Remus found no peace in it.  Never again.

The potion was meant to let him keep his mind during the change.  That description had obviously been designed by someone who had never taken the potion.  A more accurate tale spoke of a few thin strings of sanity tying back a snarling, baying animal, a twisted thing that could smell meat and had tasted it before, tasted it so recently.  The memory of blood, rich copper hot, the wet snap of bones and the sound of human screams taunted it, dangled an incentive just out of its reach, and only the faint notion of ‘don’t, shouldn’t, can’t’ kept the thing on a leash.  Each time the litany got softer, weaker, fainter, buried under the growing knowledge that shouldn’ts and can’ts were far more wrong than any hunt.  A human thing, this notion of conscience, and mercurial at that.  To feed had been forgivable before.

They had given the beast medals.  A dozen Deatheaters torn to shreds in the name of heroism, or what was called heroism by those who had never been on the battlefield and those who didn’t know that it had nothing to do with choice.  The beast was not particular about where it fed. That night Severus had been missing for months, and there had been no potion.  Desperation and hunger and fear had made Remus walk onto a Scottish moor, smell Severus’s blood and the stench of a hundred Unforgivable Curses, and let go of the beast’s leash.

It had been blind fucking luck that the beast had stopped with the Deatheaters.

And now the important men with the silver medals were nowhere around to see that the beast wasn’t satisfied, that the feast had only made it hungrier, that the ‘intact mind’ trapped inside the beast was slipping down drowning under the pounding snarling fury.

Dawn crept over the horizon, rosy fingers pushing the darkness back and painting the sky in shades of blue and gold.  The first flare of the sun, bright red and searing, peeked over the hills in the distance and the swollen moon faded at the sight of it.  The beast got one precious glance at light spilling through a crack in the blinds before the curse wrenched and began to turn in on itself.

It hurt.  Of course it hurt; it always hurt, bones cracking and shrinking, ligaments twisting back into a human shape.  The wolf-man-thing twisted on the floor, grasping at the air with almost-fingers as a howl and a scream spilled from its mouth.  The change was always quick, an odd touch of mercy from a curse that was anything but kind.  Between one ragged breath and another, it was done.  Where there had been a wolf, there was only a man covered with scratches and slick with sweat.

The air stank of beast and blood, heady and disgusting.  It took too much effort to roll on to his side, his breath coming in halting ragged gasps.  His body didn’t want to move, struggling hard enough already to turn back to the other shape even with the moon long gone.  He was trembling, shaking too hard to breathe properly.  His eyes wouldn’t open.

Faintly, with senses that seemed clouded and dull, he heard the door open and the click of nails on the wooden floor.  A wet nose brushed his cheek, and he heard a noisy snuffling before something slimey swiped across his cheek.

Reaching up with a trembling hand, Remus touched fur that felt bristly and soft in turn.  His lips turned up in an almost smile, though he wasn’t sure he actually moved.  Rough fur changed to soft skin between one heartbeat and the next, and there was suddenly a hand pushing sweaty hair back from his eyes.  Sirius’s voice sounded smoky and distant.  “All right, Remus?”

Hopefully Sirius wasn’t expecting a response, and breathing would be answer enough.  Anything else seemed beyond him.

A sigh, and then an arm was sliding underneath his back, another underneath his knees.  Sirius was still all corded lean muscle over bone, and Remus himself would never get to an even healthy weight, so it seemed easy enough for Sirius to lift him.  It took too much effort to lift his head and lay it against Sirius’s shoulder, make it a little easier on him.  Neither of them were young anymore.

Stop it, he wanted to say.  Leave me there.  This isn’t a bloody cold, Sirius, it’s a curse.  I’m not your loyal sidekick, I’m a monster, I’ve eaten before and Merlin help me, I wanted to do it again.  Put me down.  Please.

But his mouth wouldn’t move, and by the time he could even manage a dull croak Sirius was setting him down on something soft and giving.  His bed.  Before he could open his eyes, to thank him or protest, the darkness had swam down.

A minute or an hour later, Remus blinked awake.  The crushing fatigue had eased a bit, replaced by mere exhaustion.  He could breathe around exhaustion, focus enough to make sense of the figure perched at the end of his bed.

At first glance, Sirius could pass as a Muggle in his battered pants- jeans, they called them- and a shirt that declared something about a Hershey, Pennsylvania in large black letters.  He had the tip of an eraser in his mouth and a textbook open in front of him.  His expression was just as endearingly intent as it had been when they were both children, studying for one exam or another.  For a moment, despite the Muggle clothes and the too-quiet room, Remus could almost pretend…

Then Sirius glanced up, and those haunted eyes caught his own, and any chance of illusion was torn to pieces.  Even as Sirius brightened, it was all too obvious that everything had changed.

“Well, h’lo.  Glad to see you finally decided to join us.”  Closing the textbook with a snap, Sirius leaned up and pressed a hand to Remus’s forehead.  His skin was cool.  Satisfied with whatever he felt, Sirius sat back and picked up a steaming cup of something off the endtable.  “You hungry?”

Always, between the wolf and his own body trying to recover from what the change burned off.  He could never eat enough to satisfy both. He nodded, not exactly trusting his voice, and managed a weak smile as he took the cup Sirius offered with the stern air of someone’s mother.

Chicken broth.  Trust Sirius to treat the curse like he always had, like some sort of sickness that could be staved off with bedrest and soup.  No matter how many times Remus changed in front of him, no matter how often he had looked at Sirius with the eyes of a wolf, Sirius would never see the monster.  Just the man.

That was the only reason he hadn’t run screaming.  That was why he had almost sent Severus to his death that night.  He trusted Remus implicitly, trusted his control over the beast.  Remus might have appreciated the sentiment more if he knew where the beast stopped and he began these days.

Taking a sip from the cup, Remus blinked at the unfamiliar taste.  He glanced up at Sirius, who shrugged and looked somewhat sheepish.  “It’s Muggle make.  They’ve got a town nearby, has a grocery store and all.  So I walked there.”

Oh.  Bugger, that was right.  Sirius hadn’t had a wand since they snapped his in Azkaban, and no currency for the wizarding world to buy one now that he finally had the right.  Clearing his throat, Remus managed a painful rasp.  “Minerva will give you a pay advance.  I’ll go with you to Ollivander’s, get you a new wand-“

Sirius waved that off, glaring.  “You’re not going anywhere until you can stand without wobbling.  I’ve gotten used to doing without, I can manage a few more days.”

Annoyed, Remus leaned back against the headboard and glared back at him.  “I might look like an invalid, but I assure you, I have done much more taxing with much worse.”

The look Sirius gave him was frankly pained.  It added years to his face, already worn from the war.  “You think I don’t know that?  That’s all the more reason that, in one of the few times you don’t have to drag yourself right out of bed and into the battlefield, you should just fucking rest for once.”

There might have been a time that Remus could ignore the raw pain in Sirius’s voice, but he couldn’t remember it now.  With a sigh, he glanced down into the cup.  He could see no magic in the steam or his own reflection in the surface of the broth.  “All right.  Tomorrow then.”

Sirius huffed out a breath that blew his ragged bangs out of his face.  The man could use a haircut, too, and new robes.  And about twenty pounds added to his frame, but that couldn’t be bought.  Crawling to the headboard, Sirius sat down so that his shoulder was against Remus’s, their thighs almost touching. If he cared that Remus was naked under the thin sheet, he didn’t show it.  Sirius was still in the long transition from subtly flinching at every touch to craving it, needing to soothe the hunger of being alone and hunted for so long.  A month ago, Remus was fairly sure he’d never have gotten so close.  If Remus had been anyone else, Sirius probably wouldn’t even be near the bed.

Leaning his head against Remus’s shoulder, forehead to collarbone, Sirius said so softly the words were almost lost, “I worry about you, Moony.”

Damn it.  One of these days Remus was going to figure out how Sirius could go from aggravating to… well, this… so quickly.  There had to be some sort of antidote.  For the moment, he had to settle for resting his cheek on top of Sirius’s head.  “Don’t.  I’m fine.”

Sirius shook his head, so fiercely that Remus had to lift his head to avoid one of them getting bruises.  “I have to.  If anything-“  The words cut off sharply in his mouth, and he shook his head again as if to flick the thought away.  His voice was falsely, brashly bright as when he spoke again, reaching for the textbook and dropping it on Remus’s thigh.  “So.  What should I teach the kids for the first couple weeks, huh?  I’m torn between this…”

It was hard not to recognize that tone, harder still not to push as instincts built in easier years urged him not to let Sirius dodge.  But seventeen years had changed things, warped things, and where there had once been no secrets there was inside a minefield between them, a place of barbed wire and broken glass where certain things were not to be discussed.  Lily, James, Peter, Azkaban, the night on the moor, whatever nightmares jarred them both awake screaming.

This was obviously one of the minefield topics.

Biting back a sigh, Remus shifted so that one of his hands steadied the book and the other rested on Sirius’s back.  The muscles tensed, wire-tight, under his hand, then eased.  He could feel the knobs of Sirius’s spine against his palm, the flex of each shallow breath.  Sirius still breathed like he was afraid of being heard.  Coping mechanisms had kept Sirius alive through the war, brought him home again, but that didn’t mean Remus had to like them.

“I think,” Remus murmured, “that Manfield McDuggan’s theory of transformation might be a touch advanced for the first week, but you could certainly teach that in the first month…”

Serendipity, in the way that when Remus stopped paying attention and focused on the book, things eased between them.  When he came up for air in the middle of a debate on whether it would be appropriate to change the class’s bully into a flying squirrel and leave it to the other students to figure out an antidote at their own leisure, it was to find that Sirius was leaning warm and heavy against his side.

The faint stirring of hope felt strange after all this time, out of place, especially when the moon was just starting to wane.  His emotions followed the ebb and flow of the moon like tides, and hope was not usually among them.  But there it was anyway, a warm knot in his stomach as he began to cautiously rub his hand along the column of Sirius’s spine.

Sirius didn’t pause in his tirade, which seemed to be something about how much they’d have appreciated it if their professors had turned Lucius Malfoy into a frog and besides, it would build character.  He didn’t, in fact, react at all unless one was watching very closely.  Only then would one notice the almost imperceptible way he leaned back against the touch.

Remus noticed, though, and felt the warmth stir like someone coaxing a fire back to life from a faint glow in the coals.  For the moment even the fatigue that made his arm tremble, the rumble of the wolf sleeping under his skin, didn’t matter as much.  Sirius was here, and their war was over.  All they had to do was build up their lives from the ashes, piece by piece.

And all Remus had to do was make sure that the beast didn’t knock it all down again.