Chapter 3: Which Way Is Out
Remus does the obvious things first, because grief has taught him to be practical about panic. He checks the house, every floor, every room, even Walburga's dressing room. He checks the kitchen, where Kreacher is polishing a gravy boat with a vengeance and says Master went out at noon and did not say where, as if Master was ever in the habit of saying where. He checks the bedroom on the second floor that Sirius never sleeps in, the one with the Gryffindor banners and the Muggle motorbike posters and the photographs of girls in bikinis that Sirius, at the height of his rebellion, glued to the wall with a Permanent Sticking Charm specifically to horrify his mother.
The posters are still there. The bed is still made. The leather jacket isn't.
Remus stands on the landing with the note in his hand and makes himself breathe.
He is aware, distantly, that he is being ridiculous. Sirius is thirty-seven. Sirius is a free man with a pardon from the Wizengamot framed in the downstairs loo, because Sirius thought that was funny. Sirius has every right to sell his horrible house and go wherever he likes without explaining himself to the man who's been counting his snuffboxes.
I'll explain when I can.
The last time Sirius said something like that to him, it was the twenty-ninth of October, 1981, in the doorway of the flat in Camden. I've got to go and check on something, Moony, I'll explain when I can. Two days later James and Lily were dead and Sirius was in a cell, and Remus didn't hear his voice again for twelve years.
He goes up.
Not to the third floor. Higher. Past the bedroom that was Regulus's, with its door still shut. Past the room where Buckbeak lived. Up the narrow stair at the very top of the house that leads to a trapdoor, which Remus has noted in his inventory as Access to roof, condition poor, possibly jinxed. He'd guessed right. The trapdoor tries to slam on his fingers. He hexes it and climbs out into the cold.
The roof of number twelve is a mess of chimneys and slates and the slow decay of a building that has been magically hidden for a hundred years and has never once had a Muggle roofer. It's nearly dark. The sky over London is a dirty purple, and the city stretches out in every direction, a million lit windows, and somewhere to the north, a motorbike is making a noise like the end of the world.
The noise gets louder.
Remus stands among the chimney pots with his hands in his pockets and watches the bike come in low over the rooftops of Islington, headlamp blazing, black and chrome and outrageously illegal, and he has a moment of perfect and ridiculous clarity in which he thinks: of course. Of course it's the bloody bike.
It lands on the flat bit of roof beside the chimney stack with a crunch of slate that will be very expensive to repair. The engine cuts out. Sirius pulls off a pair of goggles that look about as old as the jacket and stares at him.
"Moony," he says. "What are you doing up here?"
"I could ask you the same. That's Hagrid's bike."
"It's my bike, I lent it to Hagrid. Arthur's been fixing it in his shed. He put in a sidecar, which I've told him is a crime against motorcycling." Sirius swings a leg over and stands, looking guilty and windswept and thirty-seven, his hair a disaster. "I went to fetch it. I was going to surprise you. Did you read the…"
"Yes, I read the note."
"Ah." Sirius looks at Remus's face. Whatever he sees there makes his own expression change. "Ah. Oh, no. Moony. No, that's not… Merlin, I'm an idiot."
"You've written me a note saying you're leaving. You took your jacket."
"I took my jacket because it's October and I was flying a motorbike over London." He comes closer, picking his way across the slates. "I wrote the note in a hurry because I wanted to get to Arthur's before it got dark and you were asleep, and I didn't want to wake you after the moon. I wasn't leaving, I was… I can't stay in this house. That's true. I can't. I've been trying all year. I sleep on the floor because I can't make myself lie down in any bed in it. I keep the lamps on because when it's dark I can hear my mother. That's not the veil. It's just the house." He stops a few feet away. "But I wasn't leaving you. I'd never leave you a note. Not after the last time."
Remus finds that his hands are shaking in his pockets. He takes them out to look. They're shaking. "You said you'd explain when you could. That's what you said last time. Word for word."
Sirius closes his eyes. "I know. I realised on the way to Arthur's. I nearly turned round."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I had a plan." Sirius opens his eyes and they are wet, which Remus has seen maybe four times in his entire life. "I've got a terrible, half-finished, romantic sort of plan, and it involves the bike, and I didn't want to explain it, I wanted to just do it. I thought I'd sell this place and put the money somewhere useful. Hogwarts. St Mungo's. A fund for werewolves who can't get work. I don't care. And then I thought, maybe there's a cottage in Wales somebody hasn't been to since March. And maybe the somebody wouldn't mind if a dog came and lived in it. And I was going to fly us there on the bike tonight and show up on the doorstep and ask. Like an idiot. Instead of just saying it, in the kitchen, like a normal person."
The wind comes up off the street, cold and smelling of rain. Somewhere below, a Muggle car alarm goes off and stops.
"You were going to fly to Wales," Remus says slowly. "Tonight. On a motorbike. The day after the full moon."
"When you put it like that."
"I'd have been sick on you."
"I'd have deserved it." Sirius takes one more step. There's barely a foot of slate between them now. "Moony. I know I'm not what I was. I know there's things wrong with me. I can't sleep in the dark and I get bored in about four minutes and I've got nothing to do and no idea how to have a life. I know you've had sixteen years to get over me, and you probably did, and you're a decent man so you won't say so. You've been so careful with me. You've been careful with me since I came back, like I'm going to break."
"You did break," Remus says. "I watched it. I had my hand round your wrist."
Sirius goes still.
"I've never told you what it felt like." Remus doesn't look away this time. "Pulling you out. It was like trying to drag you out of the sea. You were so cold. I could feel the veil trying to keep you, and I could feel you not fighting it, Sirius, not at first, you just went, like it was a relief. And I thought, if I let go of him now, I will never forgive him. Not ever. Sixteen years I'd been angry with you for something you didn't do, and I wasn't going to let you go and give me something real to be angry about."
"I wasn't not fighting it," Sirius says. His voice is very quiet. "I was lost. It's grey in there. It's grey and it's quiet and there's no direction to it. You can't tell up from down or forward from back. I couldn't tell which way was out. There were voices, a lot of them, whispering. And one of them was saying my name, the way you used to say it when I'd done something unforgivable. Sirius. Like that. All exasperated." He breathes. "That's how I knew which way to go. I went towards the one that sounded fed up with me."
Remus laughs. He can't help it. It comes out wet and wrong and much too loud, up here on the roof in the dark, and Sirius laughs too, helplessly, and they stand there among the chimneys laughing at each other like two idiots who survived a war.
When it stops, Remus reaches into his pocket. He'd put the box there before he came downstairs at four. He hadn't known why at the time. He knows now.
"I bought this in October 1981," he says. "In a shop on Diagon Alley that isn't there anymore. I spent two months' rent on it. I had it in my pocket for a week, because I was waiting for a good moment, and there wasn't one, because there was a war on and you were going out every night and coming back with blood on you. And then you were gone." He holds the box out, the same way Sirius did, flat on his palm. "I never opened it again. I didn't want to see it. I couldn't throw it away."
Sirius looks at the box. He doesn't take it.
"I didn't get over you," Remus says. "I tried. I'm rubbish at it."
Sirius makes a sound that isn't any kind of word. Then he takes the box out of Remus's hand, and he opens it, and inside on its bed of yellowing satin is a plain silver ring, slightly tarnished, with a band of tiny engraved stars running around the outside. The brightest one, if you look closely, is a little bigger than the others. It was a stupid, sentimental thing to have had made. Remus had been twenty-one.
Sirius stares at it for a long time. "That's the Dog Star," he says.
"Yes."
"You had them put the Dog Star on it. You absolute sap."
"I was very young."
"You're a sap now." Sirius closes the box and holds it tight in his fist and looks up. "Ask me, then."
"Sirius…"
"Ask me. I've been waiting sixteen years. I'm not waiting for a better moment. There's never going to be a better moment, there's going to be a Tuesday, or a Thursday, I don't know which, and I want to be bored with you on it. Every one. Ask me."
So Remus asks him. It's not eloquent. It's on a roof in the cold, with a stolen motorbike and a sidecar and the full moon's ache still in his bones, and it comes out mostly as "Will you, then?" which is not how he'd planned it in 1981, when he'd had a speech. But Sirius says yes before he's finished, and then Sirius is kissing him, his cold hands on Remus's face and his mouth tasting of wind and motor oil, and it is nothing like Camden, nothing like being twenty-one. It is like coming up for air. It is like being pulled out of something grey and quiet and into a world with weather in it.
Remus holds onto him by the jacket, by the wrist, the same wrist, and doesn't let go.
They don't fly to Wales that night. Remus points out, reasonably, that he would be sick, and that the bike needs a new headlamp, and that Kreacher has made a steak and kidney pie which is going to go cold. Sirius points out that he has been waiting sixteen years and is in no hurry at all, actually, now that he thinks about it. It's a very different thing, being in a hurry and being restless.
They eat the pie. They go upstairs together, not to the drawing room and not to the green bedroom with its too-short bed, but to the room on the second floor with the Gryffindor banners and the bikini girls, which is the only room in the house that has ever felt like Sirius's. He wants to sleep there, he says, just once, before they sell it. To spite her.
Remus gets into bed. Sirius stands at the lamp for a long moment with his hand on the switch.
"You don't have to," Remus says.
"I know." Sirius looks at the ring on his finger, the silver catching the light, the little stars. Then he turns the lamp off.
In the dark, Remus hears him breathe in, sharp. Then out, slower. Then the creak of the mattress and the cold weight of him sliding under the blankets, and his head on Remus's shoulder, and his hand finding Remus's wrist and holding on.
"Still there?" Sirius whispers.
"Still here."
"Say something. So I know which way."
Remus smiles into the dark, into the long black hair, into the first quiet night of the rest of it. "Sirius," he says, fed up and fond, the way he always has. "Go to sleep."
And for the first time since the spring, he does.