Warning! The following fic is not endorsed by the Catholic church!
Sad, sad little sex-less puppies below. Spin off from Lachrymose that probably
won't make a great deal of sense without it. Sirius/Remus. Sort of. I wrote
most of it while writing Lachrymose to try and develop their characters,
and since some people had expressed interest in them I thought I might
post this. Reviews are always adored. ; )
When things get especially bad, when it feels like life is out to kill you, rip you apart, shred you into pieces, when you just don't think you can take it anymore. These are the times it is most important to grin. So says Sirius, so says the law. A little joke there, but maybe not. These are not joking matters, after all.
The war was not a joking matter, but he'd laughed anyway. He'd laughed his way through seven years of school with Remus by his side, in his bed and in his arms. He'd laughed his way through Jamie's wedding, lit up the halls of his friends' new home with the light of his smiles. He'd laughed all the way to Azkaban, or so the stories said. He honestly couldn't remember for himself.
In Azkaban no one laughed. No one ever even smiled. Sometimes in the dead of night he could hear sounds that approached laughter; high shrieking sort of gulps for air that beat against the stone walls and filtered through bars to wrap around him like musty silk. More often there were mumbles, frantic and low, reverberating like a constant vibrating drone throughout the prison. It sounded like the walls were talking to one another, because sounds like that just couldn't have human origins.
But laughter always comes back, especially for Sirius, who cannot escape the insincerity of his own emotions. There are those who would say he has a short temper, that he is ruled by his emotions, namely anger. These people do not know him. They speak of his idiot grin, of his vapid smile and vacant eyes. They don't know how carefully he's worked to scoop all light from those two dim eyes, to hollow out the ring of a once rich laugh and dry out his smiles to use again and again. His face is a mask, and that ought to be obvious, except that they don't want to see it like that. No one does.
Sirius especially doesn't. As long as he's smiling things will be okay. He once read that there's something in your brain that will automatically be happier if you smile. Smiling is a cause and a reaction. So when there's nothing to smile about he's got twice the reason to smile. The only thing is that if what he feels now is happiness, he'd maybe be better off with sorrow.
Now he's back in school, sort of, with Remus by his side, always, in his arms and in his bed. Mostly. Some things change, he grins, and some things are better that way, right? Butterflies seem much happier than caterpillars and so on. Change is a natural part of life. Living is transforming. So he smiles and he keeps himself in check. Now Remus' apologetic smiles when he pulls back from an embrace are nothing new, but they hurt as much now as they ever did. Twice the reason to smile.
Sirius knows that eventually this will all cave in. Eventually this
frantic scrambling charade will come crashing down, his smile tumbling
in upon him and this whole world will pull him under for the last long
time. That's okay. He decided a long time ago; he'll go out laughing and
they'll bury him with a grin on his face.
*~*~*
Sometimes he lets things go too far.
In the old days that was no problem. He wasn't thinking, back then, the way he is now. After the war ended, after James and Lily were killed and Peter was pronounced dead and Sirius was effectively dead to the world, he'd started thinking about things he'd counted forgotten. His mother had given him a bible once, a long time ago, and it had been growing mold for nearly ten years now. He dragged it out and started on page one.
Oh, everyone was trying to cram meaning into their lives back then. Shell shocked, post war traumatic, betrayed, beaten, screaming Remus Lupin was no exception. Baptised, given communion, confirmed. He'd made something out of himself, something he could be proud of. And if now and then it bordered on mania well, that wasn't so terrible, was it?
There are some nights that last too long though; so long you know you can't sleep through them. And it was one of these nights that found Remus careening home on the arm of a colorful young man. Afterwards, he'd felt something hideous welling up in the pit of his stomach. He felt so cheap, so volatile. Toxic. Confession that week had been a brutal kick, him sensing out his sins and receiving the highest number of Hail Mary's for his penance he ever had. He said them all in a rush under his breath, rosary clasped tight.
Not cleansed, he realized. He would not be clean so easily. There were clinics, the priest told him reluctantly, hospitals that specialised in treating just this sort of thing. That wasn't necessary, the priest said. All it took was some will power, because we all get temptations. Remus wouldn't listen. He wanted this scrubbed out. He wanted this made clean. He wanted an ailment he could cure.
Therapy. Group therapy. The licentious stories some of the men told were making him squirm in his hard wooden chair. Afterwards a shy looking middle-aged man with a gold wedding band winked at him, and Remus hurried home. He wore a veil of guilt for his next meeting with the group, and avoided all eye contact. The doctor told him later about a new kind of penance.
Beg forgiveness on your own sort of cross. Remus volunteered and was strapped tight to the cure, held down, biting on black rubber till his teeth felt like they were bleeding, nervous and too aware of the cold. Then suddenly ending. He felt his world shattering again and again, the arch of his back breaking him in half. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like anything. It was afterward that hurt.
Afterward he lay about, counting spots of light that leaked through his eyelids, and tried to gauge how successful the electricity had been. He tried to remember Sirius' smile, the angle of his eyebrows and the grace of his walk, and he tried to feel nothing. The memories were faded, burned out after the voltage, but the emotion was the same, the desire was the same.
So he called for more volts. He called for a greater power, and he prayed the rosary twice through and attended mass at least twice a week. It wasn't until his hair started going grey that the doctor told him anymore would be unsafe. It wasn't till then that he gave up on a cure.
Now he's learned that it's okay. Everyone is tempted. It's how he meets these urges that matters, and he shows amazing restraint. Hate the sin but not the sinner, he says sometimes, and controls his thoughts if not his emotions. It's like being a werewolf, he thinks, and you just have to hold onto that shred of humanity that's forever slipping away.
Except that sometimes he lets it go too far. He allows monogamy, he
allows holding hands and lingering kisses. He allows one bed and the comfort
of Sirius' warmth beside him. And once or twice, or maybe a little more
often, it's almost gone further. There've been times he's woken up so achingly
hard he thinks he'll die, and Sirius is so close, so willing. He tests
himself, night after night, and he has yet to fall. Eventually this has
to break.
*~*~*
Things came back to him slowly. The sound of Jamie's laugh and the
way Remus' eyes looked in candlelight. Things he'd thought were lost forever
filtered slowly, slowly through his mind. There were little things, and
big things, and everything was centered around Remus who, like a honey
colored deity, hung suspended as a chrysalis in the labyrinth of his mind.
It was the small things that he noticed first. It was the little changes. Grey spots in the dark gold of Remus' hair stood out like someone had loved him too much, rubbed away the colour there in heartfelt caresses. Guilt. It was a new emotion for him, when he associated it with Remus. That was another change then, and he cataloged it in his mind and put it away for later.
There were different smells too, different feelings. His fingers felt like they were missing a layer of skin. Remus' skin was smoother, softer, and so much more fragile than it had been when they were young. There were scars, and spots that looked like they'd been burnt away. His eyes looked like that--burned out. His voice sounded scorched.
Inside of Sirius, Remus' blistered words caught fire. He kept the flames caged inside behind the bars of his smile, but it was a new emotion. Nothing about Remus had ever made him feel so ashamed. And there were times things slid a little out of place inside of him, and he felt as if his heart were hanging on a string, just like bait on a hook. When things got a little too heated, when things went a little too far, and Remus would pull back and look a little too sad, there was always that anger behind Sirius' apologies as he stumbled to make up for the fall. It wasn't his religion, but he felt the weight of sin upon his soul.
The first few weeks, he tried to change Remus' mind. He said, "God is love" and "It wasn't wrong before, so why is it wrong now?" and "If it feels good then it must be right." The first weeks had been the hardest on them both, full of screaming and arguments and Remus' flushed face before he slammed another door. It was easier now.
There'd been one time, one time he'd seen his friend slip. The last day of the war, when everyone was panicked and he'd been separated from the others and lost in the forest. He'd spent hours healing himself enough to hobble back to the castle, and cross his name off the list of "lost in action" heroes. And Remus, with his hair and clothes disheveled and his nails bitten off, Remus had been waiting for him, ran to him with a shout. Then there had been a kiss like in the old days, and Remus' tongue all shy and hot and relieved in his mouth, the tension of waiting slipping into the relaxed state of gratitude before the walls went back up between them.
But there will always be, on Sirius' memory, the stain of that kiss,
so he knows that the desire is still there between them. He knows that
Remus still wants him, needs him. And he's willing to wait, until death
do they part, or perhaps a little longer than that.
*~*~*
Remus has a candle and a rosary, a bible and his own sense of imperfection.
He has his resurrected chastity and that, he is told, should make him feel
proud. He should feel a sense of accomplishment at having beaten his own
body, having overcome sin in his life. He should feel all manner of pure,
but he doesn't.
What he feels is cold water and sweat. Someone once told him that true love waits, and he took it the wrong way for a long time. Now he knows just what it means, but in this case the wait is never ending. And Sirius' face will always be just out of his reach, just beyond his grasp. The perfect gold of their youth will remain forever unattainable, trapped behind a wall of glass and somehow marred by the unbalance of their genders.
Intrinsically Disorded. It's the preferred Catholic term for homosexuality. It's rather how he feels sometimes; fundamentally flawed, or perhaps just inherently chaotic. Something inside him feels all out of sync. He feels like he's wired wrong, mixed connections sending him strange signals and sparking along the insides of his chest so that he knows that down beneath the surface things are much worse than they seem.
Sirius is wired wrong too, he knows, but the other man doesn't seem to mind so much. If anything, Remus' awareness of their intrinsic disorder serves only to annoy him. He's willing to conform to his lover's wish for chastity, though for what reasons Remus has never discovered, but you will not catch Sirius Black in a church to save his life. As if the two are at war, Remus ponders, battling for his heart.
And when you get right down to it, Remus isn't sure just where his loyalties lie. He's always had this half way compromise. If he can't have his cake and eat it too then at least he knows it will remain untouched. Sirius, stretched out six inches away, might just as well be in Azkaban, but the knowledge that he isn't with someone else can be insanely comforting.
He'll carry on with his make shift love affair, clutching at the fleeting
passion of a youth spent unaware of sin, and pray at night to a God of
mercy he's hardly sure he believes in anymore. True love waits, but how
long will Sirius? Time, he knows, will be a most excellent judge of character.