"Does it?"

The skepticism isn't heavy enough to keep him from moving to Charles' side and taking the bottle, then a drink, with no preemptive finicky sniffing and only the slightest grimace at the aftertaste. (Drinking whatever he's handed—there might be a life philosophy buried in there somewhere.) He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his jumpsuit and leans back against the adjacent washing machine, ankles crossed in front of him—one easy downward slide from sitting on the floor next to him, but not yet.

That he doesn't ask if Charles is all right is a matter of efficiency, not insensitivity. Instead he keeps casual hold of the bottle, pending reassurance that giving it back won't be culpable and reckless conduct, and gestures to his own bare jaw. "What's all this?"

For a moment Remus grins at the top of his head, more charmed than concerned—jokes, in his experience, have been the clearest mark of acceptance instead of only tolerance—but it doesn't last. He chews the inside of his lip and only looks at Charles long enough to decide there's no point in trying to read him. Not at this angle. Not with those sunglasses and that beard in the way.

So instead he joins him in watching the clothes tumble and sinks, legs sliding slowly out ahead of him, to sit down. His boots squeak against the floor the whole way, but he makes up for that, maybe, by holding the bottle back toward Charles.

"Are you drinking in the laundry room because you left or because you're back?" he asks, and raises his eyebrows. "Or for fun. I'm not here to judge anyone's hobbies."

"You made it to the 70s?" To years Remus remembers as more than a series of houses he wasn't allowed outside of, although there's nothing saying anything about his 1970s and Charles' 1970s would match up. Maybe sometime they can compare current events. A shot for every person they've both heard of—

It will take either more time or significantly more stumbling and incoherency for Remus to be too stodgy about anybody's drinking problem. He's only twenty-two.

Speaking of, he's looking sideways at Charles again, searching for signs of age under the more obvious and distracting changes. "You must be getting pretty old." If Remus knew him better he'd nudge him in the ribs—he's teasing—but he settles for a not-too-gentle smile.

"Afraid I'm not familiar."

Another point against her being a witch, but really only a fraction of one. Remus knows the songs his parents and his friends listened to, might be able to sing along with one if he heard it, but names and albums not so much. Too sheltered, then too busy cramming four weeks of schoolwork into three, then too preoccupied with avoiding a messy premature death, and most recently too poor for a record collection, a radio, or taste in anything at all and especially not in anything so inedible as music.

Though if Charles wanted to sing a few bars of 'Landslide' for him they might be able to reach an understanding.

The relative quiet takes that long to sink in, but by the time he's said familiar Remus is folding up his lanky legs in preparation to stand. "Are you going to need a hand?" he asks, with another dig—maybe about his age, maybe about his inebriation, probably both—buried unspoken in his tone. But the offer is genuine.

"Hey," Remus says, more calming than alarmed, because he's looking after the liquor bottle as it rolls away, and of course there's an Occam's razor moment where he assumes it's only misplaced feet or a rush of blood. But before he's followed Charles and stood up all the way, the rest has settled in. The braced line of his back and shoulders, the lack of color.

He's too kind and too worried to ask if Charles was possibly serious about the werewolf thing.

But he recognizes pain, whatever the source, and Remus doesn't touch him because in his position Remus wouldn't want to be touched. His hand goes to the corner of the machine, instead. He's tall and long-limbed enough to hover without getting too close. "Charles?"

You need to get to the medbay. But Remus doesn’t go to the medbay himself, doesn’t like being bossed around, and doesn’t actually have any idea what’s going on.

So he says, “Yeah, all right.”

He reaches around Charles for the sunglasses, hangs them at the split of his jumpsuit’s only-mostly-fastened collar, and spares a glance for the dryer before deciding not to bother. He can pick up Charles’ clothes when he comes back for his own.

Instead he rests a hand on Charles’ shoulder blade, ready to drop a shoulder low if he needs it. Awkwardly, probably. Remus has over half a foot on him. He’s also a wizard and stronger than he looks, and he’s rapidly weighing and discarding other options: he isn’t going to try to Apparate a possibly-injured muggle through an unstable spaceship, and Charles is only at risk of being involuntarily levitated or pack-carried through the halls if he can’t stay upright.

So it is a risk.

“You know what this is,” Remus prompts, hoping for an explanation but only really asking for a nod or a head shake, if Charles would rather grit his teeth.

Remus hesitates—a silence filled by a strain to recall the fourteenth floor, has he been there, does he remember it well enough, does anyone even live there; by a set of lungs deflating on the floor while the rest of their owner appears inside a target ring at school; by kick me and I'll put you in a body bind (a toothless threat even if he'd said it aloud); by a bleeding muggle caught in curse fire, taking in a breath as Remus grabs him and Disapparates, wide-eyed and already dead when their bodies reassemble on a quieter street—and says, "No. Sorry. Not—"

Not to the fourteenth floor. But another worried look at Charles, long enough to balance his discomfort and the remaining distance, one one hand, against the sensation of Apparition on the other, the chance he might be ill if Severus hasn't acclimated him to it already, and then Remus does tighten his arm after all, pivots on his feet, and pulls Charles along for a few seconds of squeezing, disorienting immateriality.

Only to the lift door. It's the most he's willing to try. He calls for a car without pausing to see if Charles is going to be sick on anyone's shoes.

Remus shuffles him into the lift while saying mildly, "I imagine it isn't your fault."

—or the drinking might be, but at the moment Remus is considering that another effect instead of a cause. Something else is much more wrong. He isn't especially used to handling sick or injured people, but he is used to being one and to resenting his indignity almost more than his illness. So he doesn't ask questions, avoids gawking in the lift, and declines to chatter out loud to try to distract Charles during the trek down the fourteenth floor corridor. Not thinking about it—pain—that's fine advice until it's impossible to follow. Sometimes you just have to let it have you for a while.

But he can't keep his head quiet. He doesn't realize that he should, perhaps, try; that his short search of his mental catalog of nonmagical maladies might not be something Charles can tune out of; that what would Madam Pomfrey do comes entangled with years of flayed skin and shattered bones, a wet cloth in his mouth to bite down on and keep him quiet while she worked; or that all of the worry and pity he isn't voicing or allowing onto his face, for the sake of Charles' pride, flows right out of him anyway.

His mental babble dampens, at least, when Charles points out his room and he's pulled back to the surface, wrangling to allow Charles to open the door and moving sideways through it. "Is there anyone I should call?"

"If you're going to be insulting," Remus says, because medieval is only half a step up from primitive, "I'll have to ask you to keep out." Of his head. But he doesn't quite mind, watching with a vague sort of smile. Not yet relieved, but expectant. Above it his eyes are still sharp.

There's nothing ordinary about this. Even if it were as simple as a back injury. Wizarding afflictions rose to meet wizarding cures, he thinks, so tearing oneself apart every month passes for a chronic illness, a few days of care and rest and back to work, and splinched lungs were only a bit of excitement during lessons, easily restored. But there was nothing to be done about his mother's muggle heart when she fell ill, and it wasn't ordinary.

And this, particularly—he watches Charles drink from the vial from beyond the foot of the bed, wand still in hand, expecting to be relieved as soon as the contents do their work but also expecting some sort of explanation. Hoping for one, anyway.

“He must like you,” Remus says, dry and thoughtless. Less thoughtful on the whole, now. He’s no Occlumens, but he has the foundations of a decent one if he ever learned: compartmentalization, suppression, distance. The ability to think mostly about Quidditch and write a coherent essay about werewolves at the same time, or to focus on someone’s poorly-applied mascara and smile pleasantly while she complains about half-breeds. That sort of thing.

So when Charles said can’t, no doors slammed shut, no walls went up, and Remus didn’t go mute, but he is at least more present, more self-protective, intentionally attentive to things that don’t really matter.

He takes the sunglasses hanging from the neck of his jumpsuit, waves them once at Charles to make sure he knows where they are, and sets them on top of a bureau. He thinks, Your laundry will wrinkle, and, You should really cut your hair. Out loud he says, “Are you sure you should be mixing that with alcohol?” and moves closer to swipe the vial and sniff at the contents. He isn’t serious. Potions and liquor work their magic in different ways. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “What did you mean, you can’t?”

Remus thinks—no. He veers away from thinking about what precisely he's known, but he does understand, or come close. His pain stops. Never permanently, and in between full moons his joints still ache and his wounds struggle against healing spells, but the worst of it is confined to one night a month, a few minutes on either side of the night, and all he has to do to beat it is outlast it.

So he can only imagine not having an end, or the prospect of one, but imagining it is enough. He doesn't spare a moment to worry about Charles' lost power or lost identity or whatever is wrapped up in treating his telepathy; if Remus could give up his magic to change what he was, he would.

He caps the vial and sets it back on the nightstand.

"You don't have any with you," he says, to confirm. "Is it something you could—" Brew, almost, but he's learning. "—synthesize here?"

"I'm sure if you went mad with power someone would step in," Remus says mildly. Only half of it, the part where Charles turns villain, is a joke. If anyone tried it, Remus doubts it would go over well with the ship's non-mutant supernatural contingent.

So it's only Charles he's concerned about. His autonomy and agency and ability to exist in a way he can withstand, and fuck anyone who tries to decide for him what he should willingly suffer—

Projection is a funny thing.

"Is that why you're staying down here?" He folds his arms behind his back, hand around elbow, and shifts back from the bed without taking a step.