Archive of Our Own

Prelude
 
It was his first year of the war and he had already done and seen things that had left their stains on him. His wand hand was raw from all he had done to clean Unspeakable Curse residue off it, and he had grown a new and acute sensitivity to the feel of eyes on his back. His dreams, when they came, were filled with fire and green light, the air popping and giving way to the masks of Death Eaters, their eyes flame-licked and inhuman. And he knew, now, people who had died, what it meant to cheerily tell someone you would see them tomorrow and find them hours later splattered all over an alley.
 
He knew, too, the length of a day, what had to be done to make it from waking to falling asleep. He knew the feeling of endless sheaves of dry parchment sifting through his fingers, the dim, blinking light of the back office of the temp agency, the blandness of the books on the office shelves, their titles so dull he nodded off halfway through reading them. He knew the tenor of the growling that came from his stomach every midday, a rumbling call that was never answered; he knew what it took not to rifle through the trash when his office mate threw half his perfectly good sandwich away, the stifled shame whenever James came by and made a show of taking him out to lunch, the painstakingly counted pennies he left on the counter, which James swept away with fistfuls of gold, the knowledge that he would never eat well alone.
 
He knew – and perhaps this was the most painful of all knowing – that this was his life, now and forever, and that being in the Order and bearing witness to death was the only thing that added any dignity to it. And he supposed there could be some solace in dignity, some faint vein of pride that his life had some meaning, but there could be no joy.
 
Was it a childish thing, Remus wondered, to want joy? To expect to find it in some corner, like a shining bauble bought simply for the pleasure of it? (Oh, to buy something just for the pleasure of it, what a foreign and teasing dream.) Or if it wasn’t childish, was it selfish? To want to be happy now, with people disappearing and dying, with Voldemort and his Death Eaters growing ever stronger, with the war? He felt certain that it was, and yet he also felt certain that he would grow mad without some brightness in his life. He didn’t need much, just a dollop, something small to take the edge off, something more than his duty to the Order that would make getting out of bed worthwhile.
 
Yes, I need this, he reasoned to himself, twisting fingers against wood and brass. I won’t get by without it.
 
He had slept rough once or twice and been privy to mutterings of the more unfortunate drug addicts in the city and knew he sounded the same as they did when they bargained away their bodies for a hit.
 
But this isn’t illegal and I haven’t sold anything, he defended himself to himself, while hooded eyes stared him down across the room, watching him, weighing him. And it isn’t dangerous!
 
Ah, well. That was debatable.
 
Come on, he pleaded, head bowed before the rapture that comes with giving in, letting go, fingers braced against the bow, the valves, the bell. It’s only music.
 
And so it was. For a little while at least.  

 
It was Remus’s mother who gave him his love of music. She was a music teacher at the village primary school and when she returned home she would repeat the day’s lesson with him and he would learn everything the other children had. The violin and the clarinet, the timpani and the bass, the piano and the trumpet; glissando, diminuendo, legato, staccato; sonatas, waltzes, endless etudes; flats and sharps and key changes; the breath and strength required for each note; the transcendent moment when raw sound cohered and became music. He was never destined to be a virtuoso – he would say that he was competent, at best, at all of the instruments he’d learned – but learning was never a chore for him and he never had to be pushed to practice. He could sit for hours, lips against a mouthpiece, fingers curved on a bow, working his breath or his hands through the instrument until he found out how to make it sing.
 
“Encore, encore!” his mother would cheer and clap over the smallest of his achievements, perched on the edge of the piano bench, smiling widely. In another life – one without magic – he would’ve followed in her footsteps and become a music teacher himself. It was a life he still daydreamed about sometimes, when the war was at its worst: the thought of the little village he might live in and the Muggle children he might teach if Dumbledore hadn’t allowed him to come to Hogwarts.
 
But Dumbledore had and Remus’s music playing had been, more or less, stowed away as he’d learned magic. The small school band headed by Professor Flitwick had seemed, frustratingly, to meet only on nights adjacent to the full moon and James, Peter, and Frank had not taken any interest in starting a rock band with him despite his (empty) promises of free-flowing firewhiskey and how it would help their chances with girls. He had had to resort to furtive, once a month practice sessions on the day before the full moon, when he felt so tight and coiled with nervous energy he thought he’d be sick; so he would go to the music room on the seventh floor, which he never seemed able to find at any other time, but which nonetheless was a great source of secret happiness for him.
 
He felt much then as he did now, when he snuck off to the studio, that pleasing urgency inside of him, the anticipation of playing. Except that when he had left the music room in Hogwarts he had never felt guilty or traitorous.
 
But I need this, he pleaded with himself. And I can stop if this becomes a problem.
 
This was the studio space and the walls lined with new, expensive instruments that he was allowed to play. This was the advertisement he’d seen in a Muggle paper at a moment when he was feeling low and close to despair. This was a job, a means to secure his rent and his food, and to do something he enjoyed.
 
This was the piano, its gleaming ivory keys and the lithe fingers that glanced across them, its chord shifts and the twist of elegant wrists, its black, looming silhouette made complete with the straight back of the man who sat at the bench. This was the man himself, the scion with a bloodline nearly as long as Wizarding history and the deep, darkening beat at the heart of every song they played.
 
This was Sirius Black.
 

 
Slytherin princeling, sly and mocking smile from across the classroom, insouciant to a fault. Never any smudges on his wand or his clothes, no hair out of place across his brow. Never any hint that he’d been involved with any pranks against the Gryffindors, but find him always standing between Snape and Rosier in the watching crowd, one of them whispering with a smirk into his ear. Cruel the way the winter was cruel, cold and without remorse, beautiful in its way. He killed a young kelpie that had wandered out from the lake beneath his heel; he was the only person alive who had ever made James Potter cry from a comment. The special animosity that powered their feud with Snape broke against him; he never seemed to care, hardly noticed they existed, except for the times when he did and the wintriness descended again.
 
Scent of fire on the wind when he used his wand; everyone had a different smell about them when they used magic, and his was the scent of coming danger. Blood so pure even Malfoy ducked his head, gold and silver and gems casually inlaid on his trunk, the thousand Galleon racing broom he lent to Snape and then forgot about. Never any parlays across the Great Hall to talk with the Gryffindors the way Peter and Lily had done for the Slytherins, even when they were young and the war hadn’t started and their Houses had mattered less. Above it all, but most certainly in the thick of it – check the smile on his face, the coldness of his laugh when anyone with a red and gold scarf failed or made a fool of themselves. Charmer and manipulator, bizarrely beloved by the professors, Slughorn always simpering and McGonagall meting out much of her rare praise his way. At the top of the class, but always last to check the standings; self-assured and brilliant and prone to unspoken magic at an eerily early age. Cossetted in silver and green, wild heart of the parties at the end of the year, teeth bared and head thrown back, darkly glittering. Uncannily quick with his wand, no way he didn’t know any dark magic; his house famously full of dark artifacts and dead elf heads; his wand always held executioner style, with a glove on and his fingers light on the wand wood, so there would be no trace of the spell on his skin when he was done with it.
 
The company he kept; the family he was born into; the realities of the day.
 
If anyone was a Death Eater, it was Sirius Black.
 
And yes, yes, Remus supposed that on top of all that, it could be said that he was handsome.
 

He sat across the room, at the piano. He was the one who had placed the ad, asking for an accompanist. He’d put it in a Muggle paper, why?
 
When Remus had first walked into the audition and seen him he’d thought it was a trap and he’d reached for his wand. But Black merely raised an eyebrow, the only indication he gave that he recognized Remus, and instructed him to begin with the violin. Refusing, even for a moment, to put his back to Black, he had, and when he began to play the world receded, as it always did, and Black never raised his wand or made an attempt at Death Eater propaganda. He only nodded, then told Remus that he wanted to hear him on the clarinet next.
 
He’d received an owl the next day, informing him he’d gotten the position. “This is to my benefit,” he’d told Remus during their first rehearsal together. “Now I don’t have to bother with changing Galleons into Muggle money every month.” And that was the last they spoke of the ad having been in a Muggle paper, though this was not the only element of the arrangement that perturbed Remus.
 
They played seemingly purely for pleasure for two hours four times a week, Black at the piano and Remus on whatever instrument Black wanted that day. There was no performance forthcoming, no clear goal to come of all their playing. When Remus had first seen the ad he thought it might be for a Muggle advertising company and he’d be helping to iron out the kinks for commercial jingles as his mother had done once for a small cereal company, but obviously that wasn’t what was happening here.
 
They did not discuss any purpose for being there and they did not discuss the pieces they played; in the Prophet a few months ago there’d been a little article about the lost compositions of an 18th century wizard composer being discovered and sold at auction and Remus thought they might be working on that. They did not discuss much anything at all. Remus even arrived in silence and often discovered which instrument he’d be playing that day from the sheet music left on his stand.
 
“Ready?” Black would say, stretching out his hands.
 
“Yes,” Remus would say, and then they would begin.
 
There was a little crystal enchantment on the piano that caught all sound that went into it and which, when Black tapped with his wand, would release the sound again. In this way when they played it was like playing in an orchestra, Remus adding to the song instrument by instrument, and Black sharpening every note played on the piano until the enchantment repeated them back with a precision so beautiful it ached against the insides of Remus’s ears. He could hear breaths echoing back sometimes too, both Black’s and his, and he didn’t know what to make of the fact that he could immediately tell them apart.
 
Yes, he was aware the enchantment could be used for spying, but what did he say to Black that would be worth anything to Voldemort? “Sorry, that was flat.” “Would you like to start from the third stanza this time?” What would any of that mean to Voldemort? Remus was fairly certain he didn’t even listen to music.
 
Yet despite knowing that nothing he said or did in the studio could endanger the Order, he couldn’t help but feel guilty about it, and he never told James or anyone where he went. He was faithful to the Order, but he was faithful to this too. He needed it, after all. And even after everything was all said and done, he never did know what he would have done without it.
 

Crescendo and Diminuendo
 
Rumors through the night, hushed whispers, premonitions of an attack. Dorcas Meadowes had taken down three Death Eaters single-handedly and retaliation felt inescapable. The last time a group of Death Eaters had been taken down an Order-sympathizing business in Diagon Alley was burned down with people still inside it: four dead for every one of theirs captured. Every Order member was on high alert, fear edged through every word and movement. Remus caught Peter praying outside a loo and watched James and Lily embrace each other so tightly their knuckles turned white. They sheltered in a pub that night, backs against the wall, too edgy to enjoy being drunk.
 
Nothing happened, but it would. Voldemort would not forgive this. The Aurors in the Order made their way to work, half-expecting to die, James and Lily made their way to their efforts to mobilize more counter-attacks, and Remus went to the studio.
 
“The trumpet,” Black said idly from the piano bench, flipping through sheet music, the only person Remus had seen in the past twenty-four hours not strained and unafraid.
 
Remus took up the trumpet without saying anything, though he would’ve preferred a string instrument today. His breaths felt tight in his throat; he had supplied the information that had led Dorcas to get the jump on the Death Eaters. He couldn’t shake off the strain and the peace he usually found in the music wasn’t waiting there for him. The notes were shaky and thin, the sounds coming from the trumpet near to a gasp.
 
But it was the piano that died away before the trumpet did. Turning from the piano bench, his voice cool, Black said, “Is it the spit valve, or is it you that’s gargling?”
 
Remus cleared his throat, but couldn’t manage to answer.
 
“You then,” Black said snappishly. “Fantastic.” He turned back to the piano, began turning back pages of the sheet music. “Tell me, Lupin, because I’m dying of curiosity over here, what is it that’s got you so distracted?”
 
Outrage loosened his tongue.
 
“There’s a war on,” he snapped back, “or didn’t you know?”
 
Black’s back went even straighter than usual. He turned, but only partly, so that his face was in profile and Remus couldn’t read the expression there.
 
“People are dying – and not of curiosity!”
 
Black turned back to face the piano, so that his face was averted from Remus when he said, “My brother among them.”
 
A strange spasm of emotion went through Remus, an unfortunate concoction of sympathy and triumph. It was tragic to lose family, but Regulus Black was one less Death Eater to worry about.
 
“Shall we play a dirge?” Black asked drily. “For all the dearly departed?”
 
Remus frowned, pointlessly since Black still wasn’t looking at him. “I’d rather we didn’t,” he said. “When I come here to play I don’t like to think about the war.”
 
Black’s shoulders heaved slightly, like he was taking a deep breath. “We have that in common,” he said. “But we still might die tomorrow, war or no war, and then tonight would be your last night playing anything. Do you really want to go out on such a sloppy note?”
 
“If I’m dying tomorrow I’d prefer to play the cello,” Remus said sourly, without thinking.
 
“Oh? Alright then.” He waved his hand and the cello floated over to Remus. “Play me your finale.”
 
Remus took hold of the cello, at as much of a loss with what to do with it as if it were his first time playing. “Play a finale?” he repeated back to Black.
 
“Your finale,” Black said. “The last song you’ll ever play.”
 
Remus tightened his grip on the bow, settling the cello more firmly between his legs. He’d be lying if he said he’d never thought about this before, but he would also be lying if he said he had any idea of what to play. There were so many songs he loved, so many textures and sounds he wanted to feel against his ears again and again, so many ways music made him feel that he wanted to hold on to. He couldn’t choose; he couldn’t even say that he wanted the cello to be the last instrument he played. He’d mentioned it on a whim, and so, he supposed, he’d pick the song on a whim too.
 
Before he even realized it he had begun the concerto that Black had been having them practice together these past few weeks. It was a slow piece, stately but serene in its beginning, almost like a meditation. The notes were held in long, breathing sweeps, like a mantra released in one long exhale, and there was a kind of dignity to that, each note given its time out in the world before another followed and linking with it created a more complex and wondrous sound.
 
But there was no serenity or dignity in the cello itself: its sound was deep, almost leaden, reverberating physically against Remus’s legs where he held it and echoing across his fingers. There was darkness along with the depth, a sound that brought to mind enclosed places, water lapping against the walls of lightless caverns, houses freshly emptied of inhabitants, the space behind a mask.
 
His fingers trembled against the bow; he could picture a mask, a Death Eater’s mask, a skull pressed over a living face. For so many in the Order it would likely be the last thing they would ever see. It would likely be the last thing he would ever see.
 
But he was not here to see.
 
He changed the tempo, he shifted the register, he flowed, as water does, from the darkness of an enclosure to openness and light. The concerto was winnowed away beneath his playing like a rock smoothed over by the flowing of a stream, and became at once a more complicated and harried thing: bittersweet as a last night on earth.
 
The cello weighed against Remus’s legs; the music he made with it weighed the air, turned it into sound, into something that was profound and, perhaps, beautiful.
 
At the end, Remus bound together the notes, sliding down a scale and then pulling the bow away from the cello abruptly, the last notes unplayed but still echoing in the air. As the music faded away he found that it was easier now, to breathe.
 
“You completely changed the tempo.”
 
Remus blinked, turning to look at Black who he had half-forgotten was there. Black had turned completely around on the piano bench and was looking at Remus with wide eyes. They were gray, Remus suddenly realized. All through school he had thought they were blue.
 
Remus cleared his throat, returning to himself enough to feel embarrassed about playing around with the composition. He was a performer, not a composer. “Yeah, well, you said to make it my finale so I just thought –”
 
“That was brilliant,” Black said. “And the legato at the end, and the chord shift in the middle that was…you transformed it.”
 
Remus shifted uncomfortably against the cello. He didn’t know what to do with this sudden outpouring of praise. Usually, the most he got out of Black was “that’s fine.”
 
“I guess…”
 
“Don’t guess. That was good work. I’m going to add some of those changes in.” He actually turned around to his copy of the sheet music and pulled out a pencil. “Actually…” he said, pencil freezing over the page before he’d even made a mark on it. “Perhaps not. Not on this one. This one I need for someone who won’t appreciate these kinds of flourishes.”
 
Remus frowned, confused. Before he could think better of it he asked, “What do you mean you need the piece for someone?”
 
“I wrote it with someone particular in mind. I suppose it’s meant to be a kind of gift.” He leaned against the piano. “Is a gift you know will be unappreciated still even a gift? I wonder.”
 
Remus didn’t bother adding his two sickles to the rhetorical question, he was still too hung up on what Black had said first.
 
“You wrote this?”
 
Black raised an eyebrow. “You seem surprised.”
 
“Well, you never said anything about it is all.”
 
Black shrugged, the gesture every bit as insouciant as Remus remembered it being at school. “You never asked.”
 
“I wouldn’t think I’d have to. If I’m performing someone’s composition I’d expect them to be proud enough of it to tell me it was theirs.”
 
Black’s expression darkened. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
 
“I mean that you put an advertisement in a Muggle paper. You’ve hidden your work from anyone who knows you. And rather than hire a full orchestra you’ve only got me working with you and – and I’m the only one, aren’t I?”
 
“Well, there’s obviously no one else here,” Black snapped.
 
“No, I meant…am I the only one who’s heard your music?”
 
“There’s a war on,” Black said with a nasty sneer. “Or didn’t you know?”
 
Remus’s hand tightened on the bow. “What…”
 
“What is it you think that’s first to die during wartime? Dumbledore – I remember his uplifting little leaving feast speech – Dumbledore seems to think it’s innocence. I disagree. I think it’s art. I think it’s poetry. I think it’s music. Have you heard the radio lately? All that patriotic ra-ra garbage? Everything becomes a tool during war to try to get one side to win. Even music. Innocence gets lost no matter if there’s a war or not, but nothing can taint music apart from war.” He paused for a moment, considering. “Well, war and bad musicians.”
 
Remus’s fingers had relaxed on the bow as Black had spoken. He felt opened up, the same way he had when he’d been playing. Black had given voice to so many of Remus’s own thoughts, how even the diversion the radio might have provided had become blood-spattered, the airwaves taken over by all the same fearful sentiments that filled Order meetings. He wondered how it was on the radios in Black’s home, how different the songs were, if there was even any difference to them at all.
 
For the first time, when he tried to conjure an image of Black surrounded by his fellow Death Eaters he couldn’t do it. When he imagined Black listening to the radio he pictured him alone.
 
“Are you going to say something to all that or not?” Black prodded.
 
“There’s nothing to say,” Remus responded. “You’re right.”
 
Black arched an eyebrow, as if surprised that Remus would agree with him.
 
Remus cleared his throat and feeling emboldened by the fact that they shared an opinion on how the war diminished music he asked, “So, the reason we’re here – why you put that advert in the paper, I mean – is because you want to fine-tune your compositions?”
 
“Well, yes. And record them. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that….well, I suppose I just wanted a reason to play.”
 
Remus had not realized that there was frostiness between them until it melted away, just then.
 
“Me too,” he whispered.
 
They looked at each other, understanding weighting the air between them the way music usually did.
 
“Right,” Black said, when the moment had passed. “From the top?”
 
Remus adjusted the bow, fixed the cello between his legs. “From the top.”
 

 
A day later, Benjy Fenwick, blown to pieces, in an alley. Silence and bowed heads around the table during the Order meeting, a shared and shameful relief that they had not been the ones to die. Funeral arrangements, the weeping widow, the long walk to view the casket.
 
And in the studio, the concerto, finally finished. The glittery enchantment tapped with Black’s wand and the whole piece played back, the both of them listening with a satisfaction that was not gritty or tainted, the way all satisfaction for the war effort was. They had accomplished something, and it had not cost a single life or injury (unless the new calluses on Remus’s fingers counted).
 
“Good job, Lupin,” Black said as the piece ended, his head tilted back and his eyes closed as he listened. There was an eyelash on his cheek that Remus found himself wanting to brush away. He kept his hands balled in his pockets, wondering what was wrong with him, wondering why his heart stuttered slightly when Black opened his eyes and stared straight into his. “We’ll start a new piece on Monday,” he said. “Something a little livelier.”
 
“What about Friday?”
 
“I’ll be otherwise occupied, unfortunately.” He sighed heavily, closing his eyes again and rubbing at them. “Would you like…” His voice hung for a moment, and Remus wondered, wildly, if he was about to be asked to join him in whatever occasion was keeping him away on Friday. But then Black shook his head and said instead, “What do you think, another concerto next? Or some jazz?”
 
“Jazz. One hundred percent jazz.”
 
Black smiled, handed over Remus’s pay, and in a voice that had the slightest strain of longing in it said, “I was hoping you would say that.”
 

Fermata
 
Brocade rasping against silk, the turning of her head on the pillow, the corners of her mouth cracked and near bleeding, her eyes staring blankly off into the dark. So still she’s practically just another shadow filling the room, so quiet she could almost be taken for dead.
 
It might be better, Sirius thinks, if she were. He considers the pillow beside her, knows that she would barely thrash. Alone in the house save for the house-elves, and their silence so easily secured. A few moments of pressure, then gone.
 
But what were you, he wonders, if you could so easily kill your family?
 
He thinks of his brother, who died in his bed two rooms down, the way his screams still echo, the way even the strongest magic won’t wipe his blood from the sheets. She calls for him, sometimes. Weeps for him more often. Loss, he finally understands, is never singular. One person leaves and he breaks open two people in his leaving. There are moments when he thinks he hears him still, when on the edge of dreaming he believes that if he just reaches out far enough, if he is still enough and strong enough and good enough, he can make it right, he can bring his brother back.
 
In all the world there is no shortage of grief. And, he believes, no end to it.
 
But still, he is up in the morning, he eats his meals, he drinks his wine. He makes his music. There is something in music, like grief, that goes past all definition, that comes to the root, that touches the heart of all things.
 
She stirs on the bed, her fingers clutching the sheets. Her eyes focus and she turns to the corner, where the concerto he wrote for her is playing from. It isn’t much, it is by no means any compensation, but something eases across her brow while it plays. He stands in the hallway, out of sight, he closes his eyes at the cello solo, he marks the subtle changes he made. And he feels, for that instant, slightly less alone. Because for him music is never singular either.
 

Resonance
 
“Dumbledore thinks we’ve got a spy in the Order,” Frank said over drinks. “That that’s how they knew where to find Benjy.”
 
“They might’ve just gotten lucky,” Peter said.
 
“Luck had nothing to do with what they did to Ben,” Frank replied, leaning back in his seat and gesturing to Tom for another round. The Leaky Cauldron was practically empty and no wonder, it was nearly ten am. They had been there since just after dawn, all four of them fresh off their respective night duties. No one slept much after attacks like Benjy’s; no one wanted to risk the dreams.
 
James sighed into his pint before draining it. “Something’s got to be done.”
 
“Yeah, we need to flush out the spy,” Frank said.
 
“No, I’m with Peter,” James said, shaking his head. “I’m not convinced there is a spy. I’m saying we need to do something more than what we’ve been doing because the way we’ve been fighting them hasn’t been very successful. Benjy was one of our best and they just…mowed him down.”
 
“Maybe we should try getting a spy of our own,” Remus suggested, disliking the violent edge to James’s voice, wanting to bring him back to center.
 
“I was actually thinking that we could be the spies,” James said with a little grin. He pulled a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his robes and laid it on the table. “I was going through my parents’ mail and I found this. It was sent to them just before they passed away.” He tapped the paper, a thick sheaf of parchment that looked as though it would be creamy to the touch, with his wand and elegant emerald-colored calligraphy swooped across the page.
 
Mr. and Mrs. Cygnus Black request the honor of your presence at the wedding of their daughter, Narcissa Black to Lucius Malfoy, on Friday, August 1st, at the Black Family Estate.
 
Below this were instructions on how to arrive at the estate – and how to use the invitation as means to get through the massive Shield Charm that was to be placed around the grounds.
 
“Blimey,” Peter said, poking at the invitation with his finger. “This must’ve been sent just before things got really bad. Anyone could nick this and use it to get into that wedding!”
 
“Yeah, but they probably felt safe sending it out since they only invited purebloods,” Frank said.
 
“My thoughts exactly,” James said with a worrying grin. “The cream of Death Eater society is going to be there.”
 
“Merlin, James, you can’t be thinking of gate crashing a Death Eater wedding,” Remus said, incredulous.
 
“Not gate crashing. Spying. We get in, we have a look around, and we wait until they start talking shop. If we’re lucky Voldemort got an invite too and we’ve got a shot at him.”
 
“Alright, so first of all, that’s not much of a plan,” Remus said. “Second of all, what little of a plan you have is insane. We just wander in, eavesdrop, and maybe, if we’re really, really lucky, we get a shot at assassinating Voldemort? What the hell, Jim?”
 
“Nah, he’d be too protected to assassinate,” Frank said. “But this thing is bound to be filled with everyone influential. And look, it says there’s an open bar. They’ll be getting drunk and we’d likely hear something worthwhile.”
 
“You agree with him? You want in on this madness too?” Remus asked, turning on Frank. He could usually count on Frank to be reasonable, to help him tamp down James’s more reckless qualities.
 
Frank shrugged. “Nothing’s working against them, Remus. Two of the three Death Eaters Dorcas caught got out on bail because of some legal loophole. The Ministry isn’t treating this with the seriousness it should and meanwhile we’re losing more and more good witches and wizards every day. Any edge, no matter how small, is vital.”
 
“Hear, hear!” James said, raising his pint again and bringing it halfway to his lips before he realized it was empty. “So we’re all agreed then?”
 
“No, we are not all agreed,” Remus said as Peter said, “Well, I suppose if you both think it’s a good idea…”
 
Remus gave Peter a sour look before turning back to James. “You have no idea what it’ll be like once we’re in there. They’ll likely have a second line of defense up after the Shield Charm –”
 
“We’ll figure it out.”
 
“Merlin, James this isn’t a game! We can’t go in half-cocked, hoping for the best!”
 
“I know,” James said, in that terribly earnest way of his. It was amazing to Remus, even up until the very end, how the war took things from people in pieces. There were hollows beneath James’s eyes that never went away, he had to take potions to calm his dreams, and yet he could still cavalierly plot to break into a Death Eater stronghold as if it were all just a prank. Case in point: “It’s not like we haven’t done anything like this before. It’ll be just like sneaking into the Slytherin dorms.”
 
“It will be nothing like sneaking into the Slytherin dorms,” Remus said, affronted.
 
“Ah, come on,” Frank said. “It’ll be a little bit like sneaking into the Slytherin dorms. Minus Snape’s gross nightshirt.”
 
“We hope,” Peter snickered.
 
“And apart from that horrific mental image – which can never be unseen – we got away from that one scot-free! And we’ll do it again this time and win ourselves a war in the process, what do you say, lads?”
 
You sound like you’re giving a speech before a Quidditch match, Remus wanted to say but didn’t. You should still be giving speeches before Quidditch matches. You should be finishing out your time on some minor league team, readying yourself to get signed to the Magpies or Puddlemere United. You shouldn’t be here, fresh from trying to create spells that will better kill our enemies. His throat felt tight, looking into all of their faces, not one of them at the table over twenty. None of us should be here.
 
 “What do you say, Remus? Are you in?” James asked, Frank and Peter already having assented to this mad plan.
 
“Of course,” he said, after an instant of hesitation, because no matter whether he thought the plan was mental or not he would not abandon his friends. “Someone has to keep an eye on all you berks.”
 
James pumped his fist and gave Frank, who was closest, a playful punch on the shoulder. “All right,” he said, gesturing for all four of them to come closer and huddle over the table. “Let’s talk details.”
 

Details: an Invisibility Cloak, night-black cloaks for the two of them the Invisibility Cloak wouldn’t cover, the requisite poison tablets to swallow upon capture, and the hope that this idiocy would be worthwhile.
 
James had done a complicated bit of magic on the invitation, making it allow entry for four people instead of two, and they arrived on the edges of the estate an hour after the time on the invitation to lower the risk of running into anyone. There was nothing in the field they’d been directed to, save a small, stunted tree with a white balloon tied to it, marking the official entrance of the wedding. But the Shield Charm ran all along the perimeter of the field and Peter, who was the best at sensing magic without a wand, found them a spot far back from the proper entrance, and they slipped through.
 
Remus had been hoping they wouldn’t be able to, that the invitation’s magic wouldn’t work and they’d be allowed to turn back having said that they’d tried, but they broke through the Shield Charm as simply and effortlessly as a stone plunges through water. In the distance, a splendid manor house dominated the field, the clinking of glasses and the indistinct sounds of people talking echoing across the grounds. Fairy lights or candles – it was difficult to tell at a distance – had been hung in all the trees surrounding the house, their light flickering prettily in the boughs – and driving away much of the shadows that could be used to hide within.
 
It was much more dangerous than they’d bargained for; that much was apparent at first glance. No trees to hide behind save the ones with the lights, and not a bush or an overhanging eave in sight. The entire way from the house to where they stood at the edge of the field was exposed, and there was a smell like burning cinnamon in the air, which meant the wedding party had sprung for Spell Diffusers and any sort of invisibility spell would be useless.
 
But “come on,” James said, like none of this was anything to worry about. He and Remus were the two outside the Invisibility Cloak and he led the way across the field, hood up, shoulders bent at a crouch, Remus, Peter, and Frank close behind. As the drew closer to the house the sound of clinking glasses and cutlery against plates grew louder and sounded to Remus almost like the drawing of swords from scabbards or the sharpening of knives. Until the moment that they pressed up against the wall of the manor, unseen, he remained convinced that the entire party was lying in wait for them, wands to the side, ready to tear them apart with their genteel and monogrammed flatware.
 
From beneath the Invisibility Cloak Frank dropped two Diffuser-Disrupters he’d nicked from the Auror Department; they were prototypes meant to counteract the effects of the Spell Diffusers and though they hadn’t been field tested yet they were meant to last for thirty to forty minutes. If they didn’t work the four of them would Apparate out of there and hope no Death Eaters were following them; but, naturally, they did work and James and Remus used a spell to blend into the scenery. The four of them spread out along the manor, ears cocked to the open windows, within signaling distance of each other.
 
Remus crept alongside a window that was a large as a door, the light from within made pearly by the frosted glass. It seemed to be the only window that wasn’t open, but still he could hear everything that was happening within: light laughter, the rustling of expensive dress robes, and snatches of conversation. He heard the bride’s gown discussed extensively (“Marvelous!” said one woman; “Tacky!” said another), and the matron of honor’s suspicious lack of children despite being married herself for several years (“Do you think Rodolphus has an issue with his, you know, dear, his little wand?”). He heard old friends greeting each other after many years apart, and people, delicately and indelicately both, breaking off conversations with people they clearly had no interest in. A group of groomsman teased the flower girl for long minutes, pretending they didn’t recognize her, saying it was impossible that this could be little Leticia, why, little Leticia was much shorter than this perfect young lady standing before them, there was no way this was Leticia, could she prove it?
 
And the flirtations, of course, the flirtations were everywhere. The coquetry of a giggle, the burr of a compliment, the shudder in the voice, that first indication of interest.
 
It was disorienting, all of it. The air outside thick and lush with the scent of night blooming flowers, the chatter of the wedding party so benign, so normal; for a moment Remus felt less like a spy and more like someone uninvited, forced to watch the revelry at a distance. Caught just outside the golden glow from the party what he felt was not fear, but a strange kind of loneliness. He had never been to a wedding before. He had had no idea that it would be like this.
 
Polite clapping and cheers rose up through the crowd; the happy couple came Remus’s way, positioning themselves in the center of the space that had been cleared for them to dance. Remus knew who they were, had known of them since his first year at Hogwarts: bad people, Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa Black. Rich and haughty, extreme in their ideals of blood purity, Death Eaters both.
 
And yet tonight, despite all of that, despite knowing that they were both instrumental in the Death Eaters’ victories, Remus was taken aback when they swept into the room and positioned themselves in the center of their gathering of family and friends. They were glittering, both of them, her in a dress that had a bodice sewn with diamonds, him in dress robes threaded through with gold, and their eyes shining with unshed tears of joy as the announcement filled the room: “And now, for their first ever dance as husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lucius Malfoy!”
 
Music swelled; the bride and groom beamed at each other through tears. They moved across the floor in a series of slowly revolving circles, enraptured by each other, blind to everyone else in the room. Remus was struck by how much, in that moment, they resembled how James and Lily were with each other, how they could cut across an entire room with a gaze and find each other, how everyone else was rendered superfluous in their presence, how they danced, just like this, in a halo of light of their own making. How it made Remus feel to watch them, the ache it produced, the acute sense of his own body, the lack of anyone near him.
 
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, he thought and managed a wry smile. Others had begun to join the Malfoys on the dance floor and Remus could see a few in the crowd awkwardly hanging back against the wall. He recognized them as lonelyhearts before he recognized them by name: Severus Snape and Evan Rosier. Snape was making a practiced study of his wine glass, his shoulders hunched, while Rosier stared longingly at a tall brunette in a peach colored dress robe dancing with one of the groomsmen. Remus felt for them, without meaning to. He had done the same as both of them in more parties than he could remember. It was overwhelming for a minute, the sense that he knew these people and could tell what they felt, the line between who they were and he was only as thick as the glass in the windowpanes, enough to warble the reflection but not enough to truly change what they were. In another life, one in which the only difference was that the war and the prejudice that laced through it were gone, he might’ve been friends with these people, he might’ve been invited in, he might’ve been on the other side of the glass.
 
The ache he felt then was deeper, less personal; the sense of loss more profound.
 
He had a hand curled over his heart and so felt it jump against his palm when he heard a sudden rustling in the grass nearby. He flicked the signal with his wand – which was meant to look like a trio of fireflies – and received James’s signal in response.
 
“Anything?” James whispered.
 
“No.”
 
“Fuck. Me too.” The grass near Remus flattened and he knew James was standing right beside him. “Have to hope Peter and Frank –”
 
James interrupted himself, grabbing at Remus’s arm and pulling him away from the window. He mouthed several curses and kept hissing “see.” It took Remus a few seconds to realize that James was telling him that the time had run out on his Diffuser-Disrupter and he was now visible and exposed to anyone who might look out from the party.
 
He needed to leave while he still could. They had signals for this, for debating whether they should risk the loud “crack” an Apparation would produce or whether sneaking back across the field was more or less dangerous. But before Remus could so much as lift his hand it became suddenly apparent to him that the very large window he’d been looking into was not a window at all. It was a door, and someone was opening it.
 
The noise of the party swelled against Remus’s ears, sounding now like a cannonade. He could hear clearly for the first time the music they were playing: it was a dreadful, soppy rendition of a Celestina Warbeck standard, and it was ultimately this more than fear for his own life that made him draw his wand up into a dueling position. The last song he ever heard was not going to be Celestina fucking Warbeck. He’d sooner duel the entire wedding party on his own, and he was prepared to do just that when he realized who it was who had opened and stepped through the door.
 
It was Sirius Black. He had an unlit cigarette in his fingers and when he turned to light it he caught sight of Remus and stopped dead. His eyes widened in shock, the gray of them lustrous in the light coming from the manor. Remus’s wand hand trembled. They stared at each other for what felt like the longest moment of Remus’s life, the both of them frozen, poised on the edge of actions that would have irrevocable consequence.
 
When they moved it was as one, the both of them startled when, from within, a woman’s husky voice sounded.
 
“Leave the door open, Sirius. I need a smoke too.”
 
Black’s features smoothed themselves over. He looked into the manor with an expression as haughty and indifferent as the one he’d worn when Remus had first come to audition for him. “Come now, Bellatrix,” he said silkily “You know you can’t smoke. Aren’t you meant to be trying to be a good little wife and have a baby?”
 
“Oh, shut up you little shit,” she snapped back at him.
 
“Is this a hormonal mood swing? Already? Your mother will be thrilled.”
 
“And what about your mother, cousin? I see she isn’t here tonight.”
 
Black gave a light, one-shouldered shrug. “She’s taken ill.”
 
Bellatrix’s voice purred through the door, so very close, all poisoned sweetness. “More like she’s upset her more worthy son died.”
 
Sirius’s response to this was equal in its venomous sugariness. “Well, you’d know all about sons dying, wouldn’t you, dear? How many times is it now that you’ve gone to see that unlicensed Healer on Knockturn Alley? I wonder, is Rodolphus aware of these little extractions? And when you come out empty is it simply to make room for someone else’s son, or is it because you’re self-aware enough to know you’d make a terrible mother?”
 
The stream of swears that came from Bellatrix then were all poison and no sweetness. Some of them were barbed enough with magic that Remus could feel them crackling in the air like static electricity; they snapped against his skin, nearly drawing blood.
 
But next he heard footfalls, the clacking of high heels headed away from the door, and Black, with all appearances of having completed an entirely civilized conversation, slowly closed the door.
 
He turned his back to the door and took a few steps away from the house, still close enough that anyone inside could see him lighting his cigarette, but far enough away that no one could hear the whisper of his voice.
 
“Are you alone?” he asked, smoke furling out of his mouth with his whisper.
 
Remus didn’t respond; James was still invisible and he had no idea where Peter and Frank were.
 
“Well,” Black said, taking an answer from his silence. “For your sake I hope you can get your merry little band together quickly because you’re going to need to leave very soon to avoid being seen. Lucius’s father is insisting everyone come outside shortly. It seems he’s bought some sort of surprise for his new daughter-in-law. As if this wedding wasn’t a spectacle enough already.”
 
His voice pitched as low as he could manage Remus hazarded two words, “How soon?”
 
Black pulled a pocket watch from his robes. “I can guarantee you four minutes at the most.”
 
“Fuck,” James hissed, and quickly sent a signal to Peter and Frank.
 
“Yes, you are quite fucked,” Black agreed. He turned his head slightly, seeing Remus hunch his shoulders and prepare to follow James back across the field. “The front,” he said with a touch of asperity in his tone, as if he were pointing out that Remus’s playing had been flat. “Everyone’s swarming the cake. No one’s there.”
 
“Can’t trust you,” James hissed through the dark, but Black didn’t even turn in the direction of his voice. He was looking straight at Remus, his hand holding the cigarette to his mouth so anyone who looked at him from within the manor wouldn’t see his lips moving when he said again, more gently, “The front.”
 
As when he’d chosen the concerto as if it were the last song he’d ever play, Remus had given a nod of thanks to Black and started for the front of the manor before fully realizing he’d made the decision to do so. James let out a wordless noise, half of desperation and half of irritation, but he followed Remus as he crept along the side of the house. By the time they reached the front door they were both visible and they could hear Peter and Frank’s heavy breathing, their unspoken, panicky questions of why they were headed this way. Remus wondered so himself, for an instant, as they ran out of the minimal cover the fairy light strung trees provided and were abruptly in full view of the blazing lights spilling from the wide open front door. But his heart barely had time to begin to pound before it was obvious that it was as Black had said: there was no one in the front of the house. The windows looked into empty rooms and the detritus of the party: abandoned fur-lined robes, empty glasses, and dirty, crumpled up napkins. Hissing and barely audible, James urged them all to go faster, to make for the boundary of the tree with its lone white balloon, to not risk the noise of Apparation. But no sooner had they broken into a jog that the air rent itself with a concussive boom and the four of them went stumbling to the ground.
 
Panic stricken – and, oddly, heartbroken – Remus drew his wand, readying himself for a counterattack even as he shot a look toward James, Peter, and Frank to be sure none of them were injured. But James, and what he could see of Peter and Frank’s flailing feet, were unharmed. Another explosion shattered the air, but this time Remus recognized it for what it was and lifted his head in time to see the falling sparks of green and silver fireworks and gathered beneath them, gaze fixed in the opposite direction of the front door, the entire wedding party, watching the show.
 
Remus hurriedly helped Peter and Frank to their feet and all four of them ran flat out to the entrance of the Shield Charm, the flaring and roar of the fireworks their cover. They passed through the boundary of the Shield Charm on a frantic burst of speed, the sudden silence and lack of light disorienting enough to send them careening into each other, their barely controlled, panic-fueled shouts released into each other’s shoulders. They Apparated away to Peter’s place, as agreed, and on the threshold of his home found themselves buckling over with nervous, helpless laughter. Rather than feeling like they’d escaped a hostile environment with their lives they all seemed to feel as though they’d broken a rule at school and gotten away with it. “Holy shit!” Frank kept saying, while Peter and James held onto each other and laughed. Remus, ever the prefect, felt his knees buckle and sat down heavily on Peter’s sofa, shock keeping him from trying to beat the hell out of James for making them go there in the first place. “Never again,” he said, as he had often said at Hogwarts. “I’m never doing anything like that with you lot again,” he said and found, for the first time ever, that he really meant it.
 

In exchange for this near death experience: an intimation.
 
Lucius Malfoy’s father and Cygnus Black whispering in a corner:
 
No cure then?
 
My sister begged the Dark Lord, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Says there’s no cure to be had for traitors to the cause.
 
It was true? Regulus Black, a –
 
He was an example. One we’d do well to heed. Nasty way to die.
 
Indeed. Quite nasty.
 
A new weapon, Frank figured. A bad spell, Peter worried. A piece of intel to take to Dumbledore, James suggested.
 
A bad omen, Remus thought. And sad, so very sad, as well.
 

Remus arrived early to the studio on Monday, avoided Sirius’s eyes, and, while making a fuss of adjusting the music stand, blurted out, “You’re not a Death Eater.”
 
Sirius – over the weekend, while replaying their narrow escape in his mind he had come to think of him as simply Sirius, not Black – turned from the piano. “No,” he said evenly. “I’m not.”
 
Remus shot him a hesitant look, couldn’t hold it, and went back to fumbling with the stand.
 
“You’re in the Order of the Phoenix,” Sirius said, smoothly as he had spoken to Bellatrix.
 
“Yes,” Remus said, his voice a whisper, but steady.
 
“A risky affiliation.”
 
“What’s life without risk?”
 
“Only so long as it’s a risk worth taking.”
 
“It is,” Remus said, and his voice had risen. He thought of James and Lily, Peter and Frank, Alice and his own father, the lives that might be saved. “It is.”
 
“It’s your life,” Sirius said, but there was no shrug, and no dismissal in his tone. It’s your life, he said, with a hint of disbelief, like Remus might have forgotten it meant something. And maybe he had. Maybe there were times when he thought it was worth throwing away. In Order meetings it felt like a noble thing, but here, before the sweep of the piano, and the waiting instruments on the wall of the studio, there was no nobility or honor or just cause to die for, there was only silence.
 
“My life,” he said, and felt the weight of it. “My life.”
 
It was a few moments, that day, before they began to play.
 

Staccato
 
It was jazz all the rest of that summer and into fall. For this Sirius only had outlines not fully fledged compositions and there was a sense, as they played, of tripping uphill, laughing, of letting themselves fall but always finding their feet. Jazz was playfulness given rhythm, it turned songs into tangles that had to be unwound and wound again, a circuitous maze that every time they entered they found new ways out of, the invitation to improvise implicit in its form. As he had not with the concerto he invited Remus’s input with the jazz pieces and they built things together when outside everything else was crumbling.
 
The war got worse because that’s what wars did. The dead came to outnumber the living and attacks on both sides rose in frequency and pitch, a cacophony of violence, and, within it, the strangest things: manors lit with fairy lights, pubs crowded tight with revelers, the new diamond engagement rings on Alice and Lily’s fingers, the expectation of all of this, one day, ending.
 
That was where Remus most differed from his friends in the Order. They fought for the future, for the children they might have, and the vulnerable not yet harmed. He fought for the past, for a boyhood made brilliant by friends who didn’t care he was a monster, and the sense that he had done nothing to deserve their love and must now make up for that deficiency. It was taboo to talk of after, but taboos in those days were often broken, and all his friends had plans and hopes and dreams – save him. Oh, he had longings, moments when it was unbearable to watch James and Lily ensconced in each other’s love, when the loneliness broke in as surely and suddenly as daybreak. But he had no expectations, and he certainly had no plans. His part in the Order had become among the most dangerous, barely second to the Aurors and their few spies. He drew fire and dueled often and lingered, always, over every final note played in the studio, and said, “See you tomorrow,” to Sirius without ever fully meaning it.
 
Death was coming for him, sure as anything, and so there was no sense to holding anything in reserve and he gave every song everything in him.
 
All the songs, when they were finished and Sirius played them back, were like lucid, wonderful dreams. The blazing of a trumpet, like light cutting through fog, spiraling over itself, refracting all the sound around it, the other brass joining in, the many breaths he’d released pouring out into something golden, practically molten in its intensity. The inherent slinkiness of the clarinet and the saxophone, their coyness, the way he’d made them sashay, teasing out over the notes, a pout in every stanza. The swing of the strings, the nimble feet of the violin, the husky shuffle of the bass, the slouching sway of the cello, every callused finger worth it, the notes that had been dug into his skin. The pulsing of the drums, the way he’d touched at each part – hi-hat, snares, and toms – and gotten them to mirror every form of heartbeat. The way it blended all together, the way it danced: he had never known he had it in him.
 
But Sirius had. “I knew we’d get there,” he said. “I knew it would be this good,” and he laughed.
 
Among the many things Remus learned about himself in these sessions was what it did to him to hear that laugh, the spike of joy that went through him, the flutter of pleasure in his stomach. But one thing he didn’t need to learn was something he’d known from the first moments of his audition, and that was the final, most significant element in all the songs they played: the piano, and the pianist.
 
It was articulate, the way Sirius played it, a voice that went deeper than words, but which spoke nonetheless. It whispered, it roared, and it laughed, yes, Remus had heard it, a brusque rolling of the keys, joyous, almost a bark. There was a conversational quality to it – many times did Remus feel that they were speaking to one another from within the music – but there was an elemental quality to it as well. It drew back, like the tide; it meandered, lazily as a stream does, and with urgency as a river widens into rapids; it flowed beneath the other instruments, it buoyed them, and then just as quickly flooded the song, washing all other sound away, dominating the song across all its horizons. And, like water, when Sirius played it, it was a vital thing, a nourishing thing, something Remus thought he could survive on, and he closed his eyes often when he heard Sirius playing, as if he could capture the sound, place it in some kind of well inside him so that he could draw from it later when his need was great.
 
The piano, like the guitar or the violin, was one of those few instruments that the soul finds an instant affinity for. In Sirius’s hands, and in Remus’s soul, the affinity was perhaps something more, was perhaps affection.
 
Was perhaps love.
 
Ah, but it was early. And like puppies barely grown into their paws they were only playing, and their being together was only about the music, really.
 
Until December, when the first snow and the full moon came, and the Death Eaters almost killed Remus.
 

Nocturne
 
Snape, was Remus’s first thought, because he had always suspected Remus of being a werewolf. But the masked Death Eater that charged into the shed that Remus had just transformed back in was too tall and too broad to be Snape, and anyway it didn’t matter just then, did it? A Killing Curse sliced the air an inch from his ear. He heard it shatter the window behind him as he ducked and rolled towards the Death Eater on instinct. He knocked the Death Eater’s feet out from under him, sent him flailing to the floor, and then did the most sensible thing he could and Apparated away.
 
He had to make a snap decision of destination. Couldn’t be his flat or James’s or Peter’s or Frank and Alice’s, couldn’t be any Order hideouts; he had no idea if the Death Eater had been able to place a tracking spell on him while he’d been transformed and he couldn’t risk anyone else getting hurt. So he chose a London park, one so small it didn’t have a name, and he Apparated between two stunted birch trees, naked and bloody as the day he was born, his wand held out in front of him, panting and still coughing up blood from his transformation. It soon became apparent that he’d been lucky, on many counts. The park was deserted in the pre-dawn gloom, the Death Eater absent from the shadows cast by the trees, and in his arms, there were two items of clothing he’d managed to hold onto when the Death Eater had burst in on him: no shoes, no shirt, but trousers and his threadbare coat. He risked lowering his wand to put them on, his breath puffing white in the frigid air. He turned circles in the grass when he’d finished and stopped when, just on the edge of his hearing, he heard one man’s voice answer another’s.
 
“Find the werewolf?”
 
“Not yet.”
 
They’d put something on him, oh fuck they were tracking him. He spun, Apparated, ran his wand along his body in an alley, found nothing, Apparated away again, huddled beneath the eaves of a funeral home, shivering, panicking, dizzy, made weak from the transformation, his knees near buckling, blood hot beneath his tongue. He walked on foot in case it was his use of magic that was giving him away, stumbled in front of empty buildings and flats, the shades all drawn, the traffic non-existent, the air so heavy with cold he thought pieces of him might freeze and break off any minute. He huddled into himself, his shoulders drawn, and saw two dark figures at the far end of the street.
 
A flash of green again, but he was already gone. When he’d wrapped his arms around himself to try to keep warm he’d laid hands on how they were finding him. It was his Werewolf Registration Number, inked invisibly onto his skin, but he could find the nubs of it beneath his finger pads. He knew, in an intuitive, unquestioning way he might not have had it not been so close to the full moon, that that was how they had found him, and he knew that to get away he had to get rid of it.
 
No knife, and his wand wouldn’t work on it, so he did what he always seemed to in his darkest, most private dreams and sunk his teeth into living flesh and ripped.
 
He spat a hunk of skin and blood into a garbage can and Apparated again.
 
He slammed against a wall when he reappeared, blood coursing down his arm, scalding him between his fingers. He looked around to see that he wasn’t near any safe house or close to his own flat. He had conjured the word safe and let it pull him here, to the steps of the building that housed the studio.
 
He found now that he’d escaped that he could no longer move and he collapsed onto the steps, shivering and shaking. His eyes fluttered shut and when he opened them again he was disoriented, thinking he’d slept the entire day away, for the sky had grown darker since he’d been attacked, though it was surely at least eight am by now. But the sky was heedless of the clock and a prolonged night spread above him, clouds concealing the sun, and soon, drifts of snow concealing the clouds.
 
He was distantly aware of the screaming of his muscles and the blood now congealing on his skin; the pain was all-encompassing, but it was still nothing to the cold. It pricked into every place of him, it made even his teeth ache. He could feel each and every one of his toes slowly freezing and he would’ve sold himself for secondhand shoes if given the opportunity.
 
He would’ve sold himself for a kinder death as well because it felt to him that it was coming, and cruelly. He had lost too much blood, and it was too cold. Snow swirled around him, running pink where it touched his lips and cheeks. He stared off into it, and through it the street was empty, no help forthcoming. It was a Sunday, a snow day; everyone inside, lying in, cuddled up warm. There were spells he could use to call for help, but he’d lost too much blood to use magic, and so all he did was watch the snow fall and gather, waiting for his vision to go white, waiting for his ears to fill up with that final, longest silence.
 
But instead of silence there were footsteps crunching along the sidewalk, and instead of white, suddenly, there was Black.
 
The footsteps stopped abruptly and Sirius stared at him with far more surprise on his face than he had when he’d seen him at the Malfoy wedding. His lips parted in surprise and Remus stared at them. He looked quite the pretty picture, Sirius, and Remus felt no shame in admitting it now that he was dying. His cheeks were rouged by the cold, his breath rose in a plume, and Remus could’ve fit his whole thumb between the little ‘o’ he’d made with his mouth.
 
“Come here often?” he said with a wink, before, most charmingly, he coughed up blood and fainted.
 
Awareness returned when he was on his feet, Sirius’s arms around him. He mumbled something he didn’t understand, but Sirius did because he replied, snappishly, “Oh, shut it, Lupin, you’re not dying.”
 
“Am so!” Remus replied, feeling peevish, but also far less cold. His eyes slid shut and when he blinked them open it was as if onto a dream. The sky thunderhead dark, the air pebbled with white, the most beautiful man Remus had ever seen cupping his cheek, holding a vial to his lips.
 
“Champagne? Before breakfast?”
 
“Goddammit, Lupin, drink.”
 
Who could resist those honeyed tones? He drained the bottle and although it was bubbly it had a kick like rum and a taste like watered down beer: a healing draught, a powerful one.
 
He had to keep hold of Sirius’s shoulders to stay upright. He looked around him, his limbs now made more of drowsiness than pain. He didn’t know where he was, just knew that he shouldn’t have been there, the neighborhood far too nice for the likes of him. He gaped around, not protesting as he was guided into a magnificent hotel, the lobby glittering like the sun after the darkness of the streets. He was distantly aware of Sirius having words with some sort of employee, of the man gesturing to his bare feet and the blood on his face. The next thing he knew they were in the lift; he pressed a palm to the wall and found it was covered in velvet, and when he looked up he saw that painted onto the lift’s ceiling was a small fresco. He would’ve slept there without cause to complain but then the doors opened onto a set of rooms so sublime and splendid he became even more certain he was dreaming. He was eased, without protest, between sheets so soft he cried out at the touch of them and Sirius was there, his expression – was this possible? – full of worry.
 
“There, there,” he reassured him. Sirius gave him a strange look and he realized that he’d reached up and patted Sirius’s cheek.
 
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, flinching back his filthy and bloody hand.
 
“Don’t be,” Sirius whispered back. And then, so gingerly, like he was trying to cup the word on his tongue he said, for the first time, “Remus?”
 
But Remus was finally asleep.
 

Snow collected on the sill, frosted up the window panes, diffused the already dim light to gray. Remus stirred from sleep once or twice, his head too heavy for him to hold up, his arm where he had bitten it lifted up by Sirius, the murmuration of a spell sealing his skin. A rush of cool air ran from his scalp to his toes, a cleaning charm, masterfully done so it didn’t sting. The blankets were pulled back up beneath his chin, Sirius seeming to take an age carefully tucking him in. Warm and safe he dozed, the light never strengthening, the snow never ceasing, and Sirius never leaving the room.
 
When he woke properly hours later the day was half spent, the city had been covered in white, and Sirius was slouching in a chair by the bed, his eyes closed. But all he had to do was lift his head from the pillow and Sirius’s eyes flew open and locked on his. There was alarm, for a moment, in his gaze, but then he saw that Remus was fine and his expression relaxed.
 
“Sleep well?” he asked, cool as anything, like he hadn’t found Remus freezing and injured on the street.
 
“Like a baby,” he croaked, his voice still raw from how much he’d screamed during his transformation.
 
“Glad to hear it,” Sirius said, his eyes going from Remus to the bed. He seemed to be considering his words carefully and spoke slowly when he said, “Is it always like this?”
 
Remus frowned, finding the question confusing. “Is what always like this? Being attacked by Death Eaters?”
 
“You were attacked by Death Eaters?” Sirius said, his gaze returning to Remus.
 
“Well, yeah. What did you think had happened to me?”
 
“I thought that…” He cleared his throat, looked back at the bed. “I thought that you had gone through whatever it is you go through on nights like last night.”
 
“Nights like last night? What do you…” Remus’s breath caught in his throat. Sirius was looking at his arm where it lay on the bed, and at the ribboning of scars around it, many of which, quite obviously, came from wolf teeth.
 
He hurriedly withdrew his arm into the blankets, forced himself to meet Sirius’s eyes. “I don’t do anything special any night,” he said brusquely.
 
“No? Never have any wild nights?”
 
Remus felt a toxic mix of anger and shame flush his cheeks. He hated this, the inescapability of his disease, the way it marked him physically and within the eyes of others, the way his whole life depended on people never finding out. His friends knew but, apart from James, there was a tacit agreement that they never discuss it, that it was an issue to be skirted, something too indelicate or repulsive for even young men to discuss amongst each other. Ugliness lurked everywhere: at school, in the Slytherins who suspected; from Healers, who refused to examine him unless he wore a muzzle; from friends who didn’t know, and the off-hand comments they made about his inhumanity; and with boyfriends, who could never know, who he could never share his full self with, who he must always push away. It was exhausting and endless, and this on top of a night that had itself been exhausting and endless, and the anger and the shame was at once too heavy to bear, so he spat it out, heedless, right at Sirius.
 
“If you’re going to say it, fucking say it. Don’t mock me.”
 
In response to this, and to Remus’s immense surprise, Sirius smiled and gave a little laugh.
 
“You’re a werewolf,” he said, without affect, without judgment. As if they had just concluded a conversation he slapped his knees and rose to his feet. “Are you hungry then?” He dandled a room service menu in front of Remus’s nose. “You can have anything you like – except me.”
 
Remus gaped at him, now more confused than anything else. “I – you – you don’t –”
 
“I don’t care that you’re a werewolf, no.”
 
Remus’s gape deepened, inasmuch as that was possible. “But…but why not? I mean, everyone cares, and you, you’re a…”
 
“Are you attempting to make reference to my family, or my House?” He paused, considering. “Though I suppose they’re one and the same.”
 
“Well, yeah. Exactly.”
 
Sirius sighed. “Look around, Lupin. See all the things of mine I’ve filled these rooms with? Do you think I just started staying here today? Do you think I come here because things are so wonderful at home? I have obligations there and very little else. I don’t pay or receive many social calls with people from school. They’re all so involved with the war and think me mad for not caring, for wanting more than to sacrifice my life in the crossfires between two immoveable forces. So it doesn’t matter to me, no. It never really did.”
 
“Never?” Remus asked.
 
“I only ever thought it might be easier to associate only with people in school whose upbringing was the same as mine.”
 
“And it wasn’t?”
 
“Not even for a day.”
 
“I’m sorry,” Remus said.
 
“What for? My attempt to buy into pureblood mania?”
 
“No. I’m sorry that you were lonely.”
 
Something vulnerable flashed across Sirius’s face and was quickly shuttered. “Everyone’s lonely,” he said brusquely, and before Remus could respond he thrust the room service menu beneath his nose again. “Choose something, will you? I’m about to keel over from hunger.”
 
Remus caught one look at the prices attached to the menu items and physically recoiled from the menu.
 
“I couldn’t. After everything you’ve already done – no, I – I’m fine. You go ahead and have your breakfast – or, er, lunch – and I’ll get out of your hair –”
 
“My God, Lupin, are you really that keen to die a martyr? Anyone taking one look at you could see you’re half-starved.”
 
“You’ve already done enough for me.”
 
Sirius rolled his eyes, getting to his feet. “You’re bloody stubborn, you know that? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you: I’m ordering two brunches. Now, you can let it go to waste, like the idiotic, reckless Gryffindor you are, or you can be polite and eat it.”
 
“Gryffindors aren’t –”
 
“Oh yes they are. Now be quiet while I’m on the phone and drink that water I’ve left by the bed there. It’s got some speedy healing potion in it.”
 
With that, Sirius went off into the sitting room to call the front desk and Remus was left to take a begrudging, grumbling sip of water.
 
Minutes later there was a rap on the door, in a cadence that could only be described as polite and servile. Remus sat up in bed, hearing a tray wheeled into the sitting room, and as the blankets fell to his waist realized for the first time that he was shirtless. His coat, he could see now, had been folded over a nearby chair, and while a frantic examination revealed that he still had his trousers on he still felt utterly mortified. The very few times he’d been naked with anyone he’d done all he could to ensure the lighting was dim, and that the scars that marked up almost all of his torso and legs could hardly be seen. His fear that someone would be repulsed by him ran so deep that he hardly invited anyone back to his bed twice.
 
But Sirius, casual as anything, ducked his head into the room, looked straight at Remus without flinching and said, “I’ve got jumpers in that top drawer there, socks are in the second. There’s a dressing gown in the closet as well if you’re cold. Take what you like.” Leaving Remus to it he called over his shoulder, “Hurry up though. It’s going to get cold.”
 
Hesitantly, Remus went through Sirius’s drawers, finding warm looking socks and a jumper – green, of course. If he hadn’t already intruded enough on Sirius’s hospitality he might’ve wanted to linger, run his fingers along the pressed collars of Sirius’s shirts, put his palm inside the sleeve of his robes, hear his skin sigh over the material. He sighed himself when he put the socks and jumper on; they were warmer and softer than he thought it was possible for clothes to be.
 
He padded into the sitting room, still nursing some stiffness in his joints, but far less than he usually had, and walked into a scene he had only ever imagined himself entering via watching a film or having a dream.
 
Plates upon plates of food circled the table, which was backed by a fireplace, happily roaring. The food was familiar, but all of it had been arranged on the plates as if it were art. Baby asparagus were neatly curved around two helpings of eggs benedict, the hollandaise sauce overflowing to the plate like molten gold; bacon, laid in precise criss-crosses over toast, gleamed with a maple glaze; and even the warm scones had been adorned with thick, curling dollops of lemon curd, strawberry preserve, and clotted cream on the plate beside them. And to complete the pretty picture, Sirius, refined in his handsomeness, at home among the gilt and glamour of the rooms (which, Remus was fairly certain, were not so much rooms as they were the penthouse suite). He was cutting open a scone as Remus entered; it breathed steam onto his fingers, still warm from the oven. Remus hesitated as long as he was able, his reticence having only grown when he saw the abundance of food, but it all smelled so good and he had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours. His pride dissolved after the first swipe of strawberry preserves and scone met his mouth and didn’t return until he’d cleaned his plate of eggs, bacon, and gone through two cups of tea.
 
Sirius, still only halfway through his own meal by the time Remus finished his, nudged his remaining scone in Remus’s direction.
 
“Oh. No thank you. But, um. But thank you for everything else. Really.”
 
“My pleasure,” Sirius said, as simply as if all he’d done was buy Remus lunch.
 
“You saved my life.”
 
“Don’t be dramatic, Lupin.”
 
“I’m not,” Remus said seriously. “I could’ve died without you. I owe you a debt.”
 
Sirius shrugged. “Stay a few hours later at our next rehearsal so we can finish our latest piece and we’ll call it even.”
 
Remus let out a little huff of exasperation at Sirius’s rebuff at his attempt of sincerity, but he felt a flush of warmth as he did. Our piece, he’d said. Like they’d both written it, like it belonged to the both of them.
 
And stay, he’d said, the slightest tremble in it. No friends to call on or receive, no family he was friendly with: he was lonely, he’d admitted as much. Remus was too, but it was a localized thing, a feeling that existed in the part of him that wanted to be touched and caressed and kissed, the part that wanted a boyfriend. But for Sirius it must touch everything inside him, it must make it hard, sometimes, even to breathe.
 
So though he normally might have left, not wanting to intrude, thinking himself a bother, he stayed instead. It began as an obligation, a way to begin to reduce his debt, but as the day deepened and lost its light entirely he found that he could hardly pull himself away. Because it was surprisingly easy to be with Sirius, to talk for hours without realizing it, to be comfortable in each other’s company. They played game after game of Exploding Snap and Remus showed Sirius, much to his delight, how to use the television that was in the bedroom. There was music of course – impossible for either of them to go without it – when Sirius revealed his prodigious collection of records. Looking through them Remus remarked, “Not a single Celestina Warbeck,” and Sirius replied, archly, “Check the trash,” and if Remus had not already been kindling a little flame for him it would’ve ignited then.
 
They lay along the two snow white divans listening to the records play and drinking the hot toddies that Sirius had ordered. They were Muggle records, all of them: Debussy and Beethoven, Coltrane and Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, Carlos Gardel and Edith Piaf. The closest they came that day to discussing the war was Remus commenting on the music, and the hotel, and the paper Sirius had placed the ad in.
 
“It’s not a political statement, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Sirius said. “It’s just that Muggles make interesting things and my family’s disdain of Muggle creations means they’re my best option if I want to get away from them.”
 
Remus would often wonder how it was that Sirius had even discovered Muggle music to begin with, if there had been a cheeky relative on the outer branches of his family tree who’d snuck him a record, or if it hadn’t been until school and he’d only overheard some Muggleborns playing records and pursued it on his own. But it was one of those things that felt awkward to bring up; the whole of Sirius’s childhood was like that. There was darkness there, Remus understood that much, and it had wounded him as it had molded him, made him adept at cruelty, incapable of surviving a single night without a drink, but had also provided the wellspring for his music. What it was that had happened Remus would never know; he did not ask in time. Though neither of them knew it then the clock had already begun to wind down, even as between them something was burgeoning, beginning to take shape.
 
Remus was half-convinced by the end of the night that he was only dreaming. The snow that had fallen had made the windows too cold to stand by, so they retreated to the fire, sat on opposite ends of the same divan. They’d had supper and wine and Billie Holiday’s voice was thick as smoke in the air between them. A clock, somewhere, struck midnight; they had nearly spent an entire day together.
 
“I wish we’d been friends at Hogwarts,” Remus said.
 
“Yes,” Sirius said, very quickly. “Me too.”
 
He left not long after because he sensed, rightly, that what was there was delicate, liable to break at a glance. Or maybe it was only illusory, long looks and slight sighs misinterpreted in the forgiving glow of firelight. Either way he accepted Sirius’s gift of socks, jumper, and ill-fitting boots, and was accompanied to the lobby where he stepped out, with a wave, into the snow.
 
It filled the streets, a blanket of white. In the waning moonlight it glittered, frost overlaying snow, the satisfying crunch of it beneath his boots a private delight he shared only with the stars. The air was incandescent with cold, the wind a bitter sigh, but Remus felt like lamplight in the dark that night, a creature made to melt through and warm anything. It was five blocks before he remembered what he really was and Apparated away to his flat. It seemed a pity to return, to lose his hold on a kind of magic he’d yet to master, but regret was wiped away the moment he turned the key because James was there within, frantic and pacing.
 

Where’ve you been what happened I thought they got you, the breathless refrain they’d practiced with each other since the war began.
 
The Death Eaters that had pursued Remus after the full moon had not done so because of his affiliation with the Order, it transpired. They’d gone after werewolves en masse yesterday, killing dozens, and making the attacks look like they’d been ordered by the Ministry.
 
“It was to get werewolves to turn against the Ministry and join them,” James said, pacing back and forth in Remus’s tiny flat, having to turn round with every third step. “They’re already rushing to join Voldemort in droves and now this?”
 
“If Dumbledore would offer something, perhaps the chance at a change in the law –”
 
“You know he can’t. He’s stretching his Ministry contacts thin as it is,” James said, though he wouldn’t meet Remus’s eye. This was another refrain: for werewolves there weren’t enough resources for the Order to offer anything worthwhile; for everyone else there was always more advantage to give.
 
“I understand,” Remus said, because he did, because things had always been this way.
 
James ran his hand through his hair. “I’m so grateful you’re alright. I looked everywhere I could. Where were you?”
 
There was a moment when he thought he might admit where he’d been and what he’d done all day. But then he remembered James’s response to Sirius’s help that day at the wedding, how he’d believed that Sirius had done it only to spite another Death Eater, and heard himself saying, “Camped out in a cellar. Don’t know where. Got lucky.”
 
“Well thank Merlin for that,” James said, preparing to leave. “Keep safe, Remus.”
 
Remus nodded, watched him go, and felt like he had, indeed, kept something safe.
 

Interlude
 
At their next rehearsal Remus did as Sirius had asked and stayed an extra two hours to finish their latest piece. It was Sirius’s ode to jazz, a song composed of meandering, soft curves, a journey with no fixed destination. Though clearly a song meant to unwind the listener even as the notes curled in on themselves, Remus and Sirius finished the evening feeling wired and electric. They walked out from the studio together for the first time and trudged through the snow dampened streets, ending up in a pub. They only drank one pint each, but they lingered as long as was possible over the glasses, the beer turned stale and warm by the time they left. The pretense that the both of them had maintained up until then – that they were only acquainted with each other for the purpose of making music, and were not friends – began, that month, to give way. Shared cigarettes on the steps outside the studio before going in, taking breaks to go out to the newsagent’s to get candy bars and crisps, meeting in the hotel lobby once a week before their morning rehearsal to get breakfast, exchanging books they thought the other might find interesting, having them returned with personal notes in the margins, and, in the most radical break from their previously established relationship, meeting on a day when they did not have rehearsal to go to a record store.
 
“It’s very important to me,” Remus told Sirius, “that you have at least one rock record.” Sirius turned his nose up to this and Remus had the immense pleasure of watching his face transform as he heard his first Rolling Stones song. He left the store a changed man, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, and the Rolling Stones’ entire catalog beneath his arm. He was frantic through the slush, heedless of the stains that were collecting on the ends of his trousers. “Why did no one tell me?” he exclaimed at a corner.
 
“I just did!” Remus laughed.
 
“Yeah,” he said, “so you did.”
 
His gaze snagged on Remus’s, refused to let go; they were feet apart but Remus felt as breathless as if he’d just been kissed. But it was worthwhile enough, just then, to know that he had given something as wonderful as music to Sirius and that he had shared something that was important to him.
 
And, a week later, Sirius returned the favor. “For tomorrow night,” he said, handing over one of his crystal enchantments. There was a note tied to it and written in Sirius’s flowing script it said, Music to soothe the savage beast.
 
They had spoken, in brief, oblique snatches, of Remus being a werewolf, mainly about how painful it was to transform, and with Sirius asking if there were any methods to minimize the pain. Nothing he’d tried had ever worked but Sirius felt adamant that music would, and so, the enchantment, charmed so that music would begin playing as the full moon rose.
 
Remus didn’t know what to say to show how touched he was that Sirius would try to make the worst night of the month more bearable for him, and he was even more at a loss for words when, the morning after the full moon, he hobbled out of a shed to find Sirius standing there with a cloak and a healing draught. It was the casual air of it, as if they’d always had this standing arrangement, the easy way he pulled the cloak across Remus’s shoulders, that made Remus’s heart sing in his chest. No one ever came to see him right after the full moon, especially now when the war forced other things to take precedent.
 
They went to his flat. It was as though he had never had to grow cautious, double back and wait in shadows in case he was being followed. He gave up the address without fuss, without fighting, undid the protection charms, and let Sirius inside.
 
During a time when suspicion lurked beneath every conversation, when there were passwords and phrases to prove who you were, when blind trust was rewarded with cruel death, Remus guilelessly gave over his security to a pureblood with intimate ties to Death Eaters, and spent a lazy morning dozing, watched over by someone who should’ve been his enemy. Sirius made hot cocoa on the stove and nearly burned his eyebrows off; in the afternoon he went to the chippie, returned shivering, glazed by rain. It only made sense to offer to share the only decent blanket, to curl up together on the tiny couch, the rain and Miles Davis their evening’s soundtrack. Remus licked the salt from his fingers, marked the way Sirius’s gaze followed his tongue, hated his body for its aches, for its inability to provide what he needed it to, for not letting him make a move to be with Sirius, for forcing him to give up this opportunity which may will be his last.
 
But, as it turned out, he needn’t have worried about any of that.
 

Very simple now, like sliding up and down a scale. The next few rehearsals careful things, heat simmering beneath, the songs all like water with steam rising off it, the surface only starting to churn. Excuses made to stay longer and longer, the smoke breaks taken standing inches apart, the cold a convenience to excuse their closeness, their bodies two separate melodies as yet uncombined.
 
Remus could never make himself draw near enough to take the first step; but after all, it was Sirius who was the composer, who knew how to join together disparate sounds to make a song.
 
An excuse: a scarf, left behind, perhaps deliberately. A knock on the door, Remus at the ready and then relaxed, the door swung open, his voice, blathering, you didn’t need to come all this way for that, but since you’re here, come in, come in. There’s firewhiskey, there’s tea.
 
Two drinks poured, Sirius’s thumb tracing a line over the rim of the glass. Beautiful thumb, beautiful hands: Remus knew them well, even then, before they’d ever touched him. He’d watched them on the keys, their fluidity, their grace; they were the first part of Sirius he’d lusted for in a way that went beyond the ordinary. They were the first part of Sirius that he loved.
 
They were the first part of Sirius that he kissed.
 
“I hope I’m not keeping you from anything important,” Sirius said, his voice betraying none of his nerves. “Or from anyone important.”
 
Remus almost didn’t catch it, that slight change in key, from natural to sharp, from steady to flirtatious.
 
“No,” he said, and his key changed as well. “There’s no one.” He took a gulp of firewhiskey for courage then added, “Except for you.”
 
“Oh?” Sirius said, and though his own glass was still mostly full he took Remus’s, straight from his hand, and took a long pull, his mouth precisely where Remus’s had been, his eyes locked on Remus’s, a heated, deliberate prelude.
 
He set the glass aside, took a step forward. “Is that so?”
 
“Yes,” Remus breathed, and he took a step forward too.
 
A tempo shift to go along with the change in key: adagio to allegro, slow to fast. No lingering, no trepidation, no time to second guess. Sirius, his thumb now suddenly tracing the curve of Remus’s lower lip, smoothing a bead of firewhiskey away. Remus, parting his lips, catching the tip of Sirius’s thumb with his tongue. A press of heat, breath to hands, the percussion of heartbeats, sudden movement eliciting sound: a moan, a sigh, a first kiss.
 
Remus’s hands tangled in Sirius’s hair, his lips tight against Sirius’s. Though Remus didn’t know it, Sirius’s eyes were still opened, widened with delighted surprise: Remus had nipped at him with his teeth before he’d kissed him. Nothing had prepared him for this, not the hunger of it, not the way he was losing the ability to think. He’d come to the flat inexperienced and reckless, ill-prepared for whatever might happen, but unable to resist.
 
So he didn’t.
 
Remus maneuvered them to the bed, pulling off Sirius’s clothes as they went. Sirius had never been shy about his body but he knew Remus was with his, so he was careful, one button at a time, kisses spread lavishly across each inch of exposed skin. Remus, shivering, half-crying, having never been touched with such tenderness, ended up ripping his shirt over his head, unable to stand it, needing to feel Sirius’s skin flush against his.
 
Here, Sirius whispered, was as far as he’d ever gone.
 
Remus withdrew his hands, panting. “Do you want to stop?”
 
“Never,” Sirius said, so ardently Remus’s knees almost buckled. “Just…just be patient.”
 
And Remus was.
 
His tongue teasing the lobe of Sirius’s ear, his hand dancing lightly over the inside of Sirius’s thigh, with his free hand moving his thumb in circles over a nipple, listening to the variation in Sirius’s sighs and groans. Sirius in turn moving his hands tentatively down Remus’s back, growing bolder the longer he had hold of him, tenderness throwing sparks and becoming need. When they both had thought about this before it had happened – and they both had thought extensively about it, both with and without a hand between their legs as they did so – they had both been afraid. Remus for his usual reasons, the worry that he’d be found repulsive, that he would have only moments before Sirius would realize what a mistake he was making; and Sirius was worried that it would all be insufficient, that he wouldn’t be good enough, and that the sex wouldn’t be enough break through the malaise he lived within.
 
So many worries and all of them unfounded. They kept the lights on and Sirius saw every inch of Remus, and lavished as many kisses on as many places as he could between moans of his own. He regretted nothing, thought nothing was a mistake, even the delay he caused by trying to get Remus to fuck him without lube was worth it for the way Remus wriggled away from him, causing the heads of their cocks to rub together in a way that made him nearly delirious with pleasure. It would’ve been impossible for him to identify what the word “malaise” even meant at certain points of the night, especially after Remus demonstrated just why lube was so useful, the self-satisfied ‘I told you so’ expression on his face obliterated when Sirius squeezed himself tight around the head of Remus’s cock.
 
Hour after hour, tangling and untangling and tangling together again, mistakes and corrections made (“no, no, here,”), but more often, joy, the thrill of finding in each other a new kind of music: a rising scale of moans, pianissimo rasps of skin against skin, staccato pants, legato groans, glissando cries of “yes!”
 
And, at the coda, when the sun had nearly risen, and sweat had soaked through the sheets, the final three notes, unguarded and raw, given in a call and response: I love you, I love you.
 
Not a single note played that night, but still, oh, what a song.
 

Empty and then full, silence and then song, alone and then together: Sirius’s life these past few months.
 
He had thought, for years and years, that the best he could ever hope for was numbness, and perhaps at a reach relief. That was where the compositions came from: a search for a moment of stillness, to get away from everything that had wounded him, or try to make sense of it. The blighted soil of his family tree, the knives they took out to trim the branches; they had carved themselves into more than his blood, they took what he could’ve been and instead made him into a dark, despairing thing. Made a murderer out of him.
 
All that he might’ve been, all the laughter, all the light, all the reckless joy: he knows it now. It is Remus: his breath on his neck, the freckles on his chin, the way his hand goes to his mouth when he sleeps. The curve of his back in the early morning light, the best cup of tea of his life in a pair of chipped, mismatched mugs, their legs tangling together beneath the sheets, how easy it is to fall together, then begin again their private symphony. I could die here, he might’ve thought in his past scattered moments of joy. But now, I could live here, he thinks. My whole life, with you.
 
Up until this moment his whole life has felt like a failed attempt at escape. His drinking and his melodies, his self-imposed recusal from the war, all these flat-footed attempts at fleeing when it turned out he could soar.
 
So many love songs and nothing comes close. Nothing he writes will ever be good enough. And yet, he overflows with song, he can’t stop humming, and he is lost to it, helplessly. There are now times when he can no longer tell if he is composing or dreaming or simply living because always there, the steady beat behind everything, is Remus.
 
He will never feel this way again.
 

Reprise
 
Remus never ended up becoming a spy but throughout that winter he had a double life nonetheless. Doing the drudge work of the Order by day, counting up their losses in the fast fading light, finding bodies, planning funerals, frantic, fruitless duels, his back against the wall, the never-ending fight. The next day, greet the dawn, count his bruises, breathe. In the afternoon, the rehearsal, all the songs now jaunty, soppy tunes, kisses between the grace notes, up to Sirius’s hotel room for a late lunch or an early dinner, hunger changing its shade between breaths, his back against the wall, Sirius’s lips at his throat. After, pretending that the world didn’t turn, that he could stay in bed forever, that what they had here might survive out in the world beneath the harshness of its light and its terrible war.
 
If the two lives that Remus lived ever overlapped it was only ever momentary, fleeting as dawn or twilight. A dead Death Eater he knew to be Sirius’s cousin, a trace of Sirius across his brow. Mentions of the Black family during Order meetings, James’s continuing insistence that Sirius was mad. Sirius tracing around a bruise on his back, which he’d gotten from a badly aimed Stunning Spell, his silence enough for Remus to know that he knew where it had come from. The new hitch in his voice when he asked, trying for a smile, “Will I see you tomorrow?”
 
In love, there were always promises you couldn’t keep. But yes, Remus always said, and managed, against all odds, to keep his vow. He would arrive sometimes with his clothes all blood-stained, Skele-Gro still working on mending his bones, the scent of funereal lilies clinging to his skin, but he would still arrive.
 
But just as twilight must cede to full night so it was inevitable that he’d be able to keep his two lives separate forever.
 

Black night in Devonshire, the Bones family house, a green skull and snake hanging overhead. All the occupants still and silent, save one. Edgar Bones, seemingly aged ten years since Remus had seen him the day before, thrashing on the floor, mouth open in a scream, something beneath his skin convulsing. It almost looked like his bones were moving of their own accord, trying to push their way through his skin. They tried to Stun him so they could move him to St. Mungo’s, but the spell wouldn’t take. By the time James, Frank, and Peter arrived they were still trying to figure out what to do with him. Frank put his hand on Remus’s shoulder and said in his dispassionate, Auror’s voice, “Nothing more we can do for him.”
 
They left and went to a pub, as was their custom, and sat in strained silence. James and Frank seemed edgier than usual, staring into space for long moments before jolting and turning to exchange a few whispered words with each other. Peter, clearly wanting a comfort different than what beer could provide, was trying to make eyes at the waitress, while Remus planned his exit strategy. He had plans to meet Sirius tonight; it was near his birthday and he thought Sirius might have some sort of surprise planned. Seeing him would be gift enough and he was anxious to leave and reenter the part of his life that didn’t involve so much death. “I’m off,” he said, and might as well have told the chairs for all the other three noticed.
 
He left the pub, walked out into the nighttime lanes of Godric’s Hollow and breathed in the cold night air. He had told Sirius to meet him here, near the churchyard, and as he neared it he could see him standing outside the gate. He quickened his step and heard running feet behind him. It was James, Peter, and Frank, rushing towards him and shouting his name. His immediate response was a flash of embarrassment, that they were about to discover that he’d been dating a Slytherin behind their backs. He never even considered for a second that there might still be Death Eaters lurking nearby, fresh from their attack at the Bones’.
 
The first blast tore the ground from beneath Remus’s feet and sent him flying through the air. The second blast, aimed at his friends, punched straight through Peter, killing him instantly and before anyone ever knew that he was the spy.
 
Remus saw this from above, having a perfect view of the last moments of his friend’s life, because he was floating down, not falling: Sirius had caught him with a spell.
 
James and Frank were firing back now, lost in a haze of dust kicked up from the destruction of the street. “Let’s go,” Sirius hissed at him when he reached the ground. He was still standing back behind the tree, his hand outstretched for Remus.
 
But it wasn’t in Remus to abandon his friends. He shook his head, told Sirius to run, and sprinted towards the fray. He didn’t have to go far.
 
The Lestranges, all of them unmasked and drunk with the destruction they’d cause so far that night, had surrounded James and Frank and were toying with them, casting Cruciatus Curse after Cruciatus Curse. Remus got a Stunning Spell in, felling Rabastan, before Bellatrix turned on him, all glittery eyes and bared teeth. “A half-breed!” she exclaimed, sounding at once disgusted and delighted, and fired a Killing Curse at him. It missed, narrowly, and they began to duel in earnest, as James, who’d been being tortured by Bellatrix, was freed to fire on Rodolphus.
 
Maybe if Remus had had the element of surprise he might’ve stood a chance against her. But Bellatrix was Voldemort’s best fighter: she cut through his defenses, she met every spell with a more powerful parry, she wore him down in seconds, pinned him against the churchyard gate. He raised a Shield Charm and watched it shake beneath a wicked looking curse he’d never seen before: the light coming off it was spiked and purple, and though Remus had no clue what it was he felt certain that it was the very same curse that had been put on poor Edgar Bones. She cast it again and he could feel the heat of it as it wore away at his shield; his wand was trembling under the strain of keeping the shield up; he knew it would be over soon.
 
And it was, but not for him.
 
“Bellatrix!”
 
She darted her eyes to the side, then turned, never lowering her wand, when she saw it was Sirius.
 
She laughed at the sight of him standing there in the middle of the broken street. For once, his expression was void of poise or composure; nothing in his posture was trying to make the situation casual or less horrific than it was. His hands were shaking and he was, plainly, afraid.
 
“Come to join us at last, cousin?” she asked, her voice full of giggles.
 
“No,” he said simply. And then, in a swift and sudden gesture, as if he had abruptly come to a decision, he raised his wand and aimed a Killing Curse at her.
 
Bellatrix was engulfed in green light and fell, dead, to the street.
 
At the corner, where Peter was still bleeding, Rodolphus screamed, but it was four on one now, and they made quick work of him.
 
The Lestrange brothers in chains and Voldemort’s lieutenant dead: it was an unqualified victory for the Order, but not so much for these four young men.
 
Frank bent over Peter’s body, and James, in shock, looked between Sirius and Bellatrix. Sirius, for his part, was looking anywhere but her. His hands were still shaking and he startled when Remus touched him. When he looked at Remus he seemed so terribly young. Tentatively, he reached out and touched Remus’s face, his fingers flickering over Remus’s cheekbones as lightly as he would touch the piano keys. He pulled his hand back quickly, as if the notes played had been flat, and found his fingertips red with Remus’s blood. The sight, oddly, seemed to steady him. His hands stopped shaking and he finally looked at Bellatrix’s body.
 
“I’m so sorry, dear,” he told her, stepping between her and Remus as if she were still a threat. “But you must understand. I had to.”
 

There is a room they take him to where he sits with the old headmaster. That’s what they call Dumbledore in the manors and the London townhouses his family and his family’s family owns. Bent old man with a long white beard, so much less imposing than the inhuman face of the Dark Lord. They mock his heritage and beliefs, make sport of who can insult him the most. More than the Ministry, more than the Mudbloods and the Muggles, he is the enemy. Him and his Order.
 
As much as he has never understood the Death Eater cause, the insistence that blood is proof of superiority – a fair amount of his relatives being evidence to the contrary – he understands the Order’s cause even less. Fighting merely to uphold the status quo seems a bit to him like running in place, a pointless, aggravating exercise. He knows if he asks Remus he will talk about the horrors the Death Eaters have inflicted, a need to restore order and peace, as if the world they live in has ever been orderly or peaceful, particularly for him. Remus, for all his other wonderful qualities, is a Gryffindor to his core and jumps into these battles without first thinking what he might get from them. Because he is kind Sirius supposes he would say that protecting his friends is enough, that giving his life for theirs is enough. But lives should not be given away so freely; lives have worth, lives have cost.
 
So he thinks as he sits before the old headmaster, who watches him with his ice blue eyes, considering him carefully.
 
And indeed considerations must be made: he has killed someone, again. There are witnesses, this time, and the consequences will run deeper than guilt and nightmares.
 
Dumbledore is thanking him for saving Remus and the others, but this is only preamble. One Death Eater dead and two locked up is good, but it does not end the war, and anyway they are not the likeliest avenues to victory the old headmaster has come across that night. Sirius is. He looks at him and sees the homes he can enter unmolested, the conversations he could overhear, the weak links among the Death Eaters he might discover to turn to their cause. He looks at Sirius and sees opportunity, possibility, a weapon. Just like how when the Dark Lord first saw Regulus he saw a weapon.
 
Such a slim difference, Sirius thinks, between Dumbledore and the Dark Lord. Death and broken people fill both their camps, and the promises they offer are flimsy as gossamer. Ruthless, the both of them, willing to destroy a generation to win. Dumbledore may have the moral high ground, but he has still sent out children to kill children.
 
He thinks of Regulus, so small on his death bed, calling for their mother while he still had strength enough for words. Silly boy, he thought he could walk away without incident. The Dark Lord made a fine example of him.
 
It was the same spell Bellatrix had been firing at Remus, the spell that was working its slow death through Edgar Bones. They’d tested it on Regulus, the first defector. A slow death, the skeleton trying to push through skin. There’s a quirk in it that makes it so no magic will work on the person once they’ve been hit with it. No healing spells and no pain relief are possible.
 
He realizes abruptly that Dumbledore talking to him now is less preamble than conclusion. He’s already made his decision. He made it when he saw Bellatrix aim that spell at Remus and imagined what he would have to do if it hit him.
 
His hands pressing down on the pillow, pressing down on Regulus. The soothing things he’d made himself say as he choked the air from his brother’s lungs, the way he’d learned that you can love someone so much it can cut out dark spaces within you. He let him suffer a day too long and that’s the part he most regrets. His inability to act, his weakness.
 
He has kept to the sidelines, because that is where the music is. That is his part in it, his protest. A rejection of madness for melody. And even when the war had crossed his threshold he had not felt its nearness as more than affront, like someone talking loudly during a concert. He had loved his brother but it had been in the distant, despairing way one loves a sibling one does not fully understand. Regulus had not wanted involvement in the killings, but he’d died loyal to the pureblood cause. As much as he feels the loss, Regulus has often felt to him like someone else’s casualty. It was the war that put him in the position to have to kill his only brother, and afterwards his animosity towards it has only deepened.
 
Things are different now. Because of Remus. Remus, who he loves. Remus, who is still alive. Remus, who he might have a future with. And while his love for Remus will survive regardless, his life and their future are contingent on the war ending.
 
He understood that, even as he’d killed Bellatrix. He knew that he was crossing an irrevocable line. He knew that he was picking a side.
 
And he knows, too, that Dumbledore knows this. That he saw with his keen blue eyes the way he’d looked at Remus, and the way Remus had looked at him. The Dark Lord’s greatest weakness is a misunderstanding of how love works. But Dumbledore knows. He knows it is a weapon. One of coercion, if nothing else.
 
Sirius feels it in him, the abandon love brings, the ease of recklessness. But he was raised a certain way in his house, and then his House. He was not put into Slytherin for nothing.
 
Lives have worth, lives have cost, and all payments for them should be made upfront.
 
“I’ll give you names. I’ll give you plans. I’ll give you every rumor I hear. But first,” he says to the old headmaster, steel in his voice and Remus in his heart. “First, you’re going to do something for me.”
 

The war continued, and life right along with it. Frank and James’s exceptional nervousness the night the Lestranges attacked was explained away when Remus discovered that both Alice and Lily were pregnant. Although he privately felt it was a mental time to be having a baby he was so chuffed when James asked him to be the baby’s godfather that he went right out and spent his meager savings on a training broom well before Harry was born. Holding him for the first time on the day he was born was a strange experience. He had never considered children before and found, quite to his delight, that he liked them. His idle dreams of teaching music to a gaggle of primary school children took on new depth, and if he’d been the sort to imagine a life for himself when the war was over he might’ve come back around and imagined that.
 
The far distant future was a verboten topic for everyone, but plans were still made for the end of this week and the next and things were always changing, and not always for the worse. Peter’s death left a hole in their group and against all odds, and years of resolute Slytherin-hating, Sirius stepped in to fill it. Though Remus had made it plain that he was dating Sirius he’d made no efforts to bring his friends and boyfriend together, thinking they wouldn’t get along. But when James stopped by one morning after a full moon, he’d woken up to find him and Sirius cracking each other up over some misprint in Transfiguration Today (which, in all honestly, Remus didn’t find all that interesting or funny). The bond that formed from there was tentative, but genuine. Where Remus had always felt he’d had a dampening effect on James’s personality (aided by steady Frank and fearful Peter), Sirius brought out James’s more comical and daring nature, and soon at every gathering they were always off in a corner somewhere, sniggering over something. Remus knew Sirius’s induction into the group was complete when James invited him to Harry’s christening.
 
“Lovely boy, Jim!” Sirius said, patting his back and sliding over an envelope that was almost certainly stuff full of money. “Name’s a bit stodgy but I’m sure he’ll grow into it.”
 
“I wanted to name him Elvendork.”
 
“Oh, I like that better. It’s unisex.”
 
“Exactly!”
 
There were other celebrations despite the war, a little gathering at Halloween, pumpkin flavored food and drink abounding, and at Christmas, a party at the Potter’s, Harry and James in matching Santa hats and Lily, buzzed and rosy-cheeked, enjoying her first drink in almost a year. The Christmas party was one of those rare occasions when the war seemed more like a job they could leave at the end of a long day than a fact of life. Sirius found his way to the Potter’s piano and the caroling began. It was the first time Remus ever heard him sing in earnest, not simply to demonstrate a pitch, and he shivered all over with the delight of it. He had a rasping, rough-hewn voice, and the way he felt when he heard it was the same way he felt when Sirius would lick at his neck as he undid his flies, a heady anticipation, and a need to reciprocate. He joined in at the chorus – his own voice sterling, clear, and beautiful, though he’d never think of it as such – and an abundantly sexy version of “Let It Snow” ensued. When they ran out of carols they sang jazz standards instead, and there were pictures taken of this, ones that would be tucked away into photo albums, unable to be seen without pain: Sirius at the piano smiling and looking up at Remus who, quite plainly, meant every single word of the love song he was singing. There was a warm glow around them both, and in the music too. They’d been hammering out a tricky, melancholy piece in the studio and it was a relief to come to something already fully-formed and lighter.
 
“Another!” James kept crying, his arms around Lily as they swayed, the Santa hat on his hair askew, Harry sucking his thumb, fast asleep in his crib. Presents under the tree and snow collecting on the windowsills and so very, very easy to pretend. They stayed up till near dawn, poured firewhiskey in with their tea, grew heedless only then and promised to do this again next year.
 
The new year came and went with no party, the war coming to consume all celebration. The winter was hard, dementors filtering in between the snow like fog, the deaths moving from obscene to routine; but still, the music continued.
 
Rehearsals now were in the concert hall of Sirius’s hotel and even when they were at the start of making a new piece they all felt like performances rather than play. It had taken Remus a long time to realize that Sirius’s compositions were, in fact, compositions. They were letters, treatises, manifestos, jokes. Some of the jazz pieces were little tirades, and in the same way that a writer sometimes laments the limitations of words, Sirius could be found here lamenting the limitations of sound. Then again, many others felt more like maps: explorations of different terrains of melody and harmony, a moving landscape of chord progressions. It was the map pieces that were among the most intimate things they played together. There was one, claustrophobic and muted, all strings and woodwinds, no forceful, blazing instruments, that Remus felt sure was meant to describe Sirius’s childhood home. And there was another, drowsy and mellifluous, guitar chords and wind chimes, that he knew for a fact to be the lake at Hogwarts in summertime. Another, a duet, between piano and guitar, sounded like a chase through a darkened forest, moody and tense but with an element of gamboling about it, like two werewolves beneath the full moon instead of one.
 
But most intimate of all was the first piece they’d ever played together, and which they came back to a few times. The serene concerto was what Remus called it, and after a time Remus knew it for what it was: a letter of apology, the only piece in his entire canon that Sirius had actually written to someone.
 
Remus knew who it was for and what it was about. They had spoken of it as they lay hip to hip together in bed, still awake in the graying light of dawn. There was something about that hour, when they could see the edges of the bed but not yet make out each other’s faces, that lent itself to confession. Sirius led Remus down the hallways of Grimmauld Place, and Remus knew what he had done there and why he couldn’t go back. His family, his crime, the madness that seemed to stain the very wallpaper, he called it all the Blackness. He thought he’d never get away from it.
 
“You don’t have to get away from it,” Remus told him. “Just be here, with me.”
 
And Sirius, following these instructions, folded himself around Remus, tucked his head between his neck and chin, and felt the beating of Remus’s heart beneath his palm.
 
Strange, difficult time to fall in love, but they managed it and managed even to do more than play music.
 
They moved in together to a flat much larger than Remus’s old place and far smaller than Sirius’s suite, and had many trifling rows about money, which Sirius usually won and which made Remus lash out in passive aggressive ways, like over-sweetening the tea. They learned to cook together after discovering that neither one of them could make anything more than toast and badly burned eggs. They had dates, though they were always looking over their shoulders when they went on them.
 
They even managed to have a little seaside holiday. But the whitecaps rolling in, the streaming sunlight, and the wildflowers growing amid the sand were lost on them because of the massive open-air record shop in the town they were staying in, which neither one of them was able to pull themselves away from for any sensible amount of time. The shop had a section devoted entirely to international records and it was here they spent the most time, flipping through artists they didn’t know, music styles they’d never heard, and instruments that sang in voices they’d never known before were possible.
 
Window open to the wind and sea they peeled back the plastic from the records they’d bought, lay hip to hip on the hotel bed and just listened. These songs were maps as well, and in a more concrete way. This tango they could hear if they walked the streets of Buenos Aires, that samba what they’d hear if they went to Rio de Janeiro. So many songs to listen to, and so many places in the world to listen to them in.
 
How little he’s seen, Remus marveled. Only this one island out of so many. How little music he really knew, and how limited his ways of playing. There was an instrument in one of the Chinese albums they’d bought – he didn’t know the name – but it sounded like the warbling of a human voice, clear and wonderfully affecting. He wanted to hold it; he wanted to learn it. And he was aware, acutely, that he could.
 
“We could leave,” he whispered. “We don’t have to go back.”
 
“We could,” Sirius agreed, but didn’t bother to shade his voice with a whisper. “I inherited a flat in Paris from my uncle. We could begin there.”
 
“And then we’d head south when it gets cold.”
 
“Yes, to Provence. See the lavender fields. And after that?”
 
“West. To New Orleans for jazz.”
 
“That’s quite far west.”
 
“We’ll take it in steps. We could have a little rest in Bermuda, soak in the sun.”
 
“Yes, we’ve been doing an awfully good job of that,” Sirius said, tracing a circle on the white skin of Remus’s stomach.
 
“Practice makes perfect,” Remus said, trailing a finger along Sirius’s equally pale collarbone.
 
“Does it?” Sirius asked after pressing a light kiss to Remus’s lips.
 
His answer came by way of another kiss, this one deeper, an affirmation. The third kiss, begun by Sirius, was pure delight, pleased at being pleasing. The next kisses had no such eloquence; the room had grown warmer, the music playing a distant hum blending with the sound of the surf. It was a precious thing that even then they took for granted, this ability to make the world recede and devote whole hours to each other, the most significant sound in the entire world each other’s breathing. The mind always knows that death is a possibility, but the heart keeps its secret wish: it won’t happen to me, it won’t happen to us. We’ll be alright. We’ll have time. Three-four time, and four-four time, and six-eight time, and time enough to spare.
 
But it was the closing months of the war, though neither of them knew it, and this was one of the last times, for them. 
 
Lying wrapped up in each other, the record gone to static, and the tide coming in, Sirius traced the line of Remus’s eyebrow, and said, “We really could, you know.”
 
“I know,” Remus said. That was what made it hard. That slim line over which lay cowardice and the ability to live a life with the man he loved. “But I can’t,” he said, because his heart was still beating and a small, buoyant part of him still believed they’d both be okay.
 
“Alright,” Sirius said, without thinking, without hesitating, and in those syllables sealed his death.
 

Elegy
 
He sits before the piano, still, his hands between his knees. Silence, not music, fills the room, but silence, like music, can have its own tempos and moods, its own particular qualities.
 
He holds his breath, keeps it there, and matches the pitch of the silence in the room. Held breath silence is waiting silence, the kind that precedes a gasp. Or a scream.
 
In the drawing room in Grimmauld Place Sirius found a silver locket, which writhed in his hand like a heartbeat and could not be open. In a fit of pique he fired a Killing Curse at it and when it stilled he realized what it was. He has been tracing rumors of others, has a fair idea where three or four such objects are. Snape, of all people, had been helping him gather information. He was the weak link Sirius had been thinking of in his first interview with Dumbledore. He, like Sirius, was in love, though he will never have that love consummated. The Dark Lord has discovered that there are spies, though he does not know what they’ve been spying on, and Snape has been dead for hours.
 
All the information has been passed to Dumbledore. Remus is safe in Godric’s Hollow, babysitting Harry. He has done everything he can.
 
All his life, this has been his comfort: to sit at the bench, to rest his hands on the keys, to lift out of himself and let the music take his place. He’s played since he was six, since the first time his father struck him, one eye too swollen shut to read the etude. Music’s gift is that it consumes you, if you let it, it moves through you, more swiftly and more profoundly than blood, it resonates in all your soft, wounded places, and, in resonating, diminishes the wound. Find yourself buoyed by the swell of song, made happy, made sad, and made, no matter what has happened to you or what anyone has said, to feel human.
 
To make music was a deeper affirmation of all of that. When he composes it is as though he is manually pumping his own heart and he can explore the damaged terrain of it, or he can remake it, give into his veins not blood but light. For most of his life he’s done the former, mapped out who he is and written elegies for who he might’ve been. Even before he could put it into words he’s longed for this other self, a boy who was loved by his parents instead of struck by them, a boy who had real friends in school, a boy who would’ve understood what to do with all his love.
 
All these things inside him he might be, if only there was time. He consoles himself by thinking that the clock ticks against everybody, that there is a finite limit of what anyone can do. For every writer a set number of pages, for every painter a set amount of brush strokes, for every composer a set number of songs. So it is with him. There is grief in knowing this, that he will only ever have a few melodies to speak for him, but there is peace in it too. Because even after he is gone the music will remain.
 
Still, it is daunting, to sit at the piano, to try to compose. There isn’t enough time to get it right, to convey everything that needs conveying. There’s only time enough for one last song.
 
Remus. When he walked into the studio for the audition that first day Sirius’s heart had already commenced to ache. You can only nurture a crush for so long before it transforms something in you. In school, it had been a fascination, but outside it deepened just before it bloomed. He had had no expectations, only hopes, and many of them fulfilled. What a wonder it has been, to be touched and kissed, loved and serenaded. What a fleeting, fragile wonder.
 
And this is hard enough to put to song – what they have had together, the rises and the falls, the sex and the rows, the laughs and the petulance, the intertwining notes of their duet – but it is harder still knowing Remus will be alone when he listens, and that it must bear all that they could’ve had. A future where they really had gone off into the world to hear its music, where they had played and played until the dawn ended a thousand nights, where they had been able to grow old together.
 
It is far too much to put into words, and far beyond the capacity of any spell to rectify. But music doesn’t need words or magic, and it will give Remus everything he has time enough to give him; it will let him know how good it was and how necessary, how hard it is to leave, but how sweet it was, ever since they began to play together, to linger, in song, with him.
 
Sirius sits before the piano, no longer still, and ready. His hands on the keys, his foot on the pedals, his eyes straight ahead as he plays his finale, their finale, the last song he’ll ever hear.
 

Serenade
 
Voldemort fell. He was killed bit by bit, in the same way he’d severed his soul. His Horcruxes found and destroyed without his knowing, and Dumbledore issuing an irresistible challenge. It was a duel for the ages and permanently marked everyone who saw it. There was surrendering and a few more senseless deaths in the immediate aftermath and then, the smoke clearing and the bodies growing cold, there was, finally, peace.
 
The revelry lasted nearly a week and only at the end of the prolonged party, people dragging themselves into bed at noon, did they see what had truly been won and what had been lost.
 
Lily and James and Harry had all survived, not a single lightning scar between them, a happy little family with another on the way. Alice made it through the war with the highest capture rate of any Auror while Frank was injured in the final battle, but not mortally, and was there to hear and understand his son’s first words. Order of Merlins went to all the high-ranking members of the Order, and a high propensity for alcohol abuse too. Apothecaries did a booming trade in anti-dream potions and there was a mass exodus of people who left England entirely, unable to stay where their families and friends had been slaughtered. Azkaban’s cells filled up with Death Eaters and traitors and the doors shut tight behind them all, none of them ever to successfully escape. For many, many years the dementors curled up content around their prison isle, never knowing what a feast they were missing.
 
Nearly a year after Voldemort’s fall Dumbledore, fulfilling the bargain he had made with Sirius Black, swung the vote in the Wizengamot to formally recognized werewolves as human, granting them all full rights under the law, freeing them from the humiliation of needing to be magically tracked and tagged, and granting them the right to get married.
 
It cost him quite a bit of goodwill at the Ministry and in the papers, but as ruthless and manipulative as he could be and had been during the war, Dumbledore was ultimately a man of his word. When the decision was made law he sent Remus a letter, thanking him again for his service to the Order and including the requisite line about how great a man Sirius had been and how he had died a hero’s death.
 
The letter found Remus in Grimmauld Place. He let it pile up with all the others that had come, most of them unopened and unread. He had grown pale since the end of the war; he hardly went outside for more than a few hours a day. The sunlight blinded him and the sky was at once too open and too constricting. The errands he went on were rote and colorless; he would stand at the door of the market and be unable to imagine that any of the food would taste like anything more than paste. His clothes, well-made and new, hung off him, and he always left food on his plate.
 
His circumstances had changed; Sirius had left him everything in his will. He was wealthy, to a degree he found embarrassing. In moods of clarity he would often make donations, but could not find the energy to do much more than that. The only thing that Sirius had not given to him straight away was Grimmauld Place, which he would own only once Sirius’s mother died.
 
Since it was the one place that Sirius had denied him he had had to go to it of course. He had had to see where Sirius had grown up. He was saddened but not surprised to see that the piece Sirius had written about it had been exactly right. It was an austere, claustrophobic house, every object cold and sharp to the touch, barely any light filtering in through the windows.
 
He had only meant to stay a few minutes, and only then to try to sneak a look at Sirius’s mother. He wanted, he supposed, to see some part of Sirius that was still living. Surely there had to be aspects of him in her face. But when he found her lying supine on her bed he saw that their resemblance began and ended with the shared color of their eyes. The rest of her face was waxen, the skin stretched tight. She looked the way he had when they’d found his body.
 
When her gaze had flicked to his face he’d been prepared to hurry away, but she’d taken him for a Healer and so he stayed.
 
What began as visits led to him moving in. He slept in Sirius’s old bedroom, ran his fingers lovingly along the spines of the books he’d kept on his desk, all of them either to do with Transfiguration or music theory. With Mrs. Black he never did much healing, but she didn’t really seem to mind. He was aware of what she would’ve been like in her prime, how much she would’ve despised him, but none of that seemed to matter when they sat in her darkened room together. If she was aware of what he was she didn’t say. At most, they discussed her meals, a dismal subject as her palate was as similarly dulled as his. Mostly though, she lay in the bed while he sat in the chair and they listened to music. Wizard composers mainly, but also a few bits of Beethoven and Debussy that Sirius had obviously snuck in. Remus would always choose the albums and it wasn’t until nearly a year into their living together that Mrs. Black made any requests.
 
“The jewelry box, Lupin,” she kept insisting, and though Remus thought she was having one of her lapses, he still went to it. And in it he found not a misplaced record, but one of the crystal enchantments Sirius had used to use to record music.
 
He knew what was going to play before it began, but he was still entirely unprepared to hear it. It was like seeing a wave coming towards you and being unable to get out of the way in time: no matter that he knew, he was still dragged into the undertow, emotions churning inside him.
 
It was like he’d come back. Like he’d entered through the door downstairs and was calling out his greetings. But it was a ghostly sort of return, static and fixed in place, and anyway the Sirius that lived in this piece was not calling out to him.
 
“My son wrote this for me,” Mrs. Black said, and there was pride there, if diminished by a bit of hauteur. “He composed for fun, you know.”
 
“Yes,” Remus said, his voice tight. “I know.”
 
She lay back against the pillow, her eyes fluttering shut. “The rest are in the attic,” she said, softly, halfway to sleep. “He didn’t want them to find them when they came for him.”
 
Remus was already out in the hallway before he fully registered what she had said, his body understanding before his mind. He’d been looking for Sirius’s music ever since the day after he’d died and had nearly given up on it. The sheet music had been spared the violence done to the hotel suite, so he had had that at least, but he’d wanted the performances they’d recorded together, and he had suffered a second loss when he’d been unable to find them.
 
In the attic it took him only moments to find the small black box, the only thing up there not covered with years of dust. He didn’t even open it before he brought it downstairs to the kitchen, because he knew for sure that it was them: all the songs that they had played, together.
 
In the kitchen he made tea before he opened the box, pouring in a generous amount of firewhiskey with it, though he wasn’t quite as generous as he usually was. He felt lighter now that he’d finally found the music. All this time he had trailed through this house and the flat they’d shared and had seen only the things that Sirius had left behind. But this – these pieces – this was something that had belonged to both of them, something they had made together. His childhood room, the clothes he’d left folded in the dresser, the book he’d left in on the night-stand, half-read: these were all only forms of his leave-taking. Not so with the music. In the music, he was still breathing. In the music, he was still alive. In the music, they were still together.
 
He drank his tea and slowly, with the tenderness he felt for what was inside it, he opened the box.
 
They were all there. Every single song. Except…there was one extra.
 
It was wrapped in gauze and had a note tied to it, the handwriting Sirius’s, but sloppier than it usually was, as if it had been written in haste.
 
He had not really considered listening to any of the music that day. It was still too raw to do so. He had really only wanted the option of listening, and the comfort of knowing that one of the best parts of Sirius hadn’t been lost.
 
But a new song, and the note, which said only Please listen, and how could he not?
 
He tapped the enchantment with his wand, and waited.
 
But before there was any music, there was a throat clearing, and then, Sirius.
 
“Hello, Remus,” he said, clear as if he were in the room. “This one’s for you.”
 
He said nothing more than that. He didn’t need to. The rest was in every note.
 
They had not gotten a chance to say good-bye – so few had – and here was all the catharsis of it, and all the grief of parting, and yet, it was also a song full of brightness, the piano fleet though it was fleeting, playful in the high notes, teasing in the low, and then gentle, so gentle at the end. The final note one long caress down the side of Remus’s face, warm against his tears.
 
For all the separate moods it contained, and all the undulations in the harmony and melody, the piece left Remus with a singular, all-encompassing feeling, and that was of having been loved. Because he had been so loved. And if he had ever doubted it – and perhaps he had – here was the indisputable proof. The entire song was one long embrace, and then a kiss, just one, so tenderly, at the end.
 
“Thank you,” he said when it was done, because it needed to be said, and because it was the only way he could respond to this call. “Thank you.”
 
He reached over, tapped the enchantment, and listened to it again and again and again, soaking in every chord change, every note, every key that Sirius had touched. And as he listened he began to notice again the constriction of the room, made by all the clutter that filled it, how there could be more space if he only took some of the things away. How the acoustics would be better for this song and all the others if the sound was freer to roam. How bright the house could be, just like the music, if he only cleaned the grime from the windows and let in the light.
 
Take it from the top, how often had they said that? Then they would go back to the beginning, try again. They would never be able to play the same song the same way twice. There were always variations, no matter how slight. And with the absence of one instrument the difference would be huge, but still the song could be played.
 
Remus closed his eyes, took a deep breath, flexed his fingers. Then softly, so as not to disturb the melody, but steadily, as he had not been in months, he rose from his chair, straightened, and took it from the top.
 

Coda
 
The song goes on, and with it, Remus.