Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The neon purple lights cast everything into a hypnotic blur as Sirius stalked down the hall, clenching and unclenching his fingers with the low-level anxiety he always felt before a mission. Music from downstairs, electronic and thumping and utterly hedonistic, beat a heavy bassline in his chest.

He knocked briskly on the door at the end, cybernetic index finger clicking metallically. It slid open with a pneumatic hum. He stepped in and nodded at the man behind the big metal desk.

“Moody.”

“Black. Thanks for responding on such a late notice.” 

Moody’s one good eye remained fixed on a datapad while his electric blue one spun in its socket, scanning Sirius—his wand, his plasma gun, his stash of electro-volts. The walls around them flickered with real-time displays: blinking green lights, maps, charts, fast-scrolling comms.

“Death Eaters were spotted outside of Dublin,” Moody said, both eyes finally stilling on Sirius. “We think they’re heading for McKinnon’s safe house. I have their last coordinates here.” He held up the data pad, showing a map of Dublin with a single light winking insistently in the outskirts. 

“The job,” Moody continued, “is to keep the Death Eaters occupied till McKinnon and her crew can get out. The spells on the hideout don’t drop until midnight; they’re stuck in there till then. Keep the Death Eaters away, don’t let them jump McKinnon. No kills needed, but we’ll pay extra for any you happen to take down. She’s got kids with her, Sirius.”

“Alright. I’ll head out now.” Sirius moved to leave, having all the information he needed.

“Not so fast, lad. These particular Death Eaters are werewolves. We’ve had an agent embedded with them for a time, but he’s out now. He’ll be joining you. His expertise will be invaluable.”

Sirius, already impatient, started to object, “Alright, well, where is this agent then? You know I prefer to—”

And at that moment, the door whirred open and another man entered, walking up to stand next to Sirius. He gave Moody a slight nod, hands clasped behind his back. He was dressed crisply and plainly in a black vest and black trousers with a plasma gun holstered openly on one hip, wand on the other. He looked vaguely familiar in the way that everyone from Hogwarts did, though Sirius couldn’t remember his name.

“This him, I assume? Well hi, mate. Name’s Sirius. I’ve been doing this awhile so don’t worry. Should be a breeze.”  He put out a hand, very generously trying to play nice.

The man’s face was a carefully neutral mask. He took Sirius’ hand and gave it a firm shake.

Moody handed Sirius the chip and Sirius took it, sticking it quickly into his wrist console. The map display lit up immediately. They would Apparate, of course, but the console would help pinpoint the exact location, triangulating the magic for a precise landing. The new model even cast an automatic shield charm upon Apparition to prevent hangers on. Useful stuff.

“Well, we’ll be off then,” Sirius said, still half-waiting for the other man to say anything. A hello? A name? A noise?

Getting nothing from him and seeing that Moody had apparently expected as much, Sirius shrugged a little, turned, and strode out of the room. The other man followed him, still in silence.

“I’m Remus,” he said finally as they walked together through the halls, heading toward the log station. This rung a bell for Sirius; definitely from Hogwarts, then.

“Ok. So what, you’re a werewolf?” Sirius asked, cutting to the chase. “Moody said you were embedded with them. I assume they wouldn’t just take in a regular bloke like that.” 

“A safe assumption,” Remus replied carefully.

There had been many whispered rumors in recent weeks about a werewolf in the Order. Horrified by the prospect and muttering about Dark creatures and violent beasts, a critical mass of members even submitted a formal inquiry to Dumbledore about it, to no avail. Now, looking at the man walking quietly next to him, apparently the subject of great hand-wringing and panic, Sirius did not feel particularly concerned. He looked harmless, or as harmless as anyone in the Order should ever be. And anyway, he was on their side– even if he was a vicious creature built only for causing great harm, then no problem really, as great harm was exactly what the Death Eaters deserved.

“So what can you tell me about them? Never dealt with wolves before, though I assume they go down to plasma just as good as anyone else does.”

“Do you intend to have everyone in this club hear all about this mission? Or just the people on this floor?” 

Sirius rolled his eyes and let out a huff, unable to hide his impatience. The Order was full of people like this– self-serious, all business, took Moody’s creed of constant vigilance a little too literally. 

Sirius pulled up short, and shoved his wrist console under the man’s nose, showing him the active spells screen. “Muffliato spell is holding just fine, I’ll have you know. Listen, I know you’re a big bad undercover agent or whatever, but I’m no amateur either.” He wasn’t about to spend the whole night being condescended to by some poncy werewolf.

“Alright, fair enough,” Remus conceded, mouth set in a grim line. “I know you aren’t an amateur.”

“Ah, so my reputation precedes me?” They continued down the stairs, the pounding music growing louder, vibrating in his skull. 

The club was a necessary evil, according to Moody. Ages ago it had been owned by the Prewetts, a pureblood family loyal to the Order. The ancient magic of the place still held strong, making it nearly invisible to wizards who didn’t know the precise ritual needed to enter.

Muggles were not similarly limited. This space, in a prime spot in the Haringey Warehouse District had, over the years, transformed from an industrial space to a club. It was now host to Muggles deep in the throes of drugs, alcohol, sex, and, of course, heart-thumping electronic music. Sirius had spent more than a few non-work-related evenings here indulging in all of the above.

They remained silent as they wound their way through the back halls, weaving between Muggles dressed in neon and leather, some of them festooned with cybernetic mods– optic nerve implants, glowing spines visible through mesh shirts, arms wrapped in shiny chrome.

Remus’ eyes darted around, not resting for a moment. One hand sat stiffly on his wand holster, the other twitched toward his plasma gun.

Sirius supposed being undercover with a bunch of werewolf Death Eaters would make anyone a little cagey. He decided, with a twinge of sympathy, to give Remus the benefit of the doubt. True, he seemed like an asshole and a bore now, but he could be a real asset. And Sirius had never known a werewolf before, which piqued his curiosity almost irresistibly. 

The other man was taller than Sirius, almost willowy, though his bare arms were lean with muscle.  A fine spiderweb of criss-crossing scars glowed pale purple in the neon light. One scar slashed across his face, cutting across his nose to his jaw, giving him a distinctly dangerous look. He walked with the upright and correct posture of someone with battle training– Auror or long-term Order or just a particularly enthusiastic duelist.

Yes, Sirius would lure him out. He was good at that; good at winning people over. It was how he’d gotten this far in the Order, after all.

They arrived at Lily’s booth at the back entrance of the club just as another man, who Sirius vaguely recognized from one meeting or another, was wrapping up a transaction.

“Lils, you’re killing me with these fees! Three Galleons just to transfer the pay to my account? Ridiculous. Highway robbery!” 

Lily smiled genially at him and shrugged. “Sorry, Benjy. Not my policy; it’s the Bank.”

Benjy left with a huff, his eyes flicking over Remus and Sirius with just the slightest animosity.

“Hello, loves!” Lily greeted as they stepped up to her window. She was looking at the large console on her desk, briskly typing something, clicking at the screen.

Finally turning her attention to them, she said, “Here to log a mission? Sirius, the chip.”

Sirius slid it over, his cybernetic finger implant clicking metallically on the table. Lily’s red hair fell in a curtain over her face as she took the chip and inserted it somewhere below the desk. She returned to the screen, clicking, tapping, until the machine released a satisfied beep. 

“Ah, so you’re assigned together?” A smile played across her face briefly, but she strangled it back. “500 Galleons for this one outright. 1000 for anyone you take down. Not bad. Must be risky. It’ll transfer once you return. It’ll be–” 

“I know, three Galleon transfer fee. Highway robbery, that,” Sirius said with a wink. Lily gave him an indulgent smile before turning to Remus.

“Remus, I don’t think I have you in the system yet. You’ll need to do an ocular scan.”

Remus said nothing, just leaned forward to show her something on his datapad, which he’d pulled out from his satchel. She peered at it, raising a careful eyebrow. 

“Alright then. Cash it is, Moons. Don’t even know where I’ll find that many physical Galleons, but so be it. Good luck out there, boys.” 

Sirius decided to take them back to his flat. He wanted to get Remus somewhere private so they could exchange information freely without the other man’s paranoia holding him back.

It wasn’t far, but still far enough that Remus’ insistence on remaining completely mute the whole way was irritating. At first, Sirius tried to engage him in conversation.

‘You live near here?” Nothing.

“Alright, well, we’ll pop back to mine and Apparate from there.” A stiff nod.

“So what’s with the cash-only thing? Don’t think I’ve seen a physical Galleon in about ten years.” Steely silence.

Sirius fought back his inclination toward writing this weirdo off. They had to work together, after all. Maybe he was odd and annoying, but Moody wouldn’t have paired them together if he wasn’t good. Moody knew Sirius, knew what he was capable of. Some inept partner would only hold him back and Moody wasn’t in the business of holding Sirius back.

The night was cool, verging towards chilly. Sirius’ own leather jumpsuit kept him warm enough, but Remus clutched his arms tight around himself, fending off the wind as he was not dressed for the weather.

Without thinking, Sirius clicked “Warming Charm” on his wrist console and abruptly enclosed them in a bubble of balmy air.

After a moment, Remus said, “Thanks.” He put his arms down, rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck. “Fancy model you have there.”

Not sure if he was being baited, Sirius said, “Yeah, it’s the newest one. I know it’s a bit lazy, not just casting it myself, but why waste the energy? Got enough going on without always casting stuff like warmings and muffliatos.”

“Expensive. What, like 3000 Galleons?”

So he was being baited. 

“Sure. Expensive. Doesn’t mean much to me, though, heir of the Black family fortune and all.” Alright, Sirius thought, let’s face this head on.

“Not heir anymore, I heard.”

Merlin, this man was irritating.

“No,” he shrugged, “but even Black family disinheritance comes with its perks.” 

They had arrived outside his flat, which had once belonged to his Uncle Alphard. Alphard had been disinherited too but not before receiving a sizable portion of Black family wealth and investing it, building a small fortune of his own. He’d died a year ago, passing the whole lot of it down to his favorite, most rebellious, very disinherited nephew. 

If Remus was going to be judgemental about his expensive wrist console, this flat would work him up even more.

The high-speed elevator launched them to the top floor, 87 stories up, in less than eight seconds. Stepping out, Sirius pressed his eye to the ocular scan and his front door slid open, revealing the darkened penthouse.

It was glamorous. Floor-to-ceiling windows, shimmering night skyline enticing on all sides. Sleek chrome fixtures, massive wall console sitting matte and silent on one wall by the plush oversized couch. Magical artifacts, some as ancient as the Black family itself, glittered from built-in shelves along one wall, piled haphazardly amongst stacks of paperback books in a rainbow of colors.

It was also, admittedly, a mess. Sirius’ dirty clothes were scattered across the floor. The bed, pressed up against one windowed wall, was a tangle of sweat-stained sheets, empty liquor bottles damningly close by. Take out containers littered the counters and the sink was piled with dishes. He was briefly embarrassed by what he was sure was a musty smell permeating the space. Self-consciously he waved his wand and one of the windows cracked open, letting in the cold night air.

“Well,” Sirius started, steeling himself for a snide comment, but Remus was already moving, shoving aside the detritus of Sirius’ bachelorhood from the edge of one counter and setting up his datapad. He pulled up the map Moody had shown them. The blinking light was still east of Dublin city limits.

“The Death Eaters got McKinnon’s coordinates a fortnight ago. I’m surprised they took this long to move.” He zoomed in on the light, bent over the screen. Sirius stepped up behind him to get a better look. 

“I told Dumbledore he should’ve moved Marlene to a fidelius-ed bunk. These old school safe houses are alright for most things, but she’s high-profile now, what with what she did to Mulciber,” Sirius said, tapping the screen to highlight the safe house.

Remus nodded and swiped at the console. An image of a man appeared on the screen– or mostly a man, at least.

He was hairier than any human had a right to be. Thick mutton chops ran down the sides of his face, eyebrows grown out long and wild. Back hair crept up from under his shirt collar and up his neck, giving the impression of a man mid-transformation. His eyes glared out of his skull, yellow and feral. He bared his teeth in a rictus grin, revealing razor sharp canines.

“Greyback,” Remus said, grim. “Death Eater’s rabid dog.”

“Friend of yours, then?” Sirius asked lightly, squinting at the werewolf on the screen. “Any other friends of yours we’ll meet out there?” 

Remus stiffened, straightened up. His eyes narrowed as he said, “No friends of mine, no. Maybe we’ll run into some of your family, though. Cousins, maybe?”

Sirius also straightened, stepped closer to Remus, challenging him, joking over.

“So you know all about me, do you?”

“Sure. A traitor against your own family. A Slytherin trying to blend in with the Order.”

Clenching his fist around his wand, Sirius stepped closer still, ready to have it out. Remus didn’t move, letting Sirius encroach on his space, unfazed.

“Been with those werewolves an awful long time, haven’t you? I can tell from how twitchy you are.”

So much for winning him over. 

Going for the kill, Sirius hissed, “They might call you a traitor too.”

Remus’ lips quirked slightly into the faintest smile. "We’re a pair of traitors, then,” he said, stepping back from Sirius. “Moody trusts you, history notwithstanding. So I do too.”

Sirius unclenched, surprised and a little disappointed to find the other man backing off from the fight. Sirius did love a fight and he’d thought Remus was goading him into one. 

“I trust you too,” he conceded, and he meant it. This man was no Death Eater. It was easy to tell.

Remus, barely acknowledging this, returned to the console, swiping through more images of Death Eaters, speaking professionally about each one: what he knew, what to watch out for, weaknesses, strengths. 

He stopped briefly on the photo of Bellatrix, said nothing, moved on.

Sirius let him finish, absorbing the information, thinking quickly about which spells to have top of mind, fiddling with the settings on his wrist console. Remus said there were likely two werewolves with the group, including the big one, Greyback. Beyond that, maybe another three Death Eaters, including Bellatrix. Five bodies. They would be equipped with anti-magic pulses without a doubt, but no plasma guns. Death Eaters hadn’t figured out the technology yet, thankfully, too blinded by their hatred of Muggles to co-opt their weapons. They would be counting on the pulses disarming any member of the Order while they themselves would stay out of the pulse’s range. The classic trap they’d set a hundred times, from Sirius’ experience.

Lately, the Order only held its ground thanks to one thing: new technology. Not ordinary Muggle tech, but hybrid devices that were just crude enough to dodge the anti-magic pulses. It had taken them years to get it right. Now, with a year of field use behind them, the tide of the war was finally shifting. It was a slow, quiet, fragile turn.

The anti-magic pulses had been a nightmare. Dark magic, dirty and old. When a Death Eater fired one off, it would kill every wand within a fifty-meter radius. The pulses demanded blood, too—fresh, human, never their own—so it was magic unavailable to the Order, which insisted on maintaining the moral high ground. 

That nearly wiped them out.

Then the Longbottoms, geniuses both, cracked it. They brought in plasma guns, homemade electro-volts, and a kind of brutal creativity that the Order had been missing.

Plasma was the breakthrough. Too fast, too hot, too foreign for most magic to touch. Magic fizzled around it, didn’t know what to do with it. Electro-volts were even stranger—pure Muggle tech, modified with cursed copper and an anti-hex coating. Stick one on the emitter of a pulse, and it shorted the whole thing like a circuit breaker.

Sirius didn’t pretend to get the science. He only knew that it worked, which was enough.

Between those two weapons, they'd stopped losing people. Tentatively, barely, they started winning.

The two men strategized for the next hour, discussing the possibilities. They would either be busting into a Death Eater hideout or else tracking them through the slummy Dublin outskirts. They prepared plans for both.

After a time, having flipped through the photos and reviewed the plan enough times, they were as ready as they would ever be for two men who had never worked together before. 

Remus waited in the kitchen, very consciously not touching anything, while Sirius bustled around the flat shoving things into his own backpack: extra plasma, chargers for this wrist console, three vials of Wiggenweld potions, burn-healing paste, a Mandrake draught he hoped earnestly to never need. 

Finally, he unscrewed the tip of his right cybernetic index finger, removed the regular one and replaced it with a single-charge plasma blast— a last resort.

Remus watched him do this with some amount of curiosity, which Sirius took as an opening. 

“No enhancements, eh? You a purist?”

“Not by choice. The werewolf thing. Got tired of having to reinstall them after every full moon.”

“Huh, never thought of that. What, do they just pop out?” Sirius hadn’t taken much time to study werewolves,  but now he was already thinking about when he could download some information and get to reading.

“Something like that. Good way to waste a lot of Galleons.”

Tentative, not wanting to scare him off but also achingly curious, Sirius asked, “Does everyone in the Order know? About you being a werewolf?”

As expected, Remus stiffened, guard up. 

“They’re starting to. Not a popular creature, werewolves.” He paused, wary, then continued more quietly. “I’d appreciate your discretion. I’ve been undercover a long time and now that I’m finally out, I’d rather not alienate myself completely from the rest of the Order right off.”

Sirius was a little thrown by his candor, the earnest urgency with which he said this. “How long is long?” he finally asked.

“Two years. Whole time since Hogwarts.”

“Fuck, two bloody years?” 

No wonder he was weird. Should be weirder, really. Sirius himself had spent his first year out of Hogwarts with the Death Eaters, though not undercover the whole time precisely. 

It still haunted him. Skeletal masked faces drifted through his dreams, shadows in every alley looked like Voldemort himself. It was only now, free at last and doing his all for the Order, that he had started to feel human again. The nightmares persisted though, every night.

“Your secret is safe with me, mate. Two bloody years. Can’t believe that old codger would make anyone do that shite.”

Remus shrugged at this, saying nothing. He had his satchel strapped across his chest, ready to go. 

“Well, let’s do this.” 

Sirius flipped open his wrist console, tapped the map a few times, and, after pressing a final button, put one hand firmly on Remus’  shoulder. The flat distorted, the familiar feeling of being squeezed through a pneumatic tube turned his stomach, and they were gone.

Chapter Text

The world coalesced into a dark, rainy alley. The stench of garbage filled his nose, choking him, though admittedly it was not too different from the musty, rotting smell that had been the undercurrent of the flat they had just left. 

Remus hated Apparating. 

It was wizard magic, disdained by werewolves, so he had not done much of it in the last two years. In fact, he’d barely done any since first getting licensed at school. So when they arrived, he was embarrassed to find himself stumbling to his knees, wretching, overcome by the odd sensation, by the new smell, by the motion sickness.

Sirius, having landed effortlessly on his feet, was smart enough to say nothing as Remus collected himself. 

Wrist console pulled up, face lit by the green glow of the screen, Sirius said, “Last location was just upstairs. Two hours ago.” He stepped back into a darker shadow, pulling Remus with him by the arm. “McKinnon’s bunk house is the town over, Kinegad. Any idea if they’d have left for it yet?”

Remus thought for a second. It was only nine. The wolves would prefer a later hour, but who knew what the wizards would want. They would be the ones in charge. But wolves were an asset when anti-magic pulses were in use, as they could cause physical damage that most wizards weren’t equipped for, so it was very possible they would let the wolves make some decisions, if only to keep them happy enough to fight. 

He turned his face up, sniffed, trying to detect something beyond the overwhelming smell of garbage.

“Good bet they’re still up there, waiting,” he said finally, pulling out his wand. He removed the glamour he’d put on his hands, revealing his vicious, long nails jutting out of each fingertip like claws. He could feel Sirius’ eyes on him but again the other man had the good sense to say nothing. 

Over the years, the wolf had taken its toll on his human body. It was apparent in the claws, his heightened hearing and night vision, his teeth just a little sharper than they should be, hair coming in thicker and more wiry each year. Some of it had its benefits. Some of it he was more than happy to disguise away. 

The claws, though, would be useful in a fight and he didn’t use them as well when they were glamoured. He didn’t love letting a stranger see him looking so wolfish, but it couldn’t be helped.

In fact, out of the Pack finally and trying to be useful to the Order as wizard rather than just wolf, he knew he’d have to get used to it.

Sirius was casting a spell over them both, waving his wand quickly, silently. He felt the shiver of an invisibility spell descend over him. Sirius disappeared into a just-perceptible blur before him. Such spells weren’t truly invisibility, but they would do in a pinch, in the dark, on the move. They huddled together, reviewing the plan they had made in Sirius’ kitchen.

The building was a squat old duplex, crowded together with others of its ilk. The neighborhood was dark, quiet. The neon glow of Dublin lit up the sky only distantly to the east. 

The sprawl of the city hadn’t quite reached this far yet and these neighborhoods were veritably ancient compared to the new developments that were no doubt heading this way in the next decade. An electric cab hummed by, lights momentarily streaking over Sirius’ focused face as he cast a silent alohamora on the door and creaked it open. They both slipped into the ground floor landing, backs to the wall.

The door opened directly to a staircase, dimly lit by a single LED straining at the top. The house sat silent. The distinct animal smell of a werewolf wafted down.

Remus cast several quick spells, detecting traps, and he knew Sirius was silently doing the same.

Sirius was good at wordless magic, impressively good. While Remus caught himself muttering even still, Sirius’ lips were pressed in a tight line, not releasing a word. 

One of Sirius’ spells caught something and he worked quickly to dispell it, one hand waving his wand, the other stretched out to warn Remus from moving forward. Remus nearly took offense to this but it seemed so unconscious a gesture that he decided to let it slide. 

Sirius led the way up, wand out. The stairs went up directly into a shabby living room– dilapidated, abandoned, empty. Away from the stench of the alley, Remus could smell the werewolf more clearly. 

Meeting Sirius’ eyes, he carefully raised one finger and then slowly pointed toward the beaded curtain at the back of the room. Sirius nodded, understanding. 

They moved silently through the room, each ending up on either side of the beaded door, backs pressed to the wall. Sirius counted down to three and they burst through the curtain, one after the other, curses flying.

Remus’ cast a frangor lux, slashing his wand, a blinding white light filling the room. Simultaneously, Sirius blasted a vortex of air, sending chairs and pans flying. 

The Death Eater werewolf, who had been standing by the open fridge, was thrown off his feet to the ground. He scrambled, snarling, reeling from the light. He lunged forward, throwing out a random unaimed lacero, its glowing red whip cutting through the air.

All at once, Remus felt the familiar stifling, clammy chill of an anti-magic pulse. The werewolf must have thrown one to the ground as he lunged forward, dirty clawed hands grasping toward Sirius’ throat. Sirius pulled out his gun and blasted but the plasma went wide, obliterating the cabinet just behind where the Death Eater’s head had been a moment before. One powerful clawed hand clasped on Sirius’ wrist, wrenching his plasma gun away, the other hand locking around his throat. Sirius struggled but he hadn’t anticipated how strong a werewolf could be, grip like iron.

Remus fired. His aim was good and the plasma tore a burning hole into the meat of the werewolf’s arm. The Death Eater fell back and Sirius pinned him to the ground. Remus, gun still aimed at the wolf, looked around, scanning for the anti-magic pulse, hoping to disarm it. 

The moment he spotted it rolled just under the kitchen table, everything exploded.

Remus woke abruptly, shocked into his body by the pain. Around him, the kitchen was a ruin: cabinets smashed, glassware shattered, table exploded into wooden shards by the eruption that had emitted from the anti-magic pulse. 

He sat up, hissing from the pain, head swimming.

Sirius had been thrown back, off the werewolf he’d been holding down and into a wall, toppling over a garbage can. He stirred slightly, shaking loose debris. 

The werewolf did not. He stared unseeingly towards the ceiling, a burning plasma hole in the side of his head, blood pooling, dead. 

“Sirius…Sirius, you ok?” Remus asked, clutching at his side. A piece of glass had pierced him and he was bleeding through his fingers.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m ok–” Sirius sat up, groaned, laid back down. “The fuck was that?”

The clammy anti-magic field had dissipated so Remus took out his wand, pulled out the glass shard, and cast a hasty episkey on his wound. He heaved himself to his feet, still dizzy, and went to Sirius’ side. 

“I’m good, I’m alright,” Sirius said, struggling again to sit up. “The Death Eater, is he–”

“Dead. You got him good.”

“Fuck, never seen a pulse do that before.” He didn’t seem to be significantly injured and was getting up, brushing off the dust and garbage.

“Must be something new. No one else is here. They probably already headed to McKinnon. Alright to keep going?”

“‘Course we keep going,” Sirius scoffed, holstering his gun and his wand. He clicked something on his wrist console. “Told Moody about this one, they'll come fetch him,” He shoved the dead Death Eater with his booted foot. “Hey, that’s 1,000 Galleons for us right there!”

Remus opened his datapad and looked at the map, zooming in on the blinking light that indicated their location and then scrolling west to McKinnon’s hideout. Just two miles apart, separated by a tangle of old winding streets. Death Eaters could be anywhere.

“I say we go to McKinnon’s, stake it out. She’ll be leaving at midnight and as long as we provide cover or a distraction, they’ll able to get out. Then we Apparate away. I don’t think we can take four ourselves.”

Sirius nodded once in agreement, shaking loose a scrap of fabric that had gotten stuck in his hair.

Kinegad was an old town. The buildings were wood and brick rather than steel and glass. Sirius thought the whole place was creepy, haunted-feeling, like they’d travelled back in time to some land of ghosts. 

McKinnon’s safe house looked derelict, all smashed windows and graffitied walls, but that was just an illusion– inside, it would be comfortable enough. They were positioned on a rooftop opposite, each man keeping a look out in a different direction. It was 11pm. The Death Eaters, if they were still coming, would be around soon.

Sirius felt wired, anxious. Back at the other house, things had gone sideways badly and he knew it was his fault.  He should’ve prioritized taking out the pulse and let Remus handle the werewolf. If he’d done that, the explosion could have been averted. Now, they had probably made themselves known to the Death Eaters and who knew what that would lead to? 

Really, they should have come straight here in the first place but the chance to take out the werewolf, unsuspecting and alone at the hideout, had been too much of a temptation.

He’d known Marlene only a little at Hogwarts, but it was enough to like her even then. She was a Gryffindor and had been a wicked Beater. More than one of her bludgers had left bruises on him during his time as a Chaser on the Slytherin team. Despite their sports rivalry, he’d thought she was funny and charming and she’d always been up for some banter. 

She’d killed Mulciber just a week ago, right after he had murdered three Muggles in a gory scene that still churned Sirius’ stomach to think about. She had a target on her back. 

“Stop that.” 

Sirius froze, aware suddenly that he’d been bouncing his leg. 

Trying to hold still now, Sirius asked, “Hey, did you know McKinnon? Back at Hogwarts?”

“Yes. She was a Gryffindor too and in my year. I know her pretty well.”

“Gryffindor, eh? You know, I think I remember you. Ran around with James, right? And Pettigrew?”

“Yes.” 

Sirius started bouncing his leg again. His memories of that Gryffindor crew were coming back in full force. They had been something of a spectacle back then. Really James was the spectacle: popular and loud and impossible to dislike. 

Sirius had been a little jealous of them. For a time, he even wished that he hadn’t argued so vociferously in his first year to be placed in Slytherin over Gryffindor when the hat had waffled between the two. He had dreamed of being friends with the Gryffindors, who seemed like so much fun, rather than forced to be their natural enemy.

Things would have been much better if he’d been put in Gryffindor. Probably would’ve been disinherited a lot sooner, for one. It was an odd timeline to consider.

If he’d been in Gryffindor, he would have never been a Death Eater. 

Of course now he understood that ultimately he hadn’t had much of a choice. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been Regulus, and doubtless Reg would have gotten himself killed.

And in the end, his tenure as a Death Eater had saved more innocent lives than it had taken– many times over, with all the information he ended up sharing with the Order. It was even his intel that helped with the development of electro-volts. And Dumbledore had even managed to get the Mark removed from his forearm, though he’d taken a good chunk of flesh and even a little bone with it.

So it was fine. It had been fine.

Remus was looking at him strangely and Sirius realized that he was rubbing at the forearm where the old wound was. He stopped abruptly.

“I remember you from Hogwarts, too,” Remus said quietly, looking out at the street below. “Friends with Rosier and Mulciber and Snape. Death Eaters.”

Sirius’ mouth twisted into a grimace. “If you want to get technical about it, only one of those is still a Death Eater. And I wouldn’t strictly say that any of them were really friends of mine.”

Remus said nothing more, just continued to look out steadily at the street.

Within the half hour, a figure appeared at the end of the empty street, then another, then two more. Remus pulled omnioculars from Sirius’ backpack at their feet and peered through, watching as the figures moved down the road together.

“It’s them,” he said finally, handing Sirius the device. “Big one in the middle is Greyback. Bellatrix to his right. Vexmoor and Thorne behind them.”

Sirius looked, lingering for a moment on his cousin’s face. She looked as insane as ever, eyes darting around with her usual manic energy. He could just barely make out the faint line of a scar across her nose, running cheekbone to cheekbone.

Next to her hulked the werewolf, Greyback. He was huge. If Sirius hadn’t already known the man was a werewolf, he might have guessed it anyway. He was barely human-looking even on this moonless night, worse even than the picture. He flashed long yellowed teeth, tossing wild thick hair like a mane, gesturing with claws that looked like vicious weapons dirtied with dried blood. 

Fleetingly, Sirius wondered if Remus looked more wolfish too, and was just glamoring the hair and the teeth away like he had the claws. This thought sent a shiver down his spine, making him acutely aware of how close they stood to each other on the roof.

“Nearly midnight,” Remus whispered. “We should Apparate right in front of them, sow some chaos so McKinnon can get out, then bail.”

“If there’s a pulse, I’ll disarm it. You cover me. Remember: big spells, lots of noise, distract them.” Sirius fiddled with his wrist console, turning on the protego maxima, setting up an auto-alert to Moody should he die. “You gonna yak again if we Apparate?”

Remus shrugged and steeled himself when Sirius clapped a hand on his shoulder and Apparated. 

Sirius cast his first spell before he’d even fully materialized. He threw two reductos in quick succession at the buildings on either side of the street, blasting brick into the air with a bang. Beside him, Remus had dropped to his knees but despite his nausea from the Apparation he managed to cast a marionetta at a collection of garbage cans. The cans leapt to life and bustled towards the Death Eaters, blocking them, corralling them together. Taking the opportunity, Sirius blasted the group with a stream of flame. Someone had thrown up a shield, though, then a quick blast that blew the garbage cans back, scattering them.

Chaos erupted.

Remus dashed to an alley, taking cover and firing spells with a mechanical precision that was impressive to behold. He hit what he aimed at, without fail– Greyback stumbling backwards, Thorne taking a bolt of lightning to the chest, Bellatrix shrieking as chains lashed her ankles together, sending her sprawling.

Then came the anti-magic pulse.

Its effect was immediate, a wet shroud smothering a fire. Remus’ wand fell silent. Across the street, Sirius dove behind a car as spells rained down, the Death Eaters surging forward to exploit the advantage. Gritting his teeth, Sirius scanned for the source of the pulse, electro-volt primed in his grip. Beside him, Remus had switched to his plasma gun, the barrel glowing as he forced them back with crackling bursts.

He spotted it, just across the road nearly under another car. He dove for the pulse, hoping that Remus’ plasma onslaught was enough to keep the four Death Eaters occupied. Sirius slammed the electro-volt on to the pulse with the full weight of his body, skidding across the pavement as he landed. The device let out a piercing screech and sparked violently, once, twice, and then the clammy cool hand of the anti-magic field lifted.

Sirius rolled over just in time to see a spell fly over his head, nearly hitting him. The responding plasma blast back at Thorne nearly went wide but at the last minute it diverted at a right angle and hit the Death Eater square in the chest. 

Remus was standing over Sirius, plasma gun in one hand, wand in the other. Thorne toppled over, dead.

Sirius scrambled up and followed Remus as the other man took cover again, yelling, “McKinnon’s coming out!”

Sure enough, the shield that had been around the decrepit old safe house was shimmering and dispelling. A moment later, the front door cracked open and a woman stepped out, wand held aloft.

Sirius was just about to call out to her when Bellatrix’s curse hit a wall behind him. The concussive blast sent brick flying, forcing him to drop. Remus shot a plasma bolt in her direction but she dodged and responded with another concussive blast that once again just barely missed. Vexmoor joined the fray and then they were locked in a duel, exchanging spells, dodging, ducking. Sirius tried to catch sight of the McKinnons as they filed out of the building. From the corner of his eye, he saw Greyback rushing toward them, barrelling into them, slashing his vicious claws through the air as Marlene fended him off, keeping him away from the kids.

Sirius attempted to disengage and rush to Marlene’s aid, but Remus beat him to it, moving impossibly fast. With a stab of his wand, he blasted the two Death Eaters back and broke off, sprinting toward Greyback. 

A moment later, Bellatrix and Vexmoor were up again and Sirius was fighting for his life, throwing counter curse after counter curse. He managed to hit them with a whip of flame, forcing them back long enough to give him a moment to look toward Remus and the McKinnons. 

All he saw was blood– blood on one of the children, blood on Marlene as she clutched the child, blood on Remus, locked in a brawl with Greyback, grappling and snarling. 

Frantic, Sirius forgot about Bellatrix and Vexmoor for half a second and started toward Remus, desperately wanting to blast Greyback, to destroy him. 

It was a half a second too long. Bellatrix’s spell dropped him to the ground instantly and for a stunned moment all he could do was stare up at the sky and wait for death to come. 

Bellatrix pinned him and dragged his right arm out, holding him down, grinning maniacally.

“Hello, cousin,” she spat, digging her wand right into the scar on his forearm. He gritted his teeth against a scream as she pressed magic into the wound, activating the last traces of the Dark Mark that  lingered there. 

“Still there, isn’t it? We’ll always have a piece of you," she snarled into his face.

It burned and burned and burned. He thrashed and flailed but it was no use: the Mark’s burn rendered him weak, ineffectual.

She drove her wand in deeper, and with a sharp crack of magic, broke his arm. He screamed then, twisting beneath her, trying to throw her off. She cackled with glee, pressing her knees into his ribs and leaning in, wild eyes gleaming.

“Time to go, cousin.” She leveled her wand at his face. “You’re of no use to anyone. We have the true heir now.”

Regulus.

He put up his left hand, reaching toward her, weak and shaking. His cybernetic finger glinted metallically under the street light and her eyes flicked to it right as a plasma bolt burst out of the tip, right into her face.

She shrieked, falling back.

Sirius shoved Bellatrix off and heaved himself up, broken arm useless at his side. With his left hand he pulled out his plasma gun and rushed toward Remus, still in a tangle of violent limbs. 

As he approached, Marlene finally escaped the safe house’s anti-Apparition field and disappeared, cradling a bloodied child in her arms. The rest of the McKinnon family was already gone.

Greyback had Remus on the ground, jaws nearly locked around his neck and his hands held to the ground.

Sirius raised his weapon—steady, steady—and fired. The bolt struck Greyback in the ribs, knocking him aside.

Remus scrambled up, eyes meeting Sirius’ for just a moment. He started to turn to Greyback, to finish him off, when suddenly a slash of blood bloomed across his chest as if he’d been sliced with a blade. 

Sirius whipped around just in time to see Bellatrix standing with Vexmoor’s hand on her shoulder, wand still raised, laughing for just a moment before Apparating away.

Remus collapsed to the ground, limp, life draining out of him too quickly.

By the time Sirius was on his knees beside Remus trying to staunch the flow of blood, Greyback had disappeared as well, slipping into the shadows around them. 

They were alone on the debris-riddled street, silent except for Remus’ ragged, choking breathing.

The blood wouldn’t stop; it flowed impossibly, unendingly. This was no regular wound. Sirius dragged Remus into his lap and began chanting. He hoped desperately he remembered the spell correctly,  hoped  it would work, hoped this man would not die there in his arms tonight.

Chapter Text

Remus awoke to the gentle beeping of the monitor orb hovering by his bedside. It pulsed to the rhythm of his heartbeat, glowing red to indicate that he was feverish, though in his case that was just normal– werewolves ran hot.

Sirius Black was slumped over in a chair just next to the orb, asleep. 

“Hey,” Remus said loudly. When Sirius didn’t stir, he tried again, “Hey!”

No response. 

He pulled a pillow from behind his back and threw it at the other man. Finally, he jolted awake and looked at Remus, confused.

“You don’t have to hang around here,” Remus said, unable to hide his irritation. “You can go.”

“Thanks, I’m aware of that, mate,” Sirius replied, rolling his eyes. “Wanted to make sure you were ok. Nasty curse hit you…thought we’d lost you there for a second.”

Remus tried to remember what had happened after he’d taken on Greyback but drew a blank. He’d been so angry, so single-minded. He’d lost control after Greyback attacked the girl—that much he knew.

“How’s Marlene?” he finally asked, dreading the answer.

“She’s ok. Well, not great. Greyback got a good swipe at her sister, but the kid will be fine. We killed one of the Death Eaters— nice bit of magic you did there, by the way— but three got away.” 

Sirius grinned, stood up. He’d changed out of his leather bodysuit and was now wearing sweatpants and a white t-shirt that rode up just enough as he raised his arms in a languid stretch, revealing the sharp points of his hipbones. Remus looked away.

“Not a bad take for us, then,” Remus said, staring at the ceiling as Sirius arched his back, cracking his spine. “1,000 Galleons each plus the 250 for the job itself–”

“Nah, you can have all that. I don’t need it,” Sirius said casually, now rummaging through his backpack with his head down.

“Don’t be stupid, Black. You’re taking your half. Donate it to the bloody House Elf Liberation Front for all I care, but I’m not taking your handouts.”

“No way, mate,” he replied, as he fished out a nutribar and began unwrapping it. “I do it for the love of the game, not the Galleons. It’s yours. I already told Lils and she’s going mad scrambling to find 2,500 physical Galleons. Don’t make her go through all that for nothing.”

Gritting his teeth, fighting every instinct to preserve his pride, Remus chose not to object further. He knew the Galleons meant nothing to Sirius—he’d seen his flat and his fancy wrist console, after all. And truthfully, that kind of money could mean the difference between having a room and a bed of his own soon, or sleeping in Order safe houses indefinitely. He’d swallow his pride for that.

It helped that Sirius seemed completely disinterested in the enormity of the favor he’d just done Remus. He had already moved on, yammering about Moody and how he was waiting to ream them out only once they were both better so it was best to stay in the hospital for as long as possible.

It was only then that Remus remembered what had happened. The vision of Bellatrix pinning Sirius to the ground—teeth bared in a mad grin, wand driving into his forearm—swam in his mind.

“Your arm—“ he started, eyes snapping to it. 

“It was just a break. The medics already fixed it,” Sirius said too casually when he caught Remus’ lingering stare, now holding his arm to his chest protectively. “Don’t even need a cast. Should be good as new in no time.” 

He shifted, turning his forearm inward.

But it was too late. Remus had already seen. Without the leather bodysuit to cover it, the scar on his arm was impossible to miss. It was an ugly thing: a knot of pale, white scar tissue nearly the size of a fist right in the center of his forearm. It looked deeply indented, as if a clean scoop of flesh had been taken out.

Sirius seemed like he was about to say something more when the door to the room burst open.

“Moony!” James bounded in, a flurry of anxious energy, immediately dropping a thick quilt he’d been carrying over Remus’ lap and starting to pull out plastic boxes of food from his backpack. He reminded Remus so distinctly of Mrs. Potter that he almost laughed. 

“Moony?” Sirius asked, raising an eyebrow. “A bit obvious, don’t you think?”

James ignored this, already ladling spaghetti onto plates, shoving one into Remus’ hands and the other toward Sirius.

“Mum sent dinner since this infirmary food is foul. You doing ok? I talked to the medic; they said it was sectumsempra?”

“Right across the chest,” Sirius supplied through a mouthful of food. “Thought he’d bleed out in my fuckin’ arms.”

“Good on you, mate, for saving him! Never would’ve guessed Sirius bloody Black would be our hero!” 

James plopped down next to Sirius and slung an arm around his shoulders, giving him a friendly squeeze. Sirius’ eyes widened in alarm, nearly choking on his spaghetti.

James made it look so easy. Of course, he would just decide to be friends with Sirius Black—no questions asked. There wasn’t a distrustful bone in his body. Never mind Slytherin, Death Eaters, betrayal, family legacy, suspicion. If Sirius was on their side now, that was all that mattered to James.

Sirius had saved Remus’ life. He remembered, vaguely, the hot sear of sectumsempra across his chest, the blood pouring out, draining so quickly it had felt inevitable that he should die.

Sirius had dragged him into his lap and chanted some long, complex spell, waving his wand in elaborate, mesmerizing gestures, slowing the bleeding. Remus had started to fade out, staring up at Sirius’ focused, intense face, his storm-grey eyes locked on his work.

“How did you know what to do?” Remus asked suddenly, cutting James off mid-sentence.

Sirius’s gaze flicked between James and Remus, clearly unsure what Remus meant.

“The spell. How did you know how to stop the bleeding?”

“Oh, that,” Sirius said. “Well, Snape invented that spell, didn’t he? He taught us the countercurse… taught the Death Eaters, that is. Surprised he hasn’t shown the Order yet—a bit of an oversight.”

“You can teach us, Sirius!” James said brightly, oblivious to the strange tension Remus suddenly felt. “Snape is a rubbish teacher, honestly. Nasty piece of work, that one.”

Sirius barked out a laugh at this and said, “He’s gotten more foul with age. Greasier, too.”

They went on like that for a while, cackling over their newfound shared interest in mocking Severus Snape, exchanging their favorite stories of pissing the other boy off.

Remus let his eyes drift close, lulled into a kind of peace by their chatter and laughter and the insistent beeping of the monitors.

Lily came by his room just as he was being discharged. Still in her pristine white healer’s coat as she had just finished her shift at the clinic, she nevertheless found the energy to fuss over him, checking the pale line of new scar across his chest and peering into his pupils with an expert’s eye. 

“They said you nearly died,” she said after she had inspected him thoroughly and was satisfied that, despite attempts to the contrary, he wasn’t going to just yet. 

“Well, happily, I didn’t.” 

“Moody asks too much of us. I’m going to talk to him.”

“Don’t, Lils. He doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at this, pointedly looking at the bandage just visible under his dressing gown. He said nothing further, taking her point. 

After a moment, a sly smile suddenly appeared on her face as she apparently remembered something. 

“So Moody has you partnering up with Sirius Black?” Lily asked, all innocence. 

Hesitating, Remus replied, “Well, just the once. I don’t know if it’s going to be a regular thing. We kind of mucked it up, didn’t we?”

“Are you kidding? Moody said you were both brilliant! Two Death Eaters down!” Now she was really smirking, her eyes alight with mischief. “I bet he’ll want you together again soon.”

He groaned, gave her a gentle shove, and she erupted into giggles. He knew exactly what Hogwarts memory she was thinking of.

He’d tried for a while to keep his sexuality as secret as he kept his lycanthropy, but it was no use. It wasn’t near as scandalous anyway, just mildly embarrassing, so when Lily and Marlene had cornered him in their Fourth Year and interrogated him about crushes and dating and kissing, they figured it out quickly enough.

“So you don’t like Bertha, and you said no to Olivia, and you don’t even fancy Mary, who is not only the fittest girl in school but also a swot just like you…” Lily had mused, fiddling idly with a piece of grass as they sat out on the lawn together. “Not a lot of girls left, Remus. I refuse to believe you’re some monk.”

Remus had rolled his eyes at this. “Well, believe it. Not all of us are ruled by our loins like Potter is.”

“Ugh, don’t talk about Potter’s loins around me!” 

“Ok… so the fittest girl is of no interest to you,” Marlene drove on, unrelenting. “What about the fittest boy?” She tilted her head toward the lake, indicating a group of Slytherins who were swimming and splashing in the shallows. 

Remus blushed mortifyingly, damningly, and Marlene shrieked, falling back, kicking her feet in glee.

“I knew it, I knew it! Lils, you owe me 5 Galleons!”

Lily, laughing, clicked on her wrist console, transferring the funds.

“You were betting on if I’m gay?!”

Marlene shrugged at this, still smiling. She sat up, slung an arm over his shoulder. 

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know,” Lily said gently. She looked back out at the Slytherins.  “I heard that even he–” she cocked her head toward the boys in the lake, “has spent some time in a broom cupboard with a lad, if you know what I mean. A Ravenclaw, I think.”

Remus, blushing again, hastily said, “That’s just a rumor.” 

Of course, he knew exactly who Lily was talking about. Sirius Black was inarguably the fittest boy in their year, maybe in the whole school. He was beautiful, elegant like some ancient prince, all high cheekbones and silky, curling black hair. He was talented, too–a rising star in class, on the Quidditch pitch, wherever he went. 

And Lily was right. There were rumors.

“Anyway, I’d never be into a Slytherin. Gross.”

Thinking back on this memory, Remus found himself blushing again, hoping that Lily would drop it. It was humiliating to remember all the times she and Marlene had caught his eyes lingering on Black, elbowing each other and giggling delightedly at his expense. It wasn’t his fault; the boy was mesmerizing. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to him. It was only natural. 

And thinking he was attractive wasn’t the same as wanting to date him; that had always been out of the question, for more reasons than one.

“Forget it, Lils,” Remus said finally, rolling his eyes at her. “He was a Death Eater. You expect me to get with someone like that?”

“Hey, he’s not a Death Eater anymore, is he? And he did save your life. Very romantic, that.”

Remus groaned again. Obviously cheered up and now in the mood to antagonize him, Lily’s hand shot out toward his side and gave him a vicious tickle, sending him into fits of laughter as he tried to roll away.

After a few breathless moments and another round of teasing, Lily’s wrist console beeped and she was summoned away to fix paperwork. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and one last suggestive wink and slipped out the door.

By the time Sirius returned to his flat, he vibrated on the edge of his nerves, exhausted.

The mission had been a bit botched, but taking out two Death Eaters impressed even Moody. And McKinnon and her family, though worse for wear, were safe.

He and Remus had worked well together. Moody had insinuated that he might pair them up again, pleased with their performance. Sirius thought this seemed like a bad idea— one ex-Death Eater and one formerly undercover werewolf paired up seemed needlessly antagonizing to the other members of the Order, suggestive of some conspiracy. Sirius got enough suspicious sideways glances without being yoked to a werewolf.

But still, Moody was right. They fought well together, instinctively. So maybe a little extra heat was worth it to have a partner he could rely on in the thick of battle. 

Still, though all in all the mission had been alright, he felt laden with guilt and fear. Nearly sick to his stomach.

Sirius stripped off his clothes and got in the shower, clicking buttons on the control panel until the water came out scalding hot and fragrant. He stood there letting it wash over him for too long, his mind numbing out and disconnecting, drifting away from himself. 

He realized after a time that he was clutching the scar again, gripping his forearm with his left hand, cybernetic fingertip pressing hard.

He hated that he could still feel the Mark there. Hated that they could lay him out so easily with it. 

After he’d left the Death Eaters, discovered as a spy and fleeing for his life, Dumbledore had tried hard to remove the brand. But it was no simple tattoo. Its ink sunk through the upper layers of skin, tinting the fat, the muscle, the tendons, the veins below black, black, black.

The medics had carved it all away and once they hit bone, it was there too— sunk into the white ivory of his skeleton. They tried to replace the whole bone and regrow the flesh wholesale, but it didn’t matter. It bloomed anew in the same spot.

They had done the best they could. They had scraped away the top layer of bone, coaxing the unmarked flesh from around the gaping hole back together over it, leaving him disfigured by the ugly scar but at least not so obviously branded. 

It still twinged at times, an insistent summons that was hard to ignore, but that was all. He couldn’t be tracked with it anymore and it hadn’t burned in a long time. Until last night. 

He rubbed the scar, relishing the strange numbness of the deadened nerves, lathering the soap on his skin until the wound disappeared under fragrant pink suds. 

Later, buried under blankets on his couch, wall monitor screen mutely flashing with some Muggle show, Sirius pulled out his datapad and typed a message.

Get in touch.

He tapped the screen with his wand, magically encrypting the text. It would be visible to only one pair of eyes.

That done, he pulled up the files he’d found on werewolves and spent the rest of the night reading, datapad glow illuminating his intent, fascinated face.

The safe house wasn’t ideal but it was better than sleeping rough on some bench in the park, so Remus was grateful.

The room— one large sprawling space lined with metal bunk beds, metal lockers acting as dividers— hummed with the low racket of many people coexisting. Targeted Muggleborns and their families, Order members whose addresses had been compromised, and refugees from some of the cities to the north that had gone under Death Eater control all bustled within, talking, laughing, yelling, living. 

Many of them had already been there a long time, with no end in sight. Goblins, house elves, even at least one centaur also laid their heads at the safe house, some of them using it as a waypoint on the way to somewhere better, sometimes settling in for the long haul, hoping to wait out the war.

Remus was here, of course, because he was dead broke and had nowhere else to go.

When he left the Pack two weeks ago, he’d stayed with James and Lily. They wanted him to acquiesce to living on their couch indefinitely, but Remus had bowed out just a few days ago, making his excuses.

His pride was most of it, certainly. He didn’t like mooching off his friends, though Merlin knew he’d done it plenty. 

The other part, the part he wouldn’t admit out loud even under penalty of torture, was that their domestic bliss hurt him a little to witness. Sometimes it hurt him a lot.

It just seemed so out of reach for him, so agonizingly unavailable. Seeing their easy love up close— dancing in the kitchen, kissing each other's foreheads, hands casually drifting to lower backs, laughing at breakfast— was beautiful and dazzling but also painful, like staring at the sun. 

So he’d left, come here. He supposed he could’ve camped out with Peter, but crashing with Pettigrew and his mum seemed worse even than bearing witness to the Potter’s happiness. So the safe house it was.

With the 2,500 Galleons, though, he was well on his way to a rental flat. Maybe even next month.

As he turned around from his locker where he’d been securing the bag of jingling coins, he caught the eye of a woman across the room. Her glance flicked away immediately.

He crossed to her in a few quick steps.

“Marlene! I’d have thought they would have moved you somewhere safer by now!” He smiled, happy to see her whole and safe, surrounded by her gaggle of young siblings.

“Remus,” she replied tightly.

Something was wrong. Her eyes again flicked away from him, like she was looking for a way out.

Confused, he asked, “How’s your sister? Sirius said she’d be alright, though I know that must have been terrifying….”

He trailed off at the look on her face.

“You’re a werewolf, Remus. It’s true, isn’t it? The rumors?”

His stomach dropped. He could imagine then what she must be thinking, what she must be remembering.

Years of deceiving her and everyone at Hogwarts about his condition. 

Putting everyone at risk.

Disappearing for two years, and did they know where he’d been that whole time? And for what—the werewolves were sided with Voldemort still.

She’d seen his claws, had watched him biting and slashing and brawling like a dog in the dirt with that creature who had attacked her sister. 

“That thing scratched her, Remus. It took them hours to get it healed,”

She looked at him like he was the monster, not the man who had fought it off. 

Finally, relenting a little, maybe pitying him, she said softly, “I have to go, Remus. Thank you for helping us get out of there.” She slung a bag over her shoulder and ushered her family away from him.

Later, futilely trying to sleep in his bunk while surrounded by the coughing, snoring, and whispering of about fifty other people, Remus thought back on the previous night.

Greyback had known him right away, of course. His savage grin at the sight of him had set Remus’ pulse racing, a sick rage nearly choking him. 

He’d lost control. 

The twisted heat of vengeance had seized his mind, his body, and he’d brawled with the other wolf like a common animal: claws out, wand forgotten, plasma gun abandoned.

It had been a long time coming. 

He’d spent two years pretending to be the other wolf’s loyal son, his thrall. When the game had finally been up, when he was unable to stay a moment longer, Remus had tried to take Greyback out before he left. 

He’d failed, of course, and now it all felt very, very personal and very, very fated. Remus and Greyback were on a collision course.

“I’ll rip your throat out, boy,” Greyback had snarled into his face, hot breath stinking of meat and blood. “I’ll drag you back to the den and we’ll all take a bite of you. You’ll be our feast.”

Remus had said nothing, digging a clawed hand into the other werewolf’s face, drawing blood.

Two years. Two years undercover, two years of his life wasted. Almost none of the other werewolves in the Pack had decided to side with the Order. They were under Greyback’s thumb, and Greyback was Voldemort’s feral dog, loyal, eager to be sicced on anyone with a single command. 

The Death Eater’s promised them blood and meat but they also promised them eventual freedom– a place in the empire, a seat at the table. 

That was the great lie, the thing that Remus had failed to dispel. 

There would be no equality for the werewolves under the Death Eaters. They would always be second-class: useful servants maybe, but relegated to the chain, the doghouse, ostracized still. It would be no better than it was now, living in the shadows. It might even be worse.

Two years he had tried and now his secret was out. Soon, everyone would know he was a werewolf. They would find out he was unregistered, would find out everything. It was inevitable. They would know he was barely human; a dark creature. 

Remus sighed, turned over, tried again to clear his mind. 

He had to kill Greyback. That was the only option, the inevitable road he was on. Maybe he’d talk to Dumbledore about it, get himself assigned to something: a task force, a targeted mission. Convincing the werewolves had been impossible, but maybe if he could take out their leadership they would scatter. Greyback’s loyalty to Voldemort was the lynchpin. Without his influence, Remus knew, at least half of the Pack would break away, more interested in self-preservation than empire-building. 

If he could win over the Pack, turn the tide of their loyalty or at the very least take them off the board, it wouldn’t all be for nothing. Maybe people like Marlene would understand, could forgive him, could see that he was more than a rabid animal.

His mind wandered, unwillingly, to Sirius. He’d wrangled with his cousin, Bellatrix. It was personal for him, too, Remus thought. Family business. 

He fell asleep fitfully at last and dreamt of claws and teeth, of Marlene’s gaze flicking away from him, of storm-grey eyes piercing through a fog of blood.

Chapter Text

Voices overlapped in a cacophony, bouncing off the low metal ceiling.

Dumbledore did not often call the Order together. It was dangerous to have so many people in one place and typically they could communicate well enough through encrypted messages or Patronuses in a pinch.

So this was unusual and therefore very exciting.

Sirius stuck to the edges of the room, keeping to himself.

It wasn’t the case, Sirius reassured himself, that people in the Order didn’t like him. They were friendly enough and he’d been making progress, slowly but steadily, to win them over. Charm and good looks went a long way, he knew. Unfortunately, a long way was what he still had to go. 

These meetings, surrounded by the brave-hearted rebels, those bold people who had stood against Voldemort from the start, bulwarks against encroaching death, made him feel like a fraud. Like a coward. Like an intrinsically and irredeemably bad person. 

He was distinctly aware of his place among them: a reformed Death Eater, but how reformed? Untrustworthy. Suspicious. A Black

He didn’t blame them. They weren’t wrong.

Back at Hogwarts, early on, he’d tried to be what his family wanted. He did hang around with Rosier and Mulciber, his cousins, the whole evil lot of them. When he’d been younger, he’d even enjoyed indulging in their random violence. 

Violence came easily to him, so it hadn’t taken much to join in, tormenting halfbloods and muggleborns with pranks and hexes that were just a little too mean, a little too dark to be considered just childish bullying.

But as they’d gotten older, he realized, their violence was backed by ideology and politics. Their beliefs— pure-blood supremacy, hatred of muggles— were the scaffolding from which their violence hung. 

And Sirius, in that regard, was no true believer.

He wished now that he could say he’d always believed the right thing, had stood up against their rhetoric like James Potter and Peter Pettigrew, purebloods themselves too, boldly defying the centuries of ancient family wisdom that said they were better, superior, deserving of power.

He hadn’t. Not really.

He’d ignored it, played along, checked out. He’d tried to blend in, to be the heir without really being the heir. A half-hearted effort, but an effort still. 

Then, he’d become a Death Eater.

For Sirius, the rhetoric didn’t add up to the reality he saw. Muggleborns like Lily Evans excelled at magic and halfbloods were just as competent or more so than the most pureblooded of Slytherin. And the whole thing about stealing magic, some zero-sum game where one muggleborn meant less magic for purebloods? Well, that was just nonsense; not backed by any research, a hateful invention, an excuse.

On a more superficial level, he simply couldn’t stand them. The whole solemn affair of Black family pomp and circumstance bored him. Their droning sermons on blood supremacy struck him as feudal. His cousins were ghouls, and his Slytherin peers, witless. His parents were vicious and his childhood had been spiked with the constant threat of violence; it took going to Hogwarts to find out that wasn’t normal, wasn’t how other children were raised.

But he kept all these thoughts to himself for a long time.

The problem, unfortunately, was that the Death Eaters needed him.  And if they couldn’t have him, they’d take Regulus. Though he sometimes hated his brother, too, he, in the end, was what Sirius chose to put first.

That loyalty was more bone-deep than the Dark Mark. His impulse to protect his little brother, honed to instinct over a long, dark childhood, was more important than doing what was right or saving himself. It was the only important thing.

Now he’d failed at that too.

He was knocked from his spiraling, depressive thoughts by a hand clapping on his shoulder and James Potter’s voice in his ear— “All right, mate?”

“Yeah, fine,” he responded, giving an unconvincing grin. 

“Looking a little peaky. Want me to fetch you a cup of tea?”

“No, I’m good, I’ve got—“ he raised his paper cup of quickly cooling, shitty coffee.

“Say, want to join us for a pint afterwards? Me, Lils, and Remus were going to pop over to Static once this is sorted.”

Sirius raised his eyebrows, caught off guard. Was it really so simple? Save one werewolf’s life and he could be welcomed into the inner circle? 

He’d been working like a dog for months, taking every mission, sparing no effort in his attempt to earn the trust of the Order, to claw his way out of traitorous purgatory. Still he was never invited anywhere, rarely spoken to besides what was strictly necessary, frequently whispered about, always on the outskirts.

Now: a pint? That easy?

“Sure, guess I could,” he said, sounding a little haughtier than he intended. Insecurity made him aloof.

“Good, good,” James said, clapping his shoulder again, grinning.

The room fell into an abrupt hush then, people jostling as they turned towards the front. 

Dumbledore stood behind a podium, Moody to his right. His long beard was clasped in a steel ring and his half-moon glasses, delicate, vintage looking things, glinted in the low light. He cleared his voice, pointed his wand at his own throat to cast an amplifying spell, and then spoke. 

“I bear difficult news,” he started, solemn. “We need to close the safe houses.”

The room erupted into noise: questioning, confused.

“No one will be left to fend for themselves. We’ll be transporting out the most at-risk refugees and establishing new, more secure facilities as quickly as we can. I brought this group together to ask for your help, for your generosity. We need short-term housing starting immediately for at least 100 people. The Order will provide additional security for any who open their homes.”

“But why? Why do we have to close them?” someone yelled from the back, an edge of panic in their voice.

“The safe houses have been compromised.”

Another wave of whispering. 

“We have reason to believe their locations and relevant details about protective spellwork have been leaked to the enemy. Rest assured we are looking into this with the gravest urgency. For now, the most important thing is to get the people who have entrusted us with their safety to secure locations immediately. 

“I ask that anyone who has a spare room add their names to this datapad before leaving here. We’ll be in contact shortly. That is all. I thank you for your time.”

With that, Dumbledore swept from the room, Moody on his tail. Sirius had hoped to grab a moment of Dumbledore’s time but apparently that wasn’t to be.

The crowd scattered apart then, groups breaking off, whispering, casting paranoid looks at each other. Sirius did not think he was imagining eyes on him, assessing, suspicious. 

A line of people lingered by the datapad, adding their names to the list to offer up space. Sirius moved towards it, ready to put his name down though not exactly thrilled at the prospect of hosting some random downtrodden person.

By the line, James, Lily, and Remus were in what sounded like a heated discussion. Sirius approached, giving Lily a friendly smile. 

“Just go to Peter’s, Moony! You’re being ridiculous!” James was saying. “You know we’ll take you in as soon as we can. Lily’s mum is just here until she’s done with her treatment. After the couch is all yours again, as long as you want it!”

“I’m not going to Peter’s, James. His mum hates my guts. She thinks I’m going to eat her precious baby. And anyway, it’ll be easy enough to get a squat somewhere for a bit. Could even just crash at a motel. Then in a week or two I can get my own place.”

“This is an emergency, Remus! Not a time to let your pride get in the way of your safety!” Lily admonished.

“Absolutely not. Listen, I can take care of myself. I’m going to have to get out of town anyway on the moon, so I really just need a few days. There’s plenty of places I can stay for a few days.”

“Come stay at mine,” Sirius found himself saying before he’d even really considered the thought. They all looked at him and he suddenly felt like an intruder.

“Amazing idea!” James exclaimed after an awkward moment. “Problem solved! Let’s go grab that pint, eh?”

Remus’ mouth was slightly agape in shock and then he started to protest. 

Sirius cut him off. “You’ll be doing me a favor, really. I was about to put my name down about the spare room but can’t say I fancy some random living in my flat for Merlin knows how long. At least I know you.”

Remus closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes, thinking.

“I promise I’ll clean up before you come,” Sirius added, sheepish.

Remus didn’t agree but he didn’t disagree, either. They let themselves be bustled out by James, who was already planning his own visit to Sirius’ flat— “we’ll throw a squat-warming for Remus!”

It was probably a terrible idea that he would regret imminently, but regardless Remus waited outside the high-rise, coat collar pulled high around his neck to ward off the cold.

He’d lugged out his datapad a moment before to send Sirius a message–”I’m downstairs”-- and now he was waiting anxiously at the front door, self-loathing thoughts spinning in his head. 

He felt distinctly out of place in this neighborhood. Several Muggles had emerged from the residence, giving him suspicious glances and pointedly not holding the door open for him, as if he were there to burgle them. 

Yes, this was definitely a bad idea. One mission together for the Order and suddenly Sirius Black was drinking pints with them and inviting Remus to move in.

Not move in, he thought. Stay for a night. Maybe two.

The man had already given him money, now he was offering up housing? How pathetic did Remus seem? 

But Remus had turned it over in his mind again and again and decided that staying with Sirius– for a night, maybe two– wasn’t the worst thing. Staying with Peter was the worst thing, followed by taking money from James and Lily, followed by sleeping on a bench. Staying with Sirius was maybe fourth-worst. 

He had been unfair to Sirius before, goading him about the Death Eater stuff. He’d changed his mind; that was the important thing, Remus told himself. And from what James told him, the man had been putting in work for the Order: missions multiple times a week, at least a dozen Death Eaters dead or captured by his hand, information passed on that had led to the current changing tide in the war. His credentials maybe weren’t unimpeachable, but whose were? Certainly not Remus’ own, dangerous creature he was. 

True, the difference was that Sirius had, at one point, chosen to be a Death Eater, eyes wide open. Remus had not chosen to be a werewolf. But he didn’t know all the details, anyway. Maybe it had been complicated.

The distinction didn’t seem to matter to some members of the Order, of course. 

As they had left the meeting earlier that night, he’d heard enough whispers—“werewolf”, “lived with them”, “two years!”— to know the rumor had gotten around. They were speculating about him. They had suspicions. Monsters were in their midst, and not just the ex-Death Eater. 

He tried to shake off his spiralling paranoia like so much water.  Let them talk. He would do what he liked.

At the bar afterwards, James had caught his eye and had quietly, while Lily and Sirius had gone to get another round of pints, whispered a round of reassurances. He was sure that everyone would come around.

And there was no denying James’ unyielding optimism. He was excited to make a new friend, unconcerned about what the association would mean for Remus’ crumbling reputation. He had yammered away about how he and Sirius had occasionally practiced Quidditch together at Hogwarts and that he’d always known he was different, always suspected he didn’t really want to throw in with that lot but had just done it because of his family. 

When Lily and Sirius had sat down again, it was like they’d all been old friends for ages: arguing about Quidditch, laughing about old times, making plans for this or that next weekend or next week or next month. Sirius and James were uncannily compatible, like they were meant to be. 

Outside the flat, the door opened with a metallic beep and Sirius emerged, dressed in jeans and a black vest, long hair pulled back revealing his slender neck and a small undecipherable tattoo of something on the soft spot just under his ear. He smelled freshly showered, floral. 

“Let me in before one of these Muggles calls the police on me,” Remus grumbled, pushing past him.

Upstairs, it was evident that Sirius had been true to his word: he had cleaned. Gone were the take out containers, the snowdrifts of dirty clothes, the moldy, garbage smell. The place was sparkling clean, scourgified within an inch of its life. What’s more, he’d put a curtain around the bed jammed in the corner and, Merlin help him, lit a candle. Remus felt a twinge of embarrassment at the obvious effort that had been expended on his behalf.

“Well, er… thanks,” he said at last, looking around. “I appreciate it. I’ll be out of your hair in a day, two tops. They emptied out the safe house right quick, barely had time to go back and get my things.”

“That's all you have?” Sirius asked, eyeing the small duffel bag slung over Remus’ shoulder.

“That’s it,” Remus shrugged, trying not to sound defensive. ‘Where should I–”

“Right this way!” Sirius led him to a door, opening it with a flourish, revealing a nearly empty, large, windowless room. He had assumed this was a studio since there was a bed in the living room but this was clearly the master bedroom. A large mattress stood in the middle, neatly made up with a pile of sheets and pillows and, somehow, the same quilt James had brought to the hospital.

“James brought it by,” Sirius supplied, smiling at the quilt. “Kind of a mum, isn’t he?”

“Ha! You have no idea. Listen, I’m not taking your room. I’m fine on the couch or I can take that bed in the living room, whatever.”

“Naw, mate, this room is empty so it’s all yours. I sleep in the living room, always have. I like the windows. Make yourself at home.” And he left Remus alone, going back to the kitchen.

Remus put his bag down, pulled out his datapad, plugged it in. He unstrapped his plasma gun, his wand holster, placed them on the side table. The bag of clothes– three pants, three shirts, a half-torn plastic bag of toiletries, socks, underwear– he dropped in a corner, to deal with later. 

And that was it: all his worldly belongings.

It was late. Remus considered just quietly closing the door and going to sleep. He thought about how he could just sneak out at dawn, make himself scarce, reappear only to crash. He could stay out of Sirius’ way, avoid him, live like a ghost. It would be easy; he was used to it.

Instead, he went back to the kitchen and asked for a glass of water.

Sirius, pouring him one, said, “Could get you something stronger, too, if you like. Firewhiskey?”

Remus nodded. Glasses were poured, sips were taken. The firewhiskey burned all the way down. Remus rarely drank these days so it hit him quickly, brain going loose, blurry. 

Sirius finished one glass, filled another.

“Where’d you learn to fight?” he asked finally, his feigned nonchalance revealing this was a question he’d been mulling for awhile. “That thing you did diverting the plasma bolt was incredible. I’ve never seen that.”

Remus took a sip, considering how much to reveal. He could lie. That was the first impulse, the most instinctual. Evade, avoid. Instead, for some reason, he told the truth. 

“Dueling Club at school. And the wolves,” he replied, eyes locked on the ice in his glass, slowly melting. “The gun is customized. I made a spell that controls the bolts.”

Sirius’ eyebrows shot up, clearly impressed. “Wicked! Enchanted but it still works even in the pulse?”

“Not quite,” His eyes flicked up to Sirius, who was rapt. “But I’ve been thinking of ways, maybe, to make it functional in the pulse. Heat seeking, or I don’t know…something to make the plasma guns more precise.”

The other man’s face was focused, intent— the same look he’d had when he cast the spell that saved Remus’ life. 

“That’s a brilliant idea. We could figure out a passive spell to just enchant the bolts themselves. We could even tie it to the wrist consoles so anyone could do it with a click. That would be huge! Take half the talent needed to fight with plasma out of the equation!”

He grabbed his datapad from a side table by the couch. He pulled out his wand, his gun, eager to get to work. 

Remus, refilling his drink, let himself get swept away in the excitement. 

The whiskey, the shimmering glow of the city skyline in a panorama outside the windows, Sirius’ clean, brisk spell casting, their rapid-fire discussion of charms, tech, plasma— it all elated him, his spirits rising like they hadn’t since Hogwarts.

Later, in the plush, warm bed in the other room, he slept long and dreamlessly.

He had intended to go to sleep. But lying down in his bed, pulling the curtain closed around him, staring out at the blinking city lights, slightly drunk, Sirius felt wired, buzzing with ideas.

Remus, he thought, might be a genius.

Sirius knew spell casting and knew he was better at it than most. But he wasn’t as familiar with all the Muggle tech. He could shoot a plasma gun but he didn’t know how it worked. The electro-volts were, frankly, a mystery to him. 

Remus understood them all, and better yet, knew how to carefully lace them with enchantments in a way that was elegant, clean, innovative. In just a few hours, they’d worked out the passive spell on Sirius’ gun to make the volts heat-seeking. It wasn’t final, just an experiment really, and they’d undone the spellwork shortly after, but still. It was impressive progress for one night and half a bottle of firewhiskey. He thought about introducing Remus to the Longbottoms and wondered what else they could invent.

Cocooning himself in blankets, he let his thoughts drift.

He thought about Remus’ scarred hands deftly pulling apart the gun, long fingers wrapped around the chrome muzzle, twisting.

He thought about Remus laughing at something Sirius said, sharp canines just visible.

He thought about leaning close, closer than he had to, over Remus’ shoulder to look down at his datapad, a diagram pulled up. He’d smelled earthy, a bit animal, under a sharp layer of cinnamon. He thought about that, too.

Then he thought, fuck it, and pushed the covers back.

Within twenty minutes, he was outside, dressed, heading to Haringey. He was too wired to sleep, he reasoned, and it wasn’t even that late— just barely 1am. The club would be just getting going. 

He Apparated close, but would need to walk a ways to get the ritual right to enter. He’d have a few drinks, dance, find someone to hook up with in a dingy bathroom, let off some steam. 

He would not admit it but the last two years of his life had been painfully, crushingly lonely. 

The Death Eaters hadn’t been his friends on a good day and the three months of spying on them had not been good days. The nine months before that hadn’t been good either. The seven years at Hogwarts, even, left something to be desired. And before that: darkness too.

Then, the year with the Order had been work. It was work in missions, work in meetings, work to build trust, to manage his reputation, to show he’d changed, to prove himself. Work to wrangle down his anger and despair at the whispers, the insinuations, the outright hostility from other members of the Order who saw him as one thing: Death Eater.

The other night at the bar with Potter and his friends had been the first time in a long, long time that Sirius had felt normal. Just a regular twenty year old, drinking a pint, arguing about Quidditch. It had been a relief. 

And then tonight, with Remus. They had gotten excited about complicated magic, figured out problems together, sparking at the same intellectual frequency. That had been something too.  

A thrill.  A possibility.

So tonight, he didn’t strictly need to go to the club for companionship, but old habits die hard. And, admittedly, he wasn’t sure that laying around in his bed, unable to sleep, thinking mildly lascivious thoughts about his houseguest was particularly productive or appropriate. 

So the club it was. 

But before he even got to the correct street, a ghostly apparition of a fox materialized before him, milky white. 

It trotted around him in a tight circle, said, “Fine, meet me now. You know where,” in a familiar voice and vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

With a sigh, Sirius Apparated again.

“Merlin, what the fuck are you wearing?”

Regulus appraised him with a disgusted sneer, taking in the mesh vest, the tangle of chrome wires wrapped around his forearm, the leather pants glowing with circuitry down one leg.

“I was going out, Reg. This is what people wear, not that I’d expect you to know that. Left the basement of Grimmauld recently?”

“You look like a twat. I’m glad mother doesn’t have to see this nonsense.”

“You don’t look so good yourself.” 

He didn’t. Regulus looked brittle—too thin, pasty-pale.

They were in St. George’s Gardens, not far from Grimmauld Place. The old, crumbling gravestones loomed around them. It hadn’t changed much since their childhood—a patch of green stubbornly clinging to life between looming high-rises, an anachronism in a city of chrome and neon. Electric cars whispered by on the streets beyond, their lights slicing through the dark, throwing Regulus’ sharp, angry face into sudden relief before plunging it back into shadow.

“Well, what do you want?” Regulus asked, leaning against a tombstone, crossing his arms.

“I saw Bellatrix—“ Sirius started, but Regulus cut in.

“Saw her? Tried to kill her, you mean? What do you want, Sirius? I’m risking my life just talking to you. Don’t waste my time.”

Sirius hissed out a breath, calming himself.

“She said you were going to join. Don’t do it, Reg. Don’t take the Mark. Just stay out of this. They can’t make you.”

He couldn’t see Regulus’ eyes in the dark but he could tell he’d rolled them.

“No one is making me. I want to. You wanted to once too, if I recall.”

“No, I didn’t. I never fucking wanted to. I did it so you wouldn’t have to and now you’re just going to do it anyway, aren’t you? You stupid idiot. You have no idea what they’ll make you do, what you’ll—“

“I didn’t ask you to do all that for me.” Regulus’ voice tightened, pitched a bit higher. “That was your decision, not mine, so whatever you did is on you. I don’t have time for this.” 

He turned to go.

“Bellatrix has some ritual she’s been preparing. It requires blood from each of the pureblood families. That’s why she wanted us to join, that’s why she needed us around. You’re nothing to her; you’re just a sack of blood for some lunatic spell she’s cooked up–”

Regulus flinched, stepping back.

Sirius grabbed his arm, metal fingertip digging into scrawny bicep, dragging him close. Regulus cast a disdainful glance at the gleam of metal in the dark, then yanked his arm free, turned on the spot, and was gone.

The door slid open with a friendly little chime and a Muggle woman walked in, lugging a massive, old-fashioned console of some kind, the type that was about three decades out of date.

Remus was at his day job. 

He’d managed to scrounge up this gig—essentially working as a patch rat for cheap, crappy tech—through one of his mum’s old friends. She’d been a talented mechanic back in the day, and though she was long dead, her former colleagues still honored their respect for her by occasionally helping out her hapless, semi-unemployable son.

The job paid per repair. He spoke quickly with the Muggle woman who insisted the console had to be fixed. No, she didn’t want a new one—she hated all the buttons, touchpads, and nonsense on the newer models—and yes, it had to be done by tomorrow because people were coming over to watch the cage fight. So it better be ready by then.

As soon as she left, he got to work. 

The thing about repairing Muggle tech with magic was that you had to actually understand how the tech worked. It had all gotten so complicated; the Muggle woman was right. The new technology was fiddly, elaborate, and it required a practiced and knowledgeable hand. A wave of the wand and a clumsy reparo just didn’t do the trick anymore. Luckily, his Muggle mum had had a knack for technology and she’d taught him patiently, doggedly insisting to her baffled wizard husband that it was not a waste of time, that it was worth knowing.

Sirius had been utterly enraptured by Remus’ explanations of the plasma gun and the electro-volts. It was so like a wizard to use something without bothering to understand it. At least Sirius was willing to learn. 

As he took apart the monitor–tweaking here, waving his wand there, pulling out Muggle tools occasionally to solder a wire together delicately–he thought about their work from last night. It had been good: the work and the company. 

He still felt guilty about staying at Sirius’ place, but maybe he could earn his keep, teach the man a thing or two, leave him with some upgraded weapons. Sirius’ cybernetic fingers were interesting; could he make different tips for them? His plasma gun and wrist console were both top-of-the-line but there were hacks he could do even on those– an overcharge capacitor bank or an arc cascade mod for the gun, additional spell slots on the console.

The day went by quickly like that, his hands working while his mind wandered. Afterwards, he made his way to Static to meet James and Peter for a pint.

“Remus!” Peter yelled when he walked in, jumping up and embracing him. They hadn’t seen much of each other lately. Peter worked at the Ministry– he was still in his stiff uniform– and lived outside of the city in some stuffy suburb with his mum. Remus returned the hug gladly, ruffling the shorter man’s hair. 

“Pete, you look absolutely sharp in this outfit!” Remus laughed, assessing him. He did, honestly. It was navy blue, pressed crisply, collar zipped up high to his chin. He looked official and authoritative.

His government badge was clipped at his chest, “Peter Pettigrew - Junior Analyst - Magical Records and Documentation”. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but Remus felt a little envious nevertheless. He had steady employment, a good paycheck, some degree of respect. He was happy for Peter, of course, but yes– a little envious, too.

James sat at the table already and he raised his glass silently to Remus in a salute as he slid into the booth.

“So how’s Black’s place?” he asked as Peter arranged himself and flagged down the server.

“Absolutely ridiculous. It’s a penthouse. Biggest wall console I’ve seen in my life and loads of weird magical gadgets everywhere but not a bite of food in the fridge– nothing, completely empty. You’d think he’s a vampire or something.”

“You’re one to talk,” Peter nudged him with an elbow. “What would you like in the fridge, raw meat?”

“A dead squirrel? Surgery department discards?” James added, waggling his fingers. 

They chatted for a while, mostly about nothing in particular, until eventually Lily joined them, sliding in beside James. He put an arm around her immediately, pulling her close, planting a kiss on her cheek. 

“The clinic was dreadful and now I’ve got a shift with Moody in a half hour and if I don’t get a cocktail between the two, I might just die,” she said dramatically, raising a hand to the server and putting in an order. She was apprenticing at St. Mungo’s to be a medic and was always regaling them with horrific stories of witches and wizards coming in with objects shoved into places they shouldn’t be and bizarre disfigurations from spells gone awry.

Lily joined their rambling chatter, sipping her drink, chiming in with a joke, an admonishment, an indulgent smile. All the while, James kept his arm around her and kept looking at her with such fondness, such pure and glowing love, that Remus had to look away occasionally or risk being blinded by it.

“So where are you going for the full moon this week, Moons?” James asked eventually, as he always did. 

“Probably the basement in Essex. The building was still abandoned when I last checked and I already went through all that effort to set up the spells. It wasn’t so bad.” 

Giving him a sympathetic look, James said in a low voice, “I’m sorry we haven’t figured it out yet, Moons. The spell is harder than I thought. Pete and I spent a day on it last weekend, but we’re both just so busy and…” He trailed off, chagrined. 

“I never wanted you to do it in the first place, mate. Don’t worry about it, please. Just drop it.”

Lily looked  between them with a fierce look on her face and added, “Yes, please, James, drop it. You have no idea how many people I’ve had come into the clinic half-transfigured because they botched an Animagus attempt. More people fail than succeed; the odds are not in your favor. And I’m not marrying you if you’re part pig or something.”

Of course, the argument revved up from there: it was an old one, repeated ad nauseam since their Fifth year when James had first dreamed up the idea. Lily and Remus were against, James was for, and Peter switched sides on a day to day basis, depending on how insecure he was feeling about his spellwork.

James was just working himself up into his speech about werewolf life spans and risk to benefit ratios and Animagus-attempt data sets he’d parsed when Remus gave him a swift kick under the table to shut him up. 

“Animagus attempts, eh?” Sirius asked, having approached their table with a pint in hand. “I had a great-aunt who gave it a go and ended up with bat wings. Kind of suited her, honestly.” Noting the group’s sudden awkward silence, he shifted a bit nervously, adding, “Mind if I join you? Ok if not… just wanted to say hi.”

They jumped into action immediately: making room, saying their greetings.

Remus’ twinge of annoyance at the intrusion must have been obvious because Sirius gave him a slightly apologetic look. Peter, who hadn’t been formally introduced to Black yet, shook his hand, looking a little queasy. James gave him a stern look that unmistakably said be nice.

“One of you planning to try for the Animagus, then?” Sirius asked once they were all introduced and settled. 

They were all of age and Black even knew Remus was a werewolf and the man had been a Death Eater for Merlin’s sake, so it wasn’t likely he’d clutch his pearls at not registering the attempt– but on the other hand, he’d been a Death Eater. Was he really worthy of this, one of their longest kept secrets, just because it didn’t necessarily need to be a secret anymore? No, of course not. This was not for public consumption, this was–

“Yeah,” James finally said after a moment in which Remus was sure he was doing the exact assessment he himself had just made and clearly coming to a different conclusion. “Pete and I have been noodling it over for a while. For Remus.”

“They aren’t,” Remus said firmly, glaring at his friend. “It was just a thought but they aren’t really doing it.”

Sirius’ furrowed his brow, looking between them. “Oh, because the werewolf won’t mind if you’re animals? That’s a good idea! I read about some werewolves who change at Muggle zoos for that exact reason. You’d be calmer around other animals, right? Less likely to hurt yourself?”

“That’s the theory,” Remus said stiffly, anger rising like bile in his throat. “But they aren’t doing it.”

“Why not? I bet it would be useful even outside the werewolf thing! If you don’t register, it’s like a secret weapon!” He was getting excited now, energy sparking with the same kinetic thrill he’d had last night while looking at plasma gun mods. 

James grinned, nodded, and before long he was launching into his detailed account of their studies, their roadblocks, the problems and the solutions– Sirius jumping in, gesturing, iterating. Lily sat back, resigned, sullenly drinking her cocktail and ordering another one. James had withdrawn his arm from around her to pull out his datapad and show Sirius his research. They huddled together conspiratorially like schoolboys, swiping through screens and talking too quickly to follow. Peter looked between the two men with a panicked look on his face like his fate was sealed: it’d be half-animal disfiguration for him, for sure.

Remus said nothing, at a loss for words.

Finally, Lily got up and announced she had to get to Moody’s. Taking the opportunity to extract himself from what was quickly becoming, to his great annoyance, an Animagus planning session, Remus decided to join her, barely giving the other men a goodbye before stalking out of the bar.

“Those idiots,” Lily grumbled once they were outside.

“Why the fuck did James tell Black? What’s he thinking?” 

Lily waved her wand above their heads, summoning a barrier to spare them from getting soaked in the cold drizzle. 

“I haven’t the slightest. He’s always been a little obsessed with him, to be honest. Only person who got more N.E.W.Ts than James, wasn’t he? And all those times Slytherin beat us in Quidditch? Remember when Black stole the Quaffle from James twice in one game? Drove him mad. Ever since you worked with him, James hasn’t shut up about him– Black this, Black that. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s in love.” 

“He was a Death Eater!” Remus hissed, exasperated, feeling like he was going crazy. “I’m not saying kick him out of the Order, but why is he our best friend all of a sudden? Giving me Galleons, a place to stay– it’s weird! He doesn’t even know us!”

Lily shrugged, helpless. She shared some of James’ buoyant optimism and had responded warmly to Sirius, accepting his jokes and winks and friendly overtures with kindness, but Remus was relieved that even she thought this newfound closeness was a step too far. They walked the rest of the way in silence.

Arriving, they quickly did the ritual to enter the club. It was empty now, it being a weekday and still too early for clubbing regardless. The giant warehouse space had been swept clean of its usual litter of plastic cups, cans, and glitter and was eerily silent, their echoing footsteps the only noise. It was strange to see it like this:  barren and empty, lights on, hot press of bodies gone, something lecherous and dirty made pristine.

They wound through the back halls, unnoticed by the Muggle janitors and other various staff, protected by the place’s enchantments. They split apart eventually, Lily heading to the log booth and Remus down the hall to Moody’s office.

Approaching the door, Remus tried to clear his head and prepare for the conversation he was about to have. It was no use, though, because as soon as the pneumatic door slid open and Moody’s spinning electric-blue eye locked on him, all his arguments slipped out of his head and he was momentarily speechless.

“Lupin,” Moody said gruffly from his seat, normal eye still locked on the screen in front of him. 

Remus waited until he finished typing and then cut to the chase.

“I want to go after Greyback. He’s the only thing keeping the rest of the Pack in line with the Death Eaters. If we get rid of him, they’ll scatter. I should have done it sooner, shouldn’t have wasted all that time. It’s the only way to neutralize the werewolves. I’m sorry I didn’t see that earlier.”

Moody said nothing, both eyes locked on him. Remus continued.

“I can track him myself. I think Bellatrix is his handler, so maybe I could take her out too. The moon is on Friday, so I could head out right after. I know where they go to recuperate after moons, so I would start there. I’d report back every day and if I saw an opportunity to take out more of them, we could plan something bigger, a raid maybe.” He paused again, waiting for feedback, a refusal, anything.

Silence.

“It’s unfinished business, Moody,” he finally admitted. “I need to do this; it was my job and I failed. I owe it to the Order. It’s the only thing I’m good for.”

This time, he let the silence linger, out of things to say.

At last, putting him out of his misery, Moody said, “Fine. It’s not a bad idea. You’re taking Black with you, though.”

“What? Why?” He had not been expecting that. Sirius bloody Black, everywhere all of a sudden, taking over his life.

“I need you both out of the way. Someone is leaking information to the Death Eaters, Lupin, and you know who the rumor mill is pointing to?” He raised one finger, leveled it right at Remus like a gun. “And Black, of course.” He turned back to his screen, typed a few words, slammed a finger into the screen with more force than necessary. “I trust you both. So does Dumbledore. But people are talking. They are rankled, afraid, and it’s starting to get around that you’re a werewolf, that you were undercover for a long time. Maybe you two taking out high-profile targets like Greyback and Bellatrix will shut them up; maybe not. The job will at least keep you out of sight and out of mind for a time while we sort out who the leak really is.”

Eyes rolling back to Remus’ stunned face, he conceded, gruff, “And you two were good together. I believe you might even really be able to do it. So you go together, handle it, come back the conquering heroes rather than–”

“A Death Eater and a dark creature.”

“Exactly! You get it. Good lad. I sent the message to Black already. You’re to come back here after the moon, I’ll get you the latest intel, then off you’ll go. Dismissed.”

Remus left the room feeling like he’d been slapped across the face. 

How was this happening? How was he lumped in with an ex-Death Eater? How was Sirius Black suddenly everywhere in his life, encroaching into his work, his friendships?

Irritated that, of course, he had nowhere else to go at that moment, he started to make his way back to his room– to Sirius Black’s flat.

Chapter Text

A mission to take out Bellatrix. 

A mission specifically to take out Bellatrix.

Sirius was feeling incandescent. This was perfect. This was exactly what he needed to do. It was Bellatrix’s insane blood magic scheme that made Black blood so important to the Dark Lord and it was her that was the most insistent about Regulus joining up. If she was dead, the whole thing would fall apart– Regulus wouldn’t matter any more. They’d lose interest. Sirius could convince him then, he thought. He could get his brother away from them, save him from certain death. He would see reason.

And Moody wanted him to do it with Remus! This felt perfect too, fated somehow. The doors were opening to him; he was being welcomed in, welcomed home. He’d kill Bellatrix, save Regulus, and the two of them–Black brothers reunited in freedom–could navigate the world together, out from under the thumb of pureblood supremacy and violence and family legacy. They could be the good guys; they could be heroes. Maybe both of them would be friends with James and Remus and Peter, maybe they could all get pints together and invent incredible new magic and argue about Quidditch. The glorious, happy, easy possibility of it all flicked through his mind like a rifled deck of cards.

So when Remus pinged him on his wrist console that he was downstairs, he thought they might celebrate. Remus wanted to kill Greyback too, surely. They could spend the evening planning, maybe coming up with more mods to prepare them for the fights ahead. 

But when he fetched the other man from downstairs, his expression was stormy and he said nothing.

Finally, upstairs in the kitchen, doling noodles onto a plate from a take out container, Sirius said, “So this mission Moody has us on– pretty great, huh?”

Remus looked at him like he was stupid. “Great? You know why he wants us to go on it? Because half the Order thinks we’re both traitors. He wants us out of the way or to prove our loyalty or something.”

This wasn’t as shocking to Sirius as Remus seemed to think it should be. He shrugged. “Well, so what? Sounds like Moody doesn’t think we’re traitors, or he sure as hell wouldn’t send us on this mission.”

“I guess it’s no big deal to you, being called a Death Eater, since you were one.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that– having the Order suspect you of being a traitor must not mean much to you, since it’s basically true. You were on their side.”

“And now I’m not,” Sirius said simply, lost as to where this was going. “I was a Death Eater for eight months, Remus. I’ve been with the Order for nearly twice as long and I’m still taking shit like this from nearly everyone. What are you on about?”

Remus tensed, fists clenched. He was furious, Sirius realized, nearly shaking with it. Sirius imagined what Remus was leaving unsaid, what he was implying with the narrowing of his eyes, the twisted set of his mouth: You were on their side. Not much of a leap to think you may still be.

“And before those eight months as a Death Eater, you were terrorizing muggleborns and halfbloods as a kid at Hogwarts, so let’s add what– seven years as a Death Eater apprentice to the till? And in those months, by the way, how many people did you kill? How many Muggles did you torture?”

“None! None, not one. And I could ask you the same bloody thing! When you were with the wolves, did you lock yourselves up all safe and sound on full moons? You’re sure you never killed or infected anyone, running around with them?”

Remus went completely still. He looked like he’d been punched. He was not sure; Sirius could tell immediately. The fear of that uncertainty was plain on his face.

“I just came back here to grab my things,” he said finally, voice dangerously quiet. “I’ll be out of your hair.”

He retreated to his room, leaving Sirius in the kitchen with the open takeout containers and all his dreams of heroism and friendship curdling in his gut.

Later, in his bed with the curtains pulled shut even though the rest of the apartment was empty, Sirius dwelled on his last conversation with Remus. He turned it over in his head, again and again, imagining all the things he could have done differently.

He’d been a Death Eater, yes. And before that, he’d been a shit and an idiot, a blood supremacist by association, complicit: a Death Eater apprentice.

So maybe it was too much to expect that he’d get any grace, any forgiveness, any kindness from any of them. They’d seen too much, they knew too much, he’d done too much.

He’d gotten ahead of himself, thrilling at the prospect of friendship like a kid on their first day at Hogwarts. It was embarrassing now to think about; he’d been so naive. Of course they didn’t trust him. Of course they wanted nothing to do with him. Of course they never would.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t need them, not really. He’d kill Bellatrix and get Regulus to leave home and they would rely on each other, like always. Like they had in Grimmauld Place when father cast lacero a bit too enthusiastically and one or the other of them needed stitches, or like when mother got drunk and forgot to undo a silencio, leaving them muted for days, communicating with each other through gestures, eye contact. 

Still, he felt sorry for himself. 

He revisited a favorite daydream: leaving London, disappearing into some foreign country and forgetting about the war. Starting over. Clean slate. Not a Death Eater, not an Order member, just a wizard out in the world, anonymous and free. He could imagine himself somewhere warm. He could meet strangers who didn’t know the Black family, didn’t know what a Hogwarts House even was, didn’t care about the whole burdensome history of it all. He could leave the shambles of his life–every stupid decision, every wrong turn he’d taken– behind.

But of course, it was just a daydream. Even if he did manage to convince Regulus to join him, he could not leave the fight unfinished. He had never been a true believer as a Death Eater. He had waffled, he had faked it.

But now, he was a true believer in the Order. He believed in Dumbledore. He believed in the rightness of it, the noble cause, the absolute need to destroy Voldemort and dismantle his whole poisonous ideology. He’d seen their evil firsthand. 

And if nothing else, once Sirius Black truly believed in something, he was not a quitter.

The first time he realized that he could not be a Death Eater, could not be what his family demanded of him—and therefore could not save his little brother—was on a blood moon.

Sirius had taken the Dark Mark just six months earlier. The deal was that if he joined up, they would leave Regulus out of it. Even if Regulus begged to join, as Sirius suspected he might, they had agreed: they would not let him. 

Regulus was not a fighter. He was smart and talented and magically powerful as all Blacks were, and he was ambitious: a true Slytherin. But the killer instinct, the impulse towards violence, had skipped him. He was soft. He cried when people hurt him, cried when he was made to hurt others. He didn’t get angry; he got sad. Sirius knew that his brother would not get out of the war alive if he joined up. He’d end up dead one way or the other: killed by the other side, killed by a Death Eater, it didn’t matter. 

So Sirius had struck the deal and here he was: Dark Mark on his forearm, skeletal white mask over his face, gathered under the red full moon with twenty other Death Eaters, waiting.

Up to this point, he had done mostly menial tasks: delivering messages, securing barracks, scouting. He’d gotten in a few skirmishes but escaped them all unscathed and without killing anyone, a fact that his peers apparently found dubious.

He hadn’t been avoiding conflict on purpose, exactly. But he also didn’t seek it out, suspecting guiltily that maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it either, more like Regulus than he wanted to admit.

This meeting had been called by Lucius Malfoy, on the Dark Lord’s order. Any one not occupied in a direct, active mission was to attend. So Sirius had Apparated as commanded when his Mark started to burn, dressed in the whole dreary outfit, trying to be ready for anything.

They brought a man out into the circle, bound in magical chains, tear tracks still clear on his cheeks though he was no longer crying. He was steely, silent, staring out at them, square jaw clenched.

Sirius recognized him immediately.

“Caradoc Dearborn. Halfblood. Order,” Lucius said, silky soft, his face obscured by his own skeletal mask. The man stared at Lucius, defiant.

“This will be your last night on earth, Caradoc Dearborn. You must pay for the pureblood life you snuffed out last week. Not an even exchange, as your life is worth so much less, but nevertheless…” Lucius raised his wand almost lazily. 

“Crucio!”

And Caradoc was silent no more. He screamed. He fell to his knees.

Caradoc was a Ravenclaw, Sirius remembered, his head spinning, his heart suddenly galloping. He played Quidditch. He was good at Transfiguration. Once, he had stifled a laugh when Sirius had hexed Severus Snape with a dancing curse that had him doing a twitchy jig in the middle of the Great Hall. Caradoc and Sirius had partnered on a potions project one year, spending peaceful hours together in the library deciphering instructions. 

They had kissed just once in a broom cupboard, more tenderly than Sirius had ever experienced before, and Caradoc had made him swear not to tell anyone. 

He was a good person: friendly, smart, conscientious, gentle. He had a family: a smiling Muggle mum who hugged him at King’s Cross, a little sister who tugged on his sleeve, demanding attention. 

He did not deserve to die.

“Crucio!” This time it was Narcissa who cast it, her lips painted red, like a bloody gash just below her ivory mask. Caradoc thrashed.

Sirius felt sick. He felt stupid. He’d known, of course, what the Death Eaters stood for. He knew all the stories, told boastfully over dinners and glasses of brandy, about tortures and murders. He thought that if he joined, if he just decided that protecting Regulus was more important, he could shut down the part of himself that railed against the Death Eater’s beliefs, that flinched away from their violence. Maybe he would learn. Maybe it would make sense to him one day. It was how he had been raised, after all.

Under the blood moon, he knew he’d made a mistake, had misjudged himself badly. Had taken the wrong turn.

The group went around in a circle, casting crucio on Caradoc again and again. After a time, he stopped screaming and started just twitching, releasing choking gasps like his body had run out of the strength to even produce sound.

Sirius’ mind raced, desperately flailing for a way to save Caradoc, to find a way out, to reverse direction. He came up blank.

When the moment came, Sirius raised his wand. He tried to stop his hand from shaking. He said the word, waved his wand, but he knew already it was no use– you had to mean it and he didn’t at all. The ring of Death Eaters had burst into laughter, jeering at him. He knew he’d pay for it later. 

Once Caradoc was dead, Lucius put an icy cold hand on Sirius’ neck and forced him to his knees. He cast Crucio on him five times. 

“A lesson for you, Black,” he’d said, and then he’d been left alone on the cold forest floor, shaking uncontrollably, sputtering and drooling and barely able to breath, long after all of the other Death Eaters had Apparated away.

That night, having limped back to his windowless room in Grimmauld Place at last, Sirius wept silently and shamefully. He wept for Caradoc Dearborn, who did not deserve to die. He wept for himself, for he was trapped and doomed and wrong, and it was his own fault. He wept for Regulus, because he would pay the price for Sirius’ failure, too.

Eventually, his door creaked open and Regulus slipped in on silent socked feet and slid under the covers next to his brother. He didn’t say anything and they didn’t touch but he stayed all night, a warm and still reminder of why he had made the choices he’d made, no matter how misguided. It was a recreation of the hundreds of times they had done just this for one another throughout their childhood.

It took Sirius a month to decide to do it. It took him another month to find the courage. Eventually, one night, after much struggle, he sent a Patronus to his old headmaster with a short message: I have information. 

He was not a very good spy. He didn’t have the temperament for it. 

The longer he spent with the Death Eaters, the less he was able to hide his disdain, his loathing for them and their ideologies. For a long time, he had tried to play along or to drift under the radar. But once he’d decided he needed to get out, it was like a dam broke in his soul and he couldn’t pretend any longer. He didn’t belong with them. He didn’t believe what they believed. What they were doing was wrong and he had been complicit for too long, and now he was desperate to make it right, to be better.

Dumbledore had asked him to stay as long as he could and pass on information. So he had. 

He sent every scrap of intel he could collect to Dumbledore via heavily encrypted message– encoded by magical and Muggle means. It felt like good work, worthwhile.

But he could tell he was losing the faith of his fellow Death Eaters quickly. He was out of excuses for why he couldn’t cast the Unforgivables, why he somehow always left every mission having cast spells that seemed to only miss. They had known him in school, knew he was a good duelist. His sudden obvious ineptitude was inexplicable.

Worse, he picked fights with his old Slytherin classmates regularly, unable to stop himself from questioning, debating, pushing back on every claim. It was a testament to the tatters of their old friendship that they did not report him to the Dark Lord directly for this, though they grew sick of it and word started getting around to his cousins that he was seditious, a blood traitor. 

That was why when he found himself in the crumbling basement of LeStrange manor on the outskirts of London, dripping his own blood into a cauldron, Sirius thought he’d perhaps reached the end of the line.

Bellatrix watched him with rapt, wild eyes, captivated by the trickle of his blood glittering darkly in the low artificial candlelight.

Sirius did not know what this was about. He had been summoned from his bed and directed to this house, Bellatrix commanding him as soon as he arrived to slice his wrist open. 

“What’s this for?” he asked as his blood continued to dribble.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, cousin,” she had trilled, smirking. “Keep going, we need as much as you can spare.” She raised her wand, slashed, the gash on his wrist wider. 

He let the blood dribble for a long time. It was a thick shiny layer at the bottom of the cauldron. After a time, fearing that he might pass out, he healed the wound and looked at Bellatrix, expectant.

She peered into the cauldron, assessing.

“Alright, bring the other one in,” she said to her husband, who stood at the foot of the stairs leading up. She circled the cauldron, lithe like a cat.

A moment later, Rodolphus dragged in a red-haired man, bound in chains, unconscious.

“Alright, Sirius. Here’s a task even you can’t fuck up: drain him.” 

Sirius watched her, stock still, assessing a predator. 

“Come on, cousin, I’m sure you can cast lacero.” She waved her wand at the unconscious man and levitated him up above the cauldron so he was upside down, arms hanging down limply. “Just there, across his throat. Easy.”

“What’s this for, Bellatrix?” he asked again, wary, biding for time.

“Not your concern,” she hissed.

“Tell me what it’s for and I’ll do it. I am the rightful heir of the Black family, I am a Death Eater, I am a servant of the Dark Lord and I demand to know. Now, Bella,” he said, summoning up every ounce of imperious Black family entitlement that he could. Bellatrix was a sucker for tradition and hierarchy.

“The Dark Lord needs blood, cousin. As much as he can get.” 

“I don’t see your blood in that cauldron,” he said flatly, fist tightening around his wand.

“I GIVE THE DARK LORD MY BLOOD EVERY DAY!” she shrieked, flying off the handle, shoving her scarred wrist into his face. “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION MY LOYALTY? HOW DARE YOU, YOU INCOMPETENT WORM! IMPERIO!” 

The familiar, cold fog of the Imperius curse descended on his mind. His brain emptied. It was blissful, almost a relief. The fear and the panic drained from him.. The tension that he’d been holding in every inch of his body eased and he was nearly limp, a marionette with strings slack and ready for command. His heart slowed, acquiescing to the spell, initiative dribbled away like blood from a wrist.

Cut his throat, a voice said in his mind. Cut his throat and bleed him dry.

Sirius raised his wand. 

Cut his throat now. Do it now. Cut his throat right now.

He clenched his wand, pointed it at the man. A thin nick appeared on the man’s throat and a single drop of blood dripped into the cauldron. 

He wasn’t thinking, not really– the cold fog in his mind wouldn’t allow it. It was instinct, pure and clean and deep-rooted. 

DO IT NOW. CUT HIS THROAT RIGHT NOW.

Before him, Bellatrix was gritting her teeth, putting all her considerable effort into the spell. A vein pulsed on her forehead and sweat beaded at her temples.

NOW, YOU WORM, YOU TRAITOR, YOU RAT, DO IT NOW. DO IT NOW AND THEN CUT YOUR OWN THROAT TOO.

“Lacero!”

With a violent jerk of his arm, a bloody red slash opened across Bellatrix’s face, slicing from cheekbone to cheekbone, right across her nose. She shrieked and lunged for him. The cold fog lifted instantly, his heart rate kicking up again, panic rushing in to fill the blank space that had been occupied by the spell. 

He barreled into her, shoulder down, forcing her back. Rodolphus grabbed his hair, yanking, but Sirius’ wand was up again and he cast flipendo, sending the larger man flying. He shoved Bellatrix, getting by her, and locked his hand around the limp wrist of the man floating above the cauldron. He turned on the spot, thinking frantically of somewhere safe, anywhere safe.

The prices were obscene. This city wasn’t meant for real people; it was meant for millionaires and people like Sirius Black who had inheritances.

Remus slammed his datapad down, giving up. He couldn’t afford a single rental in London. Not one. Not with the Galleons he’d saved, not with his weekly wages from the repair gig, not from anything he could hope to make working for the Order. Not even for one month. Barely even for one week.

Hot rage was still burning in his throat. 

At Hogwarts, he’d been the quiet one. He had been in control, calm, always reeling James and Peter back, speaking reasonably, responsibly. He’d been so nondescript, so unremarkable, such a wallflower that Sirius hadn’t even remembered him, though they had been in plenty of classes together. 

The time with the Pack had changed him.

He dragged his hands over his face, rubbing his eyes. The full moon was tomorrow. His body ached, spine stiffening and cramping already in anticipation of the incoming pain. That was part of it, he knew. He was always on edge right before the moon, quicker to anger. 

It was worse now than it had been, if only because he’d lost the ability to temper himself. With the Pack, he’d had to be less inhibited, less civilized just to fit in. It was a hard habit to shake.

But he also knew his anger was justified. He had sacrificed so much. He had suffered, alone and alienated and afraid, for two years. And now, of course, people were whispering that he was a traitor. Feeding information to the enemy. Siding with his kind. Lumped in with Sirius Black, former Death Eater.

Once again, what he was defined who he was. Werewolf first, wizard second. 

This, he thought bitterly, was why the Order would never win over any werewolves. At least Voldemort paid lip service to a different world for dark creatures. It was a lie, Remus knew, but it was a sweet one. The people in the Order didn’t even pretend to care. In their eyes, they were correct in their assessment of werewolves and there would be no changing their minds. They were dark creatures and therefore evil. 

A few people might give him the benefit of the doubt, but that was all it ever was– an exception to the rule. As long as he stayed quiet and gentle and pliant, as long as he performed the role of one of the good ones, he could stay in civilized wizard society.  As long as he registered with the Ministry, opened himself to scrutiny, to judgement, to testing and containment. As long as he submitted, belly up, he could hang around the edges, getting scraps, scraping by.

He was huddled in a narrow alley between two high-rises, spell cast to keep the rain off, duffel slung over his shoulder. A gaggle of Muggles deeper in the alley were eyeballing him threateningly, muttering to each other. Remus decided not to risk an altercation and got moving.

He wandered for a time, thinking he might find a quiet bench to sleep on, but eventually the persistent ache in his body and the steadily increasing drizzle broke his resolve. He veered into a motel.

It was a depressing place. The lights above were outdated fluorescents which emitted a piercing whine and the floor was dirty linoleum. A yellow neon sign blinked in the window: “CHRONO-LODGE, ROOMS AVAILABLE, 250 GALLEONS PER NIGHT”. 

There was no one in the silent lobby. He booked his room at the kiosk screen, pressing hard to get the controls to respond. It took longer than he could bear, his patience running thin as the machine lagged and malfunctioned. He gave it a thump, tried again, nearly pulled out his wand to confound the thing and try to get a free room. Only the glowing red light of a camera in the kiosk screen stopped him.

Finally, nerves frayed, he got to his room. 

Fuck Moody, he thought, throwing his bag to the ground. Fuck the Order and all the whispering gossips, waiting to stab me in the back. Fuck James and his ceaseless stupid optimism. Fuck Sirius Black and his fancy fucking penthouse and his perfect fucking face.

Remus longed to collapse on the thin, dingy mattress and forget the day. But he’d had an idea earlier and he did not want to forget it, so he pulled out his Muggle tech tools and his bag of loose parts– wires, bits of chrome, power coils, a thin sliver of biomaterial casing, two precious neural interface arrays. He had scrapped all of it from various jobs, slipping odds and ends into his pockets, daydreaming about what he might do with them.

He took out his wand and started working.

Chapter Text

Two nights later, when Remus had managed to drag himself back to Moody’s office door, he knew he looked worse for wear.

After the motel, he’d Apparated to the basement in Essex for the full moon and spent the night tearing himself to shreds. He’d awoken the next morning bloodied, bruised, broken-boned, and queasy. It had been one of the worst moons in a while.

He’d just barely had the strength to send James a Patronus– it took about four tries to summon it– asking for help.

Working furiously over Remus’ ravaged body, wand aloft in one hand and healing potion in the other, James mumbled to himself.

“Need to figure out the bloody Animagus. You’re going to die if this keeps happening, Moons. Your body can’t take it; you won’t make it to fifty at this rate. Eighth time you’ve broken this same arm, I don’t even know if any of the original bone is still there. And this bite on your leg– ugh, Merlin, I can see the muscle.” He’d turned away, gagging.

Later, more or less patched up, they had argued again: about the Animagus, about Sirius Black, about trust and naivete and secrets. But as always, after a while, their energy for the debate sputtered out and by the time they were on James’ couch, Remus recovering before his appointment at Moody’s, they were back to laughing.

That night, he left their flat to anxious hugs and well-wishes. Lily pressed a bag of potions into his arms and James rambled off a string of spells he thought might be particularly useful. Even Lily’s mother, pale and sick though she was herself, pressed a kiss to his cheek.

At the door, James made one last pitch to join the mission too.

“If Moody wanted you to come, he would have assigned you,” Remus said again, for the third time. “I’ll be fine. I’ll have your new best friend Sirius Black with me, won’t I?”

“Jealousy is unbecoming on you, Moons,” James said primly, smiling. 

And with that, Remus set out on foot, as he feared another Apparition would lead to him emptying the contents of his stomach on a London street and passing out.

Eventually, in Moody’s office, he sat impatiently for 45 minutes before Sirius Black deigned to show up. Moody had stepped out, leaving him alone amongst the blinking lights and scrolling comms screens.

Sirius stumbled in, face bright with a sheen of sweat. He was not dressed for war. He was dressed for the club.

His eyes rimmed with smudged black liner and pupils blown out wide, he gave Remus a lazy grin as he sloped in.

“Merlin, are you high?” Remus asked sharply, standing up. “We’re supposed to be leaving for a bloody mission right now!”

“Naw.” He waved an airy hand, dismissive. “Moody said we were to go to camp tonight and head to the coordinates in the morning. He messaged earlier; you didn’t see?”

“I saw, but camp is still the mission. What if we get jumped? What will you do, puke on the Death Eaters?”

“We’ll be Apparating, so I’d wager you’ll be the one puking.”

Moody returned at that point, electric blue eye rolling between the two men. He scowled at Sirius, clearly disapproving, but said nothing. Sirius threw himself into one of the metal chairs before the desk, stretching his legs out languidly, and Remus sat back down, too, grim.

“Well, lads, it’s as I suspected. Bellatrix and Greyback are out hunting. For what–” both of his eyes flicked to Sirius for a moment, “--we can only guess. But intel suggests they are travelling toward the Abbott estate. We’ll be evacuating Elysia and Gideon tomorrow afternoon as quietly as we can. Hopefully the Death Eaters will think they’re still there and come straight to you.” 

He handed a datapad over to Remus, who took it and looked at the map. 

The Abbott estate was apparently north, by the sea, near Scarborough. The map also included a blinking green light, not far from the estate, marked “camp”.

“The camp is old but the spells should hold. You’ll Apparate to just outside and then this–” he handed over a small metal chip, alert light blinking yellow, “--will open the door only in the presence of your Patronus. You’ll be safe enough for the night. Swing by the booth on your way out; she’ll have supplies for you. I’ll send over the intel packet shortly. Keep in touch.”

And they were dismissed.

Remus wanted to ask more questions, not just about the mission but about the possible leak, the rumors, what people had been saying about him. But Moody had spun his chair around, effectively ending the conversation.

Sirius did not speak to him on their way to Lily’s booth. Lily herself was not there; another witch was behind the window.

They logged the job– 3,000 Galleons each if they succeeded– and collected a vinyl backpack of supplies. Sirius was stiff, professional, apparently rapidly sobering up.

Winding back through the hallways, they emerged in the massive warehouse space, music thumping through the electric haze. The room was packed with pulsing bodies clad in reflective leather, augmented limbs and glowing tattoos moving in rhythm to the relentless bass, faces half-hidden behind visors and neon masks. 

Weaving their way expertly through the crowd, Sirius was suddenly waylaid by a blonde Muggle woman grabbing his arm. Her lined eyes were also smudged and a cybernetic implant twinkled dully in the center of her breastbone, visible through her strappy silver shirt.

“Leaving already?” she asked, nearly shouting to be heard. She was sheened with sweat too, her pupils huge, her smile a little dopey.

Gently extracting his arm from her long-nailed grip, he said, “Don’t worry, love, I’m sure I’ll catch you again soon enough.”

She stepped closer, pressing into him, tilting her face to his. Her eyelids drooped and her smile became suggestive. She pressed a hand to Sirius’ chest. 

Remus looked away but it didn’t stop him from overhearing, close as they were all standing to each other in the press of bodies.

“Let me come to your place tonight, baby– we’ll have fun, like last time,” she purred. She lifted up on her toes and nipped at Sirius’ neck, nuzzling. Remus tried to get away but he was trapped on all sides.

Blessedly, Sirius grabbed both of her wrists and firmly pushed her away.

“Busy tonight, but I’m sure I’ll be seeing you…” 

And with that noncommittal promise, he dropped her hands and instead seized Remus by the wrist, pulling him through the crowd with the confidence of someone well-versed in navigating drunken, pulsing bacchanals. Remus could feel the woman’s eyes on his back as they disappeared amongst the people.

Finally, outside in the chill night air, Sirius said, “Give me a sec, going to change,” and slipped into the darkness of an alley. 

When he re-emerged, he was ready for battle. Back in his leather bodysuit, his face had been scrubbed clean of eye makeup and his pupils were back to normal, drugs and booze probably eliminated from his system with a spell. His gun sat holstered on his hip and he was just putting his wand away, chrome fingertips glinting yellowly under the halogen street lights.

“So who was that? Girlfriend of yours?” Remus asked as Sirius approached. He meant it as a joke, teasing, but it came out all wrong– bitter, mean.

“No,” Sirius said flatly. They started down the street, still dodging drunken weekend crowds.

Remus tried again, going for light, trying to broach Sirius’ very obvious defenses. “Bet the Death Eaters would lose it over that: their most ancient pureblooded heir consorting with a Muggle bird.”

“Will you fucking drop it?” Sirius whipped around at him, finger pointed in Remus’ face. “I get it; we are not friends. Let’s just get this mission over with, alright?”

“I’m sorry.” 

The apology dropped out of Remus’ mouth before he had even thought it through. 

He was, of course, a little sorry. He didn’t actually like confrontation. He had never been the type to bully and antagonize. He didn’t understand why Sirius Black brought this impulse out in him, why he kept pushing his buttons. It was a compulsion that he’d promised himself he would put a stop to, but here he was, doing it again.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “That was meant to be a joke. And I’m sorry about the other night too. I didn’t mean to insinuate you were still with the Death Eaters. I know you’ve been doing good work for the Order for a long time now– great work. I haven’t been fair to you.”

Sirius looked dumbstruck for a moment. He opened his mouth but said nothing. Remus thought he looked like he might apologize too. The words were forming in his eyes, just barely on the tip of his tongue.

But then he said instead, “Let’s just focus on the mission. Maybe if we kill these two bastards, people will quit insinuating things about either of us.”

They continued walking until they got clear of the streaming tangles of partying Muggles and then stopped, ducking into an alley. 

“Does it help with your nausea if you do the Apparition? Or do you want me to do it?” Sirius said this gently and Remus took it for what it was: an olive branch, a kindness.

“No, it doesn’t matter. You go ahead.”

Sirius put his hand just barely on Remus’ shoulder, a whisper of a touch, and they vanished.

They appeared on a wind-whipped cliff side, salt air cold and clean and so very different from the city-smell– ozone, garbage, smoke, stale alcohol– of London.

Promptly, Remus bent over and wretched.

“Wonder if there’s a spell or a potion you could take for that. Kind of inconvenient to yak every time you Apparate.”

“No, I’m fine, I’m just— not used to it. Haven’t Apparated much lately…it’s getting better though. I’m fine.” Remus straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand.

The moon, still full and fat but waning now, lit up the beach below and made the sky a dark grey, too bright for stars. The ocean waves roared distantly. On the horizon Sirius could see hundreds of blinking beacons in various colors– Muggle ships, no doubt, carrying their cargo of electronics, home furnishings, and other assorted nonsense to who knew where.

Inland, clustered groups of city lights, small in comparison to the metropolises Sirius was used to, glowed neon bright. 

The coast was for tourists. Resort towns littered the shore. They were quaint escapes from the mechanical clicks and groans of proper city life; places where the rich went to recuperate and get away from it all and enjoy the simple life. The lodgings of course, both wizard and Muggle, were still equipped with the finest tech and the most elaborate enchantments to ensure absolute luxury– not a single expense spared, not a need unmet. 

Sirius had visited the area with his family once, staying at a stuffy wizarding hotel not far from this quiet cliffside called Kelpie’s Keep. It was not a happy memory.

Scowling at the unwelcome reminder of Walburga Black dressed in a positively funereal bathing suit while magically yanking him out of the ocean by his hair, Sirius clicked his wrist console awake and began to look for the camp on the map.

Apparently done puking, Remus walked away with the blinking yellow chip out in one hand, his bulky, outdated datapad in the other, map also pulled up. 

“This way, I think!” he called from a little ways along, further from the cliff edge. Sirius followed, adjusting the heavy pack over his shoulder.

“Door should be right here,” Remus said, gesturing at a barren, wind-whipped, scraggly tree. Sirius’ wrist console was letting out a soft, insistent beep, agreeing with Remus.

Both men pulled out their wands. 

Sirius’ gut twisted as he tried to wrestle back the memories that had been stirred up: 

His father slapping Regulus across the face when he had started to cry from the pain of a bright red sunburn

His mother hissing hatefully about a Muggle family on the beach

His own small bloodied hands, knuckles bruised and broken, from the violent crack of a spell when they had caught him collecting seashells with a half-blood boy he’d befriended.

For a few agonized attempts, the Patronuses would not materialize. Not his; not Remus’. He felt a lurch of sympathy and gratitude to find that he was not the only one who sometimes struggled with this. Remus looked focused, grimly trying again and again.

After three or four tries, a thin silver light emitted from Remus’ wand and slowly coalesced into what was unmistakably a werewolf. Sirius had read enough about them– entirely too much, perhaps– in the last few days to know it immediately. The slightly too-long forelimbs, the tufted tail, and the shorter snout all gave it away as a dark creature rather than a regular wolf. It made a lazy loop around them then sat next to Remus, patiently awaiting command. 

“Ah, I see it,” Remus said, staring at an empty space next to the tree.

Inwardly, Sirius groaned. He’d hoped only one of them would have to get the Patronus working to reveal the door to them both but evidently that was not the case. 

Gritting his teeth, he tried again. Knowing that nothing would drown out the memories of Kelpie’s Keep and all that went with it, he tried a different tack.

He let his mind sift through the memories, looking for anything good, anything that didn’t immediately blacken his spirits.

Regulus, just five years old, still baby-chubby and smiling, his toes wiggling in the sand. 

Sirius, fingers knitted together and boosting his brother up into a tree not too different than the one right in front of them. Climbing up behind him, lost in the soft green canopy, high-summer sun filtering through and warming their faces which were so similar, almost twins. 

Mother and father somewhere else; distant, forgotten for a moment.

At last, agonizingly, the Patronus formed. It wavered and shimmered, like it might go at any moment. 

As the great dog made its own quivering loop around them and then settled on its haunches next to the wolf, it was not lost on Sirius how alike the two ghostly shapes were. Canines, nearly the same size. One tail indolently wagging, one wrapped elegantly around wolfish hindpaws.

Remus apparently clocked this, too, as a slightly wry smile played across his face.

As soon as Sirius spotted the door by the tree, his Patronus blinked out, too weak to last. Shortly after, Remus dismissed his werewolf, too.

The door was a shabby, weatherworn thing—wooden, battered, and standing upright with no frame or structure around it. It looked like a door to nowhere, stranded on the cliffside, lonely and useless.

But inside, the room was small and simple but undeniably cozy. It felt like a relic from another era, perhaps set up decades ago and then forgotten. Everything was made of wood—no chrome, no metal–save for a dented tin kettle hanging from a hook above the fireplace. There were no screens, no blinking lights, no beeping sounds. Even the sound of the ocean was hushed, as though they were underground in some small animal’s hideyhole.

Sirius was surprised to find that he liked it. He felt instantly calm, like he’d been swaddled.

“I claim top bunk!” he said, tossing his backpack onto it and scrambling up the ladder. 

Remus let out a snort at this and put his own duffel on the bottom bunk, looking around.

“This place must be a hundred years old, at least. They don’t make furniture like this anymore. And look, the fireplace is real.” He walked over and waved his wand, igniting the pyramid of logs stacked neatly in the fireplace, coaxing it into a merry blaze.

Sirius peered down at Remus from the relative shadows of the top bunk. He looked tired. 

Remus was putting the kettle on, opening cupboards and pulling out tin cups, shuffling around the small space like he’d spent his life around wood and paper and dirt floors and non-electric kettles. He wore the same clothes he’d worn on their first mission: clean black vest made of some thick synthetic material, black cargo pants with far too many pockets, standard-issue gun holster, basic wand strap. 

Even in the room’s dim light, Sirius could make out the kiss of a bruise along his jaw. Some of the scars on his bare arms looked recent—still pink rather than faded silver. He had dark circles under his eyes, deep and purplish, and he moved with a careful sort of stiffness, as though everything ached.

Of course. The full moon had been just the night before. 

Sirius rolled over, turning away from Remus.

The bed was made up with a worn quilt like the one James had supplied at the medical facility, soft and multi-colored and a little musty. Sirius was tired too. He thought about burying himself under the blankets and sleeping until the afternoon.

He had dispelled the effects of the pills he’d taken and the vodka he’d drank back in London, but that had left him with a vague hangover. 

Of course, he knew that going to the club before his appointment with Moody had been a bad idea. Not a good look, exactly, showing up for a big mission in a pleather vest covered in straps and wearing makeup, hopped up on drugs and woozy from too many shots. He knew he wasn’t making good impressions.

Whatever, he thought, refusing to inspect why, exactly, he had spent all of Friday and most of Saturday obliterating his mind with sweet chemical release. We’re here now and everything is fine. No harm done.

Still, Sirius felt acutely guilty for his crass stumbling about over the last two days. He should have been preparing for this mission, strategizing. If Remus hadn’t been turning into a werewolf and ripping himself to shreds, he certainly would have been strategizing, mind sharp on the important business of fighting evil, not feeling sorry for himself and getting lost in the sweaty bodies of random Muggles.

Wrangling down his own exhaustion, reasoning that if Remus could still be bustling about then he should be too, Sirius jumped down from the bunk and settled himself on the creaky wooden chair at the small table before the fireplace. He pulled out his datapad and started reading the intel Moody had sent over.

Snape, of course, had been the one to provide the lead about Bellatrix and Grayback heading to Abbott Estate. He did not provide specifics on the purpose of the trip. The datafile included a map of the manorhouse, which was a sprawling three story affair. 

The Abbotts were, of course, an old pureblood family. They had owned the Estate for centuries. Sirius didn’t need to see the building to imagine it; he had spent many family occasions in similar places. In his experience, such ancient family homes were stuffy and foreboding, all formal dining rooms and creepy portraits blinking from dark corners and cursed-looking weaponry hanging from walls.

The Abbotts, however, were nothing like the Blacks in that they were not a bunch of inbred blood supremacists. 

A generation or two ago, Sirius’ mother might have been thrilled to marry him off to some Abbott girl, but now the family had reproduced with a few too many halfbloods and muggleborns and so, in the parlance of Death Eaters and ancient pureblood families, they were traitors. 

Sirius had known Alma Abbott, Hufflepuff, at school; she was an absolutely crack gobstone player and had scammed him out of more Galleons than he cared to admit.

The residents of this estate, Elysia and Patrick, must be Alma’s great-grandparents. Flipping back through his knowledge of wizarding bloodlines– information that was ingrained in his memory like a brand–he knew they must be some of the last pureblooded Abbotts still alive.

Sirius had a guess as to what Bellatrix and Greyback wanted at this particular house.

Setting two steaming cups of tea in tin cups on the table, Remus sat down opposite Sirius.

Like he’d read his mind, Remus asked, “So I assume you know what Bellatrix and Greyback want with the Abbotts?”

He pressed his lips together, thinking about how much to reveal, how much to speculate.

“I have an idea. Bellatrix has been working on some kind of spell or potion. I’m not actually entirely sure what it does. Nothing good, you can bet. It requires pure blood– a lot of it. Cauldrons-full. I think they’re trying to get some from each of the remaining pureblood families. They have mine, obviously. Or at least some of it. Right before I left, they tried to get the Prewetts. That business with Arthur Weasley a few months back? I think that was about the blood thing too. The Abbotts are old pureblood, or at least these two old codgers who live at the Estate are.”

“Moody and Dumbledore know?”

Sirius raised an eyebrow. “Of course they know. I’ve told them everything.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Remus said again, looking down. 

“It’s fine. Anyway, look.” He turned his datapad to Remus, showing him the map of the house. “Moody said they’d get the Abbotts out tomorrow afternoon. Based on the timelines from Snape, Bellatrix and Greyback probably won’t be here until tomorrow night. That gives us ages to work with. We could set traps, actually plan an ambush.”

For a long while, Remus studied the map and flipped through the other documents from Moody. Sirius sipped his tea in silence, watching him work. A narrow wrinkle of consternation had appeared between his eyes. 

“There’s tunnels that lead out of the basement of the Estate,” Remus said, zooming in on the screen.

“Oh, sure. That makes sense. These old pureblood families are all a bunch of paranoiacs. I’m sure the whole place is spelled up to its tits: no Apparating within the bounds, defensive charms, cursed doors, what have you. Of course they’d want some physical options for escape, too, in case all their other backups failed. Hmmm…” He peered at the map, pointed at one tunnel.

“Looks like this one leads towards North Bay Beach.”

“Have you been out here before?”

Sirius again hesitated, images of his father seizing a toddling Regulus by the throat flicking through his mind.

“Once, for a… family vacation.”

Remus said nothing to this, apparently wary of poking any sore spots. Instead, he retrieved his lumpy old duffel bag from the bottom bunk and pulled out a carefully folded tea rag, placing it on the table before Sirius.

“I, uh… made this for you,” he said, unfolding the rag clumsily, face going a little red.

Nestled in the rag were two shiny silver fingertips. 

Sirius could sense their magic right away. He was sensitive to such things; another Black family legacy. His regular cybernetic tips were purely Muggle technology and he loved them for how much his mother would hate them. They were utilitarian, like a Swiss Army knife always at hand. 

But these tips were something else. 

He peered close at them, fascinated.

They were delicately crafted and far less bulky than his store-bought ones, which never quite fit his slender fingers and instead bulged awkwardly. Where fingerprints would normally be there were tiny, almost imperceptible runes—etched so finely they bordered on artwork. 

“Here, I can show you what they do.” Remus had pulled tweezers out of his bag and deftly plucked up one tip. Sirius, a little breathless, unscrewed the fingertip from the index finger of his left hand and placed it on the tea rag. Beside Remus’ creation, it looked garish and malformed, inexpertly crafted, though Sirius knew it had been made with the most high-precision Muggle machinery.

Carefully, looking through his lashes at Sirius’ fingers, Remus placed the fingertip on the port on his index finger and screwed it in place. 

Right away, Sirius could feel its power. It connected cybernetically to his nervous system with a low buzz of energy. He flexed his fingers, feeling the lightness of it, almost like he wasn’t wearing an implant at all. The magic in them was subtle, gentle.

“There’s three passive spells in there that you can release when you snap,” Remus said, demonstrating with his own fingers lightly. “You can put any in there, I think, but I just started you off with stupefy, confringo, and reducto. The other one,” he gestured at the other tip he’d made, glinting on the tea rag, “Is more defensive: protego, impedimenta, accio. Single use, but I think they should work in the pulse since they’re passive– they’re basically already cast in there but just held, like a plasma bolt, ready to be fired.”

Sirius stared at his fingertip. Even the metal of it seemed special somehow, not the shiny chrome of most implants or the garish neon of some of the tackier brands but brushed steel, understated and noble. Experimenting, he could almost feel each of the spells trapped in the fingertip, strings ready to be plucked. The magical vibration of them was just slightly foreign to him. It was magic that was not his own, attached to his body, to his nervous system. 

“Here, maybe put the other one on to practice with so you don’t blow this whole place up.” 

Remus again carefully picked up the other fingertip from the rag, waited for Sirius to remove the old one on his right index finger and then screwed the delicate piece of machinery into place. 

Not wanting to wait another second, itching with eagerness, Sirius snapped his right hand, plucking the little thread in his mind that felt like accio.

Instantly, his plasma gun flew to his hand from across the room. 

“I made it do the gun, but you could pick anything,” Remus said, watching Sirius intently. “I was speculating we could even have it summon the anti-magic pulse; you could disarm them almost instantly that way.”

“Remus, this is… how did you do this?” Sirius felt a little lightheaded.

“Well, it took a few steps,” Remus started, and he had the tone he’d had when explaining how the electro-volts worked: patient, clear, teacher speaking to pupil. 

“I’d had this idea for a while, but didn’t know how to get the magic to hold in something so small. When we talked that night, you’d mentioned something about how to make shrinking spells stronger, to get things to be microscopic. That finally did it. I could shrink down a neural array and an overcharge capacitor to fit in the implant, and with those enchanted to manage magic rather than plasma, well…” He waved a hand at Sirius’ finger, which Sirius was still holding up with great care, like it was a bomb. “I’m still not sure if it’ll work in the pulse. Theoretically it will, based on everything we know, but–” he shrugged, “Figured you could test it.”

“Ok, second question. Why did you do this?”

“Why? It’s a weapon. We’re in a war.”

“You should have brought these to the Longbottoms. Something like this could turn the tide for us. Forget proving yourself or getting people off your back by killing Greyback, this will make you a bloody hero of the Order. If these things work in the pulse, the Death Eaters don’t stand a chance! Why just give them to me and come out here to get yourself killed on some insane mission?”

Rankled, suddenly tense, Remus scoffed. “I’m here to kill Greyback. That’s all that matters. Anyway, they’ll be useful to you. We’ll test them and I’ll bring the idea to the Longbottoms once we’re back.”

Finally, Sirius lowered his hands into his lap, still feeling the strange buzz of Remus’ magic in his fingertips.

“Well, they’re beautiful, Remus. Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

At this, Remus turned red again and busied himself with putting away the tea rag and his tweezers, nudging Sirius’ old discarded fingertips toward him.

Later, lying in their bunks, one above the other, Sirius stared at his fingers in the dark. The dying firelight made the brushed steel glow dull red, tiny etched runes glinting like stars.

Haltingly, into the darkness of the room, not knowing if he would receive a reply, Sirius asked, “Will you show me how to put the magic in them tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Remus replied. “You can do it yourself so it’ll be your own magic instead of mine.”

“No, no…” Sirius murmured, almost without thinking, still mesmerized by his own hand—by the hum of unfamiliar magic, so intimate, pulsing at his fingertips. “It should be yours. I want it to be yours.”

To that, Remus said nothing.

Chapter Text

They drank coffee the next morning, brewed the old-fashioned way with the grounds Remus had brought himself and water he’d boiled manually over the fireplace in the dented tin kettle. The ritual of it soothed him; it reminded him of his mother. 

Sirius kept looking at his own fingertips with a look of reverence that made Remus feel embarrassed. He knew it was fine work, perhaps some of his best. If they could make it work in the pulse and create more such implants, it would make a big difference in the war. He knew he should feel flattered that Sirius was so impressed. Mostly, though, he felt exposed, like he’d revealed his hand.

After the coffee and after showers in the tiny, old-fashioned bathroom’s wood basin and after eating two nutribars each, they got down to business.

First, Remus reloaded Sirius’ accio into his finger, demonstrating how he could do it himself. He felt a fresh wave of embarrassment when Sirius insisted that he wanted Remus to do it—“They should match!” he said now. But all Remus could think about was the strange, heated way Sirius had said “I want it to be yours” the night before. It had been so unexpected he almost wondered if he’d imagined it.

Then, they pulled out the map of Abbott Manor and began marking it up: main entries, traps they could set, blind spots, advantage points. 

Sirius took out all their supplies– his own, Remus’, the bag from the log booth– and sorted through them meticulously, rearranging, categorizing, repacking. He spelled both their bags to hold more and be lighter, working quickly and efficiently.

Remus, meanwhile, took out his Muggle tools and his wand and upgraded Sirius’ gun. He just did the basics: expanded clip, stabilizer, a minute increase to fire rate. He didn’t want to go too crazy since Sirius wouldn’t have much time to practice with it. Plus, he’d used most of his scrap on the fingertips. 

At noon, Sirius’ arm console dinged with a message from Moody: the Abbotts had been evacuated. The estate was empty. 

They scarfed another quick meal, some synthetic pouch of freeze-dried slop from the Order supplies, and left the camp, heading on foot towards the Abbott Estate. Sirius had said there would be an anti-Apparition field around the place but couldn’t guess how wide, so they did not want to risk a splinch by going in blind. 

Remus was grateful for the walk. His mind was clearing in the way it often did before a fight. 

With the wolves, in the early months, he’d had to prove himself again and again. They were a pack and hierarchy was important. They did not suffer the weak; they ate them alive.

At first, when fights would break out, he’d stay to the edges, horrified by the brutality of it. 

Maybe wizards were right. Maybe werewolves were all savages: unredeemable, unfit for civilized life. 

But over the months, he came to see something else in these intermittent explosions of violence. They were a pressure release. They were training. They were play. 

They were also not without their casualties, but more often than not, if someone was injured the best healers among them would use their strange magic to seal up wounds so cleanly it was like they had never happened. Only a few times had someone actually died.

Remus had not grown up with violence, aside from the kind he inflicted on himself. His parents had been gentle, pacifists to the end. His first interactions with violence outside of the full moon were at Hogwarts. Even the jocular play-fighting that James liked to engage in, tackling Peter or leveling a firm punch at Remus’ arm, was new to him. 

So it was a surprise to Remus, the first time he decided to fight for his place in the Pack and join into the fray of one of their many scraps, that he thrilled to it. 

He had dueled at Hogwarts and had been good at it. He was precise and controlled and meticulous about following the rules of engagement. He’d even won an award.

This was nothing like that. 

They did not fight with magic. They did not fight with rules. 

Claws and teeth and fists. Snarling and wrangling. Men, women, young, old; it did not matter. 

Remus had been pinned to the ground, a much larger werewolf’s knee pressing into his chest, crushing him. He thrashed, furious rage making him stupid. His breaths came short. The world began to close in, and for a moment, he thought he might pass out.

His mind snapped into focus. It cleared and sharpened, became a diamond ready to cut through stone.

Precision, control.

He dragged in one thin, pained breath and planted his feet flat on the ground, knees bent. One hand gripped the man’s elbow; the other locked onto his hip. With everything he had left, Remus shoved, braced, and then, with an explosive twist, bucked his hips upward. The larger man was thrown off, eyes wide in shock as he hit the ground.

Remus rolled, scrambling to his feet, panting. Before the man could fully recover, Remus charged him, shoulder down, and tackled him to the ground. They tumbled, wrangling, until Remus’ clawed hand raked across the man’s cheek, drawing blood. 

After that, he had made better headway. The werewolves started to accept him, to include him. He had found companionship there; he had found understanding and acceptance for parts of himself he had only ever been ashamed of.

It was hard and lonely. It was violent and risky and isolating. It was still, ultimately, a failed mission.

But with the Pack, he had learned something critical about himself that he would never forget: he was hard to kill.

The Abbott Estate was nowhere near as dreary and sepulchral as Grimmauld, but it was still a dusty old rambling place, too full of artifacts and furniture and heirlooms. Every inch of the main hall’s walls were filled with portraits, though now the frames were empty, as if their residents had evacuated along with the Abbotts. Elaborate wooden furniture lined the walls seemingly at random: a velvet settee in one corner, a stack of dining chairs in another, a hulking cabinet topped with intricately carved gargoyles leering from behind a collection of hat racks.

Sirius and Remus got to work right away.

Outside, Sirius layered a Caterwauling Charm with a Homenum Revelio around the perimeter of the Estate. Instead of respectively emitting the customary shriek upon detecting an intruder and simply making that intruder glow, this spell would instead ding on his wrist console and show the exact people and their exact locations on the map as soon as the perimeter was crossed.

Remus, datapad map open in hand, created a series of illusory spells and transfigurations: hallways that led in circles, doors to no where.

Wands waving in tandem, they opened a square hole in the ground in the dining room and covered it with another illusion. At the bottom of the pit, Sirius drew the holding runes Remus had put in the cybernetic fingertips and cast some hybrid invention of passive magic: stupefy and silencio layered together, good enough to keep even the most powerful witch or wizard frozen. He wasn’t sure it would work, he explained, but theoretically the runes should hold the already-cast spells when activated, even in the pulse.

Pleased to find that the Abbott’s home was more Muggle-friendly than one might expect a pureblood Estate to be, Remus dug into the state-of-the-art high tech security system. Cameras equipped with motion sensors in the corners of the main rooms were recording constantly. Carefully, he pulled one of these down and got to work on it, scattered electro-volt parts on the table before him as he tinkered. He only had enough materials for one, so it would have to do.

Later, as the sun set outside the manor, turning the sea orange, they sat tense and silent and ready at the top of the grand staircase, facing the front door. The fading light sliced through the tall windows, shadows playing across the shiny wooden floor. 

Sirius stared at his wrist console. He stared at the door. He tried not to stare at Remus, but caught himself occasionally eyeing the other man. His face was a neutral and still mask like he had gone into a meditation. Unlike Sirius, his eyes did not flick about, searching and antsy and energized. His leg did not twitch and he hadn’t picked up his datapad even once since he had carefully stored it away in his satchel. His breathing was slow, steady. If it weren’t for his amber eyes, wide open and faintly shiny in the dimness, Sirius might have thought he was asleep.

So when Sirius finally asked, unable to contain himself any longer, “Do you still feel tired from it? The full moon?” He was surprised to get an answer right away.

“Not tired exactly. Some of my magic gets a little weird around it, before and after. And I’m sore, I guess, but not anything a Pep-Up potion and some adrenaline can’t fix,” he said. He’d swigged two of the potions earlier in rapid succession. 

“The Patronus last night,” he continued after a moment. “That one is always hard, after. Other things too–most transfiguration, Apparating, anything that requires a lot of finesse.” 

He paused, thoughtful. “The werewolves claim there’s wizard magic and there’s wolf magic. I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere. But it’s true that some things come easier and some things come harder around the moon.”

“What comes easier?” Sirius asked. 

Sirius also didn’t remember anything about different types of magic in all that he’d read about werewolves, but that wasn’t necessarily surprising. Even the most rigorous institutions seemed to have scarcely studied the creatures. He vaguely remembered a Defense Against the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts where the werewolf chapter had focused almost entirely on how to kill them, which, considering that a werewolf must have been taking that exact curriculum, struck him as particularly macabre.

“Fighting,” Remus answered simply. 

“Well, good timing then, I guess.”

“Other things too. Spells related to nature, usually. If I’d only had to do Herbology around the full moon, I’d have gotten an Outstanding. Any kind of manipulating elements: fire, water, whatever. My senses get heightened too– seeing in the dark, hearing things, smelling things.”

“You can see in the dark? That’s wicked. How many fingers am I holding up?” He held up one metal-tipped finger right in front of Remus’ face. Remus laughed and gave him a friendly shove. 

Sirius did not want him to stop talking. He worried that if he pressed too hard or asked too many questions, the other man would retreat.

So, gently, like he was leading a fractious animal, Sirius said, “Sounds like there are some benefits to it. I wonder if they get stronger with age.”

Remus’ eyes snapped to him, immediately wary. 

“Most werewolves don’t live that long. I’m sure you know that. You’ve been talking to James.”

Caught out, Sirius leaned back on his hands and let his head fall back, pale white throat exposed.

“I just think his Animagus idea is a pretty good one.”

“Drop it, Black. I’m serious.”

“No, I’m Sirius.”

Remus shoved him again and Sirius laughed, toppling to the side.

“You’re being stupid. Is this how you take out your pre-fight stress? It’s terrible.”

Sirius shrugged.

Darkness had fallen completely and still they received no message, no alarm, no sign of any Death Eaters. They waited, mostly silent now. Sirius clenched and unclenched his fingers. 

Eventually, Remus’ head cocked up like he’d heard something a spare moment before Sirius’ wrist console emitted a soft ding.

They were on their feet immediately. Remus broke in one direction and Sirius in the other, calling out, “They’re coming from the east. Heading for the front door. Three of them: Bellatrix, Greyback, and–” 

He froze like he’d been cursed.

After a second, from across the room: “Who, Sirius? Who else is with them?”

“My brother. Regulus, my brother.”

The plan had been to surround them: Sirius to the right wing and up, taking out anti-magic pulses from on high, Remus to the left wing and down, to keep them corralled in the main entry hall. There, it would be like practice shooting in a holo-deck. Everything else was back up plan: B through D. 

Sirius ducked into the hall leading to the staircase but he didn’t go up, not yet. On his wrist console, he started to type a message to Regulus but he knew it was no use. Death Eaters didn’t carry Muggle tech. And his Patronus– if he could even summon one, which was doubtful– would give him away immediately. 

He messaged Remus instead: My brother is with them. Don’t kill him.

He could only hope Remus would drag out his datapad and read it before things got too dire. 

Going to buy him a bloody wrist console after this, he thought bitterly as he ran up the stairs.

None of Moody’s intel had suggested Bellatrix and Greyback were with anyone else. They hadn’t prepared for it, though now Sirius couldn’t think why. Of course they would have a third person. Of course it would be Regulus.

It didn’t change anything. The plan was the same, more or less. Kill Bellatrix, kill Greyback, but now capture Regulus. He flexed his fingers, impatiently watching the three green dots on the screen approaching the front door. 

From his perch on the third floor he could see the front door clearly but remained hidden in shadow. Silently, he cast an invisibility charm on himself and clicked on the protego maxima on his wrist console.

The lock on the great wooden front door clicked, barely audible. It cracked open. 

Bellatrix was the first one through. Her wand was raised. She wore a silver patch over one eye and it glinted in the moonlight filtering through the high windows. After her, Greyback. Still huge, still ragged; all bloody claws and teeth. 

Finally, Regulus, carefully clicking the door closed behind him. 

Before they could cast a Homenum Revelio, a spell shot out from the darkness and hit Bellatrix square in the chest. She went down, stupefied. 

An anti-magic pulse went soaring through the air, landed, detonated. 

The fog of it filled the room impossibly quickly. It was a cold, moist hand, choking him.

Greyback had taken off, leaving Bellatrix to scramble to her feet, freed of the spell, with only Regulus’ help. 

Sirius snapped his fingers.

The anti-magic pulse came flying into his hand and the second he caught it, he slammed an electro-volt on it and threw it back down, inert.

Bellatrix whipped around, wand raised, searching. 

Sirius cast another spell, another, another– rapid fire. Remus was nowhere to be seen, gone. The plan was already falling apart.

Another anti-magic pulse went off. Still obscured, Sirius opened his wrist console and pressed a few buttons. One of the cameras in the corner of the room turned to the pulse, blinking, and a single bolt of electricity launched from it spasmodically, jagged and hot and wild, splintering across the floor where it hit. Bellatrix and Regulus dove aside.

The pulse exploded. But rather than an explosion of fire and force, it was an explosion of singular twinkling lights, at least ten of them, scattering through the room like shooting stars. 

And each one began emitting its own clammy, cold, stifling fog– different somehow, but the same. His wand went silent.

Too many of them to handle. Fuck. They were innovating. 

Worse: Bellatrix, grinning wickedly now, threw a green shot of light in his general direction. Though it went wide, it still twisted Sirius’ gut to see it: they could do magic in the pulse.

Sirius desperately hoped that Remus would reappear as he sprinted down the stairs, plasma gun drawn.

After Remus had fired off the stupefy from the dark hall, shrouded in invisibility, Greyback had twisted instantly to him, like he could smell him.

He probably could.

Remus took off, weaving through the halls. He had studied them enough to know where he was going, to lead Greyback to exactly where he wanted him. 

Past the suits of armor they had enchanted to swing their swords at passerby. 

Into the kitchen, where, after stepping on the wrong tile, a fireball would launch out of the oven.

Through the pantry and out a secret passage, the tunnel a confusing maze of wrong turns and dead ends–some real, some illusory.

Into the dining room.

Greyback snapped at his heels.

The swords took a vicious swipe at his thick, muscled arm but he smashed the suits of armor with a swipe of a clawed hand and a blasting curse.

In the kitchen, he dove out of the way of the fireball, crashing into a rack of hanging pots and pans and sending them clattering across the floor.

The tunnels barely slowed him. He simply turned his nose up into the air and sniffed deeply, tracking. 

As soon as he emerged into the dining hall, Remus was on him.

They exchanged furious spells. Avada Kedavra blasted past him—five, six, seven times—each narrowly avoided. His instincts screamed, every nerve firing at once.

Remus struck him with a whip of flame, searing through his matted hair and Greyback roared, clawing at his scalp in pain, trying to beat out the fire.

Seeing an opening, he cast Expelliarmus and Greyback’s wand, a stubby and gnarly thing, flew out of the werewolf’s hand. 

But the werewolf was grinning, long yellow teeth shining wetly in his mouth. He raised one clawed finger and tapped something around his neck once, twice. It started to glow. The cold, clammy fog poured out of it, rolling in waves, creeping towards Remus. He would have to be right on Greyback to disable it.

“They made this one special for me,” Greyback growled, tapping the amulet again and stalking forward. “They aren’t willing to give up their wizard magic, but I don’t need it. Never have.”

Remus had his plasma gun out and firing before Greyback reached him, but it didn’t matter. The bolts hit him– arm, side– but the werewolf just gritted his teeth and kept coming. The veins in his neck were throbbing and every muscle bulged  and knotted with tension. As he launched himself onto Remus, his jaws snapped, more wolf than man. 

One shot, another.

Bellatrix blocked them both with a lazy protego. 

He snapped his fingers, plucked the string in his mind– stupefy– and Regulus, wand still out, fell to the ground, stiff.

“Oh, interesting!” Bellatrix trilled, firing another spell off in the direction he’d been a moment ago. “You’ll have to show me how you did that, cousin!”

Sirius blasted three more quick plasma shots from a different doorway and sprinted away before he even saw if they hit.

By the time he re-emerged again, opposite where he’d been, Regulus was back up, casting a healing spell on the fiery wound that had opened on Bellatrix’s shoulder. It smoldered even as it closed up.

Regulus was too close to her. Sirius tried to aim, steadying his arm, but Bellatrix seemed to understand his hesitation. She grabbed Regulus and dragged him in front of herself.

“Reggie, time to prove yourself,” she hissed.

“Homenum Revelio,” Regulus said softly. Sirius knew he lit up in his brother’s eyes like a beacon.

Pointing his right finger at Regulus’ feet, he plucked another thread– reducto.

The ground below them exploded into rubble and both Death Eaters went down, the floor opening beneath them into a shallow pit.

Greyback’s hands were locked around both his wrists and the full heavy, stinking weight of him was on Remus’ chest. He slammed both of Remus’  hands against the stone floor again and again and he could feel the delicate bones breaking. He held on for as long as he could, struggling to angle his gun at the werewolf, but it only took two more slams for critical bones to give. His gun fell from one hand, his wand from the other, no longer able to grip.

“Wizard weapons. Muggle weapons. One worse than the other. Don’t you know how to use your teeth?” Greyback’s hot breath was in his face.

He was so strong. Unbelievably strong. He was going to kill him. He was going to rip his throat out. 

Remus’ mind went clear, ringing like a crystal bell. 

He snapped at Greyback’s cheek, canines catching flesh. The man recoiled and just barely relinquished his grasp on Remus’ wrists. 

It was enough.

He wrenched his hands free and drove his elbows hard into Greyback’s knees, leveraging. He bucked his hips, pushing on his flat feet. Greyback jerked upward, nearly over Remus’ head. He threw himself to the side, losing balance, rolling, and Remus followed.

Then they were back to brawling– claws, teeth. The other man was much stronger than him and he fought with rage and brute force, bloodlust leading the way. Remus’ broken hands screamed in agony, malfunctioning and weak, but nevertheless Remus got lost in the fight. He forgot about Bellatrix and Sirius and Regulus somewhere else in the manor. 

He knew bloodlust too. He knew adrenaline and survival. The draw of the now-waning moon was faint, but it pulsed in his blood.

Distantly, far outside of the hot scramble of limbs he was tangled in, he heard a scream.

Approaching the pit in the ruined floor, Sirius snapped his left fingers– protego. He sidled forward, gun aimed. 

Someone shifted in the pit below but Sirius could not tell which body was which.

“Regulus,” he said tentatively into the darkness. “Come with me.”

Bellatrix’s cackle echoed from below. 

All at once, a blast of flame erupted from the pit and two dark shadows shot up, landing clumsily on the edge. 

The shield protected him from the blast, but regardless he stumbled back, blinded.

He spotted a flash of metal eyepatch and shot at it. Bellatrix shrieked and returned another spell that skidded off his shield. Then he was locked in battle with Bellatrix, dodging the life-ending green streaks flying past him, responding with rapid-fire plasma blasts that tore burning holes into the portraits along the walls.

Sirius did not notice Regulus rounding the pit in the ground, approaching from the side.

One visible eye alight with madness, Bellatrix smiled, baring her teeth.

“I think you’ll find your blood has been useful to us, Sirius.”

With a wave of her wand, the scar on his forearm exploded in burning pain. It spasmed involuntarily and he looked down at it for just a second, shocked at the intensity of the pain. 

He did not notice Regulus behind him, stepping carefully into the safe bubble of his shield.

The pain then was too much, sharp and insistent and spreading, forcing him to his knees. His vision went white.

A wand tip pressed into his back, right at the base of his neck. He froze, finger still on the trigger of his plasma gun, arm still ablaze with pain.

“Drop it, Sirius,” Regulus said softly in his ear.

“Reg, I know you don’t want to do this,” he choked out through gritted teeth. “I know you don’t.”

“Bind him, now,” Bellatrix commanded, her own wand leveled at him too as she picked her way around the rubble and toward the brothers.

He managed to let out one last plasma shot before his limbs were snapped together with magical bonds. The shot singed through Bellatrix’s hair and ignited a tapestry behind her. His gun dropped to the floor with a flat, final, metallic clatter.

On the ground now, hands bound in front of him and ankles pulled together, face pressed against the cold stone floor, Sirius thought of Remus. Was he dead? Had Greyback killed him?

Bellatrix flipped him onto his back with the shove of one foot. 

She leaned over him, still smiling. Her wand weaseled its way between his bound arms and found it– the scar, of course. 

He screamed as it burned where the wand tip touched him, searing his flesh and his bone. Impossibly, it hurt more. He had not thought it could hurt more.

She pressed harder and harder until his bone snapped again, the impossible burning pressure of whatever was left of the Dark Mark on his skeleton cracking him apart. She kept up the pressure longer– a minute, two– relishing his ragged screams. He could not choke them back no matter how hard he tried. He felt his bone cracking further, a splinter creeping from his forearm down to his wrist, up toward his elbow.

“Bleed him, Regulus.”

Sirius locked his eyes on Regulus’. Both storm-grey. So similar, nearly twins.

Regulus’ face was impassive, almost lifeless. His brother was on the ground before him, gasping and prone, and Regulus approached him like a predator. He stopped a foot away, looming above.

“Regulus…After everything we’ve been through? After everything I’ve done for you?” In his own ragged voice, Sirius could hear his mother; he could hear his father.

Regulus’ face twitched but he did not bend down. He did not seem to want to get closer. Silently, slowly, he moved his wand in the tight, harsh slash of lacero. Sirius could feel the burning line at his throat. The spell dragged across with an agonizing slowness, hot blood spilling out.

His brother. Regulus, his brother. 

His brother stood over him and slit his throat so slowly, like he was taking his time. 

He felt his life draining but he could not do it, he could not kill his brother, he would not risk it, it was impossible–

Sirius did not look away from those familiar grey eyes when he snapped his fingers one last time.

At the scream, the cold clarity in Remus’ mind shattered into panic and he tried to roll away and disengage. Greyback seized the moment of hesitation; he tossed Remus bodily against an intricately carved sideboard.

The werewolf grabbed Remus’ abandoned wand and plasma gun from the ground, inspecting them as he stalked forward. He was bloodied and panting, deep claw marks across his face. A wound at his neck was oozing, but none of it seemed to matter. 

As Remus disentangled himself from the shattered wood and glass, Greyback said, looking from the wand in one hand to the gun in the other, “You’re a good fighter, boy. Could be great, even. I don’t think you need these.”

And he snapped Remus’ wand in two.

It felt a little like being stabbed. 

Greyback dropped the broken wand on the ground. He flexed his other massive, meaty hand, crushing the chrome muzzle of the plasma gun. He dropped that too.

He heard a scream again: guttural, desperate.

Remus was back on his feet and he circled, scanning the ground in the dining room for the telltale glimmer of an illusion spell holding strong.

Greyback sidled and shifted, keeping Remus in front of him. 

One more step to the side. And back…  and back….

The werewolf’s foot slipped through the illusion and into the hole he and Sirius had carved into the floor that afternoon. He lost his balance and flailed his arms out, trying to catch himself.

Remus charged, shoulder down, driving into his gut. Greyback fell back, his body hitting the bottom of the pit with a dull thud.

Prone at the bottom of the hole, silenced and stupefied, Greyback was an easy target. Remus could kill him. He could kill him if he just had a gun, a wand, a few more moments.

But Remus had no gun and he had no wand and he was all out of moments. He heard that dying scream again.

The main hall was a riot of flames and splintered wood and shattered glass. 

As he sprinted in, breathless, Remus could not make out where anyone was. The clammy cold fog of the anti-magic field was still in place so he instinctively reached for his gun– but it was gone, along with his wand.

He was unarmed.

He whipped around, looking for Bellatrix, for Sirius, for Regulus, but he saw no one. There was too much rubble, like a bomb had exploded. Any pile of random destroyed furniture could be hiding a person. He rushed around the perimeter, searching.

Maybe Sirius was gone; maybe the fight had moved elsewhere or else they had taken him. 

Remus spotted a pool of blood on the ground, large enough to be concerning. He smelled it: Sirius. 

Just a few steps from the blood, he found Sirius’ plasma gun. He brandished it, still scanning.

Head tilted up, feeling nearly as feral as Greyback, Remus tracked the scent. The stink of smoke choked him, but he kept breathing in, searching, sniffing.

As Remus stepped around a pile of fallen portraits—their frames a jumbled mess of broken wood and sharp right angles—he was struck by an unusual sensation. His frantic pace faltered, as if something invisible had seized him. Though he kept moving his feet forward, the air thickened around him like honey and slowed him to a crawl, as though he’d been hit by a silent Impedimenta.

“Sirius? Where are you?”

To his right, a feeble movement– no more than a twitch. He would not have noticed it if he’d rushed past.

Remus, still moving at a crawl, dragged himself inch by inch to the pile of indistinguishable furniture and began ripping it apart in slow motion.

He found him finally, bloodied and burned, but alive. Just barely.

“Sirius… Sirius.” 

No response.

He pressed his hand just under Sirius’ jaw, carefully avoiding the ravage of burns, red and angry, and tried to look into his eyes.

“Snap your fingers again if you can. Break the impedimenta, please— I have to get us out of here quickly.”

His eyes were heavily lidded like he could not keep them open but still Sirius snapped his left fingers feebly.

Once the spell lifted, Remus’  heart beat harder than ever to make up for lost time. It thumped out a frenzied rhythm: Get out, get out, get out.

He hoisted Sirius over his shoulder. His broken hands refused to grip properly and he fumbled for several terrible minutes, unable to arrange Sirius’ limp body in a way that didn’t nearly blind him with pain.

Get out, get out, get out, his heart thumped as he struggled. 

Bellatrix could be right behind him. Greyback’s teeth felt seconds away. 

Stumbling and weak from his own blood loss and wounds, Remus hunched and hobbled his way through the crater of the main hall as quickly as he could with Sirius awkwardly slung over his shoulder. He chose the door that he knew would lead them down to the cellar and to safety: the tunnel to North Bay Beach.

Chapter Text

A silver fox circled him and it spoke with his brother’s voice.

“It isn’t enough. It will never be enough.”

He was a skeleton and he pointed his wand at James, at Lily, at Peter, at Remus. He dropped them all dead, dead, dead, dead.

Whisper thin cracks opened and spiderwebbed from his forearm, spread up and out and everywhere. He was going to shatter into a million pieces.

Caradoc Dearborn kissed him, loose and rank and gory, his jaw rotting off.

All the Muggles he had ever met: a sea of them. The men, the women, the people who had kept him afloat in the last year through their random kindness, were all dead and reanimated, shambling corpses.

His mother leaned down, a smile on her face, one of the last ones he would ever see. Her teeth were blood red, dripping, like she had just taken a bite of something raw.

His father wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pushed his face down into ice cold water. It felt good. It numbed him.

Sharp claws lovingly ripped off his arm, the one with the scar.

“Fuck, why can’t I— Episkey, episkey! Bollocks—“

The pain was everywhere all at once. He shook violently and uncontrollably, wracked by it. He could barely see and the ringing in his head superseded everything. Above him, a shadowed figure waved a wand. He opened his mouth but all that came out was a moan that was more a gurgle.

——

When Sirius opened his eyes again, it was to the cool dim light of a medical room with curtains drawn tight against the sun and LEDs turned down to their lowest setting. He wondered if he was dead. The room felt liminal, like he shouldn’t be there. Even the monitor orb floating next to him was silent as if his heart was stilled.

He sat there for a long time, too weak to move, blinking. He was stiff with bandages, covered nearly everywhere. His right arm was splinted, lying useless and traitorous next to him.

Thoughts refused to form. Drifting scraps floated through his mind but resisted coalescing into anything coherent. After a while, he fell asleep again.

“Will you turn the sound on that thing back on? I promise I’ll stop ringing you.”

Lily looked at him, exasperated, and waved her wand at the monitor orb. Immediately it started beeping, picking up Sirius’ heartbeat. It was creepy when it was silent. The previous day, it had changed rhythm erratically again and again— now fast, now deathly slow. Lily said it was just Sirius’ body doing what it had to do to heal, but every time it clipped up into a gallop or slowed to a stuttering drip, Remus had called for a medic. 

For a time, it seemed like Sirius might die. 

His body resisted magic, unresponsive to even the simplest spell. On the beach, casting every healing spell that he could think of with Sirius’ own stubborn and uncooperative wand to no effect, Remus had thought it must be his own fault— his own magic gone ineffective. He had managed to stabilize Sirius only by digging through their packs and finding the neatly organized potions, each labeled in Sirius’ jagged handwriting.

A thick coat of burn salve, applied with Remus’ own shaking and broken hands. Four healing draughts dribbled into Sirius’ mouth as he dragged in ragged breaths.

There had been nothing he could do for the arm. It was mangled beyond his skill even if he could get the wand to work. The old scar on the forearm was bleeding freely like it was fresh and the flesh had split out from it, torn and blackened. The whole arm, from wrist to elbow, looked lumpy and misshapen. 

He had pressed a rag to the bleeding wound in Sirius’ neck. Thankfully, miraculously, the artery and the jugular had not been cut. He waited for what felt like far too long for Moody to find them under the nearly-full moonlight, the icy ocean waves lapping closer and closer to their huddled forms.

At the clinic, the medics had strained over him for hours. Magic sloughed off of him like water off a metal roof, not penetrating. Potions seemed to work, though weakly, so they used those: the strongest they could brew. He was coated in burn salve, bandaged and splinted the Muggle way. He was left to sleep– to heal, Lily said– for four days. He barely stirred. Occasionally, he would groan, mumble something unintelligible. Remus would lean in, anxious, not sure what he was listening for.

When Sirius finally awoke, his eyes fluttering open, the first thing he said, voice rough and rasping, was, “The arm. I want it off. Get rid of it.”

Remus leapt from his chair and rushed to his bed side. James, who had been on the couch on the other side of the room, abruptly sat up and summoned a medic.

“It’s ok. Your arm will be fine. The medics said–”

“I don’t care, I want it off. They can…” He trailed off, mumbling, apparently too weak to finish the thought, and fell asleep again.

A day later, magic finally started to take. The enchanted cuff around Sirius’ wrist, which had been pumping him full of healing spells for five days to no effect, finally started doing its job. Sirius’ arm, which had remained somewhat mangled despite the copious potions they had dispensed, finally began to heal. 

As soon as it looked nearly normal–split skin sealed closed, shattered bone solid– his eyes snapped open. The burns that had marred his face had all but disappeared.

“About time, mate,” Remus said lightly as Sirius sat up.

“Fuck. Merlin. How long was I out?”

“Five days just about. They had some kind of new pulse that made you resistant to healing magic even once you were out of it. Medics thought you probably wouldn’t have been able to do magic yourself, either. So that’s not a great development.”

“Did it do that to you, too?” Sirius asked, impatiently ripping wires off his wrists and pushing his covers back.

“Stay down, you twat. You nearly bloody died.” Remus gently shoved him back into the cot. 

“And you saved me, I suppose? Guess we’re even now so no reason for you to hang around mothering me. Your magic, was it working?”

“Mine was fine.”

Sirius sat back, relenting, face screwed up in thought.

“It’s to do with my blood. Bellatrix said it was useful to them. And the mark…” He went quiet for a moment and Remus knew what he was about to say before he said it: “I need to get rid of the arm.” 

He said it like it was not his arm that he was talking about but something disembodied that he could just toss in the trash.

“Don’t be stupid. Your arm is fine. We’ll talk to the Longbottoms, see if they can figure out how to–”

“No, I’m not going back on another mission until this thing is gone. She could use it against me, Remus. It’s too risky. What if they can track me with it again? What if that’s how they knew I was there?” He sounded raw and tired but resolute.

‘You think they knew?”

“They had my brother with them. Bellatrix didn’t seem too surprised to see me. And they had the pulse that worked only on me.”

Remus thought for a second, then said, “So what, you’ll just have your arm chopped off?”

“It’s ok. You’ll make me a new one.” He winked, smiling weakly. He lifted his right arm, inspecting it. “Hey! My fingertips!”

Instead of the fine, delicate tips Remus had made, he was again wearing the bulky Muggle ones.

“Alice came by and took them. Sorry. She heard about everything from Moody and wanted to start testing.”

Sirius grumbled a bit but eventually went silent, thinking again. 

Finally, not sure he wanted to know the answer, he asked, “Bellatrix and Regulus? Greyback?”

“We got Greyback. Your spell in that pit held incredibly well even after you were down. Apparently even Moody’s team had a hard time getting him out. He’s at the Cell now. They don’t know what happened to Regulus and Bellatrix.” Remus said this stiffly, shifting in his seat.

Sirius leaned his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

They sat together in the medic room for a time, Sirius on the cot, Remus slumped in a chair next to him, flicking through random Muggle shows on the small wall console.

James eventually showed up, laden with more food from his mother. And then, re-energized by James’ apparently limitless buoyancy, they went over the whole story in detail– talking over each other, debating the finer points, theorizing, even laughing a little.

It took another two days to get approval to leave St. Mungo’s. They had refused to take off his arm.

Now, at his flat, hot water running down his back in the shower, Sirius stared at the scar hatefully. 

He thought about Regulus and his flat dead eyes. He thought about Bellatrix, twisting her wand and bringing him to his knees.

The arm had to go.

His spirits were quickly blackening and he was falling into a dark pit from which he was not sure he would recover. He felt so weak, so easily defeated. 

Moody had not been able to say if the Death Eaters had truly anticipated their plan or if it was just bad luck that Regulus was there. Snape had nothing to say on the matter, apparently.

At Sirius’ questioning about the blood and the strange new anti-magic pulses and their disturbing lingering effects on him, Moody had deferred to the Longbottoms. Alice, shifting impatiently at the foot of his cot, had been cagey and unwilling to divulge any details. We’re looking into it, she said, Dumbledore is involved.

About his fingertips she had been even more dismissive, refusing to say when he could have them back. He wanted them back very badly, bitter now at the sight of his old Muggle pair. Those brushed steel tips saved his life. Remus had made them for him.

Sirius spent days silent and alone in his apartment, shuffling from bed to bathroom, showering over and over again like he could get the stain of failure off himself with enough hot water. He scratched at the scar on his forearm until it was raw then healed it then scratched it open again. The curtains stayed rolled down.

Regulus was a Death Eater. They had almost killed each other.

And they could steal his magic. It had taken four days– four days– for it to come back. As sick as he was over what that meant for him, he was sicker about the wider implications. The tide of the war was shifting again; one new invention meeting another, the pace of the arms race accelerating.

The blood was the key. Alice had unwillingly conceded that they knew the pulses did run on blood. How specific blood might impact them, they were still figuring out. She wouldn’t say more, which Sirius took to understand that he was still not entirely trusted, nevermind that he had very nearly lost his life for the Order just the other day.

He did not let himself dwell on that. He’d failed, after all. He’d even hesitated to save his own life, knowing that it might mean killing Regulus in the process. The Order was right not to trust him; he was compromised. He had given the enemy his blood and he’d done so willingly. 

Some days later, Sirius didn’t know how many, a bright white stag Patronus cantered into his dark flat and circled around his bed, prancing. Emerging from under a rat’s nest of blankets and wet towels and dirty clothes, clattering an empty bottle of firewhiskey to the ground in the process, Sirius regarded it, confused.

It spoke with James Potter’s voice. “I’m downstairs. Let me up.”

Sirius considered ignoring it. He thought about burying his head under the covers and letting the Patronus wear itself out. It couldn’t go on forever, could it? Though even knowing James as little as he did, it was safe to assume the man had enough happy memories to power an army of glowing stags.

He pulled out his datapad–his wrist console had been destroyed in the fight and he had not replaced it yet– and wrote a message to James.

Your stag is harassing me. What do you want?

Not a minute later, a second stag materialized, drifting, ghostly, up through the floor. 

It spoke: “Stop sulking and let me up. Some Muggle bird let me into the lobby but there’s no bloody button for your floor on the elevator.”

The two stags playfully locked antlers, frolicking.

‘Course not. Do you think I’ve been ignoring Moody’s CONSTANT VIGILANCE lectures all year?

A third stag joined the other two, making it a parade.

“Get off your arse and let me up or I’ll stomp you.” At this, the newest stag reared up obligingly.

Abruptly, all three vanished: discussion over. He couldn’t help but smile.

After a few minutes of rushed cleaning– of the flat and of himself– he went down and fetched James Potter, whose cheeks were flushed red from the oncoming winter chill that was sweeping through the city.

Predictably, he started unloading a bag full of greasy takeout containers. Apparently, to James, there was nothing a meal couldn’t fix.

Despite himself, Sirius ate gratefully. 

“You’ve got to get your head on straight, mate,” James said amicably through a mouthful of fried rice.

Sirius snorted but kept eating in silence.

“Really, though. Remus said you’ve ignored him and Moody said you sent him a message saying that you’re retired. What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean? Retired from the war?”

“Remus hasn’t reached out to me so there was nothing to ignore,” Sirius snapped, moving to take his container to the couch.

“Fine, well, he said he didn’t want to reach out because he knew you’d ignore him. Ignored all my messages, didn’t you? Anyway, he’s almost as daft as you are about the whole thing; convinced it’s all his fault. And look at you! I’d wager you’re convinced it’s yours. Birds of a feather, you two, honestly.”

This shocked Sirius out of his willful sullen silence. “How the hell is it his fault? We got Greyback. I’m the one who–”

“I don’t know, mate. Moons tends to blame himself, it’s his favorite hobby. Something about how him going off after Greyback wasn’t the plan and he left you two-on-one. He said he got distracted.”

“I’m the one that got bloody distracted! As soon as Regulus was there, I lost my head!” 

Remus blaming himself was a step too far– he’d done everything right. He was the only reason they had gotten paid for the job, even. Moody had been so pleased about Greyback and about getting his hands on the strange anti-magic pulses to study that he’d paid out the whole job, even though Bellatrix got away. Before descending into his rotting depression, Sirius had made sure Lily transferred his whole portion to Remus’ account.

“You should take it up with him. I’m not here to argue about your stupid mission. I’m here to cheer you up!”

“Good luck with that,” Sirius grumbled, but James was settling himself onto the couch next to him, seizing the wall console remote and pulling out his wand.

With a few quick flicks of his wand and clicks of the remote, he brought up a live video of Quidditch. It was Central European league, so kind of rubbish, but the only one active this late in the fall.

“Mad men, all of them, playing in the snow all the time,” Sirius finally conceded, pulling a blanket into his lap. “Couldn’t pay me enough.”

“Have you ever watched any Russian league games? Those poor bastards are playing when the snow is halfway up the bloody posts! Someone falls off their broom and they have to dig them out!”

They spent the rest of the evening like that.

Later, quite late actually, James stretched unhurriedly, yawning,  and said, “Mind if I kip here for the night? Don’t fancy wandering out into the cold.”

Of course, he could just Apparate. He’d barely be in the cold at all. Sirius had the distinct feeling he was being mothered, but regardless he agreed. They didn’t move though, both sprawled on either side of the couch, the wall console quietly playing some Muggle show—men slashing each other with glowing swords and aliens singing in bars. 

After a time, staring at the screen and feeling calm and peaceful and sleepy, Sirius asked, “Lily won’t mind if you don’t come home?”

“Naw, I’ll let her know I was being lazy. I stay over at Peter’s all the time; she won’t be surprised.”

“Brilliant girl, Lily,” Sirius said, truly meaning it. “She once cursed me with a Bat Bogey Hex that had me snorting the things out of my nose into the sink for two weeks. Gave me about fifty detentions too.”

“Ha! Yeah, that sounds like her. She gave me about that many detentions as well. Remember that time we both had to scrub Slughorn’s private bathroom?”

“Oy, that was foul. Can’t believe he let us see that.”

They dissolved into laughter at this. 

They had crossed paths occasionally at Hogwarts, both being approximately the same brand of troublemaker and both stars on their respective Quidditch teams. They hadn’t been friends— that simply didn’t happen between Gryffindors and Slytherins— but even then Sirius had felt he was meeting something of a kindred spirit every time they interacted. 

Sometimes they were more clearly enemies. On the pitch, in actual games, they had been rivals. In classes, Sirius had been distinctly aware of James nipping at his heels, but he never cared enough about classes to be bothered. More frequently, one or another of the Slytherins would say something hideous and their groups would squabble.

In later years, as the war got real and Sirius felt himself slipping into the orbit of Death Eaters, they interacted less but also with more animosity: pranks were less funny and more cruel, verbal spats were not childish jibes but vicious slurs. 

As their laughter faded, the words Sirius said out loud so rarely but thought almost constantly slipped out.

“I’m sorry. About everything at Hogwarts. I was an idiot and wrong and such a shit. And after… well, of course I’m sorry about that too. I regret it all. I regret everything.”

He didn’t know why he was saying it or why his voice sounded so raw and strange.

He did know that even if James wanted to grant him some absolution, some forgiveness, he didn’t deserve it. And maybe James had no right to give it.

James watched him steadily, something of the noble stag in his eyes.

After a few moments of silence that made Sirius want to climb out of his skin in shame, James said, “You’re here now, with the Order. That’s what matters. You changed your mind.”

Sirius did not want this grace. He did not deserve it.

“And anyway, I was a twat at Hogwarts too,” James continued, running his hand through his hair. “Lily will never let me forget how we treated Snape. And remember that time I cursed Mulciber so badly he had to go to St. Mungo’s? I nearly killed him. I don’t even remember why I did that.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, but then Sirius couldn’t let James’ kindness stand unaddressed.

“But I knew even before. I knew it was all wrong, I didn’t buy it, the pureblood stuff. But I did it anyway. Because it was easier—“ his voice, mortifyingly, cracked a little, but he drove on, “—it was easier to go along.”

“I could tell, you know. You around them and you without them— it was different. Like you were playing a part. Me and you just messing around on the Quidditch pitch on those early mornings was like being with a different person. But you grew up around all that stuff. How did you not get brainwashed into it for real?”

He didn’t know the answer to this, not really. But he tried. 

“My family wasn’t… good. They hated me even when I was little. Regulus too. I don’t even know why, maybe they’re all just a bunch of inbred nutters and their brains are mush.”

This wasn’t it, not the reason, so he tried again.

“A lot of those families are rubbish, though. For me it was the loneliness. I couldn’t stand it. And when I got to Hogwarts, it was like I could breathe for the first time. I wanted to talk to everyone, I couldn’t stop myself. It didn’t matter that they were Muggleborn or half bloods or whatever. And I met them all and it just didn’t make sense, you know? That they were worse than us, than purebloods. It was obviously not true.”

“But then you still hung around with the Slytherins too. And you became a Death Eater.” Sirius almost appreciated the note of accusation in James' voice. It felt right.

“Yeah, I did. I did.”

They sat in silence again, the wall console flashing an ad— NEED IT NOW? MAKE IT NOW! REALITY ON DEMAND.

“Because of your brother?” James asked finally, but Sirius didn’t want to talk about it anymore so he just gave a noncommittal shrug. James, ever the diplomat and a soft heart besides, didn’t push it.

Instead, he said, grinning, “Look, these mad Muggles are figuring out transfiguration!”

With the Galleons from the job– 6,000 physical coins handed to him by an exasperated Lily who roundly refused to take Sirius’ half back— Remus found a flat.

It was dingy and small and one-room and it was not in London.

But still, sitting on his own bed with an actual roof over his head and his things neatly piled on the scavenged end table, he felt a little twinge of happiness. Even his new wand, bought with his last remaining Galleons, looked at home.

It was a short-lived feeling. Picking up his datapad, he read a series of unwelcome messages.

From James:

Stop sulking

You’re being a git. You did a good job. Come by mine.

You should message Black, he’s sulking worse than you and he nearly died besides

Where are you??? Where are you even sleeping, under a bridge somewhere??

If you’re not at Static tonight I’ll sic Lily on you. 

And Peter:

Moony, I heard about the mission, good going getting that beast

Heard Moody telling Gideon about it, he was right pleased

You coming to Static tonight?

Lily too:

James says if you’re not at Static tonight I’m to track you down and drag you out

You know I don’t approve of his methods, but he’s not wrong

We miss you, we’re worried about you. Come out tonight.

And worst of all, the message he’d been ignoring for longest:

Report to the Cell. Ninth. 1400 hours. No one must know. Your skillset is required. Vital.

Moody, of course. Reporting to the Cells bearing his “skillset” could only mean one thing: Greyback. 

The thought made him nauseous. The ninth was Monday, just on the other side of the weekend. 

He clicked open the thread with Sirius, the last message damning: 

My brother is with them. Don’t kill him.

He’d read it then and ignored it. Forgotten it the second he’d caught Greyback’s scent. 

He hadn’t spoken to Sirius since the hospital. Nearly three weeks now. 

He closed the datapad without responding to anyone.

Chapter Text

The lights at Static were lower than usual, turned down in honor of the weekend, neon signs glowing from the walls in pinks and greens and blues. The crowd was more rambunctious too, with people flitting between groups, crowding the bar, waiting in long lines for the loo.

This was an Order bar, though Muggles came here as well, oblivious to the fact that the more oddly dressed clientele were witches and wizards. Wall modules in the corners were playing Muggle channels— synthetic green football fields under white lights, game shows with giant spinning wheels— but with the right spell a wizard could flick it to MystiCast 24/7 Wizarding Media.

Sirius sat with James and Peter working on his second pint. They were in a corner booth, a prime spot. Peter wanted the whole story of the Abbott House and he and James gladly obliged, Sirius artfully editing out any parts he did not feel like disclosing or repeating or thinking about. James supplied outrageous exaggerations and ad libs. This sterilized and then technicolored version made for much better Friday night content and Peter was duly impressed.

“Bellatrix is basically You-Know-Who’s right hand, I heard!” he’d said after, his face shining with wonder. “Bloody hell, you nearly took her down yourself! She must’ve been half-dead dragging herself out of that house!”

This, Sirius thought, was a very generous interpretation of events but he let it stand.

“So how’s the ministry going, Pete?” James asked later on, his eyes flitting through the crowd.

“Busy actually. They’ve got this new policy they’re trying to implement at Records and it’s a right trick to do, no idea how we’ll manage it all—“

“Lily! Lily, over here!”

James had shot up and was waving his arm over the crowd. Peter’s mouth clamped shut like he’d been silencio’d.

Red shock of hair slipping between a group of heavily pierced, leather-clad Muggles, and there she was, dragging behind her—

“I present Remus Lupin! Bloody near impossible to find what with no ID and no bank account and his flat paid for with sacks of Galleons but never fear! I am a brilliant and incredibly resourceful witch and not even he can hide from me!” 

Lily dragged Remus’ hand up into the air, grinning in triumph. He looked sheepish but amused.

“I wasn’t hiding. I was recuperating.”

To that, Sirius raised his glass. “Yeah, mate. Me too. Cheers.” When Remus looked at him, he could’ve sworn he saw a flash of annoyance cross his face, a distinct what-are-you-doing-here expression but it was gone in an instant.

Everyone jostled and shifted to make room and Sirius decided to seize the opportunity to fetch a round.

Fighting his way through the crowd, he sidled up to the bar and made eye contact with Jax, the bartender. Jax spotted Sirius right away and grinned wide, abandoning another group mid-order to come to him.

“Sirius, mate! Haven’t seen you in ages! You’re looking fit!”

He wasn’t, he knew. After nearly dying and then not leaving his bed for weeks while drinking himself sick, he was definitely not looking fit. But no matter.

“Been busy, you know. Work.”

“Don’t I know it! Look at this place; madhouse, innit? Hey, you up for it later? I’m off at 2.” He leaned over the bar and put his hand on Sirius’, smiling suggestively.

Before Sirius could decide if he was or wasn’t up for it later, he heard a voice behind him— angry, drunk.

“Hey, Black.”

It was Benjy. Sirius knew him vaguely from the Order.

Sirius didn’t like his tone. 

He looked at him, eyebrow raised, waiting for the fight. Benjy delivered.

“Heard your brother is a Death Eater now too. Really runs in the family, eh?”

“Wouldn’t know much about it, since we’re not in touch,” Sirius replied, hitting his most imperious enunciations. 

“Sure you wouldn’t. Sure you wouldn’t.” The other man stepped closer. The crowd around them seemed to sense the dangerous tension and shifted away, letting Benjy get closer still. “There’s a rat in the Order, you know. Wouldn’t happen to know about that, either, I suppose?”

Sirius smirked, his hand twitching toward his wand. Fighting some Order member in a bar would be stupid. It would be stupid. It would be proving his point for him.

“Oh sure, mate. Loads. I’ll tell you all about it in the back alley there. You’ll be the hero of the Order, rooting me out— least obvious rat ever, no one but you could’ve ever thought of it.” He was sneering now, nearly nose to nose with Benjy.

“Sirius, need help with the drinks?” He felt a hand on his arm, the one with the scar, gentle but insistent. He let it pull him back.

Benjy stepped away then but not before he said loudly to one of his drunken companions, “Got his rabid dog with him. Let’s go, wouldn’t want to get bit.”

Sirius turned back to the bar, flexing his hand. He would’ve liked to at least throw a punch if nothing else. Remus, of course, was pressed next to him, looking straight ahead.

“He’s always been a twat. Ignore him,” he said softly. “Not worth the effort, really.”

Sirius looked at Jax again, who was staring after Benjy, alarmed at the exchange. Sirius gave him his most charming smile and said, shrugging, “Ex-boyfriend.”

He felt Remus look at him with an expression he couldn’t parse.

Jax shook his head at this, yelling over the din, “Hate that! The worst!” He poured them five pints and did not charge.

Sitting in the booth, pressed between Peter and Lily, Remus tried not to think about the old rumor about Sirius Black snogging a boy in a broom closet. He tried not to think about the way he’d just said ex-boyfriend or the easy way he had flirted with the bartender, smiling and laughing, touching his hand.

It was not relevant. It didn’t matter. So what if he liked lads too? Who cares? Why would he care? Plenty of people did.

It was the possibility, of course. The knowing of it.

“What were you saying before, Pete? Some new policy in records?” James asked, encouraging. Pete tended to get drowned out at these things.

“Oh yeah. Well uh, it’s boring really. Just work stuff,” he started, embarrassed as everyone turned to him. “I guess they want to start collecting blood samples for everyone, like to keep a record so they know who’s what— muggleborn, half-blood, pureblood, whatever. So they can provide better protection, like knowing who might be most at risk for attacks and— what? What’s wrong?”

Sirius had gone completely still and his eyes found Remus’ across the table. 

A blood registry. Blood from every witch and wizard gathered in one place. 

“That… doesn’t sound good, Pete,” Remus said carefully.

“Yeah, sounds like more Death Eater bollocks but all gussied up,” Lily added, fierce. “Just more categorizing people by their blood, obsessing over birth and all that. Anyone who opposes You-Know-Who is at risk. Don’t need some database to tell us that.”

“Do you think the Ministry is compromised?” Sirius said this quietly, leaning in, looking at James intently. “That does sound like Death Eater bollocks.”

Peter was looking between them, guilty, like he’d said too much. Remus felt a bit bad for him; he was just too close to the work to see the bigger picture. For him it was just following orders, day to day grind, work tedium. He’d missed it for what it really was.

Before they could speculate further, a bloody dead rat slammed onto their table, falling from above, sending drinks flying.

Four of them moved instantly. Sirius leapt to his feet, wand out, whipping around no doubt looking for Benjy. James was up too, but he had his hand on Sirius’ shoulder, holding him back. Lily’s head had snapped up, looking into the metal rafters above. Peter, at the end of the booth, stood and stumbled back like the bloody thing might explode. 

Remus didn’t move. He stared at the rat.

After a few tense and loud minutes, James and Lily managed to hustle them out of the bar, Sirius seething all the way. He was proposing various schemes to get Benjy, not letting it go until they had already walked two blocks in the cold.

“Can’t have one bloody night to just relax,” he said finally, a little defeated. “Every minute about the war. Everyone acting like I’m the only fucking Slytherin in the Order.”

“Well you are now, since the Death Eaters killed Dorcas!” Peter said, completely unhelpfully. James gave him a pointed look but Sirius laughed a bit nastily.

“Right you are, Pete. Right you are.”

They walked quickly and aimlessly, hunched against the biting wind.

“Hey!” James said suddenly, stopping. They all stopped too and turned to him. A few sparse snowflakes were drifting down from above, littering their shoulders. “Why don’t we go to the club?”

“Why the hell would we do that? Didn’t you just hear Sirius say he wants to forget about all that for one night? I swear, Potter, you’re going deaf—“

James cut Lily off by grabbing her around the waist and pulling her in for a kiss.

“No, love, it’s a great idea! I mean the club, not Moody’s! To go dancing! It’s nearly all Muggles, isn’t it? No war, no rats. It’s perfect!”

“Well,” Lily said, smiling a bit now. “We have never actually been.”

Sirius stared at her, dumbstruck.

“You’ve never been? You’re there nearly every day!”

James was unstoppable now, corralling them together like a sheep dog, grinning madly. 

“I know, but that’s for work! What am I supposed to do, slip away to grind up with some Muggles knowing Moody’s creepy eye is watching me the whole time?”

“You think he watches?” Peter asked, letting himself be shoved into the center of the circle. 

“He doesn’t, Pete, don’t worry about it. Alright, Lils, you take Remus, I’ve got this lot!” James clapped his hands on Sirius and Peter’s shoulders. Lily, bought in, took Remus’ hand.

Remus knew the night was getting away from him. He’d consented to one drink. Now he was being dragged to some drug-addled Muggle club.

He thought about dropping Lily’s hand and disappearing down an alley. He thought about grabbing her and telling her, fiercely and honestly, that he didn’t want to do this. He thought about telling her that he was pretty sure that Sirius Black maybe swung both ways and, back at the camp, in the darkness of their bunk beds, he had said “I want it to be yours” in a way that rang in Remus’ head still and wasn’t that interesting?

But he didn’t. 

The bass was an engine in his chest, revving him into a frenzy, and he was determined to drag the rest of them along with him.

The club! Of course! What a brilliant idea!

Under the frenetic lights, four or maybe five drinks deep, sweating and dancing and laughing, Sirius completely forgot the carousel of despair he’d been on for the last three weeks. Even at the bar, not two hours earlier, he’d been thinking dark thoughts.

Sitting with the Gryffindors under the dim halogen light of the booth at Static, he’d thought I was fine before. 

He had been fine before he had somehow been spun into the gravitational pull of this group like so much debris. His life was lonely and sparse and stripped down, but essentially fine. Better than before. He had found his place in this post–Death Eater reality, small and solitary, and been grateful for it.

He was paying his dues, making amends one mission at a time, trying to balance the scales for everything he’d done wrong in his life. That was good. Necessary. He needed to repent. 

That and the thin sliver of a hope of getting his brother back kept him moving. Beyond that, he needed little. People looked him in the eye now, more or less. He could find something like intimacy with random Muggles: men and women nice enough to share his bed for a night, maybe two, then never be seen again. Whether that was by his own choice or theirs, it didn’t matter. He could find peace, or at least a vacant mind, at the bottom of bottles or in pills or by hibernating for days.

It had been enough. It was what he deserved.

Sitting with James and Remus and Peter and Lily, basking in the unfamiliar warmth of their friendship, he had thought,

How dare you want this? How dare you want more?

Now, though, that self-hating thought was gone. It was obliterated by the deafening music and the hot press of bodies and the electric charge in the air. 

James was jumping around wildly, arms flailing, his thick black hair drenched with sweat and sticking out at all angles. From somewhere he had found a string of blinking LEDs— blue, pink, yellow, red— and he’d wound them around Lily’s head like a crown. She was smiling at him with unabashed delight, also jumping to the beat, arms waving.

They were not good dancers but they were so beautiful. Sirius had never seen love like that. 

Sirius had been thrashing about with them but now he desperately needed another drink so he wound his way through the crowd toward the illuminated bar at the back wall. It was massive and mirrored and backlit, all lights and chrome and shiny, enticing bottles, compelling him like an altar.

He found Peter chatting up a friendly looking brunette with a neural implant blinking at her temple. She was laughing at something he’d said and he was smiling like she was the most incredible person he’d ever met. They couldn’t have been talking for more than ten minutes.

As Sirius approached the bar, Pete turned to him, still grinning, and said, “This place is wild, mate! No wonder you come here all the time! Everyone is so friendly!”

Sirius laughed, throwing an arm around Peter’s shoulder.

 “They’re all bladdered or high off their arses, but yes, friendly is definitely a word for it! I’ll get your drink, don’t worry. Go back to that girl!” And he gave the other man a gentle shove toward the smiling brunette, who he would wager was pumping her brain full of some make-happy chemical through that neural implant. 

He scanned the bar crowd, looking for a familiar face. Remus had been jumping around with them for a time, looking as uninhibited as he ever did outside of a fight, which admittedly wasn’t very. He’d slipped away nearly a half hour ago, disappearing into the strobing darkness. Sirius’ eyes had tracked him for a while— he was tall enough to spot above most people— but he’d vanished behind a holographic display of swirling patterns writhing to the rhythm and had not been seen since. 

After buying drinks— the bartender knew him here too and let him cut the line with a cheeky wink— and depositing one with Peter, Sirius went around the perimeter, searching.

Not in the queue for the loo.

Not at the second, smaller bar on the other wall.

Not in any of the private rooms, which were primarily host to bodies wrapped around each other in various states of undress. 

Sirius told himself he was too drunk to wonder why he’d abandoned the dance floor to look for Remus Lupin. It wasn’t worth dwelling on; it was unknowable. It just seemed critically important, in that moment, to find him, to get closer to him. So he kept going, occasionally gently extricating himself from the attentions of various people who recognized him from one night or another.

At last, there he was.

Remus was talking to a stunning woman with sepia brown skin that seemed to nearly iridesce under the club lights. Their heads were bent close together and they were gesturing and laughing. As he approached, Sirius could tell the woman was a witch from the gentle hum of magic around her, distinct from Remus’. 

Sliding into the seat next to her, Sirius could feel himself turn on the charm and the looks and the slick Black family entitlement, demanding attention. It was as automatic as breathing in moments like this, particularly when he had been drinking and he spotted someone he wanted. It was ingrained. His legacy.

“Remus, we thought we’d lost you there for a moment. Not letting you get away that easy.” His voice had dropped to a silken purr, leaning towards Remus.

Remus, who was plainly tipsy in a happy and loose way, grinned at him, “Look who I ran into! Mary! Remember Mary McDonald? She was Gryffindor?”

Hearing the name, he remembered. She’d been beautiful then too, and clever.

“Of course I remember! Mary, lovely to see you. I’ll never forget when you corrected McGonagall on her transmogrification theory. The look on her face—“ He mimicked it artfully and she chuckled.

“She wanted to dock points for that so badly that she nearly had a stroke holding it back. Sirius Black, right? I heard about that mission at the Abbott House and with the McKinnons—“

“Let’s not talk shop!” Remus interrupted, perhaps seeing the tight frozen quality Sirius’ smile had instantly taken on. “I was just telling Mary about your shrinking spell, the one that can get things microscopic! Show her!”

So, casting a subtle muggle repelling charm on their plush little corner of the club, Sirius proceeded to entertain them by shrinking various objects as small as he could— cups, spoons, a chair. They were laughing, egging him on. 

Mary kept touching him in small, unassuming ways: a hand on his bicep, a knee pressing to his. Sirius recognized that for what it was and let it egg him on too.

“I could do you next, Mary! Keep you in my pocket,” he teased, brandishing his wand.

“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” Her hand pressed delicately to the pocket on his shirt front. “I’d be right there and you’d never have to think for yourself again. I’d whisper all the answers to you.”

“Could’ve used that in my transfiguration O.W.L., that’s for certain.” He leaned in to her touch.

“Oh, please.” She swatted at him gently. “You got top marks without even trying.”

“Didn’t seem like you had to try much either… I seem to recall you kept yourself pretty busy at Hogwarts with extracurricular activities,” Sirius said, raising his eyebrows.

“Rumors and slander! You of all people should know that allegations about what happens in broom cupboards are always blown wildly out of proportion.”

“True, true.” His hand landed on her knee and she let him keep it there. 

Remus stood up abruptly, knocking the spindly metal table between their chairs and sending a microscopic collection of cups and spoons tinkling to the floor. Without another look at them, he slipped away, back into the throng. Sirius’ eyes followed him until he disappeared.

Her leg shifted and pulled away, undraping and untangling from his.

Sirius blinked at the sky outside his window, waking up. It was visible in narrow strips between high rises, a nautical blue, like the ocean transposed to the sky.

“Sneaking out already, Mary? Makes a lad feel a bit used,” he said, pulling her abandoned half of the covers around himself.

She laughed and tossed a shoe at him as she collected her clothes.

“As if you wouldn’t have kicked me out right at dawn! I’ve seen you operate, Black.” But she was smiling and once dressed, she sat down on the corner of the bed and leaned down for a deep kiss. Sirius worked his hand into her hair and nearly succeeded in pulling her back onto him, but she laughed again, a pretty tinkling laugh, and shoved him back.

“Anyway, this flat is foul. I feel like I’m going to catch fleas in here. Worse than a Hogwarts boy’s dorm room. What are you, thirteen?”

“Well, love, didn’t exactly get a chance to clean before you were dragging me back to mine. Want anything for the road, then? I have….” He thought about his barren cupboards and the lone bowl of take out lo mein, scraped from a box and ineptly shoved into the fridge to be forgotten. “...tea.” He was sure he had that somewhere.

“No, I’m alright. I’m off to work actually.” 

She stood up and stretched, arching her back and raising her arms toward the ceiling. He watched her do this with undisguised interest and seeing him, she grabbed another stray item– his empty gun holster, abandoned on the ground– and threw it at him.

He raised the covers, defending.

“Work? It’s Saturday!”

“Moody,” she said simply, shrugging. “He’s got me doing patrols at Hogsmeade. Shouldn’t be too bad. Want me to grab you anything from Honeydukes?”

“Oh, a pack of sugar quills would be tops. Haven’t had one in years.”

She smiled again, gathered her last things, and started heading for the door.

“Wait, Mary,” and he launched into the usual spiel, so rehearsed now as to be automatic. “This was lovely, but I’m not looking for anything serious. I’m just not at that place in my life right now and I don’t want you to–”

She cut him off with a withering look. 

“I don’t expect you to get in touch. Wouldn’t want you to anyway. I just wanted to try it on, finally.” She smiled, though, unbothered. “I’ll see you around, alright? Don’t be a stranger.” And she slipped out the door with a final wink, hips swaying in a way he was sure she did on purpose.

He didn’t typically bring witches or wizards back to his place. In fact, he didn’t typically interact with too many witches or wizards socially at all. Getting with Mary had been different from all the Muggles. Not better or worse– he had met many interesting and delightful Muggles, as well as some truly dreadful ones– but different. 

She knew him and his family and his history. 

When he leaned over her, bracketing his arms around her head and dipping down to catch her mouth with his, her eyes had lingered on the scar on his forearm and he knew that she was aware of what it was. Still, she hadn’t said anything and the hum of her magic was like light against his skin and she was funny and smart and beautiful besides. 

So it had been lovely; the whole night.

He rolled over, burrowing under the blankets, and stared out into the slowly awakening city. 

He thought he might, honestly, still be a little drunk. The night came back to him in bits and pieces.

He’d had fun, of that he was certain.

He remembered joining James, Peter, and Lily on the riotous dance floor with Mary in tow. They had twirled and danced and laughed. Remus had reappeared at some point and James had taken him by the hands, spinning him, both men cackling. Later, Sirius had found Remus by the bar, nursing a whiskey– “Night cap,” he’d said, raising his glass in a cheers, smiling blearily.

Then Mary had grabbed him again and they were dancing and she was pulling him into one of the dark corners of the bar and they were kissing, his hands running down her back, hers pulling at his hair.

Back on the dance floor, yelling something in James’ ear to which he received a laddish punch on the shoulder in return. Lily smiled at him over a kaleidoscope drink.

Before he went under again– under the throng of dancing people, under a black out, under Mary– Sirius had caught Remus’ eye as he tried to slip away unnoticed toward the exit. Sirius pulled his hand from Mary’s, yelling, “Got to say bye to Moony!” The nickname came out almost naturally.

In the alley outside the front door, he caught him.

“Dangerous to go out alone, Moony! Don’t you know there’s a war on? Won’t you wait for us?” But Remus had shook his head, waving Sirius away.

“I’ll be fine, just ready for bed.”

Remus had moved to go, pulling away, but Sirius remembered grabbing his arm. He suspected that he may have said or done something awkward or strange at that point, but he couldn’t remember. The memory was gone, lost under the drunken haze, obliterated by a string of tequila shots he had gladly accepted from James upon returning to the club. 

All he could remember was Remus’ stricken face. 

He groaned into his pillow. Eventually, after parsing through the memories and finding nothing to hint at what he might have done, he fell back asleep.

Staring at his datapad, nursing his hangover with a cup of coffee, Remus waffled. 

Alice Longbottom had messaged him that morning, disgustingly early for a Saturday: 

I’m ready to return the cybernetics. I have a few questions and want you to look at my schematics. Come by the lab today? Whenever works.

He wanted Sirius to join him. He’d been so miffed to have the cybernetics taken away and anyway, he’d been very interested in everything related to all that.

So it would be nice to invite him– considerate, really. 

But Remus was feeling awkward about the previous night. Not that anything bad had happened, really. It had been perfectly fine. Fun, even, though he did regret maybe the last two glasses of whiskey as they were now drilling a hole in his brain. He wasn’t even sure he had the coordination to cast a hangover-cure spell.

In the grim light of day, he knew that he had been territorial of Sirius. Seeing Mary’s hands drifting to his chest, his arm, his neck had triggered an embarrassing and automatic territoriality in him, a very wolfish impulse that he hated about himself. It was a deep-rooted desire to draw the lines– pack, not pack– and keep them separate. 

But that was stupid, because Sirius was only just barely his friend. They hadn’t even spoken for three weeks. Sometimes Remus even felt annoyed to have Sirius around at all, like he was an invader trying to ingratiate himself. 

They had been perfectly friendly last night but not anything more. Remus had spent more time talking to Peter than he had talking to Sirius. 

So really, there was no reason for that sudden rush of possessiveness he had felt. It was irrational; a weird animal instinct that needed to be squashed.

Anyway, Mary was lovely and perfect for Sirius. Their chemistry had been apparent right away, their matching charm sparking together like steel on flint.

So he’d fought down that weird and embarrassing feeling and tried to be normal about it. He tried to have fun; that was allowed, wasn’t it? And he had. It had felt like old times: like parties in Gryffinder common room.

Then, just as he’d nearly gotten away, Sirius materialized in the alley and grabbed his arm.

By that point in the night, Remus reasoned, they had both been hammered. So the heat between them as Sirius had pulled him close– the smell of his sweat and something floral heady and strong in his nose– had probably just been that: drunken nonsense, a trick of the light.

“It was good to see you, Remus,” Sirius had said, voice low and deep and slurring only the littlest bit. “Don’t disappear on me, alright?”

“Sorry– I won’t. Just got in my head about the whole thing.”

“Trust me, I get it. But you shouldn’t feel bad about it. You were brilliant. Stunning, really. Moody showed me the footage. The cameras in the dining room were recording.”

Sirius’ hand, still locked on Remus’ bicep, holding them close, felt like a burn. Remus knew he was turning red– mortified, even through his intoxicated fog, to have been seen like that. Feral, animal. Monstrous.

A look crossed Sirius’ face as he clocked Remus’ sudden painful shame. His voice softened.

“No– no, I mean it. It was something to behold. Don’t be upset–”

And then he was leaning up, closing the distance between them, slowly like he didn’t want to startle him. His lips pressed to Remus— tender and beseeching– just on the corner of his lip, like he’d been going for the cheek, maybe, and just barely missed. 

They broke apart then: Sirius back into the club, to Mary, and Remus out into the cold, wandering to the Tube, too drunk to Apparate. 

Under the glaring white bright lights of the electric train, cutting silently through the underground darkness, Remus felt the scald of that kiss still. He spent the trip rapidly sobering up, trying to explain it to himself again and again.

Now, at his tiny kitchen table– scavenged from the street and dragged up to his flat– he opened his last message from Sirius and stared at it.

My brother is with them. Don’t kill him.

Finally, deciding to just be normal, to just be friends, Remus wrote:

Hey, mate– Longbottoms said your cybernetics are ready for pickup. Want to grab breakfast and then swing by their lab?

He almost deleted “grab breakfast and then” and then he almost added “Alice said you can go by whenever”, but he did neither and instead pressed send.

Chapter Text

On the way to breakfast, Sirius went through again what he might have done to put that stricken look on Remus’ face. He still came up empty.

Had he said something insulting? Revealed too much about himself– maybe about Regulus or his arm or his past? Had he been entirely too intimate, like back at the camp, and made Remus uncomfortable?

He was sure it was one of those, but couldn’t guess which. He wondered if Remus would confront him and demand some explanation or apology. He told himself that if he did, he’d say sorry. He repeated it in his head like a mantra– sorry, sorry, sorry– thinking that he’d actually get it out this time, would actually make himself say it.

But over their plates of eggs and toast and beans at the dodgy old cafe Remus had chosen by the lab, everything was fine.

They laughed about the previous night and complained about their hangovers and Remus asked about Mary, lifting a suggestive eyebrow, which was an expression that Sirius found very compelling and resolved to lure out from Remus more often

“She said she just wanted to try it on, like I’m some piece of meat on a sampler platter,” he laughed. “The gift and the curse of good looks, I guess.”

“Oh yes,” Remus agreed solemnly. “I’m sure it’s been an incredible burden for you.”

“It has! Half the Muggles I meet assume I’m some daft model or actor or something. The other half assume I’m a very expensive prostitute.”

“How rude of them! Don’t they know that you’re mostly an unemployed layabout and a part-time vigilante?”

Sirius tossed his hair dramatically and shot, “I prefer wastrel and retired vigilante, thank you very much.”

Remus laughed at this, but his eyes drifted to Sirius’ scar.

“You aren’t retired, Sirius. We’ll figure out the thing with your arm–”

“Yeah, by chopping it right off!” He karate-chopped his right arm at the elbow.

“St. Mungo’s won’t do that. They have standards of care and I’m pretty sure mutilating people due to paranoia is not procedure.”

“Why not? Muggles do it all the time. Do you think I cut my fingertips off myself?” He waggled his left hand, chrome index finger shining.

He had not. He’d gone to a slightly sketchy cybernetics surgeon located at the back of a tattoo parlor and gotten a two-for-one: index finger tips chopped off and tattoo inked onto his neck.

“Please don’t get some Muggle to chop your arm off,” Remus groaned, burying his face in one hand.

Earnest now, trying to make him understand, Sirius pressed further. He needed an ally.

“Did Moody show you the camera footage? The cameras in the house were recording. He has it all; he saw everything that happened in Abbott House. I watched it and…Bellatrix brought me to my knees like it was nothing. I didn’t stand a chance. And with all the bullshit they threw at us in there? I bet they’re coming up with nightmarish new weapons every day. I can’t do anything about the blood but I can at least take this away from her.” He lifted his arm limply, like it did not belong to him.

“I have seen cybernetic arms… but it’s a lot, Sirius. What if it impacts your magic?”

“It won’t. My magic doesn’t live in my arm.”

“Spellcasting, though, requires a precise hand– the movements, yes, but also the physical translation of the magic that’s in you into reality. We don’t know if a cybernetic could replicate it… but there are some runes we could try, something to neurally connect the arm to the rest of your body in a way that would be a sufficient conduit…I suppose you could also just learn to spell cast left-handed, though I’ve read some papers that non-dominant-hand spell casting can be finicky and we wouldn’t want to risk that in a battle….”

Sirius was leaning back, arms behind his head, grinning. Remus was thinking it through, solving a problem. So he’d won the argument. He had his ally.

After another thirty minutes of speculation–heartily encouraged by Sirius, who was already imagining a beautiful brushed-steel rune-covered cybernetic arm in the place of his scarred meat-arm– they finished breakfast and stepped back out into the cold. They began walking toward the lab.

Dark clouds pressed down, leaving the high-rises lost in a fog and the city feeling claustrophobic. 

“Say, isn’t the full moon in a few days?”

Sirius knew it was, but he asked anyway.

“Yes, two days.”

“So your senses and all that must be getting sharper, right? What can you smell now?”

“It’s going to snow in just a bit. I can smell that. Garbage, of course. Always bloody garbage, everywhere. The chippy down that way is burning something– I can smell the grease and the char. I can smell you.” He tilted his head up a bit and then smirked. “You smell like flowers. That Galatea soap, right? My mum used that, you ponce.”

“I love my soap! Your mum has great taste.”

“Had—she died ten years ago. But yes, it is nice. Reminds me of her to smell it, honestly.”

“Sorry, mate,” he said softly. Then, grinning again, “Pretty sure my mother bathes in wine exclusively, from the way she smells. She is still alive, very unfortunately.”

They reached the lab just as it started to snow.

Sirius clearly did not remember the conversation they had in the alley so Remus decided to forget it too. It didn’t matter, anyway. It was nothing.

As they made the long winding trip through the department store– already garish with holiday decorations– he instead thought about Sirius’ cybernetic arm idea.

He could concede that maybe, just maybe, it would be better to replace the arm. If Sirius truly wouldn’t fight again with it and he truly insisted on replacing it, then it could be best for everyone. 

Best for Sirius, best for the war effort. 

He did seem particularly enchanted by cybernetics too. Muggles were eons ahead of wizards on that front. Some of them would chop off an arm and replace it with a cybernetic without a second thought. It was a subculture, niche still, but present and growing.

The wizarding community was old-school. Datapads and wall consoles they had, eventually, incorporated, though with their own magical twists. Cybernetics and neural implants, less so. They were rare among their kind, which was why Remus hadn’t worked on them much and there was precious little research on what impact they might have on magic users. But if he figured out a way to test some ideas to make sure it would work before Sirius went and had his arm sawed off in some back alley…

Sirius had pulled out his wand and was pressing the sequence of buttons on the touch-screen directory that would reveal to them where Alice’s lab was today. 

“Ladies plus size… men’s shoes… housewares…housewares again…” he mumbled, tapping his wand. “Oh, bloody hell, where is replicators and materials printers?”

Finally, at the bottom of the directory, a new addition: Lab - 4th Floor by the Loo - Twist the Mannequin’s Hand.

The Longbottom lab erupted with the detritus of science and magic—a phantasmagoria of burbling potions, pneumatic tubes, blinking lights and scrolling screens. Thick cables wound along ceilings and around poles, buzzing with both the distinct hum of magic and the dangerous spark of electricity.

Massive hulking motherboards of circuits crowded in the middle of the room. Gears turned on the outside of them, pulling some sort of shimmering magical threads in and out, winding them around spools. 

Lab desks lined the walls, cluttered with the chaotic remains of experimentation—steel cauldrons, glass flasks, metallic components of every size, consoles spewing endless streams of numbers, figures, and schematics.

Remus’ eyes roved, fascinated, categorizing. 

A wall of neural arrays hanging from pegs.

Biometric interlinks in a jar, worth at least 5,000 Galleons, looking like so much junk.

A clearly magicked gen-weave processor apparently analyzing some of the shimmering magical wires.

A pile of slightly bloody sub-dermal synth-nodes, looking like they had just been plucked out from under someone’s skin.

Alice Longbottom greeted them looking frazzled– half Muggle mad scientist, half loony witch straight out of the Quibbler streams. In fact, Remus thought he saw a few Quibbler videos playing on one of the consoles: “NARGLES SEEN TRAVELLING THROUGH CIRCUIT INTERFACE”, “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR POLTERGEIST: WE ASK THE EXPERTS”.

“Remus!” she said, sing-song, arms thrown wide. She swept in for a hug and kissed both cheeks twice. She smelled like ozone. 

“I would’ve been glad to have you back from your undercover mission regardless, but coming back and bringing me this? Well now I admit I’m thrilled! I knew you were handy, but this! This!” 

She turned on her heel abruptly and clip-clopped briskly toward a lab table. Sirius caught Remus’ eye and shrugged, so they followed her.

Alice had been Head Girl in their first year. She and Frank seemed to think of them still— all the younger Gryffindors, really— as their flock of fond children. Even though now twenty and twenty seven hardly felt like a significant age difference, Remus couldn’t stop thinking of them like that either: older, wiser, a little out of reach.

At the lab desk, Alice had placed the two shining silver fingertips on a tray, enchanted magnifying glass tilted just so over them, enlarging the runes etched in the metal.

“These are extraordinary. I want you to show me how you made them exactly. I have all the materials you need.” She gestured at the neatly aligned items: neural interface array, sheets of brushed steel ready to be magically shaped, a pale fold of biomaterial casing, shiny Muggle solder, delicate pliers. “I believe I understand your process but I would like to see it myself.”

“Alright… it might take a while,” Remus cautioned, looking over the equipment to make sure he had what he needed. “I’ve only done it once. And probably best if Sirius does the shrinking, he’s better at it anyway and this new wand is still a little finicky.” In truth, the moon was interfering with his magic, too.

Sirius nodded and pulled out his wand, stepping forward. 

Remus worked in silence, Alice and Sirius both assisting whenever he asked. They watched intently, Alice typing on her datapad throughout and asking highly specific questions.

“When you shape the metal, you’re using a ferraforma rather than ferrumfracta, why is that?”

“What is the precise size, to the micron, that you shrink the neural array to? I saw you enchanted it first and then shrank it, why is that?”

“The runes seem to do the bulk of the work to hold the spells in place until they are triggered. Do you think they would be enough on their own for stronger spells?”

It took two hours, but the time went quickly and at the end, he had produced one single fingertip. It was similar to the ones he had made for Sirius but less artful– he hadn’t bothered with the delicate shaping of the tips, which he had done with Sirius’ own elegant hands in mind. Still, he was proud of it.

“Extraordinary,” Alice murmured, peering at the tip through a loupe, tilting it this way and that. “We’ll need to acquire more neural interface arrays, of course. That is the limiting factor. Our Muggle contact only had twenty available and they are expensive–”

“I can get you more,” Sirius said, hands shoved in pockets. Alice had barely acknowledged him up to that point, but now she looked at him with her intense, piercing gaze. “I have some contacts. The money isn’t an issue. How many do you need?”

She pressed her lips together and then said, carefully, “Another thirty would be ideal to get us started. It would be best if everyone had access to at least one weapon that can work magic in the pulse. So many in the Order are only proficient with plasma and it’s such a limited weapon. Of course we’ll need to convince them to allow us to install the cybernetics…”

Sirius cut in, impatient. “Can I get those back?” He pointed at his cybernetic fingertips, still under the magnifying glass. He didn’t wait for an answer and plucked them both up, bringing them up to his face and eyeing them again with a reverence that Remus had to look away from.

Her eyes still lingering on Sirius for a moment longer, Alice eventually said, “Remus, can you make another? I’d like to see your technique for embedding the neural interface array again. That seems to be the most critical step for allowing the user to activate the spells almost as they would cast one themselves…”

So he got back to work.

Sirius wandered away from the lab desk after shrinking another neural array, feeling extraneous. Alice and Remus were deep in discussion, which he had enjoyed listening to for the first two hours but was now bored by, ready for something else.

The lab was a cacophony of magic and electricity, potions burbling alongside consoles displaying diagnostic and debugging screens. Sirius perused for a while, nosing through files and picking up various bits and pieces, intrigued. 

In a corner far from where Remus and Alice tinkered, he found a neat row of beakers filled with blood. Glancing around to ensure no one was watching, he tapped the datapad next to them awake and flicked through the files: “Anti-Magic Pulse Components: Physical”, “Anti-Magic Pulse Components: Magical”, “Blood Incantation Test 1”, “Blood Incantation Test 2”, and on and on. 

He paused on “Anti-Magic Pulse Upgrade 2: Hemomagical Resonance”

Initial observations suggest that the new devices operate via hemomagical resonance, utilizing a subject’s own blood to extract and store their individual magical signature. This process appears to rely on the physiological and thaumaturgical link between a witch or wizard and their own blood, exploiting intrinsic magical synergies to attune the device to the user.

Upon inspection, the internal hemospin array was found to contain a single drop of blood, which appears sufficient to initiate and maintain the binding process. Enchantments integrated into the device draw magical energy from the user in a manner consistent with earlier prototype models. 

However, unlike prior iterations, this design incorporates a more complex layering of blood-binding spells, allowing the device to sequester the extracted magic for extended durations.

The stored magic is released in a controlled, time-delayed manner and is eventually reabsorbed by the original donor. It is unclear if it is possible to store the magic on a more permanent basis or if the leakage is inevitable. During the storage phase, the user experiences a marked suppression of magical function. This suppression includes not only a temporary inability to perform active spellcasting but also a measurable resistance to external magical interventions. Preliminary effects observed include:

• Impaired responsiveness to healing magic

• Resistance to transfiguration-based alterations

• Reduced efficacy of potion administration

• Disruption or failure of Apparition attempts

The underlying mechanism appears to involve an induced interference in the subject’s magical field, possibly through localized arcano-physiological stasis or dampening of magical flow via the blood-magic conduit.

Further empirical research is necessary to quantify the effects, determine reversibility, and assess long-term consequences of repeated or sustained use. 

He scrolled through the subsequent schematics blankly, bleakly. 

As he’d suspected, they had a weapon that was targeted specifically at him. They needed just one drop per device and how many drops had he given them, in that cauldron in Bellatrix’s basement? They could take his magic and even deactivating the device wouldn’t matter in a battle; it would be gone and he’d be left with just his plasma gun. And my cybernetic fingers, he thought firmly. And soon, an arm equipped with five fingers of spells ready to launch.

Not helpless. He would not be helpless. 

He flexed his right hand, closing and opening a fist, feeling the cool metal of his index finger on his palm. He had put Remus’ tips back on, shoving the old ones into his pocket.

“We’re still studying the devices,” Alice said from just behind him. She had stepped up next to him, looking over his shoulder at the datapad. “There may be a way to shorten the time period of the suppression. And the good news is, they need a subject’s blood to make it work.”

“And they only have mine now. But Alice, this blood registry the Ministry is implementing…”

“Dumbledore is aware.”

“Well he’d have to be bloody blind to not be aware,” he spat, rounding on her. “The Ministry is compromised.”

She just looked at him, uncanny blue eyes piercing, and said nothing.

Remus found himself walking Sirius back to his flat. He hadn’t intended to, but somehow, once they had stepped back out of the Department store, they fell into such deep conversation that he barely noticed where they were going.

Sirius told him about what he’d read about the anti-magic devices and they debated the Ministry– how it had become compromised, how much time was left before it fell completely, what the Order could possibly do if the Ministry itself became the enemy. They discussed the blood registry, which was being hailed at length on MystiCast, pitched as a tool to protect Muggleborns and Halfbloods by allowing them to be automatically enrolled in “enhanced security provisions”.

“Maybe we could target the blood registry itself– destroy the collection buildings or the samples, keep them out of Death Eater hands. Delayed explosions or I don’t know…” Sirius said as they walked down the snowy street, huddled close together under the bubble of warmth emanating from Sirius’ new wrist console.

“So you’re un-retired now? Ready to be a vigilante again?”

“Sure, as long as you and Alice get to work on that cybernetic arm. Get a chance to discuss it with her at all? She seemed pretty keen on your work.”

He had. He’d told Alice about Sirius’ insistence on removing his arm and replacing it with a cybernetic and she had jumped on the idea immediately.

“Of course there are purely magical solutions– enchanted silver is the usual method for prosthetics, but they would become inert in the pulse,” she had said, hand to chin thoughtfully. “A regular cybernetic like Muggles use would interfere with spellcasting but perhaps with the work you’ve done on these fingertips we could…”

So they had made a plan to work on a prototype later in the week. At this news, Sirius had grinned hugely and swung his arm around Remus’ shoulder, laughing.

“Yes! I knew you’d help me! Thank you, Remus!” He squeezed Remus around the shoulders, the heat emanating off his wrist console suddenly overwhelming.

“Just don’t run off to some dodgy Muggle cybershop and have your arm thrown in the dumpster, alright? Wait for me to finish.”

“I’ll wait as long as you need, mate, if you promise to make the arm as sexy as these fingertips,” and he nudged Remus’ chin with one, winking.

Outside of Sirius’ flat, they lingered again, talking about nothing much at all. Somehow, they got on the topic of Sirius’ Uncle Alphard and his collections of ancient magical paraphernalia and not-so-ancient Muggle mystery novels so they went upstairs and spent the rest of that Saturday fiddling with both, reading passages out loud to each other and tinkering with the strange devices that littered the shelves. 

Remus did not return to his drab, quiet flat until late.

Chapter Text

Sirius dawdled. He dallied and he wasted time. He cleaned his flat half-heartedly and scrolled idly through his wrist console at his kitchen table, staring at nothing. He did not want to go to his appointment at Moody's.

He dreaded speaking to Moody, knowing exactly how the conversation would go, so instead, once he got to the club, he let himself into the main room rather than going straight to the back office.

The warehouse space was empty and cavernous and dark. It was morning and Monday besides, so the only Muggles he’d seen were staff: a janitor sweeping the last scraps of glitter and cans from the previous night’s festivities and a woman in severe business attire staring angrily at a datapad showing some despairing-looking charts. Both ignored him, eyes sliding off like he wasn’t there at all.

He wandered to the bar. It looked compelling even in the light of day, glowing bottles lined up neatly and shining silver bartop wiped clean of sticky residue.

Stepping around the back, he pulled down a bottle of whiskey and helped himself. Liquid courage, he thought grimly swigging.

Then, he meandered to the log booth to see if Lily was in.

Happily, she was. Looking up from her module, she smiled at him beatifically and said, “Morning, Sirius! Moody said you’d be coming by. Doesn’t seem too pleased with you.”

“No, I should imagine not. I’ve been ignoring his messages.”

“Hm, thought as much.” She slid open the window of the booth and leaned her elbows on the counter, chin in hand. “James said you wouldn’t do any more missions until you figure something out with your arm.”

“Yeah, figure out how to get it chopped off.”

Lily rolled her eyes.

“I’ll leave the talking-you-out-of-it to Remus and James.”

“Remus is on board, actually. He’s building me a new cybernetic.”

Lily’s eyes widened at this and her eyebrows went nearly to her hairline.

“That’s hard to believe. He’s not exactly the type to support something that… insane.”

“Well, believe it!” Sirius said, a little smug. “Might even get him to bite the thing off himself, if I’m lucky!”

“Ugh. He’d hate to hear you say something like that, you know. He doesn’t want people to think of him that way.”

Hand over heart, Sirius declared with a grin, “I mean it with the utmost affection. Anyway, what way is that, exactly?”

“Wolfish.” Her voice was low now, solemn. “It makes him feel like he’s being judged or, I don’t know. Rejected. Ostracized.”

“I like him wolfish.” 

He leaned by the window and crossed his arms. Lily just looked at him with an unreadable expression and then returned to typing for a while, occasionally answering dings on her wrist console. 

Behind her, in the little office space, she had a wall console turned to MystiCast. Sirius stared at that, though it was mostly ads: “PERMANENTLY INJURED BY MAGIC? COMPENSATION IS DUE! WE’LL FIGHT FOR YOU!”

Sirius was about to concede and go to Moody, having clearly wrung as much entertainment from Lily as he was going to get, when she suddenly said, all too casually, “So you and Mary, huh?”

He barked out a laugh. “Don’t start with me, Lily. I don’t kiss and tell.”

“She told me, actually, that it wasn’t anything. Just a one night stand.”

“Exactly right.” Then, generously, because Mary had been great, he added, “I hope we’ll be friends. She was fun and probably smarter than me, which is rare.”

“Definitely smarter than you. You two would be good together, though. You really don’t want to give it a try? I bet she could be convinced.”

“Blacks aren’t built for love, Lils. Not everyone can moon about like you and Potter. It’s never worked like that for me.”

This was true. For Sirius, sex was easy. See someone interesting and attractive, talk to them, flirt: nine times out of ten they would end up in bed. 

It didn’t go anywhere after that, not ever. 

Even the few times he had almost wanted it to, the other person would bow out. They would see something in him, after a few days or a few weeks, that was fundamentally repugnant, not suitable for long-term commitment. He wasn’t sure what exactly that thing was but he had his suspicions. Once they saw it, though, they were out of his life forever.

Lily looked at him a little sadly and he shifted uncomfortably, thinking perhaps Moody’s office would be the preferable experience.

Finally, eyes back on her console, she said, “Everyone is built for love, Sirius.” 

He rolled his eyes and took his leave.

Upstairs in Moody’s office, Mad-Eye made him wait. This seemed to him a transparent power play and he considered throwing a fit about it or else just leaving, but instead he sat in annoyed silence.

After forty-five minutes, Moody at last made his appearance, seating himself behind the large desk. His good eye fixed on Sirius while the other electric blue one spun to the back of his head, presumably reading the scrolling comms on the wall module behind him.

“You have been ignoring your assignments. Patrol at the Cells. Security duty at the new safe houses. Others have been covering for you– Potter, mostly.”

“I told you,” Sirius said stiffly, “I’m not doing any missions until this arm is off. I’m working on it. You of all people should understand that I’m compromised. You saw the footage.”

“How quickly can you have it removed?”

Ah, bless him– straight to the point, Sirius thought.

“Remus and Alice are working on a cybernetic for me. As soon as they have something, I’ll be ready to go. I promise.” 

“It isn’t just the arm, Black. The pulses are targeted at you. And there’s this–”

He slid a chip across the table, both eyes now snapped to Sirius.

Inserting the chip into his wrist console, Sirius’ breath caught when the screen pulled up a picture of Regulus. It was his Hogwarts class photo. He looked young and healthier than he had in a long time, his Slytherin tie and robes crisp and clean. 

Regulus’ movements. His known associates. The missions he had been on, the damage he had caused. Photographs, videos, attestations from Order members who had fought him. Damning evidence. 

His brother, the Death Eater.

“I know, Moody,” he said at last, and he was grateful that his voice sounded steady and strong and normal. “I don’t have a solution for the blood yet. But I can fight in the pulse, without magic, and it’ll be even better when I have the cybernetic arm. And Regulus–” He closed the files on his wrist console abruptly. “He doesn’t matter. He’s made his choices and he’s with them. So that means he’s against us. Against me.”

Moody continued to stare at him for a few moments but eventually his blue eye spun again to the comms wall behind him and he nodded, apparently coming to a decision.

“Get in touch as soon as you’re ready to take your assignments again. We’re shorthanded, Black, and the Death Eaters are getting stronger.” He looked for a second like he wanted to say more but instead said, briskly, “Potter will take over for you for now. He’s eager enough. Dismissed.”

Remus was not surprised to run into Sirius on his way to the Cells. The Order’s holding facility was just around the corner from the club and Sirius had mentioned he had an appointment with Moody. They seemed to keep crossing paths, anyway, so Remus suspected that, even if his eyes hadn’t been scanning the passerby nearly expecting him, they still would have found each other.

Sirius walked up to him on the sidewalk in the block between the club and the Cells like they’d planned it and jumped right in.

“Moody gave me Regulus’ files. His locations and movements and everything.”

Remus wasn’t sure what, exactly, Sirius wanted to hear in response to this. He stayed silent, waiting for more.

“He’s really in it. Raids and attacks and all of it.” He shook his head then, once, like he could shake Regulus out of his mind.

“I’m sorry, Sirius. Moody can’t expect you to go after him yourself, surely?”

“Why not? He’s a Death Eater. I should go after him, the idiot.”

“You were a Death Eater, too.”

The look on Sirius’ face suggested to Remus that he knew what he meant– that he could hear what he wasn’t saying as clearly as if he were doing legilimency. 

You were a Death Eater, too, once, and look at you now.

He shook his head again, antsy, and changed the subject.

“Want company to the Cells? There’s some Death Eaters in there I wouldn’t mind mocking.”

“No, I’m technically not supposed to have even told you about it. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll just see you later then, at—“

They were interrupted by Benjy Fenwick. 

“Oh look, the Order’s Dark Creatures. Conspiring, are you?” He was sneering, Remus thought, in a distinctly Severus-Snape-ish way and he almost said so, but Sirius got there first, apparently having decided to release his grip on his temper.

“Shut the fuck up, honestly. You’re making a fool of yourself again.” He stepped up to the other man, clearly raring for a fight. Remus suspected he was enjoying himself.

“Better a fool than a Death Eater, Black. Everyone in the Order wants you out– everyone,” he spared a disgusted glance for Remus and added, “You too, wolf. It’s sick the kinds of things Dumbledore lets hang around.”

Sirius didn’t wait another second. He lunged, slamming his scarred forearm against Benjy’s throat and shoving him back against the graffiti’d brick wall. 

He snarled in his face, “That wolf is ten times the man you are. You think we care what you and your idiot friends are whispering to each other like a bunch of bloody gossiping children? We’re too busy capturing and killing Death Eaters.”

Remus yanked Sirius by the back of his winter coat and dragged him away, leaving Benjy choking and sputtering behind them.

As he frogmarched Sirius away from the scene, he couldn’t help but say, laughing a little, “If you’re going to pick physical fights with random people like some Muggle tough, you really ought to get better at it, mate. Terrible form.”

The mechanical buzz of each door as it opened before him and closed behind drove his anxiety up another notch.

Moody talked and Remus strained to listen, trying to snap his mind into some semblance of professionalism, of preparedness.

Greyback demanded Remus. He refused to speak to anyone else. 

Moody expected little from the conversation and did not seem disappointed by that, having largely given up on the werewolves already after Remus’ failed mission. He gave his instructions as he walked, gruff and to the point. His eye spun in its socket, peering into each cell they passed—lingering, inspecting.

“Just see what he has to say, Lupin, but don’t let him manipulate you. He wouldn’t do the interview with us watching so you’re on your own, but you give one shout, cast a spell, shoot a plasma— we’re in there. Leave whenever you want. The task is just to see what it is he wants from you and get out as soon as you know it’s useless. Then it’ll be off to Azkaban for him.”

In the metal chair in Greyback’s cell, the smell of the man overwhelmed him for a moment.

Animal, Pack, wolf. The full moon overhead, bright and enticing and all-powerful. He’d never seen it with human eyes, not since he was five, but for a moment he thought he almost could.

Howling together. Running together: paws on grass, on dirt. Wind in fur, unafraid and unbound. Teeth digging into animal flesh; a feast for free! Lapping frigid water from a lake. Falling asleep in a warm pile of bodies, overlapping, unashamed. Abundance. Freedom.

“Look at you, son,” Greyback said, staring at him with undisguised disdain. “This isn’t what I made you.”

He wore the standard-issue faded red jumpsuit that all prisoners wore in this short-term incarceration unit, but still he looked like a creature not meant for imprisonment. His hair haloed around his head, wild and matted and stinking. He dragged his gaze over Remus’ neat shirt, his threadbare winter coat, his plasma gun and wand at his hip.

“Moody said you asked to speak with me. I’m here. So speak.”

“I should think you would like to speak with me. To explain yourself.”

Greyback leaned back in his chair like he was not bound by chains and magic. His clawed hands, manacled, looked cleaner than Remus had ever seen them and he wondered fleetingly whose job it had been to scrape the blood—likely Remus’ own blood— from under them.

“I said everything I needed to say to the Pack on that night. You’ve led them astray. They’ll never know peace or acceptance or freedom under the Death Eaters. You’ve been lied to and you’ve lied to them all in turn.”

At this, Greyback grinned, yellow teeth knives in his mouth. 

“In your life, soft and comfortable and full of love as it has been, did you ever once know acceptance, my son? Outside of the Pack, has anyone ever seen you? Truly seen you and not looked away?”

His eyes burned in his head like embers.

“When they learn you are a wolf, do they come to you with peace and acceptance and freedom? Or is it hate and fear and chains for you?”

Now he leaned forward, straining against his bonds.

“Your Order, does it love you back? Does anyone, knowing what you are and what you are capable of, love you back? Your brothers and sisters did, Remus. I love you still, my lost son.”

Remus twitched at this like he had been stirred violently from a dream. 

“And the Death Eaters love you back?” he snapped, gritting his teeth. “They value you, do they? You aren’t just a rabid dog on a leash to them? We’ve gone over this, Greyback. I don’t disagree that our kind are mistreated. I disagree with your proposed solution.”

“My proposed solution,” the werewolf spat with utter contempt, “is revolution. It is a new order that we have a hand in. It is seizing power and control over our lives when for centuries they have denied them to us!” 

Remus stood up at this and for an instant he imagined they might fight again. Every muscle in his body was screaming to fight. The moon was so full already and of course Greyback would have asked to see him today, now, when they were most alike. 

Instead, Remus turned and knocked briskly on the door. It buzzed, a mechanical screech that shook him back to himself, and slid open. As he left, Greyback began to laugh, low and growling.

After what felt like an eternal debrief with Moody, Remus finally sucked in the fresh, cold afternoon air again outside. He breathed in deeply, steadying. He tucked himself into the alley between the Cells and the neighboring unassuming residential building and pressed his back to the graffitied wall, letting the city smells—garbage, urine, something sweet baking across the street, hot steam of laundry detergent wafting from somewhere— ground him.

One breath, two. 

Greyback wasn’t wrong, of course. 

Remus had known love, he was sure of that. His parents had loved him, had sacrificed everything for him. James and Peter and Lily loved him, too. They knew he was a werewolf and they loved him despite it. 

Despite it.

They feared him too. He could see it in their eyes, in their tense body language. They feared for him, worried for him. Their worry was tinged with a streak of hatred for the werewolf like it was something separate from him: a deformation, an interloper, a sick thing they wanted badly to eliminate. Like it wasn’t who he was, like that wasn’t becoming more apparent on his human body every passing year.

No one had ever seen him transform. They’d seen the aftermath but not the thing itself. Of course they couldn’t. It was dangerous. He’d hidden the little post-Pack changes, too, as best he could: glamoured away the strange thickening claws, hidden his heightening senses, neglected to mention the fighting and the violence he had grown accustomed to.

He still remembered the day his parents found him after Greyback bit him. His father had screamed, a long keening thing, like Remus was dead. His mother, confused, not understanding, had asked again and again if there was a cure, if there was a way, if they could make it stop.

He remembered every moon after: the experiments to see if they could bind him or enchant him or make him sleep through the transformation, all failed. The cages and dark basements and yes, chains and muzzles.

The fear of being discovered, of being found out, of the neighbors knowing, was palpable throughout his whole childhood. They were constantly moving, forbidding him from speaking to other children, from playing outside when the moon was too full lest someone noticed the slight, minute differences—the wolf rearing its head. They had been forced out of more towns than he could count. 

Then Hogwarts. James and Peter and eventually Lily finding out was a gift. It was a relief. It was a kind of freedom. But it always felt like an exception, like werewolves are bad and scary but not our Moony. And that was fine. It was alright. It was good to be an exception. It was a happy time.

But now everyone would know soon and it was clear that not all of them would think him exceptional. The whole Order, fighting against blood supremacy and fascism while spitting at his feet and calling him a monster. 

The Pack had not bent the knee to the Order or the Ministry so the excuse to slam the door to freedom and peace and acceptance was ready-made. There would be no help for the Pack. They would be left on their own, left out of society, no matter who won the war.

Remus dragged in another breath of icy air and coughed on it, burning his lungs.

Just then, his datapad dinged with a message. Grateful for the distraction, he pulled it out and read, from Sirius:

Don’t let that mad Death Eater get you down. Join us at Static tonight?

That instinctive feeling of being intruded upon, of not-pack, swelled in his gut for an instant.

Get away, get back, stay out of my life, do not look at me.

But then he thought of Sirius saying:

“That wolf is ten times the man you are,” and;

“You were brilliant. Stunning, really… something to behold.”

He thought back to their first meeting and the way that he had asked, light and unfazed by the answer, “you’re a werewolf, I assume?”

They fought then—argued— then fought alongside each other and saved each other's lives and still here he was, messaging him to meet for a pint.

He thought of Sirius looking at his claws and saying nothing but not looking away.

He thought of Sirius’ rapt face as Remus explained his heightened senses, the strange werewolf magic: brow furrowed, lips pressed together.

Sirius asked so many questions but it was as though every detail was just a fact he was collecting, an interesting bit of information, and not evidence of disease and deformation.

He thought about these things and he calmed his breathing. Eventually, he walked himself to lunch because suddenly he felt very hungry.

“The moon is tomorrow night. Another one and I haven’t made any progress on the Animagus potion. Don’t know where to find any “dew untouched by sun or human foot” and the mandrake leaf thing… We’re supposed to keep it in our mouths from “moon to moon”. Who has time for that? I’m supposed to keep a bloody leaf in my mouth for a full month?” James was pulling at his hair, pouring over the open datapad file of his notes on the Animagus ritual.

It was an old spell, unchanged and un-iterated upon in centuries. Old magic tended to be like that– full of rituals and strange mysticism and odd little requirements that Sirius always suspected might not be entirely necessary but added a certain drama to the proceedings. It would be too risky to leave out those flourishes, considering the possible consequences, but modern magic was much more straightforward and research-based. 

“Dew untouched by sun or human foot could be in a cave or something. Maybe the underside of some roots, in a forest somewhere?” Sirius said, thoughtful. 

“How are we supposed to work with a mandrake leaf in our mouths?” Peter added. “Going to fight Death Eaters while chewing on some manky old leaf? Present to the Minister of Magic with mandrake-breath?”

James put his head down, despairing. 

“You just need to start. Listen, I’ll go out and find the dew. I don’t have a day job, it’s not a problem,” he said, before James could interrupt. “Then you just have to do it. The leaf thing is stupid but we’ll just magic it in place under your tongues or something. Could probably figure out some spell to make it less noticeable, too.”

“You’re going to do it, too, right, Sirius? We need your help,” Peter said with a note of rising panic.

As Sirius had gotten more involved in this project, he had come to find that Peter was not the finest spellcaster or potionmaker or really, uncharitably, wizard. James had been carrying the burden of their research and preparation for the spell, but he was busier than ever, what with taking on all of Sirius’ Order assignments and all the time he had to spend doting on Lily like the besotted wreck he was.

“I wasn’t planning on it. This is your thing, for Remus, right? He’d think it was weird if I just joined up too. Though I guess it would be wicked to become a panther or something.”

“Moony wouldn’t mind. It’s not like you have to join us for the moons or anything. Just help us with the magic so we don’t both end up disfigured freaks for the rest of our lives.” James pulled up a picture on his datapad, apparently saved in his animagus notes: a photograph of a man with his face stretched horrifically by a bird beak protruding where his mouth should be.

Sirius shrugged noncommittally.

In truth, he had considered doing the ritual. But it seemed intrusive and he could imagine Remus’ annoyed expression– why is he here?-- quite clearly. The spell did intrigue him in the way that all complicated magic tended to, though, and now he turned it over in his mind again. He could do it. Maybe he would do it. 

By the time Remus arrived, James had stashed away his notes and they had all agreed to not mention it. Remus was cagey about the whole plan still and took every opportunity to try to talk them out of it.

“How was Greyback?” James asked as Remus slid into the booth next to Sirius. 

“I don’t want to talk about it, honestly. In fact, I’d like to drink to forget.” He raised a hand, summoning a server.

Sirius looked at him closely, trying to see if he could ascertain what it was that had upset him about the meeting by his face. He seemed weary but as he took a sip of his beer, he had a steely look in his eye, like under the weariness was some decision he had come to.

“Moons, Lily and I have patrols out in Cardiff when you’ll be recovering from… you know,” James said, looking at Remus carefully as he drained his pint with great efficiency and ordered another. “So Pete will come help you out in the morning.”

“What?” Peter yelped, this apparently being news to him. “I can’t! It’s mum’s birthday and I’m taking her to Bath! She’d go mental if I disappeared!”

“Can’t disappoint Mrs. Pettigrew,” Remus mumbled, though he gave Peter a sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’ll just bring the potions, no big deal.”

“I can help,” Sirius said automatically, though he couldn’t get himself to look at Remus as he offered. “It’s my fault James is busy.”

He expected he’d get that look–why is he here?-- and he really didn’t want to see it.

But to Sirius’ great surprise, Remus, after a moment’s hesitation, said lightly, “Alright. Guess it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve patched me up, anyway.”

Sirius did look up now and met Remus’ eyes. For a second, he could only think let me in, but after that second passed, he didn’t know why he’d thought it. 

After a few more beers and a rousing debate between the three Gryffindors about whose mum had been more of a nag while at Hogwarts—a debate Sirius bowed out of, not wanting to bring the mood down—they all went their separate ways. 

Before Apparating, James pulled Sirius aside to set a plan to work on the Animagus ritual.

“I’ll hunt down the dew tomorrow. It can’t be that hard,” Sirius said quietly, out of Remus’ earshot. “Then I’ll swing by yours.”

“You’re a bloody hero, Black. See you!” He disappeared with a crack, always loving a dramatic exit.

Then it was just him and Remus again, dallying outside in the cold. Sirius only dimly acknowledged to himself that he’d wanted it that way, wasting time until the other two had left to end up last out the door with Remus. 

That strange thought flitted across his mind again– let me in.

“So I’ll just find you… after?” he said uncertainly, not sure how to phrase what he was asking. Remus understood, though, and nodded.

“I’ll message you the location. It’s pretty heavily spelled– anti-Apparition, soundproofed, Unplottable– but I’ll get you the instructions.”

Remus looked up toward the night sky then, which was glowing the anemic starless-grey that it always was in the depths of the city. The moon peeked between buildings, just a sliver visible. Their breaths came out in icy puffs of steam in the frigid night and Sirius thought that Remus’ jacket was no where near sufficient for the oncoming winter. He thought about pulling him in and sharing his own warmth. 

“Thanks for doing it,” Remus said, still gazing up and away rather than at Sirius. “It’s… well, I won’t be at my best. It can be kind of gross, so I’m sorry in advance for that.”

Sirius shrugged, smiling, “We sure do see a lot of each other’s blood, don’t we?”

“I’d like to get out of that habit, to be honest.” Remus shifted from one foot to the other, rubbed his hands together. “You know, it’s pretty unusual how you’ve just accepted the whole werewolf thing.” He said this last in a rush, like he was nervous about it.

“Unusual? Unusual how?”

“Well, when you first found out, right when you met me, you didn’t really seem to care. And then you just had a million questions about it, but you never seemed… I don’t know. Disturbed by it. Even James was disturbed by it at first, though he was trying not to be. He couldn’t look at me straight on for about a week and then didn’t actually say “werewolf” for about six months. Kept calling it my “furry little problem” like I had a poorly behaved gerbil or something instead of a Dark curse that makes me a monster. I think Peter spent about a year scared of me, always jumping and dropping things when I came into the room.”

He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and hunched in on himself, now staring at his shoes.

“I’ve seen Dark monsters, Remus,” Sirius said, voice soft. He was staring at Remus, willing him to look up. “I could tell right away you weren’t one.”

“I am, though. I am. You asked a while ago if I was sure I’d never hurt anyone when I was with–”

“That was stupid. I was just trying to rile you up, I don’t actually think–”

“No, you were right. I’m not completely certain. I took precautions. I tried to be careful. I’m fairly certain I never… but I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure.” He finally looked up and met Sirius’ eyes.

Sirius thought: You didn’t. I know you wouldn’t. But he didn’t say it, because he knew what it felt like to be given a grace you did not feel you deserved.

“Well, anyway… I’ll send you the coordinates. Have a good night, Sirius.”

And Remus left abruptly, rushing down the street, to Sirius’ great relief. Sirius suddenly felt like he couldn’t continue the conversation another moment lest he find himself acting on the strange thought– let me in, let me in—that was ringing in his head.

Back at his flat, Sirius stayed up too late.

This would not in and of itself be a problem, but he stayed up too late drinking Muggle whiskey he had picked up on his way home and flipping through the datafiles Moody had given him on Regulus, both of which brought him right back to the precipice of that dark pit he knew he was so prone to fall into.

His brother was going to die.

Regulus, who wept inconsolably when Neepy, their ancient old house elf, had finally keeled over. He had insisted that Sirius join him in a solemn– not Black-family-sanctioned– funeral for her in the backyard in the dead of the night. He’d read a poem out loud, his sweet voice mournful under the moonlight.

Regulus, who rubbed dittany on Sirius’ back with small, soft, little-boy hands when their mother got too enthusiastic when punishing him for one transgression or another and split him open, slicing long, sticky lashes on either side of his spine.

Regulus who could hardly stomach play-wrestling on the carpet in the drawing room. Who could barely tolerate Father yelling at him over dinner. Who froze in panic when one of the Slytherin boys had commanded him to curse a Hufflepuff half blood who had looked at them wrong.

How was he going to handle Bellatrix shrieking at him to torture someone, to murder them? How was he going to kneel before the Dark Lord himself and pledge to kill and to die for him and to really mean it?

Regulus had stood above Sirius, lying there prone and bound, and started to slit his throat.

But he had cut so shallowly and he had done it so slowly.

He had not slashed the carotid artery or the jugular. It had been just a nick– enough to appease Bellatrix, to draw a rush of blood, but not enough to kill him. Not really. Not quickly enough to matter.

He’d been wasting time. Distracting Bellatrix with the drama of it so Sirius could figure something out: escape or rescue or miracle.

That, of course, was why Regulus was doomed.

Scrolling through the datafiles, Sirius dwelled on his brother’s movements, which were apparently well-tracked. LeStrange manor, the Malfoy’s, outside of Grimmauld Place, Knockturn Alley. His involvement with the Death Eaters was, according to Moody’s notes, “officially speculation per Auror’s Office standards of evidence.” Technically, in the eyes of the Ministry, Regulus was just the Black Heir: manager of many an ancient asset and general trust fund baby. But that did not stop the Order from monitoring him.

It was likely, Sirius thought, that Regulus would be killed by the Death Eaters outright eventually. He wouldn’t be able to do what they asked. He would try to back out at some point as he always did, eternally unwilling to dirty his own hands and forcing Sirius to do it for him. But Sirius had failed, had balked, and someday soon they would both pay the price.

But it was also possible Regulus would be killed or captured by the Order. 

Captured: good, ideal.

Killed? Intolerable still, even now, after everything.

Approaching a black out, feeling his whole life shrinking to one pinpoint, tears gathering in his eyes at the thought of it, Sirius knew that he still could not let his brother be killed by the Order.

He couldn’t let him be killed by the Death Eaters either, but that seemed less immediate, more like some slow-rolling inevitable disaster he couldn’t conceive of a solution to. 

But he could protect him from the Order. He just needed more information.

Sirius hit a dead-end in his problem-solving then, having drank more than half a bottle of whiskey and spiraled himself into a black mood. He did not remember the rest of the night.

He awoke the next morning before the crack of dawn, shocked by a wailing charm of some kind emitting from his own wand.  He rolled over in a panic, already feeling the hangover, and seized the wand, silencing it. Not a second later, a similar screech started blasting from his wrist console. For this, he had to stumble from his nest of blankets and range wildly around the room, looking for the source of the noise.

Finally, under his crumpled and abandoned trousers, he found it, screen still pulled up to the messages. He silenced the alarm he had apparently set and stared at the screen, where he saw that last night he had sent a string of solicitous and typo-riddled messages to several random people inviting them variously to his flat, the club, a vacation to France, and to the bathroom of a bar where a particularly good-looking man had once blown him while Sirius nervously held the door closed with one clenched fist. 

Fortunately, none of his clumsy overtures had come to any fruition and he was alone.

He remembered only after several shameful minutes during which he confirmed none of the recipients of his late night drunk advances were members of the Order that he had a job to do that dawn.

He considered blowing it off. He thought about drawing his curtains and curling into his bed, burying himself under blankets and maybe finishing that other half of whiskey. Maybe he could go to the club— it was what, Tuesday? People would be there, people who did not know him or care about him or ask any questions. Such people would be good.

But he had promised James. He thought of the scars across Remus’ face, his hands, his forearms—already a lifetime’s worth of damage, and how much more could he take? 

So, dragging himself back together, he left his flat and Apparated to the Białowieża Forest.

Alice let him use the lab. He looked through a loupe at his handiwork— runes carefully etched along a sheet of metal— and smiled, impressed with himself. He’d shaped the metal more precisely than he’d expected, thanks to the now powerful pull of the full moon and its strange impact on his ferraforma. The shell of the cybernetic arm, brushed steel lined with neat swirls of runes, glinted appealingly even under the flat lab lights.

“Your friend had twenty neural interface arrays delivered already,” Alice said, approaching him with her arms full of several plastic-wrapped boxes. “Must have cost him a fortune for that type of rushed delivery.”

“I’m sure it did,” Remus murmured back, tweaking a rune with his wand.

“You’ll help me with the manufacturing.”

This was not a question. He smiled a little, looking up from his work. “Of course.”

“Good then. We’ll pay you 500 Galleons a piece. More for any further innovations you can develop; negotiable of course. Frank makes our lunches but he's a terrible cook so don’t count that as a perk. I can expect you back a day or two after the moon, I presume?”

Remus just blinked at her. 

“If you need longer, I don’t mind, I just would like to know so I can have your work station prepared.”

She was offering him a job? Doing— he stared down at the silver arm, his wand, the Muggle solder still hot at the tip— this? She knew he was a werewolf— unreliable around full moons and a Dark creature besides— and still she offered him a job?

“Alice, a day or two is perfect. Let’s call it a day and I’ll let you know if I need more time. Incredible! I didn’t think you were taking on any additional hands.”

“Nonsense. There’s a war on and you brought us some very fine new weapons. I’d be stupid not to steal you from Moody. Can’t have a mind capable of this—“ and she gestured at the arm—“blown to pieces on some mission in a back alley. Tell me about these runes then…”

They spent the rest of the day—well into late afternoon, really—lost in the work. By the time Remus Apparated to just outside his heavily-spelled, secure basement, the sun sinking low toward the horizon, his mind and his body were pleasantly exhausted, buzzing with magic and electric charge and the satisfaction of work well done. 

The forest sparkled with a sheen of frost, the air crisp and cold and doing immediate wonders for his hangover. 

It was not quite freezing, still early enough in the season that though night had dipped down to quite frigid here in Poland, the early burn of the morning sun still delivered what he was looking for: dew.

He just had to find it.

There were precious few places like this left in the world. Nearly every forest had been leveled, nearly every wild place turned to tangles of tarmac streets and mazes of silver high rises or else squat slums. 

Sirius had thought of this forest because he had been here before.

The Dark Lord himself sent him here to find a unicorn. Sirius thought it was a fool's errand, something to keep him occupied or else just make him look stupid, bumbling around in some random forest in the night for no reason. Regardless, he hadn’t minded. A fool's errand was better than a real one.

He’d walked through the woods one summer night under the sharp crescent of a white moon and felt peaceful. He had thought about never returning, staying in the woods forever.

They felt alive around him, then and now, deep and old and mystical. He had not found a unicorn then, but he suspected they truly were nearby; the magic of wild creatures hummed softly like a tune in the air. 

The massive old oaks cracked loudly as he walked through the woods, expanding with the morning warmth. He was looking for a crevice or a cave or a particularly robust gap-riddled root system.

As the sun warmed his face, Sirius felt himself step back from the precipice he’d approached the night before. His mood shifted, lightened. He breathed in the incredible air deeply, marveling at it each time. Singing birds interrupted the otherwise hushed silence as he crunched over grass and underbrush still half-frozen from the night.

After walking a ways, perhaps further than strictly necessary, he found a gnarled old oak tree that looked promising. Its root system was bucking out of the earth, a snarl of wood that made hideyholes and crevices and gaps. 

On his knees, wand tip lit, he peered down into one such hideyhole. His wand light caught the bright flash of some small animal’s eyes as it scurried away.

Smiling, Sirius murmured, “Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to wake you.” 

He cast two spells then, wand pointed into the dark depths of the root system. The first he’d wrangled together ages ago, an experiment from Hogwarts that he’d used mostly for mischief and nonsense. It was a combination of homenum revelio, prior incantato, and aparecium. It should reveal human footprints, if there had ever been any. 

Waving his wand first under the roots and then behind himself, he was satisfied to see his own footprints light up with shimmering silver outlines on the forest floor but nothing under the roots— not a human footprint in at least the last month, if his magic was as good as he hoped.

Then, back under the roots, he cast another spell. This he was inventing on the spot, a gut-check for what seemed obvious based on the configuration of roots. Regardless, he moved his wand carefully and precisely, attempting for a hybrid of lumos sonora and revelio. Nothing lit up— the roots all remained as dark and shadowed as ever. Untouched by the sun for at least seven days. 

He summoned a vial and carefully filled it to the top with dew siphoned from amongst the roots, vanishing it again while it was still under the shade of the oak tree.

Job done, he smiled and stretched, cracking his back and his shoulders. He turned his face toward the rising sun and let it warm him. He realized cheerfully that he had nowhere to be until the evening, when James had invited him for dinner.

So Sirius spent the rest of that day wandering the forest, occupied only by the noises of the animals around him preparing for winter, the crisp breeze, and the sway of the barren, leafless trees under the sun. 

Chapter Text

“If we don’t start now, we’ll have to wait at least another month. Come on, Pete– it’s going to be annoying now and it’ll be annoying next month or the month after. We should just get it over with.”

They gathered around Lily and James’ dining table, the evidence of their efforts on the Animagus ritual in a neat pile in the middle. Peter cleared their dinner plates while James and Sirius sat, datapads open, planning.

“I have a presentation next week, James. You don’t have to work for your Galleons but I do,” Peter shot, irritated. The plates rattled loudly as he dropped them unceremoniously into the slick, matte black dishwasher that sat flush with the kitchen cabinetry, humming imperceptibly with magic.

“I’ll shrink it down and we can do a permanent sticking charm on the roof of your mouth. You’ll hardly notice it!” Sirius said, having grown exasperated with the debate. “Let’s just do it before you go off with your mum. C’mon, Peter. For Remus.”

Peter gave him a dirty look, reminiscent, Sirius thought, of Remus’ own what-is-he-doing-here look, but nevertheless he sat down sullenly and seemed to submit.

Carefully, Sirius shrank three mandrake leaves. The leaves, rough hewn ruffles nearly the texture of paper, released an acrid perfume like apples going bad. He shrank them as small as he dared and, peering into James’ open mouth, used his wand to glue the now-small green leaf just behind his teeth. James smacked his lips for a second, rolling his tongue around his mouth and then grinned. 

“Can barely feel it! Brilliant, mate– I’ll do you!”

“Don’t tell Remus about me doing it too, alright? I don’t want him to think I’m trying to butt into his whole–” 

“Don’t be so paranoid. Moony will be fine. He likes you. You’re friends. Anyway, we’re not going to tell him at all, he’ll be a buzzkill about it.”

Sirius did believe that he and Remus were friends now, but there was a big difference– leagues of difference, really– between the friendship he was tentatively building with Remus and James and Peter and the bond the three men already shared. He could see that clearly and while some part of him had the impulse to elbow his way in without a care, he also felt wary. He thought Remus even hearing about this plan, about his involvement in the Animagus ritual, would result in his expulsion from the  friendship immediately. Just seeing Remus tomorrow morning and helping heal him after his transformation felt like enough of a risky incursion.

Wand out, James stepped to Sirius and steadied his own hand on Sirius’ chin, who obediently opened his mouth and let James affix the leaf. Finally, Sirius did Peter, who gagged a little and then huffed indignantly when Sirius made a rude joke about it.

They all sat for a moment under the bright LED light hanging from a stylish pendant above the dining table, looking at each other with some amount of trepidation, working their jaws experimentally.

Finally, Peter said, “Wonder what we’ll be,” which kicked off a round of wild speculation, laughter, accusations, and further rude jokes.

Eventually, Peter left to meet his mother to yet further teasing.

“You can stay here, mate,” James said to Sirius as he tidied the kitchen once Peter had left. “The pull out is dead comfortable, I sleep on it all the time.”

“What, when Lily’s got you in the doghouse for being a twat?”

“Ha! Yes, then. But also when I’ve conked out after watching eight straight hours of Quidditch or when Lily is snoring like a bloody dragon or when she and I have had an absolutely raucous bit of shagging right here on this very kitchen table and we can’t quite make it to bed before passing out—“

“Nasty, Potter! We ate here!”

“Don’t pretend to be so precious, Black! I’ve seen your flat, it’s basically a biohazard!”

Later, when Sirius woke up before dawn once again to the blare of an alarm, he smiled to find himself buried under a ratty old quilt on James’ couch. James and Lily were gone already, off on patrol, but their presence in the warm house felt close still.

Cold steel floor pressed to his face, sticky with blood, Remus awoke immediately second guessing his impulse to let Sirius see him like this. 

He was naked for one, which seemed completely perverse and disturbing in a way it never seemed when it was just James or Peter or Lily coming in. Second, he was pretty sure he’d bitten his own leg to the bone again, which was, as James had noted last time, disgusting. His body felt weak and split apart and like it was not his own. He flailed for a moment, grabbing at the discarded trousers he’d set aside the previous night and agonizingly pulling them on, trying to be as ginger with the bad leg as he could be. 

Sirius made it all so much worse when he swung the heavy steel door open, looking flushed and snow speckled and impossibly handsome, wrapped in a luxurious black wool coat like some Christmas prince from the dreadful Muggle holiday specials Remus’ mum used to love watching.

Sirius’ face fell when his eyes adjusted to the dark and he made out Remus’ huddled body on the ground.

“Fuck, Remus–”

He tried to cut him off with something– anything– but could barely release a groan through his jaw, which had not set right.

Sirius said no more as he dropped to his knees and got to work, spellcasting briskly and administering potions and rubbing dittany on the bites and scratches, his touch careful and gentle. 

Despite the pain and the vague delirium that always accompanied awakening from a full moon, Remus still had the strength to bitterly question, again, what exactly he had been thinking.

Was it some self-indulgent impulse to make himself more pathetic in Sirius’ eyes, put on a spectacle for pity?

A desire to show him, to force him to see, that he was a Dark creature capable of great violence?

A misguided grab at attention? The utterly embarrassing desire to have Sirius Black look at him again so intently?

When he was nearly decent enough to speak again, though, Remus just mumbled out, “You smell like rotten fruit, mate. Old apples or something. You need to do laundry.”

Sirius barked out a slightly nervous laugh and bit at his lip, still surveying his handiwork on Remus’ bare leg. Remus promptly snatched his sweatpants from the ground next to him and pulled them on.

“Sorry to make you get up so early. Must be freezing out there–” Remus said, struggling to get up.

“It’s nothing, no problem,” Sirius replied too quickly, eyes mortifyingly now combing over Remus’ bare chest. “Just feel like St. Mungo’s could do a better job than me on these scars.” And he reached a finger out, ghosting it on one of the fresh scars just across Remus’ ribs.

Remus leapt away from the touch and then awkwardly tried to cover the motion by dipping down to grab his shirt from the ground. He pulled it on, very aware of his own scarred and scrawny and half-naked body next to Sirius’, wrapped fully in luxurious black wool.

As Remus gathered the last of his things, moving tenderly still, Sirius looked around the basement. It was as cozy as any steel-lined basement could be without any furniture in it, which was to say, not very. Against one wall sat coiled a long steel chain secured to the wall with hooks and heavy screws. Above it hung an old muzzle, which Remus felt the need to explain he no longer used when he saw Sirius staring at it with a furrowed brow.

“Never really worked anyway,” he said, gesturing at the muzzle. “That or the chain.” 

Sirius, to his credit, kept a straight face at this. 

“Why don’t you go to St. Mungo’s after?” he asked as they climbed the stairs out of the basement, Sirius insisting that Remus wrap an arm around his shoulders for support.

“Sometimes I do, when it’s bad enough and Lily is there to play middleman with my paperwork. I’m not registered so… don’t really want all the details in the records.”

“Oh, right. Of course,” Sirius said, eyes widening and then hand flying up to shield his face from the harsh glint of sudden sunlight as they emerged from underground. “Right, so no one in the Ministry even knows you’re down there changing, huh? Ever thought about doing it somewhere outside instead, like you did with the other wolves? Since no one is making you do one thing or the other.”

“No. It was unsafe enough when I did it with the Pack,” Remus replied tightly, gritting his teeth against the jolt to his skeleton as they momentarily slipped on early morning ice and Sirius just barely caught them. “I couldn’t risk that on my own. At least with the Pack, I was distracted by the others and we were always so far away from civilization.”

Sirius fell into silent thought and Remus wanted to press him, ask what he was thinking, but he didn’t have the energy. 

Leaving Remus’ miserable, cramped flat in some sad outskirt of London after safely depositing him into his lonely little bed with a cup of tea and a stern warning not to even think about getting up, Sirius allowed himself a pat on the back. 

He thought he’d handled the whole “healing-your-new-friend-who-has-maimed-himself” thing with remarkable stoicism and minimal embarrassment for Remus, who was plainly uncomfortable with Sirius’ presence. He felt he’d been pretty much normal throughout, successfully masking the horror—the stomach-churning horror—of imagining Remus alone in that basement in chains on the cold floor, in the dark, trying to gnaw his own leg off.

Better yet, he thought, he had even managed to choke down the sudden unmistakable realization that was ringing through his mind now like a bell: he was attracted to Remus. Very attracted to him. Attracted to him to a point of madness, maybe.

He had felt an inexplicable heat in his chest at the sight of him. He’d felt it before, too, he now realized—those same stirrings. It wasn’t until he'd impulsively placed his finger on Remus' pale, scarred chest that he’d finally recognized that heat for what it was.

The unusual thing, Sirius thought, was not that he was attracted to Remus but rather that it had taken him so damn long to truly notice. 

Typically, the process of meeting someone, being attracted to them, and acting on it was a simple thing– a one-two-three quick step, nearly instantaneous. It was something that he tended to hold lightly: a fleeting fact of life, a passing diversion, nothing to dwell on once the moment had passed. 

But now, walking back through the cold autumn morning, he felt like Remus had snuck up behind him on the street and bludgeoned him over the head, leaving him too dazed to even Apparate.

He felt sick to his stomach. The basement was a scene torn straight from his nightmares and Remus had been so casual about it. He had gritted his teeth and dragged himself up, his leg bone nearly protruding out through the skin. He’d even joked, clearly catching the very faint rotten-fruit smell of the mandrake leaf glued to the roof of Sirius’ mouth. He’d refused help, trying to shrug off Sirius’ attempts to bear his weight.

Remus took it all in stride. The physical violence was disturbing,  yes, but what hit hardest was the psychological toll—Remus locking himself away once a month, willingly, in chains and Merlin help him, a muzzle. It was wrong and cruel, a self-destruction that was intolerable to witness.

Sirius had been overwhelmed by the desire to protect Remus, to take him far from that basement forever. But he had also been floored by Remus’ strength—his pride, his stubbornness, his grit. He needed no one to save him.

Seeing Remus’ eyes glinting amber in the darkness of the basement, Sirius now understood. Let me in, let me in, he had thought again and again, and now he knew that what he wanted was to drag Remus to him, to press their chests together and to let himself be devoured and to devour in turn.

To feel this way, so strongly that it nearly choked him, about the first friend he had made in years—maybe in his life—felt like a cruel joke. Leaving the basement, he’d almost slipped on the ice and cracked both their heads open just from the sheer unfair bad luck of it.

Waiting outside of Sirius’ flat twelve days after the moon one morning, Remus wondered if the basement had scared him off. He hadn’t responded to messages, not from him or James or Peter or Lily, leaving invitations ignored and James’ insistent nagging unanswered. 

Remus hadn’t entirely noticed at first as he’d spent the days after the moon in the Longbottom’s lab, working both on an army’s worth of multi-purpose enchanted cybernetics and one very particular arm. But once he sent Sirius a message that the arm was ready for him to see and still received no response for four days, he worried.

Outside in the growing fall chill, Remus again felt distinctly out of place as various Muggles went in and out of the posh building, the doors sliding open and closed with a soft whisper. He finally slipped in behind one of them just to escape the wind. The doorman at the desk eyed him warily and when he asked to leave a package for the resident in the penthouse on the 87th floor, he was tartly told there was no 87th floor. He sent another string of messages to Sirius.

Oy, I’m downstairs. Where are you?

I have the arm for you. I’d leave it with the doorman but he doesn’t know you exist

I won’t stay, just want to drop it at yours

Finally, exasperated, Remus summoned a Patronus as subtly as he could, waiting for a Muggle woman to disappear into the elevator before calling up the glowing wolf.

He wasn’t trying to see Sirius, to impose on him. If he didn’t want to see them, that was fine. Though James and Peter and Remus were maybe a little co-dependent, acclimated as they were to always being around each other after living basically on top of one another at Hogwarts, that didn’t mean they had to drag Sirius into that type of friendship. It had seemed for a minute that maybe he wanted in, wanted to be their friend, but he’d probably had enough. They could just be casual friends, the type who said hello at Order meetings and grabbed a pint every two months. 

Normal. Very normal.

It wasn’t like they really thought there was something wrong, either; Lily reported that Sirius had contacted Moody just the other day and Mad-Eye had said he was fine.

So Remus reasoned that just coming by and dropping off the arm could be the last time he reached out and then they’d leave Sirius alone, if that was what he wanted. It wasn’t a big deal. They were only barely friends. The arm was taking up too much lab desk space though, so he wanted to get rid of it one way or another.

A half hour passed. Remus considered leaving. Maybe Sirius had changed his mind about the arm, which was a good thing really. He probably just didn’t want to tell Remus about it, since he’d already made the thing. 

Maybe he wasn’t even home; maybe he’d spent the night at someone else’s. 

Remus sent one more message and resolved to leave right after.

It’s alright if you don’t want it anymore, no worries. See you around 

He debated adding an exclamation mark, typing it and deleting it for about two minutes, when the elevator opened and Sirius stepped out. 

He looked, frankly, strung out, though Remus wasn’t necessarily one to judge, considering the last time they’d seen each other, he’d been bleeding out on a basement floor. Sirius’ dark hair was wet like he’d just showered, haphazardly pulled back into a ponytail rather than curling at his shoulders. He had dark circles under his eyes, purple and tender, and his face looked gaunt as though he hadn’t been eating. Remus could smell that slightly off, sweet rotten odor he’d caught after the moon and seemed to keep sniffing everywhere else too, which made him paranoidly wonder if maybe he was the one emitting it. More strongly, he smelled the dull stink of alcohol and unwashed clothes.

“Hey, sorry, I just came to drop this by,” he said, awkwardly raising the wrapped package in his arms just slightly. “But it’s alright if you don’t want it anymore, I’m sure we can repurpose—“

“‘Course I want it,” Sirius cut in, looking at the package through bloodshot eyes, his voice raspy. “Come up.”

In the elevator, Sirius said nothing, hands shoved into pockets and gaze fixed on the ceiling. His Adam's apple bobbed along the pale line of his throat once as he swallowed and sucked in a shallow breath.

Remus looked away, fixed his own eyes on the bundle in his arms. 

At the top floor, Sirius stepped out and briskly went to his kitchen, waving his wand jerkily and sending a mess of napkins and various bits of garbage flying from the counter to the already-full sink. 

The apartment was worse than when Remus had first seen it, basically a ruin. He scanned quickly, feeling like Sirius could sense where he looked, so he tried not to let his gaze linger. Regardless, he noticed the stripped bed by the window, mattress bare, bottles scattered by the foot of it, and the wall console which sat quiet and dark, the distinct glass shatter of someone having angrily thrown something at it evident on the screen. 

Sirius shifted, cleared his throat. “Well, the arm?” And he gestured at the counter, indicating Remus could put it there.

He did, flipping back the canvas wrapping.

He couldn’t help, then, looking intently at Sirius. A series of expressions seemed to surface there, on his beautiful haggard face, each minutely and quickly arising and being wrangled down just as efficiently. 

Remus thought he saw that reverence again, then a ghost of a smile, a flicker of storm-grey eyes meeting his, then a twist of the mouth like he felt uncomfortable or maybe sick.

Finally, he pressed one hand to his mouth briefly and eventually settled on a neutral mask—casual.

“It’s—yeah, it’s great. Looks great. Longbottoms helped with it, did they?”

“Some,” Remus replied, his stomach clenching nauseously as he fought down the urge to snatch the arm and turn tail. Alice had only really helped with the testing. Seeing Sirius still unmoving, staring at the arm, he added, “You really don’t need to take it. It’s good if you changed your mind, better even—“

“No! No. Can we do it now? Put it on?” He jolted into action like he’d suddenly woken up and stepped to the arm, brushing his fingers lightly over the rune-covered steel. 

Seeing Sirius’ hands run delicately over his work, still wearing the fingertip he’d made, metal whispering on metal, Remus thought of those same fingers drifting across his bare chest. 

Was that it? The intimacy in the basement after the moon had been too weird, too intense. Sirius had been grossed out and disturbed and it had all been too much. He could probably sense that Remus was attracted to him, must be attuned to that type of thing since everyone seemed to be attracted to him, and he’d probably been horrified by it, in that creepy, dark basement with a bloodied werewolf lusting after him.

What a colossal miscalculation, what a stupid mistake. He almost wanted to apologize but didn’t want to summon the specter of it into the room with them, afraid of what Sirius would say.

“We could go down to the cybershop, it’s just a few blocks. Chop the arm off then you could install it, right? If you have the time. I can just go myself too…”

Realizing he hadn’t responded, Remus said too loudly, “No! No. Lily and the Longbottoms will help. We can do it tomorrow, if you have the time. We’ve, uh, worked out a process.” He finished lamely, trailing off, distracted again by Sirius hefting the arm now, looking at it closely.

He couldn’t quite hide it: the look of awe, the reverence like he was seeing something that might save him. The ugly knot of scar on his forearm looked shiny with salve as though he’d been rubbing dittany on it. 

When he finally put it down and looked at Remus, though, his face had returned to a not-unpleasant neutral expression. Remus thought his eyes looked too bright, like maybe he was feverish.

“Tomorrow works. Thanks very much!” He said this very poshly, like he was thanking a particularly competent server at a restaurant.

“Right, well. No problem. You asked me to so… the Lab tomorrow after Lily’s shift, around 7 I think. I’ll just take the arm with me, bring it there. See you.”

When he let himself out of the flat, package rewrapped and feeling leaden in his arms, Remus felt distinctly like he was fleeing.

It had not been a good week, Sirius knew. Or two weeks. He wasn’t sure, he’d lost track of the days. Still, he’d been worse off in the past, so all in all, this felt salvageable.

He had not gone to the club or the bar, had not fucked any random people, had not bought unidentifiable drugs from Muggles and swallowed them down in alleys. He had not ended up hospitalized, in neither wizard nor Muggle medical facility. He hadn’t been arrested by Muggle police for some unknowable offense and been forced, wandless, to talk his way to freedom. He hadn’t woken up in any strange places at all, in fact. He hadn’t gotten into any fights or been robbed or done much of anything at all, if he was being honest.

He had just sat in his flat, wandered from bed to couch to shower, drinking and occasionally lightly abusing a sleeping draught, which was a harmless potion really. Without it, he’d wake up screaming, so he was just being considerate to the neighbors. Scary experience for Muggles, hearing someone screaming above you when you thought you were on the top floor.

He had gone down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, true. He’d clawed open the scar on his forearm more times than he cared to admit, and had ignored nearly every message he received but still. He’d been worse. He’d been a lot worse.

The thing that had set him off, of course, was the humiliating realization that he could not stop thinking about Remus Lupin. And wasn’t that just a disaster waiting to happen?

He saw their future right away, like a vision in a crystal ball, like a grim lurking at the bottom of discarded tea leaves.

Sirius would get Remus into bed most likely and they would fuck, which would be fine. More than fine, really, if Sirius let himself think about it, which he’d only done in the shower a few times while very drunk. And a few times under his covers while very hungover.

Then, inevitably, as always, things would go downhill from there. Remus would see whatever it was that people saw— that thing that gave Sirius away as fundamentally bad—and Remus would not want to be with him again, probably wouldn’t even want to be friends.

That would all be normal, the regular course of his life. 

But Remus and James and Peter were the first friends he had made, the first time he thought maybe his life could be more than a balancing of the scales. And those three were clearly entwined so where Remus went— away from Sirius, probably with haste— so too would the others. And then what? 

He’d be back to where he started: standing solitary at Order meetings, making the occasional small talk, living for hazy weekends with people he’d never see or speak to beyond the groping of hands in the dark.

Which, again, fine. Could be worse.

But why do it? Why let it happen? Why risk losing the friendship for what would surely amount to nothing at all?

So, he figured he would just wait, sleep it off, let the fever burn out.

Only, over the course of that week—or was it two?— it didn’t fade. It got worse. 

Sirius did not, as a rule, pine or dwell or fantasize about people. He didn’t think about them when they were not around and he didn’t dream of them or imagine conversations with them. He didn’t read something and then think he’d like to tell a specific person about the thing he’d read because he thought that person would find it funny or interesting. He didn’t think of that person while tonguing at the mandrake leaf still stuck in his mouth, imagining a universe where he could save that person from dark, lonely basements and chains and tortured transformations.

Except now he was.

If that had been the extent of it, maybe he would’ve been in better shape. Lovesick and pathetic was new to him, but he felt it was survivable. 

He’d also spent the last week—or was it two?—obsessively checking on Regulus, watching the live data about his location roll in day after day.

Spotted outside of a safe house. Seen collaborating with known Death Eaters. Suspected of participating in an attack on a muggleborn’s home. 

He sat around his flat and imagined a thousand ways for his brother to die.

At the same time, MystiCast news was growing excited in its coverage of the new blood registry, which promised innovations galore in security operations for muggleborns and halfbloods.

Automatic enrollment in home defense enchantment services! 

Notifications sent to your console and via arti-summoned patronus about Death Eater activity in your area! 

On-call Auror services for those deemed most at risk! 

Peace of mind, all at the low cost of visiting any area blood bank and depositing a few drops—just a few drops!— to the new Department of Blood Status. 

It was one of the breathless interviews with the new Sub-Minister, a hatchet-faced man that screamed PURE BLOOD to Sirius’ trained eye, that resulted in him hurling the bottle of firewhisky into the screen, shattering it.

Between his shameful Remus-thoughts and his obsessive Regulus-stalking and his simmering fear and rage at the progression of the war, he wasn’t doing great. Not very great at all. 

When Remus had shown up at his door with the arm, he realized at least two of his problems could be imminently solved. He wanted desperately to get back into the fight, to throw himself into it because his anger was burning a hole in his gut and he couldn’t bear it anymore. He also wanted to be wherever Regulus was, to protect him or save him or kill him himself; he was no longer sure which. 

The arm was the only way to do those things, so he would just have to control himself with Remus. He’d almost never managed to do that before, but he figured there was a first time for everything.

He’d ignored the first messages on his console out of habit but when the bright white wolf floated up through his floor like a cloud of stars, he’d nearly leapt from his skin, seeing a vision that had haunted his dreams in the last days.

Sirius scrambled into action then, showering frantically, stripping his disgusting sheets, vanishing empty bottles with imprecise slashes of his wand.

Of course, the arm was beautiful. It was a work of art and a revelation and he wanted it attached to his body nearly as badly as he wanted Remus Lupin pressed under him breathless and pliant and wide-eyed.

No, no. No thoughts like that allowed.

It nearly killed him not to rave about it, not to crow about how incredible it was, what a gift, what a masterful creation, what if we came over here to my bed, what if you stayed the night?

Later, when preparing to Apparate to the Lab, he steeled himself.

Remus wasn’t even that good-looking, not really, he thought. Sirius should know; his tastes and own appearance ran toward the conventionally-attractive and Remus certainly wasn’t that, not with the scars and the too-large nose and the lopsided way he smiled. He wasn’t even that nice; hadn’t they argued frequently already in their brief acquaintance? Plus, the werewolf thing, which certainly complicated matters. Outside the flat, he convinced himself that arming himself—ha! arming—was worth dealing with some stupid crush and getting on with it. 

The fight and Regulus were the only important things.

He Apparated, feeling ready, but when he arrived at the Lab and Remus let him in, looking like a mad scientist in a heavy apron and some sort of elaborate goggles, Sirius nearly choked on his own spit.

Chapter Text

“I told you, I don’t know if he’ll come. He was in bad shape. He wanted the arm off but also seemed a little sick—“

It was forty-five minutes past when Remus had told Sirius to meet them and there had been no word from him. Alice, punctual to a fault, was scowling ferociously from her seat by the surgery table she had set up, glancing regularly at her wrist console.

“I won’t wait past the hour. I have other things to do,” she said, clearly annoyed.

“Alice, relax. He’s coming here to have his bloody arm chopped off! Give the man a break!” Frank Longbottom wrapped his arm around his very tightly-wound wife, grinning. He was wearing a heavy leaden apron and some complicated goggles—a half-Muggle, half-magic amalgamation that he had developed that helped him work more intuitively with cybernetic/magic equipment. Remus wore the same equipment, though somewhat self-consciously. 

“Do you think we should just go get him?” James said in a low voice to Lily, who leaned against a lab table with a datapad before her, reading. She looked up at him but said nothing. 

“I’m just saying, Sirius has problems,” James continued, looking to Remus now, clearly working himself up.

In James-parlance, problems meant mental problems—mysterious and mystifying to James, though he seemed to think it was one of his obligations to his fellow man to drag people out of their problems through henpecking and patient unyielding displays of friendship and home-cooked meals and the sheer force of his own positivity. Merlin knew he’d done it for Remus and even Peter enough times.

“He doesn’t have anyone else to care about him and he had a rough go of it with that no good family of his. We should’ve started talking to him earlier, given him a chance. Not you, Remus, you weren’t here before—“ His voice grew louder, earning him a scathing look from Alice. “Pete and I would see him on his own, at the pub or meetings or whatever, not talking to anyone and we’d just gossip about him like a pair of wankers! If it hadn’t been for you, Moons, we may have never even tried to know him! You’re the one that actually reached him—“

“I didn’t—“ Remus started, not wanting credit.

“And now we owe it to him to help! We can’t just leave him in his nasty flat going mad about whatever it is that’s bothering him! I’ll just go over there right now and talk to him!”

Lily just stared at him from her spot by the lab table, clearly bemused.

Just then, there was a loud buzz followed by a click, to which Alice said, “Finally!” and leaped up from her seat. 

Remus rushed to the lab door, wishing he’d thought to remove the apron and goggles.

There was Sirius, pink cheeked and wind-swept and looking better than he had the previous day, as if he spent the previous night actually sleeping rather than drinking to excess and self-immolating.

“You’re late!” Lily called from inside. “Your surgeon is paid by the hour so I hope you’re ready to pay up! I take physical Galleons only.”

“Didn’t know I had a strict appointment time,” he said, sounding a little choked for a minute, like he’d swallowed wrong, but still stepping in and around Remus, barely sparing him a glance. “Let’s get this thing off me, shall we?”

Alice approached him, all business. “This is a significant surgery, Sirius. I would hope you’d take it more—“

“Siriusly?” 

Alice’s scowl only deepened. “Take a seat. We’ll go through the procedure.”

“Just do what you have to do, alright? I’m ready to be done with this.” Sirius held his right arm out like it didn’t belong to him.

Still, Alice made them all sit down around a lab table as she pulled up diagrams and passed out documents.

“Now, as you all know now, we have conducted multiple attempts to remove the cursed mark from the patient’s body,” Alice said, flicking through some fairly gory photos on her datapad for them.

“We attempted to remove the impacted flesh and bone and regrow it wholesale to no avail. We attempted numerous potions, counter-curses, and surgical interventions.” She scrolled briskly now through images that Remus knew were of Sirius under knife and wand over the course of his first few months after leaving the Death Eaters. “All to no avail. The Mark returned each time and remains in the patient’s skeleton today.” She paused on a picture of a bloody wound, flesh stripped down, the black Dark Mark clearly visible on white bone. “It is susceptible to manipulation and control by Death Eaters.”

Alice had shown Remus this already. It had felt invasive to see even then, wrong, but Alice insisted he should know all the medical and magical attempts they had already made to remove the Dark Mark before trying the amputation and cybernetic implant.

Now though, he thought it was a little cruel of her to make Sirius sit there while they all stared at tightly cropped images of his arm in various states of branded. 

Sirius’ face was frozen in a flat mask, lips pressed together, left hand clutched like a claw over the scar on his right arm, cybernetic fingertip digging into flesh with an alarming force. He didn’t say anything.

“Alice, is all this context strictly necessary?” Remus asked after James had made panicked eyes at him. 

“Yes. You know it is. It’s critical that we all know this procedure and all consent to it. It’s highly experimental. Sirius, you understand?”

“Sure, I understand.” And though he didn’t look even a little less uncomfortable, he nodded stiffly. Remus looked to Frank, hoping for back up, but Frank gave a self-exculpatory shrug, saying nothing.

“So, continuing…After discussing further with Headmaster Dumbledore, it’s become clear that short of You-Know-Who himself coming and undoing the curse, the full removal and replacement of the offending limb is our last best option to fully eradicate the Dark Mark from patient Sirius Orion Black.”

“Is there a reason you’re using my full name?”

“Just being thorough. Now—” She finally flipped her datapad away from the clinical images of Sirius’ branded arm to a more familiar diagram—one Remus and Alice had mocked up themselves. “In the interest of developing a cybernetic-magical hybrid limb—one that allows Sirius to channel magic seamlessly, without diminishing his abilities and remains operational in the event of anti-magic suppression—Frank and Remus have devised a new integration protocol. Would one of you like to walk us through it?”

Remus gave a deferential glance to Frank, who straightened slightly and offered Sirius a small, apologetic smile.

“So—the core challenge is dual compatibility,” Frank began. “The prosthetic has to interface with the body on two levels: physically, by binding neurally to your motor and sensory pathways, and magically, by integrating with your internal arcane conduits without disrupting spellcasting.”

He nodded toward Sirius’ arm, which he held outstretched on the table now, as if hoping someone might volunteer to make the first incision right then.

“To do that, we need to isolate and control all nerve endings and magical channels in the limb at the moment of detachment—before the body has a chance to initiate sealing, rerouting, or shock responses. We’ve developed a spell that can essentially ‘freeze’ those systems in a stable, inert state—preserving their structure and function—until Remus attaches the cybernetic. But…” He exhaled, looked right at Sirius. “It only works if your nervous system is fully engaged. No magical dampening fields, no anesthetics, no interference—magical or Muggle.”

Sirius stared at Frank and blinked. Then, cool grey gaze drifting to Remus for the first time since he’d walked in: “What does all that mean?”

Lily answered. “It means,” she said sharply, leaning forward,  “that it’s going to hurt like hell and we can’t do anything about it. I’m going to saw your arm off, slowly, and the only thing we can offer you is a glass of whiskey for the hurt.” She gestured at the bottle of firewhiskey that sat somewhat incongruously on the surgery equipment table next to the shiny silver cybernetic arm.

“We don’t have to do this,” Remus cut in immediately, seeing Sirius’ eyes widen just a bit. 

“Yes, we most certainly don’t,” Lily agreed, looking at James for agreement. James raised his hands up, deferring.

Lily had consented to assist in the surgery— remove the arm herself— only after much cajoling from Remus and some plying from Moody. 

Remus had argued that, as Alice had said, this was the only way to rid Sirius of the Mark so really she’d be doing a mercy. 

Moody, ever single-minded in his pursuit of victory, had told her that the tide of the war was turning against them and they needed every able-bodied man, woman, and child in fighting shape. He’d shown her the list of Death Eaters captured or killed by Sirius very pointedly. 

Finally, exasperated, Remus told her that since St. Mungo’s wouldn’t do it and Lily wouldn’t do it, he was fairly certain Sirius would go to some Muggle chop shop sooner or later and did she really want that on her conscience? 

At that, she’d finally relented.

Now, Sirius looked from Lily to Frank to Alice to Remus and finally landed on James. He smiled. 

“We’re doing it. Pour us a drink, then.”

James did and Sirius shot it back, gesturing for a refill immediately. Lily seemed to glare at both men at once, twirling her wand rapidly in one hand with great anxious energy. 

Forty-five minutes later, after Alice had gone through every detail of the procedure at length and insisted on Sirius providing verbal consent to every step, they had him lay down on the metal surgery table in the center of the room. 

It was a set up stolen straight from St.Mungo’s, literally. Lily had shrunk it all down and stolen away with it in her purse after a shift. The metal table stood under a single dangling bright light bulb next to a floating health monitor orb, supplies arranged on either side. With a wave of her wand, Lily connected Sirius to the orb and it immediately kicked into life, beeping out his slightly elevated heartbeat.

“Sorry about this,” Remus mumbled as he affixed Sirius’ right arm, outstretched, to the table with magical bonds. “So you don’t move it while she—“

“You move that thing while I’m working and I’ll take off more than your arm,” Lily said mildly as she put up her red hair.

Sirius said nothing. His eyes flicked to the bulky goggles on Remus’ head and down at the heavy apron.

Remus thought it spoke to the severity of whatever issue Sirius had with him that he hadn’t mocked the outfit even once. Or perhaps he was just nervous, too anxious to joke. He looked very vulnerable on the table, one arm bound and the other opening and closing a fist at his side, staring up at the single light bulb with his jaw clenched.

Finally, Lily stood over Sirius’ outstretched arm, Remus and Frank to her right, all wands held aloft. Alice stood to the side, datapad pulled up and her own pair of goggles blinking with a red light, recording. James stood back leaning against the counter, looking queasy. He gave Sirius a weak smile and a thumbs up when their eyes met.

Lily marked a neat line just below the elbow to delineate where she’d cut. Sirius’ face twitched slightly and the monitor orb kicked up its beeping a notch.

“Here, bite down on this,” Remus offered, producing a thick strip of leather and handing it to Sirius, who looked more than a little sweaty and queasy himself. In their brief glance, Remus knew he didn’t have to say that yes, he himself had also bitten down on a bit of leather to manage unmanageable pain many times too, and no, it didn’t really help. Sirius took it anyway, shoving it between his teeth with his free left hand without a word.

“Just try not to move. James, dear, buck up and come steady him.”

After James stepped behind the head of the table and put his hands on Sirius’ shoulders in nauseous solidarity, Lily started. 

With a tight and sharp flick, a narrow red glowing blade appeared at the tip of her wand and she brought it down with great focus and precision to the exact line she had marked and began to cut.

Sirius jolted immediately, an involuntary spasm to which Lily tsk-ed but which nevertheless did not deter her from her work. She was utterly focused, brow furrowed and hand steady as she dragged the red glowing scalpel across Sirius’ arm. She gestured slowly, letting the magic penetrate through skin, flesh, fat, muscle, tendon, and bone before moving on. Blood seeped out and started to soak into the flimsy sheet on the metal table but Lily was also muttering a spell under her breath, managing the flow so he wouldn’t bleed out completely before she was done.

Remus and Frank got to work. In tandem, each focusing on one or the other, they found and froze Sirius’ nerve endings and his magical conduits, those vague connections between wizard and the world around him. It was slow and complex work made worse by the circumstances. Only when they were both done with a section, feeling that all nerve endings and conduits were under control, would Frank nod, indicating that Lily should continue her bloody work.

In a testament to his willpower, or perhaps his sheer stubbornness, Sirius’ outstretched arm remained more or less still under its bindings through the beginning of the operation. He gasped and then groaned through the leather strap between his teeth, eyes screwed shut, face contorted in choked agony. He slammed his free hand on the table in a way that was apparently beyond his control because he didn’t stop doing it when Lily snapped at him. James ran around the side of the table and held Sirius’ left arm down. 

Eventually, Sirius screamed. His scream tore through the leather strap, a garbled and tortured sound. The monitor orb beeped frenetically and blinked red: danger danger danger. 

“You’re doing great, mate!” James said tensely, trying for calming and landing on extremely panicked. His hands dug into Sirius’ left forearm almost violently. 

The scream brought Remus back to Abbott Manor. Distantly, he thought that perhaps the Mark buried deep still in Sirius’ arm was putting up some final opposition to being parted from its victim. 

This theory proved true quickly as the closer Lily got to fully severing Sirius’ arm, the more the pale knot of scar tissue on his forearm bled and split and blackened, like it was trying to rot him. Dark veins appeared, spiderwebbing out from it, sickly and evil. Lily’s spell could barely contain the blood and it trickled out too quickly, also black and hot and diseased. It dripped off the table onto the tile floor.

Sirius screamed and thrashed, every muscle in his body seizing, straining against the bonds at his arm. Tears streamed freely down his face and he was ghostly pale, nearly exsanguinated, as he screamed and gasped and choked on his own ragged breathing, attempting to gain back control. Lily paused for a moment, watching him with cool clinical detachment, waiting for his movement to ease before she continued anew.

It all took so long. Too long.

Finally, just as Sirius’ strength appeared to lag and he seemed on the edge of passing out from the shock, Lily said, “Now, Remus! Quickly now!” She pulled the heavy meat of Sirius’ now detached arm free, blood spilling out, and stepped away from the table briskly with it, making room for Remus to take her place.

He knew somewhere deep down that this was insane and stupid and probably criminal but as he arranged the cybernetic arm, smooth steel rim lined up with the gory wound of flesh and cleanly sliced bone just below Sirius’ elbow, Remus felt suddenly calm. He pressed the two together and heard Sirius whimper weakly.

“Stay awake, Sirius. You may need to help put it all together. Be sharp.” He looked up at Sirius then, pulling his eyes from his work for just a moment. Sirius, sweat-soaked and tear-stained and shaking, saliva dripping from around the leather strap clenched in his teeth, nodded his head once: I’m here, go on.

He started the bonding spell, chanting quietly, waving his wand in neat circles around each rune, activating it. Gently, he poked at the inner wiring of the arm with a precise tweak of his wand, connecting the circuits. The arm whirred into electric life.

At the connection between flesh and steel, he drew his wand, sealing neatly. The line there glowed a purple-black, more void than light, and then spread through the other runes until the whole arm glowed with it, inverted stars all the way down, shimmering with magic. Remus then pulled the bundle of nerve endings and magical pathways he and Frank had been holding carefully separate and connected them to the arm with the wave of his wand, socket into outlet.

The leather strap dropped out of Sirius’ mouth, falling to the table. He gasped. The shining steel hand clenched into a sudden fist. 

“If you can feel that, try to hold on to it,” Remus muttered, still moving his wand, now nearly at the fingertips. “It’s your magic connecting to the interface.”

“I can feel it.” His voice was ragged and strained but there was wonder there, too, as he stared at his brushed steel arm and slowly moved the fingers.

In the dim fluorescent light of the lab bathroom, Sirius buried his face in his one shaking flesh hand— the only one he had left. He tried to steady his breathing and wrangle down his adrenaline, which had spiked as if he were dying in battle. 

He had lost quite a lot of blood.

Letting the water in the sink run to disguise the noise, he released a strangled shuddering groan. He dipped down and let the cold water run over his sweaty face, wiping the saliva from around his mouth and scrubbing at his eyes with his left hand.

He held his right arm curled to his body like it was something delicate and precious and breakable. 

Apparently he’d passed out at some point and Lily had labored over him— blood replenishment spells, analgesic spells for the pain, heart rate stabilizers, spells to prevent infection, immunosuppressant spells to prevent the body from rejecting the new limb. 

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but once he came to, he still felt that fight-or-flight panic and stumbled away from everyone’s prying eyes. 

Now, in the small bathroom, he met his own eyes in the mirror. Slowly, he moved his right arm up so the hand was right next to his face and he considered it. He flexed the metal fingers. He turned the arm this way and that, watching it moving smoothly at his command. He snapped his fingers and nothing happened, as he expected— they weren’t loaded yet, he could tell. Nevertheless, the snap made a clear metal click, satisfying. 

Finally, his haggard face— sweaty and pale and gaunt— cracked into a smile. He looked directly at the arm and let himself marvel at the miracle of it.

The Mark had weighed on him, he realized now. He’d gotten so used to it that he’d almost stopped noticing. But now, with it gone, it was like a rot had been cut out of his body and with it a fever had lifted. 

The arm itself was beautiful. The brushed steel glinted a light moonlight silver, elegant. The connection between flesh and metal rounded the whole limb smoothly and seamlessly, marked only by that thin glowing purple-black line that hummed of magic and electricity. The runes were neatly arrayed from elbow to fingertips, etchings fine and precise and also glowing faintly purple.

He moved the hand smoothly like it was his own. He touched his face with it, staring in the mirror again as metal met cheek, and he was surprised to find that the steel fingers were warm like flesh.

“Sirius, are you ok?” Remus called from just outside the bathroom.

Heart clenching, Sirius ripped the door open and grabbed the man on the other side, wrapping his arms—one flesh, one metal— around him, trying to communicate the depth of his gratitude through the force of the touch. He buried his face in Remus’ neck for just a second, breathing in the forest smell of him, then abruptly stepped back, before Remus even had a chance to return the embrace. Hands on Remus' shoulders now, holding them apart like it was safer that way, he said earnestly and a bit raggedly, voice breaking, “Thank you, Moony. It’s incredible.”

Remus blushed red but he smiled. “Don’t say that until we’ve done all of Alice’s tests. She’s got about fifty.”

Alice’s tests took a good long while. She started off testing Sirius’ physical reflexes and strength, a series that ended with him arm wrestling James, slamming James’ reasonably well-muscled arm to the table in embarrassingly short order.

Then, she put him through rounds of increasingly complex magic— Charms, Defense, Offense, Transfiguration. At this last, having grown cocky and manic about the whole thing, Sirius dramatically waved his metal arm, wandless, and transfigured Alice’s collection of Muggle screwdrivers into a flock of birds. As she looked at him sternly over her goggles and wrote down the results, Sirius laughed, letting a bird land on one outstretched metallic finger.

“Alright, that’s enough for today,” Alice said tartly, putting her datapad down. “We’ll finish the other tests, including the ones in the pulse and with plasma, later this week. I’ll be in touch. Get some rest.”

Like that, they were dismissed. Alice and Frank disappeared into the bowels of their lab. As Lily packed her things and James worked to corral the birds and return them to their former shapes, Remus went and leaned next to Sirius. He was sitting on a lab bench and admiring his arm as it glinted in the light.

Remus wanted to say something to dissolve the tension he felt between them but couldn’t think what. So he settled for, “Sorry I made you bleed all over me again. I really do think we should break that habit; it's not very healthy.”

Sirius barked out a laugh at this and replied, “No worries, mate. It was really Lily who mauled me, you actually made it better. A lot better.”

He stretched both arms out before him then, palms up. One pale forearm was pale, skin ever so slightly translucent, revealing delicate blue veins. The other was a nearly pearlescent silver. They were identical in shape and size, from elegant tapered fingers to narrow, bony wrists to slender forearms. He raised both hands and carefully pressed each metal finger to its flesh twin, steepling. They were a perfect match, as if Remus had measured every inch to make them exact.

“How did you do it?” Sirius asked softly, eyes fixed on his own fingers. “Some spell to make the metal reshape to match perfectly once it was attached?”

“Well—er. No. Just a lucky guess.” Remus looked away from Sirius’ intense reverent face, feeling like he was intruding on something private.

“A lucky guess,” Sirius repeated, almost absentmindedly. 

Then he reached suddenly with his metal arm and grabbed Remus’ hand. In one quick and smooth motion, he brought Remus’ fingers to his lips and kissed his knuckles lightly, cool and dry but still feeling to Remus like a sudden scald. He dropped the hand just as suddenly and hopped off the table, calling out to James with a grin like nothing had happened. 

Back at James and Lily’s, they all sat around the kitchen table, laughing and talking over each other and slapping each other’s backs, energized by their success and by Sirius’ boisterous and irresistible good spirits. 

Remus wondered if he’d imagined Sirius kissing his knuckles or if maybe it was just some arcane Black family gesture that meant nothing particular, like a curtsy or a bow. He decided to forget about it.

Sirius gamely let Lily inspect every inch of his arm with her professional’s eye, running her hand along the seam, watching intently as he moved his fingers. James demanded an arm wrestling rematch three separate times and was soundly defeated each time. Remus suspected he would’ve wanted another go if Lily hadn’t forbidden it, citing damage to her coffee table.

Sirius, who apparently hadn’t been paying much attention when Alice had explained every moment of the procedure to him and demanded his verbal consent, asked Remus to go over it again. This time, he listened with rapt attention, asking questions and occasionally interjecting excitedly to describe how it had all felt to him— the Mark in its death throes, his arm painful first from the incision, then from something else, the rush of Remus’ magic running in his blood stream.

Eventually, Peter came by still wearing his uniform from work and they had to go through the whole story again. Peter was angry to have been excluded from this particular adventure and seemed to resent Sirius for it, as if it should've rightly been Peter’s hand they chopped off.

He got over it though, brightening when James plied him with food. The night went on like that: happy, chatty, energetic. They played rounds of exploding snap, Sirius slamming his metal hand down on the explosions, smothering them. At some point, music was turned on, off-tempo dancing and jumping around was done, neighbors complained, and the night wound down. 

It wasn’t until then that Remus suspected that things were still not completely right between him and Sirius.

James convinced them all to stay the night— the man loved a sleepover. As Lily cleared the kitchen, he waved his wand and the sofa pulled out with a mechanical whir, just wide enough for two. 

“Pete can sleep in the arm chair in our room, he fits in it well enough, and I’ll make this up for you two.”

At this, Sirius visibly stiffened.

“Actually, y’know, I think I’ll just head back to mine. I’m exhausted from the whole thing and—er— could use my own bed,” Remus began, stepping to grab his bag and beat a hasty exit.

“That tiny cot of yours is probably about as comfortable as sharing this pull out with Black. Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, you’re clearly too tired to Apparate and you live basically in Cardiff so just settle in. Get comfy! We’ll make a fry up in the morning!”

There was no arguing with James without giving Sirius away. 

Sirius plainly did not want to share a bed with Remus, and whether that was the werewolf thing or the gay-and-obviously-attracted-to-Sirius thing, or some combination of both, Remus wasn’t sure. Regardless, neither were excuses James would take kindly to and why ruin the night? Just as Remus started to make more noises of protest, Sirius finally jumped in.

“I’m a dreadful sleeper— toss and turn like a madman. Don’t want to keep Moony up. What do you say I just transfigure that kitchen table into a cot and kip there?”

So he did, not looking at Remus again. Once everyone had retreated to their respective places— James, Lily, and Peter to the bedroom, Sirius to the kitchen, where he’d transfigured the table into a Slytherin four poster, to much heckling—Remus pulled off his shirt in the darkness and curled himself into the center of the pullout mattress, yanking the covers to his chin.

He told himself to let it lie. He had an impulse to apologize; he tended to do it first and too frequently. He knew that sometimes apologizing for something made it worse, brought attention to a problem that was better left unspoken and unacknowledged. 

He and Sirius were fine! You couldn’t have someone remove your arm for you and give you a new one and then not want to be friends with them. That wasn’t what was happening. Sirius just didn’t want to be so involved with the werewolf stuff, which was a completely normal reaction. And he didn’t want Remus to be led on, not about that or about the other thing, which was kind really; a mercy. 

Lying there in the dark, he had just about convinced himself. He was nearly ready to sleep, the day’s activities finally wearing on him and dragging his eyes closed.

“Remus?” The call from the kitchen was quiet, nearly inaudible, but still Remus’ eyes snapped open like Sirius had said his name right into his ear.

“Yes?” he called back, praying he wasn’t imagining things. 

“Come over here.”

Nervously, he did, pulling his shirt back on and creeping through the dark living room to the kitchen where the green brocade four poster hulked, taking up the whole space.

At his footsteps, Sirius tweaked aside the curtain and gestured him in.

Brought back to a million different times James or Peter or he himself had done a nearly identical gesture in the Gryffindor dorm room—inviting one another into each others confidences, whispering in the dark about their fears, both real and petty—Remus thought almost nothing about climbing into the bed and letting the curtain fall behind him.

Sirius sat with his back against the headboard, knees pulled up and wrapped in his arms. He looked small and young, like he might have been at Hogwarts. Remus arranged himself on the other end, legs criss crossed, feeling too large for the shadowed space.

“I just wanted to thank you again. For this.” He looked down at the arm. “It feels lighter. Everything does. I hadn’t realized until now that I could feel the Mark all the time before. Now that it’s gone, I don’t know how I lived with it.” His eyes stayed locked on his own fingers, wrapped around knees.

“It was a very dark curse. I don’t know how you lived with it either but I’m glad you don’t have to anymore. And that I didn’t completely fuck up that cybernetic, honestly.”

A few moments of silence passed. Remus could nearly hear James’ snoring in the other room.

“I am a bad sleeper, you know,” Sirius said finally, looking up, eyes shiny in the darkness. “Nightmares. I can tell you thought I was lying.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Remus shrugged. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“Maybe I won’t have them anymore. The nightmares.  It was always Death Eaters, like they were right there in bed with me every night. It hadn’t occurred to me that it could’ve been related to the curse.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes more, Sirius apparently lost in thought. Remus considered slipping out of the curtains and leaving it at that, but then he couldn’t help himself.

Hadn’t Sirius seen enough horrors already? Between the things he’d done and witnessed with the Death Eaters, his family who James mildly described as “no good” but Remus suspected was outright abusive, his brother trying to kill him, the dark curse he’d allowed to be inflicted on him— didn’t he have enough fuel for tortured nightmares without Remus adding more? Without Remus forcing him to look at his own gory suffering up close too?

“I’m sorry about the other night, in the basement. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”

“What?” Sirius jolted out of his reverie. “What are you talking about? You didn’t ask me; I offered.”

“Well still… it wasn’t fair of me to let you. It was too much.”

Sirius shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Don’t be stupid. I wanted to. And I want to again. I’ve been practicing healing spells and I think I can do a better job than Potter with those scars.”

This shocked Remus into silence.

After a minute, Sirius stretched his legs out, feet bumping Remus’ knees. He lifted his right arm up and made an experimental fist.

“You’ve got to teach me to fight, mate. This arm is strong as hell but you’re right— my form is terrible.” He grinned, white teeth flashing in the dim light.

Chapter Text

As the chill fall broke into a frigid winter, Sirius volunteered for every mission Moody would let him on. Patrol, escort, raid, guard duty, it didn’t matter. He wanted to practice with his arm. He loaded it with different spells, experimenting. The thumb, index, and middle finger could hold three each. The last two fingers, ring and pinky, were equipped with plasma bolts. His single metal index finger on his left hand held three spells as well.

It was all taking some getting used to but he relished being back in the field, scrapping gleefully with Death Eaters every chance he got. 

He never ran across Bellatrix. 

He didn’t see Regulus, either, though he checked his location every day and tried hard to get himself assigned to tasks where he might be, eager to lay eyes on him for even a minute. He still wasn’t sure what he would do if he saw him.

Though he didn’t come across any more anti-magic pulses coded to his blood, it was clear the Death Eaters were innovating. Recent skirmishes featured pulses that exploded into more pulses, charms that prevented the Death Eaters from being impacted by the pulse, glowing blood wards that triggered a pulse when crossed. 

The Order innovated too. A few members, the more battle-hungry ones, agreed to get Remus’ cybernetics—mostly single index fingers, though Gideon Prewett had a whole left hand of fingers replaced, saying that he’d rather be safe than sorry. Many, though, hesitated at the drastic step of replacing even one digit with technology that still seemed strangely Muggle. The experiments Alice and Remus worked on seemed promising, though, and helped maintain some momentum.

They needed all the momentum they could get. The war was getting worse.

The Order tensed, like an animal expecting to be hit. The rate of attacks against muggleborns accelerated, requiring a near constant rotation of guards and escorts, pushing everyone to their limits. Moody and Dumbledore refused to discuss the possibility of a traitor in their midst, tensely stating that they were still “investigating”, which of course continued to feed into wild speculation about not just Sirius and Remus but everyone, fingers pointed in all directions.

Worse, it was apparent to Sirius that the Ministry had all but fallen. More and more MystiCast news spouted pureblood talking points, insinuating that there might be something to the “early theories” about “sources of magic” and “magical genealogy”.

Remus had come by his flat once unannounced and fixed Sirius’ wall console but Sirius broke it all over again when a program featured Lucius Malfoy, “philanthropist”, discussing his family’s latest large donation to the Institute of Magical Research. 

The blood banks were not mandatory yet but over drinks at the pub, they would interrogate Peter about his work, gleaning as much information as they could and seeing grimly the direction their world was going.

All of this growing tension meant that everyone was running themselves ragged trying to keep ahead of what felt like encroaching doom. Aside from ceaselessly throwing himself at missions, Sirius spent hours with Moody and occasionally Dumbledore rehashing and repeating every piece of intel he’d ever told them about the Death Eaters: every safe house, every weapon, every talking point, ever idea or guess or stab in the dark he could come up with. They’d heard it all before but Sirius had the sense they were listening for something they hadn’t known to look for before. They would share no further details and he sometimes left those meetings feeling less like a collaborator and more like a suspect.

James took on even more jobs from Moody than Sirius did, seemingly occupied nearly every night, running himself haggard. Whenever he had a close call, he’d wave it off like it was nothing, but his shoulders stayed tense; he held himself like a man ready for an attack.

Meanwhile, Lily ricocheted from one task to the next, seeming to be everywhere at once. She took on the role of de facto field medic, on call at all hours for injuries, even slipping away from her side job at the log booth for hours at a time to tend to a curse victim. When not working for the Order in one way or the other, she was at St. Mungo’s, doggedly working toward her healer accreditation. She did all this with her characteristic stiff upper lip, though sometimes, with a few pints in her, one might hear her let out a sigh and fantasize about the day she could be a healer in peacetime: delivering babies, treating mumblemumps, reversing ill-fated transfigurations.

Remus, of course, was busy at the lab. Along with tinkering,, he was working with various Order members on training and practice with the cybernetics. Sirius guessed that he might even sleep at the lab sometimes as when he’d visited once, he had seen a tangle of blankets under a lab table like a nest for a very tired creature.

Peter, of course, was occupied at the Ministry, which had become a quagmire of political backstabbing, every employee apparently trying to get a foothold before the whole thing collapsed. Peter tried to keep his head down and shared what he knew with the Order, but it wasn’t much and it was clearly keeping him up at night. He seemed to know everyone’s comings and goings with neurotic thoroughness, always aware of when someone was on a mission or at work or at home, as if just keeping track of them could keep them safe.

Regardless of all this— the growing tension, the ceaseless cadence of work, the fear undercutting it all—Sirius felt happier than he had ever been.

He was fighting, evening the scales, but beyond that, he had allowed himself to slot in seamlessly with the Gryffindors, as if they had been saving his spot for years. They didn’t see each other much, but when they did it was light and easy: laughter and shared meals and mutual commiseration and a growing closeness that he’d never experienced before in his life.

On a few cold early winter mornings, he and James had even Apparated to a local Quidditch pitch and spent joyful days trying to out-do one another, flying with progressively more reckless abandon and throwing the Quaffle to each other from more and more precarious angles. They landed on the ground again only when the sun was near setting, laughing and wind-lashed and feeling a bit like brothers.

With Remus, things were more complicated.

Sirius realized, after the surgery, that trying to push him away had been a mistake—unnatural and impossible to sustain. That insistent thought, that longing to be let in behind Remus’ defences, never left him. So one night, buried beneath his covers and caught once again in the grip of some debauched fantasy, Sirius decided there was no harm in getting a little closer. Maybe he could see how close he could get. Maybe he could find the line between friendship and the thing he really wanted and then, maybe, he could choose not to cross it.

It was a game. The kind where losing meant ending up in bed with Remus.

Of course, denying himself only made the fantasies sharper, more potent, every moment more electric. He caught himself constantly inventing reasons to touch Remus in ways that could pass for innocent—a hand draped behind him as they sat, a foot stretched just far enough to brush his thigh, the careful pluck of an eyelash from his cheek. Sirius told himself someone would call him out eventually; it wasn't like he went around brushing imaginary lint off Peter's chest at the pub. But no one had, and anyway, what was the harm in a little human connection?

The worst—or maybe the best—was when Remus asked about the arm. They’d talk mods and upgrades, debate magical integrations. Remus would run his fingers along the smooth seam, press into the joints, peer closely at each digit. Sirius was sure that if anyone looked at his face in those moments, they’d know. No matter how still he sat, no matter how tightly he held himself together, he couldn’t hide the truth: as Remus studied what he'd made, Sirius was thinking only of pushing his metal fingers against Remus’ lips, of running them down his scarred chest. Of crossing the line, recklessly, ruinously.

A few times, Remus even indulged him, pouring his own magic into the hand at Sirius' request. He didn’t ask why Sirius liked the warm, foreign buzz of it at his fingertips, didn’t question why Sirius only asked him to do this when no one else was around.

Sirius figured that if Remus did know what was going through his head—and he might—he was choosing to ignore it. Which was fine. Better, even. Safer.

Though their lives had taken on a frenetic pace, it was a pace also governed by the moon and by the metronomic requirements of the Animagus ritual.

Sirius, Peter, and James resolved to complete it as soon as possible. They—and Remus— didn’t have time for errors or re-dos, and certainly none of them fancied another month of holding the mandrake leaf in their mouths. 

So come the full moon just two weeks after Sirius’ surgery, it was time at last to remove the mandrake leaves and begin the next phase. It couldn’t have come a minute later because Remus had taken to commenting regularly about odd smells, sniffing around them suspiciously like they were all hiding rotten fruit on their persons specifically as a prank on him.

Lily had agreed to check on Remus in the morning, giving Sirius, James, and Peter time to complete the potion.

Sirius Apparated all three of them to the camp by the sea. They needed somewhere private and undisturbed to keep the potions until a lightning storm, and the camp seemed to fit the bill once Sirius had Lily confirm it wasn’t being used by the Order.

“This place is creepy,” Peter grumbled, poking at the tin kettle suspiciously. Sirius, who very much liked it and had been daydreaming about bringing Remus back here and ravishing him on the bunk bed, said nothing to this as he laid out the potion ingredients.

“Alright: crystal phials, dew, chrysalis. I’ve got my hair right here—“ James plucked a thick dark hair from his head and carefully put it in one of the phials. “Go on, add yours.”

They did and then took turns removing the Mandrake leaves from each other’s mouth and scraping them, wet globs still stinking of rotten fruit, into the phials. Finally, they gathered all of the ingredients together and stepped back out onto the cold, wind-whipped cliff side. 

They worked quickly under the light of the full moon, shaking from the cold even with warming spells bubbled around them. After just a few minutes, they each held a glinting crystal phial up to the sky, letting the liquid inside— a milky substance that iridesced like it contained drops of oil—absorb the ‘moon’s pure rays.’

“Do you think that’s enough moon?” Peter yelled as a particularly fearsome wind picked up, tearing at his jacket and carrying his voice away.

A few moments later they hurried back into the warm camp, teeth chattering. Once inside, Sirius gathered the phials and carefully engraved their initials on each respective one, explaining, “I don’t want to drink James’ by accident and end up a cow or something.”

As he arranged the phials in a cupboard and sealed it closed, James read from his datapad.

“At each dawn and dusk, as the sun rises and sets, press your wand to your heart and intone Amato animo animato animagus. As you do so, envision yourself becoming an animal but do NOT— that’s in all capitals, so important I guess— envision a specific animal intentionally. Allow the animal to come to you as you conduct the spell rather than approaching the transformation with preconceived notions.”

“So think of an animal… but not a specific animal? Perfect, clear as mud,” Peter said, slumping down at the rickety wooden table.

They spent the next few hours practicing the incantation, debating animal visualization, and making plans to act at the next lightning storm.

Though Remus claimed the next day that his full moon had been “uneventful”, Lily later confided that he’d very nearly gutted himself, leaving a deep scar across his abdomen that not even Lily could fix. 

For weeks thereafter, at each dawn and dusk as he muttered the spell, marking time until they could complete the ritual, Sirius thought grimly of that scar.

The holidays finally arrived and they brought a frantic cheer like everyone thought this holiday might be their last. The streets outside flashed violently red and green, an explosion of neon holiday cheer, with massive advertisements screaming from billboards and buses and benches, demanding that everyone, Muggle and wizard alike, SLEIGH THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING GAME. Everyone from random Muggle punks on the street to Dumbledore himself seemed frenzied, celebrating with an end-of-the-world fervor.

Remus resolved, in his own fit of mania perhaps, to make good on something he’d decided to do so many weeks ago after he’d spoken to Greyback.

After Christmas, at the next moon, he was going to go visit the Pack. He’d procrastinated on it, to his shame. It had felt impossible and fruitless, but he knew he had to give them another chance now that Greyback was in Azkaban. It was his best shot at getting them on the right side of the war.

It was this he dwelled on when Sirius slid into the booth opposite him at Static, two pints in tow.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he said, pushing one glass toward him.

“No, nothing. Just thinking about work.”

Sirius nodded solemnly but asked no more questions, likely figuring he didn’t particularly feel like hearing a rant about neural array compatibility as he had last time he’d begged to hear more about the lab.

They sat in companionable silence for a time as Christmas music blasted around them and the bar room thronged with festivity. They were exhausted, too tired even for small talk.

“Sirius! Remus!”

They both jolted and glanced around, looking for the source of the pretty trilling voice.

It was Mary McDonald, a vision in a sleek gold dress, huge smile on her face as she approached. She swept in, kissing them both on the cheek and squeezing herself next to Sirius.

“Haven’t seen you lot in ages!” She said, smiling still as a red and green Christmas necklace blinked lackadaisically around her neck. “Of course that’ll be my fault, I was in France till just yesterday! Dumbledore wanted me to help recruit some allies there since I speak the language. Useless though, the lot of them.”

“Je ne savais pas que tu parlais François!” Sirius exclaimed, grinning. To Remus, who looked surprised, he explained,  “All Blacks speak French. Toujours Pur and all that.”

The pair rattled away in French to each other, leaving Remus sitting awkwardly silent and wrangling down the inappropriate territoriality that made him want to snatch Mary’s hand from Sirius’ metal forearm where it lingered, apparently hearing all about the new appendage with great interest.

Eventually, Mary produced a bag of sugar quills from her purse and presented them to Sirius who gasped delightedly, said something in French, and promptly kissed Mary on the cheek, pulling her close and  whispering something to her that made her laugh a sweet tinkling laugh like music.

Remus, unable to watch the inevitable unfold before him again, slammed back the last of his pint and made to leave, trying for a friendly smile as he slid out.

“Wait, Moony!” Sirius said, reaching out of the booth and grabbing Remus by the wrist. “I was going to ask you around to mine. I broke that wall console again and I have those leftovers you love, the Thai place? Can I tempt you to do me a favor tonight in exchange for noodles?”

“Right now?” Remus asked, glancing at Mary who was waving down a waiter.

“Sure, now is great! I’ll see you, alright Mary?” He gave her another kiss on the cheek and she gave him a fond smile as he said, “Thanks again for the sugar quills, ils sont délicieux!” And he slid out of the booth, pulling a slightly confused Remus along by the hand, fingers intertwined.

At Sirius’ flat, Remus moved a chair up to the wall console and stood on it, looking at the blackened hole in the center of the dark screen. 

“Merlin, you fried this thing. Plasma bolt? Really?”

“They had Lucius Malfoy on the nightly news talking about the importance of independent research. I’ve seen that man crucio people to death. So yes, plasma bolt. Is it wrecked for good or can you fix it?”

“I can fix it.” He pulled out his wand and got to work.

“‘Course you can. You’re a bloody genius,” Sirius said fondly as he filled a bowl with noodles and heated it with his wand. “Hey, what are you doing for Christmas?”

“Uhm, uh…” Remus waved his wand at the screen, coaxing broken connections back together under the shattered screen. “Well, nothing I guess. The Prewetts are still having their annual holiday party, though Pete said it would mostly be Order people and I don’t much fancy working on Christmas. James and Lily are off to her parents and Pete is with his mum, so I was probably just going to—” The console lit up and with a final wave he smoothed the glass.

“Come here and sit around with me? That’d be perfect; it’s a date.”

Turning back around and stepping off the chair, Remus raised his eyebrows. 

“Going to make us a Christmas roast, are you?”

“Sure, it can't be that hard! Is that what people eat on Christmas?”

“Or goose or I don’t know. Pudding? Uh… ham? I don’t know, I always stayed at Hogwarts for the holidays and they had one of everything at those feasts.”

“Hey, I always stayed too! So this won’t even be our first holiday together!”

For a second, Remus imagined the distance between them in the nearly-empty Great Hall at Christmas, one boy at the Slytherin table, the other at Gryffindor— like the opposite sides of the world.

“So I’ll do one of everything, then. Come by around 5?”

“No, I’ll come earlier and help you cook. I really don’t want to fix this console again and I can imagine a situation where you being alone in here with a goose might be an unsafe environment for it.”

On Christmas Eve, Remus returned to Sirius’ flat laden with packages.

James, upon hearing their plans, immediately messaged his mum and had her prepare a veritable hoard of various dishes, all which James insisted were critical to the Christmas experience. He was clearly jealous of the two men spending Christmas together without him, complaining bitterly about Lily’s miserable sister and her toad of a husband and speculating about how early they could slip out and come to Sirius’ too. Still, he’d also shoved two wrapped packages into Remus’ bag, making him promise not to open them before Christmas Day like Santa Claus himself. 

Sirius had clearly cleaned the flat within an inch of its life again, the lemon-bright scent of scourgify still lingering.

Over that wafted the merry and slightly chaotic smell of various things cooking. He’d transfigured the shelf under the wall console into a fireplace that looked just like the one at the seaside camp they’d once stayed at. Above it, the newly-repaired console played a Muggle holiday movie. All around, the floor to ceiling windows provided their own show of glittering city lights, a little blurry and misted over in the icy fog.

In the corner opposite the bed, which had its curtains neatly pulled shut, loomed an abomination of tinsel and wires and gaudy blinking neon baubles shaped in the rough approximation of a tree. Seeing Remus gawking at it, Sirius said cheerfully, “Atrocious, isn’t it? I think I’ll leave it up all year.”

That end-of-the-world festivity clearly possessed Sirius, as he wore a hideous sweater with similarly gaudy baubles on it as he pushed a red Santa hat into Remus’ hands.

“You’ve lost it,” Remus declared, solemn as a doctor diagnosing a terminal patient. “You’re worse than James. I never would’ve guessed.”

“Oh come on!” He said, rushing over to a pot of something that was boiling over and stabbing at it, giving it an enthusiastic stir. “This has to be better than sitting around in your broom cupboard of a flat and staring at spiders.”

Lifting up a lid and peering at the pot’s contents, Remus mumbled, “Certainly can’t be worse.”

They carried on cooking for the rest of the afternoon, Sirius issuing commands like he was the head chef, though Remus took direction gladly. Sirius’ wand sliced through the air, adjusting heat, stirring, sending pots and pans flying. 

Remus was flatly impressed by Sirius, who apparently had never cooked a day in his life but shrugged non-commitally when asked how he’d learned, as if going from never cooking to cooking a Hogwarts feast for two was completely normal. 

“It’s not that different from making up spells,” he said, apparently oblivious to the fact that making up spells was no easy feat.

As the sun set, Sirius disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes with the water running. Remus found a bottle of wine in the cupboard and opened it, sniffing.

“I think this has gone off,” he called towards the bathroom. “It smells foul.”

“Naw, no way,” Sirius said, finally emerging. “That’s like a hundred years old, finest Black family wine. I’m telling you, your nose is what’s gone off. Still smelling rotten old fruit everywhere?”

In a fit of nostalgia, Remus enchanted several candlesticks to float around the dining table, Great-Hall style. Sirius flicked off the wall console, which had been showing a movie about a tousle-haired lovesick buffoon, who they had been calling “James”, and his sad-sack attempts to win over the affections of the local Christmas baker, an all-business woman from the city— Lily of course.

The dining table—usually barely suitable for one—had been magically stretched to its limits, yet still looked as though it might collapse beneath the weight of so many jostling dishes.

At its center gleamed a massive golden goose, stuffed to bursting with sage, onion, and wild rice. Around it sprawled a glorious chaos of food and scent: roasted garlic mashed potatoes; crispy Brussels sprouts spilling from an overfull dish; thick gravy sloshing in a mug pressed into service as a gravy boat; Mrs. Potter’s buttery rolls; a half-scorched tray of bacon-wrapped sausages; and a bowl of rosemary roasted carrots and parsnips, still steaming, fresh from the oven. Remus couldn’t imagine how they’d manage to carve the goose—there was hardly space for a knife, let alone a steady hand to wield it.

Sirius, clearly indifferent to any conventional order of courses, had crammed the desserts onto the table as well: a Christmas pudding still under cling film, Mrs. Potter’s chocolate Yule log precariously balanced on the edge of the table, and a teetering tower of biscuit tins Remus had picked up from the corner store on his way over.

A strand of tinsel, stolen from the garish tree, wound through it all—glinting cheerfully between platters, catching the amber flicker of candlelight.

It was all, Remus thought, a little romantic.

As if to punctuate that thought, Sirius dragged his chair over to Remus’ so they would be side by side rather than opposite, elbows nearly bumping.

“Well, dig in! I only have the two plates so just scourgify before dessert.” Sirius beamed, a vision of holiday cheer under a sheen of kitchen-induced exertion. 

“Shouldn’t we say a toast or something?”

“Oh sure… what’s this holiday about anyway?” Sirius asked as he raised his glass.  “The solstice? That bloke who came back from the dead that all the Muggles are mad about?”

“Yes, Jesus Christ’s birthday. Safe to assume you never took Muggle studies I suppose. Go on then, you’re the host. Make your toast.” Remus raised his glass too with a sardonic smile. It really was quite funny watching Sirius Black play house.

“Alright.” He stood, addressing the empty room. “Here’s to a good excuse to get bladdered during the most miserable time of the year!”

They clinked glasses and dug in.

“Merlin, that was a meal. You’ve made the House Elves proud I think.” Remus stretched out on Sirius’ couch, hand to belly, red Santa hat pulled rakishly down over one eye.

Sirius smiled, happy and full and a little drunk.

He hadn’t planned to spend Christmas Eve alone with Remus. It had just turned out that way.

After he’d invited Remus over for the holiday, he’d speculated that it was probably a bad idea borne of those not-innocent impulses that he kept indulging. 

But, he reasoned, he had not been reckless lately. He had not been going to the club, had barely been drinking, hadn’t taken any pills, had even been skipping the sleeping draught. He’d been waking up early, keeping his flat clean, working for the Order—working himself into the ground, really. Between the missions, Moody’s endless briefings, and the bloody after-action reports, he was barely keeping his head above water.

And every day he had to do the animagus spell, twice a day, and he did, like clockwork, not even needing James’ friendly little reminders at the crack of dawn to remember to get up.

So if his one indulgence was a wholesome Christmas dinner with his friend that he harbored some unwholesome thoughts about, that was alright. He’d been living like a monk. Pawing ineffectually at Remus a few times after some holiday wine was basically harmless.

He stretched out on the opposite end of the couch, leg extended until his socked foot brushed against Remus’ heel. He nudged once, playfully.

“Want to watch one of those Muggle movies? I think there’s one where the girl falls in love with some artificial intelligence that’s downloaded Santa Claus or something. Sounds like a laugh.”

“Sure, put it on. My mum loved these rubbish holiday movies.”

“Your mum and I would’ve had a lot in common,” Sirius said, clicking at his wrist console to pull it up.

Remus smiled drowsily, too full to manage a quip.

Just as the movie was getting to the good part— Santa Claus AI was being corporatized and stripped of all the holiday magic that made the girl fall in love with it in the first place— a silver stag burst from the floor, violently jolting them both into battle-ready alertness.

“Merlin, Potter!” Remus spat, having leapt to his feet in a second with his wand out. 

Sirius had very nearly snapped his fingers and blasted a confringo at the Patronus. He released a string of curses he dearly wished the stag could bring back to its master.

“Let us up, wankers, it’s freezing down here,” the stag said.

After some further cursing and a few minutes, James and Lily swept in with, somehow, unbelievably, even more food.

“Merlin, mate, it smells like Hogwarts Christmas dinner in here!” James exclaimed, dumping his load of plastic containers amongst the holiday detritus already littering the kitchen counters. “Did you hire someone? Use one of those mad Muggle food replicator things?”

“I can solemnly swear this man cooked all of this food—spare what your mum sent over—himself,” Remus said, hand over heart. “He’s a freak. Feel free to hire him for your wedding.”

There was much unwrapping of scarves and dumping of coats and filling of plates before they were all settled again.

 “So then he says, ‘So are you lot all queer or is it just you?’” James put on the voice of Vernon Dursley, Lily’s brother in law, a beloved Potter impression. “All serious, staring at me like I’d spat in his pudding. And I said, not all of us but I do know one very queer werewolf. And he nearly passed out—spent the rest of the meal trying to figure out if I was joking!”

“Petunia kicked us out shortly after, the wretch. I didn’t think she could get worse, but every year she surprises me.” Lily sat curled up on the couch, glass of glittering red wine sloshing in her hand.

Peter, who had arrived not long after James and Lily, added, “Is a queer werewolf supposed to be scarier than a straight one? I should think it wouldn’t matter much if you’re about to be eaten.”

“Exactly right, Pete! Queer, straight, it doesn’t matter! We all just want a werewolf to eat us!” Sirius raised his own wine glass in an enthusiastic salute, digging his free hand into Remus’ side, tickling.

“Can we not?” Remus gasped between fits of giggling, shoving Sirius off.

“You know, mate…” James walked around the room, inspecting furniture and books and magical Knick knacks, plate of food balanced precariously in one hand. “When I first visited here, I thought you’d just moved in or something but no— this is just how it looks. It’s so minimalist. You’re like one of those Muggle tech moguls, living in your cement palace above the riff raff.” He poked an artifact and sent its fine wire arm spinning.

“Haven’t exactly had time to decorate, have I, what with the war. It was my Uncle’s, I’ve basically left it as is. Very eccentric fellow, Uncle Alphard. The best of the Blacks by a league.”

“I’m just saying, could use some color. Maybe a few what— Slytherin banners?”

Lily rolled her eyes. “James would deck our whole flat in red and gold if I let him.”

“I’ve noticed. That lion thing in your bedroom is hideous; I’d like to burn it. But no, not much house pride on my part these days, I’m afraid.”

“It’s weird, you know,” Peter said, thoughtful. “You don’t seem like much of a Slytherin. You haven’t hexed me once!”

“Still time!” Sirius tossed a ball of tinsel Peter’s way, who swatted it aside and seized a pillow, ready for battle.

“It’s stupid, really.” Lily took a sip of her wine before continuing and Remus noticed James’ eyes flick to her immediately, like he knew what she was about to say. He envied their silent communication; it was so effortless. Lily smiled a little apologetically at James but pushed on.

 “We tell a bunch of eleven year olds that we have them all figured out, split into neat categories, and then we wonder why they get so judgemental of each other

“You: brave. You: ambitious. You: smart. You: loyal. We get one trait, maybe two, and that’s the most important thing about us for the rest of our lives. Peter’s right that Sirius isn’t like the Slytherins, but what does that even mean? Why do we let it mean anything?”

This was clearly something she’d preached before. James jumped in, diffusing. “The hat is ancient, Lils. Powerful magic. It looks into your soul. And it’s not telling you who you are, it’s telling where you’ll thrive.”

“And we’ll all thrive around a bunch of people just like us?” Sirius asked darkly. “Just put all the people raised to believe in blood supremacy in one House and stick them in the basement. What could go wrong?”

“Exactly! Not to besmirch Dumbledore, but the whole House system is stupid!  We aren’t doing right by those kids, Sorting them like that. I can’t help but think it’s at the root of all this— the war, everything. Imagine if instead of coming to Hogwarts and immediately being equipped with ways to judge and divide each other, we just— didn’t.” She shifted on the couch and let James slide in next to her, settling her feet in his lap.

“You know I don’t really disagree, it’s just… it's an ancient tradition. It means a lot to people. And it does give you some choice! Look at Pete!” 

Peter blushed red, not wanting to be looked at. Remus remembered that the hat deliberated over him for a long while and he’d later confessed to begging it to let him into Gryffindor.

“I argued with it too. It was between Gryffindor and Slytherin and I was afraid my mother would actually kill me if I was in Gryffindor so…” Sirius shrugged. He’d rearranged himself next to Remus so his right arm was slung over the back of the couch, metal just barely brushing Remus’ neck. Remus vaguely remembered watching the young Sirius under the Sorting Hat, intense aristocratic face locked in discussion for at least twenty minutes before the hat had said an abrupt, exasperated “Slytherin!” 

“See! My point. You were too young to make a decision like that, for how much your life ends up dictated by your House. Imagine if it’d stuck you in Gryffindor? Or Hufflepuff for that matter?”

“Believe me, I’ve imagined it. That decision has already cost me an arm.” He raised the metal arm slightly, glinting orange in the candlelight. “Hoping it doesn’t cost me a leg too.”

When he put the arm back down, Remus could feel the full weight of it on his shoulders. Sirius had his other arm stretched along the back of the couch too, and his feet on the coffee table, in repose. Remus told himself this was just how Sirius lounged; there was no meaning to it, barely any intention.

“You just like the hat because it went on and on about how you’re the bravest and the boldest there’s ever been!” Peter said to James, laughing. Putting on a falsetto and clutching his hands together, he trilled, “Please, you manky old hat, tell me again how my ancient blood is of the lion!” James threw a pillow at him and he ducked, laughing. James lunged toward him, upending Lily.

The hat had rested on James’ head for all of one second before it Sorted him, ringing out Gryffindor with a distinct note of pride. 

It was decisive for Remus, too, which had been a surprise. His father always speculated he’d be in Ravenclaw, no doubt hoping that hours working on old Muggle radios with his mum would translate to a similar lust for knowledge in an academic setting. He’d imagined himself in Ravenclaw up until the moment he found himself next to Lily at the Gryffindor table. 

She had sat up on that stool for a while too, but when they’d asked her about it later, she’d said, with a glint in her eye, “Oh no, it decided right away. But I had a few questions for it.”

James and Peter broke out into a round of low-effort play fighting on the living room floor, rolling around and grappling at each other, a game they’d played since childhood, even before Hogwarts. Lily and Sirius watched them absentmindedly, both apparently lost in thought. Remus leaned back into Sirius’ arm, just to see if he’d move it.

It seemed inevitable the night would wind down soon as a satisfied sleepiness overtook them. The candles guttered out, still floating listlessly in the air, wax dripping down and pooling on the floor. Remus let his head tilt back and his eyes droop closed, the murmur of voices near him becoming more rhythm than distinct conversation. He could fall asleep right there, blur of wine and feast and friendship lulling him into peaceful oblivion.

Just when he was nearly out, the room exploded in a riot of color and noise, every datapad and wrist console and wall unit beeping and flashing in asynchronous discord.

Remus jerked upright, heart hammering, the haze of sleep torn away like a trapdoor yanked open.

Sirius was already staring down at his wrist, eyes wide and blazing in the sudden glare of his console against the dim candlelight. He shot upright, voice cracking with disbelief.

“Fuck. The Prewetts’ party.”

Chapter Text

Attack at the Prewetts. Need back-up immediately.

The datapad screen was still open to the message, though it lay abandoned amongst the remains of dinner while they rushed around over several tense minutes, preparing to leave.

Sirius cast a round of sobering-up spells, grateful he had so much practice with them. The spell was a bucket of ice water washing away the last of everyone’s Christmas cheer. He directed James to his equipment stash and Lily to reply to Moody. Peter dug through his bag, pulling out garishly wrapped packages and bits of tinsel, looking for his plasma gun, which he was not very practiced with. Sirius, annoyed and anxious to get going, snatched the bag from Peter and yanked out the gun, shoving it into his hands impatiently.

Remus, of course, was ready first. He stood by the door, jacket on, gun at his hip, wand at the other. He’d even dispelled the glamour on his hands, revealing the ferocious claws at his fingertips. He stood still and rigid,  expression deadly, as if a few spare minutes ago he hadn’t been half asleep slumped against Sirius, Christmas hat pulled low over his eyes.

“What do you have loaded in there?” he asked as Sirius came over, swinging his bag over his shoulder and adjusting his own gun.

Sirius raised his metal hand and ticked down three fingers, listing off the spells: nine total in the right hand. Then, left index finger, glinting with the single cybernetic tip: three more.

“Wish I’d put the new plasma bolts in. They’re much stronger.”

“It’ll be fine,” Sirius said, mostly to himself, and then to the room, “Alright, you lot, let’s go. Now.”

From receiving the message to Apparating, it had taken three minutes. Much too long.

Two spells ricocheted off their arm console shields before they were even fully materialized. Sirius seized Remus by the shoulder, steadying him as he immediately wretched. 

“Here! Take cover!” yelled a woman from somewhere in the darkness. They had appeared on a gravel path in a quiet, snowy wood. Just up a short hill glowed the Prewett House, nestled amongst trees, twinkling merrily with Christmas lights. It was an Order safe house, thoroughly spelled for protection, knowable only to members. 

High above the house in the clear starry night sky glowed the sickly green Dark Mark.

James led them, hunched with wands out, toward the voice. They found her behind a small shed, huddled over a body. 

“Thank Merlin,” she said as they approached, her voice choked. She had a frizzy crown of red hair and a thin dribble of blood running from a cut on her forehead. “He’s hurt badly and my magic isn’t—it’s not working, I don’t know why. Please—“

Lily dropped to her knees immediately next to the body and got to work. By the light of her lumos, Sirius realized the injured body was Moody, unconscious, his left leg a grotesque mangle.

“Molly, breathe. Tell us what happened.” James kneeled next to her as she tried again and again to cast a spell, any spell. Her breathing was ragged and frantic, in the clutch of a panic. He took her hand, stilling it, and repeated, “Breathe. Just breathe.”

“James, they’re firing from the windows. I don’t see anyone coming out.” Sirius was peering around the shed at the house, staying low. 

“Molly, please— now. We’re here to help.”

Through a final choking gasp, she finally looked at James and said, “They’d trapped the whole house. Anti-magic wards went off at midnight, then they swarmed in. Someone told them, the traitor, someone told them and let them in.” She sobbed, clutched at her chest. “They must’ve gotten in earlier too, to set the wards. Moody sensed something and came out here with me to look but they jumped us. We got away but—“ She looked at Moody’s still body again, eyes wide. “I got caught in the pulse but we got out of it so I thought my magic—“

“You’re a Prewett, right?” Sirius cut in, voice tight, eyes moving constantly. He thought of the unconscious red-haired man in the LeStrange basement, a single drop of blood falling into the cauldron. “They have your blood so the pulse will hold your magic for awhile. Best for you to get out of here—“

“No! My brothers are in there! And Arthur, he was upstairs!”

“Is there another way in, Molly?” Remus asked, joining James. “Other than the front door?”

“Yes—yes, there’s a way around back, a secret tunnel Gideon put in, but I don’t know where exactly—“

“It’s alright, we’ll find it,” Sirius said, already moving toward where Molly had indicated. “Lily, you stay here and help Moody. Remus and I will—“

“No.” Moody, conscious and heaving himself up, scanned them with his electric blue eye, glowing ominously in the dark. “Evans, just stabilize me and go with them. There could be injured in there. They’ll need you.”

Lily nodded once and with a few quick movements, cauterized the bloody stump of his leg. 

“Is there anyone else coming, Moody?” Peter asked. He looked nauseous and he didn’t even have his wand out. Thinking about a house full of anti-magic and Peter’s fumbling bad aim with the plasma gun, Sirius almost wanted to tell him to stay behind. But Moody was right; they’d need every body.

“Should be. Had two guarding the Cells, two more at the East Safe House. Called everyone up. There were maybe eight of them, and inside we have six of our own. They took us by surprise and the wards… I don’t know how they got the bloody wards in there.” He groaned, gritted his teeth.

“Dumbledore— did you call him?” Remus asked.

“He was here for the party. You-Know-Who himself was here and—“ he stopped, clutched his chest. “They went off, can’t say where.”

“Enough, Moody. We’re going. Molly, stay here and watch him. We’ll mark where we find the side door, you direct the others that way.” Lily pulled potions out of her bag, handed them to Molly. “Those if his breathing slows. If he gets very bad, get him to help. We’ll manage.”

James led the way, sprinting around the back of the house, shields up. As they approached roughly where Molly guessed the secret entrance was, Sirius cast a spell and a mess of silver-outlined footprints appeared in the snow, criss-crossing everywhere. Sirius scanned, trying to decipher the maze of steps but it was Remus who spotted it: a cluster of footprints by a wall, too dense to be normal.

In the tunnel, the cold, clammy chill of an anti-magic pulse crawled over them immediately, like the whole house was cursed with it.

“Fuck, wish I’d gotten those bloody prosthetics done already,” James hissed, slipping his wand away and pulling out his plasma gun. Everyone had procrastinated on it; so few were willing to cut off even a fingertip.

“Who’s guarded here before?” Remus asked, rounding all five of them up in the dark tunnel. “Anyone know the floor plan?”

Sirius had done guard duty outside and James had visited the house for various social engagements so remembered vague details only. No one else knew a thing.

“Priority should be to get people out, not take down Death Eaters. Recover anyone you can and get them to this tunnel. If you come across anyone injured, message me and I’ll come to you.”

James nodded at Lily and added, “I’ll scout ahead; I’ve got the cloak.”

He pulled a shimmering silver cloth from his pack. Sirius stared as he wrapped it around his shoulders and disappeared completely, perfectly invisible.

“Merlin, where the hell did you get that?” he asked, shocked. 

“Later. You all stay here, I’ll be right back. I’ll message with anything, keep your consoles pulled up.” 

Apparently he was gone after that, because he said no more. 

They stood in a tense huddle, all senses alight, straining for any noise or smell or vibration of magic from above. Sirius bounced his leg, shifting from side to side, stopping only when Remus gave him a significant look.

Finally, the message from James flashed on his wrist console:

First floor, three Death Eaters to left in dining room, three to right in sitting room. Second floor, door guarded by two. No sign of Order; likely beyond door under guard. 

Below that, a sketch of a hastily drawn map.

They all huddled around Sirius’ console, reading.

Before they could respond, a second message appeared, James seizing command:

setting off an explosion in sitting room in three minutes. Need simultaneous cover in dining room and second floor, don’t let them coordinate, get the hostages

They sprang into action. The countdown started.

In the dark of the tunnel, Sirius snapped his left hand three times, his right once— invisibility spells on them all. The spell was nowhere near as good as whatever cloak James was using, rendering them more of a blur than truly invisible, but it was better than nothing. The element of surprise would be critical.

The tunnel pitched steeply upward and ended with rickety wooden stairs that opened into a cluttered pantry, cans and plastic containers crowding every shelf and hanging clumps of herbs drying above their heads. 

Silent, communicating through nods and gestures, they broke apart, shields up and guns out. 

Lily and Remus went toward the dining room, Sirius and Peter to the stairs.

One minute

Sirius could just barely make out Peter’s blurred form moving ahead of him. 

“Pete, let me up front. Watch my back.”

Sirius slid ahead and crept up the stairs, plasma gun out. 

At the top of the stairs, he clicked his fingers again. Hominem revelio.

Instantly, the glowing outlines of bodies appeared, revealing one to the left and one to the right, guarding a door behind which huddled six more bodies, some sprawled on the ground.

Two minutes. 

He pointed at Pete and then at the Death Eater to the left, raised one finger to indicate there was one. Peter nodded and they split off again.

Sirius waited tensely in the shadows. He watched the outline by the hostages, glanced back toward the one he hoped Peter would be able to take out.

An explosion from below rattled the house. Sirius snapped his fingers three more times in rapid succession—accio, accio, accio—taking advantage of the chaos the explosion sowed. From various rooms in the house, three anti-magic pulses flew to his hands even as he moved toward the now alert figure by the door. He disabled them, but the clammy grip of anti-magic didn’t leave him. They either had a lot more pulses or they were using at least one coded to him. He didn’t have time to dwell. 

He rounded the door with his plasma gun ablaze, loosing three bolts before realizing that, of course, of course, it was Regulus.

Regulus dove out of the way, sending a red flash flying from his wand as he did so. The plasma bolts sizzled against the wall behind him. 

“Reg, it’s me, come with me—“

Regulus sent another string of spells at him from behind the cover of a desk. Two skimmed off his protego and the shield sputtered out, spent. 

He stepped closer, gun still trained on his brother. He knew he’d just look like a blur to his brother, so he tried again:

“I can get you out of this, Reg, we can go together—“

In the reflection of the window just behind where his brother ducked, he saw movement—someone approaching from behind. He dove aside, an Avada Kedavra hissing by where his head had just been. 

No time to spare a thought for Peter, who was no where in sight. He shot at the new Death Eater from the ground, on his back, scrambling away. He hit his leg and the Death Eater screamed, stumbled. 

The way he dove gave him a direct sight line to Regulus, crouched in the shadows of the desk, wand trained at him. Neither of them moved. The Death Eater threw another quick series of spells at him. Sirius snapped—confringo. It hit a shield, harmless. He fired plasma two more times but then another Death Eater appeared in the doorway and it was all he could do to scramble away again, launching bolts as he went to keep both occupied and not aimed at him. 

The new Death Eater, a giant of a man behind a skeletal mask, aimed his wand in Sirius’ direction and set off a massive explosion, knocking everyone and everything in its path asunder. Sirius slammed into a wall, shattering a wall mirror and sending glittering shards into the air and slicing his back. 

The spell had knocked the other, smaller Death Eater and Regulus aside too. His brother was stirring from under the broken desk, throwing wood aside.

The massive Death Eater stepped forward, wand trained at Sirius who had lost grip on his gun. He raised a hand but it was no use, he wouldn’t be fast enough and he didn’t have any spells that could stop a direct killing curse. At best he could hope to take the Death Eater down too.

So just as the Death Eater started to form the words—Avada kedav—Sirius snapped his fingers. But the plasma bolt from his ring finger hit the wall, harmless, because the massive Death Eater had been blasted off his feet by a spell, killing curse flying wide. 

He whipped around to see Regulus, wand out and eyes wide. 

“You fucking moron, they’ll kill you for this!” Sirius hissed, thinking fast. He snatched his gun from where it had fallen and shot two quick plasma bolts at the large Death Eater, who was trying to get to his feet and recover his wand. The bolts hit him in the chest, the head. He dropped, dead.

Then he was on the other Death Eater, who had been about to scream something, wand turning toward Regulus, distracted. Sirius barreled into him, metal hand locking around his wand and wrenching it away, throwing it aside. They wrestled for only a few seconds before Sirius had him, metal arm locked around his throat. His eyes bulged, hands scrabbling at Sirius, but it was no use. With one final thrash, he was dead too, throat crushed.

Sirius rounded on his brother then.

“Regulus, come with me. They will kill you. They’ll kill you for this.” He gestured at the bodies, lifeless.

“Just go, Sirius— I can’t—“ He stepped back, wand out and eyes wide. “They won’t know, no one will know.” 

A shriek tore from downstairs. Regulus’ head snapped toward the door and he was gone, running past Sirius.

“Fuck, fuck, you idiot!” he yelled after him, but there wasn’t time to chase him. He rushed to the locked door. He blasted the handle, shooting three times before kicking it open, the door slamming to the ground.

At the explosion in the sitting room across the hall, Remus and Lily, who had been on either side of the dining room door, backs to the wall, waiting with wands and guns out, moved in. 

Two anti-magic pulses flew past their heads and Remus knew Sirius had summoned them as the clammy chill in the dining room lifted immediately.

The Death Eaters weren’t expecting magic— they were barely expecting plasma—and Lily had laid one of the three out before they could even react. 

Remus shot two bolts and directed them with his wand, sending them both at the Death Eater nearest him. One hit, one missed, and the Death Eater stumbled to her knees, injured. Lily dueled with the other one, spells flying and sizzling off shields. 

A body pushed by him, invisible, and Remus shifted, letting James by. 

“Two in the other room are down!” his voice yelled, spells materializing and flying from the empty air. “One got away, I don’t know where!”

Just as Remus thought they had it, thought they’d have them all down, two more Death Eaters rushed in and the room flashed with spells, plasma, shimmering shields giving way. 

The icy clutch of anti-magic swept over them and their wands fell silent. The Death Eaters, apparently unaffected, seemed to double their spellcasting as Remus and Lily ducked for cover, plasma guns firing again and again. James, invisible, lunged for the pulse and before Remus could warn him, disarmed it. 

It promptly exploded, sending more pulses into the air— too many— and knocking James aside, his cloak tearing away.

Beyond the door, three Order members in various states of battle readiness stood, alert, armed with an assortment of random items: heavy lamp base, a silver letter opener, the broken leg of a wooden chair. Seeing Sirius, one of them, a woman with long dark hair who Sirius guessed might be Emmaline Vance, let out a thank Merlin and immediately stepped aside, revealing the three sprawled bodies behind her. 

“They’re injured, we need to get them to St. Mungo’s. Is there a way out?” 

Looking at the limp bodies, Sirius feared that at least one of them was worse than injured.

One of the other Order members, a blonde man with a vicious cut across his chest that bled freely onto his white button down, looked out the window down into the snowy from yard. 

“There’s more coming, we can’t go out the front. We’re unarmed,” he said, voice tight with fear. Sirius counted at least four more hooded figures, wand tips alight, approaching the front door.

“There’s a tunnel through the pantry. Can you three carry them?” 

With some struggle, they managed to arrange the three unconscious bodies amongst them. With the limp arm of one body slung over his shoulder, his gun in left hand and metal arm held out, Sirius led the way down the stairs. He looked for Peter’s blur desperately, wanting back up, fearing he might be dead.

The explosions and screaming from the dining room nearly diverted him. He lurched toward the noise, but Emmaline Vance’s panicked eyes stopped him and he cut toward the kitchen.

The pantry was a ruin: cans scattered everywhere, shelves asunder, the ceiling partially collapsing like someone had tried to create an explosion and block the door. 

Shifting the body he’d been supporting to one of the other men, Sirius gestured for them all to step back and snapped his fingers. The debris in front of the tunnel door promptly transfigured into a puff of smoke, drifting to the ceiling. Even in the chaos and fear, he felt a touch of pride at that spell; it had taken him hours to perfect and secure in the hand. With a bit more effort, he had the door clear and the Order members filed past.

“Go to the end and to the left, by the shed. Molly should be there, she can get you out of the anti-Apparition field. Stay low.”

Emmaline nodded once and the group hobbled into the darkness, moving agonizingly slowly.

Best he could do. He sprinted to the battle.

For a second, his heart thrilled to see Sirius fly into the room, slicing his wand through the air with a vicious red lash. But then it didn’t make sense— the clammy pulse filled the room and Sirius shouldn’t be able to do magic. He looked too skinny besides and then Remus clocked the black robes, the white skull mask pushed up from his face, so like Sirius’, and Remus knew the man must be Regulus.

His red lacero slashed James across the back as he dove away, blood arcing out and spattering against the wall.

There were too many for the three of them to fight now, so they had pivoted to retreating, moving through the house, keeping up a steady stream of plasma to keep them at bay. Four more Death Eaters burst through the front door, spells flying, and Remus thought this is it, this is how it ends. 

Then from a side door burst a large, muscled man, head a blur of red hair and raised hand glinting metalically, roaring with rage.  

He snapped his fingers six times, quick, and fired off as many confringos at the Death Eaters on their tail, exploding the halls, the rooms, everything, into fire. The ceiling collapsed, debris raining down and bouncing off of shields, knocking those Death Eaters that were unprotected to the ground.

“The building is going to collapse,” Lily hissed, grabbing his arm and dragging him away, James already ahead. 

“Is Sirius still in here? Peter?” Remus yelled, stumbling as she pulled him. He whipped his head around, searching. 

“Sirius! Peter!”

James stopped short in front of a window and he blasted it with his gun, glass shattering. 

“You two go,” he said, wiping sweat and blood from his face with his sleeve. “I’ll go make sure Sirius and Peter got out—“

His voice strangled and his eyes widened as a spell hit him in the neck. His hands went to his throat and he clawed at it, struggling to breathe. Lily caught him and held him up as he collapsed, nearly dropping under the weight of him. 

“Go, Lily!” Remus screamed as he turned on the Death Eater, plasma gun firing. 

His eyes met the flash of storm grey behind the mask, pulled down now to cover Regulus’ face. 

Remus held the trigger of his gun, let it charge for the brief moment it took Regulus to peer through the smoke and take his own aim. Just as he released, someone barreled into him, knocking him aside and sending his powerful shot wild.

Instinctively, Remus slashed his claws, catching flesh, ready to fight—bite and thrash and wrangle and kill—when a metal hand locked on his arm and he met storm grey eyes again, panicked and pleading. Three red claw marks marred his face, red slashes through the black dust and soot that coated him. 

“That’s the bloody enemy, Black!” an outraged voice screamed, and Sirius whipped his head away from Remus just in time to see Gideon Prewett snap his fingers toward Regulus. Sirius lunged, but it was too late. A bloom of blood opened across Regulus’ chest and spewed out like it couldn’t leave his veins fast enough. 

“No!” Sirius screamed, voice breaking, and he stumbled to his brother as he collapsed to the ground, robes pooling around him. 

The ceiling above them creaked and collapsed partially, on fire. 

“Sirius, we have to get out!” 

But Sirius didn’t hear or else chose not to listen. He pulled his brother up, lifting him. Regulus looked so frail and small cradled in his brother’s arms. Sirius went, stumbling, deeper into the burning house, disappearing into the smoke.

Gideon clapped a hand on Remus’ shoulder and pulled him away, toward the shattered window. Remus fought back, tried to pull away, but Gideon was so strong and his hand was like a vice on his arm now. As he tried to twist away, he felt something pop in his shoulder and it went limp. Gideon shoved him out the window, down into the cold shock of a snow drift.

He couldn’t breath or see through the smoke and of course his magic wasn’t working. 

He’d dropped his gun somewhere as he’d struggled with Regulus’ limp body. Unarmed, coughing, he lurched through the ruin of the house looking for anyone that might be able to do magic, to help stop the inexorable bleeding from his brother’s chest.

His best bet, he thought, was a Death Eater. There must still be one conscious enough to do the spell to slow the septumspectra bleeding. He’d put himself on their mercy. He’d do anything it took.

In the sitting room, he found one stirring, mask pulled down. Sirius couldn’t tell who it was but it didn’t matter. He laid Regulus down next to him and turned to the Death Eater. An ugly burn reddened his face and he clutched at it, groaning. Sirius snapped his fingers—episkey—and healed it. The last spell in his cybernetics– frittered away in a show of goodwill more than anything else. The Death Eater met his eyes then, revitalized, and moved to raise his wand. 

“Please—please,” Sirius begged, hoarse from the smoke and the fear. “Regulus needs the sectumsempra cure now. Right now. I’ll help you out through the front door and you can do it there, out of the smoke. I’ll keep the Order away from you; you can take me prisoner, I don’t care. Please, he’s dying.” Sirius raised his hands then to show he was unarmed

The Death Eater looked at him utterly confused, but the house groaned around them and he struggled to his feet, accepting Sirius’ shoulder as he led the way to the front door, Regulus back in his arms. 

Outside, Regulus’ blood dripped red on the snow. A few feet from the smoking front door, Sirius fell to his knees, laying his brother down as delicately as he could. 

The other Death Eater hesitated. He held his wand trained on Sirius. His eyes flicked toward the line of dark trees just beyond the light of the burning house. He took a step, glanced at Sirius on the ground, unarmed and soaked in blood, on his knees before his dying—maybe already dead—brother. He moved as if to sprint into the woods.

“Do it now. Do the spell now.”

Remus trained his gun on the Death Eater as he stalked forward. One arm hung limp at his side but his aim was steady.

“You have three seconds to start before I blow your head in. Do it now.”

The Death Eater put his hands up, wand pointed to the sky. Cautiously, still obviously confused, he stepped to Regulus, lowered to his knees. Eyes on Remus and the red glow of plasma in the muzzle of his gun, he started chanting. His wand moved in that familiar elaborate pattern. The bleeding started to slow instantly.

Sirius’ heart wrenched spasmodically and something gave way, a dam breaking, and suddenly he was mumbling thank you, thank you, thank Merlin, please please. He didn’t know if he was saying it to the Death Eater or to Remus or to Regulus, who looked so pale, nearly exsanguinated.

Then, before he could see his brother’s eyes flicker back open, Remus was pulling him up, gun trained on the Death Eater still.

“There’s more coming, Sirius. We need to go. Now. He’s stable, come on. He’ll be ok. There’s nothing else we can do.”

Sirius let himself be pulled through the snow, into the dark wood, which echoed with the cracking of the house collapsing behind them.

They stumbled down the basement stairs, coughing out black smoke, arms supporting each other as they both clutched at wounds— just burns and cuts, mostly, though Remus’ arm still hung limp, clearly dislocated.

“The bloody werewolf basement, really?”

“Sorry, it’s all I could think of— I have potions here and no one can get in.”

Sirius dropped to the floor, pressing his hand into a gash on his side, blood oozing out between metal fingers as he let out a pained hiss.

Remus had his own wand out, casting what healing spells he could on himself, fixing his left shoulder. Then, he turned to Sirius but as he expected, the magic did nothing, sliding off him like water over wax.

“Here, potions,” and he pulled a bag from the narrow steel locker with shaking hands, adrenaline rapidly giving way to exhaustion and shock. “Just stabilize and I’ll get us to St. Mungo’s, I just need a minute before I can—“ He coughed, choking, eyes watering.

“Fuck,” Sirius groaned, throwing back a healing draught. “James and Lily—“

“Got out, I think.”

“Peter? I lost sight of him so early, he might’ve still been upstairs, fuck. We have to go back—“ Sirius tried to lurch to his feet, but Remus pushed him back down and then kneeled next to him, pulling dittany and burn salve from the bag.

“The house collapsed. Maybe he got out.” But Remus didn’t believe it and his stomach churned. Peter. He shouldn’t have even been there; he could barely fire a plasma gun. 

“We need to get back, now. They might need us—“

The ding of Sirius’ wrist console interrupted him, and he pulled up the message, read it aloud. 

Regroup at rendezvous point C. Assume all safe houses are compromised. Immediate evacuation in place.

They looked at each other, grim, and Remus knew they were both imagining the same thing: how they must have looked, in the company of two Death Eaters, as the Prewett House collapsed behind them.

Chapter Text

Moody interrogated him for two straight hours.

He was as sharp and relentless as ever, despite the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around the stump of his knee. At one point, he exited abruptly, leaving Sirius alone in the windowless room for nearly an hour, only to return and repeat every question for another two hours with the same cold persistence—ignoring all of Sirius’s desperate attempts to ask about his friends.

Sirius told the truth. He didn’t have a defense.

“Gideon hit my brother with sectumsempra. I acted to save him because—because he’s my brother. That’s it. That’s the only reason. I wasn’t thinking about Death Eaters or battle lines or anything. Remus helped because he wanted me out of that house, and he probably knew I wouldn’t leave unless Regulus was okay.”

It wasn’t a good story. It didn’t look good. He’d abandoned the Order the second Regulus went down. James, Lily, Remus, Peter—and no one would tell him where the hell Peter was—none of them had crossed his mind. Not once. Not with his brother bleeding out in front of him.

“Vance says you helped them get out. The hostages are vouching for you, Black. You abetted two Death Eaters in escaping,” Moody said, his magical eye spinning wildly before settling dead center on Sirius’s face. It felt like being dissected—like Moody was scanning his organs for treachery.

“I’d toss you in the Cells for it,” he went on. “Just to give you time to get your bloody head on straight and decide whose side you’re actually on. But the Cells are compromised. The Prewett House was just a distraction.”

Sirius’s mouth dropped open. He had a thousand questions—but Moody silenced him with a raised hand.

“Read it in the after-action report. I’ll expect yours on my desk by morning. Dismissed.”

Rendezvous point C was a maze of dim, low-ceilinged metal rooms in the basement of a nondescript Muggle office building. On his way out, Sirius ran into Remus, emerging from his own interrogation looking pale and wrung out.

They didn’t speak as they made their way down the narrow, echoing halls. When they stepped outside, the cold near-dawn hit like a slap. Christmas lights twinkled absurdly from lampposts above them, cheery and alien. 

A few hours ago, Sirius had been cooking a goose, watching some idiotic holiday film, draping a not-so-casual arm over Remus as he dozed off on his shoulder.

Now his clothes were stiff with his brother’s blood.

Overcome and quickly coming unwound, he pulled Remus into a side alley without warning and wrapped his arms around him tightly, burying his face in the warm crook of his neck, clinging to him. Despite the sweat, the smoke, the grime, he still smelled faintly of forest.

Remus jumped at first and tensed, like he was being attacked all over again. Then he raised his own arms and wrapped them around Sirius, tight, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt. 

“I’m sorry, Remus. I’m so sorry. And thank you. Thank you. I can’t believe—I’m so bloody sorry, I’m an idiot—“ he choked a bit, felt his mind spin out, click off the rails, and he knew he might keep babbling, might apologize a thousand times or else burst into tears. 

Instead, Remus moved one hand to the back of Sirius’ head and pressed his face more firmly into his shoulder, grounding him. He shushed softly as Sirius took a great shuddering breath, trying to calm down.

“Everything’s ok, Sirius. It’s ok,” Remus murmured. “James and Lily and Peter are all fine. You got the hostages out. One dead before we got there. It’s alright, it’s going to be alright.”

Sirius pulled away just enough to look into Remus’ eyes and ask, voice still ragged, “They all got out? Peter too?”

“Peter too. Moody said his gun jammed right away so he booked it early on, through the tunnel to direct reinforcements. I told that git to let me upgrade it ages ago—“

“Moody wouldn’t tell me fuck all,” Sirius muttered. “Had me half-convinced they were all dead.”

“You’re too used to his interrogations,” Remus said gently. “I just refused to answer until he told me.”

Suddenly desperate for him, starving, Sirius pressed himself back to Remus, caution thrown to the wind. In that dark, dingy alley amongst snowdrifts of garbage and puddles of oily ice melt, he held on to Remus for a long time.

“Ouch! Merlin, Alice, you did that one already! Yes, I can feel it. Yes it bloody hurts.”

Five days after Christmas, Sirius’ magic still hadn’t returned. He’d spent most of his time either writing terse “clarifications” on his after action report to Moody or else in Alice’s lab being experimented on like a rat. 

She cast hundreds of spells on him, recording which ones stuck and which had no effect. She made him attempt to cast spells himself for hours to humiliatingly ineffectual results, his wand inert in his hand. She even had him guzzle down potion after potion, curiously peering at him as a healing draught seemed to have little impact on a paper cut she’d inflicted on his finger while a giggling serum broke him out into a fit he didn’t recover from for forty-five minutes.

“Interesting. Interesting. Yes, very interesting….” she mumbled, typing on her pad.

“So glad this has all been so interesting for you, but can I go now?” he asked, catching his breath and wiping away tears as the last of the laughter subsided.

“Yes, you can go. Come back tomorrow. I have some cursed items I’d like to see you handle.”

Sirius was tempted to tell her where she could shove her cursed items, but thought better of it. He felt like he was on probation with the Order. If sacrificing his body for science would help get him back into everyone’s good graces, he’d do it. 

He met James at Static and promptly ordered a shot of vodka, slinging it back and ordering another.

James eyed him warily.

“Busy day at the lab?” 

“She cast the bat bogey hex on me about six times. Felt like I was back at Hogwarts. All the worst hexes seem to work just bloody fine,” he grumbled, sipping at the vodka and relishing its burn. “Been a squib for five fucking days.”

“Gideon is the same,” James said, frowning slightly. “Fabian and Molly are back to normal, though. Must be something to that.”

“I’m sure Alice has her theories, though not like she’d tell me any of them.” He sank onto the table, chin on folded arms, pouting a little.

Sirius knew he shouldn’t complain, but James was so easy to complain to. He accepted it for what it was—venting and release—and he didn’t judge, just occasionally turned him away from his darker moods with a deft joke or a distracting anecdote. 

When he, Remus, and Peter had first gone to visit James at St. Mungo’s as he recovered from a crushed windpipe, Sirius had choked out an apology, meaning it so deeply that it felt like the pressure of it might crush his windpipe on the way out too.

James looked at him carefully, laying a gentle hand on his arm. 

“None of us have siblings.” He looked around at Remus and Peter. “But I imagine we’d all do the same.” As he looked at them each in turn, Sirius knew exactly what he meant and felt so achingly included in whatever intimacy James communicated with his eyes that he nearly hugged him then. Finally, softly, James said, “You can’t save him from his own bad decisions, though. No matter how much you want to.”

Right when the lump in his throat threatened to overcome him in some soppy and embarrassing way, James grinned and added, “Plus, no one in the Order died and I got to see Lily stab a knife into my windpipe like some kind of old-timey Muggle wartime medic. She’s a mad woman! I can’t wait to marry her!”

James was good like that. Always knew the right thing to say.

Cruelly, the full moon fell just a week after Christmas. Remus had meant to see the Pack, but when the day came, he was still bone-tired, hollowed out.

Worse, there’d been a breakout from the Cells, and in yet another twist of cruelty, Greyback had escaped.

“I thought he was in Azkaban already? Why the bloody hell wasn’t he in Azkaban?” Remus had demanded of Moody, furious.

Moody had only grunted something about bureaucratic delays and paperwork errors. Along with six other Death Eaters, Greyback had slipped free during what now looked like the real attack—with the Prewetts’ Christmas party raid just the diversion.

So Remus postponed his plans for another month—one more month to rest, to contact a few Pack members, to track Greyback. Then he’d go to them. He felt guilty for the delay, useless even—but when he woke up on the cold metal floor of his basement the next morning, aching and bloodied, he was almost grateful to be there, waiting for help, and not heading to some deep frozen woods.

Peter came to help. James was still in the hospital, Lily was operating on an injured Order member, and Sirius—of course—was still without his magic. Peter worked quietly, efficiently, though he looked as worn and frayed as Remus felt. His healing charms were steady but his hands shook as he pulled Remus upright.

Back at his flat, Remus sank beneath his blankets, half-dreaming already. But Peter lingered, moving restlessly about the small room, brewing tea, shuffling papers. Finally, he sat at the foot of the bed and exhaled a long, heavy sigh.

“Feeling alright, Pete?” Remus asked gently, forcing his voice to soften. He knew Peter likely felt guilty about what had happened at the Prewett’s and tried to steel himself to comfort him.

“Alright,” Peter said, though his eyes darted. “Just… all this with the spy. It’s doing my head in.”

The aftermath of the attacks had twisted the Order in on itself. Overnight, they’d gone from cautious to consumed by paranoia. Someone inside had planted anti-magic wards at the Prewetts’. Someone close. Someone trusted.

Moody acted within hours—constant vigilance was doctrine now. No member was to discuss missions with another. Safe houses were assigned on a need-to-know basis. They had new procedures for identification—magical and Muggle ocular scans, security questions, Pensieve reviews, encryption layers deep enough to get lost in.

They didn’t even gather for the funeral of Benjy Fenwick, the lone death at the Prewett House. It was like he just disappeared.

Static had been deserted for days. No one dared risk a drink, not with loose tongues and listening ears everywhere.

Peter picked at his cuticles, eyes down. “Moody asked me about Sirius,” he muttered. “About how he was before the attack.”

“Peter, Sirius was trying to save his brother. He’s nearly died for the Order more than once. He cut off his own arm to rid himself of the Mark. You can’t honestly suspect him.”

But of course everyone did. Truth didn’t matter anymore. Only whispers, which were getting louder by the day.

“I don’t,” Peter said quickly. “I don’t. It’s just—he asked when we started hanging out with him. And it was right when the spy started leaking information. Sirius grabbed my gun before we Apparated, remember? And he made sure we were upstairs together. Like he knew my gun would jam and I wouldn’t be able to stop him.”

Remus closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t Peter’s fault; it was the atmosphere—the fear. Moody had grilled him with the same questions, and if he didn’t know Sirius the way he did, maybe he’d have doubted him too.

“It doesn’t make sense, Pete,” he said quietly. “He freed the hostages. If he’d wanted them dead, he could have killed them all the second he got upstairs—and blamed it on the Death Eaters. You know it’s nonsense. They took his magic, for fucks sake.”

“Benjy was the only one that died. Wasn’t he always on Sirius about being the traitor? They didn’t like each other.”

He opened his eyes, meeting Peter’s gaze. “Benjy died before we got there. All the others confirmed it. You can’t let them tear us apart, Peter. That’s what they want—the spy, the attacks—it’s all meant to make us afraid of each other.”

Peter nodded, though without conviction, worrying again at a bloodied cuticle.

“People are pointing at me, too,” Remus added, the words spilling out despite his exhaustion. “Doesn’t matter what I do—they’ll always think there’s something suspicious about me. Sirius knows what that’s like.” 

Remus thought about the three claw marks he’d left across Sirius’ face. They hadn’t healed yet.

“You’re right, Moons,” Peter said quietly. “Sorry. Come by James’ once he’s out of the hospital? He wants to do presents—since we didn’t get to at Christmas.”

Remus managed a weak smile and nodded. The moment Peter stood to go, he let his eyes close. Sleep took him before the door even latched.

—

His magic came back in trickles and lurches, after two long weeks.

Two weeks of heating food with that strange humming Muggle contraption in his kitchen instead of an effortless spell.

Two weeks of riding the Tube.
Two weeks of twiddling his thumbs, useless except as Alice’s latest lab rat.
Two weeks of performing the Animagus ritual at dusk and dawn, not knowing if it was working or if he was simply courting permanent disfigurement.

When it finally returned, he decided he needed a project. 

Moody was still cagey about reassigning him to missions, saying he wanted a better strategy for “managing the issue with your brother” before sending him back into the field. The words made Sirius’ stomach sink — another reminder that he’d taken three steps back in the long journey to trustworthiness — but it also meant one crucial thing: Regulus was alive.

He fought the impulse to check Moody’s datafile again and again, or worse, go hunt his brother down himself.

He fought the impulse to sink into that familiar dark depression– sleeping draught and missed messages and ruined flat. Or else that manic self-destruction that he usually comforted himself with: the drugs and the drinking and the club and the press of strange bodies smothering him into numbness.

So yes. A project. Definitely.

At James’, once he was finally out of the hospital, they had exchanged Christmas gifts.

Remus had given James, Sirius, and Peter matching handheld Muggle gaming consoles enchanted and reprogrammed to play a digital version of Quidditch. The four of them spent that night, and many after, yelling button combinations across the sitting room, heckling, laughing until they cried.

It was such a thoughtful gift– the gift of more time with the first friends he’d ever had–that Sirius felt almost embarrassed about the very expensive wrist console he’d bought for Remus. It seemed coldly utilitarian in contrast, more a show of wealth than an expression of the very real heated feelings he harbored for Remus.

So, that night, back at his flat, Sirius thought of Remus again as he did the Animagus ritual. He held his wand to his heart and imagined an animal– undefined, shapeless– running through the beautiful, dark Bialowieza Forest alongside the werewolf. In his mind, the wolf was Remus’ glowing white Patronus made real, paws striking the snowy ground silently, tail a brilliant banner against the night sky. The animal that was him– something big and fast– kept pace with the wolf, joyful and wild, their breaths fogging the air together, intermingling.

As he chanted softly, wand steady against his chest, he felt his heart stutter, the beat of it splitting and doubling. His eyes snapped open and he thought for one frightening moment that he was having a heart attack, that there was something horribly wrong. But then he put his hand to his sternum and felt it there: two hearts beating distinctly for a minute, out of rhythm with each other, then slowly settling back into one.

Later, in his bed, with the city lights refracting through an icy rain outside his window, he listened for the sound of thunder, watched for the flash of lightning. But there was none; the rain was just a wintery mist. 

He knew that he needed to make that vision– himself and Remus, in those beautiful silent woods– a reality. 

He had been hesitant to force his way into the Animagus plan with James and Peter before. He had tried so hard to only toe that line with Remus: the one that, once crossed, would ruin everything.

But now he knew it was no use. 

He’d barrel recklessly through any line, break any rule, smash any delicate social balance to run through the woods with Remus, free and wild. He would do anything to know that Remus would never need to lock himself in a lonely basement again. 

The forest alone wouldn’t be enough. He turned under the covers and reached for his datapad, fingers trembling with the excitement of a plan about to be hatched. He started a list: anti-Muggle wards, amplified Muffliato, Protego Totalum, Repello Inimicum for the borders, perimeter binds as backups, maybe a detection web outside the wards for intruders, Salvio Hexia for good measure… 

Enough to cover five, ten square miles. Plenty of space to run.

Then he paused. There was the matter of before and after the transformations. Now, Remus Apparated to the basement before dusk — making himself sick every time — transformed, and stayed there until he could move again. That miserable metal cage, the pile of damp blankets, the stink of old blood and rusted chains. Then another Apparition, another round of puking, a sweaty recovery in his shabby flat on the outskirts of London.

At Hogwarts, Sirius now knew, Remus had transformed in the Shrieking Shack. He could walk there, and walk out again when it was over, at least.

He frowned down at his datapad. Would a Portkey make him sick? The Floo, maybe — that old, half-forgotten magic?

He closed his eyes. Let himself picture it: Remus somewhere warm and quiet, somewhere that smelled of wood smoke and clean sheets, not metal and blood. Somewhere that felt like him.

In a sudden gift from his over-active libidinal imagination, he saw it: a brief vision of Remus, with one eyebrow arched in that way Sirius loved, pushing him down onto the soft quilt spread on the bunkbed in the Scarborough camp. The firelight flickered shadows over his scarred chest– the long slice of the now pale sectumsempra scar cutting cleanly from one delicate collarbone to rib cage. As Remus leaned in, Sirius rose to meet him and pressed his tongue to the line of that scar, heat blooming low in his stomach.

Before it could go any further, he dragged the datapad back toward him and began typing again.

Chapter Text

The next month passed as uneventfully as any month could in the middle of a war.

They worked. They met up as frequently as possible, mostly at James’ or Sirius’ flats, creating bubbles of peace and normalcy amongst the growing tension and fear. They could no longer discuss each other’s missions, so whenever Remus did not have his friends directly in his line of sight, he felt a queasy anxiety that they were unsafe somewhere, never sure whether they were off on a patrol in Hogsmeade or off raiding a Death Eater hide out or off recovering from some mortal wound. 

When they were together, they fell into familiar patterns– dark jokes, long hours of digital Quidditch that bored Lily and Remus to tears, mindless TV both Muggle and magical, cryptic comments about escalating Ministry pressures. 

Remus was no longer allowed to discuss his lab work with others, but he would still bring scrap projects home and Sirius would sit with him, asking questions occasionally and poking around with his wand but mostly silent, chin on his crossed arms, content to watch. He could feel the weight of Sirius’ eyes on his hands, intent.

Alice started a crusade to convince Order members to get the cybernetic fingertips. They were helped significantly by Gideon Prewett, who was nearly evangelical about his own cybernetic hand, telling anyone who would listen that it had saved his life. His support was a good thing because though the Order was excited about the new weapons, many were more suspicious of Remus than ever and didn’t fancy the idea of him rummaging around with their limbs.

There had been attacks across the country— coordinated werewolf attacks on Muggles and wizard children alike, reeking of Greyback and his methods. Order members he’d once been friendly with couldn’t quite look him in the eye.

So Remus was busy and barely saw his friends, and when he did, he had to skip over whole parts of his life; the lab work, his anger at the Order over their prejudice, his fear for and of the Pack. But he wasn’t alone in feeling like his life had taken on a shroud of secrecy.

Lily would still share stories of her shifts at the clinic but she’d edit out anything Order or Death Eater related, skipping the gory injuries and deaths and sticking to goofy transfiguration mishaps. She refused to complain, ever— it wasn’t in her nature— but she had a haunted look about her like the gory injuries and deaths far outweighed everything else.

James, for his part, remained constantly tight-lipped whenever he even skimmed by an Order-related topic, taking all of Moody’s instructions to heart with a dedication that was honestly impressive. He asked security questions and layered encryptions and administered ocular scans with the paranoid energy of Moody himself.

On the other hand, Peter, who had become progressively more jumpy, couldn’t get out of the habit of asking people where they were going, of absentmindedly prying for information like he couldn’t remember the rules. They would gently remind him and he would twitch like he’d just woken up, apologize, and then later, do it again. 

To Remus’ great shock, Sirius did not seem to be in bad spirits in the month after Christmas. He was, as he called it, “in the doghouse” with the Order, relegated to the most basic of missions, though he could not share the details of even those. He did them without complaint and gladly asked for more. When not on missions, he’d disappear into some mysterious project that he also wouldn’t discuss, leaving it ambiguous as to whether it was Order or personal business. Remus feared that he was planning something related to Regulus, a fear he shared with James, but neither of them could get anything out of him about his brother. He dodged the subject so artfully that sometimes they wouldn’t even notice he’d done it.

Remus had also noticed, not without interest, that Sirius was getting progressively more touchy with him.

He wasn’t blind. Sirius touched him—casually, easily—in ways he didn’t touch James, Peter, or Lily. An arm draped over the back of Remus’ chair. Feet stretched into his lap. A chin resting on his shoulder as Sirius leaned over to inspect whatever Remus was tinkering with, eyelashes close enough to tickle his cheek.

At first, Remus had chalked it up to Sirius just being Sirius—naturally physical, hungry for affection after a lifetime of being denied it. They saw much less of each other, so maybe this was Sirius’ way of coping, hoping the physical proximity could make up for the lost time.

The almost-kiss on the corner of his lip, the long embrace they’d shared in the alley after Christmas, the way he always stood a little too close, always grabbed a hand and laced their fingers together to drag him along somewhere– all of it seemed explainable for a while.

But eventually, Remus had to admit, based on the evidence right in front of his face, that Sirius wasn’t like that with anyone else, not really. Not to the same extent. Only with him.

He basked in the glow of that realization for about five minutes before talking himself out of it again.

Sirius was only like that with him, he reasoned, because Sirius was a shameless flirt—helplessly, habitually so. Flirting was as instinctive to him as breathing; Remus had seen it firsthand with Mary. And Remus, being the only one both obviously interested in men and not dating James Potter, was simply the most convenient target for Sirius’ thoughtless, meaningless flirtation on a day to day basis.

Sirius was an obligate flirt, Remus decided. Maybe if he didn’t let that energy out, he’d wither. Perhaps, Remus thought wildly, he was part Veela, compelled against his will to charm any viable sexual partners around him—utterly unaware of the effect he had. He hadn’t had time to go to the club and meet random Muggles to absorb the blunt force of his sexual charisma, so he made do with Remus, like a plant surviving off of scant weak sunlight through the winter until it could bloom again under the full heat of the summer.

Remus began to almost obsessively plot ways to prove his theory. They saw Mary again a few times and though she was always friendly with Sirius, he didn’t think they got together again. He didn’t mention any other prospects or conquests and though he did flirt with the bartender at Static whenever they went there, he did it in a slightly goofy and cartoonish way, lacking any real tension, like he was just playing. 

Even as he spent altogether too much time speculating about Sirius’ possible sex life, Remus let himself enjoy the touching, the affection. He just would carefully remind himself, under the flattering scald of Sirius’ attention, that it didn’t mean anything at all.

The day before the full moon, Sirius asked if he could come help the following morning. He asked casually enough but when Remus told him James was doing it, he’d scowled and argued and plied, like Remus was denying him a particularly desirable honor. 

“I’ve only gotten to do it once and I told you, I’m better with the healing spells than Potter. You know I am. If you told me Lily was doing it, fine, makes sense. But Potter? Come on. You’ll end up with half your nose missing.”

Remus thought, sipping his tea, that he should have told him Lily was doing it. 

Because of course, Remus had no intention of staying in the basement and then going home after the full moon. He wouldn’t be there come morning. He had to go see the Pack.

Moody was not supportive of seeking the Pack out again. He’d written the werewolves off already before Greyback escaped. With him back on the streets, wreaking havoc, he felt sure it was fruitless. He’d declined to send Remus on an official mission.

But Remus had kept an eye on the Greyback data and he wasn’t back with the Pack, not yet, not full time. In the past month, he’d tentatively sent messages to the few Pack contacts he trusted, people who had never been enthusiastic about Greyback’s leadership but had nowhere else to turn and they confirmed it. 

One message:

Long time, Rem. Looking for a warm place to lay your head again? Greybacks not here. Been around but kept his distance. Lettie is in charge now but you know how it is. Swing by sometime, I’ll still have you.

Another:

Sure, love, it would be good to see you. Don’t get your hopes up though.

From Lettie herself:

Come visit and we can talk. At the usual place, come alone.

At the full moon, he packed a bag with a change of clothes. He’d planted the seed that he’d likely be on Order business after the full moon, so hopefully if he did get caught up, his friends wouldn’t worry.

He didn’t know why he hid this from them. Part of it was a Moody-ish impulse towards need-know-standards, but part of it was something else.

He had not spoken to them about the Pack much. He evaded the questions almost as deftly as Sirius avoided questions about his brother: a vague response, a side-step, a change of subject. James had pried at first but quickly dropped it after Remus snapped at him once. Peter plainly didn’t want to hear about it. Lily just looked at him with steady understanding that hurt a bit to receive, like she thought he was surely damaged and felt very bad for him.

Sirius had, somehow, as was his way, gotten the most information. He knew about the fighting and the changes to his human form and magic already, but he lately seemed to relish asking innocent little questions about werewolf stuff, almost like he was just speaking out loud some passing thought. He peppered these in during random moments, trying to take Remus by surprise.

“So when you were out there with those other wolves, did you usually go to woods like that?” he asked as the TV played some nature documentary about the last remaining forests.

“Hey, are you any good at Repello Inimicum spells? Been messing around with one, trying to tweak it. Did you use them when you were transforming outside?”

“Look Remus, a squirrel! Bet you’ve eaten at least one of those when you were out in the woods, right?”

Remus would sometimes answer before he even realized he was giving information away. He’d bite his tongue and stop himself before he got sucked into some line of questioning he preferred to avoid.

Because the truth was, he had enjoyed some of his time with the Pack. More than he wanted to admit. And while he told himself he was going back to see them for the Order, he was also looking forward to it, like he was going off to visit distant foreign family he barely understood but loved dearly.

This seemed too difficult to explain and more than a little like a betrayal.

The transformation that moon was not good. He awoke in the morning with a chunk of flesh torn from his arm and he wondered queasily if he’d eaten it. Hands shaking violently, he healed it as best he could— not that well—patched up the rest of his injuries, and heaved himself out into the snowy cold. Steeling himself for the inevitable nausea, praying he wouldn’t splinch himself too, he Apparated.

—--

The island had once been beautiful. Perhaps a hundred years ago, it was a rocky crag off the coast of Wales, rich with seabirds, porpoises, and seals playing in the waves offshore. Scattered along its wind-whipped coast squatted ancient ruins—crumbled lighthouses, traces of huts, and the shambling remains of what had once been a significant abbey.

Fifty years ago, half the island had been turned into a landfill. There was still space to roam, with wild fields and scraggly cliffs along the southern half, but because of the dump, Muggles no longer came and because of the heavy layers of wards, wizards didn’t even know it was there. 

The waters were tainted by gray runoff, and the air smelled more like central London—hot garbage—than Remus preferred, but it was perfect for the Pack. They had settled among the ruins in a rambling, makeshift camp where Remus had spent nearly two years.

He Apparated to the only unwarded spot on the island: the southernmost lighthouse.

After stumbling to his knees and promptly emptying the contents of his stomach—thankfully, with no trace of human flesh—he staggered out of the ruined lighthouse into the weak morning light.

“You’d think a fancy wizard would be better at that by now, eh?”

Remus braced himself against a crumbling wall, but despite the nausea and the bone-deep ache, he managed a smile.

“Thanks for finding me. Fix me up, would you?” he said, letting himself sink back against the wall.

Hawk got to work. He didn’t use a wand—‘Poncy wizard junk, don’t need it,’ he’d always say—just his large, calloused hands. As he waved them over Remus’ wounds, he lamented over the clumsily healed bite on Remus’s arm and made several pointed remarks about how Remus had learned absolutely nothing.

Remus felt a surge of warmth at the sight of Hawk Roberts. Hawk was older—into his forties—and had lived with the Pack since he’d been turned at fifteen. He carried himself with a kind of feral charisma, a wild disregard for the outside world that was oddly magnetic. His Welsh accent, soft and melodic, contrasted sharply with his rough appearance. After thirty years of transformations, his features had taken on that unmistakable wolfish cast that Remus dreaded in himself but found striking and handsome in Hawk. His thickened, slightly curved claws were surprisingly gentle as he ran a finger over a wound, sealing it closed. When he looked up and cracked a joke about Remus’s useless healing skills, his overlong canines flashed in a grin.

As they made their way across the ragged landscape, arm in arm, Remus asked, “So, how’s it been since Greyback left?”

“Sure, he just left,” Hawk said, glancing sidelong at him with a knowing look. “It’s been fine. Some of the Pack got swept up in it, before, but the fever broke a bit once Greyback wasn’t around. Lettie’s not having any of it. Death Eaters still come by, trying to sway her, but she’s strong.”

They crested a hill and down below in the valley sprawled the camp. A mix of tents patched with tarp and sailcloth, tin-roofed shacks cobbled together from corrugated metal and particle board, and sturdily-built log structures with doors and windows scavenged from the landfill jumbled together haphazardly, nearly on top of one another. The wind never seemed to stop whistling through the trampled mud paths that wound between the buildings, sending the dark smoke of oil-barrel fires flying out into wild plumes. The area was littered with the detritus of long habitation—broken crates, empty tins, burned out remains of cars overgrown with brittle flora, and the occasional glint of something once magical, now dulled by weather and neglect.

Still, life bustled there. Laundry lines threaded between buildings, hanging clothes drying to frozen shells in the winter wind. A few electric cars, built of spare mismatched rusting parts, bumped along unevenly, delivering packages, transporting people from one side of the camp to the other. The smell of cooking meat wafted from shadowed kitchens and the occasional peal of laughter or scrap of song or shout of anger carried to Remus’ ears. 

In the distance, the landfill stretched on the horizon like a grey wound, perpetually circled by vultures and seagulls. 

Here, in the shabby seaside shanty town surrounded by werewolves coming back to themselves after the full moon, Remus didn’t feel particularly happy and he didn’t feel particularly safe. But it did feel a little bit like he had come home.

—--

“He told me you were doing it today!”

“Well obviously I’m bloody not! And Lily’s at St. Mungo’s and Pete just messaged and said he’s not doing it, so– so what the hell?”

Sirius paced in James’ kitchen. James watched him patiently, drinking a cup of tea, still in his Chudley Cannons pajamas. 

“He said he was going on an Order mission after. Maybe it’s, you know, werewolf stuff for Moody. He can handle himself, mate. Don’t worry.”

“So he does this, then? Disappears without a word?”

James shrugged, took a sip of tea. “Want some breakfast? I think I’ve got bacon in the fridge.” He waved his wand, getting up. The fridge obediently opened and a package of bacon flew into his hand as he walked to the stove.

“Let me do it, mate, you always overcook it.” Sirius snatched the bacon from James and stepped to the stove.

As he stood over the sizzling pan, he thought that James was right, of course. If it was werewolf stuff for Moody, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them. It didn’t explain why he’d lied about James doing his healing that morning. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted them to fuss and argue. Sirius thought about the fussing and arguing he’d done regardless and flipped the bacon a little too aggressively. He needed to get a grip. He was doing that thing: pushy and demanding, needy, intrusive, so scared to lose people that he scared them off. He resolved to wait. He resolved to not worry.

—-

Remus figured a few days away from the Order couldn’t hurt. He’d worked hard in the lead up to the full moon to ensure Alice wouldn’t be behind in her very aggressive cybernetic production goals and they didn’t have another surgery scheduled for at least a week. 

No need to play politics right away; he could take his time with the Pack, win them over again after his somewhat contentious goodbye a few months ago, before discussing business.

He spent that first day in Hawk’s cabin. Recuperating, he had thought, but that thought went out of his head the second Hawk rolled on top of him with that easy familiarity, kissing his neck, nipping a little. 

Two years would have been a long time to be lonely. 

Remus was never particularly good at telling when someone was interested in him. Mostly he assumed people weren’t, and mostly, he thought, he was pretty much right. Occasionally, there’d be someone that apparently was pursuing him and Remus just wouldn’t notice. Once, in sixth year, a Ravenclaw boy had invited him to Hogsmeade three different times before James, speaking as if to a simpleton, explained to Remus that he was going on dates with the boy and maybe he should put the kid out of his misery if he wasn’t interested back.

It hadn’t been like that with Hawk. It really wasn’t like that with any of the werewolves. They were all straightforward to the point of bluntness. One night, over a crowded and boisterous bonfire, Hawk had said, grinning that sharp canine grin, “Come back to mine for a fuck before bed?”

And so they had, and continued to do so sporadically over those two years. It was easy and fun, without baggage, noncommittal. Sometimes Hawk would send him away, saying he had someone else coming by, and that was fine. Remus had found other lovers in those two years too, though none he really counted as a friend like he did Hawk. 

It was the nature of the place, he thought. Everyone was so free with themselves, symbiotic almost. They shared food; they shared their skills and talents; they shared rooms and fires; they shared the moon; they shared one another’s bodies without a thought. You couldn’t live in a place like that for two years and not get swept up in it.

So Hawk’s rough fingers pressing into his hipbones and the scratch of his beard against the back of his neck and his soft, rasping breaths in the dark felt familiar and comfortable. It felt like a very necessary release after weeks of Sirius Black pressing his own floral-scented self to him just close enough to be tantalizing but never close enough to satisfy.

The day after that, feeling revitalized, he visited Belladonna in her compound of interconnected tents a few muddy streets over from Hawk’s. She lived with six other women, some of whom he suspected may be related somehow– sisters or cousins– and others he assumed were involved in other ways. 

She was very cagey and mysterious about her past but also one of the people most interested in technology: a scrapper and a mechanic. She would drag busted up old consoles from the dump and fix them. The women gathered under the tarp-filtered blue light of one of the tents and watched Muggle shows on her handbuilt big screen, patched together from four different consoles she’d rescued from the landfill. Donna could tinker together whole electric cars from spare bits and bobs.

Sitting at a peeling card table, Remus waved his wand over some janky ten-year-old wrist console fished out of the landfill, trying to bring life back to its black, waterlogged screen.

“These things don’t really work that well out here, anyway, Donna. Even if I get it turned on, I don’t know what you’ll be able to do with it.”

“Don’t worry yourself about that, love. These other folk might like spending their lives on this cursed garbage heap, but I like to actually leave sometimes. It’ll be useful then. Can you believe there’s people here who haven’t been to the mainland in years? Years! Living on a landfill!”

“You should come to London sometime,” Remus said, tongue poking out slightly between his teeth as he nudged at a frayed wire with his wand. “You’d love it. Couldn’t be farther from this place. Though they both smell like garbage, to be fair.”

“Can never get too far away from the garbage,” she sighed, smiling at him. “It’s good to see you, love.” She put a hand under his chin, tilted his face up and looked at him, thoughtfully assessing.

“You’ve put on weight. It’s good. You were getting that rangy underfed look living here like some gutter dog. Didn’t suit you.”

Donna couldn’t be more than five years older than him, but he knew she had lived a hard enough life that he accepted her mothering without question. She’d seen things: the violence of poverty when she was young growing up with Muggles, a werewolf mauling that nearly took her leg off, several packs of wolves that took her in before she found this, relatively stable, relatively peaceful one. 

One of her sisters– cousins? friends?-- lifted the flap of the tent and squealed when she saw him, wrapping him in a hug. 

A girl of no more than eight, Mossie slung her arms around his neck and looked down over his shoulder at the wrist console he was working on. 

“Is that one for me? Donna said I could have one so I could interact with people my own age.” She mimicked Donna’s most mothering tone.

“Get out of here, Mossie, adults are talking!” She shoved her back out of the tent bodily. Turning back to Remus, whose eyes had widened as the console sparked feebly, she said, “Well, out with it then. What are you here for? Or are you finally done with society and ready to join us?”

“I heard Greyback hasn’t returned and Lettie isn’t interested in working with the Death Eaters. Thought we could revisit some of our old conversations.”

Donna’s expression darkened.

“Lettie isn’t interested. But Greyback’s people are still here. Loyalists. They go out at the Death Eater’s call still. Some of them even have the Mark.”

“What’s the balance? How many could we split off?”

“Split off? Remus, even those with the Mark are Pack.”

Remus put down the console. He tried another drying spell over it.

The Pack was so intertwined. Political divisions mattered, but Remus feared they would kill each other before they decided to go their separate ways. It was like a toxic family or an abusive relationship; too interdependent to pull off a bloodless divorce. 

Even Donna, one of his greatest allies in his efforts to pull the Pack away from the Death Eaters, couldn’t envision a world where she just rolled up her tents and left for good or else kicked out the opposing faction. There was an impasse that only violence could break through. 

“How long are you going to stay, then? All those Death Eaters know you’re with the Order now, so you’d better be careful,” she warned. “Stick with me or Hawk; don’t go out at night. Stay away from the west side of the camp– should be easy enough, they’ve got that hideous snake symbol painted everywhere over that way.”

He nodded absentmindedly, thinking. She pursed her lips at him, anticipating a continuation of the discussion when she clearly wanted it to end.

“There’s no playing both sides, Donna. If you stay here when the Pack seems to be involved with the Death Eaters, you’ll be just as guilty in the Ministry’s eyes when the war is over.”

“And if your side loses?”

“Then you’ll still be a muggleborn werewolf, Donna. Two strikes against you; you won’t be eating dinner at You-Know-Who’s house anytime soon.”

She shrugged.

“We don’t need either side. We never have.”

He sighed. A circular argument, around and around. They’d had it a million times.

“What about Mossie? Shouldn’t she be with kids her own age? She could go to Hogwarts, learn magic.”

“She knows magic. Better than you, I’d wager. You practicing without that stick at all, or have you forgotten everything?”

He rolled his eyes. 

The thing about their wandless magic was that it was so limited. Powerful in its way, and unexpected, but hard to control and imprecise– a blunt force weapon rather than refined like wand magic. They could start a fire but not control its size or shape. They could heal cuts and breaks and bruises, but the inner workings of organs were inaccessible. Things like Apparition, advanced magic like Patronuses, the bizarre amalgamations Sirius came up with, weaving three or four spells together to make something new, were impossible. 

Donna cocked her eyebrow at him. In response, he put his wand down and gestured at the firepit in the center of the room. It leapt into life, flaring high enough to nearly burn the tarp above.

“Not bad. Not good, but at least you’re not completely useless.”

Eventually another three women trickled in and the tent compound became raucous with their greetings and laughter. Remus was passed around for hugs and critical reviews of the length of his hair and his clothes and the number of new scars he had and inquiries about his love life, which he tried manfully to dodge but still felt like he gave away more than he cared to.

He returned to Hawk’s tent tired and full of fire-burned meat, a little drunk on the worst gut-wine he’d ever had. He pressed his mouth to the sleeping man’s lips. Hawk woke with a groan and smiled against Remus’ teeth, grabbing him around the waist and pulling him into the tangle of blankets piled on the floor.

—----------------------

“You don’t have to tell me what the mission is, Mad-Eye. Just if there is one. He’s been gone for six days. We don’t even know where he transformed at the moon.”

Sirius stood in front of Moody’s desk in full battle gear—gun at his hip, wand twirling in his hand with anxious energy—trying to break through the man’s absolutely mulish refusal to reveal anything.

“Between Potter sending me ten messages a day about it and you lingering around here like a ghost, you’re both on my last bloody nerve. What are you, his mums? He’s an adult. He was a spy for two years; I think the man is entitled to a little secrecy, don’t you?”

“Sure, he can go off and be a spy, if that’s what he’s doing. Is that what he’s doing?”

“No bloody comment. Don’t you have a patrol to get to? Get out of my office.”

Sirius shoved his wand into its holster with altogether too much force and stalked out, wishing he could slam the door behind him instead of having it hum serenely closed.

Six days without a word.

It wasn’t completely unprecedented for a mission to last that long. They’d all been on tasks that required overnights: long guards, escorts out of the country, surveillance. But even James, nearly as dedicated to security protocols as Moody himself, had the common decency to let Lily know he was alive from day to day.

Sirius didn’t want to be this anxious. He didn’t want to feel afraid, or left behind, or abandoned. He didn’t want to picture Remus dead in some gutter, torn apart by Greyback and left to rot. But those were the images his mind conjured at night, alongside the usual slideshow of Regulus: skinned alive by Bellatrix, made into an Inferius, or cut to pieces and thrown into the sea.

At first James and Lily and Peter had brushed it off. Their capacity to worry about Remus had been worn thin by his two-year absence. Over a late-night firewhiskey the previous evening, James had told Sirius about that time, when Remus had first left.

They had heard from him sparingly: a terse message, a Patronus sent to wish a happy birthday, a brief resurfacing—looking gaunt and unshaven—to share intel before vanishing again. It had been brutal at first, James said, after seven years of being inseparable, to suddenly not know where Moony was.

But they’d adjusted.  And he came back, didn’t he? More or less in one piece? A little rougher around the edges, maybe, but basically the same Moony. If he was on some werewolf mission, he’d be fine again. He could handle himself. Sirius knew that better than anyone.

Sirius let all this reasoning wash over him. If Remus’ best friends in the world– basically his family– were fine with not hearing from him, then he should be too. 

He told himself to relax. 

He told himself to focus on work.

Chapter Text

The quarter moon hung high above, pale and bright, occasionally obscured by a passing cloud but still offering him that instant reminder that a week had passed, like a calendar pinned to the sky.

A massive bonfire burned in the middle of Hawk’s section of the camp– seaside, so it was always colder than the interior. The fire helped a bit, but stepping even a little ways from it would leave you exposed to the biting ocean wind, wet and all the colder for it. Remus huddled next to it, thick woolen blanket draped over his shoulders. He thought longingly about the effortless bubble of warmth his wrist console could generate, but it didn’t work so well here– something about the wards on the island. Wand magic was wonky, too, like the wolves had intentionally cast something to make it go off. He could do it, but it was unreliable and wavery and took an unusual amount of focus. Not the kind of focus he could summon up when he’d already had two and a half glasses of wine that had been brewed in an old bathtub.

“Here, eat,” Hawk said, handing him a plate of something steaming and meaty. “Lettie’ll come by once she’s done in there.” He jerked a thumb at the large corrugated metal shack behind him, lit up by a jaunty string of holiday lights. A thin stream of pale smoke trickled from the top, whipped away into nothing in the wind.

Hawk sat down next to him with his own plate and they ate in silence. Hawk wasn’t chatty, which Remus appreciated most of the time. Right now though, he felt anxious and he wanted someone to strategize with. 

He’d already been here for a week and had mostly spent it in this single corner of the camp, fearful of being recognized by a Death Eater werewolf. Hawk insisted he’d be safe enough in his neighborhood, but still the phrase constant vigilance rang in his head and he couldn’t figure out how to be a useful spy when he’d already burned his cover months ago.

He also didn’t know what to say to Lettie to convince her to throw her considerable influence toward the Order. It was a good sign that she’d been voted Pack leader at all– she had always been uninterested in joining the Death Eaters– but not joining the Death Eaters wasn’t the same as being against them. Her version of the Pack allowed Death Eaters to take haven with them, share their food, keep their company. It was not so different from Greyback, in the end, if she didn’t stand up against them outright.

He was stirred out of his anxious thoughts by Hawk going rigid next to him. 

“Get in the house. Now,” he said, voice tightening. He grabbed Remus roughly by the arm and heaved him in the direction of his shack. A group of werewolves he didn’t recognize  stepped into the circle of warm light around the bonfire.

Not liking Hawk’s tense look, he obeyed, slipping into the darkness. He stayed by the door, straining to listen.

“Oi — raid tomorrow, lads! Bourneville —  wizards squattin’ in their posh gaffs. Expect a scrap and a tidy take for any we drop! Put names down wiv Lev, we’re outta here at dusk. Now’s the time to get on board — the train’s pullin’ out, lads, train’s pullin’ out!” 

The man was yelling like some old time street barker, strutting around the bonfire, arms thrown wide. Remus didn’t recognize him but he had the look and smell of Greyback’s crew– ragged and bloody and more wolf than man.

He couldn’t quite see what was happening but he heard the shifting of bodies, more voices speaking lowly.

“What about you, Hawk? Never joinin’ us, are ya? Greyback’ll see about you when ‘e’s back. Don’t like wolves that don’t carry their weight.” 

Remus could only see a sliver of Hawk’s face as he sat by the fire. He looked up at the other man, said something. The man cackled, spit on the ground at Hawk’s feet, and moved on. After a few minutes, the whole group left, presumably carrying their message on to the next neighborhood.

Just as Remus was about to step back out and return to the bonfire, a shadow crossed the shack’s open doorway. 

“Remus? Let’s talk.”

Lettie slipped in, closing the corrugated metal door behind her. She stepped to Hawk’s cold fire pit and waved her hand over it, igniting a neat fire immediately. 

An older woman with steel grey hair that fell past her shoulders, she had a severe look on her face that suggested this wasn’t a social visit. She frowned as she looked him over, like she didn’t particularly like what she saw. As if to make the message abundantly clear to him, she shook her head in disdain once before sitting down on one of the camp chairs by the fire.

“You saw that, I assume? They’re recruiting every night. I’m sick of it. I want them out.”

Remus almost laughed at this, it was so unexpected. He had been ready to argue with her– wheedle and debate and fight for every concession, every step in the right direction.

“Alright. The Order can help with that.”

“They’re threatening people who won’t join them. They don’t respect my leadership. They’re taking our resources.” 

Remus just nodded, letting her lead the way.

“A boy joined them out on one of their raids,” she spat, full of loathing. “Got killed by some wizard. He was about sixteen, just turned.”

She slashed an impatient hand at the fire and it flared, heat and light flooding the shack, throwing shadows over the nest of threadbare blankets, the little table piled with books next to it, Remus’ duffel bag crumpled in the corner.

“It will get worse. They’ll kill half this Pack, one way or the other.”

“Lettie, we can help. What do you need?”

“I need at least most of the neighborhoods to agree to it, but what I need–” she looked at him, strangely yellow eyes piercing him to the spot, “--is all of Greyback’s people gone. Removed from this island. I need him back in your wizard jails or dead. I don’t care which.”

“Ok,” he nodded, heart racing. “We can set a trap. The Order can come here and coordinate with you–”

“I won’t give you them all for free. This is a betrayal of what the Pack stands for, but my one defense is that they betrayed it first by yoking us to those Dark wizards. I’ll need promises from your people.” She pointed a long, curved claw at him, accusing. “I’ll need guarantees, magically binding.”

“Of course, I understand. I’ll speak with Dumbledore.”

She remained silent for a long time, staring at the fire. Just when he thought he might need to come up with something to say, she looked at him.

“I need allies in this. I can’t promise you safety here anymore, not after everything you’ve done. But you’d be wise to stay and speak with those that might be sympathetic to your cause before I discuss this with them all at the next moon. Merlin knows the Death Eaters have their representatives doing the rounds.” She scowled deeply at him again, that flicker of disdain crossing her face. Then she abruptly waved her hand, snuffing out the fire instantly and throwing them into darkness.

—--

Sirius took his gun apart for the second time, checked all the parts, cleaned the muzzle with the corner of his shirt, and put it back together again. He spun his wand between his fingers, faster and faster until it blurred in the dim light. He shifted from one foot to the other, bouncing one leg.

“Will you bloody relax, Black?” hissed Emmaline Vance. “Honestly, you’d think you’d never done a stake out before. Ridiculous.”

He glared at her, but she couldn’t see him in the dark. 

Moody had called him up—along with Emmeline, James, Gideon, and Fabian—to intercept a werewolf attack in Bourneville that they had “gotten word of.”

When Sirius had raised an arched eyebrow at that phrasing, Moody’s crag of a mouth drew tight, and he had refused to say any more.

The five of them huddled together on the ground floor of a house in Bourneville. The place was eerie: a reconstructed nineteenth-century village crouched among the glowing sprawl of shabby high-rises and crisscrossing highways. Apparently, a small enclave of witches and wizards lived here, using layered Confundus charms and anti-Muggle barriers to preserve their quaint cluster of dormered homes amid the graffitied urban sprawl.

All the residents had been evacuated to the town hall—a neat, snow-covered building straight out of a storybook. Moody’s intel from his “unnamed source” said the werewolves had Apparated just outside the town and would arrive at midnight.

Sirius peered out the window, looking up at the white half moon in the sky. James put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

They– he, James, Lily, and Peter– had all received a message, encrypted, from Remus, shortly before Sirius and James got the call from Moody.

I’m alright. Won’t be back for a while.

He was alright. He wouldn’t be back for a while. They assumed Remus was just on a mission—only the usual amount of mortal peril. This should be somewhat comforting. Better than nothing.

Still, Sirius had bitten his cuticles bloody, a habit he always mocked Peter for.

When Sirius had spiraled the night before, after they got the message, James had only said, “He knows how to handle himself with those monsters, Sirius. He’s a professional.”

That phrasing bothered him, though he’d been too worked up to wonder why.

Now, in this ghost-town reconstruction, Sirius told himself he was here to fight monsters. But these monsters had come from the Pack—the same Pack Remus was probably living with right now. Because he was one of them.

But Remus wasn’t a monster. And if Remus wasn’t a monster, neither were the other wolves– just men, making the wrong choices. The thought circled endlessly in Sirius’s head until he almost wanted to lean over to James and say something, though he wasn’t sure what, but then Gideon abruptly shifted, breaking his reverie.

“I see them,” Gideon said, drawing his wand and gun.
“Nine of them,” Fabian hissed, his brother’s twin in every way but his lack of metal hand. “No wands, no plasma—just claws and teeth.”
“Should be easy enough, then,” Emmeline said lightly, readying her own weapons.

It was easy enough, though not without its horrors.

The wolves, of course, threw down their anti-magic pulses as soon as they engaged. Sirius took three of them out with the snap of his fingers, but they were the type that just exploded into more, so it was no use.

They also seemed to know now to target the people with metal limbs, so two of them had rounded on Sirius and three on Gideon while the other four fell on James, Emmaline, and Fabian. 

The werewolves were oddly resistant to the plasma, seeming to shrug off injuries that would lay out regular wizards. So it was a brawl– guns and snapping fingers and wrangling limbs. As Sirius struggled to wrench a clawed hand from his throat, he wished bitterly that Remus had taught him to fight, imagined him here in his best form.

He emptied the last of his hand on the wolves, taking out the two attacking him, then spun just in time to see one clutching James by the neck, jerking like he meant to break it.
Fabian got there first, blasting the wolf four times before it went down.

By the end, they’d only managed to drop three before the rest fled, vanishing into the labyrinth of buildings beyond the village’s artificial candlelit glow.

Outside, in the doll-house streets as snow began to fall, Sirius stood bloodied and bruised, grateful as the clammy pressure of the anti-magic field faded. He wasn’t sure he could have handled another two weeks without magic, not now.

Those werewolves were going back to the Pack—back to wherever Remus was. The thought turned his stomach.

Someone he loved, wandered off into some unknowable danger without him.

Because that’s what this was, wasn’t it? Love? He’d never felt it before, not like this, but he was sure this must be that thing everyone made so much noise about.

It terrified him.

He wanted it out– punched out of him or fucked out of him or puked into a dingy toilet in some bar bathroom. He wanted not to feel the fear, not to feel the desperate crush of love. How vulnerable it made him. How stupid. How weak. How painful it was. 

The month went by so slowly.

Sirius got drunk. He went to the club and solicited drugs from random people, smiling and charming them until they agreed to share or sell. He instigated fights– like a Muggle street tough, he thought grimly as a fist met his jaw. He woke up at least once or twice outside, spared a chilly death only by the warm bubble of his wrist console’s heating charm. 

Despite these dark nights of the soul, he was still unwilling to take any more steps back in his long journey to trustworthiness. Whenever Moody called, he would report for duty after casting a sobering spell so powerful that it burned like ammonia in his nostrils. 

He even managed to feign a kind of normalcy to James and Lily and Peter, who seemed only slightly thrown by his sudden absences. He still joined them for a pint at James’, then drank ten more alone afterward.

He tried to find someone to sleep with, but he just couldn’t stomach it, even high. He’d talk to some impossibly good-looking man and just drift out of the interaction, leaving himself behind like some hollowed out puppet. This wasn’t much of a problem for many people and he probably still could’ve gotten laid even half-present, but instead he’d just disengage and go home by himself, resigned to solitude.

Was that the love, too? Had Remus ruined him for everyone?

How completely embarrassing, he thought bitterly.

In the few sober moments he had alone, not working and not pretending, he’d worry about Remus. He worried about him a lot.

Then he would worry about that, too, around and around. Was this exactly the thing that made him so impossible to love, that made the whole thing such a doomed affair? His spiralling and his fear, his suffocating neediness and then his inevitable retreat from those most terrifying feelings?

His fundamental instability: a Black house built on a rotten crumbling foundation, ancient and innate and Dark. 

If he acted on this maddening, sickening love, he’d lose any chance of getting even a scrap of it. He’d lose everything: the easy friendship, the quiet afternoons watching Remus bent over some bit of tech, brow furrowed, the innocent touches he could get away with. All of it would dissolve under the weight of whatever toxic waste seeped out of him now.

He decided to pivot. He’d spent too long thinking about Remus. The forest project had spun him into some domestic fantasy, and he needed to remember what mattered.

So he spent a week sending increasingly elaborate encrypted messages to Regulus, pleading for contact, for a meeting, for even just proof of life.

He’d nearly given up on that rabbit hole when a silver fox drifted out of an alley that he was smoking outside of.

“The usual place. Midnight. You idiot,” it said, slinking around his feet.

—---.

Living with the Pack returned to him like muscle memory. 

With the help of a few glamours, he felt brave enough to leave Hawk’s neighborhood and speak with the potential allies Lettie had mentioned. It was painstaking work. He had the same circular arguments again and again, the same ones he’d had a thousand times over his two years here. 

Along with being intertwined with each other, the Pack was also entirely insular. It was hard for them to care about the rest of the world, since the rest of the world didn’t seem to care about them. But when he was asked for the tenth time in a day why he cared so much about wizards and Muggles, why he fought for them, he wanted to scream. He wanted to make them watch footage of Muggles being murdered in their beds or wizards being tortured to death. He wanted to tell them it was wrong and that was all the reason he needed to fight.

Instead he spent hours coaching it in terms they could understand and relate to. Greyback was dragging them into the war. He wanted them to die for the Death Eaters. He would not take no for an answer. He had to go.

At the same time as he’d sent the warning to Moody and the update to his friends about his whereabouts, he’d stood out in the southernmost lighthouse and crafted a long message to Dumbledore requesting an audience. Two days later, the man himself arrived.

Looking serene and unfazed by the ramshackle shanty town, he sat with Remus and Lettie and negotiated. He was wary of making promises, saying that he could only control the rest of the wizarding world so much. 

But this is what he agreed to:

Any werewolves of school age could go to Hogwarts. 

Dumbledore would vouch for the Pack in any Wizengamot trials that might impact them. 

He would work personally to get the Ministry to acknowledge the Pack as a negotiating entity in future discussions about self-determination, property ownership, and other matters. 

That was it, but it was eventually enough for Lettie to work with. Dumbledore didn’t dawdle. He patted Remus with a kind of fatherly pride on the shoulder, told him to stay safe, and vanished. Old codger, Remus thought in Sirius’ voice.

He missed his friends. The Pack— Hawk and Donna, really— were his friends, too, and he was surprised by how much he’d missed them, but he thought longingly of James and Lily and Peter and Sirius.

He thought of them when Hawk looked at him stretched out in his bed and said placidily, “Your transformations are getting worse.”

Remus glanced at his own scarred chest and shrugged. It was true. He looked worse than the wolves here, always had. 

Hawk put one clawed finger on the side of Remus’ nose, broken so many times by the wolf smashing its snout against a cage wall that it was crooked beyond repair.

“My friends have been trying to convince me to—er— try something to make the transformations better, when I’m not here. They worry about me,” he finally confessed, self-conscious.

“I would not think much of them as friends if they didn’t.”

Apparently done with the conversation, he rolled over and fell promptly asleep. Remus thought about his friends and their Animagus plan, which he’d long suspected they’d been carrying on with behind his back. He let himself imagine them running with him at the moon, his two worlds colliding. The thought brought up that old fear, that protectiveness– stay away, don’t look at me, not pack, not pack. 

But as he let the idea play out, as he imagined his friends wearing the skins of some unknown animals beside him under the bright white light of the moon, it seemed like it could be possible. Like it could be good.

—-

At the cemetery, sharp ammonia smell still burning in his nose, Sirius waited for Regulus. 

He leaned against a tombstone, tilting his head back against it and staring up at the starless grey-green city sky. The moon above was just past new, a thin scythe hung amongst the clouds. He huffed out a breath and watched the cloud of it puff out and dissipate. He closed his eyes.

“Shouldn’t you be a little more alert when meeting the enemy in a cemetery?”

Sirius smiled, not even bothering to look.

“You’ve had a few chances to kill me and you haven’t taken one yet,” he smirked, looking at Regulus as he came to lean next to him against the same tombstone. “That’s what I wanted to talk about, actually.” 

He felt a twinge of some instinctive annoyance when he noticed that his little brother was taller than him now.

When they were young, they would come to this graveyard to play hide and seek. Regulus was so good at it that Sirius couldn’t find him once for hours and eventually, mother came looking. Regulus had finally emerged, red faced and crying, as she struck Sirius across the face. He’d wedged himself into a dark mausoleum, crawling in through a crack and hiding amongst the bones.

Sirius wondered when his little brother had gotten so old. 

“You want to talk about how I should kill you?”

“How you should kill me but won’t, and how that’s going to get you murdered,” Sirius said, pointing a metal finger at him.  “If that Death Eater back there had told that you’d attacked one of them for me—“

“Well luckily you strangled him with your bare hands, so no harm,” Regulus spat, all haughty Black sarcasm. “We’ve discussed this before. Do you have anything new to add?”

He lit a cigarette and took a long pull, releasing twin streams of acrid smoke through his nostrils.

Sirius, disbelieving, laughed, “Bit of a Muggle affectation for someone who purports to hate them and want them all dead.”

“Muggles don’t have a monopoly on nicotine. Anyway, we don’t want them dead. We want to stop having to hide and cower from them.”

“A lot of them seem to be ending up dead though. You can’t really believe all that stuff. You aren’t that stupid.”

Regulus said nothing to this, took another pull. At Sirius’ outreached hand, he passed the cigarette over.

Finally, he said, “I’m not here to debate with you. And I’m definitely not here to come with you, so don’t start. I’m here to warn you.”

A pair of people walked by the entrance to the dark cemetery and they both went completely silent and still, waiting for them to pass and for their voices to fade in the distance. 

“Warn me?” Sirius repeated blankly.

“Yes. They’ve been experimenting with your blood. I’ve been trying to slow the effort but they’ll figure it out sooner or later and then they’ll be able to take your magic permanently.”

“Permanently,” Sirius repeated again, processing.

“Are you thick? Yes, permanently. I’d say you should just stop fighting and stay away, but I know you won’t so here.” He pulled out a small chip with a glowing red light.

“You’re giving me… what, intel? Regulus, you’re sabotaging them? Are you trying to protect me?”

Regulus pressed his lips together and sighed almost imperceptibly, only the quick puff of steam from his breath giving him away. He stood up straight as if to leave, but Sirius grabbed him by the arm.

“Give me one of those cigs for the road?” he asked, voice gone soft.

As he went to hand it over, Sirius pulled him into a quick, fierce hug.

“Don’t die, Reg. Don’t let them kill you.”

Regulus, who felt like a skeleton under his hands, a body shambled out from a crack in a mausoleum, returned the hug.

“Same to you.” 

And he pulled away, disappearing with a crack, leaving Sirius to smoke alone amongst the tombstones.

—-

At the waxing quarter moon, Remus’ luck nearly ran out.

As he’d slipped out of a tent where he’d been engaged well into the evening in a lengthy debate with a pair of werewolves who insisted that the Order and the Death Eaters were exactly the same, actually, no lesser evil to be found, he’d come nearly face to face with one of the barkers who went around recruiting for raids.

“Oh, sorry, mate,” Remus mumbled, head down, as he maneuvered around him. 

“Oi, you. We’re raiding some Muggle campground tonight, meeting at the lighthouse to leave in an hour. You look capable enough, want to make some coin? 500 Galleons per head.” He squinted at Remus’ face in the dark. Remus hoped his glamour would hold. It wasn’t an impressive thing, what with magic being so strange here, but probably enough to be unremarkable to someone who didn’t know him beyond rumors.

“Sure, yeah– what’s the campground?”

“We ain’t tellin’ anymore ‘til we get there. Someone’s been ratting.”

“Makes sense. Yeah, I’ll be there. Thanks, mate.”

He made a hasty exit as the barker slapped him on the shoulder, grinning ferally.

Back at Hawk’s, he pulled on his nylon jacket and slipped on his malfunctioning wrist console, clicking experimentally at the buttons.

“Where you going?” Hawk asked from his seat by the fire, where he was elaborately manipulating some piece of wood into a curved shape with careful gestures.

“On the raid. They’re attacking a Muggle camp but wouldn’t say where it is until we’re there. So I need to go and get the info to the Order so they can help.”

“Bad idea. They’ll figure you out—“

Remus turned on Hawk, all his choked down anger suddenly surfacing.

“Some of us can’t just sit around while people are murdered!”

Hawk raised his hands in a placating gesture. Then he got up too and pulled on his own threadbare coat.

“You don’t have to come,” Remus sighed now, exasperated. “You have to live here; I get it.”

“Can’t have you killed,” he shrugged.

An hour later, the group gathered by the lighthouse was at least fifteen strong. More than he would’ve anticipated. They had increased the pay out for participating in these raids and it seemed to be working. The group shuffled and talked excitedly, like they were lined up for a highly anticipated concert, not about to go murder innocent strangers.

“Alright, Lev and Rosie here will be running Apparitions, two at a time, two at a time. Keep it moving, quickly. Cop a shoulder and hold on!” 

Remus kept his head down and his hood pulled up against the chill as he waited his turn alongside Hawk. A man with his sleeve rolled up to show his Dark Mark, like he wanted everyone to see it, came up to Hawk and punched him on the shoulder, saying, “Knew you’d come ‘round eventually.”

“Just need the Galleons,” Hawk mumbled darkly.

“Good enough reason as any,” and he moved on.

Remus had his wand hidden in his waistband and his plasma gun strapped to his lower back. None of the other wolves carried either for Muggle raids, preferring a more physical violence. His wrist console made for a misshapen lump under his sleeve. He breathed deeply through his nose, calming himself.

They held onto Rosie, a slight, wiry woman with angry searching eyes that looked at him suspiciously, once it was their turn. She Apparated away again instantly once they materialized .

—--

Blood soaked through Lily’s shirt, dark and tacky. It smeared her face too, smudged across her cheek like she’d tried to rub it away but only spread it around.

“He’s ok, James. I saw him. He helped get some Muggles out, but I don’t think the other werewolves realized. He was glamoured or something. I wouldn’t have known it was him if he hadn’t looked right at me.”

James kept asking her the same questions over and over again as he bustled through the kitchen, setting the kettle to whistling, arranging biscuits absently on a plate. Sirius sat opposite Lily, silent. Peter leaned against a counter, arms folded tight, worrying his lip.

“Don’t they already know he’s with the Order?” James pressed. “He said when he left, he fought with Greyback. How is he still undercover?”

“I don’t know. Moody said the camp’s massive, and like I said, he’s glamoured. Maybe he’s just laying low and collecting information. If it hadn’t been for his message, a lot more Muggles would’ve been killed in that raid. Whatever he’s doing, it’s good. Can you get me a towel or something?”

Sirius rose wordlessly and ran a kitchen rag under the tap, handing it to her. As she pressed it to her face, pale pink drops of blood-stained water pattered to the kitchen table.

“He never went on raids with them before—just sent the info to Moody. They must have some kind of new security measure now. We really shouldn’t even be talking about this, Lils. We shouldn’t know any of it.”

“What, James—do you think I’m the bloody rat?” Sirius suddenly exploded, shoving his chair so hard it toppled and skittered across the floor. “Think I’m going to tell the Death Eaters about all this?”

“Sit down, Sirius,” Lily snapped. “Of course he doesn’t. But we have protocols for a reason.”

He righted his chair and slumped back into it, nostrils flaring.

Since seeing Regulus, he’d been too busy to spiral back into his old ways. Moody kept him locked in his office day in and day out with Dumbledore and Alice, reviewing the data his brother had shared.

 If it was real, it was a treasure trove.

Locations of research facilities. Stolen scraps of notes on the anti-magic pulses. Maps of drop points for transferring blood from Ministry banks into Death Eater hands. And one long document about Sirius’s own blood—dense and incomprehensible to anyone but Alice, who said it looked like he’d painstakingly transcribed the information from his own Pensieve memory.

Dumbledore, Alice, and Moody were skeptical. They kept insisting he share his source, as if they couldn’t guess. Sirius stayed stubbornly silent, smirking a little at Moody when he said it was just something he’d “gotten word of”.

Moody made plans to vet and verify all the information. Dumbledore thanked him sincerely, eyes glittering. Alice couldn’t stop reading, clearly itching to get to work.

Sirius just felt sick. He couldn’t tell anyone about it under Moody’s strictest orders but the secret burned in his throat like a hot coal.

It hadn’t occurred to him that his brother might be trying to protect him. That wasn’t how they worked, not ever.

Sirius protected Regulus. 

Sirius took the beatings from their parents, acting out louder and worse whenever Regulus was in their sights so he could draw the fire. He deflected the attention of the Slytherins, hexing anyone who questioned why Regulus couldn’t stomach their cruel games. He cozied up to Bellatrix, to the Malfoys, even to the Dark Lord himself just to keep Regulus away from them.

And now Regulus was the one risking everything for him.

His brave, stupid, impossible brother.

The tide of the war was about to change again. He could feel it like an atmospheric pressure shift. All because of Regulus. 

He’d looked so thin, so frail, like his time was already running out.

—---

He could feel it in his bones, in the air, in the brittle, bright tension strung across the entire camp. The full moon’s pull, even in the sunlight of the high afternoon, yanked on them all like a leash. 

Lettie told Remus to keep low, not to interfere. He’d done what he could.

In whispered conversations over guttering firepits, in raucous debates with werewolves drunk on berry wine, in winding philosophical arguments about moral responsibility, wizarding prejudice, forgiveness and reciprocity and self-respect, he had made his case.

A purge: cut out the rot. Work with the Order to rid the Pack of the Death Eater loyalists. Lettie suspected removing a core of fifty people would be enough to loosen the Death Eater’s grip. And of course, Greyback himself would have to go.

There was nothing more he could do. Lettie had gathered those she considered essential to winning over, enough to form a strong coalition to manage the inevitable outrage and unrest afterward. They were deliberating now. They might still be deliberating by moonrise.

Remus had whiled away the morning in Hawk’s tent, working off his nervous energy and saying a long goodbye. One way or another, he would be leaving the island before the moon, returning to his life. With the first stop being his dark basement.

When they finally emerged to the high noon light, blinking and shaking out their limbs, the island around them had come alive with the full throng of a few hundred werewolves preparing for a long and wild night. 

Remus wanted to make the rounds and finish some repairs he’d promised to assist with– fixing some jerry-rigged wall consoles, helping patch together a rusted over Muggle stove, sorting through some of Donna’s landfill finds to see what might be salvageable. 

As he left Hawk’s camp, the older man pulled him in for a kiss, calloused hand rough against his jaw, before sending him off with a gruff, “Stay safe tonight.” 

He took his time along the flattened paths, muddy from snowmelt, weaving between the tent cities and the teetering, ramshackle sheds built up from nothing. The whole camp echoed with laughter and shouts carried on the wind. He wound toward the edge of the camp and took a moment to look out at the dark and turbulent sea. Across the channel, he knew, stretched Wales and then England and somewhere in there, London: his friends and his work and the war. 

As he meandered toward Donna’s tent compound, Mossie darted in front of him, shrieking with laughter, chased by another young boy Remus knew had only just been turned. It would be his first full moon. Remus’ heart

twisted as the boy ran by, no doubt energized by the electric pull of the moon, blissfully unaware of the pain he would endure for the rest of his life. He couldn’t be older than six or seven—about the same age Remus had been when Greyback bit him.

At Donna’s, he picked through a pile of scrap, poking here and there with his wand to see if circuits could still go live or if motherboards were irreparably water-damaged. 

“This one!” Donna shouted happily, lifting up what looked like the ruins of an ocular cybernetic. 

“Yeah, that could work,” Remus agreed, looking at it closely as she handed it to him. “Take out the camera, add it to that chassis we found the other day–”

“Just need to find about ten more of them and a few more of those buoys and we could have our perimeter monitored at all times even out at sea!” She dropped the cybernetic into a metal box at her feet– the “keep” pile.

They carried on like that for most of the afternoon. As Remus finally went to leave, she pulled him into a hug.

“Don’t stay away so long, Remus,” she said a touch sadly. “This is a good place for you, you know.”

He smiled at her through the lump in his throat. “I’ll be around, Donna. I’ll come back to visit.”

“To visit,” she scoffed, pulling away. “Next time you’ll be back here it’ll be to kill us.”

“Kill Death Eaters, Donna. Maybe even just capture them, if we’re lucky. It’ll be better. You’ll see.”

A look twisted its way onto her face, skeptical and dark and a little angry.

“Yes, I suppose I’ll see.”

—----

Halfway through figuring out how a Muggle refrigerator worked, Remus got the message from Lettie. Dusk was quickly falling, people already drifting toward the barren field to the north of camp for the moon circle. He’d been waiting, hoping to get word before he had to leave.

The messenger, a dark-skinned man with bright, quicksilver eyes, found him a few tents down from Hawk’s. He was one of the neighborhood’s more respected leaders. Remus bent over the broken machine, hands smudged with grease, prodding at what he suspected might be the condenser.

“We’ve agreed,” the man said, and the way he said it, fierce and victorious, suggested that what they had agreed to was good news. “Lettie will be in touch with your people to coordinate.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Thank you. We needed the push,” and slipped back out into the twilight.

Remus, who’d been squatting on his haunches, let himself roll back, sitting on the ground. He grinned in disbelief. Two years of undercover work. Failures and struggles, impasses and tangles of political machinations. Fighting and scraping and arguing and pleading. Now, scarcely a month of work as himself: Remus Lupin, representative of the Order. He’d spent two years building goodwill– enough that everyone he’d spoken to at the camp had kept his presence more or less a secret from the Death Eaters, helping squirrel him away into dark tents whenever they came by. That had allowed him to come to them bearing honesty and truth, not subterfuge. And it worked. It hadn’t all been for nothing.

He stared up at the blue tarp above him, dark now as the sun quickly fell behind the horizon. He almost wanted to stay for the full moon. If he stayed, it might be the first full moon he’d ever enjoyed– a celebration, a release after a month of tension. Political differences tended to disappear as soon as the moon rose, so he reasoned he could be safe enough even if he ran across a Death Eater loyalist as a wolf. He would just have to make sure not to linger long after, while they all stirred in the morning.

No. It wasn’t safe. He had to go.

He made his way toward the southern lighthouse with a light step despite the growing pain in his spine and legs, almost happy. He didn’t see anyone on his way; they would all be gathered already. In the distance, he could hear the wild howls of people already anticipating their wolf forms, no doubt throwing their heads back and slinging arms over shoulders and playfighting with abandon. 

The dark shadow of the ruined lighthouse loomed just ahead. He steeled himself for the inevitable nausea of Apparition, the lonely basement, the agony of transformation. He thought about messaging Sirius to meet him there in the morning and smiled faintly, imagining him bounding down the stairs red-cheeked and windswept, ready to show off his healing spells. He glanced at the time on his wrist console and picked up his pace.

He was nearly there, steps away, when four figures emerged before him, melting out of the twilight dimness like ghosts.

Remus wasn’t fast enough. One of the figures, amber eyes glinting in the light, tackled him to the ground before he could pull out his wand. Another seized his gun from its holster and threw it aside, turning on him with shiny teeth bared.

“We heard you were lurking around here,” one of them growled close to his ear. In short order, he was pinned, four heavy bodies holding him down. He could barely move an inch.

“Rude of you to leave without joining us for a moon,” another hissed, pressing a clawed hand to his cheek, forcing his face into the dirt. 

They held him like that for a minute or two, heads cocked toward the sky like they were listening, but Remus knew what they were waiting for. He tried for the wandless werewolf magic, but it was no use– he wasn’t good at it at his best, and pinned in the dirt was far from his best.

Remus couldn’t speak, couldn’t shout for help. The moon was rising, he could feel it– his bones shifted under his skin already, breaking and roiling. The dark shadows looming above him were teeming and twitching too, their grip on him loosening as they were overtaken. The one nearest him released a low guttural growl as his face elongated, jaw cracking, saliva dripping onto Remus’ cheek in long, blood-tinged strings.

Soon, he thrashed too, back arching. The other werewolves forgot him, lost in their own thrall, bucking and snarling. Their bones broke, their flesh tore. Bristling hair erupted from once-smooth skin as his teeth sharpened and multiplied. He could feel his organs rippling and rearranging, his heart swelling, his brain crushed momentarily as his skull reshaped around it. Remus’ scream of agony broke into a ragged, keening howl.

Chapter Text

Sirius only barely dozed. He’d blinked awake at the first sign of light to do the Animagus ritual, half-asleep, then slumped back over, face almost pressed to the cold window.

The blue dawn light faded in and out of his vision. All night he’d barely slept, waiting to hear the beep of his wrist console or see a ghostly apparition of a wolf rising from the floor. It had been a month since Remus left– moon to moon. He had some premonition, or perhaps some misplaced hope, that they would hear from him today. A sign of life. 

The unassuming ding of a message jolted him into full consciousness like he was being attacked. He snatched the wrist console and read the message, the glowing light of the screen blinding him.

need help island off wales

It wasn’t encrypted, just typed outright. There was so little information. He read it again. It said it was from Remus, but could it be a trap? 

It didn’t matter; it didn’t matter at all. He was up and strapping on his gun and wand before he even knew where he was going. 

As he rushed out of his flat, he pulled up a map of the coast of Wales and scanned it, zooming in frantically, counting.

Over fifty at least, ranging from tiny specks onward.

“Fuck, fuck Remus, I can’t find you with this,” he mumbled to himself, looking at the message again and willing it to reveal more. 

Wolves needed space and there were a lot of wolves. He’d start with the largest one and go down the list. He typed the coordinates for the first into his console and Apparated.

—----

Icy cold water lapped at his feet. Though it was cuttingly frigid, he thought about crawling into the ocean and letting it freeze him solid. It would hurt less to die that way. He could just breathe in the salt water, let it fill his lungs. Maybe then it wouldn’t burn so much. Maybe his broken ribs would go numb, and he could finally fall asleep. Falling asleep would be best. If he could just fall asleep.

Seagulls screamed above him, and he opened his eyes to watch them wheel across the sky.

I’ll be a good meal for you soon, he thought. Just wait a few minutes.

Far above him, at the top of the cliff where he now lay broken at the bottom, loomed the shadow of the lighthouse. He couldn’t remember what had happened after the Death Eaters—because surely that’s what they were—attacked him. But he could guess.

He thought about just lying there and dying. The other werewolves—Hawk, Donna, Lettie—would think he’d left. They wouldn’t know to look for him, and they’d be licking their own wounds besides. A Patronus was out of the question; he’d never be able to cast one in this condition. He wasn’t even sure he could lift his wand.

He tried moving his right arm. It barely shifted, the wrist console feeling impossibly heavy. His body shook and quaked with shock—its last desperate effort to keep him alive.

He blinked up at the sky, at the birds circling high above in the pale dawn light.

“Hey—” he croaked, surprised to find he could still make a sound. His throat felt raw and shredded. “Send a message.”

Nothing. The wrist console’s screen stayed black. Probably broken too.

Fanciest bloody model, he thought wildly, almost choking on a delirious laugh. Least it could do is save my life.

“Send a message to Sirius,” he said as loudly as he could toward his limp, broken arm. The screen flickered to life—listening. Maybe the message wouldn’t even go through, but he was close to the unwarded lighthouse. Maybe. Just maybe.

The effort made his head spin, darkness closing in at the edges of his vision.

“Need help.”

Not enough, he thought dimly. Something else.

“Island off Wales.”

It would have to do. His eyes found the seagull again, still circling lazily in the sky above.

—------

The first island wasn’t it; he knew the moment his feet touched the sand. The lights of some Muggle settlement glittered atop a distant cliff: too populated for werewolves. He didn’t bother to look twice before typing in the next coordinates and Apparating.

The second island stretched before him, barren and empty, a mass of stone and scraggly sea grass. Nowhere to live, no nooks to hide in, just wind-whipped fields as far as the eye could see. Unlikely. 

When he typed in the coordinates for the third on the list, his console spat out an error: Location not found. He tried again, double-checking the Islands of Wales list he’d found in some Muggle publication. Again, location not found. He stabbed at the screen, pulling up a Muggle map and zooming in. 

There it was, exactly where Islands of Wales said it should be.

Ah, warded, he thought. That felt very promising. He studied the Muggle map, gauging the distance. Sixty-four kilometers south-southwest. Pulling up a photograph of the island, he focused on the image: rocky cliffs, grassy fields, a landfill to the north, a sparse forest to the south, and the ruins of a lighthouse jutting into the morning sky.

He turned on the spot and Apparated into the unknown. 

—--

Roiling water closed over his head and he flailed, struggling toward air. He crashed against a rocky wall, was pulled back by the sea, and then crashed against it again. This time, Sirius managed to grab a hold of an edge and cling on, sputtering, as the sea tried once more to drag him away.

He scrambled along the cliff edge, losing his balance more than once and dropping into the water, resurfacing, starting over. It was slow going. The cliff was too high to climb, so his only hope was to follow it until he found a beach, an outcropping—anything solid. He needed both hands to cling to the rocks, unable to free one to reach his wand or his wrist console. His leg burned; he must have splinched himself somehow, though he couldn’t get a good look to assess the damage.

At last, arms shaking from exertion and his whole body shivering from the wet cold, he stumbled onto a narrow stretch of pebbled beach at the base of the cliff. Above loomed the shadow of a ruin, a spike of crumbling stone stabbing the sky.

No way up the cliff, even from here. 

His attempts at magic fizzled, uncooperative. Even his wrist console glitched, refusing to activate the warming spell, leaving him drenched and shivering violently against the frigid winter wind.

Scanning the beach, his heart leapt into his throat at the sight of a dark, motionless shape near the water’s edge. Limping and gasping, Sirius half-ran, half-stumbled toward it, falling to his knees on the loose pebbles. He turned the body over.

Remus.

So broken and bloodied that he was surely dead. 

Sirius grabbed his limp arm, activating his wrist console. The biodata flickered a rapid, weak heartbeat, fluttering like a moth against glass. The screen flashed red. Critical. Seek medical attention immediately.

Sirius tried every healing spell he knew, every spell he’d ever seen Lily do, and some he’d only read about. The magic faltered, faint and sluggish as if he were a first year, and not even the best one in the class. He snapped his fingers three times– episkey, episkey, episkey– grateful he’d at least thought to load those, bitter that he hadn’t done more. A few wounds closed, but the surface injuries weren’t the danger. It was the internal bleeding that would kill him.

Furious, he ripped potions from his waterlogged backpack and unstoppered them one after the other, pouring healing potions and mandrake serum and wiggenweld down Remus’ throat nearly at random.

Sirius’ breathing hitched up and started to strangle him, his mind going blank with panic. The potions might be helping but if Remus had fallen from the cliff top, his organs could be ruptured, his spine broken. He needed a real medic, not half-functioning spells and a cocktail of random potions. Sirius clasped his metal hand to his chest, willing himself calm, begging his heart to stop trying to leap out. 

He considered Apparating, but it felt wrong. He was too panicked, too unsteady, his magic unreliable. He’d splinch them for sure. And what if moving him made things worse? He didn’t know. He had no idea.

Remus’ wrist console steadied its beeping minutely. 

“Ok—ok, you’re not going to die, Remus,” Sirius gritted out, grabbing his wrist again and pulling the console closer. “Not right now. Not here.”

He sent off messages to everyone— James, Lily, Peter, Moody—sharing their location. They seemed to stall in delivery, but Remus had gotten a message to him somehow, so worth a try.

Then he flipped back through Remus’ messages, scanning.

The story of what had happened the night before told itself. Long claw marks, now slightly healed thanks to the onslaught of potions, shredded Remus’ back and shoulders. He’d been bitten along his limbs and neck and face, teeth impressions of several different sizes circling dark bruised skin. His bones were broken too, but it was hard to tell what was from a fight, what was just regular post-transformation damage, and what could be from being tossed off the edge of a cliff.

Either way, the wolves had attacked him at some point and left him for dead on this desolate beach.

Desperate for help, Sirius wavered. 

Remus lived with the wolves for two years and chose to return even after he blew his cover.  He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have a single friend among them. He must have sensed some hope here. 

Monsters, he thought, looking at the bloody mangle of Remus’ body. But it didn’t sound right.

Werewolves were people. They made good choices, they made bad. 

There, just before the message he’d sent to Sirius:

It works by the lighthouse!! 

From someone named Mossie. 

To Mossie, he wrote: 

Badly injured on the beach under the lighthouse, need a medic immediately, please come as soon as possible

“Please be nice, Mossie,” he mumbled as he leaned back over Remus. “We need you to be nice, we really need you.”

He spent the next hour shivering in his wet clothes trying to wrangle his magic out from under whatever wards held it down.

—-

A bad dream. Some feverish werewolf full moon hallucination; it’d be a new symptom but why not? 

He woke up in Hawk’s warm tent, bundled under the blankets that smelled like them both, a fire burning merrily in the pit by the entrance. It was all too hot; he was boiling alive. He thrashed off the blankets and relished cooler air hitting overheated parts.

Everything ached but not in a mauled-to-death-and-thrown-from-a-cliff way. Just in the normal post-transformation way. 

Remus’ wand, wrist console, and gun sat neatly lined up on the rickety bedside table, alongside Hawk’s collection of Muggle books recovered from the landfill.

Afternoon light rimmed the corrugated metal door, streaming in through the cracks. He felt serene and sleepy, like he’d just woken from an afternoon nap on a day when he didn’t have any responsibilities.

He was almost completely convinced it was all a dream until he opened that door and stepped out to find Sirius in what looked like very intent consul with Hawk, their heads bowed together by the fire pit.

Remus nearly just closed the door and went back to bed. Go back to sleep and wake up in a different reality; it worked in some dreams

But Sirius looked up in that instant and was on his feet a moment later, holding Remus in a bone crushing embrace that would have been entirely inappropriate if he’d really broken his whole body falling from a cliff after being ripped apart by werewolves. 

Sirius pulled back, hands on his shoulders, and looked him over. 

“Incredible! St. Mungo’s would’ve had you laid up for a week!” He grabbed one of Remus’ arms and lifted it as if to see if it worked.

“How long has it been?”

“Since I found you? About ten hours, I think. Hawk is an incredible healer, Lily is going to lose her mind—“

Remus pulled away and turned to Hawk, who’d stood up and was watching them, waiting patiently.

“What happened? What happened last night?” he asked Hawk, voice cracking. It was bad, he knew. He could tell by Hawk’s body language, by the smell of blood in the air, by the hushed silence of the camp around them.

“You should hear it from Lettie.” He jerked his head in the direction of the meeting house and Remus promptly followed, leaving Sirius by the fire pit, staring after them.

Lettie and a half dozen others gathered in the meeting house, seated in a circle of rickety mismatched chairs. Lettie stood at the front before a podium made of a barrel and she was speaking when he slipped in.

“—not what we had wanted, not what I promised you, but it will still be protection. We must take circumstances as they come and—“ Seeing Remus by the door, she stopped and raised a hand. “A moment, friends.”

In the hush of a back room, she turned on him.

“They knew you were here. They learned we were hiding you from them, and they aren’t stupid— they put two and two together.”

“Lettie, please, what happened during the moon—“

“A bloodbath is what happened, Remus. Greyback and his people turned on us. They figured we planned to conspire with the Order. We lost fifteen. Fifteen.”

Remus’ knees nearly buckled. 

She continued, something like hatred in her eyes. “They got away, most of them.” She laughed a cold ringing laugh that clattered around his brain. “I guess we’re rid of them like I’d hoped, but I certainly doubt Greyback will forget that we tried to betray him to the Order.”

“We can protect you, we’ll help—“

“Yes, your people were here already offering their help. Your wizard called them, four of them to our doorstep when we’re most vulnerable. They’ll help. Promised us patrols and guards and minders. They’ll make a jail of this place. We’ll get nothing but their promises of safety—no rights, no dignity. They offer us from Greyback but who will protect us from them?”

He felt like she’d slit his throat, and he was as silent as if she had. Finally, he choked out, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know–”

“Of course you didn’t,” she spat, as if that was worse than if he had. “It would be best if you left as soon as you’re well enough.”

“Yes, I’ll go. But Lettie, who was–”

“Killed? The fifteen who were killed?” She looked at him still with that hatred, that accusation. “Alaric, Cressida, Bram, Isla, Eldric, Marigold, Belladonna, Torvin, Pippa, Osric, Fen, Lydia, Corbin, and Nell.” She said each name with violent force, like she thought with some effort they might pierce him. “Those are the fifteen that died last night. Would you like me to write them down for you? Did you even know them all, wizard?”

He didn’t. He knew some.

Osric who had a garden in his backyard that grew miracles even in the coldest weather; Lydia who would sing all day, her sweet voice carrying on the wind; Bram, who had loved to spar and show off elaborate wrestling moves he’d picked up from Muggle TV.

And Belladonna, of course. Donna. Dead.

He fled then, unable to meet Lettie’s eyes.

—---

The man who climbed down from the cliff to save them seemed unreal; too hearty and hale to be true. He looked like some kind of knight straight from a fairytale, run through a werewolf filter and deposited on this desolate island—half paladin-prince, half wild wolf. Sirius was delirious with fear for Remus and nearly frozen to death himself but still he was pretty sure he fell a little in love with the man the moment he saw him: his hero.

“Mossie?” he’d asked when the man approached.

“Hawk.” He had the soft lilting voice of a poet.

Sirius didn’t know if this was a name or just a noise. Hawk seemed as fake a name as Mossie, but Sirius blearily thought he had no legs to stand on when it came to ridiculous names.

“Please, he’s dying. We need a medic.”

The man didn’t say anything to that, just knelt down beside Remus’ limp broken body and began to wave his hands like he was some hacky diviner sensing auras.

“He got tossed from that cliff, I think. And was attacked by wolves. I don’t know what else. Please, we need to get him to St. Mungo’s or– or somewhere closer. Is there a wizard hospital in Wales?”

“Don’t need it.”

“He needs a medic, he’s probably got a ruptured– I don’t know– ruptured everything! What are you doing! He’s half dead, you can’t just–”

But his biodata was leveling out, steadying. The wrist console flicked from red to orange.

Sirius fell silent at that and sat back in just a bit of awe as Hawk worked.

When he seemed satisfied that Remus was stable enough to move, the man picked him up in his arms like he weighed almost nothing, setting off with Sirius at his heels.

They arrived at a dilapidated shack made of metal sheets amongst a veritable sprawl of dilapidated shacks. Hawk settled Remus in a natty pile of blankets inside and, again without a word, sat down outside in front of the outdoor firepit and started roasting sausages of some kind.

Sirius, still wet and freezing, huddled as close to the fire as he could get, teeth chattering.

“Who are you?” the man asked finally, like it was an afterthought.

“I’m Sirius–” 

“Friend of his.” It wasn’t a question.

“Right. Well, he messaged me and said he needed help so I–”

“Good thing. We wouldn’t have found him. Thought he left.”

Man of few words, Sirius thought, again a little in awe. He’d never been so terse a day in his life.

“I messaged Mossie, who’s she?” 

“Another wolf. She’s not well; sister was killed. Lot of people were killed.”

“And you’re ’Hawk’? A friend of Remus’?”

The man nodded once. He took a bite of sausage.

From there, over the next several hours, Sirius asked every question he could think of. Every single one. What had happened, who all the players were, what Hawk thought would happen next, what happened at full moons usually, how did people get food here, did they eat wild animals when they were wolves, what did Hawk think of Death Eaters, what did Hawk think of the Order, did he think the Animagus thing would really work, how did they make decisions here, did that usually work, why didn’t magic work here, why didn’t technology work here, how in the bloody hell did you do all that healing? 

It was every question he always wanted to ask Remus but didn’t for fear of scaring him away or else he knowing he wouldn’t get an answer. 

Hawk, though, answered each indifferently, like they all had the same weight and meaning to him. His answers were clear and short, but kind, though Sirius suspected anything would sound kind in Hawk’s lovely lilting voice.

They were interrupted by a little girl running up to the camp, her face red like she’d been crying. Despite that, she still looked a bit excited, like not even grief could stifle her thrill at interesting happenings around the grey camp.

“Hawk, there’s wizards at the lighthouse! They said ‘serious’ called them? What’s that mean?”

“This is Sirius, Mossie. He called them.” Hawk jerked his head in the direction of the lighthouse and Sirius took that to mean that he should go with Mossie.

She led the way, glancing back at him constantly with that wary, curious expression on her face.

“You sent Hawk to help us, right?” he asked gently. “Thank you. You saved Remus’ life.”

She smiled but she looked a bit watery, like she might cry again. But then she skipped once, shaking it off. 

“It was lucky that I like to go to the lighthouse after full moons. The console doesn’t work anywhere else.” 

They were quiet for a few minutes as they walked, now away from the sprawl of the camp and cresting over a hill just above the lighthouse. The wind blew the noises of the werewolves away, leaving this part of the island nearly silent, impossibly calm after everything that happened here last night.

“Are you Remus’ boyfriend?” Mossie asked, looking sidelong at him. “It’s just my sisters were saying they thought he had one with you wizards, though he wouldn’t really say.”

“Uhm, no, not his boyfriend. Just a friend.” Sirius was too tired and his nerves were too raw to examine this question, but he mentally put a pin in it.

Before they reached the lighthouse, he could see them– James and Lily and Peter and Moody, huddled together by the ruin, wands out as if in anticipation of a fight.

“He’s ok!” he said right away, knowing what they were thinking when they saw him approaching with no Remus. “He’s healing.”

“We just got your message, what the hell do you mean he’s healing?” James said, rushing up to him. 

“The messages don’t go through right. I found him– I don’t know– six hours ago now. He’s back at the camp, they healed him. It was kind of incredible actually, but listen, it’s not a good idea for you all to go in there. Things are tense. Maybe just Moody.” He looked at Moody, whose eye rolled madly in his head. His metal leg– Remus-made, of course– glinted in the light. He nodded brusquely.

After a few more hasty explanations, the other three Apparated away after making Sirius promise to come straight to James’ as soon as possible. 

Mossie didn’t say anything on the way back to the camp, apparently terrified of Moody. Who wouldn’t be.

Hawk directed Moody to Lettie, and then disappeared into the tent to tend to Remus again, putting up a gentle hand when Sirius tried to follow.

Sirius sat at the fire, picking at the sausages Hawk had cooked, staring around at everything like he could understand Remus better if he just absorbed the angle of every tin roof, the tenor of every shout in the distance, the expressions on the faces of everyone who passed him by. The passing werewolves gave him wary looks– he was very clearly other, not-wolf– but no one approached him.

Later, after Remus had come back again, Hawk insisted that they both stay the night, as he didn’t feel Remus was well enough to Apparate. Honestly, he less insisted and more stated, pointing to a small tent that Sirius could kip in and handing him a thick wool blanket. 

Around the bonfire, a few other werewolves trickled in and Sirius sat, letting their low murmuring voices wash over him. He’d only gotten a few words with Remus and he was wary to push too hard. He had a devastated and broken look on his face and whenever he met Sirius’ eyes, he could tell that Remus was profoundly uncomfortable to have him there. Intruder. What-is-he-doing-here. 

So he tried to stay as unobtrusive as possible.

Mossie came by and sat next to him. After a few moments of building up her courage, she started peppering him with question after question.

“Why’s your arm like that?”

“What’s Hogwarts like?”

“You really need that stick to do magic?”

Sirius, feeling like it was karma, answered each, chuckling fondly as she bounced next to him. She delighted him a little; a ball of energy. Regulus flicked across his mind, ten years old and making Sirius show him his wand every five minutes, like it might have changed since the last time.

Remus and Hawk sat just opposite and he could see them through the flickering orange glow of the fire whenever he looked up. They spoke softly together, Hawk’s arm around Remus. Comforting him. The Pack had lost a lot the previous night, Sirius understood. The whole sparse group around the fire had an air of sorrow.

Then Hawk kissed Remus tenderly, his hand gentle on Remus’ jaw, pulling him in. Sirius looked away with such a violent jerk that he thought someone must have noticed, like he’d just had a seizure. His stomach gave a decisive flip and he got up abruptly, suddenly needing the cold air.

“Give me a minute, Mossie. Need a walk—“

He walked through the deserted muddy paths, hands shoved in pockets, and hated himself. 

Remus was grieving the loss of friends and the failure of a mission years in the making. He was plainly devastated. And Sirius, in his jealousy and pettiness, saw him be comforted by what was clearly his lover– a man who was, frankly, extraordinary– and his first sick instinct was to feel sorry for himself. To mourn the loss of his imagined romantic prospect. He kicked at a trash can half-heartedly, then harder, until it hurt his toes a bit.

He realized now that whatever game he thought he’d been playing, he had been playing it only with himself. 

It took him a while to make it back to his tent. He wandered through the quiet camp for a long time, thinking about everything Hawk had told him, obsessing a little, and then trying to purge himself— trying to force out the jealousy and the fantasy and the game he’d invented, and just keep the friendship. 

When he did get back to Hawk’s, after getting lost a few times, the fire glowed only with embers but Remus still lingered, wrapped in a wool blanket and staring flatly at nothing.

“Hey, sorry– went for a walk,” Sirius said by way of explanation.

“Oh, yeah, no worries. Just wanted to make sure you got back ok.” He moved over on the crate he sat on, as if inviting Sirius to join him. He did.

“Thank you for coming to find me. For figuring out how to get help. You’ll have to tell me about it later; I don’t think I gave you much info to go off of, did I?”

Sirius smiled and said, “No, you really didn’t. I’ll tell you tomorrow when I tell James.”

“Don’t. Don’t tell James, alright? About this place. Someone knew I was here and told the Death Eaters, Sirius. We can’t talk about things, not to anyone. Not even to each other.” He sounded so raw and wounded that Sirius could only nod.

“How are you feeling?” Sirius asked finally, looking at the burned down embers rather than at Remus.

“Honestly? Really sick of us almost dying all the time.”

Sirius barked out a laugh at this, a bitter sound with no mirth to it. 

“Me too, mate. I said something similar to Lily the other day and you know what she said? She told me Gideon and Fab were just at St. Mungo’s on death’s door too and we shouldn’t feel special. Everyone is almost dying all the time, and we should be glad it’s just almost.”

“Fuck, this war has hardened her,” Remus replied, laughing a bit himself. “No one said it’d be fun, I suppose.” 

“No, not having any fun at all.” 

A month ago, he might have felt bold and put an arm around Remus’ shoulder, pulling him close. Now, he just sat stiffly next to him, too aware of every time their elbows bumped. Eventually, Sirius said he was going to bed just so that Remus would too– he looked dead on his feet. He got up and slipped into Hawk’s shack like it was what he did every night, like that was where he belonged.

In his tiny tent, sleeping on the ground with no pillow, wrapped only in an itchy woolen blanket that smelled like Hawk, Sirius pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and tried to just breath through the knot of confusing, painful, shameful feelings in the pit of his stomach.

Chapter Text

Remus didn’t think it was possible for the Order to constrict itself more, but it did. Everyone became as fanatical about security as Moody—saying nothing about missions, refusing to discuss the news, growing shifty and paranoid and afraid.

Afraid of each other. Afraid for each other.

His absence had set them back on Alice’s goals, so Remus worked long hours in the lab to make up the difference. The rate of cybernetic surgeries climbed as tensions did. Everyone wanted to arm themselves, even at the expense of a few fingers. Alice had also come by new information—gleaned from who knew where—on the anti-magic pulses and the blood magic. At first, she guarded it like a state secret, but eventually conceded she needed another pair of eyes. 

They worked late into the nights, glaring lab lights washing over steel and datafiles, disrupting his sleep patterns beyond repair.

Remus didn’t see much of his friends. They were all equally busy, barricaded under layers of security measures and fear. 

Remus buried himself in grief and guilt, too.

Donna and fourteen others dead because the Death Eaters had known the Pack meant to turn against them. All the Death Eater werewolves scattered, untraceable. They struck at random—Muggle neighborhoods, wizard enclaves, anywhere. Every report of an attack was a knife reminding him: You did this.

Hawk’s terse updates arrived through Mossie’s console.

Security tightening. The Order sent patrols. The Pack’s unhappy. People talking about leaving. Afraid of Death Eaters. Afraid of the Order. Maybe France. Maybe East.

All this because Remus hadn’t been careful enough, had trusted too readily. 

His friends were the only people who knew that he had been with the werewolves, and that thought haunted Remus with its own choking paranoia. 

Lily had seen him there and she’d surely told them all. It was a shameful fear, he knew. He’d talked Peter out of as much not long ago.

He tried to reason with himself. Anyone could’ve guessed where he’d been—missing for a month, a werewolf—it didn’t take genius. But what if someone had mentioned it, even offhand, in the wrong company? An overheard comment, an unencrypted message, a careless slip after a drink?

It made him sick to ask, but he had to know. The looks on their faces when he brought it up were devastating: the war coming between them, a poisonous fog obscuring them to each other.

Three months passed.

They saw each other maybe once a week, sometimes less. Lily came by after full moons to heal him—efficient, gentle, gone within minutes. James never stopped working missions, haggard and tense and angry in a way Remus had never seen him. Peter jumped at every shadow and sound, peered through cracked doors before opening them fully, leapt to shut off the news whenever there was a story about some gory death as if he couldn’t bear to hear it. 

He missed them all, but missing Sirius was the most complicated.

When he’d first woken at the camp and seen Sirius there, dread had knotted in his stomach. What had Sirius seen? The dirt, the crumbling shacks? Hawk—silent, strange—working his Dark creature magic? A pack of feral werewolves squatting by a landfill? Disgusting. Animal.

But Hawk had liked him.

“Doesn’t shut up,” he’d said that night as they lay together in his tent. “Curious about us, though. Didn’t think wizards wanted to know.”

Sirius had sat with Mossie for hours by the bonfire, showing her his wand, his gun, letting her tug on his hair, answering all her questions. He’d wandered the camp alone, unafraid. He’d looked at everything with wide, curious eyes, as if trying to memorize it. And when Remus was dying on the beach, Sirius had trusted the werewolves to help him.

But when Hawk had kissed Remus, in that easy thoughtless way he always did, Sirius’ face had shuttered and he’d disappeared into the dark. Remus had watched him go. When he returned, he was changed: carefully composed, tightly wound.

And he stayed that way.

He wasn’t unkind. He didn’t seem angry. When they managed the occasional dinner altogether at his flat, it was clean and tidy and he chatted and joked, nearly normal. He answered messages. He spent hours in Moody’s office on unknowable tasks, never complaining, never sharing information. He seemed, more or less, sober.

Everyone was tired and worn thin by fear—but Sirius was that, and something else besides.

The easy closeness between them vanished. The casual touches, the lazy sprawl of affection that Remus had come to expect, gone. Sirius held him at a distance and Remus wanted desperately to ask why, but had no idea how without sounding ridiculous.

Hey Sirius, if you happen to notice that I have a crumb on my chin or something, feel free to just wipe it off yourself without asking like you used to. I don’t mind.

Go ahead and put your feet in my lap, would you? I like it.

I noticed that you haven’t been straightening my shirt collars for me lately, why is that?

Remember that time that I very nearly fell asleep in your arms? Let’s try that again.

The part of his brain that trusted no one, the part that could even harbour the haunting thought that one of his friends was the traitor, whispered that maybe Sirius had not liked what he saw at the werewolf camp after all. Perhaps it had given Remus away as the filthy and low creature he was– living like that for two years, loving creatures like that–and now he was just taking a careful and measured step back.

The other part of his brain thought about that shuttered look on Sirius’ face when he’d seen Hawk kiss him. Remus suspected there was some colossal misunderstanding between them– something stupid and fixable– but he didn’t know how to ask about it; didn’t know how to broach the subject. 

So he didn’t. It was silly, childish really, he told himself, to be preoccupied with such things in the middle of a war.

But then James and Lily got engaged. 

They were gathered at their house, slumped in various stages of exhaustion. Peter had his head down on his folded arms on the dining table, still in his work uniform. He’d worked daily to feed Moody intel from inside the Ministry, and it seemed to wear him thin. Spying didn’t suit him. He snored softly.

Sirius sprawled across the couch, taking up the whole thing, one leg draped over the back. He twirled his wand between his fingers, spinning it into a brown blur, his gaze vacant.

Remus scavenged dinner from the fridge. He pulled out various containers from the fridge– a quarter of Mrs. Potter’s shepard’s pie, a plastic box of noodles, a few slices of pizza haphazardly wrapped in foil, an opened tin of fish that was half-eaten with the fork still in it, like someone had started on it and rushed out before finishing, jamming it in the fridge on their way out the door. A pitiful spread but he set it all out anyway.

When James and Lily swept in, they looked happier than he’d seen anyone in months. The cold winter weather had finally broken into an early spring but they were both flushed red like they’d come in from the snow. James’ grin threatened to take up his whole face and Lily held a bottle of champagne aloft like a trophy. 

“We’re getting married!” James yelled, startling Peter out of his chair and to the ground in a tumble. James pulled Lily into a cinematic kiss, tilting her back and spinning her around. She giggled, a sound Remus hadn’t heard in about four months.

They all rushed up in a flurry of excitement. Congratulations were shouted, hugs were exchanged, the bottle of champagne was popped to much fanfare. They toasted to James and Lily, to their love, their future, and, as Peter declared, “to it being about fucking time.”

As the night wound down, after they had reminisced in great detail about James and Lily’s tumultuous romance–mostly for Sirius’ benefit, since he hadn’t been there to witness the disasters– James grew a little embarrassingly teary-eyed as he looked at them all. 

“We can’t let this war ruin our lives,” he said softly, eyes moving from one of them to the next. “This is important. This– us together. It matters. We can’t let them tear us apart. When you love someone, you can’t let them go.” 

“You sop,” Sirius said, throwing a pillow at him, but his smile was fond, eyes maybe a little wet around the edges too.

Lily gently patted James’ cheek. “He is a sop, but he’s right. We should hold on to the love we have.”

“No one’s ever loved me,” Peter moaned. “Remember Third Year when Imelda told me she loved me like a brother?” 

As James launched into an impassioned defense of Peter’s virtues, Remus got up from his creaky kitchen chair. Sirius was again sprawled on the couch, charming little smoke hearts into the air and sending them floating lazily toward Lily, who popped each one through the center with her wand, dissipating it.

When Remus gently lifted his legs and slid under them, settling Sirius’ socked feet in his lap, Sirius gave him a startled look but said nothing. Remus only smiled faintly, leaning back comfortably, and joined the banter.

Sirius didn’t move again. He fell asleep right there, warm and heavy across Remus’ knees.

“A storm! Lightning forecast for tonight!”

James vaulted over the back of the couch, landing in a heap of limbs squarely on top of Sirius, who had been dead asleep on the pullout under three heavy quilts.

“Get off– you’re crushing me! Merlin, you weigh a ton,” Sirius groaned, trying to toss him off.

“We can do the ritual tonight, mate! I messaged Peter– he’ll come over as soon as he’s off work! We’re ready. Tonight’s the night!”

Sirius, finally managing to wrestle his head free from the blankets, blinked up at James. His grin spread almost in spite of himself; James’ excitement was, as always, contagious.

They had all been hearing the double heartbeats for a month now. Every time he pressed his wand to his chest and started the spell, the two heartbeats kicked up in tandem instantly, like they were impatient for him to get on with it. He could just barely make out his animal when he closed his eyes, a blur on the periphery of his vision: something big and furry and black.

James and Peter had gone through the same stages, each catching up in turn. Now all three of them were in sync, and the forecast finally promised lightning. After months of dreary, stormless winter, spring had finally brought rain. They’d been watching the skies obsessively, ready to move the instant they saw a flash or heard a roll of thunder.

Sirius was very ready to be done with it for two reasons.

First, Remus. His last few transformations had left him bedridden for days. A wrist, broken months ago, just wouldn’t set right and clicked whenever he moved it with an ominous and painful sound. 

Hawk had told Sirius that yes, it was very likely the presence of other animals would make a significant difference– though of course, he hadn’t used so many words. Eager for some solution to Remus’ rapidly deteriorating body, Sirius had even enlisted Lily to convince Remus to go to the wolf pack for his transformations, but Remus had just darkly said that he didn’t think he was welcome there anymore.

Second: also Remus. 

Every dawn and every dusk, performing the ritual, Sirius thought of him. And he couldn’t think of him anymore; he couldn’t stand it. His feverish lovesickness had broken into a cold, stabbing pain and he wanted it to be over, wanted badly to just move on. It would hurt less once he wasn’t made to think of him twice a day like clockwork, a thumb pressed into a bruise again and again.

So that evening, he went to the seaside camp to fetch the Animagus phials— though it was no longer on the seaside.

He worried about that: the forest project, the camp. It was finished now, ready to show Remus—but showing it would feel a little like peeling back his ribs and showing his whole stupid heart. He’d poured so much of himself into it. Was it too intimate? Too much, too obvious? He didn’t want to push anymore, didn’t want to force open doors that Remus clearly wanted closed. If Remus had Hawk—brilliant, composed Hawk—then who was Sirius to try to compete? Who was he to try to elbow his way deeper into Remus’ life?

And yet. The forest was the perfect place for the transformation, if the ritual worked. He’d just have to play it casual. Maybe he’d say James, Peter, and Lily had helped. Maybe that would make it all seem a little less like a confession.

When Peter finally arrived, drenched already from the downpour outside, Sirius and James were buoyant. Peter looked drawn and tense, and when he saw Sirius’ nest of quilts on the pullout and his clothes thrown carelessly over a chair, he scowled deeply and snapped, “Don’t you have your own bloody flat, Black? Why are you always squatting here?”

Sirius, too enthusiastic to be goaded into an argument, just tackled Peter and wrestled him into a headlock, pulling him down onto the couch, laughing, “Why, you jealous? You can join me if you’d like a cuddle, you know!”

“Stop it, get off–” Peter shoved him, too hard to be playful, his expression as stormy as the sky outside. “I’m just saying it’s weird. You’re here about every night. Bit clingy, don’t you think?”

“Back off, Pete,” James said mildly, gathering the crystal phials into his bag along with towels, water bottles, his data pad, and inexplicably, three sandwiches.

“Yeah, Pete, back off,” Sirius echoed, less mild. “No reason to be scared, you know– we’re going to be fine! We’ll all be, I don’t know, zebras and bears and stuff in a few hours!”

“I’m not scared,” he grumbled, his scowl not fading at all.

They Apparated to Epping Forest, a once-grand woodland close to London that was now more public park surrounded by run down tenement buildings, half-swallowed by the city. They didn’t dare go out farther. They wouldn’t say it outloud, but they all wanted to be near enough to St. Mungo’s should anything go awry. Lily was on shift, ready to conduct a miracle should one of them end up disfigured. And besides, the storm was strongest over London.

By the time they arrived, the rain was coming down in sheets, straight and heavy as a wall. The forest was deserted. They double-checked anyway, warding the perimeter and setting up alarms. Sirius synced his wrist console with the wards, tapping his wand to the display.

They pressed deeper into the trees, hoods drawn tight. Lightning slashed the sky; thunder followed, deep and rolling. The world was silver and black and water.

Finally, beneath the thick boughs of an oak, James huddled them close.

“Alright, remember—“ he shouted over the heavy thrum of rain all around them, “Say the spell the same way one more time, then drink the potion. Heartbeats, then expect pain. Don’t be afraid, don’t fight it, just let it happen to you. Then turn back. You have to remember to turn back not long after, or it’ll get confusing and you might get stuck.”

He grinned at them, Quidditch captain to his bones, and held out a hand for a team cheer. They humored him, if only to chase off the last jitters.

Phials in hand, they all stood under the curtains of rain, pointing their wands at their hearts. Sirius said the spell and before he’d even finished, his heartbeat split to two, bounding together now, eager. He threw the phial back and lightning cracked above them, followed almost instantly by a rumble of thunder that felt like it might knock them over. 

Just as the animal started to coalesce in his mind, he heard Peter say something next to him. He looked over but his shape had gone blurry from the spell or the rain. He wasn’t sure which.

“Hey, what’s the transformation gonna do to your arm?”

He sounded distant and canned but Sirius heard him. Both heartbeats faltered with the sudden fear.

Would his metal arm be destroyed, like Remus’ cybernetics were whenever he transformed? He couldn’t lose it, he couldn’t let it be destroyed. He grasped at it with his other arm, gripped by panic, and thought he was doomed– hideous disfigurement, losing his mind, death.

Then the black dog appeared in his mind, whole and strong and perfect, one sturdy forepaw a moonlight silver. It wagged its tail languidly but kept its canines bared like it wanted to lay Sirius flat.

Of course. 

The fear vanished. The dog ran through a snow-frosted forest, pawstrikes nearly soundless, more vibration than noise. The rain-soaked park dissolved around him, the lightning and thunder, Peter and James, his own arms and feet—all gone.

Then his body melted, painfully. It was not gentle: candle wax or ice, slow and dripping. It was metal super-heated: magma spilling through his veins, the spark of a solder to his joints, softening bone and reshaping it, remaking it. He thought maybe he screamed but it was pure instinct to do so; the fear was gone. 

The pain didn’t last long. Intense and all-over, but then drained away. When it dissipated as quickly as it had come, he was the dog. 

His mind scrambled; thoughts came and went loosely, randomly, jostling around in his head.

The wind! The rain– so cold! A rat! A stag! 

He bounded up to the other animals, sniffing, tail wagging. The rat squealed when he shoved his snout at it and scampered away under a bush, but the stag sniffed back, huffing, pawing at the ground with its great hoof.

A flash of lightning and a long peal of thunder sent him into a frenzy, terrified and excited in equal measure, barking and jumping, nipping at the stag half in play, half in fight. 

They leapt and jostled and ran. The rat emerged and scampered up the stag’s leg, settling into the cup of a massive antler. The dog barked at it, taunting, and the stag tossed its head, flinging the rat into the air and catching it again. The rat’s squeaks shifted from terror to exhilaration.

Rain slicked his fur; he shook it out, ears flapping, then shook again just for the joy of it. He snapped at the falling drops, catching them midair. Beneath the sharp scent of rain and ozone, another smell drifted, enticing him. Snout raised to the sky, he started to track it.

The stag rounded on him, head down, and pushed him back. He growled, irritated, and tried to duck past, but the antlers hooked him and threw him toward the tree. Stomping its hoof, the stag corralled him, forcing him under the boughs.

The dog didn’t understand. He wanted to run, to leave, to follow the scent and keep going, going, going.

He snarled as the great stag shuddered and melted, leaving behind a man

The man said something to him, hands out, placating. The rain battered him, but his familiar scent was there, just barely detectable. A second shorter man stepped to stand next to the first, eyes wide, arms pulling his jacket tight around him. He said something too, panicked.

The dog raised his hackles.

“Sirius, you have to change back! Turn back!”

A voice he recognized. Dark hair plastered to his forehead, pleading.

He imagined himself as a man and his body melted.

When he received the message from James– Come by mine tonight, we need to talk to you– Remus assumed it was bad news. 

Someone was dead. The wedding was off. They’d found the spy and, actually, it was Moody. The Death Eaters had destroyed the werewolf camp, blasted the whole island off the map with some inconceivable new technology they had no hope of countering. 

Or it was fake and James and Lily were both dead and he was about to fall into the lowest-effort trap ever.

At the flat, he had his wand out when James opened the door. It spoke to the tenor of the times that James did not comment on this.

They exchanged the now-routine security questions and James ushered him into the living room, oddly formal. Remus could sense a nervous energy prickling the air. When he glanced around the room and saw the anxious faces of his friends seated and looking at him expectantly, he was sure it would be bad news.

“Is this an intervention?” he joked feebly. “Because if it’s about the werewolf thing, I promise, it’s not really in my control.”

Sirius barked out a laugh a little too loud, bouncing his leg like a jackhammer. Remus wanted to press a hand to his knee and still it.

“Don’t be mad,” James started, not promisingly.

“What did you do?”

“You know we’ve been concerned about how bad your transformations have been getting,” James continued, looking at Lily like she should pull out some medical charts to support his point.

Remus’s voice went flat. “You did it, then.”

“Sirius said one of the other werewolves believed it would make a difference. More gentle transformations could extend your lifespan significantly, spare you a lot of–”

“You idiots.” He sank onto the couch and covered his face with one hand.

“Look, we’re fine!” Sirius cut in, spreading his arms wide to show that he was not disfigured, perfect as always.

Lowering his hand, Remus sighed. “Well, go on then. Show me. You’re all clearly very excited.”

He didn’t know how to feel. A sick nausea was building in his stomach and he thought he might wretch. It was too much. They had done too much for him.

The three men exchanged a significant look. Peter and Sirius stood to join James and then all three of them melted away. 

It was impossible to understand at first, a bizarre trick on the eyes that he couldn’t quite parse. Men and then not, less a transformation and more a replacement. Where they had been: a great black dog, a stag with its antlers nearly skimming the ceiling, a rat quickly climbing the table leg to perch and peer at him, nose twitching.

Remus’ mouth fell open. The dog wagged his tail hopefully and lolled out his tongue in a canine grin. The tilt of its head was so unmistakably Sirius that Remus actually laughed — helpless, incredulous. One forepaw gleamed faintly silver.

The stag shimmered and straightened back into James, followed abruptly by Peter, who launched up from the floor like a tree growing in high-speed. The dog stayed a dog, watching Remus.

“Guess there’s no point in telling you to not do it now.”

He’d suspected, of course. They weren’t exactly subtle — whispered conversations that stopped the second he entered a room, sudden five-minute disappearances one by one at dinner, random inquiries about weather forecasts.

And he’d said nothing to them. The clench in his stomach felt like guilt; he had suspected and he’d said nothing, willfully letting himself miss the opportunity to stop them.

“So what, you’re all going to join me on full moons? What if I kill you? What if I bite one of you?”

His eyes landed on the great black dog. Sirius abruptly changed back, materializing before him. 

Apparently misinterpreting Remus’ expression, he said in a rush, “I don’t have to join. I know that this was all between you three, I’m not trying to butt in. I just wanted to help and–”

“You turn into a great bloody dog, Sirius. You joining is a bit fated, isn’t it?” 

Sirius’ smile was so heartbreakingly relieved that Remus’ stomach twisted again, the fear and the guilt now mixing with a little shame. Sirius really expected Remus would push him away.

“We’ll test it,” James said in response to Remus’ original very critical question. “See how you react to one of us, with safeguards in place in case it goes badly. Everything I’ve read suggests it’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, even a bite wouldn’t infect us if we’re animals!” Peter added, and even he seemed excited, like this was all figured out and settled.

Remus throat felt dry. He coughed, pressed a fist to his mouth. They had no idea what they were asking, what they were risking. They would see him. They’d see his transformation, see him out of his mind with werewolf rage and hunger and violence. Not human. A monster. A danger to them, inherently and out of control.

“Remus, you won’t live past fifty if you keep transforming like you are.” Sirius stepped to him and for a second, Remus thought he would touch him– hoped, maybe, that he would. But he stopped short, twisted his hands together like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“So I’ll have thirty more years,” Remus replied carefully, looking down at his own hands, clenched now in his lap. “Thirty years is a long time.”

Sirius’s mouth twitched into something between a smile and a wince. “Sure. Time moves very slowly when you’re lonely.”

Remus looked up sharply, but Sirius’s expression was unreadable — wistful, sad, pleading, all at once.

“Remus, let us do this for you. Let us try,” James said softly. His eyes had some of the stag in them, big and brown and innocent.

To Remus’ terse nod, all three of their faces split into nearly identical grins, triumphant. James let out an actual whoop and Sirius abruptly turned back into a dog and bounded up to Remus, pressing him deeper into the couch with heavy paws. He leapt off, frolicking, tail wagging furiously.

When Lily returned to the flat, Peter was sniffing along the kitchen counter, his rat nose twitching after some invisible crumb. James and Sirius wrestled in a complicated tumble of fur and tail and hoof and antler, threatening the furniture with their thrashing. Remus had already rescued several framed photographs and a lamp from certain destruction. 

“So I take it they told you,” she said dryly as she came up beside him. “It’s been about three days of this nonsense. I’m going to need to build a barn for them or something.”

“I can’t believe they really did it. Very illegal. Very stupid.”

Lily shrugged, smiling when James spotted her and disentangled himself from Sirius. He bounded over and pushed a cold nose into her palm before giving her hand a wet and enthusiastic lick.

She yelped. “Ugh—James!”

“The moon is in three days,” Remus said to the stag. “So you’re planning to squeeze into the basement with me? Don’t know if you’ll even fit, mate.”

Transformed back, James shook his head.

“No, actually—Sirius has a thing. We’re going to—”

“James,” Lily interrupted smoothly, raising a meaningful eyebrow. “Why don’t you let Sirius show him? He made it.”

She turned a bright, encouraging smile on Sirius, who had transformed back too and now sat cross-legged on the carpet looking distinctly rumpled.

He blushed red, to Remus’ immense surprise. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Sirius Black blush.

“Oh, yeah! Of course! You show him, mate. It’s your thing.”

“It’s not my thing,” Sirius muttered. “It’s just—an option.”

Remus folded his arms, curiosity piqued. “Go on, then. Show me.”

Looking oddly sheepish, Sirius got to his feet. His eyes fdarted between James, Peter, and Lily, as if begging for backup. Getting none, he sighed, shoved a hand deep into his pocket, and produced a small plastic baggie.

Remus squinted. “Is that drugs?”

“What? No! I mean—there were drugs in it before, but now it’s something else. Just needed something to carry it in.”

He gave the baggie an awkward shake.

“Alright,” Sirius continued, nervous now, “you keep it small, like this, see? So you can take it anywhere. Then, when you’re ready to go, you just put it down—”

He stepped closer, gesturing for Remus to hold out his hand. When Remus obliged, Sirius tipped the contents into his palm.

Remus frowned at the tiny, rectangular scrap of wood in his palm. “What is it? A bit of bark?”

“It’s a door,” Sirius said simply.

Before anyone could ask, he shoved the coffee table aside with Peter’s help, clearing a space.
“Go on—put it there.”

Remus, no clue where this was going, placed the speck of wood on the carpet and stepped back.

Sirius cleared his throat, visibly uncomfortable, like someone about to reveal their most embarrassing childhood photos before a public audience.

He flicked his wand.

The speck of wood enlarged into a shabby, weatherworn door, standing upright in the middle of the room. A door to nowhere. Remus recognized it instantly.

“How did you–”

“Just go in, Remus,” Lily said, still smiling that encouraging smile. Then, to the others, “I’ll start dinner, shall I? We’ll keep some warm for you two whenever you’re done.” 

And she put her hand on James’ back, forcibly guiding him out of the living room, Peter behind them, leaving them alone with whatever Sirius had made.

When he’d shown the forest and the camp to James, Peter, and Lily, the two men had bounded off, talking excitedly about how perfect it was, how easy transforming together would be with access to the room and the big, quiet stretch of woods deep in Poland. They raced through the meadow, shifting easily into their animal forms, frolicking immediately like they were born for it.

Lily, though, stayed behind.

She moved slowly around the little cabin, running her fingers along the wooden walls, peering closely at everything he’d placed on each self, smiling knowingly in a way that set his teeth on edge. She basically smirked as she picked up the french press set on the kitchen counter– an unnecessary touch, he now thought, absurdly domestic. He considered chucking it in a bin.

To the discordant sounds of James and Peter racing around through underbrush, Lily looked at him and said, very carefully, “This is really something special, Sirius.”

He tried for nonchalance. “Well, we needed a place, so–”

“It’s perfect. Remus is going to love it.”

He shrugged, said nothing, scowling like she was annoying him. Which she was.

Then Lily crossed the room in two strides and pulled him into a tight hug, her hair tickling his nose as she squeezed. 

“What are you–”

“It’s lovely,” she interrupted firmly, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “You really understand him.”

When she finally released him, he turned away abruptly under the pretense of straightening a chair, but really he was trying to hide the sudden heat– surely red and damning– that had rushed to his face. “It’s just practical. It’s for all of us,” he muttered feebly, but of course, he’d given himself away plainly.

It was all for Remus– every detail he’d added, every charm laid carefully, every convenience arranged stupidly, obviously, pointlessly for him.

With Lily’s tender eyes– Merlin, was she teary?– on his back, he dreaded showing this to Remus. It was too much. Way too much.

Chapter Text

The fire danced in the hearth, casting warm flickering shadows across the dark wooden walls and the rickety kitchen table. Sirius closed the door behind them with a soft click and they were transported in time, back to that seaside mission.

It was almost just as it had been then. Almost.

The bunk beds were gone, replaced by a single curtained bed, a makeshift four-poster straight out of Hogwarts. Remus caught a glimpse of the old quilt—pink and green patchwork, Mrs. Potter’s handiwork, the one James always let him use.

The kitchen counter, thick butcher block, shined with some orange-scented oil. By the sink sat a steel french press and a ceramic jug he was sure held coffee grounds. The dented tin kettle hung in its spot by the fireplace.

Sirius lingered by the door, shifting from foot to foot, hands shoved deep in his pockets, looking everywhere but at him.

Remus walked slowly around the room, peering at the shelves, opening cupboards.

On a shelf, a neat row of Sirius’ Muggle mystery books, arranged in a perfect rainbow. 

In the bathroom beside a ceramic tub, replacing the splintery wooden one Remus had complained about, a bottle of Galatea soap.

Tucked against a wall, a small metal desk lit by a lamp like Alice used in her lab; bright enough to work by. On the desk, Remus found a box of scrap collected in an untidy jumble, ready to be sorted.

In a corner, a wall console, at least three decades out of date.

“It doesn’t work,” Sirius blurted as Remus pressed the on button. “Found it at a Muggle thrift shop. Thought it looked right in here, like, I don’t know. Thematic. You can probably fix it and then you can, you know, watch stuff while you rest after the moon.”

Remus looked up. “So this is–” 

“It’s just a place for you to recover, so you don’t have to Apparate right away, puking all over yourself,” Sirius interrupted, voice gone a little haughty and defensive. “The rest of it is…” he gestured to the other door in the room. 

Remus crossed the room, brushing past Sirius, and opened it.

He stepped out into a flower-speckled meadow, the green-gold wash of it dazzling his eyes. The trees, just budding with their first spring leaves, stretched tall toward the clear blue sky and a chill hung in the air– fresh, invigorating– that had long fled London already, suggesting that this forest was somewhere further north. Across the meadow, he saw a massive log, moss covered, and beyond, more forest– endless forest, alive with sound: overlapping bird song, rustling of some small mammal rooting in the brush, the drone of a distant insect.

Wandering a few paces into the meadow, he felt sundrunk and disoriented. He pressed a hand to a mossy tree, the bounce and wetness of it pleasing. Crouching down, he dug his fingers into the soil, letting his glamour vanish, long claws curling into rich loam. 

He didn’t even notice that Sirius had stepped up behind him, wringing his hands together still and looking toward the sky.

“It’s warded all around, about ten square miles,” Sirius started, voice carefully professional, like he was presenting to a class. He still wouldn’t look at Remus. “Muffliato, of course, and anti-Muggle wards. Protego Totalum and Repello Inimicum and Fianto Duri for the borders, perimeter runes as backups. I put a detection spell around the outside, you remember the one that dings to the wrist console? Only this one will spot anyone even five miles outside the perimeter. Pain to set up, not very mobile– I showed it to Moody, he’s figuring out if we can use it for the Order. But here, at least, you’ll be able to know before the sun sets if anyone is even close by.” He was working up into a ramble, and Remus was inclined to let him, watching his face carefully.

“This area is unplottable, like the island– I just copied their spells, though that werewolf magic is something else; couldn’t get it perfect. I left the wards open for wildlife, though– squirrels and birds and things like that. I read it would be bad for the whats-it, the ecology, to just close the whole thing off and Hawk said you did sometimes hunt together at moons, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. Would feel a bit dead in here without all those little animals anyway. Magical creatures can’t get through, though. There are unicorns in this forest and I figured eating one would be… bad karma.” He laughed weakly. “But anyway, it’s safe. Totally safe. You can’t hurt anyone here. I’ll have to re-do the charms every once and awhile, but it’s not so hard. I can show you how.”

He finally fell silent. Somewhere above, a bird released a tittering trill that echoed thinly between the trees. 

Remus’ mind had gone blank, crystal clear and sharp: that suspended live-or-die feeling. 

Sirius watched him so warily, so cautiously. Remus wanted to hit him. He wanted to strike that look right off his face.

Instead, he stepped forward and cupped Sirius’s jaw in both hands. His thumbs brushed the edge of stubble as he leaned in and pressed his mouth softly to Sirius’ parted lips. 

Sirius made an odd startled sound—half gasp, half laugh—but then his fingers found the back of Remus’ shirt and clenched, pulling him closer. His mouth opened, uncertain but very willing, and his tongue met Remus’ in a slow, tentative sweep, heat blooming between them.

Remus tangled his hands in Sirius’ hair, as silken as he’d always imagined. He held them together, unwilling to let Sirius slip away, not wanting to see that wary look on his face again. 

They stayed like that beneath the trees, wound together, the world shrinking to fit just them.

Sirius gripped his lower back now, dragging them closer still. The scrape of stubble against his skin, the flutter of eyelashes against his cheek. He smelled him—floral and soapy, tinged with an edge of nervous sweat. 

He’d had dreams like this. He’d dreamed of it since he was a boy.

Sirius broke away with a gasp, like a man surfacing from under the sea. To Remus’ immediate horror, he looked stricken– panicked, frightened.

“We can’t–” he started, but Remus didn’t want to hear it. He couldn’t bear it.

“We can’t,” Remus echoed immediately, and he saw Sirius’ face shutter, the panic wrangled down, the vulnerability of just a moment ago tucked away somewhere.

“Yeah. We shouldn’t. It isn’t a good–”

“Right. We shouldn’t.”

He almost let it stand. He very nearly just left it at that: a kiss in the woods, a few spare moments together and then the tidy ending: we can’t, we shouldn’t.

But he remembered that same shuttered look from before, when Hawk had kissed him. He knew for certain now what it had been then– jealousy, shoved down and muzzled and locked behind a door. And he knew now what this was. 

The camp and the forest, perfect in every detail, threaded through with the intricate magic that could only be Sirius’ work. Sirius himself, nervous and frightened, so unlike the man everyone else saw.

“So then what is all this?” Remus finally asked, gesturing at the forest around them, the angry edge to his own voice surprising him. “If we can’t, and we shouldn’t?” He looked down at Sirius, grateful to be a little taller.

“What do you mean? It’s just a place for you to transform. For us to join you.” His voice wavered; even he didn’t believe himself.

“Are you fucking with me?”

“What? No! No, I’m not–” 

“So what do you mean then? That we can’t and we bloody shouldn’t?” Remus’ voice rose, ragged and fierce. “You did this — the most fucking romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me! And you’ve known me for what, a few months?”

His voice echoed through the trees now, too loud.

“You don’t owe me anything, Sirius. You didn’t have to do this– no one made you! No one made you touch me all the time or invite me to your bloody Christmas dinner or save my life or wait around at the hospital for me to wake up! You didn’t have to become a dog just to keep me company or hang around with werewolves or come down to my miserable fucking basement just to help me!” 

His voice cracked, but he pushed on. “So why, then, if we fucking can’t and we fucking shouldn’t, are you doing all that? If you really don’t want this–” and he gestured helplessly between them: you and me, the space between them. “It must be to fuck with me; that’s the only explanation. You can’t possibly be so oblivious. It’s funny for you. You’re playing with me.”

Remus never got so mad. He never let himself.

Sirius’ mouth gaped like he’d been punched in the gut. He searched Remus’ face, eyes darting, alight with frantic thought. 

“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” Sirius said finally, breathless. “I meant… it’s a bad idea.”

Remus turned to go, at a loss, but Sirius’ metal hand shot out, catching his wrist and pulling him back hard. Their chests collided, flush, and Sirius’ lips met Remus again, rougher this time, desperate.

When they broke apart, Sirius was grinning a little, a manic glint in his eye.

That manic energy effervesced off of Sirius. Sometimes it was hot oil spitting from a pan– volatile, blistering, seconds away from igniting. But right now it was champagne bubbles: light and easy and so delightful to drink in.

When Remus pushed him down on the bed, he’d grinned and said I had a dream like this once.

Tearing off Remus’ shirt, Sirius didn’t wait a second to press his tongue to the long line of scar running from collarbone to ribcage, sending an exquisite shiver all the way down Remus’ spine.

He caught Remus by the hips and dragged him close, tilting his face up to be kissed. Remus gladly obliged, met by teeth tugging at his lip.

Sirius’ metal arm glinted in the low firelight, the purple-black trace of runes like inverted stars. He pressed a silver thumb against Remus’ lower lip. Remus opened for him, tasting metal.

After, when the fire had guttered to nothing but embers, Remus traced a finger down Sirius’ pale back, feather-light. He hadn’t noticed the scars before—long, deliberate slashes that cut cleanly down the spine, from the nape of his neck to his lower back.

As he did this, Sirius let out a little groan– half pain, half pleasure. Remus knew the feeling: the strange shiver of numb scar tissue, a little uncomfortable, a little compelling.

“What are they from?” he asked quietly.

For a moment Sirius didn’t answer. He lay on his stomach, head buried in his folded arms, back rising and falling in shallow breaths. Maybe asleep. Maybe pretending to be.

Then, muffled, “My mother.”

Remus’ hand stilled but before he could say anything else, Sirius rolled onto his side and looked at Remus, that manic spark apparently not burned out yet.

“So,” he said, mouth twisting into a grin, “you and Hawk, then…” 

Remus rolled his eyes at both the question and the obvious change of topic. “Friends. Very good friends.”

“The best kind of friends, I bet.” 

“Something like that. Honestly, you seem a bit interested yourself. You sure you don’t wish it were him here instead of me?”

Sirius ignored this, rolling closer until his breath warmed Remus’ throat. His teeth grazed the skin there. “When you two got friendly,” he murmured, “did he do this?” 

He bit down lightly, then sucked at the spot. Remus yelped, shoving him off.

“I’m not talking to you about that,” he said, half laughing. “Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”

“Not jealous—just curious. What about this?”

He disappeared beneath the quilt. 

Remus yelped again, but this time, he didn’t stop him.

Lying in the dark-curtained bed, the fire finally dead and cold, Remus curled away from him, Sirius felt doomed.

His chest tightened, a rising tide of dread.

The crystal-ball vision was coming true.  He’d slept with Remus—twice now—and the countdown had begun. It was only a matter of time. Remus would find him too difficult, too strange, too dark. He’d see it—the neediness, the instability. Sirius would snap, say something cruel. Remus would recoil from his heat; Sirius was always too much. That gaze, sweet and hungry just an hour ago, would sour into disgust. He would pull away. He would leave.

Now, Sirius pressed his metal hand to his own bare chest, willing his breathing to calm down, worried about waking Remus. He thought about Remus running his finger along the scars on his back and wished he’d thought to hide them somehow– a glamour maybe. He’d forgotten they were even there for a moment. Stupid. 

Stupid, stupid.

Carefully, he maneuvered out of the bed, crawling over Remus, mindful not to stir him. He pulled the curtains closed behind him.

The cool spring night air woke him up fully when he stepped outside. He heaved in a long breath. The primeval forest hummed with nocturnal life—rustles, murmurs, the deep, resonant bellow that once puzzled him but now he knew: stags rutting in the dark. The sound made him smirk. He thought of James Potter showing off for Lily Evans at Hogwarts—a bellow for attention.

Above, the stars freckled the sky in astounding abundance. He couldn’t see much of them because of the crowding trees. It was too late at night to see his own star, anyway, Sirius thought, but Regulus would be visible somewhere. 

He sat down in the field amongst the white wood anemones that grew thickly along the forest floor, their soft petals closed now for the night. An owl hooted, distant and low, and he cocked his head, listening for its location.

The painful restriction in his chest, that cold fist of dread seizing around his heart, loosened a little in the cool night air. He tried to be reasonable. If he carried on like he always did, Remus would hate him soon. There was no long-term plan for them. Sirius thought of that you-me gesture Remus had made, a finger turned to himself and then a finger to Sirius. Like they could be a unit, like some shining gold string might hang between them, connected, singular, a “we”– but no. He couldn’t expect it; he couldn’t let himself hope for it. He didn’t deserve it. Remus would never want it, not really.

Deep in his gut, he wanted to seize Remus and drag them together, overlap them, blur them like watercolor paint bleeding across a page. But that was a scary feeling: scary for Sirius, scary for Remus. Pain came from closeness, he knew that. The closer you got, the worse it hurt. He felt like he was back on the cliffside at the werewolf island, clinging to the rocks, being torn away by the power of the sea for a moment, sent rolling in turbulent waters, and then smashed again to the stones, helpless with the thrill and terror of it.

He shifted into the dog. It was easier to be the dog; he liked it very much. His thoughts quieted. He heard the owl again and his ears perked to it: somewhere to the north. Owl noise. Something big rustling through the underbrush, slow and deliberate. Soft moss, nice to sniff into, moist and earthy. 

A door creaked and he whipped around, hackles raised. 

Remus. Tail wagging, he thought, Remus, Remus, Remus.

“So what do you think?” Remus asked, lowering himself to the forest floor, hand sinking into fur. “Should we just stay here?”

Sirius shifted back. Leaning on his elbows, he gazed up at the scatter of stars. The old day dream again: leave, never return, start over. This time, though, Remus at his side. 

“Think you could live off of bison?” he asked. “Between us, we could probably take one down. There are supposed to be a few left in this forest.”

Remus shook his head, smiling. “Probably shouldn’t. They’re endangered, I’m pretty sure. Let’s make sure they can’t get in here.”

“I’ll show you all the spells tomorrow. I bet we could connect them to a console with some of those runes so you could re-do them with a click. I wanted so badly to ask you to help with that; I can’t deal with all that Muggle nonsense. The door, too– getting the Patronus ward off it was a pain so I didn’t have time to add a different security measure. I don’t want it to just be hanging around out there while we’re running wild for anyone to–” 

Remus silenced him with a kiss. 

When he pulled away, Remus said, looking around at the shadowed trees above, “It’s incredible. I can’t believe I might get to transform here. I can’t even imagine it.”

Sirius said nothing, eyes fixed again to the sky. 

Though they crept back into James and Lily’s early, blue-dawn early, Lily was already up, drinking tea and nibbling a slice of toast.

Remus, that traitor, darted straight for the bathroom, leaving Sirius alone to endure her prying.

“So I take it he liked it?” she asked, that infuriating smirk on her face.

Sirius snatched the toast from her hand and took a bite, then handed it back.

“Loved it, I bet, considering that you’re–” She surveyed him from head to toe, “-- a little disheveled.” 

He sat down opposite her, lowered his chin to the table and then, conceding, pressed his forehead down. 

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he mumbled.

“Pardon?”

He straightened, rubbed his face. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. Just don’t. It’s nothing.”

He did not add: Don’t make a big deal out of it; I don’t want to scare him away.

He did not admit: I can’t afford to get my hopes up.

He might have confessed: He’ll hate me soon.

She looked at him over her cartoonishly large mug of tea, the side of it emblazoned with IT’S ALWAYS TEA O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.

“I won’t,” she said carefully. “Don’t hurt him, though. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s the last person who deserves it.”

Sirius looked at her and rolled his eyes. 

At his flat, on the day of the full moon, Remus didn’t know what to do with himself. He’d barely slept and was due at the lab in an hour but his brain felt sluggish, honey-dipped, too golden for work under fluorescent lights.

He splashed his face with water, got dressed.

He thought about Sirius. He thought about the little blur of a tattoo below his ear, right on the soft part just behind the angle of his jaw, still indecipherable. He imagined Sirius’ rib cage rising and falling below him in quick, sharp pants. His mouth, his hands. The quirk of an eyebrow, a twist of the lips.

Fuck, he thought, dragging his mind away,  I’m late.

At Alice’s lab, he wasn’t much better. 

As he squinted at a fine cybernetic through a loupe, his mind wandered to the line of dark hair trailing down Sirius’ abdomen. A finger hooking into a belt loop. His back against the door, hips pressing to hips.

“Ouch! Fuck!” He shook his hand out, sucked on the burn from the solder. He pushed his chair away from the workbench, willing himself to stop thinking about Sirius. Stop imagining him draped in flickering firelight or looking a little feral in his kitchen just that morning, shoving Remus against the fridge, sending magnets skittering across the floor.

To Lily, Sirius had said it’s nothing.

That made sense, Remus thought when he’d overheard it. Nothing, just sex. Not a big deal. Like with Hawk, it was just easy fun, nothing at all, really. Just friends who fucked.

But Lily had said don’t hurt him, like she could see that Remus was so hungry for love that he’d be easily hurt–effortlessly hurt–by someone like Sirius Black. Naive and lonely and lovelorn, prone to taking things too seriously and then getting hurt. 

She expected that Remus would throw himself at Sirius and Sirius would be confused, bemused, indifferent– it’s just a bit of fun, relax– and then Remus, of course, would be hurt. Very pathetic. Very sad werewolf.

So no, that wasn’t going to happen. 

In the clear light of day and the harsh glare of the lab’s fluorescent lights, Remus resolved that he would be cool and unfazed. No more raised-voice confessions, no fantasies of running off together. 

He hadn’t messaged Sirius for two days and Sirius didn’t message him either. Remus told himself he wasn’t waiting for him to; he didn’t expect anything.

Then that morning, the morning of the third day, the day of the full moon, his body ached, joints creaking like they were protesting what he was about to put them through. He considered calling Alice and telling her he couldn’t come in, that he was unwell; she’d understand. She knew the drill. But another part of him wanted the distraction. They were going to test the Animagus forms with the wolf that night and Remus was terrified. The fear snaked up, acidic, from his stomach and burned his throat.

He might have stayed in bed all day if he hadn’t heard some very insistent barking from the street outside his window. 

As soon as the front door opened, the great black dog slipped past him. He sat on the worn welcome mat, looking at Remus with a stillness that was very unlike Sirius.

Once the door closed again, he transformed back to a human and within an instant was pushing Remus back, shoving him against the door, mouth rough and harsh, hands locking around Remus’ wrists and holding them flat against the wall. Remus could smell a sharp undercurrent of aggression, of anger even, under the abject lust. This close to the moon, he thrilled to that aggression immediately, heady and powerful, making him dizzy with want.

He twisted, wrenched his wrists free and locked his own hands around Sirius’ shirt front, tearing it open, shoving him back and sending them stumbling through the tidy little flat, wrapped together, fumbling at one another’s clothes, wrangling for the upper hand. 

Afterwards, the flat was a wreck– furniture knocked asunder, a collection of cutlery and spice jars scattered to the floor from the kitchen counter, bed sheets tangled on the ground, clothes thrown to the far corners of various rooms. Sirius got up off the floor without a word.

Remus watched as he pulled on his clothes with great efficiency, clearly practiced at re-dressing in a hurry. He opened the front door, turned back into a dog, and with a dismissive flick of his tail, walked out, leaving Remus dazed and sore in the ruin of his flat.

“Alright, I got the curry you made, that soup he likes from the deli, a bunch of sandwiches, too—and my mum sent this tonic. Says it’ll do him good. Wonders for the nausea.”

James’ head popped up above the open fridge door. “Sirius, you sure this Muggle fridge works? Barely feels cold in here.”

From his sprawl across Remus’ bed in the camp, Sirius shrugged. Realizing James couldn’t see him—what with the curtains drawn and him half-buried in blankets—he added, “No idea. If not, Moony’ll fix it. Or just toss a cooling charm on and call it a day.”

James basically vibrated with nervous energy in anticipation of the full moon. He bustled around the little room, re-arranging things that did not need re-arranging and fretting over all the specifics of their plan.

“So if we’re in here and he’s out there as a wolf, it won’t be able to get through the door? You’re sure?”

“‘Course I’m sure. Give it a rest, mate, you’re giving me a migraine.”

“It’s just that if it doesn’t like you, we need to be ready to get you out, and I just want—“

“He’s going to like me. It’ll be fine. Relax. You’re going to freak him out if you don’t calm down.”

James at last sank into one of the rickety chairs.

At last, James sank into one of the rickety chairs, rubbing his palms together. “You looked at those pictures I sent? The werewolf attacks? What if Remus is… bigger than we expect? What if we can’t control him?”

“He won’t be,” Sirius snapped, irritated now. James was clearly afraid of the werewolf which seemed ridiculous to Sirius since he’d known Remus for half his life. Sirius had only been around for a few months and he wasn’t half so worked up. He wanted to tell James to shut up, but felt like maybe he should exercise some patience. It was important for them to be a team tonight.

Trying to put that patience to work, he said more gently, “We have a good plan. We’re being as safe as possible. It’s going to be ok.”

Sirius could still feel James’ nervous energy, but he didn’t say anymore—or bring up another round of gory werewolf attack photos. 

He had an impulse to dig in to James’ fear, his obvious discomfort with the whole werewolf thing. Sirius couldn’t help but notice that James always said “it” about the werewolf, as if it wouldn’t just be Remus in different skin. He seemed obviously discomfited with the whole thing, which again– absurd. He’d known Remus, been so close to him since he was eleven. “Time to get over it, mate!” He wanted to say, for Remus sake but also for his own– he didn’t want to hear it anymore. 

But he didn’t say anything; it seemed risky. Like if he pushed too hard, James would shut him out.

Sirius had been sleeping at James and Lily’s a lot. They hadn’t discussed it; Sirius just started sleeping on the pullout more often than not. The thing about James was that he made it easy. It never felt like he was doing Sirius a favor or like he was being imposed on in any way. Even Lily barely seemed to notice a change. She said goodnight to him with the same benevolent smile every night, like he was just their roommate, not a squatter who definitely had his own flat and really didn’t need to be there.

To make himself useful, Sirius cooked. He wasn’t allowed on missions—Moody’s orders—so instead he spent his evenings wandering Muggle grocery aisles, piling his cart high, and cooking elaborate dinners: chicken cacciatore, paella, curry, bouillabaisse, prime rib. Something to keep his hands busy.

Only Peter seemed irritated by the arrangement, huffing and glaring as more of Sirius’ things accumulated at the house. When he arrived at the camp, the door to which they had set up in James’ living room again, he threw his work bag to the ground and slumped into the kitchen chair, looking sour.

“So what, you’ve moved in with James now?” he sniped at Sirius. “Saw your stack of manky Muggle books in there. Need two flats to make a mess of?”

“So sorry that my presence is cutting into you valuable ass-kissing time with James; I’ll be sure to give you some privacy tomorrow,” Sirius sniped back, voice gone ice cold. He didn’t like the insinuations: clingy, encroaching, what-is-he-doing-here.

Peter flushed. “Pretty soon you’ll be all over Lupin’s too, I bet, though at least that would make some sense since you’re–”

“I’m what, Pete? What am I?” Sirius was on his feet, blankets thrown to the ground, voice low and dangerous.

They had not talked about what had very obviously happened the other night. 

It wasn’t that Sirius was trying to hide it or lie about it, but like he’d told Lily, he did not want to make it a big deal. Defining it, gossiping about it with Peter and James, felt like too much of a big deal.

He hadn’t even reached out to Remus for two days after. Of course, look what that had led to– barging into Remus’ house like a mad man and ravishing him on the floor, leaving without even saying a word. Not his proudest moment. Admittedly, that whole interaction would serve as fodder for many a wank for years to come, but still. It wasn’t great. Not exactly coming off as psychologically stable, he thought.

“Enough, both of you,” James cut in. “Remus’ll be here any second—”

And he was, the door swinging open to reveal Remus, looking very drawn and pale, moving with that careful stiffness Sirius knew meant his bones hurt in anticipation of the change. He imagined himself slamming Remus against the kitchen counter and cringed; he hadn’t been gentle at all.

The sun was sinking fast. James went over the plan one last time, voice clipped with nerves. Then it was time.

As Sirius and Remus stepped out into the twilight woods, the warm glow of the camp at their backs like a safe beacon through the open door, they didn’t speak.

Only once they had walked a ways out into the clearing, did Remus finally say, “I think I can move pretty fast, so just be ready to go back inside– don’t hesitate, alright? If it seems unsafe, just–”

“You sound like James. I’ve got this.” He didn’t mean to sound so dismissive, but it came out like that anyway– annoyed, haughty.

Remus leveled him with a glare. “I could kill you. I could turn you into a werewolf too. Don’t be such an idiot.”

Sirius just shrugged and watched in silence as Remus sat down on the mossy forest floor. He carefully unbuttoned his shirt, pulled off his boots. Then, looking back up and waving a hand toward the camp, “Well, go on then, over there by the door. And don’t look.”

He turned into the dog and trotted back to the door, sitting just outside of the circle of warm light pouring out into the forest. James and Peter crouched just inside, ready to transform or to slam the door closed. He couldn’t see Remus from here; he’d chosen a spot in the clearing that was just out of the line of sight, certainly intentionally.

As the woods around him thickened with shadows, the dog grew antsy. He sensed something wrong amongst the trees, something not natural shifting in the brush. He stood up, sniffed the air, paced in a quick circle, pawed at the ground, let out a low whimper growing into a growl at the back of his throat. He beat his tail against the ground nervously, waiting.

When the noises started– a choked hiss, groaning, something shifting and sliding, a hideous meaty sound– the dog lost what little restraint he had and broke for the clearing. Men shouted at him from somewhere, pleading and panicked, but he could no longer understand them.

He turned the corner and there he was, huddled on the ground: skin rippling, bones pressing against flesh like they were trying to escape, expanding and twisting. His head was already deformed and unrecognizable, skull shifting into the wrong shape. A half-scream, half-howl tore out of a jaw that had stretched too wide, had too many teeth. The noise echoed amongst the silent trees, sending birds to wing.

Even as a dog, with his simple dog-thoughts, Sirius knew agony when he saw it. 

Remus’ spine hunched and cracked, forcing him to hands and knees. His skin, so ghostly pale in the moonlight, bristled with new hair– dark, much darker than Sirius had ever imagined the wolf would be. Some shining mixture of slobber and blood dripped from his lips as jaws and teeth and skull settled into the snout. 

His claws elongated, greyish white, while his fingers curled in on themselves and scrambled at the dirt, looking for purchase to drag his mangled body up. A strangled scream cracked into a full, keening howl, head thrown back.

It was not a quick transformation; no easy melt into a new form, no trick of the eye almost too fast to parse. 

Sirius watched every bone crack and break and rearrange itself. He watched flesh split and knit back together, a step by step by step transformation from man into wolf, a slow-motion torture as a human body was torn to pieces and reformed as beast. The air smelled of blood and sweat and fear.

His instincts screamed to run, every nerve alight with the desire to bolt. Get away, run away. When the wolf’s yellow eyes, glinting in the darkness, locked on him, he knew it was not safe. He knew he was in danger.

But those yellow eyes were just amber gone pale; they were still so familiar.

The wolf prowled toward him, holding his body low to the ground, stalking. He lifted a lip in a growl to reveal rows of long teeth, fur along his back and shoulders raised on end. 

The dog’s hackles raised too, ready to fight for his life. 

But as the wolf neared him, snarling now, Sirius tried to focus. He fought down that animal-instinct, that fight-or-flight desperation to survive.

Remus, he thought. That’s Remus.

He lowered himself to his belly, licking his lips nervously. He gave his tail a slow wag. The wolf prowled closer, close enough that it could lunge now, could lock those long jaws around his throat.

Hello. Friends. Let’s be friends. 

Feeling like he was perhaps giving up his life, like he might be eaten alive in just a moment, he rolled onto his back, showing his belly. 

He let out a little whine– pleading, playful. 

Friends, friends, let’s be friends.

The wolf stepped to him and pressed a cold nose into his belly. He sniffed deeply, nudged, never quite silencing that low, guttural growl at the back of his throat. 

Then he stepped back and barked. To Sirius’ canine ears, it sounded like it could be, alright then.

Blinking into the pale dawn light, Remus found himself swiftly wrapped in a quilt with one firm motion—bundled, nearly swaddled. Around him, the excited voices of his friends rose, overlapping and far too loud.

“When we found that stream—”

“—you climbed to the top of that tree, you must’ve been able to see—”

“--could barely keep up with him, but then he wanted to play, didn’t he—”

“—the perimeter spell nearly singed my hair off. I think you can still see it—”

Remus let the sounds wash over him, closing his eyes. He felt the familiar hum of healing magic sweep over his body, though it didn’t last long. He wasn’t in too much pain—just the inevitable soreness from his body’s strain and an odd fatigue in his muscles, like after an intense workout. 

But, miraculously, nothing was broken. He didn’t even think he was bleeding much.

“Remus, can you get up?”

He opened his eyes to see James crouched beside him, his eyes sparkling with that telltale gleam—mischief, excitement, adventure. Remus had seen it a million times.

“Yeah, I think so,” he murmured, trying to sit up. A hand pushed him gently back down, pressing against his chest.

“Wait a sec. Let me finish with the scratches and clean off some of this dirt.” Sirius crouched at his feet, his wand working silently. “Alright, done.” He looked up at Remus, grinning with that same wild thrill of adventure—but there was something else there too. 

It was the same look Sirius had worn when gazing at the cybernetic fingertips or the arm with its glowing purple runes—reverent, as if seeing something that might save him.

Remus looked away.

Eventually, they made their way back through the quiet morning woods, birds singing all around as the sun filtered through the leaves. James slung an arm around Remus, chattering excitedly about the previous night—apparently, it had been a rousing success. 

After a few tense moments, the wolf had accepted them all. They’d been able to corral him, herding him along. They’d run and wrestled, explored the woods, with Sirius guiding them along the perimeter he had so carefully charmed to be impenetrable. They’d chased badgers and boars, released strange animal calls to the sky, and waded into streams to drink cold, fresh water under the full moon.

Remus could feel it. He didn’t remember, not really– not with any specificity or clarity. But he could feel the memory of that thrill in his muscles and bones, the adrenaline of it still draining from his brain. 

It had worked. He had not hurt them; he had not even hurt himself.

Now it was his turn to look reverently at his friends as they settled him in the soft bed back in the camp. James tucked the pink-and-green quilt around him, still grinning, looking windswept, like he’d just disembarked from a broom after a particularly gripping Quidditch match. Even Peter and Sirius, tense as they’d been with each other recently, were laughing now—Sirius jostling Peter’s shoulder, Peter blushing under the praise.

They’d left the door ajar and the woods beyond awakened into life under the first kiss of early morning light, sun streaming in and washing them all in gold. Awe bloomed in Remus’ chest as he settled in the warm embrace of the bed, the exhaustion of running wild all night finally dragging his eyelids down. His friends quieted, lowering their voices down to whispers, and he knew they were moving to leave. 

His friends who had risked their lives so he could be free.

Just as they approached the door back to James’ flat, Remus reached a hand out from under the blankets, claws unglamoured. 

“Stay, Sirius.”

He did. He didn’t even think twice about the look Peter and James exchanged as he moved instantly back to Remus, settling himself in the bed next to him as the flat door clicked closed behind them. 

“Get under here,” Remus mumbled, lifting the covers. 

Sliding under, he laughed, “Merlin, it’s a thousand degrees in here. What are you, a furnace?” But he didn’t mind; he was usually freezing so this was nice. It was very nice.

Remus rolled over and pressed his face to Sirius’ shoulder, nudging. He lifted his arm and wrapped it around Remus, pulling him close and letting the weight of the metal settle over him. Remus tucked down, under Sirius’ chin.

For a second, Sirius could nearly feel both of their defenses down: every wall lowered, every self-deception melted away, every doubt silenced. 

Sleepy and warm and worn out from the night, they lay there with both their hearts bared to each other, but they were too tired and too tongue-tied to say a word. 

But for a second, for a few minutes before he dozed off too, Sirius thought maybe this had never been too much to hope for.

When Remus woke up, he was alone in the curtained camp bed, the spot Sirius had been in still warm. 

He sat up abruptly, searching. The idea of Sirius leaving him alone, creeping out while he slept, felt intolerable. But he was just over at the kitchen counter, putting a kettle on. 

“Morning, mate. You nearly boiled me alive under there.” He’d taken his shirt off, coming back to the bed with two cups of tea in just his trousers.

“How long was I sleeping?”

“I don’t know, a few hours? I think it’s past noon, maybe. Should probably get a clock in here, though I do like not knowing.” He wasn’t even wearing his wrist console, which was usually as much a part of him as his shining metal arm.

They sat together, sipping tea for a while. Finally, after sorting through his vague memories of the previous night, Remus said, quiet and just a little accusing, “You looked.”

Sirius jumped at this like he’d been shocked, whipping his head to look at Remus. His face, which had looked almost happy a second ago, shuttered immediately, wary. 

“What was I supposed to do, keep my eyes closed all night?” Haughty, sharp.

“That’s not what I mean. You looked while I was transforming. I told you not to.”

Sirius seemed to struggle with something for a second, some impulse to say one thing or the other.

Then, like he could barely get it out, “Sorry.”

Remus waited for more.

“I didn’t really think about it. Dog and all– I don’t know,” Sirius shrugged. “I heard you groaning and screaming and all that. I just went.”

“Was it horrible?” 

He had never seen himself change, had never seen himself as a wolf. He’d seen the beginnings of other werewolves’ transformations but never his own. He couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t picture what that pain looked like laid out in physical form. It seemed impossible that someone could see it, whole and human and sober, and not be disgusted. He’d surely been disgusting.

“Yeah, it was horrible. I can’t believe you’ve done that how many times now? How many years has it been?”

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it was what he expected. Horrible, monstrous. But why was Sirius looking at him like that? Waiting for an answer?

“Uh, yeah. I was five.”

“So what, one hundred and eighty times now. Nearly two hundred times.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Remus stayed silent, took an awkward sip of his tea

Shaking his head in disbelief, Sirius finally said, “And this was a better moon for you. You barely broke anything this time. No bites. No scratches.” He looked at Remus then like he’d decided something; like there was no going back.

Then, because there was no secret Sirius didn’t want to root out, not one bit of information he didn’t want to taste on his tongue, he asked, “Where’d he bite you? Greyback, right?”

Before he could even decide to tell or not tell, his fingers drifted to the distorted bite mark on his hip. It was barely distinct now from all the others, just another stretched out bit of scar tissue criss-crossed by more of the same. But his fingers could always find it.

Sirius slipped his metal hand to the spot instantly, finding the raised tooth marks, ghosting lightly around the crescent of it. 

Remus snatched his wrist and yanked it away.

“We should go,” Remus said, suddenly feeling too hot, suffocated.

“Right, yeah.” Sirius sat up and abruptly smoothed his hair back like he’d been caught in disarray. “Let’s go.”