shuffle:
of a kind

There was no delayed reaction. He first caught the scent immediately after the older students filed into the Great Hall, talking and laughing amongst themselves; it was already there by the time the doors banged open again and admitted a slightly damp and worried-looking straggle of new students. Not a first year, at least, he thought, or he would have thought if his hands hadn't been braced against the staff table in the sudden stunned silence of his brain.

Actually, as it turned out, the first thought that he was capable of having was that Dumbledore hadn't warned him about this. Which was a stupid thought to have. No, it wasn't. Dumbledore must know about it; Dumbledore knew about him. He cast a glance toward the center of the table, but Dumbledore was beaming serenely out at the student body, paying no attention to his colleagues to either side.

He'd been mistaken. Of course he had; this had never happened to him before. It was probably one of the staff, he just hadn't caught it before, it'd taken a minute to drift over to him, and... and that was absurd. Who would it be? Professor Flitwick? And it had come to him instantly, at the moment the students had come in. Regardless of his own lack of experience, there was no mistaking the timing.

A vague, chiding thought about internalized stereotypes crossed his mind when his eyes drifted toward the Slytherin table.

It didn't matter, though; they caught long before he could get there, on a small group of older Gryffindors. Seventh years, he thought, certainly not younger than sixth. At first he couldn't even say what about the boy had attracted his attention. There didn't seem to be anything particularly special about him, aside from that -- oh, yes, that was probably it, actually -- he reminded Remus of a boy he had known when he himself was at school, his crush of several years as a matter of fact: poised and handsome, too-long dark hair that flopped into his eyes, which had a heaviness to their lids that lent him a drowsy, indulgent look. This boy was slimmer than that one had been, though, and paler, didn't look the athlete like -- what was his name? -- had, but good-looking all the same. Not that Remus was in any position to notice that, of course. He -- the boy -- was sitting to one side of another, taller and ganglier boy, who had glasses and rumpled hair and a slightly daft expression, and a pretty redheaded girl quite literally on his arm. She was laughing at something the boy in glasses had said, at the same time that she was raising a mock-threatening fist; as Remus watched, the boy in glasses turned back to the dark-haired boy in an apparent appeal, but the first boy, though he was smiling, seemed distracted. There was a frown-line between his brows, and he was raising his head, casting his eyes around the room, as though he were looking for something.

As though he had smelled something peculiar on the air.

No, Remus thought instantly, and spared only a moment of guilt for the entire hall's worth of other children he had just volunteered for condemnation. No. It didn't matter. Not that one. Not him.

At the moment the boy was surveying the line of first years who were being Sorted at the front, applauding halfheartedly for the calls of 'Gryffindor!'. He raised his hand to push hair out of his eyes, and as the sleeve of his school robes pulled back the torchlight picked out a long, pink, new line of scar running down his forearm and disappearing under the fabric. Which of course meant nothing, because there were plenty of ways an attractive young man could have acquired a large, recent scar on his forearm. Any young man. There were plenty of ways any young man could have acquired a large, recent...

And at that moment, the boy came to the same conclusion as Remus about the first years (except he didn't, because that wasn't what he was looking for, please not him not him), and raised his eyes to the staff table. Where the only new teacher was sitting frozen just to Dumbledore's left, with his hands clenched around the lip of the wood, staring back at him.

Their eyes locked.

The Sorting was just coming to an end by the time Remus was able to wonder how he could ever have thought there was anything drowsy about those eyes. Even 'intense' seemed to fall short.

Then the boy's friend, with the glasses, seemed to notice something was amiss; he waved a hand in front of the dark-haired boy's face, making him blink and then swat it away, grinning sheepishly. And the boy turned back to his friends then, and allowed himself to be drawn back into whatever conversation it was they were having... but his eyes never quite left Remus. For the rest of the evening and the entirety of the feast, even when Remus was struggling his hardest to pull himself away and focus on other things, the gaze was always there: it rested on Remus with a weight he could nearly feel. A sort of horizontal gravity, pulling him like a compass needle. North and north and north.

He had no idea how, when Professor Dumbledore announced "our new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Professor R.J. Lupin," his legs managed to hold him up.

---

And when he had the seventh years in class on Tuesday, there was no anticipation. The dark-haired boy was one of the very first students to arrive at the classroom, and he sat down at once near the back and rested his heavy gaze squarely back on Remus's face. From the very beginning, he never liked to keep Remus waiting.

So Remus, of course, pretended to be busy with other things behind his desk until the boy's friends arrived, which let up some of the pressure. The pretty blonde girl who sat down on the other side of the boy didn't hurt, either, at least until Remus started watching things out of the corner of his eye. They might have been anywhere from nodding acquaintances to a couple; neither the girl's behavior nor the boy's gave him the slightest clue. She fawned and giggled in his direction and made countless gambits to engage him in conversation, and he smiled at her and answered her questions with polite, single-word responses, and kept looking directly at Remus. If they were dating, she must have had a nearly inexhaustible supply of patience, but then he had seen teenaged girls put up with far worse in the course of his own adolescence. And there was nothing particularly bored or irritated about the way he responded to her, for that matter -- merely a self-possession, an aloofness, that seemed to limit the extent of the entire universe to his own immediate vicinity. He didn't seem uninterested in her, he just hardly seemed to be aware that there was anything there in which he might take an interest. The boy had spun himself into a kind of mirrored eggshell, and the pretty blonde girl was sitting just outside it, speaking only to her own reflection.

The class was full by now and too loud to hear anything they were saying, but the boy with glasses seemed to make some joke directly to her, across their mutual friend in the middle, and she exploded into giggles, resting a familiar hand on the dark-haired boy's arm. Remus thought he had never in his life seen anyone look so desperately unhappy as she did right then.

He prepared himself to hate this boy. In point of fact he longed for it.

He took roll at the beginning of class, which he hadn't been planning to do until he announced that he was going to do it, and again he wasn't made to wait.

"Black, Sirius."

"Here," the dark-haired boy said, and Remus tried and failed to look everywhere but at his more-than-intense eyes. They were closer this time, and accompanied by a slight, curving smile that could not possibly look shy.

The blonde girl took the boy's (Sirius's. Sirius Black's. Sirius's.) distraction as an opportunity to cast him an adoring look. Did she know? She couldn't possibly. He would have been admonished not to tell even if he didn't know better. Did the boy with the glasses? Did anyone? Were the people who knew this boy's, this Sirius's, Sirius's secret, were they the only ones allowed inside that mirrored eggshell? Was that why his gaze was fixed on Remus, why Remus felt so included, suddenly, so close, as if the room were shrinking but only between the two of them, as though to bring him up so close that the boy and he could feel each other's breath?

Sirius. The boy's name was Sirius.

The next one he called felt like paper in his mouth.

---

The class went well; the rather advanced counter-jinx work he started them out on went over with varying degrees of success, but gave him a good idea of where he'd be starting from. Even the steady fixed gaze on him from beginning to end he found he could get used to. After a while it was almost pleasant, which he took as a bad sign.

He pretended to be surprised when he looked up from collecting the books on his desk and found Sirius Black standing there, but of course he wasn't. Even over the sounds of the other students leaving the room, chatting over the assigned homework, the gaze had burned right through into the center of his consciousness, made it impossible for him not to be aware at every second of the owner of those eyes.

"Hi," the boy said, smiling that small, shy smile again (except it couldn't be shy, it couldn't possibly, because boys like this weren't shy), and Remus straightened and smiled back. Measuring every inch of it carefully.

"Hello. Mr. Black, wasn't it?"

"Yes, sir." He had a soft, low voice, not a man's yet, but definitely thinking about it. He was even more handsome up close. His mouth had a broody look to it that disappeared when he smiled, turning soft-looking and full instead, a mouth that could haunt someone's dreams and inspire the worst possible thoughts. Remus didn't look at it as it shaped the words, "Could we talk for a moment?"

"Certainly," Remus said, or listened to someone else say it. "My office?"

Sirius nodded. They went.

What was bothering him -- down at the back of his mind, this was, where he was still capable of being bothered -- was that he himself was unusually old, for what he was. The bite had been eight years ago this past spring; he had always heard the life expectancy guessed at about five years. Remus was by all accounts three years overdue for his own unpleasant death, and not, generally speaking, very comfortable with this fact.

And yet every instinct he had in his body told him that he was leading back to his office a considerably older wolf than he.

It was a problem in more ways than one. Even leaving the life expectancy issues aside, he was also leading an eighteen-year-old boy. The mathematics were enough to bother anyone.

He sat down on one side of the desk and Sirius sat down on the other, and as though they had sat on switches, the tone of the encounter changed all at once. Some sort of electrical charge seemed to fill the air, making all of Remus's hair want to stand up, making it difficult for him to breathe. Suddenly the participants in this conversation were not limited to the human ones. Suddenly there were more than two people in this room.

And Sirius was still staring at him.

"Well," Remus said after a moment, when he almost trusted his voice again. "This has been a surprise."

"A good one?" Sirius said. Something had shifted behind his eyes, leaving something else naked that Remus wasn't sure he wanted to see. He wasn't smiling now, and he didn't sound remotely shy. Remus opted to ignore the question.

"I noticed you the other night, in the Hall." Sirius nodded, both his understanding and his agreement, and Remus didn't look. "Professor Dumbledore hadn't -- " warned me, he almost said, but that sounded terrible. " -- hadn't informed me. About you." It seemed very hot in his office. He would have to speak with someone about that. "I trust he knows, at least. He, ah, knows about me."

"He knows about me too." He risked another look at Sirius, and found all the calm poise the boy hadn't had earlier. No eggshell here, though. He seemed to radiate himself, to spread his aura out over the room and claim it. He had no boundaries. And oh, oh, he was no boy right now. "He's why I was able to come here."

This conversation was useless. Worthless. Full of stupid, bulky, oversized human words. He wanted to be growling, howling, not talking, down on all fours. He wanted to roll over and show his belly. He wanted to be claimed and adopted and taken in and fucked and student damn it student student.

He took as subtle a deep breath as he could and tried again.

"How do you..." No good, he sounded terrible. Again. "How do you -- ah. Manage?"

And now Sirius was smiling: the not-shy-at-all smile he had been expecting earlier and hadn't seen, a sly, slow, hot smile that said he knew everything Remus had been thinking and Remus could only hope and hope it was bluffing. "You know the Shrieking Shack, in Hogsmeade?" No 'sir' now, either. Not from this one. "It's not really haunted. They have me go up there to change. The people in town heard all the howling and crashing and reckoned it was ghosts, but it's just me."

"I see." Whatever he'd just heard, Remus was certain it had been fascinating. Meanwhile, Sirius had somehow ended up more sprawling in the chair than sitting in it, and the shape of his body was a long, liquid series of tantalizing hints under his robes. His knees seemed to have developed opposing magnetic poles. Not that Remus was looking. No, not.

"What are you going to do?"

That jolted his eyes away all at once. Nothing! he was halfway to answering, before he remembered they'd been talking about the full moon. God, he wished Sirius would stop smiling at him like that. "I don't know yet," he managed, after only a moment's pause, tearing his eyes back to some neutral space between his desk and Sirius's feet. "I had thought I might occupy a dungeon; I understand Hogwarts has several."

"You should come with me." Almost before he'd finished talking, bald and solid and only a thin coat of velvet away from being an order.

Remus was equally certain that he was not anywhere near on the verge of agreeing with this terribly, terribly bad idea. "I -- wouldn't want to impose..."

"You wouldn't be." And did he flicker there for a moment? Did the smile slide away from his face and a more earnest, uncertain look start to creep into its place? Remus didn't dare look closer, but somehow he had the dizzying sensation that they were both there at once: the sly, teasing smile and its shyer, younger substitute. "I'd like the company. And to get to talk to you some more. Would it be all right?"

And that, at least, had been an entirely human question. And whether that was what threw up Remus's last feeble flicker of resistance or what kicked it away, it was impossible for him to tell.

"I don't see why not," Remus said, although he did. And when he smiled, the smile he got in return was the tiny one from before, the one that couldn't be shy but was. Not swaggering and arrogant, not resentful or aggressive or cold. Shy. Uncertain. Reaching out from the other side of that mirrored wall, the one that could imprison one person inside just as easily as it could keep another out.

The smile of a boy and no wolf. Which really should have made the room feel less overheated, not more.

There were sounds and voices in the next room again, and Remus allowed his enormous gratitude to carry him to his feet. "The fourth years," he explained to Sirius, who looked at once apologetic and disappointed, all human again.

"And I have class -- " He stood up too, and they looked at each other, and Remus offered an awkward hand across the desk.

"I'll see you soon, then. I mustn't make you late."

Still, with as long as it took them both to draw their hands away again, in the end neither one quite made it anywhere on time.

---

He'd thought the first day of class that Professor Lupin had beautiful hands: long and graceful, almost delicate. The one wrapped around Sirius's cock now felt as good as it looked. It squeezed its way up to the head, then almost didn't touch him at all on its way back down to the tangle of dark hair around the base of the shaft, a barest brush of fingers and then an almost painful tight squeeze, again and then again and then again. He was moaning on every stroke now, drawing a smile across the older man's lips, and he was here, after all these days and weeks of wanting, after one class after another where he'd just sat and stared and daydreamed of this, after one night after another where he'd taken a second shower for the day and come in his hand with his back leaned on the wet wall with his eyes closed and thinking of exactly this, here, he was here. It was happening. It was his. Bent over Sirius Professor Lupin was naked and lean and as scarred as the boy underneath him, nobody's rock-hard flawless magazine model but perfect anyway, his mouth soft and close and his tongue touching Sirius's and his hand, his hand --

And Sirius came just as he always had, arching his shoulders back into the stones underneath them and wanting to moan a first name that he didn't even know.

And just as he always had, he sighed just a little when he opened his eyes and it was gone.

From a great distance, he heard Gwen let out a small sigh of her own as she sat up, and he watched her back through half-closed eyes as she picked up the heap of her robes, and then of his, and rummaged through the pockets of each. Finally she turned up a scrap of tissue, and dropped the robes again as she wiped off her hand. Which admittedly was quite graceful and delicate, if small and distinctly feminine.

"It's just my luck, you know?" she said, without looking up. Sirius tried to frown, found it required too much energy, and settled for just looking up at the stars some more. He supposed someday they were going to figure out that the Astronomy tower was a prime make-out spot at night, but he hoped it wouldn't be anytime soon.

When he didn't say anything she glanced over at him, then looked away again, pitching the tissue with great accuracy over the tower's parapet. She paused for a moment, then picked up his robes again and came up this time with one of his cigarettes and a wand. As she stuck it in her mouth, muttered, and then touched the small blue flame to the tip, Sirius found himself overcome with an unexpected, unexpectedly strong wave of affection. He really liked Gwen a lot.

"I'm mad for this boy nearly since third year," she continued, muffled before she took the cigarette out of her mouth, "and I get on him and won't leave him alone until finally he starts going with me, and then I find out -- there's nobody home." Gwen was from Manchester originally, and though she'd tried to get rid of her accent, he could still hear the faint drawl to the vowels on there's nobody home. "Like talking to a really nice wall." She laughed, breathing out smoke, and pushed blonde hair out of her eyes. "It's the story of my life, all right."

Sirius turned his head to look at her, but all he could see was her back; he buttoned his trousers again as he sat up. Though he opened his mouth a time or two, he still couldn't think of anything to say, and she stared at the end of the cigarette as it streamed smoke. When she finally did look at him, he saw that she was crying a little. He tried to put an arm around her, but lost his nerve halfway, and dropping it back to his side left him feeling awkward and stupid.

"Do you like me at all?" she asked, with the corner of her mouth twisting in a tiny smile. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to return it or not.

"Sure I do."

She just nodded, and took another drag on her cigarette. "You like somebody better, though?" He didn't answer that one, either, just froze up, and finally she shook her head. Still looking at him. "You know, I'd like to see the girl who could get your attention, Sirius. Or the boy, I don't even know. Really, I would." Her eyes were steady and leaking just a little, and she reached out and touched his cheek with her fingers. It seemed to come from a long way away.

"I'm sorry," he said, a few moments later. She tilted her head in mild surprise, then laughed.

"What are you sorry about?"

He didn't have an answer for that, either, so he just smiled a little and stayed quiet.

"Is that my shirt on the other side of you?" He nodded. "Let's have it, then."

She reached behind herself and reclasped her bra before putting it on again, doing up the buttons with the cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth. It was down to a butt by the time she was done, and she stubbed it out and sent it to join the tissue before retrieving her panties from the tangle of cloaks and wriggling them back up her legs, under her skirt. He just sat and didn't quite watch her. This, too, seemed to take a long time.

At last Gwen let out a breath, patted herself down, and then leaned over to plant a kiss on Sirius's cheek. Her face was still wet to the touch. "I've had a really lousy time dating you," she murmured in his ear, and then pulled back, smiling, and stood up. "Good night, love."

I'm a werewolf, Sirius said. I've never been able to tell anyone. Except I don't have to tell Professor Lupin, because he's one too. If you feel like you haven't ever really gotten to know me, it's because you haven't ever really gotten to know me.

But now you know, he said, and you'll probably hate me, but I just thought you deserved to hear it. And if you wanted to see who could get my attention, well, now you know that too.

I'm really sorry, Gwen, he said. I really liked you and I'll miss you a lot.

"Good night," he said out loud. The doors shut with the softest of booms, and he stayed for a long time, watching the stars.

---

It was a week before the full moon, not to mention well after classroom hours, when the knock came on his office door. "Professor Lupin? Are you there?"

Remus's head jerked up from his paperwork a little harder than it needed to. Even if he couldn't have recognized the voice a mile away, there was really only one student who would be knocking at this hour. It was like fate, only not so irritating.

"Yes?" he called back. "Come in." The door creaked open just enough to admit Sirius's shaggy head and shoulders at first, and he wore that maybe-timid, maybe-not expression again as he peered inside.

"Hi," he said, starting on a breathless little smile. "I hope I'm not bothering you."

"Not at all," Remus lied -- though 'bothering' was perhaps too strong a word for it. 'Unsettling,' perhaps, was better, but that was a daily state of affairs by now, and hardly worthy of comment anymore. "Can I help you with something?"

At that Sirius slipped the rest of the way in, and closed the door behind him. He was without the outer robe of his uniform this evening, and the shirt and trousers fitted the lines of his body in a way that was probably inappropriate to think about. "I just wanted to know if I could talk to you for a bit."

Not right now, I'm sorry, I'm really much too busy, some other, sane Remus said in an alternate dimension somewhere. "Of course," Remus said. He gestured to the other side of his desk, to the chair Sirius had gone sprawling across in such recent memory, and then winced inside at the thought. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Thanks."

Sirius sat, and as he did so Remus thought something in his demeanor had changed again; the shyness seemed to be ebbing out of him, replaced with a calm poise that was inexplicably dangerous. Which one was the act and which was real was impossible to say. He didn't say anything at first, and didn't look at Remus, either.

"Was there something you wanted to discuss with me?" Remus said at last, when unprompted Sirius said nothing at all. At night, alone, in my office? God, what am I doing?

Sirius kept looking at the floor for a few more moments, and then finally looked up. When he did, it was with that look Remus had seen in his eyes before -- like the boy's eyes had shifted aside, and left the eyes of something else completely exposed beneath them. But not shifted aside completely; the sense of what might have been shyness or hesitation was still there, a curious echo doubling his confidence, as though two completely different people were using the same body to do and say the same things.

"I've seen you looking at me," was what he, or they, said now. "In class. You do it all the time."

The slow, leisurely slide down Remus's stomach made had nothing to do with surprise, everything to do with instant cold dread and something stuffed down under it, something not so cold at all. So hot, in fact, it had turned his throat to a sudden desert. Sirius's eyes were steady on him again, compass needles that pierced his skin and went all the way inside.

"I...." he began, but there was no breath to continue. There was nothing. No I do no such thing, please don't trouble me with this nonsense, no of course I do, I look at everyone, people have eyes and these things happen, what exactly is the problem? Silence and white noise in his head. Sirius's eyes, steady, burning, on him.

"It's when you're talking about something else, or you're not paying attention. You just end up looking at me again and again." He picked up again as though Remus hadn't said anything; for all practical purposes, Remus supposed he hadn't. Calm, arrogant, and somehow, somewhere, shaky. "I know you want me. I can smell it."

Not a boy anymore. A boy he could resist, pat on the head, explain using sense and reason why this was a bad idea beyond the worst of all bad ideas that had ever wormed their way into his adolescent mind. A boy he could shame, if all else failed. Not this thing. Not this beast. "I don't know what you...."

"Yes, you do." Somehow Sirius had reached the point where he was sprawling in the chair again, lounging with his knees spread, and now a smirk uncoiled itself across his face the same way. "It's all over you. I can smell how hard I make you. You want to fuck me?" It was a tease and a plea at the same time, the same voice saying two different things with the same words. "You want me to fuck you?"

Hard? He didn't doubt Sirius could smell that; he suspected a full human might be able to at this point. He might possibly be harder than he'd ever been in his life, enough that he would be swaying if he weren't gripping his desk in both hands. "Sirius." He couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe. "Sirius, I... I really don't think we should be..."

"I'd like it, you know." Cutting through his protests like he hadn't said a word. "I'd love it. I've been looking at you, too, thinking about you all through class, wanking about you, wanting you..." A slight sneer curled his lip, as though of amusement or disgust, as though he were speaking in the third person: the wolf mocking the boy, or maybe just Remus's imagination all along. And God, Sirius was hard too; the way he was lounging made it impossible to miss the rise in his trousers. "I want it, don't worry about that."

"It's not that." Remus raked his fingers back through his hair, trying to give any excuse to break eye contact. It worked, but only briefly. "Sirius, you're simply too--"

"I know." Sirius's chuckle was hot and liquid. It should have been illegal for any sound to be that sexual, especially the sound of someone laughing at him. "It's okay. You don't even have to touch me." And even without eye contact, even without looking at Remus at all, his voice was suddenly a powerful, irresistible command that made everything else a moot point. "Stand up."

No. This was where it had to end. Miles past the far border of propriety, well into the danger area outside where there was nothing but a highly attractive void, this was where it stopped. He would lose his job, and he would never find another. What little reputation he had managed to scrape together, against all odds and over every hurdle his condition could present, would vanish. He shouldn't even have let the boy in, should never have allowed him to start speaking. This was the end.

"Sirius, no," he said, in a weak, waffling voice, but he did say it, and then he even dared as much as, "I think you should leave." And there it was. Everything he had meant to say. Everything he should have said all along.

And by the time he had finished saying them he was already on his feet.

"Shhh." He -- it -- wasn't even listening. The wolf spoke in the voice of somebody he needed to obey; the voice of someone -- something -- he had to roll over and show his throat to. It went deeper than hearing, deeper than thought. "We aren't doing anything wrong. You're all the way on the other side of your desk. That's safe, isn't it?" Sirius rolled his head back, looking up at him with dark smoky eyes and parted lips. "You're just standing up."

There was really no possibility of resistance. Sirius spoke and he believed it, had to do it; he couldn't do anything else. And if it wasn't Sirius on the other side of the desk, it wasn't him who stood on this side anymore, either. The spreading, insane calm that was filling him, making him wonder what was wrong, what he was so worried about, should be clue enough of that. He stayed standing, staring at Sirius, a vague, inane smile finding its way onto his face. It was all the answer he needed to give.

"Good," Sirius said in a low purr. "Now, take out your prick. Let me see how hard you are."

Yes. Of course. His fingers jittered on the fastenings of his robes, but the panic already seemed to have happened a long time ago, to somebody else. He was hard, and proud to show just how hard the other wolf made him, how hard and long he was in his own hand, standing there, close enough to smell. Sirius -- or whoever -- shifted in his chair as he did, a restless roll of his body that was his only acknowledgement of the erection jutting out from below his belly. "Stroke it," he commanded, and the amusement had gone out of his voice; he sounded dry, and intense. "Stroke it for me."

He didn't have to be asked twice. He barely had to be asked once. Gripping the back of his chair with one hand, Remus let the other travel the length of his prick, down and back again, letting the clammy chill of his palms -- inexplicable now to his body's other occupant -- cool briefly the hot, soft skin. Slowly, now, not too fast -- he would come so soon if he let himself speed up, if he let his hand close, and his elder and better wanted to see.

The wolf dressed in a boy's skin who was watching him was breathing through his open mouth now, and his eyes were darker and heavier-lidded than ever; he was sprawled completely limp in the chair, staring, looking only as hungry and predatory as he should. "Good," he breathed -- and even now there could have been a boy's voice in there too, a teenaged boy's fear and excitement and unsteadiness. He barely seemed to realize he was speaking. "Good... You're perfect. Mine."

So quiet here -- only the sound of their breathing, and Sirius's voice, the line that was guiding them both through this, the faint rustle of Remus's hand disturbing fabric as he jerked himself harder. So easy to forget they weren't the only two creatures in the world.

"Yeah." The wolf that was in Sirius seemed to have no problems with human words, though, at least. "Fuck, yeah. Like that." He made a small sound, almost murmured, maybe a moan, and it didn't sound like a wolf at all. "Jerk it. Show me how much you want it." He bit his lip to keep from crying out, not even knowing why, the higher functions of his brain useless and redundant, and the newest restless gasping moan just drove him on. "Wish I were fucking you -- Wish it were me inside you, jerking you off, making you come -- do it, come, I want to see you get yourself off, I want you to come all over your desk thinking about me, please -- "

And the wolf didn't say please, the wolf commanded, it didn't ask, that was Sirius --

He came, and came hard -- hard enough that it didn't feel like he would ever be able to stop, and that was going to be a tremendously embarrassing condition to have to explain to Poppy later. He came shuddering and gripping his desk and jerking his cock, his hand working so hard it slipped and he rapped his knuckles on his chair hard enough to send it scooting a few inches with a wooden squeak. The boy -- not wolf, boy -- in front of him gasped at the same time, his breathing spiking deeper and faster when Remus's did, shivering and staring transfixed and no longer looking anything like the dominant party in this situation. By the time Remus could finally breathe again, even if he couldn't necessarily move or think, Sirius was just staring at him, not moving, his chest rising and falling in quick gasps. And he had no idea whether he had just come in spite of this slip, this break in the wolf before him, or because of it.

Remus stared at his desk. At some point he let his hand fall away, and he was acutely aware of its wetness, and of the splatters of come that had landed on the paperwork that he'd been working on. He'd been standing too close to the desk, that was all, he hadn't been paying attention. He hadn't been allowed to pay attention. There were spells that would dry them, of course, but it was the smell you could never get out. Not entirely.

There was no sound from the boy in front of him. None whatsoever. He might have been alone in his office, but for that soft breathing, the eyes he could still feel on him.

"Get out," he said, low, shaking, surprising even himself. And that produced a sound, at least -- a tiny strangled one from a human voice, and a jolting squeak of chair legs against the floor. Fury snapped out of the empty bottom of his mind like its vessel had broken open. "Get out."

"I -- " Sirius's breathing was even faster now, but from the sound of his voice, this was panic, not arousal. "I -- I -- I'm sorry -- "

"Get out!" Roaring now, shouting out his fury and arousal and shame and sorrow and desperate longing and desire -- too many colors just made brown, and together they all sounded only of anger. He thought Sirius said "I'm sorry" again, but it was so strangled and covered by the sound of the chair being knocked over that it was impossible to hear if he did. And then the boy was running from the room, crashing into the doorway with a thud on his way out, pounding out into the hallway and away.

Remus stood. After a while he took several deep breaths, then several more. Then he started the trick he had learned in grad school of counting in Hindi until he couldn't any longer. He made it so far as realizing he'd forgotten the word for eighty before he stopped, and it occurred to him that he had, in fact, calmed down. Also that he had yet to repair the disheveled state of his clothing, which he did with some alacrity.

All right. It had happened, obviously; there was nothing to be done about that. He should never have shouted at Sirius, either, but there was equally little to be done about that. On the other hand, he had also probably frightened the boy so badly it was unlikely to happen again, which was something. And with his head clearer, and with the aftereffects of one hell of an orgasm making it much more difficult to feel like bothering with the shame and the feeling of having been used against his will (never mind that it hadn't been entirely against his will, or that under very different circumstances he might have initiated it himself), he was finally able to think of just how much power Sirius had had over him in that situation, how much power the boy had obviously known he had, and yet how little of it he had exerted. With wolf speaking to wolf he could have made Remus do nearly anything; if he had ordered Remus onto his knees instead of his feet he would have encountered no more resistance. But he hadn't. If he hadn't cared, if he had only taken what he wanted and left Remus to deal with the consequences, it would have been one thing, but he hadn't. He had done what they both wanted, and been as careful as he really could have been, and Remus had shouted at him and chased him out.

He sighed and sank into his chair, resting his face in his hands. Sometime soon he was going to have to deal with the consequences of all this, with how badly -- and apparently reciprocally -- he wanted one of his seventh-year students, but for now, whether it was reasonable or not, he felt he owed Sirius an apology. He was supposed to be the adult here; he shouldn't be taking his own feelings out on such a young man. If he waited until tomorrow, in class, caught Sirius afterward and explained to him... but that was no good, he could just imagine what Sirius would go through in the intervening time.

Of course, finding Sirius now presumed he had any idea where the boy might have gone, which he didn't. But he had to try. At least now he could possibly catch Sirius before he made it back to his dormitory, where he could positively not go looking for him.

It was only when he went to lock his office door, on his way out, that he noticed that it had been locked by someone else until mere seconds before. The spell lingered only in traces, but the traces were already as familiar as his own name.

Never mind.

---

Of course, the only classroom between his office and the rest of the school proper with its door shut was perhaps a good enough hint to be going on with.

Though the handle was unlocked, there was something keeping the door from opening, as though something heavy were leaned against it. "Sirius?" he called through the wood, trying to sound as gentle as he could while keeping his voice low; there was a thump on the other side of the door, almost as though someone had sat up very fast and knocked his head against the wood, which probably answered the question of what was propping it shut. He tried very hard not to be amused, and dared raising his voice just a little. "Sirius, if you're in here, please, I'd like to talk with you. I'm sorry for shouting at you earlier; it was horrid of me. Please, will you open the door?"

Silence for a long time. "I..." An audible swallow. "...okay." Another long silence followed, punctuated only by the occasional rustling sound, and then Sirius's face was looking anywhere but at Remus from the gap between the door and the jamb. Remus smiled, and meant it for all its weariness.

"Thank you," he said; and then in the absence of any comment from Sirius, "It's all right, Sirius. I'm not angry."

Sirius didn't seem ready to take his eyes off the floor anytime soon, though. "I'm sorry," he said again, almost in a whisper, and with that dam breached everything else seemed to come tumbling out. "I'm really sorry, I didn't mean, I just -- " He stopped, took a deep breath, and seemed to try to calm down. And this, here, this was the real boy -- the one Remus had never really spoken to, alone or otherwise, the one who had been consistently replaced by the wolf in his presence. Sirius Black: a creature of extraordinary poise and grace, not to mention attractiveness, for his age, certainly, but also one as shy, interior, and awkward as Remus knew too well his condition could make a person -- and also, currently, terrified. "I know I shouldn't have. I'm sorry."

"It's all right," Remus replied, finding the smile across his face again and only hoping that it wouldn't be misread. "You're right, you shouldn't've, but I shouldn't've shouted, so I suppose we're in much the same position." He breathed, as Sirius had, and considered, began again as delicately as possible. "I do need you to realize, however, that exploiting that sort of power over me, or over anyone, for any reason... it isn't acceptable, Sirius. You mustn't do that again, if you and I are to have any sort of friendship -- which I would very much like to have."

Sirius was already nodding his head, so quickly and vigorously Remus feared he'd hurt himself, staring at the floor. "I know," he said when Remus paused, and then finally dared to look up at him, squinting as though into bright light. With the tiniest hint of an embarrassed smile he went on, hesitatingly, "...You ever have one of those ideas that seems really clever while you're having it, but once you've done it you can't imagine how you were ever that stupid?"

Oh, there was nothing for it; he was helpless in the face of this. He managed not to laugh, but his smile was larger and more genuine than ever. How badly he had wanted to hate this boy. "I think those sorts of ideas are a universal constant," he agreed with as much dignity as he could muster. "Which is why I'm not angry. Please believe me."

Sirius nodded again, looking still shaky but a little better now. "It's -- all right, though, I mean. I mean..." He looked at his feet again, leaning a little on the doorjamb. "I'd understand, if -- you know, you didn't want to... really talk to me anymore, apart from classes."

At that the laugh actually escaped, and Remus could only hope Sirius wouldn't be offended. "Oh, no, Sirius. No, not in the least." Sirius relaxed visibly at that, but this was all right. This was better. They were back where they belonged -- teacher on one side, student on the other, and, well, a door in between them. Probably for the best, really. ...Of course, his present calm probably had more than a little to do with the spectacular orgasm of several minutes previous, but that was better not to think about. "In fact, I was hoping you would still welcome my company for the transformation."

"...What? I -- " Sirius was looking at him again now, at least, his eyes wide. "Oh, no, I -- yes, I mean, I just thought... you still want to?"

"Of course. It's rather a lonely time, isn't it; I was looking forward to the companionship myself."

"Yeah. Me, er, me too." And now Sirius was smiling, too, even if it was only just a little bit. "I'd really like it." And flushed slightly, which was more charming than it had any right to be. Enough so to make Remus very grateful that he'd gotten off so recently, and his prick couldn't yet betray him by more than a few feeble twitches. It occurred to him, rather catastrophically in his opinion, that Sirius had never attended to his own erection before, and certainly hadn't had time (or possibly inclination) to do so in the interim. Possibly that was why Sirius wasn't coming out from behind the door. Possibly he shouldn't be holding Sirius up from that. Possibly he shouldn't be thinking about this to begin with. What had they been talking about?

"Well... that's good, then, isn't it?" The more fumbling his own smile became, the wider and more sincere Sirius's grew -- not mocking, merely... charmed? Probably. "That works out for all concerned."

"Yeah... thanks." Sirius faltered then, and dropped his eyes again. "Really. Thank you. You're -- well, I mean, I've botched up everything so bad, I really am sorry, and I just -- thanks. For understanding, I guess."

Remus stepped back from the door; he might as well give Sirius room to escape whenever the boy was ready. "It's all right," he repeated. Hopefully it sounded like he meant it, and not that he sounded as though he were trying to convince himself. "I just hope we can both understand that though there are special circumstances to our relationship, obviously, what with our similar," he coughed, "conditions, our relationship as instructor and instructee trumps all others. Yes?"

"I know." And in the tiny, embarrassed laugh Sirius let out just then, Remus thought he could already hear -- or possibly try to ignore -- the beginnings of a tremendous crush that had absolutely nothing to do with a wolf on either side. "...I don't even know your first name."

The shy hint, its relative absurdity to the situation, surprised him into laughter -- and into answering. "It's Remus," he admitted. "Remus John. I started using the 'R.J.' years back; thought it sounded more professional. But no. Remus, please." He quirked an eyebrow. "Just not in class."

"Right," Sirius said, with another small laugh that turned into a smile that was much too warm. "Remus? ...It's a nice name."

"Why thank you." He couldn't imagine why he was still talking, but he couldn't seem to stop. "Bit of a Pax Romana naming scheme in my family. I'm the youngest of five boys, and our mother was a classics major. Suppose I'm glad she didn't like 'Romulus,' as I don't care for it much myself."

Sirius actually laughed out loud this time, and it was a wonderful sound that sounded like it didn't get made enough. "I think it suits you. Remus, I mean." He ducked his head a little then, looking sheepish again. "Um... thanks. I, er..." This time his small laugh probably had more to do with nerves than with anything else. "Dinner's probably started already. I should probably go."

"Of course." Remus stepped back a little farther, as though it were some sort of skittish animal he were trying to allow out of the classroom, and not a largely rational teenaged boy. Sirius slipped the rest of the way out of the classroom, finally, and oh, Remus was not going to check to confirm his suspicions.

"I'll see you at the moon, then?" he asked, shyly, not quite turning to go yet. Oh, and every second they lingered here the more danger they were both in, and yet neither of them quite seemed able to leave. He forced himself into a kind, neutral smile.

"In class before that, I hope." Sirius chuckled a little, and he looked sheepish and nervous and unfathomably beautiful. "Have a good meal, then?" Feeling awkward, and strange, and making himself turn and start down the hall out anyway.

"Professor Lupin?"

"Yes?" Remus paused, turning back over his shoulder.

Sirius looked like he would have liked to say an awful lot of things just then, judging by the hesitations and false starts he went through, but finally he settled for wobbling his way to a smile. "Thanks," was all he said, but he said it with a great deal of sincerity.

With little else to offer, Remus nodded. "Thank you," he answered, though he couldn't quite say why, and whisked away before Sirius could possibly ask him exactly what part of the evening had been worthy of Remus's gratitude.

And assure himself though he might that he was not looking, when Remus went down to dinner himself, he couldn't help but notice that Sirius never turned up.

---

Sirius was already there when he arrived in the Shack, a half hour or so before moonrise; he was stretched out on the dusty canopy bed upstairs, with a book and a magical light hovering over his shoulder and his bookbag tucked up next to his feet, and looked to have settled in for some time. Any implications about Sirius's anticipation of this event Remus chose to ignore. When Remus wandered in, still uncertain of his surroundings, Sirius broke into that warm, shy smile again and set the book quickly aside.

"Hi," he said, swinging his legs off the bed to sit up, with a glance at the boarded windows. "Is it almost time?"

"Almost." And Remus couldn't imagine how the time between now and then could seem so much too long and so much too short at once. Possibly because he could think of absolutely nothing to say, not even an excuse to stop hovering just inside the bedroom doorway. "Ah. So. This is the place, then?" Sirius nodded, looking up at him with his hair screening his eyes.

"Yeah." He made a small, helpless gesture around at the furniture, which Remus noticed had taken some rather severe abuse. "I've been coming here since first year. It'll be weird to leave it when I graduate..."

"I can imagine." He thought of sitting down for a moment, then realized that would entail sitting on the bed next to Sirius and swiftly reconsidered, all of which resulted in a very awkward false start and a long silence following. He cleared his throat. "Well. ...Shall we get ready, then?"

"Sure." Sirius scooted off the bed and onto his feet; he was very graceful, even if not athletic, and Remus certainly wasn't looking. "There's a cabinet in the closet where you can put, put, you know, things -- " Clothes. Of course. Sirius swept his book back into the bag and went to demonstrate, and Remus followed him at a decorous distance. And then took a few even more decorous and also hasty steps back as the boy started unbuttoning his shirt. Maximum distance seemed safest. Sirius glanced over his shoulder at him and offered a brief, uncertain smile that he could only try to answer.

Well, nothing for it, really.

He took off his wristwatch first, of all things, and laid it in the empty side of the cabinet, then his outer robe and suit jacket, dithering rather more than was appropriate to the lateness of the hour. Sirius apparently had no such qualms, and Remus supposed he wouldn't; a young werewolf away at school, he would have had no proprietary rights to his own body from the prying eyes of concerned adults for a number of years. It was not a thought that remotely comforted Remus in his own position, and he turned both his eyes and mind well away from the casual way Sirius stripped out of his tie and shirt, kicked out of shoes and socks before husking off trousers and boxers in the same sweep. His own buttons were as far down as he would allow his gaze to drift, and his only hope was that it would shield him from thinking of whether any response of Sirius's to the proximity of the situation had just been rendered perfectly visible, should he only turn round.

With his own shirt and trousers neatly folded in a line with his shoes and coat, he considered briefly whether he was willing to simply sacrifice a pair of underwear to the wolf... but the longer he thought about it, the more it seemed absurd and implausible, more likely to draw attention to the problem of their nudity than deflect it. And besides, if he were to be honest with himself, wasting clothing was an extravagance he could ill afford. He added them to the pile and closed first the cabinet and the closet at last, turning reluctantly back to the room to find Sirius -- long since done before him -- standing at the boarded window with a hand braced on either side, peering up through the cracks in the boards. In the dim light he was pale and even more lovely, enough to hold Remus in place against all his better judgment. He was lined with scars, like Remus -- more so, even, with the ones that had been stretched and broken up, the body they had been left on having grown under their feet -- but they seemed like decorations on him, not hateful as he found his own. There was a nest of four dark, clear claw-marks that curled from almost below Sirius's shoulderblade up to the top of his shoulder and disappeared toward his front, and they both made Remus's stomach contract with pity and his mouth water, just slightly, to touch and taste --

It was very close now, he thought, and closed his eyes. It was the wolf, thudding under his skin to get free, making him think these things. Or at least making him think them up on the surface, where they could not be ignored.

"I can see the light," Sirius murmured, still looking out the window; Remus imagined his face, rapt and gazing, a bar of starlight cast over his eyes. "It should only be another minute or two." Remus had nothing to say to that. Of course he knew it already, of course Sirius knew he did. Sirius was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice was still soft but less distant. "Part of the reason," he said, and hesitated. "...was, I wanted to make sure... we'd recognize each other. You know. I wouldn't -- we wouldn't... I dunno. Hurt each other. When it happens."

...He'd never thought of that. He was so unused to all this, the thought that this was something that could be shared, a wall that could keep two in as well as one in and one out --

But those were thoughts that led nowhere sane and nowhere sensible, and he held himself back from them at once.

Sirius turned toward him then, anyway, and to his chagrin that was distraction enough at once. He resisted an instinctive urge to shut his eyes. Sirius, for his part, still barely seemed to mind at all, for all his shyness in more ordinary things; and he couldn't help seeing, even peripherally, the high color and fever-bright eyes in Sirius's face, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the inevitable glimpse of his erection, full and heavy in its thatch of dark hair. The thought struck him cold: that it would be easy, very easy, right now. Perhaps the only saving grace was that they didn't have the time.

"You don't think we will, do you?" he said, almost pleading, and Remus sensed him wanting to reach but not daring the physicality of their bodies and skin. Wanting comfort, but wanting more than that. "I mean, I'm never sure what it thinks, not really, we might not know -- "

"I think we'd know each other anywhere," Remus said, and if the hot dying rush in which the words came out was to be his only slip then he supposed he would have to count himself a victor, even if it all felt like loss, and loss, and emptiness.

Then the first of the cramps hit him, and he thought nothing except pain and change and the silver round eye of the moon. Only the vaguest sense, as the last of his consciousness left him, of his voice joining with other cries; only the faintest fading, darkness-swallowed impression of a flash of black fur, a considering snarl of teeth, the sense of leaping and being leapt for and the imminence of collision and satisfaction for the towering hunger inside him --

Then nothing, and now truly nothing at all.

---

Remus woke to cracks of dawn light through the boards, dimly aware of being in a heap on the floor but with some warm weight making him far less cold than he'd have expected to be. At first he was only aware, blearily, that he felt strange, but after a few more seconds' travel toward consciousness he determined that the problem was that he felt bizarrely good. He was sore, of course, but not in pain; it seemed that no significant injury had been done to him beyond the ordinary (or, well, not ordinary, but for him, at least usual) strains put on his body by the transformation. He was being kept warm, as he'd noted. And... there was a third feeling, one so distantly familiar that as groggy as he was he couldn't quite place it for very long moments, only grasping and finding that it was something he associated with -- of all things -- when he'd been with Ian. A sense of -- peace, almost, a weary kind of --

...Oh. The realization woke him up the rest of the way quite suddenly, his eyes opening to the play of blue stripes of dawn across the cracked ceiling. It was the feeling of mornings when he woke late after a long, hungry night where he'd been fucked all through nearly until dawn, come so many times he'd lost count, been left spent and sore and delirious and then woke up exhausted and underslept but happy, and held, and sated beyond all need. Those mornings had been too few, he supposed, but more than he'd ever really expected. Something you never knew you needed until you had it: waking cradled in the arms of a lover.

He looked down. The warm weight was Sirius, of course: he was still fast asleep, his head pillowed on Remus's chest with a tangle of dark hair spilling up toward Remus's gaze, his breathing deep and slow. His body was half on top of Remus's, Remus's trapped arm curled up around his waist and holding him near, their legs tangled to a point that was scandalous in their current state of undress. His hand rested on Remus's chest, fingers twitching slightly in late dreams.

Well. Presumably the wolves must have managed somehow; after only a matter of seconds, though, considering the logistics that might have been involved made him queasy and more than a little nervous, and he had to give it up as a bad job. To his vague surprise, though, he found himself rather calm about the whole thing, although whether or not that stemmed more from his general sense of peace than from anything else he couldn't precisely say. It couldn't possibly be helped, as long as they were transforming together (and they could hardly be blamed for wanting to transform together; the apparent medical benefits alone justified that); it was something neither of them had any control over whatsoever, and while it wasn't precisely appropriate to merely overlook the issue, he felt that he nonetheless could do so as the lesser of two evils, and without too much remorse. Certainly nothing near what he would feel if he were to give in as his human self, or even as more the wolf in human guise -- but that was nothing he should even begin to think of, especially with the inner plane of Sirius's bare thigh pressed firmly against his groin. He shouldn't even be thinking about that, actually. He should really sit up, extricate himself from this heap, and go clean himself up and get some clothes on.

He closed his eyes again and lay still. After a moment he lifted his hand, just enough to lightly stroke Sirius's hair.

He hadn't even recognized the feeling, it had been so long.

No, his will asserted itself again, firmly, after a moment, and it was hard to be sure whether he was more disappointed or relieved by its appearance. It was not a lover he held; it was a boy, even if a boy who was technically of age, still a boy very nearly young enough to be his son, and still his student, and trusting him as a companion for some of the most painful and degrading hours of both their lives. It was a strange and trying situation, but he would master it. It was his responsibility to protect them both, and Sirius was not the answer to his own loneliness, even if he could to some degree be the answer to Sirius's, at least for now.

But even still, when Sirius finally stirred, and raised his head, and smiled, and said his small shy out-of-practice "Good morning," he couldn't exactly say there were no regrets in the decision.

---

And somehow, they managed to go on like that. Sirius sat in the back of Defense Against the Dark Arts and deluded himself that Remus actually thought he was paying attention to the lecture, and not just to any number of elaborate fantasies on the theme of his professor's lips; if anything would keep people from suspecting anything inappropriate between them, he found himself thinking and not without amusement, it would be his decidedly mediocre grades in Remus's class. They met in the Shack every full moon that fall, and transformed, and pretended that not remembering anything that happened while they were wolves meant they had no idea whether anything did, and the more time went by the more Sirius found that -- of all the unexpected things -- he treasured and looked forward to the full moon more than he could ever remember doing anything. He ran all the way to be at the Shack as early as possible, held his breath for Remus to come just a little sooner rather than a little later, made a fool of himself making flimsy excuses and inane conversation trying to keep Remus just a little later in the morning afterward, right up until whenever time ran out on him and Remus gently pointed out that their first class each was in half an hour and breakfast was almost done, and shouldn't they get underway?

It wasn't that he had any lingering ideas about seducing Remus -- which he honestly didn't -- or even that he wanted to enjoy longer the intimacies the situation thrust on them -- which he... well, did, but that wasn't why. Not anymore, at least, not after the first couple times and the first real hours of time spent in Remus's sole company. It wasn't just the wolf, marking territory as always: he liked Remus, more than in solidarity, more than sexually, more than as a teacher or a crush or a friend. Liked him a lot, in fact, enough that thinking about him didn't just turn him on anymore; it made him drowsy and short of breath and his stomach feel like it was winding itself around a stick, and yet just happy, almost happier than he could ever remember being. All he really wanted, he found, was just a little more of Remus's sole company -- just to talk to him, to spend time with him, even clothed and from across a room if necessary. Although he certainly didn't mind the alternative that was more usually the case between the two of them: the mornings when they woke in a pile on the Shack's floor, twisted in dusty blankets and entwined in ways about which he entertained long, feverish thoughts for hours afterward.

And yet, and Sirius thought (with a small twist of sickness in his stomach) particularly after what he'd done so early on in their friendship, Remus's sole company seemed to be the one thing the man was most determined not to give him any more of than necessary.

It was maddening, and it might have been even more maddening because he understood it so completely. Even without the immediate practical considerations that Remus always very reasonably brought up, they had to keep up appearances. It would be tricky if they built up so much intimacy between them that someone else would notice it when the two of them were back in public again, and there was only so long during school days a teacher and a student could both be missing at the same time, even if both were known to be often missing independently and the headmaster presumably had some idea of what was going on and was deflecting curiosity at every turn. There was still his curiosity, and like Remus, he was sure, Sirius had no doubts that Dumbledore would know more or less instantly if something did end up going awry. Which it wouldn't. But never mind.

But, he thought, and didn't admit to himself that he was really sulking it instead, it wasn't like he wanted anything wrong. Just to talk, for heavens' sakes. Just to be in the same room with no one else around for a little while.

Just to be near.

The fall wore on into winter, and with every moon that passed the longing drove more hooks deeper into him, making him wholly its own. For someone who'd never had much of anyone, he couldn't remember feeling this alone before; like a sunburn he'd never known was there until someone struck a palm against his skin.

---

The full moon in December fell on the second day of the Christmas holidays, and after a long, quiet afternoon correcting end-of-term papers in his drafty office, Remus made his way across the empty grounds to the passageway. He permitted himself to indulge in only a bit of melancholy in transit; for all that company for the change was something he had never anticipated, he had come very quickly to the point where he expected, even longed for it. It would be strange and cold, no doubt, to wake alone, and return to a chilly, silent school -- and perhaps spend the rest of the holidays bedridden and recovering, for that matter, depending on just how enraged the wolf was to find itself deprived of its companion.

These thoughts kept him so unpleasantly occupied that he was several steps into the Shrieking Shack's bedroom, already loosening his tie, before he noticed Sirius lounging in his accustomed place on the bed, book in hand.

He jumped, and felt absurd at once; still, it couldn't stop the "Sirius!" that jerked itself from his lips, and then Sirius jumped, looking up at him, and he felt guilty as well as absurd. Remus caught himself, pulling up by the doorway with a sheepish laugh. "...Pardon me. You startled me; I thought you'd have gone home."

And by then Sirius was already sitting up, setting his book aside, offering his shy smile with his hair screening away his eyes. "No," he said, "I normally stay here for the hols -- I thought I'd told you."

Had he? It didn't seem likely to Remus that he would have forgotten such an oddly striking piece of information, but he saw no point in making an issue of the question. "Well, I'm pleased to have the company, at any rate," he said, and smiled, and Sirius answered it with a smile of such glowing warmth that they both ended up looking away afterward. "...So. Shall we?"

It was a bitterly cold night in the Shack that night, and Remus couldn't really even find the heart to be chagrined when they huddled together before the change as well: two pale, naked, scarred bodies, sitting with knees to chests on the floor with their breath pluming slightly, his arms wrapped around Sirius's shoulders and Sirius's arms tucked around Remus's. He'd have conjured some sort of magical source of heat, but didn't dare right before taking leave of his senses and being forced to leave it unattended for the night, especially not in a structure made so much of old, dry wood. He wished he could say that Sirius's human warmth wasn't a far superior substitute, but couldn't, not truly.

"I'm glad you're here," Sirius murmured, right in the last moments before the early winter moonrise, and laced his fingers into Remus's; and even after they had to be drawn away again to begin turning into the stubby toes of a paw, their touch was also no little warming.

He woke shivering, entwined around Sirius as though in desperation, and made a bleary, clumsy fumble to draw a heap of the bed's blankets to his hand and then around the boy, before staggering to the closet cabinet for his wand. The heating charm took a few tries in his disorientation, but then set the room warming up at once. Outside the cracks in the window-boards he could see only glimpses of white. Barely awake, behind him, Sirius crawled feebly up into the dusty bed in the meantime, trailing blankets, and curled into like a pillbug into it; when he was done casting the charm Remus set his wand down next to the bed and climbed in under the covers with him without a second thought for modesty or propriety, just wrapping his body heat around Sirius and Sirius's against himself. They slept again, heavily, well past dawn, while the morning's snow piled up in drifts around the rickety old house.

The second time Remus woke in far greater comfort, and rather more gradually. They were still both on their sides, wound in musty blankets, Sirius tucked up against his chest and his heavy breath tickling over his collarbones. Remus held his head close and looked at the slivers of the weather he could see through the boards over the window: great, fat white flakes of snow, wafting down out of the sky in such thickness that even the tree right outside the window was obscured. A surge of dismay and urgency troubled him for only a few drowsy moments before it occurred to him that it was the holidays; he had no classes to teach, Sirius none to attend. There was no need to hurry out into the storm.

He tried to muffle the cracking bones in his arms and hands as he stretched them, but Sirius stirred anyway; his eyes slitted open, after a moment, and he wrapped closer in to Remus, making a small, contented noise. Remus smiled, allowing himself a hand on Sirius's hair and no more.

"You can sleep, if you'd like," he said, softly. "It's still snowing out."

Sirius yawned, his jaw cracking a little in answer to Remus's hands. Werewolves were full of cracking joints, Remus thought. Parts that didn't ever seem to fit together right, not anymore. "Mm. S'nice here."

Remus's smile broadened, his hand resting where it was. "The charm's probably close to wearing off by now, I'm afraid. I should get up and recast it..." But to this Sirius immediately made a low but emphatic sound of mumbling protest, his brow knitting in a line that was barely visible against Remus's chest, and in spite of himself Remus had to suppress the laugh that his smile wanted to turn into. He supposed he must have misinterpreted Sirius's first comment, then.

Eventually he did rise and reinforce the charm, and at least put back on his trousers and undershirt, and though Sirius's frown-line deepened at his departure the boy was mostly asleep again, and didn't offer any more real protest. He only wriggled as close as possible again when Remus came back to bed, and then they both dozed again, off and on, not deeply. He blinked off sleep not long later to find Sirius actually awake now, cheek propped on Remus's arm, gazing at him with a tiny smile sitting on his lips.

"Good morning," he murmured, amused and a touch discomfited. "Is -- something the matter?"

Sirius half-laughed, but dropped his eyes, and after a moment Remus could see that color was flushing up in his face. "No," he said, nearly under his breath, and gave a nervous shove at the hair in his eyes. "I was just... you know, thinking."

"Thinking what?" Remus asked, brushing fingertips on his shoulder, and only then was awake enough to know what a dangerous game that question probably was -- but although Sirius looked a bit flushed, he only laughed and shook his head, barely looking up at Remus in glances.

"Just..." Sirius pushed hair out of his eyes. "How you're really handsome."

Remus stared at him for a few seconds, then couldn't help it: he burst out laughing. At the small offended frown that started this time at Sirius's brow, however, he tried to stifle it. "I beg your pardon. I'm not laughing at you, Sirius, never; only at your taste. Or lack thereof."

Sirius hung on for only a few more seconds before cracking a smile himself, his head dropping as his laughter reluctantly joined Remus's, sounding more of nerves than amusement. "Well, it's true," he said, almost defensively. "You -- " But he seemed to think better almost at once of whatever thought he had been beginning to form, and Remus supposed he understood why. "You really are," he finished at last, a bit lamely. Remus only smiled, and touched his hand, and let the subject drop. It was nothing they ought to be discussing in these circumstances, to say the least, but nonetheless he found himself touched and even oddly surprised by the confession -- especially coming from a decidedly human mouth. Somehow, even amid all the related considerations at work here, the idea of genuine attraction between the two of them always seemed to remain far down on the list.

He had to admit it unsettled him as well, however. Always easier, when he could dismiss Sirius's interest as a childish crush, with little really to do with himself at all.

"Thank you," he said nonetheless, smiling, enjoying just a bit the way Sirius ducked his head down and reddened further. It was too easy, a temptation he found difficult to hold out against -- Sirius was just so earnest, when it was just the two of them, a trait he couldn't help but wonder how many people knew about but him. Fortunately, though, there were other thoughts lingering in his mind to distract him from these, and he turned to one with a palm still lightly resting on the back of Sirius's hand. "Sirius -- of course I'm pleased that you're here, and I don't mean to pry, but... do you mind my asking why you stay at Hogwarts over Christmas? You... have family, surely?" And the question came, Remus found, with a faint rush of guilt; for all the times he had thought of how little anyone might really know about Sirius, had he really spared so little thought for what he knew?

Sirius hesitated, but only slightly, and perhaps only that kept him from backing down altogether. "Yeah, I do," he said, at last, but after too long for it to have been a simple question. "My uncles -- my uncle Alphard and his boyfriend Felix." Remus couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that, but kept his peace. "They live on Diagon Alley, over their bookshop, they brought me up. I... well, it's a long story." He laughed a little, and Remus thought it was again in his stuttering, uneasy way. "I don't want to bore you."

"I'm not bored," he said softly, and then smiled and nodded his head toward the window. "And I haven't much of anywhere to be today, at any rate."

Sirius offered him a wan smile in return and then looked down at their brushing hands. "Well, if you want, I guess," he said, and pushed hair out of his eyes. "I... it's hard to know where to start, but I got bitten when I was really little. I reckon you might have guessed that, though, 'cause of the way it looks -- " he gestured at the scar marring his left side just above the hip, half-hidden by the blankets, an old and broken semicircle of jagged twisting bite-marks that was echoed on the back, conjuring the image with painful clarity of jaws closing around a small body -- "and how mine is older than yours and all. Actually I was six." Remus hissed air through his teeth, unable to help himself, and could see Sirius trying to ignore it. "I don't really remember much about it, mostly I only know what people told me.

"But I know I had a big row with my mother and decided I was running away from home." Another pale attempt at a smile. "That happened a lot, I think. That we had big fights and I ran off from home. She... mm. I don't know if you know anything about my family, the Blacks, or anything, but it's one of those old, crazy, pureblooded wizarding families, where they mostly go crazy over being pureblooded, you know." Remus nodded, and Sirius caught it in one of the few sideways glances he was daring to cast in Remus's direction, and smiled a little more honestly. "I hate that stuff now, but I didn't even know anything about it then, mostly it was just that she wanted me to go to bed earlier than I wanted to, and told me I couldn't run on the stairs, and things like that, and she had a bad temper and I was really stubborn. It was just stupid, you know? But I ran off, and we lived in the middle of Muggle London so I got pretty lost right away. I sort of remember that -- wandering around in all these narrow little streets I didn't know anything about, and lost, and really scared because it was dark already and I didn't think I'd be able to get home. And I saw this thing, from across the road, down in the shadows at the end of the alley. At first I thought it was a dog, but when it got closer I saw that it was really big, I suppose I mostly thought that because I was so small but it was growling, and it just seemed so, so big -- "

He broke off, although Remus couldn't detect any real strain in his voice beforehand; Sirius sounded mostly as though he were reading from a mildly exciting book, and the look in his eyes was much the same. Distance was kind, he thought, for neither the first time nor the last. Sometimes it was the only kindness.

"I woke up in St. Mungo's," Sirius said, when he'd found his thread again, and shrugged. "I was in a lot of pain and I don't think they thought I was going to make it, but I did. There were nurses fussing over me all the time, but none of them would even look at me."

"That does sound familiar," Remus murmured, and Sirius glanced at him again with an even paler smile than before; it was a ghost by now, and still fading fast.

"Yeah. Well, and it was even worse in my case, because -- " He was no longer making any sort of eye contact, and he turned his head so far away, as though staring out the window at the snow, that his hair screened his eyes away as well. Nor did he sound like he was reading now. "They owled my mother to have her come get me, right away, while I was still unconscious. And she... ah, she came in, and took a look at me, and she told the Healers to keep me, do whatever they wanted with me, she wasn't taking me home."

Remus curled a hand around Sirius's forearm, unthinkingly, and held it. Sirius didn't look at him, didn't move, and for pity and for the fondness he'd already long since had for the boy, he could have said then, Stop, you don't have to, I already know this story. You don't have to cut it back open and bleeding for my sake. Don't say the rest. Just stop.

He said none of it, though, partly because he couldn't bring himself to form the words; but mainly because he knew it wasn't for his sake, and that Sirius did have to.

"That's as much as I heard, anyway," Sirius said, and his head tilted down toward his hands. "I'm sure there was actually a lot more of 'won't have a filthy half-breed in the house of my fathers and ancestors,' and what all, knowing what I do about her, but I dunno. By the time I woke up she was long gone and the Healers and nurses were just going mad trying to work out what to do with me." His head lifted enough that Remus could see the edges of another faint smile, although Sirius's eyes were still well hidden. "I feel really bad for them, honestly: stuck with this little six-year-old sprog in a heap of bandages going 'where's my mummy?' and 'I want to go home' all day long." His voice rose vaguely toward a falsetto mimicry on these, although without much conviction. "I mean, what could you say? And they only had a month to find someplace to put me, 'cause, well." Remus nodded, and Sirius covered the hand still on his forearm with his own suddenly, giving it a slight, tentative squeeze. He gripped it back, and held it.

"They probably sent owls to most of my family, but of course they were all like that, they didn't want anything to do with me." Again his mouth curved, this time in a softer, more genuine smile. "Then finally they got hold of my uncle Alphard." He scraped hair out of his eyes, and his expression was even and calm now -- distracted, perhaps. "He and Felix weren't crazy about the idea, either -- I mean, who would be, adopting a werewolf, and they'd never wanted a kid around to start with -- but they couldn't just leave me there." He looked at Remus again, finally -- really looked at him, meeting his eyes, with the slightest of smiles on his lips. "That's the thing about them, I guess. We've had a lot of hard times, but that's still the thing. They couldn't just leave me."

Sirius stretched a little, taking that moment's pause, and pushed himself up onto his elbows above Remus in the process. "So I went home with them," he said, when he was done, shrugging one shoulder a bit. "They got stuck with the job of explaining to me what had happened with my mother, too, which I don't think was much fun either." A little half-smile, and then he gave up altogether, looking down again. "Felix did most of it. He was still pretty young then, and he's a Muggle so he didn't understand a lot of the werewolf stuff, but -- "

"Really?" Remus interjected, sorry to interrupt, but too surprised not to. "I-I'm sorry, I hadn't caught that."

"Oh, yeah -- didn't I say?" Sirius glanced at him again, and grinned a little, easing the pressure that had come to embed itself in his chest somewhat just with that one brief look. "Uncle Alphard wasn't really talking to anyone in the family before that, but I don't imagine it did him any favors." Remus smiled back, and Sirius shook his head a little, finding his thread again. "He doesn't have all the family history, either, so I guess he was the weird one to have explain, but he's always been better with kids -- I think he likes them better, honestly. Uncle Alphard's, well. We kind of have the same temper." His smile looked wan again at that; even wistful. "Anyway, they fell all over themselves making it out to be all not my fault at all, and Felix was using a lot of words like 'intolerant' and 'irresponsible' and 'reprehensible,' but I was just six, I didn't really get it. All I knew was my mum didn't want me to come home, and I couldn't think what I'd even done, apart from run away, and I did that all the time and she'd never wanted me to just stay away before. But I didn't know, maybe this was just, you know, one time too many."

Remus watched their hands, where they lay interlinked on the dusty sheets, caught in the pale grey light of snowfall. After a moment Sirius let out a breath and spoke again.

"After the first time I changed, anyway, I think I sorted it out that it wasn't what I'd done, it was what I was. And I hadn't even asked to be, and I didn't even know why, and it hurt and I hated it, and... well. I was pretty hacked off."

"Understandably, I should think," Remus murmured, and Sirius smiled at him sidelong.

"Well, I ended up pretty hacked off at most everything and everyone, so I don't know if it made all that much sense," he said, and Remus again had to struggle not to laugh -- not out of mockery, of course, only at Sirius's surprising and rather charming candor. "I was a pretty awful kid for most of the time, for a really long time. Made a lot of trouble and had lots of stupid tantrums and fits about things, started arguments about nothing, acted like an idiot -- you know. Ran away from home a lot, too, still, which I guess really isn't the smartest idea if you're a kid who's a werewolf. I mean, you'd think I'd have learnt. I just about drove them crazy, I think, after they went to the trouble of taking me in and all." He scraped hair out of his eyes again, staring at nothing. "But it was sort of like the worst had already happened, you know? Like... it didn't even matter what I did anymore, if my own mother didn't want me, then anybody could get sick of me at any time, so I didn't even need to bother trying to make them like me. And. I dunno. I guess..." He paused, thought, seemed to change his mind, then changed it back and let the words out after all. "I didn't really want them to care about me, or to care about them. Because the same thing was just gonna happen again, and I didn't want it to hurt this time. ...I dunno, I guess that sounds stupid."

"It doesn't," Remus said, quietly, but he didn't think Sirius was listening at that point.

"And Uncle Alphard and I both had such bad tempers, we were fighting all the time about everything, and, well... he can be pretty nasty, I mean I s'pose I can too, but, well. We were pretty much always mad at each other, and I kind of -- well, I trusted him, but I kind of didn't. I never really forgot that he didn't even really want me there in the first place. And Felix was nice, and a lot calmer about things, but he still wasn't family and didn't understand a lot of things, and he didn't feel like he could mess about between us all that often, and... I'm just blathering, I don't even know. Point is, I gave them a really rough time, and had a sort of rough time myself, and I think we were all really happy to see me off to Hogwarts." He paused for a moment, and then said, "D'you mind if I smoke?"

"Only morally," Remus said, and smiled as kindly as possible when Sirius looked at him as though not sure whether to laugh or be wounded. "Go ahead. We're not on school grounds, I suppose."

"Thanks." And then, of course, Remus had to look somewhere else quickly as he got up -- not that anything inappropriate was exactly foremost in his mind just now, but nonetheless, on principle. Sirius padded naked over to the closet and fished in his clothes in the cabinet for a few moments before producing a battered packet of cigarettes, pulling out one and lighting it with only a pass of his hand. Remus couldn't help but feel a little bit pleased and proud over that, even if the context was decidedly awry; he knew Sirius had been watching his own penchant for small manual magics over the past few months, and apparently learning. He quite notably failed to put back on any of his own clothes, came back with the cigarette in hand and sat down on the edge of the bed next to Remus, pulling a corner of the sheet decorously across his lap with the hand he wasn't smoking with. It took two long drags for him to find his thread again, and resume.

"After a few years here I calmed down a bit," he said at last, looking at the smoke trailing up from the coal until it began to weave lazy patterns in midair. "I mean, nothing was all that different -- I couldn't tell anyone and it was rough getting to know anyone, keeping that a secret -- but I made a couple of friends, and at least I was somewhere I sort of belonged. It was better." He dragged again, breathed smoke. "My cousin Andromeda -- she's all right too -- she got married, and my uncles started trading me off with the two of them in the summers after I started Hogwarts. It gave all of us a break, kind of. Then she got pregnant herself, though, and I could tell they didn't really want me around the baby. So I stopped going." He shrugged a little. "But it didn't make me angry, that time. I just... calmed down. Sort of understood where everyone else was coming from, and I couldn't be hacked off at them anymore. They just didn't know what to do with me, and I was making it worse." Another look and smile at Remus, although the smile didn't quite touch his eyes. "And I just decided I ought to stay here over the hols, I guess, as much as I could. I just didn't want to be in anybody's way anymore. I didn't even go home to Alphard and Felix's last summer, I went abroad, instead. Managing the moons was a bit rough, but I was all right."

He finished the cigarette in silence, then looked for something that wasn't wood or otherwise incendiary to stub it out on; Remus finally supplied him with simply a pinching gesture that extinguished the coal, making Sirius smile at him again, more honestly. He pitched the butt into the bottom of the closet and crawled back into bed alongside Remus, pressing close. It was very difficult not to be aware of all that cool, scarred skin, although Remus made a valiant effort.

"Sorry, anyway," Sirius said, in a puff of warm breath into his shoulder, and laughed; and managed to sound only a little forced when he did. "I guess that was more than you really wanted to hear."

Remus considered this, and then leaned in and kissed him.

It wasn't a very deep kiss -- his conscience was stretched as it was, and to involve tongues in any way might have served as breaking strain -- but it was soft, and thorough, and more than a bit wet. He cradled the back of Sirius's head in his hand, pressing his mouth to lips that were at first rigid with startlement, and then pliant and eager. Sirius surged into him, so desperate it left him with pangs of remorse of more than one kind; their mouths met and brushed and caressed, opening to a hotter, wetter place that Remus barely kept a leash on, barely kept that tiny last distance alive in between. He had meant affection by it and had ended someplace not exactly unexpected, but couldn't find the heart to break out of kissing Sirius for what seemed like a very long time indeed -- his whole life, maybe -- and yet was still much, much too short when the contact finally broke on a slightly obscene, wet sound.

They hovered briefly, sharing an awkward moment as they both struggled their eyes open and stared at one another, smiled and laughed and looked away by turns. Sirius made an unobtrusive gambit to settle the blankets more firmly over the area below his waist, and Remus did his best to appear not to notice.

"Thank you for telling me," he said, when they had settled themselves, and touched Sirius's cheek one last lingering time before removing his hand and arm to safer terrain. "I hope you know how grateful I am for your trust." Sirius dropped his eyes away and shrugged, a small uncertain smile flickering on his mouth, but he appeared to be blushing a bit and Remus decided to take that as good grace. He thought for a few long moments, before finally beginning to speak, slowly. "I... was studying werewolves, actually, for my thesis. This was, oh, a good eight years ago this past summer. I'd gone out to the countryside where a pack was said to be gathered, to stay concealed and take notes. Fieldwork, you understand." He smiled a bit wanly himself. "I didn't stay as concealed as I thought I had. There was -- one, in particular, the alpha male of the pack in question; he was very well-integrated with his wolf, much more than I've ever been or known another to be, he had a certain degree of control over it when he was in his transformed state. He, ah, hunted me, I suppose. Didn't care to be the subject of study, and thought he'd turn the tables a bit." He gestured at his own ring of toothmarks that the undershirt didn't quite hide, in the curve of his shoulder and neck above his collarbones, this not stretched and broken but rather puckered with aging and weight lost since. "...Which I suppose from my current perspective I can't entirely blame him for. Still, I do wish he'd simply expressed himself by declining to answer a survey." He offered Sirius a feeble smile, but Sirius wasn't laughing: rather, training an intense, serious expression on the scar on Remus's shoulder. He reached, then stopped his hand long enough to glance up into Remus's eyes.

"Do you mind?" Remus shook his head, and Sirius's fingertips lit on the ring of scar at once, tracing it around and over his shoulder and round the back. Remus suppressed a tiny shudder, and not only at the memory; Sirius's fingers stirred tiny hairs on the back of his neck, waking his skin to full attention. The touch continued for only a matter of moments, though, and then Sirius was also drawing his hand away again like he had touched something hot. "...I'm sorry," he said, and if there was a double meaning to the statement Remus opted not to understand it.

"Thank you. Really, though, it's nothing like what you went through -- six years old, I can't even imagine." Sirius shrugged one shoulder again, turning on his side to peer up at Remus from the heap of blankets.

"I can't really imagine how you did it," he admitted. "I've been one practically my whole life; it's got so I almost can't picture being any other way. But having it sprung on you, when you've got a whole other life already -- " He broke off, shaking his head, and didn't finish the thought. "Anyway, I grew up on Diagon Alley, so there were always loads of people around who knew on the sly what the matter was, and most everybody who didn't just avoid me cooked up some sort of remedy to help with it. I probably had it easier than any other werewolf ever, I reckon."

Remus smiled, and touched his hair briefly. "I'm pleased to hear it, then." ...And it came to his lips, quite suddenly, to finish the rather extremely incomplete picture he'd painted; what had come after, why he understood, and Ian's name even danced on his lips for a few startling seconds before he managed to swallow it back. No. They were still teacher and student, all else aside, all intimacies of conversation to the contrary, and his instincts still told him that was a line not to be crossed. And if instincts, then human ones, not a wolf's -- or maybe only cowardice, and how was he to tell? This wasn't the time, that was all he knew. Not the place, so peaceful here with just the two of them, Sirius curled up not quite to his chest, the snow still falling outside.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, after a moment, scrambling for something to waylay his thoughts. "I brought a bit to eat, I thought I might be up here for a while today -- "

"Starved, actually," Sirius said, and he was grinning, and there was nothing like it for making Remus forget every other consideration he so badly needed to bear in mind.

And he retrieved the apples and biscuits and they ate, and talked a little more, and laughed a little more, and eventually ended up dozing off again, Remus half in and half out of the covers, Sirius still undressed and tucked close to Remus's chest with his head in the crook of Remus's arm. They spent most of the day there, sleeping and waking and biding their time, until finally the snow stopped and as it was late afternoon Remus finally worked up the strength to declare it time, truly this time, for them to go. Still, the thought that remained in his mind after they had gone, swirling around it like an errant snowflake circling, was as haunting as it was bitter: Sirius's mother leaving her son to the mercy of a hospital, unconscious and pale and swathed in bandages, never knowing that all was already lost, that nothing would ever be the same again. His whole chest seemed to ache with the image, and yet he could neither dissolve it nor send it away.

But as a result he found himself quite able to invite Sirius to stop by his office and help him do his winter tidying-up, and even enjoy the delight with which Sirius accepted, without even a second thought. And what more could he ask of any nagging thought, right now, than that?

---

Sirius came by the day after Christmas, exactly when Remus had asked him and probably a little earlier in the day than Remus had really meant, but he couldn't bring himself to mind. He wondered if Remus had noticed, if he might even be able to make a joke of it; of all the things he might think he needed to worry about with Sirius, at least tardiness wasn't among them. It was nice to be able to meet up out of uniform, even if the jeans and hooded sweatshirt he ended up wearing took an embarrassingly long time ahead of time to pick out, and showing up at Remus's office to find him sitting at his desk in slacks and an old shapeless sweater was somehow charming beyond all reason in its own right. His stomach squeezed at Remus's answer to his smile, and it wasn't quite as hard as he'd feared (hoped?) to put out of his mind what had happened the last time he was in Remus's office -- although he was careful, coming inside, to leave the door wide open.

It was an odd, quiet day, both awkward and peaceful, after all the unexpected revelation of the last moon: as though they had run across some particularly tenacious boggart in the shadows of their strange uncertain friendship, had a right old time rousting it out, and could now enjoy a little peace and quiet with just each other. Remus sorted through papers and set those that were outdated crumpling themselves out of existence, while Sirius dusted clumsily with his wand. Just talking while they worked, comfortably and about nothing that mattered. It was something you didn't even know you wanted until it was right there.

Of course dusting was mostly a cover story for wanting to nose around the stuff Remus had in jumbles on his shelves, but Remus seemed willing to let this pass without comment. "Is this silver?" Sirius asked, peering at a knife over the edge of the top shelf. It was just at his eye level, probably a good bit more convenient to Remus.

"Yes. Don't touch it." Sirius glanced at him and smiled briefly, before returning his gaze. It was beautiful: a blade the length of his hand, gleaming pearl-white where the light struck it. "I handle it with gloves, generally. Strictly for, well. Emergencies."

"What sort of emergencies?" Remus looked up himself, from the stack of papers, at Sirius's long look, and their eyes caught again. His smile looked a bit forced.

"Dire ones, I should hope." He said nothing else, just indicated the jar behind it. "If you can believe it, that's powdered garlic."

"For pasta emergencies," Sirius said, with a sage nod and a nearly entirely straight face. Remus met him with extremes of patience.

"Working with Dark creatures requires a great many contingency plans, I've found. Do mind the knife, though."

"I am." He worked his way along to a couple of round, wrinkled white discs, turning them over in his fingers for a moment. "What are these, bogeyman repellent?" He guessed he was being a little cheekier than he ought, but what about it? They were friends, really, more than teacher and student; the thought made him giddy, and he meant to relish it in every possible way. "Oh, wait -- ugh." He dropped the disc at once, rubbing his hand on his trousers. "Does the giant squid know you're keeping Cousin Mabel's suckers?"

"They were a gift," Remus said, with dignity. Sirius made a faint amused noise to himself, but went on, gingerly prodding a few long, sharp, bony spurs mixed in with the suckers.

"What about these, then?"

"Kishi fangs." Remus barely even had to look up, although when Sirius glanced at him he had a slight, absent smile on his face. "From my fieldwork in Angola. That's sort of a funny story, actually." After Sirius had been looking at him for some time he glanced up, and hesitated, seeming to catch himself. "...Perhaps when you're a bit older."

Sirius's eyebrow went even higher, but Remus seemed done, just scanning a set of parchments at length before eventually setting them on the keep pile with an air of determination. At last Sirius sighed and gave up, dusting further along the shelf to where a few slips of paper had been fanned out in a stack. At that Remus did finally look up again, with only a slight frown of concern. "Take care with those, please, they're quite old."

"Yeah. Is that Chinese writing?"

"Japanese. Ofuda -- for repelling yuurei, or hungry ghosts." With another glance at Sirius, he added dryly, "And no, not nearly so likely to be satisfied with a fry-up as those at Hogwarts."

Sirius tried to keep his snerk between his lips. "I wasn't gonna say that."

"You were."

"Wasn't. Where did you get all this stuff, anyway?" When you could have been getting some less tatty robes and something decent to eat, Sirius guessed he meant by that, although of course he didn't say so. "I mean, some of it I've never even heard of, and I grew up next to an apothecary."

Remus shrugged, taking a moment's rest to fold his hands on the desk (which Sirius had to turn away from immediately with a vicious stab of visual memory, all too much to do with that same desk and not quite the same paperwork, and definitely with Remus's long, graceful hands). "Mostly by accident and misadventure, I suppose. Dark creatures were always a point of focus in my studies; I suppose becoming one elevated it to something of an obsession. And a great deal of experiential learning tends to lead to, well... evidence and preparation." He swept a hand vaguely around. Sirius shrugged, and moved on to the next shelf, sorting through some empty holding tanks.

"It's brilliant, though. Did you ever..."

But he lost the rest of the sentence, frowning. Something was wedged between two of the tanks, and he tugged and sawed at it for several long seconds before it would come free. It was a picture frame: plain, dark wood, but nice, if a bit old. He turned it over, and the photograph inside stopped his breath for a second. It was Remus -- looking about ten years and a lifetime younger, unscarred and not greying at all and almost unbearably beautiful, as far as Sirius was concerned -- but it was also another young man of about the same age, with a thin high-cheekboned face with a slightly sardonic look to it and a pair of small gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose. They were laughing and waving dutifully at the camera on occasion, captured in front of some sort of monument Sirius didn't recognize. There were flakes of snow in Remus's hair; the other man was wearing a knitted cap, and they stood a little too close together to quite be friends or brothers. All Sirius could seem to look at, though, was that smile -- that laughing, easy fluency to Remus's eyes and mouth. He hadn't ever seen Remus laugh quite like that: like he didn't know what it was to wake up bleeding, like he'd never counted off the last three of twenty-eight days, and the thought made his chest ache with the longing to touch Remus's face in the picture, as though he could reach in and touch the memory of the man.

"...Who's this?" he asked, and then Remus was at his elbow, drawn to his feet no doubt by Sirius's lapse into silence. He glanced up at Remus and surprised a peculiar expression on his face, staring down at the photo: a sort of rueful irritation.

"His name was Ian," Remus said, though, without rancor. "...Well, it still is, I imagine. I didn't realize that was in there." Sirius couldn't help flushing at least a little.

"Sorry -- I didn't mean to snoop." But Remus was waving him off already, a smile twisting just the edges of his mouth.

"It's all right." He paused, seeming to consider; Sirius was expecting (with a slight edge of hurt resentment) this discussion to go the way of the earlier one about the kishi -- whatever they were -- but then Remus began again to speak, in a halting, musing tone. "We were together for quite some time. Nearly seven years, I think. We started seeing one another just out of school." He paused again. "We -- "

"You split up after you got bitten," Sirius said, quietly, staring down into the picture. "Right?"

He didn't look up at Remus to see the reaction, but he could hear the slow breath, feel the slight hitch of what wasn't quite laughter. "As much as I might like to paint him as the villain of the piece, Sirius, I'm afraid I can't. Ian was always a very gentle man, a very kind man. He tried very hard to... to tolerate my infirmity, and support me as much as he could, but he couldn't very much; he left within the year, but you must understand -- I'd studied werewolves, I made certain he knew how much time I likely had. Five years the median, ten the maximum, I had always heard, your remarkable example aside. I never expected to still be here eight years later. He cared for me, and... he couldn't bear to watch me die."

"So he left you to do it on your own instead?" Sirius muttered, but though he still didn't look up at Remus this time, he didn't have to. He shook his head, fast, not saying any more, not even the Yeah, pretty kind, all right, that wanted to follow unnecessarily from his lips. Picturing, nonetheless, pressing down with his thumb on the picture over this Ian man's face, punching it through the glass, down to grind its bleeding pad into his miserable, traitorous smile. "No. I -- I know."

Remus's hand touched his shoulder; he let his eyes close, wanting so badly to lean into it, to press his body back into the warmth of Remus's. "It's probably just as well," he said, and when Sirius lifted up his head again to look at him Remus was staring down into the picture himself, with a very fixed little smile. "He's married now; their daughter should be starting at Hogwarts in another few years, I think. I know he always wanted children."

"I'm sorry," Sirius nearly whispered, and Remus's hand on his shoulder gave it a gentle squeeze.

"It was a long time ago," he said, still smiling, and Sirius looked away.

"You still have his picture, though."

It probably wasn't something he should have said, and Remus's expression did flicker when he looked up again; but then he was smiling, a bit more genuinely this time, and gave Sirius's shoulder one last squeeze before letting go. He tried to swallow his disappointment. "Well, it's the only good one of me ever taken, as far as I can recall." Sirius tried to smile back, but it was too hard. Too hard, with that face still so close under his thumb, and when Remus gently took the picture frame from his hand, he let it go a little too quickly, as though it were hot. Remus took it away, put it in his desk drawers somewhere. Sirius didn't give much thought to where.

"Not much dust on the rest of those," Remus said, when it was done, leaning on his desk with a practiced and sturdy expression of teacherly firmness. "Would you be so kind as to help me get these books in order?"

They did find the old thread of comfortable conversation again, in time, and stayed there together until dinnertime, but Sirius dreamed of it that night, in restless, feverish lingerings: the snow in Remus's hair; the laughter in his eyes; the ordinary life and love that he must never have thought would end.

---

The rest of winter and the spring that followed were an odd paradox of distance and closeness. Remus had feared that sharing so much -- sharing much of themselves with each other at all, really -- would make it difficult if not impossible to be only teacher and student to each other with any degree of conviction thereafter, and to an extent he was right; in their time together up at the Shack they were closer than ever before, having long discussions and debates like equals, laughing together like friends or lovers. And after that first time there were kisses, as well: no more than once per occasion, generally, but with a couple of memorable lapses, and though usually not so deep as long, always having to be brought to a gentle halt in the end by his own waning strength. But at the same time, they both drew instinctively apart when they were on school grounds, not speaking more than necessary in class, avoiding one another's company out of it, throwing themselves into work and studies respectively to try to forget about each other whenever the moon was other than full. They pulled back as they came closer, and though for the most part it seemed to work to Remus's satisfaction, he did catch Dumbledore giving him curious, troubled looks from time to time at meals or staff meetings, which always at once made him turn sick with guilt and escape the room as quickly as possible afterwards. He had no doubt that his original conviction about what Dumbledore would and would not know had been correct, and if anything made him able to resist the lure of Sirius's fumblingly greedy, hungrily wet kisses once a month, it was that knowledge.

Distance and closeness, in frustrating but constant tension -- but not the only tension, particularly as one moon slipped by after another and they found themselves in spring. All other concerns aside, the one that came to reign with the slick grip of something like panic, as March came with the threat of April after it and after April May, was the passage of time, and what it meant.

The end of the spring, and the end of the year. That was all, but it was enough.

---

Sirius woke up late on another cold morning -- although none of them since had been like the one where it had been snowing, over that awkward and wonderful holiday -- buried in body heat, burrowed against Remus as tightly as he could go. They were tangled in heaped sheets and blankets again, although not all that effectively, but he didn't want to move enough to drag them closer. Remus would do fine for heat anyway. His skin smelled good, warm, like yeast and dusty sunlight. He wanted to crawl closer than it would let him, deep inside and safely away.

It was good, so good, being like this.

He let his mouth press into the side of Remus's throat, just above where it met his shoulder; his head was mostly tucked there anyway, and it wasn't a long way to go. He thought about flicking his tongue out to taste it, and shivered, but didn't. Still half-asleep, but able to help himself with that much, at least. The cord of muscle there was hard and hot under his cheek, and he nuzzled that against it instead.

This was really all he wanted, he tried to tell himself: to be held like this, like he hadn't been and hadn't really let himself be, truth be told, very often before in his life. Remus's warm arms looped around his waist, secured him close, Remus's breath ruffled his hair and the lines of his body pressed awkwardly and at odd angles into Sirius's and it was all perfect, it was all everything he needed, or it had to be because asking for more than this would be braver than he thought he knew how to be. All he wanted was Remus, really. The dark warm smell of his skin, his sleeping tendency to hold Sirius close, his scars and smiles and beautiful long hands.

His cock, though, pressed uncomfortably hard against the bony inner line of Remus's hip, wasn't sure it was entirely in agreement. Bloody stupid -- hadn't they been at it all night as wolves, anyway? Not that he ever let on that he knew that, since Remus didn't either, but it still didn't seem fair for him to wake up with a hard-on after all that. He wished to hell he could just fucking grow up already, save both of them all this trouble.

But Remus was warm.

He exerted a moment's experimental pressure with his hips, sighed across Remus's shoulder. Remus twitched in his sleep, and Sirius winced. Careful, more careful. If he woke up he'd say to stop. But it wasn't hurting anybody if he didn't have to know, was it?

Stay asleep. Stay asleep. It's just a dream.

After another moment and a deep breath he rolled away, settling on his side with his back against Remus's chest instead; as good as rubbing off on Remus's leg might sound, even Sirius had to admit that was crossing a line. He laced his fingers into Remus's, drew Remus's arm forward to wrap around his own waist. Held him there, sighing, breathing the lonely coldness of air that hadn't been warmed in Remus' lungs or rising off his skin, and rubbing his palm in an absent way around against the stiff line of his prick through the mess of blankets. Concentrating on Remus's arm, slung over his waist, how close Remus's hand was.

Finally he groped for the blanket's edge, found it, and slipped his hand underneath into relative warmth. His fingers were startlingly cool on the hot flesh at the base of his cock. Remus's breath landed on the back of his neck, light and feathery, the touch of a ghost. For a moment Sirius just lay with his eyes closed and waited for the need to become unbearable.

When it did, he started in earnest, gripping his base, stroking his length, starting to feel light slickness at the top of his strokes as he went along. His fingers laced through Remus's flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed. He arched back a little, rubbing up against Remus's body as much as he dared, but Remus was still now, not stirring at all. Sirius turned his head in toward the floor and opened his mouth wider to deaden the sound of his panting, and pushed his hand faster, drawing himself on. In spite of how much he wanted to linger of course faster was better, faster was safer, and it turned out to be easy to go faster, easy to push for all he was worth deeper into the darkness behind his eyes, where magic lantern images slid by of Remus's hand stroking his own cock behind the desk in his office, Remus not quite able to completely keep his gaze from raking over Sirius's body as they waited for the moon, all his old dream images of Remus's hand in place of his own, Remus arching and scar-struck over him, into him, Remus --

-- was holding too still.

Sirius faltered. Only for a second, he was really too close for anything longer, but his hand stuttered on his cock and his breath must have hitched, because then Remus's fingers wound through his were gently stroking them -- sliding along the insides of his digits, waking up nerves Sirius hadn't even known he had in so innocuous a place as his stupid hands. And that was definitely, definitely Remus's mouth leaned in even closer to the nape of his neck, stirring the ends of hair his voice slipped between, barely the shadow of a whisper: "Don't stop."

He came like a natural disaster, everything shaking apart and destroyed in its path, so hard it was barely even pleasure anymore and water leaked from the corners of his squeezing eyes. Sometime in the drifting, strange minutes or hours that followed he collapsed into a shuddering heap on the floor, gasping as though really sobbing, and Remus's arm curled all the way around his chest, holding him, holding a hand over his heart. Keeping him, wanting him close.

If there was actually an "all" he needed -- if what he needed had boundaries, had borders where it could be stopped from expanding in billowing, noxious clouds of childish greed -- then it was all right here, the lines were drawn all around this place where they lay. Maybe just snugly around them, like outlines around corpses on the ground. It was a good thought, for no good reason, and with it Sirius fell asleep in Remus's arms.

He could stay like this, he thought, forever.

---

By the full moon in April -- the third-to-last one of the year, by Remus's uncomfortably repeated and fervent count -- Sirius's energy and warmth for their time together seemed to have cooled somewhat, leaving him a little softer-spoken and more like he had begun the year than he had been of late, and by the second-to-last full moon of May he seemed faintly strained. In May he sat beside Remus in the Shack's bed, half-dressed, a cigarette poking out of his lips and trailing plumes of smoke that Remus thought clearly spoke of abusing certain privileges, and only smiled wanly at Remus's comments on the weather and how his younger students were finishing out the school year.

"Is everything all right, Sirius?" he gave up and asked at last, and Sirius jolted a little, sitting upright with his eyes clearing at once. The response didn't quite seem to fit, and he found himself frowning, and trying not to let the back of his mind think.

"Oh, I -- yeah. Yeah." He paused, took the cigarette out of his mouth, put it out with an air of impatience. "Just... you know. Exams. And so on. Lot of pressure."

And Sirius was probably nervous about leaving Hogwarts, which had always served him so much more as a home than anything else like a home he'd had, Remus thought; and was careful not to think anything deeper on the matter. He touched Sirius's shoulder, and found himself relieved when Sirius leaned into it. "I know you'll do well. You're an excellent student, when you put your mind to it." He delicately stressed the second half of the sentence, but could get nothing more from Sirius than another faint smile.

"I'm just knackered, is all."

"Well, I can certainly understand that." Remus swept his thumb over Sirius's shoulderblade, grazing the edge of one of those claw-marks that crossed it. "What are you hoping to do after you graduate?"

Muscles hardened, just slightly, under his hand; before he could do more than look up with a curious frown, though, Sirius had shrugged, making it impossible to tell if it had only been his imagination. "Dunno," he said. Rather tightly, Remus thought. "I haven't really thought about it."

"I suppose you'll have to see your scores," he pressed on, however, albeit a bit hesitatingly. "Still... have you thought about going abroad again? Or perhaps some sort of post-graduate education?" Sirius said nothing to this at all, and Remus only sat frowning at his back for a moment longer before trying again. "Perhaps even the Ministry -- "

"And they're hiring werewolves now, are they?" Sirius interrupted him. He didn't sound tense now; he sounded positively toneless. Remus didn't have much of an answer for that, and Sirius must have known he wouldn't. After only the space of a few more seconds he stood up, letting Remus's hand slide off his skin like water. "I've gotta go. I have to get to class."

"Sirius," Remus murmured, but Sirius didn't seem to hear him. He was standing, dressing, leaving, and Remus's stomach was cramping into a hard little ball, and he could suddenly think of nothing to say at all.

---

He didn't see Sirius much that month. After N.E.W.T.s were done classes could scarcely be made mandatory, and where he had thought at the back of his mind Sirius might linger anyway, searching out some relatively secluded time between the two of them to talk out some of his fears, what happened was just the opposite: Sirius disappeared, apparently avoiding him if at all possible. He scarcely even saw Sirius at mealtimes, somehow always arriving at just the wrong time, just catching a glimpse of his back or the stony pale side of his face. Remus told himself he didn't understand the reason for Sirius's evasiveness, and on a much deeper, less conscious level down, began to fear that he knew perfectly well.

He was at least looking forward to the full moon, to the chance to actually behave as some sort of genuine educator toward Sirius and help him sort things out -- but when he arrived at the Shack the night of the full moon in June, for the first time in all this past year, he found it empty. It wasn't all that far off from moonrise, and he waited, awkward and naked, on the room's single bed with increasing disquiet that at the end blossomed into something very much like panic. What if Sirius didn't even come? What would happen, what would happen to him, to either of them? Where could he possibly be? Had something gone wrong, had something happened?

At moonrise the panic became outright terror, and the terror pain, and the pain change... and only then, only in the grip of the searing, consciousness-stealing agony of altering his entire shape into new angles and forms did he have any dim awareness of the bedroom door banging open, stumbling footsteps, a snarling shifting form barely hanging on to human thought long enough to claw its way out of clothes, before it was all over and there was only a terrible lunging with jaws wide --

He woke up in gruesome, throbbing pain: the kind of pain he had forgotten, the pain of stinging cuts and bruises all over, incidental damage incurred during the night that always somehow hurt so much worse than the deeper structural damage that was killing him by inches every month. Remus blinked at the ceiling, trying to get smeary sleep out of his eyes, trying to think. Had he been alone after all? But no, Sirius had come, he was sure -- had they fought? After all this time, why would they...

Remus looked around, startled out of his train of thought, and found Sirius at once. He was sitting at the foot of the bed, huddled, as far away from Remus as possible within its confines. His knees were tucked up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He wasn't smoking, or even moving. Remus couldn't see his eyes.

"You want me to go away," Sirius said, in a voice that might almost have sounded perfectly, levelly calm.

Remus struggled to gain his elbows, to make himself more alert. His mouth seemed to be functioning on its own, far ahead of the rest of him, already trying to take control. "It's not that I want you to, Sirius, it's just -- "

"Shut up," Sirius snarled. Remus could see his lips peeling back from his teeth. "I reckon it was convenient, eh? Having another werewolf at school. Somebody to change with for a while, and then, oops, off you go, oh well, best find something else to get by with. Fuck." He spat it through his teeth, then shoved his hands up into his hair, concealing his face even further behind his wrists. "What makes me so stupid?"

"Sirius, that's not true -- " Reaching, just fumbling, trying to get a hand on Sirius's shoulder and Sirius jerked away as though Remus had tried to break his arm.

"Fuck off!" He was nearly shouting, now, if still going to any lengths to keep his face turned as far away from Remus as possible. "Fuck off, I hate you. You're just like the rest of them and I hate you."

...There was no way to stop it hurting, and Remus fell back, away from him, half-ready to even let Sirius escape if it meant he wouldn't have to hear that again. It took him long minutes, terribly long, to gather his thoughts, to find anything like a coherent approach to this; if there was anything fortunate in all this, though, it was that for all his hurt fury Sirius didn't seem to be in any hurry to get away. "I don't want you to leave," he said, in a quiet, steady voice that sounded like it had had all the air pressed out of it, but nonetheless was better than nothing. "There's little I want less, I promise you that. But you must have known you'd have to graduate sometime; neither of us has any control over that."

"That doesn't mean I have to leave." Sirius's voice was still strained, still ragged, but at least he waited for Remus to finish speaking this time, and he wasn't shouting anymore. "That doesn't mean you have to make me leave. I could, we could -- I could stay, we could, we could really be together, really, finally, I -- they're not going to exile me! You don't have to talk about it like I'm your bloody favorite student or something, like you're going to write me a fucking letter of reference!"

Remus closed his eyes. It had been a mistake, he should have known, trying to treat Sirius as though that distance between them had never been erased or at least complicated, not to -- but even as he thought it he caught himself, realized that this too would be better said than thought. "It was a mistake," he said, simply, echoing his own mind. "I'm sorry, Sirius. I should have been more plain with you from the start; I only thought it would be easier -- "

"For who?" Sirius cut him off, and it recurred to Remus in a bright flare of pain what Sirius had said about his arguments with his uncle: He can be pretty nasty, so can I... Remus couldn't, of course, but before he could even begin to think of how to respond Sirius shook his head, sharply, his eyes still down and out of sight. "Forget it," he muttered -- and then softer, so raw with pleading hope that it twisted and burned in Remus's gut as though the words were the silver knife in his office: "...You don't want me to go?"

"No," Remus said, and Sirius finally began to lift his head, enough that Remus could at last see his bruised-looking, dark-circled eyes, half-wild with not daring to believe it could be, just maybe, all right. And well he shouldn't, Remus thought, and tried not to sigh. "But you must."

The reaction was immediate: Sirius's whole face twisted, or maybe even crumpled. "Why?" he nearly yelled, again, giving up and whipping round on the bed to face Remus fully. It was not an improvement. "Fuck! Why? I probably can't get a bloody job anyway and I don't care about anything but you! Why can't I just stay?"

You've just told me, Remus thought sourly, but of course he couldn't say that either. "After you graduate -- "

"So I'll get a place in Hogsmeade!" Sirius interrupted him again, scraping at his hair in his eyes so roughly it looked painful. "Or something, I dunno -- I'll stay close by, we can meet up, we can, we can date and kiss and fuck and everything else because I won't be your student anymore, it'll be -- what?"

"Sirius, think for a moment," Remus said, quietly, into the only pause he'd been left. "If you graduate from school and we immediately begin a relationship, it can't help but cast a great deal of doubt on the nature of the one we had previously."

"So?" Sirius said bluntly. Remus did allow his expression to reflect a bit of that sourness this time.

"Well, at best I'll lose my job, if that's of any particular importance to you. And my reputation as an educator henceforward, and as you have pointed out, employment isn't precisely easy to come by for people like us to begin with. Nor will your future prospects be particularly bright, especially tied to mine."

Sirius did seem a bit chagrined by that, finally, but it was quick to fade. "No, but -- why should you? I mean, that's not proof that anything happened -- and nobody can prove anything happened, and you know why? Nothing's happened!"

"That's not precisely true, Sirius." The more quietly he spoke, the more of Sirius's attention he seemed able to hold, and he pushed the advantage. "As I think you're well aware. Nor would it matter if it were; even the possibility of an affair with a student is most serious, and any investigation into me on that suspicion would easily find at least two or three good reasons why I ought be sacked."

He could see Sirius still trying to argue, opening his mouth and then closing it, first hotly, then weakly, and then Sirius collapsed back on his hands at the end of the bed with a snarl of frustration. "So -- fine, I don't -- fine, we don't have to have a thing or anything, I just thought... I don't even have to do anything, just -- " His voice had taken on a pathetic, pleading, almost whining tone that hurt Remus nearly physically to hear, if only because he could see so clearly that it hurt Sirius to use it. On the point of begging, so desperate he would probably do anything, and Remus had to say no, had to. It was more than he thought he could bear. "I can just stay near -- I'll just come up at the full moon, yeah? We'll just -- change together -- we don't have to do, do anything, or anything, you don't even have to see me if you don't want, I could just -- "

"No, Sirius." Cutting across, doing them both that mercy, and then pushing ahead in a tumble before Sirius could start shouting again. "You know it wouldn't work. I would want to see you, and after a while you wouldn't be satisfied with only the full moons, and nor would I. Be reasonable; how long do you really think we would manage, with no practical constraints, not to let our relationship become intimate? I think we're no more than a good three moons off from it, myself, to be perfectly honest. You may be willing to give up any possibility of a relationship now, but in half a year's time I think you'd come to regret that decision."

"Well, maybe by then -- "

"No." He said it with a little more force than he'd meant, and then couldn't meet Sirius's eyes. "...That isn't all of it, either. Not in the slightest. You tell me that I'm all you care about in the world; you don't know what you care about in the world, because you haven't had a chance to find out. You aren't -- "

"Oh, don't you give me that," Sirius snarled over him, his hands fisting up in the bedsheet tangles. "It doesn't seem to me like I'm the one who doesn't know what he wants here. If I'm too young just say so, and then I might as well just go kill myself, because there's nothing at all I can do to fix that."

"Don't joke about that, Si -- "

"Who says I'm joking?"

There was nothing for either of them to say for a long moment, and then Sirius was wrestling himself back under control, slowly, with an effort. "I know what I'm after," he said, leaving the question only hanging in the air unanswered, bold and unsettling. "I'm not stupid, I know. I want you and I just want to be with you, it doesn't even matter how little. I've been managing this long barely seeing you once a month, with you always pulling and pushing at me to go back up to school and have it over a little sooner, and now you don't even want me to have that much? What am I supposed to do? Man up and say thank you? I love you!" He let that hang for a moment, seeming as shocked as Remus that it had come out of his mouth at all. "...I -- love you, so don't treat me like I said I want to have a pet unicorn, or something. I know what it takes to love you, even when I can't have all I want from it. I'm not him, Remus." Throwing it at him, back in his face, like a slap, spitting both the name said and the one left unsaid to ring in Remus's ears. "I'm not going to want to walk out on you ever, so there's no point trying to get me to do it right away to save you the wait."

"That isn't -- " But the protest fell dead in his mouth, because... well, it was, a little. Only a little, and not quite like Sirius thought -- or was accusing, at least -- but enough to keep him from saying no, that isn't it at all, and really being able to mean it.

"I love you," Sirius repeated, almost sullenly this time, staring down at the floor. "I do." And Remus made himself reach again -- reach over and place his hand on the back of Sirius's. Sirius didn't pull away, but he didn't clasp it, either. Remus supposed it would have to do.

"I love you," Remus said. Sirius didn't look at him when he said it, but seemed to cringe into himself slightly -- as though he wanted to close himself around the sound of the words like an oyster around a pearl, to keep them from ever escaping and fading away again. And perhaps as though at this point it hurt him more than gratified him to hear them. "And I'm well aware that you're not Ian, Sirius. But you must understand that nor am I your mother." He had been expecting the flinch -- that much or worse -- but neither that nor the fact that Sirius had begun this dirty game first could stop him feeling miserable and cruel. "I have no intentions of abandoning you, or deciding I don't want you anymore. Quite the opposite, in fact -- I want you to come back." He turned his hand suddenly, catching Sirius's in his palm, leaning in with the sudden force of need. "Sirius. I want you to come back. Please, promise me that you will, even if it's not for long. Even if it's only to tell me that you've changed your mind. Just come back, at least once, and tell me."

"If you want me to come back then why are you sending me off in the first place?" Sirius shot back, but Remus was gratified to hear that much of the heat was gone from his voice. ...Well, perhaps not precisely gratified, as most of what had replaced it was only a miserable weariness, but even so. "Remus... please." It was what he had been afraid of, and he could no more look at Sirius then than he could in good conscience have allowed his eyes to stray any night before the full moon. "Please don't make me leave at all. I don't even -- " His breath hitched, and he tried again. "We don't even know how much time we have -- you might not even be here for me to come back to. You could be dead, I could be dead, we don't even know, next week even. Remus -- " Now that he'd said the name already in the conversation, it seemed to be coming easier. "Please. Don't make me do this. Don't make me waste whatever time we've got."

Remus closed his eyes again; he had to, looking away was no longer sufficient. "I'm sorry," he said, scarcely above a whisper. "There's nothing I can do about that."

"You can tell me to stay," Sirius said, and he was whispering. Weight shifted on the bed; his voice, and breath, came very close. "Just tell me to stay. However far or near. I will. Forever. I swear."

There was a long moment when Remus couldn't speak at all.

"Come back," he said, at last, without opening his eyes. His tongue felt thick and heavy and difficult. "Promise me."

And Sirius made a sound of disgust in his teeth, thumping back to the end of the bed and letting go his hand, and then he could open his eyes. Breathe again, too, although to be honest he hadn't really noticed that he'd stopped doing that. "Fine," Sirius said, indistinctly, more just angry consonants than a real word. "Fine. If that's all you'll take, then fine. I'll come back."

"Promise me," Remus insisted; and when he met Sirius's eyes, staring into them, he could swear they looked slightly mollified after all.

For a moment, at least, before Sirius shrugged and threw up his hands, angrily, looking away into nothing. "I promise. All right, I promise."

"Thank you." And this he said with such sincerity that he thought Sirius's gaze, even turned away as it was, softened again, just a little.

Which left him entirely unprepared for what came out of Sirius's mouth next. "Then fuck me," he said, and turned to look straight at Remus again as he did, sitting back on his hands, brutal and shaking and somehow naked beyond even the obvious. "If you really want me to come back, then fuck me. At least I'll have that even if I can't have anything else." His tone was curiously like it had been that first time in Remus's office; somehow doubled, arrogant and pleading in one voice. But he knew perfectly well there was no wolf here now. "But I don't want to be paying for an affair I've never even had."

There was another moment's pause. They stared at each other across the bed, Sirius's expression raw and full of tumult, Remus's, he hoped, betraying nothing at all.

"All right," he said, at last, in the calmest, most even tone he could muster; and again it was not desire that wanted to deform its shape. "All right, Sirius. If that's all you want from me."

Again the response was immediate; Sirius really hadn't ever liked to keep him waiting. He first looked slapped, then stricken, then crumpled in a hopeless way that Remus had finally to look away from, all his righteousness deflating. "You know it isn't," Sirius said. His voice was small and finally, finally defeated, and terrible to hear. Remus sighed.

"I know." He hesitated, and then shifted himself across the bed, for once not even minding his own state of undress, coming to settle next to Sirius and cup the boy's cheek gently in his hand. "I do love you, Sirius. You know that as well. If I didn't love you it wouldn't be so hard; I could give you anything you asked of me, and not worry so much about the consequences for you. But I do, and so I can't."

Sirius shrugged, roughly, and pulled at his chin a bit in Remus's grip. His expression had soured a bit at this last, but Remus didn't let him go. "Yeah. Well. Lucky me, I guess."

"Sirius..."

And he wanted to, that was the trouble; he wanted so much of what he knew was the wrong answer, so many things that would ruin both of them, and there was no way to stop wanting, he couldn't blame Sirius for that much. Certainly he was setting no examples here, desperate to give Sirius something, not to have Sirius dodging his eyes away again; in no position to judge with Sirius's face cupped in his hand and leaning in, leaning to kiss him, wanting at least for that much to be all right.

But of course it wasn't, and for more reasons than just Sirius jerking his head away, pushing Remus's shoulders, pulling back. "Don't," he said, sharp first, then weary again, sounding exhausted: "Don't. Just don't. ...Fuck, I'm so sick of this."

And Remus supposed he could have said something to that, something or anything else in the short minutes between when Sirius pulled all the way away and started to search out his clothes and when he had them on and strode silent out the bedroom door. Of course he could have. It was just that it was hard to see the point.

---

They didn't see each other again until the last day -- truly the last day of the term, when the students were on their way home, saying confused goodbyes and until-laters in the Great Hall under the brilliant blue, sunny ceiling. Some seventh-years left straight from school for wherever they were headed next, no longer bound by the train; some still took it back to London for convenience's sake, and then from there on to wherever else. Sirius was doing the latter, he had heard, although he could no longer remember from where. Remus still scanned the crowd half-heartedly, but down underneath he was sure that it wasn't so; that Sirius had already taken himself off, and gone.

And then a gaggle of sniffly fourth-year girls coalesced in front of him, writing owl post addresses on one another's hands in enspelled ink and making promises, and a student he'd quite liked from his fifth-year classes came up to shake his hand and exchange a few words; and when the young lady in question and the slightly younger ones just beyond had all moved on, milling away and out of his immediate line of sight, there was Sirius, standing in the middle of the floor, looking at him with a small, rueful smile. He was out of his school robes, a leather jacket on over his t-shirt and jeans; apart from his trunk a knapsack was slung over his shoulder, and he looked very tired and much more like a grown man than he had at their first meeting. For that one moment, just meeting eye-to-eye, he took Remus's breath away.

In the flurry of embracing students it was easy for their own hug to go unnoticed -- just one more among hundreds. He cradled Sirius's head to his shoulder, breathing in the familiar scent of his hair mixed with the somehow soothing one of leather, and whispered in his ear: "Remember that you promised."

Sirius tucked his head close, his mouth pressed briefly into the curve of Remus's neck and shoulder, hidden from anyone else's eyes by his own arm. "You too," was all he said, muffled in Remus's skin.

The train pulled away in the early afternoon, but he didn't go to see it; he returned to his office, slowly, climbing the stairs one by one in the empty, echoing castle. His legs felt leaden, very tired and very old. Once inside he closed the door, and sat at his desk for a long time doing nothing, quite at a loss. There seemed to be no purpose to anything he might try to accomplish, and the light coming in the windows seemed dishwatery and dim.

After an hour or two had passed, he began to find it difficult to believe that Sirius had ever been here at all.

---

The time that followed was long and cripplingly strange, impossible to document. He found, later, when he could look up again, that the calendar claimed it had been two years -- in a loud, insistent, quite literal voice -- but for all Remus knew it could have been ten, or a thousand. He was lost underwater, sounds deadened, eyes flooded. The best he could catch were dim squints of sunlight, far above.

He taught classes. He read novels. He changed at the full moon in a dungeon he'd found beneath Hogwarts as he'd originally intended, not wanting to dare the Shack and Sirius's absence from it. He slogged through the days as though they were made from treacle and wax. His students still liked him, he thought, but in a distant, puzzled way, as though the ones who remembered him weren't quite sure what had become of him, and the ones who didn't weren't quite sure who he was. He drowned, and lost some hours, and others stretched out into days and weeks and years while the ticking of the clock nonetheless remained perfectly regular. The world became plastic, a thin membrane over a depthless pool.

He had owls from Sirius, from time to time. He wished he could have said they were the only things that remained able to sharpen him into focus, but in reality even they fell somewhat short, more often than not; they were only words on paper, impossible somehow for his undermind to connect to the elemental, gravitational force of meaning and direction that had been sapped out of his life. Sirius's missives were brief, infrequent, blunt, and yet somehow cryptic, like he said everything so plainly it hid whatever he was trying not to mention. He talked about traveling the continent again, about the buildings in Italy, about taking care of his transformations as a tourist without hurting anybody else or, to a lesser degree, himself. In one letter he mentioned, matter-of-factly, that he had lost a little toe from his left foot at one full moon; his other self had just worried and worried at the paw, in its frustration, until it had torn it cleanly off, and he hadn't been able to treat it until too late to reattach the digit. I reckon it's all right as I wasn't using it anyway, he'd written in conclusion in his letter, with what seemed like perfectly good cheer, and Remus had laughed like a loon for a while and then covered his face and sobbed for much longer, for no particular reason he could put his finger on, other than the obvious.

Other letters, too, just as matter-of-fact if not even starker: descriptions of the effects of a few assorted wizarding and Muggle drugs, which accounts Remus read wincingly if at all; tales of being fucked in back alleys in Prague and Vienna and Paris by men whose names he didn't know, from which it was harder to look away. His hands looked a little like yours, mostly, Sirius had written, his handwriting blocky and irrefutable as stone, and I could sort of pretend, watching their fingers all slicked up and all, but he didn't feel big enough in me and he didn't smell like and then Remus was folding up the letter fast, rough enough to almost tear the parchment, hands shaking, shoving it into a drawer and out of sight and away and trying to knot his hands into each other to make them still. Not safe, it was impossible to stop thinking, idiotically, not safe to have here, he must do something with it, he --

He took it out and read it three more times, over the week, feeling like a thief rummaging through his own desk. Each time, later, when he came spilling over his hand with his teeth locked, he could almost see something like light, floating above through miles of water, almost blocked by the drifting fronds of seaweed and the murk of even the clearest pool.

His own replies were plain, bland, bloodless. My students are and Professor Dumbledore mentioned and lovely, it really sounds like and not much of any meaning. Only once did he really break down: at Sirius's birthday, which he had barely even known was a date he knew, of the first year, a small stuffed grey wolf tucked into the tube of the letter. Travelling can be lonely, was his only, dignified explanation, and Sirius only ever mentioned it in a P.S. some time later: He's pretty good company, but don't get jealous. Casual enough to be almost dismissive, but by then Remus could read the slight shake in his letters, the one that said, don't push just now, please; just let me pretend a little while, just let me catch my breath, and maybe.

Maybe, maybe; maybe.

He took his letters and sent them. He began to get very ill after each full moon, often missing as much as a week of classes at a time. Ten years, he had heard, at the outside.

Long years; and strange.

---

It was in his mid-afternoon class on Thursday, with the fourth-years, when he finally turned round from his demonstration and found the rearmost desk occupied not by another gangly adolescent but by Sirius, twenty, in his leather jacket again, his hair well overgrown and in his crinkled, laughing eyes, too thin and more beautiful than anything Remus had ever seen before in his life.

"Er, so you see," Remus found his mouth saying on a crash-bound autopilot, his wand caught in midair and his eyes frozen and fixed, "the obvious consequences, of, ah, of the, obviously, of." He swallowed. Several of the students were curiously following his eyes now, turning in their seats with a steady rustling to see Sirius merely sitting with his smile hidden behind his folded hands, not being remotely disruptive. "Er, of. Of that. Essentially. Let's break early today, shall we? You've your assignments? Class dismissed..."

"I didn't want to interrupt," Sirius said mildly over the backs of his hands, when the students had all cleared out, the last casting bemused (and a couple Remus would have sworn were amused) looks over their shoulders as they let the classroom doors shut behind. "You always did a good show with counter-jinxes."

"How would you know, you were never paying the slightest attention," Remus said, but it came out in more of a murmur. He could feel his mouth stretching oddly for a second before even realizing it was a smile. "...Look at you. You look amazing."

"Look at me," Sirius was saying, or at least starting to, but then Sirius was on his feet and Remus was across the classroom, and they were in each other's arms again, and the scent again was leather and Sirius, Sirius's hair and his absurd coat, as though no time had passed at all.

He thought he could easily keep embracing Sirius until the end of the world, but unfortunately was forced to admit his class schedule wasn't likely to allow it. Remus drew back to arms' length, regretfully, holding Sirius by his shoulders just so he could look at him again. "What's brought you here? You never mentioned..."

Sirius shrugged, grinning crookedly. He had grown into himself quite a bit; much of his ranginess had left him, and though still too thin he had filled out in a way that had nothing to do with how he was eating or abusing his body. While he still didn't look entirely like an adult, he looked far closer than Remus had ever seen him. Less pleasant to note, though, were the new scars Remus could see: a hook of deep, almost burnt-looking scratches curling up from his neck under his jaw, a few narrow cuts sliced across his brow and upper cheekbone on the left side. "Wanted it to be a surprise," he said, shrugging. "I'm here for a project, actually. I've been doing research on werewolf biology for a while now; I'm thinking about going back to school, like you said. Hogwarts has got an especially good collection about Dark creatures, though most of it's under lock and key. I've been talking to Professor Dumbledore about using it and he's gotten me all the permissions." At Remus's stare, he dropped his eyes away, unable to help another grin as he added, in a teasing thoughtful tone, "Plus, ah -- I did make this promise, one time..."

And then Remus was embracing him again, tight again, and Sirius squeezing back, half-laughing, and it was impossible to imagine ever letting go.

"You're not going to tell me you've changed your mind, are you?" Remus murmured after a long moment that was not nearly long enough, his breath stirring Sirius's hair, and Sirius really did laugh.

"No," he said, poking Remus a little, gently, in the lower back. "No, somehow that wasn't in the plan. Sorry."

Remus wasn't exactly surprised to find himself relaxing at that, just a little bit, wrapping into the embrace just that half an inch further. Nor by the distant sounds of shuffling and voices beginning from without the classroom door, for that matter -- although those did make him start a bit.

"I have another class," he said, in a tone so regretful it almost made him laugh to hear it. Not making any move to let go, he noticed, vaguely. "...Two, actually. Not for a few moments yet, but -- "

"But I'd best be on my way," Sirius finished, in a mockery of his own old litany on the mornings after the moons that was as gentle as it was unmistakable. He was grinning against Remus's ear, laughter in his voice. "I know, I know. Want to have dinner tonight? There's this -- "

"Yes," Remus said, immediately, over him, then stopped and they both laughed a bit. "I'm sorry, you were saying."

"Just there's this place in Hogsmeade, I've never been there but I hear it's all right." And now Sirius was drawing back, first, with a bit of an apologetic smile. "Meet me at the gate at... seven or so?"

"That sounds wonderful." Remus hesitated another moment, then said, "You really do look amazing."

Sirius smiled, so warmly and meltingly that it seemed to transform them both. "So do you," he said, although Remus waved this off; he knew perfectly well how he looked. He reached out instead, curling his hand under Sirius's chin. Sirius lifted it to accommodate the touch but dropped his gaze again.

"You didn't mention this, though," Remus murmured, and Sirius shrugged, looking back up at him again sooner than Remus had expected.

"Didn't think it was worth mentioning," he said. "It's nothing, really. You should see me with my clothes off, I -- " He caught himself there, though, and an expression of strained hilarity flickered across his face, his lips compressing. Remus coughed, firmly.

"Tonight, then," he said, and then realized how that had sounded; although he couldn't really bring himself to regret the look in Sirius's eyes as he grinned.

"I'll see you then."

---

The place in Hogsmeade was small, pub-like, tucked away down a sidestreet he might never have ventured down himself, and indeed possessed of what was probably quite good food. Although Remus thought he could easily have been shoveling ashes into his mouth all the while, and none the wiser.

"At the castle," Sirius answered his question over dinner, with a rueful little smile. "I should have known I'd never be away for good. Professor Dumbledore -- or just Dumbledore now, I guess, I dunno, I could never quite get used to either one -- he offered me a little suite of rooms up in the west tower that doesn't go to much good use otherwise. It was really kind of him, I can't really afford much of anything else around here long-term. Poor budding academic and all." He grinned at Remus's smile. "I don't know if it'll ever amount to anything, but I can at least write a book to go gather dust in the library."

"I hear it could always use those," Remus agreed, watching him. He looked so much like himself and yet so much older, it was hard to imagine only two years had been put on his face and frame. Then again, the same was probably true of himself. "Do you have any idea how long you'll be staying?"

"As long as I want, as far as I know," Sirius said, a little too lightly, and Remus's lips twitched; he supposed that hadn't been very subtle to begin with, as these things went. "As long as I need to."

And this time his smile across the table made Remus have to look decorously somewhere else.

Most of what they talked about was meaningless: Remus's classes and students, (of which there was little to report Sirius couldn't have guessed, and certainly little enough that had really sunk in in Remus's own mind), what Sirius had been doing in the intervening time (the important parts of which Remus had heard already), the state of the world, the phase of the moon. They walked back up to Hogwarts after dinner together, not quite letting their hands touch out of habit. At the castle doors it seemed only sensible to invite Sirius up to his own quarters for a drink, and it certainly appeared to seem only sensible to Sirius to accept.

"This is exciting," Sirius said, grinning, as Remus held the door open for him, although he looked almost more nervous than excited; his hands were stuffed down deep in his jacket pockets, Remus was quite sure to keep them from shaking. "Your office is one thing, but I don't think I ever expected to actually see the inner sanctum."

Remus shut the door behind him, trying to keep from making any sort of undignified configuration of his features at that particular turn of phrase. In the end, he settled for a slight, ironic smile. "Not ever?"

Sirius turned to glance at him, his grin rather destabilized but still in evidence. "Well," he said, and then laughed. "Expected's maybe not, not the word."

"Hmm. May I take your coat?"

"Oh, yeah -- "

Without it, as at dinner, Sirius looked smaller, not younger but diminished, as though he'd padded himself up with it on to seem healthier and stronger, less of a potential victim. Remus didn't know what the chances of that were anyway, but he could sympathize with the impulse. He gestured at the wheezy couch he'd inherited with the rooms, and Sirius sat on it gingerishly, lacing his hands. "What would you like? To drink."

"Oh, um -- " Sirius hesitated again -- and then broke into full, bright laughter, a sound so nearly unfamiliar that Remus's throat closed up at it slightly. Nervous laughter, but that made it no less lovely. "Actually just water sounds fantastic. I'm a little, um." He gestured vaguely at his mouth and throat, and Remus, a faint smile on his own mouth, thought he could sympathize again.

"Of course." He lingered for an awkward moment -- it was surprisingly hard to make himself stop looking at Sirius -- and then went for the glasses in his little kitchen space, and to fill them. Sirius drained off most of his water all at once when Remus sat back next to him, smiled a little self-consciously, set the glass back down. He closed his eyes for a second, and sat like that looking unsteady and somehow fragile, leaving Remus unsure quite where to look. The scars along Sirius's brow seemed to stand out quite strongly in the lower light of Remus's rooms, and he fought another urge to touch them, to run his fingers along their lines.

"I don't know how to do this," Sirius said at last, opening his eyes again to fix Remus in their gaze with surprising strength. He sat back slightly, with a breath that sounded like it had been held in for some time. "Seduce you, I mean. I spent so long trying not to try that now it's like trying to think of pink elephants and you find you can't even think of what one looks -- "

Remus kissed him, which wasn't exactly what he'd been expecting to do. Fortunately Sirius didn't seem to mind being interrupted.

When they broke off he lingered close, his eyes still mostly shut, his lips brushing Sirius's when he spoke. "You don't have to seduce me," he murmured. "You were saying something about seeing you with your clothes off?"

He could feel Sirius's lips form the grin, stretching and pulling smooth against his. "Put down your glass and we'll talk about it," Sirius said, his voice in a matching half a whisper. "You're dripping on my thigh."

He'd scarcely finished talking before he was bursting into laughter, and Remus was helpless not to follow, helpless in general, almost to the point of laughter becoming hysteria. "I'm sorry," he managed, as he was leaning back, setting the glass of water down with almost exaggerated care. There was, in fact, a dark splotch on the leg of Sirius's jeans that he tried not to look at. "Not one of my finer moments -- "

"I don't mind, 'sjust cold -- " Sirius was struggling to talk between his own mild hysteria, his scarred fist shoved up against his mouth. "Well, now I have to get out of my clothes, eh?"

"Please, don't let me keep you," Remus said, the heaviness of his breath still buried in laughter, but Sirius kept himself -- lunging forward again, seizing Remus's face in both hands and kissing him hard and heavily and wetly, and ultimately Remus fought down the nerves that made him want to laugh at that last thought with little difficulty.

"Merlin, fuck," Sirius said after breaking away, into Remus's mouth this time, still holding him tightly, "I can't believe this, I can't even believe I'm here -- "

"Nor I," Remus whispered; and he had almost no voice at all now. "Come to bed, Sirius."

It was a crashing, ridiculous journey, occupied by hands and mouths and short on navigation. They landed on the bed in a tangle, Sirius on him, already touching him in ways that would have been fully off-limits when last they'd seen each other. He made a broken dying sound at a hand on his cock, and Sirius heaved breath into his shirt like it had been on his own, fumbling with clumsy fingers to feel out its shape. Then Sirius was rearing back, up, stripping out of his own shirt in a mess of thrashing elbows, not even bothering to undo the buttons. He was working on Remus's buttons instead when Remus propped himself up slightly, staring again in a less pleasant way, and ran a hand down his arm.

"Oh, Sirius," he said in a half-breathed airless voice, and Sirius glanced at him and then down with a tiny, self-conscious smile shaping his heavy breath. Struggling with Remus's shirt seemed to give him something else to think about.

"Yeah," he said, and shrugged, not saying I know or I told you already but making them both plain by that gesture. The overlapping twists of scar down Sirius's arms were unmistakable: bites, deep bites, not old but most not fresh either. There was quite a bit more scarring spread over Sirius's chest, as well, and probably more on his back, but this was the most damning evidence of what Sirius had alluded to that Remus could think of, worse than the usual misadventures and frustrations. He'd been shredding himself, deliberately, trying to hurt himself. With anger or with grief, in their time of separation his wolf had gone quite mad. "You look all right, though." This came out half-purred, with Remus's shirt finally open, and he found himself flushing slightly, absurd as it was.

"I've managed," he said, and didn't say what he didn't know if Sirius suspected; that lately even his other self had been much too weak and sick and exhausted, wrung out from the change, to do himself any real damage. Sirius didn't say anything to that, just made a faint humming noise in his throat. He was already freeing Remus from what was left of his shirt, and then turning his attention to dispensing with his own jeans and boots and socks.

It was strange -- nothing new, and yet everything new. Sirius's body had filled out and looked less boyish but still, like his features, was definitively itself, familiar as the possibility of looking at it in good conscience was unfamiliar. Remus took his time. He reached up, at last, to run his hands over Sirius's chest, not quite believing in what he was doing, and Sirius shuddered down into them at once, his head dropping forward as he lost his thread with Remus's trousers no more than undone. Remus slid his palms down to Sirius's hips and Sirius let out a moan that sounded ailing and lost. "Stop, stop," he was gasping already, without much conviction, "I can't -- nnah." This last as Remus's hand curled under his cock, stony and damp at its tip, trying to push its insistent way forward from the dark curls at the meeting of his thighs. "Fuck -- " His voice jumped an octave and broke there. "Fuck, Remus -- "

"Good?" Remus murmured through a smile, his breath coming so fast and light the word lost much of its sound in the middle. Sirius shuddered, his fingers curling and tightening in the useless parted cloth around Remus's zip.

"Every time I've wanked off for the last three years," he said in a dense spilling rush, and then didn't complete the thought; he didn't really need to. His hips jutted into Remus's hand quite expressively enough. And then he was drawing back, pulling away, leaving Remus's palm feeling bereft and empty -- although not for long, since then Sirius had dived like a hawk and Remus's cock, inside his mouth, was of much more immediate importance.

He thrashed his head back, panting, groping with eyes closed to find something for his hand to hold; it found Sirius's hair, and so went about its holding with all the gentleness he could manage. It was too much, he knew what Sirius had been saying, he couldn't bear this, it was like a gourmet's feast after years of starvation. He hadn't had time to prepare himself, and now he might be lost. All the thoughts of Sirius's dangerous mouth he'd ever had tumbled free, out of their holding: smiling the wolf's smile in his office, too beautiful around every damning word, and then speaking for no one but his human self -- meeting Remus's kisses that he should have known better than in the Shack --

A strangled noise wormed through his teeth and his control broke; he fumbled at Sirius's head, pushing and smoothing back his hair, encouraging his mouth away. "No," he managed, whispering, and trying as hard as he could not to make another mess, to make No sound like Yes, yes, but -- "Finish. I need you inside me."

How he had managed to make a complete thought right now was a mystery lost to time, but the effect on Sirius was electric. His whole body stiffened in its awkward stretch across Remus's legs -- he seemed to fold on himself slightly, like he might burst. But all that came of it was a long, hard shudder, and then he was letting Remus's cock escape his lips, gently, emerging in a long, wet, slow slide. That last little tease was very nearly a disaster; Remus had to dig his fingers into the sheets and make himself turn his mind to blank grey stone to keep it from being the end of him. He just lay still a moment after his release, breathing, and in time Sirius's hands -- definitely shaking now -- returned to their task and finished stripping his feet and legs. He was able to register faint amusement, finally, when Sirius fumbled his wand back out of his jacket and used the slicking spell Remus had seldom in life been certain enough to rely on. His own prejudices aside, at least Sirius knew quite well by now what he was doing.

Sirius's entry was agonizingly slow and worth it, worth every muscle straining in Remus's upraised thighs, worth the twinges of discomfort and then forced relaxation as he fought a good decade's lack of practice. His body protested and then realigned, stretched itself into a shape to suit, as he supposed it'd learnt to do with every waxing moon. Was this something like what had happened, on all of those nights neither of them could remember? He had no way of knowing, and no real desire to. This was them, for once, and not the foreign invaders who ruled their lives in cycles. A clumsy, slow, heavy, human thing, full of skin and sweat. He held Sirius's shoulders, breathed, and closed his eyes; Sirius made a low sound in his throat, and moved, and Remus moved with him. He thought they had never been more themselves.

It wasn't long for either of them -- not nearly long enough, and then Remus found his eyes squeezed shut and a whimper keening through his teeth, trying to hold back and hold on -- but Sirius's hand was on him before he had any chance of stopping it, rough and callused and hard and warm, and his teeth broke open in a shout that lost him the option of restraint. Sirius drove into him, deep, gasping, crying out, calling out Remus's name, the one he'd only ever known from still being brave enough to ask from behind a door in a dim hallway --

He came, and hard; seeming to hover in space, at once both lost and found.

He collapsed back onto the pillow when he could finally move at all again, when he'd spilled what felt like every fluid in his body over his own belly and Sirius's hand (much better than on his desk, he thought vaguely, with a lazy smile), and Sirius collapsed on top of him and drew great shuddering breaths. Remus placed a hand against his hair, holding his head in place, and Sirius's arms curled around him at once, clinging like a drowning swimmer. His hips shifted, and his softened cock slid inside Remus, starting to withdraw.

"No," Remus said again, finding his voice dry and husky but surprisingly strong. Sirius stopped moving, at least, and Remus cleared his throat. "No. Stay. Stay until you're hard again."

He couldn't decide which was more satisfying: the hitch in Sirius's breathing he could feel against his neck, or the soft twitch in Sirius's cock he could feel in a much more intimate place.

And then Sirius was lifting his head, grinning in a sort of sheepish amazement into his eyes, and as beautiful as Remus had ever remembered and more; and then they were kissing, long, slow, deep, wet, everything he could never allow before and now couldn't have stopped if he'd tried.

It turned out not to take very long at all.

---

"Oh, complete nonsense," Sirius said, later, sprawling across Remus's chest with his head tucked into Remus's shoulder. He wasn't smoking, at least; he'd said he'd quit, although Remus still had his doubts. "I mean, Hogwarts has a perfectly good library on Dark creatures but so do nearly a dozen other places in Britain, most of them even in London. I just came for you."

Remus was surprised into full-throated, genuine laughter, and even more surprised that he was surprised. "Well. I hate to have distracted you from your research -- "

"Pfft," Sirius said, eloquently. Remus tried not to laugh again, found it difficult. Everything just felt so good, lying in the dark, Sirius's limbs heavy and warm and at slightly uncomfortable angles on top of him.

"Why didn't you come back sooner, then?" he asked after another long moment, a bit more quietly, maybe hoping Sirius would be able to ignore the question altogether. He didn't want to... well, he didn't exactly know what he didn't want to do. Darken the mood, perhaps. Sirius did quiet, but he just shrugged after a moment, shifting his weight slightly on Remus in the process.

"Didn't know if you wanted me to," he said, with a casualness that might have been forced. "I didn't know -- if it was too soon, or I hadn't been away and around the world enough, or what. It was sort of hard for me to judge how long was long enough anyway, since halfway through the first day I was away I was like, oh, well, it's been about eighty years already, maybe I should send him an owl?"

"I know the feeling," Remus murmured into Sirius's shoulder, and touched the small of his back. Sirius made a small, chuffing sound, mostly like laughter. "So what did bring you around? If you don't mind my asking."

Sirius laughed a little more honestly this time, and rolled back off Remus to rest on his back, propping on his elbows with an easy grin. "Oh, that. I had an owl from Professor McGonagall."

Remus blinked. "...I'm sorry, you what?"

"It was hysterical, actually, you know how she is. Just this terse little note about -- " his voice went up a fluting octave that wasn't precisely appropriate to the imitation -- "'if you please, Mr. Black, I understand if it is not to your convenience but Hogwarts would very much appreciate the return of its Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, as the one we had seems to have been replaced with an Inferius in your absence -- '"

"She did not," Remus said, staring at Sirius. The latter's expression wasn't doing anything to help keep his own lips straight.

"She did."

"That nosy, interfering -- "

"Don't call her names, she'll probably know that too," Sirius said, and broke at once into bright laughter at the look on Remus's face. "I've still got it in my things -- oh, I should go get them, actually. Assuming, ah, I'm invited to stay -- ?"

Remus didn't answer that question, but he thought the kiss might have served well enough. "Remember to put back on your clothes first," he said, helpfully, making Sirius laugh again.

"You just get more sarcastic as I get older, don't you?"

"Nonsense. You only notice it more." Sirius grinned, and kissed his nose.

"I'll be back."

A short time later he was -- despite Remus's momentary, patently absurd fears to the contrary, as he lay staring at the ceiling, half-certain in spite of knowing how absurd it was that it would all turn out to have been a dream -- with his knapsack, and a few books that Remus judged had already been taken from Hogwarts's library tucked under his arm. He was beaming again as he came back in, pulling back out of his clothes, and Remus couldn't help thinking of how much more Sirius had come to smile like that in the time they'd known each other -- and especially now, now that they were finally able to be together like this. How much more he himself had begun to, come to that.

And then Sirius wrestled with his knapsack for a time and at last pulled out the little stuffed wolf, looking significantly less new and more well-loved than it had the last time Remus had seen it, and that cut the line of thought off quite effectively.

"Can't sleep without him anymore," Sirius said, dumping it on the bed with a half-grin. "It's embarrassing, really."

Remus picked up the toy in his hands, turned it over, slowly, considering. "I'm glad he could be of service," he murmured, after long moments, and the sound of his own voice made him wince. When he finally put it back down on the sheet in his lap, he couldn't quite seem to raise his eyes again to Sirius's. "I should never have sent you away." His voice, he found, had sunk perilously close to a whisper. "It was -- foolish, I think. A terrible mistake. Do you expect that you'll ever forgive me?"

"Don't be stupid," Sirius said, and his voice sounded so close to amused that Remus was able to look up again, to find Sirius naked again and crawling back into the bed from its foot. "I mean, I agree that you shouldn't have, and I still think you did it for the wrong reasons, but I understand, too." He hesitated in front of Remus, and then pushed himself to sit next to him, curling his arms around and holding on. "It might even have been the right thing to do, honestly, I don't know. But I know you didn't do it to hurt me, or you, and..." He sighed, and leaned his head on Remus's shoulder. "...Look, don't worry about it. I'm back now. Everything's fine."

For now, Remus thought, but it was a terrible thought, the kind of thought that ate people like him alive when they might be spending their time living; a sensible thought, perhaps, but he had come so far from being sensible by this point that he scarcely recognized himself. No, neither of them did know how long they had, or what might happen, or how they would deal with anything in the future when it came. Wasn't that the whole point, on some level? Great masters of Divination tended to die by their own hands. Nobody ought to know, because not knowing gave you hope.

"Yes," Remus said, and leaned his head against Sirius's, sitting up in the too-small bed that was now nonetheless surely theirs, and let his eyes fall closed. "I suppose everything is."

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