stepping out

Remus is standing at the door still. The cold air slaps his calves with the staccato crashing of wave-break. Voices chatter behind him, but their words are wordless. Worldless. Some cars pull away from the outside, Muggle cars (best to blend in, they say). Remus does not turn when his name is called, he lets himself get cold. Get numb. His knuckles are pink; there's snow on the ground.

"We are all getting a chill," Dora states. She is trying to prevent the annoyance from sinking into her voice. Her tone is rigid and false. She is sitting at, no was sitting at the table, she's moving now to the door. She shuts it and stares up at Remus. "Please come inside," she says. But he's inside. "Come sit," she expects him to follow. His bones stick to his joints when he moves: he hears them crunch and click just like the sound of stepping on freshly-sleeted-on snow. Remus hears inwardly now. He sits.

The others are standing around the Tonks's table, coming and going through the kitchen. There is no mistaking how exhausted each person is. Wizard, witch, Remus thinks everyone looks so genderless. They look like walking wounds. Not bleeding, but staunched. They move with the mechanics of humanness: with legs. But these people, these wizards and witches, these wounds, are packed up and tuckered in on themselves. Remus feels dirty in comparison to such sterility. His cheeks reach up to his eyes, sticky, and his hair flops on his head in every direction like a fern. His clothes are as black as Dora's, as black as Arthur's pants, as black as the look in Harry's eyes. But Remus bleeds when they don't: Remus is beyond wearing black. Remus is colorless altogether at this point. Null. Void. Cliché. Fuck.

Someone is pouring him a glass of whiskey. Dora's drinking gin. Her hands are so female against the vulgarity of such a bottle. When she finishes, she hesitates before walking back into the kitchen. It's just sound now to Remus. Kitchen, background. Hazy, unfocused: he sees the glass before him, the dark wood of the table around him, the skinny boy-legs of Ron shifting his weight in his periphery as he is consoled. Words still are tuned out, he picks up the glass and brings it to his lips, the alcohol burns the place he'd been biting and

"Sirius—

Remus stops drinking comically, the glass to his lips at a near-pouring angle yet nothing comes in and his elbow cannot move down. Glued. Who spoke the name? His eyes burn. His brain thunders as his ears reopen, he tilts his chin up to see who'd spoken. His throat tightens with dread. It's Harry. Oh fuck, he thinks, fucking shit. This is it. This is it. He is thinking like an animal: he must verbalize the command under his breath, a whisper. "Down," he says. No one hears it; he's talking to his arm. People hear the glass hit the mahogany, though. Eyes back on Remus, then back at Harry.

Ron edges Harry on, a regular James-Sirius maneuver. It's enough to make the bile surge in Remus' throat. Sirius. James. Sirius.

"Okay. I'm sorry for doing this, but I can't stand it anymore. We're all here for a reason, and that's…Sirius. And nobody," Oh god, Remus thinks, his voice is cracking, "nobody has said his name yet. I'm all for denial—but that's not the point." Harry sniffles, takes off his glasses, rubs out the invisible dust, replaces them. "I'm not saying I want, that I want us to bloody reminisce all night. I just want to feel like I'm not the only one who misses him." Harry is crying. The room, despite being full of the Order, is pregnant with acrid silence. Remus feels claustrophobic even though people have given him more space than anybody else in the history of meetings of mourning (this could not be called a funeral, nor a wake—Sirius was so entirely gone). "I want him to know, if he's here…somewhere…if that's possible…that it really bloody hurts being here without him."

When the thick bubble bursts and silence leaks out into apologetic whimpers of comfort and grief, Remus stands up. He's in the kitchen before he knows it. He can bloody hear tears slish-slosh down their faces: he needs to get drunk. Firewhiskey, firewhiskey, he chants under his breath. Are people watching me?, he wonders without verifying the suspicion. Dora nearly walks her arm into his chest. Side-step, side-step. The bottle is off the counter and in his hand before she can even attempt to catch his eye. Cap off: the lip practically smashes into his teeth, an audible misfortune. The Weasleys, Hermione, Dumbledore: he passes their worried, grief-stricken faces without a glance. The alcohol hits his stomach like air flowing into oxygen-starved lungs. He winces, goes to the door, holds it open.

This time, no one says anything.

Sirius is dead, he thinks. Sirius, "my Sirius," he whispers. The wind takes a tumbling dive, skipping across the snow, running its hands through his hair. Wintertime freezes the wetness in his eyes before he can even consider crying. He sits on the doorstep, still holding the door open. The people inside are freezing but, in the weird way that grief-stricken funeral-goers do, they see this as a sign of beyond grief, of mourning. Remus can hear Dora begin to breathe hard inside, the way that you only do when snot sneaks its way out of your nose and between your lips. Or maybe that was Harry. Well. He keeps the door open if only to encourage their bleeding; because heaven knows, Remus thought, to bleed is to be lucky. Remus put his chin on his hand, knees to his chest, bottle to his lips and back. If I could bleed, he thought, I'd be over you. Would have been over you so long ago, Padfoot, that I'd be heterosexual. Could sit in there like Dora, like the kids, like Arthur and Mollly, could well up and confess, 'I loved him so' and be done with you in a week. A week, Sirius. But bloody hell, you bled me dry, bled me dry for years waiting to return to your side, to feel your skin against mine. I bled when you fell, when they thought you could come back, when I found out you were gone. I can't bleed anymore, Sirius, and this is the time to bleed. You're gone. You're dead, you're bloody dead, but I am so past the point of bleeding that I'm afraid that this pain of you is never going to leave me. Remus empties the bottle, breaks it on the ground. He almost laughs, how wonderfully coincidental it would be for him to cut himself just now, how…ironic.

But there's nothing ironic about now. Sirius is dead. Remus is alone. Both of these things will not change: they can't. Someone will come to the doorway in a moment and usher him in. They'll say that he's heartbroken, but they'll not know just how without Sirius Remus is. Remus expects all these things like he expects the wind to come and hit him in his eyes.

"Remus," Ron is leading him inside. When did I get up? he wonders. "Are you going to be alright?"

Ron sits him down at the old mahogany again. Remus sits like a statue. Judgment day. Eyes on Remus. He felt small: weak, timid…just like when he was a boy, when he needed Sirius and James to protect him from his own fear of himself, when he surrounded himself with a stag and a dog and a rat to feel safe. He feels like his books have been pushed from his arms by a Slytherin bully, like he just got his first B on a Dark Arts exam; he feels like how he felt when he saw Sirius kissing all of those girls back at Hogwarts only to the nth degree, because Remus managed to win Sirius back then but there would be no winning now.

He's bleeding before he knows it, the tears that should not have been able to come came, and waves of pity permeated the atmosphere. "Stop, stop," Remus keeps saying, but no one will have it. He doesn't want condolences. They don't bloody know anything, he thinks. Sirius was his, not theirs, and his tears were for them, not for the public. Dora wraps her arms around him from behind and, as usual, underestimates his werewolf-enhanced strength. She falls back into the wall with a crash.

There is muted horror all around him, but at least he's not being touched. Remus wipes his face with his sleeve and stalks to the door for the third time. A gush of air, and then nothing.

The door slams.

-

This could be a one-shot, though I feel it will grow. I'm legitimately trying to update LH, but it is SO IMPOSSIBLE to get back into something so AU...I honestly forget my plans/premise. Please send me suggestions if you can/want to: I'll consider them! What did you think of this? It's supposed to be sad, but realistically sad. I've never been a fan of those sobby-sobby delights. Review? Thanks.

Glad to be back =)