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Published : 2 years, 11 months ago (Fri, 06 Jan 2006 06:09:04 PST)
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RULED BY THE MOON
Chapter 6
Title: Ruled by the Moon
Author: Me, ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nellie_darlin
Disclaimer: Not mine. Jo's.
Pairing/Characters: Remus/Sirius (unrequited so far!)
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Everything! Tis Lupin's Life!
A/N: Many millions of thanks to lyras for the beta-ing, and her endless patience with my vacillating and sometimes shocking writing habits. Feedback is adored.
A/N 2: Props to Nancy Mitford for the title of this chapter. (Heartily recommended, by the by...)
Summary: Being an account of the life of Remus J Lupin, Esquire, from his first day at Hogwarts to his last on this earth. In many chapters. Also starring Sirius Black, James Potter, Peter Pettigrew, and the various inhabitants of Hogwarts and the wizarding world.
Teaser: Sirius Black liked things, or he disliked things. There was rarely a middle ground.
Chapter 6
Love in a Cold Climate
Sirius Black liked things, or he disliked things. There was rarely a middle ground. Aged eleven, he announced that he liked Potions, Charms, James Potter, and blowing things up. He disliked cabbage, Brussels sprouts, Severus Snape, and History of Magic. Aged thirteen he liked Quidditch, Potions, Charms, James Potter, and blowing things up. He also liked Transfiguration, winding up Professor McGonagall, and apple crumble with custard. He disliked rhubarb, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, Severus Snape, and History of Magic. He also disliked his brother, his cousin, and Slytherins in general. Aged fourteen, he added to his list of likes Ancient Runes (difficult enough to test him), Arithmancy (ditto), Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, cigarettes, and lurid crime novels. To “Dislikes” were added Wordsworth, Tennyson, Jane Austen (“too soppy”) and Care of Magical Creatures (“too dull”).
Aged fifteen, he added “girls” to both his lists, a development that slightly bemused the Marauders. By Christmas of Fifth Year, Sirius had gone out with twenty different girls. Only Remus understood that Sirius was not a flighty, heartless womaniser, but a confused, uncertain teenage boy who praised beauty above character or personality and then wondered why each relationship was so unsatisfying. Each time, he would vow not to make the same mistake again, but of course he did. Seduced by breasts or eyes or hair or voice, Sirius would pursue, win, then despise.
“Why?” he wondered aloud, one rainy afternoon in November.
“Why what?” James asked, now used to the abrupt way that Sirius began and finished sentences. “Check.”
“Why do I do it? Why can’t I find a girl who actually interests me?”
“Because you think with your cock, not your brain?”
“Thanks, Pete,” Sirius said scathingly. “And when was the last time you used your cock?”
Peter blushed but jutted out his chin. “Last weekend, actually, Sirius.”
Sirius flung himself into an armchair, a figure of anguished melodrama. “Like hell you did. Who was the date with, your right hand?”
“Jane Gould.”
“Fuck off,” Sirius said, disbelieving.
“He’s right, as it happens,” Remus said, not looking up from his book. “Petey got jerked off last weekend by Jane Gould.” Remus secretly loved saying things like “jerked off”, drawling them in his husky voice and making Sirius go pink and amusingly confused.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“Hestia told me.”
“Hestia?”
“Hestia Jones,” James said. “Check, Pete. She’s friends with Jane. Oh come on, Sirius, you know her. Curly black hair, clever, Ravenclaw -”
“He won’t know her, James,” Remus said. “He doesn’t go for clever girls.” A shocked silence. Remus averted his eyes, fuming internally. Again, for what was certainly the hundredth time this term, a response that started as a joke in his head was curdled by his tongue into a cutting, irritable put-down. What was wrong with him?
All three of them looked at Remus, surprised. Remus was never cruel like that; Remus was the quiet one who offered support and the occasional sardonic retort, but he was never deliberately hurtful.
“What’s wrong with you, Moony?” Sirius snapped.
“I don’t know.” Remus honestly didn’t. All he knew was that he felt … grotty. Discombobulated. He felt as if he’d gone a bit mouldy inside. The impatient, slightly hurt way that Sirius was looking at him didn’t help. He thought he could feel a headache coming on. “I’m going to bed,” he announced.
Upstairs, he opened the window to get some air to clear his head. Leaning his head against the iron casement, relishing the streak of cold against his cheek, he tried to work out what was wrong with him.
It had all started at the beginning of Fifth Year, he decided. Sirius had finally grown into his looks, and was even more attractive now than he had been when Remus first met him. He carried himself with an easy, loping grace, a sexy loucheness that effortlessly drew the attention of most of the girls in the school. His hair was always carefully tousled, his eyes deep and warm, his smile a self-possessed, achingly sexy grin that set up a current between your eyes and your groin. The stupid thing was, Sirius didn’t really think about his looks. He had revealed, in one of their midnight heart-to-hearts, that a lot of the time he wished he were less good-looking. He felt he was judged on his appearance and not on his character; that people were too quick to dismiss him as arrogant and vain.
But you are arrogant and vain, Remus had said, affectionately.
I know, Sirius had whispered with that disarming grin. But that’s not all I am.
Remus disliked the girls Sirius went out with. It sometimes scared him, how violently he despised some of them. Arianna Goldsmith, for example, a dark-haired beauty with impossibly pert breasts and soulful dark eyes – Remus dismissed her as a cruel, petty bimbo. It was no satisfaction to Remus that he was proved right about her. He just wished Sirius would stop making a fool of himself.
Why don’t you like her? Sirius asked each time, wearing the expression that reminded Remus only of a kicked puppy.
And each time, Remus would try to explain, while the small niggly voice in the back of his head whispered, You’re just jealous.
The weeks passed. The girls came and went. Remus felt sourer and sourer, and hated it. There were times when he even hated Sirius, hated him for his looks and his charm and his effortless cool, and for making Remus feel inadequate. He sometimes felt like Sirius’s shadow, a paler, colder imitation of his friend. Remus, with his books and his soft jumpers and the twist of unhappiness that still lingered around his mouth and eyes. Remus with his two secrets to hide, the secrets that set him apart and taught him to be evasive, and the third secret that he knew, deep down, but was refusing to admit, even to himself.
He was getting chilly now. The night was damp and misty, the clouds patchy, the moon a niggling crescent just touching the mountain away to Remus’s left. Distantly, the noise of the common room – laughter and chatter – drifted up the stairs. A swirl of mist teased against the window pane, then dissipated in the warmer air of the dorm. But Remus couldn’t bring himself to move. He liked the cold, liked the crick in his neck and the dampness of his jumper and the numbness of his fingers, because these all could be cured. He could close the window and stretch his muscles and change his jumper, and the problem would be gone. And when he was cold, that meant a part of his mind that would be obsessed with finding warmth and comfort, and that was one less part of his mind that was obsessed with Sirius Black and his bloody harem.
He felt unbelievably weary. The tension of hiding, of denying, of persuading, was taking its toll. Sometimes it made him shake all over, with the effort of holding himself still and composed. Pressure like that had to go somewhere. At the moment, it was escaping him in snide, cruel comments that felt incredibly satisfying for half a second, before he saw the wounded look in Sirius’s eyes, before he saw the way Peter crumpled, the way James blinked behind his glasses. There was a moment of release, and then a wash of bitterness and self-loathing.
He was run ragged with the effort of continuing his pretence.
~*~
A little while later, there were footsteps on the stairs, and Sirius’s voice said, “Remus?” Remus didn’t turn round, but stared fixedly out into the night. He didn’t want the Remus-and-Sirius Show tonight. He couldn’t bear it anymore, the desperate pretence that things hadn’t been different between them this term, that there hadn’t been an awkward undercurrent of resentments and unsaid, unsayable things. When Sirius joined him on the window-sill, however, the atmosphere was different, softer, more flexible. Remus felt a little of his sourness fade away, although the prickle of irritability still lurked in his temples.
“I’m sorry, Sirius,” Remus said, after a minute or two of edgy silence. “I shouldn’t have said that about you.”
“Yes, you should,” Sirius replied. Remus looked around, startled. “You were – are – right.” There was an odd expression on Sirius’s face, a mixture of wry amusement, affection, and uncertainty.
“Sirius -” Remus began, but Sirius shushed him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s all over now.”
Remus met his level gaze, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The air seemed too thin, despite the chilly breeze coming through the window. He definitely had a headache coming on – he could feel the pressure behind his eyes. And maybe it was the flu, too – he was shivering. Shouldn’t have sat by the window so long.
Sirius leant forward. “Don’t frown, Moony,” he said, and gently touched the pad of his thumb to Remus’s forehead, smoothing away the lines there. Remus felt the breath catch in his throat. He hated it when Sirius looked at him like that, soft and intense and sweetly, seductively intimate, because it set up that old pull in his stomach and chest, a line connected to the corners of Sirius’s mouth that tugged when Sirius smiled. He was forced to duck his head at times like this, afraid that his needs would float to the surface, past the barriers and checks, and show naked and incriminating on his face. “I wish you’d smile more,” Sirius said, slightly wistfully, and Remus shivered again. At times like this, he hated himself, knowing that if Sirius knew what he was, knew what he thought about late at night, he would hate him. Despise him. Certainly not make personal remarks like that, or smooth away his frown. He didn’t hate you when he found out you were a werewolf, a small voice told him, but he ignored it. To Sirius, Remus was as straight as he himself was, and while he believed that, he felt comfortable with this level of intimacy. Remus hated the deception, hated having to lie again, but he took a guilty pleasure in the way Sirius touched him, nuzzled against him, wrapped him in effusive bear hugs and then tickled him until he was gasping and writhing.
“I do smile,” Remus protested, but quietly.
“I know you do. It’s your little defence mechanism, that polite, vacant smile with the slightly raised eyebrows. The one that says, ‘Oh? Really? You think that?’” Remus had to laugh at Sirius’s exaggerated impression of him, and Sirius clapped his hands. “There!” he said, triumphantly. “That’s what you haven’t been doing. You smile the whole fucking time but not once in the last few months have you actually meant it.”
Remus was trying to think of something to say in response to this startling comment, when James and Peter came bickering into the room.
“You’re not still wittering on about that smile, are you, Sirius?” James said wearily, kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie. “Holy mother of Merlin, it’s freezing in here. I think my bits have shrivelled up, it's so cold.”
“As if you had any to begin with,” Sirius muttered darkly, flinging himself onto his bed.
“You’re just jealous,” James retorted. “Oh, shut the window, for fuck’s sake.”
Remus obeyed, but stayed on the windowsill. “What do you mean, James?” he asked, wincing as he caught his finger in the window.
James blinked at him. “I just asked you to close the window. There’s no occult second meaning there.”
“No, I mean the wittering thing.”
James paused in the act of taking his trousers off. If Remus hadn’t been feeling so odd, he would have found the sight comical. “That wasn’t particularly significant either,” he said, his eyes flicking over to Sirius.
“Well, if he won’t tell you, I will,” Peter remarked. “You’ve been going around with a face like a wet weekend for months. Sirius has been worrying about it. Getting rather boring, actually.”
For the first time since Remus had known him, Sirius actually blushed. “Shut up, Peter,” he growled, and retreated behind his bed hangings.
“I was just saying,” Peter said.
“Yeah, well, don’t,” James told him. “Night all.”
~*~
The dorm was in darkness. James was snoring heartily, Peter snuffling and squirming. Far away, the clock was striking one. Remus was awoken by a lithe shadow slipping through the hangings and climbing onto his bed.
“Remus!” Sirius whispered. “Remus!”
“Wha’?”
“Wake up!”
Remus struggled into a sitting position and blinked a few times. “This had better be important, Black,” he warned.
“Oh, it is,” Sirius replied earnestly.
“Go on, then.”
“Erm – it’s kind of chilly. Can I get in?”
Suddenly Remus was wide awake. “Uh – OK,” he heard himself say, and mentally kicked himself. Sirius Black? In his bed? At night? Was he mad?
“Good-oh. It’s fucking freezing. Budge up, budge up.”
And Remus found himself shifting along and making space. “Fuck, your feet are like ice!”
Sirius laughed. “I love it when you swear,” he said, and the warmth in his voice made Remus feel slightly dizzy, as if he were standing at the top of a cliff. Nice as it was to have Sirius in his bed, he was starting to wonder if it had been such a good idea. After all, he looked a bit like Oliver (except with black hair, not blond), and his body seemed to be getting confused.
“So,” Remus began, and it came out much too high. He coughed, and said, in the proper register, “So, what’s wrong?”
Sirius was silent for a moment. “It was me, wasn’t it?” he said, abruptly.
“What was?”
“Why you’ve been unhappy.”
“Yes.” In the dark, it was easier to be truthful, even to oneself. “Yes, it was. Or at least, that was part of it.”
“Oh.” Another silence, even longer than the first, while Sirius mulled over Remus’s answer. “What was the rest of it?”
“Oh, lots of things. Being a prefect, for one. I mean, I’m terrible at it.”
“Are you?”
“You know I am, Sirius. You were there the other day, when Abelard Finch told me to fuck off. So much for authority.”
Sirius put a hand comfortingly on Remus’s arm. “He’s a tit, Remus. Everyone else likes you. You can do this amazing thing which is even better than shouting, the whole ‘I’m really disappointed in you’ look that makes you go all cringy inside.”
“Rubbish,” Remus replied, but secretly he was pleased. Very pleased.
“Not rubbish at all, my friend. Lily may scare the bollocks off everyone, but people do what you say because they like you, and that’s a whole lot better.”
“Well, there’s the rub. Not many people like me.”
“We do,” Sirius protested.
“Sirius, you do realise that people are separate entities? That not everyone thinks the way you do?”
“Don’t get sarcastic, Moony. I’m trying to help you, and you just sarcasticise.”
“I what?”
“Sarcasticise. The verb of sarcastic, stupid.”
Remus laughed, and he wondered why he hadn’t done this in a while, wondered how he hadn’t gone mad, missing the intimacy and the laughter and the safety that was his friendship with Sirius. And then he realised that he had. That sour, cruel Remus was not the real Remus, but a shrivelled, envious shadow. He needed Sirius there, to make him laugh, to bring him out of his shell. Sirius had done that from the first day of Hogwarts, like a bright sun nurturing a flower, and Remus knew he would never stop needing that sunshine. Part of him was worried that he allowed another person to rule him so completely, but then the rest of him said, I am ruled by the moon. Why not by a star as well? And the little voice at the back of his mind said, Poetry, Lupin? How sweet.
Sirius was tracing designs on Remus’s arm. Relaxing under the soft swirl of his fingertips, stretching out liked a petted cat, Remus was suffused with relief and happiness that everything was back to normal. He loved these rare intimate chats, because he could stop lying. The darkness made everything easier to say. Not absolutely everything, of course, but most things. He often marvelled at how comfortable he felt with Sirius, at the easy way their limbs fitted together, the way their minds worked in a complementary interweaving that was deeply fulfilling. Sirius knew him, better than anyone, better even than his parents. With Sirius, Remus didn’t need to explain everything, didn’t need to articulate everything. Sirius understood, somehow.
“So, how can I make you smile again?” Sirius asked, and his hand moved up Remus’s neck to his mouth, and to the corners of his eyes which crinkled when he laughed.
“Be the real Sirius,” Remus heard himself saying, soft and low and heartfelt. “Don’t get hard and cynical. Don’t be cold. You’re so warm, Sirius, so generous. This arrogant, careless, fickle person – this isn’t you.”
“But maybe it is. Maybe that is what I am.”
“It’s not. I know it’s not.” Then, in a whisper, “It can’t be.”
“Then it won’t be,” said Sirius impetuously, and Remus could hear the smile in his voice. “Anything for you, Moony.”
“One other thing,” Remus added, to distract himself from Sirius’s hand in his hair and the choir of angels that was inexplicably singing in his chest.
“Anything. You know that.”
“Forget those girls.”
“What, be gay?”
Yes!
“No. Let me finish. Forget those girls who are silly and giggle and are dull and petty and jealous. Go out with someone who deserves you. Someone who can actually think, can actually have a conversation.”
Silence, long and heavy and terrifying. Then, tentatively, humbly, “I quite like Cleo Emmett, actually. Do you know her?”
Remus did know her, and he actually quite liked her. She was in their Arithmancy class, a lively Gryffindor girl with wavy brown hair and freckles on her nose. She was intelligent, interesting, and confident, and as far as Remus knew, she didn’t giggle. She would be good for Sirius. She wouldn’t let him get arrogant, and wouldn’t stroke his ego the way the other girls had done. Remus smiled to himself.
“I think she’s perfect.”
Prologue | one | two | three | four | five | six |
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