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When he returned from the Scottish countryside on the Hogwarts Express for the last time as a newly minted graduate, Sirius didn’t expect to sit behind another desk for a long, long time, or perhaps even ever. Now as a trainee at the Auror Academy, there were a lot more desks -- and a lot more reading -- than Sirius had bargained for. It was almost as if they’d never even left Hogwarts at all; he and James still shared a desk, they copied down Moody’s personal ten commandments (“constant vigilance” always topped the list with a triple underline), and, honest to God, they had homework. Every day Sirius sat in the “classroom” -- a converted storage room in the Auror’s Office at the Ministry -- was a day he wasn’t out on the streets, doing his part in this war. He was impatient, and he could feel the same buzz of anticipation from his fellow trainees.
Moody finally announces that they will soon begin their practical lessons, and that buzz morphs into a hum of excitement. Sirius is practically bouncing in his seat, the way a toddler does to their favorite television show, his mind reeling with all the possibilities, everything he should try and prepare for. James elbows him in the arm.
“Better brush up on those defensive spells, eh?” he whispers. “No idea what this crackpot will throw at us.” All Sirius can do is grin. Just throw something at him, and he’ll be happy.
On the day of their first practical, a piece of parchment is tacked to the classroom door instructing the trainees to present themselves at the Department of Mysteries at two o’clock that afternoon. They will then receive further instructions. As a pack, the auror class makes their way to Level Nine, whispering amongst themselves all the way.
“...Department of Mysteries…?”
“I thought… secret and illegal?”
“...anyone who works there?”
“What do you think we’re in for?” Sirius asks, leaning toward James and watching the number nine light up as the lift jolts to a stop.
“Couldn’t tell ya, Pads,” James says, offering him a shrug and a smile before following their peers out into the dark-tiled hallway. “Let’s go find out.”
Moody meets the group at the end of the hall, standing directly in front of the only door off the space. He clasps his hands in front of his body, holding a velvet drawstring bag and examining each of them closely in turn as they come to a wary stop before him, many of them still shifting their weight from foot to foot. Allowing the uncomfortable silence to grow for a moment, Moody holds his tongue, and Sirius has the distinct feeling that he’s waiting for one of them to break. To call it all off and run back to the lift at the end of the hall. Sirius straightens, rolling his shoulders down and back, and the next time Moody’s gaze falls on him, he meets his eyes.
Still staring through the small crowd at Sirius, Moody says, “I’m glad you all found the place. Now today’s exercise will be the first of many to gauge your readiness for field work. More of a mental exercise than a physical one, you’ll each take a turn…”
James leans over and knocks his shoulder against Sirius’s. “Constant vigilance,” he whispers with a half-hearted attempt at Moody’s gruffness. Sirius feels his lips twitch upward.
Moody shakes the velvet bag out, and that pulls Sirius’s attention back to what he’s saying. “...won’t be needing your wands,” he says definitively, opening the bag and holding it out to the student closest to him. A nervousness ripples through the group as they each, many with hesitation, drop their wands into the bag as it appears in front of them. When it reaches James, he slides his wand out of its place at his hip, holds it in both hands for a moment, then looks up at Moody and drops it into the bag. Moody turns to Sirius and gives the bag a shake, and Sirius can’t get over the hint of a challenge he sees in Moody’s eye. He practically rips his wand from his waistband and tosses it into the bag, his jaw clenched as he stares up into Moody’s face. Sirius isn’t sure if he’s imagining it, but he could almost swear Moody’s perpetual frown loosens.
“You lot will wait here,” he says once he’s collected all the wands. “I’ll come and get you one by one, and when you’re finished you’ll make your way back to the Auror Office. Potter! You first.”
James’s eyebrows shoot up, quickly obscured by his incorrigible hair, but he only looks surprised for a moment before pushing forward through their small group and making his way to Moody’s side. With a hand on the young man’s shoulder, Moody guides James through the door without another word. The click of the latch behind them is one of the loudest Sirius has ever heard.
Immediately the other trainees break off into pairs or trios, whispering amongst themselves, and Sirius walks over the wall and slides down with his back against it until he’s seated on the floor. The black tiles are reflective, and though the images moving across them are blurry and indistinct, Sirius keeps pressing his palm against the floor as if just to make sure he won’t fall through. He watches them, though, these phantoms of his classmates as they dance across even darker shadows, their voices melting together around him.
One by one, his peers disappear through the door, leaving a dwindling pack. Without windows, clocks, or any sort of natural light, Sirius can’t begin to guess how much time passes between students, especially since none of them come back out into the hallway. There must be some other exit, although Sirius has never heard of one, but then again he hasn’t heard much of anything about the Department of Mysteries. When there are just three of them left, Moody comes back through the door.
“Black,” he says, and Sirius gets to his feet.
The two step through into a circular room, with doors along the wall leading off in all different directions. Once the door clicks shut behind them, Sirius suddenly realizes he can’t tell which door they came through. He turns in a slow circle on his heel, and every door looks the same.
“Come on, boy,” Moody says, taking him roughly by the shoulder and guiding him toward the door directly across from them -- or was it more to the right? Every time Sirius turned his head, the room seemed to shift around him.
“This is it,” Moody says, gesturing toward the door before them. “You just step through here. The door won’t open again until you’re finished, and then you’ll be able to find your way back to the Auror’s Office. Remember--”
“Constant vigilance.” Sirius looks up at Moody with a smirk, and once again he thinks he sees something in Moody’s expression soften just a bit, as though the creases in his skin were made of rubber rather than carved from marble.
All he says is, “Get on with it, Black.”
Sirius returns his attention to the door, wraps his hand around the knob, takes a deep, long breath as it turns, then wrenches it open. He stares into a seemingly empty room, though he finds that it’s almost difficult to look at the walls. The moment he tries to focus his gaze somewhere, something seems to slip and he has to look away. Taking a single step into the room, Sirius tries to get some bearings of his surroundings, but then the door slams shut behind him, and he finds himself standing in total darkness.
As his eyes adjust, Sirius realizes that the walls are moving, or at least rippling. His feet stand solidly on a cold, stone floor, but Sirius thinks that if he went up to one of the walls and touched it, his hand would slip right through, to where he could never guess. Even though there is no light source in the room, some sort of glare seems to reflect as the walls crest and fall, undulating around him like a contained ocean of ink.
Suddenly, the room seems to take shape before his eyes -- grass grows beneath his feet, a fence with a gate springs up before him, and when he lifts his gaze he sees the Potters’ little cottage in Godric’s Hollow, the windows glowing against the night. He turns, sees the quiet country lane stretch out on either side of him, then returns his attention to the house before him. Reaching out slowly, Sirius brushes his fingers against the wood of the gate post, surprised to find it absolutely solid beneath his touch, before grasping it and swinging inward. As he starts up the walk, he swears he can hear the church bell clanging down the road in the center of the small hamlet.
When he reaches the top of the path, something in his stomach twists, and he swallows. From the street, the golden windows and ivy-covered facade were so inviting, but now Sirius can see that something isn’t right. The door is still open and looks crooked on its hinges, as though someone forced their way in. He pauses with one foot on the stoop, trying to take stock of his other senses. Constant vigilance. Other than these subtle signs of a struggle, the night seems quiet, so Sirius takes another breath and slips into the house.
Before he can even look around, Sirius’s foot knocks against something. Looking down he sees… a foot. But it’s a foot still attached to a body, and as his eyes trail up toward the face, some part of Sirius already knows what he’s going to find. James lies motionless right there in the front hall, eyes wide and arms splayed out in either direction.
Despite a little voice trying to remind him that this can’t be real, Sirius chokes on air and stumbles the couple of steps between them before dropping to his knees at James’s side.
“James,” he croaks, taking his best friend’s head between his hands and turning it to face him. The warm brown eyes, usually so alive, stare blankly up into Sirius’s face. Gasping on a sob, Sirius rests his head back on the floor, fixes the glasses that have been knocked askew, and gently closes his eyes.
“Oh, Prongs, goddammit, Prongs,” Sirius mumbles, closing his eyes and rocking back on his heels. He can feel the burning just beneath his eyelids and tilts his head back, hoping to stave off the tears. “What the hell did you get yourself into?”
He rocks forward again, this time dropping to rest his hands and head on James’s chest, one he was all too aware should be rising and falling just like his own. Instead, it was perfectly still beneath him. “I should have been here,” he whispers, and he can’t stop himself from pounding a fist down just over James’s heart. “This never would’ve happened. It couldn’t have happened…”
Taking another shaky breath then, he looks up, his hand unclenching from its fist to rest flat over James’s shirt. “It couldn’t have happened,” Sirius whispers again, turning his gaze to James’s face once more. “I never would have let it.” The soft affirmations begin to calm his wildly beating heart, and Sirius finds he starts to breathe more easily.
Reaching out and taking hold of James’s haphazard arms, Sirius brings them back to rest gently across this stomach. “I never would have let this happen to you,” he says one last time, this time with a deep stubbornness that lends a steely edge to his voice. The more sure he feels, though, the more it seems like the room starts to blur around him, James lying before him melting at the edges. Sirius narrows his eyes, tries to squint down at his best friend, but this little corner of the world dissolves into colors, shapes, and then darkness, and he’s kneeling on a cold, stone floor in a strange rippling room.
Sirius remains there for a moment, looking at the empty ground before him, the image of a lifeless James jumping up at him every time he blinks, until he hears a wail from behind him. Stumbling to his feet and whirling around, he suddenly finds himself standing in the doorway of his brother’s bedroom in Grimmauld Place. The scene before him may feel like nearly a distant memory now as he stands on the precipice of real adulthood, but the same rage and fear sear through his chest as if he were still the little boy living under his mother’s thumb.
Regulus lies in a tight ball on the ground, curled inward as though he might be able to grow a turtle’s protective shell from sheer force of will. Their mother stands over him, wand raised, looking down at her son with stern and calculating eyes.
“We uphold certain values in this family,” she sneers. With a flick of her wand, a gash appears along Regulus’s upper arm and he lets out another wail. It goes straight to Sirius’s heart, cracking it like a sculptor hammering at a block of marble.
“We are Blacks.” Another swipe, another bloody gash, another scream. “You must understand what your traitor of a brother never could. Your duty is to your family.”
Sirius barrels into the room, positioning himself directly between his mother and his brother. His heart rages against his ribcage, and the soft whimpers emanating from the body curled on the floor are somehow blurring his vision. Wiping desperately at his eyes, he glares at his mother.
“Regulus has always done his duty,” he screams at her. “He has only ever wanted to do his duty, why are you punishing him? Punish me!” To Sirius’s own alarm, a note of desperation has slipped into his voice. As much as he has dreamed of some confrontation of this nature, has dreamed of all the insults he would yell, has dreamed entire scripts he would say, he can feel something breaking inside him as he stands here now beneath the cold examination of her black eyes. That gaze has only ever seemed to ask, Where is your weak spot? and staring into them now, Sirius feels like an animal bearing his soft underbelly.
“It’s me you want,” he says, trying to regain control of his own voice. “It’s me.”
Walburga digs the tip of her wand into the soft spot beneath Sirius’s chin, forcing his head upwards at an awkward angle. “You left,” she hisses. “You left this house, you left this family. You are nothing to us. You are nothing but a burn mark on the wallpaper. You left everything to Regulus.”
Straining to look down at his mother over the tip of his nose, Sirius swallows. “Regulus--”
“Regulus must fill your role, take on your responsibilities. All of them. Including bearing the duty of this family. You can’t protect him. You’re no longer family.”
Sirius closes his eyes. He has wanted to hear those words for as long as he can remember, a definitive break from the family he has been distancing himself from ever since he was born. But the full weight of his decisions -- of his rebellion -- now stares at him in the form of his mother. He left Regulus behind, and his little brother fell victim to the tantalizing webs every Black had a way of spinning. He took on family duty in a time when that duty suddenly meant not only family, but also dark ideals about the entirety of the wizarding world. And Sirius hadn’t been there.
“But he made his own choices,” Sirius whispers to himself, the words just barely audible. He opens his eyes again and steps away from Walburga’s wand, letting the tip fall from his chin toward his chest. “He made his own choices,” he says again, steeling himself to hold his mother’s gaze. “And I can’t protect him from those, either.”
As Sirius stares down at his mother, steadies his breathing, the sounds of his brother’s pain begin to fade behind him, and Walburga, like James before, takes on a blurry quality, slowly seeping away at the edges, like a watercolor that’s been oversaturated. Even when Sirius stands once again in the dark, rippling room, Walburga’s eyes seem to gleam out at him from the shadows. When the room remains still, his heart kicks up a notch with anticipation. Turning slowly on his heel, his eyes shift through the room, looking for a door, or any kind of exit. Only inky blackness stares back at him. So, he wasn’t done. He stands, and waits, but when he suddenly hears a voice, one he would know anywhere, every bone in his body feels like ice.
“Where were you?”
After just a moment of hesitation, Sirius looks just over his shoulder and finds Remus staring back at him, hands clasped behind his back as though he’s about to begin a lecture. The rest of the room hasn’t changed; the two simply stand facing each other between these walls of rippling ink, but Sirius can see Remus clearly, as if someone slowly turned up the stage lights in an auditorium and the actors have taken the stage.
“What do you mean?” Sirius asks, taking a couple of steps toward Remus. Lupin stands almost completely still, only cocking his head to the side as he watches Sirius approach.
“You weren’t there,” Remus says, and Sirius can hear the way his voice is beginning to harden. It’s a tone he has almost forgotten, not having heard it much since their school days, when someone would push Remus too far and he began to retreat into himself.
“I wasn’t where?” Sirius asks, his hands going to Remus’s chest as he looks up into this other man’s face, this face he has loved so dearly for so many years. As always, it remains a mask, revealing nothing of the workings of Remus’s heart or head. “I wasn’t where?” he asks again, curling his fingers into the soft knitted fabric of Remus’s jumper.
“I needed you.”
The words Sirius constantly aches to hear, in the present tense -- I need you, I want -- pierce him like daggers in the past. I needed you. That’s what Remus said, staring down at him with eyes so still they could have been made of glass. “And I wasn’t there,” he whispers, his hands going nearly slack against Remus’s chest. They stand in silence for a moment before Sirius suddenly feels reanimated with a new vigor.
“Where was I?” he gasps, clutching Remus’s face between his hands with a desperate grasp. “You needed me, where was I?”
“You weren’t there,” is all Remus says.
Sirius starts shaking his head frantically, running his thumbs over Remus’s cheekbones. “No, no, that can’t be right,” he says, staring into Remus’s eyes, begging for some sort of recognition, a softening of that gaze. “That can’t be right. I wouldn’t have left. I would have been there. I would have been there for you.” He wraps his hands around the back of Remus’s neck and pulls his head down until their foreheads rest against each other.
“I needed you, but you weren’t there,” Remus says, and Sirius curls his fingers in the soft hair on the back of his head, clenching his fists so tightly his knuckles feel like they would pop.
“No,” Sirius gasps, turning his head from side to side against Remus’s forehead, and all of a sudden he can feel the coolness of the wet trails left by tears on his cheeks. “No, Moony, you have to listen to me, I’m always at your side, I’ll always be there, that’s the only place I belong.”
“But you weren’t there, Sirius.”
A new chill begins to creep throughout Sirius’s body at the sound of his name, and he pulls back to look at Remus’s face, who still looks at him as though he’s merely a mannequin in a shop window, with only a sort of mild interest. “You weren’t there, Sirius, what am I supposed to do?”
“Padfoot,” Sirius breathes, pressing in closer to Remus’s body. “I’m Padfoot, all of that was for you, I would never walk away from that.” He has a sudden inspiration to transform, all knowledge of his current presence in the Ministry of Magic as an unregistered animagus forgotten, but when he steps back to do so, he finds he can’t. Shaking with the effort of something that’s usually as easy as wiggling his fingers, he balls his fists against his eyes and lets out a scream of frustration. “All of this is for you!” he sobs.
“You’re like the others.” Suddenly Remus’s voice is harsher, sharper, and when Sirius looks up, there’s a hint of anger blazing in his eyes. “Leaving. Always leaving.”
Sirius drops to his knees in front of Remus, and he doesn’t even feel the jolt go through his kneecaps as he slams into the hard stones. Reaching up, he grabs at Remus’s waist, at his hips, latching on. “Moony,” he moans, looking up in Remus’s downturned face. “I would never leave. I will never leave you. I’ll always be here.” Unable to meet his gaze anymore, Sirius rolls his head forward to rest against Remus’s stomach.
“I needed you.”
Without warning, the desperation morphs into anger, and Sirius feels every muscle shaking against his statue standing in front of him. “Then why couldn’t you tell me?” he snaps, digging his fingers into Remus’s hips and looking up again. “Why couldn’t you tell me? ‘I need you,’ why can’t you say that?”
Using Remus’s body to pull himself to his feet, Sirius lets this rage pulse through his limbs. This rage is so much better, so much easier than the panic he felt before, the utter destitution. Anger, that he knows how to handle.
“Come on!” he shouts, and this time he gives Remus’s shoulders a small shove. The taller man hardly moves. “Come on, Remus, I want to hear you say it! You need me, right now, in this moment. I want to hear it!”
Remus merely stares at him, a sort of calm washing over his features. Sirius starts to feel it, too, and as his heartbeat slows, he only closes his eyes when the Remus standing before him begins to melt to the edges of his field of vision. When he opens them again, he’s staring directly at a wooden door.
Crossing to it in just two long steps, Sirius rips it open and steps into the Auror’s Office.
***
Unwilling, or unable, to wait around for whatever sort of debrief awaited him, Sirius makes straight for the lift. Rounding the corner, he comes upon James sitting on the floor beneath the call button, head tilted back against the wall and eyes closed.
“Prongs!” Sirius shouts, running the last few steps and pulling James to his feet before he had even managed to open his eyes.
“Pads, what-- is everything okay?” James asks, his voice muffled by Sirius’s shoulder as he pulls him into a fierce embrace.
“Everything’s… everything’s fine,” Sirius mumbles, closing his eyes and tightening his arms around James. It’s a moment before James does the same in return.
“Hell of an exercise, eh?” he says quietly against Sirius’s ear. Sirius nods before pulling back, holding James by the shoulders.
“What even was that?” Sirius asks, his brows furrowing slightly as he takes his first chance to think over what he’s just endured. “And what time is it?”
James glances down at his watch. “Just after four thirty.”
Four thirty. Sirius blinked. With all that time waiting in the hallway beforehand, he couldn’t have spent more than thirty minutes in that chamber. “How long have you been sitting here?” he asks, finally returning his attention to James.
A thin smile tugs at James’s lips. “A while,” he says. “After all that I… I didn’t really know what to do with myself. Thought I’d hang around for you. I picked up your wand, Moody had them laid out in the classroom. Fancy a pint?” He reaches for the lift call button, but Sirius wraps him in another hug.
“I’m glad you did,” he murmurs, feeling the low vibrations of James’s laugh against his chest.
“So what do you think?” James asks as the lift opens and the two step inside. “I thought it must be some sort of boggart, but I’ve never seen anything like that before, one that can morph the whole room like that.”
Sirius nods along, but the more they talk about the room, the more often Sirius sees James’s sightless brown eyes when he looks at him rather than the glowing smile he currently wears. As the lift clicks towards the Atrium, he becomes more and more engulfed in the images flashing through his own head.
“...did you see?” James is asking as the gate clamors open and the bustling Atrium spreads out ahead of them.
“What?”
“What did you see in there?” James asks again, glancing over at his friend. “You sure you’re okay there, mate?”
“Yeah, fine.” Sirius runs a hand through his hair. He watches James’s open, smiling face. So alive. “My mother. Got to have a little family reunion, she and I.”
James frowns. “Sorry, mate, that must have been rough.”
“And what about you? What did you see?”
The lines in James’s face deepen. “Lily. She was…” he trails off, clears his throat, “killed right in front of me.”
Sirius lets out a low whistle and slings an arm around James’s shoulders. “I think we really need that pint.”
***
After spending most of the evening at the pub -- mostly eating and talking since neither of them had much of the spirit for drinking, it turns out -- Sirius apparates to the front stoop of their flat. Tapping the door with his wand, he hears the lock disengage and slowly pushes the door open.
Remus sits on the couch, a book open beneath the light from the reading lamp on the rickety side table, as though the world had gotten dark around him and all he could manage was the light right beside him. He looks up when Sirius comes in, sticks a finger between the pages to save his place, and smiles.
“Wondered when you might get back,” he says easily, getting to his feet and placing the book on the coffee table. But Sirius hears the echo of another voice, another Remus, Where were you? and stands stock still in the doorway.
Frowning slightly as he crosses the room, Remus comes to stand before Sirius, gently pushing the door closed behind him before taking his face between tender hands. “Something wrong?”
There’s a beat of silence before Sirius snaps back to his own body, this moment, and shakes his head. “Everything’s fine,” he says, turning his head to press a soft kiss to the palm of Remus’s hand. “Just went to the pub with James after training.”
“And how was training?”
Sirius feels like a boulder has just plummeted into his stomach and threatens to pull his entire body crashing to the ground. He’s silent for a moment too long, and they both know it. “Oh, you know,” he says. “‘Constant vigilance,’ and all that.” He attempts a smile, but even he can tell it wavers.
Remus leans in, kisses Sirius’s forehead, and lets his lips linger. Closing his eyes, Sirius breathes in. There’s something still so new about this, about them, that every touch still carries a breath of caution, a silent question. And Sirius savors every one. Remus wants to take it slow, he’ll take it slow. But he’ll enjoy every moment of it.
“Tea?” Remus asks.
“Please.”
When Remus disappears into the kitchen, Sirius lets himself drop to a crouch right there in the middle of the living room, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He presses so hard he sees colors behind his dark eyelids, and he lets out a ragged breath. It doesn’t matter that the Remus he saw earlier today wasn’t real, it doesn’t matter that this one, here, in the kitchen, brewing tea, is. Coming home to see that face finally smiling at him, Sirius feels like his body is finally feeling the aches and pains of a boxing match he lost. If any part of this Remus, his Remus, ever thought that Sirius would leave, he didn’t know how he was supposed to keep getting up in the morning. But isn’t that what they were doing here? Playing house in this flat, taking things slow, so that Remus could be sure things would stick? That Sirius would stick? Sirius balls his hands into fists. Why didn’t he see that already?
Sirius finally makes his way over to the couch, and when Remus returns with their mugs, he’s sitting with his feet up on the coffee table staring at the opposite wall. He smiles in thanks as he takes the mug, looking down into the steaming depths while Remus slowly lowers himself onto the couch beside him. He watches Sirius for a moment, waiting for some sign that he wants to get whatever’s eating at him off his chest. With no indication, however, Remus kicks his feet up to mirror Sirius and picks up his book again.
Glancing over, Sirius presses the open palm of a hand against the mug of tea. It’s almost too hot, but the heat and the pain keep him present. He watches from the side as Remus’s eyes dance over the page, so fast it hardly looks like he could actually register the words in front of him. Placing his mug carefully on the coffee table, Remus turns the page, then picks up his tea again. Looking at the long fingers curled around the cover of the book, the soft crease between his eyebrows as he reads, the tawny waves falling across his forehead, Sirius knows right then, just as he knew in that room in the Department of Mysteries, that he would always be right here. At Remus’s side. And that he could take in this view for the rest of his life.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says suddenly, but he keeps his eyes locked on Remus’s face.
Remus glances up, closes his book again with his thumb in the binding, and raises his eyebrows. “Were you planning a trip?”
“No, Moony,” Sirius shifts on the couch, pulling one leg underneath him so he’s facing Remus more completely, “I’m not leaving you.”
Remus sighs, dropping his book into his lap and rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “You can’t make a promise like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t know what could happen.”
“The only things that are going to happen are what we’re going to make happen,” Sirius says, placing his mug down on the coffee table and moving across the couch until he’s up against Remus’s side, his elbow resting on the back of the couch. “And I’m telling you, I’m not leaving.”
Remus looks over at him. The light from the table behind him casts a glow around his head, the flyaway hairs glowing like fireflies. “I just don’t want you to feel--”
“What?”
“Trapped.”
“Why would I feel trapped?”
Remus drops his head into his hands then, pushing his fingers back through his hair as he looks up again. “I don’t know, Padfoot, because you’ve always done just what you wanted to do, and I don’t want you to feel like you have to stick around--”
“I don’t feel like I have to--”
“--but you might start to feel that way, and then what happens?” An almost pleading note has crept into Remus’s voice, tainting the usual detached manner with which he normally addresses all points of concern.
“Do you want me here?”
Remus looks at him with eyes so wide with confusion Sirius feels like he’s getting a glimpse into what Remus must have looked like as a very small child. “What?” he breathes, as though he must have misheard the question.
“Do you want me here?” Sirius asks again. “Do you want me?”
The answer spills out, words tripping over each other, before Sirius has even finished asking: “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Sirius takes a moment to breathe and steady his pounding heart, a feeling so different from that which was coursing through his veins just earlier that same day, but the same physical effects. He realizes then, as Remus sits before him glowing in the lamplight like his own personal angel, that he’ll never have to hear those words spoken out loud again. He’ll carry them with him.
“Then please, Moony,” Sirius says softly, taking Remus’s mug from him and placing it on the coffee table before moving to straddle his hips. Running his fingers through Remus’s hair, he leans in to trail kisses along his jaw. When he reaches his ear, he whispers, “Let me show you how much I want to be here. How much I want you.”