Remus spent all his weekday afternoons at the same café. It was a small place, with round tables and quietly obsequious waiters. It was situated in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, within a short walk of one of its best universities. Vines grew artfully around the café’s signage, and in the spring bougainvillea blossomed from them, turning everyone’s lunch break into a flower viewing party. Remus tried to draw them, but on the paper they looked dull and smudged. He didn’t have any colored pencils.
Remus always ordered the same thing – the cheapest thing on the menu, which might change from week to week depending on what was in season or in trend. The waiters were not as polite with him as they were with the other patrons. They avoided his eye, ignored his attempts at idle chitchat.
It didn’t bother him. He was used to it. And all in all, he preferred being ignored to the other alternatives.
In fact, he sort of liked that no one really bothered him here. There was no pestering, no tearfulness, no vociferous pretending that things weren’t the way they are. Here, he was just the cheap young man who always wore clothes the color of leaves dredged out of a storm drain – streaky browns, dirty grays – who just so happened to use a cane.
The cane was also cheap and also brown and gray. He had refused to let his father buy a new one for him when he left for the city. He had seen the bills for his mother’s funeral and known how strapped their finances were. In six months or so, when his father started working steadily again and Remus returned home, maybe there could be a new cane, and perhaps a new winter coat and new shoes. Until then, his lunch would consist of a small, hot drink and he would keep using the cane he’d had since he was fifteen.
He could’ve had a more substantial lunch for the exact same price elsewhere in the city. There were places by the flat where he could’ve had chips or a bacon sandwich or even chips and a bacon sandwich for a few coins extra. Maybe his stomach wouldn’t rumble so much at night if he sat at one of those dirty counters and endured looks from men coming out of their weekend benders.
But if he did that he wouldn’t get to see the most beautiful boy who ever lived.
This was probably an exaggeration. There was probably a flaw in his features somewhere, if only Remus could get close enough to him to see it. But since he could not he would hold by his claim: the young man with the swept-back black hair, the high, sharp cheekbones, and the devil-may-care grin was the most beautiful boy who ever lived.
He came to the café every day, like Remus. Only he didn’t come alone.
He walked at the head of a crowd of other young men and women who went to the university. He pushed tables together, unmindful of whatever hassle that might cause for the waiters, and he and another young man, who wore glasses and was not beautiful but who was apparently very funny and popular, sat at the center of the group. Or, rather, it seemed like they were at the group’s center because of how everyone’s attention was always drawn to them. They were the twin suns that this cluster of university students revolved around. Even the university students who did not walk in with the main group and sit down with them kept glancing at the two young men. These people were a bit more varied than the hangers-on, who all wore the same worshipful expression. There was a pale, greasy-haired young man who sat alone with his black coffee and advanced physics textbook and sneered openly whenever the group laughed loudly at a joke one of the two young men had made. And there was a young woman with red hair who always carried two organic chemistry textbooks and a volume of Donne or Shakespeare; she sat with a group of her own friends and would throw half-exasperated, half-longing looks at the one who wore glasses. She and Remus had met eyes a few times and once they had ascertained that they were not staring at the same bloke they exchanged sheepish expressions and fell back into their bad habits.
Remus justified these prolonged stares by saying he learned something about composition from them. He liked to draw – it was his only pastime, apart from feeling hungry – and as he stared at the beautiful boy his right hand was working, smoothing out eyebrows and tracing nose and lips. He drew him laughing, skulking, exultantly basking in the others’ obvious admiration. There were a few pictures of the one with glasses and the red-haired girl, and one of a pudgy hanger-on who always laughed the loudest and insisted on carrying their books, but the beautiful boy was his obvious favorite. He did his best to convince himself that he watched the young man purely for art’s sake, and that in order to keep said art pure he should not wonder about what his name was or what he was majoring in (he never brought his books, damn him) or what he did on the weekends. Mostly he succeeded in this, except during one Friday when he came to the café not realizing that it was a university holiday and none of the students showed up. That day he thought, where are you? and an image of a train appeared in his mind. He and the one with glasses were traveling alone together. They were going to one of their estates in the country. (They had to have estates in the country. They were so obviously rich.) They were sitting in their compartment together. Alone. They were sitting on the same side of the compartment, practically in the same seat. They were –
None of that, now. Didn’t you promise? Isn’t this just about art?
The voice of reason in Remus’s head was always his mother’s voice, which meant that it was enough to wilt any blossom of ardor, no matter how small.
But though he left the café quickly that day, and did not attempt to think of where the beautiful boy might be again, he knew, deep down, that this absolutely, positively had nothing to do with art.
What this was about was the heat in Remus’s cheeks and the heat in the parts of Remus that were well south of his cheeks. What this was about was the sheer unattainability of someone who was not only rich but well-educated and well-liked and so, so beautiful. What this was about was the safety of that heat and that unattainability. The beautiful boy will never want Remus; he will never fulfill the promise of his blushes. So Remus can stare and stare for hours and days and never, ever feel the fear of being seen.
…
There was a hunting accident. Sort of. Not really. ‘A hunting accident’ is just the easiest, least gruesome way to describe it, much in the same that ‘excessive scarring and permanent loss of full mobility’ is a calm, simple way to describe what Remus’s body looks like and how it moves.
The truth is, there were wolves. A pack of them. They were rabid, starved. And a young boy, in the throes of a tantrum, is such easy prey.
Remus was lucky. Or so the doctors would always insist on telling him. The wolves were small, weakened. They didn’t nip off any of his fingers or toes. They didn’t gut him and start gnawing on his internal organs.
They just bit him and clawed him and tore him and ripped him and wrenched him so much that there was hardly a spot on his body unmarked. This was, again, an easy way to put it. To make it plain, to be completely clear, he would say this: he was disfigured, he was ugly. Even the doctors could not bear to look at him for long. There were chunks of skin missing from one of his legs – it never healed right, hence the cane. There was one claw mark on his face – just one, thank God, and that easily covered by a combination of a high collar and longish hair. Not much else had been spared and no one apart from the doctors and his parents had ever seen him. He couldn’t bear the thought of being naked in front of another person, the look of revulsion on their face. His nightmares were more full of his own nakedness than the wolves. In his dreams, mirrors haunted him, and hallways full of staring, queasy-looking people. When he was fifteen there had been a girl who worked at the chocolate shop in his village who’d always flirted with him and shown a little interest in him, and during that time his nightmares were full of her. He’d had to avoid her to stop them.
There were never any dreams of the beautiful boy; he never saw him screaming or going white with horror, that beauty distorted into disgust and fear. Even his subconscious knew unattainability when it saw it.
Everyone knew it – the red-haired girl he occasionally crossed glances with, the one with glasses who had raised an eyebrow at him once or twice. Everyone, apparently, except for the beautiful boy.
…
What happened was a complete chance encounter, a little burst of serendipity. It was like something out of a romantic comedy, or a horror movie where if the girl’s car hadn’t broken down on that exact spot on that exact road she would’ve lived and there would’ve been no movie. Only for Remus it was his leg that broke down, not his car.
It was a Saturday and he was making a delivery for the man he worked for. The man, Mr. Brewers, was an old friend of Remus’s father and the job he gave Remus was another in a long line of pitying charities Remus had received during his life. Mr. Brewers owned an antique shop that specialized in restoring rare maps and though he spent a lot of time among pages and tablets that depicted the roads and landmarks of the world, he was forever getting lost in the city he had spent his entire life in. Knowing this, he would send Remus out instead, flinging him to all corners of the city’s compass. This was not a chore Remus enjoyed. He preferred to be with the maps and their established, finite boundaries, and their parchment smell. But he was not the boss, and so he went out into the city without complaint to deliver a restored map to one of Brewers’ customers.
It was on his way back from the delivery that his leg started to bother him. It did this every so often if he had to walk far, or if a storm was coming. That day, it was both: he’d been walking for forty minutes and the sky was overcast and the air was growing colder. Remus was only a few blocks away from the map shop, but at the corner of a four lane boulevard he found it impossible to go on. His leg was throbbing and his hand hurt from clutching the cane so hard. He eased himself down onto the stoop of a nearby shop, breathing deeply and trying to keep his features impassive. Second to being naked, he hated the thought of anyone else seeing him in pain.
He’d been sitting there for a few minutes when the shop door behind him opened. The stoop was wide enough for someone to pass, but Remus knew how people were and he braced himself for someone to mutter at him at least, and indeed there came a sharp, “Oy.” But then, someone said, “It’s you.”
Remus looked up and saw the beautiful boy.
Correction: he saw the beautiful boy in ripped jeans and a tight leather jacket and suddenly a hitherto unknown array of fantasies presented themselves in his mind.
“Never thought I’d see you around here. I didn’t figure you as the type to have a bike.”
Much too slowly, a few facts presented themselves to Remus: that shop he was sitting in front of reeked of motor oil, that the shop sign said “Dave-O’s Motorbike Parts and Repairs,” and that the beautiful boy had a helmet tucked beneath his arm.
“I, uh, no. You-You’re right. I don’t have one.”
The beautiful boy smiled as Remus stammered. It was a strange smile – cold, but also indulgent. He was used to having this effect on people.
“You know who I am, right?” he asked, a touch of flirtatiousness to his tone, which Remus in no way took personally. He would expect anyone who saw him to remember him, of course. The question was pointless.
Had Remus ever flirted with anyone before he might’ve played coy and tried to pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about, but as it was he just said, “Yes. You go to the café by the university. With all the chattering you do, I’m surprised you had time to notice me.”
Remus’s voice came out sharper than he intended it to, and the beautiful boy’s eyes widened slightly and he gave Remus a once over, like he was making an appraisal of him.
“We’ve given you a nickname, actually. Want to know what it is?” He didn’t pause long enough for Remus to answer. “We call you the professor. Because you look like one of them.”
From his tone, Remus could tell that this wasn’t a compliment. A wave of dislike went through Remus at the thought of how haughty this boy seemed, how he probably thought he knew more than all of his teachers.
“I don’t teach,” Remus said through his teeth. “I don’t think I could bear to be in the presence of insufferable, arrogant fools for more than a minute. Certainly not since they’ve done away with corporal punishment in classrooms.”
It was a lie: teaching was high on the list of things Remus would like to do before he died. He just wanted the boy to get fed up with him and leave before he ruined what remained of his fantasy appeal.
But the boy didn’t budge from where he stood at the bottom of the stoop. “Oh?” he said, quirking his eyebrow. “Not a professor, huh? What’s your name, then?”
Remus hedged a second before telling him. And then, forgetting his desire to limit what he knew about the boy, he asked, “And yours?”
“Sirius Black,” he said evenly, and a bit of the dislike that Remus had been feeling ebbed away. He felt an automatic sympathy for people with unusual first names. He knew that even with all that he had going for him Sirius would’ve had to suffer a certain amount of teasing and puns.
“The dog star,” Remus said, and Sirius’s eyes widened again. “The brightest star in the sky. How apt,” he added without thinking.
A belt of thunder spared him embarrassment. Sirius looked skyward, muttered, “shit, really?” and pulled his keys out his pocket. While Sirius wasn’t looking Remus used the stoop railing to pull himself to his feet.
Sirius started to back away from the stoop, his eyes still on the clouds. He glanced at Remus, looked long at his cane, and asked, casually, “Do you need a ride?”
A wash of heat went through Remus at the mere thought of sitting behind Sirius, his arms around his waist, his fists clutching his jacket, the rumbling of the motor thrumming between his legs. It would be more than Remus would’ve ever hoped to get from Sirius, more than he had ever dared to dream of. It would be, maybe, too much.
“No,” he said. “I’m just a few blocks away.”
Sirius nodded, went to where his bike was parked at the curb, and Remus just stood there, practically slack-jawed, watching him go. In a quick series of fluid, graceful movements Sirius put on his helmet, threw a leg over the bike, started the ignition, tossed Remus a careless wave good-bye, and rode off, a vision in leather and chrome, future fodder for many, many all too warm evenings in bed.
Seeing him ride off, his jacket rising and exposing his back as he leaned forward and his jeans tight around his thighs, was almost enough. Almost.
…
The next Monday Remus went to the café as usual. He did not expect to be noticed by Sirius, or acknowledged by Sirius except perhaps by a nod in his general direction. On the extremely limited chance that they exchanged pleasantries Remus did not expect Sirius to remember his name or to deign to spend more than ten seconds engaged in conversation with him.
And he most certainly did not expect Sirius to abandon the group he usually sat with, grab hold of the empty chair at Remus’s table, ask, “this seat taken?” and not wait for an answer before plopping down into it.
“How was your weekend?” he asked.
Remus just stared at him. It was a good, long, up-close stare. The tables were small and even though Sirius was sitting across from him he was closer than he had ever been to Remus before. For the first time Remus saw the color of his eyes. They were gray, but not a dirty gray, like leaves from a gutter. They were the sensuous gray of smoke furling off of a warm drink, the gray of old, expensive silver.
Remus was mesmerized by his eyes for so long that he was still staring when the waiter appeared at their table and asked Sirius for his order. He asked for a pastry, something French and expensive, and told the waiter to bring him a black coffee as well.
“Is that all, sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you,” Remus said sharply, like he was prompting a child.
Sirius blinked, and then turned to the waiter and said, “Yeah. Thank you.” When the waiter had gone he said to Remus, “You know, you remind me of a governess I used to have.”
“That’s funny, because I was just thinking that you reminded me of a dog that hasn’t been properly housetrained.”
Sirius grinned. “I get that a lot.”
Remus took a sip of his drink, today a very weak Earl Grey. He laid the cup very carefully into its saucer and asked, “What are you doing here? Sitting with me, I mean.”
“What’s the matter? You don’t want me here? You’d rather be alone?”
Remus stayed silent and after a moment Sirius sighed and said, “Listen, I just thought it’d be a nice change of pace. I get bored of that crowd, and you seem much more interesting.” He leaned forward and smiled a dazzling, wit-addling smile.
“Also, James is stuck at home with the flu.”
“Ah, of course. That’d explain it.” Remus shook his head and took another sip of tea. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to play stand-in for your friend.”
He was about to get up and leave – further contact with Sirius would surely ruin the integrity of the fantasy, and some days the fantasy was all that kept him going – when Sirius reached across the table and took his hand and every muscle in his body went still as stone.
When Remus pictured himself, he always pictured himself occupying a halo of negative space. No one ever jostled him on the street or tried to shake his hand or held him or touched him softly. He was set apart, he was other, he was alone. He lived in a void of paper and ink and the wood on his cane. Nothing else had touched him for a long, long time.
So it was a shock, Sirius’s hand on his. Even though the gesture wasn’t tender or flirtatious, even though it was a demand to stay more than anything else, it warmed him through and through.
“Just stay with me while I eat,” Sirius said, as though Remus still had any control over what he was doing. “I promise I won’t bore you.” He deliberated a moment and then added, “You can have one of the pastries. Just stay.”
The pastries were heaped with chocolate, and Sirius kept smiling, and Remus was absolutely helpless to refuse.
“So what do you do then?” Sirius asked, picking up one of the pastries and breaking it in half.
“I’m an athlete, can’t you tell?” Remus said and Sirius snorted, but made no comment. Remus gave the remaining pastry a long look before picking it up. It was warm and sweet: the perfect balm for his hunger. As he ate it he explained about Mr. Brewers and the map shop.
“A cartographer, huh? How very unusual of you,” Sirius said. “I admit I had you pegged for a student. An art student, specifically.”
Remus blinked. What little university education he had received had in fact centered on visual arts and art history. He said as much to Sirius, who grinned and said, “Every dog knows his own.”
“You’re concentrating on art history?” Remus asked, surprised.
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that you and I were both art students. I meant that you and I had to stop being art students.” He popped the rest of his pastry in his mouth and licked the chocolate from his fingers. “There,” he said, “look at that. I’ve found us some common ground.”
And though they spoke about this shared interest for a while, and though Remus became quite animated on the subject of the Pre-Raphaelites, his thoughts were mainly with the tip of Sirius’s tongue and how it had brushed, languidly, against the skin of his fingers. When Sirius left for class – demanding that they eat lunch together tomorrow – Remus rushed to his flat as fast as he could manage, eschewing the rest of his lunch break. He drew the curtains in his small bedroom and locked the door and thought of shadows, solar eclipses, blindfolds, and how loud and wonderful the sound of licking would be in the dark.
…
Remus began to eat lunch with Sirius every day. It became natural for him to look up and suddenly see Sirius sitting across from him, audacious in his handsomeness, eager to talk and insist that Remus try this or that item on the menu, equally prepared with a slight or a compliment, and ready to hand them out with the same sigh-inducing grin.
Remus suffered no illusions about what this was. He was a few minutes’ entertainment to Sirius, deserving of precisely the same attention as the croissants on the table and the bougainvillea growing on the vines and no more. Sirius was bored – he said so often enough – and he so obviously loved to flout authority, which given Sirius’s comments about him being a professor and a governess, Remus assumed Sirius saw him as a part of. Remus was a diversion, an interesting trinket bought in haste and lost even faster. It meant nothing that Sirius laughed at his jokes; it meant nothing that Sirius asked how his weekend was and enquired about his father, his job, and his mostly evil and mostly dead pet rabbit; it meant nothing that Sirius continued sitting with him day after day, week after week, as summer’s last warm days faded into fall’s brisk coolness. It had to mean nothing, otherwise who could explain it? Why else would Sirius Black, heir to a fortune beyond measure and currently in possession of the city’s most beautiful face, want to spend time with a dowdy shop clerk whose main possession was an overabundance of scars if not for the mild entertainment of a change of pace?
That was all it could be. That was all it was. Remus kept having to remind himself. Because there were moments – scattered and precious – where he would forget that he was nothing more than a pastime to Sirius and think that horrible, hope-filled word: maybe.
This had happened a few times. Once, at the end of the first week they had started sharing lunch, Sirius pushed a book of poetry into Remus’s hands. They had had a long discussion about this poet the day before, when Sirius dismissed him out of hand and Remus came to the poet’s defense and tore down Sirius’s arguments one by one. Sirius had left an inscription in the book – My concession to my professor. Remus must’ve traced that second ‘my’ with his forefinger a thousand times, both flushing and growing irritable at the thought that Sirius considered him his.
Then, there was the first day of the autumn rains. They stepped outside together just as the first raindrop fell. Sirius was quicker opening his umbrella, and he held it over Remus while he tried to sort himself out between his cane and his umbrella and the books he was carrying. Someone was coming out of the café behind him and Sirius put his hand on the small of Remus’s back to nudge him to the side. Remus felt the warmth of his palm through his thin coat and jumper. He felt it all throughout the rest of the day; it was the windowpane between him and the rain.
But the incident that most affected Remus was the afternoon that Sirius invited him to the Halloween party he was throwing at his house.
It was nearing the end of October and they were both drinking pumpkin flavored coffees. The bougainvillea were dead, the sky had been gray for practically the entire month, and there were black paper cutouts of bats and spiders stuck to the walls of the café.
“I’m having my Halloween party on Saturday,” Sirius said. “There’s going to be a full moon.” He smiled as if he had personally arranged for there to be a full moon on the night of his party.
Remus shrugged. He didn’t need anyone to tell him when the full moons were. He always knew. The full moons, more than the actual date, served as his anniversaries for the hunting accident.
“You’re not going to be able to see it,” Remus said, gesturing to the window and the overcast sky beyond.
Sirius grinned. “The weather service says it’s going to clear up just in time for the party. You should come, by the way. I guarantee you’ll have fun.”
He said this in an offhand tone that was belied by the eagerness in his expression. Remus recalled a story he had heard from Mr. Brewers’ wife about how sometimes university boys invited the ugliest girls they could find to a party so they could rate them against each other. The boy who brought the ugliest girl got free drinks. Remus wondered if this was something like that.
“What do you need me there for? It’s not like you’ll be able to hear me lecturing you over whatever Godawful music you’ll have playing.”
“There’s going to be a live band, what do you take me for? Plus, there’ll be free food. Who says no to free food? No one, that’s who. Even my Uncle Alphard shows up to events for free food, and he’s richer than Midas.”
“I’m not your uncle.”
“No. Thank God.”
Three little words and he said them just right: emphatically and with a hint, just a hint, of pining.
Maybe, Remus thought.
“It’s a costume party. I bet you’ll come up with some really great idea,” Sirius said. “Just say you’ll be there.”
“Maybe,” Remus said, though there was no maybe about it. He was going to be there with bells on. Or, rather, he’d be there with claws on. It was, after all, going to be a full moon.
…
Remus put on the rags with care. He had baggy trousers with patches on the knees, an old coat with a frayed fur trim, a top hat whose rim was twisted and bent, and stained fingerless gloves that had rips on the palms. He looked just like a slightly poorer version of himself until he glued the claws over his fingernails and sewed a fake wolf’s tail to the back of his coat.
Under his breath he hummed a song from a cartoon he’d seen once, involving two shoddily built houses and three little pigs. He felt drunk, though he hadn’t yet had a drop to drink. He stumbled to the mirror without his cane and his leg hardly hurt him.
It was always like this on full moons. They filled him with restless, aggressive energy. When the sun sank and the moon rose everything was electric, vital. He didn’t walk, he prowled. He didn’t eat, he devoured. He could stare into the darkness without it seeming like darkness to him. He saw the leaves shift when prey animals scuttled by. He would feel the urge to track them, hunt them, feel them break between his jaws. He was not himself; he was at most himself.
The doctors had told him that the wolves had had rabies. But that had been taken care of, they promised. There had been shots and blood work to be certain. He had been allowed out of the hospital to mingle with the unafflicted.
And yet, he could feel the moonlight on his skin. He could taste the night air on his tongue. The wind told him things. He hardly needed to use his cane.
Every other night Remus hated the wolves, but on full moons hate cooled to understanding. He was kin to them then, and never more so than when the door swung open at Number 12 Grimmauld Place and he found himself face to face with his quarry.
“Remus!” Sirius exclaimed, and then he hesitated before inviting Remus to come in because he was disarmed by Remus’s smile. It was a hunter’s smile, all white, sharp teeth and hunger. It was a moment before Sirius backed up enough so that Remus could get inside.
Remus took his time doing so. As he passed over the threshold he took the opportunity to look over Sirius’s costume. He had dirtied himself up as well. There were streaks of black make-up on his cheeks and his hair had been artfully disarrayed. He was wearing iron shackles on his wrists and ankles, and a torn striped uniform that was open to bear his chest, which was also streaked with fake dirt.
“You make a wonderful criminal,” Remus said.
“You know, you’re the first to say so. About the criminal part, I mean,” Sirius said, starting to lead Remus into the house. “Everyone else thinks I’m supposed to be an escaped mental patient.” Sirius smiled ruefully, to show that this was only partly a joke. He pushed aside a gossamer curtain that had been carefully destroyed so that it resembled a spider’s web and Remus got his first look at Grimmauld Place proper.
“Austere” was the first word to come to mind - “cold,” the second. There was nothing comfortable or welcoming about any of the rooms Sirius led him through, even the ones with food in them. All the furniture seemed to have sharp, pointed edges, and none of the cushions on the chairs seemed anything more than decorative. Remus couldn’t imagine living there, but the decor was well-suited to a Halloween party. With just a few clever decorations Sirius had managed to make the house festively haunted. He’d somehow gotten long-stemmed candlesticks to seem like they were hovering off the floor at hand-height; in one hallway, the candles were the only lighting and it was unnerving to see those spots of candlelight flickering in the distance like will-o-the-wisps. There were trays of smoking drinks and blood red candies, and the band was dressed as skeletons with sewn-shut mouths. They were playing an eerie rendition of a swing tune that was nonetheless suitable to dance to. Remus saw a lot of the university students who hung around Sirius and James at the cafe - the red haired girl was there, dressed as a witch - and many more people that he had never seen before. He was properly introduced to James, who until then he had only nodded to once or twice at the cafe.
James was bedecked in a doublet, a foppish hat with a long white feather pinned to it, and an ostentatiously fake moustache. “I’m a fifteenth century explorer, don’t let him tell you otherwise.”
“He’s a clown that hasn’t got his make-up right,” Sirius said to Remus in a stage whisper.
“Wanker,” James snapped.
“Arsehole.”
James let out a stream of expletives in English, Welsh, French, and Latin. It sounded comically vile and Sirius laughed, conceding.
“Anyway, this is Potter,” he said. “You’ll grow to love him. Everyone does. Unless you’re a girl.”
“Fuck off, girls like me.”
“Only until they hear you talk.” He squeezed Remus’s shoulder. “I’ll be right back, I’ve just got to say hi to someone,” he said, and went off in the direction of a woman so striking that she matched him perfectly. She put her hand on his arm and Remus had visions of ripping her pale, perfect white throat out.
“Don’t be jealous. That’s his cousin.”
Remus flushed. He had forgotten that James was standing right there. “I’m not –”
“It’s okay. Everyone gets jealous when Sirius talks to someone else. I mean, I don’t, but that’s just because I’m probably the only one here who hasn’t had a fantasy of shagging him. We’re like brothers.” He took a sip of his drink and frowned when he saw that one end of his moustache had drooped into the glass.
“You’ve known him that long?” Remus asked, feeling less like a hunter and more like an embarrassed teenager probing for gossip.
“Since we were kids,” James said. He gave Remus a quick, assessing look. “You know, I liked you before I ever met you. Mostly because of the way he would talk about you. He’s never talked about anyone like that before. He likes that you say no to him. Not a lot of people do that. It’s weird, because he likes his freedom and he likes to do whatever the hell he wants, but he also wants someone to hold him on a leash and tell him to cut that shit out. It’s like he wants to be owned, but he also wants to pick his owner.” He went to take another sip from his glass and was startled to find that it was already empty. “I dunno why I’m telling you this,” he mumbled. “It’s just he’s happy when he talks about you. He hasn’t been happy in a while.”
“What’s not to be happy about? He has everything.”
James swayed slightly. Behind his glasses his eyes were red and unfocused.
“Everything he has is empty.”
With that fatalistic pronouncement said, James raised his glass at Remus and tottered off in the direction of the drinks. Remus was left standing there alone, watching Sirius be surrounded by a group of girls in low-cut costumes, the yearning expressions on their faces all identical. He backed away from the party, and the strangely sexy version of “Monster Mash” the band was now playing, and pushed through the gossamer curtain and reentered the relative quiet of the entry hallway.
He didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going. Idly, he thought of trying to find a bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. There were stairs leading off the entry hallway and he took them slowly, the sounds of the party receding until all he could hear was the sharp, deliberate ticking of a grandfather clock. He saw a line of pictures going up the stairs and he slowed to look at them. In most of the pictures, Sirius was a child or a young adolescent. He wore starched clothes and stood in an equally starched pose. All the pictures were family portraits. Some had been taken in exotic locations – the French Riviera, Mumbai – and some had been taken in the house. The arrangement of the four family members was always different – sometimes Sirius and his brother stood while his parents sat, sometimes only his mother sat, and so on – but one thing was always the same: none of the Blacks were ever touching each other. They stood side by side like strangers on a train platform, careful to keep distance between them, not showing any sort of sign of affection. They weren’t even smiling.
Halfway through the line of pictures, Sirius’s father stopped appearing. Two pictures higher and Sirius's brother was gone as well. It was just Sirius and Mrs. Black, trapped alone in the frame. Mrs. Black had lost a great deal of weight since the first picture and her skin was waxy and covered with blotches. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap and she was staring off to the side, heedless of the photographer or her son. She reminded Remus irresistibly of patients he had seen in the hospital, ones who had gone too long without leaving, ones who knew they would never leave.
At the top of the stairs Remus kept walking. He passed older portraits, of people long dead posed in the exact same way as the most recent Black generation, but these were nowhere near as eerie or sad as the portraits on the stairs. As he traveled down the hallway he felt that he had started to understand what James had drunkenly revealed to him only moments ago.
Only one door along the hallway was opened and Remus knew instinctively that it was Sirius’s. The light was on inside his room and Remus was drawn to it, beguiled by it like a moth or any other creature that has lived its whole life in the dark. He had only intended to stand at the threshold and see what color Sirius’s bedspread was, but when he peered into Sirius’s room – trying not to feel like as much of a snoop as he was – he saw something taped to the wall that he couldn’t help but want to look at up close.
So he went into Sirius’s room, with its elegant four-poster bed and blood-red bedspread and gold tassels on all the lamps. He passed the worn copies of Baudelaire, the propped open motorbike manuals, the snapshots of Sirius and James at various ages with their arms around each other, the filled in crossword puzzle from that week’s copy of The Times, and stopped right in front of an ink pen drawing of himself.
In the drawing he was sitting alone at his table at the café, his expression indecipherable. His head was turned to the side, his scar exposed and inked in detail, the only part of him that had been colored in. The drawing was dated two weeks before Remus had run into Sirius at the motorbike shop.
“I’d tell you off for spying, but I’d have done the same thing if I was in your house.”
Remus didn’t turn around. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the drawing. He heard Sirius shut the door behind him and start across the room.
“Be a bit more of a challenge for you,” Remus said. “I live in a one room flat. You’d never be able to get away from me long enough to snoop.”
“I could live with that.”
Sirius had come to stand just behind Remus, and he could feel the heat of Sirius’s body against his back. He looked at his own face, composed in ink and red pigment, and clenched his hands into fists. His fake claws dug into his palms. His insides were churning and he was filled with a sure sense that this could only end badly, but still he asked, “Why? Why did you draw me? Why have you got it here in your room?”
“For someone so smart, you can be incredibly dumb sometimes. I mean, come on, it’s completely obvious that I’m in love with you.”
Remus’s instincts took over. He whirled around to face Sirius, grabbed him by the neck, and pulled him close for a long overdue kiss. Sirius let out a gasp of surprise into Remus’s mouth: it tasted like mint – sharp and pleasant. Remus wanted to taste it again so he bit Sirius’s lip and Sirius groaned, the skin of his neck pulsing beneath Remus’s palm. Remus nipped at Sirius’s jawline and licked at his throat and Sirius clutched one hand in Remus’s hair and the other he sent wandering along his back, around his side, to his waist, and underneath his jumper.
Remus went still. Sirius’s hand was spread across at least five separate scars.
“Hey,” Sirius said, sounding confused, his hand still wandering along Remus’s bare skin.
In a single movement Remus grabbed Sirius by the wrist and pushed him away. Sirius stumbled backward and fell, sprawling against the bed. “Hey!” he said again, now sounding angry, but Remus didn’t wait around to hear it a third time. He was out of the room before Sirius got up off the bed, propelling himself with his cane, rushing past the portraits and seeing Sirius age in reverse, and soon he was out the front door of Grimmauld Place, wishing that he had never come there.
…
Remus stopped going to the café. He went to the restaurant across from them a map shop and ate lunch with the drunks and the derelicts. None of them talked to him, or accused him of looking like a professor, or hung drawings of him in their rooms, or got dangerously closed to touching him. It didn’t bother him. He was used to it. And all in all, he preferred being ignored to the other alternatives. So he told himself.
He complained of the pain in his leg to get out of making deliveries for Mr. Brewer. He stopped going out on the weekends. He buried a book of poetry in the back of his closet beneath a fake wolf tail and a worn-out jumper that he hadn’t worn since a Halloween party. He didn’t need those things and he kept trying to remind himself to set them out with the trash, but for whatever reason he kept confusing the trash pick-up days. Strange how the mind starts to slip.
He saw very little that was beautiful as fall faded into winter; it never snowed, it just got bitterly cold. He ran out of drawing pencils and didn’t buy new ones. But he was, once again, in possession of a magnificent amount of negative space. It was his halo, his traveling cloak, his armor against the fear that another person’s hand on his body brought him. It comforted him to know that he would never have to worry about someone else’s revulsion. He had taken care of that quickly, effectively. He had bought back his peace of mind.
So what if some nights he had trouble sleeping? So what if when he did sleep he dreamed that he was lost in Grimmauld Place? (The house swallowed him whole and wouldn’t let him leave. He knew that he wasn’t the only one trapped inside.) So what if his stomach clenched into a knot every time he heard a motorbike pass by the shop? So what if there were things he couldn’t eat or drink because they were tied to memories he’d rather not revisit? So what if in the mornings the only thought that got him out of bed was ‘you’ve been through worse than this’?
He wrote a letter to his father, hinting that he might want to come home. It would be so easy to go back there and tuck himself away with his books. He could spend the rest of his life there, taking his tea at the same time every day, watching his father grow old, the feelings he’d had in the city fading with time. And he very well might have lived out his life just like that, had Sirius Black not been the most obstinate, obnoxious fool alive.
“REMUS LUPIN!”
Remus started out of his doze. The book he’d been reading fell out of his lap as he looked around, disoriented. He could’ve sworn he had heard someone calling his name, but his flat was empty.
“I KNOW YOU’RE UP THERE, REMUS.”
Remus stumbled out of his chair and went to the window. Sirius was on the sidewalk outside, staring up at him.
“I’LL STAY OUT HERE ALL DAY. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOUR NEIGHBORS THINK. DO YOU?”
“Son of a bitch,” Remus hissed, struggling to open the window. A blast of cold air hit him in the face when he finally got it to budge. “What the hell are you doing here?” he called down in the quietest yell he could manage.
“FREEZING, MOSTLY. ALSO, WAITING FOR YOU TO LET ME IN.”
Remus just gaped at him. An elderly couple stared at Sirius as they passed him on the sidewalk; he noticed them and gave them a congenial smile, and they started walking faster.
“I WASN’T KIDDING. IT’S REALLY COLD OUT HERE.”
Remus pulled the window shut, and after a moment’s hesitation he buzzed Sirius in. Not until Sirius walked through the door was Remus certain that he would let him in.
“Sorry,” Sirius said, “but I got tired of waiting for your sulk to end.” He held up a hand to stop Remus from speaking. “I know, I know. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have been flirting with those girls at the party. I brought you as my date and then I went and left you. One of them - I swear to God - was my cousin. But the others? Yeah. I understand why you’re mad and all. Don’t quite understand why you kissed me before you left me, but fine. Maybe it was a delayed reaction thing, I don’t know. I kept waiting for you to show up at the cafe so I could apologize, but you never did, so here I am, and I really am sorry.” He took a deep breath and then smiled his most winning smile at Remus.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Sirius’s smile fell. “The party? And you running out on me mid-snog? I thought you were mad because I’d been flirting with other people, but apparently not. Was it me telling you I love you, then? I’ve been talking about this with James and he says he shouldn’t have brought that up so soon. Was it that?” He did his best to look as if a “yes” would be acceptable, and Remus suddenly felt incredibly guilty for leaving without explaining.
“No,” Remus said quietly. “It wasn’t that.”
“Why then? Was it because I have a drawing of you in my room?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. I have about twenty of you,” Remus said without thinking.
“What? I want to see them! No. Wait. I want to know why you left me first. Because now I’m very, very confused.”
Remus’s face was burning and his leg was shaking. He had gone to the door in such a rush that he had forgotten his cane. “Let me – let’s – I need to sit.” He lowered himself onto his bed, the springs creaking beneath his weight. His own bedspread was a pallid white – the color of moonlight. He rested his hand upon it, staring at a scar that was peeking out from his sleeve.
“I can’t have you near me,” Remus said quietly, not lifting his head.
“Why not?”
Remus swallowed. “Because…even the thought of you close is painful for me. I know what’ll happen and I don’t want it to. That’s why I left. And that’s why you should leave now.”
“What’s going to happen?”
Remus forced himself to raise his eyes to Sirius. “You won’t want me when you see me naked.”
For a moment, Sirius just stood there. Then, to Remus’s surprise, he leaned his head back and let out a bark of a laugh. “That’s all? That’s your big worry?”
Remus flushed. “I realize it must be hard for you to understand, but –”
“I’m going to stop you right there, because first of all, this whole ‘I know what you’re going to do when you see me naked’ thing is ridiculous. No one knows what I’m going to do before I do it. Not even I know what I’m going to do. Do you think I planned on coming here today? I didn’t know it was going to happen until it did.
“Second of all, do you really think I’m that shallow? Do you really think I care about your scars? Which, by the way, hardly a big secret – if you do an internet search for your name guess what’s the first thing that comes up? ‘Five-Year-Old Kid Attacked by Wolves.’ I’ve seen you with your cane. I can put two and two together.
“Third of all…I don’t even have a third reason. I love you. I don’t care how messed up you are. There. Now, can we kiss and make up? Or am I going to have to do some really crazy romantic stuff to get you to see reason? Because I’m completely prepared to stand outside your window all night with a brass band or a boombox or whatever. I love that kind of nonsense.”
Remus stared at him, slightly slack-jawed. “You’re a lunatic,” he said flatly.
“Yeah, probably. That does run in my family.”
“I – I didn’t mean…”
“I know. It’s fine.”
Sirius crossed the room and came to sit next to Remus on the bed. He left a little space between himself and Remus and rested his hand, palm up, between them.
“I don’t know what more to say to you to get you to trust me,” Sirius said. “But I want you to know that I’ve missed you. I stopped going to the café when I knew you wouldn’t come there anymore. I couldn’t stand being there without you. I think about you all the time. I can never sleep without dreaming of you. So if you can’t trust me…if you don’t want me…I guess I’d just like something to hold onto. Like a kiss good-bye.”
Remus’s whole body was trembling. He could feel the space between him and Sirius pressing down on him as tangibly as if he had been plunged into the ocean and was surrounded by the pulsing waves. He could barely breathe as he turned to Sirius and leaned closer to him, crossing through the empty space, pushing back toward the surface. Sirius closed his eyes, tilted his head, but Remus didn’t kiss him. Instead, he put his hand in Sirius’s and, wordlessly, he lifted Sirius’s hand to his face, to rest against the first of many scars.
When he let go of Sirius’s hand Sirius kept his palm cupped against his cheek for a moment before slowly, gently tracing the scar with his fingertips. He followed the scar down, down, down to where it disappeared beneath Remus’s collar, and when he reached the collar he pushed it aside to finish tracing the scar’s length. He saw the damage on Remus’s shoulder and collarbone and he looked at Remus not with disgust or revulsion, but with hunger.
He pressed his lips and teeth and fingers into Remus’s skin, and for the second time in Remus Lupin’s life he was devoured.
...
When they wake their limbs are all tangled together and the morning is already over. Outside, the streets are covered with the winter’s first snowfall. The map shop does no business, the university holds no classes, and the cafe closes early.
Sirius surprises Remus by knowing how to cook. He makes crepes in Remus’s tiny kitchen as Remus stands at the window, looking out onto the city that he already knows he’s never going to leave.
Sirius talks idly as he cooks. He muses aloud about whether he should get a puppy, and in the next breath admits that he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He mentions places they ought to go together, and then manages to compare the color of the honey he’s pouring on the crepes to Remus’s eyes without sounding saccharine. Remus smiles, watches as more snow comes down.
Remus doesn’t have any kitchen chairs - he barely has a kitchen - and so Sirius joins him at the window. They eat side by side, leaning against each other, looking at each other, drinking each other in. Remus’s arms are bare and it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t feel the cold and he doesn’t flinch away when Sirius goes to touch him. He finally voices what he had said over and over through touch last night: “I love you.” Sirius smiles with such radiance that Remus can no longer remember why he had ever denied him. They kiss and it is a thousand times better than any fantasy that Remus ever had.
And as they kiss, the window shows their reflections. Overlaid against the snow and the smoke gray sky and the city where they will love each other, there they are: two beautiful boys.