For melody, who prompted 'a Sirius/Remus story based off "the madness within"'.

I'm beginning to think I'm physically incapable of writing Sirius/Remus that isn't bursting to the seams with angst. Sorry about that.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

- Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

I used to wonder how you know who a person is.

Are they a name, a face, a body? Are they clothes, words, friends? Are they encounters, memories, moments?

Could it really be those thousands of abstract, insignificant little things make a human being? Are they really all that there is? Are those truly the things that make up a life?

...

My name was given to me on a day I'll never forget. Not the day I was named, but the day I earned my name, the day it was bestowed upon me.

I remember standing on the landing at my parents' house, glowing with pride, back when bloody perfect Regulus was nothing but a baby, wailing in our mother's arms. She'd smiled at me that day – tight and strained and condescending, but a smile nonetheless – as my father had stencilled my name onto my bedroom door.

S. I. R. I. U. S.

A proud name. An old, traditional wizarding name. The name of plenty of Blacks before me, and probably plenty to come. One passed down through the family, kept clean of mudblood-

But, no. Even back then I'd never truly been able to think like that.

It had all been an act back then. A daily performance, a mask that I'd painted on each morning and carefully maintained year after year. For eleven years. That's a long time to spend acting. It makes me wonder if... if sometimes I wasn't acting. If maybe, somewhere within me, the things I used to say and do and feel were real. Still are real.

Like my name. It's a part of me. It is me. And despite the ancestors that I got it from, the parents who gave it to me, it's all that I've ever had. It's all I have to show of eleven years of a wasted, lost childhood.

Eleven years spent waiting for my life to start. Eleven years spent realising that I didn't have to be what my family wanted me to be, what my heritage destined me to be. Eleven years spent absorbing ideas and, without even knowing it, becoming a part of their world.

When I went to Hogwarts I already had it all inside of me – beasts, burdens, beliefs. Things. The Sorting Hat had told me it could see them, and that somewhere beneath the layers of pretence, the results of my horrible upbringing, there was something worthwhile within me. Courage, bravery, strength. Goodness.

I wondered sometimes... what did it really see?

Deep inside me, was I ugly? Was I what I was brought up to be, what I was named to be, or what I wanted to become? Was I going to fall to the temptation – the constant, insatiable tug – to just give up? Or was I going to last, to hold onto the strange, potent, reckless hope that always fought back?

I wondered if it knew. If it knows now, so many years later.

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder...

...

My friends were given to me on a separate day, a better day, but one I remember just as clearly.

The four of us were standing in our dormitory, glancing at our beds, then at each other, then at the beds again. There was no ceremony this time. No labelling of doors, stencilling of names upon plaques. Prongs shot me a grin, shoved me out the way and ran for the bed by the window. I crash-tackled Moony onto the next one, kicked and shoved at him as he spluttered out curses. He fell off the mattress and onto the floor with a crash, and Prongs and I howled with laughter until we couldn't breathe.

It was the happiest I could ever remember being.

I'd watched as Moony clambered onto the bed closest to mine and, after a minute of trying hard to glare, he'd smiled shyly back at me. I remember getting the feeling it was the happiest he'd ever been too.

I remember so much about those moments, those years. My glory days at Hogwarts.

Lounging in the Common Room with Prongs, throwing balled up bits of parchment at Evans in first year. Sitting in class with Wormtail, daring each other to creep up the front and rub out a few letters here and there on the blackboard, until it spelled out something obscene. Huddling in the stands with Moony, so tangled up in our cloaks that neither of us could tell whose was whose, watching Prongs hurl the Quaffle through the goal and trying not to trip each other as we stood up to cheer.

It was never a secret why I was so drawn to Moony instead of to anyone else. For my whole life, I'd been taught that most people were irrelevant, undeserving of my attention. That was one pearl of wisdom that I un-learnt pretty quickly, courtesy of Prongs and his bloody morals.

But Moony... Moony understood me. Before we even knew about his condition, his secret, I knew that he was different. He wasn't privileged like Prongs – carried through life on a litter, floating above all the badness, all the darkness. He wasn't ignorant like Wormtail – too nervous about his little bubble of a world to know or to care about what else existed out there.

Moony was like me. He had those things inside him, things that scared him, things that he couldn't control. They were a part of him too – a hated, awful, terrible part, but a vital part nonetheless. Like me, he was damaged. He was tortured. But he was beautiful.

I wondered sometimes, if he thought I was too. If he, like the Hat, could see past all the- all the everything, and peer through the hazy remnants of my mask, the heavy weight of my name and my family. What did he see when he looked at me, I wondered.

Those wide amber eyes stared and stared sometimes across a room. Even at the age of fourteen, I'd somehow known that I never wanted him to stop looking. Because, one day, I knew he'd finally see it. He'd see past what I was made of. And he'd just see me.

Would I be beautiful to him? Could I be?

I wondered, I wondered, I wondered...

...

I fell in love with my name one day. An unobtrusive, unimportant day, sometime in August, I think, sometime in that period after school was over, but when the rest of my life was yet to begin. The day was unimportant. But I remember every detail of it.

We'd spent the day together, Prongs, Moony, Wormy and I. A day without Evans, without the Order, without all the distractions of reality. For a day, we'd let ourselves return to being the people we were at school, and we'd plotted and planned and laughed and laughed like nothing was wrong with the world. I'd thrown my arm around Moony's shoulders and he'd trembled at my touch, just a little. He never trembled when Prongs touched him. Only me. Only me.

The other two had left in the evening, when it was starting to get dark and parents or girlfriends or loved ones might start to get worried. Moony and I hadn't had any such loved ones to worry ourselves with, so we'd stayed at my house, talking more than ever before. I don't even know what we were saying. At the time I don't think it mattered. All I'd known was that I wanted to keep him there, because he was looking at me again as if the entire universe were suspended in my eyes.

And that night as my mouth chatted away, he'd dived in and he'd explored it, swimming through the space and the stars and thick, thrumming magic. He'd found something in there, and to this day I still don't know what, but whatever it was he liked it. Loved it. Maybe?

"Sirius," he'd said, cutting off my tirade, and it was only one word slipping out of his mouth, but it was... big.

He'd said it as if it meant something. As if it was something. As if, separate to my face, my body, my family, my clothes, my words, my experiences and memories and encounters and all those other abstract things, he'd found something. That thing within me that I was in equal measures scared and proud of. The thing that was a little bit of those first eleven years and a lot of the next seven.

It had taken me a second – a sharp beat of silence – to realise that he hadn't called me Padfoot. Not my nickname, my safe name. He'd called me Sirius. My real name.

"Remus?"

I'd hated that it was a question. Because, Merlin, I'd been anything but nervous, anything but unsure. I'd known exactly what that energy was that buzzed between us, because I'd been fixated on it for years, ever since I'd been fourteen and begun to notice those amber, golden, gleaming eyes that stared so intently – so intensely – at me.

"Sirius, I-"

I hadn't let him finish, hadn't wanted him to.

Because it wasn't about him. It was about me.

Not in a selfish way, not in a dominant way. Just in a way that nothing had ever been allowed to be mine before.

I'd never been allowed to claim something before, not since the day that my bedroom had been declared mine, given my tag, my name. But that room and the life I'd lived in there had gone. So had the bed in Gryffindor Tower, and suddenly all I'd had left was him. The man who let himself be owned by be, gave himself up to me so willingly, so gladly.

He'd trembled under my touch again. Shaken and shivered and moaned my name, and it was so utterly, blissfully affirming, as if every time he'd said it I'd been anchored a little bit more to him. To earth.

What we'd done that night- it hadn't been about pleasure or tension or love – although all those things had been hovering uncertainly between us for years. It had been about us. About uniting two people who had so much hidden in themselves – hatred, wildness, want – and needed it to be freed. We were both made with it, with that darkness – that madness – inside us, and years of pretending to be pure Gryffindors was pleasant but it wasn't real.

That night, something in me had broken free. A filter, a lense had fallen over my eyes, or been lifted away, maybe. I'd suddenly felt whole again. Like Sirius – the boy whose name was still stencilled onto a bedroom door in a hated house; the teenager whose name was inked onto endless scrolls of parchment and detention slips; the man whose name fell again and again from the lips of someone who mattered, someone who understood. Someone who knew it was right for those three Sirius's to be the same. Who loved me so thoroughly because of them all.

When that night had finished and the first few rays of the morning sun had begun to splatter the horizon, I'd wondered no more. With a startling, terrifying, liberating clarity I'd just known.

I was Sirius.

The Black, the Gryffindor, the monstrous dog. The face, the clothes, the memories. The past, the present, the future.

The man Remus loved.

That was who I was. That was enough. That was everything.

...

I don't wonder anymore.

Even though things have changed - people have died, people have lived, people have fallen in and out of love - the certainty that I felt in that moment hasn't faltered. If I was Sirius then, if Remus with his pure, pure heart had known it, then I was still Sirius now. Time, accusations, changes - none of it matters. What matters is that conviction, that sureness with which my name had once been spoken. That reverence.

"Sirius. Sirius. Sirius. Sirius."

He'd known who I was then. At my most naked, my most exposed, my most vulnerable. He'd known exactly who I was.

It's that same voice - his voice - that I can hear through the veil. I imagine it is fluttering bedsheets, their light warmth settling around us like the coats we'd been tangled in so many years ago. And, like the sheets, I let it embrace me. I let myself sink into it, sail through it, and land in his arms. Because there, more than anywhere else in the world, I know exactly who I am.

I'm Sirius.

I'm everything. I'm nothing.