Archive of Our Own

James lives by the sea. His parents’ farmhouse overlooks the beach, and from the back garden there are rocky steps that make their way down to the sand. When Remus and Peter arrive, apparating into the lane just outside the house, they see curtains moving upstairs and then a wild frenzy of waving. “Which is which?” Remus asks Peter, who squints up at the house and says, sounding mystified, “I have no idea.” There are two black-haired figures but then one vanishes. The window swings open wide and Remus sees Sirius’s face, his white smile, his wild hair, and somehow even from far away the light grey of his eyes. They catch Remus’s gaze for a split second and he sees Sirius’s smile deepen – but then maybe it was just a trick of the light, because Peter’s shouting “Sirius! Hello, mate!” and stepping forward to the front gate. Then the front door opens and James is there. He hugs Peter first, slaps his back so hard that Remus hears Peter say “Oof,” and then he moves onto Remus. “Moony. It’s so good to see you.” James hugs like he means it, tight and warm and sincere, his glasses pressing into the side of Remus’s head, and then there are Sirius’s footsteps and Sirius’s scent and Sirius’s arms too, pressing around Remus and James as though forever.

*

Inside, James puts the kettle on and explains, “My parents are in the south of France. They wanted to get some sun, and besides, with everything that’s been going on…”

There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence. They weren’t at Diagon Alley when the attack happened, none of them were, but Marlene McKinnon was. She’s one of Lily’s best friends and she was burned badly in an explosion. “How’s—” Peter begins.

“Marlene?” James swallows and Remus sees his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “Lils says she’s getting better. The Healers didn’t quite get to her in time so the – there’s going to be some scarring. But.” He clears his throat. “She’s alive. I suppose that’s what matters. Anyway!” He sloshes water into four mugs and flicks his hand distractedly so that the teabags leap neatly out of them and into the bin. Another flick and Remus sees the dark colour of the tea lighten as milk is added to it. A slight frown on James’s face and the mugs travel through the air from the sideboard to the table. The tea in Sirius’s mug slops over the side and James lets out an annoyed sigh. “Shit. Sorry, Padfoot.” He picks up a cloth and throws it at Sirius. “Dad said it was a good idea to learn some wandless magic. Lily’s brilliant at—”

“You think Lily’s good at something? Bloody hell. Haven’t heard that one before.” Sirius pointedly doesn’t mop up the spilled tea.

James rolls his eyes. “Shut up, Sirius. She really is good at it. You know what she was like at Charms.”

Remus knows. He knows a lot of things: that Lily was by far the best in their year at Charms, that she was probably cleverer than the four of them put together, and that Sirius will never admit that she’s better than him at anything, not least at being James’s favourite person in the world. Remus isn’t completely certain, but he thinks that towards the end of their final term at Hogwarts, Lily was just about starting to edge it. He isn’t sure what that means for Sirius’s slightly fragile psyche, but it can’t be good.

Sirius makes a grumbling, disparaging noise. “Is she coming here?”

“Probably in a week or so. She’s on holiday with her parents at the moment. Do you have a problem with that?” James’s voice is low and steady, which is always a bad sign, and Remus and Peter glance at each other.

“Of course I don’t,” Sirius mutters, after an uncomfortable moment.

“Good.” James sits down on the opposite side of the table. “Will you clean up that sodding tea? Or it’ll stain the wood.”

“Sorry, Mrs Potter,” Sirius says, and when Peter laughs the last edges of discomfort crackle away and things are back to normal: the four of them together again, in a way that Remus was afraid they would not be when school ended. James is due to start Auror training in September, and Peter at Gringotts. Sirius seems utterly dedicated to a life of leisure and loafing around, and Remus – Remus doesn’t want to think about it, if he’s entirely honest. Legally, he has to disclose his status as a werewolf if he’s offered any jobs. Even though Sirius has shouted about it being barbaric and James wanted to write to someone to complain and Peter murmured something about it being a thoroughly shitty deal, there isn’t anything that he can do about it. He’s resigned to the concept of living in his old room at his parents’ house for the time being, with his Queen and Bowie and Bolan posters and his sheepskin rug on the floor and his old stuffed toys gathering dust in a box on the top of the wardrobe. It wouldn’t be the worst life. If he gets a job among Muggles, something simple like delivering post or working in a bookshop or a record shop, perhaps, he won’t have to tell them. But then he’ll need time off every month and it’ll be hard to explain away. The whole concept of it makes his head hurt, so it’s a lot easier to focus on his friends for now, this summer at least, this one last summer before everything changes.

*

The next morning, Remus wakes up early. He’s in the spare bedroom that has been his every time he’s slept over at James’s since they were much younger, with black-painted beams overhead and a wooden door with a latch and a small window that looks out on the Potters’ vegetable patch. Across the hall is Peter’s room, and James and Sirius are down the hallway. The quiet and stillness are intoxicating, and so are the clean white sheets and the soft knitted blanket at the end of the bed. It feels like home, but a more polished version of it – a home made with more money than his parents have, but home nonetheless. It isn’t like the stories Sirius has told them about his family’s house, which sounds ornate and elegant but austere and empty and dark as well. It’s bizarre to think that someone as full of life and brightness as Sirius came from a place like that. Even Regulus, a thinner and paler and more thoughtful version of Sirius, has moments of surprising lightness that Remus has caught occasionally across the Great Hall at dinner: laughing with a friend, or holding his arm out so that his owl could perch on it, and reaching out with gentle fingers to touch her feathers. Although he often makes fun of his old house and his family, Sirius does not talk about Regulus: as far as Remus can tell, Regulus, or more accurately what Regulus might happen to be doing with his time these days, is a step too far for Sirius to contemplate.

He presses his face into his pillow and wonders what it would be like to be the sort of person who could sleep through the morning and doze infinitely, like James and Peter. Instead he gets up, and washes, and goes downstairs, where he finds Sirius yawning and leaning against the kitchen worktop and half-heartedly whisking eggs. “I’m making breakfast,” he says to Remus, and hands the bowl over and sits down at the kitchen table.

“You’re doing a very good job of it,” Remus says, starting to whisk with a bit more effort. “Maybe you could consider some bacon too.”

“I could consider it,” Sirius agrees, not moving. There’s a twinkle in his eye that makes Remus physically incapable of being annoyed with him, which is in itself annoying. He’s been furious and he’s been terribly sad because of things that Sirius has done, but annoyance and irritation have largely bypassed him. Remus raises an eyebrow at him and Sirius gets to his feet as docile as a puppy before taking the bacon out of the fridge. The smell of it will wake the others soon, Remus is sure of it, and he tells himself to take this moment of just the two of them and hold it carefully because it feels special.

He’s right; as soon as the bacon hits the frying pan there are footsteps on the stairs, and James squinting through his glasses with his hair doing ridiculous and appalling things, and Peter with lines from his pillow still patterned on the side of his face. Peter makes tea, and James makes toast, and together the four of them take their seats around the kitchen table, still scattered lightly with crumbs and mug-rings from the night before, and plan out their day.

*

As soon as the sun is high in the sky, the day is hot. James unearths brightly coloured beach towels from a cupboard and hands them out, and the four of them go down to the beach together. James, Sirius and Peter stand fidgeting like children and pushing their bare toes into the sand as Remus murmurs sun protection spells over them one-by-one before setting them loose. He’s the only one wearing a shirt, because of his scars; they burn easily, and even alongside his friends he doesn’t like to show them. The beach is mostly empty other than the four of them and he can’t completely imagine what it’ll be like in a few days when Lily’s here too and bumping Sirius out of the way to monopolise James’s attention.

Remus spreads the towels out on the sand as James and Sirius and Peter pound towards the sea. Pete is just a little behind, as he always is, although right now Remus thinks it’s probably an eminently sensible move on his part, because the second James and Sirius hit the water they start splashing each other, the droplets crystal in the sun. They splash out deeper and Remus watches as Sirius jumps on James’s shoulders and pushes him under and James comes up laughing. Out of habit, Remus checks for James’s glasses, which he has beside him on his towel for safekeeping. Sirius is just a silhouette in the sun as he turns back to Remus. “Moony,” he’s shouting, and then louder, “Moony! Come in! We miss you!”

Like a moth to a flame, Remus is drawn to him. He gets to his feet and walks down the sand slowly and deliberately. Being barefoot in public is less rare for him than one might expect – after his transformations, it usually takes him a while to find his shoes and socks again. But right now – God, it’s bliss, with the sun on his face and the sand right there under the soles of his feet, under his toes, the soft dry granules, the sharpness of half-broken shells, the slight dampness of the harder-packed sand when he drives his tip-toes deeper. When he reaches the water there are more pebbles, slick and smooth, and he crouches down so that the water laps at his ankles, and pushes his hands deliberately into the pebbles and the sand, right up to his wrists. When he pulls his hands out again there’s a shell in one of them, tiny and sun-bleached and perfect, its inside petal-pink and iridescent like the inside of a mouse’s ear. As he straightens up, he pushes it carefully into his pocket. Then he walks out into the water, hissing in a sigh as the coldness hits his crotch – James laughs, damn him – and goes deeper, deeper, until the water is halfway up his chest. Sirius looks poised to send a cascade of water in his direction, but Remus twists out of the way and lands smack on his back with a crack of a splash. His t-shirt billows around him and he sees the sky above through clear cold water. As he surfaces he blinks salt water out of his eyes and lets himself float, his arms out and his legs bobbing. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Sirius again, still now, his gaze on Remus almost hungry.

*

They lie out in the sun as the salt dries on their skin, white and itchy. Peter’s nose is burning despite Remus’s protective spells, and finally James hops to his feet and says “I am going to absolutely pass out if I don’t eat something soon,” before reaching down, grasping Sirius’s hands, and dragging him upright. Peter and James march on ahead as Sirius and Remus linger to pick up the damp sandy towels. Sirius levitates them as they climb back up the stony cliff steps towards James’s house. Remus’s shirt is cool and not quite dry on his back, but ahead of him Sirius’s shoulders are gleaming in what’s left of the sunlight, his skin unfathomably smooth and his hair an almost-black mop made into rough knots by the seawater. He reaches out and touches Sirius’s hip as he almost stumbles, patting him back on course, and Sirius jerks and looks back at him over his shoulder, the towels twitching in mid-air.

When they’re up the top of the path, they can walk side by side again back to James’s house, the lush green garden fragrant with herbs and healthy with magicked water. There are beehives that hum and buzz, and the vibrant flicker of hummingbird wings. Over the arch there are roses twining that are heavy with scent and colour all year around, in jewel tones: deep crimson, and pink roses edged with orange, and pale yellow, which means friendship. That seems apt. He grins sideways at Sirius and nudges his shoulder with his own. Sirius beams back, more uncomplicated than usual, and Remus feels good and heady even as Sirius reaches out to loop an arm around Remus’s neck, pulling him in tight, ruffling his hair and then smacking a noisy kiss onto the crown of his head. “Get off me,” Remus protests, not particularly wanting him to get off, and loops an arm around his waist as they lollop into James’s house.

The atmosphere is immediately different. Something is off, and Sirius lets go of Remus right away, his smile sliding immediately off his face. From the kitchen, Peter appears, looking sombre, and Remus imagines the worst for a split second. Then he says, “Lily’s here.”

“What?” says Sirius, sounding distinctly unimpressed. “Why?”

“Sirius!” Peter shuts the kitchen door behind himself. “She’s upset, and—”

Sirius huffs out a sigh, and shoulders roughly past Peter and into the kitchen. “Evans,” he intones. Behind him, Remus and Peter exchange a look that says, silently, that whatever is about to happen, it won’t be good.

“Sirius, for once don’t be a prick,” James is saying, low and rough, and Remus makes for the kitchen door already preparing ways to sooth the situation, to make it better. When he sees Lily his heart sinks: her face is pink and puffy and tear-streaked, and James is holding her against himself as though she’s fragile and easily hurt, even though Remus has seen Lily organising games of Muggle field hockey on the Hogwarts playing fields and knows that she’s very happy to robustly hack at people’s ankles when she needs to.

“Are you all right?” Remus asks her, moving across and touching her elbow, which makes James look slightly mollified.

“You’re going to think I’m being stupid,” Lily says, sounding snotty. Behind them, Sirius makes a noise that sounds a lot like, No surprise there, and James’s eyes flash, sharp and angry. “Ignore him,” Lily says, and somehow it actually works and James’s hackles flatten again. “I’m fine. I was on holiday with my parents and my sister, and Petunia was being awful, and then I couldn’t stand it any more, so I apparated here instead.” She looks up at James. “Can I stay for a bit?”

“Of course you can,” James says immediately.

“For fuck’s sake,” Sirius says, and Peter says, “Padfoot!” and Sirius says, “I’m just saying. I thought something was actually wrong when I came in here, and—”

“Something is wrong,” Lily snaps. “The fact that they’re my problems and not yours doesn’t mean they’re not valid.”

“Bloody hell. Fine.” Sirius hisses out a sigh and raises his eyebrows as Remus sends him a reprimanding glance. It sometimes feels as though Sirius only feels empathy when it suits him, and then occasionally far too much. The extremes he teeters back and forth between are probably a result of growing up with a mother who was openly not particularly keen on him. Sometimes Remus thinks that it might have been more damaging than being bitten by a werewolf, but on other days he thinks he’s probably giving Sirius far too much rope and that if he’s not careful he’ll end up hanging himself with it.

The tension dissipates as Peter calmly starts making cups of tea for everybody. Sirius comes to stand next to Remus, and there’s still pent-up energy pouring through his skin, in the tension in his muscles and the way his shoulders are bunched up. Remus extends a hand and touches Sirius’s shoulder, the one closest to him. He kneads it hard until the knots of muscle fade into something more recognisable as working flesh, as opposed to an old mattress full of tangled springs and ready for the scrap heap, and then he moves onto the other shoulder. Sirius drops his head and inhales. His tendons are strong and his skin is like silk except for a few small under-the-skin spots which make Remus feel oddly protective of him. When he removes his hand, Sirius leans sideways against him, his elbow resting roughly in the crook of Remus’s. Through the touching of their bare skin, Remus tries to give him calmness, stillness, quietness. A less lashing tongue. Patience. A sort of kindness that is softer, because Sirius isn’t unkind but he can sometimes be terrifying and over the top in the ways that he’s generous to others. At the kitchen table James and Peter’s heads are bent together, blond and black, over a map of a cove that they’re planning to explore tomorrow, and beside them Lily sits sipping her tea, her eyes catlike and curious when Remus meets them with his own.

*

No question, things are different when Lily is there. James is different, although not in a way that Remus dislikes. Watching him learn how to be gentle and how to love feels precious. He’s had girlfriends before, but not like this. The next morning at breakfast Sirius watches them with furrowed eyebrows, looking confused and hungry at the same time. There’s a large pile of toast on his plate, so presumably he isn’t hungry for actual food, and Remus can identify with that: the easiness of slinging your arm around the back of someone’s chair and of holding hands with them, and the way that Lily touches the corner of James’ mouth to catch a crumb of toast-and-marmalade that’s lingering there—it’s hard to understand when you haven’t been there. Sirius may be part dog, but he reminds Remus of a chaotic feral cat when he gets up and prowls away to the kitchen window to look outside. “I think it’s going to rain,” he reports, and Peter boos softly.

“But I wanted you all to show me the beach today,” Lily says, starting to pout, and Sirius leaps back with a shocked exclamation as an owl abruptly clatters against the kitchen window, before shifting forward to open it.

The owl flies in, drops a newspaper and a couple of letters, and does a flapping circuit of the kitchen before swooping out again. James reaches for a postcard on the table. “They’re having a good time on the Riviera,” he reports as he scans the writing on the back of it. Remus glances over to see the photograph on the front of it – blue water and an even bluer sky – and catches ‘Darling James And Sirius’ in James’s mother’s swirly handwriting. “Padfoot,” James says, and Sirius seems to have more purpose in his step once he’s been given permission to look over James’s shoulder and read it. His face looks less tense when he looks up again, and James hands over the postcard and says, “You can keep it, if you like,” before Sirius tucks it into his back pocket. Remus thinks that finding a second mother and father and brother when his first ones turned out to be so useless is probably the best thing in Sirius’s life.

“We could go to the town,” Lily suggests brightly, and so they do: James insists on showing off his driving skills instead of apparating, so Lily gets into the front seat of his parents’ shining little car while Remus and Sirius and Peter pile into the back. Peter is wedged in the middle, getting progressively pinker and pinker as the journey goes, not least because of James’s driving, which is – to put it kindly – less accurate and somewhat bumpier than his flying.

Sandycote Bay has a small beach, and several tourist shops that sell buckets and spades in off-puttingly neon colours and children’s fishing nets and glittery jelly shoes. There are six different ice-cream shops, and two pubs, and the smell of fish and chips floating on the air. The weather is grey and damp, and it’s only a day until the full moon, which means that the cold and the wet is getting into Remus’s bones and making him feel a lot older than eighteen. They sit on the pier and eat fish and chips out of newspapers patterned with politicians and celebrities that Remus is too cushioned by Hogwarts to recognise. Peter finishes his chips first, and turns his grease-mottled paper around so that he can read it. “Do you think—” he mutters to Remus, pointing to a paragraph-long article about a car bomb that killed a mother and her baby, and Remus shrugs. He doesn’t know if it had anything to do with them. There are terrible people everywhere, and the grey skies are making him feel maudlin.

“How’s Marlene?” Peter asks then, and Lily shrugs as she steals one of James’s chips. “She’s getting better, I think,” she says. “I’m supposed to be going to see her soon. You lot could come with me, if you want. I’d like to go to London. We could all go.”

“Isn’t it…” Peter pauses.

“Dangerous?” Sirius asks, a laugh in his voice. “Please.”

“Everywhere is dangerous,” James says, and adds, “I’d like to go,” which is no surprise because Remus is actually somewhat surprised that he didn’t waste away and die of pining for Lily while she was on holiday with her parents, so of course he wants to follow her to London too.

Peter looks troubled even as Lily says “Perfect!” She tilts her head back so that her hair tumbles bright and shining down her back, her eyes closed against the sky, as though she’s breathing in sunshine that isn’t quite there today. “What about you, Remus?” she asks, turning to him after a moment. “Are you up for it?”

“In a couple of days,” Remus says, a little weakly. Sirius shoots him a sideways glance and offers him one of the crispiest and best chips from his newspaper wrapping. Remus smiles gratefully and reaches out to take it. Halfway there Sirius touches his hand, fingertips rough almost like he doesn’t know completely what he’s doing, but when Remus looks up he’s looking out and across the choppy grey sea.

*

James starts to make their excuses the next morning. “It’s a thing we have to do,” he tells Lily. “It’s sort of – it’s a tradition, so we can’t really…”

Remus is exhausted from the almost-there full moon the night before, and from the knowledge of the coming pain that night, and from the fact it’s all happening at all. He cuts in and says, “Honestly. It’s no bother. James doesn’t have to come—”

“I do have to come,” says James, looking outraged.

Lily glances between them, pleasantly puzzled, before shrugging as though it’s too much of a bother to try to find out. Remus knows that the friendship that he has with Sirius and James and Peter is hard to understand and a little impenetrable to outsiders. Not trying to understand is probably the healthiest way to deal with them. “You can do whatever you want,” Lily says. “I’ll go home for the night.”

“You could pull a prank on your sister,” James suggests. “You could fill her curtain rail with prawns, or cover her floor with frogspawn.”

“I could,” Lily agrees, with a tone that adds, But I won’t.

Remus leaves them together, leaves her laughing as James says something about stealing all of Petunia’s socks and filling them with snails. He glances back as he leaves the sitting room where they’re on the sofa together, and sees Lily put her hand in James’s messy hair as she tugs him towards herself for a kiss. How can it be so easy to reach out? To touch with such simple intimacy? To know that he will never be that sort of person is an ache that’s almost physical in its intensity.

Everyone is in a subdued mood. They spend time outside during the heat of the day; they go down to the beach and although James and Peter and Sirius tear off their clothes and fling themselves towards the water Remus picks a gentler way down to the sea, half-stumbling over the uneven ground. Before he reaches the wet sand he bends down to roll up the hems of his jeans. Lily stands with him in the shallow water, James’s mother’s moth-eaten wide-brimmed straw hat on her head, and then together they find their way back to their beach towels. Lily takes her time to brush the wet sand from her feet but then sinks her red-painted toes into it again. Remus can feel himself sweating, his shirt sticking to his back. He raises his hand to his face and wipes sweat off his forehead as unobtrusively as he can, but then Lily pulls her wand out and murmurs “Accio,” and then there’s a cold bottle of lemonade fresh from James’s fridge that she’s pressing into his hand. “Are you all right?” she asks him, looking off into the distance, which he’s grateful for because he knows that she’s granting him the space to answer exactly as he chooses to.

“I’ll be better soon,” he says, and she nods a little. He wonders how much she knows exactly, how much she’s guessed. He knows that James would never say anything to her because the only thing fiercer than his love for Lily is his loyalty to his friends – or it is for the time being anyway. Remus supposes that it will develop and change, depending on what happens between the pair of them. But he knows that his disappearances from school had a rhythm to them, and he also knows that Lily is sharply intelligent. Perhaps she’s guessed. Perhaps she hasn’t. Either way she’s smiling sideways at him, gentle and companionable, as though she’s his friend either way. He takes another sip of the lemonade – it’s so cool and so fresh and sharp on his tongue – before settling down on his back on the towel, the soft mounds of sand lumpy in a just-about-bearable way beneath him. After a moment the light shifts and he feels Lily lying down beside him. He can smell her, although not in a bad way: Muggle sun cream, and the straw of her hat, and her perfume too. He wonders what it would be like to roll over and kiss her. Obviously James would be extremely confused and unhappy – but what it would be like if James wasn’t a factor, and if Lily actually wanted him to kiss her. He doesn’t know what he’d do with his hands. He doesn’t know if he’d manage it, or if he’d like it, and he feels as though he should be sure of that.

He squeezes his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids the sun pulses dark red and the heat is almost pleasant. Then there’s a shadow looming and he opens an eye to see Sirius, wet from the sea and his skin glowing in the light like a young god, his face uncertain and unguarded, his lips parted as if he’s about to speak.

*

When the afternoon sun has dipped and the breeze is cooling and Lily has apparated back to her parents’ house for the night, the four of them pile into James’s car. Remus’s head is throbbing already but he doesn’t know if it’s the threat of the moon or the dread of it that’s sinking into his limbs like lead. He sits in the front seat as James drives and glances down to stab at the radio. The Stones, Bowie, Queen—

“Keep it on this,” Sirius says from the back seat, taking a moment out from trying to strangle Peter.

Freddie Mercury’s voice is one of the most aching and gorgeous and joyful things that Remus has ever heard. As they get further into the countryside the radio blurs into crackly static and James reaches down to snap it off. The sky is starting to dim by the time he parks outside what looks like a small cabin in the middle of the woods. When he steps out of the car Remus can smell wet grass, fresh wood—the red rust scent of blood somewhere far off. A rabbit, maybe, dead in a trap. He glances at the trees, his neck twisting fast and hard, and then Peter’s gone and Wormtail is in his place. Remus bends and scoops Wormtail into his hands and onto his shoulder. The kneading of Wormtail’s toes and the bristle of his fur against his neck helps to keep him here. Inside, the cabin reeks of mildew, old fabric rotting, damp and mould. It’s been a long time since anyone was here. “Where did you get this place from?” Remus asks.

James shrugs a shoulder awkwardly before dropping his bag on the floor and kicking it into a corner. “Someone in the village mentioned it – it’s on their land, they don’t come here anymore…”

That much is clear. Remus nods, and holds an arm out so that Wormtail can run down it and onto the back of an old checked armchair with stuffing bulging out of its seat like yellow fat from a deep wound. Sirius stands by the window, his silhouette black against the dim light. His shoulders are broad and Remus feels something more primal for him, like he wants to climb on him, to inhale his neck, to bite him, to just – to graze his teeth across—

Instead he joins Sirius at the window, and looks outside. The colour of the sky is deepening. “Purple,” Sirius murmurs, and Remus half-smiles before he says, “Mauve.”

“Mauve?” Sirius sounds impressed.

Remus feels exposed, and stares hard outside instead, feeling Sirius’s gaze drop from him. He watches as the sky’s colour changes, as clouds sweep over it, and then – then, the moon. It invokes a sort of horror in him that he can’t explain, couldn’t begin to explain. He takes a step back from the window that’s almost a stagger, and out of the corner of his eye he sees James melt into Prongs, his eyes intelligent, his head dipped – Remus realises suddenly that he’s being careful not to get his antlers caught on anything, which is as close to funny as anything could be right now. Wormtail is still watching from the armchair, all bright beady eyes.

Remus can smell Sirius more strongly now but it isn’t unpleasant – fresh cotton, fresh sweat, familiar skin, soap, unwashed hair. Sirius comes towards him and the shape of him is fading away as pain ripples through Remus’s body and he starts to lose himself, trying to hold the threads in his fingertips even as they fall away like dust in the wind. Sirius’s face swims into view and Remus feels the hard press of his forehead against his own, Sirius’s warm breath on his mouth, the prickle of his eyelashes tangling with his own for just one moment, the rough caress of his mouth swiping half against Remus’s as he mutters, “Until morning, Remus,” and a black dog takes his place. Remus feels a flicker of relief as he sees Padfoot’s reassuring shape, his sharp white teeth and his pink tongue lolling, his good faithful eyes like Sirius’s good faithful heart—

Pain again, cracking, bones and teeth, fur – he hears himself make a noise that’s barely human and then, with a release that’s so acute he feels dizzy, he is gone.

*

He wakes in the morning to sunlight, pale and watery. He can still smell damp, although not so acutely as the previous night, and the surface beneath him is soft and sagging. His head is pounding and for a moment he thinks he might be sick. He can just about see the shape of a bucket on the floor next to his head, presumably placed there by one of his friends who knows what his next-mornings are like. Twined with him is Padfoot, his furry self almost as long as Remus’s body. His eyes open as Remus manages to lift a hand to touch Padfoot’s head, thumbing the silky fur between his eyes and on the top of his head. Padfoot bumps Remus’s hand with his nose, presses his head against his palm in a gesture that’s entirely un-doglike and entirely Sirius. Remus sighs and sinks back against him.

Across the room, Peter is curled half-asleep on the armchair where Wormtail was perched last night, and James is rubbing his eyes, his head in his hands and his glasses discarded on the small wooden table. Remus tries to say Hello, but it doesn’t come out right. James looks up sharply and then smiles, pushing his glasses back on and crossing the room to his bag. Out of it he pulls a thermos, whispers a spell, and then the thermos is steaming. “Tea,” he says, as he crosses the room back to Remus. Gently Padfoot nudges him until he can sit upright. His whole body hurts but nothing seems to be broken, nothing hurts abnormally. “Thank you,” he says, as James pours an inch of tea into the thermos lid and hands it over. As he tries to drink, his hands are shaking. When the tea is gone, James pours him more, earnest and careful. The heavy weight of Padfoot’s head on his thigh is helping, and the tea is hot and sweet. James moves and then he’s back, snapping squares of chocolate off a slab of it before handing them over. Remus dips one in his tea until its edges are shining and half melted before biting into it.

James reaches down before he goes back to the other armchair, pats Padfoot, scratches his head and Padfoot licks the underside of his wrist, a brief flicker, before James sits down heavily across from Remus and Padfoot. He looks tired, which fills Remus with guilt. “You don’t have to spend these nights with me,” Remus says, trying to sound matter of fact. “I’m sure I would have been all right.”

“We will spend every moon with you for the rest of our lives,” James says firmly, and Padfoot growls gently in agreement.

Remus loves them terribly in that moment. It almost hurts. He has done nothing to deserve them and this. “How was it?”

“It was fine, actually. Normal. Quite exciting, because it’s a bit less familiar than around the Shack, so we could explore.” James frowns thoughtfully. “You found a rabbit at one point, but that was our only casualty.”

“Except for you,” Peter says through a yawn as he stretches himself awake. Remus nods, because he can feel that the bones of his left leg are still knitting themselves back together just below the knee, and he can smell the heady herby scent of the tincture that James’s mother makes and that James claims will fix any ills. So far, over the last seven years, it seems to have mostly worked. A long scratch down Remus’s forearm is greasy with it, and bandaged too, the careful edges of it all Sirius’s work.

James clears his throat. “I thought I might make bacon sandwiches,” he suggests, and there is no way on earth that Remus could say no to that.

*

The car journey back to James’s house is a lot quieter than it was on the way there. Remus is in the back seat this time, still curled up with Padfoot’s warm weight against him. James and Peter talk softly in the front seat and make gently excited noises when a badger crosses the road. Padfoot sleeps on, and so Remus closes his eyes too and lets himself be lulled into a light doze as the car hums homeward. Light from between the tall trees flashes over his face and he can half-see it from behind his closed eyelids before finally allowing himself to sleep more deeply.

He wakes up later, he doesn’t know how much later, he doesn’t know when – but his head is in Sirius’s lap and Sirius’s eyes are on his face and his hand is in Remus’s hair, carding through so gently, so carefully. His fingers touch Remus’s forehead and they’re so cool that it’s heaven. Sirius’s eyes are obscured by a fall of dark hair over them but his hand is so soft as he touches the side of Remus’s face with the back of his fingers. “Shh. Not quite there,” he says, quiet and steady, stroking Remus’s hair back from his forehead. Remus turns his head with more effort than he’d like and finds that hand of Sirius’s, clasps it hard with his own, finds his palm that’s rough from years of Quidditch and presses his lips against it in something like a kiss.

*

He sleeps all day, and wakes when the sun is low in the sky. He’s sore but the exhaustion has gone, and when he takes a shower the heat of the water beating on his shoulders does him good as he inhales the moist air and washes his hair over and over, blinking soap suds out of his eyes. When he goes downstairs, navigating the steps a little more slowly than usual, he can smell sausages cooking. James is in the kitchen in shorts and not much else, a pale crust of salt drying over his darkly tanned shoulders as he peers into a frying pan. “Moony!” he says with a smile, and adds a couple more sausages to the sizzling pan.

Remus smiles back gratefully and touches his arm as he passes by on his way to the living room. He’s hungrier than he thought. Peter’s in there, spread out on a chair, one foot on the coffee table, squinting at a battered paperback in his hand. He lifts his eyes from it for a moment to raise his eyebrows at Remus. You all right, he asks silently, and Remus nods a little in a Yes, as he sits down on the sofa next to Padfoot, who is dozing and snoring faintly in a way that Sirius never does. At Remus’s weight next to him, Padfoot twitches an ear before waking slowly. He shifts, lays his paws over Remus’s lap, raises his head so he can lick the side of Remus’s jaw, and Remus puts an arm over his back, enjoying his warm weight. “Why are you here instead of Sirius?” he asks, and across the room Peter says, “He had an argument with Lily. She’s outside.”

“Really?” Remus looks down at Padfoot. “Why did you do that? She makes James happy. And she’s nice.”

Padfoot growls, faint in the back of his throat, before shaking Remus’s hands off him and unfurling his long body as he steps down off the sofa. As he crosses the room to the door to the hallway, he stretches and elongates and pales until he’s Sirius again, dark brows drawn together in a scowl as he slams out and upstairs.

“What happened?” Remus asks Peter, who sighs heavily and shrugs.

“He’s being a baby,” James says as he comes in, passing Remus a plate with a sausage sandwich on it. When he peels back a piece of the bread, it’s covered in ketchup just the way he likes it. James hands another sandwich to Peter before coming back with his own, flopping down next to Remus on the sofa, one bare foot on the coffee table. “He doesn’t like her—”

“He doesn’t like being usurped,” Remus corrects him. The words hang in the air and he wishes he could take them back. He probably wouldn’t have said them at all if he wasn’t still so stupidly tired and sore. “Sorry, I—”

“No, I know.” James pushes his sandwich around his plate. “I do know. I wish I could get him to understand that nothing’s changed.”

“It has changed, though,” Peter points out mildly. “I like Lily, but it’s different with her here. Not bad different, but it is different.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do about that?” James snaps. “I’m not going to break up with my girlfriend to protect Sirius’s ego.”

“No one’s asking you to do that,” Remus says, and nudges James with his shoulder. “I think you two are good together.”

“We are good together,” James agrees, and adds more earnestly, “Aren’t we?”

“You are,” Peter says. James has become gentler, and more ready to listen and learn. There’s less twitchy energy, and that desperation to impress has gone, that urge to make people laugh at whatever cost. Remus isn’t sure what it is, whether it’s love or contentment or sinking into something real and grown-up for the first time, but whatever it is, it suits him.

James nods, still looking bothered but a little more settled. “Good.”

“What actually happened?” Remus asks, indulging his worst and most gossipy instincts.

“She apparated back from her parents’ house at about lunchtime. Sirius came in from the beach and said ‘Oh Merlin, not you again’, and she was…” Peter looks contemplative. “She was not at all happy about it.”

“She’s in the garden now,” James says. “Reading.”

“It’s so nice to have someone else here who can read,” Remus says dreamily, and is almost hit in the face by Peter’s paperback when he throws it across the room. “Walt Whitman?” he says, picking it up and flipping through it, raising a surprised eyebrow at Peter.

“Sirius was reading it before,” Peter says. “It seems quite good.”

“Whitman’s very good,” Remus says, trying to put together the pieces of his mind that have inconveniently scattered in every single direction. He can feel James’s eyes on his face and it’s making him flush, he can feel it. He stuffs too much sandwich into his mouth and manfully does not choke on it, before getting to his feet. “I’m going to,” he says, and indicates at the hallway, meaning I’m going to find Sirius, and Peter nods at him.

In his room, Sirius is lying on his bed and looking like a tortured Romantic poet, which is to say that his hair is a mess and he looks as though he’s in a bad mood. With his pale skin and sunburned cheeks and bright eyes, he also looks as though he might have consumption, which is extremely Keats of him. Remus sits down next to him and touches his knee and says, “I’m sorry that I upset you.”

Sirius sits up. “You didn’t upset me, for Merlin’s sake, I just…” He shrugs and appears to forget every word he knows. Instead, he says, with feeling: “Ugh.”

Remus has to laugh. He can’t help it. “James still loves you the most,” he says after a moment.

“Maybe,” Sirius agrees frankly, and shrugs a shoulder. “But not for long.”

That might be true. Remus can’t imagine having nobody in the world except for his friends. The fact of his parents at home, pottering gently around and watching television and being disapproving of rock music, is smothering and if he’s honest not ideal, but it is absolutely a safety net in case his friends decide they don’t like him any more – fair enough – or if somewhere on the way to adulthood, things fall unceremoniously apart between the four of them. If that happened, it would be polite, Remus thinks – James and Lily would move in together and start spending time with other friends who are couples, and Peter would give into all his best instincts and befriend his new colleagues at Gringotts, ones who aren’t werewolves, the sort of people who have their lives together and money and nice flats and who don’t have complicated feelings about each other and who don’t turn into slavering beasts every now and then.

And Sirius – Remus has no idea about him, but he knows that there are a thousand ways that Sirius could get lost along the way. Looking at him, his fiery eyes and his stubborn mouth, Remus thinks that not seeing Sirius any more would probably kill him, but – and it’s an odd realisation – that equally, Sirius relies a lot more on the rest of them than they do on him. He needs them but Remus wishes he could find the words to tell Sirius that, even more importantly than being needed, he is wanted, terribly so.

“You’ll just have to deal with it,” Remus tells him, just as frankly, and puts out a hand to cup the side of Sirius’s jaw affectionately. Sirius turns his face into it and bows his head and Remus feels the prickle of his eyelashes. He touches the line of Sirius’s high cheekbone tenderly with the pad of his thumb and hopes that they’ll last forever.

*

It’s a quiet evening after that. Remus is still tired and things are still stiff between Sirius and Lily despite his muttered, awkward apology that seemed to please nobody except James, who visibly lost most of the tension that his shoulders were carrying. They make plans for the next day: for London, and for seeing Marlene. “The scars aren’t as terrible as you might think,” Lily says, “but you should be prepared, so don’t – you know. Don’t stare at them. She also vehemently objects to anyone who looks at her sympathetically. The head tilt.” She tilts her head to the side and widens her eyes in a way that makes James splutter with laughter. Remus finds himself laughing too, and Sirius looks at him indignantly.

The next morning dawns more quickly than Remus would like it to. He leaves his room to go to shower and Sirius is there at the end of the hallway, standing at the window there that looks out over the sea. He clearly just left the bathroom: there’s a towel around his waist, which tapers from broader shoulders. He’s the sort of person who’s too impatient to dry himself entirely so there are water droplets gleaming on his shoulders and dripping from his dark hair. Remus feels sick at the sight of him, his unfair beauty that Remus will have to deal with for the entirety of their friendship. The knowledge of it is something that he has pushed down so many times. It’s such a pain that Sirius is so gorgeous. It’s such a shame that Remus finds himself so desperate to touch in moments like this.

Sirius looks over his shoulder as though he’s sensed Remus standing there, and smiles. “Come here, Moony. This is one of my favourite things.”

Remus goes, because he would go anywhere that Sirius told him to, anywhere in the world, he would travel to the ends of the earth. That’s the power that Sirius Black has over almost everyone, but that’s because he’s handsome and charming: Remus would follow him because of his clumsy thoughtfulness, the way he reaches out when he’s trying to show affection. Because even though James is Sirius’s best friend, Sirius is Remus’s, and he loves him, and sometimes he is dizzyingly aware that his love has no limits.

He stands at the window next to Sirius and his distractingly fragrant, freshly washed body, and looks at the glory outside: the endless blue of the clear sky, the salt-air coming in from the open window, the way that the sun dances off the infinite waves, the sharp crack of the horizon far away. On the right there are fishing boats painted bright colours, red and yellow and green, with their white sails and tiny pinpricked figures. The headlands are green and lush and the beach is deep ochre, and Sirius is looking at it with greed, as though he’ll never stop drinking it in. “This is so different from my parents’ house,” he says, none of the usual edges in his voice. “You feel so hemmed in there. The Potters are such good people, Moony. When they said I could live here with them, I felt as though my life had opened up. To look at that every morning…” He gestures at the window.

“Heaven,” Remus agrees, and means everything: the love of a friend, the endless water that feels like endless possibilities. The summer, the sun, the sky.

They’re there for a moment longer, and then Sirius nudges him and throws him a smile and pads, still dripping, down the hallway to his room.

*

Remus can never decide if he likes London or not, but there they are anyway, the five of them. They’re all in their best Muggle gear, James is sporting his Rolling Stones t-shirt proudly and Lily’s in flares that Remus has never seen her wear before and Peter looks out of place in James’s dad’s tweed jacket and Sirius is wearing offensively tight jeans that he clearly knows look incredible on him. He lounges indecently against a pillar, and smirks in a way that makes Remus feel naked. Around them people are bustling around, tourists dawdling, residents throwing them exasperated glances as they sidestep around them. They’re outside a shop in Carnaby Street, waiting for Lily, who is inside and looking at Muggle clothes. James is making the sort of face that he always makes when he’s trying to pretend that he doesn’t feel intimidated. Finally she comes out wearing a brown leather jacket despite the heat, and tosses her hair over her shoulder and says, “Let’s go.”

She’s different in the Muggle world, Remus thinks. She’s wearing thick black eyeliner and her lips are painted red and her platform boots mean that she’s an inch taller than James. He doesn’t seem to mind, judging from the appreciative way that he keeps glancing sideways at her. He wraps an arm comfortably around her waist and she leans in to kiss his cheek, leaving behind a lipstick mark.

It isn’t far to the entrance to Diagon Alley. Sirius, being alarmingly handsome and also quite noisy, gets a few glances from people, which Remus is not remotely surprised by. Peter looks pink and a little anxious, which makes Remus feel oddly comfortable: at least he isn’t the only one who feels terribly out of his element. They walk down Oxford Street and swing into a record shop near Charing Cross Road so that James and Sirius can buy albums for the record player that sits neatly in the corner of James’s bedroom. They fill a bag with Kate Bush and Blondie and Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and Remus catches James’s eye as he sneaks in a copy of the Grease soundtrack. It’s for Lily, James mouths, and Remus absolutely does not believe him.

In Diagon Alley, the air is cooler and quieter. There’s a sense of uncertainty that wasn’t there among the Muggle world, and that hits home all the more when they go to meet Marlene McKinnon outside Florean Fortescue's Ice-Cream Parlour, when she turns her face and Remus sees her scars. They shouldn’t be surprising given the amount of scars that he has, particularly the bite mark on his shoulder that’s tangled and silvered and that will probably never fade. But the way the sun gleams off Marlene’s scars, the knotted pink skin on the side of her face, the unevenness of it when the last time Remus saw her she didn’t have to live her life with these marks—it’s a shock, that’s all. But he’s fairly certain he doesn’t let it show, not the way that Peter does anyway, with his dropped jaw and his horrified eyes. Remus gives him a sharp elbow to the ribs and mutters, “Get it together,” before following Lily to give Marlene a hug.

“I know I look like a state,” Marlene says, almost like she’s apologising. Remus rolls his eyes as though she’s making a big deal out of nothing, and Marlene says with a little more intensity: “Really. I know. It’s all right.”

“It’s healing,” she explains five minutes later when they’re sitting at a shady table outside the ice cream parlour, James’s bag of records stashed under the table and Lily’s new jacket hanging on the back of her chair and ice cream cones in all of their hands. Remus has a triple cone: a scoop of double chocolate, and a scoop of normal chocolate, and another scoop of double chocolate to round it off. Marlene licks a trail of cherry ice cream that’s making its way down her cone to her hand, and says, “You should have seen me a week ago. I mean, honestly, I was a wreck. And it doesn’t hurt, so that’s something.”

“I think it’s a badge of honour,” James says stoutly.

Sirius nods in agreement. “I heard that you helped to get people out of the Fiendfyre.”

Marlene looks awkward, because everyone who is sincerely good seems to look awkward whenever people mention their good deeds to them. “Anyone would have done it.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Sirius says, even though Remus knows that’s a lie. “Mess up this pretty face? No thanks.”

There’s a moment of appalled silence, and then Marlene snorts with helpless laughter, and Lily reaches over to slap Sirius lightly across the back of the head, and Marlene says, “Thank God you said that. Everyone keeps looking at me so seriously. I knew you lot wouldn’t, because you’re—”

“Charming,” Peter suggests.

“Nightmares,” says Marlene, with great affection. “Horrible nightmares, all of you.”

*

Marlene is going out with Fabian Prewett, who was a year ahead of them at school and who has always regarded them with a sort of fond worldweariness. The two of them were together for Fabian’s last year of school, and long-distance after he left. Remus always knew when the letters Marlene received at school were from him. Her face glowed when she opened the envelopes, and she seemed to block out everything else in the world until she had finished reading them. He remembers Fabian visiting Hogsmeade sometimes, and seeing the two of them talking at the Three Broomsticks, close and intimate, their knees pressed together under the table. He remembers seeing them laugh together, which has always seemed to Remus like something that’s crucial in relationships. After his friends, he doesn’t think he could bear a life with anyone who didn’t make him laugh, but then beggars can’t be choosers.

They’re staying at Fabian’s flat that night after they’ve gone out to a club, although after they reach Fabian’s flat Remus is pretty sure that he’ll come back early and look through Fabian’s well-stocked bookshelf. “My brother sleeps through there,” Fabian says, gesturing at a doorway, “but he’s away tonight so a couple of you lot can take that room.”

“Me and Lily will,” James says immediately, looking at her in a way that makes her blush.

“Revolting,” Sirius says. Remus concurs.

Fabian laughs. “So the rest of you lot can take whatever you can find – sleeping bags, the sofa, it’s yours. Just don’t apparate home drunk, or you will splinch yourself.”

“You sound as though you know that from experience,” Sirius says, sounding awed.

Fabian winces in recollection. “I’ll show you the pictures later,” he says. “For now, I have to go to a meeting. I’ll—” He bends his head to kiss Marlene quickly. “—see you later.”

He apparates away with a crack, and Sirius says, “Let’s trash his flat.”

Remus is already wandering away to look at the bookshelf, but he still hears a thud and then Sirius saying “Ouch! Marlene, I was only joking,” in an injured voice. On the top of the bookcase Remus sees a photograph of three red-haired boys. He isn’t much good at estimating ages, but the two older ones are elbowing each other and giggling while the little one looks wide-eyed at the camera and chews on the side of his fist.

Remus would like children, one day.

The thought vanishes as quickly as it appears, because it makes his stomach lurch unpleasantly. Thinking about the things he’ll never have is something that he tries to avoid at all costs, unless he’s having a particularly self-hating day. That usually happens right after a transformation, when he can’t focus on anything except for his dratted body and the ways that it betrays him. Then he likes to wallow in despair, to construct lives for himself that he knows he will never have. Children, a boy and a girl; a fat ginger cat that wanders along the back of his armchair before curling up warm and purring in his lap; a job that is intellectually motivating but that doesn’t take time away from his family; and someone else there, someone warm and funny and wild, someone—

“What are you looking at?” The weight of Sirius’s chin, sliding into the hollow where Remus’s shoulder meets his neck, right where his biggest scar is.

“The books,” Remus says, and Sirius nods before taking a cursory look himself, trailing his finger thoughtlessly along some spines. He isn’t being careful enough; he is never careful enough. Remus lingers by the books as Lily and Marlene disappear off to get ready. The smell of paper reassures him, and he finds himself still there when James comes out of Gideon Prewett’s bedroom wearing tight Muggle jeans and a flowered shirt that Remus is pretty sure Lily chose for him and made him wear. James clucks at him and says, “You’ll be late,” and so Remus peels off to change into the trousers that he regards as his best ones. There’s a shirt lying on the floor as if it’s been tried on and discarded, pale ivory silk, the material like fairy-spun gossamer between Remus’s fingers. From it he can smell the scent of Sirius, and before he allows logic to take his heart over and stop him like it usually does, he puts the shirt on. It’s a little looser than it would be on Sirius, who wears his clothes tight, but Remus doesn’t think it looks too bad. He regards himself in the hall mirror and turns his face to inhale the collar, which feels almost like the ghost of fingertips against his skin and smells the way that Sirius does fresh out of the shower.

Finally they peel off outside together, the six of them, into the warm summer night streets. The lampposts cast a light that’s made of melted butter and liquid gold, and Lily and Marlene stride ahead, heads bent together as they talk. Remus hears Marlene’s laugh, bright and loud, float back towards them. Her thick curtain of dark hair is half over the side of her face and he knows it’s fashionable probably – although he doesn’t know much about fashion, it’s one of the many things he isn’t much good at, like poaching eggs, and working out how to drive his grandfather’s car, and Arithmancy. But he also knows that she’s wearing her hair like that because it hides her scar. He thinks that as the only other badly scarred person there, he’s also the only one who realises that. It would be nice to tell her that she looks just as pretty with her scar as she did without, but she’d probably think that he was lying. He would, if someone said that to him.

The club is too busy, and instinctively Remus dislikes it. He exchanges dubious glances with Peter, who is equally averse to things like sweating and being grinded against and holding James up at the end of the night as he vomits whiskey into the gutter. He doesn’t know the song that’s playing but it’s sharper around the edges than he’d like, full of heavy bass and guttural guitars. Muggle music is getting like that too. Less celebration and more pain. Then again, art is supposed to reflect reality so it makes sense. Life is getting harsher.

The air is clogged with smoke. Beneath that and beneath the scent of alcohol he can smell, faintly, piss. The floor is sticky and he doesn’t want to think about why, and when he takes a hesitant step towards the crowd, broken glass crunches beneath the sole of his shoe. Sirius and James are laughing together and Lily and Marlene are lighting cigarettes and Remus can see Peter steeling himself to leap into the fray. That’s something he should want, isn’t it? To be in the middle of all those bodies dancing, to feel other people’s sweat on his skin? But that amount of intimacy with that many people makes him feel tired and desperate to be back in the Prewett brothers’ flat, perusing books and enjoying the echo of silence. Remus has never been certain of what he wants, or what he should want, or what he secretly wants but is too afraid to reach out for. Sirius knows what he’s doing, though. His eyes are alight as he looks around, as though he’s gaining instead of losing energy from the room around them. Blue and pink lights are darting off the planes of his face and his shirt is unbuttoned low enough that Remus can see the shadow of his collarbone. He wants to press his face into the side of Sirius’s neck and smell his familiar scent but right now Sirius’s attention is resolutely everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

They battle their way through to the bar and Sirius orders Firewhiskey. Lily says, “I can’t do shots, for heaven’s sake,” and then throws a couple back quite comfortably while James splutters beside her and complains about how his throat’s burning itself to shreds. Above them bright lights are turning and the ceiling is a sky full of fireworks. One wall is made entirely of real flowers that are starting to wilt because the magic’s beginning to wear off, and the people behind the bar are unfeasibly attractive. A woman with twined tattoos of flowers and vines down one arm that are shifting and moving is pouring out more shots for Sirius, and beside her a man with dark skin and silver hair is crushing something that smells like mint into a glass.

Down the bar, James and Peter link arms before raising their glasses to their mouths with shouts and grimaces as they swallow. Then there’s Sirius next to Remus, his lips red and the shadows of his eyelashes long on his cheeks, eerie and beautiful at the same time. “Moony,” he shouts over the music, tugging Remus’s collar and leaning into him. “Have you had anything to drink yet? You don’t have to if you don’t want to!”

Sirius probably thinks he’s giving him an out, but Remus is nothing if not stubborn. He grasps a glass in his fist and the Firewhiskey sears as it goes down but he manages not to wince. Sirius looks delighted and Remus laughs, heady with joy at the expression on his face, leaning into him, hand curling around Sirius’s wrist. Sirius leans in, mouth close to Remus’s ear, and begins, “Moony, I—”

There’s a push from the side and a couple of girls shout apologies as they stumble past, colour-changing roses strung in their hair. Sirius’s hand falls from Remus’s wrist and Remus says “What were you going to say?” and Sirius shouts “It doesn’t matter!” over the music. It’s disappointing and a relief at the same time, so the solution seems to be more Firewhiskey. Remus turns back to the bar, behind which a tall man is standing now, a cigarette hanging fron the corner of his mouth, all big dark eyes and lean body and ears that stick out ever-so-slightly. He has nice hands, Remus thinks, and leans in to order. But the man’s eyes are moving over him to meet Sirius’s, his eyebrows shooting up as he grins and stubs his cigarette out. “Sirius Black,” he says, and there’s a tone in his voice that makes Remus tense up, something familiar and mellifluous, as if some time in the not so distant past, he has said Sirius’s name under completely different circumstances.

Beside him Sirius is flushing and when Remus looks down the bar he sees James looking from Sirius to the bartender and back at Sirius, and laughing. He leans in to whisper something to Lily and Remus wants to know desperately what it was he said, but he knows somehow anyway. It’s obvious from the way that the bartender is leaning on the bar, his face turned to Sirius’s like a flower to the sun. Sirius has that effect on people but Remus has never seen it in action quite like this before. He’s never seen that blotchy blush making its way down Sirius’s neck and that shyness in his eyes. It’s obvious that something has happened here, something that Remus doesn’t know about but that James does. Something that happened when Sirius and James had one of their nights out, over the Easter holidays or Christmas perhaps; a night here, and Sirius spending time with this bartender, time that has joined them together with an invisible thread of unmistakeably flirtatious smiles and focused attention. This man – because he’s a man, not much more than a couple of years older than them but a couple of years older nonetheless – is looking at Sirius as though he’s known him in a way that Remus resolutely has not.

His throat is tight and he’s suddenly far too hot. Sirius looks caught and captivated like a fish in a net, and the actuality of it is too much to bear. Remus is embarrassed about the way that he’s looked at the short hairs on the back of Sirius’s neck, the lines on the palms of his hands, the endless colour of his eyes in sunlight, as though they were something to be treasured and held gently, when really what he should have done was wanted and then taken. He allows himself to think it for the first time: pressing Sirius’s wrists down and feeling him gasp. The sounds that he’s heard Sirius make at night from across their room, as though the curtains around his bed were soundproof, those sounds beneath Remus’s mouth. He thinks of the way that Sirius’s throat would feel underneath his lips, his hips beneath his hands. He wonders whether his skin would taste the way it smells – because he knows his scent from years of hugs, of pressing his face against the place where Sirius’s neck meets his shoulder. But this man knows more: he knows about this world of Sirius’s that Remus did not. He didn’t know it could be a possibility. That it was, and that Sirius chose this man—

Remus feels as though he might cry, which logically is one of the most stupid things that has ever happened to him. He picks up one of the shot glasses with shaking fingers and when he throws back the Firewhiskey this time he barely tastes it. Finally he feels Sirius’s eyes on him and that look of captivation is gone, probably because he’s looking at his ridiculous old friend Moony the ragged werewolf and not an irritatingly handsome bartender. Replacing it is a look of sudden realisation and worry, and Remus feels Sirius’s fingertips touch his arm even as he pulls away. “Moony,” he hears Sirius choke out, but Remus has already turned away. He needs time to process this. He needs time alone, like he did in sixth year when Sirius pushed Snape into the tunnel and almost made him a killer—

Not that this is remotely similar. Of course it isn’t similar. This has nothing to do with betrayal or death, but it does have something to do with a side of Sirius that he’s never seen before. And it’s a good side this time, it isn’t sharp or wicked or reckless, it’s about love and sex and those are beautiful things. He just feels stupid that he never knew it existed before, that he made an idiotic assumption that Sirius liked girls, despite moments of tenderness that Remus is fairly sure were real. He’s embarrassed that he took glances that he thought were special and cherished them, small touches that sent delicious shivers down his spine, when in fact Sirius was busy choosing someone else.

He finds the way to the front door easily. The music is beating down on him like heavy rain and he pushes through people until he reaches blessed cool air underneath a real night sky, free of fireworks. Free of stars too, he realises as he looks upward. His legs feel weak so he sits down on the kerb and puts his hands on his knees and looks carefully down at the cobblestones on the street, the cigarette butts, the dry drain. Behind him the door swings open and he looks back instinctively. When he sees James, he’s relieved and disappointed at the same time.

“Moony,” James says, offering him a tentative smile. “Are you feeling all right?”

Remus nods. “Sirius is—” he begins.

“I don’t know,” James says, and bites his lip. He sits down on the kerb beside Remus even though it’s dusty and Remus knows that he’s wearing his favourite trousers. He stretches his legs out and looks at his feet, and then he looks back at Remus. “Sirius is.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“I don’t have one,” James says. “We haven’t actually talked about it.”

“Does he know that you know?”

James nods. “He and I once—”

“Oh my God,” Remus says, his entire body breaking into a sweat with the horror of it. “You and him?”

James laughs and the strangeness of it, an unexpected snort, breaks whatever tension there is, and it’s easier then, James’s warm shoulder against his, so familiar and comforting that it feels like going back to the Gryffindor dormitories and getting into the bed there that he slept in for seven years. “No! For Merlin’s sake, no. I mean,” he adds hastily, “not that I object to it, not at all. But I like girls. And I think that if I didn’t, Sirius wouldn’t be my type anyway.”

“Sirius is everyone’s type,” Remus points out, because it’s obvious.

James looks at him as though he’s slightly mad. “No, he isn’t. I know he’s good-looking – I mean, I’ve got eyes, and he talks about it often enough—”

Remus laughs, accidentally affectionate. “He does.”

“But he isn’t for everyone, you know. He’s an incredible friend but sometimes he’s difficult. For a while,” James says, “I thought that he was jealous of Lily in that way, you know.”

Remus hadn’t considered it. The thought makes him feel slightly ill for reasons he suspects are entirely selfish. He pulls a face.

“I think it’s just because he isn’t very good at sharing his things,” James says reassuringly. “And he doesn’t have much family except for me. I think that I just need to keep being there for him. Lily understands, we’ve talked about it. Anyway, what I was saying before was that when we’ve been out over the holidays, sometimes he’s met girls and sometimes he’s – you know. He’s met boys.”

“And you don’t mind?” Remus asks, almost holding his breath.

James looks appalled. “Of course I don’t mind,” he says emphatically. “Merlin. No. Of course I don’t. Have I ever told you about my Aunt Isabel and Aunt Emily?”

Remus shakes his head.

“They live on the Isle of Skye,” James explains. “They’re both about a thousand years old. My parents used to take me to visit them when I was younger, and then I sort of stopped wanting to go because there isn’t much to do there. I Floo there sometimes these days though, during the holidays, for a cup of tea and some shortbread. Aunt Emily makes brilliant shortbread. They’ve got a farm, lots of sheep, dogs, cats, that sort of thing. And a donkey called Orlando. It’s brilliant there. Anyway, once I asked my dad whether they had husbands, and he told me that they don’t, because they’re Sapphists.”

Remus laughs despite himself. “Sapphists?”

“I know.” James is grinning, a little bashful. “Remember, my dad’s also about a thousand years old. His vocabulary is maybe not entirely up to date.”

“Is there a male version of – you know. Of the word ‘Sapphist’?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, homosexual, gay, bisexual. But they don’t have quite the same classical connotations, do they?” James casts a curious look sideways. “Why? Is that… do you think that you…”

“I don’t know.” Remus looks up at the streetlight. His face feels like it’s on fire. “Maybe. Would it matter?”

“Moony.” He feels James’s arm around his shoulders, familiar and clumsy and sweet. “I just want you to be happy. I just want Sirius to be happy too. Although I don’t think he’s particularly good at it.”

“At happiness?”

James shrugs, and bites his bottom lip. Overhead, the moon is starting to drain Remus: it’s waning but he still doesn’t like its pale bulge and its brightness in the night sky. “Shall we go back inside?” he asks, and James nods.

*

They buy more Firewhiskey from the black bartender with silver hair. The other bartender is there too, the one that Sirius knows better than Remus would like, talking to a girl with flowing dark hair and making her smile, but Sirius himself is nowhere to be seen. There’s a shriek of recognition behind them and Remus sees Lily and Marlene, flushed and beaming. Lily throws her arms around James and he throws his around her, and Marlene rolls her eyes before reaching for Remus’s hand and dragging him out towards the dancefloor.

By now he’s had enough Firewhiskey that it doesn’t seem like too bad an idea. His limbs feel looser than they usually do and his hips feel as though they might manage to move in a way that isn’t odd and awkward and angular. Marlene lifts their joined hands and turns under them. The silver-pink twist of scar tissue on the side of her face shines ultra-violet in the light, as though it was painted on. At school, she was Peter’s first girlfriend; they went out for exactly three weeks before she split up with him and started going out with Darren O’Hare instead, who was a Hufflepuff in the year above and who James loathed because he kept beating him at Quidditch. Darren O’Hare had clear blue eyes and soft dark hair and a lilting Irish accent, so on the whole Remus understood her decision. Right now, school seems like a thousand years ago as Marlene smiles up at him and he holds her waist and moves with her in a way he never dreamt of when they were throwing ink pellets at each other during History of Magic. Lily appears and Remus expects Marlene to vanish off with her, but she doesn’t. She turns, still in Remus’s arms, and throws an arm around Lily’s shoulders to draw her in closer. He can smell perfume and clean sweat and it’s helping, he feels lighter, he feels surrounded with love. Admittedly it could be the buzz from the Firewhiskey but he’ll take it either way.

The music shifts into something moodier and James appears, murmurs in Lily’s ear as she smiles. Marlene shrugs and turns her attention back to Remus. Her necklace catches his shirt button and as she tugs at it, clumsy and half-drunk, the shirt tears down the left side, its thin material too insubstantial to hold. “Shit! I’m sorry! Should I…” Marlene holds out her wand but Remus shakes his head because she isn’t sober and if she tries to reparo his shirt she might end up jinxing one of his nipples off. So instead they move closer together and dance beneath the fireworks, her scars and his scars visible, roadmaps on their skin under the false night sky. As the song draws to a close Remus catches sight of Sirius, his elbow resting on the bar, an untouched glass by his hand, his eyes wide and almost hurt, his mouth in a thin tight line.

*

Fabian Prewett appears two songs later. He whisks Marlene away and starts kissing her in the corner in a manner that probably isn’t appropriate in a public place. Remus is drunk enough to dance but he’s too sober to dance alone. His head is starting to spin and he feels as though his feet aren’t quite touching the ground, which should be a good thing but feels dizzying and unpleasant. Fresh air is starting to seem like the only option, despite the oppressive weight of the moon hanging in the sky. The way to the front door is blocked by people, moving and dancing and talking and kissing, and so he makes for the back door instead.

Outside there’s a small terrace. It smells like spilled beer and urine and something that Remus suspects may be marijuana, which he has never tried because he’s absolutely certain that if he ever uses any illegal substance it will be his bad luck to end up reacting badly to it and dying horribly, and then his mother will be embarrassed when she has to tell people what happened to him. The terrace has two or three half-hearted plant pots that should be watered more often, and discarded bottles and glasses and overflowing ashtrays on the tables – and then, leaning against the wall and looking more jittery and flustered than he usually does, it’s Sirius.

It’s another one of those moments where he’s unfairly beautiful, with his big thoughtful eyes and wild hair. He’s no Romantic poet now, he’s got the moody, gorgeous face of a Byronic hero, like Heathcliff, like Rochester – but those romances never ended up well, and no matter what else happens, Remus wants a happy ending for Sirius. As Remus watches, Sirius smiles; it’s tentative and almost nervous, which is nothing like his usual self, and it makes Remus feel horribly tender towards him. “You were jealous,” Sirius says, not entirely a question, “of Benjy.”

“Benjy’s the—”

“The bartender.” Sirius’s eyes are on his face, Remus can feel them like a weight around his neck. His whole body is too hot.

“I don’t know if I was jealous,” he admits. “I was – surprised, maybe.”

Sirius nods, and Remus finds himself moving towards him as though there’s some sort of magnetic pull right there between them. “I don’t owe it to anyone,” Sirius says, “telling them, I mean. Not even you. I don’t want people to react badly—”

“Sirius.” Remus feels his heart plummet, like a dying bird from the sky. “I’m not—” I’m not people, he wants to say, which doesn’t even make any sense.

“Your opinion matters a lot to me,” Sirius says, and half-smiles, reaching out to touch the rip in Remus’s shirt. “You tore one of my favourite shirts.” His fingertips are on Remus’s skin now and Remus wonders how it must feel, the bumpy uneven lines of his scars. He’s half ashamed of himself and the imperfect way he looks, and half terribly aware of the concentration on Sirius’s face. Slowly Sirius lays his palm over Remus’s heart, warm and solid, and looks up into his face. “Your heart’s beating fast.”

“I know.” Remus stands there and looks into Sirius’s clear grey eyes and feels the weight of his hand and the curiosity of his gaze. Then there’s a slight movement of his head and Remus stands his ground. Sirius exhales through his nose with something that sounds like relief and Remus knows he’s passed a test.

The first kiss isn’t as sweet as Remus would have liked it to be, as sweet as he would have written it if this was the love story he had chosen. Instead he has a love story that has risen unexpectedly from the solid foundations of seven years of affection and friendship, which seems more romantic anyway. The kiss is hard and Sirius bites his bottom lip and mutters, “Sorry,” and Remus’s head is spinning from alcohol and heat as sweat beads on his forehead. He can feel one of Sirius’s legs shaking against his and he isn’t sure why, whether it’s nerves or a lack of certainty or maybe even regret. Sirius hasn’t got James any more, James is inside with Lily who Sirius is finding it hard to learn to like, and Remus is simply a second choice and Sirius doesn’t know how else to be close to him, and maybe that’s why this is happening.

Those things all run through his head as Sirius runs both his hands around Remus’s hips and pulls him in tighter. It doesn’t seem worth bothering to worry when Sirius is so close and feels like a dream come to life. Remus touches the side of Sirius’s face and Sirius makes an enthusiastic noise and licks into his mouth. Do you want me, do you want me, an insistent voice rings through Remus’s head, and it seems that the answer is yes because he can feel a bulge in Sirius’s trousers pressing up against him. But that isn’t love, it’s biology, and he knows that even as Sirius pushes him back and his shoulder blades hit a wall. It’s the first time that pain has ever sent a shockwave of pleasure through him and he wishes that he could take a little time to digest that but it feels as though there’s no time, no time at all. This is moving at lightning pace and he’s only just keeping up.

But it’s good, though. It’s good that he can touch Sirius’s silky hair and the back of his neck and the lines of his shoulders, that he can let his fingertips dance across the bottom of his spine, where it indents very slightly. Mapping someone else’s body with his hands is something that he hasn’t done before. Where possible, he doesn’t even look at or touch his own body, so the possibility of touching Sirius’s is unfathomable, but at the same time he feels a sense of loss because this cannot last forever; this will be over; tomorrow the sun will rise and they will separate; this cannot be love, because Sirius is Sirius Black and some days Remus is barely even a shadow.

But Sirius is kissing his neck and Remus feels himself arching towards him because there’s the sweet prickle of Sirius’s stubble on his skin and the softness of his hair against Remus’s cheekbone, and the hardness of his skull beneath that too. Remus lifts a hand to tangle it in Sirius’s hair and to touch the shape of his head at the same time. His father had an antique phrenology bust and Remus knows that it’s rubbish, that it’s racist, that it could never have worked – but at the same time the shape of Sirius’s head is beautiful to trace with his fingertips, the base of his skull, the nape of his neck. He imagines that every area of Sirius’s head would tell him a story and reveal everything he wants to know, if only he could unlock that secret language.

The feel of him is overwhelming and beautiful, and violent in its intensity. Remus feels as though his skin is burning and he wants to eat Sirius alive, which is a thought that he probably shouldn’t vocalise. Then Sirius dips his head and kisses the scar on Remus’s chest and he feels a sudden terrible burst of tenderness that almost knocks him off his feet. He draws Sirius upright again and kisses his mouth and presses their foreheads together and looks into his eyes, locks their gazes, and feels Sirius’s breath on his lips. His best friend, his best friend, his greatest love. The morning will be unbearable and entirely worth it.

“Listen, Moony, I—”

“It’s fine, we can—”

“No, let me—” Sirius draws in a breath and Remus looks at his mouth, kiss-bruised, ripe like a plum. Forgive me. Delicious. So sweet. Sirius raises his eyebrows in a way that means he’s saying It’ll be all right, like in first year when Remus had never ridden a broom before and was too afraid to kick off from the ground. Remus shudders out a breath that means, I trust whatever you want to do, and Sirius drops to his knees. He pushes Remus’s – Sirius’s, really – shirt up off his stomach and kisses his skin, and it’s something that Remus would have thought he would hate: he’s too thin, he’s too pale, but there’s desire in the way that Sirius’s eyes are shut, his dark lashes like smoke on his cheeks, and so Remus lets himself be wanted.

Sirius undoes his belt and then the top button of his trousers with ease. It’s mad, doing this outside, but it’s mad doing this at all. Remus touches Sirius’s face and the fine line of his forehead and the delicate shell of his ear. “You don’t have to,” Remus breathes, his voice stark in the moonlight.

“I want to.” Sirius nuzzles against his skin. “I like doing this.” He draws Remus’s fly down slowly, slowly, slowly. “Especially with you.” He looks up and smiles slightly, and then he bites the waistband of Remus’s underwear and laughs a bit against his skin. This is it: this is heaven, and Remus is there, and there is nothing that could ever be better than this mixture of deep arousal and heart-clenching affection. There’s mischief in Sirius’s eyes: this is the way that Remus likes him the best. He strokes a fingertip over Sirius’s cheek, wondering and amazed, and Sirius says, “Moony, I—”

And then, in the dark pupils of Sirius’s eyes, Remus sees the reflection of fire.

The explosion comes a fraction of a second later, and Remus feels Sirius’s hands on him harder now, dragging him to the floor, and then Sirius’s warm body pressing him to the ground and covering him, his breath on the back of Remus’s neck, his fingers biting hard into Remus’s flesh. They wait for a moment as the air stills. It feels as though everything around them is pulsing as dust falls and settles, and all Remus can hear is the pounding of his blood in his ears, fast and frantic.

What cuts through it is the screaming. The screaming starts and Sirius rolls off Remus. Energy surges through Remus’s veins as he fumbles for his wand. Before they re-enter the building, he shares a look with Sirius, hard and certain and strong. Remus is so often afraid and he knows that now he should be. People are starting to surge to the doors and push past them into the courtyard, apparating away in jagged volleys and swoops, a girl with blood streaked down her face and dust in her hair, a pale blond man with his hand clutched over a wound in his side, a couple with bubbling blistered burns. Remus thinks wildly of James and Lily and Peter and Marlene and Fabian and Sirius’s bartender, and all the other people in there beside them, all the people who are no less valuable for his not knowing them. He knows that they need to do whatever they possibly can.

“Let us through!” Sirius barks. His fingers close tightly around Remus’s wrist and he drags him through the crowd, pushing and shoving hard through people who are frantic and afraid and wreathed with the smell of smoke, until they’re inside. The first thing that Remus sees is the bright whip of Lily’s hair and her bared teeth as she duels – she duels! This is real life! – a figure in dark robes and a silvered mask. At her back is James, his mouth a bleeding slash across his face as he hurls curses at another dark figure. Across the club – music is still blaring, which is the most bizarre and out of place thing that Remus has ever encountered – he can see the strawberry blond of Fabian’s hair and his grimace, his arm tight around the neck of one of the masked figures.

From his side, Remus hears someone snarl something contemptuous about brawling like Muggles. It’s a voice that he almost thinks he recognises but what makes him prickle with horror is the venom in the words. Remus turns his head and sees grey eyes glaring through a mask. “Halfbreed,” the man hisses and Remus has a choice: to shrivel, or to fight. And so, of course, he chooses to fight.

“Impedimenta,” he snaps out, and the figure falls wordlessly to the floor. Remus blinks down at whoever it is, and then steps over them. They won’t be out for long, whoever they are, but it’s enough for now. Sirius’s bartender – Benjy, that was his name – is fighting three robed figures at the same time, twisting and turning, his lean body lithe and graceful. Remus is about to help him when he feels someone barge into him. He turns, a jinx ready to spill from his lips, but sees Peter there.

His blond hair is mussed and his face is wet with sweat. “What are you doing?” he says. “We need to get out of here. We can hex our way out—”

“Are you a Gryffindor or are you not?” Sirius thunders from beside Remus, and Peter’s nostrils flare before he turns like a chastened child and vanishes into the crowd.

On the floor there are people who are injured and maybe even dead. The bartender with the beautiful tattoos that were swirling over her forearms is still and the flowers on her arms look dead and faded. Behind her head a halo of blood is spreading outward. For a moment Remus feels as though his heart might break, and then he steels himself and goes to help Benjy.

It’s easy to throw spells, after the years of practising in their dormitory room, years of fighting the Slytherins in a way that sometimes was good-natured and at other times decidedly was not. After years of living with James and Sirius, Remus knows that he has good reflexes, and he knows that he has strong magic, burning inside his chest and roaring to be let out. When the black-robed figures fall to the floor, he feels nothing but deep, grim satisfaction.

He keeps an eye on his friends, too. Marlene’s dark head is bobbing around as she moves from crumpled figure to crumpled figure, feeling pulses and throwing defensive spells and healing the worst wounds. Sirius with his flashing eyes and elegant grace, Fabian with his raw power, Lily maybe the fiercest out of them all. The music is silent now and all Remus can hear is panting and snarling curses. Something cuts him, a slice across his side, but little do they all know that Remus Lupin has born far worse pain than a few cuts and bruises. Across the room he hears “Crucio!” and it’s a dirty word, forbidden and wrong, toe-curling and skin-crawling, like the first time he heard someone say Mudblood – to Lily, on their second day at school – and then there’s a scream, wrenching and with a depth of pain unlike anything Remus has ever heard before.

Who’s nearest? He looks desperately around and is shot with a searing curse as a result. James. James is the closest. “Prongs! Over there!” he yells at the top of his lungs and out of the corner of his eye he sees James stretch out his left hand even though he fights with his right, sees a jet of light arcing from his palm, and sees—

Someone crumples. A dark-robed figure crumples, and the screaming stops, and then the front doors burst open and the Aurors pour in.

The black-robed figures start to apparate away, cracking through the air to God knows where, leaving vacuum pockets of empty air behind them, leaving prone figures and broken glass and dead flowers and a sky that’s somehow still pouring with fireworks. Remus halts, out of breath. Beside him, Sirius is standing frozen, stock still. Remus follows his stricken gaze to a black-robed figure dodging around the Aurors. The mask is the same as the first one that Remus saw, the figure he cast an Impediment jinx on, the grey-eyed one who called him a halfbreed. Then finally Sirius seems to have got the use of his legs back as he jerks forward through the crowd of Aurors as though someone’s possessing him.

Remus follows him, because he always does. He follows him onto the street, heart pounding in his chest, and tries to reach him, but Sirius is too fast. When Remus gets outside Sirius is standing with his face turned beseechingly up to the sky, where Remus sees the shadow of a figure on a broom speeding away into the night. “Regulus! Come back!” Sirius roars, his voice choked in his throat from fire and despair, and then louder, more desperate and more pained as though his heart is breaking: “Regulus! Regulus!”

*

There are only two dead, which apparently isn’t so bad, despite the fact that Remus knows it’s the end of the world for everyone who loved them. Fabian prowls up and down in front of them like a caged tiger in his flat when they’re all back there, sweat still beaded on his forehead. Behind him, Benjy is leaning against the mantelpiece, his arms folded over his chest and his brows furrowed and thoughtful. Marlene is making tea for all of them, hot and sweet, and James’s arm is around Lily. Beside Remus, Sirius is sitting still and silent with his forearms resting on his knees and his eyes on the floor, his face blank and set. Across the room, Peter’s eyes are red and his face is pale and faraway.

“You all did well,” Fabian says, and exchanges a look with Benjy. “You were brave.”

They were brave – although Remus casts a glance across at Peter and thinks, uncharitably, that he was mostly only brave when it came to saving his own skin. James and Lily were brave, and Sirius was brave, and Marlene was maybe the bravest of them all. Remus just followed them; he doesn’t think he can claim any of the credit. “You,” Benjy says after a moment, eyes on James. “That was wandless magic, wasn’t it?”

James spreads his hands, looking at them as if they belong to someone else. “I’m not very good. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Still.” Benjy looks at Fabian. “They’re good.”

“They’re young.”

“This time last year, you were that young.”

Fabian shrugs a shoulder. His mouth is turned down at the corners. “I don’t want Marlene to—”

“You don’t want me to what?” Marlene says from the kitchen. “I make my rules, thank you. I’ll do what I want.”

Fabian blinks slowly. He looks as though he’s getting a headache, which Remus can empathise with. “Fine,” he says. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

Marlene inclines her head a little as she comes in and puts down a tray of mugs. Everyone reaches for one, except for Sirius. Remus takes one for him, and nudges it carefully into his hands. “Drink it,” he murmurs, and Sirius just frowns into it as if he’s never seen a cup of tea before in his life. Before they left the club, they all had to talk to the Aurors. Remus heard Sirius being interviewed, heard him say “I know who one of them was. My brother. Regulus Black,” in a voice that was hollow and resigned. And then Remus heard the Auror say, “You’re the Black boy that left your family, aren’t you? You need to know that that’s a very serious accusation that you’re making there.”

Long story short, Remus doesn’t think that Walburga Black will have any Aurors banging on her front door any time soon, demanding to arrest her remaining son.

A long look passes between Fabian and Benjy, and then Fabian says: “What are you lot planning on doing next year?”

“Gringotts,” Peter says.

“Auror training,” James says.

“Healer training,” Marlene puts in, “but then, you already knew that.”

“Department of Mysteries,” Lily says. “I have an internship.”

“Magical Menagerie,” Sirius says. Remus catches his eye, and Sirius shrugs defensively. “What?”

“Nothing,” Remus says. “I just didn’t know.”

“I thought it would be fun,” Sirius says. “I like animals.”

“I know you do,” Remus says.

“I don’t have to tell you lot everything,” Sirius mutters to the floor.

“In fact, sometimes,” Remus says, “it feels as though you tell me nothing.”

It comes out more icily than he was expecting, and behind Fabian, Benjy raises his eyebrows.

Fabian lets out a breath. “What about you, Remus?”

His heart sinks dully, the way it always does when he thinks about the future. “Nothing,” he says. “Moving back in with my mum and dad. I might find a Muggle job—”

“What?” James says, suddenly frowning at him. “Really? Why?”

“Well, what else would I do?” The words burst frustratedly out of Remus.

“Live with us, of course,” Peter says, as though it’s obvious.

“This,” Sirius says to the floor, sounding exhausted, “is another one of those occasions where we’ve discussed things amongst ourselves and completely failed to actually mention them to Moony.”

“Right. Well, the four of us are moving in together,” James says. “My dad’s helping us find a flat—”

“I can’t afford that,” Remus snaps. As if they didn’t know that already. Hope is starting to unfurl itself like a flower inside his chest, and that’s dangerous when there’s a good chance it’ll come to nothing.

“We’ll sort it out,” James says earnestly. “We’ve talked about it, and—”

“I love it when people have conversations about my future when I’m not even there,” Remus says. “Feels brilliant.”

James’s gaze drops to the ground and Remus sees Lily’s hand stroking his back. He wishes he had someone to do that for him right now but Sirius is still frozen beside him, curled into himself.

There’s a slightly awkward pause. Then Fabian says, “It’s been a rough night. But me and Benjy were wondering – we need to have a chat with a couple of people, but we thought you lot might all want to come over again next week.”

“Hopefully,” Benjy says dryly, “there will be fewer explosions then.”

Remus coughs out a laugh, despite himself. They all rumble out an agreement, and then James says, “I think I want a night in my own bed,” and Lily nods, and so does Peter, and Remus likes the idea of it too – or his bed in James’s house anyway, under the white ceiling and black-painted beams, beneath his soft knitted blanket. Lily hugs Marlene goodbye and then they all gather their things up and apparate back to James’s house. There’s no danger of anyone being so drunk that they splinch themselves; Remus is fairly certain that none of them have ever felt so sober in their lives.

They appear in James’s kitchen one by one. When Remus apparates in, James and Sirius are already there. Sirius has turned to James to rest his forehead on James’s shoulder, as though he’s extremely tired, and James has curved his hand over the back of Sirius’s neck as though he’s comforting a little brother in need. Remus wonders, as he catches his balance and reaches out for the back of a chair, if Sirius ever comforted Regulus in that way. He can’t imagine it, especially not after tonight. He can’t get the smell of the bar out of his nostrils – the burning, the metallic tang of blood.

Lily appears and almost knocks into Sirius. Her eyes are defensive for a second, as though he’s going to be cross about it, but instead he just turns and reaches out to hug her for a moment. “You were brilliant tonight, Evans,” he says, and turns his head to mutter something into her ear that makes her relax into his arms and hold onto him tighter. Then Peter appears, stumbling and exhausted. He mutters his goodnights before making his way upstairs. Then Lily smiles over at Remus and says, “Good night, then,” before taking James’s hand and starting to lead him out of the room, before turning briefly to say, “By the way, Remus, your trousers are undone.” She arches an eyebrow before disappearing off, and James half-laughs, tired and not quite happy.

Remus feels his face heat up. It seems like a thousand years ago, outside with Sirius, tongues rich with Firewhiskey and want. He wonders if they’ll ever be able to find that moment again. He doubts it, but that’s all right. They almost got there, and that’s enough for him. “Sirius,” he tries, just in case.

“I’m really tired,” Sirius says. His voice is clipped and he isn’t quite looking directly at Remus. “I’m going to bed. I’m just…” Finally he makes eye contact. “I’m sorry, I really—”

“No, of course,” Remus says immediately. “Go on. Good night.”

Sirius looks at him for a moment longer. Then he inclines his head slightly, and smiles just a little, and then there’s Padfoot standing there in his place, Padfoot making his way out of the room, and meanwhile, Remus: Remus stands alone in James’s kitchen, which suddenly feels terribly empty, and wonders why he feels as though he’s lost so much more than this long, odd, sad night has actually taken away from him.

*

Remus can’t sleep, which is no surprise. Somewhere in the middle of the night he catches a couple of hours on and off, but then the sky starts lightening incrementally and he knows he’s sunk. Outside he can hear birds chirping as they wake up, and usually he would think it’s pleasant but tonight – this morning – it’s just exhausting. He wants to press his face into his pillow and sleep for days. He saw people die. There was another attack and he was there and he knows there will be other attacks, he knows there will, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He can’t stop that. Someone he knows and loves might die, and then he feels guilty for worrying about that because they aren’t any more special than anyone else just because they have a special place in his heart.

And then there was Sirius – Sirius, who likes boys as well as girls, Sirius who kissed him and who was going to—

Remus doesn’t want to count his chickens, but he’s pretty sure what Sirius was about to do before the attack happened, and he knows for a fact that it would have been incredible. And he also knows that afterwards it would have been awkward, and probably regretted, firstly by Sirius and then later by Remus himself. All he wants is for things to never change, but they already have – school is over and they’re growing up and James has fallen in love and last night they fought, really fought, for the first time.

He can’t lie in bed any longer. He wants some fresh air, to be out in the cool early morning breeze while the sun rises. He pulls on swimming shorts and a t-shirt and walks barefoot down the dark hallway. He pauses outside Sirius’s room but all he can hear is silence, and he doesn’t have the courage to push the door open, so he tiptoes downstairs instead. There are footsteps in the kitchen and he catches Lily there, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired and clutching a glass of water. “I was thirsty,” she whispers in a cracked voice, and gestures towards her throat. “I think the smoke last night…”

Remus nods. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I think so. Are you?”

“I don’t know either,” he tells her, and the corners of her eyes crease in a sort of smile that says she understands. “Is James asleep?” he asks.

She nods, and he sees easy affection move over her face. “Like a baby.”

“It’s so strange how he just falls asleep and doesn’t move for hours.”

“It’s lucky,” she says. “I always thought he’d be the sort of person who kicks.”

He grins at her, because he can see what she means. “D’you know what, Lily? I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Me too.” She smiles up at him. It’s easier to see the future now: the four of them and Lily as well, it’s easier to see how she’ll fit in. It’s her humour and her strength and her kindness. He thinks she understands that in order to love James, she’ll have to love all four of them. He thinks that she’s fine with that. “Remus,” she says then, and bites her lip. “Look… I just wanted to say. All through school, you were kind to me. From the very first moment that we met.”

He frowns at her. “Was I?” He doesn’t remember that, but if that’s what she believes, it must be true.

“Yes.” She reaches out and touches her arm. Her eyes are so green in this light that it’s disarming. “And everything about you – everything, Remus – I wanted to let you know that it’s fine with me, and I like you exactly the way you are.”

His throat feels tight. “Do you mean the Sirius stuff, or—”

“I mean everything,” she says, her gaze on his, steady and thoughtful, and he knows then that she knows. It’s a release, to have someone else who knows about the moon and the effects it has on him. He has three friends who knew and who loved him anyway: an increase to four is a significant rise. She searches his face, and evidently sees something there that makes her smile and squeeze his arm gently. “I should get back to bed.”

He nods, and steps aside to let her pass. It feels so quiet then, the whole house, like the corridors of Hogwarts at night, still and dark and breathing low and steady. There are dirty plates on the sideboard, the detritus of the last meal the five of them ate here together, and an empty cage for James’s owl, and Lily’s new jacket flung over a chair, and Sirius’s bag of records on the floor in the corner, and a photograph of James’s parents on their wedding day beaming down at him from over the hearth. He lingers there for a moment and then steps out into the night.

Morning is coming soon, he can tell from the colour of the sky and its lack of inky black. The sun will be rising soon although it hasn’t made its way over the horizon yet. Remus is barefoot but he makes his way down the garden path anyway, the flagstones cool and smooth underneath his toes. The cliff steps are rocky but his feet are callused and it doesn’t bother him too much as he climbs down to the beach. Down there the sand is cool and damp and the breeze smells of salt. If he stands still, he thinks he can hear the mermaids calling from the next cove down. When he closes his eyes and inhales, his heart is so full that he thinks it might break.

Down on the sand there’s a discarded towel, purple and blue, one of James’s. Remus squints out at the water and sees a bobbing figure in the waves. Sirius, he realises, swimming, his stroke precise and perfect. The water must be freezing this early. Remus watches him, the arc of his arm and the wet black of his hair and the way that the water shimmers around him. It’s going to be a hot day.

Sirius surfaces and stills. He’s too far out for Remus to be able to see his eyes, but he can tell that Sirius has seen him. He dives under again and emerges close to the shore. When he walks out of the water he doesn’t look particularly handsome or godlike: he looks more skinny than usual with his wet swimming shorts clinging to his legs and his hair matted to his head and his shoulders hunched with cold. Remus greets him with the towel held out and Sirius wraps himself in it. His nose is pink with cold and his teeth are chattering slightly. “What are you doing down here?” he asks.

“One of my favourite people told me that it was beautiful here in the morning.”

Sirius smiles a bit, and looks down at the sand before looking up again. “Yesterday was strange.”

“Very strange.”

Sirius nods, and then he plops down onto the sand, holding an arm out, the towel streaming from it like a purple wing. “Come on.”

“You’re all wet,” Remus tells him, wrinkling his nose.

“Moony!”

Remus sits. It doesn’t seem so bad that Sirius is all wet skin because he’s warm too, and there’s the towel there as well, covering both of their shoulders. Sirius digs his toes into the sand and says, “I hope I didn’t upset you.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Remus says automatically, and then admits, because he needs to learn to be more honest, “Maybe a little.”

Sirius inclines his head, the corner of his mouth twitching down. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” It would be a lie to say that Sirius never means to upset people, but on this occasion Remus trusts him. “Was it really your brother there last night?”

“I think so,” Sirius says, looking out at the sea. “I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, would you? I keep thinking about it and second-guessing myself, and—”

“I think it was him,” Remus said. “His eyes. You two…”

“We have the same eyes. Yeah. I know.” Sirius looks a little sour.

“The same colour,” Remus says. “Otherwise, totally different.”

“Really?”

“Really.” In his pocket Remus can feel the shell he found on this beach a few days ago digging into his thigh. “What did you lot mean about me living with you?”

“We just thought that it wouldn’t be the same without you,” Sirius says. “We want you there. Imagine me and James and Pete together. Wormtail would probably die of fright. Prongs and I would murder each other. We need you there, I know that you’ll get all strange about the money thing, but James – he really can afford it.”

It makes Remus feel odd, the idea of living in a flat and not being able to pay much rent. He says, “Mmm.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sirius asks, elbowing him not quite gently enough.

“Nothing. I’ll think about it.”

“Please live with us.” Sirius is suddenly heartfelt.

“Maybe,” Remus allows, but he knows that he’ll give in. He could never resist anything Sirius says, and anyway, he wants to live with them and soak up their laughter and their love. He wants to be eighteen and to have fun. He wants to drink and dance and live as decadently as he can with his best friends. He wants space to fall in love, and to listen to loud music, and to shout in anger if he needs to. The world is getting harder and he knows that he needs to be courageous to face it. His friends have always given him courage through the easy way that they love him. Beside him, Sirius is shivering. “Do you want to go inside?” Remus asks him.

“No. The sun’s going to rise soon,” Sirius says determinedly.

“If you get hypothermia…”

“Such is life.” Sirius grins, bright and sweet, and Remus’s stomach flips. He disguises it by rolling his eyes and leaning his shoulder against Sirius’s. Together they watch the sky as a thick line of orange bleeds across the horizon, flaming and joyful. A new day rises; there will always be moons, Remus knows that, but the sun will always follow. He glances sideways at Sirius, his familiar profile, his full lips, his thick lashes – and the stars, too. Always the stars, infinite and forever. Sirius seems to feel Remus’s gaze on him and turns to smile, softer this time, almost hesitant, before turning to look at the sky again as he speaks. “Moony, about last night – you know that James is my best friend, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“But you’re different to that. You’ve always been different. You’re a best friend but in a different way.”

“Like Peter?”

Sirius laughs, a surprised splutter. “Not like Peter.”

Remus can feel his heart thumping. “Right.”

Sirius shuffles closer on the sand. “I feel so deeply for you that it’s ridiculous. It just grows more and more all the time. I feel as though my whole heart is given over to you. Every time you do something, even if it’s little and insignificant, I find myself thinking: That’s brilliant. Moony’s brilliant. And if you want to just be friends with me, that’s fine. I’ll take anything I can get and I’ll be happy with it because I just want to be around you. But if you ever want – if you ever want me, all of me, I want you to know that I’ll always be here.”

The sun is finally cracking the horizon now, pink and yellow and orange streaking through the sky. It’s beautiful, and Remus turns his face to Sirius’s, and finds his mouth with his own. It’s a better kiss than the previous night: slower, and infinitely sweeter. Remus touches the side of Sirius’s face and feels himself trembling a little. Sirius turns so that he can kiss Remus’s palm and nuzzle his face into it before looking into his eyes. “Remus?”

“Yes.” Remus is probably replying too quickly, playing all his cards, but he doesn’t care. “You too. Everything.”

Sirius leans forward and presses his forehead against Remus’s before kissing him again, his lips salty from the sea but warm even as his wet hair drips onto Remus’s chest. Above them there’s a brighter light and when Remus looks up he expects to see the sun rising higher and prouder but instead he sees the arc of a phoenix, wheeling and spinning in the air and leaving a trail of fire behind it. They watch the bird as it soars down towards James’s house and disappears over the lip of the cliff. Sirius looks at Remus, wide-eyed and surprised. “Was that Dumbledore’s phoenix?”

“We don’t know any others,” Remus points out.

“Maybe we should…” Sirius nods up at the house.

“No.” Selfishly, Remus wants to keep him here. He darts in for another kiss, marvelling inwardly that he can do it, that Sirius won’t pull back, that he can feel as much joy emanating from Sirius as he feels in his own heart. He touches the line of Sirius’s collarbone and the hollow of his throat and the side of his jaw, lightly stubbled and beautifully drawn, the curve of his mouth sweet in its familiarity. It’s the way that he moves that Remus is drawn to, the quirk of his left eyebrow, the quizzical tilt to his mouth when he’s about to make a joke, the softness of his gaze when he thinks that nobody’s looking. His good heart. “Stay with me,” Remus says, feeling Sirius look down at his mouth. He has never been wanted like this before. It’s a revelation. “Stay right here with me until the sun rises.”

And so they do, the pair of them. The purple – “Mauve,” Sirius says, his mouth against Remus’s shoulder – fades from the sky as blue takes its place and the morning starts slowly to form. There are things that must be begun, there are leftover fights that haven’t yet been won, but there’s time for this, there’s time to be together before the business of the day begins. There’s the rest of the summer as well, aching exquisitely ahead of them. Crumbs to be dropped, skin to be touched, sunrises to be watched—

“I feel so happy,” Sirius murmurs, one hand tugging gently through Remus’s hair, and Remus breathes out and in again, fresh sea air, Sirius’s familiar scent, and whispers, “Me too.”