Remus
Remus had gotten fairly accustomed to missing out on things. Crawling back into his skin hours later only to find that the world hadn’t waited for him. That the book he’d been planning on checking out from the library because hadn’t it only been there yesterday would be gone for another three weeks. Parties, inside jokes, drunken revelations that he wasn’t there to witness and had to pick up on later, sifting through the careless clues others tossed around in conversation.
It became a fact of life, as inevitable as falling asleep and waking up, as looking across the Great Hall and seeing James sat there with his mad grin, facing forward, but forever angled the slightest bit sideways on the bench, all the better to glance further down the table to where one Lily Evans sat with her friends. Remus would lose time and he wouldn’t get it back.
He supposed he wasn’t meant to be one of those fresh-faced, unrumpled people who were up early, and got to class early, and were among the first few you thought about when throwing a party, or who remembered an umbrella when it was raining and a hundred little other things that people who were made for the world and comfortable in it were and did. He wasn’t the first line of defense, the friend that was waiting with open arms and a spare room and domestic comforts at a moment’s notice. Never mind that he would have carved a place out in himself, what was left of him anyways, scars and sinew and marrow, if Sirius needed somewhere to sleep– Maybe he could have been, in another life, but he wasn’t in this one and that was alright; he was who he was.
He was the friend who found out later. But he was determined to be the friend who came as fast as he could, even still. And prepared Sirius tea that James' parents had paid for. He could do that much.
…
The morning he got word from James was as slow and creaking as every morning after the full. If he tried to resist, move too fast, too suddenly, his muscles would twinge spitefully and it would make everything that much worse, so for now, he didn’t. Feeling the pain was inevitable, and he already did a bit, but he could barricade himself from the full extent of it for the time-being. Like Muggle cryogenics; he lived as if encased within the ice. If he stuck to his painstaking, glacial pace he could pass these early morning moments in relative serenity.
He made a scant breakfast and went to sprawl out on the woven recliner on the back patio. The white light made his eyes water and it was just a little too breezy to be entirely comfortable but being in the sun seemed like something that was a good idea, in the same way as doing aerobics and eating your leafy greens was—something Poppy would be pleased that he was doing. He chose to ignore that chain smoking might mar this picture of health.
That was where the Potter’s barn-owl found him. The unruly creature deposited a small envelope on his lap and nipped at his toast in the same breath. The small piece of parchment inside had James' boyish scrawl rambling across it. It was a fairly short note.
Don’t come rushing over or anything, recover first– not that you’re going to listen to me anyways. He didn’t want me to tell you, but I reckoned I better. Sirius, he’s at my place. I think, for good. And before you hyperventilate he’s fine (physically). I don’t know everything but I do know it was bad.
Remus’ glacier was already beginning to melt at this point, his body starting up its familiar symphony of complaints; ligaments whined, kneecaps moaned, nerve pain a high and frenetic string section, so it wouldn’t make all that much difference whether he was standing or not. He did then, and reached around for his back pocket until his fingers closed around plastic.
When he tapped it out, the powder was white and pristine on the back of his wrist. It was bitter and numbing when it went down his throat. The morning brightened minutely, the symphony reached a crescendo, the sun burned its white light into his eyes. Then silence. He set out for his friends.
Sirius
Sirius was sat on the Potter’s couch staring at the same centimeter of the paisley, looping one of the Jam’s lyrics in his head until it ceased to mean anything (Then I saw that I was really the same// So this link's breaking away from the chain).
Up until now his indoctrination into muggle music had mostly consisted of the full bodied instrumentals and enchanting chord progressions of classic rock. But punk rock was everywhere that summer, spewing loud and distorted from muggle car radios, bold-faced adverts for pop-up shows and the latest band’s pub circuits plastered on every available surface. He liked that it was ugly but pretty in its ugliness, like the haunted beauty of the blackened gnarls left in the wake of a forest fire. The snarling, baritone, voices, the roaring power chords, it all dislodged something that had been caught in his throat but he’d never quite had the words for until now. Not vicious for viciousness sake, but so very hungry, an animal restless after spending so long underfed.
And the bolshy girls and boys who played songs on their half-falling apart guitars or else flocked to live shows to watch others. Outfits held together within an inch of their lives, safety pins, and spiky hair, people fashioning themselves to look sharp enough to cut you. A certain force in their conviction that said as skinny as they were they’d keep standing through anything, laughing at the world as it threw acid in their faces. It didn’t half remind him of Remus.
Remus, who had liked punk since The Damned had burst on the scene crooning “I got a feeling inside me…” He wasn’t loud and insistent about it; he'd simply play the vinyls he bought during summers on a clunky muggle record player and would never protest when the others eventually ganged up on him to switch to something more melodic. Not for the first time, Sirius thought that Remus had a nose for things of value, rooting out treasure from the rubbish, endlessly useful spells from the densest of old tomes on magical theory. He had a way of amassing the right things that made you just want to be one of them, like a piece of sea rock that someone had stooped down to pick up as they strolled along the shore; it was nice to be chosen.
He thought about bringing it up. “That music– I like it too. I think, for a lot of the same reasons,” but he couldn’t figure out how to say that without sounding like a twat so he didn’t. It was surprisingly difficult, and increasingly frustrating, staying quiet. Protests blazed all over Muggle London and the smattering of headlines on the growing faction of blood purist fundamentalists was only a pale presage of what was to come, but the vast majority of the Wizarding World seemed content to bury their heads in the sand and go on like everything was the same as always. A fire had lit up all of the whole wide world and Sirius wanted Remus to know that he saw the flames too, that he was prepared to burn with it.
Remus—who was suddenly there, crawling out of the fireplace amidst a green plume of flame and unfolding his long limbs, a healing gash on his cheek the color of the peach trees on James’ property. Moony smiling at him, and biting back his own pain just for Sirius and wasn’t that the most horrible thing. He could hardly look at him, so he looked at James instead. James was already looking at Sirius, with an expression like he felt a little bad about telling but couldn’t make himself regret it.
Because it was Moony. Of course he would come as soon as he got word, putting his hurt, his needs second without even consciously deciding to do it, like it was to be expected.
“James— you knob,” he bit out . “I told you not to tell him.”
“Sirius,” Moony said, chastisingly.
He was looking down at him, because he always was, the tall bastard, the gap only exacerbated with Sirius still sitting. He’d scarcely been back on his feet since Euphemia had forced him off of them last night, gently unlacing his shoes for him and sliding them off when he didn’t do it himself. There wasn’t anything physically preventing him from standing except an intense feeling that if he did it he might find out he had never stopped running after all and the people were still screaming at him, the cold air of curses close enough to landing that they raised hairs on his neck and he’d already done so much of that already, better not to chance it.
“Don’t blame Prongs. He knows I would’ve been a proper nightmare if he didn’t tell me.”
He shot a look at James before turning his eyes back on Sirius. “Sorry I wasn’t here.”
“You shouldn’t even be traveling in your state,” Sirius found himself saying, because deflection was the only weapon he had against such disarming concern for his well being. Then he snickered a bit at how much he sounded like Madame Pomfrey.
Remus grinned, no doubt having the same thought. “Oh I do apologize ,” he said with an overstated prissy inflection. “Let me get off my feet then. Budge up.” He sat down next to Sirius on the couch, drawing up his long limbs.
James, good mate that he was, murmured about something he needed from the kitchen, perhaps sensing that Remus wanted a moment alone with his friend.
The moment James was out of the room Remus turned to Sirius and said in a low voice, “How are you, then?”
He sighed. He didn’t want Remus to have asked that. He didn’t not want to talk about it but the truth was he didn’t know; he had a hard enough time fathoming what he was feeling at any given moment, let alone packaging it neatly into something that could be articulated to others on command. It always brought to mind one occasion he'd gone swimming in Black Lake and in a moment of considerable idiocy, lost his grip on his wand. Panicked, he'd kept plunging deeper, hands grappling frantically in the murky depths, desperate to close around something, anything, but always coming back empty, until James finally put him out of his misery with a Summoning Charm.
His inability to answer for himself was one of his bitch mother’s least favorite qualities of his and it had led to many a shouting match in the past, if they could even be called that. “Do you not feel ashamed, Sirius ?” she would hiss in that terrible voice of hers and he would try to wrest something out of the depths of himself to present to her but come up blank and from there it would be, “Don’t just stand there and look at me you insipid child. Do you think I can’t make you if I wanted? Do you think there aren’t curses for that?” and on and on it went.
Probably why, to people who didn’t know him very well he came across as a bit curt. At best, blunt, at worst, rude. It had been beaten into him. Get the words out fast, before you’re punished for your silence. Say something, anything, lie if you have to, but lie quickly and don’t look back. You might not have a chance later.
But Remus, those light brown eyes, that creeping, contemplative smirk, like the sun moving over the hills in the morning, like spring ripening into summer, like the piano in the song Billy Joel released later that year, slow down, you’re doing fine. Sirius knew how fast Remus wished he could always be moving; fast eyes over the brittle pages over his paperbacks, quill moving quickly over parchment as he tried to make up for time lost in the hospital wing, his languid movements might have fooled most, but Sirius knew that the very core of him was moving at full sprint. And yet, for Sirius he was willing to slow the pace, give him the extra moment to compose himself, gather his thoughts. For Sirius, he was willing to waste time.
“Is it alright if I don’t know yet?” Sirius said finally. “And I'll tell you when I figure it out?”
“Yeah,” Remus said. “That’s alright.” There was a brush of fingers, feather light, across the crown of Sirius’ head, there and then gone.