I
Harry and Remus sat despondently in the smaller of two sitting rooms at number 12 Grimmauld Place, nursing teacups that had long since gone cold, because the alternative would be attempting to make conversation. This would not only be uncomfortable, but also more than likely impossible, given the raucous torrent of insults and vindications being hurled by Walburga’s portrait and Sirius in the room over.
Remus had been tempted to put an end to it as soon as it had begun with a well aimed stupifiction spell, but had hesitated. It might be the unhinged, throat tearing screams of a lunatic, but Sirius was actually talking. Not lurking in a shadowy corner looking like a reanimated corpse, the specter of a grimace on his otherwise blank, hollow face- a poor imitation of a smile by a man who had felt nothing remotely akin to happiness in over a decade.
‘And who’s fault is that?’, Remus’ mind supplied dryly. ‘All those years of him treating you like no less than human despite what you are, and you couldn’t even recommend a trial? Veritiserum? Something?”
‘He didn’t need something,’ another voice in his head whispered, snake like and goading.
‘He needed someone and you weren’t there.’
The reasonable half of Remus’ head reminded him gently of the context in which the arrest had occurred- namely, their most cherished friends slaughtered, the survivors at each other’s throats with paranoia, and Sirius Black in a heap on a decimated street, laughing and sobbing in turns like a lunatic, surrounded by burnt and bloody bodies.
But then his thoughts turned again to the spry and exuberant twenty year old with twinkling eyes that danced like silver fire, chin high in the air- daring anyone to tell him what he could or couldn’t be- and every bit the loyal hound he so often transformed into. In the face of those memories, Remus’ justifications squirmed like excuses in the pit of his stomach.
Suddenly, it occurs to him that Harry has never seen that Sirius, with his shining raven’s wing hair and a smile like the sun. It strikes him as a horrible injustice to both godfather and godson.
“He wasn’t always like this,” he says quietly, but so suddenly that Harry’s head whips around fast to meet his gaze. Those big green eyes may be Lilly’s but they’re so innocent and open, just the way James’ had been. But James’ eyes had never been so wise and sad.
“What was he like?” Harry asks. There’s a ragged edge to his voice. He’s begging for stories of better times. It’s a child’s desperation hidden behind a casual and mature expression. It makes Remus’ heart ache.
“Fearless,” Remus says. “Stubborn, though I suppose that hasn’t changed much.” They both laugh softly at this, and it’s quiet a moment before Remus speaks again.
“He was beautiful and brilliant, and a bolder man by age sixteen than any adult I know, even now.” His head involuntarily offers an image of the Gryffindor lion, radiant, regal, powerful.
“It was like his heart was on fire,” Remus finishes. Harry shivers, and Remus knows he’s thinking of dementors.
“Thank you,” says the boy softly, and there’s at least a little peace in his voice this time.
“I think I’ll get some sleep. Night, professor.”
Remus doesn’t bother contradicting the title and bids him good night. With one last furtive glance, the scrawny, scruffy teen slips past a raging Sirius, up the stairs, and out of sight.
Remus waits a couple minutes longer and tries not to listen, really he does, to save the dignity of a sane man who vanished fourteen years prior. But Walburga’s shrill voice carries with a special intensity, and Lupin cannot help but catch words like “half-breed”, “unloveable”, and by far the worst, “abandoned you”.
“SHUT IT! JUST SHUT- STUPIFY!” Sirius shouts in a ragged, strangled voice. For moment it’s eerily quiet. Then, all thoughts of dignity and privacy fly out of Remus’ mind when he hears soft, broken weeping in the other room. At the threshold, he sees Sirius’ bony frame collapsed in on itself, his back against the wall, hand cradling his face though his wand is still limply held in one set of pale, needle like fingers.
“Sirius,” Remus says as he squats down beside the other. He tries not to feel hurt at the way Sirius flinches when he touches him. He eases the wand from the trembling hand, and squeezes it gently. The man who meets his eyes is a ghost.
“Sirius, let’s get you a shower and a rest mate, yeah?” Remus tries. They’re halfway standing when Sirius shakes himself from his stupor and wrenches his hand away, but the weak, emaciated wrist remains gently but firmly clasped in Remus’ grip. Even in a fit of anger, Sirius is too feeble and ill to put up much of a fight. He doesn’t pull away again.
Instead he snarls “I didn’t ask to be looked after.” But the effect is spoiled by the tears still sliding down his hollow cheeks.
“Tough shit,” says Lulin grimly, and half carries Sirius up the stairs. The man has gone silent again, but his quiet, uneven gasps tell Lupin that he’s still crying.
He sets the other on the bed in a room still garishly decorated with Gryffindor pennant flags and new wave music posters. He realizes then how much time has passed and how much growing up Sirius has missed out on. He’s looking at a man barely out of childhood, trapped in a battered, thirty-five year old body. It certainly explains a great deal. The sensitivity, the impulsiveness, the inability to regulate his emotions.
“Not to mention he’s mad as a hatter,” a blunt voice adds in the back of Lupins’ mind. He loathes the voice because there’s some truth to this. Sirius doesn’t have good days, he has good hours, good minutes even. He laughs a bit and talks and spoils Harry. But you blink and it’s gone, replaced by fits of laughter, screaming, stony silence, or restless agitation. He vacillates so wildly between these states that it feels as if Remus is sharing a space with seven people instead of two. Sometimes Sirius stays up for days cleaning the manor, pacing, spitting abuse at Kreacher. Other times, he can hardly move from his bed, locked inside himself with terror and sorrow and exhaustion.
He puts a hand to Sirius’ cheek and it’s immediately shaken off but there’s a pleading look in those devastated eyes that tells him to try again, so he does. This time Sirius averts his eyes in shame, but allows himself to be touched and grounded. They stay there for a while, Remus’ hand climbing gently into Sirius’ hair as Sirius himself attempts to slow his breathing.
Just when those bruised eyes close and Remus wonders if Sirius needs sleep more than anything else, the other gives a huff, rubs his face with a heavy hand, and retrieves fresh clothes from the wardrobe.
Tossing them onto the bed, he blanks momentarily, staring vaguely at the floor.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he says.
“It’s just a shower, Pads,” Remus jokes, though his voice is void of humor. Sirius gives and equally noncommittal laugh, but his face is pinched when he speaks.
“I couldn’t remember any of it for years,” he admits. Remus’ head shoots up. Sirius doesn’t talk about these things. Ever. Lupin holds onto every word, because he knows this may be his only opportunity to peak inside that mind that he was once able to read like a book.
“Then when I got out, I was so impatient to get all of it back.” He shakes his head, as if to imply that the desire to regain his only happy memories was an incredibly foolish thing, and Remus feels a little sick.
“I wanted to see them again- see all the good times- James and Lily and baby Harry and- especially you.” It’s delivered like an apology but it makes Remus’ heart skip all the same.
Then Sirius’ face contorts into something like anguish and Lupin chastises himself.
‘This isn’t about all that, you old fool,’ he thinks scornfully.
“But I was so wrong, Reems.” Sirius is disintegrating quickly now, face once again a wet wreck of grief.
“I was so wrong. I don’t want to remember. B-before all I knew to the story was how it ends and- it was awful, of course but-.” He chokes back a sob. “But now? Remembering everything we’ve lost?”
Remus can only stand there and listen and ache along side his dearest friend. He knows the feeling all too well. His heart is broken in an identical way, and there’s no fix, no words to comfort.
“I don’t want any of this!” Sirius shouts with desperation and pain and something else that Remus can’t identify. Remus feels hot tears begin to slide down his own face.
“I know. I used to feel it all the time,” he says, as what he imagines is a hollow consolation, but he pushes on.
“You squeeze your eyes shut so tight because you want to open them just once and have everything be different.”
Another sob wracks Sirius’ frame, and he’s shaking.
“I’ll never get to be there for him,” Sirius mutters, distraught. “I’ll never get to see him grow up, or-or stand in the kitchen with Lily, or ride around in that beat up death trap of a muggle car with James, and-“ he takes a shuttering breath and his eyes seek the floor again.
“I will never be with you. Never prove… that I’m worthy of you. The man who might’ve been worthy once, who did all those things, who was working up the courage to tell the whole f-fucking world how much he loved you-.” Sirius’ hands clench in nameless frustration, and then fall limply to his sides as despair overtakes his worn features. “He’s dead, he- he died such a long time ago and- and he took all of the good parts with him and left us with me, and I’m sorry Remus but I don’t think that this- this piece of a person is worth the effort. For me or for you. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t, I don’t want to, please, I just want it to be over.”
Remus had stood stock still and white as parchment while trying to decipher the meaning of words like “loved” and “be with you”, yet this final plea shakes him awake like a blast of icy water.
Because the man standing before him loves him back. Because he always has.
And now that man is asking for permission to die.
Remus doesn’t ask why because he knows the answer. Because Sirius thinks he’s empty. Because he thinks he’s irreparably damaged (and maybe there’s some truth to that), because he believes himself every bit a burden, and he doesn’t know- how could he? He doesn’t know that Remus loves him back; Would die for him a hundred times over; would trade places with him for the last fourteen years in a heartbeat just to take the pain away.
Doesn’t know that sometimes when Sirius is watching Harry, or caring for Buckbeak, or tucking into a simple meal like it’s the best food he’s ever tasted, that he smiles. Not like the cocky nineteen year old Remus remembers; Not like the grief stricken madman sobbing and laughing in the street; Not like the grim, bitter convict, exhausted and disillusioned, his youth destroyed by rotting in prison for crimes he didn’t perpetrate.
It’s a real honest-to-God smile and though it’s uncertain, though it doesn’t always banish the grief from those grey eyes, it fills Remus’ soul with a warm and welcome fire. Because it is beyond any doubt the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
It’s the only thing Lupin has eyes for, the only thing he wants to see when he wakes, a bloody wreck, to the light of a waning gibbous moon. Some days, it’s the only thing driving him on in the tempest that is this never-ending war, the compass in his hand as he drifts in the enormity of churning black sea beneath the hull.
Because underneath the pain and darkness and damage, Sirius is there, and Remus loves him as much as ever. And it’s a relief to see his Sirius, and to see that he needs Remus now, all these years later (of course, Sirius had always needed someone, but he was such a gifted liar back then, holding his cards tightly to his chest, and oh so proud).
Because Remus has always needed Sirius, whether the moon was full or the sky was peacefully black. And Sirius Black, brazen, loyal, attentive- had always been there.
Remus would give anything to undo the last fourteen years of misery with the wave of his wand, but he can’t. What he can do is settle the debt; He can carry Sirius the way Sirius had always carried him. It’s a labor of love he has always yearned for the honor of repaying.
Remus clears the space between them with three long, hard strides, and this time when he embraces the other, it’s with near violent need, gripping the skeletal frame with enough force to push the breath from weakened lungs.
“He is worth the effort to me,” Remus says forcefully into Sirius’s hair. “He’s you, Sirius, and he is worth everything to me.”
For a moment Sirius is too shocked to do anything. But then he begins to cry into Remus’ tweed shoulder. The occasional sips of air he forces through his parched and worn throat sound like a death rattle. Remus repels this thought with all his strength. Sirius is alive. The man he loves is alive, and in order for Sirius to believe it, Remus has to believe it first.
They stand there for centuries that neither of them notice or care are passing, Remus letting silent, stoic tears slide down his face, Sirius trembling like a leaf.
It strikes Lupin again how thoroughly roles have been reversed, and he leans in even closer, stroking the knobby back and whispering gentle, calming things.
Slow and steady, Remus guides the other to the bath. He throws a dry towel around Sirius’ shoulders, murmuring, and with the flick of his wand it becomes blessedly warm. Sirius shudders as if he had only just noticed he was cold, and sighs appreciatively, leaning back against the wall beside the sink. Remus runs the taps and once the tub is filled with frothing, hot water, looks to Sirius in a silent question.
Remus had seen Sirius without clothes plenty of times. They had snuck out to goof off in the lake almost every warm night of fifth year, snickering about how skinny-dipping made it that much more exciting.
James had rolled his eyes when they regaled the tale at breakfast (where Remus and Sirius sat brushing shoulders, as always) only vaguely saying, “For all your book smarts, you two are the least self aware people I’ve ever met. It’s actually kind of impressive.”, causing Lily to choke on her orange juice and Peter to look from face to face as if watching a tennis match, saying “I don’t get it! What did I miss?!”
But that had been before twelve years of extremely poor health and malnourishment. Sirius has always been self conscious, consequently preening himself like a peacock, but in the absence of his old bravado and charming mock arrogance, he just seemed paranoid and embarrassed.
He had allowed Remus to repair his yellowed teeth, several of which had been shattered for reasons Sirius neglected to share, but had rolled his eyes and swatted the other’s hand away when it began to gently untangle his mess of hair.
“I assure you Moony,” he had snapped sardonically. “My days of vanity are far behind me.”
Remus hadn’t attempted to help Sirius regain his health since, but for the exceptions of forcing him to eat at least three times a day and snatching glasses of fire whiskey out of his bony hands. Even this assistance was not remotely appreciated, though Remus knew that had less to do with himself and everything to do with Sirius’ haughty Black dignity, which neither his abhorrence for his family nor his time in Azkaban had been able to diminish.
That stubborn pride, however, was nowhere to be found now. Sirius stood on the threshold, unsure, with his arms wrapped around his chest. He looked up from the floor and met Lupins’ eyes in a tentative, sidelong glance.
“Might fancy a bit of company,” he said nonchalantly, but Remus knew better than anyone what Sirius Black looked like when he was afraid. And yet he felt an unbidden grin slowly spread across his face. Sirius flushed and rolled his eyes, but looked equally beguiled into good spirits.
Not to be cowed by his own poor self esteem, Sirius gruffly yanked and shook off his clothes rather than neatly removing them. The gesture was so thoroughly Padfoot that Remus had to bite back a laugh.
Still, as Sirius sank into the hot water and leaned his head against the edge of the tub, it was apparent how utterly exhausted he was. Tears had left stains on his high, sharp cheekbones, which were now red and puffy. He flushed his eyes with bath water, attempting to rid them of the smarting salt.
Sirius hissed as he lowered himself further into the water.
“Jesus, Lupin, were you afraid I’d get hypothermia?” He complained, but a small smirk was playing at the corners of the mouth. Remus gently shoved his shoulder, causing a small splash in the otherwise quiet room.
“Don’t be a shit, padfoot.”
Sirius arched an eyebrow.
“I thought I was the one with the bad mouth.”
“You certainly had your moments. Poor McGonagall, putting up with your flirting. She had every right to smack you, I don’t know how she resisted the temptation.”
“Oi!” Said Sirius, scandalized.
“Don’t be Jealous!”
“Can’t help it. Minerva’s a beautiful woman.”
This in turn earned Lupin his own swat in the head, and they lapsed into mischievous snorts before falling silent again, into a much warmer and more comfortable silence than before.
“We still bicker like an old married couple,” Remus pointed out.
“We are an old married couple, Reems,” Sirius pointed out, signifying this by pointedly cracking his neck.
Remus was sure that if he stood and checked in the mirror, his face would be an unfortunate shade of Gryffindor scarlet. If Sirius noticed, he mercifully ignored it.
Instead he continued to groan and stretch his stiff joints.
“If this is what bloody thirty-five feels like, what must it be like to be eighty?” He whined. Remus offered one of his signature wry smiles.
“I’m not sure you and I qualify as average thirty-five year olds as far as aches and pains are concerned,” he pointed out. Sirius gave a very dog like growl.
“That’s bollocks, you know that? That just means we’ll be that much worse off.”
Remus fixed Sirius suddenly with a soft but intense look.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
Sirius’ eyes widened, doleful and unsure, before he nodded slowly and rested his damp head of hair against Remus’ neck.
“Guess so, right?” He says, but there’s a renewed determination in his voice that puts a lump in Remus’ chest. He could weep with gratitude and relief- but he doesn’t.
Instead, he applies cautious fingertips to Sirius’ delicate cheek. Turning the others’ head gently, he does what he had always been too afraid to do before.
Their lips meet slowly, sweetly, and all Remus can think of is that they owe their younger selves an apology for not doing it sooner.
Then again, he reflects, they had forgiven each other that night in the Shack with hardly a moment’s hesitation. How hard could it be then, to forgive themselves?