Trigger Warnings: Mentions of insanity as a result of torture (physical and psychological)
Mentions of war
Implied references to child abuse and neglect
Just Is
'Love is not moral or immoral, it just is.'
'I hated you, I loved you too.'
'It's 4 in the morning, the end of December…I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you…'
'I hate and I love…and I am in torment.'
Remus arrives home from the mission battered and so exhausted he can scarcely see straight, with a pounding headache and desiring nothing more than to have Sirius kiss him senseless and then sleep for a week. He leans against the chipped kitchen sink, gripping it hard with one hand to support himself and using the other to tie a clean rag (because why would the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix need bandages?) around his pulsating forearm in an attempt to staunch the relentless stream of blood that has already ruined his only decent shirt - curse injury and werewolf blood that refuses point blank to clot is not a good combination. It is not until he turns around 10 minutes later with a grubby mug (all Molly's cleaning fervour cannot scourge the oppressive grime of Grimmauld Place) of strong over-sweet tea and sinks into one of the rickety kitchen chairs with a huff of relief, that he realises there is someone else already sitting at the long table.
Sirius is holding a Daily Prophet – this morning's edition if the owl pecking irritably at his sleep (or lack thereof) -matted hair is anything to go by – and staring at the front page with an intense but unseeing gaze. His expression is warped into a peculiar, conflicted expression that Remus cannot define and his white-knuckled grip creasing the newsprint is more shaky than the new normal – above and beyond Azkaban-induced tremors layered over those periodic nerve spasms that he has suffered ever since that night that this place finally pushed him past his limit and he escaped (Remus never asked, never even looked it up – he feels instinctively that he does not want to know), hoping never to return…now he is trapped here – being driven slowly more insane by the day; his childhood (can it be called that? Remus isn't sure it applies really – the connotations seem irrelevantly positive) house succeeding, where Azkaban failed, in finally pushing the ex-Black family heir past the point of endurance and suffering in silence, into the brittle, lonely, fierce madness that has already consumed the other children who once populated these sinister, shadowy rooms with echoing footsteps and muffled laughter [Remus never knew it when it was like that, yet he mourns for it, for them, those wrecked children that he almost fancies he can hear the whispered memories of in the shadows and the dust of this house of horrors…and if he feels them, what must it be like for Sirius?], tipping him into the chasm of the inbred legacy he evaded for so long, only to have it eventually, inevitably ensnare him, when he is confined to the company of depraved ghosts – both the lingering presence of the depraved [who won't stop exhibiting her instability in that bloody portrait – the sensible adult in Remus would like to pretend he didn't punch an ancestral portrait, Sirius' maybe-trying-to-be-boyfriend can't fake regret ] and the phantoms of those innocents lost to this very depravity that now teases at the edges of Sirius' cracking mind (like darkness just before you faint) – and his night-sometimes-refusing-to-leave-with-the-stars terrors…And yet still Remus loves his broken friend, who was once more than that, with all that's in him, to the point where he is raw and exposed and his insides are screaming…
"Padfoot?" Tentatively.
There is no reply and he hadn't really anticipated one – the worn-out werewolf can see in the other Marauder's vacant gaze that he's not really reading the page in front of him, is not really in the bleak kitchen at all. So instead Remus drags his weary body – resentful muscles protesting vociferously – around the table to take a look at the headline that he assumes is responsible for this particular episode of dissociation.
The mug slips from abruptly numb fingers and shatters on the flagstone floor, ingrained with decades of filth, sending a wave of scalding tea over his socks – making them soggy and unpleasantly clingy. He barely even notices, casting a reparo charm automatically, but the sound of breaking china is enough to make Sirius flinch out of his reverie. He looks up at Remus who is still staring, transfixed, at the front page. The latter's eyes eventually move from the first attention-grabbing headline (so horrifying it's riveting) in months to the fearsome photos below. One face leaps instantly out at him and now he understands Sirius' behaviour. What does it say about Remus as a person, he wonders, that the thing that hits him instantly, like a vicious blow to the face, is not shock or alarm or panic but how bloody much she resembles her cousin? The photo is a grainy, unflattering, black and white snapshot that does not convey the half of the vividly terrifying woman he has encountered only a handful of times, and yet somehow it gets across that wasted, hollowed, ruined beauty. A beauty that so clearly was it almost still is – vestiges of grandeur, allowed, rather like the House of Black, to decay in the haunted, haunting faces of its lost children…a star being sucked into a black hole – obviously doomed but dazzling, with an unearthly, disconcerting radiance, until the last. Sirius' oldest cousin leers up at them out of the mugshot and Remus is transported instantly back 2 years to those wanted posters that seemed to be emblazoned on the inside of his lids – the image of Sirius laughing the humourless laugh which, if Remus could have borne to search his memories, he should have remembered takes the place of tears … a manic cackle – all he has ever heard from her mouth, her battle-cry – that the cousins have in common, that is a deceptive, mirthless scream of anguish, a silent plea for help; and if only someone had listened to the sound of their silence sooner maybe neither of them would ever have been laughing in Remus' face at the inside joke on a Ministry wanted poster…
He feels a weird swirl of struggling emotions after the initial shock – a thrill of terror because this drives home that it's really happening, the war really is starting again (and the delusion that they were at peace was exactly that, just as Remus had pessimistically predicted: a delusion; those 13 years had been nothing more than a temporary ceasefire – a lull in active hostilities), and then a brain warping blend of furious hatred – it was Remus, after all, the only one left to do so, who visited Alice and Frank in St. Mungo's the immediate aftermath and soaked Alice's newly, shockingly white hair with all the tears he'd been too numb to cry until then and all the tears that she was too shut-down to ever cry again for that shattered, sick situation; and she did that, Bellatrix Lestrange did that – and an understanding that for Sirius it is more complicated than that [which consequently complicates it for Remus]…he can only suppose Sirius must feel about her as he, Remus, does about Peter (although Sirius never seemed to have any trouble seeinghim in black and white terms of hatred and betrayal) – rationally there is hatred and enmity because of the awful things they've done…he's heard it often enough in Sirius' words (but not his voice, and that's the thing) on the rare occasion that he talks about her…but there is also the illogical but undeniable sense that the person you see in your memories, that you thought you knew, must still exist – whether buried inside the reality of who they are now, or a separate person entirely, either way – and your feelings for that person are what they ever were, and so you can't bring yourself to let them go…it's like how Sirius will curse Bellatrix Lestrange and her despicable actions and politics and fixation with Voldemort in a tirade vented at Remus as a rant, but when he says her name it's almost like a cry, for or of a lost child, an aching plea for Bella Black to hear him, to come back to him…But if Remus is a mess over the article, he has nothing on the state Sirius is in.
Sirius looks up at him with that bleakly twisted self-loathing Remus has come to despise and asks, brokenly, "Does it make me a terrible person that I'm relieved she's out of there?"
Remus pauses, because abruptly he is thrown back into the tumultuous pensieve of his memories as he recalls asking himself much the same question 12 years earlier. It was the first Christmas that he truly knew what it was to be without them, that he couldn't bear to even go through the feeble motions of festivities, because every string of tinsel they weren't strangling each other with while in animagus form, every handful of icing that actually went onto the cake rather than into Harry's mouth and hair, twisted the knife a little harder. The previous year he had still been in shock: emotionless and frozen and unable to comprehend it, any of it. In 1983 the agony was freshly painted all over his body and soul. That was the year he did more than beg to see Harry, accepting the refusals and rebuffs with miserable resignation; that was the year that he screamed his demands in Albus' face and broke to pieces in his presence at the impassive, understanding but unyielding response he received. That December was his first, hopeless, relentless attempt to file for custody regardless; the first cold, blunt rejection letter he received and crumpled in his fist as he fell apart in the sleet, on his knees in front of Lily and James' grave. And that was the first and only time that he simply couldn't suppress the truth of his feelings and for one night, on New Year's Eve, stopped shouting down what his instincts and his heart screamed with what his head and the world told him, and allowed himself to listen to the ache, on a basic, uncomplicated level, for Sirius' arms and lips and trust…grieving him as someone who had disappeared (irrevocably gone, leaving in his wake the impossibility of closure for anyone)…If anyone understands that love is not cancelled out by hate, that they could not be less mutually exclusive , that the increase of one can heighten the other, it is Remus. He remembers the feel of a sheaf of muggle polaroid pictures in his hands (Peter's camera was amazing) – blurry, abstract moments frozen in time and safe from its ferocious tide, distorting under his twisting grip and the steady drip of brine trickling onto the image from his burning eyes; he remembers clenching his teeth until his jaw ached, gnawing the inside of his mouth to a ragged and bloody mess in his effort to suppress the anguished scream clawing at his throat so as to avoid being thrown out of his grimly decrepit flat for disturbing the other miserable tenants inhabiting the block (he used to wonder idly sometimes, as a distraction, whether that kind of person was drawn to the squalid tenement or whether the conditions were to blame for the general despondency that infected it nearly as prolifically as the cockroaches Remus spent hours at a time trying to rescue)…He of all people knows what it's like to feel as though your own heart has betrayed you, and as though it will tear you apart from the inside out; so he answers Sirius with absolute honesty. There is no getting around the fact that Sirius' cousin is a psychotic terrorist infatuated with a megalomaniac and responsible for torturing 2 of their closest friends into permanent insanity, amongst other, presumably similarly heinous crimes, but it also cannot be overlooked that any haphazard mothering Sirius may have received was down to his beloved Bella…maybe, morally it does make him a terrible person to be glad, relieved, whatever, that she's been unleashed on the world again, but there is no one with more right than Sirius to make a judgement about who deserves Azkaban and who doesn't, and perhaps it doesn't matter that it makes him a terrible person that he doesn't want his sister-cousin in hell…
"Probably." He admits. Sirius words were a statement of fact more than a question, but he still looks like Remus has slapped him. Remus hurries on hastily. "But I felt the same way when you escaped. So we can go be terrible people together."