His fever peaks on the hottest day of summer so far, when there’s no breeze to cut through the stench of prokaryotic organisms and insect eggs that hangs thick around the pond in the Potter’s backyard.
He shivers and wraps himself tighter in the sweat-dampened sheets and relishes in the knowledge that he is at this point in time, completely and perfectly pathetic. He’s ill in a disgusting, whole-hearted way, the way he was never allowed to be when he was still living in his parents’ house.
He asked James not to come into his room and for once he’s happy the other boy listened. It’s already too much that he’s here, taking up space now that his parents have decided they’re done with him, lapping up the goodwill of others that he’s probably never deserved but especially doesn’t after what he did at the end of last term. It would be unbearable to watch James play nurse-maid, the perfect portrait of goodness, tetchy at first out of loyalty to Remus but his kindness leaking through the gaps in his noble armor. Kneeling before his bedside like the word brother come to life and letting Sirius back into that christening light, while he lies there like the wretched souls in the dark corners of renaissance paintings, waiting to be blessed.
There’s not really a risk of dying; purebloods are especially sensitive to muggle maladies but even their frail recycled blood has enough magic to fight the flu. Still, infecting James and his parents is a reasonable concern and one that conveniently excuses him from any prolonged contact and time spent subject to their ministrations.
So they leave him alone. At first it’s mostly boring. He looks out of the window and when his eyes water too much he closes them and listens. Then, as the shadows crawl along the walls and the sun beats down on his eyelids lighting the backs of them up bloodred, his temperature crests and things get more interesting. The solid lines of the room and of the world beyond it collapse into themselves and nothing is sure anymore.
He hears the roaring of a muggle automobile passing by outside and in the fuzzy twilight on the border between sleeping and alertness he imagines he’s riding along in one of them. He’s on the passenger’s side and Remus is driving and they’re like the muggle lovers Bonnie and Clyde, shot, red flowers blooming thick and ripe petals into their starched white uniform tops, or else he’s the one shooting at Remus, or else Remus is shooting him, or else–
He’s becoming delirious, not as delirious as he’s deluding himself that he is, but he indulges himself all the same. He lets all his stupid, childish wants blossom and fester until they’re pungent and unseemly, playing on a loop behind his eyelids. Warm milk, and someone to press a kiss to his forehead and tuck his hair back out of his face. Someone to read to him, to sing or even hum to him, to be able to cry and have someone wipe his tears; as it is now he can’t even shed them, he’s probably too dehydrated, dried up like potpourri–cloying and decorative and utterly divorced from what he might have been, no longer any roots in the ground to speak of.
He wants for someone to care for him, not because it’s the honorable thing but because they can't stay away. Like a mum who holds her child close even when they’ve been bad and really don't deserve it and they’re not going to learn that way, no, but she can’t stop herself because to punish her child is to punish herself. At least that’s what he thinks that’s like. He hasn’t had that but it feels tangible enough to mourn.
Mostly, and most selfishly, he wants Remus. In any capacity. Not so he can apologize again or be forgiven. He just wants Remus. Remus to make Sirius feel better by the sheer fact of being there and isn’t that the most selfish thing of all?
“I’m here, Sirius,” Remus says, and he doesn’t know when that happened exactly, but he is, and his handsome face is creased with worry so Sirius must have been crying out loud enough for him that one of the Potters made him come.
He feels slow and stupid, and his memories of the day only come to him in errant flashes with big glaring black spaces in between. Remus, framed in the doorway, stooped a little so his head doesn’t hit the frame, a black shirt with some graphic splashed across the front that he must have worn a million times before but for some reason it feels so crucial to make out what it says until he’s straining to sit up in bed with watering eyes. Remus sitting on the edge of the bed and speaking in low voices with James’ mother for some reason, her waiting in the doorway. Now he’s sitting on the chair near Sirius’ bed.
“It’s not so bad,” Sirius says, or tries to. He hardly recognizes the voice as his own. Because in the scheme of things, it could be so much worse. He could still be at his parents’ for one. It could be crucio. He could be living with the consequences of his actions if James had been a minute slower down that passageway and Snape had died that day and he could have lost Remus. This, in the scheme of things, is really nothing.
“Isn’t it?” Remus says, after a minute. It’s everything. It’s the last line of his defenses disintegrating in a cloud of dust because if hurt isn’t relative, if pain is just pain no matter how much pain you’ve felt, then he’s been deluding himself, clutching to his chest the ridiculous notion that it’s different because it was him. That somehow his hurt makes what he did to Remus any less despicable. Remus says that and he knows he can’t hide from it. The truth is hurt is hurt. Pain is pain. Bad is bad.
He chokes on a sob. Remus sighs.
“Remus,” he says. “Moony, it really hurts. Everything.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
He sobs again. He'd told himself a long time ago that he'd never again ask for someone to believe in his pain. Not after years of crying into the floorboards after his mother cursed him, thinking if I could just make her understand, if she only just knew she would stop doing it until he realized his father crucioed his mother sometimes and watched as she screamed and writhed on the floor just as he had and it struck him that of course she knew how bad it hurt. She’d always known exactly how much pain she was causing.
But now–he’s sick in bed with the fucking flu of all things and Remus has had his bones broken and reformed every month for years but Sirius is pathetic with it, this need for Remus to know how much he hurts.
Remus doesn’t usually hold Sirius’ hand but he does now. And he’s going to go back home in time and Sirius is going to get better again and when they go back to school they will have to learn how to walk again, finding their footing as friends on fragile limbs, bent by the weight of the awful thing he’s done. But for now, Remus is holding his hand and he’s not letting go of it. He’s saying, “I know,” again.
For now, Remus tells him, “It won’t always feel like this,” and Sirius thinks he’s telling it to himself too.