At the end, after more than a year, and these are the people I thank – my Kyo Baggins, who is more beautiful than she gives herself credit for; my Bacteria, who always makes everything easier, even if I don't always tell her.
And my readers, especially those who take the time to tell me what they think – them I cannot thank enough, for giving me the reason to finish when some days it is just too easy to quit. Thank you.
*
I'll fill your every breath with meaning,
And find a place that we both can hide.
*
0. "Hey, how do you think things would have worked out if we had chosen to remain ghosts?"
So he had known I haven't really been reading. I pretend to be occupied for a few seconds more, staring down at the open Milton in my lap with a frown, thumbing the pages with the air of careless distractedness. He watches me patiently - I do not need to look up to know that his grey eyes are now sharp with the gentle mockery that catches all the thin light in the room, possessive and beautiful and selfish, warming his cool perse into a half-lidded smolder, that reaches into my gut and knocks me on my back, breathless as he would have liked. I take a small breath to prepare myself, releasing it such that it could pass as a sigh of exasperation, and look up into his smirking face. His left hand is tangled in his hair, the pale bone just visible in that nest of ink black feathers, and I think, not fair, distracted immediately and wanting to reach forward to replace his fingers with mine.
"Do you really think I wouldn't notice you watching me?"
I raise an eyebrow at his words, but do not deign to address his cocky grin, and slowly push my Milton shut. He takes my silence as a challenge and an invitation both, as I had hoped he would, and reaches to pull me towards him, such that I fall forwards, sprawling messily on my stomach and tucked into the small crook of his arm, backed against the upholstery of the sofa and the warmth of his body. He smiles at me again, no more tender than before, his grin decidedly predatory now. I roll my eyes at him, but wrap one arm around his neck, tugging him down so that I could meet his lips, cold in this silly weather that James and him had decided to play God and create.
"Did you see anything you like?" he whispers as soon as we draw apart, and I answer his question by kissing him again, a little hungrier than before, and he laughs deep in his throat, a pleasant hum that tells me he is pleased with my reply.
I time the space in between the reason of my thoughts and the breathlessness of falling into him, and pull away just when I feel my ground slip from beneath my feet, when a single star explodes in the line of my vision. He isn't smirking anymore, his cheeks flushed with the rose bloom of the thoroughly kissed, and I still my breaths, willing him to even his exhalations to keep time with mine. I lie, unmoving in his arms, the torn skeleton of our weary couch tickling the small of my back, and I am content, but thirsting. My eyes rake his face greedily - his cheeks are full again in Death as in our youth, his storm grey eyes like pools of rain water, and I imagine I can scent the wet and the hope of the squall in the shadows of his gaze, that which flickers like lightning across my own features.
He raises a hand to my cheek, his fingers splayed and searching, the hesitation in their fluttering the product of Azkaban, of losses we have only begun to learn to leave behind, now in the easiness of Death. I raise my eyes and hold his, willing him to know I see him, not clearer now that he is gloriously beautiful again, but always, even when he was the broken man who is still present behind his restored charm and laughter.
I turn my cheek deeper into his palm, until my lips graze his thumb, and I close my eyes, feeling the ghosts of his past fade away as his trembling fingers finally calm. I kiss the small hollow of his wrist, his pulse soothing against my neck, and he sighs, a hoarse murmur, as I seek his tattoo, my tattoo, with a blind clarity. I breathe lightly across and along the contours of the crescent moon, and he hisses into my ear, his back arching in the pleasure that my touch offers.
"It never would have worked," I reply presently, my eyes still closed as I move deeper into his embrace, this small space between the heat of his body and the threadbare softness of the couch like a lazy sunspot.
His hand has now moved into my hair, combing the strands absently through his fingers, lingering on the longer strands along my nape. I had come into Death with my hair untrimmed, longer than I usually keep it, but he had liked it, and it had stayed since.
"Hmm?" he asks, a small, distracted sound, as he pulls me even closer to him.
"You would never have chosen to remain behind as a ghost. You are much too brave."
My tone is decided, and my words ring with a knowing confidence, and he laughs throatily at my faith, the timbre of his humor vibrating through his lean body. I decide I like the sensation of his laughter, like how I am beginning to realize one can like the smell of sable eyes, and fold myself tightly around the contours of his limbs. He does not complain - of course he doesn't – but takes the chance to run a hand up my sweater, his lightly calloused fingers raising anticipatory goosebumps as they dance along my bare flesh.
I squirm, trying to collect my thoughts before he can scatter them in a quick blaze of scarlet need. He laughs again, and the tremor of his body causes mine to react instinctively, and I groan, biting down on my lip as pleasure burns through my blood. I murmur what I had meant to say, breathlessly, sentences that twist themselves messily, that stumble into being, hindered by my distractions.
"You are too recklessly brave to be afraid of what comes next, and too proud to want to remain in a world that no longer wants you, not for anyone or anything. And because you wouldn't, I wouldn't too, because then we cannot be together. And that will break me, to have to wander the span of forever without you, when I know I am already broken."
A brief lull, and I listen to the echo of my honesty as it fades, whispering and sighing, into silence, as though alarmed by my undisguised and unexpected candor. But I don't speak the words heavy on my tongue, the words that push forward to spill. I don't tell him I know he would never have stayed for me, because even if he loves me, he will be true to himself first. I don't tell him I have spent nights fighting sleep, watching his namesake ignite in the summer skies, missing him enough to want him with me, and to be tearfully angry at the absence of ghosts, at the unwanted wisdom of love.
He pulls away from me, a small distance, so that he can study my expression, his eyes now cut to ribbons of indigo, narrow with thought, and with hurt. For a few fleeting seconds, I wonder if he has heard my unspoken words, as he have had on numerous occasions in all our years together. But he reads the muted anxiety in my eyes, and he swallows, allowing me to keep my secrets for now, even if it seethes like a restless itch in the silence between us.
"Do you remember fourth year in the library?"
He does not reply immediately, his brow still furrowed with his struggle to not pursue my earlier confession, and I wait patiently, my left arm now numb where it is tucked in between our bodies.
"You mean when I came out to you and everyone else within hearing distance of our table?"
He reaches to tug my arm gently free as he speaks, holding it straight against my hip as small pin pricks stab through it. I smile, both at the unapologetic indifference still evident in his tone when he discusses that day, and at his uncanny anticipation of my needs, our movements fluid and languid like a well-practiced dance.
"You didn't come out – you did that in our third year, and crudely too," I remind him, wincing a little as my arm re- familiarizes itself with blood circulation.
He snorts, a haughty sound of nonchalance, and then shrugs.
"Prongs deserved it. He had been bugging the hell out of me the entire week that year – 'Sirius, is there something you would like to tell me?', 'Sirius, you know you are my brother and I'll still love you like the git you are irregardless of anything, right?'".
He waves his hand in the air for dramatic air quotes as he mimics James' tone of concern, making it sound suspiciously more constipated than I remember, but I laugh anyway, mostly at the memory of his belligerent chagrin even back then.
"Where's Prongs now, anyway?"
"Terrorizing Dumbledore with more questions of here, why, life-after-death etc etc," he rolls his eyes at the ceiling, unaware of just how aristocratically imperious he looks when he is expressing his anxiety for James' sanity.
"Last I saw, Dumbledore was sneaking into some broom shed. Probably hiding from Prongs. Or arranging a rendezvous with Grindelwald.
"
I groan, and kick him feebly in the shin for that unwanted image of our ex-Professor, and my ex-employer. He turns and grins at me, all toothy and smug, as though very pleased with his own ability to mentally scar me for afterlife.
"Anyway, I wasn't referring to your coming out."
"You mean my declaration of undying love for you, then?"
His smile widens even further, and I cannot help but compare it to the expression he had worn that afternoon in the library. The four of us, together with half the school, had been studying in the library that day – it was early spring, and the exams had been close enough on our heels that even the most apathetic of students had felt its bite. He had been restive that entire afternoon, leaning back as far as the legs of his chair could support him, and then swinging forward to push himself off against the table again. He had been staring at me too, a dark, furious glower, and I had been afraid to meet his eyes.
The both of us had spent the fourth year alternating between petty arguments and rabid civility, and I had been tired, and heart weary, by the end of a howling winter. James was the only one who had paid him any mind that afternoon – like Sirius, James thought himself above studying, and was thus the only member of our quartet who could afford the distraction of attempting to decode Sirius' mulish mood. And truth be told, Peter and I both knew that James was the only one foolhardy enough to meet Sirius in one of his tempers, and the only one who could walk away relatively unscathed.
I had read the same page of my Potions textbook about twenty-five times that day – twenty-five times and not had a single word register. The silence at our table had been unbearable, even if quiet is a familiar blanket in the library, quilted and stitched zealously by Madam Pince. James had been content, or too wise, to watch Sirius without speaking that afternoon, and I had ached for the both of them to begin throwing half-hearted insults at each other, had ached for anything at all that would turn Sirius' pale grey eyes from me.
And then there had been a final slap as Sirius' chair slammed back against the table, and a whine as he dragged the chair away and stood up. When I had finally looked up, he was already leaning across the table towards me, the slate of his eyes impossibly translucent in the dim.
"You should probably know – I am in love with you, have been since the summer of our damned second year."
He had given me no time to react – a broken second in which he stared into my eyes, defiant and wild and terrified, and then he was gone, storming through the library and out the doors. There was a collective pause as almost everyone held their breaths, and then all hell broke loose as the Hogwarts populace debated the intentions of the Great and Dashing Sirius Black towards one Remus Lupin.
"I am ardently in love with you, my Moony, the moon to my star, the Dorian to my Henry Wotton."
I am stirred from my reverie by his obnoxious, and very loud, declarations, and blink to see him beaming at me, his lips half-curled in knowing mischief.
"That's hardly fair - you always get to be the one who corrupts."
He laughs, but his smoky eyes darken into a shade more somber, and he laces his fingers through mine again. We fall into silence together, contemplative but not discontent, and I listen to his racing pulse with the flat of my thumb, directly over the inked symbol for silver, the inked symbol of his intentions towards me.
"I stayed, after the veil, in Grimmauld Place. You could not see me though."
I startle, but his eyes are solemn, and they tell me to wait.
"I think I am glad, now, that you could not. Because I think I was trying to lure you from life, and I would have succeeded."
He knows me well.
There is guilt in the tense line of his jaw, apology in the controlled quiver of his lips. I sigh, and think of all the endings that the war has brought into our lives – an end to innocence that is essence-deep, that can only be lost with hands bloodied with blood not ours; an end to promises of forever, because one is either no longer here to honor it, or to receive it; an end to bravado and imperfect fearlessness. Sirius, who had never learnt to ask permission for the things he wants, waits now for an invitation. I remember him on my porch four years ago, a bundle of black fur and wet nose, who had remained, for nights and nights, just beyond the threshold of my door, even though it had been a cruelly sweltering summer. I had struggled to understand what he would ask of me, because he would not speak, and he refused his human form. Then one night, I understood, and had sat with him on that hardwood floor, and murmured my forgiveness just as the moon began to wane.
In another world without Voldermort and without the deaths we do not look for, he might not have asked my permission to steal me from the tattered facsimile of my life. He would not be looking at me now with those hurting eyes, pale pearl grey rimmed with an almost black ring of violet indigo, like the irises of wolves, but of a color that is wrong.
I'd freeze us both in time
And find a brand new way of seeing –
Your eyes forever glued to mine.
But even in another world, I would still have given him my Yes, and would still have followed him into the dark.
I look at him steadily now, and do not look away until the hues in his stare melt into one, blending into the shallow pools of still water that will be lighted by the amber of my golden eyes. I tuck my head in the hollow of his throat, and I feel him swallow, his grip on my hand tightening.
I declare, in a whisper, and not as dramatically as he had so many years ago, that I love him.
For all its endings, the war has given us numerous firsts as well – the first of autonomy as we each struggle with the person that we are, and the person we have become in absence.
The first reunions, under the tree of our childhood, and then against the flashing dusk of life at its end.
The first of knowing we don't ever need to start over, merely continue on the page we've bookmarked with fragments of all our beginnings.
Because at the ending always comes another beginning, and it is no longer so difficult to embrace this plummet to zero, when I know we can always count forward again, and together, always, this time.
*
Fin
