It doesn't happen very often, but every now and then, Sirius tries to apologize. He'll corner Remus in hallways and doorways and in those shared moments in roomfuls of people when they are the only ones who really exist. Remus won't let the words pass his lips. They've said all those sentiments already. They said them many months ago, that night in the Shack, the night when all the suspicions and rumors and untruths finally came forward, finally withered away under the gaze of the moon.
x
September, 1981
Sirius had gone out. He went out a lot, those days, but Remus never went with him, because what would they do? He knew well enough. They would kiss and bite and snarl like animals in back alleyways, stagger into smoky, dirty bars and drink themselves away, and laugh like fools when they were pushed outdoors into the biting fall air. They would Apparate home recklessly in the eyesight of Muggles. They would falter and fall down in bruises, and insult each other carelessly, and the next morning the only thing that would be real would be the swearing and the dirty looks between drinks.
Remus could do well without all of those things.
He felt like he'd been living in the flat for a million years. The air was old and stale. The cold had settled in with the end of August, and now, halfway through September, the harsh wind spent the night blowing debris from the street up into the sky and against their tightly shut windows. The glass would shake and rattle all night long.
Remus pulled on an old sweater from school, but it was suddenly too short and too thin, and it made him feel thirteen again, awkward and clumsy and shy. He couldn't afford that anymore. He pulled it back off again and threw it in a corner. Then he opened the bedroom window and took a deep breath of late night air. He could feel the wolf pulling at his corners, howling in his ears.
The city was good to cover the night noises with traffic and domestic yells from the next floor up. Sometimes, though, even through those things he could feel it: the call, the call against his heart and in his bones and seeping along with his blood.
He grabbed a half drained whiskey bottle from the kitchen and climbed through the window, unto the rusting metal fire escape. He sat cross legged on the edge of the first step and took a long, deep swig. The moon was shining above him, a half full moon. He stared at it, and dared it, with his eyes, to show its full face to him again.
I'm not fucking afraid of you.
Where was Sirius? The filthy dog, he was probably out drinking his liver to death. Remus's eyes narrowed. The alcohol burned against his veins. Sirius. What was wrong with him? Where was he? What was he doing? Was he with somebody else?
Remus had accused him of so many things in his own mind, to add one more was effortless, was perhaps too easily done. He would place all the crimes in the world on that one man's shoulders, if he could.
Had he been in a more contemplative mood, he might have wondered when the whole affair deteriorated. When had things gone wrong? He realized with an angry sigh that it mattered little. The bottle had been half empty when he'd taken it outside; before long there were only dredges of liquid left at the bottom.
Remus shivered. There were people—not very many, mostly a few late night stragglers—walking on the street below him. He watched them intently, and his eyes narrowed. He wished, suddenly, incongruously, that there were more trees in the city. There had always been trees, all the years of his childhood, their green leaves turning magnificent shades of orange and red, and falling to the ground in heaps, and turning the otherwise desolate landscape of fall into a beautiful place.
They had done such a good job of it, he hadn't even realized the desolation until now.
He growled in disgust and pulled himself up. Stumbled, almost fell. Caught himself in time.
Maybe it would have been better if I'd just let it all go.
It was a difficult job to pull himself back in through the window again; he felt sluggish and clumsy, and he hit his head twice on the windowsill. Once he had finally managed it, he threw the empty bottle in the trash. He was a little dizzy, and a little sick. He lay down on the bed and stared ahead at the room until it stopped spinning, and when it had righted itself he saw a piece of paper sticking out of the trash on the other side of the bed.
Something Sirius had thrown away. Remus struggled to bring himself upright again, and then he picked it up out of the ashes of all the correspondence they had burned, and he opened it across the stiff lines where it had it had first been folded.
He didn't feel guilty. Sirius had been practically begging him to find it, leaving it out like that, not even burning it to keep it safe.
Never even mind the fact that it was addressed to them both.
Padfoot and Moony,
This is important. That's practically all I can say in a letter. Maybe I shouldn't even be saying that, I don't know.
The writing was sloppy and hurried, and there were ink blots all over the page, as if the writer had left his quill too long against the parchment, trying to decide how best to phrase his words. Even through the worry and the fear, though, Remus recognized James's handwriting instantly.
Lily Harry and I are going away. We're going to a place where no one can ever find us. I don't know when we'll see either of you again, so I need to say goodbye. It's not
The words ran out suddenly, and for several lines the only marks on the parchment were crossed out lines and unreadable blotches of ink.
a real goodbye though, so don't worry, mates, because Potters are tough folks and we survive everything. So anyway, Dumbledore has it all figured out. We want to tell the both of you but, like I said, that's impossible here, so meet me at the old place and I'll explain everything.
Prongs
He had scratched a few, almost unreadable, symbols at the very bottom of the page—symbols Remus recognized as the next day's date. It settled like a cold ice pick to his chest that Sirius had hidden this from him. He never would have known to go; he never would have shown up. The fear he felt at the thought of James even writing the word goodbye was quickly swallowed up by bitter hatred, hatred for Sirius and all of his lies.
Remus felt with sudden sureness that there had been a letter to Peter, too, and he felt with just as sudden certainty that Sirius had gotten to that one, too, and the ice pick in his heart turned to fire, and he crumpled the parchment in his hands.
He wanted to think through it. He wanted to be coherent, and logical, and practical, about everything that was swirling around his brain but all he seemed to be able to latch onto was Sirius, leaving at night without him, and Sirius, who was always angry or else cold and cruel, and Sirius, a person he used to trust, keeping things from him, lying to him, deceiving him.
The door of the flat slammed open.
Remus kept the paper in his hand as he stormed into the main room. Sirius had paused at the kitchen table, and he was squinting at one of the maps in the dark and struggling to cast off his jacket, which was halfway on and halfway off.
"Need some help?" Remus asked, and came to stand facing him in the glow of the moon through the window.
"No," Sirius snapped, and finally flung off the coat. He threw it onto the couch. Up close, he smelled of cheap booze and stagnant cigarette smoke. Remus just stood, just stared. "Was there something you wanted, Moony?" Sirius asked coldly.
Remus moved the hand still holding the letter slightly, almost imperceptibly, back. "How much did you have to drink?" was the only thing he said.
Sirius's nose twitched, canine, experimental. "I should be asking the same thing of you." A small, taunting smile, quirked at the corners of his mouth. "Drinking alone, now, Remus? How pathetic of you."
The words didn't affect him. It could have been anybody saying them, because it certainly couldn't be Sirius—not any Sirius he knew, anyway. He moved the hand with the letter back in front of him, held it up and smoothed it out.
"Any particular reason this letter from James ended up in the trash?" he asked lightly.
Sirius paused. It was barely a pause, barely a stutter in his calm, but Remus caught it, quick animal resources and the instinct he had gleaned from so many years of knowing Sirius so well.
"You walked into the room just as I finished reading it," he answered finally, after the half a heartbeat pause. "I didn't have time to set it on fire."
"So that was your plan? To destroy it before I could see it?" Remus's voice was beginning to sound accusing. It had just the slightest bit of bite to the edges—slight, but Sirius could hear it well.
"Yes."
He didn't even sound ashamed when he said it.
"It was addressed to me, too, Sirius."
"I know."
Remus could feel the anger boiling up through him, obscuring his reason, obscuring his rational thoughts. Sirius reached out and took the parchment from his hands. Then he withdrew his wand and lit the letter quietly, lightly, on fire. Remus watched in stunned, frozen amazement as the flame crept up, and up, and up, to Sirius's fingers. Just as it reached them, he dropped the parchment to the ground, and his boot smashed over it, and the flame went out.
He could have let it sit there until the whole flat fell irredeemably to flame, and Remus would have been too shocked and too drunk to do a thing. As it was, there was only a small circle of charred black wood at their feet.
"Now it's gone," Sirius whispered.
Remus paused, looked down, looked up again. He stepped squarely in the ash when he stepped closer to Sirius. He could kill him, if he wanted to, and he wouldn't even need his wand. He wouldn't even need the moon.
It was a testament to them, to their anger, to the way they knew each other inside out and upside down and through and through, that they both felt it: the threat of death, through and through and through, and through them both.
"I don't care what you think," Sirius whispered, and then he repeated the words, slower still. "I don't…care…what you…think."
Then it blew up.
"Maybe you should care!" Remus yelled.
His voice was loud enough to stop the muffled up stairs fighting, to make even the swoosh of midnight traffic outside the window seem to slow. The wind blew harsh against the panes of the windows.
"Maybe you should care, maybe you should finally give a fuck for someone other than yourself, Sirius fucking selfish Black, stuck in heaven knows what world never thinking about anybody else!"
Sirius had taken a few steps back, but he was hardly beaten, and his eyes caught the light of the streetlamp from the window and glinted, animal like, in the dark.
"And you, Remus. You're any better? You're always running away. You weren't even there when Dumbledore told us someone was ratting on Prongs—"
"I was on a mission—"
"Mission my arse! You weren't there when you were needed and that's all I can see!"
"You've hardly been around all the time yourself. Where have you been all night? Where were you all the other nights? If something had happened—if someone had actually wanted your help—you would be too busy boozing in Muggle clubs for anyone to ever find your sorry bones."
Sirius's lip twitched up in a small, guttural growl. Remus could hear the vibrations of it, more than the actual sound of it, against his bones.
"It makes me laugh to even hear you talk," he answered. His voice was loud but slow, gaining speed and anger and edges as he continued, until Remus's angry, squinted eyes grew wide again in astonishment.
"I bet you know a lot about your help being unwanted," he continued. "How many times has the Order wanted to drop you, just a giant liability, an incongruous sore thumb in any fight against evil you are, Moony."
His name, a curse again.
"I mean, really, who would want a werewolf helping them fight Voldemort? He's probably just waiting to recruit you. Another Dark creature for his army—"
Remus punched him.
Sirius staggered and almost fell, but reached for the table instead, and all of its papers fluttered around them in sharp edges and pointed corners as the whole heavy frame of it fell crashing to the floor.
Sirius managed to stay standing.
"You obviously know what you're talking about pretty goddamn fucking well, Black," Remus snarled. His fist was throbbing from where it had made contact, but he refused to let any of his pain show. Another gust of wind, harsher than the rest, threatened to blow the whole window in.
"Fuck you, Lupin," Sirius answered back, and swiped the back of his hand across the eye were Remus had aimed his punch.
His face was all but completely in shadow. Remus couldn't have made out his familiar features even if he'd tried.
"I don't need this anymore. I'm leaving," Sirius continued, and then he turned roughly and headed toward the door. Remus could hear the sound of it slamming shut echoing in his ears for several minutes.
He'll be back, he thought faintly, as he fell into the cushions of the couch and buried his head in his hands. His eyes were stinging terribly, but he couldn't tell if he was crying or just shaking. He'll be back.
Two days later a messenger from The Leaky Cauldron came to collect Mr. Black's things.
x
end part 9/10