Previously in the Darklyverse: Sirius and Remus broke up. Sirius and Emmeline began working together at Scrivenshaft's and tried to rekindle their friendship. The Order pulled its members away from Mary's wedding shower for a series of raids on simultaneous Death Eater attacks that nearly got Remus killed. The Order discovered that everyone they'd captured and delivered to the Ministry since developing the curse-identification orb had been under the Imperius Curse.

xx

December 11th, 1978: Sirius Black

It's been a month, almost two, since he and Remus broke up, and still Sirius feels like he's reeling. It's been worse the last few days, and he thinks he knows why: the full moon is coming up on Thursday night, which means that Sirius has to make a decision. He skipped it last month, and James and Peter said it went fine, but that hasn't stopped Sirius from feeling obsessively guilty for the last month.

At the end of the day, Remus is supposed to be one of his best friends, and Marauder loyalty shouldn't come second to whatever romantic drama is going on between the two of them. Right?

"You look pensive over there," Emmeline eventually says in between customers at Scrivenshaft's, where Sirius is moodily standing at the till and staring down at his feet. "Anything going on that you want to share?"

"What? I'm fine. It's just—Remus."

"Oh. You're still not talking to each other, then?"

Sirius shrugs. "I wouldn't say we're not on speaking terms, but we're not really—seeking each other out. I say hello to him at Order meetings, and I always tell James to say hi for me when James comes over to my flat, but…"

"Hey. Sirius, he still cares about you. I know he does."

"Isn't that the problem, though? Wouldn't we be better off if we hated each other? At least then it wouldn't…"

"Hurt so much," Emmeline finishes the thought. "Yeah. I hear you."

The bell tinkles as someone opens the door that moment, and Em immediately puts on her customer service face and asks if they'd like any help making their selection today, leaving Sirius to brood at the till. He's not sure he's ready to talk to anyone about Remus, but then again, he's going to have to rip off the bandage eventually, whether that means confiding in someone like Emmeline or just dealing with his thoughts from inside his own head.

He hasn't really been doing a great job of either. He was hoping that the pain would go away if he ignored it long enough, but at least so far, that hasn't been the case.

So after he rings up three more customers and the shop goes quiet again, he tells Em, "We're stuck at—kind of an impasse. Me and Remus, I mean. I wasn't… I'm not gay, Em. I don't know what that makes me because I do love him—I'm in love with him—but I didn't want some of the stuff that came along with it. I offered, but he didn't want to make me, and it just… imploded. It would have been fine if he would have just let me, but he wouldn't, and I couldn't stand to stay in something that wasn't equal."

"Maybe it was never going to be equal," Emmeline reasons. "Maybe, even if you'd done the stuff you weren't doing, he still would have felt like he wasn't connecting with you because it didn't mean to you what it meant to him."

"See, now you sound like him," says Sirius ruefully. "We kept butting up against each other, and now I don't know how to be his friend and be his ex at the same time."

"Maybe you're not supposed to be?" she suggests. "I mean, I'm not saying you can't be friends again someday, but it's got to be hard to be there for each other in a meaningful way when you're trying to create that distance at the same time. You'd survive a few months apart, right?"

"I guess so," says Sirius carefully.

"The only thing is, you can't put a timer on it. If you tell yourself you're only taking space until, say, April, you can't just spend the whole time waiting to be able to see him again when April rolls around. You'll just end up right back where you started."

"How do you know all this, anyway?"

One corner of Em's mouth curls up. "I had to get over you somehow, didn't I?"

Sirius smiles. "And now look at us. You're with Peter, and I'm… persistently single."

"And we're actual friends, maybe."

"Yeah," says Sirius with a faint smile. "Yeah, I think we are."

He has three days to decide whether to ignore Em's advice and spend the full moon with Remus, and he spends them working the shop during the day and, at night, helping James clear out his parents' manor. The place was aired out enough that it was probably safe to return to without risking spattegroit months ago, but James hasn't had the heart to set foot in it until now, and Sirius thinks James probably still would be avoiding it if Sirius hadn't suggested that they go in together. They've been working on it for a few hours most evenings, leaving most of the furniture and décor but cleaning out any personal effects to make it presentable to future buyers.

Tonight, when Sirius meets James out the front of the manor, James steels his jaw and says, "We should do my bedroom and theirs today."

"Are you sure? We don't have to do them right away."

"I'll just feel worse if we keep putting them off. I just want to get them over with so we can move on."

They take James's bedroom first, which looks like it won't take long: he'd already brought plenty of his own stuff with him to Sirius's place that has made it to the new flat with Remus and Alice. James seems to be holding it together pretty well while he and Sirius Vanish photographs, books, rolls of parchment, even James's Gryffindor and Quidditch posters on the walls. Sirius keeps a running list of everything they're Vanishing on a scrap of parchment tucked inside his robe pocket, so that they keep track of what they'll need to conjure back up when they leave here.

"Are you skipping the full moon again this month?" asks James while he's sweeping his wand across a dresser drawer full of socks.

"I haven't decided yet. Emmeline thinks I ought to stay away from Moony for a while until we get past this."

"Emmeline thinks, huh?"

"Oh, shut up. It's not like that, and you know it."

"Yeah, I know," says James, but he's still smiling. "I'm glad you two are getting along better. Evanesco. I think that's this room done…"

"Are you still sure you want to do this tonight?" asks Sirius in an undertone, and James nods.

His parents' bedroom is way at the east end of the fifth floor, and as they walk there, Sirius notices James's steps getting smaller and smaller. When they're ten paces away, he claps James on the back bracingly. "You can do this. Ten minutes or less, right?"

"Ten minutes or less," James echoes, and they dive in.

Sirius does most of the work in here, watching James stare at the door as if his mum or dad is going to walk in at any moment. He absently answers Sirius's questions about what to do with clothing, quilts, Mr. Potter's sewing kit, an old photo album. "We're almost done," Sirius finally says, holding up a WWN alarm clock.

"That can stay here," says James faintly.

"Okay. And—Vanish the Healing potions, I'm assuming?"

"There's a place at St. Mungo's where they collect these kinds of things," James says. "We can take some of them there and give the ones the Order could use to Lily."

"All right. That's the last of it, I think," says Sirius, waving his wand. "You did good, Prongs."

There's a defeated slump to James's shoulders as he stands there looking at Sirius like his world is crashing down around him. "I just want to get out of here," he says finally.

"Will you come to our place?" says Sirius. "It's my turn to cook dinner. We're having casserole."

"You sure I wouldn't be imposing?"

"Please. Lily would love to see you."

So James comes round for dinner. He and Lily sit and banter on the couch while Sirius is cooking, mixing the veggies and macaroni, heating up the oven while he snarks back at them. You'd almost think that James isn't mourning both his parents, that Sirius isn't spending his every waking thought on somebody who won't stay for him.

"Are you two crazy kids ready for your wedding shower this weekend?" Sirius asks once they've started eating, covering his full mouth with his hand.

"After the fiasco that was Mary's shower?" snorts James. "I'm not sure whether to feel worried the same thing is going to happened or secure in the idea that nothing that happens can be as bad as what happened to her."

"I'm sure there's not going to be another massively orchestrated Death Eater attack on multiple locations," says Lily, "so I don't think we have much to worry about. I do feel bad for us all bailing on Mary, even though under the circumstances we kind of had to. She owled her RSVP a few days ago, though, so we'll just have to make it up to her there."

"Has anybody been keeping in touch with her?" Sirius asks.

"Alice has," says Lily. "She's been trying to, anyway. I think it gets a little awkward when Alice is totally entrenched in a world with the people that Mary left behind."

"Or the people who left Mary behind, let's be real," says James through a mouthful of hamburger.

"We just have to start inviting her to more things," Lily presses on. "Has anybody besides Alice seen her since her shower?"

"Not that I know of," says Sirius. "I didn't even realize that Alice has seen her."

"Only a couple of times," says Lily, "but her track record is still better than mine is."

"Or mine," James says.

"We'd better finish up here," Sirius says then. "Alice and Em and Fabian are coming over to work on the Imperius Curse thing, and they should be here pretty soon."

"Don't let me keep you," says James cheerfully.

"Say hi to Moony for me," Sirius says, trying to sound nonchalant.

James looks at him funny, but then Lily rescues him with a quick, "And for me. Tell him I'm looking forward to seeing him on Wednesday."

"What's on Wednesday?"

"Oh, Alice is having me over. No big deal."

"The Imperius Curse thing," as Sirius puts it, is not going well. They're trying to work out a quick and foolproof method of identifying whether somebody is under the effects of the Imperius Curse, but Sirius is the only one in the group who has any experience with spell-writing, having worked on the Sectumsempra countercurse, and even he isn't that great at it. By the end of the hour, Sirius's head is swimming with theory and equations and lots of Latin phrasing that may or may not even be what they're looking for, and he tells the group that he needs to get some air and then stomps out of the flat to tip his head against the winter breeze outside.

He wishes Remus were here. He wishes Remus were here instead of a bunch of people looking to Sirius for answers he doesn't have.

When Thursday night rolls around, Sirius doesn't allow himself to think much about what he's doing when he Apparates to Remus's flat. They used to have full moons every night at Sirius's place, since his roommate (Lily) knows about the Animagi but Remus's roommate (Alice) doesn't, but obviously they'd had to change that up when Sirius missed last month. Remus apparently hasn't told Alice much, just that even with the Wolfsbane Potion he'd like the place to himself since he might be up in the night a lot, so she's sleeping over at Marlene's while the Marauders have come to Remus.

After a moment's thought, Sirius transforms into Padfoot while he's still out in the living room. He trots over to Remus's bedroom and raps one of his paws a few times against the base of the door.

James, who can't easily transform into Prongs in a space as small as his and Remus's bedroom, lets Padfoot in. "Hey, man," he says. "Didn't know if you were coming."

Padfoot barks a couple of times, grateful that he's not having to do this as a human. "Wormy's here, too," says James, indicating toward Remus's bed, where Moony is lying on his side with Wormtail resting between Moony's paws and belly.

He barks again and hops up behind Moony, curling up against him with his paws pressed tight to Moony's back. This is all he gets, he tells himself firmly. One night, just to show his support, not even alone together, and then he can go back to trying to "move on" or whatever it is he's supposed to be doing.

He doesn't sleep all night long. Neither does Moony.