Chapter Text
Move-in day is largely unremarkable. Remus has few possessions, just a handful of trunks and boxes, already packed after his departure from Hogwarts. Sirius has nothing, not even a wand. The wand is a problem Remus isn't sure how to solve until Dumbledore turns up unexpectedly with a house-warming gift: a long, narrow box for Sirius, and a word to both of them about the future of the Order of the Phoenix. Remus is gutted at the idea of another war. The first one was terrible enough. It's just a whisper at this point, a warning, and he hopes fervently that it will never develop any further.
The landlord has generously provided them with a few bits of worn furniture. That night, Remus and Sirius share a quiet dinner at a shabby wooden table. Sirius swears to replace the furniture with better quality things at the first opportunity. Remus expresses misgivings about Confunding the landlord. ('How else would we have gotten Buckbeak in here?' Sirius asks. 'He really doesn't look like a dog.') But mostly they eat in silence.
Afterwards, restless and agitated, Sirius takes himself for a walk. Remus, book in hand, watches his tail whip out of sight as the door swings closed behind him. When he returns, he joins Remus in the sitting room, settling in a chair across from him, pretending not to watch him. Eventually, Remus closes his book and says, 'Well. Good night.'
'Good night.'
Remus goes into his bedroom, closes his door, lies down on his bed. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel at all like it used to. He hears Sirius go padding by, into his own room. Remus sighs heavily. He gets up again and soon finds himself at Sirius's door. Sirius is sitting up in bed, and looks up immediately when Remus appears.
'May I join you?' Remus asks, hesitant.
'Of course!' says Sirius, overeager, moving to make room in the bed.
Remus climbs in next to him, and there's an awkward pause. This used to be so easy. All he should have to do is reach for Sirius, pull him close, follow their own natural rhythms. But he can't remember how it goes any more. It feels as if there is a great chasm between them, impossible to reach across. Or a maze, perhaps, that he no longer feels confident navigating. He's coming up with metaphors as fast as he can, hardly recognising that he's starting to panic.
Sirius raises a hand towards Remus's shoulder, hesitates, and then tucks it behind his own head instead. 'Hey,' he says gently. 'Are you OK?'
Shaking now, Remus says, 'Ye – no – I don't –' Tears start to stream down his face, and he is mortified, but he can't stop them. He turns away, as if he can pretend that he isn't sobbing.
Sirius sighs heavily. 'God, Moony, how did we get here?'
Remus is intimately familiar with loneliness. He's spent more than a decade getting to know almost every flavour of it. And yet he can't remember ever feeling more lonely than he does now, sitting in bed with Sirius, their relationship broken between them. Still crying, Remus says, 'I thought you betrayed us.'
His voice haunted, Sirius says, 'I spent twelve years in Azkaban for that betrayal.'
'Neither of us deserved this,' says Remus. He sniffles and amends, 'None of us deserved this.'
Silence, for a moment. Then Sirius says, 'I thought I was going to die in that place.'
'I waited for death every day.'
Silence again.
Hesitant, careful, unsure of himself, Sirius begins to speak. 'Do you remember the time that – no, hang on. Did you know that I –' He grunts in frustration. 'OK. The – you know, the Dementors – they – they rob you of all your happy thoughts, and memories. My freedom was taken away, my reputation. My life. But that wasn't enough for them. They kept taking and taking. I started to forget all the good times with you. All I had left were our fights... that time in seventh year when we broke up for a while... those months towards the end when I became suspicious of you.
'I was left with very little. And yet, even the bad memories of you had this kind of... this warmth to them. The more I played them out in my head, the more I came to the conclusion that, well – no one could possibly have been such an insufferable nag towards me unless he loved me very much.'
Remus chokes out a laugh through his tears. 'I did love you very much.' He looks at Sirius, puffy eyes and tear-stained face be damned, drinking in the sight of him. 'I do love you. But it's hard, Sirius. This used to be easy. It was always easy. I don't know how to handle it now that it's not.'
Sirius nods slowly. 'Do you remember when I decided to learn how to play the guitar?'
'What? Yes,' Remus says, thrown by the sudden anecdote.
'There wasn't a music shop in Hogsmeade, so we stole down to the Muggle village one weekend and found a guitar in a second-hand shop.'
'That battered old thing,' says Remus. 'I thought you were going to snap it in half whenever you played it.'
'We smuggled it up to the castle,' Sirius continued. 'James was Head Boy that year and kept threatening to turn me in.'
'He never would have, he enjoyed watching you struggle too much for that.'
'I did struggle, at first,' Sirius says. With a meaningful look from Remus, he says, 'All right, I struggled for a long time with it. But I got quite good in the end, didn't I?'
Remus nods. 'Before the Great Guitar Mishap of '79.'
Sirius shakes his head. 'May it rest in peace. But my point, Moony, is that learning to play the guitar was difficult. Very difficult. I worked so hard. Because I knew it was worth it. I knew that I wanted to play the guitar, and so I put in the effort.'
Remus can feel tears welling up again. He pushes them away. 'This is worth it, too,' he says, his voice a whisper.
'I think so,' says Sirius, just as quiet. 'I'm willing to put the effort in. Are – are you?'
It's as if Sirius has given him a map for the distance between them. Remus throws his arms around Sirius. His forehead pressing into Sirius's collarbone, Remus says, 'When did you get so good at this?'
Sirius lets out a bark of a laugh. Remus has always loved the sound of it. 'I had a long time to rehearse conversations with you,' Sirius tells him.
What a heartbreaking thing to say. Remus looks up at him and says, 'May I sleep here tonight?'
'It would be my honour,' Sirius says, and then pulls a face at his own solemnity. 'Sorry. Er – yeah. Of course.'
They break apart to settle down for sleep. Remus finds himself unexpectedly exhausted. Before he can even register how natural this feels, he's asleep.
*
It's still dark when Remus wakes. The curtains in this new flat are thick and heavy on the window. His only hint at the time is the tiny patch of sunlight where the curtain isn't hanging quite straight. He rises from the bed and stretches, trying not to groan as he discovers how stiff his body is. He pulls the curtain aside to get a better look at the morning, forgetting that he shared a bed last night.
Sirius cries out as if Remus has stabbed him. In their school days, Remus might have laughed or teased or made jokes. Now, he says, 'Oh, Merlin! Sorry about that. I forgot –'
'Ssskay,' Sirius slurs, his head buried beneath a pillow. 'Don't have t'pologise...'
After a moment of indecision, Remus leaves the curtain drawn. He sits back down on the bed, where Sirius peeks up at him from under the pillow. 'Morning.'
'Good morning.' There's a pause, but Remus is determined to prevent it from becoming awkward. 'If I make you breakfast, will you forgive me for the rude awakening?'
Remus catches just a glimpse of a smile before Sirius takes cover underneath the pillow again. 'Abfrr-utely.'
In the kitchen, Remus throws a few kippers to Buckbeak, who snaps them up eagerly. He lays the remaining two in a pan for frying. They're nearly done when he feels a pair of warm arms slide around his waist and a heavy weight lean into his back.
'I thought you were going to keep sleeping?' Remus asks.
He can feel Sirius's face twitch against his shoulder. 'I wasn't really sleeping. I was just comfortable.'
Remus turns around, concerned. 'Did you sleep at all?'
Sirius waves an awkward hand. 'Don't worry about it, Moony. It's just a – a habit that I've fallen out of.'
'Sleeping?'
Sirius grimaces. 'Yeah.'
Unsure of what to say, Remus turns back to the sizzling kippers, prodding them to keep them from burning. Eventually, he asks, 'Is breakfast a lost habit too?'
'Honestly? Yeah,' Sirius admits. 'But it's one I'm looking forward to picking back up. Do we have eggs, too?'
And so their lives fall into a rhythm that could be called normal. They order furniture from a catalogue, along with sheets and towels and cutlery. Sirius surprises Remus with a boxful of books that have to sit on the floor for a week until the bookshelves arrive. Remus does the weekly shopping while Sirius slowly relearns how to cook. Once a month they Apparate together to lonely patches of wilderness to accommodate the curse.
One sunny afternoon, Sirius plucks Remus's book from his hands and sits down in his lap. Remus wraps his arms around him, drawing him closer, and as their lips meet it feels so damn good. They end up rolling onto the floor and making love in the sitting room like unsupervised teenagers. ('This was lovely and all,' Remus says afterwards, massaging his knees, 'But next time, can we please use the bed?')
Still. Some days Sirius feels so caged by the small flat that he transforms almost instinctively and flees, not returning for hours or, once, days. Some nights Remus is torn from sleep by his old nightmares, gasping and crying in the dark.
But when Sirius reappears, he knows that he will return to the warm and solid presence of Remus Lupin. When Remus wakes, he knows that Sirius will be there to ground him in reality and in the present, even if he's dead to the world and snoring.
Things aren't OK yet, but they will be. One day. It's only a matter of time.