neutral_omens | (no subject)

Entry tags:

remus,
sirius

(no subject)

Date: January 24th, 2001
Setting: Remus' and Sirius' bedroom
Status: Private - Remus, Sirius
Summary: Some secrets ought to come out of their closets.

Weeks ago he acquired a music player, left behind near the front desk, and after a slow period of time the player made its natural progression to the bedroom. It played cassettes, and the only one it possessed was one, inexplicably, of Queen, although the label held an unsubtle label declaring it The Beatles. It wasn't that he minded; it was just that he didn't quite understand what was so wrong with Queen that it had to be mislabelled.

Remus had been quietly reading, enjoying his evening off work. The day had been spent mostly asleep, and in the night Sirius disappeared, vague about where he was off to. He half-wondered if he was going to spend the entire night alone, or if Sirius would crawl into bed at ten past three in the morning, sodding drunk.

He had been.

The music was still going softly as the door burst open.

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Sirius wasn't even remotely sodding drunk, although he sort of wished he was. He slammed the door open angrily and burst into the room, but frankly he didn't have any fucking idea how to begin this conversation, or even how he should feel. He knew he was pretty damn angry, but he wasn't quite sure who it was that he was angry at.

He shut the door behind him and crossed his arms.

"Remus. Would you mind telling me who the fuck is Roman?"

It... was going to happen sooner or later, the rational part of his mind told him. You merely had to expect these things, like you expected an earthquake or tornado.

"I-" His voice cracked as an adolescent's, and he cleared it. "A dead person, now."

"Is that so?" His tone may have softened slightly at the crack in Remus' voice, but rage mixed with, for some reason, hurt prevented him from changing it too noticeably. "Who was he, a friend of yours? Odd you never mentioned him."

Deliberately, carefully, Remus closed the book and set it aside, and turned off the music player.

"We should talk."

"Do you think?" he growled, but nonetheless he uncrossed his arms, and sat on the edge of the bed. Once sitting, he sighed. He had no idea what he wanted to say, but he didn't want to just drop this, either. Didn't think he could.

"Fuck, Remus. Jesus fucking Christ," he said finally, although the tone in his voice was somewhat undecipherable.

The thing with the expected is that when it does happen, that doesn't necessarily mean you have a plan, either, or an idea of what to say.

At all. Remus twisted his fingers together nervously.

"Well. You weren't supposed to find out, Sirius. You were dead, if you recall. How did you find out in the end? Go looking for a night mate?" It was not bitterness, just a dampened curiosity that spilled out in his words.

He was going to splutter that that wasn't any of his business, but, well, it probably was. "Yeah. Sort of. I was just talking to this bloke in the pub and it came up, I guess."

He sighed, not looking at Remus. "Why?" He didn't sound exactly angry anymore. What had John said? I gathered he was in pretty dire straights at the time...

"Was it just the money? But why-- the job you're doing now supports both of us, right?"

Did it? Sirius didn't know. It wasn't as if, he thought bitterly, Remus would tell him if it didn't.

"Yes, it does."

Twisting his fingers again, Remus looked askance at Sirius.

"What would you like me to say to you, Padfoot? I was hungry, that the deals with Greyback had not gone well, and the Order had disintegrated? There was no life for me in our world. I was blacklisted, now that Dumbledore is long dead. You had died, too, and with you... The money was good and the hours were my own, and I was not fired once the first full moon came around."

He still wasn't looking at Remus through the speech, as he rubbed his face nervously and felt sick, utterly sick to his stomach. And then it occurred to him why he was upset.

"It's not fair."

Shaking his head, Remus half-laughed, a chuckle reminiscent of Sirius' own post-Azkaban days.

"Padfoot, of all people, why on God's earth would you think that it could be fair? That is why you are upset?"

The latter was a stupid question, and he regretted asking it the second it had left his mouth. Of course he knew why that was what was bothering Sirius. Remus knew.

"Why the fuck shouldn't it be?" he snapped. "Why us?" He delivered a few violent punches to a convenient pillow.

"Did you know there's some people who get to be happy?" he asked bitterly. "Yeah, I couldn't believe it either but apparently with some people everything doesn't always constantly go to shit just when you think it might work out for once."

He growled and brought the pillow close to his chest, almost hugging it. "I'm such an idiot," he said quietly.

Remus snorted. "No one in this Manor," he murmured sardonically, thinking of overheard arguments, accidents, and others admitted to the hospital he spent his moons in.

Silently, he stared at his hands, flexing them slowly. "For the life of me, Sirius, I don't know why that makes you an idiot."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he just laughed harshly.

"It's not that. I just don't see why the fuck I didn't leave you anything," he replied. "Just about the only way my family has proved useful, leaving me loads of money and now here we are and we can't get to any of it. Just fucking brilliant."

He sighed. "What are we doing, Remus? Why do we even try anymore?"

"Sirius, when you left, I was under the protection of Albus Dumbledore. It was not your fault."

He wasn't going to answer the other questions. It was too easy to get caught up in self-pity, in his experience, and self-pity never fed you.

"When you wanted a job I refused you - yes, I know you were going to ask me about that - because you needed your freedom. I was a coward when the Order had you in Grimmauld, and you died trying to escape from the second prison. We could have left, lived in protection, but still freely. I still regret allowing them that. My refusal didn't have anything to do with... this."

"You're wrong," he said. "Yes, I hated Grimmauld. But I died protecting my godson. We couldn't have left because The Order was the only thing I could do to help Harry." His tone had even more bitterness now-- he may have failed Remus, and that hurt, but Remus was strong and could look after himself for the most part. Harry had needed him, and he'd been helpless.

"I would've gone to the Department of Mysteries that day no matter what you did. I don't care about freedom, Remus, I just care about being able to protect the people I love."

Remus smiled terribly, hearing the passionate note of loyalty in Sirius' voice.

"If anything, I know that, Padfoot. I meant it was unfair to ask you to work when you were so recently freed."

He rubbed his hands over his face idly, sighing, and then paused. "Wait, what? Sirius, I thought we had this discussion about femmes de la nuit. Back in seventh year, when you and James went on that speculation about that awful lacy shop in Hogsmeade? There was a lot of Firewhiskey involved, as I recall..."

"Anything's better than sitting around all day being useless," he grumbled.

He snorted. "Oh, you're one to talk. Besides, I wasn't out looking for--" he wasn't sure if he was objecting to the femmes part or the de la nuit bit, so he didn't elaborate. "It just sort of came up."

Had the atmosphere suddenly become a lot more comfortable? He still didn't like the idea of Remus, well, doing that. But they'd be able to deal with it.

"It just sort of came up? Padfoot..." He doubled over in nervous laughter, wheezing. "D'you remember when you told McGonagall that Snape had just tripped into your fist? And pointed to the carpet we had spelled to fly? That's like this. 'I just happened to walk into a bar...' Sounds like the beginning to an awful joke."

"Oi. He really did trip into my fist. Are you doubting me? After all these years, Remus?"

He smiled. "Fine, you caught me. First bloke I met I went right up to and said 'You don't know if my mate Remus Lupin has been leading a double life, have you?"

"It wasn't a double life. It was, at the very most, one and a half lives. One and a quarter, really. One point zero six two five lives." And they said you'd never use Arithmancy in real life, Remus thought.

He laughed. "All right, point zero six two whatsit it is."

His tone became slightly more serious when he added "You still could have mentioned it, though. I mean, I understand why you didn't, especially since I didn't exactly take it well-- I wasn't mad at you, though, not really-- but. You can tell me things."

He smiled. "So, on that note, anything else you've been keeping from me?"

"Nothing to that scale. Werewolf, homosexual, that short-lived career, and wizard. No, I think we've been fairly clear on all of those points, Padfoot, all things considered."

"Ah. Good." He smiled again, and gave Remus a friendly cuff on the shoulder.

Of course, if Remus was being honest with him, it would only be fair to--

He wasn't sure he was ready for this, but this was the time to say it.

"And... we might have more of that list in common than just the obvious," he said, attempting to sound light-hearted about it.

"Really?" Remus quipped, eyeing him. "Let me guess; you're a werewolf."

He was only joking. The mistletoe, the rest of it... Sirius was the greatest ladies' man Hogwarts had ever seen, even some of the papers went into his popularity in that field. Except... he knew Sirius, didn't he? The girls never stuck.

"Are you certain? What about that girl? The redhead?"

The trouble was Remus had more time to think about something like this. In the last year, the only action Sirius had been getting - probably - had come from Remus himself (and the redhead). Sirius had been alone for so long... but straight men didn't try and get drunk to hit on their best friends, either, no matter how long it had been.

"Heh. Try again."

He frowned, trying to remember what Remus was talking about. "Oh! Her!" he said at last. "Nah, that was just-- she's just a kid, right? I was just flirting a bit for fun."

This was really uncomfortable. "Look, the other night? That wasn't-- that wasn't exactly the first time for me, you know?"

In all normal manner of circumstance, it was probably not the best idea to announce, after hearing that one's best friend was a male prostitute, that you find yourself sexually attracted to men.

Cuffing the hysterical part of him that was laughing like, well, Sirius, Remus looked at him, fully.

"Well, we have snogged twice, so I couldn't do the teenager thing and give you a test snog to see if you're utterly sure of yourself." Remus grinned at Sirius' expression, explaining, "You didn't realize this in the seventies, Pads."

"I-- that's not entirely true." He had, in a way, known he liked men since he was a teenager, it was just the significance that had managed to evade him. Or, more accurately, he'd managed to evade it. "It's more that I never realised I didn't prefer women back then, you see."

He laughed at little more nervously than he meant to. "So there we are. Good thing we got our uncomfortable conversation quota for the year out of the way early, isn't it?" He grinned, and then pat Remus' arm in a friendly way. "We're all right, yeah? None of this is that big a deal, I mean. Okay?"

"Right."

Remus stared, for the first time.

"All right, Padfoot." It wasn't that he was going to argue, not that, it was only... "You're all right with my...?"

"Yeah," he said. He didn't want Remus to say it, and he sure as hell wasn't ever going to do that again, but it was okay. "Don't worry."

He grinned suddenly, pounced, and forcibly pulled Remus into an uncomfortably tight hug.

"Re~emus," he half-sang. "We are aaall right."

"Right," Remus agreed, meaning it. "Right."

It was a sign of Sirius' insecurity, too, before, he realized.

Sirius was a bit insecure at the moment, and nervous, and uncomfortable. It was the reason for his strange singing-- he didn't have the words to explain how he felt, and they were not getting any easier.

He'd developed a mechanism for those times when the words wouldn't come and his emotions were too complex to comprehend over the past decades. Still squeezing Remus, he loosened his grip and turned into Padfoot.

He then proceeded to nuzzle and lick Remus' face in a Padfootian way.

"Padfoot," Remus laughed, burrowing his long hands into the thick fur of the dog. "Go on, go on the bed. You ought to get some sleep. Have deep dreams of rare steaks..."

It was easier this way. The Sirius before would have turned into the dog before they'd said anything of value or worked anything out. It had been infuriating then, but this, this was... different.

Padfoot squirmed happily into the petting, his only thought now the simple joy of loving and feeling loved in return. When Remus commanded him to bed, he wriggled (reluctantly) out of the man's arms and leapt onto his side on the bed, curling up with his head against the pillow and tail thumping the bedspread.

Sirius had changed more in the past few months than he had since Azkaban. It was so easy, to just relax in a peaceful place and let Remus take care of him utterly, and it had done wonders for him. But that care had only served to strengthen his resolve to look after Remus in return. He wasn't going to back out of conversations they needed to have. He wasn't going to back out of his responsibilities, either.

Tomorrow he'd go looking for a job. For now, he was content just to close his eyes and rest.

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