Variations on the Word “Sleep”
by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

 

 

*

 

I Would Like To

 

It was just after one in the morning, and Sirius lay on the bed like a typo, the open parenthesis of his body curved inward.  Remus — the Remus who most mornings sipped tea and solved the crosswords in the paper, who proofread his reports to Dumbledore at least twice, even as he bled on the parchment — wanted to take up the spot beside Sirius, so that at least they could be an empty set together.

 

They shared the room and its shadows, and the long silences which measured the air between them.  Sometimes, they shared the bed, too, and Remus would feel his arm touching Sirius’s, a welcome accident.  But Remus was usually away on business for the Order, and Sirius was usually alone.

 

Leaning against the tall rosewood armoire, Remus pulled off his muddy boots and stripped away the damp socks.  His left ankle was swollen, a dark purple bruise ringed in a particularly distasteful shade of yellow.  Sprained, he assessed, flexing his long toes.  It could be worse.

 

Remus favored his right foot only a little as he walked into the adjacent bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him quietly.  It wouldn’t do to wake Sirius.

 

The bathtub faucet sputtered, still rusty from disuse.  All of Grimmauld Place — but particularly these rooms which had belonged to Sirius in his childhood — had fallen into disrepair after the death of the Blacks, at which point the only inhabitant of the entire house was Kreacher.  Who was, needless to say, less concerned with maintenance than he was with the preservation of the Black family “treasures.”

 

Still, Remus thought, watching the water fill the clawfoot tub, Grimmauld Place was as impressive now as it had been the first time he had entered it.  He could still remember being thirteen and astounded by the archways and darkness and the cold eyes of Sirius’s family.  Fie, fo, and fum, everything seemed to say.  I smell the blood of a British man. 

 

That had been the last time Sirius invited his friends to visit him over the summer.

 

Remus slipped out of his clothes and into the bathtub, tensing as the hot water enveloped him.  Steam curled across the old scars painlessly, but seemed to linger in the new ones, stinging.  Despite that, he could feel the heat osmosing through his skin, the fear and stress of the past week soothed as his taut muscles and stiff joints slowly, slowly relaxed. 

 

Shutting his eyes, Remus submerged himself in the water.  It rushed around his body and into his ears and up his nose, hoping for entrance at the line between his lips, and he marveled that water was not just two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, but was a whole, cohesive and — his aching chest reminded him — deadly.  He surfaced and breathed and waited for his eyelids to blink open.

 

The water, he saw, had turned pink.

 

“Oh, Merlin,” Remus said, pushing the hair out of his eyes.  He’d been bleeding into the bathwater and he hadn’t even realized it.  “Wonderful.”

 

Remus shivered as he stood up in the bath, the air freezing against his wet skin.  He stepped out, ignoring the gooseflesh prickling his arms and legs, and turned to face in the mirror over the sink.  He looked sicklier than usual, the rings around his eyes black against the stark paleness of his skin.  He glanced down.  Fresh bruises blossomed on his arms and legs, across his stomach, a purplish pattern over the crisscross of old scars.  A brown-red crust had formed over a large gash on his shoulder, blood leaking where it hadn’t yet clotted. 

 

No, he realized, touching the sticky edges.  Not a gash — a bite.

 

“A souvenir, I presume,” he muttered, wincing as he probed the wound.  The werewolf pack he’d been living with for two weeks had been neither friendly nor welcoming, and it was only through brilliant negotiating that he’d been able to leave it while still in possession of all four limbs.

 

Remus pulled his hand away and looked at it.  Blood and dirt were molded into the whorls of his fingers, and he could smell foreign skin cells under his fingernails.  He’d been forced into several violent, savage fights with the pack, most of which he’d lost.  He couldn’t channel the Wolf while he was human, couldn’t snap and bite and claw like the others could, and though he was bruised and beaten now because of it, Remus was still a little grateful for being bogged down in that humanity.

 

Rivulets of water slid down his legs and onto the floor, a glimmering stream between the tiles of the floor.  He watched for a moment and then stepped back into the bath, scrubbing away the scents and stains on his skin.  He shivered in the tepid water.

 

*

 

Moonlight pressed through the water-streaked windowpane and illuminated the empty vase on the bedside table.  Sirius opened his eyes and watched the shapes the shadows formed, the steady sound of breath and dripping water trying to tempt him back to sleep.  But he knew what cold memories and cloaked figures waited on the backs of his eyelids, and he stayed awake.

 

The bathroom door opened and Remus emerged, his hair flattened against his forehead.  He had bent his thin, chapped lips into a slight smile, probably without even realizing it.  It was his default position of geniality, the bland expression he had shown professors and underclassmen, which he had shown his students, and which he now showed everyone, including Sirius.

 

“What — ”  Sirius coughed, his throat a little sore.  He probably shouldn’t have spent most of the previous day alternating between shouting at Kreacher, shouting at his mother’s portrait, and shouting at Molly Weasley when she made a brief appearance to collect some of Arthur’s things he had forgotten there.  “What time is it?”

 

Remus stiffened but appeared otherwise indifferent to Sirius’s voice.  “Oh, a quarter ‘til two.  Did I wake you?  I’m sorry, I was just having a bath before I went to bed.”

 

“No,” Sirius replied, sitting up a little.  “It wasn’t — it wasn’t you.”  

 

He tried not to remember his dreams, reminding himself that he had escaped from that place, that it had been two years.  He tried to remember that Moony was standing in front of him, alive and whole, but he knew that wasn’t true.  Remus stood in front of him, gray-haired and dead-eyed and smiling politely.

 

Moony and Padfoot were dead, the both of them, buried in the rubble of 1981.

 

*

 

“Well,” Remus said, sliding into bed beside Sirius.  “That’s good, then.  Goodnight.”  His voice was strange to his own ears.  He was supposed to say — he wanted to say — “I love you.”  He was supposed to hold Sirius’s hand, and kiss Sirius’s forehead, and find a way to make all that was wrong right again.

 

It should have worked out.  In the end, they were alive and together and almost touching (Remus could feel Sirius’s breath tingling against his collarbone, a strand of black hair tickling Remus’s ear), and Remus had read enough books to know what was supposed to happen.

 

Remus would stretch out his fingers and touch Sirius’s unshaven cheek.  Sirius would open his eyes, and he would understand, and he would forgive.  They would kiss, for the first time in fourteen years, and though each would tremble and be afraid, they would also feel the warmth of hope spread through their stomachs and into their hearts.  Something cold and dead inside of them would thaw, reanimate, if only a little.

 

Instead, Remus listened until he heard Sirius fall back asleep — into that terror that was all his own, that Remus could not find the courage to try to save him from.  When at last Sirius’s breathing evened out, Remus turned away from him and let sleep pull his eyelids closed before any tears could fall.

 

Fin.