FIC: "Stranger in the House (1/2)," Remus/Sirius, NC-17
& now you say you've got no expectations
But I know you also miss those carefree days
& for all the angry words that passed between us
You still don't understand me when I say
There's a stranger in the house; nobody's seen his face
But everybody says he's taken my place
There's a stranger in the house no one will ever see
But everybody says he looks like me
- Stranger in the House, Elvis Costello
There was a time when Remus thought about these things constantly. In the dark, sacred womb of his bed, surrounded by curtains, Remus would imagine Sirius’s mouth like a cartographer might imagine an uncharted continent. He would marvel at the symmetrical curve of Sirius’s lips, the sharp-white glisten of his teeth in the dark, the rasp of his tongue, and wonder how he might taste when he was pinned down and desperate. Remus thought about these things guiltily, compulsively, but only when his thoughts were his own and unlikely to be interrupted.
Now, here, Sirius is stretched beneath him, his arms braced against the headboard, his legs spread into a wide v-shape. He is temptation incarnate, perfect to the naked eye-but Remus knows better. There is a tiny cut beneath Sirius’s jaw where he’s never gotten the hang of shaving. There are spots on Sirius’s chin and a half-dozen freckles scattered across his endless expanses of skin, mostly in unusual places. Remus finds these flaws, these small indications Sirius is mortal, because they are like fingerholds for his mind, reminders that he loves Sirius, truly, and not at all in the way Sirius forces everyone to love him, like a love-starved puppy. He loves him with an awareness born of years of quiet observation, of careful consideration.
Like everything else, Remus Lupin does not love carelessly.
Of course, this is not to say that being dangerously, recklessly in love with Sirius was a conscious decision, per say. It’s a tic, uncontrollable as blinking, vital as breathing. It took years of careful consideration before Remus could justify his compulsion, but in the end, he just let it happen.
Fortunately, Sirius turned out to be impulsive enough for the both of them. Unlike Remus, he never sees the need to locate the moment at which thought turns to action and subsequently cage that moment, keep it closely guarded, locked away in his pounding heart until actions shrivel to missed opportunities, a mocking chorus of what ifs. So when Sirius kissed Remus, once, at the corner of his mouth, on the couch in Sirius’s flat the summer after they left school, it was surprising, but not out of character. Sirius was eighteen, fierce and scared and alive, all to the point of excess. His hands shook with the electricity of the impending fight crackling in the air, even as they cradled Remus’s face, even as his thumb traced Remus’s cheek with tenderness, violent in its intensity. What was surprising was that Remus did not pull away.
But then, Remus had already had years to consider it.
Remus will have to leave for work soon. The only job he’s been able to keep is working the early morning shift at a library for one of the universities nearby. It’s perfect for him, really, except it pays next to nothing and means getting up before Sirius is even home most mornings. But this morning, this morning is different. Sirius was home before midnight, and they were able to actually sleep together, for once, in the most innocent sense of the word. And when Remus’s alarm went off, it was Sirius’s arm that emerged from the heap of blankets. It was Sirius’s voice that said “fuck it,” and Sirius’s warm, naked skin that kept Remus from getting out of bed fifteen minutes ago, when he still had a shot at being on time.
“I have to,” Remus says helplessly, looking down at Sirius’s inviting body.
“Of course you don’t,” Sirius says, grabbing at Remus’s hips to pull him back down.
Remus lets out a long-suffering sigh that he doesn’t really feel.
“It’s my job,” he says, irritated by the pleading note in his own voice, knowing full well Sirius won't let go.
“So? Be late,” Sirius suggests, managing at last to drag Remus’s body against his own.
And of course Remus wants to point out that being late as frequently as Sirius would have him be late is also likely to result in unemployment, but Sirius’s tongue is touching his ear, the side of his neck, the inside of his mouth, and he just can’t anymore. Because Sirius is hard and wet against the sensitive skin on his stomach, because Sirius is grinding against Remus’s own rapidly-growing erection like getting Remus off is his bloody job, because Sirius’s very presence has become rare and all the more precious. So he presses Sirius into the mattress and kisses and strokes him, and he’s only fifteen minutes late to work, if a bit rough around the edges.
______________________________________________________
It’s not a terrible occupation, when Remus thinks about it. He thinks about it mostly while he is at work, probably because there is little else to do. There are books to sort and the occasional student to harass, but mostly Remus wanders the stacks like a man in a labyrinth, and everyday he manages to get completely lost before eventually finding his way back to the front desk.
There is a girl who works there every Tuesday and Thursday, with a pretty smile and long, strawberry-blond hair. She’s petite, and when she stands beside Remus, he is very aware of how neatly her body would fold into his, be engulfed by his height. Sometimes, he wonders if this is something he wants, or if it’s just something he feels he’s missing out on. Sirius does not fold into anyone, and even if he did, he’s too long and solid. When they lay together in bed, their knees are always getting in the way, and neither of them can figure out what in the hell to do with their arms. But this girl, Anna is her name, she would fit perfectly in the crook of Remus’s shoulder, curve against his chest.
That evening, as he walks home, he wonders whether he ought to buy groceries. There’s a shop around the corner from Sirius’s flat-because it is Sirius’s flat, no matter how frequently Sirius insists that it is theirs-and the owner is an elderly woman who says Remus has a kind face. She almost always forgets to ring up at least half of whatever Remus is purchasing, and it makes him feel guilty to be taken care of in such a way. He decides to stop at a sandwich shop instead, and by the time he walks the three sticky-warm blocks to Sirius’s building, he is ravenous.
Sirius is sitting at the kitchen table, looking remarkably well-rested. Remus realises with a faint lurch that he’d been hoping Sirius would already be gone.
“About time you dropped by,” Sirius says, smiling.
“Have you done anything at all today, oh layabout of mine?” Remus asks, abandoning his sandwich on the counter while he hunts for a clean glass.
“I have. I slept until noon, and then I was naked in a variety of locales,” says Sirius, who has apparently made a less than heartfelt effort at clothing himself, wearing only a washed-thin t-shirt of Remus’s and, thankfully, his own pants.
“Well, sounds like you’ve accomplished quite a lot,” Remus offers.
“And what did you do to entertain yourself at that institution of catalogued oppression?” Sirius says, coming over to where Remus is standing and poking at his sandwich without much interest.
“I catalogued things, mostly,” Remus says, extracting a glass from the last cabinet he thought to check. Sirius is forever rearranging their cabinets and cupboards and drawers, and Remus wonders whether he will one day stumble upon some miraculous configuration that meets his apparently high standards, or whether he will outgrow this, too, as he has so many of the habits he developed living in a house full of cold, expensive objects and even colder people.
“Shocking. Really, Moony, don’t you ever stop to consider how you must make the books feel?”
Remus fills the glass with water and snatches his sandwich away from Sirius’s curious fingers.
“I can assure you, I do not,” he says, settling in at the table.
“Trapped, that’s how I’d imagine. Forced to live in predetermined locations, always being grabbed and cracked open and forgotten at the backs of shelves,” Sirius says wildly. His eyes are bright and mercurial, and he almost looks carefree enough to pass for his own age.
“Are they?” Remus offers.
“How would you like to be told where to live based on your last name? Or, worse, the last name of the bloke that thought you up?” Sirius asks with the sort of pseudo-intensity that makes him so goddamn charming when he wants to be.
“Would that be ‘g’ for God, or did you have another creator in mind?” Remus says.
“What about ‘m’ for Merlin?” Sirius suggests.
“Or ‘d.’ Aren’t you part French?”
Sirius snorts and rolls his eyes. “Maybe you belong with the ‘b’s,” he says slyly, taking Remus’s hand in his own and leaning in close. “Maybe I made you up inside my head.”
Remus feels suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin.
“Am I the sort of thing you find yourself manifesting often?” he asks, casually.
“I’m not sure,” says Sirius, releasing Remus’s hand and sliding into the chair across from him. “I’ve never manifested anyone before.”
“Well, I can’t say much for your taste,” Remus says, wiping a stray glop of mustard from the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, I’ll not have you disparaging my work like that. I might have got a little carried away in height department, but overall I think I did rather well,” Sirius says defensively.
Remus lets out a dry chuckle. “And I suppose the whole ‘monstrous scourge of the earth’ bit was just an oversight?”
Sirius sighs loudly and passes a hand through his already unruly hair, making it stand on end in places.
“You depress me, Remus,” says Sirius.
“I what now?”
“Depress me. Your persistent lack of good spirit and wanton man-lust leads me to believe that you are not, in fact, entirely at ease with your present station in life,” Sirius babbles.
“I’m not at ease? Of course I’m not at ease. Don’t be ridiculous,” Remus replies, finishing his sandwich in two oversized bites. He’d like to dig something else out of the cupboards, but he would also like to be somewhere else very soon.
“I’m not being anything of the sort. It’s just that you’re never here,” Sirius says. Coming from anyone else, it would sound clingy and pathetic, but coming from Sirius it makes Remus wish that he could be there.
“I have a job. Just like you have a job,” Remus offers sensibly. He has a job, because he can’t not have a job. He wouldn’t know how to function without something to wake him up in the morning and a reason to go to sleep at night. He thinks he might drift away without the firm anchors of responsibility at either end of the day.
“I don’t have a job. I have a task. An objective,” Sirius says, getting up from the table in one graceful lurch. “You don’t have to work.”
“Haven’t we had this conversation?” Remus asks. They’ve had this argument on a regular basis since Remus moved in and Sirius began going on missions with the Order at all sorts of ungodly hours. The volume and frequency with which they have it has been increasing, but the basic premise remains the same.
“Not this conversation, no. Do you even remember the last time we were both here and awake for more than half an hour?”
“What about right now?”
“You’ve been home less than fifteen minutes. And anyway, I have to meet Frank and Alice in ten,” Sirius says.
“Then maybe we should talk about this later,” Remus suggests.
“When? The next time our paths happen to cross? Shall I learn to interpret your snoring so the conversation doesn’t feel one-sided?”
“You just don’t understand,” Remus says. He can feel himself withdrawing, even as Sirius draws closer to where he is still sitting.
“What don’t I understand, Moony?” Sirius asks, sounding tired. “If I could quit the Order, I would. But you know how bad things are. You’ve seen it as well as I have.”
“Sirius, I can’t quit my job. I won’t. I just can't,” Remus says slowly. He hopes that by drawing out each word, carefully shaping each syllable in the back of his throat, he will be able to communicate the things he’s scared of putting into words. He worries that some ideas are just so terrible, so unthinkable, that even voicing them aloud might give them the power.
“Why won’t you just let me take care of things, Moony? It’s not-It’s not even some great bloody sacrifice. I’d be paying to have you around, which, quite frankly, would drive my mother mad if she found out, which is reason enough for me to do it,” Sirius says, grabbing Remus’s empty glass and refilling it at the sink without being asked.
“Is that what you like about me? My endless capacity for irritating your parents?”
“Of course not. That’s what I love about you.”
“Well, your mother’s mental health aside, I have no desire to be kept,” Remus says, trying not to sound bitter.
“You are so bloody stubborn, did you know that? There’s nothing standing in the way of our-our, you know, not being miserable all the goddamn time indefinitely, except for your stupid, selfish pride,” Sirius spits, slamming Remus’s drink back onto the table so that it splashes and forms a puddle at the base of the glass.
"It’s not my pride, it’s my survival instincts,” Remus says quietly.
He can feel it, the crack in the dike, the building pressure that is about to explode and drown them both. Remus touches the rim of the glass, concentrating on the way the moisture clings to the pad of his thumb.
“Keep talking,” Sirius says steadily. He has his hands on the table, but he’s barely sitting.
“You just-” Remus begins. He pauses, takes a breath. “What happens if you’re not around?”
“If I die?” Sirius says, deadly calm.
Remus doesn’t flinch.
“Sirius,” he says levelly.
“If my insides are smeared all over a wall somewhere?” Sirius says.
“Sirius.”
“If I die, bloody cease to exist, what will happen to you?”
Sirius isn’t shouting, but his voice is like a razor wrapped in velvet.
“Well, what will happen?” Remus says loudly. “What will happen to poor, sickly Remus with his fury little problem and his big empty bed? What will happen, Sirius?” He hates talking about this because he hates even thinking about it. However, when he does force himself to consider the possibility, he can’t help but realize that even if the whole world ends and there is no one left to dislocate his possessions and poke his sandwiches and make him late for work, he will still have to go on, to keep living. He has to be able to survive on his own.
“Stop it,” Sirius says.
“You stop it! Stop acting like my work schedule is the problem,” says Remus.
“Fine, then what is our problem, Remus?” Sirius says.
“This is, Sirius. I’m so tired of fighting,” Remus says, standing up and grabbing the wrapper from his sandwich.
“It’s not our fault!” Sirius says, half-kicking the chair Remus had been sitting in moments ago.
There is a clanging silence of truths unspoken, truths that don’t need to be spoken because they’re already there and happening. There is a war. They are mortal. There is a spy. They are always apart.
Remus places his hands against the cool countertop and concentrates on remembering to breathe.
“I just need my job,” Remus says quietly. He stares at his hands and waits.
“I need a break,” Sirius says, grabbing his coat off the hook by the door.
“What does that even mean?” Remus asks. He is almost surprised at the lack of panic in his tone, but in reality, he’s not panicking. He finds he’s curious more than anything.
“It means,” Sirius says, shrugging on his coat. “It means… I don’t know what it means. I’m going to stay with James for a few nights. We can talk about this later.”
The petty, angry part of Remus’s brain wants to scream when? and throw Sirius’s words back in his face spitefully. But he doesn’t.
Remus stands perfectly still, his fingertips braced against the countertop, and doesn’t exhale until he hears the crackling pop of disapparation at his back.
--
The next morning is the same as nearly every other morning of late. Remus wakes up alone, huddled in an unseasonably heavy thicket of blankets, his alarm wailing angrily. With practiced certainty, he gestures at the alarm and performs the first bit of wandless magic he ever learned. The alarm falls silent. Then, it is simply a matter of gathering momentum and calculating exactly how much strength it will take to get through the day. Remus steels himself and rolls over so he is upright with his feet on the floor. It is only then he remembers why Sirius is not there, and the sinking in his stomach surprises him a little.
The day passes at a dull, monotonous pace, for which Remus is secretly grateful. Boredom has never bothered him, and it gives him time to think-not that he is significantly lacking in time these days.
Anna makes tea in the afternoons, and she always makes an extra cup for Remus whether he asks for it or not, and usually he doesn’t. Today, she sits beside him and takes delicate sips from the oversized coffee mug she always uses, and while she talks, she touches his knee twice with her small, smooth hand. The second time she does it, Remus wonders what it would be like to take her hand in his and hold it for a while. It scares him to even consider such a thing, but Sirius is gone all the time, and now he’s gone because he wants to be, and this girl, this lovely, gentle girl is here, right now, and she’s touching his knee with a crooked smile on her face, and Remus realizes in a horrible flash that he can imagine perfectly what she would look like spread out beneath him, all heat and uncomplicated want.
“And anyway, it sounded like something you might like, so I thought I’d see if you wanted to go with me,” Anna says. Her voice catches a little on the last two words.
“I can’t,” Remus says politely. Part of him feels the need to point out that he probably could, and no one would ever be the wiser, but he’s not even certain what she’s talking about. He wasn't listening. Remus never imagined himself to be the sort of man that loses track of a conversation because he can’t keep from picturing an attractive girl naked, and the realization bothers him.
“Oh well,” says Anna lightly. She lets out a nervous, fluttering laugh, and Remus thinks it quite sweet, in a way.
She looks around, probably for some way of excusing herself, but an approaching student saves her the trouble. Remus watches her scan the card catalogues for whatever the boy is looking for, and he follows when she slips away into the storage room, in search of some lost volume.
When he rounds the corner, into the dusty tomb of books forgotten, he is struck by how very silent it is. His footsteps give off a muffled echo and the sounds of Anna rummaging through the stacks ring out from a few shelves away. Remus follows the noise and finds her hunched over a stack of medical encyclopedias. Anna looks up at him, her expression curious and open.
Remus is planning to say something like, “maybe next weekend,” or “it’s not that I don’t want to,” because he’s afraid she’ll stop talking to him, and then where will he be? Probably a lot safer. Only he doesn’t say any of those things. He takes two steps towards her, and when she doesn’t back away, he kisses her, gently but sure, presses her back against a shelf, and kisses her some more, until she lets out a content sound and pushes him away, gently.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, running his hands through his hair.
Never in his life has Remus Lupin kissed someone without months of careful deliberation, let alone by accident. He’s not sure if she’s angry, but he’s pretty sure that he’s going to pass out or throw up on her shoes soon.
“Don’t be,” she says. “I don’t mind,” she says.
“I’m so sorry,” Remus says again, backing away with his hands raised in submission. He’s not really apologizing to her anymore, but she’s here and the person he should be talking to is god-knows-where. Something in his chest feels knotted and unpleasant, and he wishes to god it weren’t so damn quiet, because the hot, guilty roar of his own breath is deafening.
Part 2
But I know you also miss those carefree days
& for all the angry words that passed between us
You still don't understand me when I say
There's a stranger in the house; nobody's seen his face
But everybody says he's taken my place
There's a stranger in the house no one will ever see
But everybody says he looks like me
- Stranger in the House, Elvis Costello
There was a time when Remus thought about these things constantly. In the dark, sacred womb of his bed, surrounded by curtains, Remus would imagine Sirius’s mouth like a cartographer might imagine an uncharted continent. He would marvel at the symmetrical curve of Sirius’s lips, the sharp-white glisten of his teeth in the dark, the rasp of his tongue, and wonder how he might taste when he was pinned down and desperate. Remus thought about these things guiltily, compulsively, but only when his thoughts were his own and unlikely to be interrupted.
Now, here, Sirius is stretched beneath him, his arms braced against the headboard, his legs spread into a wide v-shape. He is temptation incarnate, perfect to the naked eye-but Remus knows better. There is a tiny cut beneath Sirius’s jaw where he’s never gotten the hang of shaving. There are spots on Sirius’s chin and a half-dozen freckles scattered across his endless expanses of skin, mostly in unusual places. Remus finds these flaws, these small indications Sirius is mortal, because they are like fingerholds for his mind, reminders that he loves Sirius, truly, and not at all in the way Sirius forces everyone to love him, like a love-starved puppy. He loves him with an awareness born of years of quiet observation, of careful consideration.
Like everything else, Remus Lupin does not love carelessly.
Of course, this is not to say that being dangerously, recklessly in love with Sirius was a conscious decision, per say. It’s a tic, uncontrollable as blinking, vital as breathing. It took years of careful consideration before Remus could justify his compulsion, but in the end, he just let it happen.
Fortunately, Sirius turned out to be impulsive enough for the both of them. Unlike Remus, he never sees the need to locate the moment at which thought turns to action and subsequently cage that moment, keep it closely guarded, locked away in his pounding heart until actions shrivel to missed opportunities, a mocking chorus of what ifs. So when Sirius kissed Remus, once, at the corner of his mouth, on the couch in Sirius’s flat the summer after they left school, it was surprising, but not out of character. Sirius was eighteen, fierce and scared and alive, all to the point of excess. His hands shook with the electricity of the impending fight crackling in the air, even as they cradled Remus’s face, even as his thumb traced Remus’s cheek with tenderness, violent in its intensity. What was surprising was that Remus did not pull away.
But then, Remus had already had years to consider it.
Remus will have to leave for work soon. The only job he’s been able to keep is working the early morning shift at a library for one of the universities nearby. It’s perfect for him, really, except it pays next to nothing and means getting up before Sirius is even home most mornings. But this morning, this morning is different. Sirius was home before midnight, and they were able to actually sleep together, for once, in the most innocent sense of the word. And when Remus’s alarm went off, it was Sirius’s arm that emerged from the heap of blankets. It was Sirius’s voice that said “fuck it,” and Sirius’s warm, naked skin that kept Remus from getting out of bed fifteen minutes ago, when he still had a shot at being on time.
“I have to,” Remus says helplessly, looking down at Sirius’s inviting body.
“Of course you don’t,” Sirius says, grabbing at Remus’s hips to pull him back down.
Remus lets out a long-suffering sigh that he doesn’t really feel.
“It’s my job,” he says, irritated by the pleading note in his own voice, knowing full well Sirius won't let go.
“So? Be late,” Sirius suggests, managing at last to drag Remus’s body against his own.
And of course Remus wants to point out that being late as frequently as Sirius would have him be late is also likely to result in unemployment, but Sirius’s tongue is touching his ear, the side of his neck, the inside of his mouth, and he just can’t anymore. Because Sirius is hard and wet against the sensitive skin on his stomach, because Sirius is grinding against Remus’s own rapidly-growing erection like getting Remus off is his bloody job, because Sirius’s very presence has become rare and all the more precious. So he presses Sirius into the mattress and kisses and strokes him, and he’s only fifteen minutes late to work, if a bit rough around the edges.
______________________________________________________
It’s not a terrible occupation, when Remus thinks about it. He thinks about it mostly while he is at work, probably because there is little else to do. There are books to sort and the occasional student to harass, but mostly Remus wanders the stacks like a man in a labyrinth, and everyday he manages to get completely lost before eventually finding his way back to the front desk.
There is a girl who works there every Tuesday and Thursday, with a pretty smile and long, strawberry-blond hair. She’s petite, and when she stands beside Remus, he is very aware of how neatly her body would fold into his, be engulfed by his height. Sometimes, he wonders if this is something he wants, or if it’s just something he feels he’s missing out on. Sirius does not fold into anyone, and even if he did, he’s too long and solid. When they lay together in bed, their knees are always getting in the way, and neither of them can figure out what in the hell to do with their arms. But this girl, Anna is her name, she would fit perfectly in the crook of Remus’s shoulder, curve against his chest.
That evening, as he walks home, he wonders whether he ought to buy groceries. There’s a shop around the corner from Sirius’s flat-because it is Sirius’s flat, no matter how frequently Sirius insists that it is theirs-and the owner is an elderly woman who says Remus has a kind face. She almost always forgets to ring up at least half of whatever Remus is purchasing, and it makes him feel guilty to be taken care of in such a way. He decides to stop at a sandwich shop instead, and by the time he walks the three sticky-warm blocks to Sirius’s building, he is ravenous.
Sirius is sitting at the kitchen table, looking remarkably well-rested. Remus realises with a faint lurch that he’d been hoping Sirius would already be gone.
“About time you dropped by,” Sirius says, smiling.
“Have you done anything at all today, oh layabout of mine?” Remus asks, abandoning his sandwich on the counter while he hunts for a clean glass.
“I have. I slept until noon, and then I was naked in a variety of locales,” says Sirius, who has apparently made a less than heartfelt effort at clothing himself, wearing only a washed-thin t-shirt of Remus’s and, thankfully, his own pants.
“Well, sounds like you’ve accomplished quite a lot,” Remus offers.
“And what did you do to entertain yourself at that institution of catalogued oppression?” Sirius says, coming over to where Remus is standing and poking at his sandwich without much interest.
“I catalogued things, mostly,” Remus says, extracting a glass from the last cabinet he thought to check. Sirius is forever rearranging their cabinets and cupboards and drawers, and Remus wonders whether he will one day stumble upon some miraculous configuration that meets his apparently high standards, or whether he will outgrow this, too, as he has so many of the habits he developed living in a house full of cold, expensive objects and even colder people.
“Shocking. Really, Moony, don’t you ever stop to consider how you must make the books feel?”
Remus fills the glass with water and snatches his sandwich away from Sirius’s curious fingers.
“I can assure you, I do not,” he says, settling in at the table.
“Trapped, that’s how I’d imagine. Forced to live in predetermined locations, always being grabbed and cracked open and forgotten at the backs of shelves,” Sirius says wildly. His eyes are bright and mercurial, and he almost looks carefree enough to pass for his own age.
“Are they?” Remus offers.
“How would you like to be told where to live based on your last name? Or, worse, the last name of the bloke that thought you up?” Sirius asks with the sort of pseudo-intensity that makes him so goddamn charming when he wants to be.
“Would that be ‘g’ for God, or did you have another creator in mind?” Remus says.
“What about ‘m’ for Merlin?” Sirius suggests.
“Or ‘d.’ Aren’t you part French?”
Sirius snorts and rolls his eyes. “Maybe you belong with the ‘b’s,” he says slyly, taking Remus’s hand in his own and leaning in close. “Maybe I made you up inside my head.”
Remus feels suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin.
“Am I the sort of thing you find yourself manifesting often?” he asks, casually.
“I’m not sure,” says Sirius, releasing Remus’s hand and sliding into the chair across from him. “I’ve never manifested anyone before.”
“Well, I can’t say much for your taste,” Remus says, wiping a stray glop of mustard from the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, I’ll not have you disparaging my work like that. I might have got a little carried away in height department, but overall I think I did rather well,” Sirius says defensively.
Remus lets out a dry chuckle. “And I suppose the whole ‘monstrous scourge of the earth’ bit was just an oversight?”
Sirius sighs loudly and passes a hand through his already unruly hair, making it stand on end in places.
“You depress me, Remus,” says Sirius.
“I what now?”
“Depress me. Your persistent lack of good spirit and wanton man-lust leads me to believe that you are not, in fact, entirely at ease with your present station in life,” Sirius babbles.
“I’m not at ease? Of course I’m not at ease. Don’t be ridiculous,” Remus replies, finishing his sandwich in two oversized bites. He’d like to dig something else out of the cupboards, but he would also like to be somewhere else very soon.
“I’m not being anything of the sort. It’s just that you’re never here,” Sirius says. Coming from anyone else, it would sound clingy and pathetic, but coming from Sirius it makes Remus wish that he could be there.
“I have a job. Just like you have a job,” Remus offers sensibly. He has a job, because he can’t not have a job. He wouldn’t know how to function without something to wake him up in the morning and a reason to go to sleep at night. He thinks he might drift away without the firm anchors of responsibility at either end of the day.
“I don’t have a job. I have a task. An objective,” Sirius says, getting up from the table in one graceful lurch. “You don’t have to work.”
“Haven’t we had this conversation?” Remus asks. They’ve had this argument on a regular basis since Remus moved in and Sirius began going on missions with the Order at all sorts of ungodly hours. The volume and frequency with which they have it has been increasing, but the basic premise remains the same.
“Not this conversation, no. Do you even remember the last time we were both here and awake for more than half an hour?”
“What about right now?”
“You’ve been home less than fifteen minutes. And anyway, I have to meet Frank and Alice in ten,” Sirius says.
“Then maybe we should talk about this later,” Remus suggests.
“When? The next time our paths happen to cross? Shall I learn to interpret your snoring so the conversation doesn’t feel one-sided?”
“You just don’t understand,” Remus says. He can feel himself withdrawing, even as Sirius draws closer to where he is still sitting.
“What don’t I understand, Moony?” Sirius asks, sounding tired. “If I could quit the Order, I would. But you know how bad things are. You’ve seen it as well as I have.”
“Sirius, I can’t quit my job. I won’t. I just can't,” Remus says slowly. He hopes that by drawing out each word, carefully shaping each syllable in the back of his throat, he will be able to communicate the things he’s scared of putting into words. He worries that some ideas are just so terrible, so unthinkable, that even voicing them aloud might give them the power.
“Why won’t you just let me take care of things, Moony? It’s not-It’s not even some great bloody sacrifice. I’d be paying to have you around, which, quite frankly, would drive my mother mad if she found out, which is reason enough for me to do it,” Sirius says, grabbing Remus’s empty glass and refilling it at the sink without being asked.
“Is that what you like about me? My endless capacity for irritating your parents?”
“Of course not. That’s what I love about you.”
“Well, your mother’s mental health aside, I have no desire to be kept,” Remus says, trying not to sound bitter.
“You are so bloody stubborn, did you know that? There’s nothing standing in the way of our-our, you know, not being miserable all the goddamn time indefinitely, except for your stupid, selfish pride,” Sirius spits, slamming Remus’s drink back onto the table so that it splashes and forms a puddle at the base of the glass.
"It’s not my pride, it’s my survival instincts,” Remus says quietly.
He can feel it, the crack in the dike, the building pressure that is about to explode and drown them both. Remus touches the rim of the glass, concentrating on the way the moisture clings to the pad of his thumb.
“Keep talking,” Sirius says steadily. He has his hands on the table, but he’s barely sitting.
“You just-” Remus begins. He pauses, takes a breath. “What happens if you’re not around?”
“If I die?” Sirius says, deadly calm.
Remus doesn’t flinch.
“Sirius,” he says levelly.
“If my insides are smeared all over a wall somewhere?” Sirius says.
“Sirius.”
“If I die, bloody cease to exist, what will happen to you?”
Sirius isn’t shouting, but his voice is like a razor wrapped in velvet.
“Well, what will happen?” Remus says loudly. “What will happen to poor, sickly Remus with his fury little problem and his big empty bed? What will happen, Sirius?” He hates talking about this because he hates even thinking about it. However, when he does force himself to consider the possibility, he can’t help but realize that even if the whole world ends and there is no one left to dislocate his possessions and poke his sandwiches and make him late for work, he will still have to go on, to keep living. He has to be able to survive on his own.
“Stop it,” Sirius says.
“You stop it! Stop acting like my work schedule is the problem,” says Remus.
“Fine, then what is our problem, Remus?” Sirius says.
“This is, Sirius. I’m so tired of fighting,” Remus says, standing up and grabbing the wrapper from his sandwich.
“It’s not our fault!” Sirius says, half-kicking the chair Remus had been sitting in moments ago.
There is a clanging silence of truths unspoken, truths that don’t need to be spoken because they’re already there and happening. There is a war. They are mortal. There is a spy. They are always apart.
Remus places his hands against the cool countertop and concentrates on remembering to breathe.
“I just need my job,” Remus says quietly. He stares at his hands and waits.
“I need a break,” Sirius says, grabbing his coat off the hook by the door.
“What does that even mean?” Remus asks. He is almost surprised at the lack of panic in his tone, but in reality, he’s not panicking. He finds he’s curious more than anything.
“It means,” Sirius says, shrugging on his coat. “It means… I don’t know what it means. I’m going to stay with James for a few nights. We can talk about this later.”
The petty, angry part of Remus’s brain wants to scream when? and throw Sirius’s words back in his face spitefully. But he doesn’t.
Remus stands perfectly still, his fingertips braced against the countertop, and doesn’t exhale until he hears the crackling pop of disapparation at his back.
--
The next morning is the same as nearly every other morning of late. Remus wakes up alone, huddled in an unseasonably heavy thicket of blankets, his alarm wailing angrily. With practiced certainty, he gestures at the alarm and performs the first bit of wandless magic he ever learned. The alarm falls silent. Then, it is simply a matter of gathering momentum and calculating exactly how much strength it will take to get through the day. Remus steels himself and rolls over so he is upright with his feet on the floor. It is only then he remembers why Sirius is not there, and the sinking in his stomach surprises him a little.
The day passes at a dull, monotonous pace, for which Remus is secretly grateful. Boredom has never bothered him, and it gives him time to think-not that he is significantly lacking in time these days.
Anna makes tea in the afternoons, and she always makes an extra cup for Remus whether he asks for it or not, and usually he doesn’t. Today, she sits beside him and takes delicate sips from the oversized coffee mug she always uses, and while she talks, she touches his knee twice with her small, smooth hand. The second time she does it, Remus wonders what it would be like to take her hand in his and hold it for a while. It scares him to even consider such a thing, but Sirius is gone all the time, and now he’s gone because he wants to be, and this girl, this lovely, gentle girl is here, right now, and she’s touching his knee with a crooked smile on her face, and Remus realizes in a horrible flash that he can imagine perfectly what she would look like spread out beneath him, all heat and uncomplicated want.
“And anyway, it sounded like something you might like, so I thought I’d see if you wanted to go with me,” Anna says. Her voice catches a little on the last two words.
“I can’t,” Remus says politely. Part of him feels the need to point out that he probably could, and no one would ever be the wiser, but he’s not even certain what she’s talking about. He wasn't listening. Remus never imagined himself to be the sort of man that loses track of a conversation because he can’t keep from picturing an attractive girl naked, and the realization bothers him.
“Oh well,” says Anna lightly. She lets out a nervous, fluttering laugh, and Remus thinks it quite sweet, in a way.
She looks around, probably for some way of excusing herself, but an approaching student saves her the trouble. Remus watches her scan the card catalogues for whatever the boy is looking for, and he follows when she slips away into the storage room, in search of some lost volume.
When he rounds the corner, into the dusty tomb of books forgotten, he is struck by how very silent it is. His footsteps give off a muffled echo and the sounds of Anna rummaging through the stacks ring out from a few shelves away. Remus follows the noise and finds her hunched over a stack of medical encyclopedias. Anna looks up at him, her expression curious and open.
Remus is planning to say something like, “maybe next weekend,” or “it’s not that I don’t want to,” because he’s afraid she’ll stop talking to him, and then where will he be? Probably a lot safer. Only he doesn’t say any of those things. He takes two steps towards her, and when she doesn’t back away, he kisses her, gently but sure, presses her back against a shelf, and kisses her some more, until she lets out a content sound and pushes him away, gently.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, running his hands through his hair.
Never in his life has Remus Lupin kissed someone without months of careful deliberation, let alone by accident. He’s not sure if she’s angry, but he’s pretty sure that he’s going to pass out or throw up on her shoes soon.
“Don’t be,” she says. “I don’t mind,” she says.
“I’m so sorry,” Remus says again, backing away with his hands raised in submission. He’s not really apologizing to her anymore, but she’s here and the person he should be talking to is god-knows-where. Something in his chest feels knotted and unpleasant, and he wishes to god it weren’t so damn quiet, because the hot, guilty roar of his own breath is deafening.
Part 2