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“I suppose I’d like to know… what he was like, before. Before Azkaban. Or in school, or… anything.” Harry crossed his arms over the stone railing, trying to see the bottom of the water it stretched over. There was a heavy mist in the air, and he shivered in his thin jacket. Beside him, Professor Lu… Remus, stood like a brown smudge in the grey day, his frown tugging at the scar on his cheek. He seemed as uncomfortable being called by his first name as he was being called by his last, but had insisted that Remus was fine, Harry, really. ‘Moony’ was out of the question, even though Sirius still called him that sometimes. Harry had tried it once and Remus had flinched so badly he dropped his tea, an expression on his face like he’d seen a ghost.
“Well,” Remus said finally, “He… do you mind if I smoke?” Harry shrugged, and Remus ruffled in his coat for a carton of cigarettes. They were a cheap brand that Harry recognized — menthols. Aunt Petunia used to smoke them in the back garden, just one at a time, and crumple up the whole carton afterwards. Harry thought probably his uncle and cousin didn’t know, and that’s why he would find them tucked neatly into the rubbish already out on the kerb, a full pack but for one. Remus put a cigarette to his mouth and lit it with a snap of his fingers. At Harry’s expression, he smiled a bit. “It’s not very impressive, really, as far as wandless magic goes. It’s really only good for lighting cigarettes — Sirius figured it out in fifth year. Naturally, we were all smoking.” The tiny burst of flame cast his face in light, making him look years younger.
Harry had been shocked to learn that Remus was only in his thirties. He moved like an old man. His face looked like a war zone. It wasn’t that he was bad looking, just… hurt looking. Mr. Weasley sometimes got that look on his face too, and Sirius wore it almost all the time. Like something terrible had happened, was happening, or would happen again.
Remus took a drag of his cigarette that seemed to last forever, then flicked the ash over the railing with a wry expression. He turned to Harry again. “Well. To answer your question, Sirius was a lot like your father. Though I think your father was less of a bastard, to tell you the truth.”
It startled a smile out of Harry, and Remus smiled back, the expression skittering over his face almost too fast to catch.
“Imagine… oh, I don’t know. Do kids listen to Queen these days? Do you know who Freddie Mercury is? Marc Bolan?”
Harry shrugged. “Kind of?”
“Imagine a rock star, is what I’m saying. Charismatic, you know. Charming, talented, arrogant, a bit mad. All the stops. Now imagine you share a bathroom with him, and he takes an hour in there every bloody morning doing his hair.”
It was so completely the opposite of what Harry had expected him to say that he burst into a laugh, then said “Sorry,” since he wasn’t sure if it was a laughing matter.
“No, you can laugh. It’s funny. He was funny. Wicked sense of humor, nasty as anything. Which suited me just fine. James, he didn’t go in for that as much. He preferred things light, preferred… you know. Harmless fun. Or what he thought was harmless fun, which very often wasn’t.” Remus looked wistful for a second, or rather, more wistful than he usually looked. “We were all bastards, you know. We were pigs. I think you’re old enough to understand what kind of boys we were, Harry, and I think I can say with confidence that you’re more mature at your age than we were at twenty. But Sirius took the cake. He was just as funny, just as clever, just as charming as James, but James always felt bad about it when he was being a pig. Sirius never felt bad about it. Sirius thought it was funny that you felt bad about it.”
Remus was staring somewhere Harry couldn’t see. He flicked the end of his cigarette, a little crumble of ash trickling onto the stone railing. “I don’t mean to speak badly of your godfather, Harry. That’s not…” he shook his head, once, very quickly. “I don’t say these things because I didn’t like him. I liked him very much. I… I do like him very much.” He let out an unfunny little laugh. “I don’t know why I’m talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive.”
Harry didn’t say anything. It didn’t feel like the kind of thing he should interrupt.
“And these are things you’ve observed too, I imagine. He has a temper. He has a sense of humor that tends towards the grisly. And he can be cruel. I’m not saying this because… Harry, I liked that about him. I still do. He bit Evan Rosier once, at school, did you know? When they got in a fight over… oh, something to do with Regulus, I’m sure. Bit him! Like a dog!” He was smiling at the memory, and turned to Harry, who smiled in return.
“Wait, as a person?” Harry said.
“Oh, this was third year. He wasn’t even an Animagus yet, there was absolutely no excuse.” Harry laughed, and Remus shook his head, still with that fond expression playing across his face. “You have to remember, I was this… nervous, bookish, timid thing who was so convinced I was a monster, and here comes Sirius Black, and James too, I suppose, but you asked about Sirius — looking like all the pureblood fathers come at once, with that poncy accent he used to have and that leather jacket he stole even though he had the money for it, going around biting people. And he wanted to be friends with me! Thought I was the smartest bloke in the world, always wanted to know what I thought, never flinched at how bad I got with, well, you know. I would have forgiven him anything. Did forgive him anything.”
Remus stubbed out his cigarette. “It was like that for most people. Everyone loved Sirius Black. Didn’t matter what he did. He was the most brilliant thing in the world — you always wanted to be right next to him.” After a thoughtful pause, Remus added, “I think nearly every witch in our year got her heart broken at least once. He really was quite terrible about it.”
Wait. Harry felt like he’d fallen into a trick step on one of the moving staircases. “What?” he said.
“Marlene at least twice, though that was more of a complicated friendship than a true relationship, if I had to guess. More Hufflepuff girls than I knew the full extent of. Never Lily, though,” Professor Lupin said quickly. “Your mother was very sensible — knew a bad idea when she saw one, she did.” He frowned. “Or perhaps she didn’t. She did marry your father. Either way… I shouldn’t say any more.” He cut a quick glance over to Harry, the assessing look of an older relative trying to determine what family gossip was age appropriate.
Harry was still stuck on ‘girls.’ The last time he had seen Sirius, his godfather had been in a shouting match with a painting, looking much better than he had while living on the run, wearing no shirt, suit trousers, and an odd-looking leather duster with a fur collar that Harry assumed was an heirloom since he couldn’t imagine it being made in the last century. It was true that wizards wore all sorts of strange things. He didn’t think this was a sufficient explanation for the hair, or the high-heeled boots, or the earrings. Sometimes, being around Sirius, Harry liked to imagine inviting him over to the Dursleys’ for supper. It was a mental image that had brought him much joy in recent months.
Which was all to say, Harry had sort of assumed Sirius was what his aunt would have called an “unabashed homosexual.”
Remus had said Freddie Mercury, right? Harry wasn’t misremembering?
His confusion must have been visible, because after a moment Remus said, “Harry?”
“Oh. Sorry. I just… always assumed he was gay?” He could be bisexual, he supposed. It would be sort of hypocritical of Harry to rule it out.
Remus’ second cigarette hung unattended in his hand. He looked dumbstruck. After a second, he said rather nervously, “What on earth makes you say that?”
Harry felt this was all rather apparent. Professor Lupin didn’t strike him as particularly oblivious, but it was possible there was an angle he wasn’t considering. Certainly his tone when talking about Sirius had been idyllic — maybe there was a mental block there. Obviously he’d been different in school, but flamboyant personal style didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d develop in a decade-long prison term. Certainly Sirius took joy in it. And he’d always seemed to Harry to be one of those people who possessed very little guile and even less discretion. Whatever he was, it was difficult to imagine him hiding it.
After a second, Harry simply said, “He wears brocade trousers.”
“That — lots of men wear brocade trousers.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Remus' face was doing something odd. His skin was usually very pale, almost sallow, but was now rapidly approaching a healthy ruddiness. “It was the seventies, Harry, we were all wearing… Merlin, fur coats and flared jeans and…” Remus trailed off and made a loose, flapping gesture with his free hand that Harry assumed was meant to convey sexual ambiguity. “We all looked like a bunch of poofs already, it…”
“I don’t think you can say that, Professor,” Harry said. He was too baffled by the conversation to be truly offended, but remembered somewhere in the back of his mind that he ought to be.
“Of course I can say it, I was—” Remus cut off very suddenly and closed his mouth, leaving only an incriminating silence hanging in the air afterwards. He was making an interesting face, like he’d stubbed his toe and was trying to be brave about it.
Harry made a face to match. He felt like he and Professor Lupin were back on the Hogwarts express, except it was only the two of them, and they were at the front of the train, and the train was hurtling into a cliffside. The hypothetical was only marginally more pleasant than the dementors. “You were… what?”
Professor Lupin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his rather large nose with the two fingers that were not holding a cigarette. It had burned down, unsmoked, about a centimeter — he seemed to have forgotten about it. “God. Merlin. Christ fucking damn it all.”
“Alright, professor?”
A deep sigh. “My apologies, Harry. What I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to dance around for the past few minutes is that. Well. Me and Sirius, or rather, Sirius and I, yes, let’s try to use the correct pronoun for the subject of a sentence—"
“Wait, were you…” Remus’ previous comments fell into place with earthshattering clarity. “Oh God. You were. You two were shagging.”
Professor Lupin made a mortified noise that at a previous time would have indicated that somewhere, somehow, Crookshanks was getting his tail stepped on. Harry didn’t have a response — he was too busy replaying everything Remus and Sirius had ever said about each other, a neverending cascade of winsome stories and meaningful chuckles and extremely suspicious dog jokes. Mrs. Weasley’s smug raised eyebrow at some comment of Hermione’s about Professor Lupin not having a wife, or the way they always seemed to be deployed as a unit on Order business, or the strange silences whenever they were in rooms together. To say it was obvious was untrue — it was not obvious. But it was apparent. Once you had seen it, you felt very foolish for not noticing earlier. Or at least, Harry did. He didn’t see much of Remus these days, but he tried to talk to Sirius every week, and Sirius was a forthcoming creature. He overflowed with wild tales of adolescent exploits, the adventures of James Potter and his band of merry men, storybook characters from a golden age of mischief. Surely he could not have left out something so crucial.
But then, he also didn’t talk about Peter Pettigrew at all, though he must have been there. He rarely talked about his brother, though he must have attended Hogwarts at the same time. Very little mention of his family, though Harry knew they had been truly, spectacularly awful.
…Maybe he had misjudged Sirius. It turned out he possessed quite a bit of discretion, if what he was being discrete with were things that he didn’t want to talk about.
He realized he had been silent an uncomfortably long time. “Well,” he said flatly. “Um. Good for you? I’m glad you’re… happy together?”
“We’re not,” Remus said tonelessly. His cigarette dribbled ash on the railing. “Together, I mean. Anymore.”
“Oh.” Harry fiddled with a loose string on his jumper. “Um. Sorry to hear that. Why… not?”
Remus turned to look at him, an unexpectedly pained look on his face. It made his scar look worse, the one that cut across his jaw stretching awkwardly across the skin as it pulled toward the nose. He said, “Oh, you know, twelve years of bad blood, mistakes, betrayal, murder charges.” He laughed once, sharply. “Never mind we were both bastards in the first place! No, of course not, I’m sure we can work it out, settle down in Grimmauld Place, redecorate Sirius’ dead brother’s room, ignore the house elf heads and ongoing domestic terrorism. What a grand idea.” He shook his head, hair flopping in his face. “No. We’re not together.” He seemed to remember he had a cigarette in his hand, and seeing it had burned down to the filter, tossed it off the bridge.
Somehow this was the most shocking part of the outburst. Harry had never seen an adult he respected litter so outrageously and with so little remorse. He wasn’t sure Professor Lupin had realized he’d done it.
After a moment, Remus shook his head, letting out a wounded sort of sigh, the kind that very old dogs make when settling down to sleep. “I’m sorry once again, Harry. I’m being very unpleasant. It’s not really you I’m arguing with, as I’m sure you can tell.” He gave Harry a ghastly, weak little smile.
This was quickly shaping up to be one of the more confusing conversations of Harry’s life. Was it sad? Was it funny? Was it sad and funny at the same time? Harry wished he had something to say, something to get Remus off the topic. He didn’t want him to be upset, and from the look on his face, this discussion was very upsetting. “Well, thanks. Or… sorry that happened?” He wasn’t sure what to do. A terrible thought was occurring to him that he might have to have this conversation all over again with Sirius.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. It’s not as if it’s a secret. It was just difficult to find a reason to bring it up, since it was so long ago, and it didn’t seem relevant, really, and…”
“It’s alright. I mean, I don’t blame you, I was just, um. Confused.”
“I suppose if you have any… er, questions, I could—”
“I don’t have any questions,” Harry said very quickly. “I mean, I’m gay too, so.”
“You’re… what?”
“Well, bisexual I guess. I don’t know, I haven’t had much time to think about it.” Since a murderous evil wizard tries to kill me every year.
“Oh!” Remus said.
Something extremely strange was happening on his face. He looked happy. The expression did not seem correct on his features, like the skin had to move in directions it wasn’t used to. His eyes got very wide, and for the first time Harry noticed they were an unusual shade, a clear, light brown.
He sounded genuinely delighted. It was sort of freaking Harry out.
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Harry. Congratulations. How exciting.” Professor Lupin was very tall, Harry was realizing, as he straightened from his typical slouch and seemed to actually, meaningfully perk up for the first time since Harry had met him. “Thank you for telling me. I mean that. I’m so glad that you can— that you can be who you are, that you’re comfortable telling people, that—” He started to speak again, but to Harry’s horror, he seemed to be unable to continue, clearing his throat several times before saying wetly, “Your parents would be very proud of you, you know.”
Harry nodded once, now feeling both magnificently awkward and on the verge of tears. “Thanks. Um. You too.” Oh God, not an acceptable situation to say you too. Harry floundered for a bit, then said, “I mean, not your parents, um. My parents?” Merlin, he was absolute pants at this.
Remus snorted, still wiping his eyes surreptitiously. “Hardly. James was very weary of Sirius and I by the end of it, I’m afraid. And Lily, needless to say, thought we were both wankers.”
Harry nodded silently, blinking away the lingering sting. “For what it’s worth, I think he misses you,” he said, then regretted. “I just mean—"
“I know what you mean,” Remus said. He was looking back over the water once more, a worryingly misty look in his eyes like he might start crying again later.
“Just, as a friend. He talks about you all the time. And I think he gets lonely in that house.” Harry shuffled his feet guiltily. “I’m not saying get back together or anything. I just think he’d appreciate a visit.”
Remus turned to look at him, tapping absently on the stone, cigaretteless. A small smile lingered on his face, and he opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
“What?” Harry said.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”
Harry tensed. Remus was regarding him thoughtfully in the way people did when they were about to tell him how much like his father he was.
Remus didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “You really are smarter than we were, you know. If we’d had you instead of Prongs we probably would have beaten You-Know-Who the first time around.”
Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He said, “Thanks.”