Night Sanctuary (Otto Hesselbom)
On Sirius’ nightstand there sits a small shining world encased in glass. It’s resided in this place of pride ever since Moony gifted it to him last Christmas. There was a shy smile percolating at the corner of his mouth that Sirius can still call forth in his head if he concentrates. It’s almost hard to believe it’s the same mouth that is now more often than not set in a face suspended somewhere between disappointment, listlessness, and a profound sadness.
He couldn’t say for sure, but Remus and him were on the brink of something, it felt like, in those late spring days on the steady march up to summer. Sirius could lie between Remus’ long legs, head propped up against his chest or stomach, talking or listening to the sounds of him turning pages for hours into the night and wake up early before James’ hellish alarm to sneak back to his own bed.
And the worst part was that in all the carnage, in all the scorched earth and noxious smoke left in the aftermath he couldn’t identify a body, couldn’t quantify the exact scale of the casualty–couldn’t point his finger and say that, there is precisely what has been lost, because they’d never even acknowledged the existence of something beyond the normal parameters of friendship between them. But what was unquestionable was that it wasn’t coming back, and half a year later Sirius still feels just as aware of the vast empty space left behind as if it was yesterday.
James is James, flying by the seat of his pants same as always, getting into detention for stupid shit to distract from the fact that Sirius would be serving it alone otherwise and that he has cemented himself as leagues above the likes of Sirius in the minds of their professors and their friends.
Peter’s constantly on edge around him like he’s a bomb that might go off at any second and his colossal fuck-up was only the first installment in a painful but inevitable devolvement into psychopathy. Maybe it is; it certainly feels like it might be when he has to watch Wormy avoid his eyes at all costs and rock anxiously on his toes anytime he’s left alone in the same room with him.
But Moony’s just gone, like he’s packed up and shipped off to some remote island in the deep blue sea of himself and has yet to find any reason worthy of swimming back to their shores.
Sirius knows for his part he hasn’t given him any adequate reason to do so. He spent all summer working himself up into a right state, pacing from wall to wall of his room building up palaces of the precisely right words to construe the magnificence of his grief all to arrive at King’s Cross and watch as Remus took him in blankly and muttered, “Thank you for saying that,” and it to hit Sirius that he wasn’t magnificent even in his repentance, that for all his efforts he didn’t amount to anything worth Moony’s time or attention, the fevered flame that had sustained him up until that point effectively withered down to nothing. He doesn’t think he’s felt properly warm since.
A cold has taken up residence in his bones since then, like an early-onset rigor mortis that makes him feel as if anything beyond the daily trek to his classes and back to the dorm to sleep would be asking too much of him. He was kicked off the Quidditch team but he suspects he wouldn’t have been able to move his arms and legs fast enough to fly half-decently anyways. Maybe they could have used him as a Beater's bat or a goalpost or something but ah now he’s just getting carried away.
That’s not to say other emotions never manage to claw their way through his hypothermic membrane. Today, for instance, the primary one is annoyance.
It’s just the fucking biting cold of the air he used to actually like and people chattering loudly about beloved families back home they can’t wait to see over hols and just now the raucous laughs and shouts of James and Peter as they duel across the dormitory. The way Peter’s breath has to rasp wetly every time he opens his mouth to bellow a jinx like he’s an eighteenth century maiden coming down with consumption.
He would escape off to someplace quieter but he’s pretty sure Remus is sitting in the common room and he doesn’t feel up to facing the nothing look Remus will give him when he passes. So he stays where he is, gnashing his teeth as the jagged bursts of light fall textbooks and board games until finally, tongue tucked between his teeth, Pete resorts to a time-worn tactic from the Marauders playbook of vanishing an opponent's clothes, and lobs an “Evanesco” at James, who ducks out of the way at the last second, so it lands squarely on the object behind him instead; Sirius’ snowglobe.
James and Peter, to their credit, stop dueling immediately, and the room descends into a tense, anticipatory silence.
Sirius’ voice comes out sounding low and mean even to him. “I always think there’s a limit to how stupid one person can be and then you go and prove me wrong. You’ve really outdone yourself Wormy.” Peter just looks at him with big shocked eyes, and Sirius feels angrier if that’s even possible.
He can feel James’ wary look burning into the back of his head like a cattle brand. “Calm down, you tit,” he says, annoyingly flippant. “Forgot you’re a wizard? Conjure another.”
“Couldn’t make another one like that.” The anger has apparently remembered itself and receded back into the much larger reservoir of sadness that serves as his primary emotional state these days.
“Sorry Wormtail,” he adds as an afterthought. But there really isn’t anything he can say to justify his outsized reaction other than the truth. And he hasn’t even told James; he’s certainly not going to explain it to Wormtail.
“Whatever,” Peter grunts, gets into his bed and draws the curtains.
“Sorry Prongs,” he says without raising his eyes to look at him.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” he says honestly. “Think I’ll sleep.”
He doesn’t—sleep that is. He lies down in bed and thinks about his parent’s townhome in London. The spotless sheen of the floors. The dark places his mother locked him in and how without fail, when she finally let him out, whatever he’d broken would have been replaced with a perfect replica or else swept up and tidied out of eyesight by a small army of House Elves, whatever dinner he’d interrupted restored to order.
The error of his rebellious ways erased, eviscerated, vanished without a trace. He never even had to worry about seeing the damage he’d done reflected on his family’s faces, because no matter what he’d done this time they’d look at him the same way they alway did: his dad with empty eyes and apathy, his mother with her haughty austerity and Reg with that terribly disappointed expression.
There was a certain comfort in it, knowing he could trust things to fall back into place as if he’d never been there in the first place, never really mattered at all. If he did exist, it was always as this same loathsome thing– this bad son, this disappointing brother, who had always been exactly as hated as he is now.
_
“Padfoot?”
He doesn’t remember nodding off, but he must have done. His eyes are wet and he wonders what mean thing his mother was screaming at him in his dreams. It’s dark, not the absolute darkness of the dumbwaiter at Grimmauld place, but the staticky gray of the dormitory, ripe with warmth and the sounds of his friends sleeping. Two of his friends, at least.
“Padfoot,” Remus’ voice comes through his bed-curtains again.
“Moony?”
“Can I come in?”
“Alright.” He swipes at his itchy eyes. The crimson bed-hangings part and Moony ducks in. He sits kitty-corner to Sirius on the bed.
“I can get you another snow-globe. Really. It’s not worth maiming Wormtail over.”
“I’ll be a good boy and apologize properly in the morning.”
Remus hums in a noncommittal way that seems to translate roughly to, “I’m not your mom, that’s none of my business,” which makes him feel rather uneasy given that when they were still friends Remus never hesitated to behave as if that was the case.
“I just– I didn’t intend for you to take it out on them. I mean it’s our thing, yeah? So if we have to have it out-”
“I mean Moony, what did you honestly expect? I had to be fine with it because you were telling me to be. But summer was– ” As hard as he tries to wrest control over his voice it still comes out brittle and bitter.
“You had Prongs,” Remus says defensively.
Sirius stares a hole in his blanket, breathing around the hurt in his chest. “I had Prongs. I needed you.”
“God, Padfoot, you can’t say shit like that.”
“Sorry,” he says robotically, letting his head droop. It suddenly feels too heavy for his neck to support. His eyes get that telltale burning feeling and he jams his tongue to the top of his mouth to buy time. He’s really going to have to kill himself if he starts actually crying .
“Bugger it, Sirius I didn’t mean–Do you really mean it? Or are you–” his voice gets a lot quieter, “are you just saying that because you know it’s what I want to hear?”
“Which is more likely to make you hate me more than you already do?”
“I don’t fucking hate you, you prick.” Name-calling; definitely a sign of progress. His limbs faintly tingle.
“Look do you want to fucking go for a walk? It’s– the air’s all stale in here and it’s a thousand degrees,” Remus says and grabs for his elbow roughly, apparently deciding for him. Sirius chooses to interpret that last comment as pertaining to the general quality of the air in the dorm room as opposed to a jab at the recent drop-off in his own personal upkeep.
Remus grabs the cloak from where it’s pooled on James’ dresser and moves through the darkness of the room to the door.
They pause right outside of it, forced together in the cramped landing of the stairwell. Remus sort of nods at the cloak and Sirius backs up close enough to him so that Remus can let it fall over them both. It’s all so muscle-memory enough to be painful.
The castle is the kind of quiet you only get in the middle of the night in the middle of winter. That and the familiar course Remus charts soothes him like warm water. He doesn’t know exactly where they’re going but he’s able to to guess the next one or two turns before Remus makes them, the shortcut down the back staircase, the out of use corridor between the Charms classroom and Arithmancy that housed scholarly societies and dueling clubs in years past. He gets a stupid amount of satisfaction from the fact that even after all this time and space there are still secrets he and Remus share.
So he knows before they arrive at the massive front door to the castle that the only place Remus could possibly be going is out onto the grounds.
He feels a pang of some anxious emotion pierce the momentary calm brought by the journey through the dormant castle. It’s all too painfully reminiscent of the old him, who loved wintertime, who lived for days out in the cold enchanting snow down Remus’ jumper. It feels like he’s in danger of trespassing on something that no longer belongs to him, like he’s some dodgy character peering in through the window of a house he no longer lives in.
His love for winter is all tied up in his love for Remus and he doesn’t know if he’s ready to open himself back up to one of them again if it means exposing himself to the full force of the other.
Remus– whether unaware of Sirius’ misgivings or simply unsympathetic– murmurs an enchantment and shoulders open the door.
The world beyond it is cloaked in white. Miles, miles, miles of the stark landscape of crests, crags and valleys, the brilliant contrast of sweeping whiteness with the black wall of the Forbidden forest punctuated only by the lights of Hogsmeade village in the not-so-far distance.
“First snow,” Remus says.
“First snow,” he echoes.
Sirius is a sentimental bastard. When your mother has a penchant for vanishing your most beloved possessions it’s hard not to get attached to the things you have left. He thinks maybe Remus is a sentimental bastard too. It would be extremely in character for Remus to schedule his forgiveness to align with this ritual of theirs, an armistice in the snow for the poetic effect of it all. Or maybe he was going to trek out on his own but Sirius’ latest breakdown persuaded Remus to take mercy on him. Dare he presume that his own emotional desolation was the deciding factor? That would be hoping for too much, he thinks.
When they’re a safe distance from the castle, Remus whips the cloak off and they just stand there breathing twin pires of smoke into the frigid air. He’s still holding Sirius’ elbow, for some reason. Sirius stares straight ahead, trying to get a handle on the harried stuttering thing in his chest, but he can feel Remus’ eyes on him, searching him out; making that familiar, measured entreaty for his attention; oh how he has missed it.
“…So,” Remus says, finally breaking the silence.
In his peripheral vision he can just make him out smiling that barely-there smile of his, the one that makes you think you’ve imagined it.
“I was thinking… seeing as you’re so heartbroken about the snow globe, we might make some more.”
He hardly has time to get through his gormless thought– You mean it really was all for me? – or register the loss of the warm weight of Remus’ hand around his arm, before his friend is using it to pack snow together and pelting it right at him. It registers as a shock of startling cold pin-pricks at each and every one of his nerve endings. Enlivening and surprisingly lovely.
“Pleased with yourself, are you?”
“Very,” Remus says, and now he’s really on his way to smiling, a slyer one of his, and one of Sirius’ particular favorites.
“Gonna get me back?” Remus says, already shuffling back in preparation for a counter-attack.
“Suppose I have to,” Sirius grunts, trying to sound indignant and failing miserably, spelling some into his own hand. There is something waking up inside him that if you asked him a few weeks ago he would have been fairly certain would go on slumbering for the next millennium; the inertia he has accumulated in the past months has started sloughing off, and a giddy laugh bubbles out of him. It’s like having his own personal holocene there in the snow. Remus skirts away, and narrowly dodges his attack, but Sirius is already packing snow for another volley of spheres, and they scramble for a few minutes in a breathless impasse, alternating between parrying and ducking.
Finally Remus feints to the left and lines himself up for a perfect shot, but he doesn’t take it after all, just ducks in close enough for Sirius to see the particles of snow in his long ash-blond lashes. “Lost your touch, eh Padfoot?”
They close the distance to the village without talking, the wind whipping up little flurries of powder, their tracks unfurling behind them— two crooked and occasionally overlapping lines.
They pause when they reach the start of the high street and the wind picks up then, a haunted choir around them that straddles the line between howling and singing.
Sirius looks out at the deserted village, the merry story-book houses, cozy yellow light emanating from windows gone blurry with frost. It’s like treading on a massive frosted birthday cake, the soft glow of the lamp-posts like candles all around them, as if they wandered out of the castle and right into the world from his snow globe.
“It’s so weird being out here when no one else is. It’s like we’re the last ones left.”
Remus hums in agreement. “Or the first inhabitants of a new planet.”
“Not much hope for populating this new planet is there.”
Moony cuffs him lightly on the shoulder, “You’re horrible. Get in the spirit of it. Fresh starts and all that.”
“Do you really believe in them? Fresh starts, I mean.”
Remus stops in his tracks, a clear indication that he’s giving the question proper consideration.
“I guess... Maybe not if I’m honest. I think– you can’t start over, not really. There’s always some old in the new. So– no I don’t think things just get erased, if that’s what you’re asking. Nature keeps a record. The past doesn’t go away, but maybe it becomes less important. New layers form on top of the old, new chances for things to grow…”
He pauses to look at Sirius for a long time; of course he understands what the underlying inquiry is.
“It’s a tiny fraction, one stupid impulsive moment. But I just mean even at your worst– I still, there’s a part of me that still wants to have seen it, known it, so I can forgive that part. I don’t think there’s a thing you’ve done I’d want to forget or turn away from. Even if it hurts like a bitch to remember.”
God, and isn’t that proof of how good Remus is. He’s not like Sirius’ mum, vanishing anything with a chip and conjuring sparkling replacements in their stead. He could throw Sirius out with the rest of the rubbish but he’s willing to take on the rest of the detritus, even the broken glass bottles that cut his hands and the shit, like literal shit because there’s something in the midst he deems worth saving.
If Remus is willing to remember the very least Sirius can do is return the favor: invite his love for Remus back in, much as it may hurt. Love even those parts that might still hate Sirius, the parts that make Sirius hate himself.
And he does love him.
He loves every iteration of him, every last gone-silver scar on Remus’ face, even the ones that are the result of his own foolhardy actions. Loves every edition of him, even this latest one, dragging him out of his bed like a dog that needs to be walked. He can’t just close his eyes to the world and seal himself away from the winter. He knows in his bones there’s no way forward except to feel it. Even if it means the damage can’t be undone he’d rather have the bad with the good, rather take stock of what he’s lost than pretend he never had it in the first place.
In his most desperate moments over the past few months he was scarily tempted to just Obliviate it all away. But he couldn’t do it– he couldn’t find it in himself to vanish Remus.
He understands now, more than he ever has, the blind trust that it takes for Remus to let them spend every full moon with him. To take them at their word when they tell him he is good and worth the effort.
He can’t change the past but he can be better than he was before, because for some reason Remus still seems to thinks he’s worth the effort and Sirius can– has to– at least try to make it worth his while.
“For what it’s worth, Moony, I do really need you. I wasn’t just saying it, before.”
“And I need you not to do anything like what you did again.”
“Yeah. Understood.”
The next words spill out of Remus like it was all he could do to hold them back.
“It’s worth a lot, actually– I can’t tell you how bad I wanted to break. It was a trip, let me tell you– I was fucking bending over backwards writing paragraphs in my head to justify just forgiving you and then walking it all back the next day. When I saw you, after this summer, I just wanted to hold you,” he says fervently, earnestly and then smiles sheepishly and looks away
The flare of hurt and anger he feels towards Remus for making him wait so long is lost in the heat of the inferno of other emotions reigniting after such a long hiatus.
He doesn’t look at Remus, but down at his own booted foot as he drags it back and forth, digging a grove in the snow. But he feels Remus’ gaze burning into him, warm to the point of scalding.
Remus takes measured steps towards him bringing that impossible warmth along with him. Sirius wrenches his voice out from somewhere in the tremulous depths of himself.
“I– wasn’t sure if there actually was something… but whatever there was, I was sure I ruined it.”
He’s all choked up, half on his way to hyperventilating and under his nose is a mess of snot.
Remus shakes his head and kisses him for the first time heedless of it all so he must really like him. He wants to tell Remus more things, tell him all of it, how cold he’s felt without him and how he wasn’t sure he’d ever feel magnificent again but at Remus’ murmured entreaty he forces himself to slow down and suck in a few deep and very necessary breaths.
He settles for tucking his head under Remus’ chin and letting Moony shelter him from the wind, giving the growing fire inside of him a proper chance to ignite further. Snow falls ceaselessly all around them but the core of Sirius thaws on at a rapid pace.