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The window in Remus’s bedroom is running with damp from the cold outside, meeting the warmth inside. The radiator under the sill is doing its noisy best and not really achieving anything.
Sirius has been here since teatime. Hope had opened the door without asking what had happened, taken his coat, put a cup of tea in his hands, and given him that small smile of hers that she reserves for the days when he turns up looking like this. She hadn’t asked; she hadn’t even raised an eyebrow.
Sirius would die for Hope Lupin.
Hope says grace before meals in three soft words—thank you, God—and then sits down at her plate. Walburga’s grace at the Black table runs for two and a half minutes and is mostly about what is owed, and not what to be thankful for. Sirius has been thinking about the difference since he sat down in the Lupin kitchen at six o’clock and heard Lyall say amen before he was even halfway through his own first mouthful.
Now, he is sitting on the floor of Remus’s bedroom with his back against the bed, and Remus is sitting on the floor beside him with their shoulders touching. They have been here for hours. The second cup of tea has long gone cold; the lamp on Remus’s desk is the only light in the room. Outside, the snow that started in the afternoon is still coming down, blurring the window glass.
“What’d she do this time?” Remus says eventually. Sirius can tell he’s been dying to ask.
Sirius doesn’t answer for a moment.
“Threw something.”
“At you?”
“At the dog.”
Remus turns his head a small degree, looking at him.
“Didn’t hit this time at least,” Sirius says. “I caught it. The old hag is getting slower.”
He doesn’t mention that he hadn’t caught it; he’d stepped in front of it. He doesn’t mention the bruise the size of a fist coming up under his shirt. He doesn’t mention what it was—the huge onyx rosary ornament off the hall table, the one she takes to early Mass on Wednesdays to be displayed—because the answer to the question what did she throw at you is never the bit that hurts. The bit that hurts is always what she said while she was throwing it. He had hidden the bloody shirt at the bottom of his bag before coming over. He knows that Hope will find it while he’s sleeping and will wash it for him. He is wearing one of Remus’s jumpers now, oatmeal-coloured, smelling of fabric softener and the faint paper-and-pencil smell of the room.
“Padfoot.”
“S’fine.”
“You can stay tonight.”
“Your mum already made the bed up in the spare. Third weekend in a row, I think.”
“She likes having you.”
Sirius doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t know what to do with people who like having him.
They talk for a while about nothing: school, James, an essay neither of them has started, Regulus, Peter’s girlfriend, Mick Jagger being knighted. They talk about everything and nothing at the same time. Remus doesn’t press him about the rosary; Remus never presses. It’s one of the things Sirius is in danger of about him.
Remus’s hand finds Sirius’s at some point on the floor between them, fingers loose, not really hand-holding, just the easy touch of two boys who have been touching more and more lately and pretending they’re not doing anything. Sirius doesn’t move his hand. He looks down at it instead; Remus’s thumb is moving very slightly against the side of his palm.
He thinks about the bonnet of the car in August. He’s been thinking about it for five months, really. There hasn’t been a single day since when he hasn’t thought about it. Sometimes, he thinks about it the way you remember a particularly good meal—full sensory recall, the warm metal, the bugs going mad in the long grass, the cassette starting again from the car. Sometimes, he thinks about it the way you remember a small now-clean wound—the place where the little fingers had touched, the way they hadn’t moved his hand.
Sirius is fairly certain Remus has been thinking about it too, all this time. They haven’t spoken about it. They haven’t dared to, but there is a thing in the room with them now that hadn’t been there before, and they have both kept walking around it, pretending it isn’t there.
He thinks too about the things he hasn’t let himself think about since the bonnet of the car. There is a particular set of sentences in his head, all written long ago and none of them by him, that he has been trying to outrun all autumn. They are in his mother’s voice mostly. Sometimes, they are in Father Macnair’s, who has known the family since before Sirius was born and christened, and who has an unsettling hush in his voice when he reads from Leviticus and Romans, like he is doing the words some kind of kindness. They are about the shape of certain sins and how they begin.
Sirius knows the words for what he wants. He has known them since he was about twelve. He knows what he is, and knows what he wants is called. He cannot possibly ever say them out loud, not even in his own head, not even now, not even in this room with Remus’s thumb moving slowly against the side of his palm.
When Sirius was thirteen, James had walked him out of the school gates with their hands jokingly clasped and their arms swinging between them, skipping for half a step like a pair of girls in a film, laughing about something that was already not funny at all by the time they hit the kerb. Walburga had been waiting in the car. She hadn’t said anything in front of James, but she had said a great deal once the door of the Bentley closed.
Sirius was not to associate with James Potter again. He was not to see him out of school. He was not to be seen with him in any way that could be discussed afterwards. He was to forget that boy even existed. And when they had got home, his mother had stopped him in the hall and held him by the shoulders and prayed over him out loud. She hadn’t told him what she was praying about exactly, but Sirius knew. He’d stood very still. He’d felt the small cold press of the cross at her throat against his chin where she had bent his head to hers, and when she had finished, she’d touched his cheek with two fingers, very gently, and said: we will not have to speak of it again. They hadn’t spoken of it again. Sirius has spent every day since being afraid of the day she decides they do.
He can feel it now. He can feel it in Remus’s thumb against his palm. He thinks: I should move my hand. He doesn’t move his hand.
Then Remus says, very quietly: “Sirius…”
Sirius looks up; Remus has turned a little toward him. Their faces are so close. Sirius hasn’t realised quite how close until now. Remus’s eyes go to his mouth, then back to his eyes.
Sirius stops breathing, and then Remus leans in and kisses him.
For one second—for one second, maybe two—Sirius kisses him back. He kisses him back. He kisses him back so fully that it’s not even a heat-of-the-moment decision; his body has been making this decision for months. Remus’s lips are slightly chapped from the cold but surprisingly warm, and they fit against Sirius’s mouth as if God had created them to mould into each other’s shape perfectly and completely. He can feel the small catch of Remus’s breath, the half-inch of warm air between them, the brush of Remus’s nose against his. Remus tastes like biscuit tea and like Remus, which is something so intoxicating that Sirius can’t stop sucking in sharp breaths. There is a heat at the centre of Sirius so total and so sudden he could swear someone has put a match to him. His heartbeat is doing something embarrassing in his ears, hammering out the same two syllables over and over: Moony, Moony, Moony, Moony. His hand has come up without his permission and found the back of Remus’s neck, fingers in the soft hair at his nape, and he is holding him there with a tenderness he did not know his hands could do.
It feels right; it feels so right it’s almost terrible. It feels right in his chest and in his hands and in the place behind his teeth.
And for a moment, Sirius understands, awfully, completely, that he is in love with Remus Lupin. That he has been in love with Remus Lupin for what is probably years. That there will never be another mouth he wants like this. That this is the mouth. That this is the one.
He could weep.
And then his mother’s hand is on his shoulder in the hallway again: We will not have to speak of it again. The cross at her throat is against his chin.
Sirius pulls back.
He doesn’t mean to. Or—that is not true. He does mean to. His hands come up between them. He puts one hand against Remus’s chest, gently, gently, with no force, like he is closing a door with the latch instead of the lock.
“Moony…” he says, and he doesn’t know what is supposed to come after.
Remus is very still. His eyes have not caught up yet. The kiss is still on his mouth.
“I can’t,” Sirius says. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Something happens to Remus’s face. It’s not anger, but Sirius wishes it were anger. Anger, he would know what to do with. What it is instead is confusion. Remus pulls his own hand back without looking at it, as though he has only just noticed it is still on the floor between them. He sits back against the bed, and he doesn’t look away. That’s the worst of it.
“Okay,” Remus says.
“It’s not—I’m not—”
“Sirius.”
“I want to.”
“Okay.”
“I want to, I just—”
“Padfoot. Stop. It’s fine.”
“S’not fine.”
“It is fine.”
“Don’t say it’s fine. Please don’t say it’s fine.”
Remus looks at him for a long moment. The radiator clanks again under the sill. The room is so quiet that Sirius can hear the snow on the window.
“What is it, then?” Remus says carefully. “Just tell me what it is. Because I just want to understand.”
Sirius opens his mouth; closes it; he looks down at his hands. His hands look like his father’s hands. He has noticed this lately—the fingers, the way they hold things. He has a sudden, useless thought, which is that he would like to take a knife to his own knuckles.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he finally says.
“Do what?”
“This. With you.”
“It’s a kiss, Padfoot. It’s not—”
“It’s not just a kiss. It was never going to be just a kiss. Not with you.”
That shuts Remus up. Something flickers behind his face that is almost hope, that is almost—and Sirius hates himself for putting it there, because he is about to take it away again. He is about to do exactly what he knows he is always going to do.
“I grew up in that house,” he says. “Moony. You have seen what comes out of that house. I am what comes out of that house. I don’t know how to—how to be tender with anyone. I don’t know how to be lo…cared for without ruining it. I will ruin it. I will.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. I do know that.”
“You don’t, Moony, because you don’t see it. You don’t see me the way I see me. You keep getting closer, and I keep thinking, any minute now he’s going to see what I actually am, and I can’t—I can’t be there when that happens. I can’t be the one who breaks your heart.”
Remus doesn’t say anything.
Sirius is shaking, he realises. It’s small, but it’s all over his body. He can hear his mother’s voice in the back of his head, the way he always can when he is in a room he is not supposed to be in. He pushes it down. He cannot push it down.
“My mother prays for me,” he continues, very quietly. “Every night. Out loud. She doesn’t have to say what she’s praying about, I—I’ve always known what she’s praying about. I’ve known since I was about twelve.”
Remus is so still beside him that Sirius can hear his breath.
“And I keep thinking that if I—if I let this happen—she’d be right. I keep thinking she’s been right all along. I keep thinking she’ll get to be right. I don’t want to be the thing she thinks I am, Moony.” His voice is going. “I don’t want to be the thing she thinks I am, and I am. I am. That’s the thing. I am, and I’ve always been, and she’s always known, and I can’t—I can’t open this door, because if I open it I’m going to have to look at it. And I can’t look at it. I can’t. I can’t.”
There’s a long silence after that.
Remus doesn’t say anything for what feels like an age. He is looking at his own knees; Sirius cannot see his face properly. His chest hurts.
Then Remus says, confidently: “She’s wrong, Padfoot.”
It’s so flat; so plain. Like he is correcting a small error on a piece of homework.
“Moony—”
“She’s wrong. About what you are. About what it is. About all of it. She’s wrong.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand fine.”
“You don’t, you don’t, you—”
“Sirius.” Remus looks up. His eyes in the lamp-light are extraordinary, brown going gold at the edges, and there is no anger in them, no pity in them, just an enormous tired patience that Sirius feels like he doesn’t deserve. “I’m not going to argue with you about it tonight. I just want you to know that I think she’s wrong. And I think one day you’ll think she’s wrong too. And I’ll still be here when you do.”
Sirius cannot answer; his throat has closed off.
“And in the meantime,” Remus continues, very gently, “I won’t kiss you again. Not until you ask. Alright?”
Sirius makes a small sound that is not really a word, but Remus takes it as an acknowledgement nevertheless.
“Alright,” Remus says, to himself, answering for him.
After a moment, Remus draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, which is what Remus does when he wants to occupy less space, when he is trying to make himself smaller to leave Sirius more room to be however he needs to be.
For a long time, they sit without talking. The radiator clanks; the snow comes down. At some point, Sirius realises that he hasn’t moved his hand from the floor, and that Remus hasn’t moved his either, and that there is again the small space between their hands that they’ve spent the whole evening not closing.
He looks at it. He thinks: he kissed me. He kissed me, and I pulled away, and he is still sitting next to me. He hasn’t even moved his hand. Sirius doesn’t know what to do with that. It doesn’t fit anywhere in the shape of what he knows about being loved.
He thinks, dully, far inside himself: I have to leave.
Not now, not tonight—he means it in the larger sense. He means London. He means the plan he’s been building in his head all summer and autumn. He means: I have to get away from him before this gets worse, before I get worse, before I do to him what I am eventually going to do. Better to leave now, before the anger comes. Better for Remus to remember him as a boy in a jumper sitting on a bedroom floor, loved by someone else’s parents, than the person Sirius is going to be by twenty.
He thinks: I hope he moves on.
The thought is so ugly he has to close his eyes against it.
Beside him, Remus shifts a little, and Sirius feels, against the back of his hand on the carpet, the smallest pressure. Remus’s little finger has hooked around his.
Sirius doesn’t look down. He doesn’t pull away.
Remus doesn’t let go.
