Fic: Heat the Winter Floods for inksheddings
Title: Heat the Winter Floods
Author: daphnaea
Written for: inksheddings
Rating: R (for language)
Prompt: Something found that had been lost and nearly forgotten.
Summary: It was funny, Sirius thought, the things you could fail to learn about your best mate despite sharing a dormitory for seven years.
Other Notes: My apologies, but this is slightly over 3,000 words (more like 3,100)... There was no way I could cut it down in time for the deadline. I throw my verbose self upon your mercy. Also, the title is borrowed from Dylan Thomas's "I See the Boys of Summer."
It was funny, Sirius thought, the things you could fail to learn about your best mate despite sharing a dormitory for seven years. If someone’d asked him, that last May at Hogwarts, some sun-sweetened afternoon spent out by the lake pretending to revise, how well he knew Remus, he’d have laughed and said, “I know him better than anyone,” and maybe, closed book as Moony tended to be, that would even have been true.
But he hadn’t known, then, that Remus loved the sort of Chinese restaurant where they served chicken’s feet but would get stuck in the loo for hours if he tried to eat a curry. He hadn’t known that his friend watched Muggle quiz shows on the telly and yelled answers at the contestants when he felt them too dim. And it had never dawned on him that Moony was a complete and utter slob. Yes, his work areas tended to get piled with stacks of half-scribbled-out notes and reference books and broken quills, and it always took him half an hour to find anything in his trunk, but the house elves had tidied their room sufficiently often that nothing resembling a real mess had time to form. Unfortunately, as Sirius’s inheritance had not encompassed any domestic help, this was no longer the case.
Of course those sorts of practical considerations hadn’t factored into their decision to live together. Even if Sirius had been aware of his friend’s inclination toward entropy, it wouldn’t have seemed significant to a teenage boy just leaving school. And he’d meant to share the flat with James when he bought it. But then the prat had gone and gotten engaged (“Bit quick, don’t you think?” Remus had murmured, after the happy couple had made their announcement and then traipsed off to continue celebrating in the privacy of a storage cupboard. Sirius snorted. “Course not. You know Lily’s mum. If there hadn’t been a ring, she wouldn’t have let them alone together for a second. Our dear Prongs has just faced a choice between matrimony and celibacy and, so to speak, grabbed the grindylow by the horns.”), so Sirius had, at the last minute, been stuck with a two-bedroom flat and no flatmate. With Pete headed back to the rather insistent bosom of his loving family, the choice had seemed obvious.
By August, he’d been ready to hex (all right, he actually had hexed, but only a little bit) Remus virtually every time he walked into their flat. It wasn’t the plates piled up in the sink that Moony claimed “not to notice,” nor even the dirty dishes not in the sink but scattered around the flat half-filled with stale tea and those disgusting flaky chocolate biscuits he seemed to live on, nor the heaps of unwashed socks dotting the avocado shag carpeting in front of the sofa. Those were easy enough to remedy with a bit of grumbling and a swish or two of the wand. No, the problem was Moony’s piles. Piles of papers. Piles of books. Piles of dead leaves, some of them with non-dead slugs still on. The pile was Remus’ organizational tool of choice, and if the piles were disturbed, he would grumble and complain as if Sirius had disassembled his firstborn child instead of a stack of moldy Ancient Runes monographs that’d been left on the seat of his chair.
Then there had been That Day in September, when Sirius had come home to find a pile of Muggle museum leaflets on top of a pile of fwooper feathers intermingled with chocolate frog cards on top of his leather motorcycle jacket. An hour later, Remus returned and discovered that every pile in the flat was now attached to the ceiling. Of Remus’ bedroom. In a rather rude configuration. He’d found Sirius in the kitchen, staring morosely into a mug of firewhiskey.
“Er, is this your way of telling me the stacks bother you?” he asked.
Sirius took a long, slow sip of his drink by way of a reply. Sirius was in calm, spiritually healthy place, and he had no intention of threatening that by doing anything as futile as trying to use reason or rhetoric against a person who had deliberately created a pile of used teacups with leaves still at the bottom in case of future Tesseographic emergency.
“You could’ve just said something,” Remus had said mildly, and toddled off back to his room. Three minutes later there was the unmistakable clatter of china falling from a significant height. Sirius smiled and took another drink.
* * *
Since That Day, things had settled into a more-or-less acceptable routine. Remus kept the significant majority of his piles confined to his room. Of course, this meant that if he was having a particularly inventive week, Sirius would stumble to bed only to find his flatmate fast asleep there already. There was even a routine for this. Sirius would plant one of his invariably icy feet against Remus’ back and nudge him toward the wall. “Shove over,” he’d say. “Surrey,” Moony would slur, “minesdoofull,” meaning that his own mattress had been overcome by an infestation of books on hedgehog breeding and Frank Sinatra LPs organized geographically according to where they’d been recorded. And Moony would shift over and Sirius would slide into the warm spot he’d left and then he’d wake up two hours later and elbow Moony until he stopped snoring. If it had been anyone but Remus, he might have paused at some point to consider the unconventionality of the arrangement, but after several years of full moons and their aftermaths, conventionality had rather gone out the window. Besides, it was sort of nice sometimes, if he’d been out on an Order mission, if it hadn’t gone well, to be able to hear someone else breathing.
The months had ticked by, October and November, and it seemed to Sirius he must have always known that Remus hummed Beatles songs when he made tea and wore pyjamas under his robes on laundry day. And even if he was in some ways not the ideal flatmate, well, Sirius himself was known to take a simple list to a Muggle grocery store and come back with four flavours of crisps and some sort of exotic pointy fruit that neither of them knew how to eat but no actual jam or milk. And if Moony hadn’t been there, in the flat, all the time (more or less literally, as he did freelance editing and translation from home to avoid the monthly issues likely to come up with any standard employment), then there would be no one to complain to about all the things that needed complaining about, and what with Pete so wrapped up in the family business and Prongs absorbed with house shopping and wedding planning and his stupid Ministry job, he’d practically have no friends left at all.
* * *
And then, in December, the oddest thing happened. Or really, a pair of things. Neither of which was actually odd unless you were Sirius Black, in which case they had the combined power to turn the world upside down. The first odd thing was that Remus began going out. In the evenings. Without Sirius. The first time or two, he put it down to Order business and ordered curry. But at a certain point, a conversation needed to be had.
“Where’re you off to?” Sirius asked the next time Remus made an unexplained evening escape.
“Out,” Remus said, putting on his gloves.
“Got a date?”
He shrugged. “Guess so.”
“With who?”
“Someone I met.”
That had been the conversation, and as conversations went, Sirius found it rather unsatisfactory. Remus had always been a private bloke, inclined to mention his liaisons once they were over if at all, possibly because he understood that his friends (Sirius in particular) were constitutionally incapable of leaving anything well enough alone.
But, for the sake of domestic harmony, Sirius was initially willing to give discretion the old Hogwarts try. He could grow as a person and as a friend. He could mind his own business. With the aid of rather a lot of Scotch and positively inhuman quantities of patience and self-restraint. Probably.
At least, that had been the plan until the second odd thing, which occurred on one of the Remus-not-going-out nights when he also happened to be occupying Sirius’ bed due to an influx of Gobbledegook texts on his own. Things had begun in the standard fashion (foot, back, mumble, shove, sleep), but then he’d woken from a rather unpleasant dream about what’d happened in Cornwall the night before (sickly glow of the Dark Mark illuminating poor Gordon Smith, inside out and smeared across his kitchen floor) to the feel of a hand against his side. At first he’d thought Remus had put the hand there to wake him up, but then it became obvious that he was still asleep. The touch was accidental, the result no doubt of random nocturnal thrashing. Except - and this was where the oddness started - it didn’t feel random. It felt both deeply comforting and profoundly discomfiting, and Sirius found himself unable to go back to sleep. Instead he lay awake with his eyes closed, trying to breathe gently so as not to dislodge the hand resting between his hip and his ribs, which seemed in that four a.m. nonsense hour like the only thing in the winter night wholly immune from the taint of green light.
When Sirius woke again, Remus was gone, but the oddness remained. His body felt different in an obscure fashion which did not become clear until he slouched into the kitchen in search of tea and saw Moony at the table reading the Prophet, and his treacherous body went wobbly and then tingly and he ended up getting as much cream on the counter as in his tea.
Things deteriorated quickly after that. In the ensuing fortnight, Sirius spilt eleven cups of tea, a glass of burgundy, three pints of ale, and (on a particularly memorable occasion) an entire pitcher of bloody merlins, all in Moony’s presence, which suddenly made his brain fizzle out like a candle when someone pressed spit-moistened fingers to its wick. He also found himself doing a lot of mute staring and radically over-employing the word “um.” It was a frustrating and mysterious turn of events. No one had ever made Sirius clumsy and wobbly before, so it took him quite some time to understand what had happened. He was well acquainted with the effects of desire. Last year he’d cut quite the swathe through Hogwarts’ more attractive upper year girls (and, all right, Tim Davies in the locker room that one time), but fancying someone had in the past always made him particularly witty and apt to do brilliant things on a moment’s notice. It had never rendered him incapable of drinking a cup of tea without having to change his shirt after.
When the knut finally dropped, it was a Remus-going-out night, and Sirius spent the evening moping as Padfoot, flopped mournfully on the sofa with his muzzle on his front paws. At half twelve, Moony arrived home, saw the dog, and came by to pat its head in greeting. Padfoot’s tail thumped automatically against the cushions, and then in his next breath, he inhaled Remus, redolent with sex and the smell of another man. He growled, low in his throat, and Remus withdrew his hand and gave him a quizzical look. But Sirius, deeply uncertain he could keep his mouth shut if he resumed his proper form, just leapt off the sofa and stalked stiff-legged back to his room, where he nosed the door shut behind himself and went to curl up in the darkest corner under the bed.
He hadn’t quite known Remus was that way until then, which he would have liked to be indignant about, except it wasn’t as if he’d gone blabbing about the Tim Davies business, either. He was sure that this changed things, but he wasn’t certain which, or how. Did it change the lump of boy in his bed? The hand on his side? The morning grumbling about who got the last bit of tea in the pot, lukewarm and sour from over-steeping? There was no way to know. Sirius wasn’t daft. Just because Moony was that way, it didn’t mean he was that way about him. If anything, the distinct lack of spilt tea and incoherence on his flatmate’s part suggested the opposite. But still. Even if he wasn’t. Maybe he could be. Except the nights out had been going on for several weeks, and now he smelt wrong. The growl was back in his throat just at the thought of it. Wrong. All wrong. But he had no right to think so. Padfoot whined and chewed anxiously on the leg of his bed.
* * *
Sirius woke up the next morning with a sore back and a severely impaired temper. His ability to speak to Remus had abruptly returned, but he only found himself able to say unpleasant things, like “How fucking hard is it to flick your wand at the sink every week or so?” or possibly “Remind me again how it is that you’re home all bloody day but don’t have time to pick up your own socks? I guess when you don’t have to pay rent you don’t have to do anything else, either.”
The following evening, Remus demanded to know what he was upset about.
“Can’t think what,” he replied mock-cheerfully. “Nothing for me to be upset about, is there?”
The next morning there were no dishes in the sink and no socks on the floor, and Sirius said, “With your hair like that, you look like a partially-shaven goat.”
“We can’t all be as pretty as you,” Remus replied, unperturbed.
* * *
After work, the fireplace chimed and Prongs’ absurd head came through.
“Oi,” he said to Sirius, “is that bloke of yours about?”
“He is not ‘my bloke,’” Sirius snapped.
“Aww, is it your time of the month again?” James smirked.
Sirius shut the flue.
* * *
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you today?” Remus asked.
Sirius just stared at him.
Remus nodded sharply. “Thought not,” he said, and retreated to his bedroom.
Weariness descended on Sirius. He was sick of the whole wretched business - the spilling, the yelling, the utter inability to speak to his best mates about anything at all. He wanted to throw up the wobbliness and the blind rage and all the rest of it and just be himself again - just feel like a genuine human being for an hour or two, maybe long enough to have a conversation with someone, long enough to sort out what the bleeding fuck was wrong with him.
As he knew that the quickest way to throw up anything was through a bottle of Ogden’s finest, Sirius grabbed his coat and headed out for a drink.
But the first one didn’t fix him at all, and the second made him feel even worse, so after nursing it for an extra hour just to avoid going home, he gave up and trudged back to their flat. It was spitting wet, heavy snow and his feet felt like blocks of ice by the time he was clomping up the stairway, even though the pub was just three blocks away, and at that moment Sirius wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep forever.
Except someone was already in his bed. And he just couldn’t. Not after the hand and the smell and every cruel thing he’d said, not after what it might mean, and what it might not mean at all.
So Sirius turned and made his way to Moony’s room, over the creaky floorboards and past the radiator that sounded like it had a ghoul living inside but didn’t, determined to knock every pathetic pile on Moony’s useless bed directly to the floor.
Except when the light came on, only one pile stood on the bed, and it wasn’t even a very big one. The top item was a picture of Sirius and James, nearly fourteen, all gawky elbows and bushy hair. They are crouched on James’ bed in Gryffindor Tower, pretending to howl at the moon. Remus is behind the camera, not sure whether to be horrified or delighted. They have known Remus’ secret for perhaps a week and are still apt to stop walking mid-corridor and mutter “Brilliant…” under their breaths.
Sirius hadn’t seen the picture in years. The moment had long since faded into the vague half-memory of times gone by, not precisely forgotten but never dredged up and aired out, either.
For the first time he considered what that image might mean to Remus. To have had friends who knew, even if they could never understand. To have been one of them. It must have seemed nothing less than an act of miraculous grace, unworthy as the adolescent Sirius had been of bestowing such a thing.
It seemed ridiculous, suddenly, that a secret as terrible as Moony’s could have bound them together so many years ago only to have one as stupid as his tear it all to pieces.
He picked up the photograph. Underneath was an odd collection of things: a chewed up sock. An empty tin of Remus’ favourite tea. A frayed Slytherin tie, trophy of some long ago raid. Sirius didn’t know what they symbolized for Remus, but in that instant they were a reification of a life, a friendship built day by day and teacup by teacup until it was as definite a thing as the picture in his hand, the walls of their flat, the streets of the city.
Sirius reassembled the pile and turned off the light. He returned to his room and stripped down to his pants and climbed into his bed without shoving Remus over, so they were both in the center of the mattress, nearly touching.
After a moment, a hand climbed up his back and curled against the chilled skin of his side. It could have meant anything or nothing.
He reached back and grabbed the hand, pulling it down across his chest so that the arm it was attached to had no choice but to curl around him, and was rewarded by the puff of warm breath against the back of his neck.
It could have meant everything or nothing. But when morning came, Remus would smell of no one but him.
Author: daphnaea
Written for: inksheddings
Rating: R (for language)
Prompt: Something found that had been lost and nearly forgotten.
Summary: It was funny, Sirius thought, the things you could fail to learn about your best mate despite sharing a dormitory for seven years.
Other Notes: My apologies, but this is slightly over 3,000 words (more like 3,100)... There was no way I could cut it down in time for the deadline. I throw my verbose self upon your mercy. Also, the title is borrowed from Dylan Thomas's "I See the Boys of Summer."
It was funny, Sirius thought, the things you could fail to learn about your best mate despite sharing a dormitory for seven years. If someone’d asked him, that last May at Hogwarts, some sun-sweetened afternoon spent out by the lake pretending to revise, how well he knew Remus, he’d have laughed and said, “I know him better than anyone,” and maybe, closed book as Moony tended to be, that would even have been true.
But he hadn’t known, then, that Remus loved the sort of Chinese restaurant where they served chicken’s feet but would get stuck in the loo for hours if he tried to eat a curry. He hadn’t known that his friend watched Muggle quiz shows on the telly and yelled answers at the contestants when he felt them too dim. And it had never dawned on him that Moony was a complete and utter slob. Yes, his work areas tended to get piled with stacks of half-scribbled-out notes and reference books and broken quills, and it always took him half an hour to find anything in his trunk, but the house elves had tidied their room sufficiently often that nothing resembling a real mess had time to form. Unfortunately, as Sirius’s inheritance had not encompassed any domestic help, this was no longer the case.
Of course those sorts of practical considerations hadn’t factored into their decision to live together. Even if Sirius had been aware of his friend’s inclination toward entropy, it wouldn’t have seemed significant to a teenage boy just leaving school. And he’d meant to share the flat with James when he bought it. But then the prat had gone and gotten engaged (“Bit quick, don’t you think?” Remus had murmured, after the happy couple had made their announcement and then traipsed off to continue celebrating in the privacy of a storage cupboard. Sirius snorted. “Course not. You know Lily’s mum. If there hadn’t been a ring, she wouldn’t have let them alone together for a second. Our dear Prongs has just faced a choice between matrimony and celibacy and, so to speak, grabbed the grindylow by the horns.”), so Sirius had, at the last minute, been stuck with a two-bedroom flat and no flatmate. With Pete headed back to the rather insistent bosom of his loving family, the choice had seemed obvious.
By August, he’d been ready to hex (all right, he actually had hexed, but only a little bit) Remus virtually every time he walked into their flat. It wasn’t the plates piled up in the sink that Moony claimed “not to notice,” nor even the dirty dishes not in the sink but scattered around the flat half-filled with stale tea and those disgusting flaky chocolate biscuits he seemed to live on, nor the heaps of unwashed socks dotting the avocado shag carpeting in front of the sofa. Those were easy enough to remedy with a bit of grumbling and a swish or two of the wand. No, the problem was Moony’s piles. Piles of papers. Piles of books. Piles of dead leaves, some of them with non-dead slugs still on. The pile was Remus’ organizational tool of choice, and if the piles were disturbed, he would grumble and complain as if Sirius had disassembled his firstborn child instead of a stack of moldy Ancient Runes monographs that’d been left on the seat of his chair.
Then there had been That Day in September, when Sirius had come home to find a pile of Muggle museum leaflets on top of a pile of fwooper feathers intermingled with chocolate frog cards on top of his leather motorcycle jacket. An hour later, Remus returned and discovered that every pile in the flat was now attached to the ceiling. Of Remus’ bedroom. In a rather rude configuration. He’d found Sirius in the kitchen, staring morosely into a mug of firewhiskey.
“Er, is this your way of telling me the stacks bother you?” he asked.
Sirius took a long, slow sip of his drink by way of a reply. Sirius was in calm, spiritually healthy place, and he had no intention of threatening that by doing anything as futile as trying to use reason or rhetoric against a person who had deliberately created a pile of used teacups with leaves still at the bottom in case of future Tesseographic emergency.
“You could’ve just said something,” Remus had said mildly, and toddled off back to his room. Three minutes later there was the unmistakable clatter of china falling from a significant height. Sirius smiled and took another drink.
* * *
Since That Day, things had settled into a more-or-less acceptable routine. Remus kept the significant majority of his piles confined to his room. Of course, this meant that if he was having a particularly inventive week, Sirius would stumble to bed only to find his flatmate fast asleep there already. There was even a routine for this. Sirius would plant one of his invariably icy feet against Remus’ back and nudge him toward the wall. “Shove over,” he’d say. “Surrey,” Moony would slur, “minesdoofull,” meaning that his own mattress had been overcome by an infestation of books on hedgehog breeding and Frank Sinatra LPs organized geographically according to where they’d been recorded. And Moony would shift over and Sirius would slide into the warm spot he’d left and then he’d wake up two hours later and elbow Moony until he stopped snoring. If it had been anyone but Remus, he might have paused at some point to consider the unconventionality of the arrangement, but after several years of full moons and their aftermaths, conventionality had rather gone out the window. Besides, it was sort of nice sometimes, if he’d been out on an Order mission, if it hadn’t gone well, to be able to hear someone else breathing.
The months had ticked by, October and November, and it seemed to Sirius he must have always known that Remus hummed Beatles songs when he made tea and wore pyjamas under his robes on laundry day. And even if he was in some ways not the ideal flatmate, well, Sirius himself was known to take a simple list to a Muggle grocery store and come back with four flavours of crisps and some sort of exotic pointy fruit that neither of them knew how to eat but no actual jam or milk. And if Moony hadn’t been there, in the flat, all the time (more or less literally, as he did freelance editing and translation from home to avoid the monthly issues likely to come up with any standard employment), then there would be no one to complain to about all the things that needed complaining about, and what with Pete so wrapped up in the family business and Prongs absorbed with house shopping and wedding planning and his stupid Ministry job, he’d practically have no friends left at all.
* * *
And then, in December, the oddest thing happened. Or really, a pair of things. Neither of which was actually odd unless you were Sirius Black, in which case they had the combined power to turn the world upside down. The first odd thing was that Remus began going out. In the evenings. Without Sirius. The first time or two, he put it down to Order business and ordered curry. But at a certain point, a conversation needed to be had.
“Where’re you off to?” Sirius asked the next time Remus made an unexplained evening escape.
“Out,” Remus said, putting on his gloves.
“Got a date?”
He shrugged. “Guess so.”
“With who?”
“Someone I met.”
That had been the conversation, and as conversations went, Sirius found it rather unsatisfactory. Remus had always been a private bloke, inclined to mention his liaisons once they were over if at all, possibly because he understood that his friends (Sirius in particular) were constitutionally incapable of leaving anything well enough alone.
But, for the sake of domestic harmony, Sirius was initially willing to give discretion the old Hogwarts try. He could grow as a person and as a friend. He could mind his own business. With the aid of rather a lot of Scotch and positively inhuman quantities of patience and self-restraint. Probably.
At least, that had been the plan until the second odd thing, which occurred on one of the Remus-not-going-out nights when he also happened to be occupying Sirius’ bed due to an influx of Gobbledegook texts on his own. Things had begun in the standard fashion (foot, back, mumble, shove, sleep), but then he’d woken from a rather unpleasant dream about what’d happened in Cornwall the night before (sickly glow of the Dark Mark illuminating poor Gordon Smith, inside out and smeared across his kitchen floor) to the feel of a hand against his side. At first he’d thought Remus had put the hand there to wake him up, but then it became obvious that he was still asleep. The touch was accidental, the result no doubt of random nocturnal thrashing. Except - and this was where the oddness started - it didn’t feel random. It felt both deeply comforting and profoundly discomfiting, and Sirius found himself unable to go back to sleep. Instead he lay awake with his eyes closed, trying to breathe gently so as not to dislodge the hand resting between his hip and his ribs, which seemed in that four a.m. nonsense hour like the only thing in the winter night wholly immune from the taint of green light.
When Sirius woke again, Remus was gone, but the oddness remained. His body felt different in an obscure fashion which did not become clear until he slouched into the kitchen in search of tea and saw Moony at the table reading the Prophet, and his treacherous body went wobbly and then tingly and he ended up getting as much cream on the counter as in his tea.
Things deteriorated quickly after that. In the ensuing fortnight, Sirius spilt eleven cups of tea, a glass of burgundy, three pints of ale, and (on a particularly memorable occasion) an entire pitcher of bloody merlins, all in Moony’s presence, which suddenly made his brain fizzle out like a candle when someone pressed spit-moistened fingers to its wick. He also found himself doing a lot of mute staring and radically over-employing the word “um.” It was a frustrating and mysterious turn of events. No one had ever made Sirius clumsy and wobbly before, so it took him quite some time to understand what had happened. He was well acquainted with the effects of desire. Last year he’d cut quite the swathe through Hogwarts’ more attractive upper year girls (and, all right, Tim Davies in the locker room that one time), but fancying someone had in the past always made him particularly witty and apt to do brilliant things on a moment’s notice. It had never rendered him incapable of drinking a cup of tea without having to change his shirt after.
When the knut finally dropped, it was a Remus-going-out night, and Sirius spent the evening moping as Padfoot, flopped mournfully on the sofa with his muzzle on his front paws. At half twelve, Moony arrived home, saw the dog, and came by to pat its head in greeting. Padfoot’s tail thumped automatically against the cushions, and then in his next breath, he inhaled Remus, redolent with sex and the smell of another man. He growled, low in his throat, and Remus withdrew his hand and gave him a quizzical look. But Sirius, deeply uncertain he could keep his mouth shut if he resumed his proper form, just leapt off the sofa and stalked stiff-legged back to his room, where he nosed the door shut behind himself and went to curl up in the darkest corner under the bed.
He hadn’t quite known Remus was that way until then, which he would have liked to be indignant about, except it wasn’t as if he’d gone blabbing about the Tim Davies business, either. He was sure that this changed things, but he wasn’t certain which, or how. Did it change the lump of boy in his bed? The hand on his side? The morning grumbling about who got the last bit of tea in the pot, lukewarm and sour from over-steeping? There was no way to know. Sirius wasn’t daft. Just because Moony was that way, it didn’t mean he was that way about him. If anything, the distinct lack of spilt tea and incoherence on his flatmate’s part suggested the opposite. But still. Even if he wasn’t. Maybe he could be. Except the nights out had been going on for several weeks, and now he smelt wrong. The growl was back in his throat just at the thought of it. Wrong. All wrong. But he had no right to think so. Padfoot whined and chewed anxiously on the leg of his bed.
* * *
Sirius woke up the next morning with a sore back and a severely impaired temper. His ability to speak to Remus had abruptly returned, but he only found himself able to say unpleasant things, like “How fucking hard is it to flick your wand at the sink every week or so?” or possibly “Remind me again how it is that you’re home all bloody day but don’t have time to pick up your own socks? I guess when you don’t have to pay rent you don’t have to do anything else, either.”
The following evening, Remus demanded to know what he was upset about.
“Can’t think what,” he replied mock-cheerfully. “Nothing for me to be upset about, is there?”
The next morning there were no dishes in the sink and no socks on the floor, and Sirius said, “With your hair like that, you look like a partially-shaven goat.”
“We can’t all be as pretty as you,” Remus replied, unperturbed.
* * *
After work, the fireplace chimed and Prongs’ absurd head came through.
“Oi,” he said to Sirius, “is that bloke of yours about?”
“He is not ‘my bloke,’” Sirius snapped.
“Aww, is it your time of the month again?” James smirked.
Sirius shut the flue.
* * *
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you today?” Remus asked.
Sirius just stared at him.
Remus nodded sharply. “Thought not,” he said, and retreated to his bedroom.
Weariness descended on Sirius. He was sick of the whole wretched business - the spilling, the yelling, the utter inability to speak to his best mates about anything at all. He wanted to throw up the wobbliness and the blind rage and all the rest of it and just be himself again - just feel like a genuine human being for an hour or two, maybe long enough to have a conversation with someone, long enough to sort out what the bleeding fuck was wrong with him.
As he knew that the quickest way to throw up anything was through a bottle of Ogden’s finest, Sirius grabbed his coat and headed out for a drink.
But the first one didn’t fix him at all, and the second made him feel even worse, so after nursing it for an extra hour just to avoid going home, he gave up and trudged back to their flat. It was spitting wet, heavy snow and his feet felt like blocks of ice by the time he was clomping up the stairway, even though the pub was just three blocks away, and at that moment Sirius wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep forever.
Except someone was already in his bed. And he just couldn’t. Not after the hand and the smell and every cruel thing he’d said, not after what it might mean, and what it might not mean at all.
So Sirius turned and made his way to Moony’s room, over the creaky floorboards and past the radiator that sounded like it had a ghoul living inside but didn’t, determined to knock every pathetic pile on Moony’s useless bed directly to the floor.
Except when the light came on, only one pile stood on the bed, and it wasn’t even a very big one. The top item was a picture of Sirius and James, nearly fourteen, all gawky elbows and bushy hair. They are crouched on James’ bed in Gryffindor Tower, pretending to howl at the moon. Remus is behind the camera, not sure whether to be horrified or delighted. They have known Remus’ secret for perhaps a week and are still apt to stop walking mid-corridor and mutter “Brilliant…” under their breaths.
Sirius hadn’t seen the picture in years. The moment had long since faded into the vague half-memory of times gone by, not precisely forgotten but never dredged up and aired out, either.
For the first time he considered what that image might mean to Remus. To have had friends who knew, even if they could never understand. To have been one of them. It must have seemed nothing less than an act of miraculous grace, unworthy as the adolescent Sirius had been of bestowing such a thing.
It seemed ridiculous, suddenly, that a secret as terrible as Moony’s could have bound them together so many years ago only to have one as stupid as his tear it all to pieces.
He picked up the photograph. Underneath was an odd collection of things: a chewed up sock. An empty tin of Remus’ favourite tea. A frayed Slytherin tie, trophy of some long ago raid. Sirius didn’t know what they symbolized for Remus, but in that instant they were a reification of a life, a friendship built day by day and teacup by teacup until it was as definite a thing as the picture in his hand, the walls of their flat, the streets of the city.
Sirius reassembled the pile and turned off the light. He returned to his room and stripped down to his pants and climbed into his bed without shoving Remus over, so they were both in the center of the mattress, nearly touching.
After a moment, a hand climbed up his back and curled against the chilled skin of his side. It could have meant anything or nothing.
He reached back and grabbed the hand, pulling it down across his chest so that the arm it was attached to had no choice but to curl around him, and was rewarded by the puff of warm breath against the back of his neck.
It could have meant everything or nothing. But when morning came, Remus would smell of no one but him.