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When Remus passes him the syrup at breakfast, Sirius realizes that this is finally it.
Finally, because he's been hogging the stuff while talking to bloody Longbottom about some Muggle Studies project, his hair pushed from his face and his sleeves rolled down to bare the white of his wrists; but also finally because Sirius has been waiting all this time – three moons — for this thing to get better or even acknowledged as a thing, and Remus couldn’t have not seen him, hanging about the side on his fucking knees in penance. And kneeling, even metaphorically, hurt. (Only sadists like Benjy Fenwick would ever want to be Catholics.)
"Thanks," Sirius mouths. His voice seems to be rebelling; it wants to shout or maybe howl. Padfoot is always better for this sort of moment, but since he can’t roll over onto his belly and bask, he takes the bottle.
"You're welcome."
His giddy hands slip, spilling syrup all over himself
-----
"So?" James says as Sirius trudges back down from changing his robes. He’s stretched out over the long couch where Sirius slept that first hellish week. He wonders if James’ back hurts in the same place as his had from the lumps.
James has gotten older, older than should be possible in three months, but then a lot of things that shouldn’t be possible have happened, haven't they? Sirius only noticed recently, when James had snarled and called him a stupid fucking cunt in the Library (after Remus ran out, after Sirius made an innocent joke about Snape, after Snivellus did act like a fucking coward in Defense class), but now he sees it each time he glances at his best friend. A different way he holds himself, maybe.
"So?" Sirius straddles an arm of the sofa, nudging away his feet.
"What did you do?"
"You saw the mess." He rubs at his eyes; his hands still smell sweet. "I had to change."
"No, what did you do to change his mind?"
Sirius blinks. "You noticed that?"
James nods, and Sirius begins to grin — you know how it goes, Black charm, gets them every time — but ends up shrugging. "I have no fucking clue."
James looks over, his glasses askew. "You don’t deserve it."
Sirius gnaws at a callous on the triangle of skin between his index and middle fingers, but finds no sugar on his flesh there. "I know," he says, and decides maybe James has earned that prefecture (Remus’s badge, but of course they weren’t going to let him keep it anymore, were they?) after all.
---
Remus pulls him into an abandoned classroom after History of Magic, tugging Sirius’s sleeve. Sirius slows purposely, just to make Remus pull him by the hand. (Remus lets go quickly, but then he didn’t expect much more.) James sees, but doesn’t comment; Peter passes by, chirping about gooseberry jam and meat pies.
"Why?" Sirius asks, slouching back against a rickety desk. They both know what he's asking. He’s never seen this room before, he thinks, though Remus obviously knew where it was. He blows at a dust bunny until his head spins, rather than think about what Remus might do in such a place without him, with some—Sirius scowls, then realizes he shouldn’t be giving off that impression.
Remus dangles his feet from his perch on the professor’s desk, patterning the dusty ground. "It didn't make sense," he says, toes jutting out to trace a shaky R.
Sirius’s chest catches. "I think it did."
"Maybe at first. But now, it just doesn't." He stubs out the letter with his sole. "All that anger — I don't like how it feels anymore, having it inside me."
Sirius swallows. "You know I didn't ever mean to." Coughing, he attempts to scrape away the rust in his voice.
"I know that." He looks up -- he looks at Sirius, and.
"Okay," Sirius says. His tongue clicks in a satisfying way as he says this, so he repeats it. "Okay." Okay, okay, okay, he staccatos in his mind, each repetition a little hammer knocking things back the way they should be.
"Okay," but for Remus, it's more of a sigh, a relaxation of his shoulders and a darkening of his eyes, a defeat.
He whispers "okay," again as Sirius stands, wavering in the space between before shuffling over; "okay," as he crouches down in the shifted dust; "okay," as his hand brushes up against Remus's.
"Good," Sirius whispers, entwining their fingers.
---
That night, James leaves for Prefect's duty twenty minutes early; Peter, after making a face that suggests he's just been kicked in the shins, follows. As they exit, James glares at Sirius, then looks pointedly to where Remus has been standing in front of the opened window for the last half hour.
Sirius sticks out his tongue.
After their footsteps fall off, Remus turns. His eyes are bright, his hair sticking up every which way from the wind, and he looks -- wild, Sirius thinks, even though he knows Remus wouldn't like that word. Beautiful, though maybe he might not like that one either.
"I want to show you something," he says, his lips red from the cold air. Sirius wonders whether they’d taste red, too.
Sirius wonders if he's allowed to wonder about those sorts of things again. He nods. "Yeah, sure."
Moving from the window, Remus comes towards him; Sirius stops breathing until Remus kneels at the foot of his bed. "Come here," and the hand that beckons wasn't necessary; Sirius is hugging his knees at Remus's side, looking carefully disinterested, in moments.
"I've been writing to you," Remus says, with a diffident little shrug. "All this time." His hands go to his trunk, pushing off the books and Chocolate Frog wrappers atop it.
"Oh," and Sirius wants to say, I know, I saw you curled over a desk the day after our Charms papers were due, remember? I asked if you wanted to borrow my ink, and I was really telling you I loved you, and you looked away and said I wasn't to try and ignore what I'd done?
Oh is enough, he thinks, for now.
Remus flips up the clasps — Muggle ones, Sirius sees, but reinforced with tiny, sand-grain markings even Evans wouldn't be able to break — and tugs up the chest lid.
"How many —" Sirius isn't sure he wants to know.
"Over fifty."
For a moment, the sheets of paper remain still, trembling as if embarrassed by the scrutiny. Sirius reaches out, but before he's halfway to touching them, a great gust of wind from the window kicks up and Remus gives a sharp, hurt cry as they begin to blow away.
Sirius curses, leaping forwards to slam the box shut again, but it's too late; the top papers have caught the wind and are flying through the dormitory, wheeling like white birds above their heads. He throws his arms up, pulling down sheets and hugging them against his chest, crisp edges catching his sweater.
Above the wind — Merlin, when had it gotten so bloody cold? — he hears Remus shout, and with a bang, the window slams shut. Robbed of the wind, the letters fall, bumping against the sides of their heads to settle on the furniture, birds come down to roost again.
"Well, then," Sirius says.
"How melodramatic." Remus snorts. He kneels, shepherding the sheets of paper into piles.
Sirius crouches beside him, watching his slender fingers work. Pages and pages of letters, each in that familiar script that Sirius knows so well — only instead of Arithmancy notes or Transfigurations asignments, it's his own name at the top of each page, repeated over and over again until his eyes can't even process the meaning anymore, the individual characters falling back into meaningless squiggles.
"Can I read them?" he asks.
Remus shakes his head.
"Why not?" He tries not to inflect the words.
"They're not meant to for you to read."
"But," Sirius eyes the pages, "they're all addressed to me."
"Not anymore." Remus's hands are pale and winter-looking as he pulls them away.
"You said you're not angry." Sirius shouldn't touch his shoulder. He does it anyway. "Aren't you?"
"No," Remus says, "I'm not." Sirius can feel the shifting muscles at the juncture of his shoulder when he sighs.
"Right." He meets Remus's eyes; something inside twists as Remus smiles. It's a wan smile, but Sirius will take it. Will take anything, really.
Sirius shifts his legs around to face Remus, and reaches for a stack of letters. "Here, let me put those away."
"No, Sirius, I —"
"I want to help." He forms his words firmly in his mouth, enunciating each sound. Keeping his eyes on Remus, he finds the brass clasps —
"Bugger!" He yanks his stinging hand back. The trunk sizzles in belated warning. "Bloody hell, Moons, you could've warned me!"
"Targeted anti-unlocking charm," Remus laughs, "stupid sod." taking his hand. He takes Sirius's hand, raises it to his mouth. Kisses the reddened tips of each finger.