Chapter Text
It goes like this. They pretend this is normal. They do their best to get along. They don’t acknowledge that it feels better when they don’t. They pretend the last thirteen years didn’t happen. They apologize when one of them mentions they did. They have their tea. They worry about the brewing war. They fuck when they don’t feel like worrying anymore.
Sirius thought they might. He was scared they wouldn’t. He didn’t even know if he still could. After a week at Remus’s, crawling into bed after staying up as late as he could excuse, he finally felt the hands he’d thought about countless nights in Azkaban pull him closer in the darkness.
It was slow. It was awkward. It was devastating to learn that at 35, you could be so disgusted by your own body. He cringed at the feeling of fingers in the depressions between his ribs. He felt precious about kissing with new teeth, as if the slightest nudge would have them shattering. His head was still so full of magical fog that he could barely get hard.
And Remus had the audacity to be sweet and patient with him, instead of letting him suffer his indignity quickly in the name of “trying again later.’
When it was over, when they lay stretched out like they used to, passing a cigarette and looking anywhere but at each other.
The morning after Sirius arrived, they received a less than revealing owl from Dumbledore. The Order was to be reinstated, they were to be members, they were to help search for a headquarters, they were to remain hidden until they received his next owl.
The tortures of not knowing clearly lost on the all-seeing.
They did as they were told.
As they did, Sirius could feel himself becoming human; responsible again for a life observed. He chewed with his mouth closed and quietly learned to stop talking to himself, easier made by the presence of another person. He went to sleep as Sirius and only sometimes woke up as Padfoot and only sometimes outside.
“You’re looking better,” said Remus one morning over tea and toast. They had moved the small table in the kitchen to the garden so that Sirius could spend as much time outside as possible. The stifling drought and unprecedented heatwave had brought the flowers to ruin and left the skin across Remus’s nose pink and peeling, but Sirius continued to wear double layers.
“Are you implying that I looked bad before?” snorted Sirius.
“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying you looked bad before.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Of course.”
“You’re looking rather good yourself. Very alive.”
“Compared to what, looking dead?’
“Or close to, yeah,” said Sirius, turning his eyes to the sky and then back to Remus, “I suppose I know that that means. How soon are we?”
“Two nights from tomorrow,”
“So, three nights?”
“If you’d prefer.”
“I’d prefer you stop making everything unnecessarily complicated.”
“Only when you stop oversimplifying everything, Sirius.”
They had had this argument before, and it had nothing to do with semantics. Imprisoned time together after oceanic time apart was picking at their scabs.
Sirius held his teacup to his chest, attempting to siphon off its remaining heat as he alternated looking at Remus and past him.
Remus was always brighter around the moons. Twitchy, often giddy, but easily annoyed. Usually, this excited Sirius. He became something new. Something difficult to keep hold of. Literally, in most cases, as by the time the dawn of the moon approached, he would double in strength.
James used to call him the Iron Man. Sirius always thought he was talking about the song.
“Fine, then,” said Sirius, “if it suits you. So, what’s the plan? It’ll be nice to get out and stretch our legs a bit.”
“There is no plan,” said Remus, “You’re not coming with me.”
“And, er, why on earth would I not?”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“I think that bridge has been well and truly crossed.”
“Because it’s different.”
“Meaning?”
“The wolf doesn’t know you anymore, Sirius. You know it didn’t recognize you that night in the forest.”
“Well, we’ve done introductions before. I think we could probably manage that again. Teach old dogs new tricks. Or Old tricks. Or whatever.”
“When we did introductions the first time, it was three against one, there was a safety net.”
“Two against one,” Sirius corrected, “I’m not counting Peter.”
“Yeah, me neither, I suppose,” Remus sighed, bringing his hands to his face to pressing on his sinuses for a moment, before dropping them to his lap. While Sirius, even in the stolen Puddlemeer sweatshirt, still struggled to keep warm in the raging summer heat, Remus had abandoned his usual self-consciousness for a t-shirt.
He was too tall for the chair that sat opposite Sirius. Too big for the table, constantly readjusting his legs, and bumping his knees underneath it, sending their tea sloshing over the tops of their mugs. In the sun, the jagged, runaway scars on his arms nearly shone. In another world, in another life, the man covered in scars who towered over everyone in every room he entered would be a terrifying sight, but to Sirius, he still just looked like Moony.
“Moony?”
“Yes?”
“Moony?”
“Yes, what?”
“Why do you actually not want me to come with you two nights from tomorrow?”
“For exactly the reason I said.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Stalemate. Remus would break first. He always did. He bowed his head and spoke to his lap.
“Because I don’t want you to see me like transform.”
Sirius barked in laughter. God, maybe the t-shirt really was making him feel exposed.
“Moony,” Sirius said, “I do hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I fear I must inform you that I have seen you transform. Many times. None of which I’m likely to forget.”
“Not like this you haven’t,” said Remus, looking up, “Not recently.”
“Supposed I’ve been a bit preoccupied with being on the run and all that.”
“We’re not young anymore.’
“Speak for yourself, I’m a regular spring chicken.”
“Alright, well, I’m not. And it’s getting harder, okay? It’s getting really fucking hard to actually make it through the transition – My body just can’t handle it the way it used to.”
“I’d take you at face value if I didn’t think you had such a talent for telling everyone the sky was falling.”
“Sirius be –”
“What? Serious?”
“Ffffff –” Remus breathed through his teeth before he could force composure. For a moment, he looked as if he were going to flip the table. Sirius almost hoped he would.
“For fuck’s sake, Sirius,” said Remus, desperately trying to steady himself, “For once in your miserable life, I need you to actually fucking listen to me, okay?”
“Okay,” said Sirius, hands up before drawing a halo in the air with his forefinger around the top of his head, “you’ve got me, just get it out.”
“Do you remember the book from the restricted section?”
“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific.”
“No, I don’t,” said Remus.
“No, you don’t,” said Sirius.
On the Corruptive Nature of Infectious Lycanthrope by Bartholomew Dunn was a slim volume, easily concealed in folds of one’s robes and even easier to hide in the boy’s dormitory in Gryffindor Tower. At the time of its publishing in 1921, few academic texts had ever ventured toward understanding the medical nature of the condition, favoring instead to give graphic instructions on how best to kill a werewolf.
Bartholomew Dunn used his final years on Earth to keep a careful record of how lycanthropy would, in advanced age, eventually push a body past the point of being able to fully transition before the stress eventually stopped the heart. Through pages of gut-turning illustrations of partially transformed wolves struggling to fully transform, he concluded that the approximate terminal age for werewolves would lie somewhere in late middle age, though his studies remained inconclusive, as he died half man, half wolf, under a full moon at the age of 55.
They stared at each other across the table, the sound of the birds and the buzz of summer around them dulling as they did. Sirius thought about the weeks following their discovery in the library, of Remus’s swift oscillations between manic, adrenaline-junkie nihilism and depressive catatonia, of the struggle to make a peace that would never come.
“So,” said Sirius, “you think the clock is ticking?”
“I think that I’ve reached the point where, from now on, it will only get harder.”
“All the more reason to have me with you then, don’t you think?”
Sirius reached across the table for Remus’s hand. They were rarely so sweet with each other, but they tried their best when it mattered. And Remus, to his credit, allowed his hand to be held.
“Okay then,” said Remus, “but try not to be a prick about it.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” replied Sirius as he brought Remus’s hand to his lips and laid a kiss across his knuckles.
* * *
Three nights later, as the moon’s light just barely filtered to the floor of the Abernethy Forest where they had apparated just moments before, Sirius, now Padfoot, watched as Remus’s transformation took place in slow motion.
The swift, liquid elongation of his face and spine had been replaced by horrible, echoing cracks of bone and the snapping of tendons as his body collapsed in on itself, as if being crushed by an invisible fist.
Horrible, guttural screams ricocheted off the trees around them, encasing them in sounds of agony.
And it was agony. For both of them. The little Remus has let on was nothing on the actual experience of it. As soon as it began, Sirius begged for it to be over. As the remaining joints finally slammed their way in place several slow minutes later, the wolf was left whimpering on its side on the forest floor.
Padfoot, with his usual lack of caution, trotted up to the wolf where he lay and nudged him with his nose. The wolf whined as it pushed itself to standing, and for a moment, deep somewhere behind its eyes, Padfoot saw Remus looking through at him, before he was swallowed whole.
The wolf snarled at Padfoot, baring its teeth in a show of dominance before arching its neck to the sky and letting out a massive, bellowing howl.
* * *
If the transformation to wolf was agony, then the transition back to human necessitated the invention of a new word to capture its suffering.
By the time Remus finally came to on the forest floor, naked and feverish, he could barely breathe. Sputtering, he took desperate, sucking gasps like a man saved from drowning.
Sirius just watched in silence before passing Remus his clothes. There really was no way to be a prick about this.
Sirius stood, cupped Remus’s face in his hands, and brushed away the tears staining his cheek, and told him it was going to be alright. He helped him to his feet and caught him before he fell and helped him get his feet through the legs of his trousers and did up the zipper and button with Remus bearing all his weight on Sirius’s shoulders.
He apparated them back to the cottage. He tried not to think of Remus doing this without him. He put them both to bed.
By the time Sirius woke in Remus’s bed, the sun was setting again, and Remus was tucked under his arm, looking up at him.
“Thank you,” said Remus.
“For what?” asked Sirius.
“I told you not to be a prick about this.”
“I’m not. I’m just saying, there’s nothing you need to thank me for.”
Sirius thought of his first night here with Remus and knew that Remus felt now what he did then. Insufferable shame, embarrassing neediness.
“What did we get up to last night?” asked Remus.
“You were annoyed with me, but you let me tag along while you hunted. I stopped you from eating a vole, which the wolf wasn’t happy about, but I’m certain you’re doing a lot better than you would be if you spent the morning coughing up bones.”
“Likely so.”
Remus pulled himself closer to Sirius, asking silently to be held tighter. Sirius obliged, secretly cherishing this closeness despite its source. They watched the sun set together through the small bedroom window in silence, and as the last trace of it crawled beneath the horizon past the open field flanking the cottage, Remus looked up at Sirius, and very plainly said:
“I want you to kill me.”
“Now? But it’s such a nice evening,” Sirius said, hoping to end the conversation before it started.
“One day, in the future, fifteen years from now, twenty years from now, when it becomes clear that the next moon will be my last. I want you to kill me – I want to die human.”
Sirius knew that Remus was serious, which scared him. He knew that he would do it too, if it came to that, which scared him even more. What wouldn’t he do for Remus?
“Okay,” said Sirius, “but I’ll warn you now. I’m not as good at killing my friends as everyone thinks.”
Remus laughed. It sounded like music.
And so, it goes like this: they pretend this is normal.