What Stars There Are

"I threw my eyes to heaven
and I asked for a sign
They said I can get back my yesterday
if I cross the date line
But I'm sick of all this hope
Sometimes the stars are not enough
I'm sick of all this hope
Sometimes the stars are too much"

-Bell X1, White Water Song

Remus can't remember ever wishing upon a star as a child. He knows that it is done, that it is custom among children, Muggle and Wizarding alike, to stare at the distant pinpricks of light and mouth their dreams. He supposes that he must have done it too, once, somewhere back before a childish desire to pet a dog that wasn't a dog and the set of teeth that belonged to it changed his life. He has even built himself an entire mythology wherein a tiny infant Remus kneels eagerly on his bed, (he can remember, maybe, a quilt, blue with grey dogs lolling candy-coloured tongues. Dogs; he has always loved dogs,) hands clasped on the window sill. Light with that particular silver quality only achieved by stars spills across him, gilding and graying his thin baby's hair, and a voice like his but purer lisps, "Star light star bright first star I see tonight." He tells himself that this is how he looked, once. That this is how things were. That whatever wishes he made once upon a time came true. He tells himself this fiercely. He almost believes it, somehow holds this belief in his mind even with the knowledge that these things are a story he has made up for himself, for all the times James speaks (spoke, something hisses,) of a happy childhood. In reality he cannot remember much past the bite, except in snatches of sound: his mother's voice, the music on his father's record player. It is like he was born with the bite, and since then- well. The night held nothing but horror for the real infant Remus. For him the moon filled the whole sky, swelling, rounding, pregnant, gestating the wolf that would claw his chest. He has never seen her handmaidens clearly enough to wish upon them.

He is wishing now. Star light, star bright. First star I see. Any star. Any one. The wood of the windowsill bites into his palms and he thinks, just a bit more. He leans his full weight into his hands, knowing the sill isn't sharp enough. He tries to draw blood anyway. A sacrifice. Is that what you want, he asks the stars savagely, though no voice makes it up the ladder of his raw throat or past the dead cellar door of his lips. Blood? Scars? And then, inevitable, haven't I given you enough of that?

He closes his eyes and this brings him back, abruptly, his memory suddenly like a Pensieve. The perfect crystalline clarity of hindsight, he supposes. And how many details has his mind already changed, he wonders. What has he altered to suit his guilt and his love in the past twenty-four hours?

He is sitting in his favorite squashy arm chair, the only chair they have been able to find that feels at all like it belongs in the Gryffindor Common room, like it belongs in their home. Our home, he thinks, feeling his lips form a smug little smile as warmth floods his chest. That word is his favorite in the world. Ours.

Hamlet is open on his lap, propped in the hollow formed by the cross of his leg, ankle over knee. Doubt thou the stars are fire, he thinks, not doubting at all. The problem has never been doubt. The weak sunlight that falls across him, broken by the shadow of the window's cross beam, has heated his still slightly burnt-from-summer skin, and he feels like toast, like baking bread, like something heavy and warm and filled inside. He isn't reading. He's listening to Sirius in their bedroom, Sirius who is singing some awful Muggle rock song to himself. Remus can tell that he is trying to put on his socks without sitting down to do it, because every few moments there is the thump of a body tripping sideways into a wall and a curse. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:29:00 2005 ]

"Bloody, sodding...fuck...wanker!...SOCKS," he hears, and the small smug smile stretches and the heavy warm feeling inside of his ribs gets a little warmer. Sirius getting dressed in their bedroom.

The door opens and Sirius comes stumbling out, hopping on one foot as he attempts to pull the gnarled grey cotton up past his toes. The other sock is on his right hand like a puppet. Remus can't help but laugh, lazily. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:29:00 2005 ]

"Putting on a show for me, Padfoot?"

Sirius collapses to the floor and holds out both hands to Remus, a sock flopping from one and covering the other. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:29:00 2005 ]

"They are in revolt. They do not agree with my policy of walking on them. I can't defeat them myself."

"I'm not putting on your socks for you," Remus says.

"Moony. Moooooooony. Please. They listen to you!"

"Sirius, you're a grown man."

"Mooooooony."

"I'm not your mother."

"No," Sirius replies, wiggling his eyebrows obscenely. He's grinning; his left cheek dimples just a tiny bit, when he grins like this, and it is so incongruous against his sharp, aristocratic cheekbones that when Sirius is not grinning just like this, Remus doubts his own snap-shot memory of the event. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:29:00 2005 ]

"No," Sirius says again, "I should hope not. I don't plan on doing terribly unmentionable things to my mother this evening. Nor do I want to think about terribly unmentionable things being done to her, which is, I suppose, why they're unmentionable. Oh, ugh. I can't believe you just put that image into my head, Lupin. Just for that-"

"I'm still not putting your socks on for you, Black," Remus says, settling deeper into his chair.

Sirius pouts.

"No," Remus says, a little desperately.

Sirius pouts.

"Padfoot, no."

Sirius pouts.

"Merlin's beard," Remus mutters, sliding out of his chair and onto the floor next to the other man. Boy. Man-boy thing that cannot get dressed properly on his own. He takes the free sock from Sirius. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:30:00 2005 ]

"Foot," he says wearily. A foot is extended. He shoves the sock onto it without ceremony, then reaches for the other one, the one acting as a puppet. The puppet grabs his hand and won't let go; Sirius uses it to drag Remus closer, until the smaller man is half across his lap. [Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:30:00 2005 ]

"My oh my," Sirius breathes, looking at him, and then their lips catch together, lightly, brushing, part, catch again and meld and bind and melt.

"My oh my, what?" Remus asks when he pulls away.

"You are whipped," Sirius says with a grin that can only be called wicked, (not wicked, thinks the Remus caught helplessly in the memory, not wicked, just mischievous, just playful, not wicked which smacks of evil or malice or both) and Remus hits him and it becomes a wrestling match on the floor. Remus thoroughly loses, as he always does. Padfoot has him pinned to the carpet and it is a while before the socks are finally and properly on.

"I'm going to the Hollow," says Sirius, standing up and brushing at his trousers.

The tug of anxiety that Remus feels is not prophetic. It's not even that the war has made him this way; he would worry, he is sure, even if the world were bright and kind. "Alone?"

"Yes, alone. Worrywart."

"Dumbledore's told us, going out alone is-"

"Calm down, Moony. I'll only be gone for a few hours. I need a boy's chat with James."

"What about Lily, then?"

"She's smitten with Harry, isn't she? She'll let James alone for an hour. We need a boy's chat."

"What am I then?" Remus grumbles, trying to mask the worry. The worry is why he isn't quite 'boy' enough for a boy's chat. "A girl?"

"I think we both know that you're a little too well endowed to be a girl."

"What am I, then?"

"You sound like a girl right now, that's for sure, mate."

"I'm serious."

"No, that's me."

"Sirius!"

"You're Moony," Sirius says simply, and throws his arms over Remus's shoulders.

They stand like that for perhaps a minute, before Sirius grins again (Remus is not sure of the veracity of anything else in the memory, but the dimple is right, he knows it in his bones and in his blood,) and nods sharply. "Right then. I'll be back before you know it. I promise."

And Moony lets him walk out of the flat.

You promised, he tells the stars, the first star he sees. He was never very good at Astronomy. He has no idea which of the bright lights above him is the Dog Star, but he knows that it is there, somewhere, hovering above him out in the dark, caught and frozen and caged far away in the web of that darkness. He thinks that it can hear him. Everything has changed; everything has shattered. Sirius walked out of the flat and went to Voldemort, and nothing will ever be mended.

He imagines what he might have done differently, imagines grabbing Sirius's hand and pulling him to the bed. Stopping him that way, buying them all another day. He imagines changing his mind, somehow, with an innocent word or movement. He imagines saying "I love you," as Sirius opens the door. He wonders if that would have made any difference. He always assumed that Sirius knew, and felt the same way.

James is dead, and Lily is dead, and Peter is dead. It is them he ought to be mourning. This is no time to start wishing on stars. The Dog Star ought to be dark for him now. Star light, star bright. First star I saw...the rhyme goes brittle in his mind.

Remus kneels below the window, and crosses his arms around his chest, and stares at the night sky. He can remember his mother at the window, every night for months after the bite, gripping the window sill when she thought him asleep. Looking into the darkness. Whispering, Please, God. Not this. Give us a miracle. Please. Remus knows that wishes don't come true. He knows that stars are nothing solid, nothing that can be held or trusted or known. Somehow, still, he looks into the night and he makes wishes on what stars there are.[Author ID0: at ]

[Author ID0: at ]

[Author ID1: at Wed Jul 13 19:07:00 2005 ]