This story is about the friendship (or lack thereof) between Remus and Sirius. It isn't slash, and it isn't fluffy. You were warned.

I'm not sure if this is what I really think about the friendship between these two, but I thought it was interesting. I've always been more interested in James and Sirius, and to a lesser extent James and Remus – and I guess I always put Remus and Sirius as quasi-rivals for James's attention. They are his shoulder angel and devil. Which means, naturally, that they don't always get along. In this, I've concentrated on the part that doesn't get along.

This is not my big return to fanfiction. Just something I had for a while and finally feel is finished.

Silence and Contradictions

Sometimes I loathe the very sight of him.

I can't shake it. The more I try to reason the impulse away, the more I despise him. Sometimes I even catch myself wishing that we could go back to how it was, and this is the most sickening thing of all. Because I don't mean how it was when we were teenagers, dodging authority and thinking only of ourselves. Those days are beyond capturing again. No, I mean how it was when he was locked away, when everything had been wrapped up and neatly explained and I was free to live the remainder of my tattered life in relative peace, only catching a reminder of how everything had been ruined when I saw my own face in the mirror. Now I see it in his face too, more frequently than is healthy for me I'm sure.

And such a face! The worst of it is that I can still see the youth in his eyes, just past the deadness afforded them by prison. I can still see the boy Sirius, trapped in a body and face almost unrecognisable. A part of me feared, even at school, that Sirius would be the boy who never really grew up. Now we are all that's left, the boy who was forced to grow old before his time, and the one who can't quite let go of his childhood.

And we shall go on reminding each other of the good times until the end of our days, just torturing each other with the painful, beautiful past, eating away at the friendship on which we both rely so much.

There's nothing that can be said. He knows it too. For all our sworn pacts and vows we mistrusted each other, threw each other to the wolves (as it were) and now we must live with that knowledge, in silence.

Silence. Deadly, cold, sanity-destroying silence. The mind wasn't designed to withstand this sort of tragedy. It wasn't designed to withstand a lot of things that we two have known. Demons in the dark, who take your soul and change it, until what's left doesn't even look as though it belongs to you at all.

The past slips away like water held in cupped hands. And yet it's also permanently around us, in the subtle, jarring reminders of what we once had. Sometimes it's like I can't remember James's voice at all, and others I can hear him as clearly as though he were standing right next to me. Sometimes I think Remus has been replaced by a stranger sometime in the last few years, and yet sometimes it feels as though he hasn't changed at all. I can't even really decide if I ever actually knew him.

I've changed, and yet stayed the same. Died and yet still live. It doesn't make any sense, and yet it's true.

There's nothing to say anymore. We both know it. So we will live with the silence and the contradictions.

The others accepted me, in their way, but I always sort of knew that he looked at me sideways. James had no problems with it ever, because that was the sort of person that James was. The only crime anyone ever committed in his eyes was prejudice. Peter ... well, perhaps Peter had trouble with it more than we knew. He certainly was uncomfortable at first. Later, I thought we banded together on the outside of James and Sirius's friendship, but maybe that's just what he wanted me to think. It's hard to tell now.

Sirius, on the other hand, has trouble hiding emotion. And I knew he never really saw me in the same light. He certainly has used my condition to serve his own purposes, and to that end he probably appreciated and even liked me the better for it, but I don't think he has properly trusted me since third year. I could see that. It's not that I blame him, because if I spent time blaming people for being prejudiced I wouldn't have much time to do anything else, but it is sad I suppose. We were not as close friends as we pretended to be for James's sake; that much is certain. Besides all else that came between us, we are not particularly compatible people.

For all his brilliance, he acts like a complete idiot half the time. And for all my naiveté, I act as though I always know best. He hates it when I lecture him. I hate it when he doesn't listen. Were it not for the other two, it is quite possible that we would not have any obligation to each other at all. And yet, since fate has gone this way, he is my brother. And that is how it will always be.

I know why he thought it was me. And he definitely knows why I so easily believed it was him. And yes, we have to live with that, forced to be better friends than we would otherwise have been because, let's face it, he's all I've got and vice versa.

He's a bloody prat really, and that's all there is to it.

High-and-mighty bloody snob. Acts as though he knows everything; when in fact he's got no idea how to deal with himself, let alone anyone else. I know I'm not one to talk, and Merlin knows we all make mistakes in this life, but I simply don't understand this martyr complex of his. This weird compulsion he has to be a suffering artist or whatever this image is that he's cultivating for himself. I don't get it. I mean, who the bloody hell does he think he is? Does he even know?

Maybe I'm a hypocrite, and maybe I'm even worse than he is sometimes, but he really is a whiny sod.

All right, so I am a hypocrite.

Still, with Remus it's a definite problem. I mean, he is still human most of the time, so really it ought to have dawned on him by now that he is perfectly capable of living by his own terms. No one ever taught him that it's all right to not care about what other people think. Sometimes I think about giving him that lesson; however my method would be rather violent I think, and probably not all that effectual. There are days when I think smacking him with the business end of a broomstick would do wonders for my own mental health, though.

I don't know what it is about him, but he always manages to get on my nerves. Always has done. Something in that mild smile and self-pitying expression just pisses me off. There's nothing that can be done about it. Just one of those weird personality things.

He doesn't know. What I've been through, what I've suffered – he doesn't know and, as usual, he doesn't care. From where he's standing, everything seems to be moving on a roughly circular path, with him at the centre. Right now, all he thinks about is Harry – and, by extension, James – and so that's all that exists, that's all he can believe in. And should I expect any different, after all these years? Should I expect that he might have grown up, might have come to see the error of his ways?

Of course not. He is just as he always was, and always will be. A right royal prat. A spoiled little pureblood prince who thinks he's a cut above the rest of us just because he staged the odd rebellion. The look on his face would be priceless if I actually told him so. If I actually let out what's in my head half the time, he would explode like one of the twins' fireworks. And sometimes, I'm not really certain that it wouldn't be worth the consequences.

Not that I'm a particularly malicious person, of course, and nor do I aspire to be one. But sometimes ... I don't know. There are dark things hidden inside all of us. I have to pay particularly close attention to mine in any case, but more so when Sirius is near. And it's not that I hate him – I could never hate him, not really – but I do find myself thinking more uncharitable thoughts about him than almost anyone else I've ever formed an acquaintance with. I think a lot of people, in fact, would be quite shocked to hear my full thoughts on the subject, were I ever inclined to share them.

A lot of people. Not Sirius, though. Nothing comes to him quite so naturally as being disapproved of. And I'm sure he knows, deep down – or perhaps, not even so deep – how differently he and I see the world. How I cannot understand the way he chooses to live his life.

But he doesn't know me. He doesn't understand me. Because he doesn't care or because he can't be bothered taking the time to gain some insight, it doesn't matter.

We were – I mean, we are friends. After all these years, he should know. And I should understand him. And I shouldn't want to scream at him so badly that I have to physically bite my tongue. That's just not the way it should be.

And yet it is.

Ultimately, I have trouble deciding what it is that bothers me most about him.

The things that always bothered me at school – the werewolf thing, my own deep-rooted guilty prejudice, along with the fact that he was always a swotty, weak thing who radiated self-pity – those things come and go. Sometimes the prejudice hits you harder, rises up from the dark places and bubbles over into rational thinking. I wish it wouldn't. Especially since prejudice is one of those frustrating things which seems only to appear in hindsight. I wish it wouldn't, but that sort of deeply ingrained hatred is passed along in the blood.

Which isn't to say that it's right, or that I'm not ashamed of myself every time. The truth of the matter, though, is that it isn't what annoys me about him. It's what makes me not trust him, despite not having anyone else in the entire world to trust. But that doesn't annoy me. Well, it does. But it's yet another thing where the problem is internal rather than any fault of his. After all, I know now exactly how much trust I owe him. The fact that I can't is yet another reminder of how this whole sorry situation is entirely due to my own shortcomings.

But that isn't the point at all. Not at all. Because none of that helps me to divine what it is that makes us secret enemies. You see, I know he has these thoughts too. I know that sometimes he can't even bear to look at me. There's that guilt, that same guilt I feel. The problems I have in dealing with him are the same as the problems he has with me. And yet, that's not the worst of it.

Because, if I think about it, we were always this way. Before. At school, we were always on opposite sides of the argument, with James and Peter forced to mediate. Before we all knew his secret, I was the one who wondered if he could be trusted.

We were – we are friends. Still. Despite the fact that we never really should have been, and that had it not been for James, we might never have even spoken to each other. We are friends. If I sit down and think about it for a while (something I've had plenty of time to do in the past twelve years) I can half-remember times when we laughed over some joke that not even the other two were part of, and I seem to recall Padfoot and Moony having some good times together. Those things must exist, somewhere.

Once or twice it might even have been friendly. Maybe what annoys me so much is that I can't really tell if we weren't just going through the paces, or if there was something deeper there. Maybe what annoys me is that I can't seem to understand him the way I think I should.

Maybe it's just that he can be annoying sometimes, and there's not much I can do about that.

And so what can we do with it all? All the pent-up emotion, the frustration and the deep, dark, forbidding knowledge of our continued distrust of one another?

Silence. The only answer. Because what else do we have? Who else do we have but each other?

We are all that's left. Me and him. Four down to two, and it's the two most unlikely to be able to work together peacefully. But we will. Because we must.

We cannot fail. We should never have been put in this situation, but now that we have we cannot fail. Is it fair? Of course not.

We of all people should know that life isn't fair.