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His eyes are grey and really, is that all you can think of right now? Funny how 12 years doesn’t change anything really. He traces your elbow patches with a quizzical look, as if he can’t believe that you had the audacity to age. You can tell that he thinks it’s still the 80s sometimes. It makes you feel devastated inside.
Later, you turn the lights off. When you can’t see him and he can’t see you, you can both pretend that your bodies are still in their twenties. “We were cheated of a decade,” you say, and he huffs, smirks, and whispers, “There were no cigarettes in Azkaban, wouldn’t it be ironic if I lived longer after all?”
You dance in the dark, enveloping him in your arms. The wireless buzzes. His godson’s asleep in the room upstairs (you hope.) He’s pressing his face into your shoulder to muffle his laughter. Even after all these years, he remembers the steps. You both do.
“Guess we’re a happy family now, hm?” he asks. The acquittal has brought some amount of youth to his expression, now that he knows there’s nothing stopping him from going out in public. You hum. He smirks, says something about taking your last name. “Dogstar Wolf,” you murmur into his ear. “That’s fitting.” He laughs then, loud and open, and if Harry hasn’t already woken up that would’ve done it.
“Please,” he says, rolling his eyes. “As if your name is any better.”
You frown, looking into his concrete eyes. Of course he wants your name. He’s been running away from his blood relatives for as long as you’ve known him, much before he was sixteen and he actually ran away from home. He wants to establish himself as a part of your family, and who are you to stop him.
“I like the sound of Harry James Lupin, don’t you?” a new voice says, and you grimace and turn to face Harry, who has snuck up on both of you unnoticed. Soon-to-be Dogstar Wolf turns the wireless off with a flick of his wrist and with no wand. Boom, there you go. Silence in the kitchen, broken only by the guffaws of godfather and godson. You love them both, but sometimes you swear they live to torment you.
“I think I have to draw a line there,” you say. “What would James and Lily say?”
“James and Lily,” Sirius says, and you are already dreading this, “would fully endorse it. I sometimes think Lily loved you more than James, you know.”
“Dad clearly loved you too,” Harry says. “He became an animagus for you.”
So did Peter, and look how that turned out, you do not say. Instead, you say, “Harry, if you still feel this way when you are of age, of course you can change your name.”
“Moony, you’re a boring old man,” Sirius says, ruffling your hair.
“You’re older than me,” you remind him. He pretends not to hear. Harry is watching, amused.
It’s just another day in your life, you reflect, as you and Sirius get Harry back into bed and turn the lights off after wishing him goodnight and telling him that he ought to get some sleep. And later, when you kiss Sirius you bite his tongue just a little, not enough to wound but certainly enough to startle him, because what is the point being a Marauder if you don’t get payback when it’s due?