Harry Potter: Discontinuing a Romp
Title: Discontinuing a Romp
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters/Pairings: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Peter
Genre: Angst
Rating: PG-13 for Language and Implied Sexuality
Word Count: 4,986
Author’s Note: Written for the 2010 rs_games Team Canon. My prompt was: “You held my hand when it was cold, when I was lost you took me home, you gave me hope when I was at the end, and turned my lies back into truth again. You even called me friend.” Thanks to cacklesthewitch for the beta :)
Summary: In the aftermath of October 31, 1981, Remus tries to understand how the man he knew and loved could be the same person who betrayed everything he’d ever cared about.
Alternate Link: http://community.livejournal.com/rs_games/95512.html
"Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?" - Vladimir Nabokov
Remus’s eyes open grudgingly. It’s the fifth time he wakes up this morning, but his first thought, once again, is that there is no point in being awake. He tries rolling over but his body finally lodges a formal protest and he knows there’s no hope for falling back asleep.
A bottle sits on his bed stand staring at him. “Good Morning,” it seems to say, half-full with liquid amber and about as friendly as Remus can hope for. He reaches out for it. There is nothing else to reach for.
It burns going down.
_______________________________________________________________
The last place in the world Remus wants to be at 6 in the morning in the middle of December is lying on wooden boards in a house that has more holes in the wall than blankets. A draft passes over the room, moves his hair and makes his face itch as it blows dust up. Remus doesn’t have the energy to turn over or reach for one of the quilts he so wisely left at the other side of the room. His teeth begin to knock together, but Remus is almost used to this by now. He rolls his eyes and lets out a deep, annoyed sigh.
Something warm moves over him. Remus’s eyes don’t open to check what it is. He’s probably dreaming and, even if it’s a hallucination, he’ll take what he can get. The quilt rolls itself around him lovingly, Remus lets his muscles relax.
“You okay, mate?”
Remus shoots up then, eyes wide and terrified. The blanket falls off his shoulders, but he’s too distracted to feel the cold anymore. Sirius is right there, kneeling next to him, close enough to touch-except that his hands are drawn back, too close to his chest.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
Sirius shrugs, points to the blanket as if it explains all.
“No. Really. What are you doing here?”
Sirius inclines his head to the side. “Don’t know how you do it,” he says.
“Do what?” Remus asks, his voice faltering.
“Crawl all the way back to the castle in this condition by yourself every month.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just got lost in the woods and thought I should stay here instead of-”
“Coming back to the dorm as a fully-transformed werewolf? Appreciate that.”
“You know?”
“Sure looks like it,” Sirius says, sounding a little upset. “Don’t see why you couldn’t just tell us.”
Remus doesn’t say anything in response to that, doesn’t look at Sirius, either. “How’d you find out?”
“We’re not complete idiots, you know. Except maybe Peter. We were bound to figure it out eventually.”
“We? You all know?” Remus looks down at his lap, pulls the blanket in against the chill that he knows has nothing to do with the snow outside. “Does everyone at school want me gone?”
“Never,” Sirius responds immediately before reeling himself back in. “We haven’t told anyone, and we’re not going to.”
“Then why are you here? To gloat? Rub it in that you figured me out? I bet James dared you to prove you weren’t too chicken-shit to come see the werewolf, huh?”
Sirius frowns. “We read somewhere that it was painful. I was just…worried.”
Remus laughs cruelly. “Yeah, sure. Worried about the werewolf.”
“I was,” he insists. “If I’d known it was this bad, I would’ve come sooner.”
“How much sooner?” Remus almost doesn’t want to know just how long he’s been figured out, but curiosity wins out.
“James put it together over the summer,” Sirius admits, wincing slightly in response to Remus’s expression. He leans a little closer and puts his hand on Remus’s wrist. “We’ve known this whole time and nothing’s been different, right? We don’t care, Remus.”
Remus shoves the hand away. He’s still riled up from the wolf and the knowledge that his friends all know is more than he can handle right now. He can’t really listen to what Sirius is saying or focus on how soft his tone and touches are. All he can think is that it’s all up. He was happy for five minutes in his life, he knew this would happen eventually.
“Leave me alone.”
Sirius’s eyes get just a little bit wider, but he doesn’t even flinch. “Remus, I just wanted to help you-”
“Piss off,” Remus says, actually pushing this time. “You never want to help anyone, you think I’m stupid enough to think you’ve grown a conscience all of a sudden?”
“It’s different,” Sirius almost whispers. “You’re different.”
Something tugs hard at Remus’s insides, something warm and wonderful and Remus despises it, because he knows this is an act and all he wants is for it to be real. They can’t be okay with what Remus is and Sirius can’t really care, not about him. It’s not the way things work. Remus launches forward. Survival instincts, Remus decides. The wolf is still present and it senses a threat.
Sirius stumbles backwards and Remus doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he’s hovering over Sirius, his arm poised to strike. Sirius closes his eyes tightly and turns away, anticipating the hit. That’s when it dawns on Remus that he’s about to attack his best friend Sirius for no real reason at all.
Remus lets his hand drop to the side. When a few seconds have passed without any punches, Sirius tentatively opens one eye. Remus says nothing, too scared of how his friend will respond. If Sirius really didn’t hate him before, Remus has just given him a perfectly good reason to reverse that.
“Sirius, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, I just-”
“It’s okay, Remus. It’s okay. I know.”
Remus attempts to shift then, give his friend the space to sit back up, but Sirius doesn’t let him move. Elegant fingers reach up and brush a loose hair out of Remus’s face. He stares up at Remus for a long time and Remus looks down, neither of them moving or even breathing. Sirius’s expression is probing, like Remus is suddenly a foreign object he’s never seen before. Remus thinks he must look the same.
Neither of them really seems to know what they’re looking at, but Remus doesn’t blink or look away, afraid he’ll miss it. He doesn’t quite understand what’s happening until Sirius has leaned up and Remus down and their lips suddenly meet in the middle. It’s his first kiss and as much as it surprises him, he doesn’t stop or question it. They pull away at the same time, Sirius looks as scared as Remus feels, but there’s a small upward turn at the corner of his mouth when he brings his fingers up to trace his lips.
Remus stands up and turns his back to his friend. “We should head back before people start waking up, or Madame Pomfrey comes looking for me and finds both of us.”
Sirius surprises him with a hand brushing his own, tangling their fingers together. He doesn’t say anything the rest of the way back, but he holds fast to Remus’s hand and Remus doesn’t feel the cold anymore.
_______________________________________________________________
Remus drinks a lot now. He’d never put much stock in alcohol as a coping mechanism before, had generally been the one snatching bottles away from Sirius when the other man was in one of his moods.
He needs it now, though, as long as he’s here, he’s going to need it. There are potions that will make him numb, some might even help him forget, but as long as he knows where he is, there’s no potion that can change the way he feels when he looks around his apartment. Sirius’s apartment. All the stupid things Sirius had come home with, looking so excited over them that Remus always felt the presence of a wagging tail, even when Sirius was not Padfoot.
The most important part of Remus’s morning is drinking until these things all blur together. It’s much, much easier that way.
_______________________________________________________________
“No, you’re lying,” Lily says, clapping a hand over her mouth as she laughs. “You have to be lying.”
“I swear on my mum,” Remus says, laughing a little himself. He takes another sip from his firewhiskey and continues, “So for an entire month, I would wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s this bloody great dog on my bed. And he’s climbing over me and curling up in my space and one day I say to Sirius, ‘I’ve been having the weirdest dreams lately. Don’t imagine you’ve seen a big dog wandering around on the grounds recently?’”
“And he owned up to it?” asks Lily.
Remus snorts. “We must not be talking about the same Sirius.”
Lily looks back out at the backyard where James and Padfoot are wrestling. James waves proudly when he realizes they have an audience and promises that he is going to win in her honor. Padfoot barks and knocks him over and Wormtail scurries to the side, trying to avoid being landed on. Lily shakes her head.
“What did he do then?”
“Oh, you know. Pulled a Sirius. ‘That is a weird thing to ask, Moony, sure you’re feeling all there? Always did think you were liable to go a little mental.’”
“Insufferable,” Lily says, smiling.
“Of course, that’s when he decided to get really creative. So I would wake up and he’d be sticking his head into my side for attention and I figure, what the hell, it’s a dream, right?”
She nods.
“I scratch his belly and the damn thing winks at me!”
“Stop it! And you still had no clue?”
“I thought I was just having recurring dreams in which a giant dog flirts with me. Weirder things have happened. Then the next full moon comes around and there he is with the stag and the rat, acting perfectly innocent.”
“I was innocent,” Sirius says, surprising both Remus and Lily with his sudden contribution to the conversation. He sits on the arm of Remus’s chair and smiles when Remus glowers at him, taking the drink out of his hand and sipping from it. “Don’t know what I’m accused of, but I’m almost positive I was innocent.”
“Weren’t you busy playing with your little friends?” Remus asks in his most condescending tone.
“Oh, I was very busy indeed, but then I saw you over here being all clever and amusing and I knew you had to be talking about me.”
Remus smirks. “I was just telling Lily about how you couldn’t keep the secret fifth year.”
“It’s not my fault I figured the Animagus thing out so fast. I wanted to show off, dammit.”
“You? Show off?” James says, taking the chair next to Lily and grabbing a bottle off the table in the middle of the deck.
Sirius responds by sticking his tongue out and looking around. “Where’s Peter, then?”
“I think he went inside to get more cheese,” James jokes, earning him a smack on the shoulder when the rat that had been next to his seat turns into Peter.
“Everybody accounted for?”
“What do you have up your sleeve?” Remus asks, eyes narrowing.
“Nothing but a heartwarming and completely socially acceptable toast to our futures,” Sirius says, raising his, or rather Remus’s, glass.
“Stop, stop, you’ll make me cry,” Peter says.
“Oi, everything makes you cry,” says James.
“Not everything,” Remus interrupts. “He’s the only one of you who didn’t cry when we went to the Muggle cinema, if you’ll recall.”
“Well, that’s a testament to his cold heart,” James says solemnly. “That Bond bloke was a patriot.”
Sirius clears his throat. “Excuse me, but there was a very important toast going on here.”
“Oh, by all means. When Sirius is the one staying on topic, attention must be paid.” Lily raises an eyebrow and indicates that he should continue.
“Very well. Let us raise our glasses, bottles, empty hands, whatever, in honor of…um. Ourselves. We will never have to go back to Hogwarts and see Severus Snape’s unwashed hair or giant nose again.”
“We also won’t have to smell Peter’s socks anymore,” James says. “Sorry mate,” he adds, turning to Peter who shrugs good-humoredly.
“Yes, this is just poetry,” Lily says, her tone flat.
“We are going to go on in life and be responsible adults. Except for those of us who aren’t Lily. We’ll probably all just be fired after our first weeks and come home and get pissed together every night.”
Remus grabs the nearest bottle and raises it.
“But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We’ll come home and get pissed together every night. Which makes it romantic instead of pathetic.”
“Here, here,” James agrees, earning a ‘don’t even think about it’ glare from Lily.
“I, um. What else did I want to add, Remus?”
“Mischief Managed?”
“Brilliant!” Sirius says, flailing his arms and coating Remus in what was formerly his own beverage. “What he said.”
“What he said!” James and Peter both cry, and even Lily clinks her glass into the center of the group as they all smack each other on the back and mumble incoherent messages about how proud they are of each other.
Forty-five minutes later, James comes out from the kitchen and tells them to all piss off because he thinks he’s going to get laid. Lily yells something from the house that could be a protest, but when James still hasn’t re-entered in five minutes, she comes back out and starts doing the shooing herself.
Peter squeaks in fear when he sees her approaching and immediately Apparates. Sirius grabs Remus’s jacket and aims a warm, slightly drunk smile at him. “Let’s go.”
“You want me to go home with you?” Remus asks, licking his lips.
Surprisingly, Sirius doesn’t waggle his eyebrows or grope or do anything that Sirius would do.
“I want you to come home,” he says, voice even. His expression is a little nervous and Remus can’t pretend he doesn’t mean exactly what Remus thinks he does.
“You probably should have asked me to move in sooner,” Remus says. “All my things are on my way to my parent’s.”
“Nuh uh, I stole them,” Sirius says, eyes bright. “They’re waiting for you in our living room.”
Our living room, Remus thinks. Can’t really say no to that.
_______________________________________________________________
At the end of the day, Remus stumbles into bed.
He knows that the next day will be a repeat: he’ll spend every moment just as drunk, wishing that it was enough to make him stop caring. Remus never really does stop caring, but he cares less about caring after a while.
The bed is too big for him. No surprise there. It was made to hold them both and it did its job admirably, long after they stopped sharing it, and even now when Remus has no reason to hope that tomorrow will be the day they fix everything.
_______________________________________________________________
Things get bad pretty fast for them after Hogwarts. What seemed like a terrible but removed threat becomes much more immediate without the safety of their school’s walls. They begin to lose people and they begin to fight back.
James is the first to join the Order, which is a terribly James thing to do. He makes a fantastic hero, and as usual, he drags everyone into the fray with him. This time it’s for the best.
Lily goes second. She’s the one in the most danger, of course, and Remus knows she thinks of her family every time there’s another report of Muggles getting attacked.
Peter follows James shortly thereafter, takes a few weeks to be torn between terror and wanting to be like his hero. Remus is proud, but not surprised, when his courage wins out. Whatever Sirius may say, Peter is a Gryffindor at the end of the day.
Sirius joins because of Remus. The day he gets home and finds out Remus has been fired, finds out werewolves are no longer considered safe to be employed at the Ministry of Magic, he tracks down Alistair Moody and refuses to go home until he’s in.
Remus is the last to join. He is not welcome at first. Sirius, Lily, James, and Peter raise the issue for three months before Dumbledore and McGonagall throw their weight in and everyone who had been arguing that a werewolf had to be on Voldemort’s side is forced to shut up and welcome him.
The missions are terrible for all of them, but Remus thinks he has it worst. Lily loves the work she does for the Order, helps organize the hospital after attacks and manages to save more lives than she loses. Peter plays spy, and they all have laughs at the expense of the other members when they ask how he manages to overhear so much. Sirius decides that it’s poetic, using their rat as a rat. Peter almost doesn’t know how to take so much positive attention, but he certainly doesn’t ever complain. James and Sirius, however much they hate the fallout, love the heat of battles. Remus is sent to meet with werewolves, always kept separate from his friends and not really able to see how he’s helping. The other werewolves are suspicious of him and Remus is suspicious of them. There is nothing in the world Remus hates more some days than seeing himself reflected in them.
But nothing is really unbearable when things first start. They keep on living, even through the war. Sirius never lets Remus get too upset without pulling him back in, reminding him that there’s another pack he belongs to, one he wants to be a part of. Theirs.
“Lily’s knocked up,” Sirius announces one day, first thing as he walks in the door.
Remus lifts his head from the letter he was writing to Dumbledore. “What?”
Sirius smiles wide and walks over, putting his arms around Remus from behind, taking the pen out of his hand like he could already tell it was somehow bothering Remus. “I said ‘James Potter is about to have a spawn in a few months.’ You are losing the race for us, Remus,” Sirius says, rubbing his nose on Remus’s neck. “How long are you gonna make me wait before we have some puppies?”
“Forever,” Remus replies, stretching a little in Sirius’s embrace and pushing the letter away. “I’m not giving birth to anything, human or canine, ever.”
“Bugger,” Sirius teases, jabbing Remus in the side.
“How was work?”
“Did you hear what I just bloody told you? We’re going to be fathers!”
“Here I was thinking James did all the work himself.”
“James never does anything without us, you know that.”
Remus rolls his eyes. “He did this alone, or you have some explaining to do.”
“Alright, whatever. You know what I meant. We’re going to be godfathers.”
“You’re going to be a godfather,” Remus says, trying not to sound sorry for himself. “I’m not legally allowed to be anything human’s godfather, remember?”
Sirius frowns, then smiles bright and wide. “Of course not, but the baby will need a fairy godmother, too.”
“And it’ll be getting two for the price of one,” Remus says, turning into Sirius and giving him a kiss. Sirius responds with enthusiasm and, Remus knows half of it is just Sirius trying to keep him distracted, but he doesn’t really care. It works.
“Better make Peter godfather,” Sirius says when they finally break the kiss. “I like being a fairy.”
Remus laughs and gives him a smack on the arse as Sirius leads the way to their bedroom. The letter sits on the table forgotten for weeks, and all of the anxiety it was causing sits there with it.
_______________________________________________________________
Remus reaches out for him some nights, when he wakes up and it’s still dark and Remus is still not entirely sober. It always takes a few seconds to remember why Sirius isn’t there.
The bed still has the other man’s imprint on the side Sirius used to sleep on. Remus knows he should do something about that. He should want to get rid of it, because being able to brush against the mattress and remember exactly what Sirius felt like lying there should be torture.
He likes the way the bed dips under his fingers, though. Likes knowing the way Sirius arranged his limbs. He even likes that the impression is turned in his direction, reminding him that Sirius spent more time holding him than not. He was alone in this bed long before Sirius left. He got addicted to feeling his lover in the mattress back when he was the bad guy, back when he could say “Sirius will sleep like this again when he realizes it isn’t me.” He can’t stop now.
_______________________________________________________________
They spend three months as strangers. Remus isn’t surprised that he’s the first person suspected when they find out there’s a traitor, but he takes the support of the Marauders for granted. He’s right to, at least at first, until someone finally points a finger in their direction and demands to know why they assume anyone could be guilty except for them. Sirius flings something ugly back, James laughs it off-but the question is a valid one.
Remus, for his part, never even wonders if it’s possible that the traitor is one of them. Sirius insists he doesn’t, either, loudly and to anyone who will listen. James and Lily and Peter do the same and Remus believes they all really aren’t suspicious. Not until the Death Eaters anticipate their attack-an attack only the five of them knew about.
They all draw apart then, almost instantly. They still spend time together, pretend things are okay, but the tension is ever-present. James and Lily huddle close, James always walking with an arm around Lily, protecting what’s his. Peter stays clear of them as much as possible, even of James.
Sirius and Remus are different, though. They’re not the ones being threatened like James and Lily, so there’s nothing for them to band together on, no basis for trust. They can’t withdraw like Peter. They’re in each other’s space and somehow everything that had once been a comfort to Remus goes sour.
Sirius never accuses him out front, but Remus knows the day he finally breaks. The door slams behind him and he comes into the living room, guns blazing before he’s even said hello.
“What do you do for Dumbledore that makes you so miserable?”
“You never asked me that before.”
“I’m asking you now.”
“You know I can’t tell you.”
Remus regrets that answer for the next three months, regrets that he does exactly what he’s been instructed to do. He thinks about telling Sirius after that, but he knows it’ll look suspicious, like he only came up with an answer after having time to think about it. So he kicks himself every day until October 30th because he thinks he should have just told him. Sirius is the person he can trust, always, no matter what Dumbledore says.
They don’t talk. They don’t touch. They lie in bed turned in opposite directions, listening to the hostile breathing on the other side because they can’t bring themselves to leave. Remus starts to hate Sirius, because Sirius thinks he’s a murderer and doesn’t even have the gall to say so out loud. Sirius should leave Remus. It says something awful about both of them that he’s able to face Remus in the morning thinking what he does. And Remus should leave Sirius, too, just for believing Remus could betray them. Remus never will. Deep down, he can’t even blame Sirius for what he’s thinking. He just doesn’t understand why Sirius won’t leave.
He overhears them one day, James, Sirius, and Peter, arguing about it. James stands up for him. Peter points out in a shaking voice that, “Well, he is a, you know, werewolf.” Sirius doesn’t say anything, not until the last few minutes when Peter’s already left. James says something comforting about Peter not knowing what he’s talking about, and Sirius replies in a soft, self-loathing whisper, “It could be him. I don’t know anymore.”
It’s not only Sirius being nasty after that, because knowing Sirius suspected him and hearing him say it out loud are two completely different things, and there’s only so much Remus can take. Nevertheless, they stubbornly continue on, lying to each other and themselves, pretending they still have what they used to.
This is how it goes for those three months, until one night Sirius comes home and everything is back. Not perfect, not the way it was at Hogwarts or for the brief period after they graduated when things were still good. But not the way it has been. Not a lie, not hatred and suspicion.
Sirius is swaying slightly when he gets home and Remus knows he’s been drinking. He doesn’t shove Remus away violently and insist he’s fine when help is offered like he’s done every other night since this started, so Remus clings tighter, helps hold him up.
Sirius looks at him then, his eyes suspiciously misty, and he apologizes. For everything. He says he knows it’s not Remus, that Remus could never do it. Remus doesn’t know what to say, wouldn’t get the chance to if he did. Sirius kisses him. Everything dies out and is replaced by just that one thought. Sirius is kissing me. He wants to kiss me. He doesn’t hate me anymore. He’s really kissing me.
Tomorrow, Remus thinks, they will address all of the things they should be talking about now. Tomorrow he will make Sirius answer for the way he’s behaved, for the way he’s made Remus feel. Tomorrow he can explain why he’s suddenly had this change of heart. Tonight, this is all the conversation Remus wants to have: Sirius touches him and Remus feels loved again.
Sirius is good to him the night before he destroys everything. He’s tender and goddamn reverential. He says I love you as they drift off to sleep, even though he’s never said it before, and Remus knows he means it.
Remus naively decides that this is the end of their problems, thinks they can face anything together. He wakes up the next morning happier than he can ever remember being.
_______________________________________________________________
The thing that hurts Remus the most, of all the unimaginably ugly things that happen on October 31, 1981, is the memory of the night before.
He wonders at first if it was deliberate on Sirius’s part, something he cooked up to hurt Remus even more. Remus doesn’t think it was. He spent the best years of his life questioning if Sirius loved him, terrified he would wake up one day and the other man would have realized how much better he can do. Remus spent their entire relationship skeptical of Sirius’s feelings for him and it’s now, when he wants nothing in the world but to believe that Sirius didn’t ever care about any of them, that Remus can’t doubt it for a second. The way he’d touched Remus and spoken to him that night-that was love.
He digs through every possible way out he can think of, desperately hoping he can invent something substantial enough to convince himself Sirius didn’t do it, that this is all a big mistake. Sirius couldn’t have, because Remus can’t believe that a man can make love the way Sirius did and go on to do the things his friend had just a few hours later. It doesn’t seem possible, let alone fair.
Remus eventually has to accept both of the unhappy truths about the man he’d once believed he was going to spend his entire life with. Sirius Black killed everything Remus had ever cared about, and he’d spared Remus. If he was going to kill anybody, he should have taken Remus out first. It was the one thing he couldn’t bring himself to do, Remus hates him for that more than anything. He’d be better off dead, like Lily and James and Peter, than alive and having to know what saved him.
Somehow, without a heart to do it with, Sirius Black had genuinely loved him. And Remus…Remus is hardly any better. There are times when he remembers where Sirius is and worries. He spends weeks trying to kill the part of him that pities his lover and he still can’t do it. If he’s being honest with himself, he probably would have been just as powerless to leave Sirius if he’d known as he was when he thought it was something else entirely tearing them apart.
They’d always been perfect friends, had always clicked despite the odds, and Remus now knows there was a reason for that. They were meant for each other, just not in the way he’d always liked to think.
For the first time since that kiss second year, Remus understands what Sirius saw in him. It’s not sweet or redeeming, and it has nothing to do with overcoming odds.
People expect the worst from us, but we’re better than that. We understand that. We’ll save each other. This was a mantra for him, once upon a time, back when he was trying desperately to believe that someone perfect, someone like Sirius, could want him. Remus snorts at this logic and drains the last few drops from his bottle.
He doesn’t know if loving him is what made Sirius a monster, or if it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter anymore; the end result is that Sirius turned out just as evil as the thing Remus turns into every month. Two monsters, Remus finally accepts, belong together, always will. He lets the empty bottle break on the floor, idly thinking that he’ll clean it up tomorrow, and curls up in bed with what’s left of his monster.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters/Pairings: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Peter
Genre: Angst
Rating: PG-13 for Language and Implied Sexuality
Word Count: 4,986
Author’s Note: Written for the 2010 rs_games Team Canon. My prompt was: “You held my hand when it was cold, when I was lost you took me home, you gave me hope when I was at the end, and turned my lies back into truth again. You even called me friend.” Thanks to cacklesthewitch for the beta :)
Summary: In the aftermath of October 31, 1981, Remus tries to understand how the man he knew and loved could be the same person who betrayed everything he’d ever cared about.
Alternate Link: http://community.livejournal.com/rs_games/95512.html
"Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?" - Vladimir Nabokov
Remus’s eyes open grudgingly. It’s the fifth time he wakes up this morning, but his first thought, once again, is that there is no point in being awake. He tries rolling over but his body finally lodges a formal protest and he knows there’s no hope for falling back asleep.
A bottle sits on his bed stand staring at him. “Good Morning,” it seems to say, half-full with liquid amber and about as friendly as Remus can hope for. He reaches out for it. There is nothing else to reach for.
It burns going down.
_______________________________________________________________
The last place in the world Remus wants to be at 6 in the morning in the middle of December is lying on wooden boards in a house that has more holes in the wall than blankets. A draft passes over the room, moves his hair and makes his face itch as it blows dust up. Remus doesn’t have the energy to turn over or reach for one of the quilts he so wisely left at the other side of the room. His teeth begin to knock together, but Remus is almost used to this by now. He rolls his eyes and lets out a deep, annoyed sigh.
Something warm moves over him. Remus’s eyes don’t open to check what it is. He’s probably dreaming and, even if it’s a hallucination, he’ll take what he can get. The quilt rolls itself around him lovingly, Remus lets his muscles relax.
“You okay, mate?”
Remus shoots up then, eyes wide and terrified. The blanket falls off his shoulders, but he’s too distracted to feel the cold anymore. Sirius is right there, kneeling next to him, close enough to touch-except that his hands are drawn back, too close to his chest.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
Sirius shrugs, points to the blanket as if it explains all.
“No. Really. What are you doing here?”
Sirius inclines his head to the side. “Don’t know how you do it,” he says.
“Do what?” Remus asks, his voice faltering.
“Crawl all the way back to the castle in this condition by yourself every month.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just got lost in the woods and thought I should stay here instead of-”
“Coming back to the dorm as a fully-transformed werewolf? Appreciate that.”
“You know?”
“Sure looks like it,” Sirius says, sounding a little upset. “Don’t see why you couldn’t just tell us.”
Remus doesn’t say anything in response to that, doesn’t look at Sirius, either. “How’d you find out?”
“We’re not complete idiots, you know. Except maybe Peter. We were bound to figure it out eventually.”
“We? You all know?” Remus looks down at his lap, pulls the blanket in against the chill that he knows has nothing to do with the snow outside. “Does everyone at school want me gone?”
“Never,” Sirius responds immediately before reeling himself back in. “We haven’t told anyone, and we’re not going to.”
“Then why are you here? To gloat? Rub it in that you figured me out? I bet James dared you to prove you weren’t too chicken-shit to come see the werewolf, huh?”
Sirius frowns. “We read somewhere that it was painful. I was just…worried.”
Remus laughs cruelly. “Yeah, sure. Worried about the werewolf.”
“I was,” he insists. “If I’d known it was this bad, I would’ve come sooner.”
“How much sooner?” Remus almost doesn’t want to know just how long he’s been figured out, but curiosity wins out.
“James put it together over the summer,” Sirius admits, wincing slightly in response to Remus’s expression. He leans a little closer and puts his hand on Remus’s wrist. “We’ve known this whole time and nothing’s been different, right? We don’t care, Remus.”
Remus shoves the hand away. He’s still riled up from the wolf and the knowledge that his friends all know is more than he can handle right now. He can’t really listen to what Sirius is saying or focus on how soft his tone and touches are. All he can think is that it’s all up. He was happy for five minutes in his life, he knew this would happen eventually.
“Leave me alone.”
Sirius’s eyes get just a little bit wider, but he doesn’t even flinch. “Remus, I just wanted to help you-”
“Piss off,” Remus says, actually pushing this time. “You never want to help anyone, you think I’m stupid enough to think you’ve grown a conscience all of a sudden?”
“It’s different,” Sirius almost whispers. “You’re different.”
Something tugs hard at Remus’s insides, something warm and wonderful and Remus despises it, because he knows this is an act and all he wants is for it to be real. They can’t be okay with what Remus is and Sirius can’t really care, not about him. It’s not the way things work. Remus launches forward. Survival instincts, Remus decides. The wolf is still present and it senses a threat.
Sirius stumbles backwards and Remus doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he’s hovering over Sirius, his arm poised to strike. Sirius closes his eyes tightly and turns away, anticipating the hit. That’s when it dawns on Remus that he’s about to attack his best friend Sirius for no real reason at all.
Remus lets his hand drop to the side. When a few seconds have passed without any punches, Sirius tentatively opens one eye. Remus says nothing, too scared of how his friend will respond. If Sirius really didn’t hate him before, Remus has just given him a perfectly good reason to reverse that.
“Sirius, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, I just-”
“It’s okay, Remus. It’s okay. I know.”
Remus attempts to shift then, give his friend the space to sit back up, but Sirius doesn’t let him move. Elegant fingers reach up and brush a loose hair out of Remus’s face. He stares up at Remus for a long time and Remus looks down, neither of them moving or even breathing. Sirius’s expression is probing, like Remus is suddenly a foreign object he’s never seen before. Remus thinks he must look the same.
Neither of them really seems to know what they’re looking at, but Remus doesn’t blink or look away, afraid he’ll miss it. He doesn’t quite understand what’s happening until Sirius has leaned up and Remus down and their lips suddenly meet in the middle. It’s his first kiss and as much as it surprises him, he doesn’t stop or question it. They pull away at the same time, Sirius looks as scared as Remus feels, but there’s a small upward turn at the corner of his mouth when he brings his fingers up to trace his lips.
Remus stands up and turns his back to his friend. “We should head back before people start waking up, or Madame Pomfrey comes looking for me and finds both of us.”
Sirius surprises him with a hand brushing his own, tangling their fingers together. He doesn’t say anything the rest of the way back, but he holds fast to Remus’s hand and Remus doesn’t feel the cold anymore.
_______________________________________________________________
Remus drinks a lot now. He’d never put much stock in alcohol as a coping mechanism before, had generally been the one snatching bottles away from Sirius when the other man was in one of his moods.
He needs it now, though, as long as he’s here, he’s going to need it. There are potions that will make him numb, some might even help him forget, but as long as he knows where he is, there’s no potion that can change the way he feels when he looks around his apartment. Sirius’s apartment. All the stupid things Sirius had come home with, looking so excited over them that Remus always felt the presence of a wagging tail, even when Sirius was not Padfoot.
The most important part of Remus’s morning is drinking until these things all blur together. It’s much, much easier that way.
_______________________________________________________________
“No, you’re lying,” Lily says, clapping a hand over her mouth as she laughs. “You have to be lying.”
“I swear on my mum,” Remus says, laughing a little himself. He takes another sip from his firewhiskey and continues, “So for an entire month, I would wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s this bloody great dog on my bed. And he’s climbing over me and curling up in my space and one day I say to Sirius, ‘I’ve been having the weirdest dreams lately. Don’t imagine you’ve seen a big dog wandering around on the grounds recently?’”
“And he owned up to it?” asks Lily.
Remus snorts. “We must not be talking about the same Sirius.”
Lily looks back out at the backyard where James and Padfoot are wrestling. James waves proudly when he realizes they have an audience and promises that he is going to win in her honor. Padfoot barks and knocks him over and Wormtail scurries to the side, trying to avoid being landed on. Lily shakes her head.
“What did he do then?”
“Oh, you know. Pulled a Sirius. ‘That is a weird thing to ask, Moony, sure you’re feeling all there? Always did think you were liable to go a little mental.’”
“Insufferable,” Lily says, smiling.
“Of course, that’s when he decided to get really creative. So I would wake up and he’d be sticking his head into my side for attention and I figure, what the hell, it’s a dream, right?”
She nods.
“I scratch his belly and the damn thing winks at me!”
“Stop it! And you still had no clue?”
“I thought I was just having recurring dreams in which a giant dog flirts with me. Weirder things have happened. Then the next full moon comes around and there he is with the stag and the rat, acting perfectly innocent.”
“I was innocent,” Sirius says, surprising both Remus and Lily with his sudden contribution to the conversation. He sits on the arm of Remus’s chair and smiles when Remus glowers at him, taking the drink out of his hand and sipping from it. “Don’t know what I’m accused of, but I’m almost positive I was innocent.”
“Weren’t you busy playing with your little friends?” Remus asks in his most condescending tone.
“Oh, I was very busy indeed, but then I saw you over here being all clever and amusing and I knew you had to be talking about me.”
Remus smirks. “I was just telling Lily about how you couldn’t keep the secret fifth year.”
“It’s not my fault I figured the Animagus thing out so fast. I wanted to show off, dammit.”
“You? Show off?” James says, taking the chair next to Lily and grabbing a bottle off the table in the middle of the deck.
Sirius responds by sticking his tongue out and looking around. “Where’s Peter, then?”
“I think he went inside to get more cheese,” James jokes, earning him a smack on the shoulder when the rat that had been next to his seat turns into Peter.
“Everybody accounted for?”
“What do you have up your sleeve?” Remus asks, eyes narrowing.
“Nothing but a heartwarming and completely socially acceptable toast to our futures,” Sirius says, raising his, or rather Remus’s, glass.
“Stop, stop, you’ll make me cry,” Peter says.
“Oi, everything makes you cry,” says James.
“Not everything,” Remus interrupts. “He’s the only one of you who didn’t cry when we went to the Muggle cinema, if you’ll recall.”
“Well, that’s a testament to his cold heart,” James says solemnly. “That Bond bloke was a patriot.”
Sirius clears his throat. “Excuse me, but there was a very important toast going on here.”
“Oh, by all means. When Sirius is the one staying on topic, attention must be paid.” Lily raises an eyebrow and indicates that he should continue.
“Very well. Let us raise our glasses, bottles, empty hands, whatever, in honor of…um. Ourselves. We will never have to go back to Hogwarts and see Severus Snape’s unwashed hair or giant nose again.”
“We also won’t have to smell Peter’s socks anymore,” James says. “Sorry mate,” he adds, turning to Peter who shrugs good-humoredly.
“Yes, this is just poetry,” Lily says, her tone flat.
“We are going to go on in life and be responsible adults. Except for those of us who aren’t Lily. We’ll probably all just be fired after our first weeks and come home and get pissed together every night.”
Remus grabs the nearest bottle and raises it.
“But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We’ll come home and get pissed together every night. Which makes it romantic instead of pathetic.”
“Here, here,” James agrees, earning a ‘don’t even think about it’ glare from Lily.
“I, um. What else did I want to add, Remus?”
“Mischief Managed?”
“Brilliant!” Sirius says, flailing his arms and coating Remus in what was formerly his own beverage. “What he said.”
“What he said!” James and Peter both cry, and even Lily clinks her glass into the center of the group as they all smack each other on the back and mumble incoherent messages about how proud they are of each other.
Forty-five minutes later, James comes out from the kitchen and tells them to all piss off because he thinks he’s going to get laid. Lily yells something from the house that could be a protest, but when James still hasn’t re-entered in five minutes, she comes back out and starts doing the shooing herself.
Peter squeaks in fear when he sees her approaching and immediately Apparates. Sirius grabs Remus’s jacket and aims a warm, slightly drunk smile at him. “Let’s go.”
“You want me to go home with you?” Remus asks, licking his lips.
Surprisingly, Sirius doesn’t waggle his eyebrows or grope or do anything that Sirius would do.
“I want you to come home,” he says, voice even. His expression is a little nervous and Remus can’t pretend he doesn’t mean exactly what Remus thinks he does.
“You probably should have asked me to move in sooner,” Remus says. “All my things are on my way to my parent’s.”
“Nuh uh, I stole them,” Sirius says, eyes bright. “They’re waiting for you in our living room.”
Our living room, Remus thinks. Can’t really say no to that.
_______________________________________________________________
At the end of the day, Remus stumbles into bed.
He knows that the next day will be a repeat: he’ll spend every moment just as drunk, wishing that it was enough to make him stop caring. Remus never really does stop caring, but he cares less about caring after a while.
The bed is too big for him. No surprise there. It was made to hold them both and it did its job admirably, long after they stopped sharing it, and even now when Remus has no reason to hope that tomorrow will be the day they fix everything.
_______________________________________________________________
Things get bad pretty fast for them after Hogwarts. What seemed like a terrible but removed threat becomes much more immediate without the safety of their school’s walls. They begin to lose people and they begin to fight back.
James is the first to join the Order, which is a terribly James thing to do. He makes a fantastic hero, and as usual, he drags everyone into the fray with him. This time it’s for the best.
Lily goes second. She’s the one in the most danger, of course, and Remus knows she thinks of her family every time there’s another report of Muggles getting attacked.
Peter follows James shortly thereafter, takes a few weeks to be torn between terror and wanting to be like his hero. Remus is proud, but not surprised, when his courage wins out. Whatever Sirius may say, Peter is a Gryffindor at the end of the day.
Sirius joins because of Remus. The day he gets home and finds out Remus has been fired, finds out werewolves are no longer considered safe to be employed at the Ministry of Magic, he tracks down Alistair Moody and refuses to go home until he’s in.
Remus is the last to join. He is not welcome at first. Sirius, Lily, James, and Peter raise the issue for three months before Dumbledore and McGonagall throw their weight in and everyone who had been arguing that a werewolf had to be on Voldemort’s side is forced to shut up and welcome him.
The missions are terrible for all of them, but Remus thinks he has it worst. Lily loves the work she does for the Order, helps organize the hospital after attacks and manages to save more lives than she loses. Peter plays spy, and they all have laughs at the expense of the other members when they ask how he manages to overhear so much. Sirius decides that it’s poetic, using their rat as a rat. Peter almost doesn’t know how to take so much positive attention, but he certainly doesn’t ever complain. James and Sirius, however much they hate the fallout, love the heat of battles. Remus is sent to meet with werewolves, always kept separate from his friends and not really able to see how he’s helping. The other werewolves are suspicious of him and Remus is suspicious of them. There is nothing in the world Remus hates more some days than seeing himself reflected in them.
But nothing is really unbearable when things first start. They keep on living, even through the war. Sirius never lets Remus get too upset without pulling him back in, reminding him that there’s another pack he belongs to, one he wants to be a part of. Theirs.
“Lily’s knocked up,” Sirius announces one day, first thing as he walks in the door.
Remus lifts his head from the letter he was writing to Dumbledore. “What?”
Sirius smiles wide and walks over, putting his arms around Remus from behind, taking the pen out of his hand like he could already tell it was somehow bothering Remus. “I said ‘James Potter is about to have a spawn in a few months.’ You are losing the race for us, Remus,” Sirius says, rubbing his nose on Remus’s neck. “How long are you gonna make me wait before we have some puppies?”
“Forever,” Remus replies, stretching a little in Sirius’s embrace and pushing the letter away. “I’m not giving birth to anything, human or canine, ever.”
“Bugger,” Sirius teases, jabbing Remus in the side.
“How was work?”
“Did you hear what I just bloody told you? We’re going to be fathers!”
“Here I was thinking James did all the work himself.”
“James never does anything without us, you know that.”
Remus rolls his eyes. “He did this alone, or you have some explaining to do.”
“Alright, whatever. You know what I meant. We’re going to be godfathers.”
“You’re going to be a godfather,” Remus says, trying not to sound sorry for himself. “I’m not legally allowed to be anything human’s godfather, remember?”
Sirius frowns, then smiles bright and wide. “Of course not, but the baby will need a fairy godmother, too.”
“And it’ll be getting two for the price of one,” Remus says, turning into Sirius and giving him a kiss. Sirius responds with enthusiasm and, Remus knows half of it is just Sirius trying to keep him distracted, but he doesn’t really care. It works.
“Better make Peter godfather,” Sirius says when they finally break the kiss. “I like being a fairy.”
Remus laughs and gives him a smack on the arse as Sirius leads the way to their bedroom. The letter sits on the table forgotten for weeks, and all of the anxiety it was causing sits there with it.
_______________________________________________________________
Remus reaches out for him some nights, when he wakes up and it’s still dark and Remus is still not entirely sober. It always takes a few seconds to remember why Sirius isn’t there.
The bed still has the other man’s imprint on the side Sirius used to sleep on. Remus knows he should do something about that. He should want to get rid of it, because being able to brush against the mattress and remember exactly what Sirius felt like lying there should be torture.
He likes the way the bed dips under his fingers, though. Likes knowing the way Sirius arranged his limbs. He even likes that the impression is turned in his direction, reminding him that Sirius spent more time holding him than not. He was alone in this bed long before Sirius left. He got addicted to feeling his lover in the mattress back when he was the bad guy, back when he could say “Sirius will sleep like this again when he realizes it isn’t me.” He can’t stop now.
_______________________________________________________________
They spend three months as strangers. Remus isn’t surprised that he’s the first person suspected when they find out there’s a traitor, but he takes the support of the Marauders for granted. He’s right to, at least at first, until someone finally points a finger in their direction and demands to know why they assume anyone could be guilty except for them. Sirius flings something ugly back, James laughs it off-but the question is a valid one.
Remus, for his part, never even wonders if it’s possible that the traitor is one of them. Sirius insists he doesn’t, either, loudly and to anyone who will listen. James and Lily and Peter do the same and Remus believes they all really aren’t suspicious. Not until the Death Eaters anticipate their attack-an attack only the five of them knew about.
They all draw apart then, almost instantly. They still spend time together, pretend things are okay, but the tension is ever-present. James and Lily huddle close, James always walking with an arm around Lily, protecting what’s his. Peter stays clear of them as much as possible, even of James.
Sirius and Remus are different, though. They’re not the ones being threatened like James and Lily, so there’s nothing for them to band together on, no basis for trust. They can’t withdraw like Peter. They’re in each other’s space and somehow everything that had once been a comfort to Remus goes sour.
Sirius never accuses him out front, but Remus knows the day he finally breaks. The door slams behind him and he comes into the living room, guns blazing before he’s even said hello.
“What do you do for Dumbledore that makes you so miserable?”
“You never asked me that before.”
“I’m asking you now.”
“You know I can’t tell you.”
Remus regrets that answer for the next three months, regrets that he does exactly what he’s been instructed to do. He thinks about telling Sirius after that, but he knows it’ll look suspicious, like he only came up with an answer after having time to think about it. So he kicks himself every day until October 30th because he thinks he should have just told him. Sirius is the person he can trust, always, no matter what Dumbledore says.
They don’t talk. They don’t touch. They lie in bed turned in opposite directions, listening to the hostile breathing on the other side because they can’t bring themselves to leave. Remus starts to hate Sirius, because Sirius thinks he’s a murderer and doesn’t even have the gall to say so out loud. Sirius should leave Remus. It says something awful about both of them that he’s able to face Remus in the morning thinking what he does. And Remus should leave Sirius, too, just for believing Remus could betray them. Remus never will. Deep down, he can’t even blame Sirius for what he’s thinking. He just doesn’t understand why Sirius won’t leave.
He overhears them one day, James, Sirius, and Peter, arguing about it. James stands up for him. Peter points out in a shaking voice that, “Well, he is a, you know, werewolf.” Sirius doesn’t say anything, not until the last few minutes when Peter’s already left. James says something comforting about Peter not knowing what he’s talking about, and Sirius replies in a soft, self-loathing whisper, “It could be him. I don’t know anymore.”
It’s not only Sirius being nasty after that, because knowing Sirius suspected him and hearing him say it out loud are two completely different things, and there’s only so much Remus can take. Nevertheless, they stubbornly continue on, lying to each other and themselves, pretending they still have what they used to.
This is how it goes for those three months, until one night Sirius comes home and everything is back. Not perfect, not the way it was at Hogwarts or for the brief period after they graduated when things were still good. But not the way it has been. Not a lie, not hatred and suspicion.
Sirius is swaying slightly when he gets home and Remus knows he’s been drinking. He doesn’t shove Remus away violently and insist he’s fine when help is offered like he’s done every other night since this started, so Remus clings tighter, helps hold him up.
Sirius looks at him then, his eyes suspiciously misty, and he apologizes. For everything. He says he knows it’s not Remus, that Remus could never do it. Remus doesn’t know what to say, wouldn’t get the chance to if he did. Sirius kisses him. Everything dies out and is replaced by just that one thought. Sirius is kissing me. He wants to kiss me. He doesn’t hate me anymore. He’s really kissing me.
Tomorrow, Remus thinks, they will address all of the things they should be talking about now. Tomorrow he will make Sirius answer for the way he’s behaved, for the way he’s made Remus feel. Tomorrow he can explain why he’s suddenly had this change of heart. Tonight, this is all the conversation Remus wants to have: Sirius touches him and Remus feels loved again.
Sirius is good to him the night before he destroys everything. He’s tender and goddamn reverential. He says I love you as they drift off to sleep, even though he’s never said it before, and Remus knows he means it.
Remus naively decides that this is the end of their problems, thinks they can face anything together. He wakes up the next morning happier than he can ever remember being.
_______________________________________________________________
The thing that hurts Remus the most, of all the unimaginably ugly things that happen on October 31, 1981, is the memory of the night before.
He wonders at first if it was deliberate on Sirius’s part, something he cooked up to hurt Remus even more. Remus doesn’t think it was. He spent the best years of his life questioning if Sirius loved him, terrified he would wake up one day and the other man would have realized how much better he can do. Remus spent their entire relationship skeptical of Sirius’s feelings for him and it’s now, when he wants nothing in the world but to believe that Sirius didn’t ever care about any of them, that Remus can’t doubt it for a second. The way he’d touched Remus and spoken to him that night-that was love.
He digs through every possible way out he can think of, desperately hoping he can invent something substantial enough to convince himself Sirius didn’t do it, that this is all a big mistake. Sirius couldn’t have, because Remus can’t believe that a man can make love the way Sirius did and go on to do the things his friend had just a few hours later. It doesn’t seem possible, let alone fair.
Remus eventually has to accept both of the unhappy truths about the man he’d once believed he was going to spend his entire life with. Sirius Black killed everything Remus had ever cared about, and he’d spared Remus. If he was going to kill anybody, he should have taken Remus out first. It was the one thing he couldn’t bring himself to do, Remus hates him for that more than anything. He’d be better off dead, like Lily and James and Peter, than alive and having to know what saved him.
Somehow, without a heart to do it with, Sirius Black had genuinely loved him. And Remus…Remus is hardly any better. There are times when he remembers where Sirius is and worries. He spends weeks trying to kill the part of him that pities his lover and he still can’t do it. If he’s being honest with himself, he probably would have been just as powerless to leave Sirius if he’d known as he was when he thought it was something else entirely tearing them apart.
They’d always been perfect friends, had always clicked despite the odds, and Remus now knows there was a reason for that. They were meant for each other, just not in the way he’d always liked to think.
For the first time since that kiss second year, Remus understands what Sirius saw in him. It’s not sweet or redeeming, and it has nothing to do with overcoming odds.
People expect the worst from us, but we’re better than that. We understand that. We’ll save each other. This was a mantra for him, once upon a time, back when he was trying desperately to believe that someone perfect, someone like Sirius, could want him. Remus snorts at this logic and drains the last few drops from his bottle.
He doesn’t know if loving him is what made Sirius a monster, or if it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter anymore; the end result is that Sirius turned out just as evil as the thing Remus turns into every month. Two monsters, Remus finally accepts, belong together, always will. He lets the empty bottle break on the floor, idly thinking that he’ll clean it up tomorrow, and curls up in bed with what’s left of his monster.