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It's the second day of London December when Remus wakes up, sore and tired, smelling a bit like peppermint and cheap whiskey, misery disguised as holiday spirit he realizes and fights the urge to throw up all over the sheets. There is draft panting behind his neck and the air he breathes out is visible, burning, like sulphur or perhaps tear gas.
It takes him forty three minutes to wake up, properly. He sits naked in his bed for the most of it, staring at the ugly, peeling patch of wallpaper just left to the window.
Well – no. Obviously. I should think even Sirius’s mother mastered the valuable skill of drinking muggle alcohol by now. Much stronger than firewhiskey, no doubt. Prongs…James, I’m not planning on spending the night in the hospital wing because the ‘judgment’ area of your brain is severely impaired - he wants to say, to put a hand in his pocket and pull out Mrs. Bertha’s Magical Remedy For Hangover and give it to James, who’s dramatically (and not very manly at all) whining in his four poster bed. He wants to laugh at him, with him, at the sounds of Peter snoring in the bathtub, then, at the sheer irony of the situation, now.
But he doesn’t.
Because his pockets have holes, where he wriggles his fingers when he’s waiting in the line for a train ticket, and James is dead, Peter too, and Remus Lupin is an idiot, a downright masochistic idiot, for doing this again. He always does this, this thing, always– he wakes up and thinks.
You can move away, change your town, your job, your haircut but there are some things you cannot change. The color of your eyes. Your age. The way leather smells after the rain. This sickening pattern where he gets up in the morning, after a night in the pub or on a mission, and thinks. And he’s tried, god he’s tried, but his boggarts don’t live inside dark closets, or under the bed; they’re living, breathing things inside the marrow of his bones, between first and sixty first heartbeat of every minute, in the curve of his ribs, in the holes of his pockets. Like a persistent itch in that place right between shoulders blades, that you can never seem to reach.
It’s because winter in London is too cold, he thinks pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s because London is too fucking cold, drowning under people with woolen hats and red noses; people with perfect teeth smiling from billboards, telling the world hurry up, hurry, love costs only 99,99 in your local store.
He tries to laugh and ends up vomiting in the sink.
---
“Well, isn’t this” – says an older lady, sitting next to Remus on the train – “Isn’t this nice, now? Holidays, darling. Time for joy. You should be smiling, you know.” It makes Remus sick, the way the skin around her mouth wrinkles when she talks, the smell of old age and pickled onions peeling off her in layers when she tilts her head, like this. A former teacher, he guesses, only they have that special, all-knowing way of looking through you from over the top of their glasses.
“Yes. Delightful.” Remus says, politely, adjusting his jaw into something that might have been a smile, a lifetime ago. The lady nods anyway, because Remus has always been a skillful liar. A deceiver. So skillful in fact that he, too, had believed once. But it’s not true, he wants to yell, none of it. How many people in the world shouldn’t be smiling right now? How many Jameses are rotting under oak trees, right now, in Godric's Hallows of the world?
“Season of joy.” he mutters and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes as the train goes click-a-de clack through the city.
---
Remus doesn’t like teenagers very much. They laugh too loudly, talk too much, care too little, always smelling a bit like mischief and beer and hormones, thinking they have it all right here - a world on a platter just below their feet.
So he doesn’t move aside when a group of them passes him by on the narrow sidewalk, instead he elbows his way through and shoots them a look, one of those you-know-nothing looks he’s seen on McGonagall’s face more times than he can count. He thinks he gets it now.
“Santa is coming, Tom, behave.” the girl with a red scarf to his left giggles and this Tom, a blond and lanky boy of maybe 15, possibly 16 laughs, bright and pompous like only youth can, and says "Santa will not be the only one coming this Christmas".
That stops Remus right in his tracks. The joke, it sounds so very dark, distant, it echoes behind his eyelids a lot longer than it should. He has heard it before, only the boy who said it once, maybe twice, was dark and not-so-lanky, and had a mean streak as wide as the December sky. He had said ‘Oh shut it, Lupin. You’re looking forward to it, you perverted, little werewolf.’ and Remus rolled his eyes but the corner of his mouth twitched, treacherously, because nobody could say something like that and have Remus laughing, nobody except Sirius Black.
---
- “I really don’t know.” the girl sighs, eyes travelling between Dickens in her left hand and Hesse in her right hand. “This is important, you know. I want a perfect gift. Something that sends a message.”
Remus cringes quietly. - “Perhaps you should try with jewelry?”
- “Like a watch, you mean? Yes, but-“
- “I’m terribly sorry but you do understand it’s quite late and I really need to close.” says Remus apologetically. There’s a teakettle and an empty flat he has to come home to.
- “But I don’t know yet-“ says the girl miserably.
-“Bah," said Scrooge, "Humbug..” - he hums, suffocating a sudden, mad laughter bubbling in his chest.
- “Pardon me?”
- “Dickens.” Remus manages politely, somehow, glancing down at the girl’s fingers, the way they are pressed against the book covers, trembling, just so, and there’s a handful of sun in the places between her words which Remus understands, which makes him jittery all over and he wonders – what the hell is wrong with the world, how bloody stupid do you have to be to be in - “You’re in every line I have ever read.” he says anyway, because the books are to be sold, after all, and rent isn’t going to pay itself. “Dickens, again. You can never go wrong with Dickens.”
Oh, but you can. How monumentally and naively when the world comes crashing down around your ears.
---
It’s because he was in love. I’s because he still is, however reluctantly. He knows it by the constant buzzing in his ears and this feeling like everything’s washed out on the edges, sometimes, like the wires got all crossed and his heart didn’t get the memo – Lying.Stop.Bastard.Stop.Killed.Stop.JamesLilyPete.Stop. – it’s because he hates holidays and winter and jinglebells and people on billboards; because he can’t hate Sirius Black no matter how hard he tries, it’s because-
-‘you’re a fucking coward that’s why!” Sirius is sixteen, an inch or two taller than him, but when he’s standing this close, close enough that Remus breathes his air, it looks like he’s at least a head taller than him. Perhaps he actually is but Remus never really noticed it before.
“You’re a bastard.” Remus says through his teeth, and means it, jaw tightened with restraint. He wants to punch Sirius Black in his stupid nose, god how he wants to hurt him right now and not only because the full moon is two days away, that’s not the only reason.
“Maybe. But at least I’m a not a coward.” Sirius glares at him, a bite worse than a growl, Black pouring out of every pore on his perfect face even though he’d rather die than admit it. “You- No, you know what. Fuck you, Lupin, if you don’t want to stand up for yourself then fuck you.”
Remus wants to sneer at that, because it’s not true, he’s not a coward. Or maybe he is but he just wants Sirius not to be right, wants to piss him off. So instead he touches Sirius’s neck, just above the collar of his shirt, and his fingers are shaking when he grips at the fabric, roughly, a little too tightly because he doesn’t have an answer to this, no witty remark he can spit in Sirus’s face and win.
When he kisses him it’s mostly because he can’t think of anything else.
He kisses him and the bastard does the most inconvenient thing possible – he always does the most inconvenient thing possible – he closes his eyes, moves forward until there’s no space between them, until his hands are on Remus’s hips, right there, warm palms resting against the sharp curve of a hipbone, and smirks into the kiss.
I’m not a coward, see - Remus thinks frantically - I’m just so very fucked.
Today, he doesn’t remember what the fight was about, he remembers how the Common Room smelled of rotting lemons, sweet and sour, and how Sirius was barefoot, and he remembers the stupid neon-yellow pustule on his toe because he had stepped in puddle of pixie’s piss Peter spilled all over the dormitories earlier that morning.
---
It’s the second day of December when Remus goes to sleep. London is fading outside, softly blurred on the edges, aquarelle of dirty skies and street lamps, and Remus feels like he melts right into it, like he too is thin, smudged all the way to the tips of his fingers on days like this, or perhaps all the time.
He thinks maybe he would like to scream himself hoarse now, this very moment he could cover his ears and his mouth and scream his way into the new year. It would be very nice if he could even smash something, a chair perhaps, or a teacup, or himself.
But – because there are people sleeping around him - Remus presses his left cheek to the pillow and breathes, slowly, squeezing down this thing that makes him weak, that makes his throat tight and the back of his tongue burn like a stray touch of a razor blade.
In and out.
In and out.
Inandoutinandout.
And just when the orange sun rips the sky open, just when he thinks – so this is it, then, isn’t it – when the sharp pain that tugs and rips at pulls at his eyelids becomes three times worse than unbearable, Remus closes his eyes and falls asleep.