A/N: I come to all of you sheepish and apologetic. I cannot believe I went this long without updating. This semester has been complete and utter chaos, and believe me, I've been missing the boys and their story just as much as you. If you've stuck around for this story and you've been waiting patiently, you have my eternal gratitude.
Recap: In chapter 7, Sirius started his new job as a professor at NYU Law where he had some interesting encounters with his new students (Fairchild in particular). He and Remus are doing great and they're happy as clams. In this chapter, we get a visit from a colleague of Sirius's at NYU, and Remus has his own interesting encounter.
I've got several chapters in the works for this story, so the next update will not be far off, I promise! Please let me know that there are still people alive out there who are enjoying the story and there will be some wonderful rewards in it for all of you (in the form of some sexy scenes between Remus and Sirius...).
My apologies again, and thank you for not giving up on me! Enjoy!
Chapter 8: A Special Thank You
Remus sat hunched over the desk that used to be his father's in the office that use to be his father's inside the office building of the business that his father built. He was exhausted and probably the only person left in the building. It was well past business hours, but Remus still felt behind on all the work he had to do. The sky was almost completely dark, and his stomach was rumbling at him angrily, but he told himself it would just be a few more minutes and then he could wrap up and go home.
It had been several weeks since Remus had started back at LLC, and his father had figured that the best way for Remus to get used to running the business was just to jump right in. While he had been doing just normal lawn care duties over the years, Remus had also served as office manager. So, he was aware of most of the trappings of the business—at least, he'd thought he was until he sat down behind his father's old desk and immediately felt like the most inadequate man on Earth.
John Lupin was always available to help Remus—whether he was around the office or a phone call away—but Remus was determined to do things on his own unless he desperately needed his father's help. For the most part, John was beginning to settle into retirement while Remus spent long hours every day at LLC trying to do what his father had made seem so effortless.
Remus leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands down his face before he reclined a bit further and put his arm over his eyes. He yawned widely and loudly as he stretched before a voice interrupted him mid-stretch.
"I think you're working too hard."
Remus jumped and let his chair fall forward with a small thud when he looked up and saw his new coworker—ahem, employee—standing in his doorway.
"Ephraim! What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here so late."
Ephraim let out a deep, rumbling chuckle. "I could say the same to you," he said as Remus gestured for him to take the seat across from his desk. "Mr. L never stayed here this late," Ephraim said as he sat.
Remus smiled. "Yeah, my mom was always really adamant that he be home in time for dinner. In the early years of the business my father always stayed until after I had gone to bed, but by the time the business became stable, mom put her foot down."
Ephraim laughed deeply again. Remus was mildly amazed by the sound.
"What are you doing here so late?" Remus asked again.
"Oh, the job I was on ran a bit late… needy housewife," Ephraim said.
"I know all about those," Remus said with a laugh.
"I'm sure," Ephraim said, grinning. "But Mr. L always liked us to come back to home base before we left for the day. But…" Ephraim looked directly at Remus. Remus was slightly taken aback by the brown color of his eyes. For a man so dark, his eyes were shockingly light—like the color of a caramel candy. "You're the new Mr. L now."
Remus shook his head. "No, I'm just Remus. Trust me. Just call me Remus."
Ephraim chuckled again. "Remus…" he said slowly, as if he was testing it out.
"How long have you been working here?" Remus asked him after a brief pause. He thought he should get to know the man that his father was so adamant on Remus taking under his wing. "He's a hard worker, Remus. A good worker," his father had said over and over. "Guide him… The way I guided you."
"About… eight months."
"You like it?"
"Oh it's wonderful. I love physical work, and I love being outside, and your father is—or was—a great boss."
"Yeah, well, he seems to think the world of you."
Ephraim shook his head and looked at his hands. "I think he overestimates me."
Remus scoffed good-naturedly. "Trust me, John Lupin is not a man to overestimate. Quite the opposite."
Ephraim looked up at Remus. "Well, then you must be a god in human form on Earth," he said. "If your father was underestimating you, I can't even imagine what you must really be like."
A confused smile graced Remus's face. "What do you mean? He talks well of me?"
Ephraim gaped. "Are you kidding? The man adores you. All he ever talks about his how great you are and how much he loves you and your husband and your daughter. He goes on and on about how proud he is of you and how you're basically the best thing ever."
Remus was beyond confused. He'd never gotten that kind of praise from his father. Remus knew his father loved him, but praising and adoring John Lupin was not. "I can't even imagine," Remus said.
"Trust me, I'm not lying." Ephraim then leaned forward so his arms were on the desk. His caramel eyes pierced Remus's. "So how does your husband feel about you working such long hours?"
Remus didn't particularly like the inflection that Ephraim put on the word "husband," but he simply frowned slightly and answered anyway. "He's glad. I stayed home a lot when our daughter was born, so he's happy to see me out and doing what I love again."
Ephraim nodded and leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He then crossed one leg over the other. "So, did you two do surrogacy or what?"
"We adopted," Remus said. "She was several months old when she came to us, but she was a preemie, so she was still tiny like a newborn."
"A preemie?" Ephraim said, raising an eyebrow. "That must have been hard."
"It was," Remus said simply. He didn't really feel like going into detail about the first few months of Teddy being home with them. He hated remembering her so tiny and helpless.
"But she's strong and healthy now?"
"Like you wouldn't believe," Remus said with a smile. "She has her hands in everything, she's constantly exploring, and she runs around the house as fast as her little legs will carry her."
"You love her a lot," Ephraim said with a tilt of his head. Remus looked up at him and saw that the man was studying him intently.
"More than anything."
"More than your husband?" Ephraim said with a grin.
Remus chuckled. "It's a different kind of love." Ephraim nodded with a smile and after a pause, Remus spoke again. "So what about you? Do you have a family or anyone special in your life?"
Ephraim laughed. "God, no. I'm only twenty-four. I don't intend on having a family or settling down with 'someone special' for several more years."
Remus shrugged his shoulders. "You never know when that someone might come along."
Ephraim laughed and shook his head. "I suppose you're right, but for now I'm content with working a lot and having as much fun as I can. I'm sure you felt the same way, what, five years ago?"
"Not really," Remus said with a shrug. "I was determined to work hard to impress my father, but I was always a long-term relationship kind of guy."
"Hmm…" Ephraim said as his eyes narrowed a bit. "Yeah, you seem the type."
Remus just chuckled and stood up. "I'm not sure what that means." Ephraim stood up as well as Remus gathered up a few things. "I should get home. I could do for a back rub from my husband and some kisses from my daughter."
"Sounds nice," Ephraim said as he stood up and stretched. Remus heard a few bones cracking, and he couldn't help but glance over at the muscles that bulged slightly in Ephraim's arms as he stretched them over his head.
Remus walked to the door and held it open for Ephraim to walk out. Ephraim walked to the door but stopped when he was directly in front of Remus. "You're doing a really great job," he said quietly in his deep, rasping voice. "You don't have to work so hard."
"You think so?" Remus said. He couldn't help the relief that flooded through him at Ephraim's words. The relief almost made the fact that Ephraim was so close that his breath was ghosting over Remus's face go unnoticed. Almost.
"Of course," Ephraim said with a grin. "You already worked here for years, so the workers all already know, love, and respect you. You know what you're doing, and it's been three weeks and you still haven't managed to burn the place to the ground." Remus laughed and Ephraim smiled wider. "That's a feat."
"Thanks," Remus said. "Besides that last part, I really needed to hear that."
Ephraim put a hand on Remus's shoulder, and Remus looked at it briefly before he turned back to the man. "Anytime," Ephraim said. "Anytime."
"Hi, Gretchen," Sirius said as he walked into the waiting area with his briefcase in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
"Good morning, Professor Black," she said as he set the coffee on her desk. "For me?" He nodded. "You're so sweet."
"I try," he said, returning her smile.
She took a sip of the coffee and sighed with a smile before looking back up at him. "You have a visitor. I told him he could wait in your office."
"Okay great, thanks."
Sirius walked into his office and frowned a bit when he saw the back of the head of an older man—clearly not one of his students.
"Can I help you?" Sirius said as he walked around his desk to face the man. When the man looked up at him, Sirius's breath caught in his throat.
"Professor," Sirius said in a slightly shaky voice, extending his hand.
"Mr. Black," the man said as he stood up to take Sirius's hand. Then, "My apologies, Professor Black," he said with a smile. "I've been meaning to come and see you since you started, but beginning of the year, you know. It's busy. I've got a lot of students coming into my office." He paused. "But I'm sure you do as well. You've been the talk of the school since you got here."
"Have I?" Sirius chuckled a bit nervously and gestured for the aging professor to take a seat. It didn't matter how many years had passed, the man was still the most intimidating man he'd ever known. "Then I guess I'm like you. I remember my first year when you were all anyone could talk about."
He laughed. "Is that so?"
Sirius nodded and then sighed. "It's great to see you, Professor Slughorn," he said as he settled into his own chair.
"It's great to see you, Mr. Black," Slughorn said with a smile. "Professor Black," he corrected again and shrugged. "Old habits, you know."
"You can just call me Sirius," Sirius said.
"Well, then you can call me Horace."
Sirius raised his eyebrows. "That might take some getting used to."
Slughorn chuckled. "Anyway, Sirius, I admit, I came here for more than just a welcome."
"Oh?"
Slughorn paused. "Can I tell you a story?"
"Of course."
Slughorn smiled slightly. "About ten years ago my father got really sick. He was an old man, anyway, but he had always been healthy and the doctors would always tell him that he had many many good years ahead of him.
"My father had always taken care of his health. His was incredibly fit for an 80-year-old man. He always got regular check ups, and he always made sure to exercise and eat well. He never smoked, rarely ever drank, and so when the doctor told him he had lung cancer, we were all pretty shocked… But he had grown up in an era where chemicals were sprayed over whole cities, and asbestos lined the walls of most houses. He'd tried so hard to be healthy, but in the end, it didn't even matter.
"He was only in the first stage, so there was a good chance that he could be treated with surgery and radiation and chemotherapy. The doctor said the surgery and the chemo would cut some years off his life, but that it would give him probably at least three to five more good years. We decided to take what we could get."
Slughorn sighed. "When we went to get him the surgery and start the treatment, however, his insurance company told him that the treatment wouldn't be covered because he was deemed a 'high-risk client' and his cancer was considered a pre-existing condition. They nearly tripled his premium and when my father tried to challenge it, they dropped him for missing payments. After my father had been a healthy man, paying dutifully for health insurance for fifty years, they dropped him just like that.
"We tried to fight it, but the cancer was progressing rapidly. He applied for Medicare, but it's a process, and the doctor told us that if we didn't begin the treatment soon, the cancer would progress beyond treatability." Slughorn's voice waivered a bit. "You know my father hadn't applied for Medicare originally because he believed in private health insurance. He believed in that system. As soon as he'd turned 65, I had told him to get it, but he didn't listen. He was always a free marketeer and he thought Medicare was just the first step to socialism in this country." Slughorn chuckled. "The old fool."
"By the time the Medicare benefits would come through, my father was severely sick. The cancer had progressed to stage three and the mass on his lung had expanded so much that the doctor said even if they tried to remove it, it likely wouldn't be successful. Even with chemo and radiation, he would probably only get six more months, and they would have been a painful and torturous six months."
Slughorn paused a moment. "My mother had died about five years prior, so it was just me and my sister there with him. We were scared, the two of us, but my father told us not to be. He told us he'd lived a long, beautiful life with a wonderful woman, and they had raised two wonderful children together that he couldn't be more proud of. He told us that every life came to an end but that didn't mean that those around them should stop living." He paused again. "He decided not to get the treatment, but to just die peacefully. 'Don't worry about me' he told us as his frail little body was beginning to deteriorate to nothing. 'I'm going to be with your mother,' he said."
Sirius felt tears sting his eyes and Slughorn began to wrap up his story. "It was a Wednesday night when he died. I had just come from teaching a class."
Slughorn looked up at Sirius, and Sirius's breath caught momentarily. "Do you know why I tell you this story, Sirius?" Sirius thought he knew, but he let Slughorn keep talking. "My father got his insurance from the Riddle Corporation." There was a long pause as Slughorn let that sink in. "After watching my healthy father become a weak old man who couldn't feed or bathe himself; after watching him die slowly over the span of a few months; after watching a man who could have had ten more good years become a shell of his former self because he couldn't get treatment, I vowed that if it was the last thing I did, I would see that the Riddle Corporation paid for what they did.
"I began building up a case. When I wasn't working for my classes, I did research, spoke with colleagues who specialized in this kind of thing. I wanted to create a class action lawsuit so I could help all the families of the people that had to go through the same kind of thing. It took me a few years, and right when I thought I had enough, I saw your face and your father's face on the news.
"You know, Sirius, I had always been proud of the work you'd done as my student, but when I saw that your firm was defending Riddle, in that moment… I hated you. It made me sick." Sirius didn't speak. He didn't think he could even if he wanted to. "But then, just a few months had passed, and you were defending your brother against Riddle. After you'd gotten him off, it appeared that you were determined to tear Riddle all the way down. You took arms up against your father's lawsuit with Riddle. And you won."
Slughorn studied Sirius for several moments. "The point of this story is this: you are an extremely accomplished attorney, Sirius. You've done things in your short legal career that it takes most attorneys decades to do, if they even can. You have your own firm, you've won major legal battles, and you have a professorship at a prestigious law school. But, Sirius… I want you to know that no matter what you accomplish in your career in further years, nothing will compare to the lives you saved and the people you helped when you saw to the fall of the Riddle Corporation. You…" His voice broke. He nodded for several seconds before he spoke with a shaky voice. "Nothing else matters—awards you might get, money you might win—nothing matters because you saved millions of lives."
"Professor—" Sirius finally tried to speak, but Slughorn stood up abruptly and swiped a hand across his eyes quickly.
"I just wanted to thank you in person, Sirius," he said, reaching out a hand. When Sirius grasped it, Slughorn looked at him for a few long seconds. "Thank you, Sirius."
Sirius simply nodded.
When Slughorn turned to leave, Sirius called out to him.
"Professor!"
Slughorn turned back with a small smile. "Yes, Sirius?"
"What… What was your father's name?"
Slughorn smiled, and Sirius thought he saw tears well in the old man's eyes as he breathed in deeply. "His name was Emeril. Emeril Francis Slughorn."
Remus pulled up to his house late that evening and was happy to see Sirius's car already on the street. Dora's bike was still secured against the tree in their front yard as well. He parked behind Sirius's car, and half-walked, half-jogged up to the house. All he wanted to do was see Teddy and then crawl into bed and cuddle with Sirius. He smiled to himself at the thought as he put his key in the front door and went inside.
"Hello?" he called out when he got inside.
"Teddy and I are in here," Dora answered from the family room.
"Daddy!" Teddy yelled as she came barreling around the corner and threw herself around Remus's legs.
Remus scooped the toddler in his arms and planted a wet kiss on her cheek. She was in her pajamas and her thick, black hair was wet from her bath.
"What did you do today?" Remus asked Teddy.
"Well, I went to preschool, and Tonks picked me up and we walked home and we played outside a little and then we read some books and now we're playing makeover."
Remus looked up as Dora turned around and small smile. Remus laughed at the "make up" all over her face. It looked far more like Teddy had tried to color with markers on Dora's face, but Remus wouldn't say that out loud. "You look beautiful, Dora," he said with a smile.
Even under the make up, Remus could see her blush. "It's Tonks," she said as she turned away from him.
"I told her she looked so pretty, Daddy, but she didn't believe me," Teddy told him with a broad smile. Obviously she'd taken Remus's compliment as a compliment to her abilities rather than to Dora's actual looks.
"Is Daddy home?" Remus asked Teddy.
Teddy nodded as she waddled back over to Dora. "He's in his office."
"He ordered pizza," Dora said. "I left some warming in the oven for you."
"Thanks, Tonks," Remus said. He gave her a grin before he walked past, but he stopped in the doorway. "You're doing a great job, by the way," he said. "You have no idea how much of a help you are to Sirius and me. And Teddy loves you. We all do."
Tonks blushed again. "Thanks," she said with a shy smile, and Remus returned the smile before he went to find Sirius. Pizza could wait.
When he got to Sirius's office, he stood in the doorway for a moment, watching Sirius work. God, Remus loved him. Just watching him work made Remus's heart race. Imagining that his man was all his for the rest of their lives… It always made Remus unimaginably happy.
"Working hard or hardly working?" Remus asked from the doorway.
"Remus," Sirius breathed when he looked up quickly, a bit startled at the sound of the other man's voice. "I'm so happy you're home," he said as he got up to greet Remus at the door. Remus met him halfway, however, and they embraced in the middle of the room. Remus inhaled Sirius's familiar sent as he buried his face into the man's neck. Remus then planted a kiss on Sirius's neck, causing Sirius to slide his hands up to cup Remus's face so he could kiss him.
"I missed you today," Remus said when he and Sirius broke apart.
"Back at you," Sirius said as his hands slid down and around Remus's waist and Remus's came up around Sirius's neck. "I had a thought today," Sirius said.
"And what was that?" Remus asked.
"We should get away this weekend."
"Oh?"
"Yeah," Sirius said before leaning in a kissing Remus on the neck. "We've both been working hard these last few weeks, and this will probably be one of the last warm weekends of fall." Sirius kissed him on the other side of his neck.
"Mm…"
"We'll relax, watch the stars…" Sirius said, kissing Remus on the neck between words. He ran his nose along Remus's neck where his jaw began. "…make love," he said before nibbling Remus's earlobe.
"Enough," Remus said, grabbing Sirius's face in between his hands. "You convinced me," he said before pulling Sirius's face to him and kissing him hard. Both men got lost in the kisses, but Remus had to stop things before they got too carried away with Tonks and Teddy in the other room. Instead, Remus made it up to Sirius later that night and promised he would keep making it up to him this weekend. A promise he was sure to keep.
Preview for next chapter:
Remus and Sirius go away for the weekend. The truth comes out.
