Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

He is alone. Remus doesn't know why this surprises him anymore. It wasn't always like this, nights spent sitting at the kitchen table with long fingers elegantly drumming the song of his sorrows. It used to be that they couldn't be separated. Sirius always said that to leave him would be to cleave half of his heart from his breast, half of his soul from his body. Now, he never knows where Sirius might be. He never knows whether he is alive or dead; in this time of war and terror, the image of Sirius' battered body lying in an alleyway is all too easily conjured and all too hard to banish.

Finally, he hears the door to the flat creak open and the heavy, stumbling footsteps of someone that has had a few too many firewhiskies. Remus stands quietly, facing the archway leading from the kitchen to the living room. He watches Sirius saunter in and throw his leather jacket carelessly onto the divan followed by his own body. Remus can smell the alcohol, and another fainter scent. He can smell the musky scent of sex hanging heavily in the air, cloyingly spicing the space around Sirius.

"Who was it?" Remus asks softly, unsure as to whether or not he really wants that particular knowledge.

"Does it matter?" Sirius' speech is slurred somewhat, his tongue thick, his grey eyes hazy as the London fog, "It wasn't you."

It cuts, bitter and fierce like the icy wind whirling outside the windows. Far inside, deep in the pit of his belly, Remus has known. Remus has known that he was no longer the main concern in Sirius', but he has never quite acknowledged with it. He has not yielded the fact that they haven't made love for two months, that they have been reduced to satellites revolving around one another across an endless void, that Sirius no longer looks him in the eye. Until now, that is, for Sirius is doing exactly that. Sirius is staring into Remus' eyes, yet the man Remus sees is not the man he once loved. Someone completely different than the man he was so bewitched by is looking back at him.

How did it ever come to this? Remus wonders. He can't pinpoint the moment, the hour, the day, the week things went wrong. It has been a slow, steady rockslide and Sirius has slipped away from him.

Sirius' mouth twists into a cruel grin as he watches the emotions warring on Remus' face, "It was brilliant, you know, the sex. Not like it is with you, all soulful staring into each other's eyes and that bloody nonsense. It was real, it was rough and fucking raw. You could never do those things to me."

Every word is calculated, weighted and timed to perfectly rend and rip Remus' heart from his chest. Every gesture, every curl of Sirius' lip sends Remus into further agonizing misery. Remus takes a step back as if Sirius has physically wounded him. He is painfully aware of each clashing scent in the air and of how close the moon is upon him. He is acutely, violently aware of the fact that he has neither taken his dulling Wolfsbane nor firmly secured himself behind the locked doors of his self-inflicted prison.

Sirius is standing now and striding still closer to him. Remus matches his pace backwards until he feels his back pressed rigid against the wall and the alien scents surrounding Sirius are suffocating him as Sirius leans in yet closer, eyes flashing.

"He touched me in ways that you would never dare. He hurt me." Sirius pulls down his collar to reveal several purpling bruises on his neck and upper chest, some look like bite marks, others like claws, "It was painful, coarse, and above all hotter than you could possibly imagine, dear Remus."

Remus's blood is furiously hot in his veins, pulsing at a frenzied pace. Breath quickening, pupils dilating, the change isn't far off now. His fraigle body begins to tremble from the strain of the Moon's pull and the force of Sirius' wicked passion. Sirius bares his vicious teeth, throwing back his head and laughing savagely.

"It was James."

Howling, the Wolf breaks free.