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The Darkness In Me


Sirius had a nightmare that night. It was the first in sometime. He shook in his sleep, thrashing his limbs and whimpering. “No, no… please…” his voice whimpered, a bit broken up as he quaked. “Please... No.”

Remus woke with the movement. He rolled over and shook Sirius awake gently, “Padfoot… Padfoot… Sirius... it’s me, c’mon, hey wake up, it’s me, Remus. It’s Moony.” He stared into Sirius’s face as he struggled to focus up at him and his face went from one of terror filled panic to absolute sadness. His eyes filled up with tears.

“Moony.” He clutched onto Remus, sitting up so that their torsos pressed together and he started crying, great silent heaves that were all wet with spittle and tears and he pressed his face into Remus.

“Blimey…” Remus murmured, rubbing his back. “Shhh… it’s alright. Whatever it is can’t hurt you - it’s only a dream, my love. Only a dream.” He pressed his cheek to Sirius’s hair, which was just about an inch long now - having been two months since the incident in the boys’ toilet. It wasn’t shorn and ugly any longer, it was thick and black and short - similar to a style that a lot of the boys had, so at least it no longer stood out as glaringly horrible as it had done when McGonagall had given him the cap. Sirius was still self concious about it, always being self depricating over the shape of his jaw or the curve of his ears, but Remus thought it was nice and the hair coming in was soft yet spikey against his chin when he leaned into him like this and it smelled fresh, like Sirius’s shampoo. He closed his eyes as he breathed in the smell of him, rocking him gently as he continued to heave and cry into Remus’s shoulder.

Rey wanted to talk to him, to get whatever was bothering him out. He knew if Sirius kept it bottled up it would only return, whatever this nightmare was, but he didn’t want to wake James and Peter up, either. “Here, let’s go down to the Trophy Room Passageway, you want to?” Remus whispered quietly.

Sirius nodded against him.

So Remus got up and bundled himself up, tugging on a pair of thick wool socks and an extra sweater and Sirius pulled his black boots on right over his pyjamas, and together they snuck out of the dormitory, leaving James and Peter asleep, and snuck through the common room, carrying the folded up map. In the corridor, Remus drew his wand and whispered, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” and tapped the parchment. The web of corridors rooms blossomed across the map, scrawling words and tiny moving feet that indicated where everyone was. Most of the names were jumbled up messes about the common rooms, the students all in their beds… Although Dumbledore was pacing about the Headmaster’s Office - and Alistor Moody was up there with him… and there was Mr. Filch and Mrs. Norris down on the third floor, where Peeves was doing something zooming about the Defense classroom… Remus carefully tucked his arm around Sirius’s shoulder and pulled him along toward the stairs to the sixth floor.

Sirius held fast to Moony and his great bulking sweaters. He drew a deep breath, his eyes sore from crying and that sort of tired that comes when you don’t get proper rest. Remus’s arm was solid and good and Sirius wished more things in his life were as reliable and safe as Remus Lupin’s arm.

When they’d reached the little alcove off the passageway, several minutes later, Remus pulled Sirius down on the couch and wrapped a blanket over their heads so they sat there with their legs all folded up, facing one another under this sort of blanket fort, illuminated solely by Remus’s lit wand. Remus held Sirius’s hands in his, and stared into his eyes a long moment. “My love, tell me about your dream.”

Sirius stared at the stitching of the quilt that covered them, his eyes unfocused, as though seeing something far, far away. “It’s the dementors, Rey… I think I can feel them in my bones, lurking about out there.”

“They can’t get you in here,” Remus promised.

Sirius looked into Remus’s eyes suddenly and the grey of his irises seemed darker - almost charcoal - and they glistened. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I feel like I have dementors inside of me.”

Remus ran his hand over Sirius’s knuckles softly, studying the patterns in the folds and dents of the knuckles. “I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” Sirius’s eyes searched Remus’s desperately, wanting to hear that he wasn’t crazy, that feeling that sort of darkness inside was… was… well, not normal, but at least that he wasn’t the only one in all of the world that ever had.

Remus nodded. “I do. Sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of all the goodness in the world for all the bad. Like there’s so much pain and darkness that it just consumes all the good… like a lighted candle being blown out.”

Sirius nodded. “It hurts.”

“Yes. Physically hurts.” Remus squeezed Sirius’s hand. “I know.”

Sirius shivered and he covered his eye with his hands, “It has to stop, it has to. I feel so weak sometimes, I feel like a great big phony.”

“You’re not a phony.” Remus whispered, “It’s hard times is all. Losing sight of the goodness is far too easy.” He ran his hand onto Sirius’s knee. “But there is plenty to be happy for. There’s us, for one, just to name one…” he smiled gently at Sirius. “And there’s the lads. Our friendship. There’s roast. There’s laughter and good pranks. Spring is coming, soon there will be grass and leaves again and sunshine. The world isn’t dark, it’s the people in it. The bad guys. But not every one is the bad guy, not every day is a bad day. You know?”

Sirius murmured, “I’m afraid, Rey.”

“Of what?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to do the Patronus thing. I’m afraid what that means for full moon, for me being able to protect you.”

“You will,” Remus promised. “You’ll see. Just because you couldn’t do it on the first go doesn’t mean you can’t ever do it. You’ll get it.”

Sirius whispered, “I hope so.”

Remus smiled and patted his shoulder. “You will.” He paused a moment as Sirius half-smiled, staring down at his hands, picking at the fingernails carefully. “Out of curiosity,” he asked, “What memory were you thinking of when you gave it a go earlier?”

Sirius didn’t look up from his hands, instead, he said thickly, “In the Leaky Cauldron that summer… you and me… it was three in the morning… and we woke up and we were talking and you - you told me you loved me. And you said it with so much conviction. It was the first time you ever said it to me. The first time anyone has ever said it to me… The memory of that, the way you made me feel when you said that.”

Remus smiled.

“What would yours be?” Sirius asked.

Remus drew a deep breath and he closed his eyes. “Fireflies.”

“Fireflies?” Sirius asked.

“I had a jar of them… I caught them that night… the night Greyback bit me. I was three, so I don’t remember a lot about it… but I remember so clearly that jar with the fireflies inside of it… the way they glowed… and my mum telling me she could see some more, just over there by that tree there across the yard… and I’d run over to get them. I was so happy then. My mum and my dad loved me and I knew that, and I was carefree and the full moon was about to come out - it was dusk - and I wasn’t in pain and I wasn’t cold and there were no scars, and I wasn’t about to turn into a wolf, that I knew of, at least… I wasn’t a --” he’d been about to say monster, but he checked himself and he smiled tremulously. “The memory of being free of everything that I hate about myself.”

Sirius squeezed Remus’s hands, “I can’t believe you remember it so clearly.”

“I can still smell him stepping through the gate that night,” Remus replied.

Sirius shook his head.

Remus’s eyes met Sirius’s. “My happiest time coupled irrevocably with my greatest tragedy. That’s about right.” He chuckled. “Everything in my life seems to be like that. Pain tied up with the joy. Two sides of a single coin.”

“I think all pain might be like that,” Sirius answered. “I wouldn’t have you if I wasn’t a Gryffindor, but because I’m a Gryffindor that I lost my parents and Regulus, for example. We trade some pains for joy and some joys for pains and we move in this circle…” He sighed. “Rey, do you reckon my parents ever loved me?”

Remus said, “Only someone without any heart at all could fail to love you, Sirius.”

Sirius leaned in and their foreheads touched and they sat there, fingers laced together, and breathing in silence.

“Sometimes I worry the darkness in me is them,” Sirius whispered.

“Hmm?” Remus murmured.

“You know how there’s that cliche that we all turn into our parents eventually? Like how much James sounds like Mrs. P sometimes when he talks to Peter?”

Remus laughed quietly at this thought - James really did sound like Dora Potter sometimes.

“Sometimes I’m afraid that the dark that consumes me up is my mum or my dad, trying to break out of me. Like evil lives in my soul and I’ll become what they are by genetic design. I fear one day I’ll wake up and the darkness will have taken over and I’ll just… just betray everything I love… everything I’ve tried so hard to be… because you can’t fight the designs of what fate’s chosen for you.”

“That’s rubbish,” Remus said quietly. Their foreheads were still pressed together, their noses bumping. “Sirius, your darkness is not your identity. It is not who you are. You are more. The darkness is pain, and pain can be fought. Pain is not as strong as love. You’d never betray those you love, Padfoot. Dumbledore himself could stand before me and tell me you’d have done and I’d say never. Because you, Sirius Black, have far too much light in you to ever be consumed by darkness.” Remus tilted his chin forward and kissed Sirius softly.

Sirius melted into him and though he still felt the darkness pooling in his heart, in his guts, in the tips of his fingers, heavy as lead, he felt the lightness, too, and he was so bloody thankful for it. He closed his eyes and just felt Remus Lupin’s weight as Remus leaned over him, their lips and bodies touching… They were the only thing in the world…. The rest of it had ceased existing. There was no tunnel, no walls, no castle towers, no grounds, no forest, no dementors, no country, no Dark Lord, no earth, no stars or moon or sun or space… There was just Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.