Title: I still remember.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius.
Disclaimer: I wish.
Summary: For the prompt: MEMORY. Remus can't remember a lot of things but he tries to hold onto the ones that matter.

Even at eleven years old, Remus's memory was patchy, but he never said a word.

He figured it was all just a side effect of being a werewolf and it didn't really matter. He was unfortunate. It was unfortunate. Sitting, unaware, in his parent's backyard with the sticky summer sun burning angles across his arms and flushing his cheeks - right round to the back of his neck where the loose hair tickled awkwardly. His shoelaces were half fastened, half looped, but his father sat down beside him and his head ached; the edges of his thumbs pushing half moons against his temples.

He could trace the way his lips moved in his head but the words, all of it -- an arm tangled itself around his shoulders and the sleeve of his jumper fell down, rolling itself over his clenched fingers. And it was green. Peppermint green. A burst of colour and he was laughing, crawling across the beach with a shaggyhaired sheepdog.

Then nothing.

"I don't know." he told Mr.Jamison from across the street, curled up with a fraying blanket on a strangers sofa, "I don't -- remember. I don't remember."

But he'd been outside with only his pyjama bottoms on and his grandpa's slippers. The moon was rising -- fading, and Remus had been breathing: in, out, in, out, bringing it back into his world for a fraction of a second at a time until it was too much for him to handle.

Chipping paint on white fences, flaking numbers scrubbed against doors. Number 72 with the A missing.

"I think I want to go home now." he said timidly into his hands, shaking, his shoulders tightening as he looked around and a large bronze cat stared back at him with emerald eyes from the fireplace.

He still had the thick blue shirt and the dirt marks on the knees meant nothing to him. The grass stains, the scuffed shins. Even his own scars.

"I fell off my bike." he told them, when he was old enough to lie properly, "I tripped over my robes." and he was thirteen by then, hiding behind library stacks and between pages and under big red duvets or heavy eyes. "I...don't know where they're from. I really don't." he wanted to cry, he wanted to scream when it hit him that he could have been telling the truth and he, himself, he wouldn't know the difference.

In and out, he reminded himself, catching his lungs pushing up too hard against his stomach when they all stood around him. James with his glasses tilted to the left. Peter with the smudge of ink down his nose. Sirius...Sirius.

"You had fuschia lipstick half hanging off your collar." he could smirk, weeksmontshyears later, "It disappeared onto your neck. And there was a lovebite right behind your ear. James was wearing Lily's tie because it hung too far above his stomach."

The exact shade of oak leaves was stuck on repeat behind everything else in his mind. The feel of dry grass against his stomach where his shirt twisted up and the thick scatter of clouds directly above. He told Sirius all of it. He told him he could never forget the things that mattered. They both smiled and their knuckles almost brushed as he moved his hips away from the spot of dew gathered over the morning flowers.

He had his eyes closed, he had the world running behind them. And Sirius was there. Looking down at him and grinning like he'd just found a stash of dungbombs behind an old mulberry bush or the entirity of Slytherin house had been expelled for the year.

His hand reached up before he could stop it and Siriu's lips were moving, pushing words between them. His chest tightened, his fingers gripped tightly in his hair.

And they were running.

"I don't remember." he whispered to a newspaper cutting with sharp eyes and a wispy beard, "I don't remember you not being like this."

"I don't remember you saying it, Sirius, I don't remember you loving me."

The first thing he did the next day was cancel his subscription to the Daily Prophet.
The next, was to call his mother and tell her she had been right all along.