Sirius has scars, too. Only Remus can really tell how deep they go. He realizes that Sirius wants to forget about them. He wants to forget, for a moment or two, about all the reasons that they're there.
x
October, 1981
"So you decided to show up?"
Remus looked up sharply when he heard the voice. The air was quiet and still with the stillness he always remembered from fall, and another stillness, on top of that, the slow decay of many months old death covered in the death of the world. A few trees were still left standing, a few solitary trees that scattered their dull orange and dark red leaves across the ground, and as he walked, he pushed them out of the way with the toes of his shoes. The charred remains of home—though it could never be his home again, could never be the home of the person he'd become, a person as black and burnt and ugly as the background—lay still behind him. Almost nothing had been salvaged. There was nothing recognizable left.
The voice was coming from behind him. He didn't need to look to know who it was, but he turned around anyway, and couldn't help but take a half step back as he saw the sudden apparition balanced on the cornerstone of the destroyed house.
"I didn't think you would," Sirius continued. His voice was level, so devoid of emotion it was if he had drained himself of all feeling, and his face was composed into sharp lines and worry scars and passivity.
He spoke as if he had planned their meeting, and perhaps, Remus thought, he believed he had. But if he had sent a message, Remus had never received it. Rather, he had been sent on Order work to Wales, and had come back to his parents' house on a sort of whim. He wondered that Sirius had picked just that location as a meeting place. They hadn't seen each other since the day after their last fight—the day after Sirius walked out.
They hadn't spoken to each other that day, but they had occupied the same general space, and that alone was almost more than Remus could bear. The air had been cold and thin. It was the four of them again—no Lily, no Harry, no anybody else—just the four Marauders, all grown up. Remus had realized very clearly that the era must end in the same place it had begun: in the Shack, where he had known his first real friendship with these three other boys, first understand what friendship meant as they faced each other in animal simplicity, the rawest feelings and the simplest loyalties. It had begun in that way, and it must end in that way, and it was indeed the end. He could smell it in the broken furniture and the rotting wood. He could hear it in the way James spoke to them, in a voice not unlike the one he used when outlining complicated pranks, but without the hint of a smile, almost unnoticeable, at the corner of his mouth.
One more move, he'd said. One more moment of secrecy. One person, with the power of three lives in his hands.
Even in their innermost circle, there was only one choice for whom it would be.
If he had known that Sirius had asked to meet him, now, Remus couldn't say what his answer would have been. He couldn't have let the opportunity pass by. He still felt sick with the thought of James, and Lily, and Harry, and the suspicion that he couldn't put to words, even still. But he couldn't have said yes, either; he couldn't have agreed to any requests from this man anymore.
"I'm here," was all he said. Then he took another drag off of his cigarette, and threw it into the leaves, and ground it out with his foot.
"I didn't know you smoked," Sirius said. He tried to speak as lightly as possible, but Remus could hear the strain in his voice, still, the anger and the fear beneath it all. He jumped off crudely from his perch on the ruins of Remus's life, and alighted amid the scattering of leaves and dead grass.
"I don't," Remus answered.
"So there are still some things I know about you, at least."
There was a hint, a hint of something in those words. Remus hid his hands in his pockets. He didn't try to move any closer, and he didn't run away.
It was like facing a wild animal, he thought. You had to be careful. You couldn't provoke it, and you couldn't show fear. After all of those months, he had finally learned that very secret practice of keeping fear hidden away from the surface.
Remus wanted to answer that he certainly didn't know Sirius at all, but he didn't. He couldn't quite. He choked on the first word when he finally spoke: "So it's done?"
"Yeah." Sirius didn't even have to hesitate. He knew well enough what Remus meant. It was the only thing left between them now, it seemed: that small, curling tendril of mistrust, wrapped in the pretext of worry and compassion, hidden in the powerful magic Sirius kept coiled around his heart.
As he said it, he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his own jacket pocket, and lit the end of one with his wand. Remus had known Sirius to smoke before, but only very rarely. He had smoked the night of James's bachelor party, the morning he had learned of Regulus's death, after particularly difficult battles, after some of their worst fights.
Now, he exhaled a long trail of smoke upwards into the sky, a curling of gray above both of their heads.
"You're James and Lily's Secret Keeper," Remus continued, not a question, not quite completely a statement, but said so flatly that the reassurance he was asking for might easily have been missed.
Sirius's eyes shifted to him, shifted back, annoyance rippling through him at the redundant, useless question.
"Yeah," he answered again, watching the smoke still, watching the air. "I'm James and Lily's Secret Keeper."
After that, they fell into a silence of several long moments. Remus stared at the remains of his parents' house again, imagined the fire starting up again and destroying it again, and destroying that part of him again, and spreading farther and farther and farther. He closed his eyes. His skin burned. A wind flew around them briefly, and stirred the leaves at Remus's feet.
"You're the one who wanted to meet," he said finally. He was beginning to get the feeling that he was part of one big trick, the last prank of Monsieur Padfoot, the butt of a final joke.
Sirius hesitated. It was the first real hesitation Remus had seen in him in a very long time. He threw his own cigarette out, only half gone, into the ground, and as he crushed it out with the heel of his boot, he took a step forward. Remus wanted to reach for his wand but—
"You look sick." He might as well have been saying you look like shit, for all the compassion in his voice.
"The full moon is next week," he answered, and started walking carefully, casually toward where Sirius stood. By the time he stopped they were irredeemably, physically, closer. "It's Halloween night this month."
"I know."
A hint of defensiveness, a hint of anger.
He dropped his eyes. "I mean—"
"Sirius."
He had to say it. He couldn't bear to hear him talk. How had it happened—why had he done it—why had he closed the gap between them so that now he could look squarely into Sirius's eyes? He unfocused his gaze, refocused on the black ash and burned wood and stone beyond Sirius's shoulder. Barely anything had been recovered. Not even the bodies.
Sirius was shaking his head. "Moony." There was sadness, regret, anger, accusation there. "Moony."
"Padfoot." He kept his voice steady. It wanted to break. He wanted to hit Sirius, he wanted to punch and kick and maybe even kill this man in front of him, this man he didn't know.
He kept all of his emotion in. He hid away; he hid away because it was the only thing he knew how to do. Sirius was decaying in front of him. A part of him wanted so badly, so desperately, for it to stop, that he took one step closer, and the leaves cracked under his feet.
"Are you expecting me to kiss you, Moony?"
It was a taunting comment. Sirius's voice was thick, was rough with hatred and disgust. Remus knew he wasn't going to be treated, anymore, like he used to be treated in school.
"No. I'm expecting you to walk away like you always do."
"You think you know me that well, do you?"
Sirius's voice walked a thin line between soft whisper and low, gravel covered, threat. He was almost smiling: low, sadistic, cruel.
"I am absolutely certain, Padfoot—Sirius—that I don't know you at all," Remus whispered back at him. He found himself staring into Sirius's black, black, eyes, and his own eyes narrowed in answer. "Now you're the one who wanted to see me, and I want to know why you picked here, why you picked now, why you picked any place and any time at all."
Sirius shook his head. He stepped back again, dropped his hands in exasperation to his sides. "I don't even know anymore." He was almost laughing, all confusion and insanity, and Remus felt all the hatred he had inside radiating toward Sirius, reaching toward him. "I don't know what I thought seeing you again would do. I guess it's too late now. I guess it's just…too late."
And Remus wanted to say something—he even opened his mouth to try—but, as quickly as he'd appeared on the cornerstone, Sirius Disapparated from view.
Remus shook his head. The ground was spinning; he was sick. He stumbled over to the ashes. He fell down on the blackened granite of the doorway where the wooden front door used to be, and he closed his eyes as tight as they would close and waited until the earth stopped spinning.
x
Remus Lupin is covered in scars. Some of them stretch across his skin, and others burn into his heart, but only the first are the visible ones. He has learned to live with these marks; they identify him; they define him. Only one person knows the sources of these definitions, and as Sirius Black traces the red lines of the visible across the skin over Remus's ribs, he whispers the words of the past and the present against Remus's heart. He is not asking for forgiveness, because Remus will not let him, and he's not offering it either, because he's given all of the forgiveness he has, even and especially to Remus, many years ago. The past still lingers around them sometimes. It whispers by like a faint breeze through the room, where moonlight pushes away darkness and they lie tangled together awaiting the sun.
x
end part 10/10