Amateur Cartography

The old brass alarm clock on Remus’s nightstand reads two-thirty when he opens his eyes in the dark of drought-scorched July, curled beneath a cotton-blue sheet on the last night in London. He found it at a sideways antique shop in Kentish Town the summer he moved in with Sirius—three years ago, by now—where “antique” was code for “cheap and potentially lethal secondhand magical paraphernalia” and brought it back to the flat, along with half a dozen books on runes and a heavy copper mirror they hung above the umbrella stand, green like ghosts and pondwater; the clock keeps its own time more often than not, completely lacking anything like internal consistency or a discernible rhythm and seeming to correspond only to the out-of-tune chords of Remus’s heart, a certain lengthening of shadows in the room. No amount of spellwork or coaxing will ever talk it into behaving, but it still rings on time in the mornings when he needs it, and Remus thinks it’s strangely more accurate this way: it hovers neatly at the eleven when he drinks his evening tea and stops at seven-thirty when Sirius comes home from work or an Order job, the blue hour, like breath held behind his teeth—a bright invasion of his thoughts and his skin and his beating heart.

He still lies awake waiting for it even now, on nights when Sirius is gone, and Sirius is always gone: he dreams of the bird-wing flutter of the second hand accelerating in an arpeggio the moment the key turns in the lock, for the red tumble of his heart in his chest as the worry finally flushes out of him, and then the long, measured wait for Sirius: the sound of the bedroom door creaking open, the soft give of the mattress as the arms slip around his waist and their fingers slide together in a kiss, his voice sinking into the distant dark places only Sirius knows how to reach. Remus craves it like famine, tries to make time move to the tune of his skittish pulse, beating love-me-love-me-love-me loud enough to drown out everything else but the hush of wanting, but it doesn’t happen often anymore; he has to forage for the few scraps of Sirius he can find in the flat: dirty teacups and stray socks and misplaced books, a dwindling supply of firewhisky, one of his own desk drawers pillaged and the evidence only halfheartedly erased, as if guilt caught him by the wrist in the end; they argued over it for a whole afternoon, brittly. He lives like this, a hungry thief in their flat, trying to read the breadcrumbs left for him at the table while his ribs and toes and the elastic tendons of his neck miss Sirius like a broken piece of the articulated anatomy they’ve grown between them.

So when he hears the rapid clicking of the hands spinning like a broken top all the way to the seven and the six in the teetering dark of the bedroom, his heart leaps in a way it hasn’t done for months: not since April, he thinks, with the music of rainwater on the windows and the sweet green smell of cut grass crisp in the air, when he last felt Sirius’s lips moving behind his ear in a sigil of belonging.

A door closing, a shuffling of clothes, a nervous groan of floorboards in the doorway; Remus holds still as an effigy under the sheet, condensing silently into himself, waiting, waiting.

“Remus,” Sirius whispers, and lies down beside him. He smells like Ivory soap and cigarette smoke and an undercurrent of something else, metal-sour, like old blood. The clock has stopped; Remus wants to turn over and shove him down, take his face between both hands and kiss him where his words well up until he understands, wants to laugh or sob or scream at him even after his voice gives out and he has to breathe it into Sirius’s lungs. “Remus,” he says again, leaning forward into the charcoal shadows cast by Remus’s neck and shoulderblades.

Sirius presses his lips to the skin just behind his ear, and Remus doesn’t breathe, doesn’t turn over, feeling strung-out like a string of lights waiting to burst. He slides his fingers around Remus’s left wrist where it lies on the bed, too cold, circling his blue pulse in a way that shocks as much as it soothes. Then the midsummer heat extends its claws, and Sirius turns his arm around.

It seems to take him hours to jerk his arm away and sit up, wild and unbelieving, ten years of shared blood and birthdays and love and growing between the cracks all burnt out at the brush of Sirius’s fingers. When he stands up he finds that he’s dizzy with it, his stomach stone-hard and churning, his head aching like history: all the things they’ve been, everything he’s ever had and ever loved, and none of it was really his, was it. He kept them all on borrowed time and now it’s over, because he was never really the same as them after all, never as good or as whole as them, half-blood, half-beast, in-between thing always yearning twice as hard for half as much, so it’s only natural that the entire arrangement was a ticking time bomb just waiting to blow up in his face: that the horrible, monstrous voice he’s learned not to listen to over the years was right all along, and he was never good enough, and he shouldn’t have bothered pretending.

His hands shake when he drags out his trunk from the spare bedroom, though he tells himself it’s partly with relief that the inevitable has finally kicked him in the teeth the way it was always going to. Better now than ten more years gone; be thankful for small mercies, he thinks as he pulls on his trousers, but they are always so small.

“We got a—one of them showed up at James’s and Lily’s,” Sirius is saying. He’s sitting up now, one hand braced on the edge of the bed, the other hanging uselessly between his knees; he doesn’t look at Remus. “And how would they have known—”

“You think it’s me,” says Remus, and feels a deep sickness open up inside him when Sirius doesn’t answer. “You think I’m a fucking spy.”

Sirius doesn’t move for him. Remus wishes, with a nauseous lurch of his heart, that he could put a match to the whole thing: the flat, the unquiet night, Sirius’s silence that is answer enough—erase the place in his mind where the fear and the doubt and the pain live inside him, and be done with it. “What am I supposed to think?”

“Oh, I don’t know, that I told them, Sirius, is that what you want to hear? Voldemort asked me himself and I pulled back my discount Death Eater cloak and gave him directions to James and Lily. You were right, and, and why wouldn’t you be, a dark creature can only rein in his instinct for so long and a cult of Purebloods who’d love to skip rope with my intestines were finally just too irresistible for me,” he bites out, breathless with rage and loss and hurt, shoving everything he can fit into his trunk. The clock, sorrow-quiet, fits against his jumpers and his balled-up winter socks when he waves his wand and shrinks them. It’s a broken thing; it belongs with him. “Feel better now?”

“Shut you fucking mouth,” Sirius snaps, standing up but not moving from the side of the bed. Remus watches him for a moment, the face he’s hardly seen for weeks—the jagged cut of his hair, the sharp-set features like the edge of knife, the sad cast of his eyes, too bright in the light of the bedside lamp. They make Remus feel like he’s looking at the shards of a broken mirror, and something in him unravels coldly. “I don’t know why I even say anything, all you do is lie when you’ll fucking talk to me at all—”

“Because you’re here so often to talk to, aren’t you. Maybe James can have his couch back now that you can sleep without worrying I’m going to kill you in bed—except that’s where you’d really rather be, isn’t it, or whatever girl you’ve been with when you can’t be bothered to come back for whole days at a time.”

“I can’t believe—you’re pathetic. Of course that’s what you’d focus on,” Sirius hisses, thrumming with anger, looking at Remus like he hates him. “Just get out, if you’re going. Leave. Run away, you fucking coward.”

“You’ve already done enough of that for both of us,” says Remus, and tugs his trunk out the bedroom door, his fingers half-numb. “Stop. Just stop it.”

“And you think this is the answer, because, because what? You want to play martyr again?” says Sirius, seeming to teeter on something before he springs, a sudden flash of teeth in the dark. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t be doing this. You wouldn’t.”

“No,” says Remus, with the small, hurt smile he knows Sirius hates, “I’m pretty sure I would be. You’ll be better off.”

With near clarity, he packs his books and the blanket folded over the back of the couch, the dark summer-green tea set Sirius gave him last Christmas. A single photograph in an oak frame on the mantel, a black-and-white print of the two of them, together, sitting on a dock with their feet deep in the saltwater. Brighton, 1979 is written on the back, no names; he wonders what he might have done then, if he’d known the things he knows now, what was going to happen to them, every consequence and every doubt. They’d both be doomed, he supposes, as ruined as God—he’d never dare to love Sirius. He couldn’t.

Which is a lie, of course, but the photo is still his. He slips it in next to his tuneless brass clock and puts on his shoes, fumbling for his key in the pocket of his folded cloak; he leaves it on the coffee table just as Sirius comes into the sitting room from where Remus knows he’s been pacing in their bedroom, his hair tangled where he’s torn his fingers through it in the dark.

“Remus,” he says, his voice sounding hoarse and weak to Remus’s ears. Later, he will put it all down to fear and pain and nervousness, but he swears—for a shrill glass shard of a moment—that he sees Sirius as much older than he is, his cheeks sunken and waxy, his skin moon-sickly, reedy and ravaged except for his eyes—too young and too bright and too daring for his starved face. Then he blinks and it’s gone, his skin prickling like hoarfrost all down his spine.

“Remus,” Sirius tries again, the words strangling out of his mouth, “you don’t even understand—”

He wants to scream and throw things at the wall. He wants to push Sirius down to the scratched floorboards, tell him that he’s the one who doesn’t understand, who could never understand how much older than them all Remus has always had to be or why he’s always had to fight his battles differently, what the hell is wrong with him? He wants to cry, wants to tell him he’s the best thing in the world, the best thing Remus has ever had, he wants Sirius to hold him until morning, wants to fuck him on the floor, tell him he’s loved him for years and years and years, take the photo frame out of his trunk and feel the glass splinter in his hands. Remus doesn’t want to leave.

“Don’t understand what, Sirius? That you’re a liar? That you’d rather be up James’s arse right now? That you’re acting like your fucking family?” Which isn’t true, and he hadn’t meant to say it; he supposes he’ll regret it all later when the fury starts to mingle with guilt and shame and loss and he recalls it with an agony beyond solace or solution, but for now, as he takes in the nearness of Sirius’s face—the shadowed strength in his eyes and cheekbones, the hurt downturn of his lips, barely breathing—Remus is surprised to find that he doesn’t care. “This isn’t, it’s not fair to you, clearly.”

Sirius flinches and takes a jagged step towards him, but Remus doesn’t move; he can’t bear it, suddenly, the sad cast of Sirius’s face or all the spaces in the flat that they’d learned to occupy together, the things that were never really his to have. He takes his trunk and steps back from the impossible chasm between them, and shuts the door.

Part of him, the same part that worries over the floofy state of his hair in the humidity and apologizes for bumping into inanimate objects, frets for a brief minute on the curb over what this looks like: a three a.m. man with a full trunk and a shirt caught in the teeth of his hastily-zipped trousers, his eyes puffy and bruise-dark, sticking out his wand; it looks like exactly what it is, but fortunately the Knight Bus, great equalizer, doesn’t stutter even once when he takes his seat at the end of a narrow single bed next to a girl with haunted—hunted—eyes, and an old man who groans in broken fragments the whole time. “Rusted locks and nasty shocks,” he mutters, “twelve whole years spent out on jagged rocks.” Remus rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees spots and wishes he would stop.

The night passes in fits and starts outside the smudged windows, all the liquid lamplight spilling onto the trunks and mahogany paneling and blinding the brightest stars in a loud, gauzy daze; Remus watches it streak by in blurry lines across the tired span of his vision, the boundless glory of unsleeping London writhing red-yellow-white when he leans against the bedframe and closes his eyes. He remembers the last time he took this ride: the summer he was seventeen, mid-August beneath a singed moon, climbing down the treacherous wooden trellis overgrown with bindweed outside his bedroom window to Sirius waiting below, his heart coming untethered when Sirius reached for him out of his mother’s rosebed—and then the ride home and the climb back up just before dawn, thrillingly sore and wearing Sirius’s thin jacket against the damp chill, lying awake and listening to the rainclouds tear open and pour out, green-blue like a happy memory, and he felt then for the first and maybe last time in his life that mythical sense of immortality so prevalent in the electric blood of the young and whole, as if the world only needed one small touch to be jolted off its axis.

Somehow he manages to sleep fitfully for a few minutes along the way, his head propped against the wall and his feet on the carpet, his dreams stuttering colorlessly with each jostle of the bus; once, on waking again, he feels absurdly like he should throw something overboard, something important, recite a poem to himself at the edges of morning with verses full of smooth, cold stones. In Shropshire, at the thick tangle of a forest, he gathers up his trunk and his tired hands and stands in the inkstain of his own shadow, feeling heavy in his limbs as if he’s run for hours and hours in the dark, his heart sluggish, winter-slow in the hush of early July.

It’s not until he’s about to make his way to the front of the bus that the old man sits upright in his bed, lightning-quick, a cloaked skeleton watching him with a terrible hunger in his murky eyes. “Go home, boy,” he says. His voice is like the flicker of a candle, and Remus has to strain to hear. “Before he stows away. He’s been watching, you see—so go home. Or it’ll be the end for you, too.”

Remus tightens his hand on the handle of his trunk and looks back at him. He is twenty-one; his voice is a thousand years old. “I don’t understand,” he says politely, if guardedly.

“Go home, I said.”

“I don’t have a home,” says Remus, for himself as much as anyone.

“You’re not heartless, are you? No? See, if it’s still working,” says the man, very quickly, almost desperately, “then you’re not homeless. You’ll see. You’ll find it, in the end.”

“I’m sorry?” Something about it saws on his nerves—the clammy words, the glowering darkness.

But the old man just says, “You’ll see,” and closes his eyes. Remus doesn’t see them open again when he turns away.

From the bus, it’s a fifteen-minute walk through the winding sinews of the lane leading up to his parents’ old cottage, which has breathed emptily since February when his mother died and Remus started selling what she left, rationing out her earrings and quilts and secondhand crockery like a sandglass until everything is gone and it all becomes one less thing in his life. He’s already forgotten the particular corkscrew lilt of her voice while she tried to talk to the gnomes that took up residence in the garden every summer; soon, he thinks, he will forget Sirius’s too, and James’s and Lily’s and Peter’s, Harry’s nonsense babble. He’ll forget the bright burst of James’s smile, the second teacup pulled from the cupboard reflexively, the sun-dappled moles on Sirius’s back. All these thousand individual loves, rusting like relics underneath the knife of memory.

A year’s worth of untended roses catch at his trousers on the way inside, where he drops his trunk on the floor and collapses against the door, crying. He chokes on his sobs with his fists clenched between his knees and feels the house tense around him, widening its dusty mouth to accommodate him again; distantly, he hears the ticking of his clock resuming finally from somewhere deep in his trunk, but when he digs it out, gulping down shaky, hopeful air, it’s fixed over the nine: the rest of his life.

He wipes his hands on his thighs and goes into the kitchen to make tea, which he takes upstairs in the dark and drinks with the shadows at the dormer window, where he can see his own brown eyes and the flat-edged moon emptying out into the glittering stream of Shropshire stars, a scar hung wide across its face that Remus likes to think matches the one it gave him at sixteen, right over the nose. Three-quarter moon, liar’s moon. Traitor’s moon.

This is the sort of man he’s become, he thinks: one who keeps time with a broken clock and the cyclical sharpening of the moon when all else has stopped, looking to the stars burnt onto the warp and weft of the sky for the monstrous, universal truth of tomorrow, and tomorrow.

—

Three days later, Remus folds himself into the armchair on the inquiring side of Dumbledore’s desk and watches the headmaster from his seat, who looks tired but warm—slightly tanned, even, with the memory of recent sunburn darkening his forehead. Phineas Nigellus paces disapprovingly in his portrait, trying to catch Remus’s eye; a month ago he’d have found it amusing, three or four months ago he’d have laughed over it with Sirius at home. Dumbledore clears his throat and smiles, offering Remus tea he refuses and folding his hands over his beard while Fawkes cocks his head back and forth, back and forth, pendulum-steady, waiting for someone to speak.

“I, ah, understand, Mr. Lupin,” says Dumbledore, his cornflower eyes glimmering kindly, knowingly, “that you’ve had something of a relocation.”

Remus nods. What else can he do? “Yes. I’m sorry for not telling you myself, I—was a little preoccupied, sir.”

“Perfectly understandable,” says Dumbledore, twining his fingers together and smiling gently, as if former students arrive in his office every morning and make vague allusions to explosive late-night breakups. In light of everything else festering at the frozen heart of the world, he supposes it’s a distant concern, maybe even a little funny if you hold it up sideways and look at it in the right light. “Sometimes, I find that a change of scenery does wonders for head congestion. Perhaps—perhaps Mr. Black will even join you, after some time.”

It’s so absurd that Remus almost laughs, but he chokes it down into the same place that boils too much water for tea and keeps listening for breathing on the other side of the bed he knows isn’t there. He considers, again,again, asking Dumbledore why he can’t tell his only friends where he goes when the moon spills its acid into his bones, which would be useless because he doubts Sirius would believe him at this point, and he thinks of begging for scraps of news from the Potters, needling at the headmaster until he knows Sirius is alive and fine and hasn’t been hit with any Unforgivables or gotten any extremities blown off or maybe just that he had breakfast this morning before he left for work; it all seems so unfair, that everyone he loves has to be involved and has to spend so much time suspended as if in horrible stasis waiting for awful things to happen, that their mouths and lungs and brilliant red hearts could just stop, scratched out like candlelight—that he was given all these things, and had them taken away.

He stares down at his hands, the scraped knuckles, the patched seam of his trousers on the left knee, the dog’s-tooth scar on his ring finger. Reels, a bit, at the crumbling of the years. “And I believe,” says Dumbledore, looking at Remus over the rim of his glasses, “this presents a unique situation we may find to our advantage yet.”

Brilliant Dumbledore, he thinks, knowing just how to turn tragedy into opportunity. “What do you need me to do, sir?” asks Remus, looking into the needle-sharp light of midmorning, waiting for the next lurch forward.

Monsters, it turns out, are what Dumbledore has in mind: werewolves mostly, same as it’s been for nearly a year, but now too giants and vampires and hags crouching in the distant crags and cracks of England where the bloodless whispers of war go unheeded by those living unfettered at the knife-edge of constant battles already long lost, strange covens of pale, mud-splattered people huddling under the cowl of their curse with their own dialect, their own dark comforts, their own brutal justice, weighed on the scales of fearful necessity and savage hunger. The cottage in the woods will lend him greater credence than a flat in Camden and a part-time desk job at a Muggle library and, though Dumbledore doesn’t say so, a handsome, reluctant Auror-to-be boyfriend with a last name louder than his motorbike; so Remus hoards what little he has and settles into the hillside, fighting his way through the roses and the mint that’s conquered the old garden and taking tea outside with The Secret Mating Patterns of Boggarts and Misery for Pastime and Profit at sundown, dwindling into the house with the ancient, dusty draught blowing through the kitchen every night and speaking its comfort against his lips and his ears, gently, gently.

A week later, when low-strung Scorpius tears through the murmur of the trees at dusk, he pulls on his boots to head out into the expectant evening air with all three hands of the clock on his bedside stopped dead at the two; he leaves the key buried in the dirt of the single potted geranium on his kitchen doorstep where Dorcas Meadowes and Caradoc Dearborn have been told to expect it, and feels the night rise up in a bitter fog at his ankles, singing his heart to stillness as he crosses the railroad tracks into the cranesbill-thatched clearing. You’ve done this before, he tells himself. You’ve done this before.

When he finds them, they’re sitting in a nonsense pattern beneath the heat-wilted branches of the oaks, a tiny fire crackling with broken brush and last year’s autumn leaves. Two children—not older than five or maybe six—chase after fireflies in the long grass, their hair matted and their clothes stained with blood and grass, dirty knees, crooked teeth; he can smell something thick and iron-ochre, like an animal that’s just been killed and eaten raw, and his stomach churns with it until he opens his mouth to breathe instead, which is when they spot him: two men and a woman with a slight limp and skin that looks as if it’s been sewn back together badly in several places. She reaches him first, fishing in her pocket for what he knows is probably a knife. She wouldn’t have a wand.

“Leave,” she orders in a voice like a dam breaking over a river. Remus meets her eyes, which are a mossy August-green, and lifts his shirt up across his belly like baring his throat, showing the scarred-over place where his body still remembers the thunder-crush of a livid mouth and his own blood dripping between impossibly white teeth, the dirge of poison that shakes him still. He shudders as they look and feels like he might as well strip and walk around naked in the night, flay his skin from his bones: here is his inhuman secret, his greatest shame, apotheosis of his agony. They don’t even know his name.

She touches it once, the silvery spot marking what Remus thinks is an incisor and what Sirius once named Earl Moonchester of Shropshire and spoke to in sonnets. It makes him shudder, the contrast of her jagged fingernails and Sirius’s warm palms, his beautiful, reverent mouth as he knelt in front of him for the first time, kissing the irregular crenellation of each tooth, plucking laughter out of his belly; Remus remembers wanting to cry, wanting to curl into his body and lie in bed with him forever, seventeen years old and shattered by the totality of his love.

The woman backs away from him warily, unblinking, and Remus’s throat loosens again, driving Sirius from his mind. “I’ll listen to you,” she tells him, “but you’re not getting any promises out of me. Don’t speak to my children,” she adds, making a shooing gesture at the two who have stopped to watch him with the blithe curiosity of young things, foals just learning to walk on new legs. One of them grins and opens a chubby fist, showing him a worm; Remus gives her a wan smile, and follows her mother.

“Talk,” she says, so Remus does: he tells her of London, of his fabricated dissatisfaction with the city and its people, Ministry regulations like a hangman’s noose, so here he is, come to run beneath the frenzied woodland sky and carve his way through fencerows and fields full of chickens and sheep in monthly ritual. Only some of it is a lie. Things are worse for people like him, in ways, than they’ve ever been before, and it’s true that he can’t keep a job or dim the suspicion he sees in strangers’ eyes when their gazes linger on his newest wounds, and that someone dressed in smothering black robes—someone whose name rhymes with Schmeverus Schmape, his mind supplies, ghosts of Sirius not yet put to rest—did in fact call him a “degenerate animal” quite loudly (for someone speaking through his nose, that is) in Knockturn Alley just last week. Far from the worst he’s been stung with between his eyes, but it helps his story along swimmingly.

By the time he manages to twist the stilted conversation around to serpentine faces and stormclouds over London, the fire has begun to smolder and Remus can only just make out the shadowplay on the woman’s face when he asks if they’ve heard anything in their wandering, so far away from it all. She shows her teeth to the half-moon and looks at him with undisguised pity softening the lines of her stone-shrewd eyes.

“Who’s let you out this far on your leash?” she sneers, folding her arms across her thin chest. Remus holds his breath. “Sent you to roll around in the filth where no one else can or will, hmm? I know better. They won’t help us, and I’m not stupid enough to think that little wizard cult wants anything more than a pack of slavering beasts to slaughter once they’ve stopped being useful, because all either of you want from us is bloody cannon fodder. I’m not even a witch—Mudblood, that’s right, they’d rather kill me on sight.”

“Muggle,” says Remus, on reflex. “Where did you see them?”

“South of here, about twenty miles. There’s a much larger pack coming through in the next week or so I think they wanted to contact. Not us. We’ve no magic between us except for the change.” She pauses, the braver of them, he feels, and speaks quietly so not to draw the eye of the moon. “I was fourteen,” she says. “Cut through the woods on my way home late, one night. My mother took me to London, once, begged someone to help, and the best they would offer was a cage and some dittany. The doctor, or healer, or whatever you call them, she flinched away from me. Said I might as well see a veterinarian.” Between the trees, he can hear the old man moving slowly with night-worn, arthritic bones, calling the children to bed. “I thought they would help me. All I wanted was my life to live.”

He watches her against the nighttime sway of the trees, her uncombed hair, worrying at her bottom lip where the starlight glints off her teeth, making her look like she could have been young, once, with birthday cakes and history exams and outgrown shoes, as if she and Remus weren’t both born already ancient and ready for suffering. She looks like anyone else on a clear night in July, which is probably what galls people: they look just as human as you do. Best to keep them out of sight before you have to look them in the face, and forget.

“I was almost five,” says Remus, talking to the oak leaves. “My dad could hardly look at me for months, he, well, he blamed himself. My mum used to stay with me, the nights right after, and I tried so hard to be quiet, and good. I think—I think she knew, as much as anyone else can, at least, that it wasn’t a separate thing from the rest of me. That it is me.”

She nods quietly and accepts it, memories made loam-soft with time and bartered like gold, blood feeding blood as a strange stand-in for trust, for shared pain. He doesn’t share Sirius, the way he used to hold Remus’s limbs together with his own arms when he shook afterwards or smoothed his hands down his back in the staggering daytime light during those hours before the change, his voice and his breath warm chords pressing into his neck while Remus leaned his head back against Sirius’s shoulder, slipping on waves of nausea, his mouth pressed to the blood jangling in Remus’s throat: how he knew better than anyone ever has, or ever will.

“You’ll find them in about three days, if I had to guess,” she says, “and you’d best be mindful of them. They don’t play nice, not for anyone.”

“Take care,” he says, wishing for the first time on one of these pre-dawn endeavors that he had something to offer other than shared misery or uneasy caution passed down from Dumbledore. “Stay clear of the Severn, if you’re heading north. If you can’t see Arcturus in the sky, lie low for the night.”

“‘If you can’t see Arcturus,’ what are you, a fucking centaur?” And she laughs—actually laughs, a sound like January, wintery storm glasses and creaking bare branches. “Go on, then.”

He takes the long way through the trees to the tracks and back to the start of the lane to the hill with his wand lit up, painting him translucent as a ghost on the gravel, hungry and tired and wanting to wrap himself in his quilt and spend the night out in the garden beneath his needlepoint stars with a cheese toasty and a cup of tea, lulled in the palm of the wise, ancient land. But the house is bright with lamplight, where he knows Dorcas and Caradoc are waiting beneath the prickly fluorescent ceiling fan in the kitchen, ready to weave him a plan. Over the house, in the pearly summer-gleam of the Milky Way veiled across the perfect dark, Canis Major—Sirius—is still hidden, its face turned away from him in the clamor of July-sticky heat; he used to follow it on cold London nights, after work or Order jobs or both of them coming home from a smattering of pubs and cinemas and sandwich shops, looking up to find what he loved best: a star flickering like laughter above their flat, visible even in the flush of frozen lamplights, calling him home.

Something else they have in common, he supposes: that yearning for the base vocabulary of home, the proper nouns they built together in the walls and windows of their flat and found in the solid strength of each other. They fit together like two pieces of the same broken thing, all the good and all the bad, all the things they could never leave behind; it’s what Sirius has always understood about him better than anyone else, the way James and Peter can’t, the way only they knew: you’ll never be anything but yourself. You can go anywhere in the world, do what you want, reinvent yourself at will, but you’ll never get away from who and where you’ve been, even those parts you’d rather forget. You can’t outrun yourself.

The woman sleeping miserably in the clearing feels it like Remus does, his joints and sinews snapped at moonrise, homeless in his own bones; Sirius Black, no one’s son, knows it just as well, picking his way through the minefield of war and loss and regret and fear somewhere in faraway London.

Remus hesitates at the kitchen door, wanting suddenly to be anywhere but here. Thinking back on what he said to Sirius the night he left, he feels like an incomparable arsehole; no one wants to come home to all these reminders of everything they have left to lose and how many miles and miles they still have to fight through before they can all start breathing again. He wants Sirius here, waiting for him on the sitting room couch with a cup of tea and open arms, just so he could tell him he’s sorry.

An overdeveloped sense of duty, in the end, takes his wand out of his pocket and unravels the wards cobwebbed into the crevices of the brick and mortar at his doorstep, the light of the kitchen breaking on the night like another world when he opens the door.

—

It isn’t exactly surprising to find that Caradoc Dearborn, world’s most disturbingly chiseled man, looks more at home in Remus’s house than Remus often feels himself: one arm slung loosely over the back of a rickety oak chair that’s sat in the same spot since 1965, a leg crossed over his knee at the shin, languid as the shadows slanting across the plaster walls when he rises and goes to Remus, firing through the cautionary questions that come quicker to all of them than greetings do these days. Remus feels him studying his face, lingering on the heaviness beneath his eyes and the freckles star-strung across his nose; Caradoc looks at him for an amount of time that approaches unsettling, during which Remus also notices the flecks of black in Caradoc’s eyes for the first time and thinks how close they are right now, that he can see the beautiful, miraculous machinery that moves them and how easily it could all be obliterated or overtaken, and how instead of binding them closer it’s made them bigger strangers than Remus thinks they’ve ever been before.

“Tell me something nice and secret. Make it a good one,” says Caradoc, hands on his hips, sculpted jaw clenching manfully as he waits for an answer.

“Sixth year—your seventh—I was on rounds right before Christmas and the mistletoe caught me, near the library, so you, er, sort of spun me around and kissed me. Rather thoroughly.” He swallows, blushing wine-dark with the skittish teenage off-footedness that still hasn’t quite left him at twenty-one. “That was my first kiss, actually.”

Though he doesn’t count it as such: his first kiss was Sirius’s at thirteen, which was really more of an open-mouthed, wet-tongued, joy-blurry Sirius-kiss that ended with a bruised elbow and saliva up one of his nostrils. He doubts Sirius even remembers, but his heart has never forgotten the rhythm it skipped into there, coming on a November chill behind his bed curtains with no moon in the sky and his hand pressed to his cheek, the new rush thrumming deep inside him whenever he made Sirius laugh or their weed-gangly bodies knocked together in tight corridors, mornings after moonset, the countless midnights spent with their hands cramped over the map until they fell asleep in a knot on Remus’s bed and woke up together sometime before dawn, laughing quietly, as if they really should have seen it coming. Back then, he didn’t know it for what it was or what it would be, but the warm hum of it kept him up on nights when he would glance sidelong at Sirius and find him smiling at something he said or watching him already from beneath the fringe of his hair, thinking, Look what I did.

Caradoc, clapping him brightly on the shoulder and laughing jaggedly, startles him out of it; Remus wonders how long it’s been since that same hand touched anyone else. “And a cracking good one, I’d think,” he says, grinning as he steers Remus to the sitting room with a hand at the small of his back. Because he’s a huge hairy ponce and he fancies you, you daft fucking prune, Sirius had snapped over breakfast the next morning when Remus told him and then proceeded not to look him in the eye for three days, another misstep in a new and brittle tenseness that started sometime late in fifth year and wouldn’t break until the summer before their seventh. Somehow, he doubts Caradoc Dearborn, noted human bicep, would still be interested, although the palm sliding across his waist in the doorway might suggest otherwise.

He sits on the couch across from Dorcas, whose eyes go bright for a brief moment when he begins to tell them what he knows and then go faraway again, reminding him of Sirius, of his own face in the green copper mirror hanging above the umbrella stand in London—the way all their faces have changed, the darkness catching at the edges of their jawlines, a hardening of mouths and eyes. It’s strange to look at her now, diminished by loss, something in her almost stagnant with grief; he remembers her twined around Marlene McKinnon, smiling wide, flitting about their house with her bird bones and her sunny voice always laughing with the easy certainty of a woman who never knew how much she had to lose. Her hair is longer now, and she holds herself close to one arm of the blue velvet chair, a full cup of tea between her hands long gone cold.

As soon as Remus finishes, Caradoc stands and makes to Apparate from the sitting room, glancing at the silver face of his watch in the low gleam of firelight and reaching down to clap Remus on the shoulder again. “Dumbledore’s office in the morning, then,” he says, nodding to Dorcas, who nods gently back as he brushes a palm against her shoulder. “You’re not worried? I can keep a lookout when they get here, at the very least—someone’s been feeding them information like it’s their full-time job, God knows that much is obvious. I hate for you to do this alone.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve done it before,” says Remus, fiddling with the frayed hem of his jacket sleeve right above a circlet-scar on his wrist. Sometimes, he wonders how none of them see; sometimes, he wonders if they do, and it doesn’t matter, or else they hide it away so he doesn’t have to look at the distaste twisting their faces. “If anything goes wrong, send for you and run screaming, I know.”

“There’s a good lad. You just give the word, and I’ll be there to carry you to safety,” says Caradoc, grinning with all thirty-two teeth. He’s always reminded Remus of Sirius, a little, and then not; maybe if Sirius had deltoids the size and span of a ship mast and had ever said anything like Fancy a bit of posh totty tonight, Lupin? in his entire life. “Actually just give the word anytime, I’ve been doing extra press-ups. I can get your arse up to those top shelves in a snap.”

“Just in case?”

“Constant vigilance, mate,” he says, pointing to his own chest and Apparating with a laugh.

There’s a sudden creak of the floorboards behind him and he startles, spinning around to find Dorcas with one now-steaming cup of tea clutched at her side, one held out to him on steady fingers. He hadn’t even heard her move; she clears her throat and stares like she wants something from him, wheaty-curly hair in her eyes, and Remus wonders if she knows already why he’s really out here, cloistered so far from everyone else.

“Thank you,” he says, scalding his tongue and his jangling nerves on Earl Grey, unsweetened. “Are you—how are you?”

He flinches as soon as he says it: hello, Dorcas, everyone you’ve ever loved is dead and your mouth hardly works anymore, how are you? But what else is there to say, when you know too well that the woman sitting across from you with recent scars raking over her knees and her lips curled with a brutal understanding could just as easily be you, or the ones you love the most. Dorcas, for her part, takes a drink and smiles with the right side of her mouth.

“I’ve been up in Inverness again,” she says, not quite looking at him, “with the Aurors. You wouldn’t believe how many of them, even there—just showing their faces in broad daylight, and us only meant to follow.” Her teacups sloshes onto its chipped coaster when she sets it down without drinking anything, her fingers twitching into violence, jagged, choked shapes hanging deadly still above her knees. “I’d love to know where the rat’s hiding in the walls. I wanted to kill them. I want every one of them bleeding out in the sewers.”

“Dorcas,” he starts, but she cuts him off, staring somewhere between his mouth and his eyes.

“That’s what it’s going to take. You’ve seen, the way they just—they get inside your head, they hurt you, kill you over evening tea or in the fucking alley on your way home from work. You’re not going to get anywhere feeding them Veritaserum and asking nicely, or, or bloody bargaining with them like Dumbledore does, trying to save their arses from Azkaban—they deserve to die. They’d kill us without a second thought and if we don’t do the same there’s no winning this. There’s just not.” The curtains murmur in the wind, a single frog croaking through the silence; it’s the most Remus has heard her speak at one time since March, when they found Marlene’s body in a Devonshire ditch. “These people can’t change, they won’t, and the minute you let them go and give them even a shred of trust they’ll turn right around and do it all again and you’ll be the first fool with their wand pointed right at your gut. We can’t even keep them out of our own bloody ranks.”

His mind snags on Sirius at sixteen, a Christmastime orphan walking away from every comfort and every hatred put to his name: thick black dog fur pressed against his belly like ballast after sunrise and an arm around his waist helping him hobble to the bed, hands moving across his hips and shoulders, making him tea, making him laugh. “I don’t believe that,” he says at last, looking down and tucking away his longing into the bottom of his teacup.

“Lucky for you,” she says. “Maybe you’d feel differently if it was Sirius they’d found down by the Teign. Maybe then you’d understand.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, trying not to think of all the ways Sirius could get himself killed—Death Eaters, one wrong step at the tube station, the charm on his motorbike giving out over the decrepit maw of the city, undercooked Christmas turkey, eating the wrong thing out of the bin behind The Hog’s Head—and fails utterly, the way he always has, missing him and missing him while his tea goes cold in his lap. “I just don’t, I mean—I don’t think that, of most people. I don’t think anyone is beyond change.”

“Then you’re blind,” she says, quietly. “You don’t know how these people work, how they think. Look into their heads sometime, just look at them and what they do, and then come back and tell me there’s any redemption to be found there but at the end of your wand.”

“What? I—what are you talking about?” There is a vicious knowledge in her face that makes him shiver, something that doesn’t belong in her bright autumn eyes sticking in Remus’s stomach and making it churn. “Dorcas, what did you, what have you done?”

She looks away, out the window, out to the inkspill of the Shropshire sky and the stars clattering a gold-chime in the dark, perhaps thinking of the same things Remus does on nights like these: remembering the youth they had not yet outgrown, when they could look up at the vast wilderness of summertime constellations and think of something better waiting at the end of tomorrow, still so new and raw and undimmed by the frozen world. They’re too young to be so cold, so unyielding. When he tells her this, Dorcas shakes her head and speaks softly into her cup.

“You’d do the same,” she says, “if it were Sirius. And so would he.”

The fact that Sirius would probably kill for him, would die unquestionably or once would have, isn’t a point Remus can argue, though it’s not nearly as romantic or comforting a thought as peacetime poetry would have you believe; when he thinks of Sirius hurt or dead, or the time last autumn when his squad was ambushed on training in Surrey and Remus spent almost a week unable to eat or sleep and sitting on the edge of the bathtub late at night with terror gnawing a hole in his head, he lurches, sick with worry and regret and love he’s got no one to give, remembering how he’d wanted to hurt afterwards, how he spent the April-pale moon dreaming of the iron-burn of blood spilled, split bone, conjunctions of vertebrae snapping on serrated teeth. And then the warm chord that binds him at his center pulled him back to himself, and he held Sirius all day, and forgot it.

It’s fear, he thinks, that makes greater monsters of people than anything ever could, and it terrifies him that what he sees in Dorcas is not fear, but a ruthless resignation, as if she understands something he doesn’t. He can’t bring himself to ask her what it is.

“There was a meeting in London the other night,” she says, cutting through the frightened white hum at the back of his teeth. “He asked me if I’d seen you. Sirius did.”

“You didn’t tell him—”

“Of course not. But I don’t understand why you haven’t, which I’m sure is why you’re all the way out here instead of Camden.” She takes a drink and crosses her legs, where Remus can see the bruises that spread nauseously up her shin, like she wants it to show. “You think I didn’t tell Marlene what we’ve been doing?”

“I promised Dumbledore,” he says, knowing further down that the real reason lies closer to the realm of shame: for having nothing to show for a year of work, for learning to wield lies like armor not so much to spare the ones he loves the most, but himself. “I can’t.”

“Dumbledore already asks enough of you—enough of all of us. I think you can let yourself have this one thing,” she says, and he spares a moment of envy for the audacity of a woman not indebted a thousand different ways to Albus Dumbledore, keeper of werewolf souls. Dorcas cradles her teacup, watching him with something that might be a smile. “Marlene and I always thought you had enough sense for both of you once, but she reckoned Sirius screwed it out of you within a year or so. Guess she was right.”

Remus laughs for the first time in days. “No, Marlene always said we had our heads shoved so far up each other’s arses we could see daylight between our tonsils, but I might’ve known she said better when we weren’t around.” All at once he misses her so much his heart drops and he aches for it, for all of them and the way things were. He’d considered Marlene more Sirius’s friend than his for so long that it took him the better part of two years to get used to the gale-force voice and Girls’ Club slaps on the back before he realized that she liked him, too, and he hardly had any time to find his equilibrium with her before the whole world broke and she was gone. Even now, he can see the parts of Dorcas that wouldn’t exist without her tumble into Marlene: the quirk of her jokes, milk and honey with her tea, a particular sly-slick diction clinging to her consonants when she swears. She speaks again before he can try to tell her.

“He looked miserable,” she says, her expression smudged with the night, indecipherable.

“That’s not my problem anymore,” he says, knowing already how the words curl up weak as a lie on the thread of dusty air.

“You love him,” says Dorcas. “You’re each other’s problems.”

Even now, after months of it, seeing her so still is jarring, like watching a trapped bird suddenly cease its struggle against the bars and go quiet, battered with the effort. “Dorcas, I’m—”

“D’you mind if I kip on your couch for the night?” she asks. “Little late, to be out.”

“Of course,” he says, the last of his words turning to cotton in his throat. “There’s a spare bedroom, if you’d rather. It’s the first door down the hall, to the right.”

“I’ll be fine right here,” says Dorcas; and, while Remus rummages in the hall closet for a blanket, “It gets quiet, doesn’t it.”

Remus doesn’t have to ask her what she means. “You can stay here. For as long as you like, I mean.”

“It’s all right,” she says, “I’ve never been much of a country girl. Good luck on the harvest though, Farmer Remus, maybe you can buy yourself some chickens next year.”

“My mum used to have some. They always went for the jugular.” He unfolds a purple throw, the same one that used to hang over the back of the couch in his flat, and lets it fall across her legs and shoulders, wide enough to hide in for a while. “Goodnight,” he says.

He’s halfway down the hall when he hears her voice again, a slim ghost walking too far ahead of its form: “I’ve made them awfully angry.”

Something cold settles in Remus’s belly and then comes loose again, and he wants to ask her why but he doesn’t want to have to ask, either. “Have you told anyone else,” he says, knowing the answer already.

“No. But I thought you ought to know.” She sighs, and he turns around expecting to see her face, but only finds her shoulders turned towards the back of the couch, her body blurring with the night, grief-heavy. The sound of the draught whispering through the hallway nips at his heels like waves, and Dorcas lifts her head to it slowly, yearning in every movement the way Remus does on rainy nights in August and all through the ragged bones of a house that remembers too much: it’s the tumult that comes with realizing there is no emptiness like the one that lives between your lungs and answers to your name.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice going stale in the lilac heat.

“Don’t be,” says Dorcas, and he hears her turning over, a pale, mummified sound. “I’ve worked very hard at it.”

In his room with the door shut and the moon lancing through the gap in the old green curtains, he sits at the end of his bed with half a cup of cold tea in his hand, drinking the last of it (and after he’s brushed his teeth, even, is he Sirius?) until only the dregs remain, turning it sideways sleeplessly as he thinks of Sirius and the photo facing the wall on his desk, of Peter at his mum’s and James and Lily living in a mildewed two-up-two-down in Hackney, Marlene McKinnon buried at twenty-two in Yorkshire and Dorcas lying on his couch with a brave hunger in her eyes, thinking how lost to herself she has become. It gets him thinking about people and the way they turn your dial forward a few degrees and move the cogs and gears of your body to music, how you are altered, forever, from having known them and loved them; he lies down and dreams of the Bermondsey Square market, smelling of dusty-warm air and the silver tang of clocks tick-tick-ticking against his skin, and then sometime later he wanders through Columbia Road with its deafening gush of color spilling into the street, parting red bursts of holly berries with his fingers and trying to find something he left there, some spare part he lost in the peony stems on his way home one night.

And then, out of the starry bloom-field, something grabs his hand and tugs him hard, through the giant primroses and into the brick of the deli in front of him, which shreds like smoke at the contact and flows into the Shrieking Shack: footprints in the dust like eyeglass imprints, a neatly-made bed, splinters stuck in the floorboards, and someone crushing his wrist in their hand, yanking him around in the amber-glass dusk.

“Boo,” says Sirius, his face in Remus’s face, and Remus wakes up gasping with spider-veined shadows trembling up his arm where fingers would have grasped him, where he can still see the red crescent imprints of nails. He keeps still on the bed so the echoes shiver across his body with the filmy light of morning, an arpeggio played on his bones.

He considers telling Dorcas about it, but she’s already gone when he goes down the narrow stairs into the sitting room, the blanket folded and her teacup left washed with its rim upside-down on the kitchen counter. No taste, no stain of her, no indentation in the couch cushions—as if he might have dreamed her, too, a figment crafted from loneliness and regret in the darkest of nights, washed away with the smothered grey of the sun illuminating every room of his house and every inch of his untouched skin: one pair of shoes by the doorway, one umbrella balanced in a boot, empty corners, out-of-tune clocks. It’s only when he turns Dorcas’s cup over to make tea that he finds her note, the edges coiling in the humidity: You were right that nothing is beyond change.

—

Two days later, he locks up and walks through the forest at midnight with his boots sticking in the soggy spots from recent rain and half-tripping down the grassy knolls that roll crookedly beneath his feet, hoping that he looks like a man entitled to be walking through the teeth of the forest with the roving beasts gurgling in the dark and the nightbirds watching him from their quivering branches, the infrequent cries of owls shooting through the cloud-broken moon. Once, one of them—someone’s pet, most likely, on a late-night errand Remus imagines involves dirty letters and a certain degree of nudity—perches right in front of him and cocks its head, blinking, blinking, blinking its enormous eyes and seeming to ask quite clearly, What do you think you’re doing here, unicorn bait?

So far, he’s seen neither hide nor hair—here, the Sirius who still lives in his head smiles indulgently—of the werewolves he’s meant to be liaising with, as Dumbledore tastefully put it, but it hasn’t been a complete waste of an anxious evening, either: he’s gotten a face-full of spiderweb three times, stepped in something revolting, tripped over his own shoes, rescued an enormous worm from an imminent trampling, gotten slapped with a low-hanging branch, and found a fuzzy sprig of night-blooming catchfly, which he clips with his wand and sticks in his pocket for his nightstand. A bad idea, probably, if he actually does come across any werewolves tonight, but he reckons they’ll smell the mortality on him anyway, the dull-blade complacence brought on by having a space to breathe in and dinner you don’t have to kill before eating every night.

Unicorn bait, indeed.

About a mile from home, he stops at a clearing where he can see the stars cracking recklessly through the sky over the tinny lights of a farm set against the western horizon, where he leans against a tree trunk to feel the night winds shiver through his hair. He tips his head back and looks up to find the moon’s spidery, scarred face hanging high overhead, bringing with it the sinew-tugging nervousness characteristic of the waxing gleam that washes out the surrounding stars just two days before it fills up his veins and pulls him knees-first to the ground. The sight of it so near to full always makes him long for it to be over, clenching his teeth around the yellow glare that twinges low in his spine; there’s a strange comfort that comes in the days after as it empties and his wounds settle into scabs and scars, a sort of cottony, wooly ritual of hands and voices and bandages wrapping him up as his bones re-knit themselves, and his heart re-aligns: renewed and reborn in the steady monthly rhythms of the moon to whom he belongs, the miraculous repetition of his mother’s story-soft voice and then Sirius’s body pressed into his own like steadying breath, calling him back to himself.

He stands there with his head cradled against the tree and looks out over the wide stretch of summer sky, thinking of all the wild clutches of space he has to learn to occupy without Sirius, without James and Lily and Peter and Harry and his mum and of all the ways that, maybe, maybe, Sirius is learning the same lessons in London, where every empty patch on the desk and the holes between the books on the shelves and the Ivory soap Remus always bought will become aching bones, each loss a joint or a rib in the anatomy of shared memories that have become leaden and arthritic with his absence just as Sirius’s weighs on him, somewhere deep in his own body. Logically, he knows that nothing is ever so crushing or shattering that you can’t fit your pieces back together into a new whole again even though you might have to grit your teeth sometimes to keep the seams from tearing, but you keep on living because no one else is going to eat your breakfast or brush your teeth for you; because your heart, your traitorous, wondrous heart, still expands and beats inside you, cracks and all, and you’ve got to take it somewhere.

It’s with that thought that his own heart, solitary audience always to both his fatalism and his occasional bouts of distant romanticism, seems to swell inside his chest for no discernible reason at all, and he opens his eyes in the moonlight half-expecting to find something staring back at him, but he’s met only with the lazy hush of the leaves in the wind, fluttering like wings; it’s not until he turns slightly towards the south that he sees the kite-tail of Lyra glowing brighter than he thinks it ever has through the thatch of trees, something streaking brilliantly through Vega, bright enough to burn out everything else, and Remus stops dead and feels his heart lurch, drawn forward by the invisible tug of gravity singing to the marrow in his bones.

He doesn’t have to go far before he hears something—or, really, feels more than hears it, the way he sometimes feels the distinct, almost palpable non-presence in his house when he goes inside some nights, the same thing waiting at the bottom of the stairs as he walks to the kitchen in sleepless, dreamy discontent. It hums just at the edges of his hearing so that he can smell the sound of it faintly, so close to the full moon: a chalky paper-rattle of twigs, sweet green crenellations of shoeprints bending the grass. Not a werewolf, not with the deliberate, muffled steps and the crisp consonants of menthols lingering on the air, as if they’ve been crushed in a jacket pocket by a wand or a clumsy hand fumbling in the dark; again, Remus looks up and has a sense of being pulled along, like his mind can’t catch up to his feet.

Then: “Bugger fuck,” as his someone stumbles on a branch, and he knows it’s impossible, or maybe it isn’t, but—oh, if there was ever a voice that could make him move, running through the trees towards the sound with his wand held out in front of him, secrecy and Order business and the rest of the miserable world long forgotten.

But whatever ghost he’d expected to find, it wasn’t Sirius Black with his wand lit up blue-white to match Remus’s, staring back at him like he’s just had the breath knocked out of his lungs, and Remus’s heart lurches again, strangely, before it rises.

“Remus,” says Sirius, drawing out his name, though it somehow comes out equal parts relief and disbelief and reverence and accusation, the effects of which play out on his face the way only Sirius can wear emotional confusion: a tensing of the shoulders, a widening of eyes and a clenching of fingers around his wand, drawn tight as a noose with authority dragging behind his feet like a badly-fitting cloak. Dorcas hadn’t been lying; he really does look unhappy even in the dead of night, days unshaven with darkness gathered beneath his eyes and moving with a slowness he didn’t have when Remus last saw him, but then he’s seen so little of him lately that it might be nothing new. Watching him through the haze-heavy air, Remus lowers his wand and decides that reality has been postponed until further notice, because otherwise, he would not be standing here breathless and unbelieving with Sirius twitching jaggedly towards him like those knife’s-edge moments in old stories, where one lover has to decide whether he’s going to slit the other’s throat or love him forever.

“What are you doing out here?” Remus asks, low and almost passionless, with rather more steadiness in his voice than he feels the situation warrants. He should be trembling. He should be digging bloody welts into his skin where he clutches his arms to keep from throwing them around Sirius.

“What am I—what are you doing, do you have any idea—” here, Sirius sputters, dragging a hand roughly through his hair and glaring down his nose at Remus, “—no, of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t have fucking vanished in the first place when you got too scared and just couldn’t handle it anymore.”

“Yes, Sirius, that’s exactly what happened,” says Remus, surprised even now at the certainty of his own feet on the ground while something plays a sickly melody on his entire digestive system whenever one of them speaks; he doesn’t need Sirius’s derision to remember what happened. “I’m here because I have to be, not that it does any good for you to know, or—or that you care one way or another, but you’d do good to be out of here by the time the moon’s full. Go home.”

“It’s not like I came out here looking for you,” he says, with a cruel cut of his mouth that looks, almost, like a smile. “I know better than that.”

He’s not sure whether it’s meant to hurt as much as it does. In that secret, curled-in part of himself that Remus folds away deep into the shadows of his heart-muscle, the same part where he hid years of yearning and the knowledge of running free under the full moon every month, the same part he stuffs every guilt and festering resentment into—grown over with scar tissue, choked out with tangled threads of his love, cultivated and burnt out and re-grown—Remus had wanted Sirius to come after him. Even admitting it to himself is like having the breath ripped out of his lungs; he turns away slightly with a practiced disinterest and says, “I wouldn’t have wanted you to. I did leave for a reason, after all.”

“Remus—”

“Go home, Sirius,” he says, turning and remembering, unbidden, the man from the Knight Bus, his frantic admonition.

“Remus, would you stop,” says Sirius, loud and controlled with suspicion, like he says it all the time. His Auror voice, Remus used to call it, and hearing it now jackknifes along his thoughts; Sirius has never used it on him, or maybe it’s just never worked before. “Don’t you fucking dare walk away from me again. I’ll follow you across this entire bloody country to wherever you’ve decided to hole up and hide if I have to, and you don’t want to make me.”

“No, you’re the only one who’s allowed to run away,” he mutters, just loud enough for Sirius to hear as he turns around. His stomach twists with the stab of a sudden memory: there are Aurors who have to hunt down werewolves, but surely not. Never, never Sirius. “Here to round up dark things, are you?”

Sirius falters in his boots a bit, as if Remus has hit him upside the head, and he reckons, belatedly, that it might have hurt less if he had. “You ought to know better,” says Sirius, coldly stunned, “and you ought to know me better. Or maybe you don’t. For someone who likes to act so grown-up and above it all you don’t really have a fucking clue how to handle anything like an adult and you never have.” It comes out brittle and tired but it’s true enough, and Remus looks at him in the wand-light, the taut coil of him condensing into himself, the worried set of his lips as plain as anything; Sirius has never been very good at hiding how he feels, at least when it matters. “So, what, here’s your answer? You went back home and had a crisis meeting with Earl Dumbledore, Son of God, and now you’re wandering around all night just trying to get your guts ripped out in the middle of Arse End, Nowhere, and—”

Something changes in his face, starting in the eyes and blooming down his knifeblade cheekbones to his mouth, which closes around the words before they can matter. He seems to soften and then sway with the immense impact of understanding, like a door blown open in the wind, and Remus, for the second time in his life since he was twelve years old and caught up in Sirius’s arms on his red four-poster—we know, Remus, it’s all right—we know, just breathe, Remus, I’ve got you, I’ve got you—thinks it was just his luck that he had to go and make friends with someone so brutally, deafeningly sharp. Twenty-one, and it’s just his luck that he had to go and fall in love with the berk, too.

“Oh my God,” says Sirius, bringing his hand up to his mouth and then dropping it, taking several uncertain steps closer through the brush. His shoulders have gone rigid, and Remus can feel all the promises he made Dumbledore being waved away with the slow shake of his head: secrecy and duty and promises he didn’t know he was making when he was eleven years old on the Hogwarts Express, and now every weak excuse and sleepless night and inexplicable bruise that have put all these miles between them falling into place like an intricate iron lock. “You were—this is why, all those nights—and he’s been sending you all over the country to run about with—”

“With half-breeds, Sirius?”

The shell-shocked expression Remus still can’t quite read turns vicious and he glares, so fiercely Remus would look away if he didn’t know now that the anger wasn’t for him this time, or at least not completely. “You know what I mean, how was I supposed to know he was sending you on these—these fucking charity missions, you never said anything to me even when I practically begged and you could have—oh God,” he says, barely above a whisper, as if the thought is standing too close and he can’t get away. “You could have, Jesus fuck—you could have been killed, and I never would’ve known—” Sirius wipes at his face and seems to try and catch his breath, and he looks at Remus like he wants to scream, just scream.

And Remus, having felt something in the realm of shrieking insanity buzzing at the roof of his mouth for the better part of four months by this point, knows exactly why. “It isn’t your fault,” he says, which is true enough, but Sirius shakes his head again, moving closer and then back again.

“I want—” he begins, his mouth opening and then closing around the words before he starts over. “I need to talk to you,” he says at last. “Will you come home? Please, I—just, please.”

He bites his lip hard enough to taste the iron-swill of blood and shudders convulsively; July moves the wind through the stars overhead where Lyra glows needle-keen and cunning, but when he looks across the brush again, all their light seems to have blown into Sirius’s eyes watching him in the dark, grey like December nights and good memories. Remus’s heart beats red-ripe, staccato. Alive.

Nothing is ever truly beyond change.

“My house is closer than your flat,” he answers, noting how Sirius tries to hide his wince and fails utterly.

“I never wanted you to leave,” says Sirius, taking a single step closer in the careful distance left between them, trying to pull the tightrope taut and bridge the chasm until he can get to where Remus is waiting—has been waiting—on the other side. “I just want this to—I’m sorry, Remus, just, please don’t go—”

Snapping twigs and a rapid-fire pulse of feet behind them, and they’ve both got their wands held out with an arsenal of counter-curses rattling behind their teeth, more than two twenty-one-year-olds should ever have had to learn; Remus doesn’t breathe again until Sirius’s partner comes into the clearing, wand also thrust out at a savage angle and his face shifting from fearful pallor to confusion to profound awkwardness when he sees who Sirius has been talking to.

“Oh, Jesus heavenly Christ, I heard voices and I thought—but what’s he doing…?”

“He lives out here,” Sirius says tersely, running a hand over his eyes. “Look, I need to talk to Remus. Tell Moody I’ll see him in the morning and he can save the lecture, I know where to put my fucking wand.”

“Right. Er,” says the boy—a boy, Remus thinks, frightened and intimidated and hardly out of Hogwarts, glancing between him and Sirius like he’s standing on a minefield waiting for the detonation, because it’s not enough that he should have to spend all night re-treading old battlegrounds with Sirius: in the morality play of Remus Lupin’s life, there must always be a punchline, and the amused look the boy bounces against both of them just before he turns to Apparate rings through the trees louder than any laughter would. Probably, he thinks they’re going to throw things and punch walls and break down in each other’s arms like some tawdry afternoon at a cheap cinema. Then again, he might not be wrong.

But Sirius goes so quiet afterwards that Remus’s stomach starts to knot with worry as Sirius gives him that solemn and bottomless look that always makes him feel naked and split open down the middle, the same way he does when Sirius says his name sometimes in the middle of the night like it means something beautiful. When he blinks, his eyes are very slightly damp.

“Come on, then,” he says, and Apparates them to his back doorstep, where the bindweed blossoms and the summer curls impatiently at their ankles and nighttime laps at them like tidewater. Only as he opens the door, silent still, does it occur to Remus to ask him what he should have done already:

“Tell me something only you would know,” he says, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the wand in his trouser pocket. “Can you keep a secret?”

Looking at Sirius from the top step, weary-boned, the sad cast of his eyes, Remus can actually understand the mistrust and the doubt, the whole nights spent away while he watched a broken clock beat from his side of the bed. Wartime makes it easy to mistake suspicion for devotion. Duty breeds resentment breeds festering betrayal, fairness fades to secrecy and vindication. Love is spreading himself open raw at Sirius’s feet for a touch of indelibility.

Sirius shifts closer, up the four steps to where Remus is standing, pushing forward like a swimmer breaking the surface of foaming waters until he bends his neck and presses a kiss to Remus’s lips, open-eyed, lingering. One of his hands comes up to Remus’s on his wand and their fingers interlace at his hip; when Sirius pulls back, neither one of them moves for fear of breaking their equilibrium, not even when Remus’s mind supplies him with ten thousand different ways this is all inadequate and idiotic and expressly un-secret and the whole thing is only going to end in profound agony for both of them.

Strange, then, that somewhere along the way, the spongey ganglion of nerve-endings deep in his spine-rungs seems to decide that this is the truest thing he’s ever known: Sirius’s fingers twined through his, and his own quiet hand, tugging them over the threshold and into the house.

“Come in,” says Remus, wonderingly, pulling apart the tricky tangle of wards and locking the door behind them, not even minding that he has to do it one-handed because neither of them will let go. How many times, he thinks as Sirius presses closer, how many times have they done this in their lives together, found each other and lived each other and saved each other? How many times have they knocked themselves off their own immutable axis?

Remus leans in and kisses Sirius again with his eyes fluttering closed this time, tasting menthols and inevitability at the corners of his lips.

—

The first thing Remus does under the burn of the fluorescent fan-light is make tea. The second thing he does, still blinking through the muzzy haze as his eyes adjust, is sit at the opposite end of the couch from Sirius and tumble over the event horizon in his sitting room; before Sirius can even ask, Remus is plucking secrets from his mouth like splinters, months of them, years of them, all of it coming loose and unfettered late into the night while he stares straight ahead, not looking at Sirius even though he knows Sirius is looking at him in nervous intervals, either dead-on or from the corner of his eye after Remus unearths one of the especially enormous lies or half-truths that have been moldering away at them from the inside since at least last winter. Sirius asks him miles of serrated questions, and for the first time since he started looking for explanations, Remus answers them honestly, cutting through the thin-lipped beginnings of fury and regret whenever they bubble up until he’s finally bled himself dry and there’s nothing left to give away.

It’s well past one by the time silence rings dully on the sullen air, and Remus, wrung out and exhausted as he is, finds it odd that he feels at most a sense of relief: at finally having it out in the open, and not having to shout about it, and being able to look at Sirius afterwards without flinching from the odd notes in his tight frown or the absence of all the things Remus knows he wants to say, and maybe most of all for not having to pretend that everything is all right or even that it’s going to be all right and not having to be so lit-up and strung-out all the time, as if in recompense for Sirius’s gradual withdrawal. He leans his head against the back of the couch while Sirius stares at him somewhere between his mouth and his cheek, taking a long, slow breath that seems to stretch the enormity of the moment to an almost unbearable fragility; somewhere, a train whistle echoes in the night, whispering against the flaking plaster walls.

“What I said,” says Sirius, at last, “I mean—”

“I know what you said, Sirius,” says Remus, entirely uneager to re-tread that particular nightmare. And it’s hardly the first time, he thinks bitterly, but it’s hardly the first time he’s said things he shouldn’t have to Sirius, either; no matter what else, they’ve always been an even match, love for love and hurt for hurt in all the places where they’ve cut themselves on each other. Maybe they’ve ruined everything. Maybe he’s ruined everything. But how does anyone live, these days, except by picking their way through the ruins?

“But I shouldn’t have—”

“No,” Remus agrees, “you really shouldn’t have, and neither should I, so let’s leave it at that.”

“Will you just shut up for eight seconds and let me fucking apologize?” Sirius explodes, dragging a hand across his eyes and turning to Remus on the couch, all twenty-one tired years of him meeting Remus’s eyes and aching his way into forgiveness. “I’m sorry. I never should have said that and I’m sorry, for all of it, and for letting you think what you did, and for—for not being there. For you.” He takes another breath, loud enough that Remus can hear the slight hitch in it, and sudden he remembers three a.m. in their Camden flat, the way Sirius’s face turned ghostly and death-emptied, and feels his hands yearn for him, for the cut of his jawline and the solid red melody of his heartbeat jumping beneath his palms.

You looked so much older the last time I saw you, he thinks, worrying briefly that it might happen again because, if these things happen more than once, it generally means either looming, barking madness or inborn and troublesome Divination coming into flower, and he really hasn’t got the stomach for the former or the wardrobe for the latter; instead, he asks, “Why? You’ve known me for nearly—since we were eleven years old, and you know every bloody part of me that matters and I’ve given it all to you and I’d do it again and you still came home two weeks ago thinking you’d been sleeping with a latent Death Eater for four years. Do you have any idea—” he swallows harshly, his throat gone slightly hoarse. “No. No, you don’t.”

Face flickering down to the twice-reupholstered fabric of the couch, Sirius shakes his head before he looks back up at him with a strange quietness in his eyes that makes Remus’s stomach drop, whether for having put it there or for the world being the terrible flesh-eating machine it is, he can’t decide. “Because I don’t know every part of you,” says Sirius, heavily, plainly, “and you’ve always been good at lying because you had to be. Especially when you had to be. Because you’ve changed. And every time you leave I have to wonder if it’s the last time I’ll ever see you and then I can’t even fucking sleep or eat or function until I’ve gone home and seen that you’ve been there. And I’m scared.”

Whatever Remus had been expecting to hear, it wasn’t a confession of fear from a man who’s been gleefully running alongside a werewolf since he was fifteen and illegally enchanting motorbikes to fly over great swaths of land and water and deadly-sharp crags. Nor did he think—or want—to hear, in not so many words, that he’s no longer the same person Sirius grew up with, no longer the same Remus Lupin he loved, even though he knows it must be true; no one stays the same forever, and Remus’s life has been a perpetual adjustment phase spent adapting to people and places and loss and love, underscored by the lonely clamor of longing in his heart and the cyclical disobedience of his own body. Human beings are nothing if not studies in mutability; but himself, he knows, more than most.

Everyone does it, he reasons. Everyone is a little malleable, and constant death and devastation only sharpen their edges and make them shrink them inward within themselves, turn lovers into unfriendly strangers; he thinks of the darkness at the backs of Dorcas’s eyes, his new and thrilling desire to cheat the curfew in seventh year, portents of Sirius haunting their flat in every visible object, and wonders how they fit together now.

“I don’t think I’ve changed all that much,” he says, a bit softly, a bit defensively. “Or maybe we both have. I don’t know.”

Sirius seems to consider this for a moment, eyeing the side of Remus’s face still turned towards him. “You’re a little quieter than you used to be,” he says, “I mean, not much, but it’s like—you don’t talk to me about every little thing the way you used to. I started wondering if you were keeping a diary on the side again.”

“I’ve never kept a diary in my life.”

“Please, Remus, it’s been nearly a decade. I know what I saw and it was you recording your innermost self-loathing and your consuming lust for me.”

“We were eleven. I didn’t lust after you.” At this, Sirius shoots him a look so full of raised eyebrows that Remus very nearly laughs. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. “Not until I was fourteen,” he concedes, running his thumb along the chip in his teacup and looking down into the ripples, at his face made watercolor by the surface. “I think I’m just… I don’t know. It’s not like we wake up in the morning and decide to be different people.”

“I know. Just, sometimes I think—what if we’re growing apart, or this stupid sodding war does the job for us? Or you get sick of me and throw me over for fucking Dearborn, and don’t think I don’t know he’s been sniffing around you again, he’s about as subtle as a rhinoceros with a gland problem and the cologne lingers for days wherever the stupid twatting little prick goes.” And, at that, Remus does manage a soft laugh, fading to a hum when Sirius smiles at him for the first time in what must be weeks, his mind slowing to a sluggish crawl. “It’s like, you know—you’ve always been more grown up, except not entirely, and I feel, oh, I don’t bloody know, like I’m twenty-one but I still feel like I’m sixteen even though I know I’m not, and I don’t think I act like it, but I just—I miss you. And I’ve been stupid about it, and I should never have done any of that and I should talk to you, and I’m sorry. For everything.” He takes a long drink of his tea, wishing probably that it were something stronger, staring down between his knees. “I never wanted you to leave me,” he says, again, and something in Remus’s stomach constricts tight enough to make him tense up with that unique cocktail of fear and longing only he can generate in the depths of his misery, sitting in his belly like a stone.

“We’re here now, aren’t we?” he asks, still worrying at his bottom lip but smiling through it anyway. “I miss you, too. I’ve missed you for—for a long time.” No mention of the nights spent lying awake, waiting for a creak of bedsprings beside him and sifting through the rubble of their flat for fragments of Sirius, of them, like something broken and shattered in every corner, every shadow. It won’t do to sound too pathetic, but when the light hits them just right here in the sitting room, he can almost believe they’re going to be all right.

There’s a weariness to Sirius’s face, a sort of curious intensity that Remus finds difficult to watch, but he doesn’t look away, not even when Sirius takes a breath and says, “I love you,” and looks surprised that it came out, but seems to decide swiftly that, all other things considered, it was the most appropriate thing to say after all.

And Remus, in the brief surge of head-swimming—when was the last time he heard that from Sirius?—feels his breath catch around the edges of July, and smiles quietly, almost automatically. “I know, Sirius.”

“Do you?” Sirius, stone-shrewd and searching. “Sometimes, I’m not sure you really do.”

Unsure of what to say to that, Remus settles for a rejuvenating drink of Earl Grey and a furtive glance at the stubble shadowing Sirius’s jaw, the hem of his collar crumpled with unmistakable baby-prints: tiny marmalade and pudding smudges tucked cheerfully into the fabric like wards against the darkness drawing in, tokens of something to fight for. Thinking back just a couple years, Remus can remember Sirius talking with him over ham sandwiches and a spill of April sunshine in Regent’s Park one Sunday when the daffodils came up about how awful he’d be with children, how he never wanted any because they were noisy and slimy and they’d severely interfere with his ability to bend Remus over the kitchen counter at all hours of the day; it makes him think of outgrown shoes and continental drift and a thousand different futures curled in on themselves like a ball of snakes or vibrating violin strings, watching Sirius until he’s sure he can see every individual whorl of blue and grey and black in his eyes, wondering if he’s ever noticed it quite so clearly before from so far away. He blinks.

It’s a marvel, what you never notice about a person until one day you’ve unearthed it and held it in your open hands, and suddenly you can’t stop thinking about it.

“Are you staying?” he asks, feeling he’s dragged the moment out long enough. “I mean, you don’t have to, it’s just, it’s late, and work and all—”

“Nah,” says Sirius, pulling at the ragged cut of his hair, “I quit.”

Hearing it now isn’t as surprising as it might have been a year ago, when Sirius threw himself into any work he could that would be of even marginal assistance to the Order and seemed to choose Auror training more, Remus suspects, out of a sense of obligation to the cause and a slightly panicked grasp on burgeoning adulthood than anything else, but now, with circles gouged deep beneath his eyes and that recalcitrant set to his lips Remus has always loved, he wonders how he didn’t see it coming all along. He tries to look appropriately surprised, but the shock just won’t come.

“Finally broke one sacred tenet too many, did you.” Over the rim of his teacup, he sees Sirius smile at him.

“Sort of. I just—it’s not for me, Moony,” says Sirius, starting a little at the sound of an unbidden nickname he hasn’t used for months. Remus tries not to read too much into it and does a very poor job. “And I guess I should have known that, considering all the memorization and reprimands involved. I’ve got patrols now, ridding the tunnels of boggarts and Yaxleys. I like it—you should see me crawling around in the sewers.”

“Same time?”

“Five every morning, actually.”

Remus looks at the clock. “That’s in three hours, you idiot,” he says, incredulous. “And Dumbledore had you out this late when he knows—”

“Not like he’s got people lining up to wander around in dens of iniquity like Shropshire at all hours of the night. Suppose we can both shout at him about it later, among other things. If we’re awake.” A long, shuddering sigh and an uncertain look that makes Remus freeze, shivering as Sirius watches him. “Do you want to come back to London?”

If Remus is honest with himself, and it’s far too late not to be, he misses their bright flat with its worn flannel sheets and sunny window plants beneath the cigarette-burnt screens, where he could find both of them packed into every corner and crevice and visible surface of the space they made together, everywhere he looked; briefly, he imagines waiting out the brimming moon and packing all over again, skipping past St. Pancras and up the stairs to their Somers Town flat, the left side of the bed waiting for him to sink into it, the wardrobe yearning for his clothes to hang beside Sirius’s where they belong. For a spare second he allows himself to wander in the minefield of his head, dreaming of dinners eaten together again, crosswords conquered on the couch, Sundays spent in bed with toast and tea and the ink-dotted beauty of Yeats contained on the pages of the book he reads to Sirius, making love with August sifting in through the cracks of the curtains, coming home to each other no matter how far away they may be.

But fantasy is fantasy is fantasy. There’s a war on, even if no one calls it that. There are a thousand different reasons for why not; some things take time to make right. He wonders about the statistical probability of one of them being killed when they’re alone rather than functioning as a matched, cohesive unit, and realizes they’ve both been effectively alone for months and it probably doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not sure if they really are less likely to get themselves blown up or contract deadly food poisoning together than they are apart.

“I don’t know, Sirius,” he answers, quietly. Sirius looks down at the frayed carpet in front of the hearth. “Right now, it’s probably best if I stay out here. Convenience, and all.”

Sirius nods distractedly, unsurprised but still a bit hurt all the same, and Remus notices, again, the defeat in his shoulders, the breath held and then pushed out from exhausted lungs. “Probably, yeah,” he says, and Remus almost thinks to reach out and take his hand in some melodramatic conciliatory gesture before deciding it would be too awkward even for him, and the thought of being awkward with Sirius after all this time lights too many conflicting fuses in his head; instead, he digs his fingernails into his palm and closes his eyes. “D’you mind if I hijack your couch? Just for tonight, I mean.”

“Oh. No, of course—but there’s my old bed down the hall, if you’d rather.” And his bed, transfigured from his mother’s old bed in the master bedroom that’s really only slightly larger than the one he grew up in, but he doesn’t mention this. “Do you, er, need me to set an alarm, or anything?”

“I’ve got the body clock of a bloody sundial, mate,” says Sirius, smiling his odd half-smile, “no need to worry your pretty face.”

“Which means you get there exactly twelve seconds before you need to be, probably with your fly unzipped. Can’t you just, I don’t know, take tomorrow off? You’ll be going on nearly no sleep.”

“I’ve done it before, Remus, it’s not like I’m fighting off Voldemort every morning in moldy London tunnels,” says Sirius, the unspoken mostly hanging sickly on the air. Probably, he ought not worry so much; Sirius can do most anything he sets himself to, Order work or Auror training or illegal Animagus transformations. When they were still living in London, Remus used to love watching him take apart Muggle contraptions and help him put them back together, functioning as one cohesive unit. “So, just. Stop looking like you’ve swallowed a cockroach. I’ll be fine. Fucking tired, but fine.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“And you wouldn’t be the fine specimen known as Remus Lupinus if you weren’t worrying about eighteen things simultaneously until you tie your small intestine into fishing knots. It’s your resting state.” He stretches with his empty teacup in one hand, the chipped rim glinting in the dim light. “I think I’ll just—lie down, like. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” Remus says again, taking Sirius’s teacup and standing, making sure not to let their fingers touch. It feels strange and cowardly, as if they’ve forgotten how to occupy space together in their distance, feeling suddenly fourteen years old again and having to plan out everything they say before they say it, too afraid to move their skittish limbs, but at least they’re being cowardly together, Remus thinks pathetically. “I’ll just… get to bed, then.”

He hands Sirius the same blanket Dorcas used the other night, though he doesn’t drape it around him like he did for her; as he turns off the light and swallows the last of his tea and his half-spun words, wondering miserably—Remus Lupinus, woeful creature, look at him fret himself spare—if anything is ever going to be right again, Sirius calls out to him in the dark, his voice tinged warm like firelight and sun-green grass.

“Last night I had a dream about you,” he says, his face soft and stark with longing, and Remus has an almost violent urge to board up the windows so the moon doesn’t shine so brightly in his eyes. “You were at the flower market, looking for me. I bought you a bloody nice fern.”

Something heavy settles in the pit of Remus’s stomach, raking cold claws across the back of his neck, but he can’t even come up with a reason why that doesn’t sound like he’s been inhaling too many fumes in those Divination shops his mother used to like loitering in while he shopped for school supplies at the beginning of each term. An odd misstep on the uncertain conjunctions of the future once or twice is a coincidence; more than that, and it starts to feel like the universe really is trying to tell you something.

Or, he and Sirius have spent so much time around each other over the years that their brains have started to re-route and grow together, a tangled mass of becoming. He’s heard stories about old married couples who have been together for nearly all their lives, each wrinkle and thread of grey mirrored in the breathing body always beside them, saying that if they lived forever they would eventually blur at their borders and become the same person, one smudge of love and evening tea and history all threaded into their time-fused muscles and their heart-meat. Remus doesn’t think he and Sirius will ever get to that point, not least because Sirius can make potions without melting anyone’s nipples off and Remus takes Earl Grey with his toast, buttered with a pat of jam in contrast to Sirius’s Darjeeling and usual half-pound of Nutella and honey and occasionally caviar, and then there’s the fact that Remus has the sense God gave turnips when it comes to telephones and eating things out of bins; lately though, before everything froze over, there have been a few times when they’ve both seemed to communicate everything that needs saying without ever saying anything at all, as if a decade of friendship and three years of carving out a life together has grown a joint awareness between them: a vividness of attunement that sits always in their minds like a clock or a constellation only they can read, an understanding stored in their fingers and the curl of their spines and their quavering minds.

Suddenly, he is deeply, profoundly grateful for both their differences and their likenesses, for all those fractures nurtured within themselves that let them fit together like the pieces of something broken. They’ll never share brain cells, which is probably for the best, but Remus hopes there will come a point in ten or fifteen years when they can finish each other’s sentences—there’s something dead charming about that.

There’s nothing charming about strange omens, though, and nothing comforting in the thought that whatever the incomprehensible magic lying inside the cords of creation is trying to tell him (he often envisions it as a neurosurgeon or a hooded trial lawyer hiding somewhere beyond the asteroid belt), it’s decided to muck about with Sirius, too.

“I had one too,” he says after a moment, “only you didn’t buy me a fern. Not even a single rose, actually.”

“That’s because you’re more of a cardigans-and-cigarettes bloke. Gifts that keep on giving lung cancer and all that.” Sirius laughs a bit, moon-fingers prying between his teeth. So close to full, lethal-bright, Remus feels it pressing in on his gums, deep in his eye sockets. “I’m not that kind of pouf. Dearborn’s that kind of pouf.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you are.” He smiles around the words, almost absurdly happy to have some bit of easiness with Sirius again, like maybe the intricate nets they’ve woven can be re-knitted after all. “Never said I wanted roses, anyway. Tulips, maybe. Or peonies.”

Sirius looks at him, his eyes soft and somehow sad, the wind coming in through the window and getting in his hair and the fringe of the blanket. “I’ll fill the whole yard with peonies, if that’s what you want.”

“I know you would. You’ve always been a melodramatic knobjob like that,” says Remus, and Sirius laughs for him, surprised and sleepy and as near to happy as Remus has heard him in a long while. “Try to sleep. Don’t make me worry about you more than I already do, you’re like, like a human-sized ulcer or something. You have no idea.”

“Terminal, I hear. And I am careful, you great ponce, careful is our middle name. Remember?”

“Please be… sincere.”

“You were going to say ‘serious,’ weren’t you.”

“No. Just because your vocabulary has dwindled to a first year’s level since graduation doesn’t mean mine has. Yes.”

“That’s a real hardship for you, isn’t it,” Sirius murmurs, warm and quiet. “I know it’s stupid and puns are the lowest form of humor, but it always makes your mouth twist up all funny like you do when you’re trying not to laugh, even when it got old. That,” he pauses, considering, “that was the fourth thing I liked about you.”

“What did you do, keep track?”

A small huff of laughter, light enough to flow away with the night winds. “Yeah. Mind, I had a veritable goldmine of material, so I kept a running tally in my head. Moony-science, you see. Which was fucking difficult, with the way you always insisted on getting taller and smarter and running around with those ink stains all over yourself, I could barely tie my bloody shoes around you sixth year without doing something terrifying. All of which you know perfectly well, so don’t act all innocent and unassuming, Remus von Studly Lupin.”

Remus’s mouth twitches up again, angling at the sound of laughter in Sirius’s voice and unsure of how to fill the first reasonably comfortable silence they’ve had for so long, or if he even wants to. “You’re trying to be charming,” he says eventually, meaning it for fondness rather than accusation, watching Sirius blink tiredly where his head rests in the crook of his bent elbow.

“We can’t help what we are,” says Sirius, a bit airily, “but actually, no. I just—I wish—” he scrubs a hand across his face and swallows, shuttering his fingers over his eyes. “I miss you, Moony.”

He looks down into the dregs of Sirius’s teacup where there’s a distorted shape he can’t make out at the bottom, a chain or maybe a knot, and after a moment, his mouth does what it sometimes can’t help doing around Sirius: it moves entirely without his head, overflowing with all the fragments gravity can only keep down for so long. “I love you,” he says. Sirius pulls his hand away from his face, and Remus doesn’t look away. “And I miss you, I’ve missed you for so long and you’ve got no idea how many nights I’ve spent just lying awake watching that stupid clock and waiting for you to come home and worrying myself to the point of—of insanity wanting to see you, and I know I haven’t been honest but neither have you. Not for a long time. And we’re both—different. But I never thought the worst of you, Sirius. I’m still—I don’t know,” he says, all in a rush; Sirius has pressed his hand over his eyes again, one arm wrapped around his stomach beneath the blanket. “Everything is complete shit and now you’re here and even if you weren’t, I don’ think I could ever stop thinking about you because you’re just, you’re permanently lodged somewhere in my bloody hindbrain and I love you so much it’s like I can’t even breathe sometimes when it hits me.”

It all comes out heavy the way things always have those few times he’s opened his mouth and emptied himself out, peeled raw with grief and pain like blood welling up in a wound. He looks off into the glare of the moon in the kitchen window, half-furious, half-ashamed, though there’s really no reason; it’s nothing Sirius hasn’t seen before.

“Remus,” he starts, hoarse, “I’m—I’m sorry. I don’t know how much that counts for, but I am sorry and I love you. I always will. But I don’t,” he pauses for a long, thin breath, “I don’t expect anything from you.”

Liar, Remus thinks, suddenly too angry to take it for honesty. You miss two years ago. You miss how we used to be. You miss the youth we’re throwing away, you miss being able to see James anytime you wanted, and if I were James you would never. You would never.

How much of that has any merit and how much of it is born of lingering resentment and the old twinges of inadequacy, of not being good enough, of not being James, he can’t tell. Sirius has never wanted him to be anything but himself; it was always Remus who used to feel out of place and out of rhythm with him sometimes, measuring his words on his molars before they were spoken, trying to impress, trying to puzzle out the best way to make him laugh and retreating within himself when he couldn’t get it right. Once he’d gone nervous and quiet, it was always Sirius who coaxed him out again, who could become as expansive and invasive as the air inside his lungs until he’d overtaken him and sent them both stumbling into each other in a chaotic collision of laughter and fumbling and long, febrile limbs.

Whether or not this is ideal right now, they’re here, and Sirius is telling him that he loves him, and Remus figures that sometimes you’ve got to learn to come at each other from new angles if you’re ever going to spark again.

“I don’t know exactly what I want from you, either,” he says, finally, “but I do know that I don’t want to be without you anymore.”

“You never lost me.”

And whether that’s true or not, the wind is ruffling the short fringe of Sirius’s hair, and he’s here, and Remus loves him like he knows he will never love anything else. So that, then, is that.

“Goodnight, Sirius,” he answers, in a sort of wonder, and leaves him.

In bed with the duvet kicked down to his feet and his clock stuck at familiar seven-thirty, Remus sinks down into himself, settling his nervous tendons and guilt-rigid muscles against the mattress while the moon shreds through the filmy curtains ready to burst in his veins, lying awake and thinking about tomorrow, thinking about the turning of the stars and being twelve years old and feeling so much the same as he does now, like he’s talked his way through miles and miles of secrets with a relieved, tired soreness in his joints at finally having told them and having anyone at all to tell them to. Only, if this was like being twelve again, Sirius would be in bed with him, curled quietly around him and asking curious questions, tracing the circlet scar on his wrist until Remus fell asleep beside him on the same pillow, breathing the same air, a part of the same twelve-year-old whole.

That was the first night he tasted the word love, flat against the tip of his tongue like a strange wine, where he pressed it to the roof of his mouth and it stuck: I love you. He mouthed it at Sirius’s chest, tasting clean cotton and toothpaste, and thought, dreamily, that this is what it would be like, to be in love: warm hands and secrets smothered in the bed sheets, peace in the places where two bodies touch. No one really falls in love when they’re twelve, he thinks, but looking back, he’s not so sure that he didn’t; he dims into dreaming wishing Sirius were in bed with him like he used to be, so he could have one more secret to tell him.

The moon is still stark in the morning, a wide brim of ice glinting in the sunlight that glints through the windows of the cottage when he goes downstairs to find Sirius gone and the blanket folded over the back of the couch the way it used to be in their flat, as if he’s a tenant and not a guest. At the kitchen door, there are a dozen white peonies distributed evenly between the boots that Sirius—brilliant, infuriating, beautiful man—has audaciously Apparated without, and Remus aches for it all, suddenly: for the teeth of faraway London, for himself, for Dorcas and James and Lily and Peter, for Sirius in their off-balance flat, for all the spaces inside themselves where they can still feel each other in those warm blanks between heartbeats, where the red vowels echo through his rib-rungs, like love, and love, and love.

—

The day, disoriented: July curling up at the edges of dawn, the sun lancing greyscale through the clouds and the trees where it seeps into his starving skin, pale and blue-streaked with veins in places, bloodied and raw in others. He lifts his head and feels the world come apart, shards of green and dirt and the rusty sound of twigs snapping, the taste of old blood in his mouth; he retches on the morning-damp leaves, grappling for a hold in the thorny brush until he finds it in the heartbeat pounding in his fist and opens his eyes, breathing through the sense of detachment. At the base of a tree, he claws his way up to standing again and lifts his head to the rind of the moon, a chalky-soft memory hanging low on the curve of the world through the clearing; Remus shivers, and breathes.

It becomes easier, usually, to hold on to himself as the daylight shudders into his marrow and the ache comes like a flame at the base of his spine, reminding him of who he is and where, cataloguing the damage while his veins finish re-wiring in these first cagey moments, studying his hands and knees like reciting broken poetry for his nerves: the wrist bones and the shrill white ache of new joints learning to stand on two feet again. The talks last night had gone badly at first. They didn’t believe him, and why would they, stranger with scars that magic could have carved into his skin and the smell of city life and Earl Grey saturating him straight through, an easy kill; he’d been tied to a tree and stripped—his wand left on his nightstand, only his hands and what he could make—and they’d watched him, all of them, as the moon came to turn his eyes a vicious gold and split his lungs apart with fever, and made new believers of them all.

Come back next month, they’d said, all the quicker to recover for cultivating that seething wilderness inside them Remus has never known; for a brief, appalling moment, he envied it: their ease, their cold certainty. And maybe we’ll have something to talk about.

Which, all things considered, was far better than having his throat ripped out in the middle of Arse-End, Nowhere, Shropshire: he hasn’t failed, he has good news, this is something only he can do. He staggers to where his tattered clothes are strewn about with the twigs and latches on to another tree trunk while he waits for the head-rush to thin out, squinting into high summer while a sparrow sings on a blackberry bush nearby, shattering into orange-hot notes behind his eyelids.

“Please fuck off,” he says to it miserably, his voice coming out hoarse and muffled through the torn fabric of his flannel as he takes an inordinate amount of time to maneuver it around his swollen shoulder. The sparrow in the blackberries just watches him with its button eyes for a moment and then starts singing again. “Sorry,” he mutters, “that was rude of me. You could find somewhere else, though.”

If there was ever a sign of being a sad fuck, he supposes apologizing to birds for being inconsiderate because you have no one else to bear witness to your pain tops the list. It hops to a new branch when he opens his eyes and trills all the louder, making his ears ring high and glassy-keen.

He leans his head back against the tree and tries to gauge the time, thinking it’s probably earlier than he first realized with the sun weakly tearing open a cloud at the distant rim of the earth, still more shadow than light; Dorcas and Caradoc won’t have come up yet, and if he can firm up his footing he might be able to Apparate into the backyard without splinching off any of his fun bits, though he’s willing to risk it just to get away from the birdsong blurring in a yellow haze across his eyes, its warbled arpeggio needling up through his jaw where he clenches his teeth around it. The landscape sighs and begins to breathe, alive as a beast beneath his bare feet.

As the nausea leaves him and his vision steadies, he takes a few tentative steps and begins to walk again, finding his equilibrium and reciting the litany that anchors himself to his life, to the world: My name is Remus Lupin and I live in Shropshire, formerly London, and I have all ten fingers and all ten toes and I take my tea with milk and two sugars. I am a werewolf and I’ve read everything Keats ever wrote. I like dark chocolate best. I worked in a library and now I work for the Order, which isn’t a paying concern, but we are at war, or something like it, and I’ve done well. I’m in love and I think I always will be. This is my heart and these are my lungs and here are the muscles that move me. Today is Saturday. I have peonies in a vase on my kitchen table, and I have promises to keep.

Heat, flooding his limbs again; he hugs his flannel to his chest, ready to keep walking when he hears something snap a twig nearby, and then another, another, a filmy rustle of damp leaves: the bird gives one last long trill before a clatter of wings carries it away, and Remus, his bruises screaming, ducks behind the nearest tree as it comes closer.

Catching his breath, though, his senses still sharpened on inhuman teeth, that’s when he finds it: Ivory soap and menthols and Darjeeling, just the slightest thread of dark, loamy ink; given his current situation and the strange off-kilter miracles of the universe lately, he supposes he really should have seen it coming.

“I’m over here, Sirius,” he says without turning around, and hears Sirius startle so badly he nearly falls over, as evidenced by the stumble followed by the violent swearing. One of his shoes is lying in some brush nearby, the other one beneath a small flowering shrub; he untangles the laces and waits for Sirius to find him, knowing that six years’ training as a dog has left Sirius with a nose that would know him halfway across England, if he set his mind to it. Or, maybe it was always like that; considering that neither of them actually needs to sniff, there’s a good possibility it might be something inborn or ingrained, as inseparable from them as the magic that strikes sparks at their cores—the same thing that lets them know they’re alive. He’s not sure which option is more likely.

“Fucking stupid trees,” says Sirius, pulling a spiderweb off his nose. He’s wearing a pair of old trainers and looking like he’s had a shave recently, but the circles under his eyes are as deep as Remus has ever seen them, giving him an odd quality in the early light: too young and too old all at once, and Remus stares for a moment in fear and wonder, frozen. “Fucking stupid hills of your ancestral home. The Lupin paterfamilias couldn’t have settled anywhere civilized, could they.”

“Besmirching my family name is high comedy for you, isn’t it.”

“Always.” Sirius scrubs at his face and stands in front of him, surveying the damage before he reaches out to brush some dirt from Remus’s cheek, his eyes silvery and wild when they meet Remus’s, making his breath catch. “You found them, then?”

Remus can’t quite look away from his face, the sunlight blading off his cheekbones, the worried mouth. The miraculous fact of him, his hands on Remus’s waist like ballast, the solemn strength of his shoulders. A flock of blackbirds rattles past them in surreal slow motion. “Yes,” he answers, squeezing one of the hands where it’s moved on to his hip, searching out the pain. “Why—what are you doing here?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Remus. You’ve just gone and done something incredibly dangerous and fucking noble on your goodwill mission out at the arse-end of England and you look like you just got squeezed through a sausage grinder—you’ve got something disgusting in your hair by the way, I’m not touching that. It’s a mystery, mate,” says Sirius, helping him shove his foot in his shoe and then fastening all the buttons that are still attached to his flannel before he looks up, holding his eyes. “I’m doing what I told you I was always going to do.”

“We’re in the middle of a forest and you’re wearing trousers and there’s no tequila on my nipples, so I think you’re lying.”

“The day’s young,” says Sirius. Remus laughs at him, loving even the ache that spreads through the muscles of his belly. “I promised you.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I promised you,” Sirius repeats, looking slightly murderous. “You weren’t home and I couldn’t sleep at all last night and I felt like a fucking dead limb waiting around not knowing if you were all right, so I came out here and this bird just kept hopping around like it wanted me to find you, and there you are, like you’re, I don’t know, werewolf Cinderella in the wild with a pair of trainers. I’m not going anywhere.” A dim, sun-stained pause. “And I left my boots in your kitchen.”

“What a complete accident you absolutely didn’t plan.”

“We live in a strange world that just won’t stop throwing us at each other like flies onto windshields. And if I know you, you had yourself a wank over them, so—come here, all right?”

Unsure of what to do with this new information or how to process it on no sleep and the searing pain in his left thigh, Remus blinks and shuffles closer to Sirius when he pulls him to his side, hanging his arm around Sirius’s shoulders as they begin to move with the waking of the world, a many-legged beast born of sunlight and dream-break, its two heads out of tune, slouching up the lane towards home.

“If you’d rather go home,” Remus begins, their hips knocking together, Sirius holding him tight by the waist. “I mean, there’s nothing—”

“You are where I want to be,” Sirius says, simply, and they move for home.

His arms anticipate every shuddering stagger of Remus’s feet on the way to the door; at some point, Remus loses track of whose limbs are whose or who is carrying who, slipping into a wooly union of goosebumps and beating hearts until they’re finally inside. Once they’ve hobbled to his bedroom, Sirius presses him gently on his bed, and Remus closes his eyes, exhaustion unfurling deep behind the sockets just as Sirius comes back and starts unbuttoning his ruined flannel, dimmed mellow by the light that makes the closed curtains glow.

The shirt is the first thing to go, and then his shoes, and then Sirius is sitting beside him, running a warm washcloth underneath his chin, looking at his shoulder from different angles. “Y’know, you’re in fairly good shape, considering,” he says, turning Remus’s face towards him and daubing at a small scratch by his ear. “I’ll run you a bath later. Any idea when Dorcas and Mr. Muscles are coming?”

“Caradoc could probably carry me all the way home after full moons.”

“And I’m sure his abdominals would sing you ‘God Save the Queen’ along the way, but as it is, you’ve got me and I’m not going anywhere, so you’ll just have to learn to live with that, you demanding little slag. Here, turn around and I’ll get your shoulder.”

“Jealousy makes you look puffy. And no, I don’t know. Just sometime this morning,” says Remus, wincing when Sirius murmurs something heavy that spreads in a cold fire-flush through his swollen shoulder. The discomfort of it makes him all the more aware of what’s going on in his bedroom: Sirius talking to him the way he used to, looking at him the way Remus used to wish he would when they were sixteen, when his heart was young and loud enough to drown out his own voice, sometimes.

Even now, even after so many nights waited out together and so much time spent tangled into knots in the mornings after, this is still relatively new to him—this closeness, this intimacy, the feeling of giving himself over to the strength of someone else’s hands. He’s never let Sirius see the change when it starts; he still shrugs him off when the pain slams into him at easterly sunrise, licks most of his own wounds until they both collapse in bed and sleep, motionless, through the day and night. The thought snags behind his eyes and he stumbles on his way back to the bed after he gets his pajamas on, dreamlike, but Sirius just puts a quiet arm around his waist again and sets him back against the pillows, moving away from him to keep another careful distance.

As he feels the bruise deep in his skin start to hum with pain and looks at the scabbed-over cut he hadn’t noticed arching around Sirius’s elbow when he checks the wristwatch that used to be his brother’s, it occurs to Remus that they haven’t always been very fair to each other. That the ancient ache that lives in your gut, the ghosts of your own making—they have the tendency to forget that other people know them, too.

“I have to go back next month,” he tells Sirius, forcing himself to meet his eyes. He remembers the woman near the railroad clearing, her old-young eyes, how they fed each other blood for blood and hurt for hurt. “They didn’t want what I was selling, because why would they want to hear that again, and I—I understand it, I mean. I don’t even know if Dumbledore can give them what he says. I don’t know if I even believe him. We’re better off with them on our side, I’d never question that, and I’d do whatever I could to help, it’s just—they’re not nice, but the world isn’t exactly nice to them, and they’ll die to save a few of us for a fight that isn’t even really theirs. For things they may never even get. For things I may never even get.” Cannon fodder, he remembers; convenient human shields with diseased ruins for hearts no one has to feel too sorry for when they catch the bad end of a curse. “And I don’t know how—what I even think of that, sometimes.”

Sirius stands and presses a cool hand to his cheek, stroking his thumb along the arch of Remus’s eyebrow, softly, softly. Oh, he’s missed him for so long, he’s missed him like dreaming and breathing and hurting; he closes his eyes and swallows around the sting that wells up in his throat, choking out the empty spaces where he’s forgotten how to laugh or touch or want. “You’re trying, Remus,” he says, “and that’s more than anyone else can say. Voldemort will come for them eventually, too—you’re trying to help them and help yourself in the long run, that’s what matters. You’re not lying. And we keep our promises.”

“Do we?”

“We do,” says Sirius, fiercely, and Remus opens his eyes to meet Sirius’s, grey like winter’s teeth and hundred-year storms, and catches his breath, shocked. The part of him that has cultivated indifference almost like a kindness fights to keep his expression blank, but the part of him that’s trying to open up again—a bigger part, Remus is happy to discover—lets the relief bleed into his smile, into his eyes. “Fuck the Ministry. Fuck Dumbledore. We’ll make it work.” He leans in and kisses Remus on the cheek, gives him a crooked smile when he pulls back. “Want some tea? Or some of those biscuits, maybe. I can do omelettes now. I’ve been practicing.”

“You know, Black, I wanted a handyman,” says Remus, feeling the smile coiling into his own voice, “not a housewife.”

“Fuck you, Lupin.” Sirius laughs, that reckless, irresistible thing Remus hasn’t heard in months. It makes his heart ripple, makes something in his belly wind itself tight; sometimes, he thinks Sirius’s laughter could blot out entire days of his life, but he reckons telling him so would probably send him hiking up Mount Insufferable for a solid week, so he clamps down on it. “Everyone knows whose wife you are, Mrs. Black. You darn my jumpers, for Christ’s sake.”

“Joke’s on you, I actually like doing that,” says Remus, and wiggles his toes as he sits up straighter against the pillows, feeling slightly less like a tenderized steak. From the doorway, Sirius is looking at him, smiling his favorite smile, the quiet one that tugs at the left side of his mouth more than the right and makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners, watercolor-soft, and Remus’s heart beating faster for it—subject, always, to Sirius’s gravity the same way Sirius is subject to his. It is, he thinks, his smile. “Can I tell you something?”

“Let’s have it.”

“Remember that time in sixth year, when I got sick on fish at Easter hols and thought it was a heart attack?”

“I cleaned up that sick,” Sirius says, fondly. “I don’t just clean up anyone’s sick.”

“Well.” He studies his hands for a moment, one raw knuckle, the hardened white scar carved into the wrinkles of his middle finger. “Sometimes, when you smile at me, it makes me feel like that.”

He watches Sirius’s face falter somewhere between surprise and regret, like he can’t decide whether he wants to beg forgiveness or throw his arms around Remus and never let go. Remus can see his throat bob when he swallows, whether with vows or apologies or reverence, he can’t be sure; but when he looks up again, Sirius’s eyes are overbright, and he laughs, whisperingly. “Tell me if I ever stop?” he says.

Remus smiles at him, and nods his promise. Best deal he’s ever made, he thinks, and closes his eyes.

By the time he opens them again, the sun is slicing in furiously at the gap in one of the curtains, lighting up the thin hairs on his arms and glimmering on the spinning second hand of his alarm clock, where the hour and the minute are still stopped at seven-thirty; he turns to find Sirius curled around him on the right side of the bed, his fringe falling into his eyes. Remus blinks and rubs at his shoulder, the swelling mostly gone; only a dull, lingering ache like the memory of violence when he lifts his arm. The movement makes Sirius open his eyes, reaching out to meet Remus’s hand and trailing his fingers around Remus’s wrist, feeling his pulse flutter in Sirius’s fingertips.

“It’s not quite nine,” says Sirius, rough with sleep. “No one’s been by yet. War’s on hold.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” Remus says through a yawn. Their hands slide together, the solid strength of them tightening, clenching. “For what can war but endless war still breed?”

“Shut it. Just because you fancy John Milton’s desiccated corpse you think you’re better than me.” Sirius strokes his fingers along the lines of his palm, tracing the straining hollow of his hand until Remus presses it up into his again as if in offering, interlacing their fingers. “How’s your shoulder?”

“Better,” he says, rolling it against the bed. There’s a rubber-band twinge in place of the howl that was throbbing through the tendons when he first woke up hours ago with dirt in his mouth. “Thanks for the—er, deflating it.”

“It doesn’t usually work that fast.”

“Mmm.” He sits up against the pillows and looks down at Sirius, bed-headed and bedraggled, not letting go of his hand. Remus lifts it to his shoulder, unshaking the instinct to hide away the tortured bone, the hateful magic in his blood that will never, ever let him shatter, and presses Sirius’s hand to the stubborn jut of his collarbone, down the slope of his shoulder to his bicep: here are the marvelous mechanisms of his body, here is the curse of his strength. It unfurls deep inside him just beneath his heartbeat, knitting and re-knitting, the muffled melody of healing, the lullaby of living. “We heal faster.”

Very slowly, Sirius begins to touch him. He passes his hand over the shoulder and arm first, and then back up to his throat where his heart thrums with the unevenness of a wounded animal, tense and ready to turn at the first missed beat. The pads of his fingers curl under Remus’s chin, reaching for the scratch on his face that’s long gone now, tenderly, wonderingly, voraciously; Remus feels like a lock being picked open, every joy and every agony exposed, every secret and every love he’s hoarded behind his ribs cracked open for Sirius’s hands to read. After a while, he reaches out and puts a hand on Sirius’s chest, groping for his heartbeat until he feels it rising against his hand like a song, muscles moving and contracting as he finds the small finger’s-breath scar on the side of Sirius’s neck where Remus knows he fell out of the oak in the backyard when they were fourteen, where only he knows to look. Touch is indelibility, fluency, truth measured on the span of starving fingertips. He holds his hand against Sirius’s throat and feels him breathe when Remus breathes, their fingers warmed with each other’s bodies, letting them inside.

This is their truth; this is the language they must learn to speak, the map to be drawn and redrawn, easy arithmetic. This is how they find each other a thousand, thousand times, scattered across the world, collision, revision, transition, lighting up a million different skies. This is how one wolf-child falls in love with the other.

“So,” says Remus, his head bowed close to Sirius’s, “what was the first thing you liked about me?”

Sirius laughs and looks at him with a warm, unhesitating sort of intensity. “Your voice,” he answers. “The very first day I heard you say something, on the train. I don’t remember what it was, but I’d never known such a country boy before. Mother Nature’s very own son, aren’t you, all barefoot and chasing after the chickens.” Remus smiles wider. “I liked hearing you talk.”

A part of Remus, a small, ashamed piece of his subconscious that still splinters doubt inside him from time to time, used to worry that Sirius only ever thought of him in relation to himself: why can’t you be happy, why won’t you let me, why can’t you understand. Brought on by anger and inadequacy and an occasionally remarkable lack of faith in himself that sometimes extends to everyone else’s perception of him, it makes him retreat into his own shadow while Sirius expands, mercurial as air in a room, and sometimes stops Remus from finding his rhythm with him, makes Sirius withdraw or burst out in irritation and towering fury until they’ve weathered it together, never exactly apologizing. They are both sometimes cruel and sometimes spiteful, stumbling around each other in disharmony, getting their time signatures mixed up, but there’s never been a time when they couldn’t find each other again; there’s never been a time when Sirius didn’t love him—all of him—for exactly what he is, knobby knees and distant curled-in places and all between, and they are neither of them cowards.

They are a wonder, he thinks. They are an inextricable, incalculable wonder. Remus isn’t sure he’s ever been more deafeningly in love with anything; he clears his throat.

“And the second?”

There’s a shuffling of hands and legs, a white flash of teeth over Sirius’s bottom lip. He leans over and kisses Remus’s nose, grinning brightly when he pulls back.

“What a revelation,” he says, catching both of Sirius’s hands and feeling his laughter against him. “Might as well catch me up, since I already know the fourth.”

“That look you get on your face whenever there’s shepherd’s pie for dinner. You’ve always done it—that one where your eyes get all wide and your mouth goes wobbly. No one’s ever been sexually aroused by shepherd’s pie but you, Moony.”

“I’m not.” He pauses. “Maybe in a few situations.”

“You’re a, a—a food-philiac. Or something. There are words for people like you.”

“Unfortunately the word you just used isn’t one of them.”

“Last Christmas says otherwise. I’m still feeling twinges,” says Sirius, laughing breathlessly. “Maybe my cooking just turns you on. Maybe I’m just that good.”

“Logically, if that were true, we’d have sex three times a year,” says Remus. He reaches out with both hands and strokes his thumbs over Sirius’s jaw, looking into his eyes, the lashes so long they always tangle at the corners, the flecks of blue and green and gold that always put him in mind of early January dark holding fast to his own, their foreheads pressed together. Remus breathes into his mouth, thinking about chaos theory and erosion and the fact of the two of them, twenty-one and wrung out but alive and together, thinking that maybe the way his fingers curl around the base of Sirius’s neck is going to take them a thousand miles from here. Tipping his head forward, he kisses Sirius, stubble rasping against stubble. “Does the mirror miss me?” he asks, and Sirius smiles at him.

“It’s been singing funeral hymns and asking me where the darling with the sweater vests is in that pathetic breathy voice. The other day it got shirty with me—I may have been a bit drunk, and got in an argument with it—don’t look at me like that—and it called me a right arse.”

“Uncanny.”

“Oh, a pox on your short memory. Which one of us spent half an hour sulking after it insulted your Christmas jumper? Because that wasn’t me.” Sirius leans forward and gives him a closed-eyed kiss.

For a moment, they only breathe, the uneven rise and fall of their chests like the sway of the morning music outside. “Remus,” Sirius says again, “I want this.”

Remus closes his eyes and aches with the enormity of it. When he looks at him again, Sirius’s eyes are so bright they take his breath away. “So do I.”

“No, I mean—” He hears Sirius swallow, his hands sliding down to Remus’s waist as he rubs their jaws together. “All of it. This—the before and after and the hideous nausea and the parts that I can’t understand. The things that live in your bones and the ones that want to rip into my guts and, and the dark spaces I can’t see. I want those, too.” Sirius draws back and stares at him, hands still at his waist; the lines of their bodies blur together like ripples on water. “And I want to give you all of mine, if you want them.”

He’s never sure whether it’s a perfect selfishness or an unselfishness, and later, when he’s drifting again with Sirius’s heartbeat in his ear and a hand splayed over his belly, breath moving his hair and as happy as he never dared to imagine he could be again, he will think, with near clarity, that it’s the first time they’ve ever understood each other without having to say anything: the shock of love like being winded and his eyes slipping closed, meeting Sirius’s kiss halfway, undone by the entirety of his own surrender. At the corner of his nightstand, the hands of his clock begin to move forward, slow, slow, marking no time but his own.

“Since we’re being honest,” says Remus, finally, “the first thing I liked about you were your eyes.”

“Revisionist history won’t work on me. You weren’t the one with the pathetic running list in your head like some sort of disease, Moony.” His lips tug into a smile at Remus’s cheek, right where he can feel it against the skin. “But it probably will get me naked.”

“Sometimes the right maneuver when you’re brushing your teeth gets you naked,” says Remus, pressing a hand to Sirius’s chest again and then up, underneath his chin. “You’re just so—you’re just lit, sometimes, you can just fill a whole room. And whenever you look at me like that, it’s like, I used to feel like my stomach was trying to crawl out of my mouth. But mostly it’s just—it’s good, I mean. It makes me feel good,” he babbles, “and I was trying to be original and clever but I’m not actually saying anything.” A long breath; his heart beating slowly, expanding in his chest. “You make me feel so much braver than I am,” he whispers, and Sirius leans into him, and doesn’t, doesn’t let go.

—

Late morning swings in on its hinges, bringing Dorcas and Caradoc with it, their faces haggard and Dorcas blear-eyed but both of them smiling, both of them breathing relief deep into their lungs when Remus tells them every murky shard of last night and this morning, the promise of next month—of progress, however small—hanging on the balmy summer air. They Floo Dumbledore from the sitting room while Sirius bangs about with tea in the kitchen, pretending to ignorance as they map out new battleground to be breached, how to time their footsteps around advancing enemies into disputed ground: Remus to the vampires in Cornwall this week, Caradoc to the giants, Dorcas on reconnaissance at a pureblood’s sprawling estate in Dorset, set to come find them once the job is done. In the midday light illuminating all their shadows, they look so young and so old it’s almost confusing—none of them more than twenty-two and already with something burnt out in their hearts that’s never going to come back. There are other fuses you have to learn to light instead, he supposes, but feeling the rigid stretch of his shoulders and the way his elbows brace on the arms of the chair he used to be able to curl up in after the full moon when the ache finally gave way to a month of peace, he wonders when they sacrificed their youth for a slim figment of a future they have to keep at arm’s length just so it doesn’t blind them.

Plans, then: they’ll check in with each other on Thursday, meet with Dumbledore by Tuesday, send a Patronus if they can’t; more of the usual. Remus tries not to dwell too much on it, on the livid burn across Caradoc’s arm or Dorcas’s silence buzzing at the back of his throat or Sirius’s patrols on Monday night, knowing well that there’s no patrol anymore without incident. To get rid of the panic starting to claw up his throat, he focuses on his tea when Sirius brings it—Earl Grey with two sugars, like Remus never left.

“That’s all right, Black,” Caradoc drawls, winking at him, “I take mine unsweetened. Nice and sturdy.”

On the other end of the couch, Sirius tries valiantly not to make a face like he’s just stepped in dog shit, a sign of his looming maturity if ever there was one. “Suit yourself. I prefer it hot and complicated and extremely flexible, myself,” he says, with a glance in Remus’s direction that has him reconsidering inviting Sirius to sleep in his bed tonight, “but, y’know, whatever. Have you been up to see the giants before?”

“My first time was back in April, I think,” says Caradoc. Remus remembers it because he was there too, trying to talk to a smaller group of them a few miles off; Death Eaters had shown up before they could get much done, and after the following fight killed one of the giants they’d both had to Apparate to an inn halfway across the country, botched like so many other peace offerings before. He wonders if it even matters, now. “They’re not… friendly, exactly. At all. In fact, most of them seem to hate me on sight. But if we can get somewhere, I have to try.”

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Absolutely shitless.” Caradoc laughs, and for once, so does Sirius. “But I guess—it’s like, who else is going to do it, yeah?” He sighs, looks into his empty palms. “I never felt like I understood what we were doing better than I did when I was trying to perform a healing spell on a bloody huge giant. Like maybe you have to feel helpless before you can really get it, I mean.”

Sirius looks at him, somewhere along frigid borders of surprised and unhappily sympathetic. Then, “Listen. Do you want a sandwich, or something? I’m hungry.”

“I’d love one, darling,” says Caradoc, feigning surprise. “Look at this—Lupin’s almost got you domesticated. Give it another month and he’ll have you in heels.”

“I didn’t put mustard in your tea but I can fix that, since it’s apparently a problem for you.”

And for a few long, fragile moments that Remus will always remember with a clarity slightly out of proportion to their significance, things are just this side of perfect.

Dorcas ends up staying until after dinner, speaking at odd intervals and coaxed out of herself occasionally by either necessity or the summer-shiver of laughter that still reaches her even in the places where she haunts her own body like a ghost, in the jutting bones of her hips and the knife-line of her shoulderblades cutting out from the back of her dress. He remembers the way it used to be in Camden or at her new house in the suburbs with Marlene, lit up and stretched out, learning his own rhythm with them on the short nights that dragged them too quickly into autumn and winter, and desolation. When Sirius goes to shower, Remus follows her out to the backyard to sit beside her on the wooden step, watching her pull a lighter from her pocket while he fumbles with his own, rolling one on his knee from the small bag of tobacco he keeps in his front pocket.

“Rolling your own now, are you?” she asks, handing him the lighter.

“Cheaper,” he says. He’d started smoking in sixth year, behind the broom-shed when Sirius offered him a drag of his cigarette on a night in late May when the air was strung green with promise; he took to it with a competence that’s alarming to him even now, and felt another piece of Sirius sink into him from where their edges rubbed together. Just the two of them hiding in each other after dark, and Sirius looking at him like he was something strange and beautiful, the icepick of the scythe moon catching in his eyes and turning them silvery-sloe. “And I’ve never liked his menthols much. They make my throat feel like someone’s scrubbed it out.”

“I was always going to try to quit,” she says, not looking at him. “Too late now.”

“No, it’s not,” he says, with a conviction he almost believes. “It isn’t too late to try.”

“Nothing’s beyond change, right. Except, not always the way we want.” She takes a drag and seems to exhale for a very long time before she turns to Remus, smiling crookedly around her cigarette. The war would seem far off here, mythological, if it weren’t for her sad eyes, the ravaged topography of her face. “Would it be bad of me if I said I’m jealous of you?”

Remus blinks and draws in a long drag. “It’s not exactly perfect,” he says, not really knowing what else to say. Sirius is in his shower, Sirius will fall asleep beside him tonight; it’s the first line of a poem or the new notes of a song he’s never heard, where they will doubtlessly stumble and sing off-key until they get it right and change the lyrics to suit them. He wonders how many more times they’ll do this, reinvention and reclamation. He wonders how many times they already have—if redemption is a verb and love means speaking without tongues, if all we ever do is learn and re-learn how to fill the spaces between stars to get from one to the other.

“Maybe not,” Dorcas agrees, “but it’s something. You have that chance.” Overhead, he can hear the nightbirds calling, the blue dusk-song and the bush crickets below; the sweetness of it always creeps inside him, settling somewhere behind his chest until it makes him ache to be eighteen years old again with all the wilderness of his youth to re-map. “I never got that.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “Don’t you think she’d want to see you try?”

“Marlene isn’t here to tell me what she’d want. Can’t say.”

She looks off into the tree-line, where the watercolor red-violet of sunset drops off into the green of the forest, the very first stars glinting with the swift dwindling of the evening. Right at the edge of the yard, suspended on the low branch of an oak, is the old wooden swing his father made for him when he was four years old. There is still blood in the wood. “Sometimes,” says Dorcas, “when I wake up at night, I still listen for her breathing. Or I try to remember exactly how she’d say something—what her voice sounded like in the mornings, or when she was giving the tea kettle a what-for—and I can’t get it right. I’m forgetting already.”

“You can still hold on to what you’ve got. Living doesn’t mean letting go of everything.” Remus looks down at his hands, the cigarette lit and burning away to ash, thinking of his mother’s voice and the way she turned her attention and her smile into a gift, how the sun got into her hair in the garden and made her a halo of copper. Not the specifics, always, but enough; the important parts of her he keeps pristine, twined through muscle and bone. “There’s a lot left in you. You’re still alive. Don’t—don’t throw that away.”

“I’m not throwing it away, Remus. I’m giving back to the cause. A regular bloody saint.” Her fingers fan out across the smear of the horizon, and she turns her head away from the rosebush to exhale smoke in the opposite direction; a habit, he knows, from her first flat with Marlene, when Dorcas started smoking outside or out of windows to spare the houseplants and Marlene, needing no real persuasion, started doing the same. “The Order’s had every spare part of me for the better part of a year, and if Dumbledore can’t understand he’s never going to get anywhere playing nice and trying to fucking negotiate, he might as well dig his own grave. When something hurts you, sometimes you have to hurt it back. So I don’t really need the lecture, because from how I see it right now, you’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing left to lose, and when he finds me, I promise I’ll go laughing, if that makes you feel any better.”

It feels like a blow to the ribs. Remus holds his breath in his lungs and blows out a cloud of smoke, letting his eyes sting. “You’ve got us. We’re not nothing.”

“Never said you were,” she says, cocking her head with a smile that says, very clearly, But what is this, next to what was. When the light hits her she almost looks twenty years old again, irrepressible and tightly-wound, a graceful pathfinder, like her hands have never bent into shapes she never wanted to know and she never learned the sound of her own voice splitting someone else’s bones with a curse. “You always were smarter than the rest of us. You’ll probably live to be a hundred.”

“I’d rather not,” he mutters, the impossibility of it going unspoken. What does that even mean, except outliving everyone you’ve ever loved? “Why don’t you stay here tonight? There’s a spare bed, or the couch again, and Sirius tells me he can make omelettes now. We should test that. I think he was just trying to be impressive.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t, or you won’t?”

Dorcas grinds her cigarette into the bottom step and doesn’t look up. “Both.”

He looks at her from across the edge of the night, her eyes so dark and so deadly resolved that he knows this must be what she wanted all along: that Dorcas Meadowes, ancient at twenty-two, rendered herself up and existed entirely without bounds for a few short months; that Dorcas, whose fingers and bones bear the stain of spells Remus will never use, knows exactly what it is to be forced into the cliffside-grip of the present tense. What she wants is immolation, however brief, however glorious. A slow wave of horror courses through Remus; what good can he do in the face of something like that, when all he wants to do is hold on to a world that’s shown him quite plainly that it doesn’t care whether he lives or he dies?

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says, softly, choking on how useless it sounds. “Christ, I wish—I hate this. I hate it.”

“Look,” she says. Her hand on his elbow, her face alive, unfettered, “You’re still here, Remus. And you’ve still got something worth protecting, so this might sound a bit dodgy coming from me, but if you want my honest advice? Live. No matter what else happens, just live. Live fucking voraciously, when you can. Let yourself be daft. Learn to be stupid together all over again. Don’t let it go sour. Don’t sit in the corners.”

In truth, that sounds exhausting to Remus, aching in the spaces between his ribs where the skin is still pulling into place beneath the waning moon, and now with the reminder of new blood to be spilled for the cause so soon after lingering heavily in the back of his head. But he doesn’t tell her so when she leans in to kiss him on the cheek, or when he does the same to her just before she Apparates, knowing he can no longer hold on to her; as he watches Arcturus brighten too quickly in the southern sky, he imagines her with a vividness so intense he wonders for a moment if he’s dreaming: wandering into the mouth of a distant forest where she waits like bated breath, bright bird in the dark, a brutal knowledge in her eyes. Then, in rapid succession: Dorcas two years ago stringing up her Christmas lights, Dorcas who liked to sing Bowie while she cooked and went barefoot even outside, Dorcas who biked to work like a Muggle and loved pinball machines and could talk to you at length about Nabokov’s poetry, almost able to convince you it wasn’t complete shite—fragments drifting into a familiar pattern, kept whole in the artless collage of memory.

Early in the morning, that time just before full dawn when the sun thins the darkness to shadows, a bird hits his bedroom window in panicked, breakneck flight. He goes outside and keeps watch for owls or stray cats, hoping it will hop to its feet and fly off again, but its head droops shortly after, its feathers ruffling uselessly in the kindly wind; they bury it that afternoon, near the overgrown garden next to his father’s dead owl, but Remus can feel it in his hand for the rest of the day: its flightless wings, it almost weightless body small enough to fit in his palm like a broken charm. Bereft, he thinks. It’s like the word bereft, the ghost sensations of belonging still whispering through his limbs. One less thing in his life.

—

An incomplete list:

Dorcas Meadowes, twenty-two. Benjy Fenwick, seventy-six. Aoife Bones, forty-eight. Sophie Gudgeon, thirty. Gideon and Fabian Prewett, both twenty-three. Marlene McKinnon, twenty-two. Edgar Bones, fifty-seven; Isabel Bones, fifty-three; their three children, aged fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen. Whole strings of uninvolved Muggles and Muggleborns too numerous to count; half-bloods with the wrong politics or sympathies or spouses, or last names. A giant, caught in crossfire. Two werewolves, ages unknown. The certainty of surviving a trip to the late-night shop round the corner for cigarettes. Knowing you can live through the rest of the year and not go mad. Trust, freely given. Love, unquestioningly taken.

He’s in Cornwall on the fourth day of his visit to the vampire clan he’s been assigned when Caradoc’s Patronus finds him, late in the afternoon. Giving himself a moment to breathe at the entrance to the abandoned mine they’ve made their home—as much for himself as for them, not wanting to bring the sunlight in on his freckled face—and speaks to the oldest one, the man who seems to be something of a leader. They’re surprisingly easy to talk to, almost comfortable: Remus isn’t sure if it’s due to their relative isolation here on the clifftop or if, perhaps, they simply feel an affinity for other dark creatures—they know their own, they say, and they’re extremely receptive to the Gospel of Dumbledore, which makes Remus clench his fists between his knees and vow to try that much harder—but if the circumstances were different, he probably would have enjoyed his time here, lack of decent plumbing and abundance of live prey notwithstanding. All they asked for was one drop of blood; never his scars, never his secret agony.

“Something has happened,” the oldest one says when Remus tells him he needs to leave, his skin threaded with veins, ash-quiet. Some of the others call him a king, but Remus can’t be sure whether it’s out of formality or fantasy. It seems like one big inside joke he’s not privy to.

“Yes,” says Remus. He tries not to let the swelling panic show on his face.

“And this will not stop. This will not stop until it reaches us here, and even then. I know exactly what it’ll be,” the old man trails off, but Remus doesn’t answer; he seems to be talking to himself, his strange eyes pale and far away. “I don’t see that we have a choice, young man. Keep your word, and you can tell your master you’ll have what aid we can offer.”

After thanking him, Remus forces himself to walk slowly back outside: he finds Rigel in the south and follows its solemn vigil to the west, down the finger-length trail of the bow to where his shade-lit house is waiting below, where Caradoc, his hand over his eyes, grapples blindly for Remus’s hand from the bottom step. The trees sway as the stars tear across the big woodland sky, their heat-hazy clamor like a dirge, leaving blurry white spots imprinted on the backs of Remus’s eyes when he blinks.

They bury Dorcas in Yorkshire four days later, with Marlene. Her father stares at the wall during the funeral, where there are photos of her spread in an inept arrangement, flitting through the frames in some, smiling still-life in others; her mother and sister, who Remus has never met, shake his hand. He can see her in them, her mother’s nose that was Dorcas’s nose blunted, Mrs. Meadowes’s hair and her daughter’s that are the same thick, wavy cast as Dorcas’s. When he remembers what Dumbledore said, how Voldemort found her waiting in her house with a cup of tea and laughter, apparently, for every curse, he has to kneel on the tile in the loo of the funeral parlor with Sirius until his hands stop shaking.

On Sunday, they go to realign themselves with James and Lily, who are living out of boxes in a bolt-hole in Hackney where Harry routinely gnaws on James’s ear and tries dauntlessly to climb the stairs on tottering one-year-old feet. “Moo,” he says, eloquently, lifting his arms upon seeing Remus in the doorway, and Remus has a few moments of dread that things are going to be awkward and horrible and he’ll never find his place in the offbeat rhythm he had with them, everyone else moving three notes ahead of him while he sits with his hands in his lap trying to find his spot; and they don’t quite harmonize, at first, but then Lily is shoving Harry into his arms, grinning at him like she means it, wrapping her arms around him like he belongs there. James, overcompensating as gracelessly as he always does when he’s been wrong or wronged, takes his turn after Lily, giving Remus an affectionate pat on the bottom like it’s still two years ago, because James would always rather pretend the worst hasn’t happened instead of talking about it and thus making it real; Peter claps him on the shoulder.

And so, he stumbles back into their riotous melody like he never forgot it at all.

Or, almost: James and Lily fit against him in the same patchwork patterns they always have, especially once James stops fussing, and Harry is too happy to drool on every part of Remus his determined mouth can reach; but Peter is strangely subdued and off with him—and only him—for most of the afternoon. No one else seems to notice, and he’s starting to think he’s imaging the whole thing, or that maybe Dorcas’s death has him on edge (though they hadn’t known each other well) when Peter snaps at him after Remus repeats a question, having watched him drift out of the conversation long since.

“What’s up your arse?” Sirius, glaring down the curve of the table to where Peter flinches at the acid in his voice.

“Nothing. I’m just tired, mate, sorry.” He doesn’t meet Remus’s eyes.

It reminds him of being thirteen again, when he first realized that Peter, pudgy, amiable bundle of blithesome smiles and who-me shrugs, wasn’t a very happy boy: he resented Sirius and James alike sometimes, in turn for the closeness that walled him out and for their teenage impatience with anything that moved at a slower speed than theirs, grazing his knees and bruising to the bone when he tried to match them; how he could never find, even now, his own spaces to occupy outside of Transfiguration homework and Quidditch stands and the keen eyes in the corridors just before moonrise, reliable and easy, quick to laugh even when something wasn’t funny.

That those feelings would extend to Remus and maybe Lily too isn’t something he’s ever considered. He thinks back to his own exasperation with Peter in school, wanting to be a Sirius or a James when he was Peter, no more them than Remus was, and Remus, who was always older than himself, who always knew himself and where his borders ended, never had much sympathy. All the times he and Sirius went to see James and Lily when they lived in Islington or Kensington and no one thought to ask Peter along; the owl sent when Sirius’s squad was attacked in Surrey, Peter the last to know. A few times, lying in bed with Sirius in the middle of the afternoon or early evening, wine in oversized coffee mugs, a book or the crossword and a ballpoint propped up on Sirius’s broad back, and both of them pretending not to be home when they heard the doorbell echo through the walls.

The unfairness of it, if some of it can be called that, sticks in his mind like burrs, and he can’t shake it when James and Lily suggest stopping by Remus’s house after dinner and Peter begs off instead, claiming his mother’s arthritis is acting up again. “See you soon, Peter,” he says, trying for a smile, trying to get used to the way even Peter’s face has sharpened with adulthood the way all their faces have.

“Sure, Moony,” says Peter, and turns the doorknob, one foot already on the threshold.

James is as taken with Remus’s house as he was at twelve, pointing out the perfect geometric angles of the stairs and shoving his head in the refrigerator to make sure it really is exactly as big on the inside as it is on the outside, having a go at the ice tray while Lily sips tea at the table and lets Harry tug her sock off her foot until James picks him up to give his son an early and terribly incorrect lesson on Muggle culture.

“Look at it—there’s a whole compartment for eggs, Lily, like they’ve got to keep everything separate. I want one.” He pauses to examine the vegetable crisper, pulling it out and pushing it back in. “Remus—I’ll give you twenty Galleons for it and I’ll even move it. You can have our cold cupboard, mate, you’re a cold cupboard sort of man.”

“Why don’t you stick your head in the oven? It’s the only thing that could possibly knock out more of your brain cells than you already have,” says Lily. “Honestly. You’re absolutely beastly around anything with a lightbulb attached.”

“I can’t very well stick my face in your parents’ appliances, can I,” he reasons, lifting Harry up high so that he shrieks happily somewhere in the region of the ceiling fan. “Remus knows a man has urges.”

“Only because he’s too nice to say anything. Besides, it is a bit cute when you get all worked up over them. Makes me want to buy you a toaster oven.” Lily pats his hand and takes Harry from James in a maneuver that looks complicated to Remus, but practiced and perfected with the finely-honed skill of two sudden parents working in tandem. He’s always thought parenting must be a little like being the Minister of Magic or maybe God: how could anyone ever possibly be prepared for it, to protect such a little life, but here are his friends, doing as well as anyone ever has or ever will. It makes him smile. “Here, Remus—d’you mind watching him for a bit? I want to inspect your perimeters, see the glory of the Lupin family home.”

“Oh—no, it’s fine. I wasn’t finished asking him about the election yet, anyway,” he says, finding his lap full of wiggly baby-fingers again. “Hallo,” he says, letting Harry grip his finger with a jam-sticky hand. Lily laughs at him.

“Just yell if you run into anything unsavory,” James tells her on her way out, poking around in Remus’s pantry. “Used to be loads of gnomes out here. You never know.”

Lily curls her fingers into his hair, gently, as she passes him in the doorway. “I know.”

Westerly sunset has already stirred the sky to rust and ruin outside the kitchen window, the last of his tea going cold while he discusses dinner options for tomorrow night and the current political climate with Harry, who babbles happily along. His house seems to breathe in the new voices reverberating in its cobwebbed cracks and corners, its angles straining for them the way Remus does himself, drinking them in, making room to accommodate other beating hearts again, trying to learn the absurd context of hope.

“You sound like a plonker,” says Sirius, from directly behind him. Harry makes a high, delighted sound and reaches for his hand when he comes up to the back of Remus’s chair. “Confidentially, Harry, I think he’s being a self-sacrificing little raisin again. He should let me bring him dinner, his arteries could do with bit of clogging. Among other things.”

“My arteries don’t need clogging any more than we need to run loose in Islington at the full moon. Bring me fish and chips?”

“I only asked because it would have done the world a bit of good,” Sirius murmurs, leaning down to kiss the place where his hairline meets his neck, breathing him in when Remus rests his head against his shoulder. “Did Wormtail seem a bit off to you this afternoon?”

“Yeah. I just—maybe it’s getting to him, all of it. I mean, it’s awful. Everything’s awful, no matter how you look at it.” But he watches Harry play with the watch on Sirius’s wrist, green eyes river-dark and his hair already with James’s tendency to insanity while Sirius smiles against the back of his neck, and thinks: no, not everything.

“He was fine when I saw him last week.” His nose presses into Remus’s head, his breath ruffling his hair when he laughs at the impressive amount of drool on his arm. “Christ. Look at this—I’m letting a baby leak on me and planning ahead for dinner. When did we get married?”

“Second year, if you ask some Slytherins.”

“That’s… fairly apt, actually.”

A clatter of feet in the kitchen entryway signals James, who is dangling the toothbrush holder from the bathroom between his thumb and forefinger like incriminating evidence in one of the many Muggle mysteries he’s seen; unfortunately, it only makes him look deranged. “Shacking up again, I see!” he says, winking at them as both toothbrushes rattle. Only, James can’t actually wink, so he just grins and squints both eyes astigmatically in lively imitation.

“He’s found us out, Moony,” says Sirius, laughing into Remus’s hair. “Congratulations, mate, you’re a bloody genius. You’ve put the clues together inside that spacious skull of yours and outfoxed Scotland Yard yet again. Put that down.”

“Sorry, Black, did you need Moony to yourself? I can take Harry and come back in, oh, five minutes.”

“Fuck you, Potter.”

“He can hear you!” James yelps, flinging himself to the table and making to cover Harry’s ears, toothbrushes and all. “And Lily’ll blame me. The other day I thought he was trying to say that while she was at work and I nearly cried. Would’ve been great, though, once she got over the murderous rage. Remus, are those kneesocks?”

“I really don’t need this from a man who wears holiday pajamas.”

“Better than Christmas jumpers,” says James, taking a seat in the chair beside Remus and adjusting his glasses with his middle finger. In the thinning light of the kitchen he looks older, dimmed by the exhaustion of living constantly with both feet at the precipice of a cliff, danger almost as regular as tea-time for him and Lily by now. “I’m not that far gone yet.”

“Nah, you’re worse,” Sirius says cheerfully, plucking Harry up from Remus’s lap. “You should be paying me to be friends with you, Prongs.”

“I mean, if we’re starting that, you’ve got seasonal underwear. I think it kind of cancels out, like.” Sirius levels a betrayed glare at him that only makes it halfway to his eyes.

James, taking a drink from Sirius’s teacup, narrows his eyes. “I thought you said you threw those away,” he says, making a face when he swallows and then going for Lily’s instead.

“He likes them on me. Huge, huge tart, that one. I count the entire month of December my workout for the whole of the year,” Sirius says by way of answering for him. He’s set Harry on the counter, handing him measuring cups that hang from tiny hooks over the sink and watching him try to use them like building blocks, making him laugh his belly-deep baby laugh so that Remus can’t even throw anything at him in retaliation. Not for the first time, it occurs to him that Sirius would make a better father than he thinks he would; beside him, James seems to having oddly similar thoughts, watching Sirius with a solemn stretch of intensity at the corners of his lips and in his eyes, and Remus wonders if it’s only melancholy or memory, but when James turns to him too, he knows, deeper down, exactly what it is.

“It’s a good thing Lily and I married the two of you,” he says, with all the false cheer he can drum up when he’s contemplating his own violent death, “you know. I can’t think, I mean, if something does—”

“James, don’t.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Don’t.” Sirius, undone by the fear showing through the veneer of good humor, turns to glare at him, James’s voice turning to cotton in his throat. “Don’t even. He’s going to learn to say something vile by the end of the year and Lily’s going to keep eating his baby food you’re going to Floo us having a stroke about flesh-eating bacteria every time he’s got a rash and it’ll take the three of us plus Peter with a bucket to pick you up when he goes to Hogwarts. Learn to fucking deal with it.”

And James, tugged back to himself again, smiles at them with a fathomless sort of gratitude deep in the backs of his bright eyes and learns to fucking deal with it.

Later, cradled by the velvet-blue dark of the night, the prickly stars cloaked in wisps of clouds and the brittle curve of the moon bled from the sky, he sits with Sirius on the back steps with the green rasp of the trees and coming August in the heat-hazy air, the two of them taking turns staring down the neck of a firewhisky bottle. Quiet twines through the cracks of the house, growing up in the gaps of conversation where they don’t talk about the massacres or the disappearances or the factions forming in secret after Order meetings, how no one will say the word spy aloud but it spreads through them like fever and rots in the silences that have begun to fester between them. How their best friends can’t even unpack, moving always from shadow to shadow like bated breath with their own deaths looming behind every second thought. How it feels like the world really is ending, sometimes. How it’s so much worse than it was ever supposed to be.

The world is hardening, he supposes, turning all of them brittle with it, and how could it not, when every sound could mean the end of everything, when every darkness could be hiding the annihilation of everything you’ve ever loved? If you think about it, you start to go mad, but there’s no way to keep from thinking about it when Dorcas and Marlene are dead and James and Lily have been in constant flight for a year and Sirius, beautiful, mercurial Sirius, who Remus loves like sticky summer heat and the breath inflating his lungs, stares out at the wide tree-line where July blurs at the corners thinking the same thing Remus is: how all the fear and the worry won’t change anything or save anyone at all. That this time tomorrow, he could be holding a dead vessel of skin and bone where the man he loved used to be.

Sirius rubs a hand over his eyes and shoves the bottle at Remus, leaning back on the heels of his hands and, by this point, drunk enough not to keep his mouth shut. “You know,” he says, turning to Remus with a grin, “I’m pretty attached to the idea of being alive.”

“I’m pretty attached to that, too. So let’s keep it that way, right?” He leans over, pressing a kiss to the place between Sirius’s jaw and his ear, his head butting into Sirius’s neck. “No eating things out of bins or smoking on the roof. Or riding the motorbike higher than the bedroom window, you’re no good to me in pieces, Pads. I like all your bits.”

“I mean,” says Sirius, doing his best to keep up the smile, “I do like living, and there’s a lot I want to—I just,” he pulls away from Remus, staring into the open bottle. “I don’t want to die,” he says, quietly. “I don’t want to. But when I think about, God, when I think about you, or James or Lily—”

“Stop it.” Remus spins him around by the shoulders, his grip digging into Sirius’s skin, his mouth gone tight and dry. Panic slams into him full-force; he has to look into Sirius’s eyes to get his heart back down from his throat, thinking of the way the flecks of color there correspond to his own as he breathes, harshly at first, and then deeper, as if he’s trying, desperately, to do it for both of them. “Don’t do this. Don’t.”

His hands grasp at Remus’s chest before coming up around his shoulders to hold him, swaying there with the creaking of the trees and the boundless night, breathing, breathing each other in.

“Do you remember,” he murmurs into Sirius’s neck, “last October, when they ambushed you, and you were out for nearly a week?”

“Yeah.”

“I—” he falters, swallowing. This is too ugly, too poisonous a thought to show anyone, but he’s already flayed himself raw with it, all those nights spent wishing he could turn his fear and grief outward into a weapon. “I wanted to hurt them. I’ve never wanted to just—I’ve never hated anything that much, and it was awful, and I still don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d come across any of them. It scares me. Still, I mean.” Sirius pulls back to look at him, very close; it takes Remus a moment to look back. “So, what I’m saying is, I’m very glad you’re attached to your general existence, because I am, too. Murderously so.”

“Moony. Moony. Shhh.” Sirius tugs him back in, hands on either side of his face, the sandpaper of his chin when he kisses him, the grip of his hands on Remus’s neck like a finger-hold, like something permanent. He gasps into Sirius’s mouth, half-sobbing with laughter until they settle, trembling, against each other again, his mouth over Sirius’s throat where his blood thunders through his body, where his voice and his warmth spill out of him and into Remus: alive, alive, alive. “You know,” he says, the cogs and wires of his body working under Remus’s mouth, forming words, “I almost went after you. That night. I still—I should have.”

“When I was on the Knight Bus, an old man—he was a bit mad, I think—told me to go home.” He turns his head in the crook of Sirius’s shoulder, closing his eyes in the cradle of skin and flannel. “It was a bit unnerving after, well, everything else.”

Beneath his hands, he feels Sirius go suddenly still and then lean back again, pushing Remus away by his elbows and frowning in that uneasy way of his that means fear, rather than fury. “What else did he say?”

Remus blinks and tries to cast his mind back to nearly a month ago, three a.m. and emptied out. “Not much. Something about—finding someone, I think, while I still could. I’m not sure. He was a mad old man on a bus and I wasn’t exactly in the mood for conversation, Sirius.” But just as suddenly, he feels the back of his neck prickle the same way it did on that night in London, when he saw Sirius’s face ravaged, haunted by the ghost of himself: he remembers the dream he woke from too soon, his body echoing with all the things Sirius never got to tell him; when he found him that night so close to home, or, rather, he thinks, when they’d been led to each other; and then again, the morning after moonset. The bird buried near the garden; the strange unhinging of the stars in the darkest of his nights, galvanizing him to movement, whispering for his burgeoning heart to hurry, hurry. He looks at Sirius with wide eyes and says, uncertainly, “Fuck.”

“Ten points to Gryffindor, young Lupin.” There’s no mocking in his tone, the amusement flooded through with worry and a quiet sort of disbelief, his hands still gripping Remus’s elbows so hard the knuckles have turned bone-white and rigid, his expression straddling some no-man’s land between guilty and homicidal. “I’m just going to, y’know, put this out there, but Remus—I had about as much use for Divination as the next bloke with two neurons to rub together, but I’ve read enough to know that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you fucking listen, or else they find what’s left of you in a jar of peanut butter six years later.”

“You lied on your Divination O.W.L., I hardly think you’re one to—”

“So did you, cupcake, but I guess mine was just slightly more convincing than yours. No need to be bitter.”

“You said you saw yourself naked in the Quidditch showers being fed pudding by a man with a, what was it, a strategically-placed tea towel and scars that depicted the forking branches of his life in dog years.”

“Look at my seventh year, Moony: I’ve got the makings of a real Seer. The gullible read their Divination textbooks and the rest of us go through life knowing exactly what the gratuitous nudity in their dreams means.” He’s grinning again, laughing at the halfhearted shove Remus angles into his ribs. “Speaking of—how many times do I have to buy you dinner before you start putting out again?”

“If you keep going at this rate, maybe another six months and a wedding cake,” says Remus through a poorly-concealed laugh, and Sirius leers at him as best as a drunk man with the end of the world following him around like a drawn noose can possibly do. It’s a wonder, sometimes, that they can still find the muscle strength to laugh, a miracle that fills their lungs with each other; Remus looks up at the smoky midnight sky unfurled overhead, stars arranged into a map like grains of sand and Saturn glimmering to the east, too big and burning too bright for a cloud-shrouded night in July, even with the moon on the wane. “Would I sound like a ponce,” he asks, “if I said the universe was trying to knock our heads together?”

“No.” Sirius’s eyes looking back at him are like finding something unexpected and beautiful in the dark. “I’d say that sounds about right.”

“But why? I mean—what for?”

“I don’t know, Moony,” says Sirius, looking as uneasy again as Remus feels. “But I reckon we should probably pay attention. Or else I’ll have to put you under my fucking shirt and never let you out of my sight again so you don’t do anything cataclysmic.”

“Or so the cataclysmic happens to both of us,” Remus agrees, and kisses him.

By the time they stumble to the bathroom together, he’s already thinking about the implications of a cosmic collision again: how they are both inextricably tangled, split photons twisting together and reacting to each other’s movements, no matter where they are. He feels each bump of their hips at the bathroom sink when they brush their teeth, the peppermint smiles smothered against their lips, cold feet on cold feet beneath the duvet—the taken-for-granted, everyday miracles he could have gone the rest of his life without if they hadn’t found their way in the dark again. Beneath the sheet, Remus shivers and turns to Sirius, watching the way they blur together, the re-written lines of their bodies on his bed like spilled ink.

“Try to sleep,” says Sirius, sounding remarkably more sober than he did twenty minutes ago. “Look at you. Already four-thirty.”

Remus blinks, looks at his clock, blinks again when he finds that Sirius is, improbably, right. “How did you know that?”

“Four-thirty is your most melancholy hour,” says Sirius, pressing a sleepy thumb to the crease that’s formed between Remus’s eyes. “You nonce. What, did you think I never learned to tell Moony-time?” And before Remus can consider the implications of that, Sirius slips his arms around his waist and closes his eyes, gathers him in, and Remus drifts there with him, into dreaming.

—

August breaks the leaves from the trees, still green and breathing the death of summertime drought. Remus comes to a mossy clearing, where he sits on the edge of a hollowed log with his heart hammering a litany against his ribs and spreads his fingers through the dark, lets the scorched air lick through his palm like arson; he tilts his head up to the slim golden thorn of the moon in the sky and the turn of the summer stars, thinking of Sirius, imagining his advent.

He’ll come home from trailing the Death Eater Dumbledore set him on tonight, take his shoes off by the door; maybe he’ll have charmed a confession out of him, and maybe not. He might bring a cake or a cheese pasty home for Remus, or put the kettle on and watch for him out of the kitchen window; he might sit outside and smoke on the steps, watching the trees and the stars, counting the time with the strange rotations of Remus’s clock like some relentless metronome, waiting for him in the fitful night, because he knows Sirius will be waiting for him. Because Remus has read enough in his life to know that this is how journeys are meant to end: two lovers meeting, no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles; he staggers to his feet and holds his jagged pieces together, and breathes.

To the west, Altair glows like a torch in the triangle positioned in a knifepoint above home; but to the east, the crown of Corona Borealis burns a trail through the trees, beckoning him back to the heart of the night, where the werewolves watched him go with their eyes glistening out of the low branches and spoke in slow metaphor, strange dialects like earth choked out with ivy. Both of them beckon to him, deep in his heart-blood and his spine-notches, and he has a strange sense of watching it from outside of himself: of both paths pulling him into different orbits, lines connecting in a branching pattern when he takes a step towards one instead of the other, sending him tumbling into the edges of twenty seconds from now, six hours from now, thirteen days, a month, a year, twelve years from where he balances on the balls of his feet and curls his fingers around this single brittle moment in August, 1981.

Again, he thinks of Sirius: Sirius in London, Sirius smoking at his kitchen table, Sirius thinking of him; and then in turn the people he’s just left, their secrets, their code he hasn’t yet deciphered, the promises he has yet to keep. Blink, he thinks, and the world shifts. Take a step to the left or the right, and set yourself on a collision course where the echoes ripple out to catch the ones you love the most.

There’s a nightbird singing, somewhere off to the west, and Remus thinks of how it has always lived in this place, how it nests in the trees and sings for him at night, how the trees hide the werewolves and the werewolves wait for him at dusk, Sirius waits at home, Dumbledore waits in his office, the Order makes one move and not the other on his word, how the world doesn’t care whether you live or you die. Action, and reaction. The sear-point of the stars on a particular summer night; the shiver that runs through his body, burning and chilling him, as with love. How they’ve become a universe, together, and the universe has become them. How they are all inexorably, irrevocably connected—how the cartography of his own desires hums deep inside him and peaks in his knees bending towards the west, towards his broken clock and his chipped teacups and his thousand promises, towards Sirius, towards home.

He makes it approximately twenty-three and three-quarters steps before something casts a monstrous shadow across the leaves, darkness slicing through darkness, remembering that his wand is on his nightstand because he can’t take it with him when he goes to visit them, the less magic the better, except when something is sniffing him out in the dark and reaching into its pocket oh fuck—

“Yum. You smell like peaches,” it says, right at his throat as it takes an extremely generous and firm grab of Remus’s bottom and sends him stumbling gracefully into the brush, arse-first.

“What,” he starts, heaving breath into his straining lungs before giving up on any semblance of composure, “what the hell are you doing, having a game of one-sided tag with my arse? I could have been a Death Eater, I could have, I could have been a bear.”

“Don’t get so flappy about it, Moony, I’d know your arse in my sleep. Which, I can remind you in loving detail, I do. And we don’t have bears, England makes do with us, remember.” Sirius takes both his hands and tugs him back up, his eyes wide and silvery in the wand-light. “The stars are too bright tonight.”

“You sound like a centaur,” says Remus, peeling something slimy off his cheek.

“And your voice broke just then but I didn’t mention that, now did I? You’ve got—” Sirius tilts his head, swiping his thumb over Remus’s forehead and looking up above the trees again. “I could see the stars through the kitchen window,” he says, as if that explains everything, and the thing is—the thing is, it does.

“I wish this would stop,” he says, dusting off his knees and letting Sirius steer him towards the edge of the trees, where the stars are still flashing like a neon sign overhead; when he looks back to the glittering trail of Corona Borealis behind him, it’s faded to specks of old light again, shivering in the distant stretch of nothing. “You know, I can’t decide whether we’re both going insane or if the world’s just catching up to us on that front.”

“Nothing’s wrong with us except the fact that one of us is wearing seasonal socks in August and his underwear seem to be chafing a bit, and it isn’t me.”

“Circumstances would suggest that everything is wrong with us,” says Remus, slightly breathless, plucking a beetle from Sirius’s hair. “This isn’t—this isn’t normal, Sirius, I think I might—it’s like a map, I think.”

Sirius stops short and looks at him, tangles of words in his mouth. “What, you mean—all this?” he asks, gesturing to the sky, the ground, his hand on Remus’s elbow.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” says Remus. He points to Altair, burning omen-heavy above the house. “These—this has been going on since the night I left, and everything that comes with it—the old man, the birds, my clock, the dreams—it’s like it’s trying to show us which way to go,” he says, taking a slow breath and watching the first spark of understanding dawn in Sirius’s eyes. “I could have gone back to the werewolves, I was, I was actually thinking about it, but I could have gone home to find you, too, and you could have stayed at home, and it’s—d’you see? This is where we could go,” he points towards home, trying to find a way to show Sirius what he understands so Remus can make him understand, “and that was where I could have gone, five minutes ago, back there. But I can’t, now. Because I’m here—”

“And I followed—”

“And we chose this—”

“So if we’re here right now—”

“—Then this is what happens if we find each other,” says Remus, his eyes on the faded hang on Lyra, the claw of the moon beginning to fill. “This is what happens when I didn’t go home on that night in London. This is what happens if we stay together.”

“This is what happens if we don’t,” Sirius finishes for him, his face alive, overflowing. Remus stares at him in a sort of wonder, in a dream.

“Maybe this conversation,” says Remus, staring at the gradual smile curling into Sirius’s lips, “the fact that we’re even having it, I mean—us, right now, and your hands on my arse—maybe this changes everything.”

“So it does,” says Sirius, the clamor of everything pressing heavily against Remus’s senses—the dusty-warm August air, the vein of stars, the places where their hands are held together, soft and deadly at every point where they touch.

It takes them a good fifteen minutes to get back home, where they can see the reflection of their faces—young and old and new all at once, somehow; it takes Remus a moment to realize he’s seeing them—lit up in the porch-light of the kitchen door, distorted through the glass. Sirius splits a cheese and potato pasty with him where they sit, half-stunned, half-numb, in the fluorescent whine of the ceiling fan, talking about birds and teacups and the finger-lengths between the stars, valleys and rivers and frozen borders between them waiting to be bridged. At one in the morning, Remus wraps himself in the purple shag blanket from the back of the couch and sits beneath the gathering clouds, soothed by the rattle of the bush crickets, by the solidity of the dry earth beneath his bare feet.

He’s rolling a cigarette when Sirius finds him, licking the side of the Rizla and smoothing it into an uneven cylinder when he realizes he’s forgotten his matches on the kitchen counter; from behind him, Sirius cups his hand around the tip and mutters at his ear, striking kindling with his voice and making Remus shiver, the way it always has.

“Thanks,” he says around the tip, drawing it in. He leans back against Sirius’s chest, feeling his heart beating through his back, reverberating in his spine like ripples. “Padfoot?”

“Mm?”

“What does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” says Sirius, heart beating, arms around Remus’s waist, “I really don’t. Other than the end of the world, maybe. Or the universe really wants me to shag you where it can see.”

“If only,” says Remus. Tilting his head against Sirius’s shoulder, he watches him watching the stars, their distant light veiled with wisps of clouds like a faraway harmony. It reminds him of London, watching him watch the television they bought last year with a chaotic combination of suspicion and fascination that always made Remus smile; probably, he figures as he presses the cigarette between Sirius’s lips, he spent more time watching him than he ever did the television itself. “If you go back to the flat this week, bring the tele.”

The laugh that tumbles out of Sirius’s mouth is more felt than heard, warming him down to his toes. “You just want to make fun of me watching the weather, and I’m going to tell you right now, Lupin: I won’t stand for it. One word out of you and the divorce papers will hit you so hard you’ll need reconstruction surgery.”

“But you get so worried about the little people in the box,” Remus laughs, and sputters when Sirius bites down gently on his ear and puts the cigarette back between his lips, his fingers making a V against the corners of his mouth. When he licks his lips, he can taste the salt from his fingertips, the hectic warmth of his skin.

Remus finishes his cigarette in two harsh drags and crushes it in the parched brown threads of grass, leaning back against Sirius so that he can feel him breathe, bending his neck to kiss the place where Remus’s hairline begins. He considers the two of them, his greys and greens and Sirius’s reds and blues, the holes in his socks, the hem of Sirius’s trousers that Remus darned himself, the place in his palm where a thorn got stuck on his way down the trellis outside his bedroom window the first night he went out to meet Sirius at the end of the lane, seventeen years old and bound to each other by their own burgeoning blood. He considers them here, maps only they can read: north and south in their fingers and toes, east and west in the secret inward curl of their spines, a pathfinder in his mouth on Sirius’s skin, how his scar-veined skin and Sirius’s burnt-out name fit together in a scintillating constellation wrenched out on savage cosmic teeth, patched seams and stitched-up skin like stars hidden in their bones. The clockwork cartography of their hands, their mouths.

If there exists a possibility for them in every branching loop of the universe, Remus likes the one they make right now: his head on Sirius’s shoulder and his fingers around his wrist, Sirius’s heart beating like a secret through his own body—drifting here with the ash and the August fever, forever.

He tugs Sirius’s hand into his lap and spreads out his fingers, running his thumb over the northern peak of every knuckle and then up to his wrist, where the golden hands of his watch tick the same ruthless tune that counted down the end of his brother’s life. “How’d you end up with this?” he asks, watching it gleam in the night-light.

Sirius only hesitates for the span of a breath before he catches Remus’s fingers up in his, speaking into the wheaty-brown spill of waves at the top of his head. “Andromeda was still talking to Narcissa off and on after Regulus got his miserable fucking arse killed. The ex-mother let Narcissa have a few of his old things apparently, and then she shared the bounty with Andromeda. I think it brings out the gold undertones in my complexion, personally.” He presses his nose into Remus’s hair and breathes in, his chest swelling and deflating with anticipatory breath against Remus’s back. “It was my dad’s ages ago, before he had it. Sometimes—when he got bad, I mean, mostly towards the end—I’d put it on him, or comb his hair and talk to him. It calmed him down when he had the fits, and I thought—it’s stupid. I used to think it was because it was me, but I don’t think he knew me by that point. I think he just didn’t want to be alone.”

“No one wants to be alone.”

“No,” says Sirius, “but sometimes you have to learn how to be.”

Everything Remus knows about Sirius’s father comes from two or three offhand comments made years ago, once under the influence of vodka-induced confession, another spoken in sleepy teenage indiscretion: that he went mad when Sirius was very young, and he died the year he turned thirteen. Briefly—selfishly—he wonders if even James has heard this, if anyone else even knows, and folds it away, deep in his belly. “You were still his son,” says Remus, softly, softly, weaving their fingers together again.

“Maybe,” says Sirius. “At any rate, I ended up being the son Mum and Dad Potter really wanted and then your beautiful mother adopted me to do the heavy lifting around here, so I’d say I came out of all that with the better bargain.”

“Idiot,” says Remus, thinking of the way his mother would ask after Sirius, how she sent him Muggle candy and a new scarf at Christmas every year that he wore until they came apart, watching her teach him how to use the coffee maker on nights when Sirius came to stay, slipping him extra bacon and making concerned noises about the hair in his eyes and the tiny earring she couldn’t believe his teachers let him wear to class. “Mum loved you,” he says, his voice low, sweetly-thick with memory.

“I loved your mum,” Sirius says against his temple, the smile fine-grained into his words, “and between you and me and Mrs. Lupin’s old tomatoes, I fancy her son like mad.”

“She never was very surprised at that, y’know. After I—”

“Had a sad wank over me every night for years—”

“We’re talking about me, not you. I think she sort of expected it, like.” He turns Sirius’s palm in his hand and puts his ear to his chest, listening to the miraculous hum of his body, the sound of his voice moving through Remus like the blood in his heart. “I talked about you all the time whenever I was home, whatever stupid thing you were doing, or how funny you were, or your bloody hair or something you said—I was probably obvious, now that I think about it,” he says, remembering his mother’s patient smile whenever he brought up that lovely Sirius Black for the third time in an afternoon. “And then you got that earring sixth year and all my joints started turning to pudding. Christ. I must have been unbearable.”

“Yeah. She might have told me that a few times,” says Sirius, and there’s hair in his eyes and yearning in his mouth when Remus turns to look at him. “Oh, don’t look so betrayed, it’s not like she was telling me about your nightly toss-offs that ended in tears and my name echoing through the halls of the Lupin abode. She just said you talked about me a lot. The last time was right before seventh year started, she told me you’d gone on at length about my motorbike—probably all that hot, hard machine rumbling between your legs—haha, ow, I fucking need that hand—anyway, it always made me happy, knowing you were thinking about me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d fucked your brains out of your ears in Shrewsbury not three days before.”

“Such tact, Mr. Black,” says Remus, but he’s smiling, leaning in to kiss the laugh out of Sirius’s mouth. “For the record, in the interest of full disclosure and all, there was a point in sixth year when I didn’t think I could wank over you anymore without damaging something irreparable, but I still didn’t stop. You’ve made me completely insane, you know—I hope you’re happy, because I probably did knock something loose sometime around New Year’s and I haven’t got it back.”

Sirius laughs, a jangly, startled sound—the new one Remus is learning to pull out of him, the one he loves the hear the most. “Moony, my late-blooming little flower,” he murmurs. His knuckles drag down Remus’s ribs to his hips, where he feels each bump of bone on bone marking time in the notches of his spine. “All that prefect-y stuffing just snapping like so many overstuffed pockets. It’s hard, being a prefect’s boyfriend, by the way.”

“Oh?” Remus half-whispers, letting Sirius haul him into his lap, straddling his hips with his knees and kneading his hands up in Sirius’s hair. He watches the shadows flit across Sirius’s face, the cloud-thunder widening of his eyes, the glint of light off the fine slope of his nose, and feels the familiar catch of desire deep in his belly, the first lines of an old poem spoken with his blood and muscle and his beating heart, spreading wild through his body down to his fingers and toes.

“Everyone expects so much of you, setting a good example for the youth and not smuggling vodka in from Hogsmeade and all, but it really is difficult when all that prefect wants to do is skive off History of Magic so he can bend you over the desk in the dormitory and smoke with the windows closed.”

They laugh, Sirius’s hands sliding up his belly to feel the burst of it in his palms, and then Remus bends his neck down to kiss him, both of them laughing into it as Remus swipes his tongue across Sirius’s lips, feeling him drag it across his own, slow, and then raking it across his teeth, hard, harder. Sirius gets his belt and his fly undone, hitching his shirt up until he can press his hands along the skin of Remus’s lower back and curl them into Remus’s trousers, cupping both sides of his arse and squeezing him until he arches with it: he hisses into Sirius’s mouth when he reels him in by the hips again, groaning something that sounds like it belongs on some sort of nature documentary and grinding his hips into Sirius’s with a dizzying sort of roughness as he pulls away, nose to nose, teeth to teeth, their eyes flickering open.

Something inside Remus, something cracked and worn and ancient, begins to expand and breathe again, rising gently in his chest until it falls into place. His heart ripples against Sirius’s, moving the blood through his body like a limb long disused as he leans down to kiss him again, wonderingly, his fingers sliding around his neck, pressing his thumbs to the frantic-red pulse-points of his heartbeat and realizing, for maybe the first time, that there is no gravity like another person’s hands on your skin, like another person’s heart beating against your fingertips—for you, only for you.

“Let’s go inside,” he whispers into Sirius’s mouth. The hands at his hips tighten, finger-holds.

“Let’s not,” Sirius answers, and presses him gently back onto the blanket that’s fallen off Remus’s shoulders, one hand behind his head and the other at his chest, moving both of them with that thoughtless, inborn grace he tries to deny. “It’s not like we’ve never been naked in Merrie Olde England’s wilderness before.”

“Regent’s Canal isn’t wilderness,” says Remus, gasping at the friction of Sirius’s hips slamming into his, making him jerk up, convulsively. “God—neither is Hogwarts, for that matter.”

“This is private property.” One by one, Sirius plucks his buttons open and pulls away while Remus is still fumbling with his trousers, licking the very tip of his tongue into Remus’s navel, tasting the red-soft violin-string vibrations that tremble through his belly.

“This is indecent exposure,” says Remus at the very moment he enthusiastically lifts his hips to let Sirius tug his trousers down his legs, shocking his skin hotter, thrilling at the blood-swill at his temples. He sits up to yank Sirius’s shirt off and only gets it up to his waist before he reels him in again, knees sliding against his sides, light and ticklish, making him laugh again, and Remus thinks: I would go down on my knees if it meant I could have this, for the rest of my life. I would grovel for your laughter. I would eat the world alive to keep you safe.

Remus sits up on his elbows and cranes his head up to Sirius’s neck where it hovers above him, sucking rosebud-imprints into the skin there, his pulse dark under his tongue, velvet-warm. “Do you know,” he asks, teeth biting down on Sirius’s groan, “the first thing I liked about you?”

“What?”

“Your laugh,” he says, curling his hands into Sirius’s biceps and surging up again, feeling Sirius’s cock slide against his hip. “That very first day, on the train—I love it when you laugh. And the second, I think—oh—it was your hands, and then your eyes. And that look you get when the shops start putting out Christmas decorations, that’s—you’re so fucking beautiful,” he stutters, Sirius’s thumb brushing the nipple right above his heart. “You always have been.”

For a moment, Sirius only looks at him, his red-bitten lips, the knifeblade angles of his face moon-lit and surprised, reverent; it’s like looking out into the dark and finding something beautiful, Remus thinks, just as the starlight flits into his eyes, a wild glint of sun off steel. And then they’re kissing again, fiercely, with a violence of emotion that makes Remus shudder against him, the sandpaper of his stubble, the bump of a nose against his; when Sirius pulls back, Remus presses his palms under his shirt to his chest again, feeling his heartbeat come like a song—like the time they keep here, the one that’s theirs and theirs alone.

“Well, hello there, Earl Moonchester,” says Sirius, sliding down his body and speaking to the wolf’s-tooth scar between the soft jut of a rib, where his body has learned with the years to tremble with love, and not fear. “It’s been too long, mate. I’ll have Remus bring out his finest crystal so we can have a drink after this,” he says, kissing it with both hands riding up his sides, making Remus laugh. “I bet,” he says, mouthing at the inside of Remus’s thigh, his lips soft and cunning, “I bet I know the fifth thing you liked about me.”

“Oh?” A flash of teeth on skin; Remus’s heels dig into the grass, tensing.

“My cock,” says Sirius. It causes another burst of laughter from both of them, half-sobbing with it until Sirius wraps a hand around Remus’s cock and then leans in to drag his tongue underneath it before taking it in his mouth, which effectively destroys any capacity Remus had left for conversation or intelligent noises.

He groans, his hand shaking in Sirius’s hair as he moves his mouth along the length of Remus’s cock, his hips jerking off the ground even as Sirius’s hand grips him so hard the skin turns yellow-white in the dark, the sweet silver rush pulsing between his legs and rising in waves through his belly. Sirius pulls back after a moment, dragging Remus’s cock against his lower lip and then making him cry out at a kiss to the head of his erection, running his hands over the bone-blades of Remus’s hips and into the freckled basin of his belly as he stretches out again, everything in him yearning for Sirius. Somewhere in the woods, an owl calls unanswered, echoing with the bitter winds; Sirius presses two fingers to Remus’s lips and lets him suck them in, one hand gripping his wrist while Sirius watches him, his teeth bared to the shred of the crescent moon.

Sirius has beautiful hands: big and heavy with broad palms and fingers even longer than Remus’s. He used to think about them a lot when his crush on Sirius—if it could be called that—began to turn extremely physical in a hysterical bone-melting sort of way sometime around fifth year, and even now he’s still struck by them, their calloused warmth, the silvery scar on his index finger from a misspent night attempting to fix his motorbike two years ago rubbing against Remus’s lip; he flicks his tongue out at Sirius’s fingertips and then his palm when he pulls them out of his mouth, his face open, stark with longing.

“Have you ever thought about how we’re, I mean, we’re so different than even—Chirst—than we were six months ago? I didn’t know if we’d ever even—ah,” he swallows, Sirius’s shoulder beneath his teeth, the green-bright salt-burn of his skin like the taste of recognition.

“Six months ago, I probably wouldn’t have had my hands down your trousers, so yes,” says Sirius, his voice low and private, and then he reaches down, grasping both of them in his hand, their hips slotting together like glass tumblers. Remus gasps, grabbing a fistful of Sirius’s hair. “And if you stop thinking so loudly for about eight seconds,” he says, stroking them both slowly together, callous-hot, “you might actually have an orgasm.”

All in all, it’s much more comfortable than the cold concrete of Regent’s Canal on his back or the single memorable time on the stone ramparts of Gryffindor Tower, late in seventh year, both of them folded away into the creases of the night. The drought-wilted land seems to hold them in its palm, the arch-and-curl of their bodies moving in a crescendo; Remus grips Sirius’s shoulders and thrusts against him in counterpoint, watching the twisted topography of their shadows melting into each other on the cut-dry grass where the universe condenses to the span of Sirius’s hand fisted around his arm and the sweetness of their breath, smoke-dusky and pale like hours passing by. He watches the arrhythmic smudge of the stars over Sirius’s shoulder and rocks up into him again, their bodies a wave of limbs and angles as he reaches down into the hardness between them and curls his fingers around Sirius’s, moving in time with him, his thumb straying over the heads of their cocks with each stroke of their palms; when Sirius groans, he can feel it in his own lungs, in the hallow-dip of his hips.

Their hands stroke faster, an erratic, electric hum twining tight between them: Remus moans, feeling more than hearing Sirius gasp something irrelevant and important into his mouth, their bodies moving almost to the frantic red rhythm of their hearts until something sparks deep on the inside, pulsing out from the pit of his belly. “God,” Remus gasps, “you’re, oh, you’re so—”

And that’s all it takes—Sirius’s teeth biting down on the pulse in his neck, the intricacy of his body tangled with Sirius’s body, and Remus comes with his hips grinding into Sirius, the rush and the jagged-slow shock coursing down his limbs, breath caught tight in his throat like choking on scorched August. He’s still jangling with it when he tightens his fingers around Sirius’s and rocks his hips up hard, again, again, feeling him go tense against him and finish: oh-oh-oh-fuck-Remus ripped out of his throat, gasped into the hollow of Remus’s neck like his name means something beautiful.

The wires of his body are quavering when Sirius pushes off of him, pulling his trousers up his thighs again and using his shirt for cleanup, which makes Remus cringe almost automatically until he realizes how very much he doesn’t care. Sirius sits up and lights a cigarette, and Remus, his breath slowing still, lies on his back and watches him for a moment, the laddered notches of his spine curved in an arc, the moonlight getting between his fingers parted in a V where his cigarette flares orange at his mouth, his skin lit up brighter than August: a seven-thirty sort of man with a sadness running through his vein-lines and a mouth that can make Remus burn; and then himself, midmorning September and Earl Grey, measuring out time in tealeaves and heartbeats, in love with the shape of his long limbs tangled with Sirius’s long limbs.

It feels like beginning. It feels like the logical conclusion to their simple equation. The fact of them beginning again, and again, and again, like finding new patterns in the stars, basic conjugation, easy geometry. He wonders if they will ever stop; he wonders if he wants to.

“Here I thought I’d have to teach you how to bask all over again,” says Sirius, stretching out beside him, his toes pointed like a swimmer’s treading water. He presses his menthol to Remus’s lips, and Remus, too summer-sultry and too in love to care that he’s not supposed to like them, holds Sirius’s eyes and keeps his wrist in place while he takes a long drag, exhales. “Mm. That’s probably the fifth thing I liked about you,” he says, his voice low, smoke-smooth. “Only real slags do that, you know.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.” He laughs, kisses the space between Sirius’s ribcage. “You know, that first day I saw you on the train, I thought you were the most handsome boy I’d ever seen in my life. I still do, for the record.”

“You’ll write greeting cards someday, Moony,” says Sirius. He runs a happy, uninhibited palm along the back of Remus’s neck, making him shiver. “Sixth is when you talk in your sleep.”

“I still don’t believe I’ve said half of what you say I do. But it usually ends well for me, so,” says Remus, turning into him and twisting a sweat-curled strand of Sirius’s hair around his finger. The wind murmurs with their voices, twining around the drone of the insects and the nightbirds, the charred August song rubbing against the edges of the leaves; he leans over to kiss the shadow at Sirius’s mouth, the air making their damp skin prickle with an out-of-season chill. “We should go inside,” he mutters, making no move at all to sit up from where his head lies in the hollow of Sirius’s shoulder and his hand drifts on his chest, his skin dense, soft as chalk. Remus has seen effigies carved of marble like that.

“I haven’t missed work yet, I’ll have you know, so don’t go all disapprove-y on me,” Sirius laughs, honey-slow. “I don’t know when I got so respectable. Probably your fault.”

“Have you thought about what you’ll do after all this is over? If you wanted to, I mean,” says Remus, not wanting to add in the acid if but knowing, sickeningly, that it does no good to leave out any eventuality.

“Some.” He crushes his cigarette against the cracked dirt, and Remus pulls him back in, spreads his fingers out and curls in like a nautilus, seeking the shelter of their bodies. The grass tickles his ear, summertime breathing in their hair. “Cursebreaking doesn’t sound too bad, maybe, and it’d take a lot bloody less time to get everything sorted. Maybe we could travel, Moony—you could do it too, or maybe get some research contracts and some new seasonal jumpers and we could go anywhere if we wanted, or become professional boggart exterminators, or buy a two-up-two-down and pretend to be civilized. We probably wouldn’t be able to have sex in the backyard, though. Always a downside to living like real people.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying,” says Remus, drinking in the lines of Sirius’s face made golden by the same moon that festers in his marrow, taking his fill. “It’s just that cities have laws about things like ‘public decency,’ you know, for hygiene, and the good of the children and small animals and all. Maybe we’re just not fit for civilization.”

“That’s part of the appeal, though. We’ll always be slightly illegal,” says Sirius. His smile blurs through his kiss like a cloudburst.

Remus, being very careful to pretend he’s actually thinking about that, laughs into Sirius’s throat so he can feel it in his mouth, rhyming with the echo of his pulse. “Honestly,” he says, “and, well, I’m outside and not wearing much of anything and you’ve turned me into a pile of sentient jelly, so, strictly speaking, I don’t think I can be anything but honest—I’m pretty sure I could go anywhere in the world with you, and as long as you were there and we had a tin of Earl Grey, I think I’d be happy.”

Sirius holds his eyes for a few seconds. Then he kisses Remus so hard it fills his lungs like being winded, cocooned in a crevice of peace where they press into each other with a starved hunger, as if they’re trying to break each other open and get inside.

He tangles their legs together, both of them sticky from the sullen late-summer air and the frenetic closeness of their bodies, the stars leaving burnt-out black shapes behind his eyelids when he closes them. Opening them again, he’s blinded for the briefest of moments as he considers the world turning them in its fist, time crushing, shadows darkening, the moon swelling; Remus looks up to the summer triangle above them, connecting all three points in a spear, and thinks of the word stasis from the theoretical charms textbook he’d used for the map in seventh year, whispering himself ineffably into the parchment, into the walls made of their voices, their words: the desperate chant you get when you say stay-like-this over and over and over, the taste of it like a selfish immortality. Stay, stay, stay like this, stay.

—

Cloud-bleary morning skittering across his eyes where he lies at the sinews of a maple, gulping dawn-dark into his lungs. There’s blood deep in the grooves of his molars that isn’t his, thick as oil and acrid, inhuman; he clutches at the vines growing over the tree-roots and squints through the head-rush, feeling like a blow to the ribs the weight of his humanity slamming full-force back into him: guilt fracturing in his jawline, the memory of claws gouged out at his knuckles, fear running down his femur, violence quelled in the snap of his spine-bones. It’s easy to treat rebirth like a blank white slate if you’ve never made the return trip yourself. Remus would know.

Standing after some minutes, he puts his hand out to steady himself on the trees and takes his first new steps into the waking world, trying to find his footing with it again as he listens to the discord of his own body learning to breathe with twenty-one-year-old lungs and a twenty-one-year-old heart in the listless foggy air. They didn’t chain him again last night, but they’d listened to him, watching with rapt hostility or disbelief or a skeptical, tight-throat maybe hanging on their silences; it’s not much, he thinks, but it’s not failure, either, not yet, not in this shaky, jelly-legged trust he’s still kindling. He listens to the timid notes of the crickets and the rustle of the green leaves, still soft with tree-blood: this is the in-between time, where the dark and the light fan out into smoke and unfettered shadows bend into shapes their forms wish they could forget.

Pain unwinds in his hip, a yellow curl of thorns stretching against the scratched skin when he moves. Remus braces himself on a low branch and looks up at the few stars left unhidden by the clouds and the creeping grey morning, finding Antares where it falls off of Libra’s balance and watching burns like a blade until he can scarcely see anything else, beckoning him forward on unsteady legs; behind him lies the moon, its glassy eye already with a shadow forming on its cheek.

Something flits into the brush at his side, chasing the dead leaves, and he startles; it’s only a bird, the last of the owls looking for an easy kill, but he still chafes at the indignity of it all, that these things seem to happen so often when he’s half-naked or throbbing or he’s had to leave his wand at home and might as well be hobbling around on one leg. He gathers his breath, wondering briefly if these same stars aligned just so at his birth to doom him to a lifetime of stumbling around unexpectedly naked at the worst possible times, forever one missed beat away from a mild cardiac event. And no James or Sirius or Peter in sight, even; at least then the sudden nudity is usually fun, if only sometimes in retrospect and with the great bandage of time to soothe pierced egos and bruised bottoms. One more breath, and then another; he walks slowly beneath the scale of Libra, weighing him as the tempter or the tempted, he can’t say.

In his head, sharpened on the ache behind his eyes, he begins unfurling the same lines he’s used to anchor himself to the world and to whatever lies at his core since he was five years old and bleeding into dusty floorboards for the first time, his own endless, cyclical eulogy: My name is Remus Lupin and I am twenty-one years old. I live in Shropshire. Part of me also still lives in London. I take my tea with milk and two sugars, and I do the shopping on Wednesdays. I have all ten fingers and all ten toes, and my nose is in one piece. I always know what time it is at home, which is the only time that matters. There are people waiting on me, and I am keeping my promises. I can recite Rimbaud’s worst from memory. I have four best friends, and Caradoc too, and two others I have lost. My mouth knows constellations of words and the history of my entire universe is tattooed into my heart-muscle. I am in love with Sirius Black, and I always will be.

That’s as far as he gets before an owl perches dead in front of him, and opens its beak.

“You’re going the wrong way, boy,” it says. Remus’s whole body goes still like hoarfrost.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re going the wrong way,” says the owl, again, in a voice wrung raw with age, like rust on metal. “Go home.”

Panic rises up in a swift wave through his belly. He staggers backwards and turns, wanting to run but not able to make his knees move fast enough for the ache thrumming through his tendons, already too late: he hears the crackle-and-hiss of magic somewhere to his left long before he sees them. The body-bind that slams every inch of him to the ground is expected; the hesitation when they turn him over and point their wands at his throat is not.

Or, maybe it isn’t hesitation; it’s hard to tell, with both of them masked—a man and a woman, and young, from the erratic jerk of their movements—and quiet as death. His first thought is that they can’t know, that they couldn’t possibly know what he is, but then he realizes that even if they did, they know why he’s here, and that is reason enough for the Crucio he expects will come next; he holds his breath, lets it out slowly, waits like it’s moonrise all over. No, they couldn’t know, or else they’d know that Crucio would never be enough.

But what he hears is “Legilimens,” and his head starts throbbing like a red, ruined heart.

It’s like a fishhook pulling through his mind, grappling at all edges for something to use while his eyes sting and cold fingers reel him out of himself. Memory plays out unbidden behind his eyes, glimpses of the everyday music of his life and farther back, through time and pain and change and love, glittering like the scales of a fish as he lives them again: the sweet star-burst of a peach in his mouth last night, Sirius’s voice reading him the clue to twenty-four down, a yellow crush of tea with lemon, windfall. “Gimme Shelter” playing in the flat next door, June-red, his mouth on Sirius’s navel. His mother’s fingers in his hair, avoiding the blood; explaining Transfiguration theory to Peter, watching the narrowing of his lips. Walking home from Inverness Street Market with oranges for breakfast, Camden Lock slipping by like a living thing, the evening-rich notes of Sirius’s laughter, reading in the winter-light by the bedroom window—all echoing through him, sound and sight and fragile recollection inscribed into the threads of his being, picked apart and discarded by serpent’s fingers.

“Fuck you,” he manages, shaking, half-delirious with rage. “I’ll kill you, I’ll—fucking—” One of them shoves his face into the dirt and scours his mind, harder, hissing, “Potter.”

Occlumency isn’t something he’s well-practiced in, not the way Sirius is, but it’s always been easy enough for him to gather steel in his mind and throw up a wall around what’s most important, burying it down so deep he can almost forget he knows it at all. He’s never sure whether it comes from a lifetime spent as a consummate liar or from the ritual of rebuilding the foundations of himself in the still morning air every month, marrow and bone and tissue all stitched together to harbor his monstrous heart; he hears them mutter something above him and feels the barbs cast out in his mind again, scraping relentlessly against what they can’t see. Almost from outside of himself, he feels Sirius pressed up against his back two days ago, early dagger-blue dawn, his knees folded into Remus’s knees; there’s a scoff above him as they throw that away too, and Remus feels himself burn to the bone with fury, knowing that he just needs to wait it out and run, and knowing, beneath the fear and the anger, that he won’t have the time.

At the very edge of his vision, something moves—at least he thinks it does, from what he can see where they’re pulling him through Brighton three years ago, where his hair was salt-dry, hopping across the blistering asphalt on his bare feet while James laughed; and, just as suddenly, it stops. The world lurches back into place: he grapples for a hold on the ground, the bind wearing off, waiting for the right moment to cut and run, but he never gets the chance. They run, far off and into a clearing before Remus hears the unmistakable crackle of Apparition and gets up, not wanting to face what made them run, but—

“Oh, it’s you.” The voice is a woman’s, hoarse with disuse and a night of screaming herself ragged, her lungs wired to the moon: he looks up and finds the same werewolf he met last month, limping still, her children and the men who were with her nowhere in sight. Remus tries to speak and gets stuck on nausea instead, feeling as if something has slithered inside his body and left it wrung-out; he doubles over and retches, shaking, trying to gulp down air. “What was that? No, no—sorry—go on, then, finish up.”

“They—they were Death Eaters,” he stutters, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. Cold sweat breaks out on his forehead; if they already know where he is, then they’ll know where Sirius is, too. “They know, they know you’re here, and it’s not—” they aren’t after you, he almost says, and thinks better of it; if they know it’s only to do with him, with James and Lily, then he’ll have lost any chance he might have had with them, and this is all for nothing. Empty hands, wasted pain. “You need to move. I think—I think it was just a few new recruits or something, otherwise—but they might be back.” He swallows, a shattered lungful of August. “What are you doing here?”

She looks away, shaking her head. Somehow, she looks smaller set against the spindly trees, shot through with the blue armistice of morning. “Nowhere else to go,” she says, shrugging, and wouldn’t they both know. Remus nods, horror still with its hook in him; more of them are starting to stumble out in the light, looking on with confusion and a fresh fear. “How did they—what if they come back?”

“You can’t stay here tonight,” he mutters, “in case they come back, you need to—you should move, a few miles away. I don’t think they’ll be back,” he says, louder to keep the quaver out of his voice, “but they know where you are now.”

One of them, a man with leather-deep wrinkles on his face who Remus thinks must not be much older than himself, braces an arm on a tree and looks at him, winter-shrewd. “Can’t you send someone out here? Haven’t you got people to fight them, isn’t that what this is about?”

Remus looks at them, these weathered reflections of himself scattered around the trees like blood spilled, their bodies as breathing bargaining chips or commodities of war like Remus’s is, forced suddenly into the dagger-flare of the present tense. Here they are: the only people in the world who truly understand the word helpless; he opens his mouth and offers them a precipice to fall from, or else fly. “We can’t help you until you help us, too. If you do—if you do, you’ll have whatever protection we can offer, and everything I’ve told you—we’ll make it happen. But not until we have your word.” He swallows, feeling his own rancor rise up in his throat again: the terror of being found out, and the shame of this new manipulation. “You should move away from here before night. In any case,” he says, and runs.

He’s never sure how he makes it home; when he tries to recall it later, much later, he won’t remember the panicked flight from the woods to his backyard where he staggers into the rosebushes at the gate, half-blind with the bite of the early sun. Sirius stands from the back steps, where there is now the largest collection of fag-ends ever smoked in a single morning, and rushes towards him, his hands going around Remus’s waist, murmuring something, ready to pull him in. Then Remus remembers himself, and shoves him roughly away.

“Don’t touch me,” he rasps, watching Sirius—who had looked almost deflated with relief—bristle and frown. “They were there, Sirius, they know I’m here, they—just fucking ask me something,” he says, urgently. Sirius looks as if he’s been slapped, his elbows still bent, waiting to catch Remus.

“Seventh year, at Christmas,” he starts, his voice like the burnt rasp of dead leaves, “you stayed with me, and I put—”

“Mistletoe in the shower,” Remus finishes for him, warming at the faint smile that twitches onto Sirius’s lips. “And I told you I loved you.” He gasps, winter-sharp. “I love you.”

“I know you do,” says Sirius. When Remus stumbles forward in a heavy flush of relief, Sirius only barely catches him in time.

It takes five healing spells, three cups of tea, two hours, one more sticky wave of nausea, two half-eaten biscuits, and a whole heap of laundry before he’s finished telling Sirius everything, like sucking the venom out of a wound. He goes over it again and again, all the things they touched with their monstrous hands and what he managed to bury deep down, where they couldn’t find it; Sirius runs his hands down Remus’s arms to his sides and hips, checking for more injuries but mostly just wanting to feel him, his feverish skin, his thunderous blood. They both laugh at nothing, the way they’ve always done when they’re nervous or frightened, and for a few moments, Remus feels twelve years old again, both of them wound into knots in the nights before the full moon, or Sirius just back from a visit home, learning how to sink to the bottom of each other in the deepest and darkest of their nights.

“Did they—” Sirius starts, and runs his hand through his hair impatiently, coming up with a few inky strands of black. “Did they do anything else to you?”

“What, other than fuck my mind over a few times? No,” says Remus, curling in on himself, his elbows on his knees. Sirius moves for him again on the couch but then stops, and for some reason it hollows out a space in Remus’s belly, prying open a swooping sickness in his core that makes him dizzy, as if he’s never going to find his balance again, that it will fester inside him forever. After a moment, it passes, and he realizes he’s clutching the arm of the couch so hard his knuckles ache; Sirius still hasn’t said anything. “They got—I think they got scared. They heard the others, the other werewolves, I mean, they were coming, and they must have thought there were more than a few. I can’t think of what else it could have been.”

Sirius gets up and walks over to the window, where the ashy-grey underbellies of the clouds have smeared out the weak sun again. “You’ve used up your quota for the word ‘fuck’ for the day, Moony. It’s just—I can’t believe they let you go,” he says quietly, and then walks to the mantel, looking at Remus hard. His whole body is pale, brittle. “I mean. It’s not a first, but you know what these fuckers do to us. I’m just—”

“Do you want me to go back and ask them? Would you rather I’d been killed?” He laughs hollowly. It isn’t funny, and Sirius’s face when he turns back to him is something in the realm of murderous.

“You know what I mean,” he bites out, and there it is, the cut of uncertainties old and new stinging him again. Remus stares at the clock, pretending Sirius isn’t looking at him with an expression too difficult and too painful to meet, feeling too old and too young and too daring for his age all at once, strung to snapping. Their last words hang on the humid breath of late summer, dagger-green: You know what I mean. For the first time in weeks, Remus wonders if he really does.

The rest of the morning is spent rolling cigarettes and waiting for Caradoc and Dumbledore, very methodically not looking at each other. Remus replays every moment in his mind, running through explanations, each less likely than the next: either Voldemort has gotten information from a werewolf who knows of him, or someone has discovered what he’s been doing for the last year, and knowing, sickeningly, which possibility is more likely. Caradoc comes at midmorning, and Sirius nods to them tightly as he goes to the kitchen to wait while they speak to Dumbledore, the sound of their voices pitched, reedy-quick with urgency; Dumbledore only listens to them both in turn, that cornflower twinkle in his eyes still unextinguished by the breaking of the whole world. Where does it come from, Remus wonders, how does he find it, that strength to burn for every other moth to flutter around when everything else has frozen over? He presses his palms to his knees and swallows, his mouth still dry with fear and pain.

Dumbledore cocks his head to one side, firelight from the Floo glinting at the corners of his mouth when he smiles. “Perhaps,” he says, his eyes watching Remus, “there is a boon to be found in this unfortunate turn of events, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.”

Leave it to Dumbledore to find the blessings in the blood, too; Remus’s fingers twitch, convulsively, between his knees. “What do you need me to do? Sir.”

“At the moment, I think we’ll trust your judgment, Mr. Lupin: it won’t do to push them too hard right now. You’ve given them much to consider. Give it some time, and go back to them. Let them think they decided this for themselves.”

Remus nods, breathes in the haze of stale toast and old blood. Just breathes, in and out, the rhythm of living, like there’s a trick to it, like he’s done it all before. The ceiling fan creaks from the kitchen while he talks to Caradoc, pretending not to notice the way Sirius looks at them sharply for a long, quiet moment over the V of his fingers, smoking another menthol. He wants a bath, or sleep, or a glass of whiskey, or to be a thousand miles away from here; every part of him itches with the aftertaste of panic, still soaked in sweat and feeling foolish, and terrified, and crazy, all jagged angles to Caradoc’s smooth wheaty-brown voice, his clean hands; he tries to concentrate on the words, forming them carefully on his tongue before he lets them out from behind his teeth, everything moving too fast.

“Next week, then, mate,” says Caradoc, standing up with a grin that almost looks genuine. His face seems faded, blotted out with grief and fear; Remus wonders if the change is permanent in all of them, if his own reflection will always show him with his eyes constantly sliding off to the side and his mouth set into a quiet curve, or if his hands will always shift into the violent shapes he wishes he’d never had to learn. “If it all goes well, I’ll buy you a pint. You too, Black, haha! Don’t look so overcooked, man, it’s a strictly platonic pint. Though if Lupin here wants to retread some steamy old territory—”

“You can buy me three pints and dinner, Dearborn,” says Sirius. He looks warm where he’s standing, and Remus wishes that he would look at him again so he could feel it in his own body, like sunshine coming through a window.

“I’ll hold you to that,” says Remus, and finds that he even means it. There’s a shadow between Caradoc’s eyes that he wants to reach out and touch, insanely; he shoves his hands into his pockets and grasps at the edges of a smile. “We’ll be here, er. Whenever.”

“Until the next thrilling episode,” says Caradoc. He winks on his way out the front door, managing to make it as lewd as possible even with the sleep-loss bruised beneath his eyes.

But the next thrilling episode never comes. A week later, Caradoc has gone missing; a week after that, some Muggles find his body near the Thames at Brentford, a thin and lethal trickle of blood trailing from one ear, dried black in the grass. Remus spends the day thinking about all the different ways to snap a neck or burst a heart and making tea he doesn’t drink before pours it down the sink, dregs and all; he doesn’t want to know the future anymore.

They see Peter in Diagon Alley a few days after—he seems to see Peter everywhere lately, sometimes only from the corner of his eye before he’s gone—and wind up at Lily’s and James’s with him, poking at takeout in the living room that none of them really want to eat and laughing too loud at nothing, all of them too high-strung to do much but sip their tea and talk about school and last Christmas and where Harry threw his orange juice yesterday, things safely enough in the past not to blind them. After a while, James exchanges some invisible signal with Sirius and goes out to the patio with him, leaving Remus to converse with Harry about the merits of disposable nappies and trying not to think about the way they don’t even look back, Lily sitting beside him and Peter stretching to leave for his mother’s house almost immediately.

Sirius, on his way back through the living room for the pack of cigarettes he’s left on his chair, claps him briefly on the shoulder. “Come by the house sometime, Pete,” he says. “Remus has got a set of Gobstones you’d be gagging over,” and turns to the kitchen doorway, where James is waiting.

“Do you ever feel like the world is ending?” he asks Lily once they’re alone, trying to teach Harry which hand to shake with and startling every time he wobbles on Remus’s lap, still not quite assured of the strength in his own arms and preferring to sit down with him; babies are such delicate things, always spitting up and trying to get choked on their own fingers or sticking things into electrical sockets. “Or, oh, I don’t know. Like your brain is turning into marshmallow fluff.”

“All the bloody time,” says Lily, stretching her feet out on the water-warped coffee table. She reaches a tired hand out to brush Harry’s tangled hair off his forehead, and then does the same to Remus, resting her palm on the back of his head from across the couch, warm and sweet, a beloved, impoverished gesture; Remus closes his eyes and opens them again, slowly. “I’m tired all the time, you know? And when I’m not tired I’m scared, and that just makes it even worse, and I’m—cover his ears, Remus—I’m fucking sick of everything, of always having to run away and not even being able to get groceries by myself if I want. I can’t even use the phone now without going through some nuclear meltdown ritual to make sure no one’s listening in. Some days I really do feel like I’m going mad.”

“It’d be nice to go home and be sure you know the right person is wearing your skin. But I reckon it could be worse, I mean. We could be dead. Or we could have sand in our bits.”

“Exactly. What are spies next to gritty knickers,” she says, patting his head. He thinks of Caradoc suddenly, his wide, heavy palms, and wonders what it must be like, that moment you realize someone has betrayed you. It must be worse than death, he thinks, knowing someone has wished you that much evil. “You always know how to put things into perspective for me, Remus. It’s a talent.”

“I just think of the worst and add some chafing in delicate places. It isn’t hard,” he says, and it’s not really funny, but they both laugh anyway, too hard and too loud.

“Hands off, Evans. In front of the children, even, my God.” Sirius throws himself into the old armchair again and kicks his feet out, as if he could occupy every empty corner of the room on his own. It reminds Remus of school, of sixth year in the Gryffindor common room: the vast, insidious presence he’s always loved filling up his ears and his lungs. “Come on, Moony. We’d better get home before she goes below the belt.”

“Oh, Black, stop protesting so much. James’ll catch on that it’s really you I want and then where’ll we be? We’ll have to run off to Majorca and go into hiding.”

“As long as I get Remus in the divorce settlement,” says James, shoving his glasses up his nose. His smile, Remus thinks, is watery and tired, like he can’t quite recall how to move his lips properly.

“Do I get as say in this?”

“No. And get your hands off my wife, Black! My God, you two are animals!”

And they laugh, all of them, but what assails Remus about it is the terseness of their voices, the way it all seems so hollow the longer they laugh until he forgets what they were even laughing about at all; it makes him feel sick again, and afraid, unable to shake the strange ghost sensations of shadows creeping in his veins or dancing in the dragon’s jaws, always waiting for one end after another. At home again, reading in the muzzy yellow of the lamp on the nightstand, he watches Sirius undress from across the room, tugging off his shirt while he looks at the photos Remus keeps on the desk, watching the two of them flit from frame to frame in a patchwork imitation of love stitched together over the years. He’s sitting the wrong way in bed to see Sirius’s face, but his shoulders are pulled tense and slumped, as if something is weighing on his middle and coiling him in on himself; there’s a crack of blackness between the curtains where he stands, where nothing can get in at them, and they can get at nothing.

“Do you want that?” Sirius asks, gesturing to a photo of them from the wedding two years ago, their mouths sliding together and curling with the thrill of it. “Wedding, cottage, baby, jobs with weekends off, retiring to the moors when we’re arthritic old raisins? Forevers, and all that?”

He still isn’t looking at Remus, and Remus figures it’s just as well, so he doesn’t have to see the uncertainty in his eyes. “I’d rather focus on the forever part, I think,” he says, after a few breath-beats. “What did James want?”

Still, Sirius doesn’t turn around. “I’m not sure I can tell you.”

Remus goes cold all over, dread and disbelief opening him up from his belly to his toes. Of course it comes down to him and James, of course Remus is the last to know, of course his blood isn’t to be trusted. He clenches his fists under the filmy sheet, wanting to scream, wanting to throw things and knowing that he can’t, because they’re really doomed if what matters is how something is said, and not what is really being said, not whether it’s actually true. He closes his eyes and breathes, feeling like sediment in a river, or a smooth stone ravaged flat by the water: no matter what, he always sinks to the bottom again. Sometimes, selfishly, he wishes he knew how to let himself break.

“You mean you need to work out which parts to leave out before you tell me,” says Remus, not looking at Sirius’s eyes on him in the mirror above the dresser, “but it’s fine. I’ll wait.”

Sirius turns to him sharply, glaring, anger howling in the shadows of his face like a mask; after a moment, it falters, leaving a chalky smudge of mingled hurt and fear in his cheek and his eyes. “That isn’t fucking fair and you know it,” he says, without much force. Remus just meets his eyes and listens to the clock ticking down to nothing beside him, thinking that if he could just be still enough—if he could just take them both and hold on, if he can clench his fists and stretch this moment to indelibility—then maybe they can make it through this.

Let me in, he wants to say. He thinks of getting off the bed and going to him, but he stays where he is; Sirius’s brightness burns, sometimes, even if he doesn’t mean to, and Remus doesn’t want him to see the hurt simmering just beneath his skin.

“They’re talking about the Fidelius Charm,” says Sirius, and Remus feels the anger drain out of him, his stomach dropping in a swift, horrified pang, like falling down an elevator shaft by mistake and realizing there’s nothing below but your own end. Sirius looks at him and shivers in the heat, worn threadbare by the edges of this thing he’s been carrying around all day, and Remus would go to him now if he could move his legs at all. “At any rate, they’ll have to move again soon.”

“You’ll be the very first person they go after.” It comes out as a whisper, the rest of it not needing to be said, spider-webbed in the indistinct silence of the dark: that if Remus isn’t dead by that point too, he’ll wish he was.

“It’s just talk,” says Sirius, with a shrug and a bravado that is not quite put on. “Nothing’s concrete yet. And Dumbledore was talking about doing it himself, so—but it’s not like people line up for that sort of thing. So.” He slips off his belt, staring at the floor. “There’s that.”

No one talks about the Fidelius Charm but textbooks and graduate-level courses and people who have already spent every last cent of their hope, now forced to cling to crumbling cliff-sides as they spin themselves into an un-existence that is like oblivion, a space defined by not being there at all. He wonders if he is doomed to watch all his friends disappear this way, always with the endless longing for them in his bones wearing at him like the entropy of his body until there’s nothing left but the mercy of his own memory, haunting himself like a ghost.

He’s always liked to think of Sirius as invincible, secretly, seventeen forever and standing beneath Remus’s window when they knew what it was like to be fearless, looking up and breathing courage into him until he climbs down the wall to meet him, the two of them happy as thieves. Forcing the panic back down his throat, Remus looks up at him again with his heart pounding in his mouth and says, “What you said earlier—about, about wanting all that. Do you?”

“Do I want what?”

Remus shifts on the bed, the old springs creaking beneath his thighs, cold sweat on his feet under the thin linen. “A cottage and decent jobs—Cursebreaking, I don’t know, and getting old and rheumatic and leaving the crossword half-done in the loo for me every morning. All that.”

Sirius’s mouth opens slightly, showing the glint of his teeth in the lamplight. His eyes, grey like storm glass and early mornings, go bright and then he laughs like rain, soft and surprised in that startled way Remus can sometimes pluck out of him. “You’re unbelievable, Moony. I feel like something I scraped off the bottom of my shoe and you’re proposing to me. Your timing leaves a lot to be desired, but I suppose I could do worse as far as potential Mrs. Blacks go—I warn you, though, I know you haven’t saved yourself for our wedding night, as is customary in the House of Incest. Wanton little slag.”

“Arsehole. Come to bed.”

“Ask me properly,” says Sirius, once they’re curled into each other in the dark, his ankle crossed over Remus’s ankle. “Go on.”

“Sirius Orion Black, Esquire, love of my life, fire of my entire cardiovascular system: barring any discriminatory laws in the interim, and you still want to, and all,” says Remus, half-laughing, tracing Sirius’s eyebrow with the pad of a thumb, “and if it’s all sufficiently illegal for you, being two blokes, and the werewolf thing, and the disownment—d’you want to marry me in ten years or so, maybe?”

“Yeah,” says Sirius, a little breathless, a little unbelieving, “that sounds fucking ace,” and leans across the quiet gap to kiss him.

“You know,” Sirius says a moment later, Remus’s jaw still cupped in his hand, “if the universe really does branch off every time we go a different way, or there are a billion, million, trillion whatevers out there, with all those version of us—I’d love you in every single one.”

Unable to think of anything to say to that that feels remotely adequate, Remus lets his fingers speak for him and takes Sirius’s hand, holding it with his own over his heart, thrumming with the enormity of it. But: “You can’t know that,” he whispers, kissing the space between his eyes. “It’s a lot of us, I mean. But I like to think we’d get a nice cosmic nudge where we need it.”

“I do know, you ponce.” He kisses Remus’s chin, the place between his ear and his neck where his dry-grass hair gets in Sirius’s mouth. “I think you’re the bravest person I’ve ever known,” he says. Remus spent months earlier this year dreaming about his eyes like this in the dark, Sirius’s hands tangled with his own inextricably, perfectly.

“I’m not,” says Remus, pressing closer into the narrow warmth they make between them. “I just don’t have much of a choice.”

“No. You’ve got plenty of choices,” says Sirius, and pulls him close, where Remus can hear the tireless music of his body blurring into his own, singing, singing like a promise played on out-of-tune chords and enshrined in the crooks of their knees, in the sleepy syllables of their muscles.

Later, on the back step when he can’t get to sleep, Remus will think that’s not quite true: bravery is something he’s always envisioned as a choice you make, a conscious step into unfamiliar territory, your fingers on a thousand different triggers finer than any lock or any spellwork. A moment of time fragmented into a thousand branching paths, your feet moving forward as you forget about the ruthless calculations of risk and profit. And Remus doesn’t think he’s ever had much of a choice. This was decided long ago, when he took his first steps into the Great Hall of Hogwarts at Albus Dumbledore’s behest, eleven years old and wondering if this was what it meant, to be in thrall.

But looking up at the ancient, blood-dark sky to where Cygnus cracks the clouds apart and Deneb glitters like a lyric above where Sirius is sleeping, he wonders if he’s been making his own choices all along—if the sound of his own heart is the only rhythm that’s ever really mattered.

The bravest thing he’s ever done, he decides, crossing the teaspoon’s-breadth distance between Vega to Deneb, to Sirius in the bedroom, is fall in love. The most foolish, brilliant, inconceivable, dangerous, agonizing, exalted, terrifying, revelatory, joyous, fucking beautiful chance he’s ever taken in his life was letting Sirius inside him like a splinter, worried beneath a fingernail until it lodged in his tendons and muscles and spread roots down to the bone, where he cultivated it in all the darkest, hollowed-out parts of his body like a flame cupped in both hands. It’s the change from one thing to the next, love as a shape-shifter, every touch and look and word preserved in a fossilized record within yourselves as you re-learn each other, again and again: we remember, we repeat, but we must also breathe.

And this, Remus knows—the shape of his knees bent into Sirius’s knees, the brush of his fingers along the laddered notches of Sirius’s spine—this, this is the bravest thing he will ever do.

—

September rises in a shiver above the trees, trailing frost-fingers across the windows in the mornings that melt away at the first kiss of the sun, the leaves beginning to show their blood in the razor-winds that slice down from the north. At night, they can hear trains through the windows rolling their iron percussion through the earth, Neptune falling into line with the moon: the balance has given way to the serpent, the northern crown to the claws of the fox, justice to suspicion, mercy to disdain and death. They watch it at night from the breathing space of the backyard, the pendulum of the sky swinging back and forth in an unnatural clearness, owls flitting from branch to brittle branch, star to shattering star.

The long nights stretch their shadows out into the evenings, a dark hunger growing like winter and dragging them fitfully into the autumn chill. A strange, dun-colored hush settles into the land; the smoke from the grassfires and the fields to the north drifts between the cracks of the house like sawdust, skimming a fine after-taste of fire and burnt September across everything. This has always been Remus’s favorite season: jumper-weather, orange-flavored everything, apple-crisp October stories that rattle like fallen leaves. He likes to sit on the back steps at night with Sirius, breathing in the smell of coming frost and field-smoke; they’ve always been linked in his mind, Sirius and September fires, his beauty like the very edge of a knife, his hair like spilled India ink in the winds that blow the last of the grass to pale straw. Of course, it could just as easily be his teenage penchant for trying to use Incendio to light his cigarettes.

“Should we carve a pumpkin early this year?” Remus asks one evening, perched on the bathroom counter with what’s left of the crossword while Sirius is in the shower. “In honor of still being alive, and having all our teeth, and all.”

“And we can put the stuffing in a pie,” says Sirius, over the gush of water. “What better way to celebrate our tenuous grip on existence. Give me the next one.”

“Eight-letter word for ‘impending doom.’”

“Thursday.”

“That’s uncanny,” says Remus, filling it in.

They go on like that, making jokes that really aren’t funny and laughing at the absurdity of it, as if poking fun at the dread and the fear and the fact that Remus’s clock hasn’t moved from midnight for nearly a month—his most perilous hour—will keep the darkness out of the house. It’s at least a little true, though: if you can’t make fun of your own mortal danger, what else are you going to do with it? You can’t look it in the face or you’ll go mad. So, he and Sirius do the crossword every day and watch the Muggle telly and cook dinner together and drink too much and make love and sometimes argue and wait up for each other until they can finally collapse, tired with joy, into each other’s arms when they come home, aching but alive. Remus folds every kiss and every touch into his belly, small orbits in the constellations of what is real, of what is true.

Struck by the bright ermine-blue of the sky and the loamy clarity of the air the Friday before the full moon, they Apparate to London and roam Leadenhall Market for fish and fresh cheese and a few bottles of wine, and Remus almost has the sense of being a spectator or a passenger, ambling along the arcades like everyone else doing their shopping for the weekend, unaware of the beasts sniffing for his blood. It would be easier to pretend if he and Sirius didn’t both have their wands hidden in their back pockets, twitching closer to each other at every errant noise, holding their breath when the shadows shift from the corners of their eyes.

On the anvil of nighttime, plum-warm with wine and his father’s ancient Wireless buzzing on the mantel, Remus goes to close the windows that are still open in the sitting room, looking into the last of the white clematis outside, a sky full of pinwheel starbursts; they close the curtains at the first burnt-sunshine streaks of dusk these days, so he takes it all in as best he can: the quiver of the autumn leaves like laughter, the cloud-wisps cloaked in violet arms, the nightbirds singing their slow longing into the dark, beautiful beyond solace. He thinks of James and Lily ready to flit to another bolt-hole, Peter in his mother’s heavily-warded house, parents calling their children inside well before dark, shops closing for days after attacks or changing their hours so they don’t have to keep watch into the night—the wasted sweetness of the season. Something twinges in his throat, caught between the white bone-shards of moon fingers and his own heart beating suddenly too fast, like a bad omen; he closes the curtains and walks away with a slight pang in his knees, tormented by the rising of the moon.

“Having a good think?” Sirius, coming up behind him, clasps his hands around Remus’s hips and leans forward, cigarette hanging off his bottom lip. He pulls back and reaches up, taking a drag, letting the light get in his eyes and the corners of his mouth; Remus’s stomach gives a pleasant lurch, knowing full well it’s deliberate and not caring even a little. “Oh. I know that look,” says Sirius, pointing with his forefinger, “you’ve either got indigestion or you’re about to shove me onto the couch with sexual intent.” He curls his finger back into his fist. “It’s the second one, isn’t it?”

“If only you’d actually applied yourself in Divination. You’ve got the makings of a true Seer.” Remus kisses the weak gradient of light on his bottom lip, russet-sweet, a bright wash of color. “You make that look so good it’s a little infuriating.”

“I came out of the womb smoking,” says Sirius, pulling Remus around to the couch, his eyes catching on the slight stumble of his knee. “All right?”

“Yeah. Just—” he inhales, unsure of how to explain this to Sirius: the teeth and the ire and the agony all threaded through 145 pounds of gangly twenty-one-year-old limbs and vein-lines, woven into the same parts of him that fold his socks and fall asleep on any semi-suitable surface. If anyone would understand, it’s Sirius: burnt-out threads and blood that doesn’t want him, still learning how to make those bits work with the ones that fly an illegal motorbike and throw him head-first into danger for the sake of people who have become more his own than any blood relation. He remembers sitting in the common room in second year right after they figured it all out, listening to a first-year boy pretend to be a werewolf, chasing after his friends with a face like something drawn from caricature and arms outstretched into claws; and himself, hiding behind his Transfiguration textbook until he heard Sirius shout at them all, full of a twelve-year-old’s fury: Shut up, idiot, are you daft? You don’t know anything.

“It always starts in the bones,” says Remus. “Deep, like. In the joints a few days before, and then when it starts—the change—it’s always in the spine, like an icepick in each vertebra, and then it sort of ripples outward to the rest of you in layers: your muscle, and then the tendons, and your skin feels like it’s made of worms, writhing until it turns into something else. Sometimes, when it stops, I can still feel—well, myself. If I try hard enough, it’s like, I can still think in my own voice, or whatever that is that’s always at the back of your head. The part that tugs you back to yourself.”

“Because it’s all you,” says Sirius. “No, listen. It’s like—it’s like magic, right? You could always blow someone’s nipples off, or kill them, or take what isn’t yours. Or you could use it to cook dinner and heal stab wounds or help you get dressed in the mornings and get you halfway across the country in six seconds, or turn into a dog when you want to run around naked without the preventative statutes. It’s not just either/or, it doesn’t—nothing works that way, Moony. You don’t stop being Remus Lupin when you want to eat my kidneys. And you don’t stop being a werewolf when you darn your jumpers or get toast crumbs in the bed.” Sirius looks down at his hands where they’re clasped between his knees, making nonsense patterns on the rug. “And I don’t stop being who I am because I walked away from everything, or because you’ve forgiven me. We don’t get to pick and choose, and we wouldn’t be here without all that, I mean. Even if it’s not something you want. You have to know who you are.”

Remus’s throat tightens in the silence, and his heart, his invincible twenty-one-year-old heart, expands and beats; he closes his eyes and opens them again, leaning in to rest his forehead against Sirius’s temple, and thinks that this is the first time he has ever been understood so completely, so immaculately. “You’re awfully clever, you know that?”

“Gets you hot in the prefect-parts, doesn’t it.”

“Among other things.”

“Good thing I’m insatiable,” says Sirius, running a hand up Remus’s arm and pressing the wicked curve of his lips to Remus’s temple. “Good thing you’ve got that twitchy look about the face that means a shagging is imminent.”

“Want to test that theory?”

Sirius rolls his eyes. “Please, Remus. All I’ve got to do is put a cigarette in my mouth or touch your elbows the right way or quote something filthy at you and you turn into an extremely pliable pudding. Face it, mate: you’re easy.”

“Actually, I think I might get an early night! It’s been such a long week, and with the full on Monday—”

Hands on his elbows, pulling him into Sirius and squeezing while he murmurs a low flicker-flare in Remus’s ear and somehow, somehow, after four years of learning to anticipate it and draw it out, he still manages to turn Remus’s legs into last Christmas’s wobbly pudding: “So, dear love, when another night pours on us, lift your fingers white, and strip me naked, touch me light—”

Unable to ascertain whether D.H. Lawrence or his own humiliating whimper is the greater affront to his crumbling dignity, Remus grabs him by the back of the neck and kisses him, for expediency.

Tripping along the rug and up the stairs, they pull at each other’s clothes ineffectually and stumble into walls, leaving laugh-lines in the plaster, indelibility in the gaps between the creaky floorboards: here are the coordinates of divinity, absolution, joy, of a beloved, ineffable forever. Remus wants to draw a map of them, the topography of desire, the chain-links in the architecture of the love they’ve strung together in this house; he wants to look at all the places they’ve collided, all the places they’ve made between them, and say, Oh, I found you here: at the kitchen counter, the black tangle of trees at the edge of the backyard, the right side of the bed, the threshold of the door. He wants to show them to Sirius like the individual stanzas of a poem; he wants to make love to him in every place he was ever happy, hang them in the sky to find from his window every night. Someday, he thinks, shoving Sirius onto the bed with a copper-creak of old springs, someday, he will find a way to make Sirius understand.

He’s kneeling on the floor, the arc of Sirius’s legs around him and the plot-points of his hands on him, one clasped around his hip, the other palm curled around Sirius’s cock, stroking a slow snow-melt up and down while the muscles in his belly flutter in elastic-band vibrations; Remus looks up and finds his eyes, the long lashes making shadows on his cheeks, the knife-bone cut of his jaw. He smiles, kisses the place where his ribcage meets.

“I bet Yeats would’ve gotten—oh—would’ve gotten you flat on your back.”

“You know,” says Remus, licking thin ribbons across his cock and tasting the silvery shudders, the salt-shock of recognition, “a bloke in your position might want to watch his mouth.”

“Don’t act like you don’t want my mouth wide open,” he says, guiding Remus’s head, laughing. “I’d rather watch yours.”

“I’m too nice to you,” Remus murmurs through a laugh, and then wraps his lips around Sirius’s cock, feeling his fingers stick in his hair as he moves his head back and forth, lapping with his tongue. He can feel the pulses against his cheeks, Sirius’s gasps like the hiss of a flame, making Remus groan around him, giddy-drunk; Sirius tugs at his hair until Remus pulls back, dragging him up to the bed with him: Sirius spreads his legs out, back against the headboard, pulling Remus into his lap.

“Come here,” he says. Remus moves to straddle his hips, his thighs tight around Sirius’s waist, orchestrated by the matchstick-pull of his breathing. Sirius slides his hands along his jaw and presses a thumb between Remus’s lips until he bites down, taking him by both wrists—but this is when his eyes catch on the lines in the hollows of his palms, where the grooves of his life lines don’t match.

“Have they always been like that?” he asks, wonderingly. On Sirius’s left hand, it flows unbroken off the side of his palm; on the right, much smaller, it branches off into a slim indentation at the very end. Remus traces both into the shadows of his palms until they taper off at the edges, as if painting them onto the fabric of his memory, again and again.

Sirius turns their hands and lets them wander, together, across the landmarks of Remus’s body: knuckles delving into the crevasse of his ribs, making a slow procession along the slope of his hipbones and up to the jut of his shoulderblades, trailing into the basin of his stomach. Remus trembles, and then giggles helplessly at Sirius’s fingers swirling corkscrew-patterns on his belly. “I’ve never noticed,” he says, watching Remus turn them both in his hands and kiss each palm, turning them back on Sirius, pressing them into his skin where his heart beats red, febrile-bright. “Don’t worry, Sibyl, it just means there’s a new vacancy in hell—” here, Sirius breaks off to gasp when Remus tugs his ear between his teeth— “or, y’know, second chances and all. And the other one’s just fine. Be optimistic, young Lupin.”

“I am trying to do,” says Remus, and surges forward to kiss him, a flush of lips and the wine-sweet crenellation of teeth making him shiver, Sirius’s hands caught up in his own, a promise.

His fingers dig into Sirius’s shoulders while he twists his fingers in him, flicking out his thumb until Remus kisses him again, mouthing at the tight-strung tendons of his neck and tasting the moan that rasps out of his throat, the exhale hissed like a lit fuse when Remus curls a hand around Sirius’s cock and guides it until Sirius brushes his hand out of the way to hold it against him, grinning, thrilled into excited, jangling quiet.

“Christ,” says Sirius, his head tipping back when Remus shifts deliberately against his cock. One hand grips Remus’s thigh hard enough to leave indents; the other directs his cock inside of Remus as he lowers his hips, biting down on the flare that sparks deep inside him and fires through his belly to his limbs. A warmth settles over them both, condenses the universe to the wave of their bodies; Remus takes Sirius’s left hand with its single unbroken life line and thinks: I don’t have to be afraid anymore, and presses his hips down just as Sirius shoves his up hard, their bodies moving together in a slideshow crescendo. “Look at you, you fucking beautiful thing—God, Remus.”

He leans into the breath of space between them and catches his mouth on the sweat-damp hollow of nerves at Sirius’s throat, the dizzying rise and fall of their hips making him gasp sharply, watching Sirius watch him through his lashes, irises sloe-cunning. Remus moves in a staccato, arching into Sirius’s hands rubbing along his spine and then down to the divots of his back and his arse, pulling him down and in with each surge of their hips: Remus’s palms delve into the familiar terrain of Sirius’s body, trying to memorize every articulated inch of his existence, every exactness he can hold in his hands. He flits his fingers into the jut of Sirius’s ribs, the basin of his belly, the precise color of his voice when Remus shifts his hips down hard, his eyes like winter nights, starlit and December-sharp; he swallows the fact of Sirius’s pulse through the rough swill of blood that rolls through him when Remus says his name, the charm of his laughter timed to Remus’s, the green-sweet smell of his skin, hot and electric at every point where they touch—the cardinal directions of both of them, together.

Their breathing goes tight. Remus shifts and Sirius thrusts into him harder, as if he can’t be deep enough inside him; his limbs quake slightly, Sirius’s breaths and his movements too arrhythmic to match now, but a few strokes of his hand on Remus’s cock and he feels himself ready to shake apart, the sweet rush shocking through his limbs like foxfire: he shoves his hips down to meet Sirius’s and then harder into Sirius’s hand, his fingers moving across Sirius’s chest as he groans and curling under his jaw, graceful pathfinders.

“I love you,” he gasps, on the verge, Sirius’s teeth scraping his tongue when he kisses him so that he feels it in both of their bodies, “I’ve always loved you—God, I’ll always—oh—”

It doesn’t matter; Sirius knows it all now, knows the strange curled-in parts of him no one else ever sees, and Remus comes with Sirius’s hand on him and his head bowed into the comforting hollow of Sirius’s shoulder, his teeth bared into points. He’s still riding out the aftershocks when he feels Sirius grip him hard, a sharp spike of his hips as he finishes, a warm jolt spreading deep inside him as they fade out together, breathing each other’s ragged exhales until Sirius laughs, wonderingly, and rubs his lips along Remus’s jaw to his lips, catching the curlicue-jolts of laughter between his teeth.

“See,” says Sirius, running a presumptuous palm along his back as Remus stretches out beside him, “I told you I saw sexual intent in the twist of your delicate features. I’m absolutely fucking fluent in Moony.”

“Someday, they’ll put your face on a chocolate frog.” He laughs again, feeling open and new and so happy, every wire and quavering muscle in his body coursing with it in the places where he curls into Sirius beneath the duvet, shivering with the draught against their damp skin.

“Mm. For the sex, or the unprecedented Divination skills in the face of extreme adversity?”

“Both, I think.” Remus takes a long breath, watching Sirius’s sleepy eyes, his bitten-red mouth. “Definitely both.”

“If it’s both, they’ll have to put your face on there too,” says Sirius, kissing a smile into him. Remus inhales them both deep, smelling Ivory soap and sex and cotton-clean linens. “I didn’t do that by myself.”

“We’re pretty good at it. Our chocolate frog ought to say something about that.”

“How you were just obliterated by my intellect, and also my—haha, stop, you immature little tosser.”

He settles himself against Sirius under the duvet, slotting their legs together and feeling his ribs expand into Sirius’s, love-warm and thrilled in every piece of themselves, the fullness of being together; it’s a marvel, he thinks, how much he loves his body like this, breathing happily with Sirius’s in the dark where they’re tucked away from everything else, where the world shrinks to the bed and the clock on the nightstand and their beating hearts. Pressing even closer, he puts his ear to Sirius’s chest, where he can hear the music of his body: his heart beating in Remus’s own chest, his lungs swelling and deflating in his ears—and then the skip of his blood against Sirius’s hand, humming a familiar tune into his fingertips, a melody sung in the flow of their skin and the chords of their heart-strings.

As they drift together with the moon swelling to sickness outside the window, Remus curls his fingers dreamily into the slopes of Sirius’s ribs and thinks, for the first time in weeks, about the future.

In theory, he supposes, there are universes that contain every possible incarnation of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. In one, maybe he went back home on that night in London, and they never left again; in another, he never found his way back to Sirius and sleeps alone on the left side of his bed, going whole days without speaking to anyone, his mouth and his lungs and his spine-notches aching with the memory of his loss while the world holds its breath: for the war, for betrayal, for the love he could never, ever wish away. And in others, he lives like a vagrant Muggle, never allowed at Hogwarts and flitting from job to job, where he eventually meets Sirius at a pub and teaches him to roll his own cigarettes, first at the bar, and then later in his room, trading a Rizla for the syllables of a new spell, naked at the open window. In some obscure, impossible corners, there is no war, or a lesser war, where James and Lily and Harry never have to hide from the world, and Peter doesn’t forget the wards to his mother’s house, and Caradoc threads every day with laughter, and Marlene and Dorcas stop by on Sundays with a bottle of wine, and Regulus Black knocks on the door late one night and presses himself into his brother’s arms, safe and forgiven. Remus puts on the teakettle and kisses Sirius over the stove in their new Camden townhouse, where the light gets into every crevice, where they never had to leave; where they have always been in love.

But in this one—in the only one that matters now—Remus’s body is curled around Sirius’s, Sirius’s fingers lost deep in his hair as he thinks of tomorrow, and next week, and three months from now, ten years from here: a single indistinct future where he dreams of falling in love with Sirius over and over and over, a fixed orbit in their own sky. Outside, in the sharpening dark, the earth and the hills and the trees hold their breath, waiting, waiting.

—

Light crowds into his skull in watercolor fragments. The fade-in is always slow with the dwindling moon-dark under his tongue, joints snapping, jaw screaming, skin burning hot-cold-sharp with the cyclical agony of rebirth: ravenous paws becoming hands becoming claws forced into narrow finger-needles, veins re-routed, violence satisfied, heart remade and thundering against realigning ribs. Instinct still slices in with human relief and fear at cross-sections, baring all thirty-two teeth in a snarl and curling his fists so hard his ragged nails leave welts on his palms, wanting the snap of bone and the thick iron-trickle of blood down his throat while the muzzy early-morning parts of himself break the surface at regular intervals, making him howl in pain and impatience. For a single moment, crouching on the ground and smelling the metal-sharp tang of blood between two of his toes, the twenty-one-year-old heart and the ancient poison throbbing in his head almost, almost harmonize.

A dog is barking somewhere nearby; Remus growls back, knowing it can’t hear him, but just as suddenly, he stops: his hands scramble up a tree trunk and he pulls himself to standing, thinking his first thread of words: I’ve been here before.

Memory begins to flit through him in sepia progression, bright touches of color blurring into him with a head-rush almost like orgasm. The shards of last night prickle beneath his skin, brushing up against his senses with the fervor of reclamation; he remembers the moments before moonrise, the beacon of Capella lit up in a pinpoint overhead, lining his path to a conclusion, or to a preface. Sometimes, there’s not much difference.

And their voices, he thinks with a fog-thick cough, his fingernails coming away with chunks of bark when he rakes them across the tree trunk, still irrationally furious at the lightening of the sky for robbing him of blood, of a dream; they had spoken again, he and the other werewolves, just before the change came and brought with it the linguistic shift that speaks only in terms of pain and hunger and rage, closer to honesty than Remus has ever gotten with them as a man.

They made their promise. He remembers listening to them, the words that smelled like blood and musk and fear snuffed out deep in the dead grass, and they promised; they promised, and Remus’s fists shook in his pockets, and he’d wanted to sob with relief at his own improbable victory, however slight, however late it’s come for him. A strange sinking sensation begins to tug at him from the chest and down to his belly, as if his monstrous heart is still learning to beat with a human harmony, but then he recognizes it distantly as exaltation: that he hasn’t failed, that he hasn’t wasted a whole year of pain, secrets, blood loss, of looking at his friends’ faces and seeing the darkness in their eyes and knowing that he’s partly to blame for it, too. That he can still do this much, when there is no one else who can.

The stars are beginning to fade out with dawn, so that he can no longer see their paths lit up in the glowering night-light, morning coming over the hills like a curse. It makes him panic, half-mad anger and inhuman fear mingling with the frantic feet of a twenty-one-year-old man, suspended between victory and catastrophe; his steps form into words beneath the cloud of his breath as he tries to run and stumbles instead, scrambling up again with his hands and knees: Breathe, breathe, breathe.

He can still hear the dog barking, much closer now, though he can’t see it as he bares his teeth in answer; in the southeast, through the bright blood of the tree-leaves, he can see Canis Major beneath the legs of the hunter, set against the curve of the earth in hairline fractures of light that burn black shapes onto his retinas when he looks away into the September-withered brush.

Sirius, he thinks when he looks up again. Sirius. That means something, something full of hands, full of music; his joints ache like memory, straining for the last star in the east.

More trees and brush and leggy, autumn-wilted undergrowth scratching at his ankles as he grapples for a foothold, the bright cold of the wind like fingers curling along his neck. The moon, still swollen full on the slope of the western hills, hums a tuneless song in his bones, sung in the snap of tendons and the flash of his teeth; when he raises his head, he can’t find the path anymore, and he closes his eyes, breathing in the strangeness of the waking world in the in-between time when his body still thrums with the strange knowledge of the night.

A sudden breeze again, bringing with it a hot-cold clash against his skin: a ghost of scent like a distant melody jangling along his nerves, a bright peal of bells and ink and menthols crushed in the corner of a pocket, a song that tugs at his knees and turns his head—music that can make him run.

“Moony,” say the trees, only—oh, he knows that voice, but when he turns, he doesn’t see the great black dog his irrational forebrain still expects to find with the moon’s teeth sawing inaudibly in his bones; Sirius, walking upright without a single stumble or misstep, watches him from a few paces away, palms turned up as if in supplication, and Remus feels a fresh rage split apart inside him at the arrogance of it, at his pitying hands offering an intolerable kindness. Sirius has never seen him like this before, always waiting out the almost-morning as a dog until Remus comes back to himself completely and he’s left with the residual ache haunting his body as the moon slips below the earth, the blood-hunger and the howling fear both finally gone. He wants to throw something, wants to scream at him and claw at his skin for even being here, but instead he stalks towards him, loping forward on uneven, graceless steps, like a foal on brand new legs, every muscle stretched deadly-tight and ready to hurt, ready for suffering.

But: “Moony,” Sirius repeats, and the moon, the miserable, hungry moon, begins to wane in his blood. “Remus, I’m right here.”

When he staggers to his knees, Sirius only barely catches him in time.

“What, what are you doing, you’re not—I could’ve,” he gasps, the pain that was blunted by the moon blooming out in waves where there’s a deep, sticky gash on his left side; cold panic begins to take hold when he realizes how long Sirius has been out here and he struggles to breathe, fear constricting his heart and lungs, his pulse beating at his ribs like a trapped bird and making him shortsighted with terror—a jittering of the brain. “I could’ve hurt you, you bloody, fucking idiot.”

Sirius pulls him hard against his chest but Remus jerks away, shaking with pain and fear and the frenzy of disorientation that always comes just before and just after the change, his vision blotting out and narrowing to the nonsense shapes of the trees and Sirius’s shoulders; he twitches violently against Sirius, panicking beyond reason as Sirius locks his elbows in tight around his waist and presses his forehead to Remus’s, steadying him. “Remus, Remus, you have to breathe.”

It takes another few out-of-tune breaths before he registers the rhythmic swell-and-hush of Sirius’s chest rising against his, trying to pull Remus into his orbit. Slowly, slowly, he begins to breathe again: in and out, in and out, one exhale after another sloughing off like dead weight into the morning until his rhythm evens out, and smooths into Sirius’s; when he opens his eyes, he can see the very last stars in the sky, flickering out of time with their breaths and never, never as bright as Sirius’s eyes on his. He can feel Sirius’s heart beating through the thin fabric of his jacket, blurring into his own.

“Why,” he whispers, running his palms wildly down Sirius’s arms. Their breathing is still wired together, moon-melded, and whenever his mouth tries to form other words they stutter into senseless noises.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting in answer. To hear that Sirius was worried, or he wanted to see him—or he isn’t afraid of him, slavering beast that he is—or some other string of words far too sharp when it’s six o’clock in the morning and Remus is still naked and the strange, inarticulate newness of the world is twining up through his body, tangling darkly behind his teeth. He shivers in Sirius’s arms, pressing a hand to his hip like a pathfinder, as if they’ve been here forever, learning and re-learning each other from the inside out.

“I love you,” says Sirius. His thumbs trace the vast cartography of Remus’s jaw to his neck and down to his shoulders, the lines and divots that define him so completely, holding every part of him in his hands. “Even the bits that want to eat my face and chew my skin off like a dog with a bit of steak—which you are, I mean.” He swallows, and the first dreamlike shards of sun dapple his eyes with warmth. “I love you. I love all of you.”

There are few things in this world—this universe, truly—that Remus has ever been certain of: the swell of the moon outside his window, Earl Grey in the pantry, empty pockets, cold hands and cold feet every morning when he wakes up. But for the first time in his life, the first time in twenty-one years of wishing and yearning and sacrifice and denying himself pain, he is certain of the solidity of someone else’s breathing body, of someone else’s hands and mouth and heart.

Remus holds him by the hips, and drags in a shaky breath, and says, for the first time, “I know you do.”

And if it comes out as half-sob, half-exaltation, Sirius doesn’t say anything; Remus feels himself opening up against him, giving himself over to Sirius: the perfect intimacy of it, indelible and secret in their tangled togetherness, in their love. This is, he supposes again, the bravest thing he will ever do.

“What did they say?” asks Sirius, urgently. The sky shows star-bright in the cracks between the clouds. “Are they with us?”

“Yes,” says Remus. “I’ve—I’ll have to talk to Dumbledore, as soon as we get home. It’s not much, I mean, but—”

“Moony, it’s everything,” says Sirius, and Remus leans in to kiss the smile breaking over his lips, ardently. “Christ, I just—I could take my trousers off right now, and not even in a slaggish sort of way.”

“For the benefit of the wildlife, and the situation.”

“Exactly.” Sirius clasps both his hands and pulls him up, his body pressed into Remus’s like a ballast. “Speaking of,” he says, casting an appreciative glance down the ridges of Remus’s body, almost pornographic considering the time of day, “you could stand to do that more often. Think of the country, Lupin: a little more of your bits, and Wizarding England will be well on its way to a long overdue cultural education. Not to mention, y’know, the benefits to myself.”

He laughs, rough with dawn and straining on his sore stomach muscles, but he can’t seem to stop—another side effect of close proximity to Sirius Black, he thinks, this overwhelming joy sometimes tinged with pain or fear: a love so deep and so innate he could no more dissever it than he could be rid of his condition, or unwind the threads of his own soul. “Why,” he asks, between a fresh cut of pain and laughter, “why are you like this? That’s—I can barely even be coherent and you’re talking about my bits when the sun’s not even up. You’re, you’re—I’m not even sure there’s word for you, but please don’t stop.”

“It’s the inbreeding,” says Sirius. “It’s good that you’re into that sort of thing, mate. We can be depraved together when we’re eighty years old and arthritic and make my mother pirouette in her grave.”

“The grounds of your mind are a fertile place, Pads.”

“Want to plow them?” Sirius asks, giving Remus’s waist a squeeze and making him laugh breathlessly until he has to lean on him, heavy and thrilled in his bones.

Something hitches in his chest; for a moment, he thinks it’s his breath, but then he recognizes it as his heart—the same subtle gravitational pull that’s always been there at the root of his relationship with Sirius, since the very day they met. No one he’s ever known in his entire life has ever been able to make him laugh like Sirius can, no one has ever made him as happy, nothing can make him love the way Sirius does, with every broken-edged part of himself; and when he stops to take Sirius’s face in his hands, turning it towards the low-strung easterly sun, Remus has never been more in love with the solidity of his own hands on Sirius’s body, with the tangled black shapes gravity has made of their shadows in the half-dark.

“Sirius,” he whispers, tracing the ridges and hollows of his face in an invincible recollection, something holy where he touches him—all of him, all of him. “You’re so,” he says, and takes a shuddering breath and letting it out slowly, like breathing fire into kindling. “I just—I love you, God, I love you.”

Sirius laughs, a warm, off-tune chord. “I know you do,” he says, and kisses him so that Remus feels again the shock of love deep in his belly, loud enough to drown out everything else.

The stars hang in bright lanterns overhead, like threads strung on the warp and weft of every universal truth Remus Lupin knows: that he is alive, that home is the finger-length distance from himself to where Sirius stands; that he is in love, and will always be. Their hips knock against each other as they make their way through the shadows and the trees until they step unflinchingly into the light, together.

—

October comes like a thief, slipping its fingers through the cracks of the house at night: needle-cold winds blading between the trees and the last of the field-fires licking ash through the air in the afternoons, everything painted in deep shade and omens and sunshine like honey. Remus sits on the back steps in the evenings and watches the darkness draw in earlier and earlier each night over the barren earth, the whole world sinking into silence while he waits for Sirius to come home from Order business, thinking of the year, ending; thinking of the year, beginning, and all the places they’ve been, all the places he wants to go.

He imagines it as a rapid-fire turn of events sometimes, the help he’s won and the confessions Sirius has charmed out of unwitting suspects all adding up to a swift, miraculous victory; sometimes, he thinks of fighting for years, for decades, an erosion of years where danger becomes mundane. Most of the time, they live through this, both of them, folded safely into Shropshire beneath overgrown ivy and bindweed or back in London, re-learning themselves and each other cyclically, endlessly, in phases that mirror the crescent arc of the moon. Other times, when he looks up at the shapes and names in the stars lit up in a map only they can understand, the future is so bright it leaves him half-blind, and he supposes there’s hope in that, too.

Looking up into his wide expanse of October night, he sees Aquila and Cygnus lit almost shatteringly bright and wonders if, somewhere, all those versions of himself and Sirius can exist. He likes to think they do; he likes to think, sometime soon, things are going to change again.

The wind whispers over the hill from the north, bringing with it a scent like sound: an odd note of menthols and cut grass and clinging autumn cold, a song he would know at the end of the world, at any corner of their strange unknowable universe. Sirius’s shoes tap out a staccato on the ground as he comes around the side of the house to the backyard and up the three steps to where Remus sits, his thigh sliding against Remus’s in the yellow hum of the back light. The moon, a livid waning crescent, gleams in the slit of his eyes when he leans over and kisses the tired twist of Sirius’s lips in answer of the litany of questions they still don’t need to ask.

“How’d it go?” he asks, watching the jagged cut of Sirius’s silhouette set against the night, the impossible angles of his hair, darkness into darkness.

“All right, for the most part,” says Sirius, leaning back on the heels of his palms; for a moment, it makes him look very young. “No one’s arms got blown off. What, were you worried?”

“Don’t be an arse.”

“It’s all right, Moony. Crippling worry-turned-indigestion is the national anthem of Remus Lupin, I know. The clock being stuck on certain death doesn’t help.” He leans into Remus, pressing his nose into the side of his neck and sliding his mouth over his pulse, where it rises to meet the plot-point of his lips. “I could hear you a mile away. ‘Oh, Sirius, when will you come home, it’s so cold and frightening out here on my own, in the nude—’”

“Shut,” says Remus, tilting Sirius’s head towards him, “up,” and kisses him slowly, unrushed, because Remus doesn’t know what they’re rushing towards.

They don’t speak for a while, but in the shadow-play of their bodies cast by the buzz of the light and the stars, Remus can see the strange shapes Sirius’s hands keep twitching into between his knees in that nervous way he has, speaking fear and doubt in the curl of his fingers so that Remus can almost feel it in his gut, twisting into knots; it reminds him of being seventeen, of the first time Sirius kissed him behind the broom-shed in early June, how his hands had trembled at Remus’s jawline the way they never had before, like he was something beautiful; and Remus, shattered with the newness of it, with his own desperate love, had taken them in his own until they stopped shaking, and both of them laughed like they’d just jumped off the end of the world together.

“Sirius,” he says. He feels suspended like a spider web between a beginning and an end—between one future and another. A strange sense of separation from everything but the house and Sirius sinks into him, and even though he knows he’s imagining it, he still can’t shake the sense of a pause, a lapse; the world seems to be holding its breath, even when Sirius opens his mouth and speaks.

“James and Lily had to move again,” he says quietly, looking into the shroud of woods at the edge of the yard, “last week.”

His heart stutters, and he hunches forward, churned with it; Sirius arches with him, head bowed with Remus’s. “I went to see Peter,” he says, quieter still. When Remus looks at him, his jaw is clenched tight around all the things he still isn’t saying, brittle enough to crack; he reaches out and puts a hand on Sirius’s back, smoothing it out in small circles until Sirius leans into it like it’s the best thing he’s ever had.

“When are you doing it?” asks Remus, and only realizes it’s a whisper after he’s said it. And then, “Why did you need to see Peter?”

In the long minute that follows, Sirius doesn’t say anything. Remus finds himself thinking of March, of the empty bed and the breadcrumb trail he followed through the flat every morning and every night, and then the wide brim of the moon waxing gibbous in July, leading him to what he lost until he made it his own again, of all the parts of himself he’s still learning to cultivate, the parts of Sirius he wants to unearth and hold and love in every future they might have. He wants to see this whole war through, wants to come home to Sirius and re-learn him inside out, argue with him and wander the earth with him and beg forgiveness and grow grey hairs and improvise crossword clues when they’re eighty years old and fall in deafening love with him, over and over like fixed orbits in the language of desire, for as many times as their unknowable lives will allow. He wants to look at the stars and the clock on his nightstand that keeps their own time, the bathroom counter and the bed and the dormer window and the shade-lit garden—the cartography of their entire universe plotted out in teaspoons and patched jumpers and placeholder kisses in the doorway—and say, Oh, I found you here.

Remus isn’t sure he has ever wanted as much and as deeply as he does now; he’s never had this much to hope for, this much left to lose. Above them, all across the wide dark spill of the sky, he can pick out every individual star glittering like laughter—like possibilities, he thinks, instead of a map, all of them teeming with life. For a moment, he can almost see them breathing.

“I love you,” he says, and bows his head to the crook of Sirius’s shoulder, feeling him turn, his lips pressed to Remus’s hair. “No matter what else, I love you.” Time seems to expand and contract all at once: he’s never understood so completely before now just what it means to be in love, what it means to open yourself up and let someone else inside—what it means, indeed, to jump off the end of the world together.

It is loving Sirius at twelve, wrung out with fear and relief as he touched the wide hound’s-tooth scar on his ribs for the first time, curled into each other in the dark with Sirius’s heart beating under his mouth and the laughter coaxed out of his own throat, always, by the sound of Sirius’s voice.

It is loving Sirius at seventeen, his hands held out to Remus beneath his bedroom window in the invincible hush of August, their bodies slotted together like the pieces of the same broken thing.

It is loving Sirius at eighteen in Camden on the first night after he moved into their flat, when all Remus wanted to do was hold him until morning, when all he wanted was to fall asleep beside him every night for the rest of his life.

It is loving Sirius at twenty-one, here on the back steps with his lips pressed to the marvelous music of Sirius’s pulse, a thousand different futures they can’t know. It is loving Sirius now, because it is all he wants to do with the warm red thrill of his beating heart.

And when Sirius turns to kiss the shadow in his mouth, he knows that Sirius understands, too.

“Can you keep a secret?” asks Sirius, smiling, and Remus laughs, a bright clamor of memory, of hope. He twines their fingers together and feels the pulse of the inviolable eternal, a spark of possibility in the places where their hands are touching.

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