Admit to What
I don't know how the weather is anywhere else, but where I am, it is hot and humid and really just this side short of unbearable. So I wrote this. It is Sirius/Remus and summer and humidity and lazy teenage angst and love--so I hope it can find a place here even though it wasn't written in response to a prompt. Though I am working on fic that responds to prompts! Just...not done yet.
Title: Admit to What
Author: L. Stone
Word Count: 415
Rating: PG, for language
Summary: Sirius feels sick with heat and exhaustion, dizzy with feeling flooding where there was, so recently, a cruel absence of feeling. Sirius/Remus. Seventh year.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, including and especially Sirius and Remus, or any of its settings.
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It’s not that it’s hot, Remus says, it’s that it’s very, very (VERY) humid.
Sirius tells him to fuck off because he doesn’t care. He feels like he’s breathing water. His skin is slick with a pervasive sheen of sweat. His fingers, where they twine with Moony’s, are slippery and hot.
They have been lying here for an hour, two boys too large to share a dormitory bed, all of the sheets and the blankets kicked off into a pile on the floor.
Sirius closes his eyes and lets out a long, rattling breath. Kill me, he says.
Never. What would I do without you? Life would be boring.
Sirius can’t tell if Remus is joking or telling the truth. He wishes he could move. Pin Moony down, make him admit-
Admit to what?
To love?
Oh he’s drowning.
He almost misses the gasping sort of tired whisper to his side.
Padfoot?
Hmmm? What?
He kicks his shin against Moony’s.
The most effort he can manage.
They have left the window open even though there is no breeze, and if there was all it would do would blow more buzzing hot dripping air over them. Remus shifts next to him. He is leaning on one side now, his hand still clasped with Sirius’s.
Sirius feels sick with heat and exhaustion, dizzy with feeling flooding where there was, so recently, a cruel absence of feeling.
He feels a smooth hot touch where Moony’s fingers trail down the skin of his cheek.
What are we going to do, Sirius, next year?
He closes his eyes. Just feels.
The truth is that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything but Moony fingers and Moony toes and Moony voice, still hovering over him, asking him questions with no possible right answers.
What are you doing, trying to think in this weather? he asks. It is all he can come up with in answer. His brain feels slow, mired in the heat, sluggish and exhausted.
I can’t help it, Remus answers. He lies down again, his head on Sirius’s pillow now, their foreheads just barely touching. Their fingers still intertwined. The fingers of Remus’s other hand falling down Sirius’s chest, coming to rest on Sirius’s bare side.
Padfoot?
Hmmm? What?
Remus’s whisper is the quietest sound Sirius has ever heard, almost impossible to distinguish, fighting as it does the short distance to Sirius’s ear, through the listless, heavy air falling around them.
I-
Know. I know, Moony. Me too.