Work Text:
December 10th, 9:53 pm
It was so quiet in the store that night that he could hear the humming of the neon sign all the way back among the secondhand atlases. Open, it said, and he did: his lips first, and then his eyes, wide, disbelieving. New and well-loved, it said, below, in nearly illegible piping, and that was just how he felt. Washed clean as the air after rain, rough edges as tenderly worn away as the bindings of so many of the books around him. A volume of Greek and Macedonian history jabbed itself into his spine, insistent and bruising, and a compact Spanish-English dictionary rested its full weight on the crown of his head, but breathless as he was, caught in heat as he was, they were nothing, not even irritations. He tilted his head and shook every conjugation and false cognate to the floor; the history he left behind him, as he closed his eyes, no longer disbelieving. “Sirius,” he sighed, and it felt like the first page, the first word, the beginning of something new.
But, really, it was somewhere closer to the middle.
September 30th, 7:09 pm
Mr. Lockhart let him pick up more shifts afterwards. He was the only one who didn’t ask questions, who didn’t look at him with trepidation or disdain. “Add Thursdays and Fridays, then,” was all he said, not even looking up from his phone. The lack of eye contact made the subsequent fawning easier – “Oh, thank you, Mr. Lockhart, you have no idea how much I appreciate this, Mr. Lockhart, you’re so generous, Mr. Lockhart” – but no less humiliating. He had, after all, spent the last few years inwardly mocking his boss at every opportunity, snorting at his vanities, like the way he included himself on the list of local authors they kept by the till, and the piles of his signed, unsold books they were made to keep stocked near the front. The scribe, his friends had called him with ever increasing glee, as Remus recounted his petty outrages during their study breaks, energy drinks and cooling coffee cupped in their hands, their notes a chaotic mass on their shared table in the library, midnight long since faded. He looked back on those nights now with the wince-inducing sting only hindsight could bring. Because Mr. Lockhart might be as bitter and self-involved as every failed author, but he hadn’t even tried enough to fail. All he’d done was absconded, running off like a thief into the night – but the stupid kind of thief, the kind who hasn’t got sense enough to run far.
He woke up every day to see the textbooks still littering his flat floor, many of them splayed open to their last relevant pages; he had to tip-toe around them to get from one end of the room to the other, balancing on the ball of one foot, overextending his stride, like he was an adventurer in a crumbling temple choked with jungle vines, making his way across a floor rigged with booby-traps. He hadn’t even considered picking them up, not even when the empty promise of their titles squeezed something tight in his chest, not even when he stubbed his toes on them and howled the way someone might when poisoned darts whizzed into their naked skin. He couldn’t have explained why, what force those books exerted over him, the same way he couldn’t have explained why he’d stayed in town instead of going back home, why he’d kept the same job, where from the window he could see the tallest spire of the tallest university building. It was as inexplicable to him as it was to his friends, many of whom had asked, right afterwards, “So when are you going back?” and then had had to hurriedly cover their surprise when he’d told them he wasn’t. They were the things, really, that he would have shucked from his life if he could. Not forever – not even for long – but just until he didn’t wake up every day remembering. He longed, with an intensity that had once been reserved for his physical hungers, to wake up and not think, first thing, How could you not even make it through your third year, you fucking drop-out?
And this, of course, was first among the things about himself he simply could not explain. How he had felt panic creeping up on him for months and months, observed it rolling in like a storm he expected to swerve at the last minute, thinking it could not possibly be for him, it could not possibly come to spoil what had been, by his own admission, the best years of his life so far. Even when it was right on top of him, its voice in his ear – What are you doing here, really? What’s the point of all this? – he had tried to deny it. He spent so much energy trying to deny it, in fact, that his breakdown came as much as a surprise to him as to anyone else. When he’d sat down in Slughorn’s class the third week of his third year he’d expected to leave at the bell with his friends, go to the library for the next hour before his last class of the day, and study late into the night. But twenty minutes in Slughorn had looked up from his lecture notes and called on him to answer a question – a nothing question, a prove to me you did the reading question – and the panic that he had so long denied converged on him, took him over, no longer a thing he could watch along the horizon but something inside him, dense and ungovernable and burning up his throat like bile. He lost time, literally could not remember a detail about the twenty or so seconds he must have sat in silence, blankly staring at some point over Slughorn’s head. But he certainly remembered what came after; and if he hadn’t, he was sure no one else would ever let him forget it.
Slughorn’s voice, plummy, dripping condescension, had rung out through the lecture hall. “Hello-o, what’s the matter up there, Mr. Lupin?” And it was like a light, sinuous as a moonbeam slipping beneath a curtain, but white hot, blinding, had been shone not just through his eyes but through his entirety, piercing him, pinning him to the spot; and it altered something in him, did not make him snap as his classmates would later claim, but rather, in its illumination, made something buried deep within him visible for the first time.
“What’s wrong with me?” he exclaimed in a near scream, unable to contain all he felt inside him. “What’s wrong with this whole fucking institution, more like! What are we even learning here? What is the point of this? Why is macroeconomics a prerequisite to be an English major? What are we even learning here beyond how to pass the end of semester exam? What life skill is any of this – any fucking class – preparing us for but how to pass tests? What is the point of that, huh? What is the fucking point?”
He might have said more, he might have gone on for longer – far longer – but in the split second he took to draw more breath, to launch himself even more deeply into a destructive spiral, he heard a single, barking laugh. He recognized it, and that recognition drew the wildness away from him, set him firmly back in his own skin, where he was woken to the fact that he’d just been yelling and cursing at a teacher and that all of his classmates were staring at him in stunned silence. Well, not all of them: the one who’d laughed was staring at him with an expression of absolute mirth, and when he met Remus’s eyes Remus could only open and close his mouth twice, mechanically, before he slowly rose to his feet, where it occurred to him that the only sensible course of action was to leave.
“I’m leaving,” he announced to the entire room, as he proceeded to collect his textbook and notes from the desk, taking care to gather up the now empty coffee cup he’d brought with him to class, and taking the time – even he could not help joking about this, later – to neatly pack everything in his bag. He’d then left the classroom on a growing tide of whispers, the sound of them pushing him faster out the door, where he’d thrown the coffee cup into the first trash can he saw before bending over and vomiting right on top of it. By the time he got back to his flat he was sweating and shaking and weak-limbed, more fluish than when he’d had the actual flu. He’d collapsed on his bed and slept for twenty hours straight, his phone still in his pocket, buzzing so hard and so constantly against his thigh that he recalled dreaming of wasps, of hissing whispers, of slow amputation. He’d woken up to find it drained, the shock of what he’d done – and furthermore what he knew he still had to do – keeping him pinned to the bed for an hour more.
He formally withdrew from university that day, after hours of talking with his advisor and his parents, and made a quick stop at Slughorn’s office to formally apologize. The professor had refused to make eye contact with him, as though whatever madness that had possessed Remus might be spreading, but he hadn’t seemed angry, just confused, like everyone else, at why Remus had done it. He wasn’t failing his macroeconomics class, or any class; he wasn’t hard up for money despite not having grown up with very much; he wasn’t into drugs or over-drinking; he wasn’t caught up in any kind of tormented love affair; he wasn’t having trouble making friends or adjusting to the university atmosphere; he wasn’t suicidal or depressed or anxiety ridden; he wasn’t even unhappy about the major he’d chosen. He was, just simply, done. And to everyone – not least himself – that was what made the whole thing so baffling.
In the weeks that followed, as he threw himself onto Mr. Lockhart’s mercy and started working full time at the bookshop, memories from his first two years in college and the beginning of the semester would come to him in flashes. He’d remember sitting with Lily at the end of their first week their first year in a small, kitschy café, listening to her talk excitedly about the lecture they’d just heard, how eager she was to read over the syllabus again, and feeling like he was listening to someone talking in another language, her excitement incomprehensible to him. He’d remember walking into every classroom feeling as marked and out of place as a tourist, and how that feeling never went away. He’d remember being shushed in study group, told to stop making puns at the expense of the Romantic poets so they could all concentrate. He’d remember how the first time he’d had an energy drink so that he could pull an all-nighter he’d thought, but I don’t want five more hours of energy. He’d remember the sound of his alarm being like a blow to the chest, standing at his open front door with only the watery winter sunlight above him, having to make bargains with himself just so he’d step over the threshold and go to class. He’d remember the mnemonics, the study guides, the cheat sheets, and the way they curled up gold at the edges when he’d burned them in the summer. He’d remember looking up at the clock over Slughorn’s head, two weeks to the day before screaming, and thinking, Oh my God, two more years of this, thinking why am I doing this, thinking what’s wrong with me?
But once analyzed and meticulously combed Remus saw that these were only the warning signs, not the explanation. And though he thought and thought about it, trying to find it, it turned out that it was to come to him on its own, by slow degrees and storms, and from something – or rather, someone – he would have least expected.
It was late September and he was still a spectacle: students from the university coming into the bookshop just to gawk, the boldest among them bringing books they wanted to sell, reassuring him the books had nothing to do with macroeconomics because they knew that made him crazy. He’d laugh – he had to, he was behind a counter, trapped by the machinations of the customer service industry – and then when they’d gone he’d go into the back and scream into his coat. He still didn’t feel right. He felt better, sure – he was, as the therapist his mother had made him go to said, “coping well” – but not back to himself. He wondered, sometimes, if he’d ever be back to himself, if knowing that he was capable of flying off the handle like that had altered his inner geography to too great a degree, made it impossible for him to navigate his own moods and thoughts. It depressed him to think this, made him stare open mouthed and dull-eyed at whatever lay before him, which led, unfortunately, to him looking like a slack-jawed dope when he walked in.
He jolted, far more than he would have if it were anyone else. “Ah! Oh, er,” he managed, further entrenching himself in embarrassment. “Andromeda just went on break. Or no – wait, sorry. Sorry. She left for the day.”
Sirius said nothing to this as he neared the counter, just smiled in that aggravating way of his, his lips curved just shy of a smirk, their fullness accentuated. Yes, I know, you’re welcome for the look, the gesture seemed to say, and Remus hated it, hated how much he enjoyed it.
“I’m not here for my cousin,” he drawled, his voice, as always, startling to Remus in its lushness, the depth of it like a bow pulled low on a cello’s strings. How unfair, he always thought, that Sirius could be gorgeous without even being seen.
“Oh,” he said stupidly. “Well –”
“I’m here for you.”
Remus’s heart squeezed tight in his chest, and he was filled, as he had so often been lately, with an onrush of memory. Only unlike his memories of his unhappiness at school, which came to him one at a time, with such blunt force it was as though he’d been shoved back into that moment, these memories went through his mind like light through a prism, a scattershot of color and movement:
Sirius stretching out below a tree in the language building courtyard, sunlight and shifting shadow on his face, his hair. Sirius leaning against the railing outside the library, wearing nothing but a jacket despite the cold, the tip of his nose bright pink. Sirius in French class, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips, to kiss the vowels. Sirius somehow sitting down in painted on jeans, the seams straining along his thighs; Sirius rolling up his sleeves, fingers careless with the cashmere; Sirius out dancing in a white t-shirt he’d written my eyes are up here in Latin on, the arrow pointing down; Sirius throwing back egg nog in antlers and the ugliest Christmas sweater ever made; Sirius wearing the same shirt two days in a row and nobody else noticing anything. Sirius never alone, always accompanied, admired; Sirius and Marlene making out in the quietest corner of the library, his hand sliding into her lap; Sirius and Dorcas dirty dancing at Honeyduke’s, her thighs moving down his; Sirius and Gideon coming down the stairs at James’s end of semester house party, lips swollen, shirts half-buttoned; Sirius and Benjy leaving the alumni dinner in a rush, a wine stain on Sirius’s neck, Benjy’s hands already partway in his trousers; Sirius and his bad reputation. Sirius crossing his arms during James and Lily’s first attempt to combine their friend groups, moodily surveying the dim sum. Sirius raising his eyes during the second try, sloshing his beer in his glass, and laughing – yes, laughing – at the story Remus was telling, at the jokes he’d thought only Lily would get. Sirius standing outside a bar, midnight burning away like the tip of the cigarette in his hand, head tilted back, laughing up towards the stars, again, miraculously again, at something Remus had said, his lips parted, wet.
Sirius’s laugh, so distinctive, sharp, a bark, filling the silence he’d made in Slughorn’s classroom, bringing him back to himself. And now, the sound of his voice again, the hint of laughter in it, making him realize what he should have the moment he came in: that he wasn’t really here to see him. He was just doing the same thing as everyone else, coming to see the sideshow.
“Right,” he heard himself saying flatly. “What a treat for me.”
Sirius’s ego must have been too big for him to even comprehend the concept of a snub, because he kept on smiling as he walked up to the counter. “Don’t you know it,” he said, and Remus hated himself for having a crush on this arsehole all over again.
He reached the counter, swinging his bag up on top of it like the damn thing wasn’t made of glass and undoing the leather straps. “Jim told me you’ve been looking for books,” he said, riffling through the bag. “Said you wanted to keep your mind busy or something.”
“Ah,” Remus said, fighting not to let out a weary sigh. He now felt worse than if Sirius had come in to mock him or make a joke at his expense. One of the most trying things about the aftermath of his breakdown – just after no longer feeling like himself, and his mother calling him up all the time crying – was how keen his friends seemed to be to fix him. After being assured that he was okay, that he didn’t need anyone coming over with food or to take him to see a therapist, the first thing Kingsley had said to him was, “Okay. So. Let’s talk game plan. What are your next steps?” And Mundungus – Mundungus! – had brought him multiple flyers on how to best utilize your gap year, plus pamphlets on how to transfer universities, and a list of universities with the most stress free environments. But it was Lily and James who proved to be most ardent in their desire to “get him back on track.” They had started coming in at least twice a week in addition to their insistence on taking him out to weekly dinners, arriving with every increasing degrees of optimism, talking about his “recovery” and “getting back on the horse” and giving him self-help book after self-help book with titles like Effective Effort, Max Your Life, and The Only Way Up Is Down: A Guide to Transforming Failure to Success! He had only gotten a paragraph into Effective Effort before he’d had to put it down, his palms sweaty, the need for a drink nearing critical. Is that all life is, he’d wondered, doing your best to be efficient? To what end, to what purpose? He’d had to lie through his teeth to Lily about how helpful the book had been, the same way he’d had to lie to her about loving their classes. He adored Lily – they’d been friends since they were six – but her ambitiousness made him uneasy, estranged him from her in a way that their more obvious differences never had. And now with James she was even worse, making five year plans, spending hours color-coding her day planner, constantly urging him to do the same. They had undoubtedly talked about him and all the ridiculous books they’d shoved at him in front of Sirius, and Sirius, with his double major and aggressively good grades, had no doubt taken it as a hint to present Remus with yet another book about how you should only sleep four hours a day and spend all your waking hours working in forty minute bursts. Remus found himself nauseous at the mere thought of it, and he decided that it didn’t matter that Sirius had the most mesmerizing eyes he’d ever seen or that he would have given his pinky toe just to lick the corner of his jaw, he wasn’t going to take another self-help book to his flat.
Sirius set the book down on the counter with the magnanimous air of an oil baron turned philanthropist. “This should keep you busy enough!” he declared.
“Actually, I’ve already read—” He cut himself off, his gaze fixed to the book Sirius had set on the counter. Instead of the glossy, anodyne hardcover he’d been expecting there was a fraying paperback as wide as his fist, its spine lined with cracks. On its cover was an abstract swarm of deep grays and black, the intimation of a hulking building in its depths, a teardrop of gold at its center. It did something to the nerves along his spine just to look at it, made him reach out, pull it closer so that he could weigh it in his hands. He saw its title only when he picked it up; in a crimson font with serifs sharp as spikes it did not designate so much as it demanded: Feast.
Blinking, utterly thrown, Remus looked up at Sirius and blurted, “But – but this isn’t a self-help book!”
“Aren’t all books self-help books?” Sirius said archly. But then, when Remus was too slow to laugh he leaned in, suddenly serious. “Oh God, don’t tell me Jim’s been giving you those preachy, bullocksy books he’s so in love with. Dream Your Plan, Plan Your Dream, and all that other dreck?”
Remus cleared his throat, feeling awkward about complaining about James to his best friend. “Ah…uh, well, he hasn’t given me that one yet.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s on its way. It’s his favorite out of all that nonsense,” Sirius said, rolling his eyes. “But while you’re waiting to be told how to plan your life down to the millisecond…” He reached out tapped Feast, where it still sat in the palm of Remus’s hand. The book shifted against his thumb from the pressure of Sirius’s movements, and he realized, with embarrassing swiftness, that this was the closest he’d ever come to deliberately touching him. How pathetic, he thought at once, and the surge of annoyance he felt, the way he was tired of even his own pity, made him bold, made him lean in closer to Sirius as he spoke.
“Give me your number,” he told him, amazed even as it happened that his voice didn’t shake. “When I’m done, we’ll have coffee and I’ll tell you how I liked it.”
It was Sirius’s turn to blink and look nonplused, though it could hardly have been the first time anyone had asked for his number. It might have been an insult, an implication that Remus was so far outside Sirius’s league that he was not even a prospective candidate for giving his number to, had he not recovered immediately and said, breezily, “Sure. Here.”
Remus’s phone was charging in the back, and the only thing left in Sirius’s bag was his laptop, so he picked a secondhand Rita Skeeter up from where it was displayed in front of the till, paid the discounted fee against Remus’s protests, and wrote his number on the flyleaf. “Look at that,” he said with every inch of his ego on display. “A Skeeter book that finally has something in it worth reading.”
Remus rolled his eyes; it he wasn’t so damned sick of seeing Skeeter’s beetle-like face on the back cover of half the books in the store he might’ve come to her defense, but as it was he just watched Sirius put his pen away and hoist his bag onto his shoulders, and felt a pleasant little shiver go down his spine when he smiled his good-bye.
Only after he vanished past the marquee of the indie theatre across the street, its decadent neon lights flickering like candle flame through the start of the rain, did Remus realize, too late, that he hadn’t said thank you.
…
He walked home in gusting winds, the rain now in earnest. His shoes were sodden by the time he hurried into his building, the fabric of his umbrella so much in tatters that it had become elegant in its uselessness, like a splendid piece of high fashion no woman going about her daily life would ever wear. For that reason he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, at least not yet, while the rain still glimmered along its shreds, and so he left it in the hallway, along with his shoes, trusting that his neighbors – an intense, cat loving older woman, and a bloke his own age so obsessed with online gaming he rarely left his flat – wouldn’t even notice they were there.
Inside, he peeled off his clothes and put on the least groddy sweats he could find, dodging the books on the floor all the while, feeling what could only be termed a tragic sense of accomplishment when he made it from the bedroom to the kitchen, where he reheated pasta, and back again without disturbing a single one. On his bed he slurped his pasta in fast, devouring bites, listening as the rain revved itself up into a proper storm, hesitating over which show to watch on his laptop, Feast clear in the corner of his eyes. He found himself sneaking glances at it, just as he had often snuck glances at the boy who’d given it to him when they’d sat near each other in class. What was more, he was shifting about nervously on the covers, as if his stare might be answered, as if he might have occasion to say, Oh, do you need a pen? or Wow, your coffee smells amazing, where’d you get it? He felt ridiculous; he was even rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, his most persistent nervous habit. “Oh, bugger this,” he snapped to himself, and went right ahead and scooped the book up and set it in his lap.
He was somehow even more nervous when he held it; he realized that he not read anything for fun since starting university. During the semester there hadn’t been time, and in the summer he hadn’t the energy. He recalled picking up a book here and there over the holidays, trying and failing to make it past the twenty page mark. He’d begin them and then start to do what he’d do for class: take mental notes in preparation to dissect the book in an essay. It had exhausted him, and so he’d given up on reading. And then when the semester came around again he’d hate the reading assignments all the more, wonder why they had to cut each book into pieces, why they couldn’t just appreciate them, what the point of that was. And no one else seemed to be bothered by it, that was the thing too, so he had felt alone in his doubts and worries and so they had built up on him, led him to Slughorn’s classroom.
Thinking of all that – the fear that he’d been ruined for reading for enjoyment – almost made him put the book back. But then he thought of Sirius’s number, already stored on his phone, and how wonderful it would be to get together, just the two of them, to hear that laugh again up close, and he knew that he was going to have to at least try the book, if only to tell Sirius so.
His muscles tensing, he lifted the book. And in the few seconds it took him to turn to the first page, his mind held roughly a hundred thoughts, some composed of the same pulsing blackness that had filled him before he’d dropped out, and many others, simply, Black. But mainly, what he was thinking was that he was going to read a page of this book, maybe two, and then he’d be free to give it up, text Sirius that he’d tried, and blank out to 90’s sitcoms like he had planned.
And so he skimmed, his mind a hand drifting over the surface of a still lake, trailing ripples, mostly elsewhere – until, almost by accident, he dipped a bit more of himself in, sinking slightly below the surface, and finding that what was there was inviting submerged himself more, and more and more, until there was no part of him elsewhere, until he was reading.
It had been so long that he had forgotten what it was like, how near it felt to the tacit communion of matching his breathing to another’s, how it was like the long day’s end, the key turning, the door opening, how it was homecoming.
Bleak and morbid as a public hanging, dark and confining as the stone walls of a fortress, and containing both in equal measure, Feast was not at all what he would have chosen for himself, but that was part of the gift of it, the gift of all reading: the surprise of finding resonance in so unexpected a place, like rounding a corner and chancing upon a stranger about to become your lifelong friend. Because for all that it was grim, relating generations of suffering enclosed in the same moldering walls, telling of prisoners locked away for so long they no longer remembered their crimes, it encircled moments of startling absolution, brilliant as sudden candlelight shining in a shadowed place. And he had needed that, needed it so badly it had existed beyond articulation: the acknowledgement of misery, and then, within it, the possibility of grace.
He read through the storm, through the gray-hued dawn, through texts from Lily and his mother that he would later not recall seeing, his responses to them equally new to his eyes. No I’m not out in the rain, I’m fine, I love you, no, I swear, L, I don’t need anything. At noon he fell asleep unwillingly, and at sunset woke again, the book still in his hand. Twenty minutes to midnight he opened his front door, trying to hide that he was crying from the delivery boy from the 24 hour pizza place; his favorite character, knifed in the gut, had just pushed himself out onto the fortress’ turret to see the unbarred sky and sea for the first time in twenty years as he bled out, dying. He wept until the food was cold, heated it up, read again, finishing the last hundred pages in the dizzying, labyrinthine hours that preceded dawn. Then, the book closed and tucked beside his bed he slept and dreamed he read again. Such strange, beautiful dreams, vivid enough to feel more like memories: he saw the green and glorious Shire and the moors beside the Heights, passed through the palace of the panserbjorne at the frozen tip of Svalbard and the shadow struck woods of the Deepneath, and landed at last on the shores of far flung Ithaca where they kissed the wine-dark sea. And he knew them all, each path and turn, as Denis Johnson’s unnamed narrator knew every raindrop by its name; for he had walked there, lived there, in all of those places.
It was early morning, chill and mist-strewn, when he woke, a full hour before his alarm. He stood at the window, holding the sill, remembering how he’d had to drag himself through every word of the last ever English assignment he’d done. It had been a short story, but it had felt like a thousand pages. They day after he’d read it he couldn’t have even said what it was about, let alone now. He wondered at that, why he couldn’t hold on to hardly anything he’d learned in class, if he was broken somehow because he couldn’t learn properly. He’d wondered this before, called himself stupid, a loser drop-out, but now in his thoughts there was a thread of doubt. He’d just read an 800 page book in two days, and could recall every major element of it. He didn’t need a test to prove to him he knew it. Maybe, then, it wasn’t entirely him. Maybe – could it be? – it didn’t mean he was stupid because he’d dropped out.
This thought left him filled with a pleasant daze, which took him early to the bookshop, where he unlocked the door, dusted the shelves, and set out the bagels he’d bought in the back room. He recalled hating this solitary duty every other time he’d done it, the pressing silence that surrounded his every movement like something close to suffocation. But today was different; today, he had company.
He trailed his fingers down their spines, he lifted and turned their pages. Hello, hello, he whispered to each and every one of them, to the soft covers and the hard, to the genre and the literary, to the ones that were used and the ones that had been published yesterday, and, above all, to the ones he knew intimately. He pulled his absolute favorite from the shelves, cradled it in his arms, and then, abruptly remembering why he’d blown through Feast in the first place, took out his phone and texted Sirius before he could think better of it.
His confidence was almost immediately rewarded by a return text. Brill, was all he said, which was slightly annoying. But then, right after: Leaky’s tonight at 6?
Of course Sirius was the type to be fine with making same day plans; meanwhile he needed 12 hours before and after to mentally prep and then decompress from any kind of social activity. The mere phrase “spur of the moment” was enough to give him hives – but he refused to be daunted. Anyway, it wasn’t like he hadn’t just read an 800 page book in preparation for this.
6:15, he returned boldly. And then, because he could not help but justify himself: Need time to get there from work.
Sirius assented to this with a thumb’s up emoji and Remus, unwilling to do anything to look too overeager, chose not to respond at all to this and spent the rest of his shift trying to quell the knots in his stomach. It surprised him that he succeeded, but then he had the first book of Dolores Mallon’s Deepneath trilogy beside him, and he turned to it every quiet moment when he might have been worrying, remembering all over again how good it was: both the book itself and the fact of reading. It managed to make it so he left work feeling mostly mellow – until he saw how late he was running. Then he all but ran the two blocks over to Lily’s, pausing only to stop at a bakeshop along the way, dashed up her stairs, used his key, changed into one of the shirts she’d stolen from him – a much nicer shirt than the one he had on, never let it be said she didn’t have taste – and then made quick use of her kitchen before bounding out of her flat again and speed walking the five blocks to Leaky’s. He slowed only when he went through the door, which was fortunate because Sirius was just inside.
“What a change for me,” Sirius said by way of greeting, “to not be the late one.”
Remus might have had a sharp response for that – crush or no, he expected the decency of a hello – had he not seen the momentary flash of apprehension in Sirius’s eyes. It was so out of character that it caught him off-guard, made him wonder if perhaps something had happened to him. Remus of all people knew well enough how a bad day in class or a poor grade could knock you down, so decided to let Sirius’s rudeness pass, and instead pointed to a table, just being vacated, in the back. “I’d say I’m sorry, and I am,” he said, “but I did just ensure we get the best table, so maybe you’ll find it in yourself to forgive me. Come on.”
Sirius only let out a haughty sniff at this and hurried after Remus; getting this particular table at Leaky’s – set in a snug corner just beside two windows and nearest to the fireplace – was indeed a rarity. Though it was not yet late enough in the year to benefit from the fire, the view out the windows was lovely, the trees in the café’s courtyard just starting to put on their fall colors, each warmly glowing from the white fairy lights strung between them. A waitress was quick to come take their orders – Mexican hot chocolate for Remus, a double espresso for Sirius – and even quicker to deliver them, so that Remus had barely any time to set down his bag before Sirius was staring at him expectantly through the steam off their mugs.
“So, uh, how was your day then?” Remus asked awkwardly, realizing that they’d hardly said anything to each other and not wanting to jump right into raving about the book. “Have they announced the midterm date—”
Sirius heaved a sigh. “Let’s not stall, alright?” he said, a touch tersely. “What did you think of Feast?”
“I loved it,” Remus said at once, not even pausing to blink at Sirius’s tone.
Sirius offered a thin smile to this. “Of course you did. You read it in three days.”
“Two, actually, I finished it last – wait.” He straightened up, the implication of Sirius’s words sinking in. “You…you don’t think I read it,” he said, forcing himself to choke down his indignation.
“No one reads it,” Sirius said dully, prodding at his drink with a spoon he hadn’t even bothered to put sugar on. “It’s too depressing to read, or so everyone keeps telling me. I thought you – because of that presentation you did on Kafka, you know – would at least try, but fine. I get it.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling thinly again, all but piercing Remus with his glare. “Well go on then,” he said coolly. “Let’s hear whatever you really wanted to talk about.”
There was something in Sirius’s tone – something so like the apprehension that had appeared in his eyes when they’d first met – that forestalled any anger he might have had on his own behalf, and made it so that he didn’t feel compelled to say anything when he reached into his bag, pulling out what he had so hastily made at Lily’s. Looking quickly toward the nearest waiter to be sure they wouldn’t see, he pulled it free of its brown paper bag and set it before Sirius, who stared down at it, his look of disdain transforming into one of disbelief. “You…” he said slowly, pulling the plump, sugar coated Danish towards him, holding it up so that he could see the cuts Remus had made into it, and the slices of plums and blueberries within them. They had been arranged distinctively, if haphazardly, in imitation of a dessert lovingly described by one of the prisoners at the long awaited titular feast – a scene which did not occur until fifty pages before the book’s ending.
“You read it,” Sirius said, so shocked he didn’t seem to notice that sugar was falling onto his cuff. “You actually – I was so sure you hadn’t!”
Remus’s brow furrowed, suspicion suddenly blooming in his mind. “Is that why you wanted to meet today? Because you thought you could catch me in a lie, make it impossible for me to cheat?”
“There’s no way to cheat. There’s next to nothing about Feast online. The point of meeting today was so you’d get really nervous when you realized that,” he said bluntly.
“Wow,” Remus bit out, feeling wounded.
Sirius let out a heavy sigh. “Look, it’s just…800 pages in three days,” he said. “When you texted me so soon I was sure you were bullshitting me like everyone else I’ve ever given the book to. Like Jim told me he loved it but then when I asked him what he loved about it he cracked and told me he couldn’t even get past the opening. Said it ‘depressed the shit out of him.’” He let out a disgruntled huff of breath at this, rolling his eyes. “And then Marlene, Benjy, God even knows how many others, it’s always the same thing: ‘I love it. Oh, wait, sorry didn’t actually read a word of it. But you’ll still give me your chemistry notes right? You’ll still lend me money right? You’ll still help me make my fucking ex jealous right?’ God, it’s always the same. Schoolwork, money, or a one night stand. Oh, and the bullshitting beforehand, can’t do without the bullshitting.” He raked a hand through his hair, agitated, glaring down at his cup. “You know if people just said, ‘hey, sorry, can’t be arsed to read this long of a book, this depressing of a book,’ I’d be fine. But no one ever does. It’s always, ‘I loved it.’ Always. So…you know, yeah. I thought you were the same.”
Remus hardly knew what to say to all this; he felt badly for Sirius, but all the same he was still hurt.
“You know,” he said slowly, “this book…you giving it to me…it helped me a lot. I haven’t been doing too well, obviously, and it was nice to have something that wasn’t saying, ‘Oh, hey, you’ll get back on track and get your degree and be everything everyone expects you to be.’ It was nice to have something that said life can be shit and dark and unhappy, but there’s still beauty in it. It was nice to get sucked into this. It was not so nice being accused of – of cheating – particularly when there wasn’t even a test involved, and particularly when that is, I think, the reason I dropped out to begin with, because, you know, what are tests even measuring except that you can take a test, who decides what information is important enough to be tested on and – and I’m getting off track. My point is, I don’t like that you were testing me…but I get why you did it. And I’m sorry everyone else lied to you.” He paused, staring into Sirius’s wide open eyes, and then added, unable to resist: “And it was two days. I finished it in two days.”
For a long, heart-pounding instant, Sirius’s face was completely blank, giving nothing away as to how he felt about Remus’s outburst. But then, as suddenly as a light switch flipping, he smiled, wide and brilliantly, and said, “God, I always forget how sharp you are. It’s amazing. And – I’m sorry. Really.” He leaned a bit across the table, his eyes wide, sincere, and as splendidly gray as raindrops. “Let me buy you another hot chocolate to make it up to you?” he cajoled. “And we can, you know, finally talk about it…”
The eagerness in his tone divested Remus of the last of his irritation; for him, it was more warming than the offer of hot chocolate had been – though, naturally, he was still going to take him up on it. He made a little show of thinking it over, though he didn’t let it drag on too long before he, too, leaned forward eagerly.
“So, when Wydverd –” he said, and that was all it took to get them off and running. It was exactly as he had hoped it would be – an excitable recounting of the best moments, venting over things they wished had gone differently – but at the same time it was not at all like he’d expected. There was a shared warmth he hadn’t counted on, a sense that every word spoken was genuine, nothing brought out in artifice or an attempt to impress. It was a feeling like having been caught in the rain together, like having run laughing down the street, soaked to the bone, like they had shared something between them, some small but vital experience. He found himself flushing in a way he wasn’t sure was showing on his skin, but he could feel himself glowing, radiating warmth. He understood now, the longer they talked, that what Sirius had shared with him was not just the love of this book, or the rare thrill of being able to talk about it with someone who knew it – no, it was more than that. This was his book, the closest to his heart, his favorite. And he had given it to Remus, in the blind hope that it might mean something to him too.
Perhaps that would mean little to someone else; perhaps they would scoff and say, so what, big deal, it’s only a book. But Remus heard the reverence in Sirius’s voice and felt its echo in him; he understood that love, fervent and formless, which beats for a certain set of pages and the world contained in them. And he knew, now more than ever, that there were certain books that were not simply things you held, but things that held you. So when the moment came that Sirius sighed over the empty cups scattering their table, their dregs long since chilled, and said that he was sorry, but he did have to go, he reached into his bag and pulled out the book he carried, the one he had been reading all day. And he cleared his throat, pulling free the bookmark he’d stuck in earlier, and held out, for Sirius’s inspection, his own favorite.
“So before you go, I just thought…since you gave me such a good book that I would give you one too. I don’t know if you like fantasy,” he added in a rush. “I know for a lot of people that’s not their thing, it’s too, uh, hokey and the characters have too weird names or whatever. But it’s my thing. And this one is the best. Or I think it is anyway.”
He smiled, somewhat awkwardly, hating that he was blushing, watching as Sirius leaned in to see the cover of the first, and best, book in the Deepneath series: Moonlight’s End.
“Oh, I’ve heard of this,” Sirius said softly, and gently took the book from Remus’s hands, opening it to skim the blurb. He gave a nod at what he read there, a small, almost imperceptible smile just curving his lips. “Beastly footsteps padding through the shadowy woods and moonlight that kills? Sounds just my speed,” he said when he’d looked up again. “But, you know, you didn’t have to give me anything. Not this, or the feast day pastry.”
“Yeah, I did,” Remus said. “This was…significant for me. You know, you, uh…heard my rant.”
Sirius grinned more widely at that. “Both of them.”
Remus flushed.
“Hey,” Sirius said, with a little laugh. “Look, for what it’s worth, I think you were right. About prerequisites and the constant cramming for tests: it does feel a little pointless. Especially for someone like you, who’s just trying to learn.”
Remus blinked. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just that you never talked about the high powered job you wanted to get after you graduated or where you wanted to go for your PhD or how you wanted to be published in this or that journal by the time you’re twenty-two. With you it always felt like you were there for the sake of it, not because it was a stepping stone between you and whatever other goal you had. You were always asking the professor questions, you know? You wanted to learn. It’s hard to learn when you’re just cramming.”
Remus felt as if a boulder had just landed on him. “Shit,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I just…can’t believe I needed someone else to explain me to me. And that you noticed all that about me.”
To his surprise Sirius flushed and glanced away, rustling in his bag for the money for their bill. “Well. Call it a thank you. For that look you put on Slughorn’s face.” He shot Remus a quick smile then and got to his feet.
Remus was slow to follow suit, still thinking about what Sirius had said. He had noticed him. No, more than noticed him: he had looked at him long enough to learn something about him, something that even he didn’t know. He flushed just to think about it, unsure now, as he followed Sirius out of the café, what he should say. He thought of how easily they had talked about Feast, how it felt like they’d already been through something together, and that was enough to make him bold again.
“You know you’ll be a hypocrite if you don’t try the book I gave you, right?” he said as they stepped outside.
Sirius answered this with a grin, his breath clouding in the chill. It was not one of his usual you’re-welcome smiles, or the lazy, half-curving grin that seemed to imply that you had amused him unintentionally. It was the smile he had used when they were talking about Feast, the one, Remus realized now, that he had not truly expected to see beyond that little corner table, the book open between them.
“Arsehole, degenerate, ingrate – call me anything but a hypocrite,” he said, beaming and lifting a hand in farewell as he began to stride off down the street. “I’ll text you the moment I’m done!”
He said it so matter-of-factly, the promise of it pluming in the air, hanging white and brilliant between them. Remus almost felt like he could have cupped it, held its warmth against him, flickering against his skin like pale flame, a promise of what was to come.
January 7th, 2:12 am
Rightness: the only word he’d had for what they were to each other in the beginning, when the messages they sent arrived only at odd hours, thoughts dispensed without preamble or throat-clearing, every word en media res. The moon’s never had a face that wasn’t glaring at me, Remus wrote once around midnight. I must be missing what everyone else is seeing. Close your eyes, listen to the tide, Sirius answered. That’s the moon’s real face. At a book, he might have shook his head, rolled his eyes to read those lines, but when they’d appeared on his phone he was right at the shoreline, at the end of a run he hadn’t intended to take so far, within reach of the tide’s steading breathing. How did he know? he’d wondered. How did Sirius always know exactly what he needed to hear? Rightness: his eyes closed, the tide shushing, the pale curve of a cheek, the fierceness of a brow, the phone in his hand, buzzing again, Come over to mine if you’re still awake. Red wine diluted to the color of coral with mineral water; just enough, Sirius said, to keep things interesting. His textbooks opened across an imposing oak desk and the chairs around it, Remus checking on the threshold at the sight of them, “Oh, sorry,” he said, “do you want me to leave?” “You’re the DJ,” Sirius told him, not even turning his head, gesturing to speakers so discreetly arrayed they seemed more spycraft than sound system. He played long dead men, their soft, stirring strings, out of respect for the half-written study guides and Sirius’s bent head, until Sirius snapped, “Jesus, enough with the Chopin!” Leonard Cohen then, that voice, deep enough to vibrate bone, Sirius occasionally joining in, the words mangling. The silence that came between songs, the strange way it didn’t seem empty. Falling asleep on Sirius’s couch, that first time. Waking to breeze, Sirius hanging out the window, smoking. “Coffee or tea?” he asked when he saw Remus blinking. They went to the café on the corner, got one of each, blowing off the steam, Remus couldn’t help thinking, I’m happy, why am I so happy?
Rightness. And then the kiss. And now, what he calls moreness: the implacable heat of skin, the hunger to touch and be touched by him.
Tumbling into Remus’s flat, reunited after the lengthy boredom of the holidays, they found the bed beneath them like a late-coming Christmas miracle, the cold they’d carried on their skin from the snow outside already faded. So stupid to leave their first time to the day before they’d had to leave each other; for two weeks now Remus had felt Sirius’s touch ghosting his skin, rising up within him when he touched his own hip, where Sirius had kissed him, his thigh, the long, twisting scar along his ribs, his own touch making him achy, a livewire, each place Sirius had been radiating as much feeling as the site of a bruise. Now, finally, he had more than just the memory of his fingers, his lips. Now he had the stubble on his jaw, deliciously rasping against his collarbone, he had the shocking softness of his thigh against his knee, and the sharp, bright exclamation of his teeth, just hard enough on the juncture of his hip and thigh. He must have always had a particular need to be touched there, but he hadn’t known it until now, hadn’t realized what it would do to him when soft kisses chased the bite. He forgot the composure he was always desperate to keep hold of, the need not to look a fool, especially now, here, in front of Sirius. He let himself make noise, a series of needy, hungry mewls, and felt Sirius’s gaze lift to him, felt the gasp of his breath against sweat sticky skin as he whispered, “Oh,” and heard need there in his voice too. It was an answering need, ravenous and seeking, his mouth alighting on Remus with searing heat. He gripped his hips, turned Remus over, kissed along all the freckles on his back, and then lower, deeper, putting his mouth where Remus had never let anyone put their mouths before. Remus had an impression of a world gone white at the edges, of a feeling somewhere between floating and falling, his breath tangling and untangling inside him. Godgodgodgodgodgod, he thought or he said, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t, not when he felt Sirius so close, so close, like this, like this.
After, in a glow so blissful he felt fundamentally altered by it, he curled himself into the bow of Sirius’s body, trailed a hand up and down his spine, loving the feel of each vertebra tipping into the next, each piece in its place, holding this beautiful boy together.
“You know this is a first for me,” Sirius whispered into the dark, his voice tight with confession. “Being more than someone’s wild night. I really…I really didn’t know if you would text me over break.”
“I didn’t really text you,” Remus whispered.
“No, you called me, which is…I mean this is, isn’t it?”
Remus would have been lying if he said the strength and the suddenness of feeling that came over him then didn’t frightened him, didn’t make him feel as out of control as he had in Slughorn’s class. He hadn’t been aware that he had something this wild, this bright, this boundless within him; he hadn’t known that that was what this kind of love was. It robbed him of breath, filled him to his fingertips, and, again, he would have been lying if he said he did not think, for just an instant, of running away from it. But this was not a classroom, not a lecture on a subject he couldn’t grasp. This was Sirius, who had kept his word and texted him two days after they’d parted at Leaky’s, who had written, this book is already in my dreams I feel like I lived here in another life is it like that for you too?, who had let him sleep on his couch every night he’d felt lonely in November, who had made him his favorite dinner before the first time they slept together, who had held him that night and whispered, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that. His heart pounded just to think his name; he could no more have run from him than he could have flown.
And so he stayed where he was, clasped in Sirius’s arms, and he let all that he felt expand to overflowing, pouring out into his voice as he said: “Yes. Yes, this is real. Yes, this is love.”
May 1st, 7:00 pm
When the last customer of the day had gone, and he was left alone with the books and the flickering neon, he remembered how he’d once thought himself a poor criminal, without even the sense to run far, and he laughed, wondering, but how could I ever even think of going? On the phone with his parents he’d think of the quiet town he’d grown up in, so far from the sea and its whispering description of the moon’s true face, and farther still from places like Leaky’s, where you could buy a hot chocolate at two in the morning and find yourself in deep conversation with a stranger at the next table, and the bookshop where the most bizarrely wonderful secondhand copies washed up every week, and the customers unburdened their foibles to him as he rung them up, but farthest of all from Sirius: his eyes, his embrace, his maddening laugh. And fine, perhaps there were other places in the world like this – Sirius notwithstanding – but this one was his, and he’d known it, deep down, for longer than he’d ever realized, just as he’d known, long before he walked into Slughorn’s classroom that day that he would have to leave school.
It was strange to think of parts of him knowing what other parts of him did not, just as it had been strange to find himself screaming at a professor that day, and just as it continued to be strange, each day and sometimes each hour, to discover how much he felt for Sirius, how much love his heart could contain. He might have fretted over this in September to find himself cast so far adrift from what he knew of himself, worrying that he would one day wake up changed beyond all recognition; but now, rather than fretting he marveled, that he could contain so much, that there could be the equivalent of whole uncharted continents and seas inside him and that every day he knew more – and yes, strangely – less. It was a bit like a trip, he thought, that place, so often thought of, quite different in reality – Paris bereft of all berets, the leaning tower of Pisa adjacent to a parking lot – and how that could take the dream of it away, render it bizarre and unknowable, until you stopped to take in the truth of the cobblestone streets, the steamed glass of the bakeries, the immaculate blue stretching out to the horizon. And wasn’t it a lifetime, always, to truly know those streets, that place, in all its seasons, in its perpetual change? And wasn’t it the same to know anywhere – and anyone? A lifetime and a cheap tourist map you should promptly throw away, because nowhere and no one is ever that easy.
Even this shop, he’d realized, was its own little globe. And he loved it for that: for its particulars – the lock that had to be twisted just so before it would slide in place, the lingering, almost ghostly scent of popcorn, forever blown in from the cinema – for its long seasons of quiet and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, bursts of babble, like the first flowerings of spring. He loved the customers, too: the older regulars with their Vaudevillian patter and their obsession with bloody mysteries, the other regulars, who walked in like acolytes to the temple, their palms upraised, asking only, they said, always, for a really good read, the delightfully unexpected pairings – the young man on his way home from the gym who always bought the latest bodice ripper, the old man in his workman’s jeans who was a vocal Daphne du Maurier devotee – and the satisfyingly predictable ones, the ones who started reading as they left, the ones who stayed to talk about all the books they’d been reading, and, of course, rare but real, the ones who blew in with the rain, talking loudly about just wanting to stay dry, affecting disinterest until their gazes snagged, on a cover, on a name, the look in their eyes something more than just a parody of love at first sight, something quite like prescience or recognition: I know you. You will be important to me. Ah, that moment, and when they returned to gush, changed, suddenly and forevermore, a reader. What grade could contain it? What price could measure it? He supposed, almost laughing, that the price could be his salary; he had, after all, just been promoted to assistant manager.
He had been industrious – making themed displays, proposing marketing schemes, creating an account for the shop on social media, which brought in so much new traffic that it had actually made Mr. Lockhart look up from his own phone – and more or less discovering that he had a knack for running things. Another new continent, this, and one with a bookshelf-lined interior; he found he could imagine himself, if only faintly, with his own shop one day. He pictured walls of exposed brick, a few squashy armchairs, an Erasmus print by the till, just to be cheeky, and every book he’d ever loved lining the shelves. When the lights were dimmed and the customers vanished he’d take them down, run his fingers down their spines, touch a palm to the open leaves of them, the ink and the pages fluttering, like a bird’s wild heart, between his fingers, and he’d remember what they were to him, how much they meant, how, in their way, they had led him there.
In this imagining, Sirius was there too, older, in a silk tie and silver-shot hair, leaning against the counter, waiting for Remus to lock up at the end of the day. He imagined this so easily, even though things between them weren’t always easy – he was finding, bit by bit that the business of being with Sirius was not always perfectly timed texts, or kisses so complete they devoured days, but was in fact a work of its own sort, one involving the navigation of rough, choppy moods, bad days and bad memories – but which was, always, inevitably, right. He smiled just to think of that feeling, and then, in the quiet of the locked store, turning toward the window, his smile became a full on beam. Because, of course, as if beckoned by Remus’s thoughts of him, there he was, in his leather jacket and Remus’s not-so-ironic librarians are novel lovers t-shirt, garlanded by the mist and the light from the cinema marquee, smiling that smile he had just for Remus, the one that said yes, yes I’m here for you. Impossible not to look at him and feel his heart squeeze tight in his chest; even more impossible not to think of December, the snow-touched air, his breath smudging the pane as he stood where he stood now, smiling that smile at him for the very first time. That was the night they’d kissed among the neon striped shelves; the night when Remus vanished over the horizon past any thought of rejection, and had gone to kiss him – only to find himself too slow, and kissed slowly, sweetly, first.
He beamed again – what else was there for him to do? – and then he turned to take one last look at the darkened shelves, and thought of all that unmapped space before him, all the pages he had yet to read. His heart beat hard, the world within him shifting, and he went for the door, his hand outstretched for Sirius’s, wondering what tonight would find for him.