Archive of Our Own ^beta

            After the war, and there is an after now, they make do in Number Twelve as long as they dare, the three of them. It’s not lucky why, but they don’t spend much time creeping through the halls—there are hearings to be conducted, testimonies to be had. There are funerals in twos and threes, the smell of freshly turned earth in their dreams and the blank spatter of rain against their best shoes leaving them permanently chilled. So they sleep in the house that howls, but sleep is just about all they do.

            One night in the dead-heat of a rubbery summer, Sirius slinks into the bedroom at the furthest corner of the house. Decades ago it was a guest room, the most definition still attached to it creature-worn duvets of velvet and snarky cameo portraits that were all easily disposed of. He’s soaked to the bone in rain that hasn’t fallen, but he kneels on the bed, pooling water around him in silhouette, and extends a key. It’s brass, fortuitously.

            Remus takes it in his scarred palm and lays a kiss like a promise to the top of Sirius’s sodden head. Fulfilled is the twenty years sadness, onto better things.

            They had ruled out a dwelling in the woods and a place carved from the coast, only a few feet from the shore. They’re tired of hiding, especially behind branches, and Sirius finds that his stomach drops out from beneath him if he gets too close to the sea. The peppery salt spray had left him heaving on knobby hands and knobby knees, bile aching in his throat.

            And those things too ruled out the city, that’s too violent a cage, and the far-flung village where Remus once lived the longest under the watchful gaze of his mother and her ties. He can’t bring himself to call that place home any longer, that right was lost to vicious tooth and bone when he was just a squalling thing.

            The only thing Harry ever asked, in a low voice interjected into a conversation he didn’t truly believe he had the right to be a part of, was that it be its own place. The thought of returning to the patchwork of suburbia or some seemly neighborhood with neat houses in their little rows and fat hydrangea bushes out front wasn’t something he planned on doing. Not now, not ever.

            There’s a place to be found, and it is with only a little dirty work. Dirty in the most literal sense, there’s quite a bit of mud involved in the process.

            In the end, what it is, because it is some things and most things, is nice. Set back off the road a ways in a wind-budged field. The front path is so long it’s a drive, stretching on to the horizon and continuing on until it’s a mile to the mailbox and more. The magic over it, so palpable the air tastes like ozone, makes it so any unaccompanied Muggle will find it to be an endless yawn of road that never quite reaches the home that sits in the slightest of dips. A witch or wizard advancing across it will crest a small hill and see the structure for all that it is.

            Above all, a home. Not shabby or illustrious, just what it is and not what it isn’t. A blue, muddied front door; three cockeyed windows with faint tan-lines from where flower boxes once stuck; functional shutters that have seen storms like kingdom come and never budged, no magic needed.

            The back way is far less complicated. Family is to come in that way, Apparating in at their leisure and tramping through the back door. There, they’re greeted by a small entryway with hooks on the wall for coats and scarves, a mat for boots or to scrape off muddy paws. Up only a short ways is the kitchen, which is dated and bright and the loudest, happiest room in the place, all gangly plants in the windowsill over the sink and cupboard doors that refuse to all be shut at the same time and a table for two that can become a table for many, with mismatched chairs and mismatched plates and tomatoes the size of plump birds left to ripen in the center.

            There’s no dining room, because that’s far too formal for how they live, and bedrooms enough for anyone that needs a place for one night or many. At the end of the hall, down on the left, is where Remus and Sirius sleep. Two doors down and on the other side of the hall is Harry’s—still has his Chudley Cannons posters spelled to the walls and all, because he lived there at eighteen and nineteen and twenty in the bubbles of time free of school and the Aurors. It’s what he still comes back to, because it’s his favorite and it’s his home, first of its kind.

            Directly on the other side of the kitchen is the den, with a fireplace and squashy furniture and a door that leads to the back garden, which is kindly overgrown enough to be unsuspecting but produces food enough to share with their friends in the nearest village. Beyond that, there’s space for things like restless hounds and flying practice and shoddy, laughing spellwork; an ancient oak whose branches have known the crowing laughter of the boy who lived and the brightest witch of her age and their heart.

            The quiet presence of trees in the distance takes up some of the sky, but the rest is always summer-ripe and unobstructed: blue and orange and pink, far as the eye can see and even beyond that. Lay out in the surrounding field of writhing, whistling grass and it will swallow you whole to keep you by its heart.

            It’s free, well and truly. Unburdened of guilt and the guilty, all that burned on the battleground, culled like the forest floor for the new-green to grow through.

&     &     &

           It’s not rare nor is it common practice, but sometimes Harry writes to say he’ll be coming to stay. More often, he bursts in the back door, calling their names with a laugh and a bag tossed over his shoulder. I’m home, he’ll say, and they’ll all swarm upon one another like flies to honey.

            Undoubtedly, Sirius will grab him shoulders first and say a delighted look at you, and Remus will wait his turn but hold him the longest. Harry will talk as fast as the words will leave his mouth through it all, a hand tacked to the crown of his head to keep his hair intact, glasses perpetually crooked on his tall nose. More brilliant each and every year.

            And when he does show, no matter if it’s after ample advance or on a weekend whim, he hardly ever does so alone, with Ron and Hermione trailing not far behind. It’s not that different than going home for them, either.

            There’s a November day, scathing wind and a fire in the hearth that pops and sputters, that catches them both. Sirius and his business somewhere at the back of the house, trying to keep quiet so as not to wake Remus with his ankles crossed, dozing on the couch—slothful and extravagant a practice he’s picked up.

            In through the back door comes Harry like a shot, Ron just behind him, ducking the doorframe. When they realize there’s no one in the kitchen they do at least try to keep their voices down, but Remus stutters awake anyhow and unfolds his hands from his middle, slowly tucking himself back to wakefulness. It’s been four days since the moon and he’s still chasing Hypnos.

            These surprise visits have become frequent enough in the last year that Remus really shouldn’t call them that at all, but for the way mischief marks Harry’s lily-green eyes, he indulges.

            In the aftermath of his moving out, when he’d gotten himself a little flat and thrown himself shoulder-first against his Auror training, he’d lost some of the fullness that had begun to snare him after three years in Remus and Sirius’s care.

            Remus himself had worried, albeit silently. Biting his nails quick-red and worrying his thumb across his eyebrows. He had lived his life with too many decisions taken from him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of forcing Harry’s hand, of doing just as had been done to him, so he didn’t say anything at all. Sirius had waited too, worrying through sleepless nights and far-out eyes. When they’d both felt that things were coming to a head, that an intervention was the only way, Harry was plodding home anyway, eyes sinking into his quicksand skull, tongue wavering. He’d been worried they would be disappointed in him. As if they could ever harbor anything for this boy except pride so immense it’s sometimes troubling in its great vastness. As if they didn’t breathe a collective sigh that night. He left the Aurors, and they counted their luck like rattling coins.

            The other end of that lackluster appearance he’d upheld for eighteen months was found in the days and weeks thereafter. Catching Harry in the corner of one’s vision yielded a lost look. Inspecting him any closer only unearthed a sort of franticness that’s sinew-strung and buzzing like hornets just under his skin. It precedes him into a room, palpable even on the other sides of walls and doors. They’d worried about that too, but not as much. Harry had a knack for finding his way.

            That afternoon, hazy though it is, Remus thinks he’s finally settled. He moves easier, smiles wider. His cheeks are full and brown, no longer sick-pale, and his eyes have light in them again. His hands wash all around him too, almost knocking Ron’s nose clean off his face on more than on occasion, but it’s instinctual for him, not having to look to know when and where Harry will be.

            Though the Aurors nearly took Harry for everything he had, they seem to have had a dissimilar effect on Ron. He stands with his shoulders back, unrolling to his full height. He’s overly aware of the emblem stitched on his jacket’s breast pocket, like he’s merely its satellite instead of its gravity, but he doesn’t seem necessarily unwell. Remus suspects there’s still a year or two ahead before he realizes it’s not what he wants to do after all.

             Sirius cuts into the room, covered in dust, and effectively lurches conversation around, having appeared delightedly at the sound of Harry’s voice. “Right from shift, Ron?”

             Ron shoves at Harry’s shoulder boyishly and says something about not having been able to get him to come alone. The accused balks, tries even to make an excuse, but there are none to be had. They all know well enough that he hates to Apparate and though commonly worse on the senses, prefers to ride side-along with anyone willing to bring him.

            He fought a war and still goes green around the gills at the thought of getting splinched—he’s a wonder, Sirius had once said on the matter.

            Now, he directs Ron to his room and tells him to get some rest, gentle and charming in his delivery.

            “Right, actually—” Ron turns to Harry, making to ask something, but Harry cuts him off.

            “Thanks for the ride, mate, but Sirius’s right.”

            It’s only once Harry assures him he’s all right that the truth of Ron’s tiredness sweeps him. He nods, already lethargic, and sets off for the room he and Harry have always shared. Remus and Sirius had offered him his own room to stay in, but it hadn’t lasted even the night. The memory of finding Ron and Harry propped up against the side of Harry’s bed, asleep on one another’s shoulders, still comes back to them sometimes, an intense itch. From then on our there had always been a second bed, transfigured out of the desk Harry hardly ever used.

            Sirius moves toward the cupboards to extract the fixings for afternoon tea and asks over his shoulder, “How is he?” while Remus bumps around in the sink to fill the kettle, studiously avoiding eye contact lest he break Sirius’s streak in competitive nonchalant questioning. He can get most anything out of Harry—including, but not limited to, secrets, the hiding spot for gifts, and vague or otherwise puny gossip—with just a few well-placed words. It’s rather simple, but it takes delicacy.

            “Long week,” says Harry. “I told him I’d come in by myself, but I dunno, I think he wanted to get away early.” He frowns, like he hasn’t considered the confluence of events until just that moment, but he doesn’t particularly like how they’ve landed.

            Remus knowingly hums an ah, breaking the moment. Sirius used to stomp through their first flat after a long week, frustration building itself from his boots right on up until it sputtered out of his wand in a cascade of spells that smashed and repaired the same plate on the kitchen floor. The repetition, he’d later reported, had been good for him.

            Sirius taps the side of the kettle to make it heat faster. “Best thing for him is sleep.”

            “Right,” says Harry, but he doesn’t look all that convinced. He rolls his lips between his teeth, staring at the tabletop with particular intensity. His godfathers share a look over his head—this isn’t anything new. The last time he’d sat like this at their table he’d left his career, the time before he’d been nineteen and coming out.

            Remus takes two mugs from Sirius’s elbow and puts one in front of Harry who mumbles a thanks and continues on his way. Taking their own mugs in hand, Remus chooses the seat on one side of Harry, Sirius the other. Silence prevails until it gets beaten back.

            “He’s been staying at mine, y’know. I don’t know what happened, but he showed up one night about a month ago and’s been on the sofa since.”

             This isn’t a shock, not really, but they’re still unsure what to say, so they wait for Harry to continue.

             He shakes his head and sets his mouth. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about—I’ve decided to get my teaching certification,” he says, and they aren’t surprised by this either. “I’ve been talking with Hermione, and she’s helped me figure out what I need to do.”

            “Harry, that’s wonderful.” Remus pats his forearm, offering him a small smile. He’s not as well-versed in this, the soft extraction of information, just knows how to spot when it’s there and needs to be tended. He was always on the receiving end of it, and anything that James or Sirius wanted to be known about themselves they’d tell freely once they were ready.

            “Not History of Magic, I hope?” asks Sirius, amusement crinkling the corner of his mouth and pride the other.

            Relief drips down Harry’s face at their easy acceptance, jolts him back to his unfettered self. “Professor McGonagall was hoping I might put all that time I spent teaching Defense to use, actually. I think I’ll take the suggestion.” His eyes flick to Remus, checking to see if this is all right, and Remus burns brighter.

            Harry tells them about owling with the Headmistress, the post extended to him whenever he has the right credentials to his name and how if it were merely up to her he wouldn’t even need those. Remus offers to help in whatever way he can with whatever he remembers and Sirius chides him for his modesty and volunteers to be the test dummy in the same breath and they both think, reverently, that if there ever were someone to crack the curse of the station, it will surely be this young man at their table.

&     &     &

           Sirius can sleep most nights straight through, five uninterrupted hours spent submerged in pond-dark night, a triumph. It had hardly ever been a reliable practice for him; in his youth he would wake at the slightest sound and after Azkaban he began to jerk awake on each hour, his heart pulling tight in his chest until he awoke gasping and pleading. But now there’s one to six, thankless hours though they are, and catnaps in the afternoons, just as appealing as they had been when they were a means to skive off of school work or kill time between shifts.

            From time to time the odd night comes to him, perfectly treacherous by means of crawling skin and bloodied images that snake through each capillary-thin vein in his eyelids. It’s a riot of feeling, of screams that aren’t his own and grief that blooms with how deep it’s buried in the soil. There’s no remedy but to eye the horizon and hold steady. No safe place to weather the storm except as far from the lovely weight of their bed so as not to burden it with memories. The last thing he needs is more guilt.

            For the nights between, when sleep is neither near nor far, when he’s accompanied only by the patient snores of Remus beside him and never anything darker, he crawls out of bed only because he’s just far enough past restless that he needs something to occupy himself, lest he die of boredom. That’s the deal, after all. On those nights he lets the faint hum of the world have him and in return it gives him peace of mind.

            This night in particular he arrives at half two with resignation, an unsettled feeling lingering low on his neck that propels him out of bed. Their room isn’t much, centered instead around the big window on the far wall that lets in the perfect light and, in the summer, a nice breeze.

            Aside from the bed and the small closet, there’s a wingback armchair in the corner, upholstered in orange velvet. It doesn’t match a single other article of furniture they own, but it guards the corner so well, gathers clothes and gives them something to balance against when they tug on their shoes, they can’t bring themselves to make anything else of it.     

            On its back it carries a jumper that Sirius pulls over his head with familiarity, letting it snag in his hair before it settles on his shoulders. It’s just a bit too long in the sleeves to be his, but he pushes them up to his elbows and makes sure he brings it back in one piece. Though he’s already buttoned up in thick flannel from shoulder to ankle, he’s been running cold for years now and doesn’t think Remus will mind on account of that, if he ever finds out.

            Where Sirius’s curse is too little sleep, Remus’s is too much—how he’d ever hacked it as a professor, Sirius would like to know—and he’s still soundly off when Sirius finally putters down the hall, tucking his wand into his waistband at his hip. He passes Harry’s door, slows only to listen for a sliver of a second. He and Harry, they quickly realized, have the same temperament when it comes to nights, had met enough times in the hall on their way to the kitchen to wait on respectable hours to account for that. But tonight Sirius hears the absence of noise, no fitful cries or hacking snores, no low chatter of young men fighting off sleep and the nightmares to come after, and it’s only once he’s satisfied it isn’t a muffling charm but instead sleep that he heads on without him. With any luck, he thinks, they won’t emerge until midday, rested.

            In the kitchen, he puts together a well-meaning cup of tea with the aid of a coconspirator kitchen. Mustard yellow drawers and cabinet doors that ease open and shut with a spot of wordless magic. A thin mug that lifts itself from where it had been left to dry and carries the moonlight until it lands in his hands. The kettle he grabs himself, but only because he doesn’t entirely trust himself to not empty the scalding contents onto any sensitive bits.

            Despite all the work and secrecy, even as the bag steeps, his jutting body folded in the corner of the counter waiting on it to turn the right shade, he knows he won’t drink it. He never does, can’t keep any of it down no matter the lackluster hour. It might seem useless then, but it is, he’s found, a nice thing to have the heat. A reminder that everything is, more or less, all right, and when he steps out the door in the morning there will still be sky and sound and life to be found if he decides to venture beyond the trees. Simply put, the things that still haunt him are the kinds of things that balk at heat.

            The mismatched chairs stationed around the table shy away from him one at a time until he falls into one with its back to the sink, facing instead the wall whose either side is flanked in dreaded wallpaper they’ve yet to replace because they can’t find a spell to get it off the wall and they’ve already tried the Muggle way, as shown in the missing patches around the doorway to the den. The only other piece of view is that of a calendar, hung on an ailing thumbtack and tabbed in birthdays and moon phases. It’s easier to face that than the open maw to his right that opens out into the hallway, left to the bedrooms and right to the backdoor.

            The black swarms steady in the corner of his vision, shifting itself into tepid outlines that bear gauzy cloaks and wrinkled, rotted fingers. He keeps his eyes on the steam, but it’s a show, his thumb idly tracing the geometric tattoos that arc over his forearm. The lines are watery and faint like bruised veins now, but he doesn’t dare have them filled in. It had hurt like a bitch the first time around, lighting him on fire and burning him up, and that had been when he didn’t feel much at all, no telling what it might do to him now when he feels new things every day. It’s odd, the pain he’s willing to relive and that which he isn’t. Priorities are such fickle things.

            Huffing into his mug at the melodrama of the thought, he drops his head forward, dented hair sweeping his vision away. Elbows on the table, head bowed, the odds are high of his being found in that exact position come morning. It might be challenging, once the tea turns out its heat and solidifies, but surely a small warming charm won’t be too much fuss, but one never knows. Odd too is what magic his stores allow from him—non-verbal spellwork comes easily and first year charms tear his throat open. Not even the wand makes much a difference either way.

            Getting a wand had been something of an effort once things cooled off. Despite the sometimes overly lengthy process of exoneration and its publicity, or perhaps because of it, most interactions with wizarding society at large left him with a bad taste in his mouth. They were never cruel enough to turn him away, oh no, he fought in the war, after all. He fought in the war, so they had to take his money, you see. He fought in the war, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s right, it means he’s righteous, it means he’s presentable enough to be twisted into a header for the Prophet and then tut about him behind his back. Well he’s been fighting wars most of his life now, damn lot of good that’s ever done for him and the ones he loves.

            After all the fucking paperwork that had been pushed to even give him the right to carry a wand again, the better end of the deal had been his interaction in the wand shop with Ollivander’s spawn, a grandson by the name of Gilmore who didn’t care beyond the fact that Sirius was a wizard in need and he, Gilmore, could provide. He was odder than his grandfather, no doubt, with a wispy sort of trill that emanated from the backroom and curious hands that shoved a package bound in twine under your nose the moment you jangled the bell. Sirius was no common gossip, but he had heard the word on the street that there was a chance of Gilmore’s mother having been a seer. That was not concrete, though, so best taken with a grain of salt.

             Been waiting on yooou, Mister Black, Gilmore Ollivander had said, because that was how Gilmore Ollivander spoke, with a few extra letters sprinkled about and a half-grin. Sirius hadn’t been entirely sure if he meant he or the wand had been doing the waiting, but once he undid the twine he didn’t give it another thought. Seer or no, Gilmore was a bit of a wonder.

            The wand is gorgeous, no doubt. Nine and seven-eighths inches of dark rowan wood with a calico stripe of paler wood up the middle. The grip is simple, a firm knot on the end and two rings just above where his fingers rest naturally. The rest is perfectly round and smooth.

            From the first moment he held it in his hands he warred between feeling as though he could breathe again and an old sadness. He couldn’t help but miss the old holly thing he’d had, just a bit, even if he’d hated the day he got it under his father’s determined gaze, it had been, in the end, another of his mischievous companions.

            But as for all things, the end had come for it swiftly—he’d felt it splinter in his hand that day in the Ministry under Bella’s curse and still didn’t know what power it had been that had seen it fit to merely take his wand and not his life. He would have snapped it over his knee a hundred times to keep the feeling thereafter of hauling Harry, battered but safe, into his arms. Bought a thousand and one rowan-wood-with-a-calico-stripe for the moment of seeing Remus, shaken but on his feet and smiling at him and only him so bloody brilliantly.

            In a showing of grace, both wands carry a dragon heartstring from the same creature since some things never do change.

            To have a wand fit for the man he is now slides into place like second nature and yet is as foreign as feelings come. What should be muscle memory has to be retrained because his fragmented mind warps the syllables before they can reach his mouth. And yet he soars easily through the complicated, theory-wound wards he places over the house.

            At first they were something to do, a challenge that should be a challenge because they are far from uncomplicated. A week in, Remus had suggested he get a more pleasant hobby, perhaps some rose bushes to cluck over instead of the wards, and so Sirius had suggested, kindly, that he piss off, and they had both walked away laughing. Now it’s their joke. The wards have to be routinely maintained, stocked up for the moon, and when that time comes, Sirius is disposed, ‘in the garden, tending the roses.’ It’s nice to have something to pride himself on, to have something commendable attached to his spellwork.

            Thing is, they’ve only ever been tripped once, a long, long ways back, and purely by accident at that. Minerva had come calling to level an amused look at the two of them over the rim of her glasses while offering Remus whatever work he wanted. She left only after eating all of their shortbread and securing Remus for a series of guest lectures to be held on his schedule. By then, Sirius’s memory of rippling wards had already grown faint, which is why he doesn’t realize the slouching feeling at the base of his neck now for what it is until he hears the burly crack of someone Apparating into the back garden.

            Something in him hesitates reaching for his wand, and he cocks his head to the side so as to put his better ear out—his sight and smell aren’t anything like they used to be, but his hearing isn’t a total wash. Listening, he tracks Ron’s familiar gait as it comes up the back path and shuffles in the door quiet as a decently-sized mouse. He creeps past the kitchen, eyes moving too fast to take Sirius into account until they irrevocably do. He lurches to an embarrassed halt, whole body tensed up as he eyes Sirius in alarm. He is, Sirius notes with amusement, more like a child being caught sneaking in than an Auror or a hero. Always nice to know these things haven’t completely gone to his head.

            Sirius hails him mildly with an, “All right?” because he figures that he isn’t in the best place to point fingers, is he?

            Ron seems to find half himself, and then the other half too, patting his arms absentmindedly. He nods slow, expelling in a starting and catching sort of way, “Just needed a walk. Kind’ve, er, gotlostoutinthewoods. Had to Apparate back. Sorry.”

            It makes Sirius laugh for reasons beside the obvious, his chin jerking and his hair shaking on his shoulders. Unsure is always an odd way to see a Weasley—or a Prewett, for that matter, if one is to consider the other half of Ron’s lineage. Molly and Gideon and Fabian were hardly ever a meek bunch.

            “Something on your mind then, or just a casual stroll?”

            Ron cuts his eyes down the hall, as if he’s debating himself, before he nods again, his face more for anxiety than due diligence when he turns back to face the kitchen. Sirius leans forward onto his elbows, levelling a curious look. It had been a joke between he and James and Peter, in the months leading up to the Animagus ritual, that Sirius ought to be a cat for all the times curiosity had nearly gotten him killed.

            Ron steps into the kitchen boldly, but his eyes land everywhere but on Sirius until he blurts, “Can I ask you something?” and his eyes come to a crashing halt somewhere near Sirius’s quirked brow. Fat patches of moonlight fall in from the window and onto the kitchen’s tiled floor, offbeat spotlights that travel high enough to light Ron’s uncomfortable, almost pained expression in perfect clarity.

            Inclining his head in a sweeping half-circle, Sirius encompasses each of the empty chairs for Ron’s choosing. He takes one diagonal from Sirius all at once, his limbs going limp and dumping him onto the tufted cushion tied to the back rungs by thin strings. He tucks his shoulders and drops his chin and proceeds not to make a single noise, not even one that can be construed as hesitation. Quite the feat.

            Patience, it turns out, is a virtue Sirius has attained in his later years. Not a lot of it, because that’s just a little too contrary to his nature, but enough not to immediately start up a tribunal. Progress, still. He hangs an arm over the back of his own chair and resists two overwhelming urges. The first is to tip his chair on its back two legs, the other is to berate Ron with enough questions that it finally makes him exclaim whatever it is that has him so trussed up so they can get to the meat and potatoes part of the conversation.

             For a few minutes, the only sounds to be heard are Ron shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He picks at the skin around his thumb with a covert sort of vengeance. If he makes himself any smaller, Sirius will have to start worrying—briefly, he entertains the thought that perhaps this is what Minerva felt every time she had him and his compatriots on the other side of her desk. Like the world as she knew it was three to five seconds from potential collapse.

            “Ron?” he prompts, not unkindly.    

            At his name, he looks up from his hands. In this moment, he’s a boy. The twelve or thirteen-year-old Sirius met on that fated first night. He’s seen him stare in the eyes of the Grim and stand his ground against Death, but now he looks awfully faint. A flush has started at the tops of his cheeks and is starting to bleed inward to his nose.

            “When you were…” he starts, but he’s already shaking his head and backtracking. Words so small they might as well have scurried across the floor and dove into the house’s informal tenant’s hidey-holes. (Padfoot’s working on the mice problem, but the field procures them in droves.) “When did you, y’know, know?”

            Oh, all the things Sirius does know and all the things he has yet to. When did he know life wasn’t a silver spoon and when did he know there is love in truth and when did he know he was made for different things and when did he know none of those revelations would hurt forever? When did he know he would do anything for his friends, to live for them and die for them and if the time came, to kill for them? When did he know there would be life after hell that is made of regret and grief and the match-bright honesty of love?

            All the things he does know and all the things he doesn’t and he can’t begin to fathom what it is exactly that Ron’s trying to put to trial at his kitchen table.

            Shifting forward onto his feet, Ron explains. Somewhat. “Well, it’s just, you’ve been with Professor Lupin for ages, yeah?” Sirius has to hide his smile at the way Ron still names Remus as professor even though their years as teacher-and-pupil are a decade and more behind them. He has a harder time of tamping down the thrill of being tied to Remus for ages.

            Ages, what a tremendous thing. Ages are equal, but not limited to, the amount of years Minerva has been alive or how long it takes for the kettle to boil when you desperately want a cup of tea or the length of time all the Blacks combined haunted Grimmauld Place. Ages are ancient and all-time, earned with every bit of bloodshed. Ages are what the batty old couples in the park that feed bread crumbs to the pigeons have. Ages seemed, to a child, impossible and boring and like the opposite of good decision making. Ages are what they have, he and Remus, and they are just as impossible and boring as expected, and that makes them the best decision Sirius has ever made.

            “I have,” he says because he has been with Remus Lupin for ages in the eyes of a young man, and that is legacy enough.

            Ron squirms again, shifting from foot to foot as best he can while sitting down, and finally comes to clasp his hands in holy pair in front of himself, thumbs folded one over the other. “So you must have known.”

            “Oh. Oh,” says Sirius, a bit slow on the uptake these days, apparently. He adds, “I see,” which makes Ron’s face flush further, the color flaring all the way to the tops of his ears. He looks a bit like the worse end of a flobberworm, all wrinkled skin and puckered mouth. Sirius speaks before he’s ever found what he wants to say just to put Ron out of his misery.

            He says a lot of things, true and hurried. How he thinks he always knew, but his house growing up wasn’t any place to consider it, and once he got to school it made things easier not to wonder. How Remus never made anything easy, though, and so he had to catch on sooner or later.

            But as for specifics, well.

            “I was sixteen when I finally figured it out,” he says with a quiet laugh. “After I moved in with the Potters, I took stock for the first time in my life, figured out who and what mattered to me. It was a bit of a shock how high up the list Remus was, but once I mulled it over it made more sense than I cared to admit. Which I didn’t, for some time. Is there, y’know, anyone in particular—?”

            Ron snaps no far too quickly for truth and then amends in quavering hand, “No, ‘ve just be thinking.” He picks conspiratorially at the nonexistent lint on his trouser leg as if that will distract Sirius from his sudden outburst.

            “It would, er, that’s to say if there was someone,” Sirius tries carefully, failing to catch Ron’s eye to really drive the point home. “That would be all right, too.”

            He damns himself for not being able to find the right words, even though he knows he’s never had to. When he and Remus figured themselves out, they were long past the years where liking a bloke was the root of their self-loathing and so their relationship had spun up without too many words on the subject. It was understood, at some point along the way that Remus was bisexual and Sirius was gay and that was that. The enlightening conversation they’d had with a nineteen-year-old Harry had been most things, but mostly one-sided too. So no, discussing the mechanics of these things isn’t his forte, but that’s never stopped him before.

            Ron mutters something under his breath that sounds to be mostly an aside for himself, if the face he pulls when Sirius asks him to repeat himself is anything to go by, that is. He heaves a windy sigh.

            “I said you sound just like Hermione.”

            “Ah. So she knows then?”            

            “I don’t think we really knew how to act, her not knowing something,” he says with a half-grin. “But, yeah, sort of. The blokes part, at least, not about, er—anyway, she made a bit of a to-do about it, tried to give me pamphlets, she did. I told her I didn’t need pamphlets and she told me not to be so dense.”

            Sirius’s laugh bobs up his throat finally giving cause to Ron’s shoulders to remove themselves from the roosts they’ve taken up by his ears. The heat in his face recedes, glad for the fact that they don’t seem to be dwelling on his near slip-up.

            When he cracks a lopsided grin, Sirius would have been willing to swear everything was fine if not for the just left of center look to his eyes. Like he’s going to stumble back down the hall into the soapy night if anyone startles him too roughly.

            “I guess it was nice of her,” he admits eventually, scratching self-consciously at the back of his neck.

            Sirius nods, encouraging. Harry hasn’t made mention of Ron and Hermione breaking up, but then again, Sirius thinks a little ruefully, he always has had a way of taking his time to pick up on these things. The kid’s a terrible gossip in the sense that he can’t at all; the flobberworm might be marginally less hopeless.

            “She’s a good…?”

            “Friend,” says Ron. He clears his throat, looks up with a steadier cast about him. “I’d say we split off, y’know, but she’d probably tell me to call it an amicable parting or something.” It’s in the years and years of friendship and love that it’s to be said that when Ron tries to inflect something of Hermione’s voice in his own that it’s both dead on and not quite right at all, colored by perception. It makes his nervous smile turn sincere before it vacates its seat altogether. “It’s not that I don’t still like girls, y’know, and I told her that, but…she’s my best friend, right? One of ‘em at least. And I told her I thought…maybe we were supposed to just be best friends.”

            “And you both agreed?”

            Ron nods and in a faint voice he admits, “Honestly, I think we were both sort of relieved.”

            If Sirius does know all about one thing, it’s the absence of love. A byproduct of searching for it in every nook and cranny for so many years. The falling out of it, the failing of it even after trying to keep it together, the stark finding of it never having been there in the first place, instead expected and performed to the whispering ensemble.

            He knows too about infatuation and victims of circumstance and right place right time or right place wrong time or wrong, wrong, wrong all the way across the board and over the ledge. For years and years more he thought all he was fated to get was some bitter, binding truth, burned into him like vines buried into his skin, and a fraying knot tied careful and tight by pureblood hands, each slick with their own horror. He thought, surely, he would look up one day and find himself his father, face distorted in the heavy silver his relations so loved to populate their homes with.

            And then he grew and learned love like teachings. How to protect himself from love, how to give it leeway enough when the time came, it itself a Dark Art. It took two years under James’s persistence, Peter’s nervousness, Remus’s solidarity, but it became like those damn things they grew in the greenhouses every fall. Careful tendings love required.

            But for all that, each trial on his way to understanding, he had never fallen out of love. An old man looking back, he might have been too careful with his heart, or perhaps just selective enough. Or maybe, his heart just doesn’t beat that way at all.

            He still loves Remus, across every painful deed, loves him like the sun loves the morning and the rain loves the earth. He still loves James and Lily, damn him as far down as there is if he ever stops. And though some days he wants to carve it out of his skin and bury the body underneath the garden beds, he still loves Peter too, whatever of him, if any, had been theirs at all. In the beginning and the end he loves Regulus, and though what comes in between is as old as time and twice as hard to tame, it sticks to his ribs insistently.    

            In the same sharp breath, he’s had people fall out of love with him. Has known what it is to look at them and know them and then look at them again in the next breath and know too that it’s gone. Hell, he’s had people that never loved him at all who spent great portions of their lives making sure he knew that fact with all the intimacy of a hand on the back of the neck.

            And in all of that, each complicated piece, he has no way to take it and quantify next to it the notion that it can all simply happen as one clean break straight down the middle, leaving behind two equal pieces that know they don’t fit but can still color the same part of the sky without strife. But he’s glad of it, glad that the next generation is making their leaps and bounds.

            And now really isn’t the time to discern the finer points of this thing he has never had to learn. The house creaks, the night groans, and Sirius says, “Good on you both for working it out,” and “Does Harry know?” because sometimes his mouth misses his foot.

            Ron, lifted a bit from his chair, asks, “Know what?” His voice catches on cracking, but Sirius is much too polite, even now, to point it out. Between the two of them, the picture comes into some unspoken focus.

            “About the break-up, I mean.”

            “Oh, er. I dunno. Since he left the Aurors he and Hermione talk on the phone every night, figured she’d told him.”

            Sirius can’t tell if it’s jealousy over Hermione, who has always spent the majority of her time with Ron, dedicating this time with Harry, or if it’s the direct opposite that leaks into Ron’s voice and makes it sound all the more resigned. And to that end, he can’t even tell if Ron realizes it’s there, just at dog-pitch. It’s a tricky place, Sirius knows, to be torn between your friendship and the love you keep burrowed within it and the even more capricious stuff you harbor outside of it, harder still if they start to fill in the space around one another until it’s all a smooth surface. What frustrates him the most is he doesn’t know how best to tell Ron it’s worth it to figure it all out, for better or worse, or even if he should. Some things are better left learnt on their own.

            Ron digs quietly at the grain in the tabletop with his thumb, the muscle in his jaw billowing in and out as he saws at the inside of his cheek. “With you and—Remus.” His tongue tangles uncertainly over the name, face pinching like he’s gotten hold of a box of sizzling sour-drops. “I just assumed you’d always been together, but that’s not right, is it?”   

             “Not at all,” he replies, teeth flashing night-bright until his smile fills up his whole face,
“Would have saved me more than my share of embarrassment if it was.”

            The particular memory had taken longer than others to come back to him, wrenching him open and shut when it did finally take hold. There wasn’t time for the grief of it and how long it had been for the glory of remembering acutely Remus’s face in its many stages of life once and for all. The lurch between his brows when he was properly pissed off and the way his mouth curled up into his cheeks, sardonic and more dramatic than Sirius could have ever dreamt to have been at seventeen. No one ever gave Remus his proper credit, he had just as much dramatics in him as the rest of his band, he just knew when best to deploy it.

            “Wasn’t it weird? Being mates and all?”

            “Strangely enough, I think that was always the easiest part. We were both stubborn bastards, but there wasn’t anything that could keep us from being attached at the hip if everything else came unspooled. Well—we knew that afterwards.” His smile softens, thinking of it. That had been November, too. First term of seventh year, everything finally crashing together in symphonic reality.

            Ron cuts a curious look at him and Sirius, never needing to be prodded, obliges. “He hates the way I tell it, so I’ll save you the misery of the full account, but we didn’t wise up until it came to where we’d all live after school. Everyone and their mother knew James and Lily’d shack up together first chance they got, and I had a bit of inheritance from my uncle, figured I’d end up in a flat not far away. Remus was going back to the village to stay with Hope—his mother.” And that was where it had gotten messy.

            It had scared Sirius to death, realizing the summer before exactly what it was burning him up from the inside out, and then having to confront that he wouldn’t have time to get use to the thought and make it fit inside their dorm and the common room and classrooms, that it would have the whole bloody world to take up before long. It was a good excuse to spend so long not saying anything at all.

            Remus, in his youth, he liked to point out, had a temper that snapped like a matchstick and was just as quick to light. He always focused it inward, was just about anything but confrontational unless the scene demanded it, and spent not a small portion of his time keeping it in check. Although, there had been plenty to be angry over back then, couldn’t really be helped. But he and Sirius had always been more forthright with one another than with just about anyone else, could drop words that sunk like lead because it was a language they both were particularly fluent in or spitball truths they would otherwise keep folded up. Every harbored word between them was something new and unnegotiable, and this, what was at that point the biggest decision of all, was an even rockier terrain.

            “Whenever someone brought it up I’d get this daft look on my face and he’d take it as a personal offense—if he were awake he’d say that’s not true, so I’ll say it for him, but I’ll also tell you he’s a liar. He thought I was keeping a secret from him about my plans after school and he was upset, not really with me, but it started to come across that way, which set me off. It’s a wonder we could ever move forward for all the circles we walked.”

            It’s been a long time since Sirius has told this story to a proper audience, but when Ron laughs and settles his chin against his forearms, Sirius tucks in. He tells it with the least amount of embellishment he’s capable of. Plain honesty is the best way he knows how to say everything he thinks Ron needs to hear. The house creaks, a floorboard groans in earnest, Sirius’s lips twitch as he continues.

            The stalemate hadn’t been a surprise to anyone until the second month or so. No one knew what it was about, but everyone knew about it. Black and Lupin and the elephant they shepherded around with them. It didn’t come to a head until a few days before Sirius’s birthday, holed up in the common room, denying it as they hunched over the never-ending scrolls they’d been forced to write that year as if there weren’t more pressing things.

            “He’d accidentally knocked his inkwell over,” Sirius recounts fondly, “It blotted out both of our essays, onto both our hands and trousers. Neither of us could remember a scourging charm, but we were both so up in arms—I blurted it out right then.” Why don’t we get a place together when you know bloody well I want to and I know bloody well you do, too.

            “And he got—his whole face went red, reddest I’d ever seen, and I thought there you go, Black, you’ve gone and done it. I hadn’t, fucked it up that is, and it settled that part of the debate. There was still the glaringly obvious, so I bucked up and told him that, too—”

            “Bucked up hell, I seem to remember you muttering, ‘now why can’t telling you I fancy you be that easy,’ and then turning a shade of purple I didn’t think was possible for any human. In fact, I thought I’d inadvertently hexed you.”

            Though Ron jolts, Sirius doesn’t have to look up to know Remus is there—had already heard him come up the hall—but he does so anyway, meeting smiling eye to smiling eye. He’s leaned, rather disreputably, in the doorway, his shoulder against the jamb and his jumper-bedecked elbows akimbo, hands tucked against their opposite sides. Looking at him, Sirius thinks things far too soppy for a man his age.

            “You’ve never cast a hex you didn’t mean, Moony, your memory must be failing in your old age. And besides, I remember—clearly mind you, I’m as sharp as I ever was—you called me a prick, so you shouldn’t point fingers for indelicacy.” It’s Remus’s turn to be abashed, and he does it well. It touches him feather-light, a bundling at the corner of his jaw, a sharper pronunciation to his throat. Never a blush, but a guilty smile so much so it might as well be mocking. Always a thrill to confound Remus Lupin, even better to trip him up entirely. Sirius would doff his cap if he had the proper accompaniments, but instead he spreads his hands in false, boyish amnesty that makes Remus roll his eyes when he pushes off the door.

            “Yes, well,” says Remus, crouching beside Sirius to the lock-picking of the bones in his heels and knees. He digs a bony elbow into Sirius’s thigh to steady himself, and the other props his hand up to scratch distractedly at the soft underside of his chin. “About a week beforehand I’d made what I believed to be the mistake of telling James I fancied Sirius. Pure accident, and I swore him to secrecy on penalty of all the curses I knew, but I figured James had let it slip and it was being thrown back in my face. I’ve been told I had a penchant for the illogical when it came to these kinds of things.”

            Sirius grunts had? rather derisively under his breath, which Remus smiles at and digs his elbow into his thigh for. The truth of James and Sirius being incapable of keeping secrets from one another is as old as the joke of Remus’s belief or lack thereof when it comes to so-called matters of the heart. Once upon a time, Remus had likened the former issue to the little old ladies and gents in the village he grew up in that would sit around with their flasks and knit chattering gossip from one end of the village to the other in one great tapestry of embarrassment for all those involved. The latter had been more easily summed up as ‘every great man must have his one daft downfall’ by one black-haired boy or the other.

            “Had he told you?” asks Ron with a gallant motion of his hand.

            “Oh, no, no,” assures Sirius, “James, for all he was, never would have told me himself. He told us later—what was it, Rem?—he’d been convinced you would ‘hex my bollocks to the sun and the rest of me to the moon,’ wasn’t it?”

            “A crafty bit of spellwork I wasn’t above learning,” says Remus, mischievous glint to his eyes. He flashes Ron the matching-set smile that tramples on wicked, the one that most never see, but when they do they’re reminded, rather uncomfortably, he had been a Marauder, first-billed at that.

            “Did you have a row, then?”

            “Oh, yes,” answers Remus, “We’d gotten rather good at it and everything, but I’d say that was our best one.”

            “I’d say so,” agrees Sirius.

            It was a hell of a night. They’d each tried to storming off in great teenage huffs, but had forgotten their beds were merely a dorm’s length from one another and neither had sense enough to leave, too much pride. James found them each with their curtains drawn with sticking charms when he got back from patrol. It wasn’t until two in the morning, when they snuck separately to the common room to have their respective thinks that they came face to face again. Somehow they managed to stop with the underhanded remarks long enough to agree they’d both been prats and have what some might generously call a civilized conversation. Gone on me, gone on you, ad infinitum. And it still took three days for them to work up the nerve to kiss.

            “That was because you deserved it, for being such a prat.”

            (Remus’s hands had sweat so terribly that first night he thought he’d lose grip on his own palm, let alone stay put long enough to get anywhere near a Sirius cast in fire and burning like his namesake. They smiled so much in those three days, hiding it behind their palms and faux-furrowed brows.)

            Absently, Remus pats Sirius’s knee, and Sirius puts his hand on the back of his wrist, and Ron looks on, harboring a small smile like children employ when their family members display any minor form of affection in front of their poor, virginal eyes, and they don’t want to admit that it’s sweet, in a way. Gross, but heartwarming.

            “Right, can’t do any worse than you two, can I?” he says finally, just as fond.

            Sirius bursts into raucous laughter, now cradling Remus’s hand.

            There’s no pleasantries after that, no thanks for this or any time because it’s known and known well that if Ron needs anything else, he merely has to turn up looking mildly distressed and Sirius will stay with him until he’s figured it all out. It’s true for any of them, really, Harry and Ron and Hermione are a lot like a box of abandoned kittens on the side of the street. You end up taking them all home, no matter how attached you are to the first one you saw. It’s too much to separate them.

            “Now that you’re done filling his head with wildly mistold versions of our old stories?” asks Remus conversationally, the come back to bed? tucked neatly somewhere between his faint smile and one drooping vowel and the next. As soon as Ron had taken his leave, so had followed the wakefulness from Remus’s eyes and coherence. He puts a hand on the mug forgotten in front of Sirius’s hands and raises an eyebrow; in return, Sirius gives him a small nod, and the mug gets carried off to the sink.

            “I suppose,” he says languidly, taking to his feet.

            Back in bed, an hour gone form the clock since Sirius last checked, Remus waits until they divvy up the covers between them before he speaks, and then it’s soft, as he rearranges the worn pillows under his head.

            “Everything all right with Ron?” Careful Remus, never pries.

            “He had questions, and for once I had answers.”

            Remus hums. “And the spectacular ways we made fools of ourselves was relevant?”

            “Apparently so.”

            In the short pause that follows, Sirius surmises it’s the gears churning along in Remus’s head before he can figure out what it is he wants to ask. He finds it as, “So it’ll be Harry, you think?”

            Sirius huffs a laugh through his lips and pulls the covers up over their heads, plunging them into a pocket of warmth and dark made for trading these kinds of observations. “I would bloody well hope so,” he says, bumping against Remus’s shoulder.

&     &     &

            “We’ve been ransacked,” says Remus blithely, looking at the scattered remains of a half eleven breakfast. Sirius, standing at his shoulder, makes an odd gesture with his hand, almost like trying to smudge a foggy window, before he realizes he’s not holding his wand. With a sour expression, he bends around Remus’s unbothered form and snatches it up from the table to wag it properly now, making the mugs dance over to the sink and the crumbs jump ship for the rubbish bin. He’s either still half-asleep, or he’s given the charm a bit too much, because one mug hurtles with an impressive force and smacks the wall before falling limply on the counter, somehow still intact. That’s not even to mention the pocket of crumbs that stages a coup and tries to climb back up the table leg. Overall, it’s impressive. Remus says as much.

            Sirius kisses his shoulder fondly. “You left all those spell books lying around, I needed something to do with my time.” Remus draws him in until they’re nearly chest to chest and putters a kiss or two to Sirius’s mouth.

            “Where are the boys?” he asks before the third, just so he might accurately gauge what kind of time he has for such deeds.

            There’s an unspoken rule, for Harry’s sake, to consider his whereabouts when they decide to start kissing in the kitchen. Or the den. The back garden’s fair play, but only just so. No child, no matter their age or how far it’s removed from legal childhood, wants to be reminded that their family members kiss. The horror of it all! The unseemliness! Remus likes to tell him he has Sirius’s delicate sensibilities.

            “Ron took the Floo to settle something at the office, Harry’s in the garden looking forlorn.”

            “And you’ve got a plan to remedy that, I assume?”

            “When do I not?”

            Remus rests his nose against the smile lines at the corner of Sirius’s eye and hums, thinking. “I would wager,” he says, low and slow and right by Sirius’s ear, “At least eighty-eight percent of the time.”

            “It’s so good to be known by you, Moony, anyone else would have said a hundred.”

            “Yes, but not everyone else grew up listening to the gears in your head grind upon one another once every few months when you had a coherent thought.”

            Sirius throws his head back in a rich, riveting laugh, the top row of his teeth perfectly round and in sight like the hazy borderline of the moon through the clouds. He disentangles from Remus only after he’s had his fill, nodding along to the side door in the living room that lets out into the garden. Through the blinds, from which Remus peeks with a grimace, Harry can be seen about forty paces out, drawing his wand through the air and mouthing to himself. He jacks his glasses up his nose and jabs his wand at the ground, netting the grass in a fine blue spark.

            “How long has he been out there?” asks Remus, the blinds flicking shut as he pulls back to look over at Sirius.

            “Have a guess.”

            Remus hums, tries to remember twenty-three or even just his twenties. The eighties weren’t particularly kind to him from start to finish, but he was then at the opposite end of the journey Harry is at now, lost instead of found. He had never seen, not then, what end there could be aside from tearing himself apart and scattering the pieces between the places where his life had once meant something. As he stands at the closer of his story, he watches Harry try to figure out how to begin his in earnest because sometimes the world is cruel, but sometimes it’s overly fond.

            “Let me talk to him first. Ten minutes?”

            “I think I can pencil you in.”

            “Say you can?” He kisses below Sirius’s eye, at one of the lone beauty marks there. “Right, wish me luck.”

            Sirius looks as though he wants to say something, his lips parting. Probably to impress a concept upon Remus that he’s already debated or batted away in a bout of modesty most unbecoming. Instead, he shakes his head and ushers him quietly out the door.

            At the sound of the latch clunking into place, Harry looks up with a frown steady on his mouth. He doesn’t manage to shake it as Remus approaches, doesn’t even seem to try. In a way, it warms Remus’s heart that he’s permitted to see even the most unchecked parts of him.

            “Morning,” says Remus, shaking his wand down into his palm. “Harry, forgive me, but could you tell me the International Wizard’s Coalition standard dueling guidelines? No particular order.”

            Harry’s eyes are half-moons, suspicious and yawning in his skull even as he dutifully rattles off, “Er, both be armed and acknowledge the other. Have an unimpaired field of at least twenty paces. Recruit a third party to mediate—“

            “Oh, well, we’ll have to shake the last one; Sirius won’t be out for another ten minutes.”

            “What?”

            “We’ve acknowledged one another, and are both armed. Once I take my ten paces and you yours, I think we’ll be quite ready, it’s house rules all the way down from there.”

            He expects, perhaps erroneously, for a little pushback from Harry, a tiny sliver of him that may in some circumstances be called a right mind to protest, but instead his decidedly unright mind has him pushing up his sleeves and jogging back ten paces with a gleeful smile. Trust him to be shaken from his gloom at the prospect of dueling his godfather.

            Remus tucks his wand under his chin and calls, “Ready?”

            Harry nods and they count together, making do without the moderator. On three, Remus’s stupefying hex glances harmlessly off of the handy shield charm Harry’s thrown up. In the next breath, he send a disarming spell that Remus ducks out of the way of, landing one of his own on the cuff of Harry’s non-dominant shoulder. Harry sends another, and then a petrifying jinx just after that catches Remus in the ankle and sends him toppling. Remus laughs breathlessly, one hand clutching the grass and the other shaking his wand with meaning to catch Harry with a well-balanced Jelly-Legs.

            “Damn!” crows Harry, collapsed in a puddle of himself. He hunches at the waist, laughing desperately over his gummy legs, and palms his wand covertly in a way he thinks Remus won’t take notice of. Three years of his tricks, and Remus is well-versed in this tactic of his.

            “Protego!” His shield flares just before a final disarming hex can crash into him.

            “You’ll have to work on your tell!” chides Remus not unkindly, poking at the pins and needles now running the races in his legs. It had been a good, sharp spell, and the effects will most likely gnaw at his bones for minutes still. He’s stuck, whether he likes it or not.

            “I need to work on a lot of things,” rebuts Harry between murmuring counter-jinxes over his legs. Once he’s un-jellied himself, he hefts back to his feet and stumbles over to where Remus is still planted amongst the grass blades and weeds, wiggling his toes and taking in the day.

            “Harry,” he says when Harry offers a hand to pull him to his feet. With a grunt and a heave, they stand shoulder to shoulder—no, Harry’s just a touch taller now, even though it seems like it was just yesterday he fit perfectly in the crook of his arm. “I have no doubt in my mind you came to the conclusion of seeking a professorship on your own volition. And I hope you know that I, that both Sirius and I, are immensely proud of whatever career you decide on. Or don’t decide on, you could change your mind a hundred times, and we wouldn’t mind at all.”

            “But?” asks Harry, arms folded protectively over his chest, a brow raised with practiced ease.

            “No buts,” says Remus firmly, “A postscript, perhaps. You’ve spent a long time beyond your years, Harry. Fighting, losing some and winning some and coming to more draws than anyone will ever know. And even without that, I know you are more capable, more dedicated and passionate and equitable, than most; I’m immensely gratified to see you embrace that because there are so many students that are going to benefit from studying under you.

            “But—ah, there’s the but. I just want you to know that you don’t have to do it all right away. You went from school straight to war, from that back to school and then headfirst into your Auror training. And that’s not to say you did anything wrong, of course. You made the choices that were yours alone to make and they have put you on a path with the opportunity of even more choices, and I can never discourage that. But I can’t help but think…there’s more to life than trying to beat the clock, is what I’m trying to say. It’s okay to step back and just breathe and be. You deserve that, you always have.”

            For a long time, Harry stays silent, looking out across the tree-line with eyes have ducked against the afternoon sun. There’s a meandering breeze today that stops by to chat once or twice, but otherwise, the air is still and the sky is still and they are still. Finally, he bumps Remus’s shoulder with his and keeps his eyes trained forward.

            “You both gave me that. You and Sirius,” he says, “You gave me a place to come back to, to come home to, where I really, honestly wanted to be. Before I got to Hogwarts, I didn’t even know that you were supposed to look forward to coming home,” he explains with an abashed laugh tucked and dissolving underneath his tongue.

            “That’s why I came, I think. To get my head on straight at the place where I learned that life isn’t always about the fight. I’m tired of fighting, Remus, but teaching, I don’t know, it’s the how and not the why, which is a luxury I never really got. And I enjoy it, which I guess is another luxury I didn’t deal much in either.

            “What I’m trying to say and probably making an arse of myself while I do it, is I know all of that and I learned it best from you two. So don’t, don’t worry about me. I’m taking things slow this time.”

            Remus pats his shoulder, trying to will back the tears welling up in his eyes. He’s old, he decides, he’s allowed momentary lapses. It’s only when Harry reaches back for him and they nearly crawl into one another’s arms, Remus holding tight to the back of Harry’s sweet head and Harry with both his arms around Remus’s middle that either of them bothers to actually shed any of the tears. They’re a sad pair, snuffling quietly.

            That’s how Sirius finds them when the ten minutes he auctioned off are up. He tips his head to the side a fraction, a curious look for Remus who smiles faintly, like the cat who got the cream and will brag about it later once the kitten has gone to bed.

            “Run the gamut without me, I see. Lousy sods,” says Sirius with a bracingly endeared look on his face. At four months older than Remus, he’s old, too, allowed all the lapses he wants, even if the two across from him will never let him live it down.

            “Remus,” asks Harry, now braced so he’s facing Sirius with an impish glint to his eyes, “That sounds like acknowledgment, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I would, Harry, I would. And I happen to know he’ll have his wand in his waistband.”

            “Well,” says Harry, “Ten paces.”

&     &     &

            The kitchen smells of iodine and mending spells at dinner, acidic and not unlike a pie that was left in the oven for too long. The three culprits all studiously avoid the subject, keeping their grins to themselves and their explanations even further. Ron, for his part, only has to look from Sirius’s skinned hand and split lip, from Harry’s bruised cheek and the way one long leg cranes out from under the table, from Remus’s careful posture and winning-smugness, to get a good grasp of things. He thinks it better left alone; just like all families, their rituals are varied and mostly incomprehensible.

            Which is all to say when he first arrived back from the office, Harry shrugged before he could ask and said something cryptic about forgetting how competitive Remus and Sirius are with one another. How he managed to forget that, Ron would never know, but he was so grateful to see Harry look so unburdened he left whatever else could be said of their afternoon to lie.

            When he showed up at the door to Harry’s flat, bag in one hand and a grim sort of taught hold to the other, Harry had merely opened the door wide and waved him in. His eyes were smudgy and his mouth didn’t turn one way or the other and for the twenty whole minutes it took for him to track down proper linens to toss on the couch, he didn’t ask Ron a single question. When he finally did speak, it was straight to the point, but no less concerned. Just, are you all right, mate? and once he was sure of that, is Hermione?

            Truth of it was, Ron was fine and Hermione was fine and there wasn’t anything wrong. Everything was perfectly normal the Tuesday night he turned up at Harry’s, except he’d just gotten out of a six year relationship and his best friend didn’t have any direction and now they were sharing a couch, not talking about it.

            They didn’t talk about it so much that talking about it would have broken the unspoken oath they’d taken. Ron ate breakfast while Harry pried himself awake at the small table shoved in the corner of the kitchen and they didn’t talk about it. Harry came around for lunch and to give the eye to all the familiar places at the office and they didn’t talk about it. Ron walked in the door and collapsed on the couch and they didn’t talk about it. Harry spoke to Hermione every evening, neither loud nor hushed, a pad of paper and a mangy quill in hand, and they, not a single one of their three, ever talked about it. It was hard to see what the it even was after a while.

            It was honestly all too easy after their years in Gryffindor tower, the living with Harry bit. Five weeks, and they’d never touched upon the how or why of the arrangement, but it was easier, didn’t complicate the fact that Ron’s snoring put Harry to sleep quicker than any pill, and his need to get up throughout the night to get water from the kitchen sink could always push Ron back from the panicked night with steady hands. Like this, their nightmares, receding over the years but still perfectly present, could be quelled by sitting on either end of the couch from one another and not talking about that either, breathing in time until they dozed against lumpy sofa arms, just glad of another heart beating in the room.

            If he were being frank, and it was rare that Ron wasn’t, he was hoping they’d return to that after this excursion to Remus and Sirius’s. Was planning on it, in fact. He’d slip his fair share into the canister on the kitchen counter where he knew Harry kept the rent stowed, or something, anything but go back to his and Hermione’s old place which was, mostly, far too awkward a space for him now.

            And he wouldn’t, if he thought Harry wanted him to go. If he thought Harry wanted him to go, actually, he would’ve moved himself to Ginny’s couch immediately and pestered her until he felt right side up again. But Harry seemed just as content as Ron himself was with their set-up. He hadn’t been able to cheer him up entirely, couldn’t get rid of every single bad day, but he’d gotten him to stop wallowing, got him eating real food (Molly’s recipes, Ron’s capable hands) instead of takeaway cartons, and laughing again—Merlin’s greasy beard, that had to count for something, didn’t it?

             And all the other things, the feelings mucking up Ron’s chest when he thought too hard about Harry, those would go away eventually. He’d move on, meet someone new that wasn’t one of his best friends, and he’d get over it, plain and simple. Harry would never even have to know and Hermione would respect him enough not to voice the guess he was sure she’d been working on. Not everyone was meant to have a story like Remus and Sirius. They won and they were alive and they were still in each other’s lives, he didn’t need all the rest, just the water glasses by the sink and the promise of tomorrow.

            Harry knocks the butt of his spoon against the tabletop, a trail of broth making for his fingers. He’s furrowing his eyebrows at Ron. “You two have to stop fighting,” he’s saying, as if that’s anywhere remotely near the problem. Not that there is a problem. 

            See, Ron’s working on the rest, trying to dust the thoughts out and all, and it’s going about as well is to be expected, on his own time and all of that, but he hadn’t thought that it showed. He figured he was doing the thing people do where they’re strong for those they love, putting on a brave face because Harry needed his help getting back to his feet in the wake of leaving the Aurors more than Ron needed anything else. He didn’t think that it would read like anything else, the tight-lipped-ness, like he and Hermione were so disgusted with one another they couldn’t even be in the same room. He was having flashbacks to the bloody tea leaves and the headaches he used to get from the ill-advised smoky Divination classroom. Double meanings and two-timings abound.

            “She’d already put in the request to take off for the holiday with her parents, but that got cancelled, so I invited her, and Ron, I’m serious, you and Hermione have to, to sit down and figure this out.”

            Sirius raises his eyebrows, one right after the other—and Ron could never do that but the twins could and that was a fact he hated—and leans back in his chair like he can get out of the way of the words coming across the table. Ron wishes he wouldn’t, that he’d stay firmly in the way, but because he’s obviously being punished for something he’s done in his life, Ron gets them all full force. Probably all the times he talked back to his mother, she always told him it would come back around to bite him, so this must be it, being sequestered however far from civilization with his ex-girlfriend who is still his best friend and his roommate who is also his best friend who is also his something that doesn’t even know they’ve broken up. Merlin and Morgana, whoever’s listening, let him have some sort of allergic reaction to the stew. He’s never been allergic to a thing a day in his life, but he’ll take it now, one good carrot allergy to get him out of this here moment, it’ll be a worthy sacrifice.

            “We’re not fighting,” Ron snipes back around a lump of carrot which, unfortunately, goes down just fine. His life’s a fucking joke without a punchline these days.

            “Right. And you’ve been on my sofa for a month why then? Whatever it is can’t be that bad, you’re both just being stubborn.” Spoken with actual stubbornness, for the record, but Ron doesn’t think pointing that out will exactly elevate his stance. He’s still trying to connect the dots of Hermione and here and tomorrow morning in his head with very little luck, anyway.

            He hasn’t seen her since he left, hasn’t talked to her or about her because that was what happened naturally for one embarrassed week and then after that it came to him like muscle memory. He knows he can go to her at any time and pick right back up where they left off at sixteen, seventeen, before everything got so complicated, but it’s not that easy, is it? Or maybe it is, he’s always had a way of overcomplicating.

            “We’re stubborn?” he says, for lack of anything else. His cheeks flush pink, like he’s buzzing on wine, and he purses his lips. “Are you even listening to yourself, mate? You can’t just go around inviting people places and, and shoving them together! Whatever’s going on with Hermione and me’s ours to figure out, so get out of it, all right? I don’t need the help.”

            Hurt, real hurt, flashes in Harry’s eyes, and he jaggedly excuses himself from the table, his spoon clattering beside his bowl as the chair legs groan against the door. It’s the other thing that’s a relic of what had once seemed like their better years: the snapping, blunt exchanges, the storming off and the harried expelling of steam. They won’t talk for the rest of the evening, but in the morning it’ll be like nothing’s ever happened because nothing ever really did. It’s rare their spats ever make sense.

            Diagonal from Ron, Remus takes another bite of stew. Sirius crosses his hands over his middle and exhales.

            “I’m not going after him,” says Ron petulantly, prodding around in his bowl. Not that he has to say it, given how clear it is he’d rather fuse permanently with his chair.

            Sirius comments, “Not a bad idea,” before bringing his chair legs back to the floor. He takes hold of his bowl and turns it up in front of him, disappearing the rest of his dinner in one swallow that’s loud for the kitchen’s new quiet.

            Ron doesn’t know which way he means it and he’s too tired of the double-talk to try and figure it out himself. Maybe that’s stubborn of him, but apparently that’s just what he is. At least when he’s been stubborn in the past, there’s Harry doing just the same, but he figures he’ll have to get on with doing things by himself at some point anyhow.

            He takes his bowl to the sink and is surprised to find it already full to the top with hot, soapy water. At the Burrow, dishes were almost always charmed clean, but with seven kids and not enough hours in the day, it made sense. At Harry’s, he does the same because it’s what he knows, and he doesn’t like the way the dish soap Harry buys smells, like artificial apples too wrong to be made into candy.

            Differences of opinion.

            He jolts when he feels a hand on his shoulder, turns to find Remus looking at him pleasantly neutral. They, both he and Sirius, have always been carefully subdued when it comes to any skirmishes between Harry and Ron and Hermione. Oh, they’ll take sides of course, and they’ll tell any of them when they’re wrong, but they don’t do it out of bitter satisfaction, just honest concern.

            “I’ll take this,” says Remus, inclining his head to Ron’s hands plunged into the water. He doesn’t say anything else.

            Ron looks down, where the water’s creeping close to his sleeves, and sighs. It’s a big, long, tired thing, only an extra second away from being a production. “Thanks,” he says, pulling his hands out. He grabs the towel and scrubs at his already red hands, goes around his wrists and in between his fingers and over the pale, delicate skin of his palms. But no matter how hard he scrubs, there’s still water on the floor like proof of purchase.        

&     &     &

            It’s only as the sky starts pinking that the first knock comes. A baby bear, not too soft and not too hard, just right, against the back door. When orange swells from behind the clouds, the knocking grows less reserved and more sure, a rapid, striking beat. Sirius’s first conscious thought is that they must have forgotten to put the key out.

            His second is such as follows: he loves Hermione dearly, just as he does Harry and just as he does Ron because they’re all an extension of one another. And he knows, firsthand, what it is to have another person be so intrinsic that when they aren’t there it’s like missing a vital organ. James his heart and Remus his lungs; Peter had been his spleen, to do with or without. Yet Hermione is to Harry what a nose is to a face, everything else anchored around it.

            In the early light of day, Sirius doesn’t much want to understand anything. Five fifty-three says the clock, seven minutes gone too soon. The Ministry has taken all of her decency, he decides; no surprises there.

            “Quit being so melodramatic,” says Remus, his shoulder cracking soundly as he sits up.

            “I haven’t said a thing,” replies Sirius evenly, groaning under his breath when he touches the floor. It’s much too cold under his bare feet.

            “That’s never been a need with you.”

            They all collect in the hallway, looking around half-bewildered as they try to fit the right arms in the right holes of the right jumpers. Harry and Ron between them have enough cowlicks to populate a small pasture, and they all have enough grit in their eyes to blame on the sandman. They pilot into the entryway and the door bows again; Remus pinches his eyes.

            Yawning thickly, Ron waves at whoever’s closest to the door. “Let her in before she takes the door off—bloody hell, what time is it?” Harry quietly grabs him around the wrist and checks the watch face fastened there, mumbling the reply under his breath.

            “I’m not going to take the door off,” Hermione calls dryly from the other side, “But I would like to be let in.”

            Ron gestures again as if to say see, before tucking his hands under his arms and clenching his jaw against the cold. It takes a few complicated steps after that to arrange the four of them around the door in a way that’s conducive to adding a fifth, but they get Hermione over the threshold after a short back and forth.

            She smells of rain, like the sky after it falls and everything has been washed away. There are big, fat drops stuck in her curls, slipping from her hairline at her temples and treading toward her jaw. There’s no telling where she’s been—they haven’t had rain around in a week.

           “There was a layover with the portkey,” she explains when she notices their confused looks, hands working at the claw clip that’s holding her hair back from her face. She doesn’t offer up any explanation for why there was a portkey in the first place. Her arms drop at her sides and she sighs before a brilliant grin bunches her face. “But it’s so good to see all of you.”

            She goes down the line, hugging them as they’re nearest. First Remus, and then Sirius once he offers up his arms to her. Neither she nor Ron hesitate before locking their arms around one another, and Harry watches them covertly enough, save for his glasses slipping barely down his nose.

            Ron’s chin still tucks perfectly against the crown of her head and her arms still know their way around his middle. He burrows against her, so much love in the way they hold each other without the expectation of anything else. It’s a bit like being eleven again, ecstatic to have a friend.

            His whole life has been hand-me-downs and leftovers—clothes and jokes and times. He got the runoff of his brothers’ attention, because Bill had Charlie and Fred had George and Percy found people to shadow. He got Percy’s old rat, the smallest piece of chicken at dinner, he was called every name in the Weasley family tree before his own—and that wasn’t much his either because his parents and brothers had already had their way with ‘Weasley’ by the time he came along, Bilius was his uncle’s name, and Ron was just a shortcut. No, the first thing that Ron Weasley ever had that was well and truly his were his friends.

            And Hermione’s love, it was real and it was right for them once upon a time. It wasn’t an obligation, it was them, seventeen and adoring, but they aren’t seventeen anymore. He still loves her, probably always will, but it’s over for good, and that hasn’t made sense, not really, until right this moment. He squeezes her tighter and tells her very quietly he loves her and that it really is good to see her, honest. When they pull back she smiles at him, the tension broken, and plants a farewell kiss to his cheek.

            Harry clears his throat pointedly, shifting from foot to foot, and Hermione laughs, grabbing him too. They’re a better match in height, and before she blots him out in a swirl of emerald robes and ardor, he can be heard faintly complaining, “I just saw you last week.”

            “Doesn’t matter,” she says, and he’s not-so-secretly pleased at that, Sirius can tell. But who is he to point that out and ruin their perfectly good morning with insistences to the contrary?

            “Breakfast?” asks Sirius instead to a wave of agreement.

            Remus makes mugs of rich coffee, charms them to sweeten to the taste of the drinker, and dispatches them like a medic at war before going to stretch the table. Ron cracks the eggs because he never gets bits of shell in the bowl and once he passes them off to Harry to scramble, he nudges around in the cupboards in search of black pepper. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Harry, Sirius pokes at a panful of sausages bought from the village butcher with a morning much like this in mind, and on the other side of him, Hermione toasts and butters a loaf of thick-slice bread.

            The place settings are butchered by plates from three different sets and forks and knives of varying sheen, and they haul over their offerings to throw off the balance even further.

            Ron takes a seat with his back to the wall, Remus on his right, and Sirius on his. Harry makes to take the seat by Sirius, sort of waving Hermione into the one by Ron. She’s stood in the middle of the kitchen, now dressed casually, holding her coffee and trying, it seems, not to laugh right in his face.

            “Have you suddenly discovered chivalry?” she asks, looking at him bizarrely, eyebrows tucked neatly together over amused eyes. Harry, for his part, looks at Hermione as if she’s the absurd one, and it’s clear he’s enjoying that at least, he doesn’t get to do it often.

            “Doubt it,” says Ron, without thought or heat, tilting his mug toward Remus in silent thanks.

            Harry starts to explain himself, clearly intent on saying so you can sit with Ron, but he’s already trying to course-correct before Hermione can open her mouth. Her eyebrows go up her forehead and her eyes narrow like she’s finally caught onto the joke and doesn’t like it one bit. Finally and all at once she huffs, “Oh, honestly, Ronald,” shooting a fondly perturbed look at him around Harry’s shoulder. In turn, he looks the other way, knowing that what comes next is the breaking of the oath. This is what he gets for leaving the flat.

            She takes the still empty seat beside Sirius and announces, “Ron and I broke up ages ago,” just like that. “Really, Harry, don’t get that look, it was an amicable parting.”

            Sirius conceals a laugh behind a cough, courtesy of the swift kick to the shin he receives under the table from Remus, and shoves a triangle of bread in his mouth to keep himself further in check.

            Harry’s gone oddly still, hands on the back of the last free chair. He does have an odd look about him, as Hermione had so kindly pointed out, something less like worry and more like curiosity.

            Ron, on the other hand, has turned a lovely shade of parasol pink. “I figured you would have told him,” he explains to her under his breath.

            “And I assumed you had told him when you showed up on his doorstep. Honestly, what have you two been doing this whole time?”

            Silence snaps into place in all different tunes, Hermione’s playing unabashed and Ron’s donning discomfiture, whereas Sirius’s plays delighted and Harry’s grates out of key, distracted. Remus’s is only half so of anything, and his wish to get breakfast on with is greater than that to fully grasp the situation.

            “Right, well. Pass the eggs?” he asks patiently, just enough distinction to his tone that Ron sits up straight and Hermione’s teeth click when she closes her mouth. Harry’s long grown out of responding to his aptly named ‘professor voice’ and merely drops into his seat, looking delighted and nauseated in equal measure.

            So the platters go ‘round and the jam follows after, forks piercing crisped skin, and glasses thumping against the tabletop. Ron eats as heartily as he ever has and even Hermione abandons some of her properness, juice slick on her chin. Harry mulls his food in his mouth, forgetful as he makes his way through enough to feed three. It’s no matter, because here there’s always enough to go around.

            Often Sirius remembers the confidant tone one night, long after the fire had died in the grate. Admitting: celery, a slice of grapefruit, cakes stale around the edges decomposing underneath a loose floorboard in the hopes they’d just last the summer. He nudges the platter of sausages closer with the corner of his elbow, surreptitious enough that Harry accepts them without question.

            Once upon his youth and arrogance, Sirius thought he had never not had enough. In all the subsequent years he made do, clothes that fit when he wasn’t lean from brutal reconnaissance and crueler nights, food scrounged together or a place that would offer what he didn’t have. The only thing he ever wanted for was love, and that too came in time. A charmed life he’s lead between the magicless parts, then. He counts himself lucky seven different ways and at least seven more when there’s time to spare.

            But this—a full kitchen table that bears the weight of waving voices, a knobby ankle hooked around his out of sight, food to give to the boy he learned the word unequivocal for. This is more than he ever could have thought up or asked for, more than he once would have believed he deserved, but knows now he does because he has given his time.

            He feels a touch on the back of his wrist and finds Hermione’s fingers there, a breath away from the furthest line of his tattoos. She smiles warmly, close-lipped when she realizes she’s caught him off-guard, and inclines her head to the eggs on his far side.

            “All right?” she inquires, spooning the scramble onto her bare plate. He passes her the pepper before she can ask and nods.

            “And you?” he asks.

             She thinks it over while methodically folding the pepper in with her fork. “I’m better now. Work has been….” She shakes her head ruefully and goes at her eggs so forcefully the fork cracks against the plate. “Thank you two for having me down. Some time away will do me good, I’m sure. And I’m glad to see, well, you all, really.”

            Though she says glad, Sirius hears relieved, sees the worry dissipating from her every moment she’s here, back in her proper ranks. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since she and Ron have been in a room together, but he does know it’s been too long.

            They don’t give her enough credit, or maybe they give her too much—he sees her too as the fierce-chinned fourteen-year-old he’d first met her as, the one who was worried about the rules, sure, but infinitely more about her friends. It’s easy to begrudge her preciseness, but the road it travels always leads back to her heart and he can tell Harry and Ron’s varying absences have weighed on her more than she’ll ever let on.

            Truthfully, he tells her, “It’s always good to have you, Hermione.”

            Harry calls her attention away after that, inviting her along to the day’s lesson. She rolls her eyes once he explains the practice he’s devised with Remus—Dark Arts trivia, with every wrong answer being met by a spell the answerer has to deflect—but Sirius hears her mumbling a checklist of unfortunate spells under her breath when she gathers dishes at the end of the meal. Sirius feels particularly sympathetic for whoever’s on the other end of her wand once they get going, but he’s comforted knowing it won’t be him.

&     &     &

            Remus has spent most of the time they’ve lived here learning how to make plants grow with ten times the magic his mother ever used in their family garden. The most luck he’s had is with the tomatoes, as evidenced by all the bruschetta they eat in the summer, but he’s also inadvertently done something to the pre-established copse of wildflowers, so he counts those, too. The only thing free of his touch and consternation is at the back of the property, an apple tree that drops fruit year round.

            He’s spent a little time learning spells for repair work and other small patch jobs, too—contrary to popular belief repairo doesn’t fix everything—and another piece of his time entirely devoid of magic, reacquainting himself with all the things he couldn’t part with over the years. There’s the obvious: the photo albums and the record sleeves, the hand-annotated and rumple-page books—more poetry than anything, with a bit of fiction and more than a few tomes scrounged from charity shops and estate sales.

            He’s trying to make it all work together, his last life and this one, work for one another, even. They haven’t felt like one in the same in a very long time, but there’s something to be said for the way they complement one another. He wonders, sometimes, why it is he gets to have both; suspects, perhaps, the pain of one over the other is enough to balance things out, however delicate that balance may be.

            Often he wonders if this is his silent affliction, a latent eye for the mystical and retrograde prophecy. If not, how do others see it? Do they knead together each timeline or force them together like repelling magnets? Is there an anger to the thing or is it like his, is it gratefulness that bleeds gold between each seam of the cracked pottery?

            There are flashes he can’t ever anticipate, the ones that knock him back a step and make him blink sparse, blond lashes to try again. When Harry’s chin juts out just the way James’s had, or when he comes across some old knowing and thinks of the rolls upon rolls of parchment they’d once scratched out on the subject, one essay bastardized from that to his left so they’d have more time, ironic as that is now.

            Or when Sirius wears boots that rattle the ceiling and clothes that are loose on purpose and keeps his hair behind his ears and he looks altogether a bit like someone Remus used to know.

            “So this is what you’ve been up to, then,” says Remus from the mouth of the attic’s entry, his shoulders above and torso below, feet on the creaky wooden ladder that really would do best with a bit of reflection on its strengths and weaknesses. He plants his elbows and plans to stay awhile, with raised brows and pestering questions.

            Sirius tips his head back and forth, stood between two precarious stacks of boxes as tall as himself and some taller. Set in the wall behind him, a cramped window spits out half-light through the grime even though the sun is high in the sky outside, no doubt burning Ron’s skin where he and Harry and Hermione are devising some sort of gauntlet. There’s a hissing emanating from somewhere that makes the hair on Remus’s forearms stand at attention.

            Admittedly, Sirius thinks when he looks around, trying to see what it must look like to Remus’s eyes, the dust and the boxes and the scuttling in the rafters make it an odd situation. “We always said we’d get to it,” he settles on.

            At that, Remus wags his head. “Well, truth be told….”

            “What’s that?”

            “I figured they were hiding something, er, negligent up here, a creature or a body, you see, and that’s why we got such a good price,” he admits, laughing with each increasingly ridiculous word. Some things sound best only in mind.

            “And you were just willing to have that on your hands, were you? Over our heads?” jokes Sirius, motioning in tight circles to all the…boxes, probably, there’s not much else to be seen.

            “It was a very good price.”

            Sirius grins at the nearest box, probably aiming for a wall or a floorboard, but there aren’t exactly any in employment. His teeth cut the line between his lips and Remus has a decidedly hard time looking away from his mouth, but he can’t see a clear enough path to make his way over to him. It’s a problem, really, being in love. It makes him do the funniest things, like agree to help clean the attic on a Sunday just for the promise of that mouth against his and more importantly, but only just, a life together.

            Sirius must see him eyeing the space where the floor should be because he casually remarks, “Never seen you shy,” with only an edge of challenge.

            Remus knows he has a problem with pride. Mostly, that he never has it unless it’s an incredibly stupid situation that’s likely to leave him with at least one broken bone. But then, he’s had enough of those in his life he’s had to have regrown an entire skeleton by now. All to say it’s easy, too easy, to talk him into something if you’ve the right face and the right name and the right idea.

            He hefts himself up by his elbows to Sirius’s wolf whistles that barely land on their paws for how hard they’re both laughing. He lands gracelessly on his shins and toddles to his feet, a steadying hand reaching for something solid and instead grabbing something that’s equally as fuzzy as it is sticky. Logical brain in revolt, he takes the thimbleful of preservation he has left and chucks it over his shoulder like spilt salt.

            It’s never good for Sirius to know he’s talked him properly into something, so he gives him a squinty-eyed look as he slips through the boxes and the furniture and the fuzzy-sticky things. “Remind me again?” he mumbles, a half-thought as he pops through a gap he can barely fit through.

            The kicker is that these aren’t even their things, not any further than can be reached from the door without stepping foot in, anyway. They each have a big enough loathing for dark corners and things unseen that they found other places for their extras. Condensed and donated and stowed in enchanted drawers until they could live comfortably downstairs.

            Sirius shrugs, but doesn’t say anything, which means he has a perfectly understandable explanation that he won’t share. Not to be stubborn or contrary, which they both deal in with increasing accuracy. He tilts his head to the side, a sweep of hair falling loose, and acquiesces something. Meaning this is something he’s working through still.

            “Wouldn’t mind the company s’all,” he says against Remus’s jaw, a hand furling into his side. The other mutters under the lip of his cardigan and plants his hand to Remus’s side, calloused fingers pressing into wolf-warm skin.

            Remus feels the gold band hitting closer to his jutting hipbone than his ribs and presses a kiss to Sirius’s forehead that migrates to his mouth like a bird flying south for the better summer. His own hand cups Sirius’s neck, thumb over the steady rhythm of his pulse.

            With a regretful huff, Sirius pulls back, their eyes just shy of level. He says, “Lazy sod,” like love. “You can’t bribe your way out of this.”

            “Just my luck to find myself attached to the only incorruptible Black in the whole of history.”

            “How terrible for you,” agrees Sirius, already beginning to point out objectives.

            The work is easy, if only not so heavy. They scuffle with boxes full of odd-man things, bells and whistles and all the Muggle fixings, each reeking to the high hill of stale, stuffy magic that had worn off long ago. Remus sneezes as much as he lifts, his elbows popping and lithe muscles contorting. Together, they tackle the bulkier items, mainly a comically large desk with faux panels concealing who knew what, and a tall mirror so dirty it looks like it’s made from mercury glass. It doesn’t do much more than reveal another two day’s work.

            They bag up more clothes than anyone could possibly own in two lifetimes, unless they deem it usable. Finders keepers is as sacred as any vow. When Remus goes to toss down the third bag for the charity shop he finds Harry looking up at him, clearly trying to decide if he’s coming up. At each shoulder there’s the sun and moon of Hermione and Ron, their necks craned back, too.

            “He got you, eh?” asks Harry cheerfully.

            Remus does his due diligent deductions. “That’ll be why you spent the afternoon outside,” he concludes.

            “You could have joined us.”

            “No, I’m afraid I couldn’t.”

            Harry smiles his usual smile that he saves for them and their unfathomable love. Ron diverts his eyes, looking, funnily enough, more endeared than usual. Hermione can see him out of the corner of her eye, and the edge of her mouth cracks in a secretive smile. Remus observes them all, seeing everything and saying nothing.

            “Need some help?”

            “If you would be so kind. There might be some of my old teaching companions up here; they’re yours if you find them.”

            He and Harry have a way of speaking that grins and bites all at once.

            Extending a hand, he helps Hermione up the tricky steps first. She turns and reaches for Harry, who is left to bring Ron up. It’s a mess of young limbs and height and too many feet—there’s barely enough room for two people, let alone five—but they’re all more than ready to work.

            Hermione winds her wand into her hair as they all stand about, pushes her sleeves up to her elbows. Taking her cue, Harry and Ron do away with their wands and prepare themselves. They turn in triple time, waiting on instructions. Their compliance lasts only that long.

            In a box crinkled on all corners, Hermione finds a hat. It’s a terrible hat, objectively and subjectively and every other way one can look at it. Feathers sit on a wide brim, glistening like a pot of greenish-blue ink and fanning out over the edge, drooping one over the other in a race to cover the wearer’s eyes. The hat’s bowl is crystalized—not crystal, not jewels—it’s been spelled to have a delicate shell overtop what Hermione reports to be prosaic black felt. It bears repeating that it’s a terrible hat, but she wears it well, and when Ron peeks his head around to ask her a question and sees it, he laughs loudly and unabashedly, broad shoulders bouncing and hands on his hunched sides. This draws Harry’s attention and really, it all goes downhill because of the hat.

            In a race to find the best-worst thing, they three crowd around the area where Hermione had found it and work in pup-like fervor, divvying up the contents between them and howling over one laugh with the other. Ron finds a sort of headband thing that settles precariously in his mottled, peach-ripe hair, black curving between dark red and the fairer highlights made by the sun. Atop the headband is a bowl flipped right-side up filled with blue acrylic—bloody heavy, Ron reports—made to look like water. A gangly fish loops constantly in and out, shaking the end of its tail out at each zenith.

            Harry occupies himself with a set of smaller boxes, unearthing feathers in opalescent shades and loose, rattling beads. Finally, there’s a box of hand-embroidered sweater vests that had perhaps once been sleeved, if the tattered strings coming out of the shoulder seams are in any way telling. He’s enamored by one that’s shifting plaid, ultraviolet and fire-center orange and chartreuse; which are hard to look at separately and on the best of days, but are purely garish all mixed together today. Stitched on the breast is a sleeping black dragon that pushes tiny blue flames and puff-clouds of steam through its nostrils on each exhale.

            It’s among these boxes that Harry finds one of theirs, marked in Remus’s quick hand from twenty years on. He pries the flaps open with an easy grin that stammers on his face. Though the pain has dulled to an ache, Remus knows that face, the pit-sinking of seeing James and Lily young and happy and unannounced. It only takes him a blink now to wade through the sorrow and find joy, and Remus is glad of it. He moves in closer to look over Harry’s shoulder.

            Resting on the very top is a cheap wooden frame, the picture inside pure magic. James, maybe eighteen, with his rugby jersey and scrawny limbs, stumbles over the threshold Remus recognizes easily as the house at Godric’s Hollow. He’s burdened by the weight of a shaggy black dog flipped on its back in his arms, tongue lolling from the side of its mouth. James is laughing and Padfoot is wriggling; clearly, it’s a bridal carry. In the background, Lily can be seen on the front stoop, bent in half with tears in her eyes, her thin, speckled shoulders shaking. There’s the impression of Peter, just outside the frame, and in the right, uppermost corner is the hint of Remus’s index finger. He’d scarcely been able to get his hands to stop shaking long enough to take the damn picture, let alone crisply.

            Harry’s holding it now, thumbing along the corner of the frame with well-worn reverence. He watches the movements’ loop, green eyes tracking each rotation once before craning his head to look over at Sirius.

            Sirius shrugs. “Lily wouldn’t let him carry her across the threshold. Said she thought James’d give her a concussion.”

            “So you offered?” asks Harry, impish to a fault.

            “Ah, well. Had to christen the place somehow.”

            Harry and Sirius have a way of talking that’s steady and two-sided.

             “I was too tall,” recalls Remus as he crouches down to sift through the rest of the box. There’s loose sheaves of paper and a few old trinkets he doesn’t have use for anymore.

             “We found that out the fool’s way,” says Sirius, his eyes crinkling up until they blur out the smirking look Remus is giving him over Harry’s head.

             “I never was quite the same, you know.”

             Remus and Sirius have a way of speaking where they don’t have to say much at all. A byproduct of spending so much of their time with a clock ticking over their heads.

             Hermione casts something under her breath and the rest of the items zip out of the box, hovering around them for easy sightseeing. Remus raises his brows at her—wants to ask where she’s picked up such concentrated wandless magic and if she’d like to pass on the luck—and she just smiles, a dimple in each cheek, now picking through the papers nearest her.

             “Remus, are these the books?” asks Ron, grabbing one from the air by his elbow.

             It’s a set of three with one supplement, all the same watery brown as the cardboard with curdled red ridges down the spines and stamps in faded black ink that denote each volume. Responding to the Dark Arts, Volumes One, Two, Two and a Third (Notes from the Authors), and Three. They end up split between them all, Remus flipping through the counter-curse appendix in the first volume with Sirius peering over his shoulder, Hermione tracing her finger over the supplement, Ron accidentally unleashing an illustration from the third volume’s bestiary, and Harry mumbling directions under his breath from the second.

            The difference between these and, say, the set he and Sirius gave Harry all those years ago is that these are less a style guide and more words of wisdom from those who have already walked the path. It will teach you how to teach, yes; how best to handle live doxies and what temperature to keep the water to bring around a grindylow, but it will also give anecdotal advice on how to make people understand that a dark creature is no more at fault, no lesser, than any of the light. It was the first academic setting where Remus ever experienced a fair and honest treatment of werewolves, casting them not as mindless beasts but as humans with reoccurring symptoms.

            “I bought these from a Muggle woman in seventy-nine,” says Remus with a fortuitous smile. Harry turns like a flower in the sun to face him, intent on gleaning every word. “Fit of whimsy. I think you’ll find them to your liking; they aren’t the most mainstream of guides. Definitely not Ministry approved,” he explains, glancing at Hermione who mimes zipping her lips.

            With a chuckle, Sirius says, “And that was why you liked them.”

            Remus remembers, like a strand amongst many in a thread, leaving the books all around their first flat. Sirius cursing them in name and lineage every time he nearly sat on one stuck between the cushions of the couch. Remus studied them with the same patience and dedication as he ever had with any of his schoolwork, enamored by the words of academics before him who hadn’t come to their work by routine. Muggle-borns and half-bloods. One Veela, and of course, another whose passages Remus paid special mind to.

            “We were kindred spirits. I was never going to be a professor by normal means, so my teaching style might as well not be either. One of the authors, writing under a pseudonym of course, was herself a werewolf. I’ve never found compassion in any other volume like I did in these and that, I believe, is the thing that matters most in teaching a subject such as the Dark Arts. Everything else comes along, but the compassion is built—not that you’ll have to worry about that, of course, Harry.” He traces the mottled leather before gripping the book firmly between both hands and holding it out to Harry, who takes it and the rest, one by one until they’re piled high in his hands. He sets his jaw firm and forward, and holds them against his plaid-and-burning chest.

            Remus looks down at Harry, his face so gratefully young despite all the extra years he had to live. He doesn’t think he ever looked that young, definitely not by ’93. He thinks of stepping into the Defense office for the first time, setting those very books on the corner of the desk and turning in a small, wondrous circle. He had wanted it for so long and yet the accomplishment sat dulled, a surge of amazement beat back by everything else that weighed relentlessly on his shoulders. The books sat on the shelves behind that desk for one blooming year, and he knows that soon they’ll sit there for many, many more.

&     &     &

            Harry notices more than people give him credit for. There have always been too many life-or-death bargains to be made for him to put in much practice, but he checks in where he can. He’s never claimed to know it all, or to be particularly delicate with what he has, but he knows enough, even if the likes of the Prophet think he’s a dithering idiot hell-bent on falling into everything he does, including but not limited to saving the wizarding world.

            The older he gets, the broader his horizons get. This skill is more refined now than it ever was when he was a kid, due in part, he’s sure, to all the years he has under his belt now, and even more to all the time he’s had free of looming threat. He’s never been any good at paying attention to things like relationships, and he’s a terrible gossip for it, but he’s gotten better at it, has started to put his fair share of pieces together.           

            At fifteen, he knew Remus and Sirius were in love before he understood what that meant, had already started to think maybe he understood it more than most would. At eighteen, nearing nineteen, he knew he and Ginny weren’t meant for the road they were treading. At twenty-three, he knows there’s something going on with Ron and Hermione beyond the breakup, not that he can pinpoint what it is on his own or otherwise draw it out of either of them; lack of trying not being the issue.

            He’s tried to bring it up to Ron, and hasn’t been able, so he’s tried to start slow and merely think about how he’s going to bring it up. It always comes out wrong, a garbled string of words that backtrack and half-talk into oblivion and never really asks the question at hand, so maybe a plan would be best.

            With Hermione, it’s a bit more complicated. Hermione has never had an issue discussing her feelings, and if he asks, she’s never had a problem telling him directly. Sometimes, she even does it of her own accord, and sometimes, Harry tells her what he’s feeling. It’s how he problem solves the things he can’t figure his way out of by himself, like what he was supposed to do after leaving the Aurors.

            He’d been so caught up in the shock that he’d actually done it, actually left them after miserable years of trying to hold onto the last decision he’d made in that first life of his, that what came next had never occurred to him. The panic set in around forty-eight hours later and the first call to Hermione went out an hour after that. Every night, it’s them—ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour, then more until it was and is an hour each night. It’s an easy part of his schedule, favored, but in all that time he’s never found it in himself to ask Hermione what happened. He thinks it’s because he knows all he has to do is ask.

            He pushes out the back door, letting it thwap shut behind him and send dying sunlight bouncing off its face. Dinner has been cleared for a while now and his legs are lazy and restless at once. He follows them out into the thinning grass, not sure where he’s going until he stumbles upon Hermione lying on her back, looking up at the sky.

            “Budge over,” he says, though there’s plenty of room. He thumps down beside her, spreading out one long leg and then the other, tucking an arm underneath his head to stave off the hard ground and throwing the other over his middle. They’re mashed side to side, so much so that he can feel the rise and fall of her side slotted against his. Her hair’s undone, the claw clip snagged on the edge of her bulky overcoat, and a few strands play in the breeze, tickling his ear.

            “I really did think he’d have told you,” she says, apropos of nothing, but Harry supposes this is what he came here for anyway, unknowing or not. These things have a way of coming back around, a fly carrying on with half a wing. He’d thought, though, he’d at least have been the one to bring it up.

            “I should’ve asked. I, er, I don’t think I really wanted to know, to be honest.” He scrunches his nose up, shakes his head a fraction.

            She hums, amused. “Well, I can’t be upset about that, can I? We put you in the middle—I’m sorry for that, by the way.”

            “I didn’t know I was in the middle, so it wasn’t all that bad. It was kind of like being back in school, me and Ron in our place and you in another.”

            “Still,” she mutters.

            There’s a cloud overhead, like one of those tiny dragons with the fan around its neck. Harry pulls his eyebrows together and tries to think of holidays at the Burrow spent listening to Charlie—a frilly something or other. When they’re in danger they stand on their hind legs and raise that flap like a warning flag.

            “Hermione,” he says quietly. She inhales, deep and fluid, waiting on the question. “Are you all right?” At that she deflates, clearly having expected something else. She takes her time placing the words together in her head before she speaks. Batting a coil of hair back from her ear, only for it to fall right back into place, she starts.

            “You know I’ve never lived alone? Not even a night by myself when I lived with my parents; they’d just send me off to Gran’s if they had a, a conference, or somewhere else to be. My gran had birds like some people collect stamps—they were huge, but they were so loud and lively, I loved spending time there. I got a piece of that living in the dormitories, and even more of it being at the Burrow, like I was surrounded by all those squawking birds with the prettiest feathers you’ve ever seen.

            “It took a while for me to adjust after Ron and I got our flat. Don’t you remember, I would invite you over almost every night? At first I thought it was just because I was worried about you being alone after you and Ginny broke up, but I realized it was because I liked having the noise. But now, with me and Crookshanks…Harry, it’s so unbearably quiet.” Her chin crumples on delivery of that final word, three squiggly lines set into quavering skin, but her eyes stay perfectly dry.

            “Do you…” He clears his throat, a nervous tremor arching up his hand. “Do you want Ron to come home? Because I could, I mean I could talk to him, if you want. I would.”

            “Oh! No, that’s not what I mean. I do miss having him around, but that’s because I miss being his friend. I meant it when we broke up, I really did.”

            “Right,” says Harry, scratching the side of his nose down in the little crook between nostril and cheek. “Hermione, what happened?”

            She sighs like he’s taken a weight off her shoulders just by asking and rolls to face him. “That’s just it,” she says, “Nothing happened. We haven’t fought or anything else of the sort. We just…we aren’t the same people we were when we were kids, we’ve realized the people we are now.” She pauses, unsure, but says anyway, “I thought I was going to love him for a lifetime.”

            “But?”

            “But I realized recently it was…comfortable. We were comfortable.”

            “What’s wrong with that?”

            “Nothing, really. We just, I think over the last few years, we’d built up these expectations for ourselves, like we had to be together. No one ever told us that, but it started to feel implied somewhere along the way. That’s not to say we weren’t ever happy, because we were, and I love him and I know he loves me, but it’s not that way anymore and we just got so comfortable in never talking about it that we didn’t say anything at all. The way we were going, we were going to make one another miserable, slowly and painfully and ruin our chances of ever being friends again. Maybe even ruin the three of us in the process.

            “That was why, well, when you started to call.” She covers her face with her hands and half-groans, half-laughs at herself, the curve of her cheek just barely peeking around her pinkie finger. There’s a ring on it, inset with a tiny, tiny, tiny stone the color of velvet. “It sounds so childish out loud, but I’ve always worried that if it ever came down to it, you’d take sides between us, and…you’d pick Ron over me.”

            He swallows uncomfortably, letting that revelation settle between them. He wants to blurt out anything that would explain to her that he’d never do that, wants to wrap her in a thick hug and promise his allegiance to them all as a three. Mostly, his face burns with embarrassment because, he knows, it’s not that simple. It’s not a wonder that some small part of her could ever think that would happen; has he ever fully proved to her that it’s not true?

            “And I, you know I would never hold that against you. I know you and Ron are each other’s family, but I don’t think I’d be able to bear losing the both of you over something that seems so trivial in comparison. You and Ron have always been the world to me, you know?”

            It’s not right, debating these things. It should have already been plainly spoken and reaffirmed. A lump lodges itself in Harry’s throat because if he and Ron are the world, then Hermione’s always been their sun. They wouldn’t have a center, a reason to keep going, without her.

            “Sirius and Remus, the Weasleys, you,” he says, because there’s no complication about this fact. It’s final for him.

            “What?”

            “My family. It’s Sirius and Remus, the Weasleys, and you. I figured someone would have told you.”

            Laughing, she swats his shoulder, but before she can pull back, he swipes her hand up in his and holds it between them. The sky spits out a new cloud, entirely inappropriate in shape, and they laugh together until their ribs ache.

            “Sorry I’ve been such a git,” he tells her sometime later.

            “Apology accepted. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a prat.”

            Harry snorts and tightens his hold on her hand; all’s forgiven.

            Eventually it grows red-sky, then blue, right down to the purple night. The clouds are made negative, shadows making features that hadn’t been there before. They don’t say anything else, just hold perfect hand in perfect hand, resting in the grass. The back door swings open a few times until it finally stays put. They’re just within earshot so they can hear the shape of Remus and Sirius’s mindless chatter as they water and otherwise tend the garden, and soon, the door opens again and out comes Ron, the bass in his voice carrying as he asks after them.

            Harry goes to get up, his knees folding and his back protesting, but Hermione holds onto him steadfastly, saying in one well-paced breath, “I just want him to be happy. As long as they’re truly happy together, I won’t care who it’s with. That’s all I want for the both of you. That’s what I want for me, too.”

            She looks tired, even in the moonlight. The way her eyes crinkle at the corners is deeper than he last remembers, and her mouth is naturally downturned now. Fiercely, all he can think is that so deeply it plucks far beyond muscle and bone, somewhere near his magic perhaps, it’s all he wants for her, too. To be really happy, to have so much of it that it’s coming out of her ears, so much that she’s got to give it away by the peck and bushel.

            “You’re gonna be happy,” he says, because he and Hermione have a way of talking that’s in all honesty. Blunt lines and no padding, not brutal but truthful.

            “It’s not me I’m worried about,” she replies softly, getting to her feet and pulling him up with her. She waves at the three blurred figures in the distance and starts off without another word. When he catches up, Harry pulls tiny pieces of grass out of her hair by the faint porch light and the backlight from the moon.

            Meeting the unspoken line of the yard, they’re hailed by exasperated voices—there’s a debate about snap peas happening, apparently—and Ron motions to Hermione silently, both an SOS and a pointer for the dandelion fuzz on the side of her head Harry can’t see. It’s comedic, watching Ron’s face contort when he tries to give directions without drawing Remus and Sirius’s attention, but even as the smile spreads across Harry’s face, something in his stomach clenches.

            They devise an escape plan big enough for three and retreat inside to splay in front of the hearth. There isn’t a fire in the grate, but no one moves to make one, already plenty warmed by piling so close. It’s Harry nearest the kitchen, with Hermione in the middle and Ron on her other side, closest to the back door. The boys have their feet kicked up on the brick ledge, but Hermione’s legs are pulled up toward her chest.

            When Hermione nods off not long after, Ron nudges Harry’s foot. Turning to face him, he finds Ron already halfway through his question.

            What? Harry mouths back.

            Ron jabs a finger from Hermione to Harry and raises his eyebrows. Okay?

            Oh. Yeah.

            At the risk of waking Hermione, Ron doesn’t say anything else and almost immediately falls asleep, too. Lying awake by himself, staring at a superficial crack in the ceiling backdropped by his godfathers’ faint voices, Harry thinks about what Hermione said. About getting so comfortable and never saying anything at all.

            He wonders, almost idly, if he’s got anything like that. He thinks he should probably know, but that’s the trick, isn’t it? That you don’t know? He follows it along anyway, picking up thoughts and putting them back down like he’s inspecting produce. He’s comfortable not telling Sirius his tea is awful, comfortable not telling Luna he thinks half the things he reads in the Quibbler subscription she sends him are beyond barmy, and he’s comfortable not telling Mr. Weasley he doesn’t really care to know how or when indoor plumbing was invented.

            There’s the other thing, but that’s not comfortable, not really. It’s like a bug bite, still there and still glaring red, but at least it doesn’t itch anymore. He rolls onto his side, facing away from Ron and Hermione, and shuts his eyes. In his dreams that night, there are little red bugs everywhere, gnashing at his outline.

&     &     &

            "Harry.”

            Ron looks overtop Harry and into the kitchen, spying Sirius’s back in the nearest chair. He can vaguely hear Remus, but unless Hermione’s keeping quiet—unlikely in the mornings, she’s animated when her post arrives—he doesn’t think she’s in there. He reaches over and shoves at Harry’s shoulder, hissing his name again.

            Cracking an eye open, Harry squints at him with frightening accuracy.

            “Here—” Ron leans over himself and snags Harry’s glasses from the hearth, pushing them gently into Harry’s hands so he can apply them himself. On the one occasion he’d asked Ron to put them on for him, he’d nearly lost an eye. No, they stick to Ron removing them and nothing else.

            “What is it?” asks Harry, now glassed up and still squinting. He pulls himself up and crosses his legs, rubbing fitfully at the side of his head that had become so well-acquainted with the floor during the night.

            Ron scrubs a hand over his face. It feels almost like Christmas morning: violet anticipation shrouding the curtains and fogging up the windows, puttering off into the next room like yuletide secrets. Harry tips his head into his hands, not waiting on an answer with any particular vehemence, and the feeling is muffled with it. Now, Ron just feels sort of sick.

            Ron looks at Harry quite a bit, side effect of sharing a flat that amounts to three rooms and a front door, but in this moment it’s hard to do. There’s something that’s too much about the carpet lines imprinting on his cheek and unsettling his hair, the bow of his head and the way his fingers dig into his temples. Looking away hurriedly, Ron clears his throat unconvincingly and says to the fireplace, “C’mon.”

            “What?” Harry demands irritably.

            “Come on,” repeats Ron in the same tone, though just a touch quieter, and pushes to his feet. He offers a hand to Harry, who bypasses it without malice and joins him in being upright. He doesn’t look too thrilled about it, and Ron saves that for whatever comes next. He can always blame it on Harry hating an early morning.

            “Why are you whispering?”

            “Because I don’t want Hermione to hear us!”

            Harry’s face immediately sours and he takes Ron by the shoulders, pushing him down the hall without giving him the chance to find purchase of his own. If he’d have thought of it, he might as well have levitated him. He has the courtesy to close the door gently enough, but as soon as he casts the muffling charm and wheels around, he’s anything but half-asleep.

            “What the hell was that for?” demands Ron, rubbing at his shoulder.

            Harry’s hands stutter at his sides like blinds, up and down. “What’s your problem with Hermione? She’s forgiven you, the least you could do is give her the same courtesy.”

            “Forgiven me? What makes you so sure I’ve done anything that needs to be forgiven!” Ron’s system is flush with the thrill of a fight, so bitter and scheduled that it shuts everything else out. He can’t even remember why he woke Harry up in the first place.

            Harry straightens his chin in the infuriating way he does. It’s the one thing Ron could name easily off the top of his head if anyone ever asked if there was anything he despised about him, just by the way it makes his blood boil. “I don’t think either of you have done anything that needs to be forgiven. I talked to Hermione—”

            Ron’s throat tightens just like that, in the same length of time it takes to snap all the breath out of the world. The back of his nose scalds with fear and he demands through teeth gritted hard enough to crumble, “Oh you did? And what did she tell you, eh? What did she say that absolves everyone of blame?” White-hot embarrassment stumbles through him because Harry knows, he has to. Hermione’s too smart for her own good and she’ll have figured it out, of course she will, and she’ll have told Harry without meaning to. Ron’s going to have to face this head on and he wants anything but.

            Falling in love with Hermione was almost too easy. The way they aligned was so easily done that they never stopped to think about the why or the when of it, just accepted it from the first kiss on. Hermione had said something the night they talked about expectations, how they just assumed they were supposed to be together. He thinks that’s true, but not so much for the fact that they’re friends and they’re a boy and a girl and that’s how things generally go, but because they’ve always been the same. They were Harry Potter’s best friends which meant something to everyone but to the boy who it was about; they’ve always occupied the same space, separated from everyone else and somehow from Harry, too. Like tools in a bag to be pulled out at just the right time, and Ron for all his life has always hated that gap.

            Now he feels sick at the thought of all the things between them being within reach. In the same breath of wanting to be closer, he doesn’t know how to lay it all bare, how to even admit that he’s been throwing things into the schism and trying his hardest to make enough noise that no one ever hears it hit the bottom.

            Falling in love with Harry was almost too easy, too. Because Ron could hold onto it quietly, keep it tucked away from spectators and let it be whatever it was going to be. He would never have to explain or justify it, never have to scrutinize it or make it work within the other reaches of his life because no one would ever know. It was the opposite of what he had with Hermione because if no one saw it, there couldn’t be any expectations at all. That was how he knew it was really his and not anyone else’s, back at the beginning when he didn’t want it to be true at all.

            “What did she say?” he asks again quietly. They’re both shaking and neither of them seem to realize it.

            “That’s just it. Something. Anything! You haven’t said a word about any of it, and, and she’s our friend, too. You can’t possibly be mad that I talked to her.”

            “Not like you ever asked me, is it? If you wanted to know so badly, I’ve been here the whole time. Stands to reason you’d just ask me instead of waiting to drag the whole bloody ordeal out of Hermione.”

            “You made it more than clear you didn’t want to talk about it, Ron!”

            “Well, I’m making it clear again. Ask me, then! Just do it.” He’s advanced from shaking to trembling—he feels hijacked, like someone else is using his mouth to say all the things he’s never had the lion’s courage to say. It’s exhilarating if he doesn’t think too much about it.

            Harry yanks his glasses off his nose and jabs his thumb into the crook of his eye, leaving Ron and his thunderous chest to stew in the moment. Just long enough to regret everything, just long enough that he can retract the offer if he wants to and they’ll never speak of it again. They’ll push right past it and out the door, out of the house, right on back to the city to the couch they sit on and sit on and ignore one another from.

            “Well, say it, then, whatever it is.”

            Ever since telling Sirius in as little and yet far too many words, Ron’s been mulling these things over, trying to figure out how to say it without choking on the words before they make it out. He hasn’t come up with a better solution, so he expels every cycling word until Harry understands the what and not the who. Best to take it as it goes, he figures.

            “She didn’t tell me that,” mutters Harry finally. He puts his glasses back on and shuffles his nose back and forth under the bridge while he looks steadily at Ron. “So that’s it?”

            “That’s it? Thanks, mate, I’m feeling supported.”

            “Well, it’s not really a foreign concept to me, is it? Or should I come out again, too?” asks Harry with a cheeky grin, already ducking out of the way when Ron goes to bat his shoulder.

            Collapsing onto the nearest bed, Ron hedges the balls of his feet on the outside board of the frame. His shoulders sag as the adrenaline weeps from him. “Let’s not do that again; you had to explain it five times before we could figure out what you were talking about.”

            Harry laughs about it now because he can. The embarrassment doesn’t sting so much looking back on it. Before he’d told anyone else he was bisexual, even before Remus and Sirius, he’d told Ron and Hermione in an ill-conceived dual conversation up in Ron’s room in the Burrow. True to Ron’s approximation, he had to repeat himself at least half a dozen times with increasing tension before it made sense to anyone in the room. Mostly, he’s glad he never has to do it again, and it’s in remembering that he drops a hand on Ron’s shoulder and squeezes.

            “Did she try to give you the pamphlets, too?” recalls Harry. There had been, to his best guess, every color known to man and then some represented in the array Hermione came up with.

            Rocking forward to press his forehead to his knees as a bout of nausea swarms him, Ron laughs and affirms. Maybe he should have taken a couple, they could at least give him some counter-charm for feeling like total and utter shit after telling anyone. He flinched when Harry’s friendly hand landed on his shoulder, but he hasn’t entirely squirmed away, so there must be something to be said for unburdening one’s hard-won truths.

            “Right,” says Harry, suddenly awkward. He retracts the hand to push through his hair. “Can I ask…Viktor Krum, right?”

            Ron groans and tries to shove him away, but that only makes him laugh hard enough that he has to brace himself on the footboard, the other hand attached to the stitch in his side.

            “Yeah, ha-ha, very funny,” complains Ron good-naturedly, his ears blazing pink.

            “I’m not hearing no?”

            “’f course it’s not a no. Have you seen him?”

            Harry shrugs and mumbles something about being more interested in his Quidditch, but he’s stopped laughing, which says plenty. When he realizes what the absence of an answer sounds like, he fitfully blurts, “It was a passing thing. It never, er, took hold like some others.”

            “Like that chaser from the Cannons—” starts Ron, but he’s cut off by a knock at the door and Remus’s faint promises of breakfast bearing through the muffling charm. It pops the moment like a soapy bubble that you can taste the aftermath of, even if you didn’t have your mouth open.

            Looking between the door, Harry seems to make his choice with a pained sort of grimace, undoing the charm with a quick flick of his wrist. He hauls the door open and peeps his head out into the hallway, and once satisfied it’s all clear, he looks over his shoulder and says, “’m glad you said something, mate,” before disappearing toward the kitchen.

            The room goes starkly quiet, just as it had been in the split second between the casting of the charm and Harry’s outburst. It feels like December 27^th, when all the festivities are over and there’s leftovers bundled away in the fridge for something called later that’s never truly defined. It’s when all the relatives have gone and it doesn’t feel like life will ever be as it once was.

            Ron scrubs his hands down his thighs, revving like a penny racer, and exhales long and loud through his teeth. Unless Harry comes down with a localized case of amnesia that chucks this one piece of information from his brain, locking them all in a time-loop of perpetual coming out—which Ron can’t fully write off as impossible, such is his life—then he never has to jump the hurdle of telling Harry again. If nothing, at least it’s over.

            He’s only ever planned to tell Harry and Hermione, anyway. Telling Sirius had been a spur of the moment decision because he couldn’t sleep and he needed to know…something, he’s still not sure what. By telling Sirius, he assumes Remus will know as well; even if Sirius doesn’t tell him, he’s smart enough to figure it out himself. Mentally, he tallies them: Harry, Hermione, Sirius, and Remus, that’s everyone.

            Telling Mum and Dad isn’t pertinent, he doesn’t think, and having something his siblings don’t know is like having a golden goose egg. If he lets it slip to any of them, he thinks it’d be Bill, maybe Charlie if he ever came home by more than postcard. Percy could sit and stew in the knowledge that everyone knew something he didn’t for all Ron cares, and George is trying out being supportive, which unnerves Ron to no end. Ginny seems the obvious choice, what with the way she goggles Luna when she’s on about the newest creature-thing she’s found out in the wild, but Ginny’s his baby sister, it’s just too weird, even for his comfort.

            He rubs his thumb over a freckled eyelid and groans to himself. Nothing breakfast won’t fix, he decides, a faithful refrain. In fact, he’s determined to act as though nothing’s happened in those seven minutes behind that locked door. Calm, cool, collected, that is Ron Weasley on this very morning.

            Instead, he finds himself on the receiving end of Hermione coming up the hall with single-minded purpose. She doesn’t see him, it seems, until they’ve collided.

            He grabs her by the shoulders to steady her on her feet while she catches up with the world at large, her eyes coming to focus on the end of his nose. A laugh curves her face, and she swiftly apologizes. This had been a regular occurrence at home, between Crookshanks diving between their feet and precarious furniture abound, and it hits him as funny to think of their flat as that now. The Burrow had always been home, shouts and feet perpetually thundering overhead; he’d never realized that changed. He wonders, really, when it became so, wonders when it will stop.

            “What were you two in there plotting?” she asks, inclining her head to Harry’s room.

            “Quick chat. Er, you?”

            “I’ve lost my toothbrush,” she says, her nose scrunching up. “And I feel like I slept with my mouth open last night.”

            “You did, snored like a foghorn.”

            “I don’t snore.” She laughs, goes to shove past him, but he reflexively grabs her around the shoulders in a backwards bear hug before she gets away. “Ron!” she cries, wiggling in his grip. She’s laughing, so he knows she could break it if she wanted to.

            “Hold on—watch the elbows, that’s my liver—I want to tell you something.”

            “What is it?” she asks, prying at his fingers. It’s a childish fight, but Ron’s had plenty of practice with those, dodging Ginny’s charged kicks and Percy’s disgruntled legislative threats, the twins’ decidedly fantastical approach and Bill’s tenure, even Charlie’s targeted wrestling. Defending his position is perhaps the thing Ron’s best versed in after all this time.

            “I’m sorry,” he says, “And I should’ve, called or showed or, I should’ve said it sooner.”

            “Oh, Ron, you don’t have to—”

            “Not for—I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you. We said we’d still be friends, but I haven’t tried at all, really. So I’m sorry for letting you down. And I do. Still want to be friends, that is.”

            The incessant, insecure side of him that’s as tall as a child with an equal outlook doesn’t want to say any of this. Wishes instead they could go back to how things were because he’s never been able to make himself believe, not fully, that he’s worthy of his friends. So if he doesn’t acknowledge the hard things, there’s no capitulation to be had, they can’t walk away if they never look directly at him. Saying honest things is like focusing a spotlight on his face.

            But given that he’s tried to do a bit of the awkward growing up not usually afforded to friends of chosen ones, he says he’s sorry even fiercer. It’s easy to listen to that side of himself, but it’s even easier to listen to his heart on this one. He wants things to be right between them. They can be as new and different as they like, as long as they aren’t broken.

            She crooks a look at him that he’s always believed is her reading his mind and says, “I want to apologize, too. I got it so in my head that you wanted or needed space, and I used it as an excuse not to reach out to you myself. I’m sorry.” She’s almost made a full turn in his arms, so she uses that leverage to wrap her arms around the back of his neck and squeeze.

            She departs like nothing’s happened to disappear into the bathroom down the hall, but before the door closes, she peaks her head around the jamb. “I love you,” she says, and he can see the dimple in her chin.

            “Love you, too, ‘mione.”

            She’s really gone then, so he marches on. In the kitchen, Harry flicks the chair beside him out with his foot without even looking up, focused instead on a conversation that makes Remus lively, with a flush so high up on his cheeks it’s almost to his eyes and an excited tumble to his words.

            In Ron’s chest there’s a pin and a balloon, each creeping toward the other, humming like cicadas. A dull roar before everything bursts.

&     &     &

             For that day, all is quiet on the home front, shuffled into place down to the way the band of three can move side by side by side again, laughing with open mouths and bumping shoulders without holding their breath. For that day, life is a semblance of something almost known, without secrets or confusion or fear, it’s like the easy summer days they should have had at sixteen, even in November air.

            They eat cherry-ripe tomatoes and finely ribbed leaves clutched together in the back garden to stave off the time between breakfast and dinner, too lawless to go inside for lunch. They dash off while the sun’s still high, running until their chests hurt, the only thing at their heels being Padfoot, bounding unobtrusively with them for a while. When that grows boring—and what a joyous, mundane thing it is to be bored—Hermione, half-dozing, quizzes Harry. Her feet in his lap and her head pillowed against Ron’s leg. They’re a pile of limbs and lazy answers until their second wind comes and they race to the front of the house, calling out purposefully wrong phrases to make the wards stretch the grassland so they can count the trees in forward and backward number.

             When they arrive again back at the house, they change into clothes that are already mucked up and poke their heads into the attic, one by one like mongooses out of the dirt. They find Remus alone, burning a box of Halloween decorations in a red flame so controlled it’s dizzying. There isn’t even smoke. He gives them a close-lipped, pleased smile and calls them in. He’s found a new depth to the attic, if they’d like to help.

            Expanding magic is tricky, and Hermione’s the first to tell them so once Remus shows them what he’s found. Harry and Ron listen to her far more easily than they had when they were young, taking in about three-quarters of what she says instead of a measly half. She’s still a smidge too technical for their focus, but that comes from her fascination for the magic, at how and which way things tick. She’s a lot like Arthur that way, Ron has always thought.

            What she says in essence is this: much like her handbag, undetectable extension charms can be cast on anything if you’ve got enough nerve. Open spaces can be extended for storage purposes, but it creates a pocket that, unless you know where it is, you can fall right into and, being disoriented, find it impossible to get back out. Time pulls like taffy inside until it’s too late.

            With directions from Remus, they find the pocket with relative ease. Hermione warns them only once: watch your step, test the air, be careful. It’s in the back corner of the attic, just past a board that looks fresher than the rest, when they feel exactly what she means. Ron tears his wand through the air in front of himself and finds that it lags behind the true flick of his wrist, buried under the weight of water.

            Unreal, Harry calls it, and for someone who knows experiences so extreme the memory is more like story and song, it’s high praise for the magic. Hermione leads them, wand outstretched, with Harry in the middle, and Ron bringing up the rear. Remus had told them there was no telling what they’d stumble across and they all took it to heart.

            The darkest creature they find is a spider hung just so from the ceiling that it blinks eye-to-eye with Ron, onyx eyes the rim to a perfectly translucent body. It twirls like a dancer in a jewelry box, reedy music seeming to emanate from anywhere and nowhere at all. Ron hisses for Hermione and orders a step-step-step retreat before he blasts it from this plane to the next with a shaky hand. Harry rates it an 8.5 and claps his hand against Ron’s shoulder to tell him so; there was a little room for improvement in the execution, but the intent remains immaculate.

            They each haul back a box and only Hermione dives back in to collect more, waving off their offers to go with her. She is, after all, an expert in these things.

            In the first box, Harry finds tangled Christmas lights with fat, colorful bulbs, and in another newspapers from the fifties. He calls out to Remus, unsure of his exact location, and asks the question that’s been on everyone’s minds. Where, he wants to know, did all this junk come from?

            Remus doesn’t bother to disentangle himself from the further reaches of the room, explaining the history of the house while stuck in its ribs. An old acquaintance had turned them onto it, and they rented it from an elderly woman that had lived within for forty-odd years with her husband until he passed, before they ultimately took it over entirely. Long before her, it had belonged to her uncle, and before that, it had passed through a few sets of hands from the village. Before that, it had been bricks and boards, not yet conceptualized.

            “So all this stuff,” Ron surmises, most for himself but his volume’s a benefit to everyone in the room, “Is either cursed or worth a fortune.”

             Remus acquiesces the probability and promptly drops something on his foot, shattering it into pieces that shiver and shake. More than likely cursed, then, which is for the best because their riches aren’t going to be made with shards.

             Hermione totes the last of the boxes out and seals off the pocket over the course of a few minutes. Sleeves pushed up and hair down around her face, she’s a sight to behold. In profile, she reminds Harry of an ancient queen; like the one Dudley forced him to write his book report on when they were eight or so. Magic crackles around her, a soft orange haze that threads in and out as it stitches space to space and smooths down any wrinkles. When she’s done, Remus directs her to a smaller one he’d found before the last moon and hadn’t had the energy to clear up himself. The spells she works make the room taste like a spice rack, the roundness of cumin and the lurch of sage and something else unnamed that drops all the way down to their stomachs.

             Sirius returns around then from the village where he’s been wreaking havoc and buying up all the yeast. He contracts Ron’s help to make up a loaf or two of bread because he’s the only one of them that can reliably be of use. Harry still hasn’t taken the time to make cooking an enjoyable practice instead of the punishment it always was, and Remus is better at growing things, proficient beyond that only in things that make up a diet for the deficient. Hermione’s really very good at making toast, but strictly with bread that’s already been baked.

            She follows them soon after to wash the magic off before dinner, leaving Harry and Remus in silent rhythm. Eventually, Remus comes to rest beside him, legs crossed beneath himself, smelling faintly of sweat and the soap bars he buys that come wrapped in brown paper and capped in twine.

            Harry expects some sort of frankness, a question about yesterday’s muffling charm or the way they all act as though they’ve trekked up and over a hill to get to the ease they’re at now. In short, he expects some degree of interrogation, but he forgets sometimes that Remus is far more skilled than that.

            He says, “I met Bill Weasley in the summer of ‘78.”

            He continues, “But I always got on best with Charlie. Beasts, you know; we had the interest in common, and he was about as well-versed as I was.”

            He explains, “I never formally met Ron. I was away the spring he was born, and by the time I came back, the places we were forced to meet weren’t fit for children. But I remember,” he stops to smile, “I remember when Molly was pregnant with him, she would say she hoped he’d get all the sense his brothers didn’t.”

            Harry isn’t surprised by any of this. There are so many ways to be tied to a person, so many ways in the world to meet them and know them and keep them around. The only thing, really, that strikes a chord in his throat, is the thought of his parents in the Burrow’s kitchen, looking down at a red-headed, speckled baby and knowing a piece of their son from long after their time, one he didn’t get to greet until he’d spent a hard decade without them.

            “It was a lot to ask of a baby, I believe, to carry all that. I think he’s just now growing out of theirs and into his own.”

            Though he’s always had the general air of it, Remus has tended to stray from the cryptic in these last few years. Life’s too short to not say what you mean, he’s often been heard saying, but that’s usually said to a grinning Sirius, so that might not be the best reference.

            Harry shoots him an exasperated look that says something along the lines of what the hell are you on about now? and he laughs, not unkindly.

            “Well,” says Remus, scratching along the line of his nose; he’s not careful at all, never minding the rigid, pale scar that cuts across his skin there. “He seems to know what he’s doing, who he’s doing it for. That’s all.”

            That’s all, thinks Harry. And what about me?

            Family tied to family through the thickets and the burs, and still it all comes down to choice. 

&     &     &

            Hermione has witnessed, in her time, what some would say is too many of Harry’s brooding periods. By now she’s even the foremost expert in discerning between the different kinds.

            There is, of course, angry-brooding; usually reserved for things like when he’s had a fight with either she or Ron, or when Gryffindor had a bad match. Close-lipped and shoulder-hunched and generally miserable company, but it wears off by the end of the night.

            Then there’s the silent sort of brooding, which is mostly a front for his worry. He saves that for when he’s trying to work out a problem and more than likely could use some help, but he’s not ready to ask for it yet. Spacey eyes and a furrowed face and someone that’d miss a freight train if it were heading right at him.

            This particular one is more the latter, but it’s less worry, she thinks, and more thoughtful; at most, slightly overwhelmed. He’s flipped on his back on the couch, feet slung over the back and head hanging over the side, glasses riding up toward his scar; he’s staring across at the fireplace, his thumb nail between his teeth. And they say she’s the most obvious with her emotions.

            She coaxes her rook forward two paces despite it pushing back against her finger. She leans back against the side of the couch and her hands fall limp in her lap. Ron’s piled on the floor across from her, running his tongue along his teeth in deep concentration. Between them is a compact, traveling Wizard’s Chess set she’s never seen in her life before today and she already hates it as much as every other set she’s ever seen.

            They’d all been playing exploding snap until Remus nearly lit Sirius’s shirt aflame, and only once he’d made sure Sirius was properly doused did Remus laugh; so hard, in fact, that he had to excuse himself. It was then that the chess set procured itself. Ron was always good at finding the perfect opening to talk her into playing, and he’d done just that, even though in all their years she had yet to best him, much to her chagrin.          

             “Harry?” she says, turning to face him while she waits on Ron to take his turn.

             “Hm?”

             “When are you leaving?” Ron’s bishop pierces her rook through the so-called heart and Harry sits up with a frown, his glasses slamming back into place.

             “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

             “Oh. All right,” says Hermione, nonplussed. She swings her knight around and knocks a pawn from the board.

             Ron sends another pawn diagonal to dispatch her knight before looking up from the board for the first time in the last ten minutes to say, “I’ve got to go back day after tomorrow.”

             “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” says Harry to Hermione. That settles that. He shuffles around and presses his back against the couch’s arm so he can see the board, looking as present as she’s seen him since before dinner.

            Hermione casts her last bishop to her left and cracks into Ron’s queen, forcibly shoving him into check with a delighted grin. She cheers quietly for herself; for once, she’s seen a move he hasn’t.

&     &     &

            Harry looks up at the apple tree on the edge of Remus and Sirius’s property with a tight frown screwing up his mouth. There’s a tender spot on the top of his head the size of a large coin, or the surface of a large-ish red apple, depending on how one looks at it. He scrubs at it through his hair, sending lightning arcs of pain over his skull, and plots how best to scorch the tree from root to branch as it shakes its shoulders at him in heaving time. If only Remus didn’t love it so damn much.

            “Accio apple,” he tries again, enunciating as best as possible and stretching his free hand as far out in front of him as it’ll go without the muscles down his side protesting. An apple the size of two of its strictly Muggle counterparts smacks into against the scarred over palm that still flexes every time he lies. It’s been doing that quite a bit lately, and he can’t chalk it up to the fact that he’s been thinking about Hogwarts more than usual as of late. It’s fourth year he’s fixated on after all, not fifth.

            He polishes the apple on his sleeve—one of Ron’s old Christmas jumpers with a great yellow R on the chest. Harry never remembers to bring anything warm with him when he visits Remus and Sirius, mostly because he knows one way or the other he can snag something warm. Ron’s are his favored, longer in the torso than his own so they trap pockets of heat when pulled down over the right t-shirt. Out here, where everything is colder and broader, the extra warmth does him well.      

            It was in the cold of fourth year, a cracked windowpane of a February, when he first faced the realization that he was, that there was a chance, that maybe he was properly taken with Ron.

            After the second task, when he wasn’t dodging attempts on his life, he’d had the fleeting concession that they fact the took Ron stirred something in him he’d been pushing down. At fourteen, there were so few people he ‘couldn’t bear to lose,’ and he would’ve gone after any of them without hesitation, but this one raised more questions for him than answers.

            Cho made sense for Cedric, as his girlfriend and all, and Hermione for Viktor in some weird way, the girl he was so taken with and the fact that he was so far from home. It was a given, of course, that they would choose Gabrielle for Fleur, being her sister and everything. Initially, he’d chalked Ron up in the latter category—his best friend, they were like brothers.

            That became a clear misquoting on his part when he became increasingly clear that the clench in his stomach anytime Cedric smiled was the same one that reared its head when he was with Ron, and in far greater number at that. It hadn’t surprised him from a logical standpoint, more that Ron was Ron and Harry had just failed to notice it before.

             Eventually, he grew used to having it around. There was no point that he could see of hashing it out when he was likely going to die before he was ever even of age. Better for Ron and Hermione to have a go at it, since they’d have a decent shot. It was the same reason he’d always hesitated with Cho, why he waited so long to try with Ginny, why he tried not to think about that part of his life much at all. He’d resigned himself to dying and when he did, he didn’t want to take anymore with him than he had to.

            He hadn’t planned, not in earnest, for what happened if he did make it through; that had always felt like asking too much of who- or whatever was listening.

            And yet here he is, alive. Here he is, trying to assemble a life. Here he is, still unable to shake the feeling of knowing someone into love. Falling in love, that’s easy. You pick up all the little pieces of someone that they drop along the way and hold onto them for safekeeping. It’s when they turn around and you realize they’ve been holding onto all yours, too. But knowing someone into love, it goes beyond pieces and parts and spares, it’s growing up together and seeing every truth and lie; it’s unconscious, reaching out and grabbing hold and never letting go.

            Working the apple down to its core, he spits the seeds to his left and wonders if Trelawney would tell him to look over his shoulder to read his future in them. If all the points are facing north, he’s sure to die, but if two are facing east, he’s going to embarrass himself gravely. For a laugh, he looks for them and finds them all facing south, back toward the house. He remembers just in time he would’ve failed Divination if he hadn’t been such an easy target and puts any thoughts of seeds and true north from his mind.

            He doesn’t know the protocol for things like this, wonders if one of these days he should just come right out and say it. His and Ron’s friendship has weathered the likes of the end of the world as they’ve known it, surely there’s enough weight on the other side to balance out Harry admitting.

            The worst he might have to endure is Ginny and her quick wit—I never did recover after you tried to leave me for my brother, said with her arm looped around Luna’s shoulders and a grin slapped across her wind-chapped cheeks. That’s what he’d guess, if he’s ever known her. And Hermione, she wouldn’t object, had said quite clearly all she wants is for them all to be happy.

            There have been so many unknowns in his life, a bushel of what-ifs. Some of them he can live with because the trade-off is where he stands now, but there are some that stick to his teeth like bubblegum—he’ll make peace with them, but he’ll still wonder for the rest of his life. Can he honestly say this is one of the former and that it’s worth it to never know? Can he put his belief in the notion that this is the way things are supposed to be and wash his hands of everything else?

            Given that it’s endured this long, he knows the answer, but his courage is too out of practice. He thought things were supposed to be easy now, that they were all supposed to get their happy endings. He forgot that it doesn’t all just fall into place and things are awkward and unsteady and have to be built before they can stand.

            He rears back as far as he can and lobs the apple core into the trees for the birds. His hands stick to themselves, fuzzing up as he tries to brush them clean on his ground-dirtied trousers the whole walk back.

&     &     &

            The last meal of the every-chair-occupied season isn’t unlike the first. Remus bemusedly watches from behind his bowl, now accompanied by freshly made bread, as Harry and Hermione and Ron all work around one another despite having taken chairs side by side by side in the first place.

            Hermione has perfected the art of the sidelong glance. With her curls pinned up on the top of her head, spilling like a pitcher of water down her neck, she eyes Ron and Harry in equal measure, efficient and discerning without ever spilling a drop of her dinner. The boys, in turn, ignore not only her but one another, passing the bread basket back and forth like it’s a note in class and they each are the professor.

            Remus is old enough that he feels he’s already paid his dues in terms of young awkwardness and can thus find the humor in the scene before him. When he silently tips his head toward them while eyeing Sirius, he sees that he’s holding back a smile in the lines around his eyes. They’re in the same boat at least, trying not to tip it over in their revelry.

            When dinner is done, the three troop outside in one quiet line, Harry with a quaffle tucked under his arm—another attic find. Out there, at least, they can spread out to dilute their unspoken things. They also have something to kick, which is even better.

            Remus is found at the sink, sleeves of his loose plaid shirt rolled all the way up to his pink elbows, plunged that high in scalding water. The exposed scars up and over his forearms almost mirror the sweeping lines along Sirius’s, which are just as on display as he dries the plates with a scrawny towel kept just for the purpose.

            Though there’s no shortage of magic on the premises, they have found through trial and error and many broken dishes that they prefer to do this manually, with dish soap the color of citrus and a rag that has to be swapped out when it sours.

            On the nights it’s just the two of them, they alternate who gets to slick their hands in the soapy water and who gets the less desirable job of shuttling the clean dishes away. When there are gatherings such as these, it’s whoever gets there first. Remus had slipped over to the basin while Sirius had his back turned, the cheating bastard, so they finish them like so, companionable silence punctuated every now and then by one of their boarders shouting an emphatic foul!

            Done, Remus dries his hands in methodic time, from elbow down to the creases of his fingers and back up again, and Sirius pads over to tuck his arms around his familiar middle, jutting chin settling in the crook of Remus’s neck as he huffs petulantly in his ear to make him scrunch up. These wicked games are as old as they are, but they never lose their shine. He kisses the mole under Remus’s chin in half-hearted apology.

            The quiet that wraps them up then is so much so that one can hear the bubbles popping in the sink. Remus pauses, towel still caught between his hands as he lets himself be held. A rare sight indeed, so Sirius indulges. A tune starts up outside of young crowing and it makes both their eyes shine with pleasant laughter.

            “Remember when we were like that?” murmurs Sirius against the soft skin of Remus’s shoulder.

            “Young and full of boundless energy?” asks Remus, mouth curling at the corners. That smile, so like seventeen-year-old Remus and twenty-year-old Remus too that Sirius has to remind himself they aren’t new people every morning when they wake up, they are still those stubborn boys with the same hearts.

            “Speak for yourself, won’t you?”

            Remus says, “Always do,” he says, “I remember.”

            “I wonder if they’ll figure it out.”

            “No, you don’t. You think they will, and now you want to know if I do, too.”

            “Well, do you?”

            Amusedly, Remus says, “We hardly did.”

            Sirius flicks his ear and leans further against him, a kiss now to the junction behind his ear where a tickle of curls fall.

            “I think,” starts Remus, “That Harry and Ron aren’t us.”

            “Thank Merlin for that.”

            “I also think they’re both kind and intelligent and have sworn the kind of oath to one another that very few people can understand. And if, after everything they’ve been through, they’re supposed to find their way to one another, then I think they will.”

            “And so decreed Moony, hurrah.”

            Remus snrked and did a turnabout, coming face to face with Sirius for what felt like the first proper moment in days. He cocks his head to the side, listening out.

            “I’d say they’re sufficiently occupied,” he reports, “What say you?”

            Sirius’s face at once is prideful and soft. “I say it’s our damn kitchen.”

            Ah, but Remus and Sirius have always been best at breaking the rules when in close proximity to one another. They kiss in their damn kitchen.

&     &     &

            Ron has, for as long as he can remember, slept with the covers tucked under his arms, never higher. When he was six, a pet project of Charlie’s got in his bed and he got tangled in the covers trying to scramble out. Ever since, he likes the option of having an escape route. When it gets cold, especially in the Burrow where heat never ran as high as they needed, he sleeps in a jumper or two.

            He can’t find the one he brought with him, the one from four Christmases ago that’s coming undone a bit and has faded to a puke-flavored bean sort of green, so he pokes his head in the bathroom where Harry’s brushing his teeth and asks if he’s seen it, scratching his shoulder absently.

            Harry rinses his toothbrush off under the crashing spray from the faucet and docks it back in the chipped coffee mug they keep on the counter for it. It circles the rim, shaking its head back and forth like it’s trying to tell them something.

            “Er, yeah. Should be on the other side of my bed,” he says, cupping his hands under the water. It spills over his hands into the powder-blue sink basin before he leans down to rinse his face off.

            Taking the measly offering, Ron runs with it, joking about how he’s dreading packing because without fail his clothes always end up strewn across the room. It just serves as fuel to the sort of pained look on Harry’s face, and he mumbles something about borrowing it to go out to the apple tree. He reaches blindly for a towel to dry his face with, water slipping down his eyelids and clotting in his eyelashes, and Ron sighs, inching around him to grab the towel draped over the hook on the wall.

            When Harry resurfaces, his skin is agitated, and there’s a patch of hair at the front of his head that water still clings to, tugging down toward his face.

            “You missed…” Ron says, gesturing on himself about where it is. Harry jerks his chin down in understanding and scrubs over it until it sticks straight up again.

            “Right, well,” says Ron, and he goes to retrieve his jumper. He finds it where promised, vaguely folded on the floor beside the lamp in the corner. When he tugs it on over his head, he can smell the faint perfume of apple skin and dried leaves underneath a brisk whiff of scourging charm. Crawling into bed, he tucks the covers under his arms and mutters a spell to snap the light off before Harry appears again.

            When he does, he climbs into his bed without a word and turns away from Ron.

            Ron tucks himself onto his side and pushes his cheek against his shoulder, working his breaths even if he doesn’t manage to claw his way to a restful sleep until it’s nearly light out. He can’t help but feel like something’s gone wrong.

            He doesn’t wake until late the next morning to Harry’s hand on his shoulder, an apologetic smile on his face. “Hermione’s leaving,” he explains as Ron looks up at him confusedly.

            “’m up, tell her ‘m up,” he promises. She’ll be halfway down the drive if he doesn’t hurry, and he’s not running unless he has to.

            Nodding, Harry heads off and Ron, climbing into his plaid bottoms, can only hope he catches Hermione before she takes off.

            He stumbles into the kitchen and finds everyone accounted for, no more, no less. She’s nodding along to something that Sirius is gesticulating about—bread, Ron realizes, somewhere around prove and air bubbles, Sirius’s telling her about bread.

            “—owl me the recipe?” she’s asking hopefully as she slings her handbag over her shoulder where it wrinkles her robes. It’s as Sirius agrees that Ron gently picks the folds free to right them.

            She startles, whirling around to face him. When she sees it’s him, she leans up and kisses his cheek. “I was just about to leave,” she tells him seriously.

            He yawns and returns the kiss to her forehead. Saying simply, “I know.”

            She smiles, real and assorted. He can’t tell what all it says, but he trusts that whatever it might be is something he’ll figure out in time on his. It’s good, with so many things changing, to know they’re still Ron and Hermione, intelligent in their different ways, both ahead and behind and at one another’s side.

            She thanks Remus and Sirius for having her, just as she’s done every time she’s ever stayed with them and will do every other time ahead. They each give her a parting hug-and-shoulder-pat and tell her, just as they always have and will, she’s welcome any time.

            Before she vanishes for the final time, she steals over to Harry to get one last goodbye hug. She wraps him up tight and scrunches her shoulders. He returns it, eyes falling closed behind his glasses, a serene look to his face. He professes his love to her first and she tells him much the same. With that, she’s gone, and they are four again; a pair and then some.

&     &     &

            Harry spirits away to the attic not long after Hermione takes her leave. He’d overheard Sirius tell Remus there wasn’t much left to move about before it was fully empty up there and felt like it would do him some good to finish something.

            He left his wand on his bed, the kind of thought that was unfathomable once upon time, and rolled his sleeves up, hauling around the last wall of boxes to sort through them. More knitwear, more yellowing pages, more scratched up tchotchkes. He chucks the rubbish and bags what’s worth donating with rigid speed that aches from repetition.

            He grows more and more agitated with himself, finally slamming down the last box with force enough that the sides dent. When he opens it, he’s met with a musty smell that reminds him of hiding in the potions pantry—silky plant extracts and gnarled roots and bat saliva or whatever else can be found and made worthwhile. Lined up in measured rows are squat glass bottles plugged with fat, moth-bitten stoppers. He picks one at random and eases it out of its space. There’s a thin layer of dust, but through it he can make out what looks like the tiniest dragon scales he’s ever seen. Putting that one back, he pulls another: eye of newt. He checks a few more and finds them all to be miniature-sized potions ingredients he knows well, only a couple he has to check the curling label on the bottom of the bottle to name. The last bottle he uncorks is stale and plastic smelling, and he smiles. A children’s potioneer set; old, sure, but still with all its pieces. He sets it to the side to be voted on by the committee downstairs.

            “Mum had one of those when she was a kid that she let us play with, but it was missing the lacewing flies,” Ron says, pulling himself up into the attic. “Blimey, it looks so much bigger up here now,” he adds when his eyes adjust to the quiet light. All the boxes and gobs of old furniture are gone, leaving behind plywood flooring to stretch out in one long gasp. There’s a few support beams dotted about, but other than Harry in the middle, it’s empty.

            Harry gets to his feet to collapse the empty box he’s been sitting on. “This’s the last of it, I think,” he says, though that’s obvious.

            “Yeah,” agrees Ron faintly, moving along the perimeter of the room. His fingers scrape over the studs, where there’s a few faint drawings and words dotted about in plain black ink. “Sirius and Remus are in the garden. Something about gnats; said if we hear anything explode to wait at least until the smoke clears before we go out.”

            Harry shakes his head amusedly and goes to do his final sweep. They’ve been finding loose bulbs all around and it’s become a bit of a hazard. Ron falls into step behind him at first, then moves to step in stride with him. It’s tense, the quiet, but if it just stays intact until they make it back downstairs, it’ll work itself out, Harry thinks.

            Out of the corner of his eye, for what that vision’s worth, he sees Ron’s jaw working slowly, like he’s trying to work out what, if anything, to say. Before he, Harry, can do anything to steer them away from whatever’s coming, he hears, “Harry—damn it,” and a thump.

&     &     &

            Ron finds himself ready to open his big fat mouth until he realizes they’ve stumbled into another pocket. He doesn’t see the chest—that must be full of bloody boulders for how much punch it packs—until he’s walked clean into it. He hisses and reels back, the air thick as water to cradle him against a true fall.

            Harry calls his name twice. Coddled in early morning light, not quite burning and not quite blustering, they’ve been separated.

            “’m all right,” assures Ron, palming at his face—he can feel blood, but he can’t tell where it’s coming from.

            Harry’s face swims into view, his skin like a struck match when he presses cautious fingers to Ron’s forehead. Ron’s sure it’s already black and blue where he touches.

            “You don’t want me to heal that,” Harry diagnoses, quarter of a smile purging itself through healer stoicism.

            Ron realizes in sudden, startling clarity that he’s going to do it this time. “Harry, mate,” he says, oddly calm, “I think I’m a bit in love with you.”

            Harry laughs, but the width of it betrays that it’s forced, too many teeth and too much fervor. His fingers fall away from Ron’s forehead and he asks, “How hard did you hit your head?”

            Ron’s face flares. He’s always blushed like sunburn and now’s no different; he can feel mortified heat rolling off him in waves, mixing with the different air in the pocket to make a broth-like concoction that makes him feel like he’s stewing in his mum’s favorite big metal pot. Boiling like a ham hock seems preferable, actually, to having to explain himself, of all things.

            “I didn’t—I’ve just, and you. You aren’t serious?” Ron stammers out like an accusation, but all he can truly think is that Sirius is a madman for ever having done this, and so’s every other bloke that’s ever confessed his love to his best friend. Miserably, he adds onto his own thought, in his godfathers’ attic, just so he can truly take in the breadth of how idiotic he’s managed to make this moment.

            “You aren’t serious,” Harry shoots back, black brows pinching and eyes hard enough that Ron wants to check over his shoulder for Medusa.

            “Yes I am!”

            He hadn’t expected much in the way of good tidings from this particular announcement, but he hadn’t expected a standoff either, each of their faces burning frantically and neither believing the lengths the other will go to to win this fight.

            Ron swallows hard, his throat constricting, and he tries again, tries to do it right. “If I was looking for an excuse to stay on your sofa for another month, I’d just tell you I was still broken up over Hermione. This is—Harry, this is me. All right? I’m not, I don’t think I’m concussed, but I could tell you again after we get my head checked out if it’ll make you believe me.”

            “Right,” says Harry, “Right. And if I was a bit in love with you, too?”

            Ron doesn’t waste any time processing that because if his mouth is free to say whatever it wants much longer he’s probably going to say something mortifying and then he’ll never be able to live it down. He reaches for Harry the same time Harry reaches for him, hurried and without inhibition. Every touch is a burning warning sign that they fly past until there’s nothing else to reach for.

            They kiss like breathing, a push and pull that takes a moment to slot into place, but once it’s there it’s pretty fucking fantastic. A little room for improvement, but the intent remains immaculate.

            The glasses become a bit of a pain, but they’ve been a blight upon Harry’s love life since he’s had one to speak of, so Ron does his best to work around them until he’s worried about losing an eye.

            “If I just—” he says against Harry’s mouth—and what a place to be and say things, if he says so himself—and he’s given the slightest of nods. He plucks them from Harry’s face and tucks them into his shirt pocket, careful when he moves back in not to crush them.

            It’s a momentary enough lapse in contact, though, that they have to look at one another, and it sends them cracking up.

            “This’s weird,” declares Harry, still holding onto Ron by his shoulder.

            He nods emphatically. “Weird Sisters weird,” he agrees in huffing breath as they haul back in.

            When they meet in the middle this time, it makes more sense than the last because they know now where and how they fit together. They laugh against one another’s mouths and kiss overzealously and it’s all so generally embarrassing and new and odd that it’s a pity to ever stop.

            “Er, about the sofa—” says Harry in the next breath, blinking owlishly in the low light without his glasses. “It’s yours as long as you want it, mate.”

            Ron snorts, finally unable to hold the sliver of composure he’s made. “Oh, well, in that case, y’know. Got what I wanted didn’t I?”

            Harry hits him with a smug grin and shoulders past him, heading off in the direction they came. He shoves his glasses back up his nose and looks back, calling Ron with the harmony in the lines of his face captured in perfect frame. If Ron had to describe it, he’d say it looks a lot like the best parts of his life.

            Ron advises him to wait up as he walks off the buzzing that shoots all the way down to his toes. “Easy to get lost up here,” he says, bumping their shoulders together, and Harry just laughs as they pop back out on the other side.