Snowstorm

Remus twisted his fingers through his hair and glanced out of the common room window again. In the distance, a gentle pink was starting to illuminate the gray winter clouds. He stared blankly at the swirling snow and felt dread creeping into him, a pervasive spirit that would hold him hostage for the rest of the sunrise, no matter its beauty. The scroll on the table before him, blotted and dark with smudges, bore little resemblance to the perfect assignment he had envisioned when starting it eight hours before. I hate you, Sirius, he thought absently, twirling a strand of hair around his index finger. I hate that I'm sitting here, still trying to write this essay, even as the sun rises, and you're asleep in your bed, warm and unaware that I would do anything just to be near you.

Snow and Sirius went together wonderfully. Sirius had long ago learned to mask his boundless enthusiasm for life in the hopes of appearing cool, but even a hint of snow stripped away his cool and sent him sprinting out of the castle and into the frigid air. Remus remembered the night before, when Sirius, James, and he had entered the Hall and seen the gray clouds on the enchanted ceiling, just beginning to leak snowdrops the size of gumballs. Sirius threw his bag down on the Gryffindor table and walked with overly long steps back out the door. James rolled his eyes at Remus, who smiled almost apologetically and, turning, walked after Sirius's shadow.

Entering the entrance hall, Remus caught a glimpse of Sirius's black robes disappearing through the front doors and broke into a run after his friend. If he told himself the truth, he needed to see the enthusiastic Sirius, uninhibited by the posturing of adolescence. Shoving one of the heavy doors aside, he drew in his first breath of the snowy air and stopped on the steps, pulling his robe more tightly around himself. Sirius was already on the grounds, running towards the lake, a black silhouette against the fine layer of snow already lying on the earth. Remus bent down and scooped up a handful of it, examining the individual flakes and debating whether or not to chase Sirius to the water's edge. He looked back up at his friend's form and saw him stooping to the ground, also scooping up the fine snowflakes, light as grains of sugar, and then burying his face in it. Remus knew Sirius was tasting it, taking in the scent of winter and then devouring it, and his stomach lurched painfully. Dread flooded back into him as he thought about what he would do if he went down to meet Sirius by the lake, in the swirling aura of the season's first snow, and he turned around, dragged open the heavy wooden door to the castle, and returned to the hall to eat dinner.

After eating, Remus and James returned to the Gryffindor Common Room, where they joined Peter in working on a Transfiguration essay about turning furniture into four-legged animals. As always, Remus had meticulously planned out his essay the night before, outlining his main points and citing research, whereas the other two had to start the essay from scratch. As always, Remus was the last sitting at the table, long after the fire turned to ashes and everyone else in the common room had gone to bed. At some point early in the night, Sirius entered, snow in his fine black hair and cheeks red with cold, but he had immediately disappeared upstairs to bed. James and Peter tagged after him, calling goodnight to Remus, Peter glancing down at the parchment and raising his eyebrows at the blank space. Blank space, Remus thought faintly, stretching onward to infinity... Why can't I just be a blank space? Why did I spend the entire night thinking about my best friend standing in the snow when I should have been writing an essay? Groaning, he laid his head down on the parchment and turned to look at the falling snow in the dawn. He imagined the castle in the daylight, its towers crusted with white like an elaborate gingerbread house. He closed his eyes and imagined Sirius, again raising the snow to his face and tasting it.

"Hey, Remus."

Remus jerked awake, pulling his head up from his arms and banging his knee on the table. Sirius stood against the wall next to the boys' stairwell wearing only thin pajamas, his arms crossed and his teeth chattering slightly. To Remus' eyes, he seemed smaller than normal, and slightly awkward. He had a tense half smile on his face. "Are you still working?"

Remus closed his eyes and sighed, mentally preparing himself for a day without sleep. "No, I think I've done all I can." He sensed Sirius coming towards him; heard him shaking with cold, and then felt his presence as he sat down in the chair next to Remus'.

"You could skive off Divination and get some sleep," Sirius said gently. It was a tone of voice Remus rarely heard from his friend.

"That's a good idea," he said, surprising himself. "Maybe I will." He opened his eyes and looked at Sirius. "When did you write your Transfiguration essay?"

"Last night, in the room." Sirius quickly raised his eyes from Remus' face to the window.

"It's been snowing all night," Remus said softly, studying the sharp features of Sirius' face. "I wonder how long it will last."

Sirius reached across the table and grabbed Peter's half empty teacup. He swirled around the cold liquid and then gulped it down, making a hideous face. "Yeeecch." He stared down into the cup and said, "And now, from these tea leaves, I will divine how long the snowstorm will last." He reached into the cup with his index finger and prodded the soggy residue at the bottom. "I see..." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Can it be? I can't see anything! It must mean the castle will be buried in snow!"

Remus started laughing. "Or maybe the castle will be buried in tea leaves."

Sirius raised one eyebrow. "A very real concern." Remus laughed harder, and Sirius slammed the tea cup down on the table mockingly. "How dare you impugn my art?"

"Oh, I don't know, possibly because you're terrible at it," Remus said, smiling and laying his head down on his arms again. "Take notes for me in Divination, will you?"

"Maybe I won't go either," Sirius said, mirroring Remus' position. "I could do with some extra sleep too. I need to build up my strength for the excellent snowball fight later tonight."

Remus closed his eyes, trying to ward off the swelling emotion inside of him. Seven years, he thought, seven years I've known Sirius. Five years I've had a crush on him, two that its been harder and harder to hide. This was their last year at Hogwarts; he felt impending doom at leaving this cozy world where he'd made his first true friends and struggling, alone, through the hard cold place outside of the castle walls. Ever since he'd begun his final year, he'd felt this: a knot of fright and uncertainty wearing the walls of his stomach thin. He wondered if Sirius felt it too, and then the thought of Sirius made that other emotion well within him again. Every time he and Sirius were alone, he sensed a potential in himself to do something crazy, just to let Sirius know how much he loved him.

A cold hand on his shoulder startled his eyes open. "Moony, maybe you should go sleep in your bed. It's freezing down here."

He looked at Sirius, at the genuine concern on his friend's face, and then he said exactly what he didn't mean to. "Your hand is really cold." Sirius started to pull it away, but Remus reached up and caught it, and the movement was instinctual rather than intellectual. If he had taken even a second to think about what he was doing, he would have let Sirius go, but instead he drew his friend's hand into both of his and rubbed it. A second later, as his brain caught up with his body, he felt mortified but realized how stupid it would look to throw down the hand. He kept on rubbing, waiting for Sirius to stop him. After a few seconds he glanced up at his friend and saw him watching their entwined hands, a fascinated expression on his face. Then Sirius reached out with his other hand and wrapped it around one of Remus'.

"I guess the house elves didn't restart the fire. Probably because I was down here," Remus said, watching Sirius' face.

"Yeah," Sirius said, his voice almost a whisper. Remus felt the emotion trying to break out of him. He was going to say or do something insane in just a few seconds if something didn't distract him from Sirius' touch.

"Do you ever think about what it will be like once we graduate?" Sirius asked suddenly. His fingers tightened around Remus' hands.

"Yes," Remus replied, wondering if Sirius was somehow reading his mind.

"I worry about it a lot," Sirius said. He was staring out the window again. "I don't know if I'm ready to survive on my own. I certainly know I'm not done with all the learning I need."

Remus squeezed Sirius' hands back, noticing that his breath was turning into crystals of ice in the air but not feeling cold. "I don't think we can ever learn enough."

"You know what I mean, Remus." Sirius was suddenly frustrated. "We have to fight in the war, whether we want to or not, and if we aren't educated enough, we'll just be helping the Death Eaters."

Remus sighed and leaned his forehead against their hands. Sirius' fingertips were still cold, and he rubbed his head against them. The war, he thought faintly, I'm sitting here worrying about my schoolboy crush, and Sirius is thinking of the war. "I don't know what to tell you, Sirius," he said honestly. "I don't know how we'll do, I don't know who will win, and I don't know if we'll even live to see the end."

Sirius stood up abruptly, pulling his hands away from Remus. "I'm going back to bed," he said, his voice rising on the last word.

Remus gathered up his parchment, books, and quills. "Me too." He looked back out the window, where the snow gathered around the joints in the glass. "Snowy days always make me want to curl up in bed with hot chocolate and book."

Sirius was already halfway to the stairs, but he stopped and turned back to look at Remus. "Snowy days make me want to run outside and dance," he said, but there was no elation in his voice. "I wonder how many more we'll see." Then he was gone. By the time Remus entered the bedroom, the curtains around Sirius' bed were closed.

Remus set everything down beside his bed and then yanked off his robes and shoes, angry at himself for upsetting Sirius and breaking their connection. He lay down on his bed and tried to calm himself for a few hours sleep, but he kept remembering his own silly words, sounding as if he were trying to ignore Sirius' fears. These glimpses of the real Sirius--the one without pretense, with emotions and a personality beyond boredom--were too few and far between for him to push aside. After a few minutes he stood up again, wincing as his feet touched the cold stone floor, and walked over to Sirius' bed.

"Hey Sirius?" he whispered, leaning close to the curtains. "Can I sit down?"

Sirius stuck his head between the sheets of long red cloth. He didn't look as if he'd been asleep. "Yeah, sure." He pushed one of the sheets aside. "Have a seat."

Remus crawled onto Sirius' bed and sat, crossing his legs. "I'm sorry if I seemed like I wasn't listening to your concerns," he said awkwardly.

Sirius sighed. "I'm sorry for getting all morbid with you. I was just thinking of my brother, Regulus." He reached up and pushed a chunk of hair behind his ear. "I know I'm supposed to hate my family and everything, but..."

"They are your family," Remus said quietly. "You can't hate them, no matter how much you think you should." He remembered when Sirius' brother died, the year before, murdered on Voldemort's order. Outwardly, Sirius hadn't shown any emotion; inwardly, Remus guessed, he'd been severely hurt. He hadn't been invited to the funeral.

Sirius lay down on the bed, curling into a ball. "Moony, I feel like I can tell you anything," he said, looking up at Remus with a very dog-like pleading expression. "More so than James and Peter."

Remus shrugged, feeling embarrassed and slightly dishonest. I haven't been telling you everything, Sirius, he thought. "You can tell me anything, but I'm sure they'd listen too."

Sirius closed his eyes. "They don't quite know who I am, Moony."

Remus lay down carefully, stretching out beside Sirius but maintaining a distance of several inches between them. "And you think I do?"

"I think you know more than anyone." Sirius' voice was so quiet that Remus could barely hear him. "If I die soon, promise me you'll tell them who I was really."

Remus swallowed hard. "Stop worrying about dying, Sirius."

"Promise me," Sirius repeated. "I'm not worrying about dying. I know I can't change the future. I'm much more worried about being remembered as someone I wasn't." He paused and sat up, a haunted look on his face. "After all, once you're dead, all you are is memories. If those memories are wrong, then you don't exist at all." He lay back down, but his black eyes were burning with the idea.

"I promise," Remus whispered. He waited a few minutes, lying as still as possible, until he heard Sirius' breathing slow down and even out. Then he rolled on his side to watch his friend sleep. A half hour passed, and he still couldn't sleep, as he tried to arrange in his mind who the real Sirius was. He heard James and Peter getting up, and then he heard Peter say, "Remus must still be down there working."

"Poor guy," James said. "Where's Sirius?"

Remus shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep as he heard James opening the bed curtains. Then the cloth was pulled shut again, and he heard James say, "Peter..."

"Yeah?" came the reply. Remus held his breath, waiting.

"What do you think about Sirius and Remus?"

There was a long pause, in which Remus assumed Peter was furrowing his brow and looking confused. "They're great guys..."

"Yeah, I know. I mean." James paused. "Like, what do you think about them, I don't know, together."

Remus heard Peter crossing the room, and then the curtains being parted and then closed yet again. He hoped Sirius wouldn't wake up. "I think..." He could almost hear Peter thinking. "I think we're all just looking for someone to hold onto during these times." It was an uncharacteristically candid statement for Peter, and Remus heard the truth in it. So, apparently, did James.

"I've always sort of guessed something like this would happen between them," he said, sounding uncertain. "I don't have a problem with it," he added quickly.

"Me either," Peter said. "And maybe we're jumping to conclusions. I mean, they're just sleeping in the same bed, on top of the covers, nowhere near each other." Yeah, Remus thought defensively. Maybe you are jumping to conclusions. We're not even touching, and I don't even know if Sirius feels the same way about me as I do about him. Hope welled up inside of him, warm and jumpy. He wanted James to be right so badly that it hurt.

"I don't think we're jumping to conclusions," James replied, and Remus sensed the knowing look passing between his friends. Then there was an awkward silence. "Hey, let's get to breakfast and let them be."

"Yeah, let's go," Peter agreed, and then Remus heard them leave. He relaxed a bit and felt his body sinking into the pillow and featherbed mattress. He closed his eyes, but after an hour could only achieve a restless half-sleep, where fragments of dreams appeared behind his eyes in a disjointed narrative of snow, tea leaves, burning black eyes, and a strange hippogriff made of pine and chocolate frogs gallivanting past gingerbread houses.

At some point James and Peter reentered the room, talking loudly about how Care of Magical Creatures and Herbology had both been cancelled due to the snow. They were in high spirits, and spent only a few seconds dropping off their books before tromping back down the stairs. Remus groaned and opened his eyes, resigned to not getting any sleep, even though he desperately needed it.

"Good morning," Sirius said quietly, and Remus realized that his friend was awake and watching him intently.

"Hey, Paddy," Remus managed before yawning widely. "So, so tired."

Sirius grinned. "So go to sleep!"

"I'm in your bed," Remus said, testing out Sirius' reaction.

"I assure you it's just as comfortable as yours."

"I also cannot sleep, and I don't know why."

"Transfiguration essay getting you down?" Sirius asked quietly, still grinning. "We don't have to turn it in for a while, and since the classes between now and then are cancelled, you can bring it up to the usual perfect Remus standard."

"Shut up," Remus mumbled, trying halfheartedly to hit his friend. Sirius grabbed his hand and then playfully punched himself in the stomach with it.

"Ow, you really hurt me, Moony! I give up!" Sirius was laughing now.

"I just want to sleep," Remus mumbled, trying to bury his head in the pillow and free his arm. "S'all I want."

"In the whole world?" Sirius replied teasingly. If Remus had been more awake, he would have detected a flirtatious air to the question, but as he was barely conscious nothing registered.

"Gimme my arm, Paddy!"

"Fight me for it!"

Remus growled and leapt at Sirius, biting down on his friend's wrist. "Want to become a werewolf?" he asked, his voice muffled by the warm arm in his mouth.

"You insult my intelligence. You can't give me anything except a bruise right now." Sirius glanced at the moon chart he kept above his bed. "Of course, if you want to wait like that for seven days..." Remus growled again. "You're right, you're already drooling on me, I can't imagine what it would be like after seven days." Remus gave him a very dirty look, and Sirius laughed even harder. "Plus, think of all the class you'd miss." He released Remus' hand, and Remus released his wrist and flopped back onto the bed. "Don't sulk."

"What do you want from me?" Remus demanded in exasperation. He loved the teasing play between them, but he could feel the desperation building in him again; in a minute, he was going to pin Sirius to the bed and kiss him, and that would be disastrous for all concerned.

"I want you to be happy," Sirius replied, curling back into a ball. "I just want everyone to be happy." He paused. "Wouldn't it be odd if I were to start acting like a dog and had to circle around a bit before I could sleep?" He hopped onto all fours and tried it, nearly falling off the bed. "Oh, damn."

"You were right, Sirius," Remus said, watching his friend with one eye open. The tension was nearly unbearable. "No one really does know the real you. They all think you're cool, but turns out you're a total prat."

Sirius started laughing. "I have to act cool in front of most people, Remus, but I know I can act like a prat in front of you. After all, you're ten times worse than I am. I'm just trying to make you feel better about yourself."

Remus sat up, pretending to be offended. "That's it! I'm going to work on my essay." Truthfully, he couldn't take another minute lying beside Sirius; he thought his heart might explode.

He spent the rest of the morning trying to calm himself down and rewriting the essay. Sirius would enter the common room from time to time, covered in snow and looking far less cool than usual, and beg Remus to come outside and join the snowball fight, but Remus was haunted by visions of himself tackling Sirius into the snow and destroying their friendship. By lunchtime he couldn't find anything wrong with the essay, and he was forced to eat with his friends. Peter and James kept shooting strange looks at he and Sirius, and occasionally James tried to ask leading questions about the night before; they always resulted in Sirius giving some nonsensical answer, shoving another forkful of food in his mouth, and then coming half out of his seat to look up at the ceiling. The snowstorm had turned into a full-fledged blizzard, and the ceiling looked like a giant salt shaker with its lid fallen off in an attempt to convey the weather. Eventually they saw Dumbledore clap his hands and the ceiling turned to a sunny day, complete with tropical birds roosting in the rafters. Sirius plunked back down in his seat and ate even faster, looking extremely put out.

After lunch, Transfiguration seemed to take far longer than it should have for being the only class Remus had attended all day. He sat in the back row, between Peter and Sirius, and took copious notes in an effort to stay awake. Beside him, Sirius hummed and drew pictures of black dogs eating snowballs and bouncing through snow forts. Most of the other students seemed to be equally distracted, and when James couldn't answer a simple question because he'd been too busy staring out the window, Professor McGonagall dismissed them, a bemused expression on her face. The four friends walked back to Gryffindor Tower to drop off their bags, James, Peter, and Remus walking carefully and trying not to slip on the wet castle floors while Sirius bounded ahead, completely uncontainable.

"He's like a force of nature himself," Remus said, grinning after his friend slid down the length of a hallway. "It should snow more often. It makes him crazy."

"Hey, Moony, do you have anything you want to tell us?" Peter asked suddenly, and James' head turned quickly toward Remus.

"Not really," he replied, grinning inwardly. I wish I did, but your curiosity is entertaining too, he thought. "Should I?"

James looked exasperated. "So why were you asleep in Sirius' bed this morning?" he whispered.

"Oh, I was talking to him and I fell asleep," Remus replied, almost truthfully. "Why, what are you implying?"

"Nothing," Peter said quickly. "Just looked sort of odd, you know?"

Remus shrugged. "Would you care if it had been something else?"

"No, no," James and Peter said at the same time. "We'd just want to know," James added. "Wouldn't be a problem at all."

Peter eyed Remus closely. "You sure it wasn't something else?"

"Really, yes, I am. Sirius is my friend, I daydream about kissing girls, and all that." Remus sensed a strange shift going on inside of himself. All of his real kissing daydreams involved Sirius, and no one else, but he'd never thought of it as an issue of Sirius being a male; he'd never been attracted to another boy, but then again he'd never been attracted to any girl. The implications of that hit him hard, and as they stepped into the common room he flopped into a chair and started flipping through a book moodily, ignoring his friends. James had felt that he and Sirius getting together was inevitable, and maybe, he thought unhappily, James saw something in him that he was still to immature to recognize. He glanced up at Sirius, who was listening to Peter intently, his black eyes opened wide, lips slightly parted. His hands were fumbling to put on thick gloves, and Remus remembered holding those same hands early that morning. The edges of the room started to turn gray, and Remus reached out to grip the arms of the chair, letting the book slide onto his lap. He had only had a few hours sleep the night before last, and none since then, and he was starting to feel very sick from tension and unhappiness. Suddenly James and Peter were gone, along with most of the common room, all the Gryffindors heading out onto the grounds for a massive snowball fight. Only Sirius remained, and he was kneeling before Remus, one gloved hand on top of Remus'.

"You have to come out," Sirius said softly, and Remus raised his eyebrows and didn't say anything. "It's a great snowstorm, Remus, maybe the best of the year. I don't want you to miss it." Sirius leaned in close, removing Remus' hand from the arm of the chair and taking it in his own. "Please, I want you to fight on my team. Canine power, right?"

Remus folded beneath Sirius' imploring gaze. "I feel pretty tired," he said, but he was already half-standing, half-being pulled up by Sirius. Then Sirius draped robes over Remus and pulled gloves onto his friend's hands, grinning widely.

"Not too tired that you can't have a great time," Sirius said brightly, not relinquishing one of Remus' hands and dragging him out of the common room, down the stairs, and out into the snow. He only let go when the rest of the school came into view, and by then he was running at full speed towards the rest of the Gryffindor seventh years, who were all busily bewitching a giant snow fort to transfigure snowballs into birds. Remus followed more slowly, wading through the snow and attempting to fend off stray snowballs with his wand. Peter waved to him enthusiastically, yelling, "Remus, we need your help over here! The Ravenclaws are beating us!"

Remus floundered through the snow toward the fort, but he never made it. A snowball flew from his right and hit him square in the side of the head, knocking him sideways and into a drift. He inhaled a mouthful of thick, wet snow, and pulled himself up in time to see Sirius racing toward the Ravenclaws, wand out, yelling and sending snowballs flying in all directions. James reached out to pull Remus behind the fort and said, grinning wildly, "Can you imagine how boring a muggle snowball fight would be?"

"What is Sirius doing?" Remus asked, leaning over the fort and squinting through the snow toward his friend.

"He yelled 'kamikaze' before he ran out there," Peter said, laughing and charming the top of the fort to repel snowballs into the lake.

Remus slid back down behind the fort, and the tired and dizzy feeling started to evaporate as the freezing air penetrated every corner of his body. "Well what are we doing, letting him go out there alone?" he demanded, leaping to his feet, throwing his robe back, and readying his wand.

"Um, well, we're defending the fort," Peter said.

"It's an important job for us non-suicidal kids," James agreed, looking apologetic.

Remus shook his head mockingly. "Cowards." He stepped away from the side of the fort and raced toward the Ravenclaws, filling his lungs with the delicate snow and frigid air, yelling incomprehensibly. I'm coming after you, Sirius, he thought, almost delirious with excitement. You're not going to fight alone. He leapt behind the fort, wand at the ready, and found Sirius standing before him, grinning widely and pointing toward the forest.

"I ran them off, Moony." He looked like it had been a brutal fight: snow caked his robe in various strange shapes, his hair stood up wildly and had white streaks in it, and his face was bright red and beaming. "The fort is ours."

Remus grinned and sat down in the snow, not caring about getting wet. The fort was simply two high snow walls put together at a right angle, bordering on the Forbidden Forest. In the distance, he heard the Ravenclaws yelling as they ran back to the castle. "It's almost dinnertime, isn't it?"

"Yeah, that's probably where they're off to. It will make a good excuse for deserting their fort." Sirius plunked down beside him and shook his head, snow flying in all directions. "You want to go back?"

Remus shrugged. "I just got here." His stomach lurched as he watched Sirius. This is getting ridiculous, he thought. At this rate I'll never be able to be alone around him, which means I'll never be very happy either. He felt something inside of him snap, and he made a decision: he was going to follow this emotion, and see where it led, and not try to fight it anymore. He couldn't lie to his best friend. "What do you want to do?"

"I'm not hungry," Sirius said, and then he jumped up, cocking his head to the side and listening. "Do you want to go for a walk?"

"Sure," Remus said, standing up and following Sirius as he entered the outskirts of the forest. His wolf memory stirred; this was where he played in the moonlight. There was nothing to fear from the tall snow laced trees or any of the inhabitants within, so long as they didn't disturb anything. Snow tumbled down, filtered through the branches into a gentle shower, and coated their hair and robes. They walked in silence for several minutes, always sticking to the outskirts of the forest, but far enough in to be invisible from the castle. In the silence of the snowstorm, their feet made no sound on the forest floor. Remus felt as if there had never been a more perfect moment in his life, as if time had stopped and all the violence and unhappiness in the world was so far away as to be unnoticeable.

"You know what I was thinking?" Sirius said suddenly, tilting his head up and sticking out his tongue to catch the snowflakes.

"Hm?"

"I think that we should get a flat after we graduate. James and Lily are moving in together, and Peter is going to France to train for his Ministry job, and we could get a nice, cheap place and decide what to do with our lives. It'd be great!"

Remus stopped walking and turned to look at Sirius. "It would be great," he whispered, and his heart started beating like a caged thing fighting against the bars. "But..."

Sirius stopped too, eyebrows raised in concern. "But what?" He looked down at the ground and started to fidget with his gloved hands. "Did you make plans with someone else?" he asked, sounding miserable.

Remus frowned, taken aback at Sirius' sudden vulnerability. "No, that's not the problem." He studied his friend, who continued to watch the ground intently. "I'm a bit of an idiot, that's all." He reached out and tried to brush the snow from one of Sirius' shoulders, but all he did was rub the wetness into the robe.

"You're not an idiot, Moony. You're probably the smartest person I know," Sirius said, looking at Remus' hand on his shoulder.

Remus laughed sarcastically. "Then why am I about to ruin our friendship?" he asked, not realizing that he'd said the words aloud until he saw Sirius' eyes, wide and scared. "Dammit, sorry, I didn't mean to say that."

"Then what did you mean to say?" Sirius asked quietly.

"I'm just really tired right now," Remus said. "Let's go back."

"What the hell?" Sirius said, starting to get angry. "You can't just evade the question. Tell me what you meant."

Remus took a deep breath and realized that his hand still rested on Sirius' shoulder. "Sirius, I feel terrible about this, and I don't know how to tell you." Sirius regarded him silently, and Remus felt the tension growing between them. "The thing is, I'm... I've sort of..."

"Look, Remus, you can tell me anything," Sirius said reassuringly, but he still looked frightened.

"I'm in love with you," Remus said, looking anywhere but at Sirius' face.

For several seconds, there was no sound but the branches creaking faintly under the weight of the snow. Then Sirius said, very quietly, "Oh. Well that's good, because I'm in love with you too." He paused, and Remus thought his heart was going to stop. "Silly of us, not to say that sooner, don't you think?"

Remus looked up into Sirius' eyes. "Yeah, that was silly," he agreed, in a daze, unable to believe what he was hearing. Then he leaned forward, very hesitantly, and he felt Sirius reaching toward him as well, until they were so close that Sirius' breath warmed Remus' face. They paused, as if a barrier had sprung up between them, and then Remus leaned in across the distance and they were kissing.