"He ate and drank the precious words;
His spirit grew robust.
He knew no more,
That he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust."
- Emily Dickinson
2.
Remus smiles. He often doesn't know what to say if he's complimented, but it's Sirius, so it can't be awkward and he has the freedom to say nothing specific.
"So what did you do to combat said boredom?" asks Remus. Sirius just wonders at looking at him. He looks a hundred times better for his mystery visit, thin though he is, he has energy again, and you'd be hard pushed to find someone who could be convinced just two days ago he was falling apart at death's door.
"I lay out and watched the stars. Used to do that with the Old Slag, when I was really little. Could still remember where all my family are, though." Sirius tells him. He tries not to feel bitter that Remus lies to him, and just be happy with their friendship the way it is.
"Show me, tonight" Remus smiles, somehow very much at peace again, his secretive unsolved ramblings forgotten as if he never said them. As if he didn't break down in tears, grip Sirius's hand and inform him, deathly white and terrified, that Things, whatever his Things were, weren't going to be okay.
"Okay, but it won't be as good now" says Sirius, still feeling a little sore. "It was the full moon, so the sky was really bright. I can still find them, though."
Remus doesn't say anything for a second longer than is comfortable, and Sirius could swear his body is stiffening beside him. When he does, it's just "Oh." And it's too high pitched. Maybe Sirius was too harsh. Maybe there's a really good reason Remus can't tell. So Sirius elbows him very gently in the side, and changes the subject.
"Still want to come see the stars?" asks Sirius.
Remus looks over at him. It's much later, and Sirius is wearing the soft black trackies and tee-shirt he's taken to sleeping in.
"I'd forgotten that. I'm in my pajamas, Sirius."
"So am I." And then he regrets it, worried again that he's annoying Remus. First time in his life he's ever second-guessed himself, especially as it's on account of him worrying about being unwanted. Sirius Black? He's learnt to have a skin thick as armour and charge boisterously through life. He doesn't stay in one place long enough to be hurt. But suddenly- here he is.
The other boy just smiles, abandoning his book, and trails out of the door, after Sirius.
The night is relatively warm but staring out at the great sinister expanse above them feels cold. Sirius is absorbed in his task, finding all the main constellations and naming them. Remus is lying quietly next to him, listening.
"There I am" he says, pointing to the bright, bulging star. "And there's Canis Major around me. I'm the Dog Star. For the Chinese, the Wolf Star," And Remus stays silent. "But look see, there's the dog shape. Can't you see it?"
"On summer nights" murmurs Remus. "Star of stars. Orion's dog they call it, brightest of them all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fever to- to suffering humanity. Sirius rises late in the dark liquid sky."
"What?" asks Sirius, sitting up. Remus stays lying down, and smiles faintly.
"Homer. In the Illiad." Sirius just stares at him, baffled and slightly alarmed. "He was a Greek tragic poet. That passage is about Achilles approaching Troy."
"Who? Where?"
"Dad likes the classical authors. I like books. My summer was boring. So I was reading the Illiad, and I coincidently have this friend named Sirius." I'm not just a psycho, stalking your star.
"What's it about?" asks Sirius, lying back down and looking at the sky.
"The Illiad?"
"That passage. And The Pilliad. Yeah."
"Ill-iad. The passage is about the star Sirius, you nutter" giggles Remus. "When Achilles is on the boat, he's going to war. Looking up at the stars I guess. Superstition."
"Why was he going to war?" asks Sirius comfortably shuffling, hoping that's not a stupid question and that it has a long answer. He turns on his side and watches Remus, imagining the two of them on an old wooden boat, drifting towards the great war beneath the vast sky, and Remus stares up at star Sirius and recounts the tale.
"Ah, the Trojan War. I can't believe you've never looked at the classics, with your heritage, Sirius." And he shuffles his head a little closer to Sirius's. "So the ancient Greeks were sailing to Troy to lay siege to the city, led by Agamemnon, and Achilles was their great warrior. Due to having a Goddess mother and so on, he was invulnerable except on his ankle, because that's what he'd been held by as a baby to be dipped into the Styx to create aforementioned immortality. Evidently the Styx is the river to the underworld, Sirius, stop asking obvious questions," but he grins, and tweaks Sirius's nose.
"So he's off to war, and y'see the Greeks liked to kind of take girls, but then Agamemnon to give his bit on the side back. And he had to because Apollo is a God and he made him. Are you following? So Agamemnon's without his girl, gets lonely, and takes Achilles' girl, instead. Anguished, Achilles withdraws his service and without him, the Greeks start to lose. But he changed his mind when his best friend, Patroclus, gets killed by the Trojans, and he goes back to battle. And he gets hit with an arrow on his heel and dies."
"Mum couldn't have been more thorough" Sirius says happily.
"Yeah. But he was a tragic poet. That's what makes it a tragedy, I guess, his downfall, and how it could have been avoided, but wasn't" he wonders aloud.
"Why did they even go and attack Troy to start with?" poses Sirius, hoping it's another long story. There's something in the air, or in Remus's long, slim fingers, or his indescribable voice, that's perfect tonight, nicer than when he was here alone, under the full moon. Next full moon, he will definitely lie here with Remus again.
"Paris, a Trojan, abducted the ruler of Sparta's beautiful wife, Helen, and so they went to get her back." And then he stops, like he's tired of speaking, but Sirius prefers this story to his own about the stars.
"They like to nick girls, don't they, the Greeks" jokes Sirius, trying to get him to laugh.
"It's all hazy." He says it philosophically, finding no joke in the chronicle. "There isn't just one story, in some of them Paris-" and he pauses, "well he, you know, against her will, and he takes her. And in some she fell in love with him and just ran off."
Sirius stays silent for a while, relaxing in the companionable air, feeling small beneath the vast nothingness above them, and wondering how they got onto analysis of the classical poets. Easily, really, seeing as he is talking to Remus. Remus makes anything and everything interesting, even an old story about an old bloke who dies in an old war. With Remus telling it, Sirius can really see the two of them sailing under that liquid sky, in the Billiad, and all of it.
"The thing I like about the story really is Achilles. It's the epitomy of poetic tragedy. The gods even had to stop Achilles smashing up Troy too much, because he was so violent and passionate, over the death of his friend, because Troy wasn't s'posed to have been destroyed yet, and it's like the rage of Achilles could have changed fate." He smiles and looks over at Sirius. "Just one mortal. And fate was very important for the Greeks. That's what Homer described to show his rage at the Trojans killing his best mate. Do you like it? I love the tragedies. They're so beautiful- poetic."
The girl got taken and Achilles just sulked, but when Patroclus was killed, his rage was so intense. He fought the man who killed him and died himself.
"But it's sad" says Sirius, suddenly thinking of Remus's face when he was sick, and it all comes back to him. "Why do you like sad things? You always seem so sad. You're so – hard on yourself. All the time."
Sirius sees Remus's face and immediately regrets it.
"Oh" he says very quietly, and stares back up at the stars.
"I didn't mean that."
"I'm sorry to be such a downer on you, Sirius, really I am" snaps Remus suddenly, and makes to get up.
"Remus, sit back down!" Sirius starts to panic. Remus's thin, hopeful, hopeless face is wracked with tragedy. And then again, tears well up in his eyes, and his nose starts to turn red.
"Why? I'm obviously raining on your parade here."
Sirius's stomach wrenches to think Remus might think himself boring. Especially that he himself might think Remus boring. He's so interesting- although he really shouldn't be, he's not all loud and shrieking and mental like James, but he so is- he just seems to sparkle without ever doing anything much that Sirius can really put his finger on.
"Remus! Please."
Remus turns back toward him, tears sliding down his face. Soft, sweet, delicate Remus. It's like he's so unsteady. "I don't know why you'd want to talk to me, Sirius." And suddenly Sirius sees himself and he's acting ridiculous and he's can't keep his mouth shut and he physically can't stand it another second.
"WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?" he screams at the immense nothingness, and Remus jumps out of his skin at the sudden loud noise. Sirius whips round on his knees, eyes blazing. "I can't stand that you won't tell me" he says, as he starts to cry. Remus looks at him, a feeble combination of heartbroken and alarmed.
"I can't stand you lying. I can't stand you carrying around this weight, I can't stand you not trust me, I- I can't stand it. I can't stand you being- so ill, that your temperature is soaring and you're crying in the night and the teachers, and the plans that you won't say and I can't stand that you lie there, and look at me like you're dying-" he sobs, crying properly now, and tries to regain himself. "I can't stand you looking like you're at death's door and you won't even let me stay to- to comfort you, to be near you, because it's like you're scared, that you might tell me whatever this is!" And he bursts into tears, flumping back down on the mountainside, weeping agony into his robes. He knows it's pathetic: he doesn't care. He's Sirius Black, careless and carefree, drama queen extraordinaire, and he's going to say what he thinks.
Anyway, he's said it now.
Sirius hears Remus sits down a little way from him and looks up, and Remus's legs are dangling over the little stone ledge, he's gripping fistfuls of the rock by his sides, staring straight out into space. Sirius stumbles over and Remus's tears are once again making those silver lines down his face. He looks like he's holding on for dear life.
It's after a very long time of sitting there together, Sirius sniffing loudly and trying to wipe away his tears, refusing to let himself speak before Remus does, else he never will, and Remus letting his nose and eyes drip, as he stares into the great expanse, and he's actually shaking, that Remus speaks. He looks up at the moon. He looks at Sirius and then quickly looks back at the stars.
"How did you know?" he croaks, very quietly, into the open night.
"I d'know anything. You never say it. Please, Remus. There isn't anything so bad as would make me angry-"
"But you do" he whispers, still refusing to look at him. "You just said it all. How did you know that? Why- I mean- do you think- did you think- I was hiding someth- ings."
"Because it's obvious" says Sirius in a small voice. He's still shaking with sobs, but suddenly the tightest belt in the world has been unbuckled and for all the emotion, he feels a hundred times better.
"From what" squeaks Remus, who knows the question is pointless.
"From- what? I don't know. You- in the bed and the fever? And the looking at me- so seriously and then, the horrible- and then so angry. Like just now. I didn't even say anything. You're so fragile. I can't bear it. That's what I meant. I didn't mean any of that stuff. You're not boring, you're not a downer raining on me, I- you're like, well James is my b- look, you don't understand. You- the going away, randomly, the teachers. Please tell me."
"How can you be sure there's one thing?" asked Remus softly, like a man defeated. "Could have just been a coincidence."
"Remus, every day I wake up and James and Peter are in their beds. And sometimes you're not. And you just appear, and change the subject. And sometimes you're fine- and you're so happy- and I'm so happy- and you just switch on me, Remus. Why can't you just tell me? I won't tell Pete or James. I won't tell my mum."
Despite everything, Remus barks a short laugh. "Wasn't afraid of that" he says without thinking.
"So- see! You admit there's something!"
Remus can't find a reply to that, and it's answer enough.
"Even if it's complicated. I won't get bored and fidget like I always do and James tells me off but he does it too and look, I won't do it with you, I'll shut up, I swear I can. I won't ask questions till you're done. Is it because it's embarrassing? I've told you all about my family. Everything pathetic I've ever done, or felt, or been afraid of. I would never hide a thing from you" he sobs."You even admit there's something, Remus." And he stops, because there's nothing else to say. He's just repeating himself.
Remus smiles sourly at the inky sky. "How did I get here?" he asks, in a murmur, but Sirius gets the feeling he probably shouldn't answer. "I was going to be so careful." He says it tenderly, like those two words are beautiful and precious to him. He gazes up at the stars, clutching them. And he's still spilling tears, but he's smiling a scary, reckless smile, as if nothing matters. "You know, this really is why I shouldn't have friends, be allowed to talk to anyone." He's speaking cryptically, in riddles now, and Sirius is sure is all has a meaning but for some reason he just can't think of it.
The night seems like it has gone on forever, yet is only just beginning.
"You're acting like you're a monster" says Sirius softly, and Remus barks out another false laugh, like he's mocking himself, and lies down. Sirius looks down at him. "But- you're not. You're Remus. There's no one I could imagine whose less a monster than you."
"Then, I've played my part well" murmurs he, and so Sirius feels the anger welling up again.
"Remus, I'm not being funny. You have to tell me. I'll do something crazy if you don't. I can't work you out. It itches so badly it hurts, in my belly," he gabbles, feeling like he is making no sense yet perfect sense both at once. "What the hell do you mean, you've played a part? It's me, Sirius. I don't pretend stuff when, when I'm with you. Why do you always have to play a fucking part?"
"I don't know," says Remus, not responding to the provocation. "I thought- thought no one had any idea." He says it almost as if it's comical. "I'm so, so stupid. What if everyone knows? They all know? You already know-"
"I DON'T!" he roars. "IF I KNOW, THEN JUST SAY IT! YOU'VE NOTHING TO LOSE- I'm not fucking Herlock Sholmes like in one of your best friends the muggle books. Is this a joke to you? I've been awake at nights. I've fallen asleep in classes and dreamed about- you- secretly part of a cannibal cult, having a deadly disease, having killed someone and hid the body, having- an evil twin who died, harbouring this secret- this secret thing that's making you so unhappy! You're- making a game out of this, messing with me, do you know? Do you know, what I can't stand the most, I can't stand you not caring how much you're ripping up my insides."
Again, it's a long pause while they both sit and stare into the monstrous sky. Sirius slowly stops shaking and stares at his hands.
And then says Remus, in a low, and mournful voice: "Sirius, you have a friend who keeps disappearing and looks ill a lot and doesn't say where he's been. He's the only one that's not normal, doesn't change in front of the rest, reads books about people that never even existed like they're his friends, as if to block out the world. When he's sick and- and weak" and a tear dribbles down his face. "And then people take advantage, getting him to admit his- hopelessness. His best friends tell him he's always so sad. That's what you said to me, right. Is any of this news to you?"
Sirius shakes his head slowly.
"Remus, please. I'll beg. You're terrifying me now. For you to answer this one straight question and not lie like you always do. Please, Remus, I don't understand, I don't get it." Sirius has the feeling that something very very obvious is staring at him in the face but he can't see it. He tries to force the pieces in, but they won't go. He's dizzy, on the edge of finding out, but his stupid, stupid slow dumb brain won't fucking work.
Remus stays completely impassive, looking up at the stars, waiting for the blow. He doesn't deserve to defend himself by this point. Maybe Sirius will just leave. That will almost be worse than the beating he could well be about to endure. He imagines the scene, being run out of Hogwarts with pitchforks and flames. Or worse, the real scene, his traipsing down flanked between two long tables, a thousand pairs of eyes on him, the whispers, the sneers, the judgement. The silence. The sad eyes of his mother at her thirteen-year-old, reading alone every day, knowing Remus has failed, messed everything up, gotten complacent and cocky and like Sirius that he just can't afford to be and ruined the one chance he'll ever have had to be halfway normal. Maybe he's so calm because he's just already given up.
Suddenly Sirius realises that he means that it's real life. It's the harsh world, and they're teenagers now, poised on the brink of something scary and shapeless. Life isn't full of winning. Running amok, laughing it out, playing pranks, messing around, hating one's mother. Knowing there's a Hogwarts-shaped safety net around you, handy cushion no matter how hard you ram yourself against the bars.
Life's heartbreaking.
They are suddenly growing up. Everything's all of a sudden overwhelmingly terrifying, and they both cling to one another, frightened little boys, one of what he knows and one of what he doesn't, faced with too much, too soon, right now. Sirius's fingers creep into Remus's and he rests his forehead on them, waiting for Remus to say something, anything. He will not be the first to talk.
And then Remus sobs "I can't speak to you, Sirius," struggles up quickly, and before Sirius can physically stop him, is pattering up the steps and then thudding back over the hill to the castle.
Sirius lays there only fifteen minutes more because he's so cold from the tears soaking his face and collar and the angry, swirling, freezing sky and the absence of anyone around to protect him from the monsters that only creep out when he's alone, that he gives up and trudges back to the grey, looming castle, feeling as tragic as Remus looks.
He doesn't talk to James about what happened. James is so bubbly that it's easier, shamefully easy in fact, to forget the whole itchy thing and just be swept up with James's James-glee. He doesn't talk to Remus about it, because Remus is obviously trying so much harder now to pretend to be happy that Sirius thinks sometimes he really persuades himself he is and he isn't going to be the one to reduce Remus to sobbing and shaking and saying horrible, sinister, grown-up things again. Of course he doesn't talk to Peter, who in the past week has been so incredibly annoying in the way that Sirius never really noticed before. So he doesn't say anything and the problem is rubbed away at by everyday life so in three and a half weeks' time, it's just a small thing sitting patiently in the back of his stuffed head to be remembered about.
Then, it's always still there, eating away at him, making him jumpy and tearful.
Then, it all happens at once:
Then, in three and a half weeks they wake up and Remus isn't in his bed again but they don't really notice by now because he always turns up and then Peter's cousin who's a First Year has been taken to the Infirmary and then James and Sirius go with and then James gets bored and wanders off round the Infirmary and then through a door that's wedged shut but not very well that says No Entry on it because how on Merlin's green earth could he resist that and then white as a sheet he returns and punches Sirius six times on the arm hard enough to bruise and can't speak and then they follow him and then they see Remus.
So. I wrote this a million years ago and over those million years its been merged with things and edited and changed and has emerged as this, a kind of four part thing (of which this is the second and longest part) which ends up, obviously, with the Marauders accepting and understanding Remus. If you do want the other two parts that are sitting on my computer, you have to tell me.
Please do drop me a review; they make me so happy. :)
