Chapter Text
So many memories were taken from him. Sometimes they were taken in chronological order, sometimes they were taken in a random clump. By the time he escaped, he wasn’t sure how much he remembered of what he had lost. By that time, twelve years had passed, and he couldn’t know if the things that made him who he was were totally and completely gone. Or if he was nothing but a vessel for revenge. The first night of his freedom, he found an abandoned shack on the edge of a forest far from where he had swum ashore. It was one small dusty room, a door hanging off its hinges, an old cot under a broken window, old rags and Muggle papers strewn about the floor. He crept inside as a dog, sniffing for any other human scents. None, maybe for months. He changed back into his human body for the first time in freedom and rasped a protection charm so he could not be disturbed. It was weak—he could feel its edges even in his sorry, faded state—but it would hold for a few hours. He needed to recover some parts of himself, some pieces that he knew in some vague way were important to his identity beyond his reason for escape. He lay his tired, thin body on the cot, closed his eyes, and breathed, reaching deep within himself.
Soon, memories began to return. Some were flashes of feelings. Others were longer, dream-like narratives. They returned in chronological order from when he was twelve; the first times he had experienced joy. He was drowning, grasping towards the face of a lonely boy with scars on his hands and neck.
It was the second night of their second year at Hogwarts, and Sirius slipped through Remus’ closed bed curtains and straddled his stomach, shaking Remus’ thin shoulders.
“Lupin,” he whispered. “I can’t sleep.”
Remus opened his eyes slowly and groaned. “How is that my problem?” he replied, whispering too. He unearthed his arm from the heavy red quilt anyway and patted the mattress to his left.
Sirius scrambled off Remus and under the covers next to him, nudging his head onto Remus’ shoulder. “Thank you,” he said.
Remus pulled him in and Sirius cuddled close to his warmth. “Summer was bad?”
Sirius shut his eyes tight and nodded against the armpit of Remus’ white sleep shirt. “It was bad.” He felt Remus’ hand clutch his arm as if the confirmation was physically painful for him too.
“I wish you had different parents.”
“Me too.”
They were quiet. From the other side of the curtain, Peter’s snores cut through the air and James was mumbling in his sleep. Sirius and Remus had always been the bad sleepers.
“Sirius?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to be okay.” With Remus’ breath drifting over Sirius’ forehead and his heart beating under Sirius’ ear, in the darkness of the closed curtains, Sirius felt safe. “Bad” to Sirius and Remus meant something different than it did for Peter and James. Sirius didn’t know the details, but he and Remus had recognized unhappiness in each other almost from the moment they met. It was something in the dryness of Remus’ humor, in the cynicism of Sirius’ perspective on daily life in the castle. When Remus told Sirius it was going to be okay, it sounded different than when James said it. Sirius pressed tighter against Remus, feeling tears building against his resolve to be unbothered and brave.
“How do you know?” Sirius whispered so quietly, he wasn’t sure if he wanted Remus to hear the question.
Remus squeezed Sirius’ arm again. “Because when we’re older, you’re going to live on your own and you’ll never have to go back there,” Remus whispered back, just as quietly.
Sirius scooched his body up so his face was close to Remus’ on the pillow. Their noses almost touched. “Can I live with you when we’re older?” he breathed.
Something flickered in Remus’ eyes. Before Sirius really got to know him, he thought it was irritation, but now he understood it was something else, some fear or hesitation, a wall that flew up sometimes. Sirius took a deep breath and snaked his hand out from under the covers and very gently touched the thick, golden eyelashes on the top of Remus’ eyelids. Remus closed his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, so quietly that later Sirius wasn’t sure if he had dreamed it.
In late November, Sirius learned what that door in Remus’ eyes contained. His secret. He and James guessed, lining up the cycles of the moon they were learning about in Astronomy to Remus’ monthly disappearances. Being twelve was hard enough without being a werewolf, they figured, so they hadn’t planned on mentioning anything to Remus. It all came out during an argument, Sirius just spat it out—"We know why you leave once a month; you’re a werewolf!”—because he was tired of the lies. One month it was a sick aunt. Another it was a head cold. No one stayed overnight in the Hospital Wing for a head cold. Remus’ anger was incandescent. He didn’t speak to Sirius for weeks; his owls were ignored throughout Christmas break.
“But I don’t understand, you figured it out too!” Sirius wailed. He and James were sitting against a tree by the Lake, one day in January shortly after they returned to school. Sirius’ skin, pale to begin with, seemed translucent against the cold slate gray of the day.
James patted Sirius’ knee and, with his other hand, popped the gigantic pink Drooble’s bubble he had been working on for the past ten minutes as Sirius had complained. It made a loud splat on his face. “Yeah, but you’re the one who threw it in his face,” James said wisely, picking the gum off his cheeks. “You didn’t have to bring it up like that.”
Sirius crossed his arms over his chest. “Friends don’t lie,” he said. Lies were only for family, is what he didn’t say.
“Friends are also supposed to be kind to each other,” James said pointedly, raising his eyebrows at Sirius, who leaned back against the tree trunk, feeling small and ashamed.
“I know that,” he said. “I’ll apologize.”
James nodded. “Good. Now, you can help me think up a way to get Evans to be my partner in Potions this term.”
“Oi, I thought I was your partner?”
James just smiled as if he knew something Sirius didn’t.
By the end of third year, Remus and Sirius had fought and made up, fought and made up, so often that James stopped trying to help them work it out. Peter never got involved in their arguments, preferring to stay far from the blistering heat of Sirius’ anger and the cold blast of Remus’.
On the last night of school, Sirius was staring at the wood-paneled ceiling of the dormitory, willing time to slow down so he would never have to get on the train. He wished he could just stay there on the bed forever, following the swirls of the wood grain with his eyes, minute details that should have helped him fall asleep.
His bed curtains cracked open. “You okay?” Remus’ face peered through, his expression earnest but nervous. They had argued again that day, over nothing probably. Sirius couldn’t even remember how it had started, but by the end of the day, as they were all silently packing their trunks, Sirius had lobbed a green pair of socks at Remus’ head and the glare Remus had given him was bone-chilling.
Sirius looked at him, dead-eyed, then turned his head back to the ceiling. Remus clambered onto the tall bed and sat cross-legged, looking down at the long lump of Sirius’ body under the covers.
Remus put his hand on the knob of Sirius’ knee. “Please don’t hate me, Sirius,” he said quietly.
“I don’t hate you. You hate me,” Sirius said to the ceiling.
Remus sighed. “I could never hate you.”
“You’re doing a good job acting like it,” Sirius said, sniffing. He knew he sounded whiny. He didn’t care.
Remus lay down on the pillow next to Sirius, hands in a prayer under his cheek, his legs stretching out past the hump of Sirius’ toes under the covers. “I promise I won’t lie to you ever again,” Remus said.
Sirius snapped his head to look at Remus. That was it, wasn’t it, the reason they had been fighting all year. Sirius only realized it in that moment, but Remus had known that Sirius had been harboring that hurt. They locked eyes, light blue on deep hazel. “I won’t tell your secrets ever again,” Sirius whispered. “I’m really sorry.”
Remus shrugged a shoulder. “The truth is,” he said, “I’m glad you and James and Peter know. It feels…a little less lonely.” He tucked his upper lip under his lower in a thoughtful pout. He had grown this year, he was taller and his face was more pointed, his cheekbones more pronounced; he looked older to Sirius. Or maybe he just looked more like himself. Sirius looked at his lips, they were plush and pink. And so were his cheeks…But maybe he was just blushing. Sirius realized, too late, that the silence that had stretched between them had grown awkward, that he hadn’t responded to Remus’ confession.
“Well anyway, I just wanted to make sure we were okay before you go home,” Remus said. He began to push himself off the bed to leave, but Sirius grabbed his wrist.
“Thank you,” he said. He raised himself out of the covers and threw his arms around Remus’ neck, bringing his head close in, holding him tight. “I’ll miss you this summer,” he said into Remus’ ear.
Sirius came back to Hogwarts with a long silver scar running from across the inside of his wrist like a bracelet. “Look,” he said to Remus, “now we match.” He smiled a twisted grin. Remus traced the raised skin with a warm fingertip.
“Didn’t your mum want to fix it for you?” he said.
They were in the bathroom, washing up. On the other side of the door, James and Peter were having a pillow fight, amped up from the Welcome Feast. Their feet pounded the wood floor as Peter ran after James, whose whoops were loud and raucous.
“She’s the one who did it,” Sirius said, roughly pushing the sleeve of his pajama shirt down to his hand. He carefully squirted toothpaste onto his toothbrush, staring intently at the bristles. “I’ll get dittany from Madame Pomfrey tomorrow,” he said softly.
The bathroom door banged open and James, panting, flew in, his face red, his hair sweaty on his forehead. He turned to close the door, holding it fast, laughing as Peter banged on it with fists. “Not fair, James, not fair!” Peter called. He began kicking the door.
Remus rolled his eyes and shoved James away. “Don’t be a dick,” he said.
Peter fell through the doorway, pillows in both hands, and immediately set upon James, hitting him on the head over and over until he fell to his knees to the tiles. Peter straddled his torso, methodically smacking him with the pillows, left then right then left again. Sirius, mouth full of toothpaste, wheezed from laughter.
When Sirius couldn’t sleep, he snuck out of the dormitory under James’ Invisibility Cloak and walked the halls and grounds. He felt he needed that space to breathe, to inflate after a summer of compartmentalizing every piece of himself until he almost did not exist. With time and patience, on nighttime walks along the edge of the Forbidden Forest and around the Black Lake, on full moons, trailing Madame Pomfrey and Remus to the Willow, he turned himself inside out. Soon, Grimmauld Place was the thing he stuck in a box in his mind, not to open or look at. Soon, he forgot the specifics of summer days, the loneliness and sinister quiet, the dustiness and the murk. The fear. Prowling like a cat through the hallways of the house, doing his best to stay out of sight, even from Reg. Soon, he just walked through Hogwarts at night because he liked the peace and quiet.
One night, shortly after Christmas break—he had stayed at Hogwarts this year and the castle was crowded and loud again—he crept back into the dormitory and deposited the cloak in James’ trunk, closing it softly so he didn’t wake the others. He undressed and left his clothes in a pile on the floor, then unfurled the curtains. Remus was lying on top of the covers, arm behind his head, reading a Muggle book, his lit wand behind his ear and pointing towards the page. He looked up at Sirius and his gaze flickered between Sirius’ thin, pale chest and his startled face.
Sirius closed the curtains and got under the covers, shivering. “Are you okay?” he asked, pulling the covers up under his chin.
Remus put the book down on his stomach and unlit his wand. “Sorry for the intrusion,” Remus said.
Sirius stuck his arm out of the covers and punched Remus lightly. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
“You don’t come to my bed anymore,” he whispered. “When you’re upset.” Remus closed his eyes. Sirius wondered what it felt like to say those words, to be so earnest. Remus’ fear always turned to bravery, Sirius thought. It was the night before the full moon, and he knew Remus was in physical pain, that his feelings were heightened.
“I’ve been walking,” Sirius said. “All over the castle.” Remus’ eyes flew open and he turned to look at Sirius with a deep intensity.
“Why?” Remus said.
“I have been feeling…I don’t know. Claustrophobic.” Sirius squirmed under Remus’ gaze, nuzzling the blanket under his chin. He felt like he was under a microscope, like Remus was asking more than one question that Sirius couldn’t fathom.
“Oh.” Remus looked down. “I miss talking to you,” he said.
Sirius didn’t know what to say. They talked every day, but he knew what Remus meant. There was something about their conversations in the privacy of the bed, the quiet of night, away from the others that allowed them to be softer, maybe, more honest, then they could be in the daylight. Remus grimaced, clutching his stomach. The nausea, Sirius knew.
“Maybe you can come with me next time,” Sirius said, watching Remus’ chest as he breathed through the discomfort.
Remus nodded. “Okay,” he said. He started to lift himself up off the mattress.
“No, stay here,” Sirius said. “You don’t feel well.”
Remus grinned. He dropped his book on the floor next to the bed and lunged under the covers. Under the blankets and sheets, he kicked Sirius’ shin. “Goodnight.”
There was a Hogsmeade trip the weekend before Remus’ birthday. In the dormitory before Remus woke up, James, Sirius, and Peter raided Remus’ trunk, pulling on the heavy knit sweaters he often wore on weekends. James had used the Geminio Charm to replicate Remus’ gold wire-framed glasses the night before and handed the copies out to the others. In the bathroom, they toasted each other with a bubbling goblet of Polyjuice Potion, each containing a hair taken from Remus as he slept.
A few minutes later, three versions of Remus Lupin thrust open the real Remus’ bed curtains and screamed Happy Birthday into his terrified face.
Laughing, they all walked down to Hogsmeade, Sirius a few steps behind the others. He felt tall and gangly in Remus’ body, a little shy, a little overwhelmed. Under his school robes, he touched his/Remus’ stomach, feeling more broadness than he was used to in his own body. His legs were long, his feet bigger. The real Remus turned to see if Sirius okay. Sirius could tell it was him by the slightly skewed smile, the raised eyebrow both exasperated and concerned.
“Remind me how long this will go on?” the real Remus said, once they were all sitting in their usual booth at The Three Broomsticks, bottles of butterbeer in front of them.
James/Remus checked his watch. “Another ten minutes,” he said.
Remus rolled his eyes. “You put in a lot of effort for an hour-long prank.”
“It was worth it to see your face when we woke you up,” Peter/Remus laughed and Remus snorted butterbeer up his nose.
The four Remuses were attracting attention in the pub, just as they had in the Great Hall. Madame Rosmerta, the barkeeper, was pointing their booth out to all of the people she helped, cajoling them to send over rounds to celebrate Remus’ birthday. By the last five minutes of the Polyjuice, there were twenty bottles of butterbeer on the table, and as the boys turned back into themselves in fits and starts, they cheered. Sirius and James, back to themselves, threw off Remus’ glasses with a flourish and jumped up on the table.
“Thank you, thank you, kind Broomsticks patrons!” James yelled. “We are absolutely thrilled to celebrate the great Remus Lupin with four more rounds of libations.”
Sirius extended an arm out and bowed low, ignoring the prickle of self-consciousness he felt when he noticed his cousin Narcissa sitting with other Slytherins by the front window, watching him with narrowed eyes. “And the fun continues for all,” he shouted. He waved his wand and a rainbow of sweets from Honeydukes flew out of his and James’ pockets and through the air, falling over the crowd like confetti. “To Remus!” he called out. “To Remus!” everyone in the pub repeated, holding their hands out for candies.
James grabbed Sirius’ hand and they bowed three times as if giving a standing ovation, then they hopped off the table and slid back into the booth. Remus’ cheeks were red, but his eyes were happy and shining. “And for the actual birthday boy,” Pete said, pulling out a parcel from under his seat. “A cake!”
They had snuck into Hogsmeade at the last moon to pick up the candies and organize the cake with Rosmerta, who had placed it under their booth before they arrived. “This is too much,” Remus protested, after they sang the Happy Birthday song at the top of their lungs.
Across the booth, James and Peter protested loudly as they tucked into the chocolate ganache. Sirius squeezed Remus’ knee under the table. Remus pushed his leg closer to Sirius—was it involuntary?—and Sirius kept his hand on his leg until they left the pub. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but it felt right and it felt good and Remus’ leg didn’t move an inch.
Year Four began. They started the process of becoming animaguses. Sirius couldn’t stop watching Remus in class, during meals. On the sleepless nights, they sat in the Astronomy Tower and talked and smoked cigarettes, which Remus had started during the summer and shared with Sirius. Towards the middle of the year, Sirius caught Remus watching him too. He would say “what?” aggressively, to show him that he knew, to dare Remus to say whatever it was out loud. Remus would smirk and shake his head, nothing nothing. Sirius worried Remus knew something about Sirius that he himself did not let himself know. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before.
In that place, the fortress on an island in the middle of an angry and cold and violent ocean, Sirius would remember everything about the summer before he turned sixteen. But on his first night of freedom, the first day of Hogwarts returned, sharper than many of the others, perhaps because of its proximity to darker things.
He had shown up to Platform 9 ¾ in September of Year Five with a hollowed-out expression and three-inch long scars tracking neatly up along both arms from wrist to bicep. That was the summer his parents had slashed his body over and over again until even dittany would not heal the skin. Later, Sirius would learn that Regulus, who usually stayed out of it, had sent James a letter in August, warning him about the disfiguration.
He sat on the train staring out the window, Remus across from him, faintly scowling. James didn’t know what to do, he kept trying to engage Sirius in conversation about Quidditch. Peter sat in the opposite corner of the car, biting his lip and pretending to read a book, his eyes unmoving on the page. In a haze, Sirius heard Remus mutter something to James and Peter and then the car door open and close.
“Sirius,” Remus said. When he didn’t answer, Remus said his name again, louder, and snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. Sirius looked at him, surprised to see it was just the two of them in the car.
“What?” he said.
Remus’ eyebrows slanted with concern. “Sirius, what happened?” he said gently.
Sirius pursed his lips and shook his head. Remus leaned over and put his hands on Sirius’ knees. His hands were warm, steady, and large, and Sirius looked at them blankly.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “But I’m here.”
Sirius’ eyes filled with tears and he looked up, breathing in deep to keep them from falling. In flashes, his summer: the weekly meetings at Bellatrix and Rodolphus’ house, where a tall, thin man with a waxy face watched Pureblood families promise what they would do for him, increasingly desperate for favor; the way his parents looked at him when he told them he wouldn’t go anymore; the searing flash of fire pain on his arms, over and over and over until he passed out. The hatred in his mother’s eyes as his blood dripped from his limbs. He had never felt part of his family, not really, but that summer, he had felt their disdain more than usual. He had acted out: posters of Muggle women stuck to his wall, sneaking out to drink at Muggle clubs. But the punishment became too much to handle and he had spent most of the last two weeks in his bedroom, curled up in a corner.
Remus drew circles on Sirius’ right knee with his finger to bring him back to the present. Sirius stared at it, then gripped Remus’ hand tightly in his, knuckles white. Remus huffed in surprise. They looked at each other and Sirius watched Remus swallow, his throat constricting.
“Sirius, I—” Remus began, but the car door slammed open to James and Peter, a pile of sweets in their arms.
“We’ve brought lunch!” James shouted gleefully. His smile faded slightly as he saw them sitting nearly forehead to forehead, Remus’ hand clutched in Sirius’. “Are we alright?” he said uncertainly.
Sirius let go of Remus’ hand and nodded once, briefly. “All better,” he said.
In the shack, lying on his back in his ragged prison robe on the moth-eaten cot under the rotted wood window, he opened his eyes. The sky was lightening. The memory recovery had grounded him: he forced himself to look at his human body. His right hand, bones jutting out of skin, was clenched, holding tightly onto nothing. His left hand hung off the cot as if separate from his arm. With effort, he pulled his arm up over his face and let the robe fall to his shoulder so he could look at his skin. Faint scars in a line from wrist to elbow, some covered by black ink that looked like smudged nothing to him in this state. Would he one day remember what these tattoos had meant? He let his arm fall. His legs were stick-thin and his ankles were crossed, a betrayal of comfort. What was this body? He couldn’t understand how it had turned into this. His throat felt sandpapery dry. The boy of his memory-dreams was strong, vital, beautiful. Had it really been him?
He groaned a guttural moan as he sat up and looked around. Thick, layered spiderwebs were strung like decorations across the rafters of the small room. A rusty, empty mousetrap was overturned on the floor by the decrepit door. He remembered why he was there.
He shook his head and was a dog again. And as a dog, he had no memories that mattered, only this: he’s at Hogwarts.