Chapter Text
Sirius comes to with a jerk, sitting upright before he’s fully regained awareness. Wormtail, he thinks, out of nowhere.
He’s in St. Mungo’s, he realizes almost immediately. He recognizes it from when they’d all come to visit Dorcas earlier in the year. Everything bright and pale and eerily clean. Except—Remus, who’s sitting in a chair near the edge of the bed, staring at him.
“You’re here,” Sirius says.
Remus is getting to his feet already, looking chagrined for some reason, like Slughorn has caught him in the potions storeroom again. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m—I’ll get Peter.”
Sirius reaches out and grasps his hand, and Remus stills, looking down at where their fingers are touching. He looks terrible: pale and hollowed out, an angry slash of a scar Sirius doesn’t remember snaking up the side of his neck. Sirius wonders how long he’s been lying here unconscious, for Remus to look like that.
“Moony,” he says. “How bad off am I?”
Remus draws in a breath. “The healers aren’t sure,” he says down to their hands. “There was some sort of, I guess, explosion. No one knows what spell might have hit you, or … your body’s fine, now, but they said they’d have to talk to you when you woke up.”
Sirius nods and then huffs a laugh, glancing around the room.
“I can’t believe I got blown up my first time out,” he says. “Prongs’ll never let me … and Gid and Fab, they’ll be even more insufferable. I told you sos and all.” His eyes reach Remus again and there’s a stricken expression on his face. “What?” Sirius asks.
“Sirius,” Remus says, in a tone not unlike the one he’d used to tell them his mum was ill.
“What?” Sirius asks again, his voice creeping up a little with sudden fear. “Was someone else hurt? Was it Marlene? She was—”
“Marlene wasn’t there,” Remus says.
Sirius’s forehead creases. “No,” he says.
“Sirius,” Remus says again. “You said, you said your first time out.”
“Just tell me what it is, Moony,” Sirius says. “You’re scaring me. I know that voice, what’s—”
“I don’t know,” Remus says. He sits down. “I need you to—you said your first time out.”
“Moony,” Sirius says, but Remus just stares back at him, so he says, “Yeah. Or ours, right, mine and Prongs’s.” He glances toward the door, suddenly feeling like all of his organs have dropped out of his body. “Moony, he isn’t—”
“James is fine,” Remus says. Sirius stares at him. Remus never calls James James. And actually, he never calls Sirius Sirius, either, unless something’s gone wrong.
“Then what—”
“Sirius,” Remus says again, firm. “I need you to—what’s the last thing you remember? Before you woke up here?”
Sirius closes his eyes. “I was with Marlene,” he says. “We were on watch at that warehouse off Elm. It was boring, we’d been there for ages. Prongs was on the other side of the building, with Caradoc, and we were supposed to meet up with them before we could go home.”
He opens his eyes. Remus is staring at him.
“I don’t even remember anyone else being there,” Sirius says, frustrated. “They must’ve got me from behind, I can’t—”
Remus is still just looking at him.
“Stop looking at me like that, Moony,” he says. “Tell me what’s got you so twisted up.”
Remus shakes his head. “What year is it?” he asks.
Sirius stares at him. “No,” he says.
Remus doesn’t say anything.
“1978,” Sirius says. His voice is full of air now, thin with fear. “It is still 1978, Moony?”
Remus looks down at where Sirius is still holding his hand. “It’s 1981,” he says.
Sirius sucks in a breath. “It isn’t,” he says. “I’ve been knocked out for three years?” He shakes his head. “Or no, are you saying, what, someone obliviated me? But not … I can still remember everything, I remember you made me toast for dinner and the edge was all burnt, it isn’t gone, what—”
Remus is still looking at their hands.
“Moony,” Sirius says, feeling desperate. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” Remus says. “It doesn’t.” He stands up abruptly, still not looking at Sirius’s face. “I have to get a healer,” he says. “And—Peter. Peter can explain to you, he can—”
Sirius stares at him. “You’re leaving?” he asks.
Remus finally moves his hand away. “I shouldn’t have been here—” he shakes his head. “Peter will talk to you,” he says. “And the healers, they’ll know what this is.”
Sirius lets out a shaky breath. 1981. Remus, pale and too-thin and leaving him. He feels like his throat is closing up the way it does before he cries, but he hasn’t cried in he doesn’t know how long, and there are no tears. Just—
Panic.
As if he can feel Sirius starting to spiral, Remus finally looks up and meets his eyes, his hand coming up to cradle Sirius’s cheek. He’s always been good at knowing what Sirius is feeling. The best. Sirius has always felt like the reverse was true, too, that he could read Remus better than anyone else, that they could communicate on some wavelength that no one else was on, but now—he has no idea what the look in Remus’s eyes right now means. And that’s maybe the worst thing yet. The thing that makes the idea of three lost years feel real.
“It’ll be alright, Sirius,” Remus says quietly. He sways forward suddenly, as if he’s being pulled, and presses his mouth to Sirius’s in a hard, desperate kiss. And then, before Sirius can gather his thoughts enough to stop him, he leaves.