Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money from this.
Warning: This is a slash story about Sirius and James, but it is Remus-centric. It contains very dark themes, which I am not specifying here, as the story works by implication and suggestion. If you would like to know the exact issues which this fic contains, please email me at oscura at dsl dot pipex dot com.
To thee the reed is as the oak
Did you try to put him back together with your own hands? I think I remember how you would trace his skin, every cold, white inch of it, at night. Many were the nights when neither of you were there, the secret nights – even I didn't know where you were. The whole thing was hidden. I don't suppose you ever wondered why things got so quiet, every time you came back in, whether apart or together, whether silent or whispering. It was because every time we thought you might be going to tell us. After you've been alone with your demon as dawn breaks, and felt your skin slippery with the blood you tore out of yourself, then tell me I wouldn't understand how he was breaking, how even with you in it – you're only one man, and then you were even less – the world was what he couldn't bear. I thought I remembered crying, one night, but it can't have happened like that, you were both too good at magic, surely there would have been a charm to lock you both up into a little bell of shy silence? Unless you wanted me to help you, unless you realised then that he was breaking, unless you called me, by not waving your wand.
What did it feel like on your fingers? I don't know, I wasn't there, I never knew what happened, you never told me, and he never told anyone, so I don't know how you knew. He spoke too much in company, too little, when we were alone. In the morning he wasn't there, you weren't there, everyone noticed, usually the two of you were so good at pretending. Everything was wrong. You were away for a month, I never saw one stain on you, and you didn't talk about him, and she was so gentle with you, so gentle. You did everything to forget. I imagined that you tried to reconstruct something already lost, you tried to teach him about living, and then you tried to put him back together, with your own hands.
Do you have to ask? I will keep your secrets. I will hold your home inside me, I will hold your memories of him, because when you are safely in that house you can't remember him at all, you dare not feel it on your hands again.
FIN
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