One Light Burning for adistantsun
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small_giftsTitle: One Light Burning
Author/Artist:blanketed_in_stars
Recipient:adistantsun
Rating: G
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *none*
Word count: 5,134
Summary: Remus is facing him across the table, palms braced against the wood and cheeks flushed from the wind, obviously demanding an explanation. Sirius swallows. I missed you, and I think you might be working for the other side, and I still miss you.
It's the winter solstice of 1980, there's a spy, and strange magic is cropping up off the coast of Scotland.
Notes: Thank you as always to Audrey, my amazingly patient and thoughtful beta, whose advice is always quality (whether I listen to her or not). The prompt for this was Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) by Laura Marling, and I also incorporated the Orkney Islands and dusty memories. The title comes from "Vigils" by Siegfried Sassoon. Enjoy!
1980
The hut at Brodgar is empty, and Sirius guesses from the stale chill that it has been for some time. He works his way out from Mainland: Kirkwall, Shapinsay, Rousay. All the outposts stand empty. He picks up the trail at Guith from a witch who tells him there have been strange noises from the Calf the last few months—she doesn’t say any more, but points with her chin to the northeast. Sirius thanks her and leaves, feeling her eyes on his back.
When he apparates to the top of the bluff, he’s surrounded by the roar of the surf crashing below. It fills his ears as the salt smell fills his nose, and goddammit, he’s knee-deep in snow already. The night is clear, and by the light of the stars he can see—nothing. He struggles across the empty expanse, now regretting his choice of clothing. Of profession. Of friends.
But Remus meets him after twenty meters’ slog. “Sirius.” He stands there as the last of the disillusionment charm wears off, and asks, “What’d you tell me that night seventh year?”
“Er—” Sirius is there again suddenly, a little drunk, talking quietly in the empty common room. “That I didn’t care if Reg never talked to me again.” He swallows down the pain of that. “What’s the last thing you said to me?”
“I told you not to come find me,” Remus says. Which is correct, of course. Relief and irritation mixed in his eyes. He grabs Sirius by the arm. “Merlin’s beard. I said it for a reason. You can’t just show up here, you idiot. It’s not—oh, come on.” He drags Sirius through the snow and pulls out his wand as they go, muttering spells that Sirius only half-hears. “Sine Amicum,” he finishes, flourishing his wand skyward.
Sirius hardly has time to register that the little shack has appeared, lopsided and dark, before he’s being ushered through the dark door. Only it isn’t dark at all—it’s bright, deliciously warm, and smells of thyme. “Have you been cooking?”
“The herbs are part of the wards,” Remus says, hanging his cloak on a peg and already turning left into another room. “Which you weren’t supposed to break.”
Sirius follows him in and finds himself in a kitchen, which is definitely too big for the size the hut looked from the outside. Remus is facing him across the table, palms braced against the wood and cheeks flushed from the wind, obviously demanding an explanation. Sirius swallows. I missed you, and I think you might be working for the other side, and I still miss you. “I was bored to death going to all those meetings with Wormtail. And it’s solstice, he’s already off with his mum, and I knew you were freezing your arse off out here, so—here I am.” Sirius can’t look away—drinks in the sight of Remus looking back. He’s all right. Half a year and barely a word, and then all those empty rooms—and here he is, looking threadbare and tired but also supremely irritated. Moony, every inch of him. Even the tremble of suspicion in his stomach stills for a moment.
Remus’s mouth twists. “How the hell’d you find me?”
And there it is again, the chill in his veins. “Just kept looking,” Sirius says, shrugging.
“No one else is coming?”
“No one,” Sirius says. He’s supposed to tell Peter—to let him know, so they don’t have to worry anymore. Once he can find a quiet moment to send the message. If he can slip back past the wards for long enough to cast the spell. “So—what’ve you been up to?” he asks, trying to be casual and knowing full well that it’s the worst thing he could ask.
“Ah.” Remus raises one eyebrow and points his wand at the kettle. “Can’t tell you that.” He inclines his head toward the single chair. “But if you sit down, you can help me with my own project. Since you’re so desperate to be here.”
———
2010
Remus is already awake when the sun rises, and so it comes for him first with a creeping glow at the edges of the room. He points his toes and feels his joints strain and pop as they always do. Another wave of sleep threatens to take him, but he sits up instead.
At his side, suddenly exposed, Sirius curls up more tightly without opening his eyes. The light hasn’t reached him yet—though for the light to be here at all, Remus thinks, it must be well past dawn. He slips from the bed. “Putting a kettle on,” he tells Sirius, who doesn’t stir.
The kitchen is—strange, in the new light. The same cramped little room and tiny frosted window above the sink. The same view over the bluffs to the horizon. It ought to be familiar, but instead Remus finds himself wondering if the counter was always scratched there, if the cabinet door always hung crooked like that. His own forgetfulness, or the decay of the years?
The kettle is boiling by the time Sirius emerges, tousle-headed and yawning, but with a clear brightness in his eyes. He kisses Remus on the back of his neck, reaches down to find his hand, and in the press of their palms Remus feels anticipation. Apprehension. Kinetic expectation of a runner at the block. “Too excited to stay in bed?” Remus asks.
Sirius kisses the bump of his spine again, and then Remus feels him lean his head there, his nose pushing gently against the bone. “It’s no fun if you’re not there,” he says.
Remus chuckles, leaning backwards into the embrace. “And here I thought you’d jump at the chance to sleep till two,” he teases. It’s been years since they’ve stayed in bed that long—he finds himself surprised, still, when he wakes without grogginess, his body sore but not tired. It’s not what he expected age to feel like. And he’s surprised now to feel an enthusiasm he associates with youth, as if the years are melting between them.
———
Sirius falls into the chair while Remus pulls two mugs from the cupboard. “This is—what, exactly?” He picks up a scrap of parchment with some illegible scribblings. A few runes stand out from the scrawl. Fate. Tomb. “For the Order?”
“I said, I can’t tell you about that.” Remus puts one of the steaming mugs in front of Sirius and conjures up his own chair. “Stop asking. No, it’s something else. Look at this.” He hands Sirius a map, clearly hand-drawn, and so marked up that it takes a moment to recognize it as Orkney.
There are crossed-out labels with little arrows drawn between them, radiating in vague circles around—well, around where they are now. Eday. The Calf, specifically. “What, are you tracking something?” Sirius asks, squinting at it. “Some creature?”
“A spell,” Remus tells him. “Sending some message.”
“A message?” Sirius shakes his head, changes the question. “Who’s sending it?”
“That’s the thing.” Remus runs a hand through his hair and it sticks up worse than before. “I haven’t a clue. It comes and goes, and I can never get a handle on where it’s coming from, exactly. I thought it might be the Ring of Brodgar, you know, since that’s where I first picked it up—but that was an echo.”
“An echo,” Sirius repeats, frowning. “Moony, you’re not making any sense.”
“Then listen,” Remus snaps. He starts rifling through the parchments, clearly looking for something. “It’s not like any spell I’ve come across before, it’s…” He’s biting his lip, tapping his foot noisily beneath the table, moving his hands too quickly. “It’s different,” he finishes.
“Mate.” Sirius reaches out and stills his restless searching. Places his hand atop Remus’s, the sudden contact shocking even though he meant to do it—a jolt passes between them, and their eyes meet. Sirius thinks, are you hiding something from me? are you going to be the end of me? “Just slow down,” he says. He makes his voice softer, keeps his fear from the words. “Start at the beginning.”
———
It was brown November when Remus plucked up the courage—halfway through that long, lingering autumn, Sirius swinging, fifteen and unfettered, between elation and a strange humility. All of them skiving off classes and doing whatever they did then—Remus is sure it was idiotic and remembers loving every bit of it.
And he’d been watching Sirius, because he was captivated and unable to pretend otherwise. Sirius with his new earring and his long hair and his eyes that would catch Remus’s, sometimes, when no one else saw.
Sirius laughs when Remus reminds him of it now while they watch the morning pass them by. “And I cornered you, didn’t I?” Remus says, trying to capture it exactly. “On the astronomy tower.”
“Kissed me under the stars.” Sirius gives a theatrical flutter of his lashes. “Swept me off my feet.”
“Till Peeves found us, sure.”
Sirius snorts. Remus loves the sight of him here in a way he hadn’t all those years ago, the low winter sunlight in his hair, the salt air in both their noses. Loves it especially when he laughs, looking down, the smile growing across his face as if he’s trying to hide it and can’t, quite.
———
“I thought it was an old curse,” Remus says. His fingers are wrapped around his mug. “The kind you always find in ruins, you know. But it was… beyond just energy, it was a feeling. Sometimes words, but sometimes just—images. Sensations.”
“A message,” Sirius repeats. “What was it saying, then? What kind of magic? Something dark?”
“No,” Remus says at once. “It was—it was sunlight. The furthest thing from dark magic I’ve ever felt.” He gives a little uncertain shake of his head. “Warm and peaceful. Sunny, you know?”
“Er—no,” Sirius admits.
“Well.” Remus checks his watch. “You can see for yourself in about half an hour.” He looks up and catches Sirius’s puzzled look. “It comes and goes, like I said. More frequently, lately, so I think there’s a good chance we’ll get something soon. Two o’clock, maybe a bit later.”
He seems to be thawing a bit, Sirius thinks, watching a smile tug at his mouth and hearing the jump of excitement in his voice, his syllables tripping over themselves. It’s like school, almost, the way he would get wrapped up in something and forget to be annoyed, or tired, or that the waxing moon was trickling through his veins—and he has the same look now, all earnest and thoughtful.
But there’s still a spy. There’s someone leaking information and dates and locations, and it could be Remus, and all the way out here, who’s to say that it isn’t? Sirius takes a too-hot gulp of tea. It makes his eyes sting. “Moony,” he says, and stops. But Remus is already looking at him, a little quizzical, much more concerned. Nothing to be done. “Peter thinks—” Well. “We know,” he starts again, “that there’s a spy.” The words pushed out by his fear and weariness. All at once. There.
“I know,” Remus says. His eyes guarded, suddenly still. “It isn’t me.” Of course, Sirius thinks—“That’s just what a spy would say, isn’t it.” Remus’s voice is calm but tight, thin ice under the feet.
And the expression on his face is so dangerous that Sirius knows, at once. “It’s not me, either,” he says. Funnily—horrifyingly—having it out in the open doesn’t help.
But there’s nothing for it. He can see the moment when Remus decides—forces himself?—to move on. The guarded expression doesn’t leave, but he says, “You picked a nice night for it. Longest one of the year and all that.”
Sirius takes another swallow of tea. “We’ll have plenty of time, then.” And he feels the black hours stretching out before them.
———
This far north, this time of year, the sun starts slipping down towards the horizon—endless expanse off the cliffs—just past noon. Remus doesn’t notice until Sirius squeezes his hand, waits till he looks over, and nods at the window: the shadows are gathering.
“And you’re sure it’s supposed to be at dusk,” Remus says, aware that it’s unnecessary, unwilling to leave it un-asked. “Not dawn, or—?”
“I’m sure.” Sirius smooths a thumb across his knuckles. “Didn’t you ever learn to read a star chart?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s symmetry,” Sirius explains, maddeningly, as if it isn’t the twentieth time he’s said it. “Dawn’s when it ended, then, so dusk’s when we cast it now. Thirty years doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the solstice, and as long as we’re together. Here. The balance, you know, the place and hour—”
“It’s all very complicated, I’m sure.” Remus leans over and kisses him to stop the words. “I trust you.”
“Dangerous business, that.”
“What can I say, I live for the thrill.” Remus gets to his feet and pulls Sirius up after him. It’s true, he sees, peering out. Darkness is falling fast. He’d forgotten, in the interim, how the dusk comes on like a wave: first the sea, then the snow, swallowing up any light they don’t hold close.
———
“So the spell is in some ruin?” Sirius asks as they wade out into the snow.
If Remus nods, it’s lost in his scarf. “There’s a tomb on the southwest side.” Sure enough, he leads the way towards the Sound, and as they turn the lights of the mainland twinkle in the distance. “I meant it, you know,” he says while they walk. The wind dampens his voice. “When I said I didn’t want you to come find me.”
It’s like a punch. Sirius focuses on not falling into the snow, and replies a few moments late. “I know.”
“But you did.”
“Yeah.” There’s no reply, and now Sirius can see the cairn: a dark hole in the earth, gaping against pale snow, stones jutting from the drifts like teeth. Is he supposed to explain, as they step close to the mouth, give his false reasons? Or the real ones, which are worse?
But Remus either doesn’t care or is saving it for later. He turns to face Sirius on what might be the threshold, beneath the snow. “We don’t need to go all the way in,” he says. “This is close enough.”
“So we just—wait?”
“That’s the idea.” A definite irritation in the tone. His eyes go to Sirius, flicker away, then come back. “Padfoot, I’ve been meaning t—”
Sirius doesn’t catch the end of it, the magic taking hold without warning. Like gasping in a breath underwater, a flood the mind can’t handle: the feeling of laughter bubbling in the chest—a sense of something held in the hands, grasped tightly—feet tucked under the body and taste of tea in the mouth. A curious lightness.
The spell leaves Sirius blinking against the inky night, half-blind. The air hurts his lungs as if he isn’t used to the cold, as if he’s actually gone somewhere else and returned—but he hasn’t, he can’t have. He peers at Remus, who’s staring back at him. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Sirius asks.
“Someone laughed.” As if it should be obvious. “It sounded like—” He clearly doesn’t want to say, but at Sirius’s raised eyebrows, he does. “Like you.”
“You heard me laughing.” Again, ghost-like, the brimming sensation in his lungs. He doesn’t know if he should be frightened or amazed.
“Well, I don’t know.” Remus looks away. “There’ll probably be another one along in a bit.” He waves his wand and creates a pocket of warmth between them. “No sense freezing while we wait.”
“Can anyone see us out here?” Sirius asks quietly. “From the mainland, or—? Will the ward—?”
“We’re safe,” Remus says. Something dark in the underbelly of his words, impossible to define.
———
By seventh year Remus was torn. On the one hand, there was a war, and death tolls in the news, and no job prospects for anyone like him. But on the other, Sirius knew that it hurt and didn’t try to fix it, just held him when he wanted holding and promised they’d be together. When? Remus didn’t ask. Where?
It was the biggest fight they’d had, and the last one. And when they left school and the cold and the distance came, it wasn’t that they weren’t friends—it was that they could have be more, and they both remembered how sweet it was. And it hurt still, but there was no question of being held anymore.
“I missed you,” Remus says as they pull on cloaks. That’s the important part, really.
Sirius pauses in the act of pulling up his hood. “I missed you, too.” His voice is subdued.
Remus has to smile, not at the lingering memory of the pain but at the sudden softness in Sirius’s eyes and the easy way they can reach for each other now. “I’m so glad you did,” he says.
One corner of Sirius’s mouth lifts. He opens the door to the night, lets Remus walk through it first.
———
“You were going to say something,” Sirius says, breaking their silence of twenty minutes. “Before the spell hit. You’ve been meaning to do something?”
“Yes.” Remus nods but doesn’t speak right away, choosing instead to study his hands clasped in front of him. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says slowly, “is everything all right? At home?”
“I live alone,” Sirius says, stupid with alarm. It’s a trick. But what a strangely earnest ploy.
“I mean with our friends,” Remus tells him, stumbling a bit on the last word. “No one’s—no one’s so much as sent an owl, let alone been to visit. Till you.”
Sirius shrugs. “You told us not to come after you.”
“You’re the only one I told.” Now Remus is looking at him again, his eyes sparkling. “And you’re the only one who came.”
“Oh.” Sirius feels small, caught between the revelation and the truth, which is that he misses them, the way they used to be, and he doesn’t know if the open secrets they’re trading make it any better. He doesn’t get owls either anymore. If people need to talk to him they do it to his face, like Peter, or pass messages along through Dumbledore. And if they’re silent for long enough, well, he’s not an idiot. There’s a war on, after all. “Everyone’s all right,” he says. His own voice sounds thin to his ears. “As far as I know.”
There’s a change in Remus’s expression, as if he guesses how little Sirius actually does know. Or how much he’s keeping from him. “That’s good,” is all he says. Then—“I know things are… shit,” he says, “and I know it’s bloody cold out here, and I—I know I’ve been gone a while—but I’m glad you came.” Absurdly, there’s a small smile on his lips. “Really, Padfoot, I am.”
“I need a smoke,” Sirius blurts out, trying to get away before he says more than he already has—all he knows is that he can’t, doesn’t know how to hear these things and survive. But he slips on the hard-packed snow in turning, falls, reaches out—Remus catches him, and fingers brush knuckles—
Muffled sound: a voice in his ear, and here I thought you’d jump at the chance… Hugging something to his chest, another body, a warm clean smell, lips smiling at something he doesn’t know.
There are tears on Sirius’s cheeks as he falls, finally, into the snow, his hands smarting at the sudden cold. He gasps at the shock of it—ignores Remus saying his name and just goes, not even bothering to pull out the cigarettes as he hurries off.
———
The ruin, at least, is just as Remus remembers—a place where the shadows collect like spiderwebs. Like a phantom heart, something in him thrums out an anxious beat as they approach. An echo of what he felt then, the wondering and waiting and the winter chill that seeped into his bones.
“Think it’ll work?” he can’t resist asking as they turn to each other in the mouth of the tunnel.
Sirius gives him a half-smile. “It’d better.” The lightness of his voice is for Remus’s benefit, it must be, because Remus can see worry in the lines around his eyes.
He realizes he can hardly remember a time when those lines weren’t there—however many years it’s been, long enough to grow familiar with the way time ravages, threading brown and black with silver, wrinkling and softening, making bones heavier, wearing in the soles of the feet. Both of them together all the while: so that now the years come and go like old friends. “Shall we?” he asks, his doubts fading.
In answer, Sirius pulls his wand from his pocket, and Remus does the same. They place them end-to-handle, balanced side-by-side, and hold each other’s hands around the wood. Against the sharp bite of the air, Sirius is warm, his touch familiar, and the words he speaks are lost to the wind as the sun touches the horizon.
———
On the other side of the little hut, Sirius draws his wand, his stomach a roil of guilt and pain and leftover joy from the spell. Not enough, though, for the Patronus. And what the hell is he supposed to tell Peter? I found him. He’s keeping secrets and hiding from everyone. While Remus is probably sending his own message back at the ruin. The air floods his lungs and freezes them solid when he sucks in a breath. No point in delaying. He fixes the message in his mind, raises his wand, delves for some happy memory, something beyond this dark—
—And he lets his wand fall. Stands staring at nothing for a moment, two, three, as the memory takes up more space in his thoughts than he wants to give it. Remus, whispering to him seventh year, leaning close in the darkened common room as they watched James watch Lily with that idiot smile he had: two Galleons says he ditches us within the hour. Strange, that that memory would be the one, when all it really has is a soft glow around the edges—but that voice. He knows it, and from more than just ten years’ friendship, two years of something more—no, he knows it from a memory that isn’t his. Though in the spell it had sounded older, worn at the edges, he can tell now. And here I thought you’d jump at the chance…
The message dies on his lips. Spinning, he hurries around the side of the hut, traces the path in the snow to where Remus is still waiting—leaning on the ancient stones. “Moony,” he says, and Remus lifts his head with a weariness that passes suspicion and impatience and just looks old. “Moony, it’s us.”
“What—?”
“The spell, the message, it’s about us.” Sirius wills him to understand. “You said—before, you said you heard laughter, and I—I felt it, I was laughing—it was me.” He can see that it’s not taking hold, that he doesn’t make sense. “And the last time, I heard your voice.” The confession leaves him empty, somehow, though it’s only the smallest of truths: something of the intimacy of that unremembered moment. “You were there.”
But now Remus is staring at him, and he looks confused, he says—“You were there, too.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing.” Remus shakes his head. There’s something in his eyes that isn’t quite confusion after all. It sounds as though the words cross his lips unwillingly. “But you were holding me.” He looks away, then back, as if he, too, feels the absence of touch like a loss. “I was talking. And here I thought—”
“—You’d jump at the chance.” Sirius wants, more than he ever has, to reach for him, but he isn’t sure how.
“Jump at the chance to what?” Remus asks.
“I don’t know.” Sirius brushes that aside. “I don’t care. It was us. Couldn’t you feel it?”
The moment the words leave him, he realizes the depth of what he’s asked—more than just the spell. Can you feel it? Can you feel us? The question he’s wanted to ask for two and a half years since something ruptured between them, and the answer he’s afraid to hear now hanging unspoken in the air. He feels the tenuous weight of it. If Remus says no, he thinks, it will mean he’s wrong—that they can’t be saved, that what he feels now and felt in that un-memory belongs to him alone, that it isn’t enough. But if he says yes—if he says yes—
———
“Is that it?” Remus asks when Sirius finishes the incantation. The question drifts clouded in the air between them.
Sirius shifts his grip ever so slightly. “Not quite,” he says. The sky is, quite suddenly it seems, shot through with a golden-orange radiance that washes the snow and lands glimmering in Sirius’s hair.
Remus frowns. “What else is left?”
Sirius nods toward the horizon, over Remus’s shoulder. “We just have to wait,” he says. “Till the sun’s down.”
Remus doesn’t know how long that will take, but the light seems almost already to be fading. “Whatever it takes,” he says. He remembers, can’t help but remember, the way it was then: a feeling so strong it seemed to come from outside him and at the same time to live in his very bones. Made of light and two heartbeats and memories then-unfamiliar. The feeling itself, though—he knew it even then.
“I love you,” Sirius says, smiling at him. Not with joy or excitement, but just smiling, his eyes brighter than the last seconds of daylight.
———
Remus doesn’t say yes or no. He says nothing at all, but looks off to the horizon—the east, Sirius realizes—where a faint pale line peeks up over the edge of the world. “If you’re right,” he says at last, looking back, “then who’s casting the spell? Who would send a message like that?” The question a bare breath of wind, nearly lost in the salt roar.
“All I know,” Sirius says, carefully, feeling the ice beneath his words, their minutely-shifting weight, “is that it’s something good. Better than good.” He swallows. “And it’s coming from the spell, but it’s also—like it was already there inside us.”
It sounds absurd, Sirius knows, but Remus doesn’t look doubtful. He looks—wondering, lost in thought, his eyes glittering against the failing night. “What if it’s coming from us?” he asks, just as slowly. “What if we’re the ones casting the spell?”
“Sending—sending ourselves a message?”
“Telling ourselves something,” Remus says, still soft, nodding. His gaze meets Sirius’s with a touch of that old excitement, the need to know and understand. “Something—but what?”
Sirius wonders, a last gasp of fear, if what he thinks is the truth is only his desperation. “That we’re together,” he guesses, “or—we will be. Eventually.”
“So we make it out,” Remus says. “It’s not…we don’t end here.” He looks almost as if he might smile. Something changes in his eyes, a melting or a thawing, a dawning realization in time with the slow brightening of the sky, which is turning a deep blue, still sprinkled with dimming stars.
———
The theory, Sirius explained to him when he finally found the right books, was actually quite simple. An incantation, the wands held together, the memories drawn up and out of them: a conduit of their bodies and hearts. The ruins helped. And what passed through them would wait, through the reversing of the years, and find them as they stood there for the first time. If it worked, it would hold true. It would save them.
A message not in words, but in the fabric of their lives, as if whispered so softly that the voice was inaudible, transmitted through the brush of lips and breath alone. And Remus doubted—he still doubts—but he doubted then, too. At the core of himself, though—an iron certainty. A miraculous spark. Something that reaches through the night from dusk to dawn and holds on tight.
“I love you,” he whispers back. The sun slips away.
———
The hope in Remus’s eyes, the tremor in his voice. Suddenly Sirius knows—in his heart, in his bones, in the breath in his lungs. “That’s what it’s saying,” he realizes. “That you’re not the spy.”
And if he wasn’t sure before, he is now, when Remus says, “And neither are you.” Something blinding in the smile on his face, his startled laughter like bells. “Of course not.”
They believe it now. Sirius can feel it himself and sees it on Remus’s face—in the press of his fingers as he reaches for Sirius’s hand, and the magic, strengthened perhaps by their touch, like a spark of static energy passing from one to the other, takes them again. They fall towards each other, and Sirius catches Remus, holds his body against his own. I didn’t believe it, I never did, he wants to say, and If you’re not the spy, then who is? and I love you so much more than I thought I did. He can feel their hearts beating through bones and skin and cloth, together, keeping time.
———
In the dark, they separate. Remus’s hands feel cold, as if the loss of that last glimmer of light took away what could have warmed him—but the air against his face is salt-choked and full of memory. Though they never returned before now. Though it was only one night then, one night now.
Instead of pulling away, though, Sirius pulls him in for a kiss, and in his lips there is a hint of urgency. Some final effort, Remus thinks, to get the meaning across the gulf of time. “It’s all right,” he says, breath against skin. “It worked.”
“It’s not much to go on,” Sirius says. Even at this soft volume, the fear steals in.
“It’s everything,” Remus insists. And when he thinks of it—what else did they need, then? Trust, love, a small bit of hope. A hand to hold in the dark. All the things they did and said and learned afterwards were just that, an afterthought. “We figured it out. We’ll do it again.”
Sirius sighs. His shoulders relax. “Do you remember?” he asks. A cautious conviction in his voice. “What happened next?”
“Not precisely,” Remus admits. Only the feeling of it, the relief. The sight of the gilded tips of the waves rolling towards them, squinting against the light.
Author/Artist:
blanketed_in_starsRecipient:
adistantsunRating: G
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *none*
Word count: 5,134
Summary: Remus is facing him across the table, palms braced against the wood and cheeks flushed from the wind, obviously demanding an explanation. Sirius swallows. I missed you, and I think you might be working for the other side, and I still miss you.
It's the winter solstice of 1980, there's a spy, and strange magic is cropping up off the coast of Scotland.
Notes: Thank you as always to Audrey, my amazingly patient and thoughtful beta, whose advice is always quality (whether I listen to her or not). The prompt for this was Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) by Laura Marling, and I also incorporated the Orkney Islands and dusty memories. The title comes from "Vigils" by Siegfried Sassoon. Enjoy!
1980
The hut at Brodgar is empty, and Sirius guesses from the stale chill that it has been for some time. He works his way out from Mainland: Kirkwall, Shapinsay, Rousay. All the outposts stand empty. He picks up the trail at Guith from a witch who tells him there have been strange noises from the Calf the last few months—she doesn’t say any more, but points with her chin to the northeast. Sirius thanks her and leaves, feeling her eyes on his back.
When he apparates to the top of the bluff, he’s surrounded by the roar of the surf crashing below. It fills his ears as the salt smell fills his nose, and goddammit, he’s knee-deep in snow already. The night is clear, and by the light of the stars he can see—nothing. He struggles across the empty expanse, now regretting his choice of clothing. Of profession. Of friends.
But Remus meets him after twenty meters’ slog. “Sirius.” He stands there as the last of the disillusionment charm wears off, and asks, “What’d you tell me that night seventh year?”
“Er—” Sirius is there again suddenly, a little drunk, talking quietly in the empty common room. “That I didn’t care if Reg never talked to me again.” He swallows down the pain of that. “What’s the last thing you said to me?”
“I told you not to come find me,” Remus says. Which is correct, of course. Relief and irritation mixed in his eyes. He grabs Sirius by the arm. “Merlin’s beard. I said it for a reason. You can’t just show up here, you idiot. It’s not—oh, come on.” He drags Sirius through the snow and pulls out his wand as they go, muttering spells that Sirius only half-hears. “Sine Amicum,” he finishes, flourishing his wand skyward.
Sirius hardly has time to register that the little shack has appeared, lopsided and dark, before he’s being ushered through the dark door. Only it isn’t dark at all—it’s bright, deliciously warm, and smells of thyme. “Have you been cooking?”
“The herbs are part of the wards,” Remus says, hanging his cloak on a peg and already turning left into another room. “Which you weren’t supposed to break.”
Sirius follows him in and finds himself in a kitchen, which is definitely too big for the size the hut looked from the outside. Remus is facing him across the table, palms braced against the wood and cheeks flushed from the wind, obviously demanding an explanation. Sirius swallows. I missed you, and I think you might be working for the other side, and I still miss you. “I was bored to death going to all those meetings with Wormtail. And it’s solstice, he’s already off with his mum, and I knew you were freezing your arse off out here, so—here I am.” Sirius can’t look away—drinks in the sight of Remus looking back. He’s all right. Half a year and barely a word, and then all those empty rooms—and here he is, looking threadbare and tired but also supremely irritated. Moony, every inch of him. Even the tremble of suspicion in his stomach stills for a moment.
Remus’s mouth twists. “How the hell’d you find me?”
And there it is again, the chill in his veins. “Just kept looking,” Sirius says, shrugging.
“No one else is coming?”
“No one,” Sirius says. He’s supposed to tell Peter—to let him know, so they don’t have to worry anymore. Once he can find a quiet moment to send the message. If he can slip back past the wards for long enough to cast the spell. “So—what’ve you been up to?” he asks, trying to be casual and knowing full well that it’s the worst thing he could ask.
“Ah.” Remus raises one eyebrow and points his wand at the kettle. “Can’t tell you that.” He inclines his head toward the single chair. “But if you sit down, you can help me with my own project. Since you’re so desperate to be here.”
———
2010
Remus is already awake when the sun rises, and so it comes for him first with a creeping glow at the edges of the room. He points his toes and feels his joints strain and pop as they always do. Another wave of sleep threatens to take him, but he sits up instead.
At his side, suddenly exposed, Sirius curls up more tightly without opening his eyes. The light hasn’t reached him yet—though for the light to be here at all, Remus thinks, it must be well past dawn. He slips from the bed. “Putting a kettle on,” he tells Sirius, who doesn’t stir.
The kitchen is—strange, in the new light. The same cramped little room and tiny frosted window above the sink. The same view over the bluffs to the horizon. It ought to be familiar, but instead Remus finds himself wondering if the counter was always scratched there, if the cabinet door always hung crooked like that. His own forgetfulness, or the decay of the years?
The kettle is boiling by the time Sirius emerges, tousle-headed and yawning, but with a clear brightness in his eyes. He kisses Remus on the back of his neck, reaches down to find his hand, and in the press of their palms Remus feels anticipation. Apprehension. Kinetic expectation of a runner at the block. “Too excited to stay in bed?” Remus asks.
Sirius kisses the bump of his spine again, and then Remus feels him lean his head there, his nose pushing gently against the bone. “It’s no fun if you’re not there,” he says.
Remus chuckles, leaning backwards into the embrace. “And here I thought you’d jump at the chance to sleep till two,” he teases. It’s been years since they’ve stayed in bed that long—he finds himself surprised, still, when he wakes without grogginess, his body sore but not tired. It’s not what he expected age to feel like. And he’s surprised now to feel an enthusiasm he associates with youth, as if the years are melting between them.
———
Sirius falls into the chair while Remus pulls two mugs from the cupboard. “This is—what, exactly?” He picks up a scrap of parchment with some illegible scribblings. A few runes stand out from the scrawl. Fate. Tomb. “For the Order?”
“I said, I can’t tell you about that.” Remus puts one of the steaming mugs in front of Sirius and conjures up his own chair. “Stop asking. No, it’s something else. Look at this.” He hands Sirius a map, clearly hand-drawn, and so marked up that it takes a moment to recognize it as Orkney.
There are crossed-out labels with little arrows drawn between them, radiating in vague circles around—well, around where they are now. Eday. The Calf, specifically. “What, are you tracking something?” Sirius asks, squinting at it. “Some creature?”
“A spell,” Remus tells him. “Sending some message.”
“A message?” Sirius shakes his head, changes the question. “Who’s sending it?”
“That’s the thing.” Remus runs a hand through his hair and it sticks up worse than before. “I haven’t a clue. It comes and goes, and I can never get a handle on where it’s coming from, exactly. I thought it might be the Ring of Brodgar, you know, since that’s where I first picked it up—but that was an echo.”
“An echo,” Sirius repeats, frowning. “Moony, you’re not making any sense.”
“Then listen,” Remus snaps. He starts rifling through the parchments, clearly looking for something. “It’s not like any spell I’ve come across before, it’s…” He’s biting his lip, tapping his foot noisily beneath the table, moving his hands too quickly. “It’s different,” he finishes.
“Mate.” Sirius reaches out and stills his restless searching. Places his hand atop Remus’s, the sudden contact shocking even though he meant to do it—a jolt passes between them, and their eyes meet. Sirius thinks, are you hiding something from me? are you going to be the end of me? “Just slow down,” he says. He makes his voice softer, keeps his fear from the words. “Start at the beginning.”
———
It was brown November when Remus plucked up the courage—halfway through that long, lingering autumn, Sirius swinging, fifteen and unfettered, between elation and a strange humility. All of them skiving off classes and doing whatever they did then—Remus is sure it was idiotic and remembers loving every bit of it.
And he’d been watching Sirius, because he was captivated and unable to pretend otherwise. Sirius with his new earring and his long hair and his eyes that would catch Remus’s, sometimes, when no one else saw.
Sirius laughs when Remus reminds him of it now while they watch the morning pass them by. “And I cornered you, didn’t I?” Remus says, trying to capture it exactly. “On the astronomy tower.”
“Kissed me under the stars.” Sirius gives a theatrical flutter of his lashes. “Swept me off my feet.”
“Till Peeves found us, sure.”
Sirius snorts. Remus loves the sight of him here in a way he hadn’t all those years ago, the low winter sunlight in his hair, the salt air in both their noses. Loves it especially when he laughs, looking down, the smile growing across his face as if he’s trying to hide it and can’t, quite.
———
“I thought it was an old curse,” Remus says. His fingers are wrapped around his mug. “The kind you always find in ruins, you know. But it was… beyond just energy, it was a feeling. Sometimes words, but sometimes just—images. Sensations.”
“A message,” Sirius repeats. “What was it saying, then? What kind of magic? Something dark?”
“No,” Remus says at once. “It was—it was sunlight. The furthest thing from dark magic I’ve ever felt.” He gives a little uncertain shake of his head. “Warm and peaceful. Sunny, you know?”
“Er—no,” Sirius admits.
“Well.” Remus checks his watch. “You can see for yourself in about half an hour.” He looks up and catches Sirius’s puzzled look. “It comes and goes, like I said. More frequently, lately, so I think there’s a good chance we’ll get something soon. Two o’clock, maybe a bit later.”
He seems to be thawing a bit, Sirius thinks, watching a smile tug at his mouth and hearing the jump of excitement in his voice, his syllables tripping over themselves. It’s like school, almost, the way he would get wrapped up in something and forget to be annoyed, or tired, or that the waxing moon was trickling through his veins—and he has the same look now, all earnest and thoughtful.
But there’s still a spy. There’s someone leaking information and dates and locations, and it could be Remus, and all the way out here, who’s to say that it isn’t? Sirius takes a too-hot gulp of tea. It makes his eyes sting. “Moony,” he says, and stops. But Remus is already looking at him, a little quizzical, much more concerned. Nothing to be done. “Peter thinks—” Well. “We know,” he starts again, “that there’s a spy.” The words pushed out by his fear and weariness. All at once. There.
“I know,” Remus says. His eyes guarded, suddenly still. “It isn’t me.” Of course, Sirius thinks—“That’s just what a spy would say, isn’t it.” Remus’s voice is calm but tight, thin ice under the feet.
And the expression on his face is so dangerous that Sirius knows, at once. “It’s not me, either,” he says. Funnily—horrifyingly—having it out in the open doesn’t help.
But there’s nothing for it. He can see the moment when Remus decides—forces himself?—to move on. The guarded expression doesn’t leave, but he says, “You picked a nice night for it. Longest one of the year and all that.”
Sirius takes another swallow of tea. “We’ll have plenty of time, then.” And he feels the black hours stretching out before them.
———
This far north, this time of year, the sun starts slipping down towards the horizon—endless expanse off the cliffs—just past noon. Remus doesn’t notice until Sirius squeezes his hand, waits till he looks over, and nods at the window: the shadows are gathering.
“And you’re sure it’s supposed to be at dusk,” Remus says, aware that it’s unnecessary, unwilling to leave it un-asked. “Not dawn, or—?”
“I’m sure.” Sirius smooths a thumb across his knuckles. “Didn’t you ever learn to read a star chart?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s symmetry,” Sirius explains, maddeningly, as if it isn’t the twentieth time he’s said it. “Dawn’s when it ended, then, so dusk’s when we cast it now. Thirty years doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the solstice, and as long as we’re together. Here. The balance, you know, the place and hour—”
“It’s all very complicated, I’m sure.” Remus leans over and kisses him to stop the words. “I trust you.”
“Dangerous business, that.”
“What can I say, I live for the thrill.” Remus gets to his feet and pulls Sirius up after him. It’s true, he sees, peering out. Darkness is falling fast. He’d forgotten, in the interim, how the dusk comes on like a wave: first the sea, then the snow, swallowing up any light they don’t hold close.
———
“So the spell is in some ruin?” Sirius asks as they wade out into the snow.
If Remus nods, it’s lost in his scarf. “There’s a tomb on the southwest side.” Sure enough, he leads the way towards the Sound, and as they turn the lights of the mainland twinkle in the distance. “I meant it, you know,” he says while they walk. The wind dampens his voice. “When I said I didn’t want you to come find me.”
It’s like a punch. Sirius focuses on not falling into the snow, and replies a few moments late. “I know.”
“But you did.”
“Yeah.” There’s no reply, and now Sirius can see the cairn: a dark hole in the earth, gaping against pale snow, stones jutting from the drifts like teeth. Is he supposed to explain, as they step close to the mouth, give his false reasons? Or the real ones, which are worse?
But Remus either doesn’t care or is saving it for later. He turns to face Sirius on what might be the threshold, beneath the snow. “We don’t need to go all the way in,” he says. “This is close enough.”
“So we just—wait?”
“That’s the idea.” A definite irritation in the tone. His eyes go to Sirius, flicker away, then come back. “Padfoot, I’ve been meaning t—”
Sirius doesn’t catch the end of it, the magic taking hold without warning. Like gasping in a breath underwater, a flood the mind can’t handle: the feeling of laughter bubbling in the chest—a sense of something held in the hands, grasped tightly—feet tucked under the body and taste of tea in the mouth. A curious lightness.
The spell leaves Sirius blinking against the inky night, half-blind. The air hurts his lungs as if he isn’t used to the cold, as if he’s actually gone somewhere else and returned—but he hasn’t, he can’t have. He peers at Remus, who’s staring back at him. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Sirius asks.
“Someone laughed.” As if it should be obvious. “It sounded like—” He clearly doesn’t want to say, but at Sirius’s raised eyebrows, he does. “Like you.”
“You heard me laughing.” Again, ghost-like, the brimming sensation in his lungs. He doesn’t know if he should be frightened or amazed.
“Well, I don’t know.” Remus looks away. “There’ll probably be another one along in a bit.” He waves his wand and creates a pocket of warmth between them. “No sense freezing while we wait.”
“Can anyone see us out here?” Sirius asks quietly. “From the mainland, or—? Will the ward—?”
“We’re safe,” Remus says. Something dark in the underbelly of his words, impossible to define.
———
By seventh year Remus was torn. On the one hand, there was a war, and death tolls in the news, and no job prospects for anyone like him. But on the other, Sirius knew that it hurt and didn’t try to fix it, just held him when he wanted holding and promised they’d be together. When? Remus didn’t ask. Where?
It was the biggest fight they’d had, and the last one. And when they left school and the cold and the distance came, it wasn’t that they weren’t friends—it was that they could have be more, and they both remembered how sweet it was. And it hurt still, but there was no question of being held anymore.
“I missed you,” Remus says as they pull on cloaks. That’s the important part, really.
Sirius pauses in the act of pulling up his hood. “I missed you, too.” His voice is subdued.
Remus has to smile, not at the lingering memory of the pain but at the sudden softness in Sirius’s eyes and the easy way they can reach for each other now. “I’m so glad you did,” he says.
One corner of Sirius’s mouth lifts. He opens the door to the night, lets Remus walk through it first.
———
“You were going to say something,” Sirius says, breaking their silence of twenty minutes. “Before the spell hit. You’ve been meaning to do something?”
“Yes.” Remus nods but doesn’t speak right away, choosing instead to study his hands clasped in front of him. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says slowly, “is everything all right? At home?”
“I live alone,” Sirius says, stupid with alarm. It’s a trick. But what a strangely earnest ploy.
“I mean with our friends,” Remus tells him, stumbling a bit on the last word. “No one’s—no one’s so much as sent an owl, let alone been to visit. Till you.”
Sirius shrugs. “You told us not to come after you.”
“You’re the only one I told.” Now Remus is looking at him again, his eyes sparkling. “And you’re the only one who came.”
“Oh.” Sirius feels small, caught between the revelation and the truth, which is that he misses them, the way they used to be, and he doesn’t know if the open secrets they’re trading make it any better. He doesn’t get owls either anymore. If people need to talk to him they do it to his face, like Peter, or pass messages along through Dumbledore. And if they’re silent for long enough, well, he’s not an idiot. There’s a war on, after all. “Everyone’s all right,” he says. His own voice sounds thin to his ears. “As far as I know.”
There’s a change in Remus’s expression, as if he guesses how little Sirius actually does know. Or how much he’s keeping from him. “That’s good,” is all he says. Then—“I know things are… shit,” he says, “and I know it’s bloody cold out here, and I—I know I’ve been gone a while—but I’m glad you came.” Absurdly, there’s a small smile on his lips. “Really, Padfoot, I am.”
“I need a smoke,” Sirius blurts out, trying to get away before he says more than he already has—all he knows is that he can’t, doesn’t know how to hear these things and survive. But he slips on the hard-packed snow in turning, falls, reaches out—Remus catches him, and fingers brush knuckles—
Muffled sound: a voice in his ear, and here I thought you’d jump at the chance… Hugging something to his chest, another body, a warm clean smell, lips smiling at something he doesn’t know.
There are tears on Sirius’s cheeks as he falls, finally, into the snow, his hands smarting at the sudden cold. He gasps at the shock of it—ignores Remus saying his name and just goes, not even bothering to pull out the cigarettes as he hurries off.
———
The ruin, at least, is just as Remus remembers—a place where the shadows collect like spiderwebs. Like a phantom heart, something in him thrums out an anxious beat as they approach. An echo of what he felt then, the wondering and waiting and the winter chill that seeped into his bones.
“Think it’ll work?” he can’t resist asking as they turn to each other in the mouth of the tunnel.
Sirius gives him a half-smile. “It’d better.” The lightness of his voice is for Remus’s benefit, it must be, because Remus can see worry in the lines around his eyes.
He realizes he can hardly remember a time when those lines weren’t there—however many years it’s been, long enough to grow familiar with the way time ravages, threading brown and black with silver, wrinkling and softening, making bones heavier, wearing in the soles of the feet. Both of them together all the while: so that now the years come and go like old friends. “Shall we?” he asks, his doubts fading.
In answer, Sirius pulls his wand from his pocket, and Remus does the same. They place them end-to-handle, balanced side-by-side, and hold each other’s hands around the wood. Against the sharp bite of the air, Sirius is warm, his touch familiar, and the words he speaks are lost to the wind as the sun touches the horizon.
———
On the other side of the little hut, Sirius draws his wand, his stomach a roil of guilt and pain and leftover joy from the spell. Not enough, though, for the Patronus. And what the hell is he supposed to tell Peter? I found him. He’s keeping secrets and hiding from everyone. While Remus is probably sending his own message back at the ruin. The air floods his lungs and freezes them solid when he sucks in a breath. No point in delaying. He fixes the message in his mind, raises his wand, delves for some happy memory, something beyond this dark—
—And he lets his wand fall. Stands staring at nothing for a moment, two, three, as the memory takes up more space in his thoughts than he wants to give it. Remus, whispering to him seventh year, leaning close in the darkened common room as they watched James watch Lily with that idiot smile he had: two Galleons says he ditches us within the hour. Strange, that that memory would be the one, when all it really has is a soft glow around the edges—but that voice. He knows it, and from more than just ten years’ friendship, two years of something more—no, he knows it from a memory that isn’t his. Though in the spell it had sounded older, worn at the edges, he can tell now. And here I thought you’d jump at the chance…
The message dies on his lips. Spinning, he hurries around the side of the hut, traces the path in the snow to where Remus is still waiting—leaning on the ancient stones. “Moony,” he says, and Remus lifts his head with a weariness that passes suspicion and impatience and just looks old. “Moony, it’s us.”
“What—?”
“The spell, the message, it’s about us.” Sirius wills him to understand. “You said—before, you said you heard laughter, and I—I felt it, I was laughing—it was me.” He can see that it’s not taking hold, that he doesn’t make sense. “And the last time, I heard your voice.” The confession leaves him empty, somehow, though it’s only the smallest of truths: something of the intimacy of that unremembered moment. “You were there.”
But now Remus is staring at him, and he looks confused, he says—“You were there, too.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing.” Remus shakes his head. There’s something in his eyes that isn’t quite confusion after all. It sounds as though the words cross his lips unwillingly. “But you were holding me.” He looks away, then back, as if he, too, feels the absence of touch like a loss. “I was talking. And here I thought—”
“—You’d jump at the chance.” Sirius wants, more than he ever has, to reach for him, but he isn’t sure how.
“Jump at the chance to what?” Remus asks.
“I don’t know.” Sirius brushes that aside. “I don’t care. It was us. Couldn’t you feel it?”
The moment the words leave him, he realizes the depth of what he’s asked—more than just the spell. Can you feel it? Can you feel us? The question he’s wanted to ask for two and a half years since something ruptured between them, and the answer he’s afraid to hear now hanging unspoken in the air. He feels the tenuous weight of it. If Remus says no, he thinks, it will mean he’s wrong—that they can’t be saved, that what he feels now and felt in that un-memory belongs to him alone, that it isn’t enough. But if he says yes—if he says yes—
———
“Is that it?” Remus asks when Sirius finishes the incantation. The question drifts clouded in the air between them.
Sirius shifts his grip ever so slightly. “Not quite,” he says. The sky is, quite suddenly it seems, shot through with a golden-orange radiance that washes the snow and lands glimmering in Sirius’s hair.
Remus frowns. “What else is left?”
Sirius nods toward the horizon, over Remus’s shoulder. “We just have to wait,” he says. “Till the sun’s down.”
Remus doesn’t know how long that will take, but the light seems almost already to be fading. “Whatever it takes,” he says. He remembers, can’t help but remember, the way it was then: a feeling so strong it seemed to come from outside him and at the same time to live in his very bones. Made of light and two heartbeats and memories then-unfamiliar. The feeling itself, though—he knew it even then.
“I love you,” Sirius says, smiling at him. Not with joy or excitement, but just smiling, his eyes brighter than the last seconds of daylight.
———
Remus doesn’t say yes or no. He says nothing at all, but looks off to the horizon—the east, Sirius realizes—where a faint pale line peeks up over the edge of the world. “If you’re right,” he says at last, looking back, “then who’s casting the spell? Who would send a message like that?” The question a bare breath of wind, nearly lost in the salt roar.
“All I know,” Sirius says, carefully, feeling the ice beneath his words, their minutely-shifting weight, “is that it’s something good. Better than good.” He swallows. “And it’s coming from the spell, but it’s also—like it was already there inside us.”
It sounds absurd, Sirius knows, but Remus doesn’t look doubtful. He looks—wondering, lost in thought, his eyes glittering against the failing night. “What if it’s coming from us?” he asks, just as slowly. “What if we’re the ones casting the spell?”
“Sending—sending ourselves a message?”
“Telling ourselves something,” Remus says, still soft, nodding. His gaze meets Sirius’s with a touch of that old excitement, the need to know and understand. “Something—but what?”
Sirius wonders, a last gasp of fear, if what he thinks is the truth is only his desperation. “That we’re together,” he guesses, “or—we will be. Eventually.”
“So we make it out,” Remus says. “It’s not…we don’t end here.” He looks almost as if he might smile. Something changes in his eyes, a melting or a thawing, a dawning realization in time with the slow brightening of the sky, which is turning a deep blue, still sprinkled with dimming stars.
———
The theory, Sirius explained to him when he finally found the right books, was actually quite simple. An incantation, the wands held together, the memories drawn up and out of them: a conduit of their bodies and hearts. The ruins helped. And what passed through them would wait, through the reversing of the years, and find them as they stood there for the first time. If it worked, it would hold true. It would save them.
A message not in words, but in the fabric of their lives, as if whispered so softly that the voice was inaudible, transmitted through the brush of lips and breath alone. And Remus doubted—he still doubts—but he doubted then, too. At the core of himself, though—an iron certainty. A miraculous spark. Something that reaches through the night from dusk to dawn and holds on tight.
“I love you,” he whispers back. The sun slips away.
———
The hope in Remus’s eyes, the tremor in his voice. Suddenly Sirius knows—in his heart, in his bones, in the breath in his lungs. “That’s what it’s saying,” he realizes. “That you’re not the spy.”
And if he wasn’t sure before, he is now, when Remus says, “And neither are you.” Something blinding in the smile on his face, his startled laughter like bells. “Of course not.”
They believe it now. Sirius can feel it himself and sees it on Remus’s face—in the press of his fingers as he reaches for Sirius’s hand, and the magic, strengthened perhaps by their touch, like a spark of static energy passing from one to the other, takes them again. They fall towards each other, and Sirius catches Remus, holds his body against his own. I didn’t believe it, I never did, he wants to say, and If you’re not the spy, then who is? and I love you so much more than I thought I did. He can feel their hearts beating through bones and skin and cloth, together, keeping time.
———
In the dark, they separate. Remus’s hands feel cold, as if the loss of that last glimmer of light took away what could have warmed him—but the air against his face is salt-choked and full of memory. Though they never returned before now. Though it was only one night then, one night now.
Instead of pulling away, though, Sirius pulls him in for a kiss, and in his lips there is a hint of urgency. Some final effort, Remus thinks, to get the meaning across the gulf of time. “It’s all right,” he says, breath against skin. “It worked.”
“It’s not much to go on,” Sirius says. Even at this soft volume, the fear steals in.
“It’s everything,” Remus insists. And when he thinks of it—what else did they need, then? Trust, love, a small bit of hope. A hand to hold in the dark. All the things they did and said and learned afterwards were just that, an afterthought. “We figured it out. We’ll do it again.”
Sirius sighs. His shoulders relax. “Do you remember?” he asks. A cautious conviction in his voice. “What happened next?”
“Not precisely,” Remus admits. Only the feeling of it, the relief. The sight of the gilded tips of the waves rolling towards them, squinting against the light.
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Date: 2018-12-04 01:56 pm (UTC)The whole thing is so mesmerising- really really beautiful writing!
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Date: 2018-12-04 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-12-05 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 11:30 am (UTC)I am unfortunately drowning in work at the moment, but I promise I'll be back with a more substantial comment soon!
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Date: 2018-12-05 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-12-07 08:49 am (UTC)I was thinking of the Stonehenge the whole time, it's got sth to do the sunlight and solstice and mystery too... And Intestellar too. It's a film in which the protagonist in the future sends a message back to the past to her old self, providing some sort of solution that starts the whole film in the first place. Mesmerising, indeed.
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Date: 2018-12-07 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 02:56 pm (UTC)Thank you for immediately making it at least a tiny bit better by having them both be alive and together in 2010. That’s so much better already.
OMG but this:
Sirius thinks, are you hiding something from me? are you going to be the end of me?
Just kill me now, you’re going to with this, I can just tell. I am not prepared to cry today. *is crying anyway*
I love your scattered time jumps, they make the heavy sections all that much heavier, but also break them up so that the tension is smoother, rather than just relentless. Lovely choice.
Oh, and then Remus trying to explain the spell to Sirius and finally starting to get a little excited. And seeing it through Sirius’ eyes is just amazing, in every way, the love you can tell he feels even though he isn’t sure he still should, coupled with the fear and the longing and… this is simply amazing.
OMG what an amazing way to set things right! To convince them to trust each other! That is the perfect ending! This entire thing was so magical, so lovely, built on love that withstood it all, and carried them not only through but back again, and I loved every second of it! Amazing job!
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