The rain has been relentless for hours, drumming against the roof of Remus’s flat like impatient fingers against wood. He sits by the window, watching the streetlights flicker through the storm, a cigarette burning between his fingers, though he never remembers taking it from the pack.
The smoke curls around him, a ghost of something lost. A ghost of him.
He mouths the name like a prayer, but it brings no comfort. No warmth. No fire. Just silence. Just absence. Just the dull ache in his ribs where love used to be.
He tries to remember his face.
(He tries, oh, God, he tries.)
But memory is cruel. It is a trickster, a thief. It gives, and then it takes, unraveling the edges of a portrait he once knew by heart. The curve of a smirk, the sharpness of his jaw, the reckless light in those grey eyes—gone, all of it, slipping through his fingers like mist.
His voice, too, is lost to time.
There was laughter once, ringing through the Gryffindor dorms, echoing off stone walls, filling every hollow place inside Remus’s chest. There was the low murmur of his name, spoken in secret, whispered against his collarbone in the dead of night.
But now, when Remus closes his eyes and listens—nothing.
And yet, the absence of Sirius Black is still the loudest thing in the room.
He exhales, tilting his head back against the chair, the cigarette smoldering between his lips. Smoke fills his lungs like grief, sharp and aching, curling inside him until he thinks he might choke on it.
They say time heals all wounds.
(It doesn’t. It never has. It never will.)
It only dulls the edges, only teaches you how to carry the weight of the loss, how to live with the gaping hole in your chest where a person used to be.
Sirius was a storm, a wildfire, a force of nature impossible to contain. He was laughter and recklessness, sharp teeth and soft hands, all fire and ruin, and Remus had loved him more than anything in the world.
Now, all he has left are the echoes.
Faint, fading, slipping further away each time he reaches for them.
Remus doesn’t cry. He doesn’t have it in him anymore.
Instead, he watches the rain fall, listens to the quiet hum of the city beyond the glass, and wonders—
If Sirius had known how he would haunt him like this, would he have stayed?
