Previously in the Darklyverse: Sirius tried to reconcile with Remus. Frank filed for divorce from Alice. Upon Millicent Bagnold's death, Albert Runcorn replaced Barty Crouch Sr. as interim Minister when Crouch turned in his own son as a Death Eater after they tried to blackmail him with this information. Dumbledore took a leave of absence and tasked Sirius, who took over as Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts, with retrieving Slughorn's memory.

xx

February 6th, 1982: Sirius Black

"Come here for the full moon on Monday."

Remus stares blankly back at him. "Are you mental? With the students here and everything?"

"We'll be in my quarters the whole time. No one will even know you're here. Lily's still brewing you Wolfsbane Potion to take a week out of every month, anyway, so it's not like you're going to be a threat to anybody."

"But—why can't you just come to my flat like the last two months? Em and Alice will be there with me at home, of course."

"So now you're worried about what it's going to look like?" Sirius cocks an eyebrow, and Remus blushes a little.

"I mean, we're not together anymore, and…"

"And you're worried how it's going to look," Sirius repeats. "Just tell them you're coming over, and then come over. It's not like anything's going to happen. Bestiality isn't my thing, and it isn't Padfoot's, either."

Remus rolls his eyes, but he doesn't look convinced, and can Sirius blame him? He can't—because he can cry platonic all he wants, but the last two months have been… intense, maybe not physically, but certainly emotionally.

It's not that he's seen Remus all that often, because he hasn't. They've sat together at Order meetings, and Remus snuck into Sirius's Hogwarts quarters a couple of times for dinner, and one time in January, Sirius spent the night at Remus and Emmeline and Alice's flat in Edinburgh when it wasn't a full moon. Even then, he hung mostly around Emmeline, who ribbed him for leaving her all alone at Scrivenshaft's and subjected him to a lot of bad guitar playing while Remus helped Alice move over the last of her stuff from her old place with Frank and Neville. Before he knew it, it was one o'clock in the morning, and Alice and Emmeline were heading back to bed in their room. Not long after, Remus left Sirius alone in the living room, where Sirius slept on the couch.

But sometimes he looks at Remus, or their elbows brush together, or Remus recounts something funny that somebody told him during the time that he and Sirius weren't really speaking, and Sirius feels like he can't breathe. He wouldn't say that he even regrets the time that he and Remus were broken up, necessarily: he hadn't been single since pretty much early puberty, and he thinks it probably did him good, the time spent focusing on himself and what he wanted out of life (even if it was just Scrivenshaft's shifts and Order raids and butterbeer with James and Lily on the weekends). He's not so concerned anymore with forcing one of the complicated, broken relationships he's been in to work, as if without it, he can't be happy.

He has been happy. Sort of. But he's also missed his best mate, even more so now that Marlene is dead and Peter is the villain, now that he feels like he's going to go out of his mind if he loses one more person close to him. Even if Remus is somebody he lost unequivocally a long time ago, he just needs to believe the impossible: that the irreparable is reparable.

And so here he is, one step away from begging that Remus come to Hogwarts for his next full moon, as if tangling his fingers in Remus's fur while he's falling asleep without anyone around to watch will undo all the months he spent believing Remus was the spy, sealing their separate fates. Sirius can live without Remus—he did it for months, and he could do it again—but he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to do it anymore. Now that he knows Remus is safe…

"Come here," Sirius presses. "The girls know that I'm an Animagus now. Tell them we'll be running in the Forbidden Forest together like we used to, except this time, you'll have your mind."

"Just like we used to? Prongs obviously can't come, and Wo—uh, Peter…"

"We don't need Peter," says Sirius harshly, even though he feels a little sick inside. "And Prongs will understand. He's been Apparating off to the Canadian wilderness to transform out there when he's supposed to be sleeping."

"Really?" says Remus with interest, seeming to momentarily forget about the thing making him so goddamn angsty. "Does Lily know about this?"

"Mate, it was Lily's idea," Sirius says smugly. "She's just as happy to be free of that cottage as he is. She knows what it means to him to be able to stretch his legs."

"I'm glad Canada is working out," says Remus. "I keep waiting for the day that Mary and Cattermole have to follow them out there. How long do you think Muggle-borns have to stay in Britain before things explode?"

"Runcorn won't go that far," says Sirius dismissively. "Not when he's still only the interim Minister. The special election is still a month away."

Remus smiles wryly. "And in a month, Runcorn's going to win. Crouch may be on the ballot now, but he's losing in the polls. People don't have a lot of places to turn right now. If people start to trust Runcorn—and they will, because he's the figurehead who's been handed to them to listen to—and he starts telling them that Muggles and Muggle-borns are their enemies—"

"But he won't."

Remus insists, "But he will. Sooner or later, Voldemort is going to use that to his advantage. He's too power-hungry to lead a quiet life of immortality in the shadows. He doesn't just want to live—he wants to dominate."

"So, then, what's the plan?" says Sirius.

Remus furrows his eyebrows. "I think anyone who doesn't totally submit their allegiance to Runcorn is going to become a target, and I think that submitting your allegiance to Runcorn is going to be synonymous with submitting your allegiance to Voldemort, one way or another. That's as much as Mad-Eye has been able to gather, isn't it? Either whatever the hell Dumbledore is planning in his leave of absence pays off, and soon, or…"

"Yeah. About that," Sirius says.

Remus looks sympathetic for a moment, but then he sees the look on Sirius's face. "Wait. Are you telling me—you got the memory?"

"I got it," says Sirius, and he pulls a small glass vial out of his pocket. There's a silvery, fluid-like strand wriggling slightly inside of it. "And we're going to break into McGonagall's office and watch it."

"You devious man," says Remus, grinning from ear to ear. "McGonagall has orb duty tonight, doesn't she?"

"Yep," Sirius replies, popping his lips on the P.

It wasn't easy, getting the memory from Slughorn. Sirius tried buttering him up first, spent a solid month lounging around Slughorn's quarters in all his free time to eat crystallized pineapple and drink Madam Rosmerta's mead with the man, setting himself up as someone Slughorn can trust. When it finally came time that Sirius felt ready to broach the subject, he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be asking for—Dumbledore never gave him a straight answer as to what memory of Slughorn's he was supposed to be extracting—but he barely had to say the word Dumbledore for Slughorn to cotton on.

And then Slughorn shut down—iced Sirius out for weeks. It didn't matter how much he spent down his inheritance from his Uncle Alphard on gifts for Slughorn: the man refused to take any of them.

It wasn't until recently that it occurred to Sirius that flattery wasn't the only way to get through to Slughorn—and he went back to Slughorn's office with stories in tow about his dead brother, Regulus.

To be honest, Sirius doesn't know a lot about what happened to Regulus. His body turned up in the English Channel over two years ago, weeks after he disappeared, a month after Sirius received some kind of cryptic letter asking—no, begging—Sirius for a meeting. He still remembers its exact wording: Sirius, I was wrong. We need to meet. There's a lot you don't know that you need to know. Can you meet me next week? I'll send the time and place in a second letter tomorrow. But Sirius never wrote back, and the second letter never came.

His brother was killed because he saw what a monster Voldemort really was, because he tried to use his closeness to Voldemort against him to save innocents. Voldemort had the charm and the tools to lead a good, talented, promising Slytherin boy like Regulus astray and to destroy his future and the futures of so many more like him, the longer he remains in power—or so Sirius told Slughorn. He thinks the story was almost enough to win Slughorn over—but it wasn't until he let Slughorn in on the Fidelius Charm, when he told Slughorn that the reason he stopped hearing from Lily Potter was because Voldemort had forced her and her family into hiding, that Slughorn relented and reluctantly turned the memory over, begging Sirius not to think ill of him when he saw it.

"I don't need to see it," he had said. "I'm giving it directly to Dumbledore. Knowing that you and I can be a small part of carrying out his plans is enough."

He had lied.

"We'll have to use this, of course," he adds, pulling the folded-up Invisibility Cloak out of his pocket and dangling it in front of Remus. "Or else the portraits will all report back to McGonagall that we snuck in."

"And how exactly do you propose opening the door, closing the door, opening the cabinet that holds the Pensieve, adding the memory, jumping in with the Invisibility Cloak somehow still covering us, pulling ourselves back out, closing the cabinet door, opening the office door, closing—" He breaks off when he sees the second, much larger vial that Sirius pulls out of his pocket. "Is that—is that Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder?"

"It won't stop them from seeing that someone broke in, but it'll at least stop them from seeing what we do in there. It wasn't cheap to order enough of this to keep the office dark for a whole ten or twenty minutes, let me tell you. Good thing I'm on a Hogwarts salary now instead of paychecks from Scrivenshaft's. My inheritance from my uncle is almost gone, and importing this from Peru was—"

"Wait a minute. If you had to wait for this to ship from Peru first, then how long have you been sitting on this memory instead of giving it to Dumbledore to actually use?"

"Only a couple of weeks," Sirius says—quickly, as if that will stop Remus from absorbing the meaning of the words—"but—"

"You got the memory a couple of weeks ago? That was before Doc disappeared! When we get to the end of this thing, a couple of weeks could be the difference between multiple members of the Order, dozens of Muggles, living or dying—"

It's Sirius's turn to roll his eyes. "If you're telling me you don't care about looking at the memory—"

"Of course I want to see the memory," Remus huffs.

"Well, all right, then. It's probably going to be another couple of hours before McGonagall leaves for Prongs and Lily's house, so if you want to leave and then come back…"

"…No," says Remus haltingly. "I can stay. But I do have to pop back home for a moment to take my potion."

"Hurry back. I'll keep the bed warm," says Sirius without thinking.

He's expecting Remus to look horrified, but he doesn't. Instead, Remus's mouth falls open, and he just stares at Sirius for a second before shaking his head a little and grabbing a handful of Floo powder.