Trust by Minnow
Summary: Sometimes, it's better to forget than to remember.
Disclaimer: These characters belong to J.K. Rowling and various publishers and agencies. That they exist outside the Harry Potter books is a tribute to Rowling's imagination, not to mine.
For S-Star, who introduced me to slash. Thanks for yet another displacement activity!
Trust
He has always heard that the Dementors of Azkaban strip you of all your memories. A few years into his life sentence, he would welcome oblivion. Never again to see James and Lily's bodies, never again to stand by helpless while Peter disappears down that sewer...
The worst memories are the best ones, though, the best memories complete with insight into how he, Sirius Black, has completely screwed up his own life and the lives of all his former Hogwarts friends. He excludes Peter from this: Peter screwed up enough on his own.
Mainly, he sees the face that he has always considered the most beautiful face in the world. Here's Remus in fifth year, the year they started being more than friends, smiling up him in perfect love and trust; golden Remus, with his shyness, his depths, his thoughtfulness.
No doubt, Sirius thinks, his memories glow far brighter than the reality. No doubt, to everyone else, Remus was a perfectly ordinary boy with brown hair and eyes. It doesn't matter, though, because when Sirius is remembering the good times, he remembers the Remus of late-night fumblings, and morning kisses, and furtive glances, his private Remus, who shines with the direct light of the sun.
Sirius relives the nights of the full moon, running once again with the wolf, with Prongs and Wormtail, through the woods around Hogsmeade. He relives the sweetness of one particular Sunday by the lake, hidden with Remus in the cove that nobody else, not even the other two marauders, has ever mapped. He remembers Halloweens, the last day at school. A wedding and a christening. And he remembers, God, how he remembers, a flat in Muggle London with no furniture except a big bed and a sofa.
He remembers love and laughter and pleasure so great he thinks yet again that you could die of pleasure like this, and seeing his own happiness reflected back at him from those innocent eyes in a young, smooth face; the beautiful face; Remus's face.
And then, he is powerless to stop everything changing. How can this have happened? How can that delicate, open face have seemed, even for a second, like the face of a spy? How can he have ceased to trust the person he loves more than anyone else on earth?
To the end of his days, the memories will make him squirm; the images of his love, his soul-mate, his Moony, juxtaposed against the ugly, dark creature that Sirius, for some reason lost forever, has imagined his lover to be. Oh, yes, Remus has always been secretive, there is that, but Remus has never kept secrets that would hurt anyone but himself.
And there's also the worst memory of all, the moment at Godric's Hollow when he not only realises that Peter was the spy, but what that means, that Moony has never, ever considered, even for one second, turning away from the light.
Sirius remembers Hagrid flying away with Harry on his once treasured motorbike, which will never mean anything again to him, anything at all. Running all the way home to cling to Moony and tell him what has happened, and finding the flat cold and empty, and Moony gone. Gone somewhere that Sirius doesn't even know about, because he has been avoiding talking to Remus. But he remembers the last time he saw him, gaunt and anxious, his eyes veiled, his mouth twisted with misery. All Sirius's fault, and he will never understand how this estrangement could possibly have come about. How he could have caused it to come about.
Each time he remembers Remus glancing anxiously at him from across the room –whenever did they start keeping such distances, such Alaskas of space away from each other? – Sirius loses control, and screams like the other prisoners, screams out for the Dementors to come and wipe his memories, to kiss him if need be, so he doesn't ever have to feel such loss and pain again.
'If I ever find you again, Re, if ever I get another chance...I'll deserve everything you throw at me. I'll deserve it if you refuse to believe me, if you hand me over to the Dementors, if you let them take my soul.'
In the best of all possible universes, the one he cannot envisage at all until after he has escaped from Azkaban, he finds Moony again. And Moony believes him, forgives him and still loves him.
But no matter how kindly Remus might judge him for his disloyalty, and he can never stop agonising about this, Sirius cannot feel any absolution, because there is none; not in this life, and possibly not in the next.