Fic: This World Is For The Young And Beautiful
This World Is For The Young And Beautiful
By minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Era: Grimmauld Place/MWPP
Summary: Sirius’s last year, flashbacks.
Rating: PG-13
Dedication: Another one for astra_argentea, with thanks for a quick beta and because she likes it!
Posted to my journal, remusxsirius and starcrossedmoon.
This World Is For The Young And Beautiful
The first September in Grimmauld Place marks the 24th anniversary of their meeting. Not the silver, yet: that will be next year. A bad omen, perhaps, in view of werewolf lore.
They avoid words like ‘anniversary’, because so many of the events they could commemorate are too sad, and no doubt they have very different memories of the first time they saw each other. Not all their memories are shared, or even similar.
Remus lets himself soundlessly into the house that’s so silent now the children are back at school and the Weasleys only come here on Order business, though Molly pops in to cook dinner from time to time. It’s an autumn morning, early, five a.m., but Sirius is already up and in the kitchen waiting for him. There’s tea in the pot, and he’s rationed the Firewhisky to one small nip, just to put some warmth in his bones. The dog can sniff the woody smell of outdoors - a bonfire in the square, perhaps - can feel the vestiges of summer lingering in a patch of warmth on Remus’s robe, distinct from the warmth that Remus brings with him whenever he walks into a room.
Though the start of the Hogwarts term has come and gone, the images float between them above the kitchen table as they talk in the low voices that the hour imposes. Another autumn morning, if the seasons are to be defined by the school year, and an encounter that wasn’t really a meeting. Two black-haired boys thrown together by the demands of the dwindling pureblood community, though as time went on the Blacks grew less willing to have the scion of the family associating with the Potters. But Sirius always was spurred on rather than deterred by his parents’ interdictions, so he sought out James purposefully as soon as he and his trunk had been dumped on Platform 9¾, and made sure they were in a carriage together.
He didn’t take kindly to the fact there was another occupant of the carriage, a skinny boy with messy light brown hair and a self-contained air that came across as aloofness.
Now, sometimes, in his dreams, that aloof, skinny boy is lying on a bed with him, and they’re kissing each other with more passion than skill, and he will know absolutely that this was the most important meeting, or nearly. James he tries to keep well away from the surface. James he loved, Remus he loves. Or thinks he does. He loved. God, yes, he did, because this is the eternal paradox of Azkaban: the Dementors leave whatever you find painful, not realising that when times are harsh, the happy memories are the most painful of all. So Sirius can replay, can relive, many of the best, the sweetest details of the past.
He’ll close his eyes and it’s autumn again, in a different year, when the damp weather turned the falling leaves to mulch under the trees by the lake. There was one particular day when the two boys ran back to the castle through the rain, books open over their heads so they wouldn’t get too wet, wands left carelessly flung on beds, used as bookmarks, anywhere but safely in the pockets of robes, where they ought to have been.
They caught colds, of course, and Pomfrey scolded them, because colds had no cure in a wizarding school. She allowed them to stay in bed in the dorm, instead of infecting the other patients in the Hospital Wing, the ones with respectable, magical diseases. As soon as James and Peter had gone down to lessons - Peter with much grumbling about how lucky Remus and Sirius were, and how he could do with a cold, though he didn’t catch it - Sirius got into Remus’s bed, and they made snuffling, sneezy, coughing, ecstatic love, until the bustling of the house-elves come to tidy the dorm sent Sirius scooting back into his own bed again.
*
Already, Remus is away for long swathes of time on Order business. Sirius knows, he’s said it himself, that some things are worth dying for. Some things are worth being lonely for, reaching for the fresh bottle of Firewhisky, wandering through the past for hours every day and trying to tread round James and Lily. He’s spent fourteen years reliving their death, and that does inure you, though sometimes a glimpse of a very young James with his Head Boy badge will flare up in his memory and undo him completely. Though when was James not very young, after all?
The present continues to be a problem, however; the present where two faded, one-time lovers gaze at each other across the vast expanses of space the Black family considered necessary for wizarding aristocrats.
Sometimes, it’s as if they’re chasing ghosts through Grimmauld Place, through the bedroom and attics and drawing rooms, and the ballroom where the Blacks used to entertain wizarding heads of state, even Voldemort himself on one occasion. Sirius can almost hear the clatter of heels on the marble floor. The weather outside worsens; the windows rattle, and in the draughty room, phantom dancers twirl and sway to the discordant music of the wind.
He’s given Remus the grand tour, shown him the old bedroom where he never wants to sleep again. ‘I hate this room. I had so many nightmares here.’
It’s spacious, with a big, soft bed. The bookcase, crammed with a younger Sirius’s wizarding library, is compelling, in spite of any bad associations lurking here. They occasionally come up for no reason, perhaps to sit on the floor and look through the old Quidditch annuals, and Sirius is sure that he can glimpse the outlines of the two boys they once were kneeling by the fire, playing chess, the way they do every evening in the drawing room. Not that Remus ever entered this room, the house even, before last summer.
Sirius has no words to tell Remus how much he knows, how much he still remembers. The first meeting, the aloof boy, the slight irritation when he was in the same house, the same dorm… He remembers the werewolf thing, though that wasn't one of the good times, because it was the day he first really saw Remus, when Remus came into focus. Until then, he’d seemed rather like a ghost himself, always creeping about, making as little noise as possible, always sick. Sirius used to imagine that he had some fatal disease, had maybe already died, like Professor Binns, and just kept on going through the rounds of school and homework because he didn’t know what else to do.
It was a November morning, much like the mornings now, when Sirius is too cold to get out of bed before Kreacher has come in to light the fire, a job he still performs out of some Pavlovian reflex. Of course, Sirius could light the fire himself, but his second-hand wand is unreliable, and needs to be conserved for a real emergency.
After breakfast, when they were up in the dorm making their beds and getting their schoolbags, they sat Remus down and confronted him. Behind him, out of the window, Sirius could see the red and yellow leaves drifting down on to the lawn. He fantasised that each leaf was one of the tears that Remus was steadfastly refusing to shed as he watched them with wary eyes, waiting passively for the world to break apart around him.
James was the kindest, Sirius remembers with a pang, and Peter was frightened, until James sneered at him and said what a poor Gryffindor he was. Sirius was…cruel. He called Remus a filthy liar, and taunted him that he should have been in Slytherin, with Snivellus. ‘You’re even sneakier than he is, wolf boy.’ He still isn’t sure why: perhaps because he already was drawn to the reserved child in the bed next to his, and the pureblood Black was ashamed to admit it.
Besides, Sirius considered him such an unlikely werewolf. In his own mind’s eye, in Remus's too, possibly, Sirius was charismatic, bursting with vitality, so magnetic that you couldn’t help looking at him, watching him; and beside him, Remus so pale, insignificant. And yet Sirius can remember, clearly, watching Remus with a sort of hunger, finding him beautiful and desirable.
He made up for his cruelty with the Animagus work. He remembers being Padfoot the first few times, long nights when the wolf needed to be controlled for hours on end, and mornings shivering under a thin blanket, shivering in his own fur, and Remus hugging him fiercely, kissing him sometimes, whispering things in his ear that he didn’t quite hear, or want to hear.
Now, the dog is mangy. When Sirius transforms, Padfoot retains the skeletal thinness, the burning eyes that sometimes seem quite mad, the matted fur. Remus has washed Sirius’s hair for him with magic, with shampoo, every day for the past month, but the dog’s fur is still matted. He thinks that Remus is a bit diffident about offering Padfoot a bath.
*
The year is starting to unravel too fast, the slow, languorous autumn hardening into frost and dark mornings, nights when the sky is dizzyingly full of stars. He can’t see them, of course, but he gets an occasional glimpse of the outside when Order members file in through the front door.
Christmas is unexpectedly good, though Remus doesn’t come home until late on Christmas morning and spends most of the day ferrying Harry and the Weasleys to and from St. Mungo’s.
It’s not as good as the winters then, of course. They were the best times, the wonderful Christmases, like being inside a swirling snow globe with aromatic pine trees and the shiniest of baubles; memories that hurt beyond belief in the bleak cells of Azkaban, where there was no sign whatsoever of the passing of the year, beyond an extra chill in the already chilly air.
He and Remus were alone together that last Christmas at Hogwarts, the Christmas of the full moon. They celebrated properly on Boxing Day, and the Headmaster arranged for them to have their Christmas dinner then, up in the Hospital Wing. It should have been a bit bleak, a bit miserable, in the infirmary with its dim light and slight smell of medicinal potions, but it was wonderful. Sirius smuggled up half a bottle of Firewhisky, and they drank it in a way Sirius can no longer drink, sipping from their tooth mugs.
They agreed that it went brilliantly with turkey, masking their grimaces when they could, because they were seventeen and eighteen and of age, and men could handle their drink, even if was strong and bitter.
In Grimmauld Place, Remus comes home with snow on his cloak, and Sirius, ever the dog, puts his tongue out and licks the snowflakes off. It’s an intensely personal gesture, intimate even, but Remus doesn’t move away or flinch, and Sirius has hopes once more that they can retrieve some of what has been lost
He tries to be with Remus as much as he can, those days Remus isn’t with him. He plans and schemes. The thought of Remus in his bed is alien to him, yet the boy in his bed once upon a time, in the lovely and inviolable world of late childhood, is part of his very soul. He will spend the afternoon reliving the happiest events of his life in almost three-dimensional detail. He sits by the fire for hours while his mind wanders off with Remus to the Room of Requirement, where in winter you could look down through the small window and see the Gryffindors far beneath, making snowmen with red and gold scarves. He always expected James to glance up and wave, but of course they were invisible, in the hidden, secret room.
Yet when the real Remus actually appears before him, he is paralysed, totally undone. He can’t do more than take another swig from his bottle - he’s long since given up such niceties as glasses - and stagger, though he doesn’t want to, to this person he knows yet doesn’t know, and perhaps try to embrace him.
‘You’ve been drinking again,’ Remus will say. He isn’t accusing, really; indulgent, almost, as if he’s waiting for Sirius to get indignant and swear he never touched a drop.
Sirius wants to be able to make that move, or he thinks he wants to. The man in front of him bears vestiges of the boy he loved: the hazel eyes, still clear and without guile, the mouth still slightly turned up, and the golden hairs in the brown still outnumber the grey ones.
‘It’s freezing out,’ Remus will say, taking off his gloves. ‘Let me have a drop of that.’
It’s Remus who has more alcohol than he’s used to, and reminds Sirius about another Christmas, the Potters’ last Christmas, the one he’d forgotten because Peter had already told him he thought Remus was the spy. Of course, he’d been indignant, angry even, but Peter’s words had stuck.
‘We went round London on the top of a bus, looking at the decorations. Don’t you remember, Padfoot? We sat at right at the front, and the parents with kids getting on the bus gave us filthy looks. I wanted to move, but you wouldn’t.’
He’ll let Remus think he’s forgotten because it was one of the good times. That seems a kind thing to do. If he tries, he can recall scattered details that become clearer as the evening goes on. A London very unlike the one he’s in now. The lights in Oxford Street, and holding Remus’s hand on the bus, and that Muggle couple staring at them, curious rather than repelled. He can remember the feel of Remus’s hand in his, its smoothness, the short nails - the werewolf has a horror of long nails - the way his palms got slightly sweaty after a while on the overcrowded, overheated vehicle.
They see in the New Year with a bottle of wine, for a change, but nothing seems any different after the clocks have struck midnight.
*
The mirrors are turned to the wall, their voices disconnected by a harsh spell whispered in the early hours of the morning when Sirius was searching through Grimmauld Place for himself. He assumes Remus doesn’t mind, because he never was one for mirrors or reflections, unless it was the minuscule image of himself in Sirius’s eyes.
No doubt he could easily seduce Remus with reminders of their shared history, even if they've moved beyond it. They’re hanging on now, for their lives, and Sirius gets drunk yet again and grumbles that his life is shit anyway.
He remembers more than Remus, he thinks. Remus has had twelve years in the real world, the chance to create new memories to soften some of the bad ones, if that were possible. Or conversely, you could say that Remus hasn’t had the luxury of living always in the past but had to endure an extra twelve years of the present.
There are times when Sirius will talk about a particular day, a quality of light, a feeling, and Remus will look blank, and try to hide it. Remus may have retained more of the stupid details: the book they squabbled over once in Divination, which was apparently a textbook about astrological houses, a detail that escapes Sirius, but he can remember the fumblings of their first time, down by the lake on a spring night: a warm night, at least, and a lovely one, both then and now, with the moon, not the full moon, of course, rising in a clear sky
He has no idea why they went all the way out to the lake, why Remus risked expulsion: probably some issue with the dorm. He doesn’t know what, because they often did amazing things there. Perhaps they wanted that night to be especially romantic. He feels he should ask Remus, but doesn’t.
Sometimes, Remus is reticent. They’ll almost be back there, curled up together on the hearth, almost holding hands, almost touching, and they’ll be talking about certain days, certain times. Sirius will speak, through a lump in his throat, about the shack one May morning, a perfect morning after the second shortest full moon of the year, Remus virtually unharmed except for the terrible pain of transformation, but that would always pass. The sunrise through the window, and snuggling up as Padfoot, right under James and Peter’s noses. There was nothing dark about that morning, just a sort of innocence, the wolf boy and his dog, and a bond and love between them that actually ached.
A shadow, though, will cross Remus’s face, and he’ll change the subject in a ridiculously obvious way, talk about the Order or the stew Molly promised them for dinner. It’s almost as if he weren’t part of Remus’s private life, Sirius sometimes thinks sourly, as if the boy in the memory had been someone else. Well, he was, in a way. He was happy and confident, and now he is utterly destroyed.
We should have gone through life together, Sirius reflects. We should have shared all our experiences. We should finish each other’s sentences, know each other by heart.
Still, what’s the point, now that they are almost halfway through an ordinary Muggle life span? In normal times, they would have been young for wizards, adolescents, virtually. In normal times, they might have been one of those boring couples who meet at school and stay together for the rest of their lives. Perhaps their story, the drama and the tragedy, make them more interesting. Sirius is never quite sure whether he’d prefer boring, though on the whole he thinks not: life in Grimmauld Place, stuck here with the mad portraits and the madder house-elf, is stifling enough. A lifetime like this would have killed them both, no doubt.
But he knows, really, that it would have been wonderful. Get Remus against the light on a pale spring morning, and he’ll catch his breath, because Moony is there again, right next to him, and it’s all he can do not to reach out and hug him close, closer, closest, a superlative of love and longing.
Love is the real spell, the single spell that can turn back time. He’s not the only one who can feel it, in his Firewhisky haze. He's sure that Remus can too, sometimes, when Sirius has coaxed him a bit nearer, as if he really were a wild, skittish creature. And Remus in a good mood, a good moon, one could say, will hold out his hands, as if his touch is the key to the magic door that only love can unlock.
It may be Remus who says, ‘Do you remember the day we…?’ and unleash a thousand sensory images tumbling over each other: sugar quills, snow on the roof, a spinning top that Peter acquired from an ageing aunt, James hunched over the Transfiguration textbook, covering his ears with his hands so he could concentrate, Lily Evans smiling at James when he wasn’t looking - her hair, her glorious hair, aflame in the light from the fire - and Remus smiling at him when he was looking, smiling as if he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it, as if it was painful, like the memory is now.
Rainy mornings, the sweet smell of wet earth, and sunny afternoons that always had that edge of slight dreariness, because the sun leeched the colour from the sky outside the classroom window, and it always seemed to be History of Magic. The quiet boy with the light brown hair would never fidget as Sirius did, but sit completely still, so still that sometimes you might worry that he’d never move again, would stay rooted at his desk forever.
Sirius vividly remembers one morning when Remus was sunk in gloom, because Professor Dumbledore had spoken to him sharply about his inability to keep his friends from bullying Snape, and told him pointedly that he shouldn’t be so indulgent towards Sirius Black. ‘You don’t think he suspects anything, do you?’ Remus kept asking. He actually mentioned suicide pacts, and Sirius would have laughed if he’d been less worried, because he was supposed to be the melodramatic one. Looking back, he could shake those two as they were then, pale and upset, and so scared about James and Peter finding out. ‘That really would finish me off,’ Remus said, looking at the floor, scraping his already scuffed shoe on the ground.
What did those boys know about despair and loss and pain? Everything, they thought at the time. They wasted a whole beautiful May morning tormenting themselves, oblivious to the trees in leaf, the way the tops of the trees outside the high windows formed a carpet of green you could almost walk on.
There are no leafy back gardens here, no foliage visible from Grimmauld Place this spring, no glory of emerald, viridian and jade. There are dark, opaque panes that reflect your tired face back, and you can’t get rid of them the way you can the mirrors.
He’ll close his eyes, and he’ll be waiting for Remus after one of those interminable prefects’ meetings: and, oh, wouldn’t he just love to have those empty moments back again. He can see himself clearly, trying to talk to James and Lily, who had separate meetings now they were Head Boy and Head Girl, but looking in the direction of McGonagall’s office and fidgeting.
They were starting to queue for lunch that day, and he remembers it well because it was the first time the word love entered his consciousness. One of the Hufflepuff girls had positioned herself just beside the door of the Great Hall so she’d be first at her table when the bell went and have the pick of the food. That was unusual, because the Slytherins generally pushed in front.
Then, when everyone was going into the hall, Remus came along at last. He never hurried: he seemed to be in a perpetual dream. People who didn’t know him sometimes mistook him for simple or a bit crazy, but behind those unfocused eyes was a sharp, observant brain. It took Sirius, too, a while to find out; he still has a pang of regret when he recalls how he and James teased Remus those first few months, how Remus would seem to curl into himself, to put up barriers against them and their barbed tongues.
Remus walked up to his friends, said hello, and Sirius thought he was just on the verge of taking his arm, but stopped himself before the movement became perceptible. Even now, so many years later, he can feel the emotion that suddenly flooded him as they went into the Hall.
After lunch, they wandered down to the Forest and leaned against a tree, and kissed until their lips were sore, and he tried to say the three words but didn’t quite manage.
He wants those days back so much it’s unbearable at times, those days when they had no idea that they were young and beautiful and full of hope.
*
They get together in the end; of course they do. The fire in the blood at sixteen does not extinguish itself through neglect, quite the reverse; and the love branded in the soul, the love interrupted, does not die. Still, it is solace as well as passion. Wasn’t it always, though?
He’s forgotten that in Grimmauld Place, it’s always cold, no matter what the season. They sleep in the same bed now, for warmth, for comfort. For the first time ever, this house feels like home.
He’ll whisper ‘I love you’ in the night, but he’s never sure whether he loves Remus, the solid man in his arms, so familiar yet so strange, or the boy he once knew, who was so familiar in every way. There are three of them in the bed; possibly four, Sirius suspects, because no doubt in the dark of midnight at Grimmauld Place, Remus is also back in the past, holding that gorgeous, desirable boy who could have had any girl he wanted, but who chose Remus.
Remus tells him the news from outside. It’s quite hot, and he’s a bit sunburned. He laughs and asks Sirius whether he remembers sunbathing by the lake with James and Peter, and Peter’s horrible pair of bathing trunks.
Sirius has a distinct image of the sweltering heat just after they’d finished their OWLs, and some snapshots of the times after school, a while later. There was a park or a garden, flowers and bees and the drone of a Muggle lawnmower somewhere in the distance. A picnic, a red and white checked cloth; one of the half-and-half memories that advances and recedes infuriatingly. Bittersweet, then, or nondescript perhaps. He has a very vivid picture of Remus’s face beneath his, of a canopy of leaves above them, of the sudden silence when the mower cut out, the smell of the freshly-cut grass.
He has preserved intact the day he and James went to Honeydukes with the saved-up allowances of all four marauders for a whole summer term, and bought out the place to celebrate the end of OWLs. Remus had read about Muggle boarding schools and how they had midnight feasts, and they all went to sleep early so they could get up at midnight, in the time-honoured fashion. Sirius is still amused at the logic. They were jerked awake by the horrible ringing of James’s alarm clock, and though they felt groggy and not at all hungry, they dutifully gathered up their food and their Butterbeer and made their way through the dark common room and down to the grounds. The door was locked with some very complex spell that he and James managed to break.
Outside, it was hushed and dark, and they stumbled across the velvety grass to the Quidditch pavilion, where they sat on the steps, lit their wands and had their feast. He can still taste the bitterness of the Butterbeer on his tongue after half a slab of chocolate, and feel the slight, very slight pressure of Remus’s leg against his as they sat side by side. They were very newly together, at a point where both still privately thought that this was a transient madness of the blood and would pass with their schooldays.
Who would have thought then that they would still be together now, all those years later? If they are together, and Sirius likes to think they are. Certainly, now, in the lull before the inevitable war begins, he feels almost peaceful, almost content to be here, waiting.
Never quite content, though. He still gets irritated when Remus goes out before dawn to Apparate to some godforsaken country or region, on some mission that’s bound to be dangerous, risky at best. He wants to be there with him, fighting side by side, as they did in the first war. It was just that they didn’t realise it. He envies Harry and Ron sometimes, though his rational side knows how lucky he was to have those few precious extra years before the darkness fell. Perhaps he simply envies their youth.
All roads always lead to this, Sirius thinks in the early afternoon, deciding not to take that first drink, not yet. However it starts, however he and Remus kissed and faded into each other’s arms for the first time, for the last time, it always ends here, on a summer day in a house that only a handful of people can even see. The outcome has shrunk to this table in this kitchen, to this pot of tea ready to be brewed with a wave of his wand whenever it’s needed.
On a July day long ago, they boarded the Hogwarts Express at the end of Seventh Year. He teased Remus because he still lived at home, and his parents were meeting him off the train. But all the same, he squeezed his hand in full view of James and Peter and whispered, ‘You’ll be coming to the flat in a few weeks. We’re going to have a brilliant time.’ And they did. For a while.
He can’t change what has happened, but he can at least make sure the future is better. He waits eagerly for the sound of Remus’s footsteps in the hall.
End
By minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Era: Grimmauld Place/MWPP
Summary: Sirius’s last year, flashbacks.
Rating: PG-13
Dedication: Another one for astra_argentea, with thanks for a quick beta and because she likes it!
Posted to my journal, remusxsirius and starcrossedmoon.
This World Is For The Young And Beautiful
The first September in Grimmauld Place marks the 24th anniversary of their meeting. Not the silver, yet: that will be next year. A bad omen, perhaps, in view of werewolf lore.
They avoid words like ‘anniversary’, because so many of the events they could commemorate are too sad, and no doubt they have very different memories of the first time they saw each other. Not all their memories are shared, or even similar.
Remus lets himself soundlessly into the house that’s so silent now the children are back at school and the Weasleys only come here on Order business, though Molly pops in to cook dinner from time to time. It’s an autumn morning, early, five a.m., but Sirius is already up and in the kitchen waiting for him. There’s tea in the pot, and he’s rationed the Firewhisky to one small nip, just to put some warmth in his bones. The dog can sniff the woody smell of outdoors - a bonfire in the square, perhaps - can feel the vestiges of summer lingering in a patch of warmth on Remus’s robe, distinct from the warmth that Remus brings with him whenever he walks into a room.
Though the start of the Hogwarts term has come and gone, the images float between them above the kitchen table as they talk in the low voices that the hour imposes. Another autumn morning, if the seasons are to be defined by the school year, and an encounter that wasn’t really a meeting. Two black-haired boys thrown together by the demands of the dwindling pureblood community, though as time went on the Blacks grew less willing to have the scion of the family associating with the Potters. But Sirius always was spurred on rather than deterred by his parents’ interdictions, so he sought out James purposefully as soon as he and his trunk had been dumped on Platform 9¾, and made sure they were in a carriage together.
He didn’t take kindly to the fact there was another occupant of the carriage, a skinny boy with messy light brown hair and a self-contained air that came across as aloofness.
Now, sometimes, in his dreams, that aloof, skinny boy is lying on a bed with him, and they’re kissing each other with more passion than skill, and he will know absolutely that this was the most important meeting, or nearly. James he tries to keep well away from the surface. James he loved, Remus he loves. Or thinks he does. He loved. God, yes, he did, because this is the eternal paradox of Azkaban: the Dementors leave whatever you find painful, not realising that when times are harsh, the happy memories are the most painful of all. So Sirius can replay, can relive, many of the best, the sweetest details of the past.
He’ll close his eyes and it’s autumn again, in a different year, when the damp weather turned the falling leaves to mulch under the trees by the lake. There was one particular day when the two boys ran back to the castle through the rain, books open over their heads so they wouldn’t get too wet, wands left carelessly flung on beds, used as bookmarks, anywhere but safely in the pockets of robes, where they ought to have been.
They caught colds, of course, and Pomfrey scolded them, because colds had no cure in a wizarding school. She allowed them to stay in bed in the dorm, instead of infecting the other patients in the Hospital Wing, the ones with respectable, magical diseases. As soon as James and Peter had gone down to lessons - Peter with much grumbling about how lucky Remus and Sirius were, and how he could do with a cold, though he didn’t catch it - Sirius got into Remus’s bed, and they made snuffling, sneezy, coughing, ecstatic love, until the bustling of the house-elves come to tidy the dorm sent Sirius scooting back into his own bed again.
*
Already, Remus is away for long swathes of time on Order business. Sirius knows, he’s said it himself, that some things are worth dying for. Some things are worth being lonely for, reaching for the fresh bottle of Firewhisky, wandering through the past for hours every day and trying to tread round James and Lily. He’s spent fourteen years reliving their death, and that does inure you, though sometimes a glimpse of a very young James with his Head Boy badge will flare up in his memory and undo him completely. Though when was James not very young, after all?
The present continues to be a problem, however; the present where two faded, one-time lovers gaze at each other across the vast expanses of space the Black family considered necessary for wizarding aristocrats.
Sometimes, it’s as if they’re chasing ghosts through Grimmauld Place, through the bedroom and attics and drawing rooms, and the ballroom where the Blacks used to entertain wizarding heads of state, even Voldemort himself on one occasion. Sirius can almost hear the clatter of heels on the marble floor. The weather outside worsens; the windows rattle, and in the draughty room, phantom dancers twirl and sway to the discordant music of the wind.
He’s given Remus the grand tour, shown him the old bedroom where he never wants to sleep again. ‘I hate this room. I had so many nightmares here.’
It’s spacious, with a big, soft bed. The bookcase, crammed with a younger Sirius’s wizarding library, is compelling, in spite of any bad associations lurking here. They occasionally come up for no reason, perhaps to sit on the floor and look through the old Quidditch annuals, and Sirius is sure that he can glimpse the outlines of the two boys they once were kneeling by the fire, playing chess, the way they do every evening in the drawing room. Not that Remus ever entered this room, the house even, before last summer.
Sirius has no words to tell Remus how much he knows, how much he still remembers. The first meeting, the aloof boy, the slight irritation when he was in the same house, the same dorm… He remembers the werewolf thing, though that wasn't one of the good times, because it was the day he first really saw Remus, when Remus came into focus. Until then, he’d seemed rather like a ghost himself, always creeping about, making as little noise as possible, always sick. Sirius used to imagine that he had some fatal disease, had maybe already died, like Professor Binns, and just kept on going through the rounds of school and homework because he didn’t know what else to do.
It was a November morning, much like the mornings now, when Sirius is too cold to get out of bed before Kreacher has come in to light the fire, a job he still performs out of some Pavlovian reflex. Of course, Sirius could light the fire himself, but his second-hand wand is unreliable, and needs to be conserved for a real emergency.
After breakfast, when they were up in the dorm making their beds and getting their schoolbags, they sat Remus down and confronted him. Behind him, out of the window, Sirius could see the red and yellow leaves drifting down on to the lawn. He fantasised that each leaf was one of the tears that Remus was steadfastly refusing to shed as he watched them with wary eyes, waiting passively for the world to break apart around him.
James was the kindest, Sirius remembers with a pang, and Peter was frightened, until James sneered at him and said what a poor Gryffindor he was. Sirius was…cruel. He called Remus a filthy liar, and taunted him that he should have been in Slytherin, with Snivellus. ‘You’re even sneakier than he is, wolf boy.’ He still isn’t sure why: perhaps because he already was drawn to the reserved child in the bed next to his, and the pureblood Black was ashamed to admit it.
Besides, Sirius considered him such an unlikely werewolf. In his own mind’s eye, in Remus's too, possibly, Sirius was charismatic, bursting with vitality, so magnetic that you couldn’t help looking at him, watching him; and beside him, Remus so pale, insignificant. And yet Sirius can remember, clearly, watching Remus with a sort of hunger, finding him beautiful and desirable.
He made up for his cruelty with the Animagus work. He remembers being Padfoot the first few times, long nights when the wolf needed to be controlled for hours on end, and mornings shivering under a thin blanket, shivering in his own fur, and Remus hugging him fiercely, kissing him sometimes, whispering things in his ear that he didn’t quite hear, or want to hear.
Now, the dog is mangy. When Sirius transforms, Padfoot retains the skeletal thinness, the burning eyes that sometimes seem quite mad, the matted fur. Remus has washed Sirius’s hair for him with magic, with shampoo, every day for the past month, but the dog’s fur is still matted. He thinks that Remus is a bit diffident about offering Padfoot a bath.
*
The year is starting to unravel too fast, the slow, languorous autumn hardening into frost and dark mornings, nights when the sky is dizzyingly full of stars. He can’t see them, of course, but he gets an occasional glimpse of the outside when Order members file in through the front door.
Christmas is unexpectedly good, though Remus doesn’t come home until late on Christmas morning and spends most of the day ferrying Harry and the Weasleys to and from St. Mungo’s.
It’s not as good as the winters then, of course. They were the best times, the wonderful Christmases, like being inside a swirling snow globe with aromatic pine trees and the shiniest of baubles; memories that hurt beyond belief in the bleak cells of Azkaban, where there was no sign whatsoever of the passing of the year, beyond an extra chill in the already chilly air.
He and Remus were alone together that last Christmas at Hogwarts, the Christmas of the full moon. They celebrated properly on Boxing Day, and the Headmaster arranged for them to have their Christmas dinner then, up in the Hospital Wing. It should have been a bit bleak, a bit miserable, in the infirmary with its dim light and slight smell of medicinal potions, but it was wonderful. Sirius smuggled up half a bottle of Firewhisky, and they drank it in a way Sirius can no longer drink, sipping from their tooth mugs.
They agreed that it went brilliantly with turkey, masking their grimaces when they could, because they were seventeen and eighteen and of age, and men could handle their drink, even if was strong and bitter.
In Grimmauld Place, Remus comes home with snow on his cloak, and Sirius, ever the dog, puts his tongue out and licks the snowflakes off. It’s an intensely personal gesture, intimate even, but Remus doesn’t move away or flinch, and Sirius has hopes once more that they can retrieve some of what has been lost
He tries to be with Remus as much as he can, those days Remus isn’t with him. He plans and schemes. The thought of Remus in his bed is alien to him, yet the boy in his bed once upon a time, in the lovely and inviolable world of late childhood, is part of his very soul. He will spend the afternoon reliving the happiest events of his life in almost three-dimensional detail. He sits by the fire for hours while his mind wanders off with Remus to the Room of Requirement, where in winter you could look down through the small window and see the Gryffindors far beneath, making snowmen with red and gold scarves. He always expected James to glance up and wave, but of course they were invisible, in the hidden, secret room.
Yet when the real Remus actually appears before him, he is paralysed, totally undone. He can’t do more than take another swig from his bottle - he’s long since given up such niceties as glasses - and stagger, though he doesn’t want to, to this person he knows yet doesn’t know, and perhaps try to embrace him.
‘You’ve been drinking again,’ Remus will say. He isn’t accusing, really; indulgent, almost, as if he’s waiting for Sirius to get indignant and swear he never touched a drop.
Sirius wants to be able to make that move, or he thinks he wants to. The man in front of him bears vestiges of the boy he loved: the hazel eyes, still clear and without guile, the mouth still slightly turned up, and the golden hairs in the brown still outnumber the grey ones.
‘It’s freezing out,’ Remus will say, taking off his gloves. ‘Let me have a drop of that.’
It’s Remus who has more alcohol than he’s used to, and reminds Sirius about another Christmas, the Potters’ last Christmas, the one he’d forgotten because Peter had already told him he thought Remus was the spy. Of course, he’d been indignant, angry even, but Peter’s words had stuck.
‘We went round London on the top of a bus, looking at the decorations. Don’t you remember, Padfoot? We sat at right at the front, and the parents with kids getting on the bus gave us filthy looks. I wanted to move, but you wouldn’t.’
He’ll let Remus think he’s forgotten because it was one of the good times. That seems a kind thing to do. If he tries, he can recall scattered details that become clearer as the evening goes on. A London very unlike the one he’s in now. The lights in Oxford Street, and holding Remus’s hand on the bus, and that Muggle couple staring at them, curious rather than repelled. He can remember the feel of Remus’s hand in his, its smoothness, the short nails - the werewolf has a horror of long nails - the way his palms got slightly sweaty after a while on the overcrowded, overheated vehicle.
They see in the New Year with a bottle of wine, for a change, but nothing seems any different after the clocks have struck midnight.
*
The mirrors are turned to the wall, their voices disconnected by a harsh spell whispered in the early hours of the morning when Sirius was searching through Grimmauld Place for himself. He assumes Remus doesn’t mind, because he never was one for mirrors or reflections, unless it was the minuscule image of himself in Sirius’s eyes.
No doubt he could easily seduce Remus with reminders of their shared history, even if they've moved beyond it. They’re hanging on now, for their lives, and Sirius gets drunk yet again and grumbles that his life is shit anyway.
He remembers more than Remus, he thinks. Remus has had twelve years in the real world, the chance to create new memories to soften some of the bad ones, if that were possible. Or conversely, you could say that Remus hasn’t had the luxury of living always in the past but had to endure an extra twelve years of the present.
There are times when Sirius will talk about a particular day, a quality of light, a feeling, and Remus will look blank, and try to hide it. Remus may have retained more of the stupid details: the book they squabbled over once in Divination, which was apparently a textbook about astrological houses, a detail that escapes Sirius, but he can remember the fumblings of their first time, down by the lake on a spring night: a warm night, at least, and a lovely one, both then and now, with the moon, not the full moon, of course, rising in a clear sky
He has no idea why they went all the way out to the lake, why Remus risked expulsion: probably some issue with the dorm. He doesn’t know what, because they often did amazing things there. Perhaps they wanted that night to be especially romantic. He feels he should ask Remus, but doesn’t.
Sometimes, Remus is reticent. They’ll almost be back there, curled up together on the hearth, almost holding hands, almost touching, and they’ll be talking about certain days, certain times. Sirius will speak, through a lump in his throat, about the shack one May morning, a perfect morning after the second shortest full moon of the year, Remus virtually unharmed except for the terrible pain of transformation, but that would always pass. The sunrise through the window, and snuggling up as Padfoot, right under James and Peter’s noses. There was nothing dark about that morning, just a sort of innocence, the wolf boy and his dog, and a bond and love between them that actually ached.
A shadow, though, will cross Remus’s face, and he’ll change the subject in a ridiculously obvious way, talk about the Order or the stew Molly promised them for dinner. It’s almost as if he weren’t part of Remus’s private life, Sirius sometimes thinks sourly, as if the boy in the memory had been someone else. Well, he was, in a way. He was happy and confident, and now he is utterly destroyed.
We should have gone through life together, Sirius reflects. We should have shared all our experiences. We should finish each other’s sentences, know each other by heart.
Still, what’s the point, now that they are almost halfway through an ordinary Muggle life span? In normal times, they would have been young for wizards, adolescents, virtually. In normal times, they might have been one of those boring couples who meet at school and stay together for the rest of their lives. Perhaps their story, the drama and the tragedy, make them more interesting. Sirius is never quite sure whether he’d prefer boring, though on the whole he thinks not: life in Grimmauld Place, stuck here with the mad portraits and the madder house-elf, is stifling enough. A lifetime like this would have killed them both, no doubt.
But he knows, really, that it would have been wonderful. Get Remus against the light on a pale spring morning, and he’ll catch his breath, because Moony is there again, right next to him, and it’s all he can do not to reach out and hug him close, closer, closest, a superlative of love and longing.
Love is the real spell, the single spell that can turn back time. He’s not the only one who can feel it, in his Firewhisky haze. He's sure that Remus can too, sometimes, when Sirius has coaxed him a bit nearer, as if he really were a wild, skittish creature. And Remus in a good mood, a good moon, one could say, will hold out his hands, as if his touch is the key to the magic door that only love can unlock.
It may be Remus who says, ‘Do you remember the day we…?’ and unleash a thousand sensory images tumbling over each other: sugar quills, snow on the roof, a spinning top that Peter acquired from an ageing aunt, James hunched over the Transfiguration textbook, covering his ears with his hands so he could concentrate, Lily Evans smiling at James when he wasn’t looking - her hair, her glorious hair, aflame in the light from the fire - and Remus smiling at him when he was looking, smiling as if he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it, as if it was painful, like the memory is now.
Rainy mornings, the sweet smell of wet earth, and sunny afternoons that always had that edge of slight dreariness, because the sun leeched the colour from the sky outside the classroom window, and it always seemed to be History of Magic. The quiet boy with the light brown hair would never fidget as Sirius did, but sit completely still, so still that sometimes you might worry that he’d never move again, would stay rooted at his desk forever.
Sirius vividly remembers one morning when Remus was sunk in gloom, because Professor Dumbledore had spoken to him sharply about his inability to keep his friends from bullying Snape, and told him pointedly that he shouldn’t be so indulgent towards Sirius Black. ‘You don’t think he suspects anything, do you?’ Remus kept asking. He actually mentioned suicide pacts, and Sirius would have laughed if he’d been less worried, because he was supposed to be the melodramatic one. Looking back, he could shake those two as they were then, pale and upset, and so scared about James and Peter finding out. ‘That really would finish me off,’ Remus said, looking at the floor, scraping his already scuffed shoe on the ground.
What did those boys know about despair and loss and pain? Everything, they thought at the time. They wasted a whole beautiful May morning tormenting themselves, oblivious to the trees in leaf, the way the tops of the trees outside the high windows formed a carpet of green you could almost walk on.
There are no leafy back gardens here, no foliage visible from Grimmauld Place this spring, no glory of emerald, viridian and jade. There are dark, opaque panes that reflect your tired face back, and you can’t get rid of them the way you can the mirrors.
He’ll close his eyes, and he’ll be waiting for Remus after one of those interminable prefects’ meetings: and, oh, wouldn’t he just love to have those empty moments back again. He can see himself clearly, trying to talk to James and Lily, who had separate meetings now they were Head Boy and Head Girl, but looking in the direction of McGonagall’s office and fidgeting.
They were starting to queue for lunch that day, and he remembers it well because it was the first time the word love entered his consciousness. One of the Hufflepuff girls had positioned herself just beside the door of the Great Hall so she’d be first at her table when the bell went and have the pick of the food. That was unusual, because the Slytherins generally pushed in front.
Then, when everyone was going into the hall, Remus came along at last. He never hurried: he seemed to be in a perpetual dream. People who didn’t know him sometimes mistook him for simple or a bit crazy, but behind those unfocused eyes was a sharp, observant brain. It took Sirius, too, a while to find out; he still has a pang of regret when he recalls how he and James teased Remus those first few months, how Remus would seem to curl into himself, to put up barriers against them and their barbed tongues.
Remus walked up to his friends, said hello, and Sirius thought he was just on the verge of taking his arm, but stopped himself before the movement became perceptible. Even now, so many years later, he can feel the emotion that suddenly flooded him as they went into the Hall.
After lunch, they wandered down to the Forest and leaned against a tree, and kissed until their lips were sore, and he tried to say the three words but didn’t quite manage.
He wants those days back so much it’s unbearable at times, those days when they had no idea that they were young and beautiful and full of hope.
*
They get together in the end; of course they do. The fire in the blood at sixteen does not extinguish itself through neglect, quite the reverse; and the love branded in the soul, the love interrupted, does not die. Still, it is solace as well as passion. Wasn’t it always, though?
He’s forgotten that in Grimmauld Place, it’s always cold, no matter what the season. They sleep in the same bed now, for warmth, for comfort. For the first time ever, this house feels like home.
He’ll whisper ‘I love you’ in the night, but he’s never sure whether he loves Remus, the solid man in his arms, so familiar yet so strange, or the boy he once knew, who was so familiar in every way. There are three of them in the bed; possibly four, Sirius suspects, because no doubt in the dark of midnight at Grimmauld Place, Remus is also back in the past, holding that gorgeous, desirable boy who could have had any girl he wanted, but who chose Remus.
Remus tells him the news from outside. It’s quite hot, and he’s a bit sunburned. He laughs and asks Sirius whether he remembers sunbathing by the lake with James and Peter, and Peter’s horrible pair of bathing trunks.
Sirius has a distinct image of the sweltering heat just after they’d finished their OWLs, and some snapshots of the times after school, a while later. There was a park or a garden, flowers and bees and the drone of a Muggle lawnmower somewhere in the distance. A picnic, a red and white checked cloth; one of the half-and-half memories that advances and recedes infuriatingly. Bittersweet, then, or nondescript perhaps. He has a very vivid picture of Remus’s face beneath his, of a canopy of leaves above them, of the sudden silence when the mower cut out, the smell of the freshly-cut grass.
He has preserved intact the day he and James went to Honeydukes with the saved-up allowances of all four marauders for a whole summer term, and bought out the place to celebrate the end of OWLs. Remus had read about Muggle boarding schools and how they had midnight feasts, and they all went to sleep early so they could get up at midnight, in the time-honoured fashion. Sirius is still amused at the logic. They were jerked awake by the horrible ringing of James’s alarm clock, and though they felt groggy and not at all hungry, they dutifully gathered up their food and their Butterbeer and made their way through the dark common room and down to the grounds. The door was locked with some very complex spell that he and James managed to break.
Outside, it was hushed and dark, and they stumbled across the velvety grass to the Quidditch pavilion, where they sat on the steps, lit their wands and had their feast. He can still taste the bitterness of the Butterbeer on his tongue after half a slab of chocolate, and feel the slight, very slight pressure of Remus’s leg against his as they sat side by side. They were very newly together, at a point where both still privately thought that this was a transient madness of the blood and would pass with their schooldays.
Who would have thought then that they would still be together now, all those years later? If they are together, and Sirius likes to think they are. Certainly, now, in the lull before the inevitable war begins, he feels almost peaceful, almost content to be here, waiting.
Never quite content, though. He still gets irritated when Remus goes out before dawn to Apparate to some godforsaken country or region, on some mission that’s bound to be dangerous, risky at best. He wants to be there with him, fighting side by side, as they did in the first war. It was just that they didn’t realise it. He envies Harry and Ron sometimes, though his rational side knows how lucky he was to have those few precious extra years before the darkness fell. Perhaps he simply envies their youth.
All roads always lead to this, Sirius thinks in the early afternoon, deciding not to take that first drink, not yet. However it starts, however he and Remus kissed and faded into each other’s arms for the first time, for the last time, it always ends here, on a summer day in a house that only a handful of people can even see. The outcome has shrunk to this table in this kitchen, to this pot of tea ready to be brewed with a wave of his wand whenever it’s needed.
On a July day long ago, they boarded the Hogwarts Express at the end of Seventh Year. He teased Remus because he still lived at home, and his parents were meeting him off the train. But all the same, he squeezed his hand in full view of James and Peter and whispered, ‘You’ll be coming to the flat in a few weeks. We’re going to have a brilliant time.’ And they did. For a while.
He can’t change what has happened, but he can at least make sure the future is better. He waits eagerly for the sound of Remus’s footsteps in the hall.
End