Chapter Text
“Never be so kind, you forget to be clever
Never be so clever, you forget to be kind.”
It was January, 1977.
Remus Lupin was sixteen. Love had claimed him, the new and young kind that lent his somber heart a fresh lightness. It was exhilarating and it felt like home all at once, a kaleidoscope of newness and age-old tales which had nestled themselves into his heart that autumn.
Before that, really, but Remus wouldn’t have admitted it back then, in the new year of ‘77, not even with Sirius there next to him by the firelight, late in the evening when the common room had all but emptied itself out.
Remus had stayed at Hogwarts for the winter break that year. It had been only the first time ever that he’d not spent Christmas at home with his parents, held in place by the pull of young love and the promise of nights alone with Sirius in their otherwise empty dormitory.
“What do you think,” Sirius began, tracing his slender fingers over Remus’ forearm, “we kick James and Peter out?”
Remus let out the breath of a laugh, the really amused kind.
“We can’t,” he answered simply.
“We can,” Sirius argued immediately. Sirius was good at that. “We’ll trick them into doing it themselves.”
It was clear that James and Peter’s impending return to Hogwarts was on Sirius’ mind. Remus took a quiet pleasure in the idea that Sirius seemed to crave even more time for the two of them.
“It’s their room, too, Pads,” Remus said mildly, instead of admitting that aloud. “How’d you like to be kicked out of your room?”
Sirius sighed, heavy and dramatic. Remus felt it in his back, where his spine rested against Sirius’ chest.
Remus turned, halfway, back twisting as he craned to catch a look at Sirius, whose eyes sparkled so much lately. Sirius watched firelight dance against the gold of Remus’ hair.
“Never be so kind you forget to be clever,” Sirius said with a cheeky grin. It sounded like he was quoting something, but Remus knew the contrary. This aristocratic speech pattern into which Sirius occasionally lapsed confused his casual acquaintances, but Remus knew it like the roots of the forest floor on the nights of the full moon.
“Never be so clever you forget to be kind,” Remus answered, equally cheeky, and Sirius’ eyes lit up the way they did when Remus said all the right things- and Sirius kissed him, and it was all just as well forgotten.
“Never be so polite, you forget your power.
Never wield such power, you forget to be polite.”
It was the late summer of 1981.
Outside, a war was raging. Every day brought news of further deaths and disappearances. Every exchange, every encounter, was left fraught with uncertainty and distrust. At every turn, the possibility of laying down one’s life for his cause. Every morning, the latest tragic news. Every evening, the fear of what was coming next. What you might miss in the night, what morning light might reveal.
And in the little flat- home, for three years now- the toll was apparent.
Remus, already looking older than his twenty years, had aged in the recent months. The full moons took more out of him now, Sirius could tell. And the day-to-day, too. It was taking a toll on them all, more than they had bargained for. In some ways, they had been naive, craving some glory in the face of war, brash and brave and full of Gryffindor courage. But not anymore. Gone were the days when they had all hoped, secretly, for their chance at playing the hero. It was in all of them, on some level, but the war had faded them, leaving them in so many ways shells of the boys they had been not so long ago. Gone were the carefree days of their school years, the freedom and safety of the Hogwarts grounds, and with that, so much of the hope they had all harbored. The naivete, wiped from them and replaced with lines around the eyes that they’d intended to stave off for another decade.
Sirius was angry. The August rain lashed against the window, and Remus, staring past the glass there, didn’t even seem to see it. He was seeing something else, something beyond the weather or the street, or Sirius hovering near him.
He’d taken on an assignment, a stint in a werewolf community, and for the first time in their lives, Sirius could not persuade him to change his mind.
Sirius might have been more afraid than angry, but his heart had always seemed several sizes too big for his chest and the words were always lost somewhere in the maze of lungs and heart and throat.
He didn’t know how to tell Remus not to go. He didn’t know how to say I’m scared for you. I’m scared for me. Please don’t leave me alone.
Please don’t go away when I need you most.
Please don’t leave me.
Please don’t get hurt.
Please don’t let them change you.
It all went unsaid.
“Are you going?” Sirius asked instead.
Remus snapped out of his trance, and turned to look at Sirius, leaning against the doorframe in a brave but failing attempt at casual uncaring.
Their eyes met, and for a fleeting moment, Remus saw something there in the stormy depths, a glimpse of vulnerability, something like the uncertain eleven year old he’d met in Sirius a decade earlier. And just as fleetingly, Remus thought of staying.
But for what?
For Sirius, who wouldn’t even say he wanted Remus to stay?
“I’ve made you tea,” Remus said. His voice was softer than usual. “It’s still steeping in the kitchen. Strong, like you like it.”
Sirius softened. It was visible in his posture, a little of the bravado fading. Remus couldn’t help feeling like pieces of Sirius were falling away before their eyes, the war tearing away at them and leaving behind what he thought would soon be unrecognizable pieces.
“Remus,” he began, and his heart beat in his ears a cacophony of don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
Remus looked up again.
“Don’t be so polite you forget how powerful you are,” Sirius said. His gravelly deep voice was faintly scratchy.
Remus held his gaze for a long moment, understanding. He nodded his head and took a step toward Sirius, bridging the gap between them. He rested his palm on Sirius’ cheek, brushing a calloused thumb over Sirius’ sharp cheekbone. The terrain felt so familiar that Remus wanted to forget it, for a brief moment, and dull the ache of it.
“Don’t be so powerful you forget to be polite,” he told Sirius softly.
And it wasn’t I love you. It wasn’t please don’t go. It wasn’t it’s killing me to leave you.
But it was theirs.
And then it was gone, fading like their childhood, disappearing into the Scottish mist outside. Cooling like the cup of tea waiting for Sirius on the counter.
By the time Sirius picked himself up from the floor late that evening, it had gone stone cold.
“And if I didn't know better
I'd think you were talking to me now
If I didn't know better
I'd think you were still around.”
It was July, 1996.
Outside, it was summer, but behind the cold, stone walls of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, it might as well have been a gray and frozen January. Not only the weather, but the time, too, had frozen here.
Lupin thought of Sirius’ bedroom upstairs, locked in the moments of their teenage years, preserved in the late seventies, and he marveled at the way time had passed, at the way nearly twenty years had disappeared like smoke drifting into the air. He couldn’t grasp it.
He couldn’t grasp any of it.
He couldn’t grasp the way Sirius was kept so preserved in this wretched house, but somehow still was never coming back. He had survived twelve years without Sirius, thinking him as good as dead. But now, the earth wiped clean of everything he’d been, Remus felt empty.
He couldn’t bear to go into Sirius’ bedroom upstairs. He couldn’t stand to think of the Quidditch posters, the old clothes, the photographs. That was the Sirius who had died with Azkaban, with James.
But here, in the little tucked away corner guest room, were the remnants of the older version. The Sirius he had grown to love again, with the softer and gentler kind of love they had cultivated last summer at Remus’ cottage among beds of wild rosemary. The love that had followed them here, to the halls of Sirius’ nightmares.
But they had found the solace in this place, hadn’t they? In each other? In the little bedroom in the corner?
“I feel at home in here with you,” Sirius had admitted softly to Remus one night as they had sat side by side on the big bed, the room lit with the warm light of Remus’ lamp. His things had been strewn all around the room, and Sirius kept refusing to put anything away. Remus had grown exasperated, but the look in Sirius’ eyes always stopped him short of actually doing anything about it.
“You do?” Remus was surprised. Sirius nodded, and his dark hair, now shoulder length and so much healthier- you’d hardly know him by the photos that had been plastered over the Prophet not long ago- fell into his eyes over his now-lined but still vaguely youthful face.
He wasn’t even forty yet.
His whole life still ahead of him.
Their whole life.
“I do,” Sirius answered. The ghost of a smile, radiant and reminiscent of younger, brighter days, flickered across his features. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but Remus didn’t mind. He took it as a sign of days ahead that would be just as bright.
“The autumn chill that wakes me up
You loved the amber skies so much
Long limbs and frozen swims
You'd always go past where our feet could touch.”
Remus wanted to leave it all untouched.
He wanted this room as preserved as the one upstairs with Sirius’ name on the door. But Remus was leaving Grimmauld Place, and he hoped he would never be back.
He couldn’t leave Sirius here alone. This couldn’t be the place Sirius was preserved, his memory trapped as he once had been. So Remus stood in the middle of the room and turned in a circle, and his whole body ached as it never had. It was worse than any full moon, worse than war, worse than betrayal. To have loved and lost, only to love again and be torn apart...Remus felt the weight of it resting on his chest and thought that he might never recover.
He caught sight of Sirius’ favorite old jacket on the back of an overstuffed crimson armchair in the corner, and felt his knees might buckle under him. How many times had he seen that same jacket, back in their school days, thrown over every available surface? How many times had he seen it rest on Sirius’ shoulders like it had been made for him?
He walked over to the jacket and picked it up. His hands shook as he brought it to his face and buried his nose in the fabric of the inner lining. It smelled exactly like it had last week when Sirius had tossed it on Remus as he sat in that very chair, playful and mischievous in a show of someone Sirius used to be. He slipped it around his shoulders, feeling the weight of the fabric. The shoulders were too broad and the sleeves were too short, but it didn’t matter.
Remus buried his hands in the pockets of the jacket and his fingers brushed the sharp edge of something inside. Pulling it out, Remus felt his breath catch.
It was a photograph. Remus and Sirius laughed in it, each of them half-drenched in autumn rain. Remus recalled the moment exactly, the fall of their last year at Hogwarts, the world stretched out in front of them endlessly, the two of them caught up in something so bright and good that they could ignore the edges of a war brewing around them. They’d gone swimming in the lake that day, just the two of them. Sirius’ idea, of course, but Remus had stopped objecting by then. He just wanted to be with Sirius. Even soaked to the bone and freezing, there had been a warmth about him back then that Remus craved more than anything.
He tore his eyes from Sirius’ laughing face and the hand on Remus’ waist, and flipped the photograph over.
In Sirius’ so familiar slanting script, the words:
Remus, ‘77. Me in love.
His heart could have burst from the pain of it all.
Instead, he tucked the photo back into the jacket pocket and drew it closer to himself, sinking into the chair, his earlier mission all but forgotten.
Packing up, while inevitable, would wait a little bit longer.
“I should've asked you questions
I should've asked you how to be
Asked you to write it down for me
Should've kept every grocery store receipt
'Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me.”
The room was unrecognizable.
No longer the homey abode Remus had spent so much effort making safe for Sirius, it had returned to an empty shell.
The packing was done. It had taken Remus longer than he had planned- much longer. He was glad he’d taken his time.
Sirius’ leather jacket hung around his shoulders.
It had been packed in a box in Remus’ closet, gathering dust, for twelve years. He couldn’t bear to see it packed away again.
Remus had thrown away nothing. Everything that meant enough to Sirius for him to keep it out in the last year of his life meant enough to Remus to keep. He mused that when he returned to his cottage, he would take it all out again. He would put Sirius’ old records on the shelf with his own, mixed in together like they’d imagained all those years before. He would mix in Sirius’ books with his. He would tuck away his clothing in the closet. He would wear them sometimes, he thought. Especially that one buttoned shirt he loved on Sirius, with faint embossed flowers on the collar. It was soft from use and scratchy on the inside of the collar where Sirius had cut the tag.
He wished he had more time. There was so much he would have gotten around to asking Sirius. He would have wanted to know if Sirius remembered their life together before Azkaban. If he had drank the tea Remus made him right before he left their home for the last time. He would have asked if Sirius noticed how Harry was so like Lily in the way he moved his hands. If he could see James in the way Harry smiled. If he ever thought about the full moons they had spent together. He would have wanted to know if Sirius still wanted to get married. If he ever thought about having children. They weren’t even forty yet. He would have asked if maybe, after the war…
He would put up photos of Sirius when he got home. He would never hide him away again. Sirius, in a life they’d lived once, loved the spotlight. Remus had hoped to bring that out again in him. And now, if he couldn't do it in life, he supposed the one thing he owed the man he’d loved more than anything, was to give him that at least in death. He deserved that.
He had deserved more.
Remus wasn’t ready to leave.
Sirius would have wanted him to.
He traced his fingers over the doorframe. How many nights had he seen Sirius shadowed there in the last year?
“What died didn't stay dead
What died didn't stay dead
You're alive, you're alive in my head
What died didn't stay dead
What died didn't stay dead
You're alive, so alive.”
“Want to come in, Pads?”
Remus’ voice was light and mild on that first night in Grimmauld Place. Sirius had been upstairs in his old bedroom. Remus was not the least bit surprised to find him in the doorway of the little corner bedroom at a quarter past midnight.
“Do you mind?”
Still timid. Voice still scratchy.
Remus looked up from the book he was reading. He couldn’t help smiling. Sirius looked, for a moment, so like himself, in the evening shadows that hid his still-hollow cheeks and the spaces between his ribs.
“Never,” Remus replied.
Sirius climbed into bed with him. Remus brushed a brief, light hand through Sirius’ curly dark hair, which was slowly regaining its luster.
Sirius never slept alone again.
And Remus?
He went home, to the little cottage in Wales. The smell on Sirius’ leather jacket faded slowly. But Sirius was everywhere.
And Remus slept alone. But sometimes, right at sunrise, if Remus stood at his bedroom window and looked out across the misty ground to the edge of the nearby forest, he would swear that he could see a big black dog winding through the trees.
And that was enough for him.
And if I didn't know better
I'd think you were singing to me now
If I didn't know better
I'd think you were still around
I know better
But I still feel you all around
I know better
But you're still around