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On Valentine’s Day their last year at Hogwarts, Sirius gave Remus an envelope that was slightly bent at one corner. The defiantly pink wax seal was in the shape of an especially luscious set of lips.
“Charming,” James said.
“Thanks, yes, it is,” Sirius said, undeterred. Sirius took more censure as a form of applause. He sat down on the opposite end of Remus’s bed. “I’ve invented a new spell, one with a good chance of changing the world, and instead of publicizing it, I’ve given it to you for Valentine’s Day. What did you give me? Chocolates.”
“You like chocolates,” Remus said absently, tilting the envelope back and forth to examine it. The last time Sirius had given him something like this, it had singed his eyebrows off: it didn’t do to go rushing into things.
“Chocolates never changed the world.”
James, who was religious about chocolate, threw a pillow at Sirius’s head in objection and then went back to crafting his elaborate plan. James specialized in elaborate plans which mostly all had the same point—sneaking out to meet Lily and thereby “defy the British boarding school tradition that lets you two go at it all the time.” Remus sympathized, but didn’t understand why so many of James’s plans had to involve costumes and arson.
“Do I open it?” Remus said. “I thought you fancied my eyebrows.”
“Your eyebrows are rather fanciable, and you can’t open it. How’s your Latin?”
“Abysmal. Not as bad as yours.”
“There’s a Roman bloke, Catullus, who wrote about snogging a lesbian, or something like that, and anyway, he said da mi basia mille, give me a thousand kisses, and I spelled it. Ensorceled it. Made it into a thingy.” He pushed the envelope up towards Remus’s mouth. “Say the Latin part and kiss it.”
“If this turns out to be some elaborate ploy to get me to snog a piece of wax—oh, fine. Da mi basia mille, and stop looking at me like that.” He pressed his lips to the seal, which felt strangely warm, and—oh. Oh.
It wasn’t like anything he had ever felt before. It wasn’t even like really kissing Sirius, except it was kissing Sirius.
It was like—once they’d all gone out walking through the grounds even though there was an impenetrable heap of snow on the ground, and Sirius had kept saying impenetrable in a lascivious voice, and everyone had forgotten their scarves, and the number their fingers got, the harder it was to cast the necessary spells to warm themselves up. They’d shivered snowflakes off themselves for hours once they’d gotten back home. Sirius’s hair had been frosted white and he’d looked at Remus and smiled, the most beautiful thing Remus had ever seen, and he’d said, “Now you remember what it’s like to be warm again, don’t you, Moony?”
He had cupped Remus’s face in his burning-cold hands and kissed him full on the mouth in front of everyone: their first kiss.
And Remus had just gotten it a second time from an envelope.
He pulled away dizzily. “Compressed memory? How--?”
“I just kissed a bit of wax a thousand times,” Sirius said with a shrug. “I suppose the context’s up to you. That’s why they call it magic, Moony.”
James was looking over now with a bit of interest. “How did you do it?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“Oh, never mind,” said James, who was sometimes so easygoing that he might as well have been in a coma. “I don’t know why he needs a seal to kiss him anyway when you’re here all the time. It’s like wanking off with your date in the other room.”
“He has a point, you know,” Remus said. He hadn’t yet taken his fingers away from the still-warm seal, but all things considered, he’d have rather had Sirius than an envelope.
“There are always holidays,” Sirius said primly. “And times away. You never know when you might be missing me.”
*
Remus tucked the envelope away in a corner of his trunk and forgot about it until a few years later, when he tore the flat apart looking for it and, when he found it, drove it into his lips. “Da mi basia mille,” he said, or growled, or sobbed, and just like that, Sirius was pushing his hair out of his eyes. They were in Venice, in July, and Sirius tasted like pistachio gelato; they had never been to Venice, not together, but Remus had looked at pictures of Sirius enthusiastically waving beside a variety of canals. He had tasted pistachio gelato: that smoky combination of salt and sugar.
It went away too quickly. He used up a dozen more kisses that night, feeling foolish and terrible for loving Sirius despite everything, for wanting this dream, this set of wax lips, even with James and Lily dead and Harry orphaned—but it was nothing. It was Latin poetry. It was loneliness pressed into wax.
Wanking, James had called it, and he’d not been wrong, but now, it was all Remus had: a set of fantasies and the ability to play pretend. And Sirius’s love for him. Surely he didn’t have to make that meaningless now. Surely one could be a monster and still love.
One thousand kisses. It must have taken some time.
The last one that night was the two of them old together, gray-haired and long-bearded, like every old wizard they’d ever seen in portraits, and it was a chaste peck as Sirius slid out of bed in the morning, knees creaking and popping like chestnuts over a fire. That Remus, the older one, said, “It’s the cold that does that, you know,” and as Remus woke again, he said to himself, “You’re remembering what it’s like to be warm again.”
*
He doled the kisses out sparingly over the next thirteen years, or he tried to. Sometimes he would keep the envelope in a locked desk drawer for months, but then he would hear Sirius whisper to him, and he wouldn’t be able to stand it any longer. He was getting older. A more sensible man would burn the damn thing and find someone free, someone he could love without regret. Someone who hadn’t murdered half his heart and frozen the rest of it.
But then he would say, “Da mi basia mille,” and it would be Christmas, and Sirius would have mistletoe.
“Da mi basia mille,” and they would be in a striped tent that smelled of a carnival—elephant dung and sawdust and frying oil—and Sirius would be holding up a set of colored silk scarves and asking if he wanted to see a magic trick. “I have nothing,” he said, “nothing in the scarves, nothing at all,” and then he would loop them over Remus’s wrists and pull him close. “And now I have Remus Lupin.”
“Abracadabra,” Remus would say. “It’s Muggle magic.”
“There are worse things in the world,” Sirius would say, and then, “But you’re the best thing, Remus. You’re always the best thing,” and he would kiss him as the barkers started their calls in the distance, asking for feats of strength, for derring-do, for nights of love out among the swans. Remus would think, We should take a swan, and then the world would dissolve into cold wax against his tongue.
*
When Sirius—gaunt, sharpened, exhausted, stripped away—came back to him, Remus had two kisses left on the envelope. Thirteen years, nine hundred ninety-eight kisses, or nine hundred ninety-seven if he remembered the kiss from the night Sirius had first given it to him. He tried to think how many kisses he would have had—they would have had—if their lives had gone differently, but the arithmetic fell away from him. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Alone for the first time in over a decade, he skimmed his fingers over every inch of Sirius, and thought, I’ll take you to Venice, then, and the circus, and Barbados. I’ll find mistletoe at Christmas and champagne at New Year’s, and I’ll remember you, and you’ll remember what it’s like to be warm again.
Sirius said, “I’m not what I was.”
“None of us are what we were. I’m not. Do you know how many jobs I’ve been sacked from? I suppose we thought we’d amount to something, but no—an Azkaban escapee and a failed schoolteacher werewolf. I hope you don’t plan on a school reunion. We'll both be horribly ashamed of ourselves.”
But Sirius after Azkaban was as undeterred as Sirius at seventeen: “I’m not what you deserve.”
“I’m not what you deserve either.” Sirius deserved someone who never lost faith in him, or who, failing that, lost faith in him but didn’t keep after the sculpted wax of his phantom kisses, someone with either more faith or more strength, when Remus hadn’t had enough of either. “You’re all I want, though. You’ve always been all I want.”
“You must have forgotten me sometimes.”
“No,” Remus said. “Not that. Never that.”
And he went for the drawer, unlocked it, and brought the envelope back. “Da mi basia mille,” he whispered to it, and lightly touched it to his lips. Sirius—the other Sirius—was in a hallway with him, a hallway in the center of a labyrinth. He pressed Remus against the wall and kissed him thoroughly. This time he was much older, his eyes darker, his face more haggard: his Sirius, still. Always.
When he took the envelope away, Sirius was looking at him, eyes wide. “You kept it. I always thought—I always imagined you losing it.”
Remus said, “There’s only one left, now,” and swiftly, he said the words again, and this time moved the seal to Sirius’s mouth instead of his own.
It was a gap of about twenty seconds before Sirius, breathing hard, took it down in trembling hands.
“Was it you?” He was honestly curious: it had been an uncalculated gesture with no certain result aside from discomfiting Sirius and possibly reassuring him that the kisses were as far gone as they were, as if Sirius’s kiss would have the strange feel of licking the last of the jam from the bottom of the jar. The slide of sweetness against slick nothingness.
Sirius nodded. “Kissed myself. Is that—is that how you see me? How I am there?”
“Where? What were you like?”
“Venice. Pistachios. It was raining, just pissing down rain, and hot, like there’d be steam coming up from the cobblestones.”
Remus smiled. “One of my favorites.”
Sirius sat very still, as if he were clockwork that had wound down for good, and then, licking his lips a few times, he said, “It’ll open now,” and he split the seal away from the paper easily, with one thumbnail, and gave what was left of their first Valentine’s Day to Remus.
Inside was a cheap mass-produced card gone yellow with years. A wolf was howling at a silver-glitter moon with a red velvet heart sticker at the center of it. On the inside, it said, in garish letters, I’M OVER THE MOOOOOON FOR YOU. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
Love, Sirius.
Remus blinked at it.
“I was seventeen,” Sirius said defensively. “Anyway, it’s still funny.”
“I love you,” Remus said. He looked at the card and considered how happy he was, still, that Sirius was with him. “I must. But this is a nightmare.”
He threw it away from them, where it bounced off the side of the bin, because he’d been shit at sports in school and wasn’t any better now.
“That was all you had of me for years,” Sirius said, looking after it. “That was—”
“That was wanking,” Remus said. “This is real. This is us. You’re here, and I don’t need anymore fucking memories or fantasies or anything but you, ever. Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,” everything he had committed to heart so long ago that the memory of the words had outlasted the memory of the circumstances. He didn’t need it, anyway. He didn’t even need all the words.
“Da mi basia mille,” he said again. Give me a thousand kisses.
Sirius pulled him down. He tasted like Remus’s discount variety tea and smoke and liquor; his mouth was hard and his lips were chapped. He’d forgotten techniques he’d known verbatim at fifteen, and it was sloppy and brutal and wet, hard, too much tongue and too much teeth at the wrong places and in the wrong moments. It was nothing like magic at all and for that, Remus loved it, kissed harder into it, thought of all the time it would take for both of them to relearn how to do this with each other. He thought of years. It was the best kiss, his favorite kiss, and he wanted others to compare it to, to cheapen it, to strengthen it, to top it, to topple beneath it.
He tugged at Sirius’s clothing, seams sliding crooked underneath his fingers, and remembered what it was like to be warm.
“A down payment,” Sirius said finally. “On the thousand.”
Remus said, “Don’t stop.” They owed each other such a lot.
Vivemus, atque amemus. Let us live, and let us love.