Chapter Text
Sirius sat at the scuffed old kitchen table, surveying the elaborate array of cards laid out before him. He’d been hoping for answers, for direction, but all he’d found was tragedy.
Never taking his eyes off the cards, Sirius raised the stub of his cigarette to his lips and inhaled. His friends would laugh if they could see this, the blatant evidence of his desperation. Well, maybe they wouldn’t laugh. There wasn’t much laughter to go around these days. More likely than not, they would pity him, probably even worry about his sanity.
Poor, delusional Sirius Black, trying to win the war with nothing but a deck of tarot cards.
His friends had always taken the piss out of him for his interest in divination. Even Lily had gotten in on the joke. Last Christmas she’d bought Sirius a black plastic ball with the number 8 painted on it. It had a small window that answered “Yes-No” questions when someone shook the ball. He’d been fascinated with the Muggle divination device until Lily had explained that it was nothing more than a toy.
Sirius didn’t mind it, not much anyway. They all took the piss out of each other for one thing or another—James’s hair, Remus’s chocolate, Peter’s gullibility. That was part of how their friendship worked.
The truth was, Sirius’s family had always respected divination as an ancient art. His great aunt cast runes, his father owned a collection of crystal balls, and his mother drew up detailed horoscopes for births and weddings. Though he’d done his best to shake off the bigotry and snobbery he’d grown up with, Sirius had never lost that near reverence for divination.
He was no seer. Sirius knew that he was never going to speak prophecies or see the future with crystal clarity, but he didn’t discount the idea that there were insights to be gained from the world around him, patterns that could be discerned and decoded.
That had always been a comfort to Sirius. Until this last year, when all his readings had turned dark and dire, warning of misfortune and calamity.
They hadn’t been wrong either.
Sirius took one last drag from his cigarette and dropped the butt into an empty teacup that had been pushed to the very edge of the table by the enormity of his tarot spread. As he exhaled through his nostrils, he picked up the very last card in the spread. This was the one that was supposed to represent the answer to his question, the outcome of everything.
He turned it face up.
Ten swords stabbed the fallen body of a man. He lay facedown in the mud, but Sirius recognized the messy black hair and the glasses that lay broken beside his limp hand. Sometimes, the figure in the card resembled Remus or Peter or Lily, but most of the time it was James.
This was the future Sirius had seen in so many of his tarot readings, in the leaves at the bottom of his teacups, even in the stars above his head.
The Ten of Swords.
Loss. Destruction. Betrayal. Death.
The End.
This was what was coming for them all if he couldn’t figure out how to stop it.
Cursing under his breath, Sirius swept a hand across the spread, knocking the cards out of place into an anarchic jumble. The Ten of Swords disappeared into the mix with all the rest of them.
When the cards were gathered, Sirius tapped the deck into a straight, orderly stack. Then he shuffled again. Maybe, maybe if he could just find the right question, he might get a different answer. Maybe he could find a path out of this darkness. The only question running through his head though was how do I fix it? How do I make it right? Too vague and unfocused to produce any real answers.
Still, when the cards felt right, Sirius stopped shuffling. He cut the deck once and drew the top card, setting it face down on the table.
“What are you doing?”
Sirius jumped, his knee banging the underside of the table. The cards went skittering out of his hands, spilling across the table.
Remus stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room. He was carrying one of the many teacups he habitually abandoned around the flat when he became distracted by something else. People always assumed Remus was the tidy one in their relationship, but if it wasn’t for Sirius, their flat would be a maze of misplaced books and forgotten teacups.
“I, um…” Sirius looked over the table, realizing how mad the whole thing must seem to Remus. Rather than piece together an answer, Sirius stood so he could reach across the table and scrape the cards back into a pile.
Floorboards creaked as Remus crossed into the kitchen. He was frowning with some cross between curiosity and irritation, as though Sirius was a child who’d made a mess while playing with his toys at the kitchen table. Sirius wished he could feel his own corresponding flash of annoyance at Remus, for the interruption, for the look on his face, for all his disappearances and lies, even for the damned teacups. Instead, he just felt a tightness in his chest, like he was suffocating.
“Nothing,” Sirius said. “It’s nothing.”
It was too late though. Remus was already at the table, standing across from Sirius. He reached out and picked up a card that sat apart from the spilled mess of the rest of the deck. It was the one card Sirius had managed to lay down in his new spread.
Remus’s frown deepened, furrowing his brow. Sirius took the moment to study his boyfriend, taking in the weight Remus had lost, the thin strands of grey already flecking his brown hair, and the general air of ill health that seemed to have settled on Remus’s shoulders like a cloak. The moon was a thin crescent just beginning to wax, but Remus looked ready to fall asleep on his feet.
It was the war. It was taking a toll on them all, Sirius included. He wasn’t wasting away like Remus, but he’d had more than his fair share of pain and suffering in the past few years.
The trauma went deeper than scars or exhaustion though. It had left nothing untouched, nothing undamaged. This damn war had been systematically destroying everything in Sirius’s life for the last three years, and now, if there was any truth in his predictions, it was coming for the people Sirius cared about the most.
“Tarot cards, right?” Remus asked, looking over the card he’d picked up. He wrinkled his nose in distaste before handing it back to Sirius. “You were doing a reading?” He made that a question too.
Remus had given him the card face down. The tightness, the pressure, in Sirius’s chest increased. For a moment, Sirius considered just slipping it back into the deck. He knew all of the cards that had been in the spread he’d just done. Most of them hadn’t been happy cards. He knew that, if he looked, he would attach meaning to it, he would connect it to Remus in some way. There were already questions and doubts gnawing at his edges of his mind. The last thing Sirius wanted was to do was feed them.
And yet, he needed to know.
Sirius turned the card until he could see its face. Yes, he could see why Remus would have picked up this card, and why he would have found it objectionable.
It was the Moon.
Unlike Remus, Sirius felt himself softening at the sight of the card. Remus hadn’t looked at it for more than a moment and likely as not hadn’t noticed anything beyond the unnaturally large and full moon that dominated the card. Had he even seen the figures below? The back dog and the wolf who romped by the shores of the Black Lake, with both Hogwarts and the Shrieking Shack in the background.
This was their card.
Of course, that didn’t automatically mean it was always a good card to draw. Tarot cards were flexible, that was one of the reasons Sirius liked them. Cards could develop personal subtexts beyond the standard meanings each card was assigned. Those standard meanings didn’t go away though. The Moon was the card that represented his and Remus’s relationship, but it had other connotations as well.
“Sirius?”
He startled again at the sound of Remus’s voice.
“Are you all right?” Remus asked. The way he said it implied this wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question.
“Yeah, fine,” Sirius lied. Remus was frowning again, but now he looked concerned. It was touching, actually. Things had been going so bad between them lately cycling through vicious fights, awkward silences, and cruelly ignoring one another. He’d missed Remus’s concern, just like he missed his laughter and his smile.
They were so much less than they’d once been.
“Would you, er, like some tea?” Remus asked. He held up his own teacup to illustrate the offer. His tone sounded forced, and he shifted uncomfortably on his feet, like he wanted nothing more than to turn on his heel and flee to avoid the wretched tension that had grown between them. He didn’t though. Remus stayed where he was.
He was trying, Sirius realized. For the first time in what felt like a very long time, Remus was trying to reach out to him.
“Tea sounds good,” Sirius replied. Remus gave him one last look of puzzled apprehension before nodding and turning toward the kettle.
As Remus busied himself making tea, Sirius turned his attention back to the card he held. There were many ways of interpreting the Moon, and some of them were very dark. Illusion, anxiety, secrets, and hidden dangers all lurked within the card Sirius now held.
His mind flashed back to the Ten of Swords that had ended his last spread and all that it meant. Pairing that card with the Moon did not paint a pretty picture. In fact, it drew Sirius’s mind in a direction he had been fighting against for months.
There was a traitor in the Order of the Phoenix.
They all knew it, had known it since summer when Order members had started dying faster than lacewing flies. Someone within the Order itself was selling mission details, names, safe house locations, and even home addresses to Voldemort and his supporters.
People were whispering and pointing fingers, and quite a few of them had started pointing at Remus.
Sirius didn’t want to believe it. He’d started fights when others had suggested as much. And yet, at some point in the last few months, lying alone in the bed he was supposed to be sharing with Remus, Sirius had started to let the doubt sink in.
Sirius hated himself for it, but once he’d cracked opened the doors he’d found it impossible to reclose them entirely. He loved Remus, would do anything for him, would die for him, but were those very feelings blinding Sirius to what everyone else seemed to see?
He couldn't afford to live with that doubt anymore. Not after the conversation he’d had with James and Lily just last night. Not when the lives of his best friend’s entire family were on the line.
There was another interpretation of the Moon though, a small voice in his head reminded Sirius. Sometimes, the moon could stand for clarity, bringing light to the darkness and illuminating hidden truths.
Down on the card, the wolf and the dog were no longer frolicking with each other. Instead, they sat on opposite sides of the path that wound through the middle of the card, regarding each other with caution.
Sometimes the cards were ambiguous, but sometimes their meaning was pretty damn obvious.
“Earl Grey, rosehip, or Assam?” Remus asked. When Sirius turned toward him, he found Remus holding tins for the latter two options up for his review.
“The rosehip, please,” Sirius replied. He didn’t need any caffeine making him jumpier than he already was right now.
Sirius placed the Moon face up in the middle of the table and gathered up the rest of the cards and shuffled. The cards slid like a river through Sirius’s fingers. They seemed to whisper as they slipped against one another and tumbled from his right hand to his left. Sirius tapped the deck into a neat stack and set them down just below the Moon.
This was probably a bad idea, but the alternatives were worse. James, Lily, and Harry needed to be protected, and Sirius needed to know if he could trust the man he loved.
Remus carried two steaming cups of tea over to the table. He set Sirius’s on the table, but didn’t put down his own. Remus didn’t plan to stay in the kitchen and share the table with his lover. He turned to leave, but before he could, Sirius caught him by the wrist.
“Will you do a reading with me?” He asked.
Sirius could feel the tension in the tendons and muscles beneath his fingers. Remus wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were fixed on some point out of the kitchen and down the hall. Anywhere but on Sirius.
“You know I don’t believe in that,” Remus said tersely.
Sirius swallowed, but he didn’t let go of Remus’s wrist. “Humor me…please?”
This was the sort of thing they used to do all the time: indulge each other even in the interests they didn’t share. Sirius would carefully listen to Remus ramble about on about Muggle novels he never had and never would read, and Remus would let Sirius read his palm or tea leaves. These days though, they barely even indulged in the things they both enjoyed, let alone each other’s separate passions.
Remus seemed frozen, like a rabbit faced with a fox. He finally turned enough to look at Sirius. There was worry in his eyes, confusion and frustration as well. Sirius suddenly felt stupid, childish. This was a terrible idea.
He let go of Remus’s wrist. His hands fluttered down to the tabletop, tapping against the wood.
There was a sigh, and the scrape of the chair across the table as Remus sat down.
“Sirius…is something wrong?” Remus asked. “Did something happen last night…when you went to James and Lily’s?”
The tattoo of Sirius’s fingers against the wood stopped suddenly, leaving utter silence in its wake. Something had most definitely happened at James and Lily’s house last night. His best friend’s family was under siege. James and Lily and even innocent little Harry were all at the very top of Voldemort’s kill list, and they were trusting Sirius to protect them. They wanted him to be their Secret Keeper.
It was all on the tip of Sirius’s tongue as he stared across the table at Remus. He wanted to tell Remus everything, but something held him back.
James and Lily hadn’t invited Remus when they’d asked Sirius over. Did that mean something? Did they not trust Remus anymore? What did it mean if even James and Lily suspected Remus of betraying them? Sirius felt acid burn in his throat. He took a scalding hot drink of his tea to swallow the rising taste of vomit back down, and to cover at least some of his prolonged silence.
His eyes drifted back to the Moon card sitting halfway between himself and Remus. The dog and the wolf still seemed cautious of each other, but as he watched, the black dog approached the wolf, sniffing. Sirius felt his lips twitch in a feeble attempt at a smile.
“This is our card, you know,” Sirius said. “Us, our relationship. It practically came out of the box ready-made for the two of us.”
Remus sighed again and gave the string attached to his teabag an annoyed tug. “So I can’t escape the moon even on a bloody tarot card?” he asked.
Sirius let his fingers drift to the card, tracing the path that cut through the center of the scene leading to the lake in the foreground. The wolf and the dog both followed his movement, their heads swiveling, ears alert.
“We had fun back then, even you,” Sirius said. “Besides, the cards are more than just the pictures.”
“We were reckless, stupid,” Remus replied. “Do you know how lucky we were that no one was ever hurt or killed on our little escapades?”
Sirius pulled his hand away from the card and tried not to flinch. “Do you regret it?” He asked quietly.
Remus was looking at the card now, finally really looking at it. They both watched as the black dog tentatively licked the wolf’s face, his tail wagging. The wolf’s tail gave a small thump as well.
“No…” Remus said. “I know I probably should but no, I don’t regret it.”
The dog on the card dropped the front half of his body into a bow, his rear end up in the air as he invited the wolf to run and play. The wolf cocked his head, tail wagging a bit more even as his body tensed. Padfoot was off like a shot down the path.
“What does it mean?” Remus asked, watching as Moony raced after Padfoot, their already small forms vanishing among the trees at the edge of the card. They would be back sooner or later.
“The card, I mean,” Remus said when Sirius looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “What does the card mean, beyond the obvious?”
“Secrets, illusion, anxieties, sometimes dreams or difficult decision, crises of faith…deception…”
Remus snorted and his lips twisted in a cynical, almost fatalistic way. “Not an encouraging card to have represent our relationship,” Remus said.
“It’s not all bad. The Moon can also indicate clarity and intuition. It can illuminate hidden truths. It can even imply the release of fears, or an important decision to be made.”
“So, what do you think it means this time?” Remus asked. He sounded…cautious, almost worried. Sirius tried to rein in his imagination as his mind buzzed wondering what that meant.
Sirius took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm the thoughts that bashed around his skull like Bludgers. This was the part of divination he struggled with. Sirius had always been good at making intuitive leaps and following his instincts, but quieting his mind, digging deep inside himself and considering all the variables. That part often eluded him.
“I think…I think this time it’s all of it. Everything, good and bad. Mostly though, it’s us. Just you and me,” Sirius said.
He reached out again, this time for the rest of the deck in their neat, facedown stack. The Moon he left where it was near the center of the table.
When he’d handed Sirius the Moon card, Remus had quite literally put their relationship in Sirius’s hands. Now he needed to follow that moonlit path through the darkness.
And he needed Remus to come with him.
“Will you do a reading with me Moony?” Sirius asked as he offered the tarot deck to Remus.