Loving Me Takes Patience

November 

By the time Sirius makes it downstairs, hungover, once again hidden, wrung out and guilty and sick with the ghostly image of Remus’ face in his mind, the ghostly feeling of Remus’ hands on him lingering overnight, Remus is nowhere to be seen. 

Pete is still asleep, the sitting room trashed from the party and Sirius laments the clean up job that awaits them as he trudges into the kitchen and sits down. He looks for Remus- he always looks for Remus when he walks into a room- but there is only James, and he is looking at Sirius like he could stare a hole through Sirius’ skull. 

“What the fuck did you think you were playing at?” James asks, dropping his spoon into his cereal, making splashes of milk fall on the table. He’s still got makeup smudged around his face, clad in his school football hoodie as he sits at the table. His hair is sticking up and he should look funny but he doesn’t, he looks angry and Sirius hasn’t ever seen it before. He freezes near the doorway and shakes his head. 

“Sirius-” James voice raises in decibels, and Sirius flinches back, body suddenly forgetting it’s James, not father, not hands that hurt but hands that help. 

“Oh, fuck, I forgot, I’m sorry- sorry, sorry,” James hurries around the table, face softer now but the damage has been done and Sirius shrinks into himself with each step James takes towards him before he’s being pulled into a soft jumper and a warm body and strong arms wrap around him and hold him, keeping him together where he’s falling apart at his badly-stitched seams. 

“I’m so fucking angry at you, Sirius,” James says into Sirius’ hair. “I love you so much, do you know that? Do you know how much I love you?” 

Sirius doesn't know what to do with those two statements, said so close together; he cannot understand how they can both be true. He cries into James’ chest, and James holds him through it, like he holds him through everything.

Sirius realises that he has never once wondered if James ever needed holding, too. 

When he’s calmed down again, sniffing snot back up into his nose and stepping back, wiping roughly at his face, he can’t meet James' eyes. 

“Is he still asleep?” 

“He went home, Sirius.” James says, face stern and it hurts, hits like a cricket ball to the sternum, bruising. 

“Oh.” 

There’s an unrelenting pain to having done something wrong. A buzzing that starts in Sirius stomach as he realises what’s done can’t be undone, words said cannot ever be taken back. His remus has never been his Remus, and maybe now less than ever. 

And it’s all his fault. 

He starts to cry again, and James comes back, arms circling Sirius’ back. James hugs feel like home, like when Sirius arrived at the Potter’s and James had held him so tightly like he was trying to get their bodies to merge into one. 

This doesn’t feel like that. This is just James' arms loosely wrapped around his body because he’s crying, not because James wants to make him feel better. 

*

 By mutual agreement, nothing is said to Peter when he wakes up, and the three of them work on cleaning the house up in tense, uncomfortable silence. Peter is luckily too hungover to notice, or to doubt the explanation James gives of a family emergency as reason for Remus’ sudden disappearance. 

The day passes in a monotony of hungover complaining and filling industrial-sized black bin bags with all the rubbish from the party scattered around the house; overflowing ashtrays on windowsills and on the steps down to the garden. Empty bottles of liquor and cans of mixer and beer. The shattered glass shards of a smirnoff bottle left on a precarious ledge. 

Through it all, a beating, pulsing knot of guilt that sits in Sirius’ gut like a living, vindictive creature. Remus’ absence is a glaring, gaping hole that Sirius notices at least four times an hour, and each time he does the resulting feeling sends splashes of sour bile up the back of his throat as he contemplates how on earth he will face Remus at school. 

James, his rock, his safe space, is suddenly a hostile island, closed off to Sirius, silent and sullen. Its a physicality unmarriable with his usual, jovial self and the tiny, infinitesimal part of Sirius’ brain that’s currently able to use logic tries to tell him that it’s just as much his hangover as it is his anger at Sirius that is making him so moody, but Sirius can’t listen to it when the tsunami of bad, bad, bad washes over him at every turn. 

*

School is a new form of torture. The three of them return early Sunday morning, leaving earlier than the dawn, before Earth herself is awake, yawning and sluggish and tucked cosily into the backseat of Effie’s tank-like land rover. 

It’s too early for Sirius to tell the lay of the land. Is James still angry at him, or is it just six in the morning, and even the birds are still asleep? Peter’s round face is pillowed on Sirius’ shoulder and drool glints like jewels in the corner of his mouth as he snores, but Sirius cannot get comfortable. 

Seventeen lies on the other side of the horizon and it doesn’t feel good. Starting a new year with such a monumental fuck up must be cosmic bad karma, Sirius muses as he watches the countryside fly by, blanketed in a fine, gossamer layer of frost that glows pearlescent in the rising dawn. 

Hogwarts rises up to greet them like a sleepy giant ambling over the hill, and Effie exclaims quietly at the sight of it, as she always does, marvelling at the beauty of the architecture. For the first time in his life, since he was a too-short eleven year old in a too-big blazer hiding a miriad of bruises along his ribs, Sirius is not excited to go back to school. 

Well, at least it’s not a thursday. 

*

Remus is nowhere to be found on their return, his bed in the room he shares with Peter exactly as it was before the holidays started, a fine layer of dust collecting on the beat-up docs he uses as school shoes. His books are still piled up on the bedside table, an eclectic mix of his prized titles; Audre Lorde and Auden and Joyce and C.L.R James and many others Sirius has never heard of. 

Standing in the doorframe, blocking an increasingly irate Peter from entering and unpacking, there’s a morbid sense that the room is commemorative in a way; like Remus is never coming back and they’ve kept his room exactly as it was to remember him by, like the mother in Cinema Paradiso, the film Remus had made him watch however many months ago. 

Finally, Peter has enough and roughly shoves Sirius to the side and the spell is broken. The room is a room again, not a museum to all of Sirius’ unsaid thoughts. The dust is disturbed as Peter trips over Remus’ shoes on his way to his bed. The books are rattled by the magnitude of Peter’s knees hitting the rough wooden floors, and the room is just a room again. 

Remus is coming back. 

Everything will be fine. 

*

Except it isn’t fine, nothing in Sirius’ life is ever fine, because James heads straight to see the football team after dumping his duffel on his bed and leaving it there and he doesn’t have to say it but Sirius knows James is avoiding him. Their bedroom feels bigger than it ever has as Sirius unpacks the clothes he’s grown unable to stomach back into his dresser, and plugs his laptop in. there’s a ritual, to it, his unpacking. Sirius has a lot of rituals. 

Socks get balled up and lined up next to folded boxers (for which he is mocked relentlessly), in the small, right hand uppermost drawer. In the left, ties and under-vests for the colder months. Underneath, in the first full drawer, trousers and shorts. Pressed and folded and placed reverently within the ikea flat-pack furniture. 

The bottom two drawers are for civvies and jumpers, and there’s a small wardrobe tucked in a corner which houses his shirts and blazers, mirrored by the one that James should use but never does, throwing his shirts over the back of his chair and hoping for the best, instead. 

Usually the routine helps him feel better, like the mere act of folding and placing and folding and placing can quiet down the mess that thrives behind his eyes, but this time everything just feels messier. He can’t complete the ritual properly because he keeps checking his phone to see if Remus has texted the group chat, his disappointment increasing to devastating proportions every time his notifications centre remains stubbornly empty. 

Sirius doesn’t note when James returns because the minute it becomes socially acceptable he is buried under the covers (acceptable to whom, he wonders as he pulls a pillow over his head. He is alone in the room. No one would know. No one would care.) 

He hopes, tucked in the blackness, that when he wakes in the morning, everything will have gone back to normal. 

*

When he wakes in the morning, he is seventeen. 

James has clearly cooled off, as there is a small pile of presents at the foot of his bed and a body atop his as he is ripped from his dream scape and dragged kicking and screaming into the land of the living. 

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY PADFOOT!” James screams in his face the minute his eyes open. Its overwhelming and disorienting but Sirius doesn’t care because James is back, staring at Sirius with eyes once again brimming with love. 

“Thanks, prongs.” Sirius rasps, sitting up just as Peter kicks the door open with a bang, awkwardly cradling a misshapen chocolate cake in his hands. 

“Aw, wormy, you didn’t.” 

“I had to give old nelly in the kitchens four boxes of mum’s fudge for this.” Peter crows proudly as he sets the cake down on Sirius’ desk. He notes idly that it is slightly crooked, like an edible tower of pisa. 

“Aren’t you a mate, Pete.” Sirius grins, because he is a mate, because he’s clearly planned ahead to get Sirius a birthday cake, because he and James clearly co-ordinated presents, presents that Sirius carefully piles up to open later on in the day. 

It’s lovely, it really is, and it’s clear that his friends have made a difference, but Remus is still not there. Sirius can’t tell which hurts worse, that Remus is skipping out on his birthday, or that Sirius fucked up enough to make him want to. 

He drags out dressing for breakfast, not even hungry after the three of them managed to put away at least half the cake, eating it with sticky fingers and liberally decorating the floor with crumbs, but an absence at breakfast isn’t worth the detention it brings so eventually Sirius drags himself through the motions of a cold shower- the pipes are never at top form when the old castle’s been empty for longer than a few days- and donning the uniform that has truly started to revile him for the way it highlights a body he feels no connection to. 

Birthday surprises are not something Sirius has ever come to believe in, not growing up the way he did, which is why he’s finally come around to the idea of Remus missing his seventeenth, somewhere half-way through his sausages, when a warm hand clamps his shoulder and a warm body drops down next to his. 

“Happy seventeenth, Sirius.” a lumpily wrapped parcel is dropped into his lap by a brown hand and Sirius’ heart sings. 

“Remus!” he turns to see Remus out of breath somewhat, cheeks pink with exertion. He’s in school uniform with an extra zip-up hoodie atop his jumper, and his hair is hidden by the hood. Momentarily, Sirius forgets all his wrongdoing, all his guilt. Remus is next to him. Things feel okay again. 

“I thought you weren’t coming in.”

“And miss your birthday? No chance. And besides,” Remus reaches for a plate, and piles it high with cold toast triangles. “Mum would never let me miss the first day back.” 

James grins, and makes a comment about it being Remus who’s too swotty to miss a day of school for anything less than a terminal illness, and things feel okay again, like maybe Sirius got his wish, like maybe a few days of guilt were enough penance. 

*

But then tuesday morning comes, and things start changing. 

Remus sits with the girls at breakfast, which in and of itself is not a huge surprise, he does it maybe once or twice a month, and Sirius doesn’t usually mind watching him laugh with them from across the dining hall. 

But then he sits with them again at lunch. 

And at dinner. 

In fact, by the time Sirius returns to his rooms at half seven as he always does after dinner, ready to shed his tie and neglect most of his homework and instead wait for Remus to turn up at nine-ish for telly time, he realises he’s not seen Remus all day. 

It happens again the next day, and then the next. In fact, a whole week goes past of Remus slotting in seamlessly with the girls, almost like he’d never left their dorm. 

“Rem didn’t spend much time with us this week.” he notes with a frown to James, who slides him a look that immediately opens up that pit in Sirius’ stomach. 

“He’s still mad at you.” 

“He was fine on monday.” Sirius feels almost nauseous, now. Monday had been perfect and everything was supposed to be normal again, like it always was. 

James sighs and it’s an awful sound, like nails on a chalkboard for the way in which it makes Sirius shudder. “That’s because it was your birthday, Sirius. He didn’t want to make you feel bad.” 

“Oh.” The word comes out as small as Sirius feels in the moment, like he’s suddenly ant-sized and James is a vindictive toddler in a field with stompy shoes. 

“You know, not everything can be ‘the sirius black show’, all the time.” James says nonchalantly, not even looking at Sirius as he says it, instead leafing through his biology folder as his works land like knives into the softest, most vulnerable parts of Sirius. 

“We’re not just your supporting characters. Remus is a real person with real feelings, and you hurt them really badly.” James is looking at him now, gaze accusatory like a french newspaper. 

“I know that, James,” Sirius insists with a cracking, collapsing voice as tears rush to line his waterline, threatening with malicious intent to spill over, to make his vulnerability known. 

“Do you?” James studies him, eyes narrowed behind dirty glasses. “Do you know that? Because you’ve not apologised. It’s been a week now, and you’ve not said sorry. You’ve not even suggested to me why you did it. You just cried for a bit and then moved on.” 

“I’ve not- I just thought-” the words are running away from him like a river coursing downhill and Sirius’ tongue is a broken sieve, he can’t catch any of them. “I thought monday was normal, I thought we were normal?” asked like a question, because it is, because Sirius doesn’t understand and he hates it when he doesn’t understand things. James looks at him like he’s a child, takes his biology folder and leaves. 

That too, lands like a blade. 

Sirius cries himself to sleep and wonders, pathetically, in an ugly quagmire of self pity and self loathing that pulls him apart like a child breaks unwanted toys, if there is a limit to how many tears a person can cry before they all dry up. 

*

Morning brings little relief but it does bring James, gentler this time, like a fruit peeled of a bitter, cruel outer layer. 

“Sirius, mate.” he starts, with that look in his eyes he always gets when he’s about to teach Sirius something that apparently everyone else knows but the fucked up kid with the fucked up family somehow missed out on. “I don’t think you realise what you’ve done.” 

Of course Sirius knows what he’s done, he’s ruined everything. 

That’s not easily put into words, though, so he just looks at James and waits for the explanation that he knows will follow. 

“You might have ruined Remus’ whole relationship.” James scolds and it’s a reprimand, intended to make Sirius feel bad but it doesn’t, because that’s sort of what he wants. 

“Do you know,” James continues, “what a big deal this relationship is to him?” 

“What do you mean?” Sirius asks, because he doesn’t know, he tries not to think about Remus with anyone other than him as a matter of principle. 

“Have you ever thought,” James starts again, and his softness is rapidly drying up again, “That maybe, being in a relationship as a trans person is a big deal? That maybe for Remus, existing outside of the norm and being a part of two minorities constantly made to feel undesirable, that being desired might be a big fucking deal to Remus? That having someone want to date him is important, because it’s not an inevitability he has relied on in the way that you and I have? Did you not think that maybe barrelling in and kissing him for a drunken lark and potentially taking away from him the first person who's made him feel valued and attractive might, I don't know, emotionally destroy him, just a tiny bit?” 

It’s not what he’s supposed to be thinking about right now, Sirius knows, but the first thing he notices is actually how clever James is. Not just booksmart, but actually, genuinely intelligent, because Sirius gets better grades but no, he hadn’t once thought about any of that. 

All he had thought about, when he kissed Remus- in fact, all he ever seems to think about, he is slowly realising- is himself. He wants to insist that it wasn’t a drunken lark, but that opens the can of wriggly worms into the way Sirius feels about Remus and he can’t do that, not yet. Not now, when he doesn’t deserve to even have Remus as a friend (are they still friends? Sirius is too scared to follow that question through to its conclusion.) 

“Just, sit with that, yeah? And tell him you want to apologise. And then don’t get upset when he still doesn’t want to talk to you.” 

James leaves, and Sirius misses breakfast, deciding that the detention is worth it for more time wallowing and he curls on his side on top of his bed, tie still undone, and thinks about the things James told him, like homework almost, like when a good teacher shows you a new way to see the world and suddenly you’re reeling, like getting glasses for the first time. 

Or so Sirius thinks. He has 20/20 vision and has always been quite proud of it.