Chapter Text
When Sirius Black looks in the mirror it's only his own grey eyes that look back.
He hadn’t expected any different really, though in that secret small part of himself (the part that he’d allowed to flourish when he’d been away trapped in the dark moist hellhole that was Azkaban, the part that didn’t quite have a hold on reality) he’d wished for another.
He clutches the mirror so tightly it bites into the tender skin of his palm, the palm of a boy who’d never had to work a day in his life, the palm of someone who spent years without a wand. It's still foreign, that uncallused skin. He’s always had soft hands, in fact he’d revelled in it while he was in school. The girls had cooed over it, asked him what potions he used and shivered as his fingers trailed across their warm, plump cheeks, the skin of them thin as the outside of a peach. He’d laughed then, cast one of those grins he’d made himself known for—a grin that said, yes I am so wonderful, I know it to be so; yes I am so wonderful, no one has ever told me different; yes I am so wonderful, don’t look too close—and winked, murmuring that it was all natural, love. The natural work of a pureblood born into privilege. Of a boy who hadn’t been forced to do chores but had been forced to punish his brother for every wrongdoing, the kind of work that left marks which could not be seen.
It’s the lack of calluses, not the softness of his palms that is strange. Sirius had been using a wand before he could talk, it almost felt like a different person who’d been trapped in a magicless hell for enough time for a scabbed baby to grow into a scarred young man.
He’s glad for his tender skin now because when the glass bites into it, into the untouched valleys of his palm, the too-deep too-short crease of his lifeline, it presses through the skin. Blood wells bright and red and real in the cradle of his hand beading in ruby droplets across the mirror. But still it’s not the brown eyes he longs for. Brown eyes he will never see again.
“Merlin,” Sirius says aloud as he drops the enchanted mirror into his lap, flinching as it clinks against its twin, “I need a hobby.”
Buckbeak makes a sort of snuffling sound in response, easing one golden eye open a sliver. It’s enough to make it clear he heartily agrees.
“A distraction, or something,” Sirius continues, leaning back on the side of what had once been his mother’s bed. It’s a mess of hay and splinters and matted feathers now and Sirius still gets a bit of a thrill every time he sees it; the mess that’s been made of a place his mother had once taken so much pride in she threatened to crucio him if he even thought about stepping inside.
Fuck you mum , he think to himself, grinning into the air.
“You truly do look like a madman grinning like that,” Regulus says from his place in the corner, not even looking up from his book.
“See Buckbeak,” Sirius gestures at the hallucination of his brother. “If I keep being this maudlin I will finally drop off the deep end.”
“You’re already off the deep end,” Regulus mutters. He sighs and settles back against the wall. Still somehow elegant as he slouches, he fiddles with the locket strung about his neck, looking, as he always does, as if visiting Sirius is a mighty inconvenience for him. As if he isn’t just a figment of Sirius’s imagination, beholden only to him. Though Sirius supposes it makes sense for his mind to dream Regulus this way, in life his brother had only disdain for him.
No , Sirius reminds himself, dedicated, even while overcome with spite, to reclaim the truth of his memories, patchworked and torn as they’d been by twelve years of dementors slowly suckling at the husk of his soul.
It was only after Sirius had left home to live with James Potter that Regulus had finally burned away what was left of his brotherly affection. At the time Sirius had simply thought good riddance, and taken it as a sign that Regulus had always been destined for darkness, a fate Sirius himself had escaped by some intrinsic goodness in his nature. But that was a lie he’d told himself, his oldest and most familiar lie. Sirius was not inherently good and neither was Regulus inherently evil. Sirius had simply fallen in with those who’d made it easy to be better than he was. James and Remus and even—Sirius nearly shuddered as he thought it—Peter. Regulus had none of that, he’d only had Snivellus and Lucius and the never-ending vitriol of their mother that—Sirius now realized years and years past when it would have done anything—had been directed toward Regulus in an entirely different and altogether more insidious way than towards himself. Regulus had been pulled toward darkness with love and sickly sweet adoration as much as he’d been pulled by duty and guilt and the smothering sense he wouldn’t be able to escape, all spewed from the manipulative dichotomy of his mother’s pursed, ugly little mouth. Sirius’s chains, forged of pure hatred and intolerable cruelty, had been much easier to break.
And Sirius hadn’t helped save Regulus, that was the truth of it. He’d abandoned him. Just like he abandoned everyone. Just like he'd been abandoned.
“I could always try singing more Christmas carols. You liked that, didn't you ole’ Witherwings?”
Buckbeak's feathers ruffle especially loudly at the same time that Regulus groans. “Please, not again. I could only handle it so long as the redheaded blood traitors were stomping around enough to drown it out.”
“Everyone’s always ganging up against me,” Sirius whines. “You’re from my own twisted psyche, shouldn’t that mean you’re on my side?”
Regulus responds to that, but Sirius is no longer listening.
The truth is that Sirius doesn’t really feel in the mood to sing Christmas carols. It had been lovely, Christmas with the Weasleys. They brought such effervescent brightness with them, turning the musty halls of Grimmauld Place toasty warm just from the reflection of light off their hair. It had been enough to stave off the worst of the visions and the memories, both of which had been increasingly overtaking him. He’d gathered enough of their joy to feel delighted with how much Fred and George reminded him of the Marauders in the height of their pranking careers. Enough to feel wistful when the youngest, Ginny, turned a bit too quickly and her hair covered her face enough for her to look like Lily. Enough that when Remus smiled at all of them, the silver scars around his mouth pulling and dragging at the wrinkles that now carved lines into his sad eyes, Sirius could pretend that smile was real.
But now they’re gone and the house echoes with their leftover laughter. Now Remus stays in his room speaking little and smiling even less. Now Harry walks the halls, shoulders bent in a way Sirius wishes he could unsee. Now Sirius stays with Buckbeak and the ghost of his brother, absolutely languishing in all the guilt his mind can think of.
But it’s all so pointless. The memories will come regardless, Sirius’s mind can obviously no longer tell them from reality. He might as well try to distract himself as best he can.
So he gets up (a little slower and creakier than he would have before Azkaban. He’s gotten older, as much as he hates to admit it, and so much time spent as a dog has swelled his joints in a way that makes them ache always, but especially in the damp London winter) and levers himself out of the room.
“Be good,” he tells Buckbeak, lingering in the doorframe and the creature gives his best approximation of an eye roll before settling down for the kip he’d been trying for before Sirius arrived lonely and ever irritating.
Regulus follows him as he steps out into the hall, closing the door to Buckbeak’s room behind him. As soon as he does every sound inside is muffled, the charms his mother had placed on the room still working even after all these years. There are only two other places in the house where this is the case: his father’s old study, which Sirius hasn’t been brave enough to attempt entering, certain it's filled to the brim with all sort of dark arts paraphernalia and guarded enough that anyone who enters will be cursed for a thousand generations; and the library where his parents has entertained their more...unusual guests.
The rest of the rooms had hardly any privacy at all, a fact that had irritated Sirius mightily in his youth before he’d discovered that his mother’s and Kreacher’s ever listening ears meant that every muggle record he brought into his room they could not escape. And so even when he was locked into his room over summer hols, alone for weeks at a time, they couldn’t shut Sirius up. Absent of any other opportunity for rebellion, Sirius would not be ignored.
He’d done that often the summer after third year, when Moony had gifted his dinky skipping turntable and scratched records to Sirius at the end of term. Sirius had tried to refuse it at first, objecting not to the gift itself, but to the fact Moony was giving it to him in return for something Sirius wanted to be freely given. It was that year he and James had discovered their roommate's secret.
“I have a muggle illness,” Remus would mutter back then, pulling his sleeves down over the silver scars on his wrists. His face was pale, the scars standing bright and silver like the moon itself had scratched his face. “But I’m fine, you don’t need to worry.”
Yet Sirius had worried, more than James, who, for all his big-heartedness, was inclined to take Remus at his word. “Leave him alone,” he shrugged. “He says he’s fine, and it’s probably true.”
But Sirius Black knew, maybe better than most, that what people said wasn’t always exactly what they meant. He may have been sorted into Gryffindor, but he’d been around enough Slytherins to know that.
And another thing that irked him about it, Remus had said over and over that he was fine. Like Sirius was an idiot. But Sirius wasn’t an idiot, and he wanted an opportunity to prove it.
It had been easier than he’d thought to learn the truth, and when he told James his tune had shifted, brightening. It was James who’d come up with the idea to become Animagi, operating outside of the law for Remus’s benefit. And though Sirius had been wary of the legal ramifications—not because he cared much for the law, but because his parents had raised him to fear aurors above almost anything else—he’d delighted in the idea of doing something secret, something to help Remus. There were so many people that Sirius couldn’t help (this was a thought that Sirius, at the time, hadn’t truly been able to articulate, so embroiled was he in the inherent competition imbued into sibling relationships and simmering with spite because of it. It’s not until later that he realizes the truth of these impulses, that Sirius had never ever been able to control his life, had never had the power to help anyone, not even himself. And the opportunity to do so had filled him with a euphoria he had not been able to name) and that Remus was the one who’d receive his goodwill. Quiet, studious Remus, who Sirius had to force to become his friend by repetition all of second year, Remus whose eyes looked sadder than they should, felt right. Felt perfect.
And so they’d told Remus, who, when first realizing all three of them (because yes, Peter had been brought in as well, they hadn’t known then that...they hadn’t known a lot of things) knew his secret and subsequently realizing that despite it they still loved him, had cried softly and silently, his gold eyes glistening like the finest china in Sirius's mother’s cabinets. Sirius remembered thinking then that Remus was beautiful, too beautiful to be a werewolf, that maybe they'd been wrong. Of course, then Remus had confirmed their theories and told them their plans were unnecessary, which made it feel even more satisfying when they decided to go through with them despite his protestations.
Sirius had forced Remus into friendship, he would now force him even further—to realize he was loved, even if every line of his body said he thought he didn’t deserve it.
And so, after months of studying, studying they would all be continuing over the summer holidays, Remus had come to Sirius with a gift.
“I don’t have much to give,” Remus had whispered as he pressed the parchment-wrapped bundle into Sirius’s arms.
Sirius had tried to give it back. “But Moony, you love your records—”
Remus hadn’t let him give it back. “I do, but you do too. And I will have another one soon. My granddad just died—no it’s okay, I didn’t really know him,” he said quickly, sensing Sirius was about to interrupt. “He didn’t like...what I am. Anyway, he left behind some records and a nicer turntable than this old junk heap. So it’s not really like I’m giving up anything at all, giving it to you. I’d like you to have it.”
The words had come out in a rush, so unlike Remus’s usual measured way of speaking. Words picked out carefully, demure and polite in all things. Sirius had long suspected it was a curated conversational style, because in times of excitement and prank planning, sometimes the words burst out of him just like this—rushed and tumbling like water over river stones. He’d come to treasure those moments where Remus was letting the mask he’d painted for himself crack just a bit, just enough for Sirius to see a sliver of what was inside.
And that was an even greater gift than the music.
So Sirius gently took the gift in his arms, reverently stroking his fingers over the hastily spelled corners, those small imperfections that Remus ordinarily wouldn’t have let show. And he smiled to himself. Then he smiled at Remus. “Thank you,” he said.
Remus had smiled back, small enough that the scar at the corner of his mouth hardly moved and said, “You’re welcome.”
And so Sirius’s summer had been filled with Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie and a scratched and worn Simon and Garfunkel album, clearly well-loved. He’d listened as he poured over books on transfiguration and the history of animagi, studious in a way he’d never been. And he’d pretended that Remus was with him, listening along.
Sirius nearly trips as he enters the narrow stairwell, more shadowed than light in the flickering glow of the dirty gaslamp hung far above. Standing on the landing he can hear everything that whispers from the floors below, and above Harry’s cursing in the kitchen and Kreacher’s subsequent scolding, nearer than that, he can hear trembling strings rising. The pluck of guitar. The fuzzy, clicking sound of an old record player.
Remus and his music.
It’s funny, Sirius thinks, that he’d just been remembering Remus and his music. How every time he hears Major Tom burbling out of a radio from a passing automobile outside he thinks of Remus, remembers him. Yet he’d forgotten somehow that this is Remus, that the Remus he’d known is here, right now, if Sirius only reaches out to touch him.
Yet he won’t. For a thousand reasons, he won’t.
Even so, he hesitates for a moment on that landing, halfway between the floor above and the one below.
It’s the sight of Regulus still there and nearly solid-looking behind him, leaning against the railing, that makes the decision for him.
And he goes up, up to his room, up to one past, a further past full of guilt and death and memories that Sirius almost doesn’t want to escape.
—
His room is rather less full of distractions than he’d hoped.
Or, rather, it is full of distracting things, but not that which would stop memories from overcoming him, leaving him gasping and shaking on his childhood bed. These distractions are ones that would invite those memories, practically beg them to overwhelm him.
“What are you even looking for?” Regulus asks, lounging now on Sirius’s bed, clearly making an effort not to cringe at their garish Gryffindor color palette.
“I’m thinking I might take up reading,” Sirius says, pulling open the drapes he has not touched in nearly two decades. Plumes of dust dance in the air, and Sirius coughs once before sucking them into his wand with a muttered spell. He hasn’t spent much time in here since moving back to Grimmauld Place. For some reason sleeping in Buckbeak’s room makes him feel...safer. Less fragile maybe. Sirius isn’t entirely sure, articulating his emotions, even to himself, is something he hadn’t been in the habit of doing, even before he’d actively suppressed his emotions to keep them from being eaten.
Regulus scoffs, propping himself up on an elbow. The light makes his skin shimmer and Sirius can see now that he’s fully translucent, that he’s not there at all. Which, of course, Sirius knows, but it’s good to be reminded, so as to retain what little sanity he has left. “You, reading? I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“You didn’t,” Sirius says sharply, “you’re dead.”
Regulus rolls his eyes. “Yes, obviously. It’s a turn of phrase. What I meant is that it always seemed to me that you were far too occupied with silly childish antics to read. It was your werewolf friend that always had his head buried in a book.”
Sirius eyes him. “You knew that Remus…” He trails away, the amount he has to remind himself that Regulus is a manifestation of his subconscious is not a point in favor of those claiming he’s not gone ‘round the bend.
“I’m not an idiot, brother, though I know you often thought me so,” Regulus says and it's his turn to sound defensive. “Plus Severus told me.”
“Of course he did,” Sirius says, which of course he would think that Snivellus would tell Regulus about Moony because he’s the one who invented the scenario because Regulus is really Sirius, therefore everything he says is something Sirius already believes whether he realizes it or not, even his criticism is what Sirius secretly believes about himself—Sirius’s head hurts. He kneels down as he moves a pile of now nearly fossilized dirty clothes away from his old school trunk. “And I read plenty.”
“Alright, whatever you say,” Regulus says, but Sirius is no longer listening. Here in this trunk is where he’s stored his books. There are other things too—broom polish, an old charms textbook, a pair of Mary McDonald’s knickers—but what captures Sirius’s attention are the worn leather-bound spines, spiderwebbing cracks obscuring paperback titles, pages so dog-eared and worn they’ve gone soft between his fingers. He brings them out, letting them pool and bend between his crossed legs. This one here he stole from the library because he thought it would help him solve Moony’s little wolf problem. This one he plucked out of Remus’s hands and forgot to give back, distracted as he was by James’s laughter and Peter’s impatient little dances. This one he’d stolen under the cover of night from the muggle corner store down the way, shoving the colorful bills he’d been gathering at the clerk and tucking it beneath his jumper as he hurried home before Kreacher could catch him up and about and whip him bloody on his mother’s behalf.
Every book in his hand held not only the memories of when he’d acquired it, he realized as he flipped through the pages. They were a catalog of youthful jokes and ideas—he and James had used to write little notes in the corners of their school books and even library books, signing each one Padfoot and Prongs. They’d thought themselves clever but Remus always had a way of finding their little doodles and forcing them to spell the pages pristine again. Once Sirius had spelled the entire book blank as a laugh but Remus had glared at him for so long after he’d never done it again.
Remus cared about books in a way Sirius never did. He kept them in nearly the exact same condition which he’d found them, taking care not to tug too hard at any page, opening the cover at the right angle so as not to bend the spine. Sirius thought it silly and pointless, wasn’t the purpose of a book to enjoy it , but it wasn’t to Remus. He didn’t want to ruin things, he’d said once. Sirius had told him it was impossible for him to ruin things—if he marked things up it was an improvement because Remus had done it.
This ongoing spat of theirs really ratcheted up a notch when one day Remus saw Sirius and James making their little margin notes in class and so overcome with frustration was he that he reached over and yanked the book out of their grasp. Only the page hadn’t come with it. And so Remus was left, red-faced and sputtering in the middle of History of Magic, a torn page in his hand while Sirius and James tried to hold back their laughter.
Remus stared at the page in horror before throwing it at the two of them and tried to compose himself, claiming it was all their fault, and he hadn’t even done anything really.
It had all been so funny then. Sirius had been so delighted by the look on Remus’s face that he’d kept that torn page, reverently sticking it to the wall above his bed, proclaiming for their whole dorm to hear, “proof that Remus is a destroyer of books, a killer of knowledge!”
Every time Remus had seen it his face had gone red, his eyes bulging out. He’d tuck his own books beneath his robes as if they’d be scandalized by the sight of their damaged compatriot and Sirius had roared in laughter every time. Remus Lupin, who so often caged everything loud and sputtering within him, smearing the surface with polite little smiles and smoothed out deference, could always be brought near to shouting by Sirius Black. For a while, it was his point of greatest pride.
What had that page even said? Sirius can’t remember now. There are so many things Sirius can’t remember now.
Suddenly the books are too much. The idea of rereading those pages turns something in his stomach and he stands abruptly, stumbling only slightly before rushing out of the room.
—
The library is only slightly better. There are still memories here, in fact, the air swims with them, thickening the dust to a paste that clings to his throat, tightening the tendons there so it hurts to breathe. But these memories—the shivering phantom pain of the crucio his father would cast if he touched the books, his mother screaming at him he would never be anyone or worth anything, ministry officials that would soon become death eaters leering at him, asking his father if they could take him under their wing—are somehow more bearable than the memories of Remus’s smile, of laughing with James at something only the two of them understood. Of trusting Peter. In fact, he almost courts them.
He stretches out fingers gone knobbly and crooked towards one of the shelves his father had been especially protective of, not caring what memories will leap to meet him. But just as Sirius feels his fingers get near enough to sense the strange velvety smoothness of the spines, his hand stops.
He blinks at it, that hand frozen outstretched; at the translucent fingers wrapped around his wrist, so cold they almost burn.
“Don’t,” Regulus says. “Don’t underestimate the staying power of father’s curses.”
Sirius still can’t understand. He stares at those fingers. Those not real fingers. Those invention of his tattered mind fingers. Fingers that have actually, in real life, stopped his hand.
I’ve gone mad, he thinks.
Then Regulus is gone and Sirius nearly stumbles into the bookshelf, stopping himself just before he barrels in the book Regulus had broken the laws of the universe to stop him from touching. He catches himself against the wood just as he hears two pairs of footsteps stomping across the floors. One is loud, and just on the edge of familiar—too-large sneakers slapping against the ancient hardwood, almost sullen with little snap snap of the toes on the ground. The second he knows better than his own—soft, softer than they should be, like the owner of those feet is placing every step gingerly, like he doesn’t want to make too much noise, like he’s worried it will hurt. Even after all this time , he asks himself, almost angry at the secret place in him that unfurls at the sound of those steps. Always , something in him responds.
A smile plasters itself across his face as Harry makes his way into the room. “Hey, kid,” he says. Tone it down , he almost hears Regulus whisper, you don’t want him to know how truly mad you are . Sirius clenches his hands at his sides and tries to make his smile seem more natural. But he knows he doesn’t succeed, he can feel the mask of his too-thin face stretching itself into nearly grotesque shapes. This is a smile , he tells himself, stop overthinking it. This is what a smile feels like. He has smiled since he came out of Azkaban, more than once. He just doesn’t know how to fake it anymore.
Harry, though, doesn’t seem to notice. He slouches into the room, throwing himself into one of the chairs by the fireplace. As he does something inside it shifts, like the darkness is alive and Sirius clutches his wand to his side. The trouble with madness, however, is that he can’t tell whether it’s a boggart lurking inside or a manifestation of his pesky subconscious.
“Hullo, Sirius,” Harry says, clearly pouting. A real smile almost bursts across Sirius’s face when he sees it. Harry has been sullen and unhappy for months now, but something had seemed to lighten within him yesterday at Christmas. Perhaps it was Arthur Weasely making a miraculous early recovery from the snake attack Harry had witnessed. Or maybe it was simply spending time with his friends. But now his pouting was clearly that of an average fifteen-year-old boy, not the knitted brow of a child with the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Do you have any books on seer dreams? Professor Lupin says I should be researching instead of lazing about.”
“That’s not exactly what I said,” Remus says softly as he enters the room, his shoulders slanted in that nonthreatening way they always are. Like he’s trying to pretend he’s shorter, his stature less intimidating than it is. “And I told you to call me Remus, Harry. I’m not your professor any longer.”
Sirius feels frozen in place, his cheeks still garishly bent upwards.
He’s seen Remus since that fateful day in the shrieking shack, of course he has. Loads of times. But most often in a group with other people to make it so they didn’t have to speak to each other. Because Sirius didn’t want to speak to him; his insides rebelled against it, so mixed up were they about who betrayed who betrayed who betrayed who. And Sirius, when confronted with uncomfortable, tangled emotions, almost always runs away.
Not very Gryffindor of you , the Regulus in his head says. Shut up , Sirius thinks so purposefully the voice falls quiet.
Harry may have not noticed Sirius’s strange posture, but Remus sees through it right away—the way Sirius is not quite meeting Harry’s eyes; the way the look on his face looks more like a baring of teeth than anything else.
Sirius lets it drop. He turns away a bit so he doesn’t have to see Remus’s eyes.
“All I meant, Harry, is that if something is bothering you, it’s nothing a bit of research can’t settle. Knowledge is the natural destroyer of anxiety,” Remus says, as if he hadn’t noticed anything at all. Sirius pretends he’s looking very closely at the bookshelves, but behind him, Harry heaves a huge sigh.
“Bothering me, why would something be bothering me?” He asks mockingly.
“Well,” Remus responds in a way that, Sirius can tell just from hearing, is just the tiniest bit amused. “Perhaps because Phineas Nigellus told Dumbledore that you were planning on leaving Grimmauld Place—”
“I was being sarcastic.” Harry rolled his eyes.
“Yes, Harry,” Remus says. “I did realize that.”
“Wait.” Sirius turns. “You were going to leave—”
“He had a bag packed and everything,” Remus says and it almost feels natural again, speaking to him; them on one side, Harry on the other. It hurts a bit.
“I’m not!” Harry yells, standing. “I thought about it for a moment. Only because I realized I’m putting everyone in danger because bloody Voldemort can see through my eyes. I’m spying on the Order just by being here!”
“Harry,” Sirius starts.
“But no! I’m not leaving because even though Dumbledore won’t even look at me, he told me I have to stay put. And he didn’t even have the decency to tell me himself.” All of a sudden he looks like he’s about to cry and Sirius steps forward, his hand outstretched.
“Harry,” he says. “I’m sure it’s not—”
“No,” Harry interrupts, his hair swaying as if there’s a wind around only him. He takes a deep breath and it stops. “You can’t understand what this is like for me. Don’t even try.” And then he stomps out of the room, the toes of his trainers slapping the ground with every step.
And then it's Remus and Sirius alone, Sirius’s hand still hanging in the air and Remus’s face so closed up and tight even Sirius can’t read what’s written there.
But maybe that’s not unusual. He hasn’t been around Remus enough to test it out. Maybe Remus is unknown to him now, the play of his expressions a language he can no longer read.
Even so, his muscles relax once Harry leaves the room, his hand loosening around his wand on instinct alone. It’s like—despite the turmoil in his mind and in his soul and in his needy impetuous heart—his body has forgotten he cares about being vulnerable with Remus in the room. That’s not it, something in him whispers, it's that the body always remembers, even when the mind has forgotten.
His stomach clenches and his muscles tighten, this time purposefully.
In all the time Sirius spent thinking about memories and comfort and lost friends Remus has been moving. He’s close now, closer than they’ve been since that hug when Remus discovered the truth, when he’d felt his heart pounding beneath his ribs and every cell in his body had screamed I’m home I’m home I’m home .
Sirius feels frozen as Remus stands in front of him, arm raised. terror and (pitifully) anticipation warring in his mind.
It’s then that he realizes that Remus is trying to reach the shelf behind him.
When they’d been in school Sirius had made a joke of this, standing in front of Remus every time he had to get a book from a shelf so that Remus was forced to lean in close, groping blindly behind his shoulders. It had excited him then, that closeness, and he hadn’t ever thought about why. He’d just whined to Remus, pawing at his robes. “Come play with us, Moony,” he’d say. “We’re seeing how pink we can get McGonagall’s face before she snaps.” But what he meant was, what every muscle in his body was straining to communicate was: stay with me Remus, be with me Remus, look at me Remus.
And even now his muscles whisper the same thing.
Stay with me, Remus.
Be with me, Remus.
Look at me, Remus.
But what he says is this, “those books are cursed.”
Remus smiles a little, faint enough that the scar on the side of his lip barely moves at all and Sirius’s stomach clenches even as he still doesn’t move because he knows that smile. He knows it so well.
“Curses don’t really work on me,” Remus says. “Werewolf. Remember?”
I remember .
Sirius practically leaps out of the way, his muscles finally obeying the frantic signals from his overwrought mind, giving Remus far more room than he needs. But this is safer, this is better.
He should leave now, get out while he can, even though he came here to read and he hasn’t even touched a book. Instead, he clears his throat.
“What are you looking for?” He asks. “My father’s collection is probably a lot darker than what you’re used to.”
Remus hums deep in his throat as he draws a long elegant finger across the spine of each book. “I think you’d be surprised at how much dark I’m used to. Or maybe you wouldn’t be.” He pauses for a moment, something bitter in his tone. Then he shakes it off. Sirius doesn’t though. He stands frozen, his breath caught in his still tight throat, the muscles aching now. Because Sirius had thought Remus was dark all those years ago. He’d thought Remus was a spy for the death eaters.
Though, to be fair, Remus had thought the same of him.
His tone is much lighter as he continues, purposefully so. “I think there’s a book on seer dreams in here. And if I’m lucky,” his finger has stopped now, “maybe one on prophecies and the bonds that two mentioned within one might carry.”
Sirius feels ill. “You think Harry—”
“I’m not sure what to think,” Remus interrupts. “And seeing as Dumbledore hasn’t seen fit to share his suspicions, I thought I might do a bit of research on my own. Knowledge is the natural destroyer of anxiety after all.” He straightens, piling four volumes in his long arms. “These should do nicely. I hope you have a nice Boxing Day, Sirius,” he says as he turns toward the door. “Perhaps you could take Harry outside a bit later, I think he could use a bit of fun.”
Sirius’s voice croaks as he says, “Yeah, maybe.”
Then Remus is gone without even looking back and Sirius is left staring at the empty doorway.
“I thought you were going to read, not pine.”
Sirius jumps and growls without thinking about it. Regulus just puts two hands in the air, soft, but callused, palms facing outward. Sirius deflates, rubbing the heel of his hand between his brows, pressing so hard it nearly hurts.
“I was,” he says. Then he straightens. “I was, there’s just not a damned thing in here to read unless I want to confirm everyone’s suspicions and become a death eater.”
Regulus’s mouth does a little twist. “I don’t think anyone suspects that, dear brother.”
“Not anymore,” Sirius spits bitterly. Then he sighs again, trying to shake off this hideous knot that kept tightening and tightening beneath his chest. It didn’t used to be like this. He never used to feel like this.
“I will admit that our father was not predisposed to the type of muggle fiction you seem to prefer, but there should be at least a few volumes of poetry within the stacks,” Regulus says. There’s something odd in his voice. Something strange and soft, almost kind.
It makes Sirius want to laugh. But he doesn’t. A laughing lunatic is even worse than a grinning one.
Regulus steps over to the chair Harry had just vacated and peers at the trollfoot side table on its right side. He reaches down and almost appears to pick up one of the thin volumes stacked on top of it. Sirius doesn’t even flinch, if his mind’s invention of Regulus can be convinced to stop by a hallucination’s touch he certainly can pretend the book is moving off of the table.
Regulus flips through some of the pages, then blinks. Then hums. “Maybe I was wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Sirius marches over and rips it out of his hand. He only has to glance at the page before he realizes Regulus is right. Or wrong.
This is a volume written by a muggle, but it definitely didn’t belong to his father.
He can tell just by looking that it belongs to Remus.
It’s a volume of poetry. A recent one. Published, he sees, while he was rotting, forgotten in Azkaban for a crime he did not commit.
An Atlas of the Difficult World , it’s called, and Sirius snorts. So somber, so typically Moony.
He reads through a few pages, something about it niggling at him, but it takes him a while to figure it out. Though he could tell the hand was Remus’s, the shapes of the letters are different. Sharper, the rounded shapes turning to spikes under pencil lead. Sirius gazes at the shapes unseeing, something about the dissonant difference striking something inside of him like a wand against a chalkboard. Wrong. It’s all wrong.
Not because Sirius cares about Remus’s handwriting—he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t. It’s that this, this shift of shapes, is a definitive sign that time has passed. It’s like something about that didn’t feel real until right now.
It’s funny how, when he was in Azkaban, even when he was a dog in Azkaban, he always knew time was passing. In fact, he wouldn’t, couldn’t, let himself forget it. He counted the days, scratching it into the walls, into his skin if necessary—so as to remind himself that time was moving on without him, without...them.
And yet, he’d forgotten. That thought time was marching on without Sirius, without James, without Lily, Remus had been marching with it. He hadn’t had a choice.
He must have felt like the last one, the one who was doomed to go on.
It's funny how with all his purposeful remembering he still forgot.
Yet, even different as the handwriting is, Remus is still so clearly there, living in the margins of his book. Sirius finds him in the underlined sections ( What does it mean to say I have survived, he’s underlined, until you take the mirrors and turn them outward and read your own face in their outraged light? And on the next page— Outrage : who dare claim protection for their own amid such unprotection? What kind of prayer is that? To what kind of god? What kind of wish? ), the small stars and notes he’s written in the margins. As particular as Remus always was with his books, he could never stop himself from leaving annotations. It’s like, because for so much of the time Remus kept himself quiet, nearly sewing his lips together to make sure of it, he couldn’t stop himself, in this, from voicing his thoughts. He never wrote in ink though (Remus almost never used ink if he could help it, even in school he’d loathed quills, instead bringing a supply of soft-leaded yellow pencils that he would sharpen quietly between classes with a small knife) and every note pertained directly to the text. Sirius loved to watch him make those little notes; loved the press of the lead against the paper shushing and soft, so much like Remus himself. The marks so impermanent, faint enough that, if erased, not even a shadow would remain. Sirius had tried writing with those pencils once, but he’d just broken the lead—the marks he made in the page too strong, too dark, to be removed.
Not Remus though. Remus was careful, always careful.
There’s a section in one of the poems that Remus has marked with a line along the side to indicate he finds it important.
This is the capital of money and dolor , it begins. Though where the poem states money and dolor Remus, in a move so out of character Sirius is almost scandalized, has crossed out the original words and in that small unfamiliar handwriting he has written these words instead magic and blood, so that the poem reads like this:
This is the capital of magic and blood whose spires flare up through air inversion whose bridges are crumbling whose children are drifting blind alleys pent between coiled rolls of razor wire.
This is our legacy , Remus has written beneath. A ruined life of death, children mourning before they learn to speak. A curtain of decay that none of us stopped from swinging closed .
Sirius has to close the book then because he can no longer breathe and his vision is blurring so he can no longer read. This is not a distraction, this is the opposite.
And so Sirius leaves the library as if imperiused, so unaware is he of his surroundings. He finds that he has walked up to Buckbeak’s room and somewhere between those two places he has turned into Padfoot. And nestled beneath Buckbeak’s wings, his dog mind pleasantly blank, he stares at the walls until he falls to sleep.