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It was easier than Remus thought it might be to pull the girl’s body from the water. He had seen the vague shape of her from the top of the lighthouse, a dark head and pale swath of dress, draped over the jagged rocks and pounded continually by the surf.
So he had thought it would be difficult—the pulling, the dead weight, the seawater—but it wasn’t. She was waifish beneath the thick white cloud of her dress; even soaking wet, she was lighter than the barrels of kerosene he carried every day.
Whatever hopes Remus had when he rushed down the lighthouse steps, that he might be the hero of this day, that the person in the water might still be alive after all, were quickly dashed. He laid his ear against her breast and in the hollowness of her chest he heard only his own heartbeat echoed back at him.
Then the question became: what to do with her? The supply boat would come in a week’s time, too long for her body to sit in the heat of early summer without collecting rot. There was the other boat on the island, for use in case of an emergency, but the meaning beneath it was clear: Remus was not to leave his post except in the instance of his own impending death—likely not even then.
So it was decided. He would bury her here, on the island, after he had finished his chores for the day. It was his first season as the lighthouse keeper and it would be his first burial.
Remus stared down at the hole he had dug a short distance behind the lighthouse and at the woman inside it. It was shallower than it should have been, but his arms ached, and he’d wanted to finish before the sun had completely set.
The woman—who, upon closer inspection, was likely older than he initially believed, perhaps early twenties—looked like a porcelain doll in her grave. He had tried to arrange her that way, to provide her some small mercy that the sea hadn’t; he smoothed the wrinkles down on her dress, brushed her still-damp hair away from her face, and crossed one arm over the other on her chest. But there was no denying that she was still as cold and as dead as when he’d found her that morning.
Remus sat down with his lantern and pulled the Bible out of his work coat. He went straight to the only passage he knew by heart, one he’d heard for the first time at six years old at the funeral of his own mother, and most recently, last spring, at his father’s.
“The lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters.
“He restoreth my soul; He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
“Thou prepared a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
When he finished the psalm he looked back down at the woman. It truly was a shame. She was unfathomably beautiful, and what for, to die so young? He wondered about her family—surely she had a husband—how they’d ache at never seeing their daughter or sister or wife again.
Remus wondered about the events that led to her death. He knew he’d spend the rest of his life reckoning with that question. But there wasn’t time on this night, no—so he picked up the shovel and got to work.
Remus awoke in the night.
The bottom room of the lighthouse was drenched in shadow. It took him a moment to collect his bearings and the reason for his rousing. But there it was, the creaking rattle of the rusted door handle.
It felt to Remus like a dream as he got up from the mattress. The darkness stretched endlessly before him, an eternity to reach the door. As he laid his hand upon the knob it trembled under his touch. He had left the door unlocked, as usual; the only person on the island, more often than not, was himself.
Steeling himself, he opened it. There on the path below his feet was the woman he’d buried only hours before. She was on her knees, an arm outstretched towards the door, towards him. Her dress was streaked with mud and grass stains. There was dirt underneath her fingernails.
But her eyes were what captivated Remus the most. Now that they were open he could tell they were sad eyes. The eyes of an animal left to fend for itself. Her blue irises wavered on him, not seeing him but perhaps looking through, before they rolled back beneath her eyelids. In the next moment Remus had to catch her body as it crumpled.
Remus carried the woman inside and set her on the floor beside the wood stove. She was still cold to the touch. He set about removing her clothing, unlacing her dress and then her undergarments. It took him many minutes because he tried not to look at her bared skin longer than was necessary. Worse men than he would have admired or perhaps touched, but better men wouldn’t have even imagined the swell of her breasts, the apex of her thighs. It wasn’t a conscious body but still yet a woman’s, and it had been a long time for Remus. It was no excuse.
He wrapped her naked body in a quilt and added more logs to the fire. Then he decided that giving her his mattress would be the gentlemanly thing to do, so he drug it from the bed to the stove and laid her upon it.
He laid down a blanket for himself in the opposite corner of the room, which would be his bed for the rest of the night following a last check of the light. It would be a hard night for his back. He was sure he deserved it.
He woke for the second time that night, slowly, to the deepest, most entrancing pleasure. It felt like a fever, like adrenaline, like the touch of a woman. He moaned.
The mouth at his neck—and there was one, wasn’t there—sucked at him harder. He could feel other things he hadn’t before. The whole weight of a woman above him, every inch of the front of her naked body pressed against his clothed one. Remus wrapped his arms around the curve of her back, mapping it with his palms, fingering each knot of her spine. His neck stung as she traced her tongue across it. He was aroused but inexplicably not erect, despite the overwhelming feel of her on top of him, practically writhing with each harsh suck on his neck.
He held her, even as his vision slowly darkened again, as sleep welcomed him. In the dimness of the room, the woman pulled away from him. She had a beautiful face, he thought, those big blue eyes and red-stained lips. Remus had been a fool before, thinking that someone like her could die.
The guilt hit Remus when he woke up with the sun. He had dreamt about the woman that he had saved—and then buried alive—in an inexcusably explicit way. He looked over to the wood stove, suddenly, as if he thought she might have disappeared in the night. But there she was, just as he had left her—her back to him, one shoulder peeking out from beneath the quilt, sleeping peacefully.
He left to start his day the way he always did: cleaning the lenses. He tried not to think about his dream, how solid and real and crude and wonderful it had been.
He was done with the cleaning by the time the sun had fully risen, and so took his morning’s logs: it was chilly but the winds and visibility were fair, which meant less work for him throughout the day. He was glad for it, after the night he had.
He had momentarily forgotten about the woman in favor of performing his duties, so by the time he descended the stairs and entered his quarters he was startled to find her sitting up. Remus, in an effort to disregard her nakedness, focused in on her face. She was looking pinker, more alive, but didn’t speak as he stood in the doorway. Remus wrung his hands.
“Miss,” he said, “can I get you your clothes?” He went to the table, where he’d hung them over the back of a chair. They were dry, if dirty. She eyed them dubiously as he gave them to her, but she stood up and began pulling them on. He blushed as he turned away and set about putting the coffee on; he would have gone away, if only she had given him the time.
When the rustling stopped he looked back over. There she was—what a peculiar sight, to see her standing—dressed for the day. She made the mess of her dress look intended, like she had stepped straight out of a ladies’ fashion magazine. Popular this season: grass stains! He nearly wept at the beauty of this creature and what he had put her through.
“Miss, would you like to have a seat at the table?” Remus pulled out the chair for her and she came, settling into it. He pushed her back into the table and took the chair across from her. He took a deep breath. “I apologize for my actions. I believed you dead.”
It occurred to Remus that perhaps the woman was unaware of what he had done. She had been unconscious when he had pulled her from the sea and had not regained consciousness until, presumably, she was buried beneath a layer of dirt. It was inconceivable that she had been able to claw herself out of the grave he had made her, except that the evidence was sitting right in front of him. But whether she knew it or not, it would not take long for her to come to that conclusion; they were the only two on the island.
She raised an impossibly aristocratic eyebrow. And then she spoke in a language like a river, with smooth and swooping syllables. It was then that Remus understood why she hadn’t spoken this morning: she hadn’t understood him.
“That is French?” Remus wondered. “You are French?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. Maybe, then. That’s what it had sounded like to his ears, which were admittedly not well traveled. He hadn’t been to the continent.
He didn’t know what to do. He had a woman in the lighthouse that couldn’t tell him how she had gotten there, or at least couldn’t tell him in a way he would understand. And he couldn’t aptly apologize for burying her. But the coffee was boiling, giving him something to do.
He got his mug for it, and another for her in case she wanted it. Then he cut two slices off the bread loaf and plated them with a pat of butter. They were meager offerings but the most he could do for the moment.
He set the plates and cups down on the table and the woman eyed hers before picking up her piece of bread and nibbling on the corner.
Remus’s eyes tracked her face as they ate. The gentle clench of her jaw. Her cheeks, red from the wind or perhaps the sun. Her eyes, with their dark eyelashes, trained back on him. She spoke again, a short sentence.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, “I don’t understand.” She seemed to eye him hopefully for a moment before sighing. He could not fathom how they were supposed to live like this for the rest of the week. And they would have to. The supply boat would come on Sunday. Only then and no sooner would Remus be able to convince James to take the woman back to the mainland with him. If they couldn’t communicate in that time…
When he finished his slice of bread he pointed to himself, slowly and intentionally. “Remus,” he said. “Remus.”
She pointed to him. “Remus,” she repeated, with an accent. She then pointed to herself. “Sirius.”
“Sirius,” he said. This, he knew. As the son of a sailor, he had been taught all of the important stars. Still—a woman named after one? How peculiar.
He stood up. “Sirius, I must do my duties for the day.” She stood up as well. It was impossible.
Remus went outside and Sirius followed behind him at a distance. He had no idea what her interest in him was for. He carried a barrel of kerosene from the storage shed to the house. It was harder for him than it should have been. He had woken up that morning feeling weak, which he had attributed to the lack of sleep, but he was beginning to wonder if he was coming down with something.
He dreaded lugging the barrel up the steps, but it had to be done. He had to pause twice on the way up, and by the time he came back down, the back of his neck was coated in sweat.
Sirius hadn’t followed him up the stairs, something he was grateful for. Her gaze had more weight than a regular person’s. It was like she was tracking him, cataloguing him. For what purpose, he couldn’t be sure.
The problem, upon entering his room, was that Sirius was slumped over the table, forehead resting against the wood, her dark hair falling in such a way that it shielded her face. She seemed still from far away, but as Remus approached, he noticed the minute shaking of her body. She was crying.
“Sirius.” She lifted her head, slowly, to look at him. He gasped, horrified. “What have you done?”
Her face was a blotchy red, something between an allergy and a sunburn. The tops of her cheeks and the end of her nose and her forehead bore the brunt of it, her skin nearly peeled— burned?—away to reveal the vulnerable pink layer underneath. The salt from her tears had to make the hurt even worse, Remus knew.
He got a towel and ran it under the spigot, wetting it, and offered it to her. She didn’t take it. Slowly, carefully, as one would do to an animal, he approached her, lifting the towel to her face. He laid it flat over her from her hairline past her chin. He hoped it was cool enough to provide her with some relief.
It seemed to help, with the way she pressed her own hands against her face through the towel. But still her shoulders trembled.
He had come through the house periodically throughout the day—breaking from the light for lunch, lugging up the second barrel of kerosene—and it seemed to him as though Sirius slept for most of it. She lay there on his mattress on the floor, not ever poking her head up when he entered.
She didn’t rise until evening time, after Remus had cooked dinner—salt pork and potatoes—and plated it. As soon as the plates clinked against the table, Sirius got up from the bed. He suppressed a smile about it; it made him feel fond towards her. He could appreciate being driven by nothing besides hunger.
She looked better, he thought, as he tucked her into the table. Really, unfathomably better. Her face as a whole was just looking the slightest bit pink, and there was only some scabbing on the worst of the wounds from the morning.
He wanted to say something but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t say for certain, but he thought that Sirius felt that way, too. But it was strange, eating with someone. Remus had been alone for a long time, and Sirius still had a presence, even if she couldn’t speak English.
In the time it took him to clear the plates away, Sirius had picked up the Bible that he had left on the table the previous night. She thumbed through the thin pages, not stopping anywhere in particular, before handing it to him.
He ought to have put it back on the shelf after he had finished with it, but there was something comforting about the presence of a religious text, even if you didn’t subscribe to its ideals. The bookshelf sat by the stairwell. There were fifty-odd books on it, a mix of fiction and nonfiction and reference texts and cookbooks, and always the Bible. The Service traded them out every three months. It was the last time that James had come that they had been switched, and not enough time had passed for Remus to work his way through all of the fiction books, much less be desperate enough to start in on the others.
Remus would call it serendipity that there would be an English-French dictionary in the midst of the other books on the shelf. Of all the books in the world! He couldn’t help but laugh; his luck had never been so great.
Sirius stood over him, staring at him quizzically. “Come,” he said, standing, and led her to the table. “Sit.” She did.
He thumbed through the book. Now that he had the possibility to say any word he wanted, he couldn’t think of one. He finally went with “Hurt?”, motioning to his own face, and found it on the page. He kept his thumb beneath the word, showing the book to Sirius. Her eyes skimmed the page before she broke out in a brilliant smile.
“Remus!” She cried, now also recognizing the possibilities the dictionary opened up. Then she thought about his word and bobbed her head from side to side as if to say so-so.
She took the dictionary from him and flipped to the front where the French words were arranged in alphabetical order. She turned it around to show him. Basané:, he read, tawny, sunburnt.
“Sunburnt?” It was the only possible explanation for what had happened to her, though it was not a good one. It didn’t make sense. It was a clear day but not hot, nor a particularly bright sun. Perhaps she was especially sensitive.
“You’ll need a parasol.” He did have an umbrella tucked away somewhere. It came in handy in the spring. She could use it if she chose.
Next he showed her Sea.
She showed him Shipwreck.
His eyebrows drew together. Any shipwreck close by he would have seen or heard about by now. And she was the only debris that had washed up on these shores.
Using his hands again to communicate, he kept them close together—“Near?—before moving them farther apart. “Far?”
Sirius spread her arms wide. Remus wondered if she really grasped what he had meant. If she had, that was a great length she had traveled. She couldn’t have been unconscious for all of the journey. She had to have swum, even if only for a little while.
Remus put the dictionary away shortly after. It was maddening to converse with her in such a way, but it was the only option. He was thankful she could read, or else it would have been doubly as hard.
He returned the mattress to its frame. Now that Sirius wasn’t frozen to the bone, there was no reason to stick her next to the wood stove.
Sirius touched his arm, after, and stared into his eyes and said something. Remus recognized only his name. He wanted the dictionary. He wanted to see her lips form English syllables. He wanted to speak with her. Most of all, he wanted to peer inside her mind at all the things he was sure she was hiding.
In the days following, Remus and Sirius fell into a routine. Remus would go up to the light and would come back to eat bread at the table with Sirius. She’d follow him around beneath the umbrella whilst he did his morning chores. He’d go back up to the light and Sirius would do whatever she did while he was occupied. When he had breaks, there’d be a page of sentences for him to decode—the problem with the dictionary was that it sometimes gave multiple translated synonyms, so they’d had to choose arbitrarily—which he would answer, asking his own when he had the time. And at the end of the day they’d supper together, sitting with the dictionary between them until it was time to sleep, where Sirius took the bed and Remus was on the floor.
It was strange, but Remus thought he was falling in love with her. He had been so lonely, before. Sirius seemed to fill all of the empty spaces. Overfill them, even.
He was puzzling over a sentence from Sirius (Why survive lighthouse sole? Family?) that he thought really meant “Why do you live in the lighthouse alone? No family?” and was in the midst of formulating a reply that he hoped read as Family dead. Love sea, when the door opened.
It was Sirius, of course. There were leaves in her hair. Remus wanted to pick them out, but he stayed seated. He noticed as she set the umbrella down that she had her hand pressed to her throat. “Hurt?” he asked. She looked over at him and shook her head. She was better at remembering the English words after looking them up than he was with the French.
He got up and filled a cup with drinking water. He brought it to her, and she smiled, but he got the sense that it wasn’t what she needed. It was a helpless sort of feeling.
They wound down into the evening. Sirius had been helping to prepare dinner, which Remus appreciated. He knew the basics, or how to cook things so they weren’t inedible, but Sirius had brought out the cookbooks, with the help of the dictionary and Remus. On this night they were making corn chowder.
Sirius had put him in charge of peeling and cutting the potatoes. An easy job that he’d done hundreds of times before—though the hundreds of times he had done it were not up to Sirius’s standards. She was scolding him about how he was cutting the potatoes. He could tell that much without knowing a word of what she was saying. It brought a smile to his face. This is what it must be like to have a wife, Remus thought.
The longer he stared down at her, the less steam Sirius seemed to have for admonishing him. Her cheeks were flushed and a smile had crept onto her face as she held up two differently sized potatoes, gesticulating with them wildly as one final effort to prove her point. He got the sense that she was making him out to be a fool. Oh, he was.
He plucked one of the pieces of raw potato from her fingers and ate it. She scoffed then ate the other, leaving him to cut the rest.
After the success of dinner, Remus brought out a deck of cards. It was a nearly perfect pastime: cards didn’t mind what language you spoke, as long as you knew your numbers. They played War. A child’s game but enjoyable nonetheless.
It was late by the time they finished, with Sirius claiming victory in the end. Remus ascended the tower to check the light before sleeping. He was monitoring the kerosene level when he heard footsteps behind him on the stairs.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” he said, not at all meaning it as he watched Sirius look around the tower. She was seeing this tower for the first time, and she looked so overcome that if he were a betting man he’d say it was her first ever.
She came to stand beside him, staring at the light between the lenses. He liked the way she looked in the glow of the light. It made her look strong. Alive. She must have realized that he was looking at her, because when she turned to him her cheeks were already pink.
“What is it?” Remus asked. “You don’t wish to sleep? Go to bed?”
Sirius looked away. “No.”
He reached out for her hand. “Sirius. What is it?”
She ignored him for a moment before sighing and turning to him. She said something under her breath as she came in close to him, then brushed her fingers over his collar, one of her fingernails skimming his neck. He shivered. “Remus,” she said, looking up at him through her eyelashes.
“Sirius.” She was so close that Remus could see the peach fuzz on her cheeks, the freckle on her bottom lip. He would give her anything if only she asked.
“Kiss?” she asked, almost hesitant, like she wasn’t sure if it was the right word or if she was saying it correctly. There it was, that anything. Remus was helpless to resist her.
He slipped a hand behind her neck. It was cool there, beneath her curtain of hair. He dipped his head down to hers, pausing as their noses touched, relishing Sirius’s hitch of breath. “Yes,” he murmured, brushing their lips together.
Their kiss was tender and soft and unhurried, each feeling the other out. He pulled her closer to him by a hand on her hip and threaded the other hand into the hair at the nape of her neck, twisting his fingers into the soft strands.
Sirius pulled away first, resting her forehead against Remus’s shoulder. “Remus,” she said into his shirt.
“Sirius,” he replied, hands coming to cradle her back in some semblance of an embrace. He had no reasonable explanation for why he deserved this.
She raised her head and then, as if she couldn’t help herself, pressed her lips against Remus’s once more, quick and light. “Sorry,” she murmured.
“No! Don’t apologize.” He was certain his face was red. “That was lovely, really.”
Sirius extricated herself from him and, standing there for a few moments, nodded her head at him. “Bed,” she said, for an excuse, then averted her eyes and descended the steps.
Remus leant back against the windows for balance, feeling faint. He scrubbed a hand down his face, smiling a little beneath it. He touched his lips, trying to memorize the feel of hers against them.
That night, sleeping on the floor had nothing to do with his troubles falling asleep.
The next day was dreary, but all Remus could feel was warm.
Eating breakfast with Sirius was a charged sort of quiet. They glanced at one another when they thought the other wasn’t looking, and looked quickly away when they were caught out. It turned Remus’s stomach into Fisherman's knots, to see her be so shy because of him.
It was cloudy enough outside that, when Remus went to collect kerosene, Sirius didn’t require the umbrella. He pushed it into her hands anyway. She held it at her side, like a taunt.
She followed along as he moved three, four barrels into the house. When he finally stopped to drink a glass of water, she came up beside him with the dictionary in her hands. “Storm?” She read, eyebrows raised.
He nodded. It would come at some point during the day or night. A storm meant continuous watch of the light. And since he was the only keeper, he was bound to his post at the whim of the storm. He would be awake, constantly vigilant, for as long as it lasted.
The storm did come, as he suspected, though not until after dinner. They had cooked and ate and washed up, after which Sirius wanted to practice her pronunciation of English words—“Read?”—but they could hardly get there before the rain started coming down in sheets.
He looked at her apologetically. “Tomorrow.”
Remus was beginning to realize what a lonely night he was in for. He had gotten so used to Sirius at nighttime. Waking up to check the light and noticing the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Her body in his sheets, twisting, rearranging. She spoke in her sleep, sometimes, soft French mumblings he couldn’t understand.
He had been thinking about Sirius and the sea and James’s impending arrival and coffee and, still, Sirius, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. It was after midnight.
And there she was—Sirius, because who else might it have been?—with a cup in one hand and a cushion in the other. He straightened out where his posture had wilted against the wall as she came closer. She looked down at him, smiling, and offered him the cup.
It was filled with hot coffee, strong and dark. Remus could have kissed her. “Thank you,” he said instead. “You shouldn’t have.”
She laid down the cushion next to him and sat. “I watch,” she said pleasantly. “Sleep.”
It took him a moment. “No, I couldn’t.” She was offering to watch the light so he could sleep. It was unbearably tempting, but not polite. He couldn’t ask her to do that—but then again, he hadn’t. She had offered of her own accord. And she had brought him coffee. “Perhaps in a few hours,” he acquiesced. “You should sleep for now.”
Sirius eyed him warily and seemed to accept it. Then she leaned over and lay her head in his lap. Remus froze. It took a moment for his brain to catch up to him. He reached out and stroked over her hair, moving dark strands along his fingers. She sighed, her body relaxing against him.
Remus stayed like that, petting her, as she fell back to sleep.
She got to him, later, when he could hardly keep his eyes open any longer. She whispered to him, coaxed him down into her lap, cradled his head with her thighs. He couldn’t fight sleep long, with her fingers scratching gently at his scalp.
The rain stopped around sunrise. Remus had sent Sirius to bed—the real bed, with a mattress—not long before. She had kissed his cheek as she left, a faint brush to his skin.
Remus hadn’t stopped thinking about Sirius in all the time he had been awake during the storm, and afterwards, when he had cleaned the lenses and windows. “Marry me,” he said, as he came down the stairs from the light. It was the first time he had been there since the night before and the bread was already on the table. Sirius looked up at him from where she sat on the bed, chipper enough for what he knew had been a long night. He realized she was waiting for a word she could understand. “Be my wife.”
She frowned and shook her head. “No husband,” she said. They both knew Remus already knew this.
“No, Sirius–” he knelt down beside the bed and took her hands in her own, pressing them on either side of his face– “be my wife.” He kissed her wrist. “Sirius, wife. Remus, husband.”
Her fingers twitched on his face, holding his cheeks. Her mouth was half-open. Her blue eyes stared into his, as endless as the ocean.
Remus would understand if she declined him. He’d not hold it against her. He made little money. His profession was the loneliest there was. She had a family back home, even if she did not care for them. She was too young and too beautiful to waste a life here on the island with him. Still, selfishly, he hoped.
She pulled him up beside her on the bed. She already had the dictionary at her side, which proved to be completely unnecessary. Her word was secret, the same in French as it was in English.
“I’d know all your secrets in time,” Remus said. “I know you have them. They do not matter to me.”
Her eyes searched his face. She picked up the dictionary again. She put her finger under Mal. It had many translations: evil, ill, harm, pain, ache, sickness, misfortune, difficulty.
“I don’t understand,” he said finally. That was too much to read out of a single word—she meant something bad, but he couldn’t be sure how bad. He scanned the English words on the page. He showed her Maladie: malady, disease, sickness. “Are you ill?”
She drug her finger further down to Malédiction: malediction, curse.
“Sirius,” he said. She looked up at him, her lip between her teeth. She changed the page. Sang, her finger pointed, blood, race, family.
“Family curse?” he tried. “Blood curse?”
Sangsue: leech, bloodsucker.
She leaned in close to him, to his neck, just above his collar. He tried to comfort her. He wasn’t sure how they could make this work. And yet he wanted it anyway. Remus brushed her hair over her shoulder and she hummed against his skin, right where his pulse beat insistently. And then she kissed him, over that place of thrumming blood.
It was a kiss, and then it was more, with Sirius sucking the skin into her mouth. It would bruise. He wound an arm around her lower back and Sirius moved into his lap without detaching herself from his neck. It was nice to have her like this, he thought, even if he would rather be the one kissing her.
Then she pulled back and looked him in the face. Her lips were wet with saliva; she licked them. “Remember?” she asked. Remus didn’t have time to puzzle why this was a word she knew before she was saying it again, this time not a question but a command. “Remember.”
He shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t know.”
She got off of him, off the bed. Her face was wrought with determination, even as her hands trembled as she began undoing her dress. He was reminded of when he did it, that first night. This time he watched as she undressed, shedding her layers until she was naked in front of him.
She was too thin, but still beautiful. Her skin was pale white, her soft belly dotted with moles. Her breasts weren’t round but sloping, like cresting waves. And there was the dark thatch of hair on her pubis that made his mouth water.
He pulled her close to stand between his legs and he put his mouth to her, right above her navel. He looked up to find her looking down at him with those big blue eyes. “Beautiful,” he murmured. Her cheeks colored.
He reached for her thighs. “May I?” he asked, running his fingers over the dusting of hair he found there, inching closer to her mound.
“Yes,” she said. She gasped as his hand slipped between her thighs, tracing her cleft with his fingers. It was the warmest part of her he’d felt, and so soft and wet.
“I want to kiss you there,” he said, and Sirius groaned. He wondered if she could parse what he meant.
In the next moment she grabbed his wrist. He let himself be led by her, up through folds and hair, to touch her clitoris. She pressed his fingers to it and her thighs trembled.
She guided him in slow circles against her. Satisfied he could pleasure her properly, she let go of his hand in favor of using his shoulders to keep her balance. It was easy to do, Remus thought; Sirius was so sensitive. He experimented with the weight and speed of his touch, cataloguing the noises she made. She liked a firm hand, slow at first. It made her moan prettily, roll her hips into his hand. Then she started speaking to him, the desperation evident in her voice, like she was cursing at him. He sped up his strokes then, so harsh and quick he was afraid he’d hurt her somehow. The sounds she made weren’t far off, low and gravelly like an animal, completely pleasure seeking.
And then it was as if she were a spring uncoiled, a spool unwound. The muscles in her body slackened beneath his touch. She took a few moments to herself and then brushed his hand away, pushing him down to lying by his shoulders. She climbed upon him for the second time, a time infinitely better for the fact that she was wearing no clothes. Remus surged up and kissed her mouth. Her fingers went to his shirt buttons.
The feel of her on top of him in this way… there was a familiarity there. He struggled to place it—it felt real and not, and the way Sirius’s hands were sliding across his skin as she uncovered it did nothing to help—until finally he did. That first night’s dream that he had all but pushed from his mind. Sirius, above him, fully naked—the two events were strikingly similar.
He was distracted from his thoughts by Sirius, the real Sirius, who had freed his chest completely from his shirt and was trailing her hands down his ribcage. He jerked, sensitive to her touch.
“Yes?” she asked him, as her nimble fingers crept to the front of his trousers. They got them off him together, clumsily, Sirius giggling as their fingers tangled.
She wrapped her hand around his hardness and stroked, once, twice, and then he held her hips as she lowered herself down. She took him into her body slowly and then all at once. The feel of her was so magnificent that he had to squeeze his eyes shut. She stroked her fingers down her face and murmured at him. “Remus,” she said, once he opened his eyes again. She was so beautiful like this, cheeks flushed with exertion.
This was one act they didn’t need words for. Sex was a language all to itself.
She worked him slow but nowhere near ineffectually. He loved all of it, the tiny intricacies of sex with Sirius: her hitching breaths; her French mutterings, mixed intermittently with his own name; the dimples on her lower back; her wet, open mouth.
Before long she stilled, his length throbbing inside her, and bent to connect their mouths. Remus kissed her like he had kissed no one else before, deep and messy but so full of tenderness.
She kissed over his chin and then along the curve of his jaw and then down his neck—he was beginning to think she had a fixation—and eventually it was so much for him that he had to thrust up into her. She moaned and moved back against him, so he got his feet beneath him to rut into her with more purchase.
Remus was going mad. Sirius licked along the shell of his ear, then nibbled at the lobe. “Remus,” she sighed, breathy, into his ear. “Remember?”
He couldn’t focus. The feel of her around him, over him, in him. Her lips moved back down his neck and in the next moment he felt a sharp prick as her teeth dug into him, immediately followed by a spark of heat so intense that it took his breath away.
It was almost indescribable, the second layer of pleasure on top of the physical. But what he did know was that it was something else entirely. Something that he’d felt only once before, in that dream.
“I remember,” Remus said. He came.
After, Remus painted.
He had dressed in silence. His hands had shaken under Sirius’s gaze; he couldn’t look at her, but he had known she was watching all the same, bedsheets pulled up to preserve her modesty. She hadn’t said anything, either, when he pulled on his shoes or—he cringed at the extent of his own cowardice—when he had taken the umbrella as he left the tower.
He went to the supply shed and got out the white paint used for painting the lighthouse. It was due for a fresh coat, he knew, which was easier to tell himself than what he knew was true.
It was tedious, painting. The exterior of the tower was roughened due to its location by the sea, and the paint was averse to filling the cracks and gaps. It gave him time to think.
Sirius was, in her words, a bloodsucker. He had heard of people like that before, from his father. As a sailor, his stories tended to be about fish-people, but occasionally they dealt with monsters who walked on land. Dead men, he called them, who could only live again by sucking the blood and life force out of another. “But they’re never satisfied, boy. They couldn’t have just one, no. If they want to keep living, and live on forever, they’d have to keep killing.”
Sirius was one of them. It made sense. That first day, she had been dead, or close enough to it that no mortal could have come back. No human could have unburied themselves in that way, either. And then she had drank from him, so much that he had fainted. That was why she looked healthy and lively and beautiful; he had made her that way.
The door creaked open. Remus was startled not to see Sirius. She was there, he could tell, but she had a quilt draped over her head as if she were a child impersonating a ghost.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have, but he went to her. He dropped his paintbrush and opened the umbrella and held it above her as he unearthed her from the quilt. It fell from her shoulders to the damp ground.
Sirius looked at him only a moment before slipping into rapid French. Her volume increased and her face turned progressively redder as she continued. Her bottom lip trembled. Remus caught his name. And then, after a shaking breath, she was sobbing, her chest heaving and tears running in rivulets down her cheeks.
It hit him, then, later than it should have, that this was still Sirius standing in front of him. She was that same frail woman he had found on the rocks. If she was a monster, she had been one the entirety of the time he had known her. When he laughed with her. When they cooked together. When she watched the light for him. When they made love. And in all that time, she hadn’t killed him.
He took her into his arms, beneath the umbrella, and she melted into him. “I’m sorry,” he said, clutching at her desperately, in the same way that she was holding onto him. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Remus got them back inside. He wrapped a clean blanket around Sirius’s shoulders and sat her at the table. Both pieces of bread were still there, untouched. Remus swallowed the lump in his throat and filled a glass with water, pushing it into her hands. She sniffled and drank.
It took a long while, but by sitting beside her and encouraging her, Sirius opened up to him. She explained, painstakingly slow, how she came to be this way. Shipwreck was not true, but ship and thrown were. She used the words bite, drink, death, bloodsucker, thirst. She used the word remorse.
He tucked her against his chest as she wept once more. So she had killed. But it—the way she was forced to live her life, or the lack of it—was new to her; she hadn’t killed enough not to be sorry for it. If it was difficult for her not to drink from him after the initial instance of it, then she hadn’t shown it. So perhaps she had gained some control, or at the very least won in the fight against her desperation.
He thought of how after her bite came pleasure; a give and a take. That was one small merit of her curse. And what else did it say about her affliction, that she was able to provide a merciful death?
Though Remus tried, he couldn’t find a fault in her. Animals killed; it was inherent behavior. It could be tracked in a simple chain: the shrimp ate the algae, the tuna ate the shrimp, the human ate the tuna. And there, at the end, was the bloodsucker to have the human. The new apex predator in a revised law of nature. How was Sirius different from any other animal doing what it needed to in order to survive?
“How often will you have to… feed?” She recognized feed but not how often; he looked up frequency. What Remus meant was this: Will I be enough for you?
She thought about it. Thirst forever. Feed… She held up two fingers, then four. Then, weeks. He had recovered extremely well in the days following when she had last drank from him; surely two to four weeks would be enough time for him to fully convalesce. Because he would be the one keeping her alive, if he had any say in it.
“I want you to stay,” Remus said plainly. “I want you to live here with me. You’ll be safe here. I’ll take care of you always, however you need. I’m in love with you, Sirius.” He slipped out of his chair and kneeled beside her. He took her hand in his own and bowed his head to press his lips against it. “Marry me.”
She put her hand to her mouth and nodded. “Yes, Remus.” She laughed a little, eyes glistening. “Husband.”
His heart soared. He lurched up and cradled her face in her hands and kissed her, deep and sure.
Remus broke away. He looked upon her face, the woman he had first seen a mere week ago. The woman with whom he had to communicate in an unconventional way. The woman who fought against her base instincts every day to be close to him. The woman who wanted a life with him, despite it all.
“Wife.”
The next day, James arrived around noon.
It had been a slow morning for Remus and Sirius. It was the first night they had slept in the same bed, and Remus was loath to untangle himself from her at sunrise. When he returned from the light, Sirius was still wrapped up in the covers. She coaxed him back into bed, and there they stayed for another hour, dozing and kissing and touching lazily.
They did finally get up, eating breakfast and then going outside. Sirius watched him, as always; but on this day it felt like even more.
Remus went up to the light to work, afterwards. It was a few hours before he could see James’s boat off in the distance. He went downstairs to tell Sirius.
She was hunched over the table, her eyebrows furrowed. As he got closer, he could see the books and paper she had scattered across it. “Sirius?”
She jumped, her eyes flitting to him. Her cheeks were pink. “I… try.” She said. Remus could see the dictionary and Frankenstein and a penciled-in sheet that was half English, half French. So she was translating it, it seemed, trying to use it to understand the syntax of the English language.
It filled him with pride. “That’s a very good try,” he said. He dipped his head closer to her. “I believe it deserves a reward.”
“Reward. Reward?” They both repeated the word a few times until she had figured out the pronunciation. Then she found it in the dictionary. When she looked back up at him, her mouth had curved into a smile that was almost salacious.
He swallowed, then remembered James. “Reward tonight, not now.” He brushed her hair behind her ear. “Come, let’s welcome James.”
They went down the path to the dock, Sirius under her umbrella, as the boat approached. Remus helped James to tie up as he arrived. And then there he was, in the flesh.
“Remus!” He clapped Remus over the shoulder. “I come bearing gifts.”
“My pay, I’d hope,” Remus cracked. James handed him a bag. Inside were three ripe apricots. “How much?”
James winked. “Free, for you.” Then he stumbled, despite the fact that he was on flat ground. “I–I apologize, miss. I didn’t see you there. Good afternoon.”
Remus turned. Sirius had stopped at the other end of the dock. She gave a nervous curtsy. It was incredibly endearing.
“Ah, James. This is my fiancée, Sirius.”
The utterly confused look James gave him said, “We’ll be speaking about this later.” What actually came out of his mouth was, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She nodded her head at him, smiling. “She’s still learning English,” Remus told him.
James smacked his back again, scoffing light-heartedly. “Only you, friend.” He jumped back onto the boat for the time being. Soon they would have to unload all of the supplies from the deck.
Remus took the bag of apricots to Sirius and offered her one. Her eyes shone as she took it and bit in. Still chewing, she held it out to Remus. He leaned in and took a small bite out of it from her hand. And then, he couldn’t resist; he leaned in and pressed a chaste kiss to Sirius’s mouth.
“Remus,” James called. “Is there anything you’d like to put in for for next time, while I’ve got the log open?”
“We’ll need English grammar books,” Remus said. He looked at Sirius, the flesh of the apricot yielding beneath her teeth, her lips shiny with the juice. “And a priest, if you can get him. We’d like to be wed before the summer is over.”