Fic: Words Like Smoke for sugaredarsenic
Title: Words Like Smoke
Author: L. Stone
Written for: sugaredarsenic
Rating: PG-13 for war themes
Prompt: I officially wrote for prompt #1, AU of any sort, although the story is also for prompt #2, the making of the Marauders’ Map, and I tried to get a bit of #3, MWPP inventing/carrying out their own festive traditions.
Summary: It’s almost Christmas and Sirius is missing again. James and Remus come up with a brilliant plan to keep track of him.
Any other notes, warnings, etc.: This is an interwar London AU, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I was reading for my modernist British lit class at the time prompt claiming was going on. It’s set in 1924 and our heroes are in their early 20s. Everything else should become clear during the story itself, but because I like making notes on things, I’ve posted some semi-coherent ramble on the universe at my journal here. (ETA: unlocked. sorry about that; I just didn't want the notes to be available before the story itself and only unlocked the post this morning.)
I had a lot of plans for this piece but ultimately didn’t have time to write it until the week before the deadline, so of course it does not live up to my expectations. I hope it is still okay. It’s also, I must warn, WAY over the word limit (about 5,500 words)-hope that’s all right.
Title is from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing-which I know is post-1924 but I kind of suck at titles. I was also considering titling it “I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place,” from the same piece, but thought that was too dark for this story.
The night the Walsh boy died was a full moon night. Remus thinks about this often, imagines, often, Sirius sitting in some trench, some hollow, some hole, lying in some deep scar in the French soil, staring out his eyes into nothing. He hadn’t known what was happening to him. He couldn’t have known. But maybe he’d sensed something, even then, something he couldn’t explain, and maybe he’d been scared.
Remus had been scared. Not for Sirius, whose breaking he did not yet know, but for his own mutation. Sometimes now, as he is making coffee, as he is stepping onto the bus, or tying his shoes, he thinks about this night. How he might say of it, they had never been closer, a parallel breaking, how as the first cracks began to run jagged through Sirius’s mind, his own frail bones were cracking into pieces. How he could say of it, they had never been farther apart, much more than a sleeve of water separating them, at that moment.
No, no, he decides: it was not the moment of Sirius’s homecoming that changed them (how tightly they’d hugged each other, oh the feel of him again, so solid and real), nor the moment of his departure, nor even less the moment, the pause, the slash of the window the first sound of alert, as Sirius pushed it open, creaky and stiff a long winter, they all gathered in the common room, right the edge of spring that day, and turned around and declared, I’m leaving. For a long time, for many years, that was the moment Remus thought changed everything. But he’s reconsidered, by now.
He’d been reading Yeats. What an odd detail to remember, really. He’d been sitting on the center couch, Peter next to him and James in the armchair, and everyone else had been outside, the dorm deserted. “A real war,” Sirius had said. “Wizards haven’t had a proper one in ages.” He’d said this as if it were a bad thing. Another fault to add to the list. Wizards are complacent. They don’t know how to live. They rely on magic. They fail to consider the possibilities, fail to take risks, fail, in some way, to be human.
But the refrains are only a cover. It’s disillusionment-he won’t see this until later, a long stretching final year of school and every night his face sunk so deep into his pillow he’s waiting to stop breathing, and he’s thinking, where are you, Sirius, where, and he’s thinking through these moments again and again, and he’s coming to conclusions-it’s disillusionment that’s pushing him. To say these things.
“All this time we’ve been hiding in towers, we’ve been throwing about spells. But I want to live with my hands and my teeth and my eyes and my feet. I want to walk on a tightrope without a net. I want to jump into waters that drown me.”
“You’re such an idiot,” James had said, and thrown a pillow at him, but when Peter asked him if he was enlisting too, he said, “Of course. Aren’t you?”
Hold your breath. Remus’s inside breaking. Peter’s mouth was open. And Remus had saved him, had said, “Well we all know I can’t.” A rush of spring breeze fluttered the pages of his book. He still held it open, his fingers carefully weighting down the pages.
“Oh I don’t see why not,” Sirius said airily, loping behind the couch-when he put his hands on Remus’s shoulders, so strong and hard on his shoulders, and leaned down next to his ear, breath on his skin by his ear, Remus jumped. Sometimes when Sirius touches him his whole body cinches up. “A werewolf to send to the enemy-that would really get them!”
Werewolves are ugly creatures, magic deformed, as uncontrollable as the worst magic always is, and Sirius knows this, and that’s why what he says, it is so stupid, that no one can answer it. In the end, events unroll exactly as they must, people contacted and papers altered, two boys to stay and two boys to go: they take their OWLs, and four days later there’s a full moon, and Remus’s howl is one of such great sadness even Sirius hears the broken notes.
(He puts his key in the lock, click, click, the door slides open when he puts his hand on the doorknob, and as he closes it behind him he leans against it. Sometimes he sees those minutes so clearly it is like he is a kid again, a child merely, a boy, jumping into waters that drown him. Like he could reach out and touch him.)
“Are you okay, mate?” The room is dark. Why is it dark? He can’t remember. Maybe he is imagining it all. The moon, still great and large and round, steals in through the window. Sirius in moonlight, planes of his young boy’s face, unlined. That aristocratic nose, high forehead, cheekbones. (Remus is the kind of boy who notices cheekbones.)
“Are you okay?”
Had they touched? Even just a hand to the arm or the shoulder, even that? He remembers it so.
“We won’t be gone long. And Peter’s not going, you know, you won’t be alone.”
And already he felt alone. Yes, Sirius’s hand on his arm. And he’d turned full towards him and he’d wrapped himself in him, and he’d noticed how strong his arms were. (Remus is the type of boy who notices how strong another boy’s arms are.)
Sirius’s whisper. “It’s okay.” How he’d dared to be comforting. “It will be okay. It will be okay. It will…it will…”
Voice trailing. Lips closer. Later, they had not spoken of it. Later, busy train station, James already yelling, come on mate come on, their gazes had caught, snagged, one on the other’s and his breath had snagged, caught and he couldn’t uncatch it.
There had been letters. Sent through Muggle post. A seventeenth birthday, a telegram. When James came home, he stayed in a Muggle hospital. The nurses say, poor boy, only 20 years old, and Peter sputters outloud to hear them, and Remus punches him, and tells him to learn some discretion. But James, tired and pale against the hospital sheets, doesn’t care. “Let them think I’m 50,” he says. “It’s how I feel.”
“At least he’s home, now,” Peter says later, as they splash through the street puddles. But Remus can’t answer. He’s preparing himself to see Sirius, preparing and preparing and preparing, but when the war ends, finally, and he comes home, finally, the injuries he carries aren’t the type Remus was expecting.
What Remus is watching, now, are James’s knuckles. This is the best gauge of James’s anger, he’s discovered, better than the volume of his voice, the number of his curses, the sweep of the gestures of his right hand. He’s yelling now, vocabulary like a sailor, and his free hand is knocking through the air wide enough to threaten the pile of books on the table, but the knuckles of his left hand where they grip his crutch have only started to lose their color, so it could be worse. It has been worse. Remus steadies the stack of books, leans forward with his own fists on the tabletop, and listens.
“You’ve lost him again!” James is shouting. “That’s what it all comes down to, Remus: he’s lost, and one of these days we’re just not going to find him!”
You don’t live with him, Remus wants to say. You don’t see him every night before he goes to sleep or every morning when he wakes up. You are not his guardian, his keeper. You do not hear his nightmares. You don’t know what I know. You cannot worry like I worry.
But what he says is “We’ll find him.”
James steadies himself again. He takes a few deep breaths. He is twenty three years old. Most days he looks older. For a moment, his silence, his breathing, Remus’s calm, a great wave of uncertainty crests over them. Then James shakes his head and expels his breath harshly and snaps, “Sometimes I think you’re just as cracked as he is.”
And he’s too shocked to think, or else he would agree.
“I am! I-with my quiet little life-my books! I’ll be doubting your sanity next, Prongs.” He tries to stay calm, but there’s a snap to his tone, an edge. He moves the books to the floor and straightens the map that he has laid out across the rest of the table’s surface. This one is of South America, absolutely gorgeous the detail of it, a new find. He’s been examining it for days. Tracing rivers and running over cities in great bounds. On paper even the wildest worlds are manageable. His own attempts are too haphazard, he realizes in those clear moments. And too small. He has never been able to grasp the largeness of the earth.
“Exactly-your quiet little life and your books-that’s exactly what I’m talking about, Moony.” He grips his crutches and moves forward to the other edge of the table, leans in so he’s right in Remus’s face. This type of challenge makes the wolf blood rise in him, a bile in the back of his throat, animalistic he hates it. “You’re not…paying attention.”
The angry laughter that he offers as his only response-it’s the cruellest thing he can do. James leans back again, away from it. Paying attention. Like in class. The classes James dropped out of, the classes he abandoned for some stupid, silly, war, some Muggle spat, while Remus dilligently wrote out essays in his thin illegible script or sat up to two or three with large tomes he could barely keep his eyes open to read, but oh he read, never a more diligient student than he and oh-it is all so simply stupid, so ridiculous. Paying attention. He pays attention. Yes, the quiet boy in the back, you know he’s watching, only wonder what he’s thinking. Admiration? Judgment? Well. You’ll never know; he’s the silent type. Paying attention. Ha. Remus barks out again in laughter.
“Obviously you can’t handle this anymore,” James says, so calm he must be keeping careful track of his voice, as he starts to widen the gap between them again. “Obviously we all need to reconsider-”
“Yes, Sirius can move in with young James and his charming wife and cute little son and nothing bad will ever happen again,” Remus finishes. “For the love of God, stop exaggerating. I’m fine. He’s fine. Fine enough anyway, and we’ll find him or he’ll show up-it will be okay.” He puts some effort toward his own voice, infuses some compassion, some consideration. Upbeat, perhaps the conversation will close, “Okay?”
James is shaking his head. “Not okay. Remus look around you. You’re-hiding. No-don’t argue with me, I’m not up for it. Just look. Your books. Your papers. Your manuscripts. Your maps-your goddamn bloody maps. You have the whole world in this room but-”
“It’s the only world, I need, all right,” Remus answers, and starts to rearrange one of his shelves. But he’s only pretending. James knows it well enough. When did this conversation turn, he wonders. When did he lose control? He takes deep breaths to steady himself and hopes James cannot hear him. He listens as his fingers drift over the papers, the uneven books, the maps in great disorganized piles. James is settling himself on the couch under the window, the sound of his body shifting, how he is avoiding the stray springs that poke up through the cushions.
“I’ll do something,” Remus says, into the silence. “I’ll-I mean I know we can’t continue like this. I’ll-find something…to do.”
“Yeah, sure,” James answers. It’s hard to tell if he is being polite or deprecating, his voice shows only exhaustion. Another moment, and another. Remus takes out a map at random and unfurls it. London. He spreads it across the table.
“If only I could,” he says, barely more than a whisper. James is settled at the edge of the couch, his hands on the cushion edge curling over the side, his brow furrowed. He is thinking-is he thinking-like Remus…?
“If only we could track him,” Remus says, and James’s voice almost on top of his:
“Can we?”
Remus flicks his eyes up, catches his stare. Their sight moves together, back to the map.
“It would involve magic,” Remus says after a moment. Hesitant. Catches James’s eye again.
“Well that education of yours should be good for something,” James answers. It is this, this approval, this breaking of a great ocean of ice, that allows Remus to smile, finally, and let his thoughts run out in all directions of posisbility.
In the end it is Remus, Remus this time and Remus each time, always Remus, who finds him. Remus who has no steady job to keep to, Remus who has no toddler son to rush after, Remus who can drop everything to search the city, Remus who knows Sirius’s haunts all too well. Remus who Sirius will let find him.
It’s just short of Christmas and the city is festive. Christmas lights, special window displays, electric starlight, snowmen with carrot noses. Remus wraps his old school scarf around his neck and tramps through slush. Sirius is at a café, not ten minutes from home. It’s been six nights since he returned to sleep in his own bed and that is what Remus wonders first, when he walks through the door and sees the familiar thin shadow in the corner booth, cup of coffee and eyes trained down at the counter top, where did he sleep? Icy fingers clench his stomach as he imagines cold park benches. The type he would be on right now if Sirius didn’t need him.
“Anyone sitting here?” he asks, polite, his voice a neutral stranger’s.
Sirius waves him to sit down.
“So you found me,” he says dully.
“So you let yoruself be found.”
No answer to this. A waitress comes by. Remus orders tea. She leaves them and carefully, one hesitation and then two, Remus reaches out a hand for Sirius’s coat sleeve. At this touch, finally, Sirius looks up and allows Remus to see the full of his face. His scraggly beard and sharp eyes.
“You want to come home?” Remus asks-even though he knows the answer. Sirius nods, so small and repentent, he looks like a child.
“I just needed to get away, you understand,” he explains later, a bit of life back in him and they walk with suitable space between them down the sidewalk. Sirius’s heavy boots crunch on the ice. It’s not much of an explanation, and anyway, Remus has heard it before.
“You must be cold,” he says as he unlocks the door.
“Oh not so bad,” Sirius answers. “Have you been working on anything interesting?” This is his routine, too: to keep the conversation on Remus, to keep everything between them solid and ordinary. They skate on ice, it doesn’t matter how thin, they just can’t pierce that surface. Remus plays along.
“Oh, some things. The article on vampires is almost done-”
“I can’t believe you support yourself on those things,” Sirius interrupts. He hangs up his coat and wanders into the bathroom. Remus leans in the open doorway as Sirius moves his face close into the mirror. “Need to shave,” he mutters. Then continues, “All that Dark Creature stuff. Doesn’t it get you down, always stuck in that Wizard mentality?”
“Well, not all of us have an Uncle Alphard to pay all the bills,” Remus answers levelly. He doesn’t really mean it to be harsh, to be anything but a casual comment, a space filler, a place holder, but Sirius shoots him a look anyway. Too close, you’re too close.
Remus shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest. “Well it’s just temporary,” he says. This is what he has been saying, now, for six years. Sirius returns his gaze to the mirror.
“What about your maps?” he says. “Your cartography?”
This is one of his favorite words. Remus knows because he told him once, one of his spells so he probably didn’t know what was coming out of his mouth, huddled up on the couch and all the curtains drawn, sunset bleeding in the edges. Cartography. What a beautiful sound it makes, on the tongue, he’d murmured.
“Nothing big,” Remus shrugs. He shifts his foot slightly, presses down on the toes of his left with the toes of his right, leg bent at the knee and balance careful. Sirius peers closer into the mirror. His nose almost touches the glass.
“Moony,” he says. “Mooooony.”
“Hmmmmyes?”
“I saw him today.”
Remus doesn’t ask who. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything at all. He takes a breath to speak with but holds it, uncomfortable this pause, how later, this moment will exist only for him. Sirius will forget, or pretend to forget, that this ever occurred. He is now examining the lines under his eyes (sometimes he complains about feeling old) and not looking at Remus, who can only look at him, wanting to ask who he is, but knowing, and knowing that Sirius will never say.
“Padfoot,” he says finally, and steps forward, and places a hand on his arm. Gently. Sirius takes his face away from the mirror. This would be a perfect moment-Remus thinks-a perfect moment-for an apology, or a kiss, or a confession.
But Sirius just looks at him for a moment, his face a neutral sort of stare, and then pushes past him to the doorway and toward Remus’s study. “It’s been a bloody week,” he says loudly, almost jovially, or rather, a bit too much so. “Don’t tell me you’ve done nothing.”
Remus’s first draft of London is on the large center table. By the time he gets there, Sirius is already standing over it, his arms crossed this time, eyebrows furrowed. (Remus wants to kiss the lines where they form on his forehead.)
“What do you think, then?” Remus asks him. He’s not sure, he’s never sure, how close he should stand to Sirius. The distance between them now is awkward, not close, not far; he stands on the adjacent side of the table and pretends to look down at the map.
“Well,” Sirius answers. He’s still wearing the same clothes he had on when he left. He looks ragged, a bit unwashed, his hair getting too long again, uncombed, ratty. Later, he will take a bath, might spend all evening in the bathroom with the door closed and when he opens it a waft of hot steam and he’ll look new again. Almost.
“Well, it’s not very exotic, is it? Not your usual subject.”
Remus makes a vague, noncommital sound in reply. Sirius picks up the wand sitting next to the map. Raises his eyebrows. Twirls the wand around in his fingers. He was a Quidditch player in school, before he dropped out. Before he left, he would say that the sky wasn’t where he, wasn’t where any mortal man, belonged-and he shot himself instead into the ditches. Now he’s holding the wand with his Quidditch fingers, deft, practiced, long. Remus doesn’t say anything, watching Siriu’s fingers. Then he finds the wand pointed at his chest.
“Bang,” Sirius says.
Remus covers his hand in his hand and moves the wand down. Sirius still holds it, motionless by his side. “What’d you bring this old thing out for?” he asks.
“Nostalgia,” Remus answers. A bit of hestiation, planned, careful. He hopes he sounds natural, even though he still holds his hand out, drifting, just over Sirius’s. At the edges of the map, the markers he has drawn for each of them are starting to move restlessly. He hasn’t quite controled them yet. Sirius is staring at him and not the map. Siruis is staring at him and his mind is already wandering, Remus notices. He takes the wand from between Sirius’s fingers and puts it away in the desk drawer. He asks if Sirius is hungry.
“Not really,” he answers, a bit sighing, a bit weary. He moves away from the table, his movements wafting, uncertain, stranded in the middle of the room now and looking around, vaguely, almost confused. “I’m mostly tired, really, Moony.”
And then these things happen: they walk to Sirius’s room. They do not touch. Sirius sits down on his bed. Takes off his shoes. Slowly, first one and then the other. Then he leans back on the bed on his back and stares up. Remus stands in the doorway for one minute, two, and then when Sirius doesn’t say anything, he steps into the room proper, and takes of his shoes, and lies down on his back next to Sirius so that only their arms touch. Sirius’s eyelids grow heavy, close-almost-close, properly close. He turns on his side and reaches an arm around Remus’s stomach. And he kisses him on the side of the neck. Remus lies on his back with his eyes open and stares at the ceiling.
You know I’m not-I mean-I don’t like boys, Moony. …I mean, it’s different with you, like between us it’s just different, but…I’m not sure about this. I have to go. …No I mean-I might not be coming back for a while. …James and I are leaving tomorrow you see and I-
They take the stairs up becaues Sirius has “this thing,” he says, about lifts. James and Lily live on the fourth floor. On their door is a festive green wreath with a red ribbon, slightly lopsided. James must have put it up, Remus thinks, absently, even as he knocks and Lily answers, smiling.
Then they are enveloped in greetings-Happy Christmas-Happy Holidays-the like-even Sirius smiles warmly. Two hours before he was still locked in the bathroom but he looks better, well rested and properly fed again. James does not mention his absence and Sirius, too, keeps his silence.
Lily has set up a large, round table in their living room and covered it in a warm red tablecloth and around this they sit and eat Christmas dinner and talk, the usual things, how Peter’s job is boring but he will defend it anyway, how James’s studies are progressing, the interesting things Lily has been reading these days, by nightlight after she puts Harry to sleep. And this year Harry is talking too, 2 years old this year and certainly getting LOUD, Sirius says, smiling comma lines around his mouth.
Remus finds himself staring down at his near empty plate. He is full. A wonderful feeling. And this is all he knows at this moment until Lily carefully lays down her fork and her knife and asks, as she does every year at this moment, a question for which Remus never has much brain left, but he tries: “What was the best thing that happened to you this year?”
They go around the table. “You haven’t divorced me yet,” James laughs, and Peter thinks very carefully and says, “I’m getting a raise next year,” and even Lily’s answer, when she gives it, seems small.
Sirius says: “I was walking down the street and I saw all of the people walking past me and I saw their faces and I heard their voices and the way the buildings towered over them and yet they seemed to tower over the buildings, and each of them so small but the wave of them so great, and I thought, they all survived it anyway, the war, but that’s over. Over. This realization…”
His hand on the table almost touches Remus’s hand, on the table.
“I’m happy for this moment,” Remus says, but it’s what he says every year, and when he flickers his eyes away from them and looks at his empty plate again they all get up and put things away.
The rest of the afternoon slips away into the early evening of winter, gray shadows of the undetermined hours sloshing over the windowsill. They collapse into piles over the furniture. This is the moment for noticing the small things. The way Lily touches her fingertips to her temple. The way James rubs at his knee. The way Peter’s eyes are always wandering (he has started to resemble a rat in his everyday life, too, and it makes Remus wish they’d never-but).
Harry has settled himself between Remus and Sirius on the couch. He is a toddler by now, yes officially no longer a baby. The kind of energy only boys his age have but even he is calming, now. Remus notices how he stares and turns to him and smiles. “Hullo there,” he says softly. “Happy Christmas to you, young sir.”
He’s got a scar on his temple. Perhaps it is this that Harry is staring at, squinting at so. He gets very close but then something else, some other detail of Remus’s face seems to catch him, and he puts one hand to each of Remus’s cheeks and says, “Moony face,” very solemnly.
“Yes,” Sirius says, from Harry’s other side. He has been watching this whole time, with his lidded, staring eyes. He catches Remus’s eye, and he doesn’t smile but still, there is a light to his face. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Where’s Sirius?” James asks him, and Remus, who has been washing dishes with his back to the doorway, but who is not surprised because James, once the perfect sneak, is now constantly announcing himself, the sound of wood on the hard floor surface-Remus glances back at him. He answers over his shoulder: “With Lily, I think.”
“He is awfully fond of Harry,” Peter comments absently. He has wandered in, too, a small and round little man, often in suits. He sits down at the kitchen table and adds, “So I heard you’re making a map, Moony.”
“How alliterative,” he says, an answer and not an answer and the dishes warm under the water of the sink.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” James adds. He sounds, just the vaguest bit but he sounds, worried. “How is it going?”
“You mean does it have a chance of working?” Soapsuds slide off the plate. “Can’t tell yet. Maybe. It will take a lot of time, James. And a lot of-”
“Magic. I know. I don’t care.”
“I don’t see what you have so much against magic,” Peter says. “I use it all the time at work-makes things much easier, you know. Anyway, we’re wizards-"
“Magic is antiquaited, Wormtail,” James says shortly, and turns back to Remus. “You know that things would be so much easier if we just had a way to track him-”
All these interruptions, Remus finds himself thinking, they’re so distracting. All he wants is the warm water and the prism bubbles of soap and the clink of dishes as he sets them away. But when he hears Sirius in the doorway (voice a bit too loud and so indignant-“Why don’t you just put him in a cage if that would be easier”), he turns around and he forgets to set down the dish or to turn off the water. He stands there dripping soap suds onto the floor and the water behind him runs, and runs, and runs.
“Thanks for letting me in on the plan, mates,” Sirius is saying. “I’m glad we’re still keeping the spirit of the Marauders alive.”
And he leaves them and he slams the door behind him and Peter makes some comment that no one listens to and Lily comes from Harry’s room to ask what the hell is going on, and Remus just stands there, and the water runs and runs.
He wasn’t expecting to see Sirius again for a while, but when he gets home he’s there. There at the table and a wand between his fingers. It’s Remus’s own. And he’s staring down at it and down at it and doesn’t look up when Remus walks through the door and comes to sit in the chair next to his.
He lays a hand on Sirius’s arm.
“I wouldn’t,” Sirius says. His voice level calm but low, low, animal low. Remus moves his hand.
For a while, they just sit, Remus’s hands on his lap, Sirius’s fingers twisting about the wand, over and over-Remus is afraid to look at him. For this reason, he hears the crack first before he sees, just out of the corner of his eye, the two broken pieces of his wand there on the table with the jagged bits of wood sticking out of their snapped ends. It will, he thinks, cost a lot to replace. Siriuss doesn’t say anything but leaves the pieces where they are and gets up to go to his room.
Was it a good idea to follow? Remus will ask himself later. He hadn’t thought about it, merely found his own feet moving. At the doorway to Sirius’s room they caught up to each other, suddenly terribly close, Remus just in the doorway and Sirius just ahead, suddenly turned like he would slam the door in Remus’s face-what Remus was expecting, in the moment he had to expect anything-and then Sirius’s hands were slamming into his chest, hitting so hard he stumbled down onto the floor.
Sirius is shouting things (can’t believe you, keeping secrets, trusted) but the words lose their coherence and soon it’s just fists. Remus doesn’t fight back. He lets Sirius pound his head against the floor and shake him by the neck. He is skinny and he doesn’t eat right and some days he can’t get out of bed but beneath all of this he is strong. And anyway, it is true, even he will admit, that for not just the map but for the last years, all the things he has not said and has not done, all the opportunities he has not taken, the life he has not allowed himself, the sacrifice he has made to the thin of the air, he deserves this. Deserves Sirius, over him and suffocating and heavy, deserves it all.
He almost does not notice when it is over. His stomach hurts, he doesn’t know why. Sirius collapses over him. His lips are against the skin of Remus’s neck. Remus closes his eyes and lets himself feel it.
(It’s okay it’s okay. Sirius, it’s okay.
He had been crying. He never cried but suddenly the tears were leaking out the corners of his eyes as Remus watched them, and he’d kissed them away and tasted the salt of them and all this time he’d kept whispering, oh, Padfoot, Padfoot it’s all right. You can.)
“It’s okay,” he whispers, now, his voice all gravel, strangled, as Sirius’s lips begin to trail down the skin of his neck. He kisses so lightly Remus can do nothing but feel it. Oh. Oh. “It’s okay.”
Sirius reaches up again, one hand braces the floor, the other runs rough along Remus’s cheek and up into his hair. He kisses Remus’s chin, his nose, then back down to his mouth. Can’t breathe can’t breathe.
“Sirius,” he chokes out, finally-“Padfoot."
Sirius pulls back just enough to look at him, eyes meet eyes, shining, just a moment, then he closes them and leans his forehead carefully against Remus’s. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, Moony,” he whispers. “Please don’t ask me. I-I’m mad at you and I’m not mad at you and I’m-furious at myself and I’m sorry.”
(It was dark and they’d been close and bodies pressed so close so close and after a few moments, Sirius’s body had started to relax, relax to his touch, and relax-they’d been close in the dark.)
Remus listens to his breathing, feels him breathing. He wants to say something, reassurance, love, but he just reaches up to touch Sirius’s face and then pushes him up. They help each other to stand, then walk into Sirius’s room proper, and Remus wants to reach for him, wants to hold him.
They sit down on the bed. Remus wants to tell him that he doesn’t know what is happening either, what he is doing or what he is doing, what went wrong, how everyone can say every day it’s getting better and the war is over and we can be happy now and it’s all right. He spent two long years learning magic just to throw it away at the door. He welcomed Sirius home because he thought he could cure him. He has found himself wishing to cry and unable to cry-wanting more than anything to shed tears for such useless thoughts as his sacrifice, as if this were any sort of sacrifice. So he has given others up. So he has. He has rejected men whom he might someday come to love. He has defined himself by his work and his loneliness and his waiting.
“I-” Sirius says, and coughs. Remus looks at him and when Sirius looks up again, they catch on each other again (the train rushing away from him he’d watched it watched it for as long as he could) and Sirius leans in.
He runs his fingers through Remus’s hair. Such soft hair, he’d told him once. They’d been in school, horribly drunk. Such soft hair, Moooony.
And again his hand runs down to Remus’s cheek and stops there, and he brings up his other hand, softly, just barely touching, the other side of Remus’s face. “Moony face,” he says softly. Remus’s heart is beating very quickly.
The next day Sirius is slamming things around the flat and Remus wakes up bleary and his hair a mess. It’s already afternoon and he cannot believe he has spent so much time wandering through his own dreams. Sirius slams the cupboard door closed.
“Padfoot, you’re going to break something.”
Sirius pours hot water into his mug over the tea bag, and Remus hopes he won’t slam the kettle down. (He doesn’t.)
“I’ve been thinking,” Sirius says. He gives the mug to Remus and Remus raises his eyebrows but Sirius doesn’t notice. He is dressed and properly awake, his hair still damp from a recent shower. He makes his own tea and sits down next to Remus. “I’ve been thinking-keep the damned map. If you really think you need it.”
Remus takes a sip of tea and says, “If I can even get it to work.”
Sirius makes a scoffing, grumbling sound in his throat, and for a long time after, adds nothing. But he is restless. Almost angry. Fizzing up with something Remus doen’t even know what, and it makes him nervous and excited all at once.
Finally-
“I’m going to do something,” Sirius says. “But don’t say anything."
Remus’s heart beats a bit faster, a bit tighter against his ribs, as he wonders what will happen. Sirius will kiss him, he imagines. Rip open his shirt so that the buttons pop. They will fly off and scuttle across the floor. Oh Holy God. Oh Merlin.
Sirius reaches over and takes his hand.
Remus’s breath catches, but he keeps his promise, and his silence.
Author: L. Stone
Written for: sugaredarsenic
Rating: PG-13 for war themes
Prompt: I officially wrote for prompt #1, AU of any sort, although the story is also for prompt #2, the making of the Marauders’ Map, and I tried to get a bit of #3, MWPP inventing/carrying out their own festive traditions.
Summary: It’s almost Christmas and Sirius is missing again. James and Remus come up with a brilliant plan to keep track of him.
Any other notes, warnings, etc.: This is an interwar London AU, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I was reading for my modernist British lit class at the time prompt claiming was going on. It’s set in 1924 and our heroes are in their early 20s. Everything else should become clear during the story itself, but because I like making notes on things, I’ve posted some semi-coherent ramble on the universe at my journal here. (ETA: unlocked. sorry about that; I just didn't want the notes to be available before the story itself and only unlocked the post this morning.)
I had a lot of plans for this piece but ultimately didn’t have time to write it until the week before the deadline, so of course it does not live up to my expectations. I hope it is still okay. It’s also, I must warn, WAY over the word limit (about 5,500 words)-hope that’s all right.
Title is from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing-which I know is post-1924 but I kind of suck at titles. I was also considering titling it “I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place,” from the same piece, but thought that was too dark for this story.
The night the Walsh boy died was a full moon night. Remus thinks about this often, imagines, often, Sirius sitting in some trench, some hollow, some hole, lying in some deep scar in the French soil, staring out his eyes into nothing. He hadn’t known what was happening to him. He couldn’t have known. But maybe he’d sensed something, even then, something he couldn’t explain, and maybe he’d been scared.
Remus had been scared. Not for Sirius, whose breaking he did not yet know, but for his own mutation. Sometimes now, as he is making coffee, as he is stepping onto the bus, or tying his shoes, he thinks about this night. How he might say of it, they had never been closer, a parallel breaking, how as the first cracks began to run jagged through Sirius’s mind, his own frail bones were cracking into pieces. How he could say of it, they had never been farther apart, much more than a sleeve of water separating them, at that moment.
No, no, he decides: it was not the moment of Sirius’s homecoming that changed them (how tightly they’d hugged each other, oh the feel of him again, so solid and real), nor the moment of his departure, nor even less the moment, the pause, the slash of the window the first sound of alert, as Sirius pushed it open, creaky and stiff a long winter, they all gathered in the common room, right the edge of spring that day, and turned around and declared, I’m leaving. For a long time, for many years, that was the moment Remus thought changed everything. But he’s reconsidered, by now.
He’d been reading Yeats. What an odd detail to remember, really. He’d been sitting on the center couch, Peter next to him and James in the armchair, and everyone else had been outside, the dorm deserted. “A real war,” Sirius had said. “Wizards haven’t had a proper one in ages.” He’d said this as if it were a bad thing. Another fault to add to the list. Wizards are complacent. They don’t know how to live. They rely on magic. They fail to consider the possibilities, fail to take risks, fail, in some way, to be human.
But the refrains are only a cover. It’s disillusionment-he won’t see this until later, a long stretching final year of school and every night his face sunk so deep into his pillow he’s waiting to stop breathing, and he’s thinking, where are you, Sirius, where, and he’s thinking through these moments again and again, and he’s coming to conclusions-it’s disillusionment that’s pushing him. To say these things.
“All this time we’ve been hiding in towers, we’ve been throwing about spells. But I want to live with my hands and my teeth and my eyes and my feet. I want to walk on a tightrope without a net. I want to jump into waters that drown me.”
“You’re such an idiot,” James had said, and thrown a pillow at him, but when Peter asked him if he was enlisting too, he said, “Of course. Aren’t you?”
Hold your breath. Remus’s inside breaking. Peter’s mouth was open. And Remus had saved him, had said, “Well we all know I can’t.” A rush of spring breeze fluttered the pages of his book. He still held it open, his fingers carefully weighting down the pages.
“Oh I don’t see why not,” Sirius said airily, loping behind the couch-when he put his hands on Remus’s shoulders, so strong and hard on his shoulders, and leaned down next to his ear, breath on his skin by his ear, Remus jumped. Sometimes when Sirius touches him his whole body cinches up. “A werewolf to send to the enemy-that would really get them!”
Werewolves are ugly creatures, magic deformed, as uncontrollable as the worst magic always is, and Sirius knows this, and that’s why what he says, it is so stupid, that no one can answer it. In the end, events unroll exactly as they must, people contacted and papers altered, two boys to stay and two boys to go: they take their OWLs, and four days later there’s a full moon, and Remus’s howl is one of such great sadness even Sirius hears the broken notes.
(He puts his key in the lock, click, click, the door slides open when he puts his hand on the doorknob, and as he closes it behind him he leans against it. Sometimes he sees those minutes so clearly it is like he is a kid again, a child merely, a boy, jumping into waters that drown him. Like he could reach out and touch him.)
“Are you okay, mate?” The room is dark. Why is it dark? He can’t remember. Maybe he is imagining it all. The moon, still great and large and round, steals in through the window. Sirius in moonlight, planes of his young boy’s face, unlined. That aristocratic nose, high forehead, cheekbones. (Remus is the kind of boy who notices cheekbones.)
“Are you okay?”
Had they touched? Even just a hand to the arm or the shoulder, even that? He remembers it so.
“We won’t be gone long. And Peter’s not going, you know, you won’t be alone.”
And already he felt alone. Yes, Sirius’s hand on his arm. And he’d turned full towards him and he’d wrapped himself in him, and he’d noticed how strong his arms were. (Remus is the type of boy who notices how strong another boy’s arms are.)
Sirius’s whisper. “It’s okay.” How he’d dared to be comforting. “It will be okay. It will be okay. It will…it will…”
Voice trailing. Lips closer. Later, they had not spoken of it. Later, busy train station, James already yelling, come on mate come on, their gazes had caught, snagged, one on the other’s and his breath had snagged, caught and he couldn’t uncatch it.
There had been letters. Sent through Muggle post. A seventeenth birthday, a telegram. When James came home, he stayed in a Muggle hospital. The nurses say, poor boy, only 20 years old, and Peter sputters outloud to hear them, and Remus punches him, and tells him to learn some discretion. But James, tired and pale against the hospital sheets, doesn’t care. “Let them think I’m 50,” he says. “It’s how I feel.”
“At least he’s home, now,” Peter says later, as they splash through the street puddles. But Remus can’t answer. He’s preparing himself to see Sirius, preparing and preparing and preparing, but when the war ends, finally, and he comes home, finally, the injuries he carries aren’t the type Remus was expecting.
What Remus is watching, now, are James’s knuckles. This is the best gauge of James’s anger, he’s discovered, better than the volume of his voice, the number of his curses, the sweep of the gestures of his right hand. He’s yelling now, vocabulary like a sailor, and his free hand is knocking through the air wide enough to threaten the pile of books on the table, but the knuckles of his left hand where they grip his crutch have only started to lose their color, so it could be worse. It has been worse. Remus steadies the stack of books, leans forward with his own fists on the tabletop, and listens.
“You’ve lost him again!” James is shouting. “That’s what it all comes down to, Remus: he’s lost, and one of these days we’re just not going to find him!”
You don’t live with him, Remus wants to say. You don’t see him every night before he goes to sleep or every morning when he wakes up. You are not his guardian, his keeper. You do not hear his nightmares. You don’t know what I know. You cannot worry like I worry.
But what he says is “We’ll find him.”
James steadies himself again. He takes a few deep breaths. He is twenty three years old. Most days he looks older. For a moment, his silence, his breathing, Remus’s calm, a great wave of uncertainty crests over them. Then James shakes his head and expels his breath harshly and snaps, “Sometimes I think you’re just as cracked as he is.”
And he’s too shocked to think, or else he would agree.
“I am! I-with my quiet little life-my books! I’ll be doubting your sanity next, Prongs.” He tries to stay calm, but there’s a snap to his tone, an edge. He moves the books to the floor and straightens the map that he has laid out across the rest of the table’s surface. This one is of South America, absolutely gorgeous the detail of it, a new find. He’s been examining it for days. Tracing rivers and running over cities in great bounds. On paper even the wildest worlds are manageable. His own attempts are too haphazard, he realizes in those clear moments. And too small. He has never been able to grasp the largeness of the earth.
“Exactly-your quiet little life and your books-that’s exactly what I’m talking about, Moony.” He grips his crutches and moves forward to the other edge of the table, leans in so he’s right in Remus’s face. This type of challenge makes the wolf blood rise in him, a bile in the back of his throat, animalistic he hates it. “You’re not…paying attention.”
The angry laughter that he offers as his only response-it’s the cruellest thing he can do. James leans back again, away from it. Paying attention. Like in class. The classes James dropped out of, the classes he abandoned for some stupid, silly, war, some Muggle spat, while Remus dilligently wrote out essays in his thin illegible script or sat up to two or three with large tomes he could barely keep his eyes open to read, but oh he read, never a more diligient student than he and oh-it is all so simply stupid, so ridiculous. Paying attention. He pays attention. Yes, the quiet boy in the back, you know he’s watching, only wonder what he’s thinking. Admiration? Judgment? Well. You’ll never know; he’s the silent type. Paying attention. Ha. Remus barks out again in laughter.
“Obviously you can’t handle this anymore,” James says, so calm he must be keeping careful track of his voice, as he starts to widen the gap between them again. “Obviously we all need to reconsider-”
“Yes, Sirius can move in with young James and his charming wife and cute little son and nothing bad will ever happen again,” Remus finishes. “For the love of God, stop exaggerating. I’m fine. He’s fine. Fine enough anyway, and we’ll find him or he’ll show up-it will be okay.” He puts some effort toward his own voice, infuses some compassion, some consideration. Upbeat, perhaps the conversation will close, “Okay?”
James is shaking his head. “Not okay. Remus look around you. You’re-hiding. No-don’t argue with me, I’m not up for it. Just look. Your books. Your papers. Your manuscripts. Your maps-your goddamn bloody maps. You have the whole world in this room but-”
“It’s the only world, I need, all right,” Remus answers, and starts to rearrange one of his shelves. But he’s only pretending. James knows it well enough. When did this conversation turn, he wonders. When did he lose control? He takes deep breaths to steady himself and hopes James cannot hear him. He listens as his fingers drift over the papers, the uneven books, the maps in great disorganized piles. James is settling himself on the couch under the window, the sound of his body shifting, how he is avoiding the stray springs that poke up through the cushions.
“I’ll do something,” Remus says, into the silence. “I’ll-I mean I know we can’t continue like this. I’ll-find something…to do.”
“Yeah, sure,” James answers. It’s hard to tell if he is being polite or deprecating, his voice shows only exhaustion. Another moment, and another. Remus takes out a map at random and unfurls it. London. He spreads it across the table.
“If only I could,” he says, barely more than a whisper. James is settled at the edge of the couch, his hands on the cushion edge curling over the side, his brow furrowed. He is thinking-is he thinking-like Remus…?
“If only we could track him,” Remus says, and James’s voice almost on top of his:
“Can we?”
Remus flicks his eyes up, catches his stare. Their sight moves together, back to the map.
“It would involve magic,” Remus says after a moment. Hesitant. Catches James’s eye again.
“Well that education of yours should be good for something,” James answers. It is this, this approval, this breaking of a great ocean of ice, that allows Remus to smile, finally, and let his thoughts run out in all directions of posisbility.
In the end it is Remus, Remus this time and Remus each time, always Remus, who finds him. Remus who has no steady job to keep to, Remus who has no toddler son to rush after, Remus who can drop everything to search the city, Remus who knows Sirius’s haunts all too well. Remus who Sirius will let find him.
It’s just short of Christmas and the city is festive. Christmas lights, special window displays, electric starlight, snowmen with carrot noses. Remus wraps his old school scarf around his neck and tramps through slush. Sirius is at a café, not ten minutes from home. It’s been six nights since he returned to sleep in his own bed and that is what Remus wonders first, when he walks through the door and sees the familiar thin shadow in the corner booth, cup of coffee and eyes trained down at the counter top, where did he sleep? Icy fingers clench his stomach as he imagines cold park benches. The type he would be on right now if Sirius didn’t need him.
“Anyone sitting here?” he asks, polite, his voice a neutral stranger’s.
Sirius waves him to sit down.
“So you found me,” he says dully.
“So you let yoruself be found.”
No answer to this. A waitress comes by. Remus orders tea. She leaves them and carefully, one hesitation and then two, Remus reaches out a hand for Sirius’s coat sleeve. At this touch, finally, Sirius looks up and allows Remus to see the full of his face. His scraggly beard and sharp eyes.
“You want to come home?” Remus asks-even though he knows the answer. Sirius nods, so small and repentent, he looks like a child.
“I just needed to get away, you understand,” he explains later, a bit of life back in him and they walk with suitable space between them down the sidewalk. Sirius’s heavy boots crunch on the ice. It’s not much of an explanation, and anyway, Remus has heard it before.
“You must be cold,” he says as he unlocks the door.
“Oh not so bad,” Sirius answers. “Have you been working on anything interesting?” This is his routine, too: to keep the conversation on Remus, to keep everything between them solid and ordinary. They skate on ice, it doesn’t matter how thin, they just can’t pierce that surface. Remus plays along.
“Oh, some things. The article on vampires is almost done-”
“I can’t believe you support yourself on those things,” Sirius interrupts. He hangs up his coat and wanders into the bathroom. Remus leans in the open doorway as Sirius moves his face close into the mirror. “Need to shave,” he mutters. Then continues, “All that Dark Creature stuff. Doesn’t it get you down, always stuck in that Wizard mentality?”
“Well, not all of us have an Uncle Alphard to pay all the bills,” Remus answers levelly. He doesn’t really mean it to be harsh, to be anything but a casual comment, a space filler, a place holder, but Sirius shoots him a look anyway. Too close, you’re too close.
Remus shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest. “Well it’s just temporary,” he says. This is what he has been saying, now, for six years. Sirius returns his gaze to the mirror.
“What about your maps?” he says. “Your cartography?”
This is one of his favorite words. Remus knows because he told him once, one of his spells so he probably didn’t know what was coming out of his mouth, huddled up on the couch and all the curtains drawn, sunset bleeding in the edges. Cartography. What a beautiful sound it makes, on the tongue, he’d murmured.
“Nothing big,” Remus shrugs. He shifts his foot slightly, presses down on the toes of his left with the toes of his right, leg bent at the knee and balance careful. Sirius peers closer into the mirror. His nose almost touches the glass.
“Moony,” he says. “Mooooony.”
“Hmmmmyes?”
“I saw him today.”
Remus doesn’t ask who. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything at all. He takes a breath to speak with but holds it, uncomfortable this pause, how later, this moment will exist only for him. Sirius will forget, or pretend to forget, that this ever occurred. He is now examining the lines under his eyes (sometimes he complains about feeling old) and not looking at Remus, who can only look at him, wanting to ask who he is, but knowing, and knowing that Sirius will never say.
“Padfoot,” he says finally, and steps forward, and places a hand on his arm. Gently. Sirius takes his face away from the mirror. This would be a perfect moment-Remus thinks-a perfect moment-for an apology, or a kiss, or a confession.
But Sirius just looks at him for a moment, his face a neutral sort of stare, and then pushes past him to the doorway and toward Remus’s study. “It’s been a bloody week,” he says loudly, almost jovially, or rather, a bit too much so. “Don’t tell me you’ve done nothing.”
Remus’s first draft of London is on the large center table. By the time he gets there, Sirius is already standing over it, his arms crossed this time, eyebrows furrowed. (Remus wants to kiss the lines where they form on his forehead.)
“What do you think, then?” Remus asks him. He’s not sure, he’s never sure, how close he should stand to Sirius. The distance between them now is awkward, not close, not far; he stands on the adjacent side of the table and pretends to look down at the map.
“Well,” Sirius answers. He’s still wearing the same clothes he had on when he left. He looks ragged, a bit unwashed, his hair getting too long again, uncombed, ratty. Later, he will take a bath, might spend all evening in the bathroom with the door closed and when he opens it a waft of hot steam and he’ll look new again. Almost.
“Well, it’s not very exotic, is it? Not your usual subject.”
Remus makes a vague, noncommital sound in reply. Sirius picks up the wand sitting next to the map. Raises his eyebrows. Twirls the wand around in his fingers. He was a Quidditch player in school, before he dropped out. Before he left, he would say that the sky wasn’t where he, wasn’t where any mortal man, belonged-and he shot himself instead into the ditches. Now he’s holding the wand with his Quidditch fingers, deft, practiced, long. Remus doesn’t say anything, watching Siriu’s fingers. Then he finds the wand pointed at his chest.
“Bang,” Sirius says.
Remus covers his hand in his hand and moves the wand down. Sirius still holds it, motionless by his side. “What’d you bring this old thing out for?” he asks.
“Nostalgia,” Remus answers. A bit of hestiation, planned, careful. He hopes he sounds natural, even though he still holds his hand out, drifting, just over Sirius’s. At the edges of the map, the markers he has drawn for each of them are starting to move restlessly. He hasn’t quite controled them yet. Sirius is staring at him and not the map. Siruis is staring at him and his mind is already wandering, Remus notices. He takes the wand from between Sirius’s fingers and puts it away in the desk drawer. He asks if Sirius is hungry.
“Not really,” he answers, a bit sighing, a bit weary. He moves away from the table, his movements wafting, uncertain, stranded in the middle of the room now and looking around, vaguely, almost confused. “I’m mostly tired, really, Moony.”
And then these things happen: they walk to Sirius’s room. They do not touch. Sirius sits down on his bed. Takes off his shoes. Slowly, first one and then the other. Then he leans back on the bed on his back and stares up. Remus stands in the doorway for one minute, two, and then when Sirius doesn’t say anything, he steps into the room proper, and takes of his shoes, and lies down on his back next to Sirius so that only their arms touch. Sirius’s eyelids grow heavy, close-almost-close, properly close. He turns on his side and reaches an arm around Remus’s stomach. And he kisses him on the side of the neck. Remus lies on his back with his eyes open and stares at the ceiling.
You know I’m not-I mean-I don’t like boys, Moony. …I mean, it’s different with you, like between us it’s just different, but…I’m not sure about this. I have to go. …No I mean-I might not be coming back for a while. …James and I are leaving tomorrow you see and I-
They take the stairs up becaues Sirius has “this thing,” he says, about lifts. James and Lily live on the fourth floor. On their door is a festive green wreath with a red ribbon, slightly lopsided. James must have put it up, Remus thinks, absently, even as he knocks and Lily answers, smiling.
Then they are enveloped in greetings-Happy Christmas-Happy Holidays-the like-even Sirius smiles warmly. Two hours before he was still locked in the bathroom but he looks better, well rested and properly fed again. James does not mention his absence and Sirius, too, keeps his silence.
Lily has set up a large, round table in their living room and covered it in a warm red tablecloth and around this they sit and eat Christmas dinner and talk, the usual things, how Peter’s job is boring but he will defend it anyway, how James’s studies are progressing, the interesting things Lily has been reading these days, by nightlight after she puts Harry to sleep. And this year Harry is talking too, 2 years old this year and certainly getting LOUD, Sirius says, smiling comma lines around his mouth.
Remus finds himself staring down at his near empty plate. He is full. A wonderful feeling. And this is all he knows at this moment until Lily carefully lays down her fork and her knife and asks, as she does every year at this moment, a question for which Remus never has much brain left, but he tries: “What was the best thing that happened to you this year?”
They go around the table. “You haven’t divorced me yet,” James laughs, and Peter thinks very carefully and says, “I’m getting a raise next year,” and even Lily’s answer, when she gives it, seems small.
Sirius says: “I was walking down the street and I saw all of the people walking past me and I saw their faces and I heard their voices and the way the buildings towered over them and yet they seemed to tower over the buildings, and each of them so small but the wave of them so great, and I thought, they all survived it anyway, the war, but that’s over. Over. This realization…”
His hand on the table almost touches Remus’s hand, on the table.
“I’m happy for this moment,” Remus says, but it’s what he says every year, and when he flickers his eyes away from them and looks at his empty plate again they all get up and put things away.
The rest of the afternoon slips away into the early evening of winter, gray shadows of the undetermined hours sloshing over the windowsill. They collapse into piles over the furniture. This is the moment for noticing the small things. The way Lily touches her fingertips to her temple. The way James rubs at his knee. The way Peter’s eyes are always wandering (he has started to resemble a rat in his everyday life, too, and it makes Remus wish they’d never-but).
Harry has settled himself between Remus and Sirius on the couch. He is a toddler by now, yes officially no longer a baby. The kind of energy only boys his age have but even he is calming, now. Remus notices how he stares and turns to him and smiles. “Hullo there,” he says softly. “Happy Christmas to you, young sir.”
He’s got a scar on his temple. Perhaps it is this that Harry is staring at, squinting at so. He gets very close but then something else, some other detail of Remus’s face seems to catch him, and he puts one hand to each of Remus’s cheeks and says, “Moony face,” very solemnly.
“Yes,” Sirius says, from Harry’s other side. He has been watching this whole time, with his lidded, staring eyes. He catches Remus’s eye, and he doesn’t smile but still, there is a light to his face. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Where’s Sirius?” James asks him, and Remus, who has been washing dishes with his back to the doorway, but who is not surprised because James, once the perfect sneak, is now constantly announcing himself, the sound of wood on the hard floor surface-Remus glances back at him. He answers over his shoulder: “With Lily, I think.”
“He is awfully fond of Harry,” Peter comments absently. He has wandered in, too, a small and round little man, often in suits. He sits down at the kitchen table and adds, “So I heard you’re making a map, Moony.”
“How alliterative,” he says, an answer and not an answer and the dishes warm under the water of the sink.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” James adds. He sounds, just the vaguest bit but he sounds, worried. “How is it going?”
“You mean does it have a chance of working?” Soapsuds slide off the plate. “Can’t tell yet. Maybe. It will take a lot of time, James. And a lot of-”
“Magic. I know. I don’t care.”
“I don’t see what you have so much against magic,” Peter says. “I use it all the time at work-makes things much easier, you know. Anyway, we’re wizards-"
“Magic is antiquaited, Wormtail,” James says shortly, and turns back to Remus. “You know that things would be so much easier if we just had a way to track him-”
All these interruptions, Remus finds himself thinking, they’re so distracting. All he wants is the warm water and the prism bubbles of soap and the clink of dishes as he sets them away. But when he hears Sirius in the doorway (voice a bit too loud and so indignant-“Why don’t you just put him in a cage if that would be easier”), he turns around and he forgets to set down the dish or to turn off the water. He stands there dripping soap suds onto the floor and the water behind him runs, and runs, and runs.
“Thanks for letting me in on the plan, mates,” Sirius is saying. “I’m glad we’re still keeping the spirit of the Marauders alive.”
And he leaves them and he slams the door behind him and Peter makes some comment that no one listens to and Lily comes from Harry’s room to ask what the hell is going on, and Remus just stands there, and the water runs and runs.
He wasn’t expecting to see Sirius again for a while, but when he gets home he’s there. There at the table and a wand between his fingers. It’s Remus’s own. And he’s staring down at it and down at it and doesn’t look up when Remus walks through the door and comes to sit in the chair next to his.
He lays a hand on Sirius’s arm.
“I wouldn’t,” Sirius says. His voice level calm but low, low, animal low. Remus moves his hand.
For a while, they just sit, Remus’s hands on his lap, Sirius’s fingers twisting about the wand, over and over-Remus is afraid to look at him. For this reason, he hears the crack first before he sees, just out of the corner of his eye, the two broken pieces of his wand there on the table with the jagged bits of wood sticking out of their snapped ends. It will, he thinks, cost a lot to replace. Siriuss doesn’t say anything but leaves the pieces where they are and gets up to go to his room.
Was it a good idea to follow? Remus will ask himself later. He hadn’t thought about it, merely found his own feet moving. At the doorway to Sirius’s room they caught up to each other, suddenly terribly close, Remus just in the doorway and Sirius just ahead, suddenly turned like he would slam the door in Remus’s face-what Remus was expecting, in the moment he had to expect anything-and then Sirius’s hands were slamming into his chest, hitting so hard he stumbled down onto the floor.
Sirius is shouting things (can’t believe you, keeping secrets, trusted) but the words lose their coherence and soon it’s just fists. Remus doesn’t fight back. He lets Sirius pound his head against the floor and shake him by the neck. He is skinny and he doesn’t eat right and some days he can’t get out of bed but beneath all of this he is strong. And anyway, it is true, even he will admit, that for not just the map but for the last years, all the things he has not said and has not done, all the opportunities he has not taken, the life he has not allowed himself, the sacrifice he has made to the thin of the air, he deserves this. Deserves Sirius, over him and suffocating and heavy, deserves it all.
He almost does not notice when it is over. His stomach hurts, he doesn’t know why. Sirius collapses over him. His lips are against the skin of Remus’s neck. Remus closes his eyes and lets himself feel it.
(It’s okay it’s okay. Sirius, it’s okay.
He had been crying. He never cried but suddenly the tears were leaking out the corners of his eyes as Remus watched them, and he’d kissed them away and tasted the salt of them and all this time he’d kept whispering, oh, Padfoot, Padfoot it’s all right. You can.)
“It’s okay,” he whispers, now, his voice all gravel, strangled, as Sirius’s lips begin to trail down the skin of his neck. He kisses so lightly Remus can do nothing but feel it. Oh. Oh. “It’s okay.”
Sirius reaches up again, one hand braces the floor, the other runs rough along Remus’s cheek and up into his hair. He kisses Remus’s chin, his nose, then back down to his mouth. Can’t breathe can’t breathe.
“Sirius,” he chokes out, finally-“Padfoot."
Sirius pulls back just enough to look at him, eyes meet eyes, shining, just a moment, then he closes them and leans his forehead carefully against Remus’s. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, Moony,” he whispers. “Please don’t ask me. I-I’m mad at you and I’m not mad at you and I’m-furious at myself and I’m sorry.”
(It was dark and they’d been close and bodies pressed so close so close and after a few moments, Sirius’s body had started to relax, relax to his touch, and relax-they’d been close in the dark.)
Remus listens to his breathing, feels him breathing. He wants to say something, reassurance, love, but he just reaches up to touch Sirius’s face and then pushes him up. They help each other to stand, then walk into Sirius’s room proper, and Remus wants to reach for him, wants to hold him.
They sit down on the bed. Remus wants to tell him that he doesn’t know what is happening either, what he is doing or what he is doing, what went wrong, how everyone can say every day it’s getting better and the war is over and we can be happy now and it’s all right. He spent two long years learning magic just to throw it away at the door. He welcomed Sirius home because he thought he could cure him. He has found himself wishing to cry and unable to cry-wanting more than anything to shed tears for such useless thoughts as his sacrifice, as if this were any sort of sacrifice. So he has given others up. So he has. He has rejected men whom he might someday come to love. He has defined himself by his work and his loneliness and his waiting.
“I-” Sirius says, and coughs. Remus looks at him and when Sirius looks up again, they catch on each other again (the train rushing away from him he’d watched it watched it for as long as he could) and Sirius leans in.
He runs his fingers through Remus’s hair. Such soft hair, he’d told him once. They’d been in school, horribly drunk. Such soft hair, Moooony.
And again his hand runs down to Remus’s cheek and stops there, and he brings up his other hand, softly, just barely touching, the other side of Remus’s face. “Moony face,” he says softly. Remus’s heart is beating very quickly.
The next day Sirius is slamming things around the flat and Remus wakes up bleary and his hair a mess. It’s already afternoon and he cannot believe he has spent so much time wandering through his own dreams. Sirius slams the cupboard door closed.
“Padfoot, you’re going to break something.”
Sirius pours hot water into his mug over the tea bag, and Remus hopes he won’t slam the kettle down. (He doesn’t.)
“I’ve been thinking,” Sirius says. He gives the mug to Remus and Remus raises his eyebrows but Sirius doesn’t notice. He is dressed and properly awake, his hair still damp from a recent shower. He makes his own tea and sits down next to Remus. “I’ve been thinking-keep the damned map. If you really think you need it.”
Remus takes a sip of tea and says, “If I can even get it to work.”
Sirius makes a scoffing, grumbling sound in his throat, and for a long time after, adds nothing. But he is restless. Almost angry. Fizzing up with something Remus doen’t even know what, and it makes him nervous and excited all at once.
Finally-
“I’m going to do something,” Sirius says. “But don’t say anything."
Remus’s heart beats a bit faster, a bit tighter against his ribs, as he wonders what will happen. Sirius will kiss him, he imagines. Rip open his shirt so that the buttons pop. They will fly off and scuttle across the floor. Oh Holy God. Oh Merlin.
Sirius reaches over and takes his hand.
Remus’s breath catches, but he keeps his promise, and his silence.