Cycle Of Time
by Am-Chau Yarkona (amchau@popullus.net)
Sirius/Remus

The days are grey and dull, but the nights spin with flashing visions. While the sun is in the sky—lurking behind clouds as January drags itself along—Sirius cleans and tidies and scrubs away as many memories as possible from the house, trying to replace them as he does so with himself and Remus and their new reality.

When true darkness comes, the ghosts he has failed to exorcise begin to dance over his sleeping eyes.

A kiss, they call it, with careful sanitization. The black rags shrouding unnatural shapes swirl above him; despairing ice begins to crack his bones. He feels himself straining upwards, back arching in agony, le grand mort  close as always to le petit mort. The times of happiness are long past.  

Even those moments of pleasure he has had in the last few hours—Remus' arms around him—are gone now, and all that remains are the mockeries—Remus' fingers turning to claws on his back.

His mouth opens. His dream-mind lets his soul pour out through his lips, and Sirius screams.

Clever long fingers grasp his shoulders, friendly hands are shaking him awake.

"You were dreaming again," Remus says, smiling, soft, blue eyes pools of midnight in the candle-flickers.

Sirius nods against the pillow, feeling the scratch of clean linen. "I was. Thanks for waking me."

"Want to tell me about it?"

"Never," Sirius swears, determined that, though everyone will suffer in this war, Remus will not suffer any more than he must. He lets Remus hold him close and rest a stubbly chin on his shoulder, and does not mention that he hasn't slept when Remus wakes again to a flat dawn light and Sirius' grey eyes watching his every breath.

* * *

For once, Remus has no errands to run, no excuse to prove his freedom, and so, by some miracle, he stays. Sirius finds himself unwilling to leave his company, ready to do anything—spray Doxycide, reshelve books, take a knife to unwanted paintings—so long as Remus is in the same room.

He does little work while Remus' back is turned.

Instead, he takes notes, trying to store up twelve years' worth of memories in a day. He memorises the way Remus' hair now hangs, a little shorter than it used to be. Greyer. Perhaps it's the light, but Sirius thinks it used to have a few blonde streaks. He thinks that in the old days Remus didn't seem exhausted every day, didn't look like every second ground him a little further down, but maybe he's misremembering.

So much of the happy time has gone, he might be imagining that it was happier than it actually was.

The grass is far below him now, the rest of the team swirling in the air between. He loves the patterns they make, swatches of red and gold touched to brilliance by the setting sun. 

Time for one last dive.

He climbs a little higher, slowly, not ready for it to end.

A whistle blows.

The handle of the broom angles down before he's even thought about it; he pushes it a little further and leans forward, face into the wind until it stings his eyes, mouth open to take great gulps of the cooling evening air.

The team have scattered, at the edges, watching their crazy, risk-taking mate show what he can do.

It's coming… fifty feet… thirty feet… twenty feet….

Exhilarated, Sirius screams.

He's landed on Remus, panting, the darkness a shock after the red-gold sunlight of the dream.

"It's all right," Remus says, and Sirius has a bizarre feeling that he should be saying that to Remus. "Just a dream."

"Yes," Sirius agrees, "just a dream."

He almost wishes Remus would ask what it was about, because he might be able to tell him.

He definitely wishes he could ride a broomstick now. The flights on Buckbeak, while they lasted, where nice but not the same, and now he's trapped in his hated childhood house, with only dreams as his escape.

* * *

Remus makes tea by the Muggle method, with almost belligerent concentration. In one way, it's annoying, because it takes more time and sets the Screaming Mother Portrait, as Sirius has come to think of it, to yelling obscenities again.

Now he comes to think of it, though, the latter is really a good thing, since he's always enjoying upsetting his mother; add to that a prime moment for watching Moony move, and really the habit seems adorable.

There are two of them, so he makes it in the pot—a chipped china thing Molly gave them, because the only tea service the Blacks had owned was silver, and had poured other less savoury things more often than Sirius liked. Sirius knows that if Remus was alone, he'd cheat and use a teabag, because he found a box carefully hidden at the back of the store-cupboard and there can be nobody else who would consider such a thing.

Remus places the pot carefully on the counter, fills the kettle and checks the fire in the top of the stove. Then there is a moment of waiting, so he turns to look at Sirius, sitting the other side of the kitchen table; Sirius, who has been staring, ducks his head for a moment because to stare at a Dementor is to invite further punishment.

Then he remembers where he is, and looks up again. Remus is smiling at him.

Sirius is about to smile back when the kettle whistles and Remus returns to his work.

He warms the pot with a splash of water, tipped down the sink. Next, he measures out two teaspoons full of leaves—the spoon is stainless steel, from Remus' own flat—and then, with a quicker move, adds "one for the pot". He says as much aloud, as if explaining the apparent wastage.

"Mmm," Sirius agrees, more preoccupied with the way Remus' fingers are carefully wrapped around the spoon handle.

He lays the spoon down with a clink, snatching up the cloth pot holder in one dexterous hand to pour almost-boiling water into the teapot. Sirius wonders when he became so practiced at this, so skilful, and imagines with a pang of sorrow that he must have missed many pots of tea.

Minutes later, his own hands are curled around a warm cup. He stirs three spoons of sugar in, mainly because that annoyed his mother, too.

"You're turning into a right little vagabond, Sirius Canicula Black," his mother spits. "If you won't let Kreacher in there, you can sort your own room out this instant, or your father will deal with you when he gets home."

That means curses, spat across the dinner table, when he can't run or hide. Probably  in front of Regulus, who is bound to laugh.

Sirius slams the door when his mother is safely along the corridor, then turns to his room. In a fit of temper—he didn't want to study, he wanted to be outside this summer's day, or better still in September already, back at Hogwarts with his friends—he'd thrown the books, the parchments, even his quills and ink over the floor.

He looks longingly at his wand, but he knows that would get him into even more trouble.

Sighing, he begins to pick things up. He stacks them on the desk in a disorderly heap, thinking of James, who would have distracted him and calmed him before he got so angry, or quiet Remus, who would at the very least have helped him sort them out, or even Peter, who could probably have been persuaded to do the picking up for him in return for a little attention from a ringleader.

He hates it here. He wants to be with his friends.

Sirius is tempted to scream, but with his mother in the house and his father due home soon, he has to settle for silent scalding tears.

"I wish you’d tell me," Remus says, touching and stroking and soothing in the unleavened blackness, "what you dream about."

Sirius kisses him, more urgently than he's dared before, so glad to be back with what remains of his tattered friendship group that he can't help himself.

"Bad," he says in the end, when the kiss is over and Remus' forehead is resting on his. "Bad things. You don't need to know."

Remus' hand is tangled in his hair, and Sirius leans back into it.

"Is there anything else I can do?" Remus asks.

"This is enough," Sirius says, and when Remus' lips drop back to his he can feel the smile.

* * *

Molly brings them breakfast the next morning, Flooing in laden with sausages and beans and suchlike goodies. She sits them at the table—their sleep disturbed, they'd been lying in, snuggled under their blankets like a pile of puppies—and chatters gaily as Remus yawns and Sirius scowls.

"Don't mind him, early mornings have never been his strength," Remus tells Molly, his voice mercifully quiet after Molly's, which has begun to grate on Sirius' ears. In the morning, things start to grate rather easily.

She feeds them, watching them eat and swapping news, apparently eager to hear about how the cleaning is going, now they've reached the outer edges of the house.

Sirius clears his plate without speaking, habit begun as a child and rubbed into his skin along with the grey grit of Azkaban, while Remus picks at his food and talks to Molly about the technicalities of getting some kind of maggot egg out of floorboards.

Molly doesn't let him go easily, though, answering his questions with patience and a watchful eye that never relents, making sure he eats every last bite. Sirius is glad someone knows how to take care of Remus. He's tried, once or twice, to feed him up, but feeding Remus usually ends in something else entirely.

Not unpleasant, far from it, but not effective either.

And while Molly is there he can watch Remus undisturbed, his latest hobby.

When they finally run out of house keeping details, and Remus runs out of sausage, Molly finally turns to Sirius.

"You look happier these days," she says, and Sirius has to agree.

In these days, he is happy.

He was happy before, and he knows it, but the exact details drift just out of reach. As the Dementor hovering behind the iron door flapped in some unfelt breeze, so the memories seemed to be there, invisible and frustratingly close.

He is hungry. Changing into his dog-form doesn't reduce the hunger; he has learned that trying to chew on a Dementor is a bad plan, and they have a rudimentary kind of magic-- intended to hold a prisioner in his place-- that can prevent him changing form when it's trained on him.

Tail between his legs, he huddles in the centre of the cell because the chill air is still warmer than the stone walls.

At least there are no books to pick up, no chores to be done, but for the first time in his life he would be glad for something to do. Home is a depressing enough thought that he has been allowed to keep it. He clings to it, hoping that his misery will be enough to convince the ghastly creature outside the door that he is not good to feed on.

The Dementor exhales, a gust of wind through the bars sliding slimily across his sensitive skin, and then moves on.

Dementors can fly.

He's heard a rumour that the prisoners whose souls are sucked out become Dementors themselves, and he thinks that would be a welcome escape. At least he would be free of walls once more.

They are deaf and blind, so Sirius lets himself scream his anguish at the unrelenting stones.

This time he sits up so fast Remus cannot follow him.

"Sirius? It's a dream."

"I know," Sirius says, and is shocked to find that his voice is hoarse again. "I know, Remus, I know, I know." The words are to comfort, though he isn't sure who they are for.

"Come here," Remus says, and eases him down into a tangle of limbs and bed-sheets. "Let's sleep a little while longer."

He agrees, and Remus sleeps.

Sirius lights a candle and watches his face, the flickers of smiles and ghosts that cross it as he dreams, aware that time has passed and they no longer have the world to waste.

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