They are shadows and they make their own heat in the big, cold bed. Underneath the decaying drapes and old, thin linen, they are strange and fragile to one another still, but neither one of them can be gentle. There's too much loss and lust and *time* between them for that. Remus pins Sirius' hands to the headboard, and Sirius bares his teeth, fierce in the dim light. He bucks up against Remus with a wild thrust and twist of his hips when Remus growls against his ear. They scratch and bite their way into love together, here in this old and angry house on an old and tired bed that sags beneath them.
When they fall asleep they curl away from one another, sleeping with their backs pressed firmly together. And if, in his sleep, Remus sometimes cries out, Sirius doesn't mention it - just like Remus never mentions the way Sirius sobs aloud as he dreams.
In the morning there are bruises across Sirius' wrists, curved around them like bracelets. There are long angry red marks down Remus' back from Sirius' fingers and round, dark souvenirs of Sirius' kisses are littered across Remus' chest.
The best time is right after they wake up, when Sirius rolls toward Remus and tiredly lays his head on Remus' pale, strong shoulder. He wraps his arms around Remus and says nothing. Remus toys with his hair and talks - telling stories from the classes he's taught, or books he's read, or sometimes just thinking out loud. Sirius closes his eyes, warm and calm and comfortable.
Sirius is too cautious by half to call this happiness, but sometimes during the day Remus will turn to him with that small, familiar smile - the one that breaks over his face slowly - and Sirius feels light, and young.
It's been a very long time since he was either one of those things.
Sirius has the days to himself, mostly, and he's known every inch of this house his whole life. It's oppressive, and it's dark, and he hates it, but in the corner of the living room was where he first read the letter telling him he was going to Hogwarts, and over by the dining room table between the two windows with their heavy curtains was where his mother used to put the Christmas tree every year. The carpet in the library is still stained from the time he spilled a bottle of wine he'd stolen from the cellar to split with Andromeda, and there's something comforting about knowing the house's scars as well as he knows his own. As though this house, this place, bears witness to his life by existing - by standing still and being the same as it was, it holds the memory of Sirius as he was once. Before he changed, and changed again and again and became who he is now.
It's something he's been thinking over lately - change, that is. He's wondered when his mother became the thing that's shrieking in the parlor, and when his father started practically applying all the dark magic in his books to people Sirius went to school with. He knows that it's easier to try and figure these things out than to think about the ways he's changed. Or even the ways Remus has changed.
And he has, of course, but then - that's to be expected. It's foolish to have expected Remus to have simply *stopped* the last time Sirius saw him - for Remus to have remained inviolate, immutable, always the slim, golden man who had pressed a hard kiss against his lips that last morning together. And yet, somehow, that's exactly what Sirius expected, and this Remus, this new Remus who sleeps beside him every night and who he does love so very, very, much is still a stranger to him. Sirius doesn't know when Remus stopped telling ridiculous puns, or when he learned how to cook, or what it is that makes him so afraid even when he's sleeping. Sirius used to know every single freckle across Remus' shoulders intimately, and the story behind every mark on his skin, but now there's a tracework of scars across Remus that Sirius can't even bring himself to ask about. He's not sure Remus would answer.
Even when he spent months as Padfoot, following Harry's small feet through Hogwarts and London, Sirius had never felt quite as lost as he did when he realized that Remus had stories that he didn't know. That Remus had lived a life without him in it seemed so incomprehensible, something he hadn't understood completely.
His life has never been without Remus; even in the deadly cold of Azkaban, Remus had been a shade that haunted his cell. A dream that he clutched tightly, even while waking - what kept him as close to sane as he managed to remain, even as the dementor's chill scraped across his skin.
But now, now he has Remus. Not always there, but close enough to touch, to speak with, to hold, and Sirius is terrified of him. He's afraid of Remus' life, of all the things he's done and seen and been and all of the people who he's known that Sirius hasn't. He's afraid of the time that lies between them, unavoidable and deep.