You're not here

by jennygiraffadil

A mix of music and fiction. The story of how they went from strangers, to best friends, to something more. And how the war, not only tore them apart, but helped bring them back together again.

Title: You're not here 1/3
Pairing: Remus/Sirius.
Disclaimer: I wish.
Summary: A mix of music and fiction. The story of how they went from strangers, to best friends, to something more. And how the war, not only tore them apart, but helped bring them back together again.

i. i'm not here, this isn't happening, i'm not here.

It was growing up that broke him, really - although if anyone ever asked he'd just knead his knuckles into the back of his eyes and smile, saying it was nothing, that it was okay.

Before his eleventh birthday Sirius would hide in his room. He wasn't stupid enough to think nobody knew about it, but he did it anyway. Momentarily, sometimes, it made him feel safe. Under blankets, behind piles of books - even going so far as to wrench the thick mahogany headboard forward so he could squeeze behind it and try to forget how to breathe.

When he was older, Regulus joined in - until the day he ran to mother and told her all about it. "He's beneath the bathroom cupboards" or "There's a set of floorboards that move" and, in all honesty, neither of them had ever been too good at sharing, anyway. Sirius, with his toys that always (secretly) belonged to his brother. Sirius with the hole he had been digging behind the branching apple tree in the garden. Sirius with his secrets that Regulus never managed to play into. He never had his own so he had to take somebody else's.

"That's my broom --" Regulus hissed, and it was a Wednesday, almost spring. His tiny hands spreading like eagles wings across the bristles and Sirius tried not to growl.

"No! It's mine --" they didn't fight, they never fought, but they set one another with dignified glares and square jaws, even at seven years old. Black's did not make public displays. Black's did not squabble. Black's had no need for arguments.

And then his father came along, heavy tread boots with his neatly combed back hair and took it from both of them.

"Regulus had it first." he would say and for all they both knew it wasn't true, neither said a word. Apart from tongues were stuck out behind palms and eyes creased downwards.

He went back to hiding then, Sirius, he did everytime. And by the time he set foot on Hogwarts grounds he thought he had got rather good at it. Maybe too good, he realised, perched shakily on an old oak stool as the sorting hat with the fraying mouth and threads hanging in his eyes yelled "Gryffindor!".

And for all his heart started pounding wildly with relief, he still felt like a traitor.

"At least you didn't get Slytherin!" a boy to his left muttered loudly and he turned straight into thick black glasses and wide eyes, a small round boy beside him, "They have to live in the dungeons!"

"Won't there be dragons?" Sirius nearly snorted but kicked his shoes together beneath the table instead. Perfectly polished, loose laces.

"Don't be stupid! They don't have dragons in the school - they'd eat everyone!"

Surrounded by red and gold banners and staring directly across at the silver and green he'd been brought up on, he suddenly laughed. Threw his head back and laughed.

And then he spoke, across the shoulder of robes with the wrong colour thread sewn, with a scar down his left cheek. He didn't know what spurred it, but his fingers tapped against his dinner plate all the same.

"I think we should go find out."

Summer was still the same though, summer in the big grey house surrounded with static and the hallway that screamed when he was out of bed after ten pm. Regulus stopped knocking for him. Regulus started locking his door.

Nobody met him at the station fourth year. And fifth year he couldn't get into the house.

After that, he just stopped trying. After that, he knew he'd been hiding too long.

ii. i will take you as you are, please accept me as i am. there'll be something in the wind to show us we're right and tell us we're wrong. i want to know more.

James's garden was much better than his own had been - tall yellowing grass around the edges brushing his knees at midday. Just the right size for Quidditch but not so big you could lose yourself, even if sometimes he felt like he ought to try anyway, for old times sake.

He'd never had cookies before then. He'd never had juice with the seeds still in, hitting the back of his throat until he nearly choked with James bent double in front of him; eyes watering.

He thought he was in love with him then, once, he thought he was in love with all of them. But the beginning of autumn was always, Sirius agreed, by far the best. Peter would fly over from his holidays and Remus would turn up with smudges of soot across his cheeks that nobody would mention.

They'd run through the forrest in the midlands, they'd climb the trees and sit around in the Potters' living room, large glasses of lemonade and stories they all knew had never happened.

It was their last year before he suspected anything, the week before they went back and Lily's letters were pinned all over the bedroom walls. Hearts and spirals and sharp-angled A's.

"Do you love her?" Sirius asked, lounging on the bed with a soft breeze coming through the open window. James paused and Remus looked up from the floor.

"I think I really do."

He thought then, and nodded, he thought about the pile of letters he had neatly tucked away in his trunk. He thought about the way it had only been the three of them the year before and how he'd stayed inside, "I don't know what's wrong" he'd told James and Peter with a snarling glare, "I don't know I just - something's --". They'd both exchanged a look and patted him on the back. James and Lily had kissed that Christmas, for the first time, and when he thought back he could only recall the way Remus's eyes fell on the mistletoe and the slight flush aching against his cheeks.

"How do you know?" he asked James later, when they were alone, tucked inside a bedroom with the door locked - though he wasn't sure why. "How do you know you love her?"

James stalked over to the window, his wrists hanging over the ledge and his eyes lit up the way they always did when he thought about Lily.

"I just do." he smiled and Sirius thought then that he'd quite like someone's eyes to turn the same fuzzy shade at the corners when they spoke of him.

School was hectic that year, his mind was hectic. He sat with his thigh pushed up against Remus's the whole way there and only moved away when it was time to step onto the platform. The carriage ride saw his knuckles pushed into Remus's hip but they both stayed quiet incase it was an accident. They both stayed quiet, moreso, incase it wasn't.

Peter started seeing a girl then, a pretty little thing with dark brown curls that fell past her shoulders. Carrie he called her, Carolina, after her mother. And Remus always grinned at them. James and Lily too, grinned so widely his eyes closed into small slits and he hid behind his bed curtains.

"Don't you want what they have?" Sirius asked, crouching down beside him, "All of that?"

The dorm was dark with only a thin pencil of moonlight tinkering across the floor.

"No." he shook his head, pulling his knees up to his chest, "I - I don't know what I want exactly. I don't want the kind of love that consumes you though, suffocates you. I want the kind that is comfortable. That you can grow old wrapped up in and it won't expect anything at all."

Sirius nodded at that, he nodded and felt his eyes starting to burn the way he'd witnessed James's do a thousand times before. He looked away from Remus, he looked to the floor and his head started to pound in the same gentle rhythmn as his pulse.

He knew then, he sort of understood then. But it was him, nonetheless.

"I want the kind of love --" Sirius began, pausing as he shifted to sit on the edge of the bed, "--where you can both be yourselves, or not, but either way the person still wants to come back to you. Like - they know you well enough to understand you're not as great as everyone else thinks, but they love you enough that they're willing to pretend, anyway."

The door slammed shut then before either could watch the way the other's eyes slipped down to their fingers against the mattress. James came wandering in, slackened tie and hand-woven hair.

"Gentlemen!" he smirked before slipping into his bed.

And Remus and Sirius moved away - their thumbs may have barely brushed, but they moved away all the same only neither of them slept as soundly as they knew they should have.

"I think I'm in love with you" Sirius wanted to say so many times. "I want you." but every time he opened his mouth, his jaw steeled instead and the words fell into a splutter of indecencies that left Remus with wide eyes and shaking hands.

"I think I'm in love with you." he wrote on a slip of paper on their graduation day but before he got chance to part with it, Regulus was behind him, brow creased, wand pointed.

"I am not letting you ruin the family again." he said steadily, "Incendio."

And the ashes that buried his hands told Sirius everything he needed to know.

Again, he realised, he was hiding. Only this time it was for the best.

iii. when it all falls down i'll still be right here, when it all falls down we'll still be right here. once in a lifetime i could feel this way. once in a lifetime you could feel it too.

"This is a war" were possibly the hardest words Sirius had ever had to take in. Sitting with his legs spread out in front him, his head cocked to the side, "This is a war and there will be casualties" Shacklebolt continued, speaking from the back of his throat, "We all know what - who - we're fighting and we can't guarantee the outcome. To us, this is something worth fighting for. But, if you're in and that's not enough, think of the people you could lose and fight for them instead."

"This is a war--" he heard someone whisper under their breath, "And we might not all make it out alive."

If anyone had asked him a year ago, even a few months past, about how he pictured his life after Hogwarts he definitely would not have described to them a wide concrete room with rickety chairs that creaked when you swung your weight the wrong way. He would have talked about dragons, probably, about dark wizards and unspeakables. His wand, where once it had been a pleasant weight settled comfortably in his back pocket, now stung with the heavy sighs of responsibility.

But he knew he had no other choice, he didn't want any other choice.

He glanced to his friends, to Lily, with her arching back and swollen belly. To the tumultuous mix of joy and fear in James's eyes. To the empty seat where Peter should have been and the thick bags beneath Remus's eyes.

"If you want out --" Shacklebolt roared suddenly, "--now is the time to do it."

Everybody held their breaths collectively then but nobody moved an inch. Sirius reached desperately for Remus's hand under the table and squeezed hard. Please say we'll survive this it begged, please say you'll survive this.

Remus linked their fingers together and smiled solemnly, bowed his head.

Dumbledore stood before them all in his bright purple robes and without the twinkle in his eyes, they all knew, right there, it was serious.

"Oh." Remus frowned. Oh.

It was hard to say when the fight really started, or when it turned from just a war for the wizarding world into something much more personal. Remus and Sirius clung to one another at night, nothing more, arms and bodies grasping tightly until it felt safe for them to step outside of the bedroom again. Outside of the house. The flat.

The splitting pavement caused them both to reel back in alarm at first until they looked at one another and laughed. Sirius grinned then, Sirius grinned and took Remus's hand in his.

"Don't step on the cracks!" he laughed, his face practically glowing as he tiptoed past another and another and another. Remus laughed too, joining in, being pulled along.

"Sirius!" he shook his head, his knee buckling and his teeth biting back on a girlish scream.

"See, you have me--" Sirius said confidently when he caught him, Remus's scarf falling between them and onto a gathering of dried leaves and rainwater, "--no matter what happens, you have me."

And that's when they first kissed.

It wasn't really when Dumbledore piled them all into a tiny room with burnt walls that he suspected anything, it wasn't even when the announcement was made about there being a traitor in their ranks.

Thinking back to the feel of Sirius's lips pressed awkwardly against his neck, no, Remus realised, it wasn't until Peter took him aside with sunken eyes and a grave face to say "I think it's Sirius" that he even began thinking at all.