Love To The Loveless Shown

He lay on his back, naked except for a pair of ancient and frayed jeans that were shiny and greasy from many days continuous wear. In one hand burned a cigarette, blue smoke drifting lazily into the haze that hovered just below the actual ceiling, while the other held a fine cut crystal glass filled almost to the brim with neat moonshine.

The last requests of the condemned man.

They would find him, sprawled upon the floor drunk, and listening to Mozart´s `Requiem,´ the sweet and holy music of death that weaved and floated and counterpointed. Beauty versus the ugly reality.

He had tired of running. Tired of running from reality and life and what was truth and what was not.

"Lupin..." The werewolf didn´t bother to focus, just drank deeply and not seeming to notice the trickles of the cheap alcohol drip down his chin and pool in the jagged hollows of his collarbones. Nothing really mattered, nothing mattered at all. His world was `Lachrymosa,´ the piecing soprano rising above the rich warmth of the alto in homage to the very act of death. His world was cigarette haze and the burn of inexpensive spirits that scorched and burned throat and stomach. And now, resolved to the coming of the end, he closed himself away.

"Lupin. Look at me."

A hand, as grimy and ashen as his own, caressed his cheek in a parody of tenderness. From his viewpoint he could see it, black and ugly and contaminating, burned deep into the flesh of the Other´s forearm. The Mark. The Mark that stood for betrayal.

"Please? You must go, before the others find you..."

He turned his head away, turning his face to the wall and meeting his fate in the traditional way of kings and princes. The alcohol had numbed his senses, the drowsy promise of oblivion tempting his to enter the darkness of unconsciousness, a state from which he would never awake. It was alluring, the thought of going to sleep and never coming to in the morning.

As the curling smoke morphed into greyness, he could not feel himself being picked up bodily, slender but wiry arms holding him close to the black-robed body, and as reality faded for the unconscious man, both disappeared from the sad and tattered little hovel.

"He saved your life, Remus. He got you out of your room just before his fellow Death Eaters came in, intent on killing you." Dumbledore slowly unwrapped a sherbet lemon, popped it in his mouth, and offered the paper bag to the invalid that lay under the precision sheets of one of Madam Pomphrey´s infirmary beds.

"He brought you here, to me, to where he knew you would be safe."

"Has he gone?"

"Yes." At the simple word the young man gave a broken sob, tears flowing down his pale and shattered face.

"I hate him."

"Do not hate, Remus, for it is such an ugly emotion. I know that Severus must have had his reasons...

"I hate him. Sirius was right. He´s always right..."

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"Don´t go."

"I must. James will shoot me, and you know what Lily´s like with that child of theirs. They want me to coddle and play with the mewling creature while they go out and dance up a storm!" Sirius pulled a grimace of mock-disgust as he coaxed his leather trousers over his thighs. Remus leaned against the doorframe, grey eyes warm as he watched the man he loved as a friend and almost as a lover, wriggle the trousers over his enviably lovely arse and button them closed.

"Don´t stare at something you can´t afford, Lupin..." The dark eyes sparkled in the light of the dying fire, the only source of brightness in the room, and the orange glow seemed to make Black as fey and beautiful as Mephistopheles himself. He had not changed from their schooldays apart from the Celtic dragon which writhed and wound it´s way around his bicep, noble head inked into the skin above his right nipple.

"Don´t go, Padfoot. I can sense something. Stay here with me..."

"Remus!" The exclamation was good natured but bordering on the other side of patient. "Nothing is going to happen. I will go there, look after my godson, and then come back to you. And what do you think I will do then?" The rhetorical question made him grin, making the illusion of him as the fallen angel complete. "I am going to come in here, strip all my clothes off, and bugger you senseless...how would you like that, my pretty one?"

Sirius left then, claiming the werewolf´s mouth hungrily with his tongue as he stood in the bright doorway of their cottage. And although he never said it, he said it that night.

"Love you Remy..."

Remus was quite wrong about Sirius being the demon, totally, horribly, horrifically wrong. Dr Faustus sold his soul to Mephistopheles for `twenty-four years of voluptuousness.´ Sirius Black traded his best friends for the glory of his own advancement - he gave them to Voldemort.

To err is human?

To betray your lover, to shatter them cruelly. To wilfully murder your best friend and his wife through your own greed. To destroy all that is right and good and just in the world; is that truly forgivable?

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