Warnings: Mild sexual content, dubious consent
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
23rd July, 1978
"How's your mum now, Remus?"
The question broke the long, comfortable silence as the four of them sat before the creek, tossing pebbles into the gushing waters below.
"She's alright," Remus said quietly. He turned to James with a little smile. "Should be out in a day or so. They just need to do a biopsy."
"A biop-what?" said Peter.
"Just a test on her liver," Remus shrugged. He met Sirius's gaze across Peter, before turning back to the water.
It wasn't enough for tactless Peter though, who'd always had some kind of grim fascination with illness.
"Do they have to touch it?" he asked.
"What?"
"The liver. Do they touch it?"
He looked genuinely curious, eyes wide in his pudgy face, until Sirius gave him a short jab.
"Shut it, Pete."
"What? I'm only ask - "
"Well don't!"
But Remus - patient Remus - merely turned to Peter and smiled. "It's alright, Peter."
Silence hung between them for a few moments as Sirius continued to glare, until James piped up in an obvious attempt at changing the subject: "Guess what, lads? I reckon my Bess'll be done in a week or so. Thinking I might escort us all to the dance on Friday, eh?"
"All of us?" said Peter, sniffing doubtfully.
"Well, no, you and Cimmons'll have to catch the bus, I'm afraid. Or walk, it'd do you both some good," James said meanly, sniggering. "Bess has three seats in the back but I'm sure four would fit. All the birds worth asking in this village are like wafers anyway."
Sirius gave a derisive snort. "I told you, Remus and I aren't going to any twatty village dance. Are we, Moony?"
"Why not?" asked Peter, before Remus could even open his mouth.
Tossing a particularly jagged pebble into the depths of the creek, Sirius looked at him. "Because," he said, "it'll be fucking tacky and boring, all these birds done up in awful dresses with gunk plastered all over their faces."
"They won't look awful!" said James. "They'll look top. You might actually manage to get off with one for once." Their eyes locked across Remus, and James gave a sudden twist of laughter. "Or don't you want to? Mate, if you're not careful people are gonna think you're a right queer."
His laughter was cut short when Sirius shot him a sharp look. Remus tensed beside him.
"Why?" Sirius demanded. "Because I don't fancy spending my night in the shit village hall, getting drunk off cider lollies with some slag draped all over me?"
James blinked, alarmed. Quickly gathering himself, he narrowed his eyes. "Didn't say that, did I? But if you keep talking about girls that way, what are people supposed to think?"
"I don't really care what other people think."
"I wasn't going to say anything, but I suppose if you don't care..." James's confident front faltered slightly.
"What?" Sirius snapped.
"When I went in the garage this morning Fabian and Gid were saying how they think you're proper bent."
Suddenly seething, Sirius lunged forward. "I couldn't care less what those two say."
"A normal bloke would."
"Oh fuck off, James," Sirius spat. He wrenched himself up on to his feet and turned, ignoring Remus's call of his name as he pounded down the rocky slope and trudged off into the woods.
He was halfway through the gravelly copse when footsteps sounded behind him, and then Remus was stumbling down the slopes too, panting slightly as he stopped Sirius with a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't wander off," he pleaded breathlessly.
"He's been pissing me off all summer saying things like that!" Sirius snapped, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jacket and rooting for the stanley knife. He kicked at a nearby tree with the toe of his boot, crumbling bark, and then shoved the knife in the heart of the trunk. "Why can't he just give it a rest?"
"You know what he's like," said Remus, as though that were a proper answer.
"Do I? I'm pretty sure he used to be my best mate, not a total prick. He's been on my back all summer so far."
"You know that's not true. You're just angry."
"He won't stop yapping on about this dance."
"Why does it bother you so much?"
Sirius hesitated, dragging the knife down in jagged lines. "Because... I feel like he should know. About you and me, I mean." He gestured between their bodies. "It's weird keeping stuff from him."
"You can't tell him," Remus said quickly.
"I didn't say I was going to, did I?" said Sirius, a little more harshly then he'd intended. "Anyway... you don't think he already knows, do you?"
Remus visibly paled. "How could he?"
"Well I don't know. He keeps mentioning queer stuff. Has he said anything to you?"
Wordlessly, Remus shook his head.
"Well, alright then," said Sirius. Weirdly, he found himself feeling sort of disappointed. He suddenly pocketed the knife and slung an affectionate arm around Remus and began to walk them down the remainder of the sloping path, footsteps crunching. "Anyway, forget about that," he said, forcing a smile. "Let's plan our Friday."
They'd only taken a couple of steps before Remus went still, stopping beneath a large, twisted chestnut. "What about it?" he asked quietly.
"You remember. I told you on Wednesday."
"Wednesday was something of a hectic day for me. Forgive me if I don't remember the exact details of our conversation that morning."
"Sorry," said Sirius. He reached out to brush Remus's bare arm. "Just... my parents are away Friday, that business in Prague? I thought we could maybe stay at mine." He bit his lip, fixing Remus with a hopeful expression, but it became confused when the boy wouldn't even look at him.
Eventually, Remus sighed. "It's... I can't."
"Why not?"
"I just don't think it's a very good idea."
Disappointment plummeted to the pit of Sirius's stomach.
"We've been talking about it for ages though. It's the perfect opportunity. They'll be gone 'til morning, it'll just be you and me. We can - "
"I've sort of already asked someone to the dance."
The words came out in a jumbled rush, and Sirius had to ask him to say it again. When he did, Sirius went very still and blinked and swallowed.
"Who?" he finally asked.
"Mary. From 13A? I think she's in your Geometry class."
"Mary from 13A," Sirius echoed flatly, "you think she's in my Geometry class."
"Don't start."
"Hm?"
"I can tell you're going to."
"Me? As if." Sirius laughed. "How could I get angry? You're taking Mary from 13A to the village dance. You think she's in my Geometry class - "
"Sirius!"
"Well fuck, Remus, what the hell are you playing at?"
He grabbed Remus by the shoulders, not quite shaking him, but Remus shoved him back anyway.
"I'm sorry, alright?" he said. "But what did you want me to do? Take you?"
"I wanted you to not go at all!"
"Fucking hell, Sirius, it's just a village dance."
"It's not though, is it? It's our last summer, it's..." He struggled to find the words. "And none of you care. Why don't any of you care?"
"Don't let's get worked up," Remus pleaded. "We have a month left. It's just one night. My mother wanted - "
"Your mother," Sirius cut him off stonily. "Well if Mummy wanted you to take a nice girl to the dance then - "
"Oh, fuck you, Sirius!"
"Then take Mary to the dance. I hope you make it with Mary. I hope you fucking shag her!"
He turned and stomped off into the heart of the woods, and this time Remus didn't follow.
20th July, 1985
"So who turned you on to smoking?" James asks, sliding the French doors shut behind him.
Sirius exhales slowly, fresh smoke dancing in the early evening sun. "Gideon Prewett," he says behind a bitter smile. "I remember the exact moment I put one of these little death sticks between my lips."
"You're health-conscious these days?"
"I meant financially. I don't really have pockets deep enough to feed a habit but..." He turns to James and offers him a lazy grin. "Fuck me, they're good."
James smiles back. "I missed you, you know."
"I know."
"I was thinking..."
"Careful."
James bats him on the arm and moves to stand next to him properly. The two of them lean against the wall of the house, brotherly and calm.
"I said before I was thinking about that day we wallpapered the hall. About how you said Lily would never go to the dance with me."
Sirius stays quiet and finishes his cigarette.
"In truth, mate, I've been thinking about that day a lot recently. That's partly the reason I asked you to come here."
"Well, Mr. Potter," Sirius says gently, "I must say I'm intrigued."
James gives a low chuckle. "That day I said I'd prove you wrong, do you remember?" he says. "You probably don't remember. I don't know why I do. I said I'd marry Lily. I said we'd have a whole host of kids, and that I'd make you their godfather. Sirius, I'm... it's a boy."
Sirius turns to look at him, the smile tugging at his lips following a beat later. "That's amazing."
"I'm getting a little boy." A huge grin is suddenly on James's face, and for a second he looks seventeen again. "Please be his godfather."
"You don't want me, James."
"You're my best friend. Seven years hasn't changed that. Not for me, at least."
"Nor me."
"Then come back to Dittisham. You don't have a career, you don't have a... a family?"
"No."
"And London prices are sky-rocketing. You said yourself you don't have pockets deep enough." James sighs and turns back to the friendly garden laid out before them. "We're not city boys, Sirius."
"We said we'd leave. We said we'd get out."
"Why though?" James shakes his head. "It's so beautiful here. I don't think we ever realised how much. To us it was just fields and water." He scratches his nose with his thumbnail. "Trees to throw darts at."
"It's too enclosed. Everyone knows you. Everything you do you trail around in the mud after you forever. Every mistake you make."
"What did we ever do that was so wrong?" James smiles. "We were kids. If my son has a childhood half as good as ours here, I'll be happy. We were happy, I think. Those summers..."
"Yes," Sirius says wryly. "We were very wise, and invincible."
They watch the garden with peaceful ease. The thick scent of orange blossom from Lily's flower beds carries with the warm evening breeze, but above it dances a ribbon of something else; damp and earthy and wild. Sirius wonders if James's son will play football in this garden, or if Lily will fight for the flower beds. If he'll go swimming in the sea until fish with empty eye sockets nudge his toes, or if he'll climb the twisted chestnut in the woods and carve swear words in its trunk with a stanley knife. Will he play at the garage while James sells cars? Will he climb on the roof and stare at the moon like Remus?
"I think it's hard living here," he says after a while. "I think if you grow up here, you'll compare everything in the outside world to it forever. Dittisham is like... like a bubble. If you meet someone in it and then leave, you'll never get back in again. You'll never find them again. If you'd left..." He hesitates. "You'd have been looking for Lily forever."
"But you can come back," James says gently.
Sirius considers the emotions flitting across his best friend's face. "Remus and I..." he starts.
"I know," says James. He looks at him. "I knew."
"You never said."
"I was eighteen. Things are different now."
Sirius scoffs. "Do people really change that much in seven years?"
James shrugs, and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his finger. "Some of us," he says, "I suppose."
4th August, 1978
Lily Evans was coming towards Sirius in a pink pinafore-style dress, hair piled up on top of her head. Her face was painted like the Russian dolls his uncle kept on his mantel piece.
"Off to the dance then, Evans?" he called, stopping his bike in the street.
"Oh no, Black," she trilled back, "I tend to frequent the supemarket in this attire."
He laughed and rolled back a little as she approached. Then she was marching past him, and he turned his bike and cruised along the road beside her.
"Who are you going with?"
"Colin Lewis," she said, "the vicar's boy. You know that."
"You should be going with James."
She stopped in the street and turned to look at him. The expression on her glamorous face seemed to be caught halfway between frustration and amusement.
"And who are you going with?" she asked.
"I'm not going."
"Your friends are."
"And I hope they have a whale of a time." He started to back up his bike to turn around, already bored of badgering Lily Evans. She started to speak again.
"You need a haircut."
He looked at her, unimpressed. "You've been telling me that for seven years."
"Yes, well," she said, "it's looking particularly bedraggled tonight. Are you alright?"
"Why do you care?"
She looked surprised for a minute. Then she stood up straight again and folded her arms across her chest.
"Alright, fine. Forget I said anything. Anyway, I have to be off. I'm meeting Colin at the bus station."
"You should be going with James."
"And you should keep your nose out of other people's business!"
"He is my business," said Sirius, and Lily turned away and began to walk. "You'll marry him, I bet."
Lily turned around to face him again for one fleeting moment. "Potter's leaving at the end of summer," she said. "He's leaving Dittisham forever."
They shared a look, and they seemed to understand something substantial, and Sirius kicked the pedal on his bike and rode off in the opposite direction without another word.
He ended up outside the garage. It was still wide open at seven in the evening. The dance was to start at half past, and Sirius abandoned his bike outside and strode in in the hopes of finding James in there, picking up Bess for the night.
But it was empty. The radio was off, and there was no drilling, and Bess was gone, and James wasn't there, and Gideon and Fabian weren't anywhere around either. The lights were on though. A tyre and several tools lay scattered by a little Escort, and Sirius took them as signs of life as he wandered a little closer.
"Alright, Starshine?" came a teasing voice.
Sirius jumped and whirled round and found Gideon rubbing an oil-stained cloth over something small and metal.
"To what do I owe this pleasure?" he asked.
"I'm looking for James," Sirius told him.
Gideon shook his head and wandered over, setting the metal on the workbench with a thud and making a grab for another.
"James came by to pick up his car hours ago," he explained. "Haven't you seen him since?"
"I haven't seen him all day," Sirius answered, but that was nothing in comparison to Remus really. He hadn't seen Remus for four days.
"Well maybe you'll see him tomorrow," said Gideon in the tone of a patronizing parent. "I expect he'll be busy all of tonight. Why aren't you at the dance?"
"I don't have anyone to go with."
"Poor little marauder."
"Where's Fabian?"
"My brother is on a call-out in Kingswear. Just me tonight." He placed down the second piece of metal and gave Sirius a broad smile. "Between you and me, Black, it gets pretty lonely in here on my own."
He indicated the cold garage with open arms and Sirius gazed at the dark walls, the shadowy figures of the broken cars. He turned back to Gideon, who was still peering at him strangely. He'd ripped the sleeves off his t-shirt, and his arms were streaked with oil, and parts of his face too. He looked, for a moment, terribly rebellious, and Sirius was inclined to smile back.
"I'll keep you company if you like."
"Yeah? Well that's very kind of you, Sirius." Gideon moved around him, their bare arms brushing, and reached under the workbench to drag out a near-full bottle of dark Blanton's whiskey. He shook it enticingly. "Want some?"
Sirius, who'd never drunk whiskey in his life, nodded. Gideon slid himself on to the work bench, clearing tools aside carelessly, and indicated for Sirius to join him. Then he took a long pull from the bottle, wiped the neck with a clean patch of his t-shirt, and passed it to Sirius.
The whiskey burned his tongue and throat and teeth and almost made him retch, and Gideon laughed and took it from him and drank deeply, as though proving something. When Sirius tried again, it didn't get any better. He drank until he began to feel sick, and never once enjoyed it, but became acutely aware of his surroundings, and how close Gideon had inched, and five minutes after half the bottle had been drained, Gideon's hand had somehow found its way into the front of Sirius's jeans.
And then they were kissing, and Gideon tasted of Blanton's and smoke and oil, and it was disgusting but also viciously exciting and city and not country. And then Sirius was on his back, and the forked end of a spanner was digging into him, and his clothes were gone and Gideon was hurting him, but beneath the pain was so much pleasure he didn't say a word, and he didn't say a word afterwards when Gideon was fastening his jeans and pulling out a packet of Embassy filters.
A cigarette was placed between Sirius's lips. Gideon lit it for him without question. Then he went back to the Escort and picked up a tool and resumed work on the tyre.
Sirius watched him for a while. The cigarette burned away at his knee, unsmoked. Then he suddenly lifted it and took the first, long drag, and nearly coughed but didn't. After years of relishing the smell of fresh smoke, he was disappointed by the dull, earthy taste. He stubbed the cigarette out on the workbench, and thought about Remus and how his eyes were like the forest, and if Mary from 13A would notice, and if she looked pretty tonight.
20th July, 1985
They stay the night, at James's insistence. Since Sirius and Peter live in London and Remus in Pembrokeshire, none of them argue. Sirius is given James's old room, which will soon be the nursery, and he goes in expecting football-patterned wallpaper and orange carpet, and finds blank walls and more stripped floorboards.
The Rolling Stones and Farrah Fawcett posters are gone, and the record player and the framed West Ham United football kit. He wanders over to the window and looks hopefully for the triumphant carving of mischief managed in the sill, but finds plastic has concealed the marked wood, clean and white and clinical.
The bed's still here though. The carved wooden single bed, pushed up against the wall. He places his jacket down on the plain duvet and then sits beside it.
Outside the window the sky that was pink and orange and pretty accompanying their wine and cheese - yes, wine and cheese, James like wine and cheese now - is turning blue and streaky black. The summer birds, the nightjars and blackcaps, sing their final song of the evening. And then everything goes very, very still and quiet and if he closes his eyes it's almost like being back in his flat in London.
Then someone knocks on the door, and the illusion evaporates. He opens his eyes and tells them to come in.
Remus enters looking peaky and tired. He offers a sleepy smile, and Sirius automatically shifts on the bed to let him sit down. Remus does, curling up like a kid, back against the wall. The worn toes of his socks dip off the edge of the bed, and they're both too tall, too gangly and adult to curve around one another on a twin-sized bed now, and yet if they had a Hollies record it would almost feel like -
"You never wrote," Sirius says, without meaning to. "I wrote to you all the time."
"I wrote."
"For a year. At university. Then nothing."
Remus is quiet for a long time. "There was nothing I could write about."
"Nothing's happened to you in seven years?"
"Nothing I'm proud of," says Remus, turning to look into Sirius's face. "Nor that I wanted you to know. I assumed you were doing all of these wonderful things, you see."
Sirius clenches his jaw. He wants to feel indignant. He can muster nothing but tiredness from his longest day of summer.
"Assumed?" he echoes. "Didn't you read my letters?"
Remus hesitates, looking for all the world the eighteen-year-old, the fourteen-year-old, the twelve-year old Sirius remembers.
"Sometimes when you're going through a rough patch," he says slowly, "the last thing you want to be reminded of is the past. Especially when that past is..." He sighs. "But we're here now. Tell me now." A pause. "I'd like to know."
"What would you like to know?"
"When did you leave?"
"When you stopped writing. I thought, well, that's it. They're really not coming back." He gives a small, bitter laugh. "So I stopped waiting and went to London and got a job. I got on with things."
"I remember coming back for Christmas in second year. I went to your house, and the garage, and the sea, and the creek, and no one ever told me you'd left. I just had to... work it out."
"Brighton Pier," Sirius says softly, remembering. "What was university like?"
Remus glances at him and smiles. "Absolutely nothing like I expected it to be," he says, "but rather special, all the same."
"Did you meet anyone?"
"Yes. A girl. Dora." He pauses again. "I married her."
Sirius laughs when he hears this, and ignores the part of him that wants to be hurt.
"You got married?"
"As soon as we came out of university," Remus nods. "Lasted nine months."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be, it was my fault. I did it to keep my mother happy."
"That sounds familiar."
Remus gives him a wry smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. "You still remember, eh?"
"I remember everything, Remus." He turns and glances out at the sky again, and by now it's black, and the birds are silent, and all he can hear is the sea. "I remember that summer so vividly. It was so... strange. So much went on. It was like we'd been wasting the last seven years, and suddenly everything was thrown together like we were running out of time and we had to get it all done, and everything happened and..." He pauses for a long time. "And then the three of you were gone, and it was like none of it ever did."
"We just grew up."
"Yeah," Sirius smiles, "that was it."
"And things were expected of us. University and jobs."
"And marriage."
"And marriage." Remus shrugs, weary and suddenly so very old. "I'm not like you, Sirius. You were always the one who did things differently."
"And you always did as you were told."
"Yes, well."
They slip back into silence, but Sirius soon breaks through it with a loud laugh.
"Why aren't we saying it?" he asks, an exhausted grin on his face.
"Saying what?"
"I was in love with you that summer."
Remus leans across and kisses him on the forehead.
At midnight, Sirius pads downstairs into the still house and slips out of the back door. His feet crunch on the grass grown cool, and he's reminded of nights spent sneaking back in.
He walks slowly out of Forest End, which is very quiet and gloomy and old, pulls his jacket tighter around him as he passes the sleeping sea. He makes it all the way to Peter's house, passes his garden by, and immerses himself in woodland.
It's ridiculous, coming here without a torch. He's suddenly scared for a moment, by the darkness and by his own stupidity. But the forest is not particularly thick, and parts of the floor are still lit by moonlight, and besides, he knows these woods like the back of his hand, from the back of his heart.
He makes it all the way to the creek. A starving rope still swings in the nightly summer breeze, and he gazes down at the angry rocks and the moss and the water and everything that to him, as a child, meant death. He sits on the edge and allows his feet to dangle over into nothingness, and allows himself to feel giddy and dangerous and free.
Feeling in his pocket, he pulls out the blunt red stanley knife. It sits heavy in his palm like a dead thing, useless and old. On a whim, he tosses it into the creek.
It does not fly, it falls, and he watches as the red drop is swallowed whole by the waters. Then he lies back, head on the childless ground, and stares up at the stars through the breaks in the trees, and at the moon, and hears the sea, and thinks that it all means something, and for a moment he is very wise and invincible again.
12th July, 1971
"Princes of these woods," James declared, but it was Moony who held out a hand to help Sirius to his feet.
He grinned at them all, at the three friends, musketeers, the lost boys, the merry men.
"Until we're kings," he declared. He took off into the woods, and his brothers followed.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.