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Chapter Text

November 1976

The day Sirius Black turned 17 was anything but celebratory. It was so awful, in fact, that Sirius often wondered later whether it had been one of the worst days of his life.

As he sat in the exam room at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, left to compose himself after the procedure was completed, it occurred to Sirius that perhaps it was mildly pathetic for him to be so put out about the whole ordeal. He’d made the appointment himself, after all – and months ago, at that. Nobody had forced him to do it, so why was he still sitting on the uncomfortable, lumpy bed, knees drawn up to his chest, crying like an inconsolable child?

A soft knock at the door startled him, and he looked up with puffy, red eyes as it was slowly pushed open to reveal a hesitant James Potter.

“Hey,” James said quietly. He hovered in the doorway, half inside the room and half outside.

Sirius swallowed. “H-hi,” he managed to eke out. Then, he dissolved into a fresh bout of tears. James quickly shut the door behind him and closed the distance between them in seconds, pulling a trembling Sirius into his arms.

“Shit, Sirius…” James whispered, tucking Sirius’s head into the crook of his shoulder and holding him tightly.

“It’s gone,” Sirius sobbed. He clung to James’s jumper like a lifeline, too distraught to worry about soaking it through with tears. “And I know I made the r-right choice… but it hurts, Jamie, and I only did it because of them.”

The venom in his voice made it sound like snarl, and he had never wanted to curse his awful, bigoted mother and father more. They were the reason he was here. They were the evil cretins from whom he wanted to protect a stranger he’d never met. Even now, with Sirius being seventeen and officially emancipated from his parents’ grasp, they continued to poison his happiness; them and their disdain for the idea of their oldest son ever being with someone who wasn’t a pureblood girl from an acceptable family. The Black family had been known to kill off “undesirables” who matched with their heirs, simply to make it easier to force them into an arranged marriage, and Orion and Walburga had never been the type to break the Black family mould, so there was no sense believing they might now.

In the eyes of Sirius’s parents, no one could possibly be more “undesirable” than a man matched with their eldest son and heir; and Sirius was certain it would be a man. He’d known that much for years now.

“Gods, Sirius, I’ll kill your parents one day. I swear to Merlin,” James said through gritted teeth, holding Sirius even tighter.

Sirius let out a sound that was half of a sob and half of a laugh. “Promise you’ll make it a Pensieve memory for me if you do?” he asked bitterly.

“Obviously,” James huffed, and it made Sirius feel ever so slightly better for a moment until a fresh wave of grief washed over him.

“He’ll never know how much I wanted him,” Sirius sniffled. “Even if I find him, I’ll never be able to prove that we’re soulmates without a mark. I- I don’t even have a picture. Just a drawing.”

James, ever the optimist, was annoyingly hopeful in his reply. “It’s still possible, though,” the younger boy said in a strained voice.

“Sure,” Sirius scoffed. “If you think actual miracles count as a possibility.”

James squeezed him tightly and sighed. “I do.” 

When Sirius finally calmed enough to walk out of the exam room with a shred of his dignity still intact, he allowed James to lead him to the Floos downstairs, listlessly following the familiar mop of messy, black hair. One handful of Floo powder later, the two of them landed in the fireplace in McGonagall’s office. Her sympathetic gaze was far too difficult for him to meet fully, and he kept his eyes down for the entire walk back to Gryffindor tower.

“Sirius…” James began when the dorm room door closed behind them. Peter was gone, probably with the chess club in the Great Hall.

But Sirius shook his head, and James instantly understood what it meant. I don’t want to talk right now. Instead of pushing the matter, James pulled on pyjamas while Sirius did the same, and climbed into Sirius’s bed beside him.

“J-James…” Sirius croaked, his voice going wobbly.

“I know,” James said, pulling Sirius into his arms for the second time that day. “I know.”

It might have been minutes later, or it may have been hours, but eventually Sirius fell asleep just like that – in the arms of his brother, mourning the loss of his soulmark, and the soulmate he would never meet.

Chapter Text

June 1984

“Sirius!”

James’s voice rang out through the halls of their flat as the Floo flared to life, and Sirius rolled his eyes as he heard James quite literally kick off his shoes, sending them hurtling into the wall.

“Sirius, you’re never going to believe who started on the forensics team today!” James panted, skidding to a halt against the kitchen island, eyes alight with excitement.

Sirius fidgeted with the pen he was holding and raised his eyebrow in a curious expression. “Merlin, James. The answer to that question had better be Merlin himself, otherwise your reaction is entirely disproportionate.”

“Nope. Not Merlin,” James said excitedly, beaming at Sirius as he plopped down in the chair across from him at their kitchen table. “Better.”

Sirius stared at his brother and best friend for a moment, feeling somewhat perplexed. He hadn’t seen James so worked up by the mere presence of another person since…

Oh, bloody hell.

“Oh, fuck…” Sirius muttered. “Don’t tell me…”

But James was already nodding excitedly. Sirius dropped his forehead to the table with a soft thunk as they both spoke the answer aloud – James practically singing, and Sirius in a resigned monotone voice reminiscent of Professor Binns.

“Lily Evans.”

“Right, you are, my good man!” James said dramatically, leaping up suddenly from the seat he’d only just taken and startling Sirius into sitting up and dropping his pen. “This is exactly the opportunity I’ve been waiting for!”

Sirius watched, torn between amusement and exasperation as James began to pace and gesticulate wildly, saying something annoyingly poetic about true love and soulmates and second chances. Sirius’s heart twinged a little at the mention of soulmates (and James’s dream that his mark would match Lily’s), but only for a moment. It had been more than seven years, now, since Sirius had his soulmark removed at St. Mungo’s, so their mention no longer stung quite as badly.

“Need I remind you, Jamie,” Sirius said when James finally paused to draw breath. “That Lily Evans has only ever, at best, begrudgingly tolerated you?”

James pouted so convincingly that Sirius nearly felt bad. He was thankful that years of living with James had made the other man unusually easy for him to read. “You’re not wrong…” James said hesitantly. “But it’s different now! We’re not in school anymore, you know? We work together, and I’m actually quite good at my job – not that you’d ever give me credit for it back when we were still partners-”

“I literally nominated you for Junior Auror of the year.”

“-but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I’m not planning on trying to woo her with grand romantic gestures this time,” James continued, ignoring Sirius’s interjection. “I’ll play it cool.”

At that, Sirius couldn’t help but snort, and he only rolled his eyes when James paused to glare at him. “Oh, come on, Jamie. You’ll play it cool? You? With Lily Evans? How exactly do you plan to do that, seeing as you look like you’re about to keel over from excitement?”

“Of course I’m excited, you prat!” James cried indignantly. “I’ve been holding all of this in since nine o-clock this morning! But my plan is just to… I dunno, try to get her to talk to me whenever we work together, I suppose? And eventually, hopefully, convince her to go out with me for drinks after work… or something like that.”

“I still think you’re doomed to a lifetime of unrequited love with that woman,” Sirius mused, shaking his head. “Although this is the first time I’ve regretted my decision to leave the Aurors after the end of the war, since now I won’t be able to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

“Oh, please,” James said doubtfully, finally calming down enough to take a seat again. “You’re happier running the shop than you ever would’ve been as an Auror, and you know it.”

And really, what James said was absolutely true. Sirius had spent four gruelling years as an Auror with James after leaving Hogwarts, helping both the Ministry and the Order of the Phoenix track down all of Voldemort’s horcruxes until he could finally be killed. Miraculously, Sirius’s own brother had showed up on his doorstep one night with information about the horcruxes, and it had been exactly the break they had needed. Sirius had been proud to fight alongside his brother and friends, but by the end of the war, he’d been exhausted and entirely too sick of fighting, so he’d quit the Aurors and (with some encouragement from his uncle Alphard) opened up a magical tattoo parlour in Diagon Alley.

Nowadays, the only fighting Sirius did was with James over what to make for dinner and who got to use the shower first in the mornings, and he was happy to keep it that way.

“That’s fair,” Sirius agreed after a moment. “Still wouldn’t mind watching Evans take you down a peg again, though.

“You say that now…” James said determinedly. “But just you wait, Sirius Black. I’ll have Evans agreeing to go to the pub with me before the end of August. Mark my words.”

Sirius raised his eyebrow and smirked. “You willing to put a few galleons on that?”

To his surprise, James immediately grinned and held out his hand for Sirius to shake. “Ten galleons says I can get her to agree to go out with me before then.”

Sirius stared at James, then at James’s hand, and rolled his eyes, clasping their hands together and giving a firm shake. “You’re on, Potter.”

August 1984

As it turned out, Sirius had to hand it to James (quite literally, he thought, as he coughed up ten galleons just before they walked through the pub's front door). It had been less than two months since Evans began working with the forensics team at the Ministry, and James had already managed to get her to agree to see him outside of work.

Granted, she did stipulate that both of them had to bring at least two friends, so it wasn’t quite the date James had been hoping for, but Sirius was impressed nonetheless. (Even if James had been paranoid enough to ensure that both himself and Peter swore on pain of death that they would be on their best behaviour.)

They were greeted by a small group of familiar faces sitting at a round table on the far side of the pub when the three of them entered. Lily had brought along Frank and Alice Longbottom, who had been in the year above them and the year below them, respectively, as well as Mary MacDonald, Marlene Mackinnon, and Dorcas Meadows from their own Hogwarts class.

It was like a strange little Gryffindor reunion, really, and Sirius quickly slipped on the metaphorical mask he tended to don whenever he was in public. It was far easier to mask than deal with confused looks whenever he did something a bit odd, and the people here were accustomed to the normal, easy-going Sirius Black they’d all known in school.

Besides, his masked personality was easier to socialise with.

“Oy!” Dorcas called, waving them over with a grin. “It’s good to see you lot. Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Don’t reckon I’ve seen you since the last Order meeting after the war, Dorcas,” James replied cheerily, pulling her into a friendly hug. It seemed to set off a chain reaction of smiles, greetings, and more hugs than Sirius was frankly comfortable with, but he went along with it as best he could. Evans, to his relief, merely patted his shoulder when he greeted her last.

“Sirius,” the redhead said kindly. “It’s good to see you.”

He briefly considered rolling his eyes playfully in response and teasing her about how traumatised their younger selves would be watching this scene unfold – one where Lily Evans and Sirius Black had friendly conversations and smiled at each other – but instead, he nodded and gave her a small smile. “Likewise, Evans.”

“So is this our whole party, then?” Peter asked as everyone got settled.

“Nearly,” Lily said, glancing at her watch. “I might have one more person coming – a friend of mine from where I grew up. We’ve known each other since we were children.”

“He’s a muggle?” James asked curiously. 

“No, no. Not a muggle,” Lily replied. “He’s a wizard, but he didn’t go to Hogwarts. He’s- Someone in his family suffers from chronic medical problems, so he was homeschooled. Made things easier on his parents.”

Sirius nodded as James and Peter hummed in understanding.

“What’s his name?” Peter asked curiously.

“Remus,” Lily said. “Remus Lupin.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you invited him, Lily!” Alice said happily, and Sirius couldn’t help but smile a bit in response to the excitement on the younger girl’s face. “He’s lovely!”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Mary huffed. “He’s always seemed a bit stiff to me… no offence Lils.”

Lily frowned and smacked her friend lightly on her arm. “Don’t say that! He’s just a bit awkward around new people, sometimes. Give him a bit to warm up and I’m sure you’ll be just fi-” She cut herself off when her gaze landed on something near the door, and she stood up to wave over a man around their age with wavy, sandy blond hair. The man smiled somewhat awkwardly and pushed his way through the crowd.

“Remus!” Lily said happily, pulling him into a hug, which he seemed happy to return. “I’m so glad you could make it!”

Sirius merely observed as the man chuckled and shook his head fondly. “Well, I could hardly forgive myself if I said no, could I? You’ve been so busy lately that I’m surprised you’ve got any time left for me!”

Lily just laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, piss off, Remus. We see each other literally every day. But anyways, introductions… You know Alice and Frank, and you might remember Mary, Marlene, and Dorcas…”

Remus nodded along as each person gave him a small wave when Lily pointed them out.

“And then here we’ve got Peter Pettigrew…”

Peter shook Remus’s hand and mumbled a “Hey, mate.”

“James Potter…”

At the mention of James’s name, Remus seemed to focus all of his attention on the man who had undoubtedly been described by Lily in stories for years as the bane of her existence. He gave James a calculating look, then shook his hand.

“And this is Sirius Black.”

Remus’s eyes lingered on James for a moment longer, but when they finally snapped over to meet Sirius’s gaze, Sirius felt oddly fascinated. The other man’s hazel eyes were tired, but there was a quiet warmth to his gaze that made Sirius feel endlessly curious.

“Hi,” Remus said, his voice sounding rather soft in the noise of the pub.

Sirius cocked his head to the side curiously and shook his hand. “Good to meet you, Remus.” They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, still seemingly sizing each other up, before being jolted out of the moment by the noisy sound of a chair being dragged across the floor.

“Here, have a seat, mate,” James said, sliding a seat in between Sirius and Lily for Remus to sit in.

Remus nodded his thanks and sat down, only glancing quickly at Sirius before turning to chat with Lily for a few minutes as everyone fell into their own conversations.

Until, that is, Marlene interjected with a question.

“Not that I’m not thrilled about this little reunion…” she began. “But what exactly brought this on? Is it time for our quarter life crises already, where we reevaluate all of our life choices and try to reconnect with old friends?”

“Nothing like that, Marls. Nobody is having a quarter life crisis,” James said, grinning widely.

“Speak for yourself,” Sirius mumbled jokingly, more to himself than to anyone else, but he thought he heard something rather like a snort from Remus. The sound had the corners of his mouth tugging up just a bit.

“You see,” James continued dramatically. “I’ve been trying to persuade our dear Lily to grab a drink with me after work for the last two months, and she finally agreed, but only if we made it a group affair.”

“So we’re all here just so you idiots could go on a bloody date?” Marlene asked, her eyes lighting up with gleeful mischief.

“So it would seem,” James replied, nodding gravely.

At the same time, Lily loudly protested, “It’s not a date!” She glared at James, who simply smiled and shrugged in return while the rest of them looked on with amusement.

“One of these days, Evans, I’m going to convince you to give me a proper chance,” James said, projecting a confidence Sirius knew was mostly fake.

“Not likely, Potter,” Lily practically drawled. “I hardly even like you in the first place.”

James opened his mouth and began to say something witty as the others began to return to their own conversations, but Sirius was distracted when he heard Remus snort again at his side.

“Right,” Remus said, teasing and soft, elbowing Lily. “That definitely explains why I’ve known precisely what ‘James sodding Potter’ looks like since we were eleven. And why I’ve had to listen to you talk about him constantly for the last two months.”

His voice was only loud enough for Lily and Sirius to hear, but Lily began to turn bright red, and Sirius couldn’t help it. He choked on the sip of whisky he’d just taken when a laugh bubbled up in his throat. Lily just glared at both of them, and when she turned away, Sirius’s shoulders began to shake with silent laughter again.

“If it’s any consolation, he never shuts up about her, either,” Sirius chuckled lowly, leaning slightly closer to Remus conspiratorially. The corners of the other man’s mouth twitched into an amused smile. “Pete and I implemented the Lily Limit halfway through fourth year. James was only allowed to bring her up unprompted three times a day. After the third time, he had to give us each a galleon whenever he did. It’s how I made most of my spending money for the last three and a half years of school.”

“Christ,” Remus huffed. “And here I was thinking she was bad with all of the exaggerated stories she told me.”

“Oh, I’m sure she had stories, but I doubt they were exaggerated. He acted like a right tit, trying to get her attention,” Sirius said gravely, now fully ignoring the rest of the table and turning his attention to the man beside him.

“So the sonnets he supposedly sang while following her around on his broomstick…?” Remus asked doubtfully.

“True story.”

“The enchanted singing balloons?”

“Sixth year.”

“Three hundred roses for Valentine’s day in seventh year?”

“Merlin, have mercy. I nearly forgot about that one. The whole Gryffindor dormitory smelled like cheap perfume for days afterward.”

Remus stared at him, looking somewhat dumbfounded, then let out a low whistle and took a sip of his drink. “That’s…” he began, but he trailed off, apparently at a loss for words.

“Completely barmy?” Sirius prompted with a sly grin.

Remus turned wide eyes on him and nodded.

“Remus, you have no idea,” Sirius laughed, inordinately pleased when Remus smiled in return. “It’s baffling that he got her to agree to this little get-together, honestly, after all the shit he pulled when we were at school.”

“It’s not so baffling if you’ve had to listen to her complain about how unfair it is that he manages to pull off his ‘somehow artfully disastrous hair’ year after year,” Remus replied. They both glanced at the redhead, who was now halfheartedly glaring at James while he beamed at her from across the table. “She’s had a bit of a soft spot for him ever since sixth year when he punched Severus. I saw this coming the moment she marched into our flat and told me they’d be working together.”

Sirius perked up curiously at that. “You two live together?”

“For the last couple of years, yeah.”

Sirius observed the way Remus looked at her again with a fond smile and suddenly felt an odd sensation in his stomach as something he hadn’t considered before occurred to him. “But you’re not…” he began to ask, but Remus cut him off with a yelp and some very adamant head shaking.

“God, no,” Remus said quickly, suddenly looking horrified. “I mean, she’s lovely, and I absolutely adore her, but she’s also like a pain-in-the-arse sister sometimes and I’m incredibly homosexual so… Merlin, no.”

Sirius barked out a laugh at Remus’s phrasing, the odd feeling in his gut dissipating instantly. “You’re gay?” he queried.

“Very,” Remus responded simply. He glanced curiously at Sirius. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”

Sirius had to bite back another laugh. “I’d be quite the hypocrite if it did.”

Remus frowned for a moment as Sirius’s words sank in, then his eyes widened with realisation. The look of surprise on the other man’s face was almost… well, cute.

“Oh,” said Remus dumbly.

Sirius smiled and shrugged. “Yes, oh,” he confirmed.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and Sirius had to fight to maintain his mask so he wouldn’t begin openly ogling the kind, witty man who was surely destined to become a fixture in his life if  James and Lily ever got their shit together and began dating. Ogling would lead to getting flustered, which would lead to rambling, which usually led to whoever Sirius was talking to making a quick, awkward exit to escape. The thought alone was always a stressful one, but for some reason, the thought of Remus finding him irritating was exceptionally awful.

He blinked and tried to calm his somewhat-spiralling mind and determine a safe, normal topic towards which he could steer the conversation. We were talking about being gay, because Remus lives with Lily but isn’t interested in her, and we were talking about Lily because she works with James. Work! Work is a safe topic.

“So Evans and James both work for the DMLE,” Sirius blurted unceremoniously. “What is it you do?”

Apparently, Sirius’s assumption that work would be a safe topic was somewhat off the mark, because Remus’s face instantly turned into a grimace.

“I’m, er… I’m between jobs, at the moment. I was working for a private international portkey office for a few months, but they weren’t terribly fond of me taking several days off every month for my… for my mother’s condition. So I’m looking for something new.” Remus averted his eyes as he spoke and rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, and Sirius frowned.

“Well that’s a load of hippogriff shit,” Sirius said, processing Remus’s words. “It’s not like you’ve got any control over the whole thing. They ought to be a bit more understanding, if you ask me.”

Remus only shrugged. “As much as I’d like to agree with you, there’s not much I can do about it now, so there’s no sense dwelling on it,” he said reasonably. Sirius was tempted to say that there was, in fact, some sense in dwelling on it, because he thought it was absurd that Remus had lost a job because of something wholly out of his own control, but he bit his tongue. “But that’s enough of that,” Remus said with a wave of his hand. “What do you do?”

Instantly, Sirius lit up, mostly forgetting about his righteous anger over Remus’s work situation. He grinned as he told a seemingly genuinely interested Remus about the tattoo shop he co-owned with Alphard in Diagon Alley. He explained that Alphard handled the financial side of things, while Sirius was the sole artist (though they were hoping to hire one or two more in the next year or so), and that Sirius had wanted to work with tattoos since his sixth year at Hogwarts.

By the time he was finished with what felt like the most basic explanation (which Sirius knew probably meant it was a bit excessive in the eyes of anyone else), several minutes had gone by, and the others had left their small table for either the jukebox or the bar for refills. Sirius didn’t think he’d been rambling, but he knew he’d probably been cutting it close.

“Sorry,” he said awkwardly, a slight grimace flashing across his features. “That was probably a much longer explanation than you were really looking for…”

“Oh, not at all!” Remus said quickly and adamantly, and to Sirius’s surprise, he seemed to mean it. “It’s a good story, honestly, and sometimes I can be a bit… reserved… around new people, so I’m perfectly content to let someone else talk while I listen.”

Before Sirius could think of a reply, the others returned. James took his seat beside Sirius and nudged him, raising an eyebrow and glancing between Sirius and Remus with a questioning look on his face. His point was quite clear. Looking awfully chummy with the handsome stranger, aren’t you?

Sirius just huffed and rolled his eyes.

Nevertheless, his thoughts still lingered on Remus even after he and James returned to their flat that night.

James, of course, noticed.

“You seemed to get on well with that Lupin bloke,” James said casually while Sirius made himself his nightly cup of herbal tea.

“Remus?” Sirius asked. “Yeah, I suppose.”

James gave him a calculating look and took a seat at their kitchen table, watching Sirius add a splash of milk to his cup. “You suppose? Sirius, you were so focused on talking to him that for a few minutes I was fairly certain you’d forgotten the rest of us even existed.”

“Well that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Remus,” Sirius said defensively, even though he knew deep down that at least some of it was definitely because of Remus himself. “You know how I can be sometimes, getting carried away and talking for longer than I mean to.”

James, to his credit, had the good sense to look somewhat guilty. “Is that what happened, then?”

Sirius sat down and frowned at his cup. “He asked me about work,” he replied.

“Ah,” James said in quiet understanding. He knew better than anyone how quickly Sirius could get caught up in talking about the shop, as well as how self-conscious Sirius was about it.

“You know the strange thing about it, though?” Sirius asked, still frowning. “He didn’t seem to mind. Remus, I mean. When I realised I’d probably given him a much lengthier explanation than he really wanted, he just brushed it off. Said he preferred listening anyways.”

James frowned at him. “I’m sorry, Sirius, I’m not sure I understand why that’s strange…”

Sirius bit his lip and tried to find the right words to explain it. “I think…” he began before pausing for another moment. “I think I’m just used to people being annoyed when I do that.”

“So you were surprised when he was alright with it, instead of being annoyed with you?”

Sirius just nodded in response.

“I didn’t mean to make you overthink by teasing you about him,” James said gently after a long pause. “I probably should have thought that through a bit more… I just… you seemed comfortable around him, and I know he likes men, because Lily told me so, and…” He sighed and held out his hand, palm up, on the table where Sirius could see it, and after a beat, Sirius took it. “You know I can’t help but hope when someone seems to make you happy.”

Sirius smiled sadly at the place where their hands linked together and cleared his throat. “I know,” he said quietly. “But I knew what I was doing when I got rid of my soulmark, James. I knew I was more or less giving up any future relationships. Even if I don’t have a way of matching with my soulmate, everyone else does, and I couldn’t bear to steal someone else’s.”

“But-”

“James, it’s really alright,” Sirius said, giving James’s hand a squeeze. “Besides, I talked with Remus for one night. It’s not as though that means anything.”

James just frowned and squeezed back, while Sirius ignored the part of his mind that desperately wished his connection with the tall, witty boy with hazel eyes could have meant something.

After all, there was no point wishing for something he would never have.

On the following Thursday – exactly one week after the night Sirius met Remus – James and Lily organised another pub night at the same location; only this time, their numbers had dwindled, and the only attendees were James, Lily, Sirius, Mary, and (to Sirius’s secret delight) Remus.

It was a much more comfortable atmosphere with fewer people and conversations to keep track of, and Sirius found himself feeling far more at ease. He was still masking to prevent himself from rambling or making odd movements when he fidgeted, but the prospect of accidentally slipping up now felt like a minor inconvenience instead of a catastrophe

Remus, too, seemed to be feeling a bit less withdrawn that evening. He and James had a spirited debate over the merits of the Appleby Arrows versus the Falmouth Falcons, which eventually led to all five of them arguing on behalf of their favourite Quidditch team. Lily, who (like Remus) supported the Falcons, mostly nodded along with her old friend whenever he made a particularly strong point, but the conversation flowed as easily as the drinks, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

Eventually, Sirius ended up once again alone with Remus Lupin at their table, as Mary had left early on account of her work schedule, and James and Lily were buying another round at the bar.

“Looks like this might end up being a weekly get-together,” Remus mused while both of them closely observed the interactions between James and Lily from across the room.

Sirius glanced at him curiously. “You think so?”

“Well…” Remus began. “Those two-” He gestured towards James and Lily. “-aren’t going to be figuring anything out anytime soon, but they obviously fancy each other. So they’ll likely continue using us as buffers in order to hang out outside of work, don’t you think?”

“You really think Evans fancies James?” Sirius asked doubtfully, observing the way the former seemed to be trapped in a perpetual eye roll loop whenever she was talking to the latter.

“No, because thinking it would imply that there is potential to be wrong. I don’t think she fancies him; I know she does,” Remus replied simply.

Sirius stared at him in open disbelief, now. “Oh, come on, Remus. If they fancied each other, she would’ve just accepted his invitation on a proper date.”

“She will, eventually,” Remus responded. “Just not yet.” Remus turned to Sirius and seemed to clock his somewhat confused expression, because Remus’s lips quirked into a smile and he shrugged lightly. “Really, I think she’s a bit in denial, at the moment. She likes Potter now, but hating him was practically part of her identity back when you were all in school. I imagine it’s quite jarring to go from one extreme to the other, so… here we are.”

Sirius frowned slightly, still not entirely following Remus’s logic. If Evans really fancied James, what was the point in dragging the rest of them out for pub nights when she could instead enjoy a real date? Then again, Sirius had never really dated before – despite the rumours that somehow got started during sixth year about him being the Casanova of Gryffindor tower – so, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that he didn’t understand.

“I’m just glad you’re here, honestly,” Sirius said instead of continuing to question Remus’s logic. “Gives me someone to actually talk to.”

Remus smiled a full, genuine smile in response to Sirius’s words, and Sirius realised that he hadn’t seen Remus smile like that during the entirety of the previous week’s pub night. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he grinned like this, and his hazel eyes seemed to shine with more gold than green.

Sirius wanted to make Remus smile like that all the time.

“Likewise, Sirius,” Remus said, still grinning. “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

Chapter Text

October 1984

By the beginning of October, it was starting to become clear that Remus had been absolutely right. James and Lily fancied each other, but weren’t anywhere close to figuring things out, and the rest of them were simply along for the ride. Every Thursday night, some variation of their little group gathered at the pub to have a drink and catch up. James, Sirius, and Lily were there every week, and the rest came whenever they could. Alice and Frank were often scarce, with Neville at home and only two years old, but Mary, Marlene, Dorcas, and Peter were there most weeks.

Remus was nearly always there, too, except once a month or so when his mother’s health had taken a downward turn.

Over time, Sirius came to learn quite a bit about Remus Lupin by quietly observing the other man. He was a bit on the shy side, particularly when they were joined by someone unfamiliar (like the night Andromeda and Ted Tonks made an appearance). Still, he usually seemed to have something witty to contribute to Sirius and Lily, whom he nearly always sat between, and he got along well with everyone in his own passive way.

Remus could also be quite evasive when he wanted to be, and he often was when someone asked about his job. Sirius didn’t miss the fact that he was between jobs relatively frequently, though he could never quite bring himself to ask Remus about it. He suspected it had something to do with Remus’s mother’s condition, but that was another thing Remus was evasive about.

Then, of course, there were the little things Sirius noticed about the other man… like the way Remus’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed, and the way Remus tended to rub a particular spot on his right arm when he was uncomfortable. He noticed that whenever Remus returned to pub night after missing the week prior, he always looked a bit worse for the wear, with dark circles beneath his eyes and an uncharacteristic slouch in his posture.

Sirius couldn’t help but worry about Remus, who was quickly becoming one of his closest friends, whenever he was gone. Something just felt… off… about the whole situation, and the mystery of it all only stressed Sirius even more.

Still, he never broached the topic – partially out of respect for his friend’s privacy, but mostly because he was afraid Remus might be upset with him, and the thought of anyone being upset with him (especially Remus) was distressing. Besides, a crowded pub wasn’t exactly an ideal location for asking a new friend why they looked like death warmed over once every month, and until nearly two months into their pub night endeavour, they’d never met up anywhere else.

The first time they did was at a housewarming party for Marlene and Dorcas in October, and by the time James managed to drag Sirius out of their flat and apparate them over, Sirius’s social battery was already nearly drained. They’d only just had pub night the evening prior, and he’d had several chatty customers at the shop today. Honestly, he would rather have curled up on the couch and listened to the wireless all evening, but James was insistent, and try as he might, Sirius could never quite bring himself to turn away from a chance to see Remus.

Unfortunately, when they arrived, Remus Lupin was nowhere to be found, and James quickly became preoccupied with his noble pursuit of true love, leaving Sirius to fend for himself in a sea of drunk witches and wizards in their mid-twenties.

Not his favourite environment, to say the least.

“Sirius Black!” someone called excitedly, and Sirius turned just in time to see Emmeline Vance, a Ravenclaw from the year below him, stumbling his way. He acted on instinct, reaching out to catch her before she went crashing to the ground. Entirely unphased, she merely bounced right back up and gave him a much too enthusiastic hug.

“Er, hello Emmeline…” he said awkwardly, giving her a pat on the back.

“It’s been ages,” she said with a pout, which Sirius found somewhat baffling, because they’d never been particularly close in the first place. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since Hogwarts! You and Potter threw that party for all of the quidditch players, remember?”

Sirius blinked at her. “I’m fairly certain we did that several times…”

“No, this one was special!” Emmeline insisted. “We played spin the bottle!”

Oh, Sirius thought, his memory finally slotting into place. It had been his seventh year, just before the end of second term, and he’d drunkenly agreed to a game of spin the bottle, which had resulted in him kissing none other than Emmeline Vance, who now stood before him, batting her eyelashes dramatically and smiling up at him. Bugger.

“Right, that one,” Sirius said absently. His anxiety began to simmer in his gut, and he desperately wished James would swoop in and rescue him, but James seemed to be far too busy talking to Lily across the room.

“You know, I almost didn’t come tonight…” Emmeline said, leaning in conspiratorially.

Shame you changed your mind, Sirius wanted to say. Instead, he took a small step back to reclaim some of his personal space and nodded dismissively.

“But then Alice said you might be here and I just had to-”

She was cut off mid-sentence by the sound of excited, squealed greetings from elsewhere in the house, and while she was distracted, Sirius took his chance and slipped away into the crowd. Merlin, how did Marlene and Dorcas even know this many people?

Slowly, he weaved his way through throngs of people, making sure to pop by James to let him know that he was going to head home. By the time he reached the front door, his anxiety was reaching new heights, and he could feel his pulse quickening beneath his skin, beads of sweat forming on his brow. Merlin, he needed to get out of here.

It was with a small shout of triumph that Sirius finally yanked open the front door and stepped out onto the porch, away from the noise of the party, which faded the moment he shut the door behind him. Relieved, he closed his eyes and simply breathed in the fresh evening air, allowing it to seep into his lungs and calm the queasiness in his gut. It felt good to be able to relax a bit.

His relaxation was short-lived, however, because no sooner had his heart rate finally begun to go down than he heard someone calling his name.

“Sirius?”

Sirius jumped and opened his eyes, hand instinctively reaching for his wand – a lingering reflex from the time he’d spent fighting in the war. But the person in front of him was no Death Eater.

Instead, Sirius found himself staring at a rather tired-looking Remus, who was frowning back at him with concern.

“Oh,” Sirius said, suddenly feeling embarrassed. He lowered his hand away from the pocket where he kept his wand and shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry… I didn’t realise it was you.”

“It’s alright,” Remus replied, looking a bit more at ease now that Sirius wasn’t poised to curse him. “Old habits die hard, I know.”

The question slipped out of Sirius before he could stop it. “You fought in the war?”

The moment the words left his mouth, Sirius wished he could take them back. After Voldemort’s defeat, an unspoken sort of pact had been made between everyone who had fought against him, and hardly anyone ever brought up the dark years of the war anymore. Sirius himself never talked about it with anyone other than James, Peter, and sometimes Regulus. He had no idea why he had suddenly decided to ask a man he only somewhat knew about his involvement.

If Remus was upset by Sirius’s question, though, he didn’t show it. He simply huffed out a self-deprecating laugh and shrugged. “Sort of… I did some reconnaissance work for the Order of the Phoenix. Bit of a long story.”

“Ah,” Sirius said awkwardly, recognizing the implied and that’s all I’m going to say about that in Remus’s tone, after hearing it from so many others before. “I was an Auror for a while, until the end.”

Remus nodded. “That explains the reflexes, I suppose.”

And really, Remus was half-right. Sirius did have quick reflexes from his time as an Auror, but he normally wasn’t this jumpy. He’d only been so quick to startle tonight because-

“I don’t like big parties.”

Sirius had to stifle a groan when he realised that he’d gone and blurted out something he hadn’t intended to. It happened often when he was overwhelmed, and now it was happening in front of Remus, which somehow made it even more embarrassing than normal.

“I mean…” Sirius continued, apparently unable to stop. “Sometimes I do like them, but only when I’m feeling social. I’m a bit drained after the pub, last night, so coming here tonight was probably a mistake, but James was such a little prat about it and he kept going on and on about Lily and-” He paused, grimaced, and sat down defeatedly on the swinging bench on the porch. “Sorry. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this.”

Remus considered him for a moment, and Sirius was certain that the other man would probably head inside, leaving Sirius to fret over his embarrassment in peace. Instead, he joined Sirius on the bench and sighed.

“I don’t like them either,” Remus said after a moment. “Honestly, once I saw how many people were inside, I planned on just dropping my housewarming gift inside heading back home.” He gestured towards a small, wrapped package that had been placed just beside the door. “It’s a set of tea towels that yell at you if you don’t do the washing after dinner.”

Sirius snorted, pleased when Remus also chuckled beside him. “Clever,” Sirius laughed. “James and I got them self-folding linens, although now I feel we should have been more creative. Then again, I also told Dorcas I’d give her a tattoo at half-price, so maybe the linens were enough…”

“How have things been at the shop lately?” Remus asked after a brief pause. He always asked Sirius how work was going, and every time it made Sirius feel strangely warm inside.

“Not bad,” he replied honestly. “Had a few chatty customers today, though, and really, Remus, who in their right mind would launch into a detailed explanation of their sex life in the middle of a three hour session! I’m telling you, this woman was barmy.”

Remus laughed, and Sirius took that as the permission he needed to launch into the story about the witch who had come into the shop for a gorgeous Hungarian Horntail tattoo that snaked around and up the entire length of her arm, only to spend the entire session complaining about her boyfriend’s lack of “gumption” in the bedroom. By the end, both Remus and Sirius were laughing so hard they could barely breathe, and the conversation was flowing so effortlessly that Sirius didn’t even hesitate to answer when Remus asked him about the best tattoo Sirius felt he’d ever designed.

And so, Sirius talked and talked, slowly forgetting all about the anxiety that had plagued him during the party and slipping deeper into talking about the art he so loved creating. Several people walked past them on their way out the door, but Sirius hardly noticed.

Eventually, though, as he always did, he realised what he was doing and quickly paused in the middle of a sentence.

“Shit,” he said softly after a beat. “I’m sorry, Remus. I’m rambling, aren’t I?” Shame coursed through his veins like a sedative, and his excitement faded into familiar embarrassment.

“Maybe a bit…” Remus replied, and Sirius was about to open his mouth to apologise again when Remus continued. “But I don’t mind. Truly, I don’t. I like listening to you talk about the things that matter to you.”

The words, spoken softly and genuinely, had an immediate effect on Sirius, who felt a rising heat in his cheeks and couldn’t contain the small smile that replaced his frown. The look in Remus’s eyes, when Sirius met them, was so genuine that Sirius thought he might melt right through the swinging bench and into a happy puddle on the ground.

“That’s really sweet of you to say…” Sirius said shyly, biting his lower lip somewhat anxiously as his mind wandered back to all of the other ways people had responded to his rambling before. No one (except perhaps James) had ever been quite so kind.

“I mean it, Sirius. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” Remus said kindly.

Sirius sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I just… I dunno. I’m not always the best at reading social cues. Sometimes I don’t realise when people want me to stop talking, but I think everyone around me is just too nice to tell me to shut up.”

“I’m pretty sure James told you to shut up at least a dozen times last night at the pub,” Remus said teasingly. Sirius’s lips twitched at the corners and curled into a hint of a smile.

“True, but he’s always doing it as a joke, you know?” Sirius replied. He stared at his hands and shrugged. “I just worry that I’m… a lot, I suppose.”

Remus was silent for a long time, and Sirius began to panic. Had he said something wrong? Was Remus not the sort of friend Sirius could open up to like this? Before his thoughts could spiral too badly, however, Remus’s calm voice cut through them.

“I don’t think being passionate about the things you like is something to be ashamed of,” Remus said carefully.

Sirius looked up at him in surprise and found Remus staring off into the distance.

“I worry about the opposite, sometimes, you know – that I’m not present enough when I’m around other people, like when we all get together at the pub. I didn’t exactly spend a whole lot of time around anyone who wasn’t my parents and Lily, growing up…”

Sirius frowned and shook his head. “You always seem present when you’re talking to me,” he said in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. He did his best to ignore the curiosity that had him itching to ask why exactly Remus had seemingly not been able to socialise with anyone, when it was supposedly his mother who was always ill.

To Sirius’s surprise, Remus seemed to find his statement rather funny, because he let out a soft laugh and shook his head. Sirius thought he looked almost… fond.

“Well, yes…” Remus admitted. “But you’re…” He paused to clear his throat, running a hand through his hair in a gesture James sometimes did when he was nervous. Sirius wondered if perhaps Remus was prone to doing the same as he waited with baited breath for the other man to reveal the end of his sentence. “You’re, y’know, you.”

For a moment, Sirius was silent while he attempted to make sense of Remus’s words, but a nervous laugh quickly bubbled out of him, and Remus smiled sheepishly. “What in Merlin’s name is that supposed to mean?” Sirius asked, still laughing.

Now, Remus was beginning to laugh as well. “I don’t know!” he said, sounding a tad defensive, but mostly amused. “You’re just easy to talk to!”

Sirius snorted. “Well that’s not something I hear every day. Or ever, frankly.”

“But you are!” Remus protested, grinning broadly now. “You don’t ask me questions about my past, even though I know you want to pry. And you don’t think I’m odd because I was homeschooled. You’re just easier to be around than most people… for me, at least.”

“Oh, I think you’re plenty odd, Remus Lupin,” Sirius teased. “But it has nothing to do with you being homeschooled.”

Sirius was so thrilled when Remus let out a sharp bark of laughter that he had to hold himself back from bouncing with delight. He couldn’t have held in his smile, though, even if his life had depended on it.

“It’s the sweaters with the elbow patches, isn’t it?” Remus joked in return, gesturing towards his elbows which were, in fact, covered by patches. “Lily says I dress like a muggle university professor.”

Sirius grinned and let his gaze travel down the rest of Remus’s body. He was tall – taller than Sirius, certainly – and perhaps a bit gangly, but he always seemed to be wearing khaki trousers and sensible sweaters. Really, he did often look something like a muggle professor.

Wherever he got his stylistic inspiration from, though, Remus was certainly pulling it off. He always looked quite cute, bordering on downright fit, and the realisation had Sirius feeling a bit warm in the face.

“Maybe a bit,” he replied, still smiling as he locked eyes with the man beside him.

Remus laughed, and Sirius realised that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the crinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes… the dimples on his somewhat reddened cheeks.

Merlin, Remus was pretty.

A comfortable silence descended upon them, and Sirius finally managed to focus his gaze on the flickering light post across the street as he willed his fluttering heart to calm down. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was about Remus that had him feeling like a lost puzzle piece finally slotting into place, but whatever it was, he knew he didn’t want to lose it.

“You’re easy to talk to, too, you know…” Sirius found himself saying softly. It was yet another instance where the thought on his mind came tumbling out of his mouth unintentionally, only this time he couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed by it. It was the truth, after all, and Remus’s look of surprise made his chest ache, somewhat.

“Really?” Remus asked. His eyes were narrowed in confusion, head cocked to the side, and for a moment Sirius couldn’t fathom anyone not finding Remus easy to talk to. He was just so attentive, and even Sirius (though sometimes oblivious to more subtle social signals) could practically feel the genuine care radiating off of the other man.

So, Sirius nodded adamantly. “You let me ramble on for ages and never get irritated, and it seems like you genuinely care, so… yeah… really.”

Remus’s gaze as Sirius spoke was calculating, marred by a small frown, but only for a moment. It quickly smoothed out into an easy smile.

“Well… good,” Remus said quietly. Both of their smiles got ever so slightly wider. “Because I think I quite like listening to you.”

The next time Sirius saw Remus was during a very literal run-in on the streets of Diagon Alley. Really, he should have known better than to allow himself to be so distracted while he walked in the crowded wizarding district, but then again, he’d never been very good at controlling his mind’s wild thought process. As a result, he almost failed to realise that he was about to run right into someone leaving the apothecary a few shops down from the tattoo parlour.

“Oh, sorry!” Sirius exclaimed, stopping short just before he went barreling into the other person.

At the same time, a familiar voice called out, “Whoa, there. Easy mate…”

Sirius looked up in surprise and couldn’t help but smile when he realised exactly who it was he had just stumbled into. “Remus!” he exclaimed.

Remus glanced up with wide eyes, clutching the bag from the apothecary close to his chest. He looked unusually tired, and Sirius remembered suddenly that Remus hadn’t been at pub night two days prior. “Oh, hello Sirius!” the other man replied. “I suppose I shouldn’t be very surprised to see you, should I?”

Sirius chuckled and shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Probably not. The shop is just down there.” He nodded his head in the direction of the tattoo shop, then looked back at Remus. “Do you like to brew potions?” he asked, gesturing towards the apothecary bag.

To his surprise, Remus huffed out a short, somewhat incredulous laugh and shook his head adamantly. “Merlin, no,” Remus replied tiredly. “I’m rubbish at potions, actually. Always have been. I was just popping in to pick up some dittany.”

“I was never all that great at potions, myself,” Sirius said, hoping to ease some of Remus’s apparent discomfort. “My brother is, though – got all sorts of special attention from the potions master at Hogwarts. Slughorn always wanted Reg to do a potions apprenticeship when he finished school… but he’s in a healer training program now. He wants to be a paediatric healer. Honestly, I think he’d love to work at Hogwarts when he finishes his training, but I doubt Pomfrey is going anywhere anytime soon…”

“Poppy?” Remus asked. He was staring off into the distance with a slightly fond smile on his face. “She’s not going anywhere if she can help it.”

“You know Madam Pomfrey?” Sirius asked, cocking his head to the side curiously.

Remus’s eyes widened, and he looked at Sirius as though he was only just remembering who he’d been talking to. The expression on his face was nearly panicked. “Oh, I… erm… yes. She’s sort of a… family friend, I suppose. She pops by when things are especially bad.”

“With your mum, you mean?” Sirius queried. He couldn’t quite make sense of Remus’s skittish reaction or his vague explanation.

“Right… yeah. With my mum,” Remus said softly. If Sirius didn’t know any better, he might’ve thought Remus looked guilty when he spoke, though Sirius couldn’t think of anything he could possibly be guilty for.

So, he changed the subject.

“You missed pub night on Thursday,” Sirius blurted unceremoniously.

Remus laughed somewhat nervously and nodded, not meeting Sirius’s eyes. “Yes, I’m afraid I was predisposed that evening. Lily said it was a big group, though, so I hope my absence wasn’t too noteworthy.”

“Well I can’t speak for anyone else, but I missed you…” Sirius said softly. He fidgeted anxiously with his hands and shrugged when Remus’s eyes snapped to look at him again.

“You did?” Remus asked. Sirius couldn’t quite fathom how the other man could sound so surprised.

“Well, yeah…” Sirius said. He knew he probably sounded terribly shy on account of the rather inconvenient crush he was harbouring on Remus, but he couldn’t help it. “It’s not the same without you there. There’s far less entertaining commentary when you’re gone.”

Sirius was afraid that perhaps he’d made things awkward by revealing how he felt whenever Remus was absent from pub nights, but to his relief, Remus just laughed – the tension bleeding out of his shoulders – and looked at Sirius with a soft smile. “Well, I suppose it’s nice to know that someone cares enough to miss me when I’m gone,” he teased.

Sirius just beamed at him, then began to look at him with a hesitantly hopeful expression. “You know… I’ve got a bit of time before my next client arrives, actually… if you’re not busy, that is, maybe I could show you around the shop? It’s just down there.” He pointed to the small sign down the street that read Black Magic Tattoo Parlor. “Obviously, you don’t have to…” he added quickly. “If you’re busy, or if you’re tired from taking care of your mother, or if you don’t want to… Actually, maybe it was a bit silly to ask. It’s really not a big-”

Mercifully, Remus saved Sirius from his own rambling by gently interrupting. “I’d love to see your shop, actually, if you’ve got the time,” he said, a genuine smile on his lips.

Sirius felt his own mouth curve into a smile to mirror Remus’s. “Brilliant!”

It was a very short walk to the door that led into the shop, which opened upon recognizing Sirius’s magical signature to let them in. Sirius waved his wand – just as he did whenever he arrived at the shop in the mornings or, as was the case today, after a lunch break – and the lights came on, illuminating the dim area with soft, warm light.

He didn’t have a receptionist, since Sirius was the only artist, but there was a desk up front where Alphard occasionally sat while he was working on bookkeeping. On the walls were pictures of Sirius’s previous work, along with some designs he’d drawn on paper. There was also a poster of common runes, which some witches and wizards like to incorporate into their tattoos for enchantment purposes.

“It’s not much…” Sirius said, suddenly feeling a bit self-conscious as the door shut behind them. “I’m still the only artist, so we haven’t got a need for much space, but we’re hoping to expand soon…” His voice trailed off, for once, as he nervously watched Remus make his way towards the edge of the room, where a framed photo of a phoenix Sirius had done on a wizard’s back was displayed. Even Sirius had to admit that it was some of his best work; he hoped that Remus thought the same.

“This is your work?” Remus asked, studying the image closely as it moved to reveal the way the phoenix flapped its wings.

Sirius nodded, then – upon realising that Remus couldn’t see him – said, “Yeah, er… All of them are, actually. I did the phoenix a few months back on a wizard from Bulgaria.”

Remus blew out a breath just as Sirius sucked one in and held it, waiting for a more definitive response from the other man. “Merlin, Sirius,” Remus breathed, and Sirius felt a zing of happiness travel up his spine in response to Remus saying his name like that – all breathy and admiring. “This is incredible.”

Sirius could feel his face heating up as he watched Remus move along the wall to look at each photo. Praise for his work always felt good, but it felt especially wonderful coming from Remus.

“Honestly, you’re unbelievably talented,” Remus continued in awe.

Sirius practically preened. “I… Thank you,” he said, unsure of how else to respond.

Remus just turned to look at him with a genuine (albeit tired) smile on his face. “You’re welcome.”

Sirius grinned back at him, but the quiet moment was short lived, as both men jumped in surprise when the bells on the front door began to tinkle quietly to announce a visitor. To his surprise, the person who came meandering into the room was none other than his uncle Alphard.

“Al!” Sirius said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were planning on stopping by today!”

Alphard waved his hands dismissively, only briefly sparing a glance at Remus, who hadn’t seemed to have moved much since the interruption. “I wasn’t, but Xander’s current case has run long, so he’s before the Wizengamot today with his client. Figured I’d pop by and pick up last week’s transaction log to keep me occupied… Merlin knows what else I’m supposed to do with retirement so long as my husband continues to insist on working… Alas, I digress. I do hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

Sirius chuckled at his uncle’s grumblings and shook his head. “No, this is Remus. He’s a friend, not a client.”

At the mention of his name, Remus seemed spurred into action, because he jumped slightly and quickly crossed the room to shake Alphard’s hand. “Remus Lupin, sir. It’s good to meet you.”

“Oh, there’s really no need for that,” Alphard laughed, clasping Remus on the shoulder as they shook hands. Sirius watched their interaction with mild fascination. “Call me Alphard. Or Al. Or Alphie, if you insist on being as vexing as Siri, here …” Sirius made a soft, disgusted sound in response to the nickname, which only made Alphard’s smile wider.

“Understood, si- er, Alphard,” Remus said somewhat shyly. He seemed to be withdrawing a bit, much like he did when they were out with a large group for pub nights, and as much as Sirius loved Alphard, he found himself wishing that perhaps the older man had chosen a different time to stop by.

“Remus is a friend of Lily’s – you know, that girl James has been pining after for years?” Sirius commented. Alphard just smirked and nodded. “And well, James and Lily started inviting a bunch of us out for pub nights, which you already know, I suppose… but Remus is almost always there, and we usually end up talking, so we’ve become friends, I think…” He glanced at Remus, suddenly unsure, but Remus just smiled softly and nodded. “Anyways, we ran into each other outside the apothecary, so I asked if he wanted to come see the shop, and… now we’re here.”

Alphard was quiet for a moment, looking back and forth between Sirius and Remus curiously. The silence made Sirius feel a bit uneasy.

“Not that you asked, now that I think about it…” he mumbled self-consciously.

“Quite alright, Sirius,” Alphard replied. The smile he gave his nephew was immensely reassuring. “I really am just popping by and taking the books with me, though. I’d like to get home, just in case Xander wraps up sooner than expected today. I’ve hardly seen him all week!”

“Actually,” Remus said quietly. He was worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, and Sirius couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from the sight. “I ought to be going, too. I’m still a bit knackered, after… after this week, and I promised Lils I would take dinner duty this evening, so…”

Sirius bit back the disappointment that settled in his gut at Remus’s words and nodded in understanding. “We’ve got a Floo in the back office, if you’d like to use it…” he said with a small smile.

“That would be lovely, actually,” Remus replied. He sounded overly-polite, and Sirius didn’t think it suited Remus at all.

“Don’t leave yet!” Sirius said to Alphard before leading Remus to the back. “I’ll be right back!”

“You’re sure you don’t mind me using your Floo?” Remus asked when they were alone in the small office space. He looked almost guilty, which was somewhat ridiculous, so Sirius shook his head adamantly.

“Not at all,” he assured Remus. “Alphard and I hardly use it, so someone might as well. Besides, you look… well… exhausted, honestly, and Flooing is much less draining that apparating, so…” He trailed off into a shrug as Remus cocked his head to the side and smiled slightly.

“Well I appreciate it,” the other man said genuinely. Sirius watched as he grabbed a handful of Floo powder and stepped into the fireplace. “I suppose I’ll see you at pub night on Thursday?” Remus asked.

Sirius liked to believe that Remus sounded hopeful.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Sirius said with perhaps a bit too much honesty, but a smile nonetheless. Then, he watched as Remus vanished in a burst of green flames.

Alphard was sitting in the chair behind the desk up front when Sirius emerged again, feet propped up on the desk’s surface.

“You know…” Alphard said with a smirk. “When you told me you’d made a new friend at these pub nights, you left out the part about him being charmingly awkward and absurdly good-looking.”

Sirius could only hide his blush behind his hands as Alphard’s hearty chuckle filled the room.

Chapter Text

December 1984

The best thing about being roommates/best friends/brothers with James Potter was that most of the time, he was a supportive, hard-working, go-getting man who could make you feel better just by turning his infectious grin on you. Sirius loved him to death for all of those things, and there was no one on earth he would rather have as an honorary sibling and best mate.

The unfortunate thing about being roommates/best friends/brothers with James Potter, however, was that occasionally, he was so mind-numbingly stupid and infuriating that it made you want to slap him right across his bespectacled face.

Lately, Sirius had been feeling more inclined towards the latter opinion of his best friend.

It had been more than four months since that first pub night, when a gaggle of Gryffindors and Remus Lupin had gotten together just to give James and Lily an excuse to breathe the same air while they weren’t being forced to do so, and ever since, Sirius had been made to endure week after week of James pining after a woman who was so clearly mad for him as well.

And in all of those four months, not a single thing had happened between the two lovestruck idiots besides a handful of friendly hugs and one particularly awkward occasion that had since become known as The Accidental Groping Incident.

Normally, this wouldn’t have posed much of a problem for Sirius. Under normal circumstances, he would have been able to sit back and laugh with Peter as James and Lily danced around each other for months. He could have relentlessly taken the mickey out of James when they got home from pub nights for mooning all over a woman who James inexplicably refused to ask on a real date because he was afraid of messing it up.

These weren’t normal circumstances, however, because overtime, their large group had dwindled down to the two aforementioned lovestruck idiots and the only two people who loved them unconditionally enough to continue going along with the charade – Sirius and Remus.

And Sirius was a bit too busy doing his own mooning over Remus to be able to enjoy poking fun at James for doing the same over Lily. 

Sirius’s benign little crush on the handsome stranger had grown into something much larger and much more terrifying as the weeks had gone by. Remus was now a constant presence in Sirius’s life, and was quickly becoming one of his best friends (second to James, of course). If Sirius were normal – if only he still had a soulmark to hope would match – he might have joined James in pacing their sitting room and debating the merits of friendship versus a romantic relationship.

Sirius wasn’t normal, however. He didn’t have a soulmark. There was nothing to hope might match with the mark that was surely lurking somewhere on Remus’s body. For the first time in his life, Sirius almost wished he’d taken the risk and kept his mark, if only to be able to justify the stubborn, irrational hope that lived amongst the butterflies in his stomach whenever Remus walked into a room.

He knew that James must have noticed the way Sirius’s breath always seemed to hitch slightly whenever Remus turned up, as though he’d stolen all of the air out of the room upon his arrival. James had likely also noticed the way Sirius smiled wider in Remus’s presence, and he’d certainly noticed the red tint that spread across Sirius’s usually-pale complexion when Remus leaned closer to whisper a comment meant for Sirius’s ears alone. Mercifully, though, James hadn’t brought it up.

He didn’t even bring it up just before the Christmas party that Lily and Remus were hosting at their flat for their pub night group, when Sirius was fretting over the present he’d gotten Remus.

“What if it’s stupid?” Sirius asked anxiously from where he sat cross-legged on James’s bed. James was in his ensuite bathroom, taking a perplexingly long time to make his hair look artfully tousled, but he poked his head out the door to frown at Sirius in response.

“What if what’s stupid?” James asked.

Sirius groaned and buried his face in his hands. “My Christmas present for Remus!” he replied.

James sighed and gave Sirius a somewhat pitying look, which Sirius might have resented had he not felt so pitiful. “Oh, Sirius… just give me a moment and I’ll be right there, yeah?”

Sirius grumbled something unintelligible, which James took as a yes, and true to his word, James emerged from the bathroom only a minute or two later looking… well, frankly the same as he had when he’d walked in.

“Right then,” James said gently as he sat beside Sirius on the bed. “What’s the matter? I thought we talked about this and decided that your gift for Remus is perfect?”

“We did,” Sirius said defeatedly, removing his hands from his face in favour of resting them in his lap and staring down at them. “But what if we’re wrong, Jamie? What if he thinks it’s silly? Or worse, what if it makes him upset? I don’t want to make it seem like I’m… I dunno… rubbing it in his face that we all went to Hogwarts and he didn’t, you know?”

“Well…” James said thoughtfully. “Is that your intention? To rub it in?”

Sirius gave him a horrified look. “What? No, Of course not!”

“Exactly, and I think Remus will know that, Sirius,” James said calmly. Sirius looked at him and saw nothing but sincerity in his features. “Remus, he… he knows you pretty well by now. I think he knows you well enough to understand what it means, don’t you?”

Sirius hesitated for a moment, staring out of James’s bedroom door where he could see the gift in question sitting on the table, along with James’s gift for Lily. “Maybe…” he admitted after a beat. “I know I’m doing that thing where I overthink things and get all in my head about them, and I’m trying really hard not to, James, but it’s Remus… and he gave me that enchanted record player for my birthday so we could play muggle music in the flat, which was so stupidly thoughtful because I only mentioned a few times how badly I wished we could do that. I want to return the favour but I’m not good at this sort of thing. I’m good at gag gifts, like I get for you and Peter, not thoughtful ones.”

“I think the two-way mirror you gave me in our fourth year would prove otherwise, mate,” James said, nudging him with his elbow. “That’s still the nicest gift anyone’s ever given me. And I still carry it everywhere, you know…”

Sirius, despite his nerves, couldn’t help but smile at James’s words. He patted his own pocket, where his mirror always resided. “So do I…”

They grinned at each other for a moment before James pulled him into a good-natured one-armed hug. “See!” James exclaimed. “You’re better at this whole gift-giving thing than you think, so try not to get yourself too worked up to enjoy the party, alright?”

“Yeah,” Sirius admitted sheepishly. “Yeah, alright. I think I can do that.”

“Brilliant, because we’re a bit late, and you know how I hate to keep the lovely Lily waiting,” James said, a dopey grin taking over his features.

Sirius just rolled his eyes and followed James out of his bedroom door.

Surprisingly, Sirius really did manage to put an end to his fretting and enjoy their little Christmas party. It was a much smaller crowd than Dorcas and Marlene’s housewarming had been – only the pub night crew (Alice and Frank, Marlene and Dorcas, Mary, Peter, James, and Sirius) had been invited to the flat Remus and Lily shared – which left Sirius feeling far more at ease. He and Remus had hardly left each other’s sides all night (as was the case with James and Lily, he noticed), and he was only just beginning to feel pleasantly tipsy when someone broached the one topic that could always be guaranteed to sober him up in an instant.

He wasn’t sure who brought up the topic of soulmarks and soulmates first as they all sat around the magically enlarged kitchen table, but it didn’t much matter when after only a minute or two, the whole room had joined the discussion. James, who was sitting to Sirius’s left, instinctively moved closer until their arms were brushing – a grounding gesture which Sirius very much appreciated, as Sirius was determined to get through the conversation without drawing attention to himself by walking away. But by the time Alice and Frank began to talk about what it felt like to be in love with your soulmate, he’d had enough.

“I need some air,” he said quietly to James, who looked at him with concern. “I’m fine, really. I just… need a minute.”

James merely nodded in understanding, still frowning, and Sirius stood and wandered into the empty sitting room.

The warm, festive decorations that littered the room felt at odds with the nearly unbearable sadness that had settled deep in Sirius’s gut. He felt out of place among the ornament-laden Christmas tree and the floating fairy lights that danced through the air above his head, and that only served to make him feel worse.

It only seemed fitting, then, when he stepped out onto the balcony – away from the warmth and into the cold – and pulled out a cigarette. Apparently, soulmate talk was one of the few things that could prompt him to smoke, these days.

With a heavy sigh and a heavier heart, Sirius collapsed onto the little bench and lit the cigarette with a snap of his fingers. Then, just for good measure, he cast a warming charm over himself.

It felt like some sort of cosmic joke, really, that Sirius was still being made to suffer at the hands of his horrible family. Even now, nearly two years after his mother and father had been arrested and sent to Azkaban along with the rest of Voldemort’s supporters, the influence of their hatred haunted him. 

It would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The worst part was that Sirius wanted his soulmate. Desperately. He’d spent years of lonely, fear-filled nights dreaming of finding the person who was destined to love him. Sometimes, his imaginings of what it might feel like to love and be loved by someone unconditionally were the only things that kept him going. Through all of the scoldings, and all of the arguments, and all of the beatings, Sirius had held onto hope that somewhere in the world was a boy who would kiss him and hold him and love him the way he’d always longed for. He wanted it so badly it hurt.

The day Narcissa had told him about the rumours that their family had gone so far as to murder their heirs’ true soulmates in order to preserve the purity of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, Sirius’s heart had shattered right there in his own chest. What use was an heir, after all, who couldn’t produce an heir of his own?

So, he’d had the mark removed, because not even the slow, steady heartbreak of a lifetime without his soulmate could compare to the awful possibility of an innocent man being killed just for being tied to Sirius.

He startled at the sound of the balcony door opening, and was both relieved and somewhat devastated to see Remus standing there, looking at Sirius with surprise.

“Sorry… I didn’t realise you were out here,” Remus said awkwardly, which was somewhat odd, because he was hardly ever awkward around Sirius when it was just the two of them these days. “Do you want me to go?” Remus asked when Sirius didn’t reply. “It’s just… you looked a bit upset when you got up, and if you want to be alone-”

“No!” Sirius said quickly. Perhaps he was something of a masochist, wanting to be around the only person who’d ever made him question his decision to remove his soulmark in a moment when his lack of a soulmark was the problem at hand, but the thought of Remus leaving made his stomach hurt. “No, you’re alright. It’s your balcony, after all. I’m just…” Sirius hesitated, then sighed. “Not a fan of the whole soulmark topic.”

A strange emotion seemed to flash across Remus’s face, but it was gone before Sirius could make any sense of it. “Ah,” the other man said vaguely as he took a seat beside Sirius. “Any particular reason why?”

Sirius swallowed hard, taking a long drag of his cigarette, then offering it to Remus, who accepted it gratefully and took a long drag of his own.

He could tell Remus about his soulmark, now that he thought about it. It might even make it easier to get over his absurd crush knowing that Remus would never want him back, which he surely wouldn’t once he learned the truth. His only reservation was that he didn’t want anyone else to find out. Currently, James was the only one who knew. Not even Regulus was aware of what Sirius had done on his seventeenth birthday.

Remus passed the cigarette back to Sirius, who stared at it for a long moment. “Can you keep a secret?” Sirius asked finally. He took another drag as Remus let out a short, humourless chuckle and ran a hand through his hair.

“God, yes,” Remus half-laughed. “You have no idea.”

Sirius wasn’t quite sure what was so funny, but he figured it didn’t much matter at the moment anyways. So, he pressed on.

“I, erm…” he began hesitantly. “I had my soulmark removed when I was seventeen.”

And there it was – the awful truth. The one Sirius hadn’t told anyone since before he’d gone and done it, when he’d told James of his plans. The words felt strange on his lips, as though speaking them aloud gave them some sort of awful, otherworldly power, and he almost couldn’t bear to look at Remus to attempt to gauge his reaction.

After several long seconds of silence, however, Sirius couldn’t stand it any longer, so he risked a glance over at his friend, expecting to see revulsion, or at least horror… perhaps pity.

Instead, he was met with shock. Pure, unadulterated shock. He couldn’t quite tell in the dim light of the balcony, but he thought Remus looked slightly paler than normal. Perhaps telling him hadn’t been such a good idea after all… What if Remus thought he was some sort of freak, now? What if Remus started asking questions Sirius didn’t have answers to? What if-?

“You had your mark removed?” Remus asked, cutting into Sirius’s racing thoughts.

Sirius only nodded miserably in response.

“Christ…” Remus mumbled. The other man blew out a long breath, and Sirius nervously took another drag from the cigarette while he waited for Remus to say something else. A million possible responses floated through his head, and almost none of them were good.

What Remus actually said, however, was never something Sirius could have imagined.

“And here I was, thinking I was the only one.”

Sirius stared at Remus as he tried to process the other man’s words. Surely, Remus couldn’t possibly be saying what he seemed to be saying… and yet…

“You had yours removed, too?” Sirius asked, utterly stunned.

Remus nodded, not meeting his eyes. “Two weeks after I turned seventeen.” He listlessly accepted the now dwindling cigarette when Sirius offered it.

“I did it on my seventeenth birthday,” Sirius said quietly. He could still hardly believe the turn their conversation had taken. He’d never met anyone else without a soulmark – people only had them removed in extreme circumstances, after all – but apparently Remus had been right in front of him the entire time.

Remus took one last drag of the cigarette, then stamped it out in the ashtray on the railing. “Would it be horrible of me to ask why?” Remus asked, glancing at Sirius, then quickly looking away again.

Sirius hesitated for only a moment, then launched into his explanation.

Sirius told Remus everything. He told him about his father’s beatings and his mother’s affinity for cursing him, even when he was only a child. He told Remus about Regulus, and the way Sirius had been so desperate to protect his younger brother from the abuse he endured every day. He talked about all of his aunts and uncles joining Voldemort, and his parents doing the same, only to disown him when Sirius refused. He recounted the night Narcissa had confided in him that she was relieved her soulmate was Lucius Malfoy, because of their family’s tendency to “take care of” undesirable soulmates, primarily for their heirs, but occasionally for their other children as well.

He even told Remus about the night between sixth and seventh year, after the mark had already been removed, when he’d shown up on the Potters’ doorstep beaten and cursed within an inch of his life following being disowned.

Remus, for his part, simply sat quietly and listened to all of it with an ever-growing look of abject horror. It was only after Sirius was finally finished – once he had slumped backwards in his chair defeatedly – that Remus finally spoke.

“Sirius…” Remus said softly. His gentle tone made Sirius want to cry. “God, I… I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of that, and… none of that was your fault. You know that, right?”

“Sometimes I do,” Sirius replied sadly. “But sometimes I think about how badly I wanted my soulmate – how badly I still want him, honestly – and I wonder if maybe the decision I made was selfish. I got to choose, you know? But he didn’t. And he’ll never know why… why he can’t seem to find me, if he’s looking.” Sirius cleared his throat as, horrifyingly, tears began to spring to life in his eyes. “Does that make any sense?”

Remus stared at him contemplatively for some time, then nodded. “It does, actually.”

A heavy silence fell upon them, thick enough to cut with a knife. Neither of them seemed entirely sure of what to say, so instead, neither man spoke.

Until Remus softly asked, “Do you remember me telling you that I can keep a secret?”

Sirius looked at him, surprised by the seemingly random question, and nodded.

“Can you?”

Sirius might have felt offended by Remus’s question, seeing as he himself had kept the secret of his missing soulmark for years by that point, but the look on Remus’s face was so intense, so grave, that Sirius could only nod in response.

That wasn’t good enough for Remus, however, who sighed in frustration. “I really mean it, Sirius. I… If you don’t like what I’m about to tell you, believe me, I understand, but…” He ran a hand through his hair and locked eyes with Sirius, who felt pinned to the spot by Remus’s gaze. “I trust you, Sirius, but this is… sort of a special circumstance. Do I have your word that you won’t tell anyone else what I’m about to tell you?”

Sirius gulped, uneasy at seeing Remus so obviously terrified. “On Jamie’s life, Remus, I won’t tell a soul,” he said finally.

Remus paused for a long, long time, staring off into the distance and occasionally glancing at Sirius as he wrestled with what was clearly an important decision. A minute or two into the silence, Sirius noticed him shiver and scooted ever so slightly closer until their shoulders pressed together, hoping it might provide a bit of comfort, or at least some warmth. Just for good measure, he extended his own warming charm to encompass Remus as well.

“You don’t have to tell me if you d-”

“I’m a werewolf.”

Sirius’s eyes widened at the sudden admission, and he turned his head to stare at Remus in shock. “What?”

“It’s why I had my mark removed,” Remus continued bluntly. “I’m a werewolf, Sirius.”

Sirius’s mind went into overdrive as he tried to process what Remus had said. His first instinct was to be afraid – werewolves killed people, after all – but fear felt more than a little ridiculous when it was directed at Remus Lupin. Remus, who always made sure everyone got home safely after pub nights, and who would let Sirius finish his ramblings if someone else cut him off during a conversation. Remus wasn’t scary, and he certainly wasn’t a monster, like Sirius’s textbooks had told him.

He began to look back on the past few months and realised just how much sense it all made now, however. Remus’s absences once every month, his vague explanations for not attending Hogwarts, the way he always looked battered and exhausted after missing a pub night…

It was only when Sirius noticed that Remus looked to be on the verge of tears that it occurred to Sirius just how long he’d been silently staring at him in shock.

“I…” he said weakly, trying to find the right thing to say. “Fuck, Remus… oh, Merlin, it all makes so much more sense now, and it’s… How long?”

Thankfully, Remus seemed to understand his sudden and poorly phrased question, because he answered softly moments later. “I was four when I was bitten.”

Sirius’s heart crumbled as he imagined a little, four year-old Remus, terrified and lost and confused about what was happening to him. He forced down the bile rising in his own throat. “Oh God, Remus-”

“I… I understand if you don’t want me around anymore. It’s just…” Remus paused and quickly wiped away a tear, and Sirius’s heart began to ache even more. “You shared so much with me tonight, about your family, and I know that couldn’t have been easy, and it felt so wrong keeping this a secret from you because you’re important to me, and… I thought it was probably time you knew…”

“Remus…” Sirius said as gently as he could. He tried to recall the things James would do to help him calm down when he was upset. Sirius liked physical touch, so he tried leaning into Remus a bit more, pressing their upper arms firmly together. Remus didn’t pull away, which Sirius supposed was a decent enough reaction. “Why wouldn’t I want you around, anymore?”

Remus looked at Sirius as though he’d lost his mind. “Didn’t you hear me, Sirius? I’m a werewolf. I’m a monster. The Ministry classifies werewolves as-”

“Oh, fuck the Ministry!” Sirius said vehemently. “The Ministry also said that Voldemort and his cronies posed no threat to the day to day lives of wix in Britain, and we all saw how that turned out. Half of what they say is a load of hippogriff shit, anyways.”

“But Sirius-”

“No, Remus, please listen to me. I don’t care that you’re a werewolf,” Sirius said desperately. Remus looked shocked and conflicted, and Sirius decided that perhaps he needed to clarify precisely what it was he didn’t care about. “I mean, I care, obviously, because I hate that you have to deal with the transformations every month and all of the stigma surrounding your condition – now that I think about it, that’s probably why you change jobs so frequently, isn’t it?”

Remus just nodded, dumbfounded, and Sirius continued.

“Right, okay… anyways… I care because I care about you, not because I’m, y’know… afraid, or anything,” Sirius said. His words weren’t nearly as graceful as he’d hoped, but they seemed to get the point across, because the look on Remus’s face was morphing into something heart-wrenchingly hopeful.

“It really doesn’t bother you?” Remus asked hesitantly.

Sirius shook his head adamantly. “Not in the way you’re worried it does.”

Remus stared at Sirius for a very long time, something akin to awe on his face as he took in what Sirius realised was probably a very unusual reaction to his condition. Sirius wondered if perhaps Remus was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But there weren’t any other shoes – no conditions upon which Sirius’s acceptance depended, no amendments to the friendship they had already built. Eventually, Remus seemed to understand that.

“You…” Remus said softly, a small, incredulous smile tugging at his lips. He blew out a breath and ran a hand through his wavy hair. “You’re something else, Sirius… you know that?” There were tears shining in his eyes, and Sirius worried for a moment that perhaps he’d done something wrong.

“Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?” he asked carefully.

Remus huffed out a laugh and shook his head fondly. “A good thing. Definitely a good thing.”

But Sirius still frowned as a lone tear fell from the corner of Remus’s eye, trickling down his cheek in a jagged path. “But you’re crying…”

“Oh! These are good tears, I promise,” Remus said with a self-deprecating smile. He wiped at his eyes and shrugged. “I’m rather relieved, to be honest. I quite like being friends with you, you know, so… I’m just glad to know that doesn’t have to end.”

“Oh,” Sirius breathed in understanding. Remus was crying – happy tears – just because Sirius had said he would continue to be Remus’s friend despite his lycanthropy. The implication that at some point, someone had abandoned Remus because of his condition made Sirius unbearably sad, but the knowledge that Remus cared so much about Sirius lifted him right back up.

The conflicting emotions were quite a lot to handle, if Sirius was honest with himself, but Remus was here, and he looked so relieved and happy, so Sirius decided to simply follow his lead.

“I like being friends with you, too…” Sirius said. His voice sounded surprisingly shy, even to his own ears. “Actually, I… I sort of have something… for you, I mean.” Heart inexplicably in his throat, Sirius reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the wrapped gift he’d brought for Remus, unshrinking it with a quick tap of his wand.

Remus looked at him with wide eyes, but accepted the present when Sirius nervously handed it to him.

“You got me a Christmas present?” Remus asked. His expression was entirely unreadable, which Sirius found mildly disconcerting.

Sirius just nodded in response and watched with bated breath as Remus carefully tore the paper (and really, only someone like Remus Lupin would carefully tear open wrapping paper) to reveal the carefully folded Gryffindor scarf inside.

“It’s not much…” Sirius said, unable to stand the silence as Remus stared at the scarf. “Honestly it’s probably stupid… but you always seem to run cold, and you’re always so bundled up in sweaters and scarves and, well… I know you didn’t have the chance to go to Hogwarts yourself – not that I’m trying to rub it in, or anything! I just thought it might be nice for you to have something like this. Just because you never went to Hogwarts doesn’t mean you’re not one of us, you know? And I know I’m rambling now so could you please say something, even if you hate it, so I can stop bloody talking and-”

“You got me a Gryffindor scarf?” Remus asked quietly, mercifully rescuing Sirius from a rant that may never have ended otherwise.

“I, erm… yes?”

Remus laughed – a delighted sound that made Sirius want to jump with happiness – and ran his hands reverently over the red and gold knitting. “Where did you even get this? Can you still get this sort of thing even after you’ve finished school?”

“Oh! I’m not sure if you can, actually. I didn’t ask. That one was mine,” Sirius said happily.

Remus’s eyes widened, but his smile didn’t diminish. “You’re giving me one of your own scarves?” he asked in surprise. “Doesn’t this hold sentimental value, or something like that?”

Sirius just shrugged and mirrored Remus’s grin. “I’ve got two others, anyway,” he said dismissively. “I did put a charm on that one to make it emit its own warmth if you tap it with your wand, though. I thought it might be useful…”

“Sirius…” Remus breathed, eyes alight with joy. Sirius could’ve spent the rest of his life watching Remus when the other man was this happy. “I… that’s really thoughtful of you.” He laughed breathlessly and looked back down at the scarf in his lap. “It’s perfect, honestly… although technically we don’t know whether or not I would’ve been in Gryffindor.” Remus’s voice was clearly teasing as he said that last bit, but Sirius found himself leaping to Remus’s own defence regardless.

“Of course we do,” Sirius said with startling conviction. “Honestly, Remus, especially after everything you’ve told me tonight, I think you’re probably more Gryffindor than all the rest of us put together.”

Remus made a soft, strangled noise in the back of his throat, and when Sirius looked at him, his eyes were glassy again. This time, Sirius could recognize the tears for what they were: happy ones.

For a moment, they simply stared at each other, and Sirius felt a warm giddiness spread through him all the way to his toes. Remus had liked his present – loved it, even – and had trusted him with his greatest secret. They’d made so much progress in a single conversation; Sirius could hardly believe his luck. And now, Remus was looking back at him with so much obvious affection. Sirius had never felt so content in all his life.

A loud chorus of laughter from inside the flat startled both of them enough to make them look away, but Remus quickly looked back at Sirius with a suddenly nervous smile on his face. “Actually, while we’re on the topic of gifts… I’ve got something for you, as well…” Remus said sheepishly.

Sirius felt his cheeks heating up and shook his head fondly. “Remus!” he scolded. “You already got me something for my birthday!”

“Right,” Remus said with amusement, rising to his feet and extending a hand to Sirius to help him do the same. “But last I checked, you – Sirius Black – are not Jesus Christ, which means Christmas and your birthday are two very separate occasions.”

Sirius let out a surprised laugh and followed Remus back into the flat, although they didn’t head back towards the kitchen where their friends were. Instead, Remus led him down a short hallway and into what appeared to be Remus’s bedroom.

The room was a simple one, with walls painted a calming sage green and minimal decorations, but it felt lived-in and homey nonetheless. On a desk in the corner sat several pictures of Remus with Lily and two older people – a man and a woman – who Sirius guessed were Remus’s parents. There were several stacks of books scattered around the room, including some on top of the dresser beside a sort of medical kit. For his injuries after the full moons, Sirius’s mind supplied.

Sirius’s favourite thing in the room, however, was a coat rack beside the door which was piled high with an assortment of cold-weather clothing, and Sirius practically preened when Remus hung the Gryffindor scarf right on top with a soft smile.

“You’ve got far too many scarves already,” Sirius teased as Remus rummaged through one of his desk drawers. “I’m afraid I’ve only enabled your hoarder’s tendencies.”

“We live in England, Sirius. It’s cold here for most of the year,” Remus said, rolling his eyes. He finally found what he was searching for, only glancing down at it nervously for a moment before handing it to Sirius.

The package was small – about the size of the average book – and fairly light, and when Sirius tore open the paper (much less carefully than Remus had, mind you), it revealed a small sketchpad not unlike the one Sirius kept at the shop.

“A sketchpad?” Sirius asked curiously.

Remus nodded. “I wanted to give this to you for your birthday, but some of the enchantments on it were giving me trouble…” Remus tapped his wand to the pad, muttered a soft engorgio, and watched as the sketch pad grew to full size. “You mentioned a few months ago that carrying around sketchpads was irritating because shrinking them to fit in your pocket compromised the integrity of the art in them and made it go all wonky, so… I did some tinkering until I found a cluster of enchantments to prevent that from happening.”

Sirius’s jaw dropped, and he stared at Remus with an expression he was nearly certain would mimic the way James sometimes looked at Lily. He’d only mentioned his sketchpad woes on one occasion, and Remus had apparently taken it upon himself to fix the problem himself by creating something on his own.

“It’s got some other protective charms, as well, to keep it from getting wet, or to stop ink from smudging…” Remus continued while Sirius continued to flounder for words. “But you should be able to shrink it down to be small enough to fit in your pocket now, when you’re not using it.”

Sirius was dumbfounded. It was the single most thoughtful gift anyone had ever gotten him, and Remus had apparently spent weeks, if not months perfecting the charms on the inconspicuous little pad of papers just so Sirius could sketch to his heart’s content whenever he wanted. It was brilliant. It was perfect. Sirius could not have loved it more.

He couldn’t help it; he shot a blinding smile in Remus’s direction and began to bounce on the balls of his feet.

Bouncing was a quirk he’d had ever since he was a little boy. When Sirius was so happy or excited he felt as though he might burst, he would begin to bounce in his seat or (if he was standing) on the balls of his feet. It was a habit he nearly always tried to rein in around other people – the sole exceptions, of course, being James, Peter, and Regulus – but he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried as he stared gleefully at the sketchpad in his hands.

Remus, for his part, seemed entirely unphased. He merely laughed delightedly at Sirius’s reaction and cocked his head to the side curiously. “Is it safe to assume that this is a positive reaction, then?” Remus laughed.

Sirius nodded so hard he nearly made himself dizzy. “Yes!” he exclaimed, not even bothering to contain his shiver of excitement. “Sorry, sometimes I… bounce? When I’m really excited? Normally I can control it but Merlin, Remus, this is so perfect, and you made it yourself, and I love it so much… I can’t believe you put all of that work into something for me.”

“You bounce?” Remus asked, but his voice was unbearably fond and full of unadulterated affection. “God, Sirius, that’s… you’re…” He paused and looked at Sirius with wonder. “You’re really just… something else.”

And Sirius couldn’t even bring himself to be self-conscious about his bouncing, or the way he shivered with happiness for a second time, or even his rambling as he thanked Remus profusely. Because for once, he knew without a doubt that being “something else” was something good.

Chapter Text

December 1984

The moment the last of their friends disappeared in the green flames of the Floo, Remus collapsed into a seat at the kitchen table with a groan, propping his elbows on the table and burying his face in his hands. He’d been fully aware of his growing feelings towards Sirius for some time, but until tonight – until that stupidly adorable bouncing – Remus had felt confident in his ability to manage those feelings without too much trouble.

Now, though…

Now, Remus was fairly certain he was completely and utterly screwed.

“Shit…” he mumbled into his hands.

A soft chuckle sounded from behind him, and he heard Lily’s heels clacking against their hardwood floors as she came closer. It sounded as though she’d gone and hauled herself up onto the kitchen counter.

“Well that’s not exactly the sort of reaction one usually has to spending an entire evening with their closest friends,” she huffed.

Remus only grumbled in reply.

“Don’t you grumble at me, Remus Lupin! You and I both know that if you truly didn’t want to talk about what was bothering you, you would’ve gone to wallow in your room, so why don’t we save ourselves some time and skip the poking and prodding phase tonight?” Lily’s voice was stern but fond, and Remus was somehow both incredibly annoyed at and immensely grateful for her.

“Must you always be so logical?” Remus lamented as he raised his head to look at her defeatedly.

“Only for you, dearest,” she replied, voice positively dripping with sarcasm. Remus could only roll his eyes. “Now come on, you. Out with it – what’s got your wand in a knot?”

Remus narrowed his eyes and looked at her somewhat incredulously. “Do you really have to ask, Lily?”

“Well obviously it’s Sirius, but you’re never this bad after you see him, so spill.”

Remus sighed and mentally filed through all of the ways he could tell her that he’d disclosed his most closely-guarded secret to Sirius Black that evening. She wouldn’t be happy, certainly – she was always worried about the idea of Remus telling someone new – but he hoped he could do some damage control before she went into overthinking overdrive.

Honestly, sometimes it felt as though Lily was more paranoid about keeping his secret than Remus himself.

In the end, he decided the best approach would be a direct one.

“I told him,” Remus said softly after a long pause. It felt strange, admitting it out loud, but to his relief it didn’t feel nearly as scary as he’d worried it might.

Lily frowned and cocked her head to the side questioningly. “Told him what? About having your soulmark removed?” She paused, then glanced at him apologetically and added, “I’m sorry about tonight, by the way… I couldn’t think of a subtle way to change the topic without making it obvious that something was off.”

Remus just waved his hand to dismiss her apology and shook his head. “No, not that. Well, actually, yes. I did tell him about the soulmark thing, but I also told him about… the other thing…”

Lily’s eyes widened as understanding began to dawn on her. “You told him about your furry little problem?” she asked suspiciously.

“That’s the one,” Remus said, averting his eyes and worrying his bottom lip with his teeth.

His best friend seemed to be frozen for a moment, staring at him with her mouth open in shock, eyebrows practically disappearing into her hairline with how wide her eyes were. Remus thought it was a miracle that they’d managed to stay lodged inside of her head.

“Christ, Remus…” she said quietly after a very long pause.

“You know, some muggles would say it’s especially bad to take the Lord’s name in vain at Christmastime,” Remus mumbled in an attempt to lighten the mood. Lily didn’t laugh.

“Why, Remus?” she asked instead. “Why would you tell him?”

“Merlin, I don’t know,” he replied. He rubbed his temples with his fingers as he tried to find a way to explain himself to her. “We were talking about the whole not having soulmarks thing, and he shared some really personal stuff about his past, and… I dunno! I suppose that makes it sound like I only told him because he told me something, but that’s not really why. It just felt like the right thing to do.”

Lily looked torn between pity and frustration – neither of which Remus particularly liked having directed towards him. “Why were you talking about soulmarks in the first place, Remus? Did you just casually bring it up? Having a nice time, Sirius? And oh, by the way, I haven’t got a soulmark because I had mine removed.”

Despite his best efforts, Remus failed at containing his snort in response to Lily’s abysmal attempt to mimic his voice, and she glared at him (though there was no real heat in her eyes).

“First of all, I do not sound like that. And second of all, I wasn’t even the one to bring it up! Sirius was!”

“Sirius brought up the topic of soulmark removal? Why on earth would he do that?”

And, well… Remus wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. He didn’t much fancy the idea of betraying Sirius’s confidence and telling Lily about Sirius’s soulmark, but he also didn’t have any other reason to give for the way their conversation had begun. He opened his mouth to reply, then quickly snapped it shut to reconsider his options.

Apparently, the long pause was answer enough for Lily Evans – who was really too smart for her own good, sometimes – and impossibly, her eyes grew even wider.

“Oh my God…” she said softly. “Potter’s been telling me for months that Sirius doesn’t date. I just assumed it was because he wasn’t comfortable with it, but it’s not, is it?”

Remus swallowed hard and met Lily’s piercing green gaze, which had softened into sadness instead of shock.

“Sirius is missing his, too, isn’t he?”

Remus could only nod hesitantly in affirmation.

The two of them sat in silence for nearly a full minute before Remus broke it.

“I don’t regret telling him,” he said quietly. Somehow, that felt like more of an admission than anything he’d told Lily, or even Sirius, all night. He looked at her intently and shook his head slowly. “Not about my soulmark, not about the wolf… not about any of it. When I told him it was like…” Remus paused to run a hand through his hair and let out a sigh. Lily remained silent. “It was like he couldn’t even fathom the idea of letting my lycanthropy change anything. I mean, for Merlin’s sake, he was confused – genuinely confused – when I told him I understood if he wanted some distance. He just looked at me like I was the crazy one for even thinking that things might change after our conversation.”

Lily continued to listen to him with a contemplative frown etched across her face – something Remus was endlessly grateful for, because now that he’d started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop.

“He’s just so earnest, Lily. All the time. Honestly, I’m not even sure he knows how to be anything else. Can you believe that when we finished talking about the furry little problem – you know, the man-eating beast that takes over my mind and body once a month which most people are utterly terrified by – he gave me a Christmas present? Told me he didn’t mind that I was a werewolf, sat for a few minutes to process everything, and then gave me one of his own Gryffindor scarves, which he charmed himself so it would keep the wearer warm, just because he noticed that I tend to run cold, and because he wanted to make sure I knew that I was one of you all even if I didn’t go to Hogwarts.”

Remus’s heart ached at the memory of Sirius, looking so nervous as he fidgeted with his hands while Remus opened his gift, only to smile more blindingly than the sun itself upon realising how much Remus loved it.

“And when I gave him the sketchpad…” Remus continued, raking his hands through his hair and laughing somewhat maniacally. “He started bouncing in place, because apparently it’s just something he does when he’s so happy that he needs to channel all of that excess energy somewhere. He bounces, Lily. And it’s the sweetest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and he’s killing me… because even the parts of him that he’s afraid to let show – especially those parts of him, sometimes – make me want to grab hold of him and never let go. But I can’t. And it’s driving me bloody insane, Lily.”

Lily studied him for a moment before she spoke, still frowning. “Sorry, I just… I’m not sure I understand what’s stopping you from doing something about this. I think it’s obvious that this has moved well past an innocuous crush…”

Remus huffed bitterly.

“…so why don’t you just talk to him about it?”

“I mean, it’s not like anything has changed, Lily. All of the things that were true when I got my mark removed are still true now,” he sighed.

She gave him a slightly incredulous look. “What on earth are you talking about, Remus? Of course something has changed! You’re completely mad about Sirius. Sirius doesn’t have a soulmark. You don’t have a soulmark. It’s sort of perfect, don’t you think?”

“Lily…” Remus said softly, his own heart aching in his chest. “The soulmark isn’t the problem. It was never the problem, and you know it.”

“But if Sirius knows about your lycanthropy and he’s alright with-”

“He’s alright with it as my friend, Lils, not as my…” his voice trailed off and he sighed deeply. “Besides, even if he were okay with being… romantically involved with a werewolf, I’m not. I can’t do that to someone – tie myself to someone like that. We mate for life. It’s just too much to ask of someone. Being with me would lower his social status… make his life more difficult, and- God, Lily, I wouldn’t want to burden anyone like that, but especially not him. He’s been through enough.”

Lily looked at him with sad eyes, and Remus couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze “Don’t you think that’s something Sirius should be allowed to decide for himself?” she asked quietly.

“If I wanted to take the risk, then… yes, of course he would be allowed to decide for himself. But I don’t want to take the risk,” Remus answered after a beat. “We’re both meant for someone else – soulmark or not – and I can’t bear the thought of him waking up in a decade and wishing he hadn’t gotten himself tied to a monster for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, Remus,” Lily said pleadingly, sliding off of her perch on the countertop to stand behind him and wrap her arms around his shoulders. “You’re not a monster, you wonderful man.” She sighed and gently kissed his cheek, and in spite of the seriousness of the conversation, a small smile tugged at Remus’s lips. He really did love Lily Evans to pieces. “And I still think you deserve to be happy, and I know he makes you happy, love. But it’s your decision. If this is really what you want, I won’t push you.”

“It is,” Remus said softly. He stood with a grunt and turned to wrap his best friend up in his arms, taking solace in the close contact. “I’m sorry, Lils.”

“Remus Lupin, don’t you dare apologise to me,” she scolded gently. “The world owes you so many more apologies than you could ever owe to anyone”

Remus huffed out a quiet laugh and planted a kiss in her hair.

“Can you promise me something, though?” she asked after a long moment of silence.

“Probably,” Remus sighed.

Lily gave him a squeeze around his middle before she spoke. “If you ever change your mind, Remus… if you ever realise you want something with Sirius, or with anyone… promise me that you’ll give it a proper chance.”

Remus considered her words for a moment. He rather seriously doubted that he would ever change his mind about this – he had made peace with his lot in life as a soulmarkless wizard – but he supposed it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable request to make.

“Yeah, alright,” he said finally. “I promise.”

She just gave him another squeeze and laughed softly. “Good.”

Chapter Text

January 1985

On the morning of the first Monday in January, Sirius found himself standing at the front door of Remus and Lily’s apartment, silently debating with himself regarding whether or not he ought to knock.

The previous night had been the full moon – the first since Remus had told Sirius his secret – and Sirius hadn’t slept a wink. He’d been up all night wondering if Remus was alright, if he was hurt, or in pain… if he would have help in the morning when he woke up sore and weak from the transformation his body had undergone.

Over the last couple of weeks, Sirius had done hours of research on werewolf transformations, and although some of the books he’d read were outdated (and others downright offensive), they all seemed to agree on one thing: werewolf transformations were unbearably painful. The worst ones could leave behind broken bones and torn muscles, and that wasn’t even factoring in the damage a caged werewolf did to themselves while transformed.

The thought of Remus dealing with the pain all alone, with Lily gone at work, left Sirius feeling sick to his stomach, so he’d gotten up at around the same time as James and headed for Remus’s flat not long after.

Now that he was here, though, standing outside their door, Sirius realised that he wasn’t exactly sure what he was there to do. He didn’t even know whether or not Remus would be home the morning after the full moon. What if he went to his parents’ instead, or to St. Mungo’s? Or worse, what if he didn’t want company, and Sirius would be a nuisance rather than a relief?

He was seriously considering flipping a knut to decide whether or not to knock when the door in front of him opened anyways, revealing a sleepy-looking, very surprised Lily Evans.

“Sirius!” she exclaimed, moving her hand away from her wand, which she had instantly reached for upon seeing someone right outside the door. “Sorry, I was just heading down the street for some coffee… What are you doing here?” And, well… she didn’t sound angry about his presence – only curious. That was a good start, he supposed.

“I, erm…” Sirius said anxiously. He averted his eyes and began to crack his knuckles as a distraction from the nerves bubbling in his gut. “It’s just… last night was the full moon and I… I was…” Worried, his mind supplied to lips that couldn’t seem to function properly. Afraid. Terrified. Missing Remus. Wishing I could help. Wanting to see if there was anything I could do.

Instead, he let his voice trail off and swallowed the lump in his throat. When he hesitantly glanced up, he saw that Lily’s eyes had softened from confusion into something Sirius couldn’t quite place – a sort of sad fondness, perhaps.

“You’re here to see Remus,” she said softly.

Sirius just nodded, forever grateful for Lily’s penchant for deductive reasoning. She stepped aside to let him in.

“He’s resting, right now,” she said softly. “But he only got back a half hour or so ago, so he might not be asleep yet. Just… stay here for a second, yeah?” She checked to make sure Sirius nodded before hurrying down the hallway, knocking softly on Remus’s bedroom door. Then, she entered the room, closing the door behind her, leaving Sirius alone in the living room.

He felt rather out of place while he listened to the soft drone of hushed conversation in the other room. He was able to recognize Remus’s baritone voice in an instant, though it sounded scratchier than normal and he couldn’t make out what was being said. At least now, he had confirmation that Remus was at least well enough to be awake and talking. The sick feeling in his stomach eased up a little.

Lily returned barely a minute later and met Sirius with a small smile. “You can go in, if you’d like… although he told me to warn you that his company will be rather boring today, since he’ll probably spend most of it sleeping.”

Sirius huffed out a laugh and shifted his weight back and forth between his feet. “That’s fine with me,” he said in a hushed tone. “S’not like I came here expecting much excitement.” He paused. “Actually, I’m not entirely sure what I came here for. I just… I was worried. And I didn’t want him to be alone if you were off at work all day…” He trailed off for what felt like the umpteenth time that morning, afraid Lily might mistake his worry about Remus for some sort of doubt in her ability to take care of her best friend.

Thankfully, she seemed to understand what he was saying.

“Ordinarily I take the day off after the full – or at least the morning – so he’s not left alone for the worst of it,” she explained. “I was planning on taking the morning off today, but if you’re here…” She bit her lip and glanced at Sirius, apparently contemplating something important. “How good are you with healing magic?”

Sirius blinked at her. “Erm, pretty decent, actually. We had to be certified in emergency response for the Aurors, and I sort of… kept studying magical medicine afterwards. I thought it was interesting.”

Lily nodded thoughtfully and cocked her head to the side. “Would it be a terrible inconvenience to ask you to stay with him for a few hours until things stabilise a bit more? I would normally never ask, but we’re working on a massive hippogriff trafficking case and it’s not a great time for me to be missing work…”

“You think Remus would be alright with that?” Sirius asked uncertainly. He’d already dropped by without providing any semblance of a warning, and he didn’t want to intrude on what was probably an immensely vulnerable position for Remus.

To his surprise, however, Lily laughed lightly and shook her head. “I really, really do,” she said emphatically. “So, why don’t you go say hello before he crashes, and I’ll get ready for work so I have time to grab that coffee before I head in. Sound alright?”

She was already halfway to her own bedroom, so a wide-eyed Sirius merely nodded in response.

Remus’s room was a bit chillier than the living room when Sirius entered, which certainly explained why the other man was buried beneath a pile of blankets. He had two bandages on his face – one on his forehead, the other on his cheek – and Sirius could see the edge of another poking out from under his shirt collar. That one looked like it was covering something on his shoulder blade. Both of his forearms were wrapped, as well, and the bandages hardly stood out against his unusually pale skin. He was nearly as pale as Sirius, instead of the usual several shades darker, and his hazel eyes seemed to have a bit more yellow in them than normal.

Sirius wasn’t quite sure what to say when he met Remus’s exhausted gaze. What did one say to a friend who looked like death warmed over? What if he accidentally offended Remus?

Luckily, Remus spoke first and eased Sirius’s racing mind. “I didn’t know you were planning on coming by,” Remus said hoarsely.

Sirius shrugged, sticking his hands into his pockets and averting his eyes. “Neither did I, honestly, but I was driving myself mad worrying about you, so… here I am.” He glanced back at Remus, who now had a tiny, tired smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “How are you feeling?”

Remus hummed and shifted, wincing a bit as he did so. “No worse than usual,” he replied once he got situated in an upright position against the pillows. “A bit like I’ve been trampled by a rather large erumpent, but that’s not exactly abnormal after a transformation.”

Sirius nodded, recalling everything he’d read in his books. “I did some research,” he blurted unceremoniously. “All of the sources I read were in agreement that transformations are really painful, which isn’t exactly surprising considering everything your body goes through during them, but that doesn’t make them any less awful.” He cleared his throat and began to crack his knuckles again. “Not that you need me to tell you that… sorry…” he added, feeling embarrassed.

“Quite alright,” Remus rasped. “I’ve been doing this for years, but it’s all new to you. Seeing it… takes some getting used to.” He studied Sirius for a long moment, and Sirius fidgeted nervously. “You can come sit down, if you’d like. There’s plenty of room.” Suddenly, he flashed Sirius a wry smile and added, “I don’t bite, now that the sun’s up.”

A startled laugh came bursting from Sirius’s chest, and he couldn’t think of a single good reason to refuse Remus’s offer. So, he crossed to the other side of Remus’s bed, kicked off his shoes, and climbed on top of the covers, careful not to jostle the bed (and by extension, Remus) too much.

They sat in silence for a minute or two until Remus cleared his throat and broke it. “You know, I was afraid before pub night on Thursday that you would act differently around me on account of… well, this,” he said softly, gesturing vaguely to himself. “I thought perhaps you might’ve changed your mind, having so much time to think it over during the holidays. I wouldn’t have blamed you, even if you had… but Merlin, I was so relieved when you walked in and smiled at me like nothing had changed.”

Sirius’s heart clenched painfully in his chest at the knowledge that Remus had spent time worrying about such a thing, but he nodded in understanding nonetheless. “I think I understand why you would be worried about something like that,” he replied, voice equally as hushed as Remus’s had been. “But I meant what I said, Remus. It really doesn’t bother me.”

Sirius thought back to their most recent pub night, only a few days prior, and smiled slightly.

“Besides, you wore the scarf,” he added as an afterthought. “Being unhappy to see you was hardly an option at that point.”

Remus smiled his first real smile all morning.

Just as Lily had warned, Remus spent most of the morning resting. He slept more often than not, and really didn’t require much assistance with anything. Still, despite feeling a bit useless, Sirius found himself feeling content to sit on the other side of the bed with his sketchpad in his lap while Remus dozed.

Sometime in the early afternoon, he caught Remus nibbling on his third chocolate bar of the day and finally found a use for himself.

“Alright, that’s it,” he scolded teasingly, plucking the candy from Remus’s hands and ignoring the other man’s cry of protest. “You can’t survive on bloody chocolate all day, Remus, you need actual food.”

“Chocolate is food!” Remus argued, though he at least had the decency to grin sheepishly in response to Sirius’s exasperated look.

“Don’t be a prat; you know what I mean,” Sirius laughed. He looked at a pouting Remus expectantly until Remus breathed out an excessively dramatic sigh, defeated.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “There ought to be some leftovers in the fridge from last night. Lils always makes extra, so there should be enough for both of us if you’d like. I’m pretty sure last night she made carbonara, but I never eat the night of the full… so I’m not entirely sure.” He began to push himself upright, and Sirius frowned.

“D’you want me to just grab you a plate and bring it in here?” Sirius asked, feeling unsure. “I don’t mind…”

Remus winced in pain as he seemed to irritate one of the many sore spots on his body but shook his head nonetheless. “No, I really ought to get up and move around a bit, otherwise my joints settle funny for the whole month.” Sirius made a soft noise of displeasure at the prospect of a whole month of achy joints, and Remus let out a tired chuckle. “Exactly,” Remus said. “Not very ideal. Besides, I’ve got to use the loo.”

Sirius just nodded and swung his feet over the side of the bed, hurrying around to extend a hand to help Remus to his feet. Remus took it gratefully with a muttered, “Thanks.”

Sirius held tight to help steady Remus, who was now a few inches taller than Sirius himself. For a moment, it felt as though they were standing far too close. He could feel Remus’s soft exhales against his cheek, could even count the faded freckles on the other man’s nose. Surprisingly, he also noticed an assortment of thin scars cutting across Remus’s face and neck, despite the fact that he was rather sure he’d never seen them before. He’d spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time looking at Remus over the last few months, and not once had he noticed any of the slightly raised lines that most definitely resembled claw marks.

Now didn’t feel like a particularly good time to inquire about them, however, because it was then that Sirius realised that neither of them had dropped the other’s hand, and his face was beginning to feel flushed. Still, Remus kept holding on, his gaze suddenly clear and contemplative instead of tired. It made Sirius feel exposed.

“Alright?” Sirius asked softly when he was certain Remus was steady on his feet.

Remus blinked, then nodded, pulling his lower lip between his teeth.

Sirius had never wanted to kiss someone so badly in his life.

“Alright,” Remus confirmed. His quiet tone matched Sirius’s, and for a long moment, it was as though they were balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff, just waiting to find out whether or not they would go tumbling over it together.

Then, Sirius cleared his throat, dropped Remus’s hand… and stepped back from the edge of the cliff.

“Why don’t you go on and… do what you need to do,” Sirius said awkwardly (and somewhat breathlessly, if he was honest with himself). “And I’ll go get some lunch ready for us?”

He couldn’t decide whether he was relieved or terrified to see that Remus seemed to be feeling just as off kilter as himself.

“Yeah,” Remus croaked. “Yeah that sounds good.”

Mercifully, Sirius managed to get his heart under control during the few minutes that Remus disappeared into the bathroom, and lunch was an ordinary affair dotted with casual conversation while they enjoyed Lily’s (admittedly excellent) carbonara. He was somewhat surprised when, instead of heading back for his own bedroom, Remus wandered over to the couch in their living room and plopped down.

“Needed a change of scenery,” Remus said in explanation as he motioned for Sirius to have a seat. They sat on opposite ends of the couch, each of them with their backs against an armrest, and while Remus slowly made his way through what appeared to be a very complicated potions regimen, Sirius pulled out his sketchbook and opened it to a blank page.

He managed to focus on the design he was working on for all of two minutes before his mind started to wander.

Despite his best efforts, Sirius couldn’t stop wondering about the scars that seemed to cover Remus’s body. In the brighter light of the living room, he could make out additional raised, white scars on the other man’s arms and hands. They seemed to be everywhere – not that they looked bad – and were surely a result of two decades of werewolf transformations, but Sirius couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed them before.

Unless Remus normally kept them hidden…

A soft nudge against his ankle made him look up from the sketchpad he’d been staring blankly at for who knows how long, and he realised Remus had nudged him with his foot.

“You’re looking awfully contemplative, over there,” Remus said curiously, head cocked to the side.

Sirius flushed and tried to play it off. “Just thinking… it’s nothing, honestly.”

Remus chuckled. “You’ve been frowning at that sketchbook for nearly five minutes, Sirius. That doesn’t feel like nothing.” Sirius only blushed deeper and averted his eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?

Sirius bit his lip. Truthfully, yes, he absolutely wanted to talk about it, because he didn’t like the idea of Remus feeling like he needed to keep himself hidden, but he wasn’t entirely sure it was an appropriate thing to ask about. Logically, it felt like too sensitive a topic to broach the morning after a full moon.

Apparently, Sirius’s tendency to unceremoniously blurt out inappropriate things at the worst moments had other ideas.

“You’ve got lots of scars.”

Remus raised an eyebrow, then looked away and swallowed nervously.

“Not that it’s a bad thing!” Sirius said quickly. “I just… I suppose I was wondering why I’ve never noticed them before…”

“Right…” Remus said softly. He looked unusually unsure of himself, and Sirius’s heart ached with it. “Sorry, I forgot I didn’t have the Glamour up.”

“So you do hide them, then…” Sirius said, more as a statement than a question.

Remus nodded. “Usually. The only people who’ve ever really seen them are my parents and Lily, and some healers, I suppose… and, well… you.”

Sirius filed the giddiness he was feeling about being one of the few people in Remus’s life who’d been able to truly see him under emotions for Future Sirius to work through .

“Why do you Glamour them?” he asked hesitantly.

Remus sighed and ran a hand through his hair – something Sirius recognized as a nervous tic by now. “At first it was because it was what I’d always done,” he admitted, staring blankly at the wall. “My parents used to glamour my face before we went out because a five year-old walking around with scars all over his face would’ve caused people to ask questions they didn’t want to answer… By the time I was old enough to decide for myself, I didn’t want anyone to see them because I thought they were…”

Remus trailed off, but Sirius could imagine the end of that sentence nonetheless. I thought they were ugly.

“Would you…” Sirius began before stopping to swallow the lump in his throat. “Would you have put the Glamour on this morning because of me? If you’d remembered?”

Remus’s eyes snapped to him, and Sirius would have cried at the amount of sadness swimming in them. The other man looked near tears himself. “I…” A pause. “Yeah, probably.”

And, well… Sirius had never been particularly good at keeping his thoughts to himself, so instead of taking a moment to determine the best response, he blurted, “Well, that’s awfully stupid.”

Looking somewhat bewildered, Remus blinked at him in surprise. “Why?”

“Because you’re still pretty!”

Sirius wanted to crawl under the couch. Merlin, why couldn’t he just be normal? Why did every thought he had have to come barreling out of his mouth uncontrolled and unfiltered? Why didn’t he ever take a moment to think?

Remus, meanwhile, was staring at him – eyes wide and lips parted in surprise. His scarred cheeks were bright red, and despite his internal panic, Sirius couldn’t help but think that the endearingly flustered, surprised look on Remus’s face only served to make him even prettier than ever.

“You-” Remus croaked. “You’re serious?”

“Technically, I’m always Sirius.” Smooth. “Fuck, I really need to stop talking.”

Suddenly, Remus let out a strangled sort of cough, and when Sirius met his gaze, the other man simply burst out laughing. It wasn’t the sort of laughter he used to hear from his cousins, however, when Sirius said something odd and they began to mock him. No, this was a bright, lovely, unbearably fond sound, and Sirius (though still puzzled and a bit nervous) felt himself relax. Perhaps he hadn’t ruined things as terribly as he’d thought.

“Sometimes you say things like that, Sirius,” Remus said, still grinning at him with kind eyes. “And it reminds me why I like you so much. Honestly, you are without a doubt the most genuine person I have ever met, and it’s positively brilliant.”

Sirius felt the growing warmth in his cheeks and knew he was probably turning bright red, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Remus was laughing in the most contagious way – all hints of self-consciousness about his scars forgotten as their feet remained nudging each other between them – and Sirius could only join in. He was stunned in the best way by Remus’s ability to make even his most absurd (if true) exclamations feel perfectly normal.

No, not normal… Remus made it seem like he liked that part of Sirius – the part that made him ask too-blunt questions and give too-honest answers… the part that had always been his biggest source of anxiety.

He wondered if, perhaps, this was how Remus was feeling, too – knowing that Sirius thought he was pretty even with his scars.

As they locked gazes once again – both flushed red from laughter and giddiness – Sirius made note of the way Remus’s eyes seemed to sparkle with happiness. I did that, he thought in awe. I made him smile like that.

And if Sirius silently promised himself to spend forever trying to make Remus smile… well, who could really blame him?

After spending the day together following the first full moon of 1985, Sirius noticed things beginning to change, and definitely in a good way.

For one, Remus began to gravitate towards him on pub nights even more than he already had been. More often than not, the two of them ended up huddled together conspiratorially, having their own conversations, despite frequently being surrounded by the rest of their friends. Everyone else would send them the occasional curious glance, but nobody actually said anything – something Sirius was endlessly grateful for. He wasn’t entirely sure he could believably convince anyone that his feelings towards Remus were anything less than utterly adoring, and he didn’t particularly fancy the idea of trying.

Remus had begun popping into the tattoo shop whenever he made a trip to Diagon Alley (which, coincidentally, always seemed to be around the time Sirius had his lunch breaks) just to say hello and ask Sirius about his day. On one particular occasion, Remus had discovered that Sirius was many things, but a decent cook was not one of them, and that had led to the two of them having standing plans to cook dinner together on nights when both James and Lily were stuck late at the office working on a case.

(Even days later, Sirius could still feel the warm, careful press of Remus’s fingers as he patiently showed him how to finely chop herbs without accidentally adding some finely chopped Sirius to the mix. Honestly, Sirius thought about that moment more than he cared to admit. He thought about it practically constantly. )

Meanwhile, when Sirius wasn’t spending time at his shop or with Remus, he was busy with another Remus-adjacent activity, which had been inspired by something the other man had mentioned just before Lily got home the day following the January full moon.

“Werewolves only feel a prey drive towards humans,” Remus said in response to a (probably horribly inappropriate) question from Sirius about whether or not Remus had ever accidentally hurt an animal during his transformations. “The wolf never has any incentive to harm another animal unless it’s provoked, so as far as I know, the only thing I’ve ever hurt during a transformation is myself, and even then, it’s only because the wolf gets antsy and bored and turns on itself.”

“I just wish there was something more that could be done to help, besides just locking you away in a cellar and hoping for the best in the morning,” Sirius had said miserably.

Remus had simply shrugged, though his expression was slightly pained, as though he’d spent many days over the last two decades wishing the same thing. “I know…” he’d said softly before adopting a wry grin. “However seeing as you are not an animal, I’m afraid there’s no possible way for you to be there during a transformation without me trying to hurt you.”

When Sirius had returned home later that evening and climbed into bed, replaying the day’s events over and over in his mind and feeling a melancholy sort of satisfaction with the fact that Remus had put so much trust in him just by letting him be there, something had occurred to him.

Being with Remus during his transformations as a human was entirely out of the question… but what if Sirius weren’t a human?

He’d gone to the Ministry first thing the next morning and applied for an animagus permit.

He was in the middle of reading a lengthy passage on ways to ensure the mandrake leaf would stay put in his mouth for the required full month in order to make the animagus potion, until he was interrupted by the twinkling of the bells on the front door of the shop.

It was the middle of Sirius’s lunch break, which meant his visitor could only be one of two people.

To his delight (not that he had anything against his uncle), the wizard walking through the front door was Remus. Sirius just grinned and subtly banished the large tome he’d been reading into the back office.

“Ready to let me give you a tattoo, yet?” Sirius joked as Remus rolled his eyes and plopped down in the clients’ chair beside where Sirius sat at his workstation.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Remus muttered, though his tired smile was fond. “I was just in the area looking for a job. I’m afraid Esmerelda finally got around to running my background check, and… well, you know how that goes.”

Unfortunately, Sirius did know, because Remus had commented on it a week prior during one of their little lunch chats.

“I still think it’s ridiculous that your lycanthropy shows up on a basic background check,” Sirius grumbled. “They’re supposed to reveal potential threats to safety, not medical history.”

Remus merely raised an eyebrow at him, and Sirius suspected that the look was meant to convey the unspoken fact that many witches and wizards would consider lycanthropy to be a safety concern.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Sirius complained. “Let me be righteously angry on your behalf, for once!”

He couldn’t decide whether he was delighted or offended by the bark of Remus’s laughter that followed. In the end, he never had time to determine how he felt, because Remus was quickly pivoting to a new topic.

“Anyways… I actually popped in to ask if you wanted to do dinner this evening. Lily owled to let me know that she’d be late at work, so… if you’re not busy…” Remus looked at Sirius hopefully, which Sirius found absurdly endearing.

Obviously, Sirius nodded. “James sent a patronus a bit ago to say the same thing, so it looks like I’m all yours,” he replied, resolutely ignoring the extent to which his own words were becoming more and more accurate with every passing day. “Come to mine around six o’clock? I can open the Floo for you.”

“Brilliant,” Remus said with a grin that looked a bit less tired than before. The bells on the door twinkled again, and this time it was a client – a regular named Pandora who Sirius greeted with a wave.

“Sorry,” he said reluctantly to Remus. “Duty calls, but I’ll see you tonight?”

Remus was already to his feet and shoving his hands into his pockets when he nodded and gave Sirius a smile that made his heart stutter in his chest. “Six o’clock,” Remus confirmed. Then, he was out the door with a soft, “Pardon me,” spoken to Pandora and a wave to Sirius.

“Remind me to thank Jamie when he gets home,” Sirius joked as he collapsed happily onto one side of the couch in his sitting room.

Remus laughed and sat down on the opposite side. “That ought to be doable, although I’m not entirely sure what I’m reminding you to thank him for.”

“For being the sole responsible adult in this flat and making sure we have groceries,” Sirius replied simply. “Otherwise I suspect we might have been doomed to buttered noodles this evening. Probably should’ve given more thought to what sort of ingredients we had around before I offered to host tonight…”

Sirius trailed off thoughtfully, but Remus waved his hand in dismissal and shook his head. “It turned out alright in the end, didn’t it?” Remus said reassuringly. “I think we did alright for ourselves.”

And, well, Sirius couldn’t really argue with that. They had done alright for themselves, considering the fact that neither of them really had anything particular in mind for dinner. In the end, Remus had ended up throwing together a stew using whatever James had stored in the kitchen, and it had been admittedly delicious.

“You did a wonderful job,” Sirius said pointedly. “I was more or less a spectator.”

“You weren’t entirely useless, Sirius. You opened the bottle of wine, which is, arguably, the most important part.”

Sirius laughed and couldn’t help but smile at the amused twinkle in Remus’s eyes. Merlin, he could look at those eyes forever – scattered flecks of gold and green among honeyed brown, soft with fondness and sharp with wit all at once. Now – a full two weeks out from the first full moon of the year – Remus’s eyes held more green than gold, and it reminded Sirius vaguely of the earliest days of spring, when greenery was first beginning to emerge from the dead ground.

He wondered, briefly, whether Remus might ever let him sketch them. More importantly, he wondered if he could do them justice.

It was only when Remus cocked his head to the side curiously that Sirius realised just how long he must have been staring.

“Sorry!” he blurted, quickly averting his eyes as his cheeks began to grow warm. “I didn’t mean to stare, or anything – I just… got lost in thought, I suppose…” His voice grew softer until it trailed off into nothing as he braced for Remus’s response. Sirius hoped he hadn’t made the other man uncomfortable.

The sound of Remus clearing his throat had Sirius chancing a glance back up. They stared at each other from opposite sides of the couch for a long moment. “What were you thinking about?” Remus asked softly.

“Springtime,” Sirius replied. It wasn’t entirely a lie, after all.

After a beat, Remus nodded, then moved the conversation right along. “Lily’s birthday is next Wednesday,” he began. “I was thinking we ought to do something special during pub night, if you’d all be up for it.”

“Mary makes a bloody brilliant chocolate cake,” Sirius jumped in excitedly. “And I know for a fact that at least two of us have already gotten her gifts.”

“You got Lily something for her birthday?” Remus asked with mild surprise. Honestly, Sirius couldn’t even be offended by his surprise. He and Lily were hardly the best of friends, after all.

Still, Sirius nodded. “James made me. Kept going on and on about how he didn’t want to look desperate – because apparently getting someone a birthday present is desperate now – and said something about it being less awkward if he wasn’t the only person who got her something. So she’ll be receiving an amortentia candle from me and a diamond necklace from James, which he personally imbued with protective enchantments.”

Remus raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle. “Merlin,” he said quietly. “He’s afraid of coming off as too desperate, but figured diamonds were appropriately casual?”

Sirius snorted and shrugged. “Don’t ask me to try to explain Jamie’s thought process. I barely understand it as it is.”

“Oh?” Remus asked playfully. “And what exactly was your thought process, Mr. Amortentia Candle?”

“Hey!” Sirius laughed. “I’m just trying to expedite this process, alright? They’re obviously perfect for each other, so hopefully she – y’know – lights the stupid candle and smells my idiot best friend and I can stop listening to him wax poetic about her every bloody night.”

Remus laughed, but Sirius was nowhere near done.

“Can you believe that the other night, James had the nerve to try to take the mickey out of Pete because Pete was too nervous to ask his office’s new secretary on a date? She’s been there for three weeks, Remus! Meanwhile Jamie’s been pining after Evans for years and she obviously fancies him back, but he’s too damn cowardly to do anything about it!”

“Christ, I know what you mean,” Remus groaned, throwing his head back in an agitated gesture. “I might strangle her if she gets on my arse again about my own dating life. I reckon my conversations with her aren’t so different from the ones Peter is having with James.”

It took a moment for Remus’s words to sink in, but the moment they did, Sirius’s heart plummeted. If Remus was having conversations with Lily like the ones Peter was having with James, then that meant there was someone Remus fancied…

Someone who, surely, was not Sirius himself, because Sirius suspected he’d been rather bad at concealing his feelings as of late, and Remus would have said something by now if he felt the same way.

“You fancy someone, then?” Sirius asked, thankful (for once) for the years of practice he had controlling his outward emotions when he needed to.

Remus jolted as though he’d been burned, his wry smile dissolving into something that nearly resembled panic. “Oh…” he said hesitantly. He sounded the way Sirius often did when he realised he’d said something during a ramble that was probably best left unsaid. It was a strange tone to hear, coming from someone who ordinarily seemed to put-together. “I, erm… it’s not…” Remus sighed. “It’s nothing, really. Nothing that matters, anyway.”

At that, Sirius frowned, his mask beginning to slip. “Why not?”

To his surprise, Remus scoffed and averted his eyes. “I’m a werewolf with no soulmark, Sirius,” the other man said softly. “I don’t exactly have much to offer.”

Every corner of Sirius’s mind screamed in protest to the heartbreakingly dejected statement that had just come from Remus’s lips. He wanted to grab Remus’s face between his hands and stare directly into those gorgeous hazel eyes while he told Remus all of the things Remus had to offer. He wanted to kiss away the furrow between Remus’s brows until the other man smiled, instead, and then he wanted to press his own lips to Remus’s smile until they were both breathless from it. He wanted… Merlin , he wanted.

But Remus was his friend, not his lover. Remus was his friend who fancied someone else and seemed certain that pursuing that person would be fruitless.

Sirius thought, bitterly, that whoever it was that might be turning down Remus’s advances was an idiot.

“You must know that’s not true,” Sirius said finally after a long pause.

Remus looked at him with sad eyes that nearly broke Sirius’s heart in two.

“You’ve got plenty to offer, Remus, you’re you. And anyone who can’t see that is a bloody fool.” Sirius’s voice was soft and earnest, and despite the fact that his nearly unbearable urge to ramble on about everything that made Remus wonderful, he managed to leave it at that.

The emotions flickering across Remus’s frowning face were too fleeting for Sirius to decipher in the stifling silence that had fallen over the room. Sirius could only hope that he hadn’t shown too many of his cards, because painful as it was to know that Remus would always remain slightly out of reach, the thought of losing his friendship was paralysing.

Eventually, though, Remus’s expression settled on a stunned sort of gratefulness, and Sirius could relax ever so slightly.

“Sirius…” Remus said softly. “I-”

They were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of the Floo roaring to life, followed by an exhausted groan from one James Potter, who was now tracking sooty footprints into their sitting room as he walked into the room with the heels of his hands digging into his eyes.

“Sirius!” James whined. He crouched down to unlace his boots, facing away from the couch, still unaware of the third person in the room. “The love of my life has bailed on pub night this Thursday to meet her lunatic sister’s new fiancée, and I demand the comfort of brotherly cuddles while I process this devastating turn of events!”

Sirius quickly slapped a hand over his own mouth to keep from laughing, and one glance at Remus revealed that he had done the same.

“Hang on…” James said suddenly, pausing briefly in his boot-removal. “It smells good in here. Why does it smell so good in here? You can’t cook .”

Remus looked at Sirius, eyes shining with mirth. They nodded at each other.

“No, he can’t,” Remus said smoothly. “But I can.”

Poor James nearly jumped right out of his skin, spinning around awkwardly and landing flat on his arse in response to the unexpected baritone voice. “Bloody fucking shit!” he cried. “Remus, what are you doing here?”

“Making dinner, obviously,” Remus replied, eyebrows raised into an unimpressed look.

Sirius snorted. “We’ve been eating dinner together sometimes when you and Evans abandon us for nobler causes, James, you know this!”

“I mean, I knew that, sure, but you usually eat at Lily’s! I didn’t expect anyone else to be here!” James protested.

“Clearly,” Remus joked. “Although to be honest, Potter, I’m ever so glad I got to see this new ‘brotherly cuddles’ side of you.”

“Oh, Merlin,” James wailed, covering his face with his hands. “You’re going to tell Lily, aren’t you? You’re going to tell her, because obviously you’re her best friend, and then she’s going to think I’m even more ridiculous than she already does, and I’ll be doomed to live the rest of my life as a poor lonely spinster just because Petunia and Vernon couldn’t just pick another bloody day of the week to insist on having an awkward dinner of glaring at each other!”

“Christ, relax, mate,” Remus laughed, rising to extend a hand to James and help him to his feet. “I’m not going to tell Lils anything. Believe it or not, I am very much rooting for you in your quest to win her affections, admittedly baffling methods aside.”

“Oi!” James said defensively, though he seemed less frantic. “Don’t question my methods!”

“You once bribed three dozen house elves to follow her around on her birthday and sing her songs about your undying love between classes,” Sirius cut in. “Baffling is probably the kindest way anyone has ever referred to your methods.”

James glared at him, but Remus chuckled, so Sirius felt it was a win.

“Besides, just because Evans isn’t coming doesn’t mean we can’t do pub night,” Sirius continued. He emphatically denied the voice in his head that insisted the only reason he wanted to keep their standing pub night plan was in order to have another excuse to see Remus.

“Alice and Frank are out because of, y’know… parenthood,” James said dejectedly. “Dorcas and Marls are out of town, and Mary isn’t about to come if none of the girls are there, so…”

“So…” Sirius said emphatically. “That still leaves the three of us and Pete. We’ll make it a boys night – the boys of Gryffindor’s class of 1978.”

“Technically, I’m not a-”

“Hush, Remus – you’re an honorary member and that’s close enough,” Sirius interjected before Remus could deign to finish that sentence. He looked at James, who was watching their interaction with mild interest, then at Remus, who was wearing a small, proud smile and a satisfied blush that made him look positively charming. “Well?” he asked expectantly. “Are you boys in? Or are you out?”

James stared at him for a beat longer, then shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, alright. I’m in. Remus?”

Two sets of eyes turned towards Remus expectantly. “If you’re sure I won’t be intruding…” Remus said hesitantly. “I know the three of you probably don’t get a lot of time to yourselves, so-”

To Sirius’s surprise, James cut in before he could.

“Not intruding at all, mate,” James said with a grin. “We’d love to have you.”

Remus looked at James with wide eyes, then at Sirius, who nodded encouragingly and so enthusiastically he worried his own head might tumble off of his shoulders. “If you’re sure…”

James and Sirius nodded again.

“Alright…” Remus said finally. “Then yes. I’m in.”

James smiled broadly and clapped Remus on the shoulder, but Remus’s grin was trained on Sirius, who could hardly contain his joy at the way James had welcomed Remus into their little group without so much as questioning it.

“Brilliant!” Sirius exclaimed.

And if he let himself bounce, just a little, well… he knew neither James nor Remus would ever dream of faulting him for it.

Boys night ended up being (to nobody’s surprise) a resounding success.

Remus seemed to fit right into the little trio that Sirius, James, and Peter had formed all the way back in their first year at Hogwarts, and by the end of the evening, it hardly felt like Remus was a newcomer at all. In fact, Sirius wondered at the fact that Remus hadn’t been there all along.

Remus rounded out the group in ways none of them had particularly expected. He joined Peter as a second voice of exasperated reason whenever James and Sirius began to concoct a half-baked plan for mischief. He and James bonded over their shared love of muggle music (as well as, briefly, their shared disdain for one Severus Snape).

And Sirius… well, Sirius had never had any doubts that he and Remus would get along perfectly well in the presence of his other two closest friends. Frankly, Sirius had a hard time imagining there being a time when he and Remus could ever fail to get along like two mandrakes in a pot.

It had been ages since Sirius had laughed as hard as he did that Thursday night. The only downside to the whole ordeal was that by the time Remus and Peter left the flat via the Floo, Sirius was even more enamoured with the newcomer than he had been before (which, frankly, was saying something).

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Over a decade of living with James Potter had allowed Sirius to become fluent in the other man’s body language, and he knew by now that when James walked into Sirius’s bedroom with his arms crossed, bottom lip between his teeth, and eyes focusing anywhere but Sirius himself, it meant they were about to have a talk .

“Oh, no,” Sirius sighed as James took a seat on the end of the bed. They were both in their pyjamas already, and though Sirius was already snuggled beneath his blankets, he was nowhere near tired enough to sleep, yet. He was still buzzing with content happiness from their evening. “I know that look. What is it?”

James looked up at him guiltily, pulling his feet up onto the bed and turning to sit cross-legged, facing Sirius directly. “Please don’t kill me for bringing this up…” James said hesitantly.

Sirius suspected he knew where this was going. “James…”

“No, I know,” James said quickly. “I know you’ve said that how you feel about Remus doesn’t matter, because you don’t have a soulmark… but who knows, right? He might be alright with it! I mean, Sirius, he looks at you like you’re… like you’re…”

“The brightest star in the night sky?” Sirius quipped sardonically – a joke Regulus often made in reference to Sirius’s own namesake.

James, however, didn’t laugh, even though Sirius knew James was plenty aware of the joke. “Yes,” he said emphatically, instead. “Yes, Sirius. Exactly like that. You joke about it, but I don’t know how you haven’t noticed, because he’s not subtle. I don’t understand why you won’t just talk to him.”

“It’s not that simple…” Sirius said softly, and James threw his hands up in frustration.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sirius, you can’t keep assuming he’ll have a problem with the soulmark thing just because-”

“It’s not the soulmark thing!” Sirius argued. “It’s… fuck, Jamie, it’s not the soulmark thing. He knows about the soulmark thing and he doesn’t care because he doesn’t have one either.”

For a moment, Sirius worried that James’s eyes might bug right out of his head. “He what?” James cried. “Then what’s the problem?”

So many things, Sirius thought to himself. He got rid of it because he’s a werewolf and he thinks he’s got nothing to offer, and I don’t know if I’d ever be able to convince him otherwise. He’s brilliant and perfect and way out of my league. He deserves someone who isn’t as broken as I am – someone normal.

But all of these things were a bit more than he was willing to disclose to James, especially out of respect for the enormous secret Remus had trusted him with, so instead Sirius told the easiest truth he could think of.

“He fancies someone else,” he said softly, hating how small and devastated his voice sounded to his own ears.

James frowned, and Sirius turned his gaze to his fidgeting hands where they rested in his lap. “He told you that?”

“More or less…” Sirius confirmed. “He said Lily’s been on his back about going after someone.”

James was quiet for a long moment. “Do you think, maybe, that it could be you?” he asked genuinely.

Sirius shook his head sadly. “I really don’t,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’m very good at hiding the way I feel about him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, James, I told him I thought he was pretty the other week. If it was me, he would’ve said something by now.”

Mercifully, James didn’t comment on Sirius’s admission that he’d called Remus pretty, though his eyes did widen slightly in response. “Maybe he’s as blind to your feelings as you are to his,” James said after a long pause.

It was a bold statement – one that probably should have made Sirius angry. Instead, it made him a strange mix of hopeful and confused. “Yeah,” he said noncommittally. “Maybe.”

Sirius’s heart felt heavy in his chest. He thought of himself sitting in the waiting room at St. Mungo’s all those years ago, with James Potter at his side, holding his hand while they waited for a stranger to summon him to perform a procedure that would alter the course of his life. Then, he imagined Remus in the same position. Had he gone alone? Was he relieved when it was over, or devastated, like Sirius had been? The thought of Remus sitting in the exam room afterwards, crying and mourning someone he’d never met, made Sirius want to cry all over again.

“Hey Jamie?” he asked in a small voice.

“Yeah?”

Sirius swallowed and pushed past the little voice in his own head that was scolding him for being too needy and too different and too much.

“I…” He swallowed. This was James. He could ask. “Do you think you could… sleep here tonight?” he asked. “I don’t want to be alone, because I’m feeling all off, and I don’t know how to feel about any of this, and I’m afraid that if I’m alone I’ll start thinking too much, which is never good because that usually leads to me panicking, and I-”

“Hey,” James said gently, crawling up the bed and under the covers beside Sirius. Sirius shut his mouth and looked at his brother with wide eyes. “It’s alright, Sirius. You don’t need to explain. Of course I’ll stay here tonight if you want me to.”

In response to James’s words, Sirius let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding, then nodded.

The two of them settled beneath the sheets the same way they usually did these days – with James on his back and Sirius’s head resting on his chest like a pillow. James’s comforting scent brought with it a flood of old memories of this exact placement… the night Sirius had turned up, bloodied and beaten, on James’s doorstep… the night in third year when all of their classmates had witnessed Sirius’s boggart turning into his horrible mother… even the night Sirius had tearfully confessed to James that he was gay, when James had assured him that it didn’t change anything, that he loved Sirius no matter what…

It occurred to Sirius, for what was likely the millionth time, that James Potter was quite possibly the best adopted brother in the entire world. Sirius loved him more than words could ever describe.

“You’re the best brother,” Sirius mumbled into James’s t-shirt.

James huffed out a laugh that ruffled Sirius’s hair. “Better than Reg?”

“Oh, definitely,” Sirius laughed, only half-joking. He’d never met two people as different as James and Regulus – comparing his brotherhood with the both of them was the same as comparing apples and oranges, really.

“Well, I’m honoured,” James said solemnly, patting Sirius’s head awkwardly in a way that had them both giggling like children. “I love you, idiot. You know that?”

And despite his jumbled emotions, Sirius found himself smiling slightly as he closed his eyes. “I know,” he said softly. “Love you too, prat.”

Chapter Text

February 1985

When all was said and done, it took James Potter and Lily Evans thirteen years of rivalry, six months of pining, twenty-five pub nights, and one near-death experience to finally couple up.

And, in keeping with the historically dramatic nature of their tumultuous relationship, it happened in the most absurd way possible – on Valentine’s Day, in a St. Mungo’s emergency exam room, and entirely by accident.

Sirius was with Remus at the shop, enjoying a meandering chat about nothing in particular (and resolutely ignoring the fact that Remus had stopped by on Valentine’s Day, because that didn’t necessarily mean anything…) when Kingsley Shacklebolt’s panther patronus burst through the wall with an urgent request that Sirius report to the St. Mungo’s emergency department as soon as possible. This, Sirius knew, could only mean one thing: James was hurt, and badly.

Sirius watched the patronus fade, exchanged a terrified look with Remus, and bolted towards the back room. “Al!” he yelled, thanking Merlin for the fact that his uncle had happened to stop by today, of all days, to get a head start on paperwork.

Alphard looked up with a frown and set down his quill. “Sirius? What’s-”

“I’ve got to go – James is hurt and I got a patronus from Kingsley, and I’m supposed to have a session with someone in half an hour but that’s obviously not happening now, so I need you to tell them when they get here that I had an emergency to attend to and that I’ll be in touch to reschedule,” Sirius blurted.

Alphard simply nodded, looking concerned and a bit baffled. “Use the Floo to get to Mungo’s, if you would. I don’t know that I trust you to apparate like this…”

“I am perfectly capable of-” Sirius began to protest, but Remus quickly cut in, placing a gentle hand on Sirius’s shoulder.

“I’ll go with you,” Remus offered without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll apparate us straight into the emergency department, alright? But let’s get going before you get yourself even more worked up.”

Had those words come from quite possibly anyone else in the world, Sirius would have been offended, but Remus’s eyes held nothing but genuine concern for both Sirius and James, so Sirius merely nodded in reply and took Remus’s outstretched hand.

For some reason, when Sirius had imagined the scene he was about to walk into, he pictured quite a lot of yelling, perhaps some blood, and crying onlookers in a bustling emergency room filled with the sick and dying. What greeted them when they landed at the emergency visitors apparation point, however, was rather subdued.

The waiting room was quiet, save for the static-y crooning of the Wizard Wireless Network, and the reception staff looked… well, bored. Most of the patients waiting to be seen were dozing in their chairs. The monotony of the environment was really quite jarring against the panic rising in Sirius’s throat.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” a reception wizard asked from his place behind the desk.

“Yes,” Sirius said immediately. He crossed the distance between the apparation point and the desk in three strides. “I’m here for Auror James Potter. I got a patronus from Kingsley Shacklebolt just a few minutes ago and came as quickly as I could.”

The receptionist blinked, then glanced down at some of the paperwork sprawled out in front of him on the desk. “Name?” he asked in a bored voice.

Sirius bit back the millions of questions in his mind and answered, “Sirius Black,” in a clipped tone.

That seemed to match whatever was written on the papers, because the receptionist nodded. “Right. And you are?” It took Sirius a moment to realise that the man was now speaking to Remus.

“Er, Remus Lupin,” Remus said awkwardly. “Here for emotional support, I suppose…”

Even in his panicked state, Sirius nearly laughed at Remus’s wording. The receptionist, too, seemed to find it slightly amusing, because he smirked and nodded. “Right, well, Potter’s in room twelve, just down there-”

Sirius was hurrying down the hallway before the man even finished speaking, Remus not far behind him. They both skidded to a halt in the doorway of room twelve.

James was – thank Merlin – fully conscious and sitting upright against a pile of pillows on the hospital bed, though he certainly looked worse for wear. His uniform had been cut off and was lying, bloodied and crumpled, on a tray beside the bed, and his torso was covered with what looked to be a dozen or so long, thin, fresh scars. One of them had come within millimetres of cutting through the soulmark that rested just above James’s heart. It nearly looked like he’d been sliced open with a blade, though Sirius was certain it had been magic that inflicted the damage.

“Merlin’s tits, James, did you get into a fight with a bloody bear?” Sirius asked, startling James and the pair of mediwitches who were in the process of bandaging him up.

“Sirius!” James exclaimed, though his voice was hoarse and much softer than usual. “What are you doing here? And why is Remus with you?”

Sirius fought the urge to smack his brother for his utter nonchalance despite the seriousness of the situation. He supposed James had been injured enough already that a whack to the back of the head wouldn’t do much to prove his point. “I’m your emergency contact, idiot. Kingsley sent a patronus and told me to get here as quickly as possible.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” James grumbled. “It wasn’t even a big deal! Just a few minor cuts-”

“Actually, you were quite literally about to bleed out when they brought you in,” one of the mediwitches supplied. James glared at her while Sirius and Remus gaped at James.

“You nearly bled out?” Sirius screeched.

“Alright,” Remus said quickly. He rested a warm hand on Sirius’s lower back and nudged him further into the room so they could close the door (and presumably spare everyone else from hearing the scolding Sirius was prepared to give to James). The scolding died on Sirius’s tongue, however, when Remus’s hand lingered for a moment before disappearing. “Sirius, James obviously did not bleed out, seeing as he’s currently having a conversation with us, so please take a deep breath before you hyperventilate yourself into your own emergency room bed.”

Sirius made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, but still followed Remus’s advice and took a few deep breaths. Surprisingly, it really did make him feel a bit calmer.

“And James,” Remus continued. “Stop trying to downplay what happened and tell Sirius the truth, because you and I both know that he will eventually weasel it out of some poor mediwitch or wizard if you don’t, and it won’t be fun for anyone when he inevitably does.”

Surprisingly, James seemed receptive to Remus’s little speech, and he looked at Sirius apologetically. “Fine… alright, yes, it was bad, honestly,” he admitted in a subdued tone. Sirius moved a bit closer to the bed so James wouldn’t need to strain his already tired voice. “I’ve got no idea what spell it was, because I certainly didn’t recognize it – might have been something the Death Eaters invented during the war – but it sort of… cut me open while we were trying to subdue a couple of Death Eaters who’ve been on the run for ages. I don’t actually remember how I got here…”

“Your partner apparated you here,” the mediwitch from before supplied.

“Right, that…” James said dismissively. “Anyways, I think I’m alright now. They patched me up pretty quickly and shoved one of those disgusting blood-replenishers down my throat, so… yeah.”

Sirius’s mind was running a mile a minute at the horrifying reality of just how close he’d come to losing the most important person in his life. “Fuck, Jamie…” he said softly, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. “That patronus from Kingsley scared the shit out of me. I thought you might be…”

And Merlin, Sirius couldn’t even bring himself to say it.

James’s expression softened and he held out a hand, which Sirius immediately rushed to grab hold of – careful to stay out of the way of the mediwitches. “But I’m not,” James assured him, punctuating his statement with a squeeze of his hand, just to prove to Sirius that he was still here. “I’m not dead. Don’t worry, you’re very much still stuck with-”

The door burst open before James could finish his sentence, revealing five feet and two inches of fury in the form of none other than Lily Evans. All three men gaped at her in shock while the mediwitches began to pack away their supplies. Sirius dropped James’s hand as James scrabbled to sit up straighter.

“James Potter!” Lily scolded, fuming. “You utterly incompetent, reckless buffoon! What in the name of God were you thinking, nearly getting yourself killed?”

James blinked at her in confusion. “I- it was a takedown , Lily. I was doing my job.”

“Right, well perhaps you ought to get better at it-”

James yelled in protest, but she barreled on.

“Because that useless partner of yours came stumbling into the office five minutes ago, blubbering about how you were practically dead because of some twisted little Death Eater curse, and it’s taken me all five of the minutes since then to figure out whether or not you were still going to be alive for our next stupid pub night. I don’t know if you’re aware, but you being dead really would’ve put a damper on things, so next time you go on one of these ridiculous raids could you maybe try not to nearly die?”

“Damn,” James deadpanned. “Guess I’ll have to take narrowly avoid death at the hands of a dangerous criminal off of my schedule for next Tuesday, then.”

“Oh my God, I hate you, Potter,” Lily snapped.

Sirius, who had been watching the whole interaction with wide eyes, glanced at Remus. The other man seemed equally as fascinated by the scene unfolding before them, and gave a confused shrug when their eyes met.

“You absolutely do not!” James protested, a smirk now settling on his face. “Admit it, Evans, you were worried about me!”

“Oh, in your dreams Potter. No, I- '' Suddenly, she stopped short as the mediwitches finished packing up and made for the door. She was staring with wide eyes, slack jawed, at James’s chest, which was now covered in bandages.

Honestly, Sirius probably would’ve stared at it too, if he hadn’t been there to watch them apply all of the bandages himself.

“Potter…” Lily said in a strangled voice. “What exactly is that?”

James frowned in confusion. “What? The bandages?”

“What? No! No, the… the other thing. Right above your…” Her voice trailed off, and instead she gestured vaguely at James. It took a moment for Sirius to realise what she was asking about. The pieces began to slide into place at the same time Remus pieced together what was happening, because he heard a soft gasp from behind him.

James, still completely oblivious and wearing a frown, looked down at his chest. “My soulmark?” he asked.

Lily’s eyes were so wide that Sirius worried they might pop right out of her skull. “That’s not your soulmark, Potter. Don’t be ridiculous,” she said faintly.

“What’re you on about?” James argued. “I think I know what my own bloody soulmark looks like.”

Behind Sirius, Remus breathed out a quiet, “Fucking hell…” Sirius was inclined to agree.

“No,” Lily said with a surprising amount of conviction. “No. No, absolutely not. That is not your soulmark because it’s my soulmark and I did not spend seven years loathing you in school so that I could find out that you, James sodding Potter, are my soulmate, in some sterile hospital room with Sirius and Remus here to witness it. Which, by the way, Remus, what are you doing here?”

“He, erm… he was with me when the summons came from Kingsley,” Sirius said awkwardly.

James made a strangled sort of coughing noise, and everyone turned to him. “Sirius, I love you, but if you say another word in the next two minutes I swear to Merlin, I will jinx every mirror in our apartment to insult you for the next month.”

Fair enough, Sirius thought. Remus snorted.

“Evans, I’m going to need you to repeat that, because I’m fairly certain this blood loss has me hallucinating,” James continued.

“Christ, your soulmark is directly over your heart? You really are just a walking cliché, Potter,” Lily said – very much not repeating her words from only moments before. “Not that I actually believe it’s your soulmark.”

James merely blinked at her, baffled.

“Because if it were actually your soulmark, then our soulmarks would match, which – quite frankly – is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever wasted a moment considering!” Lily babbled. “Because I hate you, James Potter! Or, rather I did hate you before we started working together. And then I suppose I started to tolerate you. And then we started doing pub nights, and alright, fine, maybe I actually grew a bit fond of you and your stupid glasses and your terrible hair but that doesn’t make us soulmates!”

Slowly, as Lily continued to ramble and pace back and forth at the foot of his bed, James’s face morphed from an expression of stunned disbelief to something unbearably soft and (disgustingly, in Sirius’s opinion) adoring.

“Evans…” James said softly, but Lily continued rambling about rivalries and soulmarks and – inexplicably – that muggle field of science called chemistry.

Sirius felt his own lips twitching into a smile, and saw that Remus’s were doing the same.

Meanwhile, Lily continued her tirade. “I’m not saying I thought you were ugly while we were in school, obviously – I’m not blind – but you were ridiculous and-”

“Lily,” James tried again, to no avail. Finally, after a few more moments, James sighed, shook his head in fond disbelief, and said, “Lily Evans, I realise that you are in the middle of having a mental breakdown, but I am about ninety percent sure that you’ve just told me we’re soulmates, and I have been hopelessly in love with you for so long I can’t even remember what it felt like not to love you. So I swear to Merlin, if you don’t come over here and kiss me in the next ten seconds, I might actually die – something you are, if I recall correctly, vehemently opposed to me doing.”

Lily froze, as did Sirius’s breathing, and for a moment, the room fell utterly silent.

Then, as though pulled by a string, Lily took a step forward. Then she took another. And another. Until she was standing at James’s bedside and staring at him in disbelief. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment, and Sirius could’ve sworn James’s hand was shaking as he raised it to brush some of her flaming hair from her face.

“I hate you, James Potter,” Lily said weakly, nearly tearfully.

James swallowed, smiled slightly, and nodded. “I know,” he murmured.

Sirius had no idea who moved first, but only a moment later, he watched as his best friend kissed the woman of his dreams, feeling a strange mix of elation and sadness as he did. James deserved this with Lily – and she with him – but something about watching it all finally come together with Remus standing only a few feet away filled him with a hopeless sort of longing.

Because Sirius wanted that. He wanted someone – wanted Remus – to kiss him the way James was kissing Lily now, like she was the most precious thing he’d ever laid eyes on. He wanted to know what Remus’s lips would feel like pressed against his own, and what Remus’s wavy, tawny hair would feel like between his fingers. He wanted all of that, and so much more, so badly that it hurt.

But Remus wanted all of it with someone else.

“Erm…” Remus said awkwardly, cutting through Sirius’s thoughts. “We’ll give the two of you a moment…” Neither Lily nor James paid him any mind, so Remus gently laid a hand on Sirius’s shoulder and tugged lightly. “Come on,” he said softly.

Sirius simply nodded and followed Remus out the door.

March 1985

The remainder of the month of February went by in a busy blur. Sirius had a steady stream of clients that kept him occupied nearly every day, and he hardly saw James, considering how much time the other man was spending with Lily, now. Meanwhile, Remus had secured a job at the apothecary right down the street from Sirius’s shop, which meant they were seeing more of each other than ever.

(Sirius couldn’t quite tell whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, seeing as his feelings towards Remus continued to balloon with every encounter.)

In all of the time they spent together, however, Remus never once mentioned who it was that he fancied, or even that the mystery man existed at all. James liked to insist that it was because Sirius was the person Remus fancied. On one particularly absurd occasion, James had even postulated that perhaps Sirius and Remus were soulmates, but neither of them had any idea because they didn’t have marks to compare.

Sirius had thrown a pillow at him, for that.

Still, despite Sirius’s ever-growing crush on Remus Lupin, things were… well, good. The shop was doing well, James was happy, Sirius was spending time with the people he cared about most every day, and pub nights had continued even after James and Lily finally got together. It was the happiest Sirius had been in ages, so, really, he shouldn’t have been so surprised when it all came crashing to a halt on the morning following the March full moon.

Sirius knew something was amiss when instead of being greeted by Lily’s tired smile as he stepped out of the Floo, he was met with the sight of Lily speaking in grave, hushed tones with none other than-

“Madam Pomfrey?”

Both the matron and Lily startled at the sound of Sirius’s voice, and the former looked at him with wide eyes. “Mr. Black!” she exclaimed, floundering for the first time since Sirius had known her. “I’m not sure what has led you to believe that unexpectedly showing up in someone’s fireplace at seven in the morning is in any way acceptable, but I’m afraid now is really not a good-”

“It’s fine, Madam Pomfrey,” Lily cut in, voice strained. “Sirius knows. Remus told him.”

Remus.

A pit of dread settled in Sirius’s stomach as the circumstances began to sink in. “What’s going on?” he asked nervously. “Where’s Remus? Is he alright?”

Madam Pomfrey was still eyeing him suspiciously, but thankfully, Lily seemed to sense Sirius’s rising panic. The redhead held out her hands placatingly. “He’s… well, he’s not alright, exactly… but he will be.”

Sirius was finding it difficult to take much comfort in Lily’s uncertain words.

After another moment, Madam Pomfrey blinked, then sighed, and finally seemed to come to terms with Sirius’s presence as she began to speak. “If you are familiar with Remus’s condition…” she began, staring at him pointedly. “Then I’m sure you are aware that during transformations, it’s quite common for him to… lash out at himself.”

Sirius nodded, though he was beginning to feel a bit nauseous. “He’s mentioned it before…”

“Yes, well… apparently the wolf was angrier than usual last night, because I’m afraid the poor boy has done quite a number on himself,” Madam Pomfrey continued tiredly. “As Miss Evans said, he will recover – he’s dealt with worse, after all – but it will be a long couple of days while the worst of his injuries heal. I’m sure you recall from your time at Hogwarts that injuries inflicted by dark magic are slower to heal.”

Once again, Sirius nodded. He turned to Lily, who looked to be on the verge of tears. “You’ve got the Macintosh case open,” he said softly. James had spent the entire previous evening talking about it. “I know you’re probably needed at the DMLE…”

Lily bit her lip anxiously and wrapped her arms around herself. “I know… I am, but…” She cleared her throat and met Sirius’s eyes with a grave expression. “I trust you, Sirius. I really do. But are you sure you want to do this today? It… it’s really bad, Sirius.”

Sirius could see where her concern was coming from, honestly, but he was fairly certain he’d never been more desperate to see Remus for himself than he was in that moment. Not even a resurrected Voldemort himself could have managed to drag Sirius away – not while Remus was injured and in pain.

“I’m staying,” he said resolutely.

Lily sniffled, but nodded, and Madam Pomfrey raised an eyebrow. Sirius wondered if perhaps the matron was recalling the time he’d nearly fainted when Lockhart – a Ravenclaw several years above them who was, frankly, the single most obnoxious person Sirius had ever met – had attempted to heal James’s broken leg and instead vanished all of the bones in the affected limb. He supposed that his time at Hogwarts hadn’t given her any reason to believe he was capable of caring for someone who was seriously hurt.

He’d been through a war since then, though. He wasn’t thirteen anymore.

And if Remus needed someone, then Sirius would be damned if he couldn’t be someone the other man could rely on.

“I’m not a child anymore, Madam Pomfrey,” he said quietly, meeting her gaze for a fleeting moment, then looking down at his own fiddling hands. “I fought in the war, and I was an Auror for years.”

She stared at him consideringly for a moment, and Sirius couldn’t help but blurt out the other thing on the tip of his tongue.

“Besides, it’s Remus. I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t do to help him.” Sirius winced slightly as the too-honest words slipped from his mouth, but both Madam Pomfrey and Lily seemed pleased (if a little surprised, in the case of Madam Pomfrey) with his words. Lily smiled softly, despite her serious demeanour, and the matron cocked her head to the side thoughtfully.

“He’ll need help changing some of the bandages and reapplying salves later this afternoon,” Madam Pomfrey said matter-of-factly. “And I don’t expect he’ll be able to walk terribly well. You’ll need to help him.”

Sirius nodded.

“And of course, I expect you to summon me if anything about his condition worsens. No attempts to solve the problem yourself. Werewolf-inflicted injuries are not to be trifled with.”

“Right,” Sirius said quickly. “Yes, of course, Madam Pomfrey. What should I watch out for?”

Her eyes widened, as though she hadn’t expected Sirius to ask what he considered to be a fairly obvious question. “Signs of infection, mostly. Redness or swelling around the wounds, fever, weeping cuts or gashes… anything that seems out of the ordinary. If you think it looks strange, let me know, even if Remus tells you not to. He’s prone to downplaying his own injuries so as not to inconvenience anyone else. Stubborn as a hippogriff, that boy… sometimes too stubborn for his own good.”

Lily cracked a tiny, fond smile at Madam Pomfrey’s words, but Sirius was beginning to grow restless. He didn’t think he’d be able to relax until he saw Remus for himself.

“Can I see him?” he asked suddenly, interrupting something else Madam Pomfrey was saying about Remus’s stubbornness.

Madam Pomfrey raised an eyebrow at the interruption, and Sirius shrugged apologetically, diverting his gaze to the floor.

“I’m sorry…” he muttered. “I just don’t think I’m going to be able to relax until I see for myself that he’s alright.”

The older woman hesitated for a moment, as though waiting one last moment for Sirius to turn and walk out the front door. Finally, she sighed and said, “Oh, alright,” in a very long-suffering manner. “But quietly. He needs rest.”

Sirius nodded and followed her down the hall, leaving Lily to trudge into the kitchen. Madam Pomfrey stopped just outside Remus’s door and turned to look at Sirius appraisingly, arms crossed.

“It’s obvious you care about Remus,” she said quietly. “But Miss Evans was not lying. It’s… these injuries are not going to be a pretty sight.”

Remus is always pretty, Sirius’s traitorous brain supplied. What came out of his mouth, however, was a firm “I don’t care what they look like. I just need him to be okay.”

After a long moment, Madam Pomfrey nodded. “Alright,” she murmured, and she pushed open the door.

Remus’s room was dark – lit only by the light from the doorway and the tiny slits between the curtains on the windows – but even in the low light, it wasn’t difficult to make out the stark white of dozens of bandages against Remus’s tan skin. And the closer Sirius got, the clearer the gravity of the situation became.

Remus was positively covered in bandages from just above one of his eyebrows all the way down to where his bare torso disappeared under the blankets. He had several small ones covering scratches on his face, one particularly thick lump of gauze on the side of his neck, a few on his upper arms, and (to Sirius’s horror) one very large wrapping around the middle of his torso. His breathing sounded somewhat raspy, but strong, and there was a very large bruise blossoming on his cheek.

The sight made Sirius’s heart begin to crack open in his chest.

“Merlin, Remus,” Sirius breathed. He forced down the urge to brush some of the other man’s wavy hair out of his face, though not without great difficulty. Gods, all Sirius wanted to do was reach out and touch him – to feel warm, soft skin beneath his fingertips and reassure himself that even if Remus was a bit worse for wear, he was alive.

Instead, he turned to Madam Pomfrey, who was watching him like a hawk. “How long do you think it’ll be before he wakes up?” he asked lowly. Remus didn’t stir.

“At least another couple of hours,” she replied, equally as quiet. “He’s had a long night.”

Sirius only nodded, and the two of them stared at each other for a moment.

“The salve I use to treat his wounds is on the kitchen counter,” she said, motioning for Sirius to follow her. Reluctantly, Sirius moved away from Remus’s side and trailed after her towards the kitchen. “It needs to be applied every six hours to prevent severe scarring. Due to the extent of Remus’s injuries, he’ll likely need some help applying it. He ought to be able to drink his potions regimen without any assistance, but I trust you to make sure he takes all of them.”

Another nod from Sirius.

“Excellent. He’s hated the taste of them since he was a boy – Merlin knows I can’t blame him. Lyall always did blame these disgusting little concoctions for the boy’s dislike of the subject of Potions, you know…” she rambled.

Suddenly, something occurred to Sirius.

“ That’s how Remus knows you,” he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. Both Lily and Madam Pomfrey looked at him in confusion. “Oh, I…” Sirius said awkwardly. “He sort of mentioned you once, without meaning to… before he told me about the furry little problem.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lily smile at the wording she had come up with when she and Remus were children. “He played it off by saying you were a family friend, but that’s not quite true, is it?”

To his surprise, Madam Pomfrey chuckled slightly and shook her head. “I daresay I fit that description now, but you’re correct – I did not start out as a family friend. I was the junior healer assigned to Remus’s case when he was brought to the emergency department after being bitten.”

She frowned at the memory, and even Lily listened intently when the older woman continued.

“Well, assigned isn’t quite the right term… It was more like I was the only junior healer willing to work with a patient who had been the victim of a werewolf bite… but he was just a little boy, you know. He was only four years old.” She sighed and shook her head, her frown turning into a small, fond smile. “He was a lovely little boy when he finally woke up. Terrified, of course, and in a great deal of pain… but so very polite and kind – quite the little charmer. I knew how difficult it would be for his parents to find a healer willing to work with him after transformations every month, and I’d grown terribly fond of him, so I volunteered my services.”

“He never told me that,” Lily said quietly. “It’s no wonder he’s always been so fond of you.”

Madam Pomfrey huffed out a laugh and shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a miracle he can still stand the sight of me, after all of the nasty potions I’ve made him drink of the years,” she joked.

Suddenly, the grandfather clock in the sitting room let out a series of chimes, signalling the start of the eight o’clock hour, and Madam Pomfrey startled. “Merlin, I ought to be going. My office hours begin in thirty minutes,” she said with a sigh. She looked at Lily, then at Sirius. “The two of you will take care of him over these next couple of days, yes?”

Both of them nodded vigorously.

“Lovely,” she said. “And you will send for me if anything seems amiss. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes ma’am,” Sirius replied, at the same time Lily said, “Of course, Madam Pomfrey.”

Not long after Madam Pomfrey’s departure, Lily came hurrying into Remus’s room (where Sirius had holed up in the chair beside Remus’s bedside) and gave Sirius a quick, friendly kiss on the cheek. “I’m running late, so I’ve got to go…” she whispered apologetically. “But just let me know if you need anything. I trust you, though, and I think…” She paused and bit her lip before smiling slightly. “I think he’ll be glad to see you when he wakes up.”

She was out the door before Sirius could ask what she meant by that.

The next three hours passed in quiet worry for Sirius, who spent his time either mindlessly sketching in the book Remus had given him for Christmas or watching closely for the gentle rise and fall of the other man’s chest to calm his own nerves. Each breath in for Remus was a relieved exhale for Sirius as the two of them breathed in tandem. On several occasions, when Remus’s breathing slowed slightly, or even paused for a moment, Sirius tensed and readied himself to shake Remus awake until those lovely hazel eyes were staring back at him… but the pauses never lasted long enough.

Eventually, Remus woke on his own just before eleven o’clock with a soft groan, his previously relaxed face tensing into a pained frown.

“Shit…” Remus croaked. His eyes were still squeezed shut, and Sirius merely watched, too relieved to even breathe as Remus slowly became more conscious of his surroundings. It felt like ages before Remus’s eyes finally fluttered open. They grew marginally wider when they landed on Sirius sitting at his bedside. “Sirius…” Remus said softly.

He sounded strangely surprised, which Sirius thought was odd. Just yesterday, Sirius had assured Remus that he would be there the morning after the full moon, after all. “Hey,” he said gently. “You’re awake.”

Remus blinked several times, clearly still in the process of waking up. “You’re here?”

Sirius frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked, confused.

“’m pretty beat up,” Remus replied groggily. “Wouldn’t expect you to want to spend your whole day dealing with all of this…” He gestured vaguely at his own battered body, and Sirius’s heart clenched.

“Remus…” Sirius’s voice was uncommonly soft, and he briefly wondered if he’d ever spoken to anyone besides Remus in such a way. “You’re not something I ‘deal with’ – surely you know that.”

“I know that,” Remus said, sounding somewhat guilty. He winced when he shifted on the bed. “I just… I don’t want you to feel obligated to-”

“Oh, shut up,” Sirius sighed bluntly. “I’m not here out of obligation, you prat. I’m here to help you, and if that means making lunch and playing cards and reading like the last two months, then so be it. But if it means changing bandages and keeping you comfortable all day – you know, being actually helpful – then that’s no different.”

Remus stared at him for a long moment, blinking sleepily, before saying, “Oh…” in a soft voice.

“Yes, oh,” Sirius confirmed with a nod. “It’ll take a lot more than a few scrapes and bruises to get rid of me. You’re sort of stuck with me now, Remus Lupin.”

Sirius smiled when Remus began to laugh lightly, but the laughter rapidly dissolved into a coughing fit that had Sirius grimacing instead.

“Are you alright?” Sirius asked when the coughing had subsided.

Remus nodded dismissively. “It’s fine – just broken ribs, I think.”

“Merlin…” Sirius mumbled. Silently, he cursed the Ministry for taking so long to get his Animagus paperwork filed, because if they’d only get a move on, perhaps Sirius would finally be able to prevent some of Remus’s suffering before it even occurred.

Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about all of that, though.

“Let me grab you some water,” Sirius said instead.

By the time Sirius returned from the kitchen, Remus was already looking like he was on the verge of falling asleep again, and Sirius couldn’t help the small, fond smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth.

“You really ought to get some more sleep, if you’re tired,” he said, handing the glass he was carrying to the other man. “I won’t keep you up.”

Remus nodded, yawning as he set the glass down on the bedside table. “Good idea,” he said tiredly, only he scoffed when Sirius made to sit down in the chair again. “Sirius,” he huffed. “That chair is a rickety old piece of junk, and I don’t mind if you get in bed, remember?”

Sirius made an indignant noise of protest, even though Remus was absolutely right – the chair really was a piece of uncomfortable junk. “Well, I didn’t want to assume!” he argued. He failed rather miserably at keeping the smile off of his face, however.

“Alright, well consider this as me giving you standing permission to join me from here on out,” Remus countered. “You won’t be much help if your back gives out from sitting in that awful little chair.”

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake, Remus, I’m twenty-five, not ninety!” Sirius laughed. He climbed into bed beside Remus and sat propped up against some pillows, nonetheless.

“Oh, believe me,” Remus muttered with a snort. “It’s definitely possible to have back problems at the age of twenty-five. I would know.”

Sirius rolled his eyes. “Technically, you wouldn’t, seeing as your birthday isn’t for another three days…”

“Alright, fine,” Remus pouted. “Ask me again in three days and I’ll surely tell you the same thing.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Sirius said. He sounded unbearably fond, and Remus merely hummed in response as he closed his eyes.

Sirius tried to sketch, or read, or even just think about something that wasn’t the sleeping man beside him over the course of the next two hours, but as more time passed, it became more and more difficult. The minutes ticked by as Sirius stared at the blank pages of his sketchbook, trying not to overthink the fact that soon, Remus’s bandages would need changing, which would require Sirius touching Remus’s bare skin, and Sirius wasn’t entirely sure how he was meant to do that without completely losing his ability to breathe.

Despite most of Remus’s torso being covered by either blankets or bandages, it wasn’t lost on Sirius that Remus was… well, fit. He seemed to be made of lean muscle, and Sirius couldn’t help but wonder just how strong Remus really was, considering the number of odd jobs he’d had that required heavy lifting over the last several months. His tan skin looked terribly soft, and Sirius was both desperate to touch him and dreading the moment that doing so would be necessary. The bandage that wrapped around Remus’s entire torso would surely be the most difficult to work with, Sirius thought. He would practically need to wrap his arms completely around the other man just to redress the wound.

Merlin, he was so screwed.

Still, after two hours had gone by, he swallowed down his nerves and steeled himself before reaching out and laying a hand on Remus’s shoulder to wake him. “Remus,” he said carefully, giving the other man a gentle shake.

The sleepy snuffle Remus replied with was, distressingly, quite possibly the most adorable thing Sirius had ever seen. It did not help him with his attempt to manage his feelings, and it only got worse when Remus blinked his eyes open and gave Sirius a dopey smile. “You’re still here,” he said, tired but happy.

Sirius let out a startled laugh. “Of course I am! Didn’t I tell you, Lupin? You’re stuck with me now.”

Remus merely smiled and continued to look up at Sirius as though Sirius was something out of a wonderful dream.

After a moment, Sirius cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to wake you…” he apologised. “But we’ve got to get those bandages of yours changed. It’s been six hours.”

Remus’s smile dropped into a pout, and Sirius wanted to cry with how endearing he found it. “Well, now you just sound like Poppy,” the other man complained.

Sirius chuckled and slid off of the bed to retrieve the spare bandages and jar of salve Madam Pomfrey had left them from where he’d placed them on the dresser. “Unsurprising, seeing as she’s the one who gave me strict instructions to change them every six hours,” Sirius remarked.

“You saw her?” Remus was watching him with careful eyes as Sirius crossed the room and laid everything out neatly on the bed.

“She was still here when I arrived this morning,” Sirius explained, helping Remus into a sitting position. “Nearly threw me right back into the Floo at first, until Lily told her that I already knew about, well… this.” He gestured vaguely at the small pile of medical supplies and shrugged.

Remus seemed relatively unsurprised by Sirius’s words. “Ah… Poppy can be a bit protective sometimes, which I suppose is fair. Usually when people find out, it’s due to circumstances beyond my control, and they’re not usually, erm… particularly understanding.”

Sirius frowned as Remus continued.

“Actually, not counting my parents, Lily is the only person I ever told of my own volition.” The other man paused, turning his hazel eyes onto Sirius, and gave him a small smile. “Well… until you, obviously.”

In the roaring silence that blanketed the room while Sirius attempted to process the fact that he was only the second person Remus had ever chosen to tell about his condition, the man in question determinedly reached for one of the bandages on his upper right arm. He only managed to reach halfway across his chest before he winced, surely in response to the pain felt in his stiff shoulder muscles.

“Stop it, you’ll hurt yourself,” Sirius chided, briefly distracted from the revelation he’d been pondering. Surprisingly, Remus did as he was told with a sigh, choosing instead to fiddle with one of the coverings on the back of his hand. “Here, just…” Sirius said softly. “Let me.”

One by one, Sirius redressed each of the wounds on Remus’s arms, starting at each hand and working his way up. He was acutely aware of the way he could feel Remus’s eyes following his every movement, not that he ever actually looked up to meet them with his own. He was far too busy with the task at hand and the many questions running rampant through his brain.

It wasn’t until he finished with Remus’s arms and moved to working on a long cut just above Remus’s eye that he finally spoke again, tired of the tension of the room nearing unbearable levels.

“Remus?” he asked hesitantly as he gently peeled away the gauze.

Remus only hummed in acknowledgement.

“Can I ask you something?” He vanished the old gauze with a wave of his wand and picked up the jar of salve. Remus simply nodded. “Well, it’s just… you said that Lily was the only other person you ever told yourself…”

His voice trailed off, and after a long pause, Remus quirked an eyebrow (the one on the opposite side from the cut Sirius was currently tending to) and laughed softly. “Was there a question in there?”

Nervous laughter bubbled out of Sirius’s chest, and after long minutes of avoiding the other man’s eyes, Sirius finally forced himself to look at him – grey meeting hazel in an intense stare. “Why did you tell me?” he asked, voice hardly above a whisper.

Remus was quiet for a very long time, and Sirius worried that perhaps he had crossed some sort of invisible, unspoken line. Was he not supposed to ask? He swallowed anxiously and did his best to continue working, despite his eyes frequently flitting back to the unreadable expression on Remus’s face.

“Honestly, I…” Remus began finally, pausing to clear his throat before continuing. “I’m not sure I really knew why, when I first did it,” he admitted, and Sirius wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that answer. “It just felt right, that night.”

“It felt right,” Sirius repeated softly as he processed Remus’s words. It was a habit he’d mostly outgrown by now – repetition – but clearly not entirely. He left the cut above Remus’s eye, which wasn’t terribly deep, uncovered except for the now-drying salve and moved on to a much deeper one on the side of Remus’s neck. His fingers brushed against the line of Remus’s jaw just as Remus shivered lightly, and Sirius quickly cast a wandless, wordless warming charm over the both of them. He supposed it made sense for Remus to be cold, now that the blankets were all bunched up around his waist. “Better?” he asked, pointedly avoiding Remus’s eyes.

“I… yeah,” Remus breathed. He cleared his throat again. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, since that night, though, and I think I told you because… it just didn't feel fair for me to want you to be able to trust me with everything about you if I wasn't going to trust you with everything about me...”

Sirius froze, his hands resting lightly against the soft skin of Remus’s neck. He wants to know everything about me, Sirius thought, feeling a bit manic with happiness and longing. The mere thought made butterflies erupt in his belly, and he bit back a smile when he finally continued his ministrations.

“And I did want that, you know,” Remus said, sounding oddly hesitant. “You being able to trust me, I mean. I wanted to know as much as you were willing to share with me. I just... I wanted to know you ."

Heart pounding in his chest – whether due to Remus’s words, or the warm feeling of his skin beneath Sirius’s fingertips, or the undeniably Remus scent that always surrounded him whenever he was in Remus’s bedroom – Sirius nudged Remus forward a bit so he could spread fresh salve over a long laceration that ran diagonally between Remus’s shoulder blades.

“I do trust you,” Sirius said as he settled behind Remus. “More than I trust anyone, except maybe Jamie…”

Remus’s only reply was a hitch in his breath and a breathy, “Good.”

It wasn’t long before all but one of the wounds on Remus’s upper body – the ones he would need the most help with – had been tended to, and Sirius was questioning his own sanity for leaving what was arguably the most difficult one to deal with for last. He took a moment to steel himself as he knelt on the bed in front of Remus, staring at the last remaining old bandage that wrapped around the other man’s torso.

Remus, however, must have mistaken Sirius’s anxiety about seeing so much of Remus (and practically hugging his very naked torso) for nerves related to the severity of the injury he was about to uncover, because Remus grimaced apologetically and sighed. “I’m sorry. This one won’t be pretty.”

And, well… that wasn’t great. Remus obviously thought Sirius hated the idea of helping with this. But Sirius couldn’t think of a way to explain himself without revealing that what he was actually worried about was how badly he wanted to run his hands all over the soft, scarred plains of Remus’s skin, and that being so close to so much of Remus’s bare skin would make that temptation irresistible.

Instead of attempting an explanation, he simply whispered, “It doesn’t bother me, Remus. I promise.” He rested his hands on the place where Madam Pomfrey had secured the wrapping and met Remus’s eyes as best he could. “Can I?”

For a split second, Remus hesitated. “I… I don’t think I’ll be able to lift my arms very well… my ribs-”

“I know,” Sirius interrupted with a nervous smile. “I’ll manage.”

There was a long pause, then Remus nodded.

Praying that Remus couldn’t feel the way his hands were trembling slightly, Sirius carefully tugged the wrapping free and grasped it in one hand. He took a deep breath, then scooted infinitely closer to his friend and snaked his arms around Remus’s torso to pass the wrapping to his other hand. It was unbearably intimate, being this close to Remus. Sirius could feel the heat radiating from bare skin, could even feel Remus’s unsteady breaths in his hair, and it made him feel slightly insane.

“Sorry,” Sirius murmured as he wrapped his arms around Remus a second time to pass off the growing ball of wrapping again.

“It’s alright,” Remus muttered, so close that Sirius could’ve sworn he felt lips brushing his ear, and Sirius nearly forgot how to breathe.

His mind felt hazy with a confusing mixture of love and lust and despair, all of which had him desperately wanting to turn his head ever so slightly… to angle his face upwards and bury his fingers in Remus’s hair and kiss him until Sirius couldn’t remember his own name. He imagined that Remus would be gentle with his kisses, at first. Remus seemed like the sort of man who would hold Sirius’s face between soft palms like Sirius was something precious and treasured while they pressed their lips to one another’s, exploring with tentative tongues and teeth.

Sirius wanted it so badly he felt like he might cry. The longing left a lump in his throat and a chasm in his chest, and Merlin, it hurt. He felt on the verge of combusting right there in Remus’s bedroom, and he might have, were it not for the sobering nature of the injury that was revealed when the last of the gauze was peeled away.

“Remus, Merlin…” he breathed, because Lily and Remus hadn’t been lying. It was awful.

Parallel to each other and horizontally running the entire length of Remus’s lower rib cage were three angry, deep, red lacerations that had unmistakably been made by razor-sharp claws. The bruising on his ribs was clearly visible now, too, and Sirius could see the places where he suspected the bones had broken while Remus tore at himself in his wolfish form.

And really, Sirius thought, the Ministry was lucky that Sirius would be preoccupied with taking care of Remus for the remainder of the day, because otherwise, Sirius might have been tempted to burn the entire bloody place to the ground simply for delaying Sirius’s mission to stop the wolf from ever hurting Remus like this again.

The sound of Remus clearing his throat uncomfortably made Sirius jump, and it quickly became apparent that Sirius had been staring for far too long. He mumbled a quick apology and snatched up the jar of salve from where it rested on the bed.

A nearly reverent silence blanketed the both of them as Sirius tended the wound, whispering apologies every time Remus winced and working with the gentlest touch he could muster. When he was finally done – when the salve was applied and the wound was re-wrapped – Sirius rose to put away the items, but Remus’s hand wrapped around his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip before he could walk away.

Remus’s eyes were vulnerable when they met Sirius’s, and Sirius slowly sat back down on the bed, sending the supplies away with a wave of his wand instead of carrying it.

“There was another reason I told you,” Remus said softly. He still hadn’t let go of Sirius’s wrist. Sirius held his breath. “I… I didn’t want to keep getting to know you – to keep getting closer to you – knowing that if you only knew the truth, you might hate me forever.”

The words slammed into Sirius like a punch in the gut, stealing the air from his lungs and making his stomach churn uncomfortably. His eyes burned with the tears that threatened to go spilling over the edges.

“You’re so good, Sirius, and you were starting to become very important to me and I…” Remus paused and (to Sirius’s horror) blinked back tears before looking away. “I needed to tell you the truth before you became important enough that losing you because of the wolf could break me.”

A strangled sound of protest rose from Sirius’s throat, and he pulled his wrist from Remus’s grasp only to intertwine their hands, careless of the undeniable intimacy of the gesture. He didn’t even bother trying to stop the tears that dripped down his cheeks as he stared at their entwined fingers.

“I hate them,” Sirius said finally.

Remus’s voice was confused when he replied, “Who?”

“Everyone who’s ever made you feel like this,” Sirius said, squeezing Remus’s hand for emphasis. “Like there’s something wrong with you because of something completely out of your control – because of a choice you never made. Gods, Remus, I wish I could hex every last one of them.”

Remus’s quiet responding laugh was confusing until the other man clarified his amusement. “I believe hexing the vast majority of the wizarding world would be rather time consuming, Sirius,” he remarked, a somewhat teasing lilt to his otherwise exhausted voice.

“Right, well I’ve got time,” Sirius said stubbornly, wiping his tears away with his free hand. “I’m disgustingly wealthy, thanks to my awful, bigoted parents, so it’s not like I need my job, you know.”

That seemed to draw a proper laugh out of Remus, who laid back against the pillows, dragging Sirius along with him until they were lying side by side facing each other, fingers still tangled between them. For what felt like ages, Remus simply stared at Sirius with a small, contemplative smile on his lovely face. The attention made Sirius squirm.

“You’re ridiculous,” Remus said finally, fondly. “And a bit stupid, to be honest. You love your job – you’d be a fool to leave it.”

Sirius figured he could blame his lack of a decent night’s sleep for what he said next. “Maybe… but I’d leave it in a heartbeat if it meant I could help you.”

Remus’s eyes widened, his grip on Sirius’s hand tightening as they gazed at each other, hardly daring to breathe for fear of breaking the fragile silence that had settled between them.

“You mean that,” Remus breathed in awe. It wasn’t a question.

Sirius could only nod. The brief flicker of Remus’s gaze to Sirius’s lips was surely a sight conjured up by Sirius’s own exhausted mind, and he ignored it. Eventually, Remus’s eyes slipped shut, and Sirius followed suit not long after.

When Lily found them that evening, dozing together in Remus’s bed, neither had let go of the other’s hand.

Sirius returned to his flat that evening after dinner only to find James curled up on the couch, nursing a glass of firewhiskey and wearing a sombre expression. The bespectacled man startled when Sirius stepped out of the fireplace.

“Merlin, James,” Sirius laughed nervously. “What’s gotten into you?”

James simply bit his lip and stared at the glass in his hands for a moment. “I think we need to talk,” he said finally.

Sirius tried for levity in order to calm the anxiety that was slowly rising in his gut. “Bullocks… are you breaking up with me?” he teased, though his joke fell flat in the oppressively serious tone that permeated the entire apartment.

“Sirius…” James said warningly.

“It’s my cooking, isn’t it?” Sirius continued with the bit. He was panicking, and joking around was a coping mechanism he’d been leaning on for years. “I know it’s not very good, but I can work on it. I can change, Jamie-”

“Sirius.”

James’s tone was firm, and Sirius immediately stopped his rambling.

“James, what’s going on?” he asked.

“Sirius,” James said again. “Remus is a werewolf, isn’t he?”

Shit.

The following Thursday, Sirius paced back and forth in his kitchen while he waited with James and Peter for the Floo to roar in the other room. He hadn’t seen Remus all week – not since the previous Thursday when he’d spent the day caring for him after the moon – and it was beginning to drive him mad, even with the weight of James and Peter knowing on his shoulders. And now Remus was about to know that they knew, because by some horrible, annoyingly perfect coincidence, Lily had cancelled pub night this week, and it was the perfect opportunity for a second “boy’s night” instead.

Which meant that soon, Sirius would be stuck in his own tiny apartment with a man he was halfway to being in love with, who was likely about to believe that Sirius had broken his trust in the most heinous way possible.

The thing was… Sirius hadn’t broken Remus’s trust. He had only admitted to James that Remus was a werewolf because James had asked , and his panicked stammering had been more than enough to confirm. Still, he couldn’t help but feel like he was at fault for Remus once again being exposed against his will, because the only reason James had been paying such close attention to Remus was the amount of time Sirius had been spending with him…

“Sirius, mate, breathe,” James said urgently when Sirius finally stopped attempting to babble his way out of revealing Remus’s secret in favour of practically hyperventilating in the sitting room.

“What did you… how do you… what?” Sirius stammered as he sank into a chair and buried his head in his hands.

James sighed and set down his glass of whiskey. “I’ve been wondering for a while, actually,” he admitted. “We usually get at least one or two reports of werewolves running amok at the DMLE every month on the full moon – usually bogus, mind you – and a few months ago I realised that Remus always seemed to miss pub nights those weeks… and now you’ve spent the day immediately after the full with him for the last three months, and when Lils came into work today she looked so worried, and she wouldn’t talk to me about what was wrong, and I just… I dunno, I asked Pete and we sort of… put it together.”

“You told Peter ?” Sirius cried. “Are you insane, Jamie? Do you realise how serious this is?”

“Yes!” James said quickly. “Yes, Merlin, Sirius, of course we do. But I’d have felt like a right tit if I’d asked and the answer had turned out to be no, so I wanted a second opinion, and Peter was having similar suspicions anyway because he tracks the moon cycle. You know this!”

Sirius whimpered, because Peter did track the moon cycle (and had since they were at Hogwarts), so of course he’d figured it out as well. “Superstitious little shit,” Sirius mumbled as a tear left a wet track on his cheek. He looked at James pleadingly. “Please don’t tell anyone else,” he whispered, desperate. “Please, Jamie. He’s not dangerous, I swear. Not to anyone besides himself, at least. God, and he’s got enough going on in his life already, and he’s going to think I broke his trust, and-”

“Sirius,” James said gently, coming to kneel in front of the chair.

Sirius snapped his mouth shut.

“You… you realise that Pete and I don’t care that he’s a werewolf… right?”

Suddenly, Sirius could very much understand Remus’s disbelief when he’d said nearly exactly the same thing back at Christmas. “What?”

“I mean, it’s bloody awful that Remus has to deal with all of that, but it’s not exactly his fault, is it?” James continued. “We’re not going to… I dunno, out him, or anything. But it might be nice for him to know he’s not alone.”

Sirius sniffled and looked at James with wide eyes, staring at his brother’s absurdly earnest expression… and the words began to tumble, unbidden, from Sirius’s mouth.

He told James as much as he could without revealing anything that felt too much like a secret. He told James about Madam Pomfrey, and helping Remus recover after the last three moons, and Remus’s injuries that morning, and finally, even his quest to become an animagus.

“You’re still waiting for the paperwork to come back?” James said with a frown when Sirius disclosed that last bit. “I might be able to help with that, actually… although… d’you think you’d be alright with me having a go at it, too?”

For the first time since he’d arrived home that evening, Sirius grinned.

And that was how Sirius ended up waiting for Remus to arrive so James and Peter (both of whom were now pursuing their own animagus permits alongside Sirius) could confess to knowing about his lycanthropy.

Sirius was terrified.

The sick feeling in his stomach only worsened when he heard the rush of flames in the Floo, and James and Peter only spared him a sympathetic glance before ducking into the sitting room and cheerfully greeting Remus.

Sirius could hear the smile in Remus’s voice from the kitchen, which felt like a dagger to the chest, knowing how soon it would probably be wiped from the other man’s handsome face and replaced by the pinched, anxious frown Sirius knew so well.

He couldn’t bring himself to face the conversation (some bloody Gryffindor, he was), so instead, he sank to the floor with his back against the kitchen cabinets and listened as James carefully said. “Actually, mate, there’s something Pete and I wanted to talk to you about.”

The five minutes that followed were some of the longest of Sirius’s life. He could only listen tearfully, arms wrapped around the knees he had curled into his chest, as the tone in the other room quickly became sombre. He heard the clipped tone Remus’s voice took on as the other man braced for rejection, then the astonishment of receiving (for once) a positive reaction from someone he hadn’t told personally, and finally the confusion in Remus’s voice when at the end of their talk, he asked, “Hang on, where’s Sirius?”

Sirius tensed in his spot on the kitchen floor. This was it. This was the part where Remus came in and confronted him for betraying his trust. He was going to lose one of his best friends – his favourite person in the world. And he was going to deserve it.

“Ah, I think he’s still in the kitchen,” James said hesitantly. “He’s, erm… he’s really been beating himself up about this, mate. I think he feels like it’s his fault we figured it out…” James’s voice grew too quiet to hear, and Sirius allowed a fresh wave of tears to overcome him, burying his face in his arms and wondering if perhaps he could hide from the coming confrontation just by curling into a protective little ball right there on the floor.

He didn’t look up when he heard soft footsteps moving towards him, or even the telltale sounds of rustling fabric as someone dropped to the floor in front of him. He merely sniffled. When Remus called his name, however – calmly and gently, the way one might comfort a cornered animal – Sirius was powerless to resist. He raised his own blurry, tear-filled gaze to meet Remus’s.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius croaked. Remus was kneeling on the floor across from Sirius, knees almost touching the tips of Sirius’s shoes. Remus looked like he might cry, and that, more than anything, sent Sirius careening over the edge into sobs. “I’m so sorry, Remus. I should’ve been more careful,” he sobbed, pleading. “But I swear I didn’t mean for them to find out. I would never betray you like that. Gods, please, you have to believe me, I wouldn’t- I couldn’t- ”

“Sirius.”

Remus’s voice was so soft that it stopped Sirius’s babbling in its tracks. Sirius looked at him with wide, pleading eyes.

“Sirius,” Remus said again with tears in his own eyes, this time. “I know you wouldn’t. I believe you.”

Sirius’s arms were around Remus’s neck before he could think better of it, drawing the other man in for a fierce hug as Sirius cried into the soft wool of Remus’s sweater. Astonishingly, Remus seemed to cling to Sirius just as desperately – Sirius could feel the press of Remus’s nose into his own neck, warm puffs of air ghosting over his skin. It was brilliant. It was beautiful.

Remus smelled of earl grey tea and fresh linens… and he felt like home.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius whispered, burying his face in Remus’s shoulder. Then, “I’m sorry someone else found out without you telling them yourself,” because Remus’s words from the week prior (usually when people find out, it’s due to circumstances beyond my control) had been stuck in his mind on a loop for days now.

But instead of responding with sadness, or with the bitterness Sirius expected… Remus laughed lightly and pulled back to look at Sirius with a teary smile. “It’s alright,” he said softly. He glanced over his shoulder, and Sirius followed his gaze to where James and Peter stood in the kitchen doorway, both wearing relieved smiles. “This went much better than it normally does.”

Sirius laughed wetly and let his arms fall from Remus’s shoulders.

“You’re damn right, it did!” James said with a grin. He strode forward and reached out a hand to help Remus up off the floor. Remus did the same for Sirius, hanging on an extra moment even once Sirius was standing to give his hand a quick squeeze.

Peter, meanwhile, watched the entire interaction with amusement. “’fraid you’re one of us now, Moony,” the shorter man remarked, the new nickname eliciting a laugh from all three of the others. “And we look after our own.”

“Oh, dear,” Remus said with feigned distress, following Peter back into the sitting room and leaving Sirius alone in the kitchen with James. “ Moony is going to stick, isn’t it?”

Sirius grinned as both Peter and Remus laughed, then looked at James.

“Look at you,” James teased, ruffling Sirius’s hair. “Mooning over Moony like a schoolgirl.”

And really, there was hardly any point in denying it, so Sirius didn’t bother. “I hate you,” he deadpanned instead.

James’s laughter followed him out of the kitchen.

Sirius only smiled.

Chapter Text

May 1985

Marlene Mackinnon and Dorcas Meadows were married in the middle of May in a brief but lovely ceremony in Hogsmeade, and try as he might, Sirius couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on the nuptials themselves when his mind was buzzing with excitement for something else.

Namely, the life-altering events that had taken place the previous night, when London had been hit by one of the worst thunderstorms all year, and Sirius, James, and Peter had finally succeeded in their quest to become Animagi.

“Ja-ames,” Sirius whined as they took their seats in the Three Broomsticks for the reception following the ceremony. “I’m never going to make it through the whole evening without letting something slip. I ramble when I’m excited, and this is the most excited I’ve been about anything in ages. Back me up here, Peter.”

It was a conversation that Sirius and James had already had four times that day, in which Sirius did his best to convince James that Dorcas and Marlene’s wedding reception was a perfectly acceptable time to tell Remus about their newly-acquired animagus forms. So far, James had held strong in his argument that they would be able to tell Remus only a few days later when the four of them got together for what had become a monthly Boys’ Night, but Sirius suspected James’s commitment to the argument was waning.

Luckily, Peter seemed to be on Sirius’s side. “He’s got a point, mate,” Peter said to James with a shrug. “Remus is here, and there’s plenty of good spots to transform on the edge of the forest without anyone seeing…”

James groaned and looked at his two best friends. Yes, Sirius thought, he’s definitely going to cave. “You’re not going to shut up about this until I say yes, are you?” he asked Sirius pointedly.

Sirius grinned. “Definitely not,” he said cheerfully.

And so, it was agreed that towards the end of dinner, the three of them would pull Remus aside to tell him the news.

Unsurprisingly, it was the longest dinner of Sirius’s entire life. James hadn’t even finished chewing his last bite of chicken before Sirius was grabbing him by the wrist and dragging him over to the table next to them, where Remus was laughing at something Frank Longbottom was saying. Sirius couldn’t even be bothered to make an attempt at stopping himself from bouncing on the balls of his feet when he tapped Remus on the shoulder.

“Sirius!” Remus said happily when he turned around. “I was just going to come over and say hello!”

“Oh, well, hello!” Sirius replied excitedly. “Actually, do you think you might come outside with us for a moment?” He gestured vaguely at Peter and James, who waved at Remus in greeting. “We’ve got something we want to show you.”

Remus cocked his head to the side curiously but nodded nonetheless, and the four of them made their way out into the cool evening air towards the edge of the forest.

“We’re dressed a bit formally for a hike, don’t you think?” Remus joked while they walked.

Sirius made an indignant noise of protest, but James barked out a laugh. “I tried to tell Sirius that we ought to just wait for this weekend, but I’m afraid he insisted,” James said. “And Peter, in a heinous act of betrayal, agreed with Sirius instead of me. So… here we are.”

“Right… you’re not going to murder me in the forest, are you?” Remus asked, raising an eyebrow at Sirius teasingly. “Because these dress robes are rented, and I’d hate to return them covered in blood stains.”

“No, no murders tonight,” Sirius said impatiently. He hurried ahead and stopped in a small clearing. “I think this is far enough.”

When neither James nor Peter argued with him, Sirius turned to Remus, who was watching the three of them with a fond (if slightly befuddled) expression.

“Right, erm…” he said, suddenly feeling a bit nervous. “We sort of had an idea a few months ago, about a way to help make your transformations easier…”

Remus’s face quickly fell into a small frown, and Sirius glanced at James for some sort of moral support. This was harder than he’d expected.

“Actually, the idea was all Sirius’s,” James cut in, sensing Sirius’s uncertainty. “Pete and I just followed along when he told us about it… but it’s been in the works for a while now, and we finally finished the whole process last night, so…”

“So now we can show you,” Sirius finished.

He stepped forward, heart fluttering with nervous excitement, and met Remus’s gaze. “Close your eyes,” he said softly.

Remus only hesitated for a split second before obeying.

Sirius glanced at his two oldest friends and nodded, then he shut his own eyes and willed his body to change shape.

Within seconds, Sirius’s human form had disappeared, replaced by a large, black dog flanked by a stag and a rat, the latter of which was currently in the process of clambering onto the stag’s head to rest on its antlers. They’d spent hours the previous night trying to settle on nicknames for all three of their animal forms, since Remus’s Moony nickname had, indeed, stuck around. James was Prongs, named for the antlers atop his stag’s head. Peter was Wormtail, for… well, the fact that his tail resembled a worm… and Sirius was Padfoot, for similarly obvious reasons.

From his new vantage point, which was decidedly lower to the ground, Sirius could see that Remus still had his eyes closed.

So, naturally, Sirius began to bark to get his attention.

Remus startled as the loud noise cut through the mostly silent forest, his eyes flying open in surprise, then widening in shock. Sirius supposed that was fair, seeing as in place of Remus’s three very human friends now stood three animals, but he could also see the moment that everything clicked into place in Remus’s mind.

Remus’s mouth dropped open as his eyes began to fill with tears, and the man crouched to the ground when Sirius trotted over to him, tail wagging rapidly behind him.

“Oh my God…” Remus whispered, staring at Sirius through misty hazel eyes. Sirius, as Padfoot, nudged Remus’s knee with his snout, and even in dog form, Sirius’s heart beat just a bit faster when Remus reached out to carefully stroke his fur. “I’m dreaming, right?” Remus asked no one in particular. “This is definitely a dream.”

Padfoot only whined and gave Remus’s face a sloppy lick in response. No, idiot, this is most definitely not a dream. Remus’s cheeks tasted vaguely salty, and Sirius realised he was crying.

He transformed back, somewhat clumsily, and looked at Remus with hopeful eyes from where he knelt across from the other man on the forest floor. Behind him, he heard rustling that indicated James and Peter had transformed back as well.

“So…” Sirius said softly after a pause. “What do you think?”

Remus was silent for a long moment. He stared at Sirius, then at James, and at Peter, before finally letting his gaze rest on Sirius once again. “I think…” Remus croaked. “I think I’m definitely the luckiest werewolf in all of England.”

James and Peter both let out surprised laughs, but Sirius merely smiled. He wouldn’t be surprised if later his face hurt from smiling so much, at this rate.

“I can’t believe you did this,” Remus said softly, his eyes still locked with Sirius’s.

Sirius could only shrug modestly. “You mentioned one day that there was no way for me to help with your transformations as long as I was a human, so…”

“So you just… what, found a way to not be human for a little while?” Remus laughed, and Sirius simply nodded.

A loud cheer from the direction of the village shattered the isolated quiet of their little clearing, and Sirius rose from his crouched position while Remus did the same, hazel eyes scanning over the three Animagi once again.

“You really did all of this just so I wouldn’t have to be alone?” he asked.

Peter grinned. “Well, officially, Sirius did it to provide a case study on whether or not magical tattoos are reflected in an Animagus form-”

“Which they aren’t – fun fact,” Sirius chimed in happily. He felt like he’d swallowed an entire cauldron of Felix Felicis, he was so happy.

“Right,” Peter laughed. “James did it to further his effectiveness as an Auror, and I did it because I wanted to further my studies in Transfiguration. Officially.”

“But unofficially…” James said, stepping forward to clap Remus on the shoulder. “Yeah, mate… we did it for you.”

Remus just laughed wetly and pulled James in for a fierce hug.

“Thank you,” Remus said hoarsely. “All of you… you don’t know how much this means to me. I… I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“No need to thank us, mate,” Peter said while Remus pulled him in for his own hug. “Told you a couple months ago, remember? We look after our own.”

Our own, Sirius thought happily as he watched his two best friends welcoming Remus with open arms. Then, another whisper in the back of his mind, as Remus continued to half-laugh, half-cry: mine.

Another bout of raucous laughter erupted from the reception only a few hundred feet away, and James reluctantly glanced at the other three. “We really ought to head back before anyone comes looking and finds us all standing in the woods in our dress robes,” he said, but before Sirius could follow James and Peter back, Remus wrapped a warm hand around his wrist and held him back.

“We’ll be right there,” Remus called.

James met Sirius’s eye with a smirk and continued out of sight.

When the others had gone, Sirius turned to Remus, and it seemed that neither of them could quite stop smiling, despite the tears still lingering in Remus’s sparkling eyes. Sirius bounced happily a few times, and Remus’s grin only grew fonder.

“I can’t believe you did all of this for me,” Remus said softly – in awe.

And frankly, Sirius couldn’t quite believe that Remus couldn’t believe it, because Sirius was fairly certain he would do anything for Remus.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of you facing the moon alone,” Sirius replied. Perhaps it was too honest – too revealing – but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He bit his lip and stared at his own wrist, which was still in Remus’s grasp. “Besides, waiting for the bloody paperwork was honestly the hardest part. Jamie had to pull some strings with the DMLE to get it to go through before I lost it and did something silly like chain myself to the Ministry Floos and demand that it be done faster.”

His grin widened when Remus laughed.

“After the paperwork was done, it was just a bit of magic, really…” he added.

Remus was quiet for a moment, and Sirius looked up at him again. Remus’s gaze bore into him with an intensity that made his very soul feel flayed open, his heart laid out for Remus to hold in gentle, steady hands. Gods, Sirius could barely breathe under the scrutiny – breathless in the best way.

“A bit of magic…” Remus repeated in an incredulous whisper, smiling at Sirius like he was the sun itself. “Sirius Black… you really are the most incredible man I’ve ever met.”

Sirius blinked back his own joyful tears and shrugged, turning a blinding smile on the man in front of him, then letting himself be pulled into Remus’s arms. He buried his face in Remus’s chest, breathing in earl grey and citrusy cologne and Remus. “Only because it’s not really possible for you to meet yourself,” Sirius murmured.

Remus only held him even tighter.

The two of them made their way back to the reception only a few minutes later, joining James and Lily at the bar while throngs of people milled about in the crowded pub. Somewhere, a stereo was blasting “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick, and most of the guests had crowded onto the dance floor. Even Peter was off dancing with a girl who had been in Hufflepuff the year below them.

“Where on earth did you get off to?” Lily asked with a smirk on her face.

Remus’s eyes widened as he shot her a look, and Sirius suspected he might have been missing something when Lily snorted in reply. James just rolled his eyes and shook his head. He held out a shot for Sirius to take.

“Just firewhiskey,” James assured him when Sirius eyed him suspiciously. The moment Sirius threw the shot back, however, he knew that wasn’t entirely true, because accompanying the pleasant burn in the back of his throat was the sudden, unrelenting urge to laugh.

“You bastard!” Sirius cried, giggling hysterically as he swatted at James, who roared with laughter and jumped out of the way. “There’s definitely-” Another burst of giggles. “-Gigglewater in this!”

“James!” Lily said admonishingly, though it looked like she, too, was trying to contain her own laughter. “You can’t just run around giving people mystery drinks all evening!”

“First of all, Sirius doesn’t count as people – he’s Sirius,” James argued in his own defence, still grinning like a maniac.

“Hey!” Sirius laughed, which soon tapered off into soft giggles as the effects of the Gigglewater wore off. Really, he could hardly be angry about the harmless prank when it had put Remus in stitches beside him. “Oh, think this is funny, do you?” Sirius challenged Remus, a mischievous glint in his eye. Then, Sirius turned to the bartender. “Four shots of firewhiskey with a dash of Gigglewater, please and thank you!”

“So polite, Siri!” James teased.

“Urgh,” Sirius replied, his face twisting in disgust. “Do not call me that.”

The others all laughed as the bartender returned with the requested drinks, which Sirius took gratefully, distributing them one by one to James, Remus, and Lily, then keeping one for himself.

“Right then,” Sirius said with feigned solemnity. “I have decided to call this drink The Toe-rag, after the name our lovely Lily so brilliantly bestowed upon Mr. James Potter during the first potions class of our first year.” Remus snorted, and Lily bit back a smile. “Bottoms up, mates!”

In his twenty-five years of life, Sirius had seen plenty of adorable things. He’d seen tiny, baby puffskeins in Care of Magical Creatures class in his fourth year, taken care of an entire litter of puppies that briefly lived under the Potter’s porch, and had been one of only two witnesses to the culmination of thirteen years of pining on the day James and Lily finally got together. But until that night, Sirius had never seen anything quite so adorable as Remus Lupin under the effects of Gigglewater.

Perhaps it was due to the fact that Remus was so often guarded when he was around other people, but watching Remus dissolve into giggles – a full, unencumbered smile on his face and a joyful look in his eyes – was quite possibly the most beautiful thing Sirius had ever seen. Remus and Lily leaned on each other while they laughed, melting into each other the way Sirius and James often did after years of unconditional love and friendship. And Merlin, Remus looked so happy. Sirius couldn’t tear his eyes away.

He still hadn’t managed to look away even after two additional Toe-rag Shots, so he was somewhat startled when Lily came tumbling into him, laughing and jumping excitedly as she looked between him, James, and Remus. “We’ve got to dance!” she said insistently, grabbing Remus’s hands and tugging him towards the dance floor.

“Oh, Merlin, Lils… you know I’m not-” Remus groaned, but Lily Evans was having none of it.

“Shush, Remus Lupin, and come dance with your oldest and best friend,” she insisted, and Remus was dragged out onto the dance floor as the opening bars of “Waterloo” by ABBA began to play. Sirius could only laugh at the long-suffering look Remus cast his way before disappearing into the crowd.

“Well, come on then!” James cried from beside Sirius. He held out both hands grinning widely, glasses crooked on his face and hair even messier than usual. Sirius rolled his eyes and took his brother’s hands.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before the two of them found Lily and Remus again – the song hadn’t even reached the first chorus yet – and to Sirius’s delight, Remus was laughing while he clumsily twirled Lily in his arms, both of them singing along with the stereo. Sirius laughed and looked at James, who waggled his eyebrows and pulled Sirius in until they were chest to chest, belting the lyrics into each other’s ears.

James pulled back, grinning like an absolute lunatic, and spun Sirius in a dramatic twirl while the entire crowd shouted the beginning of the chorus.

Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war.

A few feet away, Marlene and Dorcas were laughing as they danced together.

Waterloo, promised to love you forever more.

James grinned and gave Sirius one last twirl before moving to steal Lily from Remus’s grasp. Remus, of course, bowed out gracefully, then turned to Sirius. Eyes shining with happiness, Remus extended his hand, and Sirius was too giddy to even consider rejecting the invitation.

Their dancing was terribly clumsy, especially contrasted against the downright impressive way James was expertly twirling Lily around the dance floor, beaming at her like she was the stars and the moon all wrapped up into one shining package. Remus was too stilted, and Sirius was too bouncy, but neither of them seemed to be able to stop smiling as they moved together, shouting lyrics at each other as dozens of others did the same.

Someone – Peter, as it turned out – bumped Sirius halfway through the second verse and nearly sent him tumbling to the ground, but Remus was there to catch him as all three of them dissolved into laughter until they all regained their footing. When he looked back at Remus, the other man’s eyes were already on him, locking with his in an almost gleeful sort of intimacy, and Sirius was gone.

He lost himself in the exhilarating feeling of Remus’s hands in his, in the charming crinkle of Remus’s eyes at their corners. He was drowning in the best way beneath the weight of Remus’s gaze and the indefinable connection the two of them had felt since the day they met. He smiled like an idiot and let himself be swept away by Remus’s surprisingly in-tune, baritone voice singing along with lyrics that somehow captured exactly how Sirius was feeling.

Waterloo, couldn’t escape if I wanted to.

The realisation that slammed into him as he beamed at Remus through the final chorus should have been terrifying, but it wasn’t.

Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you.

Because as both of them sang breathlessly, surrounded by friends who loved them and each other, Sirius suddenly realised that he couldn’t possibly have chosen someone more perfect to love than Remus Lupin.

And, oh…

Oh.

Sirius was definitely in love.

Wa-Wa-Wa-Wa-Waterloo, finally facing my Waterloo.

“I swear to God, I’m going to have ABBA songs stuck in my head for the rest of my life,” Remus announced as he traipsed into the shop on Sirius’s lunch break several days later.

Sirius laughed and hopped up from where he’d been sitting on top of his desk, setting down the old sketchbook from his Hogwarts years as he did so. “Merlin, I know what you mean,” he replied, heart stuttering happily at the mere presence of the other man. “Who knew Dorcas was such a fan of Swedish supergroups from the seventies?”

Remus only scoffed and plopped himself down in the chair that was normally reserved for Sirius’s clients. “Busy day today?” he asked, gesturing towards the pile of old sketchbooks on the desk.

Sirius smiled to himself at the easy, almost domestic way their conversation seemed to flow these days before responding. “Not particularly, but I’ve got a client coming in later this week who wants to have me do an old design I drew for her back while we were at Hogwarts together, so I’ve been trying to find it.”

“Hmm,” Remus hummed, leaning over to grab one of the tattered old books. He paused and looked at Sirius before picking any of them up. “May I?”

“’course,” Sirius said dismissively, reaching for one of them himself. “I’m looking for a sketch of a thestral in flight, if it helps.”

“Noted,” Remus murmured as he began to flip through the pages. Sirius didn’t bother asking whether or not Remus could see thestrals himself – they all could, by the time the war was over.

Despite attempting to concentrate on the search for the missing drawing, Sirius couldn’t stop his gaze from drifting to Remus every now and then. There seemed to have been a subtle shift in their dynamic ever since Marlene and Dorcas’s wedding, though Sirius wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t all in his head, given the revelation he’d had at the aforementioned wedding. He’d spent hours discussing it with James when they returned home that evening, and had finally resolved to talk to Remus about the way he was feeling, but the right moment hadn’t come about just yet.

“You said all of these drawings are from when you were still at Hogwarts?” Remus asked without looking up several minutes into their quest.

Sirius nodded, even though Remus couldn’t see him. “Yeah… I actually think the one you just picked up might be the first sketchpad I ever bought. Merlin, it’s been ages since I grabbed it off of that shelf in Hogsmeade. Would’ve been the beginning of sixth year, I think.” He cocked his head to the side and looked at Remus curiously. “Why do you ask?”

Remus looked up at him with a small smirk. “Lots of lion-themed drawings,” he replied. “Bit on the nose for a Gryffindor, don’t you think?”

Sirius just threw a pen at him.

Remus chuckled and continued to flip through the pages.

“When I first started drawing, I just used a quill and parchment,” Sirius rambled as he did his own perusing. “But one day a muggleborn girl saw me trying to do linework and took pity on me, I suppose, so she loaned me a pen and told me to invest in a sketchpad. I should probably thank her, now that I think about it – offer her a discount of some sort…” He trailed off thoughtfully. “Then again, I gave the pen back hardly a week later, so maybe not… what do you think?”

He waited expectantly for Remus to reply, and when the other man said nothing, Sirius huffed out a sarcastic sigh. “Not falling asleep in the middle of your lunch break again, are you?” He looked up with a smile, but the grin quickly died on his lips when he saw Remus’s face. “Remus?”

Across from him, Remus had gone very pale as he stared at something on one of the pages of the old sketchbook. The other man was completely still, eyes wide and barely (as far as Sirius could tell) even breathing. Sirius wracked his brain in an attempt to recall what could have been in the book to cause such a reaction, but he came up empty.

“Remus? Are you alright?” he asked. He began to fiddle with the pen he was holding anxiously.

After a long silence, Remus cleared his throat and looked up. The expression on his face was practically one of terror. “Sirius, what…” He swallowed and looked back down at the book in his lap, then held it out. “What exactly is this a drawing of?”

Frowning, and growing more concerned with every passing second, Sirius pulled the drawing in question towards him. His heart clenched in his chest when he saw what it was.

“Oh…” Sirius said quietly. “That’s, erm… it’s what my soulmark looked like… before I had it removed at St. Mungo’s. I wanted to keep something to remember it, so I made a drawing of it…”

He looked at Remus to gauge his reaction and was even more concerned to realise that the other man had only gone even paler. Actually, Remus looked like he might cry.

“That’s your soulmark?” Remus asked. He sounded downright devastated. Sirius couldn’t understand what was going on.

“Yes, but…” Sirius’s frown deepened and he set down the drawing. “Remus, I don’t understand what-”

He never got to finish his question, because Remus was on his feet hardly a second after Sirius had confirmed the origin of the drawing. Remus looked frantic – like a cornered animal, desperate for some sort of escape. Sirius’s mind was racing, his heart thumping painfully in his chest as the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong permeated his entire body.

“Remus…” he tried again, desperately.

“I have to go,” Remus said quickly. He wouldn’t meet Sirius’s eyes, and his movements were twitchy and frantic.

“Wait, Remus… I don’t-”

“I’m sorry, Sirius. I’m so sorry,” Remus said nonsensically. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.” He was beginning to draw his wand to apparate, and Sirius knew he was running out of time.

“Remus, no! Please, just tell me what’s going on!” Sirius begged. He took a step forward, and Remus took two steps back.

“I can’t,” Remus whispered. Sirius was horrified to find that when Remus met his gaze, the other man’s eyes were filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.”

And with a crack, Remus disappeared.

Nobody saw Remus for two full days after he’d left Sirius’s shop.

The only reason Sirius hadn’t insisted on forming some sort of search party was the note Remus had left for Lily explaining that he’d gone to stay with his parents for a while and asking, in no uncertain terms, that he be given some space while he was there. There had been no reason given for the sudden disappearance, and Lily was respectful enough of her best friend’s privacy that she refused to give Sirius any information on where Remus’s parents lived.

Sirius hated her for it.

He’d spent the last two days replaying the conversation in his mind over and over again, trying to determine what had gone wrong, and when. He’d even gone so far as to Pensieve the memory out of desperation, but it yielded nothing. As far as Sirius could tell, everything had been perfectly fine right up until the moment Remus had flipped to the page with his soulmark on it.

“Maybe he was just hurt, seeing your soulmark… because technically it’s proof that you’re meant for someone else,” James had suggested the night Remus disappeared while Sirius had curled up on the couch and cried for what felt like hours. “I mean, he’s obviously arse over tits for you, so I can’t imagine it felt good…”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!” Sirius had argued. “It’s not like we weren’t aware that we both used to have marks, James. I don’t understand why it would be enough to make him disappear.”

James had simply sighed and pulled Sirius into his arms while Sirius cried.

“I don’t know what I did,” Sirius had sobbed. “And if I don’t know what I did, I don’t know how to make it right.”

The next day, Sirius had cancelled all of his appointments and spent the day sending owl after owl to Remus. All of them returned unopened.

The day after that was a Thursday, and when Remus failed to show up for pub night, Sirius couldn’t take it anymore. So, he’d begged both Lily and James to help him, and after several minutes of pleading and a bit of convincing from James, Lily agreed to take a look at the drawing that was apparently destined to ruin Sirius’s life.

“Alright, run this by me one more time,” Lily said tiredly while Sirius rifled through his things to find the sketchbook, which he’d buried beneath a pile of his other things in an attempt to stop the bloody soulmark from taunting him. For once, he longed for the days when his lack of a soulmark had been the source of his problems.

“Remus came to the shop during lunch, like he always does,” Sirius said thickly. “Then, we started looking through old sketch pads because I needed to find a design I did while we were at Hogwarts. Remus saw the drawing I kept of my soulmark. Remus freaked out. He left. And now here we are. It’s really not that complicated, Lily.”

“Sirius…” James said softly. It was a reprimand – Sirius knew that – but it was gentle, and he appreciated James endlessly for it.

“Sorry,” Sirius murmured.

Lily only gave him a sad smile in reply.

At last, Sirius pulled the ratty old book out from beneath a pile of laundry. “Here,” he said flatly, flipping to the page in question. He paused for a moment and stared at it – his soulmark, something that had been meant to bring him joy and a lifetime of love, but had instead brought nothing but pain and confusion. Then, he blinked and handed it to Lily and James, and the two of them sat down at the kitchen table while Sirius paced. He hardly expected this to be of much help, but he could still hope.

Lily looked down at the drawing, squinted to get a better look… and gasped.

Sirius stopped in his tracks and stared at her.

“This…” Lily said softly. “This is your soulmark?”

Sirius wanted to throw something. “Yes! Merlin’s fucking pants, why does everyone keep asking me that like it’s so hard to believe!” he snapped, his pacing starting up again. He was definitely beginning to spiral as he felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. “It’s my fucking soulmark, which I had removed when I was seventeen years old because my parents were bloody menaces to society who probably would have killed my soulmate the moment they found out he was a man!” he shouted. “I gave up what I thought would be the one chance I would ever have at happiness, and Gods, I mourned for that stupid mark. I thought I would spend the rest of my miserable life alone, and I made my peace with that. I made my peace with never falling in love, but do you want to know what the worst part is?”

Sirius was crying openly as he ranted while James and Lily looked on in stunned silence.

“The worst part is that I fell in love, anyways,” Sirius sobbed. “Because frankly it’s completely unthinkable to me that anyone could meet Remus fucking Lupin and not fall in love with him. He doesn’t care that I don’t have a soulmark, and he doesn’t care that I’m odd, or that I ramble all the time and fidget constantly and bounce when I’m excited… he doesn’t care! Even worse, he acts like it’s a good thing – like all of that doesn’t make me some sort of freak!”

“Sirius-” James said brokenly, tears in his eyes, but Sirius cut him off.

“No, James! Don’t tell me that I’m not, because I know better. I know I’m not normal, and that I’ll never be normal, but I also know that Remus makes me feel like that’s okay, even though I know he thinks the same things about himself! He thinks that being a werewolf somehow makes him unlovable, which is completely insane because I love him. I’m so fucking in love with him it hurts, and I miss him, and I don’t know what to do, because I think I did something wrong, but I don’t know what, and I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m so fucking scared, Jamie. I’m scared and I miss him and I don’t know what to do-”

Sirius’s words dissolved into sobs as James’s arms came around him, and Sirius collapsed into his brother’s arms. “Sirius…” James said softly, anchoring him the way he’d done on the day Sirius had his soulmark removed all those years ago… “It’s alright, Sirius. I’ve got you, I promise.”

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” Sirius sobbed, clinging to James like a lifeline.

Lily’s quiet, gentle voice cut through the silence that filled the kitchen. “I don’t think you did anything wrong, Sirius,” she said.

Sirius and James both turned to look at her.

“I don’t think you did anything wrong at all.”

Sirius sniffled. “Then why did he-”

“Because he’s scared,” she said simply. She seemed so sure of herself, and Sirius found it both disconcerting and comforting at the same time. “Actually, I think he’s probably terrified.” Her eyes landed on James and she spoke, fixing him with a pointed look, and suddenly, James stiffened.

“No…” James muttered, but Lily interrupted him.

“Sirius,” she said earnestly. “You have to go talk to him.”

Sirius frowned, confused. He was certain he was missing something, but he wasn’t sure what it was. “I don’t have any way of contacting him,” he said miserably. “My owls are getting returned and I don’t know where he is, and…” His voice trailed off as he watched Lily hurry over to the kitchen counter and scribble something on a notepad.

“This…” she said, tearing off the bit she’d written on. “…is his parent’s address. They’re on holiday right now, so they won’t be home, but Remus will be. Go talk to him. Tell him what you just told us.”

Sirius grasped the small piece of paper between shaking fingers and looked at her hesitantly. “What if he doesn’t want to hear it?”

“He will,” Lily said sincerely. “He will, Sirius, I promise you.”

But Sirius still wasn’t convinced he would be able to stand on his own two wobbly legs, much less apparate, with how panicked he was feeling. He looked at James – James, who had been there for him when no one else was… James, who was his best friend and brother and confidant… James, who (aside from a few misguided pranks) had never once steered Sirius wrong – and let his eyes speak for him. I’m afraid, he said.

James swallowed and grabbed Sirius’s hand tightly. “I know you’re scared,” he said softly. “And I know that this won’t be easy for you, but there’s a reason you were sorted into Gryffindor when we were eleven, Sirius.”

Sirius squeezed his hand even tighter.

“You can do this, Sirius. I know you can. And you also know that no matter what, I’ll be here for you when you get back. I will always be here for you, yeah?”

Sirius could only nod in response, as any words he might have spoken were caught behind the lump in his throat.

“I love you, Sirius, okay?” James said earnestly. “It’ll be alright.”

Sirius stared at James for a moment, then at Lily, who was watching the two of them with a solemn but sure look on her face. On the coat rack behind her hung a Gryffindor scarf (though Merlin only knew whose it was, since their apartment was perpetually flooded with a number of different Gryffindors), just like the one Sirius had given Remus for Christmas, and it steeled something inside of him.

James was right. He could do this.

“Thank you,” he managed to croak out to both of them.

Then, he focused on the address in his hand, closed his eyes, and apparated.

For some reason, Sirius had always imagined that Remus’s childhood home might vaguely resemble a fortress, seeing as practically the only thing he knew about it was that Remus spent every full moon barricaded in the home’s cellar. The sight that greeted him when he appeared on the front step, however, was anything but.

The Lupins’ home was a quaint little cottage that appeared to be on the edge of a small suburban town. Ivy blanketed half of the front of the house, and a soft, warm light poured from the few windows that weren’t shuttered. It was lovely – peaceful, even – and Sirius could understand why it might be the sort of place someone would run to if they wanted to get away.

Still, that didn’t stop him from wanting to bring Remus home to London.

His hand shook terribly when he reached out to knock on the front door. The only indication that anyone inside had heard him was a surprisingly loud meow that drifted through an open window. It was such an insistent, authoritative sound that Sirius almost felt like laughing.

His heart began to pound painfully behind his ribs when he finally heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching the door. Then, there was another impressively loud meow, a gruff, “No, Basil. You can’t go outside. You’d be eaten within five minutes.”

And the door opened to reveal an exhausted-looking Remus Lupin, holding a very disgruntled grey cat.

“Sirius…” Remus said with surprise, though he seemed to recover quickly, because only a moment later he looked away and muttered, “Sorry, it’s really not a good time…”

Before Remus could slam the door in his face, however, Sirius reached out to stop it from closing. “Wait! Please,” he said quickly, and Remus paused. “I just… I just want to talk.”

Remus stared at him consideringly for a long moment until he was interrupted by the cat – Basil, apparently – who had clearly had enough of being manhandled and began to squirm valiantly.

“Oh, for the love of-” Remus mumbled. Basil let out an indignant meow and Remus turned to set her down inside of the house, then stepped forward and closed the door, joining Sirius on the front porch. “Daft thing…” he muttered as Basil began to scamper up the stairs inside.

Sirius merely watched silently.

After a moment, Remus turned to look at him and sighed heavily. “Sirius, what are you doing here?” he asked.

“I…” Sirius began, then stopped. Perhaps he should have rehearsed something before coming. “I was worried,” he said finally. “You really scared me the other day, you know… and then you just disappeared and…” He swallowed as tears began to form in the corners of his eyes again. “I was worried.”

He chanced a glance at Remus, who at least had the decency to look guilty. “I know…” Remus said regretfully, running a hand nervously through his hair. “I… I’m sorry, Sirius, I shouldn’t have scared you like that. I’m sorry.”

When Remus didn’t say anything else, Sirius cleared his throat. “I, erm… I talked to Lily,” he said quietly.

Remus stiffened.

“And James,” Sirius added quickly. “And at first they said I should just give you some space, but then I showed Lily the drawing and… and she said I ought to come and talk to you, so… now I’m here.”

“Right,” Remus said quietly. He looked so unbearably sad, and Sirius just wanted to throw his arms around the other man and never let go. It took nearly all of his self-control to stay put.

“I miss you,” Sirius blurted out in lieu of launching himself into Remus’s arms. He shuffled awkwardly when Remus looked at him with mild surprise, as though he’d been expecting Sirius to say something else. “Fuck, Remus, do you have any idea how miserable the last two days have been? I’ve been losing my mind worrying about you.”

Remus still said nothing, and Sirius couldn’t stand the silence, so he filled it himself.

“I thought…” he said desperately. “I thought I’d done something wrong. I still sort of think that, and I just want to make it right, Remus, because I miss you.”

Sirius quickly wiped a tear at the same time as Remus sniffled softly. Excellent, Sirius thought miserably. Now we’re both crying.

He tried to find the right words to tell Remus how he felt. Lily told me to tell you how I feel about you. James thinks you might love me which is good because I love you. Sometimes I want to cry because you look so beautiful and I want to kiss you but I can’t.

Sirius opted for the most straightforward option when he finally spoke again.

“Remus, I… I’m in love with you.”

He watched Remus carefully for some sort of clue as to what his reaction might be, but all he got was a marginal widening of the other man’s hazel eyes.

“I really hope you don’t hate me for saying that, but I don’t think there’s any point keeping it a secret at this point,” Sirius continued. “I love you. I love you so much that sometimes it makes me want to scream, because it hurts, not being able to kiss you when you look at me like you do, sometimes… like… like you might love me, too, even though I don’t think you do.”

At that, Remus looked genuinely surprised, but like a ball rolling down a hill, Sirius couldn’t stop.

“I know that we’re technically meant for other people,” Sirius said, barreling past Remus’s now confused look as tears began to spill down his own cheeks. “And to be honest, I came to terms with being alone for the rest of my life a long time ago, because I knew what I was giving up when I had my mark removed… but that was before I met you.”

He looked at Remus pleadingly, fighting against the way every cell in his body was screaming for him to move closer.

“I don’t think you understand how important you are to me, Remus,” Sirius said brokenly, only barely holding back the sobs that wanted so desperately to escape him. “I told James and Lily this earlier, but you… you’re the only person I’ve ever met who makes me feel like it’s more than just okay for me to be the way that I am. You let me ramble on and on about the things I care about, even if they don’t interest you, and you don’t mind that I fidget, or that I bounce when I get excited… You’re just… you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, Remus, in every possible way, and I was so sure that I would never fall in love with anyone, but I did. Because I fell in love with you .

“I fell in love with the way you’re always kind to everyone around you, even though you know that they might not be kind to you if they knew who you were. And I fell in love with your stupid, gorgeous eyes, especially when you look at me like I’m something precious and not some sort of strange mistake. Gods, Remus, I think about you all the time. I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking about you in months at this point, and I probably should have realised what that meant sooner, but I’m not always very good at managing my emotions, so I didn’t understand what was happening until the other night at the wedding.”

Sirius desperately wished Remus would say something.

“But I know now, Remus,” Sirius continued when he was still met with silence. “I know now, and I know that you’re not really meant to be mine, and I’m not really meant to be yours, because getting rid of soulmarks doesn’t erase the connection, it just erases the physical mark… but I don’t care about that anymore.”

The confusion on Remus’s face slowly began to morph into shock as Sirius continued to babble.

“I don’t care about our stupid soulmarks, or the soulmate system. I don’t care that we weren’t destined for each other because we’re here now, and I love you, and I don’t want my soulmate, Remus, I just want you, and-”

“Sirius,” Remus said softly, holding up a hand.

Sirius snapped his mouth shut and braced himself for the inevitable rejection. If Remus wasn’t smiling by now, or at least making a face that wasn’t a frown, Sirius’s confession surely hadn’t been a welcome one.

“Sirius, what are you talking about?”

Sirius laughed humorlessly and let out a choked sob. “Isn’t it obvious? I don’t know of a clearer way to tell you I love you.”

“No, Sirius, not that,” Remus said quickly. “I meant… with the marks. The soulmarks.”

Sirius looked at Remus in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

Suddenly, a look of stunned clarity washed over Remus’s features. His eyes began to flicker between emotions so quickly that Sirius couldn’t keep up with them, but the way his mouth had dropped open in shock gave away his surprise.

“You said you showed Lily the drawing,” Remus said softly.

Sirius just nodded.

“And she… she didn’t tell you?”

Sirius wanted to cry, he was so confused. He just wanted to understand. “Tell me what, Remus?” he asked tearfully.

Remus laughed almost maniacally, burying his face in his hands, then running both hands through his hair. “Oh, that sneaky little witch,” he mumbled. He met Sirius’s gaze again and held it. Sirius couldn’t have looked away if he tried. “Sirius,” Remus said urgently. “The reason I ran the other day wasn’t because you did something wrong. Christ, Sirius, of course you didn’t do anything wrong. You never do anything wrong.”

Sirius’s voice was pathetically small when he spoke again. “Then why did you leave?” he begged.

“Because I recognised it,” Remus breathed.

Sirius gasped.

“Your soulmark,” Remus clarified. He took a step closer, and Sirius had to tilt his head slightly to look up due to Remus’s slightly taller frame. “I recognised it.”

“What?” Sirius asked in a strangled voice. His mind was running in a million different directions. Remus recognised his soulmark. Remus knew Sirius’s soulmate. “Then you… you know… you know whose it matches?”

“Sirius,” Remus whispered. Sirius was frozen in place as Remus took another step forward, effectively closing the distance between them. He remained frozen when Remus raised shaking hands to cup Sirius’s face gently between them. “I recognised it because…” Remus took a deep breath as a tear slipped from his hazel eyes. “Because it’s mine.” 

It felt as though all of the air had been punched out of Sirius’s lungs. His head swam. His heart stopped. He could hardly think.

Because it’s mine.

“Oh my God,” Sirius whimpered. “Remus, you…”

Remus smiled, tears streaming down his face, and nodded.

Sirius allowed a single sob to escape him, then fisted his hands firmly into the fabric of Remus’s shirt and pulled him into a desperate kiss.

It was urgent, and messy, and wet from the tears they were both shedding, but Remus’s response was immediate. He tangled his hands in Sirius’s hair and kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him until they had no choice but to separate, both gasping for breath.

“I found you,” Sirius whispered, sobbing and smiling all at once. “I found you. I’ve spent my whole life loving you… and I still got to fall in love with you anyways, Remus… God, of course it’s you. It could never have been anyone else.”

Remus nodded as tears of joy continued spilling from the corners of his eyes. “I love you, too,” he murmured, and Sirius’s heart felt so big he worried it might burst.

“You do?” he asked, beaming.

“Yes,” Remus breathed earnestly. His hand came to cup Sirius’s cheek, and Sirius had to shut his eyes when Remus gently brushed some of the tears away with his thumb – the gesture was nearly too intimate for Sirius to bear. “So much, Sirius… you’ve no idea…”

Sirius’s next words slipped from his mouth unbidden, but he couldn’t find it in himself to wish he could take them back. “Then tell me,” he whispered pleadingly.

Remus smiled softly and pressed a sweet, lingering kiss to Sirius’s lips before drawing back and brushing away another tear. His breathy chuckle made butterflies erupt in Sirius’s stomach. “I’m afraid that may take quite a while,” Remus murmured teasingly. “How much time have you got?”

Sirius couldn’t help but kiss him again. “For you?” he asked. “I’d make all the time in the world.”

Later that night – after many more tears and many, many more kisses – Sirius lay beside Remus in Remus’s childhood bedroom, both turned onto their sides to face each other. Their legs tangled together comfortably between them, and as Sirius played absently with the fingers on one of Remus’s hands, he marvelled at the fact that he was finally allowed to do this… to touch Remus the way he’d been longing to for months, now.

Unsurprisingly, fidgeting was even more satisfying when he got to touch Remus while he was doing it, and for once in his life, he wasn’t itching to fill the silence that had settled over them with conversation. He was perfectly content to exist just like this – tracing the lines of Remus’s palm while Remus watched him with an unbearably soft expression.

“Those pyjamas are a bit big on you, I’m afraid,” Remus murmured after a while, fiddling with the hem of the tee Sirius had borrowed to sleep in.

He was right, of course – Remus was both taller and broader than Sirius, which meant that the tee was a big baggy and landed below his hips. The flannel pyjama pants he’d borrowed had to be tied in order to secure them on Sirius’s waist. Still, Sirius didn’t mind. “S’comfy,” he murmured happily, smiling at Remus. Then, because Sirius had never been all that good at keeping his mouth in check, he added, “And they smell like you.”

Remus laughed and slung an arm around Sirius’s waist to pull him closer and press a careful kiss to his temple, which only served to widen Sirius’s seemingly perpetual grin. Perhaps a bit madly, Sirius wondered if he would ever stop smiling. “Well I’m glad you see that as a good thing,” Remus said teasingly.

Instead of laughing, Sirius nodded emphatically. “It is. Definitely a good thing.”

Another comfortable silence fell between them, and Sirius moved his hands away from Remus’s palm in favour of tracing aimless shapes into the fabric of Remus’s t-shirt. They remained like that, comfortably basking in the serene wonder of simply occupying the same space, until a question popped into Sirius’s wandering mind.

“Where was your soulmark?” he asked softly, looking up at Remus with big, curious eyes. “Before you had it removed.”

Remus looked at him for a moment – his face an odd mixture of sadness and fondness – and pulled his arm away from Sirius’s waist for a moment to gesture at the space below the crook of his elbow on the inside of his right arm. “Right here,” he said quietly.

Sirius only nodded in response, allowing his fingers to ghost over the spot for a moment before letting Remus snake his arm over his waist again.

“Where was yours?” Remus asked after a pause.

Instead of pointing himself, Sirius took the hand Remus had splayed over his waist and guided it to push up the fabric of his borrowed t-shirt a few inches until a small patch of pale skin was revealed. “It was here,” Sirius said softly, pressing Remus’s fingers to the spot on his belly, just above his hip. His breath hitched slightly when Remus began to rub back and forth over the area with his thumb, skin dragging against skin. It felt wonderfully intimate.

“Do you know why Lily didn’t tell you tonight when she recognized the mark in your drawing?” Remus asked, still staring at where his own thumb was moving over Sirius’s skin.

Sirius shook his head.

“When I had my mark removed…” Remus began, a thoughtful frown on his face. “One of my primary reasons for doing so was never wanting to put my soulmate in a position that would force them to feel obligated to me.”

Sirius frowned, but continued to trace patterns over Remus’s chest while the other man spoke.

“I knew that having a werewolf as a soulmate wasn’t… Well, let’s just say that it probably wasn’t anyone’s ideal match… and I couldn’t bear the thought of someone loving me out of obligation, even if deep down, they were afraid of me, or disgusted. I thought…” Remus’s voice trailed off, and Sirius carefully cupped his cheek in what he hoped was a gentle gesture of encouragement. “I thought that was the only way anyone could ever love me,” the other man admitted, voice so quiet that Sirius could barely hear. “And I would’ve preferred not being loved at all to only being loved because someone felt forced into it.”

“Remus…” Sirius murmured, devastated. Silently, he made himself a promise to make sure Remus knew exactly how loved he was, unconditionally, every day for as long as Remus would let him.

“Lily has been on my case about you for months, because she’s an absolute menace and was insisting that you and I were mad about each other…”

“To be fair…” Sirius said teasingly. “It was an accurate assessment.”

“God, I know,” Remus huffed. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m stupidly thrilled that we’ve ended up here, but she’s going to be insufferable about it until we die.”

“At least we managed to sort things out in under a year,” Sirius countered with a grin. “ She tried to hex her soulmate’s bollocks off on no fewer than eight separate occasions over the years. But anyways… sorry, please continue.” He looked at Remus apologetically, though Remus didn’t seem to mind the digression at all, because he chuckled lightly before returning to the far more sombre topic at hand.

“The point is, Lily and I have talked about you… rather a lot, to be entirely honest, over the past few months,” Remus admitted with a slight grimace.

Sirius just beamed at him.

“And I was very adamant for practically this entire time that under no circumstances would I ever pursue a romantic relationship with anyone on account of the furry little problem. Until…” he said pointedly when Sirius began gearing up to ask what had changed. Sirius gave him a sheepish look and kept his mouth firmly closed. “Until the other night, after the wedding,” Remus continued. “When poor Lily Evans was forced to sit and listen to me wax poetic about you for hours until I finally came to the conclusion that maybe being romantically involved with you wouldn’t be so bad, since I wouldn’t need to worry about you only being with me because of some stupid mark.”

Sirius’s frown deepened into one of confusion. “So… you more or less told Lily that…”

“That the only reason I would consider being with you was because there was no way for us to ever find out whether or not our marks matched, and therefore nothing to make you feel obligated to me,” Remus finished quietly with a nod. “So she knew. She knew that if you only showed up on my doorstep, telling me you loved me, after you learned about the marks, I’d have gotten it in my head that your feelings weren’t real.”

Sirius’s stomach ached just thinking about how close he and Remus had come to ruining things before they’d ever gotten started. Still, he didn’t want to focus on anything negative tonight. “But now you know,” he said with a soft smile. “I fell in love with you long before we knew about the marks.”

“You did,” Remus agreed, his lips finally curling into a smile again. “We fell in love with each other all on our own – no soulmarks necessary.” His thumb pressed a bit more firmly into the spot where Sirius’s mark had been all those years ago, and it made him think about something James had said that day in the hospital.

“You know,” Sirius said softly. “James said something to me right after I had my mark removed, while we were still at St. Mungo’s.” Absentmindedly, and without really putting much thought into it, Sirius moved the hand that was cupping Remus’s cheek into the other man’s hair, then down so his fingers could pass gently over Remus’s forehead, his eyelids, his nose, and finally his lips – a reverent sort of gesture that made Sirius wonder what exactly he’d done to deserve being allowed to do any of this.

Remus resumed the movement of his thumb over the bare skin of Sirius’s hip and stared at Sirius patiently.

“He told me that it wasn’t completely hopeless, because theoretically, I might still be able to find my soulmate – you – and maybe they would believe me because I had the drawing.” Sirius paused and looked at Remus for a long moment. “I told him it would take a miracle, and James said that he counted miracles as still having a chance. I thought he was barmy.” He smiled, and Remus smiled right back. “But he was right, wasn’t he? I found you anyway.”

“You found me anyways,” Remus confirmed. “And I’ll spend the rest of my life thanking God that you did.”

When Sirius fell asleep that night, wrapped in his soulmate’s – in Remus’s – arms, he was certain he’d never been happier.

Chapter Text

September 1986

Sirius smiled to himself when he heard the little bell on the shop’s door tinkle at the beginning of his hour-long lunch break. He didn’t need to look up to know precisely who had just walked in.

“Hello, love,” Remus said fondly as he wrapped his arms around Sirius from behind and pressed a kiss into his hair.

Sirius just grinned even wider. “Hello,” he replied, immediately turning in his boyfriend’s arms and hopping up to sit on the desk. He didn’t waste a moment before tugging Remus in by the fabric of his shirt to give him a proper kiss. “Merlin, I’m glad you’re here.”

Remus chuckled and kissed his forehead before pulling back to meet his eyes. “Long morning?”

Sirius shrugged, glancing at the paperwork that surrounded him on the surface of the desk. “ Slow morning,” he corrected. “I wish Alphard would handle all of this hiring business. I can’t get a feel for whether or not I want to work with someone based on a bloody piece of paper.”

“Well, if the paper is bloody, I think I’d consider that an immediate rejection, personally…” Remus joked.

Sirius groaned and tipped his head forward to rest against Remus’s chest. “Oh, shut up. You know what I meant, you berk.”

Remus’s soft chuckle made Sirius smile against his chest. “I figured you hadn’t had the best morning,” he said softly, his hands coming to rest on Sirius’s hips. Carefully, he tucked his thumb beneath the hem of Sirius’s shirt to brush against Sirius’s mark – the one Sirius himself had painstakingly tattooed a little over a year ago to replicate the one he’d had removed. Shockingly, Remus had allowed Sirius to do the same on him, in the spot on his arm where his soulmark had once been. “You kept touching your mark.”

Remus’s thumb brushed over the mark again, and Sirius shivered at the zing that shot up his spine when Remus did so. The charm Remus had spent months developing, which allowed each of them to feel whenever one of them touched their own mark (no matter how far apart they were) had ended up having the strange side effect of feeling immensely pleasurable when they touched each other’s marks.

And, well… neither of them had been particularly opposed to that side effect, so Remus had never bothered with trying to fix it.

Still, Remus was right. Sirius had been touching his own mark rather a lot that morning, which meant Remus had probably felt dozens of phantom touches on his hip all day.

“Sorry…” Sirius murmured, though he wasn’t, really. “I just… it helps when I get stressed out, knowing you’re touching yours, too… and you always do whenever-”

“You don’t have to explain, Sirius,” Remus said gently. “I know it helps you, and you know I don’t mind.”

It was always in moments like this that Sirius was reminded exactly how much he adored Remus Lupin. “I love you,” he sighed, wrapping his arms around his soulmate’s waist.

“I love you too,” Remus murmured, pressing another lingering kiss into Sirius’s hair. They stood like that for a minute or two, just breathing each other in. “Don’t forget, James has demanded we meet to plan his bachelor party tomorrow night.”

“Forget?” Sirius exclaimed in mock offence. “Remus John Lupin, how dare you imply that I could ever have such a terrible memory that I could forget my own brother’s pre-planning meeting for the actual planning meeting for his bachelor party.”

“It makes sense that he’s an Auror, doesn’t it?” Remus mused. “He really is a bit of a control freak.”

“At least you’ve never had to live with him,” Sirius laughed.

Remus snorted in response. “That’s true…” he admitted. “God, I can’t believe they’re getting married. I mean, I can, obviously, because of course they are… but sometimes I think about going back in time and telling my thirteen year-old best friend Lily that she would eventually marry James Potter, and honestly… I think if I did she’d probably die.”

“If it makes you feel any better, thirteen year-old James would probably die, too… albeit for very different reasons. He’d die of excitement,” Sirius said with a smirk. “But here they are.”

“Having a proper wedding in front of all of their family and friends,” Remus said with a nod Sirius could feel from where he was still pressed into Remus’s front.

Then, because Sirius had never in his life been very good at keeping things to himself, he blurted out in the most unceremonious way possible, “We should do that.” Remus stiffened slightly in his arms, and Sirius felt like crawling beneath the desk out of embarrassment. “Oh, God. I really just said that out loud, didn’t I?”

“Maybe a bit…” Remus said, sounding a bit dazed as he pulled back to look Sirius in the eye. He looked… hesitantly hopeful. “Would you really want that?”

Sirius had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. “I mean, yeah…” he said, shifting slightly awkwardly under Remus’s gaze. “I love you.” He pressed a kiss to Remus’s jaw. “And you’re my soulmate.” Another kiss just beneath Remus’s ear. “And besides, we’ve already done the other, erm… important bit.” Remus raised an eyebrow at him, and Sirius could feel his face burning. “You know… the, erm… we’re already mated…” he said softly, still feeling a bit out of his element saying it aloud, even though it had been months since it happened. Then again, he planned to spend the rest of his life with his werewolf soulmate, so he should probably get used to it.

“Ah,” Remus said quietly, an intense, burning look flashing across his face for just a moment before it softened into something sweet and loving. “Yes, we’ve already done that, haven’t we?”

Sirius only nodded and bit his lip, averting his eyes as he willed his flush to subside.

“I would, you know,” Remus said softly after a long pause. “Marry you, I mean. If you wanted to.”

Sirius’s widening eyes snapped back to Remus’s, which seemed to be swimming in nerves. “Really?” Sirius asked, hope painfully evident in his voice.

“Of course I would,” Remus chuckled, brushing a bit of hair from Sirius’s face. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life, and I’m certain nothing is ever going to change that. I don’t need to be married in order to know that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, but if you want to…” He searched Sirius’s face for a moment, then smiled and kissed him softly. “Then yes. Of course I’ll marry you.”

Sirius couldn’t tell whether he wanted to cry or laugh, so instead, he did a bit of both. “I think I’d like that,” he said, grinning tearfully up at Remus.

“Yeah?” Remus asked breathlessly, smiling right back.

Sirius nodded. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Remus murmured. Suddenly, his face became all business, and he began looking around Sirius’s desk for something. “Aha,” he said as he picked up a random pen. He muttered a quick spell, and the pen shrunk into something small enough for Remus to curl his fingers around so Sirius couldn’t see what it was.

Sirius just looked at Remus with a curious smile on his face.

And Remus beamed at him.

“I promise I’ll get you a proper one, later…” Remus said softly. “But for now…”

Sirius gasped as Remus stepped back a few paces and dropped to one knee, revealing the transfigured ring he had clutched in his hand. “Remus… holy shit…”

“Sirius Black,” Remus said, grinning like an idiot. “Love of my life. My soulmate. My mate.”

The way Remus waggled his eyebrows as he said the last one made Sirius start to laugh tearfully.

“Would you do me the honour of being my husband?” He smiled as Sirius sniffled and began to nod emphatically. “Sirius, will you marry me?”

Sirius felt like he might die of excitement, and happiness, and every positive emotion he’d ever felt in his life as they all coalesced into the exquisite joy he was feeling now. He was shaking when he finally got his voice to work again. “Yes,” he breathed gleefully. “Yes. Merlin, yes, you idiot.”

Remus’s smile was positively blinding as he surged to his feet and dragged Sirius into one of the best kisses of Sirius’s life – focused and deliberate and an undeniable promise for a future filled with many more. Sirius’s entire body was tingling with excitement. It was far too much energy to contain, so, unsurprisingly…

Sirius began to bounce. Up and down on the balls of his feet.

Remus pulled back to look at him with an expression so loving it nearly stole the breath right out of Sirius’s lungs. “I love you so much,” he whispered, slipping the makeshift ring onto Sirius’s shaking finger. Then, they were kissing again.

“I love you, too,” Sirius murmured against his fiancée’s lips.

And as surely as the moon knew the stars, Sirius knew he always would.

Chapter Text

Below is the artwork depicting what I imagine Sirius and Remus's soulmarks might have looked like in this story! Like I said in the notes, I am VERY new to Procreate (and digital art in general), so it may not be a masterpiece, but I wanted to give everyone the chance to see what I had in mind when I wrote this story!

The stars are, of course, representative of Sirius, who is named for the brightest star in the night sky.

The crescent moon represents Remus, who is most authentically himself when the moon is far from full and the wolf is most dormant.

There are two different paw prints in the soulmark - one with claws for Remus/Moony and one without for Sirius/Padfoot.

(Just in case you are curious, James and Lily's soulmark is, in my imagination, a set of antlers adorned with lilies. The lilies in his soulmark were the reason James never gave up on his pursuit to win Lily Evans' affections.)