[FIC] To Sit A Dead Man Between Us: Part I
GUYS IT'S FIC THIS IS ONE OF THE SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE. This fucking, fucking thing is like 120+ pages long with 54,000 words, I don't even know; this is what happens when you don't write for two years. Six-parter!
Title: To Sit a Dead Man Between Us
Author: imochan
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: NC17
Summary: In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.
A Note, Before We Begin: As I’m sure many of you already know, the fandom lost someone very special a few months ago. I’m positive it’s not a stretch to say that if you’re reading this right now, you knew Anj, and probably loved her writing, or her sharp wit, or her warm and generous spirit, or her beautiful smile. Probably, in most cases, all of the above. In the first few hours and days following the news that Anj had been taken from us far too soon, many of us who had left HP fandom behind (some, like me, years ago), came together again to remember her. It was such a heartsick moment: we were all devastated that she was gone, but so grateful to know that the people we loved, that Anj loved, were still thinking of her, and of each other, even though we hadn’t spoken in such a long time. Even as it may have made us cry, so many shared their personal memories of this beautiful young woman, and it was a solidarity I think she would have been proud of (even though she would have been mortified to see the stupid fuss we were making over her).
I mention this now because the story below was something I began almost two years ago, just as I was starting to drift away from HP fandom. Over the past six months, I’ve come back to it, and just as I was very close to nearing the end of it, in the end of March, Anj passed away. More than ever, now, I’m fairly certain this will probably be my last real contribution to fandom in written form, but more than ever, now, this story was written from a place of gratitude: for the friends I’ve made here, the people who inspired and challenged and infuriated and supported me, everything they’d given me, so selflessly, with so much intelligence and generosity. I know now that no matter where I go from here, I will never again take for granted the people that I love. And so, a poor rejoinder here in this strange and rough last offering. Much of it was built out of previous writing (you'll see a few familiar drabbles worked in, maybe, and much of the character for Sirius, Remus and Regulus, especially, is something developed over years of writing them. Also most of it is really fucking depressing and probably sort of confusing! \o/ But yo, what else have you ever known me to do?
Thanks go to Lah, who was my beta and is my constant happy place (:z), and to the now-disbanded GirlsClub: this is for you, ladies. <3
All good things, I suppose. Thanks guys - it’s been a hell of a ride.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
PART I
This Book Is Not About Heroes
There is a preface, thinks Remus. Here, it's here that's where it is?
There is, he thinks, a beginning somewhere in this?
There is a small boy sitting at the end of the Slytherin table. He has thick-dark hair, and thin-pale skin. He has a familiar nose. He is watching them, and he only takes six bites of his chicken stew.
“He looks sort of ill?” says Remus, who knows a thing or two about that, after all.
“Are you going to eat that,” says Sirius, who Is Not Looking. “Who?”
“Isn’t that,” says Remus.
“No,” says Sirius, and takes his dinner roll. “It’s no one.”
Ah, he thinks. And, yes. I think so.
There is a piece of the moon missing. A dark and hungry sickle, and a patch of the sky gone imperial and wrong, it muffles the edges of the light. It silences things: his throbbing head and too-thin blood, their voices. It means they sit side-by-side-by-side on the edge of the bed and think about speaking more than they do. (He thinks about screaming, he thinks about luck, and how that had nothing to do with it.)
He would have died, says Remus, once. You know.
He could have died, says Sirius. He looks at the blood under Remus’s fingernails, and the veins of his wrists, and knows suddenly, quietly, that if he stands now, his own body will not hold him up. Because he is tired of it, he thinks, he is tired and lightheaded with Remus’s stupid, stupid, relentless encouragement.
That’s what they say, right, he says. So. So, fine.
So, says Remus. So, there’s that.
Sirius smiles at him, and he thinks it’s disgusting. Sirius gives him the last cigarette, even though James had called it hours ago, and it makes him want to crush it between both palms. On the way out the portraithole, to Herbology, Sirius tosses him his old leather jacket, and the feel of it on his back makes his neck break out in goose bumps for the next fifteen minutes. A house elf brings him a cup of tea at four o’clock on a Sunday, and Sirius does a very bad job of looking chuffed, and it makes him want to upend it over Sirius’s bare feet. Sirius misses the opportunity for a jab at his ambiguous manhood, and he feels insulted.
But he smiles back. But he smokes it, anyway. But he wears it for hours. But he drinks it. And he is, somehow, not cruel, though James disagrees.
“It’s been two months,” says James, after they emerge from forty silent minutes of detention for singing spitballs in History of Magic.
“What?” he says.
“And six days. Two months and six days. He’s driving me spare.”
He shoulders his book bag; he shifts his feet.
“I haven’t said anything,” he says, finally.
“I know,” says James.
“That’s not particularly unusual,” he says.
“I know,” says James.
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”
Right, says Sirius. I know that.
Remus has a bruise burning the skin under his jaw, where his teeth have dislocated and reset. Since it looks like you’ve been screaming, thinks Sirius, clearly, because you have, maybe, you did, maybe, so you don’t think we need to, anymore.
It could have been worse, he says.
Right, says Remus. It could be worse.
It was midway through the winter of 1977 when a Hufflepuff first-year named Willie Coverton, whom no one really knew, fell ill with a fever, went home to his parents in Cobham, and died of the whooping cough in his bed.
And it filters slowly, the news of it. There is the Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, after all. There is that Potions essay, you know, and the lake, you know, finally frozen over for skating, and didn’t you hear Torpal Goldfoot and Emmy McDormand got caught having a go by Filch in the second floor mop closet, and also there have been sausages for breakfast for the past week and a half, and sometimes supper too, and everyone seems to be fairly convinced that one of the house elves has caught an awful head cold, and so doomed the school to endless bangers.
But at the height of its importance, it is a sunny, crystalline morning; it has reached the rank of rumor and whisper. Ice clawing up from the iron of the stained-glass windows in the Great Hall and a porcelain sky arcing through the ceiling and the air smelling like sugared toast and dark marmalade, hot tea and cream, and nothing like mourning. It is just that way, thinks Remus. It is just that way that it is when no one seems to know whose responsibility it is to move first, and so everything hangs happily in the general shuffle and the ugly sweetness of that space: no definition, no direction and certainly no obligation.
He shuffles his papers, he turns a page, and scratches a few lines with his quill, and listens to the low hum and clink of breakfast, and Sirius hunkers down beside him eventually, disheveled and still smelling like sleep - just that way that it is, usually. Except that they have Not Really Fought Yet, apparently, and Sirius does not wake up early; except that he does, now.
“Shocking,” he murmurs. “Before seven, even.”
“Mmh,” says Sirius, pulling Remus’s plate of forgotten eggs and toast into his lap, half a pastry in his mouth already. “Couldn’t sleep. Rotten luck.”
“Your lying face is what’s rotten,” he says. “What’s it you want, then?”
Sirius grins; he slaps the Map down onto the table with his open palm, fork in his other fist, jam on his chin. “There’s another. Your brilliant fluke got us into that passageway behind the Aphrodite, last time, right, well, there’s another. I swear, there’s a hollow underneath Mordred’s right leg - Mordred in the - ”
“I know - the stairwell. Look. Only if I’ve finished this first,” he says, rubbing ink between his fingers because Sirius has stolen his napkin, too.
“What, Potions essay? Slugface’ll cut you slack, eh? Christ, sausages again. Again.”
“It’s not a bloody free ride,” he mutters. “Sorry, Professor, it’ll be another day or two on account of this furry little problem I’ve got.”
“So sunny this morning, aren’t we,” Sirius mutters, shoving the plate back onto the table, against Remus’s elbow.
Remus shrugs one shoulder, as if he’s got a twitch, a niggling itch to shake off.
Sirius jostles his elbow. “I’ll beat it out of you with my hard and manly fists, you know,” he mutters. “Even before a cuppa.”
Remus snorts. “Leave off.”
“Oi, c’mon,” says Sirius, and there is that teeter in his voice: the quirkcrack bubbling underneath his words that says I COULD BE YELLING AT YOU RIGHT NOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW JUST BECAUSE I NEVER DID BEFORE DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN’T HAVE IT OUT RIGHT HERE AMONGST THE SAUSAGES.
Remus clenches his teeth and spends three seconds crossing a ‘t’.
“Lupin,” says Sirius. JUST BECAUSE WE HAVEN’T REALLY FOUGHT YET DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T TAKE YOU NOW I WILL TAKE YOU ON AND WIN, says the pucker of the ‘p’ sound against his lips.
“Well,” he says. “Well, look. Look, it’s not as if you haven’t heard,” he glances at him, finally.
Sirius shrugs as he reaches for the teapot, but his eyes flicker to the left, briefly, under his lashes. The Hufflepuff table is mostly empty, mostly quiet, mostly like it always has been in the early morning in the winter.
“So?” says Sirius, finally, dropping four cubes of sugar into his mug.
“So? It’s sad, so. He was just.”
“It happens.”
“You,” says Remus, operating on the thick-tongued edge of disbelief, only. “You.”
“You have jam on your nose,” says Sirius, blowing steam at Remus over the rim of his teacup. “C’mon, I’ll write it for you, all right? A little walk-about’ll do you good, you’re all pale and rangy and rather, aren't you.”
“Hazard of association with present company,” he says, wit on that sharp and hapless drive of preservation, and Sirius laughs and loops his own scarf around Remus’s neck and that, thinks Remus, that, this is why I will never be a sour person, because I am weak in the face of stupid pointless compassion and people who eat your eggs for breakfast, and jealous of everyone who can just say, so.
“Poppycock,” says Sirius, stuffing a crumpet in his pocket and tugging Remus to standing by the scruff of his collar.
“You instill in me a great and burgeoning interest in real violence,” says Remus. And it is because it is not a lie (said only to be droll) that his stomach does a gibbering flip down into his thighs, when Sirius stuffs his personal space full of nervous energy.
“Smashing,” says Sirius. “Lovely. Now shut the hell up.”
Remus tries to roll his neck in a way that gets him dislodged out from under Sirius’s grip, but only manages to get himself tangled between the straps of his bookbag and the loop of the scarf, and Sirius laughs when he trips over his own ankles and collides into Sirius’s bony hip. The sound ricochets, it is a full noise, a storm of heat in the winter.
“Stop it,” Remus murmurs, untangling himself (attempting, anyway, but Sirius’s bony hip is bony, which is obvious, and warm, which is familiar and terrifying).
“Oh, stop it yourself,” Sirius snaps. “It’s not a bloody funeral.”
“Isn’t it?” says Remus. “I was rather under the impression that someone had actually - ”
“What’re you writing on, then?” Sirius rummages in Remus’s bookbag, unceremoniously.
“Don’t. Don’t. I’ll just finish it later.” He bites at a nail and squints into the dusty sun patches of the corridor, feeling a strange bruise blooming on his skin, or just under it, and it’s only strange because he can’t quite seem to place where it started, or where it is now.
“Man of my word, Moony,” grins Sirius, and Remus earns another nudge of a bony hip, another bruise that spreads up into his jugular and makes his teeth ache.
“Aren’t,” he mumbles, digging deep for banter, levity, and something else to implant in his voice besides judgment and self-righteousness; he finds it more hopeless than usual.
Sirius pauses, quill held between his teeth, wrist deep in Remus’s bookbag, and Remus glances over to see Sirius looking at him with awful, black, narrowed eyes. I am suddenly a problem again, thinks Remus. I’d been pegged for a while, and now, now I’m a challenge to be conquered, aren’t I, because your face is like that and that’s what that means.
“You really - ” says Sirius, and his brow relaxes, slowly, the gentle genius of a quick revelation.
Remus glares. It’s a horrible thing, this hot and boiling mess inside him when Sirius does things like that, says things like this, to shame him for being simply how he is, and it’s mostly that it never makes any sense stacked up to everything else: to the sacrifice and adventure and compassion and the way he seems absolutely ill some nights until he’s sure that Remus’s new scars aren’t all that painful, that he’s had enough to eat, that he’s warm enough, that the blankets don’t slip off the hospital bed. Oh, I know, thinks Remus, and shoves his fists in his pockets. I know and I just hate you for it.
“What?” Sirius says.
“Forget it,” says Remus, and is never sure who comes out the winner, between the two of them, anymore.
“You didn’t know him,” protests Sirius. “Lupin.”
“Fine. Fine. It’s fine.”
“Moony,” he says.
“Sorry,” says Remus. “Sorry, forget it, I don’t care.”
“Augh,” Sirius grins with his teeth; there is the hard, threatening snick in his smile, a swift and dismissive sign of his thin patience for Other People’s suffering. He grips the crook of Remus’s neck with one big hand, cold and clammy palm tight under Remus’s scarf, fingers on Remus’s collarbone, thumb on the highest knobby bump of Remus’s spine. “Pathetic. C’mon, you sorry bloke.”
Remus wants so badly to squirm, it tightens at the very last vertebrae, and makes his gut quiver. “Leave off, I’ve said it’s - ”
“I’d notice,” says Sirius, thumb bumping against Remus’s neck, rough and fumbling for skin. “Christ.”
“What,” he says, ache like a rash spreading through his blood and up into his lungs. “I didn’t - “
“Oh, shut it,” says Sirius, mouth a tight, red-bitten line until he laughs, once. “If you died. Christ. You know.”
Remus’s mouth quirks, but he knows, it’s a half-second too late on the upbeat, he knows, which means Sirius will have seen it all, and there we go, he thinks, there we go, another thing stripped away, and I’m so awfully happy to give it up, aren’t I.
“I’m not dying,” he says, asserting, and looks away.
“Not yet.”
“Cheeky.”
“Cheeky yourself,” Sirius squeezes Remus’s nape, once, hard. “Forget it, all right? We’d all come to your funeral and be very awfully morbid and soppy, and I’d - I’d. Write a poem, a sonnet, right? It’d all be very pretty and iambic and appropriately acknowledged, and I’d punch anyone who laughed for at least three months.”
“Three months,” says Remus, and shifts his weight a halfstep forward.
“Obligatory mourning period.”
“Thanks awfully.”
“Well, it’s only right,” says Sirius, and his hand goes still on Remus’s collar. “The right thing to do, when.”
It is an unchangeable mistake, thinks Remus, but he looks at him. It is the dusty sun patches in the corridor, he thinks, the cold in the corners of the stones and the sun in the dust and I have heat-stroke in the middle of winter, indoors, and my skin is crawling because my jumper is full of moth eggs or bad wool because this is an entirely different animal, with red cheeks and wet eyes and a flurried, helpless line on his lips and hand on my neck, thinks Remus, oh Christ, I’ve said so much, and now. I didn’t forgive this face, he thinks.
“When,” says Sirius. “Well.”
I don’t trust you, thinks Remus. Remember.
“Forget the essay, then,” he says, and shrugs his shoulders like he feels a chill. “Fair change for a eulogy, all right?”
“Er,” says Sirius, hand hovering where Remus has dislodged it. “No, that’s not - I.” He looks as though he’s been wedged into a tight and prickly corner, and Remus’s stomach crinkles, unpleasantly.
“Library,” he says, and stands. “I’ll be. Library, you know. See you at half-six, then?”
“Right,” says Sirius, a small dark hollow between his teeth, where his lips don’t quite close, where his tongue wets. “Yeah.”
He hands Remus the map. It is folded tight and neat; it is warm with the press of both their hands.
He will never ask why. The reasons are never right, he thinks, and he has never trusted that good intentions are actually, actually, wholly innocent, mostly because they are always suffixed by the worst mistake of someone’s life.
I, says Sirius. Only I -
I know, he says, because he doesn’t want to.
Sirius is on the floor of the common room, by the fire, with his back against the ottoman, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, with bare feet, which means a variety of things, but mostly that he is sleepy, and comfortable, and situated himself that way at two in the morning in order to be perfectly alone, should anyone encounter it.
“My. Where were you?” says Sirius, and grins, firelight catching on his lips.
Remus thinks about just turning around and going out the portrait-hole the way he came in, since he hasn’t even started to take off his scarf, or his jacket, and he’d rather take his chances in the wilds of the Witching Hour than with this.
“Could ask you,” he says. “You never even made it to the library.”
Sirius snorts. “And you’d expect me?”
I have no idea, thinks Remus. Should I.
“Where’s James?” he says, instead.
“Who knows,” says Sirius, with a disconcerting amount of absolute detachment, which means, Evans.
“Ah,” says Remus, and tugs at the loop of his scarf with two fingers. “Peter’s - ”
Sirius rolls his eyes and laces his fingers together over his knees. “You honestly weren’t holed up there all night, were you?”
“I told you - ” says Remus.
Sirius swivels, eying him halfway over his shoulder, with his hair tucked behind his ears and shadows in his jaw and cheekbones.
“You were busy,” says Remus. He had the map, after all. He had been working on it. He wasn’t checking it for that, only that it was there, much like it always was, only this time it was rather Sirius Black and Mary Mclaren and Greenhouse Four. He had thought, strangely, at that point, at midnight, about how to go about erasing something living, and adaptable and indelible. Before, of course, he realized that this shining, new jealousy and the residual, angry guilt had managed to combine in his gut to give him nausea so powerful he could feel a thick layer of bile on his tongue and teeth.
“I was busy,” leers Sirius, quick-tempered and languid, all-in-all. “Wasn’t I.”
Remus feels a bristle under the hairs of his arms, behind his ears. “Forget it,” he says, and presses his palm to the back of the armchair; he wants to leave and go to sleep. He wants to leave, and his arm stays rigid because even his body is full of betrayal tonight.
“Oi,” says Sirius, twisting fully, elbows propped on the seat. “You could have - ”
“I said,” he says. “Just - ”
“Mates come first,” says Sirius. “You - ”
“It’s nothing,” says Remus.
“You come first,” says Sirius.
“It’s nothing,” says Remus.
“Oh, what the hell are you so cross about?” Sirius snaps, jostling a shoulder into the chair.
“Lower your voice,” Remus snaps back, in a whisper. “It’s two in the morning and you were here - ”
“What,” Sirius glares. “I was here what.”
“Waiting,” he says.
“To rub it in you, eh?” Sirius laughs, dark under his tongue. “Christ, is that what you think? You think I’m still waiting to see if you’ve come ‘round?”
“You,” says Remus. “I’ve said it was - ”
“You’re still all wound up about it! I told you, I told you then and I meant it then and I’ll say it again, it wasn’t ever about that, it was about you, for Christ’s - for Christ’s sake - I’m not going to grovel for your fucking, fucking smile, Lupin. I did it to protect you.”
“Oh, for.” He turns. He turns and leaves. He turns and leaves to go up the stairs and just go to bed and fumble through another awkward, shaky day of awkward, shaky, tight-roped friendships and he pretends that he can’t hear the footsteps, until Sirius grabs his scarf fringe, and tugs, hard.
“Lupin!”
“Bugger,” he chokes.
Sirius corners him against the railing with one arm and the other hand coiled in his scarf. He smells like coals and perfume.
“The hell, Lupin,” Sirius growls. “I wasn’t finished!”
“You’re never finished,” Remus mutters, trying to loosen the wool around his neck, a little.
“I never started!” Sirius snaps. “Oi, look at me!”
Oh, thinks Remus. Oh no.
“I think you’re choking me,” he says.
“Ha ha, you don’t get off like that, you filthy bastard,” grinds Sirius. “I either am or I’m not, your brain has no fucking say in the matter. I was. And you! You were - we are done with that shite, I thought.”
Remus bristles, gut like a thick wad of paper and guilt and nerves.
“I - ” he says.
“You said - ”
“I never - ”
“I’ve been - for - I’ve been, haven’t I been - ”
“You haven’t meant a single - ”
“All right! Shut it,” hisses Sirius. “You mope at me about nobody giving a damn about you and you’re going to get it, understand? I’ve fucking had it.”
“I haven’t - ”
“Sweet fucking - ” says Sirius “ - fucking Christ. Fucking idiot. I - ” Sirius grinds it out, leaning in, wrapping the scarf in his fist and pulling. “I would have killed for you.”
It shocks his blood cold and his thighs hot. He thinks, vaguely, that he should punch Sirius in the mouth for that.
“If you say one bloody word that makes it sounds like you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll - “
“You’re raving,” hisses Remus, pressing a fist to Sirius’s chest and getting his fingers tangled in Sirius’s tie. “Stark raving and you have no right - ”
“I’d do it again,” growls Sirius, so close Remus feels his stupid, stupid stubble against his own chin. “Fuck the bloody eulogy, that’s what I mean.”
“You’ve never meant a word in your life,” Remus snaps, but it only sounds like crackling air: no force or voice, just clumsy lips and teeth clattering in his mouth.
“I gave you the map. I gave you the map tonight, you stupid shite,” Sirius hisses, and his thumb is digging painfully into Remus’s jaw.
This is where, Remus thinks, where it gets worse, and he is terrified by how utterly oblivious this raw and bloody shaking anger has boiled over into the happiest moment of his life, has turned to the most singular instance, has found a space to exist, quaking, in the hard and desperate curl of his own fingers around Sirius’s jawline.
“I should be punching you in the mouth,” he says; his brain is reusing his own thoughts.
“Go ahead,” says Sirius, and he has the grip of his fingers spread up into the fringe of hair over Remus’s nape and ear. “Or maybe you’ll actually do something right for once.”
Remus kisses him because of the economy of the action. Noise silenced, threat acted, aching quelled, blindness cured, terror stilled, violence satisfied.
( PART II)
Title: To Sit a Dead Man Between Us
Author: imochan
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: NC17
Summary: In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.
A Note, Before We Begin: As I’m sure many of you already know, the fandom lost someone very special a few months ago. I’m positive it’s not a stretch to say that if you’re reading this right now, you knew Anj, and probably loved her writing, or her sharp wit, or her warm and generous spirit, or her beautiful smile. Probably, in most cases, all of the above. In the first few hours and days following the news that Anj had been taken from us far too soon, many of us who had left HP fandom behind (some, like me, years ago), came together again to remember her. It was such a heartsick moment: we were all devastated that she was gone, but so grateful to know that the people we loved, that Anj loved, were still thinking of her, and of each other, even though we hadn’t spoken in such a long time. Even as it may have made us cry, so many shared their personal memories of this beautiful young woman, and it was a solidarity I think she would have been proud of (even though she would have been mortified to see the stupid fuss we were making over her).
I mention this now because the story below was something I began almost two years ago, just as I was starting to drift away from HP fandom. Over the past six months, I’ve come back to it, and just as I was very close to nearing the end of it, in the end of March, Anj passed away. More than ever, now, I’m fairly certain this will probably be my last real contribution to fandom in written form, but more than ever, now, this story was written from a place of gratitude: for the friends I’ve made here, the people who inspired and challenged and infuriated and supported me, everything they’d given me, so selflessly, with so much intelligence and generosity. I know now that no matter where I go from here, I will never again take for granted the people that I love. And so, a poor rejoinder here in this strange and rough last offering. Much of it was built out of previous writing (you'll see a few familiar drabbles worked in, maybe, and much of the character for Sirius, Remus and Regulus, especially, is something developed over years of writing them. Also most of it is really fucking depressing and probably sort of confusing! \o/ But yo, what else have you ever known me to do?
Thanks go to Lah, who was my beta and is my constant happy place (:z), and to the now-disbanded GirlsClub: this is for you, ladies. <3
All good things, I suppose. Thanks guys - it’s been a hell of a ride.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
PART I
This Book Is Not About Heroes
There is a preface, thinks Remus. Here, it's here that's where it is?
There is, he thinks, a beginning somewhere in this?
There is a small boy sitting at the end of the Slytherin table. He has thick-dark hair, and thin-pale skin. He has a familiar nose. He is watching them, and he only takes six bites of his chicken stew.
“He looks sort of ill?” says Remus, who knows a thing or two about that, after all.
“Are you going to eat that,” says Sirius, who Is Not Looking. “Who?”
“Isn’t that,” says Remus.
“No,” says Sirius, and takes his dinner roll. “It’s no one.”
Ah, he thinks. And, yes. I think so.
There is a piece of the moon missing. A dark and hungry sickle, and a patch of the sky gone imperial and wrong, it muffles the edges of the light. It silences things: his throbbing head and too-thin blood, their voices. It means they sit side-by-side-by-side on the edge of the bed and think about speaking more than they do. (He thinks about screaming, he thinks about luck, and how that had nothing to do with it.)
He would have died, says Remus, once. You know.
He could have died, says Sirius. He looks at the blood under Remus’s fingernails, and the veins of his wrists, and knows suddenly, quietly, that if he stands now, his own body will not hold him up. Because he is tired of it, he thinks, he is tired and lightheaded with Remus’s stupid, stupid, relentless encouragement.
That’s what they say, right, he says. So. So, fine.
So, says Remus. So, there’s that.
Sirius smiles at him, and he thinks it’s disgusting. Sirius gives him the last cigarette, even though James had called it hours ago, and it makes him want to crush it between both palms. On the way out the portraithole, to Herbology, Sirius tosses him his old leather jacket, and the feel of it on his back makes his neck break out in goose bumps for the next fifteen minutes. A house elf brings him a cup of tea at four o’clock on a Sunday, and Sirius does a very bad job of looking chuffed, and it makes him want to upend it over Sirius’s bare feet. Sirius misses the opportunity for a jab at his ambiguous manhood, and he feels insulted.
But he smiles back. But he smokes it, anyway. But he wears it for hours. But he drinks it. And he is, somehow, not cruel, though James disagrees.
“It’s been two months,” says James, after they emerge from forty silent minutes of detention for singing spitballs in History of Magic.
“What?” he says.
“And six days. Two months and six days. He’s driving me spare.”
He shoulders his book bag; he shifts his feet.
“I haven’t said anything,” he says, finally.
“I know,” says James.
“That’s not particularly unusual,” he says.
“I know,” says James.
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”
Right, says Sirius. I know that.
Remus has a bruise burning the skin under his jaw, where his teeth have dislocated and reset. Since it looks like you’ve been screaming, thinks Sirius, clearly, because you have, maybe, you did, maybe, so you don’t think we need to, anymore.
It could have been worse, he says.
Right, says Remus. It could be worse.
It was midway through the winter of 1977 when a Hufflepuff first-year named Willie Coverton, whom no one really knew, fell ill with a fever, went home to his parents in Cobham, and died of the whooping cough in his bed.
And it filters slowly, the news of it. There is the Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, after all. There is that Potions essay, you know, and the lake, you know, finally frozen over for skating, and didn’t you hear Torpal Goldfoot and Emmy McDormand got caught having a go by Filch in the second floor mop closet, and also there have been sausages for breakfast for the past week and a half, and sometimes supper too, and everyone seems to be fairly convinced that one of the house elves has caught an awful head cold, and so doomed the school to endless bangers.
But at the height of its importance, it is a sunny, crystalline morning; it has reached the rank of rumor and whisper. Ice clawing up from the iron of the stained-glass windows in the Great Hall and a porcelain sky arcing through the ceiling and the air smelling like sugared toast and dark marmalade, hot tea and cream, and nothing like mourning. It is just that way, thinks Remus. It is just that way that it is when no one seems to know whose responsibility it is to move first, and so everything hangs happily in the general shuffle and the ugly sweetness of that space: no definition, no direction and certainly no obligation.
He shuffles his papers, he turns a page, and scratches a few lines with his quill, and listens to the low hum and clink of breakfast, and Sirius hunkers down beside him eventually, disheveled and still smelling like sleep - just that way that it is, usually. Except that they have Not Really Fought Yet, apparently, and Sirius does not wake up early; except that he does, now.
“Shocking,” he murmurs. “Before seven, even.”
“Mmh,” says Sirius, pulling Remus’s plate of forgotten eggs and toast into his lap, half a pastry in his mouth already. “Couldn’t sleep. Rotten luck.”
“Your lying face is what’s rotten,” he says. “What’s it you want, then?”
Sirius grins; he slaps the Map down onto the table with his open palm, fork in his other fist, jam on his chin. “There’s another. Your brilliant fluke got us into that passageway behind the Aphrodite, last time, right, well, there’s another. I swear, there’s a hollow underneath Mordred’s right leg - Mordred in the - ”
“I know - the stairwell. Look. Only if I’ve finished this first,” he says, rubbing ink between his fingers because Sirius has stolen his napkin, too.
“What, Potions essay? Slugface’ll cut you slack, eh? Christ, sausages again. Again.”
“It’s not a bloody free ride,” he mutters. “Sorry, Professor, it’ll be another day or two on account of this furry little problem I’ve got.”
“So sunny this morning, aren’t we,” Sirius mutters, shoving the plate back onto the table, against Remus’s elbow.
Remus shrugs one shoulder, as if he’s got a twitch, a niggling itch to shake off.
Sirius jostles his elbow. “I’ll beat it out of you with my hard and manly fists, you know,” he mutters. “Even before a cuppa.”
Remus snorts. “Leave off.”
“Oi, c’mon,” says Sirius, and there is that teeter in his voice: the quirkcrack bubbling underneath his words that says I COULD BE YELLING AT YOU RIGHT NOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW JUST BECAUSE I NEVER DID BEFORE DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN’T HAVE IT OUT RIGHT HERE AMONGST THE SAUSAGES.
Remus clenches his teeth and spends three seconds crossing a ‘t’.
“Lupin,” says Sirius. JUST BECAUSE WE HAVEN’T REALLY FOUGHT YET DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T TAKE YOU NOW I WILL TAKE YOU ON AND WIN, says the pucker of the ‘p’ sound against his lips.
“Well,” he says. “Well, look. Look, it’s not as if you haven’t heard,” he glances at him, finally.
Sirius shrugs as he reaches for the teapot, but his eyes flicker to the left, briefly, under his lashes. The Hufflepuff table is mostly empty, mostly quiet, mostly like it always has been in the early morning in the winter.
“So?” says Sirius, finally, dropping four cubes of sugar into his mug.
“So? It’s sad, so. He was just.”
“It happens.”
“You,” says Remus, operating on the thick-tongued edge of disbelief, only. “You.”
“You have jam on your nose,” says Sirius, blowing steam at Remus over the rim of his teacup. “C’mon, I’ll write it for you, all right? A little walk-about’ll do you good, you’re all pale and rangy and rather, aren't you.”
“Hazard of association with present company,” he says, wit on that sharp and hapless drive of preservation, and Sirius laughs and loops his own scarf around Remus’s neck and that, thinks Remus, that, this is why I will never be a sour person, because I am weak in the face of stupid pointless compassion and people who eat your eggs for breakfast, and jealous of everyone who can just say, so.
“Poppycock,” says Sirius, stuffing a crumpet in his pocket and tugging Remus to standing by the scruff of his collar.
“You instill in me a great and burgeoning interest in real violence,” says Remus. And it is because it is not a lie (said only to be droll) that his stomach does a gibbering flip down into his thighs, when Sirius stuffs his personal space full of nervous energy.
“Smashing,” says Sirius. “Lovely. Now shut the hell up.”
Remus tries to roll his neck in a way that gets him dislodged out from under Sirius’s grip, but only manages to get himself tangled between the straps of his bookbag and the loop of the scarf, and Sirius laughs when he trips over his own ankles and collides into Sirius’s bony hip. The sound ricochets, it is a full noise, a storm of heat in the winter.
“Stop it,” Remus murmurs, untangling himself (attempting, anyway, but Sirius’s bony hip is bony, which is obvious, and warm, which is familiar and terrifying).
“Oh, stop it yourself,” Sirius snaps. “It’s not a bloody funeral.”
“Isn’t it?” says Remus. “I was rather under the impression that someone had actually - ”
“What’re you writing on, then?” Sirius rummages in Remus’s bookbag, unceremoniously.
“Don’t. Don’t. I’ll just finish it later.” He bites at a nail and squints into the dusty sun patches of the corridor, feeling a strange bruise blooming on his skin, or just under it, and it’s only strange because he can’t quite seem to place where it started, or where it is now.
“Man of my word, Moony,” grins Sirius, and Remus earns another nudge of a bony hip, another bruise that spreads up into his jugular and makes his teeth ache.
“Aren’t,” he mumbles, digging deep for banter, levity, and something else to implant in his voice besides judgment and self-righteousness; he finds it more hopeless than usual.
Sirius pauses, quill held between his teeth, wrist deep in Remus’s bookbag, and Remus glances over to see Sirius looking at him with awful, black, narrowed eyes. I am suddenly a problem again, thinks Remus. I’d been pegged for a while, and now, now I’m a challenge to be conquered, aren’t I, because your face is like that and that’s what that means.
“You really - ” says Sirius, and his brow relaxes, slowly, the gentle genius of a quick revelation.
Remus glares. It’s a horrible thing, this hot and boiling mess inside him when Sirius does things like that, says things like this, to shame him for being simply how he is, and it’s mostly that it never makes any sense stacked up to everything else: to the sacrifice and adventure and compassion and the way he seems absolutely ill some nights until he’s sure that Remus’s new scars aren’t all that painful, that he’s had enough to eat, that he’s warm enough, that the blankets don’t slip off the hospital bed. Oh, I know, thinks Remus, and shoves his fists in his pockets. I know and I just hate you for it.
“What?” Sirius says.
“Forget it,” says Remus, and is never sure who comes out the winner, between the two of them, anymore.
“You didn’t know him,” protests Sirius. “Lupin.”
“Fine. Fine. It’s fine.”
“Moony,” he says.
“Sorry,” says Remus. “Sorry, forget it, I don’t care.”
“Augh,” Sirius grins with his teeth; there is the hard, threatening snick in his smile, a swift and dismissive sign of his thin patience for Other People’s suffering. He grips the crook of Remus’s neck with one big hand, cold and clammy palm tight under Remus’s scarf, fingers on Remus’s collarbone, thumb on the highest knobby bump of Remus’s spine. “Pathetic. C’mon, you sorry bloke.”
Remus wants so badly to squirm, it tightens at the very last vertebrae, and makes his gut quiver. “Leave off, I’ve said it’s - ”
“I’d notice,” says Sirius, thumb bumping against Remus’s neck, rough and fumbling for skin. “Christ.”
“What,” he says, ache like a rash spreading through his blood and up into his lungs. “I didn’t - “
“Oh, shut it,” says Sirius, mouth a tight, red-bitten line until he laughs, once. “If you died. Christ. You know.”
Remus’s mouth quirks, but he knows, it’s a half-second too late on the upbeat, he knows, which means Sirius will have seen it all, and there we go, he thinks, there we go, another thing stripped away, and I’m so awfully happy to give it up, aren’t I.
“I’m not dying,” he says, asserting, and looks away.
“Not yet.”
“Cheeky.”
“Cheeky yourself,” Sirius squeezes Remus’s nape, once, hard. “Forget it, all right? We’d all come to your funeral and be very awfully morbid and soppy, and I’d - I’d. Write a poem, a sonnet, right? It’d all be very pretty and iambic and appropriately acknowledged, and I’d punch anyone who laughed for at least three months.”
“Three months,” says Remus, and shifts his weight a halfstep forward.
“Obligatory mourning period.”
“Thanks awfully.”
“Well, it’s only right,” says Sirius, and his hand goes still on Remus’s collar. “The right thing to do, when.”
It is an unchangeable mistake, thinks Remus, but he looks at him. It is the dusty sun patches in the corridor, he thinks, the cold in the corners of the stones and the sun in the dust and I have heat-stroke in the middle of winter, indoors, and my skin is crawling because my jumper is full of moth eggs or bad wool because this is an entirely different animal, with red cheeks and wet eyes and a flurried, helpless line on his lips and hand on my neck, thinks Remus, oh Christ, I’ve said so much, and now. I didn’t forgive this face, he thinks.
“When,” says Sirius. “Well.”
I don’t trust you, thinks Remus. Remember.
“Forget the essay, then,” he says, and shrugs his shoulders like he feels a chill. “Fair change for a eulogy, all right?”
“Er,” says Sirius, hand hovering where Remus has dislodged it. “No, that’s not - I.” He looks as though he’s been wedged into a tight and prickly corner, and Remus’s stomach crinkles, unpleasantly.
“Library,” he says, and stands. “I’ll be. Library, you know. See you at half-six, then?”
“Right,” says Sirius, a small dark hollow between his teeth, where his lips don’t quite close, where his tongue wets. “Yeah.”
He hands Remus the map. It is folded tight and neat; it is warm with the press of both their hands.
He will never ask why. The reasons are never right, he thinks, and he has never trusted that good intentions are actually, actually, wholly innocent, mostly because they are always suffixed by the worst mistake of someone’s life.
I, says Sirius. Only I -
I know, he says, because he doesn’t want to.
Sirius is on the floor of the common room, by the fire, with his back against the ottoman, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, with bare feet, which means a variety of things, but mostly that he is sleepy, and comfortable, and situated himself that way at two in the morning in order to be perfectly alone, should anyone encounter it.
“My. Where were you?” says Sirius, and grins, firelight catching on his lips.
Remus thinks about just turning around and going out the portrait-hole the way he came in, since he hasn’t even started to take off his scarf, or his jacket, and he’d rather take his chances in the wilds of the Witching Hour than with this.
“Could ask you,” he says. “You never even made it to the library.”
Sirius snorts. “And you’d expect me?”
I have no idea, thinks Remus. Should I.
“Where’s James?” he says, instead.
“Who knows,” says Sirius, with a disconcerting amount of absolute detachment, which means, Evans.
“Ah,” says Remus, and tugs at the loop of his scarf with two fingers. “Peter’s - ”
Sirius rolls his eyes and laces his fingers together over his knees. “You honestly weren’t holed up there all night, were you?”
“I told you - ” says Remus.
Sirius swivels, eying him halfway over his shoulder, with his hair tucked behind his ears and shadows in his jaw and cheekbones.
“You were busy,” says Remus. He had the map, after all. He had been working on it. He wasn’t checking it for that, only that it was there, much like it always was, only this time it was rather Sirius Black and Mary Mclaren and Greenhouse Four. He had thought, strangely, at that point, at midnight, about how to go about erasing something living, and adaptable and indelible. Before, of course, he realized that this shining, new jealousy and the residual, angry guilt had managed to combine in his gut to give him nausea so powerful he could feel a thick layer of bile on his tongue and teeth.
“I was busy,” leers Sirius, quick-tempered and languid, all-in-all. “Wasn’t I.”
Remus feels a bristle under the hairs of his arms, behind his ears. “Forget it,” he says, and presses his palm to the back of the armchair; he wants to leave and go to sleep. He wants to leave, and his arm stays rigid because even his body is full of betrayal tonight.
“Oi,” says Sirius, twisting fully, elbows propped on the seat. “You could have - ”
“I said,” he says. “Just - ”
“Mates come first,” says Sirius. “You - ”
“It’s nothing,” says Remus.
“You come first,” says Sirius.
“It’s nothing,” says Remus.
“Oh, what the hell are you so cross about?” Sirius snaps, jostling a shoulder into the chair.
“Lower your voice,” Remus snaps back, in a whisper. “It’s two in the morning and you were here - ”
“What,” Sirius glares. “I was here what.”
“Waiting,” he says.
“To rub it in you, eh?” Sirius laughs, dark under his tongue. “Christ, is that what you think? You think I’m still waiting to see if you’ve come ‘round?”
“You,” says Remus. “I’ve said it was - ”
“You’re still all wound up about it! I told you, I told you then and I meant it then and I’ll say it again, it wasn’t ever about that, it was about you, for Christ’s - for Christ’s sake - I’m not going to grovel for your fucking, fucking smile, Lupin. I did it to protect you.”
“Oh, for.” He turns. He turns and leaves. He turns and leaves to go up the stairs and just go to bed and fumble through another awkward, shaky day of awkward, shaky, tight-roped friendships and he pretends that he can’t hear the footsteps, until Sirius grabs his scarf fringe, and tugs, hard.
“Lupin!”
“Bugger,” he chokes.
Sirius corners him against the railing with one arm and the other hand coiled in his scarf. He smells like coals and perfume.
“The hell, Lupin,” Sirius growls. “I wasn’t finished!”
“You’re never finished,” Remus mutters, trying to loosen the wool around his neck, a little.
“I never started!” Sirius snaps. “Oi, look at me!”
Oh, thinks Remus. Oh no.
“I think you’re choking me,” he says.
“Ha ha, you don’t get off like that, you filthy bastard,” grinds Sirius. “I either am or I’m not, your brain has no fucking say in the matter. I was. And you! You were - we are done with that shite, I thought.”
Remus bristles, gut like a thick wad of paper and guilt and nerves.
“I - ” he says.
“You said - ”
“I never - ”
“I’ve been - for - I’ve been, haven’t I been - ”
“You haven’t meant a single - ”
“All right! Shut it,” hisses Sirius. “You mope at me about nobody giving a damn about you and you’re going to get it, understand? I’ve fucking had it.”
“I haven’t - ”
“Sweet fucking - ” says Sirius “ - fucking Christ. Fucking idiot. I - ” Sirius grinds it out, leaning in, wrapping the scarf in his fist and pulling. “I would have killed for you.”
It shocks his blood cold and his thighs hot. He thinks, vaguely, that he should punch Sirius in the mouth for that.
“If you say one bloody word that makes it sounds like you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll - “
“You’re raving,” hisses Remus, pressing a fist to Sirius’s chest and getting his fingers tangled in Sirius’s tie. “Stark raving and you have no right - ”
“I’d do it again,” growls Sirius, so close Remus feels his stupid, stupid stubble against his own chin. “Fuck the bloody eulogy, that’s what I mean.”
“You’ve never meant a word in your life,” Remus snaps, but it only sounds like crackling air: no force or voice, just clumsy lips and teeth clattering in his mouth.
“I gave you the map. I gave you the map tonight, you stupid shite,” Sirius hisses, and his thumb is digging painfully into Remus’s jaw.
This is where, Remus thinks, where it gets worse, and he is terrified by how utterly oblivious this raw and bloody shaking anger has boiled over into the happiest moment of his life, has turned to the most singular instance, has found a space to exist, quaking, in the hard and desperate curl of his own fingers around Sirius’s jawline.
“I should be punching you in the mouth,” he says; his brain is reusing his own thoughts.
“Go ahead,” says Sirius, and he has the grip of his fingers spread up into the fringe of hair over Remus’s nape and ear. “Or maybe you’ll actually do something right for once.”
Remus kisses him because of the economy of the action. Noise silenced, threat acted, aching quelled, blindness cured, terror stilled, violence satisfied.
( PART II)