All the Same

The stars look different tonight, wan and pale; many of them are hidden, overwhelmed by the light of the full moon. You haven't made much time in your life for stargazing, though at one time it interested you...or perhaps it was only the Astronomy Tower itself and its secrets that interested you. You'd known since your first year at Hogwarts that older students crept together to the tower during hours when it was supposed to be locked, always in pairs, always boys with girls. There wasn't ever a girl you wanted to take to look at the stars, not even when you believed that looking at the stars was all that happened up there, but there were people you had thought about being alone with up near the heavens.

Tonight everything feels upside-down, as if you were in the southern hemisphere with a view of a sky so foreign that you might almost be on another planet. The seasons would be flipped around in relation to the months, too. When you were a child, before you knew you were a wizard, you wondered why the people on the bottom half of the world didn't fall off and believed that magic must have had something to do with it. Finding out about gravity never really changed your conviction, because gravity seemed like a kind of magic, and it could stop working -- what if the Earth turned too slowly one day and everything started to unravel?

Right now it wouldn't be too hard to believe that the Earth's rotation had slowed. This night seems endless and you feel stretched thin, as if the moon is pulling on you more strongly than usual. Standing in your room, wrapped in a blanket that smells like Remus' hair, you look at the stars through the magical portal that lets you see the sky even when you're in the dungeon. You think about what you would wish for if one of them fell. But that's Muggle superstition, and such wishes have a way of backfiring. If you longed never to suffer alone again at the full moon, you'd probably find yourself suffering with someone, in another, more terrible form. And if you wished that he might not ever undergo his brutal transformation again, you might find before the month was out that you had unwittingly wished him dead.

So you hold back on wishing. The things that are good in your life right now came to you without conscious hope, unsought, and they're more than you ever expected to deserve, though still less than you might admit to dreaming. What's difficult to bear is the knowledge that you could lose everything at any moment...and that every moment spared only brings you one moment closer to the inevitable. Maybe, if you were granted a wish, you should ask simply to remember the feeling of joy when you face the coming darkness. Dumbledore speaks of love as perpetual, always in the present tense...

There's that word, slipping so easily into your thoughts that it terrifies you, and you pull the blanket more tightly around yourself. It seems absurd for a word that's neither a spell nor a curse to hold such power over you. Yet you could not bring yourself to say it before the full moon and now your thoughts are preoccupied by the possibility that perhaps you should have seized the opportunity. You never know when it may become too late.

The conversation had been whimsical, Lupin's head rolling against your chest when he twisted to look at you, grinning the grin that always makes the room drop away as if you're touching a Portkey. Your fingers had glided along his abdomen, teasing until he had shivered and twitched, and in response you had said, "I think I like that."

"If you like that, you should see what this does," he had replied, moving your hand lower, and after a few minutes of making him moan while he writhed in pleasure, panting, "Do you like that?", you had nodded.

"Yes, I do. I think I love that."

"I think I l..." You heard what he was about to say before he said it, and Lupin must have mistaken the shock on your face for disgust because he didn't finish the sentence. Holding his gaze, you lifted your head, waiting, but all the doubts that you thought were yours alone had crowded between the two of you, and it was he who broke eye contact to say something equally honest, "...I'm sorry."

Say it anyway, you had wanted to ask him, but he might have said you first, and you couldn't speak at all when you weren't sure that you could trust your own tongue. His hands and his eyes had been fixed on you so firmly that even though you still had the sense of being in motion, flying to an unknown destination, being so close to him made it easier to look into the future, to commit to wherever you were headed: "Tomorrow?"

And he had smiled, "All right," and it had been, because neither of you had been thinking of the clock, the calendar -- neither of you had remembered that tomorrow, which is now today, would end so abruptly with moonrise. It should have been strange to touch him, knowing how much his body would change -- that form to which you have allowed yourself to become so attached. What if he ceased to exist in that form? What if some dark magic trapped him forever as the wolf? What would you call your feelings then?

You swallow back regret at your selfishness, thinking of your own body, which you doubt anyone would describe as desirable. You've always been hopeless at sex, it's too overwhelming, whether it's with a near-stranger or someone you've allowed to get close for a brief time (always brief, there has never been anyone you could afford to trust more than that). The experience has always been equal parts discomfort and unease to pleasure, and in the moment you've often felt embarrassed instead of excited. Still, you've always suspected that it could have been better if you tried it with the right person, and you were determined to impress Lupin even if you didn't end up any more satisfied than before.

You might have known that he wouldn't have let you rush, getting yourself so tense trying to hold back your responses that he said let's not do this now because your whole body's saying you don't really want to. Then you unwound a little, telling him that it was all right even when it smarted...and again a few minutes later when it really was all right, then better than all right, and then so much better that you cried and shouted and couldn't have cared less. You've no idea what you said, then, but you wonder if what he said -- mostly "Oh God" and "Yes" -- were substitute words, things that are safe to blurt out in bed to make sure one doesn't blurt out other things.

There's the pole star, the Plough in the northern sky, and that bright reddish point must be Mars. The bringer of war and upheaval will have moved slightly in relation to the other stars by tomorrow, when the moon is no longer full and you can see Lupin again. Still wrapped in the blanket, you sleep and dream of wolves and wishes.

In the morning there are students to be silenced and parchments to be marked with emphatic red underlines, so it is evening again before you can escape from your responsibilities. Lupin looks pale and tired, and though he seems gratifyingly pleased to see you, you find it difficult to talk to him like this. There are too many memories connected to the memory of the man in the form of a wolf, too many subjects you dare not discuss, though so much of that unpleasant history has faded like starlight at dawn since you and he have been together. When you have both finished your tea, you get up to put the cups away even though you might have used magic to do so, and he finds you at the window, looking out at the night sky.

"Are you all right?" he asks softly, his hoarse voice making you feel an inexplicable mix of arousal and shame. Stepping close behind you, he rests his chin on your shoulder, pressing his unshaven cheek against your face. It feels scratchy and solid, much more real than all the nebulous doubts that have been plaguing you.

"I was looking at the stars," you tell him.

The hands that have been creeping around your sides falter. "I've never known you to stargaze, Severus." In your preoccupation, you didn't notice how cool the night air had become, and you repress a shiver as he steps back. "Did you want to be alone?"

"It was a momentary distraction." Turning to look at him, you find yourself surprised by the uncertainty in his expression. "Are you cold? I was thinking that that fire should be built up."

"I was thinking that you might be more comfortable elsewhere." Lupin's eyes are warm but sad. "I realize that I'm very poor company tonight. If you'd like to go..."

Somehow you have conveyed the opposite intention to your desire, which is to sleep through the night with the heat of his body keeping you warm. "I'd like to stay. Unless you aren't feeling up to having a guest."

His warm hand closes over yours. "You aren't a guest," he insists, his grin sending a wave of heat over you. "You're my lover, and I want you here. But I also don't want you to feel uncomfortable..."

"Come to bed," you interrupt, three words that have never lost power between you since that night when you spoke them in what you thought was innocence. In bed, everything is easier; the two of you communicate without words with far greater skill than you have ever had in conversation, and you don't mind nearly so much when it seems that Lupin can read your mind. He takes you to his room, yet as you watch him undress, you find yourself nervous again -- you don't know whether you can hold him without your body responding and you don't know whether you can touch him without hurting him.

When Lupin's eyes meet yours across the bed, he looks sad again. "Something's bothering you," he observes. "Is it too soon after the full moon?"

"I might ask you the same thing." He frowns slightly before comprehension lights his expression, and then he smiles broadly.

"I won't break, Severus. I'm tired and stiff, not fragile." As he speaks, Lupin turns down the covers, sliding beneath them with a gesture that indicates his wish for you to join him.

You are only too happy to concede, accepting all the warmth from his blankets, his body, his smile. As you move -- slowly, so as not to hurt him -- into his arms, you raise your wand to snuff the candles and catch a glimpse of the clock. "It's a quarter till tomorrow."

For a moment Lupin looks puzzled. Then he gives you the smile that can stop the world from rotating, though his eyes look a little shy. "Let's not wait till morning," he replies, and he's kissing you, sliding you flat against the mattress. You think of the stars, as unchanging from last night to tonight as they were a hundred years ago, and suddenly you cannot remember why you ever felt compelled to rush. You ask him a few times whether he's all right, but from his gasps and moans of encouragement, you come to the conclusion that he is, indeed, not fragile, and being with him now is such a strange blend of familiar and foreign that it soon takes all your concentration just to keep from losing your grip, falling over the edge.

Lupin catches you when gravity stops working, as you had always known it might, and when it starts again you tell him about the night before, the stars and thinking about wishes, even though such words are so difficult for you. The other words are already present, hovering between the two of you.

Although you haven't stopped falling since that first night, you finally believe that this is necessary to change your sense of how fast the world spins, so that there will be time for everything...the next day, the next year, or during some unimaginable span ahead. And if the worst happens, if you do lose everything you have loved, the memory will stay with you all the same.