Fic: More Beauty, More Beast (R/S/Hr), Part 1/?
Title: More Beauty, More Beast
Author: Pandaimonia
Pairings: Sirius/Remus, Remus/Hermione, allusion to Remus/Tonks - Remus/Sirius/Hermione to come,if they behave. ;)
Rating: A tentative R overall
Word Count: 3552
Summary: When your best mate and former lover comes back from the dead, the first thing you say is not, “I’m in lust with a girl. Maybe even love, but I’ll leave at it fucking, because that you could understand better. She’s a former student, by the way. You know, your godson’s friend? The one who was, oh, sixteen last time you saw her?”
A/N: This was originally going to be a one-shot, but it grew into something more. This is part one, though I'm not sure how many parts there will be. Thanks to wendynat for the beta! :)
When your best mate and former lover comes back from the dead, the first thing you say is not, “I’m in lust with a girl. Maybe even love, but I’ll leave at it fucking, because that you could understand better. She’s a former student, by the way. You know, your godson’s friend? The one who was, oh, sixteen last time you saw her?”
No, that wouldn’t do at all. He doesn’t understand that women do, on occasion, appeal to you. Particularly when they’re the ideal girl you always imagined in school, the kind of girl who even you would be straight for. Or at least give it at try, because you do have an inquiring mind: you want to know what it’s like to be with a woman in that way. After all, he knows, doesn’t he, so why shouldn’t you? Why was it always you who was careful and toed the line while the others experimented? You watched the door as they snuck girls into their bedrooms; you kept an eye out as they walked through dirty streets and winter slush to get to the Wizarding brothel, snickering all the way. You held his head and smoothed back his sweaty hair as he wretched his guts out after his first bout with too much firewhisky, you covered for them the next morning when they were too hung over to get out of bed; you helped explain to them how easy it was to get pot in the Muggle world, and when they awkwardly shoved their newly changed Muggle money into your hand, you went to a street corner and bought it for them. You were used to being an outsider (Half-Blood, scholarship student, werewolf-it followed you everywhere) and it felt strange to be with your friends in a world where you knew the ropes and they were foreign. Maybe you liked it a little, while it lasted.
Oh, Sirius and James always got along well enough in the Muggle world. Looks, charm, and money are obvious enough to girls in any world and it didn’t stop them from having a girl to go home with each night. No, you were the one who always wound up that way (“It’s because you’re too principled, Moony!” they told you, laughing about it afterward), walking under flickering streetlights, hands in the pockets of your jeans, which you pretended were faded and ripped by design not neglect. You couldn’t carry it off. You tried to go home with that girl one night, the red-haired one that looked like a cheap imitation of Lily. James had already been with her, and it wasn’t your policy to do something like that, but you were drunk and lonely and filled with self-pity; usually you were too afraid the girls would laugh at you if they knew the truth. Her hair smelled like cigarette smoke, her lipstick was waxy and unpleasant on your lips, her perfume was cloying and nauseated you. Most glaringly, she wasn’t Sirius. There was no getting around that one.
That was the closest you ever got to being with a woman, because after that one thing happened that led to another and you were in the hallway snogging Sirius like you always wanted to, grabbing the collar of his pajamas hard enough to chafe the back of his neck and pulling him right up against you until your teeth clacked. There were tongues, and some hair was pulled, and you will never, ever forget the feeling of his hand, shaking a little, cupping your cheek for the first time though it felt like always.
“Don’t ever tell me again that you don’t like boys,” you gasped and then the two of you laughed until your sides hurt with relief. Getting him didn’t make you happy like you thought it would. Oh, it made you happy for sure, happier than you’d ever been in your life, but it wasn’t enough. At first just being with him, knowing that you were together and all those years of wanting were done was giddy, a world that was a hallucination of color where there wasn’t color and light before. But of course the years of waiting weren’t done, only put off for a little while. If you had known what was coming, you would have tried harder to be happy while you could, but as it was you did your best.
And then it all ended. Not necessarily unexpectedly, because you told yourself that you’d seen the warning signs that he might be with the Death Eaters, that he was mentally unstable, a selfish sociopath whom no one could predict. In reality, you had been so concerned with the enemy outside, it was hard to think about how it really was between you two. Always you had the fear that you would somehow ruin things, drive him away never to come back, and then you would be alone for the rest of your life, knowing that you had what you wanted most and then threw it away.
So he was in Azkaban and you, you were alone. Sure that being alone was your lot in life, appointed by some deity who was malignant or simply too distant and preoccupied to care about you, you made up your mind that you would go on. Suicide or willed self-destruction through alcohol were cowardly and selfish, not your way. No, some part of you that remained was determined that when you died, at least one person would say that you died bravely. Not that you expected many mourners at your funeral.
But life went on, like life tends to do when you’re alive. And you made your way with odd jobs, even if you slept in the back of an old car occasionally, wrapped in newsprint to keep yourself warm, and wondered if you would soon be one of those old, crazy-eyed men, talking to yourself on the street corner and smelling strongly of urine. But it didn’t happen to you, whether it was resourcefulness or just luck. Dumbledore had you back to teach-he gave you a chance, and even if it went to hell like you thought it would, you can still be grateful.
And then Sirius was back and you wanted, more than anything, for it to be like old times. And it almost was. Sure it took some pretending, some looking the other way, but being happy doesn’t come for free, does it? It takes work and sometimes you cheat. Sooner or later the house of cards falls down, and this time was no exception.
Once again, life went on. There was a war, there were more deaths as there always are in war, and somewhere in there you found out what it was like to sleep with a woman. Once again, sadness and alcohol pushed your defenses out of the way and Tonks was there, bright and colorful, more alive than you ever remembered being. Needs you had pushed down resurfaced and in her arms you felt weak and shaken and, to your surprise, less unfaithful than you’d imagined you would. Sometimes you can never underestimate the importance of being held.
It couldn’t be called love and it couldn’t really be called lust, because no matter how much you care for her (and you do), you don’t quite desire her. She’s a friend, one of the few that you had, and you value that. At first you were afraid that the sex thing would ruin the friendship, but it doesn’t, and it’s good. Good the way a cup of tea is in the midst of an exhausting stressful day, good the way rain is after a hot humid spell that you can’t bear any longer. Nothing fancy, nothing too complicated, but waking up to someone next to you in bed, her legs and arms thrown across you, even in sleep her fingers curled around your wrist…you wanted that again, even if you didn’t know it. Even if you didn’t think you wanted it from her.
But the war takes her from you, like it takes most soldiers, and you have prepared yourself for this from the beginning. So much so that what you feel is hardly grief, just more water under the bridge, more dust in your mouth. You go home from her funeral, a make-shift perfunctory one for an audience that is sick to death of funerals, that might have to go to another one that day; you turn around in your bed three times, the way he used to. It’s still not comfortable and there is a stitch in your side that doesn’t go away.
You wonder if you should have told her you loved her, even if it wouldn’t have been quite true. It was a lie that wouldn’t have hurt her though, and probably given her comfort in the end. Maybe you should have tried harder.
Life is like moving through a dream and when the end of the war comes, you go through the fanfare expecting to wake up any moment, to be in your bed drenched in sweat, wondering when they are coming for you. To have spent so many years on the run from something or other (yourself) and then to know that your life is your own and no one is trying to take it from you-it should be a blessing. The government rewards you, they give you a flat and a nice little post as a civil servant. The pay is nothing to write home about it, but it’s the best you’ve seen in a long while, and you can live comfortably, undisturbed with only your medals a physical reminder that there was a war, that you fought it in. From time to time you take them out and look at them, reading the lettering: “For unfailing service, for courage in the face of danger”-what a good Gryffindor you were, what a good soldier, never flinching from your duty. When you are done, you tuck them back in an old cigar box, wrap them up in an old handkerchief and put them back in the drawer with the few other bits of flotsam from your past. Already they are starting to tarnish from lack of attention.
The only other tangible reminders are absences: James, Lily, Peter, Dumbledore…Sirius. Of course Sirius-always. You don’t wake up from the dream, but you still won’t let yourself look for oblivion outside the monotony of your workday, the quiet nights spent with a sad affair of a dinner (cottage cheese and tomato slices-watery, but at least they were on discount) and a book from the public library to keep you company. The only interruption in your routine is her-another woman, young and idealistic, bent on saving you from yourself. And when she’s with you, she almost dispels the creeping loneliness that fills every corner of every room.
It’s Hermione Granger, your former star pupil. The thought alone should make you think otherwise, remind you how grotesque it is for the old and failed to even think of chasing the young, who are too filled with life and promise to waste it on you, but really it’s her chasing you. After a few tries, you see that she’s not easily dissuaded and you let yourself enjoy her company. She seems to enjoy yours just as much. Living in a war has made her old for her years in some ways-not all the ways that count, but enough that you can assuage your conscience. She’s picked up enough cynicism, enough bleak outlook and bad habits that you don’t feel as if you’re corrupting her. Admittedly you were shocked the first time she let out a string of colorful expletives with an impish relish or the first time she lit a cigarette in your presence-the same brand as Sirius, and the smell brought back sharp memories.
No, the more you see of her, the more you wish you’d met her when you were in school. She’s clever, sharp like you always wished you were; the teachers loved her in the way you always wanted to be loved by them. Of course if you’d met her and things had gone well, you’d never have been with Sirius-for a moment you forgot that, and the guilt comes rushing in. You’ve been disloyal in a way you never were, even when you were sleeping with Tonks, even those few times you caved in and had a hurried, furtive encounter with some man you barely knew. This, this is genuine desire. When she grinds her cigarette under her heel and throws her head back and laughs at something you said, you notice the white skin of her throat, the triangle of skin left exposed by the neck of her red sweater.
And she notices you back-notices things like what brand of pens you use, and gives you a box as a present for no good reason. She remembers how you take your coffee and what you said the other night after a few glasses of wine, even if it was some comment you made without thinking. This feeling you have, of being observed, your behavior noted fondly, is foreign to you all over again. The game, the dance of gestures and little phrases left dangling for the other person to pick up if they’re interested, the play and interplay between bodies and how much distance between your body and her body at each instant.
When her arms brushes against yours and her fingers splay on your wrist, you suck in air sharply and she draws back, rebuffed. You are afraid you have scared her off, and so when you offer a used paperback, one you’ve had for ages and are genuinely attached to, you want to be sure she senses the import of the gesture. And you’re fairly sure that she does, that her eyes light up and it has more to do with you than the book.
When the question of Sirius comes up and you tell her, “Yes,” she understands, she realizes that she always knew and just didn’t quite recognize it yet. She sits next to you on the couch and takes your hand, asks you if you’d like to talk about him and you realize that yes, you would. “Tell me about him,” she says, and you comply, word following word as the stories of the two of you spill out. She laughs at the right places and you see these stories were meant to be told, that they should be shared-that Sirius would approve if he knew. And you squeeze her hand back when she grins and squeezes yours.
When she finally leans across the table and takes your chin in her hands, you are ready to kiss her back. It feels expected, like you just kissed her yesterday and the real question is why you waited so long between kisses. Kissing her is not so different from kissing Sirius, though of course her lips have their own flavor, and there is no stubble rubbing against your cheeks and there are those rather odd breasts (you’ve never gotten quite used to them, though you did grow to appreciate them on Tonks) pressing against your chest. You don’t take her to bed that night or the next or the third. Even if your body suddenly awakes, an insistent and needy creature, complaining of the many deprivations you’ve put it through, you don’t want to rush things. Maybe by now you should know that things can end quickly and you should enjoy them while they last, but you’re afraid to strain this issue, afraid pushing it might make it all pop like a soap bubble and melt away.
She is generally patient with you; she enjoys walking through the streets of London, hand in hand on dark misty nights, your voices seeming to be swallowed up in the clouds of fog insulating you. Conversation with her comes easily and even the silences are comfortable. The more you observe, the more you realize that she cares. She wants to learn which side of the bed you prefer to sleep on, how you take your tea in the morning, whether or not you fall asleep reading (the answers are left, with a dash of lemon, nothing more, and yes). After some time, she finds these out.
It takes some convincing, but not as much as you pretend, and she moves in with you. It’s strange to live with another person, but a good strangeness. You shift to make room for her and the motley assortment of furniture she brings, most picked up enthusiastically on street corners and other odd places. “Did you have any real furniture in that flat of yours?” you ask, and she laughs. That money, apparently, was spent on art, prints that now decorate your previously blank walls. She has colonized your austere space-you no longer live monastically, in the aesthetic sense or the celibate one.
More beauty in your life is a good thing, she insists, when house plants take up residence in the living room and the little slab of mildewed concrete that passes for a balcony. It looks out at a depressing industrial part of town, but now there are curtains with colorful tropical fruit printed on them (“Who puts guavas and papayas on a curtain?” you wonder aloud, and she shakes her head at you) in place of the ratty blinds. When you roll over in bed at night, you see the billows of the curtains and the curve of her shoulder, not the square tops of buildings.
She fills your life up and this should scare you more than it does. To let another person become the center of your life, the greatest source of happiness, is terrifying, because you know where that can lead. And yet, you ask yourself, where has it led that is so terrible? Yes, there have been more lost years than not, but maybe, just maybe, you’re finding yourself again.
Sometimes the grief does rise up, terrible and formless, a black frost creeping over and slowly freezing out everything alive, everything that craves warmth. At dinner you don’t taste your food, you don’t hear when she asks you about your day or when she says what happened at the bookstore that day. At night you stumble into your bedroom as if you were a blind man and your senses have gone numb, nerveless feet bumping against things, unfeeling hands brushing against surfaces without distinguishing them.
You find each other in the dark then, as if she is rescuing you for the first time. Clothes are shed awkwardly and you need each other’s help-without that, you would be lost. She is nothing more than a dark silhouette in the night, shadow traced against the walls, only the glow of the streetlight illuminating her in patches. She finds the edges of your body that you want to forget, she reminds you why having a body is not all a curse. Her hands, small and firm, rouse you from the dream you are living in, as do her insistent kisses pressing against your mouth, neck, back.
Gentle but confident, she straddles you, pushes your shoulders back down on the bed and stops your mouth with a kiss. Her hands are braced on your chest and she moves against you, maddeningly slow until you clutch at her hair, the curves of her hips, the solid weight of her thighs on each side of you, and gasp for more more more. When you run your nails up and down her back, she whimpers and you feel the shiver go up and down her spine and you want to be here, pinned between her and the bed and saying her name into the crescent of her shoulder again and again.
This is a girl you do not want to forget. You’re not pushing her away this time, not intentionally. The only way she is leaving is if she wants to go. But still, for some reason, you can’t tell her that you love her. It might be love, but you can’t be sure, and you don’t want to jinx things. You figure you have enough bad luck working against you without tempting the evil eye or the powers that be.
So when your best mate and former lover does come back from the dead, you don’t tell him that you’re sleeping with a girl, living with her in fact, and maybe just maybe are in love with her. The first thing you say is, “Don’t do this to me,” though you’re not talking to him but maybe to Fate, though you’re not sure you believe in this, or God, though you can’t have faith in him. He tells you that it’s him, and you’re afraid to believe it, and when he tries to kiss you, you find yourself shaking and wanting to cry, even though Blokes Don’t Shed Tears, so you settle for making dry, hoarse half-sobs into his shoulder. It’s the dead comforting the living and it makes no sense, but you have to believe it.
She leaves without you asking her to, and what’s worse, she understands
Author: Pandaimonia
Pairings: Sirius/Remus, Remus/Hermione, allusion to Remus/Tonks - Remus/Sirius/Hermione to come,if they behave. ;)
Rating: A tentative R overall
Word Count: 3552
Summary: When your best mate and former lover comes back from the dead, the first thing you say is not, “I’m in lust with a girl. Maybe even love, but I’ll leave at it fucking, because that you could understand better. She’s a former student, by the way. You know, your godson’s friend? The one who was, oh, sixteen last time you saw her?”
A/N: This was originally going to be a one-shot, but it grew into something more. This is part one, though I'm not sure how many parts there will be. Thanks to wendynat for the beta! :)
When your best mate and former lover comes back from the dead, the first thing you say is not, “I’m in lust with a girl. Maybe even love, but I’ll leave at it fucking, because that you could understand better. She’s a former student, by the way. You know, your godson’s friend? The one who was, oh, sixteen last time you saw her?”
No, that wouldn’t do at all. He doesn’t understand that women do, on occasion, appeal to you. Particularly when they’re the ideal girl you always imagined in school, the kind of girl who even you would be straight for. Or at least give it at try, because you do have an inquiring mind: you want to know what it’s like to be with a woman in that way. After all, he knows, doesn’t he, so why shouldn’t you? Why was it always you who was careful and toed the line while the others experimented? You watched the door as they snuck girls into their bedrooms; you kept an eye out as they walked through dirty streets and winter slush to get to the Wizarding brothel, snickering all the way. You held his head and smoothed back his sweaty hair as he wretched his guts out after his first bout with too much firewhisky, you covered for them the next morning when they were too hung over to get out of bed; you helped explain to them how easy it was to get pot in the Muggle world, and when they awkwardly shoved their newly changed Muggle money into your hand, you went to a street corner and bought it for them. You were used to being an outsider (Half-Blood, scholarship student, werewolf-it followed you everywhere) and it felt strange to be with your friends in a world where you knew the ropes and they were foreign. Maybe you liked it a little, while it lasted.
Oh, Sirius and James always got along well enough in the Muggle world. Looks, charm, and money are obvious enough to girls in any world and it didn’t stop them from having a girl to go home with each night. No, you were the one who always wound up that way (“It’s because you’re too principled, Moony!” they told you, laughing about it afterward), walking under flickering streetlights, hands in the pockets of your jeans, which you pretended were faded and ripped by design not neglect. You couldn’t carry it off. You tried to go home with that girl one night, the red-haired one that looked like a cheap imitation of Lily. James had already been with her, and it wasn’t your policy to do something like that, but you were drunk and lonely and filled with self-pity; usually you were too afraid the girls would laugh at you if they knew the truth. Her hair smelled like cigarette smoke, her lipstick was waxy and unpleasant on your lips, her perfume was cloying and nauseated you. Most glaringly, she wasn’t Sirius. There was no getting around that one.
That was the closest you ever got to being with a woman, because after that one thing happened that led to another and you were in the hallway snogging Sirius like you always wanted to, grabbing the collar of his pajamas hard enough to chafe the back of his neck and pulling him right up against you until your teeth clacked. There were tongues, and some hair was pulled, and you will never, ever forget the feeling of his hand, shaking a little, cupping your cheek for the first time though it felt like always.
“Don’t ever tell me again that you don’t like boys,” you gasped and then the two of you laughed until your sides hurt with relief. Getting him didn’t make you happy like you thought it would. Oh, it made you happy for sure, happier than you’d ever been in your life, but it wasn’t enough. At first just being with him, knowing that you were together and all those years of wanting were done was giddy, a world that was a hallucination of color where there wasn’t color and light before. But of course the years of waiting weren’t done, only put off for a little while. If you had known what was coming, you would have tried harder to be happy while you could, but as it was you did your best.
And then it all ended. Not necessarily unexpectedly, because you told yourself that you’d seen the warning signs that he might be with the Death Eaters, that he was mentally unstable, a selfish sociopath whom no one could predict. In reality, you had been so concerned with the enemy outside, it was hard to think about how it really was between you two. Always you had the fear that you would somehow ruin things, drive him away never to come back, and then you would be alone for the rest of your life, knowing that you had what you wanted most and then threw it away.
So he was in Azkaban and you, you were alone. Sure that being alone was your lot in life, appointed by some deity who was malignant or simply too distant and preoccupied to care about you, you made up your mind that you would go on. Suicide or willed self-destruction through alcohol were cowardly and selfish, not your way. No, some part of you that remained was determined that when you died, at least one person would say that you died bravely. Not that you expected many mourners at your funeral.
But life went on, like life tends to do when you’re alive. And you made your way with odd jobs, even if you slept in the back of an old car occasionally, wrapped in newsprint to keep yourself warm, and wondered if you would soon be one of those old, crazy-eyed men, talking to yourself on the street corner and smelling strongly of urine. But it didn’t happen to you, whether it was resourcefulness or just luck. Dumbledore had you back to teach-he gave you a chance, and even if it went to hell like you thought it would, you can still be grateful.
And then Sirius was back and you wanted, more than anything, for it to be like old times. And it almost was. Sure it took some pretending, some looking the other way, but being happy doesn’t come for free, does it? It takes work and sometimes you cheat. Sooner or later the house of cards falls down, and this time was no exception.
Once again, life went on. There was a war, there were more deaths as there always are in war, and somewhere in there you found out what it was like to sleep with a woman. Once again, sadness and alcohol pushed your defenses out of the way and Tonks was there, bright and colorful, more alive than you ever remembered being. Needs you had pushed down resurfaced and in her arms you felt weak and shaken and, to your surprise, less unfaithful than you’d imagined you would. Sometimes you can never underestimate the importance of being held.
It couldn’t be called love and it couldn’t really be called lust, because no matter how much you care for her (and you do), you don’t quite desire her. She’s a friend, one of the few that you had, and you value that. At first you were afraid that the sex thing would ruin the friendship, but it doesn’t, and it’s good. Good the way a cup of tea is in the midst of an exhausting stressful day, good the way rain is after a hot humid spell that you can’t bear any longer. Nothing fancy, nothing too complicated, but waking up to someone next to you in bed, her legs and arms thrown across you, even in sleep her fingers curled around your wrist…you wanted that again, even if you didn’t know it. Even if you didn’t think you wanted it from her.
But the war takes her from you, like it takes most soldiers, and you have prepared yourself for this from the beginning. So much so that what you feel is hardly grief, just more water under the bridge, more dust in your mouth. You go home from her funeral, a make-shift perfunctory one for an audience that is sick to death of funerals, that might have to go to another one that day; you turn around in your bed three times, the way he used to. It’s still not comfortable and there is a stitch in your side that doesn’t go away.
You wonder if you should have told her you loved her, even if it wouldn’t have been quite true. It was a lie that wouldn’t have hurt her though, and probably given her comfort in the end. Maybe you should have tried harder.
Life is like moving through a dream and when the end of the war comes, you go through the fanfare expecting to wake up any moment, to be in your bed drenched in sweat, wondering when they are coming for you. To have spent so many years on the run from something or other (yourself) and then to know that your life is your own and no one is trying to take it from you-it should be a blessing. The government rewards you, they give you a flat and a nice little post as a civil servant. The pay is nothing to write home about it, but it’s the best you’ve seen in a long while, and you can live comfortably, undisturbed with only your medals a physical reminder that there was a war, that you fought it in. From time to time you take them out and look at them, reading the lettering: “For unfailing service, for courage in the face of danger”-what a good Gryffindor you were, what a good soldier, never flinching from your duty. When you are done, you tuck them back in an old cigar box, wrap them up in an old handkerchief and put them back in the drawer with the few other bits of flotsam from your past. Already they are starting to tarnish from lack of attention.
The only other tangible reminders are absences: James, Lily, Peter, Dumbledore…Sirius. Of course Sirius-always. You don’t wake up from the dream, but you still won’t let yourself look for oblivion outside the monotony of your workday, the quiet nights spent with a sad affair of a dinner (cottage cheese and tomato slices-watery, but at least they were on discount) and a book from the public library to keep you company. The only interruption in your routine is her-another woman, young and idealistic, bent on saving you from yourself. And when she’s with you, she almost dispels the creeping loneliness that fills every corner of every room.
It’s Hermione Granger, your former star pupil. The thought alone should make you think otherwise, remind you how grotesque it is for the old and failed to even think of chasing the young, who are too filled with life and promise to waste it on you, but really it’s her chasing you. After a few tries, you see that she’s not easily dissuaded and you let yourself enjoy her company. She seems to enjoy yours just as much. Living in a war has made her old for her years in some ways-not all the ways that count, but enough that you can assuage your conscience. She’s picked up enough cynicism, enough bleak outlook and bad habits that you don’t feel as if you’re corrupting her. Admittedly you were shocked the first time she let out a string of colorful expletives with an impish relish or the first time she lit a cigarette in your presence-the same brand as Sirius, and the smell brought back sharp memories.
No, the more you see of her, the more you wish you’d met her when you were in school. She’s clever, sharp like you always wished you were; the teachers loved her in the way you always wanted to be loved by them. Of course if you’d met her and things had gone well, you’d never have been with Sirius-for a moment you forgot that, and the guilt comes rushing in. You’ve been disloyal in a way you never were, even when you were sleeping with Tonks, even those few times you caved in and had a hurried, furtive encounter with some man you barely knew. This, this is genuine desire. When she grinds her cigarette under her heel and throws her head back and laughs at something you said, you notice the white skin of her throat, the triangle of skin left exposed by the neck of her red sweater.
And she notices you back-notices things like what brand of pens you use, and gives you a box as a present for no good reason. She remembers how you take your coffee and what you said the other night after a few glasses of wine, even if it was some comment you made without thinking. This feeling you have, of being observed, your behavior noted fondly, is foreign to you all over again. The game, the dance of gestures and little phrases left dangling for the other person to pick up if they’re interested, the play and interplay between bodies and how much distance between your body and her body at each instant.
When her arms brushes against yours and her fingers splay on your wrist, you suck in air sharply and she draws back, rebuffed. You are afraid you have scared her off, and so when you offer a used paperback, one you’ve had for ages and are genuinely attached to, you want to be sure she senses the import of the gesture. And you’re fairly sure that she does, that her eyes light up and it has more to do with you than the book.
When the question of Sirius comes up and you tell her, “Yes,” she understands, she realizes that she always knew and just didn’t quite recognize it yet. She sits next to you on the couch and takes your hand, asks you if you’d like to talk about him and you realize that yes, you would. “Tell me about him,” she says, and you comply, word following word as the stories of the two of you spill out. She laughs at the right places and you see these stories were meant to be told, that they should be shared-that Sirius would approve if he knew. And you squeeze her hand back when she grins and squeezes yours.
When she finally leans across the table and takes your chin in her hands, you are ready to kiss her back. It feels expected, like you just kissed her yesterday and the real question is why you waited so long between kisses. Kissing her is not so different from kissing Sirius, though of course her lips have their own flavor, and there is no stubble rubbing against your cheeks and there are those rather odd breasts (you’ve never gotten quite used to them, though you did grow to appreciate them on Tonks) pressing against your chest. You don’t take her to bed that night or the next or the third. Even if your body suddenly awakes, an insistent and needy creature, complaining of the many deprivations you’ve put it through, you don’t want to rush things. Maybe by now you should know that things can end quickly and you should enjoy them while they last, but you’re afraid to strain this issue, afraid pushing it might make it all pop like a soap bubble and melt away.
She is generally patient with you; she enjoys walking through the streets of London, hand in hand on dark misty nights, your voices seeming to be swallowed up in the clouds of fog insulating you. Conversation with her comes easily and even the silences are comfortable. The more you observe, the more you realize that she cares. She wants to learn which side of the bed you prefer to sleep on, how you take your tea in the morning, whether or not you fall asleep reading (the answers are left, with a dash of lemon, nothing more, and yes). After some time, she finds these out.
It takes some convincing, but not as much as you pretend, and she moves in with you. It’s strange to live with another person, but a good strangeness. You shift to make room for her and the motley assortment of furniture she brings, most picked up enthusiastically on street corners and other odd places. “Did you have any real furniture in that flat of yours?” you ask, and she laughs. That money, apparently, was spent on art, prints that now decorate your previously blank walls. She has colonized your austere space-you no longer live monastically, in the aesthetic sense or the celibate one.
More beauty in your life is a good thing, she insists, when house plants take up residence in the living room and the little slab of mildewed concrete that passes for a balcony. It looks out at a depressing industrial part of town, but now there are curtains with colorful tropical fruit printed on them (“Who puts guavas and papayas on a curtain?” you wonder aloud, and she shakes her head at you) in place of the ratty blinds. When you roll over in bed at night, you see the billows of the curtains and the curve of her shoulder, not the square tops of buildings.
She fills your life up and this should scare you more than it does. To let another person become the center of your life, the greatest source of happiness, is terrifying, because you know where that can lead. And yet, you ask yourself, where has it led that is so terrible? Yes, there have been more lost years than not, but maybe, just maybe, you’re finding yourself again.
Sometimes the grief does rise up, terrible and formless, a black frost creeping over and slowly freezing out everything alive, everything that craves warmth. At dinner you don’t taste your food, you don’t hear when she asks you about your day or when she says what happened at the bookstore that day. At night you stumble into your bedroom as if you were a blind man and your senses have gone numb, nerveless feet bumping against things, unfeeling hands brushing against surfaces without distinguishing them.
You find each other in the dark then, as if she is rescuing you for the first time. Clothes are shed awkwardly and you need each other’s help-without that, you would be lost. She is nothing more than a dark silhouette in the night, shadow traced against the walls, only the glow of the streetlight illuminating her in patches. She finds the edges of your body that you want to forget, she reminds you why having a body is not all a curse. Her hands, small and firm, rouse you from the dream you are living in, as do her insistent kisses pressing against your mouth, neck, back.
Gentle but confident, she straddles you, pushes your shoulders back down on the bed and stops your mouth with a kiss. Her hands are braced on your chest and she moves against you, maddeningly slow until you clutch at her hair, the curves of her hips, the solid weight of her thighs on each side of you, and gasp for more more more. When you run your nails up and down her back, she whimpers and you feel the shiver go up and down her spine and you want to be here, pinned between her and the bed and saying her name into the crescent of her shoulder again and again.
This is a girl you do not want to forget. You’re not pushing her away this time, not intentionally. The only way she is leaving is if she wants to go. But still, for some reason, you can’t tell her that you love her. It might be love, but you can’t be sure, and you don’t want to jinx things. You figure you have enough bad luck working against you without tempting the evil eye or the powers that be.
So when your best mate and former lover does come back from the dead, you don’t tell him that you’re sleeping with a girl, living with her in fact, and maybe just maybe are in love with her. The first thing you say is, “Don’t do this to me,” though you’re not talking to him but maybe to Fate, though you’re not sure you believe in this, or God, though you can’t have faith in him. He tells you that it’s him, and you’re afraid to believe it, and when he tries to kiss you, you find yourself shaking and wanting to cry, even though Blokes Don’t Shed Tears, so you settle for making dry, hoarse half-sobs into his shoulder. It’s the dead comforting the living and it makes no sense, but you have to believe it.
She leaves without you asking her to, and what’s worse, she understands