Fic: Show Me What It Could Be Like for abyss_valkyrie
Title: Show Me What It Could Be Like
Author/Artist: mustntgetmy
Recipient: abyss_valkyrie
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Cursing, some references to sex but nothing too hardcore *
Word count:4,437
Summary: Unbeknownst to any of his friends, Remus has been writing M/M erotica for a living. But naturally, it's impossible for this kind of secret to be kept for very long - especially from Sirius.
Notes: I honestly meant for this to have way, way more smut in it than it actually has (which is next to none, I'm sorry!), but because I wrote it mostly at my job that didn't pan out. Hope you enjoy it anyway, abyss_valkyrie and happy holidays to you!
Remus stood before the persimmons and the oranges, weighing one with his hand and the rest with his eyes. For as long as he’d been living on his own, he had only skulked through the produce section of the market at the end of the day, when he would hope for bruised and older fruit to be marked on sale - a hope that, when it was answered, would give him a burst of joy so expansive and profound that it would force him to count out how long it had been since he’d last eaten anything that hadn’t been packaged in cheap plastic or cardboard. Usually, this would mean casting his mind back to the previous month but today he thought of yesterday, when he’d been running late to meet Sirius and the others and had grabbed an apple from the greengrocer so he wouldn’t have to apparate on an empty stomach. He remembered the casualness of that moment, of grabbing an apple near the top of the pile - not even pausing to consider it for bruises or blemishes - setting the coins down on the counter without fretting, hurrying off with the apple between his teeth, taking five big bites of it and then - and here was the most shocking part - throwing it away half-uneaten. And now, not a day later, he was standing in the middle of the fruit aisle slowly realizing that he could, if he wanted to, buy two of each and still have plenty of money to spare for something from the bakery. This realization turned the moment at the market into something surreal and dreamlike. The persimmons and the oranges looked like hardened droplets of sunlight; things that grew out of sunlight had never belonged to him before - he was used to the cold moon grays of day old bread and tacky oatmeal - and it was with something approaching wonder that he palmed a handful of each and tucked them into a basket already stuffed nearly full of food.
“Remus is looking good lately,” he had heard Lily say last night when he’d gotten up to buy a round of drinks. (Yes, he had bought the round! And not with a handful of Knuts he’d scraped together, but with two newly minted Galleons!) “Yeah, you’re right, love,” James had said, and Remus had mentally reviewed his new robe and the first haircut of his adult life that he hadn’t done himself, and then James had added, “The magazine must be doing well.”
Ah, that. Well, it was technically true: The Diagon Alley Review was doing well. But Remus didn’t write for them anymore.
He was careful to change the subject when he brought back the drinks; he hadn’t wanted any of them asking about the Dark Arts prevention articles he was no longer writing. There was a part of him that knew that eventually he’d have to tell them where his new money was coming from, but there was another part of him that only heard the derisive snigger Sirius let out whenever someone wholeheartedly embarrassed themselves in his presence. He had aimed that laugh at Peter Merlin knows how many times and though Remus had always felt bad as he’d watched Peter grow red and start to stammer he had always been privately glad to have been spared that knifelike laugh and that cool look in Sirius’s eyes.
Cruel boys were often beautiful boys - like the thorns on a rose and the luminous colors on poisonous dart frogs, it was nature’s piss poor attempt at a warning - and although Sirius was many things, most of them good, he was, on occasion, thoughtlessly cruel. He was a Cursebreaker in Gringott’s foreign division now, a job that somehow managed to appeal to the reckless, daring side of Sirius, as well as the slight elitist portion of himself that he’d never quite been able to shake, no matter how far he went from Grimmauld Place. He was forever being sent out on missions to far flung Gringott’s treasury outposts in places like Thailand and India and would return with souvenirs, scorch marks on his robes, and a banker’s weary air. Despite its irregular hours it was a thoroughly adult job, as was everyone else’s: Lily worked as a potioneer in St Mungo’s research division, James had co-founded a Muggle outreach initiative with Marlene McKinnon, and Peter, like many of their friends from Hogwarts, was a Ministry of Magic bureaucrat. Remus supposed that his job could be classified as “adult” as well, but not quite in the same way.
Was that the only reason why he hadn’t told his friends yet? Because he was embarrassed and worried they might also be? Well, that was part of it, certainly. But the other part of it was that he had seen some of them with his books.
They were paperbacks sold with a discreet mirage-inducing cover meant to disguise what you were reading but which really only gave it away (what other kind of book would you be hiding?). He had gone to a lunch party at the Potters to find Lily, Mary, and Marlene in a corner, clustered behind one of his books, giggling. Without needing to sneak behind them and check he knew it was his newest one because Marlene kept making a gesture like she was holding a whip. They didn’t turn the book around to read his pseudonym and exclaim, “Who writes this shit?” They had only kept giggling and Mary had squealed, “Ooh, I love this series!”
He had realized then that to out himself as the author would spoil their fun - and prompt them to look through the book for any connections to Remus’s real life. They would want to know if they were in there.
Now, this, Remus had been very careful about. There were no clever ginger woman characters, who made tea and counseled his protagonist, and there was no pudgy friend with a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. There was certainly no messy-haired, bespeckled athletic type character, either as a side character or a romantic interest. The protagonist himself - a blonde Quidditch player named Aidan - bore about as little resemblance to Remus as possible. Sure, he took his tea the same way Remus did, but that was only a little bit of cheek. In each book in the series Aidan juggled his emotional (and sometimes physical) affections for the three love interests Remus had dreamt up: the other Quidditch player, the Auror (for Aidan had managed to get himself involved in a Dark Arts investigation - a preposterous plot turn that had somehow managed to put Remus’s books on the map), and his childhood friend, a bookish museum curator named Kiernan. They had all been created based on the archetypes his publisher had outlined (an athletic one, a dangerous one, a kind one) in the hopes of appealing to most readers, no matter what her particular taste was. And they were mainly “hers” - Remus had no delusions about that. The love interests had been created from a composite of magazine images and vague memories of the romance movies his mother would sniffle and cheer through on the days when their television managed to get a clear signal. They had no anchor to reality (the Auror, for instance, had eyes so blue the sky was pale in comparison, had studied French pastry making, and had a ten inch cock - nargles were more real than he was) and there was no trail of breadcrumbs that led back to Remus or anyone he knew. He would be safe when he finally told them all. It would be embarrassing - the latest book had featured Aidan and the Auror typing each other up with unicorn-grade silk in the darkened ballroom of a posh hotel - but it wouldn’t be incriminating.
Except for the fact that, as Remus would discover, all fiction writing is.
…
The lease came up on his flat in May and he shoved his clothes and books into his Extendable Charm bearing trunk and moved across London to a scrubbed clean flat with a beech tree outside and an actual kitchen (well, a half kitchen, but still). Before he could even unpack Sirius, James, and Peter had come over with rotgut firewhisky and dragon steaks and they spent the night bouncing back and forth between rapture and the need to be sick. They thoroughly broke in his toilet and sink as well as the adapted stereo that could tune in on wizard radio and still play CDs. He had bought the stereo when his last royalty check, fattened by the instant success of his newest, had come in. Accompanying the check his publisher had included a note saying that the books should continue on their current trajectory - i.e. that they should include more smut. Remus was not opposed to this although the erotic scenes were among the most unrealistic thing about the books (coming at the same time? Penetration with zero preparation? A partner who always looks you in the eye? Who never gets tired of you? Yeah. Right.). His main concern, really, was running out of ideas for them. The night Sirius and the others came over he was already scrambling to figure out what he would do for one such scene in the draft he was currently writing.
The night’s drinking had been so excessive that Sirius, James, and Peter were still at his flat the following morning. Remus woke up feeling like he had somehow survived being smashed in the skull with a hammer and crawled off the sofa, where he’d fallen asleep, and went whimpering to the window to shut the curtains against the agonizingly bright daylight. He held an arm over his eyes as he closed them and collapsed, groaning, beneath the sill when darkness filled the room. From above him he heard a soft chuckling and then click and pop of a camera going off. Remus risked looking up and saw Sirius, apparently unaffected, grinning at him from behind the camera lens.
“You…” Remus ground out. “Are…the worst…in the world…”
“Am I?” Sirius said, his voice loud and bright. From the corner of the room James and Peter both moaned and cursed; Remus winced. “And here I thought I was a pretty alright sort.” He dangled what looked like a shard of actual fucking light in front of Remus’s nose. Remus almost retched until he saw what Sirius was actually holding.
“Oh, God.”
“Yes?” Sirius said cheekily.
Remus snatched the bottle of hangover cure away from him, taking a long draught, and flipping him off as he laughed. He felt a pulse of almost excruciating nausea but at the moment he thought he might have to throw up again all he ended up doing was belching and the pain was swept away. He sighed with relief, ignored Sirius’s cackling, and got up to give the bottle to James.
“What do I owe you?” Remus asked, looking around for his wallet.
“Eternal gratitude,” Sirius said. “You can begin by licking my boot.”
“Yes, of course, just give me a moment to grab my peasant costume and murder my dignity,” Remus said, rolling his eyes as James handed over the bottle to Peter. “Really, though. I know how expensive that stuff is. How much?”
Sirius shrugged. “Not a clue. Some international bank that wanted to do business with Gringott’s was handing them out like candy at the last work retreat I had to go to.”
Remus cringed and then was pleased that moving to a higher tax bracket hadn’t made him immune to the disgusting excess of businesses and bankers. He made a mental note to sneak a few Galleons into Sirius’s pocket later and felt the usual accompanying thrill that he had Galleons to spare to do so.
On the other side of the room James was crawling around on all fours apparently searching for something.
“Shit,” he groaned. “Anyone see that other bag I brought? It’s got Lily’s anniversary gift in it.”
“What, this?” Sirius said, hefting up a large white bag.
“Oh, thank Merlin,” James said. He stretched out his hand for it, but naturally Sirius rooted around in the bag and pulled out the box that was inside it instead. He popped the top off the box and unfolded a long, slinky gold dress.
“Well, well,” Sirius said, surprised. “Who knew you had taste?”
“Christ, Padfoot, I’m never going to be able to fold it back like it was.”
“Relax,” Sirius said, and then in a single fluid motion that was so typical of him, he held the dress flush against his own body and cocked his hip suggestively. “Well, what do you think?”
This was an old joke and one that Remus had already begun to prepare to laugh at. But somehow the laugh wouldn’t rise from his throat. It ought to have been funny - the dress was so obviously made for Lily that anyone else should’ve looked foolish in it - but instead of being comical it was something else entirely. It was the way Sirius had his hip tilted, the way his head was thrown back to expose (the pale column, he would’ve written) of his throat. It was the dare in his eyes, the silk bunched around his thighs. It was the way he looked at Remus a millisecond longer than anyone else. It was glorious, it was hot, it would be perfect for his next book.
“Fetching,” James sniped, waving his hand more insistently for the dress, but Sirius wasn’t looking at him. He was looking again at Remus and with a smile that was dreadfully full of knowing he said, “Have a wank, Moony. It’ll last longer.”
“I’d love to,” Remus returned, “but I’d need something to actually wank off to.”
Peter sniggered and James laughed uproariously. Sirius tossed his hair (perfect and black against his pale skin) and said sniffily, “The nerve of some people.” He flicked his wand and the dress coiled up, folding neatly into the box. Just before the box lid concealed the dress from view Remus had time to notice two things: that the glimmer of the golden dress in the plain was box was similar to the feeling he had when he could feel a good writing day was coming on, and that Sirius was still looking at him.
…
Spring deepened into summer, summer faded into fall, fall frosted over into winter, and Remus finished his book. It was published and was successful enough that for the first time non-romance readers took note of it. Think pieces were written denouncing it as coarse, plotless smut, which naturally only made sales increase. Remus watched this controversy play out in the papers, biting his lip all the while. At the annual Christmas party at the Potter’s the book was the main topic of conversation. Now, he started to hear them saying, “Who writes this stuff?” Now, the question of who the author really was came up.
“It’s autobiographical. It has to be,” Marlene said with an air of authority. She had done a phase of going to swinger parties when she’d still been dating Fabian Prewett and thought that she recognized details of two of the love interests in the book.
“Don’t try to give it a sophistication it doesn’t have,” James said. “It’s probably written by a woman who lives alone with her twelve cats.”
“Just because the Quidditch player got dumped in this book and you identify with him-” Lily started in, a refrain on the argument they’d been having since the discussion began.”
“Er, um, what do you think, Sirius?” Peter asked, desperate to keep the peace.
Sirius had been uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion and now he raised his gaze from the depths of his empty wineglass.
“Observant,” he said.
“Uh, what?”
“It’s someone observant,” Sirius said with an air of finality, as if ending the matter. He raised his gaze from his wineglass and glanced ever so briefly at Remus - but it was long enough that Remus felt a blush grow hot in his cheeks and he couldn’t help but think that somehow he had given himself away.
The party ended abruptly when Frank and Alice were called away by an urgent owl from Mrs. Longbottom; apparently, Neville had somehow managed to swallow three Gobstones. The party broke down: Lily placed an anxious call to her own mother, who was watching Harry, Marlene and Mary made quick arrangements of their hair and make-up to make themselves more suitable for a night at a club, and Sirius scooped up the remaining uneaten mini-quiches and invited himself over to Remus’s flat.
“Babies,” Sirius said exasperatedly as they rushed into Remus’s flat. It was late December now, nearing Christmas, and London was bitter cold. “Babies are going to ruin every party from here on out, you’ll see.”
“Merlin, Sirius, the poor boy might’ve died,” Remus said, hurrying to stoke the warming charms he’d placed in the corners of his living room.
“Oh, please. Do you know how many Gobstones I swallowed as a boy? At least twenty Galleons worth.”
“Such an achievement,” Remus said, his hand out for Sirius’s cloak. “They ought to have known right then and there that you were going places.”
“A right prodigy I was,” Sirius said agreeably. He tugs his boots off and laid them on the floor. “Course I’ll admit it must be nice. Not the baby so much - wouldn’t want a baby myself - but, you know.”
Remus nodded, because he did know: someone to come home to would be nice. He had begun to notice lately how quiet it could get in this flat; how, without hunger or cold constantly sapping his strength for idle thought he turned inward and became morose. He felt this had become an unspoken issue between him and Sirius; it was certainly why Sirius invited himself round so often.
“Ah, but enough of this,” Sirius said, waving a hand. “How’s the book coming?”
“Oh, it’s - what book?”
But Remus, distracted by thoughts of his own loneliness, had caught himself too late.
Sirius, triumphant and lordly as he splayed out on the sofa, asked innocently, “Who’s Aidan going to fuck this time?”
Remus had to work hard to unclench his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re -”
“Oh, save it. I know it’s you. I’ve known since the first book.”
“But - but no one read the first book,” Remus protested lamely, although at the time he had been quite pleased to have sold the five hundred copies he did.
Sirius snorted and Remus remembered the particular details of that book: thin Quidditch jersey and tight leather trousers in a heap on the floor, Aidan pushed up against the wall of his own flat by the other Quidditch player, his first time with another man. “Show me what it could be like,” he’d had Aidan pant breathlessly before the first item of clothing peeled away to reveal skin. In context the line seemed to come out of nowhere and lead to nothing: it was the longest piece of dialogue on a page otherwise filled with “ohs!” and “yes, theres!” It was also the title of the book: an unwieldy mistake that had almost certainly cost Remus readers and which he had corrected in the second volume which was called “Darkest Desires.” It was also a mistake because it was something he had taken from his real life. In fourth year, pinned to his bed in the dormitory by a bodily restlessness that usually only came upon him in the days before the full moon, watching Sirius and James through a crack in his bed curtains he had heard it. Newly obsessed with The Rolling Stones they had decided to make a band and were writing a song. It was an awful, whiny thing, mostly penned by James and so mostly about Lily, but then all of a sudden Sirius’s voice had risen up, throaty and deep and filled with some heady quality that Remus was then only on the verge of understanding, and he had sang, “Show me…show me what it could be like,” and some part of Remus had liquefied and he had known conclusively that he was gay.
He blushed as he remembered this; he had not, he realized, been thorough in extricating his life from his books after all. His blush deepened as he realized that Sirius had known all along, that he had probably gone into the books looking for some link to Remus’s life, for some link to him - and he would’ve found them. Because just as Remus had used small details of himself to shape Aidan, so had he used small details of Sirius to shape the love interests. Sirius’s cufflinks, the scent of the cologne he work, even where his tan line began and ended during the summer - they were in the books. And then of course there was the dress: taken out of a box and put on and then rucked up to the waist. Only it wasn’t a gold dress, it was a smoky gray - much better suited to Sirius’s coloring.
(And why Sirius as a prototype for all these characters? Because he was Sirius, of course. Because although Remus had long ago given up any hope of having him, he was always there, smoldering and smirking, an embodiment of all the most heated parts of Remus’s genre.)
“Oh God,” he said aloud, mortification flooding him so thoroughly it practically blinded him. How could he have ever thought he had hidden himself in his writing? In truth, he had never exposed himself more.
Sirius watched him, his face expressionless, a seemingly impartial witness to Remus’s embarrassment. When he began to sit up Remus had to fight the urge to recoil, certain Sirius was about to take some revenge for having been used as a love interest in the books. But Sirius didn’t even get up off the sofa. He merely poured another glass of wine and continued to give Remus a steady, unblinking look until Remus forced himself to ask, “How did you know?”
“Thought the title looked familiar. Took me days to place where I knew it from - you really dug through the archives there, didn’t you? Course, that wasn’t exactly a brilliant, incomparable lyric, so I read the book. And after that it was obvious. Also,” he said, taking a sip, “I found the manuscript in your flat.”
“Ah,” Remus said, slumping against the wall. “Well, that’d do it.” He ran a hand through his hair, bit his lip, and then knew he had to know. “What gave it away? Why was it so obvious that it was written by me?”
“The tea.”
“What?”
“Aidan takes his tea the way you do. One sugar, no milk, and you had him read the newspaper from back to front while he drank it the same way you do. And he talks the way you do, you have him in the same colors you usually wear, your personalities are different - I know you don’t give that much of a shit about Quidditch - but I still felt like I knew him. From the first moment he appeared it was like I recognized him.”
“And no one else?” Remus asked. “You didn’t recognize anyone else?”
Sirius frowned. “Oh, I expect Gideon’s in there somewhere, isn’t he? I know the two of you were shagging -”
“Gideon and I had a drunken one night stand that I can barely remember let alone write about. I mean, did you notice -”
“So you and Gideon aren’t together then?” Sirius said, raising his glass, and it was preposterous, implausible and yet, he sounded happy, and it seemed like he had raised his glass to hide a smile. “Well, then, who are the others? You certainly make it hard to nail down your tastes.”
“Yeah, but at least I don’t make it hard for Aidan to get nailed,” he said and Sirius snorted. “You really don’t know? Who the love interests are?”
“Why, should I?” Sirius asked, and this time there was no mistaking how his smile tightened into something more resembling a grimace. It was this that gave Remus the courage to say what he did.
“I should hope so. They’re you.”
Sirius blinked, set down his wineglass, and gave Remus an incredulous look.
“How could you not know? I thought the dress of all things would’ve been a tip off. I thought you were going to - to get angry about it.”
“The dress?” Sirius said blankly. Then he seemed to remember because he nodded to himself and murmured, “Oh, yes, well I did look stunning so I can see why that would’ve been an inspiration, but then again it’s all just fictional, isn’t it? You taking what you need to write?”
“Some of it, yes.” And then, because boldness had become the order of the hour, he walked over to where Sirius sat on the sofa and slowly, softly, cupped his cheek, “And some of it no.”
Sirius smiled, as if they were both in on the same joke, and Remus, always the one to stop a joke when it had gone too far, leaned down and kissed that smile away. It was nothing like any kiss he had ever written about. For one thing, Sirius hardly kissed him back, and for another he was wholly aware of the strain in his back as he bent at an awkward angle to meet Sirius’s lips and how clammy his hand was against Sirius’s cheek and how pathetic and foolish this gesture was. He pulled away abruptly, his courage vanishing with the kiss’s ending. “Oh, Sirius. I’m sorry, I, uh -”
“Did you mean it? Or were you only hoping to snog me so hard I forget to tell everyone you’re the author?”
“I don’t care who you tell,” Remus said. “I meant it.”
“Well, then,” Sirius said, and then he rose in one of those fluid gestures that always sent a shiver of joy down Remus’s spine, and he grabbed Remus by the waist, pulled him close, and kissed him. This kiss was past writing, past words. It was seven years of longing broken open and dissolved in a single moment. It was every far flung hope and daydream he had ever had made flesh. It was real, it was happening: Sirius, here, now, with him.
“There,” Sirius said, before Remus pulled him down onto the sofa to begin the long overdue process of undressing him. “Some inspiration for your next book.”
Remus laughed, drew Sirius in for another kiss, and again they went out past words, past description, to where it was only the two of them together at the beginning of a promising new story.
Author/Artist: mustntgetmy
Recipient: abyss_valkyrie
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Cursing, some references to sex but nothing too hardcore *
Word count:4,437
Summary: Unbeknownst to any of his friends, Remus has been writing M/M erotica for a living. But naturally, it's impossible for this kind of secret to be kept for very long - especially from Sirius.
Notes: I honestly meant for this to have way, way more smut in it than it actually has (which is next to none, I'm sorry!), but because I wrote it mostly at my job that didn't pan out. Hope you enjoy it anyway, abyss_valkyrie and happy holidays to you!
Remus stood before the persimmons and the oranges, weighing one with his hand and the rest with his eyes. For as long as he’d been living on his own, he had only skulked through the produce section of the market at the end of the day, when he would hope for bruised and older fruit to be marked on sale - a hope that, when it was answered, would give him a burst of joy so expansive and profound that it would force him to count out how long it had been since he’d last eaten anything that hadn’t been packaged in cheap plastic or cardboard. Usually, this would mean casting his mind back to the previous month but today he thought of yesterday, when he’d been running late to meet Sirius and the others and had grabbed an apple from the greengrocer so he wouldn’t have to apparate on an empty stomach. He remembered the casualness of that moment, of grabbing an apple near the top of the pile - not even pausing to consider it for bruises or blemishes - setting the coins down on the counter without fretting, hurrying off with the apple between his teeth, taking five big bites of it and then - and here was the most shocking part - throwing it away half-uneaten. And now, not a day later, he was standing in the middle of the fruit aisle slowly realizing that he could, if he wanted to, buy two of each and still have plenty of money to spare for something from the bakery. This realization turned the moment at the market into something surreal and dreamlike. The persimmons and the oranges looked like hardened droplets of sunlight; things that grew out of sunlight had never belonged to him before - he was used to the cold moon grays of day old bread and tacky oatmeal - and it was with something approaching wonder that he palmed a handful of each and tucked them into a basket already stuffed nearly full of food.
“Remus is looking good lately,” he had heard Lily say last night when he’d gotten up to buy a round of drinks. (Yes, he had bought the round! And not with a handful of Knuts he’d scraped together, but with two newly minted Galleons!) “Yeah, you’re right, love,” James had said, and Remus had mentally reviewed his new robe and the first haircut of his adult life that he hadn’t done himself, and then James had added, “The magazine must be doing well.”
Ah, that. Well, it was technically true: The Diagon Alley Review was doing well. But Remus didn’t write for them anymore.
He was careful to change the subject when he brought back the drinks; he hadn’t wanted any of them asking about the Dark Arts prevention articles he was no longer writing. There was a part of him that knew that eventually he’d have to tell them where his new money was coming from, but there was another part of him that only heard the derisive snigger Sirius let out whenever someone wholeheartedly embarrassed themselves in his presence. He had aimed that laugh at Peter Merlin knows how many times and though Remus had always felt bad as he’d watched Peter grow red and start to stammer he had always been privately glad to have been spared that knifelike laugh and that cool look in Sirius’s eyes.
Cruel boys were often beautiful boys - like the thorns on a rose and the luminous colors on poisonous dart frogs, it was nature’s piss poor attempt at a warning - and although Sirius was many things, most of them good, he was, on occasion, thoughtlessly cruel. He was a Cursebreaker in Gringott’s foreign division now, a job that somehow managed to appeal to the reckless, daring side of Sirius, as well as the slight elitist portion of himself that he’d never quite been able to shake, no matter how far he went from Grimmauld Place. He was forever being sent out on missions to far flung Gringott’s treasury outposts in places like Thailand and India and would return with souvenirs, scorch marks on his robes, and a banker’s weary air. Despite its irregular hours it was a thoroughly adult job, as was everyone else’s: Lily worked as a potioneer in St Mungo’s research division, James had co-founded a Muggle outreach initiative with Marlene McKinnon, and Peter, like many of their friends from Hogwarts, was a Ministry of Magic bureaucrat. Remus supposed that his job could be classified as “adult” as well, but not quite in the same way.
Was that the only reason why he hadn’t told his friends yet? Because he was embarrassed and worried they might also be? Well, that was part of it, certainly. But the other part of it was that he had seen some of them with his books.
They were paperbacks sold with a discreet mirage-inducing cover meant to disguise what you were reading but which really only gave it away (what other kind of book would you be hiding?). He had gone to a lunch party at the Potters to find Lily, Mary, and Marlene in a corner, clustered behind one of his books, giggling. Without needing to sneak behind them and check he knew it was his newest one because Marlene kept making a gesture like she was holding a whip. They didn’t turn the book around to read his pseudonym and exclaim, “Who writes this shit?” They had only kept giggling and Mary had squealed, “Ooh, I love this series!”
He had realized then that to out himself as the author would spoil their fun - and prompt them to look through the book for any connections to Remus’s real life. They would want to know if they were in there.
Now, this, Remus had been very careful about. There were no clever ginger woman characters, who made tea and counseled his protagonist, and there was no pudgy friend with a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. There was certainly no messy-haired, bespeckled athletic type character, either as a side character or a romantic interest. The protagonist himself - a blonde Quidditch player named Aidan - bore about as little resemblance to Remus as possible. Sure, he took his tea the same way Remus did, but that was only a little bit of cheek. In each book in the series Aidan juggled his emotional (and sometimes physical) affections for the three love interests Remus had dreamt up: the other Quidditch player, the Auror (for Aidan had managed to get himself involved in a Dark Arts investigation - a preposterous plot turn that had somehow managed to put Remus’s books on the map), and his childhood friend, a bookish museum curator named Kiernan. They had all been created based on the archetypes his publisher had outlined (an athletic one, a dangerous one, a kind one) in the hopes of appealing to most readers, no matter what her particular taste was. And they were mainly “hers” - Remus had no delusions about that. The love interests had been created from a composite of magazine images and vague memories of the romance movies his mother would sniffle and cheer through on the days when their television managed to get a clear signal. They had no anchor to reality (the Auror, for instance, had eyes so blue the sky was pale in comparison, had studied French pastry making, and had a ten inch cock - nargles were more real than he was) and there was no trail of breadcrumbs that led back to Remus or anyone he knew. He would be safe when he finally told them all. It would be embarrassing - the latest book had featured Aidan and the Auror typing each other up with unicorn-grade silk in the darkened ballroom of a posh hotel - but it wouldn’t be incriminating.
Except for the fact that, as Remus would discover, all fiction writing is.
…
The lease came up on his flat in May and he shoved his clothes and books into his Extendable Charm bearing trunk and moved across London to a scrubbed clean flat with a beech tree outside and an actual kitchen (well, a half kitchen, but still). Before he could even unpack Sirius, James, and Peter had come over with rotgut firewhisky and dragon steaks and they spent the night bouncing back and forth between rapture and the need to be sick. They thoroughly broke in his toilet and sink as well as the adapted stereo that could tune in on wizard radio and still play CDs. He had bought the stereo when his last royalty check, fattened by the instant success of his newest, had come in. Accompanying the check his publisher had included a note saying that the books should continue on their current trajectory - i.e. that they should include more smut. Remus was not opposed to this although the erotic scenes were among the most unrealistic thing about the books (coming at the same time? Penetration with zero preparation? A partner who always looks you in the eye? Who never gets tired of you? Yeah. Right.). His main concern, really, was running out of ideas for them. The night Sirius and the others came over he was already scrambling to figure out what he would do for one such scene in the draft he was currently writing.
The night’s drinking had been so excessive that Sirius, James, and Peter were still at his flat the following morning. Remus woke up feeling like he had somehow survived being smashed in the skull with a hammer and crawled off the sofa, where he’d fallen asleep, and went whimpering to the window to shut the curtains against the agonizingly bright daylight. He held an arm over his eyes as he closed them and collapsed, groaning, beneath the sill when darkness filled the room. From above him he heard a soft chuckling and then click and pop of a camera going off. Remus risked looking up and saw Sirius, apparently unaffected, grinning at him from behind the camera lens.
“You…” Remus ground out. “Are…the worst…in the world…”
“Am I?” Sirius said, his voice loud and bright. From the corner of the room James and Peter both moaned and cursed; Remus winced. “And here I thought I was a pretty alright sort.” He dangled what looked like a shard of actual fucking light in front of Remus’s nose. Remus almost retched until he saw what Sirius was actually holding.
“Oh, God.”
“Yes?” Sirius said cheekily.
Remus snatched the bottle of hangover cure away from him, taking a long draught, and flipping him off as he laughed. He felt a pulse of almost excruciating nausea but at the moment he thought he might have to throw up again all he ended up doing was belching and the pain was swept away. He sighed with relief, ignored Sirius’s cackling, and got up to give the bottle to James.
“What do I owe you?” Remus asked, looking around for his wallet.
“Eternal gratitude,” Sirius said. “You can begin by licking my boot.”
“Yes, of course, just give me a moment to grab my peasant costume and murder my dignity,” Remus said, rolling his eyes as James handed over the bottle to Peter. “Really, though. I know how expensive that stuff is. How much?”
Sirius shrugged. “Not a clue. Some international bank that wanted to do business with Gringott’s was handing them out like candy at the last work retreat I had to go to.”
Remus cringed and then was pleased that moving to a higher tax bracket hadn’t made him immune to the disgusting excess of businesses and bankers. He made a mental note to sneak a few Galleons into Sirius’s pocket later and felt the usual accompanying thrill that he had Galleons to spare to do so.
On the other side of the room James was crawling around on all fours apparently searching for something.
“Shit,” he groaned. “Anyone see that other bag I brought? It’s got Lily’s anniversary gift in it.”
“What, this?” Sirius said, hefting up a large white bag.
“Oh, thank Merlin,” James said. He stretched out his hand for it, but naturally Sirius rooted around in the bag and pulled out the box that was inside it instead. He popped the top off the box and unfolded a long, slinky gold dress.
“Well, well,” Sirius said, surprised. “Who knew you had taste?”
“Christ, Padfoot, I’m never going to be able to fold it back like it was.”
“Relax,” Sirius said, and then in a single fluid motion that was so typical of him, he held the dress flush against his own body and cocked his hip suggestively. “Well, what do you think?”
This was an old joke and one that Remus had already begun to prepare to laugh at. But somehow the laugh wouldn’t rise from his throat. It ought to have been funny - the dress was so obviously made for Lily that anyone else should’ve looked foolish in it - but instead of being comical it was something else entirely. It was the way Sirius had his hip tilted, the way his head was thrown back to expose (the pale column, he would’ve written) of his throat. It was the dare in his eyes, the silk bunched around his thighs. It was the way he looked at Remus a millisecond longer than anyone else. It was glorious, it was hot, it would be perfect for his next book.
“Fetching,” James sniped, waving his hand more insistently for the dress, but Sirius wasn’t looking at him. He was looking again at Remus and with a smile that was dreadfully full of knowing he said, “Have a wank, Moony. It’ll last longer.”
“I’d love to,” Remus returned, “but I’d need something to actually wank off to.”
Peter sniggered and James laughed uproariously. Sirius tossed his hair (perfect and black against his pale skin) and said sniffily, “The nerve of some people.” He flicked his wand and the dress coiled up, folding neatly into the box. Just before the box lid concealed the dress from view Remus had time to notice two things: that the glimmer of the golden dress in the plain was box was similar to the feeling he had when he could feel a good writing day was coming on, and that Sirius was still looking at him.
…
Spring deepened into summer, summer faded into fall, fall frosted over into winter, and Remus finished his book. It was published and was successful enough that for the first time non-romance readers took note of it. Think pieces were written denouncing it as coarse, plotless smut, which naturally only made sales increase. Remus watched this controversy play out in the papers, biting his lip all the while. At the annual Christmas party at the Potter’s the book was the main topic of conversation. Now, he started to hear them saying, “Who writes this stuff?” Now, the question of who the author really was came up.
“It’s autobiographical. It has to be,” Marlene said with an air of authority. She had done a phase of going to swinger parties when she’d still been dating Fabian Prewett and thought that she recognized details of two of the love interests in the book.
“Don’t try to give it a sophistication it doesn’t have,” James said. “It’s probably written by a woman who lives alone with her twelve cats.”
“Just because the Quidditch player got dumped in this book and you identify with him-” Lily started in, a refrain on the argument they’d been having since the discussion began.”
“Er, um, what do you think, Sirius?” Peter asked, desperate to keep the peace.
Sirius had been uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion and now he raised his gaze from the depths of his empty wineglass.
“Observant,” he said.
“Uh, what?”
“It’s someone observant,” Sirius said with an air of finality, as if ending the matter. He raised his gaze from his wineglass and glanced ever so briefly at Remus - but it was long enough that Remus felt a blush grow hot in his cheeks and he couldn’t help but think that somehow he had given himself away.
The party ended abruptly when Frank and Alice were called away by an urgent owl from Mrs. Longbottom; apparently, Neville had somehow managed to swallow three Gobstones. The party broke down: Lily placed an anxious call to her own mother, who was watching Harry, Marlene and Mary made quick arrangements of their hair and make-up to make themselves more suitable for a night at a club, and Sirius scooped up the remaining uneaten mini-quiches and invited himself over to Remus’s flat.
“Babies,” Sirius said exasperatedly as they rushed into Remus’s flat. It was late December now, nearing Christmas, and London was bitter cold. “Babies are going to ruin every party from here on out, you’ll see.”
“Merlin, Sirius, the poor boy might’ve died,” Remus said, hurrying to stoke the warming charms he’d placed in the corners of his living room.
“Oh, please. Do you know how many Gobstones I swallowed as a boy? At least twenty Galleons worth.”
“Such an achievement,” Remus said, his hand out for Sirius’s cloak. “They ought to have known right then and there that you were going places.”
“A right prodigy I was,” Sirius said agreeably. He tugs his boots off and laid them on the floor. “Course I’ll admit it must be nice. Not the baby so much - wouldn’t want a baby myself - but, you know.”
Remus nodded, because he did know: someone to come home to would be nice. He had begun to notice lately how quiet it could get in this flat; how, without hunger or cold constantly sapping his strength for idle thought he turned inward and became morose. He felt this had become an unspoken issue between him and Sirius; it was certainly why Sirius invited himself round so often.
“Ah, but enough of this,” Sirius said, waving a hand. “How’s the book coming?”
“Oh, it’s - what book?”
But Remus, distracted by thoughts of his own loneliness, had caught himself too late.
Sirius, triumphant and lordly as he splayed out on the sofa, asked innocently, “Who’s Aidan going to fuck this time?”
Remus had to work hard to unclench his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re -”
“Oh, save it. I know it’s you. I’ve known since the first book.”
“But - but no one read the first book,” Remus protested lamely, although at the time he had been quite pleased to have sold the five hundred copies he did.
Sirius snorted and Remus remembered the particular details of that book: thin Quidditch jersey and tight leather trousers in a heap on the floor, Aidan pushed up against the wall of his own flat by the other Quidditch player, his first time with another man. “Show me what it could be like,” he’d had Aidan pant breathlessly before the first item of clothing peeled away to reveal skin. In context the line seemed to come out of nowhere and lead to nothing: it was the longest piece of dialogue on a page otherwise filled with “ohs!” and “yes, theres!” It was also the title of the book: an unwieldy mistake that had almost certainly cost Remus readers and which he had corrected in the second volume which was called “Darkest Desires.” It was also a mistake because it was something he had taken from his real life. In fourth year, pinned to his bed in the dormitory by a bodily restlessness that usually only came upon him in the days before the full moon, watching Sirius and James through a crack in his bed curtains he had heard it. Newly obsessed with The Rolling Stones they had decided to make a band and were writing a song. It was an awful, whiny thing, mostly penned by James and so mostly about Lily, but then all of a sudden Sirius’s voice had risen up, throaty and deep and filled with some heady quality that Remus was then only on the verge of understanding, and he had sang, “Show me…show me what it could be like,” and some part of Remus had liquefied and he had known conclusively that he was gay.
He blushed as he remembered this; he had not, he realized, been thorough in extricating his life from his books after all. His blush deepened as he realized that Sirius had known all along, that he had probably gone into the books looking for some link to Remus’s life, for some link to him - and he would’ve found them. Because just as Remus had used small details of himself to shape Aidan, so had he used small details of Sirius to shape the love interests. Sirius’s cufflinks, the scent of the cologne he work, even where his tan line began and ended during the summer - they were in the books. And then of course there was the dress: taken out of a box and put on and then rucked up to the waist. Only it wasn’t a gold dress, it was a smoky gray - much better suited to Sirius’s coloring.
(And why Sirius as a prototype for all these characters? Because he was Sirius, of course. Because although Remus had long ago given up any hope of having him, he was always there, smoldering and smirking, an embodiment of all the most heated parts of Remus’s genre.)
“Oh God,” he said aloud, mortification flooding him so thoroughly it practically blinded him. How could he have ever thought he had hidden himself in his writing? In truth, he had never exposed himself more.
Sirius watched him, his face expressionless, a seemingly impartial witness to Remus’s embarrassment. When he began to sit up Remus had to fight the urge to recoil, certain Sirius was about to take some revenge for having been used as a love interest in the books. But Sirius didn’t even get up off the sofa. He merely poured another glass of wine and continued to give Remus a steady, unblinking look until Remus forced himself to ask, “How did you know?”
“Thought the title looked familiar. Took me days to place where I knew it from - you really dug through the archives there, didn’t you? Course, that wasn’t exactly a brilliant, incomparable lyric, so I read the book. And after that it was obvious. Also,” he said, taking a sip, “I found the manuscript in your flat.”
“Ah,” Remus said, slumping against the wall. “Well, that’d do it.” He ran a hand through his hair, bit his lip, and then knew he had to know. “What gave it away? Why was it so obvious that it was written by me?”
“The tea.”
“What?”
“Aidan takes his tea the way you do. One sugar, no milk, and you had him read the newspaper from back to front while he drank it the same way you do. And he talks the way you do, you have him in the same colors you usually wear, your personalities are different - I know you don’t give that much of a shit about Quidditch - but I still felt like I knew him. From the first moment he appeared it was like I recognized him.”
“And no one else?” Remus asked. “You didn’t recognize anyone else?”
Sirius frowned. “Oh, I expect Gideon’s in there somewhere, isn’t he? I know the two of you were shagging -”
“Gideon and I had a drunken one night stand that I can barely remember let alone write about. I mean, did you notice -”
“So you and Gideon aren’t together then?” Sirius said, raising his glass, and it was preposterous, implausible and yet, he sounded happy, and it seemed like he had raised his glass to hide a smile. “Well, then, who are the others? You certainly make it hard to nail down your tastes.”
“Yeah, but at least I don’t make it hard for Aidan to get nailed,” he said and Sirius snorted. “You really don’t know? Who the love interests are?”
“Why, should I?” Sirius asked, and this time there was no mistaking how his smile tightened into something more resembling a grimace. It was this that gave Remus the courage to say what he did.
“I should hope so. They’re you.”
Sirius blinked, set down his wineglass, and gave Remus an incredulous look.
“How could you not know? I thought the dress of all things would’ve been a tip off. I thought you were going to - to get angry about it.”
“The dress?” Sirius said blankly. Then he seemed to remember because he nodded to himself and murmured, “Oh, yes, well I did look stunning so I can see why that would’ve been an inspiration, but then again it’s all just fictional, isn’t it? You taking what you need to write?”
“Some of it, yes.” And then, because boldness had become the order of the hour, he walked over to where Sirius sat on the sofa and slowly, softly, cupped his cheek, “And some of it no.”
Sirius smiled, as if they were both in on the same joke, and Remus, always the one to stop a joke when it had gone too far, leaned down and kissed that smile away. It was nothing like any kiss he had ever written about. For one thing, Sirius hardly kissed him back, and for another he was wholly aware of the strain in his back as he bent at an awkward angle to meet Sirius’s lips and how clammy his hand was against Sirius’s cheek and how pathetic and foolish this gesture was. He pulled away abruptly, his courage vanishing with the kiss’s ending. “Oh, Sirius. I’m sorry, I, uh -”
“Did you mean it? Or were you only hoping to snog me so hard I forget to tell everyone you’re the author?”
“I don’t care who you tell,” Remus said. “I meant it.”
“Well, then,” Sirius said, and then he rose in one of those fluid gestures that always sent a shiver of joy down Remus’s spine, and he grabbed Remus by the waist, pulled him close, and kissed him. This kiss was past writing, past words. It was seven years of longing broken open and dissolved in a single moment. It was every far flung hope and daydream he had ever had made flesh. It was real, it was happening: Sirius, here, now, with him.
“There,” Sirius said, before Remus pulled him down onto the sofa to begin the long overdue process of undressing him. “Some inspiration for your next book.”
Remus laughed, drew Sirius in for another kiss, and again they went out past words, past description, to where it was only the two of them together at the beginning of a promising new story.