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“Play it again, for me,” Remus had asked with a smile, hoisting himself up on the small kitchen table for a better view. Sirius had snorted and turned slightly on his chair to look him in the eye. “I played it already this afternoon. How can you want to hear it again?” Remus had shrugged and he will never know what had compelled him to say it that night, to admit this small part of such a wide, wondrous and frightening truth that had made its home within him so long ago. “I’d listen to it a hundred times in a row if you’re playing.” The way the words seemed to have settled into Sirius, smoothed out the edge of his smile into something softer, something small and so very significant, is something Remus wishes he could forget for the pain that it drives into him, sharp and sudden. One day he will no longer recall the spark in Sirius’s eyes whenever he had played. He will look at the old piano and it will no longer remind him of Sirius’s hands flying across the keys. He will forget, he will forget, he wishes he could force himself to never forget.
Remus pours the water into his tea pot and carries it back to his kitchen table. He leaves it there and walks over to the piano next to the window. The kitchen is just big enough for it to fit right into the corner across from the fridge. Blasphemy Sirius would have called it, to leave a piano standing in the kitchen, really Remus, I taught you better than this. But there isn’t enough space in his living room or his bedroom, so the kitchen it is. Regulus had let him have the instrument, because Remus was the only one who still might have use for it. He suspects Regulus knew what it would mean to him to be able to keep this small piece of Sirius near.
He used to have lessons as a child and throughout school, never quite as naturally talented as Sirius, but good enough to draw smiles and applause out of his relatives for Christmas or the occasional school concert. Sirius had always insisted that he was much better than he gave himself credit for. Sometimes they had even played together, usually at Sirius’s insistence. He is grateful for it now, a precious collection of memories now tinted slightly bittersweet, something they had shared that neither James nor Peter had been a part of. Christmas songs and movie soundtracks, Chopin and Rachmaninoff and so many more. Gentle corrections and quick fingers, all filled with the unbelievable joy of it, of weaving melody out of thin air, together, together. He owes it to Sirius, Remus thinks, to keep practicing. Even though he is gone, especially because he is gone. What else does he have left?
The afternoon sun had been searing and merciless. Sirius had discarded his shirt many long hours ago, a cigarette between his teeth, eyes narrowed in concentration and Remus had almost asked him to please at least put his clothes back on, is he to be terrorised by both the summer heat and Sirius’s bare skin right there within reach? Remus had finished his own cigarette and now watched with rapt attention as Sirius’s burnt down, a waste really, he might as well leave it in the package if he wasn’t going to really smoke it anyway, but Remus had been busy staring at his friend and pretending not to stare at his friend so he had let the matter be. Money had never quite meant the same thing to Sirius as it had to Remus anyway.
Then, suddenly, Sirius had stopped playing and turned towards him. “I’m done!” he had proclaimed, throwing his pencil onto his shitty couch and shrugging when it bounced off and rolled onto the floor instead. “I can try to teach you now.” Remus had all but begged Sirius to help him learn his master piece, the one he had played for Remus countless times, the one everyone at school had always wanted to hear from him, the one that had (probably) helped along more than one of Sirius’s famous seductions. La Campanella, originally by Niccolo Paganini, adapted by Liszt for the piano was as beautiful as it was difficult, but Sirius had never shied away from a challenge. He had told Remus long ago, that he would be able to play it, if only he set his mind to it, and now, after school, with nothing but the sun and the stress of university applications to keep him occupied, Remus had asked him to teach him. At the time, it had felt like the most courageous thing he had ever done. “I’ll be a good student,” he had said and laughed. With Sirius, laughter had never been a forced, false thing. The first time he had made Remus laugh, at the breakfast table one night into their new boarding school life, Remus had spilled tea on himself and had had what might once have been a croissant coming out of his nostrils. “You always are, Moony,” Sirius had answered. “I know you can do it.” Believing, believing, Remus had somehow always believed him.
I gather like matter, cells multiplying, a leaf unfurling, give me shape, give me shape!
He hasn’t played it in the months since. He had tried, in the beginning, but in the end, he had never been able to finish it. Remus sits down and stares at the keys for a moment. With a breath, he reaches out to sort the pages of La Campanella and set them on his stand, remembering hours upon hours spent memorising these very notes. He knows them still, the octaves at the start, the building quiet staccato, the momentary crossing of his hands. Before the quiet of his flat can close in around him, he decides to take the jump. Cold water be damned, icy memory be damned, he will manage or drown trying.
It’s surprising at first, how well he can still play it. They had chosen Liszt for his difficulty after all and he hadn’t thought it would feel this natural, be this easy to take it back up after such a long time without practice. Remus smiles. His fingers remember, he hopes they will always remember. One day, he imagines, he will be old and grey and half-blind and his hands will know which paths to take, slowed and shaken, but certain nevertheless. He likes the speed of it, the way it feels gentle yet filled to the brim with energy, poured from his fingertips, into the keys, into the room. It settles on Remus like snow on shaky winter leaves. His hands falter after the first few bars and he slows, unwilling to give up just yet. More than sound travels here in the empty, spaceless trap of his kitchen, where once two had laughed and drunk and washed up together. He feels it within every note, every creak of the pedal. Memory, friendship, the warmth of an embrace in summer, a secret shared between sips of tea, the flash of his lighter. Chasing it, he tries, again and again, but less than halfway through the piece, his memory fails him. “Fuck,” Remus whispers into the quiet. His hands have suddenly gone cold and he shivers. Well done, he thinks he can almost hear Sirius say, you’re too impatient with yourself. With a shake of his head, Remus banishes the thought, stands and closes the lid of Sirius’s piano.
It pulls, pulses, arrow wounds piercing through my rib cage and dragging, dragging, dragging me back.
Remus’s tea had gone cold. “Kill it, Pete!” James had cried as Peter had valiantly approached the spider. Remus had laughed, joining in as Sirius began to chant, “Kill it, kill it, kill it!” With a wide swing, Peter had thrown the shoe at the poor creature. Usually, Remus would have tried to take it outside alive, but James’s crippling fear of everything crawling with more than four legs made that task nearly impossible and so they had allowed Peter to take care of the frightening beast. “Hail me!” Peter had finally shouted. “I am the mighty vanquisher of all things eight-legged! They shall sing songs of my deeds for centuries to come!”
Sirius had nodded solemnly, a hand on his chest. “Oh my bravest knight. Oh my most courageous, dearest hero.” After a moment of consideration, he had snatched a wooden spoon from James’s kitchen table and taken a deep breath as if to steady himself. “God save our gracious Pete, long live our noble Pete, God save the Pete!” James had joined in with a stunning impression of a string orchestra and Remus had grabbed onto Sirius’s spoon-microphone, their hands brushing and staying there, touching in careful carelessness. “Send him victorious,” he had tried to sing along with Sirius through the burst of his laughter. “Happy and glorious, long to protect us all, God save the Pete!”
Wrapped in sound, hidden like a bruise beneath a mantle. I was and I will be. I will be again.
Sleep has always been easy for Remus. He turns off the lights, closes his bedroom window, and within ten to fifteen minutes of lying down, he has passed into the land of dreams. Peter, eternally plagued by insomnia, even back in their school days, had always been jealous of this particular feature of Remus’s. To his surprise, nothing has changed, even after everything. His dreams that night are filled with Sirius. Remus wanders, through forests, past rivers and meadows unknown, an ancient ruin, a hidden castle, feeling strangely compelled to move forward, on and on. “Sirius?” He asks, because he knows it, feels it. “Sirius?” Wonder gives way to panic, if I don’t find him he will be gone forever. I won’t let him go. I can’t let him go. Through a field of corn and long white beaches, he runs past his parents’ house there high up on a green hill. He needs to move. He needs to find Sirius. It is the sort of dream that doesn’t mask what it truly is. Remus knows he is dreaming. He knows he will wake eventually to the cold of morning and a busy day, but he can’t fight it. If he is honest with himself, he doesn’t want to.
He comes to a halt in front of their favourite kebab place, just around the corner from where James and Lily live, with the freshest salad and meat of the highest quality and somewhere, amidst the smell of bread and garlic, there he stands. He is wearing his favourite jeans, Remus dimly notices. “You found me,” Sirius says and smiles. It claws at him like an open wound, Sirius’s smile or the memory of it, and Remus doesn’t quite know what to answer. What is there to say? I have spent three months chasing every trace of you I could find, because it frightens me to think of you as truly gone? How do you pour out your heart to someone who can no longer listen, someone who will never listen again? Do they matter, all the things left unsaid, all the things that should have been left unsaid? They exist and change nothing. I love you, Remus could have said and Sirius would have died. The coffee you make tastes terrible, he could have admitted and still, Sirius would have died.
“You’re not looking at me,” Sirius says then, startling Remus out of his thoughts. He turns his eyes back up to to meet Sirius’s. They’re greyer than he remembers. “You’re-“ he begins and doesn’t quite finish. “I know,” Sirius answers and he thinks he can see a shadow pass over his face, gone before it can truly take hold. You’re dead. He blinks. There are no street lights and the neon sign that usually displays the menu is dark, yet from somewhere beyond his sight, light rises. Enough to illuminate the two of them here at this strange crossroad conjured by some macabre part of Remus’s consciousness. “Why am I here,” he asks, not really expecting an answer. Sirius shrugs. “Because you found me.”
Remus wakes with a start, his feet as cold as ice. A gust of freezing wind stirs the curtains and makes him shiver. Outside the world lies dark and cold, unchanged and sleeping, not knowing that Remus had reached for the hand of his friend in a dreamed-up restaurant and touched formless, faceless air. He is grateful, somehow, to have known it was nothing but a dream. Those that seem more real are also more cruel, a beloved face within reach, restored for a moment of blessed ignorance, only to realise upon waking that they are as far away as ever, that the illusion was not reality. The window stands wide open and he shakes off the last remnants of his dream. He must have forgotten to close it that night.
I heard and I reached and it wasn’t enough. Try again. Please. Try again.
James comes to visit that Saturday, bearing Lily’s best wishes and his famous chocolate cake. They eat almost all of it, just the two of them and Remus stores the meagre rest in a Tupperware in his fridge after he is gone. “I’m glad to see you play again,” James had said, pointing at the sheet music on his stand. “I expect a concert when the month is out!” Remus does not back down from a challenge any more than the rest of his friends and James knows it well. With chocolate still clinging to the backs of his teeth, he opens the lid of the piano with more enthusiasm than he had expected to find within him and almost pinches his fingers. Something joyous, something difficult! What better than La Campanella! Damn his stupid dreams, damn his exams, damn the linguistics homework piling on his desk. He will tear this small amount of joy from fate’s strangling hands and bask in it. The sun casts a few stray rays upon his cold fingers and he takes it as a sign.
His consistent practice seemingly has paid of. He makes it past the first section, the transition is a little wonky still, but he takes what he can get. The room darkens, clouds must have gathered to cast a veil over the afternoon sun, and he has to bend his head to still be able to read the notes. Something makes his vision blur a little, but he knows enough of it by heart by now, that he can go on playing with only a few minor hiccups. Remus shivers.
Keep trying. Remus. Keep trying.
He crashes into dissonance with sudden, searing shock, coming to an inelegant stop with his hands still on the keys. His name, there carried with the notes, wrapped in the whirring noise of his fridge, he is sure of it. But James is gone and his kitchen is empty, so he shakes his head and turns back towards the piano, intent on trying again, when, fading like the last remnants of his stumbling final chord drawn out by the pedal, he hears it again. Remus. A thin plea, a strangled whisper, a searching bid for answer. This is it, he thinks with a strange calm, this is the moment when I finally lose it. He begins to play again, trying to ignore the gnawing sense of something that will not be shaken loose. After so many years of living with other people, it is only natural, that he now imagines someone calling for him, isn’t it? It happens to plenty of people. Peter had said so only last week! He chances a look up, nothing more than a moment to shake the hair from his face and that is when he sees him, a shadow, a drift, gone before he can quite grasp the sight.
Sirius, Remus thinks and it is enough to drive tears into his eyes. Sirius.
That night, he closes his window and goes to sleep with the lights on. He tries not to think about what it means, unprocessed grief, denial, madness, something something I can’t let go of you. He hopes his dreams at least will leave him in peace and opens his eyes beneath the giant oak tree of his school yard. “That was easy,” a voice says next to him and he looks up sharply, to see Sirius, solid and black-haired and wonderful, leaning against the bark. “You just appeared right here. You didn’t even have to look for me.” Remus blinks, but somehow, the haze of lived unconsciousness leaves no room for confusion. “I saw you,” he says instead and Sirius’s brows draw together in surprise. “You did?” Remus nods. It feels overwhelmingly underwhelming to be in Sirius’s presence like this, a half-full glass, like stopping to eat out of politeness while you are still hungry. He wants to devour the sight of him, the feel of him, the living movements of his body, but stays still and composed, a statue of dreamy surety and silent control. “You’re… dead,” he manages. He wants to frame it as a question, but that would leave room for hope, for stupid, unrealistic, mad hope, so he doesn’t. To his surprise, Sirius smiles. “So you keep telling me.”
Remus shakes his head. “I don’t understand. I know I’m dreaming, I’m not stupid!” He cries, suddenly angry, at Sirius, at the silly beautiful dream, at the world, at himself. “I know you’re gone. I know it. Why can’t I let go? Why can’t I finally fucking move on?” He takes a deep breath and tries to blink away the tears that have gathered. Sirius reaches out and brushes them away with his thumb, a gesture so tender, it makes Remus want to crumble against him. Losing you crashed into us with claws as sharp as a scalpel. A dying star, you burst and left behind a gaping black hole, nothingness and wanting and wanting and wanting. “I’m here,” Sirius whispers, almost puzzled. “Remus, I’m here.” His arms are cold and the skin of his hands feels rougher than it had during his life, but Remus doesn’t mind. “I’m trying,” Sirius murmurs, almost inaudibly into Remus’s curls. He holds onto the dreamt-up ghost of joys past and wishes he would never have to let go.
He wakes to a gust of wind from the open window and a single black hair on the pillow beside him. It must have flown in, he tells himself, with little conviction.
They had sat side by side, crammed onto the same chair in the dusty light of Sirius’s kitchen lamp, too much wine and too little water in their blood stream and Sirius’s laughter had trapped Remus in his trance like a fly caught in the light. “Try it faster,” he had said and guided Remus’s hand back onto the keys by taking it in his, warm and close and everything Remus had wanted. His touch had lingered and then, startling a soft noise out of him, Sirius had wrapped his arms around him awkwardly on the small chair, turning sideways to face Remus and pressing him close with sudden giddiness. “I just-“ he had laughed, “I just wanted to hug you!” Remus had smiled, too drunk to care for trivial matters such as his cut off blood circulation and too sober to pretend the warmth rising to his cheeks was anything less than blatant, foolish adoration.
Keep remembering. I can try if you keep remembering.
Two days pass before he sits down at the piano again. His Modern History exam was only a few days ago and he isn’t all too sure about any of the things he has written, but tries to distract himself away from that worry by first calling Peter, then his mother, and now playing his favourite piece. It works well enough, he has to pour every bit of concentration into staying in tempo during his most difficult passages and there is no room for much else than notes, sound, and the quick movement of his fingers. He has tried to convince himself that the mirage of Sirius, his dreams, his strange feeling of doom, of almost-arrival, were nothing but a projection of his grief coupled with the pressure and stress of exam season. It should all return to normal, now that the final one is done with, he is sure of it.
“Remus,” a voice says quietly and he tries not to listen. “Remus.” He looks up, slowly, to stare directly into Sirius’s face. “This isn’t real,” he whispers to himself, closing his eyes. He half expects him to be gone when he opens them again. “I am. This is,” Sirius answers gently. His voice sounds quieter than it ever had before, as if there is something missing in it, a frequency left out, an undeterminable gap somewhere deep within it. The room has gone icy cold and Remus doesn’t dare now to look away from the sight of him. It breaks through him, a wild beast let loose, a damn destroyed, a river during a flood, taking and taking and leaving no prisoners. He has ripped through the shroud of his grief, only to find his own body trapped, tangled in the shreds. He jumps to his feet, barely noticing that Sirius does not flinch at his sudden reaction. Anger burns inside his bones, brighter than confusion and hurt, louder than You are here, you are here with me. “You’re not!” He tries to argue back against his own treacherous hope. “You’re not here, damn it! Leave me!” He shouts, tears gathering, anger and sadness and the weight of months without him. “What cruelty is this?” He asks sharply, stepping closer to where Sirius stands next to his window. “I’ve had enough of hurt, of grief! Stop renewing it, stop- just stop! Stop!” Remus leans forward, pointing a finger at him in a bewildered instinct. He reaches out, to shove at his chest perhaps, or just because he cannot help himself and then hesitates. It terrifies him, the thought and he doesn’t know if he could bear it. To reach out and come away empty-handed, fingertips brushing wide, bleak nothingness. He does it anyway. Sirius stumbles backwards into the wall, surprised and Remus stares.
“What the fuck,” he whispers, startled as it draws a short barking laugh out of Sirius, not fully the sound he remembers, but almost, almost, so very close to how it was. He doesn’t want to feel the relief flooding his very heart, too afraid it will twist and turn out to be a dream. This is not how life goes this is not how the stories go. “You brought me with you,” Sirius says as if in answer to his unasked question. “I don’t remember any of it, except that I was trapped, am trapped still, at least a part of me. I don’t know what happened. I was gone until I wasn’t.” He steps closer to Remus again, strangely quiet. His shoes don’t make a sound on the creaky wooden floor, his clothes don’t rustle, his breath doesn’t stir the air. Yet he takes Remus’s hand in his and there is the unmistakable flutter of a pulse against his skin, weak and slower than it had been during his life time, but Remus wants to bend down and kiss it, this hallowed beat of life, this precious proof of a living heart, of veins filled with blood. Overcome by the relief of having him, he does. No choir can sing of glory this bright, of joy this pure. They would choke on the beauty of it wrapping around their vocal chords. Sirius says nothing, simply moves to cradle Remus’s head in his cold hands. They stay like that, looking at each other and unmoving as a woven tapestry, as the black stone on Sirius’s grave.
“Something is still missing,” Sirius eventually says, drawing Remus even closer. His smell is different, he notices. He smells of- nothing, really. “I pushed,” he continues. “I pulled through every time you remembered me.” “I still don’t understand,” Remus says, trying not to keep more than the barest minimum of distance between them. “But I don’t care. I don’t care, God, Sirius!” He throws his arms around a body he had thought to be rotting beneath the earth. Is this a replica? He wonders for a moment. Is there still a Sirius with worms gnawing at his cold dead skin? Will there one day be a tree made from what is left of him? Growing from decay, life born out of death? He doesn’t care. “Sirius,” he says again and again. “Sirius.”
“Play it again for me,” Sirius asks with a smile, hoisting himself up on the kitchen table with practiced ease. The flat has been strangely cold for a week now, but Remus has resigned himself to wearing thicker jumpers and wooden socks to compensate. If it means Sirius stays with him, he won’t complain. He laughs and turns slightly where he is seated at the piano to better look at him. “I played it already earlier. How can you want to hear it again? I’m not as good as you are.” Sirius shrugs. “Were,” he corrects. “My fingers aren’t that practiced anymore. And besides, you make it your own. I’d listen to it until my ears bleed just to hear you play.” He smiles, softly, tenderly and Remus wants to kiss his freezing mouth. He plays, because of course he does. With Sirius’s eyes bright like this, even if the spark is dimmer than it used to be, with his face open and happy and living, how could he refuse him.
“Remus,” Sirius says when he is done, voice full of wonder, a call, a question, a beckoning. Once again, he gives in. Sirius glides back down from the table, an unnaturally smooth movement. He has to look up a little to look into his eyes, something Sirius had always delighted in, still delights in, he reminds himself. “I was- I think I was a part of it, Remus,” Sirius begins, absent-mindedly drawing maddening circles across Remus’s wrist. He knows it is best to let him continue on with the thought, to wait for an explanation instead of demanding one, but it is difficult not to open himself up like a butterfly emerging, a flower blooming, beneath Sirius’s touch. “You stitched me into the music. Your memory of me was woven so tightly into it, that I couldn’t let go. It wouldn’t let me.”
Remus’s breath catches, the air sticks to his throat, becomes like water in his lungs. He waits. “Do you see?” Sirius asks and Remus nods. It feels like something drawing to a close at last, dear passengers, we are now approaching the last stop on the line, the doors opening, another closing, the fresh smell of something new and hoped for. He raises his hand to Sirius’s face, pale and cold beneath his fingers, and traces the shape of his brow, of his cheekbones. “I love you,” he says, proclaims it quietly like a truth that deserves to be known. He has carried it within his right heart chamber for years, loved him in hushed adoration, silently, because he has never dared to open himself up for Sirius to see, bloody parts, red flesh and moving muscles. But Sirius has returned from the dead and there is nothing he fears any longer, except to lose him again. After everything, he is no longer afraid of the answer.
It comes, as unexpectedly as Sirius himself, cold cold hands in Remus’s hair and a smile that is warm enough to make him forget. “Remus. Remus, Remus.” Sirius laughs and it sounds fuller than anything else he has said in the past week. “I’ve loved you since you threw up on me in year six. You dragged me back into being with a piece of classical music.” He laughs again, giddy and relieved and Remus can’t help but grin in return, so wide it hurts and makes his lip catch on his crooked canine tooth. “I love you,” Sirius finally says, “of course, I do.” Remus, with his hand still cradling Sirius’s face, pulls him downward as gently as he can manage, before he kisses him, slowly, softly, a dream that might slip away, a mirage hostage to the winds, a hope, a wish. Sirius presses back and his mouth is as cold as the rest of him, but with his other hand against his chest, Remus can feel the quickening of his heart beat, a promise hammering against his rib cage, a miracle.
Sirius cools him, kiss by kiss, ice in his blood, and Remus doesn’t care. He loves him. He has loved him through life, in dreams, in death and beyond. It moves like music through his veins:
You live within me. Like a favourite poem, a cherished memory, the smell of home long thought forgotten. You’re in the fit of my most well-worn shoes. Your joy delights me. Your joy burns me. And then: I want this for as long as I can draw breath.
They sleep side by side, with the window wide open. “It makes me feel less… distant, to wake and have the open air right there. I don’t quite know what it is,” Sirius had said and they had compromised by piling two more blankets on the bed. With his mouth kissed raw and his body strangely pleasantly chilled by Sirius’s touch, Remus doesn’t fall asleep as quickly as he is used to. The implications of it all, of Sirius’s cold lips and soundless breath and smooth movements, frighten him a little. Remus’s teeth leave no bruises on his skin, they had discovered. “I think I’m still, you know, a ghost,” Sirius had admitted. “I’m here, I am, but there is a part of me missing. It broke off when I died and I left it buried there. I don’t think I can die again until all of me is here. I accidentally cut myself while sorting through our knives and I didn’t even bleed. I don’t know. Is that a problem? That that is potentially an outcome?” “No,” Remus had answered. “I have you with me. What more could I ask for? We’ll explain it to James, Regulus, and Peter next week and they’ll understand somehow. It will work.” He hadn’t lied, not exactly, but in this aftermath of joy, of finding each other and letting each other see, through this strange work of fate that Remus doesn’t dare to question lest it be reversed, his worries become clearer.
Will Sirius still sleep on his side of the bed, once Remus is gone, he wonders. Will he turn in the morning and reach for him blindly the way Remus had done countless times before, when they had first stopped climbing into each other’s beds in boarding school? Will he look up from his book to read him a passage only to remember, harshly, painfully, that Remus is no longer with him? Will he sit at his piano (now Remus’s piano) and watch dust collect on his keys? Sirius’s long life is Sirius’s alone and Remus doesn’t begrudge him a single second of it. But a part of him, buried deeply somewhere in between his lungs, twists at the thought of being forgotten, of being nothing but a build-up chapter, a few short pages in the story of someone he holds dearer than all treasures and riches and music. The darkness cradles them in a gentle quiet that softens the sharp edges of his thoughts. Remus watches Sirius breathe as time marches onward, heralded by the ticking of the clock on his bedside table. Mortality, mortality. The word feels heavy on his tongue. He had never thought it would become something to wish for.
In the morning, Sirius performs a rather raspy solo concert of God save the Queen, several lyrics now changed to praise their former English teacher Minerva McGonagall in all her glory, while Remus tries not to choke on his porridge with laughter. They had discovered within a day that Sirius doesn’t need to eat any longer. After they have finished washing up, Sirius presses a kiss to his cheek and points to their piano. “I have an idea,” he says and takes a second chair up to the instrument. Remus dries off his hands and walks over to join him. “I thought, we could try to play together. I don’t think I can do it by myself yet, thus the student surpasses the master and all that, but maybe, if we split it between us, I can at least try to get a feel for it again.” Remus smiles and settles down on one of the chairs, looking up expectantly. “Well,” he says, “what are you waiting for then?” They start out slowly, Remus taking over the part of the right hand and Sirius the left. They bump into each other and change the tempo involuntarily, laugh and accidentally play each other’s notes, but there is something new yet familiar to Sirius’s smile, that wasn’t there before. The warmth of it settles into the room, floods it with a brightness as quick as the notes they weave together with their hands, bar after bar, a spark in his eyes, his voice as full as the holiest of choirs, different, yet right somehow, Remus knows it.
They forgot to arrange the music correctly and Sirius has to try and turn the page as quickly as he is able. He hisses suddenly, the sound breaking sharply through La Campanella, Liszt’s master piece, their master piece and Remus stops abruptly. The echo of their last note still reverberates through the kitchen and he looks up to see Sirius cradling his hand. “Stupid sharp paper. I think I cut myself trying to turn the page.” Remus looks up and then brushes a stray strand of hair from his face, the skin warm against his knuckles. “I’m sorry! We should have arranged them beforehand.” He pauses when Sirius’s expression suddenly freezes and follows his gaze.
There, upon the blackened wood, a single drop of blood.