January 15th, 1978: Remus Lupin
Being half of the only out gay couple at Hogwarts is—it's exhausting, really. Remus feels like he's constantly on the defense, unsure whether to hide or lash out when people stare at them holding hands in the corridors or sitting wound together in the common room. Nothing to see here, he wants to tell them. It's just two blokes together. No big deal.
But it is a big deal. Remus has never been in a relationship at all before, and Sirius has never been in one with another boy, and Remus feels his whole body light up with every brush against Sirius's skin. Sirius has shown him plenty of affection out in public, but they haven't kissed again since that first time a week ago, and Remus is starting to wonder if Sirius is avoiding being alone with him—if he didn't like it and doesn't want to do it again.
He's being ridiculous, he tells himself. If he didn't like it, he wouldn't still be dating Remus. But he is, and that has to mean something good, right?
It's Sunday night when Sirius abruptly stows his Transfiguration textbook in his bag and says, "Moony's coming upstairs with me now."
"I am?"
"You are."
"Have fun," says James, while Peter just grins at them. "We'll give you some time."
They've hardly walked into the dormitory and closed the door before Sirius is on him. Remus groans a little and kisses him back, still not really sure what he's doing but not really caring.
It goes on like that for some time until Sirius brushes Remus's robes open and untucks his shirt and then puts his hands underneath it. He breaks the kiss, just standing there with his hands on Remus's abdomen, with some kind of look on his face that Remus can't read.
Naturally, Remus's first instinct is to get nervous. "Is everything okay?" he asks.
"What? Oh, yeah, everything's fine. It's just—different from what I'm used to."
"Different bad?"
"Different different." But then Sirius smiles and adds, "I just want to take my time. Everything's so new that it feels like it's happening fast."
"Is fast bad?"
"No, but it's a lot, and it makes it hard to enjoy all the little things."
"Little things?"
"Yeah. Like…"
He leads Remus over to his bed, then gets Remus lying down and crouches over his waist so he can plant kisses in a line above the hemline of his pants. Remus feels like he's going to explode, but not in a bad way. In a nice, overwhelming, can't-believe-his-luck kind of way. He never, ever would have dreamed that Sirius Black—straight-seeming Sirius Black—would ever want to do these things with Remus, and yet here Sirius is, kissing Remus's stomach like it's the most casual thing in the world.
Finally, finally, Sirius pulls back and stops kissing him. Remus sort of wants to complain and start kissing him again, but he doesn't want to push his luck. He still can hardly believe that Sirius is dating him.
"Are you sure you're okay?" asks Remus again. "You just look…"
"Yeah, no, I'm fine. It's like I said—it's just really different."
"Yeah, you said that," mutters Remus.
"Hey." Sirius hops onto the bed and lies down next to Remus, tucking his head under Remus's. "I'll work it out, okay? I don't want you to be worried that I'm going to change my mind."
"Are you going to change your mind?" Remus asks, sort of kidding but also sort of not.
"I wouldn't just bail on you and say I want to go back to the way things were," Sirius promises. "I'm still figuring myself out, but I wouldn't just—throw you away."
"But you might change you mind."
"I… I mean, we can't know what's going to happen next. If I knew I wasn't going to want to be with you, I wouldn't have tried."
"That's not an answer, Padfoot."
Sirius sighs. "Yeah, I guess there's a chance that things won't work out and I won't be able to do this with you. But nobody ever knows for sure what's going to happen, and I want—I want to try this with you, Moony."
"Really?"
"Of course. I wouldn't be here if I didn't."
"Can we just—can we just lie here until James and Peter come up?"
Laughing, Sirius says, "Yeah. Yeah, we can do that."
It's about half an hour later that Remus hears a knock on the door. "Yeah, one second," calls Sirius, and they both sit up, Remus tucking in his shirt and doing up his robes. "All right, come on in," Sirius adds, and in come James and Peter, both grinning widely.
"This dorm isn't going to become a danger zone now that the two of you are together, is it?" says Peter. "Because if I end up getting barred from my own dormitory every other night so that you two can get it on—"
"Oh, shut up," says Sirius amicably. He reaches to open the drawer of his nightstand and rifles through it, but apparently turns up empty, because he asks, "Hey, has anybody seen my Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans?"
"No, man, sorry," says James. "Anyway, it's meeting time with Dorcas in twenty. We thought we should grab you two before we left in case, you know, you lost track of time."
Shit—Remus forgot all about the Order meeting tonight, and he's guessing he's not the only one. It's not like they have much to report, though, and it's not even like Dorcas is going to have any interesting missions to send them on. They've all pretty much accepted at this point that they'll be on fluff missions until they graduate, and with the possible exception of Marlene, they've all made their peace with this. Any time Remus starts feeling frustrated or patronized, he pictures Millie's and Liz's corpses lying on cots in the Hospital Wing, and that shuts his voice of dissent right up.
Sure enough, Dorcas kicks off the meeting with a quick recap of other Order business, not going into much detail and probably leaving out some of the heavier stuff. They touch base about War Stories—yes, it's going fine, they tell her, but they still haven't attracted any Slytherins, and that's the base that they need to get through to the most.
"Try starting with the first years?" Dorcas suggests. "I mean, do you know any first years you can start with?"
"My sister's a first year, and she's in Slytherin," Marlene pipes up. "I could ask her for information about whether any of her housemates seem like they might be amenable to our side."
"Great. There you go," says Dorcas. "Listen, I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but you're doing good work. People are going to learn and change their minds because of you. Just keep doing what you're doing and try not to feel too claustrophobic in there, all right? I know it's hard with the war going on outside and you all trapped inside."
After the meeting, he catches up with Marlene—they haven't really talked since before he and Sirius got together, and it's getting increasingly weird to be around Sirius all day while constantly watching Marlene sulk out the corner of his eye. When he sits down next to her in the common room, she doesn't say anything, but a moment later she flips the page of her textbook so hard it rips off entirely. "God damn it," she says, scowling, as she fishes around for her wand to repair the damage.
"Sorry," says Remus awkwardly.
"It's not your fault," says Marlene, but she definitely sounds pissed still. She fixes the book and then resumes reading, or at least tries to, or maybe tries to look like she is—Remus can see that her eyes are frozen in the same place on the page.
"I know when we talked we said we were okay, but I'm starting to think we're really not."
She slams the book shut and loudly tosses it onto the coffee table in front of her. "What do you expect me to say, Lupe? Do you want me to be happy for you? Do you want me to stop hurting? Because, newsflash, I can't just do those things on command."
"I know. I'm not expecting you to," he says after a long pause. "I guess I just want to know how much space you need, and I want you to know that I'm not—out to get you, or anything."
He knows from Sirius that Marlene had a bit of a breakdown and asked Sirius to take her back last week, right after he and Remus kissed. He doesn't dare bring up to Marlene that he knows this, but he feels pretty weird himself about dating Sirius practically right after his breakup with Marlene, especially knowing that Marlene isn't over it or ready to see Sirius in a new relationship. He's not going to break up with Sirius over it, but—
—well, should he? Did they jump into this too fast? If Marlene is so messed up dealing with the fallout from their relationship ending, isn't Sirius? And if he is, shouldn't Remus stay a reasonable distance away until Sirius has the mental clarity to move forward with someone else, someone like Remus?
"So you want to be friends with me and help me feel comfortable," Marlene says, "but only as much as you can while still dating the boy I'm in love with."
Remus winces. It's accurate, but it's harsh. "I thought we were starting to be friends again. I thought you had—forgiven me, I guess, for having feelings for Sirius."
"For having feelings, sure. You can't help that any more than I can. But I can't forgive you for acting on them. That was your choice, and you made it knowing what you were putting me through."
"I don't want to abandon you, Marlene," says Remus, and she scoffs. "It's not like I just suddenly stopped caring about you. I still want you in my life."
"But you want Sirius in your life more than you want me in it."
"I—I wouldn't put it that way. That's not fair."
"No? It's true, isn't it? You picked him without any regard for how I felt—"
"Marlene, you broke up with him! You can't control our decisions when you—"
"I'm not trying to control anyone! I'm just saying, you make choices. You knew what I was feeling, and you still made a choice that hurts me, and I'm well within my rights to make the choice to scrub you out of my life for it."
"So you do want to get rid of me."
"Well, can you blame me?" People are starting to stare, but Remus knows that if he backs off now to save face, she'll lose all respect for him. Marlene continues, "I want to be with people who are good for me, who take my feelings into account before they do things."
Yeah, but the world doesn't revolve around you, Remus wants to say, but he holds it in. "I'll leave you alone if that's what you want—"
"That's what I want."
"—but I'm not going to stop caring about you, Marlene, no matter how hard you push. If you decide you want me in your life again, I'll be there."
"Great to know," she snips. "You can go. Just go. What are you looking at?" she fires at the people sitting around them, who promptly go back to what they were doing, muttering to each other.
After how badly that went, Remus isn't much in the mood to rejoin Sirius, James, and Peter by the fireplace and make banter with them. Instead, he climbs the stairs leading up to his dormitory. He stands there in the dark for a long time, counting his breaths and reminding himself that there are pieces of him that Sirius and Marlene haven't touched.
