End of November
Remus returned on a particularly snowy day. The other three Gryffindors had been out on the grounds all morning, building a snowman that looked disturbingly like Argus Filch doing unspeakable things with a mop... They'd just left his office with another detention on their records, still dripping wet from the snow, and returned to the Gryffindor common room to find Lily Evans staring sadly up the stairs to the boys dormitory.
"Looking for us, Evans?" Potter called, walking over and attempting to put his arm around her, but she ducked away quickly.
"Remus," she said, "He's just got back and I tried to talk to him, but he murmured about wanting to be left alone and went upstairs. He looked positively miserable. I feel awful." She looked about ready to cry.
Sirius hastened up the stairs.
"Oi mate, she's only just said he want to be left alone," called James.
"He doesn't know what he wants," Sirius answered and he bounded off.
Upstairs, Sirius pushed open the dormitory door and stepped inside. Remus was laying on his bed, face down in the pillow. Hearing the door, Remus turned his head and looked over to see Sirius hovering by the door awkwardly. "I don't want to talk about it," he said, and he turned to push his face back into the soft cotton.
"You don't have to talk about it," Sirius agreed, and he walked over and sat down on the edge of Remus's bed and he reached down and gently stroked Remus's spine. He'd touched Rey's back a hundred times over the past four years, but this was the first time since he'd decided to tell Remus how he felt... and it made his tummy flip with excitement. He could feel the scars even through the fabric of Remus's white button-down uniform shirt. "But if you want to talk about it some time, I'll be here for you. I'll be here for you anytime, Rey, for anything. Just so you know."
Remus didn't react.
Sirius inched closer. "You know what James did while you were gone?"
Remus murmured, "I'm sorry, I don't want to talk at all, Sirius. Like about anything. At all."
"Okay."
Sirius paused, still running his palm over Remus's back gently, then he asked, "Would you like me to massage your back a bit? It's really tight, perhaps that'll make you feel better? Get your muscles loosened up...?"
"No," Remus replied.
"Want me to be Snuffles and you can put your fingers in my hair like you enjoy doing?"
"I just want to be alone," Remus whispered. "I'm going to end up alone anyway. You might as well go away now. Just go."
Sirius let his hand fall away from Remus's back. He sat at the edge of the bed, staring at his trainers, not wanting to go away. He glanced back at Remus again. "You're not gonna end up alone..."
"Sirius. Please."
"I'm always going to be here for you, Rey, I'm not going to go anywhere, I'm --"
"Yeah until somebody decides to kill you because you WON'T BLOODY SHUT UP AND LEAVE THEM ALONE WHEN THEY TELL YOU TO!"
Sirius's feelings bruised instantly, and he got up and hurried out of the room.
Remus felt bad for shouting, but shouting had felt awfully good, too, he could do with shouting a bit more, he realized, and a white-hot blinding anger took over him, squeezing all his Remus-ness out and leaving behind a burning desire to break things. He got up and started smashing about the room, knocking books off the shelves and smashing a vial of balm on the floor. He kicked his trunk and tipped over the desk chairs, tore the curtains from his four poster, punched the pillow until feathers burst about the room and grabbed hold of a framed photo sitting on the nightstand by Sirius's bed - the four Marauders, taken sometime the year before that Rey couldn't even recall, and he slammed it onto the floor, the shattering of the glass and cracking of the frame quite satisfying and the picture fluttered loosely, the edges torn a bit.
Remus knelt down in the middle of the mess and cried.
Sirius Black was quiet, which was most unusual for Sirius Black. The quietness spanned over the next week and was remarked upon by several of the teachers and James, too, who kept trying to get Sirius to be his usual self to no result. Remus Lupin was also very much not himself, very snappy, very cranky. Living in the Fourth Year Gryffindor dormitory was a very hard thing to do and James found himself sitting about in the common room with Peter, doing homework to avoid going back up to the room, where he knew Remus was on one bed facing one wall and Sirius was on another facing the other wall, neither speaking to the other, but Sirius too determined not to leave Remus completely alone to vacate the room completely. The more Sirius did this, the more agitated Remus became, the more he snapped and the quieter Sirius got. It was a horrible, vicious cycle.
"We're thinking of moving in with you, Evans," James murmured quietly as the weekend passed away and they were walking between classes, Remus and Sirius walking ahead, together but worlds apart. "It's been rather hell in our dormitory."
"Go ahead and try to go to my dormitory, Potter, see what happens," Lily said, thinking of how violently the stairs would chuck him across the room if he set a single toe on it.
McGonagall even noticed the disparity between the boys and she eyed Sirius and Remus closely. "In hard times," she said thickly, "Our greatest defense is to hold on tight to our dearest friends, no matter how tempted we are to push the world away." She was looking directly at Remus. "A very wise man said that to me once."
"It was Dumbledore, wasn't it?" asked James, "That whole sentence reeks of Dumbledore."
"Yes, it was, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said, nodding.
Sirius stared over at Remus, hoping that he might listen to McGonagall and let him, Sirius, comfort him somehow. But Remus didn't take it to heart, he was too broken hearted to listen to much of anything at all.
The third week of November, a notice went up on the board in the common room announcing, officially, that the Yule Ball would be held the night before the holiday would begin nearer to Christmas.
Remus was still quiet but less cranky and the word depressed was murmured among the students as people glanced warily at him as though he might shatter at any moment. And it wasn't just Gryffindors paying a good lot of attention to Remus's state of mind, but rather all the students in the castle seemed to suspect that Remus's mind was positively anywhere but at the castle. Sirius tried desperately to act like his normal self, but he felt a bit as though Remus's mood directly impacted his somehow, so he couldn't stay buoyant too long before recalling Remus's pain and being too hurt to carry on the way he usually did.
As November was coming to a close, the castle started slowly becoming more and more festive as Hagrid brought in greens and tied them up with big red bows about the banisters of the stairs. Wreaths were hung up about the castle on the classroom doors and the suits of armor were polished and could be heard prepping their vocal chords for their yearly singing of the carols. The first Sirius-y thing Sirius did in a long time was remind the suits of armor of his favorite Christmas carol - with a few small tweaks to the lyrics:
"Jingle Bells, Severus smells, Slytherins make me sick! Jingle Bells, Mopsus face repels, so he and Volemort can suck my --"
"SIRIUS BLACK --" McGonagall caught him at it, and he ran off before she could do anything, ducking 'round the corridor and into one of the secret passageways. McGonagall stood shaking her head, trying to unteach the suits of armor the words, but one of them just clung on to a couple phrases no matter what she did - jingle... sick... Mopsus... repels... - and it kept murmuring the words. "What am I going to do with those boys?" she said, irritated as she had Filch remove that particular suit of armor, to be put in the dungeons for the season so it couldn't be heard.
Frank Longbottom asked Ali Prewitt to the Yule Ball by setting a small Filibuster over the Transfiguration Courtyard one afternoon and Ali threw her arms around him, kissing his cheeks profusely, telling him how excited she was to be going with him a second year in a row. She still had the chocolate frog card, she said, gleefully, and she started flooding Lily with photos of beautiful dresses from catalogs.
Ali pointed out a gold dress, "James would really like that one," she said suggestively.
Lily looked up, "I'm not going to the ball with James."
"But he earned the date fair and square, Lily," Ali reminded her, "You have to!"
"I do not!" Lily argued.
"Well... anyway, that dress would look splendid on you," Ali said.
Lily said, "I dunno if I'm going to go at all."
"You have to go! It's so beautiful - you won't believe how they do up the Great Hall, Lily. It's fantastic! It's like a dream, you'll positively love it!" Ali begged.
Lily shrugged, "I don't really want to go alone."
"That's what Potter's for."
"I'm telling you Ali, Potter could be the last man alive on the planet and I'd still say no."
Ali frowned, "It's too bad because he really likes you a lot, and I think you'd make a delightful couple."
Lily shook her head, "How could you say that? He's a horrible person..."
"I don't know why you think he's as horrible as you do," Ali said, "I think he's rather funny, and he's really nice... He gave Frank a new pair of dragon hide gloves from the Quidditch supply catalog because he saw the old leather ones were torn. Said he didn't want Frank getting a splinter from the beater's bat."
"Doesn't want to lose because Frank got a splinter is more like. There's always an ulterior motive with Potter."
Ali shook her head, "You're literally trying to see the bad in him... You really ought to give him a chance."
But Lily refused.
Sirius sat in Potions behind Remus, cutting up the roots they were meant to be chopping to put in their cauldron. Suddenly he stopped and he pulled out a bit of parchment, and lifted his quill, writing on the paper -- Rey... Will you go to the Yule Ball with me? Sirius -- and he folded it up like a paper aeroplane.
James glanced over, watching.
Sirius chucked the plane. It spun through the air, did a loop-de-loop, and landed right into Remus's cauldron. With a flash and a hiss, the cauldron lit on fire. Sirius's eyes widened. In a hundred years, he never would've expected that to happen. Remus leaped up from his seat and quickly used a couple of charms to put out the fire.
"It would've been a terrible way to do it anyway," James told Sirius later, when Sirius was frustratedly lamenting the fact that he'd finally got the guts up to make a move and he'd managed toset a cauldron on fire. "You need to actually talk to him before you go trying to invite him to balls!"
Sirius sighed. He knew James was right, but he was still skittish about talking to Remus, thanks to how he'd shouted at him and told him to shut up the very first day he'd been back. But the full moon was coming - and Sirius thought that perhaps that would be the time to tell Remus everything that had been boiling within him...