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The hospital wing had never been meant to hold this many beds.
Remus counted them without meaning to. Seventeen. Eighteen, if he counted the boy near the door who kept insisting he didn't need to lie down and then kept fainting anyway, every few minutes, as if his body were arguing with him about it.
He stood in the doorway longer than he needed to before he let himself walk toward the cot in the far corner. The last time he'd seen Sirius Black lying still like that, it had been fourteen years ago, and some part of him still hadn't recovered from it.
He's alive. You watched them stabilise him.
It didn't help as much as he wanted it to.
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Sirius had gone through the veil.
Remus kept catching on that fact, hours later, in the grey stretch between exhaustion and a sleep he wasn't getting anywhere near. He'd watched Sirius laughing mid-duel - actually laughing, because apparently nothing had ever managed to train that out of him - and then a curse had clipped him wrong and sent him stumbling back through the arch everyone always said only went one way.
It turned out that wasn't quite true. Not this time.
Nobody could explain it. Not Dumbledore, not the unspeakables who'd shown up looking faintly reverent about the whole thing, not the mediwitch who kept saying rare, not unprecedented like that was meant to be reassuring. Sirius had come back through - been thrown back, more like - about thirty seconds after he'd gone in. Unconscious. Cold. Breathing.
Remus had held onto that last word so hard it had started to come loose from its meaning.
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He sat with him until Madam Pomfrey gave up on the idea of making him leave.
Sirius looked wrong like this - not dead-wrong, Remus had seen dead, he knew the difference - just wrong the way a familiar room looks wrong with the furniture moved. Too still. His hands were lying flat on top of the blanket, and Remus realised he'd never once seen them properly at rest before. Not in twenty years. He couldn't stop looking at them.
"You utter bastard," he said, to no one, since nobody was listening. "You couldn't have just ducked?"
Nothing, obviously.
Remus put his head in his hands and, for the first time since the tower had gone up in fire and shouting, let himself actually feel how close it had come.
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There was a version of tonight where the margin had been an inch narrower somewhere and he was sitting in this same chair with nothing to hold onto. Where he'd have had to work out, again, how to keep living in a world missing another Marauder - except this time there'd have been no one left to grieve alongside. Not James. Not really Peter anymore either. Just him.
He thought about everything he'd never said - through Azkaban, through a year spent circling each other like neither of them fully trusted the other to still be who they remembered. Twenty years old and certain they had forever, and neither of them had ever gotten around to saying the thing that actually mattered, because there was always more time. Right up until there wasn't.
"I don't do this," he told the dark, told the face that wasn't listening. "I don't say things, you know that. I've spent so long deciding I don't get to want anything that I just - don't." His voice cracked and he didn't bother fixing it; there was no one awake to perform for. "I've let you nearly die twice now without ever telling you that if it happened, you'd be taking the best parts of me with you. That's not fair. Not to either of us."
Down the row, someone - Fred Weasley, still bandaged, still stubbornly breathing - mumbled something in his sleep that sounded suspiciously like a joke.
Remus reached over and took Sirius's hand.
Cold. But there was a pulse in it, small and obstinate, doing exactly what Sirius always did, which was carry on regardless of what the situation called for.
"Here's the deal, then," he said. "You wake up, and I'll say the rest of it properly. All of it. Everything I've been too much of a coward to say since we were seventeen. You can laugh at how long it took me. That's the whole arrangement. Just - wake up first."
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He didn't. Not that night, and not the next.
On the third morning, somewhere in the flat grey hour before sunrise, with Remus's hand still curled around his, Sirius's fingers twitched.
It was such a small thing to undo someone over. But it did - Remus found himself gripping the edge of the cot, breath coming ragged, three days of holding it together finally giving way over one small movement in one thin hand.
"Sirius." His own voice sounded unfamiliar to him. "Come on. Come on."
The eyes that opened were unmistakably his - grey, unfocused, squinting against the candlelight - and then, slowly, they found Remus's face and went soft in a way he had spent years pretending not to notice.
"You look terrible," Sirius said. His voice was wrecked, barely above a whisper. "Did you even sleep?"
That, of everything, was what finally broke him. A laugh tore out of him that was half a sob, and he pressed his forehead down against their joined hands because there wasn't another way to hold his face together.
"No," he said. "No, I didn't sleep. You went through a veil."
"Noticed that." A pause, faint and dry. "Wouldn't recommend it."
"Don't." It came out rougher than he meant it to. "Don't you dare joke about this. Not yet. Not until I've said-" He stopped himself. Made himself sit up and actually look at him, even though every instinct he owned wanted to swallow it back down the way he always had.
"I made a deal with you. While you were out. Said if you woke up, I'd stop being a coward about it."
Something shifted in Sirius's face - went still, the way a person goes still when they're bracing for something.
"So," Remus said, and let his voice shake instead of fighting it. "I love you. Have done since before I had the sense to be frightened of it, and I let the fear win for twenty years, and I'm not doing that anymore. That's it. That's the confession. Three days late and no dignity left to speak of."
For a moment Sirius just looked at him - eyes too bright, too wet in the candlelight - and Remus felt the old dread creeping back in, the certainty that he'd somehow said it wrong.
Then Sirius's fingers tightened around his.
"Twenty years," he rasped, "and you pick the one week I can't even sit up to kiss you properly."
Remus laughed - wrecked, helpless - and leaned down anyway, careful of the bruises and the healing skin, and kissed him like three days of silence had finally taught him what a waste it had been, keeping this to himself.
Neither of them let go of the other's hand again for a long time.