Sweat/Heart.

Every morning Remus watches Sirius sleep, the taut muscles, the tangled black curls clinging to his forehead and neck – so thin, too thin, his face - and hates himself. The dawn light is clean light. It will not let him hide from himself, the one who believed his love a traitor and so became a traitor to his love.

Sirius sleeps on his stomach, squirms and kicks and throws off sheets. His back is scarred, where once it had been clean. Remus would take every marking himself, etch them into his flesh. On his own skin, they vanish into his own flesh wounds. On Sirius’ skin, they make him ache to the bone.

Sirius jerks awake, opens jet black eyes and screams.

He does this every morning.

Every morning, Remus holds him until the screaming stops. He murmurs and consoles until Sirius calms, clutches his hands and sleeps again.

Every morning, Remus hates himself.

* * * * * “Word from Hagrid,” Sirius says at the dinner table. “He’s tracking down the wyvern Snape needs for the potion.”

“Has anyone told him we’ll have to kill the wyvern to do it?” Remus asks.

Sirius shrugs. “I don’t know. As long as it’s not me.”

“I’ll do it,” Remus says immediately, and is very surprised when Sirius curses him and throws a book on the ground and slams the kitchen door.

“Moony!” he shouts.

“I’m sorry,” Remus says.

Sirius’ face is anguished. “Stop being sorry,” he commands. “You’re always sorry! I don’t know if you love me, or if this is pity.”

Remus cannot speak for a long moment, and when he does, it is not the right words: “I do. I do love you,” he says, idiotically, repetitively. But Sirius listens like a dog, for the tone, not the words. Sirius hears what Remus does not say, and leans in to kiss him, long and sweet.

Then he pulls away. “I learned a poem,” Sirius says matter-of-factly.

“You learned a poem,” Remus murmurs. He wonders if the night can bring any new astonishments. Perhaps Dumbledore will slam the door open and declare undying adoration for both of them.

Sirius has black eyes, like coal, like obsidian. Things shaped beneath the earth, hardened in flame before they saw daylight. When Sirius looks at Remus, intent and hard, his eyes burn. “I learned a poem,” he says, and then he says the words and Remus burns too: “Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb and dangerous, ignited, blessed -- always, regardless, no exceptions, always in blazing matters like these: blessed.”

Remus feels something break inside him, and the thing that breaks must have damned up his tears, because they flow scalding down his cheeks, and he shakes and swears and sobs and screams. Screams his self-hatred into the hostile walls of Sirius’ house.

Sirius holds him until the screaming stops.

“I let you go to Azkaban,” Remus says, when he can breathe again. “I thought you were the traitor.”

“Yes,” Sirius says simply. “And I thought you were the traitor. I would have let you go to Azkaban.”

Remus has never really thought about that. He takes long, jagged breaths. Inhale, exhale. Good air in, bad air out. The bad air is for the plants, he remembers, dizzy.

“It's odd the way things work out sometimes, isn't it?” Sirius asks philosophically.

Remus loves a man who can distill twelve years of torment into hackneyed cliché.

“Yes,” he says, and lays his hand on Sirius’ tangled curls. “It’s very odd.”

End.

The poem quotes is “I Love You Sweatheart”, by Thomas Lux, and can be read in full here: http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/dialect/poetry/luxsweatheart.html