Remus sighed as the summer heat brushed against his skin, the morning sunlight slipping into the room. He let his hand wander out to where Regulus was supposed to be in bed beside him, brows knitting together in confusion when the other wasn't.
The four Hogwarts students had come to the cottage after graduation, leaving the homes that they had never wanted, but retaining contact with those within them. It had only been a week or two, but Remus thought that he could live the contestant noise, the life that the other four brought. He'd never say it out loud to anyone other than maybe Dora, but having the others living with him, in the rooms that they had designed just the summer before, made it all feel like home in a way that nothing truly had before, like a piece clicking into place on a puzzle that he hadn't known existed.
Remus didn't think much of the absence of the other teen, it was often enough that he would wake up alone, or with only the tapping of Regulus's owl at the window for company. Some mornings when the other woke before him, Regulus would go down to the lab to make sure that Dora had made it to bed at all the night before, more often than not being roped into helping with one of her experiments and failing at his objective along the way.
But most times that this occurred, both Evan and Barty were gone as well, not coming back until late in the morning, skin smelling of dark magic. On days like that, he and Pandora only sat together in the garden and waited, the herbs around Remus growing quickly as anxious filled magic rippled off of the wolf in waves until the other three came back.
He couldn't do that today though.
Ever since coming back from Greyback's pack, the other Marauders had made an effort at reconnecting with Remus. The four would meet at pubs and one another's houses outside of Order meetings every now and then, but mostly wrote to one another about simple things that could be shared without having to worry about the consequences of mail being intercepted. There was no talking of pranks or cramming for tests, and yet it somehow had begun to feel like the early days of their friendship when Remus was still an unlikely addition that they didn't quite know what to do with.
Today was one of the rare days that the four met one another at the flat that James and Sirius shared with one another in muggle London, just like Padfoot had always wanted.
On simple days like these, Remus found that it was easy to be happy for the others for getting the things that they wanted. Easier still when Dora smiled at him on the way out the door, a chipped mug in her hands, as Barty flipped through the records that the five of them had collected, Evan watching the other former Slytherin fondly from the kitchen as golden light filled the room.
It was easy to not be so cold when he had everything that he had wanted as well, even if it wasn't with the people that he'd thought that he would find it.
(Something prickled at the back of the former Gryffindor's mind, a whisper of things that he had forgotten, but couldn't for the life of him remember. Promises of wrongness seeping in through the contentment, but the teen only pushed it aside. The whispers had been there since that day at the Potter's home, his actions always looming over him and haunting him at night. He didn't want to admit that this was different though. That it was something just out of reach, like a willow - o - wisp)
—-
Remus smells the difference in the air long before he knocks on the door of Sirius's and James's flat, before the door opens to reveal a sullen James, before his gut begins to twist in the way that it always did when he reached for the paper in the morning (he hadn't looked at it today, even though he always did. Another peculiarity).
"What happened?" Remus asks, and he wonders how the man even hears him as the wolf could barely hear himself over the thrumming of his own heart. Something so loud that he was sure James must have heard it as well. Remus found that he didn't care if the other did. He just wanted an answer. 'Prongs, what happened ?"
The nickname slips out, the child that Remus hardly got to be crying as it clung to someone familiar, to something other than the dread coiling in his chest that made him sure that he would hate what came next.
"It's Reg," the other man starts, sounding just as horribly young and terribly old all at once, as if it was both a miracle that they had lived this long and as if they each had their entire lives ahead of them all at once.
From inside the apartment, Remus can hear the wine of a dog that he knew to be Padfoot, and Remus is already shaking his head.
"No," the teen whispers, terrified and small like he had been when Greyback came for him that night, tearing at the seams like he had been when he had killed the wolf last fall.
"Remus-" James starts, but the wolf is only shaking his head more.
"No."
"Moony-"
"No, no, no," the words fall from the scarred man's lips like some sort of prayer, as if he said them enough then it wouldn't be true.
"He's dead, Moony."
" No!"
There were tears in the wolf's eyes, tears that he hadn't cried since he was young and learned that doing so was weakness. The boy's hand flew to his chest, where his heart was racing as if it wanted to use up all of its beats now so that he might join the man that has claimed a piece of him that no one else could ever have. He clutched he'd at the ring that lay on his chest and almost wasn't aware of the ground rising to meet him, or the dog curled against him in the hallway before the apartment door, each of them grieving someone that they hadn't thought that they would lose.
James stared down at the pair, sadness in his gaze that in no way measured what the boys - his boys - must have been feeling as he sat down with them as well, holding onto them both as if he could mend the broken pieces by being there. He couldn't, but he was damn sure going to try.
(None of the three noticed or had any way of knowing, but in the apartments surrounding the trio, all of the plants within them died, as if they too mourned the loss as the wolf did.
They didn't of course. No one could have)
—-
When Remus left the flat his eyes were red and stung and his movements were as slow and strange as the morning after the full moon when he still hadn't settled back into his skin. It wasn't the conditions for apparating - in fact it was just about the opposite and any instructor would cry and revoke his license if they were to see - but the wolf truly didn't care. Not about how much worse he would feel after doing so, not about the possibility of splinching, not about the war that had killed his lover. Not about anything.
(A part of him hoped that he did die, at least then he wouldn't have to wait long to see him )
But there was no blood on his skin when Remus landed in the field outside of the cottage, only the smell of his sick as he fell to the ground and lost what little he had eaten that day.
The lights of the cottage shined brightly as Remus approached it, but even from right outside the door he couldn't hear the usual swell of music and laughter. It was a good thing, the wolf didn't know what he would have done if he had.
When he opened the door Dora was there waiting for him, her arms open and face drawn into a complicated frown as the man fell into them, tears streaming down his face even as he thought that he had none left. The girl's hand rubbed circles on the boy's back, familiar symbols that the teen wouldn't remember until later. When she drew back, it was with a soft smile, and for the first time Remus felt the genuine urge to hurt the girl, wondering how she could look so close to fine when they each should be falling apart at the seams.
"Look," the girl whispered after seeing the wolf's too hard gaze. When she stepped aside, Dora revealed the figure of a ghost.
—-
It was the winter Holidays before Remus saw any of the others once more. Too long in his opinion, but finishing school was important if they wanted to get anywhere in life after the war. And Remus had to believe that there would be a time after the war for them all, he wouldn't accept anything else.
It was winter when Regulus snuck away in the dead of night with rumors of a soul being split and hidden away, a cave and a locket within it. Plans slipped from the boy's tongue, each less likely to work the last. Remus fought desperately against them all. Regulus was an extraordinary wizard, but they had no idea of the traps that the Dark Lord could have placed.
He knew that gojng was suicide and the younger boy agreed. He thought that this would be it.
He was wrong.
—-
The summer was warm, filled with music and faces flushed with freedom during the long days. During the night, the five poured over documents and thought about the traps that could have been placed, how they might get around them. How they might all survive to see another dawn once attempting to do so.
It wasn't enough.
—-
' Sometimes I think of that day in the library, love. The one where we met as something other than unlikely aquanctices, connected only by the blood that I shared with a brother that didn't want to be mine. What I never told you about that day was that there was another table by the door, hidden neatly from you behind the stacks, that we could have taken. I never told you that I chose you that day and every day since.
At first I just wanted to know the boy that Sirius seemed so infatuated with, the quiet Marauder. Moony. I had remembered the way that you were only the year before that, how unbelievably muggle and beautiful in a way that I hadn't known that people could be. The following year you mellowed and seemed to have lost that and yet Sirius's eyes still trailed after you as if you hadn't changed at all. I wanted to know the new you.
I smiled for long enough that Barty laughed at me once I realized that it was only a mask.
Masks.
I don't know if anyone ever told you, but you would have made the perfect Slytherin - the secrets, the lies. Your cunning and the intelligence that you dedicated to flawless pranks. And yet fiercely protective of your own. Of your pack. You would have been the best of us, love.
The first time that you fought during one of the house parties, I fell a little more in love with you than I thought that I would ever feel for another. The way that you moved so naturally with an elegance that the rest of us had to be taught, it was an image that I never could forget.
You're asleep now, and the moonlight is tracing your scars as if it knows that they belong to it and I'm reminded of the day that we spent learning how to cast a patronus out of spite for my brother and his friends. I never did tell you that you were my memory. I suppose I should have.
I love you, I wish I would have said that more.
Forever yours,
R.A.B.'
Tears smeared the ink. Remus didn't know if they were his own or Regulus's. He thought that it might be both.
—-
Regulus was the heart of the lion constellation. Remus almost wished then that the boy would have left it at that.
—-
The winds ripped at Remus's skin as he stood on a small cliff not too far from the cave. Even from there, through the scent of sea all around him, the wolf could smell the dark magic coming from the cave. The sort of dark magic that got the entire practice banned.
Remus knew that he was in the right place.
—-
Kreacher stood at the edge of the lake as Regulus stood at the center of the cave, something in his hand that Remus could quite see from so far away, but knew that it was nothing good. The water laid still before the wolf and yet Remus felt it thrum with a sort of twisted life, a force just left of what sat in each of their veins.
"Take me to him."
The elf that had never liked the wolf, never listened to a word that the boy man said from the first moment that they had met, held out his hand so quickly that Remus almost thought that he would hurt himself while doing so.
—-
There was a locket in Regulus's shaking hands as Remus held him, the younger pale as if he had never seen the sun. Remus held him even as the corpses rose up from the water, horrible things that they had learned of in Defense Against the Dark Arts. He held him even as fire peeled away from his skin, shrouding the entire cave in light as foxes ran along the troubled waters and dragons made of flames swooped down through the air. He held him until the last inferni was nothing but ash.
—-
"You're an idiot," Remus all but cursed as he breathed in the fresh ocean air, sea mist clinging to each of their skin.
"You love me," the other boy said with a shaky smile.
Remus didn't have anything to say against that, so he held the other instead and thanked the fates for not taking the other.
—-
"Your reaction to the news of his death will have to seem genuine," Evan said as they sat in front of the fire, the five of them close enough to one another that each of them were only a simple touch away.
"I know," Remus said glumly, sinking down into Regulus's side as if to remind himself that the other was still there. The younger threads their fingers together as if reading his mind.
Remus was a good enough actor when he wanted to be, but he didn't think that he could fake this. That he would even know what they would need to see.
"I've been working on a modified memory charm," Pandora says softly, her fingers laced with Regulus's other hand. "There is a trigger to it that will undo the spell once a certain thing is seen or heard."
That was all the boys needed to know.
—-
"You're still an idiot," Remus says as he holds the younger man tightly to his chest as if he truly were a specter that could disappear at any moment.
"I know," the other whispers back, holding the older boy just as tightly,mad if to make up for the tears that had been spilt in his memory. "I love you."
"I love you too."