Thirty-one: Timeless

[tartancravat.livejournal.com]

Title: Timeless
Rating: G
Prompt: # 31 at barefootboys
Word Count: 707
Summary: Remus feels like time doesn’t mean much any more.

August 31^st, 1991

The kitchen window is fogged over with a combination of the chill morning early-autumn air and Sirius’ shower. The sky outside is blue, the kind of blue that red-gold leaves silhouette themselves against. It doesn’t smell of summer any more, burnt grass and lemonade. It smells of September, new parchment and fresh ink, promised adventures. Remus leans against the kitchen counter, teacup cradled in his hands and radiating heat. He draws a happy face in the condensation on the glass.

Remus feels like time doesn’t mean much any more. Harry is eleven years old, tomorrow he will go to Hogwarts. He’s eleven years old, and sometimes Remus sees him grown, lost baby chubbiness around his face, jaw borrowed from James, hair as messy as it ever was. Sometimes Remus sees the baby, round face, unmarked forehead, tiny fist grasping his mother’s finger. Harry’s asleep still, exhausted from excitement, youthful unwillingness to go to bed and unwillingness to get up.

Sirius bumps into the kitchen, towel around his shoulders, hair dripping onto his neck. Remus turns, and sees him timeless, too. The eleven-year-old boy, no older than Harry is now, eyes fierce and chin forward, proud. The sixteen-year-old who left his parents’ house, who kissed clumsily with hope between his teeth. The twenty-two year old who hunted, who relearned, who remembered. A Sirius whose age is indistinguishable, the Sirius watching Harry grow up.

“What do you want for breakfast?” the present Sirius asks, going to the counter and pouring his own cup of tea. Remus watches him add sugar, the slightest amount of milk, just to see it swirl as it pours.

“I don’t care,” he says. “Ask Harry.” He smiles into his teacup, wondering at his own fierce happiness. Sirius looks over sharply, and then sees that quirk, knows Remus too well. He reaches for him and pulls the teacup away, kisses the mouth behind it, twenty years of history and all the future in the kiss.

Remus breaks away and rests his head against Sirius’ cheek. He traces a constellation of freckles at the meeting between Sirius’ neck and his shoulder, one fingertip along Canis Major, kiss for the Dog Star. They fit together, uneven limbs the invisible lines between the stars.

“I love you,” Sirius says into Remus’ ear, breath tickling.

“Always,” Remus replies.

Harry comes shuffling into the room, still in his pyjamas (red with snitches on). “Get a room,” he says, sitting down at the table and putting his elbows on it. “What’s for breakfast?”

Remus and Sirius laugh at eleven-year-old bluntness. They know again, through Harry, the pup of the pack, what it is like to grow up, to grow down, to grow sideways, to be a child. Sirius especially is still enough of a child to understand these things. He laughs like a puppy, plays like a puppy, loves like a puppy. Remus just has understanding in his veins. They are perfect fathers. James would have been a perfect father too, had he lived. Lily would have been a perfect mother.

“How’s waffles?” Sirius says, and starts flinging bowls and kitchen utensils around. Harry gets up to help, making a mess of an egg and getting batter in his hair. Remus picks up his teacup and drinks the last of his tea, watching the two people he loves most in the world. He doesn’t pause to look at the tea leaves, they hold no secrets.

The fog across the window fades and curls away. The happy face is absorbed, but it is mirrored on Remus’ face, on Sirius’ and Harry’s. Look how we are now, Remus thinks, still cradling his teacup in his palms. Just look. He starts up the waffle iron, joining in the cooking. Elbows bump, fingers brush across shoulders as one reaches for the butter, the other, for plates. They make breakfast. Life goes on.

THE END

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
- Anais Nin