Remus/Sirius. Before and after.
Remus wants to give Sirius all of himself again. He just doesn’t know if he can.
When they were young, it had been easy. No. Not easy—nothing about that time had been easy—but his feelings for Sirius had come fast and hard, almost vicious in their intensity. Their inevitability. The way he had wanted him, so much it ached, wanted him while believing, almost to the point of knowledge, that Sirius did not want him back.
Then he had discovered that Sirius did want him back. They had stood out by the Great Lake one evening, skating right up to the edge of curfew as the sky darkened over the forest, Sirius’ hand hidden in Remus’ pocket, their fingers clamped together and Remus’ pulse galloping. It wasn’t that he’d thought the two of them a particularly good idea back then—not safe, not safe at all—but he had been unable to stop up his heart. The love had just flowed right out. And he had believed (to the point of knowledge) that to love this deeply was worth whatever pain it caused. To be alive was to risk pain. To be close to someone was to risk pain. He wanted to be alive.
And he had been as close to Sirius as he could have wanted. Hands on his skin, in his hair, lips on his lips, knee brushing against knee under the table in the Great Hall feeling like a current of magic between them. In their flat after graduation, Remus used to kneel on the carpet and take Sirius in his mouth and watch. He would look up at him through damp lashes, barely breathing half the time, and Sirius would watch him back and even though Remus always thought that people who said eyes were the window to the soul had never really looked at their glassy inscrutable depths, he’d felt his lover’s gaze as a searing vulnerability. He would watch Sirius as he came. As Sirius struggled to keep his eyes open and fixed on Remus’ while Remus choked and swallowed, hating the taste and loving him.
But now. After. It’s harder now. Remus tries to look at Sirius like that again, long and open and without barrier, but neither of them can quite do it. One of them always ends up looking away.
The problem is not that Remus believes he’d been naïve when his younger self had decided that love was worth the risk of tremendous pain. He still believes that now. It’s not a question, really, of what he believes. It’s a question of what he’s capable of doing. After.
He had spent thirteen years forcing himself to swallow down the truth of what Sirius had done. Forcing himself to believe that James and Lily and Peter were dead because of the man he had loved. Forcing himself to ask, again and again, when Sirius had stopped loving him. If Sirius had stopped loving him. Remus did not doubt that Sirius’ love had been real. But something had changed, that final year, Sirius’ loyalties or his courage; something had changed that Remus could never have been big enough to combat. Remus had spent thirteen years forcing himself to look this truth in the eyes.
The fact that it had not been true had brought so much back to Remus. Life. Hope. Sirius.
And he loves Sirius now, and Sirius loves him. After all, neither of them had ever really stopped. But Remus’ heart is so scarred over. And underneath those scars? Young, red, tender flesh, still alive and beating hard as ever. Vulnerable and so, so easily crushed. He’d like to dig through the scar tissue to get to it, but he isn’t sure how. Isn’t sure if he can.
He’d like to really look Sirius in the eyes again, on his knees or not. He tries to hold his gaze a little longer every time they’re in bed together, every time they look at each other across the table at Grimmauld Place. Tries not to glance away. He always fails, but maybe someday he won’t. Maybe someday they’ll look at each other long enough that everything else will dissolve.
[thanks for suggesting wolfstar, @mybelovedmoon!]
