AN: Rated T for slash, non-graphic sex, and just being a downer. Characters et al. owned by JK Rowling. Thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon for helping with the timeline.
After their graduation from Hogwarts, Sirius and Remus' boyhood relationship had blossomed into a devoted and affectionate love for one another. The pair bought a quaint little house just outside Hogsmeade for easy passage during their monthly visit to the Shrieking Shack. The house was modestly decorated as neither man had entered adulthood with any great wealth to his name. Remus' condition prohibited him from holding down any respectable job for more than a few months, and their location prevented Sirius from finding a job with much prestige. But eventually he settled for more humble employment as a railway attendant at Hogsmeade Station. His salary was modest, but provided the couple with all they needed. Consequently, Remus spent his days playing housewife, cleaning up and cooking meals, reading extensively into many different subjects, taking up new hobbies such as gardening and collecting antique broomsticks, many things to bide his time until he found himself a job. Both men viewed Remus' inane leisure as a well-deserved, albeit a forced, sabbatical for a person who had worked so tirelessly all those years at school.
As the years progressed and the war continued to evolve, however, their relationship began to change. With Remus still unable to find work that would suit his brilliance, he grew restless sitting around the shabby little house just outside Hogsmeade. He began to volunteer to help with every mission the Order of the Phoenix asked of him, and sometimes this would mean being absent for weeks at a time. At first Sirius understood that this was important, for not only did it occupy Remus' time with more fitting pursuits than cooking and polishing old broomsticks, but it was also for the protection of the entire wizarding world. "Some things," he would justify to himself, "are more important than a relationship." Saving the world seemed to be one of them.
Remus once left Sirius by himself in that dank little house just outside Hogsmeade for two full months with hardly any word of his location, activities, or wellbeing. At night Sirius, alone, would fall into sleep filled with nightmares of the horrible tortures that his lover could be enduring at that moment, and then awaken, alone, with no means of knowing whether it had been the idle imaginings of a frightened man or the conscious premonitions of a sensitive partner. Some nights he would sit up on their bed and drink a toast to the house's emptiness, a toast to his forgetting for a few euphoric hours that his lover might be dead.
The relationship continued on like this for years, with each passing day heightening the tension between the two, until shortly after the birth of the Potters' son. Their strain morphed into suspicion and distrust. Sirius became distant from the man with whom he had once shared everything, leading Remus to suspect that Sirius must have reverted back to the will of his upbringing. "Blood is thicker than water," he would justify to himself.
But Sirius knew his coldness was due to his own suspicions that Remus, being a werewolf and therefore possessing inherently malevolent tendencies, must be acting as a double agent for the Dark Lord between him and the Order. "There is no overcoming one's nature," he would justify to himself.
The less they saw one another, the more evidence they invented regarding the other's wickedness. Remus found the names of several members of the Black family scrawled on a crumpled piece of parchment lying on the floor. "His brother," he decided, "must be convincing him to rejoin his family in fighting against us." He thought of the man he loved back in the household that treated him so badly, torturing and enslaving innocent people, and he wept.
Sirius noted that Remus had not been home during a full moon for seven months. "Fenrir Greyback," he decided, "must be helping him to use his transformations to serve You-Know-Who." He thought of the man he loved giving over to his bestial fury, tearing apart innocent people, and he wept.
Then he took another profound swig from the bottle.
One October night in the damnable little house outside Hogsmeade, the two men shared a silent, tasteless supper before retiring to their bedroom where they had sex for the first time in months. It was quick and rough and it was alien. It left both men alone and dissatisfied. Afterward they laid in silence in the dark on opposite sides of the bed, not touching nor even looking at each other.
"What's happened to us?" one asked quietly, but the other had already fallen asleep.