Chapter Text
The sun was finally setting over the mountaintops and Sirius was wondering for the hundredth time that day how much trouble he’d get into for kicking the back of Remus’s seat.
It was a sweet and balmy sort of evening, with the bright afternoon fading away easily into a warm, lavender night, and there was a clean bed to be found a few short steps from the car, and a McDonald’s, and probably a Diet Coke. A bit of cheerfully awful television to switch off to. The distant sounds of a babbling, glacial river somewhere in their valley. And all Sirius could think about was the back of Remus’s stupid neck through the little gap between the passenger seat and the passenger seat’s headrest. It was all pink, because he was an idiot and hadn’t been applying suncream at regular intervals like Sirius had. And if Sirius said anything he’d probably get told: “I don’t need it, I spend half my life outside,” or some nonsense about how the angle of the sun at this altitude meant that the ultraviolet rays wouldn’t find that particular patch of skin but they had, because it was pink, and it was annoying, and Sirius still wanted to kick the back of Remus’s stupid seat.
The driver’s side door opened, and James propped himself on it with his arm and then leant down to peek inside at the three of them sitting there like schoolchildren, and he said:
“They’ve only got doubles.”
And that was the first problem.
For reasons Sirius hadn’t wanted to exert any energy thinking about, James had taken to spending an inordinate amount of time with Peter given that the purpose of this trip had allegedly been for Sirius and James to spend as much time together as possible before they disappeared off to different universities in the autumn. Remus and Peter were, as far as Sirius was concerned, just tagging along. It had all been a great, thrilling dream to begin with: an endless summer of tearing through the wilds with his best mate, swimming in picture-postcard lakes and eating those great big bags of crisps with mad flavours like dill pickle and ranch and all-dressed , and he’d been greatly looking forward to finding out what that even was. He’d pictured hikes up sandy trails to devastating vistas. Souvenir t-shirts that said things like: Fish Fear Me. He’d even bought a new camera for the occasion — a fantastically battered old thing he’d found for pittance on eBay — and had imagined parking their rented Jeep up at the side of roads that had probably been named “World’s Most Beautiful Road” at some point and using his second-hand zoom lens to take pictures of wolves and mooses and things. Or whatever the correct term was for more than one moose. He wasn’t sure.
Either way, the trip had devolved into such a sour pitch in such a very short space of time that all he’d managed to capture, a week into the drive, were half a dozen blurry pictures of James at Heathrow Terminal 5 and then a shot of his motel bed on the first night in Seattle that he’d taken accidentally, around the same time he was swearing at James for suddenly not wanting to share a room with him.
“Charming!” he’d spat at him, and then said something infantile about Peter being boring — which he was, rather — and then slumped off to the adjoining bedroom and not spoken to Remus all night apart from to ask him if he could use his toothpaste, because he’d forgotten his.
“You two need to sort your shit out,” James had spat right back at him the next morning over a breakfast of toast and strange, plasticky waffles that they had to make themselves in a machine that looked like a little spaceship.
“What shit?” Sirius had muttered back stupidly, poking at the beige goo oozing out of the side of the spaceship with a knife, and knowing exactly what shit James was on about.
It had started sometime towards the end of Easter term. Sometime in April, when the weather was starting to perk up after a particularly miserable winter, and Sirius was — quite suddenly, and with no clear reason that he was able to identify — starting to find Remus intolerably irritating. It had seemed to come out of nowhere at all and it confused Sirius in an academic sort of sense, because they’d known each other for almost five years by this point, and he couldn’t remember ever finding Remus annoying before. Swotty, perhaps. A bit of a teacher’s pet, and modest about it all in a way that made Sirius poke gentle fun at him all through lower school. But he’d never found him unbearable. He was a lovely addition to their group, really: when he’d turned up halfway through their third year he’d slotted himself in quite neatly with Sirius, and James, and Peter. He’d actually made Peter more tolerable because, with Peter occupied, Sirius got a bit of James back, and this facilitated many happy years during which they all found a very pleasant equilibrium, and it was frustrating that some strange turn of Sirius’s sensibilities now threatened to upset the whole thing. And it wasn’t even an identifiable thing: it wasn’t as if Sirius had been able to pin it down and say: oh yeah, it’s because he’s this. It’s because he does this thing. It’s because he’s too loud — which he wasn’t — or too friendly — which again, he wasn’t — or that he smelled like bins, or anything. He was just suddenly and presently extremely irritating to Sirius, and when James had suggested they invite the other two on their long-planned summer road trip Sirius had frowned, and shrugged, and said: “I mean. I suppose we could.”
And that, somehow, had led to James forcing Sirius to share a room with Remus, and sit next to Remus at dinner, and go pop into that supermarket with Remus and pick up some more crisps for us all with Remus and Remus, Remus, Remus.
It was intolerable and thoroughly disappointing and about to get immeasurably worse, because if the only rooms at the little roadside hotel were double rooms, then Sirius was about to find himself in a situation he’d been privately fearing since that first night in Seattle.
He slumped back against his seat, and crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at that stupid patch of pink skin through the little gap under the headrest.
***
“Right,” Remus said, dropping his rucksack onto the solitary bed. “Well.”
Sirius sniffed, and dumped himself into the battered old armchair at the other side of the room. “Yeah,” he said.
It was a wonderfully unassuming sort of place: exactly the sort of place Sirius had hoped they’d be staying in as they tore their way across the west. It had scuffed carpet and tatty, peeling wallpaper, and a bucket for ice, and a big, wide window that looked out over the car park and the wilderness creeping towards them at the edges of the little backpacker town. He’d thrilled to himself that day as the landscape around them had slipped from gently rolling hills to something jagged and exciting: he’d pressed his face to the glass of the car window and stared up at the looming peaks, and thought about how it looked like something out of The Lord of the Rings, and thought about asking James to put the soundtrack on. But then Remus had said something boring about rocks and Sirius had rolled his eyes and started thinking about kicking his seat instead.
It really was a wonderful place. It was just such a shame that he was having to share it with him.
“Did you want a shower?”
Sirius frowned, and looked up from where he was playing with the strings of his hoodie, and said: “What?”
“Before we go get food,” said Remus. He wasn’t looking at Sirius: he was looking down at his trainers, and that was annoying, too. “I was going to get a shower.”
“Okay,” said Sirius, because he couldn’t imagine why he needed to be kept quite so abreast of Remus’s upcoming ablutions. “Go for it.”
Remus took exactly seven minutes in the bathroom, and then the two of them walked together in silence back down to the car park, and then Remus said: “That’s Mount Macpherson over there,” and Sirius said:
“Right.”
It was a good mountain. It was massive, and had a big snowy peak like an iced bun, and there was a huge, wispy cloud clinging to the very top of it and catching gold and orange in the evening sunlight. It was a very good mountain. He told James about it as they walked side-by-side to McDonald’s — Sirius having carefully shouldered Peter out of the way before they left the car park — and James agreed that it was cool, and asked him how he knew what that mountain was called, and Sirius said something about a leaflet he’d been reading in the hotel room whilst Remus was in the shower.
They ate burgers and chips sitting by the side of the road, which was rather grand until Remus started slurping his Diet Coke through a paper straw, and Sirius had to bite down on his back teeth so hard he wondered that they didn’t crack and splinter into little pieces on his tongue.
“So tomorrow,” James was saying through his mouthful of chicken nuggets, “it’s about an hour to Roger’s Pass, and then there’s that lake that Pete was on about. So we could go have a look at that.”
“I’m gonna swim in it,” Peter said. He had a big smear of ketchup on his chin.
James nodded, and took another bite of his sandwich. “Attaboy.”
“Was there anything you wanted to see tomorrow?”
It took Sirius a beat to realise that Remus was speaking to him. He shrugged, and looked to James for advice because he really couldn’t think of what to say in response, and then sagged in his seat when he saw that James was now deep in conversation with Peter about his chicken nuggets.
“I dunno.”
Not your stupid face, he thought. I’ll tell you that much.
“We could swim, too,” Remus said simply, and Sirius screwed his nose up at his burger, and said nothing.
The walk back to the hotel was awkward and too-long, the McDonald’s sitting in Sirius’s stomach like a stone. James waved them a cheery goodnight when they got back to the car park and disappeared off down a hallway with Peter, their arms slung good-naturedly around one another’s shoulders. Sirius wanted to punch them both.
“Right,” Remus said again when they got back up to their room. The overhead lights were yellow and fluorescent and one of the bulbs was flickering ominously: an endearingly offbeat road trip movie turned suddenly horror. Sirius nodded, and bent over to unzip his rucksack, and said:
“Yep.”
They bustled around one another dumbly for ten minutes, Sirius muttering about toothpaste again because he’d still not managed to buy himself a tube, and Remus saying something in return that Sirius didn’t bother responding to. He toed his shoes off and felt the soles of his feet stick to the thin carpet. There was a distant humming coming from just outside their door that Sirius thought might’ve been an ice machine, and how funny for there to be a machine here to make ice when there was so much of the stuff just up that mountain that Remus had pointed out in the car park.
The sheets were staticky when Sirius slid into the too-small bed. He tugged at them until they were free of their pin-sharp tucks against the corners of the lumpy mattress, and bunched his too-thin pillow up and glared out of the wide window at the black, jagged run of mountain ridges against the night sky. He felt the bed dip on the other side and heard Remus take two annoying puffs on his inhaler. The hotel room was probably very dusty; it was probably quite bad for him. Sirius should probably offer him the side of the bed nearest the window so that he might get a little fresh air as he slept.
“Night,” Remus said, annoyingly, and any thoughts of charity swiftly left Sirius’s mind.
Neither of them slept. Sirius could tell Remus was awake: you always can, Sirius thought, and was forcibly and unpleasantly reminded of nights when he was much younger, and living at home, and how Regulus used to climb into the bed behind him on nights when Mother was being particularly awful, and how neither of them really slept then, either. How they’d both stay awake and statue-still under the sheets, listening for her footsteps as she prowled the hallways of the old townhouse. He wasn’t sure which bothered him more: her footsteps, or the sound of Remus clearing his throat repeatedly on the other side of the bed, an infuriating little hm-hm against the backdrop hum of the stupid ice machine.
He found himself waiting for the next one, and the next one, and then he started timing the gaps between the hm-hms , counting the seconds in his head. The longest gap was fifty-three seconds; the shortest, after quarter of an hour of counting, was thirty seconds. That meant the average time between hm-hms was forty-one-and-a-half seconds. Forty-one-and-a-half seconds for Sirius to take his own deep breath and grit his back teeth again and convince himself it wasn’t worth saying anything, and that Remus would stop soon, or else Sirius would just drift off to sleep and it would stop bothering him.
Hm-hm.
“Oh my god .”
It hung in the darkness of the room, catching awkwardly on the still air. Sirius felt Remus shift on the other side of the bed, and then heard him say:
“Sorry?”
You should be , Sirius thought, bundling his pillow beneath his head again with his fists and slumping back down onto it crossly.
“Nothing,” he replied, in a silly sing-song voice that made him want to punch himself as well as the pillow, and the rest of them.
Remus shifted again on the mattress, as if he was propping himself up on an elbow and looking over his shoulder at Sirius. Sirius could feel his eyes boring into the back of his head.
“Sorry,” Remus said again, and it didn’t sound like a question this time, and Sirius gritted his teeth and tried not to hate himself too much.
He got the sense, after that, that Remus was trying very hard to hold the hm-hms in, as if he might be clenching his teeth as well, or holding his breath, or bundling up his side of the sheet and pressing it against his mouth to muffle the sounds. Good , Sirius thought meanly. The average gap between hm-hms climbed to fifty-two seconds, and then a minute, and then a minute and a half, and then Sirius found his mind drifting off over the jagged mountaintops outside and down into a little blue-green lake surrounded by meadows of wildflowers, or whatever grows at those sorts of altitudes.
“We could swim,” Remus said to him in the dream. He was eating chicken nuggets, and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack was playing from unseen speakers, and Sirius said:
“Yes please.”
***
Breakfast was the plasticky waffles again. They were a strange thing, Sirius thought, as he ladled the goopy batter into another spaceship-looking machine. It bubbled and oozed and the air at the little buffet table turned golden and sweet, and he found himself wondering vaguely if you could buy these machines in England, or if the voltage would be too different and if perhaps they wouldn’t work with English power sockets.
“Sleep well?”
Sirius frowned sideways at James, looking chipper and rested.
He shrugged, and spun the waffle-machine upside-down by its handle when it beeped at him, and said:
“Yes.”
“Good,” said James, plucking an apple from the plastic bowl on the counter and taking a big, messy bite. “You two sort your shit out yet?”
“There’s nothing to sort out,” Sirius said. The machine beeped again, and he peeled the golden waffle off the griddle using a plastic fork, which probably wasn’t the best idea: the prongs went all floppy and soft once he’d got the waffle onto his paper plate, and he frowned at that too, and threw the fork in the bin. “It’s fine,” he said, shrugging again. “We’re fine.”
James nodded. “Right,” he said around a yawn. “Keep working on that.”
“Whatever,” Sirius said. He poured a big glug of syrup onto his waffle and took a bite, and tried to ignore the way it tasted like melted fork.
The road from Revelstoke to Rogers Pass was, in Sirius’s view, something that someone ought to make a film about one day. Perhaps they already had. It was wide and sweeping, framed on either side by rushing foothills that became forests that became darkly looming mountaintops, catching the clouds as they drifted by up on some impossibly high current. It felt bigger than anything Sirius had ever seen: bigger than he could’ve imagined, and he pressed his face to the window again and gawped up at the sheer, pointy cliffs and the seas of pine trees that could’ve been hiding anything at all. Bears. Mooses. Lost civilisations. The answer to the question: why is the back of Remus’s neck annoying me again?
The highway swept them along into another vast and sprawling valley, and they passed a sign next to a craggy rock announcing to them that they were about to drive into a different timezone, and they all fiddled excitedly with their watches as James jabbed at the old radio of the car and flicked it forwards an hour.
“What a concept,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “Imagine if we had different timezones back home.”
“Like if everyone from Cornwall had to change their watches when they drove to Devon,” Peter said. “Or if Yorkshire was an hour ahead of London.”
“More like a century behind,” Sirius muttered, and watched the back of Remus’s neck for a reaction.
“Simpler times,” Remus said cheerily instead, taking a swig from his water bottle. “Us northern lot don’t want none of your new-fangled futuristic nonsense,” he added in a folksy, exaggerated accent that made Sirius consider kicking his seat again.
Lunch was a pack-up of bagels that James had cleverly stolen from the breakfast buffet whilst the woman at the desk wasn’t looking, and they ate them perched on the open boot of the hire car at the side of the wonderful road. It was exactly the sort of scene Sirius had imagined when they’d been planning their mad loop from Seattle up to Jasper and beyond and then back round to the coast again: he just hadn’t imagined there’d be quite so many of them. The car, too, had been something of a disappointment when they’d picked it up from the airport: a dented and rusting old Toyota that smelled vaguely like cats. Less rugged off-road Jeep, more something James’s dad might’ve gone to the garden centre with in the late nineties.
“Ah, she’ll do,” James had said on the first day, giving one of the back tyres a good-natured kick, and Remus had said something annoying and uninteresting about the engine, and Sirius had pulled a face behind his back. The car was seeing them along so far, at least. It had trundled happily with them out of the city and then into a delightfully green pocket of America that was all mossy rainforests and desolate, wind-torn beaches, and funny little towns that seemed to consist of no more than a Subway, a motel, a gas station that measured petrol in units none of them could make sense of, and shabby runs of gift shops selling souvenir t-shirts that said things like: Bigfoot saw me, but nobody believes him!
“You should buy one,” James had said, holding one of the t-shirts up on its hanger. So Sirius did, and then got another to take home for Regulus, because it seemed like the sort of thing that would annoy him.
They’d stopped in a town on the second day that Remus had said he wanted to spend the afternoon poking around because he’d read a series of books that was based there, and Sirius had trailed around after him looking at various houses that were allegedly important, and a police station, and a big red truck parked outside the visitor information centre. Remus had wanted a picture with it, and so had given his phone to some poor German tourist before slinging his arm around Sirius’s shoulders in front of the red truck, for some reason, and Sirius had felt his skin prickling for hours after that.
After lunch they drove for another half hour, and then pulled into a little car park that Peter said was worth stopping at because it was the start of some trail or other, and if they followed it for long enough they’d reach a very impressive river. He mentioned something about salmon which Sirius didn’t think was worth remembering, and then the other three ripped up the trail bouncing excitedly in their barely-broken-in hiking boots and Sirius padded along after them, grumbling to himself. He remembered, vaguely, a film he’d caught the end of on television last Christmas: something about Reese Witherspoon doing a lot of walking, and how she’d walked all the way to Canada or at least somewhere that looked a lot like Canada, and how very revelatory it had been for her. Life-changing: she’d had some sort of epiphany along the way, and as Sirius trudged along the sandy path and tried not to think too much about mountain lions, he wondered if he too could walk far enough to stumble upon his own epiphanic moment. If he took enough steps, and got enough blisters on his feet, and didn’t get plucked off the path by a passing grizzly bear, maybe he’d eventually figure out why he was so bloody livid with Remus all the time. Maybe it would suddenly make sense.
But the end of the trail didn’t deliver an epiphany. It was just a river, like Peter had said, and Sirius couldn’t even see any salmon, so he just said: “Cool,” and then turned around, and walked all the way back to the car.
The lake that Peter had wanted to stop at was teeming. There were so many cars, and coaches, and campervans that James had to park a whole mile back down the winding road, and the sun was aggressive and far too hot on the back of Sirius’s neck as they all made the way back up the dusty hill in the flowing throng of people.
“Thought you said this place was meant to be a secret?” James said lightly to Peter as they passed another coachload of sightseers clutching cameras and parasols.
Peter shrugged, and hoisted his backpack further up onto his shoulders. “Quieter than Lake Louise,” he said. “I promise you that.”
It was, Sirius had to admit when they eventually reached the water, a fantastic lake. A brilliant pool of a turquoise so vivid Sirius had to blink and rub at his eyes as if the sun might’ve been doing something funny to his perception of the colour: but it really was that turquoise. Still and mirror-glassy and with a cool, glacial breeze that whipped up gently and drew the heat from Sirius’s skin, and as they rounded the busy shores and trailheads he wondered if maybe Peter had had the right idea about bringing his swimming stuff with him.
“It’ll be way quieter up at that end,” Peter said, nodding his head towards the furthest shore of the lake, leagues and leagues away and sitting so prettily at the foot of yet another looming mountain, yellow-gold in the early afternoon light. Sirius could see a handful of little red kayaks bobbing in the water.
They all looked to James, who nodded, and hitched his own bag up by its straps, and said: “Off we go, then.”
The trail led them along the western shore of the great lake, first past a wooden boathouse turned gift shop selling sweatshirts and badges and things, and Sirius made a mental note to check out their t-shirt selection before they headed back to the car. They passed under a shady canopy of tall trees, and then along a stretch of path that hooked over fallen branches and twisting, knotty roots, and then the trail opened up gloriously into wildflower meadows all purple and pink and alpine-blue.
“Bloody nice, this,” said James, swapping his glasses for his new pair of prescription Ray-Bans. “Good shout, Pete.”
And it was. It was bloody nice. The air was arrestingly fresh, all glacial coolness and the wildflower pollen, and something that might’ve been Remus’s deodorant, which Sirius chose not to spend any amount of time thinking about. They stopped by a little pebbly beach for a cereal bar each and a swig of water, and then the trail swept them easily right around to the northern edge of the lake which was, as promised, blissfully quiet.
“Told you,” said Pete, dumping his backpack on the shoreline and toeing off his hiking boots, laces already eagerly tugged undone. “And now I’m going in.”
“You do know it’ll be freezing, Pete.” Remus dropped his own bag down onto the pebbly sand and lowered himself to the ground, propping himself back on his elbows and nodding out at the water. The bridge of his nose was turning candyfloss pink in the sun. “That’s glacial meltwater, you know,” he said. “Good luck.”
Peter froze with his t-shirt halfway off, the cotton all bunched up awkwardly on one shoulder. “Will it really be that cold?” he asked James, looking suddenly uncertain about the whole thing, and James shook his head.
“I believe in you,” he said around a bite of an apple he’d produced from somewhere. “In you get.”
Peter hovered at the water’s edge long enough for Sirius to sit down, and pull the rest of his bagel out of his backpack, and eat the whole thing.
“Ten quid he doesn’t do it,” Remus muttered quietly at his side.
“Nah,” James said, lying back on the beach. “He’s been banging on about this for weeks. He’ll do it.”
And to Sirius’s eventual surprise, he did, and then — at Peter’s frantic waving from where he stood chest-deep, hopping from one foot to the other under the water — so did James.
“No fear, no glory,” he said as he tossed his t-shirt back in Remus’s direction, and then he was wading bravely in, and hooting loudly as he did.
“You going in?”
Sirius frowned sideways at Remus.
“No,” he said, and then, because he felt he ought to say something else: “Are you?”
Remus grinned and shook his head. “I’d be wheezing for the rest of the day,” he said. He laid back and stretched himself out languidly, holding a hand up over his face to shade his eyes from the sun. “You’d be calling the air ambulance.”
Sirius muttered something that wasn’t quite a reply and stared out at the water. He could feel Remus next to him: he glanced over, and saw how Remus’s knees at the bottom of his silly shorts were turning pink too beneath their freckles. He tutted.
“Will you put some bloody suncream on?”
“I did,” Remus said, still grinning. “Must be wearing off.”
“You’re turning into Mr. Blobby.”
“I like Mr. Blobby.”
Oh, shut up.
Sirius huffed out a sigh, and flopped himself back onto the ground next to him, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
“I’m not going with you to get after-sun,” he said tartly, peering up at the handful of wispy clouds in the impossibly vast sky. “You’ll have to sort yourself out.”
“I always sort myself out,” Remus said, and Sirius didn’t know what that meant.
The breeze off the water ruffled Sirius’s hair pleasantly and the distant hoots of James and Peter faded off away over the mountaintops. It was, really, the most beautiful place Sirius had ever found himself in, and as the sun arched lazily along its path above them he gradually came to note that he didn’t even have the energy to be properly annoyed at Remus, in that moment. He took a deep breath through his nose, and sighed it out through pursed lips, and let his eyes fall shut.
“Big, isn’t it?”
Sirius frowned, and cracked one eye half open. “What?”
“The sky,” Remus said, nodding up at it. “It’s big.”
“Okay.”
“Big and blue.”
Sirius let his eyes falled closed again, and wondered if Remus was planning on stopping talking anytime soon.
“You looking forward to uni?”
“Dunno,” Sirius said, shifting to make a pillow with his hands behind his head, fingers linked together. The sun was painting little orange starbursts on the backs of his eyelids.
“We’ll just be up the road from each other, really,” said Remus. “Well, I’ll be down the road from you. You’ll be up the road from me. Half an hour or so, I think. Maybe a bit more with traffic. There’s a train, though. It’s a direct train.”
“What are you wittering on about?” Sirius murmured. He felt that he could fall asleep right there on the shores if he stayed there long enough. If Remus ever shut up.
“Uni,” Remus said. “You up in Newcastle. Me in Durham. It’s not so far, really.”
Sirius felt his bagel twisting uncomfortably somewhere in his stomach. He cleared his throat, and started to say something, and then stopped. Truthfully he wasn’t sure how long he’d been planning on keeping the whole thing to himself. It was an irritating and inconvenient inevitability that everyone would find out sooner or later. That Remus would find out. And as he huffed out another sigh, and scrunched his face up against the sun, he figured it was as sensible a moment as any.
“I’m not going to Newcastle.”
He saw Remus look at him out of the corner of his eye. “Huh?”
Sirius shrugged. “Not going to Newcastle.”
“Oh,” Remus said, and propped himself up on his elbows, peering down at Sirius with a strange sort of frown pulling at his eyebrows. “How come?”
“It wasn’t my first choice.” Stop looking at me, stop looking at me. “I applied somewhere else but I didn’t tell anyone except James in case I didn’t get the grades. Their requirements for Geography were higher than Newcastle’s. But,” he said, shrugging as if it were of no consequence whatsoever, “I did get the grades. So I’m going there instead.”
There was a funny beat of silence; just the distant shouting of James and Peter still out in the freezing water, and the breeze ruffling the wildflower meadows back up the banks.
“So where are you going?” Remus asked at length. Quietly, and as if he already knew what the answer was going to be.
Sirius cleared his throat again, and said: “Durham.”
He thought Remus might laugh. It was so silly to have kept it from him like that; so silly to have gone along with this charade of going somewhere else solely to excuse himself from the threat of embarrassment if he messed up his final exams, which he’d been quite sure he was going to. Perhaps Remus might get very cross with him: tell him he was a rotter for not telling him, and go off in a huff, and maybe he’d be annoyed because Durham was his thing, after all. He’d been wanting to go off and study Geology there since forever. It was his place, and his plan, and nothing to do with Sirius.
As it was, Remus said nothing. He just looked down at Sirius with that strange and unparsable expression, and after a minute it started to make Sirius’s skin itch, and something inconvenient that might’ve been guilt bloom in a flush across his cheeks.
“I’m going in,” he said, wildly. He pushed himself up to standing, and stripped down to his shorts without looking at Remus.
The water was freezing, and welcome. His mind buzzed oddly and the back of his neck felt tight and uncomfortable as he waded in, and then he was throwing himself into the turquoise pool and gasping with relief at the icy shock as he plunged through the surface, putting his head right under and pretending that the world stopped at the shoreline, and that Remus wasn’t still sitting there on the beach with that strange and complicated expression.
“You still being a dick?” James called cheerily to him when Sirius reached them out floating by a little gaggle of red kayaks, and Sirius rubbed the lakewater from his eyes, and didn’t look at either of them, and said, in a gloomy sort of voice:
“Probably.”
***
They walked back to the car in a dripping, tired shuffle, James and Peter laughing and shoving carelessly at one another as Remus marched on up ahead, and Sirius plodding alone right at the back. At James’s insistence — because Sirius had forgotten all about it by then — they stopped at the little shop at the southern end of the lake, and James convinced Sirius to try on a t-shirt that rather coquettishly declared him a Wild Woman in big, seventies-style lettering, and Sirius bought it because he was too busy sulking to argue.
“It was very wild of you,” James said as they meandered back down the dusty trail towards the car, the late sunlight starting to turn everything honey-warm and golden. “You just jumped right in.”
“Yeah,” Sirius said, clutching his new t-shirt in a plastic bag and ignoring the way his wet shorts were clinging uncomfortably to his legs. “I did.”
He clambered into the back seat and sniffed to himself. He smelled like lakewater.
“We all smell like lakewater,” James announced from the driver’s seat, adjusting the rear view mirror until his reflection peered at Sirius reproachfully. “But worry not. There’ll be showers at the campsite.”
Sirius frowned, and cocked his head, and asked, tartly:
“What?”
“The campsite!” James grinned, and Peter laughed in his seat next to Sirius.
“We’re camping tonight!” he said, clapping his hands together excitedly. “We decided whilst we were swimming, didn’t we James?”
James nodded, and flicked the engine on. “Yep. And I checked with the lady in the shop: there’s a campsite about an hour away that’ll have space for us.”
“But we don’t have tents!” Sirius said in horror, and tried very hard not to think about bears. It made a horrible sort of sense, he supposed: the tents went hand-in-hand with the battered old car, and the big bags of crisps eaten at the roadside, and the hiking boots that were now all swampy with water and silt. Canvas ceilings beneath wide open skies and brilliant, endless starlight. But there’d been a priss and cautious part of him that had hoped desperately they’d forgo that part of it for the duration of the trip, and the part where the bears ripped open the canvas in the night and skewered them all with their horrible claws; even if he hadn’t wanted to say it out loud because of how silly and unbrave he was quite sure it would sound.
“They’ll have tents,” James said with a shrug, dashing Sirius’s hopes of championing some alternative plan that didn’t involve being eaten by the local wildlife. “She said there’s a little hut there you can rent tents and stuff from. It’ll be good.”
“Will it?”
“Yes,” he said decisively. “Won’t it, Remus?”
“I like camping,” Remus said. “I’m happy to camp.”
“See?” said James as they trundled off the side road and back onto the highway. “We’re all happy campers.”
Sirius crossed his arms over his chest, and slouched down in his seat with a heavy sigh, and said, bitingly:
“Cool.”