Night of Nights

Night of Nights

It is morning when Sirius asks, "Tea?" and Remus answers, "Please" and the sugar doesn't help at all. Remus rests his fingers on the warm, warm mug with a little chink in it from the time he dropped it when Sirius sneaked up on him, and breathes in the steam. No words. Perhaps they've spent them all too soon, leaving none behind for silent morning teas that neither can wait to get away from before the other tries making a joke of it. No words then, no joke, only touches still prickling from the night before, touches that may or may not mean something. Remus doesn't know. He hasn't asked.

Sirius isn't eating anything. He waits until Remus has Apparated home, he always does; and so there they sit, chewing their buttered dry toast in separate kitchens and wishing certain things to be over and certain things to start, not minding to brush their tousled night-hair out of the way. James is lucky to have company for breakfast. James is lucky.

*

"Good morning, Remus."

"Good morning, Sirius."

They look at the floor as they say it, at the feet of the people around them shuffling to their seats. Peter has new shoes they see, and the floorboards are getting worn with steps of war. Everyone is tired. Everyone is greying. "Order," someone calls, "Order," but there really is no need. People are seated and the chairs creak. Sirius crosses his arms over his chest and Remus places his quietly in his lap.

Moody rises from his seat, clears his throat gruffly. He speaks of war as ever, of the things that need to be done and of the things already in motion, and people are serious and take notes with quills whose once-extravagant feathers are now drooping. Remus swallows as he glances at the rest of the Order, and as he turns towards Moody again, he catches Sirius staring.

Enough secrets are out already; theirs will be all the more difficult to reveal because of the others that they risk everything to solve. Things have been happening between them for a long time now. It isn't less of a fact just because only two people know it.

And so among others, they are friends. Among others, there is from time to time something in Sirius's eyes so wholly indefinable that Remus dares not look back. This time, he merely holds the gaze for one little moment of time, and then turns his head towards Moody yet again, to catch the latest on giant sightings. Better secret than nothing at all.

*

"Come with me." A whisper as he brushes past.

"No, Sirius. I have to get that research done." Remus looks down at his hands; they seem to fumble of their own accord.

"Maybe I could help you? Researching is my speciality, you know. Well, one of them," Sirius tries with half a grin and a lower voice usually saved for other occasions.

"Some other time," Remus responds weakly and is so very sorry.

Sirius loses his smile and lets himself be swept away in the throng.

His mood even worse, Remus goes home.

It is a small house, located far from everything and everyone, and rather badly kept as well. Small, with peeling paint and draughty windows and creaky stairs; it is small and his and Remus loves it. He needs this place of his very own, he needs somewhere there will be quiet without his having to ask for it first, and he needs to be able to drink his tea without every nerve in his body nearly snapping with the effort of holding the cup. At nights without him, he convinces himself that it is the absence of Sirius making his lips smile; and at nights with him he knows he would not smile at all had not Sirius made him.

Four years, and all the time Sirius has been laying his rent receipts on the kitchen table. Four years, and all that time Remus has not been able to look up from his tea cup. Neither of them has much money, and so to think of it in a sensible way, sharing would only be logical.

Remus likes logic. In some cases, he wholly depends on it just in order to bear a solution. But Sirius is the sort of person who might burst out in song in the middle of dreary Diagon Alley, who, when Remus Apparates into his apartment, might sit on the floor and listen to the wireless completely starkers apart from winter gloves and his Gryffindor school scarf; and while Remus doesn't actually mind, because it's Sirius and Sirius is Sirius, he's found that applying logic to that particular aspect of his life doesn't quite work all that well.

He tells Sirius that he has his reasons. But there are good reasons and bad reasons and reasons inexplicable to all except for the one who made them up, and perhaps not even them. And so Remus lives in his house and Sirius in his apartment and sometimes Sirius is naked when Remus arrives and sometimes he isn't.

*

The day is long and lets him think. The Order has him researching old Dark texts, mostly on taking advantage of the powers of so-called beasts, and he wonders just exactly whose idea of a joke this is. However, book time is usually time well spent, by Remus's standards. And he really cannot deny that it is something that has to be done, this like everything else, and while stretching his arms about noon he wonders again where Sirius was off to, and wonders again if he's going to tell him.

Gone are the days of carefree conversation, long gone are the moments where it felt like everything he could ever need in life was encapsulated in another human being. It seemed so right back then, without this terror from the outside, without everything else gnawing away at their very bones. Sirius spends a lot of time with James, or he says he does, and Remus can hardly blame him for wanting other company when he himself is so very grey and weary. Though Peter comes over for tea once in a while, he alone sadly cannot substitute their whole group of friends. Remus knows it, and Peter knows it, and his visits always end rather awkwardly with both of them proclaiming how nice it has been and that he must come again, soon.

Yes, they ought to have been four still, an entity standing together, an endless source of friendliness and terrible jokes. They ought to have been four, not one and nearly two and two that suddenly had the nerve to become three. Though he despises himself for it, Remus's visits to James's have become less frequent, and his guilt is increasing every day - somehow being holed up alone in his house makes it all easier to bear. Somehow he has half lost what he once so desperately wanted, and somehow he doesn't really care as he spots the deepening lines in his face. He thinks of the child, and himself as a child, and adds it to the list of reasons why it is a good thing he's keeping himself away from the Potters.

During the moons, it's usually just Sirius. Remus thinks of the phrase "just Sirius" and wants to weep at the thought of four years ago, when just Sirius would have meant the whole world.

Yes, Remus knows that something has gone a bit wrong along the way. But what he doesn't know is how to fix such things as this, such a thing as them, and when he looks into Sirius's hungry grey eyes at night he isn't sure if Sirius actually wants them to be fixed either. Especially as there really isn't, by the official definition, any 'them' at all.

What they're left with these days besides the physical aspect is something Remus isn't really sure he likes. Not really sure at all. But it's the only thing he's got. And so he clings to it, hard, with stubborn hands, like a proud captain does to his sinking ship in moonlight.

Most of the time it feels as if it's only about the fucks. Most of the time it feels rather good to exclude all else, too.

*

In the evening, he pops by Headquarters to deliver some translations. It's late in the way that people who have something to do are off doing it, and those who haven't aren't wasting any time getting home. Remus's surprise at seeing Caradoc Dearborn seated at the end of the large table for meetings is therefore not too great; he'd never suspected the man to be in possession of a home he'd particularly want to go home to in the first place.

"Good evening," he says amicably, and watches Caradoc jerk out of his reverie.

"Really?" he replies, his glance only hurriedly asserting Remus's identity before returning to his piece of parchment.

"I suppose pretence is as good as anything in these days," Remus answers with a sigh before depositing his scrolls in a drawer for Edgar Bones to pick up.

"Most definitely. And I'd say someone here in the Order is making a full-time job of it, as it were," Caradoc says grimly.

Remus pauses before the other man. "You don't mean -?"

"By the looks of certain recent reports from certain people, I think I most definitely mean, yes."

"But who?" Remus rasps, his throat gone dry.

"See, that's the tricky part," Caradoc says, scratching his chin with his quill. "From what I can gather from our source here, it seems to be quite a hush-hush thing, even among the Death Eaters - no doubt they too are aware of the possibility of leaks. In short, it could be anyone." He shrugs. "Could be you. Could be me, even, for all you lot know."

"Huh," is all Remus can say to that.

*

Sirius is sitting on the sofa, sleeping perhaps, and Remus steps noiselessly over to sit down by him, maybe to close his eyes as well, and the unlit living room makes the night outside steal in through the windows. He watches him breathe, calmly, chest rising within his red shirt, and then suddenly his eyes are wide open, staring at the extinguished lamp in the ceiling.

"You're late."

Remus lets his head sink backwards into a cushion.

"There was something I had to finish first."

"I bet."

"If I hadn't needed to stop by Headquarters I would have been on time, all right?" But that is not the only thing Remus has done. He has gone home and had a long and rather distressing think as well.

"Yeah. And I suppose Moody kept you with his chit-chat about the weather?" Sirius closes his eyes, and his Adam's apple bobs as he swallows.

"Hardly," answers Remus dryly. "Though Caradoc was quite eager to discuss the new gardening fashions."

The skin around Sirius's eyes crinkles slightly as he gives a weak smile, and then they both turn towards each other.

"Tomorrow I'm on night duty," Sirius says after he's kissed him.

"An expected attack?" asks Remus, something or other in his eyes.

"Dunno. Could be, I suppose."

It's Remus turn to swallow now. Sirius watches, and time is agonisingly slow.

"Did Caradoc mention anything?"

"If I had known, would I have asked you?"

"Never answer a question with a question, Moony." Sirius has straightened up now.

"We didn't really speak." Remus is deliberately vague now, not acknowledging this as proper conversation, and being rather annoyed at himself for letting it get to him all the same.

And tonight it really is all about the fucking and nothing else, the way they touch each other seemingly much more important than the way they have come to speak to each other, and if Remus shudders a bit more than usual when Sirius slowly lifts up his shirt, he does not want to let it bother him for long.

For these are not perfect times, however much one would want them to be. These are not times of lazy mornings and friendly outings in a park; quite the contrary, these are the times when Sirius starts discovering grey in Remus Lupin's hair as they roll around in desperate search for some sort of release from the world outside the bed, and the mornings are filled with dread and silent eyes, every morning, every day. It feels as if the sun has not been seen for years, and maybe, maybe it really hasn't.

*

Remus watches Sirius a lot in the weeks that come, and Sirius returns the gesture. The rumours of the spy are taken up in plenum in the Order, and though everyone appears to be shocked, they all shuffle uncomfortably in their seats as they try to sneak a peak at their neighbour. For these are the good people. These are the people in whom the rest of the population should place their trust, had they only known of their existence. And these are the people who have to deal with evil looking upon them from within their midst, and still having to entrust each other with their lives. They are all wondering, all gathering clues, a pointless but inevitable mind task, and Sirius laughingly asks as he slides off Remus one night if he'd tell him were he the spy, and Remus whispers, "Of course, of course" as his breathing slows down to normal. "I know I wouldn't like to fuck a traitor."

*

It isn't good, but sometimes it gives Remus the memory of the feeling.

He does his work for the Order, flawlessly, attends meetings and sometimes other gatherings looking serious in every way, and in the evenings he leaves for something else entirely, something that is cold and infuriating and arousing and nostalgic, and they keep it up, words becoming scarcer and scarcer by every gasp, their feeble attempts at breakfast now completely abandoned. Remus now never looks beyond the confines of Sirius's bed, afraid of what he might find, and he knows that as long as Sirius is still able to make him weak by just breathing on him, he'll keep coming anyway.

*

The trees in his garden shed their leaves as autumn progresses, and on Halloween Remus still hasn't raked them up. He can't be bothered with tedious tasks such as this anymore. The orange on the ground make a suitable enough decoration for the day, and he leans back in his kitchen chair, stealing a moment of relaxation before starting the day in earnest. He is off to Wales today to meet with a couple of werewolves who might have some useful information; Remus suspects it will take the better part of the day to coax it out of them, however, and indeed, it does, as proved seven hours and a certain sum of Order money later.

He decides to wait until tomorrow's morning meeting to divulge what he's been given, and instead Apparates directly home. Seating himself in his only armchair, he tries reading to while away the time until he can leave for Sirius's, but after he's realised the lump in his stomach is there because he is looking forward to the evening, it is somehow hard to concentrate. Evening is a time when everything is forgotten but raw needs, and people have those, and Remus has those, but every night as he arrives back home he somehow regrets that he didn't kiss him afterwards like he used to.

Tonight, Remus says to himself every night. However, that is always before falling into the lure of Sirius's eyes as usual, and any attempt to restore some sort of mental connection is always smothered in a tight grip that Remus never wants to be released.

Tonight, says Remus to himself as he Disapparates; tonight, he murmurs as he walks into the bedroom; tonight, he insists as he flops onto the bed and sees a note on Sirius's pillow; and tonight etches itself into Remus's memory for ever as the night that made an end to all nights.

I've gone out. Don't wait up.

- S

Despite himself, Remus spends the next twelve years doing nothing but.

fin