Remus and Sirius sit silently on the floor, clutching lukewarm mugs of tea in their hands like mediocre lifelines, and their bodies begin to melt into the wall. Perhaps they might be more recognizable like this: shrouded in green floral wallpaper curling around their limbs and attempting to prove that there is life here, or there once was, and now at least the vestiges of their humanity remain.
It is after the war. Remus doesn’t remember when he had started dividing his life up by pink, jagged battle wounds; here was the first newspaper headline: three muggles killed in suspected “death eater” attack , here was when Dumbledore first started collecting adolescent soldiers like postage stamps, here was the first time someone Remus loved was killed in front of him. The world goes on, life doesn’t, Remus thinks. He’s seen it stop too many times to believe in those things anymore.
But now each day is a series of trials of searching to find footing on solid ground, because time has slipped away into something that only Before-Remus would have kept track of, would have measured in litanic church bells and french poetry and Sirius Black’s smirking mouth quivering behind a tapestry at school. The moon keeps him company each month and sometimes this is all he has as proof of his own existence - that soul-deep clatter of his bones, that crepuscular tearing of flesh, that thorn and brier snarling and snaking across his body.
The war, Remus knows, has become inextricably molded against every last ill-fated inch of his life and he can’t seem to pick it out of the gaping fault lines that coalesce into his being - his love, his happiness, his melancholy all violated and turned inside out by the war’s repulsive sneering, washed through with bleach and hung to dry clinging onto feeble clothespins for dear life. In the wind, the sheets ripple and flutter like ghosts and in them Remus can almost see everyone he has ever known to be dead. Peter, Marlene, Dorcas, Fabian, Gideon, Benjy, Amelia—there are too many to list because it just keeps going, keeps searing itself onto the blood-orange backs of Remus’ eyelids so that every night, when he crawls into bed and curls around Sirius like a comma, he falls asleep to the devastating whisper of surviving when others didn’t, others you would have given everything to die for.
Sirius is stirring soup over the gas-lit stove and the grapefruit slice of sun slinking through the window is painting his skin red. He turns when Remus quietly enters the room, and Remus suddenly can’t recall the last time that Sirius hasn’t looked so ghostly-skeletal, as if he is lying in the grave, waiting for the dirt to purify his body. Sirius lifts the wooden spoon out of the pot and sets it on the counter.
“I’ve made tomato soup,” he says, without looking back, “I put some of the rosemary in that you like. You do like that stuff, yeah?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Their voices sound raw, sound foreign and empty. Sirius hands him a porcelain bowl of soup and they eat it on the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets, spoons clinking against bowls balanced on knobby, trembling knees like gunshots in an empty room.
“How did we get here?” Remus whispers. It seems like the only thing there is to say. Sirius responds with a sigh that might have been the marrow of exhaustion, bone-deep and hollowed.
“Sometimes I don’t actually know if we have,” he says, once their soup is gone and bowls set aside, like Remus hadn’t asked the question minutes ago. “It feels like we’re just shadows on the wall. Like, I could touch you and you wouldn’t feel it. Like we all actually died in the war, and we accidentally just went home instead of wherever you go once you’re dead.” He is staring at a spot on the cabinet door just above Remus’ shoulder. Remus thinks he should probably reach out and take Sirius’ hand, or hold him, perhaps, but he just tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling, bones deeply rooted in the cold linoleum. They stay like that, helplessly, for a long time, and allow the silence to slowly permeate into their skin, engulf their bloodstreams.
In the bed. Their bodies knotted together. Pale moonlight cascading thinly over translucent skin. Edith Piaf has slowly spun to a stop on the record player, and now the silence spreads to fill all the corners and divots of the room. Remus rolls over, fits his face into the curve of Sirius’ neck, and Sirius lifts his hand absentmindedly to thread his fingers through Remus’ tawny hair; the reactionary give and pull of their love. They could be marble statues, comatose in empty stillness.
“I would give anything to be a Muggle right about now,” Sirius says. “They don’t know anything happened. To them nothing has changed at all.” There is a beat of silence, and then Remus grins, the movement dragging his lips along Sirius’ pulse.
“Mmm, if only your parents could see you now. Sirius Black: fantasizing in bed about Muggles.”
Sirius snorts, and then, like a geyser bursting open, starts to laugh, really laugh, like he hasn’t done since—Remus can’t think of a time long enough ago. Remus starts laughing too, overcome by it, startled by the wild hunger in his throat, the starvation and thirst for happiness.
“Jesus Christ,” Sirius chokes out, “They would have chopped off my head and stuck it up on the wall of house elves—oh Merlin they really would, Remus, I’d be re-disowned—“
“The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black,” Remus interjects primly, and then turns to muffle the clap of laughter that escapes from his mouth against Sirius’ softly shaking body.
“Jesus,” Sirius says again, reverently, once they had calmed a little. “I love you, Remus Lupin. I really, really do.”
Remus will never tire of hearing those words, from Sirius’ mouth. Throughout everything, they had been the only constant in a tumultuous sea of variables - they came home bloody and bruised and whispered it as they cleaned each other’s wounds, they went weeks without seeing each other and it was their only greeting once they met again, they stole hours and minutes from the clawing hands of the war and the Order, fighting to preserve that one thing that carried them across: iloveyouremus, iloveyousirius .
He says it then, too, into Sirius’ skin, over and over until Sirius wraps his arms around him and holds him close to his chest, heavy weight replacing the lightness of laughter and settling between them. And in this moment Remus knows that they will never truly escape the war, that it will always manifest itself through their lives in the form of scars and silences and nightmares and maybe they will just have to learn to live around it. He tells Sirius as such and Sirius just holds him tighter, holds him like an anchor let down in stormy waters.
Remus thinks that he might’ve always been destined to fall in love with Sirius. Whether or not the crimson-blood ropes of fate really do run their course through every being in the world, he is sure that the two of them would have always ended up together; always climbed into the same bed at Hogwarts or lay pointing out constellations on the cold floor of the astronomy tower after dark or whispering secrets into the close heat between their almost-touching foreheads. He loves Sirius wholeheartedly; loves the way he twists his hair up in the morning and never lets anyone touch it, loves the way he always knows how to make Remus’ tea, and when to make it, even without asking. He loves Sirius’ collection of Muggle band tees and obsession with psychedelic rock, loves all of his different smiles and laughs and frowns, sorted and categorized in Remus’ mind. Most of all, Remus loves the way that Sirius loves him; openly, unabashedly, ardently, seemingly without cause or reason. Sirius, for all of his arrogance and childish unrestraint, has always been the braver of the two of them. He plunges into things head-first, takes what he needs without asking, without waiting for an answer. The only time that Remus has ever seen Sirius truly afraid for himself was after the Prank, when he had thought Remus wouldn’t forgive him, and even then it was a fear out of self-preservation. Perhaps Sirius wields a selfish kind of love, but then perhaps that is what loving someone is, or part of it, at least: living selfishly on their behalf. Whatever it is, Remus thinks, it is enough.
James and Lily come out of hiding a month after the war ends and with them comes light in the form of Harry’s huge, viridescent eyes — always wide, always wondering, always bright with joy. Sirius laughs loudly when Harry totters into a room, sweeps him up high above his head and tosses him through the air while Remus and Lily frown and worry. Remus can’t quite comprehend how such a small thing could contain so much vibrant, exuberant life, so much that it rolls off of him in waves, seeps out from his giggles and baby-chatter and almost shrinks the deep indigo shadows that paint themselves in the corners of every memory, joke, conversation. At night, once James and Lily have sheepishly ordained Sirius and Remus babysitters quid-pro-quo (after Remus and Sirius’ insistence to go, get out of the house Prongs you look like shit, Remus what did I tell you about swearing in front of Harry, Sorry Lily love you both now please leave ) Sirius holds Harry on his lap and marvels at the smallness of his fingers and toes and teeth. Remus laughs at him for it, tells him he’s gone soft and mushy around the edges, but Sirius just smiles and tucks the blanket tighter around Harry’s little body.
“Sometimes I'm so worried for him it feels like a physical pain in my chest. How did James and Lily manage to bring him into a world like this? How do they know he's going to be okay?”
Remus puts down the records he’s holding, moves across the room to kiss Sirius’ temple, muss around the tuft of black hair curling on top of Harry’s baby-soft head. “Because he has to be,” Remus says, simply. “He’s a good sort. He’ll be alright.”
One night, Remus wakes up drenched in sweat and gasping for stale air, his mouth dry with cotton-memories of Peter’s laughing face, Peter’s chubby hands, Peter’s round, blue eyes squinting in afternoon sunlight.
“He should be here,” Remus whispers, hysterically, and Sirius cradles him like a child and brushes the sweat-stuck hair from Remus’ forehead with gentle fingers. “He—he didn’t know what he was doing. He was just a kid. We could’ve—we could’ve treated him better, he stopped coming around as much those last couple of months and we didn’t try hard enough to bring him back, he was only a kid like us, he was just trying to survive…”
“I know, love, I know.”
“I—God, Sirius, sometimes I think about him and I can’t breathe—how did he do that? How could he do that to us?”
Sirius finds Remus’ hands on top of the quilt and rubs his thumbs back and forth across Remus’ palms in reply, brings each fingertip up to his trembling mouth as if he could soothe away the ache with soft butterfly-kisses. Remus closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the tears shimmering on Sirius’ cheeks. He feels too hot and too cold all at once.
“The worst part is, I would forgive him in a heartbeat. I would, even if it made me a horrible person. I couldn’t help it. He was our friend, Sirius. He was our friend. Why couldn’t he see that?”
And Sirius just sits there, holding him, rocking him in his arms.
Quietly, when it is least expected, Autumn begins to wrap herself up in the tender, frostbitten arms of Winter and lies there slumbering like death. The holidays come and go, and with their exit enters a new year and sloe-gray skies and bleary London mornings. Remus has taken to re-reading every last moth-bitten, dog-eared, yellow-leafed book in their little flat, searching, perhaps unconsciously, for something waiting inside the pages, some definite answer creeping in the blank spaces between lines like silent ghosts. He can’t seem to find it but he can’t seem to stop looking, either, even when Sirius has crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his weight tiredly on the cold hardwood floor, come to bed Remus it’s bloody freezing out here, and then dim orange lamplight is the only thing keeping his feverish company. The days vary. Some are easier than others. They take it as it comes.
Sirius tries to hide it, on bad days - the way his mouth slants perpetually into a frown, the way his limbs seem to weigh more heavily on his fragile, hollow-boned body. Remus doesn’t know how to help him, he hasn’t even figured out how to help himself yet and anyway they both feel more ghost than human, most days, flitting around the flat and trailing wispy, shrouded shadows along the scratched mahogany floorboards.
One evening when the air is a blanket of gray fog whispering over the dredges of London and the cold coils back to sit on its heels and wait for nighttime, Remus finds James and Sirius sitting on the dilapidated fire escape that whines and screeches when one so much as moves a finger across its rusted railing. They are passing a cigarette back and forth, smoke wafting up and out to meld itself into the bleak sky. Remus waits for the kettle to boil and picks up fragments of their stilted conversation that seep through the cracks in the walls:
“He sent me a letter, two weeks before he did it--”
“There’s nothing you could have done, Pads. You can’t start wandering down that road. It won’t get you anywhere.”
There is a pause, in which Sirius presumably sighs, lifts the cigarette from James’ lips, and takes a drag. “But I could have, you know? I could have made him come with me when I booked it out of that hell hole in the first place, and then he wouldn’t have even been indoctrinated into the whole mess at all.”
“Sirius, he wouldn’t have come with you.”
Another pause. “I know, Jamie, I--I just can’t help but think about it sometimes.”
When the kettle has finished squealing and singing in protest, Remus lifts it from its scorching bed, pours three mugs of English Breakfast with milk, no sugar and carries them out to the fire escape. James accepts his tea with a nearly too-understanding smile and sets it on the wet metal staircase beside him. Sirius wraps an arm around Remus’ waist, pulls him close to his body like they’re tethered to one another, and Remus presses his mouth to the damp fracture of Sirius’ hairline and gazes off over his head to stare at the gray muddled windows and street corners and lampposts. James stubs out his cigarette and says nothing. It’s going to be alright.
Slowly, as sizzling droplets splattering on asphalt begin to hum the first notes of a summer rainstorm, they fall into new rhythms of the mundane, re-learn how to soak up ordinary, shadow-dipped moments and not always feel acutely aware of the emptiness gnawing at the edges of a room. Remus grows plants on the kitchen windowsill; rosemary, golden pothos, thyme, spathiphyllum, and each one casts virescent light on the sink when the sun slips softly through the window panes and kisses their dew-laced palms. Sirius finds an old piano on the side of the road one day, and they both haul it home to prop against the green wallpaper and adorn it with picture frames and clocks and flower vases. Sometimes, Remus will roll awake in the middle of the night and tip-toe down the hall in socked feet to find Sirius sitting there, on the bench, hands dancing to quietly coax honeysuckle melodies from ivory keys. Remus will slot himself into the orifice next to Sirius’ body, tilt his head to be pillowed by Sirius’ shoulder and they will stay like that until dawn, sonatas and concertos stretching to fill the lingering spaces that their words cannot.
Lily, James, and Harry join them for picnics, for walks in the park, for movie watching and pie baking, even when the dough comes out crumbly and Harry sloshes half the raspberry filling onto the kitchen linoleum. Sirius and Remus fold themselves into each other at nighttime and wake up fitted together like question marks, swathed in still morning air and lilting birdsong and soft, soft light seeping like honey through yellow curtain lace.
They are so young. They have so much time to live.