Remus and Sirius have been talking all night. Sirius forgets things now. It was bad after Azkaban, but the Veil has made it much worse. Sometimes it's little things, like that Remus is allergic to cats. Sometimes it's bigger, like when Remus caught him standing outside in a torrential downpour, staring up at the sky and blinking the rain out of his eyes.

He said he forgot that the sky could cry.

They've been talking all night while Sirius swims in and out of lucidity. Remus has a theory that Sirius gets more forgetful around the moon, although that could just be his own wishful thinking, wanting to have someone else who suffers from the moon with him.

They've just had their morning tea when Sirius drops his cup and kisses Remus. The kiss is very hesitant, and it breaks Remus' heart. Sirius kisses him as if they've never kissed before, never spent years tangled up together and loving each other. He gets cold chills as he realizes that Sirius kisses him this way because he can't remember their past together. To Sirius, they really haven't kissed before. Remus wants to disappear. He knows this is driving him crazy, and that he should leave before it gets any harder. But... it's Sirius. When something surprises a laugh out of him, he sounds like he did at fourteen. Does it really matter that now all it takes to surprise his laugh is the dusty old cuckoo clock ejecting it's hourly bird? Does it matter that sometimes Sirius rejects his advances (which are never more than chaste kisses and occasional friendly pats anyway) because he forgets that he's gay? Does it really matter that Sirius doesn't know they've ever kissed before when they're kissing now, and he still tastes like he always did? His Sirius, who puts so much lemon and sugar in his tea that he might as well be drinking lemonade?

So they kiss, because Remus is too in love with a memory to put a stop to it.

Moony has the whole dining room set up for research. There are books laid out everywhere, and parchments and quills. He's throwing himself into this project
(because Adrian asked me to)
because he wants to distract himself. Down the hall, there's a room that was never there before. It's cloaked, of course, and can't be seen or felt by anyone other than him. And the broken, ghost of a man that lives in the room, naturally.

Remus drinks cup after cup of tea, and when it's not enough he switches to coffee. And he doesn't think about who he's saving, or why he's saving him. And he definitely doesn't think about the man in that room down the hall, a room that isn't really there.