Sorry if some readers didn't like Sirius bottoming, but you can get over it. I did it to make a point in the story. Besides, I like men who can do both, so that's how it's gonna go. ^_^

As far as warnings for this chapter goes, it's pretty tame. Some non explicit sexual content, but mostly fluff. I got a bit distracted with the fluffiness, but still got a few important plot points in there. Nothing too exciting going on, but I hope you enjoy it. I'm estimating 4-5 more chapters before the end, and then probably an epilogue.

Enjoy!

Sirius had been sure that he'd gone to sleep in bed next to Remus, their bodies tangled up together in warmth, but as he woke up he realized he was cold, and only felt hard stone beneath him. As he struggled to his feet he found himself in his brother's funeral church again, the beams of colors shining islands on the black stone floor. On the far end of the sanctuary he saw his brother's coffin, but a quick look around failed to reveal his parents, or his unknown bride. He could feel relief at least for that.

He made his way toward the casket, the echoing of his bare feet slapping against the stone floor the only sound in the black space he was in. He'd made this walk so many times since his brother's death. It was always a bittersweet feeling, being able to see Regulus again. He liked that he could see him like this, knowing that it kept him from truly being lost, but he was so tired of the pain he felt in his chest as he looked at his peaceful face, knowing that he would never wake up again. What he found, though, when he got up to the edge of the casket, is that his brother was not there. Instead he was looking at a very pale Remus who had taken his brother's place.

Sirius quickly looked around. This wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to go this way. Remus wasn't dead, he was still laying next to him, Sirius was certain of it. He imagined that he could still feel the warmth of him pressed against his real body. He reached into the coffin, touching his cheek to wake him.

Remus? he asked, his voice ghosting off the unseen walls. Remus, wake up.

He received no response, and tried giving his shoulder a shake instead, then brought his hand down to grip Remus' cold fingers. Looking down at the faintly blue tipped digits he felt himself grow rigid as a red, bloody line began to appear on the back of the other boy's hand, as though an invisible blade were cutting into him. As it pulled across his skin it began to form letters. Sirius felt a wave of nausea pass over him as the word "killer" was etched into him before his eyes.

No! Sirius began rubbing at the wound in an attempt to erase it from his body.

Seeing bloody spots appearing under his shirt he tore it from the narrow body before he had considered his options.

No! No, no! Stop it! He shouted at the gooey lines that were simultaneously writing dozens of words across the expanse of the pale chest.

'Murderer,' 'butcher,' 'monster,' 'guilty.' Sirius was shouting incoherently, trying to knock away the invisible blade responsible, but finding himself only able to try and wipe the words away, slowly staining the other teen red as he did so. He was panicked, trying to keep the words from spreading up his neck onto the his cheeks, screaming for them to stop.

As the words crept up to Remus' face his eyes suddenly snapped open, the empty space instantaneously filled with the sound of him screaming as his body began to thrash in the casket. The shock sent Sirius tumbling back away from the casket, devastating screams spilling almost tangibly from above him. When Sirius got back to Remus' side he found that he was nearly covered by the soil that swallowed bodies like his up, and he immediately began trying to dig him out. Being so focused on what he was doing he paid little attention to the figure that had appeared on the other side of the casket, large and grim, but he recognized his deep voice as he began to repeat the conversation they'd had in the woods when Sirius had first been able to kiss Remus' gentle lips.

Remus is very sick, Black. Greyback said, his voice seeming to vibrate the whole room. And your meddling has only made things worse for him.

Shut up! Sirius screamed as he tried to empty the dirt from the coffin as quickly as it was filling.

Do you know what that kind of experience can do to a child's mind? He continued, his voice seeming to make Remus thrash harder, lines still carving themselves into his skin. The rage he felt toward his parents still haunts him. It cant be controlled.

I said shut up! You're the cause of this! Sirius was trying to keep his rage from distracting him.

Am I? Greyback's voice was slow and solemn, and Sirius suddenly saw the bloodied knife in his own hand and realized he had been carving the words into Remus' body all along.

With a warbled sound of disgust he dropped the knife into the dirt and stumbled away from the casket.

Did you really think you could help him?

Sirius heard the familiar voice of his mother now and saw her standing at the foot of the coffin.

A useless boy like you couldn't help anyone. You couldn't even save your own brother. Her voice was cold as ice, and he could feel it seeping into his extremities.

You're only making things worse. Greyback chimed in.

It should have been you that died. His father's figure was now at the head of the coffin.

Stop it. Sirius tried to sound stern in an attempt to silence them, but his whole body was shaking.

It should have been you that died. Walburga said again, staring down her straight nose at him.

Can't even kill yourself properly. His father said with such disdain that Sirius felt tears sting his eyes.

Can't save anyone.

Can't do anything.

Can't prove it was me.

Useless.

Weak.

Unwanted.

Unneeded.

Worthless.

Disappointing.

Pathetic.

You can't help Remus.

The sound of their voices had grown to a cacophony that threatened to send Sirius over the edge. Through it all, faintly, he could make out the sound of Remus calling for him, only a scarred hand extending above the coffin, the rest of his body swallowed up by the dark soil. They were all going to keep him from saving him. He was going to be taken away from him, just like Regulus.

Sirius…

I'm sorry, Rem… I'm sorry! Sirius was in tears now, his hands clamped over his ears to stop the continuing onslaught.

"Sirius." Remus shook the other boy's sleeping body gently. "Sirius, wake up."

Remus had never seen the other boy like this, his face twisted up in panic and sadness, his breath uneven as he squirmed in his sleep. The way that Sirius always seemed so focused on his problems, he'd nearly forgotten that Sirius was still mourning the death of his brother. When he'd told him about Regulus, and his attempt to make his parents suffer by losing both their sons, he had delivered it in such a nonchalant way that it would be easy to brush aside as being unimportant, simply the act of a selfish boy. But the more he got to know the black haired teen, the clearer it became that he wanted people to think that. The tight smile he'd given him after his story hid more vulnerability and pain that Sirius would ever admit to.

"Sirius!" Remus finally raised his voice, giving him one hard shake, which successfully woke him.

Wide eyes looked up at him, but relaxed an instant later when he realized he was still laying comfortably in bed with Remus. He sighed and laid his head back in the soft pillow.

"Are you alright?" Remus asked gently, his brows twisted up in concern.

Sirius found himself smiling suddenly as he realized that this was the first time Remus had ever asked him about his well-being. Not that he wanted to be fussed over. He preferred to not talk about his problems, especially to someone like Remus who clearly had bigger problems than he did. But knowing that Remus could look that way, and that he cared enough about him to ask, flooded Sirius' body with warmth and he reached up to touch his cheek gently.

"I'm fine, Rem." He said a little more reverently than he'd intended, but immediately decided that it was exactly what he'd meant to express.

It was when Remus smiled softly at him that he realized that he was in very deep. This boy was under his skin, and surprisingly enough, he liked him being there.

"Sorry if I woke you." Sirius said, not bothering to lift his head, thumb brushing against the corner of Remus' lips where he was perched over him on an elbow.

"It's fine." Remus said a little bashfully, trying to control the tug at his mouth that was trying to force him to smile.

"How'd you sleep?' Sirius asked, wanting to know if his technique to distract him worked at least as well at Greyback's sick option.

The expression on Remus' face let Sirius know that he was aware of the weight of the question, as he seemed a little uncertain for a moment before a smile slowly softened his features. It was the kind of smile that Sirius had seen in the forest, and Sirius felt his body tingle with excitement.

"Perfectly." Was all that Remus said in response.

Sirius heaved a huge sigh of relief. He needed this to work. He needed to show Remus that there are gentler ways to help relieve him. Ways that didn't include Greyback.

"Thank you, Sirius. For what you did last night." Remus said softly, his eyes moving down the other boy's jaw, as though avoiding looking him in the eye.

"For what?" Sirius laughed. "The mind-blowing sex? Don't worry about it, it's a specialty of mine."

Remus paused and looked back at his eyes. Sirius may not have realized, but all the time that he'd spent trying to learn about Remus, in turn, Remus had been learning about him. He knew that Sirius hid behind his attitude and boasting, and saw straight through him.

"I'm talking about you letting me…" Remus' let his voice trail off toward the end, feeling suddenly embarrassed to put words to his thoughts.

"Letting you top?" Sirius finished for him.

"Yeah." He agreed quietly.

"You don't need to thank me for that. I mean, you saw that I was enjoying myself. It's not like it was torture." His voice still had a chuckle behind it.

"I know you don't usually bottom." Remus said suddenly with a sternness to his voice that made Sirius stop laughing.

"Oh? How do you know that?" He asked, his voice docile.

"You kept clenching when you should have been relaxing. You were clenching at the parts where it hurts to clench. That and I could tell by your face that I was hurting you." His voice faded with a twinge of guilt.

Sirius could see on his face that he was in the process of comparing himself, and what he had done the night before, to Greyback and what he did to Remus. Sirius took the other boys face in one hand, turning his eyes to meet his.

"Look at me, Rem. I'm fine" he reassured him, hoping to calm his guilt. "If it had hurt too much I would have stopped you. But," He hesitated a moment, feeling an uncharacteristic sense of embarrassment. "you're right. I've only bottomed one time before last night, and I don't really like to."

Remus began to shake his head, guilt filling him up again.

"You should have told me. You shouldn't have let me do that to you." Remus' head was shaking slightly, trying to remove itself from Sirius' long fingers.

"Stop it, Remus. Look at me." He waited as Remus quietly obeyed him. "I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't wanted to. Don't feel guilty about it. It was something I wanted to give you." He paused before smiling gently at him. "Think of it as a really expensive gift. Alright?"

"I'm sorry I was too afraid to do it instead." Remus said pathetically after a long pause.

"Nonono, none of that." Sirius admonished lightly as he gave Remus' ear a tug, as though mimicking a school teacher or a nun. "No apologizing. You only need to do what you want, when you want. Got it? I don't want anything from you before you're ready to give it to me. You'll insult me if you keep apologizing." He moved his hand back to Remus' chin and tipped his own nose a little. "I happen to be a gentleman." He finished in a snooty voice.

Remus stared at him a second before a grin finally split hi features and he started laughing, his head dropping down to Sirius' chest. Sirius felt his body warm up at the sound of Remus' laugh. This one was longer and hardier than the chuckle he'd heard in the woods, and it filled him to bursting with all sorts of clichéd greeting card-worthy fuzzy feelings.

"You don't believe me?" He asked teasingly. "I'm descended from nobility you know."

Remus found that he couldn't stop himself once he'd started laughing. Rationally, Sirius's mocking accent that he'd put on, making him sound like a hoity-toity socialite, wasn't as funny as it felt at the time. It was like his body was making up for all the time it'd spent not laughing, and before long, Sirius had rolled him back over on the bed, looming over him and admonishing him in his ridiculous voice for laughing at "The Most Wealthy and Snooty House of Black." It really wasn't as funny as his laughter made it out to be, and it was only because of the feeling of Sirius' mouth suddenly covering his that he was able to stop at all. For all of his giddiness, Remus felt instantly calm when he tasted Sirius' tongue as it slid past his lips, his own arms snaking up around the other boy's neck before realizing he'd told them to.

The kiss they shared was slow and less consuming than the night before, but peaceful feeling. As Sirius' tongue migrated back to his own mouth he began placing kisses over Remus' still parted lips, to his jaw line, then up to the corners of his eyes. Remus felt strangely worshiped under Sirius' attention and he found his chest aching with a happiness he hadn't felt in a long time.

"You smell like grass." his eyes were closed as the words slipped past his lips, not even realizing he'd spoken until Sirius stopped what he was doing to look down at him.

"What?" He asked with a curious smile on his face.

Remus felt his face go red. He had never told Jona that he thought he smelled like violets. He'd always thought his strange fascination with the smell of people would make him seem silly or, worse, creepy. He didn't figure that people would want to know that he sniffed at them when he had the opportunity. Remus looked stubborn, as though he would refuse to explain.

"No, you have to tell me now." He teased gently.

"You," Remus began before pausing to sigh, feeling foolish, "you smell like cut grass." He paused and took a breath in through his nose, his mind going a little blurry. "And spring time, and freshly turned soil, and wind that comes off of the water…" He trailed off, noticing that Sirius' smile had gotten wider and wider. "Don't make fun of me!" He pouted unintentionally as he gave Sirius' shoulder a shove.

"I'm not. That was beautiful." he was still grinning down at him. "Do you like all those smells?" He asked, biting his lip around a grin when Remus nodded. "Well then let me see what you smell like."

With that there was another flurry of arms and legs and shouting as Sirius buried his nose against Remus' skin, determined to smell every inch of his body. Their wrestling dissolved into erotic touches, and soon, both boys had a fist wrapped around the other's straining erection. They were holding onto each other with their free arms and panting into the other's face as their lips brushed together, meeting occasionally to exchange a deep kiss. If asked, neither could have been sure who came first, all that Remus knew was that Sirius was now massaging their shared fluids into his flat stomach.

"Not a bad way to start the morning, is it?" He asked cheekily before sucking a few of his fingers clean.

Remus had to avert his eyes to keep from getting hard all over again, but was rewarded with a chuckle for his embarrassment.

"We should clean up." He said as he pried himself away from Sirius, who sat up behind him.

Together they made their way into the bathroom where this had all started the night before. Remus noticed a smear of blood on the tiled floor where he'd sat shaking. He knew that he should feel more devastated about the puppies. His heart still ached when he thought of them, and their lives that were taken from them. But the deep, bone breaking guilt that he should be feeling had evaporated with Sirius' adamant accusation of Greyback. It was true that he couldn't recall doing it himself. But his fits always left him with blank spaces in his memories. And his fits couldn't have been only an excuse for Fenrir to kill, because he had plenty of fits where he came around to find that he'd been kept under control and no one had been hurt. He still blacked out. Wasn't that evidence that the fits were legitimate?

Sirius could see Remus' mind working, and hoped that he was coming to the correct conclusions. He felt a pang of uncertainty as he began cleaning Remus' body, his soapy hands moving over the raised flesh of the other boy's scars. The dream he'd pushed to the back of his mind suddenly returned to him, and he felt overwhelmed. He had to keep Remus safe, but was suddenly unsure if he could. As soon as the uncertainty crossed his mind he pulled Remus back against his body in order to banish it.

"I'm not going to let him do this to you any more." Sirius said quietly into the other teen's ear, a hand splayed across the scarred name on his chest. "I'm going to keep you safe."

Remus had grown stiff in his arms, his muscles twitching every so often, as though on edge to flee. As Sirius tried to pull him a little closer, he continued.

"I've proven that you don't need him to help you sleep any more, right? And I'm going to prove that he was the one who killed Jona and the puppies." His declaration was surprisingly intense for his docile tone.

Half way through Sirius' sentence Remus began to squirm, trying to pull himself from the other boy's clutches, his head shaking on it's own as he felt a hopeless fear bubbling up inside him.

"Sirius…" he began, the single name telling it's owner to drop the subject. "Stop avoiding this, Remus. I'm going to put a stop to it." He insisted.

"You're wasting your time." Remus' voice was surprisingly harsh as he finally pulled himself out of Sirius' grasp.

"Wasting my time?" Sirius sounded personally insulted. "You think this is a waste of my time?" As he spoke he took hold of Remus' arm, yanking him around to expose his scarred chest to him.

His other arm was quickly caught as well, keeping Remus from covering himself, leaving him with a feeling of vulnerability that left him a bit shaken.

"That's not what I meant!" Remus tried to defend himself, his body twisting in an attempt to get free of the bruising grip. "I meant that there isn't anything you can do to stop it!"

"Damn it, Remus!" Sirius suddenly shouted, yanking the tanned figure toward him. "Haven't you been listening to a fucking thing I've said? That's what he wants you to think! He wants you to feel helpless, and hopeless! He's using those emotions to control you, to keep you under his thumb! And don't underestimate me! There are lots of things I can do. For starters, I can go to Slughorn about all this."

Something seemed to snap inside Remus, and Sirius found himself shoved with such force that he lost hold of the other boy and stumbled against the tiled wall. Looking back at Remus he saw his body trembling with fury.

"Are you stupid!" Remus shouted at him. "Do you really think that I haven't tried that already? You think the first time he hurt me I just rolled over and took it? Fuck you! I've fucking tried going to Slughorn! I've tried a lot of fucking things, and I'm telling you that there isn't a god damned thing you can do because I've fucking tried!"

Sirius found him wildly beautiful like this, filled to capacity with raw emotion. He couldn't stop staring. Even the way the other boy's vocabulary disintegrated, leaving only vulgarities and repetition to take up space, seemed beautiful to him. The water hitting his back seemed to almost steam off of him. It didn't seem to matter if it was anger or joy, Sirius just knew that passion was what this boy was meant to exhibit.

"Slughorn didn't believe you?" Sirius asked, his docile voice visibly cooling Remus' temper.

"…No." Remus said, his voice softening, and his shoulders relaxing. He brought a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose as he eased his temper, knowing that Sirius was only trying to help him. "Greyback somehow knew that I would go to him. The next thing I know my room was being searched. They found pills stashed in my desk like I'd been hiding them instead of taking them."

"He set you up?" Sirius stated more than asked.

"Something like that." Remus said as he opened the shower curtain, stepping out to grab a towel.

"Well, maybe if I go to him with you. As a witness." Sirius pressed, following him out of the shower.

"No, Sirius."

"You can't just sit back and do nothing!" He tried to keep from shouting, but it was obvious that his temper was just under the surface, his helplessness making him feel angry.

Instead of getting angry, this time Remus turned around and kissed him softly on the lips, resting a hand on his chest soothingly. When he felt the pale body beneath his hand relax he continued.

"I think that… there may be a slight chance… that you could be right… about Fenrir…" He was having a hard time finding his words.

"Killing Jona." Sirius finished sternly for him.

"Yes. But I'm not entirely sure yet. I do believe you about this…" He said, placing a hand over his chest. "I don't want this to happen any more. But you have to give me some time to sort this out. Alright?" He turned pleading eyes on him.

Sirius knew that he was right. This was a huge upset in his life. He would need time to adjust. He just hated the idea of letting Remus out of his sight with Greyback nearby.

"I don't want you to go back to see him." Sirius said resolutely.

"We don't have a choice about that." Remus said in resigned voice, shaking his head slightly.

"Why not? Just don't go to see him!" Sirius snapped.

"That'll only make things worse." He said, turning and leaving the bathroom to change clothes.

Sirius followed behind him, refusing to let up on this.

"You can't expect me to just sit around and let you go back to a guy that I know is doing this kind of stuff to you!"

"Yes you can."

"You're gonna go see him right now, aren't you?" Sirius said in a disbelieving voice, something about the solemn way that Remus dressed giving him away.

"Just drop it, Sirius. It's not any different than it's been since you got here." He said, pulling a shirt over his head.

The two continued to argue as Remus finished dressing, Sirius finally pulling his sleeping pants back on. In the end, however, Sirius lost, and Remus was gone. The room was disturbingly quiet as Sirius sat on his bed, staring at the messy sheets across from him, feeling like he'd never see Remus again.

Remus had been right, though. In the course of their argument, Sirius realized that Remus had tried everything that Sirius had thought of, from calling the police to running away. None of his plans seemed to work. Greyback was always a step ahead of them. Sirius suddenly felt a spark of inspiration fill him, though, and his stomach churned excitedly. If he couldn't get Greyback to the police, then he would have to get the police to Greyback.