“No! Don’t hit me again- please!”
Sirius’ voice rang out through the small room, echoing and reverberating around the walls until at last it came to a quiet whisper and faded away. His breaths came in short, shallow puffs of translucent white and grey as the hot air mingled with the cold, swirling like mist in the mornings. Curling in on himself, he turned and wrapped his arms around the upper part of his torso, fingers skimming the scar he had got in third year from a hex gone wrong. He never had fixed it, figuring it was far enough out of the way for him to not care about it.
He uncurled again, restlessly shifting onto his back, as the dream continued to play out behind his eyelids in a private movie theatre only he had access to. The figure that looked an awful lot like a person he knew, but shapeless to the extent that he couldn’t tell who it was. They raised their hand again, fingers curled in a fist.
The fist came down on him hard.
Sirius sat bolt upright, bare chest heaving and cheeks soaked in tears. His mouth opened and closed in an attempt to force lungfuls of air down into his lungs but he could not breathe. He felt like he was choking, an invisible hand wrapped around his throat and strangling him to the point where he would pass out, Whimpering softly, he furrowed his brows and squeezed his eyes shut as the tears continued to fall, wrenching out more droplets. His hands were firmly planted on the mattress, pressed just behind his body to keep himself upright as the world swayed and became blurry through the haze of water. He would be ok, he just had to remember to breathe, remember that it was all in the past, that they couldn’t hurt him now, they were just his demons coming back to haunt him, but most of all he had to remember to stay quiet-
“Sirius? What- are you ok?”
Sirius swore quietly under his breath as he raised his head, flicking his eyes up in the direction of the doorframe to see a sleepy Remus, hair mussed and a t-shirt lazily thrown over himself for modesty- he couldn’t just walk about James’ parent’s house shirtless now could he?- and boxers that showed his long legs, the moonlight glinting off the pale raised skin scattered along his thigh and calf. He couldn’t lie, Moony had been one of the reasons he’d decided to keep that scar just below his armpit, along with the one on his cheek after cutting it on the Whomping Willow. Remus had jokingly called it a “battle scar”, but Sirius was happy enough to think about it like that rather than learn the charm to remove it.
Sirius opened his mouth to speak, but his voice bubbled and cracked low in his throat, so he quickly shut it and instead nodded his head surely, pursing his lips. Remus cocked his head to the side, a sure indicator that he believed what he had just expressed to be, in James’ delightfully poetic way of putting things, “utter bullshit”. The man in the doorframe raised a bisected eyebrow and gave the now cowering Sirius a look that, if it were a potion, would have been laced with Veritaserum.
“I-I had another nightmare.” Sirius admitted quietly, and Remus’ gaze immediately softened upon hearing his words.
“Oh Sirius, you should’ve told me straight away, c’mon.” Moony pushed himself off the doorframe where he was leaning and made his way over to the small black bed in the corner of the room. Sirius’ bottom lip was quivering and he felt a fresh onslaught of tears ready to fall as Remus gently lowered himself onto his bed, folding his long, gangly limbs up underneath him and finally coming to sit in a cross-legged position. “Hug?”
Sirius could never say no to his hugs, so he leaned forward into Moony’s open arms, resting his forehead on his bony shoulder as Remus gently rubbed circles into his tense back. He felt the wet patches grow below his eyes on his crumpled t-shirt as the salty tears dripped from his eyes again, and if the owner of the t-shirt noticed he didn’t care. The quiet sound of Remus’ heart, audible through his chest, calmed Sirius the most, more than the heat of his warm chest did, and he smiled as he felt his heartbeat fall into rhythm with Moony’s.
After a while, Sirius moved his arms to wrap around the middle of the taller man’s ribcage, squeezing tightly as if when he let go, he would disappear. His hand dug into the spaces between the bones that he could feel jutting out of his back, and he smoothed his fingers over the mountains and valleys of his long spine.
“Thanks Moony, I’m sorry for waking you up.” His low, groggy voice was further muffled by Remus’ chest, but it was a sentence meant for only the two of them to hear anyway, so it was ok.
“Pads, y’know I’m always here for you right? I couldn’t care less if you woke me up if it meant that you would be ok.” Remus whimpered quietly into his the top of his head, shaggy, black hair messy from his tossing and turning. “And anyways, James was snoring so I wasn’t that deep in my own sleep to begin with.”
Sirius didn’t know whether it was the steady rise and fall of the chest he was resting his cheek against, or the subtle scent of pine trees and wet fur, or his own lack of sleep, heck maybe even a combination fo the three, but he fell asleep against the warm body that was protectively draped around him. And Remus, well, Remus didn’t care at all.