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The forest did not care that it was his birthday.
That was the thing about the Forbidden Forest—it had no particular cruelty and no particular mercy. It simply was, ancient and indifferent, its roots older than the school above it, its shadows grown so thick in places they had stopped being absences of light and become something with texture, with weight. Remus understood this about the forest in a way he understood few things cleanly: he had been coming here since second year, had memorized its moods the way other boys memorized Quidditch statistics, had learned which trees leaned and which stood rigid against the wind that came down from the mountains in winter like a slow catastrophe.
Tonight the wind smelled of pine resin and old snow and something green and faintly rotten underneath—the particular smell of March deciding, not yet, not yet.
He sat with his back against a rowan whose bark had gone silver in the cold, his knees drawn up, his robes doing very little. His hands were in his lap and he was not looking at them. He was looking at nothing. He had been looking at nothing for approximately an hour, which was a productive use of his birthday, he thought. Sixteen years old and sitting in a forest in the dark because the alternative was sitting in Gryffindor tower where the portrait hole kept swinging open and the laughter kept coming through.
He was not angry.
He was—
He was something that did not have a name yet. Something that lived in the chest cavity just beneath the sternum, something that pressed outward when he breathed and made the breathing a conscious act. Something that had been there since the month prior, since Snape's face and Dumbledore's office and James's white-lipped silence. Something that tasted, he thought, like mud and old copper and the specific shame of being saved.
Six days. Six days until the moon pulled the boy out of him like a thread unravelling from cloth, and Sirius had—
He pressed his thumbnail into his palm. Felt the small bright point of it. Stopped.
A sound.
Not the forest's sounds—not the distant screech of something winged, not the creak of the rowan's ancient complaint—but a footstep, careful and deliberate, the sound of someone who had learned to move through dark places without announcing themselves. Remus did not reach for his wand. He knew that step the way he knew certain lines of poetry: by rhythm, by cadence, by the particular way it landed.
Regulus Black moved through the treeline and into the small clearing where the moonlight fell, and Remus—
Remus looked at him the way he always looked at him when Regulus didn't know he was being looked at, which was the only way Remus had ever let himself look properly. Hungrily. With the full embarrassing weight of three months' accumulated wanting.
He was not tall. That was the first thing, always—not that Regulus was short, precisely, but that the magnitude of him never seemed to match the scale of his body, so that there was always a moment of recalibration, always a moment where Remus had to reconcile the largeness of what Regulus was with how neatly he fit into a room, into a forest, into the unremarkable middle distance of a corridor. He moved like water in cold weather—not frozen, not fluid, but that exact threshold between the two, deliberate and surface-still with everything underneath in slow hidden motion. His dark hair had gone loose at one temple. His robes were Slytherin green gone black in the dark.
His face, when the moonlight found it, was arranged in the particular expression Remus had privately catalogued as looking for something he hasn't decided to want yet. Grey eyes. Serious. The kind of serious that wore itself so habitually it had stopped being an expression and become an architecture.
Then he found Remus against the rowan, and the architecture shifted into something Remus had no catalogue entry for. Something that had been appearing with increasing frequency over the past three months and which Remus had been, with increasing incompetence, failing to not be undone by.
"You're not wearing a coat," Regulus said.
"I'm aware."
"It's March."
"Also aware."
Regulus crossed the clearing without further commentary and sat beside him—not touching, the two or three inches of cold air between them as present as a third party, as they always were in these careful stolen hours—and for a moment said nothing. Just looked at the trees. Remus watched him do it from the corner of his eye and felt the thing beneath his sternum shift.
"How did you find me," Remus said. Not a question, exactly.
"You always come here when you're—" Regulus paused. Selected something. "—when you need to be somewhere that isn't where people are."
This was accurate. This was so accurate it was almost embarrassing, the way being known could be embarrassing, the way it sat differently in the body than anonymity did.
"It's your birthday," Regulus said.
"I'd noticed."
A silence. The wind moved through the upper branches and a scatter of dead needles came down.
"I have something for you." Regulus reached into the inner pocket of his robes—that precise, unhurried movement—and produced something small enough to cup in one hand. He held it out.
It was a small glass phial, stopped with wax the colour of dried blood, and inside it something moved. Not liquid—something luminous, slow-shifting, a light that wasn't quite silver and wasn't quite gold but held somewhere in the narrow geography between the two. It pulsed, very slightly, the way a coal pulses in the last stage of burning. Like something breathing.
"What is it," Remus said, and his voice had done something unfortunate and quieter than he'd intended.
"Distilled moonlight." Regulus said it the way he said most things—flatly, without decoration, as though the words required no additional ceremony. "From the January full moon. There's a process—it's complicated and I nearly ruined three cauldrons and Slughorn asked entirely too many questions—but the theory is that if you hold it, it—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth together briefly. "The texts suggest it has a stabilizing property. For people with lunar—for people who—"
He stopped again.
Remus looked at him. Regulus was not looking back. He was looking at the phial in his own outstretched hand with the focused attention of someone who had decided the object was extremely interesting.
"I don't know if it actually works," Regulus said, to the phial. "The sourcing was inconsistent. I'm not making any claims."
Three months. Three months of notes passed through library books and conversations conducted in the Astronomy tower at two in the morning and the ongoing mutual pretense that this was a casual arrangement, that it cost neither of them anything. Three months of Remus memorizing the geography of Regulus Black's silences the way he'd memorized the forest—learning which ones were shields and which ones were simply the shape of him.
He had spent three months not kissing Regulus Black.
He stopped not doing that.
It was not planned. It was the phial and the January moonlight and the three ruined cauldrons and Slughorn's questions and the particular way Regulus had said I don't know if it actually works like an apology, like a small flag of surrender—it was all of that arriving at once in the place beneath his sternum and tipping something over—and then Remus's hand was at Regulus's jaw, and he turned him, and he kissed him.
Regulus went very still.
The kiss lasted four seconds, perhaps five. Remus's thumb was at the hinge of Regulus's jaw and he could feel the muscle there, the slight held tension. The moonlight through the branches. The wind, stopped or perhaps only paused. The small warm breathing light of the phial somewhere below them.
He pulled back.
The silence was a different shape than it had been.
"I'm sorry," Remus said, immediately, into the two or three inches of cold air he'd reinstated between them. "I—that was—I should have—I didn't ask, I—"
Regulus's face was doing something Remus had never seen it do before.
Not the architecture. Not the careful studied blankness that had taken years, Remus suspected, to build to that pitch of effortlessness. Something underneath the architecture, something that had gotten through a crack the kiss had made—raw and quick and almost immediately suppressed, like a candle flame in a draft, there and then almost not there.
Almost.
"Don't," Regulus said.
"Don't—"
"Apologize." The word came out with an edge that wasn't anger, quite. Something adjacent to it. Something that lived in the same neighbourhood as anger but had a different quality to it, more interior, more worn. He was looking at the treeline again. His jaw, where Remus's thumb had been, looked very clean in the moonlight. "You don't have to apologize for it."
"I shouldn't have—without asking—"
"Remus." His name in Regulus's mouth had always done something unreasonable to him, the way Regulus said it like it was a complete sentence, like it contained its own punctuation. "I said don't."
Remus closed his mouth. Held the phial—he had taken it at some point, he wasn't sure when, it was warm against his palm in a way glass had no business being in March—and looked at the side of Regulus's face and waited.
The forest waited with him. It was good at that.
After a long moment, Regulus said, "I thought you were in love with Sirius."
The words arrived so quietly and so without preamble that Remus needed a full second to parse them. Then he needed another.
"What?"
"Not—" Regulus's throat moved. "Not recently. Or. I don't know. At the start." He said it with the precise toneless delivery of someone reading from a document they had not written and did not endorse, each word set down carefully, no weight distributed unevenly. "You looked at him."
"Everyone looks at Sirius."
"Not like that."
Remus opened his mouth and then closed it, because that was—he considered it honestly, turned it over the way he turned difficult texts over, looking for the shape of the argument. It was true that he had looked at Sirius. It was true that in first year, second year, even third, there had been something in looking at Sirius that was different from looking at other people—Sirius who was luminous and magnetic and moved through the world as though gravity had agreed to slightly different terms for him specifically. It was true.
It was also true that looking at Sirius had always felt, if he was honest, like looking at the sun. Bright. Significant. Not something you built a life around looking at.
Regulus—
Looking at Regulus had always felt like looking at the moon. Which was perhaps an unfortunate metaphor given the specific circumstances of Remus's life, but there it was: something you could actually see, actually study, something that changed and had phases and pulled at things. Something that rewarded looking.
"That was a long time ago," Remus said. "If it was ever—it wasn't—" He stopped. Tried again. "Sirius is my friend."
"I know that." A beat. "Now."
"Regulus—"
"It's a reasonable assumption." The toneless delivery was doing something slightly unsteady now, very slightly, like a table with one short leg that only showed when weight was applied. "He's—Sirius is. He's Sirius. He fills up a room and everyone in it and you've known him for five years and you're—you're fond of him, it's visible, you look at him like he's—"
"Like he's my friend," Remus said. "That's what that looks like."
Regulus said nothing.
The wind came through again, low this time, moving along the ground rather than through the canopy, disturbing the frost-stiffened leaf litter at the clearing's edge. Remus watched Regulus's profile and watched him not respond and felt, somewhere in the region of the phial's warmth, something that ached.
"Is that why you never—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "We haven't. In three months. I thought it was because you weren't—that you needed more time, or that you didn't want to, not like that, and I wasn't going to—"
"I wanted to," Regulus said, to the middle distance.
"Then—"
"Because I thought—" The short leg of the table. The very slight unsteadiness. "I thought that if you were going to—that eventually you would realize—"
He stopped.
He pressed two fingers briefly to the bridge of his nose, a gesture so unlike his usual economy of movement that it stopped Remus's breathing for a moment, this small evidence of something being effortful.
"He's better looking than me," Regulus said. Flatly. Factually. The way you'd say it's cold or the moon rises in the east?, some natural law too established to require feeling. "Sirius. Objectively. He has—he's got the—everyone has always said it, our whole lives, Sirius, Sirius, my mother's friends and the girls in the library and the boys in Sirius's year, and I look—" A pause. Something moving behind the grey eyes that he was not quite quick enough to put away. "I look like what's left over. When the interesting parts were already distributed." He said it the same way. Same tone. As if he were merely observing a principle of genetics.
Remus did not know what to do with this. He didn't have a compartment for it. He had compartments for Regulus being brilliant and Regulus being guarded and Regulus having a temper that flared hot and brief and was always regretted within seconds and Regulus being so deeply kind it was almost a weapon. He had a compartment for the way Regulus's hands moved when he was concentrating, for the particular shape of his smile when something genuinely amused him, for the way he read poetry with a focus that was almost devotional.
He didn't have a compartment for this.
"I don't want Sirius," Remus said, and it was not an elegant sentence, it was not a sentence that would win awards, it was a sentence built entirely out of desperation and the urgent need to lay bricks over the raw and dangerous thing Regulus had just shown him. "I'm not even sure I want to be his friend right now." That was true. That was true in a way that was messy and uncomfortable and not something he had allowed himself to admit to anyone, least of all himself. "He's—he's reckless and he's thoughtless and he's—he hurt someone. He hurt someone deliberately. And I let it happen. I'm not going to—I don't forgive him for that. I don't think I have to."
"Of course you don't forgive him," Regulus said, and the contempt was a small sharp stone, an old familiar riverbed of it, the sound of it a thing Remus had only ever heard in private, Regulus's private bitter well of it. "It's what he does. He breaks things and people look at the mess and they say oh, what a beautiful noise it made. He's been doing it since he was a child."
"He's your brother."
"He's my brother," Regulus agreed, but the word was hollowed out, something without sentiment, a mere fact of lineage. "It doesn't mean I don't know who he is."
He was still not looking at Remus. He was looking at the dark line of the treeline, the way you look at a map. The two or three inches of cold air between them felt charged now, a place where too much had been said and too little had been resolved. Remus thought of all the times he had watched Regulus hold himself at a careful distance, all the times he had mistaken it for arrogance or disinterest, and felt something like a knot in his throat.
"I don't think that's what you look like," Remus said, quietly. "What's left over."
Regulus made a small, dismissive noise. A puff of air in the cold. "You'd be the first." He shifted, a small adjustment of his shoulders against the rowan, and the movement brought their knees into contact. Just for a second. The pressure of wool against wool, a brief point of warmth before they separated again. Remus held the feeling in his body.
"I'm serious," Remus said. And then he winced. The name. The irony. "No—I mean—I am—" He sighed. "Do you really think you're ugly?" Because that was the core of it, wasn't it? That was the terrible, raw thing under the careful prose.
"I think I'm ordinary," Regulus said, and the word 'ordinary' landed with the weight of a condemnation. "I'm—"
"Stunning. You're stunning." The words were out before Remus could call them back. He felt a flush start at the base of his throat. He looked down at the phial in his hands, at the slow-moving light inside it, at the way it seemed to pulse in response to the rhythm of his own pulse, which had, he noted with some clinical detachment, accelerated significantly. "When you walk into a room, I know where you are before I see you. Because everything—the light, the conversations, the silence—they all sort of... reorganize themselves around you. It's like a tide. You're not the splash. You're the gravity that's pulling it."
This was too much. This was a terrible, overwrought thing to say. He braced himself for the flinch, for the retreat, for the careful reconstruction of the architecture.
"Obviously. I'm half-veela."
Remus's head snapped up.
Regulus was looking at him. The grey eyes were not looking at the treeline anymore. They were fixed on his face, and the expression in them was not one Remus had ever seen before. It was not the architecture. It was not the small flame glimpsed behind the crack. It was something else. Something that held both gravity and a terrible, fragile humour. The corner of his mouth had done something—twitched, almost.
The joke was so awful, so profoundly un-Regulus, so completely out of character with the preceding confession, that it was the most reassuring thing Remus had ever heard.
"Of course," Remus managed. "The family secret."
"Can't tell anyone." The corner of his mouth did it again, a definite shift this time. A half-smile. "It would explain the charm."
And with that, the thing in Remus's chest, the thing that had been pressing and tasting of old copper, didn't exactly disappear, but it shifted. It settled into a new shape. A less painful one. A more hopeful one. The two or three inches of cold air between them were still there, but they didn't feel like a buffer anymore. They felt like a choice they were both making, and now they could choose something else.
He put the phial in his own robe pocket. The warmth of it was a strange, private comfort against his hip. Then he reached out, slowly, giving Regulus every opportunity to move away, and took his hand.
Regulus's fingers were cold. Remus laced their them together. The skin of Regulus's wrist, just above the cuff of his robes, was pale in the moonlight, almost translucent. He could see the faint blue tracery of veins beneath it. Life. The evidence of it.
"It's a terrible charm," Remus said, and his voice was steadier now. "It works too slowly."
"I find," Regulus said, and he was looking down at their joined hands, the way you might look at a mathematical proof you were trying to solve, "that the target variables are often resistant."
"I'm not."
Regulus laughed. It was a real laugh, not a puff of air or a cynical noise, but a low, breathy sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep and unused. It startled something in Remus, a bird taking flight.
Remus wanted to collect that laugh and put it somewhere safe. He wanted to press it between the pages of a book the way you press flowers—wanted something to keep of it, some proof that it had existed, because it was the kind of thing that didn't seem like it should be allowed to just disappear into the cold air and be gone.
Regulus composed himself. He looked, for a moment, simply young. Not the composed second son of the House of Black, not the Slytherin prefect who moved through corridors like a cold front, not the boy who wore seriousness as both armour and skin. Just young. Fifteen and sitting in a forest in the dark with cold hands and one loose piece of hair at his temple and the aftermath of a real laugh still living in the corners of his mouth.
Remus did not say: you should do that more. It was too much. It would put the architecture back up.
He held his hand instead.
Regulus let him. That was—that was extraordinary, actually. Remus had learned, over three months, that Regulus permitted touch the way certain plants permitted certain weather: conditionally, with a latency, with the sense that the wrong move would trigger a closing of the petals. He did not pull away. He adjusted, very slightly, the angle of his wrist, a small unconscious accommodation, and then he was still.
"You could do it again," Regulus said, after a while.
Remus looked at him.
The grey eyes were on the treeline. The composure was back but it was a different composure—lighter, sitting differently on his face, the way a coat sits differently on a body when the person inside it has unclenched. His jaw was not set. His thumb, Remus noticed, had moved against the back of Remus's hand—a small, almost imperceptible motion, barely a pressure, barely anything at all.
"Kiss me," Regulus said. Still to the treeline. "If you wanted to. I'm—I'm saying that you could."
The forest was very quiet.
Remus looked at him—at the clean line of his jaw and the darkness of his lashes and the slight colour that had come into the skin below his cheekbone, whether from cold or from the sentence he had just said Remus could not determine. At the loose piece of hair at his temple, which the wind had shifted again. At the very deliberate way he was not looking at Remus, which was, Remus understood, not indifference but courage. The specific courage it took to offer a thing and look away so you didn't have to watch it be received.
Remus thought about the phial. Three cauldrons. Slughorn's questions. The sourcing was inconsistent, I'm not making any claims—
He reached up with his free hand and tucked the loose piece of hair back from Regulus's temple. His fingertips stayed there a moment, against the cool skin just above his ear. He felt Regulus go still in the particular way he'd gone still before—not rigid, not resistant, but gathered. Like a held breath.
Then he turned to look at Remus. Finally.
And there was no architecture.
There was just Regulus—grey eyes and cold skin and the slight furrow between his brows that appeared when he was trying to read something and wasn't sure of the language yet, and Remus thought: there it is. There he is. The thing that had been quietly rearranging itself in his chest for three months, the thing he'd been walking around carefully like a structure he wasn't sure would hold his weight—he saw the shape of it now.
He kissed him again.
This one was slower. This one had permission in it. It had the three months and the astronomy tower and the library books and the phial full of January light, and it had Regulus's thumb still moving against his hand, and it had the particular cold-warmth of Regulus's mouth, and Remus felt something in his body that he had been holding at a careful distance simply—stop holding.
Regulus kissed back. That was—he kissed back, properly, with his hand tightening in Remus's and a sound in his throat that he might not have known he made. He kissed like someone who had been waiting to and had not allowed themselves to think about it too directly because thinking about it too directly was too much.
When they separated, Regulus pressed his forehead against Remus's temple and stayed there, and they were both breathing slightly differently than they had been.
The forest settled around them. The wind had gone to wherever wind went when it was done. The rowan held them against its silver bark and did not comment.
"Happy birthday," Regulus said, into the small dark space between them.
"Yes," Remus agreed. His eyes were closed. The phial was warm against his hip. "It is."