Acting
Warnings for: mild language, first-time R/S, experimental (and lazy?) writing
1. It's like I'm in a play, Remus thinks, and I've lost everything but the stage directions.
He dips his knife into the marmalade, brings out a measured proportion, smears his toast. The rasping sounds of it seems to grate the air, but Sirius doesn't say anything. Remus looks at him—feels like he's breaking the rules. Despite the mornings when he'd—they'd—do nothing but look at each other, grinning the stupid grin of the happy.
Sirius moves as if he's underwater, the lift of his arm as he brings his coffee to his lips too deliberate. The turn of the page of his newspaper, too deliberate.
Remus doesn't know when they started acting. Just that they are.
2. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't think Remus does either, hovering like he only does when he's nervous. There was a time, not so long ago, when they could barely make it out of the door without jumping each other. There was a time, not so long ago, when they'd spend entire half hours snogging against the door before reluctantly letting the real world have at them. And then they'd be back, racing each other to see who could get home and naked and debauched first after a eight hours of thinking about each other. Sirius doesn't know now—did the real world grab ahold of them, or did they just take their parts in the real world?
It almost seems trite now, the rebelling and the back-talking and the scheming when he was in Hogwarts. You always think, when you're young, that you'll never be a part of that world, the grown-up world, the responsible world. You'll rebel and you'll stay liberal and hopefully you'll always be ignorant of exactly how taxes work.
But you grow up, you find out what exactly rents mean, you stop making out against the door when you're supposed to be leaving for work. Now you're both running, running from each other and an apartment where the air is tense and filled with the noises of toast and newspapers.
And damn it all, damn it all; the real world dragged in a bloody war, a war that's settled itself in your sitting room, in all the places in your body that should be filled with things like pranks and pumpkin juice.
You save Remus the trouble of having to think of something to say by giving him an empty smile and an empty platitude and empty doorway to stare through.
3. You're so fucking glad for work. Being an Auror, being able to help people, the war (when was the last time you were really wanted to help him, when was the last time you really helped him, when was the last time you loved-); this is what keeps you moving.
The worst part, the paperwork, is numbing and deadening and far, far too often—signing and sealing incident reports and death notices; worst of all when there's so many dead they don't even know who and where and why, so you have to write Incident of Death(s), which is fucking ridiculous, that stupid parenthetical 's', as if they didn't know that there was more than one, as if they're so busy being hung up on grammar when there's such tragedy (grammar, oh grammar, you remember when he teased you about it, when you purposefully used too many commas or not enough or a semicolon when it's only a colon or misplaced a damn apostrophe, in your letters and essays and post-it notes, just so he'd respond, just so he could say something—and you wish this silence, this silence was something you could fix with badly written notes just so he'd say something to you, something or anything at all). He remembered when he came home one day, the first time he had to write an IOD—and the way he complained about how his damn quill had broken over it and he had to go back to Moody to get a new form and the lecture he had gotten from him about "wasting government-resources, you fancy-pants poofter; can't even use a damn quill without his parents paying someone to do it for him", but by this part in the retelling he could feel a cold wetness on his cheeks and a strangled sound, like someone choking, and he looked up at Remus from his pacing and realized, through his blurred vision, that Remus had gotten up and was walking toward him. Remus spent the next two hours cradling him, softly kissing away the "oh Merlins", the "oh Merlins" because Sirius had to write an IOD, because Sirius had seen so many deaths at one time, at one place, that the Ministry didn't even want the individual slips of paper—only a mass grave.
Sirius's paperwork has always taken the longest out of all the Aurors to be processed. He procrastinates and procrastinates and manages to ignore the pink slips, the IODS, the stack that grows larger and larger everyday. He hates the office, avoids it as much as possible, because the larger the stack grows, the longer the weeks get; the more he feels like his every action just brings about more forms to fill out (it's Pavolvian, he once joked to Remus, which earned a stern glare and lecture about how You're Not Like The Rest of Them, Don't You Dare Do That, and he had hung his head in shame for the most part of the said lecture, but he couldn't help but feel safer, being told by his Moony, his Moony, that no, it wasn't his fault, and he recites things like "Moony said so, Moony said so" under his breath each time he brushes his teeth, fixes his hair, looks into a mirror that shows the Black cheekbones, the Black nose, because he wants to believe he is Not Like Them, believe that he's not anything, anything but himself).
4. Remus comes home wishing he didn't have, wishing that his keys belonged to the apartment just 'round the bend. Remus comes home hating himself for those wishes, hating himself for having wanted this, this thing with Sirius, so long ago. He stops just before he opens the door for a preparatory breath—far too often he'd come home with an expression not to Sirius's liking, far too often he'd come home to arguments and red faces and smashed tea cups and too many unspoken sentiments in the empty space between them (when was the last time you kissed me with your eyes closed, why isn't this working, why are you here, why are you here, why are you here?!) and he's come to treasure this moment of hope, this irrational belief that today there's something different behind these doors.
Bearing large amounts of guilt has always come easy to Remus. Lying has, too; even to himself.
When he sees Sirius on the couch, reading stony-faced with his knees to his chin, he knows this day is Type Number Five. It's a day with less anger than Number Ten, more guilt than Number Six, more hidden tears than Number Twelve. He's got a schedule, a line of rules that their behavior follows for each of day, so he doesn't waste time, he does what he's told; he sets down his briefcase and puts away his coat and shoes (stop shaking, he tells his hands, please stop shaking)and walks over to Sirius to give him a careless kiss on the forehead (careless, careless, since when did I start being careless about this, when all I could ever do back then was worry about how fragile this was, when all I could ever do back then was worry about keeping you forever?). Then he changes into something comfortable—Sirius's pajama pants and an old faded shirt of his (remember, remember, remember when he couldn't keep those on you? When he'd beg you to wear it and then, then, seduce you, undress you, eat you up until you didn't know you from him and him from you?)-and begins making tea in the kitchen; that now familiar silence, so far from comfortable, so far from wanted, settling in between you.
You set the tea on the table and try not to look at him across from you.