Nox (The Marauders, Wolfstar, Jily)

11: A Gay Realisation

It's never enough. Never enough for just the comfort of your own thoughts: crawling up inside your own skin. It's never enough just to have yourself and the comfort in the solidity of that, because there's no such thing as safety, there's no such thing as happiness, not really, there's just too little and too much. There's just perspective, and there are just people with too much to say, determined to define your whole world in their eyes.

There's no comfort in secrecy, in protection, in the cold window pane against your cheek at half past five in the morning, there's nothing to be said in any of it - it's just the story of the boy who saw too much and said too little, and let that continue to plague him two months down the line.

Sirius hadn't managed to get any sleep that night. Technically, however, it wasn't exactly morning yet - the sun was just yet to come up, the day was just yet to begin, and in that, opportunity still lay unclaimed, but it was growing closer to six than it was to five that morning, and the inevitable was just one of those things you had to accept.

Sirius reckoned that it should have bothered him somewhat, or at least more than it had, that maybe he should have felt something in everything around him, but there was only the cold air that fell over him like a blanket, and the warmth of Remus' head in his lap - the boy who'd fallen asleep a few hours prior. Sirius had let him, despite the fact that Remus had insisted that he shouldn't let him fall asleep on him, but Sirius didn't ever think for a moment that Remus should be forced to wait up through the night with him.

The conversation they'd shared had been enough to keep Sirius' mind occupied for hours, and perhaps that was all time was - a thing to occupy thoughts with, something to waste away in, something to let drown you out. And perhaps conversation was just an aid in that, because perhaps the longer he thought about it, the more meaning he struggled to find in anything. Perhaps it was just up to him to put the meaning into place, to make the world around him matter, turn lifeless dolls into breathing, living people with thoughts and desires, and not just get lost up in it all. It was just that in the world around him, and the worries upon his mind there was nothing but discomfort and anxiety.

Meaning lay in the people he cared for and the decisions he made, and there was no avoiding some decisions, because it was perhaps only in the emptiest, earliest hours of the morning, that inevitability finally had the chance to come crashing down on you like a great tidal wave, tsunami, or something like that. The inevitability at hand related to the matter that always lay at the back of his mind, in the matter of his uncle and his father, and how Regulus lay, likely asleep, in the dungeons of the castle, unknowing, innocent in all of this.

Perhaps he did deserve such innocence, as the younger brother, as the one who had the luxury of hiding away from it all for just a little while longer, but Sirius couldn't help but wonder if such innocence was any sort of good thing at all. And of course, if he should respect that innocence when the rest of the world seemed in no such hurry to do the same. Perhaps it was just the thing to do, perhaps it was the only thing to do, and in all honesty, Sirius imagined that Regulus would be angry that he hadn't told him until then.

Sirius was just scared. Scared of consequence, scared of outcome, scared of what becomes of everyone, scared of the end. Scared of how Regulus was always so much more confident than he was, and how in that, it was much more likely that he'd come to take some form of action, because although, Sirius was the Gryffindor, he was the Gryffindor who'd hidden away inside his own pride for the past few months.

Perhaps it would be for the best, perhaps people should know, perhaps something ought to come of it, and perhaps Regulus might know what to do, but there was just no way around the fact that he was thirteen years old. Mature for thirteen, but thirteen nonetheless. But thirteen only getting older, as we all were, because time always made sure to tick down regardless of whether we wanted it to or not, and days would always become weeks, and weeks would always become months. And in time, two months, would become two years, as he continued to waste mornings away: mind off elsewhere in the mistakes of years passed, and how there was just so little he could do to rectify all of that now.§