Chapter 2
May - July 2020
There’s a child crying in the waiting room, the wail thin and high-pitched, and it reminds Remus of the early days of parenthood, when Teddy was a fussy toddler who was starting to teeth and they were clueless kids in their early twenties who barely had two pennies to rub together and a shoebox for an apartment. He looks up from his lap and casts a cursory glance but can’t spot the crying child in his immediate vicinity so it’s probably coming from behind the shut door of one of the doctors’ offices down the hallway.
A woman in a baggy Taylor Swift sweatshirt is sitting in the plastic chair across from him, scrolling mindlessly on her phone. Her brow is furrowed and she purses her lips as the cry recedes then resumes once again stronger than before. He struggles to remember if he was ever that intolerant of children, and if so, when did his paternal instincts kick in because he was never once annoyed by a crying Teddy.
The noise distracts him, at least briefly, from the flurry of thoughts rattling in his head. There’s the rhythmic noise of clicking as the receptionist types on her keyboard at the front desk, the distant ringing of a telephone, the hum of the fluorescent lights above, the occasional slam of a door in the back, the tap-tap-tap of Remus’s foot.
Nobody knows he’s here; as far as Sirius and Teddy are concerned, he’s at work, and as far as his coworkers know, he’s out sick with a stomach bug, but he can’t chase away the paranoia that somehow everybody knows, the lies he’s told twisting and turning in his gut until he’s almost sick with anxiety, exacerbated by the anxiety that brought him here in the first place.
He’s always been wary of doctors, especially since his childhood and his mother’s diagnosis, and he shifts in his seat uneasily. It took a lot of courage for him to even be here, and now that there’s only a door and precious minutes being ticked away by the large clock on the wall above the receptionist’s desk that separate him for seeing his doctor, it’s taking even more courage to not leap out of his seat and go home.
Except if he does this, he doubts the numbness in his leg is going to go away on its own. Or the blurriness that’s almost entirely taken over his left eye. The tingling and numbness he can find excuses for. Perhaps he overextended a muscle on one of his walks with Teddy, or exerted himself at work (for this, he has to suspend his disbelief a little; there aren’t many ways a professor of literature can exert himself at work). The blurriness, though, scares him. The white spots dancing in his peripheral vision have morphed into a thin layer of plastic foil covering his entire eye and that’s a symptom he can’t ignore.
His phone buzzes in his pocket and he takes it out to read the text from Sirius.
love you, have the best day xx
Guilt gnaws at him, but he locks his phone and slides it back inside his coat. It’s not like he knows what’s wrong with him, and until he does, there’s no need to worry his husband, who is inevitably going to freak out and tell Regulus, who can’t not share with James, who tells Harry everything, then Harry is going to tell his mum, and then he’ll have Lily calling him, and all of a sudden he’s involved everyone in fussing over him, which he cannot stand. It’s best that he keep it under wraps.
Another door opens and closes and a short, round-faced nurse with a pixie cut pokes her head out. Her freckled face is slightly tan, and when she smiles at him, Remus notices her tooth is slightly chipped.
“Mr. Lupin? The doctor will see you now.”
“Thanks,” he says with a polite, albeit slightly forced cheer in his voice, and he stands up—perhaps too abruptly, because all of a sudden the room is spinning and as he tries to take a step forward, his balance shifts and he has to grip the armrest of the chair to keep his balance.
He feels a warm hand wrap around his bicep and he lifts his head, blinking rapidly as his heart slams in his chest. That’s never happened to him before. Well, he’s experienced vertigo, and he’s lost his balance on occasion, but never like this. It can’t be good. Once again, the overwhelming desire to just go home and hide under the blankets takes over again, but he feels like this isn’t something he can ignore.
“Are you okay?”
The woman in the Taylor Swift sweatshirt is the one who has rushed to his aid, and he feels the blood rush to his cheeks as he steps away from her, muttering his gratitude.
“I’m fine—I’m—It’s fine, really, thanks,” he says both to her and to the nurse who’s quickly closed the distance between them. “Just lost my balance.”
But as he heads into the doctor’s office, he fears it’s much, much worse than this.
Then the days bleed one into the other. It’s different linoleum floors that all look the same and indistinguishable hospital walls, and the ever-present stench of antiseptic hanging in the air, and the itchy, uncomfortable feeling of the poly-cotton of various hospital gowns against his skin. It’s heavy silence in offices with thick carpets, cocobolo desks, and natures mortes and diplomas hanging on cream-colored walls. It’s MRIs and spinal taps, the needle carrying the anesthetic cold against the warm skin of his lower back, and endless blood tests, and a Moroccan medical technician in light blue scrubs putting electrodes around his head.
It’s emails drafted in waiting rooms— Sorry for the inconvenience, hate to ask again, I really need today off work, I know it’s exams season —and texts and lies and phone calls— I’m sorry, Siri, I’ll be late again tonight, no, it’s okay, love, I know I’ve been working a lot lately but you know how it is, yeah, a department trip with an overnight stay, I don’t want to be away from you either —until he’s afraid he’s going to trip up in his own lies.
“Yes,” he tells his doctor, and the tireless team of neurologists, too, “I have a support network, my husband just can’t get the time off work to be here today.”
He sits alone and waits to be seen, poring over reddit threads and support groups online, and leafing through the never-ending piles of brochures he’s being handed, then he gets in his car and stares, unblinking, at the horizon, and doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now.
“It’s not a death sentence,” a man—although he’s just a kid, really, barely older than Teddy, though with how fast he’s growing all the young men he sees these days look barely older than him—says to Remus in a hallway while they’re queuing for a blood test, “but it’s still a bummer.”
Remus offers him a thin, anxious smile and he keeps wringing his hands nervously.
“Mum says I should just pray and be grateful that it’s not worse,” the kid keeps going, “but, you know, she’s not the one who has to live with it.”
The symptoms get worse. The slight tremor in his hand won’t go away. The blurriness in his eye keeps ebbing and flowing, and his muscles hurt all the time now, like he’s training for a marathon, and the soreness all over his body seems to be here to stay. Coffee stops having an effect on the ever-present fatigue.
“I’m just tired, love,” he tells Sirius, who scrunches up his nose suspiciously.
“We should get a juicer,” he says, abandoning the remote control on the coffee table and curling up closer to him on the sofa as he pulls Remus’s legs into his lap. Remus tries not to wince.
“What for?”
“Well, juices,” Sirius rolls his eyes at him as he starts softly rubbing his calves to relieve the ache. “You might have a vitamin deficiency or something, it would explain the fatigue.”
“Yeah,” Remus tries to smile but there’s a gaping cesspit of dread where his stomach once was. The yellow overhead light softens Sirius’s features in a way he’s never noticed before and he reaches over to push a curl behind his husband’s ear.
“Maybe Da’s just getting old,” Teddy pipes in from the kitchen and the three of them laugh, although there’s an edge to Remus’s laughter he hopes they don’t notice.
He still hasn’t said a word about any of it, to anyone. He’s just tired, he says. His legs hurt but it’s because the elevator at work is out of service and he’s been running up and down stairs all week. There’s always an excuse, and they all always buy it, and guilt twists his insides but he cannot bear to tell them the truth.
Once he does, it will become too real. And it’s not certain, at least not yet, and until he has a diagnosis, he can keep postponing the moment he’ll have to say something. Except—except. It’s been so long since someone looked at him with pity he’s almost forgotten what it’s like and he’s not sure he’s ready for it.
So he stays silent.
Until he can’t anymore.
“I know it’s a lot to digest,” the neurologist says stiffly and she throws her braided hair over her shoulder, “and I know you’re tired but we wanted to be thorough in the tests we were conducting so we could be as precise in the diagnosis and in our treatment plan.”
Remus nods in understanding but the whooshing noise in his ears grows louder. He supposes that’s why people don’t usually do this alone because his whole world has been tilted off its axis and while he recognizes that the doctor’s lips are moving, his words aren’t quite reaching him; if Sirius was with him he’d be writing everything down, soaking up all she’s saying to discuss later.
“I’ll give you a moment,” the doctor says and pushes her chair away from her desk. Remus is vaguely aware that she’s left the room—as indicated by the soft thud of the door—but it doesn’t fully register with him. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, and buries his head in his hands.
He was barely ten when Hope got sick, too young to really understand what osteosarcoma meant, or why his Ma and Da were now always fighting, or why Ma had to stop working and why she was always crying. By the time Lyall left, Remus had learned words like metastatic and chemotherapy, and malignant, as well as how to take care of his Ma on his own. She was dead before he was out of school.
“It fucking sucks,” were Lily’s first words when he met her at the support group for kids with parents who kicked the bucket from cancer (as she called it at the time), “how they all look at you like you’re an abandoned puppy.”
“All of it fucking sucks,” he’d said. Lily’s dad, too, had left when her mum got diagnosed.
He knows, deep down, that Sirius is not his Da. That Sirius loves him, that Sirius will support him. But what if he doesn’t?
The sun sets over the hospital roof, setting the whole world on fire with hues of orange, red, and pink, and Remus grips the steering wheel like his life depends on it. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting in the parking lot, staring unseeingly in the distance. He doesn’t know what day it is, nor the date. The past several weeks have felt both like a lifetime and like the blink of an eye. With a sigh, he glances at the passenger seat, which now houses the latest paperwork he’s been handed, as well as a pin with an orange ribbon drawn on it that says “Multiple Sclerosis Warrior” that a little girl handed him in the hallway.
His phone buzzes once, twice, three times, and he squeezes his eyes shut, bracing himself. It’s Sirius, he knows, and his stomach twists in knots at the thought that he’ll have to tell him. The diagnosis will likely hurt less than the lying. How do you even begin to have a conversation like this?
Hey, babe, so, I have bad news and worse news, you pick. I’ve been lying to you for weeks and I’ve been hanging out at various doctors’ offices trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, and wait til you hear all about it because it’s going to change our lives forever. Love you though.
No, it’s not something he can do, at least not tonight. He’s had pins and needles in his right leg all day and he can feel the numbness spreading already. His fatigue is bone-deep, and he doesn’t have the strength for a difficult conversation in him. When he takes his phone out of his pocket, his hand shakes harder than it ever has and he has to wrap his fingers around his wrist to keep it steady.
This is the first time that he’s felt like crying, the tears burning hot and shameful behind his eyelids, but he blinks them away and pulls up the text messages.
hope you don’t mind but i picked up a chinese for dinner
we’re celebrating
reggie just called and we got approval!!!
Remus stares blankly at the text messages feeling like the air has just been punched out of him. He’s been so distracted with all of this he forgot—how could he forget? Sirius and Regulus have been working for the better part of a year now to open up a community home for children who have suffered abuse or neglect, tirelessly touring properties and interviewing personnel and drawing up plans and projects, and applying for funding and all sorts of permits—and he forgot.
This illness has taken up so much of his time it has completely slipped his mind that Sirius has been working on something life-altering too, and it’s all he’s wanted to do with himself ever since Remus has known him. Everything he’s been reading on forums and in articles flashes before his eyes like the credits scene of a movie, phrases like round-the-clock care and home modifications and “my life changed dramatically” rolling and blurring as he’s finally rattled by sobs and the tears come in earnest.
Yeah, so, babe, I’ve been lying to you, and also I’m actually so sick it’s going to upend our lives, and I know your life’s dream just came to fruition but how about you forget all about that because I might not be able to walk soon, or take care of myself, so…
No, he doesn’t think he’s having this conversation with Sirius tonight. He doesn’t think he’s having this conversation with Sirius, ever.
Remus remembers that Lyall, too, held his mother’s hand and rubbed reassuring circles on the back of her palm and went to appointments with her. He remembers sitting on the toilet with the lid down, chin resting on his scraped knee, and watching as Lyall shaved Hope’s head, sobbing soundlessly and whispering how much he loved her. And still, he left when it became too much for him.
“They all fucking leave,” Lily had said, lying on his bedroom floor with her hair sprawled around her like a bloody halo. She’d been so angry back then, in the aftermath of her mum’s death, with both her dad and her sister gone to tend to their lives and only Lily to look after her. “If it ever happened to me, I’d leave first. So no one could ever abandon me like I’m spoiled goods.”
Remus also remembers what it’s like being a burden. With his Ma dead and his Da gone, he’d spent the rest of his school years juggled between various relatives’ homes, aunts and uncles, and cousins and grandparents, none of whom had the space or resources, or emotional wherewithal to take on another child. He’d vowed to never feel like he did back at seventeen and had nowhere to go and felt like an overweight load in everybody’s lives.
He has spent his entire life fighting tooth and nail to never have to feel that way again, and yet, there he is now, right where he started.
But not again. Never again.
He drives home in silence.
In the days and weeks that follow, it becomes exceedingly clear to Remus that there is no good way to end your relationship with someone you love more than life itself. He sits in a chair by the window as the IV delivers the first dose of his Tysabri into his bloodstream. The medication drip-drip-drips down the tube and it feels like the grains of sand in an hourglass measuring the insignificant scraps of time he has left with Sirius.
A nurse comes up to his side and offers a sympathetic smile.
“First time?” she asks and he gives her a curt nod. He’s usually more polite than this but lately, all his manners seem to have seeped away from him. The nurse’s calloused hand squeezes his and she adds, softly, “It gets better.”
Somehow, he doubts it.
Sirius is already home when Remus pulls into the driveway. Tonight, he’s decided, is the night to do it. He’s been delaying the inevitable for far too long, and though he’s tried acting cold and distant for a while, it seems that Sirius is going to require a more direct approach. While he would have preferred the cowardly way out, of pushing Sirius away until he snapped, he’s going to have to be brave.
The lights are on in all the rooms on the ground floor and Remus feels a pang of bittersweet affection; he’s spent the better part of two decades reminding Sirius to flip the switch when he leaves a room and yet he never does. It’s caused him a fair amount of chagrin over the years but now that he’s faced with the inevitability of losing Sirius, he knows he’s going to miss it.
“I’m home,” he calls out as he walks into the hallway, then starts making the rounds around the house to turn the lights out.
He finds Sirius in the kitchen, humming softly to himself as he’s stirring a sauce on the stove. His hair is tied into a bun at the nape of his neck, with a few straw curls softly falling out of it, and he’s wearing an old band shirt and a pair of Remus’s sweatpants. Remus’s stomach twists at the sight, at this picture of domestic bliss he’s been taking for granted. His heart flutters in his chest as he tries to capture this last memory of carefree happiness before he tears their world apart.
“Hi,” he breathes out, slowly making his way to the kitchen, and he has to take extra care not to let his limp show as he feels the strain in his calf muscles more acutely than ever. Soon, he knows, he’ll have to start using some kind of mobility aid, and that’s not something he’s sure he’s ready for.
“Oh, hey,” Sirius says over his shoulder as he notices him, and he pauses what he’s doing.
“Teddy home?” Remus asks, and hopes the answer will be yes so he has another reason to keep delaying the inevitable.
“Nope,” Sirius says stiffly, then steps away from the stove with his arms crossed. “He’s at James and Reggie’s, they have Harry and Luna over for the weekend.”
“Oh.”
It’s all Remus can manage as his heart sinks with the realization that this might be his only chance to do this before Teddy leaves for Boston in August. He looks up and notices that there’s a scowl furrowing Sirius’s brow and he’s chewing on his lower lip agitatedly — a habit he picked up when he quit smoking a few years ago.
Remus is well aware he should probably ask what’s wrong; everything in Sirius’s body language that he knows so intimately signals to him that his husband is upset. But he wants to keep clinging to the sense of normalcy for just a bit longer, so he walks up to Sirius and presses a kiss to his cheek before washing his hands at the kitchen sink.
“What’s for dinner?” he asks nonchalantly, “Can I help?”
Sirius remains silent, with his arms crossed defensively in front of his chest and his head tilted to the right.
“Guess who I ran into at the shops,” he says at last, parrying Remus’s question with his own.
“Could be anyone,” Remus slowly makes his way to the dinner table and rests his lower back against it, feigning a breeziness he’s not really feeling.
“Well, see,” there’s an edge to Sirius’s voice now that indicates nothing but trouble, “I ran into Minerva, hadn’t seen her in a while.”
The blood freezes in Remus’s veins. The one person he never would have thought Sirius might run into at the local grocery shop is Minerva Mcgonagall, his Head of Department, who has been accommodating all his recent absences. Judging by the infuriated expression on Sirius’s face, she has not exercised any discretion in discussing Remus’s indispositions.
It somehow seems fitting that all his lies caught up with him between the peas and carrots in the frozen aisle.
“I didn’t know she frequented our Waitrose,” he says at last.
“She was in the neighborhood,” Sirius deadpans.
The tension in the air is so palpable you could cut it with a knife and Remus feels like he’s going to be sick.
“Wanna have dinner while you tell me about it?” he asks, shifting uncomfortably, “I don’t want whatever you were making that smelled so delicious to go cold—”
“Fuck dinner,” Sirius snaps, then he looks away and Remus can tell by the bob in his throat that he’s close to tears. “See,” he starts, then squeezes his eyes shut and exhales slowly, “I was under the impression that you’ve been snowed under so much work—”
“I have been,” Remus tries, but knows deep down that it’s futile. The battle has been lost. Tonight is not going to go the way he planned it and the conversation won’t happen on his terms.
“That’s interesting,” Sirius clicks his tongue. He starts pacing the kitchen, putting the thyme and the oregano back on the spice rack, throwing knives and spoons into the sink. “Because,” he adds after what feels like ages, “Minerva says she’s worried about you. You know, with how much time you’ve been taking off work lately.”
“I—”
“No,” Sirius interrupts him, then buries his face in his hands and lets out a groan that sounds more like a whimper. “Can you,” he whispers softly, exasperated, “please, for once, just tell me the truth?”
Remus has been in love with Sirius since they were barely eighteen. The moment he made the conscious choice to hide the truth from him—about his symptoms, about the hospital visits, about his diagnosis—he also knew that, above all, Sirius would never forgive the lies, not with his past and all his trauma, and all the trust issues he spent years in therapy working through.
He looks paler than usual, and tired, with his face puffed up like he’s been crying, and Remus wonders for the millionth time if he’ll be able to live with the guilt of what he’s about to do. But he also remembers how quickly Lyall grew to resent Hope, and the thought that Sirius might ever have to see him weak and helpless, bed-bound and unable to even go to the bathroom himself—the thought that the man he loves might ever see him like this and then look down on him in disgust, that he might grow to despise every second he has to spend next to Remus—it’s enough to strengthen his resolve.
“Something’s wrong,” Sirius pleads, “Can you please just tell me what’s wrong?”
“We need to talk,” he says, turning his face into a blank mask. He purses his lips, preparing himself for doing the worst thing he’s ever done.
“Alright.”
He’s never been a good liar, never been one to be quick on his feet, but the lie comes naturally this time. Because he cannot bear to look at Sirius when he says it, he turns his head towards the window facing the yard, where he can see the swingset Teddy has long outgrown but they just couldn’t part with, for all the memories that lingered with it.
“I’ve been seeing a solicitor.”
Sirius looks at him like he’s grown a second head.
“You’re s—you’re what?”
“I’m seeing a—”
“No,” he interrupts him, “No, I heard you the first time, I just—Why are you seeing a solicitor?”
This, he realizes, is the last moment in his life before he breaks Sirius forever. It’s the only way he can think of, the only reason Sirius would accept, and Remus knows he’ll have the rest of his miserable existence to figure out how to live with it. He takes the moment to appreciate, one last time, the mess of curls framing Sirius’s face, the crinkle by his eyes, the scar above his eyebrow from where toddler Teddy smacked him with a toy locomotive.
“To guide me through the divorce,” he lets out at last.
Then he forces himself to face Sirius, who’s blinking in confusion, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
“What divorce,” he says, turning his back on Remus and resting his palms flat against the kitchen counter.
Take it back , Remus thinks, don’t do this, take it back, you coward.
Instead, he only has the strength to utter, “Ours.”
For the longest time, he wonders if Sirius is even going to say anything, or he’s just going to stand there, poised for battle, slightly shaking like he’s about to burst or fall apart, but he hasn’t quite made up his mind on which one yet.
“Why?” he asks finally, so quietly that Remus has to wonder if he truly heard him, but then he repeats it, louder this time. “Why?”
“I don’t love you anymore,” Remus says, forcing all the warmth out of his voice. He feels his heart splinter right down the middle and he grips the edge of the table to keep himself from crumbling to pieces.
Sirius’s shoulders drop, and Remus is glad he’s not facing him because he’s not sure he can handle the look on his face right now.
“I—What?” He sounds so small, so defeated when he says it, like he’s the scared, lost teenager he was when they first met, that for a moment Remus almost falters. He’s about to question every single decision that has led him up to this moment, but then he thinks about the alternative, about robbing Sirius of his dreams so he can take care of Remus instead, and he soldiers through. It’s better this way. It’s better if he hates him. The more he hurts, the angrier he’s going to be. He’ll move on and live his life without Remus and the burden he’s going to be from now on.
“You heard me,” he says, as cold and distant as he’s ever been, and looks away from Sirius, anywhere but at Sirius. “I’m done, I’m out.”
“You—”
Sirius scoffs in disbelief, then pushes himself away from the counter and starts pacing the length of the kitchen once again.
“I mean, whatever’s wrong, whatever I did,” the tremble in his voice is almost pathetic, “I can work on it, we can—we can work on it, we can… we can fix this, right?”
He pauses his anxious traipsing in front of the wine fridge and takes out a decanter of Merlot he’s been chilling. Remus watches him as he contemplates taking a glass from the wine glass rack under the counter, then changes his mind and takes the cork topper off, drinking straight from the decanter with his head tilted back.
“You’re not gonna say anything?” Sirius asks when the silence has stretched for so long that it’s become painful.
“I said all I had to say,” Remus pushes the words out, then swallows to try and chase away the ball of barbed wire that has lodged in his throat.
“You’ve said nothing—”
“There is nothing to fix,” he cuts him off, “I don’t wanna work on anything.”
Sirius lifts the decanter up to his lips and chugs the wine, then lets out a bitter laugh.
“That makes no sense, you’re not making any sense, Remus, we’ve been—Twenty years—Twenty—”
“I know how long we’ve been together,” he says cooly, and each word adds another tally on the list of reasons why he hates himself, “I don’t need the reminder, thank you very much.”
“Jesus, we have a child —”
“He’s eighteen, hardly a child,” Remus interrupts him again, wishing Sirius would stop making it harder. He just wants to rip the plaster off and go to bed where he can cry himself to sleep in peace. “He’ll be out of the house soon. Few weeks actually.”
“Remus, what are you talking about, where is this coming from, I—”
“I don’t want to be with you anymore, Sirius,” he says, excruciatingly slowly, enunciating each word with venom in his voice.
At last it seems to have caught up with him that this isn’t a joke, this is really, truly happening. He looks up at Remus, eyes bloodshot and brimming with tears, begging, and Remus knows he must deal the final, irreparable blow. Once he’s said it, there will be no coming back. What he’s about to say, he knows Sirius will never forgive him.
“Please,” Sirius starts, his breath raspy, like he’s about to shatter, and Remus does the unimaginable.
“Come on, Sirius,” there is no emotion in his voice now, just ice, “Is it really that hard for you to believe that someone doesn’t love you?” He pauses, then adds, dripping with disgust, “You?”
For the rest of his life he’ll be haunted by the look on Sirius’s face.
There’s only silence after that, thick and heavy, that stretches between them for seconds, minutes, hours, decades. The thread that has kept them tied together for a lifetime snaps in the length of a single breath and Remus can swear he can feel his heart flatlining.
Sirius drains what’s left of the wine, then lets go of the decanter. The crystal shatters on the polished wooden floor, into what seems like billions of pieces. Then he walks away. Remus watches the shattered glass lifelessly. He should pick it up. When Teddy gets home tomorrow, there has to be no trace of it, but the tremor in Remus’s hand is so bad he doesn’t trust himself to try and pick up the pieces—the shrapnel—without hurting himself, and besides, he’s not sure he can get up if he tries to kneel or crouch, or do anything. His legs don’t really listen to him anymore.
He can hear doors opening a closing, drawers sliding shut, the shuffling of feet, and then Sirius is back, face wet with tears, duffel bag clutched in his hand.
“Where are you going?” Remus hears himself ask, then remembers he shouldn’t care. It’s not fair of him to do that, but he still needs to know. All he wants is to rush to Sirius’s side and wrap his arms around him, hold him tight, press kisses to his temple and tell him how sorry he is. He can’t do that anymore. He’s just lost the right to.
“James and Reggie’s,” Sirius says, voice hollow, and heads for the door barefoot, looking dazed and confused.
“No,” Remus snaps, taking a step toward him, “you can’t do that.”
“You,” Sirius hisses out, and when Remus meets his eyes, there’s a look in them he doesn’t recognize, “are the last person alive who has the right to tell me what I can and cannot do.”
Remus squeezes his eyes shut, wishing he could just drop dead there and then. It would hurt less. He needs to lie down. He needs to take his painkillers. He needs to cry himself to sleep and spend alone the first night of many. He needs to get used to a cold, empty bed, and a cold, empty house.
“Teddy,” he forces himself to say, more of a whisper than anything, and that gets Sirius to pause in his tracks by the door, his face dimly lit only by the kitchen light. “Teddy’s there, what are you gonna tell Teddy—”
“No,” Sirius spits out at last, “What are you gonna tell Teddy?”
“Nothing,” Remus says, “We are not gonna tell him anything, and we’re gonna stay together, for his sake, until he leaves in a few weeks—”
Ignoring him, Sirius walks to the coffee table, his bare feet padding against the hardwood floors, and he picks up his car keys from where he left them when he got home after work. With a groan, Remus takes another step toward him, ignoring the screaming ache in his legs. He’s spent too long on his feet, he’s exerted himself too much.
“You can’t—” he starts.
“Relax,” Sirius slurs, tongue thick with the wine he’s just chugged, “I’m just—You have forfeited the right to care, Remus, but I’m not gonna do that to my child, don’t worry about it.”
Still, he turns his back to Remus and heads for the front door with a wobble in his step.
“Then where the fuck are you going, Sirius,” Remus calls out after him, “Please go to bed—”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do, you knobhead. I’m going to Cas and Marls—”
“The fuck you are,” Remus yells, and chases after Sirius despite the pain. He knows he’s going to have a terrible few days as far as his pain levels are concerned, but that’s not his priority right now, not when Sirius is in a state and trying to leave the house. He reaches to grab his wrist, “You’re upset, you’re fucking sloshed, you’re not driving —”
Sirius pushes him away angrily and when he meets his wide-eyed gaze, he finally recognizes the emotion reflected in his blue-gray eyes. It’s pure, unadulterated hatred.
“Easy,” Remus says, reaching out again to steady Sirius but he steps back, shaking his head over and over again. “Come on, let’s put you to bed, let’s—”
“Woah,” Sirius says, “What are you, my fucking mother? Oh, wait, yeah, yeah, you might as well be.”
“Sirius—” Remus tries, then gives up, feeling like he might just crumple to the ground and throw up.
“Don’t talk to me.”
For a moment, he looks like he might still try to leave, but then he comes to his senses and drops his keys to the ground. Then, defeated, he turns around and walks back into the bedroom, slamming the door shut.
May 2024
Friday
“Yes, I’ll hold,” Sirius says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and he leans his back against the wall, “No worries at all.”
There’s a contemplative crease between his eyebrows that wasn't there before. A huff escapes through his nose and he traps the phone receiver between his ear and his shoulder as he waits for the receptionist to get back to him. The sound coming through the phone now is generic elevator music rather than the muffled distant voice of the receptionist on the other side. Sirius crosses his arms and starts tapping his foot, deliberately keeping his eyes locked on the patterns embroidered on the carpet. He hasn’t made eye contact with Remus once.
Remus looks up at him from the armchair he’s sitting in and feels like his heart has been ripped out of his chest, cracking his ribcage in half in the process. He hasn't seen Sirius in years and the sight of him—the slight stubble covering his cheeks, the salt-and-pepper curls tied into a loose bun at the nape of his neck, the loosely hanging white T-shirt under his favorite leather jacket, his old familiar pair of Docs with rainbow laces—makes him go weak in the knees again, the way he did at eighteen, and twenty-eight, and thirty-eight alike. Remus knows he’s lost any rights he ever had to him, and he had thought that the time apart would erode the decades of love and devotion wrought into the very fabric of his existence, etched into his bones, and seeped into his veins, but… All it’s taken is mere minutes in his presence to bring all the feelings tumbling out of wherever Remus has kept them locked up for years.
“What do you mean?” Sirius says, pushing himself away from the wall as the receptionist returns on the call, “No, Scott, I don’t understand.”
He grips the phone in his hand, his knuckles going white with how tight he’s holding on to it, and his other hand slides into his pocket. Remus watches as he chews anxiously on his lip, a habit he has been trying to shake for the better part of his life, seemingly unsuccessfully. Nothing about Sirius has changed—in fact, he has barely even aged a day—and the realization is like a kick to the gut because nothing about Remus is the same anymore.
In the years that have separated them, Remus still hasn’t come to terms with his diagnosis, and despite the support that Lily and Dora, and Teddy, on occasion, have been, he has felt lonely, and like he has been observing his life as a ghost standing outside of his body, seeing things happen to him but not quite feeling them. The present moment is no exception: he’s adrift, floating above this scene and watching Sirius, handsome strong Sirius with his lithe body, looking anywhere but at feeble, broken Remus, who couldn’t stay upright for a few minutes, even with the support of his wretched cane, and had to sit down in this stupid, stupid chair. His body keeps failing him in ways he never even suspected possible and he hates himself for it.
“I don’t understand,” Sirius is saying, and by his facial expressions, familiar after a decade of memorizing every inch of him, Remus can tell he’s growing frustrated by the minute, “how this could have happened.” He takes a pause, presumably to allow the other party to speak, then says, slowly, “No, it makes no sense because my son made two reservations under that name—”
Remus’s heart is still beating irregularly in his chest, slamming pathetically against the jagged edges of his ribcage, and it hasn’t even occurred to him yet that he’s practically naked, while Sirius is standing feet away from him across the room. It’s exactly the kind of situation you want to find yourself in with your ex-husband after being away from each other for four years: broken and aching and only wearing a fluffy hotel robe. Fuck Remus’s life.
“—Well, this doesn’t sound like a reasonable mistake to me,” Sirius is getting snappier, each word sharper as it leaves his (exceptionally beautiful, still) mouth, “He made two reservations under the same name and you—what, just merged the two—Frankly, and with all due respect, I really do not care that the person no longer works here.”
“It’s honestly not a problem—” Remus starts, but Sirius lifts a hand up to shush him and he lets the sentence drop mid-syllable, silenced more by the dismissive manner in which Sirius has done it than by the gesture itself.
“No, I do not want a refund for my stay here, I just want my own room, Scott,” he lets out a groan, then adds, “What about a different hotel?”
He pauses, and listens attentively to the voice on the other side. A curl slips out of his bun and hangs limply by his face; Remus finds himself tempted to reach out and push it behind his ear as he’s always done, then he’s quickly reminded that’s not something he’s allowed to do anymore. His throat burns and it hurts to swallow. Not a single cell in this new body of his, this weak and aching mess, has touched a cell of Sirius’s. It strikes him as profoundly deep and sad that he was once able to reach for him and stroke his hair in his sleep but now there is four years of heartbreak and seething and a hotel room between them, and he’s not allowed to reach out for him anymore.
“What do you mean ‘fully booked’?” Sirius rolls his eyes as he leans back against the wall. “No, I don’t know how many schools have their graduations this weekend in Boston, Scott, and I don’t care, I just want—Are you married, Scott? Well, good for you, congratulations, but let me tell you something, I understand your colleague made a mistake, I truly do, but now I have to share a room—that only has one bed—with my ex-husband…well can you talk to someone? Okay, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that.”
Once he’s hung up the phone, his shoulders drop and he presses his thumb and forefinger against his eyelids, exhaling slowly like he’s practicing a calming technique. Then, out of nowhere, he slams his fist against the wall, letting out a frustrated “Fuck!”
Remus tries not to take it personally but he still flinches when bone and cartilage crashes against plaster.
“I can get a different room,” he offers, “It honestly isn’t that big of a deal for me—”
All he really wants is for Sirius to meet his eyes, or even to just look at him, to acknowledge his existence in some way, but the other man turns his back to him and starts pacing the room.
“Good luck with that,” he says at last, as he pauses in front of the window and rests his forehead against the glass, staring unseeingly at the sprawling city below, “Scotty downstairs says every hotel in the city has been booked up for months.”
A small, defeated laughter escapes him and he reaches for the back pocket of his jeans, pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Remus’s heart sinks. The last time he saw Sirius, he’d just celebrated a significant milestone in his quitting-smoking-for-good journey. With shaky hands (when did his hands start shaking?), he takes a cigarette out and shoves it between his lips. Remus is about to point out that he can’t smoke in here when the same thought seems to dawn on him too. Still, he keeps the cigarette hanging from his mouth as he resumes his pacing.
“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, “fuck, fuck.”
He pauses by the window again, takes the cigarette out of his mouth and looks at it, then at the window, then at the cigarette again, thinking—calculating—if it’s worth the trouble, then decides against it.
“That’s okay,” he says, more to himself than to Remus, “I can maybe get an AirBnB, or look for hotels outside the city—”
“Sirius,” Remus says, gripping the armrest of the chair tightly; he can’t remember the last time he said his name, and it feels good and familiar on the tip of his tongue, “you really don’t have to do that, it’s fine.”
“Oh.”
It sounds like a dagger sliding out of its scabbard as it slides off his tongue and finally, at last, his gray-blue eyes, once filled with love and trust and longing, land on Remus and they’re cold and filled with ice.
“Interesting,” he says, voice dripping with poison, and he takes a step towards Remus, then another, and each step, and each word, feels worse than a punch, “Fascinating, really.”
“It really is okay with me, I don’t mind sharing a room with you, we can both be adults about this—”
“Can we, Remus?” Sirius cuts him off, looking away from him, “Because you certainly didn’t act like an adult when you left my life in shambles and wouldn’t even pick up the phone, wouldn’t answer my texts, you couldn’t even tell me you were sick , for Christ’s sake!”
At once, Remus is glad Sirius isn’t looking at him because he isn’t certain he can face the pain and anger in his face. It was, he supposes, to be expected that the first time they saw each other, tensions would be high. Sirius, he knows, has been getting help, but there’s some things that can only be healed by screaming everything you have to say to the person who hurt you. Remus knows whatever is coming at him, he has well and truly deserved it. In the four years that lie between them, he has thought long and hard about what he did and why he did it, especially in light of what they both have gone through since, and he still thinks it was the right decision.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t wake up every morning hating himself for it at the sight of the cold, empty right side of his bed.
“I thought I was so unlovable you couldn’t bear being around me for one second longer once Teddy left, I thought you hated me so much,” Sirius’s voice wobbles, and he reaches to touch the necklace hanging from his neck—which Remus realizes with a start is not really a necklace, but his wedding band on a chain—in yet another self-soothing gesture, “that you couldn’t even look at me when you signed the divorce paper—but you’re fine sharing a room with me? A bed? After years of not even a courtesy call? You were so quick to drop me out of your life, to discard twenty— twenty , Remus—twenty years of marriage and never once look back, and now you’re telling me to act like an adult?”
He laughs again, a cruel and bitter laugh, and for a split second Remus wonders if maybe he was wrong, if maybe Sirius has, in fact changed and is now a complete stranger. Then he looks up bearing on his face that same hurt, wide-and-teary-eyed expression he knows better than the face in the mirror and his stomach drops. He could try and lie to himself, and justify the damage he caused by leaving, but the lie catches in his throat at the sight of Sirius falling to pieces in front of him, then withers and dies, leaving a bad taste in his mouth.
Sirius’s chest is rising and falling rapidly, like he’s struggling to catch a breath. Their eyes meet and Remus holds his gaze, pleading wordlessly for forgiveness he knows he’s not worthy of.
I don’t hate you , he wants to say. I never stopped loving you, and I will love you every damned day until this illness does me in, and even then I will keep loving you .
He glances away, breaking eye contact.
“Can we just do this? For Teddy? It’s just a couple of days, Sirius.”
Once he’s said his name, he can’t help himself. It’s like a dam has shattered inside him and he wants to keep repeating it. Sirius, Sirius, Sirius, Sirius. Like a prayer, like a litany, like a curse, like an offering.
Sirius barks a laugh and shakes his head.
“Right,” he says, bitterly, “For Teddy.”
The phone rings just then, forcing them to spring apart, and Remus finally realizes just how close to each other they’re standing. From where he’s sitting, he can catch a whiff of Sirius’s scent, leather, and cologne, and cigarette smoke, and that one specific smell that’s just Sirius, and he feels a shudder down his spine. Sirius briskly walks towards the phone on the nightstand and picks it up in mild frustration.
“Hi Scott,” he says, then, “I understand. And you’re…certain there is absolutely nothing you can do?”
While he’s listening, he reaches into his pocket once again to take out what Remus thinks, at first, is an abnormally large coin. Then it hits him, with a start, that it’s a sobriety chip and suddenly he feels sick.
“No, I see, thank you for trying,” Sirius nods as he speaks even though the receptionist can’t see him, and he keeps twisting the chip between his fingers, “No, I appreciate it, really, I get that it’s not your fault. No, I know, I know you’re doing everything you can, I understand.”
He exhales once again, squeezing his eyes shut and his fist closes tightly around the chip.
“Thank you, I will. I will let you know if there is anything I need.”
For a long while after he hangs up, he stands by the nightstand, hand resting on the phone, like he’s completely frozen in place, staring out through the window and dissociating. It’s really quite jarring for Remus who has never seen this Sirius, tired and absent, and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. In this light, he notices the purple circles, like bruises, under his eyes, and aches to pull him closer, to comfort him.
“Well,” Sirius says at last, sounding defeated and drained, “Guess we’re gonna be roommates for a bit.”
“Fine by me,” Remus says, even as he feels like the rug has been pulled beneath his feet and he’s falling into an endless pit, forever suspended in the moment before he hits the ground. “I’ll take the sofa, it’s really no problem—”
“Oh, don’t be such a ridiculous people pleaser, Remus,” Sirius says, and Remus wonders if he, too, is grasping for excuses to say his name, to repeat it over and over, to turn it in his mouth and see if he still remembers the weight and shape and taste of it on his tongue.
“No, it’s—it’s fine, I really don’t mind—”
“It’s out of the question,” Sirius interrupts him and Remus can swear some of the ice in his voice has thawed, and there’s a newfound softness to his words that wasn’t there before. “You’re already in pain, you’re not making it worse by sleeping on an uncomfortable hotel sofa.”
“I—thank you, I really appreciate it—” he stutters, cheeks burning in shame that despite everything he’s done to avoid this, he is, after all, in the position of being a burden to Sirius because of his condition. Fatigue wraps itself around him like a cloak, and all he wants is to lie down and rub some feeling back into his legs because they’ve grown numb, dim the lights and shutter the windows, and sleep for ten hours until his bones feel less weary. Some pathetic part of him longs to curl into Sirius’s side and feel his warmth and bask in his comforting presence, but that can never happen. Chasing thoughts of what could have been, he forces himself to say, “It really means a lot to me, Sirius.”
“Don’t mistake my basic human decency for care,” Sirius snaps, and the walls he has built up around himself come back up just as quickly as he lowered them, “I am not your friend, and I feel nothing but contempt for you, and Teddy is the only reason I will act nice this weekend because this is about him, and not about me, or how much I do not want to be around you.”
Remus blinks at him once, then twice, clutching the chair for purchase. He watches as Sirius walks away from him and before he can stop himself, the question slips out of him, his voice small.
“Wait—where are you going?”
He’s not entitled to the information, and he has long forfeited what once would have let him chase after him but he feels responsible for so deeply rattling him, and he doesn’t know what to do about it, or what to do with himself, or how to quiet the roaring pain in his core.
Sirius stops in his tracks but doesn’t turn around.
“For a walk,” he says, “Or to find a meeting. Or to get stupid drunk. We’ll see where my feet take me, mum .”
He slams the door on his way out, and Remus sits alone, engulfed in the heavy uncomfortable silence left in Sirius’s wake, feeling like all of this is his fault, like he keeps bringing about ruination wherever he goes, and there is nothing he can do to stop it.
Sirius feels like he’s walking through a thick and heavy fog that clouds his thinking, even as he walks aimlessly through the sunny streets of Boston. He lets his feet carry him through the crowds, their faces blurry, their voices and laughter, and the sound of vehicles driving past and honking their horns, and sirens wailing in the distance all merged together into a single muffled note. In his haze, he almost walks into someone, then almost gets run over by a car (“Watch where you’re going, asshole,” the driver yells out through his rolled-down window), and he finally forces himself to pause.
He finds himself at the entrance of a public park—the Boston Common, he remembers from a tour of the city he and Teddy took on one of those duck boats when he visited a couple of years ago—and he collapses onto a bench, forcing his stammering heart to calm down. Nothing in the world could have prepared him for what just happened.
In the days leading up to this, he’d thought about it. He’d replayed a million different scenarios in his head about what would happen when he saw Remus again, how he would feel, what he would say, how Remus would react. In none of those scenarios did he imagine that the very sight of him would make him spiral like this. Four years of pent-up animosity and guilt, and self-hatred disravel at the mere proximity to him.
He looked so sad and vulnerable, and lonely, and for a moment, for just a moment, Sirius let himself stop hating him and revel in his presence. When you’ve loved someone for as long as he has loved Remus, and as deeply as he has loved Remus, that love doesn’t just go away overnight; it doesn’t go away in four years either. It just curls up inside you and makes a home for itself in all the hollowed out spaces the person left when they abandoned you.
And then it comes crawling out when you see them again.
Over and over, Sirius has to remind himself that Remus hates him. That he looked him in the eye and confessed to him just how fundamentally rotten and vile, and unlovable Sirius is. Yet here he is again, running back to him whimpering like a kicked dog who licks the hand that strikes him. Disgust takes root in the pit of his stomach and he folds in half, putting his head between his knees, afraid he might be sick.
When he finally calms down and sits up, taking in his surroundings, he feels like he has to laugh at how cruel fate is being to him because he finds himself face to face with an outdoors bar. There’s a wooden stage erected across from it and a bunch of kids who like they’re around Teddy’s age are playing a rather bad acoustic show, strumming their guitars slightly off-tune. Still, in the descending dusk, amidst the late May New England coolness, the bar is packed. A couple of obnoxiously blonde girls wearing corset tops and cargo pants carry a handful of sweaty beer glasses to a tall table near Sirius where the rest of their friends have congregated, and they erupt in cheery laughter.
It would be so easy, he thinks, to take the few steps between the bench and the fence that surrounds the beer garden, then to walk up to the counter and order a drink. He imagines sinking into blissful oblivion, the alcohol drowning out all thoughts of Remus and the painful memories the encounter with him has dragged out. He closes his eyes and pictures it, downing the tall cold glass in two large gulps, then—because it’s not enough, it’s never enough, is it?—finding his way into a liquor store (a packie, Teddy told him they call them around here) and purchasing something stronger, something to fill the void inside him, to quell that raging storm—
He takes his phone out and dials without even paying attention to the time.
Regulus picks up on the third ring.
“Hey,” he says, sounding half-asleep. Sirius quickly glances at the time—18:45, the numbers flash on his screen, so it’s almost midnight back home—and cusses himself out for being so inconsiderate, but he really, really needs this.
“Hey,” he says back, and the words scratch at his throat as he speaks.
“Are you—is everything alright?”
He can hear muffled noises through the phone—Regulus sitting up in bed, the flick of a switch turning the overhead lights on, James’s sleepy murmur, Regulus picking up his glasses from the nightstand, the soft click of a door, the quizzical prrrbt of their cat—and then Regulus’s voice again.
“Sorry—you woke me up, are you okay?”
“I’m standing in front of a bar,” he hears himself say, from far, far away.
“Siri—”
“I’m standing in front of a bar and I need you to give me a damned good reason to not go in.”
He knows it’s not fair to put this all on Regulus, but he has once again found himself up on a ledge, and if he’s learned one thing over the past twelve months in recovery, it’s when to reach a hand out for someone and ask them for help in climbing down.
He can hear Regulus’s steady breathing on the other end of the line so he closes his eyes and focuses on trying to match it.
“Sirius, what happened?”
“I should be dead,” he says, and his eyes follow the bartender as she tilts a glass and fills it to the rim, topping it with just the right amount of foam, “The night James found me, I should have died, and I didn’t, and I keep wondering why.”
“Sirius, you’re scaring me—”
“No, just,” he exhales softly and realizes he’s shaking, “Can you please just listen? Can you do that for me?”
There’s silence, and he can imagine Regulus sitting in his kitchen in the dark nodding, even though Sirius can’t see him.
“I don’t deserve to be alive. Sometimes I don’t really want to be,” he adds, and realizes both that this is the first time he’s really said it out loud and that even after working so hard on getting better he still feels like this. “And I keep thinking about why I didn’t die that night, and I… I don’t know.”
“Siri, I love you,” Regulus says softly, “and you have Teddy, and Harry, and all the kids we’re helping every day—those kids love you too, you know, they—you’ve done for them what no one else did for you and me. You’re doing so much good—That little girl, remember little Hermione? I was just talking to Dorcas today and she and Marlene are adopting her, and you did that, you helped her—”
He listens to the cadence of his brother’s voice more so than to the words he’s saying, the soothing lilt of it, and he’s suddenly seven again and climbing into Reggie’s bed at night to calm him down after he’s had a nightmare.
“Remember when you were five,” he whispers, “and you broke that vase Aunt Druella brought mummy from her trip to Stromboli, and she got so mad, and she’d never hit you before and she was going to, and I saw you just—tiny little thing and you were cowering in fear, and I said it was me, I’d smashed the stupid thing on purpose. I thought she was going to beat me black and blue but I think she knew already that this was not the way to hurt me, and she just went on and on about how useless I was, and what a disappointment, and how she wished she never had me, and how I was such a vile and wicked child and nobody would ever love me—”
“Sirius,” Regulus says sternly, “Mother was…”
He pauses, searching for the right way to say it, then, “She was mean and she was vicious, and she was cruel, and none of that was true.”
Sirius lets out a small chuckle, then looks at the bartender again. She’s throwing her braids over her shoulder, laughing loudly at something a customer has said. With an eye roll, she leans over the counter and takes the crumpled bill he’s handing her.
“I spent so much time trying to prove her wrong,” he admits, “and I realized I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t those things, and all these years later I’m back here again, and—I keep thinking that I should be dead and I’m not, and there isn’t a single thing I’ve done to deserve it.”
“I swear to God, you’re making me hop onto a plane and come whoop your arse.”
“Don’t do that now,” Sirius says softly, “I’ll be fine, I think, just—You know what she’d say? She’d say,” he pitches his voice just so, mimicking their mother’s voice the way they would when they were younger, “Oh, Sirius, I always knew that’s what you would turn out to be in the end, just a pathetic little addict—”
“Listen,” Regulus interrupts him, “She’s been dead and rotting for years, but even when she was alive, nothing she said, you hear me, not a single word of it, ever mattered.”
Sirius snorts, then rubs at his eyes with the back of his palm because he’s not going to burst into tears in public, even if he’s halfway across the world from home and nobody here knows him.
“You’re not pathetic. You’re just going through a lot and dealing with it the only way you know how because you have the world’s crappiest coping mechanisms and the communication skills of a dead slug.”
“Thanks, Reggie, you’re making me feel really loved here,” he rolls his eyes, voice dripping with sarcasm, but his heart still swells at the words.
“And you know what Effie would say? Our actual mother, as far as anyone is concerned, by the way,” Regulus adds, and Sirius can hear the scraping of a chair, then the sliding of a glass door, the click of a lighter, a sharp inhale, “She would say,” exhale, “that she’s proud of you and what you’ve done, that she is very glad you’re not dead because you’re the only person who knows how to make her masala chai just right, and she would say she’s so lucky to be your mum. And then she would come to this bar you’re at, and she would take you for ice cream, except she would ask the cashier to try every single flavor before she picks what she wants, and you would be so embarrassed your ears would turn red, and then she’d turn around and wink at you.”
For the longest time, Sirius sits in silence, listening to his brother smoke his cigarette in his back garden at midnight on the other end of the world, blinking tears away. He watches two exceptionally fat squirrels chase each other up the bench, then pause right next to him, closer than he’s seen squirrels ever approach humans. They sniff at him, then quickly lose interest once they realize he has no food on him and patter away.
“That’s exactly what she would say, yeah,” he says, “Thanks.”
“Do you wanna talk about what happened? Why you’re spiraling in front of a bar?”
He’s not really sure he knows the answer. Because I have to share a room with my ex-husband for a weekend? Because he hates me and nearly ruined my life and I still love him so much it’s carved and melded into my soul? Because I wish I hated him too, and I thought I did but being in his presence quickly stripped me off all my pretenses?
“No,” he ends up saying, “Maybe someday.”
“Well, that’s alright then—No, James, I’m out here, I’m fine—Great, thanks for waking up the whole house, Sirius,” he groans, then exhales his cigarette smoke once more, and Sirius can hear him stubbing the butt out, “You’ll be okay?”
“When am I not okay, Reggie?” he jokes before he hangs up.
In the descending darkness, he throws one last glance at the bar before pulling up his Maps app and trying to figure out where he can get himself some ice cream.