever.
One of Hagrid's hands fell on his shoulder, nearly knocking him to his knees; he looked up, his train of thought disturbed, and found Hagrid looking down at him with unbearable pity. "Mayhap yeh shouldn' be here, Sirius," he said, with a kind of choked kindness in his voice. "All this -- migh' be a bit much for yeh, eh?"
"I'm fine," Sirius said, and he knew he had never sounded less fine. "Harry... give Harry to me, Hagrid. I'm his godfather, I'll look after him -- "
But Hagrid was looking extremely uncomfortable now, he saw through the dark lens over his vision, shifting his considerable weight. "Er -- I would, o' course, but y'see -- Dumbledore's given me orders, tol' me to bring him straigh' back to him, an' all that..."
The denial jarred Sirius, drug at his mind through the quicksand it was falling into, started pulling it back up; the emergence was unbearable, and he didn't know how long he could stand it, resolved to fight while he could. "But I -- I promised -- "
"Can't do it, Sirius," Hagrid said, and he sounded firm now as well as uncomfortable. "But yeh'll see him later, Dumbledore'll sort it all out."
And it was too difficult, too painful to keep fighting against the oblivion, too hard to construct a proper argument, and looking up at Hagrid, he prepared to give up... and then he thought, all at once, of Peter.
Peter. Only one person had been able to give out the secret of where James and Lily were hiding. Only one person who was missing now. Reliable, constant Peter, who had let him sob out all his exhaustion and his fear and break down for the first time in all the years they'd been at war, good old forgotten trustworthy Peter, who'd patted his shoulder and said of course he would, Sirius; of course he would.
The quicksand receded, and the world came clear again. Too clear, but it was all right. He would make it be all right.
This, maybe, he could make all right.
"No, you're right," Sirius said, and he was vaguely surprised and satisfied at how calm his voice sounded now. Or how dead. "He's right. It's probably for the best." When he looked up at Hagrid, he found the other man looking a bit taken aback, but nor did that seem to matter. "You're taking Harry to him?"
Hagrid nodded. "Aye, tha's righ'," he said, sounding unsure. Sirius nodded too, and stepped back.
"You'd better go, then," he said, in his new, dead man's voice. "Take the bike; you'll get there faster." He paused, and then gave voice to something he had only known before now at the very bottom of his mind: "And I won't be needing it anymore."
And Hagrid looked at him, a frown creasing his huge tear-stained features, and he opened his mouth as though to say something else; in the end, though, whatever it was, he thought better of it, and nodded his gratitude. He made his way across the ruined house to where the motorbike was leaning, holding Harry to his chest with exaggerated care, and Sirius watched as he straddled it and took off, with a final wave. They flew silhouetted across the moon for a moment, and then they were gone.
And Sirius left the ruins as well, and began to follow the road. He was going back to London, but he wanted to walk a while first, feel the air on his face. He was going back to London, because Peter would have needed to settle affairs, to pack, to get things in order, or at least he hoped Peter would have, because he couldn't see how else he was going to do this. But he was going to do it.
His interest in -- his obsession with -- Peter's motivations would not be born until later, until Azkaban, when he would have all the time in the world to think; tonight there was only something enormous and terrible beating its wings against the inside of his head, obscuring his vision and blotting his ears with its cries, something that forced him on and commanded him. Tonight he knew exactly what he had to do, and even if he didn't know yet how he was going to do it, the knowledge lent him a clarity and strength he hadn't felt in ages, maybe since the end of school, maybe his whole life. From this vantage point upon which he had arrived, he could now see easily what had been so cloudy to him for so long: the truth of what had been happening to him, of what he had been doing with his life, to himself, to Remus, and the truth of what, in the end, its terrible result had been. He could not yet, however, find the courage to be sorry. That would come later, when he had borne up properly the weight of his responsibility for what had happened. Sorry could wait until he had earned it.
A fleeting thought crossed his mind, of going home, of telling Remus, of explaining everything that had happened... but no. Remus might want to come with him, and he couldn't allow that. When he tried to picture himself finishing this -- coming home in the morning light, with three friends dead, in one way or another, at his hands; collapsing into Remus's arms, and crying together, and begging Remus's forgiveness; finding Harry again and bringing him home to protect him as he'd promised... He couldn't do it, and all his mind would produce instead was darkness, the darkness of a screen after the movie has ended. And while that was all right with him, that was all right for him, he would not drag Remus there with him. He couldn't.
He went back to London, back to Peter's hideout. He began working in a circle outwards, combing the streets one at a time, listening for the sound of rats. Later he would find that the hours between then and the narrow street in the early light of morning, the street where he heard Peter's voice, were completely gone from his memory, and he could not recall the specifics or the things that he had done. He thought that that was probably a blessing.
As early as it was, there were still plenty of Muggles on the street as he walked down it, hurrying puffy-faced out of their houses, heading off to work or school or wherever it was they went. Later he supposed they were lucky it was still so early; if it had been later, there might have been more. Or there might not. You never knew how this things would go.
He was so intent that he almost didn't recognize Peter's voice when he actually heard it.
"Sirius!" Behind him, ringing and clear, shattering the morning. People turned to look at them, some irritated, some surprised, some puzzled. He stopped, sick, throbbing, his stomach plummeting, his clarity of purpose draining away. Behind him, how long had he been behind him --
"Lily and James, Sirius!" Peter was shouting behind him. Sounding like he was in tears. Maybe he was. "How could you! How could you..."
And then he understood.
Oh, bloody hell, Peter, if only you'd been half this clever at school, he tried to say, but as he turned with his wand out and upraised he only got out the "Oh" before the concussion of the explosion struck him, knocking him off his feet, skidding and jarring into the street hard enough to lay his forehead open and clack his teeth together.
But, he observed as he pulled himself up to a sitting position, coughing and streaming from both his eyes and the wound in his forehead, he was alive.
His eyes cleared just in time for him to see the bare end of a rat-tail whipping down into a sewer grate; then it was gone, and of course it was hopeless. He would be under the city in seconds, he could be gone in seconds more, he could be anywhere. Anywhere a rat could run. Peter was gone, never to be found. It had been absurd to think he could ever catch a single rat in London.
He looked around. The street was another smoking ruin, the Muggles, who had been bustling about to work and school and wherever a matter of seconds before, twisted bleeding corpses. Bodies were slumped at horribly wrong angles over the humped-up cracks in the pavement, pools of blood giving them false shadows. Others had survived, perhaps injured, perhaps badly; he could hear voices screaming somewhere beyond the smoke, others crying in pain or shock. He should go check on them, maybe try to help. Maybe repair the whole street, while he was at it.
It was never too late to make things right.
Sitting in the middle of the blasted street, surrounded by the corpses of Peter's victims, still holding his wand in his hand and bleeding from his forehead, Sirius began to laugh.
----------------------------------------
10.
(now)
Tonks was asleep when he arrived on the ward, as the on-duty Healer had said she probably would be, had in fact been doing so nonstop since she'd arrived. "Really took it out of her, whatever it was," the young man had said, shaking his head, without any apparent curiosity as to what it had been. That was hardly a surprise, of course, but still a comfort.
He set the flowers he'd brought down on her bedside table (and they'd been carefully examined at the door; they were quite paranoid about plants being brought to patients at St. Mungo's now), and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. She looked pale and fragile and small under the blankets and in her hospital gown, and in her prolonged unconsciousness her hair had reverted back to what he assumed was its natural state. It was, he was strangely touched to see, a fine, glossy, shoulder-length flag that looked at once exactly right and exactly wrong framing her heart-shaped face, and almost black, almost as dark as Siri --
Stop. Breathe. Start over.
She looked paler, at any rate, although he didn't know whether that was the hair or her general condition, and even younger somehow. He reached out and brushed a strand away from her forehead, and she stirred, wrinkling her nose.
"Mm -- ?" Her eyes squinted open, and she saw Remus, and offered him a very weary smile. There were bags under her eyes, too, and her voice was weak if mostly cheerful. "Wotcher, Remus."
"Hello, Tonks." His voice sounded all right, at least, if quiet. That was something. "Feeling better?"
She nodded, and rubbed at her eyes a bit. At a closer look at his face, though, her smile fell away, and a frown drew itself between her brows. "Mph -- how long've I been out?" The frown cut deeper suddenly, and her vague concern blossomed into outright alarm; she tried to sit up, and he caught her shoulder and gently forced her back down. "Everyone else -- are they okay? Are any of them hurt?"
He tried to answer. He really did, but the words seemed to get caught somewhere between his chest and his mouth, and he couldn't seem to force them past the blockage, whatever it was. Tonks was looking at him, hard, and after only a few seconds of his struggling, she said quietly, "Who did we lose?"
Remus looked at her, helpless. They sat like that for a long time, and before long the recognition dawned in her eyes, and her face began to crumple. He noticed the tears spilling over her eyes before he noticed the ones in his own.
"Oh, god, Remus," she said in a tight, airless voice, and then she was pushing herself up and he let her this time, and she wrapped her arms around him and he crushed her to his chest, bending himself over her and pressing his face to her strange, naked hair.
He hadn't cried. He had come home, drifting past the others' uncertain, almost frightened looks without even noticing, had said many times that he was fine, and thank you; he had sat up in the kitchen without sleeping, staring into the fire, thinking nothing, not even beginning to think of going to the bed that they had shared. He had not cried; it had never seemed real, never seemed over. Now, now that he had not said it out loud, but someone else had noticed, had spoken of it... now it did. It was real, and over. Sirius was gone.
Tonks held him as he sobbed into her hair, into her shoulder, hard enough he felt like he would just break apart into pieces on the hospital bed; she cried with him, and rubbed his back, and murmured to him, and he let go.
---
Tonks was clumsy, and Tonks was, as Kingsley took apparent delight in reminding her, still very young, but one thing that Tonks was not was dumb. And when she tentatively pointed out to Remus, as he was leaving, the fact that the full moon was in three days, and he offered her a tiny hurting smile and told her not to worry, to concentrate on getting better, he would be fine, she was most certainly not dumb enough to believe him.
The jinxing she'd gotten had been bad enough to make her legs leaden and stiff and weak even two days later, and though the Healer for her ward had first been adamant that she shouldn't be walking anywhere at all, but after an hour or so of shouting, threats, and harassment, he was finally willing to relent enough to bring her a cane to stump around with, muttering about "problem patients" and "on your own head be it." She ignored him as she limped by, and also ignored the skeptical, supercilious look the information witch gave her, before telling her what she needed to know.
She found Lucy at last in a laboratory on one of the top floors, sorting through some etheric test results; as soon as she came in the door, the other woman said, "Patients aren't supposed to be in here, ma'am, you should be in bed," in a bored voice, without even looking up.
"That's what everyone keeps telling me," Tonks said, leaning on her cane again and stumping grimly onward, and Lucy jerked her head up so fast at the sound of her voice that she almost scattered the parchments she was going through.
"Tonks?" Tonks managed a smile, although it wasn't easy: her legs were really hurting, and she was too worried. And the gape-mouthed way Lucy was staring at her wasn't helping, especially. "Your hair, I didn't even recognize you -- I didn't know you were here. What happened?"
"War wounds," Tonks said shortly, and finally got close enough to the table to lean her weight on it, instead of on the cane. "Listen, I've got a favor to ask you."
Lucy looked somewhat less than pleased, which she supposed she should have been expecting. She swept her long blonde braid back over her shoulder and stood up to her full height again. "Nice to see you too. What is it?"
Tonks took a deep breath. "I've got a friend who's going to need a Healer in about three days," she said. "And he's not going to be much in shape to get to the hospital." Lucy raised an eyebrow, folding her arms.
"What, are you planning to push him down some steps and then experience sudden remorse?" The glare Tonks gave her managed to convince her that wasn't funny, though, and she sighed. "I'd need to know what I'd be dealing with, that's all."
"He's a werewolf," Tonks said. "The full moon's in three days, and -- he's been going through a lot lately, and I'm afraid he's going to really tear himself to pieces."
And oh, how she could punch Lucy right in her curling lip. "You want a veterinarian," Lucy said, turning back to the stack of papers, and Tonks's jaw set so hard she could hear her teeth cracking together.
"No," and she stood up off the table, ignoring the cane and how much it hurt, "I want a Healer, for the human bloody being he is twenty-eight days and twenty-seven nights out of every twenty-eight, but you know, if that's the way you're going to be about it, forget it, I don't need -- "
"Tonks -- " Lucy's voice stopped her turning back to the door, and though it sounded weary and exasperated, she thought she also detected a fine thread of regret. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean -- " But she stopped, because she had, and they both knew it, and after Tonks stood staring at her for a moment she just sighed. "All right, fine, I'll do it."
"Are you sure?" Lucy opened her mouth, presumably to say yes, but Tonks cut her off. "And you won't go saying anything like that to him, will you, because if you're going to be horrible to him let's just forget it right now. He's had a really bad time, Lucy, his lover just died, in fact, and he doesn't need a worse one from you, all right?"
"All right. Lay off, Tonks, I'll treat him like anyone, I promise." Tonks eyed her for a moment, and then, huffing her satisfaction, limped back over to the table. She was relieved at least to see Lucy's professional face slip into place. "His lover just died, you said? Well, that might leak through to the wolf, I'm not sure -- How long's he been a werewolf?"
"I think... thirty years? About?" That stopped Lucy already, and she looked at Tonks with a slight frown creasing her brow.
"That's not possible. Nobody's a werewolf that long -- that'd put him before Wolfsbane, for heaven's sake."
Tonks sighed, resting the cane between her knees. "Yeah, well, that's the thing. His lover was an Animagus. Turned into a dog and kept him company during the full moon, so he didn't beat himself up too badly. It kept him alive until the potion got invented." This was rather a little to say rather a lot, she thought, but Lucy seemed to properly take her meaning.
"That's... well, that's fascinating, actually, I've never heard of anything like it... but you're right, that'll probably make it worse this time if he's used to that sort of thing." She paused, pushing escaped strands of hair back out of her face. Her hair had really gotten longer. "He's on Wolfsbane, then?"
"Well, yeah, usually..." Tonks shifted; she didn't like this one any better than Lucy was going to. "He's, ah, not getting along too well right now with the person who brews it for him, though." She could feel Lucy staring at her again, and tried to ignore it.
"You'd better tell him to make up, then," Lucy said -- snapped, really -- and Tonks raised her palm in a helpless gesture.
"I'll try... Look, Lucy, it's really complicated, all right? Just -- we have to make do with a few things."
Lucy flapped a hand at her, impatient; in full doctor mode, now, and wanting the rest of the details. "Anything else I should know? Any other health conditions that might complicate things?"
Tonks shook her head. "Not that I know of. Just that he's a werewolf."
"Yes, well, that's quite enough, isn't it? So you need me at dawn three days from now?" She bit her lip, thinking, and Tonks found herself watching without really meaning to. She had always had really nice lips. "That's Thursday... I'm on the night shift that night, but I could come over afterward, be there by four-thirty or so."
"That'd be perfect." She paused again, thinking. "I'd have to pick you up -- the place where he's going to be is sort of... hidden. I'm going to have to take you there."
Lucy sighed again, but the look she was giving Tonks now was more amused than anything else. "Are you actually going to tell me what this is all about at some point, or are you having too much fun being secretive?"
"I've got good reason for being secretive, I'll have you know," Tonks said, glowering at her without meaning it much. "But... well, we can talk about it later. It's just a long story, that's all."
"All right, fine." Lucy gave her a critical look, and frowned again. "You really should get back to bed, though. You shouldn't be wandering all round the hospital in the first place."
"I know, I know." She prepared to put her weight back on the cane -- and then paused, and looked at Lucy, in the process risking one more glance at those really nice lips. And... what the hell was she thinking about? "Thanks for this, Lucy," she said, seriously. "I mean it."
Lucy waved her off, but Tonks could have sworn she looked a bit pleased. "Thank me later," she said. "Bed now."
And Tonks obeyed her, feeling just the slightest bit better all the way.
---
She was finally allowed to leave the hospital the day before the moon, to her relief, and helped shut a pale, silent Remus into the wine cellar that evening, then paced most of the night away before leaving to pick Lucy up at St. Mungo's as they had planned. They spoke little between the hospital and Grimmauld Place, almost not at all. When they arrived she handed Lucy the slip of paper she had managed to track down Dumbledore long enough to acquire; he'd questioned why she needed it, of course, but after that he hadn't asked anything more, had actually seemed approving of the idea, and she'd been grateful. Lucy stared at it for a moment, frowning, and before Tonks could start deflecting questions asked, "Tonks? Why is your werewolf at the headquarters of -- "
"Shh." Lucy glared at her, and she glared right back. "Just read it." Lucy sighed extravagantly and bent back over the slip of paper, and finally Tonks held out her hand. "Because he's a member," she answered, finally, and Lucy glanced up at her with eyebrows raised. "So am I. Give me the note."
"But isn't that the name of the -- "
"Yeah, it is. Give me the note."
And finally Lucy did, and Tonks destroyed it, and they went inside.
In the front hallway she closed the door behind them, stopped Lucy, and pressed fingers over the other woman's lips for a few seconds; she could feel a slight indrawn breath against their skin, and pulled her hand back again before she got completely inappropriate about this. She hadn't known quite how much she'd missed Lucy.
"You heard about the attack on the Ministry the other night?" she whispered. The sliver of Lucy's face she could see in the darkness was still frowning, but at least she followed the hint and whispered too.
"Of course I did, everyone did. What -- "
"That's why I was in the hospital," Tonks whispered over her. "And it's how his lover died; we were all there."
Now Lucy was staring at her. "You're not talking about Sirius Black?" Tonks nodded, which did nothing to change Lucy's expression. "Sirius Black had a male lover? Who's a werewolf?"
"Yes. Okay? And we were -- are -- some of us, still -- all in the Order. Can we get on with it?" Without waiting for an answer, she glanced around, seized Lucy by the hand, and started pulling her toward the dining room. "Let's get out of the hallway, at least, we're going to wake the portrait. And if you see a big troll-leg umbrella stand in front of us, don't let me get anywhere near it, all right?"
Mercifully, Lucy didn't question this, and didn't say anything else until they were well away from the front hall. She kept whispering, though, which Tonks found considerate and slightly annoying. "I'd heard about that -- there was a thing in the paper, the Ministry cleared him posthumously." Tonks hadn't heard about that, and she wondered if Remus had seen it. "But... well, I suppose it doesn't matter."
"No. It doesn't." She said this at normal volume, and Lucy looked a bit surprised, then a bit embarrassed, and that mollified her temper slightly. "Look -- I don't mean to be so ratty, I'm sorry. I'm just really worried about him, and it's driving me mad."
"I gathered that," Lucy said, drily enough that it actually made her smile. "I'll take care of him the best I can, I promise you."
"I know. Thank you." They stood looking at each other for a longer moment than necessary, and then Tonks cleared her throat. "Well -- it's a couple hours before dawn, still -- d'you want to try to sleep a bit, or have a bite to eat?"
Lucy shrugged. "As long as I'm awake I ought to stay that way; I wouldn't say no to some tea, though."
They ended up talking until dawn in the kitchen; not about anything particularly useful, just what they'd been up to since school, what their jobs were like, what they did in a day. Once there was a sound from the wine cellar loud enough to be heard upstairs -- a crash and a low, yelping whine -- and no sooner had it made Tonks falter into silence than Lucy reached across the table and took her hand. After a moment Tonks changed the subject, and didn't let go.
When the time came she nearly ran down the cellar stairs ahead of Lucy, which was a dicey proposition to begin with considering their age, and knelt down next to the crumpled, bleeding body curled up on the dirt-packed stone floor. "Remus? Are you all right?" Well, he wasn't, of course he wasn't, but that wasn't the real question. He managed to open his eyes, though, and look at her, and that warmed her in spite of the puffy darkness around his eyes and the nasty new scratch hooking under his jaw.
"Fine," he murmured. He was breathing shallowly, and looked completely spent. She stroked his hair back, out of danger of tacky drying blood, and on the other side of him Lucy dropped into an efficient crouch and began taking bottles of potion out of her bag.
"Remus?" He barely opened his eyes again, but she supposed it would have to do. "This is Lucy -- she's a friend of mine, a Healer -- she's going to take care of you, all right?" Remus made a motion that looked sort of like a nod, although now he was shivering too much to tell. Tonks leapt to her feet again. "I'll go get a blanket."
After Lucy had treated him as much as she could on the spot, they managed to get him up to one of the downstairs bedrooms, with one of his arms slung around each of their shoulders, and safely into the bed. He was asleep almost immediately, and only as Lucy was finishing up with a few last bandages and poultices did Tonks notice how tight-pressed her lips were, and the crease between her brows.
As she shut the door to the bedroom behind them, her only comment to Tonks was, "He'll be all right this time." And for once, Tonks had absolutely no desire to ask for clarification.
They went to the sitting room that had been set up near the start of the year: all the old, fancy, infested furniture had been given up on and destroyed, and its raw materials refashioned into a few comfortable, homey couches gathered into one corner of the oversized room, near the fire. Lucy slept for a few hours on one of them, rather than go home and have to come back, and Tonks sat with Lucy's head in her lap and went over a few parchments for work, a mug of coffee levitating beside her. She was tired too, she supposed, but she'd never felt less like sleeping in her life.
Lucy woke up around lunchtime; Tonks didn't realize she had until the head in her lap twisted around and began nuzzling in a decidedly suggestive way. She jumped a little and looked down to find Lucy squinting up at her, looking about as evil as somebody half-awake and with her neat braid rumpled all to bits could look.
"So I keep meaning to ask," Lucy asked in a low, drowsy voice that somehow managed to be impossibly sexy, "did you miss me?"
At least one of her hands was all the way up the top of Lucy's Healer's greens and one of Lucy's making its way rapidly into the front of Tonks's jeans by the time she heard the quiet, embarrassed cough from the doorway. She jerked back out of the kiss to look around, and then jumped up off the couch so fast she earned a glare from Lucy, which she ignored.
"Remus!" She tried to be nonchalant about fastening her jeans as she hurried around the couch. He was paper-white and supporting most of his weight on the doorway, but dressed and upright, and otherwise looked alert and functional. "Why are you up? Is anything wrong? How are you doing?"
"Not nearly as well as you are, it seems," he said, in a fortunately low voice; she tried to glare at him, but in the end was too relieved that he was well enough to tease her, even if it was without a lot of enthusiasm. "I was just on my way to a glass of water; sorry to interrupt."
"Oh, no -- wait here, I'll get you one -- " He might have tried to stop her, but she got out of range before he could. Lucy herded him back to bed in the meantime for a quick checkup, and then returned to the sitting room while Tonks brought the glass of water to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed while he drank it.
"So who is the charming woman who keeps threatening me with bodily harm if I don't lie down?" he asked, after a moment. Tonks smiled.
"Her name's Lucy Marsten -- well, Healer Marsten now, I guess. She's an -- old friend of mine, from school."
"A... naked friend?" Remus suggested, with a straight face. She did glare this time, but couldn't keep the smile out of it.
"Well, yes, if you want to be horrible about it..." He smiled, although it never quite reached his eyes.
"You'd be amazed how much better it makes me feel." Tonks sighed, trying to sound exasperated, although that deadened look in his eyes kept taking the humor out of it.
"Yeah, we were sort of dating for a while," she answered, steering back into safe waters -- or safer, at any rate. "...Well, if by 'dating,' you mean that we loathed and despised each other and sometimes had sex. She was in Slytherin, so, you know... But she was always brilliant, got O's in everything, and she was a year ahead of me; she graduated, started an internship at St. Mungo's, and then I finished up and went off to take my Auror tests, and we lost touch. But I knew she was a Healer, so..." She shrugged.
"Well." Remus looked more than a little alarmed by all of this information, but amused, too, despite the climbing of his eyebrow. She supposed that was something. After a long moment's pause, he added, "You didn't have to get a Healer to take care of me, you know."
Tonks leaned forward and kissed him on his forehead. "Yes I did," she said, and squeezed his hand. "Do you want something to eat? I could make you some soup..."
Remus smiled that not-quite-in-his-eyes smile again, and shook his head. "No -- thank you, really, but I'm not hungry."
"Are you sure?" She tilted her head to the side, feeling the worry-frown cross her face again and helpless to stop it. "It'd only take a second, and you might feel better."
"I'm sure. Thank you." At the sight of her face, he squeezed her hand back, and shook his head. "It's all right, Tonks; it really is. I'll -- eat when I feel a bit better."
Which sounded like a lie if she'd ever heard one, but she let it go for now. He was tired, and she didn't want to push him.
"All right. Get some more sleep. I'll be here if you need anything."
When she came back out into the sitting room, Lucy was standing, sorting out her robes, with her hair in much better order; she turned when Tonks came in and smiled, maybe even apologetically. "I really do have to go home," she said; "I'm on duty again this evening. But I'll come by first thing tomorrow morning, make sure he's healing all right."
"Okay. Thank you." She said this last with such sincerity that Lucy actually paused, and smiled at her again, a much warmer smile. Maybe that was what emboldened her, or maybe it was just -- well, Lucy. "I have to go back to work tomorrow, but... would you like to meet for lunch, or something?"
And Lucy beamed, and she was still so, so beautiful when she smiled. "I thought you'd never ask." Tonks grinned back at her, and then -- hell with it -- met her as she came around the couch for another kiss.
"This means a lot to me, you know," she murmured as she pulled back. Lucy ruffled her hair (which, to Tonks's contentment, was back to being spiky and bright blue today).
"It's really no problem," she said, and Tonks could hear that she meant it.
---
Remus healed, slowly.
Someone left him the Daily Prophet with the article about Sirius's acquittal. He read it twice, and then lay for a long time with his eyes closed.
When he was well enough, he braved returning to Sirius's father's bedroom for some more spare clothing; he had moved a few pieces down before the moon, and had slept on the couch in the sitting room in the interim, when he had slept at all. Digging to the bottom of one of the drawers he and Sirius had shared (trying not to see, or smell, or think) he found an envelope with his name on the back of it in Sirius's writing. Nothing of great value was said inside; they had said everything they'd needed to say to one another while Sirius was still alive, really, and he knew it. But there was Sirius's signature on the statement that the house and Sirius's Gringotts account were both Remus's now, to do with whatever he saw fit, and that was something, perhaps. In reading two lines of parchment he became richer and more secure than he had ever been in his life, and all he'd had to do was trade in the one thing he'd ever really wanted. If only he'd known earlier it was so easy.
At the bottom of the envelope, denting out its surface slightly, there was also a ring cast in white gold. It fit perfectly, and Remus did not take it back off after trying.
When he left the room, he locked the door behind him. The year was over.
---
It took two conversations, however, to make him understand what that truly meant.
Tonks's euphemistic friend Lucy came back once more, to make sure all his cuts were healing over and give him a few more potions, and made him lie back on the bed while she ran a few tests with her wand. Examining the shimmering row of numbers that emerged, through a pair of glasses he hadn't seen before, she said in a neutral, doctor's voice, "Tonks says you're recovering very slowly, but you seem to be getting around all right on your own." She twitched the wand to dispel them, and picked up the vial of potion she had left on the bedside table. Her tone sounded almost absent-minded as she continued. "She also tells me you haven't been eating, which I hardly imagine I need tell you is a terrible idea for someone whose body is still healing."
Remus had no response for that at all, really, but before he could even try to formulate one, Lucy cut him off, still looking at the vial and not at him. "She fancies you a bit, you know." She took off the glasses and set them aside as she stirred the potion around. "Not in a way that I think she's planning to hop the fence anytime soon, mind you, but she cares for you very much. Much more than she ever did for me." She said this in a matter-of-fact, rancorless way that somehow made him feel guilty, and when she finally looked at him, it was a plain, blank look he had trouble interpreting.
"If you give up and die, you're going to make Nymphadora Tonks cry," she told him. "And if you do that, I feel I should warn you, I am going to have to reanimate your corpse, so that I can kill you again, in a far more painful way."
They looked at each other for a long moment.
"Thank you," Remus said finally, out of a lack of anything else.
"Not at all." She pressed the potion into his hand. "Drink this, get some more rest, and then I would strongly suggest you eat."
And she swept from the room, leaving him to stare after her with the vial still sitting cold against his fingers.
---
It was not much later when there came a knock on the door, perhaps a few hours into the evening; and his invitation summoned in not Tonks, as he'd expected, but Moody, who stumped in leaning on his walking stick. "Hello, Lupin," Moody grunted, getting himself close enough to heave himself up on the edge of the bed beside where Remus was sitting. "Getting on all right?"
"I'm terrified of lesbians, Alastor," Remus said, it being the first thing on his mind. Moody gave him a look of bemused unsurprise, before nodding.
"Wise way to live." He took out his hip flask, hesitated, and then offered it to Remus, who shook his head.
"No, thank you."
Moody nodded again, and took a swig himself. He took a longer time to cap and put away the flask than was probably necessary; when he finally spoke, he was looking meditatively out at the door, not at Remus. His outsized blue eye wandered across the bedroom as he did, lingering on the bottle Lucy's potion had occupied.
"Retirement or no, I've been in this business a long time," he said at last. "Too long, some might say, and they might well be right." He turned his head to look at Remus then, and his magical eye only wandered on its own a minute longer before coming to settle on him too. "But long enough that I think I've got some idea what you're going through."
Remus didn't say anything, and suddenly he didn't want to look at Moody or his too-piercing blue eye anymore. He looked at the floor, instead.
"He's gone and you're still around, and you can't for the life of you figure out why," Moody's voice continued anyway. "That about the long and short of it?" He didn't look up, or nod, but he didn't need to. "Yeah, I know. And you probably don't want me to give you a reason, either, but I've got to, because there's a damn good one."
"What?" Remus asked. He was surprised to hear his own voice, but he couldn't tell if Moody was too. The older man just looked at him for a moment, considering.
"We're already down one and can't afford two," Moody said, in the gentlest voice Remus had ever heard him use. It was still only inches shy of a bark, but the difference was oddly touching anyway. "It's that simple."
When Remus didn't say anything, he sighed, and leaned his walking stick against the side of the bed. "In the end, living or dying is a man's own decision, as far as I'm concerned. And once this war is over, it'll be yours -- hell, it's yours now, come to that." He took out his flask again, drank, and scraped his hand across the back of his mouth. "But you're not done here, Lupin. We need you." He paused then, and in another rare, peculiar gesture, reached over to pat Remus on the hand. Scar tissue meeting scar tissue; and that was a thought that made an ache spread all across Remus's chest that he could not have explained. "And I'm more sorry for that than I can tell you."
Remus sat staring at where Moody's hand had rested long after it had been taken away again, and finally Moody got back to his feet, heaving the walking stick back under his weight. "I've said all I'm going to say," he said, gruff again. "Rest's up to you. Take care, all right?"
He'd limped almost all the way to the door when Remus said to his back, "Moody?"
Moody half-turned back, his ruined face flat and curious, and Remus tried to look away again and found he couldn't. "Thank you," he said, finally.
And Moody, still flat, as grim as ever he was, replied, "Don't."
---
The next morning, Tonks came to knock on his half-open door, as he was sitting and looking at the ring on his finger again; when he looked up she came in and sat beside him, pulling him into a hug. "How are you feeling?" she murmured, and he hugged her back, feeling a little awkward after what Lucy had told him.
But when he said, "Better," at least, he meant it. She leaned back and smiled at him with such relief that he could tell she'd heard the difference.
"Good." They pulled apart, and she gestured vaguely toward the door. "Arthur and Moody and I were just talking; we're going to King's Cross with Arthur this afternoon. We were thinking we'd meet Harry at the station and terrorize his Muggles a bit. You want to come?"
He stared at her for half a second -- and, somehow, found an honest laugh inside himself. It wasn't much of one, but he thought it would do for a little while longer. "Very much so," he said, and Tonks broke into a grin. "Although I don't know how terrifying I'm capable of being, at present."
"Oh, you're fine." She leaned back, giving him a thoughtful once-over. "You could try to, you know, swish a bit; 'gay' they'd probably understand much faster than 'werewolf'." That didn't quite make him laugh, but he did manage a smile. And Tonks smiled back, so it must have been all right.
"I'll pass, thank you. But I would like to come along." He stood up, and she stood up, and then he paused. "Tonks?" She looked up at him, and he looked down, and tried on a smile again. He didn't think this one carried its weight quite so well, but maybe it would do, too. "Thanks. For everything."
She didn't smile, but maybe that was all right. "Sure, Remus," she said, and for a moment, frowning at him but still managing to seem touched, she looked much younger even than she was. "That's all right."
They both hovered for a few moments, awkwardly, and then she produced a smile and left with a 'come on when you're ready' gesture in his direction. He looked around, and went to sort through the heap of clothes he'd piled on the chair in the corner until he found his old overcoat. It was warm out, but he felt like he needed some sort of extra protection between him and the world: a second skin that would keep everything outside, or everything in.
He would probably be back in this room in another hour, at the outside, but somehow he gave in to a need to look around it one more time, as though he were leaving it for good. It wasn't the room upstairs, the one where he had slept in the bed beside Sirius every night he could for all of this last, best year; where he couldn't help wondering if, if he had just been there beside Sirius a night or two more, Sirius might still be alive and waiting for him. It was another room, an empty room in a house that belonged to him now and that he didn't know very well, with all the personality of a hotel room and all the silence of a morgue. It was a place, he sensed strongly, that he was passing through, not one where he would ever live.
Remus pulled on his coat, and tugged the collar out from where it got trapped against his jumper, flipping it up where it belonged. He was not all right, and he knew that, and he could live with it. Nor was he done, and he knew that too; and, he was beginning to realize, that, too, he could live with. And as long as he could, he was going to. His only other option was to give up, and that was not an option. There was a ring on his finger, a girl with bubble-gum-colored hair out in the kitchen getting ready to go, and a pack of murderers -- two in particular -- out there somewhere in the world, all of whom said it was not.
And it was never to late to make things right.