Le Ciel Dans Une Chambre (Regulus/Regulus, Sirius/Regulus, NC17)
Title: Le Ciel Dans Une Chambre
Author: imochan
Pairing: Regulus/Regulus, Sirius/Regulus
Rating: NC17
Warnings: Sex, incest, (very) possible dubious consent or chan (Sirius is 15)
Wordcount: 3,080
Summary: "He starts to crave it, like chocolate or cinnamon tea."
Notes: Orginally for the pornish_pixies May Fantasy Fest as per thescarletwoman's challenge: "First time, possible dub consent? Otherwise, light on kinks, please. Can take place either at Hogwarts (location up to the author in a semi-public place) or back home at No12 Grimmauld." As per my ridiculous usual, this is more Lit than Erotica, but I hope you enjoy!
Quand tu es près de moi,
Cette chambre n'a plus de parois,
Mais des arbres oui, des arbres infinis,
Et quand tu es tellement près de moi,
C'est comme si ce plafond-là,
Il n'existait plus, je vois le ciel penché sur nous... qui restons ainsi.
All the light in the room comes from outside. When Regulus sits up against the headboard the shadows hunker down into the thick middle of it all, and the window is luminous with slate and ash-snow and the blue clatter of trolley from the far street. This is the room with the gauze curtains and the heavy black drapes, coiled like gagged ropes into the crevices above the glass, straining down to swallow the light. This is the room where the food and water tastes like ice, where the books are silver-bound and the skin of a young, sick aristocrat is blue-veined all the way to the surface, so that his boy's cheeks are cold mauve and his ankles and wrists are thin-to-invisible, and he lies on the sheets like glass carving, and his organs are brittle.
And he attracts doctors, with long, sweeping robes, with probing fingers, and he attracts thin broths with vile sorts of green herbs dusted on the top of his tongue and he attracts shadows into his belly, the inside curve of his bent knees, in the shallow place just above his nose, between his eyebrows, below his forehead: they gather and coil like snakes. And he hides his face in his mother's sleeves when they puncture his skin like thin paper; he gets slapped for crying, so he bites the juncture of his own thumb and saves it for when he can crawl under the covers with his whole aching body and ignore the row of vials on his walls.
Normally he has a list of them in his head, written in his veins and on the lining of his throat. Yellow and thick, smelling like rotten sage, alleviates fever, makes breathing (rather) difficult (possibly). Grey, thin, tasteless, smokey in his nostrils, levels his body temperature (makes his fingertips white). Maroon, passionfruit and cloying, tart, tightens his veins (slows his heart). There is a silver bracelet on his wrist that is supposed to make him sleep, but makes him dizzy instead; makes him dream the shadows are solid, makes him dream the light is banging on the windowpanes with a cry, that the owls are dying in the coop, that Sirius is touching his forehead, warming clammy skin, kissing his throat and ear because Sirius knows that that is where the missing pieces are.
He dreams that Sirius kneels, and when he opens his eyes the world is slate grey and Sirius hisses "Breathe," at his bedside. (He used to do this, when they were skinny and young with knobbly knees, and Sirius's red and yellow tie was a burn on their fingers when he looped it around their palms that summer). "Oh - oh, damn. Damn it. Y-you. Breathe."
When he did, Regulus dreamed suddenly in fairytales. It was easier to move his fingers, eventually, life in the slow coursing of air and blood under his skin. He heard voices in his ears and they were all breathe, you stupid - fucking, stupid and they were incredible, moving, powerful pieces of ripe medicine, enough to make him tear back the covers from his chest and want light, in the room. When he could sit up, ears ringing with a desperate voice, the sky opened up above him, and he could stand in the attic again under his own strength, watching Sirius - bathed in dust, sitting by an upturned trunk - scratch at parchment with a dull quill.
"What're you doing?" he crouches, palms sweaty and flat on his own knees, feeling the dust on his trousers.
"Go away," says Sirius; flick of a feather.
"I don't want to?"
"I'm busy."
"Mother doesn't know I'm here," he says, last-ditch, breath carving a spiral in the dust by his feet.
"Better not," Sirius says, turns; they meet eyes across the room. "She'd better not, Christ, why aren't you in bed?"
"In bed," he says, drifting aimless, forgetful, stifled before it leaves his tongue. "What?"
"You look bad," says Sirius - Regulus can see the thick welling of ink at the quill nub. "Sick, you look sick."
"I don't feel," he says. " - that way."
"Right, yeah," Sirius rolls his eyes, hunkers back against the trunk, dust rolling up in gold waves around him. "Yeah, you're the picture of it."
He looks beautiful - pressed open like the wriggling, careless, blood-pink inside of a spell. He is all arms crooked on the edge of the wood, wrists splayed up, dust sprinkled on his hair and nose and lashes, skin gleaming, sunrises on the inside edge of his lip when he smiles. The beginning bloom of leaner muscles in his shoulders, his hands, in the curve of his thighs - opened to the shadows where Regulus sits. It makes Regulus swallow, makes the cotton of his throat draw tight and dry, his tongue heavy. My brother, he thinks, is the most beautiful thing in the world. My brother, he thinks, can bring people back to life.
"Oi," says Sirius. "What."
"Let me stay - please," he whispers in a whirl, rocks forward onto his palms, wood scraping under the dust, trousers rucking up at his knees, ankles bared to the air - skinny and white. "I'll be quiet, and, and I won't tell, just - I know I heard you when. And it wasn't them," he gasps out, and Sirius's eyes lose the lazy glaze for a moment. "It was you, that made me - "
Sirius laughs, breaks the flow into stuttering little pieces, awkward and blue on the inside of Regulus's mouth.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
"Oh, shut it," Sirius groans, as if the sound makes his skin itch uncomfortably, thighs shifting in the dust. "Stay, stay if you really want."
Regulus folds himself into the space between Sirius's side and the rafters of the house, with the London sun shifting through the cracks in the wood, slats of light over his elbow, Sirius's wrist, his neck, Sirius's cheekbone, his hip, Sirius's bent knee. There is a coat of dust on every piece of life, warm and bright; it makes breathing easier. He watches the hard press of ink into paper, words like summer, us, what it's like here.
"Who is James," he asks, quietly.
"Shut it," says Sirius, and wraps an arm around his shoulder. He feels thin.
"Sirius - " he says, mouth against the warm shoulder.
"Christ," says Sirius, and pinches Regulus's thigh. "Shh. You fucking girl."
During the year, the room sits un-jostled, neatly closed, properly tied closed into swaths of slate and grey (green and silver hissing under the pillows of the bed, between the mattress and the frame, in the chinks of the window). Autumn makes it droop from the world and pull away, like rooms do: into the backspace of someone's memory, into the hallway at the end of the stair that no one uses, anymore. Winter makes it stone-chilly, stand-offish, ready to wrap itself in tapestries and ignore the rest of the house, the street, the city, all to conserve warmth. Spring makes it jealous; the walls push out into the stairwells with aristocratic bravado, the floorboards creak for life again, straining for something, the smooth pad of feet, a hitch in the breath of someone sleeping, a moan, the desperate, the wrong kind of love that makes Family fall, makes a room worth remembering.
In the summer, Regulus stands in the doorway. The bed is wide and lush-dark, velvet blue from the ceiling to the pillows; the stones are grey and warm. He knows what he could do with this. He could devote himself to the little bits of life: he could roll up the heavy coils of velvet at the frame and shunt back the gauze on its silver rings and open the glass out into the smog of London. He is a Young Man, they say, and he feels it in the early mornings, straining at his blood and bones and in something tight coiled right in the pit of his belly.
He doesn't think of anything, at first - it's only sunlight streaming in on his face after a year of dungeon stone and strangling neckwear. His hand is clumsy and wondrous, stumbling over himself, enamored with his own hipbones, the inner curve of his own thigh, the way it feels to bite his own lip when he touches down -- uhn -- there.
He likes the way it feels to wake up and close his fingers around himself automatically, to suck them into his mouth, slowly, and get them slick enough to simply glide through it all: to sink into cushions and light and sometimes, yes, he hears a voice in his ear like a dream - breathe, damn you - and he comes.
He starts to crave it, like chocolate or cinnamon tea. He hunches himself into his pillows to keep from crying out loud enough to be heard, because now he envisions other hands, other mouths and a solid voice, a smell. He sneaks into Sirius's room, snatches a white cotton shirt with the sticky, nervous fingers of an addict. He smothers himself with it, cleans himself with it, guilty and pink-faced and utterly shameless; in love with the little twist it gives his voice when he muffles a cry in it.
He is lazy with this self-discovery, lovely, sinful and adult and all his. He glides around the house, dazed, with what he can do. Pull back curtains, sneak to the kitchens at night, deliberately sit with his feet up on the windowseat when he reads. And when Sirius stops at his doorway, Sirius really stops, all lanky fifteen years of him, and looks.
And there is a catch in Sirius's eye, something that quells the rebellious burning coil for a moment long enough for Regulus to see the huh, and the well. And Regulus wonders if, in the blue sunlight, the filtered gray smog and the air in his thin hair, his skinny white fingers, if he's beautiful too, now.
"Hello," he says.
"What the hell is this?" Sirius asks, laughs; his mouth curls.
You, thinks Regulus. Laughing in my doorway. "Is what?" he says.
"Nhm," murmurs Sirius; he pushes away from the wall with an easy lope, a glorious shrug of his shoulders. Regulus finds himself dragging his tongue along the inside of his teeth with every peek of Sirius's collarbone, every visible sweep of the muscles in his jaw.
Sirius hunches himself into the window seat and plucks the book from Regulus's hands. His legs are longer, now; his knees and ankles knobby are against Regulus's shin and his elbows perch at odd, beautiful, masculine angles. The light makes stubble and shadows under his cheekbones, in his deep-set eyes.
"School work," says Sirius, like an offense.
"What?"
"School work - on summer hols."
"Ha ha, give it, please," Regulus means to hold out a hand, imperious, but he moves like a greedy child, and takes Sirius's wrist, instead. His fingers fit around it neatly, enough to make the air go out of him in a silent moan.
There is quiet; Sirius does not return the book, does not look up, does not seem to notice yet how red Regulus's skin has gotten under his presence, under the force of his very skin and the heartbeat under it, because Regulus is touching his pulse.
"Huh," says Sirius, soft, like the wind. "So you are."
"Wh - "
"Dangerous."
Regulus blinks; the room is bright with confusion and the illicit clench of a heartbeat.
"You," says Sirius. "Looking."
"I - "
"Touching," whispers Sirius, and stops it all short. He shifts, forward, the cushions rustling under his knees; he presses a palm to the wood beside Regulus's head, lets his mouth graze the skin just under the lobe of Regulus's ear.
"If only she knew," Sirius breathes, making Regulus's stomach squirm back against his spine, eyelids suddenly heavy. "I'm not the sick one… am I?"
"S-si..." he sounds weak, suddenly, fingers flexing in the hot air between their chests.
"I'm not the one jerking myself off to my own broth- "
The book thumps on the ground, the pen and ink well clattering beside it, shattering, Regulus chokes on a uncontrolled squeak of his own voice in protest, trying to push himself away as Sirius grabs his wrists and holds him there.
"What was it you said?" Sirius hisses. "It was me? That made you...?"
"Made m-me..." He can't breathe, can't think; he's choking from the heat on his face.
"Maybe I don't make you the way you think I do," Sirius whispers, and there is the sweet, sticky drag of a mouth against Regulus jaw, foreign and squeamish and arousing. Sirius's fingers are flexing on his wrists, his palms, tight and burning with the pinch of skin. "Maybe I made you wrong."
"Sirius!" he hisses, jerks, and there is another tussle. There is something more desperate in the jab of limbs, the hsssh of cushions under them, the unh of Sirius's voice when he puts an elbow down wrong, the rasp of their bodies, the heaving, panting, sweatypalm press of their grappling thighs and arms.
"Shut up!" Sirius snaps, hoarse, palm pressing hard against Regulus's mouth and nose, against the protesting gasp for air. "Shut it, shut it, or I swear to god I'll - "
Regulus stops, they stop; they freeze, tangling and panting, their noses bumping. Regulus is wide-eyed and Sirius is pressing him into the cushions of the window seat with his chest and elbows and stomach and hips, all frighteningly heavy. There is a burning knot, as if all of it were centered there, pressing into Regulus's thigh.
Oh, he thinks, oh, you - too.
We, he thinks, delirious, and licks Sirus's palm. He tastes sweat and it makes him shiver down, deep, to the pit of his spine.
Sirius's body twitches; his palm jerks away, fingers pressing instead to the dip of Regulus's chin. "You don't know," he whispers, watching as Regulus licks the taste of salt from his own lips. "You don't know what this means."
It's silly, Regulus thinks, to need to know when all he wants to do is feel - like the first clear inhale after months of dried phlegm and brittle bones, he just wants this. So he arches, lifts his head so his neck aches, and presses his lips to Sirius's mouth, awkward and wet and shaky and --
" - nmph," groans Sirius, tongue and teeth scraping against Regulus's lips. Regulus can feel the surge of his body: the hot press, the delicious shiver, the tightening of the muscles in his thighs and the grip on Regulus's wrists. Sirius's hands move, greedy, cupping the sides of Regulus's face, tangling in his hair to hold him down.
"Sirius," Regulus gasps, claustrophobic, overheated, pushed to bursting. "S-sirius - "
"Fuck," whispers Sirius, against his mouth, fingers fumbling down Regulus's chest, tugging and rucking at the fabric. He untucks it, fists it, splays both hands on the spread of Regulus's ribs and pushes it up to Regulus's armpits; there is squirming and hot, heavy breathing on Regulus's neck, and then a sharp hiss, when their hips collide.
"Just - " Sirius groans.
"Just -- ?" Regulus echoes, a whisper to Sirius's mouth, to the damp inside of his lip, to his tongue.
"Just - ah, fuck!" Sirius spits the word across Regulus's chin, and Regulus feels his body quiver, his mind spin, when Sirius shoves a hand up against his crotch, between their bodies, kneading like a trembling, greedy child. Regulus's vision is clouded, suddenly; he is dizzy and seeing sunrise-pink on the edges of the world, and everything is shaking.
"Ev'rythi...ng," he gasps, and Sirius finds the bare, hot flesh with his fingers. There is a dim, tearing sound, the click and rasp of buttons when Sirius's wrist catches on the fastenings of their trousers, elbows knocking against the wood, cushions falling to the floor, and oh - "... oh!"
"Shh - " Sirius hisses, mouth a desperate curve, panting and wet and laughing wild, against the side of Regulus's face. "Christ - just... someone'll hea- "
"No-- ah..." Regulus's hips lift into the damp palm; Sirius groans and shifts, and Regulus feels the hot, sticky press of something. Of another boy's, man's - oh, there. "No one w-will..."
It's only us, he thinks, us and the room and your hand on my cock and you're touching me, touching me, kissing my mouth and I've never been so, so, so, just, just, yes -- he gasps and claws at Sirius's hair: fine and black and slippery; he is fumbling even with his own breath.
"L-let me," he wants to say, not even sure if the words are words anymore, maybe just sound and air, with the world opening up around them, with him cresting delirious. "Let me, Sirius..." He pushes a hand between them, where Sirius's wrist is jerking, uneven, and tries to tangle their fingers together. Sirius groans, chokes, and Regulus's hand slips, thumb and fingerpads rutting slick and wondrous over the hot undersides, between the greedy rubbings, the damp slide of their bodies.
And Sirius grabs his hand, panting, forcing them to Regulus's hips, gripping them there - I-I, Regulus wants to gasp, I do this to myself, you should see, you know, I know how to.
"There - " Sirius groans, and pulls Regulus up, pushes down, and their bare thighs rub, and the pink, damp, hard flesh of - of, oh, oh -- Regulus clenches his fists, gasps, buries a cry in Sirius's mouth with the clumsy, desperate thrust of a tongue. He comes, and his eyes roll up to the ceiling, and all he can see, white and wide and screamingly beautiful, is sky.
Sirius's cheek is resting on his bunched shirtfront, and there is a sticky, white mess on their lax fingers, on their bellies, their thighs, and their mouths are ripe-bruised red. There is a breeze from the window; the gauze brushes Regulus's cheek like the back of a hand, the loving sweep of a fingertip.
This is what he remembers at the slam of Grimmauld's door. This is what he remembers at the back of Sirius's head, at the sound of his laugh not for him but them, and this moment, panting and contained perfectly in the space before his window.
He touches the velvet of his curtains with a thumb, feels shared skin, and blood. The air, he realizes, slowly - with the burgeoning wakefulness of a torn cocoon - is growing rather cold.
Author: imochan
Pairing: Regulus/Regulus, Sirius/Regulus
Rating: NC17
Warnings: Sex, incest, (very) possible dubious consent or chan (Sirius is 15)
Wordcount: 3,080
Summary: "He starts to crave it, like chocolate or cinnamon tea."
Notes: Orginally for the pornish_pixies May Fantasy Fest as per thescarletwoman's challenge: "First time, possible dub consent? Otherwise, light on kinks, please. Can take place either at Hogwarts (location up to the author in a semi-public place) or back home at No12 Grimmauld." As per my ridiculous usual, this is more Lit than Erotica, but I hope you enjoy!
Quand tu es près de moi,
Cette chambre n'a plus de parois,
Mais des arbres oui, des arbres infinis,
Et quand tu es tellement près de moi,
C'est comme si ce plafond-là,
Il n'existait plus, je vois le ciel penché sur nous... qui restons ainsi.
All the light in the room comes from outside. When Regulus sits up against the headboard the shadows hunker down into the thick middle of it all, and the window is luminous with slate and ash-snow and the blue clatter of trolley from the far street. This is the room with the gauze curtains and the heavy black drapes, coiled like gagged ropes into the crevices above the glass, straining down to swallow the light. This is the room where the food and water tastes like ice, where the books are silver-bound and the skin of a young, sick aristocrat is blue-veined all the way to the surface, so that his boy's cheeks are cold mauve and his ankles and wrists are thin-to-invisible, and he lies on the sheets like glass carving, and his organs are brittle.
And he attracts doctors, with long, sweeping robes, with probing fingers, and he attracts thin broths with vile sorts of green herbs dusted on the top of his tongue and he attracts shadows into his belly, the inside curve of his bent knees, in the shallow place just above his nose, between his eyebrows, below his forehead: they gather and coil like snakes. And he hides his face in his mother's sleeves when they puncture his skin like thin paper; he gets slapped for crying, so he bites the juncture of his own thumb and saves it for when he can crawl under the covers with his whole aching body and ignore the row of vials on his walls.
Normally he has a list of them in his head, written in his veins and on the lining of his throat. Yellow and thick, smelling like rotten sage, alleviates fever, makes breathing (rather) difficult (possibly). Grey, thin, tasteless, smokey in his nostrils, levels his body temperature (makes his fingertips white). Maroon, passionfruit and cloying, tart, tightens his veins (slows his heart). There is a silver bracelet on his wrist that is supposed to make him sleep, but makes him dizzy instead; makes him dream the shadows are solid, makes him dream the light is banging on the windowpanes with a cry, that the owls are dying in the coop, that Sirius is touching his forehead, warming clammy skin, kissing his throat and ear because Sirius knows that that is where the missing pieces are.
He dreams that Sirius kneels, and when he opens his eyes the world is slate grey and Sirius hisses "Breathe," at his bedside. (He used to do this, when they were skinny and young with knobbly knees, and Sirius's red and yellow tie was a burn on their fingers when he looped it around their palms that summer). "Oh - oh, damn. Damn it. Y-you. Breathe."
When he did, Regulus dreamed suddenly in fairytales. It was easier to move his fingers, eventually, life in the slow coursing of air and blood under his skin. He heard voices in his ears and they were all breathe, you stupid - fucking, stupid and they were incredible, moving, powerful pieces of ripe medicine, enough to make him tear back the covers from his chest and want light, in the room. When he could sit up, ears ringing with a desperate voice, the sky opened up above him, and he could stand in the attic again under his own strength, watching Sirius - bathed in dust, sitting by an upturned trunk - scratch at parchment with a dull quill.
"What're you doing?" he crouches, palms sweaty and flat on his own knees, feeling the dust on his trousers.
"Go away," says Sirius; flick of a feather.
"I don't want to?"
"I'm busy."
"Mother doesn't know I'm here," he says, last-ditch, breath carving a spiral in the dust by his feet.
"Better not," Sirius says, turns; they meet eyes across the room. "She'd better not, Christ, why aren't you in bed?"
"In bed," he says, drifting aimless, forgetful, stifled before it leaves his tongue. "What?"
"You look bad," says Sirius - Regulus can see the thick welling of ink at the quill nub. "Sick, you look sick."
"I don't feel," he says. " - that way."
"Right, yeah," Sirius rolls his eyes, hunkers back against the trunk, dust rolling up in gold waves around him. "Yeah, you're the picture of it."
He looks beautiful - pressed open like the wriggling, careless, blood-pink inside of a spell. He is all arms crooked on the edge of the wood, wrists splayed up, dust sprinkled on his hair and nose and lashes, skin gleaming, sunrises on the inside edge of his lip when he smiles. The beginning bloom of leaner muscles in his shoulders, his hands, in the curve of his thighs - opened to the shadows where Regulus sits. It makes Regulus swallow, makes the cotton of his throat draw tight and dry, his tongue heavy. My brother, he thinks, is the most beautiful thing in the world. My brother, he thinks, can bring people back to life.
"Oi," says Sirius. "What."
"Let me stay - please," he whispers in a whirl, rocks forward onto his palms, wood scraping under the dust, trousers rucking up at his knees, ankles bared to the air - skinny and white. "I'll be quiet, and, and I won't tell, just - I know I heard you when. And it wasn't them," he gasps out, and Sirius's eyes lose the lazy glaze for a moment. "It was you, that made me - "
Sirius laughs, breaks the flow into stuttering little pieces, awkward and blue on the inside of Regulus's mouth.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
"Oh, shut it," Sirius groans, as if the sound makes his skin itch uncomfortably, thighs shifting in the dust. "Stay, stay if you really want."
Regulus folds himself into the space between Sirius's side and the rafters of the house, with the London sun shifting through the cracks in the wood, slats of light over his elbow, Sirius's wrist, his neck, Sirius's cheekbone, his hip, Sirius's bent knee. There is a coat of dust on every piece of life, warm and bright; it makes breathing easier. He watches the hard press of ink into paper, words like summer, us, what it's like here.
"Who is James," he asks, quietly.
"Shut it," says Sirius, and wraps an arm around his shoulder. He feels thin.
"Sirius - " he says, mouth against the warm shoulder.
"Christ," says Sirius, and pinches Regulus's thigh. "Shh. You fucking girl."
During the year, the room sits un-jostled, neatly closed, properly tied closed into swaths of slate and grey (green and silver hissing under the pillows of the bed, between the mattress and the frame, in the chinks of the window). Autumn makes it droop from the world and pull away, like rooms do: into the backspace of someone's memory, into the hallway at the end of the stair that no one uses, anymore. Winter makes it stone-chilly, stand-offish, ready to wrap itself in tapestries and ignore the rest of the house, the street, the city, all to conserve warmth. Spring makes it jealous; the walls push out into the stairwells with aristocratic bravado, the floorboards creak for life again, straining for something, the smooth pad of feet, a hitch in the breath of someone sleeping, a moan, the desperate, the wrong kind of love that makes Family fall, makes a room worth remembering.
In the summer, Regulus stands in the doorway. The bed is wide and lush-dark, velvet blue from the ceiling to the pillows; the stones are grey and warm. He knows what he could do with this. He could devote himself to the little bits of life: he could roll up the heavy coils of velvet at the frame and shunt back the gauze on its silver rings and open the glass out into the smog of London. He is a Young Man, they say, and he feels it in the early mornings, straining at his blood and bones and in something tight coiled right in the pit of his belly.
He doesn't think of anything, at first - it's only sunlight streaming in on his face after a year of dungeon stone and strangling neckwear. His hand is clumsy and wondrous, stumbling over himself, enamored with his own hipbones, the inner curve of his own thigh, the way it feels to bite his own lip when he touches down -- uhn -- there.
He likes the way it feels to wake up and close his fingers around himself automatically, to suck them into his mouth, slowly, and get them slick enough to simply glide through it all: to sink into cushions and light and sometimes, yes, he hears a voice in his ear like a dream - breathe, damn you - and he comes.
He starts to crave it, like chocolate or cinnamon tea. He hunches himself into his pillows to keep from crying out loud enough to be heard, because now he envisions other hands, other mouths and a solid voice, a smell. He sneaks into Sirius's room, snatches a white cotton shirt with the sticky, nervous fingers of an addict. He smothers himself with it, cleans himself with it, guilty and pink-faced and utterly shameless; in love with the little twist it gives his voice when he muffles a cry in it.
He is lazy with this self-discovery, lovely, sinful and adult and all his. He glides around the house, dazed, with what he can do. Pull back curtains, sneak to the kitchens at night, deliberately sit with his feet up on the windowseat when he reads. And when Sirius stops at his doorway, Sirius really stops, all lanky fifteen years of him, and looks.
And there is a catch in Sirius's eye, something that quells the rebellious burning coil for a moment long enough for Regulus to see the huh, and the well. And Regulus wonders if, in the blue sunlight, the filtered gray smog and the air in his thin hair, his skinny white fingers, if he's beautiful too, now.
"Hello," he says.
"What the hell is this?" Sirius asks, laughs; his mouth curls.
You, thinks Regulus. Laughing in my doorway. "Is what?" he says.
"Nhm," murmurs Sirius; he pushes away from the wall with an easy lope, a glorious shrug of his shoulders. Regulus finds himself dragging his tongue along the inside of his teeth with every peek of Sirius's collarbone, every visible sweep of the muscles in his jaw.
Sirius hunches himself into the window seat and plucks the book from Regulus's hands. His legs are longer, now; his knees and ankles knobby are against Regulus's shin and his elbows perch at odd, beautiful, masculine angles. The light makes stubble and shadows under his cheekbones, in his deep-set eyes.
"School work," says Sirius, like an offense.
"What?"
"School work - on summer hols."
"Ha ha, give it, please," Regulus means to hold out a hand, imperious, but he moves like a greedy child, and takes Sirius's wrist, instead. His fingers fit around it neatly, enough to make the air go out of him in a silent moan.
There is quiet; Sirius does not return the book, does not look up, does not seem to notice yet how red Regulus's skin has gotten under his presence, under the force of his very skin and the heartbeat under it, because Regulus is touching his pulse.
"Huh," says Sirius, soft, like the wind. "So you are."
"Wh - "
"Dangerous."
Regulus blinks; the room is bright with confusion and the illicit clench of a heartbeat.
"You," says Sirius. "Looking."
"I - "
"Touching," whispers Sirius, and stops it all short. He shifts, forward, the cushions rustling under his knees; he presses a palm to the wood beside Regulus's head, lets his mouth graze the skin just under the lobe of Regulus's ear.
"If only she knew," Sirius breathes, making Regulus's stomach squirm back against his spine, eyelids suddenly heavy. "I'm not the sick one… am I?"
"S-si..." he sounds weak, suddenly, fingers flexing in the hot air between their chests.
"I'm not the one jerking myself off to my own broth- "
The book thumps on the ground, the pen and ink well clattering beside it, shattering, Regulus chokes on a uncontrolled squeak of his own voice in protest, trying to push himself away as Sirius grabs his wrists and holds him there.
"What was it you said?" Sirius hisses. "It was me? That made you...?"
"Made m-me..." He can't breathe, can't think; he's choking from the heat on his face.
"Maybe I don't make you the way you think I do," Sirius whispers, and there is the sweet, sticky drag of a mouth against Regulus jaw, foreign and squeamish and arousing. Sirius's fingers are flexing on his wrists, his palms, tight and burning with the pinch of skin. "Maybe I made you wrong."
"Sirius!" he hisses, jerks, and there is another tussle. There is something more desperate in the jab of limbs, the hsssh of cushions under them, the unh of Sirius's voice when he puts an elbow down wrong, the rasp of their bodies, the heaving, panting, sweatypalm press of their grappling thighs and arms.
"Shut up!" Sirius snaps, hoarse, palm pressing hard against Regulus's mouth and nose, against the protesting gasp for air. "Shut it, shut it, or I swear to god I'll - "
Regulus stops, they stop; they freeze, tangling and panting, their noses bumping. Regulus is wide-eyed and Sirius is pressing him into the cushions of the window seat with his chest and elbows and stomach and hips, all frighteningly heavy. There is a burning knot, as if all of it were centered there, pressing into Regulus's thigh.
Oh, he thinks, oh, you - too.
We, he thinks, delirious, and licks Sirus's palm. He tastes sweat and it makes him shiver down, deep, to the pit of his spine.
Sirius's body twitches; his palm jerks away, fingers pressing instead to the dip of Regulus's chin. "You don't know," he whispers, watching as Regulus licks the taste of salt from his own lips. "You don't know what this means."
It's silly, Regulus thinks, to need to know when all he wants to do is feel - like the first clear inhale after months of dried phlegm and brittle bones, he just wants this. So he arches, lifts his head so his neck aches, and presses his lips to Sirius's mouth, awkward and wet and shaky and --
" - nmph," groans Sirius, tongue and teeth scraping against Regulus's lips. Regulus can feel the surge of his body: the hot press, the delicious shiver, the tightening of the muscles in his thighs and the grip on Regulus's wrists. Sirius's hands move, greedy, cupping the sides of Regulus's face, tangling in his hair to hold him down.
"Sirius," Regulus gasps, claustrophobic, overheated, pushed to bursting. "S-sirius - "
"Fuck," whispers Sirius, against his mouth, fingers fumbling down Regulus's chest, tugging and rucking at the fabric. He untucks it, fists it, splays both hands on the spread of Regulus's ribs and pushes it up to Regulus's armpits; there is squirming and hot, heavy breathing on Regulus's neck, and then a sharp hiss, when their hips collide.
"Just - " Sirius groans.
"Just -- ?" Regulus echoes, a whisper to Sirius's mouth, to the damp inside of his lip, to his tongue.
"Just - ah, fuck!" Sirius spits the word across Regulus's chin, and Regulus feels his body quiver, his mind spin, when Sirius shoves a hand up against his crotch, between their bodies, kneading like a trembling, greedy child. Regulus's vision is clouded, suddenly; he is dizzy and seeing sunrise-pink on the edges of the world, and everything is shaking.
"Ev'rythi...ng," he gasps, and Sirius finds the bare, hot flesh with his fingers. There is a dim, tearing sound, the click and rasp of buttons when Sirius's wrist catches on the fastenings of their trousers, elbows knocking against the wood, cushions falling to the floor, and oh - "... oh!"
"Shh - " Sirius hisses, mouth a desperate curve, panting and wet and laughing wild, against the side of Regulus's face. "Christ - just... someone'll hea- "
"No-- ah..." Regulus's hips lift into the damp palm; Sirius groans and shifts, and Regulus feels the hot, sticky press of something. Of another boy's, man's - oh, there. "No one w-will..."
It's only us, he thinks, us and the room and your hand on my cock and you're touching me, touching me, kissing my mouth and I've never been so, so, so, just, just, yes -- he gasps and claws at Sirius's hair: fine and black and slippery; he is fumbling even with his own breath.
"L-let me," he wants to say, not even sure if the words are words anymore, maybe just sound and air, with the world opening up around them, with him cresting delirious. "Let me, Sirius..." He pushes a hand between them, where Sirius's wrist is jerking, uneven, and tries to tangle their fingers together. Sirius groans, chokes, and Regulus's hand slips, thumb and fingerpads rutting slick and wondrous over the hot undersides, between the greedy rubbings, the damp slide of their bodies.
And Sirius grabs his hand, panting, forcing them to Regulus's hips, gripping them there - I-I, Regulus wants to gasp, I do this to myself, you should see, you know, I know how to.
"There - " Sirius groans, and pulls Regulus up, pushes down, and their bare thighs rub, and the pink, damp, hard flesh of - of, oh, oh -- Regulus clenches his fists, gasps, buries a cry in Sirius's mouth with the clumsy, desperate thrust of a tongue. He comes, and his eyes roll up to the ceiling, and all he can see, white and wide and screamingly beautiful, is sky.
Sirius's cheek is resting on his bunched shirtfront, and there is a sticky, white mess on their lax fingers, on their bellies, their thighs, and their mouths are ripe-bruised red. There is a breeze from the window; the gauze brushes Regulus's cheek like the back of a hand, the loving sweep of a fingertip.
This is what he remembers at the slam of Grimmauld's door. This is what he remembers at the back of Sirius's head, at the sound of his laugh not for him but them, and this moment, panting and contained perfectly in the space before his window.
He touches the velvet of his curtains with a thumb, feels shared skin, and blood. The air, he realizes, slowly - with the burgeoning wakefulness of a torn cocoon - is growing rather cold.