Milk settled like a cloud into the brown tea, spreading until the liquid lapped beige against the porcelain mug. It was raining outside, as it so often was in those days, and the raindrops rolled like fat tears down the glass of the window pane. It had been days since the sun or the moon had shown their face. The overcast of clouds had been relentless, but Remus did not need to see the sky to know that the moon was waxing, almost full.
Beneath his itching skin, he could feel his bones shifting, grinding painfully against one another in dreadful anticipation. It was nearly three in the morning, but he found himself wide awake, blood buzzing with the feral energy that always seemed to wax as his humanity waned. Now, without even a whole day between him and the April moon, Remus felt restless, body aching for the freedom that came with the shedding of his human skin. Slowly, he rolled out his neck, feeling the muscles flare and pull tight as he did.
Despite the hour, little pricks of light danced in the dark of the wet window, indications of bars or apartments or lonely headlights on the street below. Remus watched them quietly from where he nested in the windowsill, letting the warmth of the mug seep into his hands and soothe his aching fingers. Less than twenty-four hours now and he would be whisking himself away from here, far from the people and their lights and their lives until it was just him and the forest and the lonely darkness between them. His body may have been restless, but inside he was so, so very tired.
“Trouble sleeping?” Came a voice from behind him, and Remus started, so lost in his own thought he hadn’t even heard the other man approaching.
“I’m starting to doubt there’ll ever be a night where that isn’t the case.” He admitted, shifting where he sat to make room across from him in the windowsill. Sirius obliged the gesture, settling quietly into place so that their knees just barely touched between them.
It was like that between them now, cautious and new, tiptoeing around each other like they were teenagers again, relearning each others boundaries and edges to find where they might fit their broken pieces together. It was strange to think that the man in front of him was someone he’d once known better than himself. So much had transpired in the years between them that sometimes he wondered if he still knew Sirius at all. He wondered if Sirius felt the same.
“There’s a kettle on,” Remus told him, nodding to the stove beside them in the dingy little kitchen. “Fags in the drawer. There’s not much but you can help yourself to anything.”
Sirius nodded politely but made no move to take the offer. Instead he stared levelly out the window, a distant and unreadable expression on his face and Remus found himself, not for the first time, wishing that he had more to give. He was certain his flat was a better alternative to a prison cell, but it was small and shabby and admittedly the first proper roof Remus had been able to put over his own head in the last decade. Food was sparse, the draft was cold, and though Sirius didn’t complain, Remus wished he had more comfort to offer.
“It’s strange to be back,” Sirius said after some time of silence passed between them. “For the first month after I escaped, I kept waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. I thought for sure that one morning I’d wake up back in that cell and all of it would have been a dream. Now everything feels like a dream. I mean, twelve years?” his face twisted into a raw expression, the ugly pain that had been eating at him just below the surface now apparent in his eyes as he turned to look at Remus. “I used to be afraid to sleep because I thought for sure I’d wake up and be in prison again. Now I’m afraid to sleep because I feel like every time I close my eyes, I could slip right back to being sixteen, and the weight of twelve years having passed when I open them again is killing me. It doesn’t even make sense in my mind. We were all… it was just yesterday… we were all…” He sighed, too defeated to even feel frustration as he slumped back against the wall. “Is it like that for you too?”
“No,” Remus admitted. “Sixteen feels like a dream for me. A good dream, but far, far away. So far, sometimes I wonder if I imagined it. The last twelve years have felt like a lifetime of month after lonely month.”
Sirius winced, arms folded protectively across his chest as they sat in silence for a long while, listening to the rain. Remus’s tea had gone lukewarm in his hands but he found himself too distracted to drink it, instead clinging to the mug like an anchor against the swell of the past rising in his mind. Whether from the moon, the uninvited memories, or an unhealthy combination of both, a headache began to bruise at Remus’s temples and behind his eyes and he let out an irritated huff, resting his head against the cool glass of the window. He wondered, as he did every moon, how much longer of this he would be able to take. He wondered whether his body or his spirits would betray him first, succumbing to the quiet darkness that waited for so long to claim him. What had kept him going for this long even, he couldn’t really say. It wasn’t as if he had much to show for it.
“How are you feeling?” He heard Sirius ask, and though the words rattled in his aching skull, nostalgia eased the pain with a long forgotten sense of comfort. The last person to have sat with him on the eve of the moon and ask him the same question had been Sirius, though a different version of him, twelve years younger with wild dark hair and stormy grey eyes. He could still see the ghost of that boy in the man that sat before him as he opened his eyes to meet Sirius’s searching gaze, eyes warm with a concern that Remus had not felt extended to him in a long, long time. It made his chest ache.
“Brilliant,” he answered plainly and Sirius nodded, gleaning more than probably most would from the uninformative answer. He looked out the window, up at the dark sky still weeping with rain and Remus watched the way the dim light caught on his features, following the curve of his face to distract himself from the pain.
“I kept track of the moon as best as I could while I was away,” Sirius said. “It was difficult. It was always dark and stormy and my view was pretty poor, but every time I caught a glimpse of it I would think of you and wonder where you were. Especially on the nights it was full.”
Remus didn’t know how to react to that. He didn’t know how to react to the way it made his heart kick painfully against his ribs, or how to say that on those nights, he’d thought of Sirius too; how they were the only nights he’d let his eyes search the sky for the brightest star before tearing at his skin and ripping himself raw until every complicated human emotion was washed away in the pain.
“Were you alone?” Sirius asked him, searching his face once more with an earnestness Remus both wanted to run from and melt under.
“Yes, for the most of it. There were a few…I tried to find others. Other wolves, other packs, but nothing really lasted. I guess even among my own kind I have a hard time fitting in.”
The tea was cold in his mug now, the rain slowing in it’s rhythm against the window, and the witching hours of the night were as quiet and honest as ever. All the reservations and uncertainties of the day time had melted away under the shadow of the night and Remus felt suddenly bare at the feet of the man before him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” he said suddenly, the words falling from his tongue with all the weight of a confession. “Everything happened so fast; they told me, and then it was in the papers and on the streets and I suddenly had nowhere to go and no one to turn to and…” he stopped, sighed, rubbed his eyes against the angry throb hammering inside his head. “I was scared. And I was confused, and I didn’t know what to think or what to do so I just tried to survive. And then that’s what I did every day for twelve years, just survived, until eventually it all seemed so far behind me I could try to forget it ever even happened. I’m sorry.”
He looked up, searching Sirius’s face for anger or accusation or something, but the man looked as tired as Remus felt, like there was heavy weight settled over him that he’d resolved himself to long ago.
“It’s not your fault, Remus,” he said quietly. “Merlin knows I have enough to be sorry for to you too. I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being sorry, and I’m just tired all together. We’ve both lost so much to this war, could we stop trying to apologise for it?”
He sat up straighter now, leaning forward so that their knees pressed together and Remus could feel the warmth of his skin through the thin fabric of his pants. In the close proximity, he could make out the years on Sirius’s face, the way his once perfect skin now creased around the edges and how his hair that had been lush and dark was now coarse and streaked with grey. And he knew he looked the same, maybe worse. There were countless new scars that littered his body, some more jarring than others as they curved in angry white lines over his weathered skin. The years had not been kind to either of them, and yet there was as beauty in it even still, a melancholy beauty intertwined in everything they shared. To know and to have been know. To have and to have lost. To have been lost and to have been found again by perhaps the only other soul who could truly understand.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Remus said softly in the nighttime, and for the first time since they’d been reunited again, Sirius smiled and Remus knew that yes, this was the same Sirius he’d known all along. A bit older, a bit broken, a bit more tired and worn down, but just as beautiful and familiar as he had been all those years ago.
“I’m glad you’re here too,” Sirius returned. And in the dark their fingers found each other, winding together as they once had in another lifetime, relearning the feeling of the same hands now aged and scarred. Two stars, they were, as they had always been, finding their way back to one another and holding tight as the night stretched on and on around them.