Forgiven (18+)

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The howl wakes me from a restless late-afternoon nap, curled like an old man in a wing chair in front of the fireplace with an afghan tucked in around my chest.

It hadn’t been there when I dozed off, but it corrected the picture nicely, ancient and heavy and matching the faded gentility of the decor a lot better than my protruding shoulders did. I’d dropped over the chair and barely drug my ragged boots onto the ottoman before dozing off with the typical endurance of a werewolf after a hard day’s spying less than a week after the full moon.

No one had come into Grimauld Place after me, which left only the ghost who haunted this filthy old mausoleum to well-born stupidity and fear and malice who could’ve performed the absent kindness to keep my bones from aching in the damp.

The howl comes again, and I have to close my eyes, my breath catching for a moment. Little wonder it woke me, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such a sound come from anything alive. Take the heart-broken wail only a tiny, abandoned pup can manage, give it a broad, deep chest to resonate from, amplify it by years of hopeless endurance, then add a touch of the fierce defiance in the death-howl of the hound brought to bay by the boar.

It won’t give you the terrible sound reverberating through stone and wood into my flesh and bones, but you’ll have a place to start from.

There had been one thing Remus could’ve given the shadow who flitted back from the dead and from the lost to wake him from a twelve-year nightmare of shallow optimism fitted over barest survival. Remus had been making the best of bitter things for a long time, since even before the night when all he valued and all he served evaporated in one destructive cloud.

What Sirius had asked was deeper, of course, not seeming but substance. Sirius acted as though it should’ve been obvious, that he was being self-indulgent in even asking, that a nod was all he needed from Remus to dismiss it all from his mind forever.

There was no making the best of that. He couldn’t look into Sirius’ face, almost dry, almost dismissive, almost desperate, and find room in himself for anything but the starkest truth. Forgiveness had been waiting on the slightest suggestion, forgiveness Sirius desperately needed to give, forgiveness that came easily to his nature even after so many harsh years of torture and madness.

There was no question of blame, of course Remus hadn’t been able to do anything. There were powerful forces and political ones and the entire world gone crazy after that night. In the viciousness that comes with victory, from the wild desire to obliterate the latent seeds of future war, if no one else believed Sirius innocent there had been nothing to be done, but clearly Remus hadn’t, ever, really believed….

But he had. Remus had seen something stark and small simply fold up behind the wide eyes when he admitted it. The last pitiful hope kept alive through all those years, killed with a word. Remus had believed him guilty. He’d explained, quietly, while Sirius stood with his hands folded behind his back and stared out the library window into the night. He’d believed it for the same reasons Sirius had doubted him, although that he hadn’t said, not that or any other thing that might’ve been excuse. But he had at least been able to say that he had grieved, not hated.

That he’d remembered the night word of Regulus’ death had come, of Sirius staring hard and bleak into the sky and talking in a low, grating voice that left the last of childhood in its ashes. It had been a night of “if only” without the wistfulness. Sirius had breathed regret and named intentions. It had made Remus afraid for the future.

Sirius had told him how Regulus died, and why. And he’d wondered how many others serving the Dark Lord felt as his brother did, but lacked his suicidal courage. What might have been achieved if he’d gone with Regulus into the mouth of the beast and held on until the moment Regulus saw sanity and then been there to help pull him out of it all.

What might yet be achieved, if the Dark Lord’s circles could be penetrated deeply enough by someone with strong enough resolve. How many might be saved from weakness of spirit to break from a herd they’d been born to. How many might be saved from death when they did rise. What it might mean to the side of right if enough of them were turned, what it might mean for the future.

It had been better considered than anything Remus had ever heard Sirius propose. It had made him truly afraid.

Sirius hadn’t hated him when he thought Remus had been turned, that he was the spy, that false assumption that had turned the wheel of fate. He’d grieved, grieved that he doubted, grieved that it could be possible, grieved that he understood the reasons that might take Remus from them – werewolves had flocked to Voldemort in the last days as the backlash against dark creatures led to alleyway murders and open executions on the flimsiest evidence.

The brilliant, fierce, beautiful boy Remus had known had not even known how to feel betrayed. Not once he loved. He’d only hurt.

Remus hadn’t hated, he’d explained to Sirius’ poised back over a decade later, addressing the shaggy gray-streaked hair. But he’d grieved for Sirius as much as for Lily and James and Peter, and counted the world well lost that could hold the circumstances of it all. He’d believed Sirius tried to act on his speculations of the night he learned his brother was redeemed and lost in one breath, and had been drawn in and broken by the weight of his father’s expectations and Regulus’ blood.

Sirius had turned and smiled that new, faint, almost bemused smile that seemed so very self-contained and yet caught the breath of everyone who saw it, much to Sirius’ puzzlement, and said he understood. It was a reasonable thought, as impetuous and headstrong and vain as he’d been, to imagine him trying such a thing, and getting caught in it.

He’d even touched Remus’ cheek in a light, strange brush that called back through twenty years to break something in Remus’ chest. I don’t care, Mooney. I had to think about it, but – I really don’t. Not when it’s you. The simplicity and certainty of boys who would be brothers in the face of the coming war. Those fingers on his face.

He’d reached to clasp them, to hold, to bring to his lips, to feel the grace of forgiveness for the failure of being who he was, of weakness he couldn’t prevent, for a second time when it mattered utterly, but Sirius had smiled again, just as gently, and pulled away.

Sirius still didn’t know how to feel betrayed, not where he loved. But this haunted, haunting shadow had had twelve years of slow-passing minutes to learn, and not knowing how to feel what he felt only made it all harder. He couldn’t even begin to forgive what he couldn’t face.

Remus heard the thunder, felt the crackle in the air of nearby lightning, and sighed as the rain fell hard again, thrown against the windows in the rising wind in wild staccato. And the howl rose again from the back garden, more abandoned as the wind howled along, and the wolf in Remus broke and writhed and cried out under it, the broken-hearted sobbing of his mate in the darkness.

Weeks pass, early autumn fading and taking the most vicious of the storms with it. Too much time under Cruciatus can leave an impression even on a werewolf, I find to my cost, especially only a few days before the moon takes sanity for its own even without the help of Unforgivable curses. So we’ve found ourselves haunting the bloody old manor together, ghosts slipping through passageways in the corner of one another’s eyes. We dance around one another in our weakness, unable to draw strength, unwilling to impose need.

Sirius is not cold. He couldn’t even truly be said to be distant. Simply – otherwise occupied, most of the time. There’s an intensity to everything he does now, even when he’s sitting motionless, staring at a blank wall. If I ask him what he sees, what he’s thinking, he’ll tell me. But it’s always some award given Regulus that once hung there, or a portrait of his aunts and his mother when they were girls, and innocent, and not on opposite sides of a war, so I’ve stopped asking.

He isn’t brooding, he isn’t waiting to be taken out of himself. Maybe Snape is right, and lingering over what has been lost is not helpful, but his focus has a desperate edge. Maybe he needs to remember what was before clearly so that he can define the differences between past and future for his own mind. Maybe he needs that clarity to stop feeling so lost. I do well to govern my own mind. It is not my place to police his.

After my injuries, after- after MacNair, damn him – after the moon, Sirius was – kind. Sure and familiar with my body in a way that haunts me. I’ve had so many experiences between the last time he looked on me in such weakness, things that make me ashamed, things that left scars inside and out, and soul-deep scalds left by surviving alone when there was no one to offer aid and the only other choice besides endurance was death.

This is something we share, this costing survival, but for him? It was a few months ago that last he touched me. A few months and a great howling rift with our youth on the other side. The years in Azkaban were a blur of non-time for him, every second vivid in its torment but empty in its weight. He weathered his way through units of pain, not years, survived each agony individually while time passed unheeded.

Little wonder he asks the time, the date, the day, so often, or lingers so over the calendar on the library desk, tracing days as they pass with his fingers, as he ghosts through another midnight spent staring, not dreaming. Little wonder the only things that seem entirely real to him are those things left from before, and those things he can touch.

And I am both. My life as a werewolf has not involved the comforting hands of friends, not since the night the wizarding world rejoiced and everything I valued went to ashes. I have not been monastic, but neither has there been anyone I trusted, not friend or lover, to treat the beast in its weakness with compassion. I would not ask it of Sirius now, not accept it, except it seems to give him so much. He is more grounded, more present when his hands are on me than in any other moment, more even than when he’s with Harry.

The shame of it aches in my chest, closes my throat, especially when he looks into my eyes with such absent gentleness, like such gifts as he gives to me in the depths of my pain are more than habit, actual instinct, set at the dawn of his world. He is careless with these gifts, even as they humble me utterly. The generous, beautiful boy who learned these things never learned to count their cost. He doesn’t, never did, really know their value to me. He knows he helps, it is something he can do that makes a difference, and that is enough for him. It always, always was.

My lack of faith was enough to destroy the last surviving certainty of his early life, to cut a lifeline that’d held through so much else. I cannot be more in his debt. It would not be possible to be. How can I do anything but submit when he says, “Damnit Mooney, have you forgotten how to be still?” as his hands urge me down beneath him, to the cellar stones, to a bed, to the floor of the library when I woke convulsing from nightmare over a text just after my torture.

I have, I have forgotten how to do anything but snap and fight and withdraw in my pains, but I must remember. I must remember to be still, and to accept, even from one I would rather die than tax, at whatever cost if it comforts him for me to know ease under his hands. I cannot owe him more, and so I cannot offer less than anything he asks.

“HUHRASHuh!!”

The noise, and a muffled curse, woke him in his bed. Remus had regained most of his strength, and his nerves, after the nasty encounter with bloody MacNair, and he had spent most of his convalescence in Grimauld Place with only Sirius for company. So he didn’t start out of bed, or even stir beyond a yawn and a turned head and a muffled, “Sirius?”

“HUHHRAHSHuh!! HUH-”

There was a sudden not-sound, a moment when the air seemed to pull in on itself, then he heard, much closer to the floor, a profoundly nasal, “hhhFFFSSSH!!” and then something very close to a whimper.

Remus shivered, suddenly very much awake, and pushed himself up on his arms in the bedclothes, straining his eyes in the darkness. He didn’t need to say “Sirius” again, at least, but seeing a black dog in a pitch dark room wasn’t easy even for werewolf eyes.

He remembered, then, as he reached for his wand, and stopped. For a moment disorientation swept him, as if he were still dreaming, and in the next moment he thought he should drop his head to the pillow and pretend he was. He had heard it even in his dreams, for the first time since Shacklebolt had dragged him through the hearth shivering and half-mad with the memory of pain after a mission gone wrong had delivered him to the man who owned his nightmares for most of a night. He’d heard it each of these last few nights since the children had returned to Hogwarts. Sirius, in the back garden, trapped and hurting and howling at the sky.

Ill-schooled at betrayal, was Sirius. Where he loved and was betrayed he hurt, but wasn’t able to hold on even to the pain of it in the face of the betrayer’s need. But Remus was better, and without the distraction of compassion and care, Sirius was left alone again in that absolute darkness.

“IHFFFSSSSH!!” The drawn out sound whuffled again at floor level. Remus saw a glint of light that was probably fang as lips curled back in irritation. “IHHFFSH! CH’IH’FFFSSSH!“

There was definitely a whimper, then, and a bump, as of ill-coordinated jaws catching at the doorknob, and Remus found himself sitting up, a light on the end of his wand, jumping out to the bedside lamp without conscious order, to cast the room in greys and shadows. Sirius had come to his room after crying his pain into the night, and that was not an honesty Remus wanted to escape over an inconvenience. Sirius might not even remember that such affliction could be more than that between them.

“Padfoot,” Remus said softly, when the great dog dropped his muzzle from its unsuccessful grasp of the nob to rub underneath his lower leg with an itchy shiver.

“IHFFFSSTCH!!” There was a sigh after that, very tired and human sounding.

“You’re all wet, mate,” Remus said softly, sliding his feet onto the floor, finding his slippers against the chill. It hadn’t been raining hard, but it was a lot colder than it had been when Sirius had spent his nights howling his pain to the stars before. And Merlin alone knew what germs the children had brought from Hogwarts to leave behind in wait for such an opportunity. He pulled a bath towel from the bar behind the door and sat on a low bench, spreading it between his hands. “Come on, then. Even dogs don’t need to stay soaked when they’re taking cold.”

That got him a mutinous glare, and his heart sank. If casual acceptance of Sirius’ presence in this state wasn’t the right tack, he couldn’t imagine what might be. But the great dog sneezed again, and seemed to decide denial was pointless, because he slunk sheepishly over to lean his forehead against Remus’ knee and let himself be rubbed down.

He wasn’t soaked, and the ease with which he’d gone from anger to mild embarrassment meant he probably wasn’t drunk, and something in Remus’ chest eased as he rubbed the thick cloth briskly but carefully through the heavy, silky mane. Whatever had brought Sirius here, he hadn’t worked himself to the outer edge of his pain and then come to drop it on Remus.

Distracted by these thoughts, Remus was unprepared when, as he leaned down to rub under the deep furry chest, he suddenly found himself instead with a turning armful of naked male. And in the next moment Sirius was kissing him.

It almost pulled him down into the floor lips-first, but he managed to catch himself and settle them both less precariously, Sirius leaning back against his thigh with the towel half-draped over him, his own arm around the still shivering shoulders, one hand in Sirius’ damp, silver-shot hair.

After the kiss lingered and deepened, Remus wondered dizzily if dropping into the floor might not still be a viable option, but just as his eyes were crossing Sirius snaked a slim, hard around his waist and pried them apart.

Remus sat up, his face flushed and almost gasping, more aroused than embarrassed and not sure if that shouldn’t embarrass him most of all. It had been – no, no point in counting years since the last person he’d touched – it had been a lifetime since he’d been kissed by the man who’d branded him to his soul when they were both too young to know anything beyond the truth that mattered.

Ani li’dodi ve’dodi li, as Grandmother Tzur would murmur, watching her husband of sixty years putter slowly about the workshop of their tiny cottage. There was a fire in Remus’ veins now that called such images, driving him toward a life he had been too wary to wake to for so very many years. The kind of rising to live that moved beyond the search for peace and into the daring for hope.

Sirius sniffled, bringing his forearm to his face. Dense, lean muscle shifted as he turned his wrist, rubbing his nose down his arm, a gathering flush in lightly flaring nostrils testament that this was fueling rather than easing the gathering urge. “Remus,” he breathed, his voice low and breathy, and Remus felt heat curl up his thighs, and up his neck. Something in that voice – Sirius did remember, he’d just been chickening out by going Padfoot.

“Remus… heh…heh-uh…S-sorry-HRAHSHuu!!” His shoulders shuddered under Remus’ hand, against his thigh. He turned aside at the last moment, sneezing into the crook of his arm, but the look he gave Remus under lowered lashes in the instant before-

Remus gasped, a wave of heat washing through his whole body. Sirius stayed turned aside, sniffling damply, teasing or actually embarrassed. Remus’ response was the same in either case. He rubbed a palm across the firm chest, down between his pecs, then splay-fingered, back up over his shoulder. When Sirius’ breath hitched again his fingers tightened, but he forced them to continue their light, soothing path.

“Padfoot,” Remus breathed, then hesitated when the shoulders under his hands stiffened. More deliberately, he said, “Sirius. Bless you.” He shivered, and Sirius snuffled against his forearm, and he made his voice come out despite the rising need urging him to take more direct action. “You didn’t need – this – to make yourself welcome.”

This. Nights in the Forbidden Forest, shaking under blankets on the Astronomy Tower, the first time he’d ever felt another’s body inside his own. The light sweat of fever, the exquisite sensitivity, and the touch and the feel and the sound….

“HRAHSCHOO!!” Sirius’ whole body curled under the force, but he remained turned away, still not speaking, and that was teasing, denying Remus his voice as the urge rose. How could he have thought Sirius could forget his weakness for this. “Hah…hah-uh…N-needed hahh-! Needed to be s-surAHTSCHOO!!” The explosion shook him to his bones, and he sagged into himself, catching his breath.

He looked up at Remus then, and his eyes were dark and wild and full of haunted things and pain, and Remus went still, afraid his slightest move would shatter the last of Sirius for good this time. But after a moment Sirius sniffled again, and something mischievous and fond peered through the blowing winds. It startled Remus so he actually jerked back, and then Sirius laughed, a real laugh, a miracle to Remus’ ears, and there was no turning back.

It was the first time they’d ever touched as men, grown into their full height and breadth. The differences made them awkward, clumsy at first, as they got to their feet and Remus out of his pajamas and both of them into the bed. But then the familiarity of their skin and their scent and them together, them, not each of them, rose and struck them both breathless, and suddenly everything was simple and thoughtless and they were laughing, tumbling shivering under the covers in a friendly pile.

The cares of unfamiliar lovers – don’t move so, don’t look so, he might be repulsed, he might find it awkward – evaporated, and they were back to the friendly push of knees and elbows and nose-bumping kisses, and from there into something like grace that had nothing to do with care and everything to do with affection and ease, even when Sirius ran his nose behind Remus’ ear and sniffled deeply and Remus gasped so hard he choked.

Remus eventually was sprawled against the headboard, both hands in Sirius’ damp, silky hair, and those hard, wiry arms clasped so tightly around his ribs it caught his breath, feeling the heat of Sirius’ need against his hip, tasting it from his mouth, feeling it aching in both their skin. Sirius was still sniffling as he tried to keep enough breath to maintain the kiss, but Remus could feel him losing the battle, could feel his chest start to hitch in little, sudden jerks, and heard the sniffling come faster.

He groaned into Sirius’ mouth and loosened his hands, wrapping his arms around the lithe, hard shoulders instead, after so many years wanting to feel every inch of this – not even fantasy, not through the grief and the pain – but sometimes guilty, aching dream.

Finally Sirius tore his mouth free, arching his head back but not allowing a spare inch between their bodies. His nostrils were deeply red now, so long neglected while the itch grew deeper, into a burn, into, “Hah-! Hyuh-! R-Remus-HAHH-!”

“Bloody-Sirius-please-!” he groaned, writhing, trying to shift their hips into better sync.

“HUHHRAHTSHuh!!” Sirius curved his head just to the side, and light spray struck Remus’ neck, his chest, as Sirius whole body surged against him. “HuhhRATSHuu!! Huh-HUHHTSSCHuu!!”

Remus was pinned beneath the smaller man by the angle of their bodies, he couldn’t get enough leverage to buck or turn, and his hips jerked helplessly, seeking contact, even as Sirius pressed his own need into his hip, pleasure and goad and not enough, not enough even as Sirius lowered his head and took a broad, hot bite into his neck, not enough to break skin but hard, so -

Remus yelled, hoarse and ripping from his throat and he found the strength to roll them over, Sirius’ teeth in his neck, still, hot and deep and he knew what he was doing, he knew. In wolves the non-tearing bite under the neck was profoundest submission.

Sirius was strong and quick but he wasn’t a werewolf, and without leverage he had no hope of preventing Remus from pinning him, tangling their legs, driving their groins together in a few needy, indulgent thrusts before pinning his hands over his head in the pillows.

Sirius tightened his teeth. Remus growled, low. Sirius sniffled, then again, frantically. Remus shuddered against him and Sirius let go, drawing a wild breath and then sneezing ferociously, repeatedly, right against the flesh he’d just bitten.

Remus groaned and couldn’t stop, feeling the force echo through him, down his spine, up his thighs, almost paralyzing in its pleasure as sound shook from deep in his own chest, not a growl. Sirius drew his head back, sniffling carefully, clearly in need of a handkerchief, but his eyes were very, very clear.

“Forgive me, Remus,” he gritted out, rocking his body up so aching hardness raked aching hardness with almost painful friction.

Remus tightened his hands around the lean, rigid muscle of Sirius’ forearms, and managed to still his breath, even when Sirius snuffled again, so carefully, the flush in his fair skin spreading up his nose speaking against any attempt to restrain the gathering urge for long. Remus couldn’t keep the anger of his disbelief from his own voice. “Forgive you for what?“

Sirius’ cheek trembled, and he breathed shakily through his mouth, but managed, “For needing…for needing to-” But then his eyes were shining and he rolled his head away, sneezing miserably, repeatedly, low-pitched and wrenching, and Remus tore himself off him despite what the sound, the feel, called from his body.

Ridiculous in the height of his arousal, no more able to ease his rapid breath than Sirius was, he snatched a handkerchief from a drawer and put it in Sirius’ hand, then sat slowly on the side of the bed, leaving his back to the struggling man. Not all those gasps were because he still needed to sneeze, nor had the water in his eyes been from his clearly gathering cold.

Remus dug his fingers into his own thighs until they hurt, just enough to give him strength not to roll over and take the man, and waited until Sirius had cleaned himself up and was breathing more quietly to say softly, “Bless you. Run that by me again?”

He dared a look over his shoulder, but Sirius was curled with his forearm pressed hard to his eyes, the handkerchief still pressed to his nose, his whole body curved around the vulnerability of his own unabated arousal. Remus hesitated, but if he couldn’t touch this man on a night he’d come to his bed like this, then Remus Lupin would never be good for anything.

He rubbed slow, firm fingers over the curve of Sirius’ back, leaning into the touch when muscles trembled in individual response. Twelve years, and no one to touch him. And it wasn’t the same, it couldn’t be, but Remus thought he knew a little, understood a little. Twelve years since he had touched anyone with the innocence of love that’d graced his first twenty years and spoiled him forever, unable to be soothed by empty imitation.

“Sirius.”

He wasn’t crying, not really. But if he spoke he would be, just then, so Remus just rubbed his back and sat there, watching his own hand move, marveling that it remembered things he’d never known he knew as it touched here and pressed there and slowly eased Sirius from his desperate knot.

“HWMPSSHUH!!” It still sent sparks up his arm from their contact, but Remus managed to keep himself from shuddering in response. Sirius had wanted sex to carry away words, had come to Remus with an assurance of his irresistibility, as though he’d needed it, but that was a bad, bad idea if they were ever to have anything stronger or more healing than fumbled pleasure in the dark. Sirius pinched the bridge of his nose through the handkerchief, and sneezed one more time, sounding tired with it, before dropping both hands from his face and looking at Remus with bleak, reddened eyes.

He examined Remus for a long minute, then closed his eyes with a sigh. After what had been in the look, enough to turn his breath to ice in his chest, Remus was ready to let Sirius sleep there, then, tucked up in his bed and anything beyond sleep out of mind. But always, always, the heart that drove such hot and cold passion was strong and steady beneath it as well. Sirius opened his eyes again, and met Remus’s gaze, and said simply, the simplicity of stars collapsing, “Forgive me for needing to hurt you before I could forgive you. For needing to forgive you at all.”

“You’re mad,” Remus whispered, completely undone, horrified that he understood completely. “Of course you-”

“I doubted you, too. It could have been you, and I would have believed. Grieved, as you said, but believed. What right do I have-?”

“The right that the world didn’t turn out that way, that you didn’t believe, whatever you think you might’ve, that I didn’t suffer twelve years of Dementors for that belief.”

“You couldn’t have done anything-”

“I could have believed.” Remus forced himself not to get up, to not even lift his hand. Anger at himself was not an excuse to leave Sirius alone, not now. It would be a shame the rest of his life that he’d forced Sirius to come to him under the self-serving guise of giving him his space. “I could have given you a place to come back to where you had never been other than the man who went to die for his friends’ lives and died inside when he couldn’t. I could have been the place the man you really are had always lived.”

“I thought you were dead, Remus.” Sirius choked, and scrubbed at his face and his nose again with the crumpled handkerchief. “I counted hours, and when no one came for me, I thought – I knew – you were dead, too. It was the last thing, I couldn’t stand – they had me then, for years they-” His voice dropped and went thin as he said more, not babble but quiet, wandering, words given to the wind a thousand times by their cadence.

And Remus knew that finally this was something he could do to help his friend break through the mists and feel real again. Given to the wind a thousand times, they had circled and cut and blown back through his soul.

“I thought you were dead, I thought you were the traitor, but I thought the only reason you wouldn’t come for me was that you were dead, and I looked at those thoughts, I was having them at the same time, and knew I’d been mad to doubt you, but why you didn’t come, and then I realized, you couldn’t do anything but make me watch you die on the walls if no one believed you, if no one with more power got me out the right way,” and on and on, twelve years of circling thoughts, swallowing one another’s tails, and so many of them about Remus that the hot knot in his throat grew tighter and tighter until when Sirius sat up and put his arms around him, both hands hooked on his shoulder and looking him in the eyes from inches and said, “And then the only thing that mattered was that you were alive, and free. But then that day in the library, when you said-” Remus gasped and shook his head, fighting for breath.

He’d known, he’d seen the cost in Sirius’ eyes at his admission, but that it could have been so simple, one trust could have grounded the world for the man. Just as one trust from Sirius could’ve saved James and Lily.

Sirius seemed calmer, seemed focused. His eyes searched Remus’ for understanding. “I do forgive you, Remus, I have, now. I need you to forgive me for needing to.”

So simple, but the very thought made Remus’ thoughts burn. He couldn’t forgive what should never need forgiveness, and yet it does. Whatever harm I caused, no one died for my folly. Ah, the unworthy mutter behind thought, not meant, not believed. Petty reaction against deserved judgment for his own real crimes.

Sirius caught his chin, and forced him to face him again. Remus realized he’d said part of that last bit out loud. Sirius shook his head. “That’s what I thought. But I needed to, Remus, I had to. And I need this from you, I’m asking-” Remus could feel his hot, congested breath against his face, was there never enough on the man at one time?

A shudder started that seemed to shift Remus to his very bones before he was done, but by then he had turned in Sirius’ arms, tackled him back against the pillows, and rolled to pull Sirius on top of him, making sure they were properly lined up this time. Sirius pushed up on his arms, not struggling free, but a flush of anger joined the color his cold had put in pale cheeks.”Remus, don’t-”

Sirius had come to lose admission and absolution in the flurry of sex, but the honest heart betrayed him. Remus wondered if the man had ever touched anyone he didn’t love in his life, had ever hid anything that mattered besides his suspicions of you.

“I forgive you.” The little voice went silent as Remus said it, and found that he could mean it. “I forgive that you needed to hurt me. I understand why, and how.” Sirius had known what it cost him to submit to his care, had caught Remus in the crucible of allowing himself to be cared for as penance to Sirius’ need to act.

Sirius had been getting satisfaction not from his physical suffering as he tended to Remus, but in how Remus’ heart tore at allowing Sirius to do it at all. And after what Remus had cost Sirius’ heart, how could he not forgive that now? That was the easy part.

Remus drew another breath and answered what hadn’t been asked. “And I forgive that you doubted me, I forgive that you couldn’t trust me because I am a werewolf, even though you swore it would never matter. I forgive all that may or may not have happened because of that.” And he did, truly, had long ago. Only in the first heat of realization, when he’d put everything together at Hogwarts, had he truly blamed Sirius for James’ and Lily’s deaths, even if the nagging thought had lingered.

Remus raised his hands and slid them back into Sirius’ hair as his eyes brightened again, making him sniffle harder. Sirius wouldn’t weep, not even for this, but a cold could excuse much. “I forgive you for needing to forgive me. I forgive it if you’ve hated me, even if you still do. There is nothing you have or can do or feel that I have not already forgiven. I know you, Sirius Black, I know what you deserve from me. Even if you’re about to walk away and tell me this was part of my punishment.” He might go mad with it, to be touched like this and then denied, and his heart might break, but he could forgive it.

Sirius’ body melted down onto him then, belly sliding, arms diving into the pillows to curve up behind his shoulders, mouth finding his and seeming to then find a way deep inside. Remus felt the urgency slam through Sirius, felt it resonate through his own body. Enough, enough, enough thought, enough pain, just feel, your body, just feel, I love you, just-

Sirius hooked a foot behind his knee, shifting angles, tightening their contact; they were both slick and leaking and the heat as they ground together should’ve lit the sheets.

“Hahhn- Hahh-!” Sirius pulled back, his eyes tightening, nostrils moving urgently as he struggled against the urge that had been denied for too long, too close to his own pleasure to want the intrusion, too caught in the simplicity of skin and souls to remember what it would do to Remus.

Remus curled nails and raked them lightly up his thigh, distracting him from any attempt at control, and Sirius’ eyes widened as his whole body jerked under the touch. He shook his head, breath quickening, his hair falling around his face, ebony and ivory locks in the uncertain light. “HAHH- Hah-uh-! HYIHHTSHUH!! Huh-HUHSCHUH!! HUHTSCHUH! HYAHUHHATSHSHUH!! Uhhh…. Uh-uh-Hehhn….HAHTSSHuh!!” He sniffled desperately, panting, and Remus surged beneath him, eyes wild and hungry, hands scrabbling to pull them close, tighter, skin to skin not enough, more, closer.

He lunged to kiss Sirius and Sirius bent into it, sniffling, panting into his mouth, struggling for breath and feeling the room begin to spin. Almost thirteen years since anyone- And Remus the last, and the first-

“HYAHPSTSH!!” He barely pulled his mouth free in time, and light mist fell on Remus’ face and across his collarbone, on his neck. Sirius wanted to bite him again, Remus’ pupils were dilated until he almost resembled the wolf, that primal touch could be a gift, but so could, “Huh-uh! Hah-uh! HAH- HAH- ” He buried his face against Remus’ neck and felt the long body tighten beneath him, “HMPSHSH!! HUH’PSSHSH!!“

Muffled against Remus’ neck, shaking them both, “Huh-uh…HWMPSSTCHHH!!” and then there was coursing heat on his belly, from his body, and they were both shaking, and he couldn’t stop sneezing, and Remus was cursing and laughing and begging Sirius not to kill him, and then there was a handkerchief in his hand again, and he had just enough strength left to slide partway off Remus’s body to let the man breathe before mobility and coherent thought drifted beyond reach together.

I wake feeling reborn in body and soul. Or perhaps simply born, fully a man for the first time in this life. This scarred, afflicted body, and this battered, weary, apportioned soul have been touched. Loved. Trusted.

Known.

For perhaps the first time. The gift in that, to one who has lived his life in every kind of hiding, is inexpressible.

Sirius shifts against me in the dark, sniffling and shivering a little, his nose rubbing damply against my neck. I absently pull the blankets closer around us, pull us into closer contact. Physical warmth I can share, as Sirius, even after all he’s been through, can still offer warmth to my heart and soul.

“I’ve hated you.” His voice is sudden and hoarse in the darkness, almost ruined.

His cold isn’t that bad yet. It’s the confession that corrodes his voice. The cold I can see tended, will, when the sun rises.

For now, “I know.” How could he think I don’t know why he howled. He’d hated me, just a flicker, for my doubt, and then he’d hated me profoundly for making him hate me.

“I love you.” Ah, such quiet desperation. Sirius, who has never lived and loved as an adult- but perhaps I am unjust. If anyone could’ve maintained a purity of attachment through the compromises of life it would’ve been Sirius, if the world had not tested him to destruction.

“I know.” I try to put all I feel in return in that, but don’t say more. He doesn’t need my words, not right now. This simple dilemma he must reconcile is tearing at the heart of him.

He draws a ragged, forced breath, and his voice makes my own throat ache. “It has to matter, Remus.”

As if his momentary hatred was anything but a gift to me, expunging guilt too deep to bear. I’m left with things I can face, now that I have truly forgiven him for it all. I no longer carry the burden of my own unjust anger against him to cut myself on.

“It does, Sirius. It just doesn’t matter as much.”

His breath catches, and I command my libido to submission as he stifles a sneeze against me, but then I feel him shake his head, and hear the sound in his throat, and realize. He needs more than the bald, unpalatable, soul-saving truth. We had been innocent, we should’ve always been. Should’ve, could’ve, Lily should’ve danced at Harry’s wedding….

“Sometimes, life just hurts.” Twelve years I lived while he survived, and that is all I can give him, for the nothing and the saving grace that knowledge can be.

After a long moment, he shifts, rolling toward me in the dark. I hear him snuffle against a cloth, hear him clear his throat, prepare myself for his anger. I get lips on my forehead, warm and light and so heartbreakingly tender and earnest and confused.

“And love endures.” He didn’t, and did, say it as a question.

All he’s been through. All I have. All we have yet to face. His too-warm body here against me in the darkness.

“If we’re lucky,” I say simply.

Oh, his voice, ahh, Sirius.

“Lucky….”

~FIN

 Note and translation: Ani li’dodi ve’dodi li Hebrew, traditional:
I for my beloved and my beloved for me.
(Half of fandom seems to think Remus is half Jewish so hey, why not?)
~ Let me know what you think?