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A drop of blood, beading on Sirius’ fingertip. As Remus bends his head to kiss the wound, he imagines that it will taste like it looks: like the dark sweetness of red wine. Crossed signals in his brain fizz and spark as copper tangs warm against his tongue. He’s not sure whether it’s the wolf or the lover in him that rears up, hungry, at the taste of Sirius’ lifeblood in his mouth. Black as a shadow across the moon, desire looms, opening its maw.
“Remus,” Sirius gasps in surprise, as Remus bites down, and clutches desperately at Remus’ clothes, letting the heavy silver letter opener he’d nicked himself on fall to the floor.
---
The weather cools and Remus goes around opening every window in Grimmauld Place. Some of them stick, cloudy diamond-paned glass and thick wooden frames, stubborn as the Black family and just as likely to bend to Remus’ will. He blasts them with a Loosening Charm strong enough they nearly crack. Up in the attic, thick with dust and ominously locked trunks and a stain in the corner Remus knows he’ll be seeing in his nightmares, the window looks immovable, but as he lays a hand on it, it shatters, a spray of glass tumbling down. Startled, Remus stumbles back. Wind howls into the dingy room, scattering crumbling scraps of parchment in its wake.
Remus tramps back down the stairs, dust in his nose and on his forehead, shivering in the cold air. The chill feels good, bracing, a relief. Already the house smells cleaner, less like the moldering cesspit of rotting wood and evil magic that Remus has, in the few short months he’s lived here, come to know like his own skin. He had fought with Sirius about using this house as the Order’s headquarters, a nasty argument that stretched for hours and hours, circling back on itself in vicious spirals, as Sirius shouted while Remus paced the worn floorboards of his narrow, hateful flat.
You’ll be stifled to death there, he’d finally snapped. I remember how you looked when you got on the Hogwarts Express every year. Like you’d been slowly suffocating for months.
Sirius had gone abruptly silent. Then he had averted his eyes and said quietly, I thought it might be a chance for us to start over again.
Remus finds him with his head all the way out the parlor window like a dog panting into the wind. His torso is bare: Remus can see the ladder-rungs of his spine, small sharp knobs. These days Remus thinks too much about Sirius’ bones, the topography of deprivation and grief they map out under his nearly translucent skin. The peaks of his elbows, the ridges of his collarbone. His cheekbones, formerly razor-sharp in a way Remus wanted to cut himself on, standing too high above the valleys of his sunken cheeks.
Sirius pulls himself back into the room, long black hair messy with bedhead and wind, and grins, and skeletal as his face is, his smile still catches at Remus and tugs.
Stuck between the well-mapped and mildly indecent angle of the corner of Sirius’ lips and the yellowed teeth within, Remus hesitates. Sirius’ smile dims. Remus goes to him, maybe too late. He puts his hand on Sirius’ chest. He wants him. He wants to want him. It’s just that wanting is hard, these days.
“I liked what we did yesterday,” Sirius murmurs. “You took me by surprise.”
His voice is pitched low. Remus doesn’t hear that tone from him very often anymore, but he remembers it well—it’s the way Sirius would talk at the end of the night, leaning close to brush against Remus’ ear at the bar, James and Lily and Peter laughing and drunk on either side of them; he would put his hand on Remus’ thigh, just higher than was really acceptable in public, and Remus’ breath would catch. And Sirius would mutter, “Are you ready to go home?”
Remus always was.
“I liked what we did yesterday, too,” he says, swallowing back the lump the old memories bring to his throat.
“We could do it again,” Sirius proposes, running a hand suggestively down Remus’ belly. And then without warning that ravenous hunger sweeps through Remus, and for a mad second he wants to tackle Sirius to the ground and devour him, right here on the ancient carpet, amongst the boxes and bins overflowing with the Black family heirlooms they’ve been sorting through, before coffee, before breakfast, before the world shatters again like the window upstairs.
“I—” he chokes out, fear coming up swiftly on the heels of desire. “I—after breakfast, maybe? I haven’t eaten, is all, I’m not sure I could—”
“Sure,” Sirius says, stepping back. “Right.”
“I don’t not—”
“It’s okay. Really, Remus. I get it.”
That seems unlikely. The rush of desire is still pounding through him, but his skin feels sensitive, unpleasantly so, like it doesn’t want to be touched. Like it’s a barrier against the floodgates threatening to open within him.
He didn’t know there was a flood to guard against anymore. He’d thought the seas inside him had settled permanently, grey and stagnant and muted in mist. Not much to see, but safe for ships that travel in the night.
Remus swallows down the last pulse of his wanting. It lodges uncomfortably in the base of his throat like bile trying to come back up. Next to Sirius’ feet, the silver letter opener shines in the morning sunlight.
---
Two weeks into November, a thunderstorm cracks open over London. Against the windows, rain lashes, beating at the panes like relentless fingers tapping for entrance.
Remus has always loved storms. Remus has always loved weather. It’s the one exception to his otherwise unshakeable placidity. His moods, so steady and stable now, bend like long grass when the sky grows dark or the air chill. The sweep of snow coming in on the wind prickles up his arms in goosebumps of anticipation; dense clouds of morning mist make him feel wide-eyed, awake and wondering; thunder rolling starts up an answering rumble deep within him. Years and years of moderating his responses in the name of caution and privacy, marshaling his eyebrows and eyes and the corners of his mouth into strict neutral shapes, have done something to Remus’s emotional register, dulled it, flattened it out. Werewolf and queer and ex-lover in prison for mass murder: all things to hide, and hiding takes its toll. His few recent sharp unasked-for surges of desire notwithstanding, it is hard, these days, for Remus to feel truly moved.
Except when it rains.
He stands at the open front door, invisible to passersby through the wet and the dark and the charms of concealment, flecks of rain stinging his cheeks, lightning flashing bright across the empty square, and feels a surge of euphoria. Alive, Christ, he feels alive again. The stifling atmosphere of Grimmauld Place, the dark wood-paneled walls always seeming to close them in, get swept away with the wind. The painting of Sirius’ mum is screaming behind her curtain, but her words get lost in the noise of the storm, all that bitter poison diluted by the downpour.
Hair damp, Remus turns back into the house, finding Sirius in the kitchen, surrounded by dozens of candles and standing over the oven. A pot of spiced cider is warming on the stove; the sweet-hot scent of cloves and cinnamon mingles with the electric lightning-charge in the air. Remus feels a stab of love and wanting, pure and clear.
“Sirius.”
At first Remus thinks Sirius hasn’t heard him over the sound of the thunder. But he says his name again, louder, and Sirius still doesn’t respond.
Remus steps into the room, concerned. “Are you all right?”
Slowly, Sirius turns his head. Remus lurches backwards.
His face is…blank. Absent, as if the marvelous, infuriating spark that makes him Sirius Black is…gone. His jaw is slack and he looks empty.
And his eyes.
Black and bottomless as the night.
“Oh, shit,” Remus says, fear cresting sharp at the back of his throat. “Shit, shit.”
He stumbles backwards out of the kitchen. Sirius isn’t advancing toward him, isn’t doing anything but looking at him with those empty eyes, but Remus has to fight the urge to run like his soul depends on it.
Sage, Remus thinks wildly, fumbling for his wand, holly, maybe, oh, god, why was the Hogwarts curriculum so modernized, why did it relegate old magic to the Restricted Section and obscure footnotes in seventh-year textbooks, so that even though he himself spends one night a month as a barely-understood dark creature Remus at thirty-six isn’t in any way prepared for the Black family home—for curses and blood magic and—and evil spirits—
For possession—
“Moony?”
Sirius comes at him out of the dark and Remus yelps.
“Get scared by the thunder?” Remus can hear the grin in Sirius’ voice and he nearly sags to the floor in relief. Sirius blinks at him, amused, and his eyes are their normal, blessed, beautiful deep brown, shot with flecks of gold.
“You were,” Remus manages. “Just now. You…”
Sirius looks at him, uncertain, mirth fading from his face.
“There’s something bad in the house.”
---
Luckily, the Black library is its own Restricted Section. Remus pores over volumes full of old runes and ancient magic that make his hair stand on end. Some of it is fascinating and some of it improbable and some of it makes him physically nauseous. Eyetooth of a werewolf is too frequent an ingredient for his liking, and it’s better not to think about the amount of effluvia and human remains required for the potions and spells they describe.
Sirius paces like a caged animal and spits curses (the four-letter kind) at the walls of the house.
“Fuck this,” he mutters for the dozenth time. “I won’t be kicked out of my own head. Have you found anything yet?”
“If you want to make more creepy shit happen, I’ve found several somethings,” Remus says wryly. “If you want to summon an evil spirit, for instance. Or if you’d like to remove all your organs, or harvest someone’s nightmares.”
“Christ,” Sirius mutters. “I’ve got fucking Lestranges as in-laws, so I know there’s dark shit out there, but…” He kicks at the baseboards, sending up a cloud of dust. “Actually, it’s probably a miracle I’ve never been cursed or possessed or whatever the hell this is in this house before. All my relatives have pretty much been using it as a storage unit for centuries.”
Remus flips through Objects Cursed and Counterfeit, frustrated. “I’m just not sure what to look for. It’s not like you were doing anything weird, or creepy, exactly. You were just…” he suppresses a shiver, “gone.”
Sirius’ fist clenches involuntarily at his side, a dark flash of fear streaking across his face. Remus stares at him.
He should go to him. He wants to go to him.
“I’ll keep looking,” he promises, and turns back to his books.
---
Just after Remus was fired from Hogwarts, he spent two weeks holed up with Sirius and Buckbeak in an abandoned cabin in the Black Mountains in Wales. As the sun sank each night, staining the hills blood-red, the hippogriff gnawed on bones in the corner and Sirius shivered his way through the sunset. Remus lay stiffly next to him, torn in two by the desire to wrap Sirius tight like a blanket and the fear that Sirius would turn away from him, unresponsive, cut adrift from past intimacies and promises he could only partially remember. He didn’t talk about his time in prison but Remus had gone through a pretty hellish phase a couple years after Sirius’ incarceration where he’d compulsively, obsessively read everything he could find about Azkaban and the Dementors and what happened to people who stayed there long enough, and he had seen photographs of prisoners after five, ten, twenty years, drooling and twitching and blank-eyed, all traces of humanity wiped from their faces. He knew that Sirius’ innocence had saved him from the worst of it, but every once in awhile, in that handful of chilly days spent in the empty, decaying cabin amidst peeling paint and broken beams, he would look into Sirius’ eyes and see nothing.
One night at dusk Remus had bent under the weight of it all and gone to Sirius, taking his shivering body into his arms.
Sirius had turned to Remus like a flower to the sun.
“When it gets dark,” he’d confessed, teeth chattering, voice hoarse, fingers gripping Remus’ arms, “it feels like the Dementors are coming. It feels like I’m going to lose myself again.”
“No,” Remus had murmured, stroking Sirius’ cracked knuckles with his thumb. “You won’t. Just hold on tight to me.”
And Sirius had.
---
“You’re kidding me.” Nymphadora Tonks kicks her booted heels against the kitchen cabinets. She’s perched on the black granite countertop, pink hair a shock of color in the drab room. “On top of everything else that’s happening right now, you’re under some creepy soul-sucking curse?”
Sirius shrugs, slicing carrots and onions while Remus adds salt and garlic to the broth on the stove. “So it seems.”
“Might be some sort of possession,” Remus adds.
Tonks shakes her head. “And how many times has this…thing…happened?”
Sirius’ eyes flick to Remus. “Three. According to Remus. I can’t remember them.”
But Remus does, with horrible clarity. The night before, Sirius had sat bolt upright in bed at four in the morning. Remus was used to his friend’s nightmares, blanket-twisting sweat-soaked fever dreams full of heavy breathing and stifled cries. This was different. This was Sirius still and silent, a black shape against the glow of the streetlights and the waxing moon.
He had turned his blank eyes on Remus and Remus had nearly fallen out of bed in his haste to get away.
Heart drumming a loud tattoo in his chest, he had forced himself to watch, one hand gripping his wand, until, maybe a minute later, the light came slowly back into Sirius’ eyes.
“Fucking hell,” Sirius had muttered, upon seeing Remus’ expression of terror, and had stalked out the door to wait for morning in his childhood bedroom, curled up in his twin bed with all the lights on.
“But, like…spirit possession? Is that really a thing?” Tonks, young and bright and practical, makes the dark-paneled house seem a cheap setpiece, all fake cobwebs and tinny sound effects. “Nearly Headless Nick told me that all ‘hauntings’ are just ghosts throwing tantrums.”
“Nearly Headless Nick should know better,” Sirius says darkly, attacking the vegetables with perhaps greater than necessary force. “Just because he spends the afterlife sulking about his inability to get into the undead equivalent of a posh country club doesn’t mean there aren’t real dark things in the world.”
“But you’re right, it might be a curse instead,” Remus puts in. “Knowing this house, it’s not hard to imagine we might have accidentally triggered one.”
“Well, that I’d believe,” says Tonks. She shudders theatrically. “This is a nightmare hellhole, Sirius, I mean, no offense, but the stories my mum has about this place—”
“Andromeda’s not wrong.” Sirius moves on to a big bunch of parsley, knife gleaming in his hand.
“So maybe you tripped some kind of wire,” Tonks says thoughtfully, “metaphorically speaking, I mean—have you been up to anything that might set something off?”
“We have been sorting through the library.” Remus taps a finger against his chin. “Old scrolls, family heirlooms…”
“So maybe a book, or an artifact—”
“Shit.” Sirius drops the knife with a clatter. Blood pours from a cut in his finger.
“Well, there goes dinner,” Tonks says dryly, hopping off the counter. “Maybe we can salvage the carrots, if not the parsley.”
“Thank you so much for your concern,” Sirius replies, hurrying to the sink and sticking his finger under the water.
“Any time, cousin.”
“Very touching family feeling. It really—Remus?”
Remus is on his feet, frozen in place, staring at the blood rushing from Sirius’ finger. His ears are buzzing. Red blooms behind his eyes, a rich deep burgundy, spreading, bleeding, and, oh, god: hunger slams through him, ravenous and gaping, the sort of hunger he feels when the moon swells full in the sky, the sort of hunger that overtakes every rational thought in his brain and wipes out every carefully constructed barrier he’s ever erected like a tidal wave crashing through fragile wooden walls. With every remaining scrap of control he can muster, he stops himself from striding over to Sirius and sucking his finger into his mouth, pulling hot coppery blood from his veins, swallowing it down—
“Remus.”
He’s panting, hands clutching his knees, eyes still fixed on Sirius’ red-stained hand—
“Hey!” A crack across his cheek. Tonks pulls back her arm. His face stings. His hunger abates. In its wake Remus goes lightheaded and stumbles to the floor. On his hands and knees, he heaves dryly, the image of Sirius’ blood in his mouth still vivid but the desire for it gone, leaving him nauseous and horrified.
Sirius wraps his finger quickly in a towel and crouches on the floor next to Remus, rubbing his back in smooth circles.
“Okay,” says Tonks, shaken, “whatever it is, there’s definitely something fucked up happening here.”
---
The basement of Number 12, Grimmauld Place is exactly as dark and airless as Remus would have imagined. A low-ceilinged chamber filled with wicked-looking objects and the stifling scent of mildew and damp. No windows in here, he thinks, running his hand over the cold stone walls; no weather.
He’s not sure whether it’s comfort or claustrophobia he feels at the thought.
“What do you think you’re doing down here?” Sirius’ voice, floating down from above, is carefully conversational, but it still startles Remus.
“Er,” he says, looking up at Sirius as he appears at the bottom of the stairs, silhouetted against the open doorway. He opens his mouth for a wordless moment. Then: “Are all these medieval torture devices real?”
Sirius moves into the room, half into the circle of Remus’ wandlight, half in shadow. “If you’re asking if they’re authentic, then yes. My grandfather’s collection. He was very proud of it. He used to show everyone who came to the house.” There’s a twist of bitterness in his voice. “But don’t worry, they probably haven’t been used since the medieval period. Blacks don’t need instruments to torture people. Or curses, for that matter.” He steps fully into the light, running a finger down a nasty-looking bunch of iron spikes on the table in front of Remus. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Remus looks away. His eyes catch on a set of manacles nailed to the wall. Sirius’ eyes follow his.
“No,” he says sharply. “Absolutely fucking not. We talked about this, Remus, you’re spending full moons in the Shrieking Shack. I don’t care how much of a risk—”
“It’s not for the full moon.” Remus sighs. “I came down here because I wanted to see how strong the door is. In case it…that thing, in the kitchen, earlier, when I…In case that happens again.”
“So you are planning to shut yourself up,” Sirius replies, eyes glittering angrily. He looks even more skeletal down here, the hollows of his cheeks sunken and shadowed in the small glow from Remus’ wand. A decaying body, down amongst the torture devices and cold stone. Remus suppresses a shudder.
“I have to take precautions. You won’t be safe if I get that way again—”
“So, what, you’re going to lock yourself up permanently on the off chance I prick my finger again?”
“I’m not going to do it yet. It’s just in case—”
“But we don’t even know—”
“We know I almost lost control. If it happens again—”
“And what if it happens to me again?”
Remus stares at him, frustration sharpening the edges of his reply. “Well, you just go blank, Sirius, you’re not a threat to anyone.”
Sirius’s face darkens. “Fuck you, Remus.” He bites off the words and paces a few steps away, out of the glow of the light. His hands come up and clutch the backs of his arms, fingers digging deep.
“No,” says Remus, heart suddenly pounding in his throat. “No, you don’t get to do this. To—to make this my fault.”
Sirius whirls on him. “How am I making this your fault?”
“By saying I—it’s not like I want this to be happening, not like I want to lock myself up down here, any more than I’ve ever wanted to be shut up in the Shrieking Shack—”
“You sure about that?” Sirius advances, eyes flashing. “You absolutely sure?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Outrage and hurt flash through him. “How could you even suggest—”
“That there’s some part of being a werewolf that suits you just fine?” Sirius’s chest is rising and falling rapidly. A flush is spreading across his cheeks. Remus knows this look, knows what it augurs, and his whole body bristles back, sense memory of the times Sirius has come at him with that particular gleam in his eyes flooding him with adrenaline, with horrible anticipation.
“Sirius,” he says, voice starting to shake.
“It’s a good excuse, isn’t it?” A mirthless smile twists up the corner of Sirius’ mouth. “I can’t. Too risky. I can’t. Might get caught. I can’t. I’m locked up. Sorry, no, I have to be on my best behavior, I can’t call attention to myself, I want to, but, you know how it is—”
“Shut up,” Remus says, choked, clenching his fists. “Shut up—”
“Shut up. Be quiet. Say less, Sirius, feel less—”
Remus is stumbling away from him, a hot sick ball of shame exploding in his gut. “I’m dangerous!” he protests, voice thick with suppressed emotion. “That’s real. That’s true.”
“All right then,” Sirius says. Red patches stand out on his sunken cheeks, angry and mottled. In the half-light he looks frightening. He looks like a man who has spent twelve years in prison. “All right. You want me to lock you up? You want me to keep you down in this basement just in case you manage to want something for more than thirty seconds and it turns you mad?”
I saw your blood in my mouth! Remus wants to scream. I have been seeing your blood in my mouth for as long as I have loved you!
“Yes,” he says as calmly as he can, his breathing fast but steady. “That’s what I want.”
“Fine,” Sirius says, after shaking his head in disbelief. “You know what, fine.” He snatches up one end of a set of manacles. The other end is bolted to the stone wall. “Put out your wrist.”
Remus stares at him.
“Well?” Sirius demands.
Mutely, Remus extends his arm. Sirius pries open the iron cuff and with a loud clang snaps it shut.
They watch each other, their breathing the only sound in the stifled damp room.
“Just so you know,” Sirius says, words quieter now but on the knife-edge of something dark and bottomless, “that’s almost the worst thing I can imagine happening to me.”
The cuff is heavy around Remus’ wrist. It’s an effort to keep his arm raised. The metal bites into his skin, cold and unyielding, and he can tell that it won’t be long before his shoulder starts to strain. He tugs experimentally but of course it holds fast.
With a kind of fascinated, far-off horror, he realizes that the sensation of being trapped in this pit of a place is evening out his breathing and dampening the pounding in his chest. That it’s a muffled sense of comfort, not terror, spreading through him.
“What’s the worst thing you can imagine?” he asks, voice hoarse.
“Feeling nothing at all,” Sirius replies.
All the wind goes out of Remus’ anger. At once, tears spring to the corners of his eyes, and he feels shaky, afraid.
“Sirius, this house…” he says helplessly.
“I know.” Sirius rubs at his eyes, weary, exhausted. The lines in his face are deep, chiseled as if into rock. He looks old.
“Believe me,” he says, and reaches out to squeeze Remus’ shoulder, rapidly, before dropping his hand to his side, “I know.”
The stone walls around them are so solid, the big wooden door so secure. The cuff around his wrist will hold him tight no matter what wild need spikes through him. Nothing can reach him down here. He can’t reach anyone else, down here. Remus lingers for a moment longer in the thought of how easy it would be just to succumb to the darkness, the dust.
“You want to let me out of this?” he asks finally, raising his wrist.
Sirius runs his hands over his face and nods.
“I won’t lock myself up,” Remus says softly as Sirius fiddles with his wand at the join of the iron cuff. “But we have to do something, then. We have to fix this.”
Sirius steps back. He looks at Remus.
“Well, then,” he says, jaw setting in the old familiar way, “let’s fix it.”
---
In the end, they have a séance.
“Really, truly, this is some Muggle horror movie bullshit,” Sirius mutters.
Remus keeps his eyes down as he clears the final boxes and stacks of paper out of the way. The space between them has been strange and raw, these last few days, ever since their fight in the basement. “I know. But it’s better than the spell with the cat livers or the suggestion to smear grave dirt mixed with corpses’ fingernails on all the windowsills.”
Remus lights the candles and, with a tense wave of his wand, snuffs out all the parlor’s lamps. He has drawn a shape in chalk on the floor that does indeed look straight out of a bad TV show. Rain pounds against the windows.
“Look,” Sirius says abruptly. “If this works. If there really is a ghost, or a curse, or whatever. What’s supposed to happen, exactly? What will the séance do?”
“It will…let it in.”
Remus keeps his voice carefully even and his eyes down.
“Let it in? Into what?”
“Into me.”
Shock and anger mingle on Sirius’ face. “Why the fuck would we want that? Aren’t we trying to keep it out?”
“You wanted to fight it,” Remus says, an edge to his voice. “You wanted to do this.”
“To fight it, yes, not to throw it a housewarming party—”
“Well, if we want to fight it, we have to look it in the face first.”
Sirius stares at him. “Fuck that,” he says finally. “Fuck that, no, I’ve looked evil in the face and so have you. I’m done. It can’t have me.”
Remus stares down at his knuckles, white and strained. “I know. You know that I—that the last thing I want is to feel that way again. To feel…” He goes quiet for a second. “The thing is, though,” he continues, and he has thought about this, he has laid awake in their bed with his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling as the dangers and possibilities spun out around him in the dark, and come up every time with the certainty that if they are going to avoid winding up in that stifling prison of a basement again this is the only way forward, “I don’t think there’s a choice, Sirius.”
He can taste the terror at the back of his throat as he speaks.
For a second Sirius is quiet.
“I don’t want to lose myself,” he says quietly. “I don’t want to lose you. Fuck.”
“Then hold me here,” Remus says, and meets Sirius’ eyes. He holds out his hands, waiting. “Keep me here with you.”
Something complicated flashes in Sirius’ eyes and even now, on the other side of the jagged gaping hole of darkness that for thirteen years obliterated like a cloud over the sun Remus’ faith in his ability to know his closest friend, he thinks he can pick out the splinters and shards of what breaks over Sirius’ face: doubt, deep as his bones; fear, huge and fanged; and the stubborn inexorable determination that has always run strong and steady under Sirius’ outward impulses and caprices and dramatics. Stubbornness, in Sirius, looks much the same as love.
Or at least, Remus has always thought so.
“All right,” Sirius says, and grasps Remus by the hands. Bony fingers, skeletal knuckle-knobs, and a grip like rock, like iron.
And so within the small circle of candlelight, the two men close their eyes, and Remus murmurs an incantation. An invitation.
And he does what the books say he must: he knocks down, one by one, the barriers he has erected between himself and the grasping claws of the world. Relaxing his defenses is a slow and tortuous process, one that for a second he’s unsure he’s capable of. For a moment there is nothing but grey, a becalmed sea, an inner landscape with no wind, no waves. But after a moment he can feel, bleeding in at the edges of his mind, something. A presence.
A hunger.
Whatever it is, this thing, this ghost, this curse, Remus takes a deep breath and squeezes Sirius’ hands tight and looks it in the eyes.
Like a blow to the chest, he’s knocked backwards, his hands pulling loose from Sirius’. His limbs and legs jerk wildly without his direction and he’s throwing himself across the carpet, towards the shadows, where piles of books and boxes line the room—digging through them, red at the back of his mind and behind his eyes—and then, solid and sharp, a cruel silver letter opener is in his hand.
Need and desire surge through him, through every vein, pulsing, racing, roaring; his mind recedes, hunger taking over; and against his bare skin the letter opener feels burningly cold.
“Remus—” Sirius says, and Remus hears him as if from a great distance. He turns his eyes on Sirius—on his friend—on this man, with the strange sunken face—on this mass of warmth and blood and life, a bright reservoir of vital energy that he burns to sink his teeth into…
“Remus—I—” The man gasps, words choking at the back of his throat, dying in a cut-off gurgle, and then suddenly he goes flat: blank-faced, empty-eyed.
Easy prey.
Hunger surges up in Remus, blind and all-consuming. He stumbles to his feet, the knife of a letter opener in his hand. When he plunges it into this man’s chest, his lifeblood will pour forth: hot and dark, alive. Remus advances, his own blood roaring in his ears. His hand trembles with need. The point of the blade moves forward.
The man sits, vacant-eyed, passive, mute. Remus will taste his life, feel it on his fingers, drown in it. The blade hovers a hand’s-breadth from the man’s chest.
And then—
Something inside Remus—
Catches.
His hand is still trembling, the letter opener poised to strike, but something deeper than his hunger holds him still, suspended: his eyes travel over the man’s face, the lines creasing his eyes, the jut of his cheekbones, and at the back of his roaring mind comes a prickle of awareness. Not him, he thinks, distantly, the thought barely audible even to himself over the churn of blood in his ears. The man’s face twitches and the thought rises higher: Oh god, not him.
But his hand doesn’t move away.
He hears, as if from a distance, a sudden howl of wind rattling the windows. A shiver runs through his body and all at once a word comes to him, a name: Sirius, he thinks, and then, urgent: Sirius, move!
Immobile, vacant, Sirius stares with blank eyes as the ghost or curse or whatever evil thing is inside Remus inches his hand closer and closer to his chest.
The blade nicks his clothes, and Remus throws his whole self into the thought: Not him!
With a great wrench of effort, he pulls the blade back, away. But it’s trembling, singing, and the thing inside Remus is calling out for blood. He can’t drop it, can’t drop the knife, can’t do anything but fight and he’s losing, sweat breaking out on his forehead, whole body shaking, the hunger screaming inside him: and Sirius limp, still: and all at once the answer flashes up inside him, blindingly bright: and Remus does the only thing he can think to do, and with a mighty jerk he turns the blade on himself.
Not Sirius, he thinks again, and the thing inside him suddenly lights up with understanding. Greedy, triumphant, it throws its will behind him, and the blade shudders toward his own chest.
Remus holds his breath, poised on the edge between terror and stubbornness, ready for the end.
Then something flickers in Sirius’ eyes.
Sirius lunges forward just as Remus feels the knife sharp against his skin. He grabs Remus by the hand and sends the blade flying. With a great gasp, Remus feels the thing rush out of him, a gust of wind, a departing wave—gone. He collapses to the floor, breathing in deep gulps of air.
“Oh, fuck,” he says, gasping, “oh, fuck.”
“Remus. Are you—”
“I’m okay,” Remus manages. “Are you—”
“Yeah. Yeah, I—” Sirius clutches his chest, winded, desperate. “Is it—is it still here, or—?”
Their eyes fly to the letter opener, gleaming dully on the floor in the candlelight. Remus pushes himself to his knees and pulls the end of his sleeve down over his hand. Gingerly, swallowing back nausea, he picks up the letter opener.
“Remus, Jesus—”
“It’s okay. Get me the box?”
Sirius finds the small wooden chest where they’ve been keeping dark objects and opens it. Remus drops the letter opener inside. Quickly, Sirius shuts the lid.
They stare at it, blood still rushing in their ears.
“It was probably used to murder someone,” Remus mutters darkly, hand on his heaving chest.
Sirius swallows. “Or one of my family members thought it would be a great prank to put a curse on it.”
“I hate this fucking house.”
Sirius laughs, a bone-rattle of a noise deep in his throat. “I know.”
“Shut up in here—”
“Believe me. I know.”
Remus crawls into his lap and kisses him hard on the mouth. Startled, Sirius lifts his arms up to hold him, to run a hand through his hair.
“God, I want you,” Remus murmurs. “Fuck, oh fuck. I want you.”
“I wasn’t sure,” Sirius replies, eyes fluttering as Remus kisses his neck. “I wasn’t sure you still did.”
“I wasn’t sure I still could,” Remus confesses, his fingers stroking down Sirius’ spine. Knob by bony knob. “Or I was afraid—”
“We were both afraid. Shut up, shut up. Just kiss me, all right—”
“Yeah,” Remus says, opening his mouth against Sirius’. “Yes, yes…”
“I’m here,” Sirius breathes. “Oh, god, I’m really here.”
“You’re here,” Remus agrees, hands moving under clothes, against skin, “you’re here, and I want you, and what happened to shut up and kiss me—”
“Prick,” Sirius murmurs, but Remus lets it go. Kisses him, and lets go.