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One night, when Remus can’t sleep, he thinks about the winter that the Great Lake froze over.
~
Not just a frosty sludge around the edges, but honest-to-god frozen right through the centre. Something about the wind currents, his mam had written to him. The coldest winter Britain had seen in nearly fifty years.
At first, no one had dared to test the strength of the ice. They eyed the smooth white surface warily, mistrustful of the depths it concealed. Slytherin students reported that, at night, the eerie sounds of popping, cracking ice echoed through the common room and dormitories.
But, as January bled into February and the cold snap showed no signs of faltering, the students grew bolder. Some wrote home, asking for ice skates. Others simply stepped out onto the ice in their shoes, thrilled by the sheer novelty of walking on the surface of the usually mercurial lake. They stuck close to the perimeter, eager to explore but not so trusting as to sacrifice a quick escape route.
While from the shore the ice had looked like one vast, silken sheet, up close it was far more textured. Air bubbles here and there, fissures and cracks, slick black patches and powdery white ones.
The ice was undoubtedly very thick—some of the fissures were wide enough that, if one cared to lie on their stomach and press their eye against the gap, they could see the crevice stretching downwards for nearly a metre. Yet still, there was a certain wildness attributed to those brave souls who skated or walked out into the very centre of the beast.
Obviously, James and Sirius had been among the first to attempt it.
“Do we have to?” Peter had asked, nervous and chilled and very much unwilling to take a plunge if the ice proved less robust than it appeared.
“ You don’t,” James had replied, which of course meant Peter absolutely did .
Remus had gone along with them, partially to prevent disaster (it was all too easy to imagine the sorts of bets James and Sirius would think up when faced with an acre of empty ice in every direction) and partially because he was genuinely curious. He’d been ice skating before on a small, crowded frog pond near his childhood home and hadn’t found much to relish in the experience, but in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—the vastness of this white expanse held a deep allure.
Emptiness always had its draws.
At the centre of the ice, everything felt different. The hugeness was one thing: impressive, bright, vaguely intimidating. The sounds, however, went far beyond that.
Deep, crackling resonances echoed across the body of the loch, grabbing the four boys by their napes like a strict mother cat, angry that her kittens had wandered so far. Examining the textured ice up close, Remus felt a genuine spike of fear. It was hard to explain: he knew he wasn’t going to drown, but even so, his body could taste the truth of the fathomless, airless, watery depths so near at hand.
~
It’s the memory of that fear that grips him now, freezing him between the sweaty sheets of the bed he shares with Sirius.
It’s that sense of uncertainty , where certainty usually lives. For an entire lifetime, Remus had lived with the expectation that, when he put his foot down, it would meet something solid and supporting. Then, in the midst of that ocean of ice, he had been forced to question his assumptions: why should the ground hold firm? Why should the ice not break apart beneath his feet?
He has the same experience now, except that instead of a frozen-over loch, the plains he treads so tentatively are the surfaces of his own mind.
It’s strange, transformed in unfamiliar ways, but indubitably still his own. Paralysed beneath the covers, in a bed that is not quite large enough for two tall young men, he sifts through his thoughts.
Voldemort has been dead and gone for ten months and eight days. The Order has been dissolved for ten months and seven days. Remus is still afraid.
When he does think of the war, it comes in broken snatches. The exact colour of the sunrise the morning they discovered Peter’s treachery. The precise sound of Sirius’ bitter laugh when his curse hit home and Bellatrix fell to the ground and did not get back up. The acrid scent of dark magic filling the McKinnon family home, rendering the once familiar place strange and frightening.
Remus has always been a thinker. When there is fear, he thinks himself out of it. When there is pain, he thinks himself through it. When there is joy, he thinks himself into every cranny of the feeling and files each detail away to savour later.
Since the war though, he doesn’t let himself think. If he starts, he worries he may never be able to stop. He worries the surface won’t hold, and the fragments of selfhood he has cobbled together over the years will shatter, and Remus Lupin will dip beneath the surface and never return.
There is a stirring in the bed beside him. Remus turns his head and sees that Sirius has woken up.
“I told you you could wake me up,” Sirius says, his voice gruff with sleep. “You shouldn’t have to lie awake by yourself.”
“I haven’t been up very long,” Remus lies.
Sirius throws a leg across Remus’ body and nuzzles his nose into the crook of his neck. “You’re a terrible liar.” The words come out muffled, his lips barely moving against the warm skin.
“I’m an excellent liar,” Remus disagrees. He still feels a bit frozen under the weight of his thoughts—or, as the case may be, non-thoughts. Even so, he works to re-engage the connection between brain and body so that he can lift his hand and stroke it down Sirius’ spine.
Sirius snorts a little laugh against his neck. “I guess I must know you damn well, then.”
“Mmm.”
For a few minutes, the only sound in the dark room is the steady tick of the clock on Remus’ bedside. Remus begins to wonder if Sirius has fallen back to sleep when there’s a whisper against his shoulder.
“Want to tell me what you’re thinking about?”
Remus doesn’t know what to say. I’m thinking of nothing because that’s the only safe option. I’m thinking of the war and of the friends we lost and the lives we ended. I’m thinking of you, and how much I love the feeling of your breath against my neck and the way each new exhale is a fresh reminder that you are still here beside me.
Instead, he says, “I’m thinking of that time the Great Lake froze over.”
Sirius hums. “That was fun, that was.”
“Yeah,” Remus replies, but even to him, it sounds like acquiescence.
Sirius lifts his head from its place of rest, seeking out Remus’ eyes in the dark.
“Not fun?” he asks.
Remus shrugs and turns onto his side, and Sirius mirrors him. His eyes, adjusted to the dark from hours of wakefulness, easily make out the lines of Sirius’ face. There’s a wrinkle between his eyebrows as he tries to tease out the meaning behind Remus’ tone.
“No, it was fun,” Remus begins. “But I was remembering how scary it felt, too. I just—I couldn’t convince myself that the ice was going to hold.”
“What?” Sirius sounds genuinely surprised. “You didn’t act scared at all! You walked ahead of us all!” He’s stopped whispering now.
“I did not,” Remus scoffs. “It was you and James out ahead. I only went along to keep you two in line.” He doesn’t include Peter in the memory. None of them have yet figured out how to speak Peter’s name out loud.
Sirius laughs. “You can tell yourself that, Moons.”
Remus huffs a quiet laugh. His memory rearranges itself with Sirius’ input, and suddenly he finds he’s not quite sure who stepped out onto the ice first. “Well, either way,” he says, “yeah, I was a bit scared.”
“The ice was plenty thick,” Sirius reminds him. “We really weren’t in danger.”
“I know,” Remus insists. “But there’s a difference between knowing it and feeling it, y’know?”
“Yeah,” Sirius says. “I know.”
They’re both quiet for another moment, just looking at one another. Sirius’ eyes are still narrowed as he tries to puzzle out the course of Remus’ thoughts. Remus uses his thumb to smooth out the furrow.
“I guess that’s just—sort of how I feel all the time these days,” he finally explains. “I guess since the war ended, everything feels just barely iced over. I’m just—I’m scared of my own mind, these days. Scared of what it will show me, if I let it.
Sirius hums again. He takes a deep breath, and Remus feels the momentary press of his expanded chest. “I think I know what you mean,” he says. “I feel that way too, sometimes. But I mean — Rem, what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“What?” Remus asks, surprised. He would have thought that was obvious. The fear of losing himself, of losing control over the order of his mind—he shrinks from it instinctively.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Sirius asks again.
“I—”. Remus doesn’t even know where to begin. So many horrible things. He feels suddenly angry at the calm of Sirius’ voice.
“Remus,” Sirius says, interrupting the spiral of his mind. “If the ice had broken, that day on the lake, and you had fallen through, what do you think me and James would have done?”
Remus, taken aback by this return to the earlier theme, says nothing.
“I reckon,” Sirius says, his voice clear and certain, “that we would have pulled you out again. And if we couldn’t have, we would have sent word back to the school and help would come and we would pull you out.”
“What’s that—”
“What I mean is,” Sirius continues, sounding firm yet gentle, “is that you won’t be alone. I was there too, and I’m here now. And James and Lily. And if we need more help, we’ll find it.”
Remus just breathes a shaky breath.
“Rem, I don’t reckon we can heal from this if we don’t admit to ourselves how awful it was. I don’t think we’ll grow past it if we don’t let ourselves feel it first.”
Remus finds his throat is parched, and swallows with difficulty before he asks the scariest question of all.
“What if there is no getting past it?”
Sirius smiles a soft, sad smile. “I’m not worried about that,” he says, and his voice is so steady and so sure. “I don’t know that we’ll forget, or that we’ll ever feel the exact same way we did before, but we’ll get past it. I mean, we already have. In bits and pieces. Like, the other night? When we got that floo from James? The first thing I thought was, ‘ is the baby here? ’ and not ‘who’s dead? ’ I call that progress.”
Remus smiles at Sirius in spite of himself. He remembers the way his stomach had lurched when James’ head appeared unexpectedly in their living room fireplace. But, he considers, it had taken less time than it used to for his pulse to return to normal.
Sirius, encouraged by his smile, closes the last few centimetres between them and presses a kiss to Remus’ lips.
“Alright?” he asks, back to whispering and his lips still close enough that Remus can feel them move.
“Alright,” Remus agrees. He’s still nervous about falling asleep, uncertain of what his mind might show him when he relaxes his grip on his consciousness. But the reminder that Sirius is there beside him, to shake him from bad dreams and kiss the afterimages from his eyelids—well, that makes it a little easier.
They’re not going to drown.