Sixth Year.
The shack is still and sour with blood.
The others are gone—James, red-eyed with concern, and Peter, nauseous, trailing behind him. Sirius had offered to stay, had insisted, and now he’s regretting it.
Remus lies on the floor, shirt in tatters, chest rising shallow and slow. His body is a map of old and new wounds. His left hand is wrapped in a conjured bandage, his face half-hidden in shadow.
Sirius sits nearby, still as a saint in a stained-glass panel, watching.
“I said go,” Remus mutters, voice like gravel. “I don’t need an audience.”
“You never let us stay. You always shut us out after.” Sirius’s voice is taut, too tight around the edges. “Let me fucking stay, Moony.”
Remus closes his eyes. “It’s not about you.”
Silence, then Sirius’s voice, raw:
“Then what is it about?”
Something inside Remus trembles.
He turns his head slowly, painfully, and his gaze is something Sirius can’t name—hungry, haunted, familiar in a way that sets his stomach turning.
“You think the wolf is the dangerous one,” Remus says softly. “But you’re the one who made me want things I can’t have.”
The words drop like meat on cold stone.
Sirius blinks. Laughs, short and startled. “What the fuck does that mean?”
But Remus just closes his eyes again.
He doesn’t answer.
And Sirius, not knowing what else to do, doesn’t ask again.
———
Later.
Sirius carries the moment like a loose tooth in his mouth for years. Worries it. Bites down sometimes just to feel it ache.
———
Seventh Year.
Remus is quieter. Polished in the way grief polishes glass—no rough edges, just gleaming silence.
Sirius watches him with that same queasy curiosity he gets around the lake when the surface stills too much. It means something is beneath.
He doesn’t touch him anymore. Not even casually. Not even during Quidditch victory dogpiles or when Remus falls asleep with a book on his chest in the common room.
There are rules now. Invisible ones. And Sirius—who’s never loved rules—obeys them.
It feels like punishment, but he doesn’t know for what.
————
The First War.
They’re twenty. They live fast and burn short. Sirius kisses strangers in dark corners of broom closets just to feel anything, and Remus doesn’t ask where he goes after meetings anymore.
Sirius catches him looking sometimes, like he wants to say something. But the moment never lands. It’s all parchment and missions and the looming weight of You-Know-Who, and anyway—
It’s not like that, is it?
Sirius doesn’t want him. He’s never said it, never meant it, never imagined curling around Remus in bed after a mission and whispering, You scare me because I think you see me too clearly.
He never says it.
So Remus never does either.
———
Then James and Lily die.
———
Then Sirius is gone.
———
Then years pass, and nothing matters.
———
Twelve years later.
Sirius stares across the fire in the Gryffindor common room, hollow-eyed and thin and wrecked from Azkaban. His voice is rust.
“You said something to me once,” he says.
Remus, newly returned, coat still damp from the rain, barely looks up from his mug. “I said a lot of things.”
“No. I remember this one.”
Remus’s hands tense around the clay. “Don’t.”
But Sirius pushes forward.
“‘You made me want things I can’t have.’ That’s what you said. Sixth year. After a transformation.”
Remus says nothing.
“I thought it meant… fuck, I don’t know. Freedom. A body that didn’t hurt. I didn’t know you meant me.”
Remus looks up then, and his face is all bone and ruin. His voice cracks:
“Of course you didn’t. You never saw me like that. You never let yourself.”
And Sirius—Sirius, who’s lived off regret like it was rations—feels the full weight of it.
He did see. He just didn’t want to see.
Because if he saw it, he’d have to feel it, and if he felt it, it might destroy them both.
It still did.
———
Now.
They sit in silence.
The fire spits.
And Sirius finally says, “I wanted you too. I just… didn’t know what I was allowed to want.”
Remus smiles then, not with joy, but with the sadness of a ghost who’s been waiting for someone to name the place they died.
“You waited too long.”
Sirius nods.
And in the next room, the clock ticks forward, like it always does.
———
And then the weeks drag. Tentative. Angry. Regret so thick in the air, it could be mistaken for humidity. The two of them cloistered in Grimmauld Place. Festering.
———
Grimmauld Place is still more mausoleum than house. Every stair creaks like protest. Every wall peels with memory.
Remus finds Sirius in the drawing room, shirt half-buttoned, a glass in his hand and another already empty beside him.
“Didn’t know you were the drinking type,” Remus says.
“I wasn’t. Until I needed to be.” Sirius shrugs. “A lot of things I wasn’t, Moony.”
His voice still wrecks Remus. The rasp of it, the tremor. The shape of his mouth after all that time behind bars.
“You need anything?” Remus asks softly.
Sirius smiles—too wide, too late. “I need a decade back.”
Remus flinches.
Neither of them says I need you.
———
The bedrooms are adjacent.
The walls are thin.
Some nights, Sirius talks in his sleep—low and hoarse. Sometimes Remus hears his name, strangled and ruined.
Once, “Don’t leave, Moony.”
And once, clearer: “I should’ve kissed you in Hogsmeade.”
Remus presses his hand to the wall like it’s a wound he can’t stop from opening.
He bites his lip until it bleeds.
He doesn’t sleep at all that night.
———
It happens in the hallway. Remus rounds the corner too fast, and Sirius crashes into him. Chest to chest. Their noses nearly bump.
They freeze.
Sirius’s breath catches. Remus’s hand lands instinctively on his waist to steady them. They don’t move apart.
Their eyes meet.
There is too much between them—rage and memory and longing and shame. It simmers like a curse beneath the skin.
Sirius’s voice is rough, close: “I never knew what to do with how I felt about you.”
Remus’s grip tightens. “You could’ve told me. Before it turned into rot.”
Sirius leans in, just enough for Remus to feel it—his hunger, his ruin. “I thought I’d poison you.”
Remus whispers, “You did.”
But neither of them pulls away.
———
It’s raining. Of course it’s raining.
They’re fighting. Over something small. A stack of spellwork that Sirius forgot to sort. A remark too sharp. A look that lingered too long.
“I’m not James,” Remus snaps, voice like breaking glass. “Stop looking at me like I’m him.”
“I know you’re not,” Sirius bites back. “James never looked at me like he wanted to fucking consume me.”
The silence that follows could swallow a planet.
Sirius steps forward.
Remus doesn’t move.
“You always wanted me,” Sirius says, voice low. “Didn’t you?”
Remus exhales like he’s bleeding. “You made it so hard not to.”
And then Sirius grabs him—not roughly, but desperately. Like someone catching a lifeline they don’t think they deserve. Their mouths crash together in a kiss that tastes like blood and ruin, teeth clicking, breath tangled.
It’s not sweet. It’s years late.
Remus fists his hands in Sirius’s shirt, presses him to the wall like he’s anchoring a ghost. “You don’t get to walk away again,” he hisses.
Sirius gasps, “Wasn’t planning to.”
Their foreheads knock together.
“I hate you,” Remus whispers.
“I know,” Sirius answers. “Do it anyway.”
And so Remus kisses him again.
Harder.
———
They’re on the floor, backs against the cold wall of the library. Clothes half-undone, breath still ragged.
Remus’s lips are red. Sirius’s collarbone is blooming with bruises.
No one speaks.
Finally, Sirius says, “You think this will fix it?”
Remus shakes his head. “No. But maybe it’s not about fixing.”
Sirius’s voice is soft now, so unlike him. “Then what?”
Remus looks at him. Really looks. His broken body. His hollow eyes. His hunger that matches Remus’s own.
“It’s about naming it. What we were. What we are. What we could’ve been.”
Sirius lets out a laugh that almost breaks. “You still want me? Like this?”
Remus cups his face. “Especially like this.”
