(Linda Arthurs)
The first time it happened was the evening after a particularly grueling loss to Ravenclaw. The two teams had been evenly matched up until the end, quite literally weathering a storm that roared and clawed and made every effort to foist the athletes from their brooms. Finally, through a dense curtain of rain Henrietta Horvath’s practiced hand closed around a tiny spot of gold in the gloom and put the miserable match out of its misery.
The result was doubly depressing because James and Sirius were in a tiff. They routinely clashed, Sirius swearing that James’ need for elaborate formations came at the expense of individual strategy and spur of the moment ingenuity, “we’re a student team after all– this isn’t the bloody Quidditch Cup,” while James insisted that aspiring to a professional standard of coordination would make them a more serious team.
On a normal day resolutions were reached through a bit of good-natured brawling on the floor of their dormitory but today’s loss had tensions boiling over. James was wearing his Oh Captain My Captain routine a bit thin, striking up a conversation with anyone who would listen about the pitfalls of the match, huddling off with older boys to lament about missed opportunities. Remus felt he was being a bit obvious, his spirited debrief drawing an increasingly pointed contrast with Sirius’ sulky silence.
The thing was, Sirius was already disappointed in his performance; he’d played more conservatively than he usually did– oftentimes his spontaneous breaks from formation were easily forgiven because they won the team points; last-second dives and feints that threw the opposition off, but today he’d mostly hovered like storm-cloud, lying in wait for an opening that never seemed to come. Certainly understandable when the current conditions prevented anyone from seeing much of anything, but there was no telling him that. Usually it would be James to rub his back and stick a finger in his ear until he stopped giving himself grief, but now James was too cross with him for any of that.
Sirius had his dark grey eyes trained firmly away from’s James grandstanding on the other side of the room, perching on the arm of Remus’ chair like a prenaturally handsome gargoyle. Remus was reading, or trying to at least, but was finding the current dynamics between his two mates a bit more riveting than regency era maneuvers.
Then Peter detached himself from the group of Quidditch players and fanatics congregating loosely around James and made his way over to them, face flushed from the heat of the room and the heated rehash of the match.
Sirius tensed like a cornered alley cat as soon as he saw him coming; Remus knew in another second he’d escape up to the dorm. It wasn’t that Peter intended to rile Sirius up (though, sometimes Remus got the feeling Wormtail knew exactly what he was doing)—truthfully, it didn’t even really matter what Peter said. Even if he was the picture of peaceable neutrality it wouldn’t matter to Sirius; it would be enough that he’d been lapping up Prongs’ glow in the way Peter always tended to and right now any attempt at conversation would be regarded as an attack from enemy ranks. Peter was saying something and Sirius was scowling and before he knew it Remus found himself placing a staying arm on Sirius’ back in an offerance of what? He didn’t know. Peace, understanding, something ? He felt Sirius stiffen, and then after a second, sag back into him.
Remus felt that Sirius’s rare amenability to such brazen coddling warranted something further— something that justified his sticking around, so, adrenaline egging him on (though he wasn’t yet aware of why touching Sirius always felt so life or death for him), Remus experimentally tightened his grip, reclining back in his seat so that gravity pulled his friend into him in a sort of backwards and sideways hug.
Sirius made a contented sort of noise, turning so he ended up half-balanced in Remus’ lap, the sharp jut of his forehead ending up jammed somewhere north of Remus’ clavicle.
“Sod it,” he said, muffled. Remus laughed. Sirius’ uniform was rain-wet and musky but Remus wouldn’t have moved for anything.
…
The second time they shared the chair was two days before the full-moon. Remus was overtaken again by that awful gnawing sensation of being conscious of every single cell in his body, the blood coursing under his skin, the sinew of his muscles, his bones rattling together like some age-old creeping alive thing was stirring from its sleep. He’d always been wary of things like that. Monstrous things. When he was really young, back before he was bitten, his mum had gotten him the book Where the Wild Things Are from the half priced book store in their village and the leering creatures in the pages had sent three year old him into such hysterics she’d had to give the damned thing away to a neighbor before he stopped crying. And now—well, the irony wasn’t lost on him.
His monster was always, always hungry. Not quite the wolf, rather an awful thing festering in his body in the days leading up to the full, before the wolf sprang forth and snuffed everything else out, quieted the noise. It got bad enough that in those last couple days before the full he looked forward to it as much as he dreaded it.
And that wasn’t wasn’t even counting the agony of transformation itself.
He’d read about the pain of transformations in his first year in a thick volume that Madame Pomfrey had rummaged up from the library. He’d expected that maybe having what was so disorienting explained to him in neat little text would make it feel more normal, more bearable. But reading about it hadn’t helped, quite the contrary it had only drawn a line under the truth; that what he was experiencing wasn’t normal or bearable. Even the way it was written, as was most literature on the condition: titillatingly, so that the audience gasped in stunned disbelief and detached sympathy, as they pondered this torturous fate, never even conceiving of a reader who was cursed with it themselves.
And so that day, as often was the case around that time in the month, he burned hot with hate. Sometimes he wanted to scream until he lost his voice at how unfair it all was, that he had to sit here and be nice and normal Remus Lupin while he was in such agony. He wanted to shout himself hoarse until people’s conversations petered out and they looked at him and maybe even feared him. At least then they would have to know what he suffered, have to acknowledge it because it was shoved right under their noses. If he had to spend his whole life knowing the world hated him for what he was, wasn’t it only fair he got to just once unleash on them the callous creature they all made him out to be? But of course, anyone finding out would be the ruin of him.
The wool of his jumper was too scratchy, the sweaty skin of his neck sticking to the leather of the chair and he was angry, so angry. At the students skiving off from class, faces dopey from spliffs behind the greenhouses, at anyone who had the audacity to be so gormlessly happy. Angry at Peter, and James, even, for no reason at all except that he was, at himself because they didn’t deserve it.
But not at Sirius. Sirius who sat quietly with him, without asking, because he knew that if he’d asked Remus would say no as a reflex, just sprawled across Remus’ legs in the common room and when they went back to the dorm curled into his side as Padfoot. The discomfort didn’t ebb, but the weight of Sirius on his legs was a balm in its own way; something firm and staying in the face of all of the stirring under his skin, the constant, tireless motion that battered him in the crescendo towards transformation. He didn’t have anything to say so he didn’t try to, just hummed a soft noise of contentment, and Sirius hummed back and it was enough.
…
Another notable occasion of chair-sharing occurred a year later in fifth year. By now the chair was largely recognized by Gryffindor house as Remus’ property (which may only be infringed on by Black) for the foreseeable future. People who failed to respect this treatise tended to find themselves at the end of mild but creative jinxes in the days following their transgression.
James, side-eyeing the enmeshed figures of Remus and Sirius on their high-backed throne, slyly transfigured an old loafer of his into a replicate armchair, adjacent to Remus’ in the same cozy space in front of the fire, under the guise of practicing for the upcoming practical exam. But Remus knew he was scheming with Lily. Or more accurately speaking, Evans was scheming and James was following slack-jawed and doe-eyed behind her, because if he was doing her bidding that meant she actually had to exchange words with him!
Sirius, hardly hazarded a glance at the inviting duplicate and only sunk back further into his lap with a petulant scoff. Remus wasn’t displeased; Remus was hiding– Lily had announced to him at the beginning of the week that a friend of hers was keen on joining him for a jaunt to Hogsmeade this weekend and had been on his case to reply in the affirmative everyday since.
The whole thing made him feel rather irritated; he’d never asked anyone to meddle in his affairs and now it was on him to politely reject the perfectly suitable girl’s advances for reasons he didn’t feel like thinking about yet. He would have to think about them eventually— there would come a point where there wouldn’t be any more time left to stall—his mum would want to know why he hadn’t brought some girl around the house or he’d get too drunk and too fed up with celibacy and his illusions of waiting for Sirius and stumble off to some bar with fogged up windows and shag some bloke in a bathroom stall but not for now.
For now, he still had time.
“Oh let him up, will you, Black?” Lily’s voice rang out. He flinched violently and huffed. Trust Lily to have him scared out of his wits for the hardly-offensable action of not agreeing to a date. Remus thought she sounded rather unreasonably harangued over something that was actually none of her business. “Remus isn’t your throw pillow. I have it on very good authority that Donna saved a seat at her table for you at the Three Broomsticks. She’s funny and clever and I can really see you two together and I might have mentioned you’d be going there later, do this for me please Lupin?”
Sirius groaned and burrowed further into the juncture between his shoulder and neck and Remus unconsciously tightened his arms around his midsection. Sitting in the armchair —or more accurately, when Sirius was sitting on Remus while he was sitting in the armchair was perhaps the sole occupation in which Sirius was inclined to be quiet for any extended period of time. Remus would settle in with a book or homework and Sirius would spill his mass of limbs across him and bend Remus’s arm until he finally gave in and let Sirius tuck his torso underneath it. At first he had assumed Sirius was doing it to try and get under his skin— Moony’s doing something quiet and swotty better go take the piss out of him— but after a while it got sort of ridiculous to keep holding his breath for the punchline. So he stopped.
“Donna’s lovely, Lily, but I’m not moving right now. And I’m definitely not going outside.”
“Ungrateful berk,” she huffed, thumbing the side of his head.
“I know, I know, I’m a good for nothing bastard.” He grinned up at a glowering Lily; she turned abruptly but not before he caught one crimson corner of her lip twitching up.
“You called Donna Harold lovely,” Sirius said in a voice of indignation once Lily had gone away.
“It was just so Lily’d bugger off.”
“Still,” Sirius pouted, “We’ve been mates for five years and you’ve never once called me lovely.”
Remus huffed an exasperated breath. “ Oh Sirius . You’re rather lovely Sirius, have I ever told you that before? Never was there a lad lovelier than my dear friend Sirius. Satisfied, lovely?”
“Fuck off. Yes,” Sirius said, but he was blushing.
…
And now… on the most stifling day of the year, they sat together, Sirius curled up in his lap, the sole castaways still indoors on a post-exams Hogsmeade weekend. The common room was silent and empty; the heat would have been altogether too oppressive if not for the current of cool air gusting in from the open window carrying with it that sharp piney smell of the forest.
For once it was Remus who felt like breaking the silence. Sirius should have been out there in the sun, and tugging a grudging Remus along with him. But as it was, he was licking his wounds, reckoning with James’ recent declaration that he and Lily were thinking of living together. He traced circles with the pad of his thumb on Sirius’ upper arm in a way he hoped was soothing.
The old Remus would have delighted in the chance to have Sirius all to himself, but they were both different people now. He didn’t feel as territorial as he once had —back at a time when time Sirius spent with James had felt like a direct encroachment on the time he spent with him, a reminder that he’d never be anything more than second place.
But over the past year, they’d grown up and into each other, like two trees with root systems gnarled together to the point of inseparability, a single many-armed organism inhaling and exhaling as one. Sitting close together as they did hardly left a space for doubts and when they did creep in in the form of his own insecurities and judgemental gazes from others they were easily banished by the warm vibrato of Sirius’ laugh against his chest, or the way he’d hum and stir when he was just waking up from a nap.
Whatever it was, this thing between them, somewhere over the course of all the time they’d spent curled up in their spot in front of the fire, it had grown from something delicate and tentative to something much more hardy, steeped in both time and trust. And now, Remus knew, if not in his head, then in his bones, that Sirius could only drift so far away from him before he flowed back, that they were two boys with one center point. They wouldn’t lose track of each other.
Remus had always suspected that their plan of all four of them living together after school was shaky at best, but he felt the confirmation just as acutely. As soppy as it was he would miss his closest friends in this life always being within shouting distance. It was comforting, the fact that as far as the curly script of their name emblems on the map traveled over the course of the day, that by the end of the night they congregated back in the same tower. But his own disappointment seemed to fade both in intensity and importance, in the face of Sirius’. When confronted by the fears of his truthfully more-than-a-friend by now it was quite easy to set his own aside and put on a brave face.
Sirius– from what Remus had observed from his unique vantage point, curled up beneath him–that was– wasn’t all energy and constant motion for no reason. Rather, he just resorted to it as a kind of defensive measure. If he kept running at full tilt he’d never have to feel left behind. But now, it was still happening, anyways.
Sure, they were all moving onto bigger and better things, adulthood, and life after school, but with war, like a cloud of noxious gas on the horizon, that went on for miles in all directions so that the only way past was through, it felt more like Hogwarts was leaving them. What need did it have for them anymore? Now it was time for them to go be soldiers, and for the school to polish itself off for the next generation of pupils with bright-eyes who were still excited about magic, weren’t worn out from worrying about all of the ways it might be used to kill them.
Remus could go home to his parents; he didn’t particularly want to; it felt like going backwards, but it was his , his childhood scribblings on the wall of his old bedroom were proof. And maybe Sirius could go to the Potters, but Remus knew it was different if James wasn’t going with him; James who was his brother and who he’d follow anywhere, but now James was going somewhere Sirius couldn’t follow him; he was starting a new family, was forming new routines and new habits of which Sirius wasn’t a part.
It just wasn’t good enough. He wanted more than anything to give Sirius stillness, something constant, like an artifact of the past seven years that he could carry on living in. A place he could go to stay.
He thought for a while. Finally he broke the weighty silence to say, “We could have a chair like this.”
“Are we getting metaphysical this afternoon? We do have a chair like this?” Sirius said, after a moment.
Remus groaned. “Not here, you git. I meant in the— the flat.”
“Oh,” Sirius said.
“It’s not– I know we haven’t talked about it. And I know– without Prongs it’ll be different, obviously. And without James in on the scheme Wormy’s going to move back in with his parents, no surprises there. But I’d still want to live together, if you do.”
The wind quieted for a moment, as if even it was holding its breath.
“And we could do this every day?” Sirius’ voice trembled a little at the end of his sentence.
“Or until you get bored of it,” Remus said.
Sirius curled still closer towards him. “And when has that ever happened?”
“Touche,” Remus said, seeing no reason to try and hide the smile that by now had overtaken his face.