A/N: I wrote this years ago (!), in the summer of 2008 for a prompt on the livejournal community nest_of_spiders. It's actually one of my favorite of my own stories and I'm surprised I haven't posted it to this site yet, so, here it is.
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Five Fragments, or How Remus Lupin Remembers the Summer of 1977
"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it (Russell Baker)."
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Among his bad habits: smoking cigarettes stolen from ex-boyfriends; not crying at funerals; Sirius Black. But today he indulges only in one. Today he has a map of Europe and the draft of one of Benjy's essays on the defeat of Grindewald in 1945 and the smell of the city in summer, all hot pavements and smoke. Benjy has his notebook out again and he's writing, an old compulsion of his, he says. Remus watches him and watches him and forgets he's watching him.
Lazy out of school days, summer. Or so it seems, though he's all grown up now (he tells his mother) and there's no going back now (he tells Sirius) and anyway the war, it's growing (James tells him, all the time, as if he were in any position to forget). He's not sure what to do, anymore. Without books and classes and tests. Sometimes he just throws himself into self destruction.
Benjy looks up and catches him staring. Remus, very resolutely, doesn't look away but only asks what he's writing.
"Dear Diary," Benjy answers, keeping Remus's stare. They are on opposite ends of the balcony sitting on the floor because there's no furniture here, and Benjy's knees are up against his chest, and Remus's have just enough room to sprawl out in front of him.
"Dear Diary. My boyfriend refuses to leave his flatmate for me."
And he says it with a straight face, too.
Remus looks down at the manuscript, scrawled out on parchment with red ink notes and cross outs. "You're pretentious," he says. "And dramatic. And sometimes I hate you."
Benjy laughs a single snorting ugly laugh, takes the last drag off his cigarette and throws it carelessly away, and says, "Now who's being dramatic."
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Sirius wakes up at midnight with nightmares and suddenly he's in Remus's room. Remus knows because the door is open—he can see the dim light of the main room slipping into the pitch black in which he sleeps—and he always keeps his door closed.
"Padfoot," he whispers, his voice creaky with the volume he'd wanted to give it, and hears a shuffling in the darkness.
Human or animal—for a moment he can't tell. Then, against the wall, a shadow moves, unsettles and then stills, half in the gray light coming through the door, and Remus can just see the shape of his nose, his chin, his hair falling down to his shoulders.
"This," Sirius says, "this is sick," but it is after Remus has come to stand next to him, barely visible himself in the darkness, after he has circled his arms around Sirius, after he's given in, and he doesn't really care what Sirius thinks.
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After the rain he walks on the edge of the curb and dares himself to fall into the puddles. He feels—but does it matter. He throws himself at people—he does what they ask of him. Still he must try to rank priorities, and when, even when, his back is close against the wall and Benjy is hands at his hips and lips to his ear and voice, telling him, you're not in school anymore, and stop being so…in the middle…of things, even then he still says no. So he continues in the middle. Benjy pulls away but he doesn't leave. Remus lets himself fall splashing into the puddle and the water leaks over and into his shoes. Above him, gray clouds sift over and against each other, and it looks like it will soon rain again.
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Sirius is in the land of the giants and with the flat so empty, Remus starts to feel jittery. Benjy comes over. They lie squashed together on Remus's thin bed. Benjy has his notebook again—or no, he's left it behind this time—and they have stolen Sirius's cigarettes and are smoking them with the windows open. They are lazy and even the wind is hot and Benjy watches the smoke trailing out and says, "You make me so wretched sometimes, Lupin, so stupid."
"No, it's the summer," Remus answers. "Making us all wretched and stupid." Then he spits out Benjy's last name—"Fenwick"—just to even the space still between them.
"Anyway," he adds, "I've seen worse."
"Your flatmate?"
Somehow they are always talking about Sirius. Remus doesn't have many things and the room is bare; then, too, he still holds on to this belief, even against the mounting evidence, the slipping down and falling down and breaking of all his defenses—he still thinks maybe he'll move out eventually. Benjy visits rarely but when he does he'll flip through the books that Remus keeps in his old Howarts trunk, next to the bed with his wand and a glass of water on top like a nightstand, and they make these vague plans to write something together.
"A chain smoker and a horrible cook, he brings home girls sometimes, just because he can—they all love him you know—and as if I were his mother, or some other person he hates but wants to impress or anger. He can be quite horrible to them; I don't know why they still come. Perhaps because he is very charming."
"Or very good at acting charming," Benjy adds. Remus is looking at the ceiling. There are cobwebs in the corners but spiders, at least, have never scared him.
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Sirius, back now and treating his new bruises with his legs stretched out and resting on the chair next to him, asks, "So how miserable are you this summer?" Remus, across the table from him and writing, a letter perhaps, there's a quill in his hand anyway, and also a bottle of ink that he will, before the week is out, spill accidentally over Sirius's papers, answers, "Not miserable at all."
"Liar." He winces. The bruise is on his left arm and it is large and misshapen and already yellow at the edges.
"Your point?"
Sirius smiles. "Ah ha. You have me. There is no point. And Benjy? How…content is he?"
Remus would rather let Sirius think he is lying than try and explain this: how each sharp stab of calendar days seems somehow worth the sting, how each day he crashes but he also floats, how if he is nothing he is also everything.
"As happy as anyone would be," he answers, "who gets to be with me."
If only Sirius would, here, put his feet back on the floor and look up from his own discolored skin and maybe try and meet Remus's eye. If only Sirius would say, Do you remember when, and if only they could remember, something pleasant for a change.
But Sirius doesn't anything. Just snorts and shakes his head, a dismissal of the type that always gets under Remus's skin, gets deep into him, where he feels sick with it for days like a fever or flu.
Remus's quill scratches against the parchment, useless words. With his free hand he presses his finger tips to the corner edge of the parchment.
"Do you ever think about the past?" he asks, finally, into the silence.
"About as much as I think about the future," Sirius answers, then swears in a thin paper cut breath as he presses a bruise too sharply. But he can feel Remus's gaze on him, meets it when he looks up, and adds, "I suppose you're always thinking about it, aren't you?"