The most disorienting thing about being Padfoot is always the loss of color. Padfoot doesn’t really mind so much because there are so many other enticing things to occupy his nervous system, the smells, for one: the sweetness of the grass in the Potter’s yard and the spice of Euphemia’s cooking and the gasoline from the passing cars. But it is always a shock how vivid everything is when he transforms back to Sirius, the boy. The golden brown of the rustling reeds that is so Remus, and the shiny cherry exterior of a muggle automobile that is so James as is the robin egg blue of the sky when they play pick-up Quidditch games in the Potter’s yard and Peter’s glorious buttery yellow like the precocious dawn light or the first pad of butter on a roll.
Color was the first way Sirius rebelled. His family’s colors; deep brooding mahoganies and burgundies, pale white skin and dark black robes. Their black was a black that absorbed everything, siphoning color and noise and snuffing it out; they possessed a likeness to space that transcended their astronomical namesakes; the same power to create and maintain nothingness; entire galaxies of teeming, glittering, silence.
Then all at once a boy showering bright blue sparks in an otherwise perfectly ordered house, not like Regulus who merely made the keys on the pianoforte sound out without touching them or Bellatrix who lit fire to every single candle in the house. And then of course, his induction into a house of crimson, vermillion scarves striped with gold, a warmer shade of red than he’d ever known, breaking centuries of family tradition.
It was around that time that thoughts and feelings began to take on colors for him, too. He’d wake up panting in his bed blinking the regal dark green out of his eyes. Fear became synonymous with that color, one which bore a startling resemblance to the color of the walls of his parent’s townhome and he’d have to hold tight to his crimson bed hangings just to stave it off. Different than the emerald of Slytherin house, because that wasn’t evil, it couldn’t be, not when Reg came sweeping around a corner in his robes and tie and his cheeks pink surrounded by friends, no green wasn’t all bad. There were those nice yellowy-green shades too, the ones he associated with Marauding and mischief making and creativity, the kind on the edges of his favorite lessons at school that got brighter and more vivid the more interested he was; the day in fourth year when McGonagall talked about the theory behind animagi and suddenly he looked at a problem he’d been trying to solve for years from a completely different perspective and almost fell out of his chair from the bright burst of chartreuse.
Now, he is lying on the grass in the Potter’s yard after leaving his parent’s house for the last time. He’s tracing a finger in the dirt and he feels something rising in him; rich and heady it blossoms in his body like Euphemia’s fuchsia bougainvillea spilling over the trellis, the polar opposite of his mother’s pale refined primroses; he doesn’t have to contain himself anymore, probably couldn’t even if he tried. He’s all meristem, ready to reach for everything he never let himself want before now, ready to admit to himself, whisper it just so he can taste it on the inside of his cheeks, I can’t stop thinking about Moony.
…
Such a seemingly innocuous event. James flicking his wand lazily at the rattan ottoman they’d been transfiguring, Peter reaching for a tea sandwich at the same time and nudging James’ arm a bit so his spell went awry and right at Sirius’ chair, which morphed at once into a bright green frog and shot out from underneath him, leaving him without a place to sit.
Remus’s voice, warm and rich in his ear. “You’re fucking heavy, you know that?”
Sirius, bated breath, hanging like a noose in the balance. “I had to sit somewhere .”
“Don’t make a habit of it,” Moony says, but he doesn't make any move to shove him off.
That’s how it starts, if there’s even a real start point at all, if it hadn’t always been pressing up against the inside of his skin, subterranean stirrings long predating the first fissure in the crust. But how it “starts” is spending more and more of his time trying to get Remus to say yes to him. If Remus lets him get away with things, and if it so happens that he experiences the rare fortune of replicating this result– that was cracking the code to life. He doesn’t think so much about why that is, it just is , something instinctual, like the way he holds wand or leaning back a little to dismount his broom, he does it without thinking.
“You’re very clingy today,” Remus says, when they rise to head back into the house but his hand is still clasped over Sirius’ shoulder so he can’t be too put off. And Sirius should think of something to say, he really should.
“You’re just so long and stretchy-like. Like taffy, you are. T’s nice,” he finally settles on.
“Don’t suppose you’ll allow me to kip in solitude either?”
Remus is wearing his stern look but his lip twitches up on one side, giving him away and Sirius feels unbridled joy at the prospect– the guest room Remus stays in is on the shady side of the house and if Prongs doesn’t get restless and wake them up early they can spend hours like that, sprawled together on a bed that is really too small for two almost grown men.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Moony, of course not.”
It takes him a long time to fall asleep. Behind his eyelids a progression of images, none of them cogent. He knows he wants things from Remus and he knows that spending more time with him doesn’t make the want go away. Even lying with his back lightly grazing Moony’s bare tan chest, close enough to feel the rise and fall of his breath, he still wants. It’s utterly irrational; he wants to be closer than even this, which means he must sort of want to climb inside him. It doesn’t occur to him at the time that this has anything to do with sex, and mostly, it doesn’t.
He’s just escaped from a house where he was always feeling persecuted for something, and he’s tired of looking over his shoulder, of looking for monsters in the shadows so he doesn’t. He indulges himself.
And rationalizes that nothing that has to do with Remus can be too maligned. Remus who is so obviously good , whose approval is the golden rule, whose attention is golden, whose quick, clever eyes call to mind “golden brown, texture like sun…”
His particular brand of grumbly fondness makes the barbs his mother threw at him seem dull and asinine, makes him question how they’d ever once hurt him. Remus is real and warm and grounding and everything outside of his purview becomes, by comparison, flat and cold and unimportant.
You haven’t really lived, Sirius thinks, if you haven’t experienced that appreciative, discerning way he cocks his head at you when you’ve said something particularly brilliant, or startled laughter spilling out of him that shakes his bony shoulders, or watched as he grins at you with eyes like the sun at its zenith that are wet around the edges how he had when they’d revealed their animagus forms, like he was happy to just know you.
The summer glides on, long sleepy days that they while away smoking weed and hiking to the closest town to the Potter’s place for ice-cold bitter pints, lying in disarray all over the house and the yard, relishing that for now, on the slow descent from the solstice, while the nights are stretched so far apart and the days are never ending, nothing is expected of them.
By mid August, the others are ready for school to start, Remus because he can only do nothing for so long; James for the same reason and also because school means he can see Lily. Not Sirius. He thinks he could go on like this forever. He says as much and Pete agrees emphatically. Pete’s good like that.
But despite Sirius’ wishes, the school year comes as it always does and with it the briskness of Fall, of trips to Diagon Alley and stationary and drinking hot tea rather than iced, of chatter about who snogged who over hols and who wants to take who to the village.
Sirius wonders why he isn’t excited about it as he usually is. He always felt it before, that indigo thrill at the prospect of sitting too close to a girl in a booth in Three Broomsticks and maybe snogging her in the alley behind, of having someone to clutch close in the cold months. He thinks about it; getting to know a girl and shacking up with her after school ends and it sounds perfectly plausible for everyone else– for Pete, and for James, and even for Moony, but when he tries out wanting that for himself, he finds he doesn’t.
He asks himself why– it was always the plan, wasn’t it? Not the stifling marriage to a Pureblood princess his mother had in mind, but meeting someone fun and getting used to them (someone who sees the merits of a motorbike and he could take out for a pint after work) someone to have by his side for the next chapter. Nothing wrong with that, was there? But he’s still not excited.
Maybe it was his parents who numbed him, and now that he’s out of immediate danger, everything else is relative. Dashing into a broom cupboard to snog and running the risk of getting caught by Filch doesn’t really get the blood pumping when you’ve been on the end of as many of his mother’s curses as he has. Or maybe this is what life is from now on; a muted sort of affair, maybe that’s adulthood, not particularly what he envisioned, but decent enough. He feels far away from his friends, at least compared to summer. It happens naturally, they’re all running off to do things and spreading themselves thin and he can’t be fussed to follow after them. He still thinks about Moony and misses summer, misses those days when they could lay all over each other and the war didn’t seem real. Freddie Mercury croons, “When I'm not with you/ Think of you always / I miss those long hot summer nights,” over and over, incessantly in his head. He wonders if Remus thinks about him too, but never finds the courage to ask.
And then one day he’s snogging Tammy Mercer and she calls him, “pretty,” whispers it low in his ear, and he shivers. He knows that he looks androgynous; he puts a lot of effort into looking precisely the way he does, but that has always been firmly about him and not his dick and who he wanted to touch it.
But after that, something changes. He doesn’t feel like he’s muddling through anymore, he feels like he’s on the brink of something, waiting for the next shock. All of a sudden his thoughts aren’t slow-moving, they’re fast and almost manic. Like grasping for something out of his dreams, waking up in bed with it on the tip of his tongue. And then one morning he wakes up and he does remember, he sees himself and he’s on the other side of things, someone is leaning down to kiss him, someone with larger hands that settle pleasantly on his waist and easily encircle his wrists, and he’s pretty sure that person is Remus.
He keeps dreaming, awake and asleep. In some Remus is teaching him a concept that he hadn’t been paying attention to in class in his patient, methodical way of his. Other times he’s remembering something that actually happened in a different light, with a new excitement—the way Remus would take care of things for him when he was too sullen or too depressed to, the way he’d filled out his course choices when all he could think about was the black of his mother eyes. Sometimes he thinks of Remus’ clever, fine-boned hands on his cock. He comes thinking of Remus and does it again and again.
…
And then, like fate, like gravity, Remus and him fall back together. He doesn’t have to wonder if Remus thinks about him because it’s written in everything he does. They start spending more and more time together, and he wonders if it feels to Remus the way it does to him, like he’s been swept up in a wind-cold energy that scatters his thoughts and makes his palms sweat. He wants Remus in the way people do in songs that sound like they’re about people but are actually about heroin.
Neither of them ever slept easily, but now they spend those bleary twilight-between-hours talking, more nights than most, and when they do fall asleep it’s in the same bed to wake up wrapped around each other. Behind bed-hangings and in far off corners of the library they whisper every thought that passes into their minds except the most obvious glaring ones about each other; it’s almost like they both have the sense that they’re running out of time, time to be young, time to be here, the way they are now, together.
It gets colder and school breaks for winter hols and when it’s time to go their separate ways at the station Remus hugs him on the platform like he doesn’t want to let him go. They exchange so many letters, long and winding, and full of funny things that happened over the course of their days and lyrics of songs that they’re in love with and Euphemia’s bougainvillea is fading in color but the feeling inside him is blooming brighter than ever.
The new year comes in a wash of rain and low hanging skies. He’s stupidly happy, reading in bed with Remus and turning into Padfoot to play fetch with him at the edge of the forest and listening to Labi Siffre on vinyl. Everyday feels like Scarborough Fair and Eleanor Rigby on repeat but happier because they exist outside of all the lonely people, on a different plane from them.
…
Remus pulls away. He starts smoking alone again, studying alone again, “forgetting” to invite Sirius along. It’s not obvious to anyone except Sirius. He wishes he could be as unaffected by it as James and Pete are, that he didn’t have to pass the time waiting for Remus to come back snogging some girl he doesn’t like, just to quiet down his stupid nervous thoughts.
They are still close, but it is never close enough for Sirius and he starts fights with Remus in retaliation. Petty things that came out of nowhere and he hates himself for it but he can’t stop; he thinks maybe he’s addicted to drawing blood. Sometimes he thinks he’s sick, that he inherited it from his parents, preferring shouting to the silence, but sometimes he thinks Remus is the sick one. For removing himself so surgically, for pretending that under all of the blue gray anesthesia he’s not still leaving Sirius with a scar.
This day is no different. Their mouths are set, muscles tensed, the stale taste of yet another argument on their breaths.
“Sirius,” Remus says. “I don’t know what you want from me,” and it hurts.
He thought Remus understood without him having to say it out loud, understood his desperation to always lie tangled up in each other with boundaries blurred and sharing body heat. He thought Remus saw it too, the undercurrent running through everytime they talk, ultraviolet undulations imperceptible to the eyes of others, a blink and you miss it slant of “ 4’o clock light ” that they could live in together “ drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing ”, the root connection Patti Smith sings about in her dark brown voice.
He thought Remus saw the significance in “I saved you a seat,” and a hand on the small of the other’s back and similar subtleties, of reading poetry to each other in poncy voices because that was the only way they could get away with professing their love.
“It’s not like that,” he says. “It’s not like, a specific thing I want you to do.” He fabricated entire imaginary kingdoms staring at the back of locked closet doors as a kid, lofty architecture, hubristic high-ceilings with skylights and grand-domed cathedrals and apparently he never broke the habit.
He remembers his mother’s voice in his ear on those times he got too excited. “You sound manic Sirius. Conduct yourself properly because like it or not, you are living in this world and in this world you do what I tell you to.”
“I wish you would just tell me,” Remus says, slicing through his thoughts. “I don’t know if you’re– are you trying to punish me for something?”
“Not that. It’s— I thought you already knew, was the thing. Moony. I thought it wasn’t just me.”
He tries to smile and leaves. He knows his face must be broken open, shattered for all the world to see, crying color.
…
He spends the next month or so wallowing in self-pity, chain-smoking and listening to Jefferson Airplane an obnoxious amount.
Eventually James wants to “talk” so Sirius lets him.
“Mate,” he says, all soft soothingly, brotherly. His breath smells a bit like syrup. “You’ve got to face it. You were smothering him a bit.”
“He told you that?”
“Well, no,” James says, scratching the back of his hair, looking something . “But it’s Moony, I mean. Of course he’s not going to come out and say it.”
“I just miss him, James,” he says. “I feel like he’s leaving me. Like, you– I know I’ll see you everyday when school ends can’t hardly get rid of you can I? But, Moony I just feel like sometimes if I don’t nail him down he’ll just slip away from us and never come back.”
“You can’t get rid of me,” James says, grinning, but it’s not enough, they both know, it’s not enough.
“I don’t think Remus realizes how much it affects you. I think– I mean it’s hard for him, Padfoot. He’s always been a bit closed off, I think he thinks it’s better. But this isn’t new Sirius. This was always–He’ll stray from us and he’ll come back, because he always has. I just don’t think it used to bother you as much. You can’t just expect him to be different because you are.”
He’s right of course. Sirius feels childish and small. The world and the people in it are moving on, looking forward to the future; they don’t have time to entertain his whims any longer. His mother was right after all.
James sighs heavily and drops his shoulders, his cowlick of black hair visible as he tips his head back at the sky. Then he turns on Sirius with one of his rare, piercing James stares.
“Padfoot,” he says. “You know how much I love you?”
“Yeah,” Sirius says. He’s still suspicious of that word. I love you and that is why this is being done to you, taken from you, why you can’t have this thing.
…
Things come to a head in March. His anger is like a stray dog, limping on a lame leg, and then finally a day comes where all the wind’s gone out of it, leaving an abscess, a dearth of any and all color, in its wake. He starts missing class, spends hours at a time in bed, wasting away.
After a week of this, Remus takes pity on him, pulls back the covers, tells him they’re going for a walk.
They chart a winding path down to Black Lake. Remus is going easy on him, not forcing him to talk yet, but Sirius knows even his patience has limits.
When they get to the lake, the water is opaque black, reflecting nothing. It reminds him of his parents. He knows he has to talk.
“I just,” Sirius says, feeling pathetic. “It wasn’t always like this, I know it’s me who’s different, only me who feels like it’s not enough anymore, and everyone else is, everyone is okay, but I’m the one who can’t…”
He tries to order his scattered thoughts.
“We’re all moving on, we’re all leaving, but it feels different, when I think about you leaving me, it feels like–everything else is going to shit and I can accept it, but I don’t think– I can’t do it without you Moony,” he cradles his own face. “And it’s okay if you can’t feel the way I do, I just– you’ve always let me follow you everywhere and I sort of thought I might always, even when school ends and all that. But I never asked if– if you, want me to just stop?”
“Padfoot,” Remus says, but Sirius won’t look at him. Remus sighs and steps into his line of sight. His arms go around him, blotting out all the colors, mercy from how lackluster everything is. “Padfoot, I don’t want you to stop.”
“I didn’t know,” Remus says. “I didn’t know you felt like this. I’m not going anywhere. Not now. Not–We’ll figure this out, alright? I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” and he wants to tell Remus to stop saying that; it’s not making it better and actually it might be making it worse but he thinks that it’s nice that Remus is trying to comfort him and not telling him to go. Still, he can’t stop himself from asking, “How did you not know?” It comes out choked and tremulous. Remus doesn’t answer.
Sirius catches his breath, kneels on the fertile earth and stares at the same spot on Remus’ jeans. He’s already hollowed himself out, expelled all of the grotesque matter that was weighing down his innards. He doesn’t have anything left to give.
“It’s not that I didn’t see it, not really,” Remus says. Sighs. “I think–I was trying not to look. I don’t know when I started doing it, a while ago, I think, but there are these times when I go so far into my head I forget about other people. Every so often, as a reminder. Like as long as I can go back there I’ll be safe, because there–in that place, I don’t need anyone, only me.”
He’s speaking thoughtfully, really thinking about the words before he says them.
“I never meant to make you think that– that none of it mattered to me. I– it all mattered. It mattered a lot. Really, Padfoot. All of it. I think; it’s like I forget that I take up space sometimes? Like other people take up space and the things they do matter and make me feel, but I don’t assume it works the other way around. Our things– all of our things, our conversations… as stupid as it sounds, I never imagined you thought about me when I wasn’t in the room.”
His eyes land on something through Remus’ legs that he hadn’t noticed before, there on the edge of the water, small dots of white and purple wildflowers that he didn’t see before, that surely weren’t there a second ago.
“You’re right,” Sirius croaks. “That does sound stupid. I mean, Moony, of course I think about you.”
“I think about you too.”
Sirius stares at the purple-white wildflower and Remus’ faded blue jeans. He decides that hope is those colors.
Remus says, “I think I convinced myself that my being here doesn’t make much difference one way or another. But I’m, it’s a bad habit. I’m going to try not to be scared of that so much anymore. Needing people, I mean. Because I do– and if they need me, that’s alright, too. I’m going to be here , from now on, I’m going to do better, I promise.”
…
Spring finally arrives and Remus makes good on his promise.
He trudges down to the stands to watch Quidditch matches with Sirius even though he swore he’d never do that and now he doesn’t just leave without telling them anymore, he tells Sirius where he’s going and one time even presses the map into his palm on his way out the door so that he doesn’t lose track of him again.He underlines his favorite lines in books for him and leaves them on his pillow.
And he’s still Remus, quietly contemplative and awfully inscrutable at times, but there’s something extra in there too now, something intentional, that’s just for Sirius, a smile he hasn’t seen before, and him telling Sirius one morning over breakfast, “you were in my dream last night,” and asking him in a casual voice what his thoughts are on living in Camden.
The days get long again and Remus takes him out to Hogsmesde to buy frivolous things he knows Sirius only pretends not to like, delicate French pastries with fruit compote and bright curling lemon zest and spirals of apple peels.
“You’re a mess,” Remus says when he gets jam all over his nose, and drags him into an alley to lick it off, then licks his lips until he parts them and they stay there, panting into each other’s mouths and tasting all that color for a good part of the afternoon.
He thought he needed Remus to always know what he was thinking but he thinks maybe this is better. He has never had this before— someone going out of the way to see the world through his eyes. Remus would do that for him— try to see in colors he never has before, for Sirius.
He teaches Sirius how to treat him the way he likes to be. He shows him how he likes his tea to be prepared and confesses to him that sometimes he needs to not talk as much so that Sirius knows that he isn’t upset with him, he just occasionally needs a break from it all. Sirius has never felt like that but he thinks he can understand it, understand why Remus needs a break when the colors get too bright.
For so long he’s wanted to get under Remus’ skin but now he doesn’t have to, not when Remus is already making space for him, showing him a little more every day that he doesn’t have to fight his way in using force, that doors are opening for him, and drawbridges, and windows.
They are counting down the days till summer, counting down the days till they can move into their new flat in London, and Sirius already has in mind the first thing he wants to put in it: a pot of bougainvillea.