Archive of Our Own

“Oi,” he says, loudly, and kicks the corner of the sofa.

Remus starts, with a move like maybe he had been dreaming of falling, with the way he catches himself at the edge of the cushions with one hand, palm down, fingers spread.

“Whassa -- ” he manages, and then squints upwards, pushing himself onto one elbow. “Sirius. All right?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You asleep?”

“Apparently,” says Remus, dryly.

Sirius settles on the other end of the couch, nudging at Remus's feet with his knee, until Remus yawns again and curls himself up enough that they both fit, blankets shoved up between them, cushions piled behind Remus’s head; something hard pokes into the small of Sirius’s back, and he tugs it out (a book, dogeared, dilapidated, not his) and tosses it onto the floor.

"You sleep so much," he says.

"You don't sleep at all," says Remus, rubbing at his face with his palms.

"Did you always sleep this much?"

"Did you ever think about not being such an odd, manic creature and just closing your eyes once and awhile?"

"I was smoking," he says, by way of explanation.

Remus blinks heavily, and shifts his shoulders down under the blankets again. “Well, suppose you would need to be awake for that,” he mutters.

“I couldn't see any stars,” he says.

Remus says: “It’s London.”

“It’s dark,” he says.

Remus blinks at him, slowly, and then at the clock on the wall; sleep still dragging him gently out of focus with the rest of the world. “It’s night-time,” he says.

“Cheeky,” says Sirius, and throws a pillow at him. (He misses.)

“Please stop being awful,” says Remus. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Beg your pardon,” says Sirius. “Do you even fucking live here?”

“No,” says Remus, with a self-satisfied yawn.

“Go back to sleep,” Sirius huffs.

“That’s the idea,” says Remus, dreamily, and rolls over, taking all the blankets with him.

--

When he wakes up the next morning (still on the couch, his entire left side prickled with pins-and-needles), Remus is already gone. There is a note on the coffee table, which just says --

Hallo. Tea →

-- in Remus’s gentle, looping handwriting, the arrow oriented towards the direction of the kitchen. He’s charmed the pot to stay warm, but has used up all the milk. Sirius will not see him again for a week and three days.

--

When he does, again, it is late in the afternoon, on a day at the end of the month when it is unsettlingly, horrifyingly warm and the whole of London seems to primly gasp about its day with the very minimum of functionality and a maximum of noise and bother. He’s been picking his way through Diagon, running errands that for all but one (new dragonskin boots) are fruitless, and he feels as though his own skin is about to slough off his bones when he climbs the stairs to his flat only to find his door already unlocked and the smell of toast and the sound of the wireless burbling down the corridor.

“Oi,” he yells, sliding his wand out from his sleeve into his palm; the bones in his wrist crackling gently with the motion. “Hello?”

“Hallo,” calls a voice, from the kitchen.

“Lupin?”

“I’ve got the kettle on.”

“Fucking hell,” he says, rounding the corner. “I thought the owl’d started speaking the Queen’s English.”

Remus squints at him from across the room. “The fact that that’s where your first thought went, rather than the more obvious option that you might have interrupted someone robbing you blind - I do wonder.”

“Naught to steal, mate.”

“Well. You’ve got PG Tips, and bread, for toasting,” says Remus, gesturing with a nod of his chin at the small kitchen table, where there is a single piece of bread slathered in glisteningly dark blackberry jam (which is Sirius’s favorite, unabashedly).

“Have you honestly broken into my flat to prepare tea?” Sirius flings his rucksack under the table, sliding into one of the chairs, nabbing the toast and tearing it into two pieces. “You’re a shite robber.”

“We all play to our strengths, Sirius Black,” says Remus. “And so let us leave our weaknesses for the weaker yet.”

“That’s that Shakespeare bloke?”

“That’s me,” says Remus, and smirks.

"Sounds like that Shakespeare bloke," he says.

"You're an easy target," says Remus, and hands him a cup of tea, raising an eyebrow at the way that Sirius is licking blackberry jam from him fingers. “You think anything with a cadence is poetry, and anything with loud guitars is music.”

“Oi,” he says. “You’re the one that bought me that Kinks album last year, what are you even on about?”

“Just the poetry, then,” says Remus, and sits in the chair across from him.

When he offers Remus the second half of blackberry toast, Remus takes it, but doesn’t eat it; he just lets it sit on the plate between them and picks at the edge of the crust with his fingers and manages to looks exactly the opposite of how Sirius feels at that particular moment -- which is comforted, relieved, comfortable.

“Good lord, Lupin,” he says. “If it’s really making you that miserable, give us the toast back and I’ll eat it so you don’t have to look at it any more.”

"Well, er -- “ says Remus. “I’ve just got back from Wales, yesterday, actually. Me mum's ill.”

"Oh," says Sirius. "She going to Mungo's?"

Remus shakes his head. "Muggle thing."

"Oh," he says, again.

"Don't tell James," says Remus.

"Cross my heart," he says. (James worries. James has become a worrier. Sirius can see it percolating underneath his intelligence, his artfulness, his ease with love and care of others, that it has become something tight and vaguely foreign, the way he doles out galleons for everything and casts increasingly grim and meaningful looks every time any time any one of them looks at a Prophet headline or pauses at a name on the wireless. Don’t tell James -- it means, I don’t want to see him worry.)

"She's gonna be all right?"

Remus shrugs. "Probably," he says, and it is short and clipped and final in the way that Sirius knows That Is That.

He watches Remus continue to pick at the crust of his toast, as if he hasn’t just willingly shared a rather personal bit of information that James is, apparently, not supposed to know; like it is a secret, this thing that they should obviously all know, that Remus is probably upset about the fact that his mum is ill, and that they have to pretend, for all of their sakes, that he isn’t.

“Peter?” he says, trying for nonchalant.

Remus makes a small noise, and shoves the crust of bread into his mouth; he shakes his head.

“All right,” he says. “I follow, Lupin. Just you and me.”

“Promise?” says Remus, swallowing.

“When’ve I ever let you down?” he says, and goes for the killer grin.

It doesn’t make Remus smile, or even roll his eyes (which is when he is the most amused, forced to ignore the reality of his own happiness with an actual expression) - he just sits there, chewing, frowning vaguely at the space to the left of Sirius’s right knee, until Sirius feels sort of nasty and woolly in the chest about what the implications of Remus Not Answering what was supposed to be a very flippant and rhetorical question about Sirius’s ability to be a good and reliable friend in tough times, and so he has to go bang about in the sitting room for a bit until he’s sufficiently distracted himself enough to forget how rotten he feels.

Later, when he and Remus are sharing a takeaway curry and a few fags on the roof, he feels brave enough to try again.

“You gonna go see her again?” he asks.

Remus makes a low noise. “Probably,” he says. “Soon.”

“I’ll watch your plants for you,” he says.

“Oh, they’ve passed on,” says Remus, and then he makes a harsh, huffing sort of laugh in the back of his throat. “Not too be too morbid about it, I suppose.”

“It’s because they liked me better,” says Sirius, and blows smoke at the moon.

“Of course they did,” says Remus – and Sirius can feel the heat of sharp gaze on the side of his face; it makes his spine feel sort of itchy, like an errant pain signal, like the air between them is sort of oddly lit up with the hum of low-level magic.

“Broke their krono-phyrric hearts to be so long without my presence,” he says, with admirable deflection.

“Chlorophyllic,” says Remus, absently.

“Want me to come?” he asks.

“No,” says Remus, far too quickly, like he is choking on the words he can’t get them out fast enough, so he swallows (Sirius watches his throat bob, tight and jerky), and amends: “No, I - er. No, Pads. It’s fine. Honestly. It won’t be for long.”

Sirius frowns at the dead-looking sky (the moon looks lonely, hanging there like a mournful, lopsided crumb of light, flat and dull without the cradle of stars).

“I miss the way the sky looked at school,” he says. He gestures, pointedly, at the night. “This -- this is pure shite. London is shite -- you can’t, you can’t see anything, look.”

“You just miss school in general,” says Remus, meaningfully. “Your nostalgia has you acting out rages on urban reality and astronomy.”

“Don’t you?”

“What?”

“Miss school?”

“Pads,” sighs Remus.

“Moony,” he mimicks, a little nastily.

“Be nice,” says Remus. “It’s not my fault you think adulthood has it in for you.”

“It is your fault you think I should just do whatever it is people expect from ‘adults,’” he flaps his hand about vaguely. “I’m perfectly happy in my well-curated ignorance, thanks.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” says Remus, and he stubs his cigarette out by his boot -- sparks scattering in loosened, freewheeling bits of red light.

“It’s nice you get to go to the country, though - to the farm,” he says, later, when they are on their backs, side by side, heads pillowed in folded arms, watching the clouds slip across the black and starless sky.

After a moment, Remus says: “She’s in hospital in Cardiff,” and then he scrapes to his feet, brushing off his knees and the backs of his jeans, before disappearing inside, and down the stairs.

When Sirius follows him down to the flat, he’s already asleep on the couch, face buried into the cushions, arms crossed over himself and the line of his back drawn up tight. Sirius unfolds a blanket from the back of the couch and throws it over him; he takes a moment to straighten it out over Remus’s feet, to make sure it’s pulled up over Remus’s shoulders.

For a moment, he watches Remus breathe. He’s not sure, he thinks, what this is supposed to mean, that Remus would make him toast and tell him a secret and then keep deflecting, like a gnat or an itch or a poorly cast and errant spell, what Sirius assumes is expected of him. Which is, well, he thinks, I’m not sure I fucking know.

He sits on the edge of the couch for a while by Remus’s feet and flicks vaguely through a discarded book, but finds he keeps thinking about mothers and family and that one time (which feels ancient, but was only three years ago), the only time, when he saw Remus so obliquely, horrifyingly angry that his voice shook and his whole body went tight and rigid and cold and Sirius felt like he had fractured something precious into a million pieces of dust. And he thinks about the other time, the only time he saw Remus cry, and he thinks, well, that was when he was happy, he thinks, so what is this? What is this supposed to be?

--

“Moony’s running late,” he announces, two weeks later, at Sunday tea at James and Lily’s. “Bit of a back-up at the Leaky’s floo.”

“Cor, he’s been gone for ages, feels like,” says Peter. “What’s Wales even like this time of year?”

“Wet,” says Lily, and shoves a bowl of potatoes into Sirius’s hands. “Peel these, please. Peter, can you make sure James isn’t burning the roast?”

“I’m not burning the roast!” yells James, from the kitchen.

“He’s probably burning the roast,” says Peter, and disappears dutifully toward the back of the cottage.

“This is honestly my least favorite thing to do, ever,” says Sirius, glaring at his first half-peeled potato.

Lily pats him gently, absently, on the shoulder, and reaches into the bowl to grab a potato of her own to peel. “You are very dramatic, and I do worry about you.”

Remus finally arrives, a dozen or so peeled potatoes later, spilling ash and dried leaves and the smell of wet wood into the cottage sitting room, carrying cider and a heavy bottle of dark wine, and James has, in fact, not burned the roast at all, and the potatoes boil up nicely, and Peter and Lily manage to wrangle a large salad together from a pile of radishes and cucumbers and dandelion leaves from the garden out back, and Sirius feels like his body is positively bustling with warmth and laughing voices and the heartiness of living, and even Remus looks marginally better, in the way that his eyes aren’t so tired, he’s eating well, like he has appetite again, and he looks a little more full in the face, a little more color in his cheeks, and it’s all rather brilliant, that he’s back in London, that they’re all together, that is, it is all brilliant until James pushes back his plate and pours a glass of wine that is maybe a bit too full and says: So, mates, er -- we’ve uh. The thing is -- we’ve decided to get married, and Lily pushes her long hair back behind her ears and pulls a bit of a face, although she is smiling, and Peter makes a loud whoop! and pushes back his chair so violently to throw his arms around them both that it topples to the floor.

“It’ll be a bit of a small to-do,” James is saying, while Sirius tries to figure out what the holy fuck’s just happened. “Maybe a month or so from now. Mum and Dad’ll have a fit about that, but. We just sort of figured.”

“Congratulations,” Remus says, warmly, and then and elbows Sirius gently in the middle of his ribs.

“Sirius?” says Lily, brow furrowing.

“Is he choking?” says Peter.

“Black?” James is leaning across the table. “Oi, Sirius, say something.”

“Oh my god,” says Sirius. “We’re adults.”

--

“You’ll be the best man?” says James, later, when they are sharing a cup of cider on the back veranda.

“Best dog, maybe,” he says.

James rolls his eyes, and pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Woof woof.”

“Do I have to wear dress robes?” he says, pulling a face.

James laughs. “Wear whatever you bloody want, Black - we just want you there with us.”

“Soppy. This is all very soppy stuff,” he accuses, but he slings his arm around James’s neck, to hold him there, just the same.

--

Second week of August, there is a full moon; they do like they have been, since school. They go out together to Hogsmeade, they play Exploding Snap in the Shack, or listen to the wireless, while Remus grows increasingly quiet, and then increasingly rangy, unsettled, twitchy, as his muscles and bones start to start stretch and pull inside the seed-brittle casing of his skin, and he paces the length of the creaking floorboards, splinters catching in the soles of his bare feet and naked ankles, and then he sits, very still, at the edge of the sagging four-poster bed, and then they all go quiet, and they change, and they wait for Remus to join them.

And then they run together in the night.

This time, though, the air smells strange and dark - despite the heat of the moonlight on his back, furrowing deep into his fur to spread out along his skin like a salve - something is missing. The sky is dark and empty when he howls at it, like the long black horizon of a flat lake. The moon is fat, icy, lonely, quiet; it hangs by a grove of trees and tries to light the earth by itself. It gives up, not too long after, retreating like a wounded creature behind the hills.

And this time, when they change back, and bundle Remus up into blankets and check him over for broken bones and bleeding wounds, James readies them to all Apparate together back to Remus’s place to sleep off the night and Peter says Wait, wait, mates, listen, and also he says, Any way we could use the cottage tonight? Or mine? and Sirius says, without thinking, My flat’s fine, let’s use that, because half of Remus’s things are there anyway.

And so James and Peter curl up on the floor and the couch, asleep like stones (James is snoring by the time Sirius makes a cup of tea for himself and warms a few tablespoons of potion for Remus).

In his bedroom, Remus is bandaged around his neck and on one wrist, skin pale and creased under his eyes, scars reformed as soft, pink scratches along his face - in the next few days, they will reharden, calcify, grow ancient again. He smells a little like blood and pinecones, and oak leaves, hayweed, and thistle, and old splintered wood.

“All right?” he says, leaning down to check on a cut healing above Remus’s eyebrow.

“Mmph,” says Remus. And then, when he tries to move enough to make room for Sirius: “Ow.”

“Oh, listen to you -- poor, poor wee Moony,” he says, not unkindly, and sits on the edge of the bed so he can slide an arm under Remus’s back and tug him gently upright. “C’mon, then -- up we go.”

Remus makes a protesting noise, but moves willingly when Sirius wrangles him into a enough of a sitting position that he can down most of the potion in a few gulps.

“I put some mint in it,” says Sirius, as Remus eases himself back to the pillows. “Still smells bloody awful.”

Remus grins, gingerly, wiping his mouth; his eyes are sliding closed again. “Tastes it too. Ta, though.”

“Here, budge up,” Sirius nudges him again, and moves to sit with his back against the headboard.

Remus resettles beside him, curled onto his side, bandaged wrist cupped against his chest. His breathing is quieting, Sirius can feel it change in the air between them, the pain leaking quietly out of his joints, his bones reknitting slowly inside him, unpoisoned blood refilling his veins.

“It was too bloody quiet when you were away in Wales,” says Sirius. “By the way. My flat was too tidy. It missed all your disgusting socks. And, also, I had to eat a million curries by myself.”

Remus laughs, hoarsely, into the pillow, and flips Sirius the v’s with two pale and sleepy fingers.

--

One morning at the end of August, he wakes up, takes a piss, finger-combs the tangles out of his hair, makes coffee, reads the Prophet, brushes his teeth, gets dressed, and is in the process of tugging his boots out from under the coffee table and onto his feet when he notices that Remus is asleep on his couch, ensconced under a red Gryffindor blanket and Sirius’s discarded gray jumper.

He does the only obvious thing one could really do upon finding out that your mate has begun to sneak into your flat in the middle of the night, and pokes him in the forehead with the toe of his boot.

“Oh. Hallo,” says Remus, rubbing his eyes.

“You’re definitely my creepiest friend,” says Sirius, taking his boot back to shove his left foot into it. “You absolutely weren’t here when I went to bed.”

“Is there coffee?” says Remus, yawning.

“Not for you,” says Sirius. “You’re a filthy criminal.”

"Where're you off to?" says Remus. "It's early."

"It's half-ten," he says. "It's not early."

“Christ,” mutters Remus.

“Haven’t you got work?”

“No,” says Remus.

“Sacked?” he says, and tries to be clear in his tone that whatever the reason, he’s not interested, or anything, unless Remus wants to talk about it, which he almost never does, or unless it’s clearly been an enormous miscarriage of justice, in which case Sirius will have to stomp about the flat for another quarter of an hour in an anarchistic rage, which he doesn’t mind, really, it’s just that he he’s got to go buy milk and meet James in an hour.

“I quit,” says Remus, throwing off the blanket and casting about sleepily for his oxford.

(It’s hung over the back of the couch. Sirius hands it to him, and Remus tugs it on over his Chudley t-shirt, and everything about him looks so wrinkled and heavy-eyed and bruised-over and tired that Sirius has to go fix him a cup of coffee after all, just so his stupid ribs will stop creaking with stupid pity and his fingers will stop aching with the urge to grab Remus’s face with both hands so he can properly yell at him to just snap out of it, for fuck’s sake.)

“Why?” he says, handing Remus the mug.

“God bless you,” says Remus, to the coffee. “You are, indeed, a very good friend.”

“Why’d you quit, Moony, christ - pay attention,” he says. “Order?”

“Mm,” says Remus. “What else?”

“What’s the old man got you doing?”

“Research, mostly,” says Remus, and yawns, jaw cracking. “Have we got the Prophet yet?”

“Owl drops it by the kitchen window,” he says. “Get it yourself, I’ve got to get us milk before meeting Jim at the Ministry.”

“What’re you up to then?” says Remus, finding a rogue sock buried in the couch cushions and tugging it onto one of his feet.

“Eh,” Sirius shrugs. “Dumbledore wants us to talk to a few of the fat cats dragging their feet on passing the bill for the Auror ramp-up - maybe he thinks James’s da still has enough sway, galleon-wise, to get them to reconsider all their poncing about.”

“Or maybe your pure hearts and intellectual rigor will win them over,” says Remus. He has found another sock, but it is blue and striped and does not match the other one. “And we’ll win this stupid war before it even starts.”

“Oh, are we at war now?” grins Sirius.

“Buggering fuck,” says Remus, ignoring him, “How do I keep just -- where are all my socks going? Is this yours?” A third one, held out accusingly: red and gold polka dots.

Sirius wrinkles his nose. “Fuck you, no.”

“I swear,” Remus mutters, and then seems to give up on the whole endeavor. “I’ve got you a telephone, by the way.”

“What? Why? What’s that? A what?”

“The Muggle talking machine,” says Remus. “Telephone. It’s in the kitchen. Lily wanted you to have one. I’ll show you how to work it later.”

“She’s a witch,” Sirius protests, swiveling his head to glare suspiciously in the direction of the kitchen. “Jesus christ, what’s wrong with a firechat?”

“It won’t kill you, Pads,” says Remus, finishing his coffee in one long gulp.

Remus is right, of course: it doesn’t kill him. But it does take several days of Remus trying to convince him not to put a silencing charm on the damn bloody thing -- It keeps fucking ringing, Moony! -- and just let make a horrible racket all the time, which is, apparently, the point of the whole thing, after all.

--

The first week of September comes with a strange fit of discomfort; ranginess; fitful sleep -- he spends three days drinking too much and chain smoking, and then he attempts to clean the flat. Remus is in the bedroom, quill between his teeth, charting instances of Muggleborn attacks on a map, and in the sitting room, Sirius pulls a jumper out from a disastrous pile on the coffee table.

"Lupin!" he yells. "Is this yours or mine?"

"What color is it?" calls Remus.

He regards it, solemnly. "Not black."

"Mine, then," says Remus.

"Where do you want it?"

"Wherever,” Remus calls back.

He goes to the bedroom, holds it up over the dresser: "I'm putting your shite in the top drawer," he says.

Remus looks up (his face has ink on it, smudged across the scars on the bridge of his nose) and gives him a funny sort of smile.

"All right," he says, and bends his head to the map again.

The adventure in organization lasts about 48 hours all told: Remus’s socks end up strewn around the sitting room again, there are books everywhere, piles of old newspaper littered with Remus’s looping handwriting in the margins, mugs of half-consumed tea litter the counter in the kitchen, his own boots are always in two different places, inexplicably, but Remus manages to keep his jumpers in the top drawer, which Sirius finds to be oddly satisfying, and therefore he reckons that the whole endeavor must have been some sort of a success.

--

James and Lily are married in the evening the following week, just before sunset, in the crisp air of mid-September, in the back garden of the cottage. Sirius spends the whole day feeling dizzy and rather ill, and then makes a rousingly successful speech about how much he loves James Potter without bursting into tears, proceeds to get incredibly drunk, does not get into any fights (he punches Peter too hard in the arm, but that is because he is incredibly drunk, so it doesn’t count), dances with several strange Muggles, Lily Potter, and also, once, at the end of the night, with Remus Lupin - who is flushed and laughing and also very drunk, and also, very bad at dancing.

You are very, very bad at dancing, he tells Remus, against his ear.

Shut up, says Remus, who is grinning (he can feel it against his cheek), and behind his head, he can see the whirling bob of milky-white lanterns spinning against the dark and empty sky, like fat sparrows, like glowing bits of seafoam, like an eddy of stars.

--

“Well, how was it?” he asks Remus, a few days later, while pilfering the last of the leftovers of Euphemia Potter’s pudding from the cottage ice box.

“Context, please,” says Remus, not looking up from a list he is making from the back pages of the Prophet classifieds at the kitchen table.

“The speech, you numptie,” says Sirius. “How -- I mean. I don’t even bloody remember how it went, I felt like I was going to be sick the entire time and then when it was over I got massively drunk and tried to dance with a load of Muggles, so I don’t remember much outside of that.”

“You were nervous,” says Remus, putting down his quill. “That’s what being nervous feels like.”

“Ha ha,” he says, and growls at Amadeus the cat, who has chosen this moment to infiltrate the kitchen and beg loudly for Sirius’s pudding.

“It was lovely,” says Remus. “Don’t yell at the cat, Sirius.”

“I’m not yelling at it, we’re having a conversation.”

“Yes, but, I’m the one that has to live here in his company for the next week while I take care of the cottage, please - he’s already incredibly suspicious of me.”

“Was it really?”

Remus raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“Lovely?”

“The speech?” says Remus. “Yes, it was.”

Later, in the garden, when Remus persuades him to throw a few gnomes about before it gets too dark, Remus says, I might have cried a little, and Sirius howls with laughter and says, You gigantic pouf, you did not, and Remus just shrugs and throws a particularly ugly gnome in Sirius’s general direction, and it’s the happiest Sirius has been, in a while, he realizes, even while dodging a small, warty, living projectile.

--

James and Lily return from their honeymoon at the end of September, glowing with the remnants of Mediterranean sunshine and salt baths and Aeaean magic. They pour gifts out onto the floor of the cottage sitting room: Ouzo, olives, cheese, Persephonic sand for Remus, in a glass vial (for healing), a bit of Circean wood carved into a small dog, for Sirius (for protection), and two smooth, black Wandering Rocks for Peter (for finding things that have been lost).

They make a simple bit of tea, and Lily complains about the portkey-lag, and Peter makes a joke about how she might be pregnant if she’s really so bloody fatigued all the time, and James laughs a little too high-pitched and hysterical, and Lily throws a cucumber sandwich at Peter’s head and banishes them all to the veranda in the back garden (James, she keeps, for helping with the washing up).

“You want to kip at mine?” says Peter, to Remus, after a while, as the sun is starting to sink into the rooftops of Godric’s Hollow.

“Er,” says Remus, and for some reason, looks increasingly uncomfortable.

“Nah, Moony’s gonna show me how to turn on the shelly again," he says, around a mouthful of cucumber sandwich.

“Telly,” says Remus. “Television.”

“You sure?” says Peter.

Remus shoots Peter what is clearly intended to be a significant sort of look.

"All right," Peter throws up his hands. "I'm just saying, mate."

"Please don't," says Remus, rather neatly, and pushes off the railing to slip back inside.

Sirius waits for the screen door to bounce back merrily against the latch before he levels his most impressively heavy, penetrating, meaningful look at Peter.

“What?” says Peter.

“What was that?” he says, jerking a thumb behind him.

“What was what?”

“That -- ” he shoves Peter with an elbow. “That horrible little dance you two just did, that oh we know what this is all about but he doesn’t shite, what was that?”

Peter sighs, and pushes a few crumbs around his plate with the flat of his thumb.

"Pete."

"I mean," says Peter, and makes a vague gesture. "You know."

“Pettigrew,” he says. “I’m this close to shoving the rest of this sad excuse for a sandwich into your ear canal.”

“You know he’s definitely homeless,” says Peter. “Right?”

“What,” he says.

“Arse-up,” says Peter.

“What the fuck,” he says.

“Don’t blame me,” Peter insists. “He won’t take any favours beyond the bloody converto-couch, I swear. He made me promise not to tell Jim, so long as I could feed him lunch every now and then without him having an enormous fit of guilt. He only house-sat for these two while they were gone so he wouldn’t have to keep bothering me and you."

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew!” Peter snaps. “I mean, you keep letting him sleep at yours and eat his way through your pantry, I thought you knew.”

Fuck, he thinks, suddenly struck by a rapid flash of recent memories -- Remus on his couch, Remus making tea in his kitchen, Remus drunk and vaguely sleepy, humming to himself as he wallops Sirius in gobstones (yet again), Remus on the floor of the sitting room hunched over a spread of newspapers, ear craned to the wireless, scribbling notes for Dumbledore, Remus taking fitful naps in his bed with the door propped open in case anyone (Sirius, supposedly) should need to wake him, Remus making stupid jokes about his plants being dead, Remus not inviting him over to listen to the new records he found in the bins behind his local pub, Remus only seeming to wear the same four jumpers and two oxfords and the way his skin got paler this summer, the way it looked so tight against his bones, sometimes, the way he would stay for days and days and days and days until Sirius couldn’t imagine any of his spaces without Remus in the corners, like a small bit of constant light under the doorway, like the song that would get stuck between your ears, rattling away against your skull, like the most distant and familiar habit, and then, the way he would just disappear again, like a slip of smoke.

“God fucking damnit,” he says, and throws the rest of his sandwich at a dozing garden gnome, because it seems, at the time, like the most logical option in the universe.

--

"But my couch is smaller than yours," he hisses to Peter, when he corners him outside the upstairs loo, a quarter of an hour later.

"Yeah, but," says Peter. "You don't ask questions."

"I ask questions," he says.

"No," says Peter, fondly. “You definitely don’t.”

--

It chews at him, for just under a fortnight. It has grabbed him by the ankle and then by the back of the neck, this idea that Remus has been pilfering important bits of truth from their friendship, and it just keeps nipping at the nerves under his skin until he can’t take it any more, especially not because Remus just keeps on doing what he has been, as if nothing is at all the matter: keeps turning up in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, in the morning, afternoons, cooking potatoes and making tea and spreading papers everywhere and sharing bits of chocolate and cigarettes and curries with Sirius as though nothing is the matter. He keeps sleeping on Sirius’s couch, in his bed in the middle of the day, keeps showering in his loo, keeps growing thinner and sadder and quieter and more bitter in the eyes, but not in the way in which you could ever ask him about it, because nothing at all was the matter, no, of course not.

And then Sirius wakes up one morning in early October to the sound of the monstrous muggle machine in his kitchen ringing -- loudly -- in the stillness of the apartment. He groans, and rolls about in bed for a few seconds, willing it to just fucking, fucking shut up, and when it does, he hears Remus’s voice, muffled, unintelligible, from the kitchen. His cadence is flat, and when Sirius rolls out of bed and pads into the kitchen, Remus has already hung the thing back on the wall; he’s got his palms flat on the kitchen counter, head bent, as if he’s thinking.

“Who was that?” he asks.

“No one,” says Remus, starting; he says it quickly, dismissive. “I’ve got to go out for a bit.”

“Well, I’m not your keeper, am I?” he snaps, and the look Remus gives him on the way out makes him feel rather ugly and rude about the whole thing.

Remus slips back into the flat an hour or two later, and does the complicated thing with the telephone where someone is there on the other side of it, and he talks to this person in clipped, short sentences that Sirius can’t quite make out from the sitting room, so he ventures into the kitchen doorway, feeling sort of ill and suspicious and nasty in the vicinity of his ribs, and frankly pissed off about Remus’s ridiculous pretension and his aloof sensibility and his emotional fakery and his stupid, stupid pride.

"What was that?" he asks, when Remus puts down the talking-into end of the machine.

"Nothing," says Remus, scribbling something on a scrap of paper.

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one, Sirius,” sighs Remus, folding the paper and slipping it into his pocket. “It’s -- “

“What?” he sneers. “None of my business?”

Remus’s head snaps up. “Maybe not,” he says, coldly.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be fucking about with it in my flat, then,” says Sirius.

Remus’s brow furrows - he looks confused, angry, frustrated - his jaw sets, and he makes a vague gesture at the Muggle talking machine. “Look, I just needed to use the telephone, that’s -- ”

“You know what, no - stop acting like a fucking wet cabbage,” says Sirius, hot in the cheeks. “You honestly can’t think I’m that nice of a bloke that I’m going to let you keep coming in here and consuming all my hard-earned toast with that sorry fucking attitude, I’ll tell you.”

“I’m sorry, did you just call me a cabbage?” Remus pulls a face; his eyes have a hard edge, like his patience is thinned out to the barest of threads. He retreats, down the hall, towards Sirius’s bedroom: back straight and shoulders tight. “Look -- could I just take a bit of a kip, right now, I’m honestly just - ”

“I’ve called you a lot worse, it’s not like you've ever had the self-respect to do anything about it,” he snaps, getting to his feet and following him.

"Jesus, Sirius," Remus's mouth twists in that way that always manages to make Sirius irrationally, instantaneously angry -- like Sirius is some sort of child in the midst of a tantrum, like he is a small, gnatty, challenging nuisance. "Could you please just -"

"Just what," Sirius sneers, and steps into his space; Remus's gaze widens, and flickers sharply - to Sirius's mouth and then back to his eyes. "Just go on not mentioning how you keep showing up in the middle of the night and keep wearing the same four fucking disgusting jumpers you own and keep brushing me off and keep refusing to imagine that I might want to know what's going the fuck on with you? Just go on pretending I don’t notice anything and think too much about myself to worry about poor old Moony? Just go on ignoring how much of a miserable, closed-off, secretive little cunt you've been all summer?"

He can feel his heart hammering in his chest; in the silence that follows, he imagines that it is loud enough to hear through the walls of his ribs. Remus's face is white; the fresh scars on his neck look raw and filled with blood. His eyes are cold.

“Please go fuck yourself,” says Remus, finally, and steps back to slam the bedroom door firmly in Sirius's face.

“Oi! Is this my fucking flat or not? ” Sirius shouts, and kicks at the door.

“Fuck. Off, ” says Remus, flat and muffled.

Sirius kicks the jamb again for good measure, but it doesn’t make him feel any better.

--

Some time after six in the evening, Sirius hears the bedroom door creak open, the sound of running water in the loo, a few moments of silence, and then Remus appears in the threshold of the sitting room to throw Sirius’s jacket at him from across the room.

"Local," he says.

"Beg pardon?"

"Pub. C'mon," says Remus. "You're paying."

Sirius figures if Remus is admitting poverty by his own volition, it must be at least a little bit like an apology.

--

“So,” says Remus, when they are halfway down the stairs. “My mum died.”

Sirius pulls up sharply enough that Remus’s elbow collides with the back of his head. “Owfuck,” he snaps, rounding on him; ribs rapidly constricting around his heart. “Jesus. What?”

“Sorry,” says Remus, who is rubbing his elbow and frowning rather tightly in the direction of his shoes.

“You said it was nothing,” he says, accusingly. “That chelly-bone call this morning, and you - ”

“Telephone,” says Remus. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Sirius huffs, because he’s managed to somehow get cross about the whole thing, rather than whatever might be appropriate in this sort of situation, which he’s not sure he would understand, anyway, even if Remus had been a fucking normal human being about it and not gone about surprising everyone with his dearth of tactful emotional timing and his bad moods, and also, his sharp elbows.

“That would explain all your horrible behavior earlier,” he says.

“Sorry,” says Remus.

“Don’t be,” he says, and shoves his hands into his pockets, because his palms suddenly feel a bit clammy. “Don’t be, christ -- sorry. You weren’t. I was sort of, er. It wasn’t actually horrible.”

“It was. Sorry,” says Remus again, and clears his throat. “I’ve been -- well.”

“Right,” he says. “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t - ”

“Look, Pads,” Remus makes a heavy shrug with both his shoulders, like he’s shaking off the sticky feeling of a cobweb clinging to the hairs on his nape. “Look, I’d honestly rather just get a bit drunk right now.”

“Apparently.”

“I mean, if that’s all right with you,” says Remus. It sounds as though he’s trying for something sort of wry and helpfully tone-setting, but it ends up coming out a bit plaintive, and his mouth twists; he can hear it too.

“You think I’m going to make you talk about it?” he says, and squints at him, sharply.

“You might,” says Remus, shifting his weight; the stairs creak.

“Well, don’t I sound like a right bastard? Are you sure we’re mates?”

“Fuck off,” says Remus, but he’s smiling through the corner of his mouth (it’s tight at the edges of his eyes).

“Come on, then,” he says, and clasps his hand around Remus’s elbow. Remus might have flinched, he thinks, as he tugged him down the stairs and out into the street (dark with the dearth of stars), but it could have been the sputtering failure of the swinging naked lightbulb above their heads that made his eyes look, just for a moment, so scared.

--

“What happened?” he asks, at some rather indistinctly blurry time after ten, several pints and four shots between them.

“The Muggle thing,” says Remus, gesturing vaguely at his own midsection. “Cancer.”

“In her stomach?”

Remus shrugs. “I guess.”

“Your Da all right?”

Remus efficiently downs the rest of his pint, and makes to stand, however unsteadily.

“Dunno,” he says. “‘xpect not, really.”

“You gonna go home?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow,” says Remus, squinting at the blackboard over the bar. “What -- what you want?”

“Same as,” he says. And then: “Can I come?”

Remus wobbles, at the other end of the booth, and directs his squint in Sirius’s direction. Sirius squints back.

“I mean,” he says, finally, into the strange and rather liquid silence between them. “Obviously we’re all coming.”

Remus’s brow pinches.

“Moony,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “Stop it.”

“Sorry,” says Remus. “Right.”

“I meant, can I come with you tomorrow.”

“Right,” says Remus, and presses a hand to the side of his face. “If you want.”

“If I want,” he sneers. “Who do you think I am, exactly?”

“A right bastard,” says Remus, who is definitely swaying, now. “Wasn’t tha’it?”

“I am that,” he says, proudly. “I’m horrible.”

“You are,” says Remus, and for a moment, he looks as if he might be deeply upset about it. Upset about the fact, somehow, that he is present in this moment, this moment that smells of stale beer and dark wood and whispers, and the sting of early October air like a sharp, cooling memory in the sweat gathering on the backs of their necks and the inside of their elbows. Like he is upset to be present, now, having shared yet another piece of himself with another human being, who is horrible, objectively -- they both know that he, Sirius, is horrible, sometimes, objectively horrible, even more so when he is trying so hard not to be. And yet he is still here, present, and fumbling with something so enormous and unwieldy, with his eyes looking a little glassy (and his cheeks starting to flush) -- he looks upset about this.

“Pints,” says Sirius, firmly. “Go get them.”

“Right-o,” says Remus, and makes a sloppy, incoherent gesture that Sirius supposes (somewhere, behind where his eyes are starting to let things blur) was meant to be a jaunty sort of thumbs-up.

“Fucking hell,” he says, loudly, to Remus’s retreating back. “If you’ve gone jolly, we really are in for a night, aren’t we?”

--

"You have to tell Jim," he says, three quarters of an hour later, to the top of Remus's head.

Remus makes a tight noise, and lifts his face enough to glare at Sirius over the rim of his pint. "He's going to worry."

"You can't not tell him," he says. "Jesus. He worries about you anyway. All the time. "

"Ermghff," says Remus, and drops his face into his palms.

"You know," he says, downing the rest of his own pint. "You could at least try to pretend that our adoring and honestly monumental love for you isn't such an enormous inconvenience all the time."

"Please don't," says Remus, almost petulant. "I liked it so much better when we weren't talking about feelings."

“Fine,” says Sirius, “Look, fine. I promise not to ask you any more about your feelings for the rest of the night and pay for all the drinks just so long as you tell James tomorrow.”

Remus frowns, tightly, across the width of the table. “You tell him,” he says, finally.

“Oi, why me?”

“Because you’re -- you’re the only other one that knows,” says Remus, and he smirks rather darkly into the last bit of his drink, before downing it.

“You’re a right shithead, you know that,” says Sirius, almost proudly. “You’ve fucking played me.”

Remus just holds out his empty pint glass for a refill and smiles gently, beatifically, in a way that doesn’t really reach his eyes.

--

Two more shots of cheap whiskey, and another three or four or six pints, and everything is lovely, except for the fact that Sirius can’t tell whether he’s supposed to be having a good time, and Remus keeps looking at him like he thinks Sirius can’t tell that he keeps looking at him, that Sirius knows he keeps looking at him, and then Sirius isn’t sure if he keeps looking at him like that because he’s supposed to be doing something he’s not or if that’s just Remus having a grand old miserable time in his own head like he always does, rattling around with his own stupid feelings instead of letting people take care of him, like people want to do, because he’s Moony and everyone wants to take care of him, because he’s an odd, stupid fuck a lot of time, but he’s also a very special person, thinks Sirius, he’s a very special friend who has had something difficult happen to him that Sirius isn’t entirely sure he understands, considering it is about mothers, and, honestly, considering it is about Remus.

And then Remus is saying something, very close to his ear, and Sirius says: What? and Remus says, Last call, Pads, and Sirius squints into his wallet and says Just as well I’m out of the Muggle whatists, and Remus says, Pounds, and Sirius says I’m out of all the Muggle pounds, and Remus laughs, for some reason, and they drag each other to their feet, clutching at jackets and shoulders, because the room is spinning joyously around them, and the air inside the pub is, by now, hot and loud and stuffed full with other spinning, joyous, clutching bodies.

And they are still laughing when they tumble out onto the back street, perhaps because Sirius has done a wonderfully astute impression of the very Northern bartender, and Remus is too drunk to be politely offended, so he actually finds it completely hilarious, or perhaps it is because of the way Sirius can barely function sober in a Muggle pub, with handfuls of galleons in his pockets and a propensity to send charms flying at any given moment, but either way they are still laughing so hard Sirius honestly can’t even breathe.

"If you did -- didn't want anyone to know," he says, when he can speak again, pressing a hand against Remus’s shoulder to steady himself. "Why'd you tell me?"
Remus's mouth twists; he rubs his face like the pull of the grin on his cheeks is hurting him, a little. "Because you're horrible," he says.

“That -- that joke’s wearing a bit thin,” he says.

“It’s not a joke.” Remus sways, bumps his side, his hip, into Sirius; he’s still smiling. “You’re the worst person I know.”

“O -- oi,” Sirius hiccoughs; he reaches out and grabs at Remus’s shoulders with both hands, and pulls him round to face him. “You say that to my face.”

Remus grins: the way he used to, back in school -- sly and knowing, with the flash of an eye tooth. He sways a little into Sirius’s palms, catches his lower lip between his teeth and murmurs: “Say what to your face?”

Something pleasant and hot curls in the pit of Sirius’s belly. “Say I’m the worst bloke you know.”

“You’re the worst bloke I know,” say Remus, very quietly, and then he is leaning in, against the pressure of Sirius’s palms on his shoulders, and his own hands have fisted in the front of Sirius’s jacket, and he is, suddenly and all at once, kissing him.

The noise that Remus makes, a very soft, humble little mmh -- Sirius catches it with his mouth, right between his teeth. It tastes like a drop of seawater; salty and a little sweet, and there is the snick-scrape of Remus's teeth against his tongue. Remus tilts his head, and Sirius, somewhere in the back of his skull, feels the terror of any movement as a threat of emptiness, so he reaches out, grabs, with both his hands, on either side of Remus's face. His fingers end up tangling in the soft baby curls at the nape of Remus’s neck, he feels his palms cup the sharp line of Remus’s jaw; he can feel at his wrists the damp skin of Remus’s neck, the way his breath hitches when Sirius catches the edge of his mouth with his teeth --

Remus makes another sound, a hoarse, hungry noise in the back of his throat, and then -- he pushes at the center of Sirius’s chest with one hand, sudden and desperate, breaking them apart far enough that he can vomit, rather neatly, all over the sidewalk, and also all over the top of Sirius’s new boots.

--

"Lupin," he says, when they are both on the floor of his loo, Remus kneeling by the toilet, after Sirius has risked a very ill-advised Apparition that did manage to put them, wobbling but un-Splinched, in the center of his kitchen. "You should really leave the self-destructive behavior to the professionals."

"Shut up," says Remus, wiping at his mouth weakly.

"You're pants at this," he says, fondly, and tucks a bit of damp hair behind Remus's ear. "You've just gone all soggy."

"Ughf," says Remus, and manages to open one eye to a squint.

“What a miserable lump you are,” he croons, and smooths back the hair under his hand. “Sad, damp, vomitty werewolf.”

“You’re usually so much nicer than this,” says Remus, squeezing his eyes shut again and going rather ashen. “Aren’t you usually much nicer than this?”

“No,” he says, gleefully. “I believe we've agreed that I’m horrible.”

“So horrible,” says Remus, and makes a rather unpleasant noise in the back of his throat.

"Poor Moony," he says, and pats Remus's cheek with all the facetious and sanctimonious pity he can muster. “Poor, poor, soggy, vomitty Moony.”

"I hate you," says Remus, and throws up again.

--

Remus is half-asleep by the time Sirius manages to get him to change his clothes (just the shirt, which is wet, and frankly, has got quite a bit of sick on it) and curled up into Sirius’s bed, and Sirius can’t be bothered to totter drunkenly in the dark into the sitting room, and anyway, why does it even fucking matter, he thinks, as he flops gratefully into his own bed, beside Remus.

He rolls onto his back, and hears Remus snuffle beside him, in the darkness. He feels the heat of Remus’s bare arm against his own; feels Remus’s breathing softly against the damp skin of his neck.

“Moony,” he whispers, to the ceiling (which is still spinning gently).

There is only the steady, satisfying ticking of the bedside clock; the faint whistling noise when Remus exhales gently through his nose.

“Moony,” he says, again. “I’m still drunk, mate.”

The clock ticks off a few seconds; the shadows of the room continue to wobble over his head.

“Moony,” he says.

“I’m sorry about your mum,” he says.

“Moony,” he says, again, just to see how it sounds, in the dark: a whisper gilding his tongue like a sharp, buzzing little secret.

Outside, through the window, he watches a long roil of dark gray clouds sift across the black sky. There are streetlamps lighting the underside of the night, a sickly, wavering glow; there is the moon, somewhere, struggling to grow fat. He closes his eyes; this is where the stars are now, swimming behind his eyelids like dull sparks in the distance.

“It’ll be okay,” he says, because that -- he knows -- is what people say. “Moony. It’ll be fine.”

He thinks, rather dizzily, about the fact that Remus has kissed him and then gotten sick all over his shoes, and about the way that Remus had looked earlier, in the wan light of the pub: stretched out at the edges and fuzzy in the eyes, with his tongue pressed against his upper teeth, like he was searching for some sort of nerve that would make it all stop, that would staunch whatever feeling was seeping out of him like a leaking pipe, like a broken dam; the force behind it too great and fucking powerful from whatever had been built up to keep it in reservoired.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep; just the feeling of Remus breathing shallowly against his skin and the sensation that he might be teetering gently at the lip of some high and fragile and crumbling edge.

--

He wakes, muzzily, slowly, the next morning with his head feeling like it is being steadily squeezed between the two large clamps of a vice. The sunlight is weak, but still strong enough to make him groan and roll over to bury his face into the pillow. His hair smells of cigarettes, his mouth tastes gummy and chalky and horrible, and overall everything is completely the worst and very unpleasant.

When he turns his head, slowly, to mitigate the pounding of his headache, Remus is still asleep, on the other side of the bed, facing the wall and curled in on himself. It makes him feel sort of weak, and wobbly, in the vicinity of his stomach, when he looks at the curl of Remus’s hair against his nape and has the distinct, if swimmy, memory of pushing his fingers there, clutching at the back of Remus’s neck, because -- he swallows down a groan, when it hits him, like a churning wallop, the memory -- Remus kissed him.

He slides out of bed, fumbling along the hallway for the loo, and takes his time splashing water on his face, brushing his teeth (twice), twisting his hair up out of his face and growling, unhappily, at his reflection.

By the time Remus pads into the kitchen, still dressed in his own jeans and one of Sirius’s tee-shirts, Sirius has managed for coffee and is willing his pounding head to stop aching by sheer force of will, at the kitchen table.

“Good morning,” he says.

“Apparently,” says Remus, who looks, surprisingly, terrifyingly, as though he hasn’t just spent the last four hours sleeping off one of the most confusing, debaucherous, world-spiraling, ceiling-spinning nights of their young and fragile lives.

Sirius squints at him. There is the distinct smell of magic about him; rather than cheap, dark alcohol and cigarette smoke and the mustiness of going to bed without brushing one’s teeth after vomiting all over one’s best friend’s boots, as he putters about the counter readying a mug of coffee for himself, Remus is practically wafting with that particular scent of ozone and something like mint antiseptic.

“A hangover cure,” he accuses, sharply, and Remus jumps, slightly, at the sharpness in his voice.

“What?” he says, when he turns from the counter with coffee in hand, crooking an exasperated eyebrow.

“You cheated,” Sirius snaps at him.

“I -- ” says Remus, very carefully, as he stirs his coffee. “ -- I might have.”

“There’s no cheating,” Sirius growls, through his own splitting headache. “No glorious triumph of drunken bad decisions without the crippling bodily degradation. That’s the rule.”

Remus sips his coffee, silently, and does not look remotely contrite.

“The rule you made, Prefect.”

“I think I’ve had enough bodily degradation for one lifetime, ta,” says Remus, primly. “And anyway, if it’s my rule, don’t you think I’m allowed to bend it once and a while?”

“Oh no,” Sirius waves a finger at him. “You don’t get to pull the werewolf card now, you sneaky little fuck -- not when there’s sick all over my boots and you somehow managed to clog up the tub again after --”

“-- don’t,” Remus raises a hand and looks as though he might actually be a bit ill, after all. “God, please don’t. The cheating bit was so I wouldn’t have to relive whatever terrifying destructive behavior you might have managed to coerce me into.”

Sirius narrows his eyes. “It was your fucking idea, mate.”

“Was it?” Remus sighs, sliding into the chair opposite and rubbing at the side of his face. “Honestly, I don’t remember anything after you called me a sad cabbage and I told you to go fuck yourself.”

“Right,” says Sirius. “That’s definitely not fair, if you’ve managed to remedy yourself to the point you can’t remember that you’re the one responsible for the pure death marinade assaulting my skeleton right now. Also, you were absolutely acting like a cabbage, so.”

“I don’t suppose we fought?” says Remus, cringing.

“Er,” says Sirius.

Remus’s fingers clutching at his collar and the rasp of his stubble against Sirius’s cheek, and the noise he made -- desperate and wanting and almost like a sob -- when Sirius gripped at his face with both hands and kissed him back hard enough that their teeth scraped each other’s tongues and Sirius thought that maybe he might faint before it all came crashing to a halt.

“No?”

“No,” says Sirius, blinking back an odd, slithering, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his belly. “Though I could punch you now if you like.”

“You do look as if you’d like to,” says Remus, his eyes apologetic over the top of his fingers. “But thanks.”

“Anytime you like,” he says, trying very hard not to think about the fact that Remus has minorly Oblivated himself out of a very strange experience that Sirius, frankly, feels like he might have a few dozen questions about, considering. “Just say the word.”

“Well,” says Remus. “I suppose I owe you one.”

“Please,” Sirius groans, pinching at the space between his eyes where the headache appears to have settled into a painful knot and decides to ignore whatever it is that keeps making him think about the feeling of Remus’s mouth, wet with lager and spit and laughter and edged with teeth and desperation, against his own. “The debt is paid.”

"Listen," says Remus, mouth set in a firm, grim line. "Er -"

“Your mum died,” says Sirius, because that secret -- that one he knows what to do with. “I know.”

“Oh,” says Remus, after an uncomfortable pause in which Sirius glances at him through the pinch of his headache only to catch Remus’s most implacable, straight-lipped scepticism staring back at him. “Right.”

“You told me,” he says. “Last night. On the way to the pub you told me your mum died, and that you just wanted to get completely bladdered.”

“Right,” says Remus.

“You’re going home today. I’m coming with you,” he says. “You said I could.”

“Right,” says Remus, again.

“All right?” he says.

“Yes,” says Remus, all too quickly. “Yes. That’s -- that’s fine.”

“Good,” says Sirius. “So go get fucking packed.”

--

They floo to a Wizarding pub in Birmingham; on the train from New Street Station to Betws-y-coed (there’s no floo at the farm, Sirius, we haven’t been on the network since I was a child, remember -- I don’t fucking remember, no, I’ve only skivved out to your sheep-ridden paradise on a broom or the motorbike, how was I supposed to know), Sirius calls to James on the mirrors, and explains, says to tell Lily, to call Peter too on the fire and to let him know. Remus sits across from him and stays very quiet, eyes locked on the diminishing industrial weave of Muggle wires and trainyards and carparks and the nascent nubs of grassy hills.

“Moony’s here,” he says. “Say hallo, Moony.”

“Hallo Moony,” parrots Remus, gently, and he gives a little wave when Sirius flips the mirror in his direction.

“All right?” says James, tinny and tenor through the filter of magic glass. “Jesus, Moony, I’m so sorry -- we’ll be there as soon as, promise.”

Remus makes a vague, placating gesture, and his eyes flicker (just for a second of a second), up to Sirius’s face, which Sirius takes as much of a clue as any that he is done with having to deflect pity and compassion, even from any great distance, and he flips the mirror back to say goodbye.

Remus sleeps the rest of the way, head pillowed against the window, the space under his lashes dark with bruise-colored skin. He needs a haircut; the cuffs of his shirt are fraying, his shoes are scuffed.

(Sirius, for a while, inexplicably wants to reach across the distance and push Remus’s hair back from his forehead, but his ribs keep clenching tightly, uncomfortably, around his lungs whenever he thinks about the feeling of Remus’s jaw under the pads of his fingers, so he settles for propping his legs up on the seat next to Remus -- his right ankle pressed up against the warmth of Remus’s hip for the remainder of their softly rocking, traveling hours.)

PART II
--------------------------------------

Hope Lupin is buried the morning of October 10th. The orchards are blooming blush-faced swells of apples; the sky is blue, and bright, and cloudless.

He looks at Remus's dry cheeks and lowered lashes from across the width of a grave, and feels like it is a lie, because he has a memory of the way the skin of Remus's jaw tasted under his own mouth: bitter, gritty, and laced with salt, like the soft and rasping curl of the ocean. He has a memory of eyes so bright with the fever of feeling that they burned.

--

The Lupin farmhouse fills up, to the very brim, with voices and bodies: first James and Lily, and then Peter, and then Mr and Mrs Benbow from down the road, and then a group of frumpy, rather burly older men that Remus says are some of his father’s former colleagues, and then several of Mrs Lupin’s cousins, with sweet faces and soft brown hair and gentle eyes, and another half dozen Muggles bearing, suddenly, a mountain of boiled potatoes and hams and puddings and steaming dishes of mutton and carrots and a barrel of dark cider, and for several hours the farmhouse is awash in murmurs and the smell of home-cooked food and fresh tea and sweet cream -- and then, just as suddenly, it empties out.

Sirius finds himself standing in the front vegetable garden, watching as James and Lily sweep up and away into the sky on their brooms, and feeling the house behind him suddenly like a dark, gaping bit of emptiness, heavy with nothing and sorrow. He turns to look at it - the sweet, rambling windows, the vaguely off kilter organization of the two floors and the attic, like an afterthought, the mixture of grey stone and dark wood -- only now it looks like someone has bled all the life from it and left it to dry out in the winter sun like dead, curling moss.

He finds Remus in the kitchen, organizing puddings in the refrigerator.

“Why is it always puddings?” he asks, sort of dumbly, leaning over the open door.

“Food makes people feel good,” says Remus. “It’s comforting.”

“Yes, all right, sure,” he says. “But puddings. ”

Remus tilts his head, considering the contents of the fridge. “There’s quite a bit of ham, too.”

“I’m gonna hang about for a bit longer,” says Sirius. “That all right?”

Remus looks up at him; his expression is strangely still, implacable. He shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “All right.”

--

He sleeps on the floor of Remus’s childhood bedroom. It is in the attic, with a window shaped like half of a moon; it is (unlike everything he knows about how Remus is literally incapable of keeping his things in order, of maintaining anything resembling material organization) very neat, tidy, small, and well-dusted. There is Remus’s small bed, with white sheets and a single pillow and a hand-knitted navy quilt that is dusted with white dots, like stars. His cupboard is bare except for two Gryffindor jumpers, three white oxfords (too small, by the look of them), his school tie, his school robes. There is a small desk by the window, which is cleared of everything except for a small stack of books - Remus, sometime in seventh year, by the look of the age of them, has stuck a few photographs to the wall above the desk, along with a Lions pennant. The photographs are all of them, the four of them: of James hanging by his knees from a tree in the back garden of the Godric cottage, of Sirius and Peter covered in glitter and tinsel at a Christmas party in the Gryffindor common room, of Sirius, on the bleachers of the Quidditch pitch in the middle of the snowstorm that hit Hogwarts in February of their sixth year, wrapped in a heavy wool coat a mound of scarves (and looking, frankly, he will admit, utterly miserable), of the four of them, taken by Frank, maybe, or maybe Lily, on the last day of school. In that one, Remus is smiling -- he glances away from where James has Sirius in a headlock, away from them to look at the camera, and he smiles.

Sirius had touched this one, when they were getting ready for bed; pressed the pads of his fingers to where Remus’s unbuttoned shirt and the knot of his tousled tie lay against the silvery lines of scars on his chest.

I like this one, he’d said.

Remus, brushing his teeth, had leaned over his shoulder. I like all of them, he’d said, simply, with toothpaste in his mouth.

Remus is asleep now, curled in on himself. From his sleeping bag on the floor, Sirius (still awake, restless) can peer up through the half-moon window and through the leaves of the large oak tree outside, he can see the sky.

The night is clear, but the sky is empty. He had thought, maybe, that out here in the country, away from the bleed of London light, that there would at least be -- something. But even when the wind shifts, and the leaves wave in the breezes, the sky stays dark; the stars stay hidden from view.

He punches his pillow, turns over, and tries not to think about the way that Remus smelled (metallic, like blood, and sharp, like autumn air) when Sirius wrapped an arm around his shoulders that afternoon, in a graveyard, under the shadows of the apple trees.

--

The next morning, Remus and his father set about cleaning the farmhouse, in some sort of wordless, headstrong, obsessive agreement that Sirius has not been privy to: dusting, washing, sweeping, tidying, putting things in boxes. Sirius helps (he tries to help) for a while, and then finds his own ineptitude frustrating and his lack of interest in organization distracting, and so he wanders off.

He finds Mr Lupin’s study, which is books and books from wall to wall and end to end, dust and leather in the air like ether. He finds Mrs Lupin’s sewing in another room, strangely abandoned in a moment where she must have been mending a pair of socks, or a tear in an pair of trousers, or patching a quilt. He finds pictures of Remus scattered throughout the house, tucked in bookshelves and on mantelpieces and between the pages of cookbooks and folded in with piles of nubbly rugs and soft blankets. Like it is a puzzle, he sits on the floor of the sitting room and pieces together the chronology of Remus’s life in photographs -- a fat baby with big eyes and gigantic ears sucking on his own toes, a toddler in a striped jumper pointing gleefully out the window, a child asleep in his bed, with the sunlight in his hair, awake and solemn and a little bruised (like a secret, if you knew where to look) along the edges of his wrists as he bends over a book with his father, and then in his school robes, not Housed yet, on the first day of Hogwarts at the platform (he looks nervous, and won’t smile at the camera), and then in his Gryffindor jumper, older still, laughing, with holly branches in his arms, next to his mother, who is pretty and thin and young-looking, in a pair of blue overalls and yellow Wellingtons, with the same eyes and same long nose and the same kindness in the lines of her face.

It doesn’t help, Sirius realizes, with whatever it was he was trying to make it help with, so he abandons the pile of aging images with disgust, and bangs about in the kitchen making several cups of tea.

He finds the cellar, later, through a door that maybe should have been locked. He finds the small room, poured concrete, windowless, with the chains hanging lifeless from the walls. He runs his palms over the gouges in the floors, in the back of the door, along the edges of the room. He puts his hand through one of the manacles. It hangs like a dead animal from his wrist, and makes his stomach suddenly revolt with a fit of queasiness so intense that he has to rage out into the garden and kick furiously at the largest rocks he can find for a good three-quarters of an hour, until he is called into lunch.

(They eat soup, leftover roast turkey, some of the frankly horrendously large selection of puddings -- Sirius can’t look at either of them, Remus or his father.)

After lunch, Remus and Mr Lupin retreat to the attic -- Sirius follows, feeling like a heavy shadow, like a strange bit of lint caught on the backs of their heels. Grief in company is odd, he reckons, as he helps them sort through boxes and old books and bits of lace in the storage room next to Remus’s bedroom. It’s like an illness, he thinks, handling a pile of papers strewn with runic writing, like when you wake up one day and feel a meaningful tickle in the back of your throat or a heaviness in your head, or a tinge of fever at the outer layer of your skin, and you think: Is this mine, now, this feeling? You think: I got this from someone else, and, Now it lives in me.

“ - irius?”

“What?” he startles. Remus is looking at him from across the room, arms full of some heavy-looking books.

“Can you pop into my bedroom?” He gestures with his chin. “There’s a pile of things on my desk we need to sort out -- we can do it in here.”

Late afternoon in Remus’s bedroom is all sunlight and dust, like an eddy of sparks. On the desk is the pile of books he’d seen before, and a new stack of papers, some photographs. He lingers, over the pile -- at the top of the stack is a small, brown leather-bound book: square, with no writing on the spine. He picks it up, feeling the weight of it in his palm (where it fits nicely), turns it over, plays with the thin, red ribbon that is threaded through the pages, marking a spot.

He flips it open in his hands, scans the pages: a list (apples, pork, sunflowers, toothpaste, soap, call J), something that looks like several ingredients and instructions for a potion (middleweed, lavender, mint, elderberry, boil and then stew for an hour), pressed leaves, a dried rosemary branch, snatches of poetry, and then -- pages and pages of writing, all in Remus’s hand: gentle, looping, evenly-spaced. And where the red ribbon lies, down the center of the page:

He is in love. It hurts him.

I wonder if he had ever fathomed this. If he ever watched his friends tumble into the orbits of one another, watched them dissolve into that helpless wonder at the size of their own hearts, and if he had thought: no, not that for me. Unnecessary, maybe, or --

“All right?” Remus calls, from the next room, and Sirius panics, suddenly, like he has been caught in the middle of one of the nastier pranks of his life.

“Coming!” he yells, and gathers up the remainder of the things on the desk. The little journal he stuffs into his rucksack, on the floor, by the sleeping bag.

--

That night, he waits until Remus is asleep. It has been tugging at the edges of his body all evening, this odd pocket of knowledge he’s stolen and kept for himself, this indecipherable bit of leather and wood pulp that has settled into his gut like a piercing knife. He waits until Remus is asleep, until he is really asleep (he can tell from his breathing, from the way, when he cranes his neck and looks up at the bed, that he can tell that the tightness in Remus’s shoulders has eased), and then he scoots over to his rucksack, carefully, silently, and tugs the book free.

He can read it in the moonlight, if he shifts closer to the window. He tugs the red ribbon to find the place where he left off:

He is in love. It hurts him.

I wonder if he had ever fathomed this. If he ever watched his friends tumble into the orbits of one another, watched them dissolve into that helpless wonder at the size of their own hearts, and if he had thought: no, not that for me. Unnecessary, maybe, or even more so: impossible. Because of what we had told him.

I think he must be hurting, though. He is different, and he is in love. And perhaps he has been startled by the force of it.

--

In the morning (he has had confusing dreams, slept poorly, kept waking up and glancing over at where the journal stayed tucked in his bag, unable to bring himself to read any more), Remus is already gone from the bed. He finds him in the kitchen downstairs, where he and his father are stuffing things into two threadbare bottomless rucksacks: a compass, a map, neatly wrapped packages of food.

"That long-haired one's still here," says Mr Lupin, without looking up.

"Often is," says Remus, absently.

“Oi,” says Sirius.

"Get your things," says Remus, pushing something across the table at him that looks suspiciously like a rolled-up pup-tent. "Change of clothes, if you want, and bring your jacket."

"Where're we going?" He asks, eyeing Mr Lupin's own pack.

"A walk," says Remus. "To the hills."

--

They trudge first through the fields, and then into the forest, where the ground starts to rise up under their feet and take on a rockier edge, damp and strewn with moss and pine needles and the mulch of older leaves. There are the remnants of stone walls and the foundations of old shacks, near the edge of the wood, and then things become more overgrown; stuttering vines become bold, moss moves from stone to whole torsos of trees, the light grows darker and less filtered, as the canopy closes up around them. It smells like mushrooms and green fern and small red berries, and the first closing-ups of autumn, when the leaves know they are about to go, and so stop sending off their green and floral scent, and let the subtle poison of death leak out about them.

Mr Lupin points with his walking stick: quail in the underbrush, tracks of a fox, marks on a tree where a deer has rubbed its itching belly, sun-bleached skeletons of field mice discarded under leaves where the owls have not got them yet, white like the inner membrane of a shell, and even, once, badger droppings, which makes Remus roll his eyes.

After hours, the trees thin out as the ground gets higher still -- Sirius can feel the air change like a faraway whistling, he can smell it on the wind. The mud gets heavier on his boots, and then there is, suddenly, in front of them, as they pull themselves up the last of the high, sloping hill of grass, a scattering of large gray stones.

They look, to Sirius, for a moment, like slumbering animals. Their heavy, rounded backs and gentle sort of arrangement; it is like they have stumbled into graveyard of giants. One is standing, slightly off-kilter to one side, and the rest have fallen to the ground, overgrown and cracked in places, marking out a wide circle in the earth.

Mr Lupin and Remus throw down their packs somewhere to the left of the stones, and Sirius watches them, silently, as they stand there together a little ways off: heads straight, both so tall, shoulders both slightly slumped in the act of being, and Remus now more gray in the hair than his father, who is still wildly ginger. Among the stones, against the low clouds, they look like two gray statues: quiet monuments to themselves.

“Muggles around here think they’re fairy graves,” says Remus, when he approaches. “Da doesn’t agree.”

“No, I do not,” says Mr Lupin, gruffly.

“What are they?” he asks, crouching down to run his hand over the surface of one of the stones: it’s cool and a little damp, a strange energy against his skin.

“Protection circles, most likely,” says Mr Lupin, squinting up at the sky. “Pre-medieval, definitely pre-wand. Magic’s mostly bled out of them, by now, we think, but.”

“Wow,” says Sirius, tracing a strange vein of dark red mineral with his finger. “Cool.”

Mr Lupin gives him a look as if cool is not, perhaps, an appropriate word for the situation.

“It’s very cool, Pads,” agrees Remus, kindly, bending down to touch his own hand to the stone next to Sirius’s, and Sirius realizes in that moment, like someone has reached inside his chest with a violent, terrifying fist and squeezed his heart so hard that all the breath in his lungs is instantly gone, evaporated up into the air, that he wants Remus to kiss him again, really kiss him, more than anything he has wanted in his whole, young, stupid, frantic, and wondrous life.

--

They start back down before the sun begins to set, and set up camp a ways down the hill, back through into the woods, in a small clearing of dead oak leaves and pine. The pup-tent is in fact a modest but roomy Extension-charmed bit of canvas, with enough room for two cots and a sleeping bag, as well as a pit for the fire, and small, clear, and shimmering window made of a localized Invisibility enchantment on one sloping side. If it’s clear, says Remus, You can watch the sky and look for falling stars (Sirius imagines he would take any kind of star, on any kind of night, at this point).

They prepare a dinner of leftover mutton and potatoes, more puddings, some tins of sardines and a glass of warm, dark cider each, before it starts to rain lightly and Mr Lupin drags him outside to help him put up the outdoor umbrella-ing charm, which is a complete disaster until Mr Lupin tells him, not completely unkindly, that he is using the wrong verb, which is for personal and indoor shielding from atmospheric and weather elements.

"Never been camping before," he says, once they have got it done up correctly, bobbing neatly over the smart little triangle of tent, and he comes back in through the flaps, shaking the rainwater off his arms.

"It shows," says Mr Lupin, behind him, and Remus laughs.

He takes the sleeping bag, while Mr Lupin and Remus sit by the fire; the long walk and the warm cider and the low murmur of conversation and the rain and the heady, dark smell of the earth (and the four days on no cigarettes) making his eyes heavy, his heartbeat slow. He dozes, he feels the crackle of the fire against his skin like a lullaby, he hears snatches of conversation, and then the air is quiet for a while; the voices go still.

Then, he hears Remus say, very softly: "Everything feels out of focus."

"It's like I'm going mad," he hears Remus make that huffing, surprised sort of laugh. "But only -- only very slowly."

The fire snaps. Sirius feels the heat of it on his wrists, his knuckles, the skin of his cheeks.

"I keep losing track of things, without her," he hears Remus say. "Losing my train of thought, losing sense of what I'm supposed to be doing one minute to the next, losing track of where my feelings are supposed to go, losing track of actual things --"

Sirius hears Mr Lupin make a gruff little noise in the back of his throat.

"I've lost her journal," says Remus. "Da, I don't know where I could have put it, I swear to god I'd just left it in my room, but -"

And Sirius feels, suddenly and sickeningly, the heavy, solid thump of realization behind his sternum -- like the snick of a key in a lock, like the feeling of smooth, warm wood in his palm when capturing someone else's wand, like the prickle of heat along the back of his skull when the magic fits to the round and thick words of the spell against his tongue.

He thinks of the moment he lifted the small leather book from that neat, square little table in the corner of Remus's childhood bedroom, with dust sparking in the shafts of late afternoon light. He thinks of the way it felt, strangely heavy and thick, in the palm of his hand. He thinks of the handwriting, looping and gentle, familiar. He thinks of the book where it is tucked now, in the bottom of his rucksack, next to a crumpled pack of fags and his wand.

Fuck, he thinks. Oh, fuck.

--

A shaft of sunlight wakes him -- slicing through the window and sitting rudely right across his closed eyes, until he groans, and has to roll his body into waking. The sun is warm but early, the birds, somewhere in the trees, are making throaty dawn-fond noises. Mr Lupin and Remus are not in the tent. The fire is gently cooling, a pot of coffee left warming on its hook over the coals. He is alone.

He grabs for his rucksack, with the knowledge that whatever he heard, it might have been a dream, but if it wasn’t Remus’s diary, if it was his mother’s, then that could mean --

He digs it out from under his crumpled jacket and pair of pants and a folded up knot of socks (none of which match each other), and flips it open, right there on his lap, over the quilted sleeping bag, tugged down over his hips.

He finds the page with the red ribbon, and then flips forward, backward, scanning for something that could -- and then there it is, on the page before:

The garden is full of boys today. They are almost seventeen now though, not quite but almost men -- swinging from the trees and terrorizing the sheep, spinning cartwheels, yelling nonsense.

Remus sometimes looks like he is skeptical of how happy he is. I think he often looks a little like I feel sometimes, looking at them: how if there is really magic in the world, maybe this is it.

Sirius Black has let his hair grow long. He runs from floor to floor, rampages across the garden, he streaks across the sky, like he has a wild dog after him. He doesn’t know what to do with me, I think. Remus says he has a horrible family, that his mother was a terror, that they cast him out. Sometimes I think I catch him watching me out of the corner of his eye, like I am an uninvited stranger in his own house.

Remus was helping me with supper, he was peeling tomatoes in the kitchen, and Sirius Black fell out of a tree -- we saw him through the window, laughing in the grass like bruises were badges.

He’s an odd one, isn’t he, I asked Remus.

Yes, he said, and so fondly. He is.

You adore him, I said. I was teasing him, I suppose, but he looked moved by it, somehow, even when he rolled his eyes and said, Mum, come on, he also said, like the same breath, Yes I do. And he was smiling.

We’ve taught him secrets so well -- I wonder if anyone knows.

I wonder if --

The page ends. He turns it.

-- he knows.

And there, on the line below:

He is in love. It hurts him.

--

He emerges from the tent, tugging on his jumper, to find Remus alone, sitting on a log with an empty mug beside him.

“Oi, where’s your Da?”

Remus looks up from scraping at the ground with a stick; he looks absent, a bit ill, stretched thin.

“Had to go back early,” he says. “Meeting in town with the barrister.”

“Well,” says Sirius, squinting up at the sky. “You’re on your own with the camping shite, then. I think we’ve proved I’m no help.”

“You did fine,” says Remus, and he stands, brushing off his knees. “We can go back tomorrow. Want to go for a walk?”

“Again?”

“It won’t kill you, Pads,” Remus rolls his eyes with great affection, and brushes past Sirius on his way into the tent.

“You said that about the belly-moan!” Sirius protests, to disguise the fact that his skin is tingling where Remus’s body has been, just a second before.

“Telephone, Sirius," calls Remus, from inside the tent.

--

They leave the camp where it is, marked with a neat little homing spell that Remus tips out of his wand with the kind of practiced skill and natural, sweet ability that makes Sirius’s skin ache again. Through the morning, they circle around the low circumference of the large hill, and then follow a small stream down into where it joins a larger bit of river, into the dark of the valley to the east.

They eat lunch on the side of the water (cold cheese sandwiches and spell-warmed potatoes), and Sirius tries his hand at stunning minnows, until Remus makes noises about disrupting some unsuspecting, small fish’s life for pure, selfish enjoyment, so instead he attempts to cross the river via a log and several small, mossy stones. He falls in twice (once on the way there, and then again on the way back).

Remus makes a very strong showing of not laughing at him, and for that (and because, he reckons, at this point, he is completely, disastrously, head-over-heels besotted for this odd, serious, secretive, beautiful, strange boy, who is also his friend, one of his best friends, whom he loves), he doesn’t try to push him in.

They circle back through the valley in the afternoon, the light growing heavy and the chill lifting out of the air. Sirius takes the rare opportunity and goes bounding off-path in the underbrush as Padfoot, his head gloriously uncomplicated by feelings and full of the simplicity and richness of the mulchy, dying web of the natural world. He can smell Remus’s magic behind him, beside him, he digs his snout into ratholes and into trees, he scents the industrious toil of a line of ants retrieving a dead beetle to their nest (like salt, and a curling, hot thread of iron), he scratches his back in a pile of pine needles and brittle leaves, he finds several utterly brilliant sticks, and brings them all back to Remus for inspection.

By the time he has exhausted his four legs, they have circled back around almost the whole way, and Remus leads him up onto the hill with the stone circle again. He runs about the circumference of it three, four times, before lolling onto his side at Remus’s feet, tongue panting.

“Change back, Pads,” says Remus, reaching down to rub a hand along his ruff (it feels amazing).

He whines; throws his paws up into the air.

“I’m not feeding you water out of the cap, you dumb mutt, c’mon.”

He changes, reluctantly, shaking pine needles and dirt out of his hair. Remus, gratefully, says nothing about the potential smell and disastrous state of his jacket, and only hands him the canteen when he takes a seat on one of the stones.

Sirius stays standing, surveying the slope of trees down into the valley from where they’d come. The mist is rolling it from across the fields, sliding down the slope of a distant hill to congeal in the valley below them.

“You come here a lot with her?” he asks.

“With who?”

“Your mum,” he says.

Remus’s mouth twitches in a grin, he bends at the waist to swipe some mud from his shoes. “No,” he says. “No, she, er. She didn’t like it much up here. Preferred the woods. Said the stones always made her feel a bit odd.”

“Muggles are odd,” says Sirius.

Remus rolls his eyes. “Muggles are fine.”

“Your mum was fine,” he says, feeling the heaviness of the book against his back, through the cotton of his rucksack. “I mean, she, er. She was nice. I liked her.”

Remus is quiet for a moment; when Sirius glances at him, his head is bent slightly, his lashes low against his cheeks.

“I think she liked you too,” he says, and looks up at Sirius with a lopsided, quiet smile that makes Sirius’s pulse skitter along his veins, makes his ribs pull tight against his heart.

“Look, er -- Moony,” he says, in a rush, and then realizes he can’t really find the right way to say what it is he’s been trying to say since he realized how badly he needed to tell Remus something, and he just opens his pack and digs around for a bit until he finds the book, and then he draws it out, and wordlessly, he hands it to Remus.

Remus takes it slowly, skeptically, as if he’s not entirely sure what it is, or what he’s supposed to do with it. He holds it in both hands, over his lap; Sirius watches him run the pad of his thumb over the spine, slowly.

“I found it,” he says, feeling sort of weightless and sick, helpless and floundering. “I mean -- that is. I took it. From your room.”

Remus is silent. He doesn’t look up.

“I dunno why I did it,” Sirius sighs; he runs a hand through his hair. “I dunno, I just thought. I didn't know it was hers. I thought it was yours, I guess.”

“Mine?” Remus says, a little hoarsely.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess. Her writing looks like yours, a bit.”

Remus is silent again, for a while. The wind whips at them sharply, suddenly, from the east, and the smell of moss and dried wood and feverish marsh hits Sirius full in the face.

“I read it,” he says. “I read, I mean. I read parts of it.”

“Oh,” says Remus.

Sirius crouches, next to him. He watches Remus run his thumb up the spine again, watches him slide his fingers along the outside of the leather cover, under the little lip, along the edges of the pages, like he is terrified to open it. Like he wants to, but can’t bring himself to take the step. Sirius can practically taste it, like he did that night against his own mouth, under the wheaty lager and the salt of Remus’s sweat and the ash of cigarettes: the heavy, bitter blood of Remus’s fear.

“Got anything you wanna tell me, Moony?” he whispers.

Remus inhales, and he glances sharply at Sirius’s face, just for a moment. Then his expression closes up; tightens in, and he looks away.

"We should get back," he says, tightly, getting to his feet and tucking the book into his pack. "It's getting dark."

--

Remus’s steps down the hill have a strange, frantic urgency; Sirius finds he can barely keep up, and he keeps slipping on the wet moss in an effort to match his strides to Remus’s, keeps knocking into the whiplash of long branches in an effort to keep his eyes trained on Remus’s rigid, hunched shoulders.

“Oi,” he calls, as they near their campsite. He can see the happy, humming light of the smoldering fire-pit through the trees, the glow of the tent peeking through.

Remus doesn’t answer; his pace just picks up.

“Oi,” he yells again. “Moony, for fuck’s sake.”

Remus turns a bend, toward the camp, and Sirius loses sight of him.

“Fuck,” he snarls to the trees and the dead, empty path, and breaks into a run.

He catches up with Remus just inside the tent, by the firepit, and grabs his arm, hard, tugging him back into his own space, not sure what it is that he’s supposed to say, now that he’s caught him, but his heart is pounding in his chest and he can’t breathe and he’s not sure any of this is even right, that this is what people do, but what comes out of his mouth, harsh and sharp, is:

“You kissed me, Moony.”

Remus starts, eyes wide, his breathing is labored and he tries, once, unsuccessfully, to tug his arm out of Sirius’s grasp.

“You kissed me,” he says again, slower this time. “What’m I supposed to do about that?”

Remus flinches; Sirius lets go of his arm, and immediately Sirius can see the way his hands are curling inwards -- knuckles getting white, wrists growing tensed.

“You could forget it,” Remus says, finally.

“Fuck you, I will,” he says, harshly. “And -- fuck you for thinking I would.”

“That good, was it?”

Remus’s smirk is, he thinks, one of the saddest things he’s ever had forced on him. It looks like his heart is breaking.

“I’m going to kick you,” he hisses. “I can’t believe how fucked up you are.”

“I didn’t think you remembered,” says Remus. “I thought. Maybe.”

“I didn’t think you did, you fucking sneak!” Sirius snaps. “That’s not fair.”

Remus laughs, harshly, in the back of his throat, and makes a move like he is going to throw up his hands, move away from the fire, out of the tent, so Sirius grabs him by the sleeve and tugs him back.

“No, no. Listen to me. You know, I get called out all the fucking time for being the selfish one, but has anyone ever stopped to take a look at you?”

“Sirius - ”

“You’re so fucking self-absorbed, mate, you don’t even think that someone could -- that you might be -”

“ - Sirius, for christ’s sake - ”

“No, fuck off -- listen to me for a bloody second, all right? I didn’t fucking say no, did I?”

Remus’s tugs his arm back, sharply, and his eyes dart to the fire, and then back to Sirius’s face.

“I don’t remember that part,” he whispers.

“Coward,” Sirius spits.

That shuts Remus up; shuts him down. He falters. Sirius can see him lose the last bit of whatever was holding him up, holding him together, as Remus takes a folded-in, hesitating seat on the log by the fire. In the flickering of light and shadow, through the wisps of smoke, Sirius watches the minute twist of his mouth, the grinding of his jaw, the imperceptible collapse of his shoulders, the crumble of his spine.

“I remember wanting to kiss you,” says Remus, quietly, finally; his hands are knotted in his lap. "Did you?"

“Did I what? ” He feels cruel, suddenly, like a hot brand against his chest, for forcing it out of him.

“Did you say no,” says Remus.

“What do you think?”

Remus swallows, thickly; his jaw works. “We were drunk.”

“So?”

“You like girls,” says Remus.

“Don’t you?”

Remus’s mouth twists. “Sometimes.”

"Maybe it doesn't fucking matter," he says, urgent, angry, sliding onto the log beside him, wanting to reach out and shake him. "Maybe you think too fucking much."

"One of us has to," snaps Remus, sounding desperate and frayed, his voice gone hoarse in the back of his throat. "God forbid you use your brain before hurtling headlong into a series of horrible choices and muck everything up."

“Muck everything - ” Sirius sputters. “You know what, for someone who’s supposedly in love with me, you’re doing a right fuck job of showing it.”

Remus’s face, in the firelight, suddenly goes very pale and still, his eyes take on the startled, wild look of an animal with its paw stuck in a trap, like his pulse has suddenly triggered a snapping, burning panic somewhere along the back of his spine.

"I'm not - " he swallows; he takes a shallow, sharp breath. "Did I -- did I tell you that I - "

"No," says Sirius. "Are you?"

“Well,” says Remus, and he sounds miserable. “I suppose that -- I mean.”

“Lupin.”

The fire snaps, loudly, in the silence; a shower of sparks spirals up into the air, and disappears.

“Yes,” whispers Remus. “I mean. I am.”

Sirius feels as though someone has handed him something made of glittering, spun glass, like someone has shown him what it must feel like to reach out and be able to feel the age of starlight, like someone has opened up his ribcage and poured it full to bursting with the feeling of laughing so hard you start to cry.

“I’m sorry,” says Remus, completely ruining everything.

“I’m not,” he laughs, he has to. “Fuck you, I’m not.”

Remus shoots him a look of terrified, miserable, utter confusion.

“Moony,” he says, and he reaches out and encircles Remus’s wrist with his fingers. “Pay attention.”

Remus swallows, sharply, and seems unable to look away from where Sirius has pressed their skin together. “You didn’t say no,” he whispers, and Sirius can almost feel the battering throb of his pulse with his whole body, like it is already on his lips.

“Moony,” he says, because that’s the only answer that matters when his heart feels so expansive and light he can feel his ribs creaking and writhing with the size of it. "How could I ever fucking say no to you."

“Oh,” says Remus. And then, again, softer: “Oh.”

And then he reaches out and grabs the front of Sirius’s shirt with his fist and pulls, and then suddenly Remus is kissing him again, and Sirius reaches out to steady himself but ends up somehow with his palm pressed against the side of Remus’s face, pushing into Remus’s hair, gripping at the back of his collar, and it’s all he ever wanted, he realizes, was this again; the searing itch that had been traveling up and down his spine for the whole sad, creaking autumn, the way looking at Remus and knowing the way his mouth tasted, how cracking open his secrets one-by-one like small, brittle bits of hollow bone made him delirious, unsettled, angry, euphoric, that this was all he needed to feel like he could breathe again.

“How do people do this?” Remus whispers, against his mouth. “How do they just go around wanting things so badly all the time?”

“That’s normal, you stupid berk,” he says, and kisses him again, because he can.

“What do you know about normal,” says Remus (Sirius can feel the smile curve against the side of his face).

“Nothing,” he says -- and honest humility tastes a little like the memory of the tang of blood and lager against his tongue, like the scrape of Remus’s teeth against his lower lip. “I didn’t know anything until now.”

And Remus laughs, surprised, breathless -- and he is beautiful, Sirius thinks. "Suppose that makes two of us."

Some indistinct and wonderfully fuzzy, tingling time later, when Remus’s trousers are gone and Sirius’s shirt is rucked up under his armpits, and Sirius is on all fours over Remus with his hand shoved down the front of Remus’s pants, he does realize that maybe they could have opted for one of the cots, but since Remus has wrapped his fingers around his cock and has his teeth nipping at Sirius’s lower lip, he honestly couldn’t give a bloody, buggering fuck where they were.

“I’m -- ” he gasps, heat gathering like a pooling of magic under his skin. “Sorry, sorry, fuck, this is going to be really fast, sorry.”

“Uhm,” Remus hisses, thickly, against his mouth, and his fingers stutter along the length of Sirius’s cock; his eyes are half-closed, his face is flushed, his hair is dark where it’s damp and plastered against his forehead, he’s got his other hand fisted in the front of Sirius’s shirt, and this is better than even the filthiest thing Sirius ever imagined doing with any girl, the way Sirius can taste every gasp, like little puffs of steam he can lick at with his tongue, the scrape of teeth like the striking bursts of matchfire prickling along the nerves under his skin.

Remus makes a desperate noise against his mouth, sucking on a gasp, and then his head tips forward, his face tucking in against Sirius’s shoulder, his wrist twisting, jerking in the circle of Sirius’s fingers; Sirius can feel against his knuckles the way the muscles in his stomach grow tight and fluttering, the way his cock seems to get harder.

“Oh, fuck,” he hisses, “Fuck, are you coming?”

“Ohmygod,” Remus gasps, sharply, and it’s like his whole body is drawn taut and shaking, and his knees slide up against Sirius’s ribs, right thigh tight against Sirius’s hip, his free hand is in a fist, first pressed to Sirius’s shoulder, and then his own face, knuckles making divots in his cheek as he bites down on the fleshy bit of his palm.

“Fuck,” he says, again, desperate, releasing Remus’s wrist to tug his head back against the ground by his hair. “No, fuck, lemme see.”

“Sirius -- ” Remus’s mouth is wet, dark, red and swollen; a flash of white when he hisses between his teeth.

“Wanna see you come,” Sirius gasps, and then leans his hips back, one hand still fisted in the damp tangle of Remus’s hair, so he can watch his other hand work faster over the length of Remus’s cock.

And when Remus comes, Sirius sees: his face, open, and shattered, and bright.

--

They do use the cots, after all. They pull them together by the fire, and Remus tugs the sleeping bag over both of them, and Remus rests his chin against Sirius’s shoulder, and it all feels familiar and new, all at once, Sirius thinks, feeling the pulse of Remus’s heart through his own skin, to know that you’ve sort of been a stupid cunt, to have been in love for so long like this.

“This is the weirdest day of my life,” says Remus, sleepily, against his ear. “An’ that’s saying something.”

“How d’you mean?” He grins.

“I’m happy,” says Remus. He makes a vague, floppy gesture with his hand; yawns. “I mean. About, you know. But I’m -- I’m sad.”

His voice tapers off, like he is ashamed of the small stature of the word. He reaches out, across Sirius’s chest, and picks up the small, square little journal from where it is lying by the fire. When he rolls back onto his back, body warm and solid against Sirius’s side, he holds the book in both hands, lightly, against his own stomach.

“I’m sad,” he says, again, quietly. “Because I miss her.”

Sirius does the one thing he has been wanting to do since Remus knelt beside him and told him that the stones were, in fact, yes, very cool, since the train ride to Wales, since Remus kissed him in a dark, stinking alley behind a shitty, dirty pub, and he reaches out with one hand and pushes Remus’s overly-long hair back from his forehead, smoothing it back behind his ear.

"I actually haven't read it," murmurs Remus, almost sheepishly, turning the book over in his hands. "I guess. I mean, I didn't really want to think this was the only part of her I had left."

“We can read it together,” says Sirius. “If you like.”

“Yeah,” says Remus. “All right.”

“You come off very well, by the way,” he says. “Me, maybe not so much.”

Remus laughs, and he opens the book.

And there, through the black fingers of the autumn bower, when he looks up, with the taste of Remus’s skin on his lips, he can see the exact moment when the darkness parts and the stars descend, like a shower of light, into their rightful places.

--

We are a cradle of light for those we love, she had written. If we are ever bright, it is because of their brightness first.

(He is in love, she writes.)

We are like stars, she had written. Our light, far older than our bodies, shines only in those we have touched.

(He is in love, she writes.)

He is in love.