Morning comes early when there is tea to be had, and also when gulls insist on squawking outside the windows of Remus's seaside cottage at near five in the morning.
I wouldn't even be up at five on a normal day, Remus tells himself, but he's been up at five every day for the past six years, and it has dawned on him in recent barely-sunlit mornings that maybe he ought to accept this as his new normal. He has to wonder about the time frame dictating when something previously out of place and unpleasant becomes commonplace; he finds he cannot answer, because the wounds that led to him adopting a new morning routine, among other things, are still far too fresh (and are constantly being salted by the spray coming off the North Sea, which is really too cruel of a circumstance to consider. Remus is still bitter, and wonders how one goes about writing an angry letter to the winds of fate that have blown him so close to the place where his heart is locked away, close enough that he has to wonder sometimes if Sirius can feel this same wind, if his hair is gritty with this same sea salt blowing in through the bars of his prison cell, if he wakes with the dawn, too, and thinks of Remus as much as Remus thinks of him when there is no light in any place just yet, especially within the hearts and minds of these two men).
Remus's bare feet make cold contact with the wood floor, and he winces.
It's nothing special, the place itself; but then again, Remus thinks, neither is the man who inhabits it. The cottage cost him surprisingly little due to its location and the fact that it never quite dries out after a rainstorm. The leaky spots to buckets-and-bowls ratio is skewed beyond the point of Remus caring anymore and the front garden needs a trimming, but that would involve actually doing the trimming. The dark voice in the back of his mind reminds Remus that he has no one to wheedle into doing dull tasks for him anymore; he decides not to think about it. He shuffles into the kitchen, in line with his new (normal?) morning routine.
The stovetop is slow to heat and even slower to boil the water for tea. He clutches his robe a bit closer, feeling the chilly morning air (coming in through places it really shouldn't be coming in) reach him all at once. He closes his eyes.
His cottage is full of small noises: the incessant whistling of the sea wind through the weak spots in his shabby, ill-fitting windowsills; the clatter of the kettle on its burner as he lifts it off to pour his first cup of the day (the first cup of many); the soft clicks of his cigarette lighter; the soft puff of dust that rises when Remus eases back into the cushions of his horribly-patterned couch. Occasionally there's the scratch of a record on his Victrola, but not today; not just yet. Remus needs a spot of quiet with his tea before he is ready to face anything more than the back pages of the newspaper and a few drags of his cigarette.
He wonders how much longer he must live like this, alone and always chilled to the bone. He thinks he could give it all up in an instant if he had anywhere else to go, but he doesn't, so he sips his tea and smokes his cigarette and waits.