Previously in the Darklyverse: The Death Eaters threatened to execute Dumbledore if the Canadians did not return the vigilantes to their custody. The Canadian Ministry clamored for war and suspected the Order of being in cahoots with the Death Eaters. Sirius proposed to Remus, who thought they were moving too fast. Narcissa sent a disguised letter to Andromeda.
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January 17th, 1983: Remus Lupin
Remus breathes a little easier once Agatha is protected by a Fidelius Charm. As an Auror working on Pyrites's orders, she is the Order's only source of information into the inner workings of the Death Eaters; the Order stands to lose a lot if she gets caught spying and her boss tosses her in Azkaban or, worse, has her killed. She's the only reason they even know that their movements are being tracked—it's thanks to Agatha that they know to cast Homenum Revelio at the beginning of meetings or anytime they're going to talk about anything sensitive. They haven't managed to capture any of the Aurors who have been spying on them, but they have, more times than Remus likes to think about, identified Aurors' presences and scared them off before they could listen in on anything sensitive.
Sometimes, it's hard to believe that Wizarding Britain has bought its Ministry's story that the Order is lying about Death Eaters running the place—but then Remus remembers that, according to Agatha, even some Canadians are saying so when no one from the Order is around. He'd thought he'd heard it all when Lily and Reg reported that the Canadian Ministry wanted to go to war with Britain, but he supposes it makes sense. Canada is a big country: it's not like every single witch or wizard in it is going to hold the same opinion as each other about the war raging in Britain.
"It makes sense," Sirius says late that night when they're sitting pressed up against each other in bed. "People probably don't want to admit that they elected a Death Eater as their Minister. If only they'd kept Malfoy out of office when Runcorn got ousted for embezzling money, Voldemort dying would have been the end of it."
"If they'd elected Lily when they'd had the chance, none of this would have happened," sighs Remus.
Sirius smiles faintly. "You say that like you're not horrified with her—or me—for our politics."
He shrugs. "We used to be on the same side. Honestly, I still think of us on the same side, even if we disagree about the Order's role in all this. We all still want the same thing, and that's the Death Eaters out of power. We just… have very different opinions about what we should be doing to that end."
"Opinions we agreed not to talk about outside of Order business," Sirius reminds him.
"Hey, you're the one who brought it up."
"Okay, okay, sorry. You're right. Shutting up now."
"I can think of better ways for us to keep that mouth occupied," teases Remus with a grin.
A sly smile creeps onto Sirius's face. He leans in close, but not close enough to touch; Remus can feel Sirius's hot breath on his cheeks. Remus closes the gap, kisses him, but Sirius keeps the pace torturously slow—and then, just when Remus is starting to twist so he can get his hand between Sirius's legs, Sirius pulls away.
"Padfoot," Remus groans.
"I'm just respecting your boundaries," says Sirius in an infuriatingly self-satisfied voice. "You're the one who thinks we're not ready to get married."
Remus folds his arms. "Sirius, I don't want to be shitty and pressure you into sex if you don't want it, but it's also shitty of you to hinge sex on my agreeing to something I've made it abundantly clear I'm not comfortable with."
Sirius's smirk disappears. "You're right. I didn't think of it that way. Sorry."
"It's okay." To show that he's not really mad, Remus leans in again and pecks Sirius, slow and gentle, on the lips. "Look, I'm not saying no."
"You absolutely are saying no," says Sirius, though he looks a little heartened. "That's literally what happened. I asked you to marry me, and you said you weren't ready."
"Yet," Remus intones. "You're forgetting that, in the same conversation—before you proposed—I asked you to have kids with me someday."
"Yeah, someday," Sirius grumbles. "It's just—haven't we waited long enough to be together? Haven't we done our time?"
"Of course we have. That's why we're together—why we're going to stay together. But we… I've got to show myself that we can do it before I put on a ring. Historically, we haven't been the most stable couple in the world."
"But we love each other. Our love is epic, Moony. I love you more than…"
"Besides," Remus cuts in, "it's not the time. They're going to execute Dumbledore if we don't all hand ourselves over. It's hardly appropriate for us to—to hold his life in our hands while we—"
"McGonagall says Dumbledore was bent as a hatstand, and for Gellert Grindelwald, no less. If he could shag the darkest wizard until Voldemort while plotting their dominion over all of Muggle Britain, he can forgive us—two people who are both fighting against dark wizards, thank you very much—for making a little happiness of our own during wartime."
Remus smiles in spite of himself. "Point taken. I just… I know we agreed not to talk about it outside of meetings, but—"
"Here we go," mutters Sirius.
"Don't even," says Remus, rolling his eyes. "I make a valid point, and you know it."
"Your point is ancient history. Now that we know Canada basically wants to bomb the shit out of the British Ministry, none of us disagrees about what we're supposed to be doing anymore. We all think that we need to run interference on a bloody international war crime before we can even think about whether to put ourselves back on the front lines of the civil war that's still going on over there."
But Remus doesn't think it's quite so simple. Sirius may not have come right out and said it yet, but Remus is pretty sure that Sirius doesn't object to the idea of Canada interfering at all the way Remus does—that Sirius would be okay with World War III if Canada limited its involvement to targeting Death Eaters instead of the entire British Ministry. For his part, Remus doesn't know what to feel. He agrees that the Death Eaters need to be stopped, but Canada's attitude is exactly why he doesn't trust any foreign entities to step in and do it on Britain's behalf.
Plus, then there's the matter of whether the Order should be handing themselves over in order to save Dumbledore from execution. Remus doesn't even know if he trusts the Death Eaters to uphold their word and spare Dumbledore's life if they get what they want, but doesn't the Order owe it to him to try? It makes Remus sick thinking about how they're all sitting on their arses in a foreign country, talking about weddings, of all things, when, meanwhile, Dumbledore is rotting in a prison cell and about to lose his life because of what they apparently aren't willing to do for him.
"I'm just saying," he tells Sirius, "I'll feel a lot better about the whole marriage-and-kids thing if our relationship survives the end of this war."
"But we might not survive the end of this war," Sirius points out. "If this war is the only time I get to have with you—if I lose you before it's over—"
"Don't talk like that," Remus whispers.
"Remus, we have to talk like this. We don't know how long we get to have each other, not in this world. Don't you want to celebrate what we have while we still have it?"
"Not if rushing it means risking losing you altogether," Remus maintains.
Sirius sighs. "You're never going to lose me. We're not breaking up again, and, even if we did, we'd stay in each other's lives."
"You don't know that. There was a time—a long time—when you thought I was a Death Eater and we weren't in each other's lives."
"And I know now that I was being an idiot and completely wrong about you. I won't make the same mistake again."
What Remus doesn't say is that Sirius's mistrust in him isn't what Remus is worried about. If Sirius takes his politics too far—if he, Lily, and the others break off from the Order in order to carry out assassinations—will Remus be able to look at him the same way he does now, or will he start to believe Sirius is as morally inaccessible as Sirius thought he was when Sirius assumed he was a Death Eater?
He's overthinking it—he has to be. After all, Sirius did go on raids, two of them, right before they all got asylum. He probably had the intention to kill the Death Eaters he met on them, and Remus still loves him in spite of that, doesn't he? He even went with Sirius on the second one, just to make sure personally that Sirius would be okay. Remus may not agree with Sirius's methods, but he has complete confidence that Sirius is a good person—that he'd only ever do anything wrong because he was trying to save the world in the wrong ways. There's nothing hateful about that, is there?
Suddenly, he doesn't want to talk about it any longer. He doesn't even want to think about it any longer.
Sirius lets it go—for now—but he seems to be determined to woo Remus into changing his mind and accepting Sirius's proposal. The next morning, Sirius gets up early to prepare Remus breakfast in bed, waking him with a full helping of orange slices, bacon, and a Belgian waffle, complete with baked apple topping. He's even sprung to stick a few roses in a vase on top of the tray he brings into the bedroom. "Pads, I—you didn't have to do all this," stammers Remus, who frankly is still too out of it to thank him coherently just yet.
"Wanted to," says Sirius simply, bending forward to kiss Remus on the cheek. "By the way, we got a couple owls this morning while you were sleeping. Andromeda says hi."
Remus nods, unsure exactly how to react—he knows Sirius's relationship with her has been complicated for years now. "She figure out what's in the empty letter yet?"
"Not yet, but she's working on it. Oh, and Lily wrote, too."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah." He scrunches up his nose. "She and Reg talked to the Canadian Ministry last night—they're granting Pettigrew and Snape visitation rights."
To call Remus happy about this would be a bit of a misnomer. Honestly, he doesn't know what he feels. He's getting what he asked for, but is he really ready to visit Peter in that place? He can talk all he wants about how Peter did what he did under duress and deserves a slightly less miserable livelihood, but actually facing him…
This is Peter, he reminds himself. They've been best friends since they were eleven years old. He knows him—he knows his character—and Peter would never do anything to hurt anybody if he hadn't been under enormous pressure to do it. Does Remus really want to drive Peter back to the point of bashing his head against the window (or wall, now—he probably doesn't have a window in indefinite detention) trying to kill himself for want of any sliver of happiness?
Then again, this is the same Peter who probably contributed to so many Order members' deaths—including Marlene's. He can't reconcile it. He can't—
"I need to see him."
"Moony…"
"You get it," Remus whispers. "You were as scared as I was—maybe even more—when he…"
Sirius groans and purses his lips and sidles back into bed next to Remus. "I know. It's Wormtail. The thought of losing him makes me feel like a huge piece of myself has been ripped out."
"And we haven't lost him," Remus continues, "not yet. He's still here, Padfoot. All we have to do to get him back is…"
Sirius nestles his head into the crook of Remus's shoulder. "It's not that simple. You know it's not. You know what he's done."
"I haven't forgotten," says Remus, and it's true: he hasn't. He just—after losing James, he doesn't know if he has it in him anymore to keep fighting it.