Where Drinking Gets You

Where Drinking Gets You

Remus opened the door to a pleasant-faced Sirius and an overheated, enchanted motorcycle.

"So, I was just in the neighborhood..."

"I live in a cottage in a secluded forest on the outskirts of a town populated by twelve farmers. What could you possibly have had to be in the neighborhood for?"

Sirius scratched his head with the hand holding his helmet. Who the hell was he fooling? Remus was smarter than James; he should've known he'd get right down to the point. But if that technique came complete with positive results, Remus would've cracked their shells of tomfoolery years ago.

"I needed fresh eggs. Man's gotta keep up his strength, right?"

Sirius grinned at his friend, but that did nothing to convince.

"What do you need that you couldn't have phoned me for?"

He hated that stupid Muggle machine. You put one part to your mouth, one part to your ear and talk. Talking into a machine wasn't logical. It wasn't reliable, either. Many a time, Remus had 'hung up' on him for no good reason. All right, there was probably a good reason, but he hadn't had the chance to make one last sarcastic comment. Sirius believed that if one wanted to talk to a person, one did it face to face--whether that meant person to person or mirror to mirror. Plus, he just really wanted to get out, clear his head, and his bike gave him the perfect opportunity to do it.

"I just wanted to--oh! Is that tea?"

Sirius ran into the kitchen, passing Remus who was rolling his eyes.

Whenever Sirius had troubles and needed to ask help of Remus, it was always the really bad kind of trouble, and they both knew that to be true. He had acted the same way when he'd been in trouble with the Ministry for 'created a disturbance' in their entrance hall when he went in for trial over his improper use of magic with a Muggle. Allegedly, he had opened an outlet with his powers to see up the girl's skirt, something Sirius would never contest nor admit to. It had been quite a day trying to sort all of that shit out, and Remus, the poor bloke, had been his main savior.

He was now wearing that same weary expression he wore when Sirius had come knocking on that occasion--and that was never a good sign.

Sirius sipped at his tea and looked around the room nonchalantly. "You've redecorated."

Remus put his elbows on the table and placed his chin in his intertwined fingers. "Yes, well, there isn't much else to do around here. And I got sick of reading."

"No!" said Sirius with a skeptical look. "Remus? Are you feeling okay?"

"Has it ever occurred to you, Sirius, that I do sometimes do things with my day other than stick my head in books?"

The Animagus shrugged. "Not really."

Remus sighed heavily, swirling a spoon in his tea. "Well?"

"Well..."

"No, that wasn't a pass-the-time 'well'; it was a questioning 'well'."

Sirius looked at him, an eyebrow raised. "Well?"

"Yes. Well."

"Now, which 'well' is that, exactly?"

"A question."

"I am well. Thank you, Remus."

The responsible adult never lost his temper, but Sirius was able to put him within several feet of blowing his top off. The werewolf's cheeks reddened with masked anger and his eyes were just slightly ablaze.

"Honestly, Sirius," he said calmly, letting the words slide out of his mouth through a two centimeter slit, "what did you come to see me about?"

"Were you in the middle of something, Moon? Because I can tell you're in a fairly moody mood and I wouldn't want to--Merlin's teeth, I forgot!"

Sirius' gaze was genuinely apologetic and for that, he could tell, Remus had relaxed his tense shoulders somewhat. The remainder of the tension was undoubtedly because Sirius was not likely to forget the date of a full moon, so whatever had happened to bring him to his friend's cottage was obviously of great importance.

"It's all right. I didn't scratch myself up too horribly, but I did acquire a rather large gash to the gut." Seeing the look on his friend's face, he added, "My potion was...delayed."

"What do you mean, 'delayed'?" Sirius' eyes narrowed. "It was Severus, wasn't it?"

Remus didn't look directly at him, but muttered, "Possibly."

"I'm going to scramble his insides, burn his slimy hair, and then sick myself on him so he'll know just what you--"

"Sirius, calm down!" said Remus, surprised at his friend's general protectiveness. "I'm fine. Just a few days of rest would be nice."

"I--" He shook his mop of hair. "Than I'm really sorry I have to tell you this."

Senses alert, eyes open a little bigger than they were used to being, Remus quietly asked, "Have to tell me what?"

A giant sigh accompanied by hunched shoulders and a drained expression met that question. For some reason, even when he could with all the things he had gotten in trouble with before, he wasn't able to look him in the eye when he said it.

"I, sort of...well, accidentally...got a girl...preg..."

Nor, apparently, could he bring himself to say the word of his offense. It didn't matter, either way, because Remus had stood up at 'girl'. The puppy dog gaze Sirius aimed in his direction only made his eyes flare a bit more.

"Sirius," he said softly, but with vehemence barely notable if it hadn't been looked for, "if you're pulling a fast one on me, I swear to everything holy that I will bite your ass off this time next month."

"No, no, no, Remus. I was...very serious about the issue at hand."

Shoulders tensed even more. The position Remus was in made Sirius feel like a frightened child being reprimanded for breaking a priceless family heirloom--needless to say, he knew exactly what that felt like. Remus' hands were placed on the table, but they were shaking slightly as if they wanted to grasp something and rip it to pieces.

"Yes, you were very Sirius about this whole thing, weren't you? You couldn't act responsible for five minutes if someone paid you with women!" Sirius had opened his mouth to protest, but quickly shut it. "I can't believe you. You act, but you really don't think about anything you do. You don't realize the consequences. Come to think of it, you probably don't care. How are you planning on dealing with this, Sirius? Are you going to provide for this woman and your baby? With what? You have just meager enough wages now to provide for yourself! Does she even want you to help her? How can you even be sure that it's your baby anyway?"

"Now that's an easy one. She said she hadn't been laid in..." Sirius stopped short on the information he was about to convey because of the riled look on Remus' face. "We...we just know."

"Splendid. So you got a could-have-been-respectable woman pregnant. She could have gone off and gotten herself a good paying job, a loving normal husband, a promising future. Now, she has no future. I hope that one night was damn well worth it, Sirius."

"Actually, I, uh, don't exactly recall..."

Remus stared at him for three minutes straight before he took his hands off the table and wrung them around a spare towel that had been on the back of a chair.

"Where's a knife? I need to chop up something."

As he walked past, Sirius held his hands protectively around the crease in his trousers.