Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sun was finally setting over the mountaintops and Sirius was wondering for the hundredth time that day how much trouble he’d get into for kicking the back of Remus’s seat. 

It was a sweet and balmy sort of evening, with the bright afternoon fading away easily into a warm, lavender night, and there was a clean bed to be found a few short steps from the car, and a McDonald’s, and probably a Diet Coke. A bit of cheerfully awful television to switch off to. The distant sounds of a babbling, glacial river somewhere in their valley. And all Sirius could think about was the back of Remus’s stupid neck through the little gap between the passenger seat and the passenger seat’s headrest. It was all pink, because he was an idiot and hadn’t been applying suncream at regular intervals like Sirius had. And if Sirius said anything he’d probably get told: “I don’t need it, I spend half my life outside,” or some nonsense about how the angle of the sun at this altitude meant that the ultraviolet rays wouldn’t find that particular patch of skin but they had, because it was pink, and it was annoying, and Sirius still wanted to kick the back of Remus’s stupid seat.

The driver’s side door opened, and James propped himself on it with his arm and then leant down to peek inside at the three of them sitting there like schoolchildren, and he said:

“They’ve only got doubles.”

And that was the first problem.

For reasons Sirius hadn’t wanted to exert any energy thinking about, James had taken to spending an inordinate amount of time with Peter given that the purpose of this trip had allegedly been for Sirius and James to spend as much time together as possible before they disappeared off to different universities in the autumn. Remus and Peter were, as far as Sirius was concerned, just tagging along. It had all been a great, thrilling dream to begin with: an endless summer of tearing through the wilds with his best mate, swimming in picture-postcard lakes and eating those great big bags of crisps with mad flavours like dill pickle and ranch and all-dressed , and he’d been greatly looking forward to finding out what that even was. He’d pictured hikes up sandy trails to devastating vistas. Souvenir t-shirts that said things like: Fish Fear Me. He’d even bought a new camera for the occasion — a fantastically battered old thing he’d found for pittance on eBay — and had imagined parking their rented Jeep up at the side of roads that had probably been named “World’s Most Beautiful Road” at some point and using his second-hand zoom lens to take pictures of wolves and mooses and things. Or whatever the correct term was for more than one moose. He wasn’t sure.

Either way, the trip had devolved into such a sour pitch in such a very short space of time that all he’d managed to capture, a week into the drive, were half a dozen blurry pictures of James at Heathrow Terminal 5 and then a shot of his motel bed on the first night in Seattle that he’d taken accidentally, around the same time he was swearing at James for suddenly not wanting to share a room with him.

“Charming!” he’d spat at him, and then said something infantile about Peter being boring — which he was, rather — and then slumped off to the adjoining bedroom and not spoken to Remus all night apart from to ask him if he could use his toothpaste, because he’d forgotten his.

“You two need to sort your shit out,” James had spat right back at him the next morning over a breakfast of toast and strange, plasticky waffles that they had to make themselves in a machine that looked like a little spaceship.

“What shit?” Sirius had muttered back stupidly, poking at the beige goo oozing out of the side of the spaceship with a knife, and knowing exactly what shit James was on about.

It had started sometime towards the end of Easter term. Sometime in April, when the weather was starting to perk up after a particularly miserable winter, and Sirius was — quite suddenly, and with no clear reason that he was able to identify — starting to find Remus intolerably irritating. It had seemed to come out of nowhere at all and it confused Sirius in an academic sort of sense, because they’d known each other for almost five years by this point, and he couldn’t remember ever finding Remus annoying before. Swotty, perhaps. A bit of a teacher’s pet, and modest about it all in a way that made Sirius poke gentle fun at him all through lower school. But he’d never found him unbearable. He was a lovely addition to their group, really: when he’d turned up halfway through their third year he’d slotted himself in quite neatly with Sirius, and James, and Peter. He’d actually made Peter more tolerable because, with Peter occupied, Sirius got a bit of James back, and this facilitated many happy years during which they all found a very pleasant equilibrium, and it was frustrating that some strange turn of Sirius’s sensibilities now threatened to upset the whole thing. And it wasn’t even an identifiable thing: it wasn’t as if Sirius had been able to pin it down and say: oh yeah, it’s because he’s this. It’s because he does this thing. It’s because he’s too loud — which he wasn’t — or too friendly — which again, he wasn’t — or that he smelled like bins, or anything. He was just suddenly and presently extremely irritating to Sirius, and when James had suggested they invite the other two on their long-planned summer road trip Sirius had frowned, and shrugged, and said: “I mean. I suppose we could.”

And that, somehow, had led to James forcing Sirius to share a room with Remus, and sit next to Remus at dinner, and go pop into that supermarket with Remus and pick up some more crisps for us all with Remus and Remus, Remus, Remus.

It was intolerable and thoroughly disappointing and about to get immeasurably worse, because if the only rooms at the little roadside hotel were double rooms, then Sirius was about to find himself in a situation he’d been privately fearing since that first night in Seattle.

He slumped back against his seat, and crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at that stupid patch of pink skin through the little gap under the headrest.

***

“Right,” Remus said, dropping his rucksack onto the solitary bed. “Well.”

Sirius sniffed, and dumped himself into the battered old armchair at the other side of the room. “Yeah,” he said.

It was a wonderfully unassuming sort of place: exactly the sort of place Sirius had hoped they’d be staying in as they tore their way across the west. It had scuffed carpet and tatty, peeling wallpaper, and a bucket for ice, and a big, wide window that looked out over the car park and the wilderness creeping towards them at the edges of the little backpacker town. He’d thrilled to himself that day as the landscape around them had slipped from gently rolling hills to something jagged and exciting: he’d pressed his face to the glass of the car window and stared up at the looming peaks, and thought about how it looked like something out of The Lord of the Rings, and thought about asking James to put the soundtrack on. But then Remus had said something boring about rocks and Sirius had rolled his eyes and started thinking about kicking his seat instead.

It really was a wonderful place. It was just such a shame that he was having to share it with him.

“Did you want a shower?”

Sirius frowned, and looked up from where he was playing with the strings of his hoodie, and said: “What?”

“Before we go get food,” said Remus. He wasn’t looking at Sirius: he was looking down at his trainers, and that was annoying, too. “I was going to get a shower.”

“Okay,” said Sirius, because he couldn’t imagine why he needed to be kept quite so abreast of Remus’s upcoming ablutions. “Go for it.”

Remus took exactly seven minutes in the bathroom, and then the two of them walked together in silence back down to the car park, and then Remus said: “That’s Mount Macpherson over there,” and Sirius said:

“Right.”

It was a good mountain. It was massive, and had a big snowy peak like an iced bun, and there was a huge, wispy cloud clinging to the very top of it and catching gold and orange in the evening sunlight. It was a very good mountain. He told James about it as they walked side-by-side to McDonald’s — Sirius having carefully shouldered Peter out of the way before they left the car park — and James agreed that it was cool, and asked him how he knew what that mountain was called, and Sirius said something about a leaflet he’d been reading in the hotel room whilst Remus was in the shower.

They ate burgers and chips sitting by the side of the road, which was rather grand until Remus started slurping his Diet Coke through a paper straw, and Sirius had to bite down on his back teeth so hard he wondered that they didn’t crack and splinter into little pieces on his tongue.

“So tomorrow,” James was saying through his mouthful of chicken nuggets, “it’s about an hour to Roger’s Pass, and then there’s that lake that Pete was on about. So we could go have a look at that.”

“I’m gonna swim in it,” Peter said. He had a big smear of ketchup on his chin.

James nodded, and took another bite of his sandwich. “Attaboy.”

“Was there anything you wanted to see tomorrow?”

It took Sirius a beat to realise that Remus was speaking to him. He shrugged, and looked to James for advice because he really couldn’t think of what to say in response, and then sagged in his seat when he saw that James was now deep in conversation with Peter about his chicken nuggets.

“I dunno.”

Not your stupid face, he thought. I’ll tell you that much.

“We could swim, too,” Remus said simply, and Sirius screwed his nose up at his burger, and said nothing.

The walk back to the hotel was awkward and too-long, the McDonald’s sitting in Sirius’s stomach like a stone. James waved them a cheery goodnight when they got back to the car park and disappeared off down a hallway with Peter, their arms slung good-naturedly around one another’s shoulders. Sirius wanted to punch them both.

“Right,” Remus said again when they got back up to their room. The overhead lights were yellow and fluorescent and one of the bulbs was flickering ominously: an endearingly offbeat road trip movie turned suddenly horror. Sirius nodded, and bent over to unzip his rucksack, and said:

“Yep.”

They bustled around one another dumbly for ten minutes, Sirius muttering about toothpaste again because he’d still not managed to buy himself a tube, and Remus saying something in return that Sirius didn’t bother responding to. He toed his shoes off and felt the soles of his feet stick to the thin carpet. There was a distant humming coming from just outside their door that Sirius thought might’ve been an ice machine, and how funny for there to be a machine here to make ice when there was so much of the stuff just up that mountain that Remus had pointed out in the car park.

The sheets were staticky when Sirius slid into the too-small bed. He tugged at them until they were free of their pin-sharp tucks against the corners of the lumpy mattress, and bunched his too-thin pillow up and glared out of the wide window at the black, jagged run of mountain ridges against the night sky. He felt the bed dip on the other side and heard Remus take two annoying puffs on his inhaler. The hotel room was probably very dusty; it was probably quite bad for him. Sirius should probably offer him the side of the bed nearest the window so that he might get a little fresh air as he slept.

“Night,” Remus said, annoyingly, and any thoughts of charity swiftly left Sirius’s mind.

Neither of them slept. Sirius could tell Remus was awake: you always can, Sirius thought, and was forcibly and unpleasantly reminded of nights when he was much younger, and living at home, and how Regulus used to climb into the bed behind him on nights when Mother was being particularly awful, and how neither of them really slept then, either. How they’d both stay awake and statue-still under the sheets, listening for her footsteps as she prowled the hallways of the old townhouse. He wasn’t sure which bothered him more: her footsteps, or the sound of Remus clearing his throat repeatedly on the other side of the bed, an infuriating little hm-hm against the backdrop hum of the stupid ice machine. 

He found himself waiting for the next one, and the next one, and then he started timing the gaps between the hm-hms , counting the seconds in his head. The longest gap was fifty-three seconds; the shortest, after quarter of an hour of counting, was thirty seconds. That meant the average time between hm-hms was forty-one-and-a-half seconds. Forty-one-and-a-half seconds for Sirius to take his own deep breath and grit his back teeth again and convince himself it wasn’t worth saying anything, and that Remus would stop soon, or else Sirius would just drift off to sleep and it would stop bothering him.

Hm-hm.

“Oh my god .”

It hung in the darkness of the room, catching awkwardly on the still air. Sirius felt Remus shift on the other side of the bed, and then heard him say:

“Sorry?”

You should be , Sirius thought, bundling his pillow beneath his head again with his fists and slumping back down onto it crossly.

“Nothing,” he replied, in a silly sing-song voice that made him want to punch himself as well as the pillow, and the rest of them.

Remus shifted again on the mattress, as if he was propping himself up on an elbow and looking over his shoulder at Sirius. Sirius could feel his eyes boring into the back of his head.

“Sorry,” Remus said again, and it didn’t sound like a question this time, and Sirius gritted his teeth and tried not to hate himself too much.

He got the sense, after that, that Remus was trying very hard to hold the hm-hms in, as if he might be clenching his teeth as well, or holding his breath, or bundling up his side of the sheet and pressing it against his mouth to muffle the sounds. Good , Sirius thought meanly. The average gap between hm-hms climbed to fifty-two seconds, and then a minute, and then a minute and a half, and then Sirius found his mind drifting off over the jagged mountaintops outside and down into a little blue-green lake surrounded by meadows of wildflowers, or whatever grows at those sorts of altitudes.

“We could swim,” Remus said to him in the dream. He was eating chicken nuggets, and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack was playing from unseen speakers, and Sirius said:

“Yes please.”

***

Breakfast was the plasticky waffles again. They were a strange thing, Sirius thought, as he ladled the goopy batter into another spaceship-looking machine. It bubbled and oozed and the air at the little buffet table turned golden and sweet, and he found himself wondering vaguely if you could buy these machines in England, or if the voltage would be too different and if perhaps they wouldn’t work with English power sockets.

“Sleep well?”

Sirius frowned sideways at James, looking chipper and rested.

He shrugged, and spun the waffle-machine upside-down by its handle when it beeped at him, and said:

“Yes.”

“Good,” said James, plucking an apple from the plastic bowl on the counter and taking a big, messy bite. “You two sort your shit out yet?”

“There’s nothing to sort out,” Sirius said. The machine beeped again, and he peeled the golden waffle off the griddle using a plastic fork, which probably wasn’t the best idea: the prongs went all floppy and soft once he’d got the waffle onto his paper plate, and he frowned at that too, and threw the fork in the bin. “It’s fine,” he said, shrugging again. “We’re fine.”

James nodded. “Right,” he said around a yawn. “Keep working on that.”

“Whatever,” Sirius said. He poured a big glug of syrup onto his waffle and took a bite, and tried to ignore the way it tasted like melted fork.

The road from Revelstoke to Rogers Pass was, in Sirius’s view, something that someone ought to make a film about one day. Perhaps they already had. It was wide and sweeping, framed on either side by rushing foothills that became forests that became darkly looming mountaintops, catching the clouds as they drifted by up on some impossibly high current. It felt bigger than anything Sirius had ever seen: bigger than he could’ve imagined, and he pressed his face to the window again and gawped up at the sheer, pointy cliffs and the seas of pine trees that could’ve been hiding anything at all. Bears. Mooses. Lost civilisations. The answer to the question: why is the back of Remus’s neck annoying me again?

The highway swept them along into another vast and sprawling valley, and they passed a sign next to a craggy rock announcing to them that they were about to drive into a different timezone, and they all fiddled excitedly with their watches as James jabbed at the old radio of the car and flicked it forwards an hour.

“What a concept,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “Imagine if we had different timezones back home.”

“Like if everyone from Cornwall had to change their watches when they drove to Devon,” Peter said. “Or if Yorkshire was an hour ahead of London.”

“More like a century behind,” Sirius muttered, and watched the back of Remus’s neck for a reaction.

“Simpler times,” Remus said cheerily instead, taking a swig from his water bottle. “Us northern lot don’t want none of your new-fangled futuristic nonsense,” he added in a folksy, exaggerated accent that made Sirius consider kicking his seat again.

Lunch was a pack-up of bagels that James had cleverly stolen from the breakfast buffet whilst the woman at the desk wasn’t looking, and they ate them perched on the open boot of the hire car at the side of the wonderful road. It was exactly the sort of scene Sirius had imagined when they’d been planning their mad loop from Seattle up to Jasper and beyond and then back round to the coast again: he just hadn’t imagined there’d be quite so many of them. The car, too, had been something of a disappointment when they’d picked it up from the airport: a dented and rusting old Toyota that smelled vaguely like cats. Less rugged off-road Jeep, more something James’s dad might’ve gone to the garden centre with in the late nineties.

“Ah, she’ll do,” James had said on the first day, giving one of the back tyres a good-natured kick, and Remus had said something annoying and uninteresting about the engine, and Sirius had pulled a face behind his back. The car was seeing them along so far, at least. It had trundled happily with them out of the city and then into a delightfully green pocket of America that was all mossy rainforests and desolate, wind-torn beaches, and funny little towns that seemed to consist of no more than a Subway, a motel, a gas station that measured petrol in units none of them could make sense of, and shabby runs of gift shops selling souvenir t-shirts that said things like: Bigfoot saw me, but nobody believes him!

“You should buy one,” James had said, holding one of the t-shirts up on its hanger. So Sirius did, and then got another to take home for Regulus, because it seemed like the sort of thing that would annoy him.

They’d stopped in a town on the second day that Remus had said he wanted to spend the afternoon poking around because he’d read a series of books that was based there, and Sirius had trailed around after him looking at various houses that were allegedly important, and a police station, and a big red truck parked outside the visitor information centre. Remus had wanted a picture with it, and so had given his phone to some poor German tourist before slinging his arm around Sirius’s shoulders in front of the red truck, for some reason, and Sirius had felt his skin prickling for hours after that.

After lunch they drove for another half hour, and then pulled into a little car park that Peter said was worth stopping at because it was the start of some trail or other, and if they followed it for long enough they’d reach a very impressive river. He mentioned something about salmon which Sirius didn’t think was worth remembering, and then the other three ripped up the trail bouncing excitedly in their barely-broken-in hiking boots and Sirius padded along after them, grumbling to himself. He remembered, vaguely, a film he’d caught the end of on television last Christmas: something about Reese Witherspoon doing a lot of walking, and how she’d walked all the way to Canada or at least somewhere that looked a lot like Canada, and how very revelatory it had been for her. Life-changing: she’d had some sort of epiphany along the way, and as Sirius trudged along the sandy path and tried not to think too much about mountain lions, he wondered if he too could walk far enough to stumble upon his own epiphanic moment. If he took enough steps, and got enough blisters on his feet, and didn’t get plucked off the path by a passing grizzly bear, maybe he’d eventually figure out why he was so bloody livid with Remus all the time. Maybe it would suddenly make sense.

But the end of the trail didn’t deliver an epiphany. It was just a river, like Peter had said, and Sirius couldn’t even see any salmon, so he just said: “Cool,” and then turned around, and walked all the way back to the car.

The lake that Peter had wanted to stop at was teeming. There were so many cars, and coaches, and campervans that James had to park a whole mile back down the winding road, and the sun was aggressive and far too hot on the back of Sirius’s neck as they all made the way back up the dusty hill in the flowing throng of people.

“Thought you said this place was meant to be a secret?” James said lightly to Peter as they passed another coachload of sightseers clutching cameras and parasols.

Peter shrugged, and hoisted his backpack further up onto his shoulders. “Quieter than Lake Louise,” he said. “I promise you that.”

It was, Sirius had to admit when they eventually reached the water, a fantastic lake. A brilliant pool of a turquoise so vivid Sirius had to blink and rub at his eyes as if the sun might’ve been doing something funny to his perception of the colour: but it really was that turquoise. Still and mirror-glassy and with a cool, glacial breeze that whipped up gently and drew the heat from Sirius’s skin, and as they rounded the busy shores and trailheads he wondered if maybe Peter had had the right idea about bringing his swimming stuff with him.

“It’ll be way quieter up at that end,” Peter said, nodding his head towards the furthest shore of the lake, leagues and leagues away and sitting so prettily at the foot of yet another looming mountain, yellow-gold in the early afternoon light. Sirius could see a handful of little red kayaks bobbing in the water.

They all looked to James, who nodded, and hitched his own bag up by its straps, and said: “Off we go, then.”

The trail led them along the western shore of the great lake, first past a wooden boathouse turned gift shop selling sweatshirts and badges and things, and Sirius made a mental note to check out their t-shirt selection before they headed back to the car. They passed under a shady canopy of tall trees, and then along a stretch of path that hooked over fallen branches and twisting, knotty roots, and then the trail opened up gloriously into wildflower meadows all purple and pink and alpine-blue.

“Bloody nice, this,” said James, swapping his glasses for his new pair of prescription Ray-Bans. “Good shout, Pete.”

And it was. It was bloody nice. The air was arrestingly fresh, all glacial coolness and the wildflower pollen, and something that might’ve been Remus’s deodorant, which Sirius chose not to spend any amount of time thinking about. They stopped by a little pebbly beach for a cereal bar each and a swig of water, and then the trail swept them easily right around to the northern edge of the lake which was, as promised, blissfully quiet.

“Told you,” said Pete, dumping his backpack on the shoreline and toeing off his hiking boots, laces already eagerly tugged undone. “And now I’m going in.”

“You do know it’ll be freezing, Pete.” Remus dropped his own bag down onto the pebbly sand and lowered himself to the ground, propping himself back on his elbows and nodding out at the water. The bridge of his nose was turning candyfloss pink in the sun. “That’s glacial meltwater, you know,” he said. “Good luck.”

Peter froze with his t-shirt halfway off, the cotton all bunched up awkwardly on one shoulder. “Will it really be that cold?” he asked James, looking suddenly uncertain about the whole thing, and James shook his head.

“I believe in you,” he said around a bite of an apple he’d produced from somewhere. “In you get.”

Peter hovered at the water’s edge long enough for Sirius to sit down, and pull the rest of his bagel out of his backpack, and eat the whole thing.

“Ten quid he doesn’t do it,” Remus muttered quietly at his side.

“Nah,” James said, lying back on the beach. “He’s been banging on about this for weeks. He’ll do it.”

And to Sirius’s eventual surprise, he did, and then — at Peter’s frantic waving from where he stood chest-deep, hopping from one foot to the other under the water — so did James.

“No fear, no glory,” he said as he tossed his t-shirt back in Remus’s direction, and then he was wading bravely in, and hooting loudly as he did.

“You going in?”

Sirius frowned sideways at Remus.

“No,” he said, and then, because he felt he ought to say something else: “Are you?”

Remus grinned and shook his head. “I’d be wheezing for the rest of the day,” he said. He laid back and stretched himself out languidly, holding a hand up over his face to shade his eyes from the sun. “You’d be calling the air ambulance.”

Sirius muttered something that wasn’t quite a reply and stared out at the water. He could feel Remus next to him: he glanced over, and saw how Remus’s knees at the bottom of his silly shorts were turning pink too beneath their freckles. He tutted.

“Will you put some bloody suncream on?”

“I did,” Remus said, still grinning. “Must be wearing off.”

“You’re turning into Mr. Blobby.”

“I like Mr. Blobby.”

Oh, shut up.

Sirius huffed out a sigh, and flopped himself back onto the ground next to him, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

“I’m not going with you to get after-sun,” he said tartly, peering up at the handful of wispy clouds in the impossibly vast sky. “You’ll have to sort yourself out.”

“I always sort myself out,” Remus said, and Sirius didn’t know what that meant.

The breeze off the water ruffled Sirius’s hair pleasantly and the distant hoots of James and Peter faded off away over the mountaintops. It was, really, the most beautiful place Sirius had ever found himself in, and as the sun arched lazily along its path above them he gradually came to note that he didn’t even have the energy to be properly annoyed at Remus, in that moment. He took a deep breath through his nose, and sighed it out through pursed lips, and let his eyes fall shut.

“Big, isn’t it?”

Sirius frowned, and cracked one eye half open. “What?”

“The sky,” Remus said, nodding up at it. “It’s big.”

“Okay.”

“Big and blue.”

Sirius let his eyes falled closed again, and wondered if Remus was planning on stopping talking anytime soon.

“You looking forward to uni?”

“Dunno,” Sirius said, shifting to make a pillow with his hands behind his head, fingers linked together. The sun was painting little orange starbursts on the backs of his eyelids. 

“We’ll just be up the road from each other, really,” said Remus. “Well, I’ll be down the road from you. You’ll be up the road from me. Half an hour or so, I think. Maybe a bit more with traffic. There’s a train, though. It’s a direct train.”

“What are you wittering on about?” Sirius murmured. He felt that he could fall asleep right there on the shores if he stayed there long enough. If Remus ever shut up.

“Uni,” Remus said. “You up in Newcastle. Me in Durham. It’s not so far, really.”

Sirius felt his bagel twisting uncomfortably somewhere in his stomach. He cleared his throat, and started to say something, and then stopped. Truthfully he wasn’t sure how long he’d been planning on keeping the whole thing to himself. It was an irritating and inconvenient inevitability that everyone would find out sooner or later. That Remus would find out. And as he huffed out another sigh, and scrunched his face up against the sun, he figured it was as sensible a moment as any.

“I’m not going to Newcastle.”

He saw Remus look at him out of the corner of his eye. “Huh?”

Sirius shrugged. “Not going to Newcastle.”

“Oh,” Remus said, and propped himself up on his elbows, peering down at Sirius with a strange sort of frown pulling at his eyebrows. “How come?”

“It wasn’t my first choice.” Stop looking at me, stop looking at me. “I applied somewhere else but I didn’t tell anyone except James in case I didn’t get the grades. Their requirements for Geography were higher than Newcastle’s. But,” he said, shrugging as if it were of no consequence whatsoever, “I did get the grades. So I’m going there instead.”

There was a funny beat of silence; just the distant shouting of James and Peter still out in the freezing water, and the breeze ruffling the wildflower meadows back up the banks.

“So where are you going?” Remus asked at length. Quietly, and as if he already knew what the answer was going to be.

Sirius cleared his throat again, and said: “Durham.”

He thought Remus might laugh. It was so silly to have kept it from him like that; so silly to have gone along with this charade of going somewhere else solely to excuse himself from the threat of embarrassment if he messed up his final exams, which he’d been quite sure he was going to. Perhaps Remus might get very cross with him: tell him he was a rotter for not telling him, and go off in a huff, and maybe he’d be annoyed because Durham was his thing, after all. He’d been wanting to go off and study Geology there since forever. It was his place, and his plan, and nothing to do with Sirius.

As it was, Remus said nothing. He just looked down at Sirius with that strange and unparsable expression, and after a minute it started to make Sirius’s skin itch, and something inconvenient that might’ve been guilt bloom in a flush across his cheeks.

“I’m going in,” he said, wildly. He pushed himself up to standing, and stripped down to his shorts without looking at Remus.

The water was freezing, and welcome. His mind buzzed oddly and the back of his neck felt tight and uncomfortable as he waded in, and then he was throwing himself into the turquoise pool and gasping with relief at the icy shock as he plunged through the surface, putting his head right under and pretending that the world stopped at the shoreline, and that Remus wasn’t still sitting there on the beach with that strange and complicated expression.

“You still being a dick?” James called cheerily to him when Sirius reached them out floating by a little gaggle of red kayaks, and Sirius rubbed the lakewater from his eyes, and didn’t look at either of them, and said, in a gloomy sort of voice:

“Probably.”

***

They walked back to the car in a dripping, tired shuffle, James and Peter laughing and shoving carelessly at one another as Remus marched on up ahead, and Sirius plodding alone right at the back. At James’s insistence — because Sirius had forgotten all about it by then — they stopped at the little shop at the southern end of the lake, and James convinced Sirius to try on a t-shirt that rather coquettishly declared him a Wild Woman in big, seventies-style lettering, and Sirius bought it because he was too busy sulking to argue.

“It was very wild of you,” James said as they meandered back down the dusty trail towards the car, the late sunlight starting to turn everything honey-warm and golden. “You just jumped right in.”

“Yeah,” Sirius said, clutching his new t-shirt in a plastic bag and ignoring the way his wet shorts were clinging uncomfortably to his legs. “I did.”

He clambered into the back seat and sniffed to himself. He smelled like lakewater.

“We all smell like lakewater,” James announced from the driver’s seat, adjusting the rear view mirror until his reflection peered at Sirius reproachfully. “But worry not. There’ll be showers at the campsite.”

Sirius frowned, and cocked his head, and asked, tartly:

“What?”

“The campsite!” James grinned, and Peter laughed in his seat next to Sirius.

“We’re camping tonight!” he said, clapping his hands together excitedly. “We decided whilst we were swimming, didn’t we James?”

James nodded, and flicked the engine on. “Yep. And I checked with the lady in the shop: there’s a campsite about an hour away that’ll have space for us.”

“But we don’t have tents!” Sirius said in horror, and tried very hard not to think about bears. It made a horrible sort of sense, he supposed: the tents went hand-in-hand with the battered old car, and the big bags of crisps eaten at the roadside, and the hiking boots that were now all swampy with water and silt. Canvas ceilings beneath wide open skies and brilliant, endless starlight. But there’d been a priss and cautious part of him that had hoped desperately they’d forgo that part of it for the duration of the trip, and the part where the bears ripped open the canvas in the night and skewered them all with their horrible claws; even if he hadn’t wanted to say it out loud because of how silly and unbrave he was quite sure it would sound.

“They’ll have tents,” James said with a shrug, dashing Sirius’s hopes of championing some alternative plan that didn’t involve being eaten by the local wildlife. “She said there’s a little hut there you can rent tents and stuff from. It’ll be good.”

“Will it?”

“Yes,” he said decisively. “Won’t it, Remus?”

“I like camping,” Remus said. “I’m happy to camp.”

“See?” said James as they trundled off the side road and back onto the highway. “We’re all happy campers.”

Sirius crossed his arms over his chest, and slouched down in his seat with a heavy sigh, and said, bitingly:

“Cool.”

Chapter Text

The driver’s side door opened, and James propped himself on it with his arm and then leant down to peek inside at the three of them sitting there again like schoolchildren, and he said:

“They’ve only got doubles.”

Sirius gawked at him dumbly from the back seat.

“What?”

“They’ve only got two tents,” James shrugged. “And they’re both two-men tents. So we’ll just share — two and two, yeah?”

“Nice!” Peter grinned, pushing his door open and clambering out onto the grass. “Which one’s ours, James?”

Sirius stayed sitting in his own seat for a long moment, perhaps in some misguided apprehension that he might’ve misheard, and that James would reappear at any moment and point him in the direction of his very own one-man tent. But not so: James and Peter had already scampered off to the treeline at the edge of the grassy clearing, lugging one big roll of canvas between them whilst the other sat waiting and ominous a few steps from the car.

“Right,” Remus said eventually.

“Yep,” Sirius said back.

The campground was, in fairness, fantastic: a wide and sunny meadow dotted with a handful of tents and surrounded by knobbly pine trees, tall as houses, and with a sweeping view out over the valley and the jagged mountaintops beyond. That big blue sky, and everything painted in such golden sunlight that the whole place took on a warm and Kodaky sort of hue, like Sirius might’ve already photographed it on film with his grainy old second-hand lens.

“I suppose this is us,” Remus said, clambering out of the front seat and nudging the remaining roll of canvas with his trainer. “You any good at putting up tents?”

“No,” said Sirius.

It took ages. They hauled the thing over to the treeline — which Sirius thought was a stupid idea, given the bear situation, but said nothing — and then there followed at least an hour of painful, low-level bickering as they faffed around with poles, and eyelets, and slightly rusting zips.

“No,” said Sirius for the fourth time, “that’s the top bit. This is the bit that goes at the front.”

He held up a dented length of pole, brandishing it at Remus roughly.

“Okay,” Remus said, and shrugged. “Let’s try it that way,” he said, and they did, and Sirius realised that he’d been very wrong and that the dented pole was the top bit after all, and said nothing.

“God, have you still not got it up?” came Peter’s voice as he ambled over with James in tow. “We finished ages ago.”

Sirius bit down on his back teeth and smiled at him tightly.

“Ours was all rusty,” Remus said charitably, tugging the last zip shut. “That’s why it took us longer.”

Dinner was a throw-together sort of affair around a little gas stove that James had borrowed from the same hut they’d got the tents from. They poked sausages and beans around in a pan until it was all steaming, and ate them from tin plates with enamelware mugs of water and black coffee, and it was so thrillingly aligned with everything Sirius had hoped for from the summer that he found himself mercifully slipping back away from his near-constant state of irritation for a moment, and into something easier, and less bothered by the way Remus was slurping his drink on the other side of the circle across from him.

“This is cool, this,” James said, nodding emphatically and gesturing at the general outdoorsiness of it all. “This is proper stuff, this.”

“This’ll be you two, anyway,” said Peter, and pointed first at Remus and then at Sirius with his fork. “Off studying your rocks and what-not. Bet you’ll go on loads of field trips.”

“Remus is studying rocks,” James said through a mouthful of beans. “Sirius is studying rivers and stuff. Aren’t you, mate?”

Sirius mumbled something unintelligible into his mug of coffee, and thought the whole thing very awkward. James knew about Durham, and now so did Remus. But James didn’t know that Remus knew. And Remus knew that James knew but Remus wasn’t saying anything, because he still had that horrible sort of pinch to his eyebrows like he’d had at the side of the lake, and he still looked sort of sad and possibly quite hurt by it all in a way that Sirius didn’t want to think about, and it was still making Sirius feel about four inches tall. And Peter didn’t know anything, so he leant over to spear another sausage from the pan, and said, stupidly:

“There’s a big river in Newcastle.”

The sun slipped behind the rocky outline of the ridge and the air turned cool and lilac and full of little bugs that nibbled at Sirius’s skin and made it itch. He pulled on a fleece that he’d stolen from one of the others and stuffed his socked feet into his boots to traipse across the campground to the tiny shiplap shower block, where he washed off the last of the lakewater, and brushed his teeth using Remus’s toothpaste, and ignored his reflection in the age-spotted mirror above the sink.

“Right,” Remus said when they met back at the tent. Sirius watched as he tugged the zip down and the campground disappeared and then it was just the two of them, lying side-by-side in musty old sleeping bags beneath the darkening canvas. He could hear the little bugs buzzing around outside, and a distant rustling in the pines that he hoped was a breeze, and nothing with fur, or claws.

Ten minutes passed. Sirius counted them in his head, and wasn’t sure why. Another five minutes. And another. Another rustling at the treeline, and a faraway hooting that sounded like an owl, although Sirius wasn’t sure if owls lived all the way up here. Maybe it was an eagle. Maybe it was some sort of great Canadian hawk that he ought to look up in a book tomorrow. Remus would probably know.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was a quiet and lonely thing, a half-whisper, and Sirius wished he hadn’t heard it. He let it hang there in the darkness for a while before answering.

“I dunno,” he said uselessly to the canvas ceiling. “I just didn’t think I’d get in.”

“Yeah, but we got our results ages ago. You could’ve told me then.”

Sirius bit down on his bottom lip with his two front teeth, and said:

“Yeah.”

Another silence. A sound of a zip opening somewhere out across the campground. Peter going to the loo, maybe.

“We don’t have to like… hang out when we’re there,” Remus said eventually. “If that’s what you were worrying about. I’ll leave you alone.”

There was a horrible sort of bite to his voice as he said it: a strange and sad thing that sounded terribly alien, and made Sirius’s stomach twist uncomfortably. It was an awful thought: being in the same city and the same campus and possibly even some of the same lectures, and not being friends. Not being them. Sirius couldn’t imagine why on earth Remus would suggest such an unappealing thing, so he frowned, and shook his head against his pillow, and said:

“I don’t want you to leave me alone.”

“Oh.”

“That’s not it at all,” Sirius said quietly, and wasn’t sure why the skin on the back of his neck was prickling hotly again. Maybe one of those mountain bugs had given him a bite there.

“Oh,” Remus said again, and then, after a long moment: “Well, something’s the matter. Isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he said. Sirius heard a rustling, and thought Remus might have turned over in his sleeping bag to look at him. He could almost feel the heat of him at his side. “You’ve been off with me for ages.”

“No I haven’t,” Sirius lied, dumbly.

“You have. You’ve been really mean, actually.”

“Oh,” said Sirius, and wanted to punch himself. “Sorry.”

Remus said nothing to that. He was just looking at him in the darkness — Sirius could feel him, looking — and then eventually he cleared his throat, and turned over onto his back again, and said:

“What do you think’s causing it?”

It was as tricky a question as any Sirius had ever been asked. Final exams suddenly seemed very easy: how silly of him to have ever worried about not getting the grades for Durham, because all those essays and all those papers had been blindingly straightforward compared to whatever this was. He shifted on his thin mat and felt the earth beneath him, cool and meadow-soft. His brain was a tired and unreadable collage of bears and lakewater and the pink skin on the back of Remus’s neck.

“Causing what?” he said, at length, and in a small sort of voice that didn’t really sound like him.

“This tension between us.”

“I don’t know,” Sirius said. He was regretting eating quite so many sausages at dinner. He wished they were back at the lake so that might throw himself in again and ignore all of this, and the way his hands were balling themselves into fists of their own accord, his fingernails pushing little ridges into his palms. “It’s just normal, isn’t it?” he said, and didn’t mean a word of it. “Things are a bit tense between me and James sometimes. And me and Peter. It’s just normal friend stuff, I think.”

He found himself, in that moment, hoping that the rustling in the treeline actually was a bear, and that the bear would eat him very soon, so that he didn’t have to have the rest of this conversation.

“Hm,” Remus said quietly, which didn’t help at all. “Alright.”

And then nobody said anything else. Remus rolled over onto his other side, and Sirius heard him clear his throat again, and then he must’ve fallen asleep, because his breathing went all slow and even and with that little catch every now and then because of all the tree pollen, or the altitude, or the cool night air. And Sirius laid there and stared at the canvas above him, and the faint outline of the tall pines beyond it, silhouetted by the big mountain moon and all those wonderful stars.

***

It rained the next day. Sirius woke, groggy and unrested, to a pale dawn light and a faint pattering on the outside of the tent. Remus was gone already: his sleeping bag was bundled up neatly at the top of his mat, and his trainers — which he’d left by the doorway last night — were missing, along with his horrible knitted jumper that Sirius had always had a hateful sort of fascination with.

He clambered out of his own sleeping bag and crawled over his mat to stick his head out of the canvas. The air was misty, and cool, the mountains across the valley painted in barely-there blurs of green and grey, and there were little dewdrops clinging to the grasses of the meadow.

“Morning,” James said brightly, ambling over with a mug of steaming coffee and a fluffy, purple fleece, tugged right up to his chin. “What time d’you call this?”

Sirius frowned at him. “It’s seven in the morning, James.”

“Early bird catches the worm.”

“The wet worm,” Sirius muttered, running a hand through his already-damp hair and peering out around the drizzly clearing. “What are we going to do today when it’s like this?”

“We’re going on a big walk,” James said, and took a swig of his coffee. “There’s a gorge thing just down the road. Like a canyon with waterfalls and stuff. And you can do a big walk up to the top.”

“Oh, right.”

“And then I thought we’d just come back here for another night,” he said into his mug. “And maybe another night after that. Who knows?”

Sirius looked up, and found himself being watched with a testing sort of expression, as if James was waiting for Sirius to tell him to bugger off at the idea of a second night in a tent with Remus, and as if James might find that rather amusing.

Breakfast was another huddled affair round the gas stove, eggs and more sausages bubbling away in the pan and the four of them in cagoules with their hoods up against the mist. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, Sirius had to admit: there was something deeply cleansing and lovely about the way it settled on his skin, and how very clean it felt when he breathed it in. James valiantly offered to do the washing up afterwards, and he and Remus padded off over to the little shower block with all the plates, and Sirius settled himself back in the vestibule of their tent with a mug of coffee and his camera, peering through the grainy lens at the campground.

It had been Fleamont who’d first poked at him to have a go with the whole photography thing. He’d caught Sirius fiddling with an old point-and-shoot that he’d found in a drawer that first winter he’d come to live with James, and Fleamont had taken it apart and shown him where the cartridge went, and how the shutter worked, and if Sirius were a more poetic sort of person he might’ve said that there was something in the permanence of the prints that spoke to him and the shifting, changeable currents of his boyhood. Something about immortalising the good moments on film, so that nobody could snatch them away from him.

Or something like that.

As it was, he told himself he just liked it for the fun of it all. The easy hours he could spend watching the world through a lens, clicking away whenever he felt like it and then getting to revisit it all a few weeks later when the developed prints came through. Boxes and boxes of the things, stashed under his bed and in his wardrobe and pinned to the sides of the mirror in the bathroom he and James shared. Fleamont and Effie at a barbeque three summers ago. James, swearing at him good-naturedly with two fingers up as he stood knee-high in a stream at the other side of the village. The lot of them, on results day, grinning and clutching their certificates on the school field. Remus in his horrible striped jumper.

A little animal popped out of the ground a stone’s throw away from the entrance to the tent, and Sirius focused his lens on it, and snapped a photo. It was a funny thing: a sort of squirrel-hamster-type critter, and it bobbed about comically for a moment before looking right at him, and Sirius pressed the shutter again, and smiled to himself.

“Don’t eat me,” he muttered to it, still watching it through the viewfinder. “Don’t tell the bears where I am, either.”

He focused the lens on the battered old car then, parked up at the other side of the meadow, and then at the treeline, and then at a patch of purple flowers over by James and Peter’s tent. The tent itself, and then the gas stove, sitting out in the mist, and then he zoomed in and shot Remus’s mug that he’d left behind on a tree stump, still steaming gently.

“Getting some good stuff?” came Remus’s voice. Sirius looked up to find him standing over him, hair soft and downy with the drizzle, the bridge of his nose still pink despite the grey skies.

“Yep,” he said shortly. “Saw an animal.”

“Yeah?”

Sirius nodded. “Big hamster-looking thing. It was in a hole in the grass over there.”

“Probably a ground squirrel.”

“Maybe,” said Sirius, and clicked his lens cap back on, tucking the camera carefully into his rucksack. “Apparently we’re going on a walk.”

“Apparently so.” Remus cleared his throat, and huffed out a long, slow breath, nudging at something near the tent with the toe of his trainer. “We good?” he said, in an offhand sort of way, and Sirius shrugged.

“Yeah?” he said. It sounded like a question. 

“You sure?”

Another question. You sure? We good? What do you think’s causing this tension? Why didn’t you tell me about Durham? 

Why are you being mean to me?

And Sirius didn’t know. He didn’t know any of those answers: not one. So he just sniffed, and pushed a hand through his mist-damp hair again, and said:

“Can I borrow your toothpaste?”

***

The canyon was a narrow, craggy scar running up the steep mountainside, all slippery trails and ferns poking out from crevices in the cliffs, and more waterfalls than Sirius could count. There were bridges, and splintery wooden boardwalks that James assured them all were quite safe but that seemed to be clinging to the rocks with nought but a few well-placed timbers and a healthy amount of optimism, and Peter in particular seemed wary of their load-bearing capabilities and so soon took to walking like a little fawn on ice, all tiptoes and a careful testing of his weight every time they came across a new section of path.

“You sure this is safe?” he said breathlessly over his shoulder as they reached yet another climb, and James told him to stop being a big old baby about it and to get moving, because he was holding everyone up.

“Thousands and thousands of people come up this canyon every summer,” he said sagely, giving Peter a hearty clap on his shoulder as he passed him. “And only a handful of them fall to terrible, terrible deaths. You’ll be fine.”

Peter looked at Remus, stricken. “Do they really?” he said, as Remus passed him with a grin. “Do they really fall to terrible deaths?”

Sirius shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe.”

Peter grumbled something that Sirius didn’t hear, still looking worried, and peeled himself away from the wall to follow Remus up the next part of the trail. It seemed like the sort of place Sirius would want to remember, so he hung back to pull his camera from his rucksack and snapped a few frames: the waterfall, and the bridge up ahead. The swaying pine trees lining the other side of the gorge like sentries. Remus, now walking next to Peter on the track, and his hair still fluffy with mist. His striped jumper and his silly shorts. His socks that looked like something someone’s grandma might knit for them, and his hiking boots with their red laces.

They walked for an hour, and then stopped at the side of the trail for a drink of water and a handful of crisps from a big bag that James passed around. The rain eased off, and the narrow stream of sky that they could see at the top of the gorge turned pale and still, just wispy clouds being carried over the mountains by a whippy, high breeze. Sirius lost sight of the others after a while; he hung back with his camera, and took more pictures of this, and that, and that. A bird perched on a pine branch, and a tree that had been snapped in two on the opposite bank, its trunk clinging to itself at a right angle as the upper branches made a mossy bridge over the water. Another bird, and a set of rickety wooden steps, curving around a rocky outcrop in the cliffside.

And when he rounded the corner he saw, through his lens, the rest of them up ahead, and he frowned.

Remus was bent over, one hand braced on his knee and the other on the railing at the edge of the trail, with James standing next to him and peering at him with a worried expression. Sirius set his camera down and let it hang on its strap around his neck. Even from a distance, he could see that the pink blush on Remus’s nose had spread itself to his cheeks, and he could see how his shoulders were rising and falling in a funny, erratic pattern, and how very concerned Peter looked, standing back against the rocky walls of the gorge.

“What’s happened?” Sirius asked when he reached the top of the trail, and already knew.

Peter glanced at him, wringing his hands nervously together, and said: “He’s left his inhaler in the car.”

“Fuck’s sake, Remus.”

“Yep,” Remus said, all breathless and red-faced. James’s mouth was set in a grim line, and he was glancing between Remus, Sirius, and the long path they’d just climbed, and Sirius could tell he was doing the maths in his head.

“You’re supposed to carry it always, Remus,” Peter said unhelpfully.

James rolled his eyes. “Yep, thanks Pete.”

It had always been the most horrible thing. Sirius had seen plenty of horrible things: Mother in a rage, Father in a drunken stupor. Regulus hiding in the bathroom. All that broken glass, all over the sitting room on Christmas morning. Gravy on the wall from where someone had stupidly thrown a plate at it. It had all been horrible, but for some reason, he’d always found this thing the most horrible thing. The way Remus would gasp and wheeze and the way his hands would be all unsteady and nervous, even when he did have his inhaler. The way he’d go quiet afterwards and not say anything for hours, and not come out with any of his annoying little facts or bits of trivia that nobody had asked for. It was strange, and Sirius had always hated it.

Which was why he’d always made a secret pact with himself, just in case.

“It’s alright,” he said, in that voice that didn’t sound like his own. He shouldered off his rucksack and set it down on the trail, unclipping the fastenings and fishing around for the hunk of blue plastic he knew was tucked away at the bottom, sandwiched between his other lens and his bear spray that everyone had made fun of him for buying. 

He passed the inhaler to James wordlessly, and James gaped at him, and said, after a beat:

“Right.”

It was an awkward and unpleasant fifteen minutes. James had Remus sitting on the wet ground at the side of the path, leaning back against the rocks as they held the blue inhaler between them and managed first one and then two puffs, and then Remus sat with his eyes closed and James kneeling next to him, Peter hovering uselessly a pace away, and Sirius picking at the zip of his raincoat and studying the way the little teeth caught at the stitching of the fabric when he ran it up and down its track. A gaggle of American tourists passed them all at one point and eyed Remus worriedly, and one of them said:

“Do you guys need some help?”

And Sirius just said, flatly: “No,” which he would later worry over the rudeness of, but in the moment it didn’t seem to matter.

It started to rain again. Big, fat drops of it this time, landing with heavy plups on Sirius’s coat and on the slippery wooden slats of the boardwalk. Nobody said much of anything on the descent. James tried: he chatted quietly to Remus about something or other, pointing into the canyon now and then, or at that tree, or that bird. Peter scurried on ahead, glancing nervously back at the rest of them over his shoulder at each turn as if Remus might’ve suddenly crumpled to a heap on the ground, and Sirius padded silently at the back, and watched the outline of the plastic inhaler now wedged in the back pocket of Remus’s shorts, just visible under the hem of his raincoat. It hadn’t been hard to get hold of: Remus used to forever be leaving them lying around at school, and he must’ve been costing the NHS a fortune because half of them went missing and were never seen again — lost to old PE kit bags and lunchtimes sitting up on the field — and so it hadn’t seemed like it would matter too much if Sirius had taken one, and stashed it away just in case. It came with him most places: nestled at the bottom of backpacks or suitcases, which had only seemed sensible, given how annoyingly cavalier Remus tended to be about remembering his own.

It was just good planning, really. It wasn’t anything else.

***

The campground was damp and grey when they got back, and it felt, to Sirius, like it had been days since they were last there.

“Are you sure about staying here another night?” Peter said as they all spilled out of the car and back into the meadow.

“Hm,” James hummed, looking at his watch. “It’s a bit late to be trying anywhere else. What do you reckon, Remus?”

Sirius thought it was optimistic of James to expect Remus to give any sort of honest answer to that question. Really they ought to have bundled him up in blankets and gone and checked into a nice warm hotel with a nice warm bath and a big warm bed. That was what Sirius would’ve done, anyway, but he knew that given the option Remus would just shrug it all off and say something like: It’s all good with me.

“It’s all good with me,” Remus said, shrugging and tugging the hood of his raincoat up over his wet hair.

They ate damp noodles for dinner and played a damp game of damp cards sitting in a tight huddle in James and Peter’s tent, the rain still tap-tap-tapping on the canvas above them as the sky pitched itself to a darker shade of grey outside the open door.

“This is cosy,” James said, putting down a pair of queens and picking another card up from the pile.

Remus’s knee was jammed awkwardly against Sirius’s under the thin padding of Peter’s sleeping bag, and Sirius couldn’t really think about anything other than that, so he put down a card at random and picked up another and said:

“Yep. Cosy.”

They played on until they finished their mugs of tea, and then Peter said something about being tired and how he wanted Sirius to get off his sleeping bag, and after a wet walk across the now-empty campground Sirius found himself staring up at the canvas of his own tent again, his tongue all minty from Remus’s toothpaste, and waiting for Remus to come back from the shower block.

“All good?” Sirius asked him when he finally flopped down onto his mat. He hadn’t really planned to ask: he just did, and wondered if he was talking about Remus’s trip to the loo, or whether he was comfortable enough in his bed, or if he meant what had happened up at the canyon, and whether Remus was feeling better, or if his chest still felt all tight and his throat sore from the exertion.

Maybe he was talking about something else altogether. He was starting to long for the bears again.

“All good,” Remus said quietly from the other side of the tent.

“Good,” said Sirius.

“Yeah.”

Ten minutes. Fifteen, and then twenty. The rain stopped falling on the canvas, and a mountain bird hooted somewhere, and Sirius said:

“Are you alright?”

He heard Remus rustle about in his sleeping bag, clearing his throat and rearranging his pillow before he answered.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “I’m alright.” Another minute, and then two, and then: “How come you had one of my inhalers in your bag?”

What an annoying question, Remus.

“Dunno,” Sirius said, and bit his top teeth down into his lip again. “Just thought it was sensible.”

“What do you mean?”

Sirius shrugged into his pillow. “Just thought you might forget yours one day. So I thought I’d better have one, just in case.”

“Oh, right.”

“Yeah.”

He heard Remus move again, as if he was turning onto his side. “Thanks,” he said quietly, and Sirius nodded.

“Sure,” he said.

There was another long beat of silence. Sirius clenched his hands into fists inside his sleeping bag again; he thought that if he listened hard enough he might be able to hear his own heartbeat under his t-shirt. He wondered if Remus could hear it, too.

“Sirius?”

“Yeah?”

Another silence. Sirius’s fingernails pushing into the flesh of his palm. That thud-thud, thud-thud beneath the cotton of his t-shirt.

“Nothing,” said Remus after an age, and Sirius frowned at the darkness, and said:

“Okay.”

There didn’t seem to be anything more to be said after that. Remus tossed and turned for a while longer, eventually settling with his back to Sirius, and Sirius laid there in silence, and blinked up at the roof of the tent. He counted the beats between Remus’s breaths; they were even, and slow, and caught only occasionally. He was alright. He’d be alright.

Sirius huffed out a deep breath of his own and watched it ripple the canvas above him, and found himself wondering vaguely about all those field trips Remus might go on once they started university, and where they’d take him to, and how Sirius would have to make sure he’d packed his inhaler. Maybe he’d stitch one to the inside of Remus’s raincoat when he wasn’t looking. Maybe he’d just go with him: hide himself away in the hold of the plane and follow him around as he did his fieldwork. Track him across the Alps or the Dolomites or the Icelandic interior. That wouldn’t be strange at all. That would be normal friend stuff.

Anyone would do the same.

Chapter Text

It rained again the next morning. Remus was gone, again, and Sirius spent another hour perched at the door of their tent with a steaming mug of coffee and his camera, snapping away at this and that and trying very hard not to think about any of the things that Remus had or hadn’t said the night before. It was all too difficult: difficult and inconvenient, and threatening to overbalance the already precarious tower of things Sirius was trying to stack neatly in his mind. Something between inhalers and Durham University and suncream. It was hard, and it was making him cross and worried, so he decided not to think about any of it, and just took more photos instead.

The little animal was back. The ground squirrel.

“I dunno what he was getting at,” he muttered to it, clicking away at the shutter. “What’s he on about? Why did you have one of my inhalers in your bag? Why wouldn’t I?” He frowned, and fiddled with a couple of the old camera’s limited settings, and refocused the lens as the ground squirrel hopped across the meadow towards him. “It’s only because he always forgets his, and one of these days he’s going to keel over and wish I was there.”

“Who’re you talking to?”

Sirius jumped, and blinked up at the figure looming over him.

“Oh,” he said, feeling horribly like he’d been caught doing something naughty. “The ground squirrel.”

Remus grinned. “He have much to say?”

“No,” said Sirius stupidly.

“Typical,” said Remus, as if he knew those ground squirrels to be famously poor conversationalists. He jerked his head over towards the car, his hands tucked into the pockets of his raincoat. “We were thinking of going into Banff for the day, given the weather. Have a look around the shops, and that.”

“Alright,” said Sirius, pushing himself up and clambering out of the tent. “We could get you some after-sun,” he muttered, zipping his jacket up and tucking his camera into his rucksack. “For your stupid sunburn.”

Remus nudged him with his elbow as they set off across the campground. “Ha-ha,” he drawled drily. “We could get you some manners.”

“Whatever,” Sirius said, and saw Remus grinning again out of the corner of his eye in a way that he probably should’ve found very annoying but, annoyingly, didn’t.

***

Banff was a bright and bustling little corner of the world, full of quaint Alpine-style lodges and fancy-looking hotels and shops selling flashy, expensive gear for every outdoor pursuit Sirius could think of, and then some. They crawled along a line of traffic into a sandy car park, and then walked in happy throngs of tourists along a wide avenue watched over by the looming shadow of a huge, rocky peak on the other side of the town.

“That’s Cascade Mountain,” Remus said around a mouthful of ice cream as the two of them hovered outside a restaurant, waiting for Peter to use the loo.

Sirius hummed to himself. “Good mountain. Big.”

“Just shy of three-thousand metres.”

“How on earth do you know that?” Sirius muttered. He licked his own cone, and ignored the little smear of vanilla Remus had on the end of his pink nose.

“I know everything,” Remus said.

“Okay.”

They did get after-sun. Remus slipped into a chemist’s at the end of one of the avenue’s side roads, and dabbed a line of the stuff along the ridge of his nose where the ice cream had just been, and Sirius rolled his eyes and took the bottle from him to drizzle a second measure into his hand.

“Turn around,” he sighed, and then rubbed the lotion quickly and carefully into the annoying patch of pink skin on the back of Remus’s neck, just below the curl of his fluffy, too-long hair. “This has been doing my head in for days, you know.”

“My neck has?”

Sirius snapped the bottle shut and stuffed it into the pocket of Remus’s backpack. “Yes,” he said, wiping his sticky hands on his own forearms. “You should’ve bought this ages ago.”

“Sorry,” Remus grinned.

They ate more bagels for lunch, sitting on a bridge near a big, rushing river, and then James appeared holding a tray of coffees and a red paper box filled with little balls of donut covered in powdered sugar and chocolate sprinkles and icing the same pink as Remus’s silly nose.

“Nice place, this,” James said, flopping down onto the bench next to Sirius and stuffing another of the donut things into his mouth. “Could live here.”

“Could do a ski season, or something,” said Peter, licking powdered sugar from his fingers. “Defer uni for a year. We could all do it.”

James nodded in faux contemplation. “Done,” he said decisively. “Pete, make the calls.”

Peter chuckled, and leaned back on the bench to tilt his head towards the weak sun, still battling with the rainclouds. “It will be weird though, won’t it?”

“What will?” asked Remus.

“Us all going off to different places,” said Peter. Sirius cleared his throat, and concentrated on the crack in the paving stone just across from where they were sitting. “Different unis, and that. Not being together anymore. It’ll be weird.”

James hummed noncommittally. Remus nodded, and popped another donut ball into his mouth.

“Well,” Sirius said, without ever really deciding to. “Not quite.”

Peter frowned. “How do you mean?”

“We won’t all be at different unis.”

He felt Remus sit up a little straighter next to him, their elbows knocking together on the narrow bench.

“I’ll be at Durham,” Sirius said, still tracking the line of the crack in the pavement. “With Remus. We’ll be at Durham together.”

Peter gaped at him, his face all covered in powdered sugar.

“You what?” he said, and James laughed, and clapped Remus on the back.

“Finally told you, then?”

“Finally,” said Remus darkly, and Sirius was relieved to find there was little sting in it now. “Didn’t know you’d been keeping secrets from me, James.”

James grinned. “Hey,” he said, holding both hands up in defence. “He was the one being a weirdo about it.”

“He is a weirdo,” Remus said quietly, nudging Sirius gently in his side and going back to his coffee.

And if Sirius felt some sort of happy way about that, and if the skin on his arm was tingling strangely where Remus had been pressed up against him, and if the whole thing was still annoyingly unannoying, then he didn’t think it was worth dwelling on yet. 

The rains returned in the late afternoon and they found their way lazily back to the campground, stopping at this river or that viewpoint so that Remus could read the information plaques and Sirius could snap photos from a distance of Remus reading the information plaques. James rustled up a dinner of burgers and potato salad that they’d bought from an eye-wateringly expensive supermarket in town, and Sirius took himself off for a shower and stood for an age under the icy faucet.

“Nice t-shirt,” James drawled when he rejoined the rest of them, sitting in a circle on their coats outside James and Peter’s tent, the rain a light and pleasant mist on the evening air and Sirius’s hair dripping all over his new top.

“Remus chose it,” he shrugged. It was a silly thing: Remus had spotted it in the window of one of the gift shops on the wide, central avenue whilst Peter was off using the loo again, and had slipped away from Sirius to emerge a few minutes later thrusting a plastic bag at him with a stupid grin and a: “Seemed like your sort of style.”

“What does it say?” Peter said, cocking his head to study the design.

Sirius held the cotton of the t-shirt out at the hem, straightening the letters.

“It says: I’m kind of a big deal in Canada,” he said flatly.

“That you are,” James said, passing him a steaming mug of tea. “And don’t you forget it.”

“Suits you,” Remus said, with a grin at Sirius over the rim of his own mug, and Sirius didn’t really know what to say to that, so he just smiled back, and rolled his eyes.

James leaned forwards then, and brandished his cup at the rest of them in a toast. “Well, gents,” he said. “The rain may be falling. Our little feet may be tired. Sirius may have to pay for an extra bag on the flight home to accommodate his ever-growing naff t-shirt collection. But what a very excellent start to the summer these past ten days have been.”

They all hummed in happy agreement, clinking their mugs together.

“Thanks for driving us, James,” said Peter.

“You’re welcome, poppet.”

“Thanks for inviting us,” Remus said, shrugging, and looking sideways at Sirius. “Can’t really think of many better ways to spend the summer.”

And Sirius just nodded, and willed himself to be annoyed by something, but the skin on Remus’s nose was much less pink now that he’d bought that after-sun, and he was still smiling across the rim of his mug at Sirius, and the rain was still catching in his hair and making it soft, and fluffy. So he just nodded again, and drank his tea, and said something that might’ve been:

“Yep.”

***

“What college are you going to?”

Sirius frowned at the dark canvas ceiling. “Huh?”

“At Durham,” Remus said, and Sirius heard him turn over in his sleeping bag to face him. “What college are you at?”

“Oh,” Sirius said. “Hatfield.”

“That’s near mine.”

“Oh, right.”

“So we’ll probably run into each other,” Remus said quietly.

Sirius tutted. “We’ll do more than run into each other, Remus,” he said. “I told you: I’m not going to start avoiding you when we go there. That wasn’t why I didn’t tell you.”

“Okay,” Remus whispered, and Sirius could tell he was grinning again. “So you won’t be too embarrassed to be seen at the pub with me?”

“No,” Sirius sighed. “I won’t be too embarrassed to be seen at the pub with you.”

“Even if my nose is still pink?”

“It’s less pink than it was.”

“How about if I wear my horrible knitted jumper that you hate?”

“They’re all horrible,” Sirius said, and let his eyes fall closed. “I hate them all.”

There was a silence then that, for the first time in the trip, didn’t feel fractious, or prickly. The breeze rustled the pines behind the tent and whatever little birds were perched up in the branches hooted out their calls, and Sirius found that he wasn’t grinding his teeth, or clenching his fists, or wanting to punch anything, or anyone. It was nice.

“Remus.”

“Hm?”

Sirius sniffed, and rolled over in his sleeping bag, and said, tiredly:

“Thanks for my t-shirt.”

“You’re welcome,” Remus said. 

Sirius yawned. “It’s silly,” he said. “I like it.”

He heard Remus chuckle, and more of those night birds outside in the meadow. And then, as sleep tugged resolutely at the edges of his mind and everything turned soft, and quiet, and distant:

“You are kind of a big deal in Canada, you know.”

***

The rain had awayed itself for good to some distant valley and the happy morning light in the clearing lit the tent like a little glowing beacon, warm with the morning sun and the way Sirius felt so incredibly safe and comfortable, there in his sleeping bag. He curled his toes in their woolly socks, and flexed the muscles of his back gently, and smiled tiredly as he buried himself further into his pillow.

His pillow moved.

Sirius’s eyes flew open, and he saw a horrible knitted jumper, and a freckled hand, and he said to himself:

“Um.”

Remus said nothing. He was still and happy and warm, his chest rising and falling evenly beneath Sirius’s cheek, and when Sirius craned his head slowly to peer up at him it was to find his sleeping face stretched in an easy, oblivious smile, his hair still fluffy and soft from the rain.

It must’ve been very early. Sirius couldn’t hear James or Peter from the other side of the meadow, and the birds at the treeline were quiet and lazy in their morning song. The sunlight filtering through the canvas had a sweet, balmy quality to it but the air still felt fresh and new, and Sirius found himself having to make a series of very important decisions.

He could stay where he was. He was comfortable in a way he wasn’t sure he could ever remember being before, and Remus smelled like toothpaste and everything safe and familiar and important, and it was so early, and he could simply go back to sleep. Or: he could move. He could very carefully peel himself away, and bundle up right at the other side of the tent, and pretend that he hadn’t woken up like that, and that he wouldn’t remember the feeling of the wool of Remus’s horrible jumper against his cheek. He could sit bolt upright, even, and loudly demand to know what on earth Remus thought he was playing at, because surely this was Remus’s doing. Surely Sirius hadn’t just rolled uninvited into Remus’s side of the tent and cuddled up against him like a dog, or a baby. Or worse.

As it was, he didn’t have to decide anything, because a bird chose that very moment to land on a branch very close to their tent, and open its nasty beak, and make a piercing call so shrill that Remus’s eyes flew open themselves, and he said:

“Huh?”

Sirius didn’t move. Whether it was a conscious decision informed by logic or whether his mind and body had simply given up comms, he wasn’t sure. He just laid there, and stared up at Remus from his place beside him, his head still resting dangerously on his chest, and tried to ignore the sudden realisation that their legs were somehow all tangled together, too, and Sirius wasn’t sure how that was even possible, given that they’d both started the night inside separate sleeping bags.

He watched Remus frown first at the canvas roof of the tent and then, horrifyingly, down at him, a little crease pulling at the skin between his eyebrows as he blinked, and blinked again, and said:

“Oh. Hello.”

“Hello,” Sirius said automatically, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“This is new,” said Remus. And amazingly, he didn’t sound cross. He didn’t sound angry, or like he might be about to punch Sirius, or call for James and Peter so that they might wrestle Sirius off him and drag him away across the meadow for his poor comportment. He didn’t sound displeased at all. He just sounded sleepy, and surprised in a light and benign sort of way, and he smiled at Sirius tiredly, and said: “You good?”

Sirius gaped at him. “Yeah,” he said. His throat felt all hot, and dry. He wanted to jump in the lake again and disappear beneath the surface. “I just woke up,” he said, as if that mattered at all.

“Hm,” said Remus. He was still watching him. He was still smiling. His chest was still warm and comfortable beneath Sirius, and his hair was still fluffy, and soft. And there was suddenly and presently absolutely nothing about him that Sirius found annoying. Not his pink nose; not the way he cleared his throat quietly, that little hm-hm that should’ve driven Sirius to distraction. His striped jumper was lovely, actually. Soft and cosy. He was soft, and cosy.

“Remus,” Sirius said, and had no idea what he’d planned to say next, so he said nothing, and carried on gaping up at him stupidly, and desperately tried to find him irritating again.

“Sirius,” Remus said. And then he wasn’t smiling anymore. He frowned instead, and wrinkled his freckled nose up in a funny little scrunch, and said, strangely: “Do you think we might be close to figuring it out?”

“Figuring what out?”

It was a terrifying silence. A thousand answers suddenly sprung from the meadow and filtered themselves through Sirius’s mind, and he batted them deftly away in turn until only a single one was left, and it was mad, and wild, and terribly inconvenient and the most comfortable, fantastic thing he could imagine. He swallowed, and ignored the way he couldn’t feel his toes inside his woolly socks, and he said:

“Oh,” and then, “I see.”

Remus scrunched his nose up again, little ripples pulling at the sunburnt skin there. “Maybe we should—” he said, and then stopped, and then started again, and then stopped again. And then he coughed, and gave Sirius a lovely sort of half-smile, and said: “We could try something.”

And Sirius just blinked, dumbly.

“Huh?”

“I mean,” said Remus, and Sirius watched as his cheeks turned the same strawberry-pink as the bridge of his nose. “Like… you know. Give it a go. Just to see.” He shrugged, his mouth still turned up in that wonderful smile. “Might not be completely awful.”

Sirius swallowed, and stared at him, and said:

“Okay.”

It shouldn’t have worked. Nothing about it should’ve worked: Sirius should’ve torn himself reeling from the tent the moment Remus moved, and certainly before their lips touched. He should’ve wept or screamed or something, and barrelled down the mountainside to safety or else thrown himself into the treeline and let the bears finally take him. This wasn’t normal friend stuff: he didn’t do this with Peter, or James, apart from that one time that neither of them talked about afterwards because it had been weird and horrible and had felt like kissing Regulus. This wasn’t normal friend stuff at all, and as Remus kissed him, and as Sirius felt a freckled hand run wonderfully through his sleep-tangled hair, he was moved to immediately reevaluate the entirety of the past four months. 

Because maybe Remus wasn’t annoying; maybe not one thing about him was annoying, and maybe Sirius’s growing ire at everything he did was less burgeoning hatred and more, in fact, a blossoming, schoolgirlish obsession that he simply hadn’t had a name for until now. Maybe the reason he found the back of Remus’s neck so irritating was because it pained him to see Remus take such poor care of himself when the suncream was right there , in the centre console of the car. Maybe the hm-hms and the wheezing didn’t drive Sirius mad because it was boring; maybe it drove him mad for the same reasons that had him snaffling that inhaler away at school and stowing it in his backpack. Maybe he hadn’t kept Durham a secret from Remus because he hated him, and maybe the reason he wanted to punch James and Peter whenever they disappeared off into the sunset together with their arms slung around one another wasn’t because he felt left behind, but rather because he felt that ought to be him and Remus instead, and how very irritating that it wasn’t.

But now here Remus was, kissing him with a big lovely grin on his face, and with the mountain sun beaming down on the canvas of their tent and turning the air warm and meadow-sweet, and maybe the whole thing suddenly made a blinding amount of sense.

And maybe Reese Witherspoon had been right all along: all it had taken was a week walking through the mountains, and look at them now.

Sirius stared at him when he pulled back. “Huh,” he said, and wasn’t sure whether it was the kiss or the lingering drowsiness that was making him quite so stupid.

“All good?” Remus asked carefully, quietly. His right hand was hovering lightly over Sirius’s shoulder, not quite touching, awkward and lovely and half-sure.

And to Sirius’s surprise, it was. It was, in fact, all good.

He shrugged, and smiled dumbly, and said: “Yeah. All good.”

Remus’s chest sagged beneath him as he let out a great gust of a sigh, all relief and wonder. “Thank god,” he murmured, widening his eyes at the canvas ceiling and letting his hand rest back on Sirius’s shoulder.

“How did you know?”

Remus made a little questioning noise in the back of his throat.

“That,” Sirius said, nodding vaguely at the narrow distance between them. “How did you know that would work?”

How did you know that was where all that horrible tension was coming from? he thought. How did you know that was why I was being such a rotter? How did you know how obsessed I’ve apparently become with you without me even realising it?

How are you so clever, Remus?

“I didn’t,” Remus shrugged, and gave him another one of those pretty half-smiles. “But I know you. And I figured you were worth the gamble.”

***

Sirius flattened his hair down self-consciously for the eighth time and wondered if he was being very obvious as they all sat around the little gas stove and poked at a pan of eggs. James said something about coffee that wasn’t funny, and Sirius laughed too loudly, and Peter looked at him like he was mad, and Remus grinned into his enamelware mug.

He felt giddy with it. He wanted to be back under the canvas, in that lovely warm light with the wool of Remus’s jumper against his skin and Remus’s freckled hands carding gently through his hair. He wanted that, always. He never wanted to leave the campground: let’s just stay here, he thought. You’re not annoying, or horrible, or any of those things. So we could stay. Stay and be together and eat sausages from tin plates with mugs of tea, and go climbing up to the mountaintops every single day.  

Let me wear hiking boots and Remus’s fleece and my Wild Woman t-shirt forever. Let me sleep under the stars.

He let himself believe the fiction for the rest of the morning. The sun was high and hot and the world took on that wonderful film-grain again, the yellows turning golden and the greens turning yellow and everything deep and rich and wonderful, as if they’d all climbed inside Sirius’s old camera and as if they could stay there for as long as they liked, because the world only existed as far as the rocky horizon, and that was plenty big enough for the four of them.

“You’re acting chipper,” James said to him as they paddled in a pebbly stream after a lunch of crisps and apples and cereal bars, and Sirius nodded, and took a photo of him, and said:

“Yep.”

“You two sort your shit out, then?”

He was grinning in a way that told Sirius he knew precisely what the two of them had been up to that morning, and whether he did or not Sirius found that he didn’t mind too much, even if he’d rather not talk about it just yet. Let the madness settle for a few days, or something. 

Let me just enjoy it for now.

He shrugged, and took another photo. “Mind your own business,” he said around a mouthful of apple, and James grinned again, and swore at him through the lens.

It was a hazy sort of day from then, the return of the sun sending them all silly and feral and running through streams and up sandy trails between avenues of impossibly tall pine trees. Sirius used two whole rolls of film by the middle of the afternoon, and happily clicked another cartridge into his camera as they snacked on blueberries and leftover donut bites, perched in the open boot of the car near another pretty trailhead.

“What do you reckon, then?” James said, taking a glug of water from a big bottle and passing it around. “One more night in the tents, then move on?”

Sirius resolutely didn’t look at Remus.

“I like the tents,” said Peter.

“Me too,” said Remus, and Sirius had to turn away towards the treeline to hide his grin.

“Sure,” he said, as if he was easy either way, and didn’t want to stay in that campground with Remus until he was old and grey. “We could do another night.”

***

They danced around one another in the little shiplap shower block, swapping the tube of toothpaste for a bottle of water between them and, Sirius thought, purposefully not looking at each other, but both of them grinning dumbly into the mirror with foamy teeth and flushed cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun.

“Been worrying you might’ve asked to swap tents,” Remus said softly when they were tucked up in their sleeping bags, and Sirius could see the outline of his face in the darkness, and that he was still smiling.

“Why’s that?”

Remus shrugged. “Worried I might’ve scared you off,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Thought you might rather get some distance.”

“Nope,” Sirius said, and then, madly, bravely: “The opposite, really.”

“Yeah?”

It was wild, and reckless. It was the sort of thing novels and films and adults warned you against: how perilous to take a friendship and set it alight with such lovely flames as these. But, Sirius reasoned as he watched Remus in the darkness, the amphitheatre of the mountains seemed like exactly the sort of place in which he ought to be doing those sorts of things. Back in little England it might feel dangerous, and too-big. But here it felt just big enough. If he couldn’t do it here — on the wide, tearing highways with the river breeze in his hair and innumerable bears in hot pursuit — then where, exactly, was he supposed to do it? Be reckless, he thought. Do the wild thing. 

It was, it turned out, very difficult to attempt any sort of closeness when both participants were already zipped into separate sleeping bags. Sirius thought they must’ve looked like two big caterpillars, worming themselves across their mats until they met in the middle of the tent, and Remus grinned at him again, and said, quietly:

“Hi.”

“Hi,” whispered Sirius.

“Have you had a good day?”

Sirius nodded, and felt Remus nudging his foot gently through their twin, fluffy layers. “Yes,” he said. “Have you?”

He felt Remus shrug against his pillow, all nonchalant and breezy. “It was alright,” Remus said. “This bloke was making big Bambi eyes at me all day, though. Weirdo.”

“Git,” Sirius muttered, poking him right back with his toes. He felt Remus shift, and then there were lips being pressed softly against his own for a too-brief moment. He wondered if Remus could feel the heat blooming in his cheeks, or the way his heart did a happy little hop-skip as Remus pulled back and looked at him. There were a thousand lovely things Sirius ought to have said then. Something about love, or fate, or how very thrilling he was finding this suddenly-bright summer. Something poetic and memorable and important. But he couldn’t seem to pin any of them down in his mind, so he just cleared his throat instead, and said: “Uh,” and then, “Do you think the other two know?”

“Probably,” Remus said airily, as if he really didn’t mind either way. “James has known about me for ages, I think.”

Sirius frowned. “Known what?”

Remus faltered at that. Cleared his own throat, and swallowed twice, and looked away in a manner that gave Sirius the distinct impression he’d just said far more than he intended to. “Nothing,” he muttered eventually, burying himself further into his sleeping bag.

“Go on,” urged Sirius. “Known what?”

“Oh,” Remus sighed, turning to flop onto his back. “Just… you know.”

“Do I?”

“You know,” he said, and Sirius thought he might’ve been smiling again, and that his cheeks might’ve been turning even pinker under his sunburn. “Just… about me.”

“What about you?”

“About how I’ve fancied you for ages, you tit.”

It was a strange and wonderful thought. The idea that someone might’ve fancied Sirius for any amount of time without him even realising it, and the idea that that someone might’ve been Remus. He wondered how long ages was. He wondered if Remus had been very obvious, and if James had always known, and if Peter had known, and if the two of them had talked about it together whenever Remus and Sirius weren’t in the room. 

He wondered if he’d fancied him right back, this whole time.

“Oh,” Sirius said, stupidly, and then made up for it by wriggling closer still on his sleeping mat and pressing his lips clumsily against Remus’s cheek. “That’s okay,” he said.

Remus laughed. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“And I think James probably did know. I think that’s why he shoved us in this tent together.”

“I suspect you might be right about that,” Remus said primly. He turned again then, facing Sirius across the narrow stretch of space between them. “Do you mind?”

He sounded soft, and careful. Sirius frowned at him in the darkness.

“Mind what?”

“You know,” Remus said, and Sirius watched the silhouette of his shoulder rise and fall in a gentle shrug. “Mind if James knows that you’re… or, that we’re…”

He trailed off, awkwardly, and it all hung in a funny sort of silence between them for a moment whilst Sirius sorted through the pieces.

“Oh ,” he said quietly. And he sort of adored Remus, in the moment, for thinking of that. “No,” he said, and felt Remus nod against his pillow. “No, that’s all fine.” And then, for reasons that would elude Sirius for many maddening years to come: “I’ve kissed him before, anyway.”

The silence, that time, was deafening. All that still mountain air, so heavy outside the walls of the tent. Even the night birds seemed to hold their breaths and their calls in their horrified beaks. What an insane thing to have said, Sirius thought. His hands felt all sweaty, the skin of his palms itching strangely whilst he battled away memories of James’s gormless expression as they clumsily lunged at one another for no better reason than boredom and benign, hormonal curiosity. 

What a terrible image.

And then, after what felt to Sirius like a silence so protracted it was utterly immeasurable, laughter.

Great, hooting peals of laughter, ringing around the canvas and out into the treeline beyond where it must surely be waking the bears and the mountain cats and all the other campers in a hundred-mile radius. Bright and sudden and deranged, Remus curling himself inwards as he pressed his hands to his midriff through the soft bulk of his sleeping bag.

“Oh my god,” he gasped, all cackling wheezes and giggling. Sirius blinked at him dumbly. “That’s brilliant.”

“What is?”

“You two,” Remus hooted, rolling onto his back and laughing loudly up at the canvas ceiling. “God, what was that like?”

“Horrible,” Sirius said flatly, still not understanding what exactly was so funny about the whole thing. He’d never found it particularly amusing. He found it embarrassing in an unimportant sort of way, and vaguely nauseating. “That’s why we never did it again.”

“Well, I hope he’s not going to get jealous,” Remus teased, coughing into his fist through another round of giggles. “I couldn’t take him in a fight.”

“You couldn’t take anyone in a fight.”

“Fair,” Remus said breathlessly. He pushed himself up on his mat, still wheezing, and fumbled for his backpack at the foot of his sleeping bag.

Sirius tutted. “Come here,” he muttered, reaching for his own bag and easily fishing out the hunk of blue plastic from the pocket there, passing it to Remus in the darkness and watching him take a long, unsteady puff.

“Maybe this whole thing was a ruse,” Remus said, chest all uneven rises and falls, inhaler held carelessly in his right hand. “Bring me out here, leave me for the bears, have you all to himself.”

“Shut up,” Sirius murmured. “Do your thing again.”

Remus took another puff.

“He needn’t have brought you all the way to Canada,” Sirius said, still watching him. “A badger could finish you off. He could’ve just left you by the side of the road on the way to the airport.”

Remus grinned, and huffed out a still-ragged breath. “I could easily take a badger.”

Sirius tutted again. “Will you concentrate?” he said, pushing himself to a seat and shuffling closer to Remus on the mat. “Learn to breathe first, then worry about fighting badgers. Idiot.”

“And why should I listen to you when you’re so very mean to me?” Remus teased, voice thin and raspy, smiling around the mouthpiece of his inhaler as he took one more puff.

“Because I’m kind of a big deal in Canada,” Sirius said drily. 

Remus turned to look at him then, and Sirius wasn’t sure when his hand had made its way to Remus’s upper back, or when he’d started rubbing little circles with his palm through the warm cotton of Remus’s t-shirt. He felt the waves of Remus’s breath begin to slow and even themselves out, tired and calm, and easy.

Sirius could almost see the petal-pink of his nose in the silvery, faraway moonlight beyond the canvas walls. 

“Nah,” Remus said, so quietly, and through a bright and happy grin. “You’re kind of a big deal everywhere.”

***

James did know. They both knew, apparently, because when Remus and Sirius spilled out of their tent the next morning and sat too-close and too-blissfully side-by-side around the campfire, it was to a short, calculating silence followed by Peter huffing out a great sigh of relief, and a: “Well, thank god for that.”

“For what?” Remus asked tartly around a mouthful of sausages, and James laughed, and Peter said:

“Just don’t pitch your tent anywhere near ours at the next place if you’re going to be…” he waved a hand carelessly, not looking either of them in the eye and instead muttering into his mug something that sounded a lot like: “Copulating.”

“There’s a next place?” Sirius asked, looking to James and ignoring the way Remus’s shoulders were shaking with laughter next to him.

“Thought we’d find another campsite further north,” James shrugged. “There’s a cool place just outside Jasper. They call it: The Valley of the Five Lakes. And some mad mountain they call The Watchtower.”

“Sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings.”

“Doesn’t it?” James said excitedly. “They’ve got campsites and all sorts. Tents we can hire again. You up for it? We can find a motel, otherwise.”

“He likes tents now,” came a little voice from Sirius’s right shoulder, and he turned his head to fix Remus with a low, unimpressed stare. Remus smiled at him innocently, and said: “Don’t you?”

“I like tents now,” Sirius said flatly.

“Good stuff,” nodded James. He reached over to refill Sirius’s coffee, and then Remus’s, and then he leaned back to prop his elbows in the meadowgrass behind him, and beamed at them both. “Look at you,” he said, grinning sunnily.

Sirius buried himself in his mug. “Shut up, James.”

“Two little mountain lovebir-”

“Shut up. ”

Sirius’s aim was terrible, but Remus’s was surprisingly good, and James screeched like one of those great Canadian hawks as half of a fried tomato hit him square in the chest and left a dripping, seedy splatter of orange-red across his white t-shirt.

***

The sun was finally setting over the mountaintops, and Sirius was wondering for the hundredth time that day if he’d get away with reaching for Remus’s hand, resting there on the back seat between them. It would be very obvious, he thought. James was sure to see him move in the rear-view mirror. Peter would probably crane around and gawk at them, and say something bluffly abrasive in an embarrassed, well-meaning sort of way.

It was a warm and lovely evening, with the bright afternoon giving way to a sweet, balmy night, the vast skies above slipping to gemstone lilacs and hinting at starlight. There was a campground to be found a few more miles down the wide, meandering roads, and fluffy sleeping bags, and a little stove on which they might make sausages, and beans, and cups of steaming coffee to the distant sounds of wild northern birds and rushing gorges and the high mountain air winnowing its way through forested passes and deep, deep valleys.

The car trundled off the highway and up a gravelly track carved into the hillside, chugging into a pretty clearing dotted with pine saplings and candyfloss wildflowers. Sirius watched a speckled bird flit from one of the saplings out to the treeline. It didn’t feel like the sort of place the bears would be. Too sweet an evening, he thought, as they sat there quietly and waited. The bears would have better things to do than to terrorise him tonight.

The driver’s side door opened, and James propped himself on it with his arm and then leant down to peek inside first at Peter in the front, and then into the back of the car, where Sirius sat sideways in his seat with his shoulders against the window and his feet propped lightly in Remus’s lap, and James said:

“They’ve only got doubles.”

And it was the loveliest thing Sirius had ever heard.

-⛺⛺-