Fic: Getting Off In Five Easy Lessons
Getting Off In Five Easy Lessons
By Minnow
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Era: MWPP, Fifth and Sixth Year
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: R
Crossposted to remusxsirius, two_boys and marauders_slash. (The last with spectacular lack of success!)
Getting Off In Five Easy Lessons
1. Gimme.
Sirius is the needy one. He’s sixteen, and he feels pretty grown-up. But inside him there’s this childish voice of me, me, me. The voice that tells him to egg James on to greater feats of nastiness towards Snivellus. The voice that tells him to disagree just one more time with his father, even it means a beating. The voice that tells him to say ‘Fuck off’ to Regulus when his mother’s listening.
The voice is very insistent tonight. It won’t stop nagging at Sirius as he watches Moony. He looks at Moony a lot, though he hasn’t ever stopped to analyse why. He just finds Moony-watching pleasant. Soothing. Especially when Moony is getting on nicely with homework, writing his second roll of parchment for McGonagall, and he’s bound to get an O and be asked to read his essay out to the class again. Not that Sirius minds that. He loves hearing Moony read his essays. He’ll start off shy, so quiet that the professors will tell him to speak up. Then, as he goes on he’ll gain confidence, and by the end he’ll be reading loudly and clearly, and with expression. McGonagall loves With Expression, and will usually give Moony 10 points for Gryffindor.
Tonight, though, Sirius’s voice isn’t saying, as it actually does sometimes, ‘Oh, Sirius, let’s just watch Moony working and be quiet, so we can have the pleasure of hearing him read his essay out on Wednesday.’ That voice of his is rather restless, and a bit provocative, whispering wouldn’t it be great if someone dared him to kiss Moony on the lips? Just as a joke. He’d even suggest a game of Spin the Bottle to that end, but nobody’s around to play. They’re all in bed, where Sirius and Remus should also be, but Remus sneaked down to finish his essay and Sirius didn’t get quite as far as the dorm in the first place, because he was doing one of the crosswords in Peter’s puzzle book. Not much fun, because Wormtail fills in half the answers wrong, in quill, and you have to magic the whole grid clear every time. And if Peter finds out he runs to James and makes a big scene.
He’s looking at Remus’s lips, because that’s what the voice is telling him to do. And he has to agree that Moony does have a beautiful mouth. So, why shouldn’t he find Moony’s mouth beautiful? He’s good at drawing, though it isn’t a discipline taught in a school of magic. He might want to sketch Moony sometime, and then he’d have to notice what his mouth is like.
He actually wants to put his arms around Moony really tight, and kiss that mouth until it bruises, and it’s not just the voice insisting. His whole body is wide open to the thought as well.
‘C'mon, do it,’ the voice says. Sirius knows better than to ignore it. In his time, the voice has led him into more trouble, detentions and hot water than is good for him, so why should he stop heeding it now, just because he’s aware of the disasters that follow invariably in its wake?
He goes over to the table and crouches beside Moony, and presses his lips against Remus’s, and delicately licks Remus’s lips so his mouth will open a bit, which it does. Possibly, Remus doesn’t have a clue what’s hit him. Sirius, the voice in his head silent for a moment, clings on to him for dear life, not wanting to let go, not sure what to do next.
Remus recovers from whatever shock he’s gone into at the assault; he pushes Sirius away, but gently. Sirius waits, resigned, for retribution. As always, the voice whispers happily, ‘But wasn’t it worth it?’ He doesn’t know if he’ll answer ‘Yes’ until he dares to raise his eyes from the floor and see Remus’s expression.
Getting off? Later, when Sirius is alone in bed, he’ll remember the moment, and remember it again, frequently, during the nights to come. But Remus has always been forgiving, and soon other, newer memories will come along, though none of them will ever succeed in wiping this one out completely.
There's always the voice to remind him, anyway.
2. Midnight, Wand-Light, Silence and Dreams.
Remus thought sleeping together that night was a bad idea. He wanted to be fresh for the OWL mocks, which were going to be taking place all week. Professor McGonagall had given them The Talk, the one she gave to all Fifth Years, which went, ‘These exams are just as important as the real ones. If anything goes wrong, if you’re ill, then these are the tests that will determine your OWL marks.’
Sirius reminded him that the first exam was Divination. ‘We’re going to fail it anyway. And apparently the mock’s always the same. You have to write down and interpret a dream and give reasons why it may be prophetic. Piece of cake. I’m going to dream that I ace my Divination OWL.’
‘I’m not going to dream anything unless you get out of my bed and leave me alone,’ Remus grumbled. He couldn’t really say it with much conviction, because he desperately wanted Sirius in bed with him; but he rationalised that once Sirius had gone he could deal with the problem arising from having someone beautiful and beloved whom he fancied rotten lying almost on top of him, practically breathing the same breaths.
Sirius rolled fully on top of him. ‘You know you want it, Moony. Shame to waste one of my wonderful silencing charms.’
‘If I say yes, will you sod off afterwards?’
‘I love you too, sweetheart. Yes, I will sod off, as you put it so eloquently. If you want me to. But you won’t.’
Remus arched up so his whole body could feel Sirius’s weight above him as they kissed fiercely, clinging and incoherent. It had been a while; Remus’s revision timetable didn’t leave him much time for anything but schoolwork.
Soon, they were lying side by side, heads close together, Remus almost asleep. He never could keep up with the insomniac Sirius.
Sirius quietly got out of the bed, and Remus jerked awake instantly, panicked, as if he’d just been roused from a nightmare. ‘Where’re you going, Padfoot?’
‘I’m just sodding off. As requested.’
‘No! I didn’t mean it. Come back to bed.’
Sirius got back in, pulling rather more than his share of bedclothes around him. ‘That was so quick, and there’s probably hours of the silencing spell left. Shall we have another go?’
But Remus was already asleep again. He dreamed that he and Sirius were a wolf and a dog, running in the Forbidden Forest. Then, they were lying on the bed in the Shack, and he was so happy not to feel any pain after the transformation. They were kissing, light, sweet kisses. In the dream, he felt such love and longing that he thought his heart would burst.
He didn’t use that dream in his Divination mock; he wrote about inventing a potion to cure lycanthropy. He knew it couldn’t possibly come true, but he enjoyed the irony. He hoped beyond anything, though, that the real dream would prove to be prophetic.
The fake dream was good enough to get him an ill-deserved E. Sirius made up a dream about taming the giant squid, but his wasn’t quite as convincing so he only got an A.
He’d really dreamed about flying over the castle on his broomstick with Remus sitting behind him, arms round his waist, laughing. In the dream, he felt many indecipherable emotions, some of which were so intense they were almost painful. But he wasn’t going to tell anyone about those, not even Remus.
3. Hands, No Context.
When you fall in love, the world regains its purity. The words for what you do will be gentle, euphemistic, even. There are many spells that you never want to break. After all, sensation means nothing without feeling.
‘Just like that. With your hand, oh, God yes…’
‘Yes, just touch me, right there - please, don’t stop…’
When you’ve gone this far, it gets so personal that you can’t just go on your way afterwards and assume the earth will keep turning as it always has before. You could feel a bit weird that it’s with another boy, but the familiarity, like looking in a mirror, is strangely reassuring. You are going to reach out tentatively and touch the image behind the glass, because it won’t be cold and flat, but warm and breathless and hard and eager under your fingers.
4. Lips Aren’t Only for Kissing.
They eventually got away from James and Peter; fairly simple, once the pair of them were ensconced in Zonko’s. It seemed a bit harsh, Sirius reflected, not to let James in on the buying of pornography. He could do with some, given that Evans seemed to dislike him more every day.
But it was specialised pornography, and neither Sirius nor Remus really wanted James to get his paws on the magazines they were currently Transfiguring into boring Arithmancy books with brown paper covers. They managed to find three examples of the sort of porn they were looking for on the same rack as the conventional girlie magazines, tucked away behind tattered copies of Witches and Warlocks.
They got out of the little shop in a back street of the village seconds before the hag behind the counter grew suspicious and asked their ages. Mind you, she probably wouldn’t have made them return the magazines, as that would mean refunding quite a lot of gold. She and her five adult children made a huge living out of teenage boys from the school, though they normally preferred rather more mainstream material. These two couldn’t have been more than sixteen, she reckoned. Dirty little buggers.
As soon as they got back to the castle, Sirius grabbed Remus’s hand and dragged him up to the dorm. James called after them, aggrieved. ‘Oi, you two! I thought we were going to get some more of the Map done today.’
‘Yes, we are,’ Sirius said, ‘but we have to get this stuff upstairs before Pomfrey catches us. She hates Moony using the Muggle medicines.’
Before either James or Remus, or even Peter, protested that you couldn’t buy Muggle medicines in Hogsmeade, Sirius was already putting a locking spell on the door of the dorm. ‘That is such a bad idea, Padfoot,’ Remus pointed out. ‘If they come up here they’ll know we’re up to something. Better just leave it till later. We can keep the magazines Transfigured.’
Sirius laughed. ‘Great. And instead of instructions on how to do sex, we’ll get a wonderful equation to make a wizard’s hat look like a chimney. Come on, let’s at least see some of the pictures.’
Remus blanched as his friend flicked through Boys ‘R’ Us. ‘God, Sirius, this stuff is just filthy. I’m not even going to look at - oh, shit, how can you do that?’
‘You have to be double-jointed, I imagine,’ Sirius said.
Remus put his arms round Sirius and nuzzled his face against Sirius’s shoulder. They kissed for a moment, holding each other close.
When they drew apart, Remus said carefully, ‘I think it’s a bit too mechanical. As if they don’t even like each other.’
‘Well,’ said Sirius, torn between sympathy and exasperation, ‘I do see what you mean, but these guys, they’re just having their pictures taken, aren’t they? They’re not together or anything. It’s just a guide.’
‘I suppose. I suppose lots of people do this, do they?’
‘I wouldn’t know any more than you,’ Sirius said. ‘But all that sucking they’re doing looks fun.’
Remus looked down at the double-page spread, where the wizards were mainly moving their mouths and lips. ‘You can’t really tell, can you? What’s going on inside their mouths, I mean.’
Sirius laughed. ‘They’re hardly going to show you, are they? Use your imagination.’
‘Well, I am, Padfoot. But it would be useful to see exactly what to do, wouldn’t it?’
‘A lot of it’s instinct, isn’t it? Nobody taught you to wank, did they?’
Remus contemplated that for a second. ‘But you do develop technique.’
Sirius laughed. ‘You do, yes. You would. Don’t look so hurt. Your technique’s great. I love it. And I’m sure you could develop technique with your mouth as well.’
‘You’re not going to let it go, are you?’
‘Isn’t this stuff turning you on just a bit?’
‘Of course it is. But the door’s locked, which looks bloody awful. Prongs and Wormtail are going to be up here in a minute to put their things away before dinner, and so you are going to have to wait.’
Sirius caught Remus’s arm and held him close again. ‘You will do it, won’t you, Moony? Just try it. Okay?’
‘Yes, okay. Tonight. And you can try it too. Only fair. Now, open the door.’
The magazine lay discarded on the floor, its lurid cover contrasting vividly with the brown paper wrappers of its Transfigured cousins. The two wizards in the photos relaxed as the boys turned away to tidy up their own things. The light-haired wizard wiped his mouth, rolling his eyes, and the other one smiled vaguely, curled up and lay across the centrefold with his eyes closed. A few minutes later, when Remus picked the magazine up and shoved it under his mattress, they were jolted out of their blissful afterglow and had to cling to the edge of the page to avoid falling off.
5. Words: An Adolescent Boy’s Guide to the Body.
Remus isn’t the only one who likes doing things by the book. Sirius also loves books, and reads up on everything from motorbikes to Animagus transformations to having sex with another boy. They agree that porn magazines are fine as stimulants, but don’t give the step-by-step instructions that would be really helpful.
Remus is fascinated by the subject of sex, of course, but he isn’t quite as scientific as Sirius. If Sirius were a Muggle, he’d be the guy with the chemistry set and the full details of how to make your own bomb. Remus can’t even put a potion together. He definitely doesn’t understand, or want to understand, everything there is to know about anatomy.
Concepts like the prostate, for instance. Or lubrication. The dizzying detail surrounding what should be the simplest, most basic of acts.
Sirius flings armfuls of books on to Remus’s bed, books with pages turned down or marked with strips of parchment. ‘I can’t look now, I’ve got too much homework!’ Remus wails. ‘I don’t know how you find the time to get through all those. You read them and tell me afterwards. Or show me. That would be best.’
Sirius obediently reads them all. Because he's a fast reader, he also gets his homework done, and is well up with his revision.
Remus decides he doesn’t want to be left out. He leaves three essays only half done so he can join in the research. He feels he’s always running after Sirius, trying to catch him, not quite quick enough. He stays up all night to finish an important Ancient Runes essay, and misses out on a couple of hours in bed with Sirius. The essay isn't even that good, and he only gets an A, well below his usual standard.
They feel they’re buried in books, drowning in them, the miles of print, of diagrams, ancient volumes falling down from the shelves of the Restricted Section in the library, new paperbacks piled high on Remus’s bedside table, crammed into trunks and shoved under beds. Every morning, owls hover over Sirius’s place at breakfast, bearing books from wizarding stores, from Muggle mail-order companies, from all over the world.
What it boils down to is simplicity itself: all they want is to get really, really close, like every couple wants to, and the thousands of words about it are just that. Words. Except for the lube, which apparently isn’t optional.
They want to hug and kiss each other and be together, really together, and have real sex: though of course, it’s all sex, but it’s not quite the same, even if it’s going to feel pretty well the same. They want to be like the well-thumbed section in the Muggle sex manual that's completely different to the one Lily keeps hidden in her trunk: the part where the two boys totally love each other and are going to instruct other guys how to do it.
It's an intense relief when they're ready to set the books free, let them fly off on flapping wings to wherever they came from. Sirius waves his wand, and the pages disperse, spiral away from him, disappear into thin air or to reappear goodness knows where in the universe. Sirius and Remus don’t care; physics is not their concern, not now that the dorm is tidy again, the library no longer threatening and they can breath without choking on dust or the scent of print.
Once the books have been dispatched, Sirius, feeling lighter and happier than he has for weeks, says, ‘‘I think we could get on with the showing part now.’ He doesn’t really expect it to be like an exam, and luckily it isn’t.
Footnote
Sex is important, but there’s a vast amount of real life flowing around it - school, work, homework, revision, tests, the Map, pranks.
They’re in the common room again, warm and cosy on a chilly autumn evening, when the lamps cast an orangey golden light. Outside, the world smells of apples and falling leaves and sharp, cold air. Later, they’re going to curl up in bed together and sleep, and there’ll be other stuff in between.
Meanwhile, there’s a kiss.
End
By Minnow
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Era: MWPP, Fifth and Sixth Year
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: R
Crossposted to remusxsirius, two_boys and marauders_slash. (The last with spectacular lack of success!)
Getting Off In Five Easy Lessons
1. Gimme.
Sirius is the needy one. He’s sixteen, and he feels pretty grown-up. But inside him there’s this childish voice of me, me, me. The voice that tells him to egg James on to greater feats of nastiness towards Snivellus. The voice that tells him to disagree just one more time with his father, even it means a beating. The voice that tells him to say ‘Fuck off’ to Regulus when his mother’s listening.
The voice is very insistent tonight. It won’t stop nagging at Sirius as he watches Moony. He looks at Moony a lot, though he hasn’t ever stopped to analyse why. He just finds Moony-watching pleasant. Soothing. Especially when Moony is getting on nicely with homework, writing his second roll of parchment for McGonagall, and he’s bound to get an O and be asked to read his essay out to the class again. Not that Sirius minds that. He loves hearing Moony read his essays. He’ll start off shy, so quiet that the professors will tell him to speak up. Then, as he goes on he’ll gain confidence, and by the end he’ll be reading loudly and clearly, and with expression. McGonagall loves With Expression, and will usually give Moony 10 points for Gryffindor.
Tonight, though, Sirius’s voice isn’t saying, as it actually does sometimes, ‘Oh, Sirius, let’s just watch Moony working and be quiet, so we can have the pleasure of hearing him read his essay out on Wednesday.’ That voice of his is rather restless, and a bit provocative, whispering wouldn’t it be great if someone dared him to kiss Moony on the lips? Just as a joke. He’d even suggest a game of Spin the Bottle to that end, but nobody’s around to play. They’re all in bed, where Sirius and Remus should also be, but Remus sneaked down to finish his essay and Sirius didn’t get quite as far as the dorm in the first place, because he was doing one of the crosswords in Peter’s puzzle book. Not much fun, because Wormtail fills in half the answers wrong, in quill, and you have to magic the whole grid clear every time. And if Peter finds out he runs to James and makes a big scene.
He’s looking at Remus’s lips, because that’s what the voice is telling him to do. And he has to agree that Moony does have a beautiful mouth. So, why shouldn’t he find Moony’s mouth beautiful? He’s good at drawing, though it isn’t a discipline taught in a school of magic. He might want to sketch Moony sometime, and then he’d have to notice what his mouth is like.
He actually wants to put his arms around Moony really tight, and kiss that mouth until it bruises, and it’s not just the voice insisting. His whole body is wide open to the thought as well.
‘C'mon, do it,’ the voice says. Sirius knows better than to ignore it. In his time, the voice has led him into more trouble, detentions and hot water than is good for him, so why should he stop heeding it now, just because he’s aware of the disasters that follow invariably in its wake?
He goes over to the table and crouches beside Moony, and presses his lips against Remus’s, and delicately licks Remus’s lips so his mouth will open a bit, which it does. Possibly, Remus doesn’t have a clue what’s hit him. Sirius, the voice in his head silent for a moment, clings on to him for dear life, not wanting to let go, not sure what to do next.
Remus recovers from whatever shock he’s gone into at the assault; he pushes Sirius away, but gently. Sirius waits, resigned, for retribution. As always, the voice whispers happily, ‘But wasn’t it worth it?’ He doesn’t know if he’ll answer ‘Yes’ until he dares to raise his eyes from the floor and see Remus’s expression.
Getting off? Later, when Sirius is alone in bed, he’ll remember the moment, and remember it again, frequently, during the nights to come. But Remus has always been forgiving, and soon other, newer memories will come along, though none of them will ever succeed in wiping this one out completely.
There's always the voice to remind him, anyway.
2. Midnight, Wand-Light, Silence and Dreams.
Remus thought sleeping together that night was a bad idea. He wanted to be fresh for the OWL mocks, which were going to be taking place all week. Professor McGonagall had given them The Talk, the one she gave to all Fifth Years, which went, ‘These exams are just as important as the real ones. If anything goes wrong, if you’re ill, then these are the tests that will determine your OWL marks.’
Sirius reminded him that the first exam was Divination. ‘We’re going to fail it anyway. And apparently the mock’s always the same. You have to write down and interpret a dream and give reasons why it may be prophetic. Piece of cake. I’m going to dream that I ace my Divination OWL.’
‘I’m not going to dream anything unless you get out of my bed and leave me alone,’ Remus grumbled. He couldn’t really say it with much conviction, because he desperately wanted Sirius in bed with him; but he rationalised that once Sirius had gone he could deal with the problem arising from having someone beautiful and beloved whom he fancied rotten lying almost on top of him, practically breathing the same breaths.
Sirius rolled fully on top of him. ‘You know you want it, Moony. Shame to waste one of my wonderful silencing charms.’
‘If I say yes, will you sod off afterwards?’
‘I love you too, sweetheart. Yes, I will sod off, as you put it so eloquently. If you want me to. But you won’t.’
Remus arched up so his whole body could feel Sirius’s weight above him as they kissed fiercely, clinging and incoherent. It had been a while; Remus’s revision timetable didn’t leave him much time for anything but schoolwork.
Soon, they were lying side by side, heads close together, Remus almost asleep. He never could keep up with the insomniac Sirius.
Sirius quietly got out of the bed, and Remus jerked awake instantly, panicked, as if he’d just been roused from a nightmare. ‘Where’re you going, Padfoot?’
‘I’m just sodding off. As requested.’
‘No! I didn’t mean it. Come back to bed.’
Sirius got back in, pulling rather more than his share of bedclothes around him. ‘That was so quick, and there’s probably hours of the silencing spell left. Shall we have another go?’
But Remus was already asleep again. He dreamed that he and Sirius were a wolf and a dog, running in the Forbidden Forest. Then, they were lying on the bed in the Shack, and he was so happy not to feel any pain after the transformation. They were kissing, light, sweet kisses. In the dream, he felt such love and longing that he thought his heart would burst.
He didn’t use that dream in his Divination mock; he wrote about inventing a potion to cure lycanthropy. He knew it couldn’t possibly come true, but he enjoyed the irony. He hoped beyond anything, though, that the real dream would prove to be prophetic.
The fake dream was good enough to get him an ill-deserved E. Sirius made up a dream about taming the giant squid, but his wasn’t quite as convincing so he only got an A.
He’d really dreamed about flying over the castle on his broomstick with Remus sitting behind him, arms round his waist, laughing. In the dream, he felt many indecipherable emotions, some of which were so intense they were almost painful. But he wasn’t going to tell anyone about those, not even Remus.
3. Hands, No Context.
When you fall in love, the world regains its purity. The words for what you do will be gentle, euphemistic, even. There are many spells that you never want to break. After all, sensation means nothing without feeling.
‘Just like that. With your hand, oh, God yes…’
‘Yes, just touch me, right there - please, don’t stop…’
When you’ve gone this far, it gets so personal that you can’t just go on your way afterwards and assume the earth will keep turning as it always has before. You could feel a bit weird that it’s with another boy, but the familiarity, like looking in a mirror, is strangely reassuring. You are going to reach out tentatively and touch the image behind the glass, because it won’t be cold and flat, but warm and breathless and hard and eager under your fingers.
4. Lips Aren’t Only for Kissing.
They eventually got away from James and Peter; fairly simple, once the pair of them were ensconced in Zonko’s. It seemed a bit harsh, Sirius reflected, not to let James in on the buying of pornography. He could do with some, given that Evans seemed to dislike him more every day.
But it was specialised pornography, and neither Sirius nor Remus really wanted James to get his paws on the magazines they were currently Transfiguring into boring Arithmancy books with brown paper covers. They managed to find three examples of the sort of porn they were looking for on the same rack as the conventional girlie magazines, tucked away behind tattered copies of Witches and Warlocks.
They got out of the little shop in a back street of the village seconds before the hag behind the counter grew suspicious and asked their ages. Mind you, she probably wouldn’t have made them return the magazines, as that would mean refunding quite a lot of gold. She and her five adult children made a huge living out of teenage boys from the school, though they normally preferred rather more mainstream material. These two couldn’t have been more than sixteen, she reckoned. Dirty little buggers.
As soon as they got back to the castle, Sirius grabbed Remus’s hand and dragged him up to the dorm. James called after them, aggrieved. ‘Oi, you two! I thought we were going to get some more of the Map done today.’
‘Yes, we are,’ Sirius said, ‘but we have to get this stuff upstairs before Pomfrey catches us. She hates Moony using the Muggle medicines.’
Before either James or Remus, or even Peter, protested that you couldn’t buy Muggle medicines in Hogsmeade, Sirius was already putting a locking spell on the door of the dorm. ‘That is such a bad idea, Padfoot,’ Remus pointed out. ‘If they come up here they’ll know we’re up to something. Better just leave it till later. We can keep the magazines Transfigured.’
Sirius laughed. ‘Great. And instead of instructions on how to do sex, we’ll get a wonderful equation to make a wizard’s hat look like a chimney. Come on, let’s at least see some of the pictures.’
Remus blanched as his friend flicked through Boys ‘R’ Us. ‘God, Sirius, this stuff is just filthy. I’m not even going to look at - oh, shit, how can you do that?’
‘You have to be double-jointed, I imagine,’ Sirius said.
Remus put his arms round Sirius and nuzzled his face against Sirius’s shoulder. They kissed for a moment, holding each other close.
When they drew apart, Remus said carefully, ‘I think it’s a bit too mechanical. As if they don’t even like each other.’
‘Well,’ said Sirius, torn between sympathy and exasperation, ‘I do see what you mean, but these guys, they’re just having their pictures taken, aren’t they? They’re not together or anything. It’s just a guide.’
‘I suppose. I suppose lots of people do this, do they?’
‘I wouldn’t know any more than you,’ Sirius said. ‘But all that sucking they’re doing looks fun.’
Remus looked down at the double-page spread, where the wizards were mainly moving their mouths and lips. ‘You can’t really tell, can you? What’s going on inside their mouths, I mean.’
Sirius laughed. ‘They’re hardly going to show you, are they? Use your imagination.’
‘Well, I am, Padfoot. But it would be useful to see exactly what to do, wouldn’t it?’
‘A lot of it’s instinct, isn’t it? Nobody taught you to wank, did they?’
Remus contemplated that for a second. ‘But you do develop technique.’
Sirius laughed. ‘You do, yes. You would. Don’t look so hurt. Your technique’s great. I love it. And I’m sure you could develop technique with your mouth as well.’
‘You’re not going to let it go, are you?’
‘Isn’t this stuff turning you on just a bit?’
‘Of course it is. But the door’s locked, which looks bloody awful. Prongs and Wormtail are going to be up here in a minute to put their things away before dinner, and so you are going to have to wait.’
Sirius caught Remus’s arm and held him close again. ‘You will do it, won’t you, Moony? Just try it. Okay?’
‘Yes, okay. Tonight. And you can try it too. Only fair. Now, open the door.’
The magazine lay discarded on the floor, its lurid cover contrasting vividly with the brown paper wrappers of its Transfigured cousins. The two wizards in the photos relaxed as the boys turned away to tidy up their own things. The light-haired wizard wiped his mouth, rolling his eyes, and the other one smiled vaguely, curled up and lay across the centrefold with his eyes closed. A few minutes later, when Remus picked the magazine up and shoved it under his mattress, they were jolted out of their blissful afterglow and had to cling to the edge of the page to avoid falling off.
5. Words: An Adolescent Boy’s Guide to the Body.
Remus isn’t the only one who likes doing things by the book. Sirius also loves books, and reads up on everything from motorbikes to Animagus transformations to having sex with another boy. They agree that porn magazines are fine as stimulants, but don’t give the step-by-step instructions that would be really helpful.
Remus is fascinated by the subject of sex, of course, but he isn’t quite as scientific as Sirius. If Sirius were a Muggle, he’d be the guy with the chemistry set and the full details of how to make your own bomb. Remus can’t even put a potion together. He definitely doesn’t understand, or want to understand, everything there is to know about anatomy.
Concepts like the prostate, for instance. Or lubrication. The dizzying detail surrounding what should be the simplest, most basic of acts.
Sirius flings armfuls of books on to Remus’s bed, books with pages turned down or marked with strips of parchment. ‘I can’t look now, I’ve got too much homework!’ Remus wails. ‘I don’t know how you find the time to get through all those. You read them and tell me afterwards. Or show me. That would be best.’
Sirius obediently reads them all. Because he's a fast reader, he also gets his homework done, and is well up with his revision.
Remus decides he doesn’t want to be left out. He leaves three essays only half done so he can join in the research. He feels he’s always running after Sirius, trying to catch him, not quite quick enough. He stays up all night to finish an important Ancient Runes essay, and misses out on a couple of hours in bed with Sirius. The essay isn't even that good, and he only gets an A, well below his usual standard.
They feel they’re buried in books, drowning in them, the miles of print, of diagrams, ancient volumes falling down from the shelves of the Restricted Section in the library, new paperbacks piled high on Remus’s bedside table, crammed into trunks and shoved under beds. Every morning, owls hover over Sirius’s place at breakfast, bearing books from wizarding stores, from Muggle mail-order companies, from all over the world.
What it boils down to is simplicity itself: all they want is to get really, really close, like every couple wants to, and the thousands of words about it are just that. Words. Except for the lube, which apparently isn’t optional.
They want to hug and kiss each other and be together, really together, and have real sex: though of course, it’s all sex, but it’s not quite the same, even if it’s going to feel pretty well the same. They want to be like the well-thumbed section in the Muggle sex manual that's completely different to the one Lily keeps hidden in her trunk: the part where the two boys totally love each other and are going to instruct other guys how to do it.
It's an intense relief when they're ready to set the books free, let them fly off on flapping wings to wherever they came from. Sirius waves his wand, and the pages disperse, spiral away from him, disappear into thin air or to reappear goodness knows where in the universe. Sirius and Remus don’t care; physics is not their concern, not now that the dorm is tidy again, the library no longer threatening and they can breath without choking on dust or the scent of print.
Once the books have been dispatched, Sirius, feeling lighter and happier than he has for weeks, says, ‘‘I think we could get on with the showing part now.’ He doesn’t really expect it to be like an exam, and luckily it isn’t.
Footnote
Sex is important, but there’s a vast amount of real life flowing around it - school, work, homework, revision, tests, the Map, pranks.
They’re in the common room again, warm and cosy on a chilly autumn evening, when the lamps cast an orangey golden light. Outside, the world smells of apples and falling leaves and sharp, cold air. Later, they’re going to curl up in bed together and sleep, and there’ll be other stuff in between.
Meanwhile, there’s a kiss.
End