Chapter 2: The Moon, Regardless
The moon rises at seven minutes past six on the Saturday, and Remus has been feeling it since Wednesday, a pull behind the breastbone like a hook catching on a seam. He has told Sirius nothing about the box. Sirius, astonishingly, has not asked again.
That night in the green bedroom, Remus had taken the box out of his hand and put it in the drawer of the bedside table and said, "Not tonight, Pads. Please." And Sirius, who in 1977 once followed him across the entire grounds of a castle demanding to know what was wrong until Remus hit him, had looked at him for a long time and then nodded and said, "All right." And gone back downstairs to his lamps. And not mentioned it since.
It is somehow worse than being asked.
By Saturday afternoon Remus is grey and aching and short-tempered, and he has broken two teacups and snapped at Kreacher, who snapped back with real feeling. The Wolfsbane arrives at three by owl from a Ministry-licensed potioneer in Hogsmeade, a smoking goblet's worth in a stoppered flask. He drinks it standing at the kitchen table. It tastes the way it always does, like licking a rusted gate and then eating the rust.
"Christ," Sirius says from the doorway, watching his face. "Still that bad?"
"Worse, if anything. They've improved the formula. I think the improvement was to the smell." Remus sets the flask down and wipes his mouth. "I'll use the cellar. You don't need to do anything."
"I'm coming down with you."
"You don't need to."
"Moony." Sirius crosses the kitchen and stops on the other side of the table. "I haven't run with you in sixteen years. You've done every one of them alone, haven't you? Every single one, since James and Peter and I…" He stops. Peter's name still sits wrong in the air between them, like a tooth that's been knocked loose. "Every one," Sirius says again.
"Not every one. Some of them I did in the Shrieking Shack with Severus Snape looking in on me, which I'd rank as considerably worse."
Sirius doesn't laugh. "I'm coming down."
Remus is too tired to argue, and too honest to pretend he doesn't want it. "Fine. But if you chew the furniture, you're explaining it to the Ministry."
The cellar of number twelve is long and low and smells of damp stone and centuries of wine nobody drank. Remus has cleared it of everything that might break, and some things that might bite. He takes off his shoes and his jumper and folds them on the bottom step. He's done this so many times that his hands know the order without him. Shoes, jumper, shirt. Glasses on top of the pile, the ones he only started needing last year. Then he sits on the cold floor with his back against the wall and waits.
Sirius sits beside him. Not touching. A hand's width of stone between their shoulders.
"Do you remember the first time we managed it?" Sirius says. "Fifth year. James got his antlers stuck in the Whomping Willow."
"Peter nearly got trodden on."
"Peter always nearly got trodden on." A pause. "I used to think, in Azkaban, about whether I'd tread on him on purpose, if I had the chance. Back then. Just once. In the dark. No one would ever know."
"Would you have?"
"Every night, I said yes. Then in the morning I'd say no, because James would've been disappointed." Sirius tips his head back against the wall. "Funny, the things you keep."
Remus thinks about a velvet box in the drawer upstairs. He doesn't say anything.
The change comes on at six, the way it always does, as if someone has taken hold of him by the spine and twisted. He has had thirty years of it and it has never once got easier. His jaw goes first. Then the long bones of his legs. Then everything, all at once, the world going loud and sharp and full of smells, the stone under him, the old wine, Kreacher's cooking two floors up, and Sirius, Sirius, Sirius, who smells the way he has always smelt, under everything else, motor oil and woodsmoke and something that is only him.
He hears Sirius change. It's quieter than his own. A little grunt, a rustle, and then claws on the stone and a great black dog sitting where a man was, shaggy and thin and enormous, with eyes that have stayed exactly the same colour.
With the Wolfsbane, Remus keeps his mind. He has never decided if that's a mercy. The wolf is still there, all of it, the hunger and the restlessness and the terrible animal wanting, but now he has to sit inside it and watch. He paces the length of the cellar and back. He paces it again. Padfoot watches him from the bottom step, head on his paws.
On the fourth length, Padfoot gets up and paces with him.
They used to run for miles. The Forbidden Forest, the edge of the lake, the long grass on the far side of the grounds. James, a stag in the moonlight; Peter on his back; Padfoot and the wolf neck and neck, crashing through the bracken until dawn. There's nowhere to run in a cellar in Islington. They pace it anyway, shoulder to shoulder, a wolf and a dog going nowhere in the dark, until the wolf stops feeling like it wants to tear through the walls and starts feeling like it might, possibly, lie down.
He lies down. Padfoot lies down beside him, the whole warm weight of him along Remus's side, and puts his great shaggy head on the wolf's neck, and sighs through his nose like a dog that has finally got where it was going.
Remus, inside the wolf, inside the dark, thinks: oh.
Thinks: I'd forgotten.
Thinks: I hadn't, actually. Not once. That's the trouble.
He wakes up human, which is the worst part of every month. His body feels like someone took it apart and rebuilt it from memory. There's a blanket over him that he didn't bring down, and his head is in someone's lap.
He knows whose lap. He keeps his eyes closed a little longer than he needs to.
"I know you're awake," Sirius says. "You breathe differently."
"Go away. I'm dying."
"You're not dying, you're thirty-seven and dramatic. I've seen you do this a hundred times." But there's a hand in his hair, moving slowly, the way you'd soothe something, and it doesn't stop. "There's tea. Kreacher brought it down. He spat in it, I think, but only a bit."
Remus opens his eyes. The cellar is grey with the light that comes through the grating at street level. Sirius is sitting against the wall in yesterday's trousers and nothing else, with the old brown jumper bundled behind his back as a cushion. There are scratches on his shoulder, shallow ones. Remus's stomach turns over.
"Did I…"
"No. That was the wall. I got overenthusiastic around three and fell into the wine racks." Sirius's hand doesn't stop moving. "You were good, Moony. You were so good. You just lay there with me all night."
Remus sits up too fast, the blanket sliding off, and has to put a hand on the floor to keep the cellar from tilting. Sirius steadies him with a hand between his shoulder blades. Warm. He'd forgotten that too. How warm Sirius always runs.
"I believed it," Remus says.
He hadn't meant to say it. It comes out of him the way the wolf does, all at once, from somewhere he has no say over.
Sirius's hand goes still on his back.
"Twelve years," Remus says. He's staring at the grating, at the grey light, at anything that isn't Sirius's face. "I believed you'd done it. James and Lily. Peter. Those Muggles in the street. I believed it the night it happened and I believed it the whole time you were in there. I never once asked to see you. I never wrote. I never asked Dumbledore if there'd been a trial, and there hadn't been, Sirius, and I never even asked." He breathes out. "I had that box in my pocket and I believed it. I used to think about what I'd say to you if you ever got out. It wasn't kind."
The silence goes on long enough that Remus has to look.
Sirius's face is perfectly calm. That's the frightening thing about it. Sirius was never calm. "I know," he says.
"You know."
"Of course I know. You think I didn't do the sums? In there?" Sirius's voice is level and low. "I sat in that cell and I thought, Remus will know it wasn't me. Remus knows me better than anyone alive. And then I thought, no. Remus is going to think it's me, because I thought it was him." He laughs, but there's nothing in it. "I was the one who told James to switch to Peter. Because I thought the spy was you, Moony. I thought it was you. I thought the werewolf would go to the werewolves, that's what everyone was saying, and I believed it, and I never asked you either."
Remus has known that for four years. He has never heard Sirius say it out loud.
"So we're even," Sirius says. "That's what I worked out, eventually. Somewhere around year eight. We both believed the worst thing about the person we loved most, and we were both wrong, and the only one who was right was the rat." He takes his hand off Remus's back. "I don't know what you want me to do with that. Forgive you? Done. Did it in nineteen eighty-nine. You want me to hate you? I tried. I'm rubbish at it."
"I want…" Remus stops. He doesn't know how that sentence ends. He's known for sixteen years and he doesn't know.
Sirius waits. Then, when nothing comes, he gets up stiffly and pulls on the brown jumper and holds a hand down to help Remus up. "Drink your tea," he says. "Go to bed. A real one. I'll get Kreacher to stop spitting."
Remus sleeps until four in the afternoon. When he comes down, the drawing room is empty. The lamps are out. The cushion has been put back on the settee.
There's a sheaf of papers on the writing desk, on top of Regulus's letters. Remus picks them up because he has spent a month picking up every object in this house and writing down what it is. The top sheet is on the letterhead of a wizarding estate agent in Diagon Alley. A valuation of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, fully furnished, curses and portraits to be cleared at the buyer's expense. Below it, a contract of sale, unsigned. Below that, a page torn out of a notebook, in Sirius's sprawling capitals, which have not changed since they were eleven.
It says: I can't stay in this house, Moony. I'm sorry. I'll explain when I can.
That's all it says.
Remus turns it over. The back is blank. He looks at the hall, at the stand where Sirius's leather jacket usually hangs, the old one, the one from the motorbike days, which he dug out of a trunk in August and has worn every day since.
The hook is empty.