Chapter Text
A cool breeze blows through the yard, sending dry, orange leaves skittering across the cobbles and ruffling Cecil's wiry fur where he sits on his haunches at Sirius's feet.
"Chuck us that, love," Remus calls, nodding at the old bit of cane they've been using to poke the clumps of moss off the highest reaches of the roof tiles. The old slate's almost perfect now, cleaned up and repaired with stone and mortar around the new chimney stack Lyall and Remus built together on the last day of September, just as the sun and the clear blue sky began to fade away for the autumn and a greyer sky rolled in, cocooning the farm and the yard and the fell in a comforting blanket of cloud and mist. Everywhere's quieter than it was a month ago; the paddock behind the barn is empty once again, the ewes and their lambs back up on the hillside in the low pastures, ready for the winter, tiny cream dots amongst the gorse. The songbirds have flown south, replaced by jackdaws and great, raven-beaked crows that nest in the copse of trees up the trail where the branches grow barer by the day, umber leaves scattered to the wind. And the yard, after the blaze of high summer, seems to rest too, the only activity today the low gusts that howl through the hollows between the outbuildings and the two of them, busy as ever, putting the finishing touches to the renovated stable block behind Hope's kitchen garden.
"It'll be alright, will that," Lyall had said gruffly one day in August, nodding at the outbuilding as he stood beside Sirius in the yard. "You'll do a good job with it."
It had been Lyall's idea, as it turned out, Hope insisting she would've been thrilled if the two of them had stayed in the main house but Lyall insisting, quietly over dinner one night, that Remus and Sirius would want their own space, and that the old stable block that looked out over the trail that led to the fell would do them just fine. And it has, so far; a busy month and a half of renovating, whitewashing, building and glazing has left them with a small, narrow cottage of sorts, two of the stables knocked through to make a low-ceilinged kitchen and the other two giving them a bedroom and a cosy sitting room respectively, a tiny, functional washroom tacked onto the back of the bedroom, and a wood-burning stove providing them with enough heat to warm the whole cottage through the winter.
"Ready to move in?" Remus asks as he clambers down the ladder and steps back to admire their almost-finished work. There's still a broken glass pane that needs repairing in the new kitchen, boarded up with a plank from an old crate of feed for now, and they've not hung curtains in the bedroom yet so there'll be no lie-ins on Sundays, the milky autumn light streaming through the windows at dawn to wake them.
It is, other than that, Sirius thinks, rather perfect.
He grins, and leans into the arm that Remus slings around his shoulders, the wool of his jumper warm and scratchy against the skin of Sirius's neck. "Absolutely."
It's a funny thing, Sirius muses over dinner that evening, to think on how different his world is today against what he thought it would become six months ago. He would've been in Hong Kong, by now, had they followed their ill-considered plans. They'd be there on the bay, in some sterile, glass-and-chrome apartment block. They'd live on fast food and fast business and hollow meetings with clients and agencies and whoever else they'd been planning on existing alongside doing whatever it was they'd even set out to do. They wouldn't be here; Sirius wouldn't be here, in Hope's kitchen, with a black sheep who's really too big now to be indoors snoozing happily at his feet as Remus tops up his mug of tea for him and Lyall quizzes them about their plans to renovate another outbuilding in the spring, just because they can. They would never have taken Effie and Fleamont - up from London for a long weekend - to the show at Malham at the end of the summer, and Sirius would never have nudged Remus to go and talk to Ashar, dawdling at the back of some food truck and gazing over at Remus hopefully when he spotted him. He'd never have ambled over himself, at Remus's wave, and shaken a then-grinning Ashar's hand - which had felt strange at the time, given the circumstances - and he'd never have heard himself be introduced in a gruff, low voice as Remus's boyfriend, or seen the blush that bloomed across Remus's cheeks as he said it. James wouldn't be spending his days with Lily, or his evenings working his shifts down in the pub, or sharing the flat above it with Peter the bartender, and none of them would ever have known the joy of Peter hanging up a Pride flag in the living room as a welcoming gesture on the day James moved in, and the wonderful shade of red he'd turned when James had kindly explained to him that he'd misunderstood a few things.
It had changed things, though. Peter, insisting the flag not go to waste, had hitched it on a hook behind the bar downstairs instead, tucked snugly beside the white-flowered Yorkshire flag, blue and rainbow cotton hanging proudly together between the copper pots and the old, framed oil paintings on the bare stone walls. It had gone largely unnoticed, Sirius assumes, until September when he and Remus had wandered down to the village to meet Lily for a drink one night, and Remus had - incredibly - taken Sirius's hand there atop the table and held it gently as Lily regaled them with some story about Riley and a mouse that had taken up an unwelcome residence in his stable. Sirius had held his breath, and glanced cautiously around the pub, and found that nobody had even cared to notice and if they had, they hadn't said anything. It happened again the following weekend, Remus carefully threading their fingers together amongst the beer mats and empty pint glasses, and when Petunia and her two burly friends had wandered in an hour later James had drawn himself up to his full height behind the bar and dared them to say a word. They'd glanced in Remus and Sirius's direction, and been met with three more challenging stares, and then one of them had frowned at the rainbow flag hitched on the wall in confusion. There'd been a tense, heavy silence for a moment, and then the boy had rolled his eyes and shaken his head, and the smaller boy had followed suit, and they'd cloistered themselves off at their usual table at the far side of the pub and said no more about any of it.
It was as good as they were likely to get, they’d decided, and Sirius had grinned at Remus over his wine glass and delighted at the answering squeeze of his palm. They still got the odd look in town; the occasional raise of an eyebrow, or blank, bemused stare as they wandered the cobbled streets hand-in-hand, but something in Remus's broad, capable stance, and James and Lily's unerring protection, and perhaps the fact that people in the town and everyone in the village knew Lyall and Hope seemed to keep the worst of it at bay, and for now, that was more than enough for Sirius and, he knows, more than Remus ever believed he'd get at all.
In truth, if Remus has found himself stunned to silence by the apparent acceptance of just about everyone he knows, it's matched only by Sirius's utter bemusement that he's been permitted to find such sheer, unbridled contentment here; some small measure of absolute peace, here on the old farm tucked away between the dales and the dark, looming fell. It seems too much, somehow; a mirage, a cruel joke played on him by some unseen trickster and the wonderment at having the world on his side for once had only heightened when he'd woken in Remus's bedroom one morning in September and had to read the message on his phone four times before he'd taken it in. It had all come about, it had turned out later, off the back of some daft picture James had posted online; Sirius astride Bess in Lily's stable yard, pulling a silly face at the camera, squinting in the early autumn sun. "Where are you?" read the message from Regulus that morning; short, perfunctory, but ending up being an inlet to a cautious and tentative conversation between the two brothers as the days wore on. It had been sent, Sirius had later pieced together, within hours of Regulus leaving Grimmauld Place for his place at university, and the realisation made something in Sirius shift and realign itself and lead him to wonder that perhaps that could be the start of something else, too. He's still under no illusion that Regulus will be turning up on the yard to visit him anytime soon, and the thought of his stuffy, straight-laced brother finding this place anything other than entirely objectionable - and finding Remus anything other than entirely objectionable, too - is as yet too alien for Sirius to comprehend.
But then, he reasons, thinking back to his own utter distaste for the whole affair when he'd first arrived with James in the spring, and Remus's words all those months ago: perhaps stranger things have happened.
"Are you happy with our little house?" Sirius whispers that night, as they huddle together under the patchwork blankets they'd dragged down from Remus's yellow room in the farmhouse to throw over their new bed in the cottage, the log stove in the sitting room burning down to embers and warming the very walls around them.
"It's not bad," Remus says sleepily, holding Sirius's hand under the covers. "Are you?"
"It's not bad," Sirius parrots, and grins at him in the moonlight streaming through the bare windows.
There's a low grumble from the foot of the bed; a discontented sigh and then a ruffle of blankets, and Sirius pushes himself up on his elbows in time to see Cecil crawling out of his own basket and clambering instead into the wide, padded bed Hope had stitched together for Snuffles when it became clear he had no interest in joining the other sheep up on the fell. "Told you he'd forget he were a sheep," Remus had muttered when Snuffles had come trotting merrily back down the trail one day after being deposited up on the hillside with the rest of the flock by a teary Sirius, and Sirius had grinned, and stooped down to bundle the lamb into his arms. "Don't blame me," he'd said airily, raising his eyebrows first at Remus and then, accusingly, at Cecil, padding up the path from the yard towards them. "He doesn't think he's a person," he'd reasoned, setting Snuffles down and watching as he scampered off down the hill to greet the terrier. "He thinks he's a dog."
Sirius watches as Snuffles shifts over in his basket now to make room, and then they're curling up together on the blankets, wiry fur squashed against black, cotton-soft wool; nature's most unlikely couple, Sirius thinks, and then looks back at Remus on his pillow.
"I'm glad they didn't send us to a castle," he says, smiling tiredly as he sinks down onto the mattress and tugs their patchwork quilt back up over them.
"Mhm," Remus hums, eyes closed. A peaceful beat of silence follows, and then, in a low whisper: "I'm glad I went arse over tit off the quad up on the fell and knackered my shoulder."
Sirius grins.
"I'm glad," he murmurs, nestling himself deeper into the soft mattress and slipping a hand back into Remus's under the blankets, twining their fingers gently together, "that I stayed down on the yard and James was the one who went up on the fell with your dad. Your summer could've gone very differently, you know."
"I think James and I would've made a lovely couple," Remus drawls into his pillow, eyes still closed.
"He snores," Sirius whispers back, and watches through the darkness as Remus wrinkles his nose in distaste.
"Maybe not, then."
There's a hush again then; just the low crackle of the embers in the grate of the log burner in the next room and the occasional huff from Cecil against Snuffles's coat.
"I love you," Sirius says, quiet and gentle, closing the space between them.
"Love you more," Remus mumbles.
It's one of those mad, wonderful things Remus says to him sometimes now; wonderful things spoken in that soft liminal space between sleep and wakefulness. Things that Remus doesn't quite dare say in the daylight yet. Love you more. Love you most. And - memorably, after a particularly heavy night at the pub - a slurred, dopey "love you like Cecil loves Snuffles." It's the same side of Remus that Sirius got to glimpse only occasionally over the summer, but is, fantastically, more and more privy to now as something in him opens up, somehow; something that blooms every time they get to walk hand-in-hand through the village and nobody even glances their way, or when Sirius kisses him on the cheek outside the pub and the lady in the cheese shop beams at them through the window, or when Sirius had his birthday and Hope signed a card with kisses from her and Lyall and gave him a gift of his own pair of work boots, the same type as Remus's. And he's still Remus; he's still gruff, and taciturn, and coarse. He still tuts fondly when Sirius says something daft. He still goes about his work with the same stoic diligence that Sirius admired in him to begin with, but somehow - somewhere along the way - it's as if he's let a little more colour come to the surface. A little more magic, a little more madness; something that has him grabbing Sirius's hand in the barn sometimes and spinning him round in the hay bales as his ridiculous tapes blare out from the old radio they'd set up once the lambing pens had been cleared away for the season. The same thing that has him marking nights on his calendar when he wants to take Sirius out for dinner, or days when he says he needs to take him to see this village or the other, or to climb that hill, or to swim in the pool at the bottom of that waterfall carving its way through some distant dale.
And the same thing that has him whispering in the moonlight that he loves him more, and that he loves him the most, and that he loves him like Cecil loves Snuffles, and that he's the happiest he's ever been.
They fall asleep like that, tangled together hand-in-hand under the patchwork quilt, Sirius smiling into the darkness, and awaken to the grey dawn drifting through the windows and a soft, persistent, tap-tap-tapping on their new front door. It sounds suspiciously like a beak.
Sirius grumbles as he buries himself in the covers and wills the sound away, to no avail, and then tuts as he throws the blanket off and clambers out of bed onto the bare wood floor, wincing at the cold air hitting him. He pulls on a stray jumper hanging from the bedpost - Remus's, he thinks - and stalks out of the room to tug open the door to the misty trail outside.
As suspected.
"Remus," he calls tiredly over his shoulder. "Can't you do something about this horrible goose?"
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