clovenbuttercup | Remus/Sirius: More Indelible Than Ink

Title: More Indelible Than Ink
Character(s)/POV: Sirius Black
Pairing: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Rating: 15
Beta: glory_jean; all remaining mistakes are my own.
Notes: My headcanon for Sirius is that Grimmauld Place almost achieves what even Azkaban couldn't do: drive Sirius insane. I am minded to think that he knew it was happening, and that he almost let it; that he stayed in that house for Harry (and only Harry), and that Remus was, by the end, the one thing keeping him sane. The title and summary come from a quote by Anita Loos.
Timeline: Order of the Phoenix, in the main. References events from earlier books.
Disclaimer: Characters you recognise belong to J. K. Rowling.
Summary: Memory is more indelible than ink.

Some days, Sirius thinks, he’s going mad; others, that he's already there.

On the good days, which have become fewer in number since he stepped over the threshold of this house, it’s bearable. He’s able to get out of bed. Congenial humans are around for company, instead of his being stuck alone with Buckbeak. That infernal portrait of his mother is silent – and his mind is unclouded by memories.

Today is not a good day.

Today the walls of the house of his childhood are closing in on him; he can almost feel them trying to eat him. The house is not a living thing, and the rational part of his mind knows this, but Azkaban destabilised his mind and it plays tricks on him. He hears and sees things that by rights shouldn’t be possible, and his being uncertain what he’ll find outside his bedroom makes him disinclined to leave it. On days like these, where his sense of self is caught in the temporal and spatial trap of his past, the only one who can reach him is Remus; Remus, a rare bright spark in his mind's darkness.

It’s easy enough, these days, to let his mind wander and allow himself to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening. This is especially true now that ‘normal’ – or what anybody sane would define as such – no longer applies as a concept.

The new normal feels more and more like the time he spent in Azkaban, and on the run, had never happened; it feels like Voldemort had never been defeated and thus the Novus Ordem had prevailed and subsumed the Order of the Phoenix.

And nobody had noticed. Or is his seeming inability to differentiate any longer between nightmare and reality just more proof of madness?

James and Lily, dead for nothing. Alice and Frank tortured beyond endurance for a pissant's pipe dream; Albus Dumbledore a zealot, or a fool – or both. And all of them little more than dirt on the bottom of Voldemort's shoe.

Yes, these were the bad days, although he’s had worse. There are days he is physically unable to get out of bed, days where he barely remembers his own name or where and when he is. Days where he thinks he’s still in Azkaban, Harry is still lost to him – and where he can no longer remember Remus.

He and Remus keep few secrets from each other these days; secrets have destroyed everything between them before, and neither cares to risk a repeat performance. Since his disappearing act from Hogwarts on Buckbeak's back, they've kept in constant contact by owl whenever they've had to be apart; they use quill and parchment as tools to feel their way back towards each other.

The Tri-Wizard Tournament means much of his attention, perforce, has to be on Harry; even then, in his correspondence with Remus, he lets nothing prevent him focussing on this dearest of friends – to the exclusion of almost everything else. Harry is important, yes, but under current circumstances, he's inclined to consider Remus even more so; to him, if no one else.

During the interstitial periods where nothing happens, where he is bored and there are hours of empty time to fill with nothing to do but think, he needs distractions to keep his sanity. He daydreams about Remus until he can no longer tell the difference between wishful thinking and reality; at the same time his sex drive, so long dormant in (and after) Azkaban he'd thought it gone for good, resurrects itself. He's lost count of how often, both before and after ending up back in Grimmauld Place, he's brought himself to completion with the face behind his eyes– and the name wrung, sobbing, out of him – always the same.

Remus.

He has friends and acquaintances in the Order, of a sort, but nobody like Remus. Remus is unique; the only one left (Wormtail doesn’t count) who both shares his past and was as fond of James as he'd been. And necessary as James had been to him before his death, Remus now is more important by far. James had been his brother. Remus had been – is still, when he's honest with himself – something far more nebulous, far harder to define; something arcane that Wormtail had tried to taint and smear to deflect attention from his own treachery. And thanks to Wormtail’s chicanery and his own credulousness, his relationship with Remus is almost as damaged now as he believes his own self to be.

So when the world goes to hell for the second time in his lifetime, and Dumbledore sends him home to Remus, he knows he's in deep, deep trouble. Remus is so precious to him he’s terrified the damage to their relationship is too severe and his last friend is lost to him for ever.

But he has a second chance with Remus, now, he never let himself dream he'd get. He needs to make the most of it; there's no way he’ll ever get a third.