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Sirius parked the bike behind a brilliant strand of ash trees at the bottom of the hill.
"Tell me again why we're here?" he asked, shaking out his hair and looking up at the streaks of chalk that showed clearly though the dying grass.
"Because it's autumn," Remus said, with admirable patience, for maybe the hundredth time since waking. He stretched, fingers locked above his head, rising on his toes and breathing in deeply.
"We could still be in bed. It's bloody cold, Moony."
Remus pulled out a muffler that matched his own. If it were possible to wind a muffler sarcastically, that was what Remus did. "Never prepared for the weather, are you? There. Now you look all dressed for walking." He turned his back on Sirius and ducked through the hedgerow.
"Oi, Moony," Sirius yelled, and swore loudly as he followed.
The hill was more like a juvenile mountain, Sirius thought, and fell off the fence he was climbing into the sheep pasture. The fall was accompanied by a loud ripping sound, and he looked down to see a ragged gash across his knee through the new ventilation in Remus' jeans. He lay there, watching the sheep and bleeding, for a good two minutes before Remus came back for him.
"I could have died, and you'd have been no help at all," he said with a touch of the martyr.
Remus said nothing, just dropped down next to him and pointed his wand at Sirius' knee. He said the spell softly and the cut was gone, replaced by a thin red line.
"Think it'll scar?" Sirius asked hopefully. Remus gave him a significant look that he knew well. "Aren't I allowed to laze about with the sheep, then?"
"We're almost there," Remus said, and yanked him to his feet without a bit of sympathy. Sirius wrapped his arm around Remus' waist and discovered that if he exaggerated his limp he rubbed against Remus in a very nice way indeed. "Just up to that stone there." He handed Sirius carefully over the fence on the other side.
"Funny place for a rock," Sirius said. It was nearly twice his height and looked as if a giant hand had dropped it from the heavens to rest unnaturally on the top of the hill. "Suppose it's lost?"
Remus rubbed the sun-warmed curves of the rock and smiled. "My dad put this here."
Sirius boggled, just a little.
Remus looked around, down at the great golden wheels of hay in the far-below fields. "This is where I was bitten."
"Moony." The wind swirled around them, and there were no human sounds at all, only the nagging of the sheep and the cries of the blackbirds that circled the stubbly fields. The desolation was beautiful and terrible, and Sirius pictured the little boy he knew only from photographs sneaking out at night to climb in the light of the full moon. Oh, yes, he could see that happening easily.
"It's a… monument, of sorts." Remus moved around the stone to a place where it looked as if a large chuck had been sheared off, and rapped it with his wand. The surface shimmered and words floated to the surface.
Remus J. Lupin. Not Dead Yet.
Remus rubbed his palm across the words, fond and apologetic. "My dad had a rather warped sense of humour."
Sirius studied the depth to which the letters had been carved. "More like a lot of suppressed anger."
Beneath, dates started to appear:
1968. 1969. 1970. 1971. 1972.
1973. 1974. 1975. 1976. 1977.
1978.
"We came back here every year, on the anniversary. When I couldn't come, he came alone. And last year… I came alone." Remus directed his wand at the stone and frowned in concentration. He wrote slowly but neatly, and when he stepped back there was another year.
1979
"Why--?" Sirius realised that he didn't even know what he was asking. He shrugged, and repeated, "Why?"
Remus tapped a spot near the bottom. "Now, this we never showed my mother. But my dad and I always knew it was here."
Three words, deep and ragged, rage in the stone.
Fuck you all.
Sirius snorted and started to laugh.
"It gives me great comfort," Remus said gravely, despite the smile at the corners of his mouth, "to know that this is here." He slapped Sirius on the back, twice. "Breathe, Sirius, breathe."
Sirius pulled Remus into his arms and wiped his face on Remus' shirt despite protests. "Your dad was a subversive bastard." He nuzzled the side of Remus' face, found an earlobe to chew. Remus twisted, somehow getting both his cold hands under Sirius' shirt, making Sirius jump. "Fuck, Moony."
"Don't you want lunch first?" Remus murmured in his ear.
"I must be turning into an old person," Sirius said. "I cannot believe that I would ever prefer food to sex."
"Too much of one and not enough of the other," Remus said. "You'll have to climb, though." He pointed out a few useful projections, and then all of a sudden he was looking down at Sirius from a great height. "Think you can manage it?"
Sirius only fell once, and that not all the way to the bottom, which he considered a great success. Years of experience had taught him that in matters of escape, in running, climbing, and hiding, he would never match Remus Lupin, although he was getting good at keeping up. Especially when there was a reward promised.
He pushed himself up to the top of the rock, and Remus pressed a cup of hot black coffee into his hands. There was a red tablecloth, and spread out across it was a ridiculous amount of food. Bread, brown and black, and three kinds of cheese, and apples cut into wedges, and meat pasties, and persimmons, and sausages, and chocolate digestive biscuits. Sirius sighed with contentment and fell to.
They ate in companionable silence, only making occasional remarks like, "pass the mustard," or "if you're not going to eat that…." When Remus refused the last biscuit in favour of crunching into a persimmon, and the feast had been reduced to a lone cheese sarnie, Sirius lay back with his head in Remus' lap.
"No napping," Remus said firmly, and apologised as he wiped juice from Sirius' forehead.
"I wouldn't dream of napping, not when you can drool on me at whim," Sirius said, but closed his eyes anyway. "Do you think I'm a subversive bastard?"
Strong and slightly sticky fingers combed Sirius' hair back from his face. "Oh, definitely."
"Good." Sirius shifted, settling in with contentment. "Are you romancing me, Moony?"
"Might be." Remus fiddled a little with Sirius' muffler, straightening the knot. "Do you remember, after James' wedding, when we were all sitting around talking? There was something Peter said, do you remember?"
"I try not to remember what Peter says."
"This was important. He said, what's the point in getting married, any one of us could be dead tomorrow. And I thought, I still think, that he had it the wrong way around. If I might die tomorrow I want to know that I did everything I wanted to."
"No regrets?"
"No regrets, exactly." Remus sounded relieved. "So, then." He took a deep breath. "Sirius Padfoot Black, I love you and I love being with you. Will you marry me, or would you, if you could?"
Sirius' eyes flew open, and he rolled over and sat up. "Yes," he said hoarsely. He couldn't help smiling, not when all his insides had suddenly become carbonated. He leaned in to kiss Remus. "Yes," he said against Remus' mouth. His hands said yes as they pressed against Remus' back, drawing him near, and his body said yes as they lay back, tangling together with practiced ease beneath the cold high arch of autumn sky.
Later, they would watch the sun set, staining the golden world with rosy light; and still later they would watch the first stars appear, and the thin moon rise above the distant ocean. Later they would walk down the hill pressed together for warmth, preferring to share mufflers and pockets to warming spells. Still later they would be high above the sleeping world, dreaming of home and forever.
But for the longest time there was simply the word yes spoken again and again between them, on the red tablecloth, on the great stone at the top of the world.
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