a little wolfstar childhood analysis i wrote because i cant stop thinking about how their childhoods were so similar in such different ways
Sirius Black was born in winter. He supposes that was an omen for his childhood. He was raised in an achingly cold house. The eight different fireplaces did nothing to replace the lacking warmth of arms that refused to hug him. Everything he remembers stung the way only freezing water could, straight through the muscle, settling into his bones. Sirius was surrounded by it, all the time, everywhere, as if floating in the ocean in the middle of December. The ring on his mother’s hand as it cut into his cheek. The plate of soup Regulus snuck up to his room hours after everyone else had had their dinner. The biting remarks, never yelling, never passion that would imply care.
That was the thing Sirius hated most about the place he couldn't quite call home. Walburga never showed hatred towards him, not past a disgusted look or a particularly harmful punishment. She never screamed, never let her frustration with him show. Emotions and respect couldn't go hand in hand in his mother’s eyes. There was terrifying power to be found in a masked face like hers.
Orion on his part, well, he wasn’t there, not in any way that counted. Nothing more than a cold shoulder. He was the ghost of the house, invisible and haunting. A shell of a real human person, robotic, like he had one goal in life, one duty, and he’d given up on what others called living.
The thing about the cold is, it’s numbing. It starts slow, you lose touch with reality as your fingers stop working. Your body shivers, an automatic response to shake you awake, force yourself to be your own source of warmth, but it can’t ward off the cold for too long. Your reactions, your response time becomes slow, your mind foggy like the snow storms is somehow reaching inside you. After some time, you don’t even feel the cold. The ice keeps forming around you as hypothermia sets in.
It traps you, keeps you in the water frozen in place, unable to escape. For a long time, Sirius let it happen. He felt the ice form around his cheeks, swallow half of him, only part of his face above water. Not quite sinking, not quite floating. There was no rope in the water he could use to pull himself up from under the ice, and if there had been his hands would have fallen off from frostbite before he made a fist.
What they don’t tell you about freezing to death is, the scary part is when you stop shivering. You don’t feel pain, but you know. Your body is giving up. Sirius didn’t know this would happen, nobody told him. He only realized it when he saw it happen to Regulus. Watched him drown and sink to the bottom. That day, Sirius had the awful realization Regulus had taken into Orion’s steps.
Worst of all, Sirius saw that he had turned into his Mother. Seeing feelings as a weakness, a flaw. He had learned very early on to embrace the cold, let it freeze his muscles so he couldn't even smile, or cry, or frown. Blank slate like a snowy mountain. And now he realized he missed it, forgot how to even. Hated that he couldn’t bear to be seen crying just as much as he hated the fact he even wanted to cry.
“Pads?” Remus. God Sirius hadn’t even heard the door open.
Sirius couldn’t reply, his voice even through the curtain would show how hurt he was. He tried to swallow, gather himself, but he couldn’t find the words to play it off. Remus, oh thank Merlin for Remus, just waited patiently on the other side of Sirius’ canopy.
After some time, a few tissues and cleaning spells, Sirius opened the curtains to let Remus in. It was always easier than talking, to just, be with him. Remus seemed to know that, because for a long time he didn’t speak. They just sat side by side until Sirius found his voice again.
“I’m sorry if i worried you”, was the best he could come up with. “I didn’t mean to storm out”
“It’s alright, though I think you’ll have to talk to Prongs, maybe buy him something at Honeydukes”. When Sirius didn’t laugh, Remus finally turned to look at him properly. Saw the shame in Sirius’ eyes as he zeroed in on his hands as he flexed them opened and closed over, and over again.
“It’s my parents”, and Remus nodded because he had guessed that much. He waited for Sirius to continue, but it became clear he wouldn’t, head tilted down fully focused on the movement of his own hands.
“I, well, it’s not exactly the same for me but”, Remus took Sirius’ hand in his own to get his attention, “I understand what it’s like”.
Sirius’ head snapped up and the tears that had been welling up fell as he widened his eyes, “You mean, your parents, they…”
Remus Lupin grew up in a warm home. The kind of warmth carried in freshly baked cookies, afternoons gardening, hot cocoa, the sunshine that was Hope Lupin. The heat at the bottom of a bottle. The burning of yelling. The fire that rested in Lyall Lupin’s anger.
If you asked Lyall Lupin, though you’d need to force veritaserum down his throat first, if he loves his son, he'd tell you he doesn’t know. He’d tell you he once did. Back when he saw this miracle crawling all over the house, saw his smile as he rested on Hope’s hip. Back when he thought he had broken the cycle. Thought his son didn’t carry the fire that was consuming him all his life. Thought, “This is what i could have been”, marveled over his wife’s magic like she was the cure and didn’t resent the sight of his son being a better version of himself. And then Remus turned four.
They say if you submerge a frog in water and slowly raise its temperature, it doesn't notice it’s being boiled alive. Remus can testify this is not the case for wolves. Remus grew up with the kind of warmth you associate with love, but by the time he was all grown up, the house was on fire, the flames not just licking his skin but biting into his core. How can a flower bloom in a burning garden?
He noticed. He knew the moment the match was struck, when he was four, the moment it hit the kerosene covered floor, when his mother died ten years later. The burning reached the beams that held their house up, that made it a home, and slowly they were reduced to ashes. The whole time Remus could feel the heat rising beyond comfort, couldn't escape it, felt the sweat at the back of his neck like a constant reminder. He was boiling alive and he knew it. He couldn't tell if his father noticed it too and simply didn’t care to stop it.
“Not like yours but” Remus took a breath in. Talking about his mother was something he avoided. ”My mom was good. She um, she really wanted to be a mother you see. So when I came around, I was like this marvelous thing to her. She was my first and only friend for most of my life.” He swallowed thickly, and Sirius watched patiently as he gathered himself.
“When I got bit, she sort of, I can’t explain it, she went hollow. She was still great, don't get me wrong, she did everything right, but it was like, she loved me without heart. I think she never recovered from that night, I really scared her. The medics say I was dead for some minutes before they brought me back”. Remus heard Sirius’ breath hitch but ignored it, he refused to look into what that meant. “Everything felt colder after that night”.
“And your father?” Sirius’ voice shook with the question and Remus realized Sirius had new tears forming. He squeezed his hand.
“My father, he’s always had issues with control. From what mom used to tell me. Self control, you know, with alcohol. And anger too. I suppose that’s where I got it from.” Remus tries, he really does, to keep the resentment from his voice. He always fails. “He was good the first few years of my life, I think mom had cracked the secret code to stabilizing him. But after she, um, faded, he got worse. The way he sees it, his son did die that night. Whatever I am, it’s nothing to him.”
“Moons…”. It took Sirius breaking the silence for Remus to realize he was squeezing his hand too hard. He let go and shook his head before hurrying to continue.
“Anyway, um. We got into some fights, I guess, here and there. Mom tried but she never really could get him to calm down anymore, didn’t have the energy. It was like, he sensed her light dimming and his best way to light up the house again was to set it ablaze. And then, you know”, He cleared his throat past the lump that was forming there. “Mom died, and it got so much worse. However little her presence was helping, it just, evaporated. We can’t even stand to be in the same room anymore, Dad and I, so we don’t”.
Remus closed his mouth to swallow but it never opened again, not for a long while. He sat with Sirius and thought about how different things were two years ago, fourteen years ago. She’d be so sad to know, he thinks, that we don’t play music in the sitting room anymore. No point, with all the yelling that would drown it out.
“I didn’t know,” Sirius finally said, voice hoarse.
“Not a lot of people do,” Remus replied, almost lightly. like the weight of it hadn’t been crippling him for years. “That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”
Sirius huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah.”
Remus nudged his knee against Sirius’, just barely, just enough. “We’re not them, you know.”
Sirius exhaled. “I know.”
He didn’t, not entirely. The cold still sat in his chest, made his cheeks red and nose runny, still pressed against his ribs like a weight he might never shake. But for the first time, with Remus beside him, he thought maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe warmth wasn’t something he had to summon on his own. Maybe it could find him.
They fell into silence again, but it wasn’t asphyxiating cold, and it wasn't uncomfortably hot. In the quiet of their dorm, in the privacy of his bed, Sirius let his head fall on Remus’ shoulder and simply exist.
Sirius Black, born in winter, thought perhaps he wouldn’t die of it. Not as long as he had the fire of Remus Lupin’s love with him. He wondered if Remus knew, knew that the way the moon moves tides was nothing compared to the way Remus made the cold water leave Sirius’ lungs. He did not realize next to him Remus was thanking the stars for the cooling breeze that was Sirius’ acceptance, and for the first time in two years, Remus felt the taste of smokeless oxygen, felt his throat grow less dry.
