Chapter Text
When Sirius Black was eleven years old his father pushed him down a flight of stairs. As they waited for Sirius to be fitted for a cast, his father would claim that he’d barely touched him. His story was, and still is to this day, that Sirius had stumbled over his own feet. That he was clumsy and uncoordinated, and a bit of a crybaby, too, actually.
And it hardly mattered if he'd meant to send Sirius down the steps or not, because either way Sirius had gone down. Thump, thump, thump, and by the time he’d reached the foyer down below his radius had broken in three places. His arm, and his relationship with his father, were never the same.
Then, on James Potter’s thirteenth birthday, he dared Sirius to jump off the balcony of his new treehouse, and Sirius fractured his fibula. Seventeen and he turned too fast on a wet exit ramp and crashed his motorcycle into a guardrail. Broken collarbone.
Point is, he’s familiar with the feeling of a broken bone, so when he squints down at his hand and feels the pain radiating up his arm he knows immediately that he’s broken a few fingers.
“Ow,” he mutters out loud to no one, trying to flex his fingers and wincing when they barely move. He’s standing in the snow on the sidewalk outside of Luke’s apartment building, and in his defense he never would have punched a brick wall if he were sober, because he’s not insane. But he is far from sober, and he’d screamed at Luke, and the whole night has turned into a massive fucking disaster, really. He’s got the broken bones to prove it.
It's the wrong side of midnight, and he's the wrong side of drunk, his breath hanging heavy in the cold winter air as he stumbles a little, tilts his head, and squints up at Luke’s apartment window. He frowns at it, hesitating as if he expects his boyfriend to materialize in the frame above, but the window is dark, the curtains drawn tight, and after a moment he turns, holds his hand close to his chest, and begins the walk down to the nearest subway stop.
His wallet is unfortunately (hopefully) sitting where he left it on Luke’s kitchen counter, and his phone is dead in his pocket. He glances at the turnstile in front of him and then back over his shoulder, but the area is deserted. He only hesitates for a moment before gracelessly hopping over. It’s his hundredth horrible idea of the night, starting with going to Luke’s in the first place, maybe, and ending with him nearly eating it as he lands on the other side. He stumbles over his own feet and just barely manages to stay upright, but no one appears to shout at him or give him a ticket, so he continues onto the platform.
Back home, Sirius pulls his keys out with his left hand and squints down at them in his palm. Someone down the hall is blasting REM: Consider this, the slip that brought me to my knees. It's a horrible song, Sirius decides as he struggles to fit his key into the lock, squinting through his drunkenness and the darkness. If he were smarter, he’d have fucked up his non-dominant hand.
He drops his keys, swears, picks them up, and then drops them again, and as he’s straightening up for the second time the door swings open to reveal Remus Lupin standing on the other side, his perfect mouth curved in amusement.
“You changed the locks on me,” Sirius mutters, which makes Remus laugh. He pulls Sirius inside the apartment and re-locks the deadbolt behind him.
“Didn’t know you were coming back tonight,” he says, tilting his head as he watches Sirius try to get his boots off with one hand. “I was about to go to bed.”
Sirius rights himself and blinks, focusing on Moony standing there in sweatpants and a soft looking t-shirt, leaning on his cane a little, all tall and crooked and warm. Something loosens in his chest, just slightly. He wants to hug him.
“Fucked my hand up.”
His tongue is heavy in his mouth, words coming out twisted and wrong. He holds his arm up for Remus to see. It looks pretty bad, up close.
“Jesus, Sirius.” Remus’ brow furrows as he leans in to look at it, shaking his head. Judgement, maybe. Possibly concern. “What did you do?”
“Slammed it,” Sirius mumbles, because, I punched a brick wall, is not going to win him any points. “S’gotta be broken.”
They both look at his hand. The busted knuckles. The crooked fingers. Remus exhales through his nose, lifting his eyebrows at him, and Sirius breaks eye contact.
“Want me to go with you to urgent care?”
“No.” Sirius waves him away. New York City urgent care at two in the morning is for life or death situations only. His hand is fine. “Fuck no.”
He moves towards the kitchen, uncoordinated and going for the ice machine, but Remus beats him to it.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll get it.”
So Sirius sits down right there on the ground, leaning back against the cabinets with his legs bent in front of him. From down on the floor Remus looks very tall, the counters huge, and then suddenly the whole room is spinning. Something acrid and foreboding wells up on his tongue, but he swallows it down and focuses his eyes on his hand. The mess of it. The split knuckles and the blood staining his sleeve. It aches in an abstract, intangible way, and he squeezes it with his left hand while he waits, pushing at it where it hurts the most.
And then Remus is right there, his hand warm against Sirius’ cold wrist, gently pulling his arm away.
“Stop,” he mutters, brow furrowed. Sirius smiles at him sort of hazily and leans his head back against the cabinet, letting his eyelids flutter shut and focusing on Remus’ gentle hands, soothing the pain.
“You should really get this looked at.”
“You’re looking now.”
“By someone who knows what they’re looking at, I meant.”
“It’s my hand,” Sirius mumbles nonsensically, cracking his eyes open. Remus lifts an eyebrow.
“You are so drunk.”
Sirius meets his gaze, smiling wide, and Remus rolls his eyes, but his lips twitch down at the corners like they always do when he's trying not to laugh. It's one of Sirius’ favorite Moony faces, and here— drunk on the kitchen floor, it makes him want to reach out and touch his face, touch the spot where amusement is playing at the corner of his mouth. His broken fingers twitch, and then he swallows, glances out across the kitchen floor.
Remus, he often reminds himself, is off limits. Too good for Sirius by a mile. Good in a way Sirius knows most people aren't. In a way he knows he isn't.
“Did you punch someone?” Remus asks, and Sirius can’t tell if he’s still amused or maybe more concerned, more wary.
“A wall,” he admits, smiling, although it’s not really very funny. Remus looks at him. Those golden eyes. That all seeing gaze.
“You’re an idiot,” he mutters after a moment, but he’s gentle when he smooths the ice pack over the broken hand.
“Yeah.”
He is. He knows he is.
“We might have a sling in the bathroom.”
Sirius wrinkles his nose. “I’m good.”
“Advil?”
“No, no.” He shakes his head, rolling it back and forth against the cabinet. His eyelids feel heavy. “I just need to… sleep it off.”
Remus shakes his head, smiling that sharp smile that always makes Sirius feel as though he’s being laughed at.
“In your bed, at least. Come on.”
“My hand hurts.”
Remus snorts.
“Jus’ leave me here.”
“You’re drunk, Pads.” A hand on his shoulder. “Don’t sleep on the kitchen floor.”
“Mhm.”
Remus sighs, all put upon and exasperated, and bends down again to help him up. Sirius grips his arm like a lifeline, and with Remus’ one good leg and Sirius’ two drunken ones, they manage to get upright.
“God, you’re heavy,” Remus mutters, and Sirius would be offended if Remus hadn’t told him two weeks ago that his doctor thinks he needs another surgery on his knee. Another surgery he can’t afford, won’t accept help with. Remus never complains outright, but Sirius notices. The way his face goes all tight with the pain sometimes, how he clenches his jaw to try and hide it. He notices the way that his limp is worse in the mornings, worse in the cold. Remus rarely says a word about it unless prompted, but Sirius knows it’s constant. He struggles to get his footing, forces himself not to lean so much.
But then Remus pulls away, and Sirius very nearly reaches out to pull him back. The kitchen is cold, suddenly, without Remus’ hands on him, but Sirius just stands there and sways on his feet a little as he watches Remus turn to fill a pint glass with water before flicking off the kitchen light. Sirius blinks at the darkness for a second as his eyes adjust, and when he can see again Remus is leaning back against the counter with his brow furrowed, observing him.
“You alright?” he asks, voice low. “Why’d you punch a wall, anyway?”
Sirius ought to be embarrassed, honestly. Breaking his hand against a brick wall is some mental illness shit, some truly frightening behavior, but Remus isn’t looking at him like he’s crazy.
“Luke’s so mad at me,” Sirius mutters, half under his breath. Remus tilts his head.
“Why?”
“I dunno.” He shrugs, glances away. “I was mean.”
Sirius is sick of himself, if he’s being honest. He has no idea what he’s doing. For a moment, Remus says nothing. His expression is unreadable as he studies Sirius’ face, and then he holds the water glass out towards him and quirks an eyebrow.
“Worry about it tomorrow,” he says, in that everything’s going to be alright way of his. Sirius nods once, suddenly feeling strangely choked up. He takes the glass and hides behind it as he takes a sip, and then Remus nods his head towards the hall and Sirius ends up trailing behind him towards their respective rooms.
“Moony,” Sirius says, pausing by his bedroom door. He watches Remus through the shadows as he stops, as he tilts his head towards him.
“Mhm.”
“Thank you.”
Remus shifts on his feet, leaning into his cane, and in the darkness his face looks sharper, the scar across his lip more jagged. He nods once.
“Course,” he says. A flash of teeth in the darkness. “Get some sleep, Padfoot.”
***
Come morning, the broken hand is purple, swollen, and completely useless.
The throbbing is the second thing Sirius is aware of when he wakes up. The first being his alarm trilling obnoxiously on his bed stand, phone vibrating across the wood as the sound vibrates into his skull. He groans and slams his uninjured hand against the screen, somehow managing to snooze it, but once he’s awake he can’t get comfortable again, because the third thing he's aware of is that he is massively hungover. His room is too hot, and his hand is too broken, so he forces himself up and out of bed, on the hunt for Aspirin.
In the shared bathroom in the hall he finds an empty Tylenol bottle, which he throws aggressively into the garbage before leaving to knock on Remus’ door. He cracks it open when he doesn’t get a response, but the room is empty, bed unmade, so he shuts the door and moves towards the living room.
A glance out the window towards the fire escape and then he’s turning and freezing when he sees James sitting there on the sectional.
“Prongs.” Sirius lifts his eyebrows. “Why aren’t you at work?” James glances up from his laptop, the screen reflected in his specks as he looks across the living room at Sirius. He takes one look at him and flashes a slow grin.
“It’s Saturday,” he says, lifting an eyebrow. Sirius frowns. Well, shit. So he's supposed to work later, and they'll definitely be pissed that he only has one working hand to bartend with.
“Oh.”
“You look like shit,” James tells him very bluntly.
“Cheers,” Sirius says, narrowing his eyes. “I feel like it. Where’s Moony?”
“No clue. Fire escape, maybe?”
“Checked there.”
James shrugs. “Hey, did you take off work for next Saturday?”
Sirius winces. He hasn’t.
“I will today.”
He can tell by the look on James’ face that he’s judging him, and he can't deal with this so early in the morning. He wants a cigarette and an ice pack.
“Alright,” James says slowly, dragging it out. “But it’s not every day our Moony gets to show off all his freaky art shit, you know? Don’t forget.”
“Obviously I’ll be there,” Sirius mutters. His head is throbbing in beat with his hand now, so he wanders over to the kitchen to check the little basket of Vitamins and such for some pain relief. He rattles around the bottles, Vitamin C, Calcium, fucking Magnesium. He turns around, glares at James across the kitchen island. “Where the fuck is the Advil?”
“Hall bathroom, probably.”
“Just an empty bottle.”
“Check Moony’s bathroom, then.” James shrugs. “I don’t know.”
He returns to his laptop, and Sirius makes a mental note to salt his fucking water bottle.
“Great,” he mutters. “Thanks. Yeah. Will do.”
He knocks again on Remus’ door, and again there is no answer. What Moony could possibly have to be doing out and about before noon on a Saturday is a mystery, but Sirius long ago accepted that he will forever be curious about what that kid is up to.
Sirius has always loved Remus’ room. The stacks and stacks of books, piles of canvasses, the paint, the scattered plants, the ridiculous number of pillows on his bed. To Sirius, it has always felt like something deeply personal, a small but significant piece of this unknowable person that he is lucky enough to see.
It's also a complete fucking mess, but Sirius sort of likes that, too. He steps over a pile of dirty clothes and into the tiny bathroom, swinging open the medicine cabinet above the sink and scanning the shelves. Vitamin D. Nyquil. More nyquil. Zzzquil. More nyquil but in liquid form this time. Oxycontin.
Sirius stops, blinks at the little orange bottle. Fucking opioids? For a second, he just looks at it, and then he picks it up off the shelf and rattles it around. It’s mostly full.
He’s stuck, for a moment, staring at the bottle, trying to think of a reasonable explanation.
“What are you doing?”
Sirius jumps at the sound of Remus’ voice, nearly fumbling the pill bottle. He turns, and he watches Remus’ eyes drift down to the bottle in his hand.
“I was looking for Advil, Moony. Why the fuck do you have this?”
He rattles the bottle in the air, holding it up to Remus’ face so he can see exactly what he’s talking about. He’s not sure what he’d been expecting, but Remus barely even reacts.
He holds Sirius’ gaze, expression unreadable, and he says, “I’m not using again.” Point blank.
Sirius studies his face, trying to decide whether or not he believes him. Remus is hard to read, sometimes.
“It just seems really stupid to have this sitting around, then,” he says after a beat.
“Take it.” Remus breaks eye contact, patting at his cigarettes in his pocket. His universal, I’m about to leave the room and escape this conversation, move. “I didn’t even know they were in there.”
He's gone moments later, and Sirius frowns after him, frowns down at the bottle.
James knew Remus first. They were seventeen years old when they’d rented that first apartment with Peter in Noho, eighteen when they’d moved uptown and Remus moved in. So Sirius hadn’t been around right after Remus’ mom died, but he knows the story, of course. He knows she died that day, in that car, but that Remus lived. Just barely. He knows about the hospital stay, the painkillers, the subsequent addiction. And he knows about the OD, (“accidental, thank God,” James had told Sirius in private; “just a stupid fucking mistake,” Remus had told him, also in private, with a wry smile), the pumped stomach, the rehab.
And he knows that it was fucking Oxy.