The Chocolate Story
“You’re not damaged, you’re perfect,” Sirius said, his heart aching for his friend. He strained to raise his head and shift position, wanting to look Remus in the eye, but there wasn’t enough slack in the handcuffs to move much. “Why don’t you lay your head on my chest so I can see you?”
The voice beside him was muffled as Remus’ lips were pressed into his ribcage. “I don’ want you t’ see me cry.”
“Shit, Reems, I’m crying too. Plus, I just saw you sobbing, like, two minutes ago. Look, all I want to do is comfort you. You can comfort me, too, okay?”
So Remus laid his cheek on Sirius’ chest, draping an arm over him and hooking one leg around his, his mussy hair tickling Sirius’ neck. “Hey, Sirius?” he asked. “Can you still call me Moony, even though Sev doesn’ like it? Jus’ secretly, so I don’t get in trouble? It makes me happy.”
“Sure, Moony,” Sirius murmured, leaning to kiss the top of his head. “And tomorrow we’re gonna go out and buy you more chocolate, loads and loads of it, a whole candy shop’s worth. If he doesn’t want you to have it, he can talk to me.”
He felt Remus nod, felt his body shake with the little gasps that come after sobbing. “D’you…” The voice was halting, timid. “D’you know why I… why I’ve always got ch-… chocolate?”
No, Sirius didn’t. He hadn’t ever thought about it, just assumed Remus had a sweet tooth and that there was nothing more to it.
But by now he knew better than to assume the simple answer with anything when it came to Remus; there was always something behind the quirks. Like how he had thought there was no real reason why his friend took so long to start eating whenever food was placed in front of him, either at a restaurant or Sirius’ house, or even his own meals in his own house. Then one day Remus told him: as a child, he’d often had to sit and watch others eat, waiting for permission to begin his own food. He was supposed to ask, “May I eat, please?” and then wait in silence. Often, the permission never came and his meal was dumped in the trash or fed to the dogs. If he ever snuck a bite before being told to do so, he was beaten. Now, still, he had an intense fear of eating without permission. “Every time I want to eat,” he had finally confided to Sirius, “I ask myself, ‘May I eat, please?’ And then I tell myself, ‘Go ahead and stuff yourself, you bloody little tramp. Who knows when you’ll get another morsel.’” Evidently, this was what his parents had said to him.
Then there was the fact that he hated to have his picture taken, which Sirius had originally put down to the typical camera-shyness suffered by many people, perhaps a bit more pronounced in Remus because he was more sensitive than most. After he got to know him well, of course, he learned of the horrors he had faced in front of the camera lens, how his torture and humiliation had been used for the sexual gratification of others, how pornographers had immortalized these images and videos online and he would never be completely free of them.
Now, Sirius braced himself for another shocking story. He rubbed his chin into Remus’ hair, wishing he could touch him with his hands. “I want to hear about the chocolate,” he said, “but I just wish I could wrap my arms around you while you tell me.”
“Dunno where the key is,” Remus mumbled.
But Sirius felt a little twitch, as if Remus had tensed up momentarily, and it suddenly occurred to him that something besides an error in judgment might be keeping him locked to the bed. “Moony,” he said slowly, “can I ask you something? And before I ask, I want you to know that I won’t be mad whatever the answer is.”
He felt that tense little twitch again, then a tentative voice, “You can ask.”
“Are you keeping me locked up because you don’t want me to leave tonight?” he asked. “Could you unlock me if you wanted to?”
There was a pause, then the slightest hint of a nod.
Sirius breathed a sigh of relief. “Reems, all you had to do was ask and I would stay, don’t you know that? Come on, get the key. I’ll stay the night. Trust me when I say, I really, really want to be here with you.”
“No,” Remus said desperately. “I need you, Sirius. I don’ wanna be alone; you’ll leave.”
“But I said I’d stay, didn’t I?” Sirius asked, trying not to get frustrated. “I want my arms free so I can hold you, that’s all.”
Remus whimpered. “Sev says everyone’s gonna leave me… everyone but him. And him, too, if I piss him off bad enough.”
“Oh, fuck Sev!” Sirius shouted. But when Remus’ arm instinctively lifted to cover his face, as if protecting it from a blow, he softened his voice. “Never mind. Tell me about the chocolate now. We’ll talk about getting the cuffs off later.”
So Remus began, in the slow, deliberate manner of a drunk on the verge of sleep, the origin story of his chocolate stash. It was the first day of year six, he said, and here he was, a bright but nervous ten-year-old who was always black-and-blue, and he was starving. Or rather, he was being starved. He had survived the summer by foraging for berries, sneaking dandelions from the back garden, and digging through neighbourhood garbage bins for edible scraps. The day before, he’d heard his mother bragging to a friend that she didn’t have to buy him a new school uniform because he hadn’t grown. “We’ve put a stop to that,” she’d said. “No more sweets.” As if they’d ever given him sweets.
Now that school was back on, though, he knew things would be different. For one thing, all parents were expected to pack a bagged lunch for their children, so he would at least be having one meal a day. But the best part was his teacher. He had been assigned to Mr. Gryffin’s class, and Mr. Gryffin was known for one thing: chocolate! He kept a large package of creamy milk-chocolates in his desk and at the end of each day he gave some out to the students who had shown the best behaviour. Every day! Remus had quickly done the math and determined that was one hundred seventy-two chocolates he could possibly get.
Every day that school year he was sure to sit up straight with his hands folded on his desk. He never passed notes or spoke out of turn. He never let himself fall asleep in class, though there were days when it was hard to keep his eyes from drooping. It was the lack of nourishment that did it.
His mother had found ways to make it look like he was getting a reasonable amount of food. Every day she packed him what appeared to be a half peanut butter sandwich. In reality, she had painstakingly spread the peanut butter only around the edges of the bread where it could be seen, so that in the middle there was nothing at all. She would also pack a bit of garbage – an empty packet of crisps, an orange peel, a banana peel – to make it look as though he’d eaten part of his lunch ahead of time. Had she known he turned the crisp packet inside out and licked the salt and grease from the foil, or that he devoured the fruit peels like they were candy, she wouldn’t have included them.
Still, young Remus started each day with a smile knowing that he had a shot at one of those delicious chocolates from Mr. Gryffin, the coolest teacher in the school.
At this point in the story, Sirius cut in. “Oh, Moony,” he breathed, “no wonder you love chocolate so much. It was just an extra treat for the other students, but for you… it kept you alive.”
“No,” Remus said, trying to stifle a large yawn that came out anyway. “You don’ unnerstand. I was invis'ble to him. I never got a chocolate.”
It turned out that Mr. Gryffin, a boisterous man himself, liked the more gregarious students best. The timid, frail boy who kept to himself and did his homework on time was of very little interest to him. Finally, near the end of the year, when Mr. Gryffin announced how proud he was that everyone in the class had earned chocolates, Remus got up the courage to raise his hand.
“I haven’t got a chocolate, sir,” he’d said, a little too loudly, a result of his hunger coming out.
Mr. Gryffin frowned. “Really? I think everyone’s had more than one by now. Are you sure you haven’t?”
Remus nodded.
“Well, I suppose I may have forgotten you, sitting all the way back there –” Remus was in the middle row of desks “—here you are, then.” And he dropped a beautiful chocolate onto Remus’ desk, wrapped in golden foil.
Remus sat staring at that magnificent gold square for a long time, imagining how good it would taste. He didn’t touch it, though he longed to. He couldn’t. He was waiting for something.
Suddenly, a hand came down and snatched the chocolate from under his nose. “Right then,” said Mr. Gryffin, clearly irritated, “if you don’t want it, I’ll give it to someone who does. Here you go Lily.” And with that, all hope was lost. He knew he wouldn’t be given another chance, and, sure enough, he wasn’t.
“See,” Remus said now, yawning again and squeezing Sirius like he was a teddy bear, “I was waitin’ for him to say I could eat it. Y'know, like, say I was allowed. I dunno why I didn’t jus’ fuckin’ ask him. Maybe cuz I was outta practice.”
Right, Sirius thought, bitterly, because you’d been denied food to such an extent you’d had no opportunity to ask; the monsters had stopped even placing meals in front of you, hadn’t they? He knew Remus liked to put a bowl of chocolates on his desk when he taught, and students were free to take as many as they wished. He’d even told him about encouraging certain students to take extra: a much-too-thin girl with sad eyes, a boy who never spoke, another who’d come to school with a black eye and a suspicious cover story. It had made sense before, but it made even more sense now.
“Moony,” he murmured, “I’m gonna give you all the chocolate. I’ll build you a fucking house out of chocolate. And we’ll get married and live in it together, and whenever we’re hungry we’ll eat the walls.”
He thought he was being clever, slipping in that “married” comment to test the waters, but Remus was already asleep, still cuddled as close as he could get, his breath on Sirius’ neck coming in sighs and whistles. A sleeping Moony, of course, meant Sirius’ arms would stay locked over his head for what remained of the night. He thanked the Lord he didn’t have to go to the bathroom.
In fact, he was okay with the arrangement. It was still kind of sexy being cuffed to his crush’s bed, even with said crush passed out cold. It was only a problem once in the night, when Remus had a nightmare and began wailing in his sleep and Sirius wanted desperately to hold him and rock him through it. Instead, all he could do was quietly reassure him that he was only dreaming and that he, Sirius, was there to watch over him. That seemed to calm him and the rest of the night slipped by unnoticed. And then it was morning, and again the handcuffs were a problem because Remus was still asleep and Sirius was sure he heard a key in the front door…