A very slender, beautiful boy stalks across the hall. I see him move efficiently and still he moves slowly; he avoids possible delays but there's no rush, no excitement in his steps, like he's accepted a fate of a dementor's kiss yet cannot greet the loss of his soul with such favorable expressions like smiles and doe eyes. He doesn't look sour and though there's always something in his cheeks that is remarkably sweet and unassuming, some of that is gone at this moment and the more I stare at him the more I conclude he looks powerfully possessed with some thought or another, no doubt something very important and profound. I cannot help but follow the creature as he scurries. I do not know where he is taking me, only that it's not where I was and that I don't mind necessarily because I'm not sure I've ever been happy where ever I've been. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be happy anywhere I go. I'm blind in knowing where I'm meant to be going yet there's a smile of contentment upon my face- I can feel it in my jaw, raw and swollen, bruised as it was, it didn't even hurt- and eventually find that I'm climbing the North Tower. Never once does my leader glance back. I do not know if he senses my presence and he simply doesn't care or if I mean to startle him when we reach the top and he attempts to close the hatch, but I set my feet to the stairs. He breaks into the sunset; it is almost blinding as he emerges in it and he squints his eyes and covers his face with one of his dry hands, forcing himself to the landing that wraps around the tower. He did not shut the hatch.
I follow his shadow all the way up but I do not flinch at the light. I have been searching for it most of my life. He's standing at the edge and I approach him slowly.
"Do you ever wonder what it'd be like to jump?" he asks me. I take a cigarette from my back pocket and light it.
"Did you lead me all the way up here to thwart a suicide mission?" The look he gives me is harsh- it is a warning to bite my tongue. I suppose it's fair. Sometimes I don't think I have a conscience. Rather what I have is him, and what he'd say. I can hear him so forcefully and so clearly in my head. Right now, right now he should say to me, 'dear Sirius, it's not like you would stop anyone from committing a murder' and I should have the opening to say that I was god-awful sorry and mean it, but he doesn't give it to me so I think of something else to say in return because I'm afraid if I do not keep him talking he will never listen to me again. "No, I don't. I personally think that life is too short."
"Do you?" he asks, conversationally, as if I stated that I thought the weather was chilly. "That's odd." I take a drag of my cigarette, and his eyes remain straight ahead. There is nothing there except colors, an exceptional vision in many ways for the British Empire in her grand glory that is usually drabbed in stormy grey. I suppose in many ways that is something worthy of looking at, unlike me, though there were plenty of colors in my face at the moment. "Sometimes I feel like my life will drag on forever and in the end I'll wish that it hadn't carried on so long."
"Bold stuff to think, mate, especially when there's a bloody war brewing over somewhere in that corner of the sky." He turns towards me now.
"I'm telling you this now, Sirius, because it's what I think to be true and I wish to offer you a slight bit of what you'll call useless advice. If you don't make an effort to check yourself you will be fighting the same enemies as me but they will come for you three times as hard and four times as fast. You tend to insult someone with every movement of your mouth, your brain tends to offend someone every second the cogs in there are turning. You tried to kill someone last night. I never thought someone I loved could be capable of something like that and yet here we are. I am afraid of what will happen in the years to come not for me but for you, for James, for Peter. I don't want any of you to open your big fat mouths because then I'll end up surviving alone for all the world to see my ruin and what your death will do to me." He moves away from me now and I realize I haven't come up here to save Remus from dying.
"I'm not going to deny that what I did was wrong, Remus."
"Good; I suppose that's progress coming from you, yet I can't help but feeling that there is more you wish and that you are going to say."
"Quite true. Remus I-oh, sod it, I know I'm a fool. It doesn't take you to make me see that it. I've always known that I was a fool, a bloody good fool too, because it's the only thing I've ever really been good at. Taking the mickey out on someone, acting like a child, feeling the need for vengeance so badly that it literally consumes me and it eats at me until I can't breathe or sleep until it finds its way from me like it did last night. I'm a fucking fool for calling myself loyal and then betraying your secret- your life- to someone that I hate simply because I thought it would be deserved and I still think the little fucker would have deserved it but you do not and you would not Remus. You deserve more than what I have ever given you. I'm so sorry."
The sun has all but set. I am standing next to the most beautiful boy in the world at this moment, I know it to be true, and yet he is unreachable- like the rays of red light bouncing off the tree branches swallowing the sky with their black arms would be to a camera at this moment there is nothing and no one in this world to do him justice. He heaves a sigh.
"You are a fool, but not a very good one; anyone who truly knows you also knows that. Why do you so completely refuse to let people see that there is a good side to you?"
"There are too many sides of me I don't wish people to see." I say darkly.
"Well, I'm glad you share some of them with me." Remus says. This is as much of an invitation as needed for me. I toss my cigarette over the ledge and then I gently place my palm on top of his hand. He immediately recoils. Remus, he fears touch. He speaks to me of never letting people see me but he also is shrouded in this melancholy aura where no one can ever feel him because it is too imposing. "I-I said some of them."
"What are you talking about?" I ask him and though I don't feel it truly it comes out sharply, defensively. "And what side of me do you think I'm showing you now, Lupin?"
"Sirius, don't be a prat." He says it- I so dearly wish to obey him but I'm a fool despite what he says and I can't help it. The feeling I didn't truly feel before is suddenly rising in me; because it's not just my body that wants him, it's something that only he can save that needs him. My soul. It leaves me now.
"It's Black to you, if you want it to be that way, Lupin. I'm not the sort cut out for these sort of games. The thing is I always have to win and come out on top. I'm very childish like that." He doesn't say much of anything at first but soon something falls from his lips.
"So is this what happens when someone spurs your advances, Black?" he asks me and I look at him and I know he doesn't truly mean it. He's standing with his back to the ledge now and I turn to walk closer to him and press him against it with my hands on his shoulders. He tilts his head up to me as an act of defiance but he soon turns away from me and I can feel him breathing in my own chest, like a sickness.
"Say it then. Say it directly, like a big boy, one who's learned his words and everything. Say it. Say no." He doesn't say anything. He looks like he is struggling for a plethora of words when all he needs is one, but the thing is the word is just not coming to him. I stand there, searching his face but the more I look over it the more I see that what I'm doing is doing him no good. I'm hurting him. I don't scare him but I do hurt him. But what about the hurt he causes me? What about what I need in this life, what the world would have denied to me if it could but it can't. My world is invested in this one boy, this beautiful boy, in this sunset, where the light is fading fast and I realize that one day the sun may never come back up as I look at him. What if the sun never comes back up, what if he never smiles again at me? Could I bear it? I'm fighting against him with the wrong side. I know it, I know it and I sigh and lean my forehead onto his. "Remus, I need you. Please don't deny me you."
"Fuck you, Sirius, truly, sincerely, utterly- fuck you." He states with exasperation but not denial. No, there is no denial in his voice. His hand reaches up to cup my face but he pulls it back slightly after running it across the wounds on my face. "Merlin, Sirius- James really beat you into a pulp. Let me fix it for you."
"No. I promised him I'd wear it; consider it penance."
"So bloody stupid!"
"No, it's not. It shows him I meant it when I said I was sorry."
"I'm not going to kiss you with your face like that. You look grotesque."
"Please." I growl.
"No." He says, sternly. "I promise I will but not like this and not right now. It's hardly the right time. If I didn't tell you how I felt it sounded likely that you would have thrown yourself off the roof so I figured I needed to stop you from doing that, but I do not have to kiss you when you look like a pincushion that Peter transfigured wrong." He says it lightly but I know he is far from kidding and I pull myself away from him slowly, like trying to separate Velcro quietly. We make it about a foot before Remus says something again.
"Dammit, I'll go to Prongs. I'll tell him to order you to get rid of it." The same smile I felt before is returning- the one that numbs the pain and numbs part of my mind but allows my heart to feel alive and red-blooded rather than dead and black. "No, no…more consideration tells me that we should take time to gauge how he'd react to the thought of…of…us."
"Jim? He'd only be confused as to why it wasn't him, as he always is. Can you imagine- why doesn't Black like me? Everyone else likes me. I'd captain of the Quidditch team, top marks in classes, handsome, charming, debonair, rich and modest!" We snicker at the thought.
"As if that's all that a man looks for in a man. Let's go back down. It's getting dark. I want to be able to see you, grotesque or not."
A very slender, beautiful man stalks across the tower. I see him move efficiently and still he moves slowly; he avoids possible delays but there's so much rush, true excitement in his steps. Me, I'm sworn only to follow him not only because I know in my heart he is what will make me happy, but also because he is not usually the type to lead yet there is no one else I'd rather follow anywhere. Into the dark or into the light.