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Love is a lie and we were children, he thinks, but this is not quite true.
About the love, he can’t know; Remus found love in between the pages of books, in the spaces in a library, on the ends of spoons and in standing, still, in a busy street at midday. He found it in the corners of things, on lamppost graffiti, in meeting a stranger. Not in Sirius; though sometimes in mornings he’d come across it, the light still half-blue, awake from agitation in the middle of the night, feet itchy, Sirius mumbling behind him, blunt fingers grasping for the warmth - then settling. He’d yawningly grab bread, make toast with his wand and eat it dry, and there, clinging to the edge of a crust like a dab of butter or jam, was love; but he never ate it.
They were children. Twenty, twenty-one at most, depending on when you think it ended, but not old enough to know anything, least of all the complicated processes of giving, of finding something else in someone, something other than a place to put yourself. Remus had found himself at twenty-one suddenly empty, because Sirius had stretched himself across his life, smoked cigarettes and left sheddings all over Remus’ skin. Been inside him and outside him and shoved his nose everywhere, everywhere, and it hadn’t mattered because they were children, and this is what children do. But at twenty-one, Remus found himself suddenly a man, and knew nothing about what to do with it.
And perhaps it had been a lie, though they hardly knew it. Perhaps love wasn’t for everyone, just for the lucky or the brave, or the young, just for those who kept promises. Perhaps when Sirius first whispered “Alright Moony, don’t pitch a fit. I love you, you know?” It wasn’t real, though Remus threw something at him and slouched off to become a werewolf and said nothing more, nothing back. Maybe it was just words.
They weren’t lovers long, he thinks. If they were lovers at all.
And now Sirius is a darkening shadow, a lurching man, not really a man at all. A person who will clutch him and kiss him and tell him every secret, but nothing he has asked for. Someone dark, not a boy. Not a child, like they were. Remus feels sometimes that being back at Hogwarts makes him a boy again, not really real, not really behaving as he should. Thinks maybe it gives him this dangerous streak that sends him back again to pretending they are still loving, still lovers. Still loved.
Gone is the empty silence of their suspicion, and replacing it is a sort of waiting. They kiss, but they do not discuss. They drink, but they do not fuck. Sometimes, with a laugh to himself, Remus thinks he could hardly manage it now (the loving or the fucking). Sirius is trying to learn, to come back, but standing in his own way, and Remus is not sure he’s not a stranger, and surprised to find how little he cares.
They were children. Sometimes he thinks that was the only way they could love; that they turned tail and fled, in the end, because ‘growing up’ was just too much. That a braver man, a man more deserving – a man at all, like James – might have fought for the right to be happy. Might have won.
He sits by the fire with Sirius’ head in his lap, a dog then, in sleep, no longer concentrating, the shaggy head of a man. He studies his scarred face. He wonders how it all went wrong.