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Remus and Sirius have barely gotten settled after leaving Hogwarts when Dumbledore shows up at their flat, wearing a grave face. He apologizes for not sending notice, but they do not send him away. They usher him inside, offer him a seat, and begin to listen.
Later, Remus will tell Sirius that he had a bad feeling about what was happening, and he was not surprised by Dumbledore’s visit. Sirius will believe him for the wrong reasons.
“There is a war,” Albus tells them in his slow, even voice. “There is a war growing, and I need you.”
Sirius nods and Remus nods, and so it begins.
They are just kids when it starts. When it ends, they will be the worst kinds of adults—the ones that grew up by force, the ones that were not ready. Sirius will look back on their life and his heart will ache, because they could been everything and never got the chance to be.
At first, there is so much to fear that they cannot help but trust each other. They cannot give up on each other, or give up on James and Peter, because they need to keep their faith in something.
The world is getting scarier. Sirius feels as though the earth is opening up beneath him, and he clings to Remus to keep himself safe.
Dumbledore sends them to handle separate tasks. They ask why once, during one of Dumbledore’s visits to their home. The Order of the Phoenix, he tells them, has a limited supply, and he cannot send them out together. “I lose one of you, and I lose both of you.”
Sirius asks what that means, and Remus reaches over and takes his hand.
“Mr. Black,” Albus says with a sad little smile, “could you carry on if you thought you could have saved him?”
His breath catches in his throat, and he looks at the floor. No, he is saying, no, I never could.
Remus’ hand tightens around his.
Their flat is empty most of the time. When Remus has a mission, Sirius goes to James and Lily’s place. He does not like to be alone now, though he hates to admit it. Sirius does not know what Remus does when he is not home.
At the beginning, Sirius asks. He comes home and he is always relieved when he finds Remus there. “What did you do today?” The question is innocuous, but Remus tenses.
“Order stuff,” he says, and looks away. This happens every day they spend apart, and it does not take long for Sirius to stop asking.
Sirius has more tasks than Remus does, it seems, but rarely as long. Dumbledore sends him out on what feel like day trips, on errands rather than missions. He goes to the place to meet the wizard to get the thing to bring it back. His orders are secret, but rarely major. Once, Remus asks him where he’s going. Sirius tells him, because Sirius still trusts him, and that night he is caught. When he escapes a week later, there is no physical sign of damage, but his mind is a darker place than it ever had been before.
Remus is waiting by the door when he comes back, and he looks up at him with distrusting eyes.
“What’s our safeword?”
“Frostbite.” Sirius sounds exhausted, and he closes the door, and Remus’ suspicion turns to relief.
“Oh Merlin-” His words get caught in his throat, and Sirius sways where he stands. Remus catches him, and half-carries him into their bedroom, and sets him down on their bed. “Don’t do that,” he begs him, unbuttoning his shirt with deft fingers and kissing his neck, his jaw, his cheeks, his lips. “Don’t disappear, please promise me you’ll always come back.” Sirius closes his eyes.
“Promise,” he says, slowly bringing up a hand to curl around the back of Remus’ neck. “I promise, Moony.”
Sometimes they are alright. They are not always out, of course, but still they hoard the time they have together. They steal kisses and wrestle on the living room floor and manage to turn cooking dinner into far more of a team activity than it was ever meant to be.
Now and then, for little bits and pieces of their time, they forget.
Their transition from the peace of their tiny London apartment to the reality of the war around them is abrupt sometimes.
Remus usually tells him when a mission will take him days, and Sirius hates the waiting but he can handle it. It is worse, he finds out, to have no warning, because one day he does not tell him that he is leaving and then he does not come home, and Sirius loses his mind with worry. After a full night, he sends Dumbledore a letter.
I know I can’t ask for details about what my wolf is doing, but please tell me you know where he is?
When he does not get an answer, he sends another letter, and another, and another, and each time his owl flies back without any sort of reply. There’s no knocking at the windows, and Sirius is getting scared.
He does not know how to handle this. He’s barely twenty and he’s engrossed in this war, and he knows he’s one of the Good Guys but he’s losing any sense of what that means.
On the third day of waiting, an unfamiliar owl appears at the window. The parchment holds one word.
Soon.
Sirius knows Remus’ hand, and, though he will deny it, that single word on a scrap of paper brings him to his knees, and he’s relieved and overwhelmed and scared, still so intensely scared, and he clutches the slip of paper and lets himself break.
Sirius does not like to cry, but he is alone and his Remus is not dead, and he needs him to come home.
He does not leave the flat, because he cannot abide the idea that he will be out when Remus comes back. He is embarrassed to admit it, but the kitchen does not seem right without Moony, and so he orders takeout for a few days. When James and Lily get wind of what’s happening, they bring over food and keep him company, and try and talk to him like things are fine and Moony is just stepping out to have a smoke.
Sirius does not like when he is alone, but he also does not like when they are there, because he is not sure if he will kiss Remus or punch him when he comes in, and either way he’s not sure he wants James and Lily there to see the aftermath.
It is a week after the letter arrives that the door opens, and Sirius does not kiss him or punch him. He just looks at him, and his heart hurts. He’s not clearly injured, but Sirius knows there are more effective ways of torture than physical violence. He’s learned that lesson.
He is sitting down on the floor, leaning against the side of the couch, and he looks away from Remus.
“It’s frostbite,” Remus offers, and Sirius looks up. “Do I need to ask you one, too? Where we were the first time we kissed?”
“That’s a dumb choice,” Sirius answers automatically, “We were in the middle of the Great Hall. Plenty of people saw. Useless security question.”
Remus smiles anyway, and closes the door behind him. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Sirius hauls himself to his feet.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
They just look for a few moments, with Remus shifting awkwardly under Sirius’s unreadable stare.
“I don’t like when you’re gone.” When Sirius finds his voice, he’s a little embarrassed by how pitiful his words sound, and once he starts speaking, he can’t seem to stop. “You didn’t even tell me you were going, and then you didn’t come back, and I wrote to Dumbledore and-”
“You owled Dumbledore?” Remus cuts in sharply, and Sirius falters.
“I asked him if he knew where you were. Not to tell me or anything, just to make sure someone did, in case something didn’t work out how it was supposed to, or…” He looks down at the ground, and finishes quietly, “I needed to make sure you were somewhere that you’d expected, not that you’d just been taken or killed or- it doesn’t matter. He didn’t send an answer.”
Remus takes the tiniest of steps toward him, and when he speaks, his voice is so soft that Sirius can barely hear him. “People die in wars, Sirius.”
“Not you.” He means for his response to come out fierce. He really just sounds desperate. “Please, please, not you. Promise me, Moony, please-”
Remus closes the distance between them and wraps him up in his arms, but he does not promise anything.
Looking back, maybe that is when the first crack formed.
Remus grows distant, and Sirius rarely sees him. He has not yet lost the fear that he will not come home. Sirius has not yet given up on loving him, and he’s not sure he could even if he wanted to. The word ‘spy’ makes him cringe, but he is afraid. Remus is never home, and it no longer surprises him to not see him for weeks at a time. Sirius is never comfortable when he is gone. He does not like not knowing what he’s doing.
It’s been a year since they joined the Order, and Sirius thinks it may destroy them.
He does not think Remus would betray him, but he doesn’t smile anymore, and he is never there, and he rarely speaks when they’re together. Sirius does not want to believe what he’s seeing, but the world around him is growing paranoid, and maybe he can’t trust him anymore.
The prophecy terrifies Sirius.
“We need you to be our Secret-Keeper,” Lily begs him, clutching Harry to her chest, and Sirius swallows. He takes the oath.
And later, he meets them in their home, and he sits on their couch and holds Harry in his arms. “We should switch,” he says softly. “They’ll know it’s me, and they’ll find me and they’ll kill me and the secret will spread to everyone who knows it. They’re going to kill me anyway, we have to at least give the secret to someone they won’t suspect.”
And so they do, and it is okay for a while. Sirius is always afraid now. He trusts Peter, and he trusts Lily, and he trusts James. He is afraid of not trusting Remus, and there is one night in the house in Godric’s Hollow where Sirius breaks, and he sobs, and he does not tell James why.
Remus and Sirius fight together against giants once, the first time the two of them are sent out together. Dumbledore tells them he does not want to do it, but they have no choice. Sirius is on edge during the whole of the mission to the mountains, and Remus is unshakeable.
It makes Sirius nervous.
They win the battle, and for a time, it appears that the violence is declining, and maybe it will be okay.
But one day he returns to their flat, and it is not only empty of Remus, it is empty of everything Remus owns. It feels as though the wind’s been knocked out of him, and he stands in the doorway and looks. There’s a taped up box in the center of the room, and he goes to it and he kneels.
Gifts, the label reads, and when Sirius opens it up, everything he had ever given Remus was packed into this one box. There’s a tattered old novel at the bottom, a copy of one of the only classic books Sirius had read first.
He opens it, and looks at the cover page, and reads the familiar note he’d scrawled when he was fifteen and really, just a child.
Figured you’ve given me enough books to read that I should offer one back.
He does not cry. He will not cry.
He goes to Lily and James, and his voice is empty. “Remus is gone,” he says quietly, and their eyes go wide with panic.
“Are you sure Dumbledore didn't send him somewh-”
Sirius does not let James finish, and he stops him with a sharp shake of his head.
“He took everything. Emptied the flat of his things. He’s just- he’s left me.” Sirius has gone through a thousand scenarios of losing him, and not one has been has agonizing as this new reality where Remus has chosen to go.
Lily envelops him in a hug, and he cannot react.
It is a month before he corners Remus at the first Order meeting they both attend. Sirius keeps his eyes on him the whole time, and Remus never returns the gaze. Sirius catches him before he can run, wraps his fingers around his wrist, and pleads, “Tell me why.”
Remus doesn’t speak, and this is the first time that Sirius feels as though he’ll cry.
He may not speak at first, but he wraps his fingers around Sirius’, and maybe that is even better. Sirius does not know what to expect, and Remus says quietly, “Can I come home with you?”
Sirius cannot say yes quickly enough.
He means to have a big serious discussion; he really does. His intention is to sit them down and talk, and maybe they can fit their pieces back together. It does not take long for him to get distracted, because Remus has very nice hands, and those hands seem determined to remove Sirius’ clothing.
Slow kisses and careful touches follow, and when it is over they lie on their bed and hold each other, and Remus murmurs apologies into his skin.
“Please don’t go away again.” Sirius doesn’t mean to say it, but his tongue betrays him.
Remus looks at him a moment and says softly, “I won’t.”
But when Sirius wakes up, the bed is cold, and the flat is empty, and that is when he is sure that the Remus-shaped hole in his heart will never be filled.
By the night Lily and James die, he is so thoroughly broken that he can barely even feel the additional grief, and the only thing he can allow himself to think is find Remus, tell him the truth, find Remus.
He was wrong. He was wrong, it wasn’t Remus, it was never Remus, and it was Peter all along, and he and Remus will not survive this, but he has to tell him nonetheless.
He pushes his bike off on Hagrid, begs him to take Harry somewhere he will be safe, and runs. Everyone will blame him, he knows this. This war has already stolen Remus, and now Peter has stolen James and Lily, and it is only a matter of time before it steals his freedom or his life. At this point, which one it takes is irrelevant; Sirius just wants to find Remus somehow and tell him the truth before it is too late.
Sirius knows that he will be blamed for their deaths. He knows that he will be arrested, if not killed. And all he wants is to make sure that Remus knows he would never have betrayed him. That’s all he is asking for before he loses the only thing he has left.
Instead, he finds Peter. And he starts laughing. The world has gone mad, and he raises his wand to scream words he’d never thought he could mean. Avada Kadavra is on the tip of his tongue when suddenly there is no Peter, and the Muggles that were watching are now fallen.
He does not run. He allows himself to be caught, and arrested, and hauled into the Ministry.
He does not get a trial, and he spends his time in Azkaban carving Remus’ name into the walls.