The Marauders had a very quiet Christmas with the Lupins—Remus spent most of the day in his parents' room with his mother, even taking his meals there since she had become too frail to join the others at the kitchen table. James, Sirius and Peter exchanged their gifts and spent a bit of time messing around in the snow behind the cottage, but the customarily hyperactive boys were unusually subdued, sensing the dark, heavy grief that pervaded the cottage and their friend.
After dinner, Remus finally emerged from his mother's room and went upstairs to his own; he gave a small nod of acknowledgment to the other Marauders, who watched him climb the stairs without a word.
Sirius stood up once he'd vanished into his room. "I'm going to talk to him," he decided.
James narrowed his eyes. "You sure that's a good idea, mate?"
"Maybe he just wants to be left alone," Peter murmured.
"Well, if he does, he can tell me that himself." Sirius grabbed the tiny box beside him, the Golden Snitches painted onto its wrapping paper buzzing excitedly. "Besides, I've got to give him his Christmas present, don't I?"
Sirius headed upstairs and into Remus's room, only to find that he wasn't there; he was quite confused for a moment until he noticed two feet dangling down from above the room's window. Grabbing an overcoat from the back of Remus's door, Sirius unlocked the window and clambered out and up onto the snowy cottage roof beside Remus.
"Hey," said Remus quietly, his cheeks flushed in the cold. He glanced down at the box in Sirius's hands. "What's that?"
"Your Christmas present." Sirius held it out to him. "Go on—open it."
Remus removed his mittens and obeyed, extracting a pair of shiny black objects from the box. "Are these earplugs?" he wondered.
"Special earplugs," Sirius explained. "I know your hearing gets super sensitive around the full moons. And your smell, of course, but I couldn't find anything for that." He studied his feet, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious. "When you put those earplugs in, they'll sense the amount of noise that's making it through to your brain and reduce it to a normal level you can tolerate better." Sirius had found them in Diagon Alley over the summer; they were enchanted artifacts crafted with advanced charm-work and had been quite expensive to buy, but Sirius had been saving up the meager allowance his parents gifted him from the Black family fortune. "I—I don't know how they work exactly, but I thought they might help you."
Remus placed the earplugs back in their box. "Sirius, that's—thank you. I've never heard of these, but…they must've cost you a lot." He looked at him almost guiltily. "All I got you were those pictures of Muggle girls in bikinis you asked for."
"Oh, don't worry about it, Re. Those pictures are going to be perfect; I plan to stick them up all over my bedroom back home." Sirius didn't care about Muggle girls in bikinis, of course, but the fact that he appeared to would anger his parents more than just about anything else. "You're better at acquiring Muggle things, and I'm better at spending my family's fortune. We both have our talents." Remus smirked.
Sirius laid back against the roof and glanced out into the woodlands surrounding the cottage. The grass and trees were covered in a thin layer of snow, turning their surroundings into a sea of white and brown and green. The sky above them was open and expansive, its few clouds painted a fiery orange by the setting sun.
"It's beautiful out here," Sirius said.
Remus leaned back to lie beside him. "I know. This is my favorite place that my parents have lived, I think. I love coming up here to clear my mind, and just…be alone, I guess."
Sirius looked to him, thinking of what Peter had said. "I can leave if you want me to."
"No, that's all right. I think the company's good for me right now."
Hesitantly, Sirius reached over to place his hand on Remus's mittened one. "I'm glad I got to meet your mum, Re. She seems wonderful."
"She is." A thin, sad smile stretched Remus's lips. "She was given such an awful lot in life. She's not even a witch, and she's had to spend the last decade fretting over her werewolf son, making sure I was safe and no one found out about me. But she never complained—she always just wanted me to be happy."
"Must be nice," said Sirius, trying his best not to sound bitter.
Remus turned onto his side to look Sirius in the eye. "I'm sorry," he said quickly. "I know how things are with your mum. I shouldn't be rubbing it in your face."
"It's all right, Remus. I'm happy you have such a great family, and got to have a good childhood and all. I just wish we all did."
Remus was quiet for a long moment. "It wasn't really a happy childhood, though," he said at last. "It isn't my parents' fault, of course, but I wasn't ever really allowed to play with other kids because of my condition." He bit at his lip. "Sometimes, when we were living around other families, my dad would catch me watching kids running around outside our window for hours. I tried to sneak out to join them a few times, too. I was just…I was very lonely, I suppose."
Something twisted in Sirius's heart as he thought back to his own days growing up in Grimmauld Place, staring out his bedroom window at the Muggle boys playing football in the street outside. "You shouldn't concern yourself with them," his mother had always told him. "They're Muggles—they aren't worth your attention."
"I was lonely, too," Sirius murmured. "I couldn't associate with anyone who wasn't a pure-blood, and none of the big London families had kids my age. So I didn't have friends, really, until I met you lot." Sirius's hand tightened around Remus's. "Becoming friends with you and James and Peter was like—like…I don't know how to describe it, Re."
"Like filling up a hole you didn't know you had in you," Remus said.
"Exactly." Sirius narrowed his eyes at Remus; he'd never thought he'd had much in common with his quiet, studious werewolf friend, but maybe they'd both had that unnamable darkness and loneliness inside them all along, eating away at them from within. Sirius suddenly got the sense that Remus understood him better than James ever had, better than anyone he knew. He felt as though he were seeing him for the first time—how had he never noticed the way the setting sun brought out streaks of gold in his hair, or the tiny shadow of hair growing across his chin?
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Remus asked.
Sirius turned away quickly. "I'm not looking at you like anything," he lied.
His lip quirking up, Remus glanced away from Sirius and up into the sky. "Oh, look," he said, pointing. "It's your star, Sirius."
Sirius followed Remus's finger up to a star shining brightly within the darkening sky, just over the trees that studded the horizon. "You remember your Astronomy," Sirius remarked.
Remus smiled. "The dog star," he said. "Like your Patronus."
Sirius had always hated that star—the Blacks always named their children after stars and constellations, feeling that their bloodline was too pure and powerful for anything but the heavens. His parents had named him Sirius after the star in Canis Major, the dog constellation faithfully following the hunter Orion across the sky. The sight of the star always reminded Sirius unpleasantly of the Blacks, the horrid family he was forever tied to by birth and blood and name.
But hearing Remus speak now and seeing his smile made him think of it all in a different way. Sirius was his star, not Orion's or anyone else's. The dog star, the brightest star in the sky. Why shouldn't he be proud to bear its name?
Sirius lifted Remus's hand up to his chest and placed it against his heart. "Merry Christmas, Remus," he said.
Remus pulled closer to him, his eyes still fixed on the stars. "Merry Christmas, Sirius," he replied.
