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His transformations are defanged under the influence of the Wolfsbane potion. He imagines sliding his tongue across empty gums, feeling the bloody holes where sharp yellow-white canines should be. This is what transforming feels like now, though his teeth are there: rendered harmless, his jaw not strong enough to break skin. When the moon is new, Remus is grateful for this. When the moon is full, he wishes for fangs, for sinews, for the snap of wrist bones and slender phalanges. He drinks the potion anyway, wishing for blood all the way down, because the choice of the potion is the only thing that might ever make him human, but only if he keeps choosing right.
Lying on the cool earthy floor of the basement in his small, isolated house. Feeling his jawbone click back into place, the slide of his molars down into bone. The stretch of skin over his temples, and the way his spine grows back in pieces. The transformations are slower with the potion: not violent at all, but he can feel every single moment of it, all the strange ways that his body changes and changes and grapples into this other form. James always used to call it “turning back,” as if there was any choice to it, as if the wolf was any less a part of Remus than the man was. That was always a stumbling block for James; he could never think of Remus as anything other than Remus, when the truth was that Remus has never truly been Remus at all. Not in a long time.
But these are all old thoughts, lost history, ancient. These thoughts circle every time he transforms (turns back, a sixteen year old James Potter stubbornly says, across decades), and they are as familiar and painful as the physical transformation itself. Old history, repeated. Circles that go nowhere. Sometimes you become so accustomed to rewalking old paths that you never even expect anything new, never expect anything to change. Sometimes you set your life aside and just keep setting it aside for thirteen uncertain years.
But this morning is different. This morning, Remus transforms and someone knocks on the door to the uneven wooden staircase, at the base of which Remus lies curled, shivering, naked, a rough blanket pulled around his bruised and beaten shoulders.
Sirius’ voice, quiet, ill at ease. “Remus?”
Remus lies there, thinking about circles and how some things never change. How some things lie in the past for more than a decade and then it is as if they were yesterday, so close, your fingers pressed hard against the glass of time. He does not respond, and the floor upstairs creaks as Sirius walks away.
Sirius had shown up yesterday evening. Truly unfortunate timing, only a few hours before the full moon rose and Remus retreated to the basement. “Dumbledore told me to find you,” is all Sirius had said, and Remus had stared at him and stared at his feet and stared at the door. The nerve, then, of Albus Dumbledore; even now, after so much time.
Remus lies for there another moment, considering. He has never had to get up and take care of someone else after a full moon before; or at least, it’s been a long time. Sirius, who once would have laughed if anyone had told him he needed to be taken care of. Sirius, who had sat in the tub last night, silent and still, as Remus combed the tangles from his hair, an hour before the moon rose. An hour after it has set, Remus stands, his joints all aching that familiar phantom other-self ache, his body yearning to walk on four feet, not two.
Upstairs, the small house is quiet, Sirius nowhere to be seen. Remus dresses, washes his face, presses his hands hard against the bruises on his shoulders and upper back until the pain sets properly, and then he lets go. He smells smoke.
In the kitchen, Sirius is burning toast. Remus, standing in the doorway, wonders if everything he learned about time in school is wrong: whether time really can bend the way he wishes it could, and if he is looking back now across the wrinkles of it.
Sirius turns to face him. He is malnourished, rendered in grayscale except for the blue glimmer of his eyes. His hand, holding the plate, is trembling, but either he doesn’t notice this or is so used to it that he has stopped paying attention to it.
“Sorry,” Sirius says, as if that is enough to span the distance between them. He gestures with his free hand towards the toaster. “I couldn’t figure out the buttons.”
Remus, endeared against his wishes, feels more tired than anything, more than hollow. “It’s broken. Runs too hot.”
“Oh.” Sirius pauses. “I thought it was me.”
It may well have been; Sirius never could cook, but neither could Remus, and in thirteen years Remus has never bothered to learn anything but the basics. It’s not as if Sirius ever had the chance.
Remus goes to the fridge. “Do you want eggs?”
“I’m not hungry,” Sirius says.
Remus turns back, looks at him. His head is pounding, but he feels clear, clearer than he has been in years. “Really.”
The clench of Sirius’ jaw. “You’re the one who woke up on the basement floor this morning.”
“I,” Remus says, as he cracks four eggs into a bowl, “have woken up on my basement floor once a month for the past few years, and in other worse places for much longer than that. You’re the one who was on the run for two years and—well.” He whisks the eggs, feeling foolish. It’s much too soon to bring up Azkaban, so he simply doesn’t, but the reality of it lingers there between them.
Sirius scrapes jam over the blackened toast. They don’t say anything while Remus makes the scrambled eggs and Sirius watches. The pallor of his face, his darkened eyes. When Remus sets a plate in front of him and slides two pieces of toast from Sirius’ side of the table onto his own, something in Sirius’ face visibly relaxes, though Remus cannot pin down why.
Sirius pushes the eggs around with his fork for a long moment, only taking a bite after Remus is nearly halfway done eating. Finally, he says, “I didn’t come here for you to take care of me, Remus.”
His name, again. His name, in Sirius’ mouth. “Then why did you come here?”
“Dumbledore said—”
“Right,” Remus says. “Dumbledore said.” They finish breakfast in silence.
Sirius watches Remus do the dishes and does not offer to help. That much, at least, is familiar. “You were very quiet last night. I thought maybe you....”
“There’s a potion these days,” Remus says. “It’s all very civilized.” Most of the money he made during his year at Hogwarts has gone towards procuring the Wolfsbane potion since he resigned. It’s very expensive; and Snape, no longer forced to share the castle with Remus, only rarely makes good on Dumbledore’s word to ensure that Remus always has access to the potion now. Or maybe Dumbledore considered that promise fulfilled when Remus willingly left Hogwarts.
“Oh,” Sirius says. He looks at Remus searchingly as Remus sits at the table once more. Sirius can’t see the bruises across Remus’ shoulders from the slow pain of the transformation, nor the empty ache in his chest from a night spent in the wolf’s skin, the wolf that never really leaves you even in the light of day. “So, it’s all good, then?”
Sirius never understood what it meant to be a werewolf, and Remus never had the words to try and explain it, nor the will. Remus told Sirius once that he is not sometimes a man and sometimes a wolf, as Sirius seemed to think—he is always a werewolf, whether he walks on two legs at any given moment or four. The hunger is less strong when the moon wanes, turns new, but it is always there.
“Yes,” Remus says; “it’s fine.”
Sirius smiles for the first time Remus has seen since—since before. It isn’t even a true smile, not really, a mere quirk of the mouth, a brightness to his eyes that had not been there a moment ago. “That’s a relief,” he says. “All these years I was—well, you were on your own, I thought....”
Remus spent eleven years transforming alone, without the Wolfsbane potion, before he took the job at Hogwarts. But let Sirius think he has been transforming for more than a decade in relative peace, ease. If there is anything that Remus has learned, it is that sharing your sorrows with others is not worth it, not when silence will do. If it takes an ocean not to break, well—then it takes a near-intergalactic tidal pull to spill your secrets along the riverbank.
“Don’t worry about it, Sirius,” Remus says without any real feeling. Don’t bother.
Sirius is nodding, just nodding, looking out towards the window now. He seems far away. His mouth, opening and closing. When he speaks, it is to himself, not Remus. “I worried,” he says; “so long, such a long time...at night, the stars....” His fingertips touch a place just below his collarbone, where Remus knows there is a tattoo, one that he hates, has always hated: a small, dark moon.
When Sirius looks over at Remus again, snaps back, his eyes are light, clear. “You really thought I did it,” he says; “didn’t you?”
Remus doesn’t know what to say. The truth? For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Sirius is not genuinely asking; not really. He already knows. Remus said nothing while Sirius spent twelve years in Azkaban for a crime that was not his. Remus had accepted the Ministry’s verdict because there was nothing else he could accept. Not that the Ministry would have listened to a werewolf. Not that Remus would have spoken up, because he had believed.
“I did,” Remus says at last, because Sirius is waiting for an answer that he already knows, waiting patiently. Even though Remus had not wanted to, he had. Why lie? Why apologize? They know the truth now, the both of them: as much of it as they will ever get.
Sirius nods once more. “Good,” he says. Firmly. He looks down at the table. “Good.”
Is it, Remus thinks, but he does not bother to ask.
“I think you should get some rest,” Remus says, because it is something to say. Remus is tired, too; he spent the whole night awake, staring at the walls and thinking of open fields. The only time he wakes this early is when the moon forces him to.
Sirius closes his eyes. “That’s what Dumbledore told Harry,” he says. A flash of pain, of something bitter. “You—heard?”
Of the maze—of Voldemort returned, of Cedric Diggory, of how Harry had survived and escaped. Remus nods.
“Last year,” Sirius says, his voice a rasp; “beside the lake. Harry’s patronus....”
“I know,” Remus says.
“You taught him.” Not a question, either; something almost like an accusation.
“I did.”
A ghost of a smile. “I tried. Couldn’t.”
“You never could,” Remus says; he means it to be gentle, a reminder of all the ways that he knows Sirius, but it feels bitter, mean. How strange, that the Dark Creature of the two of them has always been able to summon a patronus, yet loathed to do so, while the other has always struggled to manage the spell, yet needed it the most.
“A few times,” Sirius says, quietly. “A wisp...white light...I suppose after twelve years, I’ll never be able to.”
No: probably not.
There are things they don’t teach students about patronuses, or maybe there are things that most people just don’t know about patronuses because no one has ever thought to ask a werewolf before. But under the full moon the night Sirius returned, Remus felt Harry’s patronus from across the lake, across the woods. Patronuses only turn back dementors but affect nearly all Dark Creatures to some extent; a gentle pressure against the back of your neck, for werewolves. Reminding you of sunrise, of sunlight. A painful, devastating reminder. Remus had howled and run on four huge clawed paws as far away as his legs would take him, until the presence of the patronus had faded. When he awoke in the woods the following morning, messy, alone, bloodied, bruised, Sirius had already been gone.
And there are things no one knows about Azkaban, about what twelve years surrounded by dementors might do to you. About giving up and letting go. Remus has never known how to do either. But it might be easier if he did.
Across the table, Sirius’ nose begins to bleed. Blood so dark it is nearly black drips slowly onto the table, onto Sirius’ shirt, and Sirius does not notice until he sees the expression change on Remus’ face.
“Oh.” Sirius presses his fingers below his nose and looks at them. “I....” He trails off, not looking at Remus anymore, before he gets to his feet and leaves the room.
Remus sits there silently, empty-handed. He hears the faucet running in the bathroom. He stands up, suddenly dizzy—the smell of Sirius’ blood so strong, so powerful this close to a full moon—and fetches some ice from the freezer. He focuses on his cold, numb fingertips as he wraps the ice in a dishtowel and tries not to think of the three drops of blood on his small kitchen table.
Sirius returns, pinching the bridge of his nose. His shirt is damp, hurriedly rinsed yet still stained with pink, and he moves to clean the table. The color is high in his face but he does not look any healthier; if anything, he looks worse.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Happens.” He throws out the bloodied paper towel. “Must be the weather.”
Remus hands him the ice. Their fingers touch, briefly: Remus’ cold, Sirius’ still damp from the bathroom faucet. It is as if they aren’t touching at all. Sirius presses the ice to right side of his nose, just beside his cheekbone, and closes his eyes.
“Must be,” Remus says hoarsely.
When Sirius looks up at him again, there is an almost-smile at the edge of his mouth, wry, bitter. The pink is fading, slowly, from his face, save for where the ice is pressed, and his eyes are wintery and sharp, shards of glass. Remus wants to embrace him nearly as much as he never wants to see him again. “Never could tell when you were lying, Moony,” Sirius says, quiet.
It’s been a long time. “Yes,” Remus says; “I know.”