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They take the remainder of the evening to themselves, listening to the howl of children outside pretending to yearn for the waxing moon, and smile at their blameless ignorance, a startled scuttle of bats dotting the sky before disappearing under muted lamplight. It’s appropriate, tonight, on Halloween, when old ghosts creep through entryways uninvited and filter like misted spectres through the spaces between words.
Propping himself up on an elbow, Sirius turns to face him, a hand sneaking underneath the blankets to play across Remus’ stomach, foot squirming over to touch their toes together in the mimic of a kiss. This front of normalcy they’ve put on for months hangs dead in the air like the questions neither of them ask and the bodies of fallen comrades, as though by clinging to the illusion of peacetime, happiness might actually find them.
Remus catches the hand near his navel and twines their fingers together, giving it a brief squeeze before moving towards the edge of the mattress, thinking he’ll put on some tea to bring back to bed, but something in the soft noise that comes involuntarily from the top of Sirius’ throat stills him. Looking over, Sirius’ expression is soft, something languid and relaxed in the line of his brow that hasn’t been there in a very long time, and his nearly-closed eyes beg a single question: stay with me?
Brown eyes meet steely gray, and both know the answer is “forever.”
Something shifts, at this, and Sirius pulls him suddenly close, rolling to envelop him in a tight embrace, a vague desperation marking the way their bodies fit together, as though they haven’t done this a thousand times and as though they won’t have the chance to do it a thousand more. Remus’ lips part to let out a sigh, and they cling fiercely to one another for endless minutes, drinking in the feel of the other’s skin instead of the chamomile Remus had been about to put on.
Tea was a foolish idea.
----
Remus can see their secrets written on the walls in slanted cursive, the familiar loops of Sirius' hand twining with the sharp peaks of his own letters, the same questions, assertions, doubling over one another and pouring over the windowsill, flooding the room with doubt like moonshine.
He’d read somewhere that the Ancient Ægyptians had believed the word was the deed, that the hieroglyphs they carved so painstakingly perfect in rows onto the walls of their temples and tombs would enact the thing they described, bring it to life and perpetuate it through eternity.
But he won’t read these words, so he won’t inadvertently acknowledge the power that they hold over the two of them even now. He refuses to breathe the syllables into being, the suspicions that haunt him, because he doesn’t know if he wants them to be true – or if they already are.
Maybe, if there were truth there, it would prove that he isn’t insane, that he isn’t imagining the distance between them, the silent calendar weeks where they miss one another en route to different corners of the continent, the furtive looks cast about at meetings, the way Sirius always seems to know just that little bit more about a coming raid than the rest of them.
Remus thinks he’d prefer madness.
----
Shutting his eyes against the room, Remus buries his face in Sirius’ neck and tangles his fingers around sheets and ribs under muscle, breathing in the heavy air that tastes like ink and fear. The arms around his waist wrap tighter, pulling him in closer, and a sudden conviction presses him into believing that it’s better not to know, that to lie here in simple ignorance is the better choice, like Sirius hadn’t returned home again this morning smelling like formaldehyde and someone else’s smoke with seemingly blank parchment in his robe pockets, for reasons he couldn’t tell why.
For a hot moment, their hips align, and they begin to rock together, lips on his forehead and muttered touches skating across his shoulders. Forever, his heart races, forever, just this moment, to stay like this in their denial of things that only hope says haven’t happened, a living photograph of blood and breath and skin, the tentative furls of trust all but ignored around the edges of the frame.
Remus turns his face upward from the throat it is buried in and draws up a hand to cup a scruffy, aristocratic chin; dark hair is slicked across the pillow like spilt oil, inviting him to hook thick strands of it around his knuckles and drag them down from an ear around a jaw. He catalogues the fluttershut of Sirius’ eyes as the burning wire between them pulls taut and snaps in an instant, recoiling back into a spring, twisting them further into one another, hands held hard against yielding flesh scattered with scars and battle-earned bruises, stretching time to its breaking point.
They don’t speak.
----
He feels Sirius stir in the middle of the night, the blankets pulling back and the pulling on of socks, half-muffled through the dim consciousness granted him in sleep. It doesn't register, entirely, the soft movement of fabric being removed from a chair and the quiet snick of the door closing behind a head held upright in the darkness.
Remus marks it up to a midnight run to the loo, a dressing gown to ward off the cold autumn chill that leaks through the hallways and cracks in the ceiling, and is asleep before Sirius returns. In his dream, a broad hand quickly strokes his hair, and a kiss is pressed to his cheek.
He doesn’t wake.
----
The sharp rapping of an agitated beak against the window at seven pierces through the blankets, resulting in a drawn-out groan. Turning in his half-sleep, he reaches out with every intention of prodding Sirius and telling him that it was his turn to pay the owl for the Prophet, s’freezing and the alarm clock hasn’t gone off yet, but his hand catches on empty sheets, bursting the trapped, cold pocket of air. Remus’ eyes blink open as his stomach falls through the mattress, pinning him to the bed.
Something is very wrong.
----
The poor bird bashes itself against the glass, the urgency with which it tries to get his attention bordering on suicidal, and Remus can’t explain why his fingers tremble as they unhook the windowlatch and fish three Knuts from the mug on the sill, slipping them into the leather pouch. The owl shoots off into the city skyline as soon as the clasp catches shut, pelting through a group of pigeons flocking on a neighboring rooftop.
He climbs back into bed before daring to unfold the paper, dropping it to his lap as the headlines hit his brain like blunt knives stabbed into the small of his back. The newsprint spills over his hands, screaming lies at him as if they’re true, as if they’re supposed to make some sort of sense, but the reality is that he’s known it for months now, just couldn’t admit to the belief that it would finally come to this.
His eyes are wide open as he reads the accusations in smearing typeface that mirror the ones wretchedly carved on the wall of his tomb, bringing them forth into an existence as real as the paragraphs swimming in front of him.
The silent, cackling laughter of the Sirius in the photograph splashed over half the front page rings in his ears, distorted with the memory of always, and the mad, crippling truth of never.
It’s been so long, he can’t remember how to cry.