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The Gryffindor Common Room is uncannily quiet late at night, long after its many residents have retreated to the safety of their beds. What is ordinarily a bustling, cacophonous space becomes one of stillness… of silence.
But Remus has never minded the quiet.
On the contrary, he quite likes it – the way he can hear the crackling of the hearth as it radiates warmth into the large, empty space. Sometimes, on nights when sleep is even more elusive than usual, he finds himself sitting on the plush couch nearest the fire, keeping the tower’s resident fire-dwelling salamanders company.
Tonight is one of those nights, and he’s only just turned to the next chapter in his novel when he hears the soft padding of footsteps coming down the stairwell from the boys’ dormitories.
He’s not terribly surprised to see that the boy who emerges from the shadows is one he knows quite well. Achingly well, if he’s honest.
Sirius looks exhausted and skittish when he steps into the firelight, and he jumps, slightly, when he lays eyes on Remus, who stares silently up at him from where he’s lounging on the couch. A year ago, one of them would have made a quip about not being able to sleep as they settled in comfortably beside each other, words long having ceased to be necessary.
But this isn’t a year ago. This is now, and even though Remus forgave Sirius for his ill-conceived “prank” on Severus Snape some time ago, things are still different. They’ve been different ever since that night, even after their reconciliation following James’s frantic Floo call to Remus’s cottage on the night Sirius ran away from home.
They’ve only been back at Hogwarts for a few weeks, and though Remus is loath to admit it, the two of them still seem to be finding their footing with each other.
This isn’t a year ago, and Remus knows that’s why Sirius stops short when he first enters the room.
“Remus,” Sirius says softly. His voice is hoarse from sleep, tainted with an edge of guilt Remus desperately wishes weren’t there.
“Hi,” Remus breathes. He closes his book – offers Sirius a small smile. “You’re up awfully late.”
Sirius smiles hesitantly, his eyes darting around the room like he’s waiting for something awful to come leaping out of the shadows. He’s like this often, now – ever since he ran away – and even after weeks of seeing him like this, it doesn’t break Remus’s heart any less. “I’m sorry,” Sirius mutters. “I didn’t know you’d be down here. I can go, if you-”
“No, don’t,” Remus interjects quickly, because even after everything, Remus craves Sirius’s presence like a sprout craves sunlight. Sirius still looks hesitant, so Remus pats the cushion beside him. “Really, Sirius, it’s okay.”
We’re okay, Remus wants to say, only he doesn’t, for fear of being proven wrong.
Still, Sirius flounders for a bit, and Remus wonders if the other boy is really going to flee back up the stairs, after all. But eventually, Sirius sighs and makes his way over, sitting a foot or so away on the other side of the couch.
It’s yet another thing that’s changed, in the last few months. A year ago, Sirius would’ve sat so close they’d be touching from ankle to shoulder – practically on Remus’s lap. Remus quickly pushes the thought away, because if he thinks about it for too long, he may do something terribly embarrassing like cry. Instead, he focuses on the much more important problem at hand, which is the fact that Sirius is still plenty close enough for Remus to notice the trembling in his hands.
Remus swallows and stares at his friend’s shaking fingers, feeling rather wrong-footed. He hates this – God, he fucking hates this. He hates that Sirius is hurting. He hates that things are so strange between them, nowadays. He hates that the strangeness does nothing but make Remus feel like he’s missing a limb – trying to walk without a leg – and that it makes him feel unable to comfort someone who means more to him than anyone could possibly imagine. More than Remus has even admitted to himself.
“Sirius,” Remus says, setting the book on the table beside the couch. “Are you alright?”
The question makes Sirius curl in on himself, and Remus waits patiently for a response, if he’s going to get one at all.
“I-” Sirius starts, then cuts himself off with a sigh. “Yeah, I… it’s fine, Rem. Just a bad dream. You know how it goes.”
Remus does know how it goes, is the thing. He knows better than anyone, because he and Sirius have been sharing the darkest hours of the nights for years after bad dreams – after visions of glowing yellow eyes and sharp teeth have Remus waking in a cold sweat, and memories of shouted curses do the same to Sirius. They’ve talked each other through the aftermath. Held each other at the worst of times, occasionally waking up the next morning so tangled together that Remus couldn’t tell where he ended and Sirius began.
But they don’t do that anymore. Not since…
Remus doesn’t want to think about that, right now.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I know.”
There’s a long pause before Sirius speaks again.
“You know…” Sirius says tiredly. “I’m not sure I can remember the last time I had a good dream.”
The statement takes Remus by surprise, not because he’s surprised to hear that Sirius feels this way, but because he’s surprise to hear Sirius say it. It feels dangerously close to opening up, and that’s something the two of them haven’t done with each other in a long, long time.
“There are nights where I don’t really dream, or at least, not that I remember, you know?” Sirius continues. “But I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about something that was good. Something that made me happy.”
Remus’s heart beats unsteadily in his chest, because this, strangely enough, is not something he can relate to. Remus does have good dreams, on occasion, and a great many of them feature the boy with whom he is currently sharing a couch. He’s done his best to shove them to the back of his mind, whenever he wakes up from them. He relegates them to that ever-expanding box of Sirius-related memories that would be better off forgotten and moves on, only now… Sirius is right beside him, prodding at the box with long, aristocratic fingers, and Remus can feel the lid beginning to slip.
But he’s been silent for too long, and he should know better, because Sirius Black has never been able to resist filling a silence. “Do you have good dreams, Moony?” he asks softly.
Remus won’t lie, but that doesn’t mean he has to tell the whole truth. “Sometimes,” he says noncommittally, praying that will be enough of an answer for Sirius.
It’s not. Of course, it’s not.
“Yeah?” Sirius asks, turning sideways to face him – one elbow propped up on the back of the couch and a knee resting on the cushions between them. “What about?”
“Mundane things, really,” Remus answer diplomatically. “Everything’s so awful, out there in the real world, for people like me. Sometimes I dream that I just… disappear. Get a little cottage somewhere off the beaten path, with a garden, and a crup or a kneazle, and I can just sort of… exist, you know?”
It’s all true, even if he’s leaving out the most important parts. The part about Sirius being there with him, cooking dinner together in a tiny kitchen. The part about the bed he shares with a boy with long, wavy black hair and shining grey eyes, that leave him waking up hard and aching with want.
He swallows, and Sirius studies him for what feels like an eternity. Remus is certain that his face must be giving something away. He’s never been particularly good at poker.
“Sounds lonely,” Sirius murmurs, and it cuts through Remus like a knife.
It is, he wants to say. It is, because at least before, I could trick myself into thinking that maybe I wasn’t so crazy. That maybe you could be there, after all.
Instead, he says, “It’s not. Not always, at least. Sometimes I’m not alone.”
There’s a flicker of something sad and haunted in Sirius’s eyes. “Good,” he whispers. “I don’t want you to be alone, Moony. You don’t deserve that.”
Remus blinks at him – barely even thinks before uttering, “Neither do you.”
He nearly chokes on all of the words left unsaid in the silence that follows. There’s a palpable tension in the air, and Remus wonders if perhaps it’s all in his head or if Sirius can feel it too – if Sirius can feel the crushing, all-consuming weight of Remus’s love for him, attempting to bully its way out of Remus’s throat and into the open, like water testing the integrity of an overburdened dam.
Sirius’s gaze is a weighty thing, when it finally settles on Remus again. “Your dream sounds nice,” Sirius says. Remus feels his eyes begin to sting. “Practical, but sort of cozy. Like you.” His ears turn crimson when he says the last, and Remus has to wonder whether he meant to say it at all.
“You could do it too, you know,” Remus says tightly. “There’s nothing stopping you.”
There’s another pause – a long one.
“We could do it together,” Sirius says.
He’s poking that box of memories, again, and this time, the lid goes tumbling off.
Remus laughs wetly and quickly brushes away a tear he never granted permission to fall. “Sometimes we do,” he confesses. “When I dream about it.”
He glances at Sirius, who’s looking at him with wide, teary eyes, and finds that he can’t stop now that the lid is off the box, now that the dam has begun to crack under the pressure.
“Sometimes you come with me,” he says, voice shaking. “And you laugh at me when I fuss over the garden. You bring that muggle record player you have and never turn it off. And sometimes we quarrel about dinner, or whose turn it is to feed the crup, but we’re-” Remus’s voice breaks, and he sniffles. “We’re happy.”
He feels a bit like he’s losing his mind when he finishes, and he can’t bring himself to look at Sirius. It’s as close to a full confession as Remus will ever get, and Sirius is an idiot, sometimes, but he’s not stupid. He’ll be able to put two and two together, and then Remus’s secret – the only one he’s kept closer to his chest than his lycanthropy – will be out. Exposed like a wound that will never fully heal.
Sirius’s voice is strained and soft, when he speaks again. “Remus,” he croaks. “Remus, I…”
He never finishes the thought, and Remus’s blood begins to burn with shame.
But then… Sirius murmurs something else. “Remus, I want that.”
They’re the words Remus has been longing to hear for years, but dismissing them is astonishingly easy.
“You don’t mean that,” Remus says flatly.
“I do, though.”
“No, Sirius, you don’t,” Remus snaps, rising to his feet. “You don’t know what you’re saying – what I’m saying. You don’t know what you’re agreeing to, it’s-”
“No, Remus, listen to me,” Sirius pleads. He reaches out, nimble fingers encircling Remus’s wrist, and Remus freezes. It’s the first time they’ve touched each other beyond an accidental bump in the halls since the night of the prank, and his skin suddenly feels too tight for his body. He’s so shocked, he can’t even bring himself to resist when Sirius pulls him back down to sit on the couch again, much closer this time. Their knees brush against each other, and the contact burns hot like a brand.
Remus looks at Sirius – meets his gaze properly – and is stunned to find that his grey eyes are filled with tears.
“I know what you mean,” Sirius insists. “And I mean what I’m saying, Remus, surely you know that.”
“Sirius, it’s just a dream,” Remus counters tearfully. His heart is dangerously close to cracking open right there inside his chest, and he’s not ready. God, he’s not ready to have his heart broken by the conversation he knows is coming. “And you’re not… you don’t feel that way about me. Not like I do for you.”
“Remus,” Sirius whispers, soft and urgent, like Remus is the one breaking his heart, and not the other way around. “Everyone knows. Everyone knows that I- that I-” He can’t seem to get the words out, but Remus knows what his imagination wants to fill in at the end of the sentence. Two words that simply cannot be true.
Until Sirius Black, unpredictable as ever, does what Remus has never, in four impossibly long years, been able to do.
“Everyone knows that I love you, Remus,” Sirius says, tears streaking down his alabaster cheeks. “Everyone except you.”
Remus forgets how to breathe. “What?”
Sirius sniffles and releases his grip on Remus’s wrist in favor of tangling their fingers together. “I have no right to say that, Moony, I know that. I do. Especially not after… what I did last year. But Gods, I- I can’t do this any longer. I’ve been disowned by my family, Remus, I haven’t talked to Reggie in months, and I’ve still never missed anyone as much as I’ve missed you.”
Remus shakes his head, unable to believe what he’s hearing with his own ears. “Sirius, we talk to each other every day-”
“But we don’t, do we?” Sirius argues, desperate. “Not like we used to. Not like I wish we did. It’s different, now.”
“Of course it’s different!” Remus hisses, his fingers tightening around Sirius’s, even as his own heart tries to pull away. “It’s- I can’t… I’m not…” He huffs in frustration and fails miserably at blinking back the tears that won’t stop coming. Sirius looks utterly devastated when Remus glances at him.
“I know,” Sirius mutters brokenly. “I know, Remus. You can say it.”
Remus takes a shaky breath, and he thinks of all the things he’s wanted to say to Sirius for the last few months – all the questions he’s never asked – but they’re questions he knows Sirius won’t have answers for. Sirius will never be able to tell him why he sold Remus out to Snape, that night, because Sirius doesn’t know why. That much has been clear from the moment it happened.
So Remus doesn’t ask. What he says, instead, is this:
“I don’t understand why it had to be you,” Remus whispers, and he can’t look at Sirius’s face, right now, so instead he looks at their joined hands. “That’s the most fucked up part of this whole mess, Sirius. When I think about it…” He pauses. “When I think about things that I wish were different, my first thought is never that I wish the whole prank never happened – it’s that I wish it had been someone, anyone, other than you who did it.”
Sirius is silent – head bowed and hand shaking in Remus’s grasp, despite how tightly they’re clinging to each other.
“I know it sounds mad, but it’s true,” Remus continues. “Because I love James, and Peter, and Lily – you know I do – but not…” He takes a deep breath and raises his eyes to meet Sirius’s. God, what a messy, tragic pair they make.
He squeezes Sirius’s hand.
“Not like I love you.”
Sirius’s breath hitches softly, his red-rimmed grey eyes flitting back and forth across Remus’s face while the words hang in the air between them. The silence is deafening, ringing with the truths that have finally been voiced after years of silence – that Remus and Sirius’s relationship has never been quite like the others. That it’s always been a different sort of love.
Of course, it’s Sirius who ultimately shatters the silence, and Remus hardly has time to register what’s happening before Sirius chokes out a sob and launches himself into Remus’s arms, clambering into Remus’s lap and wrapping around him like a koala. The broken apologies that emerge between sobs are the final blow to Remus’s fractured heart, and he feels the moment it cracks open, bleeding desperation into every cell in his body. He winds his arms around Sirius’s body and holds him close – just like he used to after their worst nightmares – and stops trying to fight the tears.
“I’m sorry, Remus, I’m so sorry,” Sirius pleads, breaths ghosting over the exposed skin of Remus’s neck. “Please, Remus, you have to believe me. I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Please.” I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Remus knows – he’s always known – and he forgave Sirius a long time ago, only because he knew Sirius would never forgive himself.
“I know,” Remus murmurs, holding Sirius so tightly he’s nearly surprised Sirius has any air left to speak. “And I do. It’s okay. We’re…” He pauses, because, he wants to tell Sirius that they’re okay, but they’re not. Not really. Not yet. “We’ll be okay, Sirius. We will. I swear it.”
He hears Sirius let out a shuddering breath, but he feels, more than hears, Sirius murmur into the skin of his neck, “I love you.”
“I know,” Remus says again, burying his face in the crook of Sirius’s neck, where the soft wool of his sweater gives way to smooth skin. Sirius’s arms tighten around his middle. “I love you, too.”
“I want-” Sirius starts, interrupted by a soft hiccup. “I want to have good dreams again, Moony.” His voice sounds so small – like that of a child – and it makes Remus ache.
Slowly, gently, Remus extricates himself from Sirius’s grasp so he can look Sirius in the eye. His hand hardly feels like his own when he lets it rest against Sirius’s flush cheek, brushing away the still-falling tears with a careful swipe of his thumb.
They’ve shared a bed dozens of times, before. Spent entire evenings on this very couch with Remus’s head in Sirius’s lap while they laughed with their friends. Sirius is straddling him right now, in this very moment, but this – Remus cradling Sirius’s face in his hand, stubbornly thumbing away tears while they stare at each other, gazes open and honest in a way they’ve never been, even before the prank – is undeniably the most intimate thing they’ve ever done.
And Remus knows, now, what he’s denied for so long – that there will always, always be a part of him that loves Sirius Black, and miraculously, he thinks Sirius may always love him, in return. It may not be tonight, but one day, Sirius will gather the shards of Remus’s heart and put it back together. Breathe love into it like oxygen. And Remus will do the same for him.
Maybe they can start right now.
“You will,” Remus says softly, a wobbly smile on his lips. “But for now, you can borrow mine, if you’d like.”
Sirius’s eyes widen with wonder, and God, Remus loves him. He loves him so much it hurts.
Remus doesn’t know this, yet, but in two years, the two of them will lay together in their bed and bicker teasingly about who kissed who first. Remus will claim that it was Sirius who first leaned in, and Sirius, ever the contrarian, will say the opposite. But they’ll smile through the playful disagreement, and sooner or later, the argument will end with one of them cheekily fitting their lips together in a successful attempt at distraction.
But this isn’t two years from now. Not yet. So for now, Remus doesn’t particularly care whether it’s him or Sirius who initiated it. His only cares in the world are that Sirius tastes like mint toothpaste, and his lips are soft and pliant against Remus’s own, and that their first kiss is a little wet with tears and a little devastating, but still perfect.
It’s perfect because it’s them – RemusandSirius – and for now, that’s enough.
For now, Remus Lupin kisses Sirius Black and smiles, because for the first time in a long time, he knows that his favorite dreams are finally, finally within reach.