Sirius had been taught that he was better, but he never really believed it very often. It seemed foolish, like most of the things his mother said; that he'd never amount to anything; scourge of her loins; stain on her flesh, rah, rah, rah. When he was younger he and Regulus were told, before they went outside; You are better. And underneath it lay; So act like it. So when Sirius reached Hogwarts and learned, finally, that he might not be such a little flesh-stain after all, it went logically that he wasn't better, either. That he was just a boy, and that was fine by him. Fantastic, even.
Sitting alone in their flat at four in the morning things are different.
The floor lies cold out in front of him, bare planks of wood they always said they'd do something with, and Remus is somewhere. Not here, but somewhere, and Sirius is waiting.
They do this all the time.
He cannot imagine a time when he has been late home. Mostly he works and he floos home and he crawls into bed; but Remus has friends. Muggle friends, who take him out to the pub and make him say things like Sirius. Come on. You're not my mother. That much, of course, is true.
He doesn't mind, he tells himself, that Remus works at the bookshop. It's good for him; he was always well-liked at school but never an extrovert, with his furry little problem. Muggles, however, never suspect. If he's crotchety around the full moon, they assume he's had too much to drink. If he snaps at them, they laugh it off. They never put the pieces together, so he is free with them. Almost as free as he was with James and Peter and Sirius, just a few months ago.
The problem is, Sirius is not accustomed to compromise, or sharing, or all those other words that just mean not getting what you want. And at four o'clock in the morning he feels a boiling anger, an emptiness unreplicated in daylight. He thinks too much. He drowns in silence. Any sane person would go to bed – but Sirius isn't really any kind of sane person. He never has been. They've had this fight but he can't shake it off; Remus fucking someone else, the same way – or differently – to how they are together. Remus kissing someone else, drunkenly. Remus loving someone else, the worst. Remus harbouring another dark secret, far more terrifying than the monthly beast; the secret that Sirius is not better and that secretly, always, he believed he was. The secret that Sirius has hardly grown up since he was eleven, that he is still that same aristocratic-looking boy with his nose in the air.
Other times, he's afraid he has these awful fantasies (and that's what they are, in the end) because something in his head looks at Remus, face full of scars, bookish and nerdy and torn to shreds all over and sees a burden, a weight to bear, a mark of his humanity. Not a love. That maybe deep down what they have isn't anything special – just pity, or spite against the family who would disapprove.
He starts to fall asleep, this thought clenched in one fist. That they're breaking. That he doesn't want to be the one to end it, but he doesn't want Remus to be, either. That if one of them has to 'win', he'd rather it was him.
Xxx
But he wakes in the morning to that scarred face that got in at five-thirty, with bags around its eyes. The face brings him coffee and kisses him, and lays its scarred hand on his shoulder and cajoles him into laughter and doesn't know what Sirius thought, what Sirius was thinking all night. Doesn't know Sirius cheated, once, on a night when Remus did not come home because – of all things – he was working. For them. Doesn't know that sometimes Sirius stays up all night burning, trying to convince himself that his guilt is something easier; malice, spite, envy, disgust. Something better, that he can shape into a reason to escape, to win this game he has invented.
Desperately, painfully, he feels love. It threatens to drown, to swallow him.
More than he wants to end it he wants to end his own self, to be better, but he knows that really he isn't. Remus is better, and it is killing him.