The Rain

THE RAIN

Rain slides down the window panes of Grimmauld Place when Remus is gone, sad streams of water that eventually disappear from Sirius' sight. His life feels insulated in this moment, as if he is separate from time, worn away and shuffled out of thought. Remus will return and Sirius knows that when he looks at him, all words will escape and all silence will converge, meaningless and out of place.

At half past eight the following day, the door downstairs creaks open and Remus comes up slowly, footfalls confident like the rain that bears down upon him. 'Sirius?' he says, and all words leave again. Remus is battle-scarred and world-weary, all things aged heroes ultimately become, but Remus isn't a hero and all his wounds come from things that heroes never have to accept.

No, he isn't cut from the same cloth as heroes, but Remus is Sirius' hero all the same, a rock to be idolized, a figure too intimate to be intimate with.

Sirius knows that Remus thinks he doesn't want to talk to him, but Remus doesn't know it's because Sirius just can't think when he's around. Sunlight hardly makes its way into Grimmauld Place and Sirius misses it desperately, misses the way it makes Remus' hair light up, misses the way it makes things slower and hazier as if he is watching the world through an amber drop. Sirius misses the touch of heat because it's so very cold in a house that lives and breathes hate.

'You look well,' Remus says during supper, over cold plates and even colder tea.

'Thank you,' Sirius says, pulling those words from a bank of phrases he used to say without any feeling or sentiment. Except Remus doesn't deserve his passing insincerity, and they have hurt each other so much that it's both okay and not okay to be falling like this. But Sirius caves in at the touch of skin, and Remus won't contaminate anything anymore, and so they neither move forward nor draw back because within stagnation lies a sort of comfort.

Remus leaves again two nights later and Sirius is left behind. He doesn't know where he would go if he had the whole world to himself. He has the whole house to himself, and he doesn't want to go anywhere, so Sirius feels that maybe it will be the same thing, should the sky and all its possibilities be opened up just for him and him alone.

It's his skin, he decides. He can't be in his skin anymore.

'Sirius?' Remus says from the doorway, and Sirius can't remember hearing him return, can't remember that he left at first until he feels Remus' eyes on him, and then he remembers the gap left behind and how he tried to fill it with hollow things like heat and food. 'I'm back.'

Yes, he is back, Sirius thinks, he's back and it has been raining for so long that London is surely flooded.

'The trip was all right,' Remus says, easing himself into a chair. Sirius remembers now: the curtains that are spelled shut, the windows that are made to absorb the water's tireless repetition of ra-ta-tat-tat against glass. Remus keeps talking, glancing down sometimes, his mouth forming words Sirius would rather feel on his skin than hear in the space between them. He talks about criss-crossing Asia and Africa, giving the names of cities and towns. Sirius tries to memorize them all, tries to tell their distances in his mind, tries to will Remus into saying that he'll show him one day, all of it, the two of them together, and Harry can make three.

'I'm worried about you, Sirius.'

'Moony, I'm fine,' he says insistently, wondering when they started along this line of questioning.

'You're thin.'

'So're you.'

'You're not eating well.'

'Been watching me, have you?' he says, and tries not to leer.

'Please, Sirius. Just take better care of yourself. For me.'

All right, Sirius says, I'll try, I promise, for you. But he doesn't tell Remus about the windows or the rain, doesn't tell him about the neuroses, doesn't tell him that it's so lonely at night or that he knows Remus wakes up without him. But Sirius can never wake up, not without Remus, not without the sliver of an R in his mind, thin and shining and fickle like the moon.

Remus doesn't leave Grimmauld Place anymore, and Sirius can see the difference. The curtains are open and the rain never stirs the house. And Sirius has his freedom now, freedom to linger and touch. Nothing is cold and Remus often sits by the windows, looking outside, waiting for something to come home. The light catches his hair and his face and his eyes, and the world turns to amber like it always has, but Remus is so sad these days and Sirius can't imagine why.