Sirius was bleeding.
Remus mopped up the puddle of blood on the wooden floorboards with a grimy white towel, his breathing harsh and heavy. Sirius sat on the couch with a large gash across his exposed leg, jeans rolled up to the knee. He bled profusely; the drops plopped onto Remus beige shirt and dripped onto the floor. Remus kept cleaning it, over and over and over and over. Every drop that spilled, he scrubbed away obsessively.
Sirius looked on with tired gray eyes.
Their home had never been this quiet. Sirius could hear the crickets, the ticking of the clock, Remus' heavy breathing and the scrub scrub scrub of the towel on the floor. He looked at his leg, covered with blood. He looked back at Remus, on his knees, cleaning the floor.
Remus had never really cared about cleanliness.
"What are you trying to prove, Remus?" Sirius asked, his voice hoarse and ragged, dark hair falling into his weary face, "What? Now the floor is more important than I am?"
Remus' arm stilled from scrubbing, his grip tightening so fiercely on the towel that his knuckles turned white. Remus' face was pale, paler than usual, face etched with worry lines and eyes drained of life.
"I don't know where you got that wound from, Sirius," he said to the ground coldly, his grip on the towel punishing and unrelenting, "I don't know, you won't tell me anything. It should be me that asks whether I'm less important"-
"Oh fuck you, Remus," Sirius' tone was biting and frostier than ice, his eyes emotionless and hollow. He looked to all the world like an angry and bitter man, but if you knew him well enough you could see the lingering sadness in the way his mouth drooped and fingers clutched his knee. "I'm tired of you acting like you're the only one who ever fucking suffers. I was on Order business, you know I can't tell you!"
Remus looked up at him with his beautiful amber eyes that Sirius used to adore; he remembered how he used to trace the freckles that surrounded them, used to run his fingers across Remus' eyelashes while he slept. Now Sirius wanted nothing more than to look away from those eyes, those eyes that used to drip with affection and now were frozen with pain. He wanted to look away and never see them again. The way he sunk into them was too painful; he couldn't do that anymore, things weren't the same.
"So you don't trust me, then?"
It was very silent for a moment, and Sirius was painfully aware that his leg was still bleeding. He sighed and stifled a gasp of pain as his leg twitched involuntarily from the cold.
"It's not like you trust me," he said despairingly, defeated and exhausted, a million things running through his mind that he wanted to say to Remus, that he's wanted to say to Remus for weeks. He tried to grasp onto one, but the angry and hurt and desperate thoughts slipped through his fingers like sand. "It's not like you trust me."
Remus did not respond, but kept staring at Sirius with his painfully beautiful eyes. He did not deny anything, and Sirius knew then that they were broken and unfixable.
He tried to fix it anyways.
Sirius leaned over and lifted Remus' chin; he pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. He pulled away.
Remus did not move for several seconds; the seconds ticked by as slowly as years. Then he suddenly stood up and ran to his room, leaving the towel on the floor, stained with blood. The slam of the door echoed in Sirius' ears for what seemed like an eternity.
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(In the middle of the night Remus came back to the living room where Sirius slept, nuzzling his nose into the arm of the couch, his injured leg hanging off the side. He wiped away the dried dark blood on Sirius' leg with a wet and recently cleaned towel; it was turquoise, Sirius' favorite color. He bandaged Sirius' leg, carefully, lovingly, and planted a kiss by Sirius' eye. Then he took his battered suitcase and he left.
And they did not speak again for twelve years.)
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Sirius woke up alone.