FIc: Elucidation Practice (Part 3/3) 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!
Christmas Eve comes like a thief, stalking through the flat on quiet feet and bringing with it a draught like a song, piling up in every crack and corner: rich notes of cinnamon and cloves and Buzzcocks undercut with Christmas music on the wireless, firelight on bare skin, wrinkled wool, the fruit of their laughter winding around the walls like the lights strung up with Spello-tape, and Remus gets so caught up in the whole cottony thing that he only has a minor pang of last-minute gut-panic as he wraps Sirius’s gift and shoves it under the tree, and then a slightly longer one when he notices how easily it slips into the shadow of whatever Sirius got for him. Still, there’s a whole night left before the inevitable cliff-side plummet into the realm of the saccharine and the irrevocable revelation of just what manner of artery-hardening sentiment Remus Lupin has been clogging his arteries with for so very many years.
But for now, all that is in the future. The near future, sure, but one that will come after a long night of mulled wine and gingerbread and preferably an extremely thorough shag to break the fall come morning. So, he sprawls out on the couch with Sirius and presses his cold hands to the back of Sirius’s neck, making him hiss and surge up into Remus until their bodies slot together in warm conjunctions, a hand sliding up the back of his shirt as he flows into Sirius, the wine of his mouth, the fluid arch of his hips; they drift like that for a while, hands in hair and under clothes and the salt-burn of their skin on Remus’s lips so that he can still feel the shape they make together when he closes his eyes, a sort of primal poetry that comes before sound or sight and exists somewhere in the blue skip of his pulse and between his lungs like an imprint on soft sheets. When he opens his eyes again, Sirius is watching him, running a thumb along his jawline, as if Remus is the only thing he can see. He shivers, and rubs his nose into the side of Sirius’s neck.
“It’s getting late,” he says, taking great care to move against Sirius’s thighs with a deliberate slideshow -slowness he’s learning to tug out of himself, the one Sirius loves. “I’d love to get out of these clothes but all my pajamas are in the laundry.”
“That’s a real tragedy,” says Sirius, laughter-heavy, skimming his hand along Remus’s hip, “especially considering I’ve got none to loan you. You’ll just have to sleep naked in this cold, harsh, unforgiving London winter, exposed to the elements and all the dark creatures of the night getting their hands all over you. Shows a serious-you can keep doing that-a serious lack of foresight on your part, Moony.”
“I know. It’s fortunate I share a bed with a man who’s willing to selflessly do whatever it takes to keep me warm on these cold nights when there’s naught but our skin for comfort.”
“Look at you,” says Sirius, tilting Remus’s chin up. He’s grinning in that way he has that’s always reminded Remus of the days just after the full moon, when the pain and the bone-white ache empty out of him, watching the moon on the wane with a fingernail scar across its broad face like peace and promise. “We’ve been fucking for two weeks and you’ve already turned into the biggest slag in England. How’d you know what I wanted for Christmas?”
“Latent Legilimency,” says Remus. He leans in again and bites gently at the hallow-dip of Sirius’s throat. “I could tell exactly what you were thinking in the Order meeting last week, perversion writ large all over your fine features-haha, that’s-that’s a very intimate place, Mr. Black,” he laughs, twisting away from Sirius’s hands ghosting around his ticklish ribs.
“And what was I thinking?”
“How badly you wanted your hand down my pants, and during Moody’s talk about Cave inimicum too, you might’ve paid some attention. I know it’s all fun and games until someone loses extremities or bollocks but I actually did learn a lot in between the shouting and the bulging eyeballs, in the event I have to use it.”
“Your lack of imagination is astounding,” says Sirius. “I was thinking of something with tongue, actually, and a hot ham with Swiss. He always talks past dinner and Dumbledore just lets him keep going while the rest of us suffer for need of a piss or a drink.” Across their scattered socks and LPs on the floorboards, the clock climbs its way to midnight over the mantel with the sea-green static of the wireless, counting out the newness of the day; Remus smiles to hear it, another new chord in the off-kilter harmony they’ve made of themselves in this place where they keep their hearts and their long nights and the strange fruit of their hopes, caught in the spaces where their arms are tangled. This is also when Sirius looks up at the snow falling in the gauzy bleed of the streetlights below, and then to the left-leaning tree, and says, “You know what we should do?”
“What?”
“Open gifts.”
Crack, goes Remus’s brain.
“Wouldn’t you rather wait until morning? It’s more, ah-traditional.”
Sirius, already bending over under the tree, levels Remus with a look that can only be described as fond disbelief and drops a package heavy enough to shatter a femur onto Remus’s lap. Maybe, he thinks, hopes, prays-maybe Sirius went for the scarf or the vodka Remus bought him at the last minute. If he went for the scarf Remus will say a goodnight prayer to every deity he doesn’t believe in, just for the sweet mercy of the universe.
He’s holding the photo album. Remus tries not to choke on his own tongue.
“Early gifts, Moony! Where’s the enthusiasm, Christ, it’s a present.” He nudges the bundle in Remus’s lap; the wrapping is a lot neater than Remus’s, which only makes his stomach churn faster. “Go on, rip into it. The paper’s made to be ruined anyway.”
Remus peels up the tape of one end of the package, conscious all the while of the lumpy thing in Sirius’s lap and his cold fingers and thinking of the way the light gets in Sirius’s eyes, how happy he looks to be sitting beside Remus, like there’s nothing he could ever want more than the tight closeness of their flat, the funny shapes they’ve spun from this gravity of theirs. Suddenly he’s thinking about futures and houses and breakfast with the crossword in front of big kitchen windows every morning til they’re old and grey. Suddenly he’s thinking about how Sirius’s eyes make his heartbeat pick up like it wants to be heard, how Sirius clearly missed his calling as a con artist.
The wrapping paper gives way to something thick and leather-bound: a whole set of Tolstoy, all of it secondhand and smelling of that age-warm, dusty-bright comfort that comes from all elderly books, some of the pages slightly yellowed but well-loved, like velour beneath his fingers. He leans down and breathes in Anna Karenina, loam-soft and ink-stained and brimming with the subtle stale florals of tragedy like an expensive perfume; he moans, very quietly.
“Like that, do you?” Sirius leers at him, entirely aware of the fact that he’s just gone for Remus’s literary jugular. “I picked the ones that smelled moldiest just for your discerning nose, so-all right, stop fondling them, I’ll get the wrong idea.”
“How,” asks Remus, thumbing the edges of the leather, “how do you always know?”
“It’s not like it’s hard. I know how you love your horrifying Russian literature and bookshops that smell like old sandwiches so I just combined them for maximum yuletide cheer-and I did get you something new too, I’m not that bad. But you’ll have to wait until morning for that one.” There’s such a sweetness in the hollows of his face and the light blading off his narrow nose-the unfettered joy that comes from making someone else happy-that Remus leans forward and kisses him, tenderly, until he can taste the laugh in Sirius’s mouth and lets his nose slot against Sirius’s as he pulls away.
“Thank you,” he says. “Sometimes I want to harvest your blood so I can find the source of your-the gift-giving intuition, I guess, but I’d probably end up with the parts that try to use Accio on the motorbike, too.”
“Only when I’m drunk,” says Sirius, tracing a thumb over the ridges of Remus’s knuckles. “Besides, am I not the gift that keeps on giving? All night, and sometimes well into the morning?”
“Are you going to tell me the real gift was us all along? Because please don’t.”
“No, Jesus fuck. We’re Russian literature, not Dickens.” Remus kisses the shadow at the corner of his mouth and watches Sirius turn away to the lumpy parcel in his lap. A moment of dread so profound sweeps through him that he feels his mouth go dry and his stomach clench up in a fist like an overdone Christmas pudding; he clutches at Tolstoy’s considerable girth, for moral support.
Sirius tears one folded end, working around the heavy Spello-tape sutures. He peels away the lopsided bow. The sound of the paper rips, rips, rips down each rung of Remus’s spine until it finally stops-always a whimper, never a bang-and Sirius holds the soppy, incriminating evidence of Remus’s chronic infatuation, as naked as Remus feels with the raw red meat of his heart in Sirius’s hands, waiting to be cracked open by exalted fingers.
“It’s not, I mean, it isn’t much and I know it’s stupid, but you said,” he rambles, looking out the window at golden, unsleeping London in the hush of a new needle-cold day so he doesn’t have to watch Sirius open the album, “you told me you didn’t have many photos, and I thought-this was before I got the job, so I didn’t have money that wasn’t yours and I was trying not to spend too much because I still needed to eat, and it seemed-it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I was in Dartmoor and I was the human equivalent of, of soggy bread or something because I missed you.”
He looks over at Sirius with his mind shattering into a million brilliant brain-shards, but Sirius is looking at a photo of himself and Regulus, labelled 1967 in Remus’s own tidy, sloping hand; he’s trying to teach Regulus to use a broomstick, showing him how to hold out his arm until it leaps into his hand. When he turns the page, he’s sitting with Andromeda at a large mossy pond, their bare feet hanging off the dock, making endless ripples in the water. “I thought it might be nice for you to have some, but I forget not everyone has my, what is it? My need to indulge the grandmotherly sensibilities once in a while. Just-you were a very sweet eight-year-old, for what it’s worth. And a criminally attractive adult, which those later pages can attest to, so I think it worked out pretty well for you in the end.”
How amazing it is, what you’ll say when your stomach is down by your knees and you’re trying hard not to bite down on the heart in your mouth. Remus can’t even keep track of the words gushing out, like blood welling up in a wound; it’s a habit born of a lifetime spent learning to hide his own monstrous shadow, he supposes, whenever he’s nervous or frightened, a sort of verbal armor he puts up between himself and the rest of the world: filling the holes the silence and suspicion make, and learning to choose each word carefully, arranging them like puzzle pieces, words like walls and windows and doors, words like maps to keep things inside or out. It’s always been so much easier to shut the door and keep the curtains drawn, but Sirius has always known how to pick locks and grow in between the cracks. And Remus has never, ever wanted to keep him out.
Besides, it’s all there on the pages: spilled in blacks and blues like a benediction in India ink, right where it’s been all along.
“Anyway, I got you a scarf and some vodka too, so it’s not all a loss, right?” Still nothing. Sirius turns another page to see a birthday at his parents’ house, dressed in green robes beside someone Remus doesn’t know. “It’s soppy and anyway I was hoping I’d have another ten hours and a shag to prepare, so-so, happy Christmas, and I’m sorry it’s, y’know, would you please say something, Sirius?”
“I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say,” says Sirius, softly. “And since you ruined the rest of the surprise, I got you a motorbike jacket because you look better than I do in mine and I was getting jealous, you miserable little bastard.”
“No I don’t.”
“Oh, shut up,” says Sirius. Remus takes a deep, quavering breath and curls his fingers into Tolstoy as he turns another page: a photo Remus took of him and James at Halloween in 1971, scooping out a pumpkin for carving. “Remus, I-Christ. Where did you even get these?”
“Most of them are Andromeda’s and mine. McKinnon and James gave me some, too.”
“So that’s how you knew what sort of pie she wanted this year.”
“Yeah.”
“You always were a clever lad, Moony.”
The next pages feature a collage of adolescent mishaps with various Zonko’s products and snowball fights and Black family holidays followed by a photo that someone-Peter?-took of himself and Sirius in the library during first year exams, Sirius’s head on his lap and both of them midnight-drowsy, idly leafing through their History of Magic books in the infrequent flicker of the fire; Sirius runs his thumb over Remus’s handwriting in a sort of wonder, and Remus, his heart back in his chest, feels himself warm at the memory of it and at the newness of their life together and London and midnight at Christmas, all inextricably bound up in each other. He wants more than anything else to live this forever, to know each version of themselves they’ve ever been or will ever be, these strange wanderers they can’t know yet, to come back to each other and fall in love and give themselves over, and over, and over, to find each other at the kitchen table and a hundred different doorways and be blinded by the shock of the love they’ve found.
“Remember this?” Sirius asks him, pointing to a photo from the summer after their first year, where he’s got his hand in a barrel of toad horns in Diagon Alley. “We came all the way to Shropshire to get you and the first thing we did was spend half our money on ice cream and venomous tentacula leaves and your face just-I’ve never seen someone’s face light up so fast.”
“James had that old swing behind his house,” says Remus, relaxing his death-grip on Tolstoy. “We could both fit in it, two at a time. I liked going with you because you always got it so high.”
On the next page, they’re at King’s Cross, twelve years old and hungry for everything. “God, I can’t,” Sirius starts, “I just can’t believe you remembered this.”
Remus swallows. He can feel something opening in his head, in his heart. “I listen to everything you tell me.”
“I know.”
Sirius laughs when he turns another page and finds a sequence of second year notes written on torn parchment, arranged in a cascade of Arithmancy boredom and ending with an extremely rude limerick. “Look at this. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t even, I can’t-you kept these.”
“You know I don’t like to throw anything away.”
“Yeah, but these are six years old, Remus. We were kids,” says Sirius, now reading a holiday letter from 1972 where he lovingly describes a plum pudding and how much he misses Remus three times, and where Remus, in answer, assures him that the full moon has gone well and expresses extreme jealousy at Sirius’s pudding fortune; he remembers reading it while the moon emptied out of his veins, lying in bed smiling with the ache of it until he knew every word by heart, until he could almost hear it in Sirius’s voice. “You kept these,” he says again, like a dream.
“They make me happy,” says Remus. For a moment, all he can hear is the sound of the clock, counting time between his heart and Sirius’s. “And, that’s to say, I’ve been in love with you for a very long time, really.”
There is a look on Sirius’s face Remus has never seen before when he turns to him from the photos, the surprise and the longing stark in the cut-glass lines of his face, his eyes as alive as Remus remembers them the day he stumbled into his train compartment, all wonder, all light, overflowing. He’s never put that look on anyone’s face before, like he’s just given Sirius the whole world over; he goes summer-still, curling his cold fingers on his knees and thinking wildly of rivers and mirrors and the bright clarity morning brings, how these things are meant to be said.
“I do,” he says, never looking away from Sirius, because this is what he only ever knew because he was brave enough let himself look in the first place. “I love you.”
“Even the daft bits?”
“Yes.”
“And the ones that use Accio on the motorbike?” His voice is halfway between laughter and reverence, and Remus’s heart rises, again, to know it’s for him.
“Those, too,” he says, “and the ones that bite. All of you,” and he leans in to kiss him.
“For the record,” Sirius murmurs against his lips, a warm chord of syllables, “I also love you to a degree that borders on insanity, so. Happy Christmas. I hope you plan to fill a hundred of these things with me because that sounds like a fine long-term goal to me, especially now that I can leave you all the filthy, sexually explicit notes I want around the flat.”
“With all the detail you know I find so incredibly sensual?”
“Mm.” Sirius’s tongue flicks between Remus’s lips again, making him shiver. “Every adjective in my brain, Moony. Every expert twist of my fingers.”
“A blow to the Victorian sensibilities of Wizarding England.”
“In so many ways,” Sirius says, and Remus goes to him, pressing his head into the hollow of Sirius’s neck and shoulder just as Sirius reaches for him, because they already know the flow of their own rhythm, their own gravity. “You’re just-you’re so-”
“So are you,” says Remus, because he knows this, too. “You do look so smug when you know you’ve done good.”
“All in the name of Christmas cheer, love of my life, fire of my significant regions,” says Sirius. Remus turns his head and kisses his temple, warm and rosebud-soft, and feels the shift as they press further into each other. “Will you read through this with me?” he asks, and Remus can’t be sure if the echo he hears in his chest is his heart or Sirius’s voice.
“At the risk of sounding like I do belong in a Dickens novel, and Christ knows I hate that, but. You know. The best thing I’ve ever done in my life is knock my head against yours,” says Remus, feeling Sirius’s pulse against his lips like a lyric he’s always known, a shape he understands: he is where Sirius is. They look down and find their place.
From here, where they can see London glittering moon-cold and amazed from their own front windows, where Sirius presses a stubble-prickly kiss to Remus’s mouth, where they set themselves against each other like two broken compass needles always pointing to each other, Remus reaches over and turns the page, and they sink into a fog together, into the solidity of themselves, into their knowns and unknowns, the private arithmetic of each other, and all the spaces they’ve filled together.
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!
Christmas Eve comes like a thief, stalking through the flat on quiet feet and bringing with it a draught like a song, piling up in every crack and corner: rich notes of cinnamon and cloves and Buzzcocks undercut with Christmas music on the wireless, firelight on bare skin, wrinkled wool, the fruit of their laughter winding around the walls like the lights strung up with Spello-tape, and Remus gets so caught up in the whole cottony thing that he only has a minor pang of last-minute gut-panic as he wraps Sirius’s gift and shoves it under the tree, and then a slightly longer one when he notices how easily it slips into the shadow of whatever Sirius got for him. Still, there’s a whole night left before the inevitable cliff-side plummet into the realm of the saccharine and the irrevocable revelation of just what manner of artery-hardening sentiment Remus Lupin has been clogging his arteries with for so very many years.
But for now, all that is in the future. The near future, sure, but one that will come after a long night of mulled wine and gingerbread and preferably an extremely thorough shag to break the fall come morning. So, he sprawls out on the couch with Sirius and presses his cold hands to the back of Sirius’s neck, making him hiss and surge up into Remus until their bodies slot together in warm conjunctions, a hand sliding up the back of his shirt as he flows into Sirius, the wine of his mouth, the fluid arch of his hips; they drift like that for a while, hands in hair and under clothes and the salt-burn of their skin on Remus’s lips so that he can still feel the shape they make together when he closes his eyes, a sort of primal poetry that comes before sound or sight and exists somewhere in the blue skip of his pulse and between his lungs like an imprint on soft sheets. When he opens his eyes again, Sirius is watching him, running a thumb along his jawline, as if Remus is the only thing he can see. He shivers, and rubs his nose into the side of Sirius’s neck.
“It’s getting late,” he says, taking great care to move against Sirius’s thighs with a deliberate slideshow -slowness he’s learning to tug out of himself, the one Sirius loves. “I’d love to get out of these clothes but all my pajamas are in the laundry.”
“That’s a real tragedy,” says Sirius, laughter-heavy, skimming his hand along Remus’s hip, “especially considering I’ve got none to loan you. You’ll just have to sleep naked in this cold, harsh, unforgiving London winter, exposed to the elements and all the dark creatures of the night getting their hands all over you. Shows a serious-you can keep doing that-a serious lack of foresight on your part, Moony.”
“I know. It’s fortunate I share a bed with a man who’s willing to selflessly do whatever it takes to keep me warm on these cold nights when there’s naught but our skin for comfort.”
“Look at you,” says Sirius, tilting Remus’s chin up. He’s grinning in that way he has that’s always reminded Remus of the days just after the full moon, when the pain and the bone-white ache empty out of him, watching the moon on the wane with a fingernail scar across its broad face like peace and promise. “We’ve been fucking for two weeks and you’ve already turned into the biggest slag in England. How’d you know what I wanted for Christmas?”
“Latent Legilimency,” says Remus. He leans in again and bites gently at the hallow-dip of Sirius’s throat. “I could tell exactly what you were thinking in the Order meeting last week, perversion writ large all over your fine features-haha, that’s-that’s a very intimate place, Mr. Black,” he laughs, twisting away from Sirius’s hands ghosting around his ticklish ribs.
“And what was I thinking?”
“How badly you wanted your hand down my pants, and during Moody’s talk about Cave inimicum too, you might’ve paid some attention. I know it’s all fun and games until someone loses extremities or bollocks but I actually did learn a lot in between the shouting and the bulging eyeballs, in the event I have to use it.”
“Your lack of imagination is astounding,” says Sirius. “I was thinking of something with tongue, actually, and a hot ham with Swiss. He always talks past dinner and Dumbledore just lets him keep going while the rest of us suffer for need of a piss or a drink.” Across their scattered socks and LPs on the floorboards, the clock climbs its way to midnight over the mantel with the sea-green static of the wireless, counting out the newness of the day; Remus smiles to hear it, another new chord in the off-kilter harmony they’ve made of themselves in this place where they keep their hearts and their long nights and the strange fruit of their hopes, caught in the spaces where their arms are tangled. This is also when Sirius looks up at the snow falling in the gauzy bleed of the streetlights below, and then to the left-leaning tree, and says, “You know what we should do?”
“What?”
“Open gifts.”
Crack, goes Remus’s brain.
“Wouldn’t you rather wait until morning? It’s more, ah-traditional.”
Sirius, already bending over under the tree, levels Remus with a look that can only be described as fond disbelief and drops a package heavy enough to shatter a femur onto Remus’s lap. Maybe, he thinks, hopes, prays-maybe Sirius went for the scarf or the vodka Remus bought him at the last minute. If he went for the scarf Remus will say a goodnight prayer to every deity he doesn’t believe in, just for the sweet mercy of the universe.
He’s holding the photo album. Remus tries not to choke on his own tongue.
“Early gifts, Moony! Where’s the enthusiasm, Christ, it’s a present.” He nudges the bundle in Remus’s lap; the wrapping is a lot neater than Remus’s, which only makes his stomach churn faster. “Go on, rip into it. The paper’s made to be ruined anyway.”
Remus peels up the tape of one end of the package, conscious all the while of the lumpy thing in Sirius’s lap and his cold fingers and thinking of the way the light gets in Sirius’s eyes, how happy he looks to be sitting beside Remus, like there’s nothing he could ever want more than the tight closeness of their flat, the funny shapes they’ve spun from this gravity of theirs. Suddenly he’s thinking about futures and houses and breakfast with the crossword in front of big kitchen windows every morning til they’re old and grey. Suddenly he’s thinking about how Sirius’s eyes make his heartbeat pick up like it wants to be heard, how Sirius clearly missed his calling as a con artist.
The wrapping paper gives way to something thick and leather-bound: a whole set of Tolstoy, all of it secondhand and smelling of that age-warm, dusty-bright comfort that comes from all elderly books, some of the pages slightly yellowed but well-loved, like velour beneath his fingers. He leans down and breathes in Anna Karenina, loam-soft and ink-stained and brimming with the subtle stale florals of tragedy like an expensive perfume; he moans, very quietly.
“Like that, do you?” Sirius leers at him, entirely aware of the fact that he’s just gone for Remus’s literary jugular. “I picked the ones that smelled moldiest just for your discerning nose, so-all right, stop fondling them, I’ll get the wrong idea.”
“How,” asks Remus, thumbing the edges of the leather, “how do you always know?”
“It’s not like it’s hard. I know how you love your horrifying Russian literature and bookshops that smell like old sandwiches so I just combined them for maximum yuletide cheer-and I did get you something new too, I’m not that bad. But you’ll have to wait until morning for that one.” There’s such a sweetness in the hollows of his face and the light blading off his narrow nose-the unfettered joy that comes from making someone else happy-that Remus leans forward and kisses him, tenderly, until he can taste the laugh in Sirius’s mouth and lets his nose slot against Sirius’s as he pulls away.
“Thank you,” he says. “Sometimes I want to harvest your blood so I can find the source of your-the gift-giving intuition, I guess, but I’d probably end up with the parts that try to use Accio on the motorbike, too.”
“Only when I’m drunk,” says Sirius, tracing a thumb over the ridges of Remus’s knuckles. “Besides, am I not the gift that keeps on giving? All night, and sometimes well into the morning?”
“Are you going to tell me the real gift was us all along? Because please don’t.”
“No, Jesus fuck. We’re Russian literature, not Dickens.” Remus kisses the shadow at the corner of his mouth and watches Sirius turn away to the lumpy parcel in his lap. A moment of dread so profound sweeps through him that he feels his mouth go dry and his stomach clench up in a fist like an overdone Christmas pudding; he clutches at Tolstoy’s considerable girth, for moral support.
Sirius tears one folded end, working around the heavy Spello-tape sutures. He peels away the lopsided bow. The sound of the paper rips, rips, rips down each rung of Remus’s spine until it finally stops-always a whimper, never a bang-and Sirius holds the soppy, incriminating evidence of Remus’s chronic infatuation, as naked as Remus feels with the raw red meat of his heart in Sirius’s hands, waiting to be cracked open by exalted fingers.
“It’s not, I mean, it isn’t much and I know it’s stupid, but you said,” he rambles, looking out the window at golden, unsleeping London in the hush of a new needle-cold day so he doesn’t have to watch Sirius open the album, “you told me you didn’t have many photos, and I thought-this was before I got the job, so I didn’t have money that wasn’t yours and I was trying not to spend too much because I still needed to eat, and it seemed-it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I was in Dartmoor and I was the human equivalent of, of soggy bread or something because I missed you.”
He looks over at Sirius with his mind shattering into a million brilliant brain-shards, but Sirius is looking at a photo of himself and Regulus, labelled 1967 in Remus’s own tidy, sloping hand; he’s trying to teach Regulus to use a broomstick, showing him how to hold out his arm until it leaps into his hand. When he turns the page, he’s sitting with Andromeda at a large mossy pond, their bare feet hanging off the dock, making endless ripples in the water. “I thought it might be nice for you to have some, but I forget not everyone has my, what is it? My need to indulge the grandmotherly sensibilities once in a while. Just-you were a very sweet eight-year-old, for what it’s worth. And a criminally attractive adult, which those later pages can attest to, so I think it worked out pretty well for you in the end.”
How amazing it is, what you’ll say when your stomach is down by your knees and you’re trying hard not to bite down on the heart in your mouth. Remus can’t even keep track of the words gushing out, like blood welling up in a wound; it’s a habit born of a lifetime spent learning to hide his own monstrous shadow, he supposes, whenever he’s nervous or frightened, a sort of verbal armor he puts up between himself and the rest of the world: filling the holes the silence and suspicion make, and learning to choose each word carefully, arranging them like puzzle pieces, words like walls and windows and doors, words like maps to keep things inside or out. It’s always been so much easier to shut the door and keep the curtains drawn, but Sirius has always known how to pick locks and grow in between the cracks. And Remus has never, ever wanted to keep him out.
Besides, it’s all there on the pages: spilled in blacks and blues like a benediction in India ink, right where it’s been all along.
“Anyway, I got you a scarf and some vodka too, so it’s not all a loss, right?” Still nothing. Sirius turns another page to see a birthday at his parents’ house, dressed in green robes beside someone Remus doesn’t know. “It’s soppy and anyway I was hoping I’d have another ten hours and a shag to prepare, so-so, happy Christmas, and I’m sorry it’s, y’know, would you please say something, Sirius?”
“I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say,” says Sirius, softly. “And since you ruined the rest of the surprise, I got you a motorbike jacket because you look better than I do in mine and I was getting jealous, you miserable little bastard.”
“No I don’t.”
“Oh, shut up,” says Sirius. Remus takes a deep, quavering breath and curls his fingers into Tolstoy as he turns another page: a photo Remus took of him and James at Halloween in 1971, scooping out a pumpkin for carving. “Remus, I-Christ. Where did you even get these?”
“Most of them are Andromeda’s and mine. McKinnon and James gave me some, too.”
“So that’s how you knew what sort of pie she wanted this year.”
“Yeah.”
“You always were a clever lad, Moony.”
The next pages feature a collage of adolescent mishaps with various Zonko’s products and snowball fights and Black family holidays followed by a photo that someone-Peter?-took of himself and Sirius in the library during first year exams, Sirius’s head on his lap and both of them midnight-drowsy, idly leafing through their History of Magic books in the infrequent flicker of the fire; Sirius runs his thumb over Remus’s handwriting in a sort of wonder, and Remus, his heart back in his chest, feels himself warm at the memory of it and at the newness of their life together and London and midnight at Christmas, all inextricably bound up in each other. He wants more than anything else to live this forever, to know each version of themselves they’ve ever been or will ever be, these strange wanderers they can’t know yet, to come back to each other and fall in love and give themselves over, and over, and over, to find each other at the kitchen table and a hundred different doorways and be blinded by the shock of the love they’ve found.
“Remember this?” Sirius asks him, pointing to a photo from the summer after their first year, where he’s got his hand in a barrel of toad horns in Diagon Alley. “We came all the way to Shropshire to get you and the first thing we did was spend half our money on ice cream and venomous tentacula leaves and your face just-I’ve never seen someone’s face light up so fast.”
“James had that old swing behind his house,” says Remus, relaxing his death-grip on Tolstoy. “We could both fit in it, two at a time. I liked going with you because you always got it so high.”
On the next page, they’re at King’s Cross, twelve years old and hungry for everything. “God, I can’t,” Sirius starts, “I just can’t believe you remembered this.”
Remus swallows. He can feel something opening in his head, in his heart. “I listen to everything you tell me.”
“I know.”
Sirius laughs when he turns another page and finds a sequence of second year notes written on torn parchment, arranged in a cascade of Arithmancy boredom and ending with an extremely rude limerick. “Look at this. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t even, I can’t-you kept these.”
“You know I don’t like to throw anything away.”
“Yeah, but these are six years old, Remus. We were kids,” says Sirius, now reading a holiday letter from 1972 where he lovingly describes a plum pudding and how much he misses Remus three times, and where Remus, in answer, assures him that the full moon has gone well and expresses extreme jealousy at Sirius’s pudding fortune; he remembers reading it while the moon emptied out of his veins, lying in bed smiling with the ache of it until he knew every word by heart, until he could almost hear it in Sirius’s voice. “You kept these,” he says again, like a dream.
“They make me happy,” says Remus. For a moment, all he can hear is the sound of the clock, counting time between his heart and Sirius’s. “And, that’s to say, I’ve been in love with you for a very long time, really.”
There is a look on Sirius’s face Remus has never seen before when he turns to him from the photos, the surprise and the longing stark in the cut-glass lines of his face, his eyes as alive as Remus remembers them the day he stumbled into his train compartment, all wonder, all light, overflowing. He’s never put that look on anyone’s face before, like he’s just given Sirius the whole world over; he goes summer-still, curling his cold fingers on his knees and thinking wildly of rivers and mirrors and the bright clarity morning brings, how these things are meant to be said.
“I do,” he says, never looking away from Sirius, because this is what he only ever knew because he was brave enough let himself look in the first place. “I love you.”
“Even the daft bits?”
“Yes.”
“And the ones that use Accio on the motorbike?” His voice is halfway between laughter and reverence, and Remus’s heart rises, again, to know it’s for him.
“Those, too,” he says, “and the ones that bite. All of you,” and he leans in to kiss him.
“For the record,” Sirius murmurs against his lips, a warm chord of syllables, “I also love you to a degree that borders on insanity, so. Happy Christmas. I hope you plan to fill a hundred of these things with me because that sounds like a fine long-term goal to me, especially now that I can leave you all the filthy, sexually explicit notes I want around the flat.”
“With all the detail you know I find so incredibly sensual?”
“Mm.” Sirius’s tongue flicks between Remus’s lips again, making him shiver. “Every adjective in my brain, Moony. Every expert twist of my fingers.”
“A blow to the Victorian sensibilities of Wizarding England.”
“In so many ways,” Sirius says, and Remus goes to him, pressing his head into the hollow of Sirius’s neck and shoulder just as Sirius reaches for him, because they already know the flow of their own rhythm, their own gravity. “You’re just-you’re so-”
“So are you,” says Remus, because he knows this, too. “You do look so smug when you know you’ve done good.”
“All in the name of Christmas cheer, love of my life, fire of my significant regions,” says Sirius. Remus turns his head and kisses his temple, warm and rosebud-soft, and feels the shift as they press further into each other. “Will you read through this with me?” he asks, and Remus can’t be sure if the echo he hears in his chest is his heart or Sirius’s voice.
“At the risk of sounding like I do belong in a Dickens novel, and Christ knows I hate that, but. You know. The best thing I’ve ever done in my life is knock my head against yours,” says Remus, feeling Sirius’s pulse against his lips like a lyric he’s always known, a shape he understands: he is where Sirius is. They look down and find their place.
From here, where they can see London glittering moon-cold and amazed from their own front windows, where Sirius presses a stubble-prickly kiss to Remus’s mouth, where they set themselves against each other like two broken compass needles always pointing to each other, Remus reaches over and turns the page, and they sink into a fog together, into the solidity of themselves, into their knowns and unknowns, the private arithmetic of each other, and all the spaces they’ve filled together.