The apartment where Sirius and Remus had moved in twelve years earlier was still intact, as if nothing had been moved. The place was still tiny but Sirius still loved it as if he had never stopped living there. Yet despite the security of the place, the animagus spent almost all his time in his canine form, an old Azkaban reflex.
Remus didn’t complain about it, but the werewolf never complained about anything coming from the Black.
From time to time, Sirius wondered if the boy he had known as a teenager still existed, buried under the distant man he had been living with for a few months.
Sometimes, when Remus caressed his fur while they were watching TV late at night, sitting next to each other in the old couch, Sirius almost felt like he was rediscovering the tenderness of his old lover.
They hadn't spoken about their their teenage years since they lived together.
They hadn't spoken of anything serious since they lived together.
Even though he thought the werewolf was avoiding the subject, Sirius ended up wondering if Remus had forgotten their relationship, voluntarily or not.
Until that night.
Like most nights, they watched TV silently, sitting next to each other. Sirius had fallen asleep in his dog form. He was constantly exhausted and his nights were interspersed with violent nightmares. So he tried never to fall asleep in the same room as Remus.
That night was particularly hard, he felt over and over the empty cold of the Dementors against his chest, begging the one he loves to get him out of there. Sirius had screamed in his sleep and then turned back into a human.
He had been awakened by arms that shook him
"Padfoot? Are you all right?"
The heart of the animagus squeezed when hearing the nickname that his friend almost no longer used, a vestige of their past complicity. It was the first time since what seemed to him an eternity that he was called like that.
“You were screaming in your sleep, I think you were having a nightmare”
Sirius did not answer, he had the feeling that their relationship had become awkward, as if they did not know each other better than anyone.
“You asked me to pick you up, there, you seemed to suffer”
Remus' cruelly neutral tone broke at the end of his sentence and there was a new silence, tinged with excuses.
"Do you want to sleep with me?" asked the werewolf to the surprise of the other.
Sirius simply nodded. He usually slept on the couch, a request he had made, claiming that his canine form didn't need a bed. It was mostly because he didn’t want to force Remus to change anything because of his presence.
When the werewolf got up, he followed him. Once in the room, both put on their pajamas, changing in the same room in this way reminded them both of the years spent sleeping each night in the same dormitory and from a certain moment, in the same room.
Remus slipped under the covers and invited Sirius to join him with a look that the Black would have almost described as sweet, something that seemed impossible to him then and he wondered if he was not dreaming.
While making sure not to touch Remus' skin, he slipped his hand over Sirius' waist to bring him closer to him.
“You’re so fucking thin”
There was a little silence before the answer of the other
“I had missed your presence”
“Yours too”
The werewolf then thought that the night would not be more special than another except the presence of his old lover when Sirius spoke
"Why are you acting like nothing ever happened between us?" asked Sirius, "why are you acting like we’ve never been together?"
The answer was a little too cryptic to the taste of the Black
“I could never forget you”
“Then why do you act like nothing’s happened?”
Remus swallowed strong enough for the other to hear
“Those years were hard for me about that”
“You know it wasn’t easy for me either Moony”
"I know that, of course, but it was so fucking painful to have to think that you had betrayed us when I had always been unable to stop loving you."
"You never stopped?"
"How could I?"
While he was doing everything not to cross his eyes, Remus fixed Sirius in the eyes and the animagus took the opportunity to raise his arm and gently caress the cheek of the werewolf whose tears went up.
"I had missed you so much," he murmured, with the imminent tears in his voice.
"I missed you too."