Archive of Our Own

9. Treachery

Peter looks such a mess that he oughtn't be able to stand -- and he doesn't for very long, not under his own power. His sweet, round face is unusually thin and drawn, and that would be alarming enough if his teeth and lips weren't red with blood from where he's bitten off the tip of his own tongue.

"My bag," Sirius says, glancing at Remus with barely concealed alarm as his arms wrap around Peter's shoulders to ease him to the floor before he can collapse and do himself more harm.

At eighteen, Remus would have been frozen in place, horrified by the sight of one of his dearest friends bleeding on the braided rug where Padfoot likes to curl up in front of the fire. At twenty-one, he's lost count of the number of friends he's seen bloodied and trembling with the aftershocks of Dark magic. He can force himself move through the haze that seemed to cloud his head, making everything surreal and blurred around the edges. 

"Cruciatus, wasn't it?" Sirius says, holding Peter's face and trying to keep his attention even as he looks like he was about to pass out. Peter manages a weak moan and Remus feels sick as he goes for Sirius's Healer's bag. It's been months since one of them was badly hurt

"The blue bottle," he says to Remus as he comes back into the parlour. "It'll help him with the spasms. They'll pass in a few hours, but it'll take the edge off..." Remus uncaps the bottle for him and Sirius helps Peter to drink, props him up and massages his throat with practised ease. He will make a good healer one day.

"Does He know it's you?" Remus isn't sure what Sirius is talking about, but Peter's eyes go wide with fear and understanding. 

"I inn' mean..." Peter gasps. "Ih hur -- sho much pain..." Between the sobs and his tongue, the words are garbled, but Sirius understands and his face goes hard and white.

"You told." Remus has never seen the look Sirius wears now, and it makes him cold. "You told the Secret."

Peter is gasping and choking and blue before Remus can pry Sirius's hands from around his neck.

8. Fraud

Something's been wrong, and Remus can't put his finger on it. Sirius has always been restless and loud. He's more restless now, pacing and smoking frantically and always holding a tumbler of scotch, swirling it in his hand. Remus never sees him sipping it, but the bottles empty at an alarming rate.

And he's silent. Drunk and silent. For days at a time, they hardly speak. There were times when Remus used to be annoyed by Sirius's constant chatter. Now he misses it. He sits in the lounge and breathes in the smoke from Sirius's posh cigarettes which seems much less acrid than his own brand, and tries to remember the last time Sirius looked at him without seeming like a skittish dog. 

They haven't had sex in five months. 

Remus puts it down to stress. He puts it down to the fact that sometimes Sirius disappears and comes back covered in someone else's blood and isn't allowed to tell him what happened, to the fact that he himself is gone for days at a time, speaking with werewolves so frustrated with the Ministry that they'll believe anyone who offers them hope, to the weight of keeping the Order's secrets and the many days when Remus is so exhausted he probably couldn't get hard anyway.

That night Sirius comes home looking as though a weight has been lifted. "He can't touch them now," he says, "they're safe," and if there's a threatening edge, a challenge in Sirius's voice, Remus can believe it's because James is the brother Sirius wished he had and he would do anything to protect him. 

7. Violence

He doesn't hit him because Sirius thought he was the traitor. He hits him because he deserves it, because Sirius has been showing him for months how little he trusts him, and Remus wouldn't believe that was what was happening, because he had so much faith and Sirius had so little. 

He lashes out and the blow glances off Sirius's chin, and that's enough to have him staggering back and bringing his hands up. Clearheaded, they're an even match, but Remus stopped thinking clearly when Peter came through the floo. Sirius ducks the tumbler aimed at his head and it shatters against the brickwork of the fireplace.

They're both still. Sirius is trying to block his face and waiting.

Remus throws a half full bottle of scotch at the wall and screams.

6. Heresy

Fenrir is broad muscles and strong arms and bronzed skin from living rough with his pack. Remus has several inches on him and still feels small beside him, inferior. Domesticated.

It starts with a cigarette -- holding off the chill of September with the burn of smoke in their lungs. Remus is a visitor here, an outsider among his own people, passing through before leaving the little village of muggle caravans and tents and no wands and hunting and foraging and stealing for food.

"There isn't a place for you in their world," Fenrir tells him. "Keeping you on a registry, branding you. You're an animal to them, you know." He takes a long drag on his cigarette and Remus watches it curl out his nose. "You can learn a lot about a society by the way it treats its animals. Never trust a man who kicks his dog."

5. Wrath

"I thought you were their Secret Keeper," he says, breathless now that he's pulled Sirius away from Peter. His body is shaking with adrenaline. "I thought it was you."

"I know."

There's silence between them, nothing but the sound of Peter choking and gasping for breath and then Sirius reaches out.

"Don't touch me."

Sirius's hand grips his shoulder. "Moony--"

"Don't fucking touch me!" he shouts, knocking Sirius's hand away.

4. Greed

This is his assignment for the Order: to gain the trust of the packs that might align with Voldemort, to understand them, to change their minds. And never to doubt which side he is on through it all.

"When you live among them," Fenrir says, "you take what they give you. They allow you to live among them. They don't want you there. Never forget that. Everything that is yours, you own at the Ministry's pleasure. You are tolerated, confined, imprisoned. But out here--" He smiles and his tongue runs over a pointed tooth. "Out here, we take what should be ours."

Remus wants to own all of Sirius. He wants the part that belongs to James, the broken part that belongs to his family, the part that can't quite be pinned down, the part that made him buy a Triumph Bonneville and take it to the sky. He wants the place Sirius goes when he's quiet and swirling the last bit of scotch around the bottom of the glass and, for a long time, doesn't drink.

All of it.

3. Gluttony

Their truce is uneasy. They don't fight. They don't touch. They barely speak, and when they both need to escape, they find themselves at the same pub -- separately.

And that means it shouldn't sting when he sees a sandy haired young bloke talking to Sirius, touching him. When he sees Sirius smile for the first time in so long, and it's at that boy, when they disappear into the crowd and Remus can't see them anymore, when they could be doing anything to each other, it shouldn't hurt. There's no trust left to break.

"What are you drinking?" The man who asks is tall and his nose is crooked, and he's signalling to the barman to bring Remus another. He's unguarded, laughing, most of all willing, and Remus lets himself be led to the loo.

At first, he closes his eyes, but after years together, it's too easy to start imagining Sirius's mouth on his prick. He forces himself to watch. Dark blond hair. Crooked nose. Not Sirius. Hot mouth. Not Sirius.

Not Sirius.

No, he doesn't see Sirius again until they pass each other as Remus leaves the loo. Sirius holds the door and their eyes meet. And then he disappears inside with the sandy haired lad.

2. Lust

Sirius's head hits the wall with a crack. He doesn't stop. He pulls Remus's body against him, grinds them together, fumbles with the buttons on Remus's shirt until he gives up and it tears. Draws nails down Remus's back until he bleeds.

Sirius tastes like scotch and smells of unfamiliar cologne and Remus thinks that should make him angry, but it makes him want. His hands slide along Sirius's skin, pin him to the bed, open him so he's ready to be taken.

He shouts. He sounds almost like he's in pain, but he's wrapping his legs around Remus's body and pulling him deeper. Remus grips his hips so tightly he'll see black and blue finger marks there in the morning, pulls his hair to force him to expose his neck, and fucks him like this might be the last time.

This might be the last time.

Sirius shouts and comes and tightens around Remus's cock and his nails bite into Remus's skin and it hurts. It hurts when Remus comes inside him, when they pull away and the adrenaline subsides and the bruises and scratches start to sting.

He can still hurt Sirius. That gives him hope.

1. Limbo

The morning washes out the blue of their bedroom, highlights the veins under Sirius's skin and the shadows beneath his eyes. Remus wonders if he looks so drawn and old as well.

Remus pulls the sheet tighter around him, Sirius is staring at the ceiling. When he turns to look at Remus, his eyelashes are stark against the dull white of his skin and his eyes are rimmed in red. 

The pale sun shines in through a gap in the curtains.