Disclaimer: Remus and Sirius belong to the wonderful JKR.
A/N: This was written for a 2005 secret santa exchange, although I no longer remember the prompt nor the person for whom I wrote it. Basically: I am a sap. Hence, this fic.
i. January.
Christmas songs stuck in his head like old flavorless gum, squelching on the bottom of his shoes. It's a tired way to start the year, draining a bottle of champagne because it once reminded him of someone's amber eyes. Too late, he reflects, bitterly. Far too late for that. It's the new year, hoo-fucking-ray, and he's alone in this flat and cold.
1981, thinks Sirius. One thousand nine hundred but he's bored already, thoughts like that don't occupy him for long. Remus would figure it out, talk about the ancient wizards and how old the earth's supposed to be, silly Muggle theories like some stars collided somewhere.
Fuck the stars, thinks Sirius, and throws the empty bottle to the ground. He likes the sound it makes as it shatters on the floor.
ii. February.
An owl comes in the middle of the month, when Remus is burning his hands on the stove and Sirius scowling at the empty pantry. "Fuck!" both shout at once, and grin at each other like guilty kids, hands stuck in the narrow neck of the cookie jar.
It's Dumbledore; urgent, hurried, respond at once. "Well," says Remus, and Sirius glares at the floor. "Well," he says again.
There's nothing for it—he scribbles an answer, pays the owl, bends his eyes away from Sirius's hurt reproach. "I can't do anything about it," he mutters to the table. Sirius shrugs. "I know."
They order out for dinner, greasy Chinese noodles and sodium-clogged soup. Remus spills a little and Sirius smiles, gently. Apologies burrow their way into fortune cookies, your life will be happy and peaceful, and Sirius smirks at the tacit "in bed" and his own, evidently, tepid love life.
Later that night they curl like commas, backwards and forwards like a heart.
iii. March.
"Remus!"
At the shore in March, gray sand stretching in chill monotony to the water, scarf pulled tight around his neck and slightly frostbitten hands shoved deep into his jean pockets. Standing just where the waves began to cajole the sand into their centers, rolling around them like oysters and pearls, the shaved layers of foggy grains pushing his bare feet down into the sand. Stormy sea and sky sloshing around above him like some restless replica of the waves, metronomic grinding of stone on stone.
Sirius is in the water, breakers foaming unevenly around him, careening side-to-side in his usual volcano-eruption of motion. Remus watches with mock-haughty affection, I'm too old for that while they all know, of course, he is only afraid. Remus does not like water and even Sirius can't get him to swim.
Sirius, bounding over to him across the sand, leaking coarse-edged salt and hair lurching wildly in the wind, like Medusa. Gray eyes like frozen stone. Laughing, breath stuttering in pasty huffs, cold enough—just barely—to see it.
"Moony," a seagull twitters and pecks hopefully at his feet, "Moony, Remus, you've got to come in with us. It's fucking freezing!" He laughs, hugely. "Fucking bloody cold, my feet are numb, shite, Moony, Remus, you've got to, it's fucking brilliant."
"No, thank you," wryly. "I'm quite comfortable here, as a matter of fact, watching you loony buggers freeze your arses off."
The sun is a weak thing, pallid, like numb hands. Remus feels them pulled from his pockets, splayed gently in the sunlight, kissed in rapturous spontaneity the way that Sirius is most alive when he's doing something crazy.
"Loony bugger, eh," he grins, running thumbs in hectic circles over the backs of Remus's hands.
"Quite loony," Remus agrees.
Within seconds he is flat on his back, water fanning indifferently across his face, sputtering and eyes stinging from shock and scratchy salt. "Mmhfhhfme!" he shouts, flailing uselessly beneath the giant lump of unmitigated weight that is one damp, sweaty, and utterly victorious Sirius Black.
"Quite loony," this oaf says proudly, and kisses Remus as surge of salty water immerses and drenches them both.
iv. April.
"Wet," says Remus, and wrinkles his nose.
A goulash of mud and soggy fallen petals greets his boots as he steps into the rain, umbrella-less since Sirius used it to demonstrate the uselessness of a parachute. Puddles creep into his socks, damp cotton sticking uncomfortably to pasty legs, hair plastered in odd shapes to the relatively round slope of his scalp.
Sirius prances through the street, warbling horrendous songs horrendously off-key, and Remus laughs his name into the sticky sky.
v. May.
Lily's birthday, and Remus finds himself thinking it's been far too long since he last had cake. Icing peels in serrated sugar-swirls off the twines of his fork, settling in creamy gulps against his tongue, tasting fake and delicious like Christmas lights. Sirius watches him, doped on sugar and smiling like a dope, dollop of blue icing smudged around his lip.
James and Lily dance outside and Sirius grins, whistles, clasps Remus's cool, dry hand. Baby Harry is asleep in the hammock, gentle wind rocking the creaking ropes, stuffed dragon toy dangling precariously from his hand. Alice Longbottom seizes Frank, kisses him beneath the shady apple tree. Peter stuffs himself with cake, watches James and Lily, claps harder than the rest when the music ends and all eyes stray, with natural lazy greed, to the presents.
"I got her a thong," Sirius whispers as they head inside and Remus pulls him suddenly sideways, kisses him against the sliding-glass door.
"You have icing on your lip," he explains, and licks it off, teasingly. Sirius's eyes are glinting, like rain and lambent fog. "I have a thing," he says, "for icing."
vi. June.
A miasma of sunlight shifts the focus, love and strutting park-pigeons to the places where the shadows fall powdery, like talc. The longest day of the year and it feels like it, too, humid sweaty static and gnats nipping the muggy air.
Letter on the table when they get home; Andromeda, handwriting scrunched and narrow like Remus's nose when he laughs. They are somber now, though. They are tired. Saturated skin and everything feels sore.
Regulus has joined the Death Eaters and Sirius's hand shakes. Once, twice, done. The heat fuzzes his mind, numbs him with the extra energy it takes to traverse the heavy air. He slouches on the couch, leaves the parchment where it falls to the floor, watches indifferently as Remus reads it. Sharp eyes but Sirius is too tired to care. He lets his wrist hit the ground and almost winces when it smacks the floor.
vii. July.
It's too hot for tea and Remus is cranky, sorting papers for the Order as though he has nothing more valuable to offer. He knows this is untrue, but somehow in all this heat and sun and greasy sunscreen angry thoughts are comforting. Opaque sweat dribbles down his neck.
Sirius is away and Remus left alone in the flat, two weeks to read and work the way that he often prays to get the chance to after long weekends in Sirius's company. Now, however, he is lonely; now he wants someone to pour ice-water down his back and make him shriek, make him sweat in a completely different and much more pleasant way.
Not that he has been pleasant lately, either of them, with the heat of course but even more so with the owls pouring in, the newspapers, the dark frenzy of activity. Harry's birthday coming up and they are too focused on their Order work to think about it, don't even have a present for the kid yet. Bruises under both sets of eyes and curt nods in greeting instead of lengthy kisses.
Remus takes a freezing shower, goosebumps licking his sweaty skin, and misses May.
viii. August.
Eyelash on his cheek and Remus rubs it off, silly Muggle tradition of wishing on such an ethereal thing. He does it anyway, tries to watch it blow away but it's 11 p.m. and dark outside, stars cold like the pinpricks in his hands when they go numb. Fireflies congeal around the bushes, viscous lights streaming on and off in a topaz parody of a Muggle's idea of a fairy.
Regulus is dead.
ix. September.
A weird sort of distance and neither speaks; they study the cracks and lines in the walls. Each cloud today looks like a train; each dot in the ceiling a Scottish star…. Remus reads and Sirius throws things absently around and both, secretly, crave pumpkin juice.
x. October.
One week before Halloween and Sirius is in a dangerous state, whirling frantically about the flat as though the tiniest touch will set him off. Remus is careful, these days; already they have fought over the broken table leg, the amount of tea they consume in a week, even the direction in which Remus lies as he is falling asleep at night. Sirius's anger is simply a cover for his grief; Remus is well aware of that. It does not mean, however, that he is willing to suffer another lonely, sulking night because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So when Sirius opens his mouth Remus says, quietly, "Stop."
There is a moment. There is one quick, fleeting moment when Sirius scowls and his whole body darkens—Remus can see the shadows accost it—and his eyes twist downwards in ugly angry spirals. There is a moment when it can go either way; Sirius can explode again, erupt, shout and yell and slam the door behind him as he walks out of the flat, tell himself Remus is a spy in absurd justification, go so far as to switch Secret-Keepers for the mere sake of having him duped. There is a moment when everything can break, when the future can become one eddying swirl of dust and loneliness, of guilt and regret and far too much fatigue.
Remus holds still and he can feel it. The seconds pass, one two, and in those transitory moments an entire lifetime taking place. How things could be. How they would be.
But Sirius does not explode or shout. Sirius does not walk out the door.
And things are different.
xi. November.
They move when Remus begins to miss the trees, stiff pillars of rough-hewn bark crowned with shaggy layers of soggy leaves, flaring red in their centers like embarrassed at their own graceless tumble to the ground. Cottage in the country, vines crawling over gray eroded stone, river in the backyard slicked with the treble beginnings of ice.
It isn't okay yet. There is still so much to solve: words that arrive too soon and too abruptly; shadows that coat the wrong places; furtive glances that bristle stiff-held shoulders and silences that last all through the paisley-patterned nights. It isn't okay yet; they still blanch a little when a letter arrives, still clutch the blankets too close to themselves, like first years again with nightmares.
But it will be, Remus knows, implicitly. It will be okay.
xii. December.
It's something the horizon does as he walks home alone in the evening, air chafed with brittle wind and everything at sharper angles. The sky is a rigid contraction, purple stains like plums and bruises cryogenically trapped in cirrus clouds, glacial film distorting reflections in the river.
And Remus feels safe. And Remus feels happy. And Remus feels like he is not alone.
(When he gets home Sirius will be inside, pouring tea to warm him up. They will kiss hello and talk of petty things, how are you feeling and how was your day, and both will say I love you twice before the day is over.
It will never again occur to either how close they once were to disaster.)