Death of Cold

Snow didn't fall in flakes that December, but in hard, grey pellets that rattled down the London alleys and collected in dirty mounds against every curb. Sirius walked the late night streets with his shoulders hunched up by his ears, shivering slightly under his too-thin leather jacket.

James and Lily had posted him a red scarf for the holidays with a note that read "You'll catch your death of cold"—probably prompted by Mrs. Potter's constant worry about her as-well-as-adopted son. Though he still hadn't bothered with gloves, or a hat, or Merlin forbid an appropriate winter coat, he wore that scarf relentlessly. Long enough to wrap around his neck four times, red enough to lend color to the dim late-night streets he'd been so prone to wandering that winter, alone and cold and full of young self-loathing.

Christmas had come and gone in a flash of artificial lights across the sad little balcony of their flat. They had reminded Sirius sharply, painfully, of the goblin-made Faerie lights his mother used to drape over Grimmauld Place. Christmastime at the House of Black never took on a warm, cheery ambience; instead, it always had that cold, sterile tint of those silver-and-crystal lights. Something to be admired, not enjoyed. So those cheap electric lights filled him with a discordant mix of nostalgia and remorse.

It had been four months since Dorcas died. No, not died. That was the wrong verb for her. She'd been killed. She'd been murdered. And he'd been right next to her, laughing even as more Death Eaters apparated in around them, even as he had appeared with his bone-white wand and red eyes, so much worse that Sirius had imagined, flattening the front line of their defenses as if he'd cut the strings on a line of marionettes.

He laughed because what else was there to do, in face of such terror? How could he continue on unless it was just a game, something to be jeered at, something to be taunted? And she'd laughed next to him, like they were still out by the lake practicing their dueling on an autumn afternoon. Like they could just wrap up at any minute, shake hands with the enemy, head off for tea and biscuits.

They'd thought that youth and talent could protect them. But he learned, in the instant his curse ripped through her body, that bravery and intelligence and goodness were not some protective charm to hold over their shoulders. Sometimes being the good guys wasn't enough.

He shivered more violently, balling his fists in his pockets until his fingernails dug sharp little crescents into his palms. Light spilled from the street lamps like buckets of dirty water, forming pools of light separated by six long strides of dismal, dark cement. His silver flask fit snug in his breast pocket, banging right over his heart.

He would not drink tonight. He drank the night before, and the night before, and he didn't like to need things so badly. He thought of his darling mother, the sneer of her teeth stained dark with wine nightly. He thought of brunch three weeks ago at the Potters', when he'd poured his third drink and glanced up to Remus's wide-eyed, silent accusation. The worry on his prematurely lined face, the wince of shame.

They did not discuss it later, of course. Just as they do not discuss the couch they've always outfitted with blankets and pillows as a transparent lie to any visitor, no we don't share the bedroom, but which Remus had taken to sleeping on lately, folding his long body to fit between its stiff arms.

A late night taxi stalked behind him, washing his legs with its sharp yellow light. He turned, glared through the window. His eyes constricted, savage—Remus called them his "feral eyes," a glimpse of Padfoot on his human face. The cab retreated up the empty street—Sirius imagined it with a tail between its figurative legs.

The street was lined with tourist shops and sleeping fast food restaurants. The neon sign on the pub across the street flickered and went dark, and the door opened to spill out a group of stumbling young women. One blonde, one brunette, one red head—he thought of the way Dorcas, Lily and Marlene used to cling arms, always such a trio. They clung to each other, shrieking, as they made their way across the dead street. They were leering towards him, laughing, and he fought the urge to run.

Up close, they were not as young as he'd presumed. Their jackets and skirts were trendy and nice, but their faces were caked with masks of makeup and their hair frizzed in a middle-aged way. "Nice boots," the blonde said, batting her artificial eyelashes at him in what she clearly presumed as an appealing manner. "What are they made of?"

"Dragon skin," he said flatly, pushing past them to continue on his way.

They tittered at his joke, swaying together on the sidewalk, catcalling as he stretched his legs to get away.

Once he'd made it a few blocks, he pulled the flask from his pocket, un-stoppering it and taking a deep drag before he could change his mind. He could feel the fire whiskey coursing its way down his throat, pooling in his stomach to send up little fingers of warmth. His thirst, once almost painful in its intensity, subsided to a little whisper. He took another swig, wiping his chapped mouth with the back of his hand and stashing the flask once again in his breast pocket.

"It's an ever-filling flask," James had said as Sirius unwrapped the parcel, tied in day-old Prophets with Happy 16th Birthday written in sloppy pen. "You charm it to match up with a bottle of something, and then it fills up forever, or until that bottle's all gone…"

He thought of the bottle of fire whiskey on the kitchen counter, next to the canisters of flour and sugar and Remus's favored bottle of dry gin. He thought of it dwindling day after day as his flask continued to hold just the same amount of liquid. He'd need to buy a new bottle soon, redo the charm.

He'd gone through a lot of bottles, lately.

His face flushed in a way that had nothing to do with the whiskey, or the cold wind against his cheeks. Because he thought of Remus sitting at the kitchen table, hands folded in front of him in that frustratingly neat I've-just-finished-an-exam way he was so prone to, watching the liquid level in the bottle fall, fall, fall.

He cursed out loud, a bitter sentiment abandoned to the night air.

He hated needing things. He hated feeling weak.

The warmth of the whiskey in his belly, the warmth of Remus in his bed. There were some things he could never stop thirsting for.

He checked the time on his pocket watch, another reminder of James's parents, who'd gifted it to him on his coming-of-age. Really, he thought wryly, everything that mattered to him had been a gift from the Potters.

Nearly 3 a.m. He wondered if Remus was waiting up for him. Remus had never been very good at staying up—more than one night, he'd come home to find the man slumped uncomfortably across the kitchen table, cheek imprinted with the wood grain. It was easier if Remus was asleep. He couldn't decide what was worse—the nights Remus treated him with cold indifference, turning his back as soon as Sirius came home, or the nights when Remus's eyes were so big and sad and probing.

He should go back home now. His legs protested with every step. It was the coldest time of the night now. Every inhale pinched his nostrils shut, stung all the way into his sinuses.

Catch your death of cold. He laughed out loud, watching the ghost of his breath dissipate in the weak street light glow.

Every night, he tried to get entirely lost, because then he only needed to think about finding his way back. But the old trick wasn't working anymore. Because no matter what streets he took and what turns he made, he was still in London. They were still at war. Dorcas was still dead, and Remus was still staring at him with those lonely eyes.

He could walk till the sun came up and the late-night cold dissolved into vapor on the frozen cobblestones. He could walk until the soles wore all the way through on his boots. He could walk until his legs gave out, and then he could drag himself till his knees and palms and chest were bloodied by the ground, and he would never get lost enough to forget what he'd seen.

Remus stood naked in front of the full-length mirror, staring at the fresh scars crisscrossing his body.

Twenty years old. His age echoed in his mind, taunting him. Twenty years old, and already so flawed, so tired.

He turned to his side, forced himself to keep watching. The sag of his and discoloration of his skin, the graying of his hair. He tried to look at it clinically, like the book of Lycan diagrams and moon charts he kept tucked behind the headboard of their bed. He tried to distance himself from his body, view it from another lens.

He'd read once about the idea of a palimpsest, a parchment painted over with new words so that the stories formed layers, each new one just barely covering the one underneath. He'd thought of it, then, as a poetic description of his scars. The story of his body, written over and over again on the same canvas. The ghosts of old scars haunted him just underneath the surface, thin white lines splayed under angry new scratches.

It was a terrible metaphor, really. There was nothing poetic about these wounds. They were all ugly, shameful, the mark of a monster.

Stories best left painted over.

He reached for his wand on the bureau. The ball of light from the lamp clicked off, and he was only backlit by the orange glow from the open bedroom door. In the dim light, he could almost handle the silhouette of his reflection. But then he thought of Sirius's body, so fit, so perfect, and he clutched both hands to his stomach feeling as if he might vomit.

He'd been spending too much time alone, drinking black tea and reading pulp science fiction novels. He'd gotten a job at the muggle book shop down the block, a moldering catacomb of unimportant novels perpetually a few weeks ahead of going completely under. Sirius had balked at renting in a Muggle complex, at first, but Remus had argued that for now, it was safest. The landlady gave them a long, cold look when they'd signed the eight-month lease—"She knows we're wizards," Sirius had whispered as they rushed up the stairs, hushing their laughs. Remus had thought she'd seen something else in the nervous pair of young men, something telling in the way they wouldn't meet each other's eyes as they sat in her cigarette-smelling office.

But there hadn't been time to worry, because there was an empty flat to explore. But there hadn't been time to explore, even, because there had been clothes to remove and a cold hardwood floor to familiarize. They'd reveled in their privacy, then. This new truth that they needn't cast any silencing charms or spend half of their attention listening for James or Peter's approach. No more dim corridors, hidden rendezvous. It was just the two of them, the empty apartment, no distractions. He'd whirled in a mix of exhilaration and trepidation—to have Sirius all to himself was exhilarating, to have all of Sirius's attention focused on him was terrifying.

Now, the dim light blurred his scars. Usually, he thought of them as a separate entity from his body, a net thrown over his skin. But in the orange glow, they became a part of him. He closed his eyes and ran a hand down his torso, feeling each Braille bump of knotted tissue under his blind fingers.

One week until the moon. He could feel the moon's pull in his bones already. His shoulders slumped—each morning, he lay in bed feeling the particular painful ache of simple gravity. Sirius was gone again. Sirius was always gone. He'd assumed the man was on another mission, but he never asked, because Sirius never offered. He'd opened his mouth sometimes, as they sipped silent tea or lay inches apart in bed, but always something about Sirius's tense posture, the gleam of despair haunting his eyes, drew Remus back.

They had known, once, how to touch and laugh and joke. But they'd never quite learned how to talk. And now, every day, they forgot their other methods of communication, so that now whenever Sirius entered a room Remus felt incomprehensibly blind, deaf, dumb.

He wondered where Sirius was tonight, and he wondered if he would prefer ignorance. Just last week, he'd casually asked James how he and Sirius's last week's mission had gone, and James had stared at him blankly.

There had been no last week's mission. So where had Sirius been, those long nights of absence, those mornings when he showed up red-eyed and exhausted and fell wordlessly to bed? In the last six months, the air in the apartment had soured with doubts. First he thought that maybe there was somebody else. He'd obsessed over it, culling through the possibilities, searching Sirius's bureau drawers and desk cubbies for any hidden note or illicit souvenir.

But lately, he'd been thinking something worse.

There were many kinds of betrayal.

The empty apartment was one betrayal. The empty eyes and empty whiskey bottles, another.

Dorcas's death had been a betrayal. Remus hadn't been there, hadn't been to any actual battle, but he'd heard secondhand from a shaking, drunken James. How they'd been ambushed, unprepared. How they'd been on routine rounds, nothing to worry about, but someone had given away their whereabouts, their numbers and importance, and how he had come specifically to kill the best of The Order.

He stepped backwards until the mattress bumped the back of his knees, sunk down onto the edge of it. He thought of his scars as Sirius had once described them, in his broken teenage poetics—roadways and rivers, intersections and mountain ranges—as purposeful and graceful as the inked lines on the now-lost Marauder's Map.

He could not let Sirius touch him anymore. Because Sirius's hands on his skin felt like a self-betrayal, felt unfair to both of them. There'd always been a trust stretched between them, taut and tremulous as a tight wire. Somewhere along the way, without even noticing, they'd both tumbled off.

There was a crack of apparition from the living room, the sound of a shin colliding with the coffee table, a loud and familiar curse. He stayed still on the bed's edge, hands crossed on his lap, eyes squeezed shut. He could hurry for his cloak, pull it over his naked body, hide himself again. But that would be foolish and embarrassing. He would sit here in the dark, naked and alone, and wait for Sirius to come. And then they would—he did not know what they would do. They would stare at each other.

They would look sad, or angry, or confrontational, or guarded. He used to be able to predict their reactions as easily as he could map out the lunar phases, but now it was a new moon every night; he was left in the dark.

"Moony?" Sirius's voice was hesitant, almost shy, as he peered into the dark room. "What're you doing? Are you okay?"

He turned slowly to see the man silhouetted in the doorway. Behind his shadow, the familiar stretch of the living room, an odd comfort. The secondhand orange couch with the sunset-colored quilt, the end tables stacked with books and mugs of tea dregs. They'd built this life together, and for awhile it had all seemed so solid.

"Where have you been?" his voice felt gravelly in his throat.

"I've been—out. Nowhere."

"Out nowhere…" Now he could hear the whiskey in Sirius's voice, and it made him angry.

"What are you doing?" Sirius asked again, voice edged with concern. He stepped into the dark of the room, made as if to reach out, then folded his arms protectively across his chest.

"When I talked to James last week, he said you weren't on any mission together," Remus's voice was slow, measured. "He said he hadn't seen you in two weeks."

Sirius was frozen, the dark shades of his face impassive.

"Where have you been, Sirius?"

"Where have you been, Remus? Where do you go to every moon? What are these secret underground missions Dumbledore sends you on, and why will you never tell anyone about them?" His words flew out, sharp and quick as arrows, and Remus felt pinned down.

He thought, of all people, Sirius would understand. How ashamed he was, that his best contribution came from sneaking around sketchy pubs and motels, working connections through the underground werewolf community. That he didn't like to talk about the dirtiest, cheapest inns where stone-faced old women would rent out basement rooms for four galleons a night, rooms lined with stone where he could lock the heavy door securely and tether himself to the back wall and wait for the monster to come. That his scars and bruises had been getting worse, and the deep wound down the curve of his spine hadn't fully healed in months, but he felt like he deserved these things for his lack of control, for what he was.

But there was a sharp accusation in Sirius's voice, a burning tinge of doubt. Something welled inside him—the urge to yell, or the urge to cry. He didn't want to do either, because that would mean relinquishing control. And after years of losing himself once a month, Remus liked nothing more than to stay in control.

"This isn't working," he said slowly, carefully. "Nothing's working."

Sirius's shadow swayed. He took a step backwards towards the door, a step

Forwards towards the bed, a step back again. As if he could not decide where to go, and instead chose this purgatory, this perpetual back-and-forth.

Hunched on the bed, Remus felt much the same. Because if this wasn't working, what did they have between them? What did anyone have between anyone else? A sudden panic bubbled up in him, as permeating and gut-clenching as a wave of nausea. It couldn't all be meaningless, it couldn't all be dismissible. He'd tried so hard for the last few months to convince himself that it all mattered, somehow. That it was all worth it.

What was worth it, in the end? That summer afternoon they'd stood by Dorcas's casket, feeling the hot irony of the sun in the sky? He'd been so angry at the sun that day, that it continued to shine so indecently as so many wizards clouded through the cemetery. How when he'd taken off his suit that night, there had been a dark and painful sunburn lined carefully where the ridge of his collar ended, as if all of that anger manifested itself in the angry red skin.

But there was the image of Lily, her red hair tight back so tight, her black mourning dress strained tight with her pregnant stomach. Was that worth it? This promis of life she and James held so fearfully between them? They talked about it excitedly, discussing names and possible due dates, but Remus could see the fear in their eyes. It was the same fear he felt the night before a moon—that impending sacrifice of oneself. They were so young. But youth was different these days. Youth was torn apart by curses and buried deep in the ground.

They needed babies. He knew that in an obscure, almost purposefully ignorant way. He knew his friends almost better than himself. Just by looking at them, he could sense their tension, begin unknotting their anxieties in his own mind. And when he looked at Lily and James, he knew this—that the pregnancy had been an accident, but that they could not give it up. Because so much had been given up already, and contained within all that fear and despair was a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of life.

"She told me it would all be okay," Sirius said suddenly, his voice muffled even though nothing was pressed over his mouth.

Remus stared across the dark room, his eyebrows knitted together. "Who?"

"Dorcas." The name hung in the air between them. They both flinched as if it were a moth against a light bulb, something to be shooed out of a window into the night air. Remus realized they had spoken it less and less since the funeral, that the syllables of her existence had been wiped from their vocabulary. He whispered her name under his breath, the forgotten flavor of it lingering on his tongue. And he realized, suddenly, how important it was to keep saying it.

"I grabbed her after the curse hit, apparated to that forest we all went camping that summer after graduation. Remember? Me and you and James and Lily, Marlene, Dorcas, Pete, Emmeline? I don't even know why I thought of going there, I barely even thought of it when we apparated. Maybe she thought of it, and that's what decided."

Remus was aware of every noise in the room other than Sirius's voice. The creak of the bed springs under his slightly shifting body, the hush of his quiet breath. He wanted to stay as quiet as possible, because he had the idea that any sudden noise or movement would scare these words back to wherever they'd been locked away.

"It was so bad, Remus. I thought… Avada would have been a mercy. Just a flash of green and it's all over. But this… She was turned all inside-out, and there was blood everywhere, and I kept yelling for help even though I knew that whole bloody forest was empty…"

Remus wanted to close his eyes, wanted to keep them shut. He wanted to cover his body, the bare flesh now breaking out in gooseflesh though the room was still as warm as it had always been. But he could not move, could not blink, could not swallow the sour saliva that pooled in his mouth.

"And you know what she said to me, Moony? While she's laying there bleeding out and I'm holding her hand so tight it must've hurt her? She looked me in the eye, and she said "Sirius' it's going to be okay."" His voice cracked. "She's laying there dying, and she's still braver than me, she's still better than me. She's laying there dying, and she's wasting her last words comforting me."

Sirius stared at him expectantly, desperately. As if now that he'd told his story, things might start making sense. Or even if they didn't all fall into logic, at least they might stop hurting so fucking badly. Because every part of Remus ached. His muscles burned, not just from sitting still for so long, but from the constant tension that knotted through his body day after day.

Dorcas's words surrounded them in that dark room. He imagined them like dust motes in a shaft of light—something that was always in the air, but impossible to see unless you looked the right way.

"Everything will be okay," he said slowly, testing the words out. They felt unnatural, a fabrication. Sirius did not double over, did not wail or curl up or beat his fists dramatically into the carpet. He stood there crying silently, standing straight and tall as the trails of tears glinted in the half light.

Remus blinked and the shadow was shifting shape, turning its angles inside-out. And then Padfoot was resting his head on his naked knee. Those eyes—Sirius's but rounder, wider, darker— full of liquid sadness of a simpler, wilder kind. He rested his hand on Padfoot's head, flat against the coarse fur. The dog shifted onto the mattress, stretching his long body across the rumpled sheets, and Remus moved to clutch the furry body close to his own.

Their grief, in that moment, was entirely the same. Wordless, ancient, freed from definition. The grief of two animals curled in a dark cave, unable to consider the future or the past, unable to think of anything past the instinctive fear clotting their stomachs, the instinctive pleasure of two warm bodies pressed together so tight.

He did not cry. This mourning was past tears. He just lay there, aching, until sleep pulled them both under its surface.

When Remus woke the next morning, Sirius had come back to himself. In the morning after, they were just two men. Not even men, he corrected himself—boys playing at being men, playing at being soldiers. As he lay half-awake the next morning, head pounding with hangover pulses though he'd had nothing to drink the night before, he could do nothing but hold desperately to Sirius. To pull him against his chest and silently bury his lips in his dirty hair. To breath in his smell of grease and cigarettes and whiskey, of solitude, of anger. To think that there were sacrifices and surrenders to come, but right now, maybe things could stay in the simple, animalistic half-light of last night.

Life had betrayals and complications and secrets and falling-outs, yes, but sometimes there was just survival. And sometimes you clung to it as closely as you could, a warm body in a cold bed, the only thing to reach out to during a long night.