Part 2/2: 5.7.1995

He has been gone for so long, for too long.

There is only one line in the message:

A black dog is on its way to see you. Take good care of it until I contact you.

Dumbledore

And then Sirius is standing behind my door in his animal form, his fur matted and shineless, his eyes bright in the grey dusk of the night. Suddenly I wish I had a command over the wolf that lives in me, instead of being commanded by it. If I could approach him as an animal, to sniff him from a distance, perhaps nuzzle his fur, to make a sound and nip his neck playfully, I wouldn't need to stand here closed, made of stone and weariness.

Only now does he come to me, more than a year after I saw him in the Shrieking Shack and finally knew I had misunderstood everything that distant night. I pulled him into my arms out of bare relief, held him tight to me, felt the sharp bones under my hands and couldn't believe he was there, alive and precious and familiar and strange. But the moments were short and there wasn't enough time for everything, for anything. He ran with me in the Forbidden Forest as a dog, looking, touching. And afterwards he was gone again.

Now he is standing behind my door and I'm made of stone, mute and still and closed.

He cocks his head, lets out a questioning whimper and pads past me into the house. I close the door after him and when I turn to look, he has already taken his human form. He doesn't move, doesn't speak. He merely stands there and is the same, yet different. Sirius, my Sirius, whom I kissed one winter day near the edge of the Forbidden Forest when the world was still whole for us. Sirius, who was smile and movement and sound and touches and life. Sirius, whose black hair falls now in dull tangles, whose starved body is on the alert every moment, whose eyes are too tormented deep in their dark hollows.

I study his face, each small movement of muscles he is not aware of, shadows left by years, and I feel my own face stir under his gaze. We watch and listen, look for signs of recognition, of trust. We have forgotten how to speak and neither one of us remembers how to move or touch. We stand there, in the semi-darkness of my living room like two mirrors facing each other, repeating each other's reflection endlessly as minutes, hours pass by. Tides roll over the earth and withdraw again, the moon waxes and wanes, the wolf comes and goes in me, but I don't notice. The world spins, but we remain, the grey dusk remains, and the silence remains.

His voice is hoarse and low when he finally breaks the silence, centuries, ages later.

"How's... everything, Moony?"

Only Sirius can speak such a sentence after fourteen dark years. The impossible has come to happen. The wish I never had the courage to shape into a thought has come true, and he is not a traitor after all. I have pressed my palm every night onto the cool sheet next to me, to the spot where he should have been resting, and now he comes and asks me how's everything. Only Sirius can say that. It breaks the moment and time swallows us back into its normal flow.

I say the only thing I can. I don't blame, I don't even ask, only state the obvious, and I find myself wondering how I manage to sound just like a teacher who matter-of-factly corrects a mistake in a homework.

"I could have saved you, Sirius. If you had told me before clearing off."

The defiance I remember so well from the school years flashes in his stare but it fades into something that resembles sadness. He is quiet, as if choosing his words carefully before he replies:

"I thought I could do it on my own."

A sudden warmth prickles into me, spreads almost as far as a smile. Of course he thought he could do it on his own. He thought he could do anything. He could have tamed the Dark Lord on his own, fixed all the wrongs of the world, even returned from beyond death. He was twenty-two, he had a flying motorbike and black hair floating in the wind and a lover who would have lived, died and killed for him. He was Sirius Black and the world belonged to him.

His pale face that has grown sharp and bony looks exhausted as he continues:

"Besides, I was sort of upset."

He pauses and a storm sweeps over his face as if he is trying to organise his thought, remember what is important. His words come out in more of a growl than a human voice.

"The Triwizard Tournament was a trap. He tried to help Voldemort kill Harry."

"Wormt... Peter?"

Suddenly the old nickname doesn't seem right anymore, there is too much familiarity, too many good memories linked with it. It cannot be used of Peter whose betrayal has coloured all those memories painful, destroyed from us what could have been. Sirius wants to kill him. I want to kill him. We both know it will not bring anyone back, nor turn the time's flow, nor change anything, but the urge to kill lives in us as an instinct, a blood-thirst that cannot be denied. It is a raw and primitive impulse – kill the enemy, protect yourself and your pack.

Sirius replies my unspoken question, my worried expression:

"Harry's fine. I'll tell you all about it later."

"I wish you'd told me about James and Lily that night."

I don't know why I say it. What good does it do now, who does it help anymore? But the words are spoken, I cannot undo them with a spell.

His face quivers and I know he understands what I mean. Yes, that night. It returned in my dreams all over again, and I wished for those dreams because they gave him back and was afraid of those dreams because they took him away from me again. In those dreams I knew, I knew all the time. He pushed me against the wall and I knew he had just helped to murder James and Lily; his hands were moving on my skin and I knew he would leave and never come back; he entered my body and I knew it would be the last time. And still I let it all happen, because without his touch it would have been even worse.

Now I see on his face that while I have fought my dreams, he has lain awake, stayed awake for years thinking of that night, lived through every day with the knowledge I didn't know the truth.

The wrongfulness of it all flows upon us like chilled water, surrounding and enveloping us.

Like a drowning man he reaches his hand out for me and I realise it is trembling, and I'm trembling. His fingertips are moving on my face, tracing the lines there are too many of, tracing the outlines of my lips that have lost their softness, pushing into my hair that is greyer than that of most people my age. I close my eyes and swallow, holding back whatever wants to break free from inside me.

I grab his wrist and guide his fingertips to my lips. He gasps and trembles, leans in against me and buries his head into my neck, below my ear. I feel his breath concentrate on my skin and his heartbeats against my own chest as his arms clutch my body. He is whispering my name, Remus, Remus, and slowly, uncertainly our faces turn towards each other, carefully, cautiously our mouths draw closer.

The kiss fumbles and searches, our lips are moving lightly, getting used to each other, wondering about the taste and touch that is new yet is not. So many dreams and fantasies of this moment, and still I haven't been able to imagine everything, anything. Not the way I touch him unhurriedly, nor the way he sucks gently at my lower lip, nor the way the salty tears flow onto my tongue where he can taste them too. I'm not sure which one of us is crying.

Nor have I been able to imagine the way he suddenly smiles like only Sirius can, my Sirius.

I'm holding him and thinking that maybe everything can still be right, everything at all. His smile lures a smile out of me too, and the caress of his fingers in the hair of my neck is warm. Little by little the years melt away, never again completely, but for a moment, for an hour, for a day. Outside the grey evening is dissolving into the blue night, the room is quiet in semi-darkness, the world is turning and he is in my arms.

That night I touch him as if it was the first time.