Chapter Text
Remus had never quite managed to sell the flat.
It was ironic, wasn’t it? Paying rent on two flats, then going hungry because there wasn’t enough money for groceries.
Or, at least, that was the reason Remus had given himself for the growing scarcity he had vaguely catalogued within his (second) refrigerator. The truth was, if Remus was sitting in the Hufflepuff common room just then, not a stone’s throw away from the Hogwarts’ kitchens, he was fairly certain he would be more interested in having a nap than a cheese toasty. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. Remus used to be ravenous. Perhaps it was the wolf that had hungered so constantly in his youth, but Remus had always rather liked the idea that it was simply because he had the option. To eat, that was. He didn’t have many things that were his, growing up. Not his past—that had belonged to Greyback. Certainly not his future, which had belonged first to the registry, and then the war, and then, shamefully, the memory of Sirius.
Sirius.
Remus digressed. The second flat was small, and a bit rough around the edges—rather like Remus had been in his youth, he reckoned, before he had shot up nineteen-point-two centimeters the summer before fifth year. He liked this quality of his flat. He fancied himself somewhat of a connoisseur these days—of small, rough things, that is. His teakettle (it made the perfect tea for one, dent notwithstanding). His sweaters (they had, rather unfortunately, shrunk on Remus’s second visit to the muggle laundromat). His pocketbook. Ultimately, Remus would not say he was fond of his life. But he had built it very carefully, and it had been, much like his schoolboy appetite, his to command. The only discrepancy, the only part of his present that was still tainted by his past, was their flat.
His and Sirius’s, that was.
Sirius.
Sirius had a way of disrupting all of the routines, all the plans, all the barriers that Remus had carefully built for himself. Once upon a time, Remus had had a certain fondness for this quality of his (Remus refused to call the feeling by any other name). Then, he had found it irritating. By the end, when Remus had been lying and hiding and terrified and had stayed sane only through burying it all under a certain, practiced, routine blankness, it had been downright dangerous.
Now, now that the barriers were Remus’s whole world? It was earth-shattering. And Remus didn’t know if he had the strength left in him to keep picking up the pieces.
…
Padfoot woke up to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks. Every time a wave crashed, Padfoot was pushed right up against the shoreline. Crash. Padfoot was wet. Crash. Padfoot was swimming. Crash. Padfoot swam harder. Crash. Crash. Crash.
This kind of repetition soothed Padfoot. Padfoot was a dog, and dogs were, despite everything, simple creatures. There was nothing good here, where he was. But he could find predictability. Routine. Somewhere inside him, there was something that needed to be regulated. Contained. If that thing came too close to the surface, it attracted them. The cold ones. Padfoot didn’t like the cold ones. The waves maintained their steady drumbeat of dull, monotonous, powerful, terrifying motion. Padfoot crashed right alongside them.
Crash.
Crash.
Crash.
Sirius woke up. These dreams were the hardest, the ones that took place in Azkaban. When he dreamed of Hogwarts, or Grimmauld Place, or even the flat, it was incomprehensibly terrible. This place stole the good memories, leaving only warped, incongruent remains—the worst, most horrible things that had ever been done to him (that he had ever done) in 4k technicolor vision, repeated endlessly in his mind. Perfect clarity on every mistake he had ever made, every painful moment he had ever experienced. But those dreams (those nightmares, really) contained an undeniable truth. Sirus was human, once. There had been a time where he had been more than this place, more than the sound of the waves and the cracks in the walls of his cell and the holes in his mind.
When he dreamed of Azkaban, he lost himself completely. He would worry, if he had anything left in him but horror, and grief, and vengeance, that some kind of irreparable poisoning had occurred. Azkaban had become him. The dementors no longer needed to take his soul, because it had already been siphoned, slowly, by the passage of time and the power of the walls. It had replaced Sirius’s Siriusness with dreams of itself.
“We are not of you,” the waves told him. “You are of us.”
“I know,” Sirius grumbled nonsensically. “That’s why I have to leave.”
“Why?” the waves asked him. “There is nowhere you can go that we will not follow you.”
“Touching,” Sirius said, absentmindedly. He watched as the walls around him began to curve and distort, to form the mouthpiece of the prison, to use their—its—hauntingly familiar voice to speak words into his empty mind, truths he had already come to accept. “But that’s why I have to leave. This place brings nothing but destruction. And there is something out there that still needs to be destroyed.”
“What is it?” asked the walls. The mouth moved slowly, using the same voice it always had. James’s.
“You know what, James,” Sirius spits.
“Remus.”
1981
The night Sirius had found James’s body was the night he had died.
Physically, of course, Sirius had been relatively unharmed. But James was a vital part of Sirius, like his lungs, or his brain. Even when one’s brain becomes damaged beyond repair, that person can still sometimes go on living in a coma. Their body continues to function as it always has, but they are not really alive. Thus, Sirius had learned James was dead, and yet his heart had continued, against all odds, to beat. He wished it wouldn’t bother.
Even upon seeing tiny, baby Harry, crying softly for a mother that would never come, Sirius could not muster any spark of life.
He walked gently over to the baby’s tiny crib, feeling vaguely as though this glimpse of Harry, here, in the home where he had been raised, was the last good thing he would ever see. The nursery, before its near-total destruction, had been the kind of place a mother might dream of. The walls had been a soft lavender, the rug a plush, colorful shag. Harry had had an entire wall of shelving for his toys, and despite the fact that he was already more than a year old, Harry had refused to abandon his crib. It was fashioned like a grand oak tree, with a branched-in nest at the apex for a child to perch in at their heart’s content. It had been designed with love, Sirius knew. He had spent months on it. And yet, as he approached the child, he felt nothing but an immeasurably hollow rage. He knew who must be to blame, for the death of this child’s parents. The deed had been done, and it could not be undone. There was simply nothing left to feel.
Sirius had carried Harry outside. He had passed him off to Hagrid, begged him to take the child to Dumbledore. “Take my bike,” he had said. “Try and be discreet.”
“But,” Hagrid had said, “Hadn’t he ought to go to your…”
“No,” Sirius had whispered, horrified at the thought. Hagrid looked taken aback, and Sirius attempted to school his expression into something he hoped was neutral, or perhaps just slightly less unhinged than he really felt. From the look in Hagrid’s eyes, he wasn’t quite sure he was succeeding.
Sirius breathed once—fast, hard, with force—and straightened up a little. This was vitally important, and he didn’t have time to waste on games with the groundskeeper. He could hold himself together for one final night, even if it killed him.
Especially if it killed him. He didn’t know if he could live with himself after what he was about to do.
He didn’t really want to try.
“Don’t go near my flat. Straight to Dumbledore, do you hear me? Straight there. Do as I say, Hagrid.”
Hagrid had nodded, ever obedient to anyone his master had chosen to trust. “Dumbledore.” He stopped, then, looking down to admire the child who was now sleeping, rather peacefully. The irony made a cold sort of sickness take hold of Sirius. He had the horrible notion that James and Lily had given their last shred of peace to their child and left nothing left for themselves. Nothing for Sirius. “Yes, alright lad,” Hagrid sighed. “Up ‘ye git.”
As Hagrid took off, Sirius’s bravado crumpled. He was a shell. He was empty. There was nothing left for him. He knew, of course, what he needed to do. What must be done.
The thing was, though, that Sirius had been pretending to be brave all his life. He had been pretending to be noble. He had fought and clawed and kicked his way out of his family’s legacy, into Gryffindor, into the Marauders, into James. And this empty, hollow, painful anger? This was the calm before the storm; the final bow before the curtain dropped.
He had to make a choice. The dead or the living. The brave or the cowardly. The lion or the wolf.
{At age eleven, hair neatly combed and family trunk in hand, Sirius had taken a scarred palm in his own and shaken it.}
Sirius had never stopped making the wrong choices.
…
“How can you be sure?” Remus had demanded. He had never had cause to question the man in front of him before. In every conceivable way, Dumbledore was their fearless leader, and Remus had, unquestioningly, followed him into hell (and then, on his orders, beyond, to places even Dumbledore could not go). Now, though, Dumbledore was asking him to accept the unacceptable, and Remus was finding himself, for the first time, at a bit of a loss. It couldn’t be true, and yet, here was Dumbledore, telling him that it was the only explanation.
Sirius.
Remus, of course, should have been grateful. Grateful that Dumbledore was not wasting his time wrongfully going after Remus when the real enemy {killer, betrayer, traitor, m a t e} was still at large. But he couldn’t help but wonder whether there was something further they were missing, some grander scheme. He had always been rather good at puzzles, see, and this one just didn’t feel right. There was something—
“Remus,” Dumbledore interrupted gently. “You’re in shock.” Taking a seat on their—Remus’s, now, probably—couch, he extracted a thin, silvery, fluid strand from his forehead, and placed it into the pensive, which Remus hadn’t noticed him retrieve from its place in the hall closet. He wasn’t sure how Dumbledore had known it would be there. He was sure that he didn’t care. “I had a feeling you might have reacted this way.”
Remus sat beside him numbly. Looking down into the pensive, he braced himself for whatever proof Dumbledore was about to show him. Prepared himself to explain why it wasn’t enough. To convince Dumbledore that something must have happened, must have gone wrong.
Sirius couldn’t have.
And yet, with mounting horror, Remus realized that Sirius had.
He had confessed. Had blasted a hole through a muggle street. Had stood there, raving about his love of the dark arts and hatred of his best friend, who had always overshadowed him. Every word is a betrayal of Sirius as Remus knows him to be, and yet there is no other explanation for why James and Lily did not survive.
The words weren’t what convinced Remus, though. No, it was the pain on Sirius’s face. He looked…well, for lack of a better term, he looked mad. Utterly, completely devoid of any true emotion. Remus wondered (as through Dumbledore’s memory he watched dementors cart Sirius away, still struggling to escape an Auror’s body bind curse) whether Sirius was just an incredibly good actor, or whether he had been made of nothing but spite this whole time, and Remus had just been too blinded by his own projected emotion to see it. Frankly, Remus had never pegged Sirius for the former.
Despite himself, he still felt a quiet undercurrent of doubt, and this is what broke him. Remus found himself in his toilet, vomiting until he couldn’t breathe through the sick, until Dumbledore had to cast on him to calm him down. He was disgusted at having given so much of himself to Sirius—enough that he could sense, even now, that he would never have enough of himself left to be whole on his own. He was terrified that, even now, he still believed Sirius could be good.
When Dumbledore left, Remus shattered. James was gone. Lily was gone. Peter had been gone for ages, dead or…worse. Sirius had been it for Remus. They hadn’t, of course, been doing particularly well the past few months. Remus’s secrets had been overwhelming their flat, choking out conversation and leaving nothing in their wake but rubble. Sirius was not really his; not any longer. But he still belonged to Sirius.
It was the worst kind of torture, really, for Remus to learn that Sirius’s betrayal changed nothing for him. Sirius had defined him for his entire life. Now, when Sirius had changed so fundamentally from what Remus had always known him to be, Remus simply drifted along with him. I belong to the man who killed my best friends, and orphaned their child, Remus thought, and knew it to be bitterly, awfully, irrevocably true.
When Dumbledore informed him that he had left Harry with the Dursleys, Remus didn’t protest. He was relieved, actually, that Harry would not be raised by a man who still loved his parents’ killer so wholly and completely.
1993
Sirius Black had escaped.
This was news to everyone except, of course, Sirius Black. Scouring the newspaper for any clue he could get his hands on about where Remus might have been hiding out, he got rather irritated at how much of the press his own story was taking up. He wasn’t quite sure exactly why he wanted to talk to Remus before going to the papers. Now that he was free, he could accomplish the only thing that he failed to do the first time around: keep everyone safe.
This required, however, some knowledge of Remus’s life (or, at least, that was what he was telling himself). If he was going to out Remus, he needed to ensure that Remus couldn’t just go off and change his name, or move to France, or something. He needed to give the Ministry Remus’s location before he made the move.
Yes, that was why he had found himself practicing his Full Body Bind curse, over and over again, wandlessly, hoping that the explosive power he remembered having as an Auror during the war would lend itself to casting just one wandless spell. It’s why he was connecting the rather unfortunately limp and tilted chimney on his safe house to the East London Floo network (not that anyone besides him would be able to access it, what with the ridiculously obscure floo address the house had). It’s why he was stealing a copy of the Daily Prophet every day as Padfoot, hoping to catch a glimpse of any information about someone who might know where Remus was hiding.
Day after day, Sirius bided his time. He was alone, except for the calm, ever-consistent presence of the waves.
Crash. Padfoot was whacked in the side with a briefcase. He whined, but stood his ground.
Crash. Sirius fell, weak from hunger and malnutrition. He awoke, hours later, seeing double.
Crash. A tree banged against the window of his safehouse, breaking it. Sirius didn’t notice, too busy talking to the waves.
“We miss you, you know,” they say to him. “You could always come back, to join us. It could even be real, this time. The drowning,”
As always, they sound like James.
“I’m coming, Prongs,” Sirius mutters. “Just give me a little more time. There’s something I still have to take care of.”
Soon, Sirius gave up on papers. If he had done what Remus must have, he would be lying low. With Voldemort out of commission, most all the former death eaters had gone back into hiding. He decided to start with Remus’s last known residence: their old flat. Sirius had trouble working up the courage to go—he spent an entire day as Padfoot running a crazy figure-eight between the door and the new amateur Floo Chimney Extraordinaire, deciding to leave one moment, and stay the next. He chalked his internal conflict up to Azkaban—in hell, there were no choices. Sirius was just…out of practice.
Finally, though, Sirius’s desire to move on from being trapped in one place won out. He spent a couple days loitering around his old apartment and casually avoiding the kebab cart a block away that he used to treat Remus to before full moons. To his surprise, as far as Padfoot could tell, no one occupied the flat any longer. It was a shame, Sirius thought. He had enjoyed living there. It had been a nice apartment, although at one point the cockroaches had gotten to be so numerous that Sirius could no longer claim to know each of them by name. This had been a problem for him, he remembered, because he’d grown fond of implying that they were all his personal pets.
Looking back, Sirius wasn’t exactly sure what about the flat had been so appealing to him—although after Azkaban, his memories of positive experiences anywhere were spotty at best. He tried not to dwell on the frivolous notion that it might have been the company.
Having gleaned all the information he could have from a stakeout, Sirius eventually resolved that there was really no other choice for him but to talk to the landlord. He remembered a skeevy, rat-faced sort of fellow with a greasy goatee who definitely wouldn’t have hesitated to spread any and all information he knew about his tenants, so Sirius figured it was at least worth a shot.
Before attempting gossip with a man who would surely tell anyone he ran into on the street if he realized he had spoken with Escaped Convict Sirius Black, Sirius sliced much of his greasy hair off with a piece of broken glass from the safehouse’s former window (read: current…air conditioning unit? It made the place breezier, that was for sure. Sirius had taken muggle studies, once upon a time. Apparently, the experience was painful enough that Azkaban hadn’t bothered trying to take it from him, so he felt fairly confident in this assessment). Padfoot dug around a few dumpsters and found an old pair of bright orange corduroy trousers, which Sirius rolled up in a way he thought might pass for somewhat fashionable, and a large black raincoat, which he buttoned despite the year’s unusually hot London fall in an effort to hide his tattoos. Finally, he finished the look with a ridiculously thin, hot pink scarf, which he slung around his neck carelessly before plodding in the general direction of his old landlord.
Upon entering his building, Sirius was hit with a wave of bitterness so powerful that it took him a moment to recover his plan. He didn’t recognize it at all. Azkaban had stolen this place from him. Immediately after this instinct, he realized that this was probably for the better. His happy memories with Remus were as true as the layers of paint on every surface in this godforsaken apartment building—just poor, temporary substitutes for a real solution to the cracks and damage underneath. Azkaban could have them; they were never supposed to have existed in the first place.
The building had barely changed, but Sirius was so thoroughly lost that he got turned around twice before finding the landlord’s office. He rapped on the doorframe, and the little, rat-faced man Sirius remembered (older, wider now, but no less dull-complexioned) glanced up. Sirius had only a small moment to catalogue that his disguise hadn’t really worked before the man was out of his seat with his wand in hand.
Sirius was faster, though. Azkaban had dulled his emotions, his perception, but it had sharpened his reflexes for danger and his instinct for self-preservation. Or maybe it hadn’t been Azkaban at all—maybe it had been the war, those years before everything went up in flames and Sirius still had something left to protect. He didn’t dwell on it. “Tentallagra!”
Cords shot up around the man. Sirius knew that this was a weak excuse for the Full Body Bind curse—there’s only so much one can do without a wand, after all—but the man was weak and scared. He struggled, but the cords seemed to be holding alright, so Sirius walked over and plucked the wand from the man’s hand. It was a short, drab little thing, and Sirius could feel that it didn’t really want to be wielded by anyone so explosive.
Sirius didn’t care—he won it, fair and square, and he desperately needed a way to overpower Remus before Remus could overpower him. He knew he couldn’t beat Remus in a duel, not anymore. Too many memories from Hogwarts were warped, split, cracked, or missing for him to have remembered all the proper spell work he would need for a genuine, face-to-face fight. But with a wand in his hand and surprise on his side, Sirius thought he could scare Remus into faltering just long enough for Sirius to strike.
The landlord looked beyond terrified. “P-Pl…Please,” he began, and Sirius was transported right back to Azkaban. Begging. Such a familiar sound, he mused. He heard waves at the back of his mind, heard James’s voice buzzing around his head like a fly.
“You’re acting like a common thug, Sirius,” James says. Crash.
Sirius, for the first time in many years, ignored him to focus on the task at hand. (He thought that this had been a common occurrence—himself, ignoring the voice of his prison. Once, he had known this James to be rather unlike the James he remembered. Now, he couldn’t remember enough of him to be sure.)
Sirius could barely keep the waves at bay long enough to focus on the conversation with his former landlord, so he was sure that, even without the whole ‘Full Body Bind’ business, he would have been making a rather strange impression. Crash. The landlord told him that his & Remus’s old flat was still being rented out—yes, under the same name—but hadn’t had occupants in more than a decade. Crash. Sirius tried not to think about what this might have meant but knew deep in his bones that Remus couldn’t be living up there. He just…couldn’t. The landlord would know about it, or Sirius would have seen something during his days watching the place.
Frankly, Sirius doesn’t have it in him to go check.
Sirius, newly wanded, hexed the man. He made a thousand threats he didn’t really mean. He begged, once. Finally, the landlord admitted that he’d been forwarding Remus’s mail.
Gotcha.
…
Remus’s new flat was tiny, dirty, and surrounded by weeds. Sirius didn’t notice any of this, of course, too busy trying to figure out how to get in while Remus was away. Later, he would look back on this first impression and wonder how he didn’t realize that Remus had been punishing himself, too.
Sirius discovered that Remus left his apartment exactly once daily, to retrieve a new stack of books from the library and a pack of cigarettes from the corner store. When Sirius had first seen him, it was all he could do not to jump out and do…something. What he would accomplish, confronting Remus in broad daylight, Sirius wasn’t sure—and this, of course, is the reason why he stayed put.
Remus looked different from how Sirius remembered him. This Remus was older, of course, and time had been rather unkind to him. He had a fair few streaks of gray through his normally russet hair—it was really more gray than auburn, honestly, and Sirius wondered idly whether his own had silvered similarly, or whether it was the strain of physical transformation that had done it for Remus. Remus walked with a slight limp, as well, and his skin was rather pale (probably, Sirius surmised, from all that time spent inside reading, instead of outside watching James’s quidditch practices or—later, after Sirius had lost him—howling at the moon).
The starkest transformation, however, made something deep inside Sirius clench unexpectedly. He tried to bury it, but he had been trying that trick his whole life, and it had never really succeeded (God, Sirius was a coward). Still as tall as he had ever been, Remus was now gaunt. His cheekbones, once full, jutted out of his face like the cliffs Sirius was so used to hearing his waves crash against, the ones that Azkaban sat perched atop of like some dreadful premonition. His sweater hung off of him in a way that rather reminded Sirius of a coat on a hook, and his fingers trailed off in a sort-of long, creepy way that Sirius thought made his hands look like spiders.
He was still heartachingly, breathtakingly beautiful.
Crash.
Sirius couldn’t look away.
Sirius watched the apartment for a week before he decided to act. Azkaban had taught him patience. Every day he spent waiting for his opportunity to escape was a day he spent loosing the parts of him that needed to act immediately, with all the explosive power of the lion he had been so set on becoming. Now, he was more like a panther, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
It came on a day where everything was completely usual. Remus left his dingy little flat at half noon, the same time he did every day. But he was gone longer than usual, this time, and Sirius thought he had probably meant to get groceries or something equally benign. He hated Remus for this; that he was allowed to go on getting groceries and chain-smoking and reading half the library while James and Lily sat cold and dead in their graves.
Sirius watched as a tall, muscular teen boy entered the building and slipped in after him. He climbed the stairs until he was looking at a row of off-white doors on the third floor. The numbers were painted in black ink, but parts of them had long-since rubbed away, so that 321 was sitting right beside 328, and Sirius wasn’t sure how to tell some of them apart.
It didn’t matter, though. Sirius just counted the doors down the odd side of the hallway until he got to what he had come for. 347. Such an innocuous little place for a murderer to live. “Alohomora,” he whispered, and watched as the door swung open, because of course it did. Remus hadn’t lived among wizards for years—apparently, he didn’t feel the need to charm his door shut. Sirius found this laughable, the idea that Remus hadn’t expected Sirius to come for him. Perhaps Remus, being as shut-in as he was, hadn’t yet heard of his escape. He hoped Remus had set up his floo.
Sirius stepped inside. The inside was even more dismal than the building’s exterior, and Sirius couldn’t ignore how it made a tiny, sleeping part of him shift a little in discomfort. Remus had clearly taken to smoking inside, and the whole place had a vague tinge of nicotine, making everything appear slightly yellowed with age. There was almost no furniture—just a sofa and an old TV box that looked like it had been bought secondhand several times, and Remus was just the latest in a chain of less-than-careful owners. The partial kitchen lacked a dishwasher, and Sirius could see dishes piled up in the sink.
He continued to wander further inside, stopping to examine the piles and piles of library books. Chemistry, history. Muggle, all of them. Other than the little jar of floo powder on the top of the fireplace, the whole flat was so unbearably muggle that Sirius could barely stand to be in it. Remus broke the wizarding world, and just, what? Abandoned it, afterwards? Sirius turned away in disgust and tried to focus on finding a suitable location to hide in until Remus returned.
Remus’s bedroom—if one could even call it that—was an even sorrier state of affairs. There was a rack for hanging things, but most of the hangers were empty. Sweaters, trousers, and books were strewn about the floor like they belonged there. There was a mattress tucked away in the corner that suggested irregular use at best, and more stacks of those godforsaken muggle books in every which direction. The only real piece of furniture was an ornate desk that looked strangely out of place in the otherwise lackluster living space. On it was a laptop, several paper cups of coffee (Sirius had seen a coffee machine in the kitchen. When they had lived together, Remus had made his coffee by hand each morning, carefully grinding the beans and placing them into a French press), and strangely, a single photograph. Sirius walks over and picks it up.
It’s a picture of Lily and James, their arms around one another like they hadn’t a care in the world. Sirius remembers this picture. He was the one who had taken it. He wasn’t sure why Azkaban had left that memory, but it didn’t matter anymore. Seeing that picture on the desk of the man who betrayed them soured any joy he might have gotten out of the memory anyways. He felt disgusted—with Remus, with the flat, with himself. He wished he could leave, could go curl up somewhere as Padfoot, and live out his days as a stray dog. As Padfoot, things were simpler. Padfoot didn’t know betrayal; he only knew hunger, and restlessness, and pain.
Suddenly, Sirius heard the click of a key in the door. He dove into the bathroom—a tiny room attached to Remus’s bedroom next to his desk—and held his breath as the front door swung open, and footsteps sounded inside the kitchen. Sirius heard the refrigerator door open, and then close, and the footsteps moved through the apartment before stopping vaguely near where Sirius remembered the sofa being.
Slowly, Sirius crept from the bathroom. Wand at the ready, he walked out into the living space, noticing the single bag of groceries on Remus’s kitchen counter. Remus’s back was to Sirius as he lounged uncomfortably on the small couch, his tall frame squishing in strange ways as he cracked open yet another book. He looked rather peaceful, all things considered. It was so very Moony that Sirius had to remind himself it had been a decade and a half since they had been in school with James and Peter.
He pushed back another wave of disgust-shame-anger-longing and replaced it with a cold, vicious fire. This man would answer for the things that he did. Sirius needed this—needed it like a dying man needed water. He had waited twelve years for this explanation, for this answer to the chorus of whywhywhy that had been banging (no, crashing) around in his skull. He needed to know what kind of person Remus truly was. What kind of person he had allowed to roam the wizarding world, free of consequence. Sirius needed to know what he had done.
He raised his wand.
“Tentallagra!”
…
Remus felt ropes bind him. He heard a rough, grainy male voice panting behind him. He turned his head—the only part of his body he could still move, he found with dismay—and met the eyes of a man he swore he would never think of again, the man who had stolen his heart and replaced it with lead, a dead, lifeless sort of stone that slowly poisoned him each day he spent with it weighing him down.
Sirius Orion Black.
…
Crash. Sirius met Remus’s eyes. They were grey, they were brown, they were green. They were everything, they always had been, and Sirius couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. He just crashed.
“Black,” Remus said, and there was a flat note behind his voice. Sirius looked up and saw Remus looking at him with a strangely polite expression. He wanted nothing more than to tear that look from Remus’s face and beg him to explain, to justify, to c r u m b l e.
“Moony,” he said instead, and watched as Remus’s face betrayed no recognition at the name. “You should be more careful about locking your doors the proper way. I hear Sirius Black’s escaped.”
Remus’s head lolled back onto the couch, eyes closing. He still looked as though nothing in the world could phase him. Maybe, Sirius thought, there was just nothing left inside him. “Just do it, Sirius. If you’ve come to finish me off, there really is no time like the present.” He chuckled a little, then; a cold, mirthless thing full of iron and barely contained rage. Sirius startled slightly. This thing in front of him could not be his Moony. His Moony loved, with everything he did, everything he was.
His Moony killed Lily. Killed James.
“You should know by now,” Sirius sighed, “that I haven’t got it in me.” It didn’t feel like a confession, but he saw Remus blink a couple of times, and wondered whether he really hadn’t known. Hadn’t understood why Sirius had confessed, all those years ago, laughing like a lunatic and crying like a little boy. All of a sudden, he felt the need to explain, to express his plan, to get Remus to understand that, if all had gone as it should have, Sirius wouldn’t have had to betray Lily and James’s memories. Wouldn’t have allowed a killer to roam so freely.
“I thought there would be a trial,” Sirius murmured haltingly. “I thought I could confess somewhere with an audience.” He paused to gauge Remus’s reaction. Remus’s eyebrows were furrowed, but Sirius couldn’t see beyond that infuriatingly polite mask. “I was going to tell them, see.”
“Tell them…that you killed Lily and James?” Remus asked slowly, like how one might talk to a child. Sirius had never felt the full force of Remus’s condescension before. It slid over him like oil. What right did Remus have to imply that it was somehow Sirius’s fault? Both of them knew what had really occurred that night. Both of them knew what it had cost him. What it had cost Lily and James—their memory. The truth.
“Sirius, we…” Remus took a breath, clearly attempting to compose himself. “We saw your confession. Dumbledore played it for the Wizengamot, I believe. There was no need for a trial—you pled guilty.”
“Yes, well,” Sirius muttered, “that was the plan, after all.” He practically spat the word ‘plan,’ hating the way it betrayed the premeditation of his weakness, his cowardice. “It just worked a little too well. If I had gotten a trial, I would have been able to keep everyone safe.”
“Safe from what, Sirius?” Remus barked. Then, finally, finally, raising his voice, he said “The only dangerous thing left in that house once Voldemort was done with it was you!”
“How dare you!” Sirius roared. Remus, for all his careful composure, had been rubbed raw. Sirius could see the utter pain on his face, and if he didn’t know what the man before him was capable of, in that moment, he would never have believed Remus didn’t still harbor some special consideration for Sirius’s feelings. “I gave everything to keep you safe. Everything. Look at me! Look me in the eyes, Remus. I can never forgive myself for what I did to them. To Lily, and Harry. To James. But at least I am honest about what I have done, how I failed to protect their memories—”
“Protect their memories?” Remus exploded. “You should have protected their lives.”
“I should have seen the signs,” Sirius whispered, horrified at Remus’s blunt disregard for his own transgression, his own betrayal. “I had months. But I always choose wrong. I chose wrong, Moony.”
Remus turned his head away from Sirius, but not before Sirius caught a glimpse of his eyes. For a split second, they were haunted, as if Remus had been the one to waste twelve years in Azkaban. Sirius had meant the words to hurt, for Remus to think that, if given the chance, Sirius would not choose to protect him again. It wasn’t true, of course. Despite everything, Sirius felt a pang in his chest he couldn’t fully explain.
Before he could blink, Remus’s eyes shuttered closed. When they reopened, they were clouded by an expressionless haze. “Twelve years and you can’t even come up with a proper apology?” Remus asked, with nothing in his voice at all.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Sirius intoned, his face flattening to hide his bone-deep disgust—not only at Remus, but also at himself, for falling for the werewolf’s charade. “I don’t know why I expected you to act any differently.” Sirius turned to go, hiding his face so that Remus couldn’t have any more of him than was already his. As he stepped into the floo, he heard Remus whispering, more to himself than Sirius and barely louder than the crackling of the flames,
“Neither do I.”