Three: Gravity
Summer rain wakes them. It’s the kind of rain that barely means anything. It makes the air smell clean and melts away the dust, but it doesn’t cause mud and it barely wets through their clothes. Sirius opens his eyes and blinks away the droplets that cling to his eyelashes like dew to spiderwebs. His arm is wrapped around Remus’s waist and curled upwards, his hand tangled in Remus’s loose shirt. They used to fall asleep in boy-sized tents and wake like this, pretend it hadn’t happened. Eventually they stopped pretending, but they never spoke about the extraordinary strength of their unconscious gravity. It frightens Sirius a bit that they were so incautious as to fall asleep next to each other, knowing what would happen.
He lets loose his grip on Remus’s shirt and pulls away, stands up to look down at the lumpy human-shaped patch that is completely dry. “Hey.” He nudges the back of Remus’s knee with his foot. “It’s raining.” Remus stirs and shoves his face into the ground. There’s a smudge of dirt over his eyebrow.
Sirius’s rather too long hair begins to curl and shimmer with the strange rain that comes down in particles, like sand. “Remus. You’ll get all wet.” He isn’t wearing a coat. Sirius is, his old leather jacket.
Remus rolls onto his back and opens his eyes, looks up through the rain at Sirius. “What’re you-‘s not supposed to rain.”
“Who says?” Sirius offers him a hand, which Remus considers momentarily before taking it and levering himself to his feet. His hand is a lot rougher than the last time Sirius held it. They let go very fast. Each wonders whether the other remembers the previous night.
It’s as warm as it was when they fell asleep, though now a clean warmth rather than a hazy one. “Let’s go back to London,” Sirius says. Remus wonders what he means by “back,” since they didn’t come from London in the first place. They’d met, by whatever strange chance, in Oxford.
“Any food in your flat?” Remus asks, with a slightly amused air.
“Don’t eat there much,” Sirius says ruefully. Remus nods, as though he is unsurprised. He supposes the flat, like his own cottage in Shropshire, is too much like it used to be, only quieter. Neither of them, probably, spends much time at home. “We could go out somewhere, buy some.”
“I’d rather…”
“Rather what?”
Remus wraps his arms around himself, and licks a raindrop off his upper lip. “We don’t have to-. We could just, you know, go home. We’ve made our pilgrimage.”
“Do you want to go home?”
Remus shrugs.
Sirius grabs him by the elbow. “Come on. London.” He apparates, dragging Remus with him, before Remus has time to prepare himself. They land, Remus reeling a little, across the street from the Leaky Cauldron.
They look up at the sky, simultaneously. London has seen no rain, though the sun is only beginning to peak through the clouds. It is already hot, the people on the streets in no more than t-shirts and shorts or skirts, apart from the businessmen in suits who look rather sweaty. Remus’s shirt is already beginning to dry, and Sirius looks like he never saw rain at all.
“Are we going in there?” Remus asks.
Sirius snorts. “Course not. They’ll jump all over us.” He turns left, seemingly at random, and begins walking. Remus follows, automatically, rather as a faithful dog would. A faithful wolf. The streets are busy, everyone going to work or out for a day of shopping and sightseeing. Navigating the crowd takes concentration, and Remus and Sirius don’t speak for some time. Finally they leave the busy streets behind them, turn down a quieter street full of identical houses all with different flowers on their small front lawns. Sirius slows, no longer seeming as though he knows where he’s going. He looks at Remus, who stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets and keeps walking.
“I just want to walk around,” Sirius says. “You’re not hungry, are you?”
“You could’ve walked around on your own. You know I hate side-along apparition.” He’s hungry, but isn’t going to say so.
Sirius opens his mouth and shuts it again. “Sorry. I forgot.”
This stops Remus, who turns and stares a moment. His mouth quirks, a little bit sadly. “I wonder what I’ve forgot about you.”
Sirius shakes his head and turns away, keeps walking. “I just want to walk around.” Unspoken, with you. I want to walk around with you. So they keep walking.