Fic: Lost That Easy for escribo
Title: Lost That Easy
Author: veeagainst
Recipient: escribo
Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Word Count: 6278
Summary: For the prompt: During the first war, Remus is injured during a battle and Sirius finds him first
‘You didn’t meet with Fowler,’ is how Sirius greets Remus when he walks into the pub, and Remus thinks, Oh hell this again, hackles rising already, but all he says is a mild, ‘Hello, Padfoot, fancy a pint?’
‘No,’ Sirius says, already standing up. ‘I fancy a chat. In private.’
Remus resists the urge to ask when getting a pint together turned into an ambush and then resists the urge to make a lewd remark about private chats. They’re not teenagers anymore, as of a few months ago for Sirius and a few weeks ago for him, which might explain why he went for the lewd remark second. Losing that sense of humour with age already, it seems, and Remus feels like he’s living in dog years anyway, gaining seven for every person outside the war’s one.
They go to Sirius’s flat around the corner and the door is barely shut before Sirius rounds on him.
‘So. You didn’t meet with Fowler.’
‘No,’ Remus agrees, because Sirius isn’t asking him a question and he knows that a lack of denial will put him off guard. ‘I didn’t get a chance.’
‘You didn’t get a chance?’ Sirius repeats, already starting to raise his voice. ‘Fowler comes to us with information about Voldemort and you “don’t get a chance”? How’s that, then?’
Remus has one million reasons why he didn’t: because Fowler is a quack; because Peter told him that the last time they met Fowler had tried to sell him some powdered dung beetle passed off as a protection charm; because Fowler smells like gone-off cheese sandwiches and doesn’t know a damned thing and is convinced that Voldemort has some kind of plan to feast off of dead people’s souls and make himself immortal. But Sirius is paranoid and thinks that leaving any stone unturned - even if the stone is made of plastic and designed to make a Croydon front garden look like the Lakes - is criminal, and Remus knows it, and so he decides to not exactly lie, but not exactly tell the full truth either.
‘I didn’t get a chance because he wanted to meet in the public loo at Paddington Station.’
Sirius blinks. ‘He what?’
‘Exactly,’ Remus says, rolling his eyes. ‘Good thing it’s not a few years ago, meeting in places like that, we’d be arrested for buggery.’
Sirius blinks again. Remus imagines there’s a pause there for Sirius to turn the word ‘buggery’ over in his mind. Then Sirius asks, ‘But surely you could just, I don’t know, go there?’
‘Here’s the thing,’ Remus says, and here really is the thing, because he had gone to Victoria, and he had been prepared to go to the toilets to meet with Fowler, even though the smell of public toilets is an awful difficult to even contemplate, let alone experience, but when he’d got there: ‘They have a barrier there. Non-magical. You have to pay with a specific Muggle coin to enter. I didn’t have it, and the place was too crowded to cast a charm, and they even have a guard. I waited outside for half an hour but I never saw him leave.’
Sirius sighs, ‘That’s,’ and then trails off. Remus realises that Sirius will have interpreted his not having the money as something to do with being poor, which he is, but that’s not why he didn’t have a Muggle tuppence. He didn’t have a Muggle tuppence because Gringotts won’t change money for him because the Ministry recently made it illegal for Dark Creatures to have bank accounts. He keeps all of the money he scrapes by being a private tutor in a public locker in a dark back corner of the Euston Road Station and when he needs Muggle money, he usually convinces Peter to change it for him, but he hates to ask, so mostly he gets by without. He once asked James, who offered to just buy him whatever he needed, and the shame of it nearly killed him; he can’t bring himself to imagine asking Sirius.
Now Sirius sighs again, and Remus knows that he has got the subtext, and it makes him awful, like the lowest of the low. ‘Moony,’ Sirius says after a moment, and that flash of anger is gone now, and that combined with shame take all of the anger out of Remus too. ‘This is important. We need more information. They’re winning, you know.’
Right now, to Remus, Sirius is beautiful. Sure, he has that perfect hair, all dark, straight lines that frame cheekbones so sharp they might as well conceal razor blades, his nose is straight and the perfect width, his mouth is full without being too full, and the lines of his body are hard and lean but those are just shapes, and moreover shapes with whom Remus is extremely familiar. He’s known Sirius for nearly ten years now, after all. It’s the other parts that are really what make Sirius beautiful: the long fingers that reach from the ends of his leather jacket have nails bitten to stubs, red-brown traces of blood in the cuticles; his grey eyes bear wary concern and the dark circles underneath them tell a story of sleeplessness which Remus appreciates to the depths of his very soul.
‘Moony?’ Sirius asks, and he sounds unsure. Remus wonders if he’s been staring.
‘Sorry, Padfoot,’ he says, and now he can’t even imagine fighting with this beautiful man. He longs to take one of Sirius’s hands and run his fingers across those ragged stubs of nail. ‘You’re right.’
***
Remus stays the night on Sirius’s sofa. It beats the hell out of the cheap hostels Remus usually beds down in, and when Sirius asks him to do something, he generally finds it hard to say no, the Fowler affair aside. Sirius’s flat is magnificent, especially for being a central-ish London flat maintained by a single man with a taste for expensive motorcycles and studded leather jackets who has no apparent income. There’s even another bedroom somewhere, a luxury quite unheard of - James and Lily, for example, sleep with Harry’s bassinet in their room (though they are talking about moving out to the countryside soon, so that he can have a room of his own). Remus assumes that the spare bedroom is empty, because whenever Sirius insists he stay the night (and that’s becoming more frequent, as is Remus’s inability to turn down what must be charity, which he hates), he always installs him on the sofa with a heavy comforter.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, when the sun has not yet tipped over the horizon and rain clouds still obscure the glow of coming daylight, the vial in Remus’s pocket begins to shake. Remus always wakes from sleep like a wolf, an instant transition from sound asleep to full alert. He extricates the parchment from the vial and reads a location; he’s needed on urgent Order business. He sits and swings his legs down, suddenly realising that Sirius has fallen asleep in the leather armchair across from the sofa. His head is tipped to the side, mouth slightly open, and he’s not exactly snoring, just exhaling loudly after every whistling breath. It’s one of the most grating sounds imaginable, but Remus has the urge to lay back and listen to him do it all night.
Instead, he stands, his legs creaking and ankles cracking, crosses to Sirius, and touches his shoulder lightly. Sirius starts awake, a little less wolf-like, but close, and says, ‘Moony?’
‘Order business,’ Remus says, showing Sirius the vial, which is now glowing blue. ‘That chair looks uncomfortable, why don’t you take the sofa?’
Sirius’s eyes are on the vial. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asks, and Remus is suddenly so sick of paranoia that he hands him the parchment, even though Order members are not supposed to share information with each other. Sirius squints at the paper in the blue light and asks, ‘Lambeth?’ and Remus nods.
Then the vial glows red, and Remus scrambles. He’s been standing here too long and shit shit shit shit what if this is the difference between life and death for someone. He’s fumbling around for his shoes and Sirius is up and handing him his cloak, which for some reason will not hang straight, and then he’s out the door and running for a safe place to Apparate.
It is not until seven hours later, when he, Peter, and two other Order members whose names Remus doesn’t fully remember are finally relieved by the cleanup crew (and they have their work cut out for them, this is one of those raids that will haunt him for a long time), that Remus finally figures out why his cloak just will not stay on at the right arm, why it’s been dragging down to one side and trying to strangle him all day. He’s sitting beside Peter on a flat roof with their backs against a chimney watching the rare April sun lowering itself in the sky when he finally makes the connection - and this is surely a sign of how exhausted he is, how mentally slow this war is making him - that the cloak is falling down because there’s a heavy weight in his pocket.
‘So have you seen Sirius lately?’ Peter asks suddenly, distracting Remus from the weight.
‘Saw him last night,’ he says, staring at the horizon and trying to get his eyes to focus. God he’s tired. ‘I slept on his sofa.’
‘Why on the sofa?’ Peter asks. ‘You know he bought a bed for that spare bedroom.’
‘Did he?’ Remus asks, startled. The door is always shut whenever he’s there. ‘Where from?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter says, shrugging. ‘I assume the Posh Shop for Posh People who like to buy Posh Things.’
Remus laughs, startled at how good that feels, at the familiar joke: he and Peter for years, now joined by Lily, sometimes privately have to let off steam about exactly how posh James and Sirius are. These jokes usually happen after one of the two has spent some obscene amount of galleons on something frivolous like prank aids or candy or, later, booze. ‘Well, he’s never told me that,’ he says now. ‘Sofa it is for me. It’s a nice sofa, mind.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ Peter says. ‘Probably came from the same shop.’ He glances over at Remus and his face gets serious. A pit of worry forms in Remus’s stomach. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about Sirius, is all,’ Peter says. ‘He’s really, I don’t know, acting crazy. Worried about every little thing, suspicious of every one.’
Remus always, always feels the need to defend Sirius, and even though Peter is completely correct, he does it anyway. ‘I imagine we’d be suspicious of everyone too,’ he says passively, ‘if we’d grown up in that house.’ Sirius doesn’t talk much about it but Remus has gleaned the outline: a distant father who vastly prefers his other son, an emotionally abusive mother who fed him mind games with his first milk, and, worst of all, a brother who was Sirius’s only friend before Hogwarts and is now a Death Eater. ‘I can’t blame him.’
‘No,’ Peter agrees, ‘you’re right. You couldn’t grow up around all that dark magic and not have it leave a mark.’ And Remus thinks that that wasn’t quite what he meant, but that Peter’s got a point there too.
His cloak slips again and he remembers the weight. He puts his hand into his pocket and feels a small velvet bag full of something strangely shaped and hard. He keeps running his hand over it while they finish their debriefing and then Peter hauls himself up and says he’s off, he needs to sleep, but Remus hangs back. Once he’s the only one on the roof, he takes out the bag: dark blue velvet, a thin silver drawstring at the top. He puts it to his nose, furtively, and inhales, already knowing what he’ll find: it smells like Sirius, and something else, a dark metallic tang not quite like blood. He opens it and inside is one of every denomination of Muggle coin.
***
It’s late at night and Remus is missing Sirius’s sofa and the warm comforting smells of his flat, but instead he’s sat here in the Order Control Room. James is at the table opposite, head propped up on one hand, eyes hovering near shut, as the maps spread out on the tables in front of them flicker and shift.
Remus doesn’t normally work the Control Room - Albus always tells him that he, like Sirius, is much more of a field operations man, which Remus thinks is code for ‘can’t be trusted to make important decisions’ - but tonight there was no one else to do it and the map has been lit up with trouble like a street lined with malevolent Christmas trees. James is writing out another slip of parchment to go put into a vial along the wall that matches one in someone’s pocket. That Order member will be dispatched out to a possible incident. Remus helped write the maps; they’re like enormous versions of the Marauder’s Map, except instead of looking out for getting sent to detention they’re looking out for sorcerous murder. Also these maps are much larger, and laid out in squares for the entire country.
James sits back down and wraps a hand around his tea. ‘Do they make this stuff any stronger?’ he asks. ‘Can I just eat that black powder at the bottom of the box of teabags?’
Remus smiles. He’d babysat Harry with Sirius one night when both James and Lily had been called away on Order business and they’d secretly agreed that, while Harry was terribly loveable and wonderful and would surely grow into an amazing person, the feeling of being awoken in the wee hours by his piercing cries was not one they would like to repeat. ‘How many Awake Charms have you done?’ he asks. There’s a limit, one discovered by him personally at Hogwarts, where they stop keeping you awake and just start giving you unpleasant side effects like vomiting and sideways sleep walking.
‘Lily says no more of those for me for a while,’ James says morosely. ‘I almost kicked her in the face in bed a few nights ago because I improperly cast it and it hit my feet only.’
Remus notices something flickering on the map in front of him. He reaches out and pulls the parchment, and it lifts into a flap, then another, then another, until he has three feet of parchment stretched out in front of him and can see a single street in London in great detail. It’s Cromwell Street, which he doesn’t think he’s ever been to, but which seems to have many large buildings on it. As he watches, a warning flicks on and then off again.
‘What’s up?’ James asks. ‘
The warning doesn’t reappear, and Remus shakes his head. ‘False alarm,’ he says, and James nods, because the maps can be temperamental. A pigeon that had been stealing bread out of a bakery recently lit up a section of Walthamstow and caused two fruitless patrols and one dry cleaning bill for pigeon shit on a purple silk robe.
Some time passes, and Remus’s eyes keep returning to that spot on Cromwell Road, which periodically flickers. He has a bad feeling about it. He glances at James, who is staring despondently at Edinburgh. Under Order protocol, the control room is supposed to dispatch available field agents to check out trouble spots, but Remus sees that all of the vials have parchment in them, meaning the field agents are all already out in the field - well, all but one, which belongs to Sirius, who Remus knows has been summoned every night for the last three and is so exhausted that he nearly drowned in the bath earlier and Remus had to pound on the door. He also can’t ask James to go, not with James being so tired and having Harry at home.
He stands up and says, ‘Just going outside for some air. I’ve got a terrible headache. Be back in a few minutes.’
James nods and Remus steps outside, jogs to the safe Apparition point, and steps and twists his way into the blast of colour that means he is travelling rapidly through space. He arrives at the safe Apparition spot on the other end of his journey, which turns out to be inside of the South Kensington tube station. As a result, he has to extricate himself from the gates that are across its entrance. A simple cutting spell melts away the ornate wrought iron, and he leaves a gap in it for his return, hoping that that will be soon.
He walks to Cromwell Road and realises suddenly where he is: in front of the vast Natural History Museum, whose architecture always calls to mind a cathedral to science. His bad feeling intensifies as he crosses the road and comes to the shut gates of the museum. Suddenly he sees, up in one of the highest windows, a pale light of the sort that comes from a wand.
Breaking into the museum is easy, for a wizard, especially when he can tell that other wizards have come before him and broken into it already. He follows the trail of their destruction - curled in metal bars, shattered windowpanes, a blast in stone and an unconscious (but still breathing) security guard beside it on the stairs. Remus has excellent night vision, better than most humans, so he removes his shoes and sprints silently up the stone staircase in the centre of the museum without illuminating his wand. He passes a statue of a bearded old man - Darwin, he thinks, and wishes he could ask him where lycanthropy fits into evolution - rounds a corner, and runs past vitrine after vitrine full of hominid skulls to the room at the top front of the museum, the room where the light had been shining such that he could see it on the street.
It’s the Hall of Minerals. Remus has no idea what a wizard - and he can tell that it is a dark wizard from the acrid tang of black magic that hangs in the air - would be doing in the Hall of Minerals in the Muggle Natural History Museum at three in the morning, but he has a strong feeling that it’s not purely educational. As silently as he can, he pushes open the door and enters, immediately crouching behind the first glass case he can find. It’s full of rocks from Cumbria, and around their jagged shapes he can see three dark, hooded figures at the opposite end of the room. He starts to crawl along the floor, ducking behind cases, keeping his head down so he’s not blinded by their wand light.
As he draws close, he hears one of them say, ‘It’s the one on the right.’
‘Are you sure?’ another asks. ‘That’s not as big as the other.’
‘Since when does something have to be big to be magical?’
‘I just thought that it would be bigger…’
Remus is two cases away now, hidden behind a bench, and he sees that they are standing by a vault full of red stones that glow gently in the wandlight. Three Death Eaters, one sounding not too bright, in a dark room where he has the element of surprise? It should be nothing for him.
Then he hears a low hiss behind him and suddenly his entire body explodes with pain.
***
A hand is on his face, strong and cold but sweating, and everything smells like Sirius, he’s enveloped in the smell of Sirius, and Remus thinks that if this is death, then that’s all right.
‘Moony?’ Sirius’s voice, except he sounds frantic. Remus wants to tell him that it’s all right but he can’t seem to form words. ‘Moony, can you hear me? Moony, please, I-‘
***
Remus wakes again sometime later in excruciating pain.
Sometimes he thinks of himself as a connoisseur of pain. He knows the sharp brittleness and the throbbing ache and the worst, the dull, constant, grinding pain that won’t let him think of anything but it and makes him slow and stupid. He’s too exhausted to classify this one but he thinks it will be ok; he thinks that in time, it will pass, and that all he has to do is count the seconds until it does.
‘But why was he alone?’ Peter says suddenly, somewhere to his left. ‘Why would he just go out alone?’
‘He said he had a headache,’ and this is James, also to his left, sounding plaintive. ‘He said he was just stepping outside. I had no idea…’
‘And Sirius was available to go out, too,’ Peter continues. ‘He could have called Sirius.’
‘Well, I called Sirius,’ James says. ‘I had to stay in Control since suddenly I was alone. The map was blank, blank, blank, and then going crazy. Voldemort -‘
‘Shhh,’ says Lily. Remus feels a small, cool hand on his face. ‘You’re disturbing him.’
Remus can’t seem to open his eyes or say anything. He wants to know what James was about to say about Voldemort, and he wants to know how much time has passed if James has gotten out of Control and come here. He also wants to know where he is. Every Order member has two jars kept in Control, one in case of injury and one in case of death. Inside his injury jar, he has explicitly asked to never be taken to St Mungo’s. They have made it clear to him in the past that they don’t want to administer care to werewolves. Yet he’s in a bed, and he’s groggy enough that he suspects someone has given him pain medication.
He desperately wants to know where Sirius is. He can still smell him but now he’s not sure if he’s dreaming.
‘But why would he be alone?’ Peter asks again, this time in a whisper. ‘And what would the Death Eaters want there? And how did he know?’
‘Shut up,’ says Sirius from a bit further away, and that answers that. Remus thinks his voice sounds shaky.
‘I think he saw something on the map,’ James says.
‘But you said you didn’t,’ Peter counters. There’s some footsteps and then Peter says, ‘Calm down, Sirius.’
‘I’m not going to calm down,’ Sirius says, and his voice is definitely shaking.
‘You should go lie down,’ James says. ‘You’ve been here for hours. You’ve still got blood on your robes. Get some rest.’
‘You didn’t see him,’ Sirius says, voice rising. ‘When I got there, he was-‘
Then Lily’s hand moves down to his arm and he feels something cold touch his wrist and the coldness floods through him and he passes out again.
***
Remus wakes again when the room is mostly dark and, although he is sore, it is just a ghost of the pain from earlier, and he knows that he’s awake now for real. The room feels quiet, but there’s a warm hand on his face, and he smells Sirius so strongly that he suspects the hand belongs to the man himself. His stomach flutters and he opens his eyes.
Sirius jumps back. Remus clears his throat to cover the awkward moment and croaks, ‘Where am I?’
‘My flat,’ Sirius says. He’s leaning back in a chair beside Remus’s bed. He runs the hand that had recently been touching Remus’s face through his hair. It falls perfectly, of course. His face is lit by a few candles that have burned low on the nightstand.
‘Your bed?’ Remus asks. He’d imagined that Sirius’s bed would smell differently.
‘No,’ Sirius says. ‘I bought another. For the spare room.’
‘Were you going to tell me about that, or was I going to stay on the sofa forever?’ Remus asks jokingly, but Sirius looks so devastated that he quickly adds, ‘Not that I mind. It’s a very nice sofa.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sirius says. He pushes his hair back again. ‘Listen, Remus, what happened?’
‘You’ll have to tell me the end of the story,’ Remus says. He shifts a bit so it’s easier to see Sirius’s face. ‘I saw the place where the museum is start flickering on the map. I wasn’t even sure if it was a real alert. James was exhausted, and you were the only person available to go, and I knew you were exhausted too, so I decided to just nip on over and have a look, thinking it would most likely be nothing.’ He pauses; speaking is tiring and he wants to get his thoughts in order. Sirius nods for him to go on. ‘Then I found a trail of minor destruction that I took to be some rather incompetent Death Eaters. I followed it into the museum and found them - three of them, not sure which ones, I didn’t immediately recognise their voices - and they were up in a room called the Hall of Minerals. And then I was listening to them talk about wanting to take something small and planning what to do when I heard this hissing sound behind me. Like a great bloody snake or something. Something must have hit me. That’s all I know. I woke up here, basically.’
Sirius has been staring over Remus’s head, out the window. He takes a deep breath now, and says, ‘Well, here’s my half. James alerted me that you had gone. I went to him and we saw the map. It was, I can’t even describe it, not normally bright but shining over the museum. James thought it was a glitch but I had a feeling that it might be the map trying to tell us that it was more serious than a normal attack. I couldn’t even think, I just Apparated straight into the ground floor of the museum. I could hear a commotion upstairs and it sounded like you were yelling.’ He looks down at Remus quickly and then back up. Remus has no recollection of yelling but his throat does feel raw. ‘I ran up to the sound and found you just lying on the ground outside this big room full of rocks. I guess that’s the Hall of Minerals?’ He glances at Remus again, who nods, and then immediately looks away again. ‘I thought you were… but I Apparated with you to here. I knew you didn’t want to go to St Mungo’s. I couldn’t…’ Sirius pauses, swallows hard, and Remus, without thinking, reaches out and takes his hand. Sirius’s fingers clench around his and squeeze so tightly it’s almost painful. ‘I thought you going to die, Remus. You were barely breathing, you were covered in blood. I found out later that the Death Eaters were after some ruby, no one knows why, and then Voldemort himself showed up.’
Remus feels tethered to the earth by Sirius’s hand, which is good, because the retroactive shock of learning that Voldemort had been the one to attack him is making him light-headed. ‘Do you know what spell I got hit with?’
Sirius nods, his face grim. ‘Exsanguination spell. Apparently something new developed by the Death Eaters. Madam Pomfrey was here last night looking after you and she was telling us about it.’
‘Does what it says on the tin, I imagine?’ Remus asks, wondering how on earth he survived. Maybe because it was still experimental?
‘Yes, exactly, so in an ordinary human it would have meant fairly quick death.’ Sirius swallows again. ‘For you, though, as Madam Pomfrey told us, well, werewolves are extremely good at regenerating lost blood. It’s just very painful, apparently. And you’ll feel tired for a few days, too.’
‘Huh,’ Remus says, ‘yes, I can safely say that it was both very painful and very tiring.’ He smiles at Sirius. ‘And honestly, still is.’
Sirius takes a shuddering breath and puts his free hand in front of his eyes. ‘You scared the shit out of me, Remus.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Remus says. He’s had a lucky escape, and he knows it. ‘I’m so sorry, Sirius.’
Bleakly, Sirius asks, ‘Why would you go alone?’
‘I was worried about sending you out for nothing.’
‘You can’t worry about me. We can’t worry about each other.’
‘But we do,’ Remus says gently, and Sirius’s hand squeezes even more tightly and his touch makes Remus long for more. He gives Sirius a look and wonders. Sirius’s other hand is still over his eyes but Remus suddenly can feel the tension in the room and god he wants to shatter it.
Am I really going to do this? he wonders. Am I honestly going to try to pull my friend of nearly a decade who is by my bedside, sick with worry? He could just fuck Sirius, just have one night where that gorgeous body is under him, and he thinks that that is within his power right now, though that may be overestimating his physical abilities. It wouldn’t be just a fuck, though. For all the lies he’s told his whole life, for all the lies that he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life telling, Remus is unfailingly honest with himself. He knows that, no matter if it never goes beyond this moment, Sirius Black will always be the greatest love story of his life.
Sirius finally moves the hand from his eyes and puts a fingernail in his mouth, rips at the edge. Remus makes a decision that feels like falling and asks, ‘Sirius?’
‘Yeah?’
Remus pulls back part of the blanket and pats the bed beside him. His arm feels like lead. ‘Will you come here?’
Sirius looks at him and Remus holds his breath. He wonders vaguely if he’s attractive in any way, or if anyone can look attractive next to Sirius. Then Sirius says, ‘Let me take off my shoes,’ and does so, before climbing awkwardly into the bed beside Remus and pulling the blanket up over them. Remus rolls onto his side and reaches for Sirius, who reaches out too and tugs him close.
Remus can feel that Sirius is shaking in his arms. He leans back to look at his face and sees that his eyes are squeezed tightly shut.
‘Padfoot?’ he asks.
‘Moony,’ Sirius says, and he sounds like a lost child, ‘you’re not lying to me, are you?’
‘No,’ Remus says. ‘I promise.’
Sirius sighs, eyes still shut. Remus says, ‘I’m going to take off your jacket. All the metal parts are kind of cold.’
Sirius hesitates and Remus thinks that the game is up, that he’s misread the whole thing and oh god this is so embarrassing and awkward and I want to die but then Sirius mumbles, ‘Good idea,’ and Remus puts his hands on Sirius’s chest and pushes the jacket off, helping him tug it down over his arms. There’s a clunk as it hits the floor. Remus realigns them, nuzzles in against Sirius’s warm neck, and then Sirius, eyes still squeezed shut, says, ‘I should have told you about the bed. I bought it for you. So you could stay over, so you wouldn’t have to find somewhere else to live.’
‘Oh, Sirius,’ Remus says, so touched he doesn’t know what else to say, so touched he can’t even be mad about the implied charity. ‘Thank you.’
‘Well, don’t thank me too much,’ Sirius says. ‘I didn’t tell you about it.’
‘Why not?’
Sirius sighs and his grip on Remus’s waist tightens. After what feels to Remus like an entire eternity, grains of sand being washed away and all that, he says, ‘I wanted you to stay in my bed.’ Remus takes in a sharp breath, and Sirius says in a rush, ‘By the way if you think it’ll make you feel better I’d like to suck you off,’ and Remus is so startled that he bursts into laughter.
‘Is that your normal method for making people feel better?’ he asks, suddenly needing to know, stroking Sirius’s chest through his shirt.
‘Never done it before,’ Sirius confesses, ‘but I’ve thought about it a lot. With you, just. Not anyone else.’
Remus wonders if that makes it better, in Sirius’s mind, that he, supposed breaker of all women’s hearts, is secretly fantasising about only one cock in his mouth. Remus doesn’t care except to know that it’s his. He moves up Sirius’s body to where his lips are parted, eyes still shut, and takes his face in his hands. He’s thought about this moment so many times and here it is, somehow managing to live up to fantasy, because Sirius rescued him, Sirius Apparated without a thought for him, Sirius worries about him and defends him and from somewhere acquires Muggle coins for him even though he’s generally hopeless with Muggle anything and now they’re kissing, passionately, Sirius holding him so tightly that Remus thinks he’ll have more bruises, these fingertip shaped, on his hipbones, and he doesn’t care, he strokes his thumbs over Sirius’s cheekbones and ravages his mouth and Sirius kisses back with equal fervour, arching into his touch, shakily moaning, completely open to Remus’s mouth.
When their mouths part, both breathing heavily, Sirius’s eyes are finally open, dark and shining in the low light of the room. He’s so beautiful that Remus almost can’t believe he exists, that he’s here in front of him, their bodies pressed together, and he thinks that he was always too nonchalant about this, he should have tried harder, because what if he had died last night, what if he’d never gotten to know this? Sirius lets barely five seconds pass before he’s kissing Remus again, and they’re both gasping into this kiss for each other’s breath. Sirius is saying something against Remus’s mouth, nonsense words, or maybe not, because he seems to be trying to express something: ‘Please be careful, Moony, I’ve loved you for ages, Moony, since school, I can’t even tell you, please be careful, I couldn’t bear it if you, please, Remus, Moony,’ and Remus has to shut his eyes against this world because it is too much, and then there’s just Sirius’s hands, and mouth, and voice, and warm around all of it is his smell. He realises much too late that he’s not gotten enough oxygen and that all of his limbs are leaden and when he tries to open his eyes he doesn’t see anything.
***
He’s out for maybe a second, tops, and once Sirius has made certain that he’s recovered, mostly by touching him everywhere and kissing him more gently, Sirius starts laughing so hard that he shakes the entire bed.
‘You just swooned,’ Sirius manages to choke out. ‘Like a Victorian lady.’
Remus puts on his fiercest glare. ‘I recently lost all of my blood, remember?’
Sirius stops laughing but his eyes are dancing and he can’t keep the quirk out of his lips. ‘I made you swoon,’ he says, and then suddenly he leans forward and rubs their noses together, shy. ‘I’ve never kissed a man before, but it seems I’m very good.’
‘You’re an insufferable twat,’ Remus says, but he’s smiling too, ‘and for the record, kissing a man is a lot like kissing a woman.’ He hesitates, because Sirius’s eyes have gotten very wide, no doubt suddenly imagining just what sweet, innocent Moony has been up to, and Remus is in love with letting Sirius contemplate that, but not as in love as he is with Sirius himself, so he doesn’t extend the pause too long before he says, ‘But kissing you, now, that’s something entirely different.’
Sirius fairly glows with happiness. Remus doesn’t know when he’s ever seen Sirius look like this, and he knows that soon worry will be back with both of them, but now he also knows that it doesn’t have to be a constant companion, that there can be moments when it falls away and leaves them alone with each other. He takes Sirius’s hand and Sirius says, ‘James and Peter are going to take the piss,’ though he sounds not at all upset about it, and Remus says, ‘I think I’ll have to request that cock sucking at a later date or you’ll probably finish the job Voldemort started,’ which is both the most absurd and most filthy thing he’s ever said. Sirius looks mortified and bites his lip before saying, ‘Well, maybe tomorrow morning then?’ and Remus starts to get a little bit breathless and lose blood to vital regions again. There’s an interval of kissing that is both heated and attempting to be not-heated, as Remus has to keep stopping and Sirius keeps scolding himself aloud for contributing to Remus’s medical condition, though sounding terribly pleased with himself, and then Sirius says sternly that Remus needs to sleep, and promptly falls asleep himself, with one hand in Remus’s hair and the other holding tightly to one of Remus’s.
Remus watches him sleep until the last candle has burnt out, forcing his eyes to stay open to take in the loveliness of Sirius’s sleeping face, and when the wick finally drowns in wax, dawn is lighting up the eastern sky and pouring in through the window, revealing a cold, clear future. Remus falls asleep like that, new light streaming onto his face, as close to happiness as he has ever felt.
Author: veeagainst
Recipient: escribo
Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Word Count: 6278
Summary: For the prompt: During the first war, Remus is injured during a battle and Sirius finds him first
‘You didn’t meet with Fowler,’ is how Sirius greets Remus when he walks into the pub, and Remus thinks, Oh hell this again, hackles rising already, but all he says is a mild, ‘Hello, Padfoot, fancy a pint?’
‘No,’ Sirius says, already standing up. ‘I fancy a chat. In private.’
Remus resists the urge to ask when getting a pint together turned into an ambush and then resists the urge to make a lewd remark about private chats. They’re not teenagers anymore, as of a few months ago for Sirius and a few weeks ago for him, which might explain why he went for the lewd remark second. Losing that sense of humour with age already, it seems, and Remus feels like he’s living in dog years anyway, gaining seven for every person outside the war’s one.
They go to Sirius’s flat around the corner and the door is barely shut before Sirius rounds on him.
‘So. You didn’t meet with Fowler.’
‘No,’ Remus agrees, because Sirius isn’t asking him a question and he knows that a lack of denial will put him off guard. ‘I didn’t get a chance.’
‘You didn’t get a chance?’ Sirius repeats, already starting to raise his voice. ‘Fowler comes to us with information about Voldemort and you “don’t get a chance”? How’s that, then?’
Remus has one million reasons why he didn’t: because Fowler is a quack; because Peter told him that the last time they met Fowler had tried to sell him some powdered dung beetle passed off as a protection charm; because Fowler smells like gone-off cheese sandwiches and doesn’t know a damned thing and is convinced that Voldemort has some kind of plan to feast off of dead people’s souls and make himself immortal. But Sirius is paranoid and thinks that leaving any stone unturned - even if the stone is made of plastic and designed to make a Croydon front garden look like the Lakes - is criminal, and Remus knows it, and so he decides to not exactly lie, but not exactly tell the full truth either.
‘I didn’t get a chance because he wanted to meet in the public loo at Paddington Station.’
Sirius blinks. ‘He what?’
‘Exactly,’ Remus says, rolling his eyes. ‘Good thing it’s not a few years ago, meeting in places like that, we’d be arrested for buggery.’
Sirius blinks again. Remus imagines there’s a pause there for Sirius to turn the word ‘buggery’ over in his mind. Then Sirius asks, ‘But surely you could just, I don’t know, go there?’
‘Here’s the thing,’ Remus says, and here really is the thing, because he had gone to Victoria, and he had been prepared to go to the toilets to meet with Fowler, even though the smell of public toilets is an awful difficult to even contemplate, let alone experience, but when he’d got there: ‘They have a barrier there. Non-magical. You have to pay with a specific Muggle coin to enter. I didn’t have it, and the place was too crowded to cast a charm, and they even have a guard. I waited outside for half an hour but I never saw him leave.’
Sirius sighs, ‘That’s,’ and then trails off. Remus realises that Sirius will have interpreted his not having the money as something to do with being poor, which he is, but that’s not why he didn’t have a Muggle tuppence. He didn’t have a Muggle tuppence because Gringotts won’t change money for him because the Ministry recently made it illegal for Dark Creatures to have bank accounts. He keeps all of the money he scrapes by being a private tutor in a public locker in a dark back corner of the Euston Road Station and when he needs Muggle money, he usually convinces Peter to change it for him, but he hates to ask, so mostly he gets by without. He once asked James, who offered to just buy him whatever he needed, and the shame of it nearly killed him; he can’t bring himself to imagine asking Sirius.
Now Sirius sighs again, and Remus knows that he has got the subtext, and it makes him awful, like the lowest of the low. ‘Moony,’ Sirius says after a moment, and that flash of anger is gone now, and that combined with shame take all of the anger out of Remus too. ‘This is important. We need more information. They’re winning, you know.’
Right now, to Remus, Sirius is beautiful. Sure, he has that perfect hair, all dark, straight lines that frame cheekbones so sharp they might as well conceal razor blades, his nose is straight and the perfect width, his mouth is full without being too full, and the lines of his body are hard and lean but those are just shapes, and moreover shapes with whom Remus is extremely familiar. He’s known Sirius for nearly ten years now, after all. It’s the other parts that are really what make Sirius beautiful: the long fingers that reach from the ends of his leather jacket have nails bitten to stubs, red-brown traces of blood in the cuticles; his grey eyes bear wary concern and the dark circles underneath them tell a story of sleeplessness which Remus appreciates to the depths of his very soul.
‘Moony?’ Sirius asks, and he sounds unsure. Remus wonders if he’s been staring.
‘Sorry, Padfoot,’ he says, and now he can’t even imagine fighting with this beautiful man. He longs to take one of Sirius’s hands and run his fingers across those ragged stubs of nail. ‘You’re right.’
***
Remus stays the night on Sirius’s sofa. It beats the hell out of the cheap hostels Remus usually beds down in, and when Sirius asks him to do something, he generally finds it hard to say no, the Fowler affair aside. Sirius’s flat is magnificent, especially for being a central-ish London flat maintained by a single man with a taste for expensive motorcycles and studded leather jackets who has no apparent income. There’s even another bedroom somewhere, a luxury quite unheard of - James and Lily, for example, sleep with Harry’s bassinet in their room (though they are talking about moving out to the countryside soon, so that he can have a room of his own). Remus assumes that the spare bedroom is empty, because whenever Sirius insists he stay the night (and that’s becoming more frequent, as is Remus’s inability to turn down what must be charity, which he hates), he always installs him on the sofa with a heavy comforter.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, when the sun has not yet tipped over the horizon and rain clouds still obscure the glow of coming daylight, the vial in Remus’s pocket begins to shake. Remus always wakes from sleep like a wolf, an instant transition from sound asleep to full alert. He extricates the parchment from the vial and reads a location; he’s needed on urgent Order business. He sits and swings his legs down, suddenly realising that Sirius has fallen asleep in the leather armchair across from the sofa. His head is tipped to the side, mouth slightly open, and he’s not exactly snoring, just exhaling loudly after every whistling breath. It’s one of the most grating sounds imaginable, but Remus has the urge to lay back and listen to him do it all night.
Instead, he stands, his legs creaking and ankles cracking, crosses to Sirius, and touches his shoulder lightly. Sirius starts awake, a little less wolf-like, but close, and says, ‘Moony?’
‘Order business,’ Remus says, showing Sirius the vial, which is now glowing blue. ‘That chair looks uncomfortable, why don’t you take the sofa?’
Sirius’s eyes are on the vial. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asks, and Remus is suddenly so sick of paranoia that he hands him the parchment, even though Order members are not supposed to share information with each other. Sirius squints at the paper in the blue light and asks, ‘Lambeth?’ and Remus nods.
Then the vial glows red, and Remus scrambles. He’s been standing here too long and shit shit shit shit what if this is the difference between life and death for someone. He’s fumbling around for his shoes and Sirius is up and handing him his cloak, which for some reason will not hang straight, and then he’s out the door and running for a safe place to Apparate.
It is not until seven hours later, when he, Peter, and two other Order members whose names Remus doesn’t fully remember are finally relieved by the cleanup crew (and they have their work cut out for them, this is one of those raids that will haunt him for a long time), that Remus finally figures out why his cloak just will not stay on at the right arm, why it’s been dragging down to one side and trying to strangle him all day. He’s sitting beside Peter on a flat roof with their backs against a chimney watching the rare April sun lowering itself in the sky when he finally makes the connection - and this is surely a sign of how exhausted he is, how mentally slow this war is making him - that the cloak is falling down because there’s a heavy weight in his pocket.
‘So have you seen Sirius lately?’ Peter asks suddenly, distracting Remus from the weight.
‘Saw him last night,’ he says, staring at the horizon and trying to get his eyes to focus. God he’s tired. ‘I slept on his sofa.’
‘Why on the sofa?’ Peter asks. ‘You know he bought a bed for that spare bedroom.’
‘Did he?’ Remus asks, startled. The door is always shut whenever he’s there. ‘Where from?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter says, shrugging. ‘I assume the Posh Shop for Posh People who like to buy Posh Things.’
Remus laughs, startled at how good that feels, at the familiar joke: he and Peter for years, now joined by Lily, sometimes privately have to let off steam about exactly how posh James and Sirius are. These jokes usually happen after one of the two has spent some obscene amount of galleons on something frivolous like prank aids or candy or, later, booze. ‘Well, he’s never told me that,’ he says now. ‘Sofa it is for me. It’s a nice sofa, mind.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ Peter says. ‘Probably came from the same shop.’ He glances over at Remus and his face gets serious. A pit of worry forms in Remus’s stomach. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about Sirius, is all,’ Peter says. ‘He’s really, I don’t know, acting crazy. Worried about every little thing, suspicious of every one.’
Remus always, always feels the need to defend Sirius, and even though Peter is completely correct, he does it anyway. ‘I imagine we’d be suspicious of everyone too,’ he says passively, ‘if we’d grown up in that house.’ Sirius doesn’t talk much about it but Remus has gleaned the outline: a distant father who vastly prefers his other son, an emotionally abusive mother who fed him mind games with his first milk, and, worst of all, a brother who was Sirius’s only friend before Hogwarts and is now a Death Eater. ‘I can’t blame him.’
‘No,’ Peter agrees, ‘you’re right. You couldn’t grow up around all that dark magic and not have it leave a mark.’ And Remus thinks that that wasn’t quite what he meant, but that Peter’s got a point there too.
His cloak slips again and he remembers the weight. He puts his hand into his pocket and feels a small velvet bag full of something strangely shaped and hard. He keeps running his hand over it while they finish their debriefing and then Peter hauls himself up and says he’s off, he needs to sleep, but Remus hangs back. Once he’s the only one on the roof, he takes out the bag: dark blue velvet, a thin silver drawstring at the top. He puts it to his nose, furtively, and inhales, already knowing what he’ll find: it smells like Sirius, and something else, a dark metallic tang not quite like blood. He opens it and inside is one of every denomination of Muggle coin.
***
It’s late at night and Remus is missing Sirius’s sofa and the warm comforting smells of his flat, but instead he’s sat here in the Order Control Room. James is at the table opposite, head propped up on one hand, eyes hovering near shut, as the maps spread out on the tables in front of them flicker and shift.
Remus doesn’t normally work the Control Room - Albus always tells him that he, like Sirius, is much more of a field operations man, which Remus thinks is code for ‘can’t be trusted to make important decisions’ - but tonight there was no one else to do it and the map has been lit up with trouble like a street lined with malevolent Christmas trees. James is writing out another slip of parchment to go put into a vial along the wall that matches one in someone’s pocket. That Order member will be dispatched out to a possible incident. Remus helped write the maps; they’re like enormous versions of the Marauder’s Map, except instead of looking out for getting sent to detention they’re looking out for sorcerous murder. Also these maps are much larger, and laid out in squares for the entire country.
James sits back down and wraps a hand around his tea. ‘Do they make this stuff any stronger?’ he asks. ‘Can I just eat that black powder at the bottom of the box of teabags?’
Remus smiles. He’d babysat Harry with Sirius one night when both James and Lily had been called away on Order business and they’d secretly agreed that, while Harry was terribly loveable and wonderful and would surely grow into an amazing person, the feeling of being awoken in the wee hours by his piercing cries was not one they would like to repeat. ‘How many Awake Charms have you done?’ he asks. There’s a limit, one discovered by him personally at Hogwarts, where they stop keeping you awake and just start giving you unpleasant side effects like vomiting and sideways sleep walking.
‘Lily says no more of those for me for a while,’ James says morosely. ‘I almost kicked her in the face in bed a few nights ago because I improperly cast it and it hit my feet only.’
Remus notices something flickering on the map in front of him. He reaches out and pulls the parchment, and it lifts into a flap, then another, then another, until he has three feet of parchment stretched out in front of him and can see a single street in London in great detail. It’s Cromwell Street, which he doesn’t think he’s ever been to, but which seems to have many large buildings on it. As he watches, a warning flicks on and then off again.
‘What’s up?’ James asks. ‘
The warning doesn’t reappear, and Remus shakes his head. ‘False alarm,’ he says, and James nods, because the maps can be temperamental. A pigeon that had been stealing bread out of a bakery recently lit up a section of Walthamstow and caused two fruitless patrols and one dry cleaning bill for pigeon shit on a purple silk robe.
Some time passes, and Remus’s eyes keep returning to that spot on Cromwell Road, which periodically flickers. He has a bad feeling about it. He glances at James, who is staring despondently at Edinburgh. Under Order protocol, the control room is supposed to dispatch available field agents to check out trouble spots, but Remus sees that all of the vials have parchment in them, meaning the field agents are all already out in the field - well, all but one, which belongs to Sirius, who Remus knows has been summoned every night for the last three and is so exhausted that he nearly drowned in the bath earlier and Remus had to pound on the door. He also can’t ask James to go, not with James being so tired and having Harry at home.
He stands up and says, ‘Just going outside for some air. I’ve got a terrible headache. Be back in a few minutes.’
James nods and Remus steps outside, jogs to the safe Apparition point, and steps and twists his way into the blast of colour that means he is travelling rapidly through space. He arrives at the safe Apparition spot on the other end of his journey, which turns out to be inside of the South Kensington tube station. As a result, he has to extricate himself from the gates that are across its entrance. A simple cutting spell melts away the ornate wrought iron, and he leaves a gap in it for his return, hoping that that will be soon.
He walks to Cromwell Road and realises suddenly where he is: in front of the vast Natural History Museum, whose architecture always calls to mind a cathedral to science. His bad feeling intensifies as he crosses the road and comes to the shut gates of the museum. Suddenly he sees, up in one of the highest windows, a pale light of the sort that comes from a wand.
Breaking into the museum is easy, for a wizard, especially when he can tell that other wizards have come before him and broken into it already. He follows the trail of their destruction - curled in metal bars, shattered windowpanes, a blast in stone and an unconscious (but still breathing) security guard beside it on the stairs. Remus has excellent night vision, better than most humans, so he removes his shoes and sprints silently up the stone staircase in the centre of the museum without illuminating his wand. He passes a statue of a bearded old man - Darwin, he thinks, and wishes he could ask him where lycanthropy fits into evolution - rounds a corner, and runs past vitrine after vitrine full of hominid skulls to the room at the top front of the museum, the room where the light had been shining such that he could see it on the street.
It’s the Hall of Minerals. Remus has no idea what a wizard - and he can tell that it is a dark wizard from the acrid tang of black magic that hangs in the air - would be doing in the Hall of Minerals in the Muggle Natural History Museum at three in the morning, but he has a strong feeling that it’s not purely educational. As silently as he can, he pushes open the door and enters, immediately crouching behind the first glass case he can find. It’s full of rocks from Cumbria, and around their jagged shapes he can see three dark, hooded figures at the opposite end of the room. He starts to crawl along the floor, ducking behind cases, keeping his head down so he’s not blinded by their wand light.
As he draws close, he hears one of them say, ‘It’s the one on the right.’
‘Are you sure?’ another asks. ‘That’s not as big as the other.’
‘Since when does something have to be big to be magical?’
‘I just thought that it would be bigger…’
Remus is two cases away now, hidden behind a bench, and he sees that they are standing by a vault full of red stones that glow gently in the wandlight. Three Death Eaters, one sounding not too bright, in a dark room where he has the element of surprise? It should be nothing for him.
Then he hears a low hiss behind him and suddenly his entire body explodes with pain.
***
A hand is on his face, strong and cold but sweating, and everything smells like Sirius, he’s enveloped in the smell of Sirius, and Remus thinks that if this is death, then that’s all right.
‘Moony?’ Sirius’s voice, except he sounds frantic. Remus wants to tell him that it’s all right but he can’t seem to form words. ‘Moony, can you hear me? Moony, please, I-‘
***
Remus wakes again sometime later in excruciating pain.
Sometimes he thinks of himself as a connoisseur of pain. He knows the sharp brittleness and the throbbing ache and the worst, the dull, constant, grinding pain that won’t let him think of anything but it and makes him slow and stupid. He’s too exhausted to classify this one but he thinks it will be ok; he thinks that in time, it will pass, and that all he has to do is count the seconds until it does.
‘But why was he alone?’ Peter says suddenly, somewhere to his left. ‘Why would he just go out alone?’
‘He said he had a headache,’ and this is James, also to his left, sounding plaintive. ‘He said he was just stepping outside. I had no idea…’
‘And Sirius was available to go out, too,’ Peter continues. ‘He could have called Sirius.’
‘Well, I called Sirius,’ James says. ‘I had to stay in Control since suddenly I was alone. The map was blank, blank, blank, and then going crazy. Voldemort -‘
‘Shhh,’ says Lily. Remus feels a small, cool hand on his face. ‘You’re disturbing him.’
Remus can’t seem to open his eyes or say anything. He wants to know what James was about to say about Voldemort, and he wants to know how much time has passed if James has gotten out of Control and come here. He also wants to know where he is. Every Order member has two jars kept in Control, one in case of injury and one in case of death. Inside his injury jar, he has explicitly asked to never be taken to St Mungo’s. They have made it clear to him in the past that they don’t want to administer care to werewolves. Yet he’s in a bed, and he’s groggy enough that he suspects someone has given him pain medication.
He desperately wants to know where Sirius is. He can still smell him but now he’s not sure if he’s dreaming.
‘But why would he be alone?’ Peter asks again, this time in a whisper. ‘And what would the Death Eaters want there? And how did he know?’
‘Shut up,’ says Sirius from a bit further away, and that answers that. Remus thinks his voice sounds shaky.
‘I think he saw something on the map,’ James says.
‘But you said you didn’t,’ Peter counters. There’s some footsteps and then Peter says, ‘Calm down, Sirius.’
‘I’m not going to calm down,’ Sirius says, and his voice is definitely shaking.
‘You should go lie down,’ James says. ‘You’ve been here for hours. You’ve still got blood on your robes. Get some rest.’
‘You didn’t see him,’ Sirius says, voice rising. ‘When I got there, he was-‘
Then Lily’s hand moves down to his arm and he feels something cold touch his wrist and the coldness floods through him and he passes out again.
***
Remus wakes again when the room is mostly dark and, although he is sore, it is just a ghost of the pain from earlier, and he knows that he’s awake now for real. The room feels quiet, but there’s a warm hand on his face, and he smells Sirius so strongly that he suspects the hand belongs to the man himself. His stomach flutters and he opens his eyes.
Sirius jumps back. Remus clears his throat to cover the awkward moment and croaks, ‘Where am I?’
‘My flat,’ Sirius says. He’s leaning back in a chair beside Remus’s bed. He runs the hand that had recently been touching Remus’s face through his hair. It falls perfectly, of course. His face is lit by a few candles that have burned low on the nightstand.
‘Your bed?’ Remus asks. He’d imagined that Sirius’s bed would smell differently.
‘No,’ Sirius says. ‘I bought another. For the spare room.’
‘Were you going to tell me about that, or was I going to stay on the sofa forever?’ Remus asks jokingly, but Sirius looks so devastated that he quickly adds, ‘Not that I mind. It’s a very nice sofa.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sirius says. He pushes his hair back again. ‘Listen, Remus, what happened?’
‘You’ll have to tell me the end of the story,’ Remus says. He shifts a bit so it’s easier to see Sirius’s face. ‘I saw the place where the museum is start flickering on the map. I wasn’t even sure if it was a real alert. James was exhausted, and you were the only person available to go, and I knew you were exhausted too, so I decided to just nip on over and have a look, thinking it would most likely be nothing.’ He pauses; speaking is tiring and he wants to get his thoughts in order. Sirius nods for him to go on. ‘Then I found a trail of minor destruction that I took to be some rather incompetent Death Eaters. I followed it into the museum and found them - three of them, not sure which ones, I didn’t immediately recognise their voices - and they were up in a room called the Hall of Minerals. And then I was listening to them talk about wanting to take something small and planning what to do when I heard this hissing sound behind me. Like a great bloody snake or something. Something must have hit me. That’s all I know. I woke up here, basically.’
Sirius has been staring over Remus’s head, out the window. He takes a deep breath now, and says, ‘Well, here’s my half. James alerted me that you had gone. I went to him and we saw the map. It was, I can’t even describe it, not normally bright but shining over the museum. James thought it was a glitch but I had a feeling that it might be the map trying to tell us that it was more serious than a normal attack. I couldn’t even think, I just Apparated straight into the ground floor of the museum. I could hear a commotion upstairs and it sounded like you were yelling.’ He looks down at Remus quickly and then back up. Remus has no recollection of yelling but his throat does feel raw. ‘I ran up to the sound and found you just lying on the ground outside this big room full of rocks. I guess that’s the Hall of Minerals?’ He glances at Remus again, who nods, and then immediately looks away again. ‘I thought you were… but I Apparated with you to here. I knew you didn’t want to go to St Mungo’s. I couldn’t…’ Sirius pauses, swallows hard, and Remus, without thinking, reaches out and takes his hand. Sirius’s fingers clench around his and squeeze so tightly it’s almost painful. ‘I thought you going to die, Remus. You were barely breathing, you were covered in blood. I found out later that the Death Eaters were after some ruby, no one knows why, and then Voldemort himself showed up.’
Remus feels tethered to the earth by Sirius’s hand, which is good, because the retroactive shock of learning that Voldemort had been the one to attack him is making him light-headed. ‘Do you know what spell I got hit with?’
Sirius nods, his face grim. ‘Exsanguination spell. Apparently something new developed by the Death Eaters. Madam Pomfrey was here last night looking after you and she was telling us about it.’
‘Does what it says on the tin, I imagine?’ Remus asks, wondering how on earth he survived. Maybe because it was still experimental?
‘Yes, exactly, so in an ordinary human it would have meant fairly quick death.’ Sirius swallows again. ‘For you, though, as Madam Pomfrey told us, well, werewolves are extremely good at regenerating lost blood. It’s just very painful, apparently. And you’ll feel tired for a few days, too.’
‘Huh,’ Remus says, ‘yes, I can safely say that it was both very painful and very tiring.’ He smiles at Sirius. ‘And honestly, still is.’
Sirius takes a shuddering breath and puts his free hand in front of his eyes. ‘You scared the shit out of me, Remus.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Remus says. He’s had a lucky escape, and he knows it. ‘I’m so sorry, Sirius.’
Bleakly, Sirius asks, ‘Why would you go alone?’
‘I was worried about sending you out for nothing.’
‘You can’t worry about me. We can’t worry about each other.’
‘But we do,’ Remus says gently, and Sirius’s hand squeezes even more tightly and his touch makes Remus long for more. He gives Sirius a look and wonders. Sirius’s other hand is still over his eyes but Remus suddenly can feel the tension in the room and god he wants to shatter it.
Am I really going to do this? he wonders. Am I honestly going to try to pull my friend of nearly a decade who is by my bedside, sick with worry? He could just fuck Sirius, just have one night where that gorgeous body is under him, and he thinks that that is within his power right now, though that may be overestimating his physical abilities. It wouldn’t be just a fuck, though. For all the lies he’s told his whole life, for all the lies that he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life telling, Remus is unfailingly honest with himself. He knows that, no matter if it never goes beyond this moment, Sirius Black will always be the greatest love story of his life.
Sirius finally moves the hand from his eyes and puts a fingernail in his mouth, rips at the edge. Remus makes a decision that feels like falling and asks, ‘Sirius?’
‘Yeah?’
Remus pulls back part of the blanket and pats the bed beside him. His arm feels like lead. ‘Will you come here?’
Sirius looks at him and Remus holds his breath. He wonders vaguely if he’s attractive in any way, or if anyone can look attractive next to Sirius. Then Sirius says, ‘Let me take off my shoes,’ and does so, before climbing awkwardly into the bed beside Remus and pulling the blanket up over them. Remus rolls onto his side and reaches for Sirius, who reaches out too and tugs him close.
Remus can feel that Sirius is shaking in his arms. He leans back to look at his face and sees that his eyes are squeezed tightly shut.
‘Padfoot?’ he asks.
‘Moony,’ Sirius says, and he sounds like a lost child, ‘you’re not lying to me, are you?’
‘No,’ Remus says. ‘I promise.’
Sirius sighs, eyes still shut. Remus says, ‘I’m going to take off your jacket. All the metal parts are kind of cold.’
Sirius hesitates and Remus thinks that the game is up, that he’s misread the whole thing and oh god this is so embarrassing and awkward and I want to die but then Sirius mumbles, ‘Good idea,’ and Remus puts his hands on Sirius’s chest and pushes the jacket off, helping him tug it down over his arms. There’s a clunk as it hits the floor. Remus realigns them, nuzzles in against Sirius’s warm neck, and then Sirius, eyes still squeezed shut, says, ‘I should have told you about the bed. I bought it for you. So you could stay over, so you wouldn’t have to find somewhere else to live.’
‘Oh, Sirius,’ Remus says, so touched he doesn’t know what else to say, so touched he can’t even be mad about the implied charity. ‘Thank you.’
‘Well, don’t thank me too much,’ Sirius says. ‘I didn’t tell you about it.’
‘Why not?’
Sirius sighs and his grip on Remus’s waist tightens. After what feels to Remus like an entire eternity, grains of sand being washed away and all that, he says, ‘I wanted you to stay in my bed.’ Remus takes in a sharp breath, and Sirius says in a rush, ‘By the way if you think it’ll make you feel better I’d like to suck you off,’ and Remus is so startled that he bursts into laughter.
‘Is that your normal method for making people feel better?’ he asks, suddenly needing to know, stroking Sirius’s chest through his shirt.
‘Never done it before,’ Sirius confesses, ‘but I’ve thought about it a lot. With you, just. Not anyone else.’
Remus wonders if that makes it better, in Sirius’s mind, that he, supposed breaker of all women’s hearts, is secretly fantasising about only one cock in his mouth. Remus doesn’t care except to know that it’s his. He moves up Sirius’s body to where his lips are parted, eyes still shut, and takes his face in his hands. He’s thought about this moment so many times and here it is, somehow managing to live up to fantasy, because Sirius rescued him, Sirius Apparated without a thought for him, Sirius worries about him and defends him and from somewhere acquires Muggle coins for him even though he’s generally hopeless with Muggle anything and now they’re kissing, passionately, Sirius holding him so tightly that Remus thinks he’ll have more bruises, these fingertip shaped, on his hipbones, and he doesn’t care, he strokes his thumbs over Sirius’s cheekbones and ravages his mouth and Sirius kisses back with equal fervour, arching into his touch, shakily moaning, completely open to Remus’s mouth.
When their mouths part, both breathing heavily, Sirius’s eyes are finally open, dark and shining in the low light of the room. He’s so beautiful that Remus almost can’t believe he exists, that he’s here in front of him, their bodies pressed together, and he thinks that he was always too nonchalant about this, he should have tried harder, because what if he had died last night, what if he’d never gotten to know this? Sirius lets barely five seconds pass before he’s kissing Remus again, and they’re both gasping into this kiss for each other’s breath. Sirius is saying something against Remus’s mouth, nonsense words, or maybe not, because he seems to be trying to express something: ‘Please be careful, Moony, I’ve loved you for ages, Moony, since school, I can’t even tell you, please be careful, I couldn’t bear it if you, please, Remus, Moony,’ and Remus has to shut his eyes against this world because it is too much, and then there’s just Sirius’s hands, and mouth, and voice, and warm around all of it is his smell. He realises much too late that he’s not gotten enough oxygen and that all of his limbs are leaden and when he tries to open his eyes he doesn’t see anything.
***
He’s out for maybe a second, tops, and once Sirius has made certain that he’s recovered, mostly by touching him everywhere and kissing him more gently, Sirius starts laughing so hard that he shakes the entire bed.
‘You just swooned,’ Sirius manages to choke out. ‘Like a Victorian lady.’
Remus puts on his fiercest glare. ‘I recently lost all of my blood, remember?’
Sirius stops laughing but his eyes are dancing and he can’t keep the quirk out of his lips. ‘I made you swoon,’ he says, and then suddenly he leans forward and rubs their noses together, shy. ‘I’ve never kissed a man before, but it seems I’m very good.’
‘You’re an insufferable twat,’ Remus says, but he’s smiling too, ‘and for the record, kissing a man is a lot like kissing a woman.’ He hesitates, because Sirius’s eyes have gotten very wide, no doubt suddenly imagining just what sweet, innocent Moony has been up to, and Remus is in love with letting Sirius contemplate that, but not as in love as he is with Sirius himself, so he doesn’t extend the pause too long before he says, ‘But kissing you, now, that’s something entirely different.’
Sirius fairly glows with happiness. Remus doesn’t know when he’s ever seen Sirius look like this, and he knows that soon worry will be back with both of them, but now he also knows that it doesn’t have to be a constant companion, that there can be moments when it falls away and leaves them alone with each other. He takes Sirius’s hand and Sirius says, ‘James and Peter are going to take the piss,’ though he sounds not at all upset about it, and Remus says, ‘I think I’ll have to request that cock sucking at a later date or you’ll probably finish the job Voldemort started,’ which is both the most absurd and most filthy thing he’s ever said. Sirius looks mortified and bites his lip before saying, ‘Well, maybe tomorrow morning then?’ and Remus starts to get a little bit breathless and lose blood to vital regions again. There’s an interval of kissing that is both heated and attempting to be not-heated, as Remus has to keep stopping and Sirius keeps scolding himself aloud for contributing to Remus’s medical condition, though sounding terribly pleased with himself, and then Sirius says sternly that Remus needs to sleep, and promptly falls asleep himself, with one hand in Remus’s hair and the other holding tightly to one of Remus’s.
Remus watches him sleep until the last candle has burnt out, forcing his eyes to stay open to take in the loveliness of Sirius’s sleeping face, and when the wick finally drowns in wax, dawn is lighting up the eastern sky and pouring in through the window, revealing a cold, clear future. Remus falls asleep like that, new light streaming onto his face, as close to happiness as he has ever felt.