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After Order meetings, Remus would take Dumbledore aside and plead for a mission. Afterwards, curled around Sirius, he would mournfully explain why he was the only one who could go to Panama, or Vietnam, or Diagon Alley, and that Dumbledore had insisted, despite his protests.
A few days later, he would leave for an hour, or a week, or a month, and come back ready to deal with Sirius's depression and boredom with rough, angry sex.
When Sirius fell through the veil, Remus's third thought (after "Oh, God, Sirius," and "Oh, God, Harry") was "I'll never be able to come home to him again."
It’s a few weeks later, after he’s convinced most of his friends that he’s alright to be left alone – and strangely, Molly is the hardest to run off – when he’s lying alone in the bed at Grimmauld Place, that he finally allows himself to finish the thought.
But I'll never need to escape, either.
~*~
It’s bad enough that Sirius is haunting him, but the fact that Remus is reasonably sure that the ghost is in his head and borne of his own guilt and grief only makes it worse. None of the others who have been watching him so carefully lately seem to have seen this gray and bitter Sirius, and Remus knows full well that were Sirius to orchestrate a haunting, it would be something on a much grander scale than gliding about in 12 Grimmauld Place, glowering malevolently at Remus and showing himself to no one else.
“You lied to me.”
Remus sighs, folds his arms behind his head and stares up at the darkness above the bed that he used to share with Sirius and still can’t think of as anything but ‘theirs.’ “When did I lie, Sirius?” he murmurs. He knows better, and yet he can’t stop this conversation. Even telling himself that he’s talking to himself does no good, because Sirius’s voice keeps coming to him from the darkened corners of the room.
“When you breathed,” Sirius says, his voice low, clogged with something that Remus would just as soon not think about. “Every time, Remus.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“I’m not. ‘Dumbledore needs me, Sirius. I have to go, Sirius. It’s for the Order, Sirius.’ It was all shit, Remus, and I know that now.”
“Couple of weeks worth of death has given you omnipotence, then?” Remus asks, and there’s a low growl from the opposite corner as last time.
“Maybe I’m not omnipotent so much as you’re see-through,” Sirius muses, and Remus closes his eyes.
“I wasn’t so see-through when you were alive, apparently. If I was lying to you every time that I breathed, and you didn’t catch it.”
“Just admit it, Remus. Maybe I’ll go away then, leave you in peace.”
In peace. Alone. Just the thought is enough to cramp Remus’s belly, to make the pit of his stomach ache with it. “I don’t want that. I don’t want you to leave me alone.”
“You spent enough time trying to get away from me when I was alive,” Sirius says.
“No,” Remus says immediately. “No, Sirius, it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then?” Sirius hisses. “Remus? What was it like, if it wasn’t that you didn’t want to be near me?”
Remus opens his mouth to deny it again, and then that’s not what’s coming out. Tired, he’s just too tired to keep it up anymore, too tired to keep arguing with this ghost or his own conscience or guilt, whatever the bloody hell the thing in the room with him is. “Sometimes,” he says instead, “sometimes, you were too much. You were so damn angry, Sirius, and it—“
“Like I didn’t have reason to be—“
“I didn’t say it was without reason!” Remus finally turns, looks in the direction of the corner that the voice last came from. “You had reason. I know it now, I knew it then, and that didn’t change the fact that I got tired, Sirius. I got so damn tired. No sooner had I adjusted to not having you then you were back, but we were both so different. Nothing fit anymore, and I just… I had to escape, now and then. Just… just for a bit, just to clear my head. And when I got back, you were more yourself.”
“More myself?” Sirius asks, his voice full of strange laughter that makes the hair on the back of Remus’s neck stand up. “Bored to fucking tears and pissed as hell, and that was more myself?”
“More than the shade I was living with at first,” Remus returns, and it feels like falling, saying it now that it’s too damn late. “It was like there was nothing left of you in there, nothing that I recognized unless you were angry with me, and the only way I could get even that was to leave you alone. So after Order meetings, yes, I’d do it. I’d go to Dumbledore and ask him for missions, ask him to send me to Panama or Vietnam or Diagon Alley or any-fucking-where but here because it was the only thing that got a bloody reaction from you. You got mad, you showed me you gave a damn if I was here or there or dead or alive, and I could get a few days away from you and come back ready to deal with you.”
“To deal with me?” Sirius’s voice is slow and thick, wrong on a level that Remus knows he isn’t ready to deal with yet. “To baby-sit your basket case of a lover, is that right, Remus?”
“No, it isn’t right,” Remus snaps. “It was all about pain with you then, Sirius. Everything hurt with you, because that was all you felt. Sex was pain because it was all you remembered, talking was pain because neither one of us remembered what normal was like, and I had to get away. I had to escape, even if it was only for a day or two.”
“You think it’ll be easier now that I’m dead?” Sirius asks. “That was your first thought when I fell, wasn’t it? How much easier you’d have it now?”
The pain of it is like a knife through Remus’s gut, still fresh and raw and bleeding, and he drills the heels of his hands against his eye sockets, hiding there because there’s nowhere else left to him. “No, Sirius,” he says, and now it’s his voice that’s thick and choked as he tries to speak around the tears in his throat. “No, the first thought was, ‘Oh, god, Sirius.’ The second was ‘Oh, god, Harry,’ and the third was, ‘I’ll never be able to come home to him again.’ Don’t you get it? It wasn’t the leaving you that I wanted, it was the coming home to you.” And he can’t explain this, can’t lay himself bare to the thing in the room with him because now he’s more sure than ever that it isn’t Sirius. If he could find the words, he would explain that coming home gave him his Sirius back, and even if it was just for the moment or two, he was so overjoyed to not be alone that he let himself go, dropped the years of Azkaban and madness away and just held Remus close.
Something in the room seems to ease then, some pressure fading back just enough that Remus can slowly lower his hands. Whatever it is – ghosts or grief or conscience – it’s faded now, and Remus is alone again. He’s sure that alone is going to drown him for the rest of his life, but he’s grateful to it now as he slowly swings his legs back into the bed that he’s alone in again because it lets the rest of that third thought slide through his mind, and the fact that it makes him feel even worse somehow makes him feel better because it’s no more than what he deserves.
He’ll never be able to come home to Sirius again, true, but he’ll never need to escape, either.
-End