[One-shot]: Images of a Love Affair- Remus/Sirius (August pinch-hit for rs_500)
Title: Images of a Love Affair
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own the characters and places in this fic. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Word Count: ~3600
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Profanity, angst, implied sex. Very, very, very weird style of storytelling.
Challenge for: xsilverxlightx, keywords: couch, curtains, wild flower, dialogue: “My tail looks nothing like that.”
Summary: These are the pictures Remus draws of Sirius,
Author’s Notes: Written for the rs_500 community as a pinch-hit for an August request. My first Remus/Sirius ever.
Images of a Love Affair
The first picture Remus drew of Sirius was a hasty sketch, scribbled on new parchment with the lucky quill that his father had given Remus out of his own desk drawer.
Remus didn’t know who Sirius was, then. He barely knew who anyone was; even the names his parents had urged him to memorize, so he would know who was safe to associate with and who might be connected to the darkness shifting about uneasily in the background of the wizarding world, had gone out of his head the moment he stepped onto the Hogwarts Express. The world had become a whirl of color and noise as violent as any carousel. Remus had retreated into the corner of one compartment that no one seemed to want because it was too cramped and watched everything with wide eyes.
And then a boy charged past.
He was laughing so hard that Remus swallowed nervously, wondering if it was natural for someone who wasn’t a werewolf to display quite that many teeth. He spun around and lifted a hand in which a toy Snitch beat madly fluttering wings. Remus’s attention focused on the rest of his face beyond the threatening teeth then. Dark eyes, and a high nose, and a jut of chin and jaw that proclaimed his triumph more clearly than the taunting words that he shouted at the boy who was chasing him to get his toy back.
Remus snatched up the parchment and quill without thinking about it, and then had to spend a few minutes looking for ink. He muttered under his breath whilst he did it, the mild epithets that his father had taught him and which his mother would have been shocked at him for saying. If he didn’t draw it quickly, the image would get away.
Then he had the ink, and the quill was wet, and it was all right. Remus began to draw.
The bold lines seemed to spring into being of their own accord, as if the boy’s spirit had come to possess them. Remus wasn’t surprised. He had drawn a few pictures like this before, when the vivid glimpses translated into pictures without involving his brain in the process.
Every detail he could remember went onto the parchment, and then he leaned back and regarded the picture with some satisfaction. The boy leaped up onto his toes, head tossed back, hair flying like a banner of mockery. His hand stuck up above his head and held a Snitch. Remus thought he had even managed to render the lines of motion the wings cut in the air tolerably well.
Then he realized he had drawn the boy without a House crest on his robes.
He was a first-year, like Remus.
And then he was actually in the compartment, pushing open the door as if it were the most natural thing in the world, sitting down next to Remus, waving an arm over his head, saying, “Hullo! What’s your name? Did you see me catch that Snitch? It almost got away from me near the back, but I chased it around a corner and caught it again!” And he held out the Snitch towards Remus, one wing bent.
Remus was glad to find that he had caught Sirius’s dashing nature in the dashing lines of the picture. It was hidden away, a crumpled piece of paper in the pocket of his robe, unneeded now that it had done its work and conjured the real thing.
*
“I promise, Remus, we’re going to do it.”
James and Peter made agreeing noises, but Remus’s eyes were fastened to Sirius’s face, which was the one closest to him, and the most important. It was Sirius who clasped his hands and told him, in a fervent voice, their plan to become Animagi and keep him company on the night of the full moon. It was Sirius who had made up the plan in the first place.
Nearness, friendship, in a way that Remus had never known before he came to Hogwarts, and didn’t think he was likely to know when he got there. Companionship.
He managed to mumble some reply that satisfied them all; they were gone from the Gryffindor third-year boys’ bedroom in the next moment, tearing down the stairs with wild yelps, as if they imagined that the spells they would have to study would transform them all into a wolf pack. Remus promptly pulled the curtains shut around his bed and reached for the pencils and slightly finer parchment that Sirius had bought him as a gift over the Christmas holidays. He’d known, by then, that Remus drew, though he rarely asked to look at the pictures. It was a careless gift, made from the same impulsive generosity that had made him run into Honeydukes one day to buy five Galleons’ worth of chocolates for a little Hufflepuff girl who had been bullied by Slytherins.
Remus’s hands were already opening, relaxing, losing the sense of Sirius’s fingers and palms clasping them. He had to draw quickly, before the sense departed entirely.
His first attempt was a disaster, too many lines and vague colors swirling off into puffy clouds. No one, even those who knew him, would realize it was Sirius. Remus drew a sharp breath, irritated at himself, and crumpled up the parchment to fling it under the bed. The house-elves would find it there in the morning and dispose of it properly.
The second parchment tore when Remus pressed down too heavily, trying to show the ridges of Sirius’s knuckles and the small hairs that grew on them. No one else might have noticed them, but Remus did, and he knew it was essential they be in the picture.
His mother had always said he was the most patient child she’d ever known, which was a good thing when it came to his lycanthropy. It was a good thing when he came to his art, too. Remus waited a few minutes, hands held in the same position that Sirius had held them in, and then began to draw once more.
This time, he knew it was right. There was no wild possession-by-spirit the way there had been when he drew the picture of Sirius on the train three years ago. There was only the sensation of competence, of steady labor, sluicing over him like cool water and traveling out through his fingers.
When he had finished, he lifted the image in front of him and considered it. Yes, those were Sirius’s hands, small hairs on the knuckles, scar on the heel of the palm where one of the merfolk had bitten him when he dived into the lake on a dare, roughened skin from doing Filch’s detentions, and all. Remus smiled and leaned back on his pillow, worn out. Whether it was by the drama of knowing his friends had discovered his secret and had a plan to keep up with him, or by the work itself, he couldn’t have said.
That picture, he kept for years and years, until Sirius was in Azkaban and James and Lily and Peter were dead, and then he sold it for money to buy warmth, and clothes, and food.
*
The memory of the wolf was warm and blurred, streaked with violent shines of color that Remus’s conscious mind bound to smells. He looked out through those colors as through cage bars, here a flicker of human understanding, there of friendship that reminded him the creatures running beside him were not for eating. But he understood enough of what he saw to reconstruct the memory later.
The Forbidden Forest was always their hunting ground, the one place large enough on the Hogwarts grounds for the wolf to roam without meeting a student. It was a fine place for other reasons, Remus and the wolf thought. So many small dark crevices to sniff, so many unusual scents to catch and yelp about whilst raising all the fur on one’s tail, so many brilliant leaves that would drift to the ground when James caught them with his antlers. They devised so many games there, attended with such a kind of hectic playfulness, that the wolf’s hunger was stupefied and it didn’t have to kill. It learned to run in circles after the black dog instead, snapping, or to try-uselessly-to catch the proud stag as he raced ahead, or to be surprised and dance with the sudden start to life of a rat under its paws.
But there came some evenings where laughter turned into danger, and this was one of them. James had knocked his antlers playfully against a deadfall of logs and leaves, intending to move it out of the way and clear one of their regular paths. And then those gracefully branching antlers had got stuck, and anchored themselves in a split in the log, and in the midst of his frantic snorting and kicking, James had lost the concentration that would enable him to turn into a human again.
Peter turned into a human and pulled on the stag’s rump, but then had to dodge the kicking hooves. Sirius turned back to human and leaned gravely on a nearby tree, considering, his eyes darting back and forth between James and the logs. The wolf growled and thumped its tail against the ground, but managed to remember that these humans were not prey, and not for the attacking.
Sirius’s face lit, and his words drifted through the wolf’s mind like mist. Remus got Sirius to remember them for him later, because he couldn’t catch the sense of them himself at the time. “Let me try laughing at him.”
Sirius turned into a dog again, and trotted towards the stag, standing near his head and looking at him with his tongue lolling between his teeth. James rolled one eye at him and stamped his forehooves warningly; in his state of mind, he would try to defend himself even if his main weapons with which to do so were trapped. Sirius let his tongue hang more freely, and the wolf felt a twitch in its mind that made it lie down and whine. It couldn’t feel uneasy when someone was nearby speaking of calm and ease in its own tongue.
Then Sirius began to leap about James and bark.
James flicked his eyes and ears at him in perplexity. Then he stamped. Then he tried to kick him with his hind hooves. Then he champed with his teeth and snorted warningly through fluttering nostrils.
Sirius didn’t pay any attention. He was still darting in and darting out, his ears flying behind him, his tail wagging so hard that even the wolf could see it as little more than a blur. And his grace was as careless and thoughtless as anything else he’d done. Whatever Sirius achieved, it was the result of gifts and not of labor.
Finally, this plan worked out the way he meant it to. James became so exasperated that he didn’t think any longer about the logs trapping his antlers. Determined to pierce the dog and make it stop tormenting him, he twisted his head without thinking about it and drew the antlers smoothly free.
Sirius leaped high into the air and rejoiced with a barking cry. Of course, then he had to run very fast to escape the charge of a stag with head lowered and temper fit to spear him, but knowing Sirius, Remus suspected that was just as much fun to him as the initial teasing.
Remus made a picture of it afterwards, since he often spent the day after the full moon sleeping off his exhaustion and pain in the hospital wing. He made multiple tries on this one, too, and this time there was no knowledge of necessity and doing things right to guide his hand and eye. The memory he strained to recall was crossed and marred by the wolf. He wanted the real thing, but he had to hunt it down.
Finally, it was finished. Remus leaned back and gazed on the picture in silence, an image of what had been and also of what Remus wanted to think had been, perfectly blending imagination and reality. The large black dog in the picture seemed to fly as he bounded over the stag’s back, mouth open in a taunting howl. His ears snapped like the flag his hair made in human form, and he had his paws braced for the landing already. They would launch him into motion the moment he touched down, Remus knew. Sirius could never bear staying still for long. All around the stag and the dog shone the vivid colors of the forest, and Sirius was a splash of defiance against the green. Parted mouth, sharper teeth than Remus thought he had in dog form, a canine conformity of hide and muscle that Remus knew well enough from wearing it himself…and on the ground at the stag’s feet, where he would crush it when he landed, a single silken wild flower.
Remus gave it silently to Sirius when he came to visit him in the hospital wing that evening. It was the first time he’d ever shared a picture with the subject of the picture, and he had to turn away to face the wall, biting his tongue fiercely in anticipation of what Sirius would say.
He heard the parchment rustle. Then he heard Sirius laugh, ruffled and elegant and hasty.
“My tail looks nothing like that,” he said, and tossed the image to the bed next to Remus, where he nearly sat on it. Then he flung himself down next to Remus-it was a sign of what was to come, then, the ease with which they moved around each other-and began to wave his hands in expansive gestures. “So, in Potions. Snivellus was over here, and Lily was shielding him the way she does, but I could aim around her shoulder, and I had this brilliant firework that Regulus sent me when I asked-”
Remus rescued the picture, and kept it, and was silent. It, too, was sold for food during those darkling years.
*
Sirius was the one who began it, of course. Remus would never have dared.
He knew something was happening. Their touches had become more frequent than could be explained by the casual ways of good friends, or even the triumphant embraces Sirius liked to bestow whenever he’d thought of some new prank or got a particularly brilliant mark on a Transfigurations exam. But Remus had got too used to thinking that no one other than his friends would ever share his life, thanks to the lycanthropy. He dismissed the growing feelings, and tried to think sternly about the necessity of self-sacrifice and the wonderfulness of having such friends.
And then Sirius was there, one day, on a Hogsmeade weekend when Remus had refused to go to the village because the full moon was tomorrow and he was feeling anxious, and Sirius had said he’d stay with Remus. Miraculously, the Gryffindor common room was empty and likely to remain so, at least for a few hours. The younger years weren’t allowed to go to Hogsmeade, but they tended to go outside and run around the Quidditch Pitch or sit by the lake on a day like this to relieve their feelings.
Remus was reading. He couldn’t remember, later, what he’d been reading. Probably nothing very interesting, likely Potions homework; Slughorn always did give more over the weekend, blithely assuming he was the only professor who thought of it.
Sirius’s hands appeared on the edges of the book, and he took it smoothly away. He leaned forwards and looked into Remus’s face. Remus stared back. Emotions worked and trembled under Sirius’s skin. What were they? He didn’t think he’d be able to name them even if he did try. He reached out and stroked Sirius’s cheeks, and his own hands trembled a little.
“Oh, good,” said Sirius. Someone who hadn’t known him for seven years might have missed the hint of relief under the shining, smooth surface of his voice. “You do want this.”
Remus was about to laugh, to ask incredulously why Sirius would ever have doubted, but Sirius had already started to kiss him, and he was swept away by the sense of pouring, cool rightness, the way he was when he drew certain kinds of pictures. Sirius murmured something against his lips, the words as shapeless in his memory as the words he’d been reading, and pulled him insistently down to rest against the side of the couch. Then his hands were everywhere, and Remus gasped and arched and forgot to think.
He drew Sirius afterwards, of course, asleep on the same couch, his hand flung over his eyes as though he were trying to come to terms with the enormity of what they had done. His mouth gaped slightly; Remus drew the edges of his teeth, glancing up frequently to get the swollen state of his lips just right. His tongue lolled, the closest he’d ever come to looking like a dog in human form. His hair sprawled like his limbs, one strand on a pillow, more than half on the arm. One knee was up, knocking against the back of the couch; the other unbent so much that his foot brushed against the floor. Now and then it swayed, in a manner that convinced Remus he was half-awake.
That picture, he didn’t show to Sirius, and he didn’t sell. He kept it, so he could see Sirius as he had been, careless as sunshine, before war and death.
*
Of course Remus tried to draw the way he looked when he killed Peter and those Muggles.
And of course he couldn’t.
Remus sat down several times, taking deep breaths, and telling himself it would be a tribute to Sirius as well as James and Lily and Peter, and a comfort to himself. He could lay the ghost of their love affair to rest, and stop troubling himself with regrets. Sirius was a murderer and a traitor. Remus needed to see him that way. Then he could move on and stop turning over the pictures he’d drawn every single night, and feverishly during the day before the full moon.
But he had barely started the edge of the wild mane of hair, the uplifted wand and finger, the mouth distorted by mad laughter, when his hand stopped. Or it continued the sweeping motion it began with, and scribbled violent slashes of black across Sirius’s face, until they were covered over as thoroughly as an error in a Transfiguration essay for McGonagall, and then Remus threw the parchment into a corner-despite how much it cost, despite the temptation to spell it clean and repair it so it could be useful a second time.
His imagination was limited after all.
*
Once, only once, he drew Sirius in Azkaban.
It was a night when he woke as restless as though he were about to change, and stood at the window of the house he was “borrowing”-a manor house whose owners were out of England for several months-to stare at the crescent moon until he could convince himself he was in no danger. He turned around, heat driving him, and sat down, and took up parchment and quill and plain ink.
If there were thoughts moving through his head, they went something like this: As it was in the beginning, so let it be at the ending.
The man in the image crouched on a dirty stone floor, though the dirt was only suggested by a smudge here and there. A window in the wall showed the full moon that didn’t hang over Remus’s bed, because of course he could only imagine Sirius in his hell beneath the moon that signaled his. Chains surrounded him, though Remus had never been to Azkaban and didn’t know if they kept their prisoners chained or not, and anyway they seemed to fasten on ghost limbs. Dementors blew about the edges of the picture, suggested by flashes of ink like wind made visible. And Sirius was in the middle of it all, a shadowy shape, a glimmer of man, a glimmer of dog, his head tossed back as if he were going to laugh at the moon or yelp his defiance at the Dementors.
Only when he sat back and stared at the picture did Remus realize the eyes were exactly the same as they had always been, from the prankster to the lover to the dog to the Auror to the prisoner.
He didn’t know whether it made him a great artist or a poor one, the dupe of a romantic lie or a seer of the truth.
Though he reckoned there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t be a dupe for the truth, come to that.
*
Two images sold. One tossed aside the moment its purpose was served. One kept because it was impossible not to look at that young man pinned to the paper and motionless in his life, held back from the promise of other things, but kept safe from them, too.
One Remus did not dare to keep, and did not dare to lose. He didn’t know what happened to it, in the end. He refused to make sure it was packed whenever he had to move on, and finally, one day when he unpacked his trunk in a new home, it wasn’t there anymore.
It didn’t matter. It was framed in his heart.
End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own the characters and places in this fic. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Word Count: ~3600
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Profanity, angst, implied sex. Very, very, very weird style of storytelling.
Challenge for: xsilverxlightx, keywords: couch, curtains, wild flower, dialogue: “My tail looks nothing like that.”
Summary: These are the pictures Remus draws of Sirius,
Author’s Notes: Written for the rs_500 community as a pinch-hit for an August request. My first Remus/Sirius ever.
Images of a Love Affair
The first picture Remus drew of Sirius was a hasty sketch, scribbled on new parchment with the lucky quill that his father had given Remus out of his own desk drawer.
Remus didn’t know who Sirius was, then. He barely knew who anyone was; even the names his parents had urged him to memorize, so he would know who was safe to associate with and who might be connected to the darkness shifting about uneasily in the background of the wizarding world, had gone out of his head the moment he stepped onto the Hogwarts Express. The world had become a whirl of color and noise as violent as any carousel. Remus had retreated into the corner of one compartment that no one seemed to want because it was too cramped and watched everything with wide eyes.
And then a boy charged past.
He was laughing so hard that Remus swallowed nervously, wondering if it was natural for someone who wasn’t a werewolf to display quite that many teeth. He spun around and lifted a hand in which a toy Snitch beat madly fluttering wings. Remus’s attention focused on the rest of his face beyond the threatening teeth then. Dark eyes, and a high nose, and a jut of chin and jaw that proclaimed his triumph more clearly than the taunting words that he shouted at the boy who was chasing him to get his toy back.
Remus snatched up the parchment and quill without thinking about it, and then had to spend a few minutes looking for ink. He muttered under his breath whilst he did it, the mild epithets that his father had taught him and which his mother would have been shocked at him for saying. If he didn’t draw it quickly, the image would get away.
Then he had the ink, and the quill was wet, and it was all right. Remus began to draw.
The bold lines seemed to spring into being of their own accord, as if the boy’s spirit had come to possess them. Remus wasn’t surprised. He had drawn a few pictures like this before, when the vivid glimpses translated into pictures without involving his brain in the process.
Every detail he could remember went onto the parchment, and then he leaned back and regarded the picture with some satisfaction. The boy leaped up onto his toes, head tossed back, hair flying like a banner of mockery. His hand stuck up above his head and held a Snitch. Remus thought he had even managed to render the lines of motion the wings cut in the air tolerably well.
Then he realized he had drawn the boy without a House crest on his robes.
He was a first-year, like Remus.
And then he was actually in the compartment, pushing open the door as if it were the most natural thing in the world, sitting down next to Remus, waving an arm over his head, saying, “Hullo! What’s your name? Did you see me catch that Snitch? It almost got away from me near the back, but I chased it around a corner and caught it again!” And he held out the Snitch towards Remus, one wing bent.
Remus was glad to find that he had caught Sirius’s dashing nature in the dashing lines of the picture. It was hidden away, a crumpled piece of paper in the pocket of his robe, unneeded now that it had done its work and conjured the real thing.
*
“I promise, Remus, we’re going to do it.”
James and Peter made agreeing noises, but Remus’s eyes were fastened to Sirius’s face, which was the one closest to him, and the most important. It was Sirius who clasped his hands and told him, in a fervent voice, their plan to become Animagi and keep him company on the night of the full moon. It was Sirius who had made up the plan in the first place.
Nearness, friendship, in a way that Remus had never known before he came to Hogwarts, and didn’t think he was likely to know when he got there. Companionship.
He managed to mumble some reply that satisfied them all; they were gone from the Gryffindor third-year boys’ bedroom in the next moment, tearing down the stairs with wild yelps, as if they imagined that the spells they would have to study would transform them all into a wolf pack. Remus promptly pulled the curtains shut around his bed and reached for the pencils and slightly finer parchment that Sirius had bought him as a gift over the Christmas holidays. He’d known, by then, that Remus drew, though he rarely asked to look at the pictures. It was a careless gift, made from the same impulsive generosity that had made him run into Honeydukes one day to buy five Galleons’ worth of chocolates for a little Hufflepuff girl who had been bullied by Slytherins.
Remus’s hands were already opening, relaxing, losing the sense of Sirius’s fingers and palms clasping them. He had to draw quickly, before the sense departed entirely.
His first attempt was a disaster, too many lines and vague colors swirling off into puffy clouds. No one, even those who knew him, would realize it was Sirius. Remus drew a sharp breath, irritated at himself, and crumpled up the parchment to fling it under the bed. The house-elves would find it there in the morning and dispose of it properly.
The second parchment tore when Remus pressed down too heavily, trying to show the ridges of Sirius’s knuckles and the small hairs that grew on them. No one else might have noticed them, but Remus did, and he knew it was essential they be in the picture.
His mother had always said he was the most patient child she’d ever known, which was a good thing when it came to his lycanthropy. It was a good thing when he came to his art, too. Remus waited a few minutes, hands held in the same position that Sirius had held them in, and then began to draw once more.
This time, he knew it was right. There was no wild possession-by-spirit the way there had been when he drew the picture of Sirius on the train three years ago. There was only the sensation of competence, of steady labor, sluicing over him like cool water and traveling out through his fingers.
When he had finished, he lifted the image in front of him and considered it. Yes, those were Sirius’s hands, small hairs on the knuckles, scar on the heel of the palm where one of the merfolk had bitten him when he dived into the lake on a dare, roughened skin from doing Filch’s detentions, and all. Remus smiled and leaned back on his pillow, worn out. Whether it was by the drama of knowing his friends had discovered his secret and had a plan to keep up with him, or by the work itself, he couldn’t have said.
That picture, he kept for years and years, until Sirius was in Azkaban and James and Lily and Peter were dead, and then he sold it for money to buy warmth, and clothes, and food.
*
The memory of the wolf was warm and blurred, streaked with violent shines of color that Remus’s conscious mind bound to smells. He looked out through those colors as through cage bars, here a flicker of human understanding, there of friendship that reminded him the creatures running beside him were not for eating. But he understood enough of what he saw to reconstruct the memory later.
The Forbidden Forest was always their hunting ground, the one place large enough on the Hogwarts grounds for the wolf to roam without meeting a student. It was a fine place for other reasons, Remus and the wolf thought. So many small dark crevices to sniff, so many unusual scents to catch and yelp about whilst raising all the fur on one’s tail, so many brilliant leaves that would drift to the ground when James caught them with his antlers. They devised so many games there, attended with such a kind of hectic playfulness, that the wolf’s hunger was stupefied and it didn’t have to kill. It learned to run in circles after the black dog instead, snapping, or to try-uselessly-to catch the proud stag as he raced ahead, or to be surprised and dance with the sudden start to life of a rat under its paws.
But there came some evenings where laughter turned into danger, and this was one of them. James had knocked his antlers playfully against a deadfall of logs and leaves, intending to move it out of the way and clear one of their regular paths. And then those gracefully branching antlers had got stuck, and anchored themselves in a split in the log, and in the midst of his frantic snorting and kicking, James had lost the concentration that would enable him to turn into a human again.
Peter turned into a human and pulled on the stag’s rump, but then had to dodge the kicking hooves. Sirius turned back to human and leaned gravely on a nearby tree, considering, his eyes darting back and forth between James and the logs. The wolf growled and thumped its tail against the ground, but managed to remember that these humans were not prey, and not for the attacking.
Sirius’s face lit, and his words drifted through the wolf’s mind like mist. Remus got Sirius to remember them for him later, because he couldn’t catch the sense of them himself at the time. “Let me try laughing at him.”
Sirius turned into a dog again, and trotted towards the stag, standing near his head and looking at him with his tongue lolling between his teeth. James rolled one eye at him and stamped his forehooves warningly; in his state of mind, he would try to defend himself even if his main weapons with which to do so were trapped. Sirius let his tongue hang more freely, and the wolf felt a twitch in its mind that made it lie down and whine. It couldn’t feel uneasy when someone was nearby speaking of calm and ease in its own tongue.
Then Sirius began to leap about James and bark.
James flicked his eyes and ears at him in perplexity. Then he stamped. Then he tried to kick him with his hind hooves. Then he champed with his teeth and snorted warningly through fluttering nostrils.
Sirius didn’t pay any attention. He was still darting in and darting out, his ears flying behind him, his tail wagging so hard that even the wolf could see it as little more than a blur. And his grace was as careless and thoughtless as anything else he’d done. Whatever Sirius achieved, it was the result of gifts and not of labor.
Finally, this plan worked out the way he meant it to. James became so exasperated that he didn’t think any longer about the logs trapping his antlers. Determined to pierce the dog and make it stop tormenting him, he twisted his head without thinking about it and drew the antlers smoothly free.
Sirius leaped high into the air and rejoiced with a barking cry. Of course, then he had to run very fast to escape the charge of a stag with head lowered and temper fit to spear him, but knowing Sirius, Remus suspected that was just as much fun to him as the initial teasing.
Remus made a picture of it afterwards, since he often spent the day after the full moon sleeping off his exhaustion and pain in the hospital wing. He made multiple tries on this one, too, and this time there was no knowledge of necessity and doing things right to guide his hand and eye. The memory he strained to recall was crossed and marred by the wolf. He wanted the real thing, but he had to hunt it down.
Finally, it was finished. Remus leaned back and gazed on the picture in silence, an image of what had been and also of what Remus wanted to think had been, perfectly blending imagination and reality. The large black dog in the picture seemed to fly as he bounded over the stag’s back, mouth open in a taunting howl. His ears snapped like the flag his hair made in human form, and he had his paws braced for the landing already. They would launch him into motion the moment he touched down, Remus knew. Sirius could never bear staying still for long. All around the stag and the dog shone the vivid colors of the forest, and Sirius was a splash of defiance against the green. Parted mouth, sharper teeth than Remus thought he had in dog form, a canine conformity of hide and muscle that Remus knew well enough from wearing it himself…and on the ground at the stag’s feet, where he would crush it when he landed, a single silken wild flower.
Remus gave it silently to Sirius when he came to visit him in the hospital wing that evening. It was the first time he’d ever shared a picture with the subject of the picture, and he had to turn away to face the wall, biting his tongue fiercely in anticipation of what Sirius would say.
He heard the parchment rustle. Then he heard Sirius laugh, ruffled and elegant and hasty.
“My tail looks nothing like that,” he said, and tossed the image to the bed next to Remus, where he nearly sat on it. Then he flung himself down next to Remus-it was a sign of what was to come, then, the ease with which they moved around each other-and began to wave his hands in expansive gestures. “So, in Potions. Snivellus was over here, and Lily was shielding him the way she does, but I could aim around her shoulder, and I had this brilliant firework that Regulus sent me when I asked-”
Remus rescued the picture, and kept it, and was silent. It, too, was sold for food during those darkling years.
*
Sirius was the one who began it, of course. Remus would never have dared.
He knew something was happening. Their touches had become more frequent than could be explained by the casual ways of good friends, or even the triumphant embraces Sirius liked to bestow whenever he’d thought of some new prank or got a particularly brilliant mark on a Transfigurations exam. But Remus had got too used to thinking that no one other than his friends would ever share his life, thanks to the lycanthropy. He dismissed the growing feelings, and tried to think sternly about the necessity of self-sacrifice and the wonderfulness of having such friends.
And then Sirius was there, one day, on a Hogsmeade weekend when Remus had refused to go to the village because the full moon was tomorrow and he was feeling anxious, and Sirius had said he’d stay with Remus. Miraculously, the Gryffindor common room was empty and likely to remain so, at least for a few hours. The younger years weren’t allowed to go to Hogsmeade, but they tended to go outside and run around the Quidditch Pitch or sit by the lake on a day like this to relieve their feelings.
Remus was reading. He couldn’t remember, later, what he’d been reading. Probably nothing very interesting, likely Potions homework; Slughorn always did give more over the weekend, blithely assuming he was the only professor who thought of it.
Sirius’s hands appeared on the edges of the book, and he took it smoothly away. He leaned forwards and looked into Remus’s face. Remus stared back. Emotions worked and trembled under Sirius’s skin. What were they? He didn’t think he’d be able to name them even if he did try. He reached out and stroked Sirius’s cheeks, and his own hands trembled a little.
“Oh, good,” said Sirius. Someone who hadn’t known him for seven years might have missed the hint of relief under the shining, smooth surface of his voice. “You do want this.”
Remus was about to laugh, to ask incredulously why Sirius would ever have doubted, but Sirius had already started to kiss him, and he was swept away by the sense of pouring, cool rightness, the way he was when he drew certain kinds of pictures. Sirius murmured something against his lips, the words as shapeless in his memory as the words he’d been reading, and pulled him insistently down to rest against the side of the couch. Then his hands were everywhere, and Remus gasped and arched and forgot to think.
He drew Sirius afterwards, of course, asleep on the same couch, his hand flung over his eyes as though he were trying to come to terms with the enormity of what they had done. His mouth gaped slightly; Remus drew the edges of his teeth, glancing up frequently to get the swollen state of his lips just right. His tongue lolled, the closest he’d ever come to looking like a dog in human form. His hair sprawled like his limbs, one strand on a pillow, more than half on the arm. One knee was up, knocking against the back of the couch; the other unbent so much that his foot brushed against the floor. Now and then it swayed, in a manner that convinced Remus he was half-awake.
That picture, he didn’t show to Sirius, and he didn’t sell. He kept it, so he could see Sirius as he had been, careless as sunshine, before war and death.
*
Of course Remus tried to draw the way he looked when he killed Peter and those Muggles.
And of course he couldn’t.
Remus sat down several times, taking deep breaths, and telling himself it would be a tribute to Sirius as well as James and Lily and Peter, and a comfort to himself. He could lay the ghost of their love affair to rest, and stop troubling himself with regrets. Sirius was a murderer and a traitor. Remus needed to see him that way. Then he could move on and stop turning over the pictures he’d drawn every single night, and feverishly during the day before the full moon.
But he had barely started the edge of the wild mane of hair, the uplifted wand and finger, the mouth distorted by mad laughter, when his hand stopped. Or it continued the sweeping motion it began with, and scribbled violent slashes of black across Sirius’s face, until they were covered over as thoroughly as an error in a Transfiguration essay for McGonagall, and then Remus threw the parchment into a corner-despite how much it cost, despite the temptation to spell it clean and repair it so it could be useful a second time.
His imagination was limited after all.
*
Once, only once, he drew Sirius in Azkaban.
It was a night when he woke as restless as though he were about to change, and stood at the window of the house he was “borrowing”-a manor house whose owners were out of England for several months-to stare at the crescent moon until he could convince himself he was in no danger. He turned around, heat driving him, and sat down, and took up parchment and quill and plain ink.
If there were thoughts moving through his head, they went something like this: As it was in the beginning, so let it be at the ending.
The man in the image crouched on a dirty stone floor, though the dirt was only suggested by a smudge here and there. A window in the wall showed the full moon that didn’t hang over Remus’s bed, because of course he could only imagine Sirius in his hell beneath the moon that signaled his. Chains surrounded him, though Remus had never been to Azkaban and didn’t know if they kept their prisoners chained or not, and anyway they seemed to fasten on ghost limbs. Dementors blew about the edges of the picture, suggested by flashes of ink like wind made visible. And Sirius was in the middle of it all, a shadowy shape, a glimmer of man, a glimmer of dog, his head tossed back as if he were going to laugh at the moon or yelp his defiance at the Dementors.
Only when he sat back and stared at the picture did Remus realize the eyes were exactly the same as they had always been, from the prankster to the lover to the dog to the Auror to the prisoner.
He didn’t know whether it made him a great artist or a poor one, the dupe of a romantic lie or a seer of the truth.
Though he reckoned there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t be a dupe for the truth, come to that.
*
Two images sold. One tossed aside the moment its purpose was served. One kept because it was impossible not to look at that young man pinned to the paper and motionless in his life, held back from the promise of other things, but kept safe from them, too.
One Remus did not dare to keep, and did not dare to lose. He didn’t know what happened to it, in the end. He refused to make sure it was packed whenever he had to move on, and finally, one day when he unpacked his trunk in a new home, it wasn’t there anymore.
It didn’t matter. It was framed in his heart.
End.