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small_giftsTitle: your shape in the doorway
Author/Artist:blanketed_in_stars
Recipient: [Unknown site tag]
Rating: T
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *descriptions of injuries, canonical (non r/s) character death*
Word count: 10,950
Summary: Snapshots of 1981-1992, if Sirius was on the run instead of in Azkaban
Notes: Much love to Chromat1cs for providing the lovely prompts - I did my best to write for the second one, "a hearth gone cold but just about to be warmed again," and also took a lot of inspiration from Osvaldo Golijov's "Omaramor" as per the wild card suggestion. I truly hope you enjoy <3 And thank you a thousand times over to my beta, Audrey, who saved this story from remaining the dumpster fire it first appeared to be!
1978
“And I’m going to see you—both of you—at that meeting in January,” James says, pointing imperiously even with one foot in the fireplace. “Dumbledore says we need everyone we can get and you know Wormtail won’t go alone.”
“They’ll be there,” Lily says, elbowing him. When James turns to step fully onto the hearth, she gives Remus a pointed look. “Happy Christmas again. Stay warm.”
“Bye,” Remus says, and when James and Lily have vanished in a swirl of green flames he turns back to face the empty flat. Well—not quite empty. Sirius grins at him from the couch, and the low light gleams against the window panes, on the strands of hair that fall into his face. “Don’t give me that look,” Remus tells him. He waves his wand at the table, sending the plates floating over and stacking themselves in the sink. “I know what you’re doing.”
Sirius watches him, that lazy, late-night gaze, firewhiskey a flush in his cheeks. “What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to get me to let you stay the night,” Remus says. “Like last year, when, if I recall correctly, you ate the last of my biscuits, snored all night, and borrowed a pair of socks and then lost one of them.” He tosses a disapproving look in Sirius’s direction. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Ah, Moony.” Sirius gets up and goes to the now-empty fireplace, brushes some of the ash back inside the grate. He points his wand and lights a normal fire, the red flames licking quickly up the half-burned logs. Snow falls ever-thicker outside the dark windows. “We both ate the biscuits.”
Remus snorts.
“And besides,” Sirius continues, “I’ve already eaten them all this year.” Then he pulls something small and brightly-colored from his pocket and tosses it to Remus. “Happy Christmas.”
Unprepared, Remus catches it by the tips of his fingers. He finds he is holding a small package wrapped in colorful paper, with a lopsided bow. He looks up at Sirius, accusatory. “We said we weren’t doing presents.”
“Just open it,” Sirius says.
So Remus does, pulling on the ribbon and letting the paper fall away. Inside he finds—a box of every-flavor beans. “You shouldn’t have,” he deadpans.
Sirius smiles that blinding smile again. “Half-off at the corner shop.”
He’s preening so absurdly that Remus has to laugh. He pockets the box, still chuckling, and Vanishes the crumbs from dinner that still litter the table. “I mean it,” he says at length. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I know,” Sirius says, matching his quiet tone. “But I wanted to.” When Remus looks at him, he shrugs. “Who knows where we’ll be next Christmas?”
This is not, Remus thinks, what he wanted from the evening. It’s even more disappointing because the same questions have been plagueing him as well ever since they left school. And it’s not just the war that they all seem to be joining—Peter turns down half their invitations, including tonight; James and Lily are engaged. Remus hitches a smile back on his face and meets Sirius’s gaze. “You know where I’ll be.” He inclines his head, indicating the flat.
Sirius looks around. “Merlin, Moony, I hope not. You’d be warmer in an igloo.”
“You shut up about my place,” Remus says, pretending to glare at him. But it breaks, and he smiles for real. “I suppose you are staying the night, then?”
“If you’ll have me,” Sirius says, rueful.
“I can’t turn you out in a blizzard,” Remus sighs. He catches Sirius’s smirk as he turns away.
He fetches blankets from the closet in the hall, pauses to close the tap that someone has left dripping in the bathroom. For just a moment, he stops, allows himself to savor the moment: he and Sirius, alone as they were all through the last year when James was sneaking out to see Lily and Peter was feverishly studying. Remus can almost pretend that nothing has changed.
When he goes back to the main room, he finds Sirius sitting cross-legged by the fire, staring into the flames. Remus sits down beside him, accidentally bumping knees. Sirius shifts minutely away. “Knut for your thoughts,” Remus prompts when Sirius does not look around.
“Oh, they’re nothing special,” Sirius says. “Just thinking.”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
Sirius glances at him, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I was thinking about the war,” he says. “About what Dumbledore said. That we’re going to need everyone we can get.” The firelight warms his face, makes his features softer. “Suppose that means us, too.”
“Well, we’re already members of the Order,” Remus points out.
“You know what I mean.”
Uncomfortably, Remus does. He’s familiar with this sort of creeping anxiety, a sense of something on the horizon. It’s been hanging over them for years. And, yes, they’re in the Order—but they’ve yet to do much of anything beyond relay messages, and even that has been only within London. “I think it’s important that we help,” he begins, uncertain, the words foreign in his mouth.
“Of course it’s important,” Sirius says. “I know it’s—I’m not saying—I just mean,” he says, shaking his head, “do you think we’re going to have to—I don’t know.” He falters suddenly, his fingers picking at the cuff of his sleeve the way they always do, never still for a moment.
“Are you scared?” Remus asks.
Again, Sirius’s gaze flicks to him. “Have to be bloody stupid not to be, don’t you think?”
This is a Sirius that Remus has only glimpsed a handful of times—Sirius disarmed, somehow, setting down his bravado and pride. Remus has learned to handle these moments like fragile things that must be touched gently. But he doesn’t know how to be gentle with this. “Sometimes I can’t believe we ever signed up for any of this,” he agrees.
Though it can’t possibly be much comfort, Sirius nods. “And it’s getting worse out there.”
With his eyes trained on the fire once more, Sirius looks strangely distant, the flames painting his face into something unfamiliar. “I think you’re right,” Remus says. “We’re going to have to do more for the Order. It’s going to be dangerous.” Sirius turns his head, looking at Remus with a pained, frustrated expression. “But at least it’ll give James something to talk about besides Quidditch.”
Sirius huffs out a laugh and smiles, finally. It makes his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Moony. Jesus Christ.”
Remus laughs with him, bumping their shoulders together. “And it’s like I said. I’m not going anywhere.”
The room is close, the fire warm and bright. “Thank God for that,” Sirius says. He is looking at Remus in a way he doesn’t think he’s seen before, something unspoken hiding in his eyes. “You’d better not.”
Remus shrugs. He is flushing, though he pretends to himself that it’s the heat of the fire. “Can’t leave you to fend for yourself, anyway.”
Sirius snorts, but that strange expression doesn’t leave his eyes. “You’ve got to get a better hobby than looking after me.”
“I like looking after you,” Remus says frankly, slightly surprised to find that it’s true. His flush deepens. “You’re my best mate.”
“Ah.” Sirius smirks at him, a sharpness to his smile. “Is that all.”
“You’re an idiot,” Remus tells him, fondly, but confused. “Do I need a better reason?”
“I thought—the money, maybe.”
Remus gives his knee a shove, chuckling. “And yet you’re staying at my flat.”
“Well. No sense in both of us being alone.” And Sirius looks at him simply, earnestly, only half-smiling—that strange nameless secret still in his eyes, but Remus knows him anyway.
1981
A rap on the window, nearly lost in the wild October wind. “Moony.”
Remus slides the sash up, blinking. The night is dark, the brightest thing the flickering streetlamp halfway down the block; it is just after midnight—and Sirius is crouched on the fire escape outside his London flat. “What are you—?”
“I can’t stay,” Sirius says, and his voice is a sound Remus has never heard, raw and choked, his face a mask with frightening eyes. “I can’t—but—Moony, Peter’s the spy. It’s not me.”
One hand, Remus notices, is trembling, the other clutching the metal rail. “Peter?” he repeats, the grogginess rapidly fading, turning to a spark of fear. “What do you mean?”
Sirius twists around to peer down the empty street, then turns back. “I’ve got to find him. I know what you think—what it’ll look like—but I swear, it isn’t me.”
Remus shakes his head, reaches out as if he could pull Sirius into talking sense. “I don’t understand. What—where are you going?” For Sirius has stepped away to the edge of the fire escape, out of reach unless Remus were to lean out of the window entirely.
“I’ve got to find him,” Sirius says again. The wind tugs at his robes and hair, and in the dim light his eyes are cavernous. “I’m sorry, I wish I could explain—but, please, you have to believe me.”
“I do,” Remus says, hardly knowing what he’s agreeing to. “I believe you.”
Sirius gives him a searching look. “Whatever you see, I didn’t do it.”
“All right. Please come inside.”
“I can’t.” Then Sirius turns, and vanishes with a crack. The streetlamp flickers.
1982
Remus turns his collar up against the snow, falling from the bare branches under its own weight. He wishes he could find the forest peaceful, but the silence and blank whiteness feel strangely ominous—a ghost of the war, barely three months over, haunting him. Remus gives himself a wry smile. It’s just winter.
And then the silence splits and the snow goes flying. Remus spins on the spot as if trying to Apparate himself, searching for whoever has just arrived—and then he spots Sirius in the purpling twilight, shaking a fresh tumble of snow out of his hair and drowning in an oversized Muggle trench coat. The air leaves his lungs.
“Hello,” Sirius says into the renewed, suddenly stifling woodland stillness.
The sound of his voice brings Remus to his senses. He fumbles with numb fingers for his wand and points it at Sirius. “Fuck,” he says, “oh my God.” He sucks in a breath that is so cold it hurts.
Sirius looks between Remus and the wand he’s holding as if putting together a puzzle. “I didn’t do it,” he says, slowly raising his hands. “I told you. It wasn’t me.”
“Prove it,” Remus says, hating and loving the sight of him. A part of him hadn’t wanted this moment—had hoped, as the days and then weeks went by with no appearance, that it would never come at all—but he feels now, almost, a sense of fearful relief.
“I—I can’t,” Sirius stammers, and then, as Remus shifts his grip on the wand, “honestly, Moony!”
“I should turn you in,” Remus breathes. The feeling of relief is, horribly, growing, something brittle in his voice and breath, and he can’t bear it. He can’t hear this.
“I’ll explain,” Sirius says, a note of pleading in his voice. “But could we go somewhere—a bit warmer?”
Remus blinks, and looks at him. The snow lingering in his hair, too cold to melt. The damp at the hem of his coat, his thin and worn shoes which Remus recognizes from another life. His hands are still shaking.
Half an hour later they are at the table in Remus’s kitchen, a small fire crackling in the grate, the first Remus has bothered to light since he came to the cottage. Night is falling quickly outside the window. Sirius has lapsed, finally, into silence, and Remus stares at the scratched table. He wants to believe it. He wants it to be true. “I don’t understand,” he says, “why you didn’t tell me.”
“I tried.” Sirius’s hands rest on the table, and Remus looks at them rather than his face. Long fingers, chapped skin on the knuckles. “I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s February,” Remus bursts out. His voice is loud enough that it doesn’t tremble. “You couldn’t’ve—sent an owl?”
By mistake, he is looking at Sirius, whose expression is pained. “Don’t you read the paper? I’ve been on the run,” he says. “I shouldn’t even be here. I can’t stay long.”
Like snowflakes, the time, melting away before it is truly theirs. “Did you know what he’d do?” Remus asks desperately. The question comes out more sharply than he intends, and he can see how it cuts, but he can’t take it back.
“God, Remus, no,” Sirius says, going pale. “I would’ve never agreed to it. Of course not.”
And Remus does believe him. How could he not, that breaking voice, the hands stretching out toward him as if afraid to touch, something fragile in his eyes? “Okay,” he says, and his breath runs away from him like a wild thing, impossible to catch. “Okay.”
Sirius watches him, wary, starved. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t.” Remus doesn’t think he can say more, isn’t sure what he would want to say even if he could get the words out. He doesn’t want to talk about that night, but it swells to fill his mind, the long hours in the black after Sirius had left and the news that came at dawn, the terrible grief and the bleak joy. He doesn’t know what there is to tell about all the time that followed, grey winter without a sun. Looking at Sirius, he thinks he may have been the better-off of the two of them, impossible as that seems. “Where are you staying?” he asks.
Sirius shrugs. “Wherever I can.” Then, as if he senses what Remus is thinking, he shakes his head. “Not here.”
“I’ve got a spare room,” Remus argues.
“There’s a price on my head,” Sirius replies. “I can’t do that to you.”
Remus hesitates. “Where will you go?”
A smile flickers at the edge of Sirius’s mouth—a chilling smile with a strange bite, one that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m still looking for Peter,” he says.
“Someplace warm, I hope,” Remus says. He half-hopes he can ignore the last statement and the expression on Sirius’s face.
Sirius glances at the fire, crackling away. “Not particularly,” he says softly, “no.”
Hearing his voice, seeing him here, and like this—it hurts Remus in ways he didn’t know he could hurt anymore. He wants to gather Sirius to him and hold him there. He wants to tell him to forget everything that has happened to them. The last three months, he feels, have been as long as years. And now Sirius is here, and about to leave, again. “I kept thinking about you,” he says—sudden, not quite meaning to speak.
Sirius’s gaze turns to him, suddenly blank-faced.
“I kept wondering where you were,” Remus explains. Now that he has begun he supposes he ought to continue, but he already regrets it. “The Aurors are looking for you everywhere.”
“Oh. I know.” Sirius lifts his chin, and for the first time Remus sees a hint of his old face, the charm and that sharp, blinding pride. “Don’t worry. I’ve got the jump on them.”
“I know you have.” He’s made it this far, after all. And yet Remus wonders—fears—and can’t say it.
Sirius looks at him, considering. “I’ll come back,” he says. “I promise.”
“You promise,” Remus repeats, bitter in spite of himself.
“Yeah,” Sirius says, and curiously, there is no heat in his voice. “I do.”
“Good,” Remus says. He is not angry, he realizes with some surprise, though he almost wants to be—or if he is angry, it is not at Sirius. His anger is something outside of himself, beyond this room. Somewhere out in the cold, in the trees and the frozen rivers.
Sirius goes before the moon is fully risen, bounding away in the deepening snow, his tail wagging absurdly. Remus looks after him, not smiling, but with that brittle sensation in all his limbs. He goes inside and puts on another layer, pours out Sirius’s half-drunk cup of tea, washes up, douses the fire. He waits.
And waits.
And waits.
And waits.
1983
The evening is cold beyond reckoning, and strangely silent: in the house, Remus startles at the smallest noise, a drip from the tap or the rustle of cloth when he shifts in his seat. Outside, the night draws in, the very air seeming to crackle with the chill. Remus breathes on his fingers to warm them and sets his quill back to the parchment.
The letter from Dumbledore had been a shock, but not a wholly unwelcome one—though Remus had fought down a powerful fear at the sight of that slanted, looping script. There is much still to do, and fewer hands now to do it. As if Remus isn’t aware, as if he has been on holiday the last two years. As if he has not given everything, three times over. Remus can’t think of a way to answer Dumbledore that will ring true without stating the truth: that he is, in the end, simply unbearably tired.
Dear Albus, he writes, and pauses. Merlin, this is impossible. He wishes he could ask Lily, who was always the better writer—better speaker, too—except of course that if Lily were here, there would be no need to write. He sighs, presses his fingers to his temples.
The knock on the door makes Remus jump. He stands, stubbing his stockinged toe on the desk, and goes to open the door. A gust of freezing air greets him, and he barely has time to register that it is Sirius standing on his stoop before Sirius has hurried inside, shut the door behind him, and pointed his wand at it. He is muttering incantations that Remus can’t quite hear, and his hair hangs in his face.
“What’s going on?” Remus asks, the shock catching up to him, an almost reflexive panic making his heart pound.
Sirius glances over to Remus. “Everything’s fine,” he says quickly, then resumes his spell. Remus recognizes the words now: an warding incantation.
When he finally stops, Remus can’t decide which question he wants to ask first. “Whose wand is that?” he says at length.
As if he had forgotten it, Sirius glances at the wand. “I don’t know. I stole it from a shop.”
Remus nods. There seems to be little point in worrying about this when he read in the paper this morning that Sirius is now wanted as far away as Iceland. He wants to know what brings Sirius here, whether he’s found Peter, where he has come from. He wants to hold him close and never let go. “Are you hungry?” he asks, swallowing it all down.
Sirius sits at the table with his cup of tea as Remus lights the fire and heats their food, and Remus has to force himself not to glance at him constantly, twisting his head to look over his shoulder like a fugitive himself. Just over twelve months since the last time they spoke, not a single word, and now—the last five minutes don’t seem to fit into his life, the quiet, slow days he’s been living.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Remus says. As soon as he says it he feels guilty, well aware of how like an accusation it sounds—and it is an accusation, in part. But he can’t take it back. “I know you can’t owl ahead,” he continues, “it’s just—” He falters. Turns around. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, “but I don’t understand why.”
From his seat at the table, Sirius looks surprised at the question. “It’s cold outside,” he says. “And I missed you.”
“You could have come earlier,” Remus tells him, brusque without meaning to be. He turns back to the stove and busies himself with ladling the stew into two bowls. Out of politeness, though he’s already eaten.
“I wanted to,” Sirius says from behind him. “A dozen times, probably more.”
Has he thought about coming here, Remus wonders, as much as Remus himself has thought about slinging a pack over his shoulder and going to look for him? He turns and hands Sirius his bowl, settles into the chair across from him. “Why didn’t you?”
Sirius picks up his steaming spoonful of stew but doesn’t eat it. “I don’t like to stay in one place too long,” he says. “Or come back to the same spot too often. It’s not safe.” The corner of his mouth quirks, unexpected. “Like the contact points, in the war.”
Remus remembers. The locations for delivering messages, meeting the next patrol shift, anything, had changed constantly all throughout the war, rarely using the same street corner twice. As good a way as any of keeping the Death Eaters guessing. But when the street corner is his own, he thinks, it’s strange to be kept in the dark. Even if by necessity. “I understand,” is all he says.
A silence falls then while they eat, Sirius scuffing his toe against the leg of the table, which has developed a wobble. “Nice place, this,” Sirius says, nodding to indicate the room as a whole.
Remus looks around. “Is it?”
“Better than your flat.”
Again, the hint of a smile, almost alarming in how quickly it comes and goes. Remus has to admit that it’s true: he has more space here, a better view, pipes that don’t freeze in winter. The sentinel pines at the edge of the field enshrine his cottage in deep green solitude—but there is also no one to hurt. “I thought I’d hate it out here,” he confesses, “but I don’t. Usually.”
Sirius tilts his head to one side. “You’re living alone still?”
“Yeah.” Remus taps his fingers on the table, gazes into the flames. “Marlene lived with me for a while, but—”
“Marlene? McKinnon, you mean?”
There is a sudden tightness in Remus’s throat. He cannot believe they’re sitting here and talking about the house, their friends, as if they’ve simply been living in different countries for two and a half years. As if all that has come between them is time. And yet—what else can he say? What else is left, if their old lives are beyond recovery and the pain itself is unspeakable? Remus forces himself to smile. “Yeah, we were together. For a couple months,” he adds in answer to the question in Sirius’s eyes.
“When did that start?” Sirius demands.
“Er, summer of eighty-two.”
“You scare her off?”
Remus swallows. “Her whole family died. We kind of fell apart after that.” He hates the way the words just sit there, once spoken, a piece of the truth too jagged to ignore. He did not want to say it to Sirius, to force the knowledge on him, some strange echo of the horror that they once lived day to day. “She was going to go home for her sister’s birthday, but Death Eaters killed them all.” When Remus glances up he sees that there are tears in Sirius’s eyes. It is startling in a way that nothing else has been so far. “Must have been one of the last groups still out for revenge after the war, we thought.”
“Must have been,” Sirius agrees weakly. He seems—beyond shocked—young, somehow, younger than Remus, as if he has been hidden from the horror so far and is just now seeing it, which could not be farther from the truth. He sits turned half away, blinking rapidly at the window and the falling snow.
“I thought you might have known,” Remus says softly. “It was in the papers.”
Sirius passes a hand quickly over his face, then clasps both hands together, so tightly that Remus can see his knuckles go white. “I didn’t,” he begins, and clears his throat. “I haven’t read the papers. I thought—I thought it was over.” He turns his face toward Remus, beseeching. “For everyone else.”
“It’s... better than before.” Remus shakes his head, at a loss for what to tell him. “She’s living with Dorcas now, in Kent.” He offers up a smile. “They’re happy.”
Sirius returns it, wavering slightly. The dregs of their stew sit untouched between them, gone cold, and then Sirius says, “And—and you?” He shifts his hands on the table. “Are you happy?”
He asks it so carefully, almost formally. Remus considers telling him he’s better than before, or telling him about the picture he saw of Harry last month and how green his eyes are, or telling him off for asking. To say any of that, though, seems somehow just as bad as speaking about the past. He dredges up the only truth he can bear. “I am tonight.”
“Oh,” Sirius says, nodding. “That’s good.” His eyes are lowered to the table, but the smile lingers at the edge of his mouth.
Remus takes the opportunity to look at him: really look, though he knows Sirius must be able to tell, though there is the danger that he will glance up at any moment. What he sees is a strange half-ghost, something he thought was dead but isn’t. The Sirius he used to know, flickering beneath the shape of the thin, quiet man sitting across from him. He moves the same as always, but the set of his shoulders is wrong.
Then Sirius does look up, and Remus glances away at once. “What?” Sirius asks.
Remus shrugs. He doesn’t want to tell Sirius what he thinks, the warring unfamiliarity and fondness pulling tight in his chest. “Are you still looking for Peter?” he asks. “How’s it going?”
Sirius’s gaze darkens. “No luck yet,” he says, “but I’ll find him.” The words hold a hint of a growl.
It chills Remus to hear it. It isn’t that he can’t understand the fierce shadow in Sirius’s eyes, whatever it is that makes his hands clench and unclench on the table. He understands it all too well—he recognizes it in himself, something he doesn’t like to look at, sitting heavy in the pit of his stomach. “What will you do to him?” he asks.
“I was thinking I’d kill him,” Sirius says, casual, almost careless.
Remus reaches out—to take his hand, to grip his shoulder, he doesn’t know—and ends up gathering both their empty bowls and bringing them to the sink. “He deserves it,” he agrees, running the tap, adding soap.
Sirius must sense his hesitation. “But?” he prompts.
Remus presses his lips together. “But I—I wonder if maybe you—shouldn’t,” he begins, haltingly.
“You’re joking,” Sirius scoffs. “He doesn’t deserve anything else, he—he betrayed us, Moony, he killed—”
“I know,” Remus snaps, glad he is turned away, frightened of what might show on his face if he were not. “I know what he did.” His hands are shaking in the water. He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself, but it hardly helps the wild and urgent sensation threatening to close off his throat. “I just—I don’t think—” He falters again. He isn’t sure what he’s trying to say, doesn’t know how to put into words the nameless fear filling his lungs.
Sirius is quiet, so quiet that Remus thinks he may have snuck back out into the night. He stays where he is, not looking around, his heart pounding.
And then he hears Sirius’s chair scrape back from the table and his footsteps come closer. Sirius stands next to him and places his empty mug on the counter. “I have to find him,” he says, just as quiet as before, but more gently. “I don’t know how else to make it right.”
This, too, Remus understands. He resumes his washing of their dishes, adding the mug to the water and cleaning that as well. A memory surfaces of a similar scene—in his old flat, washing while James dried, frost on the windowpanes, Lily and Sirius playing a game of chess behind them—and he fights the urge to lean into Sirius and let himself melt away against the only person left who knows all the things he knows. Fights the urge because he can’t explain it, and because the pain in his throat has reached a terrible sharpness.
They set the bowls and cup on the rack to dry. It is past midnight, and Sirius stands strangely stiff in the little kitchen, as if he’s forgotten what he was about to do. Remus looks at him and his heart sinks. He knows already, somehow—or perhaps he never stopped waiting for this moment. “You’re leaving?” he says, not really asking.
Sirius nods without meeting his eyes. “I can’t risk staying longer,” he says. Then he squares his shoulders and brushes his hair back, and smiles. “Thanks for the food. And the tea.”
“Of course.” Remus sees Sirius’s eyes flick to the door, but he can’t bring himself to move, to make this end sooner than it must. Fear fills the kitchen, and something else, sweet, pressing in against the inky windows. “Make sure you come back,” Remus tells him.
Sirius’s smile grows, startled and genuine: his face falls back into the lines of it so easily. “I promise,” he says.
There is a softness around his eyes that Remus remembers, almost as if from a dream. He will miss this, he thinks. He’s missed it for so long already. Sirius takes a step toward the hall, his tall body thin down to the bones, his gaze still on Remus’s face. Remus steps after him. “Do you—if you want,” he says, “I could help you look for Peter.” He doesn’t know what makes him say it—doesn’t think he means it, even.
“No,” Sirius says at once. He glances around the at the kitchen, the pots and pans, the crooked cabinet door. He reaches out, quick, and clasps Remus’s hand, gives it a squeeze. Then he steps away toward the back door and the waiting night. “You stay here, Moony. Don’t worry about me.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Remus says, too late. The door swings shut, buffeting in the chill air, making him shiver.
1984
In the middle of the night, Remus opens his eyes to darkness, the shapes of the bedroom turned unfamiliar in the gloom. He sits up before he realizes what woke him: some faint sound which he thinks he still hears, a knocking from outside. His chest clenches tight. Sirius.
But there’s no one at the door when Remus shuffles down the hall to open it. He peers out into the night, then goes to the back door and tries there. All he can see is blank white snow, glowing faintly in the sliver of moon that hangs over the trees. But he can still hear the knocking—what if, he thinks, a horrible twist in his gut, Sirius is hurt somewhere just out of sight?
He fumbles into his boots and yanks on a cloak, then stumbles out into the snow. It comes up past his ankles, nearly to his knees where the drifts have blown. He holds his lit wand out in front of him. “Sirius,” he calls, soft in the still night, though there is no one else around to hear.
No answer comes out of the black that presses in at the edges of the wandlight. Remus trudges a cautious path around the corner of the cottage, scanning the ground for footprints, listening hard for any sound. His fingers are numbing; the wind is mild, but he thinks it would be bitingly sharp after not too long, particularly if hurt or hungry—“Sirius, are you there?” he calls again.
And then he sees it—blown against the side of the house, a large knobby branch blown bare of needles, knocking against the wall whenever the wind gusts. Remus stares at it a moment, his wand raised, relief and disappointment warring painfully inside him. He turns away, strains his eyes to see beyond the circle of wandlight to the curtain of trees. Nothing moves in the darkness, and he knows that if he called again, all he would get in response would be his own echo off the snow, and perhaps a few icy flakes blown back at him. Nevertheless, he pulls his cloak tight about himself and waits—just a few minutes more.
1986
“Come visit again before the new year,” Marlene says, pressing Remus’s hand with her usual firmness. “Dorcas whinges every time you leave and I don’t want to hear it over the holidays.”
“I can’t help it if he’s a better cook than you,” comes Dorcas’s voice from the other room.
Remus grins while Marlene pulls a face. “I could teach you,” he offers, as he does every year.
“Better not.” Marlene hands him his scarf. “I’d burn the place down.”
Dorcas walks back in, an envelope in her hands. “And then he wouldn’t visit anymore.” She leans into Marlene’s one-armed hug while leveling an accusatory gaze at Remus. “I worry about you, you know, living all alone out there. Hestia’s still looking for a flatmate—”
“Thanks.” Remus cuts her off, smiling so she knows it’s not a snub. “But I like it where I am.”
“Well. If you’re sure.” Dorcas smiles back, her eyes crinkling. Then she holds out the letter to him: yellow parchment, a dark and familiar seal. “Dumbledore dropped by. Said this was for you?” She quirks an eyebrow.
Remus takes the letter and shoves it inside his cloak, that old out-of-place feeling rearing its head although the Dumbledore is nowhere in sight. “Can’t be that important if he left it with the two of you,” he says.
This has the intended effect: Dorcas gasps in mock outrage, and Marlene rolls her eyes. “Happy Christmas, Remus.” She leans in and kisses him on the cheek.
“You, too.” They shoo him out the door and he walks quickly across the lot, pausing to wave back at their lighted windows before he turns the corner and disapparates.
He’s still smiling faintly, flushed from the lingering warmth of their house, when he materializes at the fringe of the trees. The field is dark, the house empty, and Remus concentrates on not losing his footing on the slippery path to the door. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a long shadow unfold out of the blackness, sending his pulse racing.
“It’s me,” the shadow says.
“Christ,” Remus coughs out. He releases the handle of his wand and pulls his hand out of his pocket.
“Where were you?”
“Kent. Dorcas and Marlene’s.” He hesitates, then unlocks the door. “Come on in.”
Shock of a different kind spreads through him as he takes off his scarf and cloak in the hall, a feeling as if everything has shifted slightly, and not in an entirely bad way. He takes Sirius’s coat and hangs that up, too, and then they stand looking at one another. “Oh, hell,” Remus says, and embraces Sirius, holds him tightly, rests his chin on his shoulder. His heart swells within him.
After a moment’s hesitation, Sirius’s hands come up to rest on his back, very lightly, like birds. “Hi,” he says, speaking into Remus’s sweater.
Remus knows he ought to let go, but can’t quite. “I thought,” he says, and forces himself to be quiet. He doesn’t want to say that aloud, not now. He releases Sirius and steps back.
The look Sirius gives him makes it clear that he knows what Remus thought. “Sorry I took so long,” he says.
“It’s all right.” Remus releases a breath he hadn’t meant to hold, unable to stop himself from staring at Sirius, cataloguing the changes in his appearance—his hair growing longer, a scar across his knuckles—and the things that have stayed the same. The low light settling in the hollows of his cheeks and throat, the dirt under his fingernails. He turns away and retrieves the letter from his cloak, hurries into the kitchen where he tosses it on the table. “So,” he says, turning around. Sirius stands in the doorway. “What’s going on?”
Sirius shrugs. He takes his usual seat at the table, stretching his fingers out against the wood. “Haven’t found Peter yet,” he says.
Remus frowns, the old fear creeping in, the worry which has hardly left him these three years. He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean—that. Just—how are you?”
“I’m fine.” Sirius smiles, a ghost of a thing at odds with how thin he has become. And there is a deeper frailness to him, a brittle urgency even when sitting still. “Famished, though.”
“Right. Of course.” Remus turns around and taps the kettle with his wand, heats a pan, puts bread in to toast and sprinkles cheese on top. Quick motions, without thinking. He closes his eyes then, standing at the stove, a hot, bitter feeling in his stomach. Sirius’s presence in the house is an ember under his skin. And it isn’t—it isn’t bad, but it hurts. As always, the image returns to him unbidden: Sirius in the night, his mask-like face, his voice a torn and twisted thing. He shudders.
“What’s this?” Sirius says.
Remus looks over his shoulder to see him picking up the envelope. “Not quite sure,” he says. “It’s from Dumbledore.” But he doesn’t want to think about that, either. He pours tea and flips Sirius’s onto a plate when the cheese has melted.
Remus studies the scratches in the tabletop while Sirius eats. He wonders how many times they will do this—Sirius arriving in the dead of night, explaining little or nothing at all, in a state of vague disrepair, eating the food Remus gives him and staying just long enough to leave a mark. Since they last saw each other, Remus has tried not to contemplate that sort of future, and he still finds it hard to imagine. Hard to trust, given all that has come between them. But he knows that if Sirius comes to him, he’ll let him in; if he’s hungry, Remus will feed him. It’s the if that causes all the trouble.
Suddenly, intensely, Remus can’t bear to sit and do nothing with his hands. He reaches out and picks up the letter, knowing it is a bad idea, and opens it. Scans it quickly, lowers the page to the table. When he glances up, Sirius is watching him. He offers up a smile and half a shrug.
“Bad news?” Sirius asks dubiously.
“Not really.” But Remus sighs anyway. “He says—well, he’s mentioned it before, but this is the first time he’s really—he wants me to teach,” he says. “At Hogwarts. Defense Against the Dark Arts, if you can believe it or not.” He chuckles. “You’d think he’d want me for Care of Magical Creatures.”
“Werewolves aren’t creatures,” Sirius says at once. It’s an old argument, one they haven’t had since school. “You know I don’t like it when you—”
“I know.” Remus rubs his face, cheered, somehow, by Sirius’s long-suffering tone. “But—honestly.”
A moment passes before Sirius replies. “I don’t know. I think you’d make a great professor.” His voice is suddenly subdued. “You always wanted to teach, ever since school.”
Remus looks at him. He doesn’t know what to make of the expression on Sirius’s face, unexpectedly earnest. “Well,” he says. “It’s been a long time since school, hasn’t it?”
Sirius tilts his head thoughtfully. “Not that long.”
But it has been, Remus thinks, in all the ways that matter. Nearly ten years—a person could be forgiven for changing. For wanting something different. Remus isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s sure it isn’t a teaching post. “I’m happy where I am,” he says, hearing the defensiveness in his own words, as well as the echo of what he said to Dorcas earlier.
Sirius frowns. “What do you do, anyway?”
“Oh.” It is strange, even after so much distance, to realize Remus has never told him this. “I work with Squibs. Helping them find work.”
Sirius nods, still watching him, a strange expression on his face. He takes a sip of tea, and doesn’t look away. “Do you like it?”
“The job?”
Sirius nods.
“It’s fine.” The words are automatic, but then, he half suspects the question was as well. There is something he wants to say, Remus thinks, something waiting just under his tongue to be spoken, but he isn’t sure what. Something about—the way Sirius is watching him, as if he doesn’t quite recognize what he’s seeing. Whatever it is Remus wants to tell him, it sits leaden in his chest. He wants Sirius to know him again, to know everything—but the telling is unbearable. There are no words for time that has slipped like sand through their fingers.
Outside the windows, the night is thick and deep. Remus wonders, in the silence, how quickly Sirius will leave this time, and, with a spark of hurt, why he keeps coming at all if it is only to go again. “Why don’t you stay tonight?” he asks.
Sirius shakes his head, opens his mouth.
“Just till morning,” Remus presses. “It’ll be a long night.”
“Longest one of the year.” Sirius gives a half-smile. “I don’t know if I should.”
Remus holds his gaze. “The Aurors aren’t going to break down the door tonight. You’ll be safe here.” He can see that Sirius wants to protest again. “Please,” he says, and the need in his voice surprises him.
By the look in Sirius’s eyes, it surprises him, too. He waits a long moment before he says, “All right, then.”
A rush of relief courses through Remus, so strong that he has to work to keep himself from—he doesn’t know what—and instead he takes Sirius’s plate and puts it in the sink. He will have to make breakfast in the morning. He ought to send some food with Sirius when he goes, he thinks, to fill in the deep caverns of his collarbone, and he catches himself thinking it with a lurch of his stomach.
Later, Remus brings spare blankets to the sitting room where Sirius takes them from him with a smile. He is wearing two of Remus’s jumpers. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad you’re staying,” Remus tells him, not entirely meaning to. Sirius gives him a quizzical look. “I think it’s probably good,” he explains, hesitant, “for you to take a break—from looking for him.”
The confusion leaves Sirius’s eyes, to be replaced by a familiar and well-worn stubbornness. “I know you don’t want me looking for him at all—”
“Well, I—I do and I don’t,” Remus interrupts. “I mean—I know why. I understand that.” Seized by a sudden desperation, he reaches out and clasps Sirius’s hand, the one that isn’t holding the blankets. “But what do you think you’re going to get out of this, Sirius?” He steps nearer, willing him to understand the fear that Remus himself can hardly comprehend. “If you find him, if you kill him—what then?”
They are so close that Remus can see it when Sirius swallows, his eyes wide. Several heartbeats come and go. And then—“I don’t know,” Sirius whispers, choked and honest, and looking shocked at the admission. “But I don’t know what else I can do. Who else I can be, if I’m not hunting him.”
He pulls his hand back and turns away, and Remus leaves him there because he knows Sirius well enough to know he won’t want Remus to see him cry. He goes to his room and sits on the edge of his own bed without moving. The house fills with the sounds of the night wind and a dripping tap. Remus sleeps fitfully. Just before dawn, he looks into the sitting room to find the couch a nest of blankets, empty and cold—the back door unlocked, the snow disturbed, a path of pawprints leading away into the trees.
1987
SIRIUS BLACK SIGHTED IN ORKNEY, MAY BE HEADED SOUTH
Remus spills tea over the Prophet and holds his breath for a week. The new year comes and goes and he breathes out, slowly. No news is good news, he reminds himself, when it comes to Sirius—and at least he is alive. Out in the cold, far from home, but alive.
1988
“Remus,” comes Sirius’s voice, almost inaudible. “Let me in.”
The floor is cold under Remus’s bare feet as he walks to the door. Through the pane of glass, thick with frost, everything is dark. He turns the knob and steps aside, and Sirius shuffles into the dimly-lit hall, snow in his hair and on his coat. “Hi,” Remus says, closing the door.
Sirius shakes his hair back and flashes Remus a grin, leaning against the wall. “Did I wake you up?”
Remus shakes his head. “Couldn’t sleep.” He looks Sirius up and down, more uncertain than he has been before, wanting to touch but not sure if he should. Drinking in the sight of him, as always. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Sirius says, shrugging. “Wanted to see you.” He offers up a strange smile, one that doesn’t sit right on his face, sending a jolt of alarm down Remus’s spine. “Could I get some tea?”
“Er—sure,” Remus says, surprised at the question and surprised at himself for agreeing. He turns and goes to the kitchen, puts a kettle on. When he looks around, he sees that Sirius hasn’t followed him. “Go sit on the couch,” he calls, adding milk the way Sirius likes. “I’ll bring it to you.”
But when he brings the tea into the other room, it is dark and empty. Remus sets the cups down and goes back into the hall. He sees, with a fresh wave of panic, Sirius huddled at the foot of the wall. As Remus approaches, he lifts his head. “Give us a hand?”
“Bloody hell,” Remus says, and hauls him to his feet. “You should’ve asked for a nap instead of tea—oh, shit.” He staggers a little, unprepared for the way Sirius is leaning on him, despite the fact that he is frighteningly light. “Sirius—?”
“I’m fine,” Sirius mumbles. “‘M just tired.”
“You’re bleeding.” Remus can feel it through his clothes, warmer than the snowmelt, sticky where their bodies are pressing together. He can’t tell where it’s coming from, can’t make out much of anything in the low light beyond Sirius’s hand clutching his elbow. He pulls Sirius to him and bears his weight. “Come on.”
In the bathroom he deposits Sirius on the closed toilet seat. Sirius slumps forward but manages to catch himself, his knuckles going white where they grip the counter. “It’s really nothing, I’ve got it under cont—”
“Shut up,” Remus snaps, his fear bubbling over. He kneels down in front of Sirius and waits until Sirius meets his gaze. There is pain there, and sheepish guilt. “What happened?”
Sirius hesitates a moment, and Remus can tell that he wants to deny that anything is the matter—and then he sighs, and gestures vaguely to his left side, where the fabric is dark and wet. “I don’t know what curse it was,” he says.
With a strangely familiar feeling of dread, Remus lifts the shirt and sees a cut, not deep but very long, snaking around the side of Sirius’s torso up to the bottom rib. He hesitates with his hand half an inch from the wound and his heart pounds in the stillness.
“That bad?” Sirius asks. Remus glances up to see him watching through half-closed eyes, his head tilted back. His chest rises and falls.
“You’re fine,” Remus says shortly. He sits back on his heels and draws his wand. “Who did it?”
“One of the Carrows.” Sirius huffs a short breath. “I think. Wearing a mask.”
It takes Remus a moment to swallow down his horror; he steadies his hand and begins to siphon the blood away. The incantation is one he knows well, as he does the sight of Sirius bleeding in front of him, and the name of Carrow. They are even wearing masks again. He shivers. “If you don’t know how they did it, then I can’t use a spell to heal it,” he says. He knows Sirius knows this. He cannot think of anything else to say. He rips Sirius’s shirt to see the wound better, and summons bandages from the cabinet with a flick of his wand.
“Remus.” Remus keeps his eyes trained on his work. “Sorry about this.”
Remus experiences a sudden and sharp spark of guilt, for snapping and for the stony silence that seems to be all he can muster. “It’s all right,” he says, knowing it’s the truth, whatever he feels. “I’ll always help you.”
The skin of Sirius’s stomach is warm under his fingers, and it moves when he breathes. He doesn’t make another noise while Remus works, not even when his hand slips and pulls the bandage too tight across the wound. It is familiar, all of it, the blood and the bindings and slowly steadying beat of his heart.
And then the job is done, the bandages stark and white against Sirius’s skin, and Remus washes his hands. He looks to Sirius, who is gazing with a vague interest at his own hands, curled loosely in his lap. All is still.
“Thank you,” Sirius says, so softly that the words do not register for several seconds. He is still looking at his hands.
“It’s all right,” Remus says again.
“Is it?”
Remus considers. It is, he thinks, all right, insofar as he is relieved that Sirius is not dying. But the fear lingers, hot and crawling under his skin. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks at length.
Sirius hesitates. “I didn’t want—to make trouble,” he says, sounding so awkward that he must know it is absurd.
Remus snorts. “You weren’t in the neighborhood, were you?”
“Er—no,” Sirius admits.
Remus glances at him, and sees Sirius drop his gaze at once. Remus wants to pull his face around, force Sirius to meet his eyes—perhaps then he would be able to read whatever truth it is that Sirius is refusing to say. He can feel the unspoken words festering between them, and it makes him sick. It makes him want to scream, to weep, to sleep for a hundred years and never look at Sirius again. And that, of course, would be unbearable too.
“You should have told me,” he says. “That you were hurt. I wouldn’t have made you leave.”
“I know,” Sirius whispers. He lifts his hands, inspects them. Begins rubbing at his bloody knuckles.
For a moment, Remus watches him. He realizes that the blood is not from the wound in his side—the skin is split on his fingers as if from a badly-thrown blow. “Let me do that,” he says, and takes Sirius’s hands in his own.
Sirius startles, freezing for an instant, and then relaxes.
Remus very carefully does not look at him as he cleans the blood away, slowly, methodically, using a scrap of unused bandage soaked in water. He thinks about the fact that Sirius was not simply passing through, a truth which he is only now realizing. The truth: that he was hurt, and didn’t want to tell Remus, and came to him anyway. He feels, suddenly, the late hour, the hard tiles under his knees, the water chilling his skin.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Remus asks. The blood is almost gone now.
Sirius clears his throat minutely. “No,” he says.
He could be lying, Remus knows, as he was before. He glances up and Sirius smiles at him for a fraction of a moment. Remus smiles back, his heart contracting. “I’m glad you came,” he says. The words stick in his throat. He is always glad, and it always hurts.
Sirius doesn’t answer immediately, but he doesn’t pull his hands away, either, though they are dripping water and cleaned of blood. “I shouldn’t have,” he says.
Remus feels his pulse in his fingers. “You’ll go soon enough anyway,” he says, bitter, the back of his eyes burning.
A long moment passes, and Sirius breathes out sharply as if he’s been struck. His hands stir in Remus’s, and Remus looks up to Sirius’s eyes, tired but clear, on his. And then Sirius surges forward, kisses Remus with an open mouth.
The world shrinks. The press of Sirius’s lips, the warmth of his body, the crisp winter smell of him—his hands, resting on Remus’s jaw and shoulder, damp from the water and trembling. Something inside of Remus shifts, fitting where it has never fit before, flaring up to fill the spaces between his ribs and warm him from the inside out.
And then, almost before Remus realizes what has happened, Sirius pulls away, curling like a dried leaf into himself, mouth and hands and even eyes gone, staring determinedly at the ground. “I’m,” he says, and lurches to his feet, though there is barely room to move. “I should leave.”
He steps almost over Remus on his way to the door, is out into the hall before Remus can scramble to his feet. “Wait,” he says, “Sirius—”
Remus catches him at the back door, grabs him by the sleeve of his coat and holds him, and he doesn’t struggle. “What the hell,” Remus says, “was that?”
“Nothing,” Sirius says, his gaze fracturing, darting anywhere and everywhere that isn’t Remus. “It wasn’t—forget it.”
“I can’t,” Remus says. He knows, already, that it will be the truth. Like a spot of blood that will not wash out, no matter how many months or years pass until Sirius stands in his doorway again. He thinks, wildly, that this will not be anything new, in the end—he is always thinking of Sirius in one way or another, always waiting for him, always wanting him. Oh.
Sirius shakes his head, contradictory, obstinate though there is nothing for him to disagree with. “I’m going,” he says to the corner of snow and dark woods visible through the half-open door. He turns his head back to Remus. “I shouldn’t have come, and I shouldn’t have—” He swallows, his throat bobbing, close in the narrow hall. Close enough to kiss. “Bye, Remus.”
He pulls himself from Remus’s grip, and Remus, feeling the wrench in his whole arm, closes his eyes against it. He hears the door swing to, the snow crunching underfoot, the crack of disapparition in the still night.
Remus cleans up the bathroom. All the spots wash out. He doesn’t sleep for a month.
1991
“And have you heard from Albus?” Arthur asks. “He keeps saying—well, dropping hints—that he might re-form the Order.”
Remus looks away, shifting his weight to the other knee, acutely aware of Arthur’s green-flamed gaze on him. “He hasn’t said anything to me about the Order,” he replies. Another letter asking Remus to teach arrived last month, but he needn’t mention that.
“Well, keep an ear out,” Arthur tells him. “Molly and I have both been approached. Not by Albus himself, true, but you never know.”
“Who?” Remus asks, interested in spite of himself, frowning.
“Marlene McKinnon,” Arthur says. “She was in there with you the first time around, wasn’t she? And her flatmate, what’s her name, Meadowes?”
Remus nods. “Dorcas.” Arthur goes on explaining, but Remus isn’t following closely. He can’t help chuckling at the thought of what Marlene would say if she heard someone call Dorcas her flatmate, and apart from that he wonders where she’s getting her information, if she’s soliciting—and then he is paying no attention at all, and instead tilting his head, listening hard for the sound to come again. There it is: a knock at the door, knuckles on wood.
“Arthur, I’ve got to go,” Remus says, standing up in front of the grate.
Arthur blinks in surprise, but doesn’t argue. “Talk later,” he says, and vanishes. The green flames flicker and die.
Remus delays a moment longer to brush the ash back onto the hearth, his stomach knotting itself intensely. Then he goes to the door and opens it, surprising Sirius mid-knock. And it is Sirius, of course, standing on the threshold, snow still falling on his shoulders and in his hair. “Happy Christmas,” he says, his breath misting in the cold.
Remus steps aside to let him in. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”
Sirius pauses in the act of pulling off his scarf. “I always come back.”
It’s almost true. Remus looks at the shape of him in the hall, tall, lean, swallowed by the same trench coat as always. The slow and careful way he moves. None of it is new. Neither is the pit in his stomach. Remus thinks: say something. He thinks: this is how you got in trouble the last time. He opens his mouth. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” Sirius says, not meeting his eyes. “I nearly didn’t come, but I thought—probably I ought to.”
It’s the stilted way he says it, and the flush creeping up his neck, that spurs Remus to speak. “I want to talk to you,” he says.
Sirius hesitates, and the flush spreads farther, coloring his cheeks. “Look,” he begins.
“You look,” Remus says. He is trying to hold his ground, to express the tangle of confusion that has enveloped him for the past year, but it’s hard to know what to say first—and hard to know anything at all with Sirius in front of him, looking pained and flustered and terribly afraid. “What was that? Last year?”
There is another pause. “I want to say,” Sirius says, cautious, halting, “I know I’ve—made a mess of things.”
“You left,” Remus says. “You kissed me”—he swallows hard—“and then you walked out the door for a year. Again.” He sees Sirius wince, and it hurts him somewhere deep. He reaches out and catches Sirius’s hand where it is picking anxiously at the cuff of his sleeve. “Sirius. Would you look at me?”
Sirius tears his eyes from their joined hands and meets Remus’s gaze. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, choked.
“I’m glad you did,” Remus tells him. Sirius throws him a look full of disbelief. “Honest,” Remus says. “Not that you left. But I don’t think I would’ve realized, without you.” He looks at Sirius, standing there lost, all the glorious wasteland of their lives. “That I love you.”
He can see that Sirius doesn’t understand, that he is still afraid. So Remus does the only thing he can think to do, and steps forward to kiss him. Softly, gently, lighter than snowflakes. He pulls back minutely, and the air trembles between them. “I love you,” Remus says again, quiet as he can.
Sirius gazes back at him, stricken.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Remus tells him, something like tears sticking in his throat. He leans in to kiss him again, and this time Sirius returns it. Remus kisses him against the wall next to the coathooks, snow melting where his hands are in Sirius’s hair, learning the feel of him in a way he never has before.
When they separate, Sirius rests their foreheads together. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should’ve kissed you sooner.”
A laugh escapes Remus, and he hears Sirius chuckle as well, low in his ears. His face is so thin beneath Remus’s hands, his cheekbones so sharp. But he’s here. “Will you stay?” he asks, barely more than a whisper.
“Overnight?”
“No.” When Remus shakes his head, Sirius moves as well, they are so close together. “I mean, will you stay with me.”
Sirius pulls back, and Remus’s hands fall off him. Like a wound, he feels the absence, like an amputation. There is a look of something like despair on Sirius’s face. “I can’t,” he says.
“You’re not going to find Peter,” Remus says. “It’s been ten years—Sirius, there are a billion rats in the world.”
“I have to look,” Sirius says, desperate, eyes shining. “I’ll come back, I—”
“I can’t,” Remus begins, and has to stop to take a breath. “I can’t do this, Sirius.” He swallows. “Every time you leave, I wonder if you’ve died. If I’ll ever see you again. And I love you, and I want you in my life”—the truth, the simplest truth, which he’s known for ten years and even longer—“but I can’t keep waiting for you.”
“Remus.” Sirius’s voice is soft, but he isn’t pleading. “I’m sorry,” he says again.
“I know you are. So am I.” Remus lifts his hand to touch Sirius’s cheek, and Sirius closes his eyes. “I want you to come back.” He does, the way he wants to take another breath after each exhale, the way he wants his heart to keep beating. “But only if you’ll stay.”
Sirius lets out the barest of sighs and pulls away. “I wish I could promise that,” he says. “But I can’t. Not tonight.” He pulls his scarf from the hook, puts his hand on the doorknob. There are tears on his cheeks, snow melting in his hair.
“You won’t find him,” Remus tells him.
“I have to try.” Sirius tears his gaze from Remus and then glances back again, something unspoken teetering on his lips—and then he turns.
“See you later,” Remus says when he is nearly out the door.
Sirius hesitates, his hand on the frame. “See you,” he says. He almost—but not quite—turns back inside, the flash of his eyes and a smile in the half-dark, fresh snowflakes gusting in.
1992
Halfway up the path, Remus stops. The pines are a row of dark sentries behind him, cold enough that they creak with ice, below his feet the deep snow, and ahead of him the house: with a light in one window, flickering dim. Remus considers going back the way he came, perhaps apparating directly back to Hogsmeade, but he does not think he wants to face Dumbledore so soon after a defeat. He pulls out his wand and casts a charm to silence his footsteps, then proceeds.
The door makes no sound as he slips inside. The hall is dark—each doorway a black cavern—but the light is in the kitchen, he sees, shivering golden on the wall. He inches forward. Someone has lit a fire on the hearth, which has sat unused for most of the past eleven years, someone huddled on the ground in front of it, facing the flames.
“Did you kill him?” Remus asks, all his body seizing as if with cold, as if in death.
Sirius turns, choking on a gasp, before falling back to his knees with a hand on his chest. “Remus,” he breathes, “God.”
Remus drops to his knees beside the fire, the warmth of it melting the snow on his clothes. “Are you hurt?” he asks, another fear making itself known.
“No,” Sirius says, shaking his head. “No, I’m all right.”
Nevertheless, Remus reaches out and takes his hand, making sure in the wild and panicked part of his brain that Sirius is real. “I didn’t think,” he says, clamping down on the lingering horror, “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I’m sorry,” Sirius says, as he always does.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Remus tells him, still clutching his hand. “Even when I don’t want to think about you, I’m thinking about you. Where you are and what you might be doing. I’m always wondering if you’re still alive.”
“I’m alive,” Sirius says, “Remus, I’m here.” He takes Remus’s other hand in his own and holds it fast. “And I’m not leaving.”
Remus gazes at Sirius in the flickering light. “You found him?”
The eternal second before Sirius answers is like the nightmare Remus has had for years, where he waits in the middle of the night for some unknown thing that could come at any moment but which never does. The interminable suspense—the sickening fear.
“No,” Sirius says. “I gave up.” He says it simply, without pride or resentment.
Remus searches his face. “You—what?” He cannot understand it.
“I gave up,” Sirius repeats. “I haven’t caught his trail in years.” He squeezes Remus’s hands. “And I’m tired of running.”
“Oh.” Remus sinks into his touch, lets it ground him. The firelight flickers over Sirius’s face in a way that makes him both familiar and a stranger—but warm, and close.
Then Sirius shifts, and suddenly he is holding Remus, pulling him close, and Remus rests his chin on Sirius’s shoulder. When he takes a breath, both their chests move together. “That’s all I was doing, you know,” Sirius tells him, soft, in his ear. “Running. All this time.”
“Running from me?” Remus murmurs.
He feels it when Sirius nods. His hands are knotted in the fabric of Remus’s cloak. “From anything that meant standing still. But I couldn’t quite—I could never quite resist coming back. Even if it was only for a night.” Sirius chuckles once, a short huff of breath. “I had to see you.”
Remus crushes Sirius to him, closer, closer. He thinks he may die of this: the solid touch and the knowledge that it will last. “I was so happy to see you,” he whispers. “Every time. But I always just wanted you to stay.”
Sirius pulls back slightly, kisses Remus on the cheek. “I can promise you, this time I will,” he says.
Remus turns his head and kisses him in return, on the mouth, running his fingers through Sirius’s hair, resting his other hand against his fire-warmed jaw. He believes it.
Author/Artist:
blanketed_in_starsRecipient: [Unknown site tag]
Rating: T
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *descriptions of injuries, canonical (non r/s) character death*
Word count: 10,950
Summary: Snapshots of 1981-1992, if Sirius was on the run instead of in Azkaban
Notes: Much love to Chromat1cs for providing the lovely prompts - I did my best to write for the second one, "a hearth gone cold but just about to be warmed again," and also took a lot of inspiration from Osvaldo Golijov's "Omaramor" as per the wild card suggestion. I truly hope you enjoy <3 And thank you a thousand times over to my beta, Audrey, who saved this story from remaining the dumpster fire it first appeared to be!
1978
“And I’m going to see you—both of you—at that meeting in January,” James says, pointing imperiously even with one foot in the fireplace. “Dumbledore says we need everyone we can get and you know Wormtail won’t go alone.”
“They’ll be there,” Lily says, elbowing him. When James turns to step fully onto the hearth, she gives Remus a pointed look. “Happy Christmas again. Stay warm.”
“Bye,” Remus says, and when James and Lily have vanished in a swirl of green flames he turns back to face the empty flat. Well—not quite empty. Sirius grins at him from the couch, and the low light gleams against the window panes, on the strands of hair that fall into his face. “Don’t give me that look,” Remus tells him. He waves his wand at the table, sending the plates floating over and stacking themselves in the sink. “I know what you’re doing.”
Sirius watches him, that lazy, late-night gaze, firewhiskey a flush in his cheeks. “What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to get me to let you stay the night,” Remus says. “Like last year, when, if I recall correctly, you ate the last of my biscuits, snored all night, and borrowed a pair of socks and then lost one of them.” He tosses a disapproving look in Sirius’s direction. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Ah, Moony.” Sirius gets up and goes to the now-empty fireplace, brushes some of the ash back inside the grate. He points his wand and lights a normal fire, the red flames licking quickly up the half-burned logs. Snow falls ever-thicker outside the dark windows. “We both ate the biscuits.”
Remus snorts.
“And besides,” Sirius continues, “I’ve already eaten them all this year.” Then he pulls something small and brightly-colored from his pocket and tosses it to Remus. “Happy Christmas.”
Unprepared, Remus catches it by the tips of his fingers. He finds he is holding a small package wrapped in colorful paper, with a lopsided bow. He looks up at Sirius, accusatory. “We said we weren’t doing presents.”
“Just open it,” Sirius says.
So Remus does, pulling on the ribbon and letting the paper fall away. Inside he finds—a box of every-flavor beans. “You shouldn’t have,” he deadpans.
Sirius smiles that blinding smile again. “Half-off at the corner shop.”
He’s preening so absurdly that Remus has to laugh. He pockets the box, still chuckling, and Vanishes the crumbs from dinner that still litter the table. “I mean it,” he says at length. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I know,” Sirius says, matching his quiet tone. “But I wanted to.” When Remus looks at him, he shrugs. “Who knows where we’ll be next Christmas?”
This is not, Remus thinks, what he wanted from the evening. It’s even more disappointing because the same questions have been plagueing him as well ever since they left school. And it’s not just the war that they all seem to be joining—Peter turns down half their invitations, including tonight; James and Lily are engaged. Remus hitches a smile back on his face and meets Sirius’s gaze. “You know where I’ll be.” He inclines his head, indicating the flat.
Sirius looks around. “Merlin, Moony, I hope not. You’d be warmer in an igloo.”
“You shut up about my place,” Remus says, pretending to glare at him. But it breaks, and he smiles for real. “I suppose you are staying the night, then?”
“If you’ll have me,” Sirius says, rueful.
“I can’t turn you out in a blizzard,” Remus sighs. He catches Sirius’s smirk as he turns away.
He fetches blankets from the closet in the hall, pauses to close the tap that someone has left dripping in the bathroom. For just a moment, he stops, allows himself to savor the moment: he and Sirius, alone as they were all through the last year when James was sneaking out to see Lily and Peter was feverishly studying. Remus can almost pretend that nothing has changed.
When he goes back to the main room, he finds Sirius sitting cross-legged by the fire, staring into the flames. Remus sits down beside him, accidentally bumping knees. Sirius shifts minutely away. “Knut for your thoughts,” Remus prompts when Sirius does not look around.
“Oh, they’re nothing special,” Sirius says. “Just thinking.”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
Sirius glances at him, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I was thinking about the war,” he says. “About what Dumbledore said. That we’re going to need everyone we can get.” The firelight warms his face, makes his features softer. “Suppose that means us, too.”
“Well, we’re already members of the Order,” Remus points out.
“You know what I mean.”
Uncomfortably, Remus does. He’s familiar with this sort of creeping anxiety, a sense of something on the horizon. It’s been hanging over them for years. And, yes, they’re in the Order—but they’ve yet to do much of anything beyond relay messages, and even that has been only within London. “I think it’s important that we help,” he begins, uncertain, the words foreign in his mouth.
“Of course it’s important,” Sirius says. “I know it’s—I’m not saying—I just mean,” he says, shaking his head, “do you think we’re going to have to—I don’t know.” He falters suddenly, his fingers picking at the cuff of his sleeve the way they always do, never still for a moment.
“Are you scared?” Remus asks.
Again, Sirius’s gaze flicks to him. “Have to be bloody stupid not to be, don’t you think?”
This is a Sirius that Remus has only glimpsed a handful of times—Sirius disarmed, somehow, setting down his bravado and pride. Remus has learned to handle these moments like fragile things that must be touched gently. But he doesn’t know how to be gentle with this. “Sometimes I can’t believe we ever signed up for any of this,” he agrees.
Though it can’t possibly be much comfort, Sirius nods. “And it’s getting worse out there.”
With his eyes trained on the fire once more, Sirius looks strangely distant, the flames painting his face into something unfamiliar. “I think you’re right,” Remus says. “We’re going to have to do more for the Order. It’s going to be dangerous.” Sirius turns his head, looking at Remus with a pained, frustrated expression. “But at least it’ll give James something to talk about besides Quidditch.”
Sirius huffs out a laugh and smiles, finally. It makes his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Moony. Jesus Christ.”
Remus laughs with him, bumping their shoulders together. “And it’s like I said. I’m not going anywhere.”
The room is close, the fire warm and bright. “Thank God for that,” Sirius says. He is looking at Remus in a way he doesn’t think he’s seen before, something unspoken hiding in his eyes. “You’d better not.”
Remus shrugs. He is flushing, though he pretends to himself that it’s the heat of the fire. “Can’t leave you to fend for yourself, anyway.”
Sirius snorts, but that strange expression doesn’t leave his eyes. “You’ve got to get a better hobby than looking after me.”
“I like looking after you,” Remus says frankly, slightly surprised to find that it’s true. His flush deepens. “You’re my best mate.”
“Ah.” Sirius smirks at him, a sharpness to his smile. “Is that all.”
“You’re an idiot,” Remus tells him, fondly, but confused. “Do I need a better reason?”
“I thought—the money, maybe.”
Remus gives his knee a shove, chuckling. “And yet you’re staying at my flat.”
“Well. No sense in both of us being alone.” And Sirius looks at him simply, earnestly, only half-smiling—that strange nameless secret still in his eyes, but Remus knows him anyway.
1981
A rap on the window, nearly lost in the wild October wind. “Moony.”
Remus slides the sash up, blinking. The night is dark, the brightest thing the flickering streetlamp halfway down the block; it is just after midnight—and Sirius is crouched on the fire escape outside his London flat. “What are you—?”
“I can’t stay,” Sirius says, and his voice is a sound Remus has never heard, raw and choked, his face a mask with frightening eyes. “I can’t—but—Moony, Peter’s the spy. It’s not me.”
One hand, Remus notices, is trembling, the other clutching the metal rail. “Peter?” he repeats, the grogginess rapidly fading, turning to a spark of fear. “What do you mean?”
Sirius twists around to peer down the empty street, then turns back. “I’ve got to find him. I know what you think—what it’ll look like—but I swear, it isn’t me.”
Remus shakes his head, reaches out as if he could pull Sirius into talking sense. “I don’t understand. What—where are you going?” For Sirius has stepped away to the edge of the fire escape, out of reach unless Remus were to lean out of the window entirely.
“I’ve got to find him,” Sirius says again. The wind tugs at his robes and hair, and in the dim light his eyes are cavernous. “I’m sorry, I wish I could explain—but, please, you have to believe me.”
“I do,” Remus says, hardly knowing what he’s agreeing to. “I believe you.”
Sirius gives him a searching look. “Whatever you see, I didn’t do it.”
“All right. Please come inside.”
“I can’t.” Then Sirius turns, and vanishes with a crack. The streetlamp flickers.
1982
Remus turns his collar up against the snow, falling from the bare branches under its own weight. He wishes he could find the forest peaceful, but the silence and blank whiteness feel strangely ominous—a ghost of the war, barely three months over, haunting him. Remus gives himself a wry smile. It’s just winter.
And then the silence splits and the snow goes flying. Remus spins on the spot as if trying to Apparate himself, searching for whoever has just arrived—and then he spots Sirius in the purpling twilight, shaking a fresh tumble of snow out of his hair and drowning in an oversized Muggle trench coat. The air leaves his lungs.
“Hello,” Sirius says into the renewed, suddenly stifling woodland stillness.
The sound of his voice brings Remus to his senses. He fumbles with numb fingers for his wand and points it at Sirius. “Fuck,” he says, “oh my God.” He sucks in a breath that is so cold it hurts.
Sirius looks between Remus and the wand he’s holding as if putting together a puzzle. “I didn’t do it,” he says, slowly raising his hands. “I told you. It wasn’t me.”
“Prove it,” Remus says, hating and loving the sight of him. A part of him hadn’t wanted this moment—had hoped, as the days and then weeks went by with no appearance, that it would never come at all—but he feels now, almost, a sense of fearful relief.
“I—I can’t,” Sirius stammers, and then, as Remus shifts his grip on the wand, “honestly, Moony!”
“I should turn you in,” Remus breathes. The feeling of relief is, horribly, growing, something brittle in his voice and breath, and he can’t bear it. He can’t hear this.
“I’ll explain,” Sirius says, a note of pleading in his voice. “But could we go somewhere—a bit warmer?”
Remus blinks, and looks at him. The snow lingering in his hair, too cold to melt. The damp at the hem of his coat, his thin and worn shoes which Remus recognizes from another life. His hands are still shaking.
Half an hour later they are at the table in Remus’s kitchen, a small fire crackling in the grate, the first Remus has bothered to light since he came to the cottage. Night is falling quickly outside the window. Sirius has lapsed, finally, into silence, and Remus stares at the scratched table. He wants to believe it. He wants it to be true. “I don’t understand,” he says, “why you didn’t tell me.”
“I tried.” Sirius’s hands rest on the table, and Remus looks at them rather than his face. Long fingers, chapped skin on the knuckles. “I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s February,” Remus bursts out. His voice is loud enough that it doesn’t tremble. “You couldn’t’ve—sent an owl?”
By mistake, he is looking at Sirius, whose expression is pained. “Don’t you read the paper? I’ve been on the run,” he says. “I shouldn’t even be here. I can’t stay long.”
Like snowflakes, the time, melting away before it is truly theirs. “Did you know what he’d do?” Remus asks desperately. The question comes out more sharply than he intends, and he can see how it cuts, but he can’t take it back.
“God, Remus, no,” Sirius says, going pale. “I would’ve never agreed to it. Of course not.”
And Remus does believe him. How could he not, that breaking voice, the hands stretching out toward him as if afraid to touch, something fragile in his eyes? “Okay,” he says, and his breath runs away from him like a wild thing, impossible to catch. “Okay.”
Sirius watches him, wary, starved. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t.” Remus doesn’t think he can say more, isn’t sure what he would want to say even if he could get the words out. He doesn’t want to talk about that night, but it swells to fill his mind, the long hours in the black after Sirius had left and the news that came at dawn, the terrible grief and the bleak joy. He doesn’t know what there is to tell about all the time that followed, grey winter without a sun. Looking at Sirius, he thinks he may have been the better-off of the two of them, impossible as that seems. “Where are you staying?” he asks.
Sirius shrugs. “Wherever I can.” Then, as if he senses what Remus is thinking, he shakes his head. “Not here.”
“I’ve got a spare room,” Remus argues.
“There’s a price on my head,” Sirius replies. “I can’t do that to you.”
Remus hesitates. “Where will you go?”
A smile flickers at the edge of Sirius’s mouth—a chilling smile with a strange bite, one that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m still looking for Peter,” he says.
“Someplace warm, I hope,” Remus says. He half-hopes he can ignore the last statement and the expression on Sirius’s face.
Sirius glances at the fire, crackling away. “Not particularly,” he says softly, “no.”
Hearing his voice, seeing him here, and like this—it hurts Remus in ways he didn’t know he could hurt anymore. He wants to gather Sirius to him and hold him there. He wants to tell him to forget everything that has happened to them. The last three months, he feels, have been as long as years. And now Sirius is here, and about to leave, again. “I kept thinking about you,” he says—sudden, not quite meaning to speak.
Sirius’s gaze turns to him, suddenly blank-faced.
“I kept wondering where you were,” Remus explains. Now that he has begun he supposes he ought to continue, but he already regrets it. “The Aurors are looking for you everywhere.”
“Oh. I know.” Sirius lifts his chin, and for the first time Remus sees a hint of his old face, the charm and that sharp, blinding pride. “Don’t worry. I’ve got the jump on them.”
“I know you have.” He’s made it this far, after all. And yet Remus wonders—fears—and can’t say it.
Sirius looks at him, considering. “I’ll come back,” he says. “I promise.”
“You promise,” Remus repeats, bitter in spite of himself.
“Yeah,” Sirius says, and curiously, there is no heat in his voice. “I do.”
“Good,” Remus says. He is not angry, he realizes with some surprise, though he almost wants to be—or if he is angry, it is not at Sirius. His anger is something outside of himself, beyond this room. Somewhere out in the cold, in the trees and the frozen rivers.
Sirius goes before the moon is fully risen, bounding away in the deepening snow, his tail wagging absurdly. Remus looks after him, not smiling, but with that brittle sensation in all his limbs. He goes inside and puts on another layer, pours out Sirius’s half-drunk cup of tea, washes up, douses the fire. He waits.
And waits.
And waits.
And waits.
1983
The evening is cold beyond reckoning, and strangely silent: in the house, Remus startles at the smallest noise, a drip from the tap or the rustle of cloth when he shifts in his seat. Outside, the night draws in, the very air seeming to crackle with the chill. Remus breathes on his fingers to warm them and sets his quill back to the parchment.
The letter from Dumbledore had been a shock, but not a wholly unwelcome one—though Remus had fought down a powerful fear at the sight of that slanted, looping script. There is much still to do, and fewer hands now to do it. As if Remus isn’t aware, as if he has been on holiday the last two years. As if he has not given everything, three times over. Remus can’t think of a way to answer Dumbledore that will ring true without stating the truth: that he is, in the end, simply unbearably tired.
Dear Albus, he writes, and pauses. Merlin, this is impossible. He wishes he could ask Lily, who was always the better writer—better speaker, too—except of course that if Lily were here, there would be no need to write. He sighs, presses his fingers to his temples.
The knock on the door makes Remus jump. He stands, stubbing his stockinged toe on the desk, and goes to open the door. A gust of freezing air greets him, and he barely has time to register that it is Sirius standing on his stoop before Sirius has hurried inside, shut the door behind him, and pointed his wand at it. He is muttering incantations that Remus can’t quite hear, and his hair hangs in his face.
“What’s going on?” Remus asks, the shock catching up to him, an almost reflexive panic making his heart pound.
Sirius glances over to Remus. “Everything’s fine,” he says quickly, then resumes his spell. Remus recognizes the words now: an warding incantation.
When he finally stops, Remus can’t decide which question he wants to ask first. “Whose wand is that?” he says at length.
As if he had forgotten it, Sirius glances at the wand. “I don’t know. I stole it from a shop.”
Remus nods. There seems to be little point in worrying about this when he read in the paper this morning that Sirius is now wanted as far away as Iceland. He wants to know what brings Sirius here, whether he’s found Peter, where he has come from. He wants to hold him close and never let go. “Are you hungry?” he asks, swallowing it all down.
Sirius sits at the table with his cup of tea as Remus lights the fire and heats their food, and Remus has to force himself not to glance at him constantly, twisting his head to look over his shoulder like a fugitive himself. Just over twelve months since the last time they spoke, not a single word, and now—the last five minutes don’t seem to fit into his life, the quiet, slow days he’s been living.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Remus says. As soon as he says it he feels guilty, well aware of how like an accusation it sounds—and it is an accusation, in part. But he can’t take it back. “I know you can’t owl ahead,” he continues, “it’s just—” He falters. Turns around. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, “but I don’t understand why.”
From his seat at the table, Sirius looks surprised at the question. “It’s cold outside,” he says. “And I missed you.”
“You could have come earlier,” Remus tells him, brusque without meaning to be. He turns back to the stove and busies himself with ladling the stew into two bowls. Out of politeness, though he’s already eaten.
“I wanted to,” Sirius says from behind him. “A dozen times, probably more.”
Has he thought about coming here, Remus wonders, as much as Remus himself has thought about slinging a pack over his shoulder and going to look for him? He turns and hands Sirius his bowl, settles into the chair across from him. “Why didn’t you?”
Sirius picks up his steaming spoonful of stew but doesn’t eat it. “I don’t like to stay in one place too long,” he says. “Or come back to the same spot too often. It’s not safe.” The corner of his mouth quirks, unexpected. “Like the contact points, in the war.”
Remus remembers. The locations for delivering messages, meeting the next patrol shift, anything, had changed constantly all throughout the war, rarely using the same street corner twice. As good a way as any of keeping the Death Eaters guessing. But when the street corner is his own, he thinks, it’s strange to be kept in the dark. Even if by necessity. “I understand,” is all he says.
A silence falls then while they eat, Sirius scuffing his toe against the leg of the table, which has developed a wobble. “Nice place, this,” Sirius says, nodding to indicate the room as a whole.
Remus looks around. “Is it?”
“Better than your flat.”
Again, the hint of a smile, almost alarming in how quickly it comes and goes. Remus has to admit that it’s true: he has more space here, a better view, pipes that don’t freeze in winter. The sentinel pines at the edge of the field enshrine his cottage in deep green solitude—but there is also no one to hurt. “I thought I’d hate it out here,” he confesses, “but I don’t. Usually.”
Sirius tilts his head to one side. “You’re living alone still?”
“Yeah.” Remus taps his fingers on the table, gazes into the flames. “Marlene lived with me for a while, but—”
“Marlene? McKinnon, you mean?”
There is a sudden tightness in Remus’s throat. He cannot believe they’re sitting here and talking about the house, their friends, as if they’ve simply been living in different countries for two and a half years. As if all that has come between them is time. And yet—what else can he say? What else is left, if their old lives are beyond recovery and the pain itself is unspeakable? Remus forces himself to smile. “Yeah, we were together. For a couple months,” he adds in answer to the question in Sirius’s eyes.
“When did that start?” Sirius demands.
“Er, summer of eighty-two.”
“You scare her off?”
Remus swallows. “Her whole family died. We kind of fell apart after that.” He hates the way the words just sit there, once spoken, a piece of the truth too jagged to ignore. He did not want to say it to Sirius, to force the knowledge on him, some strange echo of the horror that they once lived day to day. “She was going to go home for her sister’s birthday, but Death Eaters killed them all.” When Remus glances up he sees that there are tears in Sirius’s eyes. It is startling in a way that nothing else has been so far. “Must have been one of the last groups still out for revenge after the war, we thought.”
“Must have been,” Sirius agrees weakly. He seems—beyond shocked—young, somehow, younger than Remus, as if he has been hidden from the horror so far and is just now seeing it, which could not be farther from the truth. He sits turned half away, blinking rapidly at the window and the falling snow.
“I thought you might have known,” Remus says softly. “It was in the papers.”
Sirius passes a hand quickly over his face, then clasps both hands together, so tightly that Remus can see his knuckles go white. “I didn’t,” he begins, and clears his throat. “I haven’t read the papers. I thought—I thought it was over.” He turns his face toward Remus, beseeching. “For everyone else.”
“It’s... better than before.” Remus shakes his head, at a loss for what to tell him. “She’s living with Dorcas now, in Kent.” He offers up a smile. “They’re happy.”
Sirius returns it, wavering slightly. The dregs of their stew sit untouched between them, gone cold, and then Sirius says, “And—and you?” He shifts his hands on the table. “Are you happy?”
He asks it so carefully, almost formally. Remus considers telling him he’s better than before, or telling him about the picture he saw of Harry last month and how green his eyes are, or telling him off for asking. To say any of that, though, seems somehow just as bad as speaking about the past. He dredges up the only truth he can bear. “I am tonight.”
“Oh,” Sirius says, nodding. “That’s good.” His eyes are lowered to the table, but the smile lingers at the edge of his mouth.
Remus takes the opportunity to look at him: really look, though he knows Sirius must be able to tell, though there is the danger that he will glance up at any moment. What he sees is a strange half-ghost, something he thought was dead but isn’t. The Sirius he used to know, flickering beneath the shape of the thin, quiet man sitting across from him. He moves the same as always, but the set of his shoulders is wrong.
Then Sirius does look up, and Remus glances away at once. “What?” Sirius asks.
Remus shrugs. He doesn’t want to tell Sirius what he thinks, the warring unfamiliarity and fondness pulling tight in his chest. “Are you still looking for Peter?” he asks. “How’s it going?”
Sirius’s gaze darkens. “No luck yet,” he says, “but I’ll find him.” The words hold a hint of a growl.
It chills Remus to hear it. It isn’t that he can’t understand the fierce shadow in Sirius’s eyes, whatever it is that makes his hands clench and unclench on the table. He understands it all too well—he recognizes it in himself, something he doesn’t like to look at, sitting heavy in the pit of his stomach. “What will you do to him?” he asks.
“I was thinking I’d kill him,” Sirius says, casual, almost careless.
Remus reaches out—to take his hand, to grip his shoulder, he doesn’t know—and ends up gathering both their empty bowls and bringing them to the sink. “He deserves it,” he agrees, running the tap, adding soap.
Sirius must sense his hesitation. “But?” he prompts.
Remus presses his lips together. “But I—I wonder if maybe you—shouldn’t,” he begins, haltingly.
“You’re joking,” Sirius scoffs. “He doesn’t deserve anything else, he—he betrayed us, Moony, he killed—”
“I know,” Remus snaps, glad he is turned away, frightened of what might show on his face if he were not. “I know what he did.” His hands are shaking in the water. He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself, but it hardly helps the wild and urgent sensation threatening to close off his throat. “I just—I don’t think—” He falters again. He isn’t sure what he’s trying to say, doesn’t know how to put into words the nameless fear filling his lungs.
Sirius is quiet, so quiet that Remus thinks he may have snuck back out into the night. He stays where he is, not looking around, his heart pounding.
And then he hears Sirius’s chair scrape back from the table and his footsteps come closer. Sirius stands next to him and places his empty mug on the counter. “I have to find him,” he says, just as quiet as before, but more gently. “I don’t know how else to make it right.”
This, too, Remus understands. He resumes his washing of their dishes, adding the mug to the water and cleaning that as well. A memory surfaces of a similar scene—in his old flat, washing while James dried, frost on the windowpanes, Lily and Sirius playing a game of chess behind them—and he fights the urge to lean into Sirius and let himself melt away against the only person left who knows all the things he knows. Fights the urge because he can’t explain it, and because the pain in his throat has reached a terrible sharpness.
They set the bowls and cup on the rack to dry. It is past midnight, and Sirius stands strangely stiff in the little kitchen, as if he’s forgotten what he was about to do. Remus looks at him and his heart sinks. He knows already, somehow—or perhaps he never stopped waiting for this moment. “You’re leaving?” he says, not really asking.
Sirius nods without meeting his eyes. “I can’t risk staying longer,” he says. Then he squares his shoulders and brushes his hair back, and smiles. “Thanks for the food. And the tea.”
“Of course.” Remus sees Sirius’s eyes flick to the door, but he can’t bring himself to move, to make this end sooner than it must. Fear fills the kitchen, and something else, sweet, pressing in against the inky windows. “Make sure you come back,” Remus tells him.
Sirius’s smile grows, startled and genuine: his face falls back into the lines of it so easily. “I promise,” he says.
There is a softness around his eyes that Remus remembers, almost as if from a dream. He will miss this, he thinks. He’s missed it for so long already. Sirius takes a step toward the hall, his tall body thin down to the bones, his gaze still on Remus’s face. Remus steps after him. “Do you—if you want,” he says, “I could help you look for Peter.” He doesn’t know what makes him say it—doesn’t think he means it, even.
“No,” Sirius says at once. He glances around the at the kitchen, the pots and pans, the crooked cabinet door. He reaches out, quick, and clasps Remus’s hand, gives it a squeeze. Then he steps away toward the back door and the waiting night. “You stay here, Moony. Don’t worry about me.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Remus says, too late. The door swings shut, buffeting in the chill air, making him shiver.
1984
In the middle of the night, Remus opens his eyes to darkness, the shapes of the bedroom turned unfamiliar in the gloom. He sits up before he realizes what woke him: some faint sound which he thinks he still hears, a knocking from outside. His chest clenches tight. Sirius.
But there’s no one at the door when Remus shuffles down the hall to open it. He peers out into the night, then goes to the back door and tries there. All he can see is blank white snow, glowing faintly in the sliver of moon that hangs over the trees. But he can still hear the knocking—what if, he thinks, a horrible twist in his gut, Sirius is hurt somewhere just out of sight?
He fumbles into his boots and yanks on a cloak, then stumbles out into the snow. It comes up past his ankles, nearly to his knees where the drifts have blown. He holds his lit wand out in front of him. “Sirius,” he calls, soft in the still night, though there is no one else around to hear.
No answer comes out of the black that presses in at the edges of the wandlight. Remus trudges a cautious path around the corner of the cottage, scanning the ground for footprints, listening hard for any sound. His fingers are numbing; the wind is mild, but he thinks it would be bitingly sharp after not too long, particularly if hurt or hungry—“Sirius, are you there?” he calls again.
And then he sees it—blown against the side of the house, a large knobby branch blown bare of needles, knocking against the wall whenever the wind gusts. Remus stares at it a moment, his wand raised, relief and disappointment warring painfully inside him. He turns away, strains his eyes to see beyond the circle of wandlight to the curtain of trees. Nothing moves in the darkness, and he knows that if he called again, all he would get in response would be his own echo off the snow, and perhaps a few icy flakes blown back at him. Nevertheless, he pulls his cloak tight about himself and waits—just a few minutes more.
1986
“Come visit again before the new year,” Marlene says, pressing Remus’s hand with her usual firmness. “Dorcas whinges every time you leave and I don’t want to hear it over the holidays.”
“I can’t help it if he’s a better cook than you,” comes Dorcas’s voice from the other room.
Remus grins while Marlene pulls a face. “I could teach you,” he offers, as he does every year.
“Better not.” Marlene hands him his scarf. “I’d burn the place down.”
Dorcas walks back in, an envelope in her hands. “And then he wouldn’t visit anymore.” She leans into Marlene’s one-armed hug while leveling an accusatory gaze at Remus. “I worry about you, you know, living all alone out there. Hestia’s still looking for a flatmate—”
“Thanks.” Remus cuts her off, smiling so she knows it’s not a snub. “But I like it where I am.”
“Well. If you’re sure.” Dorcas smiles back, her eyes crinkling. Then she holds out the letter to him: yellow parchment, a dark and familiar seal. “Dumbledore dropped by. Said this was for you?” She quirks an eyebrow.
Remus takes the letter and shoves it inside his cloak, that old out-of-place feeling rearing its head although the Dumbledore is nowhere in sight. “Can’t be that important if he left it with the two of you,” he says.
This has the intended effect: Dorcas gasps in mock outrage, and Marlene rolls her eyes. “Happy Christmas, Remus.” She leans in and kisses him on the cheek.
“You, too.” They shoo him out the door and he walks quickly across the lot, pausing to wave back at their lighted windows before he turns the corner and disapparates.
He’s still smiling faintly, flushed from the lingering warmth of their house, when he materializes at the fringe of the trees. The field is dark, the house empty, and Remus concentrates on not losing his footing on the slippery path to the door. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a long shadow unfold out of the blackness, sending his pulse racing.
“It’s me,” the shadow says.
“Christ,” Remus coughs out. He releases the handle of his wand and pulls his hand out of his pocket.
“Where were you?”
“Kent. Dorcas and Marlene’s.” He hesitates, then unlocks the door. “Come on in.”
Shock of a different kind spreads through him as he takes off his scarf and cloak in the hall, a feeling as if everything has shifted slightly, and not in an entirely bad way. He takes Sirius’s coat and hangs that up, too, and then they stand looking at one another. “Oh, hell,” Remus says, and embraces Sirius, holds him tightly, rests his chin on his shoulder. His heart swells within him.
After a moment’s hesitation, Sirius’s hands come up to rest on his back, very lightly, like birds. “Hi,” he says, speaking into Remus’s sweater.
Remus knows he ought to let go, but can’t quite. “I thought,” he says, and forces himself to be quiet. He doesn’t want to say that aloud, not now. He releases Sirius and steps back.
The look Sirius gives him makes it clear that he knows what Remus thought. “Sorry I took so long,” he says.
“It’s all right.” Remus releases a breath he hadn’t meant to hold, unable to stop himself from staring at Sirius, cataloguing the changes in his appearance—his hair growing longer, a scar across his knuckles—and the things that have stayed the same. The low light settling in the hollows of his cheeks and throat, the dirt under his fingernails. He turns away and retrieves the letter from his cloak, hurries into the kitchen where he tosses it on the table. “So,” he says, turning around. Sirius stands in the doorway. “What’s going on?”
Sirius shrugs. He takes his usual seat at the table, stretching his fingers out against the wood. “Haven’t found Peter yet,” he says.
Remus frowns, the old fear creeping in, the worry which has hardly left him these three years. He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean—that. Just—how are you?”
“I’m fine.” Sirius smiles, a ghost of a thing at odds with how thin he has become. And there is a deeper frailness to him, a brittle urgency even when sitting still. “Famished, though.”
“Right. Of course.” Remus turns around and taps the kettle with his wand, heats a pan, puts bread in to toast and sprinkles cheese on top. Quick motions, without thinking. He closes his eyes then, standing at the stove, a hot, bitter feeling in his stomach. Sirius’s presence in the house is an ember under his skin. And it isn’t—it isn’t bad, but it hurts. As always, the image returns to him unbidden: Sirius in the night, his mask-like face, his voice a torn and twisted thing. He shudders.
“What’s this?” Sirius says.
Remus looks over his shoulder to see him picking up the envelope. “Not quite sure,” he says. “It’s from Dumbledore.” But he doesn’t want to think about that, either. He pours tea and flips Sirius’s onto a plate when the cheese has melted.
Remus studies the scratches in the tabletop while Sirius eats. He wonders how many times they will do this—Sirius arriving in the dead of night, explaining little or nothing at all, in a state of vague disrepair, eating the food Remus gives him and staying just long enough to leave a mark. Since they last saw each other, Remus has tried not to contemplate that sort of future, and he still finds it hard to imagine. Hard to trust, given all that has come between them. But he knows that if Sirius comes to him, he’ll let him in; if he’s hungry, Remus will feed him. It’s the if that causes all the trouble.
Suddenly, intensely, Remus can’t bear to sit and do nothing with his hands. He reaches out and picks up the letter, knowing it is a bad idea, and opens it. Scans it quickly, lowers the page to the table. When he glances up, Sirius is watching him. He offers up a smile and half a shrug.
“Bad news?” Sirius asks dubiously.
“Not really.” But Remus sighs anyway. “He says—well, he’s mentioned it before, but this is the first time he’s really—he wants me to teach,” he says. “At Hogwarts. Defense Against the Dark Arts, if you can believe it or not.” He chuckles. “You’d think he’d want me for Care of Magical Creatures.”
“Werewolves aren’t creatures,” Sirius says at once. It’s an old argument, one they haven’t had since school. “You know I don’t like it when you—”
“I know.” Remus rubs his face, cheered, somehow, by Sirius’s long-suffering tone. “But—honestly.”
A moment passes before Sirius replies. “I don’t know. I think you’d make a great professor.” His voice is suddenly subdued. “You always wanted to teach, ever since school.”
Remus looks at him. He doesn’t know what to make of the expression on Sirius’s face, unexpectedly earnest. “Well,” he says. “It’s been a long time since school, hasn’t it?”
Sirius tilts his head thoughtfully. “Not that long.”
But it has been, Remus thinks, in all the ways that matter. Nearly ten years—a person could be forgiven for changing. For wanting something different. Remus isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s sure it isn’t a teaching post. “I’m happy where I am,” he says, hearing the defensiveness in his own words, as well as the echo of what he said to Dorcas earlier.
Sirius frowns. “What do you do, anyway?”
“Oh.” It is strange, even after so much distance, to realize Remus has never told him this. “I work with Squibs. Helping them find work.”
Sirius nods, still watching him, a strange expression on his face. He takes a sip of tea, and doesn’t look away. “Do you like it?”
“The job?”
Sirius nods.
“It’s fine.” The words are automatic, but then, he half suspects the question was as well. There is something he wants to say, Remus thinks, something waiting just under his tongue to be spoken, but he isn’t sure what. Something about—the way Sirius is watching him, as if he doesn’t quite recognize what he’s seeing. Whatever it is Remus wants to tell him, it sits leaden in his chest. He wants Sirius to know him again, to know everything—but the telling is unbearable. There are no words for time that has slipped like sand through their fingers.
Outside the windows, the night is thick and deep. Remus wonders, in the silence, how quickly Sirius will leave this time, and, with a spark of hurt, why he keeps coming at all if it is only to go again. “Why don’t you stay tonight?” he asks.
Sirius shakes his head, opens his mouth.
“Just till morning,” Remus presses. “It’ll be a long night.”
“Longest one of the year.” Sirius gives a half-smile. “I don’t know if I should.”
Remus holds his gaze. “The Aurors aren’t going to break down the door tonight. You’ll be safe here.” He can see that Sirius wants to protest again. “Please,” he says, and the need in his voice surprises him.
By the look in Sirius’s eyes, it surprises him, too. He waits a long moment before he says, “All right, then.”
A rush of relief courses through Remus, so strong that he has to work to keep himself from—he doesn’t know what—and instead he takes Sirius’s plate and puts it in the sink. He will have to make breakfast in the morning. He ought to send some food with Sirius when he goes, he thinks, to fill in the deep caverns of his collarbone, and he catches himself thinking it with a lurch of his stomach.
Later, Remus brings spare blankets to the sitting room where Sirius takes them from him with a smile. He is wearing two of Remus’s jumpers. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad you’re staying,” Remus tells him, not entirely meaning to. Sirius gives him a quizzical look. “I think it’s probably good,” he explains, hesitant, “for you to take a break—from looking for him.”
The confusion leaves Sirius’s eyes, to be replaced by a familiar and well-worn stubbornness. “I know you don’t want me looking for him at all—”
“Well, I—I do and I don’t,” Remus interrupts. “I mean—I know why. I understand that.” Seized by a sudden desperation, he reaches out and clasps Sirius’s hand, the one that isn’t holding the blankets. “But what do you think you’re going to get out of this, Sirius?” He steps nearer, willing him to understand the fear that Remus himself can hardly comprehend. “If you find him, if you kill him—what then?”
They are so close that Remus can see it when Sirius swallows, his eyes wide. Several heartbeats come and go. And then—“I don’t know,” Sirius whispers, choked and honest, and looking shocked at the admission. “But I don’t know what else I can do. Who else I can be, if I’m not hunting him.”
He pulls his hand back and turns away, and Remus leaves him there because he knows Sirius well enough to know he won’t want Remus to see him cry. He goes to his room and sits on the edge of his own bed without moving. The house fills with the sounds of the night wind and a dripping tap. Remus sleeps fitfully. Just before dawn, he looks into the sitting room to find the couch a nest of blankets, empty and cold—the back door unlocked, the snow disturbed, a path of pawprints leading away into the trees.
1987
SIRIUS BLACK SIGHTED IN ORKNEY, MAY BE HEADED SOUTH
Remus spills tea over the Prophet and holds his breath for a week. The new year comes and goes and he breathes out, slowly. No news is good news, he reminds himself, when it comes to Sirius—and at least he is alive. Out in the cold, far from home, but alive.
1988
“Remus,” comes Sirius’s voice, almost inaudible. “Let me in.”
The floor is cold under Remus’s bare feet as he walks to the door. Through the pane of glass, thick with frost, everything is dark. He turns the knob and steps aside, and Sirius shuffles into the dimly-lit hall, snow in his hair and on his coat. “Hi,” Remus says, closing the door.
Sirius shakes his hair back and flashes Remus a grin, leaning against the wall. “Did I wake you up?”
Remus shakes his head. “Couldn’t sleep.” He looks Sirius up and down, more uncertain than he has been before, wanting to touch but not sure if he should. Drinking in the sight of him, as always. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Sirius says, shrugging. “Wanted to see you.” He offers up a strange smile, one that doesn’t sit right on his face, sending a jolt of alarm down Remus’s spine. “Could I get some tea?”
“Er—sure,” Remus says, surprised at the question and surprised at himself for agreeing. He turns and goes to the kitchen, puts a kettle on. When he looks around, he sees that Sirius hasn’t followed him. “Go sit on the couch,” he calls, adding milk the way Sirius likes. “I’ll bring it to you.”
But when he brings the tea into the other room, it is dark and empty. Remus sets the cups down and goes back into the hall. He sees, with a fresh wave of panic, Sirius huddled at the foot of the wall. As Remus approaches, he lifts his head. “Give us a hand?”
“Bloody hell,” Remus says, and hauls him to his feet. “You should’ve asked for a nap instead of tea—oh, shit.” He staggers a little, unprepared for the way Sirius is leaning on him, despite the fact that he is frighteningly light. “Sirius—?”
“I’m fine,” Sirius mumbles. “‘M just tired.”
“You’re bleeding.” Remus can feel it through his clothes, warmer than the snowmelt, sticky where their bodies are pressing together. He can’t tell where it’s coming from, can’t make out much of anything in the low light beyond Sirius’s hand clutching his elbow. He pulls Sirius to him and bears his weight. “Come on.”
In the bathroom he deposits Sirius on the closed toilet seat. Sirius slumps forward but manages to catch himself, his knuckles going white where they grip the counter. “It’s really nothing, I’ve got it under cont—”
“Shut up,” Remus snaps, his fear bubbling over. He kneels down in front of Sirius and waits until Sirius meets his gaze. There is pain there, and sheepish guilt. “What happened?”
Sirius hesitates a moment, and Remus can tell that he wants to deny that anything is the matter—and then he sighs, and gestures vaguely to his left side, where the fabric is dark and wet. “I don’t know what curse it was,” he says.
With a strangely familiar feeling of dread, Remus lifts the shirt and sees a cut, not deep but very long, snaking around the side of Sirius’s torso up to the bottom rib. He hesitates with his hand half an inch from the wound and his heart pounds in the stillness.
“That bad?” Sirius asks. Remus glances up to see him watching through half-closed eyes, his head tilted back. His chest rises and falls.
“You’re fine,” Remus says shortly. He sits back on his heels and draws his wand. “Who did it?”
“One of the Carrows.” Sirius huffs a short breath. “I think. Wearing a mask.”
It takes Remus a moment to swallow down his horror; he steadies his hand and begins to siphon the blood away. The incantation is one he knows well, as he does the sight of Sirius bleeding in front of him, and the name of Carrow. They are even wearing masks again. He shivers. “If you don’t know how they did it, then I can’t use a spell to heal it,” he says. He knows Sirius knows this. He cannot think of anything else to say. He rips Sirius’s shirt to see the wound better, and summons bandages from the cabinet with a flick of his wand.
“Remus.” Remus keeps his eyes trained on his work. “Sorry about this.”
Remus experiences a sudden and sharp spark of guilt, for snapping and for the stony silence that seems to be all he can muster. “It’s all right,” he says, knowing it’s the truth, whatever he feels. “I’ll always help you.”
The skin of Sirius’s stomach is warm under his fingers, and it moves when he breathes. He doesn’t make another noise while Remus works, not even when his hand slips and pulls the bandage too tight across the wound. It is familiar, all of it, the blood and the bindings and slowly steadying beat of his heart.
And then the job is done, the bandages stark and white against Sirius’s skin, and Remus washes his hands. He looks to Sirius, who is gazing with a vague interest at his own hands, curled loosely in his lap. All is still.
“Thank you,” Sirius says, so softly that the words do not register for several seconds. He is still looking at his hands.
“It’s all right,” Remus says again.
“Is it?”
Remus considers. It is, he thinks, all right, insofar as he is relieved that Sirius is not dying. But the fear lingers, hot and crawling under his skin. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks at length.
Sirius hesitates. “I didn’t want—to make trouble,” he says, sounding so awkward that he must know it is absurd.
Remus snorts. “You weren’t in the neighborhood, were you?”
“Er—no,” Sirius admits.
Remus glances at him, and sees Sirius drop his gaze at once. Remus wants to pull his face around, force Sirius to meet his eyes—perhaps then he would be able to read whatever truth it is that Sirius is refusing to say. He can feel the unspoken words festering between them, and it makes him sick. It makes him want to scream, to weep, to sleep for a hundred years and never look at Sirius again. And that, of course, would be unbearable too.
“You should have told me,” he says. “That you were hurt. I wouldn’t have made you leave.”
“I know,” Sirius whispers. He lifts his hands, inspects them. Begins rubbing at his bloody knuckles.
For a moment, Remus watches him. He realizes that the blood is not from the wound in his side—the skin is split on his fingers as if from a badly-thrown blow. “Let me do that,” he says, and takes Sirius’s hands in his own.
Sirius startles, freezing for an instant, and then relaxes.
Remus very carefully does not look at him as he cleans the blood away, slowly, methodically, using a scrap of unused bandage soaked in water. He thinks about the fact that Sirius was not simply passing through, a truth which he is only now realizing. The truth: that he was hurt, and didn’t want to tell Remus, and came to him anyway. He feels, suddenly, the late hour, the hard tiles under his knees, the water chilling his skin.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Remus asks. The blood is almost gone now.
Sirius clears his throat minutely. “No,” he says.
He could be lying, Remus knows, as he was before. He glances up and Sirius smiles at him for a fraction of a moment. Remus smiles back, his heart contracting. “I’m glad you came,” he says. The words stick in his throat. He is always glad, and it always hurts.
Sirius doesn’t answer immediately, but he doesn’t pull his hands away, either, though they are dripping water and cleaned of blood. “I shouldn’t have,” he says.
Remus feels his pulse in his fingers. “You’ll go soon enough anyway,” he says, bitter, the back of his eyes burning.
A long moment passes, and Sirius breathes out sharply as if he’s been struck. His hands stir in Remus’s, and Remus looks up to Sirius’s eyes, tired but clear, on his. And then Sirius surges forward, kisses Remus with an open mouth.
The world shrinks. The press of Sirius’s lips, the warmth of his body, the crisp winter smell of him—his hands, resting on Remus’s jaw and shoulder, damp from the water and trembling. Something inside of Remus shifts, fitting where it has never fit before, flaring up to fill the spaces between his ribs and warm him from the inside out.
And then, almost before Remus realizes what has happened, Sirius pulls away, curling like a dried leaf into himself, mouth and hands and even eyes gone, staring determinedly at the ground. “I’m,” he says, and lurches to his feet, though there is barely room to move. “I should leave.”
He steps almost over Remus on his way to the door, is out into the hall before Remus can scramble to his feet. “Wait,” he says, “Sirius—”
Remus catches him at the back door, grabs him by the sleeve of his coat and holds him, and he doesn’t struggle. “What the hell,” Remus says, “was that?”
“Nothing,” Sirius says, his gaze fracturing, darting anywhere and everywhere that isn’t Remus. “It wasn’t—forget it.”
“I can’t,” Remus says. He knows, already, that it will be the truth. Like a spot of blood that will not wash out, no matter how many months or years pass until Sirius stands in his doorway again. He thinks, wildly, that this will not be anything new, in the end—he is always thinking of Sirius in one way or another, always waiting for him, always wanting him. Oh.
Sirius shakes his head, contradictory, obstinate though there is nothing for him to disagree with. “I’m going,” he says to the corner of snow and dark woods visible through the half-open door. He turns his head back to Remus. “I shouldn’t have come, and I shouldn’t have—” He swallows, his throat bobbing, close in the narrow hall. Close enough to kiss. “Bye, Remus.”
He pulls himself from Remus’s grip, and Remus, feeling the wrench in his whole arm, closes his eyes against it. He hears the door swing to, the snow crunching underfoot, the crack of disapparition in the still night.
Remus cleans up the bathroom. All the spots wash out. He doesn’t sleep for a month.
1991
“And have you heard from Albus?” Arthur asks. “He keeps saying—well, dropping hints—that he might re-form the Order.”
Remus looks away, shifting his weight to the other knee, acutely aware of Arthur’s green-flamed gaze on him. “He hasn’t said anything to me about the Order,” he replies. Another letter asking Remus to teach arrived last month, but he needn’t mention that.
“Well, keep an ear out,” Arthur tells him. “Molly and I have both been approached. Not by Albus himself, true, but you never know.”
“Who?” Remus asks, interested in spite of himself, frowning.
“Marlene McKinnon,” Arthur says. “She was in there with you the first time around, wasn’t she? And her flatmate, what’s her name, Meadowes?”
Remus nods. “Dorcas.” Arthur goes on explaining, but Remus isn’t following closely. He can’t help chuckling at the thought of what Marlene would say if she heard someone call Dorcas her flatmate, and apart from that he wonders where she’s getting her information, if she’s soliciting—and then he is paying no attention at all, and instead tilting his head, listening hard for the sound to come again. There it is: a knock at the door, knuckles on wood.
“Arthur, I’ve got to go,” Remus says, standing up in front of the grate.
Arthur blinks in surprise, but doesn’t argue. “Talk later,” he says, and vanishes. The green flames flicker and die.
Remus delays a moment longer to brush the ash back onto the hearth, his stomach knotting itself intensely. Then he goes to the door and opens it, surprising Sirius mid-knock. And it is Sirius, of course, standing on the threshold, snow still falling on his shoulders and in his hair. “Happy Christmas,” he says, his breath misting in the cold.
Remus steps aside to let him in. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”
Sirius pauses in the act of pulling off his scarf. “I always come back.”
It’s almost true. Remus looks at the shape of him in the hall, tall, lean, swallowed by the same trench coat as always. The slow and careful way he moves. None of it is new. Neither is the pit in his stomach. Remus thinks: say something. He thinks: this is how you got in trouble the last time. He opens his mouth. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” Sirius says, not meeting his eyes. “I nearly didn’t come, but I thought—probably I ought to.”
It’s the stilted way he says it, and the flush creeping up his neck, that spurs Remus to speak. “I want to talk to you,” he says.
Sirius hesitates, and the flush spreads farther, coloring his cheeks. “Look,” he begins.
“You look,” Remus says. He is trying to hold his ground, to express the tangle of confusion that has enveloped him for the past year, but it’s hard to know what to say first—and hard to know anything at all with Sirius in front of him, looking pained and flustered and terribly afraid. “What was that? Last year?”
There is another pause. “I want to say,” Sirius says, cautious, halting, “I know I’ve—made a mess of things.”
“You left,” Remus says. “You kissed me”—he swallows hard—“and then you walked out the door for a year. Again.” He sees Sirius wince, and it hurts him somewhere deep. He reaches out and catches Sirius’s hand where it is picking anxiously at the cuff of his sleeve. “Sirius. Would you look at me?”
Sirius tears his eyes from their joined hands and meets Remus’s gaze. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, choked.
“I’m glad you did,” Remus tells him. Sirius throws him a look full of disbelief. “Honest,” Remus says. “Not that you left. But I don’t think I would’ve realized, without you.” He looks at Sirius, standing there lost, all the glorious wasteland of their lives. “That I love you.”
He can see that Sirius doesn’t understand, that he is still afraid. So Remus does the only thing he can think to do, and steps forward to kiss him. Softly, gently, lighter than snowflakes. He pulls back minutely, and the air trembles between them. “I love you,” Remus says again, quiet as he can.
Sirius gazes back at him, stricken.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Remus tells him, something like tears sticking in his throat. He leans in to kiss him again, and this time Sirius returns it. Remus kisses him against the wall next to the coathooks, snow melting where his hands are in Sirius’s hair, learning the feel of him in a way he never has before.
When they separate, Sirius rests their foreheads together. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should’ve kissed you sooner.”
A laugh escapes Remus, and he hears Sirius chuckle as well, low in his ears. His face is so thin beneath Remus’s hands, his cheekbones so sharp. But he’s here. “Will you stay?” he asks, barely more than a whisper.
“Overnight?”
“No.” When Remus shakes his head, Sirius moves as well, they are so close together. “I mean, will you stay with me.”
Sirius pulls back, and Remus’s hands fall off him. Like a wound, he feels the absence, like an amputation. There is a look of something like despair on Sirius’s face. “I can’t,” he says.
“You’re not going to find Peter,” Remus says. “It’s been ten years—Sirius, there are a billion rats in the world.”
“I have to look,” Sirius says, desperate, eyes shining. “I’ll come back, I—”
“I can’t,” Remus begins, and has to stop to take a breath. “I can’t do this, Sirius.” He swallows. “Every time you leave, I wonder if you’ve died. If I’ll ever see you again. And I love you, and I want you in my life”—the truth, the simplest truth, which he’s known for ten years and even longer—“but I can’t keep waiting for you.”
“Remus.” Sirius’s voice is soft, but he isn’t pleading. “I’m sorry,” he says again.
“I know you are. So am I.” Remus lifts his hand to touch Sirius’s cheek, and Sirius closes his eyes. “I want you to come back.” He does, the way he wants to take another breath after each exhale, the way he wants his heart to keep beating. “But only if you’ll stay.”
Sirius lets out the barest of sighs and pulls away. “I wish I could promise that,” he says. “But I can’t. Not tonight.” He pulls his scarf from the hook, puts his hand on the doorknob. There are tears on his cheeks, snow melting in his hair.
“You won’t find him,” Remus tells him.
“I have to try.” Sirius tears his gaze from Remus and then glances back again, something unspoken teetering on his lips—and then he turns.
“See you later,” Remus says when he is nearly out the door.
Sirius hesitates, his hand on the frame. “See you,” he says. He almost—but not quite—turns back inside, the flash of his eyes and a smile in the half-dark, fresh snowflakes gusting in.
1992
Halfway up the path, Remus stops. The pines are a row of dark sentries behind him, cold enough that they creak with ice, below his feet the deep snow, and ahead of him the house: with a light in one window, flickering dim. Remus considers going back the way he came, perhaps apparating directly back to Hogsmeade, but he does not think he wants to face Dumbledore so soon after a defeat. He pulls out his wand and casts a charm to silence his footsteps, then proceeds.
The door makes no sound as he slips inside. The hall is dark—each doorway a black cavern—but the light is in the kitchen, he sees, shivering golden on the wall. He inches forward. Someone has lit a fire on the hearth, which has sat unused for most of the past eleven years, someone huddled on the ground in front of it, facing the flames.
“Did you kill him?” Remus asks, all his body seizing as if with cold, as if in death.
Sirius turns, choking on a gasp, before falling back to his knees with a hand on his chest. “Remus,” he breathes, “God.”
Remus drops to his knees beside the fire, the warmth of it melting the snow on his clothes. “Are you hurt?” he asks, another fear making itself known.
“No,” Sirius says, shaking his head. “No, I’m all right.”
Nevertheless, Remus reaches out and takes his hand, making sure in the wild and panicked part of his brain that Sirius is real. “I didn’t think,” he says, clamping down on the lingering horror, “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I’m sorry,” Sirius says, as he always does.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Remus tells him, still clutching his hand. “Even when I don’t want to think about you, I’m thinking about you. Where you are and what you might be doing. I’m always wondering if you’re still alive.”
“I’m alive,” Sirius says, “Remus, I’m here.” He takes Remus’s other hand in his own and holds it fast. “And I’m not leaving.”
Remus gazes at Sirius in the flickering light. “You found him?”
The eternal second before Sirius answers is like the nightmare Remus has had for years, where he waits in the middle of the night for some unknown thing that could come at any moment but which never does. The interminable suspense—the sickening fear.
“No,” Sirius says. “I gave up.” He says it simply, without pride or resentment.
Remus searches his face. “You—what?” He cannot understand it.
“I gave up,” Sirius repeats. “I haven’t caught his trail in years.” He squeezes Remus’s hands. “And I’m tired of running.”
“Oh.” Remus sinks into his touch, lets it ground him. The firelight flickers over Sirius’s face in a way that makes him both familiar and a stranger—but warm, and close.
Then Sirius shifts, and suddenly he is holding Remus, pulling him close, and Remus rests his chin on Sirius’s shoulder. When he takes a breath, both their chests move together. “That’s all I was doing, you know,” Sirius tells him, soft, in his ear. “Running. All this time.”
“Running from me?” Remus murmurs.
He feels it when Sirius nods. His hands are knotted in the fabric of Remus’s cloak. “From anything that meant standing still. But I couldn’t quite—I could never quite resist coming back. Even if it was only for a night.” Sirius chuckles once, a short huff of breath. “I had to see you.”
Remus crushes Sirius to him, closer, closer. He thinks he may die of this: the solid touch and the knowledge that it will last. “I was so happy to see you,” he whispers. “Every time. But I always just wanted you to stay.”
Sirius pulls back slightly, kisses Remus on the cheek. “I can promise you, this time I will,” he says.
Remus turns his head and kisses him in return, on the mouth, running his fingers through Sirius’s hair, resting his other hand against his fire-warmed jaw. He believes it.
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Date: 2019-12-11 05:27 pm (UTC)I didn't know what to expect from that grab-bag list of prompts I threw out, and the wildcard!! You knit that feeling into this piece SO WELL!!!!! God. I'm going to make a list now, because lists are how I tie myself to the ground when I'm too busy vibrating to pieces (again, in the best way possible) —
- Their dialogue is so painfully realistic it makes my chest ache. This is a very good thing.
- The concept is BEAUTIFUL. I've only read a handful of "What if No Azkaban" fics and wasn't quite sure what to expect here, but I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Remus not wanting to hold on but continuing to hold on is such a powerful dynamic and you rendered that beautifully here.
- I offer you my ENTIRE HEART for the background Dorlene <3
- The little ways Remus' day-to-day changes as it goes is just priceless. I mean, the rhythm and pacing here is just masterful. I'm so, so pleased with how it all comes together. The branch on the door in 1984 and the short passage of panic in 1987 are such perfect interjections into the movement of the story.
I'm just floored by the tenderness and care that I can feel went into this piece, thank you so much for this one <333
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Date: 2019-12-11 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-16 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-16 06:17 am (UTC)