Chapter Text
Remus can see the figure sitting on the front steps of his little rowhouse as soon as he turns the corner, but it takes him until he’s standing at the edge of the walkway to fully comprehend that it’s Sirius. It’s fall in Boston and the air is so crisp and bright it feels like it could be bitten and Sirius is sitting with his knees to his chin, his skinny arms crossed around the frayed edges at the bottom of his jeans.
“Pads,” Remus says, and then runs out of things to say.
“Wotcher, Moony,” Sirius says. Black strands are slipping out of the haphazard bun perched at the top of his head and he looks closer to fifteen than twenty five. “Can I come in?”
“Er- yes. Yes of course,” Remus says, running on pure muscle memory. “Let me just wash up and I’ll put the hot water on.”
He has to brush against Sirius to unlock the door, who scrambles up at the first press of contact and sticks his hands in his pockets. Maybe he tries to make eye contact, Remus doesn’t know, because Remus instead looks dead ahead as he gets the door open and lets Sirius slide inside.
It’s a nice flat, bigger than anywhere Remus ever lived in London. A couple lives on the second floor but Remus has the whole first floor to himself- living room with a jumble of thrifted sofas and armchairs, kitchen with its small window and herbs growing in little vases on the sill, bathroom with a mostly-working shower, and the one bedroom tucked away at the end of the hall. Remus loves it; loves sitting in the mauve velvet wingback he found at Goodwill with a cuppa and his coursework, watching college kids and young families walk up and down the tree-lined block, loves smoking in the clawfoot white tub that’s maybe been there since the revolution, drifting in and out of a not-quite sleep as he hears the couple upstairs put their baby to bed.
Watching Sirius pick his way through Remus’s haphazardly stacked piles of books and his clashing throw blankets is almost too much, so Remus locks the door behind them and heads straight into the kitchen, trying his hardest not to think at all as he fills the little kettle under the tap and sets it on the stove.
“It’s really pretty,” Sirius says, and Remus turns to find him standing in the doorway, almost intentionally not leaning against the frame. “The flat, I mean. Looks like a proper adult lives here.”
“I try to be,” Remus says, and now they’re just staring at each other, the small kitchen only giving them a foot or two of space between themselves. It’s been almost two years, Remus thinks, since they last saw each other and only for a few minutes then, and Sirius looks too real at the edges in an overlarge red jumper that Remus recognizes from where it often graced the floor of their dorm room.
“Are you hungry?” Remus asks, just to have something to say, and Sirius nods like any of this is normal.
“If you have something small, I’d eat,” he says.
Remus is fairly sure there’s food in the fridge. It’d been a wonder, his first year on a PhD stipend, to realize he could reliably put food on the table six nights out of seven. It’s still a novelty now, to open his fridge and pull out a bag of oranges, one of which he hands to Sirius, both of them careful not to let their fingertips touch.
“Thanks,” Sirius says, and for a while the only sound in the kitchen is the gentle scrape as Sirius peels the fruit and the wind whipping up the old trees in the backyard. Eventually, the kettle whistles and Sirius finishes peeling, and Remus is halfway through making the second cup with milk and two sugars before he thinks maybe Sirius’s tea preferences have changed.
But Sirius takes the cup in his free hand and declares it “perfect,” so they walk back into the living room and take two of the seats- Remus in his wingback and Sirius on the blue fabric couch.
“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” Remus says, which is an absurd thing to say because he wasn’t expecting Sirius, they had made no plans, but it feels less absurd than asking what are you doing here or what do you want from me .
“It was nice,” Sirius shrugs. Outside the bay window it’s dark, the street lit by the looming lamps lost to the late-night fog that drifts in off the bay. “You know I love to people watch.”
Remus thinks he might not know anything about Sirius anymore, although some days it feels like Sirius and James and even Peter are so stitched into his muscle memory that he’ll be ninety before he can look at a flower or a piece of fruit and not know what each of them would say about it. This might be Sirius’s first time in the States, Remus realizes, and he cannot parse out why that feels significant.
“Is everything alright?” Remus finally asks, watching Sirius balance his mug on his knees as he struggles to separate two orange slices from each other.
Sirius gets the piece in his mouth then and chews before he answers, holding his mug with his left hand. “I mean,” he starts, “not really, no.”
Remus’s blood runs cold and Sirius must see it immediately because he scrambles to add, “Sorry, sorry, everyone is safe. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean- everyone’s fine. James and Lily are good, Harry’s fine yes.”
It’s a different kind of hurt to hear all their names in Sirius’s mouth, but Remus feels his heartbeat slow back down again. No one has heard or seen Voldemort in three years but the fear of the war hasn’t quite left Remus’s system.
“I just meant,” Sirius stutters, and he looks down into the milky tea as he speaks. “Personally. I’m not...doing the best.”
Remus says nothing, waits for Sirius to string his sentences together in a method Remus has employed countless times since they were boys at Hogwarts. Sirius would always figure himself out if given enough time and space.
As if on cue, Sirius sighs and looks up to meet Remus’s eyes for the first time. His grey eyes are a shock, their impossible depth, and they catch Remus’s own in a vice grip. Remus’s hands clenching around his cup.
“I can’t...that is, I don’t really want to be in London right now,” Sirius says. “Just for a little while. And I know we haven’t been...what I mean is I know I have no right but I was really hoping I could-”
“Yes,” Remus says, surprising them both, himself perhaps most of all because he thinks he genuinely means it. “Of course you can stay.”
He puts Sirius on the couch, that first night, after they finish their tea in near silence. Remus digs out a spare sheet and pillow from the little linen closet in the hall and Sirius takes them in his arms with a soft “thanks” before Remus all but bolts to safety behind the closed door of his room.
Alone in his bed, Remus stares up at his pale white ceiling and listens to the sounds of the couple upstairs walking across the floorboards and, more faintly, Sirius moving around the flat and the creak of the couch as a weight settles into it. The awareness of Sirius sleeping in just the other room keeps him awake for mindless hours, watching the shadows stretch themselves against the wall. Sometime close the three in the morning, Remus stirs and hears hesitant footsteps making their way down the hall to the bathroom and for a brief moment he’s nineteen again and in London, poorer than he’d ever been in his life and so unnaturally confident that things would work out just fine. He turns over in his sheets and falls back asleep.
In the morning, Remus finds the dog curled up under the red knit blanket, and Padfoot blinks his eyes open as Remus slips his shoes on, his tail just barely thumping against the cushions.
“I have an early morning lecture,” Remus explains, unsure why he’s whispering in the soft light. “But I’ll be back later today. Make yourself at home.”
He doesn’t quite run out the door but it’s a near thing, and he does walk briskly from the house to the alley outside his wards where he can apparate to the campus. The Institute shares its campus with Harvard, a fact that nearly everyone but a few of the highest level board members are unaware of, and the classrooms are scattered throughout the oldest buildings, hidden between lecture halls in a bit of spellwork Remus recognized at once from Grimmauld Place.
Remus, two months into his third year, generally doesn’t take classes anymore with the exception of a Thursday night seminar, but he TAs for Advanced Magical Theory and Reimagining the Bestiary, the latter of which is taught Wednesday mornings at eight. Remus apparates into the small, designated room at the back of Massachusetts Hall, waves to the wizarding secretary Celeste, and rushes across the Yard to the seminar room where his students are already waiting.
“Good morning, sorry,” Remus pants, dropping his bag on the desk and fishing out chalk from his pocket. “Professor Isidore is still in Japan; he was bitten by an infected Kappa and is healing fine but more slowly than expected. Let’s talk about the reading, shall we?”
It’s an odd day. Remus feels only half present in his courses, answering students questions with vague responses and drifting off during his shift at the campus library. At two, he meets with his advisor to discuss an article Remus is writing on Yumboes as a foil to House Elves in sixteenth century literature, but he loses his train of thought enough times that Professor Carmilla asks him outright if he’s okay.
“Yeah, no, it’s just-” Remus struggles to explain. “Just going through some...personal stuff.”
Carmilla gives him a gentle look. “Moon troubles?” she asks, and Remus shakes his head. It’s well known within the department that Carmilla is a vampire but in general she takes great pains to hide it, maintaining a daywalker schedule and apparating between classrooms rather than teach night seminars. He’d opened up to her about his own Dark Being status early in his second year, when the Blue Moon had left Remus with a black eye and a broken arm, and she’d been nothing but kind and perhaps even too motherly about it, sending soup to his flat the morning after many a full.
Remus shakes his head and Carmilla smiles. “Love troubles?” she teases and Remus flushes even though it’s not true either.
Remus wonders if she remembers how he’d acted that first semester when he’d just come to Boston, how he’d moved through his days in the same sort of fog he can feel encroaching on him again with Sirius’s sudden reappearance. He’d never consciously thought about leaving London, those first few months after the war. After Peter had been exposed as the secret keeper turned traitor, and Voldemort had vanished after some terrible altercation with the Longbottoms, Remus had been left standing in the rubble of his life with the implicit understanding that he was expected to rebuild it all to just as it’d been right out of Hogwarts- minus one rat. His body had been physically a wreck after nearly a year of full moons with violent packs across Britain, in fact he’d spent a good deal of the post-war celebratory months in an intensive care unit at St. Mungos. But more pressing had been the unraveling of the schemes and suspicions his friends, the only ones Remus had in the world, had been holding behind his back.
Remus had thought he could handle it, the terrible fact that they’d all- James and Sirius and even Lily at the end- had thought he was the spy. He’d spent almost year, in fact, living in that same bedsit in London, working odd jobs and going to pub nights when he was invited out. They’d all talked to him, of course, James taking him for long walks and Lily crying while she’d tried to make them dinner, apologizing over and over that they’d ever suspected him, that they’d lied to him for most of the war because they’d thought he was sneaking information to Voldemort. And Remus had told them all he forgave them, he understood they’d all done things during the war they weren’t proud of. He’d even thought he meant it.
But it had festered, the betrayal, working at his skin and corroding his bones until one morning Remus had woken up and realized he had never felt so alone in the world- not even during the worst parts of the war when no one was speaking to him and he wasn’t sure why.
He’d gone to Dumbledore then and cashed in one of the millions of favors the Old Man owed him by that point and not long after Harry’s second birthday, Remus had packed up everything he owned into two suitcases and left to start his graduate studies at the Grimoire Institute of Massachusetts Bay. Remus had let James and Sirius throw him a goodbye party and see him off to the portkey exchange station, he’d even gone back to London over his spring break his first year and had semi-uncomfortable lunches with old acquaintances. But over the last two years he’d let his letters back grow shorter and shorter until they became just holiday cards and, most recently, nursery pictures of Harry in his little white button-down. It was a slow bleeding, easier maybe than the blowout screaming match Remus sometimes imagined, but the result was the same.
Instead, he built a new life for himself, filled with his courses and long meetings with Carmilla, and perfectly lovely dates with people he met in the library or at the pop-up farmers market, and nights where he did his very best not to think about the seven years he had been happier than he’d ever expected to be, surrounded by three boys who had promised to be his pack for life.
Sirius, Remus should have figured, never really gave a shit about boundaries.
“Something from London’s come back to haunt me,” Remus shares now and Carmilla laughs.
“A real haunting, or just a metaphorical one?” she asks, because they’re Bestiary Academics, and Remus laughs too.
“A bit of both, I think,” he says, and then tries again to explain his central thesis.
He stops at the store on the way home and comes back with an armful of produce. Remus almost expects to walk into an empty apartment, to discover that last night was some sort of anxiety hallucination, but Sirius is sitting on the couch and he drops the book he’s reading as soon as Remus walks in. Remus recognizes it from the spine as his own copy of Brideshead Revisited .
“Can I help with anything?” Sirius asks, solicitous and standing too close. He smells like the apartment and his hair is wet, so he must have showered with Remus’s shampoo.
Remus shakes his head. “It’s just one bag,” he says, toeing off his shoes and moving towards the kitchen. “I figured we could cobble together some sort of stew for dinner, is that okay?”
“It sounds brilliant,” Sirius says, and he smiles with all his teeth.
They cook dinner together in the narrow kitchen, maneuvering around each other in careful choreography. Remus spells the record player to cycle through Caribou and takes a sort of sharp-edged pleasure in humming along to The Bitch is Back as he hands Sirius knives and root vegetables.
Nothing about the two nights are the same-not the setting or the music or even the recipe- but Remus cannot help but think of the last time he cooked dinner with Sirius. It was during the early bits of the war- by the end they were barely spending three minutes together in the flat- and Sirius had come home with a bag of parsnips he’d gotten while stalking two Black cousins turned Death Eaters up north. They’d roasted them in the shitty old oven that barely worked even with magic and had gotten so drunk on cheap Firewhisky while waiting for the parsnips to cook that they’d forgotten all about them until they were so burned as to be nearly inedible.
Remus is surprised to realize it's a nice memory, that it leaves him feeling warm and a little nostalgic as he putters around the kitchen mincing garlic, Sirius present just at his back. Generally, Remus finds, when he indulges in old memories, they leave his mouth tasting sour and it is hard to just hold them as nice things he used to have rather than rights than had been forcibly stripped from him. Maybe it’s because Sirius is here, just at Remus’s elbow, but Remus cannot separate all of his disparate emotions from each other enough to tell.
“Do you still smoke?” Sirius asks while the stew is simmering and so Remus cranks the volume up and leaves the door open so they can listen while they smoke on the porch. Sirius pulls a pack of clove cigarettes out of the front pocket of his leather jacket and Remus laughs at him and takes one anyway and thinks this is the oddest dream he’s ever had, sitting with Sirius on his front steps and smoking out into the darkened streets of South Boston.
“How’s Jamie?” Remus asks, to be polite.
Sirius exhales. “Good, really good,” he says. “Moody’s promoting him, or threatening to anyway. They’ll make him Head Auror in like five years if he doesn’t slow down.”
“Good for him,” Remus says, remembering that first night James had come over the flat in his Auror uniform, so chuffed with himself he wouldn’t even take it off for dinner. “And Harry?”
“Still a button and a terror,” Sirius laughs. “He’s a real person now, you wouldn’t believe it. Got independent thoughts and everything. Took him to the V&A last week and he had like, intelligent things to say about the sculptures.”
Remus smiles, trying to picture it. Last he saw Harry in person, the littlest Potter was just mastering running and putting two and three word sentences together.
“They’re thinking of going for a second, him and Lils,” Sirius volunteers.
“Like on purpose?”
“I know!” Sirius says and it’s good, Remus thinks. Better than he thought it would feel.
They finish their cigarettes and Sirius goes back for the pack, fishing out one for himself before offering the box at Remus, who shakes his head. Cloves are stronger than the cheap Pall Malls Remus gets around the corner, and he can feel his head just a little detached from the nicotine.
“I’d go half,” he says, almost entirely out of habit, but Sirius does not even blink, just hands Remus the cigarette and lighter and puts the pack away. Remus gets it lit, though his hands shake imperceptibly as he remembers countless nights of that same exchange, him and Sirius sharing a cigarette out their fire escape or in front of a club in Camden or later, towards the end of the war, in the alley behind Marlene’s place where the Order used to meet. By that point, smoking together was the most contact he and Sirius would have with each other for weeks.
He passes it over too quickly and if Sirius is thinking about those same nights he doesn’t show it, his thumb and forefinger just barely brushing Remus’s in the handoff.
Sirius smokes the same, Remus thinks, as he watches his oldest friend inhale with that quick little gasp he’s done since they learned to smoke together in third year. Remus stares for a beat and then realizes he’s just watching Sirius’s mouth and turns back to stare instead at the empty street.
“Are you gonna tell me what you’re running from?” Remus asks and Sirius passes him the cigarette. The end is just barely damp from Sirius’s mouth when Remus gets it between his own lips and it’s the oldest thrill in the world.
Sirius squeezes the fingers of his left hand with his right where they hang between his spread knees, and speaks with the air of a man in confession.
“I quit the Aurors,” he says. Remus breathes out, lets the nicotine hit the back of his brain.
“Oh?”
“And...I ended things. With Mary,” Sirius adds and Remus says nothing. He’d known the two of them were nearly engaged from Lily’s letters- the only one from the old gang who still writes Remus pages even though he mostly responds in a paragraph. Lily had described them as engaged to be engaged and when Remus had read that, the letter had started to smolder in his hands in a bit of wordless magic that took Remus a while to notice.
“We were living together, you know, so I’ve moved out of the flat but I’m not-“ Sirius bites his bottom lip, his right hand clenching. “I’m storing my stuff in Prong’s basement, for now. Just till I figure out where I’m going.”
Remus passes him the cigarette and Sirius takes it with a soft “thanks,” inhaling in that same quick gasp and exhaling with a shaking breath. Remus watches the smoke dissipate and intentionally does not think about Mary.
Sirius, right on cue, fills the silence. “Jamie thinks I’m having a quarter-life crisis.”
“Are you?” Remus asks and Sirius actually laughs.
“Maybe,” he says, and he turns to Remus to reveal he’s smiling, just at the corner of his mouth. He hands Remus the cigarette back just like that, facing him, and Remus smokes while watching back, turning only so he doesn’t exhale smoke in Sirius’s face.
“Have you ever felt like- like you were being paid to play the role of your own life?” Sirius starts all of a sudden, and it’s unclear if he’s even talking to Remus anymore. “And yes, objectively, you are killing this performance, you are acting your fucking heart out but that’s all it is? An act?”
The cigarette burns out in between Remus’s fingers. “All the time,” he offers, though Sirius doesn’t deserve it.
As if he can read Remus’s mind, Sirius sighs and says, all in a rush, “You have no reason to believe me, but I’m a better person than I used to be.”
“I didn’t say-” Remus says, but Sirius doesn’t let him finish.
“I don’t want you to think, like, my life fell apart and that’s why I came here,” he says.
“That’s exactly what happened,” Remus says, but there’s no malice in it, he’s not actually offended, although perhaps he should be.
“No, I mean, yes okay that is the order of things that did, in fact, occur,” Sirius says. He’s bouncing his right leg the way Remus knows he does when he’s nervous and Remus realizes he’s missed Sirius, missed sitting together with him and listening to him bullshit with complete sincerity, pushing his hair out of his eyes and so desperately earnest.
“But I could’ve- I mean I could have gone anywhere,” Sirius is trying to explain, and Remus decides to let him. “I could’ve not fucked my whole life up too, right. But I did all that shit- the Aurors, Mary- on purpose. I’m here on purpose, too.”
Remus thinks of saying something sarcastic and a little funny about accidental portkeys, but he doesn’t. The Sirius in front of him looks, frankly, terrified with his heart in his throat and Remus was always too kind with him .
“Can I be honest, just really honest?” Sirius asks and Remus has barely nodded before Sirius is barreling on. “I miss you, Moony. So much. And I know I don’t-,” he pauses, chokes, and Remus can’t breath, “James and I have talked about it a lot, honest- we both know we don’t have a right to your friendship but I miss it, and I miss you, and when everything in my life just, well...there was just no one else I wanted to talk to.”
Remus feels like he’s being stabbed, so slowly and tenderly it’s nearly ecstasy. “So you came to America?” he says, his voice a wreck, and Sirius nods.
“I came to you,” Sirius says.
The inside of Remus’s head is silent. A car drives by in a whoosh and the city makes quiet noises all around them, the hum of the streetlights and the faint rumble of the metro. A woman walks by with her dog and the jangle of its leash breaks the spell that Sirius seems to have wordlessly cast, holding Remus hostage.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Remus admits.
Sirius has not stopped looking at him, the grip of his gaze a fragmented embrace. “This is enough,” he says, like a promise.
“It can’t possibly be.”
“It’s not everything I want,” Sirius says. “But it’s more than I thought I’d get.”
Remus breaths, swallows. Looks out at the waning moon inching its way back to full and feels it in his bones, to the depth of his marrow. To be a beast, Remus often thinks, is to feel the pull of the world more strongly than anyone, to know that it is broken and unstoppable and all-devouring.
Remus stands up. “Come eat,” he says, tilting his chin towards the house. “It’s got to be ready by now.”
The stew is rich and just right by the time they get it into mismatched bowls, and they eat it sitting cross-legged on opposite ends of the couch. Sirius makes a big show of saying how good it is and what a chef Remus is and Remus rewards them both by getting out a bottle of the six dollar red wine he buys as a treat for himself. When they’re finished, and a little drunk, Sirius insists on doing the dishes and Remus lies back on the couch and listens to the water running behind him, the hum of another living person in his space. He hasn’t felt lonely in this flat in the three years he’s lived here but it feels fuller, somehow, to know that Sirius is just there, behind the wall.
Remus doesn’t mean to fall asleep but he stirs when Sirius touches his shoulder. Remus rubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm and looks up into the curtain of Sirius’s hair and time contracts just then, knits itself together, and they could be fourteen and Sirius is waking him up for class after a long night.
“Did you want to sleep here?” this older Sirius asks, his voice low. “Only, I know your back is a bitch if you don’t get to stretch out.”
“No, no, you’re right,” Remus says blearily, and he stumbles up and into Sirius’s waiting hands. It’s the most intentional physical contact they’ve had yet, and Sirius’s hands are warm against his arms and the small of his back as Remus rights himself and then remembers.
Sirius must see it happen, the way memory sours the corners of Remus’s eyes, because he lets go at once and steps back, careful and polite. Remus doesn’t know why he wants to scream.
“Good night, Sirius,” he says.
“Night, Moony,” Sirius says. No one has called Remus Moony in two years and now Sirius has done it three times in twenty four hours.
There’s too much to say, and all of it impossible, even the fragile question that worms itself together at the back of Remus’s tongue, the great reflection that I don’t know if I can give you everything again and so maybe I can’t give you anything.
So Remus nods and holds his own arms and walks himself down the narrow hall to bed, intending to spend the next exhaustive hours tearing his brain and his heart apart but instead, almost instantly, falls asleep.