The first time Remus knew someone who died, it wasn't a wizard or a werewolf, it was this kid named Eli, who Remus had met at a party in London just after leaving his dad's house. It was maybe 1979. Eli had curly hair and thick eyebrows. They made out on a pile of people's coats upstairs for five hours. People were shooting up in the bathroom and Remus was nervous but Eli gave him a joint and told him to calm down and Remus did. At some point someone called the cops on the party and Eli and Remus left and ran and then walked around until the sun rose and Remus went home. He was the third boy Remus had ever kissed, so when, two weeks later, he went to a party at the same house and someone told him Eli wasn't there because he'd jumped in front of a train, it felt like Lyall had been right when he said that Remus was cursed.
The second time someone Remus knew died—well, not really, because he started all of a sudden to sort-of-know a lot of people who died. Werewolves and people in the Order, people on both sides of the thing people were calling a war. But the second time someone he loved died, it was James. James and Lily. That didn't need a lot of elaborating; it also couldn't really be elaborated on. In 1981 Remus was living in a chaos and everything seemed like a nightmare. Peter was supposed to be dead too, only a finger left after the explosion rocked the street and killed a dozen bystanders. Remus hadn't figured that an explosion like that was like Sirius, but people changed all the time, war did funny things to people, and in the numb cold shock of it all Remus didn't feel like thinking about it. Sirius seemed to be a traitor. If Remus hated the Aurors who took him to jail, hated the government that incarcerated both the guilty and the innocent alike, he was hollow and dried out enough that he could not to go to protests about it any more. There was no point. James and Lily were cold and their bodies lay where they had been thrown, their limbs twisted at angles. Everyone was celebrating, that night, because Voldemort had fallen. Remus was alone in a Muggle bar that night—not really alone, but in a crowd not talking to anyone, staring at the wall, watching a star streak across the blackened sky and feeling his tongue odd and lumpy in his mouth.
Then there was a boy named Francis. Remus had met him through the werewolf health collective in downtown London, back during the war against Voldemort, and they had gotten to know one another. For a long time when they first knew each other Remus was dating Brian, so they hadn't hooked up. Francis had dated some of Remus's friends, though, and they had met at parties for years before. There was a whole network of interconnection. Everything was like that in those days. Francis was one of those people who always seemed to know everyone at bars. He was a recovered heroin addict. He was proud of getting over it by himself, without any help, even though he would be the first to press anyone who came into the clinic into looking into treatment options, into finding support. He had long hair, which he bleached, and it hung around his face in waves of shocking yellow. The scars from his transformations slashed across his chest and arms.
When Voldemort fell, the Ministry started cracking down on werewolves who had been connected to Voldemort. Or that was what they said they were doing. The health clinic got shut down. You were supposed to go to St. Mungo's if you needed medical care. Gatherings of werewolves outside the Ministry had no purpose but sedition, mutiny, anarchism. That was bullshit, because part of the reason the clinic had been founded in the first place was the way werewolves were treated at St. Mungo's, and how goddamn much they charged you. Nobody could afford it. For a while under the new system the people from the clinic tried to help people pay their medical bills, at least until the few donors who had kept things going got distracted by other causes and the clinic's money ran dry. Remus had seen little old ladies whose faces were scarred and mottled with years upon years of full moons turn white staring at their hospital bill. You tried to comfort those people; you brought them flowers. The Wolfsbane Potion that people were marketing had near killed three people already; it was made out of poison, people said, no goddamn wonder. The Ministry had high hopes for it. Remus tried to stay in touch with the other people who managed to stay out of trouble. Staying out of trouble was hard. Remus and Francis moved in together for three months and it was a mess of late nights and white light and cigarette smells and terrible, desperate grappling. You couldn't find a job in the wizarding world. There weren't that many jobs outside the Ministry in the first place, and if you were a werewolf nobody really wanted to hire you. Most people found jobs, if they found them, on the Muggle side of things. Remus was working early mornings at a twenty-four hour diner and Francis was doing something or other, which turned out to be dealing. And then he relapsed, and Remus said, okay, enough, get out.
It was that time where everyone was getting sick. It had been a worry for a while—even before James died. People knew what to look for. The spots, the moles. Remus read a story where the author said he scrutinized all the skin magazines now, looking at the models for a sign of sickness, of ill health. Remus did the same thing with the men he danced with, slept with, in spite of himself. Was that a mole on your foot, or was it KS? Everyone said to use condoms; Remus was surprised people hadn't been before, but he was practical. The men who were healthy started to advertise their health, flex their muscles. Francis and some other people were living in a squat, then. Remus visited him because he didn't want to be alone. They joked about making a zine about being sick, about staying sick, about being proud of being sick. Lots of them weren't actually dying yet, but it was suddenly just hovering there: the certainty that you were going to die. Francis was cheerful about it. Remus was trying to help him find an apartment. But then there was a really bad full moon, and it hit Remus and Francis and everyone at the same time and laid them low, and when Remus bounced back, Francis didn't, and three weeks of him starving and shitting himself ended with Francis dead and nobody around who could pay for a funeral. That was about the time Remus started realizing he didn't own any clothes without holes in them.
"It's small difference in the scheme of things, less than a century less than he might have lived, and we all die anyway, but being a small person myself i notice the difference," Remus said loudly, drunk, to a man with a mustache in a bar who nodded sympathetically. "That's so strange, and I'm worried that it will be like he never existed."
Remus and Brian had broken up; in 1987 they got back together. Brian had been solid, deep brown and bearish when Remus first met him, and it was horrifying to see how he had hollowed out, dried out, his skin sallow and ashy. Remus had been weathered by misery, but not sickness, yet. Brian looked like hell. Despite the spaces visible in his ribs, the circles under his eyes, though, there remained something in his smile and in the touch of his hands on Remus's shoulders that was peace itself, a raindrop on sand, a thin note of music cutting through the baying of a pack of dogs. It helped, anyway, to wake tangled in someone else's arms in the morning, to wake up from your nightmares and have someone kiss you and tell you it was going to be all right. It wasn't going to be all right, of course, but Brian had held on for four years, getting sicker and less sick, and all through that time you held on to a kind of hope. Brian worked for a consulting firm because he had a Muggle degree, and they'd had money for half a second, had gone to America for treatment. There in D.C there were protests where people chanted and held up lurid banners with pink triangles. They had not known any werewolves in D.C. There were nights where Brian and Remus tore themselves up in the chaos of the moon and tried to piece themselves together again come dawn, try to explain to Brian's Muggle doctors why he had so many scars. Once they told a nurse they'd gotten jumped by skinheads, which wasn't exactly a lie, because it actually had happened once. The transformations cut even further into Brian's health. Eventually they heard that the Wolfsbane potion had improved, and they started both taking it, and that had helped; no longer was every month an almost, a rebound from the gates of hell. Hell still approached, though, and around the time that straight people started writing fucking plays about the gays and their plague, Brian died.
Remus had it too, somewhere in his blood. He took medicine for it, Muggle medicine because St. Mungo's was still a place that sent shivers down his spine, and so far the medicine worked. It would not always work, Remus knew. Things did not last. But he'd seen these summers and winters through and god only knew how many times he'd had his blood drawn, and his levels were fine.
Now, waking in the gray light ten or so years later, getting up out of the cold bed, Remus thought how absurd it was to lose someone, to be left alone. Every time you thought it was the last time. Every time you thought it couldn't get any more absurd.
Sirius didn't know all of what Remus had been through, but he had been through a kind of hell unto himself, hadn't he? Remus imagined the cold interior of the cells of Azkaban and the rattling breath of the Dementors every day for thirteen years, imagined the knowledge that you could never escape. And yet Sirius had escaped, for a while. Remus had thought that was the mark of a survivor.
God, the joy he had felt, hugging him that first time, all smelly and filthy in the shack where they had been smelly filthy teenagers together. So regressive, so freeing to hold him close and feel his heart beat and feel as if the last fifteen-odd years had evaporated like the mist in front of the moon. God, how much he had not cared if Sirius was a murderer, so long as they were on the same side. You ripped me open, you stitch me up, we're finished and done, let's kiss it better. Even if there were a million more close calls, knowing that both of them were capable of surviving had pushed Remus further towards dreaming of a life beyond that minimum line. That spring had brought back a weird hope, and the weird hope had been so tenacious.
Sirius had run his hands, his knobbled veiny pale-yellow hands, over Remus's scarred skin in the bath, and Remus now could not take a bath without thinking about that. When Sirius was clean, he had smelled of pine soap, of hyacinth. When Sirius was happy, he had put everything in order, taken up new hobbies, talked joyfully about anything and everything all hours of the day. Sirius, grown-up and not apparently dying, had been the first man Remus really trusted, the first man he could wrap himself around and kiss incessantly without feeling as if he was exposing a horrifying need that would never be resolved.
And then—through the veil. Through the veil, and it was a total accident, but Remus had seen it coming in a way too. There were cuts on Sirius's arms, knotted worms that looked as if he'd cast Sectumsempra on himself. You couldn't get him to talk about it. After he died, Remus knew he would never talk to anyone else about it. It smacked too much of announcing that it had been inevitable, and that wasn't true. Sirius might have lived. He could have made angry art and made a career out of it if he liked, or gotten some dumb job.
There was no body to bury. There were no ashes to dump on the steps of the FDA or the Ministry.
After he moved out of Grimmauld place he thought that the dreams would stop, but they only intensified. Sirius had held him when he had been a mad wolf when they were children; as an adult he had held Remus's quiet hairy toothed form to him in the bed and played old jazz records through the night. It had been such an odd house, such a wild and tangled jungle of memories.