It was late when Sirius got home from work. He closed the door gently and set his keys down quietly on the kitchen counter. He texted James the score to the soccer game that had been on that night, knowing he'd want to know when he woke up.

Sirius was currently working at a bar down the street, and James stopped by often to watch sports, and tell women about his beautiful girlfriend when they tried to chat him up. He had had to leave before the game was over though. Something about a history exam tomorrow.

Sirius hadn't had to worry about exams in almost two years. He was thrilled when James, Lily, Remus, and Marlene had all gotten into the same college. They were sophomores now. Alice and Frank had moved away for a different school, but they skyped almost every weekend. Peter had gone out of state too. He said he'd write, but he didn't.

But college hadn't seemed feasible for Sirius, so he decided he would spend those four years working. Trying to figure out what he wanted to do.

And he was still around. The bar he worked at now was one of the more popular ones on campus and he saw his friends all the time.

And there was the fact that he shared an apartment with Remus. Remus's parents had been a little hesitant about them moving in together so fast (11 months wasn't that fast), but things had been going very very well.

He looked at the clock above the stove in the kitchen. 1:11. Remus was probably asleep by now. He shrugged off his jacket, and wandered down the hall to the bedroom, ready to crawl in bed with him.

He opened the door as quietly as he could but the light was still on.

"Rem? You still awake?" Remus, buried under a pile of notes, jumped when Sirius spoke.

"Geez, I didn't hear you come in," Remus said. Sirius brushed some papers aside so he could lay on the bed, leaning over and kissing Remus hello before he got settled.

"Well, I was trying not to wake you up. Whatcha doing?"

"Trying to make sense of these chemistry notes."

"Aren't you tired?"

"Extremely," Remus laughed wearily. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Sirius got off the bed so he could slip into boxers and one of Remus's t shirts. He ran a brush through his hair, slipped it up into a bun, and crawled back into bed, this time under the covers.

"It's too late. Your brain can't possibly be absorbing any more information."

"You're probably right, but if I could just understand this one thing…"

"Remus take a break." Sirius stacked all of Remus's papers, ignoring his groans of distress, and put them neatly on the bedside table. "Is the test tomorrow?"

"No it's in a week-"

"Then they'll be waiting right there for you in the morning." Sirius kissed Remus again, deeper than before, letting his fingers trace along the cut of his jawline. "How was your day?" Sirius sank back into bed, Remus coming with him this time, curling up under his arm.

"Long. You smell like liquor."

"Mm." Sirius closed his eyes, trying to fight the wave of sleep crashing over him. "I work in a bar, Sherlock. Tell me something you learned today."

"Hmm. I learned that esters smell like fruits. Isoamyl acetate smells like bananas and pears."

Sirius laughed. "This is the education you're paying for? Finding out which chemicals smell like bananas?"

"Well I'm also learning how to make meth."

"I thought college was supposed to prepare you for a better life, not a life on the streets."

"It goes both ways."

They lay like that for a while, both of them ignoring the fact that they were tired and it was well past one in the morning. Once they started talking, it was usually hard to stop. Their voices were groggy and they were only half listening to each other's answers when Sirius asked a question he wasn't brave enough to ask fully awake.

"Rem, how did you get HIV?" He was expecting the other boy to shrink away, or stiffen, growing cold at the mention of those three fateful letters. But Remus didn't.

He flipped over onto his stomach, and tucked a strand of Sirius's hair behind his ears. "I don't know," He said softly, not breaking eye contact.

"You don't know?" Of all the answers Sirius had made up in his head, that one didn't even make top five.

"I don't know. I got what we thought was a really bad flu when I was five, and it turned out to be HIV."

Sirius couldn't remember a single time before tonight when Remus had said the word HIV without his voice breaking.

"But you can't just get HIV, right? It has to come from somewhere."

"I know that. We just don't know where it came from. I obviously didn't get it the traditional way. But, I was in a hospital setting a lot as a kid because my mom was a nurse, so we just assumed exposure might have come from there. It could have come from anywhere though. I was always getting scraped up as a kid."

"Don't they take precautions against that? Shouldn't a hospital be the last place you could get it?" Sirius tangled his fingers in Remus's hair.

"Of course they do." Remus wrapped his arm around Sirius's waist and rested his head on his chest. "But accidents happen. And we don't even know if that's where I got it."

They lay there silently for a while, Remus almost drifting off into sleep, but Sirius kept turning the conversation over and over in his mind. Remus was so passive about it. He had expected anger, tears, hatred. Not acceptance.

"Don't you ever wish that you did have someone to blame?" Sirius asked. He couldn't have dealt with a situation like this as gracefully as Remus was. He would need to point fingers, to declare someone guilty. He would need to know.

"I did for a really really long time." Remus took a deep breath, and let out a sigh before beginning to tell the rest of his story. "I actually did blame someone when I was younger. I needed someone to hate so I made him up in my head."

Sirius hugged his boyfriend closer to him while he talked, Remus wrapping their legs together under the blanket.

"I called him Fenrir Greyback-"

"Uh...why?"

"Well Fenrir is actually a wolf from Norse mythology, who would kill and eat people. I don't know why I picked Greyback, it just seemed to fit. I needed a monster to blame."

"You nerd," Sirius whispered as he kissed Remus softly on the forehead. Remus continued his story.

"In my head he was this giant old man, who was dirty, and lived in the alleyway by my house, stealing other kids as they walked past, and infecting them. He was evil, and awful, and I was terrified of him, even though he wasn't real."

Remus was quiet for a second, collecting his thoughts.

"I made up that the reason he had stolen me was because my father had wronged him in some way. He stole me for revenge. The revenge idea was something that really helped me start to come to terms with it. A lot of my time in the early stages was spent on trying to think of what I had done wrong...what I had done to deserve this. And I couldn't think of anything anyone could do that would make them deserve this. This way it wasn't my fault."

His voice started to break a little as the image of Fenrir Greyback started to come to life again in his mind. Sirius held him tighter.

"Every night before I went to bed, I would think of ways I wanted to kill him. I would poison him, or run him through with a spear. I imagined shooting him, disemboweling him, hanging him, beating him to death. It was awful, but I hated him. I hated him for taking normality away from me, for making me suffer for the rest of my life for no reason."

Sirius was silent, staring at the immensity of Remus's soul bared before him.

"It took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that there was no Fenrir Greyback. There was no revenge plot, no man waiting in the alley. I think I finally realized that having HIV doesn't villainize a person. That it doesn't make you inherently bad. That it didn't make me a monster."

His breath caught in his throat.

"Getting HIV wasn't something meant to punish me, it was just something that happened. It's something that I wish hadn't happened, but it doesn't make me immoral, or gross, or dirty. HIV is spread through bodily fluids, not indecency."

"And Fenrir Greyback? He's gone?"

"You know after all those years of hating him and killing him in my mind, I realized that he wasn't the person who gave me the disease. He was the disease. And knowing that made it easier to stop thinking about him. He just wasn't worth it." Remus tilted his head up to look at Sirius. "So yeah." He thought back to the day he shared his status with all his friends. The day everyone, and especially Sirius, accepted him for who he was. "He's been gone for a while now."

They fell silent again, Remus listening to the rise and fall of Sirius's breathing.

"I love you." Sirius whispered into the dark.

Remus was already asleep.