Fic: stir the flame anew for snax0
Nov. 26th, 2017 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blanketed_in_stars posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
small_giftsTitle: stir the flame anew
Author/Artist:blanketed_in_stars
Recipient:human_veil
Rating: PG-13 for language
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *none*
Word count: 5,168 (sorry)
Summary: Two winters after the war, Remus receives an owl, and, shortly thereafter, an unexpected houseguest.
It’s a light tawny who sits patiently while he reads. Moony—send something back if it’s a bad time. Otherwise I’ll be there at noon. Cheers, Padfoot. There’s nothing more, as if it were the last note in a conversation they’d already been having, but Remus can’t recall anything of the sort. He’d remember if they’d talked about this. He’d remember, he thinks, watching the owl drink the water which he absentmindedly offers her, if they’d talked at all.
Notes: Thank you so much to my lovely beta Audrey who read this at the very last minute and, as usual, offered sage advice and encouragement without which I would certainly be flailing around in despair. This was written to the prompt "re-learning each other" and I hope I've done it justice! And the title comes from the poem "New Year's Eve" by Elfrida De Renne Barrow.
“It’s not much,” Remus says, well aware that it is the first roof Sirius has had over his head in a year. There is stillness between them that he struggles to break. “I’ll run a bath—”
“Can I just,” Sirius says. The hollows in his cheeks are caverns, the sockets of his eyes the space between the stars. “Can I just go to sleep.”
———
Remus goes to bed with the snow falling outside; the cottage is already so isolated that the snow muffles the last sounds completely and he feels as if he’s inside a soft white bubble. The heating charms stop the worst of the drafts, but he still summons extra blankets from the hall closet and huddles beneath them when he wakes at midnight with icy toes.
In the morning he rises as he always does, his bones aching and the light clear and cold. He goes to the window and looks out: he’s been buried, halfway up to the sill. Nothing to see of the road except the gap in the dark pines at the edge of the field. In the kitchen he makes tea, and so he only notices the owl when it taps its beak against the fogged-up glass.
It’s a light tawny who sits patiently while he reads. Moony—send something back if it’s a bad time. Otherwise I’ll be there at noon. Cheers, Padfoot. There’s nothing more, as if it were the last note in a conversation they’d already been having, but Remus can’t recall anything of the sort. He’d remember if they’d talked about this. He’d remember, he thinks, watching the owl drink the water which he absentmindedly offers her, if they’d talked at all.
He doesn’t send anything back, and the owl flutters off after a few minutes. Remus watches her go, then drinks his tea too hot and cleans the front room. There’s almost nothing there but books, already sitting neatly on the shelf, but he feels somehow like he ought to. The minutes till noon tick away against the bright white backdrop of the snow.
Despite the silence, he doesn’t hear Sirius apparate to just beyond the pines, but when he opens the door he sees the path that’s been stomped through the snow and in any case it’s clear from his robes, which are damp up to his knees. His nose is red and his hands are balled into clenched fists, but he smiles when Remus hesitates. “You wouldn’t leave a chap out here to freeze, would you?”
His own feet numb and his heart clamoring against the stillness, Remus steps aside. He finds his tongue again as Sirius is undoing his scarf. “How did you know where to find me?”
Sirius pauses, then hangs his scarf on the hook with his cloak. “Harry told me you were still here.”
Remus purses his lips. “Did he tell you anything else?”
“He mentioned that you haven’t been to see him in months. Or anyone else, as far as he knows.” Sirius stands still, a dark shadow in the hall, the past come alive again. His eyes are deep places that Remus avoids looking at. “As far as I know, too. What are you doing all the way out here?”
Of all the questions. Remus turns and stumps into the kitchen, fills the kettle again. “Preserving.”
“What, like jam?” Sirius asks, following.
Remus taps the kettle with his wand and it begins to whistle at once. “Mugs are over the sink,” he says without looking around. “Do you still like Earl Grey?”
He can hear the second smile hovering at the edge of Sirius’s mouth when he answers. “Probably.”
They drink the tea in silence as the snow begins to fall again outside. Remus wants to say something—wants to ask all of the questions pressing up beneath his tongue—but he doesn’t know where to start, doesn’t know how to say anything that won’t sound like an accusation or a plea or, on the other hand, a lie. Sirius, for his part, watches the table mostly, except for moments when his gaze flickers to the doorway or the narrow window or, fleetingly, to Remus’s face. The words between them, already meager, wither to nothing at all, so that Remus starts to feel the heaviness of his eyelids and making tea seems like a rotten idea.
In the end he places his elbows on the table and looks at Sirius head-on, or as near as he can manage. “Well? Out with it.”
He expects Sirius to play coy, to act offended, to be dramatic and mysterious and wounded at the question. It’s a surprise to see him shift in his chair and say, in a level voice, “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Preserving.” Sirius twists the word, or bares it. “Still in this place, all alone, and at Christmas. Don’t you know we won the war?”
Remus stops himself from scoffing by the skin of his teeth. “It’s still a week till Christmas. And did Harry tell you that he hasn’t been to see me in months, either?”
“Harry told me lots of things,” Sirius says quietly. “He says you didn’t answer the door the last three times he tried. He figured he’d leave you alone if that’s what you want.”
“And has it occurred to you that—”
“It’s not what you want, Moony, and we both know that.” Sirius leans across the table towards him. “It’s Harry. Merlin’s beard, if you won’t talk to him, talk to me.”
“About what? Life’s good now. We won the war, you said it yourself.”
Sirius rolls his eyes. “Just let me stay for a few days. Keep you company. God knows I could use a change of scenery.”
“Isn’t that what you said the last time?” Remus points out. “When you left?” It flashes through his mind: a low fire, the shadow of the chase looming, a hippogriff dark against the stars.
“Well, what can I say?” Sirius spreads his hands, palms up. His fingers are long, not so thin as before; strong, like bare branches of trees, or their roots. “There’s something about this place that keeps dragging me back.”
———
They live wrapped around each other. It is like before: they fall asleep in the same space, breathe the same air, the closeness that only war can bring. They’re older and most things hurt these days, but some parts stay the same.
———
Night gathers thick and close. “It’s quiet here,” Sirius says, sounding surprised. “Like—”
“Like what?” Remus asks without turning his head as he carries blankets and a pillow to the sofa.
There’s a moment, barely more than the shadow of one, between when Sirius opens his mouth and when the words pass his lips, during which Remus is sure that Sirius is about to lie. He doesn’t know what tells him this or if he’s making it up or even how he feels about knowing it—but he is glad when Sirius says, “Like Azkaban.” That’s no lie.
“I wouldn’t think it was very quiet there,” Remus says. It sounds bad, even to him.
“You stop noticing anything if you’re around it long enough,” Sirius tells him. “I don’t know how long it took, exactly, but by the end I didn’t hear the sea anymore. And when I got out, I—it was like—” Sirius stops, switching tack and failing to conceal it. “I suppose that’s what it reminds me of, more than anything. That first night.”
He sounds as if he wants to say something more, and his eyes are on Remus, tangibly, like icy fingers beneath his shirt, but Remus is hung up several sentences back. He wonders if he has grown used to the silence out here yet or if it’s where he was always meant to be. If he will someday stop noticing the vehement letters that wind up in his letterbox, the glances when he goes into town. The oldest scars on his skin are still just as visible as they were thirty-six years ago, the night air just as cold. “I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I rather like it.” He goes to bed then, and can’t quite tell if he imagines the noises he hears in the darker hours.
———
Beneath his robes, which remind Remus of dead leaves buried beneath the snow, Sirius is a couple of ribs held together with pure will. He melts, though, when Remus lays a hand on the knob of his spine, and that is how Remus learns that there is something sweeter in the world than what it has shown him so far. And when Sirius kisses him, messy, desperate, lost under the weight of years, he wonders how he missed it all this time.
———
“Have you got any cocoa?” Sirius asks. The frost refuses to melt from the windowpanes and Remus has taken refuge at one end of the sofa, close to the fireplace. He is trying to concentrate on his book and to avoid noticing how the sofa smells like Sirius. “Moony?”
Remus looks up. “Cocoa?”
“Or eggnog. Something seasonal.”
Remus snorts before he can stop himself, then sees that Sirius isn’t looking away. “No, I haven’t,” he says. “If you wanted holiday cheer you ought to have stayed at Harry’s.”
“There’s a little too much cheer there,” Sirius says quietly.
To prevent himself from caring about that, Remus gets up and stokes the fire. “Two years is enough time to stop celebrating, is that it?”
He catches out of the corner of his eye the way Sirius goes still before he answers. “It’s nice to get away sometimes, is all.”
“And you asked me why I live in the middle of nowhere.”
“There’s a difference between taking a break and shutting yourself away,” Sirius says sharply. “At least in London you could—”
“Could what?” Remus demands, turning, heat in his cheeks and even more in his voice. “Live with Harry and pretend everything’s fine?”
“You could live with me,” Sirius says mulishly.
It stops Remus in his tracks, as was probably intended, and he pauses with his mouth half-open. “I think we tried that once,” he says too late, embers in his chest flaring to life. “If I remember correctly, we lied to each other for months and then you wound up in prison.” He hates himself for saying it, because it hurts and he can see that it cuts Sirius too, but he doesn’t know how to say anything else. He wants to bury himself in a snowbank outside to keep himself cold, to hold his own shape. “That’s not an experiment I’m eager to repeat.”
Sirius swallows and says in a constricted voice, “Maybe you’re right to stay out here, then. It suits you.”
Remus goes back to the sofa and picks up his book again without saying a word. Regret is a bitter taste in his mouth. Doesn’t it just?
———
Buckbeak doesn’t mind the snow, but feeding him is a chore when the frost refuses to leave the windowpanes. So they bring him inside and he nestles in a corner of the sitting room. “I could get used to this,” Sirius says as he grooms the glossy feathers, while Remus lights candles to drive out the gloom.
It’s the most natural thing he’s said in three and a half weeks, and Remus thrills to it like a moth to a flame. “Even here?” he asks. “You could find somewhere better—”
“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, “but could I get you to come with me?”
———
The hall floor is cold on Remus’s bare feet and he clips his shoulder on the door frame as he turns the corner into the sitting room. “Sirius,” he says, his voice sleep-low, his right arm throbbing from the door and his eyes still half blind, bending over the sofa. “Wake up!”
As if it were a spell, Sirius does, gasping once or twice and then subsiding into a silence that Remus can still hear. “I’m awake. Fuck. Get off me.”
Remus releases Sirius’s shoulder and sits back, feeling his own heart pound. “Sorry.”
“Did I wake you up?” Sirius asks after a moment, his voice still ragged. He sounds very close in the darkness. “I’m s—”
“Don’t be,” Remus says, suddenly somehow certain that if they both end up apologizing something disastrous will happen. “Just—tell your subconscious to lighten up. We won the war, after all.” The words fall as flat as he’s ever heard them. He wonders, with his knees growing sore beside the sofa and a suspicious glitter marking Sirius’s cheeks, why he bothers. Why he is unable to reach out and take Sirius’s hand, nothing he hasn’t done before, and now, when they both so clearly want it—or is that Remus, imagining it in his desperate and overwhelming need—?
But Sirius is already talking. “Sometimes I can snap out of it. But I know it bothers Harry, too. He doesn’t say anything about it. I think he’d like to—to help, somehow, but—he’s just a kid. He doesn’t know.” He shakes his head, wipes at his face. “I don’t know either.”
Remus nods, though both of them are mostly invisible, the shadows too deep to see anything but the barest outlines, anything that catches the edge of the light. He leans on the sofa and stirs, almost, almost reaching, but stops himself in time. “Me neither,” he says, “but I have them too.”
Sirius doesn’t say anything to that right away, but his hand finds Remus’s in a grip that is too tight to be accidental. “What are yours about?”
“Mm. Everything.” You, he wants to say but doesn’t. It’s true. An empty flat, a screaming photograph, clothes left unfolded. A knock on the door. “Do you think you can get back to sleep?” he hears himself ask twenty years in the future.
With a sigh, Sirius lets his hand go. “I think so.” He’s silent while Remus unfolds his stiff knees. When he’s in the doorway, he speaks again. “Thanks for waking me up.”
What is the appropriate response to that? Remus pauses, his hand on the doorframe. He can think of nothing to say. He walks down the hall and crawls back into his bed. If it feels empty, it’s because it grew cold in his absence.
———
They fill the days with small things. As if making up for lost time, they are barely an arm’s reach apart, and when the night comes they are closer. How much time they have left is a mystery Remus doesn’t care to unravel. He pulls Sirius to him and the danger presses him closer still—you never know, after all. What they have is precious, precarious, the nebulous glow of embers about to fade out.
———
They wake up to find the snow already falling. Sirius has built the fire up again by the time Remus is dressed and they eat jam on toast on the sitting room floor, Sirius with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Is this how you spend every day?” Sirius asks him when all that’s left is crumbs. “Sitting around the house?”
“I do work,” Remus says somewhat indignantly. He hasn’t made anything near to a secret out of it: the scrolls are on the kitchen table, and he does his note-taking at the window.
Sirius wrinkles his nose. “You do—what, copy-editing? It all looks dreadful.”
“Textbook ghostwriting,” Remus informs him, “and you ought to get a job as well. It’s like you’re eighteen again.”
“It’s still horrible,” Sirius protests. “I mean—not working, but your job specifically—you realize you could do anything, right? Go anywhere? But you’re locking yourself up in this house at the edge of the world.”
Remus looks over at him, big eyes and hair in need of a trim, and feels cold. He wishes he had a blanket, too. He settles for a wry smile. “Locked up or locked out?” he can’t help asking.
It shuts Sirius up for several minutes, and there’s nothing but the crackling of the flames between them then. “Are you at least going to go outside?” Sirius asks. “To enjoy the weather, I mean? That’s got to be one of the good things about living out here. Look at that snow—you remember that snowball fight in sixth year?”
“The one where Marlene got you over the head with a snowball the size of a gargoyle?”
“That’s the one,” Sirius sighs fondly. “I bet the snow would stick today. We should try it.”
“There’s only two of us.”
“Or a snowman,” Sirius suggests.
Remus rolls his eyes and takes Sirius’s plate. “For who, the postman?” He gets up and washes their dishes by hand, having left his wand on the floor. When he comes back, still damp halfway to the elbows, he finds a great black dog sitting on top of the blanket wagging its tail. “For the love of Merlin’s—no.” He turns around, fully intending to walk out, at which point the dog whines. Then he trots out into the hall and looks meaningfully between Remus and the door. “You want to go outside?” Remus asks irritably. Padfoot wags his tail again. “Fine. Speak.”
True to form, the dog growls, baring half a row of teeth before barking. Remus grabs his cloak from the hook on the wall and slings Sirius’s scarf around his neck. When he opens the door, Padfoot bursts outside and vanishes into the deepening snow. The cold hits him like a wall; his shoulders up to his ears, Remus stands on the stoop and watches as the dog plows a wandering path through the drifts. After a minute he circles back around and shakes himself, showering Remus with clumps of snow. Then he rears back onto his hind legs and puts his front paws on Remus’s thighs—Remus nearly falls over—to grasp one edge of the scarf in his mouth. Before Remus has a chance to react, Padfoot races off again.
“Oh,” Remus gasps instinctively, the icy air reaching tendril-like below the collar of his cloak. He lunges forward, far too late, to grab the scarf back. Determined, Remus sets off into the snow after him, but it’s hopeless, as he might have expected: he’s weighed down with his cloak while the dog bounds apparently effortlessly in circles just out of his reach.
Eventually he gives up, his socks sodden and his cheeks raw. He contemplates just flopping down in the snow, because what difference does it make at this point, but scrapes together enough dignity to clamber back up onto the stoop and knock his shoes against the house before he goes inside. “I’m not wiping your paws,” he informs Padfoot as he trots in behind him, tongue lolling and ears flapping.
Padfoot breezes on by and into Remus’s room. After a moment Sirius’s voice reaches him: “Just let me borrow one of your jumpers and we’re square.”
Remus walks gingerly down the hall, his socks squelching unpleasantly on the chilly wood. “They’ve all got holes,” he says, “you know I like to poke my thumbs—” And he stops, stepping through the doorway into his own bedroom. Stops because they’ve been three days with each other now and before that they bumped around Grimmauld Place for months, but Sirius post-Azkaban had seemed to take something of the salt and rocks into himself and had become secretive, shy almost. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows but never more, as if the cloth were a shield, the closed doors protection against eleven years of dormitories and shared flats—all of which Remus accepts, because who is he to blame Sirius for his scars when he himself spent the spring of 1982 hiding from the sun?
Only now does he realize that those scars are physical, visible not on skin but in the way that Sirius turns and shrinks from his footsteps, in the jut of his spine as he curls towards the wall. And Remus wonders if he should leave, look away, apologize, feels his cheeks burn as if Sirius is naked and not simply caught with his shirt halfway over his head.
Already, though, Sirius has pulled his shirt back down. “I like the thumb holes,” he says too quickly.
“Suit yourself,” Remus replies, off-beat and well aware of it, and goes to the dresser where he retrieves a fuzzy, hopefully-not-itchy jumper while Sirius’s eyes burn holes into the back of his neck. He turns around and Sirius is not looking at him. “You want trousers, too?”
“It’s fine,” Sirius says. He takes the jumper and shuts himself in the bathroom.
Remus allows himself a moment to will away the image, to wonder if somehow he has wound back the clock to fifteen years old and horribly embarrassed, before he puts on dry socks and a second jumper as an afterthought.
———
Truly, if he’s honest with himself (and that is not something Remus has much practice in being), he is amazed that he knows how to hold Sirius now, or how to be held. He thought that had vanished on an unseasonably warm October morning in another life. When Sirius presses his palm to Remus’s cheek, or his mouth to his hair, or when his breath ghosts over his skin, Remus feels flayed open: a language being learned, a map memorized. Things even he did not know.
———
The warm weight of Padfoot is so instantly familiar to Remus that he only realizes the dog is sleeping at the foot of his bed when he twists, violently, still half-asleep, and there is a sharp yelp. “Why’d you want a jumper,” Remus demands groggily, too hot beneath his blanket and the mass of fur on his feet, “when you’re like a fucking furnace already?”
Padfoot squirms into a different position, so he’s curled around Remus’s feet instead of on top of them, and huffs a long sigh.
———
He learns the intricacies of Sirius, too, as well as he can. Things are not the same as they were. There are places where he is weak, moments when he trembles. A distance in his eyes. He treasures the scent of his hair and the solidity of his body in the warm bed—the curve of his lips as he smiles as if he is only just remembering how.
———
“Why are you here?” Remus asks over his third cup of tea and an unhappy manuscript on the basic theory of wand movement as it applies to defensive charms. It’s mindless and tedious and does nothing to distract him from Sirius, who is sitting on the couch alternately paging through a book and casting fleeting glances over to Remus.
“Did we have this in London?” Sirius asks as if he didn’t hear, holding up the book. It’s a tattered copy of The Flying Squad with tape holding the back cover together.
Remus sets down his quill. “Yeah, it was yours.” He had been surprised to find it tucked into his own dresser drawer when he had finally packed up to leave the flat, had tried to remember how it had found its way there and come up, as was so often the case, empty-handed. “You can have it back if you like.”
“You always liked it better than I did.”
And there’s the answer, eighteen years too late, hardly an answer at all. He simply took it, and at the time it had been as easy as breathing, because what was either of theirs belonged to both of them, once. “Why are you here?” Remus repeats. “Do you just like watching me work, or do you have some sinister purpose?”
“I said I wanted to keep you company,” Sirius reminds him.
“For a whole week? Don’t make me laugh.”
Sirius drops the book and sets his jaw. “Fine, Moony—I came out here because you’re hiding and it’s rotten and it’s only making you unhappier. And I know that because I know you.”
“Do you?” Remus shoots back, harsher than he means to, but it feels good in the part of his chest that is ablaze. “After however long it’s been?”
At that, Sirius pauses, then says quietly, “I’d like to.”
“God, Sirius—” Remus stops, his throat full of words he doesn’t know how to pronounce, because there is nothing he wants more than for someone to know him again—but there is nothing he’s more afraid of. Does he know how to be known anymore? Is there anything in him to know? “It’s not that easy.”
“Tell me why not,” Sirius says, and now he doesn’t sound angry at all. “What happened?”
“What happened,” Remus repeats, “what happened—what didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Nothing’s changed.”
“Except you.”
“I didn’t change,” Remus insists, “ not really. I just woke up.”
“I don’t get it,” Sirius says, but Remus can see that he does, or at least that he’s close. “We—”
“If you tell me that we won the war one more goddamn time, I will throw you out into the snow,” Remus says, and his wand, sitting near the other end of the table, shoots out sparks. He ignores it, his jaw clenched and a tightness behind his ribs. He is too far gone—and the words come out pointed, sharp, just as he intends. “We fought the same fight twice, and by God, we nearly lost both times—and you want me to get another flat with you in fucking Soho like they don’t still charge me extra when I buy dittany after the full moon? Like it’s perfect now? Sorry, Sirius, but some of us just can’t stomach hiding in Harry’s guest room. As if it’s just some island where you can pretend everything’s all right.” He can’t stand the look Sirius is giving him, so he shoves his chair back from the table—legs screeching against the floor—and stalks down the hall where he stands in his room not moving, unable to do anything but stand and breathe and try not to scream.
He holds still when Sirius comes down the hall after him, his steps slower. He hears him stop in the doorway. “You think I’m a coward?” Sirius asks.
There’s something in his voice that reminds Remus of the way Sirius sounded two nights ago just before he took Remus’s hand. Faced with that, it’s hard to know what to say. “I think you’re naive,” Remus tells him slowly, “if you aren’t torn to pieces about it all.”
Softly, there comes the sound of a sigh, and then fingers brush across the back of Remus’s neck and a hand comes to rest on his shoulder. “Moony...”
It’s worse than everything that’s come before; the touch makes him want to dissolve into something small and warm that can be overlooked. He allows himself a moment of frozen, fleeting pleasure before he turns around and Sirius drops his hand. Their faces are inches apart. “I came out here to forget,” he says quite simply, “and I think you knew that the whole time.”
———
He wonders if they could ever have had this before—if there had been no war, if they had grown up happy and whole. It seems to Remus that the tender way they touch is born out of the darkness. In school it was different. He wonders if it is really love. He wonders—if they see the end of the war, will they have killed what they needed to survive it?
———
He goes to sleep with the cloudless sky black and deep as the north sea, and the silence inside the house seeps its way into his dreams. He walks down empty halls, unable to hear even his own feet against the floor, looking for a way out and finding only the same flat, featureless walls. He pounds with his fists, screams noiselessly—
“Moony! Moony, Christ, it’s just a dream!”
His eyes fly open and he starts fighting against the hand on his arm before he’s even aware of what’s happening, unable to see who is with him and only aware that—that—it’s Sirius. As he realizes that, he realizes that he’s still yelling—or is it sobbing?—something broken, anyways, and as soon as he realizes it, he chokes himself off and shudders into quietness.
“You have got a pair of lungs,” Sirius remarks into the sudden stillness. “Thought you were getting murd—hey,” he breaks off, “hey, just breathe—”
“Stop it,” gasps Remus, who cannot stop weeping and is starting to wonder if there is something wrong with his lungs. “Just—stop, get out of my fucking house—” But he doesn’t push Sirius away and isn’t even sure if he could. He feels his body folding in on itself and Sirius’s hands on his back, fingers in his hair, and squeezes his eyes shut. “This is all I’ve got here, the only thing I have—”
Sirius pulls him to his chest. “I know,” he murmurs, “believe me, I know.” His voice is more vibration than sound as he tucks Remus’s head under his chin.
And Remus, who recognizes for once in the pale nothingness that has become his life that this is something against which he has no defense, lets it happen. The darkness around them is a living thing. He is so tired. Sirius does not want to be looked at anymore, and it turns out that Remus just wants to be held. “I’m sorry for what I said,” he whispers.
“You meant it,” Sirius replies.
“But I’m still sorry.”
Sirius ignores it. “You think I don’t want to hide out here forever?” he asks, almost silent. “I wish I could.”
“You can,” Remus tells him, his fingers curled in Sirius’s collar. “It could be like before.”
“Like before,” Sirius repeats, and Remus can hear that he’s smiling. “You said you didn’t want to do that again.”
“It’s all I want,” Remus says, so much the truth that he wonders how he can even say the words. He pulls back to look Sirius in the eyes, because if it is just him he will stop now and quietly continue his recession into the space between breaths, but he is willing to stake his life on the fact that it is not. Something in the calm of Sirius’s pulse as it beats in a place that Remus can feel.
Sirius’s smile fades. “Would you come with me?” he asks. “Would you let me—could we be happy? Here or in London?”
The words hang between them, physical, living things, gasping their first lungfuls of peaceful air. Can they, Remus wonders? Can they be happy without the danger? Are they enough, the two of them, broken and still somehow breathing?
———
Dawn finds the cottage blanketed in a bright, clear silence. The road through the edge of the pines is buried deep, up to the neck of the letterbox, a dusting on the branches and the shingles. They sleep in one bed, hands held warm beneath the covers. Heads on one pillow.
———
“I want to be,” Remus says.
Author/Artist:
blanketed_in_starsRecipient:
human_veilRating: PG-13 for language
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *none*
Word count: 5,168 (sorry)
Summary: Two winters after the war, Remus receives an owl, and, shortly thereafter, an unexpected houseguest.
It’s a light tawny who sits patiently while he reads. Moony—send something back if it’s a bad time. Otherwise I’ll be there at noon. Cheers, Padfoot. There’s nothing more, as if it were the last note in a conversation they’d already been having, but Remus can’t recall anything of the sort. He’d remember if they’d talked about this. He’d remember, he thinks, watching the owl drink the water which he absentmindedly offers her, if they’d talked at all.
Notes: Thank you so much to my lovely beta Audrey who read this at the very last minute and, as usual, offered sage advice and encouragement without which I would certainly be flailing around in despair. This was written to the prompt "re-learning each other" and I hope I've done it justice! And the title comes from the poem "New Year's Eve" by Elfrida De Renne Barrow.
“It’s not much,” Remus says, well aware that it is the first roof Sirius has had over his head in a year. There is stillness between them that he struggles to break. “I’ll run a bath—”
“Can I just,” Sirius says. The hollows in his cheeks are caverns, the sockets of his eyes the space between the stars. “Can I just go to sleep.”
———
Remus goes to bed with the snow falling outside; the cottage is already so isolated that the snow muffles the last sounds completely and he feels as if he’s inside a soft white bubble. The heating charms stop the worst of the drafts, but he still summons extra blankets from the hall closet and huddles beneath them when he wakes at midnight with icy toes.
In the morning he rises as he always does, his bones aching and the light clear and cold. He goes to the window and looks out: he’s been buried, halfway up to the sill. Nothing to see of the road except the gap in the dark pines at the edge of the field. In the kitchen he makes tea, and so he only notices the owl when it taps its beak against the fogged-up glass.
It’s a light tawny who sits patiently while he reads. Moony—send something back if it’s a bad time. Otherwise I’ll be there at noon. Cheers, Padfoot. There’s nothing more, as if it were the last note in a conversation they’d already been having, but Remus can’t recall anything of the sort. He’d remember if they’d talked about this. He’d remember, he thinks, watching the owl drink the water which he absentmindedly offers her, if they’d talked at all.
He doesn’t send anything back, and the owl flutters off after a few minutes. Remus watches her go, then drinks his tea too hot and cleans the front room. There’s almost nothing there but books, already sitting neatly on the shelf, but he feels somehow like he ought to. The minutes till noon tick away against the bright white backdrop of the snow.
Despite the silence, he doesn’t hear Sirius apparate to just beyond the pines, but when he opens the door he sees the path that’s been stomped through the snow and in any case it’s clear from his robes, which are damp up to his knees. His nose is red and his hands are balled into clenched fists, but he smiles when Remus hesitates. “You wouldn’t leave a chap out here to freeze, would you?”
His own feet numb and his heart clamoring against the stillness, Remus steps aside. He finds his tongue again as Sirius is undoing his scarf. “How did you know where to find me?”
Sirius pauses, then hangs his scarf on the hook with his cloak. “Harry told me you were still here.”
Remus purses his lips. “Did he tell you anything else?”
“He mentioned that you haven’t been to see him in months. Or anyone else, as far as he knows.” Sirius stands still, a dark shadow in the hall, the past come alive again. His eyes are deep places that Remus avoids looking at. “As far as I know, too. What are you doing all the way out here?”
Of all the questions. Remus turns and stumps into the kitchen, fills the kettle again. “Preserving.”
“What, like jam?” Sirius asks, following.
Remus taps the kettle with his wand and it begins to whistle at once. “Mugs are over the sink,” he says without looking around. “Do you still like Earl Grey?”
He can hear the second smile hovering at the edge of Sirius’s mouth when he answers. “Probably.”
They drink the tea in silence as the snow begins to fall again outside. Remus wants to say something—wants to ask all of the questions pressing up beneath his tongue—but he doesn’t know where to start, doesn’t know how to say anything that won’t sound like an accusation or a plea or, on the other hand, a lie. Sirius, for his part, watches the table mostly, except for moments when his gaze flickers to the doorway or the narrow window or, fleetingly, to Remus’s face. The words between them, already meager, wither to nothing at all, so that Remus starts to feel the heaviness of his eyelids and making tea seems like a rotten idea.
In the end he places his elbows on the table and looks at Sirius head-on, or as near as he can manage. “Well? Out with it.”
He expects Sirius to play coy, to act offended, to be dramatic and mysterious and wounded at the question. It’s a surprise to see him shift in his chair and say, in a level voice, “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Preserving.” Sirius twists the word, or bares it. “Still in this place, all alone, and at Christmas. Don’t you know we won the war?”
Remus stops himself from scoffing by the skin of his teeth. “It’s still a week till Christmas. And did Harry tell you that he hasn’t been to see me in months, either?”
“Harry told me lots of things,” Sirius says quietly. “He says you didn’t answer the door the last three times he tried. He figured he’d leave you alone if that’s what you want.”
“And has it occurred to you that—”
“It’s not what you want, Moony, and we both know that.” Sirius leans across the table towards him. “It’s Harry. Merlin’s beard, if you won’t talk to him, talk to me.”
“About what? Life’s good now. We won the war, you said it yourself.”
Sirius rolls his eyes. “Just let me stay for a few days. Keep you company. God knows I could use a change of scenery.”
“Isn’t that what you said the last time?” Remus points out. “When you left?” It flashes through his mind: a low fire, the shadow of the chase looming, a hippogriff dark against the stars.
“Well, what can I say?” Sirius spreads his hands, palms up. His fingers are long, not so thin as before; strong, like bare branches of trees, or their roots. “There’s something about this place that keeps dragging me back.”
———
They live wrapped around each other. It is like before: they fall asleep in the same space, breathe the same air, the closeness that only war can bring. They’re older and most things hurt these days, but some parts stay the same.
———
Night gathers thick and close. “It’s quiet here,” Sirius says, sounding surprised. “Like—”
“Like what?” Remus asks without turning his head as he carries blankets and a pillow to the sofa.
There’s a moment, barely more than the shadow of one, between when Sirius opens his mouth and when the words pass his lips, during which Remus is sure that Sirius is about to lie. He doesn’t know what tells him this or if he’s making it up or even how he feels about knowing it—but he is glad when Sirius says, “Like Azkaban.” That’s no lie.
“I wouldn’t think it was very quiet there,” Remus says. It sounds bad, even to him.
“You stop noticing anything if you’re around it long enough,” Sirius tells him. “I don’t know how long it took, exactly, but by the end I didn’t hear the sea anymore. And when I got out, I—it was like—” Sirius stops, switching tack and failing to conceal it. “I suppose that’s what it reminds me of, more than anything. That first night.”
He sounds as if he wants to say something more, and his eyes are on Remus, tangibly, like icy fingers beneath his shirt, but Remus is hung up several sentences back. He wonders if he has grown used to the silence out here yet or if it’s where he was always meant to be. If he will someday stop noticing the vehement letters that wind up in his letterbox, the glances when he goes into town. The oldest scars on his skin are still just as visible as they were thirty-six years ago, the night air just as cold. “I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I rather like it.” He goes to bed then, and can’t quite tell if he imagines the noises he hears in the darker hours.
———
Beneath his robes, which remind Remus of dead leaves buried beneath the snow, Sirius is a couple of ribs held together with pure will. He melts, though, when Remus lays a hand on the knob of his spine, and that is how Remus learns that there is something sweeter in the world than what it has shown him so far. And when Sirius kisses him, messy, desperate, lost under the weight of years, he wonders how he missed it all this time.
———
“Have you got any cocoa?” Sirius asks. The frost refuses to melt from the windowpanes and Remus has taken refuge at one end of the sofa, close to the fireplace. He is trying to concentrate on his book and to avoid noticing how the sofa smells like Sirius. “Moony?”
Remus looks up. “Cocoa?”
“Or eggnog. Something seasonal.”
Remus snorts before he can stop himself, then sees that Sirius isn’t looking away. “No, I haven’t,” he says. “If you wanted holiday cheer you ought to have stayed at Harry’s.”
“There’s a little too much cheer there,” Sirius says quietly.
To prevent himself from caring about that, Remus gets up and stokes the fire. “Two years is enough time to stop celebrating, is that it?”
He catches out of the corner of his eye the way Sirius goes still before he answers. “It’s nice to get away sometimes, is all.”
“And you asked me why I live in the middle of nowhere.”
“There’s a difference between taking a break and shutting yourself away,” Sirius says sharply. “At least in London you could—”
“Could what?” Remus demands, turning, heat in his cheeks and even more in his voice. “Live with Harry and pretend everything’s fine?”
“You could live with me,” Sirius says mulishly.
It stops Remus in his tracks, as was probably intended, and he pauses with his mouth half-open. “I think we tried that once,” he says too late, embers in his chest flaring to life. “If I remember correctly, we lied to each other for months and then you wound up in prison.” He hates himself for saying it, because it hurts and he can see that it cuts Sirius too, but he doesn’t know how to say anything else. He wants to bury himself in a snowbank outside to keep himself cold, to hold his own shape. “That’s not an experiment I’m eager to repeat.”
Sirius swallows and says in a constricted voice, “Maybe you’re right to stay out here, then. It suits you.”
Remus goes back to the sofa and picks up his book again without saying a word. Regret is a bitter taste in his mouth. Doesn’t it just?
———
Buckbeak doesn’t mind the snow, but feeding him is a chore when the frost refuses to leave the windowpanes. So they bring him inside and he nestles in a corner of the sitting room. “I could get used to this,” Sirius says as he grooms the glossy feathers, while Remus lights candles to drive out the gloom.
It’s the most natural thing he’s said in three and a half weeks, and Remus thrills to it like a moth to a flame. “Even here?” he asks. “You could find somewhere better—”
“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, “but could I get you to come with me?”
———
The hall floor is cold on Remus’s bare feet and he clips his shoulder on the door frame as he turns the corner into the sitting room. “Sirius,” he says, his voice sleep-low, his right arm throbbing from the door and his eyes still half blind, bending over the sofa. “Wake up!”
As if it were a spell, Sirius does, gasping once or twice and then subsiding into a silence that Remus can still hear. “I’m awake. Fuck. Get off me.”
Remus releases Sirius’s shoulder and sits back, feeling his own heart pound. “Sorry.”
“Did I wake you up?” Sirius asks after a moment, his voice still ragged. He sounds very close in the darkness. “I’m s—”
“Don’t be,” Remus says, suddenly somehow certain that if they both end up apologizing something disastrous will happen. “Just—tell your subconscious to lighten up. We won the war, after all.” The words fall as flat as he’s ever heard them. He wonders, with his knees growing sore beside the sofa and a suspicious glitter marking Sirius’s cheeks, why he bothers. Why he is unable to reach out and take Sirius’s hand, nothing he hasn’t done before, and now, when they both so clearly want it—or is that Remus, imagining it in his desperate and overwhelming need—?
But Sirius is already talking. “Sometimes I can snap out of it. But I know it bothers Harry, too. He doesn’t say anything about it. I think he’d like to—to help, somehow, but—he’s just a kid. He doesn’t know.” He shakes his head, wipes at his face. “I don’t know either.”
Remus nods, though both of them are mostly invisible, the shadows too deep to see anything but the barest outlines, anything that catches the edge of the light. He leans on the sofa and stirs, almost, almost reaching, but stops himself in time. “Me neither,” he says, “but I have them too.”
Sirius doesn’t say anything to that right away, but his hand finds Remus’s in a grip that is too tight to be accidental. “What are yours about?”
“Mm. Everything.” You, he wants to say but doesn’t. It’s true. An empty flat, a screaming photograph, clothes left unfolded. A knock on the door. “Do you think you can get back to sleep?” he hears himself ask twenty years in the future.
With a sigh, Sirius lets his hand go. “I think so.” He’s silent while Remus unfolds his stiff knees. When he’s in the doorway, he speaks again. “Thanks for waking me up.”
What is the appropriate response to that? Remus pauses, his hand on the doorframe. He can think of nothing to say. He walks down the hall and crawls back into his bed. If it feels empty, it’s because it grew cold in his absence.
———
They fill the days with small things. As if making up for lost time, they are barely an arm’s reach apart, and when the night comes they are closer. How much time they have left is a mystery Remus doesn’t care to unravel. He pulls Sirius to him and the danger presses him closer still—you never know, after all. What they have is precious, precarious, the nebulous glow of embers about to fade out.
———
They wake up to find the snow already falling. Sirius has built the fire up again by the time Remus is dressed and they eat jam on toast on the sitting room floor, Sirius with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Is this how you spend every day?” Sirius asks him when all that’s left is crumbs. “Sitting around the house?”
“I do work,” Remus says somewhat indignantly. He hasn’t made anything near to a secret out of it: the scrolls are on the kitchen table, and he does his note-taking at the window.
Sirius wrinkles his nose. “You do—what, copy-editing? It all looks dreadful.”
“Textbook ghostwriting,” Remus informs him, “and you ought to get a job as well. It’s like you’re eighteen again.”
“It’s still horrible,” Sirius protests. “I mean—not working, but your job specifically—you realize you could do anything, right? Go anywhere? But you’re locking yourself up in this house at the edge of the world.”
Remus looks over at him, big eyes and hair in need of a trim, and feels cold. He wishes he had a blanket, too. He settles for a wry smile. “Locked up or locked out?” he can’t help asking.
It shuts Sirius up for several minutes, and there’s nothing but the crackling of the flames between them then. “Are you at least going to go outside?” Sirius asks. “To enjoy the weather, I mean? That’s got to be one of the good things about living out here. Look at that snow—you remember that snowball fight in sixth year?”
“The one where Marlene got you over the head with a snowball the size of a gargoyle?”
“That’s the one,” Sirius sighs fondly. “I bet the snow would stick today. We should try it.”
“There’s only two of us.”
“Or a snowman,” Sirius suggests.
Remus rolls his eyes and takes Sirius’s plate. “For who, the postman?” He gets up and washes their dishes by hand, having left his wand on the floor. When he comes back, still damp halfway to the elbows, he finds a great black dog sitting on top of the blanket wagging its tail. “For the love of Merlin’s—no.” He turns around, fully intending to walk out, at which point the dog whines. Then he trots out into the hall and looks meaningfully between Remus and the door. “You want to go outside?” Remus asks irritably. Padfoot wags his tail again. “Fine. Speak.”
True to form, the dog growls, baring half a row of teeth before barking. Remus grabs his cloak from the hook on the wall and slings Sirius’s scarf around his neck. When he opens the door, Padfoot bursts outside and vanishes into the deepening snow. The cold hits him like a wall; his shoulders up to his ears, Remus stands on the stoop and watches as the dog plows a wandering path through the drifts. After a minute he circles back around and shakes himself, showering Remus with clumps of snow. Then he rears back onto his hind legs and puts his front paws on Remus’s thighs—Remus nearly falls over—to grasp one edge of the scarf in his mouth. Before Remus has a chance to react, Padfoot races off again.
“Oh,” Remus gasps instinctively, the icy air reaching tendril-like below the collar of his cloak. He lunges forward, far too late, to grab the scarf back. Determined, Remus sets off into the snow after him, but it’s hopeless, as he might have expected: he’s weighed down with his cloak while the dog bounds apparently effortlessly in circles just out of his reach.
Eventually he gives up, his socks sodden and his cheeks raw. He contemplates just flopping down in the snow, because what difference does it make at this point, but scrapes together enough dignity to clamber back up onto the stoop and knock his shoes against the house before he goes inside. “I’m not wiping your paws,” he informs Padfoot as he trots in behind him, tongue lolling and ears flapping.
Padfoot breezes on by and into Remus’s room. After a moment Sirius’s voice reaches him: “Just let me borrow one of your jumpers and we’re square.”
Remus walks gingerly down the hall, his socks squelching unpleasantly on the chilly wood. “They’ve all got holes,” he says, “you know I like to poke my thumbs—” And he stops, stepping through the doorway into his own bedroom. Stops because they’ve been three days with each other now and before that they bumped around Grimmauld Place for months, but Sirius post-Azkaban had seemed to take something of the salt and rocks into himself and had become secretive, shy almost. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows but never more, as if the cloth were a shield, the closed doors protection against eleven years of dormitories and shared flats—all of which Remus accepts, because who is he to blame Sirius for his scars when he himself spent the spring of 1982 hiding from the sun?
Only now does he realize that those scars are physical, visible not on skin but in the way that Sirius turns and shrinks from his footsteps, in the jut of his spine as he curls towards the wall. And Remus wonders if he should leave, look away, apologize, feels his cheeks burn as if Sirius is naked and not simply caught with his shirt halfway over his head.
Already, though, Sirius has pulled his shirt back down. “I like the thumb holes,” he says too quickly.
“Suit yourself,” Remus replies, off-beat and well aware of it, and goes to the dresser where he retrieves a fuzzy, hopefully-not-itchy jumper while Sirius’s eyes burn holes into the back of his neck. He turns around and Sirius is not looking at him. “You want trousers, too?”
“It’s fine,” Sirius says. He takes the jumper and shuts himself in the bathroom.
Remus allows himself a moment to will away the image, to wonder if somehow he has wound back the clock to fifteen years old and horribly embarrassed, before he puts on dry socks and a second jumper as an afterthought.
———
Truly, if he’s honest with himself (and that is not something Remus has much practice in being), he is amazed that he knows how to hold Sirius now, or how to be held. He thought that had vanished on an unseasonably warm October morning in another life. When Sirius presses his palm to Remus’s cheek, or his mouth to his hair, or when his breath ghosts over his skin, Remus feels flayed open: a language being learned, a map memorized. Things even he did not know.
———
The warm weight of Padfoot is so instantly familiar to Remus that he only realizes the dog is sleeping at the foot of his bed when he twists, violently, still half-asleep, and there is a sharp yelp. “Why’d you want a jumper,” Remus demands groggily, too hot beneath his blanket and the mass of fur on his feet, “when you’re like a fucking furnace already?”
Padfoot squirms into a different position, so he’s curled around Remus’s feet instead of on top of them, and huffs a long sigh.
———
He learns the intricacies of Sirius, too, as well as he can. Things are not the same as they were. There are places where he is weak, moments when he trembles. A distance in his eyes. He treasures the scent of his hair and the solidity of his body in the warm bed—the curve of his lips as he smiles as if he is only just remembering how.
———
“Why are you here?” Remus asks over his third cup of tea and an unhappy manuscript on the basic theory of wand movement as it applies to defensive charms. It’s mindless and tedious and does nothing to distract him from Sirius, who is sitting on the couch alternately paging through a book and casting fleeting glances over to Remus.
“Did we have this in London?” Sirius asks as if he didn’t hear, holding up the book. It’s a tattered copy of The Flying Squad with tape holding the back cover together.
Remus sets down his quill. “Yeah, it was yours.” He had been surprised to find it tucked into his own dresser drawer when he had finally packed up to leave the flat, had tried to remember how it had found its way there and come up, as was so often the case, empty-handed. “You can have it back if you like.”
“You always liked it better than I did.”
And there’s the answer, eighteen years too late, hardly an answer at all. He simply took it, and at the time it had been as easy as breathing, because what was either of theirs belonged to both of them, once. “Why are you here?” Remus repeats. “Do you just like watching me work, or do you have some sinister purpose?”
“I said I wanted to keep you company,” Sirius reminds him.
“For a whole week? Don’t make me laugh.”
Sirius drops the book and sets his jaw. “Fine, Moony—I came out here because you’re hiding and it’s rotten and it’s only making you unhappier. And I know that because I know you.”
“Do you?” Remus shoots back, harsher than he means to, but it feels good in the part of his chest that is ablaze. “After however long it’s been?”
At that, Sirius pauses, then says quietly, “I’d like to.”
“God, Sirius—” Remus stops, his throat full of words he doesn’t know how to pronounce, because there is nothing he wants more than for someone to know him again—but there is nothing he’s more afraid of. Does he know how to be known anymore? Is there anything in him to know? “It’s not that easy.”
“Tell me why not,” Sirius says, and now he doesn’t sound angry at all. “What happened?”
“What happened,” Remus repeats, “what happened—what didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Nothing’s changed.”
“Except you.”
“I didn’t change,” Remus insists, “ not really. I just woke up.”
“I don’t get it,” Sirius says, but Remus can see that he does, or at least that he’s close. “We—”
“If you tell me that we won the war one more goddamn time, I will throw you out into the snow,” Remus says, and his wand, sitting near the other end of the table, shoots out sparks. He ignores it, his jaw clenched and a tightness behind his ribs. He is too far gone—and the words come out pointed, sharp, just as he intends. “We fought the same fight twice, and by God, we nearly lost both times—and you want me to get another flat with you in fucking Soho like they don’t still charge me extra when I buy dittany after the full moon? Like it’s perfect now? Sorry, Sirius, but some of us just can’t stomach hiding in Harry’s guest room. As if it’s just some island where you can pretend everything’s all right.” He can’t stand the look Sirius is giving him, so he shoves his chair back from the table—legs screeching against the floor—and stalks down the hall where he stands in his room not moving, unable to do anything but stand and breathe and try not to scream.
He holds still when Sirius comes down the hall after him, his steps slower. He hears him stop in the doorway. “You think I’m a coward?” Sirius asks.
There’s something in his voice that reminds Remus of the way Sirius sounded two nights ago just before he took Remus’s hand. Faced with that, it’s hard to know what to say. “I think you’re naive,” Remus tells him slowly, “if you aren’t torn to pieces about it all.”
Softly, there comes the sound of a sigh, and then fingers brush across the back of Remus’s neck and a hand comes to rest on his shoulder. “Moony...”
It’s worse than everything that’s come before; the touch makes him want to dissolve into something small and warm that can be overlooked. He allows himself a moment of frozen, fleeting pleasure before he turns around and Sirius drops his hand. Their faces are inches apart. “I came out here to forget,” he says quite simply, “and I think you knew that the whole time.”
———
He wonders if they could ever have had this before—if there had been no war, if they had grown up happy and whole. It seems to Remus that the tender way they touch is born out of the darkness. In school it was different. He wonders if it is really love. He wonders—if they see the end of the war, will they have killed what they needed to survive it?
———
He goes to sleep with the cloudless sky black and deep as the north sea, and the silence inside the house seeps its way into his dreams. He walks down empty halls, unable to hear even his own feet against the floor, looking for a way out and finding only the same flat, featureless walls. He pounds with his fists, screams noiselessly—
“Moony! Moony, Christ, it’s just a dream!”
His eyes fly open and he starts fighting against the hand on his arm before he’s even aware of what’s happening, unable to see who is with him and only aware that—that—it’s Sirius. As he realizes that, he realizes that he’s still yelling—or is it sobbing?—something broken, anyways, and as soon as he realizes it, he chokes himself off and shudders into quietness.
“You have got a pair of lungs,” Sirius remarks into the sudden stillness. “Thought you were getting murd—hey,” he breaks off, “hey, just breathe—”
“Stop it,” gasps Remus, who cannot stop weeping and is starting to wonder if there is something wrong with his lungs. “Just—stop, get out of my fucking house—” But he doesn’t push Sirius away and isn’t even sure if he could. He feels his body folding in on itself and Sirius’s hands on his back, fingers in his hair, and squeezes his eyes shut. “This is all I’ve got here, the only thing I have—”
Sirius pulls him to his chest. “I know,” he murmurs, “believe me, I know.” His voice is more vibration than sound as he tucks Remus’s head under his chin.
And Remus, who recognizes for once in the pale nothingness that has become his life that this is something against which he has no defense, lets it happen. The darkness around them is a living thing. He is so tired. Sirius does not want to be looked at anymore, and it turns out that Remus just wants to be held. “I’m sorry for what I said,” he whispers.
“You meant it,” Sirius replies.
“But I’m still sorry.”
Sirius ignores it. “You think I don’t want to hide out here forever?” he asks, almost silent. “I wish I could.”
“You can,” Remus tells him, his fingers curled in Sirius’s collar. “It could be like before.”
“Like before,” Sirius repeats, and Remus can hear that he’s smiling. “You said you didn’t want to do that again.”
“It’s all I want,” Remus says, so much the truth that he wonders how he can even say the words. He pulls back to look Sirius in the eyes, because if it is just him he will stop now and quietly continue his recession into the space between breaths, but he is willing to stake his life on the fact that it is not. Something in the calm of Sirius’s pulse as it beats in a place that Remus can feel.
Sirius’s smile fades. “Would you come with me?” he asks. “Would you let me—could we be happy? Here or in London?”
The words hang between them, physical, living things, gasping their first lungfuls of peaceful air. Can they, Remus wonders? Can they be happy without the danger? Are they enough, the two of them, broken and still somehow breathing?
———
Dawn finds the cottage blanketed in a bright, clear silence. The road through the edge of the pines is buried deep, up to the neck of the letterbox, a dusting on the branches and the shingles. They sleep in one bed, hands held warm beneath the covers. Heads on one pillow.
———
“I want to be,” Remus says.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 06:24 pm (UTC)Truly, if he’s honest with himself (and that is not something Remus has much practice in being)
This line made me smile. It's so true!
no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 08:08 pm (UTC)I was pretty much hooked from here: The hollows in his cheeks are caverns, the sockets of his eyes the space between the stars.
And then I really loved this bit:
“What are you doing all the way out here?”
“Preserving.”
“What, like jam?”
It’s so cute. I can just picture Sirius’ face as he says it.
AND THIS:
“Even here?” he asks. “You could find somewhere better—”
“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, “but could I get you to come with me?”
The way you wrote Remus is my favourite characterisation of him, especially in settings like these, and I think that line was the perfect summary.
The part where Sirius turned to Padfoot and brought Remus outside was just beautiful. I wanted to copy some of my favourite lines from there, too, but I’d end up with the whole scene. I just love the characterisation, especially Sirius as Padfoot. And Pads jumping up on Remus was just adorable.
The flashbacks were written beautifully, and probably my favourite thing about this. They really added to the story as a whole and, even though they’re brief, there’s so much to unpack in each one. Some of my favourite bits from those were:
Truly, if he’s honest with himself (and that is not something Remus has much practice in being), he is amazed that he knows how to hold Sirius now, or how to be held.
And: He learns the intricacies of Sirius, too, as well as he can. Things are not the same as they were. There are places where he is weak, moments when he trembles. A distance in his eyes. He treasures the scent of his hair and the solidity of his body in the warm bed—the curve of his lips as he smiles as if he is only just remembering how.
This is so much more than I hoped for when signing up, and I’m so happy with it. You definitely did the prompts justice. There’s literally nothing I would change.
Thank you so much for the beautiful gift!
no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 07:21 am (UTC)A++
no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 04:02 pm (UTC)This is kind of one of those pieces where I want to quote the whole thing back to you, but this passage really stood out: "And Remus, who recognizes for once in the pale nothingness that has become his life that this is something against which he has no defense, lets it happen. The darkness around them is a living thing. He is so tired. Sirius does not want to be looked at anymore, and it turns out that Remus just wants to be held. “I’m sorry for what I said,” he whispers." So lovely! I very much admire the way the house and the outside landscape become almost like characters in and of themselves. It lent the whole piece a really stunning sense of place that balanced out the heavy emotions perfectly.
Lovely!
no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 09:36 pm (UTC)First off, Sirius' entrance, his barging into Remus' life was just perfect!And the part where he's a dog and makes Remus chase him!Those bits of cute moments here balance out the overall melancholy in the fic.
My gosh, I loved how emotional, how in depth it went where Remus' life was concerned. It's different without an ever present danger looming over them, peaceful and yet, he's kind of lost. Sirius too, seeing the way Remus sees him, how Sirius hides his scars, the way Remus tries to deny himself Sirius and everything good that can be-you've really written something that really makes me feel the quiet, isolated place Remus is in right now.And the winter-y feeling too, somehow it's such a perfect backdrop for this fic.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-08 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 06:57 pm (UTC)"Sirius does not want to be looked at anymore, and it turns out that Remus just wants to be held." kind of ruined me (in the best way).
Thanks for making me fall in love with this kind of story all over again.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-09 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-10 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-10 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-16 11:03 pm (UTC)By the way, the plot is spookily similar to my own piece for Small Gifts (though set in a different era), but you've done it so brilliantly mine feels more like an afterthought haha...
no subject
Date: 2017-12-17 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-18 04:08 am (UTC)There's just so much here. It's very intense and, I think, very emotionally honest. I think we'd all like to believe that if Sirius had survived and they'd both made it through the war there'd have been a happily ever after for them, but I think you have the truer picture here. It's very, very raw and real, and even though nothing really suspenseful was happening I felt like I was on the edge of my seat, wanting to know which way it would go, at the end.
Your writing is beautiful, and this fic is beautiful. Brilliant work.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-18 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-21 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-21 12:07 pm (UTC)