Lifetime
by Nistelle
nistelle (at) gmail (dot) com
It's one of those evenings where Remus has gotten back before you expected -- before dark, even on this late November Thursday. It was a meeting in Scarborough, or somewhere near, that only lasted a few hours. Here, too, the visitors have come and gone, leaving papers, sharing rumors, Disapparating before dusk and leaving you alone. It's one of those evenings where you're glad for it.
You ate dinner together in the kitchen -- takeaway, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter either that there were no candles, no champagne, just the two of you and half a bottle of Roodeberg wine. You talked till your glasses were empty.
Afterwards, when Remus pushed back his chair, you tried not to feel the familiar weight of dread. "Off to your study, I suppose?"
"Mmm. Moody gave me some reading to finish for tomorrow." He placed the dishes in the sink, waved his wand to start them scrubbing. "More Grindelwald history."
"Sounds fascinating."
"Dreadfully so," he said. Then he turned to you, and tilted his head slightly, as if to see what really lay behind your chair-tipping, your finger-drumming. He gave you that ghost of a smile.
"Well, Padfoot? Going to be joining me, or not?"
And it didn't take long before you grinned the grin you could never contain while he was near. You let your chair thunk to the ground, and you leapt up and bounded into that black dog just as he was putting the dishes away. You weaved around his legs "ah! You --" and dove into the hallway, his laughter following. You went up the stairs together.
"I hear neutering is supposed to work wonders on unruly dogs," he said, but you didn't hear him.
On with the lamp, and with the fire; he stoked it while you leapt onto the couch, turned around twice, waited for him. ("It's cold tonight, isn't it?" he said. But you knew it wasn't a complaint, not really, not in this room that smelled not of must and age but of him, and of you, and of home.)
When he sits down with his book, you place your head on his knee. He looks down at you, and places one hand lightly on your back, your ears, your forehead; then he begins to stroke softly from your brow to your ruff. Slowly, softly, as he reads.
Something makes you remember that day in the summer when Remus finally agreed to take you to Regents' Park. You cut a mad swath through the overgrown grass, tore through the thrushes of the lake, ran circles round Remus till you thought he couldn't speak from laughing. You led him to a shadowed thicket where you lay, his head on your shoulder, your fingers through his hair, almost until dark.
You remember what he asked you as he looked up through the leaves.
"What if," he said, "you had the chance to go back and change the way it all went, if only you gave up -- other things."
"Other things?" you said. "You mean the things I have now?"
"Yes."
You lay back in the grass, and closed your eyes, and thought about twelve years: the length of them, the weight. You shifted over to look at him, his profile, that serious brow furrowed. He raised his eyes to you.
"I think men would gladly live my life ten times over," you said, "to have what I have now.
"I'm one of them," you said.
The room is warm now, and your eyes begin to close. This where you're really living, isn't it. He may leave for those days at a time, you may wake to face those mornings alone; but through those days, from morning till night, from month to month and year to year, there is always in the back of your mind these times: these hours together in the quiet, when all is still and warm. They aren't dreams; they are what's real. They are what you live to wake to.
This stamp of eternity, this time in the firelight, his hands warm as your skin, your skin warm as his hands, stroking through the soft rustle of paper and crackle of logs. Here is where the past fades, where the future won't matter. Here with every slow stroke into peace, every heartbeat where you would pay the same price a thousand times over, here is where you live.