Fic: Let Nothing You Dismay (Part 1/2) for youcantseeus
Title: Let Nothing You Dismay
Author: cevennes
Recipient: youcantseeus
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Sex, language, some discussion of homophobia*
Word count: 19,000
Summary: There are a few things Sirius really didn't count on for Christmas of 1979. The extreme sexual confusion is one of them; Remus Lupin is approximately seventy-eight of the rest.
Notes: This got long, then it got longer, and there's really no excuse; a thousand I'm-sorrys would not be apology enough! Nonetheless, happy holidays, youcantseeus! May 2015 be filled with all of these two your heart could desire.
Also, a huge thanks to the mods for being so understanding!
The trouble with poets is that they’re liars, all of them, every last Darjeeling-drinking, Parliament-smoking twat scribbling down their rose-colored witticisms in Parisian cafés, drenching entire stanzas purple with deception and dishonesty for innocent young eyeballs like Sirius Black’s to read and get the impression that life works anything at all the way Auden tells you it will. They ought to be locked up, quills snapped, publicly denounced on the steps of the Ministry.
Innocent. See, he can do it too.
It’s in the middle of one of these scathing internal monologues at the Hog’s Head on a November night when the rain can’t decide whether it wants to be snow and Peter can’t decide whether he wants to be companionably drunk or lit as a firecracker at New Year’s when James catches his eyes from across the table, the same eyes that have strayed, as they so often do, to the source of at least sixty-five of his current frustrations: Remus Lupin and the curl of his long fingers, the wry twist of his lips, the scar smoothed into the cut of his jaw, tapering off beneath his chin. James smiles, slow and self-satisfied; Sirius’ small intestine heaves sharply to the left.
And this-this is how he knows that every single poet Remus has ever left dog-eared and tattered on the coffee table is a miserable con, because the world never ends with a bang or a whimper or even an awkward, embarrassed stutter. That would be too dignified.
The world ends with James Potter leaning across the table as Remus helps Peter totter to the fireplace, elbows pressing into the table and that smug glint of mischief flashing deep in the backs of his dark eyes, as if he’s finally caught what he’s been fishing for all this time and wants to fillet it right here on the table.
“Hey,” says The End, low, unsubtle as anything, “can I ask you something?”
-
In a certain corner of Sirius’ broad and spacious closet, kept pristine among entire encyclopedias stacked chaotically from floor to ceiling and bulging with the gory details of every stupid thing he’s ever done and how much he still loves his arsehole brother, there is a thick, musty-smelling volume with notes stuffed into the margins and a spine creased with the weight of years, its edges tea-stained, time-soft. It slides in neatly between the tattered old Fuck You, Mum and Extreme Sexual Confusion, Vol. 12, and its name is Remus Lupin.
If you could sift through those rumpled pages, you’d find expert analysis on the state of Remus Lupin’s hair sticking up at impossible angles when he wakes up in the mornings contrasted with how it floofs up mightily in the humidity, and the way those things correlate to the twinging of Sirius’ insides. There are charts dedicated to which mismatched socks make him look like a plonker and which ones make Sirius want to kiss him, or both. Lengthy, furious diatribes on all the fights they’ve had. Graphic descriptions of the exact manner Remus’ smiles unfurl dusty-warm across his face, which ones crinkle his eyes, which ones are full of teeth, which ones Sirius put there. Paragraphs about his eyes flecked with gold in the muzzy yellow of the morning sun with the moon finally on the wane, falling always on Sirius. Various attempts to capture his many, many different laughs-dignified, undignified, thrilled and secret, surprised and sweet. The turbulence caused above and below the belt when Remus smokes. The sheer, undiluted joy on his face when he’s shoveling shepherd’s pie into it.
Only a few hearts, tucked away near the binding.
And it’s not as if any of this is Remus’ doing; if Sirius is honest with himself-and he mostly is, except where it concerns his seventh-year Potions exam and certain heaps of human-shaped ooze whose names rhyme with Schmivellus Grape-there hasn’t been a single moment in the last five years when he thought he was A Straight Man for more than eight seconds. Girls are lovely and fun and he knows, mostly, what to do with them, though his few bumbling, adolescent gropes with Mary Macdonald in a third-floor broom cupboard left him feeling sticky and vaguely dissatisfied. Boys, though-beyond a few drunken and not-so-drunken snogs with James all throughout school and thinking, Yeah, I’d be down if you asked every time he’s near Kingsley Shacklebolt, he’s not quite sure how it works. If he likes them as much as girls, or more, or entirely more.
Thinking about it too hard tends to give him stomachaches. For as much as Wizarding society has always been adamant about making no distinction between who is sticking whose bits where and how often or who is marrying who, the fact is, distinctions are made; it’s still not something people are enormously open about even now in the dregs of 1979 with old wossface yowling Let’s spend the night together!, uncensored, and on puritan Muggle radio at that. And then there’s the literature on the stuff, which-when it’s not being shoved to the side in favor of Oatmeal-Flavored Heterosexual Romance #59271-ends in tragedy roughly half the time, which is incredibly morbid and uncomfortable for a nineeen-year-old young man who really wants to snog another nineteen-year-old young man stupid. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell you something.
And then there’s Ye Olde Pureblood Society, who really, really don’t care how you’re getting your jollies, but know this: You are still expected to enter into a heterosexual (incestuous) marriage, and you are still expected to have heterosexual (incestuous) sex, and you are still expected to produce heterosexual (incestuous) heirs. If he tries hard enough and really applies himself, he can probably blame this one on his parents, too.
Unfair as it is, he supposes he ought to feel lucky, especially compared to Muggles; but the thing is, the more he thinks about it, the more confused and upset he gets, and it really is hard to keep feeling grateful for scraps you’re not given so much as you’ve got to rip from someone else’s feast with your own hands, nails and all.
Mostly, Sirius Black is a confused nineteen-year-old hormone cocktail with an injustice- and Remus-induced stomachache and no one to talk to. The strain is not doing flattering things to his complexion.
But the real corker here is that, logically, Remus is exactly who he should be talking to, because Remus likes boys-everyone knows Remus likes boys, not that he’s ever done anything about it. It’s Remus, after all.
For a whole week after James leaned over the table in the Hog’s Head and asked, “So why aren’t you shagging yet,” and swore sideways he wouldn’t say anything even if one of the Prewett brothers caressed his face and asked him nicely, Sirius tries to bring it up. He tries valiantly, gets as far as, “Moony, how did you-how’d you, uh, how’d you like the way I folded your underwear last night, I really feel like I deserve a ‘thank you, Mr. Black’ and a week of dinner over here,” and gives up completely.
He can’t very well talk about Remus with Remus, which is the whole problem. Most of his thoughts and his hopes and his squirmy insides are all bound up in Remus Lupin, inextricably, ceaselessly; no matter how he tries to get it out, everything comes back to Remus in constant frantic orbit. The moon fills up and empties, fans out into the sky; the days get shorter, the snow comes softer, and everything, everything rhymes with Remus Lupin.
So, in the tumult of confusion and stomachaches and Remus and all the things that wither and turn to clay on his tongue, Sirius says a whole lot of stupid half-things. Things like, “This is weird. I mean, it’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”
Remus, ballpoint tapping against his cheek, turns from the Muggle newspaper he picked up on the way home and frowns Sirius’ favorite frown, the one with the tiny, lopsided crease between his eyebrows Sirius wants to reach over and smooth out with his thumb. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, it says, but I’m awfully fond of you anyway.
“No,” says Remus, drawing it out for the eighth time since breakfast, “it’s not. We do this all the time. Why would you think it’s weird?”
Probably, he thinks, it’s because most blokes would keep a sofa cushion between them while they do a crossword together-if most blokes actually do things like sit down after dinner and work on crosswords together, which he doubts. He’s sitting so close to Remus he can see the tiny smattering of freckles trailing across his nose; he’s never really thought about it before, this closeness, the spindly shapes gravity has made of them.
“Just, you know. This,” says Sirius, gesturing vaguely around the sitting room of their rented cottage, a birdhouse of a thing with two cozy bedrooms and a big kitchen window and a few starbursts of flowers Remus keeps in cans on the bookshelf. It’s his-theirs-and he loves it like he’s loved little else, every squeaky tile and warped floorboard, the way they fill up every corner, but everything feels so off-footed and strange now, like his whole equilibrium has slipped out of place and he can’t quite fit it back the way it was. Maybe getting a Christmas tree will help. “Anyway. What do you want for Christmas, and don’t say it’s a book or you’re getting a pony.”
“Socks and shortbread,” says Remus, still eyeing him with quiet suspicion in the sideways tilt of his head, “and it isn’t even December yet, do we really have to talk about this?”
“Yes, we bloody well do! Now ask me what I want, where’s your propriety gone, man?”
“What do you want for Christmas, Sirius?”
“You know what you can give me,” he answers, grinning like a knife when Remus flushes, finishing mentally with the same thing he’s done for who-knows-how-many years now: You can shag me into the floorboards on Christmas Eve. You can take the rest of my debatable virginity, right under the tree. “I’ll just put a big bow down my trousers, like. You can unwrap me and mount me like a prize swordfish in the sitting room, first thing in the morning.”
“I thought this was your gift?” Remus’ cheeks are very pink; Sirius wants to kiss them.
“Please, Moony. I am the best and biggest gift you’re ever going to get.”
“Shut up,” mutters Remus, pulling his jumper sleeves across his knuckles the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands, and Sirius wonders if maybe Remus is sometimes just as confused as he is, even if he’s not standing on the same volatile battleground right now. He’d probably retreat into that same faded red wool jumper like a turtle, head and all, if he could fit; Sirius leans into him, and Remus, like ballast, like always, leans back. “Ten-letter word for ‘lovely’ or ‘charming,’” he says.
R-E-M-U-S-L-U-P-I-N, supplies the filthy little man who lives in Sirius’ head. “Enchanting,” he says instead, perching his chin on Remus’ shoulder as he fills it in, and then, “this is weird.”
He can feel Remus’ chest expanding, taking in as much oxygen as humanly possible to expel the loudest, weariest sigh ever pushed from nineteen-year-old lungs; there are whole chapters dedicated to that sigh in Sirius Black’s Metaphorical Closet, incoherent, mystified ramblings on its origins followed by thousands of question marks and pages full of both indignation and pride at having evoked it, but he saves himself the trouble of wondering this time and points to the sports section of the Muggle newspaper, where an oiled-looking rugby whatsit with arms like sheer granite is doing something manly and severe with what appears to be a large egg. The women’s team gets a byline and two paragraphs near the bottom of the page, and no photo.
“That, there, that’s weird,” he lies, triumphantly. “Muggle women having to play on different teams. What happens if they mix, do the men get crushed between their steely thighs? Is that why it’s all separate?”
“Probably not weird to them,” says Remus, sounding mildly irritated at being robbed of his long-and-forever-suffering sigh. “But Muggle women never get the sort of recognition men do in sport. Actually, some people joke about them.”
“You know what else is weird?” asks Sirius, bravely, so very, very bravely. “That they won’t let men marry other men.”
This is subtlety. This is courage. This is the Gryffindor Way, for which medals are made and people get snogged into next Easter.
Remus cocks his head, bright and surprised and younger, somehow, in the willowy yellow light of their sitting room. “You know, there are loads of people-not just Death Eaters-who don’t think werewolves should be able to marry,” he says. “Loads of people who aren’t Death Eaters still don’t think much of Muggleborns.”
“And those people are shit and they need to be told so loudly and often,” says Sirius. “Here-want me to give them rabies? I can maul a few and bring you their bodies, that can be your Christmas present.”
“You don’t have rabies.”
“I’ll get it. I’ll go out and chew on a bat right now just for you, Moony, say the word and I’ll be foaming at the mouth by the solstice.”
“My bloody hero,” laughs Remus, pressing his knee against Sirius’. “Four-letter word for devotion?”
T-H-I-S, thinks Sirius, all of this, Remus’ shoes by his shoes at the door and his shoulder set against Remus’ shoulder, the sound of their breathing muffled by the sound of the flames in the grate. “Love,” he says, and watches Remus fill it in with that same careful grace he does everything. “Hey-that, that’s what we should get for Christmas.”
“We’ve got the Floo and your motorbike and we can both Apparate.” Remus, rubbing his nose, blinks at him in the slim space between them; the firelight gets in his eyes, turns them to gold. “Why do we need a car?”
“Travel is only their secondary purpose, you know,” he says, just for the way Remus scrunches up his nose like he can’t decide whether he wants to laugh at him or frown. He smiles.
“And what’s their primary purpose, O in Muggle Studies?”
“Sex,” says Sirius, sagely. “You were probably conceived in one.”
“Oh God,” Remus mutters. He’s gone red around the cheeks again, with a distinct undertone of disapprove-y amusement. “I’m not renewing the television license.”
Once, and not long ago, Sirius would have stuck his tongue in Remus’ ear and said something laced with enough innuendo to drop a convent; now, his cheeks dot with pink and something in the region of his liver squirms at the thought of putting his tongue on Remus, anywhere on Remus, so he settles for scrubbing at the blue stripe on Remus’ jaw where his pen-hand had a few spasms at the mentions of sex. Looking quickly over to Sirius and back, Remus seems to be expecting it, but it never comes, and whatever it is that splashes across Remus’ face-disappointment, hurt, concern-is folded tidily away into his belly and hidden, invisible, with the thousand other aches that claw just beneath his skin.
It makes him sad and it makes him sore, but mostly it makes Sirius hate himself for putting it there.
“I’ll do it myself,” he says, looking straight ahead. “I know exactly how Muggle money works.”
For as long as he can remember, he and Remus have operated as one cohesive unit, in a different sort of way than he does with James and can’t do with Peter, a lamentable fact Sirius has always blamed on the misfortune of both of them being left-handed. He tugs, and Remus flows; Remus drifts, and Sirius drifts with him, always, always. Remus is the conclusion to his melodrama, his last thought before bed at night, balm to every hurt and every fury that’s ever shivered through his body; it is a fact, like the cold white shift of the winter stars. North-and-South, toast-and-jam, cream-and-coffee. Sirius-and-Remus. Remus-and-Sirius.
They have breakfast together. They do the shopping together. They mix their laundry, wash dishes together the Muggle way, share drinks, wait up for each other, make tea and soup when one of them is sick or the moon’s hanging iron-heavy in the sky. Sometimes-but not recently-they knot themselves together on the sofa and nap all over each other after long days. Sirius feels like they’re tipping towards something, like maybe they always have been, but he’s got no idea if Remus wants to be there for the collision, or how to tactfully say, with all the certainty of muddled nineteen-year-old blood, I think you are where I’m going, but I need a few directions.
The whole thing is painfully stupid. He says as much when he’s brushing his teeth while Remus is showering, which is another thing they do that most mates probably just don’t do. “Tffith ith hhoofifff,” he tells Remus over the spray of the water. “Aadd eeeeerrrd.”
“It isn’t stupid, Padfoot,” says Remus, “and it isn’t weird.”
That Remus somehow knows what he’s saying while his mouth is full of toothpaste doesn’t register until he’s hurrying out of the bathroom at the same time the knowledge of Remus, three steps away and naked, slams explosively into his forebrain and he has to retreat before he ruptures anything important.
He’s trying very hard not to think about it and coming up mostly unsuccessful when he looks down the hallway to find Remus leaning against the wall on his way back from the kitchen, just watching him, and Sirius twitches uncertainly off to the side.
“Sirius, I’m-” Remus starts, and closes his mouth, and opens it again. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” he says, just as his brain screams, Yes! Everything! Everything is wrong with me. “I’m fine. I’m a peach. Why would anything be wrong?”
“Because you’ve been acting bizarre for a while now,” says Remus. He’s clutching at his elbow the way he only does if he’s upset or unexpectedly naked, chewing his lip between his teeth. “If you’re not complaining about everything being weird you’re acting like you’ve murdered someone every time I talk to you. Or you’re doing this,” he says, gesturing to where Sirius is standing with his hip against the wall, as far away from Remus as he can get. “Is it-did I do something?”
“No! Why-you’re-why the hell would you think that?”
“What am I supposed to think, you won’t even look at me half the time! You act like you’re going to, to vibrate out of your own skin or something every time I get too close, and I know I don’t smell and I don’t have any diseases,” he snaps, “besides the obvious, anyway. Are you going to throw me out? Are you, hell, I don’t know, are you sick of me? I’m sorry I’m boring and weird and un-fun, I just-”
“Jesus Christ, Remus, what is wrong in your head? I haven’t done anything!”
“You! You are what is wrong in my head,” Remus half-yells, flapping his arms about like an enormous bird. “I don’t know what’s happened and you’re acting like a berk and I’m tired of it.”
“Tired of what? Being there every time I turn around? Sorry, Remus, you’re fucking stuck with me! Unless you’d like to leave.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Oh my God, Remus no, this is so-I’m bloody tired of you seeing things that aren’t there,” he bites out, miserable, already, deep in the pit of his stomach. “Not everything is a slight against your superior sensibilities, believe it or not.”
Remus’ face crumples a little, like Sirius has just pulled the plug out of him, but then he’s glaring again, pulled back into the dark space of his bedroom where he pauses long enough to grind out a terse, stuffy-sounding “Right, then,” followed by something very close to “arsehole,” and creaks the door on its hinges until it sits open, just a sliver, the way he’s always kept it.
Sirius, unsure whether he’d rather slam his own door or cry in the hallway or, for the first time, take what he thinks might be Remus’ invitation, paces around his bed for a moment before shutting his door completely and pulling the cool quilt around his shoulders, heartsore and restless in his bones. At Hogwarts, he’d have writhed around theatrically for a bit under the blankets and then gone, penitent, to Remus’ bed, where they’d curl up and talk and share potato crisps and wake up all bedraggled, tangled and together with the morning.
He wonders if that’s why Remus leaves his door open every night. He wonders if it isn’t.
It’s easier when you’re young, he thinks, and no one’s going to look at you like you’ve got a few noodles loose for sleeping in your friend’s bed. But then, all of a sudden, the world churns forward on its tracks, and you’re churned with it: School’s over, you’ve turned nineteen-you’re an adult-and you’re supposed to know what to do with these things. You’re supposed to know your own blood. You’re not supposed to stumble around, half-blind, while your brain turns to marshmallow fluff and leaks out your ears.
Maybe that’s just part of it. Lying in the dark with the cold while your alarm clock tick-tick-ticks and the old fear creeps into your belly, wanting nothing more than to crawl into someone else’s bed for the solidity of their heartbeat to sink down into, and hoping, hoping this is worth all the sleep you’ve lost for it.
-
“McKinnon,” he sputters, clambering out of the fireplace as gracefully as he can with soot in his mouth and what is likely a spider in a very delicate place, “I need to talk to you for a minute.”
Marlene, still in her shoes with her hair falling from its low chignon, sits up from Dorcas’ lap and frowns-loudly. “I’m going to glue broken glass to the chimney if you don’t start announcing yourself,” she grinds out. “What the hell do you want? I’ve only just got home and I thought you were learning to use the front door, anyway.”
“Where’s Remus?” asks Dorcas, peering behind him into the grate.
Sirius waves his hand and thus both questions away from the important issue at hand: himself. “He’s not off till six and I didn’t take the tube, so I couldn’t use the door,” he says, and leaves out that the reason he didn’t take the tube is because he’s a little squirmy about doing it on his own and Remus won’t take it with him until he learns to stop laughing every time the tube-voice says “Cockfosters,” which is more difficult than he’d anticipated. “I’ve got a question.”
“So ask it.”
A deep breath; the air in the flat is all over cinnamon and spice and it makes him itch for Christmas. “How did you know?”
Marlene blinks. “How’d I know what, that you’re an enormous tosspot?” she asks, and then her eyes flash dagger-sharp, blue as cut glass in the last of the gritty London light. “You mean, how’d I know I’m a dyke.”
“Yes,” he says, mouth dry, “that.”
Her lips twist up on one side, just as Dorcas lets out a soft, knowing half-laugh. “For the record, I always knew this was coming,” says Marlene. “Ever since your fifth year, when you-”
“WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THAT,” he shouts, loud enough to halt the flush in his face.
“Maybe you don’t,” she leers, and then settles back against the sofa, one arm around Dorcas’ shoulders and her mouth easing into something thoughtful, patient. “It’s-Merlin, I’m hardly an expert,” she says. “Isn’t this a conversation you really ought to be having with Lupin?”
He startles. Twice. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Christ, nothing, you titchy little worm, only that-”
It starts in the eyebrows: A slow lifting of the arch that spreads downward to the eyes, brightening and widening at the same time the mouth falls open in a silent exclamation, heralding your imminent doom, or, failing that, your utter and irreversible humiliation, coinciding with the clenching of your entire digestive system. A-ha, Sirius Black, it says, I have found you out!
“Oh,” says Dorcas, brown eyes pinning him there, helpless, as he considers climbing up the chimney with his bare hands. Her earrings sway like an accusation when she tilts her head.
“Oh,” echoes Marlene, far more maliciously. “O-ho! I see what this is about, Black.”
“No you don’t,” he mutters, searching discreetly for the Floo powder, with no luck.
“But I do,” she snorts, merciless. “You want to nail Remus Lupin like a loose floorboard.”
Sirius says something, something he means to be I most certainly do not! or Who the hell is Remus Lupin? or, mostly, How dare you insinuate that I would be so rough with him, but what comes out is, “Eerrrrrggmph.”
All things considered, it’s a strangely accurate summation of his current thoughts.
“Look,” says Dorcas, watching him with sympathy and amusement quirked on her lips, “it’s probably best if you get that much out, and if you can’t tell him, tell us. You’ll feel better.”
Well.
He takes a breath, stares at the garland of stars hung above the sofa, and says, “I want to nail Remus like a loose floorboard and I spend half the night wanting to bury my face in his stupid hair so much it makes me want to dive off the fucking roof and I have for a long time now.” An exhale, an inhale. “But it’s not like it’s only him, I mean, it’s-he’s not the only one I’ve-I don’t fucking know anything,” he finishes, dragging his hand uselessly through his hair.
“You know you’re bent and that’s at least a start,” says Dorcas, nodding. “You don’t have to know everything immediately. I didn’t. She didn’t.”
“And I still didn’t know, even after a few trips behind the broomshed.” Marlene grins, and Dorcas pulls her closer by the hand draped across her back until Marlene kisses her, leaving a violently pink lipstick-stain on her mouth. “But we both figured it out. And knocked our heads together along the way.”
“We did a lot of knocking,” Dorcas agrees, stealing a drink of Marlene’s tea, squeezing her knee. This, Sirius thinks, is what he wants-this tight intimacy, this funny patchwork thing with another person. It occurs to him that he might have it already, minus the kissing, and the thought makes something warm and jangly bubble up inside him, pulsing all the way to his toes. “Sirius-you’re just fine,” Dorcas tells him. “The important thing is that you ask yourself questions, and you’re happy with your own answers.”
Marlene stands, dusting off her skirt and steering him back towards the fireplace with a hand on his shoulder; strangely gentle, for the thunderous bundle of lungs and legs that is Marlene McKinnon. “Black, if I know you, and God knows I do, you’re here because you’ve made a colossal arse of yourself and trod upon Lupin’s dainty heart,” she says, wrinkling her nose, “or else he’s doing that thing where he’s being a bit of a stuffy tit again. Either way, I think you really need to be honest with him instead of shutting him out, which is no doubt why you are here tracking soot on our carpeting at this very moment.”
“And then what? ‘By the way Remus, I’d really love to be naked with you, like, right now?’’” It’s just not on to say things like that to your friends. Bad enough to think them, bad enough to want them, guiltily, miserably; actually saying it results in nothing less than cataclysm and heartbreak 99.99% of the time. They’ve done studies. Sirius just can’t bother to cite them.
“Unless I’m mistaken, that’d knock him flat on his back,” says Dorcas. “And I’m not.”
Sirius chokes a little; Marlene squeezes him by the cheeks with one hand and turns his head back to her, grabbing a handful of powder from a chipped vase on the mantel with the other, her lips cutting a smile so soft across her face it would look unnatural were it not for the knifepoint of an incisor peering over her bottom lip. “Go talk to him. You’ll be surprised how much better it makes you feel.”
“If you’re wrong, I’m coming back and I want you to flush me down the toilet.”
“I’ll make sure it’s clean for you,” she says. “Now-out. Grovel. Cry. Get shagged. Bring him round for dinner. In the meantime, we’ll be here if you need anything.”
He supposes, stepping into the flames, it’s a little easier to move once you’ve uncorked yourself a bit and let some of your stuffing out; supposes, until he hears “Use protection!” bellowed after him just as the soot gets in his eyes, and-oh, there goes his stomach again, dropping down to his ankles somewhere around Rainham.
-
Long after dinner, long after he’s washed the soot from his hair and expertly avoided Remus’ eyes for the better part of the evening, Sirius sits down at the kitchen table just before midnight and throws himself a one-man pity-party with a jar of peanut butter and a box of gingerbread men, taking care not to use the same spoon twice lest Remus find out-and he always finds out. The whole thing, he thinks, would be a lot easier if he were more like Marlene and he could just say it the way she would: Remus, I’m bent backwards and I fancy you so much it’s a little disgusting. There it is. Bat’s in your hand now; do what you will with it.
A lot of things would be easier if he were more like Marlene, an ideal he’s aspired to occasionally with few actual results, possibly due to the lack of solid steel ovaries.
“I really hope you haven’t used that spoon more than once.”
Remus, sleepy-sweet and soft at the mouth in his flannel pyjamas and his fuzziest socks, smiles at him and pulls a mug from the cupboard, heating the water with the very tips of his fingers. “I’m using every bit of self-restraint in my body,” says Sirius. “And it’s fucking miraculous because bodies don’t have self-restraint, it’s a myth sold to the meek and cautious by our capitalist overlords to keep us from doing what we really want to do.”
“And I’m very proud of you, raging against the dying of the light as you are,” says Remus, stirring his cocoa as he sits. “Must be a bad one.”
“Why?”
“Because you only eat them head-first when you’re really upset,” he says, raising his eyebrows over his mug.
“I’m sorry,” says Sirius, decapitating one more. “I am. I don’t mean to-look, I’m pond scum, I’m crust around the milk carton. It’s not you, Remus.”
“Padfoot-please. You can tell me,” says Remus, both hands clutching his cocoa, eyes brighter than Sirius can ever remember seeing them. He thinks, wildly, that there’s probably nothing he could do that would ever make Remus hate him; he can snap the spines on all the books in the house, eat too much Christmas pudding and be sick on the floor, accidentally let the ex-aristocrat boil over once in a while, and Remus will still like him anyway. He could kill a man and Remus would probably offer to figure out the exact depth and length of the hole they’d need to hide the body and show him how to get the stains out of his clothes.
There’s nothing, truly nothing, that will disrupt this orbit, this cyclical rhythm they’ve stepped into together, right in time with their hearts.
“Moony, am I a prick?” he asks.
Remus blinks and sets his mug down, then picks it up again to hide his smirk at the bottom. “By what definition?”
“Yours.”
“No,” he says, and when he lowers his hands, Sirius can see the smile blooming on his lips, warm and easy and just for him. “Honestly, if that’s what you’ve been all twitchy and red in the face about, you could’ve just said you were growing a new feeling. I can still call you an immature tosser if you want and we’ll-”
“I’m bent,” says Sirius.
Sometimes, Remus’ face does this funny floppy thing where it can’t decide whether it wants to be shocked or thrilled or mystified, and so it settles for fast-forwarding through twenty different emotions until falling, shell-shocked, back into place. Sirius loves it.
“You know, you-you really could have talked to me about that instead of acting like a, a complete-”
“A prick?” he offers though the gingerbread carnage.
“No! Just-” Remus waves a hand about and takes a fortifying sip of cocoa. “I wish you’d said something,” he says. “I mean. I do have some idea what it’s like.”
“And when have you ever done anything about it? Hmm?” Sirius shoves one last cookie into his mouth and steals some of Remus’ cocoa. It always tastes better out of his mug. “Besides, I don’t-Christ, this is stupid, I don’t even know what I am.”
“Neither does anyone else, at first,” says Remus, reaching for his mug. “You know, I wondered. After fifth year, when you-”
“STOP-”
“When you snogged Frank Longbottom after Alice broke it off with him, because, oh yes, ‘It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do,’” Remus finishes, utterly relentless, something wicked howling in his eyes. “You’re not-I mean, you’re not having some crisis, are you? Is that what Purebloods do?”
“Not like that.” Sirius, still glaring, flicks a few crumbs at Remus and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I took Muggle Studies, I know all about their sexual insecurity and they’re a sad, sad lot with so much to answer for, Moony, I mean, crew cuts and khaki trousers and weekend golf, whatever that is. It’s just-I don’t, God, I don’t know, y’know, if I’m-I’ve never even,” he makes a vague, fluttery gesture with his hands that Remus apparently understands, cocking his head in a way that makes Sirius want to kiss his big stupid nose.
“You don’t know whether you like boys more or girls. Or both, equally.”
“That. That, exactly,” he says, running a hand through his hair as his brain finishes with, I also spend most of the day wanting to put my mouth on your mouth, can you explain that one, too. “How did you know? Because let’s not pretend you’re out there having it off with anyone, ever, at all.”
“That’s really not all it’s about,” says Remus, choking a little and turning a really nice shade of strawberry. “I mean, yes, that’s important, but that’s not all there is, not at all. And you don’t have to-to go out and shag anyone to know.”
“So-?”
“So,” he continues, looking away, “I know I like both, but I like boys more. I didn’t know that immediately, Sirius. And there are times when I still wonder.”
“Maybe I’m gay.”
“Are you attracted to women, Sirius?”
This has got to be the most unbelievable conversation he’s ever had in his life, and yet, here he is, Remus Lupin looking at him, asking, in all earnestness, how much he likes to snog women. He thinks about Mary Macdonald, thinks about her laugh, the way she moved in his hands and his mouth; how happy it made him, to see her smile, to know he plucked it out of her. “Yeah. I am.”
“Then I don’t think you’re gay.”
“Bisexual,” he says, feeling the word out under his tongue. It’s like a new robe: fresh and crisp and a little starchy in its long vowels, maybe a little too big. He’s not sure it fits. “I don’t know. It’s been-what, at least three years now, shouldn’t I know?”
“You don’t have to have an answer right now,” says Remus, wiping at Sirius’ chin where he’s left crumbs. “And if you’re never comfortable giving it a name, that’s your business. I just don’t want you to think there’s something wrong with being confused or not knowing right away, because-I mean, maybe some people do know when they’re really young, or really quickly, but I just don’t think that’s how it works for most of us.”
At the corner of his mouth, sloping all the way down towards his chin, he can still feel Remus’ fingers, warm and quill-calloused like ghosts his skin wants to remember. “Is that how it was with you?”
Remus nods. “I never had some sort of, I don’t know, epiphany, or whatever. It was a while before I set myself straight-don’t laugh, that’s a bad joke-and it was a while after that before I knew I had a definite preference. It’s like-you know it’s a part of you, it’s there just sort of twinging in you all the time, but you’re never going to know what it is or how to let it spark if you don’t take it out and look at it and learn yourself.”
He watches Remus, his long fingers twined through the handle of his mug, his profile in sharp relief against the coolness of the kitchen shadows and a few frizzy hairs sticking out from the rest, sharpened to gold in the hush of the night. He’s lovely, Sirius thinks, his great honking nose, his mouth pressed into the shape of fond amusement, every scar split into his skin and every daft thing he’s ever said; all of him, all of him.
“For what it’s worth, I’m shocked you haven’t shagged your way through the library,” says Sirius, watching him flush, grinning. “What research are you really working on for Dumbledore, eh? Eh? You’re probably the subject of so many fantasies I don’t know how those ears haven’t burned right off your head.”
“God, no,” he sputters, pushing his chair in. “I’m not. I wouldn’t even know what to do.”
“People like you, Moony. The librarians probably want to take you home and stuff you-”
“Oh my God-”
“Full of cheesecake, what the hell did you think I was going to say?” he asks, swallowing one last cookie and tipping his chair back on its hind legs. “Least we know where your mind is. Dirty, dirty werewolf.”
“I hate you,” says Remus, entirely without rancor, “and anyway, I’ve read things. So.” He shrugs, rinses his cup out, and then turns to Sirius, teetering with expert danger in his chair, and says, “Come to bed, Pads.”
Something in Sirius’ head snaps; he can actually hear it. “Uh?”
“Bed,” says Remus, painting on his most exasperated face. “You’ve got work tomorrow and you know I can’t get anything done if I’m worried about you functioning on no sleep.”
“You do get all flappy and consumptive,” says Sirius, standing and feeling loose in his bones, like a knot unraveled, like he could see by the light of his own skin. “Moony-thanks.”
Remus smiles, moon-bright, and turns out the kitchen light.
At his door, exactly opposite Remus’ door, he hesitates, cold suddenly and wanting, wanting so many things he doesn’t know how to ask for when Remus turns to him and sighs. “Would you quit being a plonker and get in here.”
Sirius does, and Remus, for the first time since they moved into their drafty house and stuffed it to the seams with themselves, shuts the door.
He’s not had much cause to be in Remus’ room before, but now that he is, Sirius finds himself looking around at the tottering piles of books that won’t fit on the shelves and the camera and the rumpled parchment on the desk, the Muggle sticky notes he’s been hiding from Sirius, and decides he likes it better in here: the chaotic clamor of wet ink and socks sticking out of drawers, the scarves wrapped over the chair, the loamy-warm smell of the cloves he keeps in an empty wine bottle on his dresser. Between the curtains, he can see the snow falling in the honeyed flicker of Hogsmeade’s streetlights, washing everything out; the neighbors have already decorated the enormous spruce in their front yard, all gold and green. He would stay here, he thinks. He would stay here.
“Let’s get a tree this weekend,” he says. “We can make macaroni Christmas art for the front door and teach these heathens the real meaning of Christmas: ugly ornaments and gorging yourself on store-bought biscuits.”
“I’ll spike the eggnog,” says Remus, pulling the quilt back and reaching over to set the alarm. He doesn’t take his socks off. “Come to bed.”
It’s smaller than a Hogwarts four-poster, cotton-warm and fleecy, and Sirius is certain to his core that nothing in the world has ever been better. The sheets are thick, pilled-up blue flannel, smelling of laundry soap and bright, familiar things, Moony-things, all earthy and sun-soft. Across from him, Remus turns on his side and smiles, tugging the quilt closer around them. In all his life, in all his longing, Sirius has never wanted to kiss anyone more.
“Goodnight,” says Remus. He still puts one arm under his pillow, just like he used to. “I’ll make lunch if you want to come home for break tomorrow. I’m off.”
“You’re such a housewife,” he says. Beneath the quilt and the fluffy blanket Remus has put under it, Sirius’ knees touch Remus’ knees. “You know, this is w-”
Remus’ hand clamps over his mouth before he can get it out, cold fingers pressing into his cheek. Sirius shuts up. “This isn’t weird. If you think it’s weird, it’s probably because your mother said so once when you were seven and now it’s coming out to keep me awake twelve years later,” he says. “You’re all right, Sirius. All of you.”
He nods, pulls Remus’ hand down by the wrist, and, after a small sliver of hesitation, wraps it in his own, playing with his fingers. “I know what you want,” he says, smirking crookedly. “You want me to be your personal space heater. It’s a good thing for you I come cheap, apple stuffing.”
“Oh no,” Remus drawls lazily, “he’s seen through my ruse! How long before he realizes I only keep him around for decoration and sometimes dinner.”
“Bastard,” he says. “But it is a little weird-no, don’t give me that look. It is. What the hell are you going to do when I’m seventy years old and climbing into your bed, I’d like to know.”
“Let you in,” says Remus, eyes wide and no hesitation at all, as if it’s a fact like iron in the blood, like the grace of their fingers, intertwined. As if it’s the only answer there’s ever been.
Late, late in the blue lull of the night, as the minutes dissolve and Sirius drifts with them, he watches Remus in the dark, the rhythmic rise-and-fall of his chest, his eyelashes making long shadows on his cheeks, and he thinks this is all he wants: the two of them cloistered together on this bed, all the spaces they’ve filled between them. Remus’ hand is still, held under his and warmed by his skin when he bends his head and kisses his knuckles, so soft it might have been a dream but for the quickening of Remus’ heart against his fingers, the one part of him he could never train to quiet, measured obedience.
Touch is truth, language without tongues, confession without speech. There are words for the thrill of Sirius’ heartbeat thrumming in answer to Remus’, all of them dark, lavish, beautiful things clamoring for his mouth to give them shape and form, but for now, he lets his fingers say it, lets his blood speak them here where nothing else can, in the solid honesty of their bodies.
-
Dragging himself out of Remus’ bed to be sucked into the cold vortex of the morning, and therefore work, is the greatest misery he’s ever known in his young and occasionally explosive life; it’s so cold, in fact, that it’s probably going to kill him, which prompts Remus to lay an indulgent hand on his forehead and inform him that, no, he’s not actually dying and he should probably get to work if he doesn’t want to hear Moody twitch about the time it takes to hex some very important bits into oblivion while you’re whining about your frozen toes. He’s heard it at least six times before, concluding, always, with “If you’re not early, you’re late,” which Sirius just can’t reconcile with his whole outlook on life.
By the time he Apparates into Hogsmeade for lunch, he’s four times as miserable as he was when he left. His boots are soaked through, they’ve failed to make an arrest, James ate the last two muffins, Moody twitched at him anyway, and he can’t think a single bloody thing that doesn’t run right back to Remus Lupin like some endless one-track loop. Not that he minds that last one so much; Remus is what usually gets him through the nine o’clock tragedies, and, failing that, his bony ankles sticking out from underneath his pyjama bottoms every night will do it.
“I’m dying,” he calls from the entryway, fighting his way out of his coat and scarf and soggy boots. “Monday has squeezed me like a Christmas orange, I told you I-oh, you made cheese toasties.”
“I put tomatoes in yours,” says Remus. He’s wearing the obnoxious seasonal socks Sirius bought him last year; they make him look very festive. “How is it out there? Have any of your organs shut down yet?”
“Not yet but they’re trying, Moony, my liver will explode by the end of the day. Take good care of the motorbike for me,” he says, falling into the chair and shoving as much sandwich as he can fit into his mouth all at once. “Why are you drinking cider? Cider doesn’t go with cheese toasties. That’s just vulgar.”
“Cider goes with everything,” says Remus, “I’ll drink it while I’m changing the oil in your motorbike, or whatever. It’ll bring back painful memories, but I’ll remember your last moments with fondness, tomato skin hanging out of your mouth and all. No, really-close it. Close your damn mouth.”
“Think of me when you’re greasing those big thick cables,” he grins. “Just keep James away from my funeral, he’ll eat all the canapés and I know how you like them.”
“So selfless, even on your deathbed.”
“I’m only thinking of your stomach,” he says, and Remus smiles at him.
They eat quietly for a few minutes, Sirius thinking that his imminent undeath might provide a good excuse to tell Remus a few other things, when Remus catches him staring, mid-chew, and he has to plead with his face not to turn an unattractive puce; focusing on the grey sludge outside helps a little. He can feel Remus watching him, imagines him wondering, uncertainly, what he’s thinking.
Sometimes, usually in the crush of pale, brittle moments like these, Sirius thinks that maybe he knows, that maybe he’s always known. Remus Lupin is the least oblivious person he’s ever known in his life, fluent in the shift of shadows and the yearning of empty hands, reading always the things people grow in their margins like spilled ink; Sirius knows Remus can see his stained fingers, dripping a loud, incriminating red. But Remus is also an accomplished liar, and never more than where it concerns himself: If Sirius acted like this around anyone else, Remus would know exactly what to call it; when Sirius acts like this around him, Remus probably thinks he’s accidentally gotten treacle in bad places again.
He’s never been able to lie to his friends, though. He gets all shifty in the eyes and sad in the shoulders.
“So,” Remus says finally, “how’s being bent?”
“It’s all right. It’s-still a little confusing,” he says. “My head feels better, though.”
“It’s only temporary, you know.”
“Is it?”
“Well-that’s what my mum used to say. About the change,” says Remus, cocking his head. It’s terribly sweet. “It’s really not, but it works better if you apply it to how confused you are over which bits you like better.”
“Your mum is a beautiful woman,” he says, finishing off his pumpkin juice. “When are you going home this year? I’ll buy her something nice and spicy. You, too, if you’re a good boy.”
Remus pulls his jumper down over his hands, running his thumb over the chip in his mug. “Actually, I talked to her this morning,” he says. “I mean, she’ll just be going to her sister’s anyway, and you know how I can’t deal with the cats, or the cabbage, so-I’m going to stay here this year,” he finishes, looking up with summer in his eyes, warmer than a bit of August at the first of December.
Something bright shocks through Sirius, starting in his belly and spreading like a stain down to his toes, reaches into his throat and steals the breath right out of his lungs. “Moony! I’m getting you for Christmas. We’ve never had Christmas together. Not even once.”
“I know,” says Remus, smiling brightly. “D’you suppose we should send joint Christmas cards?”
“We should send joint proclamations.” Sirius takes their plates to the sink and waves them through the motions of a wandless wash. “This is momentous.”
“It’s an Occasion,” Remus agrees. Sirius hears the capital letter. “Here, give me those-we can eat a whole pie and no one’s going to care.”
“You act like I haven’t been doing that for the last three years.”
“But now you’ll have to share,” says Remus. “We can be sick on pie together, it’ll be like a trust exercise where we take turns with the toilet.”
By his own estimation, Sirius has eaten half his weight in Christmas pies since he left home, between Hogwarts and James’ mum and the Hogsmeade bakery; on his own, always, because for as much as he loves the Potters, he’s never felt right stomping around the place at Christmas the way he used to do over the summer, regardless of James’ protests. He doesn’t remember ever having a proper Christmas dinner with someone who wasn’t a professor or a family member sneering at him for using the wrong fork and refusing to let him put whipped cream on things while they droned about the Ministry and which wing of the house needed renovating this year.
And here Remus is, offering to get sick on pie with him. He feels like he might burst.
“I’m going to roast you a whole turkey,” he decides. “That’s fucking difficult, but that’s just how devoted I am to what’s really important in life.”
“Our gluttony.”
“Exactly,” he says. “I’ll make you shepherd’s pie with leftovers.”
Remus makes a noise, something halfway between a moan and a squeak that really shouldn’t be attractive coming from anyone, but here Sirius is, mouth dry, heart lurching in his chest. “God, that’s the best thing you’ve ever said to me,” he murmurs. And then, “Who knows, maybe you’ll find a boy to snog at New Year’s.”
Sirius swallows and goes quiet at once, still as an effigy. “I-why would you say that?”
“Well, why not? I thought you wanted to.”
“Yeah, but-it’s just,” he waves his hand, indicative of approximately nothing. “I’ve never. You know. What if I’m bad at it?”
“But Frank-”
“Remus, I will kill you.”
“Okay, fine. Prongs,” he says, lifting both accusing eyebrows. “I know you’ve kissed James, I’ve seen you do it.”
“That’s different!”
“How? Because he had his trousers on and Frank didn’t?”
“No, you absolute prick, it’s just-it’s different.”
“Have you got any idea how much sense that doesn’t make?”
“No, because it makes perfect sense,” he says, very slowly, waiting for his words to sink into Remus’ ears. “It was never like that-all right, maybe once or twice-but it was mostly, y’know, just because. For practice.”
This, he realizes as Remus chokes, sputters, and starts laughing so hard he grabs the kitchen counter, is an enormous mistake he is never going to be allowed to forget. Years from now, if he really is climbing into Remus’ bed at seventy on his sleepless midnights, he’ll startle sometimes, half-asleep, to hear Remus gasping breathlessly just the same as he is right now, “Practice! Oh my God, for practice!”
“Fuck you, Lupin. I’ll have you know I’ve never had a single complaint.”
“Oh, Padfoot, James wouldn’t know any better,” says Remus, all vengeful glee, laughing even harder when Sirius knocks his shoulder into his and sends him stumbling sideways.
“You know what I mean, you beast.” He glares halfheartedly at Remus, who is still having small, extremely convulsive fits at the sink. “I’ve never kissed another man, you know, seriously. I’ve never meant it. Just James. Fine-and Frank.”
“That doesn’t matter,” says Remus, quieting, finding his eyes and holding them until Sirius looks away.
“I know,” he says, “I’m just-I’m not sure how to go about the whole, the logistics, and I’m a little-nervous. It’s weird. Um.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, feeling too big and too heavy for his own skin, out of tune, like he’s moving through something orchestrated that just looks awkward and painful. “I do want to.”
Something about the shapes they make by the sink, he thinks. Something about the way their voices thread together in this house, because Remus is very close, his hand fumbling for Sirius’ hand; when he leans over and kisses him, Sirius can smell him, thick-knit jumper and Ivory soap, apple cider on his lips. He opens his eyes.
“First one out of the way, then,” Remus whispers, turning his head towards the window. Sirius can see the pulse beating in the thin skin of his neck.
He opens his mouth and closes it, groping blindly for a single word and finding none. Eventually, his brain slotting back into place slightly, the world slamming into focus, he says, “You kissed me.”
“I did.” Remus is looking wildly around the room, maybe hoping if he looks anywhere but Sirius all the awkward static crackling between them will evaporate and they’ll just step back into twelve seconds ago. “So. Now you know. What it’s like, I mean, in the event that-that you need to,” he mutters. “I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m, Christ, I’m sorry.”
“Please do that again,” he says.
“I-what?”
“Please kiss me,” says Sirius, trying very hard to hold all his pieces together at once.
Remus kisses him with the softness of uncertain things, his lips slightly chapped when they move against Sirius’, apple-sweet, honey-slow; their noses brush together when he tilts his head, Remus’ slight stubble scratching at his chin. It’s ticklish. It’s warm. It’s absolutely bloody amazing.
It’s also different from kissing a girl, in a way he definitely likes.
When Remus pulls away this time, Sirius catches him by the hips, his eyes on Remus’ eyes, his breathing conflating with Remus’ breathing, and the moment stretches out between them: silent and heavy here with all the things they’re not saying, pulled around them tightrope-taut until Sirius snaps it, wrenching them off their unfailing axis and into the bread cupboard, kissing Remus so hard the oak doors rattle and their teeth clack together. He pulls back a second time, a third, only for Remus to reach up and twine his fingers through his hair and slide their mouths together again, shivering and pressing up against Sirius when he flicks his tongue between his lips, heedless of the clock chiming on the mantel, heedless of any time but their own.
“Is this what you did with James,” he gasps, taking Sirius’ head between his palms, which are hot and slightly damp.
“Not even a little,” he answers. Remus’ throat bobs when he swallows, and his eyes, God, his eyes are brighter than Sirius can ever remember seeing them, shot through with gold and so beautifully, breathtakingly young.
“Good,” says Remus, and tugs him down again.
Deep in the rational part of his brain, in the single neuron that’s still functioning, he thinks he likes this better than kissing girls; it’s harder and softer at the same time, and easier, somehow, to know how to be both at once with another boy’s narrow hips and chest smashed into his own. Remus makes a small, pleased sound in the back of his throat and pulls away, running his hands wildly up Sirius’ biceps to his shoulders, making him lean even closer, not a fragment of space between them.
“You’re going to be late,” says Remus, even as he kisses along Sirius’ jaw, behind his ear.
“I know,” he whispers. He’s hard and fairly sure Remus is too and they’re both honor-bound to pretend they’re not; the cold air will just have to resolve things for him, for now. “I’m confused, Moony.”
“Are you, now,” Remus murmurs, oh, right against his lips.
“I’m a mess.”
“Well.” Remus squeezes his shoulders and looks up slowly, his lips red against his flushed skin; Sirius runs his teeth along the silvery scar on his chin, older than all their time together. “Maybe I can un-confuse you, you know. When you get home.”
“Oh God,” he groans, right over Remus’ pulse, “I’m-I’ve got to get through a whole goddamn afternoon, do you have any idea-you’ve-I can’t even talk,” he stammers, weak in the knees. “Jesus Christ, Moony, warn me next time!”
“Warn you!” he laughs, a tiny bubble of hysteria breaking out of his throat and making the blood surge up in Sirius’ ears like a brilliant blue cloudburst. “I’ve done nothing but warn you for-for three years now, you great berk, I can’t believe-”
“I have to go,” he murmurs, kissing Remus again, again, again, and then again, dragging himself away from him like one enormous human bandage and letting his hands fall down Remus’ waist to his hips until he finally peels away for the last time, everything in him straining still for Remus-his hands, his August eyes. “I have to go and we’re going to-we’re going to do a lot of things when I get home,” he finishes, eloquently.
“Things,” says Remus, nodding as Sirius forces his feet to the door. “Yes. Things.”
“So don’t you fucking dare leave this house,” he growls, one hand on the door. Remus still hasn’t moved from the bread cupboard; he watches Sirius, unblinking, as he half-trips over his untied bootlaces and steps outside.
He stumbles across the front yard in a daze, pressing his fingers to his lips as he hurries down the slippery cobbles of the street and the shrill yellow winterlight tears open the December sky, everything so fierce and rich and alive; he feels as if something inside him has galvanized, solidified-his blood, the marrow in his bones, like he’s holding all his disjointed parts together for the first time. When Sirius Apparates, he thinks of Remus, his hands clutching his shoulders, his heart under Sirius’ mouth as they stumbled, together, into a new shape. How easy it was, to hold onto him. How hard it was, to let go.
Part 2
Author: cevennes
Recipient: youcantseeus
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Sex, language, some discussion of homophobia*
Word count: 19,000
Summary: There are a few things Sirius really didn't count on for Christmas of 1979. The extreme sexual confusion is one of them; Remus Lupin is approximately seventy-eight of the rest.
Notes: This got long, then it got longer, and there's really no excuse; a thousand I'm-sorrys would not be apology enough! Nonetheless, happy holidays, youcantseeus! May 2015 be filled with all of these two your heart could desire.
Also, a huge thanks to the mods for being so understanding!
The trouble with poets is that they’re liars, all of them, every last Darjeeling-drinking, Parliament-smoking twat scribbling down their rose-colored witticisms in Parisian cafés, drenching entire stanzas purple with deception and dishonesty for innocent young eyeballs like Sirius Black’s to read and get the impression that life works anything at all the way Auden tells you it will. They ought to be locked up, quills snapped, publicly denounced on the steps of the Ministry.
Innocent. See, he can do it too.
It’s in the middle of one of these scathing internal monologues at the Hog’s Head on a November night when the rain can’t decide whether it wants to be snow and Peter can’t decide whether he wants to be companionably drunk or lit as a firecracker at New Year’s when James catches his eyes from across the table, the same eyes that have strayed, as they so often do, to the source of at least sixty-five of his current frustrations: Remus Lupin and the curl of his long fingers, the wry twist of his lips, the scar smoothed into the cut of his jaw, tapering off beneath his chin. James smiles, slow and self-satisfied; Sirius’ small intestine heaves sharply to the left.
And this-this is how he knows that every single poet Remus has ever left dog-eared and tattered on the coffee table is a miserable con, because the world never ends with a bang or a whimper or even an awkward, embarrassed stutter. That would be too dignified.
The world ends with James Potter leaning across the table as Remus helps Peter totter to the fireplace, elbows pressing into the table and that smug glint of mischief flashing deep in the backs of his dark eyes, as if he’s finally caught what he’s been fishing for all this time and wants to fillet it right here on the table.
“Hey,” says The End, low, unsubtle as anything, “can I ask you something?”
-
In a certain corner of Sirius’ broad and spacious closet, kept pristine among entire encyclopedias stacked chaotically from floor to ceiling and bulging with the gory details of every stupid thing he’s ever done and how much he still loves his arsehole brother, there is a thick, musty-smelling volume with notes stuffed into the margins and a spine creased with the weight of years, its edges tea-stained, time-soft. It slides in neatly between the tattered old Fuck You, Mum and Extreme Sexual Confusion, Vol. 12, and its name is Remus Lupin.
If you could sift through those rumpled pages, you’d find expert analysis on the state of Remus Lupin’s hair sticking up at impossible angles when he wakes up in the mornings contrasted with how it floofs up mightily in the humidity, and the way those things correlate to the twinging of Sirius’ insides. There are charts dedicated to which mismatched socks make him look like a plonker and which ones make Sirius want to kiss him, or both. Lengthy, furious diatribes on all the fights they’ve had. Graphic descriptions of the exact manner Remus’ smiles unfurl dusty-warm across his face, which ones crinkle his eyes, which ones are full of teeth, which ones Sirius put there. Paragraphs about his eyes flecked with gold in the muzzy yellow of the morning sun with the moon finally on the wane, falling always on Sirius. Various attempts to capture his many, many different laughs-dignified, undignified, thrilled and secret, surprised and sweet. The turbulence caused above and below the belt when Remus smokes. The sheer, undiluted joy on his face when he’s shoveling shepherd’s pie into it.
Only a few hearts, tucked away near the binding.
And it’s not as if any of this is Remus’ doing; if Sirius is honest with himself-and he mostly is, except where it concerns his seventh-year Potions exam and certain heaps of human-shaped ooze whose names rhyme with Schmivellus Grape-there hasn’t been a single moment in the last five years when he thought he was A Straight Man for more than eight seconds. Girls are lovely and fun and he knows, mostly, what to do with them, though his few bumbling, adolescent gropes with Mary Macdonald in a third-floor broom cupboard left him feeling sticky and vaguely dissatisfied. Boys, though-beyond a few drunken and not-so-drunken snogs with James all throughout school and thinking, Yeah, I’d be down if you asked every time he’s near Kingsley Shacklebolt, he’s not quite sure how it works. If he likes them as much as girls, or more, or entirely more.
Thinking about it too hard tends to give him stomachaches. For as much as Wizarding society has always been adamant about making no distinction between who is sticking whose bits where and how often or who is marrying who, the fact is, distinctions are made; it’s still not something people are enormously open about even now in the dregs of 1979 with old wossface yowling Let’s spend the night together!, uncensored, and on puritan Muggle radio at that. And then there’s the literature on the stuff, which-when it’s not being shoved to the side in favor of Oatmeal-Flavored Heterosexual Romance #59271-ends in tragedy roughly half the time, which is incredibly morbid and uncomfortable for a nineeen-year-old young man who really wants to snog another nineteen-year-old young man stupid. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell you something.
And then there’s Ye Olde Pureblood Society, who really, really don’t care how you’re getting your jollies, but know this: You are still expected to enter into a heterosexual (incestuous) marriage, and you are still expected to have heterosexual (incestuous) sex, and you are still expected to produce heterosexual (incestuous) heirs. If he tries hard enough and really applies himself, he can probably blame this one on his parents, too.
Unfair as it is, he supposes he ought to feel lucky, especially compared to Muggles; but the thing is, the more he thinks about it, the more confused and upset he gets, and it really is hard to keep feeling grateful for scraps you’re not given so much as you’ve got to rip from someone else’s feast with your own hands, nails and all.
Mostly, Sirius Black is a confused nineteen-year-old hormone cocktail with an injustice- and Remus-induced stomachache and no one to talk to. The strain is not doing flattering things to his complexion.
But the real corker here is that, logically, Remus is exactly who he should be talking to, because Remus likes boys-everyone knows Remus likes boys, not that he’s ever done anything about it. It’s Remus, after all.
For a whole week after James leaned over the table in the Hog’s Head and asked, “So why aren’t you shagging yet,” and swore sideways he wouldn’t say anything even if one of the Prewett brothers caressed his face and asked him nicely, Sirius tries to bring it up. He tries valiantly, gets as far as, “Moony, how did you-how’d you, uh, how’d you like the way I folded your underwear last night, I really feel like I deserve a ‘thank you, Mr. Black’ and a week of dinner over here,” and gives up completely.
He can’t very well talk about Remus with Remus, which is the whole problem. Most of his thoughts and his hopes and his squirmy insides are all bound up in Remus Lupin, inextricably, ceaselessly; no matter how he tries to get it out, everything comes back to Remus in constant frantic orbit. The moon fills up and empties, fans out into the sky; the days get shorter, the snow comes softer, and everything, everything rhymes with Remus Lupin.
So, in the tumult of confusion and stomachaches and Remus and all the things that wither and turn to clay on his tongue, Sirius says a whole lot of stupid half-things. Things like, “This is weird. I mean, it’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”
Remus, ballpoint tapping against his cheek, turns from the Muggle newspaper he picked up on the way home and frowns Sirius’ favorite frown, the one with the tiny, lopsided crease between his eyebrows Sirius wants to reach over and smooth out with his thumb. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, it says, but I’m awfully fond of you anyway.
“No,” says Remus, drawing it out for the eighth time since breakfast, “it’s not. We do this all the time. Why would you think it’s weird?”
Probably, he thinks, it’s because most blokes would keep a sofa cushion between them while they do a crossword together-if most blokes actually do things like sit down after dinner and work on crosswords together, which he doubts. He’s sitting so close to Remus he can see the tiny smattering of freckles trailing across his nose; he’s never really thought about it before, this closeness, the spindly shapes gravity has made of them.
“Just, you know. This,” says Sirius, gesturing vaguely around the sitting room of their rented cottage, a birdhouse of a thing with two cozy bedrooms and a big kitchen window and a few starbursts of flowers Remus keeps in cans on the bookshelf. It’s his-theirs-and he loves it like he’s loved little else, every squeaky tile and warped floorboard, the way they fill up every corner, but everything feels so off-footed and strange now, like his whole equilibrium has slipped out of place and he can’t quite fit it back the way it was. Maybe getting a Christmas tree will help. “Anyway. What do you want for Christmas, and don’t say it’s a book or you’re getting a pony.”
“Socks and shortbread,” says Remus, still eyeing him with quiet suspicion in the sideways tilt of his head, “and it isn’t even December yet, do we really have to talk about this?”
“Yes, we bloody well do! Now ask me what I want, where’s your propriety gone, man?”
“What do you want for Christmas, Sirius?”
“You know what you can give me,” he answers, grinning like a knife when Remus flushes, finishing mentally with the same thing he’s done for who-knows-how-many years now: You can shag me into the floorboards on Christmas Eve. You can take the rest of my debatable virginity, right under the tree. “I’ll just put a big bow down my trousers, like. You can unwrap me and mount me like a prize swordfish in the sitting room, first thing in the morning.”
“I thought this was your gift?” Remus’ cheeks are very pink; Sirius wants to kiss them.
“Please, Moony. I am the best and biggest gift you’re ever going to get.”
“Shut up,” mutters Remus, pulling his jumper sleeves across his knuckles the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands, and Sirius wonders if maybe Remus is sometimes just as confused as he is, even if he’s not standing on the same volatile battleground right now. He’d probably retreat into that same faded red wool jumper like a turtle, head and all, if he could fit; Sirius leans into him, and Remus, like ballast, like always, leans back. “Ten-letter word for ‘lovely’ or ‘charming,’” he says.
R-E-M-U-S-L-U-P-I-N, supplies the filthy little man who lives in Sirius’ head. “Enchanting,” he says instead, perching his chin on Remus’ shoulder as he fills it in, and then, “this is weird.”
He can feel Remus’ chest expanding, taking in as much oxygen as humanly possible to expel the loudest, weariest sigh ever pushed from nineteen-year-old lungs; there are whole chapters dedicated to that sigh in Sirius Black’s Metaphorical Closet, incoherent, mystified ramblings on its origins followed by thousands of question marks and pages full of both indignation and pride at having evoked it, but he saves himself the trouble of wondering this time and points to the sports section of the Muggle newspaper, where an oiled-looking rugby whatsit with arms like sheer granite is doing something manly and severe with what appears to be a large egg. The women’s team gets a byline and two paragraphs near the bottom of the page, and no photo.
“That, there, that’s weird,” he lies, triumphantly. “Muggle women having to play on different teams. What happens if they mix, do the men get crushed between their steely thighs? Is that why it’s all separate?”
“Probably not weird to them,” says Remus, sounding mildly irritated at being robbed of his long-and-forever-suffering sigh. “But Muggle women never get the sort of recognition men do in sport. Actually, some people joke about them.”
“You know what else is weird?” asks Sirius, bravely, so very, very bravely. “That they won’t let men marry other men.”
This is subtlety. This is courage. This is the Gryffindor Way, for which medals are made and people get snogged into next Easter.
Remus cocks his head, bright and surprised and younger, somehow, in the willowy yellow light of their sitting room. “You know, there are loads of people-not just Death Eaters-who don’t think werewolves should be able to marry,” he says. “Loads of people who aren’t Death Eaters still don’t think much of Muggleborns.”
“And those people are shit and they need to be told so loudly and often,” says Sirius. “Here-want me to give them rabies? I can maul a few and bring you their bodies, that can be your Christmas present.”
“You don’t have rabies.”
“I’ll get it. I’ll go out and chew on a bat right now just for you, Moony, say the word and I’ll be foaming at the mouth by the solstice.”
“My bloody hero,” laughs Remus, pressing his knee against Sirius’. “Four-letter word for devotion?”
T-H-I-S, thinks Sirius, all of this, Remus’ shoes by his shoes at the door and his shoulder set against Remus’ shoulder, the sound of their breathing muffled by the sound of the flames in the grate. “Love,” he says, and watches Remus fill it in with that same careful grace he does everything. “Hey-that, that’s what we should get for Christmas.”
“We’ve got the Floo and your motorbike and we can both Apparate.” Remus, rubbing his nose, blinks at him in the slim space between them; the firelight gets in his eyes, turns them to gold. “Why do we need a car?”
“Travel is only their secondary purpose, you know,” he says, just for the way Remus scrunches up his nose like he can’t decide whether he wants to laugh at him or frown. He smiles.
“And what’s their primary purpose, O in Muggle Studies?”
“Sex,” says Sirius, sagely. “You were probably conceived in one.”
“Oh God,” Remus mutters. He’s gone red around the cheeks again, with a distinct undertone of disapprove-y amusement. “I’m not renewing the television license.”
Once, and not long ago, Sirius would have stuck his tongue in Remus’ ear and said something laced with enough innuendo to drop a convent; now, his cheeks dot with pink and something in the region of his liver squirms at the thought of putting his tongue on Remus, anywhere on Remus, so he settles for scrubbing at the blue stripe on Remus’ jaw where his pen-hand had a few spasms at the mentions of sex. Looking quickly over to Sirius and back, Remus seems to be expecting it, but it never comes, and whatever it is that splashes across Remus’ face-disappointment, hurt, concern-is folded tidily away into his belly and hidden, invisible, with the thousand other aches that claw just beneath his skin.
It makes him sad and it makes him sore, but mostly it makes Sirius hate himself for putting it there.
“I’ll do it myself,” he says, looking straight ahead. “I know exactly how Muggle money works.”
For as long as he can remember, he and Remus have operated as one cohesive unit, in a different sort of way than he does with James and can’t do with Peter, a lamentable fact Sirius has always blamed on the misfortune of both of them being left-handed. He tugs, and Remus flows; Remus drifts, and Sirius drifts with him, always, always. Remus is the conclusion to his melodrama, his last thought before bed at night, balm to every hurt and every fury that’s ever shivered through his body; it is a fact, like the cold white shift of the winter stars. North-and-South, toast-and-jam, cream-and-coffee. Sirius-and-Remus. Remus-and-Sirius.
They have breakfast together. They do the shopping together. They mix their laundry, wash dishes together the Muggle way, share drinks, wait up for each other, make tea and soup when one of them is sick or the moon’s hanging iron-heavy in the sky. Sometimes-but not recently-they knot themselves together on the sofa and nap all over each other after long days. Sirius feels like they’re tipping towards something, like maybe they always have been, but he’s got no idea if Remus wants to be there for the collision, or how to tactfully say, with all the certainty of muddled nineteen-year-old blood, I think you are where I’m going, but I need a few directions.
The whole thing is painfully stupid. He says as much when he’s brushing his teeth while Remus is showering, which is another thing they do that most mates probably just don’t do. “Tffith ith hhoofifff,” he tells Remus over the spray of the water. “Aadd eeeeerrrd.”
“It isn’t stupid, Padfoot,” says Remus, “and it isn’t weird.”
That Remus somehow knows what he’s saying while his mouth is full of toothpaste doesn’t register until he’s hurrying out of the bathroom at the same time the knowledge of Remus, three steps away and naked, slams explosively into his forebrain and he has to retreat before he ruptures anything important.
He’s trying very hard not to think about it and coming up mostly unsuccessful when he looks down the hallway to find Remus leaning against the wall on his way back from the kitchen, just watching him, and Sirius twitches uncertainly off to the side.
“Sirius, I’m-” Remus starts, and closes his mouth, and opens it again. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” he says, just as his brain screams, Yes! Everything! Everything is wrong with me. “I’m fine. I’m a peach. Why would anything be wrong?”
“Because you’ve been acting bizarre for a while now,” says Remus. He’s clutching at his elbow the way he only does if he’s upset or unexpectedly naked, chewing his lip between his teeth. “If you’re not complaining about everything being weird you’re acting like you’ve murdered someone every time I talk to you. Or you’re doing this,” he says, gesturing to where Sirius is standing with his hip against the wall, as far away from Remus as he can get. “Is it-did I do something?”
“No! Why-you’re-why the hell would you think that?”
“What am I supposed to think, you won’t even look at me half the time! You act like you’re going to, to vibrate out of your own skin or something every time I get too close, and I know I don’t smell and I don’t have any diseases,” he snaps, “besides the obvious, anyway. Are you going to throw me out? Are you, hell, I don’t know, are you sick of me? I’m sorry I’m boring and weird and un-fun, I just-”
“Jesus Christ, Remus, what is wrong in your head? I haven’t done anything!”
“You! You are what is wrong in my head,” Remus half-yells, flapping his arms about like an enormous bird. “I don’t know what’s happened and you’re acting like a berk and I’m tired of it.”
“Tired of what? Being there every time I turn around? Sorry, Remus, you’re fucking stuck with me! Unless you’d like to leave.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Oh my God, Remus no, this is so-I’m bloody tired of you seeing things that aren’t there,” he bites out, miserable, already, deep in the pit of his stomach. “Not everything is a slight against your superior sensibilities, believe it or not.”
Remus’ face crumples a little, like Sirius has just pulled the plug out of him, but then he’s glaring again, pulled back into the dark space of his bedroom where he pauses long enough to grind out a terse, stuffy-sounding “Right, then,” followed by something very close to “arsehole,” and creaks the door on its hinges until it sits open, just a sliver, the way he’s always kept it.
Sirius, unsure whether he’d rather slam his own door or cry in the hallway or, for the first time, take what he thinks might be Remus’ invitation, paces around his bed for a moment before shutting his door completely and pulling the cool quilt around his shoulders, heartsore and restless in his bones. At Hogwarts, he’d have writhed around theatrically for a bit under the blankets and then gone, penitent, to Remus’ bed, where they’d curl up and talk and share potato crisps and wake up all bedraggled, tangled and together with the morning.
He wonders if that’s why Remus leaves his door open every night. He wonders if it isn’t.
It’s easier when you’re young, he thinks, and no one’s going to look at you like you’ve got a few noodles loose for sleeping in your friend’s bed. But then, all of a sudden, the world churns forward on its tracks, and you’re churned with it: School’s over, you’ve turned nineteen-you’re an adult-and you’re supposed to know what to do with these things. You’re supposed to know your own blood. You’re not supposed to stumble around, half-blind, while your brain turns to marshmallow fluff and leaks out your ears.
Maybe that’s just part of it. Lying in the dark with the cold while your alarm clock tick-tick-ticks and the old fear creeps into your belly, wanting nothing more than to crawl into someone else’s bed for the solidity of their heartbeat to sink down into, and hoping, hoping this is worth all the sleep you’ve lost for it.
-
“McKinnon,” he sputters, clambering out of the fireplace as gracefully as he can with soot in his mouth and what is likely a spider in a very delicate place, “I need to talk to you for a minute.”
Marlene, still in her shoes with her hair falling from its low chignon, sits up from Dorcas’ lap and frowns-loudly. “I’m going to glue broken glass to the chimney if you don’t start announcing yourself,” she grinds out. “What the hell do you want? I’ve only just got home and I thought you were learning to use the front door, anyway.”
“Where’s Remus?” asks Dorcas, peering behind him into the grate.
Sirius waves his hand and thus both questions away from the important issue at hand: himself. “He’s not off till six and I didn’t take the tube, so I couldn’t use the door,” he says, and leaves out that the reason he didn’t take the tube is because he’s a little squirmy about doing it on his own and Remus won’t take it with him until he learns to stop laughing every time the tube-voice says “Cockfosters,” which is more difficult than he’d anticipated. “I’ve got a question.”
“So ask it.”
A deep breath; the air in the flat is all over cinnamon and spice and it makes him itch for Christmas. “How did you know?”
Marlene blinks. “How’d I know what, that you’re an enormous tosspot?” she asks, and then her eyes flash dagger-sharp, blue as cut glass in the last of the gritty London light. “You mean, how’d I know I’m a dyke.”
“Yes,” he says, mouth dry, “that.”
Her lips twist up on one side, just as Dorcas lets out a soft, knowing half-laugh. “For the record, I always knew this was coming,” says Marlene. “Ever since your fifth year, when you-”
“WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THAT,” he shouts, loud enough to halt the flush in his face.
“Maybe you don’t,” she leers, and then settles back against the sofa, one arm around Dorcas’ shoulders and her mouth easing into something thoughtful, patient. “It’s-Merlin, I’m hardly an expert,” she says. “Isn’t this a conversation you really ought to be having with Lupin?”
He startles. Twice. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Christ, nothing, you titchy little worm, only that-”
It starts in the eyebrows: A slow lifting of the arch that spreads downward to the eyes, brightening and widening at the same time the mouth falls open in a silent exclamation, heralding your imminent doom, or, failing that, your utter and irreversible humiliation, coinciding with the clenching of your entire digestive system. A-ha, Sirius Black, it says, I have found you out!
“Oh,” says Dorcas, brown eyes pinning him there, helpless, as he considers climbing up the chimney with his bare hands. Her earrings sway like an accusation when she tilts her head.
“Oh,” echoes Marlene, far more maliciously. “O-ho! I see what this is about, Black.”
“No you don’t,” he mutters, searching discreetly for the Floo powder, with no luck.
“But I do,” she snorts, merciless. “You want to nail Remus Lupin like a loose floorboard.”
Sirius says something, something he means to be I most certainly do not! or Who the hell is Remus Lupin? or, mostly, How dare you insinuate that I would be so rough with him, but what comes out is, “Eerrrrrggmph.”
All things considered, it’s a strangely accurate summation of his current thoughts.
“Look,” says Dorcas, watching him with sympathy and amusement quirked on her lips, “it’s probably best if you get that much out, and if you can’t tell him, tell us. You’ll feel better.”
Well.
He takes a breath, stares at the garland of stars hung above the sofa, and says, “I want to nail Remus like a loose floorboard and I spend half the night wanting to bury my face in his stupid hair so much it makes me want to dive off the fucking roof and I have for a long time now.” An exhale, an inhale. “But it’s not like it’s only him, I mean, it’s-he’s not the only one I’ve-I don’t fucking know anything,” he finishes, dragging his hand uselessly through his hair.
“You know you’re bent and that’s at least a start,” says Dorcas, nodding. “You don’t have to know everything immediately. I didn’t. She didn’t.”
“And I still didn’t know, even after a few trips behind the broomshed.” Marlene grins, and Dorcas pulls her closer by the hand draped across her back until Marlene kisses her, leaving a violently pink lipstick-stain on her mouth. “But we both figured it out. And knocked our heads together along the way.”
“We did a lot of knocking,” Dorcas agrees, stealing a drink of Marlene’s tea, squeezing her knee. This, Sirius thinks, is what he wants-this tight intimacy, this funny patchwork thing with another person. It occurs to him that he might have it already, minus the kissing, and the thought makes something warm and jangly bubble up inside him, pulsing all the way to his toes. “Sirius-you’re just fine,” Dorcas tells him. “The important thing is that you ask yourself questions, and you’re happy with your own answers.”
Marlene stands, dusting off her skirt and steering him back towards the fireplace with a hand on his shoulder; strangely gentle, for the thunderous bundle of lungs and legs that is Marlene McKinnon. “Black, if I know you, and God knows I do, you’re here because you’ve made a colossal arse of yourself and trod upon Lupin’s dainty heart,” she says, wrinkling her nose, “or else he’s doing that thing where he’s being a bit of a stuffy tit again. Either way, I think you really need to be honest with him instead of shutting him out, which is no doubt why you are here tracking soot on our carpeting at this very moment.”
“And then what? ‘By the way Remus, I’d really love to be naked with you, like, right now?’’” It’s just not on to say things like that to your friends. Bad enough to think them, bad enough to want them, guiltily, miserably; actually saying it results in nothing less than cataclysm and heartbreak 99.99% of the time. They’ve done studies. Sirius just can’t bother to cite them.
“Unless I’m mistaken, that’d knock him flat on his back,” says Dorcas. “And I’m not.”
Sirius chokes a little; Marlene squeezes him by the cheeks with one hand and turns his head back to her, grabbing a handful of powder from a chipped vase on the mantel with the other, her lips cutting a smile so soft across her face it would look unnatural were it not for the knifepoint of an incisor peering over her bottom lip. “Go talk to him. You’ll be surprised how much better it makes you feel.”
“If you’re wrong, I’m coming back and I want you to flush me down the toilet.”
“I’ll make sure it’s clean for you,” she says. “Now-out. Grovel. Cry. Get shagged. Bring him round for dinner. In the meantime, we’ll be here if you need anything.”
He supposes, stepping into the flames, it’s a little easier to move once you’ve uncorked yourself a bit and let some of your stuffing out; supposes, until he hears “Use protection!” bellowed after him just as the soot gets in his eyes, and-oh, there goes his stomach again, dropping down to his ankles somewhere around Rainham.
-
Long after dinner, long after he’s washed the soot from his hair and expertly avoided Remus’ eyes for the better part of the evening, Sirius sits down at the kitchen table just before midnight and throws himself a one-man pity-party with a jar of peanut butter and a box of gingerbread men, taking care not to use the same spoon twice lest Remus find out-and he always finds out. The whole thing, he thinks, would be a lot easier if he were more like Marlene and he could just say it the way she would: Remus, I’m bent backwards and I fancy you so much it’s a little disgusting. There it is. Bat’s in your hand now; do what you will with it.
A lot of things would be easier if he were more like Marlene, an ideal he’s aspired to occasionally with few actual results, possibly due to the lack of solid steel ovaries.
“I really hope you haven’t used that spoon more than once.”
Remus, sleepy-sweet and soft at the mouth in his flannel pyjamas and his fuzziest socks, smiles at him and pulls a mug from the cupboard, heating the water with the very tips of his fingers. “I’m using every bit of self-restraint in my body,” says Sirius. “And it’s fucking miraculous because bodies don’t have self-restraint, it’s a myth sold to the meek and cautious by our capitalist overlords to keep us from doing what we really want to do.”
“And I’m very proud of you, raging against the dying of the light as you are,” says Remus, stirring his cocoa as he sits. “Must be a bad one.”
“Why?”
“Because you only eat them head-first when you’re really upset,” he says, raising his eyebrows over his mug.
“I’m sorry,” says Sirius, decapitating one more. “I am. I don’t mean to-look, I’m pond scum, I’m crust around the milk carton. It’s not you, Remus.”
“Padfoot-please. You can tell me,” says Remus, both hands clutching his cocoa, eyes brighter than Sirius can ever remember seeing them. He thinks, wildly, that there’s probably nothing he could do that would ever make Remus hate him; he can snap the spines on all the books in the house, eat too much Christmas pudding and be sick on the floor, accidentally let the ex-aristocrat boil over once in a while, and Remus will still like him anyway. He could kill a man and Remus would probably offer to figure out the exact depth and length of the hole they’d need to hide the body and show him how to get the stains out of his clothes.
There’s nothing, truly nothing, that will disrupt this orbit, this cyclical rhythm they’ve stepped into together, right in time with their hearts.
“Moony, am I a prick?” he asks.
Remus blinks and sets his mug down, then picks it up again to hide his smirk at the bottom. “By what definition?”
“Yours.”
“No,” he says, and when he lowers his hands, Sirius can see the smile blooming on his lips, warm and easy and just for him. “Honestly, if that’s what you’ve been all twitchy and red in the face about, you could’ve just said you were growing a new feeling. I can still call you an immature tosser if you want and we’ll-”
“I’m bent,” says Sirius.
Sometimes, Remus’ face does this funny floppy thing where it can’t decide whether it wants to be shocked or thrilled or mystified, and so it settles for fast-forwarding through twenty different emotions until falling, shell-shocked, back into place. Sirius loves it.
“You know, you-you really could have talked to me about that instead of acting like a, a complete-”
“A prick?” he offers though the gingerbread carnage.
“No! Just-” Remus waves a hand about and takes a fortifying sip of cocoa. “I wish you’d said something,” he says. “I mean. I do have some idea what it’s like.”
“And when have you ever done anything about it? Hmm?” Sirius shoves one last cookie into his mouth and steals some of Remus’ cocoa. It always tastes better out of his mug. “Besides, I don’t-Christ, this is stupid, I don’t even know what I am.”
“Neither does anyone else, at first,” says Remus, reaching for his mug. “You know, I wondered. After fifth year, when you-”
“STOP-”
“When you snogged Frank Longbottom after Alice broke it off with him, because, oh yes, ‘It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do,’” Remus finishes, utterly relentless, something wicked howling in his eyes. “You’re not-I mean, you’re not having some crisis, are you? Is that what Purebloods do?”
“Not like that.” Sirius, still glaring, flicks a few crumbs at Remus and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I took Muggle Studies, I know all about their sexual insecurity and they’re a sad, sad lot with so much to answer for, Moony, I mean, crew cuts and khaki trousers and weekend golf, whatever that is. It’s just-I don’t, God, I don’t know, y’know, if I’m-I’ve never even,” he makes a vague, fluttery gesture with his hands that Remus apparently understands, cocking his head in a way that makes Sirius want to kiss his big stupid nose.
“You don’t know whether you like boys more or girls. Or both, equally.”
“That. That, exactly,” he says, running a hand through his hair as his brain finishes with, I also spend most of the day wanting to put my mouth on your mouth, can you explain that one, too. “How did you know? Because let’s not pretend you’re out there having it off with anyone, ever, at all.”
“That’s really not all it’s about,” says Remus, choking a little and turning a really nice shade of strawberry. “I mean, yes, that’s important, but that’s not all there is, not at all. And you don’t have to-to go out and shag anyone to know.”
“So-?”
“So,” he continues, looking away, “I know I like both, but I like boys more. I didn’t know that immediately, Sirius. And there are times when I still wonder.”
“Maybe I’m gay.”
“Are you attracted to women, Sirius?”
This has got to be the most unbelievable conversation he’s ever had in his life, and yet, here he is, Remus Lupin looking at him, asking, in all earnestness, how much he likes to snog women. He thinks about Mary Macdonald, thinks about her laugh, the way she moved in his hands and his mouth; how happy it made him, to see her smile, to know he plucked it out of her. “Yeah. I am.”
“Then I don’t think you’re gay.”
“Bisexual,” he says, feeling the word out under his tongue. It’s like a new robe: fresh and crisp and a little starchy in its long vowels, maybe a little too big. He’s not sure it fits. “I don’t know. It’s been-what, at least three years now, shouldn’t I know?”
“You don’t have to have an answer right now,” says Remus, wiping at Sirius’ chin where he’s left crumbs. “And if you’re never comfortable giving it a name, that’s your business. I just don’t want you to think there’s something wrong with being confused or not knowing right away, because-I mean, maybe some people do know when they’re really young, or really quickly, but I just don’t think that’s how it works for most of us.”
At the corner of his mouth, sloping all the way down towards his chin, he can still feel Remus’ fingers, warm and quill-calloused like ghosts his skin wants to remember. “Is that how it was with you?”
Remus nods. “I never had some sort of, I don’t know, epiphany, or whatever. It was a while before I set myself straight-don’t laugh, that’s a bad joke-and it was a while after that before I knew I had a definite preference. It’s like-you know it’s a part of you, it’s there just sort of twinging in you all the time, but you’re never going to know what it is or how to let it spark if you don’t take it out and look at it and learn yourself.”
He watches Remus, his long fingers twined through the handle of his mug, his profile in sharp relief against the coolness of the kitchen shadows and a few frizzy hairs sticking out from the rest, sharpened to gold in the hush of the night. He’s lovely, Sirius thinks, his great honking nose, his mouth pressed into the shape of fond amusement, every scar split into his skin and every daft thing he’s ever said; all of him, all of him.
“For what it’s worth, I’m shocked you haven’t shagged your way through the library,” says Sirius, watching him flush, grinning. “What research are you really working on for Dumbledore, eh? Eh? You’re probably the subject of so many fantasies I don’t know how those ears haven’t burned right off your head.”
“God, no,” he sputters, pushing his chair in. “I’m not. I wouldn’t even know what to do.”
“People like you, Moony. The librarians probably want to take you home and stuff you-”
“Oh my God-”
“Full of cheesecake, what the hell did you think I was going to say?” he asks, swallowing one last cookie and tipping his chair back on its hind legs. “Least we know where your mind is. Dirty, dirty werewolf.”
“I hate you,” says Remus, entirely without rancor, “and anyway, I’ve read things. So.” He shrugs, rinses his cup out, and then turns to Sirius, teetering with expert danger in his chair, and says, “Come to bed, Pads.”
Something in Sirius’ head snaps; he can actually hear it. “Uh?”
“Bed,” says Remus, painting on his most exasperated face. “You’ve got work tomorrow and you know I can’t get anything done if I’m worried about you functioning on no sleep.”
“You do get all flappy and consumptive,” says Sirius, standing and feeling loose in his bones, like a knot unraveled, like he could see by the light of his own skin. “Moony-thanks.”
Remus smiles, moon-bright, and turns out the kitchen light.
At his door, exactly opposite Remus’ door, he hesitates, cold suddenly and wanting, wanting so many things he doesn’t know how to ask for when Remus turns to him and sighs. “Would you quit being a plonker and get in here.”
Sirius does, and Remus, for the first time since they moved into their drafty house and stuffed it to the seams with themselves, shuts the door.
He’s not had much cause to be in Remus’ room before, but now that he is, Sirius finds himself looking around at the tottering piles of books that won’t fit on the shelves and the camera and the rumpled parchment on the desk, the Muggle sticky notes he’s been hiding from Sirius, and decides he likes it better in here: the chaotic clamor of wet ink and socks sticking out of drawers, the scarves wrapped over the chair, the loamy-warm smell of the cloves he keeps in an empty wine bottle on his dresser. Between the curtains, he can see the snow falling in the honeyed flicker of Hogsmeade’s streetlights, washing everything out; the neighbors have already decorated the enormous spruce in their front yard, all gold and green. He would stay here, he thinks. He would stay here.
“Let’s get a tree this weekend,” he says. “We can make macaroni Christmas art for the front door and teach these heathens the real meaning of Christmas: ugly ornaments and gorging yourself on store-bought biscuits.”
“I’ll spike the eggnog,” says Remus, pulling the quilt back and reaching over to set the alarm. He doesn’t take his socks off. “Come to bed.”
It’s smaller than a Hogwarts four-poster, cotton-warm and fleecy, and Sirius is certain to his core that nothing in the world has ever been better. The sheets are thick, pilled-up blue flannel, smelling of laundry soap and bright, familiar things, Moony-things, all earthy and sun-soft. Across from him, Remus turns on his side and smiles, tugging the quilt closer around them. In all his life, in all his longing, Sirius has never wanted to kiss anyone more.
“Goodnight,” says Remus. He still puts one arm under his pillow, just like he used to. “I’ll make lunch if you want to come home for break tomorrow. I’m off.”
“You’re such a housewife,” he says. Beneath the quilt and the fluffy blanket Remus has put under it, Sirius’ knees touch Remus’ knees. “You know, this is w-”
Remus’ hand clamps over his mouth before he can get it out, cold fingers pressing into his cheek. Sirius shuts up. “This isn’t weird. If you think it’s weird, it’s probably because your mother said so once when you were seven and now it’s coming out to keep me awake twelve years later,” he says. “You’re all right, Sirius. All of you.”
He nods, pulls Remus’ hand down by the wrist, and, after a small sliver of hesitation, wraps it in his own, playing with his fingers. “I know what you want,” he says, smirking crookedly. “You want me to be your personal space heater. It’s a good thing for you I come cheap, apple stuffing.”
“Oh no,” Remus drawls lazily, “he’s seen through my ruse! How long before he realizes I only keep him around for decoration and sometimes dinner.”
“Bastard,” he says. “But it is a little weird-no, don’t give me that look. It is. What the hell are you going to do when I’m seventy years old and climbing into your bed, I’d like to know.”
“Let you in,” says Remus, eyes wide and no hesitation at all, as if it’s a fact like iron in the blood, like the grace of their fingers, intertwined. As if it’s the only answer there’s ever been.
Late, late in the blue lull of the night, as the minutes dissolve and Sirius drifts with them, he watches Remus in the dark, the rhythmic rise-and-fall of his chest, his eyelashes making long shadows on his cheeks, and he thinks this is all he wants: the two of them cloistered together on this bed, all the spaces they’ve filled between them. Remus’ hand is still, held under his and warmed by his skin when he bends his head and kisses his knuckles, so soft it might have been a dream but for the quickening of Remus’ heart against his fingers, the one part of him he could never train to quiet, measured obedience.
Touch is truth, language without tongues, confession without speech. There are words for the thrill of Sirius’ heartbeat thrumming in answer to Remus’, all of them dark, lavish, beautiful things clamoring for his mouth to give them shape and form, but for now, he lets his fingers say it, lets his blood speak them here where nothing else can, in the solid honesty of their bodies.
-
Dragging himself out of Remus’ bed to be sucked into the cold vortex of the morning, and therefore work, is the greatest misery he’s ever known in his young and occasionally explosive life; it’s so cold, in fact, that it’s probably going to kill him, which prompts Remus to lay an indulgent hand on his forehead and inform him that, no, he’s not actually dying and he should probably get to work if he doesn’t want to hear Moody twitch about the time it takes to hex some very important bits into oblivion while you’re whining about your frozen toes. He’s heard it at least six times before, concluding, always, with “If you’re not early, you’re late,” which Sirius just can’t reconcile with his whole outlook on life.
By the time he Apparates into Hogsmeade for lunch, he’s four times as miserable as he was when he left. His boots are soaked through, they’ve failed to make an arrest, James ate the last two muffins, Moody twitched at him anyway, and he can’t think a single bloody thing that doesn’t run right back to Remus Lupin like some endless one-track loop. Not that he minds that last one so much; Remus is what usually gets him through the nine o’clock tragedies, and, failing that, his bony ankles sticking out from underneath his pyjama bottoms every night will do it.
“I’m dying,” he calls from the entryway, fighting his way out of his coat and scarf and soggy boots. “Monday has squeezed me like a Christmas orange, I told you I-oh, you made cheese toasties.”
“I put tomatoes in yours,” says Remus. He’s wearing the obnoxious seasonal socks Sirius bought him last year; they make him look very festive. “How is it out there? Have any of your organs shut down yet?”
“Not yet but they’re trying, Moony, my liver will explode by the end of the day. Take good care of the motorbike for me,” he says, falling into the chair and shoving as much sandwich as he can fit into his mouth all at once. “Why are you drinking cider? Cider doesn’t go with cheese toasties. That’s just vulgar.”
“Cider goes with everything,” says Remus, “I’ll drink it while I’m changing the oil in your motorbike, or whatever. It’ll bring back painful memories, but I’ll remember your last moments with fondness, tomato skin hanging out of your mouth and all. No, really-close it. Close your damn mouth.”
“Think of me when you’re greasing those big thick cables,” he grins. “Just keep James away from my funeral, he’ll eat all the canapés and I know how you like them.”
“So selfless, even on your deathbed.”
“I’m only thinking of your stomach,” he says, and Remus smiles at him.
They eat quietly for a few minutes, Sirius thinking that his imminent undeath might provide a good excuse to tell Remus a few other things, when Remus catches him staring, mid-chew, and he has to plead with his face not to turn an unattractive puce; focusing on the grey sludge outside helps a little. He can feel Remus watching him, imagines him wondering, uncertainly, what he’s thinking.
Sometimes, usually in the crush of pale, brittle moments like these, Sirius thinks that maybe he knows, that maybe he’s always known. Remus Lupin is the least oblivious person he’s ever known in his life, fluent in the shift of shadows and the yearning of empty hands, reading always the things people grow in their margins like spilled ink; Sirius knows Remus can see his stained fingers, dripping a loud, incriminating red. But Remus is also an accomplished liar, and never more than where it concerns himself: If Sirius acted like this around anyone else, Remus would know exactly what to call it; when Sirius acts like this around him, Remus probably thinks he’s accidentally gotten treacle in bad places again.
He’s never been able to lie to his friends, though. He gets all shifty in the eyes and sad in the shoulders.
“So,” Remus says finally, “how’s being bent?”
“It’s all right. It’s-still a little confusing,” he says. “My head feels better, though.”
“It’s only temporary, you know.”
“Is it?”
“Well-that’s what my mum used to say. About the change,” says Remus, cocking his head. It’s terribly sweet. “It’s really not, but it works better if you apply it to how confused you are over which bits you like better.”
“Your mum is a beautiful woman,” he says, finishing off his pumpkin juice. “When are you going home this year? I’ll buy her something nice and spicy. You, too, if you’re a good boy.”
Remus pulls his jumper down over his hands, running his thumb over the chip in his mug. “Actually, I talked to her this morning,” he says. “I mean, she’ll just be going to her sister’s anyway, and you know how I can’t deal with the cats, or the cabbage, so-I’m going to stay here this year,” he finishes, looking up with summer in his eyes, warmer than a bit of August at the first of December.
Something bright shocks through Sirius, starting in his belly and spreading like a stain down to his toes, reaches into his throat and steals the breath right out of his lungs. “Moony! I’m getting you for Christmas. We’ve never had Christmas together. Not even once.”
“I know,” says Remus, smiling brightly. “D’you suppose we should send joint Christmas cards?”
“We should send joint proclamations.” Sirius takes their plates to the sink and waves them through the motions of a wandless wash. “This is momentous.”
“It’s an Occasion,” Remus agrees. Sirius hears the capital letter. “Here, give me those-we can eat a whole pie and no one’s going to care.”
“You act like I haven’t been doing that for the last three years.”
“But now you’ll have to share,” says Remus. “We can be sick on pie together, it’ll be like a trust exercise where we take turns with the toilet.”
By his own estimation, Sirius has eaten half his weight in Christmas pies since he left home, between Hogwarts and James’ mum and the Hogsmeade bakery; on his own, always, because for as much as he loves the Potters, he’s never felt right stomping around the place at Christmas the way he used to do over the summer, regardless of James’ protests. He doesn’t remember ever having a proper Christmas dinner with someone who wasn’t a professor or a family member sneering at him for using the wrong fork and refusing to let him put whipped cream on things while they droned about the Ministry and which wing of the house needed renovating this year.
And here Remus is, offering to get sick on pie with him. He feels like he might burst.
“I’m going to roast you a whole turkey,” he decides. “That’s fucking difficult, but that’s just how devoted I am to what’s really important in life.”
“Our gluttony.”
“Exactly,” he says. “I’ll make you shepherd’s pie with leftovers.”
Remus makes a noise, something halfway between a moan and a squeak that really shouldn’t be attractive coming from anyone, but here Sirius is, mouth dry, heart lurching in his chest. “God, that’s the best thing you’ve ever said to me,” he murmurs. And then, “Who knows, maybe you’ll find a boy to snog at New Year’s.”
Sirius swallows and goes quiet at once, still as an effigy. “I-why would you say that?”
“Well, why not? I thought you wanted to.”
“Yeah, but-it’s just,” he waves his hand, indicative of approximately nothing. “I’ve never. You know. What if I’m bad at it?”
“But Frank-”
“Remus, I will kill you.”
“Okay, fine. Prongs,” he says, lifting both accusing eyebrows. “I know you’ve kissed James, I’ve seen you do it.”
“That’s different!”
“How? Because he had his trousers on and Frank didn’t?”
“No, you absolute prick, it’s just-it’s different.”
“Have you got any idea how much sense that doesn’t make?”
“No, because it makes perfect sense,” he says, very slowly, waiting for his words to sink into Remus’ ears. “It was never like that-all right, maybe once or twice-but it was mostly, y’know, just because. For practice.”
This, he realizes as Remus chokes, sputters, and starts laughing so hard he grabs the kitchen counter, is an enormous mistake he is never going to be allowed to forget. Years from now, if he really is climbing into Remus’ bed at seventy on his sleepless midnights, he’ll startle sometimes, half-asleep, to hear Remus gasping breathlessly just the same as he is right now, “Practice! Oh my God, for practice!”
“Fuck you, Lupin. I’ll have you know I’ve never had a single complaint.”
“Oh, Padfoot, James wouldn’t know any better,” says Remus, all vengeful glee, laughing even harder when Sirius knocks his shoulder into his and sends him stumbling sideways.
“You know what I mean, you beast.” He glares halfheartedly at Remus, who is still having small, extremely convulsive fits at the sink. “I’ve never kissed another man, you know, seriously. I’ve never meant it. Just James. Fine-and Frank.”
“That doesn’t matter,” says Remus, quieting, finding his eyes and holding them until Sirius looks away.
“I know,” he says, “I’m just-I’m not sure how to go about the whole, the logistics, and I’m a little-nervous. It’s weird. Um.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, feeling too big and too heavy for his own skin, out of tune, like he’s moving through something orchestrated that just looks awkward and painful. “I do want to.”
Something about the shapes they make by the sink, he thinks. Something about the way their voices thread together in this house, because Remus is very close, his hand fumbling for Sirius’ hand; when he leans over and kisses him, Sirius can smell him, thick-knit jumper and Ivory soap, apple cider on his lips. He opens his eyes.
“First one out of the way, then,” Remus whispers, turning his head towards the window. Sirius can see the pulse beating in the thin skin of his neck.
He opens his mouth and closes it, groping blindly for a single word and finding none. Eventually, his brain slotting back into place slightly, the world slamming into focus, he says, “You kissed me.”
“I did.” Remus is looking wildly around the room, maybe hoping if he looks anywhere but Sirius all the awkward static crackling between them will evaporate and they’ll just step back into twelve seconds ago. “So. Now you know. What it’s like, I mean, in the event that-that you need to,” he mutters. “I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m, Christ, I’m sorry.”
“Please do that again,” he says.
“I-what?”
“Please kiss me,” says Sirius, trying very hard to hold all his pieces together at once.
Remus kisses him with the softness of uncertain things, his lips slightly chapped when they move against Sirius’, apple-sweet, honey-slow; their noses brush together when he tilts his head, Remus’ slight stubble scratching at his chin. It’s ticklish. It’s warm. It’s absolutely bloody amazing.
It’s also different from kissing a girl, in a way he definitely likes.
When Remus pulls away this time, Sirius catches him by the hips, his eyes on Remus’ eyes, his breathing conflating with Remus’ breathing, and the moment stretches out between them: silent and heavy here with all the things they’re not saying, pulled around them tightrope-taut until Sirius snaps it, wrenching them off their unfailing axis and into the bread cupboard, kissing Remus so hard the oak doors rattle and their teeth clack together. He pulls back a second time, a third, only for Remus to reach up and twine his fingers through his hair and slide their mouths together again, shivering and pressing up against Sirius when he flicks his tongue between his lips, heedless of the clock chiming on the mantel, heedless of any time but their own.
“Is this what you did with James,” he gasps, taking Sirius’ head between his palms, which are hot and slightly damp.
“Not even a little,” he answers. Remus’ throat bobs when he swallows, and his eyes, God, his eyes are brighter than Sirius can ever remember seeing them, shot through with gold and so beautifully, breathtakingly young.
“Good,” says Remus, and tugs him down again.
Deep in the rational part of his brain, in the single neuron that’s still functioning, he thinks he likes this better than kissing girls; it’s harder and softer at the same time, and easier, somehow, to know how to be both at once with another boy’s narrow hips and chest smashed into his own. Remus makes a small, pleased sound in the back of his throat and pulls away, running his hands wildly up Sirius’ biceps to his shoulders, making him lean even closer, not a fragment of space between them.
“You’re going to be late,” says Remus, even as he kisses along Sirius’ jaw, behind his ear.
“I know,” he whispers. He’s hard and fairly sure Remus is too and they’re both honor-bound to pretend they’re not; the cold air will just have to resolve things for him, for now. “I’m confused, Moony.”
“Are you, now,” Remus murmurs, oh, right against his lips.
“I’m a mess.”
“Well.” Remus squeezes his shoulders and looks up slowly, his lips red against his flushed skin; Sirius runs his teeth along the silvery scar on his chin, older than all their time together. “Maybe I can un-confuse you, you know. When you get home.”
“Oh God,” he groans, right over Remus’ pulse, “I’m-I’ve got to get through a whole goddamn afternoon, do you have any idea-you’ve-I can’t even talk,” he stammers, weak in the knees. “Jesus Christ, Moony, warn me next time!”
“Warn you!” he laughs, a tiny bubble of hysteria breaking out of his throat and making the blood surge up in Sirius’ ears like a brilliant blue cloudburst. “I’ve done nothing but warn you for-for three years now, you great berk, I can’t believe-”
“I have to go,” he murmurs, kissing Remus again, again, again, and then again, dragging himself away from him like one enormous human bandage and letting his hands fall down Remus’ waist to his hips until he finally peels away for the last time, everything in him straining still for Remus-his hands, his August eyes. “I have to go and we’re going to-we’re going to do a lot of things when I get home,” he finishes, eloquently.
“Things,” says Remus, nodding as Sirius forces his feet to the door. “Yes. Things.”
“So don’t you fucking dare leave this house,” he growls, one hand on the door. Remus still hasn’t moved from the bread cupboard; he watches Sirius, unblinking, as he half-trips over his untied bootlaces and steps outside.
He stumbles across the front yard in a daze, pressing his fingers to his lips as he hurries down the slippery cobbles of the street and the shrill yellow winterlight tears open the December sky, everything so fierce and rich and alive; he feels as if something inside him has galvanized, solidified-his blood, the marrow in his bones, like he’s holding all his disjointed parts together for the first time. When Sirius Apparates, he thinks of Remus, his hands clutching his shoulders, his heart under Sirius’ mouth as they stumbled, together, into a new shape. How easy it was, to hold onto him. How hard it was, to let go.
Part 2