Remus sat hunched around his drawn-up knees in the cold, bright night. The wind whipped around him, tugging at his hair. Trees creaked and whispered their dark thoughts, pines tossing their heads, saplings dancing, the cluster of birches fletched in moonlight. Clouds scudded across the sky, revealing and concealing the secrets of the heavens in a frenzied astrological strip-tease, and the moon hung pregnant and incandescent above the forest, almost full.

He ducked his head, and willed the limp rolled cigarette he held in his fingers alight with a surge of magical intent, and took a shuddering drag.

"Moony, really, those things will kill you," a voice remarked behind him, inflected with humour and honey and salt.

"Fuck off, Black," he snarled, and hunkered down, and sucked in another crisp and crackling breath.

"Not a chance."

Sirius emerged from the shadowed walls, his dark curls flying around his face, and padded over to Remus' side. He watched Remus quietly, drinking in the lines of his slender hands curled defensively around the cherry of burning tobacco, his long pale feet tucked against one another, the way his back curved and his elbows pressed against his knees, and the scars etched in silver across every inch of visible skin, across eyebrow and backs of hands and ankle and white strip of neck.

Sirius turned to the sky, lifting his face so the shadows fell from under his hard black brows. He whistled through his teeth.

"A harsh mistress indeed," he commented, for no reason whatsoever.

"Can – you – fuck – off," hissed Remus. His chest felt rancid, his bones ached, and he had no patience for the infuriation, the mania, the – the whims of the heir of the Noble House of Black, not tonight, not while the castle grounds glittered and spun under the light of the waxing gibbous.

He was done with this game. No longer. No more wry amusement, no more sincerity, no more honesty. He had nothing left to wager. He'd been stripped to the bone – further, even, to the pulp of his marrow and the pale filaments of his spirit, and the wind could damn well blow them to the coast and out across the blackness of the ocean. The worst of it was that he'd known the odds and measured up the unbearable cost of hope, and let it happen anyway.

Sirius kept his face to the sky, and lifted his hands to wrap them around opposite forearms, cradling his own chest. Absurdly, he began to sing, a hoarse croon that sailed off into the night.

"'Twas in another lifetime… one of toil and blood…"

He paused, and let his arms fall by his sides again, and continued, louder.

"When blackness was a virtue 'n' the road was full of mud…," his voice thickened and rounded, plucked out of his throat and into the air. "I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form…"

He turned to Remus, sharp and sudden, eyes wild, face undone.

"Don't you tell me to fucking go, Remus. Don't you fucking dare," he murmured low and ragged.

Remus released his legs, letting his feet fall from the dark stone to the dark ground, and so poured himself to stand. He flicked the fag-end into the night and took a step towards Sirius, his expression chipped flint-like into a mask of scorn.

"I don't – want you," he enunciated icily, "here."

Sirius growled low in his throat, and stepped into Remus, the shadow he cast under the moon racing up Remus' frame, up to his neck, his chin, his mouth.

"You're a liar, Moony," he said. "It took me a long fucking time to realise it, but you're more of a liar than me. And you're fucking stupid, too, and a coward, and I always thought you were the best of us."

He took a shaking breath and reached for Remus, who took hurried steps back to the wall until the light played across his hair, face, and shoulders again. Sirius froze, and then barked out a laugh.

He stepped back and ran his hands through his hair. Remus looked at him, filigreed in white, each curl, each knuckle picked out and gilded silver, and he seethed with loathing. This self-important prick he'd thought might be the death of him: here he was, just an inflated ego with pretty hair and hands, so very fragile he might dissolve into the night air. Remus wanted nothing more.

Sirius rushed towards him, lithe and quick, one hand grinding his shoulder hard into the wall and another twisting in a fistful of Remus' hair, tugging his head back painfully. He spoke into the crease of Remus' neck, muttered into his collarbones, his words skittering across Remus' skin followed by the heat of his breath.

"I'd let you tear me limb from fucking limb, if that's what you want."

He lifted his lips from Remus' skin very, very slowly to cautiously search his face. It was blank.

Inside, Remus was burning as he fell. His mind had been glacial and sharp, but he'd lost his grip somehow and now he was plummeting through the damp caverns of his sinuses, the mucus of his throat, the acid of his stomach, into the knotting fires of his belly that roared and twisted and lapped their charred tongues along his insides. And he could taste Sirius' breath on his lips, and he had no more patience, not tonight.

The silvered winds stoked the embers of his heart. Sirius' face filled his vision, dark cheeks luminous, potent, hooded eyes, lips full and glib, all framed in black curls. He knew the musty sugar of the boy's tongue and how it could wash over him. And Remus knew himself: hard-wrought and cauterised in the process, knife-sharp and agonisingly dulled at the same damn time, brimming with a foul blend of rage and fear he could never let spill.

"I do, you know I do," he forced the words out his lips. "I want to rip you into shreds."

Sirius snorted, "Blondie, huh? You never cease to surprise me."

Remus drew himself up to his full height, pulling himself out of Sirius' grasp.

"Shut up. The joke is fucking over. While I've been buggering you silly in broom closets, do you realise what has been going on here? At this accursed school? What your family has been doing? Your brother? We've been watching it happen: dark wizards intent on subjugating the entire world recruiting under our noses, killing our classmates, their loved ones, twisted sects meeting and planning the sickest of tortures, every damn professor turning a blind eye. While we've been fucking and marauding.

"This isn't about you, or us. This isn't some hot handsy forbidden love thing. And yes, Sirius Black, I'll fucking admit it: I'm mad for you. It wrecks me. I want to sleep in your shadow. I want to mark your skin, your neck. I want to hold your bloody hand. It's not going to get less painful, the fact I can't – have you – like that. The way I feel – what I fear – it's so strong I've spent the last five years lying and hiding, and, yes, you're right, it's the purest cowardice. You and me, we've been so blind, thinking any of this matters, chasing each other's bloody tails in detention while they're forging a fascist chain of command and practicing the arts of subju-fucking-gation.

"And we've done so much worse than that: we showed those sadistic bastards the way. We let them see that every rule here can be bent backwards, that students can hurt each other horribly with total impunity, led them to every secret place, and just fucking watched. You want to know what I saw today? I was trying to find that underwater lake again. And I found it, and they were there, all of them, and a dozen first years. I watched as they branded these children, fed them belladonna, baptized them, promised them the dark power of yews and hunting birds and disease, the power to take whatever they want, to hoard, to destroy. The spells they were using – I don't know how they found them, who taught them, Sirius, I don't, they made me sick, I feel infected.

"One of the first years went under the water and didn't come up for a while, and then his," Remus' voice shattered, "his back bobbed up to the surface. All the others moved way, way away, but not because he was dead: because it meant he was weak, and it revolted them."

Remus' face was anguish, drawn taut over his skull, and his breath was hitching. He slumped back against the wall, and slid down to crumple in the wet grass, head in his hands.

Sirius crouched by him, light on his feet, and reached out a hand to the crown of Remus' head, cautious and careful. He ran his fingers lightly through Remus' hair, again and again, and laid a warm hand on Remus' shoulder.

"I know you know I was raised like that," he began, voice gentle. "By that. All fire and brimstone and dominance, shrivelled and powdered and rank. I definitely used to think I'd been poisoned proper, and would never be good for anything, and sometimes I still worry. I think it should have killed me…

"But, you know, Moony, in essence it's all very simple. You've taught me a lot about blood and, mm, bodily fluids in general. Blood's a true magic, not because of what it is but how it moves. There's no purity in it. Blood's by nature impure. But you – and James and Lily and Peter – you've been helping me fight the poison in mine, and I can't regret a damn moment we've spent fucking around. I've been fighting to live, against this entire bloodline steeped in death, and I will choose the pleasure of your company over anything.

"And I think I'm right to choose that, Moony, because it's nothing like them. Nothing to them. If we're going to take them on, we need to know what matters."

He bowed his head and kissed Remus' crown, rubbing soft circles on his shoulder blades.

"Roll me a cig, moonface," he said imperiously, "and I'll serenade you for the trouble."

Remus huffed a laugh and unfolded slightly to rummage in his pockets. Sirius tipped backwards into the earth and laid himself out below the heavens.

"I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail," he rasped, in his lowest register, best-Dylan impression tones, "poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn… 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya… shelter from the storm.'"

He paused, and let the words skate away in the moonlight.

"Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there – with silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.

"'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya shelter from the storm'."