Ice bath - 747 words - @wolfstarmicrofic
The fever comes on fast, the way it always does after a bad one.
Remus knows it’s bad before he’s fully himself again, knows it the way he knows everything in those first grey hours, dimly and from a distance, through a body that feels borrowed and poorly fitted. He’s hot. He’s so hot he’s cold with it, shivering uncontrollably, and Sirius is there, has always been there, crouched beside him on the bathroom floor, saying his name in a low, even voice.
“Moons. Hey. Look at me.”
Remus looks at him; it takes a moment to make his eyes cooperate.
“There you are,” Sirius says, and something in his face does a complicated thing. “We need to get your temperature down, love. Okay?”
He really doesn’t want to get in.
He says so, several times, with great conviction and very little coherence. The water is already running and he can hear it and he’s so cold, he tells Sirius so; he’s absolutely freezing, which he knows is the fever talking but knowing doesn’t help, and his muscles are screaming in that extremely specific way they do after a transformation, the kind of ache that lives in the bone rather than the flesh, and the last thing he wants is—
“I know,” Sirius says. “I know. Come on.”
He helps Remus up, and Remus leans on him more than he means to.
As soon as the cold of the icy water hits, Remus makes a sound he’d be embarrassed about if he had the capacity for embarrassment right now, and tries to get out, and Sirius holds him gently and says I know, I know, just a minute, just stay—and then takes his clothes off and swings his legs over the side and gets in too, and settles behind Remus so his back is against Sirius’s chest, Sirius’s arms coming around him, and Remus goes still.
“There,” Sirius says, quietly.
The water is awful. Remus is shaking. Sirius presses his lips to the top of his head and keeps them there for a long moment, and Remus closes his eyes.
It helps, is the thing. It always helps, having Sirius’s arms around him—it has helped for longer than either of them was willing to admit, back when they were still pretending they were just friends. Now Sirius rubs slow circles into his arm and says nothing, and the shaking starts to ease, increment by increment, almost imperceptibly.
“You’re going to be alright,” Sirius tells the top of his head.
“But you didn’t have to, just because of me...”
“I genuinely couldn’t care less about catching a cold right now.” A pause. Another kiss, pressed carefully to his hair. “Just let me have this.”
Remus doesn’t know how long they stay like that.
Long enough that the worst of it starts to lift; the delirium thinning out, the edges of things coming back into focus. Sirius’s heartbeat is steady against his back. The water is still cold, but he’s stopped fighting it, gone heavy and loose in Sirius’s arms, and Sirius keeps kissing his hair, his temple, the side of his head, soft and unhurried, like he has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.
He probably does. He always does, after a full moon—there are things to clean up, things to sort out, he must be exhausted. He always is. He never says so.
“You really don’t have to stay in here with me.”
Sirius’s arms tighten, fractionally. “I know.”
Remus looks down at the water. “I hate when it’s bad.”
“I know,” Sirius says, and his voice is steady, and Remus has learned, over time, to hear what lives underneath the steadiness: the thing Sirius tucks away so Remus doesn’t have to carry that too. “I know you do.”
“Don’t be silly. Don’t do that.”
Remus is quiet for a moment.
“I love you,” he says. It comes out plainly, the way true things do when you’re too tired to arrange them into anything more.
Sirius is quiet for a beat, then he presses his mouth to Remus’s hair again and holds it there for a long moment.
“I love you,” he says, into the crown of his head. “So much. You have no idea.”
The water is cold. Sirius is warm at his back.
Remus closes his eyes again and lets himself be held.
