Elucidation Practice (Part 2/3) for the_realduck
Title: Elucidation Practice
Author: cevennes
Recipient: the_realduck
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Language, sex*
Word count: 21,000
Summary: Christmas, 1978. Remus, wrestling with the mighty problems of gift-giving on a budget, contemplates life, love, London in winter, and falling off the edge of the world with Sirius Black.
Notes: the_realduck, I loved your prompt so much I got a bit carried away with it. Hugely, horribly so, for which I apologize, profusely. Happy, happy holidays; I hope 2016 is full of everything bright and beautiful!
In the first week of December, when the daylight stretches itself thin and the stars come out in a frozen marble clamor like an opened vein-line, they buy a tree so big it nearly scrapes the ceiling when they crown it with Remus’s Transfigured star, which doesn’t tip it over in spite of all the Muggle lights and enchanted icicles hanging leaden from every branch; Remus’s comments about overcompensation are only met with crooked-mouthed retorts about it not being compensation if you can back it up with extremely ample evidence, which immediately makes Remus’s mouth go desert-dry while certain other parts of him take a very keen interest during his nightly shower. On the tenth, just a few days before the full moon when his joints begin to ache like memory and his mouth dreams of inhuman teeth to feed the churning vortex of his stomach, he gets a job: a letter he’d never expected to receive comes to accept his application to edit a new Arithmancy textbook, with half his pay in advance and a promise to take him on for regular contract work starting in January if it all goes well. His hands shake at that last bit.
Sirius insists on taking him out for a pint, which turns into three pints, which Remus insists on paying for with the thrilling new jangle of his own Galleons in his pockets. By the standards of most working adults it’s on the low end of desirable, but it’s enough to start putting something towards rent and groceries and not overdrawing his account when he wants a bottle of Talisker or the latest le Carré novel, and the faint whiff of self-sufficiency is enough to warm him to the soles of his feet with a bellyful of burgeoning hope all the way back from the pub.
“You’re practically glowing,” Sirius informs him as they chance the crossing in front of a bus, pulling in a drag of his cigarette while Remus watches him from beneath the coppery-curly fringe of his hair. Snow has begun to fall into the muzzy lemon glow of the streetlights, sparse white flakes that glitter in the gutters. “Adulthood’s done for you what takes most people a bottle of wine and a good shag. You’re not right.”
“Not even your library of insults to my love of crushing responsibility can dampen my mood.”
“Liar,” says Sirius, “you don’t handle responsibility any better than I do. Actually, you’re worse.”
This is true, as several bottles of Ogden’s Old under his bed and a comically overstuffed internal pocket full of stifled feelings and emotional dishonesty to be dealt with later can attest-later being some nebulous and unlikely time ranging anywhere from now to his death by aneurysm when said pocket finally explodes-but conceding as much would rather too neatly prove Sirius’s point. “The point is,” he says, feeling Sirius’s hip knock into his as they round the corner and briefly losing his train of thought at the rasp of their jeans, “the point is, it’s good for my skin and it paid for your drinks tonight, so really I think you came out just fine in the end.”
“I did,” says Sirius. He’s walking so close their wrists brush whenever Sirius takes a drag of his cigarette. “And it is, you know. Good for your skin. You wear the weight of employment the way some women wear pregnancy.”
“Thanks, I-well. I guess.”
“Jesus, it’s a compliment, you tosser. I was telling you you’re pretty.”
“I know, I’m just not sure it isn’t a slightly disturbing one.” A pause, with his cigarette halfway to his lips, with the blue velvet of the night between his teeth. “And I’m not.”
“What you are is a terrible judge of your own character and your own face, so you should probably just trust me on this one, Remus. When have I ever lied to you?”
“‘I’ll fly it slow, I swear,’” Remus answers in a fairly stunning rendition of Sirius’s dulcet untruths. “‘No, I don’t know where your green jumper is that I am definitely not sleeping in when the heat goes spotty in the dormitory.’ Or, ‘It’s not compensation if you’re not compensating for anything if you know what I mean,’ and-”
“Well it’s not,” says Sirius. The record shop down the street from their flat is just closing up, the last snow-hazy notes of Desolation Row spilling out onto the curb where they stand, waiting to cross. “I always liked this song,” Sirius murmurs around the stub of his cigarette. “When I was fourteen it was the most profound bunch of nonsense I’d ever heard. It makes me think of you.”
“Really?” Remus’s feet stutter on the stairs on the way up, something thrilled and secret coiling up like a rope between his lungs. “Why?”
“Same reasons I don’t know why it means so much, probably.”
“That’s almost poetic, Pads.”
“Don’t I know it. It’s a gift, young Lupin, which-speaking of. What d’you want for Christmas? You’ve been such a good boy this year.”
“I don’t know,” says Remus, which is a flagrant lie: what he really wants for Christmas, that deep bone-want that aches like the moon, is nothing more and nothing less than all the bite and brightness of Sirius Black, every sweetness and sorrow and all the cogs and stringy bits that make up the pattern of the person he loves. Or maybe just a kiss. “Matching socks.”
Sirius shakes his head in mingled amusement and disappointment, moving one of his childhood macaroni-and-popsicle-stick ornaments higher up on the tree, next to one of the glass bulbs Remus decorated with his mother when he was very young; both of them have a disturbing sort of Dadaist quality that clashes magnificently with everything else. “That ought to be disqualified on the grounds that it’s what you say every year and I haven’t gotten you a single pair of socks yet.”
“I like being warm in this harsh, unforgiving world.”
“Did you ever think of asking for something interesting for once? It’s what Jesus would want.”
“Did you ever think of not being such an arse and listening to what people tell you?”
“No, but I know a buttoned-up little berk who’s getting a lot of coal in his stocking this year,” says Sirius, going to the wireless and turning it to the Muggle station he’s rigged it up to bring in, catching the middle of a Wire song he can’t remember until it fades into Roadrunner. He picks up his camera from the coffee table and threads some new film through it, watching Sirius’s T-shirt ride up in the narrow scope of the lens when he straightens the tree, which is drooping very slightly under its burden; the shutter clicks before Remus even realizes what his overeager forefinger has done.
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” says Sirius. He throws himself onto the opposite end of the couch from Remus, the cushions squeaking slightly, as if flexing their jaws. “The photo-taking, I mean. Every time I turn around you’ve got it out like I’m a wildebeest on one of those nature programs you like.”
“Sorry. I just-I’ve got a lot of extra film.”
“And you want these precious, delicate memories preserved forever.”
“Every single unflattering angle,” says Remus, aiming one more at the Christmas tree, for measure. “Tis Christmastide, after all. And it’s our first, so technically-” oh, that sounds suspect, doesn’t it, “-I mean, it’s the first here and what-all, and-you know what I mean.”
Sirius raises an eyebrow, his lips twitching with amusement or fondness or maybe both, eyeing him with peculiar interest down the blade-smooth length of his nose. “We had last year too, even with the furry little problem in the middle of it, and me being a tragic disowned nobody and all. Which was one of the best Christmases of my life to date, so we’ve at least got a standard to keep up with this year.”
Last year, just a few months after his mother died and the moon fell dead on Christmas Day, they’d changed in the Shack together and gone back the next morning to the empty dormitory and leftover pudding, sleeping in Remus’s bed until late afternoon when the last dregs of sunlight turned the wide brim of the world to gold even when he closed his eyes. Grief was still gnawing at his bones then so that he hardly slept and still had to force himself to eat some days; he remembers waking slowly that afternoon with Sirius, feeling the press of longing in the places where their skin touched and finding in it an echo of love or maybe wholeness that he hadn’t known since he was small, decorating sugar cookies or eating ice cream in the village with his mother, or when she used to rub dittany onto the deeper wounds and sit up watching the telly with him on nights when his skin ached with the acid-heat of the moon biting through the thin curtains, his head held to her shoulder where she always smelled like vanilla and cold cream, lulled to sleep by the distant murmur of her heart. For the first time since she died Remus found that he could think about her again without the sadness opening him up and flaying him apart by the belly: there, with Sirius, with their dusk-colored skin and his knees still throbbing with the agony of unsharpening, Remus was happy.
He remembers, too, the shape of Sirius’s hand lying beside his on the bed like it is now on the couch, curled like a nautilus; he wonders if Sirius ever thinks of reaching over and taking his, seeing where they branch off from here. He wonders if he doesn’t.
“I miss school, you know?” says Sirius, and Remus swallows the memory back down into his belly. He watches Sirius drag a hand through the short ends of his hair, making it stand on end until it falls back into place. “I can’t fucking believe I’m actually saying that, but I do. And not just because it was nice to not have to cook or do my own laundry and clean the toilet, or become a cog in the meat-grinder of adulthood, with all the unsavory chewy bits-it’s just the routine of it, I guess, or maybe it was all the food, or just not having to worry, so probably it is overcompensation, a bit-all this.” The huge tree heavy with ornaments, the Muggle lights strung around the flat, the snow falling in the streetlights below the window, the seams of the living room bursting with all the ways they’ve piled themselves into the corners. “Hogwarts at Christmas was, it was like, everything that Christmas at home-or home in general-never was, with all the stupid rigidity and decorum of it all. I loved it.”
Hogwarts, he thinks, Hogwarts with its steady yearly rhythms and its wise, comforting stone that swallowed them all into a peace like belonging, the ancient walls that would whisper to him in dead tongues once he knew where to look. It’s that feeling, he supposes, that they’ve both always been trying to capture ineffably: the grass at the lake tickling their necks in May and the heartbeat of the earth murmuring against their backs like time immemorial, the gauzy stars from the ramparts of the Astronomy Tower, the secret nighttime laughter tucked away into fire-lit corridors and kindled into life with the science of their burgeoning blood, the cartography of becoming. Remus’s hand twitches at his side.
“I miss it too,” he says, thinking distantly about the roast they cooked together in the first week of September, when they were both thinking of trunks and trains and couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d missed an important appointment. “After a while, even when I was home, I was always thinking of getting back, or at least I was writing you lot constantly, because it just-it felt like home to me as much as home ever did. And it’s not like we’re one of those numpties who’s always going on like their life ended at Hogwarts, because that’s not it, but… I guess adulthood is an acquired taste.”
“Moony, we already do our own dishes and most of the time we even keep the living room clear of dirty socks. I think we’ve done enough for now.”
“We have to pace ourselves lest we become prune-y before the age of twenty-five.”
“See, you always know how to put things into perspective for me.”
“Still, though. This’ll probably be better than last year,” says Remus, biting his thumbnail when he notices Sirius looking at him sideways, only to find that there’s nothing left to bite. “No spontaneous werewolf transformations in the middle of the most monumental day of the year.”
“It was fun, Jesus, it was probably the best Christmas I’ve ever had, and that’s even without the pudding and the excessive drinking. You’d think you would’ve come to terms with our crushing, impenetrable adoration for you by now.”
“You’d think you would’ve, too,” mutters Remus, but Sirius scoffs and waves away Remus’s poke at his own hypocrisy.
“It was nice,” says Sirius, who is still looking at him sideways with a quietness in his eyes Remus can neither place nor meet. “We ate enough turkey to drop a rhino and slept until dinner, which is the ideal way to spend the day after Christmas.”
“I seem to remember that’s mostly what we did until second term started, except with more alcohol.”
“I’ve never seen you as pissed as you were at New Year’s,” laughs Sirius, a sound like winter light or hours passing by, and something shudders through him again, fluttering like moth-wings from his belly to his brain and making his fingers flex on the couch again with yearning as tangible and as constant as a heartbeat. Something is beginning to unravel in his chest, as if his heart has come untethered again at the sound of Sirius’s laughter through his widening smile, through the clamor of his own blood. “For the record, it was incredibly attractive-not that you’ll believe me-but you’re really the happiest drunk I know. Your mouth goes all wobbly and your eyes get enormous when you laugh or when someone asks you to explain Eliot, which no one ever does but you do anyway, and I’ve always liked it when you lecture me on bad metaphors.”
“Just because you can’t appreciate the sense of creeping mortality-”
“-or all the modern, claustrophobic decay, I know, I know. I just like hearing you laugh when I ask about the flaccid sexual inadequacy of Mr. Prufrock.”
Remus chokes on the mangled sentence that leaps to his mouth, or maybe it’s his heart, and says, “I’m amazed you remember that, considering you weren’t exactly a paragon of sobriety at the time.”
“I remember,” says Sirius. “You have my favorite laugh.”
His knuckles murmur against Remus’s, softly, when he shifts on the couch.
In the end, he’s not sure what makes him do it. Senses loosened by alcohol, or the rapid bird-wing hammering of his heart against his ribs finally beating love-me love-me love-me loud enough to drown out the scared, secretive thing beneath it, everything in him yearning for Sirius like an inescapable horizontal gravity when he reaches over and traces his fingers across the lines in Sirius’s palm to his fingertips, feeling him curl his fingers and catch Remus’s in his own, pressing them together before letting him go again. Remus strokes his fingers down the blue thrum of vein-lines in Sirius’s wrist to find the electric skip of his pulse running red against his own until their hands come together again, tendons and scars and their curious symmetry sliding together with an irresistible sort of compulsion: his fingers and Sirius’s fingers and these new shapes they make in the geometry of desire.
“No one can make me laugh like you do,” says Remus, though it comes out in a whisper, half-reverent, half-shellshocked. Sirius’s thumb is tracing the grooves of his palm, his nail in the life line.
“Half the stupid shit I do is just to make you laugh.” His fingers twine through Remus’s again and squeeze; oh, he’s nervous. “Fuck, Remus-am I,” he starts, but when Remus looks up at him, the words seem to bleed out in the air between them. They laugh quietly, and Remus watches the shift of Sirius’s face, the narrow strength of his angles and curves and the hair he finger-combs every morning, the sandpaper of his stubble, the stormglass-grey of his eyes-and his stillness, the sudden quiet of his hands where Remus can feel them strung tight with potential, ready to spark. He thinks: There will never be another moment like this. He thinks: I have wanted this as much as I have ever wanted anything that matters.
So, he leans forward through the fear of himself and the fear of ruining everything and the fear of losing what he loves the most, and kisses Sirius on their cramped, crooked couch.
Over the years, Remus has entertained countless fantasies about their first kiss, some of them sweet, watercolor-innocent, and some of a nature that would make a manticore blush and turn its beastly head: in the prefects’ baths, over the kitchen sink, on the floor of the Shack, behind a pub in Shoreditch, under the pier at Brighton. He never imagined it would be this short-both of them leaning in at the same time so their noses knock together, a compelling slide of lips and teeth and laughter Remus wants to swallow down-but it’s strangely better than anything his frantic, fragmented mind could have dreamed up; when they pull apart, Sirius is still smiling at him with a wonder Remus has never seen before, a hand fisted in the flannel near his neck.
“Are we drunk,” asks Remus, “or am I dreaming this again?”
“No,” whispers Sirius. His lips are so close.
“Oh.”
“Am I-is this-”
“All right?” Remus finishes, dreamily, the odd angle of their heads making the slide of his lips on Sirius’s jaw more compelling. “Yes. I mean-more than. Definitely.”
“You know, you might’ve said,” says Sirius, not far from breathless, his thumb moving over the hollow of Remus’s throat where his pulse runs, thrilled and febrile, beneath his moon-pale skin.
“How-I couldn’t,” he mutters, unable to look away from Sirius for the way his eyes are fixed on him as if he’s stumbled into something beautiful in the dark. “I completely fucking couldn’t. Couldn’t you?”
Sirius laughs, high and wild, the sound of it catching in Remus’s throat where he can feel it reverberating in his skin as if it’s his own. “No, I just-I couldn’t have,” he says. He picks their hands up from the couch where they’re still tangled up in each other and presses Remus’s knuckles against his mouth when he speaks, the murmur of his voice spreading in a flicker-flare up his arm. A Kraftwerk song Remus hates is on the radio, infused now with intermittent snowy static; it hardly even registers through the deafening sound of all the space between himself and Sirius on the couch. “It’s like, with James or Peter, I always know what to say or how to be, right? I never have to feel off-footed or, or worry about making everything weird and stepping all over the sacred foundations of us,” he says, lifting his head when Remus brushes his knuckles along his jaw, feeling the ticklish rasp of it, “and I fucking well never spend hours of my time wanking off to them. But with you-I don’t always know how to be around you, Remus. And I like that sometimes, really, the nerves make me happy and the wanking is fantastic exercise, but I think I like this better.”
“I think I agree,” Remus answers, “given that I’ve spent the better part of four years feeling like an overcooked tomato around you sometimes, and it’s nice, but I’d really like to kiss you instead.”
Sirius grins at him like sunrise, and everything shrinks away from the world but the brightness of his face and the feeling of his body curving against Sirius’s like easy arithmetic, his heart leaping against him, as if it’s finally found its way; as if it was only ever a matter of reaching across the finger-length distance for what was always waiting for him, or discovering that beneath the loneliness and the pain and the fear there was inside him an invulnerable love like a matchlight or a second heartbeat, undimmed by anyone or anything, not even by himself. He reaches for Sirius again, arms around his shoulders, and pulls him down with his long arms, stroking up and down the notches of his spine under his shirt, never letting go, never letting go.
More than any kissing Remus has ever done before, which is admittedly very little, there’s nothing rushed or searching about it: the shock of Sirius’s tongue pressing between his lips is more like an answer, the heavy slip of his palms up Remus’s sides and the thrill of their tongues curling together all unhurried until they begin pushing into each other with a starved eagerness, pressing at each other’s borders like they still can’t get close enough. The crenellation of teeth at his neck makes him gasp, so Sirius does it again, watching him with a thin slice of pupil through his eyelashes while Remus leans back and shows his throat; when they kiss again he tastes salt and menthols and old beer and a slight iron-burn that might be blood, Sirius’s or his own, and shifts underneath him, groaning at the jagged sweep of pleasure that jackknifes up his belly at the slide of their bodies. He does it again, again, feeling Sirius’s breath stutter, his spine curved in a crescendo, meeting Remus in electric tidal rhythm until he pulls back, his eyes like the glint of sun on January ice and his lips bitten-red, brushing a thumb over Remus’s lip.
“Is this the part,” he says, his heart beating staccato beneath Remus’s hand, “where I find out whether you’re that sort of boy?”
“Do you think I’m that sort of boy?” His voice very nearly cracks in the middle, his breathing going rougher still at the image that flares in his mind.
And then, Sirius’s thigh pressing up and rubbing between his legs in answer: Yes, yes, Remus is definitely that sort of boy. “I do think,” Sirius murmurs, whisky-rich, and Remus wants to reach for him again, wants to be held down, wants Sirius to finish him off here, now, but he wants more than that to make it last, to give everything of himself that he can, because he knows too well from all three of his previous sexual encounters-all of them regrettably with Caradoc Dearborn and all of them totaling a combined fifteen underwhelming minutes-where all the gasping and limb-tangling take you, far too quickly. “Come to bed,” says Sirius, and pulls Remus up from the couch.
They’re a natural disaster of hands and mouths and hips all the way to Sirius’s bedroom, clumsy pathfinders tearing ineffectually at clothes and shoving each other into walls, Remus’s fingers drumming up Sirius’s ribs like counting the bricks in Diagon Alley, 1-2-3, 3-2-1, taking altogether a very long time about getting anywhere. “Do you take all the boys to the inner sanctum,” Remus asks him, and Sirius laughs, undoing the last of Remus’s buttons and switching the lights on with a graceful twist of his hand; instinctively, Remus brings his hands up and folds his arms over his chest, gutted from his shoulders to his toes.
It’s not like they’ve never seen each other naked before, in the jagged pallor of dawn the morning after the full moon or, once or twice, at the bad end of a revealing charm gone wrong. But Remus still closes his fist and shuts off the lights, feeling suddenly too big for his own skin and too small for Sirius, who raises an eyebrow at him very loudly in the dark.
“Hard to see the Promised Land without the light, Moony,” he says, stepping closer until Remus can feel his chest expanding against his own. He runs his hands up Remus’s arms, makes him shiver. “I know what you look like naked.”
“This is different,” he says, feeling stupider by the second. He steps into Sirius again and angles his head up to kiss him where the liquid night-light of London below gets into his mouth, and it tastes right again, salt-slick and their skin peach-warm when Sirius pushes him onto the bed, his tongue grazing the whorls of Remus’s ear. Then he reaches over to his nightstand and whispers something Remus doesn’t catch to light the stub of a candle beside the bed, turning his skin sepia-soft and their shadows monstrous; Remus smiles against his lips.
“I bet you think that makes you look romantic,” he says. The smell of the air has changed, he thinks, or the feel of it: sharp, loamy, dusty-hot. Sirius’s hands delve into his collarbone, the spaces between his ribs, underneath his thighs, his mouth pressed to the basin of his belly where he can taste Remus’s laughter, tongue flicking into his navel and across his hipbones, making him moan, his body flowing with Sirius’s in a wave when he moves up his chest again, sucking budlike imprints onto the pale skin of his neck, the wiry, permissive tendons stretched tightrope-taut against his lips. He watches Sirius hover over him for a moment, heart beating and beating, feeling like this is the time to say something important and his mouth failing entirely to make that happen.
“For one thing, it does make me look romantic,” says Sirius, leaning down into the hallow-dip of his waist where his rib-rungs melt into the skin of his belly, his mouth sliding around the ring of serrated scars curving around his side in an imperfect impression of a wolf’s mouth, warped with age, almost like splinters beneath the skin. Sirius licks at each of them, his mouth on every tooth-mark and shattered-glass scar on his belly to his chest, the new pink ones and the old time-numb ones grown over with skin like new snow, groaning when his teeth tug gently at his nipple and then again when Sirius’s thigh brushes against his cock, making him hiss like a lit fuse. “And for another thing,” he growls into Remus’s belly, “you look fucking incredible naked, and you always have.”
Sirius hand skims up his thigh and then between his legs, his fingers wrapping around Remus’s cock as his mouth falls open, almost, almost silent. Remus, watching him, is struck for a moment at how much he looks like an allegory of something beautiful, and then Sirius lowers his head and slides his tongue along the length of Remus’s cock, which effectively shatters the rest of his sad, fractured mind into a thousand broken mosaic pieces rattling around in his head. His fingers thread through Sirius’s hair, holding his eyes and gasping for breath that doesn’t quite come when Sirius wraps his lips around Remus’s cock, and groans, which somehow makes him even harder; it’s like a spool of thread coiling tighter and tighter, an electric, knifeblade pleasure sweeping through him when Sirius pulls off in one slow, wet slide, flicking his tongue over the tip again almost lazily.
“I think,” Remus gasps, “I think you’ve already fucked my brains out, proverbially speaking and all, and we haven’t even, oh, hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”
“That good, am I?” Sirius, laughing against his thigh, sucks a new shape into the flushed skin there, the place where Remus, at fourteen, left a large, splintered scar from a twisted piece of metal on a brittle blue October night. “Maybe we should stop. I’d hate to do anything that interferes with your chronic wordiness, you know how I love all those vocalizations from the depths of Professor Lupin’s extremely attractive mind. Who knows what words you’ll be saying if we go any further?”
“I think,” says Remus, smiling at Sirius’s red lips and their shadows woven together by the candle-flame, “maybe you should demonstrate your point.”
“It’ll be an education, you know.”
Remus reaches for him then, with his hands and his eyes. The shadows play over their skin like their fingers do, Remus’s hands flitting across every landmark of Sirius’s body: the slope of his chest, the parallel lines of his hipbones under Remus’s thumb-strokes, his mouth finding the junction of his neck and shoulder, palms seeking out the music of his body in the warm divots of his back and his belly where Remus can feel his heartbeat, his knees sliding against Sirius’s ribs in sweet erratic rhythm, tracing his fingers down Sirius’s navel in octaves and feeling the violin-vibrations quivering in his muscles at Remus’s touch-because of him, for him.
There’s a lot of kissing, and Remus tries to bite off the embarrassing noise he makes when Sirius wraps a hand around his cock again and ends up laughing instead; fortunately, Sirius laughs too, filling the whole room with their sunshine song, and it’s so easy, from there. “I might,” he gasps, feeling Sirius’s knuckles brushing roughly against his belly, “I might be, oh God-I might be bad at this,” as he moves his hand, and Sirius’s whole body seems to shudder against him like low branches in the wind, a hazy underwater movement that makes Remus press himself closer to set their skin together, rising and falling.
“That’s not fucking possible,” says Sirius, his breath hitching when Remus smooths his thumb over the head of his cock, again, again. Their arms brush together as they move, and Remus has to struggle to keep his eyes open or not turn his head into the sheets, knowing that Sirius is going to watch him come but wanting more than anything else to see Sirius with his eyes on him and his mouth open, whispering his name in the dark like it means something beautiful.
So he keeps his eyes open and watches Sirius above him, all the miraculous machinery that makes up the person he loves: a winter-sharp, off-kilter sort of man with a mouth that can make Remus burn, who is rarely in bed before one a.m. and who is sometimes just as scared and secretive as Remus is, who takes his tea with too much sugar and re-wires Muggle electronics with complicated charms to make them tell lunar time or pull in every radio station in England, as alive as anything has ever been, wanting reds and blues and greens instead of greyscale, and Remus wants him, he wants to-
“Oh, fuck,” he hisses, feeling the slick rush tightening in sharp, kinetic chords between his legs and through his belly, Sirius’s hand squeezing harder, his thumb rubbing over the head of Remus’s cock out of time with the callous-heavy pull of his hand. Then Sirius leans down and bites the knife’s-edge of his jaw, and Remus comes, a sweet silver spread running wild through his limbs and dissolving in the pit of his belly; somewhere in the middle of it as he’s gasping something irrelevantly important he feels Sirius unravel and come in his hand, hips surging forward, Remus’s hand holding his head to his shoulder, both of them cradled, inextricably, in each other.
After, once their limbs have threaded out of each other and they’ve settled under Sirius’s quilt and Remus is just starting to feel like his heart has been zipped back up safely in his chest again, it registers in his cracked, fractured brain that this really did just happen and it wasn’t an elaborate hallucination dreamed up in some indistinct corner of his mind. His heart rises so sharply when Sirius turns to him on his pillow that he worries briefly about sex-related cardiac events until Sirius reaches for him again, his hand curling into the dark spaces between Remus’s ribs like every part of Remus is new to him, saying, “Hallo, Moony.”
“Hallo, Padfoot.”
“So,” says Sirius, grinning with an almost shy sort of amazement Remus has never seen on him before, “was it everything Witch Weekly told you it’d be? Did I rev your engine? Get you hot in the prefect parts?”
“I think you hit every part of me physically possible,” Remus laughs, his head on Sirius’s shoulder and their arms and legs tangled together, like a couple of swimmers clinging to each other in still waters. He feels loose, jelly-limbed, like he’s has been shaken out and put back together again, the wires of his body still jangling, exultant; he slides a palm up Sirius’s belly and between his ribcage, tasting the warm spill of laughter at his throat where there are tiny rosebud-shapes from Remus’s mouth that will still be there in the morning. “And, though this is really only Experiment Number One in the grand scientific study of all things us, I think it’s safe to say you’re not actually compensating for anything.”
“You could’ve just asked, you know,” says Sirius. His fingers are absently twisting Remus’s hair around in small curls at his temple, keeping him close. “It’s not like I’ve wanted this for fucking ages or anything, or like I’ve thought about it every single day since-oh, hell, I don’t even remember how long. Probably before I slept with Dearborn, which wasn’t an exercise I repeated, in case you’re curious.”
“Underwhelming, isn’t he.”
“Kept his socks on the whole time, Moony, what kind of man does that?” His hand, an open palm rubbing into the divot of Remus’s back and up his spine, a slow piano-key rhythm. “Which brings me around to the real question, which is: how long have you wanted to do this, exactly?”
“How long have you?”
“Two years at least,” Sirius answers, without even a flicker of hesitation. “But I asked you first.”
There’s not a time he can remember not wanting to be with Sirius, not since he first crashed into Remus’s compartment on the Hogwarts Express when they were eleven years old; telling him so makes Remus feel like all his organs are showing through his skin, so he presses his nose into Sirius’s cheek and says, “Four years, or the better part of. You’re just, you’re so-vibrant, I guess, but even that’s not quite what I mean. It’s like, wherever you are or whatever you’re doing, I just… I always want to be with you. You’re brighter than anything and you’re smarter than just about anyone I know and you like it when I try to explain Eliot and no one can make me laugh like you do, and God this makes me sound like a, like a soggy piece of toast, but-you make me happy. You always have. So-so. There you go.”
Sirius kisses him again, long and deep, and Remus gives himself over to the truth of it, no honesty like his body; he’s struck by how much kissing Sirius, even in its novelty, is so much different and so much better than he ever imagined it might be, like stepping into the Great Hall of Hogwarts for the first time or finally mastering the complicated wand-work of a charm or a counter-spell, a warm wonder that coils in his gut and then dissolves in an arpeggio with the stutter-slam of his heart.
“And you never thought of actually doing anything about it?”
“No, I thought about that very much,” says Remus, and Sirius laughs into his hair, rich and thrilled. “I just-I couldn’t. In school there was, well, you know, and I was always afraid of ruining things,” he says, tracing his fingers along Sirius’s palm again, “and I didn’t want that, more than anything, because even if you did fancy me I didn’t want to change things. Or for you to look at me differently after you knew and have to see the distance there and know things wouldn’t be the same again. And maybe that makes me a coward, but I couldn’t.”
“You don’t think this changes anything?”
Remus looks at him. “I just came in your hand.”
“Don’t I know it,” Sirius laughs. “But-didn’t it, though? Change things.”
He considers them, the vast brilliant newness of them growing around each other like ivy on Sirius’s bed, the way they smell like each other, clean sweat and sex and cotton-soft sheets, the way they make a pair of parentheses with their arms and legs and their beating hearts; he considers them, too, at sixteen in the Shrieking Shack, the only two people alive in the whole waking world, Sirius’s pulse against his pulse like out-of-tune chords, both of them laughing, laughing. It was never about making a leap as much as it was about stepping over a threshold they’ve been at for years in a sweet sort of stalemate, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, in-and-out, easy as breathing, and look at all the familiar ways they can fit themselves together; look at all the ways they can move in the spaces they’ve made for each other in the hollow places of their own breathing bodies, their own unmeasured hopes.
“Yes,” Remus whispers into his shoulder, “and you’re still my best friend.” Sirius squeezes him around his hip and slots their bodies together in a way Remus never could have known he loved, for all his frantic-heart longing: his body with Sirius’s body, in his bones, in his dreams, stuck between his teeth.
“And you’re still Moony,” says Sirius, “and you’ve got my favorite laugh, and you’re dead handsome, and I love it when you read runes under your breath, and you know more about Arithmancy than anyone and you can roll perfect cigarettes and I want to be around you all the time because it’s honestly an enormous waste when I’m not.” His eyes, Remus thinks, are so much brighter than anything else could ever be. “Remus. How could I not want you?”
Remus kisses him where the words come out of both of them, feeling the magnet-pull of their hands and their thoughts like a clock trembling on the cusp of the hour, like a compass needle pointing north, and north, and north, and north.
-
When he wakes up in bed after the full moon rather than the loam and hoarfrost of a distant forest or the age-dusty boards of the old barn on his parents’ property, he never questions it. He sets himself against Sirius and thinks, sleeplessly, about how they are known and unknown to each other, how he loves these strangenesses in them both, a pattern he can understand; it’s like a map or a maze he lost himself in years ago and he’s only just now realizing he knew the way out of all along.
“Morning, Sirius,” he says, eyes closed, into the bloody hour of sunrise. “Sirius,” again, just to hear it in the hush of morning, his voice gone from howling.
“Morning, Remus,” says Sirius, and still Remus doesn’t open his eyes. It’s like a language only they know, the spaces between heartbeats or the unsharpening of the moon, shared vocabulary in the clasp of their fingers. His body knows who they are, every joy and every pain and every shape they can make. His body knows.
-
Over the next few days, as the cold sharpens its teeth and the fog hangs above the snowy palm of the city like a dream, Remus learns the proper nouns and verbs of waking up with Sirius writing Good morning on his neck or around his hips with his mouth and how to read the heat he leaves in bed to know whether he’ll be back soon or if he’s gone to get breakfast and the newspaper, their own syntax like a breadcrumb trail scattered around the flat. They kiss on the way out the door and in the loo and get distracted with it while they’re stringing up more lights around the mantel, coming at each other from every conceivable angle to make themselves spark; they bake gingerbread that turns out crumbly but somehow better for it, eat messy omelets in bed, fuck with the lights on, do crosswords in various states of undress, get drunk on cinnamon whisky and go Christmas shopping and spend whole days not doing much but learning to feel lazy and loved and full of each other.
For Remus, the thing about romance is that it’s always existed in a fuzzy middle distance until now, a lavish impossibility outlined in magazines and Muggle films and bestselling, disturbingly heterosexual Wizarding books, tinged in pastels and staring out of dew-dotted windows he will never look out of. But love-the real thing-doesn’t leave anything out. Love shows its teeth and kicks in its sleep and makes some undignified noises where paperback romance only whispers and sighs; love rubs dittany into your claw-marked thighs and holds your hair back while you vomit and waits up for the creak of the front door late at night and knows when to apologize and when to hold on tight in the dark. It has the largest vocabulary of any language either dead or undead that can ever be learned: a study in watercolor grammar and shapeshifting syllables that Remus puts his back into like an etymologist with a catalogue of sexy newly-discovered runes.
He’s thinking about all this on his bedroom floor, scissors in hand with colorful paper and photos and piles of notes and letters ranging all the way from first year to this afternoon, scattered and scarred as memory as he leafs through them all, trying to decide which ones to include in the photo album that seems more saccharine by the hour, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Yesterday, he considered Flooing Marlene and Dorcas to ask if it might be a good idea to give the whole thing up as a syrupy loss and blow the rest of his advance pay on a motorbike jacket instead, but he figures Marlene, who has the uncanny ability to pare a man down to the skull, would’ve just told him to tie a bow around his dick instead, and Dorcas would’ve laughed and said the photos are a wonderful idea, so he spared himself the trip but not the compulsion to spend an unwise amount of his money on gifts for grey eyes. Which is part of being in love, he supposes, but he’d hoped the queasiness of the gift-giving process might have lessened a little for all his trouble.
A motorbike jacket is probably the safer option. A motorbike jacket wouldn’t reveal all the varied and occasionally bizarre ways he’s been in love with Sirius since he was probably fifteen years old, and claiming nostalgia will only get him so far when he’s got years and years of well-loved letters stowed away with the photos under his bed, sorted roughly by year and interspersed with the notes Sirius passed him on scraps of Herbology homework. It’s either a deeply touching gift, or one that says, I’ve been listening to everything you say and watching everything you do, in a creepy sort of way, ever since we were kids, and now I know what you looked like in nappies and the names of thirty family members you hate. Happy Christmas.
Still, he can’t very well stop now that he’s started, and it’s probably a ridiculous thought to be having given how very recently he was flat on his back on the living room couch. He presses another photo onto the page and writes Summer hols, 1976 underneath, watching sixteen-year-old Sirius grinning at the camera from the shoreline, long-legged and freckled across his nose as James struggles with some seaweed beside him, both of them looking squint-eyed into the afternoon sun; it makes him smile, the memory of it spreading like ink under his fingernails as he charms a series of notes passed in sixth year History of Magic to unfold like paper flowers on the opposite page, fanning out in blossoms of illicit activity detailed in Sirius’s loping scrawl and Remus’s self-contained answers, with commentary from James and Peter at regular intervals.
Looking through the pages makes him wish he could go back sometimes, or maybe just that he could wake up beside Sirius in the Shrieking Shack one more time, safe and shivering like a bare branch and so impossibly, irrevocably happy; he wants to know all these versions of Sirius again, on the train at eleven in expensive robes, fourteen years old with sad eyes at a family dinner, weaving a complicated bit of charmwork into the map with Remus’s wand lit over him in the dark, seventeen and jolly-drunk on Peter’s birthday, eighteen in the blue flush of June, smoking on the balcony of their new flat. He watches himself from one of them, seventeen years old, his eyes sliding constantly to Sirius on the common room couch, and he wants to know him all over again, himself and Sirius, all the different people they’ve been from beginning to end. He wants to live it again, go back and meet Sirius and sit with him sleeplessly by the common room fire at night, feel the solid comfort of him as a dog for the first time, wander the halls of Hogwarts after curfew with him, wake up beside him at a December sunset, feel the shock of love and the shiver of laughter and make every mistake, the forgivable and the unforgivable, all over again.
He wants Sirius to come back to him, over and over. He wants to find him on the balcony, on the roof, at the kitchen counter, on the edge of their bed; he wants to fill a hundred of these albums up to the seams with both of them, with all these loves, all these thousand threads that lead them, always, back to each other. Remus wants to fall in love with him again, and again, and again.
“Moony,” calls the light of Remus’s whole life and his beleaguered cardiovascular system from somewhere in the vicinity of the front door, voice firing along his nerves like a shrill alarm bell, “you’ll never guess how much fruitcake I’ve got-bugger fuck, these pine needles are hell on your feet-anyway, I’m home for Christmas and I’ve got dinner and I’m very ready to be out of these tight, constricting trousers.” Dead quiet; Remus, frozen over last week’s mildly obscene photo of Sirius smoking with those same trousers undone, feels the panic ricochet off his nerves like a pinball. “Where are you? That usually starts a stampede.”
“Christ Jesus.” He can hear Sirius’s footsteps coming to a stop right outside the door as he idiotically throws his old blanket over the whole mess. “Don’t! Don’t come in here. I’m naked.”
“Lupin, I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life when that would’ve deterred me, least of all now, but I guess the real question is why you’re naked in here and not in the bed. Or under the tree. Isn’t all your stuff in the other room anyway?”
“Yes, but.” Remus takes a long, tremulous breath. “I was just in here, wrapping gifts, and I thought-I thought, it’s been almost two whole weeks since I last slept in my old bed, you know? So for old times’ sake and it being awfully lonely and disused and all, I had a very long nap in it.”
“A naked nap.”
“Don’t you ever do that?”
“No. I’ve never had an odd thought in my entire life.” Finally, blessedly, Remus hears him move away from the door. “Get out here and help me eat this curry. And I hope you like fruitcake because Arabella Figg does and she’s spreading the joy like lead bricks.”
Once he’s cleaned up his mess and hidden any soppy, incriminating evidence, Remus goes into the living room to find a wreath hanging around the mantel, already shedding dry needles, and Sirius sitting on the couch with a curry and a frightening accompaniment of fruitcakes. His knees seem to have developed opposing magnetic fields; Remus tries hard not to think of situating himself between them.
“That’ll be up until Valentine’s Day,” says Remus, moving a fruitcake off the couch so he can sit down.
“It’s your gift,” says Sirius, leaning over to kiss the smile quirking his lips at the corner. “The crusty personification of my affection. Roses are red / Violets are blue / This wreath is a metaphor / For how badly I want to shag you.”
“That was sublime, Sirius.”
“I contain multitudes,” Sirius says, and shovels in some curry.
Some blurry time later, after they’ve finished dinner and they’re feeding each other unidentifiable, gelatinous blobs plucked out of the fruitcake as nighttime sweeps over their edge of London, the wireless starts playing an overwrought version of O Holy Night. Remus turns his head in the crook of Sirius’s neck and shoulder and mouths the chorus into his throat tunelessly, voice cracking on the high notes and feeling Sirius’s laughter spill into his lips like wine, wondering dimly if he could stretch this entire moment out forever with some sort of unspeakable spellwork and live in it forever.
“Remember Christmas sixth year?” Sirius asks him, fingers in his hair. “I think we were writing five times a day and all I did was listen to that Stooges record you gave me, and some of your Patti Smith because I missed you. I tried not to let on but I was so happy when you came back early that I think it broke something, my spleen maybe, and I think-I’d been thinking about you before then, I know, but I think that’s when I realized it wasn’t just hormones making me want to lick those scars on your belly all the time.”
“You don’t even know where your spleen is.”
“Because you destroyed it.”
“And you thought I was just a bunch of hormones, you berk,” says Remus, angling his head so he can bite down gently on Sirius’s earlobe, tasting the metallic tang of his earring and the rainwater softness of his skin. “If that was the case, I think a few wanks probably would have taken care of it well enough. Although that’s probably part of it, I mean, at least part of why the thought of you touching me inappropriately is enough to give me convulsions at any hour of the day.”
“At first, I thought it’d be-I don’t know, actually,” says Sirius. “On one hand, I wanted to fuck you senseless and stupid on every surface available, or maybe into the space-time continuum itself, but on the other, I wanted to go down on my knees for you in front of the entire goddamn world and treat you like an ancient Transfiguration text in fancy runic script and make breakfast every morning.” He smiles at Remus, his hand splitting apart into fingers at the back of Remus’s neck. “I still want to do all of that. But I want all of this, too.”
“The fruitcakes and the electrical hazards?”
“I told you it’s not going to burn down, you arse,” Sirius says fondly. “Just-you, and a place to stay, and a bed. Lots of pine. Maybe some fruitcake.”
Remus doesn’t know why it’s so hard for him to say what comes to Sirius so easily, or easier at least than it does to him; possibly it’s because Sirius doesn’t roll it around on his tongue until it melts down into a weak whisper and often just says what he thinks, unfiltered, where Remus measures the span of every letter and the worth of every word and decides it’s no good, or it sounds bad, or it’s not worth the emotional upheaval even after he’s already put himself through enough emotional upheaval to choke a rhinoceros. Me, too sounds so inadequate; he kisses the join of Sirius’s jaw and neck and hopes he can hear it anyway.
“Sounds good to me,” he says. “Maybe by this time next year we’ll have peace in the Wizarding world for Christmas and a big slice of Victory Pie.”
“A man can hope,” says Sirius. His mouth brushes against Remus’s hair when he speaks. “If we do manage it by next year and blow Voldemort and several generations of my family to minced meat, I’ll take you somewhere. Greece, maybe. I’ll touch you in intimate places under the table and you can do that thing where you undress me with your eyes across the table like a professional slag.”
“I do that anyway.”
“Yeah but if you really cared you’d do it with your teeth.”
“I can do that, too.”
“Brilliant man,” says Sirius, and Remus shifts involuntarily when he slides his arm down his back, as if his body is learning how to accommodate Sirius in all the secret hollows and curled-in places where their burnt-out threads and moon-bitten scars fit together better than anything ever has or will. “I almost feel guilty having you all to myself for Christmas. It’s an embarrassment of riches.”
“Do you really.”
“Nah. Not even a little.”
“Good,” says Remus, pressing a palm to Sirius chest and up to the hollow of his throat, where he can feel the miraculous clockwork of his pulse, where his words are still warm. “Because I’ve wanted this for a very long time, and werewolves are very bad at sharing, historically speaking.”
“Oh?” A forefinger pressing at his lips, between his teeth. Remus growls around it and runs his tongue along the underside of it. “I’ve always found them extremely agreeable, if a little inscrutable sometimes. Remus, what the hell does it even mean to be inscrutable? How do you be scrutable to begin with?”
“I love a man who asks the tough questions,” he says. He settles his arms around Sirius, his cold feet against Sirius’s cold feet, folding himself into the familiar, heavy warmth of each other. “We should probably check on the pudding,” he says as he closes his eyes.
“Probably,” Sirius agrees, and tucks an ankle around Remus’s feet.
Soon, he thinks, sometime soon, he’ll crack open his chest the rest of the way and show Sirius his best secret, the one he’s kept close for so long, twined around all the others like bindweed, where his heart has always been able to read it even when he couldn’t read it himself. Soon, he’ll find a way to tell Sirius in a way he can understand; for now, there’s no swell of violins, no parting of the clouds, no judgment and no deliverance. Nothing but a narrow couch and the static of the radio, London light like stars glittering in the ice on the window. Nothing but his skin on Sirius’s skin, nothing but the solidity of their beating hearts, alive, alive, alive.
Part 3
Author: cevennes
Recipient: the_realduck
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Language, sex*
Word count: 21,000
Summary: Christmas, 1978. Remus, wrestling with the mighty problems of gift-giving on a budget, contemplates life, love, London in winter, and falling off the edge of the world with Sirius Black.
Notes: the_realduck, I loved your prompt so much I got a bit carried away with it. Hugely, horribly so, for which I apologize, profusely. Happy, happy holidays; I hope 2016 is full of everything bright and beautiful!
In the first week of December, when the daylight stretches itself thin and the stars come out in a frozen marble clamor like an opened vein-line, they buy a tree so big it nearly scrapes the ceiling when they crown it with Remus’s Transfigured star, which doesn’t tip it over in spite of all the Muggle lights and enchanted icicles hanging leaden from every branch; Remus’s comments about overcompensation are only met with crooked-mouthed retorts about it not being compensation if you can back it up with extremely ample evidence, which immediately makes Remus’s mouth go desert-dry while certain other parts of him take a very keen interest during his nightly shower. On the tenth, just a few days before the full moon when his joints begin to ache like memory and his mouth dreams of inhuman teeth to feed the churning vortex of his stomach, he gets a job: a letter he’d never expected to receive comes to accept his application to edit a new Arithmancy textbook, with half his pay in advance and a promise to take him on for regular contract work starting in January if it all goes well. His hands shake at that last bit.
Sirius insists on taking him out for a pint, which turns into three pints, which Remus insists on paying for with the thrilling new jangle of his own Galleons in his pockets. By the standards of most working adults it’s on the low end of desirable, but it’s enough to start putting something towards rent and groceries and not overdrawing his account when he wants a bottle of Talisker or the latest le Carré novel, and the faint whiff of self-sufficiency is enough to warm him to the soles of his feet with a bellyful of burgeoning hope all the way back from the pub.
“You’re practically glowing,” Sirius informs him as they chance the crossing in front of a bus, pulling in a drag of his cigarette while Remus watches him from beneath the coppery-curly fringe of his hair. Snow has begun to fall into the muzzy lemon glow of the streetlights, sparse white flakes that glitter in the gutters. “Adulthood’s done for you what takes most people a bottle of wine and a good shag. You’re not right.”
“Not even your library of insults to my love of crushing responsibility can dampen my mood.”
“Liar,” says Sirius, “you don’t handle responsibility any better than I do. Actually, you’re worse.”
This is true, as several bottles of Ogden’s Old under his bed and a comically overstuffed internal pocket full of stifled feelings and emotional dishonesty to be dealt with later can attest-later being some nebulous and unlikely time ranging anywhere from now to his death by aneurysm when said pocket finally explodes-but conceding as much would rather too neatly prove Sirius’s point. “The point is,” he says, feeling Sirius’s hip knock into his as they round the corner and briefly losing his train of thought at the rasp of their jeans, “the point is, it’s good for my skin and it paid for your drinks tonight, so really I think you came out just fine in the end.”
“I did,” says Sirius. He’s walking so close their wrists brush whenever Sirius takes a drag of his cigarette. “And it is, you know. Good for your skin. You wear the weight of employment the way some women wear pregnancy.”
“Thanks, I-well. I guess.”
“Jesus, it’s a compliment, you tosser. I was telling you you’re pretty.”
“I know, I’m just not sure it isn’t a slightly disturbing one.” A pause, with his cigarette halfway to his lips, with the blue velvet of the night between his teeth. “And I’m not.”
“What you are is a terrible judge of your own character and your own face, so you should probably just trust me on this one, Remus. When have I ever lied to you?”
“‘I’ll fly it slow, I swear,’” Remus answers in a fairly stunning rendition of Sirius’s dulcet untruths. “‘No, I don’t know where your green jumper is that I am definitely not sleeping in when the heat goes spotty in the dormitory.’ Or, ‘It’s not compensation if you’re not compensating for anything if you know what I mean,’ and-”
“Well it’s not,” says Sirius. The record shop down the street from their flat is just closing up, the last snow-hazy notes of Desolation Row spilling out onto the curb where they stand, waiting to cross. “I always liked this song,” Sirius murmurs around the stub of his cigarette. “When I was fourteen it was the most profound bunch of nonsense I’d ever heard. It makes me think of you.”
“Really?” Remus’s feet stutter on the stairs on the way up, something thrilled and secret coiling up like a rope between his lungs. “Why?”
“Same reasons I don’t know why it means so much, probably.”
“That’s almost poetic, Pads.”
“Don’t I know it. It’s a gift, young Lupin, which-speaking of. What d’you want for Christmas? You’ve been such a good boy this year.”
“I don’t know,” says Remus, which is a flagrant lie: what he really wants for Christmas, that deep bone-want that aches like the moon, is nothing more and nothing less than all the bite and brightness of Sirius Black, every sweetness and sorrow and all the cogs and stringy bits that make up the pattern of the person he loves. Or maybe just a kiss. “Matching socks.”
Sirius shakes his head in mingled amusement and disappointment, moving one of his childhood macaroni-and-popsicle-stick ornaments higher up on the tree, next to one of the glass bulbs Remus decorated with his mother when he was very young; both of them have a disturbing sort of Dadaist quality that clashes magnificently with everything else. “That ought to be disqualified on the grounds that it’s what you say every year and I haven’t gotten you a single pair of socks yet.”
“I like being warm in this harsh, unforgiving world.”
“Did you ever think of asking for something interesting for once? It’s what Jesus would want.”
“Did you ever think of not being such an arse and listening to what people tell you?”
“No, but I know a buttoned-up little berk who’s getting a lot of coal in his stocking this year,” says Sirius, going to the wireless and turning it to the Muggle station he’s rigged it up to bring in, catching the middle of a Wire song he can’t remember until it fades into Roadrunner. He picks up his camera from the coffee table and threads some new film through it, watching Sirius’s T-shirt ride up in the narrow scope of the lens when he straightens the tree, which is drooping very slightly under its burden; the shutter clicks before Remus even realizes what his overeager forefinger has done.
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” says Sirius. He throws himself onto the opposite end of the couch from Remus, the cushions squeaking slightly, as if flexing their jaws. “The photo-taking, I mean. Every time I turn around you’ve got it out like I’m a wildebeest on one of those nature programs you like.”
“Sorry. I just-I’ve got a lot of extra film.”
“And you want these precious, delicate memories preserved forever.”
“Every single unflattering angle,” says Remus, aiming one more at the Christmas tree, for measure. “Tis Christmastide, after all. And it’s our first, so technically-” oh, that sounds suspect, doesn’t it, “-I mean, it’s the first here and what-all, and-you know what I mean.”
Sirius raises an eyebrow, his lips twitching with amusement or fondness or maybe both, eyeing him with peculiar interest down the blade-smooth length of his nose. “We had last year too, even with the furry little problem in the middle of it, and me being a tragic disowned nobody and all. Which was one of the best Christmases of my life to date, so we’ve at least got a standard to keep up with this year.”
Last year, just a few months after his mother died and the moon fell dead on Christmas Day, they’d changed in the Shack together and gone back the next morning to the empty dormitory and leftover pudding, sleeping in Remus’s bed until late afternoon when the last dregs of sunlight turned the wide brim of the world to gold even when he closed his eyes. Grief was still gnawing at his bones then so that he hardly slept and still had to force himself to eat some days; he remembers waking slowly that afternoon with Sirius, feeling the press of longing in the places where their skin touched and finding in it an echo of love or maybe wholeness that he hadn’t known since he was small, decorating sugar cookies or eating ice cream in the village with his mother, or when she used to rub dittany onto the deeper wounds and sit up watching the telly with him on nights when his skin ached with the acid-heat of the moon biting through the thin curtains, his head held to her shoulder where she always smelled like vanilla and cold cream, lulled to sleep by the distant murmur of her heart. For the first time since she died Remus found that he could think about her again without the sadness opening him up and flaying him apart by the belly: there, with Sirius, with their dusk-colored skin and his knees still throbbing with the agony of unsharpening, Remus was happy.
He remembers, too, the shape of Sirius’s hand lying beside his on the bed like it is now on the couch, curled like a nautilus; he wonders if Sirius ever thinks of reaching over and taking his, seeing where they branch off from here. He wonders if he doesn’t.
“I miss school, you know?” says Sirius, and Remus swallows the memory back down into his belly. He watches Sirius drag a hand through the short ends of his hair, making it stand on end until it falls back into place. “I can’t fucking believe I’m actually saying that, but I do. And not just because it was nice to not have to cook or do my own laundry and clean the toilet, or become a cog in the meat-grinder of adulthood, with all the unsavory chewy bits-it’s just the routine of it, I guess, or maybe it was all the food, or just not having to worry, so probably it is overcompensation, a bit-all this.” The huge tree heavy with ornaments, the Muggle lights strung around the flat, the snow falling in the streetlights below the window, the seams of the living room bursting with all the ways they’ve piled themselves into the corners. “Hogwarts at Christmas was, it was like, everything that Christmas at home-or home in general-never was, with all the stupid rigidity and decorum of it all. I loved it.”
Hogwarts, he thinks, Hogwarts with its steady yearly rhythms and its wise, comforting stone that swallowed them all into a peace like belonging, the ancient walls that would whisper to him in dead tongues once he knew where to look. It’s that feeling, he supposes, that they’ve both always been trying to capture ineffably: the grass at the lake tickling their necks in May and the heartbeat of the earth murmuring against their backs like time immemorial, the gauzy stars from the ramparts of the Astronomy Tower, the secret nighttime laughter tucked away into fire-lit corridors and kindled into life with the science of their burgeoning blood, the cartography of becoming. Remus’s hand twitches at his side.
“I miss it too,” he says, thinking distantly about the roast they cooked together in the first week of September, when they were both thinking of trunks and trains and couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d missed an important appointment. “After a while, even when I was home, I was always thinking of getting back, or at least I was writing you lot constantly, because it just-it felt like home to me as much as home ever did. And it’s not like we’re one of those numpties who’s always going on like their life ended at Hogwarts, because that’s not it, but… I guess adulthood is an acquired taste.”
“Moony, we already do our own dishes and most of the time we even keep the living room clear of dirty socks. I think we’ve done enough for now.”
“We have to pace ourselves lest we become prune-y before the age of twenty-five.”
“See, you always know how to put things into perspective for me.”
“Still, though. This’ll probably be better than last year,” says Remus, biting his thumbnail when he notices Sirius looking at him sideways, only to find that there’s nothing left to bite. “No spontaneous werewolf transformations in the middle of the most monumental day of the year.”
“It was fun, Jesus, it was probably the best Christmas I’ve ever had, and that’s even without the pudding and the excessive drinking. You’d think you would’ve come to terms with our crushing, impenetrable adoration for you by now.”
“You’d think you would’ve, too,” mutters Remus, but Sirius scoffs and waves away Remus’s poke at his own hypocrisy.
“It was nice,” says Sirius, who is still looking at him sideways with a quietness in his eyes Remus can neither place nor meet. “We ate enough turkey to drop a rhino and slept until dinner, which is the ideal way to spend the day after Christmas.”
“I seem to remember that’s mostly what we did until second term started, except with more alcohol.”
“I’ve never seen you as pissed as you were at New Year’s,” laughs Sirius, a sound like winter light or hours passing by, and something shudders through him again, fluttering like moth-wings from his belly to his brain and making his fingers flex on the couch again with yearning as tangible and as constant as a heartbeat. Something is beginning to unravel in his chest, as if his heart has come untethered again at the sound of Sirius’s laughter through his widening smile, through the clamor of his own blood. “For the record, it was incredibly attractive-not that you’ll believe me-but you’re really the happiest drunk I know. Your mouth goes all wobbly and your eyes get enormous when you laugh or when someone asks you to explain Eliot, which no one ever does but you do anyway, and I’ve always liked it when you lecture me on bad metaphors.”
“Just because you can’t appreciate the sense of creeping mortality-”
“-or all the modern, claustrophobic decay, I know, I know. I just like hearing you laugh when I ask about the flaccid sexual inadequacy of Mr. Prufrock.”
Remus chokes on the mangled sentence that leaps to his mouth, or maybe it’s his heart, and says, “I’m amazed you remember that, considering you weren’t exactly a paragon of sobriety at the time.”
“I remember,” says Sirius. “You have my favorite laugh.”
His knuckles murmur against Remus’s, softly, when he shifts on the couch.
In the end, he’s not sure what makes him do it. Senses loosened by alcohol, or the rapid bird-wing hammering of his heart against his ribs finally beating love-me love-me love-me loud enough to drown out the scared, secretive thing beneath it, everything in him yearning for Sirius like an inescapable horizontal gravity when he reaches over and traces his fingers across the lines in Sirius’s palm to his fingertips, feeling him curl his fingers and catch Remus’s in his own, pressing them together before letting him go again. Remus strokes his fingers down the blue thrum of vein-lines in Sirius’s wrist to find the electric skip of his pulse running red against his own until their hands come together again, tendons and scars and their curious symmetry sliding together with an irresistible sort of compulsion: his fingers and Sirius’s fingers and these new shapes they make in the geometry of desire.
“No one can make me laugh like you do,” says Remus, though it comes out in a whisper, half-reverent, half-shellshocked. Sirius’s thumb is tracing the grooves of his palm, his nail in the life line.
“Half the stupid shit I do is just to make you laugh.” His fingers twine through Remus’s again and squeeze; oh, he’s nervous. “Fuck, Remus-am I,” he starts, but when Remus looks up at him, the words seem to bleed out in the air between them. They laugh quietly, and Remus watches the shift of Sirius’s face, the narrow strength of his angles and curves and the hair he finger-combs every morning, the sandpaper of his stubble, the stormglass-grey of his eyes-and his stillness, the sudden quiet of his hands where Remus can feel them strung tight with potential, ready to spark. He thinks: There will never be another moment like this. He thinks: I have wanted this as much as I have ever wanted anything that matters.
So, he leans forward through the fear of himself and the fear of ruining everything and the fear of losing what he loves the most, and kisses Sirius on their cramped, crooked couch.
Over the years, Remus has entertained countless fantasies about their first kiss, some of them sweet, watercolor-innocent, and some of a nature that would make a manticore blush and turn its beastly head: in the prefects’ baths, over the kitchen sink, on the floor of the Shack, behind a pub in Shoreditch, under the pier at Brighton. He never imagined it would be this short-both of them leaning in at the same time so their noses knock together, a compelling slide of lips and teeth and laughter Remus wants to swallow down-but it’s strangely better than anything his frantic, fragmented mind could have dreamed up; when they pull apart, Sirius is still smiling at him with a wonder Remus has never seen before, a hand fisted in the flannel near his neck.
“Are we drunk,” asks Remus, “or am I dreaming this again?”
“No,” whispers Sirius. His lips are so close.
“Oh.”
“Am I-is this-”
“All right?” Remus finishes, dreamily, the odd angle of their heads making the slide of his lips on Sirius’s jaw more compelling. “Yes. I mean-more than. Definitely.”
“You know, you might’ve said,” says Sirius, not far from breathless, his thumb moving over the hollow of Remus’s throat where his pulse runs, thrilled and febrile, beneath his moon-pale skin.
“How-I couldn’t,” he mutters, unable to look away from Sirius for the way his eyes are fixed on him as if he’s stumbled into something beautiful in the dark. “I completely fucking couldn’t. Couldn’t you?”
Sirius laughs, high and wild, the sound of it catching in Remus’s throat where he can feel it reverberating in his skin as if it’s his own. “No, I just-I couldn’t have,” he says. He picks their hands up from the couch where they’re still tangled up in each other and presses Remus’s knuckles against his mouth when he speaks, the murmur of his voice spreading in a flicker-flare up his arm. A Kraftwerk song Remus hates is on the radio, infused now with intermittent snowy static; it hardly even registers through the deafening sound of all the space between himself and Sirius on the couch. “It’s like, with James or Peter, I always know what to say or how to be, right? I never have to feel off-footed or, or worry about making everything weird and stepping all over the sacred foundations of us,” he says, lifting his head when Remus brushes his knuckles along his jaw, feeling the ticklish rasp of it, “and I fucking well never spend hours of my time wanking off to them. But with you-I don’t always know how to be around you, Remus. And I like that sometimes, really, the nerves make me happy and the wanking is fantastic exercise, but I think I like this better.”
“I think I agree,” Remus answers, “given that I’ve spent the better part of four years feeling like an overcooked tomato around you sometimes, and it’s nice, but I’d really like to kiss you instead.”
Sirius grins at him like sunrise, and everything shrinks away from the world but the brightness of his face and the feeling of his body curving against Sirius’s like easy arithmetic, his heart leaping against him, as if it’s finally found its way; as if it was only ever a matter of reaching across the finger-length distance for what was always waiting for him, or discovering that beneath the loneliness and the pain and the fear there was inside him an invulnerable love like a matchlight or a second heartbeat, undimmed by anyone or anything, not even by himself. He reaches for Sirius again, arms around his shoulders, and pulls him down with his long arms, stroking up and down the notches of his spine under his shirt, never letting go, never letting go.
More than any kissing Remus has ever done before, which is admittedly very little, there’s nothing rushed or searching about it: the shock of Sirius’s tongue pressing between his lips is more like an answer, the heavy slip of his palms up Remus’s sides and the thrill of their tongues curling together all unhurried until they begin pushing into each other with a starved eagerness, pressing at each other’s borders like they still can’t get close enough. The crenellation of teeth at his neck makes him gasp, so Sirius does it again, watching him with a thin slice of pupil through his eyelashes while Remus leans back and shows his throat; when they kiss again he tastes salt and menthols and old beer and a slight iron-burn that might be blood, Sirius’s or his own, and shifts underneath him, groaning at the jagged sweep of pleasure that jackknifes up his belly at the slide of their bodies. He does it again, again, feeling Sirius’s breath stutter, his spine curved in a crescendo, meeting Remus in electric tidal rhythm until he pulls back, his eyes like the glint of sun on January ice and his lips bitten-red, brushing a thumb over Remus’s lip.
“Is this the part,” he says, his heart beating staccato beneath Remus’s hand, “where I find out whether you’re that sort of boy?”
“Do you think I’m that sort of boy?” His voice very nearly cracks in the middle, his breathing going rougher still at the image that flares in his mind.
And then, Sirius’s thigh pressing up and rubbing between his legs in answer: Yes, yes, Remus is definitely that sort of boy. “I do think,” Sirius murmurs, whisky-rich, and Remus wants to reach for him again, wants to be held down, wants Sirius to finish him off here, now, but he wants more than that to make it last, to give everything of himself that he can, because he knows too well from all three of his previous sexual encounters-all of them regrettably with Caradoc Dearborn and all of them totaling a combined fifteen underwhelming minutes-where all the gasping and limb-tangling take you, far too quickly. “Come to bed,” says Sirius, and pulls Remus up from the couch.
They’re a natural disaster of hands and mouths and hips all the way to Sirius’s bedroom, clumsy pathfinders tearing ineffectually at clothes and shoving each other into walls, Remus’s fingers drumming up Sirius’s ribs like counting the bricks in Diagon Alley, 1-2-3, 3-2-1, taking altogether a very long time about getting anywhere. “Do you take all the boys to the inner sanctum,” Remus asks him, and Sirius laughs, undoing the last of Remus’s buttons and switching the lights on with a graceful twist of his hand; instinctively, Remus brings his hands up and folds his arms over his chest, gutted from his shoulders to his toes.
It’s not like they’ve never seen each other naked before, in the jagged pallor of dawn the morning after the full moon or, once or twice, at the bad end of a revealing charm gone wrong. But Remus still closes his fist and shuts off the lights, feeling suddenly too big for his own skin and too small for Sirius, who raises an eyebrow at him very loudly in the dark.
“Hard to see the Promised Land without the light, Moony,” he says, stepping closer until Remus can feel his chest expanding against his own. He runs his hands up Remus’s arms, makes him shiver. “I know what you look like naked.”
“This is different,” he says, feeling stupider by the second. He steps into Sirius again and angles his head up to kiss him where the liquid night-light of London below gets into his mouth, and it tastes right again, salt-slick and their skin peach-warm when Sirius pushes him onto the bed, his tongue grazing the whorls of Remus’s ear. Then he reaches over to his nightstand and whispers something Remus doesn’t catch to light the stub of a candle beside the bed, turning his skin sepia-soft and their shadows monstrous; Remus smiles against his lips.
“I bet you think that makes you look romantic,” he says. The smell of the air has changed, he thinks, or the feel of it: sharp, loamy, dusty-hot. Sirius’s hands delve into his collarbone, the spaces between his ribs, underneath his thighs, his mouth pressed to the basin of his belly where he can taste Remus’s laughter, tongue flicking into his navel and across his hipbones, making him moan, his body flowing with Sirius’s in a wave when he moves up his chest again, sucking budlike imprints onto the pale skin of his neck, the wiry, permissive tendons stretched tightrope-taut against his lips. He watches Sirius hover over him for a moment, heart beating and beating, feeling like this is the time to say something important and his mouth failing entirely to make that happen.
“For one thing, it does make me look romantic,” says Sirius, leaning down into the hallow-dip of his waist where his rib-rungs melt into the skin of his belly, his mouth sliding around the ring of serrated scars curving around his side in an imperfect impression of a wolf’s mouth, warped with age, almost like splinters beneath the skin. Sirius licks at each of them, his mouth on every tooth-mark and shattered-glass scar on his belly to his chest, the new pink ones and the old time-numb ones grown over with skin like new snow, groaning when his teeth tug gently at his nipple and then again when Sirius’s thigh brushes against his cock, making him hiss like a lit fuse. “And for another thing,” he growls into Remus’s belly, “you look fucking incredible naked, and you always have.”
Sirius hand skims up his thigh and then between his legs, his fingers wrapping around Remus’s cock as his mouth falls open, almost, almost silent. Remus, watching him, is struck for a moment at how much he looks like an allegory of something beautiful, and then Sirius lowers his head and slides his tongue along the length of Remus’s cock, which effectively shatters the rest of his sad, fractured mind into a thousand broken mosaic pieces rattling around in his head. His fingers thread through Sirius’s hair, holding his eyes and gasping for breath that doesn’t quite come when Sirius wraps his lips around Remus’s cock, and groans, which somehow makes him even harder; it’s like a spool of thread coiling tighter and tighter, an electric, knifeblade pleasure sweeping through him when Sirius pulls off in one slow, wet slide, flicking his tongue over the tip again almost lazily.
“I think,” Remus gasps, “I think you’ve already fucked my brains out, proverbially speaking and all, and we haven’t even, oh, hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”
“That good, am I?” Sirius, laughing against his thigh, sucks a new shape into the flushed skin there, the place where Remus, at fourteen, left a large, splintered scar from a twisted piece of metal on a brittle blue October night. “Maybe we should stop. I’d hate to do anything that interferes with your chronic wordiness, you know how I love all those vocalizations from the depths of Professor Lupin’s extremely attractive mind. Who knows what words you’ll be saying if we go any further?”
“I think,” says Remus, smiling at Sirius’s red lips and their shadows woven together by the candle-flame, “maybe you should demonstrate your point.”
“It’ll be an education, you know.”
Remus reaches for him then, with his hands and his eyes. The shadows play over their skin like their fingers do, Remus’s hands flitting across every landmark of Sirius’s body: the slope of his chest, the parallel lines of his hipbones under Remus’s thumb-strokes, his mouth finding the junction of his neck and shoulder, palms seeking out the music of his body in the warm divots of his back and his belly where Remus can feel his heartbeat, his knees sliding against Sirius’s ribs in sweet erratic rhythm, tracing his fingers down Sirius’s navel in octaves and feeling the violin-vibrations quivering in his muscles at Remus’s touch-because of him, for him.
There’s a lot of kissing, and Remus tries to bite off the embarrassing noise he makes when Sirius wraps a hand around his cock again and ends up laughing instead; fortunately, Sirius laughs too, filling the whole room with their sunshine song, and it’s so easy, from there. “I might,” he gasps, feeling Sirius’s knuckles brushing roughly against his belly, “I might be, oh God-I might be bad at this,” as he moves his hand, and Sirius’s whole body seems to shudder against him like low branches in the wind, a hazy underwater movement that makes Remus press himself closer to set their skin together, rising and falling.
“That’s not fucking possible,” says Sirius, his breath hitching when Remus smooths his thumb over the head of his cock, again, again. Their arms brush together as they move, and Remus has to struggle to keep his eyes open or not turn his head into the sheets, knowing that Sirius is going to watch him come but wanting more than anything else to see Sirius with his eyes on him and his mouth open, whispering his name in the dark like it means something beautiful.
So he keeps his eyes open and watches Sirius above him, all the miraculous machinery that makes up the person he loves: a winter-sharp, off-kilter sort of man with a mouth that can make Remus burn, who is rarely in bed before one a.m. and who is sometimes just as scared and secretive as Remus is, who takes his tea with too much sugar and re-wires Muggle electronics with complicated charms to make them tell lunar time or pull in every radio station in England, as alive as anything has ever been, wanting reds and blues and greens instead of greyscale, and Remus wants him, he wants to-
“Oh, fuck,” he hisses, feeling the slick rush tightening in sharp, kinetic chords between his legs and through his belly, Sirius’s hand squeezing harder, his thumb rubbing over the head of Remus’s cock out of time with the callous-heavy pull of his hand. Then Sirius leans down and bites the knife’s-edge of his jaw, and Remus comes, a sweet silver spread running wild through his limbs and dissolving in the pit of his belly; somewhere in the middle of it as he’s gasping something irrelevantly important he feels Sirius unravel and come in his hand, hips surging forward, Remus’s hand holding his head to his shoulder, both of them cradled, inextricably, in each other.
After, once their limbs have threaded out of each other and they’ve settled under Sirius’s quilt and Remus is just starting to feel like his heart has been zipped back up safely in his chest again, it registers in his cracked, fractured brain that this really did just happen and it wasn’t an elaborate hallucination dreamed up in some indistinct corner of his mind. His heart rises so sharply when Sirius turns to him on his pillow that he worries briefly about sex-related cardiac events until Sirius reaches for him again, his hand curling into the dark spaces between Remus’s ribs like every part of Remus is new to him, saying, “Hallo, Moony.”
“Hallo, Padfoot.”
“So,” says Sirius, grinning with an almost shy sort of amazement Remus has never seen on him before, “was it everything Witch Weekly told you it’d be? Did I rev your engine? Get you hot in the prefect parts?”
“I think you hit every part of me physically possible,” Remus laughs, his head on Sirius’s shoulder and their arms and legs tangled together, like a couple of swimmers clinging to each other in still waters. He feels loose, jelly-limbed, like he’s has been shaken out and put back together again, the wires of his body still jangling, exultant; he slides a palm up Sirius’s belly and between his ribcage, tasting the warm spill of laughter at his throat where there are tiny rosebud-shapes from Remus’s mouth that will still be there in the morning. “And, though this is really only Experiment Number One in the grand scientific study of all things us, I think it’s safe to say you’re not actually compensating for anything.”
“You could’ve just asked, you know,” says Sirius. His fingers are absently twisting Remus’s hair around in small curls at his temple, keeping him close. “It’s not like I’ve wanted this for fucking ages or anything, or like I’ve thought about it every single day since-oh, hell, I don’t even remember how long. Probably before I slept with Dearborn, which wasn’t an exercise I repeated, in case you’re curious.”
“Underwhelming, isn’t he.”
“Kept his socks on the whole time, Moony, what kind of man does that?” His hand, an open palm rubbing into the divot of Remus’s back and up his spine, a slow piano-key rhythm. “Which brings me around to the real question, which is: how long have you wanted to do this, exactly?”
“How long have you?”
“Two years at least,” Sirius answers, without even a flicker of hesitation. “But I asked you first.”
There’s not a time he can remember not wanting to be with Sirius, not since he first crashed into Remus’s compartment on the Hogwarts Express when they were eleven years old; telling him so makes Remus feel like all his organs are showing through his skin, so he presses his nose into Sirius’s cheek and says, “Four years, or the better part of. You’re just, you’re so-vibrant, I guess, but even that’s not quite what I mean. It’s like, wherever you are or whatever you’re doing, I just… I always want to be with you. You’re brighter than anything and you’re smarter than just about anyone I know and you like it when I try to explain Eliot and no one can make me laugh like you do, and God this makes me sound like a, like a soggy piece of toast, but-you make me happy. You always have. So-so. There you go.”
Sirius kisses him again, long and deep, and Remus gives himself over to the truth of it, no honesty like his body; he’s struck by how much kissing Sirius, even in its novelty, is so much different and so much better than he ever imagined it might be, like stepping into the Great Hall of Hogwarts for the first time or finally mastering the complicated wand-work of a charm or a counter-spell, a warm wonder that coils in his gut and then dissolves in an arpeggio with the stutter-slam of his heart.
“And you never thought of actually doing anything about it?”
“No, I thought about that very much,” says Remus, and Sirius laughs into his hair, rich and thrilled. “I just-I couldn’t. In school there was, well, you know, and I was always afraid of ruining things,” he says, tracing his fingers along Sirius’s palm again, “and I didn’t want that, more than anything, because even if you did fancy me I didn’t want to change things. Or for you to look at me differently after you knew and have to see the distance there and know things wouldn’t be the same again. And maybe that makes me a coward, but I couldn’t.”
“You don’t think this changes anything?”
Remus looks at him. “I just came in your hand.”
“Don’t I know it,” Sirius laughs. “But-didn’t it, though? Change things.”
He considers them, the vast brilliant newness of them growing around each other like ivy on Sirius’s bed, the way they smell like each other, clean sweat and sex and cotton-soft sheets, the way they make a pair of parentheses with their arms and legs and their beating hearts; he considers them, too, at sixteen in the Shrieking Shack, the only two people alive in the whole waking world, Sirius’s pulse against his pulse like out-of-tune chords, both of them laughing, laughing. It was never about making a leap as much as it was about stepping over a threshold they’ve been at for years in a sweet sort of stalemate, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, in-and-out, easy as breathing, and look at all the familiar ways they can fit themselves together; look at all the ways they can move in the spaces they’ve made for each other in the hollow places of their own breathing bodies, their own unmeasured hopes.
“Yes,” Remus whispers into his shoulder, “and you’re still my best friend.” Sirius squeezes him around his hip and slots their bodies together in a way Remus never could have known he loved, for all his frantic-heart longing: his body with Sirius’s body, in his bones, in his dreams, stuck between his teeth.
“And you’re still Moony,” says Sirius, “and you’ve got my favorite laugh, and you’re dead handsome, and I love it when you read runes under your breath, and you know more about Arithmancy than anyone and you can roll perfect cigarettes and I want to be around you all the time because it’s honestly an enormous waste when I’m not.” His eyes, Remus thinks, are so much brighter than anything else could ever be. “Remus. How could I not want you?”
Remus kisses him where the words come out of both of them, feeling the magnet-pull of their hands and their thoughts like a clock trembling on the cusp of the hour, like a compass needle pointing north, and north, and north, and north.
-
When he wakes up in bed after the full moon rather than the loam and hoarfrost of a distant forest or the age-dusty boards of the old barn on his parents’ property, he never questions it. He sets himself against Sirius and thinks, sleeplessly, about how they are known and unknown to each other, how he loves these strangenesses in them both, a pattern he can understand; it’s like a map or a maze he lost himself in years ago and he’s only just now realizing he knew the way out of all along.
“Morning, Sirius,” he says, eyes closed, into the bloody hour of sunrise. “Sirius,” again, just to hear it in the hush of morning, his voice gone from howling.
“Morning, Remus,” says Sirius, and still Remus doesn’t open his eyes. It’s like a language only they know, the spaces between heartbeats or the unsharpening of the moon, shared vocabulary in the clasp of their fingers. His body knows who they are, every joy and every pain and every shape they can make. His body knows.
-
Over the next few days, as the cold sharpens its teeth and the fog hangs above the snowy palm of the city like a dream, Remus learns the proper nouns and verbs of waking up with Sirius writing Good morning on his neck or around his hips with his mouth and how to read the heat he leaves in bed to know whether he’ll be back soon or if he’s gone to get breakfast and the newspaper, their own syntax like a breadcrumb trail scattered around the flat. They kiss on the way out the door and in the loo and get distracted with it while they’re stringing up more lights around the mantel, coming at each other from every conceivable angle to make themselves spark; they bake gingerbread that turns out crumbly but somehow better for it, eat messy omelets in bed, fuck with the lights on, do crosswords in various states of undress, get drunk on cinnamon whisky and go Christmas shopping and spend whole days not doing much but learning to feel lazy and loved and full of each other.
For Remus, the thing about romance is that it’s always existed in a fuzzy middle distance until now, a lavish impossibility outlined in magazines and Muggle films and bestselling, disturbingly heterosexual Wizarding books, tinged in pastels and staring out of dew-dotted windows he will never look out of. But love-the real thing-doesn’t leave anything out. Love shows its teeth and kicks in its sleep and makes some undignified noises where paperback romance only whispers and sighs; love rubs dittany into your claw-marked thighs and holds your hair back while you vomit and waits up for the creak of the front door late at night and knows when to apologize and when to hold on tight in the dark. It has the largest vocabulary of any language either dead or undead that can ever be learned: a study in watercolor grammar and shapeshifting syllables that Remus puts his back into like an etymologist with a catalogue of sexy newly-discovered runes.
He’s thinking about all this on his bedroom floor, scissors in hand with colorful paper and photos and piles of notes and letters ranging all the way from first year to this afternoon, scattered and scarred as memory as he leafs through them all, trying to decide which ones to include in the photo album that seems more saccharine by the hour, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Yesterday, he considered Flooing Marlene and Dorcas to ask if it might be a good idea to give the whole thing up as a syrupy loss and blow the rest of his advance pay on a motorbike jacket instead, but he figures Marlene, who has the uncanny ability to pare a man down to the skull, would’ve just told him to tie a bow around his dick instead, and Dorcas would’ve laughed and said the photos are a wonderful idea, so he spared himself the trip but not the compulsion to spend an unwise amount of his money on gifts for grey eyes. Which is part of being in love, he supposes, but he’d hoped the queasiness of the gift-giving process might have lessened a little for all his trouble.
A motorbike jacket is probably the safer option. A motorbike jacket wouldn’t reveal all the varied and occasionally bizarre ways he’s been in love with Sirius since he was probably fifteen years old, and claiming nostalgia will only get him so far when he’s got years and years of well-loved letters stowed away with the photos under his bed, sorted roughly by year and interspersed with the notes Sirius passed him on scraps of Herbology homework. It’s either a deeply touching gift, or one that says, I’ve been listening to everything you say and watching everything you do, in a creepy sort of way, ever since we were kids, and now I know what you looked like in nappies and the names of thirty family members you hate. Happy Christmas.
Still, he can’t very well stop now that he’s started, and it’s probably a ridiculous thought to be having given how very recently he was flat on his back on the living room couch. He presses another photo onto the page and writes Summer hols, 1976 underneath, watching sixteen-year-old Sirius grinning at the camera from the shoreline, long-legged and freckled across his nose as James struggles with some seaweed beside him, both of them looking squint-eyed into the afternoon sun; it makes him smile, the memory of it spreading like ink under his fingernails as he charms a series of notes passed in sixth year History of Magic to unfold like paper flowers on the opposite page, fanning out in blossoms of illicit activity detailed in Sirius’s loping scrawl and Remus’s self-contained answers, with commentary from James and Peter at regular intervals.
Looking through the pages makes him wish he could go back sometimes, or maybe just that he could wake up beside Sirius in the Shrieking Shack one more time, safe and shivering like a bare branch and so impossibly, irrevocably happy; he wants to know all these versions of Sirius again, on the train at eleven in expensive robes, fourteen years old with sad eyes at a family dinner, weaving a complicated bit of charmwork into the map with Remus’s wand lit over him in the dark, seventeen and jolly-drunk on Peter’s birthday, eighteen in the blue flush of June, smoking on the balcony of their new flat. He watches himself from one of them, seventeen years old, his eyes sliding constantly to Sirius on the common room couch, and he wants to know him all over again, himself and Sirius, all the different people they’ve been from beginning to end. He wants to live it again, go back and meet Sirius and sit with him sleeplessly by the common room fire at night, feel the solid comfort of him as a dog for the first time, wander the halls of Hogwarts after curfew with him, wake up beside him at a December sunset, feel the shock of love and the shiver of laughter and make every mistake, the forgivable and the unforgivable, all over again.
He wants Sirius to come back to him, over and over. He wants to find him on the balcony, on the roof, at the kitchen counter, on the edge of their bed; he wants to fill a hundred of these albums up to the seams with both of them, with all these loves, all these thousand threads that lead them, always, back to each other. Remus wants to fall in love with him again, and again, and again.
“Moony,” calls the light of Remus’s whole life and his beleaguered cardiovascular system from somewhere in the vicinity of the front door, voice firing along his nerves like a shrill alarm bell, “you’ll never guess how much fruitcake I’ve got-bugger fuck, these pine needles are hell on your feet-anyway, I’m home for Christmas and I’ve got dinner and I’m very ready to be out of these tight, constricting trousers.” Dead quiet; Remus, frozen over last week’s mildly obscene photo of Sirius smoking with those same trousers undone, feels the panic ricochet off his nerves like a pinball. “Where are you? That usually starts a stampede.”
“Christ Jesus.” He can hear Sirius’s footsteps coming to a stop right outside the door as he idiotically throws his old blanket over the whole mess. “Don’t! Don’t come in here. I’m naked.”
“Lupin, I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life when that would’ve deterred me, least of all now, but I guess the real question is why you’re naked in here and not in the bed. Or under the tree. Isn’t all your stuff in the other room anyway?”
“Yes, but.” Remus takes a long, tremulous breath. “I was just in here, wrapping gifts, and I thought-I thought, it’s been almost two whole weeks since I last slept in my old bed, you know? So for old times’ sake and it being awfully lonely and disused and all, I had a very long nap in it.”
“A naked nap.”
“Don’t you ever do that?”
“No. I’ve never had an odd thought in my entire life.” Finally, blessedly, Remus hears him move away from the door. “Get out here and help me eat this curry. And I hope you like fruitcake because Arabella Figg does and she’s spreading the joy like lead bricks.”
Once he’s cleaned up his mess and hidden any soppy, incriminating evidence, Remus goes into the living room to find a wreath hanging around the mantel, already shedding dry needles, and Sirius sitting on the couch with a curry and a frightening accompaniment of fruitcakes. His knees seem to have developed opposing magnetic fields; Remus tries hard not to think of situating himself between them.
“That’ll be up until Valentine’s Day,” says Remus, moving a fruitcake off the couch so he can sit down.
“It’s your gift,” says Sirius, leaning over to kiss the smile quirking his lips at the corner. “The crusty personification of my affection. Roses are red / Violets are blue / This wreath is a metaphor / For how badly I want to shag you.”
“That was sublime, Sirius.”
“I contain multitudes,” Sirius says, and shovels in some curry.
Some blurry time later, after they’ve finished dinner and they’re feeding each other unidentifiable, gelatinous blobs plucked out of the fruitcake as nighttime sweeps over their edge of London, the wireless starts playing an overwrought version of O Holy Night. Remus turns his head in the crook of Sirius’s neck and shoulder and mouths the chorus into his throat tunelessly, voice cracking on the high notes and feeling Sirius’s laughter spill into his lips like wine, wondering dimly if he could stretch this entire moment out forever with some sort of unspeakable spellwork and live in it forever.
“Remember Christmas sixth year?” Sirius asks him, fingers in his hair. “I think we were writing five times a day and all I did was listen to that Stooges record you gave me, and some of your Patti Smith because I missed you. I tried not to let on but I was so happy when you came back early that I think it broke something, my spleen maybe, and I think-I’d been thinking about you before then, I know, but I think that’s when I realized it wasn’t just hormones making me want to lick those scars on your belly all the time.”
“You don’t even know where your spleen is.”
“Because you destroyed it.”
“And you thought I was just a bunch of hormones, you berk,” says Remus, angling his head so he can bite down gently on Sirius’s earlobe, tasting the metallic tang of his earring and the rainwater softness of his skin. “If that was the case, I think a few wanks probably would have taken care of it well enough. Although that’s probably part of it, I mean, at least part of why the thought of you touching me inappropriately is enough to give me convulsions at any hour of the day.”
“At first, I thought it’d be-I don’t know, actually,” says Sirius. “On one hand, I wanted to fuck you senseless and stupid on every surface available, or maybe into the space-time continuum itself, but on the other, I wanted to go down on my knees for you in front of the entire goddamn world and treat you like an ancient Transfiguration text in fancy runic script and make breakfast every morning.” He smiles at Remus, his hand splitting apart into fingers at the back of Remus’s neck. “I still want to do all of that. But I want all of this, too.”
“The fruitcakes and the electrical hazards?”
“I told you it’s not going to burn down, you arse,” Sirius says fondly. “Just-you, and a place to stay, and a bed. Lots of pine. Maybe some fruitcake.”
Remus doesn’t know why it’s so hard for him to say what comes to Sirius so easily, or easier at least than it does to him; possibly it’s because Sirius doesn’t roll it around on his tongue until it melts down into a weak whisper and often just says what he thinks, unfiltered, where Remus measures the span of every letter and the worth of every word and decides it’s no good, or it sounds bad, or it’s not worth the emotional upheaval even after he’s already put himself through enough emotional upheaval to choke a rhinoceros. Me, too sounds so inadequate; he kisses the join of Sirius’s jaw and neck and hopes he can hear it anyway.
“Sounds good to me,” he says. “Maybe by this time next year we’ll have peace in the Wizarding world for Christmas and a big slice of Victory Pie.”
“A man can hope,” says Sirius. His mouth brushes against Remus’s hair when he speaks. “If we do manage it by next year and blow Voldemort and several generations of my family to minced meat, I’ll take you somewhere. Greece, maybe. I’ll touch you in intimate places under the table and you can do that thing where you undress me with your eyes across the table like a professional slag.”
“I do that anyway.”
“Yeah but if you really cared you’d do it with your teeth.”
“I can do that, too.”
“Brilliant man,” says Sirius, and Remus shifts involuntarily when he slides his arm down his back, as if his body is learning how to accommodate Sirius in all the secret hollows and curled-in places where their burnt-out threads and moon-bitten scars fit together better than anything ever has or will. “I almost feel guilty having you all to myself for Christmas. It’s an embarrassment of riches.”
“Do you really.”
“Nah. Not even a little.”
“Good,” says Remus, pressing a palm to Sirius chest and up to the hollow of his throat, where he can feel the miraculous clockwork of his pulse, where his words are still warm. “Because I’ve wanted this for a very long time, and werewolves are very bad at sharing, historically speaking.”
“Oh?” A forefinger pressing at his lips, between his teeth. Remus growls around it and runs his tongue along the underside of it. “I’ve always found them extremely agreeable, if a little inscrutable sometimes. Remus, what the hell does it even mean to be inscrutable? How do you be scrutable to begin with?”
“I love a man who asks the tough questions,” he says. He settles his arms around Sirius, his cold feet against Sirius’s cold feet, folding himself into the familiar, heavy warmth of each other. “We should probably check on the pudding,” he says as he closes his eyes.
“Probably,” Sirius agrees, and tucks an ankle around Remus’s feet.
Soon, he thinks, sometime soon, he’ll crack open his chest the rest of the way and show Sirius his best secret, the one he’s kept close for so long, twined around all the others like bindweed, where his heart has always been able to read it even when he couldn’t read it himself. Soon, he’ll find a way to tell Sirius in a way he can understand; for now, there’s no swell of violins, no parting of the clouds, no judgment and no deliverance. Nothing but a narrow couch and the static of the radio, London light like stars glittering in the ice on the window. Nothing but his skin on Sirius’s skin, nothing but the solidity of their beating hearts, alive, alive, alive.
Part 3