Six: Unspoken
They meet, days later, in a train station. Outside, it’s raining, strange August rain, and inside it is damp and steamy with tracked in puddles and wet clothes. Padfoot appears from behind the barrier between platforms 7 and 8, stepping around the rubbish bins.
Remus, sitting on a bench and watching the passers-by, stands and thinks that this is too unlikely a chance. He grins, uncontrollably, the way he has always done at coincidental meetings with friends. Padfoot looks around the crowd, nose raised, and then spots Remus. His tail wags slightly, and he sets off into the crowd.
A group of gangly, spotty teenagers in school uniforms passes between them, and when they finally make their way out of the minor human traffic jam it is no longer Padfoot walking across the platform, but Sirius.
“Hello, Remus,” he says, smiling faintly.
Remus’s hand twitches and his mouth opens soundlessly. He feels rather inept, as awkward as any of those teenagers. This too-soon meeting feels so unlikely, in a way almost supernatural, that Remus doesn’t know how to respond to it. He was only just thrown off his feet by their last meeting, and he isn’t sure they’ve touched earth again yet.
“A dog in a train station,” Remus admonishes. “What will we see next?”
“The Mitford family once took a pony on a train,” Sirius says blandly.
Remus frowns. “Where do you get things like that? I can’t imagine you reading Love in a Cold Climate.”
Sirius wrinkles his nose. “Hardly.”
They sit on the bench, staring at each other. Neither asks what business the other has in this train station.
James and Sirius used to have an extraordinary facility for speaking without words, in the middle of class or while hiding from McGonagall during a prank, later while searching for Death Eaters. A raised eyebrow, tilt of the chin, quirk of the mouth, wrinkling of the nose. They were fluent. Remus never understood this language, would sit in classes with his quill leaking ink onto his parchment, not listening to a word the teacher said, while James and Sirius made eloquent almost-imperceptible faces at each other.
Yet suddenly, after years of failing to translate them, Remus thinks he understands Sirius’s expression. His eyebrows, curved and almost feminine, drawn together, his mouth pinched to the left, his chin drawn down. Two fingers of his left hand slide along the bench and press on the inside of Remus’s wrist, and that cements the message. I’m sorry. I want…
Sirius doesn’t know what he wants, so the message is truncated and cannot be turned into human speech. Remus answers, in his own dialect of this language, bites his lip and nods ever so slightly. Yes, he says, I want that too.