evesaintyves

"I should apologise for earlier," Remus tries, "it wasn't my intent to embarrass you. I didn't think it productive to continue the argument in front of—er, everyone." He means Albus, who's quietly tasked him with keeping Sirius in line.

"It's so odd," Sirius muses distantly, as if Remus hadn't spoken at all. "I hardly remember the last few weeks of school. Only in pieces. That party with Mary's godawful jam band. The rain. Do you?"

Whispering drizzle had shushed all the birdsong from the forest. The colourless sky was close enough to touch. Remus's joints were shot through with splinters; hard to tell if it was the weather or the waxing moon. They rarely found themselves alone together, but Sirius had hung back to trudge with him up the slippery lawn from the greenhouses. Remus was happy to be the entourage. Not just safety in numbers, strength in the implicit threat. Sirius got a wide berth which was half-inherited and half-earned.

"Looking forward to going back to James's?"

Sirius's cool eyes locked on him. "Don't be bitter."

"I wasn't."

"He'd take you in if you asked."

Remus wasn't sure that was true. Certainly not for the right reasons. Remus had James's sympathy; Sirius and James shared a lobe of brain.

"Can't leave my mum," Remus shrugged, and left it at that.

Sirius stopped walking.

"He thinks he's getting married," he said.

"You don't agree?"

Sirius didn't answer. Remus followed his gaze to the dead-eyed dormitory windows and the tearstains of rain on stone.

"I like Lily," he volunteered. Honestly meaning well, he'd tell himself later. Later still, after everyone concerned was dead: you can't give away what isn't yours. "She's been good for him, I think."

"Yeah," Sirius said, with a bewilderedness that was foreign on him, "I like her too."

Seventeen years on, in Remus's memory, this moment is superimposed with James and Lily's wedding, and Sirius's stunning, relentless grin.

"Loads of things are going to be different," he started, aware already of his tendency to lecture and despising it, "but James will always—"

Sirius, just for a shocking moment, crouched on the ground. He covered his mouth with his hand, breathing like a sprinter.

"It's a bit of a blur," Remus says.

"Well." Sirius pauses long enough that it seems he's forgotten again. "Think I'll check for doxies at the top of the house."

The doxies are long gone. Remus keeps quiet.

For years his mind has replayed that moment with the frequency and secrecy of masturbation: beautiful Sirius cracking like plaster. Brought to his knees. He had chosen Remus for that. Part of the addictive power of knowing him then was seeing him at his worst: sleeping sprawled crosswise on the end of James's bed, mouth lolling open and stained with apple schnapps; laughing so hard he thought he might have pissed himself and stuck a hand between his legs to check. Shouting at Regulus so brutally that drops of spittle exploded through the air between them.

Remus's mind wrote alternate endings, in which he knelt in the grass, in the bloom of petrichor, and said whatever it was Sirius needed. You'll always have me—but that wasn't it, surely. His mind made Sirius come to him, desperate, and part the curtains of his dormitory bed to crawl inside. Sex was only theoretical to Remus then, something real people did, and in his fantasy it was somehow chaste, and somehow his rattletrap body wasn't entirely involved. There was golden light, surreal and holy, annointing the perfect angles of Sirius's shoulders. A kiss that tasted immaculately of after-dinner mint. And Sirius, a wreck of love, helpless in the crook of Remus's neck. Breathing that same shuddery way, for years.

You're a monster, his imagination would eventually start whispering.

Yes, but I'm yours, his captive Sirius would reply.

After a while, Remus follows him upstairs. There's spare room at the end of the hallway, a morgue of broken furniture under sheets. No hurry, so they can pretend they've just happened to find each other. And so that Sirius will wait for him.

It's nothing like how they did it in Remus's head. Now Sirius is missing teeth. For a few months he was better about cleaning them, but since Harry left for school he's backslid and his mouth tastes of Mourvédre tannins and decay. Molly's cooking has filled out his frame but it's not lean Quidditch muscle, it's midlife sag. Sirius doesn't insist either of them get naked, which is a relief. Remus sinks his rheumatic knees into the plush and dusty carpet, undoes his old friend's buttons and zip, and thinks of the smell of that rain. It's so much like the smell of sex: indescribably alive.

"Fucking grass," Mundungus is muttering in the kitchen. "Thought he was a real mate." It takes Remus a disorienting moment to gather that he's talking about someone else.

Sirius is there, shoes on the table, tilting on the back legs of his chair. He tosses the hair from his eyes and chuckles. He doesn't spare Remus a single glance.