Empyrean

It had been raining that day. A lightly shrouded world that was vaguely gray with metallic, whispering air, and pensive with that element of abstractness an early morning always had. Feeling so much like a dream. The rain had been gentle, and poured with pleasant tempos onto windowpanes; but something about the fireless room and a fading full moon that made him gasp for something that was missing. He needed air.

He needed air.

Because the air was so thin and stretched out, and cold; he needed to go outside and damn it he needed to scream. Breathe in, breath out. Breathe in breathe out breath in breathe out. A cold wind inundated into the dorm room and sent forth fluttering a maroon curtain's shadow. He breathed the rain. The water. The rain.

"Sirius?"

Someone called---James, most definitely.

"Hmm?"

"What are you doing? You'll catch a cold." His voice was sleepy. No wonder, he had been up all night.

"Oh, just watching."

James had stopped asking and went back to sleep then, but surely he must've known that something wasn't right.

He must have.

"And wondering," Sirius added, but it never whispered past his own throat.

Remus had looked so worn later that day, so tired-it made him seem old, although he was barely seventeen. At breakfast they smiled to each other like nothing had happened; in truth, nothing did happen. Sirius had a detention to take care of, and did not make it in time to the Shrieking Shack; but he also knew that he didn't want to be there, to see Remus suffer. To hear his stifled screams and feel so guilty because he didn't do anything to make it easier. Even though there was nothing he could do.

He knew it was selfish.

But he saw no way of telling him. He thought it was a crush, a sort of spring fling that'd disappear after he realize how silly it was. But goddamnit, it was still there. So many days he had spent in front of a mizzled window wondering if this was love. He thought it'd be sweeter. He thought it'd be bitter. Hell, he didn't believe that it existed.

The rain went on for the rest of the week, with leaden, ashen skies as interludes between the rain's marching song. The first aurora, claret tipping treetops, had felt so refreshing and warm, though the hopes it brought turned out to be false---he still couldn't tell him.

James had been quick to figured it out, and told him to get it out to Remus. Days passed so quickly then; and Sirius had tried to make it stop, to make time halt in its steps so that he can grip onto something and catch his breath---and Remus. So many times he had wanted to shout to the barren world that he loved him; simply so that there was some ground beneath his feet and he wasn't falling. Tried. Couldn't. For all his Marauder talent and fearlessness, he couldn't.

It was then that tomorrows ran out, and seven years were gone.

So brief ago was the first Platform 9¾, Sirius remembered, and Hogwarts Express, the first Sorting Song. The first time he and James had found some convenient shortcut that saved them from Filch's wrath. Time was like that; so fully illustrated with mirages that it was not logical at all. He'd have to be gone. Illogical, so very illogical.

That was a bitter day. Like saying good-bye to a long-time lover or hugging mother for the last time. Nostalgia tickling at the back of his eyes more than the wind could dry.

He watched as the Hogwarts castle dimmed away from the express train and couldn't help but to feel wistful. That was it.

Home was no longer home, and now he had no home. He had a living quarter that was far too cold to come back to. He was alone now. Without James or Remus or Peter. Alone to be the ones that would face Death and its green eyes knowing that there would be no escape. It scared him. It scared him more that he hadn't told Remus and he probably would never find the chance.

Quietus would always a day away. His goals were always to stay alive for today, and tomorrow would come as it would. Voldemort or not, with or without someone in his home to make it a home.

All the same. He screamed. The fucking same. Same. Alone.

He realized that day he needed someone by his side to keep him from going slowly insane.

"So what are you doing here?"

His smile was gentle enough to make the sky seem red. Just being next to Remus was like chasing the clouds. Perpetually pleasant because he was so shapeless and indefinable that he seemed to change as Sirius blinked each time, scudding so weightlessly that he didn't feel real. But he was. Who was more real in this world than Remus? Remus was all about self-control, always poised with an almost bitter aplomb mainly because if he loses it, he loses everything. The defining element of a tragic poetry's hero.

"Vacation," Sirius grinned back.

"There's a vacation from saving the world?" there was no amusement in his voice.

"It can hardly be called saving the world," too much truth into that.

Remus had said nothing.

The silence that followed was easy and calm because the ocean's hymn overflowed over the air and all other sounds seemed to have ceased. The sea snarled in each breath it took, rolling to and from the world in its fugacious tranquility, and throttled the psychosis that seemed to be taking over in Sirius's head. Maybe it was Remus that made him sane again.

"It's been a long time, Re."

"Yeah it has."

"What have you been doing?"

"Mostly hiding, actually."

"Oh." His voice faltered into a boyish stutter.

"Yeah, but it has been tolerable."

Sirius tried to smile to him in consolation, only that he couldn't tell what it was that sparked in his own eyes. Compassion? Pity? Love? What had Remus seen?

They fell back onto the seeping sand and gazed out to the sea. It was vast and everlasting, winding and rolling into a sunless sky; but oh, the air had been brackish and bitter. Nothing thick, nothing coagulating, all so stretched out. He remembered an air like this. Back in the rain in Hogwarts. Amid the same thin water. What was it about water that is so agonizing?

"I…missed you."

"Me too."

Sirius needed to reach out to touch him to make sure that he was there, to make sure he himself was there too and not still falling. Falling.

His face was warm. Warm and soft, feeling as formless as he seemed. Humming beside them was a gray sea; flowing above them, a bleak sky. Wind had respired by in a peculiar rhythm sea-winds were wont to pulsate in, and the day seemed timeless. Funny how Sirius had already forgotten how warm another human being could be; how warm Remus was.

Sirius leaned on.

The ocean still droned.

His mouth was languid and relaxed, and tepid with a scent that was him. Remus tasted like the open vastness of unfamiliar skies, like some drifting breaths Sirius had lost long time ago. Remus was the sky, so tall and endless, so utterly alive that only birds seem to be one with it. That was what true flight should be-a closeness of the air just like how a bird flies; without the solidity of a broom under you. There was a true freedom in the kiss that made Sirius wonder that maybe if he fly high enough, he'd be lost forever. He was still falling after all.