For my beautiful Emmy, for GGE. Sorry this is a week late, my love.
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"I loved him, you know."
His voice is small, sudden — breaking the extensive but oh-so-fragile silence in the small kitchen. He sits at the table, staring at the wood grain. The dim lighting makes the perpetual bags underneath his eyes look even worse than usual.
"I know," she says, and her voice is just as soft. He looks up at her — it's a motion that would have been a jerk of surprise, once. Now it's just a lethargic lifting of his head. His eyes meet hers and there is a tiny bit of surprise in the dark amber.
"You do?"
She lets a small, bitter laugh escape. "I'm not stupid, and my mother was a Black. I know about hiding things. I know about seeing what other people are trying to hide." A small smirk of amusement twists her lips. "And you two… weren't exactly very good at hiding it."
His eyebrows furrow and he looks at her in confusion. She laughs, genuinely this time. "Oh, I know. You thought you were being all sneaky. Thing is, relationships aren't just about actions, and I could see the way you looked at him." Her lips twist into a bitter smile. "I spent enough time watching you to know how much time you spent watching him."
He ducks his head, unable to meet her eyes any longer. "I'm sorry," he murmurs.
"For what? Loving him? Don't apologise for love." A small twist of the lips. "If there was anyone who needed to be loved, it was my cousin."
But that isn't it. He isn't sorry for loving Sirius. He's not sure he could have helped loving Sirius, and even if he had been able to stop, he wouldn't have chosen to. Sirius was a whirlwind, a hurricane — the best thing that ever happened to Remus and the only thing he never once regretted. He was flash-fire temper and dancing in the rain and absolute madness, and Remus felt absolutely free, absolutely loved when he was with him.
He is, though, sorry for loving her. Loving her is messy, complicated. It's tangled up in a mess of things he hasn't said and things he has, a mess of guilt and pain and grief and that little ember glowing deep in the middle of his chest. He loves her. There is no doubt about that.
But he loves her best with silver eyes and dark hair, because she's got that same too-quick half-grin and that same spark of life — like she said, her mother was a Black, and it shows.
He loves her best when she is a fierce reminder, when sometimes he can lose himself in forgetting that she isn't him. And he hates himself for it, because she doesn't deserve this.
She doesn't deserve to be loved as brokenly as he loves her. She deserves to be loved with a whole heart, not the half of a one that is all Remus has left. She deserves to be loved completely and innocently and maybe even naïvely. She deserves to be loved in the way she loves him.
He can't give her that.
It hurts. The guilt hurts. The grief hurts. The reminders of him hurt. But clinging to the little bits of him that are pieces of her is the only thing keeping him sane.
"I'm sorry," he says again, slowly. "For hurting you. Using you."
"Remus, do you love me?"
He looks her straight in the eyes and he cannot tell her anything but the truth — and not just because her eyes are silver (molten silver, just the same) at the moment. He cannot tell her anything but the truth because she deserves nothing less.
"I do. But not in the way I loved him."
"I know that, Remus." She looks him straight in the eyes, as proud as she ever is — and in her, he has never been able to call it a flaw. She has an almost-arrogant confidence that Remus loves. It's similar, but not just the same as Sirius's ego. Sirius had beautiful confidence, but Remus saw behind the near-flawless facade. "I believe in… soul mates," she continues, "even though that isn't the right word. I believe in perfect matches, people who are meant to be. And you… you were his, and he was yours. And I know… that you cannot love me like you loved him. I understand that."
And he can see in her eyes that she understands that he can only love once the way he loved Sirius. He loved Sirius with the totality of his being, carved out a hollow in his chest and let Sirius live there, nestled beside his heart. And now that Sirius is gone, he is always going to be missing something. And she understands.
Her understanding hurts, too. Because he doesn't deserve it, doesn't deserve her. And he knows that.