NOTE: I attempted to adjust my medication, which ended up basically destroying my ability to write for the past few weeks. I breezed through my bank of chapters, and then ended up being bullied by a fandom asshole on Discord. The combo annihilated my ability to write, but I'm back! I also feel like this chapter is kind of like sticking a fork into an electrical outlet, haha. Enjoy! I don't know how soon I'll be able to be back to my old self, so my updating won't be back to its regular insanity for a little while. Thanks for your patience, and remember folks, you might not be able to see the face of the people you interact with online, but they're real people. Don't be tempted to destroy your own good name with behavior you'd never engage in with your friends and family. You only end up looking bad, and the people you hurt then get to possess the moral high ground.

It's a really fucking nice view, guys.


The January full moon fell on Saturday. The night before, Elodie had gone to her basement room to sleep for the first time since her confrontation with Barty Crouch Jr., but her warming charm did nothing to ease the chill in the air. She'd felt lonely and disconnected, and when she'd come back into Sirius's room and thrown herself on the bed instead of gathering up her things, Sirius hadn't even acted smug about it for once.

He was also fond of morning sex.

After her shower, Elodie went looking for her big Potions book, looking for the Gâteaufidél recipe so she could write down the ingredients she would need to make another batch.

"You making those again?" Sirius said from over her shoulder.

Elodie dropped the book in surprise.

From across the room in his chair, Remus cast a quick wandless charm that caught the book before it landed on her foot.

"Shit, thanks Remus," Elodie told him, leaning over to rescue the book from the hovering stasis he'd cast on it.

"Anytime. I actually have a habit of casting that when I see objects falling rapidly, but don't test me," he said. "In fact, you're lucky I was here, because I need to go and type up some of the next article now." He stood up and went into the kitchen with his presumably empty tea cup.

"Thanks again," she called out after him. "That has to have been the world's fastest shower, Mr. Black," she said pointedly to Sirius. His hair was still wet, and he was toweling it dry; his t-shirt stuck to him in places, showing that he hadn't done a thorough job drying off before dressing, either.

"I just wasn't feeling it today. Showers are hard to get used to after so long without them," he said.

Elodie looked over at him. "Oh, wow, I never thought of that." She finished writing down her ingredients and set the book back on its low shelf. Sirius was in her way when she went to head for her seat on the couch.

"More Gâteaufidél?" he asked her again.

"You don't have to look smug about tricking me into needing to answer you. I dropped the book because you surprised me, not to avoid the answer," she said frustratedly, pushing past him. She walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, realized that wasn't what she was initially planning to do, and then noticed they were low on butter. She marked it down, then looked curiously at the last three entries on her list.

Caster sugar

Butter

Tell Sirius the truth

"Honestly, Sirius. Yes! I'm making another batch. On request." Elodie marched out of the kitchen saying this, her hands on her hips.

"I thought it was cute," he said, looking a bit 'deer in the headlights' at her reaction. She dropped her arms to her sides and came over to kiss him gently.

"It's cute, but now I need to rewrite my list, because I don't want anyone at the store to see your name on it. And you're too important to me to risk just erasing it with magic, in case somehow it comes back," she explained, sitting down with a new piece of parchment and her pen.

"Oh," Sirius said in a really surprised voice. She glanced over at him and he looked stunned. "I didn't think of that. Thank you," he whispered.

"We'll clear your name, and it won't matter anymore," she responded with conviction in her voice.

"Is that one of the things you're going to change?" he asked. She hadn't told him whether or not they'd managed it before his death in the books.

"Yes," she said, focusing on her list. She put her thumb over the last item so that she didn't copy it over by rote.

"I'm going to go feed Buckbeak. It's a meat day," he said, kissing the top of her head as he stood up.

"Sirius-are you okay?" she asked him as he put on his winter weather gear.

The brilliant grin he flashed her way eased her mind immediately. "Yeah. I'm a careless bloke, and sometimes I get a peek at my life without you and Remus. I'm glad you're on top of things."

It was her turn to smile brilliantly at him. "We could try that."

As much as Elodie wanted to see what his reaction was, the cooler action was to turn back to her list as if she hadn't turned herself on, too. She steadfastly did not look in his direction again, but it took a good thirty seconds before the door opened and he went out.

Elodie counted that as a win.

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Remus started acting distant at dinner, and Elodie knew why. She was still surprised to find his door warded against her knocks an hour later, though. He clearly couldn't hear her knocking, or he'd open the door, wouldn't he? Not for the first time, she wondered if Remus somehow had an inkling of what she'd done with Moony, but her gut said no. She trusted Moony to know Remus as well or better than anyone, and he'd been quite clear about how quickly Remus would leave and avoid her if he knew what they'd been up to.

The problem was that Elodie had never meant for her visits with Moony to be about attraction and basically nothing else. The fact that the bulk of the short time they had ever spent around each other was sexually charged was never something she'd expected to define whatever strange connection they had- she'd expected to get a chance to talk to him and some point, really talk. Remus's obstinacy was putting barriers up in front of that plan, though, and the result was that the totality of her 'relationship' with Moony started to look tawdry.

This was not the right argument to bring up with him to change his mind, though!

Elodie decided she would just have to wait for Remus in the living room. She sat down on her couch and crossed her arms. He would have to come past her to go to the basement sometime.

The minutes ticked by, and her frustration with him only grew.

Elodie couldn't read when she was this annoyed, and that made the book she'd been trying to read even more annoying. Even making a list wasn't helping, because the longer Remus took to cross the house from his bedroom on his way to the cage in the basement, the more he was risking transforming somewhere other than the cage in the basement.

Was he waiting for her not to be in the living room anymore?

Was this her fault?

Elodie stood up and marched over to the basement door, reaching out and putting her hand on the doorknob. She yanked on it, but it stayed completely shut. It was charmed shut.

"What?" she said loudly.

"What's wrong?" Sirius asked, coming out from his room. He was sweaty, and she wondered if he'd been doing exercises.

"He charmed the door shut. I was sitting here waiting for him to come out of his room, because that door is also charmed shut, and he wasn't answering my knocks!" Elodie smacked the door with the flat of her hand in frustration. It stung, but it was also very satisfying. "He must have gone down there right after dinner, the asshole!"

"Never try to out-stubborn Remus Lupin," Sirius laughed.

"He's just going to make me cast Petrificus Totallus on him at six in the morning on February's full moon day if this is the way he's going about it!" Elodie raged. "What is he so afraid of!?"

"If anyone should be worried about Moony it would be me, wouldn't you think?" Sirius said, taking her arm and walking her away from the basement door.

Elodie stopped short. "But, that's the thing! I don't think he knows about that! So, what is it that he thinks he's preventing?" she said in a low, hissing whisper.

"You're going to have to ask him, Ellie," Sirius said, raising his eyebrows.

She sighed. "I don't like keeping things from people," she said, crossing the rest of the room and throwing herself face-down onto the couch dramatically.

"This from the woman who knows how at least three people she cares deeply for are going to die," Sirius said in an amused voice.

Elodie lifted her head to glare at him.

"I'm just saying, there are degrees of keeping things from people, and 'your alter-ego was lonely' is a lower degree than 'you're going to die fighting Voldemort,' don't you think?" he said, undaunted by her forbidding facial expression.

"Moony told me Remus would leave if he knew about everything," she admitted, feeling her eyes well up with tears. "And, well. He'd know, wouldn't he?" Elodie put her head back down onto the couch nose first.

"Suffocating yourself on the furniture won't solve anything, you know." She felt the weight of his body settling into the couch cushion beside where her head was. Elodie made a harrumph noise and moved to rest her cheek on the fabric instead. Sirius started to pet her hair.

"I'm not really interested in self-harm," she protested. When Sirius's hand stilled and she glanced up at him to see him looking doubtful, she added, "All right, ignoring the evidence of confronting a Death Eater to the contrary, but that was to defend Harry, which you well know!"

Sirius's eyebrows remained accusatory.

Her neck was starting to hurt, so she rolled over onto her back. "What's with the skeptical eyebrows, Sirius? You don't really think I'm cruising through this universe begging to be Avada'd, do you?"

This earned her his wide, brilliant grin. "No, but give it time," he teased. "I do think you should stop thinking your inside knowledge is foolproof, though. Particularly if you're making changes."

"I'm making changes," she said firmly. "And, okay, I hear you. But don't think I'm going to take 'don't be reckless' advice from Sirius Black of all people without giving you shit for it!"

He stuck his tongue out at her. This cheeky action was a bit marred by the huge yawn he let out shortly afterwards, though. She opened her mouth to comment on the juxtaposition, but in true Sirius fashion, he clamped a hand over her lips to stop her. Elodie wanted to try to bite him, but decided to wait to hear his argument.

"I need to sleep. I'm guessing that your mood right now is fueled by pure outrage, and I shouldn't expect Cuddly Elodie to appear tonight?"

Elodie was sure he could feel her smirk against the palm he held against her mouth. She arched an eyebrow up in his direction, and he lifted his hand so she could add commentary to her expressions.

"No one will be seeing Cuddly Elodie tonight. Probably not tomorrow, either." She stood up and stretched her arms above her head as she looked around the room. The plan that had come to her mind just now was a bit ridiculous, and she was excited to implement it. She didn't intend to imply any hidden meaning with the props she was going to use, though, so that meant it was a bad idea to grab any of her pillows or blankets from Sirius's room. Whether Remus knew they were there was debatable, but she suspected he did.

He was likely to be proud of the way he'd outmaneuvered her, and not having to worry about her sleeping without her own favorite bedclothes had almost certainly factored into that pride.

Sirius bumped her with his elbow and she looked over to see that he'd been stretching too. His lazy, loose-limbed movements were very attractive, and she almost regretted her snap decision of minutes before. Almost, but not quite. While Sirius rubbed his face sleepily, she snuck her arms around him and kissed his chest right above his heart.

"Head on to bed, then. I'm going to camp out in the hallway and make our housemate trample me on his way to his room," she said, her tone of voice colored more by anger than the affection she was trying to show Sirius. He kissed her head after her first comment, and she spun away from him shrugging when she spoke again. "Who knows, maybe I'll be more charitable in the morning!"

Elodie sighed and rolled her eyes at the whole situation. She started looking for a pillow she wouldn't mind getting dirty from being laid on the floor. There was an irritated ache in her chest that felt accusatory, like her heart was telling her to be more forgiving. Sirius's amused laughter helped to chase the feeling away, though.

"So I should cast a charm to block out the sound of yelling in the hallway so I can sleep in, you're saying?" he called out to her in an amused voice from the hallway.

With her hands full of two pillows and three blankets, Elodie could barely see him over the pile as she walked over to stand in front of Remus's locked and warded bedroom door.

"Definitely," she said.

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Elodie slept fitfully. Despite the hallway not having windows of its own, the after midnight full moon shone through the living room windows quite brightly. She'd eventually charmed one blanket to attach to Remus's doorknob and then draped the fabric over her face to block out the light. This had the added effect of ensuring that Remus would wake her up in the morning; she'd initially worried that he would somehow sneak past her despite her setup, but he would be too magically depleted to Apparate, and any movement of her blanket shield would probably wake her up.

She was right.

The blinding light of the morning sun hitting her face and Remus Lupin's groan of frustration worked together to wake Elodie up.

"I'm convinced you could rival James Potter in stubbornness," Remus said to her in exhausted irritation.

She couldn't prevent the smile that this high compliment prompted. After rubbing her eyes for a few seconds, she sat up against the solid wood of his bedroom door. "That's one of the nicest things you've ever said to me, Remus. Thank you!"

Remus tipped his head sideways at her and looked reproachful. Elodie stopped combing her fingers through her hair and crossed her arms, allowing the smile to fall from her face to be replaced by an expression of the aforementioned stubbornness.

"I'm tired. Can't we- No, never mind, I know the answer," he muttered, leaning back against the wall opposite her.

"Seems like you would have been better served to have applied that kind of logic to your actions last night," Elodie said, looking up at him and trying not to notice the signs that hinted at a bad transformation. He had a bruise on his temple and a small rip in his right sleeve. The way the fabric around the rip clung to his arm told her that it had bled and dried, stuck to his skin.

"That's shortsighted and you know it," Remus snapped. "I've made a decision that you disagree with. The only person with faulty logic here is you, thinking that by virtue of wanting to do something, you can accuse me of being unfair. It's my life, and my decision."

"If it's solely your decision, you'd have no need to question Moony's conduct, because you'd have control over it," Elodie said quietly, not looking up to see his reaction to this. A movement caught her eye anyway, and she looked toward him to see that he'd slid down the wall to sit across from her. He looked entirely too sleepy to be sitting on the floor, and she felt a pang of guilt.

"And your conduct?" Remus said, just as quietly. His eyes were closed, his face a mask of the kind of contentment that he never displayed when he was actually content, only when he was trying to appear that way.

"Listen to yourself! What are you trying to accuse me of? Do you even know?" she demanded. His heavy sigh in response sounded contrived, like he thought she might feel badly enough thanks to this display of exhaustion that she'd let up, which made her feel even less like doing so.

I really miss him, sometimes, Elodie thought to herself sadly. He was the same person, of course. The parts of his personality she liked most hadn't been on display as much as they used to be, not anymore. Their mutual silence combined with these insights made her think of something.

"Look at it this way, Remus," she said, launching into what she wanted to tell him as if she'd been speaking aloud that whole time. Elodie looked up at the ceiling, a bit afraid that she'd falter in her description if she watched Remus's face while he listened to what she was saying. "What if there was a person who, because of a curse or something, were stuck in a situation where they were only able to talk or interact with other people for, say… thirty minutes a month."

Elodie risked a peek at Remus and saw that he was looking at her with a wry little smile on his tired face.

"Now, what do you predict would happen if your friend Elodie Merriman found out about this cursed person?" she asked him.

Remus let out a short burst of laughter. "If my friend Elodie knew about a person cursed to only talk to other people for a half hour a month," he said slowly, as if he were thinking while he was speaking. He'd avoided eye contact initially, but now he looked right at her. "She'd fight for him," he sighed. His tone was resigned, but in a good-natured way. "Elodie Merriman would find a way to make sure he had the chance to talk, during those minutes. She'd probably be very angry with anyone who tried to stop her, as well."

He fell silent and looked away, and Elodie waited for the rebuttal that was sure to come. She waited for quite a few minutes, long enough that she started to fold the blankets that she'd slept with in the hallway.

"I get it," Remus said. Elodie shook the blanket to even up the way its fold lay and looked over at him. "I just don't like the idea that you're showing this kind of… how do I even put it?" He stood slowly and rubbed his face. "Proprietary interest in my alter-ego."

"I do not act like I own him!" she protested.

"On that we agree!" Remus said with no small amount of frustration. "Instead, you act like he ought to be freed, and that as his jailor, I ought to be ashamed of myself." He pointed to her, and she hated the added weight of the height disparity so much that she struggled to her feet to even things out. "It's the opposite, Elodie. It's his presence in my life that has chained me to lycanthropy!"

Elodie threw her newest half-folded blanket on the floor between them. "Your hostility is driving me crazy!" she shouted at him. "You admit that my motivations make sense to you, but you're still angry at me anyway!"

Suddenly, she understood what she was going to have to do, and the necessity of it made her throw her head back and let out a long sound of frustration. As usual for Elodie, it all came back to telling the truth, or as near a version of it as possible.

"All right, fine," she said in a much calmer voice that drew his attention immediately. "Everything about your behavior is screaming that you think I'm hiding something, that I have some sort of ulterior motive for wanting to talk to Moony." Elodie waited a few seconds, hoping he'd indicate whether she was right.

"Go on," Remus nodded.

Elodie took a deep breath, screwed her eyes shut for a few seconds, and then opened her eyes and looked right at Remus. "You're right, there's something specific I want-I need to talk to him about. But I'm not the one with an ulterior motive, all right? He is. His… actions have made that very clear," she said, her strong, even tone faltering as she verbally danced around what she was trying to tell Remus. She looked down at her hands. "Given his… prior behavior, I wanted to tell Moony about my relationship with Sirius in person. I know that he's somewhere in there, that he can observe, or whatever, but I still felt like talking to him, being honest and open about it… that's important to me."

Remus was silent, and she looked up at him nervously, her head tipped to the side like she could dodge whatever his reaction might be.

He looked utterly shocked.

Remus's mouth was open and he looked like he was staring at her but it was more like he was staring past her. As she watched him, he shook his head in disbelief, his eyebrows furrowing.

Elodie leaned over and pulled the folded and unfolded blankets off of the floor, holding them to her chest as a kind of makeshift armor. Farther down the hallway, Sirius's door slammed open.

"Are you two done, finally?" Sirius griped, stomping out of his room clad only in his typical sweatpants, his chest bare, arms held wide in mock outrage. "I may not believe in the almighty but I definitely believe in my God-given right to sleep in on a Sunday morning!"

"I'm-" Remus started, in a whisper. He cleared his throat, looking longingly at his bedroom door.

Elodie grabbed her two pillows and walked into the living room to dump them onto the back of the couch. The fact that Remus was still reacting with shock to what she'd implied about Moony made her very nervous.

Behind her, she heard a door open. "I'm going to sleep. I just- I need to sleep," Remus said.

Elodie stopped trying to keep everything from falling from the couch onto the floor and rushed back toward the hallway, but by the time she got there, Remus was inside his room and the door was shut.

"Shit," she swore. She wanted more than anything to kick the door in anger, but that wouldn't do much more than antagonize the person who was still, despite her honesty and very persuasive arguments, gatekeeping her access to Moony.

"I'm guessing that didn't go well?"

"Sirius, I'm telling you this as a friend: you should know that people with punchable faces really ought to be more careful with their snark," Elodie said, glaring at him.

"I went with 'better than average reflexes' instead, but that's solid advice," Sirius said, grinning at her.

"You are irrepressible," Elodie said, reluctantly returning his smile. She turned to walk into the living room, finding that her precarious pile had not, in fact, collapsed into a blanket lahar. "It did not go well, no." She sat down.

"As predictable as that was, screaming and all," Sirius said, walking around to stand in front of her with a frown on his face, "-I feel like letting it go now is just ignoring the Snitch, at this point. It's not resolving anything."

"Another Quidditch saying! Is that what Krum should have done? Ignore the Snitch, let Bulgaria score a bit more, then catch it when they'd win?" Elodie asked, yawning.

"Yes, in a final. It's rare that anyone in the crowd can see well enough to know what's happening, even more rare to disagree with the Seeker on the choice- and, are you trying to distract me?" Sirius had been in as close to 'lecture mode' as she'd ever seen him, and it was definitely adorable. He crossed his arms and looked down at her disapprovingly, and Elodie threw herself sideways on the couch, half hoping to trigger her blanket avalanche to save her. Sirius would not appreciate the huge grin on her face prompted by how much she loved both his 'Quidditch lecturer' and 'cross look' modes. When the blankets didn't oblige her, she hid her face in the side of the couch for a few seconds.

"You're making that face you make when you like my expression," Sirius said. "Which is confusing because I know you're not a fan of Quidditch. Or grumpiness! But I, for one, am well rested. So I'm going to sit the two of you down and get this all cleared up, and neither of you are going to stop me, because you got shitty sleep, and I'm a manipulative bastard."

Elodie rolled over onto her back to face him, but he'd already walked out of sight. "Wait! No, honestly, he won, okay? He got into his room, he needs his sleep. Sirius!"

His voice came from somewhere behind the couch. "So you're saying you slept in front of his bedroom door to make him talk to you, but all he had to do to defeat you was to make it inside? That's bullshit!"

Elodie lifted herself up onto her elbows, starting to get up, but Sirius leaned over the couch to talk to her, knocking down the blankets. She fell back and managed to free her face, but the pile blocked Sirius from her sight, still.

"I am not going to let him get away without any conversation, I just-"

Sirius muttered something as she spoke, and suddenly she was silenced. A second and another spell later, and Elodie's arms were stuck above her head where she'd been holding the blankets away from her face so she could breathe.

She couldn't even glare at him, because she was essentially entombed in blankets!

"I know you're angry, don't worry. I can picture the exact face you're making, but Elodie, I just-" Sirius sighed. "I can't let the two people I love most in the world keep talking past each other. I have a rule. Wherever I live, the amount of joking with each other has to be higher than the uncomfortable silences."

Elodie couldn't hear him walk away from her because he was barefoot, but she couldn't imagine that his steps could be faster than the pounding sound of her heartbeat in her head. Sirius just said he loved her. She was stunned, elated, and terrified. He was fighting battles for her, but what a battle to start with! Remus's hatred of his own lycanthropy was epic and ingrained, and she'd be happy if getting him to let her speak to Moony against his better judgment turned out to be as easy as talking to a brick wall instead of a steel-reinforced one.

She was gratified that Sirius would even try, but at the same time, he'd silenced and paralyzed her right before he was about to start what was definitely going to develop into an argument. Would he remember to undo those spells before he spun into an anger fit? Didn't he realize she was the one who usually talked him down from those?

Elodie would have physically jumped in surprise at the sound of Sirius banging knocks on Remus's door if she hadn't been paralyzed in place by his spells.

"It's not bedtime yet, Remus! Get out here!"

The pounding didn't stop until Elodie had counted almost forty Mississippis in her head.

Remus's door opened widely, banging on the wall and then creaking as it always did as it rebounded.

"Give me one reason why I shouldn't turn you into a frog and go back to bed, Sirius!" Remus said in a tone that sounded less angry than she would have expected. It was still plenty irritated, though.

"Because out of the four of us you were the most shit at animal transfiguration, which was completely hilarious, honestly," Sirius said. There was a few seconds of silence during which Elodie held her breath. There was poking the bear, and then there was poking an exhausted werewolf…

"Look, if I promise not to punch you in the face and add on a mandatory session of 'here's why Remus is being an asshole' with Elodie, will you let me sleep?" Remus finally asked quietly.

"Punch me all you want," Sirius said. "You'll probably need some sleep to manage it, though."

There was a meaty 'smack' sound, and Elodie's eyes widened and she caught her breath.

"That was-"

"Your shoulder, yes. I didn't miss, for the record," Remus said. There was a thread of amusement in his tone of voice that helped Elodie's heart rate start inching back toward normal. "Before I start aiming higher or lower, tell me why now happens to be the time you're so determined to butt in?"

"You're not yourself. And before you start in with the logic and the whole 'you were gone for over ten years,' I get it. But I'd like to think there are some Remus-y things that a decade and a half without me can't erase. Don't shake your head at me! I saw them only a few months ago, Moony. Then I see you arguing with Ellie and it hit me. It's got to be her. You two got, I don't know. Misaligned, somehow." There was a few seconds of silence, and Elodie's heart boomed in her own ears as she waited for Remus's reaction. "What happened, man?" Sirius's voice sounded sad.

Even yards away, Remus's deep, long sigh in response was audible to Elodie.

"I'll say this once, and only to you," Remus said. His voice was shaking a little, but he wasn't yelling. "I made decisions when I was very young about what my life was going to be like. Some of them were naive- even werewolves can't spend all their days in seclusion, not without losing their humanity. I also hadn't counted on you, James, and Peter."

Remus stopped for a long moment, and a tear slipped out of the corner of Elodie's eye and fell unimpeded into her ear.

"Other decisions seem to get even more important as the years pass. I won't ever be a father. I won't get married. I won't- Don't look at me like that, Sirius. This is important. This isn't just my life! I'm not going to inflict this, this misery onto anyone else!" Remus's voice had gotten louder as he spoke, and Elodie could just imagine the skepticism that must have been obvious on Sirius's face as he'd listened to his best friend speak so disparagingly about himself.

"You're off track. What does any of this have to do with-" Sirius demanded loudly.

"I didn't expect to meet someone I'd-" Remus was shouting, but he cut himself off and started again in a quieter voice that had the same kind of violent intensity as he'd had when he was yelling. "Elodie is everything I would have wanted. Everything I do want. Everything I can not let myself destroy. I've been meticulous in holding myself back, and I don't think there's any way to bring myself to apologize for the way that's made me distant. It's necessary."

Black spots started dancing in Elodie's eyes, and she realized that she'd been holding her breath. She gulped in air, and the amount of adrenaline that coursed through her system triggered by Remus's glorious, painful words was doubled, nearly tripled due to her fear that the sound of her gasps might be overheard. She wanted to replay his words in her head, but she knew he wasn't finished arguing with Sirius.

What else would he say?

Remus chuckled, but it was a wry, sardonic sound. "Then I hear her imply that Moony has shown some kind of attraction! The wolf! The very reason I can't ever-"

A sudden crashing boom echoed through the house.

"Shit, that was almost my head!" Sirius squeaked.

"Most of the time I can tell the difference between your head and the wall, Padfoot, never fear," Remus said, full-on laughing now. There was a hollowness to the sound of it that made her heart ache.

"You've gone mad and your hand is a mess. You do know you're supposed to cast a protection charm on your hand before you straight up punch through a wall, right?" Sirius said, also laughing.

"This from the man who had punched three walls by the age of twenty-one?" Remus retorted. "Without casting protection first. Which, yes, would have been a great idea, because ouch. Shit."

If it were possible to cast spells wandlessly, silently, and without moving a muscle, Elodie would have been up and on her way into the hall to help Remus by now. Someone made a hissing sound of pain, and Elodie realized she could hear Sirius's voice speaking in a low voice. Knowing him, he was casting spells to heal Remus's hand, but she still really wanted to be able to help.

Even though she was definitely the last person Remus Lupin would want to be faced with right now.

"James, Peter, and I really wanted you to be able to do anything you wanted with your life, you know," Sirius said.

"I know."

"Being able to love someone is one of those things."

"I can't."

"Not wanting to let yourself do something and being incapable of doing something are two very different things, Remus," Sirius said. "There. Good as new, and I don't think it'll hurt any more than they did when the full moon rose and fell last night."

"Thank you. For everything; perhaps especially taking care of her," Remus said, his words so quiet that Elodie had almost missed them.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm happy, and she's happy, but fuck, Moony! If you'd said something…" Sirius's voice was gravelly and furious.

"What are you trying to say? That you'd have behaved differently? Please," Remus asked, sarcasm dripping from his voice.

"She's attracted to you, you complete idiot! She made that perfectly clear," Sirius shouted.

"You love her!" Remus shouted back at Sirius. "You should!"

Elodie's blood froze. Sirius had shouted the exact same thing to her the day he'd kissed her in front of Remus.

"So should you! As evidenced by your other self, I imagine. Look," Sirius said, sounding tired for the first time since Elodie had heard them start to argue. "I had every intention of gluing the two of you to opposite sides of this hallway and force you to talk, but I get it, this is too complicated for brute force. But the last thing I want to picture is the idea that my girlfriend is going to fall in love with me only because the man she should be with instead has fucked with his personality to keep that from happening."

The pain and possible truth of that statement hit Elodie like a punch to the wall.

There wasn't a way for her to yell out that he was (oh, please, be) wrong, wrong, wrong.

She couldn't even shake her head to refute it.

"That's…" Remus's voice cut through Elodie's shocked haze. "That's fair," he sighed. "I don't want to hurt you, Sirius. I don't want to hurt Elodie. You have no idea how hard it was to turn away from her when she thought she-"

"You are both the smartest man I've ever met, and the stupidest," Sirius interrupted. "Go on, punch me instead of the wall, you left your wand in the bedroom, I'd wager," he said in a growly, bitter sounding voice. "That won't make your fantasy about how Elodie couldn't possibly have any real feelings for you any more true. If you only knew…"

"What do you want me to do, Sirius?" Remus interrupted in a low voice.

"Right now I want you to get some sleep. In the morning, I want you to act like the Marauder you are, not the boring, humorless, miserable person you think you should be. We'll all adjust just fine, I promise."

There was a long silence, during which Elodie alternated which piece of information prompted her to be the most emotionally overwhelmed.

Then, she heard the click of a door being shut.

Seconds later, she felt the weight of a person collapsing onto the couch at her feet.

"Well, that backfired," Sirius said conversationally.

It was quite difficult to laugh hysterically when one was magically frozen in place, but Elodie managed quite well. She did a good enough job that the couch shook a bit, which thankfully reminded Sirius of the spells he'd cast on her. He ended them in a sheepish voice, and the first thing Elodie did was shove the blankets all the way away from her face so she could take a deep breath of the open air again.

The second thing she did was conjure up a hand towel to dry her ears.

"Is there some kind of symbolism I'm missing?" Sirius asked, watching her.

"Some of that was emotional. Ever cried while lying on your back?" she asked, twirling the corner of the towel and rubbing at her left ear.

"Oh, yuck, yes. That's the worst feeling! All of that wetness in your-"

Elodie liked to think that her calm, even gaze was even scarier than a temper tantrum, sometimes. Sirius seemed to think it was effective, anyway. He ushered her into his bedroom as soon as she was finished with her hand towel, and even promised she'd be able to sleep as long as she needed to.

It wasn't until she woke up around lunch time that Elodie realized that Sirius had probably done that to avoid talking about what they'd both heard, but by then, she was well rested and more understanding.

Which had probably been Sirius's plan all along.