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He feels his bones shift even as he’s running. The underbrush feels rougher against the pads of his paws than usual, and he knows he’s almost out of time.
The pack is silent behind him, no time for yips or howls, all of them focused on catching up with him, to close their jaws around his neck.
He’s almost out of time.
When he reaches the edge, Remus doesn’t stop, just puts the last of his energy into a desperate leap. He knows he’ll never make it to the other side, he just has to get out far enough so that the water won’t be too shallow, so that he won’t hit the bottom.
He transforms midair, can feel the itch of the hair growing inwards, the agony of bones snapping into new shapes. It’s over quickly, before his now human body hits the water.
Maybe he passes out for a time. He doesn’t register the moment the still surface is broken by flesh, the sinking, the rising. But then he’s gasping, trying desperately to keep above water. He looks back up to the ledge from which he jumped, can see their faces looking back. None of them seem eager to follow him.
He lets the water direct him, stops trying to fight it. The stream carries him away rather fast, his aching limbs doing nothing to steer. For a while, Remus just screws his eyes shut against it all - the pain of claw marks across his chest, the broken ribs, the bone-deep exhaustion. The cool of the water feels good against his skin.
He’d never tried holding onto the wolf for such a long time, but with the pack the human form was weakness. He knew they all had to turn back once in a while, but only ever hidden away from the others. He had felt it as a dull ache for the last day or so, the need to dress in human skin again, but there had been no opportunity to do so. And then, then… the fighting, the chase, now here.
It had felt a relief to escape his own wolf at first, after the initial agony of transformation. Now though… he doesn’t know how long he’s drifted, but the cold is no longer soothing, it’s freezing, and he misses his fur.
Remus isn’t sure how he gets onto dry land, but here he is. Human, naked, trembling and bleeding. Jesus fucking christ. Even if the pack doesn’t follow him he’ll be easy prey to literally anything else that comes across him.
He tries to transform but all that happens is a spike of agony, leaving him gasping for air. The wolf has left him for now, he’s on his own.
Gritting his teeth against the indignity of it, he drags himself across the ground. The trees around him are bare, the ground is hard and cold. He thinks he might smell snow on the air, but that could just be his mind playing tricks on him. It’s only September after all.
In the end, he curls up with his back against a large tree. Even as the cold starts to numb him from the pain, it’s annoyance more than anything that fills him. He knew he shouldn’t have stayed with Fenrir’s pack for so long, he’d seen the others right away for what they were: monsters, just as bad as the dead, all of them happier with the new world than they’d been with the last.
He’d just been so lonely. Years had passed since he last traveled with others, and even with their cruelty and violence, they had been like him. He’d let himself be blinded by it, by the feeling of belonging somewhere.
It shouldn’t have come as a big surprise that this was the way it ended. Honestly, it wasn’t, Remus thought. He’d known there’d be trouble ever since they smelled the humans - stepping in front of Fenrir when there was blood already on his muzzle had just been the final nail in the coffin.
He feels his body trying to knit his skin back together, but the alpha-inflicted claw marks and bites would take too long to heal, Remus knew. He would freeze to death way before his body could fix itself up. Oh well.
He shuts his eyes against the graying sunlight, lets the numbness fill him, lets go of his annoyance with himself and the whole situation. All things being equal, not too bad a death. Letting his breaths even out, become deep, Remus tries to command his body to sleep. In the end, he does.
I wasn’t planning on waking up, he thinks, as consciousness seeps into him once again. Weird. He feels warm, almost cozy, bundled up in blankets and pillows. A fire is burning nearby, he can smell it.
Remus opens his eyes. He’s in a cabin, he thinks. And alone.
As he tries to sit up, a gasp escapes him. He pulls the blankets away from his chest (still naked, that’s uncomfortable), and as he carefully prods his ribs, he knows for certain that they have not healed up yet. Damn, he must’ve been more hurt than he realized, to not have even healed the broken bones yet - they should be much easier to mend than the long gashes from Fenrir’s claws and teeth.
Speaking of, these look bad . He almost feels sick when he examines them further, the puffy, reddening lacerations criss-crossing his skin. As Remus carefully moves to try and sit again, the pain of them makes him light-headed.
It takes him an embarrassingly long time to stand. When he finally does, one hand on the back of the sofa he’d been lying on for support, the other clutching a blanket around his body, he finds that he’s not quite sure what to do.
Someone must have found him in the woods, obviously, against the tree where he’d lain down to die. Someone must’ve carried him here, to this cabin, which looks to be lived in, judging by the books on the mantelpiece, the heavy knitted rug on the bed, the half-burned candles on the windowsill.
Who? Who would go to the trouble of tucking in a half-dead stranger, warming them up and then leaving them in their home, unattended? It’s a bold move, stupid really, Remus thinks: He’s seen enough of how the new world works in the past years, knows how the living left steal and kill and trap to stay alive, to protect themselves against the dead and each other.
Stupid people are dangerous. It’s time to leave.
Just as he reaches this conclusion, there are steps outside the door to the cabin. A grunt as something heavy is set down, the sound of someone kicking their shoes against a wall to get dirt off them. The smells that hit Remus are distinctly human (sweat, dirt, blood, and something else, fresh and crisp, the way he’s always thought the first days of spring smelled).
The door opens and in steps a man a little shorter than Remus. He’s carrying a bag in one hand, a dead rabbit in the other, and when he sees Remus standing by the sofa, naked but for the blanket covering him from the belly and down, very obviously struggling to keep his balance, the man just smiles before turning to put the rabbit in the small kitchen.
“What are you doing?” the stranger asks, not laughing but clearly amused. “Why would you think getting up is a good idea in your state?”
Even though Remus hadn’t actually had harming the man in mind, he can’t help but feel just a little affronted - the man obviously does not consider Remus a threat whatsoever, which, no, okay, he shouldn’t, but if Remus really wanted to, even in this state he’s pretty sure he could hurt him.
Slowly, Remus lets go of the couch. Even though the process is slower than usual, he is healing, and he trusts his body to save him if needed. He reaches for the wolf, and feels it responding this time. He can transform, if he needs to.
“I asked you,” the stranger says, turning from the kitchen table, leaning against it casually, crossing his arms, “what on earth you’re doing? By all rights, you should not be able to stand right now. I know I felt at least three broken ribs last night.”
“Where am I?” Remus asks, ignoring the questions. He examines the man standing before him, noting a gun on one hip, a bowie knife strapped to the other. The crossed arms look muscular beneath the thick sweater, strong.
Although it isn’t really relevant to the danger-assessment he’s currently conducting, Remus can’t help but noticing that this man is also really fucking beautiful, which is not exactly helpful in this situation. He’s too old to let a pretty face fool him, but it sure has been a while since Remus has actually seen one. It’s a little distracting.
“This is my humble abode. Didn’t really know what else to do with you when I came across you other than bring you here and try to get you warm. Sorry about the clothes-situation,” the man grins apologetically at this, “it seemed even more intrusive to try to manhandle you into something than just covering you up, hope that’s okay.”
Remus grimaces slightly. He does feel awfully exposed to be stood here naked in front of someone fully dressed and armed.
“Why would you bring me here?” Remus has to ask this, has to know, because he really is bewildered by this.
The smile on the man’s face disappears. He now looks serious, maybe a little sad, a little desperate around the edges even. He shrugs, and says, “I haven’t seen another living soul this far north for over a year. I guess I just… Look, I realize that it maybe wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, bringing a stranger home like this, but I figured it was worth the chance. And anyway, I couldn’t very well live with myself if I left a person to die like that, even if I didn’t know them. That’s not who I want to be.”
At the end of his explanation, the man definitely looks a little desperate.
Oh , Remus thinks , it’s loneliness then . That’s something he can relate to - after all he literally joined a human-hunting pack of werewolves rather than be on his own just a few weeks ago. He’s not really in a position to judge this man’s decisions.
A wry smile crosses the face of the stranger suddenly.
“And anyways,” he says. “If you turned out to be an asshole, I figured I could probably take you in a fight, you being sort of halfway to the great beyond by the looks of it.”
The stranger’s name is Sirius, and he’s been staying at the cabin for the better part of three years. The dead don’t trouble him this far north (as Remus already knew), and hardly any people pass by, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
He’s extremely curious about the cause of Remus’ injuries, and when Remus just mutters “wolves”, his eyes go comically wide.
“Are you saying you fought off a pack of wolves?” He asks incredulously.
“I didn’t exactly fight them off,” Remus protests, “I mostly just ran away.”
He won’t let Sirius treat his wounds, figures he’s already seen them up too close. When they heal up completely in a couple of days, Remus doesn’t want Sirius asking too many questions. He figures that like this, he can just argue that Sirius must’ve been wrong in his first assessment of them.
And he does plan to stay until he’s healed up. The cabin is warm, cozy, Sirius a generous host, lending Remus clothes and splitting the stew he makes of the rabbit and roots from the forest.
They sit on the couch, Remus still very much aware of his ribs being displaced, his skin slowly knitting itself back together beneath the borrowed shirt. Sirius is a welcome distraction from this.
Apart from being, well, annoyingly good-looking, Sirius also seems remarkably unaffected by the whole situation. The people Remus has previously met have all been in different stages of losing their minds; either being eaten up by the grief for their old lives and the things they’d had to do to survive so far, or having let their humanity slip away from them completely in order to cope with what the world has now become.
Sirius is none of these things. He still has his humor intact, and not the horrible kind Remus has encountered so often, but a humor that reminds Remus painfully of before .
He tells Remus that he’d bought the cabin as a teenager (after sheepishly admitting to coming from an obscenely rich family) as a way to escape his home. He doesn’t go into too much detail and Remus doesn’t press him.
When the world went to shit, Sirius immediately started making his way up here, the result being that he’d been relatively cut-off from the worst of the aftermath of the outbreak. Here he could live off the land by hunting and fishing, growing potatoes against the back wall of the cabin, digging for roots in the forest.
His first encounter with other people had been a little over a year ago, a man and a woman. Sirius had been overjoyed to see other people, but this quickly changed as they had done their best to claim the cabin as their own. Sirius had managed to stop them. He was left with a new gun and two graves watching over the growth of his potatoes. His voice is muted as he tells this.
To Remus, this sharing of stories feels strange, and he’s not as forthcoming as Sirius is. He talks only little of his life before, just where he came from, and how he’d traveled north the same as Sirius. How he’d been alone for most of the time, but had eventually joined up with another group who turned out to not be the greatest company.
He tells nothing of his family. There isn’t much to tell. Sirius doesn’t press him for details either.
At the end of the night, Remus curls up on the couch, looking at the embers in the fireplace. He can hear the deep breaths from the bed, and feels, cautiously, safe enough to let himself drift off to sleep.
The first snows fall seven weeks after Remus had awoken in the cabin for the first time. Fat snowflakes that blanket everything, making tracking game easier. An almost eerie silence haunts the woods.
Remus makes his way back to the cabin just as the twilight begins to set in, carrying the two rabbits he’d managed to snare. He knows there is bigger game in the forest - the wolf in him is eager to go hunting, to kill, but Remus has yet to tell Sirius of his condition, and the bow he’s working on isn’t yet good enough to convince Sirius that Remus could actually take down deer with it.
And anyways, he likes Sirius’ rabbit stew.
He makes sure to beat off the worst of the snow from his boots before he enters the cabin. The large room is lit by a few candles and the lively flames in the fireplace, the bed cast in shadows but both the kitchen and couch lit in soft orange tones.
Sirius sits curled up on the couch, a book in hand and a crease between his eyebrows. As Remus starts unlacing his boots, Sirius looks up with a smile, eyeing the rabbits.
“Want me to cook?” Sirius asks.
“Well you’d better - we both know that I’m rubbish at it,” Remus laughs. It’s true - for years he’s been eating in wolf form, usually raw meat, so cooking over a fireplace with different ingredients and spices is something he’s almost hilariously awful at.
Sirius marks his page in the book and gets up to prepare the rabbits. As he empties his bag of contents (knife, a length of rope, a book on edible plants, extra gloves, and a compass) Remus lets the warmth of the room warm his stiffened limbs.
Sirius is humming as he begins to skin the rabbits.
After eating, Sirius goes back to his book. Remus sits next to him on the couch trying to make a wearable jacket from their treated pile of rabbit- and squirrel skins. It’s slow going and the end result will be anything but fashionable, but he figures it can keep Sirius warm when the worst weeks of winter hit.
The nights are already getting so cold that Sirius has begun seeking his warmth in his sleep. The bed is large enough that they can both snugly fit with a comfortable distance between them, but Remus’ wolf is like a furnace inside him and more than once he’s awoken with Sirius’ body pressed against his back, cold hands seeking warmth. When this happens, he carefully frees himself from Sirius’ grip and goes to stoke the fire.
Perhaps he should fashion the skins into a blanket instead.
The wind rattles the windows, snowflakes slowly filling up the frame. Sirius starts to hum again. Don’t think twice, it’s alright.
Trouble comes late one afternoon, shortly after Sirius has returned home from checking on the snares. Remus hears it first, his head snapping up from where he’d been repairing the broken leg of one of the chairs, Sirius casting him a curious glance.
“See, I told you I could smell a fire going!”
“Shit man, do you think there’s a girl? It’s been so long since we’ve had one.”
Remus is across the room in three steps, grabbing a knife from the kitchen and turning to warn Sirius. The lock on the door broke months ago, and the men are so close it’s no use trying to barricade it. Remus curses himself for not paying closer attention, he really should have heard the men earlier.
Seeing Remus pick up the knife, Sirius immediately draws the gun from his belt. Not a second too soon, as the cabin door is kicked inwards the very next moment.
Sirius doesn’t even have time to aim the gun before the first man, a beast taller than even Remus, with broken in teeth bared in a smile, has shot a round into his shoulder. An agonized sound escapes Sirius as he drops the gun in reflex.
Moving on instinct, Remus has the knife buried in the second man’s throat before he even notices him there. The beast has stepped in towards Sirius but hears his companion’s wet attempts at inhaling and spins around. Neither man had noticed Remus from his position in the dark corner of the kitchen, but now the beast has his eyes trained on him, as well as the gun - it’s aimed directly at Remus’ head.
Remus lets the smaller man drop to the floor, the sound of him desperately trying to breathe through his lacerated windpipe audible in the room. Remus has only his knife, and a shot to the head from the gun the beast is holding would be more than enough to kill him dead, werewolf healing or not.
Silence stretches.
Then Sirius throws himself forwards, tumbling into the beast with little elegance. Remus takes the chance, dares not give the beast the chance to hurt Sirius even worse, and shifts.
The beast barely has time to scream before the wolf is upon him. He does, however, find the time to shoot two rounds into its chest, probably on reflex, but it’s no matter - he misses the heart, and Remus lets the wolf make quick work of the intruder’s throat. He goes still very quickly.
After, he can feel blood drip from his muzzle and the pain spreading from his chest where he’d taken the bullets. He dares not look at Sirius at first, can hear his ragged breathing and pounding heart. For a time he doesn’t move, just stays standing above the beast, looking at the body. Should he change back? Or maybe just leave, before Sirius can tell him to?
“Remus.”
The voice does tremble, slightly, but there is steel beneath it. Remus still doesn’t move.
“Remus, come here,” Sirius says, his tone leaving no room for argument.
Slowly, Remus turns to him. Sirius is on the floor, leaning against the back of the couch, his hands pressed against the wound in his shoulder, trying to stop the flow of blood. He does not smell scared, just astonished.
He makes his way over, slowly, cautiously. When he’s close enough for Sirius to touch him, Remus lets the wolf lay down on its belly in front of him. He looks up at his host, his friend, and tries to let the human in him show in the large, green eyes.
Sirius just looks at him for a while. Then he reaches out a hand, slowly, rests it against Remus’ head. He looks fascinated as his fingers comb through the rough fur, a smile spreading on his face as he flips one of Remus’ ears with a finger. Remus grumbles softly, and Sirius lets out a disbelieving laugh.
He presses a finger against one of Remus’ teeth. “My hero."
In the end, it doesn’t change much, except Sirius will point blank refuse to check the snares on the coldest days.
(“You literally have fur, you’re built for this kind of weather, now get out there and bring me back an elk!”)
On some evenings, Remus transforms and lays in front of the fireplace, content to a degree he never thought possible for him.
(“Do you purr when you hang out down there?”
“Wolves don’t purr you idiot, leave me alone!”)
On some evenings, Sirius will join him, leaning up against his large side with a book in hand, or simply looking into the fireplace.
Some nights he sleeps in wolf form. Some days he goes hunting.
One day he really does bring home an elk, and they have food for days. He also gets started on the blanket for Sirius.
The snow has mostly melted, the first spots of greenery shyly poking out around the forest, the air smelling crisp of spring and Sirius , when Sirius kisses him for the first time.
It’s not a complete surprise and certainly not unwelcome, but Remus hadn’t expected it to happen quite like this.
He’s knee-deep in water trying to untangle the fishing net when he sees a large shape moving beneath the surface. Sirius is close by, muttering curses under his breath as he too is struggling with knots and tangles, gritting his teeth against the cold of the water.
Following the shape with his eyes, Remus sees it come closer, maybe a salmon. He waits, letting wolf instinct take over, can even feel his teeth lengthen a little in his mouth, before he strikes out, grabbing the fish out of the water. It struggles in his grasp but he holds fast.
“What the fuck?” Sirius says, as he stares at Remus, smiling, fish in hand.
“I got dinner, darling,” Remus laughs, lifting the struggling fish.
“You fucking idiot,” and before he knows it, Sirius has crossed over to him in large strides, grabs him by the sides of his face and presses their lips together.
It’s just this side of desperate, a little rough, droplets of water from Sirius fingers tracking paths down the side of Remus’ neck, and he grabs Sirius’ sides, meeting him, letting the kiss deepen and forgets all about the fish. It wriggles out of his grasp, splashing them both with water as it makes its escape.
They break apart, startled. A few droplets cling to Sirius’ lashes. His cheeks are a little red, his eyes looking a little dazed, and he’s so beautiful.
“I can’t believe you let dinner get away.”
Remus lets out an almost startled laugh, drawing Sirius in once again.
“Sorry, love” he says against his lips. “How will I ever make it up to you?”
They both end up on their asses in the lake, breathless from laughter and kissing.
When, come evening, they lay gasping for breath, heads spinning with pleasure and exhaustion, Remus doesn’t think he’s ever been quite this happy.