December 7th, 1981: Remus Lupin

This time, when the letter comes, Remus doesn't avoid it: he rips it open right away, skims the thing, and swallows the lump in his throat. This time, two things in the letter are different.

For one thing, Sirius isn't calling him "Moony" anymore. For the other, he writes that if he doesn't hear back, he won't try to contact Remus again.

There's a lot to unpack in those couple of sentences, not because they're full of hidden meanings—Sirius is nothing if not direct—but because Remus has no idea how he feels about any of it. On the one hand, he never wants to see Sirius ever again, but on the other…

"Sirius again?" Emmeline asks carefully. She's sitting across from Remus at the kitchen table, frowning—not that she smiles much these days to begin with, of course.

"Yeah," says Remus, crumpling the thing up.

"He says he's sorry again?"

"Yeah, and, uh—he says he'll back off."

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes," says Remus, not totally sure whether he means it. "What about yours?" he adds, indicating the letter Emmeline's holding that arrived for her tonight—though, notably, it came in the Muggle mail rather than by owl.

"It's from Peter's mum. She hasn't heard from him in a while and is starting to get worried."

He smiles. "You win."

"It isn't a competition, Remus."

"Still—you win. Are you going to tell her?"

"That he was working with Death Eaters? How can I not?"

Peter's disappearance never got reported, so he hasn't been officially declared missing. As much as the Order would like to report him as an accomplice to the Death Eaters and put the Auror Office on the lookout for him, they can't exactly turn him in without exposing themselves all as vigilantes, and that could take down the entire Order. It surprised Remus at first that the Ministry didn't get worried when Peter stopped showing up for work, but when Em asked one of Peter's coworkers from the Department of Magical Games and Sports about it, he just said that a barn owl arrived with Peter's resignation after he'd missed work the previous day. Remus supposes that, with that cleared, the only other people who saw Peter every day to notice he was gone would be the Order, and the Order, of course, already knew exactly what had happened.

He wonders when and where Peter stopped off and took the time to write to his boss. Did he change right back into Wormtail once it was taken care of? Has he been living in a gutter feeding off of acorns and rotted apple cores, or did he go crawling back to the Death Eaters to see how long he'd last before Voldemort used Legilimency to discover that Peter could have handed him the Potters, but didn't?

Sure, Peter's parents deserve to know what happened to their son—it's not like the Order would be able to hide from them much longer the fact that he's gone, now that they're apparently looking for him—but Remus doesn't envy Emmeline the job of explaining to them that Peter was a vigilante fighting a war against the kind of evil that gets people like his parents killed and that he got caught spying for the other side. As if she knows what he's thinking, Emmeline says, "I'll run interference with Sirius if you'll write back to Mrs. Pettigrew," and she's smiling too now, albeit sadly.

"Running interference with Sirius would be a lot easier if I knew what I wanted from him," replies Remus.

"So you don't want him to back off? Liar."

She's teasing, but Remus still feels a little defensive in response. "I'm still in love with him, and I just found out the reason we haven't been speaking all this time is that he thought I was a spy for Voldemort. How do you think I feel? Do you know? Because I definitely don't know."

"Maybe you should just talk to him," Em suggests, but she doesn't look like she's trying too hard to convince him.

Yeah, because you didn't take two years to confront him when you were the one he'd hurt, he wants to retort, but he doesn't. It would be mean, it would make their joint living arrangement awkward, and he doesn't really feel enough emotion behind it to justify it.

Instead, he says, "Sometimes I think all any of us do is talk. You know what I mean? Maybe not in the Order—there's plenty of action there—but in our personal lives, all any of us do is hurt each other using words alone. I'm tired of talking. If we're not going to make up, we should just stop talking to each other, and I don't see us making up."

"What, no hot, illicit gay sex in McGonagall's old living quarters?" says Emmeline, grinning. "Because you know that's where he's sleeping nowadays."

"God, no," Remus says with a laugh. "If we're going to be having any kind of hot, illicit gay sex—and I'm not saying that we are—we're having it here. I'll give you a heads up; you can go stay with Alice and Frank for the night. You've been spending more time with her lately, haven't you?"

"Well, maybe not Alice and Frank," says Emmeline, looking down. "As far as I know, they're still fighting, which might get awkward if I were to go over there with the both of them."

"Still? Alice isn't really the type to get into fights with anybody, least of all Frank."

"She may not be very shouty, but that's not to say she's always gotten along with everybody. Remember—hell—any time there was a hint of conflict between her and anybody else? What did Alice do?"

"She ran away," says Remus. "Yeah, fair point. Tell her I say hi, okay? We should have her over sometime soon."

Emmeline nods. She picks up her and Remus's empty plates and carries them to the sink, saying over her shoulder, "You know, I think Alice gets really lonely—I think that's why she's been hanging around me lately, because she gets lonely and she thinks I need somebody, because of Peter, and because I have a… history."

"Do you need somebody?"

"Well, yes," Em admits, "but I think she might need me more than I need her. Do you want any of this ice cream, or am I just going to have to eat your share of the pint?"

"I'll have some," Remus says. "I'll get the caramel sauce."

Living with Emmeline is pretty laid back, Remus reflects as they sprawl out in the living room with their ice cream, him with a book in hand and her taking bites in between attempts to form chords on Peter's old guitar. (It worries him a little that she's been playing it—she's going to have to accept what Peter is and move on eventually, and putting off that ugly day isn't going to do her any favors—but he doesn't say anything about it. If allowing herself to feel closer to him means she can hold on for another day, it's not really his place to tell her not to.)

She doesn't seem depressed again, but of course she didn't seem particularly depressed before everything that went down in sixth year, either. But it's not like she's igniting mood swing drama all over the flat—she's perfectly pleasant to talk to, makes good company, and seems more than ever like the outgoing, sarcastic, but friendly Emmeline whom Remus met in first year. That's not to say she hasn't changed a lot over the years—they all have—but she seems more like a person and less like the shell she became for years after her parents were murdered.

He tries valiantly to make progress on his novel, but his thoughts are—where else?—stuck on Sirius. It's not exactly that Remus can't forgive Sirius for thinking he was the spy: the fact alone that it turned out to be Peter is proof that people can shock you, that there was no clear spy and anybody was fair game. But it still hurts. Besides, how can they have any kind of anything built on trust if the first suspect Sirius's brain latches onto in situations like this is Remus?

And yet—it's not like Remus has moved on. (He's in absolutely no position to judge Emmeline for not letting go of Peter when he's been hung up on Sirius for all these years.) The idea that they could get back to something, even if it's just friendship, after how intensely they at least used to love each other feels too tempting to pass up.

"Should I do it?" Remus bursts finally, and Em slaps a hand over the strings of the guitar to silence it. "Should I see him?"

"You want my honest opinion?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."

She sets the guitar aside and takes another spoonful of ice cream. "I think Sirius is a good bloke. He's talented—charming—funny—affectionate—loyal. He's also stubborn, brash, defensive, and careless, and he does hurtful things without thinking, and he doesn't like to admit when he's wrong, and yet here he is, admitting he was wrong. He cares about you, Remus. If you care about him, too, I think you owe it to yourself to find out if you can find a way back into each other's lives. I think I was an idiot to have gotten angry enough to let him go when it was me."

"So what you're saying is that I'm an idiot," says Remus, snickering.

"What I'm saying is that you love each other. Do you know how rare that is? There are so many couples that can't stand each other, not really."

Remus snorts. "I know I love him, but he… I mean, we were never really, properly together. We never had our chance. You know that."

"Yeah, but he knows you wanted that, doesn't he? And he still keeps trying to get close to you," Emmeline points out. "Would he really do that if he knew he didn't want to give you the thing he knows you want?"

"Who says I still want that?"

Emmeline just raises her eyebrows at him.

Remus ducks his head. "And anyway, what if we never get past what he thought I was? What if it festers and we grow to hate each other?"

"Then you don't get past it," Em reasons, "and you move on. But you don't know yet whether that's going to happen. Don't you want to find out if you have a chance?"

It keeps bugging him through the rest of the night, even after he sets aside his novel and tries to focus on Emmeline, refilling both their ice creams periodically as he gives her unrefined feedback on her guitar playing (not being a musician himself). Finally, at half past midnight, when Em finally retires to bed, he takes out a sheaf of parchment, an ink pot, and a quill.

I'll bring you an early dinner at the castle on Saturday evening before the Order meeting. Don't get excited. It doesn't have to mean anything. It's just dinner. -R

xx

The wait from Monday night to Saturday evening feels exceptionally long when he thinks about Sirius, but exceptionally short when he remembers that the full moon is on Friday. He considers signing up for extra orb duty every night just to help pass the time, but then he remembers that Sirius is already on orb duty this week, and he obviously decides against it. Feeling a little desperate, he asks James if he and Lily would like a hand with Harry at their house in the evenings (or technically, in Canada, the mornings) this week. James immediately and gratefully accepts, and Remus can see why—it's got to be exhausting to be around a one-year-old child every minute of every day, with no break to be around adults instead for a change.

"This is great," James says on Wednesday as Remus is playing finger puppets with Harry, who is clapping his hands delightedly. "Don't make a habit of helping, or we could get greedy."

"Oh, it's no problem," says Remus. He slides a fox puppet off of his left pinky, shrinks it a bit with his wand, and wriggles it onto one of Harry's forefingers. "How's the countercurse coming along, Lily?"

He's talking, of course, about Lily's efforts to create a countercurse to the spell the Death Eaters used on Frank the other day—Organum Sanguinem. Spell-writing is all about tapping into the sort of "source" of magic, identifying language that will evoke the exact magic you want to occur and then tying that language to a word and wand movement that can be used subsequently to anyone wanting to access the source in the future. There's a lot of Latin involved—not all spell-writing requires Latin, but it's the basis of most spells developed in Western Europe, and almost certainly is the basis of Organum Sanguinem. They've all got experience writing spells—the boys in particular did a lot of it when modifying existing spells for prank purposes back at Hogwarts, and Lily and others have developed countercurses before—but countercurses are notoriously tricky when you're not very familiar with the original curse.

"Slowly," groans Lily. "What we really need is to study the effects of it. I need to know what they are precisely to devise a countercurse, and we need that to incorporate it into the orb and, eventually, to test whether the orb is working, once we think we've got it down. But we can't do any of that safely unless we already know what it is we're trying to develop in the first place."

"You look like you could use some time away," says Remus, smiling. "Why don't you two get out of here for a couple of hours, get brunch or something? I've got this."

Distracted by Harry, he barely notices James and Lily looking at each other significantly. "If you don't mind," Lily says, "we might duck out to do some research. We just sort of up and took off for Canada without looking into its magical institutions at all—we've been meaning to find out more about their magical government and villages and schools and everything. Sirius did a bit of reading about it before we moved, but we wanted to scope some places out for ourselves—maybe apply for some jobs. Low-profile ones, of course, but—jobs."

"He poked into some werewolf laws, too," says James. "Apparently, Canada isn't as restrictive as Britain is about werewolves working. Non-government jobs don't even require you to disclose your status. If you wanted…?"

"Tired of the free ride you've been giving me?" teases Remus, smiling.

"You said yourself you were getting bored."

"I mean, a job would be nice," Remus says wistfully. "But to leave Britain? Not that it can't be done—you've done it, obviously—"

"You could always commute," says Lily. "Apparate back and forth every day. You'd be on a weird sleep schedule, but it would be doable."

"Yeah, that's true."

"Why don't you come with me?" Lily adds. "We can both pick up some applications. James can stay and watch Harry."

"Gee, thanks," says James with a grin.

So Remus and Lily take off, heading first for the Wizarding Ministry. Lily politely inquires into any job openings at the front desk and picks up a small stack of applications. It's nothing like the International Magical Cooperation jobs she was interested in during Hogwarts—there's an opening here for an Obliviator, an opening there for a Floo Network regulator—"but it's better than nothing," Lily says decidedly, tucking the papers into her bag as they set off to find some lunch.

Lily says there's a shopping neighborhood called Emosora that's sort of akin to Diagon Alley, full to the brim with wizarding shops, though unlike Diagon Alley, it's buried in the wilderness rather than tucked away in plain sight. However, when they try to Apparate there, they miss the mark by a couple hundred kilometers and end up wandering around the woods, staring at the tattered map that Lily pulls out of her bag. By the time they wind up in the right place, it's around two o'clock in the afternoon Vancouver time, and Remus is famished. There's a sprawling restaurant called Taderra's about halfway down the main road, and they duck inside and get themselves a booth, Remus pulling huge sips of water from his glass as if it'll resolve his hunger.

"I suppose if nothing pans out here that I could always look for a job in Muggle Britain," he says with a sigh after they've ordered their food—pasta for Remus and beef sliders for Lily. "I would have done sooner, but we don't have Muggle educations—I'd only really be qualified to work in a shop somewhere, and even there, it might be hard to hide who I am from my coworkers. Plus, I don't exist, according to Muggle records."

"You'll find something," Lily assures him. "You did great on your N.E.W.T.s—there's got to be people out there who would be delighted to have you."

"Even though I have about a three and a half-year gap since graduation with no employment history? They'll probably think I've forgotten all my skills by now or that there's a very good reason no one in Britain would take me that they just don't know about."

"It's worth trying, isn't it? You can't know that for sure."

"I guess," says Remus. "Hey, did Sirius happen to look into where the nearest wizarding hospital is to you? I'm sure they'd be happy to take you after your stint at St. Mungo's, especially since the Ministry openings aren't great."

"The only problem with that is that I can't put down anyone from St. Mungo's as a reference," says Lily. "Fidelius Charm and all. I might be able to find a loophole if I don't tell St. Mungo's where I'm applying and just ask for a generic letter that I can give out, but it still looks fishy."

"Yeah, that's not ideal," Remus concedes.

"At least we've got plenty of savings to go between the three of us."

"Yeah, thank you again for—"

"Don't mention it. Really," Lily insists. That's when their food arrives, so he doesn't push it, digging into his pasta primavera with relish.

Now Remus has a stack of job applications from around Emosora to keep him occupied in the mornings before he leaves for long evenings with James, Lily, and Harry. At home, Emmeline helps him figure out how to word some of his responses to the short-answer questions; she works in a shop herself and assures him that she's learned enough about customer service to know what employers are looking for. The weekend keeps creeping closer and he keeps swallowing his daily dose of Wolfsbane Potion until finally, finally, his transformation comes and goes (Emmeline sits down with him through it), and it's four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, when he's due at Sirius's quarters in Hogwarts any second.

He finds himself replaying every memory he's had of Sirius from the last few years obsessively in his mind, trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong—how Sirius feels about him—when Sirius started to believe that Remus was the spy. He's been in love with Sirius for as long as he can remember understanding what love is—drive himself crazy asking himself whether Sirius was even aware of some of the signals he was giving—but it wasn't until he was poisoned in seventh year that Sirius started to act like maybe, maybe, he recognized and shared Remus's feelings. That's one of the reasons it hurts so much that Sirius believed what he did about Remus: he took this awful, tragic, beautiful trauma that seemed to bond them together in the moment and twisted it until it accused Remus of something underhanded, something deceptive, something evil.

They danced around it until the night of Lily and James's wedding, when they got a little drunk—okay, a lot drunk—and slept together at Sirius's flat afterward. He'd thought that maybe, finally, they were on the precipice of becoming something real… but the next day, he woke up alone, and Sirius's side of the bed was cold, and when Remus padded out into the kitchen for breakfast, Sirius couldn't even look him in the eye.

So Remus assumed the natural thing: that he'd disgusted Sirius, who wasn't ready now or maybe ever to accept the idea that he might not be straight. They didn't talk about it, but he could see the way Sirius looked at him sometimes, like Remus had shattered him with his perversions, and Remus—he was supposed to move in with Sirius when Lily moved out, but he didn't think he could stand to live with the way Sirius kept looking at him, so he moved in with Benjy instead, leaving Mary to set Sirius up with Lockhart.

When Sirius started talking to him again, inviting him over, trying to worm his way back into Remus's life, he didn't give any inclination that his intentions were anything platonic: that he wanted anything more than to pretend like it hadn't happened and get back to being the friends they used to be. But Remus couldn't go back. He couldn't go back, and he couldn't stand knowing what he'd lost, and he stayed as far away from Sirius as he could. And apparently—apparently, that was enough to convince Sirius that Remus was acting strangely because he was afraid he'd be outed as a spy for Voldemort.

Get a grip, he tells himself. Like he told Sirius in his letter, it's just dinner: it doesn't have to mean anything.

The large paper bag with grub from The Leaky Cauldron comes out a little charred on the other side when he Flooes into Sirius's living quarters at Hogwarts, but Sirius doesn't seem to mind. His smile isn't broad, and he looks—nervous, even?—but he is still smiling, and it puts Remus a little bit at ease, like maybe they can have a nice night without any drama, for once in their lives. "I got burgers," he says helplessly, even though they've already spread the food out on the floor and Sirius has already taken stock of what's there.

"Thanks," Sirius replies. There's a great big pause, and then Remus seizes a burger and stuffs in a bite.

They eat in silence for a few minutes, and then Sirius asks how babysitting duty went this week. Remus doesn't ask him where he heard about what he's been up to—from James, probably. It's not like Remus has ever forgotten that, with all the mutual friends they have, there isn't any privacy to be found here.

They talk for a few minutes about funny things Harry and Neville have done around them recently, and then there's a big pause. Remus tries to laugh, but it sounds a little like he's choking. "Mate, you sleep in McGonagall's old bed now," he says to fill the silence.

Sirius grins. "Tell me about it. I still can't take a shower in the bathroom in here without feeling funky."

An image pops unbidden into Remus's head of the two of them banging, both of them snickering about how weird it is, in the bedroom he assumes is through the door to his left. He ignores it. "So are we, like, breaking a rule by me coming over here? I never saw any of the professors have guests in the castle the whole time I was here."

"As far as I can tell, nobody's going to know the difference as long as you don't leave these quarters, so what does it matter?"

"So I guess that means we won't be sneaking down to the kitchens after hours like old times," says Remus.

"Well," Sirius says, and he gets up from the table to rummage through items on top of the desk opposite them. He emerges with a silky, silvery fabric that Remus recognizes all too well.

"James's Invisibility Cloak?"

"He'd lent it to Dumbledore for a while, but apparently Dumbledore gave it back recently, and now it's mine, for now. I think James felt like it was the right thing to have it back at Hogwarts. I've been using it to—uh—" Sirius falters here "—to try and spy on McGonagall's conversations with Dumbledore. He still comes back here to see her in the Head's office and talk to her about Order business sometimes, you know. But I haven't learned anything valuable. It's mostly her giving reports to him, not the other way around."

"Have you got any idea what he's doing on his leave of absence?" Remus asks. "It all happened so suddenly, and as far as I know, he hasn't told anybody why he's gone."

"I think he's, uh… well, to be honest, I don't know what he's doing, but I know why he gave me this job. There's some memory of Slughorn's that he needs to get, for some reason, and he couldn't do it, and he thought I might be able to charm my way into getting it. I don't know what it's about, and I'm not supposed to stick it in a Pensieve before I deliver it to Dumbledore, but you can bet your life I'm going to look at it—if I ever get it, that is, which is looking unlikely at this point. I have blown so many Galleons on crystallized pineapple by now—I've gone to Slug Club parties to schmooze with him and the students—and I'm no closer to getting it than I was almost two months ago."

Remus doesn't answer right away, and Sirius looks a little like he's starting to regret sharing all that. "You're very, uh… quiet."

"Sorry. I just—I'm surprised you wanted me to know. We're not exactly…"

"Yeah," Sirius admits. "Yeah, but I want to get back there. I was wrong, Remus, and I… I should have been there last night, you know, for the full moon."

This catches Remus off guard: Sirius hasn't come over for the full moon in months and months. "It's cool," he says uneasily. "Em was there."

"Yeah, but I still track the lunar cycle. I always have. I knew when it was, and I wanted to be there, but—I was afraid I'd scare you off if I told you I wanted to come. I should have just asked you. It was stupid."

"It's not stupid," says Remus. Suddenly, he has to carefully control his breathing so as not to speed it up. "I—would have said yes—if you'd asked to come. I think I would have liked that."

"Can—can I come next month instead? Emmeline knows about the Animagus forms now—everyone does—you know this—so I can be Padfoot and everything, if you want."

"Yeah," says Remus breathlessly, and then he adds, "Padfoot—" at the same time as Sirius says, "Remus—"

They both kind of laugh, but Sirius doesn't stop watching Remus, and Remus doesn't dare take his eyes off of Sirius. "I'm sorry," Sirius says.

Remus doesn't have the first clue what he's supposed to say to Sirius. How can it hurt Remus for Sirius to act like all he wants is friendship when his stomach turns over at the idea of being intimate with somebody who suspected Remus of what Sirius suspected him? So in lieu of giving Sirius an actual answer, he just sucks in a breath and says, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I hear you. We're not good yet, but I hear you."

If Remus's life were a romance novel, he'd take a deep breath and dive, latching onto Sirius until he couldn't breathe through the kisses, until all robes were off and Sirius's heartbeat slammed a tattoo into Remus's chest. If Remus's life were a romance novel, all would be forgiven. Remus's life is not a romance novel, but when Sirius breaks out into a beam, Remus almost forgets how this story has to go.

"We should be getting to the meeting," he says instead, catching himself. "We're going to be late if we dawdle any longer."

Later—when they're at the meeting, listening to Arthur and Molly's introductions, Mary's recruitment report, Alice and Frank and Doc's Auror update—Sirius's right hand snakes out of his lap and brushes against Remus's left. He doesn't grab it. Not yet. But he feels the warmth of Sirius's fingertips, and he sighs.