Fic: Elucidation Practice (part 1/3) for the_realduck
Title: Elucidation Practice
Author: cevennes
Recipient: the_realduck
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Language, sex*
Word count: 21,000
Summary: Christmas, 1978. Remus, wrestling with the mighty problems of gift-giving on a budget, contemplates life, love, London in winter, and falling off the edge of the world with Sirius Black.
Notes: the_realduck, I loved your prompt so much I got a bit carried away with it. Hugely, horribly so, for which I apologize, profusely. Happy, happy holidays; I hope 2016 is full of everything bright and beautiful!
Sometime midway through his fourth vodka in front of the bathroom mirror, Remus’s mind finally gives up its charade of relative sanity and cracks right down the middle. He’s staring at his own reflection, which is currently straddling some no man’s land between bewildered and nauseous, trying to piece all his scattered brain-shards back together when he hears the tight thunder-crush between his ears, or maybe it’s just the crackle of the radio in the living room where Talking Heads are playing through the intermittent static; he blinks stupidly at himself and sticks out his arms and his tongue, recites a few lines of Rilke-not a stroke, then-and finishes the rest of his drink, looking back at his face as if seeing it from outside himself, the old scar curling under his chin, his mother’s crooked nose. There’s a scurry like a mouse deep inside him, shaking through the rafters of his body and up his spine-rungs until it reaches his mouth and breaks apart on his molars; he needs another drink, he thinks, or a cigarette, or maybe a fuck, but that sets his mind on a crash-course down The Streets Which Shall Not Be Named again and he has to grab onto the edge of the sink to keep his entire digestive system from caving in on itself. Blank grey slate, he thinks desperately, dead worms on the sidewalk after rain. James Potter’s three malformed chest hairs.
They’d been sitting in the living room, listening to a Muggle radio station and going through the dusty box of Christmas decorations that are mostly Sirius’s, scavenged from antique shops and his Uncle Alphard’s attic. Remus had taken one of the glass tumblers from the kitchen and Transfigured it into a glass star for the tree they didn’t have, all the more impressive for paying no attention to where his wand was pointing (directly at his crotch), and then Sirius had smiled at him-that sweet, unmeasured thing Remus sometimes manages to pull out of him without ever knowing exactly how, the one that crinkles his eyes and makes his mouth go crooked on the left side the way he likes. He’d looked at Remus the way he does after an extremely off-color joke or when they used to spread the map out across their knees in Sirius’s bed at night after everyone else had gone to sleep, like Remus was something surprising and beautiful, or else the most expensive entrée on the menu at his favorite restaurant and Sirius had been starving for it for a veritable lifetime.
Crack, went Remus’s brain.
“Moony?” Sirius, from the open door, making him jump. In the mirror, his face is chalky, the thin skin of his knuckles gone white where he grips the sink. “Are you drinking in the loo again? That’s not normal, mate. I mean, you might’ve at least invited me-who paid for your fucking alcohol binge tonight, I’d like to know?”
“Your uncle Alphard, if you want to get technical about it,” says Remus, which stops Sirius in his search for his lighter long enough to punch him in the shoulder. “Sorry, I mean-I’m sick, er. I think.”
“Do you want to get your clothes off?”
Yes yes yes, screams one half of Remus’s fractured mind. “Why the hell would I take my clothes off,” says his drunk but fortunately rational mouth. He spares a brief, dizzy moment to feel self-satisfied at the fact that he can still form complete sentences when his thoughts are bursting and careening off each other like popcorn kernels in a Muggle theater.
“The last time you got sick you took off all your clothes,” says Sirius, kneeling beside Remus at the toilet. His knees don’t crack like Remus’s do, and if he notices that Remus is taking great care not to let their thighs touch, he doesn’t show it. “Remember? I walked in because you didn’t lock the door and there you were, bits out in the wild-”
“I was fifteen and it was everywhere and Christ, please, please don’t-”
“You’d had a lot of strawberries, if I remember correctly. And I do,” says Sirius, cheerfully unhelpful, and he smells like cigarettes and laundry soap when he presses his hand to Remus’s forehead and then into his hair, smoothing it back and forth in soothing tidal motion like he does just before and after the full bloom of the moon, saying Moony, Moony, moony moony Moony in sweet cyclical harmony, one arm around his shoulders and his mouth red and very close so that Remus wants to vomit, and cry, and lean over and kiss him, or maybe crawl inside him and sink to the bottom for a while-
“Oh God,” he groans. The jolt that cramps up his stomach and into his throat means bad things. He knows this. What goes up must come down, and what comes down is subject to a toxic neurological cocktail of emotional upheaval, hormones, and sheer blind panic.
“Shhh, Moony, I’ve got you. You’re all right,” says Sirius, “I’ll aim you,” and bless him, but he does, holding him by the hair and shoulders as Remus leans over the toilet to vomit impressively for the first time in three years.
It is just after one o’clock in the morning. It is snowing, the sort that will melt at dawn, making its soft kissing sound against the bathroom window. It is wartime in London, though most of London doesn’t know it and never will. It is late November 1978, and Marquee Moon is playing on the radio, and Remus Lupin is in love.
-
People used to joke about it sometimes, when they were in school. Just Remus at first, and then later both of them: Black and Lupin, bent as butcher’s hooks, ha-ha when’s the wedding Lupin, bought the dress yet you giant queer. He’d feign deep confusion at his Astronomy homework the same way he would when someone started opining loudly about the latest dismissal of werewolf rights legislation in the Prophet-I don’t understand why the Ministry doesn’t just bloody well round them all up and have done with it, I mean, it’s not like they’re human anymore-over breakfast, and sometimes Sirius would punch someone, and Peter would say Oi you, and James would become outraged on both their behalves (but after a while mostly just on Sirius’s), and afterwards Remus would initiate a measured sort of distance from Sirius that he told himself was kindness but was really equal parts self-preservation and that deep gut-fear of exposure-in all regards-that gnawed always at the back of his mind, even then: cutting himself to spare Sirius the pain of it, but really only ever to spare himself.
But then, the one thing he always managed to forget he could count on: Sirius would catch onto his “insufferable self-sacrificing bullshit,” because Sirius was really a very sharp knife who just happened to be conveniently shaped like an extremely attractive human being. He’d get into bed with Remus at night with a bag of Bertie Bott’s or Muggle crisps or a joint procured from the stash that James furiously tried and failed to find at least three times a week, passing it back and forth between themselves and feeling the burn of ineffability at the touch of their fingers, or possibly it was just the weed.
“All right?” Sirius would say.
“All right,” Remus would answer, and he’d flush in the dark, and they’d make each other laugh and Sirius would kick in his sleep and Remus would wake up warm on the cold mornings, tucking it all safely into his heart-meat, where he kept his best secrets.
After the Incident, under the axe-hang of the February moon in sixth year, when the world was still a rind of ice and winter-bones, he woke up in the Shack with a pile of blankets lumped around him and Sirius’s fingers in his hair, everything in Remus straining for him like a moth to a flame. “You should go back,” he said, which was what he always said when the mornings dragged him aching back into being, and to which Sirius had never listened even once. Not said: James will think we’re having it off. Also not said: I want to be having it off, I want to be having it off so badly it turns my guts into a fucking hangman’s noose sometimes and I have to think of crushed flobberworms and James’s back hairs until it goes away.
Except it never goes away, of course. Not when Sirius started going out with Mary Macdonald later that year, or when Remus himself lost his virginity in a profoundly anticlimactic three minutes to Caradoc Dearborn, about whom the rumors were spectacularly untrue, during prefects’ rounds that rounded around to one of the seldom-used classrooms on the third floor early that May. It became an ache in his bones late at night, a hunger thrumming beneath the voracious moon-hunger that opened him up at the most inexplicable times as if to call attention to his empty mouth, his starving hands, and his heart screaming with it against his ribs: I want, I want, I want, I want you.
It never goes away.
“I’m not going anywhere, you shit,” Sirius told him, tinged June-red in the February grey. And then, “I think you’re the bravest person in the world, you know. And I’m not just saying that because of, I mean, your general consumptive shredded-ness at the moment, or whatever’s in your hair, you’re just-you’re fucking unbelievable. In a good way.” His fingers in Remus’s hair, the song of his pulse against Remus’s temple. “You make me want to be better. In addition to paying attention in Runes, and rolling my own cigarettes with actual finesse, I mean,” he said, leaning down, covering Remus with his own body, his own beating heart, shielding him from the last of the moon-fingers stretching through the bars in the window. His eyes were so soft. “You do.”
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment you fall in love with someone, because by the time you realize it, the thing’s already been stitched into your shadow and sitting under your fingernails like a splinter for so much longer than you could’ve know to look for it. When exactly was the precise moment the first cell mutated and your tumor began to grow, when did you first realize your heart was beating in your chest, how long have you had a hairline fracture running right down the center of your brain, Remus Lupin, you incomparable berk-you can’t know these things. But if Remus had to guess-if he had to try and uncouple the chain-links that led him here-he thinks: that morning in February, freezing in the Shrieking Shack with Sirius, verbose at the hush of sunrise, breathing into each other on the dusty bed like they were the only people alive in the entire world. That might have been it.
-
London in winter is something of an amnesiac dream, the streets and the rooftops washed out with a downy-soft layer of snow that glitters like the Muggle Christmas lights people are starting to string up around their doors and balconies. Their neighbors across the alley have a strand of them wrapped through the iron railing of their balcony with the browning ivy, and Sirius, enamored of anything that could potentially cause catastrophic house fires, won’t be satisfied until he’s blown every fuse in their overpriced Kentish Town flat hanging them wherever an outlet or overtaxed extension cord allows. The height of competitive consumerist festivity, Remus supposes, would be to explode something in the name of Christmas Spirit.
He supposes he shouldn’t find Sirius’s enduring fascination with every innocuous and occasionally lethal Muggle thing as sweet as he does, or as arousing, but that’s just the way his poor cracked crybaby brain wants to work, fragmented as it is. Everything he does, every boring, toast-and-tea household chore and game of Gobstones he loses, every song on the radio, every record in their joint collection, every crossword clue tackled together-it all runs back to Sirius, Sirius, Sirius, an endless orbit of longing and loving and the sort of dreams he wakes up from with a hand already down his pajama trousers and Sirius’s name held behind his teeth like a charm on the thread of his breath, during which Sirius definitely takes longer than three minutes and knows exactly what to do with his tongue. Twenty-six down this morning was B-E-S-O-T-T-E-D.
Most days it doesn’t make him unhappy, being in love with someone he knows he’ll probably never have and will, in all likelihood, never fall out of love with. In the ongoing cosmic joke that is Remus Lupin’s life, he figures he ought to take what he can get, and if that means he gets to hoard Sirius’s vast, expansive presence on the warp and weft of his memory, or the jangle of his laughter in the dark, or the feeling of his cold feet on Remus’s cold feet in his bed at Hogwarts, or the wicked bloom of his smiles-the Remus-smiles, the ones that are only for him-then it’s probably a fair trade. When he looks up now on cold, clear nights above their flat, he can see Sirius, too bright to be blurred by the electric hum of sleepless London, and it makes him smile. A fire is still warm, after all, even if you’re the only one standing around it.
So that’s that sorted, he thinks, ducking into the alley that’s become his favorite to Apparate from, and he’s fumbling for a cigarette in his front pocket when his fingers stutter on a few Galleons that weren’t there when he folded them last week, which means Sirius has put them there to avoid the accusing looks Remus shoots him whenever he asks Remus to pick up a curry for dinner while he’s out and then hands him enough money to buy a prize-winning pony, saying, “Keep the change, mate,” like Remus is doing him a favor. The thought of Sirius going through his clothes is by turns irritating, vaguely creepy, and strangely appealing, in a way that makes him worry for his brain-state and dredges up the old fear, again, of falling as a burden to the person he loves most.
The Camden Head has just opened by the time he Apparates, fresh from the killing fields of his latest hilariously futile job search, during which he’s turned down by the library (not the one where he lost his first job), the Muggle hospital (as a night janitor-why do you need that much time off, they’d asked, and Remus didn’t much like arguing with people carrying clipboards and suspicious stains on their uniforms), and finally as a seasonal assistant at an overstock greenhouse where they keep puffapods and fanged geraniums (they’re not looking right now, but check back in the spring!). He tells Sirius about it over his fish and peas, with a small pang for that last one; he’s always liked to watch things grow, something about the feeling of dirt and wholesome fecundity under his fingernails.
“Fuck them all,” is Sirius’s expert verdict, gesturing violently with a chip that very nearly winds up in Peter’s ear canal. “Sorry, Pete-what a bunch of bullshit, Moony, let’s go round to the place and fill it with hungry adolescent flobberworms. I’d ask you what sort of troglodytes can’t tell a man with ten green fingers and toes when they see him but I’ve got my ideas-here,” he says, heaping Remus’s plate with some of his extra chips, “I think we’ve earned a good artery clogging.”
Lily, listening with an amused sort of twist at her mouth, eyes him over her beer. “One of these days you’re going to burst something important with the dramatics, y’know. I feel like I need a nap just from listening to you, it’s exhausting.”
“A life lived at a stable blood pressure is no life at all when you think about it.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” James exclaims through a mouthful of potato, which he immediately swallows after being given a Look.
“Right, you tell that to the clogging arteries and Remus’s prospective employers.” Her foot taps against Remus’s boot under the table, and he looks across the table from the last of his peas to find her frowning, but not unkindly: a frown from Lily means she cares, and a glare means an imminent what-for delivered by solid steel lungs that’ll rattle around your skull for weeks after, but either way, it means she loves you, for some reason. “Listen, Remus-I know the thought of asking for help for you is basically the equivalent of Sirius here abiding by traffic laws, but couldn’t you ask Dumbledore if there’s anything out there? I’m sure he could at least give you a recommendation, right, that’s got to be good for something.”
“Or maybe he knows where to find you a job, mate,” says Peter. “He’s Dumbledore, he can make stuff happen.”
Remus, already indebted to Albus Dumbledore in every cardinal direction for possibly the rest of his impoverished life, shakes his head and finishes the rest of his beer. The Order may not be a paying concern, and for all he knows this might have been the plan all along: let the werewolf in, give him regular meals, suffocate him with a generosity that’s more like basic human decency and he’ll wear your leash for as long as you can hold it. But it’s something, at least. Purpose, if not a way to assuage some of the fear and frustration that crackles in his limbs on the nights when he has nothing better to do than clean the bathroom and wait up for Sirius to come home from his late shifts clearing the tunnels of boggarts and doxies, feeling thirteen years old again, like his bones don’t fit together properly and he has to weigh every word on his incisors to determine whether it’s smart enough, or clever enough, or if it’ll make Sirius laugh.
And, in some miraculous turn of fate or maybe just chance, it’s always been Sirius who knows best how to coax him out of this cloistered and often soggy shell where he gets off on his own self-sacrifice and the general pointlessness of it all, or at least makes sure he has some company for the wallowing. “If all else fails you’ll just be my kept woman,” says Sirius, turning to him with the afternoon snow-light in the hollows of his face, “but you’ll have to learn to, y’know-” here, he makes an extremely vulgar gesture with his hand and mouth, which makes Remus and James laugh. “We can work out the specifics of the arrangement while I convince you tonight, Mrs. Black.”
“I’ll need some significant convincing. I’m a man of modern virtues, Padfoot, I’m not content to just wash your socks and oil your abdominals all day. I want to experience the world.”
“See, by ‘convince’ I actually mean ‘blow every neuron in your body with my incomparable godlike sexual prowess,’ which might be intimidating to a lesser man, but you’re not a lesser man, Moony. So. Why don’t you roll that up and smoke it.”
“Mmm. I’d rather get an early night, I think. Sleep off the remains of the day, and what-all,” says Remus, but he’s laughing.
“Pish-posh,” says Sirius. “You haven’t gotten an early night since we were twelve and we’ve got to get the lights up in the loo, besides.”
“If we want the electrocution to take care of us before the heart attacks.”
“The only electromocution you’re gonna get is the one I’m going to be giving you,” says Sirius. Remus can see the edge of an eyetooth when he grins, which in turn pulls Remus’s own smile wider and makes the bottom drop out of his stomach so swiftly it almost makes him dizzy. “Anyway,” he says, and stops strangely, like he’s trying to blink something out of his eyes, “anyway, I’m just saying, don’t worry so much. It makes you go all sad at the mouth.”
“You two are absolutely mental,” says James, fondly. Lily stays quiet, but from the corner of his eye, Remus can see she’s wearing her best I-know-what-you’re-doing-Remus-Lupin smile.
“My bloody hero,” says Remus, hoping he’s not as pink as he feels and avoiding his own reflection in the smudged glass beside him, because he knows better. He always knows better. “It’s good to know I’ve still got options.”
Sirius, aiming a kick at him under the table, remains unperturbed by the sudden color in Remus’s cheeks and ears. “Oh, Lupin,” he says, “tis Christmastide,” and shoves a chip into Remus’s mouth.
Talk turns to the Order from there, to the war burgeoning with the early darkness that laps at their heels every night like a fever-dream he sleeps through and wakes up from sweaty and achy but able to forget it well enough with the distance the morning light brings. Just last week, Lily and Marlene McKinnon had charmed some information out of an unsuspecting, freshly-plucked Pureblood supremacist that has the Order considering their options for an ambush, or at least new plans to turn the tide in their favor like Christmas come early; Remus isn’t sure it’ll be so simple-the world doesn’t stop hurting you just because tis Christmastide any more than the moon stops tugging at his bones in its monthly tidal ritual just because he asks it nicely-but hope really does stick to your ribs, if you’ll let it.
“I don’t know when they’re going to move on him,” she says, her green eyes flashing, a glint of sun off of metal. “They’re just going to watch him for a bit, see what more than can find out, but I fucking well want a front-row seat when it happens. McKinnon’s already after Dumbledore about it.”
James, who manages to look simultaneously euphoric and aghast that Lily Evans is still sitting beside him after nearly a year, wraps an arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “Brilliant woman,” he mutters, choking on emotion, or possibly the last of his ham. If they ever have children, Remus thinks, it’ll take all four of them plus an industrial-sized vacuum to pick up his pieces. “You’ll win the war singlehanded and save Christmas too.”
“If anyone can, it’s you,” Remus agrees. “I’ll be sure to cling to the Gospel of Lily for comfort while I’m Dartmoor-”
“Still don’t know what he thinks you’ll find out in Arse End, Nowhere,” Peter interrupts.
“Anyway, if I’m lucky there’ll be a few left down there by the time Lily’s eviscerated them all,” he finishes. Outside, he can see people carrying shopping bags, and someone is tying wreaths to the streetlights; he chews his thumbnail only to find that there’s nothing left to chew and tries not to think of how royally he is not ready to think about gift-giving.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” says Sirius, which makes Lily smile at him. She beat Sirius on her Charms NEWT by a single hundredth of a point in June. “Have you ever seen Lily and a living, breathing Death Eater in the same room? I didn’t think so. There comes a point when one has to start looking at the common denominator in these situations, and that’d be Evans and her beastly machinations.”
“I thought you two said you were going to mow them all down on the motorbike?” Peter, eyebrows raised.
“We were drunk,” says Sirius; then, “And he doesn’t actually have a license to drive it on the ground,” Remus finishes.
There’s something to be said for complementing each other’s thoughts as much as there is for finishing them. That he’s gotten to that point with Sirius makes something pleasant curl up behind his ribcage, like a mug of tea filling to the brim.
“Where’s my compliment, you utter bastard? You never tell me you love me anymore.”
“You look pretty today, Prongs. Very shaggable.”
“The haircut accentuates your soulful eyes, which could just as easily be indigestion or the astigmatism I guess-”
“Fuck you, Lupin,” says James, and laughs, and angles his shoulder into Remus’s on the way out the door. “Anyway-anyway, let me know about the flobberworms, will you? I could keep them in the shed,” he says, to which Sirius says “We will, mate,” just as Remus says “No, James.”
Peter says goodbye while struggling with the scarf he’s had since fifth year and never learned to tie properly, his voice lost and his face swimming in the fabric. “Keep your head up, Moony,” he says, “something’ll come along. Oh, and Sirius-you still owe me a Galleon from the Harpies game last week. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were hoping I’d forget, you tosser.”
“Took you long enough,” says Sirius, fishing in his pocket to pay up. “Feel smug while you can, we both know you’re just going to lose it again this weekend.” Peter flips him a V behind his back as he catches up with Lily, the last of the snow draining all the color from their skin as they turn into the alley past the bookshop that repels most people’s eyes, like water off a duck, to where James is already waiting to see Peter off and Apparate home.
He spends the rest of the afternoon wandering around town with Sirius, looking at the early Christmas decorations that have started to sprout up around the city overnight like daffodils and surreptitiously trying to look for gifts that won’t too obviously reveal the Molotov cocktail that is his desperate and occasionally explosive love he keeps safe in his rib-rungs and the laddered notches of his spine, like a tree grown over with moss. They wrap themselves across the city, ducking into the shops when their fingers get cold or when Sirius decides they need a new holiday tea or, once, when they both decide to take a look at the artificial Muggle Christmas trees, which they both come to a tidy consensus are not in keeping with the Spirit of the Season, and eventually find themselves at a record shop that smells so strongly of incense Remus has a fifteen-minute sneezing fit after they leave. He keeps his hands in his pockets, thumbing the Galleons still warm from his own body and watching Sirius chance the crossings with a nonchalance Remus will never quite manage, even now more used to a thick green wedge of forest and the windblown grass fields of Shropshire than he is the vast electric jangle of London, where Sirius slows his quick strides for him and hangs onto the curb for an extra breath so that Remus never has to hurry to catch up to him.
He still feels himself thrumming with the strangeness of the city and the sense of displacement that comes sometimes from catching his own reflection in the glass beneath the streetlights or stepping out of the tube station, the skittish, anxious feeling of trying to learning how to belong to it the way Sirius does hammering wildly at his ribs. It’s these days, though-the ones where he forgets to be afraid of the future or where his cracked brain and creaky joints will fit into it-that he loves the best: darting through the streets with Sirius in the afternoons or the deep velvet crush of the night, the sidewalks lined with the smell of stale alcohol and piss and fresh bread from the delis, and the sweet secret thrill of finding Sirius watching him already when he looks over at him, sideways-shy, with a smile tugging at the left side of his mouth that Remus watches him with familiar satisfaction, his laughter like a revelation, thinking: See what I can do.
The station is busy, full of midafternoon shoppers and commuters when he leans against the cold brick with Sirius, rolling a cigarette with the buttery glare of the sun in his eyes and stealing glances at Sirius while he lights one of his menthols, something compelling in the angles of his face made gold by the flame of the lighter. Then he turns his head, and Remus, feeling caught in the act, immediately begins searching for his own lighter in his coat pocket when Sirius leans over and cups his hand around the cigarette hanging idiotically out of his mouth, murmurs like fire, and watches the tip flare orange-bright.
“You never told me how you learned that,” he sputters, swallowing his cough and the swift wave heat that sweeps through his body. Sirius’s hand lingers, just for a moment, around his lips.
“I was born with a cigarette in my mouth,” says Sirius, taking a drag and watching Remus through the shred of smoke-haze, his smile like the edge of a very sharp knife. “I’m told I was smoking in the womb, probably starting around the time I went through puberty as a fetus and came out of the ex-mother needing a shave.”
“Just a variation on Incendio, is it.”
“McKinnon taught me,” says Sirius, “in sixth year. Said it was how she got Meadowes to sleep with her in the first place.”
“I do love those moments when you break your own mystique,” says Remus. The second part of what Sirius said won’t register in his mind with all its implications until hours later, when he’s eating reheated shepherd’s pie and watching the Muggle news on the telly and has to spend half an hour pacing around his bedroom afterwards, palpitating, thinking about Sirius’s hands, and the sad cast of his eyes, and sex. For now, he taps a forefinger against the money in his pocket and says, haltingly, “You don’t, er. I mean, Pads, about the money-”
“Moony-”
“No, look, it’s-it’s not that I don’t, I mean, it’s not unwelcome, I just. It’s your money, Sirius.”
“And I can’t exactly blow it all on pot and motorbike shit, can I? Consider it a gift from Alphard Black, the only reason our rent’s paid through the end of the year, not to mention all the vodka and curries. It’s not like I worked for it, either.”
“But it’s yours,” Remus protests, worrying with the fraying edge of his coat sleeve, feeling his face go faintly pink again. “And I’m fairly sure blowing it on motorbike shit might actually bring you up to code with the current Muggle vehicle laws you’re breaking, or maybe you could look into charities with an actual point to the general hopeless destitution and lack of matching socks, or any prospects at all.”
Sirius looks at him over his cigarette, held in the fingerless gloves Remus gave him last Christmas-Sirius has very nice hands, he’s often thought, both in incidental observation and gasping, florid fantasy-while the frown-lines deepen between his eyes just enough that Remus knows he’s irritated but not yet inconsolably pissed off; it’s a bit like reading a weathervane that might swivel in the opposite direction at the slightest whisper of northerly winds. “Christ, you-I know you love to get off on the continued tragedy of your whole existence, and your martyr complex and all, poor Remus, what a miserable sot-but look, Moony, I’m going to tell you something, and this might chafe a bit, but is it really so fucking inconceivable to you that people like you, and want to see you happy and well-fed, and will act accordingly?”
Remus sighs into his scarf, which smells like cigarettes and home. “Always knew you’d find a way to keep me from regular employment and financial stability.”
“Just-I know you can take care of yourself, whatever. I don’t think you’re a, a fucking charity case or anything, if I thought that I’d buy you get-well cards and vitamin supplements, except I wouldn’t do that either.” A pause, where something won’t quite fit. “I wish I could make it better.”
“I know you do.”
“And I wish-oh, look, we’ve been cursing in front of children,” says Sirius, indicating a glaring mother a few paces away, ushering her children out of earshot. “Anyway. Is this argument over? Or is this where we start insulting each other.”
“We do that all the time.”
“But lovingly,” says Sirius, frowning again. “And what’s the fun of having a friend with more money than he needs if you can’t get some illicit substances out of him? Christ!”
“I could tell you exactly what you can do with your unearned money and your noble intentions.”
“Joke’s on you, I like that sort of thing.”
“I’ll have to get more inventive, then,” says Remus, laughing quietly. He looks at Sirius for a long moment, his broad shoulders, his eyes that are so old and so young they make Remus’s heart drop, sometimes, before it leaps again inside his chest, subject always to the marvelous, inescapable vertigo that comes from loving someone. “I’m not-ungrateful, and it’s, I know you want to make it better and that means more than anything. But short of turning me loose at the Ministry on the full and doing a bit of creative rearrangement of their offices for the benefit of society, and thus becoming the martyr I’ve apparently always wanted to be, I’m not sure there’s much you can do.”
“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” says Sirius, but he’s smiling again, a soft, sweet thing that makes Remus feel warm just looking at him, “but anyway, glad that’s sorted before you get any more fidgety and bite your lip off-oh, don’t look at me like that, your mouth does this flappy thing when you’re worried and then I get nervous. All packed for sunny Dartmoor?”
“Everything but my underwear, I think.”
“Go without. We’ll be the Face of the Resistance. No need for honest work or conventional wisdom about keeping your bits contained: the new decade is almost upon us.”
Remus crushes his cigarette beneath his boot and smiles at him, which is when Sirius reaches over to tug on Remus’s scarf a bit, just to straighten it out, and Remus’s mouth, his traitorous, idiot mouth, disconnects from his brain entirely and starts running like a faulty lawn mower that won’t start up. “You’d be a good Face of the Resistance, I think,” he says. “You’ve got that look about you, the whole-” Jesus fuck, his forebrain screams belatedly, shut up, Remus Lupin, you’ll have to throw yourself off the roof “-uh, y’know, roguish charm, sort of, with the-the cheekbones, and the. Unshaven-ness, and the cheekbones, I guess. It’s a good face. I mean.”
“You said ‘cheekbones’ twice,” Sirius tells him, kindly. His hands are still wrapped around Remus’s scarf, almost insistent. “You could just tell me I’m pretty.”
“Shut up.” When he looks away, Sirius’s eyes follow him, watching the side of his face with a nearly tangible weight, like a magnet trying to pull Remus back to him. “It’s just, what I’m saying is, I don’t know what I’m saying, but-you just look very, ah, vigorous. You do.”
“Do I,” says Sirius, a glint of incisors over his bottom lip. For the ten thousandth time in his long and turbulent history with Sirius Black, stretching all the way back across time to the age of eleven on the train, watching the door slide open and two daft boys spill explosively into his compartment, when the first coherent thought his frantic mind could muster was that Sirius Black was the most handsome boy he’d ever seen-which, in the bright sunshine of retrospect, was the exact day his brain slid out his ears and down the shower drain-and that it might be nice to be sorted into his House, Remus feels something like crosshairs settle over his throat.
“Shouldn’t you get going? Doxies in the tunnels and all, I wouldn’t want to keep you from the pressing needs of London’s nether regions.”
“That belongs on a greeting card. You’ll write poetry yet, just wait,” says Sirius, finally stepping back. “See you tonight?”
“I’ll just be folding my underwear,” he says, weakly. What he’ll really be doing is flushing his own head down the toilet and finishing the job he started last week, with the peppermint vodka-flavored vomit and the emotional cowardice.
“Kinky lad, you are,” says Sirius. “Try not to start drinking without me too early. I’ll be back by eleven and then we can be good-for-nothing wastrels together and have all the girly fun we want.”
If he could, if it was his to reach out and take and there weren’t currently a hundred people standing around who could see, this is the part where they’d kiss, Remus thinks. Briefly, he lets himself imagine it as Sirius stubs out his cigarette and walks round to the station entrance: leaning forward, sliding his palms flat up Sirius’s chest, smiling into a kiss like he’s done it for a thousand years. Sirius would pull him tighter and kiss him again when he pulls away, lingering and warm, like a placeholder for later. I love you and Be careful and I think I’ll take a very hot bath tonight, is what Remus might say; Personally, I never like to bathe alone, what with the drowning danger and all. Might be best to wait til I get home to watch your back, is probably what Sirius would say. And my front? Remus would reply, dripping with feigned innocence; Why, Moony, that’s the most dangerous part of all, Sirius would answer, and he’d laugh in that way he has when he’s surprised that sounds like a wild dog and feels like midsummer, a loud gush of color.
And then the violins swell up, and the credits roll, and Remus pushes off the brick wall of Kentish Town station and walks the rest of the way home with his hands in his pockets and his scarf wound too tight around his neck, the ends flying out like some thrilling sideways gravity pulling him backwards to the irresistible force behind him in lyrical, out-of-tune motions.
He crosses the street and imagines Sirius imagining him, walking along the distant dark places underneath London where the walls glisten and eyes watch him out of the darkness-imagining him checking his watch every few minutes, becoming impatient at the hands that never seem to move fast enough. Maybe he thinks of Remus too in the tender clutch of the night, maybe he has to grind his teeth and shut his eyes to keep it all from gushing out of him in an ink-spill frenzy like Remus does when the thrum of his heart drowns out everything else but the hush of wanting. Back at home, Remus curls up on the couch, the one they’ve both lost change and lighters and the occasional limb to on late nights, wondering at the marvelous, vibrant tangle of years between eleven and eighteen, wondering at the shock of love echoing through his ribs, and thinking: if, if, if all of this.
-
The real trouble with Christmas when one is a werewolf on a budget who tends to agonize over whether or not his gift is Good Enough is that gift-giving comes as a challenge at the best of times, one that tends to twist his stomach into elaborate fisherman’s knots and plays havoc with his cardiovascular system late at night when he’s plunged himself deep into the depths of holiday procrastination, for reasons that are essentially twofold:
1. Remus is pants at gift-thinking, gift-buying, and sometimes gift-receiving, and
2. Remus is trying very hard not to let the obvious show in a catastrophic display of emotional eruption from which there can be no return.
Adding to the already potent stress volcano is the fact that Sirius is unfairly, preternaturally good at it, in a way that makes Remus feel awkward and sometimes inadequate for deeply idiotic reasons. For his birthday this year, after they’d decided to flat-share, Sirius gave him a teakettle that sings old English folk songs when the water boils and likes to talk to him about the lesser-known works of Nabokov, and also gets into the odd argument with Sirius over the amount of sugar he shovels into his Darjeeling; Remus harbors very private thoughts about unlocking the source of his inborn magic and absorbing it into himself so he never has to apologize in advance for his cheap, lackluster gifts again.
He’s in Dartmoor when he’s struck by the first Christmas miracle of his eighteen and three-quarters years. The air here is lonely in his lungs, ripe to bursting with coming December and the bare branches murmuring strangely in the night-winds when Remus ventures out at regular intervals to gauge the movements of the werewolves living in the lowlands, who react to his presence with equal parts suspicion and contemptuous malice; he takes care not to look back over his shoulder when he goes back to his draughty room at the inn afterwards, freezing and feeling out of step with the whole world, and then thinks restlessly of Sirius, who is also fighting a war that smashes him full-force into people who take him for a traitor turning his back on his own kind, the burnt-out tapestry to Remus’s patched trousers and darned jumpers, who will understand him when no one else can.
For three days they write constantly, first by the inn’s communal owl and then by Sirius’s cheerful tawny, anything from a scrap of parchment saying Morning Moony!!! to whole notebook pages of fulsome encouragement for his spying job and the finer qualities of Sirius’s breakfast, in pornographic detail; once, Sirius sends him a photo of the loo in festive disarray, having had an accident involving Muggle tinsel and the bathtub drain, and Remus, in love with Sirius’s brightness even when it burns him and wanting miserably to be back in London, asks him if Christmases at the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black were such a jolly affair. Sirius sends him a bar of Honeydukes seventy-percent dark chocolate and a lengthy letter.
Pureblood Christmases exist only to squash the joys of Wizarding children all over England, writes Sirius. Kreacher did all the decorating and cooking and we opened gifts like the fucking paper isn’t meant to be ripped to shreds and then we had to wear starchy robes and have dinner with people who are the human equivalent of drying off with a wet towel, or the feeling of seaweed wrapping around your leg. There were NO Christmas crackers or obscenely-decorated gingerbread men in my childhood (which as you know is why I work so hard to make up for it now, and don’t give me that disapprove-y look). We did always have two trees though, which is probably the only thing I’ll ever miss about it as it did make the house smell very piney and fresh even though the ex-mother never let us put our beautiful homemade chefs-d’oeuvre on either of them. I’d send you a picture but I don’t have any, actually I don’t have many photos at all of either my misspent youth or the last few years, these TENDER MOMENTS have slipped right by me, lost forever to the hunk of Swiss cheese that is my mind!! Ah well, whatever.
The flat is so QUIET without you here! I’ve been playing the wireless and listening to your Animals and Talking Heads records CONSTANTLY just to fill the Remus-sized hole where there’s normally a lot of teacups and wooly werewolf in my line of sight. You’re not even here to fall asleep on when I come home from work so I’ve been reduced to using the couch pillows that really don’t smell as nice as your lap does but they get the job done in a pinch I suppose (take that as you will). COME BACK SOON MOONY, I miss you and want to feed you curry and we need to buy a Christmas tree &etc &etc
Your Own Sirius Orion Black, Esq.
Remus reads the letter approximately eight times, feeling something flare like a match-light deep inside him, and then he does two things. First, he folds the letter up with all the others (plus photo) into the front of A Treatise on the Humble Hippogriff (an enlightening read) to keep for the rest of his dreary days. Next, he visits Flourish and Blotts as soon as he leaves Dartmoor, where he buys an expensive photo album and some good permanent ink with Sirius’s money, and from there Floos to Andromeda Black’s nowhere-house out on the foggy fenland, where the rest of the world seems to fall away in a dishwatery haze of wide cloudy sky: a wild clutch of treacherous earth where Andromeda herself seems as much a fixture of the landscape as the leggy grass-stalks and the frost clinging to the rose beds.
“This is just about the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done,” she says to him over extremely stout coffee at the kitchen table. There’s an entire row of the living room bookshelf dedicated to Andromeda’s ornate photo albums, which have been hefted in front of them both and which Remus is now leafing gingerly through, watching generations of Blacks blink up at him from the pages. “Takes a good sort to look through the annals of dysfunction and inbreeding just to make someone happy. Go ahead and take anything you like and I’ll make duplicates.”
“How did you get all these?” asks Remus, not far from breathless. There must be nearly a century of family history here, all painstakingly organized from first to last, nothing out of place. His own photo albums, the ones his mother put together and he’s kept adding to since she died last year, don’t even have this much stuffed between the covers from his birth to his last day at Hogwarts.
“Stole them,” says Andromeda, which Remus thinks makes a lot of sense. She’s always reminded him of Sirius in some ways, in her recalcitrant, cut-glass edges and the sadness running through her bones, and then in other ways not-not, certainly, in the way she doesn’t pick at old scars so much as nurture them, or how she still tries to keep the old ghosts close and breathing, never quite able to let go. In school, before she graduated at the end of Remus’s first year, he remembers her much as she is now: dagger-sharp, coldly beautiful, and often alone. “Don’t expect my mother ever noticed, or if she did, she always had others.”
“You could get lost in these,” he says softly, pulling out a photo of Sirius as a three-year-old in hideous green velvet clothes, making faces at the camera. On the next page there is indeed one of the fabled Black Christmas trees, lit with candles spaced evenly on the branches, only white and blue blown-glass bulbs hanging against the needles.
“Couldn’t you just,” she says, stopping on a big picture of herself with her sisters in front of someone’s beach house. “Anyway, I knew it was coming-the big disownment, what with all the false Pureblood shite, and not wanting to marry a Yaxley, can you imagine? They’d have done it eventually no matter who I married or didn’t or how many times I got caught using pay phones, so I started taking what I could until the axe fell, so to speak. Sold some of it, kept most.” She leans back in her chair, sweeping her eyes around the cluttered kitchen, the fenced-in backyard with its dead garden. “And here we are.”
And here’s Sirius: six years old, two and five and eight and thirteen and fifteen years old, chasing his brother around a pond, swimming with his Uncle Alphard, opening a birthday gift from someone Remus doesn’t know, dressed for his first day at Hogwarts, grinning and waving as he loses a game of Gobstones to Andromeda herself in the Great Hall during his first year. It’s like taking apart a clock and looking at the pieces that make it work, all the miraculous machinery that makes a person contained here in the visual history of all the different boys Sirius has been, staring up at him with an eleven-year-old’s wonder and a seventeen-year-old’s invincible hope, all of them muscles and bones in the joyous articulated anatomy that’s grown into the man Sirius has become, the one Remus has loved and loved and loved. What a brilliant thing it is, that we contain in our tendons and toes and creaking, moon-achy joints the memory of all the things we’ve ever known and done, every loss and every shuddering fear and every morning that came after the night, the shock of belonging and the touch of a fragile forever, all the love we’ve ever made and re-made-all of it stuck forever in our heart-meat and the hollows of our spines, growing older, growing younger, an endless topography of becoming.
“Look at this.” Andromeda, who has by now come around the other side of the table to sit beside him and point out places and names, shoves a photo at him featuring Sirius, aged twelve, filling someone’s expensive shoe with treacle at what appears to be a family visit to the Malfoys. “What a twat. He always was a brilliant lad that way.”
“He is a twat,” says Remus, and oh, he’s in love, he’s in love.
He leaves with several large envelopes full of Sirius, teeming with life in his bag beside the album and the ink. At the foot of the living room fire, Andromeda stops him and surprises him with a kiss on one cheek, and then the other. “For Sirius,” she says, and smiles at him like a woman with a secret. “I expect seasonal baked goods this year since you’re finally set up like real people, in case you’re wondering what to get me.” Remus’s ears burn all the way back to Kentish Town, where he steps out of the grate of their fireplace with soot in his hair and on his coat to find Sirius asleep on the couch, blinking blearily at him from one of the pillows; Remus remembers a photo of a seven-year-old boy dozing in front of the library fireplace, sleepy-sweet, smiling at the camera.
“Well?” asks Sirius, making room on the couch and tugging the blanket out from where the cushions are trying to devour it. “Save the world?”
“We’re getting there,” says Remus. He stretches out on the couch beside him like he’s done a hundred times before, and opens his arms, and lets Sirius come to him.
-
“Among the ranks of the best ideas you’ve ever had, I’d say it’s somewhere in the top three, easy.” Lily, seemingly impressed, over the top of the Prophet when Remus asks her if his Christmas gift is too soppy or creepy before the telephone rings in the kitchen and he’s left with James and Peter for gift-giving compasses.
“He’ll like it, mate,” says Peter, who is far more focused on the Harpies game and the money he’s about to lose to Sirius again. “It’s thoughtful, like. Girly, and thoughtful.”
James is giving him a knowing, myopic sort of look that makes Remus fold in on himself a bit where he’s standing by the fireplace, clutching the photos James has given him of his parents and the two summers Sirius spent with the Potters in Derby. “You don’t think it’s, y’know-too girly? You’re not all going to spend the rest of your lives making fun of me.”
“Oh, heaven for-fucking-fend,” says Lily, with one hand over the end of the telephone. James grins.
“I think it’s the sort of thing that’d make him happy,” he says, coming to stand with Remus, “or maybe get Padfoot’s tongue up your nose. Not that I think you’d mind that.”
“I’m-we’re not-”
“Yeah, maybe not yet,” says James, giving him a Boy’s Club pat on the back that jerks Remus’s shoulder forward by a few degrees. “But I’m not blind. I wasn’t blind in school, either, so: I told you so, at least in spirit. And if I may say so-”
“James-”
“Why, yes, I may say so: good on, you. It’s about time you two confirmed my completely correct suspicions because I’ve only been waiting for years to be proven right.”
“But we’re not,” says Remus, “honestly. And you’re about to owe me another Galleon, the Harpies are abysmal this year.”
“Funny how you suddenly care about Quidditch when you know you can gloat about it,” James mumbles, and Peter looks at them sideways, and Remus laughs awkwardly as he inches back into the Floo, watching Peter’s walled-out confusion and James’s lingering amusement ripple across their faces as he calls out his own address, feeling slightly charred around the ankles when he locks his bedroom door and worrying that his heart is showing through his skin while he sits down and sets himself to the ancient grandmotherly art known as “scrapbooking.” For love, or something.
Part 2
Author: cevennes
Recipient: the_realduck
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Language, sex*
Word count: 21,000
Summary: Christmas, 1978. Remus, wrestling with the mighty problems of gift-giving on a budget, contemplates life, love, London in winter, and falling off the edge of the world with Sirius Black.
Notes: the_realduck, I loved your prompt so much I got a bit carried away with it. Hugely, horribly so, for which I apologize, profusely. Happy, happy holidays; I hope 2016 is full of everything bright and beautiful!
Sometime midway through his fourth vodka in front of the bathroom mirror, Remus’s mind finally gives up its charade of relative sanity and cracks right down the middle. He’s staring at his own reflection, which is currently straddling some no man’s land between bewildered and nauseous, trying to piece all his scattered brain-shards back together when he hears the tight thunder-crush between his ears, or maybe it’s just the crackle of the radio in the living room where Talking Heads are playing through the intermittent static; he blinks stupidly at himself and sticks out his arms and his tongue, recites a few lines of Rilke-not a stroke, then-and finishes the rest of his drink, looking back at his face as if seeing it from outside himself, the old scar curling under his chin, his mother’s crooked nose. There’s a scurry like a mouse deep inside him, shaking through the rafters of his body and up his spine-rungs until it reaches his mouth and breaks apart on his molars; he needs another drink, he thinks, or a cigarette, or maybe a fuck, but that sets his mind on a crash-course down The Streets Which Shall Not Be Named again and he has to grab onto the edge of the sink to keep his entire digestive system from caving in on itself. Blank grey slate, he thinks desperately, dead worms on the sidewalk after rain. James Potter’s three malformed chest hairs.
They’d been sitting in the living room, listening to a Muggle radio station and going through the dusty box of Christmas decorations that are mostly Sirius’s, scavenged from antique shops and his Uncle Alphard’s attic. Remus had taken one of the glass tumblers from the kitchen and Transfigured it into a glass star for the tree they didn’t have, all the more impressive for paying no attention to where his wand was pointing (directly at his crotch), and then Sirius had smiled at him-that sweet, unmeasured thing Remus sometimes manages to pull out of him without ever knowing exactly how, the one that crinkles his eyes and makes his mouth go crooked on the left side the way he likes. He’d looked at Remus the way he does after an extremely off-color joke or when they used to spread the map out across their knees in Sirius’s bed at night after everyone else had gone to sleep, like Remus was something surprising and beautiful, or else the most expensive entrée on the menu at his favorite restaurant and Sirius had been starving for it for a veritable lifetime.
Crack, went Remus’s brain.
“Moony?” Sirius, from the open door, making him jump. In the mirror, his face is chalky, the thin skin of his knuckles gone white where he grips the sink. “Are you drinking in the loo again? That’s not normal, mate. I mean, you might’ve at least invited me-who paid for your fucking alcohol binge tonight, I’d like to know?”
“Your uncle Alphard, if you want to get technical about it,” says Remus, which stops Sirius in his search for his lighter long enough to punch him in the shoulder. “Sorry, I mean-I’m sick, er. I think.”
“Do you want to get your clothes off?”
Yes yes yes, screams one half of Remus’s fractured mind. “Why the hell would I take my clothes off,” says his drunk but fortunately rational mouth. He spares a brief, dizzy moment to feel self-satisfied at the fact that he can still form complete sentences when his thoughts are bursting and careening off each other like popcorn kernels in a Muggle theater.
“The last time you got sick you took off all your clothes,” says Sirius, kneeling beside Remus at the toilet. His knees don’t crack like Remus’s do, and if he notices that Remus is taking great care not to let their thighs touch, he doesn’t show it. “Remember? I walked in because you didn’t lock the door and there you were, bits out in the wild-”
“I was fifteen and it was everywhere and Christ, please, please don’t-”
“You’d had a lot of strawberries, if I remember correctly. And I do,” says Sirius, cheerfully unhelpful, and he smells like cigarettes and laundry soap when he presses his hand to Remus’s forehead and then into his hair, smoothing it back and forth in soothing tidal motion like he does just before and after the full bloom of the moon, saying Moony, Moony, moony moony Moony in sweet cyclical harmony, one arm around his shoulders and his mouth red and very close so that Remus wants to vomit, and cry, and lean over and kiss him, or maybe crawl inside him and sink to the bottom for a while-
“Oh God,” he groans. The jolt that cramps up his stomach and into his throat means bad things. He knows this. What goes up must come down, and what comes down is subject to a toxic neurological cocktail of emotional upheaval, hormones, and sheer blind panic.
“Shhh, Moony, I’ve got you. You’re all right,” says Sirius, “I’ll aim you,” and bless him, but he does, holding him by the hair and shoulders as Remus leans over the toilet to vomit impressively for the first time in three years.
It is just after one o’clock in the morning. It is snowing, the sort that will melt at dawn, making its soft kissing sound against the bathroom window. It is wartime in London, though most of London doesn’t know it and never will. It is late November 1978, and Marquee Moon is playing on the radio, and Remus Lupin is in love.
-
People used to joke about it sometimes, when they were in school. Just Remus at first, and then later both of them: Black and Lupin, bent as butcher’s hooks, ha-ha when’s the wedding Lupin, bought the dress yet you giant queer. He’d feign deep confusion at his Astronomy homework the same way he would when someone started opining loudly about the latest dismissal of werewolf rights legislation in the Prophet-I don’t understand why the Ministry doesn’t just bloody well round them all up and have done with it, I mean, it’s not like they’re human anymore-over breakfast, and sometimes Sirius would punch someone, and Peter would say Oi you, and James would become outraged on both their behalves (but after a while mostly just on Sirius’s), and afterwards Remus would initiate a measured sort of distance from Sirius that he told himself was kindness but was really equal parts self-preservation and that deep gut-fear of exposure-in all regards-that gnawed always at the back of his mind, even then: cutting himself to spare Sirius the pain of it, but really only ever to spare himself.
But then, the one thing he always managed to forget he could count on: Sirius would catch onto his “insufferable self-sacrificing bullshit,” because Sirius was really a very sharp knife who just happened to be conveniently shaped like an extremely attractive human being. He’d get into bed with Remus at night with a bag of Bertie Bott’s or Muggle crisps or a joint procured from the stash that James furiously tried and failed to find at least three times a week, passing it back and forth between themselves and feeling the burn of ineffability at the touch of their fingers, or possibly it was just the weed.
“All right?” Sirius would say.
“All right,” Remus would answer, and he’d flush in the dark, and they’d make each other laugh and Sirius would kick in his sleep and Remus would wake up warm on the cold mornings, tucking it all safely into his heart-meat, where he kept his best secrets.
After the Incident, under the axe-hang of the February moon in sixth year, when the world was still a rind of ice and winter-bones, he woke up in the Shack with a pile of blankets lumped around him and Sirius’s fingers in his hair, everything in Remus straining for him like a moth to a flame. “You should go back,” he said, which was what he always said when the mornings dragged him aching back into being, and to which Sirius had never listened even once. Not said: James will think we’re having it off. Also not said: I want to be having it off, I want to be having it off so badly it turns my guts into a fucking hangman’s noose sometimes and I have to think of crushed flobberworms and James’s back hairs until it goes away.
Except it never goes away, of course. Not when Sirius started going out with Mary Macdonald later that year, or when Remus himself lost his virginity in a profoundly anticlimactic three minutes to Caradoc Dearborn, about whom the rumors were spectacularly untrue, during prefects’ rounds that rounded around to one of the seldom-used classrooms on the third floor early that May. It became an ache in his bones late at night, a hunger thrumming beneath the voracious moon-hunger that opened him up at the most inexplicable times as if to call attention to his empty mouth, his starving hands, and his heart screaming with it against his ribs: I want, I want, I want, I want you.
It never goes away.
“I’m not going anywhere, you shit,” Sirius told him, tinged June-red in the February grey. And then, “I think you’re the bravest person in the world, you know. And I’m not just saying that because of, I mean, your general consumptive shredded-ness at the moment, or whatever’s in your hair, you’re just-you’re fucking unbelievable. In a good way.” His fingers in Remus’s hair, the song of his pulse against Remus’s temple. “You make me want to be better. In addition to paying attention in Runes, and rolling my own cigarettes with actual finesse, I mean,” he said, leaning down, covering Remus with his own body, his own beating heart, shielding him from the last of the moon-fingers stretching through the bars in the window. His eyes were so soft. “You do.”
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment you fall in love with someone, because by the time you realize it, the thing’s already been stitched into your shadow and sitting under your fingernails like a splinter for so much longer than you could’ve know to look for it. When exactly was the precise moment the first cell mutated and your tumor began to grow, when did you first realize your heart was beating in your chest, how long have you had a hairline fracture running right down the center of your brain, Remus Lupin, you incomparable berk-you can’t know these things. But if Remus had to guess-if he had to try and uncouple the chain-links that led him here-he thinks: that morning in February, freezing in the Shrieking Shack with Sirius, verbose at the hush of sunrise, breathing into each other on the dusty bed like they were the only people alive in the entire world. That might have been it.
-
London in winter is something of an amnesiac dream, the streets and the rooftops washed out with a downy-soft layer of snow that glitters like the Muggle Christmas lights people are starting to string up around their doors and balconies. Their neighbors across the alley have a strand of them wrapped through the iron railing of their balcony with the browning ivy, and Sirius, enamored of anything that could potentially cause catastrophic house fires, won’t be satisfied until he’s blown every fuse in their overpriced Kentish Town flat hanging them wherever an outlet or overtaxed extension cord allows. The height of competitive consumerist festivity, Remus supposes, would be to explode something in the name of Christmas Spirit.
He supposes he shouldn’t find Sirius’s enduring fascination with every innocuous and occasionally lethal Muggle thing as sweet as he does, or as arousing, but that’s just the way his poor cracked crybaby brain wants to work, fragmented as it is. Everything he does, every boring, toast-and-tea household chore and game of Gobstones he loses, every song on the radio, every record in their joint collection, every crossword clue tackled together-it all runs back to Sirius, Sirius, Sirius, an endless orbit of longing and loving and the sort of dreams he wakes up from with a hand already down his pajama trousers and Sirius’s name held behind his teeth like a charm on the thread of his breath, during which Sirius definitely takes longer than three minutes and knows exactly what to do with his tongue. Twenty-six down this morning was B-E-S-O-T-T-E-D.
Most days it doesn’t make him unhappy, being in love with someone he knows he’ll probably never have and will, in all likelihood, never fall out of love with. In the ongoing cosmic joke that is Remus Lupin’s life, he figures he ought to take what he can get, and if that means he gets to hoard Sirius’s vast, expansive presence on the warp and weft of his memory, or the jangle of his laughter in the dark, or the feeling of his cold feet on Remus’s cold feet in his bed at Hogwarts, or the wicked bloom of his smiles-the Remus-smiles, the ones that are only for him-then it’s probably a fair trade. When he looks up now on cold, clear nights above their flat, he can see Sirius, too bright to be blurred by the electric hum of sleepless London, and it makes him smile. A fire is still warm, after all, even if you’re the only one standing around it.
So that’s that sorted, he thinks, ducking into the alley that’s become his favorite to Apparate from, and he’s fumbling for a cigarette in his front pocket when his fingers stutter on a few Galleons that weren’t there when he folded them last week, which means Sirius has put them there to avoid the accusing looks Remus shoots him whenever he asks Remus to pick up a curry for dinner while he’s out and then hands him enough money to buy a prize-winning pony, saying, “Keep the change, mate,” like Remus is doing him a favor. The thought of Sirius going through his clothes is by turns irritating, vaguely creepy, and strangely appealing, in a way that makes him worry for his brain-state and dredges up the old fear, again, of falling as a burden to the person he loves most.
The Camden Head has just opened by the time he Apparates, fresh from the killing fields of his latest hilariously futile job search, during which he’s turned down by the library (not the one where he lost his first job), the Muggle hospital (as a night janitor-why do you need that much time off, they’d asked, and Remus didn’t much like arguing with people carrying clipboards and suspicious stains on their uniforms), and finally as a seasonal assistant at an overstock greenhouse where they keep puffapods and fanged geraniums (they’re not looking right now, but check back in the spring!). He tells Sirius about it over his fish and peas, with a small pang for that last one; he’s always liked to watch things grow, something about the feeling of dirt and wholesome fecundity under his fingernails.
“Fuck them all,” is Sirius’s expert verdict, gesturing violently with a chip that very nearly winds up in Peter’s ear canal. “Sorry, Pete-what a bunch of bullshit, Moony, let’s go round to the place and fill it with hungry adolescent flobberworms. I’d ask you what sort of troglodytes can’t tell a man with ten green fingers and toes when they see him but I’ve got my ideas-here,” he says, heaping Remus’s plate with some of his extra chips, “I think we’ve earned a good artery clogging.”
Lily, listening with an amused sort of twist at her mouth, eyes him over her beer. “One of these days you’re going to burst something important with the dramatics, y’know. I feel like I need a nap just from listening to you, it’s exhausting.”
“A life lived at a stable blood pressure is no life at all when you think about it.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” James exclaims through a mouthful of potato, which he immediately swallows after being given a Look.
“Right, you tell that to the clogging arteries and Remus’s prospective employers.” Her foot taps against Remus’s boot under the table, and he looks across the table from the last of his peas to find her frowning, but not unkindly: a frown from Lily means she cares, and a glare means an imminent what-for delivered by solid steel lungs that’ll rattle around your skull for weeks after, but either way, it means she loves you, for some reason. “Listen, Remus-I know the thought of asking for help for you is basically the equivalent of Sirius here abiding by traffic laws, but couldn’t you ask Dumbledore if there’s anything out there? I’m sure he could at least give you a recommendation, right, that’s got to be good for something.”
“Or maybe he knows where to find you a job, mate,” says Peter. “He’s Dumbledore, he can make stuff happen.”
Remus, already indebted to Albus Dumbledore in every cardinal direction for possibly the rest of his impoverished life, shakes his head and finishes the rest of his beer. The Order may not be a paying concern, and for all he knows this might have been the plan all along: let the werewolf in, give him regular meals, suffocate him with a generosity that’s more like basic human decency and he’ll wear your leash for as long as you can hold it. But it’s something, at least. Purpose, if not a way to assuage some of the fear and frustration that crackles in his limbs on the nights when he has nothing better to do than clean the bathroom and wait up for Sirius to come home from his late shifts clearing the tunnels of boggarts and doxies, feeling thirteen years old again, like his bones don’t fit together properly and he has to weigh every word on his incisors to determine whether it’s smart enough, or clever enough, or if it’ll make Sirius laugh.
And, in some miraculous turn of fate or maybe just chance, it’s always been Sirius who knows best how to coax him out of this cloistered and often soggy shell where he gets off on his own self-sacrifice and the general pointlessness of it all, or at least makes sure he has some company for the wallowing. “If all else fails you’ll just be my kept woman,” says Sirius, turning to him with the afternoon snow-light in the hollows of his face, “but you’ll have to learn to, y’know-” here, he makes an extremely vulgar gesture with his hand and mouth, which makes Remus and James laugh. “We can work out the specifics of the arrangement while I convince you tonight, Mrs. Black.”
“I’ll need some significant convincing. I’m a man of modern virtues, Padfoot, I’m not content to just wash your socks and oil your abdominals all day. I want to experience the world.”
“See, by ‘convince’ I actually mean ‘blow every neuron in your body with my incomparable godlike sexual prowess,’ which might be intimidating to a lesser man, but you’re not a lesser man, Moony. So. Why don’t you roll that up and smoke it.”
“Mmm. I’d rather get an early night, I think. Sleep off the remains of the day, and what-all,” says Remus, but he’s laughing.
“Pish-posh,” says Sirius. “You haven’t gotten an early night since we were twelve and we’ve got to get the lights up in the loo, besides.”
“If we want the electrocution to take care of us before the heart attacks.”
“The only electromocution you’re gonna get is the one I’m going to be giving you,” says Sirius. Remus can see the edge of an eyetooth when he grins, which in turn pulls Remus’s own smile wider and makes the bottom drop out of his stomach so swiftly it almost makes him dizzy. “Anyway,” he says, and stops strangely, like he’s trying to blink something out of his eyes, “anyway, I’m just saying, don’t worry so much. It makes you go all sad at the mouth.”
“You two are absolutely mental,” says James, fondly. Lily stays quiet, but from the corner of his eye, Remus can see she’s wearing her best I-know-what-you’re-doing-Remus-Lupin smile.
“My bloody hero,” says Remus, hoping he’s not as pink as he feels and avoiding his own reflection in the smudged glass beside him, because he knows better. He always knows better. “It’s good to know I’ve still got options.”
Sirius, aiming a kick at him under the table, remains unperturbed by the sudden color in Remus’s cheeks and ears. “Oh, Lupin,” he says, “tis Christmastide,” and shoves a chip into Remus’s mouth.
Talk turns to the Order from there, to the war burgeoning with the early darkness that laps at their heels every night like a fever-dream he sleeps through and wakes up from sweaty and achy but able to forget it well enough with the distance the morning light brings. Just last week, Lily and Marlene McKinnon had charmed some information out of an unsuspecting, freshly-plucked Pureblood supremacist that has the Order considering their options for an ambush, or at least new plans to turn the tide in their favor like Christmas come early; Remus isn’t sure it’ll be so simple-the world doesn’t stop hurting you just because tis Christmastide any more than the moon stops tugging at his bones in its monthly tidal ritual just because he asks it nicely-but hope really does stick to your ribs, if you’ll let it.
“I don’t know when they’re going to move on him,” she says, her green eyes flashing, a glint of sun off of metal. “They’re just going to watch him for a bit, see what more than can find out, but I fucking well want a front-row seat when it happens. McKinnon’s already after Dumbledore about it.”
James, who manages to look simultaneously euphoric and aghast that Lily Evans is still sitting beside him after nearly a year, wraps an arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “Brilliant woman,” he mutters, choking on emotion, or possibly the last of his ham. If they ever have children, Remus thinks, it’ll take all four of them plus an industrial-sized vacuum to pick up his pieces. “You’ll win the war singlehanded and save Christmas too.”
“If anyone can, it’s you,” Remus agrees. “I’ll be sure to cling to the Gospel of Lily for comfort while I’m Dartmoor-”
“Still don’t know what he thinks you’ll find out in Arse End, Nowhere,” Peter interrupts.
“Anyway, if I’m lucky there’ll be a few left down there by the time Lily’s eviscerated them all,” he finishes. Outside, he can see people carrying shopping bags, and someone is tying wreaths to the streetlights; he chews his thumbnail only to find that there’s nothing left to chew and tries not to think of how royally he is not ready to think about gift-giving.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” says Sirius, which makes Lily smile at him. She beat Sirius on her Charms NEWT by a single hundredth of a point in June. “Have you ever seen Lily and a living, breathing Death Eater in the same room? I didn’t think so. There comes a point when one has to start looking at the common denominator in these situations, and that’d be Evans and her beastly machinations.”
“I thought you two said you were going to mow them all down on the motorbike?” Peter, eyebrows raised.
“We were drunk,” says Sirius; then, “And he doesn’t actually have a license to drive it on the ground,” Remus finishes.
There’s something to be said for complementing each other’s thoughts as much as there is for finishing them. That he’s gotten to that point with Sirius makes something pleasant curl up behind his ribcage, like a mug of tea filling to the brim.
“Where’s my compliment, you utter bastard? You never tell me you love me anymore.”
“You look pretty today, Prongs. Very shaggable.”
“The haircut accentuates your soulful eyes, which could just as easily be indigestion or the astigmatism I guess-”
“Fuck you, Lupin,” says James, and laughs, and angles his shoulder into Remus’s on the way out the door. “Anyway-anyway, let me know about the flobberworms, will you? I could keep them in the shed,” he says, to which Sirius says “We will, mate,” just as Remus says “No, James.”
Peter says goodbye while struggling with the scarf he’s had since fifth year and never learned to tie properly, his voice lost and his face swimming in the fabric. “Keep your head up, Moony,” he says, “something’ll come along. Oh, and Sirius-you still owe me a Galleon from the Harpies game last week. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were hoping I’d forget, you tosser.”
“Took you long enough,” says Sirius, fishing in his pocket to pay up. “Feel smug while you can, we both know you’re just going to lose it again this weekend.” Peter flips him a V behind his back as he catches up with Lily, the last of the snow draining all the color from their skin as they turn into the alley past the bookshop that repels most people’s eyes, like water off a duck, to where James is already waiting to see Peter off and Apparate home.
He spends the rest of the afternoon wandering around town with Sirius, looking at the early Christmas decorations that have started to sprout up around the city overnight like daffodils and surreptitiously trying to look for gifts that won’t too obviously reveal the Molotov cocktail that is his desperate and occasionally explosive love he keeps safe in his rib-rungs and the laddered notches of his spine, like a tree grown over with moss. They wrap themselves across the city, ducking into the shops when their fingers get cold or when Sirius decides they need a new holiday tea or, once, when they both decide to take a look at the artificial Muggle Christmas trees, which they both come to a tidy consensus are not in keeping with the Spirit of the Season, and eventually find themselves at a record shop that smells so strongly of incense Remus has a fifteen-minute sneezing fit after they leave. He keeps his hands in his pockets, thumbing the Galleons still warm from his own body and watching Sirius chance the crossings with a nonchalance Remus will never quite manage, even now more used to a thick green wedge of forest and the windblown grass fields of Shropshire than he is the vast electric jangle of London, where Sirius slows his quick strides for him and hangs onto the curb for an extra breath so that Remus never has to hurry to catch up to him.
He still feels himself thrumming with the strangeness of the city and the sense of displacement that comes sometimes from catching his own reflection in the glass beneath the streetlights or stepping out of the tube station, the skittish, anxious feeling of trying to learning how to belong to it the way Sirius does hammering wildly at his ribs. It’s these days, though-the ones where he forgets to be afraid of the future or where his cracked brain and creaky joints will fit into it-that he loves the best: darting through the streets with Sirius in the afternoons or the deep velvet crush of the night, the sidewalks lined with the smell of stale alcohol and piss and fresh bread from the delis, and the sweet secret thrill of finding Sirius watching him already when he looks over at him, sideways-shy, with a smile tugging at the left side of his mouth that Remus watches him with familiar satisfaction, his laughter like a revelation, thinking: See what I can do.
The station is busy, full of midafternoon shoppers and commuters when he leans against the cold brick with Sirius, rolling a cigarette with the buttery glare of the sun in his eyes and stealing glances at Sirius while he lights one of his menthols, something compelling in the angles of his face made gold by the flame of the lighter. Then he turns his head, and Remus, feeling caught in the act, immediately begins searching for his own lighter in his coat pocket when Sirius leans over and cups his hand around the cigarette hanging idiotically out of his mouth, murmurs like fire, and watches the tip flare orange-bright.
“You never told me how you learned that,” he sputters, swallowing his cough and the swift wave heat that sweeps through his body. Sirius’s hand lingers, just for a moment, around his lips.
“I was born with a cigarette in my mouth,” says Sirius, taking a drag and watching Remus through the shred of smoke-haze, his smile like the edge of a very sharp knife. “I’m told I was smoking in the womb, probably starting around the time I went through puberty as a fetus and came out of the ex-mother needing a shave.”
“Just a variation on Incendio, is it.”
“McKinnon taught me,” says Sirius, “in sixth year. Said it was how she got Meadowes to sleep with her in the first place.”
“I do love those moments when you break your own mystique,” says Remus. The second part of what Sirius said won’t register in his mind with all its implications until hours later, when he’s eating reheated shepherd’s pie and watching the Muggle news on the telly and has to spend half an hour pacing around his bedroom afterwards, palpitating, thinking about Sirius’s hands, and the sad cast of his eyes, and sex. For now, he taps a forefinger against the money in his pocket and says, haltingly, “You don’t, er. I mean, Pads, about the money-”
“Moony-”
“No, look, it’s-it’s not that I don’t, I mean, it’s not unwelcome, I just. It’s your money, Sirius.”
“And I can’t exactly blow it all on pot and motorbike shit, can I? Consider it a gift from Alphard Black, the only reason our rent’s paid through the end of the year, not to mention all the vodka and curries. It’s not like I worked for it, either.”
“But it’s yours,” Remus protests, worrying with the fraying edge of his coat sleeve, feeling his face go faintly pink again. “And I’m fairly sure blowing it on motorbike shit might actually bring you up to code with the current Muggle vehicle laws you’re breaking, or maybe you could look into charities with an actual point to the general hopeless destitution and lack of matching socks, or any prospects at all.”
Sirius looks at him over his cigarette, held in the fingerless gloves Remus gave him last Christmas-Sirius has very nice hands, he’s often thought, both in incidental observation and gasping, florid fantasy-while the frown-lines deepen between his eyes just enough that Remus knows he’s irritated but not yet inconsolably pissed off; it’s a bit like reading a weathervane that might swivel in the opposite direction at the slightest whisper of northerly winds. “Christ, you-I know you love to get off on the continued tragedy of your whole existence, and your martyr complex and all, poor Remus, what a miserable sot-but look, Moony, I’m going to tell you something, and this might chafe a bit, but is it really so fucking inconceivable to you that people like you, and want to see you happy and well-fed, and will act accordingly?”
Remus sighs into his scarf, which smells like cigarettes and home. “Always knew you’d find a way to keep me from regular employment and financial stability.”
“Just-I know you can take care of yourself, whatever. I don’t think you’re a, a fucking charity case or anything, if I thought that I’d buy you get-well cards and vitamin supplements, except I wouldn’t do that either.” A pause, where something won’t quite fit. “I wish I could make it better.”
“I know you do.”
“And I wish-oh, look, we’ve been cursing in front of children,” says Sirius, indicating a glaring mother a few paces away, ushering her children out of earshot. “Anyway. Is this argument over? Or is this where we start insulting each other.”
“We do that all the time.”
“But lovingly,” says Sirius, frowning again. “And what’s the fun of having a friend with more money than he needs if you can’t get some illicit substances out of him? Christ!”
“I could tell you exactly what you can do with your unearned money and your noble intentions.”
“Joke’s on you, I like that sort of thing.”
“I’ll have to get more inventive, then,” says Remus, laughing quietly. He looks at Sirius for a long moment, his broad shoulders, his eyes that are so old and so young they make Remus’s heart drop, sometimes, before it leaps again inside his chest, subject always to the marvelous, inescapable vertigo that comes from loving someone. “I’m not-ungrateful, and it’s, I know you want to make it better and that means more than anything. But short of turning me loose at the Ministry on the full and doing a bit of creative rearrangement of their offices for the benefit of society, and thus becoming the martyr I’ve apparently always wanted to be, I’m not sure there’s much you can do.”
“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” says Sirius, but he’s smiling again, a soft, sweet thing that makes Remus feel warm just looking at him, “but anyway, glad that’s sorted before you get any more fidgety and bite your lip off-oh, don’t look at me like that, your mouth does this flappy thing when you’re worried and then I get nervous. All packed for sunny Dartmoor?”
“Everything but my underwear, I think.”
“Go without. We’ll be the Face of the Resistance. No need for honest work or conventional wisdom about keeping your bits contained: the new decade is almost upon us.”
Remus crushes his cigarette beneath his boot and smiles at him, which is when Sirius reaches over to tug on Remus’s scarf a bit, just to straighten it out, and Remus’s mouth, his traitorous, idiot mouth, disconnects from his brain entirely and starts running like a faulty lawn mower that won’t start up. “You’d be a good Face of the Resistance, I think,” he says. “You’ve got that look about you, the whole-” Jesus fuck, his forebrain screams belatedly, shut up, Remus Lupin, you’ll have to throw yourself off the roof “-uh, y’know, roguish charm, sort of, with the-the cheekbones, and the. Unshaven-ness, and the cheekbones, I guess. It’s a good face. I mean.”
“You said ‘cheekbones’ twice,” Sirius tells him, kindly. His hands are still wrapped around Remus’s scarf, almost insistent. “You could just tell me I’m pretty.”
“Shut up.” When he looks away, Sirius’s eyes follow him, watching the side of his face with a nearly tangible weight, like a magnet trying to pull Remus back to him. “It’s just, what I’m saying is, I don’t know what I’m saying, but-you just look very, ah, vigorous. You do.”
“Do I,” says Sirius, a glint of incisors over his bottom lip. For the ten thousandth time in his long and turbulent history with Sirius Black, stretching all the way back across time to the age of eleven on the train, watching the door slide open and two daft boys spill explosively into his compartment, when the first coherent thought his frantic mind could muster was that Sirius Black was the most handsome boy he’d ever seen-which, in the bright sunshine of retrospect, was the exact day his brain slid out his ears and down the shower drain-and that it might be nice to be sorted into his House, Remus feels something like crosshairs settle over his throat.
“Shouldn’t you get going? Doxies in the tunnels and all, I wouldn’t want to keep you from the pressing needs of London’s nether regions.”
“That belongs on a greeting card. You’ll write poetry yet, just wait,” says Sirius, finally stepping back. “See you tonight?”
“I’ll just be folding my underwear,” he says, weakly. What he’ll really be doing is flushing his own head down the toilet and finishing the job he started last week, with the peppermint vodka-flavored vomit and the emotional cowardice.
“Kinky lad, you are,” says Sirius. “Try not to start drinking without me too early. I’ll be back by eleven and then we can be good-for-nothing wastrels together and have all the girly fun we want.”
If he could, if it was his to reach out and take and there weren’t currently a hundred people standing around who could see, this is the part where they’d kiss, Remus thinks. Briefly, he lets himself imagine it as Sirius stubs out his cigarette and walks round to the station entrance: leaning forward, sliding his palms flat up Sirius’s chest, smiling into a kiss like he’s done it for a thousand years. Sirius would pull him tighter and kiss him again when he pulls away, lingering and warm, like a placeholder for later. I love you and Be careful and I think I’ll take a very hot bath tonight, is what Remus might say; Personally, I never like to bathe alone, what with the drowning danger and all. Might be best to wait til I get home to watch your back, is probably what Sirius would say. And my front? Remus would reply, dripping with feigned innocence; Why, Moony, that’s the most dangerous part of all, Sirius would answer, and he’d laugh in that way he has when he’s surprised that sounds like a wild dog and feels like midsummer, a loud gush of color.
And then the violins swell up, and the credits roll, and Remus pushes off the brick wall of Kentish Town station and walks the rest of the way home with his hands in his pockets and his scarf wound too tight around his neck, the ends flying out like some thrilling sideways gravity pulling him backwards to the irresistible force behind him in lyrical, out-of-tune motions.
He crosses the street and imagines Sirius imagining him, walking along the distant dark places underneath London where the walls glisten and eyes watch him out of the darkness-imagining him checking his watch every few minutes, becoming impatient at the hands that never seem to move fast enough. Maybe he thinks of Remus too in the tender clutch of the night, maybe he has to grind his teeth and shut his eyes to keep it all from gushing out of him in an ink-spill frenzy like Remus does when the thrum of his heart drowns out everything else but the hush of wanting. Back at home, Remus curls up on the couch, the one they’ve both lost change and lighters and the occasional limb to on late nights, wondering at the marvelous, vibrant tangle of years between eleven and eighteen, wondering at the shock of love echoing through his ribs, and thinking: if, if, if all of this.
-
The real trouble with Christmas when one is a werewolf on a budget who tends to agonize over whether or not his gift is Good Enough is that gift-giving comes as a challenge at the best of times, one that tends to twist his stomach into elaborate fisherman’s knots and plays havoc with his cardiovascular system late at night when he’s plunged himself deep into the depths of holiday procrastination, for reasons that are essentially twofold:
1. Remus is pants at gift-thinking, gift-buying, and sometimes gift-receiving, and
2. Remus is trying very hard not to let the obvious show in a catastrophic display of emotional eruption from which there can be no return.
Adding to the already potent stress volcano is the fact that Sirius is unfairly, preternaturally good at it, in a way that makes Remus feel awkward and sometimes inadequate for deeply idiotic reasons. For his birthday this year, after they’d decided to flat-share, Sirius gave him a teakettle that sings old English folk songs when the water boils and likes to talk to him about the lesser-known works of Nabokov, and also gets into the odd argument with Sirius over the amount of sugar he shovels into his Darjeeling; Remus harbors very private thoughts about unlocking the source of his inborn magic and absorbing it into himself so he never has to apologize in advance for his cheap, lackluster gifts again.
He’s in Dartmoor when he’s struck by the first Christmas miracle of his eighteen and three-quarters years. The air here is lonely in his lungs, ripe to bursting with coming December and the bare branches murmuring strangely in the night-winds when Remus ventures out at regular intervals to gauge the movements of the werewolves living in the lowlands, who react to his presence with equal parts suspicion and contemptuous malice; he takes care not to look back over his shoulder when he goes back to his draughty room at the inn afterwards, freezing and feeling out of step with the whole world, and then thinks restlessly of Sirius, who is also fighting a war that smashes him full-force into people who take him for a traitor turning his back on his own kind, the burnt-out tapestry to Remus’s patched trousers and darned jumpers, who will understand him when no one else can.
For three days they write constantly, first by the inn’s communal owl and then by Sirius’s cheerful tawny, anything from a scrap of parchment saying Morning Moony!!! to whole notebook pages of fulsome encouragement for his spying job and the finer qualities of Sirius’s breakfast, in pornographic detail; once, Sirius sends him a photo of the loo in festive disarray, having had an accident involving Muggle tinsel and the bathtub drain, and Remus, in love with Sirius’s brightness even when it burns him and wanting miserably to be back in London, asks him if Christmases at the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black were such a jolly affair. Sirius sends him a bar of Honeydukes seventy-percent dark chocolate and a lengthy letter.
Pureblood Christmases exist only to squash the joys of Wizarding children all over England, writes Sirius. Kreacher did all the decorating and cooking and we opened gifts like the fucking paper isn’t meant to be ripped to shreds and then we had to wear starchy robes and have dinner with people who are the human equivalent of drying off with a wet towel, or the feeling of seaweed wrapping around your leg. There were NO Christmas crackers or obscenely-decorated gingerbread men in my childhood (which as you know is why I work so hard to make up for it now, and don’t give me that disapprove-y look). We did always have two trees though, which is probably the only thing I’ll ever miss about it as it did make the house smell very piney and fresh even though the ex-mother never let us put our beautiful homemade chefs-d’oeuvre on either of them. I’d send you a picture but I don’t have any, actually I don’t have many photos at all of either my misspent youth or the last few years, these TENDER MOMENTS have slipped right by me, lost forever to the hunk of Swiss cheese that is my mind!! Ah well, whatever.
The flat is so QUIET without you here! I’ve been playing the wireless and listening to your Animals and Talking Heads records CONSTANTLY just to fill the Remus-sized hole where there’s normally a lot of teacups and wooly werewolf in my line of sight. You’re not even here to fall asleep on when I come home from work so I’ve been reduced to using the couch pillows that really don’t smell as nice as your lap does but they get the job done in a pinch I suppose (take that as you will). COME BACK SOON MOONY, I miss you and want to feed you curry and we need to buy a Christmas tree &etc &etc
Your Own Sirius Orion Black, Esq.
Remus reads the letter approximately eight times, feeling something flare like a match-light deep inside him, and then he does two things. First, he folds the letter up with all the others (plus photo) into the front of A Treatise on the Humble Hippogriff (an enlightening read) to keep for the rest of his dreary days. Next, he visits Flourish and Blotts as soon as he leaves Dartmoor, where he buys an expensive photo album and some good permanent ink with Sirius’s money, and from there Floos to Andromeda Black’s nowhere-house out on the foggy fenland, where the rest of the world seems to fall away in a dishwatery haze of wide cloudy sky: a wild clutch of treacherous earth where Andromeda herself seems as much a fixture of the landscape as the leggy grass-stalks and the frost clinging to the rose beds.
“This is just about the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done,” she says to him over extremely stout coffee at the kitchen table. There’s an entire row of the living room bookshelf dedicated to Andromeda’s ornate photo albums, which have been hefted in front of them both and which Remus is now leafing gingerly through, watching generations of Blacks blink up at him from the pages. “Takes a good sort to look through the annals of dysfunction and inbreeding just to make someone happy. Go ahead and take anything you like and I’ll make duplicates.”
“How did you get all these?” asks Remus, not far from breathless. There must be nearly a century of family history here, all painstakingly organized from first to last, nothing out of place. His own photo albums, the ones his mother put together and he’s kept adding to since she died last year, don’t even have this much stuffed between the covers from his birth to his last day at Hogwarts.
“Stole them,” says Andromeda, which Remus thinks makes a lot of sense. She’s always reminded him of Sirius in some ways, in her recalcitrant, cut-glass edges and the sadness running through her bones, and then in other ways not-not, certainly, in the way she doesn’t pick at old scars so much as nurture them, or how she still tries to keep the old ghosts close and breathing, never quite able to let go. In school, before she graduated at the end of Remus’s first year, he remembers her much as she is now: dagger-sharp, coldly beautiful, and often alone. “Don’t expect my mother ever noticed, or if she did, she always had others.”
“You could get lost in these,” he says softly, pulling out a photo of Sirius as a three-year-old in hideous green velvet clothes, making faces at the camera. On the next page there is indeed one of the fabled Black Christmas trees, lit with candles spaced evenly on the branches, only white and blue blown-glass bulbs hanging against the needles.
“Couldn’t you just,” she says, stopping on a big picture of herself with her sisters in front of someone’s beach house. “Anyway, I knew it was coming-the big disownment, what with all the false Pureblood shite, and not wanting to marry a Yaxley, can you imagine? They’d have done it eventually no matter who I married or didn’t or how many times I got caught using pay phones, so I started taking what I could until the axe fell, so to speak. Sold some of it, kept most.” She leans back in her chair, sweeping her eyes around the cluttered kitchen, the fenced-in backyard with its dead garden. “And here we are.”
And here’s Sirius: six years old, two and five and eight and thirteen and fifteen years old, chasing his brother around a pond, swimming with his Uncle Alphard, opening a birthday gift from someone Remus doesn’t know, dressed for his first day at Hogwarts, grinning and waving as he loses a game of Gobstones to Andromeda herself in the Great Hall during his first year. It’s like taking apart a clock and looking at the pieces that make it work, all the miraculous machinery that makes a person contained here in the visual history of all the different boys Sirius has been, staring up at him with an eleven-year-old’s wonder and a seventeen-year-old’s invincible hope, all of them muscles and bones in the joyous articulated anatomy that’s grown into the man Sirius has become, the one Remus has loved and loved and loved. What a brilliant thing it is, that we contain in our tendons and toes and creaking, moon-achy joints the memory of all the things we’ve ever known and done, every loss and every shuddering fear and every morning that came after the night, the shock of belonging and the touch of a fragile forever, all the love we’ve ever made and re-made-all of it stuck forever in our heart-meat and the hollows of our spines, growing older, growing younger, an endless topography of becoming.
“Look at this.” Andromeda, who has by now come around the other side of the table to sit beside him and point out places and names, shoves a photo at him featuring Sirius, aged twelve, filling someone’s expensive shoe with treacle at what appears to be a family visit to the Malfoys. “What a twat. He always was a brilliant lad that way.”
“He is a twat,” says Remus, and oh, he’s in love, he’s in love.
He leaves with several large envelopes full of Sirius, teeming with life in his bag beside the album and the ink. At the foot of the living room fire, Andromeda stops him and surprises him with a kiss on one cheek, and then the other. “For Sirius,” she says, and smiles at him like a woman with a secret. “I expect seasonal baked goods this year since you’re finally set up like real people, in case you’re wondering what to get me.” Remus’s ears burn all the way back to Kentish Town, where he steps out of the grate of their fireplace with soot in his hair and on his coat to find Sirius asleep on the couch, blinking blearily at him from one of the pillows; Remus remembers a photo of a seven-year-old boy dozing in front of the library fireplace, sleepy-sweet, smiling at the camera.
“Well?” asks Sirius, making room on the couch and tugging the blanket out from where the cushions are trying to devour it. “Save the world?”
“We’re getting there,” says Remus. He stretches out on the couch beside him like he’s done a hundred times before, and opens his arms, and lets Sirius come to him.
-
“Among the ranks of the best ideas you’ve ever had, I’d say it’s somewhere in the top three, easy.” Lily, seemingly impressed, over the top of the Prophet when Remus asks her if his Christmas gift is too soppy or creepy before the telephone rings in the kitchen and he’s left with James and Peter for gift-giving compasses.
“He’ll like it, mate,” says Peter, who is far more focused on the Harpies game and the money he’s about to lose to Sirius again. “It’s thoughtful, like. Girly, and thoughtful.”
James is giving him a knowing, myopic sort of look that makes Remus fold in on himself a bit where he’s standing by the fireplace, clutching the photos James has given him of his parents and the two summers Sirius spent with the Potters in Derby. “You don’t think it’s, y’know-too girly? You’re not all going to spend the rest of your lives making fun of me.”
“Oh, heaven for-fucking-fend,” says Lily, with one hand over the end of the telephone. James grins.
“I think it’s the sort of thing that’d make him happy,” he says, coming to stand with Remus, “or maybe get Padfoot’s tongue up your nose. Not that I think you’d mind that.”
“I’m-we’re not-”
“Yeah, maybe not yet,” says James, giving him a Boy’s Club pat on the back that jerks Remus’s shoulder forward by a few degrees. “But I’m not blind. I wasn’t blind in school, either, so: I told you so, at least in spirit. And if I may say so-”
“James-”
“Why, yes, I may say so: good on, you. It’s about time you two confirmed my completely correct suspicions because I’ve only been waiting for years to be proven right.”
“But we’re not,” says Remus, “honestly. And you’re about to owe me another Galleon, the Harpies are abysmal this year.”
“Funny how you suddenly care about Quidditch when you know you can gloat about it,” James mumbles, and Peter looks at them sideways, and Remus laughs awkwardly as he inches back into the Floo, watching Peter’s walled-out confusion and James’s lingering amusement ripple across their faces as he calls out his own address, feeling slightly charred around the ankles when he locks his bedroom door and worrying that his heart is showing through his skin while he sits down and sets himself to the ancient grandmotherly art known as “scrapbooking.” For love, or something.
Part 2