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Remus watches Sirius’ reflection move through the motions of his nighttime routine with half-lidded hungry eyes. He thinks, vaguely, that maybe this is that happy ending waiting for him, the one that kept him from pushing the knife just a little bit further into the open expanse of his upturned wrist all of those years ago.
It’s a little bit underwhelming in a way that he knows means it’s real – absolution could only ever look like the restoration of mundanity for him.
He’s body tired and brain drained, so much so that it feels like a victory to even be standing. Every single one of his joints feels wobbly under his weight, so he angles himself pressed up against the sink so that the sharp jut of each of his hip bones can rest on the shelf of the countertop. He blinks and there’s a toothbrush in his hand, and somehow it already has toothpaste on it, so he brings it into his mouth and brushes.
When he glances back to Sirius, he’s greeted with an amalgamation mirage of him at 16 and 21 and 34, soap lathered over the sharp line of his jaw, frothed toothpaste slotting the corners of his mouth in a white parenthetical promise, throat bobbing against the presence of his own toothbrush where it crosses the very back of his tongue next to where his throat is soft and pink and beautiful. These are places Remus knows, places on the topography of Sirius Black that he’d charted almost before time even began, flesh memories, the kind etched onto the core of his brain. No amount of not wanting to be alive anymore has ever saved Remus from the reality of them.
How strange it feels now to desire more time just so he can chart the same course again and again. How strange it feels for more time to be granted.
Sirius spits out his toothpaste now the exact same way he did when he was 12, and knowing that feels like a prayer answered by a God Remus has long stopped having faith in. Out of reverence and exhaustion and necessity, he bows his head, spits his own frothed toothpaste, and notices only when his mouth is emptied of it that it had begun to taste like blood. He watches silently as the mass of it slides towards the drain, a pink foam against white porcelain, like an offering of something base and guttural against something perfect and pure.
“You okay, old man?” Sirius asks, his presence suddenly pressed flush against Remus’ side.
“Mmm,” Remus tries. “Tired.”
“Moonsick?”
“Always, these days.”
“Bed then.”
Remus nods, turning to walk, his hip locking and spine smarting as he moves. He always feels a long day in his back by the end of it.
When he crawls into bed and successfully shuffles his body – gammy muscles and worn-thin cartilage between bones groaning with each movement – into the midline of the mattress where the two of them by some ancient and unspoken agreement have always started their nights, he lies quietly and waits for Sirius to find him and tuck his face into the hollow space between his chin and shoulder. Puzzle pieces, corresponding points. Their flesh remembering each other always.
“It’s nice to see that with Voldemort’s return, we are being treated to a whole new set of war weddings this go around. They’re always a laugh,” Sirius murmurs into the quiet, voice soft. He always wants to talk when it’s time for sleep, and Remus has known this about him since the beginning of time too. He’d had to listen to the radio to fall asleep for the first few months after losing him, having gotten so used to falling asleep to his voice. Muggle broadcasting stations were a poor substitute.
“Someone else getting married that we know?” Remus asks, eyes falling closed as he speaks.
“The eldest Weasley is going to ask the Delacour girl he’s been seeing. Doubtlessly she will oblige him,” Sirius drawls, like reading Remus the latest gossip tabloid.
Remus smiles at that, remembering the way Bill and Fleur had been during their first order meeting at the start of the summer. Even the grunge and foulness of Grimmauld Place’s dingy kitchen had not dulled the light of their young love. It reminded him all too much of James and Lily.
“Mmm, those two are quite smitten with one another, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to run off and marry quietly. They’re in love.”
He feels Sirius’ smile, even though he can’t see it. “Bill told me that she is ‘the greatest love’ of his life and that he’s ‘not stupid enough to let his soulmate slip away.’ I told him not to, not even for a second.”
“Mmm,” Remus mumbles, cheeks pulling at his lips, leaving a smiling kiss on a freshly washed forehead. The smell of Sirius’ preferred sea salt soap in his lungs. “Do you speak from experience, Mr. Black?”
There is a long pause between them. Sirius’ body shifts against the sheets.
“Painful experience,” he finally says and then lapses into silence again, and Remus lets him. The pull of darkness against his body is so strong here, with his eyes closed and this man tucked up against him. Time is skipping for him the way it always does in the days leading up to the full. Minutes could be hours, he wouldn’t know.
“Moony?” Sirius breathes. His voice is too low, too worn with age to be the Sirius Remus always remembers first, 17 and alive and unmarred by war.
“Yes, darling?” Remus asks back, because this Sirius is not that one, and this one needs him to be gentle, even when he’s tired, even when it’s late.
“Do you believe in soulmates?” He asks quietly.
Remus breathes in the sea salt soap, and says, “Yes.”
Sirius’ minty breath puffs out of his mouth against Remus’ throat. It falls in the same place it always has when they lay this way, another flesh memory, map points charted over again.
“Do you think you have one?” Sirius asks.
Remus knows, he knows that this is one of those moments when he is supposed to tell a lie. He knows that now, when he has this man in his bed, in his arms, this man who he had consigned himself to the reality of never holding, never loving without guilt again, now is when he should tell him the thing that any reasonable person wants to hear in a moment like this. But to do that, to lie, it feels like dishonoring the truth in a way that is so heinous he can’t even consider it.
“I had one,” he says simply and hopes beyond hope that Sirius has the good sense to let that rest. But Sirius never lets anybody rest, not Remus, not the past, not even the dead.
“The bloke you took up with while I was in Azkaban?” He asks, not accusatory, not angry, just curious, just eager to know. He too, Remus only just then remembers, is trying to replot points on a map, to reestablish memories with his senses. He remembers that while Remus’ memories have been agonizingly untouched and uncared for in the years that lapsed between their time together, Sirius’ have been muddled and manipulated, chewed on and spit out by creatures that exist to terrorize. The realization disarms Remus in such a powerful way that he feels very carefully erected walls start to collapse against it.
“Lily,” he says, almost choking on the name, like it lives so embedded in him that it scrapes his throat as he pushes it out. He can’t manage it without opening his eyes, the admission pushes him into a level of wakefulness that was out of the question just a moment ago. He swallows in offering to the tightness in his throat.
The two of them have talked about Lily and James, but they haven’t spoken about them as separate people. They have talked to Harry about his parents who loved him, and to each other about their friends who they miss with every breath, whose memory fuels them to fight again, whose loss has thrust Sirius into the guardianship of a 15-year-old.
They have not spoken about James and Sirius or about Lily and Remus, how they were pairs of two in a different configuration than the two couples they’d ended up in. On Remus’ part, that hasn’t been entirely incidental. He has no words for the reality of what losing Lily has done to him. It exists in the same way he didn’t have words for what it felt like to have believed himself betrayed by Sirius. It is only possible to talk about the loss of her when it’s coupled with the enormity of the events that surrounded it. He can talk about the world losing the young mother of the boy who lived, he can talk about The Order losing the Potters and all the rightness in the world that the two of them held in their bodies, he can and even has openly mourned the loss of all that rightness, when their bodies went into the ground.
But he cannot talk about the loss of his best friend Lily Evans and how she was the only girl Remus has ever loved with all of who he is. He cannot talk about the way the loss of her, his only truly human friend drove him deeper than ever into the jaws of the wolf. He cannot talk about how insane it made him, to be alone from her and to believe it was because of the wolf, because of the animal he is that he couldn’t be trusted in the end. It wasn’t true, he reminds himself now. He talks his heartbeat down from the cliff's edge it’s raced up to, thinking about Sirius’s account of it, his reassurance that it hadn’t been Lily’s choice at all, that it was all Sirius, it was all Sirius’s mistrust. Sirius had thought him a spy, and that is why he was kept in the dark. Somehow, that knowledge stings much much less to Remus. He’d believed Sirius guilty of the same betrayal and so they were, in some twisted arithmetic, even. But thinking of it, even after he’s gotten the kind of resolution he’d bargained and begged in hope of for so long, it still smarts up his breastbone and into his lungs. He still feels her name like a scrape up his throat.
Remus pushes his face into the human scent of Sirius’ hair, where the sweat and oils of the day have mixed into something familiar and base that overpowers the smell of sea salt soap, and he swallows lungfuls of the smell of it. The press of his nose against the silk and softness of long black curls grounds him, it brings him back into himself. He knows this place, he’s plotted this point, he reminds himself. Sirius is asking because he wants to know, maybe even because he remembers but isn’t sure it’s real.
His voice is rough when he speaks, but he forces the words out anyway, “If soulmates are real, Lily was mine.”
Even weighed down into the mattress by the body he’s holding – and the weight of the memories that are flooding his mind – Remus holds himself in suspension at the admission. He isn’t entirely sure how Sirius will take it. Immediately, he wants to clarify – wants to offer consolation, because it feels at once like the worst kind of rejection he could have offered the man who he loves so very much, but he knows it’s moot.
After the long moment that stretches between them, Sirius finally reaches over to take Remus’ hand. With the carefulness of the man he’s become and not the boy that he was, Sirius slots their fingers together, squeezes him twice, and then says, “And James, mine.”
And Remus can hear it, the way Sirius knows, the way he understands and feels it too. Feels it worse, maybe. A loss so heavy, even now, even here, that it can’t be held by anything but deep breaths and quiet whispers in the dark.
“It hurts,” Sirius speaks again, his throat sticking all over every word. “Harry is like a ghost in human flesh. I still cannot believe that his patronus is a stag.”
Remus cannot believe it either, and thinking about it makes him ache even more with the memory of what James, Sirius, and even Peter had done for him, a gift that still astounds and confounds him to this day. To have made themselves less human so that he’d be less lonely as an animal, it’s something that he doesn't think he’ll ever understand. He doesn’t have words for it, not after 20 years, and probably not ever, so instead of trying he squeezes Sirius’ hand and looks down at where they are connected. Carefully, he brings his thumb to rub against the stag’s antlers that sprout from Sirius’ wrist and spread up his forearm, etched in ink.
“Prongs for my Prongs,” he’d told Remus when he’d come back from a trip into Hogsmeade in their 7th year with the tattoo wrapped in plastic, his grin carving lines around his mouth and his eyes, “And Jamie got my paw print on his wrist, too.” He’d been so smug, so fucking delighted by it, that all Remus could do was roll his eyes and shake his head, trying not to let the nervousness and jealousy bubbling in his chest show on his face.
He’d forgotten that night. He’d forgotten that he’d once been scared of how much Sirius loved James. So much had changed for the four of them in the war, Remus had forgotten that there was a time when he felt anything other than powerful relief that someone, let alone someone as steadfast and righteous as James Potter, cared as much about the two most important people in Remus’ life as he did. It’s hard for him to imagine it now, when the loss of him feels so present in every imperfect way Remus has tried to hold Sirius through his recovery from Azkaban, but there was a time when James had felt more like a threat than like one of the people he loved most in the world as well.
“It hurts me too,” Remus finally says, keeping his voice quiet so as not to pop the bubble of honesty between them. “I feel like he’d have been better at this,” he admits into the top of Sirius’ head. It comes out more raw than he’d meant it to.
“Better at what?” Sirius asks, and Remus pictures the pinch of his brow so clearly that he can’t stop himself from nudging his head back so he can press a kiss against it.
“Bringing you back to yourself,” he says, honestly, very aware that the two of them have never spoken so openly about what it is they’re trying to do for each other now.
“Oh, that,” Sirius says, taking every bit of earnestness Remus offers him like it’s his birthright. “I mean,” he leans forward, cutting himself off to press a wet kiss onto Remus’ neck that makes gooseflesh of his arms and a soft gasp of his breath. When he pulls his mouth back he continues, “I loved Prongs, but the taste of your neck is the answer to at least five different questions I’ve had about myself since I got out and I doubt James could do that, so… I reckon you do just fine at bringing me back to myself, Moony. ”
Remus feels a laugh fall out from behind a still aching ribcage. The words as well as the spit now cooling on his neck feel like a lifeline that he gladly takes. “Come off it, you and James never had a go at each other during one of your various and plentiful trips into each other's beds after you thought P- well, thought we’d gone to bed?” He asks, his heart skipping a beat at the almost mention of Peter’s name. Like so much else, they hadn’t spoken it since that night in the shack. This conversation feels too sacred to sully with it.
If Sirius notices, he does not let on. Instead, he barks out a genuine laugh at Remus’ insinuation, the kind of sound that defined their youth, and Remus feels the energy of it shoot through him like lightning, feels the breath of it warm against his throat like Sirius’ mouth on it had felt and any lingering exhaustion he’d felt while propped up against the sink thinking about mundanity is long gone.
“We certainly didn’t kiss each other’s necks,” Sirius says breathily, through a chuckle. “It was more like,” he shrugs, like he’s searching for the right words, but Remus thinks he might understand without them.
“Like a helping hand while you shared a smutty magazine?” He ventures a guess.
“Exactly, It wasn't romantic, it was just– just Jamie and I being stupid teenage boys,” Sirius hurries to affirm, his voice still heavy with good humor, but Remus hears the way it’s tinged with something else more soft. “I thought he’d be furious about it after I told him that I was bent, but he just laughed and said ‘You’re welcome for all the practice, arsehole’”
Remus snorts, opting not to press further about timelines and stopping points. “How did I never hear about this?”
“Well at the time I was trying to convince you to spend the rest of your life with me, Moony, I wasn’t likely to broadcast the fact that I’d been quietly tossing off my best friend for a year, was I? Of course I was an idiot who’d forgotten one very important rule,” Sirius says.
“And what’s that?”
“Moony knows everything.”
“Oh, that,” Remus says, echoing Sirius’ earlier words. “Well, Lily and I always suspected, but I didn’t know for sure. I suppose in the end it didn’t matter.”
“Mmm,” Sirius hums in agreement, tucking himself closer into Remus’ chest and slotting a knee between wiry legs. “What about you two then? If Lily was your soulmate you two must have tried something at least once, just to see, right?” He asks plainly.
The question cuts at Remus’ walls once more, pries open boxes sealed shut with tape and glue and desperation. It forces Remus to remember things, remember Sirius, the one of the past who would not have borne well the knowledge of Remus’ youthful exploration with the woman that he felt was stealing James away from him. It startles Remus to feel the pressure of the man in his arms, to smell the sweat on his head he’s known for so long, to hear the quiet breaths he lets loose in time with his 17-year-old self, and yet to feel how different he’s become.
Like when Sirius had asked about Remus’ ex-lover before, his tone is not jealous. His is the tone of a man looking to reestablish something that has been gone for a very long time, or maybe to establish a truth where there had only been assumption once – to lay something to rest like a funeral or a memorial. Building memorials with Sirius and not for him feels entirely foreign to Remus, but he supposes it is only right now. Absolution, he thinks, is what loving this man means now. It is what he deserves. Remus sticks the revelation away in his head, plots a brand new point, presses the graying stubble on his cheek against oily curls to create a new flesh memory.
“Of course we did,” he admits easily, which shocks him as much as it feels at once ridiculous to have feared saying it. It’s been years, and Lily is dead, and he’d loved her so much because he’d known her in all the ways she could be known. “The summer after fifth year when I wanted to kill you and she wanted to kill James and we both wanted to kill Severus. I stayed over at hers and she at mine for practically that entire summer, and neither of our fathers were ever home so we found a lot of creative ways to, uh, work through our anger.”
“You shagged?” Sirius clarifies, quietly.
“A couple different times, just to make sure we were doing it right,” Remus tells him, feeling the flow of memories push right through the walls of all of his carefully erected and painstakingly built dams. The flood feels more manageable here in the dark.
Sirius snorts a laugh that Remus feels inside his bloodstream, a re-plotted point. “Of course,” He says, “Bloody obsessed with doing things perfectly, the pair of you were.” He shakes his head and Remus is sure his eyes are rolling, though he can’t see it happen.
“Well, were you?” Sirius pushes, “ Doing it right, I mean?”
“Not at all. I was bent and also miserably in love with you, and she was incidentally just as in love with James, though she was stubbornly refusing to admit it even to me at that point. I told her about you though, at the end of the summer. I thought she’d be furious with me too, actually, now that I think of it,” Remus trails off in a murmur, the quiet dread he’d felt in the lead-up to that conversation in 1976 passing through his body like a current, here in his bed, almost 20 years later.
Sirius must feel it too, or sense it somehow in the way he sometimes does with Remus, because he squeezes Remus’ hand again, a quiet reassurance. “Obviously she wasn’t,” Sirius reminds him.
“No,” Remus agrees, recalling the look on Lily’s face when he’d admitted his secret, the way her eyes bored into his as he spoke, such a brilliant green that Remus remembers thinking they’d looked fake, like costume jewelry. “Lily and the sky with emeralds” he’d once sung to her, high and giggling on the floor of the prefect bathroom. That Harry was born with them and has kept them into his adolescence makes Remus’ heart ache so intensely that he has had to routinely force himself away from the thought. For some reason, this time he doesn’t. This time he lets it ache, breathes around the ache of it so he can find exactly where it does, and then he plots that point too, this one on a part of himself he hasn’t touched in years.
“No, she wasn’t furious at me for being a queer or even for using her to figure it out,” he says finally. “She was furious at me for being a queer for the likes of you.” And he grins after he says it, because it’s true and hilarious and terrible, the memory of her, the way Remus misses even her ire.
“I grew on her,” Sirius says, confidently. “I made it right with you eventually. Tried to clean up my act and make myself worthy of being the reason you were a queer.”
Remus just smiles at that. He buries his hand in Sirius’ hair and pulls his head back far enough for Remus to trace his eyes over the softly lined skin of his freshly washed face, up to the strands of gray that move back from his temples, and over to his gray eyes bright in the dark of the room around them. He breathes in the sea salt soap scent where it mixes with the sweat and oils on his lover's head, opens his mouth to speak, and tastes the mint of Sirius’ breath in the humid air between them. These are places Remus knows, places on the topography of Sirius Black that he’s lucky enough to be charting over again, flesh memories he’s hoping to revisit for the rest of his life. He carefully etches them once more onto the core of his brain.
“Sirius,” Remus whispers, keeping his eyes on the face in front of him.
“Yes, darling?” Sirius replies, the curl of a sweet smile on the edge of his mouth. He brings his hand up to rest gently against Remus’ cheek like an anointment. Remus feels the weight of it like the holy gesture it is and presses a kiss to the pulse point of the hand where his own wrist boasts a jagged scar. His own heartbeat is reflected in every shuddering thud that touches his lips. More time, it says to him, almost too late, but not quite. He’s tempted to suck a bruise there just to prove it.
“I reckon you do just fine at bringing me back to myself too,” Remus tells him. And he means it.