[FIC] To Sit a Dead Man Between Us: Part III
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.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
PART III
Nor Is It About Deeds Or Lands, Nor Anything About Glory, Honour, Dominion Or Power, Except War.
In January, Regulus returns from holidays, from London, and he is the strongest he has ever been, and he cannot sleep. He takes to slipping out of the dorms after midnight, because the silence makes his skin itch, and sometimes there are echos in his head, as though there was a voice bound up into the flow of his blood through his veins. He feels where it starts, at the belly of his bare wrist, and the leaden ink branded all the way into his bone. He cannot pinpoint where it ends; sometimes it seems to rattle around in his ribs, pushing at his lungs with broad shoulders, and squeezing at his heart as if it were too crowded in the cavity. Sometimes it spirals up his vertebrae, and plucks at the nerves in his neck, until he has to excuse himself from classes so he can sit in a stall in the boys' toilets on the fourth floor, inside a silencing spell, and scream (with his fist jammed against his mouth) until it goes away.
And sometimes, it curls up in the back of his skull, warm and soft, and kneads sleepily at the spooled-up pieces of his mind. It is not so violent, but it strips him of his ability to rest and dream, and his eyes won't stay closed when there are stray pieces of himself being tugged free and licked back into place again, even with all the care in the world. So he takes to slipping out of his bed, after midnight. So he goes to the Owlery and the Kitchens, but there are Living Things about, and so he goes to the Library instead (slipping through the locked door with a spell he heard Lucius use on a seven-bolt trunk, once, and realized it only needed a little bit of consideration for a seven-bolt door; he uses a thin, low, golden glow of lumos to keep the books from complaining).
He sits in the corner with his knees up, with a book open on his thighs, with his wrists resting on his knees, with his wand held between his fingers. And sometimes he reads. And sometimes he will write letters. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, with the intention of sending them, and they are rather boring, and sometimes rather affectionate or kind, or rather deferrent, or rather just words on a page in ink. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, but they are people he has never written to before, perhaps, and so doesn't know how to start, perhaps. His brother had a friend with brown hair and an odd, unsymmetrical sort of face, and once he saw them swimming in the Lake, and he thought that he had very skinny arms. He writes to him, and seems to end up asking a lot of questions like how did you change him and what is it, how did you do that charm with the ribbons for the Yule Ball when I was thirteen, what is it, what is so challenging about you you look so simple sometimes, what is it about you, why does he always seem to want something from you, how do I be wanted. And, this probably won't be enough, though, will it.
And every night he writes a letter without thinking who it will be for, because it is always for Sirius anyway, and he doesn't know how he would ever catalogue that, except wholly by itself.
And when the sun comes up, he puts the books back neatly where they belong. And he flicks his wand, to burn the letters into dust.
Sirius secretly thinks he may have found a hero in Caradoc Dearborn, but has trouble reconciling it with a man who won't order beer and chips in a pub. A little queer, honestly, but he's made a resolution to avoid the reality of that. Dearborn's smart enough, anyway, to cast a silent little spell that makes their conversation sound like a rehash of last night's Muggle football match, and so he ignores the fact that Dearborn scrapes the cheese from his toast and eats the bare bread with a knife and fork, washing it down with red wine. Sirius crunches crisps noisily and licks grease from his fingers and wonders about the rampant endemic issues of confused identity among the young Wizarding aristocracy.
He was an extremely well-bred young man of twenty-eight, or twenty-nine. He had those particularly impeccable manners, thinks Sirius, the kind they beat into you with the blunt end of a silver cake server and cold cabbage for three nights. He had a quick hand in all manner of spells and charms, and soft, watery brown eyes, and he clearly took every opportunity available to dress in ripped denims and black tee-shirts that advertised things like "Sex Pistols" (which Remus said once was an idea that made his thighs twinge unpleasantly). He had never once uttered a swear when Sirius had been in earshot, had a beautifully posh London accent, and always ensured that his shining, dark hair was spiked, perfectly, straight down the center of his scalp.
It's almost like he's poking fun at Sirius, isn't it? James had said, once, before he was forced to spend the rest of the day with a bag of ice cubes Spello-taped to his crotch, after Sirius upturned his bowl of soup into James's lap.
"Well?" says Dearborn. His empty plate is pushed neatly to the side; he shuffles the stack of parchment in front of him like a clerk, with easy fingers and a thumb used to turning pages and avoiding unsightly paper cuts. Sirius remembers seeing the first time Dearborn held his wand with hands like that, clean and practiced, and cast a curse cold enough to chill Sirius's pride, if not his blood.
"Hmn?" Sirius blinks and wipes his fingers on the condensation of his glass, dries it on his sleeve.
"What do we think? Do we take it?" Dearborn's thumb glides over the words informant, expects movement in two weeks.
"S'no question we can do it," Sirius muses. "Right?"
"No question," agrees Dearborn. "Except, do we take it."
"So, why not?" Sirius shrugs. "You can't play the danger card with me."
"Wouldn't dream of it, darling."
"Ta," Sirius just barely resists the urge to throw a crisp at him. "I mean. If it's not us, it's just two somebody elses, honestly, and at least we know we won't bugger it up."
"Well said," Dearborn nods. There is a hesitation, though, in the way he fingers the corner of the parchment pieces.
"But?" Sirius catches Dearborn's face in the narrow space of a squint.
"There is the matter of your - " Dearborn opens a palm, knuckles down on the table, fingers catching at the air. " - sensitivity to the persons at hand. Potentially, you see."
"Sensitivity," Sirius sneers, and leans back in the booth, finding Dearborn suddenly a little close for comfort. "It's not a sensitivity. It's not an issue."
"Potentially," says Dearborn again, and Sirius feels the curl in his lip like an involuntary nerve.
"My brother - " he snaps, and then leans forward on his elbows, voice lowered to a hiss. "Regulus is not fucking smart enough to run their kind of shite, yeah? He's bloody eighteen and a bloody coward, there's no way in hell anyone as mad as Voldemort is going to trust him with this sort of information, even a fucking shipment of very dark knick-knacks, for Christ's sake."
"Such faith," murmurs Dearborn.
"Forget it," says Sirius, firmly, skin hot and throat suddenly dry. "And I wouldn't give a shit if he were the Dark Bloody Lord himself, all right?"
Dearborn raises an eyebrow, and takes a small sip of his wine.
"What," challenges Sirius.
"Cheers," says Dearborn, and tips his glass in Sirius's direction. "I do see now why they've not bothered with you in the slightest."
"Too much trouble."
“Mm. Up Lions, indeed," murmurs Dearborn, and drains his glass.
Sirius eyes him narrowly. “You’re a Ravenclaw.”
“Was, darling. But our team was just awful when I was at school - did nothing to inspire any kind of loyalty.”
"You defected to Gryffindor," Sirius raises an eyebrow not because he doesn't believe it's the right choice; it's only nobody else seems to think so.
"When so inclined," says Dearborn. "Besides, given the intrinsic qualities and a rather enviable long-standing rivalry, the matches just happened to be much more exciting."
"Better songs, too."
"Oh, better than most," says Dearborn, and hums a few notes into his wine glass.
“Honestly, a match would have more to worry about, eh," says Sirius. "It’s two bloody messengers. It's some poor bloke’s cow field, not a battlefield in the middle of Diagon. Probably do as well to send House Elves, with how much of a fight they’ll put up.”
“Your overconfidence is precisely the reason I am considering asking Dumbledore to stretch our already thinning personnel,” says Dearborn, with a strangely gentle smile.
"Oi, come on - I'm not letting James get involved," Sirius snaps, and hardly knows why he does. "They've already got it out for him, considering he's done as well as spit on Voldemort's boots."
"Certainly not - Dumbledore did agree," Dearborn inclines his head, Mohawk dipping through the air. "And what about - "
"No," says Sirius.
"No?" says Dearborn.
“There’s no one else,” he says.
"Ah," says Dearborn.
It's not that Remus couldn't, thinks Sirius. It's not that he's untrustworthy or weak or lacking in the courage it takes (been bathing in his own blood since he was five, Christ, thinks Sirius). He doesn't know, quite, why it is that he says no, no, not them. Protection isn't all that silly, thinks Sirius. Brotherhood is an awfully fertile breeding ground for irrationality: just look at all that history tied up in crimes of passion, and passionate mistakes. He is, after all, Still Adjusting. So he doesn't quite know, but it's good of Dearborn not to ask. Gentlemanly of him.
"Well - " Sirius chews on a thumbnail. "Well?"
"Of course," says Dearborn, neatly.
"Reliable?"
"The source?" Dearborn's eyebrows waver. "Well. Who is to say, honestly?"
"Bloody reassuring," Sirius snorts, and wads a paper serviette into a ball between his hands. "Fuck it, let's give 'em what for. It'll still be a blast even if it's not a surprise, eh?"
"Well, then," says Dearborn. "It appears close to being settled. We shall owl Dumbledore for the exact details, immediately?"
"Yeah," Sirius grunts, into his emptying glass. "'mmediately."
"It will not be easy, Black - " stresses Dearborn, folding the pieces of parchment in his palms - once, twice, four times, seven, nine, twelve, until they're a neat triangle, only about the size of a teaspoon. " - it's not that I doubt your concentration on the matter, only that you - "
"- what?" snaps Sirius. "Threw up the first time I saw an eviscerated Muggle? Beg your fucking pardon, for that."
Dearborn crooks an eyebrow. "It is not your propensity for vomit that bothers me, darling."
"Faggot," Sirius mutters, and Dearborn catches his wrist in a grip hard enough to bruise.
"You," says Dearborn, bones creaking under the ring of his fingers. "Are very intelligent, skilled, and quick on your feet. But you are a violent man with a short fuse. I can say this about you, and I barely know you, except for your delectable choices of dining establishments, so I can only imagine how your mentors and friends are worried that you will, if you will excuse the expression, go absolutely stark raving mad one of these days."
"Ow," says Sirius. "Christ. Fucking let go, already."
And Dearborn does, settling his hands back into his own lap, fingers laced together and he sighs; Sirius rotates his wrist with a glare at his own empty beer glass.
"Well," says Dearborn.
"Oh, don’t fucking worry about it," mutters Sirius. “It’s on me.”
"Ah," says Dearborn. "Cheers. We'll be in touch, darling."
He pushes away from the table, leather trousers creaking as he stands. The darkness of the open door swallows him up, and Sirius orders another beer, because otherwise, he thinks, really, what a fucking waste the night would be.
Wake up. Sirius.
Sirius gropes in the buttery air, catches at the soft curve of a hip and grins. "Whut," he mumbles.
Up, Remus murmurs. We have to get up.
"Mm. Why?" Sirius mutters, with all the practiced petulance of twenty years as a prince.
Have to stop dreaming sometime.
It doesn't sit right. It sounds like a clench in the gears, a disruption of sunlight, a scratch on the victrola. He cracks one eye open, and the shadows are purple and gold, fuzzy around the edges, and Remus, just in focus, is smiling like he's told a joke. His hair is sticking up, oddly, a smudge of sleep over his cheekbone, and the cut across his shoulder - the one from the fourteenth, oh what a rollicking bloody old time - has grown a little scabby now.
"Bastard," he groans, tugging on Remus's hair. "You fight fucking un-fair."
The sheets rustle, and Remus's hips slide from Sirius's fingers, his form slipping out into the slate-cold air, naked and shivering and looking for a pair of trousers; his thighs bend just level with Sirius's eyes when he bends to pick them up from the floor.
"We've got thirty minutes," Remus murmurs; Sirius watches his white fingers slip into the waistband to tug it closed. "Christ, s'cold."
"Socks," Sirius says, sitting up to fish them from the tangle of blankets at his feet. "Here," he waits until Remus's hand is over his own, and tugs them close - socks and Remus all - noses bumping.
"Ta," Remus whispers. "Up, now?"
"Coffee," says Sirius, and pokes Remus in the chest with a knotted sock.
"Toast," says Remus, and presses his lips to the side of Sirius's mouth. And so, thinks Sirius, and so, it's a deal, uncharacteristically simple and sweet, and tasting so vaguely of toothpaste and wheat crumbs, and jellied apple preserves.
A portion of the Order of the Phoenix meets at eleven-twenty-six that Thursday morning, in the cramped attic space of Emmeline Vance's country cottage. Lily in the only proper seat, the rose-pink plush of the upholstery wreaking havoc with her hair, hands folded on her belly, and James perched on the arm, wrists to his knees and back bent along the line of the rafters. Peter sitting on a pile of filing folders, tucking back the occasional errant photograph with his ankle. Dearborn on the banister like a well-mannered raven, Elphias sitting on the curve of a coat rack with his silly hat, McGonagall on the windowsill with dust and sunlight coiled in her hair, Longbottoms like an inseparable force, cramped above packing trunks.
"We are clear, then, I believe," says Dumbledore, settled comfortably in a pile of old fur stoles and an oversized, plush-purple sunhat perched on his knee. "If necessary, the Muggles will be redirected. Once the situation has been deemed acceptable for appropriate action, Mr Black and Mr Dearborn will attempt to intercept before the meeting takes place. There is already a Portkey placed, preemptively, and quite kindly, by our own Arabella, this morning - it will take you to a location far enough away to consider the more usual methods of return, to London. Unfortunately, as some of the events in the Ministry have shown, the simplest escape is rarely the safest. I would stress that, if you feel as though you run the risk of being followed, for any reason, you exhaust all other possibilities before Apparition.”
"And no excess bravery, Mr Black," murmurs McGonagall, from the back.
"What? Or detention?" Sirius grins, and Lily smacks him on the shoulder.
"I am also quite aware," says Dumbledore, stroking the hat on his knee like an absurd cat, "that there is some nature of - "
"If anyone says sensitivity," mutters Sirius, in Remus's ear, "I'm going to kick them in the bollocks."
" - hostility entering into this particular arrangement. We cannot be assured that any of those taking part in this supposed transfer of potentially vital goods and information are actually the ones responsible for recent losses taken, and felt quite deeply, I know, by our members." Dumbledore's eyes take on the light of a shivering memory, a Pensieve-coloured silver.
"I urge restraint," he says.
"Of course, Headmaster," says Dearborn; Sirius refuses to meet his eyes.
"Excellent." The word is like a knife on a whetstone, and they are disbanded, slowly. Emmeline offers tea, but the Longbottoms go with apologies, and Peter slips down the stairwell with a clap to Dearborn's shoulder. Elphias and Dumbledore seem to have disappeared into the shadows at some point between steeping and pouring, and Sirius thinks it strange only because Dumbledore's never one to pass up a scone at noonish. Sober business, he thinks. All this thinking and talking and planning and waiting, and no room for baked goods.
James catches him at the shoulder when he leans in to take a cuppa, fingers hooked in Sirius's collar.
"Edgar Bones," he says.
"Shut it," says Sirius. "Never happen."
"Not again, you mean," says James, and touches the back of Sirius's head with an open palm. Peter found the bodies, and had no one to shout for, except them, and so. It stays with you, thinks Sirius. The last bloodless puff of life and the waste of a talented existence and the way a limp arm can look so different when it's sleep, or when it's -- well.
Sirius glares at him. "Look, it's not - "
"Don’t let them - I mean," says James. "You promise me."
What do we do, thinks Sirius. How are we even surprised, anymore, by what we say after being injected with revenge, sharp and hot on the tip of the tongue and sizzling for release in your fingers.
"Right," he says, and means it. The morning after they found the Bones family, he tried to warm the kettle with his wand, and he scorched his eyebrows off instead. It'll be a relief, he thinks, and grins, not to have to lie and call the burn marks on the tile an effort in redecoration. And Remus, who would be skeptical of his own body's existence if the proof hadn't been quite so undeniable, could just believe him.
Christ, thinks Sirius. And Remus, who looks lovely covered in dust, he thinks. Radiant in the little specks of light that have settled in his hair, in his eyelashes, fingers painted ivory in the way the light is slatted through the roof. He chews on a thumbnail when he thinks no one is looking, temple pressed to the tiny window, foot braced against a rafter, back curved against a stack of leather-bound books, and he looks fifteen again, boundless amounts of that guarded naivety and those old-man sweater vests, and that smile.
Thank god, Sirius thinks, and burns his tongue when he drinks his tea too quickly. Thank god for greed and grief, he thinks, because now you’ll believe me when we win.
He is writing a letter to Narcissa. He sits on the floor in the corner of the library by the stacks labeled History, Magic: 1701-1799, Austria, Wars, Disagreements, & General Misunderstandings with a book open on his lap and the spare, ragged end of a parchment roll spread over the pages, and the inkwell by his feet, and he writes Dear Narcissa How are you I am sorry to have missed you over Christmas Holidays I hope you are well and that France is fine I saw Lucius not long ago did he tell you that I think I would like to come see you this summer in France if you are still there in one go, because it is how every letter to her starts, more or less, and if he gets it out that way to begin with, he can crumple it up and start over with a clearer sort of head (if he has one, he thinks, at all).
His arm hurt again, tonight. It was odd, he thought, when he woke from a fitful hour of sleep with the feeling of his veins twisting inside his skin. It was odd, because it was not what Lucius had said, but he imagined that Lucius didn't feel the need to scrape out his own brain with the nearest sharp instrument just because he couldn't find sleep. He imagined, as he pulled on his shoes, and took his wand from the bedside table, and slipped out of the dormitory into the dark and empty corridors, that when Lucius cannot sleep, he simply has a glass of brandy, and pets his dogs, and then everything is all quite lovely again.
But I'm very young, he thinks, quill paused over the paper, ink already smudged on his fingertips. I'm very young still, Lucius says it all the time; they say it all the time. And sometimes, he thinks, lately, they say it as if it's pride. Maybe that's why, he thinks, and bends to the parchment again, raising his wand to get more light, maybe that's why it's different. Because I have some growing to do, yet?
He writes, Are you proud of me. He wants her to say it; he would like to read that sort of thing from Narcissa Malfoy nee Black, that she was proud of him, for whatever it was that he had done for her to be proud of. If he ever sent the letters, those ones, the ones with ARE YOU PROUD OF ME PROUD OF ME LIKE LUCIUS IS OR LIKE YOU ARE IF YOU ARE ARE YOU PROUD OF ME scrawled like screaming music notes, like runes and wriggling lines of steam over the page. If he ever sent those letters, he would like to read that. So he writes, Are you proud of me, tonight, without any intention, of course, except that maybe -- well, one day. Tonight, he writes a-r-e-y-o-u-p-r-o-u-d-o-f-m-e-? but pauses, in the first curve of the question mark. His quill stops, he cannot think of what comes next, body suddenly stilled and rigid, because there is the soft rustle of robes from the far end of the room and getting slowly nearer, a growing, winking light of a wand filtering through the stacks, and someone's voice, humming.
It is so unexpected; he cannot quite bring himself to panic. It is so unexpected, the Nox is not even past the curve of his throat before the Headmaster rounds the corner, bareheaded and singing to himself, with his hand trailing absently along the spines of the books on the shelf for Hungarian-Austrian Insults of the 1730s. He is wearing a robe with small bells on the cuffs, and blue-silk stars against the hems, and he has very plain, white slippers on his feet, and he looks as if he is thoroughly pleased to be here, where he is, as if there is a purpose in not having any purpose at all, as if Doing The Right Thing, and Running A School For Burgeoning Witches And Wizards Otherwise Known As Hellions, and Being Very Wise Apparently, were not so different from sleepwalking, after all.
Dumbledore pauses, there, at the end of the shelves, because he sees Regulus, there, at the end of the aisle (how could he not, thinks Regulus, finally).
“Ah," says Dumbledore, so lightly, it is like dust.
Regulus cannot speak, and there are bells on the cuffs of the Headmaster’s robes, and they catch all the light of his wand.
“Well,” says Dumbledore (and the bells say well-well-well when he moves his arm, slightly). "I do beg your pardon. Terribly rude of me."
Regulus stares, quietly. The light from his wand makes the shadows smooth, and the leather surfaces of the books and the skin of Dumbledore's cheeks all look very rich and young. His hair is golden in the hovering dark, and he is smiling, and Regulus is wearing his school trousers and a night shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sitting on the floor of the library with his wand arm raised to the light, of course.
"Ah," says Dumbledore, again, and takes a silent step forward.
"Sir," says Regulus; it feels like dust on his tongue.
Dumbledore's robes are like chimes, soundless on the floor and speaking for the air; he moves a few paces closer, and crouches slowly, with young-man bones and movement, and an old-man beard pooling on the floor. He has his wrinkled hands on his knees, and he looks at Regulus with his sharp, confident, secretive eyes, and he opens his mouth to speak.
“Don’t,” says Regulus. “Sir?”
Dumbledore is very close, and his eyes are very bright, and Regulus thinks he can smell things like sandalwood and lemon sugar and warm wool, and the heavy, musking pulse of living things. And it makes his gut draw up, tightly; he feels bile in his throat, and something skittering in the back of his skull digs rigid, painful fingernails into his nerve endings.
"Don't,” he says. “Don’t pander to me.”
Dumbledore pauses. Regulus cannot say if he is surprised, or even caught remotely off-guard. Headmaster to hundreds of students for decades and decades and decades, thinks Regulus, do you really think he's never heard anyone try and stand up to him before? Perhaps, he thinks, it is because he has been taught to be polite. Lucius was right about power: strength and honey, he said, and it makes Regulus think of the core of a wand, or the way his own handwriting is bold and black and indelible, how it came from his own fingers.
“Please,” says Regulus. “I mean.”
"You will be leaving us, then," says Dumbledore, finally. (Th-th-then, say the bells.)
"I don't know," says Regulus. "Maybe."
"Ah," murmurs Dumbledore, leaning forward like a secret, wandlight in his hair and skin, and on the tip of his tongue. "Know that I will not fight for you, then. I think, perhaps, there are those who need you more than I?"
"I'm sorry," says Regulus, his ribs shaking, with how fast his heart is beating. "I don't care what you think."
Dumbledore smiles; eyes like the spark of sun through an icicle. "And how refreshing," he says. "It is so rare that that happens to be true."
Regulus opens his palm over his knee, over the parchment; his fingers smear the ink of I think I would like to come and see you this summer in, because they were written all tall and hurried and rather close-together, at the time.
“Well,” says Dumbledore. “Then.”
And he straightens, slowly, and his beard uncoils from the floor and the hem of his robes stir up the dust and the small bells stir up the air, and his face slips back into the wrinkling shadows and the grey-light, and Regulus lowers his wand, and he feels the ink drying smeared on his fingers.
“Again,” says Dumbledore. “My apologies.”
Regulus blinks, once, and there is a great unraveling. The shadows eat at Dumbledore's face, when he turns, and his long fingers look old and shriveled and grey when he places a hand on the book-spines again, and his footsteps are slow, and even, and quite heavy for such a small sort of man.
"Oi!" grumbles a book, from down the stack. "Put out yer light - yer light!"
"Now, now," he hears Dumbledore murmur, like a soft pat on the shoulder, like a lullaby, a windchime. "No need to fret."
And he hums, again, as he disappears into the shadows, mostly tuneless, vaguely happy, and Regulus hisses Nox, because the ache in his arm is gone, because the back of his skull is empty, an instant void where he had just felt so overfull and quartered, and he is suddenly alone and deaf and empty, and shaking with decisiveness, in the dark.
Sirius presses his nose to the crease of a thigh and breathes; there are musty sheets tangled around his ears and eyes, and his fingers are cramped sleepily under Remus's ankle. He flexes his palm, knuckles rasping along a thin tendon, and drags his tongue down into the sweaty divot of Remus's hipbone.
"Mgnnph," says Remus, and shoves a trembling hand down into the blankets, skittish ribs jumping under Sirius's fingers.
"Shut it," Sirius mumbles into his skin, and bares his teeth to catch the shudder against his tongue.
"Black -- "
"You love it, shut up," says Sirius, and splays his thumb and fingers open slow enough to feel the resistance in Remus's hips, and then the give, the bruising reluctance with which he sighs, and lets his head tip back (his fingers are still clenched over his own belly, holding a fistful of sheet). Sirius closes his teeth over the filmy skin at the inside of Remus's thigh.
"Mnnphh," says Remus again, and his hips cant restlessly; the way his left side rocks upwards means he's turned his head and bit the pillow, arm crooked, eyes squeezed shut.
"Stop laughing," says Sirius.
"F-fucking," Remus gasps, a fine tremble in his legs. "Fucking christ, I'm - I'm not."
"Are," Sirius grins, and bites.
"Prove it," Remus hisses; Sirius can hear the chatter of teeth in his voice, the way he shakes like he's freezing when he's excited and aroused and shaken out of sleep by the feeling of someone's mouth on his skin. As if it were such a foreign concept, Sirius thinks, to be considered, like that.
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do,” Sirius grins, breath soft, sliding a thumb just this side of crooking inside.
“Ah - ” Remus rasps, grabs a fistful of his hair and pulls, hard enough to jerk Sirius’s head back, away.
“Christ!” Sirius hisses, eyes smarting. “Moony - ”
“Sorry - don’t, just - ” Remus makes a helpless gesture with one hand, face red and pinched, hair plastered to his forehead. He collapses back against the pillow, palm pressed to his closed eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to - ”
Sirius rubs at his scalp, finding Remus’s fingers there. “Just - ” he murmurs. “Just a tease, eh?”
“Ah,” says Remus. “I know,” but clearly doesn’t. His eyes are glassy when they open, and there is blood showing under every inch of his skin in a mottled flush.
Sirius holds himself up on an elbow, joints creaking, heat in his thighs and the Not-Quite-Guilt, like a filmy layer, pooling in the creases of his sweaty skin. “Look,” he says. “Are you - ”
“Are you going to fuck me, or not?” whispers Remus, in the dark.
He is very good at grinning that way, thinks Sirius. He has perfected the lascivious edge of a smile, he is top marks at that pooling darkness of the eyes and the bitten lips and the Way To Flex Your Hips. The irreplaceable hiccough-laugh when Sirius surprises him. Well-studied existence. Well above average performance, even half-asleep.
“Moony,” says Sirius.
“You’re stalling,” says Remus, and draws a knee up; it slides again Sirius’s ribs. “Honestly wasn’t a trick question.”
“Remus,” says Sirius.
“Shut up, will you,” whispers Remus, and curls himself forward to kiss Sirius’s mouth. There is that patchy scrape of stubble just under his jaw, the bump of his odd, long nose, the perfected, gawky curve of his neck, his spine, the way his collarbone feels in the half-dark: links of bone and tissue roped together, held in shape by negative space, by the missing pieces of other people.
He can’t help it - how carefully Remus puts together these moments - the crafted delicacy makes him laugh.
“What,” says Remus, a thread of light between them in the haze, where his whisper dissolves.
“I’m not,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the tuft of sweaty hair over his temple. “Not if you.”
“Christ,” says Remus, and tugs a little at the blankets tangled at their hips. He exhales sharply between his lips, and his hair tickles Sirius’s cheek. “Honestly?”
“Mm,” says Sirius, nudging him back against the mattress.
“I preferred it when you forced me against my will, you know,” mumbles Remus, elbows up, fists rubbing against his eyes, the tingling cool settling into the places where their skin rasps together, the slow un-arousal.
Sirius snorts. “Bullshit.”
“Possibly. But you can’t prove it,” says Remus. Sirius watches him from above, from all fours, from This Place: Remus Lupin breathing slowly, Remus Lupin with grey-light skin and a red bite on the inside of his thigh, Remus Lupin with his face turned to profile, with sweat on his lip and his eyes lidded to the world, Remus Lupin with one hand open on the pillow, Remus Lupin once again, victorious, in the battle against True Love.
“Wanker,” mutters Sirius. “You - ”
“It’s raining, now.”
"Mph - " Sirius moves his head with great effort, tucking himself under Remus's chin. And so it is. He can see the places on the window where the water is wiping down the grime, little clear streaks in the city's filter: too light for sound, and the hue in the clouds is just this side of the sun.
"Bollocks the rain," he says.
“And the valiant struggle continues,” says Remus. “Sirius Black vee Nature.”
“Mph,” says Sirius, again. They should fall asleep again, he thinks. They should stop all these moments when the waking gets in the way and lets the world penetrate their bones and blood and tongues and eyes and words. He thinks, I shouldn’t get up today.
“Almost lost it there, didn’t you?” he says.
There is quiet. There is the sudden stutter of wind and water on a drainpipe. There is the sound of Remus’s body, and the sheets tangled in their ankles and the looped belts on the floor and the unwashed dishes in the sink and the teakettle half-full of cold water and the two pairs of boots at the door. And there is that challenge of the next breath, like a metronome keeping the world measured in its chaos.
“Yes,” says Remus.
“I know,” says Remus.
“I must be slipping.”
The next morning, he stumbles out of the half-lit bedroom, into the kitchen, and finds Remus with his elbows on the table - who is fully dressed, and who does not seem as though they got very little sleep, and who does not look up - reading yesterday’s Prophet, and eating a piece of dry toast.
“It’s Tuesday,” he says.
Remus looks vaguely in the direction of the clock, which hasn’t told proper time in ages, but sometimes still tells them that it’s time to take out the rubbish on the appropriate day. “It is, yes.”
“You have work?” he says, and feels very lazy and unwashed, which isn’t so peculiar as just particularly annoying, at the moment. “Don’t you have work?”
Remus does not look up; he is chewing a corner of his piece of toast. “I’ve quit,” he says.
“You were sacked again, you mean,” Sirius snorts, and peers inside the kettle, which has gone cold.
Remus glares, briefly. “If I’d meant I was sacked - ”
“Why the hell would you go and - ” Sirius sighs. “You were looking for ages.”
Remus shrugs; the newspaper rustles suggestively between his hands. “Comparatively,” he says. “I suppose.”
Sirius taps the kettle, and it makes an irritated little squeak. “Pay not good enough for you?”
He can hear the tiny frown in Remus’s voice: it has the same little between-the-eyebrows wrinkles on the consonants, the downward turn of the vowels. “You don’t have to be an absolute prick. It wasn’t your job, as far as I know.”
“You just forgot to mention, then, that you were going on that Ministry dole?” Sirius snaps, prodding the kettle again. I can’t stand self-sacrifice, he thinks, it just sits there quietly in the corner of the kitchen and eats its toast and lets the kettle go cold and has absolutely no regard, he thinks, no regard at all for the rest of us.
“Christ, no,” Remus laughs, sharply. “Not quite that desperate, yet.”
“Oh,” says Sirius. “Oh, good. Because.”
“I know,” says Remus, neatly. “I’d tell you. If.”
“Don’t do that,” Sirius sighs. “Sell a few organs, first, or something, all right? Or go to Prongs, even.”
Remus laughs again, a little softer, a little rounder on the edges, and the newspaper rustles again, and Sirius knows that he is being watched now, with those modestly-brown eyes, with that funny sort of scrutiny, where he will be ashamed, if he’s caught looking.
“In that order, hm?” says Remus.
Sirius waves a distracted hand, and glances back over his shoulder. “Oh, whichever suits you, princess.”
“Don’t,” Remus pulls a face, and bends to the paper again. “It’s before eleven, let’s do let me live through the morning with my masculinity relatively intact, hm?”
“You’re going to be an awful sort if all you do from here on is laze around the flat and be shirty,” he grins; Remus flips him two fingers, over the top edge of the paper, and he reaches over, and catches at them.
“You’ll learn to live with it,” says Remus, smartly, pulling his hand free. “Or I can show you where the floo is, hm?”
“So,” he says, uptick in his voice, fingers catching at the corners of the Prophet.
“Other commitments,” Remus says, finally. “They were starting to get in the way - I couldn’t. Not conscionably, anyway.”
“Not the Order,” he frowns.
“What possible other commitment,” Remus rolls his eyes, and folds the paper, finally, onto the table. “There might be. I mean, we could be gone for months on end, if things don’t let up.”
He hadn’t heard anything about that, and watches Remus’s face sharply. “He’s said that,” he asks.
“In so many words, no,” Remus says, and Sirius has absolutely no idea if he’s lying. “But.”
“He’s not paying us, you know,” he mutters, and goes to get the steaming kettle.
“Not paying you,” grins Remus, and Sirius satisfies his anxiety and violence and affection by snapping Remus’s ankle, soundly, with a dishtowel.
He doesn't come here very often. There's nothing much here, any more. Old school robes in the closet, and a collection of dust in the corner of the kitchen. He finds a few things in the cupboard, in an old hatbox they stole from McGonagall's office in fourth year: a compass with a silver needle, a canteen, a soft suede rucksack, a pair of woolly socks, and a broken quill.
In the loo, he washes out the canteen, and the mirror stirs.
"Hullo," it says sleepily, frame smothered under a webbing of ashy dust. "Come back, have you?"
"Not really," says Sirius. "Sorry, love."
"Hm," it says. "I thought you'd died."
He snorts. But the floorboards have surprise in their groans; the spare furniture doesn't fit his solid body. The leaking pipes and the disrepair is indignant, a natural process interfered upon, the decay gone stolid.
“Didn’t miss me?” he says, and swipes a palm over his reflection; his fingers come away pale grey, and filthy.
“I didn’t,” it says.
“Bullshit you didn’t,” he smirks; he taps the canteen against the edge of the sink and ignores the gut-curl of guilt when rust flakes off the faucet. “You could be so lucky to find a another face like mine - a thousand years and you’d never, you know.”
“You were prettier before,” says the mirror.
Sirius raises an eyebrow. “Eh?”
“Mm,” says the mirror, demure and cottony, words slurred and stretched like the tail end of a yawn. “Terribly sorry to say, but it’s all downhill from here.”
Sirius grins, leaning the heels of his hands against the basin. “Cursed with an early peak, eh?”
“Nobody ever really peaks,” says the mirror. There is something odd about the room, about the dust and the slowly crumbling light, the rain clogging up the windows and sticking to the brick, viscous and dark and smothering. “It’s all quite a bit duller than all that.”
Sirius grimaces. “Weren’t always this bloody dire, were you?”
“Oh, it comes and goes,” it says. “Do remember to put out the light this time.”
Hand on the switch, Sirius grins. “’til we meet again, love.”
In the wet and hazy light, the mirror laughs. Sirius almost stumbles in the corridor; it sends a rimy curl up through every thin and trembling layer of his skin.
Remus is asleep by the window. Sirius stands with one hand resting on the doorknob, with a hot and greasy paper bag tucked under his arm, with a prickle wriggling at the base of his spine all day, and he lets the dust settle under his feet. Remus is asleep by the window, and it makes his jaw hot, like anger, or shame. There are stripes of light on the faded fabric of the armchair, there are battered trainers tucked against the wall, there is Remus’s wand laid out at arm’s reach, a little crooked at the end and always vaguely humming.
Every now and then, now, thinks Sirius, he gets this feeling: like there is a great blunted spoon slowly working at de-pulping all his human insides. It comes in the morning, sometimes, in the streets of Diagon, where the world is terrified and grey and it is dangerous to believe your own shadow on the wall. It comes in the rain, in the night, when he cannot even fathom having a brain, any more, not like this, what with everything inside it and he turns three times around himself on the rug in front of the fireplace, and falls asleep as an animal. It comes in the quietest moments. Fuck, he thinks, I wasn’t meant for any of this, he thinks. That’s what this is, he thinks, this even, slow scooping-out. I am losing my mind, he thinks, because Remus is asleep at the window.
“You awake?” whispers Sirius, in the doorway.
There is a vague stirring in the chair - a pulse flutters in Remus’s jugular. Life, thinks Sirius, when he crosses the room, La, ta-dah, and the world hasn’t stopped, after all.
“Oi,” says Sirius, and smiles a little, when Remus bats at his head, eyes still closed.
“G’way,” says Remus. “You’re a nightmare, aren’t you?”
“Nightmare with curry,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the dry skin of Remus’s jaw.
“Awful,” mumbles Remus, and curls his fingers in the air above his thighs.
“Up,” Sirius insists. “I’m leaving at half-four, you git.”
Remus readjusts his body, shoulders hunching and rolling down his spine as he sits up. He rubs a red cheek with his palm and looks at Sirius, quietly, over the curl of his fingers. “Left just enough time for food, did you?”
“Priorities,” says Sirius, dropping the paper bag into Remus’s lap. “There. Make yourself useful while I find something to eat with.”
“Other than your fingers,” murmurs Remus, but he is picking apart the opening of the crumpled bag, head dipped low to inhale the heat and spice and paper-carton familiarity. From across the room, hands paused above the cutlery drawer, Sirius watches him hunker onto the floor, legs crossed, carefully laying out the containers. Pathetic ritual, thinks Sirius, you couldn’t have gone for something more - well, he thinks, it could be all dinner linens and posh starlit strolls and something about roses, but right now it is just the comfort of Remus’s slow divisions: #42 Him #8 Him, #12 Me, #26-with-no-onions Him, #14 Me, #18 Me and a #7-to-share.
“You’re a lazy bastard, by the by,” says Sirius, from the kitchen, even though he knows the full moon is pushing heavy and fat at the horizon. “You were in that exact fucking spot three hours ago.”
“Guilty,” says Remus, ripping a packet of hot sauce open with his teeth and two fingers.
“Good kip, eh?” says Sirius, settling beside him, hooking a carton towards him with his thumb.
“Like the dead,” says Remus.
“Looked it,” says Sirius, and hands him a fork.
“Morbid, today,” says Remus, and no, thinks Sirius, it would be lovely. I am an Optimist, he thinks, to believe that one day we might all be that fucking oblivious.
Maybe, he thinks, that is dark, all things considered.
But he laughs, instead, with the tines of the fork between his teeth. “Let it never be said that I wasn’t prepared for the worst,” he says, wagging the fork in Remus’s direction.
“And what is the worst, in this case?” asks Remus, suddenly, in that awful and peevish way he has of turning absolutely acceptable forced levity into a Serious Discussion About Things That Matter While Never Having to Say Anything Himself.
“Well,” says Sirius, and stabs a fork into his rice, and thinks that the last time he had a conversation about his own death was over cold, badly cooked lamb and boiled cabbage in the kitchens of Grimmauld Place, with his brother. “Well, yeah. There's that.”
“There’s that,” repeats Remus, his eyes down-turned, their eyes both down-turned.
“Augh,” Sirius mutters. “Come off it.”
Remus rolls his eyes; the shift of his body has a heavy tension in it, where the muscles get bunched and rolled up into the defensive shrug of his shoulders and spine and the creak of his knees.
“It’s just rotten timing,” Sirius says. “All right, you’ll be - you’ve been alone loads of times, and Wormtail’ll make sure you’re set up fine, at the start, eh, so.”
“I didn’t,” says Remus, frowning at him. “That’s not what I meant. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You don’t even. I mean.”
Sirius looks at him, sharply, because the pulse suddenly plummeting deep and electric into his gut doesn’t know whether it is excited or absolutely furious, that Remus think he gets to be worried about this sort of thing.
“It’s dangerous,” says Remus, finally.
“Like a cornered bludger, maybe,” Sirius snaps, because, well. Well, he thinks, he’s only been waiting all day to be in this space and now Remus, of course, has to do this sort of thing, now, when he isn’t ready and hasn’t had any sort of time to be suave and collected and appropriately brave when it all comes crashing down around his ears, finally. Of course, he thinks, he would. “I said, come off it.”
“I’m not,” says Remus, frowning. “This is - ”
“This is fucking stupid, is what.”
“It’s not,” says Remus, firmly, suddenly. “I think it’s not, actually.”
“Actually,” Sirius jabs a fork in his direction. “I’m too fucking old for you to still talk to me like that.”
“Like that,” Remus repeats, mouth full of derision and sautéed spinach.
“Like I fucking need fucking looking after.”
Remus is immediately silent, because - of course - he is well aware of how it will drive Sirius mad with what that means.
“’the hell,” he spits, and sets the carton down, heavily. “You still think I’ve got no bloody clue what you’re so hung up on. You still.”
“Oh, honestly,” Remus sighs. The sound has years of enforced doubt behind it, and it makes Sirius want to poke and tug and scrape at it with his fork tines until it’s all wound up and stuffed down somebody else’s throat. Just not his.
“How stupid do you think I am,” he says. “Just because you’re terrified - ”
Remus does not look at him, but it is the way his wrist stills, slightly, the way his body shifts: Pinned, thinks Sirius. Got you, at least.
“I haven’t said anything about - ”
“There's nothing wrong with it," he says.
Remus looks up at him with narrowed eyes. “I’ve never - ”
“Look, isn’t everybody? Now and then, eh, so just - it’s fine, I said. Only normal, all right?”
Remus’s fist closes around the fork handle, tightly; his voice is sharp. "Oh, because if I'm not reassured of my humanity every hour or so, I'll just forget entirely?”
"Christ! Don’t fucking - it has nothing to do with that. It’s only the same as being spooked by the idea of the bloody Grim," he snaps, furious when Remus saves the jabs for the worst times imaginable. "Everybody is, I said.”
“Everybody. Everybody? Even you?”
“What,” he says. “Of dying? Or - ”
“All right, yes. Yes, that. Even you.”
Sirius shrugs, in the half-light. This used to be second nature, bullying Remus into what he wants, but now, he's not so sure, and sometimes he thinks it’s just so awfully different now. He doesn’t know where that easy satisfaction has gone. It's as though one day, while he was kissing Remus’s mouth, or being thoroughly, soppily distracted by his elbows or his inability to stay awake while reading the Prophet on Sunday night, that the satisfaction just got up and buggered off, and left him with all the old ability but none of the reason. It makes answering hard, he thinks, when Remus is suddenly watching him with something, something approaching desperation. And it makes his gut boil thickly, a hot curl into his throat.
“I - ” says Remus, suddenly.
“It’s not about you,” says Sirius, sharp. “If you want it to be, you have to. No, fuck it. This isn’t. This isn’t about that.”
Isn't it? he thinks.
Remus makes a strange sound, low in his chest. “You can’t - ” he says, jaw working. “If you can’t - either, how can you expect - ”
Sirius kisses him: he reaches over the cartons of Indian curry and presses one palm flat to the floor by Remus’s thigh and leans over, all the way, to kiss him full on the mouth. This is because I want to, he thinks, not because the other choice is more frightening, not because the other choice means I have to speak to you. This is because I want to have my fingers in your hair and taste your stupid, smart-mouthed tongue and I want you to close your eyes and I want to bite your neck and thighs, and I want to watch you when you come because I am everything you’re not and I want everything you are, and that’s it, he thinks. It’s not because if I didn’t have you, I would have to be myself, by myself. That’s not the only reason why.
Remus sits; his eyes are closed, and their lips are still wet with each other’s, cooling.
"Why can’t you just," he mumbles, and his forehead is tight, brows pinched, skin very white and the heavy-wet, black glint between his teeth, where his lips part.
“Shut up,” Sirius hisses, against his jaw.
Remus presses a closed fist against Sirius’s chest, fingers just curling in the fabric of his collar when he pushes there; Sirius feels his weight settle back against his heels, sees Remus frowning at the convenient, heavy space over his shoulder.
“I’m not - ” says Remus.
“Don’t,” says Sirius, and he has his fingers wrapped around Remus’s wrist, because that is where they are. “I don’t care. You don’t fucking get to do this now.”
Remus is stilled, there, and his eyes are fixed on the place where Sirius has his palm wrapped around Remus’s wrist and thumb, and he doesn’t look up when he speaks, when he says something, finally, that sounds vaguely faraway, like the echo off a drainpipe, or cold stone.
“If you,” says Remus.
“I mean,” says Remus.
“I think I do, too. So. If,” says Remus.
"Liar," says Sirius.
Remus looks at him, in the silence, and Sirius drops Remus’s wrist, and picks at his food with his fork. It is the Long Look, the one that Remus gave in school, when he was eleven, when he knew the answer, he knew it, but had been tripped in the corridor by Sirius Black for being a tatter-patched know-it-all of a half-breed. It is angry, the stuffy-squashed kind of angry that makes his mouth flat and pale, and his eyebrows heavy and his stupid, crooked nose jut into the air. It was ironic, thinks Sirius, then.
This is ironic, thinks Sirius, now.
Maybe I meant it, he thinks. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe let’s just wait until tomorrow and if everything’s still the same, after everything, maybe we’ll try and change it, then. Maybe I should just sit here and watch you swallow it down, how it is to have that clump of almost scrape at your throat and your guts and all your insides, because you know you can’t say it, can you, he thinks.
“Right, then,” says Remus.
Exactly, he thinks.
"Well," says Sirius, firmly, and stands. His foot knocks over a half-empty cardboard carton; he'd rather stare at the scattered curry rice than Remus's hands or knees.
"Go on," says Remus. “Go on. I’ve got it.”
"Well,” says Sirius, and shoves his fists into his pockets - his hands are cold. “Tomorrow, then, yeah?"
Remus rolls his eyes; there is the subtle dip of a head, the mess of hair that hides the redness in his face (the kind that lines the insides of the eyes, that signals flushed and mottled skin, hot under the surface). Should this, thinks Sirius, maybe this shouldn’t make you feel like you've been crying.
"Go on, then," says Remus, again.
Or maybe, he thinks, because he finally has Remus speechless and red-faced at his feet, this is why it should.
( PART IV)
Author:
imochan
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: NC17
Summary: In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
PART III
Nor Is It About Deeds Or Lands, Nor Anything About Glory, Honour, Dominion Or Power, Except War.
In January, Regulus returns from holidays, from London, and he is the strongest he has ever been, and he cannot sleep. He takes to slipping out of the dorms after midnight, because the silence makes his skin itch, and sometimes there are echos in his head, as though there was a voice bound up into the flow of his blood through his veins. He feels where it starts, at the belly of his bare wrist, and the leaden ink branded all the way into his bone. He cannot pinpoint where it ends; sometimes it seems to rattle around in his ribs, pushing at his lungs with broad shoulders, and squeezing at his heart as if it were too crowded in the cavity. Sometimes it spirals up his vertebrae, and plucks at the nerves in his neck, until he has to excuse himself from classes so he can sit in a stall in the boys' toilets on the fourth floor, inside a silencing spell, and scream (with his fist jammed against his mouth) until it goes away.
And sometimes, it curls up in the back of his skull, warm and soft, and kneads sleepily at the spooled-up pieces of his mind. It is not so violent, but it strips him of his ability to rest and dream, and his eyes won't stay closed when there are stray pieces of himself being tugged free and licked back into place again, even with all the care in the world. So he takes to slipping out of his bed, after midnight. So he goes to the Owlery and the Kitchens, but there are Living Things about, and so he goes to the Library instead (slipping through the locked door with a spell he heard Lucius use on a seven-bolt trunk, once, and realized it only needed a little bit of consideration for a seven-bolt door; he uses a thin, low, golden glow of lumos to keep the books from complaining).
He sits in the corner with his knees up, with a book open on his thighs, with his wrists resting on his knees, with his wand held between his fingers. And sometimes he reads. And sometimes he will write letters. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, with the intention of sending them, and they are rather boring, and sometimes rather affectionate or kind, or rather deferrent, or rather just words on a page in ink. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, but they are people he has never written to before, perhaps, and so doesn't know how to start, perhaps. His brother had a friend with brown hair and an odd, unsymmetrical sort of face, and once he saw them swimming in the Lake, and he thought that he had very skinny arms. He writes to him, and seems to end up asking a lot of questions like how did you change him and what is it, how did you do that charm with the ribbons for the Yule Ball when I was thirteen, what is it, what is so challenging about you you look so simple sometimes, what is it about you, why does he always seem to want something from you, how do I be wanted. And, this probably won't be enough, though, will it.
And every night he writes a letter without thinking who it will be for, because it is always for Sirius anyway, and he doesn't know how he would ever catalogue that, except wholly by itself.
And when the sun comes up, he puts the books back neatly where they belong. And he flicks his wand, to burn the letters into dust.
Sirius secretly thinks he may have found a hero in Caradoc Dearborn, but has trouble reconciling it with a man who won't order beer and chips in a pub. A little queer, honestly, but he's made a resolution to avoid the reality of that. Dearborn's smart enough, anyway, to cast a silent little spell that makes their conversation sound like a rehash of last night's Muggle football match, and so he ignores the fact that Dearborn scrapes the cheese from his toast and eats the bare bread with a knife and fork, washing it down with red wine. Sirius crunches crisps noisily and licks grease from his fingers and wonders about the rampant endemic issues of confused identity among the young Wizarding aristocracy.
He was an extremely well-bred young man of twenty-eight, or twenty-nine. He had those particularly impeccable manners, thinks Sirius, the kind they beat into you with the blunt end of a silver cake server and cold cabbage for three nights. He had a quick hand in all manner of spells and charms, and soft, watery brown eyes, and he clearly took every opportunity available to dress in ripped denims and black tee-shirts that advertised things like "Sex Pistols" (which Remus said once was an idea that made his thighs twinge unpleasantly). He had never once uttered a swear when Sirius had been in earshot, had a beautifully posh London accent, and always ensured that his shining, dark hair was spiked, perfectly, straight down the center of his scalp.
It's almost like he's poking fun at Sirius, isn't it? James had said, once, before he was forced to spend the rest of the day with a bag of ice cubes Spello-taped to his crotch, after Sirius upturned his bowl of soup into James's lap.
"Well?" says Dearborn. His empty plate is pushed neatly to the side; he shuffles the stack of parchment in front of him like a clerk, with easy fingers and a thumb used to turning pages and avoiding unsightly paper cuts. Sirius remembers seeing the first time Dearborn held his wand with hands like that, clean and practiced, and cast a curse cold enough to chill Sirius's pride, if not his blood.
"Hmn?" Sirius blinks and wipes his fingers on the condensation of his glass, dries it on his sleeve.
"What do we think? Do we take it?" Dearborn's thumb glides over the words informant, expects movement in two weeks.
"S'no question we can do it," Sirius muses. "Right?"
"No question," agrees Dearborn. "Except, do we take it."
"So, why not?" Sirius shrugs. "You can't play the danger card with me."
"Wouldn't dream of it, darling."
"Ta," Sirius just barely resists the urge to throw a crisp at him. "I mean. If it's not us, it's just two somebody elses, honestly, and at least we know we won't bugger it up."
"Well said," Dearborn nods. There is a hesitation, though, in the way he fingers the corner of the parchment pieces.
"But?" Sirius catches Dearborn's face in the narrow space of a squint.
"There is the matter of your - " Dearborn opens a palm, knuckles down on the table, fingers catching at the air. " - sensitivity to the persons at hand. Potentially, you see."
"Sensitivity," Sirius sneers, and leans back in the booth, finding Dearborn suddenly a little close for comfort. "It's not a sensitivity. It's not an issue."
"Potentially," says Dearborn again, and Sirius feels the curl in his lip like an involuntary nerve.
"My brother - " he snaps, and then leans forward on his elbows, voice lowered to a hiss. "Regulus is not fucking smart enough to run their kind of shite, yeah? He's bloody eighteen and a bloody coward, there's no way in hell anyone as mad as Voldemort is going to trust him with this sort of information, even a fucking shipment of very dark knick-knacks, for Christ's sake."
"Such faith," murmurs Dearborn.
"Forget it," says Sirius, firmly, skin hot and throat suddenly dry. "And I wouldn't give a shit if he were the Dark Bloody Lord himself, all right?"
Dearborn raises an eyebrow, and takes a small sip of his wine.
"What," challenges Sirius.
"Cheers," says Dearborn, and tips his glass in Sirius's direction. "I do see now why they've not bothered with you in the slightest."
"Too much trouble."
“Mm. Up Lions, indeed," murmurs Dearborn, and drains his glass.
Sirius eyes him narrowly. “You’re a Ravenclaw.”
“Was, darling. But our team was just awful when I was at school - did nothing to inspire any kind of loyalty.”
"You defected to Gryffindor," Sirius raises an eyebrow not because he doesn't believe it's the right choice; it's only nobody else seems to think so.
"When so inclined," says Dearborn. "Besides, given the intrinsic qualities and a rather enviable long-standing rivalry, the matches just happened to be much more exciting."
"Better songs, too."
"Oh, better than most," says Dearborn, and hums a few notes into his wine glass.
“Honestly, a match would have more to worry about, eh," says Sirius. "It’s two bloody messengers. It's some poor bloke’s cow field, not a battlefield in the middle of Diagon. Probably do as well to send House Elves, with how much of a fight they’ll put up.”
“Your overconfidence is precisely the reason I am considering asking Dumbledore to stretch our already thinning personnel,” says Dearborn, with a strangely gentle smile.
"Oi, come on - I'm not letting James get involved," Sirius snaps, and hardly knows why he does. "They've already got it out for him, considering he's done as well as spit on Voldemort's boots."
"Certainly not - Dumbledore did agree," Dearborn inclines his head, Mohawk dipping through the air. "And what about - "
"No," says Sirius.
"No?" says Dearborn.
“There’s no one else,” he says.
"Ah," says Dearborn.
It's not that Remus couldn't, thinks Sirius. It's not that he's untrustworthy or weak or lacking in the courage it takes (been bathing in his own blood since he was five, Christ, thinks Sirius). He doesn't know, quite, why it is that he says no, no, not them. Protection isn't all that silly, thinks Sirius. Brotherhood is an awfully fertile breeding ground for irrationality: just look at all that history tied up in crimes of passion, and passionate mistakes. He is, after all, Still Adjusting. So he doesn't quite know, but it's good of Dearborn not to ask. Gentlemanly of him.
"Well - " Sirius chews on a thumbnail. "Well?"
"Of course," says Dearborn, neatly.
"Reliable?"
"The source?" Dearborn's eyebrows waver. "Well. Who is to say, honestly?"
"Bloody reassuring," Sirius snorts, and wads a paper serviette into a ball between his hands. "Fuck it, let's give 'em what for. It'll still be a blast even if it's not a surprise, eh?"
"Well, then," says Dearborn. "It appears close to being settled. We shall owl Dumbledore for the exact details, immediately?"
"Yeah," Sirius grunts, into his emptying glass. "'mmediately."
"It will not be easy, Black - " stresses Dearborn, folding the pieces of parchment in his palms - once, twice, four times, seven, nine, twelve, until they're a neat triangle, only about the size of a teaspoon. " - it's not that I doubt your concentration on the matter, only that you - "
"- what?" snaps Sirius. "Threw up the first time I saw an eviscerated Muggle? Beg your fucking pardon, for that."
Dearborn crooks an eyebrow. "It is not your propensity for vomit that bothers me, darling."
"Faggot," Sirius mutters, and Dearborn catches his wrist in a grip hard enough to bruise.
"You," says Dearborn, bones creaking under the ring of his fingers. "Are very intelligent, skilled, and quick on your feet. But you are a violent man with a short fuse. I can say this about you, and I barely know you, except for your delectable choices of dining establishments, so I can only imagine how your mentors and friends are worried that you will, if you will excuse the expression, go absolutely stark raving mad one of these days."
"Ow," says Sirius. "Christ. Fucking let go, already."
And Dearborn does, settling his hands back into his own lap, fingers laced together and he sighs; Sirius rotates his wrist with a glare at his own empty beer glass.
"Well," says Dearborn.
"Oh, don’t fucking worry about it," mutters Sirius. “It’s on me.”
"Ah," says Dearborn. "Cheers. We'll be in touch, darling."
He pushes away from the table, leather trousers creaking as he stands. The darkness of the open door swallows him up, and Sirius orders another beer, because otherwise, he thinks, really, what a fucking waste the night would be.
Wake up. Sirius.
Sirius gropes in the buttery air, catches at the soft curve of a hip and grins. "Whut," he mumbles.
Up, Remus murmurs. We have to get up.
"Mm. Why?" Sirius mutters, with all the practiced petulance of twenty years as a prince.
Have to stop dreaming sometime.
It doesn't sit right. It sounds like a clench in the gears, a disruption of sunlight, a scratch on the victrola. He cracks one eye open, and the shadows are purple and gold, fuzzy around the edges, and Remus, just in focus, is smiling like he's told a joke. His hair is sticking up, oddly, a smudge of sleep over his cheekbone, and the cut across his shoulder - the one from the fourteenth, oh what a rollicking bloody old time - has grown a little scabby now.
"Bastard," he groans, tugging on Remus's hair. "You fight fucking un-fair."
The sheets rustle, and Remus's hips slide from Sirius's fingers, his form slipping out into the slate-cold air, naked and shivering and looking for a pair of trousers; his thighs bend just level with Sirius's eyes when he bends to pick them up from the floor.
"We've got thirty minutes," Remus murmurs; Sirius watches his white fingers slip into the waistband to tug it closed. "Christ, s'cold."
"Socks," Sirius says, sitting up to fish them from the tangle of blankets at his feet. "Here," he waits until Remus's hand is over his own, and tugs them close - socks and Remus all - noses bumping.
"Ta," Remus whispers. "Up, now?"
"Coffee," says Sirius, and pokes Remus in the chest with a knotted sock.
"Toast," says Remus, and presses his lips to the side of Sirius's mouth. And so, thinks Sirius, and so, it's a deal, uncharacteristically simple and sweet, and tasting so vaguely of toothpaste and wheat crumbs, and jellied apple preserves.
A portion of the Order of the Phoenix meets at eleven-twenty-six that Thursday morning, in the cramped attic space of Emmeline Vance's country cottage. Lily in the only proper seat, the rose-pink plush of the upholstery wreaking havoc with her hair, hands folded on her belly, and James perched on the arm, wrists to his knees and back bent along the line of the rafters. Peter sitting on a pile of filing folders, tucking back the occasional errant photograph with his ankle. Dearborn on the banister like a well-mannered raven, Elphias sitting on the curve of a coat rack with his silly hat, McGonagall on the windowsill with dust and sunlight coiled in her hair, Longbottoms like an inseparable force, cramped above packing trunks.
"We are clear, then, I believe," says Dumbledore, settled comfortably in a pile of old fur stoles and an oversized, plush-purple sunhat perched on his knee. "If necessary, the Muggles will be redirected. Once the situation has been deemed acceptable for appropriate action, Mr Black and Mr Dearborn will attempt to intercept before the meeting takes place. There is already a Portkey placed, preemptively, and quite kindly, by our own Arabella, this morning - it will take you to a location far enough away to consider the more usual methods of return, to London. Unfortunately, as some of the events in the Ministry have shown, the simplest escape is rarely the safest. I would stress that, if you feel as though you run the risk of being followed, for any reason, you exhaust all other possibilities before Apparition.”
"And no excess bravery, Mr Black," murmurs McGonagall, from the back.
"What? Or detention?" Sirius grins, and Lily smacks him on the shoulder.
"I am also quite aware," says Dumbledore, stroking the hat on his knee like an absurd cat, "that there is some nature of - "
"If anyone says sensitivity," mutters Sirius, in Remus's ear, "I'm going to kick them in the bollocks."
" - hostility entering into this particular arrangement. We cannot be assured that any of those taking part in this supposed transfer of potentially vital goods and information are actually the ones responsible for recent losses taken, and felt quite deeply, I know, by our members." Dumbledore's eyes take on the light of a shivering memory, a Pensieve-coloured silver.
"I urge restraint," he says.
"Of course, Headmaster," says Dearborn; Sirius refuses to meet his eyes.
"Excellent." The word is like a knife on a whetstone, and they are disbanded, slowly. Emmeline offers tea, but the Longbottoms go with apologies, and Peter slips down the stairwell with a clap to Dearborn's shoulder. Elphias and Dumbledore seem to have disappeared into the shadows at some point between steeping and pouring, and Sirius thinks it strange only because Dumbledore's never one to pass up a scone at noonish. Sober business, he thinks. All this thinking and talking and planning and waiting, and no room for baked goods.
James catches him at the shoulder when he leans in to take a cuppa, fingers hooked in Sirius's collar.
"Edgar Bones," he says.
"Shut it," says Sirius. "Never happen."
"Not again, you mean," says James, and touches the back of Sirius's head with an open palm. Peter found the bodies, and had no one to shout for, except them, and so. It stays with you, thinks Sirius. The last bloodless puff of life and the waste of a talented existence and the way a limp arm can look so different when it's sleep, or when it's -- well.
Sirius glares at him. "Look, it's not - "
"Don’t let them - I mean," says James. "You promise me."
What do we do, thinks Sirius. How are we even surprised, anymore, by what we say after being injected with revenge, sharp and hot on the tip of the tongue and sizzling for release in your fingers.
"Right," he says, and means it. The morning after they found the Bones family, he tried to warm the kettle with his wand, and he scorched his eyebrows off instead. It'll be a relief, he thinks, and grins, not to have to lie and call the burn marks on the tile an effort in redecoration. And Remus, who would be skeptical of his own body's existence if the proof hadn't been quite so undeniable, could just believe him.
Christ, thinks Sirius. And Remus, who looks lovely covered in dust, he thinks. Radiant in the little specks of light that have settled in his hair, in his eyelashes, fingers painted ivory in the way the light is slatted through the roof. He chews on a thumbnail when he thinks no one is looking, temple pressed to the tiny window, foot braced against a rafter, back curved against a stack of leather-bound books, and he looks fifteen again, boundless amounts of that guarded naivety and those old-man sweater vests, and that smile.
Thank god, Sirius thinks, and burns his tongue when he drinks his tea too quickly. Thank god for greed and grief, he thinks, because now you’ll believe me when we win.
He is writing a letter to Narcissa. He sits on the floor in the corner of the library by the stacks labeled History, Magic: 1701-1799, Austria, Wars, Disagreements, & General Misunderstandings with a book open on his lap and the spare, ragged end of a parchment roll spread over the pages, and the inkwell by his feet, and he writes Dear Narcissa How are you I am sorry to have missed you over Christmas Holidays I hope you are well and that France is fine I saw Lucius not long ago did he tell you that I think I would like to come see you this summer in France if you are still there in one go, because it is how every letter to her starts, more or less, and if he gets it out that way to begin with, he can crumple it up and start over with a clearer sort of head (if he has one, he thinks, at all).
His arm hurt again, tonight. It was odd, he thought, when he woke from a fitful hour of sleep with the feeling of his veins twisting inside his skin. It was odd, because it was not what Lucius had said, but he imagined that Lucius didn't feel the need to scrape out his own brain with the nearest sharp instrument just because he couldn't find sleep. He imagined, as he pulled on his shoes, and took his wand from the bedside table, and slipped out of the dormitory into the dark and empty corridors, that when Lucius cannot sleep, he simply has a glass of brandy, and pets his dogs, and then everything is all quite lovely again.
But I'm very young, he thinks, quill paused over the paper, ink already smudged on his fingertips. I'm very young still, Lucius says it all the time; they say it all the time. And sometimes, he thinks, lately, they say it as if it's pride. Maybe that's why, he thinks, and bends to the parchment again, raising his wand to get more light, maybe that's why it's different. Because I have some growing to do, yet?
He writes, Are you proud of me. He wants her to say it; he would like to read that sort of thing from Narcissa Malfoy nee Black, that she was proud of him, for whatever it was that he had done for her to be proud of. If he ever sent the letters, those ones, the ones with ARE YOU PROUD OF ME PROUD OF ME LIKE LUCIUS IS OR LIKE YOU ARE IF YOU ARE ARE YOU PROUD OF ME scrawled like screaming music notes, like runes and wriggling lines of steam over the page. If he ever sent those letters, he would like to read that. So he writes, Are you proud of me, tonight, without any intention, of course, except that maybe -- well, one day. Tonight, he writes a-r-e-y-o-u-p-r-o-u-d-o-f-m-e-? but pauses, in the first curve of the question mark. His quill stops, he cannot think of what comes next, body suddenly stilled and rigid, because there is the soft rustle of robes from the far end of the room and getting slowly nearer, a growing, winking light of a wand filtering through the stacks, and someone's voice, humming.
It is so unexpected; he cannot quite bring himself to panic. It is so unexpected, the Nox is not even past the curve of his throat before the Headmaster rounds the corner, bareheaded and singing to himself, with his hand trailing absently along the spines of the books on the shelf for Hungarian-Austrian Insults of the 1730s. He is wearing a robe with small bells on the cuffs, and blue-silk stars against the hems, and he has very plain, white slippers on his feet, and he looks as if he is thoroughly pleased to be here, where he is, as if there is a purpose in not having any purpose at all, as if Doing The Right Thing, and Running A School For Burgeoning Witches And Wizards Otherwise Known As Hellions, and Being Very Wise Apparently, were not so different from sleepwalking, after all.
Dumbledore pauses, there, at the end of the shelves, because he sees Regulus, there, at the end of the aisle (how could he not, thinks Regulus, finally).
“Ah," says Dumbledore, so lightly, it is like dust.
Regulus cannot speak, and there are bells on the cuffs of the Headmaster’s robes, and they catch all the light of his wand.
“Well,” says Dumbledore (and the bells say well-well-well when he moves his arm, slightly). "I do beg your pardon. Terribly rude of me."
Regulus stares, quietly. The light from his wand makes the shadows smooth, and the leather surfaces of the books and the skin of Dumbledore's cheeks all look very rich and young. His hair is golden in the hovering dark, and he is smiling, and Regulus is wearing his school trousers and a night shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sitting on the floor of the library with his wand arm raised to the light, of course.
"Ah," says Dumbledore, again, and takes a silent step forward.
"Sir," says Regulus; it feels like dust on his tongue.
Dumbledore's robes are like chimes, soundless on the floor and speaking for the air; he moves a few paces closer, and crouches slowly, with young-man bones and movement, and an old-man beard pooling on the floor. He has his wrinkled hands on his knees, and he looks at Regulus with his sharp, confident, secretive eyes, and he opens his mouth to speak.
“Don’t,” says Regulus. “Sir?”
Dumbledore is very close, and his eyes are very bright, and Regulus thinks he can smell things like sandalwood and lemon sugar and warm wool, and the heavy, musking pulse of living things. And it makes his gut draw up, tightly; he feels bile in his throat, and something skittering in the back of his skull digs rigid, painful fingernails into his nerve endings.
"Don't,” he says. “Don’t pander to me.”
Dumbledore pauses. Regulus cannot say if he is surprised, or even caught remotely off-guard. Headmaster to hundreds of students for decades and decades and decades, thinks Regulus, do you really think he's never heard anyone try and stand up to him before? Perhaps, he thinks, it is because he has been taught to be polite. Lucius was right about power: strength and honey, he said, and it makes Regulus think of the core of a wand, or the way his own handwriting is bold and black and indelible, how it came from his own fingers.
“Please,” says Regulus. “I mean.”
"You will be leaving us, then," says Dumbledore, finally. (Th-th-then, say the bells.)
"I don't know," says Regulus. "Maybe."
"Ah," murmurs Dumbledore, leaning forward like a secret, wandlight in his hair and skin, and on the tip of his tongue. "Know that I will not fight for you, then. I think, perhaps, there are those who need you more than I?"
"I'm sorry," says Regulus, his ribs shaking, with how fast his heart is beating. "I don't care what you think."
Dumbledore smiles; eyes like the spark of sun through an icicle. "And how refreshing," he says. "It is so rare that that happens to be true."
Regulus opens his palm over his knee, over the parchment; his fingers smear the ink of I think I would like to come and see you this summer in, because they were written all tall and hurried and rather close-together, at the time.
“Well,” says Dumbledore. “Then.”
And he straightens, slowly, and his beard uncoils from the floor and the hem of his robes stir up the dust and the small bells stir up the air, and his face slips back into the wrinkling shadows and the grey-light, and Regulus lowers his wand, and he feels the ink drying smeared on his fingers.
“Again,” says Dumbledore. “My apologies.”
Regulus blinks, once, and there is a great unraveling. The shadows eat at Dumbledore's face, when he turns, and his long fingers look old and shriveled and grey when he places a hand on the book-spines again, and his footsteps are slow, and even, and quite heavy for such a small sort of man.
"Oi!" grumbles a book, from down the stack. "Put out yer light - yer light!"
"Now, now," he hears Dumbledore murmur, like a soft pat on the shoulder, like a lullaby, a windchime. "No need to fret."
And he hums, again, as he disappears into the shadows, mostly tuneless, vaguely happy, and Regulus hisses Nox, because the ache in his arm is gone, because the back of his skull is empty, an instant void where he had just felt so overfull and quartered, and he is suddenly alone and deaf and empty, and shaking with decisiveness, in the dark.
Sirius presses his nose to the crease of a thigh and breathes; there are musty sheets tangled around his ears and eyes, and his fingers are cramped sleepily under Remus's ankle. He flexes his palm, knuckles rasping along a thin tendon, and drags his tongue down into the sweaty divot of Remus's hipbone.
"Mgnnph," says Remus, and shoves a trembling hand down into the blankets, skittish ribs jumping under Sirius's fingers.
"Shut it," Sirius mumbles into his skin, and bares his teeth to catch the shudder against his tongue.
"Black -- "
"You love it, shut up," says Sirius, and splays his thumb and fingers open slow enough to feel the resistance in Remus's hips, and then the give, the bruising reluctance with which he sighs, and lets his head tip back (his fingers are still clenched over his own belly, holding a fistful of sheet). Sirius closes his teeth over the filmy skin at the inside of Remus's thigh.
"Mnnphh," says Remus again, and his hips cant restlessly; the way his left side rocks upwards means he's turned his head and bit the pillow, arm crooked, eyes squeezed shut.
"Stop laughing," says Sirius.
"F-fucking," Remus gasps, a fine tremble in his legs. "Fucking christ, I'm - I'm not."
"Are," Sirius grins, and bites.
"Prove it," Remus hisses; Sirius can hear the chatter of teeth in his voice, the way he shakes like he's freezing when he's excited and aroused and shaken out of sleep by the feeling of someone's mouth on his skin. As if it were such a foreign concept, Sirius thinks, to be considered, like that.
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do,” Sirius grins, breath soft, sliding a thumb just this side of crooking inside.
“Ah - ” Remus rasps, grabs a fistful of his hair and pulls, hard enough to jerk Sirius’s head back, away.
“Christ!” Sirius hisses, eyes smarting. “Moony - ”
“Sorry - don’t, just - ” Remus makes a helpless gesture with one hand, face red and pinched, hair plastered to his forehead. He collapses back against the pillow, palm pressed to his closed eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to - ”
Sirius rubs at his scalp, finding Remus’s fingers there. “Just - ” he murmurs. “Just a tease, eh?”
“Ah,” says Remus. “I know,” but clearly doesn’t. His eyes are glassy when they open, and there is blood showing under every inch of his skin in a mottled flush.
Sirius holds himself up on an elbow, joints creaking, heat in his thighs and the Not-Quite-Guilt, like a filmy layer, pooling in the creases of his sweaty skin. “Look,” he says. “Are you - ”
“Are you going to fuck me, or not?” whispers Remus, in the dark.
He is very good at grinning that way, thinks Sirius. He has perfected the lascivious edge of a smile, he is top marks at that pooling darkness of the eyes and the bitten lips and the Way To Flex Your Hips. The irreplaceable hiccough-laugh when Sirius surprises him. Well-studied existence. Well above average performance, even half-asleep.
“Moony,” says Sirius.
“You’re stalling,” says Remus, and draws a knee up; it slides again Sirius’s ribs. “Honestly wasn’t a trick question.”
“Remus,” says Sirius.
“Shut up, will you,” whispers Remus, and curls himself forward to kiss Sirius’s mouth. There is that patchy scrape of stubble just under his jaw, the bump of his odd, long nose, the perfected, gawky curve of his neck, his spine, the way his collarbone feels in the half-dark: links of bone and tissue roped together, held in shape by negative space, by the missing pieces of other people.
He can’t help it - how carefully Remus puts together these moments - the crafted delicacy makes him laugh.
“What,” says Remus, a thread of light between them in the haze, where his whisper dissolves.
“I’m not,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the tuft of sweaty hair over his temple. “Not if you.”
“Christ,” says Remus, and tugs a little at the blankets tangled at their hips. He exhales sharply between his lips, and his hair tickles Sirius’s cheek. “Honestly?”
“Mm,” says Sirius, nudging him back against the mattress.
“I preferred it when you forced me against my will, you know,” mumbles Remus, elbows up, fists rubbing against his eyes, the tingling cool settling into the places where their skin rasps together, the slow un-arousal.
Sirius snorts. “Bullshit.”
“Possibly. But you can’t prove it,” says Remus. Sirius watches him from above, from all fours, from This Place: Remus Lupin breathing slowly, Remus Lupin with grey-light skin and a red bite on the inside of his thigh, Remus Lupin with his face turned to profile, with sweat on his lip and his eyes lidded to the world, Remus Lupin with one hand open on the pillow, Remus Lupin once again, victorious, in the battle against True Love.
“Wanker,” mutters Sirius. “You - ”
“It’s raining, now.”
"Mph - " Sirius moves his head with great effort, tucking himself under Remus's chin. And so it is. He can see the places on the window where the water is wiping down the grime, little clear streaks in the city's filter: too light for sound, and the hue in the clouds is just this side of the sun.
"Bollocks the rain," he says.
“And the valiant struggle continues,” says Remus. “Sirius Black vee Nature.”
“Mph,” says Sirius, again. They should fall asleep again, he thinks. They should stop all these moments when the waking gets in the way and lets the world penetrate their bones and blood and tongues and eyes and words. He thinks, I shouldn’t get up today.
“Almost lost it there, didn’t you?” he says.
There is quiet. There is the sudden stutter of wind and water on a drainpipe. There is the sound of Remus’s body, and the sheets tangled in their ankles and the looped belts on the floor and the unwashed dishes in the sink and the teakettle half-full of cold water and the two pairs of boots at the door. And there is that challenge of the next breath, like a metronome keeping the world measured in its chaos.
“Yes,” says Remus.
“I know,” says Remus.
“I must be slipping.”
The next morning, he stumbles out of the half-lit bedroom, into the kitchen, and finds Remus with his elbows on the table - who is fully dressed, and who does not seem as though they got very little sleep, and who does not look up - reading yesterday’s Prophet, and eating a piece of dry toast.
“It’s Tuesday,” he says.
Remus looks vaguely in the direction of the clock, which hasn’t told proper time in ages, but sometimes still tells them that it’s time to take out the rubbish on the appropriate day. “It is, yes.”
“You have work?” he says, and feels very lazy and unwashed, which isn’t so peculiar as just particularly annoying, at the moment. “Don’t you have work?”
Remus does not look up; he is chewing a corner of his piece of toast. “I’ve quit,” he says.
“You were sacked again, you mean,” Sirius snorts, and peers inside the kettle, which has gone cold.
Remus glares, briefly. “If I’d meant I was sacked - ”
“Why the hell would you go and - ” Sirius sighs. “You were looking for ages.”
Remus shrugs; the newspaper rustles suggestively between his hands. “Comparatively,” he says. “I suppose.”
Sirius taps the kettle, and it makes an irritated little squeak. “Pay not good enough for you?”
He can hear the tiny frown in Remus’s voice: it has the same little between-the-eyebrows wrinkles on the consonants, the downward turn of the vowels. “You don’t have to be an absolute prick. It wasn’t your job, as far as I know.”
“You just forgot to mention, then, that you were going on that Ministry dole?” Sirius snaps, prodding the kettle again. I can’t stand self-sacrifice, he thinks, it just sits there quietly in the corner of the kitchen and eats its toast and lets the kettle go cold and has absolutely no regard, he thinks, no regard at all for the rest of us.
“Christ, no,” Remus laughs, sharply. “Not quite that desperate, yet.”
“Oh,” says Sirius. “Oh, good. Because.”
“I know,” says Remus, neatly. “I’d tell you. If.”
“Don’t do that,” Sirius sighs. “Sell a few organs, first, or something, all right? Or go to Prongs, even.”
Remus laughs again, a little softer, a little rounder on the edges, and the newspaper rustles again, and Sirius knows that he is being watched now, with those modestly-brown eyes, with that funny sort of scrutiny, where he will be ashamed, if he’s caught looking.
“In that order, hm?” says Remus.
Sirius waves a distracted hand, and glances back over his shoulder. “Oh, whichever suits you, princess.”
“Don’t,” Remus pulls a face, and bends to the paper again. “It’s before eleven, let’s do let me live through the morning with my masculinity relatively intact, hm?”
“You’re going to be an awful sort if all you do from here on is laze around the flat and be shirty,” he grins; Remus flips him two fingers, over the top edge of the paper, and he reaches over, and catches at them.
“You’ll learn to live with it,” says Remus, smartly, pulling his hand free. “Or I can show you where the floo is, hm?”
“So,” he says, uptick in his voice, fingers catching at the corners of the Prophet.
“Other commitments,” Remus says, finally. “They were starting to get in the way - I couldn’t. Not conscionably, anyway.”
“Not the Order,” he frowns.
“What possible other commitment,” Remus rolls his eyes, and folds the paper, finally, onto the table. “There might be. I mean, we could be gone for months on end, if things don’t let up.”
He hadn’t heard anything about that, and watches Remus’s face sharply. “He’s said that,” he asks.
“In so many words, no,” Remus says, and Sirius has absolutely no idea if he’s lying. “But.”
“He’s not paying us, you know,” he mutters, and goes to get the steaming kettle.
“Not paying you,” grins Remus, and Sirius satisfies his anxiety and violence and affection by snapping Remus’s ankle, soundly, with a dishtowel.
He doesn't come here very often. There's nothing much here, any more. Old school robes in the closet, and a collection of dust in the corner of the kitchen. He finds a few things in the cupboard, in an old hatbox they stole from McGonagall's office in fourth year: a compass with a silver needle, a canteen, a soft suede rucksack, a pair of woolly socks, and a broken quill.
In the loo, he washes out the canteen, and the mirror stirs.
"Hullo," it says sleepily, frame smothered under a webbing of ashy dust. "Come back, have you?"
"Not really," says Sirius. "Sorry, love."
"Hm," it says. "I thought you'd died."
He snorts. But the floorboards have surprise in their groans; the spare furniture doesn't fit his solid body. The leaking pipes and the disrepair is indignant, a natural process interfered upon, the decay gone stolid.
“Didn’t miss me?” he says, and swipes a palm over his reflection; his fingers come away pale grey, and filthy.
“I didn’t,” it says.
“Bullshit you didn’t,” he smirks; he taps the canteen against the edge of the sink and ignores the gut-curl of guilt when rust flakes off the faucet. “You could be so lucky to find a another face like mine - a thousand years and you’d never, you know.”
“You were prettier before,” says the mirror.
Sirius raises an eyebrow. “Eh?”
“Mm,” says the mirror, demure and cottony, words slurred and stretched like the tail end of a yawn. “Terribly sorry to say, but it’s all downhill from here.”
Sirius grins, leaning the heels of his hands against the basin. “Cursed with an early peak, eh?”
“Nobody ever really peaks,” says the mirror. There is something odd about the room, about the dust and the slowly crumbling light, the rain clogging up the windows and sticking to the brick, viscous and dark and smothering. “It’s all quite a bit duller than all that.”
Sirius grimaces. “Weren’t always this bloody dire, were you?”
“Oh, it comes and goes,” it says. “Do remember to put out the light this time.”
Hand on the switch, Sirius grins. “’til we meet again, love.”
In the wet and hazy light, the mirror laughs. Sirius almost stumbles in the corridor; it sends a rimy curl up through every thin and trembling layer of his skin.
Remus is asleep by the window. Sirius stands with one hand resting on the doorknob, with a hot and greasy paper bag tucked under his arm, with a prickle wriggling at the base of his spine all day, and he lets the dust settle under his feet. Remus is asleep by the window, and it makes his jaw hot, like anger, or shame. There are stripes of light on the faded fabric of the armchair, there are battered trainers tucked against the wall, there is Remus’s wand laid out at arm’s reach, a little crooked at the end and always vaguely humming.
Every now and then, now, thinks Sirius, he gets this feeling: like there is a great blunted spoon slowly working at de-pulping all his human insides. It comes in the morning, sometimes, in the streets of Diagon, where the world is terrified and grey and it is dangerous to believe your own shadow on the wall. It comes in the rain, in the night, when he cannot even fathom having a brain, any more, not like this, what with everything inside it and he turns three times around himself on the rug in front of the fireplace, and falls asleep as an animal. It comes in the quietest moments. Fuck, he thinks, I wasn’t meant for any of this, he thinks. That’s what this is, he thinks, this even, slow scooping-out. I am losing my mind, he thinks, because Remus is asleep at the window.
“You awake?” whispers Sirius, in the doorway.
There is a vague stirring in the chair - a pulse flutters in Remus’s jugular. Life, thinks Sirius, when he crosses the room, La, ta-dah, and the world hasn’t stopped, after all.
“Oi,” says Sirius, and smiles a little, when Remus bats at his head, eyes still closed.
“G’way,” says Remus. “You’re a nightmare, aren’t you?”
“Nightmare with curry,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the dry skin of Remus’s jaw.
“Awful,” mumbles Remus, and curls his fingers in the air above his thighs.
“Up,” Sirius insists. “I’m leaving at half-four, you git.”
Remus readjusts his body, shoulders hunching and rolling down his spine as he sits up. He rubs a red cheek with his palm and looks at Sirius, quietly, over the curl of his fingers. “Left just enough time for food, did you?”
“Priorities,” says Sirius, dropping the paper bag into Remus’s lap. “There. Make yourself useful while I find something to eat with.”
“Other than your fingers,” murmurs Remus, but he is picking apart the opening of the crumpled bag, head dipped low to inhale the heat and spice and paper-carton familiarity. From across the room, hands paused above the cutlery drawer, Sirius watches him hunker onto the floor, legs crossed, carefully laying out the containers. Pathetic ritual, thinks Sirius, you couldn’t have gone for something more - well, he thinks, it could be all dinner linens and posh starlit strolls and something about roses, but right now it is just the comfort of Remus’s slow divisions: #42 Him #8 Him, #12 Me, #26-with-no-onions Him, #14 Me, #18 Me and a #7-to-share.
“You’re a lazy bastard, by the by,” says Sirius, from the kitchen, even though he knows the full moon is pushing heavy and fat at the horizon. “You were in that exact fucking spot three hours ago.”
“Guilty,” says Remus, ripping a packet of hot sauce open with his teeth and two fingers.
“Good kip, eh?” says Sirius, settling beside him, hooking a carton towards him with his thumb.
“Like the dead,” says Remus.
“Looked it,” says Sirius, and hands him a fork.
“Morbid, today,” says Remus, and no, thinks Sirius, it would be lovely. I am an Optimist, he thinks, to believe that one day we might all be that fucking oblivious.
Maybe, he thinks, that is dark, all things considered.
But he laughs, instead, with the tines of the fork between his teeth. “Let it never be said that I wasn’t prepared for the worst,” he says, wagging the fork in Remus’s direction.
“And what is the worst, in this case?” asks Remus, suddenly, in that awful and peevish way he has of turning absolutely acceptable forced levity into a Serious Discussion About Things That Matter While Never Having to Say Anything Himself.
“Well,” says Sirius, and stabs a fork into his rice, and thinks that the last time he had a conversation about his own death was over cold, badly cooked lamb and boiled cabbage in the kitchens of Grimmauld Place, with his brother. “Well, yeah. There's that.”
“There’s that,” repeats Remus, his eyes down-turned, their eyes both down-turned.
“Augh,” Sirius mutters. “Come off it.”
Remus rolls his eyes; the shift of his body has a heavy tension in it, where the muscles get bunched and rolled up into the defensive shrug of his shoulders and spine and the creak of his knees.
“It’s just rotten timing,” Sirius says. “All right, you’ll be - you’ve been alone loads of times, and Wormtail’ll make sure you’re set up fine, at the start, eh, so.”
“I didn’t,” says Remus, frowning at him. “That’s not what I meant. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You don’t even. I mean.”
Sirius looks at him, sharply, because the pulse suddenly plummeting deep and electric into his gut doesn’t know whether it is excited or absolutely furious, that Remus think he gets to be worried about this sort of thing.
“It’s dangerous,” says Remus, finally.
“Like a cornered bludger, maybe,” Sirius snaps, because, well. Well, he thinks, he’s only been waiting all day to be in this space and now Remus, of course, has to do this sort of thing, now, when he isn’t ready and hasn’t had any sort of time to be suave and collected and appropriately brave when it all comes crashing down around his ears, finally. Of course, he thinks, he would. “I said, come off it.”
“I’m not,” says Remus, frowning. “This is - ”
“This is fucking stupid, is what.”
“It’s not,” says Remus, firmly, suddenly. “I think it’s not, actually.”
“Actually,” Sirius jabs a fork in his direction. “I’m too fucking old for you to still talk to me like that.”
“Like that,” Remus repeats, mouth full of derision and sautéed spinach.
“Like I fucking need fucking looking after.”
Remus is immediately silent, because - of course - he is well aware of how it will drive Sirius mad with what that means.
“’the hell,” he spits, and sets the carton down, heavily. “You still think I’ve got no bloody clue what you’re so hung up on. You still.”
“Oh, honestly,” Remus sighs. The sound has years of enforced doubt behind it, and it makes Sirius want to poke and tug and scrape at it with his fork tines until it’s all wound up and stuffed down somebody else’s throat. Just not his.
“How stupid do you think I am,” he says. “Just because you’re terrified - ”
Remus does not look at him, but it is the way his wrist stills, slightly, the way his body shifts: Pinned, thinks Sirius. Got you, at least.
“I haven’t said anything about - ”
“There's nothing wrong with it," he says.
Remus looks up at him with narrowed eyes. “I’ve never - ”
“Look, isn’t everybody? Now and then, eh, so just - it’s fine, I said. Only normal, all right?”
Remus’s fist closes around the fork handle, tightly; his voice is sharp. "Oh, because if I'm not reassured of my humanity every hour or so, I'll just forget entirely?”
"Christ! Don’t fucking - it has nothing to do with that. It’s only the same as being spooked by the idea of the bloody Grim," he snaps, furious when Remus saves the jabs for the worst times imaginable. "Everybody is, I said.”
“Everybody. Everybody? Even you?”
“What,” he says. “Of dying? Or - ”
“All right, yes. Yes, that. Even you.”
Sirius shrugs, in the half-light. This used to be second nature, bullying Remus into what he wants, but now, he's not so sure, and sometimes he thinks it’s just so awfully different now. He doesn’t know where that easy satisfaction has gone. It's as though one day, while he was kissing Remus’s mouth, or being thoroughly, soppily distracted by his elbows or his inability to stay awake while reading the Prophet on Sunday night, that the satisfaction just got up and buggered off, and left him with all the old ability but none of the reason. It makes answering hard, he thinks, when Remus is suddenly watching him with something, something approaching desperation. And it makes his gut boil thickly, a hot curl into his throat.
“I - ” says Remus, suddenly.
“It’s not about you,” says Sirius, sharp. “If you want it to be, you have to. No, fuck it. This isn’t. This isn’t about that.”
Isn't it? he thinks.
Remus makes a strange sound, low in his chest. “You can’t - ” he says, jaw working. “If you can’t - either, how can you expect - ”
Sirius kisses him: he reaches over the cartons of Indian curry and presses one palm flat to the floor by Remus’s thigh and leans over, all the way, to kiss him full on the mouth. This is because I want to, he thinks, not because the other choice is more frightening, not because the other choice means I have to speak to you. This is because I want to have my fingers in your hair and taste your stupid, smart-mouthed tongue and I want you to close your eyes and I want to bite your neck and thighs, and I want to watch you when you come because I am everything you’re not and I want everything you are, and that’s it, he thinks. It’s not because if I didn’t have you, I would have to be myself, by myself. That’s not the only reason why.
Remus sits; his eyes are closed, and their lips are still wet with each other’s, cooling.
"Why can’t you just," he mumbles, and his forehead is tight, brows pinched, skin very white and the heavy-wet, black glint between his teeth, where his lips part.
“Shut up,” Sirius hisses, against his jaw.
Remus presses a closed fist against Sirius’s chest, fingers just curling in the fabric of his collar when he pushes there; Sirius feels his weight settle back against his heels, sees Remus frowning at the convenient, heavy space over his shoulder.
“I’m not - ” says Remus.
“Don’t,” says Sirius, and he has his fingers wrapped around Remus’s wrist, because that is where they are. “I don’t care. You don’t fucking get to do this now.”
Remus is stilled, there, and his eyes are fixed on the place where Sirius has his palm wrapped around Remus’s wrist and thumb, and he doesn’t look up when he speaks, when he says something, finally, that sounds vaguely faraway, like the echo off a drainpipe, or cold stone.
“If you,” says Remus.
“I mean,” says Remus.
“I think I do, too. So. If,” says Remus.
"Liar," says Sirius.
Remus looks at him, in the silence, and Sirius drops Remus’s wrist, and picks at his food with his fork. It is the Long Look, the one that Remus gave in school, when he was eleven, when he knew the answer, he knew it, but had been tripped in the corridor by Sirius Black for being a tatter-patched know-it-all of a half-breed. It is angry, the stuffy-squashed kind of angry that makes his mouth flat and pale, and his eyebrows heavy and his stupid, crooked nose jut into the air. It was ironic, thinks Sirius, then.
This is ironic, thinks Sirius, now.
Maybe I meant it, he thinks. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe let’s just wait until tomorrow and if everything’s still the same, after everything, maybe we’ll try and change it, then. Maybe I should just sit here and watch you swallow it down, how it is to have that clump of almost scrape at your throat and your guts and all your insides, because you know you can’t say it, can you, he thinks.
“Right, then,” says Remus.
Exactly, he thinks.
"Well," says Sirius, firmly, and stands. His foot knocks over a half-empty cardboard carton; he'd rather stare at the scattered curry rice than Remus's hands or knees.
"Go on," says Remus. “Go on. I’ve got it.”
"Well,” says Sirius, and shoves his fists into his pockets - his hands are cold. “Tomorrow, then, yeah?"
Remus rolls his eyes; there is the subtle dip of a head, the mess of hair that hides the redness in his face (the kind that lines the insides of the eyes, that signals flushed and mottled skin, hot under the surface). Should this, thinks Sirius, maybe this shouldn’t make you feel like you've been crying.
"Go on, then," says Remus, again.
Or maybe, he thinks, because he finally has Remus speechless and red-faced at his feet, this is why it should.
( PART IV)