Out of the Darkness

"Open your eyes, Remus."

Remus found himself sprawled across an unfamiliar ground, if it could even be considered ground, but something was familiar. He knew that voice.

God, did he know that voice.

"Sirius?" Remus managed to croak out, his voice uncertain in this new place. "But you're..."

"I'm what?" Remus could hear the smirk in his voice, even if he couldn't see it.

"Dead."

"I am that, aren't I?" That smirk was still there. Good old Sirius. "Come on, open your eyes."

Remus obliged, beginning to stand as his eyelids slowly rose. Whatever Remus had expected to see, it wasn't this.

The first thing he saw was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Everything was wrong. The skin of his face felt cold when he reached his fingers up to make sure he was really there. Time felt uncertain. Up and down seemed the same; left and right indistinguishable. The nothing was so complete around him that he felt like he should be sick to his stomach.

His body tried, throat and mouth and stomach all going through the motions, but he found the nothing extended to him. Nothing inside to make him sick.

All he felt was the emptiness. His stomach may not be able to do much to rid him of the discomfort, disorientation still getting the best of him in this world without physics. His head sure could still spin.

It was all he could do to stay standing, but something managed to steady him. A hand on his shoulder. A hand he knew well.

Sirius.

He knew that hand anywhere, and he knew it would keep him safe. That's how they worked, Remus and Sirius. The brawn and the brains. Any minute now, it'd be Remus's turn to save him.

Probably by telling him not to do something stupid.

The hand gently pulled at his shoulder, and Remus obliged, spinning around slowly as if daring to believe what was happening would ultimately destroy it.

"You all right, old friend?" For a moment, the two just stood across from one another. Not moving, and not speaking.

The embrace happened so suddenly and naturally that neither of them remembered who initiated it or how it started. For the first time since he'd last felt Sirius's face scratch against his, Remus belonged somewhere.

He'd loved his wife and loved his son, but that wasn't him. Never did feel like him. It wasn't his life. Maybe it could have been, if he'd stayed indoors during that full moon so long ago, but the truth was, he hadn't.

He'd become a wolf. He'd gone to Hogwarts. He made friends, the best friends, and one of them turned into so much more. That was his life.

Sirius was his home.

"I am now," Remus whispered into Sirius's hair, now much shorter than he remembered it.

Sirius pulled back, holding Remus by the shoulders, and he smiled.

All Remus could manage to do was stare at his eyes. Not a gentle stare or a gaze full of affection. Nothing cheesy. This was a real stare, one of shock at something you never expected to see again.

Sirius's eyes were back. The gray no longer stared back without emotion, sending chills down his spine. All of that had been erased and replaced by laughter and love and fierce loyalty, all the things Sirius had been and all the things Azkaban stripped him of. Remus almost began to cry, until he realized this wasn't the place for tears.

Remus looked down for a moment. He had long since come to terms with the fact he would never see Sirius again. He almost wanted to pinch his arm to make sure it wasn't a dream. He stared down at his feet, vaguely wondering what held them up, and drew in a deep breath as he reached his hands up from Sirius's waist and moved them the sides of his face. He felt Sirius look up.

He paused before raising his own head. Their eyes met once more, and Sirius reached his hand up to his.

Remus kissed him, a perfectly ordinary kiss. No desperation of lost lovers reunited that he'd been expecting from it. Somehow, now that it had happened, it didn't surprise him. It wasn't like either of them to make a big deal out of these sorts of things.

A normal kiss suited them.

"Where are we?" Remus asked, suddenly breaking the kiss. It wasn't like him to accept things without question. To his horror, he realized it hadn't even occurred to him that this might not be Sirius. He might be trapped somewhere.

What if it was a sick joke?

"It's me, Remus," Sirius assured him. "And we're dead."

"Dead?" Remus sat down, very suddenly, and he didn't even bother to question what kept him from falling on his arse. Death. Sirius said it so matter-of-factly.

That's when he realized.

It wasn't nothing. Nothing didn't make him so unbalanced and confused.

It was everything. Black and white and red and gold and green. London and Hogsmeade and Paris and Rome. His friends and his family and his enemies and his lovers. All of them at the same time.

And then he remembered. That final battle. All the deaths. His death, his wife's. The fact Teddy would never know him. The memory of each death was another brick wall slamming against his face.

He didn't even know if they'd succeeded, if it had been worth it.

Remus collapsed to the ground, the invisible chair or whatever it was that had held him up dissolving beneath him, and he began to cry.

A full-body cry, sobs and involuntary movement and so many tears that they couldn't be wiped away before they were replaced. Remus quickly decided that this was, in fact, a place for tears, as Sirius knelt next to him, one hand in his back and the other drying his eyes.

As Remus calmed, Sirius spoke.

"Let's go, Remus." He extended his hand. "We're needed."

Remus didn't ask where they would go. He didn't want to know, not yet. He just reached out, knotting his fingers with Sirius, and together, they stood up, walking out of the darkness for the last time.