Sleep Disorders

Sleep Disorders

By Minnow

Neither Sirius Black nor Remus Lupin is a very sound sleeper.

Sirius tends to wake up with a jolt in the middle of the night, often from a bad dream, with threatening images of a monstrous woman looming over him, her wand directing beams of green light directly at his head. He lies there sweating, sometimes so scared that he takes his own wand from under the pillow and mutters 'Lumos', reassured beyond measure by the friendly yellow glow banishing the shadows and the fear and last vestiges of the mad, terrible face that is his abiding image of his mother.

Remus finds it hard to get to sleep in the first place. He'll obediently snuggle down in bed at ten o'clock, lights-out time for Sixth Years. Then, he'll start worrying about something, usually homework. Has he done enough for the Arithmancy? Will his Ancient Runes once again get full marks and Very Imaginative in the margin, or has he blown it this time? He can just hear Professor Sisley sneering at him, reading it to the class in a heavily sarcastic tone, as an example of something really awful.

Sometimes, he actually gets up after an hour or so of this, sneaks down to the common room, gets out his parchment and rereads the essay feverishly, erasing and correcting with his wand as he goes.

On his way back to bed, he often sees a faint light between the curtains on Sirius's bed. In the mornings, he's sometimes curious enough to ask Sirius why he couldn't sleep. Sirius, who won't admit to nightmares in the bright, emboldening light of a spring day, just shrugs.

Of course, he can hear Remus getting out of bed and tiptoeing across the dorm. Remus is thin, but he isn't light footed. He's a bit clumsy, too, and he tends to bump into things in the dark: ironic for a werewolf, Sirius often thinks.

He sometimes, at breakfast, asks Remus in what is meant to be a fairly nonchalant fashion, 'Hey, was that you banging about the dorm at two in the morning, Lupin?'

Remus will go red, and mutter something about remembering a piece of undone homework: not a likely story.

There comes a night when Remus is lying awake fretting about sardines. How do you Transfigure a sardine into an aubergine, again? Why would you want to change one foodstuff into another? For the purposes of his essay, he's just realised that it might be helpful for a vegetarian to do that, though he wonders whether the transfigured article wouldn't retain enough of the fishiness of the sardine to count as non-vegetarian.

He's pondering this, about to slip downstairs and check the textbook entry on oily fish, when he hears a loud groan from the bed next to his. Sirius has just woken from being strangled by his mother; woken gasping for breath, with his sheet tangled round his neck, not in any lethal fashion but enough to make dreams of murder rather more vivid than they usually are.

Remus is extremely fond of Sirius; well, he's his best mate, or is since becoming Padfoot. James is great, but a bit annoying sometimes if you don't feel like joining in the latest plan to alter Snivellus's hair or nose or height, or, on one memorable occasion, to blow him up to twenty stone.

So when he hears Sirius groaning, he instantly rushes over to his bed without a thought, opens the curtains, lights his wand and sees Sirius writhing about in a tangle of apparently homicidal bedclothes. At Hogwarts, in the seventies, duvets are as yet unheard of.

Remus frees Sirius, who is totally, utterly embarrassed. Remus ignores this. His instinct is to put his arms round Sirius and cradle him, the way his mother used to when he had a nightmare. But he contents himself with patting Sirius on the back, smoothing his hair as he murmurs the standard comforting phrases. 'There, there...it was only a dream.' He also reaches for the glass of slightly stale, warm water on the bedside table and holds it to Sirius's lips for a sip. He forgets to cool and freshen it with his wand, but Sirius finds it delicious anyway, after the sour taste of nightmare in his mouth.

Sirius, to his surprise, finds that Remus's presence and words are incredibly, unbelievably soothing. He finds his eyelids drooping again, and once he's politely accepted a second gulp of water he falls back to sleep, into a dream with limpid visions of rock-pools and sunshine and a boy with light brown hair and a big, happy smile.

Two days later, Remus is lying awake agonising about the Care of Magical Creatures test yesterday afternoon. He has his wand lit, because he's very tempted to go along to Professor Kettleburn's office and just check his paper, not to change it, but so he knows the worst. He thinks he remembers putting that Flobberworms ate lettuce, but he's not entirely sure. If he didn't, he loses three marks, and if he also forgot to mention that they are very tough, and can survive for months without food, he'll lose another three, and then...

The curtains round his bed open, and Sirius is there. 'Move over,' he whispers. 'D'you know, I can practically hear you thinking when you're lying awake there. I don't even need to see the light.'

Remus moves over, and Sirius gets under the covers with him. It's a cold April night, and he's shivering. 'Did you have another nightmare, Pads?'

'Yes. I usually do.'

Remus turns over so they're lying facing each other. 'What about?'

Sirius, who rarely talks about his family, hesitates, then looks into Remus's open, anxious face and smiles. 'My mother. They're not just nightmares, they'll probably come true one of these days.'

'What does she do, then?'

'Usually she's killing me. She's about to Avada Kedavra me, or sometimes she does it the Muggle way, with a knife or something. The knife dreams are the worst, I think, because I can't defend myself.'

Remus is appalled. 'But how could that come true? I mean, she doesn't threaten you, does she?'

Sirius squirms a bit. 'Um. Don't tell the other two, but she once came at me with her wand, and there were flames leaping from it, and she singed my hair. It sounds quite funny, but I was terrified. I was only a kid. About seven.'

'Well, mums do get angry,' Remus agrees. 'Mine once said she'd leave me out for the wolves to eat. That was before I got bitten, and she still feels guilty about it.' He also feels a bit bad sometimes for taking advantage of this to get his own way, and to talk her into buying him books and records she can't really afford.

'Yeah, they do. But mine...' Sirius hesitates again, looking up at the canopy so he won't be swayed by Remus's concerned expression, then comes to a decision. He sits up and rolls up his pyjama sleeve. 'See that mark? She did that with wandless magic. It was last holidays, and I'm still not sure what happened. She was telling me off about something, my hair being too long or whatever. And this...it was some sort of blade, I suppose. It just seemed to leap from her hand to my arm, and cut me. And it hurt.' He looks and feels very vulnerable for a moment, younger than his seventeen years.

Remus runs his finger along the scar. 'Shit. That's bad. You should ask Pomfrey to have a look. She's always healed all my scars. You wouldn't even know I had any, except the original one, of course.'

'Well.' Sirius decides he's gone so far he might as well go a bit further. 'I don't want it healed, actually. I want to keep it so I always remember how evil she is. Just in case I ever forget, and think she might be something...like a real mother.'

He swings his legs over the edge of the bed. 'Anyway, I better try and get some sleep.'

He doesn't ask Remus what he's been agonising over, and Remus doesn't mention it, but blows his wand light out and turns over and is soon having the kind of nightmares he hasn't had for years, about the wolf that first time, an image that has completely obliterated itself from his conscious mind. In his dreams, the wolf and Sirius's mother, whom he has only seen once, holding Regulus's hand at King's Cross outside Platorm 9 ¾, merge, and the bite hurts and hurts, in a way the scar never does now.

It's the full moon soon afterwards, and after his day sleeping in the Hospital Wing, Remus is once more lying awake at two in the morning, this time worrying about the work he has to make up. It was a good moon: he and his friends played in the Hogsmeade woods until sunrise, which was reasonably early as it's nearly May, and then Padfoot stayed a while, as he always did, transforming back into Sirius moments before Madam Pomfrey turned up: just time to grin at Remus and say, 'Well, at least I didn't have a nightmare last night, and you weren't writing essays in your head.'

He isn't writing essays now, but brooding about how he missed a key Charms lessons, where they learned advanced Accio in detail, and it's important; and though James and Sirius are so brilliant, they're not good at communicating what they've learned, especially to someone not as clever, and it's no use asking Peter, because he just doesn't understand the first thing about Charms. Or if he does, nobody's realised it yet.

He leaves his wand unlit, because he doesn't want to wake Sirius or bother him if he's sleeping off last night, which he didn't get a chance to do during the day; unless he dozed through History of Magic.

Sirius isn't asleep, though he's dog-tired, tired enough not to laugh at the pun. He hasn't had a nightmare, this time: he seems to have caught Remus's insomnia, because he too is lying awake, but not obsessing the way Remus does. He's decided he should go and check that Remus has gone to sleep, perhaps make sure he hasn't nodded off with his wand on, though he can't see any light through Remus's curtains.

If he were being honest with himself, he'd like to curl up in Remus's bed for a while and try to get some sleep then, because maybe Remus can keep the nightmares away. He wouldn't admit that he's overtired, that every time he closes his eyes the bad images chase each other behind his eyelids, and he feels a bit scared, because it's like falling. And it's like being a child again, waiting in the dark for the footsteps of his parents coming up to bed, waiting for them to be asleep, because then he's safe from abuse or beatings.

He gets up and creeps over to Remus's bed, and slips in soundlessly. 'I'm still awake,' Remus whispers, startling him.

'Moony, for heaven's sake! You're supposed to be asleep.'

'So're you.' Remus is far too tired to argue, and he and Sirius are soon sprawled out next to each other, and sometime in the night their legs get tangled, but they are both too exhausted even to notice.

Sirius, once the horrible falling sensation has evened into uniform darkness, doesn't have any nightmares; Remus goes straight into a deep sleep without worrying about Accio; and both of them dream that they're lying very close to somebody vague but beloved.

In the morning, Sirius wakes up to the sound of Remus's alarm, returns discreetly to his own bed, and by common consent neither of them mentions the night to James or Peter.

James, in fact, is still worn out himself after the full moon, rather cranky, and complaining at breakfast that the tomatoes are tinned, and the sausages underdone. Peter, who's more even-tempered, munches his way through his cornflakes in silence. There are dark circles under his eyes. Remus and Sirius find themselves occasionally glancing at each other between Sirius's good-natured replies to James's grousing - 'Prongs, the house-elves wouldn't know what a tin was!' - and passing Peter the butter, salt and sugar, according to his monosyllabic requests.

That night, Sirius decides not to wait for the nightmares, but to go along as soon James and Peter are asleep, and check that Remus isn't lying awake again worrying, but is getting a bit of the rest he needs so badly. He likes to think he can help: he sometimes feels quite protective of Remus, because he really is so scatty, and though he's clever he isn't effortlessly brilliant, and perhaps Sirius can banish some of his worries about homework and so on.

Remus hasn't worked himself up to full panic mode yet. He's still rehashing the Herbology lesson that morning, and wondering whether he should have mentioned in his essay that magical herbs shouldn't be added to food, because they have some very weird properties. He's just pondering whether he'd like to eat levitating stew, and whether the stew itself would levitate or whether you'd levitate after eating it, which would be the ideal, when Sirius slips into bed next to him. It gives him quite a shock - there's often a moment when he's so deep in speculation that the outside world recedes completely, until anxiety about work kicks in and he comes back fully to himself.

'What's tonight's subject, then?' Sirius asks, his mouth against Remus's ear, his voice tickling as it vibrates.

'What d'you mean?'

'I know you lie awake for hours. So what's the problem this time?'

'I was just thinking about Herbology.'

Sirius laughs, and the whole bed shakes. 'Moony, you are strange. Nobody thinks about Herbology. Even Professor Bean doesn't think about Herbology. Not unless she has to.'

Remus feels vaguely affronted. 'It's a very important subject. I was thinking about herbs. Magical herbs.'

Sirius shifts over so his arm is round Remus's shoulder. 'You're priceless sometimes. What a thing to think about! What's wrong with Quidditch, or, or girls or something?'

'Is that what you think about before you go to sleep?' Remus is curious. He really would love the secret of sleeping at night. During the day, if he had half a chance, he'd be able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. It's only at bedtime that he finds himself wide awake.

'Sort of. Well, girls sometimes. But then I think of my mother, so that gives me nightmares. And I try to forget about Quidditch, seeing as I've got a permanent ban.'

He doesn't add, 'Because of sending Snivellus to the Shack,' but the words hang unspoken between them in the silence.

To compensate, because he still feels vaguely guilty, Sirius says, 'Sometimes, I think about you.'

It's Remus's turn to be amused. 'Why me? Or am I so boring that the thought of me sends you to sleep?'

'No, you're not boring. You're...soothing.'

'Same thing.' Remus sounds a bit subdued, and Sirius knows him well enough to sense that he's about to go all sensitive and hurt and then he'll sulk and Sirius will have to go back to his own bed and the nightmares that lurk there.

He shifts a bit so he can put both arms round Remus who's lying facing him, and give him a comforting hug. It feels good to hold Remus, especially now in the silence when the whole world is asleep and it's just the two of them alone in the darkness. It's like being on a boat far out at sea, rocking gently on the waves.

'Now you're being an idiot, Moony. I feel...maybe you can keep the nightmares away. Perhaps it's because I told you about them or something. I'd never tell James because - well, I love Prongs, but he never has nightmares, and he'd be very matter-of-fact and say I should have long walks and cold showers and things.'

'I thought cold showers were to stop you lusting after girls.'

Sirius is silent, because he's not exactly lusting after a girl at that second. He's an adolescent boy, of course, and like any adolescent boy he's stimulated by many things, included lying in Remus's bed with his arms around him. He knows enough physiology to understand that this is a predictable reaction to closeness of any sort. It's nothing personal. He wonders whether Remus is reacting to his presence, but he's not going to ask him.

Remus is equally aroused, but he attends the same Wizarding Sex Education classes as the rest of the Sixth Years every Thursday, so, like Sirius, he accepts that bodies aren't predictable, and isn't too bothered about it. Suddenly achingly tired, half asleep, he snuggles closer, murmuring, 'G'night,' the way his mother does.

For a couple of nights after that, they sleep in their own beds, alone, and sometimes when their eyes meet, they flush and turn away. No reason for such embarrassment, really: perhaps, in the cold light of day, when the worries and nightmares are so far away, they feel they shouldn't spend their nights like that, shouldn't lie so close, or feel so warm and content when they cuddle up to each other. They're too old to look for their mothers everywhere - not that Sirius ever had a proper mother. They're not children who might sleep curled up together without being self-conscious. They're seventeen, they're doing NEWTs, they'll be going into the world soon.

On the third night, Sirius is jerked awake violently by his father screaming curses in his ear. A whole five minutes later, he's still shaking, can still hear the echoes of that angry voice across the silence in the room. He's trembling as he lights his wand; his heart is pounding so hard that he worries he's actually going to die of delayed shock and fright, right there in the Gryffindor Sixth Year boys' dorm.

Then, his hand is being held in two thinner, more delicate hands with long, white fingers, and someone is once again murmuring those soothing litanies that work so well to keep the bad dreams at bay. And tonight Remus remembers to charm the water before offering it, so that it's cold and crystal clear and tastes of winter and snow, and a touch of Christmas too.

Remus, for all the reassurance he brings, still looks almost as shaken as Sirius feels. 'Pads, are you okay? Was it a bad one? Was it your mother?'

'My father,' Sirius says, and forces a laugh. 'If it's not one, it's the other. At least I don't have nightmares about Regulus, but give it time.'

'Poor Padfoot,' Remus says, and hugs Sirius in his turn; not a friendly hug like Sirius gave him the other night, but a fierce, defensive hug that is probably a bit too passionate, a bit too tight, but Sirius doesn't mind, because it feels good and it comforts him, and anyway he's hugging Remus back with equal fervour.

'It's okay, Moony, really,' he mumbles into Remus's neck, but he doesn't really want him to let go, any more than he wants to let go of him. If the other night was like being becalmed in a boat, tonight is like being adrift in a choppy sea, clutching each other for dear life.

Sirius wants to know what Remus has been pondering, deep in the night, awake enough to hear the slightest sounds from his bed, see the tiny crack of light through the curtains.

In fact, Remus has been thinking that Transfiguration sometimes doesn't make an awful lot of sense, as he tries to explain to Sirius once they're both calm again and the wand light is out and they're lying together in Sirius's bed with a silencing spell that Sirius decided might be a good idea if they were going to be talking in the dorm in the early hours of the morning.

'I mean, glasses. Why Transfigure them into cups? I don't get it.'

'Well, Moony, say you want a cup of tea. And you only have a glass.'

'The Russians drink tea from glasses,' Remus protests.

Sirius laughs. 'That's not the point.'

'It seems such a waste. When you could be concentrating on something important. Like turning leaves into parchment. I liked that one.'

Sirius also liked that one, the rustle and the way the leaf smoothed itself out, the way its edges straightened and it turned brittle, as if a premature autumn was leeching its moisture.

'Or the one where - '

Remus is babbling, and he knows it, because he's suddenly very nervous, and Sirius is too, but determined to stop Remus talking, so he won't get all worked up and spend what's left of the night staring at the curtains and wondering why cups should become glasses and feathers become forks, though quills would be more logical. It also seems logical, while they're on the subject, to press his own mouth to Remus's, because then he certainly won't be able to speak. Or even think, probably. Though, as the moments tick by, Sirius hopes he's feeling, because it definitely feels...different.

Remus also thinks it feels different; amazing, actually. Something new to hold in his head and bring out in the night; first, the sensation of Sirius's mouth against his, which is very unlike putting his own fingers there, as he does sometimes when he's trying to work out an Arithmancy problem. Sirius's lips are generous and soft, and when Remus opens his mouth Sirius doesn't taste of nightmares and dust but a bit of the clear water and a bit of earlier toothpaste, and a tiny bit salty, but really just of Sirius. Remus thinks that he always must have known what Sirius would taste like, and he does.

Perhaps because Remus hasn't been to sleep yet, Sirius finds that he still tastes of the evening: of fresher toothpaste, of water not enchanted by any wand, just the ordinary water in the glass on Remus's bedside table that's changed every day so doesn't get stale anyway.

He's surprised by the intensity of the experience. It's not like mere physiology, where x amount of stimulus equals y amount of reaction. It's like something deep inside, as if Remus is more than a friend who's somehow got close because he knows so much about Sirius and how screwed up his family is; as if Remus is someone he might actually feel for. Not that Sirius has ever thought about love much, in the abstract: he loves his fellow Marauders, of course, and James loves Evans, and Peter has some unspecified yearning for Evans's best friend, who doesn't even know he exists.

It's too strange, though, to start thinking in those terms late at night, when he's a bit confused and oddly happy. He wonders if Remus is feeling the same.

They break apart, breathing with difficulty. 'Well,' Sirius says, because he knows Remus isn't going to say anything, 'that shut you up.'

'Oh.' Remus is puzzled. He understands, yet he doesn't. He isn't sure what it means, and he suspects Sirius isn't either. 'But, you kissed me.'

'You kissed me back,' Sirius says, quite acerbically.

'Why?'

'I told you, to shut you up. But it felt good. Didn't it?' He's not just referring to the kiss, Remus knows, and nods, momentarily stripped of the ability to speak. Sirius's eyes are attuned enough to the darkness to see and understand the gesture.

A lot of things are going through both their heads, interchangeable thoughts: for instance, that you don't kiss other boys, or feel attracted to them, and of course you don't usually crawl into other boys' beds at night either.

'It happens,' Sirius shrugs. 'I mean, we're friends, and of course we're going to like each other. And you're...well, I think a lot of girls would fancy you. And of course they all fancy me, so I can understand why you would too.'

'I never said I fancied you!' Remus splutters. But he's beginning to suspect that maybe he does, in a purely experimental sort of way.

'Anyway, let's not worry about it. Go to sleep.' Sirius rolls on to his back, and Remus turns over on to his stomach. They lie there for a moment, and Remus is wider awake than ever.

'Pads, listen. You're not asleep yet, are you?'

'Hardly, Remus. What is it now?'

'Well. What happens next?'

'What d'you mean? Apart from you brooding for the rest of the night?' He's quite amused by the thought, though he couldn't say why. Maybe the idea of a captive Remus lying by his side obsessing about him has a certain appeal. 'You're supposed to be the calming influence, and now you're all jangly.'

'Perhaps if we did that again,' Remus suggests. 'Just to see whether it was just a one-off thing, or whatever.' Sirius knows he's wearing the determined expression that means he's going to go through with a course of action, no matter what.

Sirius has no objections to doing it again, seeing where it's going to lead, either tonight or any other night, even though he wants to stay awake, and he's heard that sex is the perfect cure for insomnia. No doubt, if they're going to go further at any point, Moony will start getting a lot more sleep. Which is a shame in a way.

They kiss for a long, long, time, until the sun rises and the darkness is dissipated entirely. Remus's alarm rings in the distance, but they completely ignore it, and ignore James swearing and going over to turn it off, and the sounds of the other two boys getting ready, and Peter's anxious, 'Remus and Sirius will be late; shouldn't we get them up?' and James's casual, 'Oh, let them sleep. You know how those two are awake half the night. It's Sunday, anyway.' And eventually, they do fall asleep, out of sheer exhaustion, still clinging together in their metaphorical boat, as the shore recedes into the distance and the sea sparkles in the sunlight.

End