It's nearly midnight when a rapping comes from his apartment door. Sirius glances down at his watch, then at the door with suspicion and confusion. He lays down his book and walks over slowly, avoiding the floorboards in the old apartment that creak. He looks through the peep hole to see a shaking and bloody Remus on the doorstep. Relief swamps him; Remus had promised to be home before 10, and told Sirius to call his work if he wasn't. He could never figure out those bloody Muggle phones though. His first instinct is to open the door and pull him into his arms, to wipe away the tears that are running down his face. He hesitates just a moment though; what if it was a Death Eater trying to lure him out?
"Cut the c-crap, Padfoot, it's m-me." No one could fake that nervous stutter so well, he thinks, and a human couldn't smell the fear on him. He whips open the door and lets him in. He takes a quick glance around outside before he closes the door.
He drags over a chair out from the kitchen and gently lowers the young werewolf into it. In the light, he has a better view of him. He doesn't appear to be very injured; there's a shallow cut on his head and he's holding his hand quite gingerly, but nothing to create the amount of blood that's soaking him. "Merlin, Remus, what happened?"
Remus strips off his bloody clothes and throws them in a heap on the floor, visible disgust on his face. Normally Sirius would make him get up and at least put them in the bathroom, but he's too busy checking him over for injuries. "I w-was attacked." He says finally. "I w-was out in th-the woods, l-looking for a n-new spot t-to t-transform, and they f-found me." His voice is small, and he wipes away a new stream of tears from his face.
"They found your old spot?" He gets up and grabs and a rag from the adjacent bathroom and wets it with warm water in the sink. Death Eaters had been tracking Remus, as well as all the other werewolves they knew of, for a while now. Moony recounted the story as best he could, saying that they were looking for werewolves to join Lord Voldemort. Remus nods.
"I d-didn't know they had b-been there until I w-went to check the security a c-couple of d-days ago." He tells him. "One of the w-wards was broken. I c-couldn't take the chance." Sirius nods.
"You made the right decision." He assures him as he gently wipes the blood from his body.
Remus sniffs. "I can d-do that myself, you know."
"I know," Sirius says, moving now to the wound on his head. Remus winces slightly when he touches it. "I like taking care of you, though. Keep going."
It took Remus a couple minutes to continue on. "I w-was looking in a forest n-near C-Castle Douglas-"
"Castle Douglas?" Sirius interrupts, leaning away and raising an eyebrow. "Isn't that on the other side of the country?" Remus gives him a withering look through the tears and Sirius closes his mouth, letting him continue.
"They s-snuck up on me w-while I was s-setting the wards and…" He buries his face in his hands, obstructing Sirius's reach to his wounds. Sirius sits back on his heels and waits for him to continue. "I don't know, Moony must have already thought of the place as his, and them as intruders on his territory? But…" He takes a deep breath and looks Sirius in the eye. His voice is steady now, and something in it strikes Sirius as wrong. "The Death Eaters threatened me. They said if I didn't come with them and pledge myself to Voldemort, they'd hunt down everyone I loved and kill them before they killed me too. So I killed them instead."
Sirius watches his face, not sure how to respond or if he should even respond. Remus's face is set and calm, and his eyes don't so much as water. The even quality of Remus's tone as he says these things scares Sirius a little. Then, all at once the werewolf's composure is gone. The tears well up again and he puts his head back in his hands.
"God, Pads, I… I d-don't know what happened. One moment I was d-dueling with Malfoy and the n-next..." he trails off. "They're n-never going to s-stop now. I'm n-never going to be safe. They're g-going to hunt me down d-during a transformation and w-when they find me, they're g-going to k-kill me. And they'll come for all of you t-too. I…" Remus looks up, and he looks more terrified than Sirius has ever seen him. Remus was always the brave one, the one who could deal with more than the rest of them. He had been through worse things than all of the Marauders combined, and they could always count on him not only to protect them but to see the bright side of things.
Sirius pulls the shaking man into his arms and holds him tight, pressing kisses to the side of his head. Remus grips him for dear life. Sirius can't absorb this, can't understand it. His Remus, the shy and gentle creature who barely said more than two words the first year of their friendship, a murderer? His Moony, who ruined many a prank because he was unwilling to let the Marauders break too many rules? No, Sirius thinks firmly. Not a murderer. It was self defense. Still, some part of him nags away that it isn't right. Something is off here.
He pushes these thoughts away and drags the man to his feet. "You need to sleep, Rem." he tells him. Remus doesn't argue. He leads him to the bedroom and helps him into pajamas. His hands are shaking too much to do the buttons by himself, but Sirius's are hardly better. Together, it takes them almost 10 minutes just to get him dressed. Sirius tucks him into bed, his mind thrown back to all the times Remus was too weak to do this for himself near the moon. He feels a twinge of guilt for his moment of suspicion. He knows that no one can fake fear and pain like this, not even Remus.
He leans down and kisses his forehead. He's about to leave the room when a hand grabs his sleeve. He turns and sees a stricken Remus clinging to his robes. The young werewolf looks so small like this. In the poor lighting, Sirius can't see the greys that are beginning to show in his hair, and he looks so much younger. "C-Could you stay here?" He whispers. Sirius doesn't have the heart to tell him that he really shouldn't, that he should be cleaning the blood off the floor and off Remus's clothes before it stains, and so he pulls off his robes and climbs into bed next to him. Remus buries his face in his chest, and Sirius can feel the tension in his muscles finally slip away. Soon he is asleep, and Sirius is laying next to him, watching his face. The stress lines never leave it, even when he's sleeping. He always looks as though he's worried about something, or like he's forgotten something very important and is struggling to remember it. Sirius smooths out the lines on his forehead with his thumb, but they reappear only a moment later.
AN: This was written for Week 1: Paintball of the Camp Potter challenge on HPFC. The prompt for this week's paintball was, "Write about a costly mistake during either war,", and I chose the optional prompt of, "comfortable silence".
I got this idea from Casting Moonshadows. In one chapter (I forget which), Remus illustrates the prejudice against werewolves to Sirius by telling him the story of the a werewolf woman and her Muggle lover. The Muggle was attacked, and the woman viciously killed his attackers, using her werewolf strength to rip them apart. She's charged and sentenced to death by the Ministry. Sirius is outraged, pointing out that if she were human it would have been considered self defense.
This doesn't follow the same story line, of course, but that's where the inspiration for it came from, in case you were wondering.
The silence should be awkward or tense given what Remus has just admitted, but Sirius thinks it's better this way. He couldn't bear to hear his voice so close to breaking, shaking and stuttering in a way that Sirius hadn't heard in years. Remus knew what would happen now. If he left even one of those Death Eaters alive, if anyone uncovered the bodies and it got back to to Voldemort, his life would be over. Hell, if anyone just put two and two together, they could figure it out. The Death Eaters had gone to track the werewolf Remus Lupin, and never came back. Sirius shuddered to think what might happen. Remus could even be prosecuted; the Ministry wouldn't mind that it was Voldemort's lackeys trying to seem righteous if they could get the execution of a werewolf out of it. The wolf was about to cost him everything.
Yet somewhere deep inside his head, a voice still wondered if everything that Remus was saying was true. Dumbledore had warned them that there was a spy somewhere in the Order...