You Wouldn't Leave Me Now
September
Sirius has never liked Thursdays. In his mind the day is bound tightly in a dark purple shroud and is merely an imposition to be endured.
Alphard had died on a Thursday. Sirius had left home on a Thursday. Cosmic coincidences that aligned like stars in his teenage mind to prove to him that Thursdays are a gift sent from satan.
And whilst he knows the comparison is inappropriate (but they are his traumas and he may categorise them as he likes) it is also a Thursday when Remus sits down at their table, tucked in the far corner of the senior dining hall, and announces that he’s been seeing someone.
Well, it's not really an announcement; it’s Remus, after all. He is blushing into his tomato soup, oversized hood hiding his eyes from the world as he haltingly explains to them that a friend from home, Charlie (stupid name, Sirius thinks bitterly) has become something a little bit more.
Leaving Sirius feeling a little bit less, and he hadn’t felt like very much in the first place, hasn’t felt like much of a real person ever, except when he’s with his friends. Except when he’s pinned like a butterfly in Remus’ warm gaze.
*
What's even worse is that nothing changes. It’s boarding school, all their friends on the outside get sort-of forgotten once they’re back in the castle.
Touch has always been important to Sirius. A palm on a shoulder pulls him back down from the clouds into his own body; reminds him he’s real. And yeah, he touches everyone, he needs to, or he’d forget he was ever a person at all.
But he touches Remus differently. James’ thigh against his in bed to watch the rugby doesn’t make his palms sweat. Jumping on Peter’s back doesn’t make him giddy with the possibility of it never ending, of a permanent intertwinement.
He worries that the touching will stop, when Remus announces about Charlie and it’s selfish- he’s selfish- because Remus is smiling in a way he doesn’t a lot of the time and all Sirius can care about is how it’ll affect him. But then the touching doesn’t stop, which is almost worse.
Remus still folds his limbs into Sirius’ bed each evening for the next episode of whatever they’re watching, tucked up against Sirius’ side in his pyjamas and hoodie. It’s been a tradition since their GCSE’s, when the transition from year ten to year eleven also meant the transition from four-bed dorms to two bed, and Remus moved across the corridor.
It means that Remus sees their touch as utterly platonic. It means that, unlike Sirius, he hasn’t been reading into every touch, every breath, every shared bout of laughter the way Sirius has been. Which means he hasn’t seen the intimacy in socked feet next to each other under covers, legs aligned from ankle to hip, a head on a shoulder, an elbow in that lovely soft bit beneath ribs.
Remus is all lovely soft bits, really. Not that he ever lets anyone see them, always hidden behind layers and layers of uniform and pyjamas and baggy civvies on weekends. He has more clothes than any of them, unable to take a trip into town and return without something new from the saint christopher's hospice shop, and he often seems to wear them all at the same time; long sleeves under short sleeves under button downs under jumpers under jackets under scarves and hats.
Sirius lives for those special days when he’ll reach for a shelf and everything will get pulled up and reveal a sliver of pale, sunless skin, a different shade of brown to the bits of him that see the sky, or when they’re in bed together staring at Sirius’ sleek new laptop and Remus will shift, his plaid pyjama trousers shifting with him and his knobby ankle will peek out, fragile and unprotected. Sirius often has to bite his fist so he doesn’t reach out and hold.
*
None of them are easy to be friends with. It’s honest, and true, and something none of them confront head-on. Peter is jealous and it twists his cherubic face into cruelty more often than it should. Always on the offensive; young, malleable brain jumping to interpret every joke as an attack.
James is irreverent, and it’s great fun when you need fun but the only antidote to teenage angst is to feel taken seriously, which he seems incapable of doing. Heavily medicated for ADHD, he drifts through school feeling like a shell of a shadow of himself, locked somewhere in the space between mind and body, begging to go home and leave his pills behind, taking the piss out of everyone because taking them seriously means taking himself seriously, and that’s the scariest thing in the world.
Remus is a secret wrapped up in an enigma and refuses to even try and be understood. He’s overly private and secretive, putting new walls up anytime anyone ever tries to knock the old ones down.
Sirius is Sirius, and that’s saying enough. Traumatised, abused, confused.
But none of that seems to matter when he and Remus are tucked under his impersonal, plain school-issue red sheets, laptop balanced on knobbly knees, a timer on Remus’ phone for when he has to slink across the corridor to the room he shares with Pete before the rounds are done. It always leaves Sirius’ bed cold and empty afterwards, and no one needs to know that he curls up in the space left warm by Remus’ body, that still smells of his lynx africa body wash and eczema cream.
It is also a Thursday when Remus shuffles in late to breakfast and collapses into the seat next to Sirius with a groan, hunched over, one arm around his stomach, hidden beneath at least four layers of clothing, the outermost one being a vintage Hogwarts Jumper that Remus had found on ebay, and hangs off his frame down to mid-thigh. His other hand is reliably wrapped tightly around a can of mango loco monster, open.
“Who’s pissed in your cornflakes, mate?” James asks, stealing some of Sirius’ bacon and crunching down on it obnoxiously.
“He’s got his monthlies.” Pete informs through a mouthful of cold and rubbery scrambled egg. Sirius glares at him, and James stiffens, watching Remus, deflating when he just groans again and flips Pete the bird. It’s a fine and tricky line to walk, knowing when Remus will find a joke funny or when it will send him into a dysphoric spiral that he won't emerge from for days.
“I woke up to a bloodbath,” Remus elaborates, hauling himself upright and reaching gingerly for some fruit. “Anyone willing to lend me a cock?”
“Take Pete’s, lord knows he’s not using it.” Sirius jokes, and it’s partly revenge, partly friendship, but Pete just huffs and flicks a soggy bit of cereal at him with upsetting accuracy, the orange flake sticking to Sirius’ cheek.
“Pete’s is a bit small,” Remus ribs, and under the table his knee knocks against Sirius’, who then has to close his eyes briefly and repeat his mantra of boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend so he doesn't do something stupid like slide a hand onto Remus’ thigh. “Go one James, give us yours, it’s the biggest by far.”
“I’ll give it to you anytime Lupin, if you catch my drift.”
“Come find me later.” Remus grins, winking, and any lingering fraughtness in the atmosphere passes. It's a bad period though, Sirius can tell by the slow pace of Remus’ walking, the way his hand remains pressed tight to his lower abdomen. It’s bad enough that they’re painful for him, let alone the emotional difficulty they cause, and Sirius slips some extra paracetamol into his satchel as they sit down for English because Remus never remembers to pack enough. He wonders if Charlie does that for Remus; looks after him properly. He’s selfishly sure no one could take care of Remus the way he can.
The day ends back in bed together, a hot water bottle sitting under the layers of flannel and hoodie, burning rubber against Remus’ soft stomach as they settle in for taskmaster. It’s their go to after a tough day; if Sirius has a run in with Regulus, if the dysphoria is bad, if they’re just tired.
Except this time Sirius isn’t cry-laughing at Rod Stewart, or lusting over Greg Davies as usual, he’s staring at where he knows the hot water bottle sits, eyes straying lower, to where he knows Remus’s pyjamas are hiding something fundamentally different to Sirius’.
As much as they joke, it’s not something they talk about, not the way Peter talks about how mean his father is, or James talks about how hard he finds remembering to take his meds, the consequences if he doesn’t, the way Sirius talks about his family, his brother.
These aren’t frequent talks, but they are shared, usually when they’re all tucked up in bedrolls on the floor of James’ house each holiday when Remus and Peter visit for a week. In the dark, empty cans of beer littered around. It’s always in those empty hours between one and three that suck your secrets out of you.
Remus doesn’t talk, though. He always listens.
But Sirius wants to ask because lately, things haven’t been feeling normal. Lately, trousers and ties have felt caging. Lately, dreams in which he’s shapeless pull him from sleep and the warm reminders of flesh as he runs his hands down his body aren’t the comfort he wanted them to be.
Lately, Sirius has sort of started to feel a bit wrong.
It’s the perfect opportunity to ask; James is at football practice for at least another two hours, running drills and lifting weights in the school gym across the vast grounds. Remus is soft and sleepy beside him, they are alone. The room is dark, a cloak of semi-anonymity.
In the end, though, Sirius isn’t brave enough, he’s never brave enough, and instead he tips his head onto Remus’ shoulder and watches Alex Horne get mocked, trying to summon laughter, instead of focusing on the horrible awareness of his boxers against his hips.