A/N: This was written for the Fanfic Gift Exchange. Written for Jess, aka autumn midnights, using the prompts Hogwarts and dreaming (though very, very loosely, I'll admit). Also using prompt 48, promise, from the Slash/Femslash Boot Camp.

My gift to you, dear! Hope you like it :)

Dear Sirius,

I still have that watch you gave me on our last night in Hogwarts. You said everything was changing and you'd gotten me a gift so that I could count the minutes until we would meet again. It was a Muggle watch. I thanked you with a kiss and a promise to never take it off. I thought time was our friend.

But it wasn't.

Time has changed us. You are not as infallible as I once believed you and I, I am not as weak as I once stood. I have grown up, moved on, but you have been stuck away, your mind withering, never growing from the boy you are into the man you should be.

I should have trusted you.

Did you resent me every day you spent running your numb fingers across the cold stone of your cell? Did you hate me for forgetting you? I would not blame you if you did. I resented you. I hated you. I held more hatred and venom for you than anyone, more than Bellatrix, more than Greyback, more than Voldemort himself.

I hated you.

I used to watch the seconds tick by on my wrist and imagine that you were counting the same seconds down to death.

God, I hated you so much, hated everything that you were, everything that you'd done.

And now I don't know what to feel.

I came across you in the hallway today. You were sitting on the floor, eyes hollow, staring straight at the curtains that covered your mother's portrait. I asked you if you were okay and you said no.

You said you hadn't been okay in twelve years. You said it wasn't fair. You asked me if I noticed how faded our friendship was, how dried up and dead we had let it become over that decade.

I said that time was bound to change us. And tragedy changes men more than time, so why wouldn't things be so different? And you said sometimes they seem different, but they're really all the same.

I didn't know what to say so I sat beside you and watched the wind move the curtains until Molly called us for tea. I kept my fingers wrapped tight around my bare wrist so that you wouldn't know I broke my promise.

I could not shake the word friendship from my mind. We were more than that. You were more than that to me and you know it. You were my everything.

I tried to forget you, you know. I never could. Your face was in my nightmares, laughing and leering ripping my life to shreds. I loathed every sick smile of yours that haunted my dreams. I reviled your laughter, once warm and friendly, now cold and callous. I abhorred your eyes, where a lover's trust sat defiled with the lies of a rat.

I mourned for Lily and for James and, regrettably, even for Peter.

But I mourned for Padfoot most of all.

We fell apart, Sirius. Four changed. James, Sirius, Remus and Peter. The four of us; one fallen, one framed, one broken, one changed. Because Peter, he changed most of all, didn't he?

I cannot reconcile the rat-man with the boy I shared breakfast with in Hogwarts, the boy who couldn't spell his own name unless he whispered it to himself, the boy with the odd socks and the stupid ideas. He was not an evil boy. But he does not exist anymore, and that is the saddest thing of all.

We have lost too many people, Padfoot. We were children and we watched the world burn. I watched silently from behind tentative curtains and you from behind cold prison bars.

We lost each other once. I don't want to lose you again.

I remember days when touching you, kissing you, was the easiest thing in the world. I used to reach for you lazily, carelessly, and now I can't even look at you without awkwardness, without panic and grief and a worthless apology on my tongue.

I hate what has become of us.

And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you a thousand times over that if I was given the chance again I wouldn't doubt you for a second. This is a promise I will not break. Although second chances are hard to come by in this life. I know that more than most.

But I want you to know: give me back that time and a clear head and I will choose you, always you, ever you. I will trust you. I would trust you. I should have trusted you.

I still have that watch you gave me on our last night in Hogwarts. I took it off when you came back to me, the second night that Peter ran.

But I keep it next to my bed and hope that the ticks that shatter the silence over and over will somehow take us back to Hogwarts, back to 1978.

They never do.

Yours,

Remus