Fic: Ghost of Winter for evandar
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small_giftsTitle: Ghost of Winter
Author/Artist:earlybloomingparentheses
Recipient:evandar
Rating: Teen
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): * Minor instance of blood (not in a sexual context)--characters deliberately prick their fingers *
Word count: 3061
Summary: Christmas is coming and the bite of winter is in the air, and way up north in the Highlands the mountains are big and bleak enough to hide even Azkaban’s most wanted from prying eyes. All Remus can imagine is being snowbound alone with Sirius. Unfortunately, there’s a ghost who has other plans.
Pads,
You’re right, the holidays are a bad time to travel. Terrible idea, really. But I agree that it’s worth it to see old friends! I’m thinking of spending Christmas somewhere out-of-the-way, maybe that old place we went the year you threw up half a bottle of Firewhiskey all over J’s girlfriend and we told my mum you had food poisoning. It’s been years, of course, but it’s the same as ever. Well, except for one thing—it’s haunted now.
I’ll be there alone all December. Just me and the ghost…or whatever it is.
Yours,
M.
The blizzard begins two hours after Sirius arrives and lasts for a week. Buckbeak curls up irritably in the old shed out back, warming charms and straw lining the wooden walls, and Remus and Sirius shut themselves up inside with a roaring fire and stacks of bread for toasting and an unspoken agreement not to talk about the incredibly stupid thing they’ve just done by bringing Sirius here when he should be somewhere deep in South America, sweltering in the heat and passing a lonely Christmas by himself and staying safe.
The risk of it was tremendous, a monumentally foolhardy undertaking that outstripped every reckless thing they ever did during their Hogwarts years, excepting only that horrifying night with Sirius and Snape and James and the Willow that Remus has spent years attempting to excise entirely from his memory. Convincing Sirius to fly across the border to the dilapidated pile of a cabin that had once belonged to Remus’ grandfather was almost, but not quite, as shockingly irresponsible as not telling Albus Dumbledore about the Map and the Marauders the year before: and of course he did it for the same reason, he always has; every breathlessly stupid, selfish, shut-your-eyes-and-leap-into-thin-air thing he’s done has been with or to or for Sirius Black, from their first kiss under the cloak feet away from Argus Filch to the day after Remus left his job at Hogwarts and Sirius was supposed to be on the run but instead they met on the coast of Ireland and shouted and wept and fucked and made promises Remus dreads that, someday, one or both of them will have to break.
Not yet, not now: Christmas is coming and the bite of winter is in the air, and way up north in the Highlands the mountains are big and bleak enough to hide even Azkaban’s most wanted from prying eyes, and all Remus can imagine is being snowbound with Sirius, whiteout conditions and a fire in the hearth.
Alone. Shut in against the world, the past, the future. Just the two of them.
The two of them, and this fucking ghost.
“I ran into the doorframe again this morning.”
Sirius is curled around Remus, tracing the new scars on his chest. New to him, at any rate: Remus has carried around the ugly twist of white from shoulder to navel for six years now. Sirius touches it gently, almost tentatively, running his fingers across the puckered skin. His hands are always cold now, and his knuckles are sharp knobs over which papery skin stretches so thin it looks like it might break. Remus tries not to shiver at his touch.
“What kind of ghost,” he asks, not for the first time, “stretches and shrinks the walls?”
Sirius shrugs, a movement Remus feels all through his body. “What kind of ghost is totally silent and invisible? I’m used to Moaning Myrtle having tantrums in the bathroom, not this weird shit.”
“I know,” Remus says. Honestly, if he’d come back from Hogwarts to find Moaning Myrtle had taken up residence in the cabin’s tiny bathroom, he’d have been pretty annoyed, but at least he’d know how to get her to leave. He cranes his neck up and kisses Sirius.
His friend’s lips are always cold now, too. He remembers when Sirius ran hot: Remus used to stick his hands up his sweater on snowy walks to the greenhouses and the lake, and curl around him on winter nights in their too-small bed, and put his hands all over him till he felt they might both catch fire. A wistful tug pulls at his chest and Remus ignores it, pushing himself up farther, pushing his tongue between Sirius’ chilly lips.
They kiss for a long moment, Sirius’ hands in Remus’ hair. Then:
“Do you feel something watching us?”
Remus breaks away and looks around, growing tense. As he expects, and as he knows Sirius expects as well, there’s no one there. The windows are a blur of white, snow falling hard and fast. A prickle at the back of his neck, though, belies their solitude.
“Fuck.”
“We can keep going, I don’t…”
“No. It’s weird.” Remus stands up, balling his fists. “Can’t you just…show yourself?” he asks the empty room, frustration thick in his voice.
All he wants is to forget that anyone exists besides them. All he wants is to let go of the past thirteen plus shitty years, smooth them out like wrinkles in a cloak, just for now, just for a few weeks while the snow piles up and the world goes mute and still. He wants to pretend they’re twenty again, with fewer scars and voices they both recognize, footsteps they know in the dark.
Nothing answers. But he can feel a presence in the room, something there besides the two of them. Something between them.
“Please get out,” he asks quietly. “Please leave us alone.”
There’s a shiver in the air. In a dizzy incomprehensible way, something moves at the edges of Remus’ vision. Sirius is sitting straight up now, ears pricked, eyes open.
“Please,” Remus says.
But whatever it is, it doesn’t go anywhere.
They make mulled wine like they did the few Christmases they spent together between Hogwarts and the end of the world. Remus unwraps the packet of whole cloves and star anise and cinnamon sticks that, back in October (the last time he’d left the mountains for somewhere with a decent spice shop), he’d nestled carefully between more mundane supplies like tinned vegetables and sacks of flour. He has long been practiced in the art of doing foolish things without thinking about them directly, folding his desires into small tight bundles and tucking them out of sight so he can carry them around and then, at the last minute, decide if he’s going to shut his eyes and let them out. So when he’d purchased the spices he had not reminded himself that Sirius wasn’t going to be with him at Christmas to make mulled wine, or acknowledged that when he found them in the back of his cupboard some dark frozen night he was going to double over like he’d been kicked, the pungent, sweet scent flooding him with knife-edged memories of December nights in London, slush soaking through his shoes, stumbling drunkenly home from James and Lily’s flat, sing-shouting dirty carols and stopping himself from holding Sirius’ hand in public. He didn’t tell himself that he would likely drown a little bit, then, choking on the ghostly sensation of getting pressed up against the wall as soon as he and Sirius stepped inside their small warm room, brandy and orange sweet on both their breaths. It was like planting a bomb, sticking that little packet of mulling spices in his shopping bag, and Remus knew better, or would have if he’d let himself think about it.
But he hadn’t and now Sirius is here and he’s tasting the wine from a battered old ladle and narrowing his eyes and wondering aloud if it needs a touch more honey and Remus is filled with wonder and a sharp painful sort of gratitude that this moment is still possible, after everything; and he can almost ignore the way the pictures on the wall have been rearranged sometime in the night and there’s something off about the dimensions of the room, something queasy about the angle of the corner and the length of the table.
Sirius turns, holding out the ladle to Remus, and as Remus bends to taste it, wine slops over the edge, splashing hot on his face and down the front of his shirt.
He swears, jumping back, and Sirius’ brows furrow. “I didn’t do that,” he says.
“I know.” He’d been holding the ladle quite still. Remus reaches for a towel, glaring around the seemingly empty room. “I taught Defense Against the Dark Arts for a whole year,” he says, “and I do not know what’s happening here. Whatever you are, just…fuck off, okay?”
He expects Sirius to join him in his annoyance, but his friend looks pensive, not angry. “I’ve been thinking about that. Hogwarts, you know, doesn’t…there are things…”
He falls silent, rubbing his thumb absently against his bony fingers.
“There are things?”
Sirius sighs. “My father used to complain about the modernization of the curriculum. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…” He shrugs, looking tired all of a sudden. “Up here in these old mountains…maybe he was right.”
It shouldn’t hit him like this, like a punch to the gut, insides contracting and breath slamming out of his lungs, but it does. There was a time he’d have believed the moon would stop rising before Sirius would concede that his father or anyone in the whole Black family might be right about something.
“Then we’ve got to get rid of it,” he says, pulse racing. “If it’s something like that—dark magic—”
“It’s done nothing but spill a little wine and mess with the house and watch us kiss,” Sirius says, still looking thoughtful.
“But it’ll get worse. If it’s the kind of thing your family would have known about…”
“Not all old magic is dark.” Sirius is staring into space, like maybe he can see the thing that’s haunting them if he looks hard enough. Remus wants, badly, for him to meet his gaze instead. “But it is usually pretty hard to shake.”
The moment he laid eyes on Sirius in the Shrieking Shack that wonderful, terrible night last spring, Remus started doing something that until now he’s been only half aware of. He’s been looking through Sirius, in a way: trying to see in this wasted, damaged man the shape of the boy he used to know. Filling out his sunken cheeks; imagining a shine to his long limp hair; adding the bright mischievous upturn to the end of his sentences. But in this moment it all falls away and for a horrible teetering second Remus doesn’t recognize him at all.
“I want it gone,” he says, voice choked with the off-kilter nausea of the screwed-up dimensions of the kitchen and the not-quite-right look of his friend, the profoundly disorienting sense of wrong angles and sharply unfamiliar lines and the presence of something he doesn’t know and doesn’t want rising up between them.
Sirius looks at him, eyes distant; and then he blinks. He moves quickly to Remus, sliding his hand around the back of his neck.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s all right.”
Is it? Remus doesn’t ask, and lets Sirius tip his head down, pressing their foreheads together, and breathes in the scent of cloves and cinnamon.
The snow stops falling a couple days later. Remus blasts the buildup away from the front door and they stand outside, amidst the white mountains, under the clear cold sky, the silence soft and total. Feeling more cheerful than he has since the wine incident, he ducks back inside to fry up some sausages for breakfast while Sirius goes to check on Buckbeak. The lights flicker a little bit, but it might just be the weather.
“Breakfast is ready,” he calls, opening the front door. Sirius is standing right on the threshold, bent over, and he glances up at Remus after a moment, looking caught.
“What are you doing?” Remus asks, eyes widening. There’s a small pocketknife in Sirius’ hand, and a few drops of blood have fallen from his pricked finger onto the white scrape of snow before the door.
“Old magic usually responds well to blood,” Sirius says. “I thought I’d try it.”
Remus feels a complicated rush: the strangeness of Sirius’ steady tone, the relief that he’s taking this seriously. “Is it supposed to get rid of the thing?”
Sirius hesitates. “Not exactly.” A pause, then: “It’s supposed to welcome it.”
His blood on the snow looks suddenly lurid, violently red.
“To welcome it?”
Sirius spreads his palms. “I don’t think it’s evil. And I don’t think it’s going away. It might be better if we just try to…make peace with it.”
Peace, Remus thinks, and a bitter laugh startles its way out of his throat. “Peace is all I wanted,” he says. “This isn’t peace.”
Sirius finds him upstairs, curled in a blanket in the cabin’s drafty attic.
“Merlin, it’s seasick up here.”
Remus blinks at him unhappily. The floor is wrong. He knows it’s flat, but when he looks at it straight on, it seems to list slightly like the deck of a ship. The corners where the walls meet the ceiling look like a cubist painting. And there’s a definite presence in the room, a prickle on his skin and a tightness in the air.
“That window’s stuck open,” Sirius says, picking his way carefully across the tilting hardwood. “You must be freezing.”
“No,” Remus says reluctantly. “The blanket’s warm.”
“Can’t be that warm. It’s like the Owlery in winter up here.”
Remus holds out a corner of the blanket. Sirius frowns and rubs it between his fingers.
“Christ,” he says. “Feels like it’s been in the oven. Weird. Are you going to share, or are you just going to sit there with your knees to your chest and stare at me unhappily?”
There’s humor in his voice, but his eyes are wary.
Remus budges up a little and Sirius sinks down next to him. His joints creak.
“I got used to living with something messing with my perceptions in Azkaban,” he says after a moment. “Whatever this is, it’s much better than Dementors.”
“Shit.” Remus winces. “I hadn’t thought…” He trails off.
“Have you thought much about Azkaban?” Sirius asks softly. “What was it like for you, these last thirteen years?”
His image of Sirius, wrapped in a little bundle like a packet of mulling spices, to be hidden and ignored until the moments Remus couldn’t hold it in anymore. Years of blankness, peppered with infrequent periods of helpless crying and kicking the walls. If pressed, Remus would estimate that after 1981 and before 1993 he uttered the words “Azkaban” or “Dementors” fewer than a dozen times, and “Sirius Black” not once.
“I’ve never been…” Remus begins with difficulty. “I’m not good at…”
“No.” Sirius squeezes his wrist. “You’re not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought of you every day.”
Shamed, Remus turns his head away. After a long moment, Sirius scrapes his teeth against Remus’ skin, just above his sweater, and bites down gently.
The memory of being two weeks out of Hogwarts and trembling, naked in bed with Sirius for the first time and feeling raw like a peeled tomato, zings through Remus. That night Sirius had bitten him just there, at the join of neck and shoulder. He’d had mischief in his eyes but Remus had felt it as a sort of benediction. An obscure kind of blessing.
“You can’t want…” he says painfully, eyes closing.
“I do,” Sirius says, quiet, lips against his skin. “I do, Moony.” He rubs his nose against Remus’ neck. They were rarely so gentle in the old days. “But I’m wondering whether you want me.”
Remus turns to him, wide-eyed. “How can you even—”
“Me, now,” Sirius interrupts. “Thirteen years later, with yellow teeth and skeleton ribs. No—no more astonishingly gorgeous hair.” He laughs, a little brokenly. “No leather jackets. No flying motorbike. Just an ornery Hippogriff and a moldy coat and—and cottony places in my mind where things go a bit vague sometimes. I’m not, you know.” He shakes his head. “I know I’m not who you want me to be.”
Guilt twists Remus' stomach till he feels physically ill. Or maybe it’s the room twisting—oh, god, the walls are shivering, the floor tilting weirdly—Remus falls suddenly forward on hands and knees, stifling a gag.
“Oh, fuck,” Sirius says to the empty air, sounding exasperated and ill. “Fuck. Come on, please, can you cool it for a minute?”
A breath of cold air passes across Remus’ face. He heaves dryly.
“Give me your knife,” he gasps out.
“What—”
“Prick my finger.”
Remus holds out a hand. After a suspended second, Sirius clasps his wrist. He pulls out the pocketknife and hesitates, blade light against Remus’ skin.
“Are you sure—”
“Do it. Please.”
Sirius cuts into his finger. Remus feels the sting. Blood wells up red. He shakes his hand once, twice, and a scattering of drops falls on the floor.
“I’m welcoming you,” Remus says loudly. “You’re—you’re here. So are we. That’s not changing. So. You’re welcome.”
The floor rocks gently. The walls shiver. Then they seem to settle, back into a shape the human mind can, if not entirely comprehend, at least accept.
Remus’ stomach evens out.
“For what it’s worth,” Sirius says quietly, “I hate that you have scars I wasn’t there for.”
Remus curls into his chest. His fingers clutch at Sirius’ shirt. He pushes his face against his sweater and breathes in.
Wool and sweat. He misses the smell of Sirius’ cigarettes.
“I never thought you’d be the one advocating for making peace with something.”
Sirius huffs out a laugh, bony hands reaching up to run through Remus’ hair. “And you’re the one who wanted to fight it.”
“We’ve changed.”
“We have.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know.”
“But I still love you.” Remus pulls Sirius’ wrist to his mouth and kisses it. “That’s one thing, about these last thirteen years.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “I never figured out how to stop loving you.”
Sirius’ arms spasm, clasping him tight.
“Okay,” he replies, voice hoarse. “Okay.”
“I know that’s maybe not enough. I know. But—”
“It’s much more than I ever thought I’d have again.”
“Well,” says Remus, heart beating in his throat, “well. Me too.”
Author/Artist:
earlybloomingparenthesesRecipient:
evandarRating: Teen
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): * Minor instance of blood (not in a sexual context)--characters deliberately prick their fingers *
Word count: 3061
Summary: Christmas is coming and the bite of winter is in the air, and way up north in the Highlands the mountains are big and bleak enough to hide even Azkaban’s most wanted from prying eyes. All Remus can imagine is being snowbound alone with Sirius. Unfortunately, there’s a ghost who has other plans.
Pads,
You’re right, the holidays are a bad time to travel. Terrible idea, really. But I agree that it’s worth it to see old friends! I’m thinking of spending Christmas somewhere out-of-the-way, maybe that old place we went the year you threw up half a bottle of Firewhiskey all over J’s girlfriend and we told my mum you had food poisoning. It’s been years, of course, but it’s the same as ever. Well, except for one thing—it’s haunted now.
I’ll be there alone all December. Just me and the ghost…or whatever it is.
Yours,
M.
The blizzard begins two hours after Sirius arrives and lasts for a week. Buckbeak curls up irritably in the old shed out back, warming charms and straw lining the wooden walls, and Remus and Sirius shut themselves up inside with a roaring fire and stacks of bread for toasting and an unspoken agreement not to talk about the incredibly stupid thing they’ve just done by bringing Sirius here when he should be somewhere deep in South America, sweltering in the heat and passing a lonely Christmas by himself and staying safe.
The risk of it was tremendous, a monumentally foolhardy undertaking that outstripped every reckless thing they ever did during their Hogwarts years, excepting only that horrifying night with Sirius and Snape and James and the Willow that Remus has spent years attempting to excise entirely from his memory. Convincing Sirius to fly across the border to the dilapidated pile of a cabin that had once belonged to Remus’ grandfather was almost, but not quite, as shockingly irresponsible as not telling Albus Dumbledore about the Map and the Marauders the year before: and of course he did it for the same reason, he always has; every breathlessly stupid, selfish, shut-your-eyes-and-leap-into-thin-air thing he’s done has been with or to or for Sirius Black, from their first kiss under the cloak feet away from Argus Filch to the day after Remus left his job at Hogwarts and Sirius was supposed to be on the run but instead they met on the coast of Ireland and shouted and wept and fucked and made promises Remus dreads that, someday, one or both of them will have to break.
Not yet, not now: Christmas is coming and the bite of winter is in the air, and way up north in the Highlands the mountains are big and bleak enough to hide even Azkaban’s most wanted from prying eyes, and all Remus can imagine is being snowbound with Sirius, whiteout conditions and a fire in the hearth.
Alone. Shut in against the world, the past, the future. Just the two of them.
The two of them, and this fucking ghost.
“I ran into the doorframe again this morning.”
Sirius is curled around Remus, tracing the new scars on his chest. New to him, at any rate: Remus has carried around the ugly twist of white from shoulder to navel for six years now. Sirius touches it gently, almost tentatively, running his fingers across the puckered skin. His hands are always cold now, and his knuckles are sharp knobs over which papery skin stretches so thin it looks like it might break. Remus tries not to shiver at his touch.
“What kind of ghost,” he asks, not for the first time, “stretches and shrinks the walls?”
Sirius shrugs, a movement Remus feels all through his body. “What kind of ghost is totally silent and invisible? I’m used to Moaning Myrtle having tantrums in the bathroom, not this weird shit.”
“I know,” Remus says. Honestly, if he’d come back from Hogwarts to find Moaning Myrtle had taken up residence in the cabin’s tiny bathroom, he’d have been pretty annoyed, but at least he’d know how to get her to leave. He cranes his neck up and kisses Sirius.
His friend’s lips are always cold now, too. He remembers when Sirius ran hot: Remus used to stick his hands up his sweater on snowy walks to the greenhouses and the lake, and curl around him on winter nights in their too-small bed, and put his hands all over him till he felt they might both catch fire. A wistful tug pulls at his chest and Remus ignores it, pushing himself up farther, pushing his tongue between Sirius’ chilly lips.
They kiss for a long moment, Sirius’ hands in Remus’ hair. Then:
“Do you feel something watching us?”
Remus breaks away and looks around, growing tense. As he expects, and as he knows Sirius expects as well, there’s no one there. The windows are a blur of white, snow falling hard and fast. A prickle at the back of his neck, though, belies their solitude.
“Fuck.”
“We can keep going, I don’t…”
“No. It’s weird.” Remus stands up, balling his fists. “Can’t you just…show yourself?” he asks the empty room, frustration thick in his voice.
All he wants is to forget that anyone exists besides them. All he wants is to let go of the past thirteen plus shitty years, smooth them out like wrinkles in a cloak, just for now, just for a few weeks while the snow piles up and the world goes mute and still. He wants to pretend they’re twenty again, with fewer scars and voices they both recognize, footsteps they know in the dark.
Nothing answers. But he can feel a presence in the room, something there besides the two of them. Something between them.
“Please get out,” he asks quietly. “Please leave us alone.”
There’s a shiver in the air. In a dizzy incomprehensible way, something moves at the edges of Remus’ vision. Sirius is sitting straight up now, ears pricked, eyes open.
“Please,” Remus says.
But whatever it is, it doesn’t go anywhere.
They make mulled wine like they did the few Christmases they spent together between Hogwarts and the end of the world. Remus unwraps the packet of whole cloves and star anise and cinnamon sticks that, back in October (the last time he’d left the mountains for somewhere with a decent spice shop), he’d nestled carefully between more mundane supplies like tinned vegetables and sacks of flour. He has long been practiced in the art of doing foolish things without thinking about them directly, folding his desires into small tight bundles and tucking them out of sight so he can carry them around and then, at the last minute, decide if he’s going to shut his eyes and let them out. So when he’d purchased the spices he had not reminded himself that Sirius wasn’t going to be with him at Christmas to make mulled wine, or acknowledged that when he found them in the back of his cupboard some dark frozen night he was going to double over like he’d been kicked, the pungent, sweet scent flooding him with knife-edged memories of December nights in London, slush soaking through his shoes, stumbling drunkenly home from James and Lily’s flat, sing-shouting dirty carols and stopping himself from holding Sirius’ hand in public. He didn’t tell himself that he would likely drown a little bit, then, choking on the ghostly sensation of getting pressed up against the wall as soon as he and Sirius stepped inside their small warm room, brandy and orange sweet on both their breaths. It was like planting a bomb, sticking that little packet of mulling spices in his shopping bag, and Remus knew better, or would have if he’d let himself think about it.
But he hadn’t and now Sirius is here and he’s tasting the wine from a battered old ladle and narrowing his eyes and wondering aloud if it needs a touch more honey and Remus is filled with wonder and a sharp painful sort of gratitude that this moment is still possible, after everything; and he can almost ignore the way the pictures on the wall have been rearranged sometime in the night and there’s something off about the dimensions of the room, something queasy about the angle of the corner and the length of the table.
Sirius turns, holding out the ladle to Remus, and as Remus bends to taste it, wine slops over the edge, splashing hot on his face and down the front of his shirt.
He swears, jumping back, and Sirius’ brows furrow. “I didn’t do that,” he says.
“I know.” He’d been holding the ladle quite still. Remus reaches for a towel, glaring around the seemingly empty room. “I taught Defense Against the Dark Arts for a whole year,” he says, “and I do not know what’s happening here. Whatever you are, just…fuck off, okay?”
He expects Sirius to join him in his annoyance, but his friend looks pensive, not angry. “I’ve been thinking about that. Hogwarts, you know, doesn’t…there are things…”
He falls silent, rubbing his thumb absently against his bony fingers.
“There are things?”
Sirius sighs. “My father used to complain about the modernization of the curriculum. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…” He shrugs, looking tired all of a sudden. “Up here in these old mountains…maybe he was right.”
It shouldn’t hit him like this, like a punch to the gut, insides contracting and breath slamming out of his lungs, but it does. There was a time he’d have believed the moon would stop rising before Sirius would concede that his father or anyone in the whole Black family might be right about something.
“Then we’ve got to get rid of it,” he says, pulse racing. “If it’s something like that—dark magic—”
“It’s done nothing but spill a little wine and mess with the house and watch us kiss,” Sirius says, still looking thoughtful.
“But it’ll get worse. If it’s the kind of thing your family would have known about…”
“Not all old magic is dark.” Sirius is staring into space, like maybe he can see the thing that’s haunting them if he looks hard enough. Remus wants, badly, for him to meet his gaze instead. “But it is usually pretty hard to shake.”
The moment he laid eyes on Sirius in the Shrieking Shack that wonderful, terrible night last spring, Remus started doing something that until now he’s been only half aware of. He’s been looking through Sirius, in a way: trying to see in this wasted, damaged man the shape of the boy he used to know. Filling out his sunken cheeks; imagining a shine to his long limp hair; adding the bright mischievous upturn to the end of his sentences. But in this moment it all falls away and for a horrible teetering second Remus doesn’t recognize him at all.
“I want it gone,” he says, voice choked with the off-kilter nausea of the screwed-up dimensions of the kitchen and the not-quite-right look of his friend, the profoundly disorienting sense of wrong angles and sharply unfamiliar lines and the presence of something he doesn’t know and doesn’t want rising up between them.
Sirius looks at him, eyes distant; and then he blinks. He moves quickly to Remus, sliding his hand around the back of his neck.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s all right.”
Is it? Remus doesn’t ask, and lets Sirius tip his head down, pressing their foreheads together, and breathes in the scent of cloves and cinnamon.
The snow stops falling a couple days later. Remus blasts the buildup away from the front door and they stand outside, amidst the white mountains, under the clear cold sky, the silence soft and total. Feeling more cheerful than he has since the wine incident, he ducks back inside to fry up some sausages for breakfast while Sirius goes to check on Buckbeak. The lights flicker a little bit, but it might just be the weather.
“Breakfast is ready,” he calls, opening the front door. Sirius is standing right on the threshold, bent over, and he glances up at Remus after a moment, looking caught.
“What are you doing?” Remus asks, eyes widening. There’s a small pocketknife in Sirius’ hand, and a few drops of blood have fallen from his pricked finger onto the white scrape of snow before the door.
“Old magic usually responds well to blood,” Sirius says. “I thought I’d try it.”
Remus feels a complicated rush: the strangeness of Sirius’ steady tone, the relief that he’s taking this seriously. “Is it supposed to get rid of the thing?”
Sirius hesitates. “Not exactly.” A pause, then: “It’s supposed to welcome it.”
His blood on the snow looks suddenly lurid, violently red.
“To welcome it?”
Sirius spreads his palms. “I don’t think it’s evil. And I don’t think it’s going away. It might be better if we just try to…make peace with it.”
Peace, Remus thinks, and a bitter laugh startles its way out of his throat. “Peace is all I wanted,” he says. “This isn’t peace.”
Sirius finds him upstairs, curled in a blanket in the cabin’s drafty attic.
“Merlin, it’s seasick up here.”
Remus blinks at him unhappily. The floor is wrong. He knows it’s flat, but when he looks at it straight on, it seems to list slightly like the deck of a ship. The corners where the walls meet the ceiling look like a cubist painting. And there’s a definite presence in the room, a prickle on his skin and a tightness in the air.
“That window’s stuck open,” Sirius says, picking his way carefully across the tilting hardwood. “You must be freezing.”
“No,” Remus says reluctantly. “The blanket’s warm.”
“Can’t be that warm. It’s like the Owlery in winter up here.”
Remus holds out a corner of the blanket. Sirius frowns and rubs it between his fingers.
“Christ,” he says. “Feels like it’s been in the oven. Weird. Are you going to share, or are you just going to sit there with your knees to your chest and stare at me unhappily?”
There’s humor in his voice, but his eyes are wary.
Remus budges up a little and Sirius sinks down next to him. His joints creak.
“I got used to living with something messing with my perceptions in Azkaban,” he says after a moment. “Whatever this is, it’s much better than Dementors.”
“Shit.” Remus winces. “I hadn’t thought…” He trails off.
“Have you thought much about Azkaban?” Sirius asks softly. “What was it like for you, these last thirteen years?”
His image of Sirius, wrapped in a little bundle like a packet of mulling spices, to be hidden and ignored until the moments Remus couldn’t hold it in anymore. Years of blankness, peppered with infrequent periods of helpless crying and kicking the walls. If pressed, Remus would estimate that after 1981 and before 1993 he uttered the words “Azkaban” or “Dementors” fewer than a dozen times, and “Sirius Black” not once.
“I’ve never been…” Remus begins with difficulty. “I’m not good at…”
“No.” Sirius squeezes his wrist. “You’re not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought of you every day.”
Shamed, Remus turns his head away. After a long moment, Sirius scrapes his teeth against Remus’ skin, just above his sweater, and bites down gently.
The memory of being two weeks out of Hogwarts and trembling, naked in bed with Sirius for the first time and feeling raw like a peeled tomato, zings through Remus. That night Sirius had bitten him just there, at the join of neck and shoulder. He’d had mischief in his eyes but Remus had felt it as a sort of benediction. An obscure kind of blessing.
“You can’t want…” he says painfully, eyes closing.
“I do,” Sirius says, quiet, lips against his skin. “I do, Moony.” He rubs his nose against Remus’ neck. They were rarely so gentle in the old days. “But I’m wondering whether you want me.”
Remus turns to him, wide-eyed. “How can you even—”
“Me, now,” Sirius interrupts. “Thirteen years later, with yellow teeth and skeleton ribs. No—no more astonishingly gorgeous hair.” He laughs, a little brokenly. “No leather jackets. No flying motorbike. Just an ornery Hippogriff and a moldy coat and—and cottony places in my mind where things go a bit vague sometimes. I’m not, you know.” He shakes his head. “I know I’m not who you want me to be.”
Guilt twists Remus' stomach till he feels physically ill. Or maybe it’s the room twisting—oh, god, the walls are shivering, the floor tilting weirdly—Remus falls suddenly forward on hands and knees, stifling a gag.
“Oh, fuck,” Sirius says to the empty air, sounding exasperated and ill. “Fuck. Come on, please, can you cool it for a minute?”
A breath of cold air passes across Remus’ face. He heaves dryly.
“Give me your knife,” he gasps out.
“What—”
“Prick my finger.”
Remus holds out a hand. After a suspended second, Sirius clasps his wrist. He pulls out the pocketknife and hesitates, blade light against Remus’ skin.
“Are you sure—”
“Do it. Please.”
Sirius cuts into his finger. Remus feels the sting. Blood wells up red. He shakes his hand once, twice, and a scattering of drops falls on the floor.
“I’m welcoming you,” Remus says loudly. “You’re—you’re here. So are we. That’s not changing. So. You’re welcome.”
The floor rocks gently. The walls shiver. Then they seem to settle, back into a shape the human mind can, if not entirely comprehend, at least accept.
Remus’ stomach evens out.
“For what it’s worth,” Sirius says quietly, “I hate that you have scars I wasn’t there for.”
Remus curls into his chest. His fingers clutch at Sirius’ shirt. He pushes his face against his sweater and breathes in.
Wool and sweat. He misses the smell of Sirius’ cigarettes.
“I never thought you’d be the one advocating for making peace with something.”
Sirius huffs out a laugh, bony hands reaching up to run through Remus’ hair. “And you’re the one who wanted to fight it.”
“We’ve changed.”
“We have.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know.”
“But I still love you.” Remus pulls Sirius’ wrist to his mouth and kisses it. “That’s one thing, about these last thirteen years.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “I never figured out how to stop loving you.”
Sirius’ arms spasm, clasping him tight.
“Okay,” he replies, voice hoarse. “Okay.”
“I know that’s maybe not enough. I know. But—”
“It’s much more than I ever thought I’d have again.”
“Well,” says Remus, heart beating in his throat, “well. Me too.”
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Date: 2017-12-13 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-12-15 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 04:00 am (UTC)You wrote this really well. Thank you for sharing it <3
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Date: 2017-12-15 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 06:15 am (UTC)Thank you for writing such a gem of a story <3<3<3
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Date: 2017-12-15 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 05:58 pm (UTC)This bit really stuck out for me: They make mulled wine like they did the few Christmases they spent together between Hogwarts and the end of the world. Remus unwraps the packet of whole cloves and star anise and cinnamon sticks that, back in October (the last time he’d left the mountains for somewhere with a decent spice shop), he’d nestled carefully between more mundane supplies like tinned vegetables and sacks of flour. He has long been practiced in the art of doing foolish things without thinking about them directly, folding his desires into small tight bundles and tucking them out of sight so he can carry them around and then, at the last minute, decide if he’s going to shut his eyes and let them out. So when he’d purchased the spices he had not reminded himself that Sirius wasn’t going to be with him at Christmas to make mulled wine, or acknowledged that when he found them in the back of his cupboard some dark frozen night he was going to double over like he’d been kicked, the pungent, sweet scent flooding him with knife-edged memories of December nights in London, slush soaking through his shoes, stumbling drunkenly home from James and Lily’s flat, sing-shouting dirty carols and stopping himself from holding Sirius’ hand in public.
Gorgeous!
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Date: 2017-12-15 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-23 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 03:58 pm (UTC)Oh, but this:
The moment he laid eyes on Sirius in the Shrieking Shack that wonderful, terrible night last spring, Remus started doing something that until now he’s been only half aware of. He’s been looking through Sirius, in a way: trying to see in this wasted, damaged man the shape of the boy he used to know. Filling out his sunken cheeks; imagining a shine to his long limp hair; adding the bright mischievous upturn to the end of his sentences. But in this moment it all falls away and for a horrible teetering second Remus doesn’t recognize him at all.
Break my heart. I mean, I think it's something we all do to a certain extent, with the memories we hold most precious, but have him realize it like that. That was gut wrenching.
But then this:
“But I still love you.” Remus pulls Sirius’ wrist to his mouth and kisses it. “That’s one thing, about these last thirteen years.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “I never figured out how to stop loving you.”
Just made the whole thing better. It's entirely bittersweet, but most things about this era are. There's just this overwhelming impression of hope there, though.
Lovely, wonderful job!
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Date: 2017-12-23 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-16 05:58 am (UTC)The moment he laid eyes on Sirius in the Shrieking Shack that wonderful, terrible night last spring, Remus started doing something that until now he’s been only half aware of. He’s been looking through Sirius, in a way: trying to see in this wasted, damaged man the shape of the boy he used to know. Filling out his sunken cheeks; imagining a shine to his long limp hair; adding the bright mischievous upturn to the end of his sentences. But in this moment it all falls away and for a horrible teetering second Remus doesn’t recognize him at all.
Just...ow, you know? Anyway, this was full of gorgeous prose. I loved the bit about Remus' spices for his mulled wine, and the danger of expectations or optimism. So painful, but unfortunately true. This was a great story about the two of them coming together because they simply had to. They were always meant to.
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Date: 2017-12-23 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-01 10:12 pm (UTC)I really liked the ghost/spirit and how it fulfilled the traditional plot device while also being a little different. Bending the house's architecture was an interesting touch.
He has long been practiced in the art of doing foolish things without thinking about them directly, folding his desires into small tight bundles and tucking them out of sight so he can carry them around and then, at the last minute, decide if he’s going to shut his eyes and let them out. - I love this introspective look at Remus. It's so very in-character. And this: He’s been looking through Sirius, in a way: trying to see in this wasted, damaged man the shape of the boy he used to know. Filling out his sunken cheeks; imagining a shine to his long limp hair; adding the bright mischievous upturn to the end of his sentences. But in this moment it all falls away and for a horrible teetering second Remus doesn’t recognize him at all. It's a perfect, painful depiction of his grief at the changes in Sirius, and I love, love, love how aware of that Sirius is despite the cottony places in his mind.
I just. This fic is wonderful. Thank you so much for writing it for me <3
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Date: 2018-01-03 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-03 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-03 05:00 pm (UTC)