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Sirius, alone on the dock, 1977

The water here was blue: a pure, sterling, shimmering shade that he had thought existed only in postcards or in dreams. During the heat of the day, when his thoughts slowed to the speed of dripping honey, he knelt on the dock and stuck his hands into the waves and watched, half-amazed, like the child he still nearly was, at how the blueness broke around his wrists and ran between his fingers. He waved at himself from beneath the water as out by the reef the sirens began to sing. They called to him; somehow they knew his name. He shouldn’t have been this far out on the dock, which was close enough to the reef that he just might take a liking to their song and walk off into the water and into their grasps, but since when had he ever done the things he was supposed to?

“Come away from there,” Barnabas had said, when he’d shown them around the island the first day. “They want to drown you,” he had said, and Sirius had thought: there are worse things.

Everything he had left was stuffed under the bed in the Potter’s guest bedroom. Five robes, two pairs of jeans, a ripped t-shirt, a leather jacket, spell books, quills (mostly broken), ink (mostly empty), half a dozen motorbike magazines (badly dog-eared), and three Galleons. Except he brought the shirt and the jeans with him here, along with his own sudden quiet (mostly unbroken) and his cuts and bruises (mostly healed). He can never go back home, except that he had never had a home and so he has never even been home to begin with. He had had a window that looked out onto a smallest piece anyone ever cut out of the sky. He had had a mother with a voice like a siren: “Come down here, Sirius. Come join us in the drawing room and take a sip of the wine. Look at this. This is your legacy, your family. You can never forget this, ever. You are of the noble house of Black.”

Blood is just like ocean: salt-laden and inexorable and poisonous to drink. Even a boy like him, who had grown up far from the ocean’s touch, had known that if a wave rears and you’re still on land you try to run. So he had.

But why, when he knew that he had gotten away, did it feel like he was still running?

The sirens’ voices lifted up over the surf. Sirius, they sang, and then, although the rest was in Greek, he knew what they were singing. Come down here, Sirius. Come join us.

He stood up and went to the very edge of the dock. Their voices were like wind itself here, buffeting his skin, filling his ears. He lifted his foot and closed his eyes and shouted, “Not today, loves!”

Not now, he had yelled at her. Not today. Not ever.

Sirius and Barnabas by Barnabas’s kitchen window, smoking, 1977

“There’s a temple on this island,” he told Sirius. “Though no one knows where, exactly.”

It was close to midnight and the smoke from their cigarettes was drifting out the window and furling into the stars. If the Potters had hoped that Barnabas would be a watchful and respectable chaperon for their son and his friends this summer their hopes had been sorely misplaced. He had shown them around the island the first day and then disappeared for the next two. He was a big man with a scholar’s absentminded air; apparently he was a visiting professor at the nearby university. He never seemed to care if he saw them in the morning clearly hungover and it was not long before he started to share cigarettes and short, peculiar chats with Sirius.

“It appears about once a year at moonset, although the day’s always changing, as well as the moon phase. Now this is a whole temple, mind, not like those ruins I showed you out by the dock. I seen it twice,” he said, tapping ash into a teacup saucer. “The marble’s still white and there were fires lit inside. Offerings to a god, probably.”

Sirius, who had smoked a little something else before the cigarette, nodded three times vigorously and said, “Mental, mate. Just mental.”

“I expect it’s Hades,” Barnabas confided. “No other god that would come and go with a temple all spooky like that.”

Sirius marshaled his wits to ask, “Wasn’t there a statue of the god somewhere inside?”

Barnabas snorted. “Do I look a fool? I didn’t go inside.”

Sirius had given him an incredulous look. “Why not? It –”

“There are some places, boy,” Barnabas interrupted, his voice growing dark. “Some places in this world that once you go in you ain’t never come out of. You feel it in your bones when you look at it and you know – you just know – that it’s a place you gotta hightail it away from.”

Sirius turned his cigarette over in his hand; he could feel the small flame burning up the air between his fingers. It was the same feeling a missed hex leaves behind in the air, heat spiraling off into nothing. But a cigarette burns out quietly, a mother throwing hexes at her son just continues to scream.

He closed his eyes, he saw that place: that house, the light inside perpetually dim, all sounds muffled by the thick carpet, its magic looped neatly into its locks and relics.

“How did you know you had to leave?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.

“Cause it sings to you,” Barnabas said, and Sirius crushed his cigarette between his fingers, ash sliding down his palm. “It sings to you to come to it. Like those sirens out there off the reef.” Barnabas took a drag, gave Sirius a knowing look, and then said, surprisingly, “Like that boy sings to you.”

“That boy?” he asked thickly, not sure if he had heard Barnabas right.

At that, Barnabas smiled and only said, “I may not be around much, but I ain’t blind.”

James and Sirius on a rock off the shore, Remus and Peter nearby in the water, 1977

“And you believed him?” James said with a snort. “Magic erodes after a few hundred years, mate, c’mon, you know this. The only reason Hogwarts is still standing is because the headmasters and professors always do upkeep spells.”

“Now who’s being thick? Hogwarts has magic in its own right. The Founders put it there. You would think someone who’s mapped the goddamn place would know that. Christ, Prongs, didn’t you feel it when we’d go out at night? There’s something –”

“Oh, spare me this ‘there’s more things in heaven and earth’ bullshit. Can’t we swim? Didn’t we come out here to bloody swim?”

“Aw, does Prongsie not like being reminded that he can’t sense magic?”

“Fuck off,” James said, and he tried to push Sirius off the rock. But Sirius, who had been anticipating this, got James in a headlock instead. James pushed him off and they grappled with each other for a moment until James got Sirius by the arm and laughed and shouted, “Here, here, look at this!” He held their two arms side by side: his a dark brown and Sirius’s spotted with pink and red and peeling. “You look just like Wormtail!” James said gleefully, and it was Sirius’s turn to say “Fuck off.”

“What? Did someone call my name?” Peter asked, doggy-paddling toward the rock.

“Nah, I was just admiring Padfoot’s sunburn,” James said with a snicker.

“I have some ointment you can borrow,” Peter said helpfully, and Sirius groaned. “What? It’s really helped!”

“Oy, oy!” James said, springing to his feet. “Let’s all take a jump! Get up here, Wormtail. Where’s Moony? Moony!”

Remus, who was floating nearby with his eyes closed and his arms and legs outspread, lifted his head, blinked, and said, “Whassat?”

“We’re jumping!” James called as he pulled Peter onto the rock.

“Oh,” Remus said slowly. “Alright then.” And with that he pulled himself out of the water and shook it from his hair. Like James, he had browned not burned; his skin had turned a warm, lovely shade that Sirius thought almost looked like caramel or café au lait – or toast, which was his favorite, never mind the bacon or the hash browns. Yes, Remus was like toast dipped in honey, or running over with melted butter. And Sirius knew that because when he looked at him just then he could taste it at the back of his tongue: something wonderful, something he wanted more of.

Oh, he thought. Oh, no. That boy.

The merciful burning, blazing sun had already scorched his cheeks with red, so no one knew that he was blushing. He stood with the others, his insides and outsides scorching, the water a cool blue invitation, but when James said “jump!” he didn’t.

He was hit on all sides by their splashes, he dripped with the water that had touched them, had touched him, and it was too hot to think past his first thought, too hot to wonder how or why or when, too hot to do anything but take a belated, fumbling step towards the water and watch the island rise over his head as he fell.

Sirius, beneath an olive tree at sunset, 1977

When the sun was so high in the sky its glare pierced through everything the entire island, even the sirens, bowed before its heat and went silent. In the small village the lanes with their whitewashed tracery emptied out, the few shops and restaurants there were closed their blue shutters, and James, Remus, and Peter fell asleep on cushions on the sitting room floor. Only Sirius was left to keep vigil over the white and curved houses, the scrub brush and the stones, the coves and the reef, the shoreline and the endless sea.

He went out walking, half-blinded by the glare, sweat spreading through the back of his shirt and trousers, rolling down his arms and even getting in between his fingers. I’m melting, he thought, and remembered that he had once said the same thing when he was six and Regulus had caught him crying and he had had to give a reason. “I’m melting,” he croaked out now, into the stifling stillness. “I’m melting.”

He meandered across the island, from the cove where it was safe to swim, to the rocky beach and the dock where the sirens usually sang, to the toppled pillars and the statue with its lost arms and eroded face on the southern tip, and then at last to the one place the sun couldn’t find him: the grove of trees at the island’s heart.

He dove into the shade the way he dove into the water and here, just like in the ocean, he felt overwhelmed by it and couldn’t breathe. He felt it at the back of his throat, like a burr was lodged there: magic, old, powerful and encircling him like walls. He closed his eyes, tensed the way you weren’t supposed to when you knew the hex was coming your way, and then realized that this was different, that this magic was breathing.

Dryads. Curled up into the shapes of trees, turned as sluggish and silent as everything else on the island. He crept past them as he had crept past his friends, half-hoping they would wake and give chase, half-hoping they wouldn’t.

He tucked himself against the trunk of a tree he was certain was a tree and wondered how so much could be happening to him at once. In the morning, when he had gone to the dock the sirens had woven Remus into their song. Come down here, Sirius! Remus is waiting. He had visions of Remus standing in the entryway to Grimmauld Place and it was all wrong. He didn’t belong there. Nothing bright did.

The heat was all-consuming even in the shade, and Sirius, his lips cracked and his tongue dry, began to have mirage thoughts, impossible thoughts. If I kissed him, if he let me, if he kissed back – what would I do?

The sun slid from its zenith; the sky brought out its best colors.

If she hadn’t hexed me, if she hadn’t shouted at me, if she had only told me she loved me – what would I have done?

A leaf brushed against his face and a tree branch tapped him gently on the heat.

“I’m melting,” he told the dryad. “I’m melting.”

James in the doorway, Sirius on the bed, 1977

“We’re going to Aeaea.”

“Have fun.”

“C’mon, Pads. Barnabas and another professor are doing a demonstration of a spell created by Circe. You remember Circe, yeah? Greatest Transfiguration witch who ever lived? The only woman you’ve ever loved – apart from McGonagall?”

“Take a picture for me.”

“Pads…”

“I’m tired, James.”

The sound of the waves filled the room. The tide lapped against the shore once, twice, and then, “Alright then.”

Sirius curled up on the bed, still dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before, counting the waves as they rolled up to shore, waiting for them to match the rhythm of his heartbeats. Only they never did.

Sirius, just outside the village at night, with two moons, 1977

He stayed out well after dark listening to the sirens sing their tide and sun song before he began to stumble half-blind through the middle of the island, hoping to see a glimpse of white through the cypresses and palms, hoping to feel some tug in his solar plexus, in the place where he always been sure his magic came from, hoping to turn his head and see the ancient temple. But all he felt was the sea breeze and the only white thing he saw was the moon – and Moony.

He was naked to the waist and, somehow, he was radiating light. Lines of white swirled around his body, like the frozen motions of a dance. They trailed over his shoulders like lace and dipped into the waistband of his trousers. It took Sirius several very long moments to realize that those lines of light were his scars and by the time he did Remus had noticed he was there.

He took a step back from Sirius and even in the dark Sirius knew that he was blushing. He cleared his throat and tried to say something while Sirius struggled to restrain himself from pressing his hand against Remus’s lit up body. To the day he died he could never explain how he managed to look away from Remus’s chest and form words.

“You glow,” he said, his voice far too loud for the darkness.

“No, I reflect,” Remus said, and he pointed up. He must’ve expected Sirius to follow the direction of his finger and look up at the moon because when Sirius didn’t, when his eyes remained locked on Remus’s face, his blush deepened and he sputtered, “I – I was only going for a walk, didn’t think about clothes – c-couldn’t sleep, you know.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t sleep? What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight,” Remus said, his voice steadying. “We tried to find you around dinnertime and then figured you wanted to stay out. Were you…were you looking for the temple?”

Sirius hesitated for a moment, and then nodded.

“Did you find it?”

“Don’t you think if I had the first thing I would’ve said to you is, ‘hey, Moony, come look at this ancient magic temple I found’?”

Remus shrugged. “Maybe you would’ve wanted to keep it to yourself.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, it’s just…you’ve been quiet lately.”

It was Sirius’s turn to shrug.

Remus let out a little laugh. “You see?” He went to fidget with the sleeve of his shirt, as was his habit, and when he realized it wasn’t there he clenched his hand around his wrist inside, soft light spilling out from between his fingers, and Sirius found it very difficult to look away.

“There’s food, still,” Remus said. “Unless you already ate with the dryads.”

“No,” Sirius said. “With the sirens. Great plates of salt water and me, screaming.”

“So it was dinner and a show, then?”

Sirius laughed. “Yeah.”

Although it was almost impossible to see each other’s eyes in the dark, Sirius knew they were looking right at each other. His own skin began to feel radiant; he wondered if Remus could feel the heat coming off him. He was startled when Remus suddenly glanced away and upwards, and then he followed his gaze and his breath caught in his throat.

Remus and the moon were not the only things shining brightly tonight: there were stars, so many stars, thousands more than he had ever seen in London, more than he had ever seen through his telescope in Astronomy class, more than he had ever seen outside the Potter’s guest room window. It took him far longer than usual to find his own star.

“There’s my family,” he whispered without thinking. Regulus. Orion. Bellatrix. Andromeda. Even his mother was up there: Walburga Estella. She was everywhere up there.

He felt something cool on his wrist and realized that Remus had, ever so gently, pressed two fingertips to the back of his hand.

“There’s leftover spanakopita and moussaka,” he whispered.

“What about any stuffed grape leaves?” Sirius asked, and this time his voice was too quiet for the darkness.

“Yeah,” Remus said, lowering his voice to match Sirius’s. “I saved you a few.”

They returned to the house, lit five candles in the kitchen, and Sirius picked apart two stuffed grape leaves while Remus made tea. He put a cup of it in Sirius’s hand and, after taking an absent sip, Sirius said with surprise, “This is Darjeeling.” He had been going without tea since they’d gotten there; he had spat the mountain tea Barnabas prepared them their first morning back into the cup and decided he could go without for a few weeks.

“Yeah, I brought a few in case…in case I got homesick,” Remus admitted.

“How many have you used?”

Remus tapped the side of the cup with his finger. “This is the first.”

“Ah,” Sirius said, curling his fingers around the bottom of the cup, deliberately touching the spot where Remus’s fingertip had just been before bringing the cup to his lips.

“I actually…” Remus paused, let out a little, jagged laugh, and then went on, “I actually nearly forgot about the moon. I went out to see what phase it was in. Which is stupid because I know what phase it’s in. I can always feel it. It’s just that here…I forget, somehow.”

“That’d be the sun damage to your brain,” Sirius said, but his head was tilted to the whisper of the tide coming in through the window and the distant calls of the bats, and he could smell the night blooming flowers and the leftover spices from dinner, and he could feel the wild touch of the island’s magic higher up inside him than usual, in his chest, near his heart, and he knew exactly how Remus could’ve forgotten himself and the moon.

“Do you want another?” Remus asked, and Sirius looked down and saw that he had finished his tea.

He nodded.

“A little whiskey with this one, yeah?”

Sirius nodded again; he would’ve kept nodding at anything Remus asked, he would’ve agreed to anything so that Remus would stay here, in this kitchen, in this small bubble of golden light, with him.

Sirius, James, Remus, and Peter eating lunch at a café on Aeaea, 1977

The wind snapped the umbrella over their heads, the ocean pooled into a magnificent blue below them, and the waiter was piling their table high with plates of food that Peter was still mispronouncing and Sirius barely registered any of it because Remus, smiling, was in the corner of his eye.

Wanting Remus was a troubling thing; it made questions rise to the fore of Sirius’s mind, questions he had never thought he would have to ask himself. But I like girls, don’t I? But he’s only my friend, isn’t he? For days he was at once uncomfortable and ecstatic over the thought of actually touching Remus; whenever Remus was near he could feel his skin prickling.

He could never pinpoint how this changed, how this wanting became troubling in a good way. He only knew that he began to feel towards Remus the way he often felt towards an especially daring prank in the moments before they began it: the stomach-knotting tension between the thought of failure (and detention) and the pulse pounding exhilaration at the thought that they might pull it off entirely, get away scot-free.

The food at the center of the table got inhaled: Peter devouring most of the saganaki in minutes, lemon squeezed over the stuffed grape leaves before they too disappear, the mussels swallowed and their shells licked clean, the bread swirled through the olive paste or the tzatziki, and the lone salad neglected until Remus pulled it toward him. The waiter forgot the forks, so Remus took the hunk of feta in the salad’s center between his fingers and broke it apart so they could all share. The feta had been drenched in olive oil, and now Remus’s fingers were dripping gold.

He couldn’t make himself take it when Remus offered it. It was too early, and he worried that it would give too much away. All Sirius managed to eat at that lunch was bread – bread dipped in honey, bread running over with melted butter. All Sirius did at that lunch was sit, with his eyes half-closed, feigning a snooze, watching Remus out of the corner of his eye.

Sirius and Remus in the cave by the cove, crushed seashells at their feet, 1977

Their laughter kept echoing. There were moments when it was even louder than the sound of the surf. They stumbled up over the shells embedded in the sand, couldn’t seem to find a place to put their feet, but who cared about feet when you were flying?

Remus’s hand was tight around Sirius’s wrist for balance and then suddenly his free hand went to Sirius’s mouth. “Shh,” he said, and the sound was studded with suppressed laughter which spread throughout the cave walls and came back and back at them.

Sirius laughed behind Remus’s hand, closed his eyes and tried to breathe through his mouth.

“Are you licking me?” Remus hissed, but he didn’t take his hand away.

He didn’t take his hand away.

“Were we – were we supposed to be doing something?” Sirius asked, and his words echoed against Remus’s palm.

“We’re playing a game,” Remus whispered, each word carefully enunciated. “We’re playing drunk hide and seek.”

“Oh,” Sirius said, giggling, and then he gasped, “James! James is ‘it.’ Oh, shit. Shit.”

“Shh. He won’t find us if we’re quiet.”

“So we should just stay here?”

“Yeah, we’ll stay here together just to be safe.”

“Okay, then. Just to be safe.”

Remus and Sirius on the floor of the sitting room as the sun rises, 1977

There was a still full bottle of retsina between them, forgotten, and a cup of Darjeeling in Sirius’s hands, long gone cold. There was an ache in Sirius’s back from sitting up all night (all night!) watching Remus glowing in the moonlight coming in from the open window and then dimming as it set. But there had been more than watching. They had been talking all night (all night!).

The bats called out to each other in their creaky voices as they returned to their caves, and the sea, which had deepened to Homer’s wine dark during the night, was again lightening, becoming blue.

Remus held his hand out the window, his wrist brushing against the pink bougainvillea that grew around the frame. “It’ll rain later today,” he said, yawning, gesturing towards the cloudless sunrise.

The oncoming rain, the tide, the sunrise, the bougainvillea, the wind: Sirius could feel all of it in his blood, the island’s long-burning magic and he knew, without a doubt, that if he left this room right now he could find that temple, he could enter its long abandoned halls. The magic was magnetic in him; it would show him the way.

But he couldn’t move. If he moved he would miss this: Remus’s eyelashes fluttering sleepily against his cheeks, his neck bowing as he leaned onto the windowsill, the sound of his breath deepening, the surety, as deep in his blood as his magic, that what he felt was more than just the need to touch him, that he was in love with Remus now.

Sirius and James in the kitchen, eating cereal covered in honey, 1977

“Bloody rain,” James grumbled, shoving his spoon into his mouth.

“Uh huh.”

“Barnabas says it’s going to rain for the next few days, which is bollocks. We haven’t got that many days left.”

“That’s too bad.”

James scraped his spoon against the bottom of his bowl, gave Sirius a careful look. “Alright, Padfoot?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah.”

James smiled wider than Sirius had seen in a while and poured some more cereal into his bowl.

“Good.”

At night, the candles burning out, the rain getting in, Remus and Sirius, 1977

The humidity lay thickly over everything. It got in through the crack in the door, it wafted in through the open windows, it slung itself over their shoulders and necks and still Remus put the kettle on and made tea. There were crumbs from the feta me meli they’d just eaten dusting the tabletop like confetti, the rain made their voices sink naturally into whispers, the candles were burning low and dim, and the whole world felt like a secret begging to be shared.

Remus set the cup down between Sirius’s hands. “This is the last of the Darjeeling,” he said with mock regret. They were leaving in two days; the amount of tea hardly mattered.

Except it felt like it mattered to Sirius. He took the cup in both hands and blew off the steam. On Aeaea, they had gone to the university’s temple, where the students still left notes for Circe and Athena, praying for good luck in their exams and experimentations. They had poured offerings of wine and milk and honey out along with their prayers. Sirius had seen one young witch do this; he had watched her lift the cup up, bow her head, and then tilt the cup gently, as if to someone’s lips.

The rain made every moment feel elastic, like it had come before or it would last forever. An instant ago Sirius had thought it still might be too early, and now he thought it might almost be too late.

He lifted the cup up, held it out to Remus. He expected a rebuff, an, “oh, no, I don’t want any,” but instead Remus let out a laugh as soft as the candle flame and Sirius was allowed to press the cup to his lips.

Steam was still curling off the tea, and Sirius worried it would burn Remus, so he just held the cup there, right at his bottom lip, and immediately began to feel awkward.

Remus let out his soft laugh again. “It seems like this might be better with wine.”

“Should I get some?” Sirius asked, too eagerly.

Remus shook his head. “James drank the last of it.”

“Fuck.”

Something flickered through Remus’s expression. He glanced down at the tea and, gently, tilted the cup towards himself and took a sip. He disentangled the cup from Sirius’s fingers and then held it out to Sirius, who closed his eyes as he drank, who kept them closed as the cup was taken away and the barest, most fleeting kiss was pressed against his lips.

He kept his eyes closed until he heard Remus’s chair being pushed back and Remus standing up, his face out of reach of the candle’s light, but the invitation still clear.

Come here, Sirius. Come with me.

He followed him past the dim, shimmering candlelights, deeper into the darkness and the pattering of the rain and the churning of the sea, into some part of the house that Sirius had not known existed until Remus pulled him there, to his knees, to the cushions that had no color in the darkness and the walls that no longer existed, the place where Remus kissed him for the first time with hunger, the place where he responded for the first time with need.

They were down there so long the rain stopped and started again. The moon came out for a while, scudding its light across Remus. Leave it, leave it, Sirius begged, when Remus went for the curtains. He trailed a finger along a scar that started at Remus’s collarbone, the reflected moonlight gathering around his fingertip like silk. He did this for long, luxurious minutes in which Remus’s sighs and hitched breaths mingled seamlessly with the hush of the sea and wind.

“I don’t – I don’t know what I’m doing,” Remus whispered when the rain came back.

“I can beat that,” Sirius replied, bending to lick a raindrop off Remus’s earlobe. “I never know what I’m doing.”

He caught Remus’s laugh at the back of his throat as they kissed, which he deepened and deepened, until they were as far down as they could go, until there was no rain, no wind, no ocean, until there was nothing but skin against skin and sighs and each other’s heartbeats so near, so near.

Sirius, wandering through the rain, laughing, 1977

He told the wind and the sea what they already knew. He shouted it to the sirens and whispered it to the dryads. He lifted his hands up to the lightning and the raindrops and took no cover until he saw the little house at the end of the lane, its face half-covered with bougainvillea, the paint chipping from its shutters, the lights on in its windows, and Peter and James and Remus inside.

“I love you,” he whispered when Remus came to meet him at the door.

“You’ll get everything wet,” Remus whispered back, but he wrapped his arms around Sirius all the same.

Sirius and Barnabas on the dock, loading the boat, Remus and James talking on the beach, Peter near the water taking pictures, 1977

“So, did you find it?”

Sirius looked up at Barnabas. “Huh?”

“The temple.”

Sirius let out a laugh. “Oh. Yeah. Sure I did.”

Barnabas gave him a knowing look and then began to shout. Sirius had almost dropped one of the trunks in the water because he’d been looking over at the beach, at Remus, who, it seemed, could reflect sunlight too.

Sirius and Lily under an umbrella on the beach, Peter, nearby, napping, 1978

“So you’ve conceded defeat as well?” Lily asked, stepping beneath the umbrella, which had been magically enlarged so the shade it gave off was as large as a room. She was wearing a green bikini and where she wasn’t red she was smeared with sunscreen.

“Defeat? Ha! I’m planning my counterattack,” Sirius said. He was, in fact, lying on his side, applying aloe to his burns.

“Yes, well, do let me in on your plans to defeat the sun,” she said, unrolling her towel and sitting beside him.

“It’s going to be a war of attrition, dear Evans,” he said, handing over the aloe.

“Yes, I have heard legend that if you wait long enough the sun simply goes away.”

“Precisely,” Sirius said, sitting up. He surveyed the beach; for the past two days he’d been trying to find something he could bring back with him to London to put in his flat. He wanted to do this partly so that when people came round they wouldn’t freeze on the threshold and go, “Oh. God. Sirius, how do you live like this?” but also partly – and it made him feel squirmy and unmanly to admit this – for sentimental reasons. When things had been bad the year before he found that if he thought of the sea, or the dryad grove, or the little white house he felt better. “The heat really takes it out me,” Lily had said the day before, around this same time, and Sirius thought that was true. The sun and the sea were like Darjeeling laced with whisky: the edge was taken off, and the mind was slowed enough to appreciate every strand of color that wove itself into the horizon.

He had hugged James for the first time since they’d hit puberty when James had told him his parents had bought that little white house and that they could go to Greece again this summer. His heart had felt buoyed up, the way it did whenever Remus entered the room or snuck into his bed.

He pulled out small, pearly shells from the sand and idly discarded them one by one, an absent smile on his face. Next to him, Lily crawled to the limits of the shade and peered out.

“I hope our boyfriends haven’t run off together,” she said.

Sirius turned over a seashell with his toe and pushed it out of the shade so the sunlight would catch on its opalescent underside. Something inside him was singing, and for a moment he hardly knew why. That boy, Barnabas had said, a year ago; Oh, you and Remus? James had said at Christmas when he’d finally found out; Boyfriend, Lily said now. Sirius had lived too long in the Ancient and Noble House of Black not to know that names meant something, that they could be links between you and other people, that different names were made of stronger material. He had lost his first family, and saw them now only at night, small figures coolly turning in the darkness light years away – which was about as much as he had expected to see of them when he’d left Grimmauld Place. His second family was nearer, but newer, and almost always difficult to navigate. (Was Lily a part of his family now? Were Mr. and Mrs. Potter? How long should he expect Remus to stay?) Names made it easier, if only so he could say, Yes, that’s my boyfriend. Or, yes, she’s my friend too.

He looked over at her, her back hunched slightly, her skin burned in some of the same places as his. She’d been dating James for a month and then he’d invited her on this trip, the only girl among boys that she knew but not well, the only person standing outside six-going-on-seven years of friendship, the only non-Marauder.

“Hey,” he said, nudging a beer against her hand. “Help me find something for my flat.”

She took the beer, smiled up at him, and they started walking down the beach, kicking over sand, leaving their boyfriends behind in the waves.

Everyone on the steps of the Aeaean University at sunrise, 1978

They ricocheted between the bars and discos, pouring retsina down each other’s throats, awash in sugary pop songs and technicolor lights. Lily was a mirror and caught every piece of light; it took hours for Sirius to realize she had glitter on her shoulders and that her dress was silver lamé. Peter kept stealing laurel leaves from the bushes and his hair looked like a hedge, while James kept threatening, “I’m gonna do it!” as he hoisted himself onto bar tops and careened towards the edge of the docks. Remus had gotten some tropical fruit drink spilled down his front; the air smelled like a rum saturated lollipop whenever he came near. In the discos, he would press himself up against Sirius just long enough that Sirius would turn to kiss him and then he’d move away. It was a game they were playing, the slow-road-to-madness game, the how-long-can-you-last game, the please-I’ll-do-anything-anything game.

Sirius was suffused with heat and prickling need. He had never won this game and he didn’t think he ever would. He looked down at Remus, who was sitting on the last step of the stairs with Lily and Peter, his hair fanning out in the wind, blowing out smoke in that slow, lazy way that he knew drove Sirius mental.

“I’m gonna do it!” James threatened again, only this time he was at the top of a long flight of stone stairs, and he was pointing into the darkness of a courtyard. Sirius realized they had somehow made their way to the Aeaean University.

“I mean it! I’m going to bloody do it,” James said, taking Sirius by the shirt collar and shaking him. “I’m going to the Argo – no, the Aegean – no, fuck. I’m going there. Next year. Applied. Didn’t get in yet but I will. Cross your fingers though. Just in case.” He forcibly crossed Sirius’s fingers and then whispered, “Padfoot?”

Sirius, suddenly mesmerized by the wildness of James’s hair, reached over and pet it, his fingers still crossed. “Yeah?”

“Do you think I’ll get in?”

Sirius blinked, let the double entendre about the status of James’ virginity fizzle and die out in his mind, and then grabbed James by the shirt collar.

“Prongs?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re gonna do it!”

Sirius, Remus, and Peter in the kitchen drinking coffee and making a fry-up, 1978

“Why?” Peter mumbled to himself as he poured out his second coffee. “Why all that rum? Why?”

“Have some bacon, Peter,” Remus said.

“Oh, Merlin, no. I’m going to be sick again,” Peter said, laying his head on the table and groaning.

“Hey,” Sirius said, “do either of you know what you’ll do after – after next year?”

“Ministry,” Peter said without hesitation. “My mum has a friend who works in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, so there probably.”

“Ah, going to do what mummy says then?”

Peter, still lying down, shrugged. “What else am I going to do?”

“Here, Peter,” Remus said. “Some more coffee.”

Peter groaned and sat up as Remus returned to the stove. He had deliberately not looked at Sirius and he had not answered Sirius’s question. Neither of them had.

Remus and Sirius in the bathroom with the door locked and the water running, 1978

Up against the shower wall, hungrily, and with abandoned, Sirius begged, “Please, now yes yes.”

Remus moaned into the space between Sirius’s shoulder and neck, his nails digging into Sirius’s arms. Faster now, out of control now, that spectacular spinning moment before the world whirred away, when he could taste the moonlight on Remus’s skin (it tasted like his sweat, like his breath), when he could watch Remus transform up close. Every full moon he became the wolf; every time he came he became this other part of himself, the most secret Remus, the one who growled in the daytime and bared his teeth, the one who showed his fears. In the autumn, Remus had shown Sirius some Muggle poetry and there was one line in one poem he could never stop himself from going back to: “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” That’s you, he’d thought sadly. Your face is never yours. It’s always for other people, to protect you from them, and them from you.

Only now, at the point of breaking, did the anger come through – the snapping of teeth and the desperate noises – as well as the joy. He laughed, afterwards; he could never help it. And he always seemed surprised, as if he’d dreamed it. As if he hadn’t really believed he’d wake up and find Sirius there.

He bowed his face back into Sirius’s neck and that was all Sirius could glimpse of him, completely bared. Sirius leaned his own head against the wall of the shower and turned off the tap. Steam billowed around their bodies and out the open window; the bougainvillea grew so thickly over the bathroom window that no one ever drew the shade and everyone took their showers in a pale pink haze.

Sirius drew his thumb over Remus’s eyebrow, brushing away his fringe, trying to see him again, but Remus only disentangled himself from Sirius and went to the sink, where stray petals of bougainvillea were moldering prettily. His back was marked with streaks and twists of white against his sun-browned skin; when Sirius closed his eyes he could still see them perfectly. He knew each scar so well if blinded he could have found his way across Remus’s body without stumbling. He loved each scar so well he could have given them all names, he could have written poetry to each of them, he could have spent the rest of his life trying to get Remus to love them too.

“They’re yours,” he had said, the one time they’d discussed this, unable to full articulate the significance of this, how everything he associated with Remus took on a mythical, worshipful quality. Even the holes in Remus’s socks were worth noting to Sirius, which was something Remus just didn’t understand. That made Sirius wonder what Remus felt, if anything, about the things that were associated with him.

There were times when he sometimes wished it was still last year, so they could have another year at Hogwarts ahead of them to hide in broom cupboards and nudge each other’s feet under the table in the Great Hall. They hadn’t talked much, and when they had it had been about nonsense. For most of the year they had been a secret, and secrets were protected and special. Relationships – well, Sirius wasn’t so sure about relationships. He only knew that he wanted to keep his.

“Moony? Move in with me, will you?”

“What?”

“Come on, then. We can get rejected from job posts together.”

Remus snorted and turned to the mirror, which was still smeared over with stream. “You won’t get rejected,” he said, and Sirius was amazed at that, how he managed to not make it sound like an accusation.

“Actually, my mother is running some sort of campaign against me in the Ministry, so it looks like yeah, I might get rejected.”

“Jesus, Sirius, why didn’t you say?”

Sirius shrugged. “Dunno. Can’t really say I wanted much to work in the Ministry anyway.”

Remus still hadn’t turned and the mirror was still obscured, as opalescent as the shells Sirius had finally decided on. He stepped out of the shower and wrapped one arm around Remus’s waist. “Say yes,” he whispered, wiping away the steam, bringing both of them into view. “Move in with me. If we have to we’ll get Muggle jobs and it won’t be so bad because – because we’ll work at the same job, yeah? So we can complain about it together.”

In the mirror Remus, damp-haired and tired-looking, was still inscrutable. He was looking at himself and Sirius could see him hardening around the eyes, so he did what he had to and forced Remus’s chin up, to look at him. “Moony,” he whispered. “Say yes.”

And he got what he wanted: a small but firm nod.

Sirius hugged him tightly, pressed kisses into his hair and neck. “I’ll get a bigger bed and you can move in as soon as we get back. It’ll all be fine, you’ll see.”

The thing was, he really believed that.

Sirius, walking along the beach, looking for shells and sea glass, 1978

He plucked out anything shining from the sand and dusted it off. He wandered very near to the sirens and was able to ignore their songs. He meandered across the island until he could feel his sun protection charm give way, humming idly, without any idea of what was coming.

Sirius, Remus, James, and Peter on the morning of Dorcas Meadowes’ death, 1979

The boxes of James’ books and clothes were still outside the house and unopened when the gray owl came with the Prophet. It fell between the honey and koulouri and lay there with her eyes looking up at them, the last known picture taken of her.

Barnabas threw open the door, took one step inside, and stopped.

“You’ve seen,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” they all murmured, although they had not watched her die, although they had not seen her blood mere steps from the Ministry, although they had not really seen anything yet.

Outside, the sky and sea were two shades of perfect, uninterrupted blue. Outside, the sirens were singing and the dryads were sleeping. Outside, outside, the war had started.

James coming out of the Aeaean University, Sirius in the courtyard waiting for him, 1979

“They said they’ll defer my enrollment,” James said. “I’ll be back next year.”

So confident, so young. Even Sirius could hear it. But he smiled, because he wanted the dark feeling slowly twisting through him to be a lie, because he wanted James to be right the way he always was.

“Sure, mate. Next year.”

Up against the bedroom wall, all the doors locked, Sirius and Remus, 1980

This was the truest thing he’d ever known: Remus’s hands gripping his hair, his teeth at his throat, his voice ferocious as he said, “you you only you.”

Doubt was a shadow slimmed to nothing by the sun, suspicion an illness that a more habitable climate eliminated. Remus didn’t answer questions because he was napping too near to the shore, and he disappeared for hours because the island made people disappear sometimes. When he devoured his veal at night Sirius did not think of the werewolf packs lured out with promises of Dark magic and fresh flesh. He thought, My hungry Moony, and got him another plate.

In London he had found himself reduced to asking, What hadn’t gone wrong? Because to phrase that question in the positive was to invite sleepless nights that required self-administered tourniquets of whisky to stem the pain of the answers.

So, what hadn’t gone wrong, then? Peter was the head of some special division in the Ministry, and James had managed to get Lily to marry him and they’d gone off on a very brief honeymoon to Majorca.

“Majorca?” Remus had said. “Why go there when they have a perfectly good house in Greece?”

It had been the first time in months since Remus had said something Sirius had been thinking; he’d asked James for the key and badgered Remus into leaving for the island the next day.

One year come and gone, but instead of a year it alternately felt like decades or days. They slept back to back the way they did at their flat and didn’t talk much because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say, but they couldn’t walk by each other without grabbing hold, as if it were impossible to see the other and not touch. Sirius would dive down and kiss Remus’s ankles underwater and Remus would come up behind Sirius as he was cooking and nuzzle his nose into his hair and it was at once the way things had always been and the way things had never been. If the war burned off like a fever dream it would be like this: they would know each other this well, they wouldn’t have to worry.

They had sex in broad daylight while the pastries burned, Remus’s head tilted back, his expression unshuttered, exposing every emotion he had ever felt. He came after Sirius, bowing his head into Sirius’s neck as he did. When he looked at Sirius again the crowd of emotions was gone and only his smile, lazy and lovely, was left. And for that moment it was all true: there was no war and no one had ever died and they had always been here in this white house threatened only by the encroaching bougainvillea and the slow erosion of the shore.

Sirius in the dryad grove, 1980

There were times when he thought he could survive on spindrift and the scent of Remus’s skin alone. If someone marooned him here with only a scarf or a glove of Remus’s he could make it. More precisely, if someone marooned him in London with the scarf or the glove and a bottle of sea spray from the island he could make it.

He’d been trying for days to trap the island’s scents into glass because he’d given up on the shells and sea glass. He hardly looked at them anymore in the flat. His eyes were tired. When he closed them he saw Dark Marks and dead bodies, gravestones and flashes of green.

He let the pull of the island’s magic tug him along. He walked right up to the edge of the cliffs and almost walked right into the siren’s bay. It took him hours to realize that he couldn’t feel the magic anymore, that he was following his own impulses straight into the teeth of the island’s most dangerous places. Had he ever felt the island’s magic? he wondered. Had it all just been a daydream?

Doubt can spread even from out under direct sunlight, suspicion was in the blood, his blood, and its proclivity to madness. He sat under the dryad’s boughs with an open jar that once held honey and let the air filter in and out as it pleased.

There were times when he thought he had escaped the day he’d thrown the front door closed between himself and his mother, when he was so sure they would win the war, when he believed that if he could take Remus away and let the sunlight turn him golden again anything bad between them would be crushed against the rocks and smoothed away by the sand.

There were times when he knew he was wrong.

A white house on an island, empty, 1981-1994

Sirius, wandering through the rain, laughing, 1994

He opened his arms to the wind and sea. He breathed in as much as his lungs would hold and let the rain hit his face. The air was headier than the first drink of wine he’d had, the rain more blissful than that first warm bath, and the sea was like nothing but itself: a dream he had thought he’d had once, a dream that had actually been days and weeks and months washed up on this shore, the most sunshine-infused part of his youth and the nights when he would bask in reflected moonlight. He had been happy here, and maybe that was the most amazing thing of all. He remembered being happy, he could practically see the marks it had left on this island’s soil, like a great temple’s ruins. Here, where he had pushed James into the shallows. Here, where he had taken his long walks. Here, where he had fallen in love.

He had a letter in the makeshift bag he’d stowed with Buckbeak inside the island’s cave; the letter had come with a box of dried fruits and a tin of Darjeeling and he read it every night before he went to sleep.

Fly away somewhere warm, Remus urged and Sirius’s heart soared and ached in a single beat. Took him over a decade and a prison sentence to realize he never needed to see Remus’s face to know what emotions he was hiding. Fly away, he had wrote, Come back to me, he had erased. I will, Sirius had responded, in answer to both. I promise I will.

He would fly to North Africa in the morning. He knew he couldn’t stay in a place where he was known. But tonight it was raining and no one was out and he would stay away from the village – although he longed to see the little white house – as he walked.

He went through the grove and felt the boughs tug at his hair, he stood at the edge of the dock and heard the sirens call to him over the rain, he felt that steady tug behind his navel, that pulse of magic that beat inside the island, pulling him along. There had been some things, maybe, that he had imagined, mirages he had conjured out of heat exhaustion and teenage angst, but the island’s magic was not one of them. It was real, as real and as alive as the sea, as the sirens’ song, as the dryads’ slow breathing. As real as his own happiness had been, though he had forgotten that for thirteen years.

He returned to Buckbeak when the rain began to let up, drenched, but still warm. “It was all still there, mate,” he said, patting the hippogriff’s beak. “Right where I left it.”

Well, he mentally added as he opened Remus’s letter yet again, almost all of it.

Remus, alone on the dock, 1996

“He’s dead,” he used to tell the strangers in the dive bars if it came up. “My boyfriend’s dead.”

In the later years, when his gray hairs were too obvious and he was mistaken more for forty than thirty, he would say, “My husband’s dead,” instead, as if that slight veneer of respectability masked the fact that he was in a sticky-floored bar, trolling for sympathy sex or, at the very least, sympathy. And if he couldn’t get sympathy from anyone at the bar, he might well get sympathy from himself; he found when he drank deep enough, his lies had all the weight of truth, and he could let out a few boozy sobs for Sirius, dead much too young – just like Lily and James and Peter and all the other innocents. “I loved him,” he could tell the whole bar openly, without the shadow of Azkaban tainting the sentiment. “I loved him,” he would say, and then he would explain how he had died, always semi-heroically, in a fire, or a flash flood, or a car crash.

What he never said: Sirius fell, slowly, inertly, through an archway, through a veil, and we never even saw his body hit the ground.

Sirius being dead, it transpired, felt exactly the same as Sirius being in Azkaban: loss was loss. His vindication in the press meant nothing. The sudden outpouring of warm feelings for him from the Order was frivolous, a pointless nicety. Just as the news that Voldemort had been vanquished by baby Harry had meant nothing. Just as all the parties and the fireworks had been frivolous.

The only thing that seemed to matter was red, a streak of it, hitting Sirius in the chest before he fell.

“She Stunned him, she didn’t kill him!” he argued with Dumbledore, much more loudly and relentlessly than he had when he’d questioned Sirius’s guilt after the verdict to send him to Azkaban. Now as then, Dumbledore was patient, but Remus could see that Dumbledore was allowing this only so Remus could vent his feelings and to move him swiftly through the stages of grief.

They were all doing this: Moody with his offers of whisky and brandy, Molly with her baskets of food and nudges towards Tonks, Tonks with her lingering hugs and quiet invitations to her flat. They all wanted him to forget, to move on, to chisel more neatly the second date on the gravestone they’d bought for Sirius, the one that marked neither the place he’d died or his body.

Was it the flash of red, that small, sizzling hope that kept him up nights and made him incapable of accepting these offerings made towards his grief? Or was it the absence of the body, being denied a chance to cut a lock from his hair, to take from him the tattered clothes he’d been wearing and wrap him in silks, to get to say good-bye?

It was both. It was neither. It was facing the long darkness of another war, but this time alone. It was facing the long darkness of the rest of his life, alone again. It was the letters he wrote and couldn’t send to Harry. It was all the things he couldn’t forget, those memories of crystalline waters and fine white sand, memories which had begun to seem more and more like dreams, because how could they have really happened to him? How had he ever managed to be so young and so happy?

That was why he had come back. He had to see if it was real.

He was prepared for disappointment, for the dull colors of reality to clash against the vibrant hues of his memories. He was prepared for the truth to sink in, like some unpalatable and unchewed food lying heavily in his gut, just the same as it had always felt whenever he’d sober up and remember that Sirius was in Azkaban, not dead like he had said. Disappointment and cold truths were the leitmotif of his life, and why should this be any different than any other day of it?

(“Shh,” Sirius would have said. “Shh, you grim bastard. There’s only room for one morose navel gazer between the two of us and it’s not allowed to be you. Shh, come to bed.”)

He Apparated onto the dock with his eyes closed, half-sick from traveling so far without having eaten anything, tired to his bones. For long moments all he could feel was his head spinning, and there was no warmth from the sun, no wind off the sea, and the island’s beauty had never existed.

Shh. Shh.

In and out, in and out, that deep, repeating shush, as inborn as breath or heartbeat. The sound of the shore being met, again and again, by the wind-tossed sea.

Slowly – so slowly it was as though he were just waking up – he opened his eyes and saw the ocean, its immense, incomparable blue, and then he turned and saw the island.

What did you call a place that wasn’t home but felt like it? He had spent only a few scattered summer days here when he was young, and yet as he walked along the beach towards the cave he and Sirius had once hid in and then up to the cliffs where he used to watch the sun rise, he felt as strongly as he had when he’d gone back to Hogwarts for the first time after graduating. It was like a door swinging open to him in welcome, it was like a light in one particular window and someone waiting up for him.

He felt this more and more strongly as he neared the little white house, which was now less a white house and more of a white and pink house. The bougainvillea had triumphed in the absence of visitors: it wrapped around the house’s front, encasing every wall, growing over nearly everything – except the front door.

Remus pushed aside the flowers, brushed away the petals from his shoes and hair and let himself inside. The door creaked open and in he went, shining light on a decade’s worth of dust and stale air. He opened the nearest window, let more light in, and saw that the boxes of James’s books for the Aeaean University were still stacked by the door, that the chairs he and Sirius usually sat in were pulled away from the table as they had left them, that one of Sirius’s shirts was crumpled up below the sitting room window, and that the cushions they had last napped on were still strewn all over the floor. He remembered that he had made a last minute attempt at cleaning. He had gotten out his wand and Sirius had tugged on his wrist and said, “C’mon, leave it. We have to go. We’ll come back again soon. I think we can get away for a few days during the fall, can’t we?” And Remus, who had doubted that war would allow for that but still wanted to believe that it might be possible, had lowered his wand and let Sirius lead him out.

He had held onto that belief for a long, long time. Even as things fell more and more apart, even as the rows and the ugly remarks increased between them, even as James and Lily were forced to go into hiding with Harry, somewhere at the back of his mind was always the sea and the bougainvillea, the cafes of Aeaea and the briny taste of olives, the windows all open at night and this house. He had held onto these things for so long. Even after the war, even during Azkaban, and especially in Grimmauld Place. Some part of him that was so deep down even the full moon’s light couldn’t reach it had trusted that they could come back here together. More than that: they could end up here. Set up the guest room for Harry, buy a boat or a little shop on Aeaea to tend, and live within reach of the sun’s warmth and the sea.

That was why this felt like home, he realized. Because he had always expected it to be.

The light on the dust covered boxes of books and cushions was suddenly too much. He closed the window and left the house at a near run, each breath painfully heavy with brine and the scent of the sea. When he made it back to the docks he was practically choking and had to sink down to his knees to catch his breath. The sea ran blue and clear below him and he could see the sand shifting constantly and small fish darting ceaselessly through the shallows. He watched them, their small short lives lived beneath this sun, this water. He watched them and he wondered what he would do now. Should he gather up the things that Sirius loved best – his favorite books, his leather jacket, the watch Remus had saved up to buy him for his 20th birthday – and bury them beneath the gravestone so at least something would rest there? Would he go to bars now and tell the strangers there that his husband was in prison, wrongfully accused? Or would he hold on to that fleeting flash of red from Bellatrix’s wand, the way he had held on to the island for all these years, until it cut too deep to feel anymore, until it was all he had?

He bowed his head against the dock, contorting himself in a way he usually only did on the full moon, as out by the reef the sirens began to sing.

Their song was like the ocean: the rise and fall, the sudden swells, the temptation to go out to it. It was dangerous for him to stay and listen. He was very near the edge of the dock, very near the edge of his control. He could feel their song in his blood the way he could always feel the full moon rising: potently and inexorably. Just as he did every month before the pain set in he yearned to give himself over to it, this tremendous, terrible, beautiful thing.

And just as he did every month when he remembered what he would become, he fought it. He rose up from the dock and began to pull himself away from their song. He had almost made it when he heard them singing, out of so many unfamiliar Greek words, one word that he knew.

Sirius, Sirius, Sirius.

He stopped, rationalized. Sirius’s name was of Greek origins; that’s how they had always known his name – even though they strangely pronounced it closer to how the English did than the Greeks. And they were only saying Sirius’s name to lure him out into the water. That had to be what the rest of their song was saying: Come to us. We have Sirius. And yet, they were no longer singing any words beyond Sirius’s name.

He looked back at them, he couldn’t help it. He saw them, their bright, bobbing heads, their hair like the shimmers of a heat wave, as one by one they ducked beneath the water, their song thinning, until only one of them was left to cry out Sirius! before she, too, dove beneath the blue.

Remus could not understand what had just happened. And he could also not understand why, although the sirens had stopped singing, he could still feel that pull in his blood, like something powerfully magic still lingered in the air or the earth. Sirius had always talked about this feeling, he remembered. Especially during their first summer here when he would wander, his eyes half-closed, through the dirt paths and into the trees, pulled along by something more than whim. He had trusted it to lead him, even though the magic was old and rotting and probably wasn’t really there at all. Remus had always found it charming that Sirius believed so implicitly in the strength of ancient magic and yet he had always secretly thought that what Sirius was really feeling was brought on by the heat or dehydration. But now he could feel it, like a second pulse inside him, and just as the sea could turn from calm to squalls in an instant so did his doubt rise back into hope.

“The island hides people,” Barnabas had told the four them, their very first day. “But only some people. Only the people it takes a liking to.”

Remus clambered up the beach and up to the cliffs. The sun had just set and darkness was closing in around him. He followed the subtle pull of the island’s magic blindly, for hours, never quite sure if he was doing it as one last tribute to Sirius, or because he wanted to see what the island would show him.

He walked along the edge of the cliffs, and along the shore by the cave as the tide came in, trusting the magic, as Sirius had. He let the night spend itself around him and he didn’t rest and he didn’t slow, though sometimes he would turn, thinking he had seen a flash of red through the trees or overhead. There came a point where the one thing he was left believing was that this is what Sirius would have done, that this was what Sirius had done, and somehow that was enough.

When the sky began to turn pink in the east the pull of the magic died away and Remus was left standing near the dock where he had started. His throat closed up and his eyes were wet; in the night it had almost felt like Sirius was with him.

The moon disappeared beneath the horizon and Remus knelt and picked up a shell, one of the pearl colored ones that Sirius used to like to bring to the flat. He cleaned it off, turned it over in his fingers, and took a deep breath. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t leave empty handed.

He was ready to return to London, ready as he would ever be to rejoin the war, and so he turned to head back up the beach and that was when he saw the temple.

Sirius and the island, 1977

The storm had ended and the sky had cleared enough so that the sunrise could be seen. Not that Sirius was paying any attention to the sunrise. He could still smell Remus on his skin and if he closed his eyes he was certain he would see Remus naked and glowing, his head tilted back, his throat bared, his lips kiss swollen. So few things were ever better than his daydreams and somehow this had been one of them.

He sighed – actually sighed – and leaned against the outside wall of the house, the bougainvillea drooping into his hair. It was near daybreak and he had just watched Remus sneak back into the room he was sharing with Peter. He had given Sirius a smile before he’d gone in, a lovely crooked smile that Sirius had never seen before, that, he realized, was a smile just for him. What he had felt right then was too big to be contained within walls and so he had left the house to give what he felt space enough to spread. Since he had left Grimmauld Place he had felt adrift: without family, without a home, a charity case that took up space in the Potter’s guest room. But somehow, over the past few weeks, it had felt less like he had flown here on a borrowed broom because his best mate’s parents felt sorry for him, and more like he had washed up on this shore after years at sea. He had been expected here, somehow. And someone had been waiting for him.

It was early, and he knew it was early, but it hadn’t felt early at all. Being with Remus had felt like a reunion, like they were both places the other knew well, like they were both each other’s homes.

He smiled again and breathed in so deeply he could practically taste the island’s magic: sweet as ozone, thick as honey, sharp as the sweat he had licked from Remus’s neck. He brushed away the flowers and meandered away from the house, half-swaying. He felt like he could scoop up the remaining stars into his palms to keep, like he could lift Atlantis from the depths of the sea, like he could outrun the sun’s light; it was a hell of an afterglow.

He walked for what felt like hours, though the sun’s position on the horizon didn’t change, but he didn’t walk far. He went just outside of the village and then stopped, because he had reached the temple.

It was smaller than Sirius had thought it would be, an intimate collection of columns and cornices, its marble still as white as snow, its fires still burning. He was not surprised to see it. He had practically known that it would be waiting for him today.

Without a second thought or reservation he walked up its steps, his bare feet on cool marble, and he entered the temple. Inside, it was like night had come again – the spaces between the columns were dark and he would swear he could see moonlight – and although he could see that there was no one else there, he felt as if Remus were with him. He smiled to himself, feeling warm, and thinking that James was going to have a field day with how soppy he’d become once he told him.

He continued deeper into the temple and saw that there were no carvings anywhere, no indication of what god the temple had been built for. In the temple’s center there was only a single archway, and a veil.

The archway stood alone and led to nowhere, the veil fluttered in a wind Sirius couldn’t feel, and magic, so powerful that Sirius could feel it in every part of him, was radiating off of it. He had come to the heart of the island’s magic, and the island had allowed him to see it.

Sirius closed his eyes to bask in it. It felt, somehow, so familiar. Like the sea had been familiar the first time he’d seen it, like the little white house was familiar to him now. There was a word for this and he had always known it but had never been able to apply it to himself. It was welcoming, it was comforting. It was homecoming.

The feeling of Remus being there was stronger now, and he could even feel James now too. Without hesitation, without opening his eyes, he went to them. Straight into the archway, straight into the veil, he went for the first time into magic so vast and unknowable it rivaled even death.

Beyond, the sun had started shining, the sea was rasping against the shore, and Remus was waiting.