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It was their last Christmas at Hogwarts.
Sirius sat in the armchair by the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, several cups of eggnog deep. The alcohol had made his head swim, his thoughts running slow. He narrowed his eyes, gaze drifting across the room to settle on his friends.
The fire crackled in the grate, and a gramophone in the corner played something that kept getting swallowed up by chatter and laughter, so the tune never quite made it all the way through. Everything felt adrift in a warm, amber haze. James, a lopsided paper crown askew on his head, had his arms round Lily and was swaying badly out of time with the music, the pair of them flushed and grinning like idiots. Peter had got into some scrape or other and was fumbling to clean up a puddle of spilt butterbeer, the golden liquid pooling across the floor. And there, just beside him, was Remus. His Moony.
Remus wore that long-suffering look of his, flicking his wand at the mess Peter had made and clearing it in two strokes. The firelight caught him and gilded him in soft amber, and he looked, as ever, soft and warm. Sirius couldn't drag his eyes away. It struck him then like some sort of revelation: he'd been in love with Remus Lupin, properly and hopelessly, for longer than he cared to admit.
Something swelled in Sirius's chest. Right then, he felt certain that if he didn't say it aloud that very instant, he'd burst. Gryffindors were never short on nerve. Sirius, rather the worse for drink, settled on a plan and acted on it at once: he was going to tell his best friend, his Good Moony, Remus Lupin, exactly how he felt, right now. He hauled himself up, wove his way across the room, and dragged Remus off towards a corner.
"Are you okay?"
Sirius heard the confusion in Remus's voice, felt his heart hammering, his mouth gone dry, his palms damp. He was going to tell him — tell him he loved him, tell him he'd gone and stolen his heart without even trying, tell him that all he wanted now was to stay by his side for good, to run beside him under every full moon for the rest of his life, and then—
"I want to be your dog!" The words tumbled out before Sirius could stop them, his head too full of some imagined future.
An awkward silence settled over them.
"Er — cheers?" Remus arched an eyebrow, somewhere between baffled and amused. "But I rather think I'd prefer you stayed human."
Merlin's beard. He'd made an utter mess of it, Sirius thought, mortified, and in his rush to fix things he only made it worse. He clapped a hand over his face and groaned — perhaps he ought to throw himself off the Astronomy Tower, or into the lake and let the giant squid have him—
"Sirius?"
—or go and pick a fight with a dragon; surely that would put him out of his misery. He felt cold all over, wretched and heartsick with embarrassment.
"Sirius……Sirius Black!"
"Yeah?" Sirius choked out.
"I love you too."
Sirius's head shot up, his mind gone blank. It still felt like a dream even as Remus leant in and cupped his face in one hand. Sirius thought he really must have had too much eggnog — how else to explain that when Remus's lips brushed against his, all he could taste was something soft and rich, sweet as melting ice cream.
Sirius opened his eyes. The warmth of that love, that long tenderness, surged towards him and then receded like a tide going out, vanishing beyond iron bars. Wrapped tight in resentment, he curled up on the cold floor, ran his tongue over cracked lips, and tasted nothing but decay and cold.
He'd thought, then, that a kiss like eggnog was only the overture. Now the sweetness was long gone, and the nights he'd spent in Azkaban had already outlasted those gilded years of his youth.