Blood Brothers

"That seeker had it coming," Sirius Black growled, sounding more dog than man, more wolf than dog. "He meant to knock Potter off his broom, and I'm sick of those Slytherin shits thinking they own this place."

Sirius was kicking ineffectually at the headboard of his bed, blind to the muddy splotches his boots were leaving on formerly white sheets. The worst thing about Hogwarts, he reflected, was that it was built to last. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing about the place would ever really change. He could kick this bed frame until each and every bone in his body shattered from the force of his exertion, but he would never make an imprint in the wood, never crack the bed down the middle like he wanted to. That was the way Hogwarts was--impermeable, untouchable, forever. It made him want to be sick, how long the castle had lived, how long its memory lasted.

Remus didn't bother to reply, knowing that whatever he said would be unheard, unwanted. He just did what he was best at these days, from all the practice--he sat crossed-legged on his bed, watching silently and waiting for his friend's fury to burn itself out. Remus knew that it would, as it always did sooner or later, but that didn't make watching this part any easier. It might take hours, or even days, but when Sirius came back to himself, Remus would be there.

Sirius could feel Remus's unflappable calm radiating all around them, and it almost made him forget that he was furious, that he wanted to crush the whole world to bits and just be done with everything. Even Potter had been frightened of him this time, not quite daring to look Sirius in the eye as he had stormed off the quidditch pitch, every inch of him pulled taut with rage.

But here was Moony, still and peaceful, everything about him smooth and comforting and glowing from within, like one of the stained-glass saints Sirius had once seen in a muggle church. No matter what Sirius did, no matter how vicious or cruel or uncalled for his actions might be, Remus was never afraid. Sirius guessed that it was because of the wolf in him, because he knew what it meant to be trapped in a body out of control, too hot and thrumming with anger to be denied its release.

"Did you see the look on Dumbledore's face when he pulled me off that punk?" Sirius was torturing himself, poking at a sore that had been festering in him for some time. It had been easy to see that Dumbledore wasn't shocked by Sirius's behavior during the game, by how he'd tackled the Slytherin seeker right off his broom, ground him into the mud until the larger boy was crying and bloody. Dumbledore hadn't even bothered to sound angry when he'd ordered Sirius, a little boy being sent to bed without dinner, to wait for him in Gryffindor tower.

"I saw." Remus finally spoke, trying to keep frustration from thickening his voice. Sirius was a good person, maybe the best Remus had ever known: He was as kind and generous as he was brave and strong, but he somehow always managed to get in the way of himself. It didn't help that what people saw about him, what they remembered about him, was what they expected--that he just was another Black, all prickles and thorns and evil intent.

Sirius had only seen surprise written on the face of the great and mighty Dumbledore once in all his five years at Hogwarts--when the sorting hat had said Gryffindor, not Slytherin. Sirius was a legacy, after all. He was the product of twenty generations or more of Slytherins, and packed up in his trunk out in the hallway had been green and silver scarves and robes and a winter hat with the Slytherin insignia woven right into it. That day, when Sirius was assigned to Gryffindor house, the only person who had been more surprised than Dumbledore was Sirius himself. And this day, out in the muck of the quidditch pitch, Sirius had been the only person less surprised by what was happening than Dumbledore.

"He was waiting for this." Sirius gave the headboard one final kick, really putting his back into it. The sound of it was solid, imposing, but nothing happened. "To expel me, for once and for all. Or maybe to move me to Slytherin, where I belong."

It was funny, Remus thought, how Sirius could go for a month without saying anything in earnest, anything that meant something real. His friend was full of jokes and fun and sometimes menace, but all the time he was mostly just afraid. Remus was the only one to know the truth of it, the only one to see Sirius like this: a frightened, sullen little boy prone to ruffled hair and whimpered doubts. Even Potter, who everybody knew to be Sirius's best friend, wouldn't recognize the boy sprawled out before Remus, staring blankly up into the canopy of his four-poster bed.

"Don't be ridiculous," Remus finally replied, doing his best impression of a trustworthy grownup. Of someone who actually knew what he was talking about. "Even Dumbledore can't overrule the Sorting Hat; it knew where you belonged when it sorted you. And being a Gryffindor is a Forever thing, not a While You Behave thing."

"Do you think?" Sirius knew that Remus could see right through him, could hear the desperate hope ringing through every fiber of his being, but he honestly didn't care. Being alone with Remus, surrounded by the graceful curves of Gryffindor tower and the cozy clutter his best friends' things, Sirius felt as if he was in a different world. One where he was safe and protected and, for the first time in his life, loved.

"I don't think. I know."

Sirius heard a quiet rustle of movement from Remus's direction, but didn't shift his attention from the thin bands of wood that curved like ribs above him, supporting his bed's canopy.

Years later, Sirius wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that love itself had been part of his Godson's early defense against those who would have done him harm. When Sirius first came to Hogwarts he had had no idea what the thing really meant--to him, love was nothing more than a footnote in the big, leather-bound volumes of history he was forced to read by the long string of tutors employed by the Black family. In those books, someone was always jumping off a cliff or starting a war or inventing some truly brutal hex in its name, and to Sirius it seemed like an emotion best avoided by the wise.

But when Sirius felt Remus's weight, tentative on the edge of the bed, when he felt his friend's hand splay flat across his chest, warm and tender and comforting, he knew that what he'd grown up believing was wrong. Love wasn't what he'd thought; it wasn't even just an emotion--it was magic, just as powerful as any spell. Sirius's love for Remus was so strong that just being close to him melted Sirius's anger, melted his bones, left him limp, drowsy, sighing, content.

Sirius stayed frozen in place, hesitant even to breathe for fear Remus would realize what he was doing, that the peaceful enchantment that had settled over the two boys would be broken. Touching like this was forbidden, after all. If the other boys saw Remus pulling Sirius's head onto his lap, saw the lazy circles he drew on Sirius's temples, their lives would suddenly become harder than they'd ever been. But knowing this didn't stop Remus's hands, and it didn't stop Sirius's desire for his friend from burning a hole right through his chest.

"When I was first bitten, I had the worst headaches you can imagine." Remus finally interrupted their long, companionable silence, his voice as soft as his hands. "My body was getting used to the wolf, I guess, my insides being rearranged in its image. And nothing could make the pain go away--not magic, not even the muggle medicines my parents finally got desperate enough to try. But sometimes my mum would come into my room and I would put my head in her lap and she would touch me just like this." Remus increased the pressure of his strokes on Sirius's temples, sending goosebumps surging up and down his spine. "It helped."

"We're just alike, aren't we, Moony?" If he had been part cat, not part dog, Sirius would have purred. All his life, he'd never once been touched like this: like something precious, something beloved. "People only need to know one thing about us to hate us--what's in our blood. You, the wolf, and me, the Black."

"Then let them hate us," Remus's hands moved to the sharp angles of Sirius's cheekbones, then slid down his face to rest in the hollows beneath his ear. "We aren't what they think we are, or at least we don't have to be." Sirius knew that this was as close as Remus would come to expressing displeasure at the way he'd acted this afternoon. Remus would never say that Sirius was stupid, that he was eager to loose control of himself, that he was happy to make other people hurt. Not even if they both knew those things were true.

"I heard that when muggles are sick, they get new blood. It's taken right out of somebody else's body and put into the sick muggle's veins." Sirius didn't want to look at Remus as he said this, but he couldn't help it. Remus's gaze on him was warm and trusting, and stayed that way. "I wish they'd do that to me. So I could finally be clean of my family."

Behind the little smile that curved the edges of Remus's generous mouth, Sirius could tell that his friend was working hard to be strong for him. Even so, he could feel Remus's thoughts as powerfully as if they'd been written in brail across his skin: If Sirius couldn't be free of just three hundred years of Blacks and their love of the dark arts, then there could be no hope for Remus; he would never be safe from the thousands of years of werewolf fairy stories parents had told to frighten children into behaving.

Sirius gathered his courage around him--as if he was preparing to face a particularly dangerous bludger--and he reached up to Remus, smoothing a hand through his friend's shaggy, light-brown hair. There was no more looking away, Sirius realized, no more bed, no more Gryffindor tower. All that was left in the universe was Remus and Sirius and the feel of hands on skin.

"We'll be your new blood," Remus whispered, letting Sirius's Quidditch-callused fingers trail along the curve of his mouth. "We'll be your family, James and Peter and I. Your real brothers."

But then there was a loud thud in the common room, and their private world dissolved around them like mist. Sirius had never been so happy for Peter's lack of coordination as he was right then. The sound of the heavy-set boy's footsteps pounding into the common room was followed by a quiet curse, prompted, Sirius imagined, by Peter tripping up the first few stairs to the boys dormitory. It gave them time to separate, for Sirius to sit up and for Remus to dart back to his own bed. Their panicked movements were like an admission of guilt, Remus thought, suddenly finding his attention riveted to anything in the room that wasn't Sirius.

When Peter emerged into the dormitory, huffing a bit from his climb, he found the two boys in the world whom he most wanted to be like sitting silently on their respective beds, as if they'd been waiting for him.

"Dumbledore wants you in his office, Sirius," Peter mumbled, hoping that he wouldn't live to regret being the bearer of bad news. "And is he ever mad."

"Pardon me while I wet myself with terror," Sirius snorted. In the space of two heartbeats, Remus had seen him turn from needy to cocky--making the transition from the boy that Remus would gladly die for, to the boy that everyone else knew as easily as if he'd put on a mask.

** **

It felt like a lifetime passed before Sirius returned, finding Gryffindor tower still and silent. All the good little lambs had gone off to bed, leaving him to cross the common room in the dark, to climb the steep, spiraling steps into the dormitory all on his own.

Sirius didn't bother with a lumos spell, knowing every step of the way as he did. He suspected that he could have found his bed while blindfolded, even if he'd been spun around in a hundred tight circles before being let loose in the tower. This was his home, after all, the first real one that he'd ever had. During the day, when lessons were hard or Snape was annoying or Sirius was lonely or sad, this was the place where he went when he closed his eyes. Sometimes even he dared to hope that Dumbledore would let him come back to be a professor when he grew up, in spite of the trouble that he always found himself at the exact center of.

He made it to the boys' dormitory without making a single noise, for once happy he'd spent most of his childhood as a ghost, learning how to be invisible. The only light up there was the dim glitter of distant stars peeking in through the windows, but it was still easy to see the dried mud caked all over Sirius's sheets, his pillowcase. "Stupid house elves," he murmured, feeling rage tickling its way through his veins for the second time that day. "If you try to nip off with some biscuits they're all over you, but heaven forbid that they're around when your bed is disgusting."

Sirius was halfway out of the dormitory, on his way back down for a night spent tossing and turning on one of the common room couches, when he heard Remus's voice. "How'd it go?" His friend sounded wide awake, as if he hadn't so much as closed his eyes since Sirius had left.

"Just as you'd expect the ravings of an elderly wanker to go," Sirius replied, rolling his eyes so enthusiastically that it hurt. "First he went on and on about how people sometimes find themselves at a crossroads in life, and then he wound down with all this bollocks about how important it is to choose the right path." Remus loved Dumbledore. Remus respected Dumbledore. Without Dumbledore, Remus would never have been able to attend Hogwarts. But Remus also couldn't help a snicker at Sirius's dead-on impersonation of their headmaster--his words gone all molasses slow and ramblingly significant.

"Don't go down to the common room," Remus found himself saying. Or maybe someone who sounded a lot like had said it, as Remus's brain wasn't willing to claim the words.

"They don't call me Black because that's how I like my sheets." Sirius wanted to turn away, but he couldn't; the curtains encircling Remus's four-poster bed opened up, revealing his friend's face. Sirius always thought that Remus looked more like the type to be from a great wizarding family, being as he was all elegant, aristocratic lines and curves.

"Come in." Remus's voice broke like it had when they were younger, when he first started to look more like a man than a boy.

If Remus had invited Sirius to sleep in his bed two years before, or even two hours, Sirius wouldn't have thought twice about it. There might have been a pillow fight later, and some candid talk about which of the Ravenclaw girls was filling out the fastest. Tonight, though, he considered saying no. That one word would make everything okay, would make things stay as they had always been. What had happened after the fight would be forgotten, unreal.

But Sirius didn't say the word. Instead, Remus watched him creep across the dormitory, sure that he was crazy. Sure that one of them was crazy, at least. All the time he'd known Sirius, he'd loved him, wanted to cuddle up next to him in exactly the inappropriate way that seemed likely to happen in the near future. But that's the way it was with Sirius--everyone loved him, from the house elves in the kitchen to the batty divination teacher right up to Dumbledore. A boy with a smile like that, rakish and challenging and dizzying all at once, was designed to be loved, even if only begrudgingly.

Sirius finally crawled into Remus's bed, closing its drapes tight behind him. It was awkward at first, settling into the thick blackness that fell over them, heavy as a real, physical touch. There seemed to be many more limbs in the narrow bed than possible; arms and legs and hands and foreheads were everywhere, all bumping together to cause short-remembered hurts.

"Padfoot," Remus whispered once they'd finally managed to find comfortable positions, not quite touching but close enough to taste each other's every breath. "Will you pick the right path?"

Sirius's answer came to him instantly, as if this was a test he'd spent his whole life studying for. "I don't need to. The right path picked me."

At first Sirius thought he'd imagined Remus's hushed response, but when he felt hesitant arms wrapping around him, pulling him so close that he could feel the steady beat of Remus's heart all the way from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, he knew it had been real.

"I love you, too, Moony." Funny how natural it felt, rolling off his tongue as if he'd said it a thousand times before, as if he'd been born to say it.

Long after sleep had finally come, Sirius and Remus stayed curled together, fraternal twins, warm and safe and comfortable at last.