Fic: Lethe and Mnemosyne (part 3/4)
Title: Lethe and Mnemosyne
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
It wasn’t long before everything went to hell, which could’ve been the leading sentence in both of their autobiographies and probably their obituaries too. For the next two weeks they became accustomed to waking in the middle of the night to strange sounds ranging from a deathly murmur in the other room to frenzied banging on the walls to a scratching in the ceiling like something was dragging itself along the rafters. Horrifyingly one afternoon when they were pretending they weren’t experiencing a violent haunting and/or living on an oil well of dark magic they’d started a fire and Remus had put on Led Zeppelin IV, perhaps in an attempt to defuse the general terrible shittiness or perhaps because he was feeling the sexual lack as acutely as Sirius was, and as they were wrapping up a package to send McKinnon and Meadowes (cheap vodka and the Kleenex EP) they both had the sensation at the exact same moment that the walls were breathing, that they were made of muscle and pulse, as if they were sitting in the belly of a living thing struggling to slouch forward on monstrous feet. They had fled the house together, tugging each other along by the hands, but they had the same faint feeling of lifeness outside in the land throbbing under their feet; it was a while before it stopped and when they ventured back inside the record was shuffling over at the end of the side, the fire nearly dead as they sat down feeling like they’d just had the worst acid trip ever had by anyone. The boathouse glowered as ever from the front windows when Sirius shut the curtains; in the blood of sunset he thought he saw something ripple in the water.
Lily had come to visit on a Wednesday when James was working late, offering to let them stay in what was going to be the baby’s room if they’d like; she wasn’t yet showing and when she had told them all over her sad glass of San Pellegrino in an Islington pub before the slapdash wedding last month Sirius had exchanged what he hoped was a surreptitious glance with Remus as both of them tried to gauge whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Truth be told they still weren’t sure.
“I was looking forward to meeting it,” she said after she’d been there for about an hour and nothing had happened. “You make this place sound like the gate of hell itself and here we are standing around the woodstove drinking and being merry. Lupin, you can stay over there if you’re going to have whiskey in front of me.”
“We could try one of those séance things,” said Sirius. “The Muggle kind with the weird magnetic glass.”
Remus laughed and Sirius found himself smiling too; after weeks of locking themselves in the heart of the beast every night they were almost exultant at having someone else in the house. Save Dumbledore and Lily they couldn’t get anyone to come over. “Those are a scam, you know that.” Sirius did know and preferred the ritual of the magical equivalent but had always been sort of morbidly fascinated with them anyway, except when the Muggles stumbled on the real thing and ended up driven mad or hanging from the walls in pieces. “Remember fifth year, when James wanted to do one after that unit in Muggle Studies? You kept moving the, the thing, so he thought something was actually after his mortal soul or whatever-”
“-And he told Selina Feinstein he was being hunted by Muggle ghosts that wanted to fry his wizard soul at the stake, and then she-um-”
“Cracking good tale, lads,” said Lily, very loudly. “The man in question sends warm tidings of course but regrettably couldn’t be here to act shocked that his Christmas Past just can’t stay buried like he wants.”
For the last month or so James had been a bit awkward around them, which Sirius supposed was part and parcel of his being unable to pretend he didn’t know what was going on between them any longer, if indeed that was what he did; it was not so much the old discomfort but more that he seemed unsure how to broach the subject or whether he even should, and at times he treated the whole thing like a big joke they wouldn’t let him in on, looking between the two of them when they were in the same room and waiting for the punchline, which rankled badly. Nonetheless he knew it would be fine; Peter though had been avoiding them and they’d both adopted a fuck-off kind of outlook towards it all unless he came around, but after nearly nine years of shared everything it still stung. The things we fixate on when we could all be dead by the end of the year, Sirius thought.
“Speaking of tidings. Dumbledore came through the Floo earlier and said he wanted to talk to you about something when we saw you, you could see about it while you were at work this week and it’s definitely not dangerous et cetera. Just Floo him when you get home,” Sirius said to Lily, whose dagger-green eyes darkened.
“I wonder what it’s like to get out of school and get on with your life without all the misery hanging over everything. When it’s over I’m not sure I’ll know what the hell to do.”
When it’s over had begun to sound like dearly wishful thinking, but still they clung to it because it was the thinning thread upon which they’d hung all their hopes; when you ripped the bottom out of that nothing was left and you forgot why you even bothered. “Make the hugest fry-up you’ve ever seen. Buy an eighth of weed. Have champagne for lunch. Never get out of bed before noon for at least a month.”
“Lie on the floor of our new flat and/or house laughing about all this shit from a fuckoff huge distance,” said Remus.
“You know how to motivate a girl,” said Lily. “But by the time I have this baby I’m not sharing any of my alcohol or my drugs or my food for a good month. Get your own.”
When they walked her down the end of the lane to the Apparition point she was looking out towards the lake with her brow furrowed when the wind picked up and the moaning started. They’d first heard it a few days ago when they’d come back from the store, thinking it was at first just the wind and realizing with a sickening fever-sweeping dread that it was not: a low, unbroken keening that called to mind a tree falling, seeping up from the frozen ground and spreading through the tree-branch fingers into the cracks in the cottage’s plaster walls. Wherever it was coming from it seemed to be getting louder, and both of them thought it had taken on an angry tenor in the night. Happy fucking Christmas.
“When did that start,” said Lily, looking truly frightened for one of the few times in Sirius’s memory, as if she’d only just realized what was happening. He could tell now as he suspected from the start that she had not been taking any of this seriously.
“Since Sunday afternoon,” said Remus. “There’s no pattern to it, just-all day, all night. Probably while we’re gone during the day too.”
Lily looked at both of them, incredulous and awestruck with fear as the hellish death-wail faded to a guttural subterranean muttering. “How the fuck do you sleep.”
“We don’t,” said Sirius.
Indeed they had hardly slept since the day they felt the walls breathing, and they didn’t sleep after Lily left either. They’d tried taking turns in the night, which fell apart two days and a spectacular fight later when they both fell asleep having forgotten whose turn it was and were late to work and a meeting with Dumbledore, respectively; even in sleep they’d taken to keeping their wands close in the bed with them which was likely to kill them before any Death Eater or murderous unworldly hellbeast did, and although the cottage was small-five steps from the couch to the kitchen, eight to the bottom of the ladder to their bedroom-they’d become increasingly uneasy when they were not in the same room, which led to a certain claustrophobic friction and at least four unslept arguments per day, their elbows and hands knocking like sandpaper into shoulders and ribs while they snapped at each other’s heels like dogs with their teeth bared in a snarl. Mornings and nights when they wanted they’d started showering together. After a week of being glued almost literally by the hip Sirius began to feel like he really was living in a Brontë novel: they could not be with each other and they could not be without each other.
Little things had been making both of them angry in a noxious amalgamation of their shitty haunting-by-magic and orders from Dumbledore and work and Christmas and worry worry worry, which he knew they’d both been trying to drown out when they felt it spark before it all exploded in a volcanic Molotov detonation; results so far had been mixed. The sexual frustration was also reaching a lofty summit, and the view from the peak was dearly fucking painful. It had been more than two weeks since they’d had sex, which was what Sirius was thinking of the night before when they were making dinner, watching the narrow strength of Remus’s fingers chop peppers for an easy stir-fry, the artful hollow of his throat, the way the night got in his oldyoung eyes and his mouth from the kitchen window. Their bodies had begun to feel like ghostly mechanical extensions of each other: if he got up to make tea it was because Remus had wanted it, and if Remus put on a record it was because Sirius had willed it, and the thread of thought became theirs. When he looked into the mirror he discovered it had become more and more difficult to hold on to himself; his grey stormglass eyes with their thick lashes became Remus’s, Remus’s mouth became his. It had been so long since they had touched each other with intent.
Just throw it out, he was planning on saying when Remus came back down the ladder from changing his shirt in their bedroom, throw it out or put it in the fridge and let’s rent a room in London, I’ll call in sick tomorrow and we can sleep all day and I’ll fuck you so hard you can’t walk straight and I’ll buy your weight in fish and chips. We can go see a cheap show and walk in Regent’s Park in the snow and we’ll take everything important and if we’re lucky this place will’ve burnt down by the time we get back.
While he was planning how best to seduce Remus body and soul the food had burnt and Remus yelled at him when he came back down and he yelled at Remus and they had depressing cold turkey sandwiches instead while the mantel began to rattle in the living room, where they discovered yet another blocky note with the strange oily ink still wet: BLOOD FOR BLOOD FOR MAGIC FOR BLOOD FOR DEATH FOR LIFE. Remus kicked the coffee table so hard the leg came loose and threw it into the woodstove without showing Dumbledore while Sirius torched their copy of the lease with wandless magic and watched it burn with a singular manic satisfaction on the hearth.
Friday after work he was bringing in some wood while Remus tried to focus enough to eviscerate a noise band whose cassette had come with packaging featuring a woman’s naked ass on stark white bathroom tile and lyrics in a similar vein; they’d spent a rare few dreamlike hours last night laughing about it. He was sitting on the couch and didn’t seem to want to get up, but when Sirius came in with the last of it and directed the logs with a spell into the lopsided pile beside the fireplace he had put on Discreet Music and stretched out across half the couch, staring into the fireplace, his notebook abandoned. Walking through the living room to the funeral dirge of it Sirius pretended he was haunting the house himself after having been murdered a decade previous but after a few minutes the stretching spectral echo of it in the house started to saw on his nerves, and he set about making tea very loudly in the kitchen.
“Bit dark for the holidays, don’t you think,” he said from the stove.
“We’re being terrorized by some unseen vengeful hellbeast entity that wants us dead. Does it really matter?”
“That doesn’t mean you need to give it fucking mood music,” said Sirius. He went back to the living room and took the needle off the record and on a vicious, spiteful impulse considered smashing it against the windowpane. Remus was staring at him with his face set into frozen vexation, nests of words in his mouth and his head he wouldn’t say, a burst blood vessel in his eye.
“I was thinking,” said Remus, still looking intently at him as he sat down in the chair to wait for the water to boil, “whatever it is, you know, it probably doesn’t even mean you. If it really is something dark it’d be after my filthy creature blood, right, it’s probably seen me out there on the moors at the full and decided, well, that’s it, time to water the unholy dark breeding ground with his blood.”
Sirius’s head had started to ache deep in his left eye socket; outside he could hear an owl calling from a snow-dusted branch in the blue dark. “And why would you think that.”
“The last note it left. Seems clear to me.”
“That was vague enough it could’ve meant anything.”
Remus blinked at him and sort of smiled in the corner of his mouth, showing teeth. “Of course you would think so because you don’t get it and you never will. You’re like, practically pureblood royalty so you think everything is all about you. But you’ll be just fine.”
“Yes Remus, I’m a hair’s breadth away from joining up with the Death Eaters and their merry marauding blood purist gang. Brilliant deduction Sherlock, that’s just genius, you ripped a hole in the charade and fucked me right through it,” he said, standing, feeling the shards of the dam-burst shatter tearing in his throat, his heartbeat swelling uneven. “Reckon I could do dear old mum proud a few years late? Last time I saw her she said she should’ve had the midwife drown me in the bath but I’m sure she’ll get over it once I complete my first pureblood rite by way of Muggle hunting and show her the new tattoo. Better late than never.”
“In theory you could just walk away from all of this right now. It doesn’t even concern you, it doesn’t affect you, nothing will change for you no matter what else happens,” which was true enough and perhaps he even deserved to hear it. Remus had sat up completely and had the couch cushion in a death grip, the vicious cornered-animal rancor seething in all the live-wires of his body; he was pale and he looked miserable and hunted and Sirius thought he had lost some weight. “Sometimes I think this is just a big fucking joke for you. Like you’ve got nothing at stake so you’ve got to go looking for it, at least until you get tired of it. You’ve got no idea what it’s like.”
“And what do you think this is-” he swept his arm around the matchbox-sized living room where they had strung themselves from corner to corner- “if not something at stake?”
What is everything I love in this scorched hellscape world if not something at stake, he thought furiously, rabid tearing bloody red-raw like a weapon. He didn’t say it.
Remus turned his head back to the fireplace and Sirius followed his stare, watching the flames unblinking until they left burnt-out spots behind his eyes; when he blinked they seemed to move closer. “Something else for you to fuck around with until you get sick of it. Something you wanted and had to have until it breaks because you couldn’t be bothered fixing it. Something familiar and lived-in because everything else is too much.”
He could feel in his gut and in his unquiet heart the tension reeled tight, the fuse lit and hissing away in the spreading shock of it, as if he’d just been slapped. “So do you have an existential crisis every time you fuck me or what.”
“That wasn’t what I meant-”
“You’re saying a fucking lot without meaning anything,” said Sirius, feeling his voice shudder in the walls as he took a heavy step towards Remus on the couch and watched him falter and recoil like a gun; his Black blood, his poison, evil pure and cauterizing as a curse. “Leave if that’s what you want so badly. Take your shit and go find someone who understands every fractured recess of your soul in all the ways I never will because deep down I’m too innately fucked spiritually or whatever to get it. What the hell are you even doing here.”
“You don’t understand-”
“Shut up, Remus, I know you love to hear yourself being vindicated and eternally correct but you’ve made your point like eight times. No one else in the whole wide world has ever suffered or been hurt, and no one understands pain or fear like you do, and no one ever will, and I am incapable by virtue of sheer evil-bloodedness of ever truly loving you. Poor you. Does that cover it?”
On the couch Remus sucked in a breath and let it out but said nothing, and in the festering serrated silence the kettle was whistling; when Sirius took it off the stove and poured he could feel the house contract and breathe the way it sometimes did, the plaster whispering in the wind like blood moving through veins, and then the death-wail rattling reaching clawlike through the earth in a hellish chant sung from exhausted lungs. Insanely Sirius threw open the kitchen window to the split red vein of sunset and launched his teacup into the yard, feeling the wind clasp needle-teeth around his wrist and tug. “Fuck you too,” he yelled as he rolled it shut again and went in huge loping strides back into the living room where he yanked on his Doc Martens and his coat while Remus, his face wide and overflowing in increments, finally got up but did not take a step towards him when he wrenched the front door open. Probably the house’s greatest drawback was its lack of doors to slam after a fight, which Sirius hadn’t considered when they signed the lease, though he felt the lack so keenly now that he was sure he’d have seen about getting one put in between the kitchen and the living room had he noticed.
“Where are you going?” asked Remus, his bottom lip raw where he had bitten it; in the bloody rime of sundown his eyes looked like June, Sirius thought, green-gold and yearning. Remus and his emotional solipsism, Remus who never had to nurse anyone’s wounds but his own, Remus who never really apologized or owned up. Sirius loved him like a seething open wound.
“Offering myself up for ritual sacrifice,” said Sirius, and slammed the door with deafening force behind him.
He made it to the end of the lane before the guilt started to wring him out, teeth chattering in the gathering nighttime gloaming; it would snow in the night, he could tell, the air tinny and thick around his neck where he’d left without a scarf. Things got like this sometimes when they cut themselves on each other, a ruinous bleeding thread that once unraveled they could not stop picking at like sutures that had begun to itch; his blood was not Remus’s blood but his possession was perhaps an inexorable twin of Remus’s possession, blood for blood indeed, a ruthless mirror where he knew Remus’s image and all the different men he’d been like he knew the reflection of his very soul. They sank into each other, the eternal echo, the only dream, the sometimes-fever and the always-desire. But sometimes they looked too close and saw too much.
Without thinking he’d walked all the way down to the lakeshore with the ceaseless breath of the wind muttering in the ink-spill of the trees stretched overhead against the bruised sky, his breath unwinding in the glacial-blue wandlight in front of him and his heart beating and beating in the hush of the winter air. He had half-expected Remus to follow him but he never did; it occurred to him belatedly that if Remus decided to wreck anything in the house (which he did sometimes after a fight, and although he almost always had things back in order by the time Sirius came home the blistering violence was obvious in the scuff mark on the wall or the new vinyl to replace the one he’d broken) he’d left all the gifts he’d bought for him a few days ago unwrapped under his side of the bed. Knowing Remus he’d still pretend to be surprised by the weird occult books he’d found at the magic store in the village and the records and the sweater Sirius looked forward to seeing him in and nothing else, even if he knew Sirius knew. At least he’d put the scarf in his sock drawer.
Across the lake the eye of the boathouse watched as ever through the sparse trees like something peeled raw, undimmed by the low fog curling over the cut-glass surface of the water. In the wandlight he found a few flat stones and tried to skip them across the water, which he’d never been very good at; Remus had taught him to do it when they were twelve or thirteen and walking along the river just beyond the Lupin property while James and Peter swam in the pond, and at first Sirius had thought he must be using magic to do it but he wasn’t. He’d waded in with Remus and they held hands against the gentle current with no one there to see, looking for good stones in the silt, and he could remember feeling in the clasp of their sweaty fingers a kind of static sweetness thrumming up against his pulse, beckoning, as if he could reach into the pocket of it and do magic he’d never done before. With the years he’d come to understand that he had loved Remus even then. Sometimes he thought he had loved the idea of Remus years before he ever knew him-the thought of loving his longing for an unmappable someone, like loving all the music he had never heard or all the life he had not yet lived.
Already he was thinking about walking home again as he threw his last stone and watched it skip only twice before it sank; maybe everything would be better if he made them grilled cheeses for dinner. He was looking for one more stone when something caught his eye across the water, more the suggestion of movement than movement itself, and for a moment he thought it was a nightbird flitting through the trees. But when he looked through the gauzy fog towards the boathouse again something was looking back.
At the window was the splatter of a shadow, human-shaped though he couldn’t be sure from the distance and the fog; he watched it, feeling pinned by the back of his neck, his heart hammering down his rib-rungs until he felt like he would be sick, too frightened and too throttlingly shell-shocked to even blink. When he took an unconscious step backwards it jerked harshly towards the glass, as if it was beating its head against the window.
Jesus living fuck. He turned and ran all the way home tripping over his own feet in about twelve seconds flat never once looking over his shoulder, gulping cold air into his straining lungs. When he got to the house he saw Remus was waiting outside with his wand held out at arm’s length, cutting into the fog; when he saw Sirius he threw open the gate and reeled him in, heartbeat to heartbeat, as if he’d been waiting the entire time to feel his arms around him when they found each other again.
“What happened,” Remus asked as Sirius finally dared to look back across the lake and found the windows glowing empty. His whole body felt like jelly. “Are you alright?”
“Shhh,” he said, pressing his face into the crook of Remus’s shoulder and feeling his long fingers fan out and splay spidery across the back of his neck. Like this he thought maybe they could melt into each other or do blood magic. It was the same feeling he often got when they were cradled in the womb of the moon-mornings, the sky emptied of darkness, the pale newborn light and the smell of their sweat and blood and the loam of the earth jangling down his senses while he looked at Remus beside him, wanting with a wild rabid compulsion to lick him clean and carry him home. He wanted Remus to swallow him whole.
Inside they locked the door and pressed together on the couch with tea and some of the Xeroxed papers Remus had brought home from the Prophet archives in London which told them altogether very little of use (the previous tenants had been a Squib man and a witch who had dropped out of Hogwarts early in her sixth year and had seemingly been living mostly as a Muggle; the Aurors had found the front door open, as if they’d let someone inside), listening to the bite of the wind and the Muggle news on the television. Eventually Sirius did get up and made them grilled cheeses on thick wheat bread with avocado and tomato slices, and afterwards they peeled oranges with their fingers in front of the woodstove and ate good dark chocolate while the snow began to fall outside, making a soft kissing sound against the kitchen window. The fear and the exhaustion and the anger all felt very far away suddenly, and they could almost pretend they were as happy as they had wanted to be, talking about what they’d make for Christmas dinner with the snow catching the lights from the tree and the candles lit on the kitchen counter, their bodies entwined in shadow on the far wall.
After a while Remus poured them some whiskey and slid his hand around the inside of Sirius’s knee, stroking his middle finger over and over into the warm curve underneath. Given that it had been well over two weeks by now Sirius felt something alight in his belly almost at the mere suggestion of the touch, like he’d been holding his breath for it without knowing, thinking yes yes yes, fever in it, touch me, why don’t you touch me, heedless of anything else. When would they even get another moment like this with the breaking of the vast fragmenting world? Chances were meant to be taken and when could they be reckless and laughing in the face of death and horror et cetera if not now.
Together they blew out the candles and went one by one up the ladder to their bedroom, where they left the strands of Muggle lights on as they undressed each other slowly. Sirius ran his hands up Remus’s chest, thumbs in his neck feeling for the song of his pulse in the familiar topography of his body; when they kissed it was unhurried, Remus’s mouth chasing him every time Sirius pulled back and let himself be caught again, his lips opening under Remus’s until the pattern shifted and there were hands on either side of his face and his tongue was about halfway down Remus’s throat, feeling him moan in his own mouth. He could feel Remus’s cock half-hard against his thigh and ran his fingers down the waistband of his underwear to stroke him, feeling Remus’s teeth graze his pulse where he was sucking a hot runic imprint against Sirius’s neck; his hips jerked electrically when Sirius rubbed his thumb over his slit, feeling the blood-heavy weight of his cock hardening against his palm. It hadn’t even been three weeks and still the pure match-strike of anticipation spreading in his gut through his chest and his cock and between his thighs made his mouth go dry, as did Remus, naked on the bed with all the pieces of him spilled out on the sheets, compulsion in his eyes and the heartbeat running wild wild wild in his throat.
Remus reached for him and bent his knees up, one of his hands taking Sirius’s hair out of its tie and the other around his hip, composing the pieces of their movement in unflowing tidal rhythm like two pieces of the same instrument, thrusting his cock against Sirius’s and then stroking them together in his big hand, eyelids fluttering. Bending his neck Sirius let his hair fall against Remus’s chest, flitting in vivid slow motion across the landmarks of his body: he could feel Remus’s heart between his teeth as he flicked his tongue across a nipple, his knuckles whispering over his ticklish sides, the slopes of his thighs trembling very tightly under his palms, the violin-vibrations of his belly when Sirius held him down by the hips and thrust his tongue into Remus’s navel-rhythmic-pulsebeat and breath like a fine trigger, timbre rising, vibration all through the wires of their bodies. When he murmured the spell against the inside of Remus’s thigh he felt him jolt, sudden wildfire in the arch of his spine.
“Do you think it’s watching,” asked Remus, breath in it, and fever. Sirius stroked a finger inside him, crooking it, just up to the first knuckle, taking just the head of Remus’s cock into his mouth and drawing lazy curlicue-ribbons underneath with his tongue dragging along the heavy silk of it; above him he could hear Remus’s breath tightening, his bent knees and his dark mouth spooling.
“Obviously it’s been dying to see me get you off,” said Sirius, low, at the join of Remus’s hip and thigh. “It’s probably been gagging for it for weeks and we’ve just left it high and dry the whole time. Maybe the cosmic void itself wants to fuck both of us into literal oblivion.”
“You think you’re so funny,” said Remus, flushed all through and laughing, his fingers in Sirius’s hair. Sirius pressed another finger inside him and watched his mouth fall open, thrusting in and then circling his fingertips around the rim where he could feel him wet and open, hips moving in time with Sirius’s fingers, seeking.
“So do you.”
“Yes,” said Remus. He took Sirius’s wrist and thrust his hips, pressing him deeper. When he took Remus’s cock in his mouth again Sirius let the bare white-sharp edges of his teeth graze against him as he pulled off, sucking hard, feeling the catch in Remus’s breath and the moan deep down in his chest. “God, Sirius-I was trying to-it was one of the first things I ever liked about you,” he said, “way back to day one, on the train. No one-no one can make me laugh like you do.”
As with all the other things it ran down the drain back to the train compartment when they were eleven years old, or maybe earlier, back a hundred years, a million things unsaid and undone and unknown, their souls sculpted from the same magnificent clay, yearning always through displaced time to find each other again. Sirius kissed his belly and then Remus was pushing him back by the shoulders, groaning when Sirius’s fingers slipped out of him; he was about to say something when Remus straddled his hips and all rational thought shriveled up in his dry mouth like leaves in the heat, his hands sliding along Remus’s thighs to his waist and back down again, squeezing his ass, Remus’s hands moving on his shoulders like he was the only thing in the world that could keep him still, the only thing that could make him move.
“Where’s my cock on that list,” Sirius asked him, feeling Remus sway against him like a willow tree and laugh wildly, the tremble of it reverberating in Sirius’s chest with his blood and his breath. Their bodies flowed together: wherever Remus went Sirius went, a two-headed creature made of wanting, made of loving, made of years and years and years.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Remus, and to make a point he wrapped his hand around Sirius’s cock and stroked him slowly, the callouses on his fingers dragging torturously along the entire length until he felt like a smoldering fuse, embers burning against Remus’s hand. After a few moments Remus took his fingers from where his thumb was pressing inside Sirius’s mouth and flicked it over his nipple until Sirius felt like he might actually combust, all the pieces of him straining for Remus as he had always, compelled and enthralled, overtaken.
“Remus,” he was saying, right against his lips, “please, please-”
“I thought we were,” said Remus even as he took Sirius inside himself, slow like ritual, “I thought we were talking about how funny you think you are.” The muscles in his belly torqued slightly and he hissed lithely, pressing down around him so slowly Sirius could feel his teeth clenching, watching the slide of his body into Remus’s body with an intoxicated starvation lighting up everything from his heart to his head to his gut and between his legs, lightning in it, a thick strike of pleasure welling up. “It drives me insane,” he said. “I love it and you know it.”
He shoved his hips up gently and moaned, thumbs smoothing over Remus’s hipbones while he canted his hips forward and then back in Sirius’s lap, searching. “Literally half of all the stupid shit I’ve ever said or done is just to make you laugh,” he said. In the middle of it Remus found the pure electric-current strike inside him and rode the flint-and-tinder of it, urging Sirius faster; he snapped his hips up into the heat of it, his cock thrusting deep into the oneness of it while Remus gripped his arms and ran his heavy palms up his biceps to his shoulders, gasping.
“Tell me-” Remus started, pushing him deeper and then going still where Sirius could feel his cock pressed into the gold thread he wanted, “tell me about it later.” Sirius moved his hips slowly into it, a long dragging curl of pleasure, the rush of it spreading through them in a molten wave.
“Always,” said Sirius, “you fucking know I will.” Sometimes it was like this when they had sex, conversation like chords plucked thrillingly at odd angles, and sometimes they never shut up; occasionally they didn’t talk at all, undressing in sheer silence and speaking only in the slideshow tangle of their bodies, their open mouths, their shifting faces in the sheets. With the strings of dusty-dim lights on Remus’s skin he looked like something wild and holy born of the moors and come as if conjured into Sirius’s bed in the night, where he had been waiting far beyond this lifetime to feel his breathing body, his heart.
Remus was driving him deeper and Sirius could feel the timbre of him wound tight, their rhythm like famine, an irresistible tidal pulse burgeoning; he watched at the join of their bodies, inside and around each other, one into one, and leaned forward to lick nonsense patterns against Remus’s nipple. “I almost wouldn’t mind,” said Sirius, hardly any breath, “getting killed, God, like this-just like this,” laughing, thinking perhaps they had already let the monster inside.
Against his palm he felt Remus’s cock pulse, his thumb rubbing over the slick head and smoothing down again, stroking him deliberately out of time with the thrust of their hips. After not so much longer Remus rode him harder, the angle the same, relentless, relentless, his chest thrumming with his blood and his breath in a crescendo under Sirius’s mouth as he pressed a sweaty hand around Sirius’s on his cock, his back arching like an ocean ripple. Sirius squeezed gently and twisted his wrist around the head of Remus’s cock and felt him come after two strokes, his teeth sunk into the heartbeat at Sirius’s neck, all of him clenching in a tight spool around his cock as he pulsed wet over their threaded fingers and both their bellies, his chest swelling and deflating wonderingly against Sirius’s.
He fucked Remus through it, trying to stave off coming himself, but then Remus reached down and touched the join of them where Sirius was stretched tight all around and over him as they moved, pulse and icefloe-tremble deep inside him when he rocked his hips into Sirius as if their bodies were the same, fingers around the base of Sirius’s cock where it was slick and heavy inside him. The spreading jolt when he snapped his hips into the swallowing heat of him, the drag of his cock-timbre splitting, rhythm breaking-he came, the tip and the wild overflow-spill melting through his belly through his thighs and all the uncoiling threads of him, going still inside Remus with a choked-off groan, an open-mouthed kiss pressed against his neck. Remus rocked his hips into him, gasping at the wet spread of it inside him, Sirius’s hand splayed out over the base of his spine to hold them together like two pieces of something broken soldered together with gold.
For a few long minutes Remus wouldn’t let him pull out, kissing him slowly with his sweaty fingers tracing the slowing blue staccato of his pulse up the vein-lines of his hips and chest, and when he did at last move the loss of it made him feel cold all over as if they’d just been severed, bereft in the dark. They cleaned up and laid down together, pulling the blanket back up with the tangled afghans and the enormous scarves they kept on the bed, not bothering to put on clothes, which in the current state of their nightmare hunting-by-malicious-magic-and/or ghosts seemed almost scintillatingly reckless. Under the blankets he ran a palm up the ivory-key ridges of Remus’s ribs to his shoulderblades where he was using Sirius as a pillow, stretching fluid against him with his back cracking in places; with his fingers Sirius lit a cigarette while Remus watched him take a drag and then another, his chest expanding under Remus’s head until he braced himself on his elbows and grabbed Sirius by the hair, kissing him hard, sucking down smoke.
“You know I started smoking because of you,” said Remus, the vibration of his voice blurring into Sirius’s heartbeat. The room smelled like sex and snowfall and pinewood and now menthol smoke; in Remus’s hair Sirius could still smell Earl Grey and clean sweat, stroking his fingers through the wiry last-leaf red of it. “I mean because of all of you, and because I liked it, but you especially. You look kind of unfairly good with a cigarette, like that boy you get warned about in public service announcements.”
“So now I’ve got your lungs on my conscience forever,” said Sirius. “Maybe we could quit, when this is all over.” They both laughed, though Sirius couldn’t have said which prospect was more hilarious.
“Too late, Pads.”
“If it’s any consolation you’re sexy even when you’re lying in repose after the full making me listen to your soothing folksy shit. Between you and me it gets me hot.”
“I always suspected as much. You’re so fucking weird,” said Remus, smiling like a cloudburst, looking at Sirius like he wanted to be devoured; around his throat and his chest where Sirius could see in the loamy shadow above the blanket he had purpling hickeys like small tokens, same as he’d left on Sirius. Often the next day he’d wear his scarf adjusted just so in a way that made it obvious what he was not-trying to hide. “Between you and me it gets me hot.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re both crazy because it gets me laid.”
“Haven’t we always known that from like minute one,” said Remus, laughing. “I think it was always going to head here, you know? Less immovable object and irresistible force and more irresistible force and irresistible force, like magnets maybe, or a bug on a windshield. But speaking of the full,” he grabbed Sirius’s wrist and took a drag of the cigarette between his fingers, “and the death by nicotine. Sometimes I felt like-I don’t know, like I do it to get back at myself, I suppose. And there’s the head-rush of course.”
“Like it’s the only thing you can do to hurt what you can’t reach. As miserable as that sounds,” said Sirius. He had given it some thought before and guessed it was why both of them threw themselves into the Order and went blind into jobs that odds were would land them in St. Mungo’s or a cheap coffin before twenty-two, aside from the obvious reasons.
“Yes. And the blaring kind of high that comes with it.” In the rafters Sirius could hear a rapid birdwing flutter drumming like a heart, echoing and fanning out across the wood from one end to the other, though by now they were so used to this at night they both recoiled slightly like components of the same spring-trap and then relaxed, breathing, just breathing. “Maybe we should take up embroidery instead.”
“I’ll make you a novelty t-shirt for the motorbike. ‘My Other Ride Is His Cock.’”
“God, you’re vile,” said Remus, shaking like a brittle tree branch with quiet laughter. “For Christmas I saw this coffee mug at the thrift store, it said ‘Like My Men: Cheap, Bitter, and From the Corner Store.’ I was gonna, y’know, magic over that last part and put ‘With a Bite’ instead. Thought it might be too obvious.”
Sirius laughed. “Well why the hell didn’t you,” he asked. He felt shaken out and new, his limbs slung lazily back together with golden honey, warm in all the places of himself where they had been together; the resonance of it shivered ecstatically down his body and Remus’s until everything was themselves and everything was each other, feeling echoes, feeling words and words and words.
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” said Remus, and he pressed up on his elbows with his handsome off-kilter face and his bony shoulders and his green copper-mirror eyes and kissed the laugh out of Sirius’s mouth. “Even if,” he said when he pulled back, “I mean, overlooking everything else in the whole of this bullshit world and the untold horrors I’m sure are waiting for us in the morning like a Christmas present. I’m really very happy.”
“Not to be a soppy fuck but you do make me very happy, you know,” said Sirius, stretching out beside him, Remus’s jaw brushing thrillingly against his shoulder where Sirius could feel the places he’d missed shaving, soft thistle. “No one I’d rather descend into hell with or jump off the edge of the world with, the only co-pilot I want when the plane’s going down, all that. It feels like the plug’s been pulled out of my brain, which is hilarious because that should’ve happened years ago.”
“I think it did happen years ago and that’s just our default state of being nowadays,” said Remus, “unplugged and held together with shoestring and Spello-tape, questions of sanity being what they are at the best of times. It’s almost romantic when you think about it.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to write Dumbledore a thank-you card. This has been the team-building exercise we needed all along, it’s not like we came out here for the scenery or anything. Who the hell does that.”
“‘Thanks ever so much for the opportunity to experience a malevolent haunting first-hand in the gaping mouth of the beast itself. This was a deep and invaluable learning experience for both of us, especially the part where Sirius hexed me when I snuck up on him with sexual intent. I owe the blistering rash on my ass to you.’”
“You’re never going to stop bitching about that,” said Sirius. He’d spent the entire evening afterwards alternating between apologizing and arguing and groveling with macaroni and cheese and planning to eat Remus out for half an hour when they went to bed, which was completely ruined when their treasured unearthly guest started hammering on the back door after dinner with extreme bloodlust. “I mean it hardly seems fair given that I basically lost the lottery there.”
“Not getting fucked is a few magnitudes worse than a screaming rash on your ass that feels like someone flayed it open. Definitely.”
“I’m gonna make it up to you if and when we get through this and you know it. For a few magnitudes.”
“That’s what I was counting on. But I guess it is a little bit funny, almost, and the sleep loss and bludgeoning paranoia and no sex for weeks, of course,” said Remus, smiling. “You know what I mean.”
“I know,” said Sirius, “Black and Lupin against the world. I know.” They settled into each other, skin to skin until they drifted apart in sleep, listening to the underground hum of their voices moving through their bodies like blood, or song.
For a while he dreamed he was trapped in his old bedroom at Grimmauld Place in the summer, the door locked and the window stuck shut, his wand nowhere he could find; on the empty street below someone he didn’t recognize stared up at him, unmoved by his banging on the window, unrelenting even when he closed the curtains and peeked through the gap to see if they were still there. They looked like they were waiting for something, and although he’d had very similar dreams before and he couldn’t have said why-the general cosmic terror of their current situation leaking into the funhouse of his subconscious, probably-he thought they looked angry, as if they were waiting to see him bleed and had in fact been waiting for it for a very long time. Once or twice these dreams had turned darkly erotic when Remus was involved and he’d been meaning to learn oneiromancy for years solely for the purposes of sharing acid-trip visions and sexual somnambulism, not necessarily in that order, but in the dream he began to panic: the doorknob broke off in his hand, starless nighttime dark slipped down outside while he wasn’t looking, and something began to move in the thinning walls, murmuring in the pipes and the rafters and knocking the dust from the corners, and outside something was waiting, stitched to the shadows with its mouth wide open and grinning like a knife.
He hadn’t been asleep for an hour when he woke up with his heart in his mouth, pounding so hard in his ribs he swore he could see the swill of blood skittering through his veins in the distant frost of the Muggle lights. Yet the feeling-something watching, something waiting, someone walking on his grave-did not dissipate on waking; Remus was still asleep beside him, so unfairly exhausted Sirius would not wake him for anything as he had not woken him that first night with the same deathly shadow burning at the back of his neck, watching at the nearness of their bodies, the unorchestrated togetherness of their movement. Very quietly, so softly that later he couldn’t be sure whether it had happened at all, the curtains rustled. Breathing erratically into the deafening tightrope hush it seemed to Sirius that certain things in the room were illuminated: the book on his nightstand, his ancient Television t-shirt hanging out of Remus’s dresser drawer, the dark chocolate on the tiny bookshelf they sometimes ate in bed, both chairs at the table where Sirius could just see down into the kitchen, the note he’d left in Remus’s pocket yesterday with its smeared ink, the jumble sale watch Remus had given him last Christmas, Remus’s bare shoulder beside him on the bed, his chest rising and falling with dreams. If he threw back the curtains to tear open the velvet night he was sure he would find eyes staring back at him through the driving snow, watching them, all of them, every touch and every slight, every shoe and every thread.
I fucking dare you, he was thinking rabidly, his wand held tight in a sweaty hand, I fucking dare you. I dare you to try and take this from me. I’ll put a match to this whole world. I’ll peel your skin off and eat you raw and screaming.
Whether it was rage or lust or castigation or something else, he couldn’t know. After a while the feeling of it receded somewhere deep inside with the other shadows, and darkness lapped at the room tidal and rich as burnt midnight. The rest of the night he could not remember his dreams; he woke from darkness to darkness, listening to the sound of Remus breathing on the pillow beside him, softly, softly.
Part 4
Author/Artist: cevennes
Recipient: grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes: grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
It wasn’t long before everything went to hell, which could’ve been the leading sentence in both of their autobiographies and probably their obituaries too. For the next two weeks they became accustomed to waking in the middle of the night to strange sounds ranging from a deathly murmur in the other room to frenzied banging on the walls to a scratching in the ceiling like something was dragging itself along the rafters. Horrifyingly one afternoon when they were pretending they weren’t experiencing a violent haunting and/or living on an oil well of dark magic they’d started a fire and Remus had put on Led Zeppelin IV, perhaps in an attempt to defuse the general terrible shittiness or perhaps because he was feeling the sexual lack as acutely as Sirius was, and as they were wrapping up a package to send McKinnon and Meadowes (cheap vodka and the Kleenex EP) they both had the sensation at the exact same moment that the walls were breathing, that they were made of muscle and pulse, as if they were sitting in the belly of a living thing struggling to slouch forward on monstrous feet. They had fled the house together, tugging each other along by the hands, but they had the same faint feeling of lifeness outside in the land throbbing under their feet; it was a while before it stopped and when they ventured back inside the record was shuffling over at the end of the side, the fire nearly dead as they sat down feeling like they’d just had the worst acid trip ever had by anyone. The boathouse glowered as ever from the front windows when Sirius shut the curtains; in the blood of sunset he thought he saw something ripple in the water.
Lily had come to visit on a Wednesday when James was working late, offering to let them stay in what was going to be the baby’s room if they’d like; she wasn’t yet showing and when she had told them all over her sad glass of San Pellegrino in an Islington pub before the slapdash wedding last month Sirius had exchanged what he hoped was a surreptitious glance with Remus as both of them tried to gauge whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Truth be told they still weren’t sure.
“I was looking forward to meeting it,” she said after she’d been there for about an hour and nothing had happened. “You make this place sound like the gate of hell itself and here we are standing around the woodstove drinking and being merry. Lupin, you can stay over there if you’re going to have whiskey in front of me.”
“We could try one of those séance things,” said Sirius. “The Muggle kind with the weird magnetic glass.”
Remus laughed and Sirius found himself smiling too; after weeks of locking themselves in the heart of the beast every night they were almost exultant at having someone else in the house. Save Dumbledore and Lily they couldn’t get anyone to come over. “Those are a scam, you know that.” Sirius did know and preferred the ritual of the magical equivalent but had always been sort of morbidly fascinated with them anyway, except when the Muggles stumbled on the real thing and ended up driven mad or hanging from the walls in pieces. “Remember fifth year, when James wanted to do one after that unit in Muggle Studies? You kept moving the, the thing, so he thought something was actually after his mortal soul or whatever-”
“-And he told Selina Feinstein he was being hunted by Muggle ghosts that wanted to fry his wizard soul at the stake, and then she-um-”
“Cracking good tale, lads,” said Lily, very loudly. “The man in question sends warm tidings of course but regrettably couldn’t be here to act shocked that his Christmas Past just can’t stay buried like he wants.”
For the last month or so James had been a bit awkward around them, which Sirius supposed was part and parcel of his being unable to pretend he didn’t know what was going on between them any longer, if indeed that was what he did; it was not so much the old discomfort but more that he seemed unsure how to broach the subject or whether he even should, and at times he treated the whole thing like a big joke they wouldn’t let him in on, looking between the two of them when they were in the same room and waiting for the punchline, which rankled badly. Nonetheless he knew it would be fine; Peter though had been avoiding them and they’d both adopted a fuck-off kind of outlook towards it all unless he came around, but after nearly nine years of shared everything it still stung. The things we fixate on when we could all be dead by the end of the year, Sirius thought.
“Speaking of tidings. Dumbledore came through the Floo earlier and said he wanted to talk to you about something when we saw you, you could see about it while you were at work this week and it’s definitely not dangerous et cetera. Just Floo him when you get home,” Sirius said to Lily, whose dagger-green eyes darkened.
“I wonder what it’s like to get out of school and get on with your life without all the misery hanging over everything. When it’s over I’m not sure I’ll know what the hell to do.”
When it’s over had begun to sound like dearly wishful thinking, but still they clung to it because it was the thinning thread upon which they’d hung all their hopes; when you ripped the bottom out of that nothing was left and you forgot why you even bothered. “Make the hugest fry-up you’ve ever seen. Buy an eighth of weed. Have champagne for lunch. Never get out of bed before noon for at least a month.”
“Lie on the floor of our new flat and/or house laughing about all this shit from a fuckoff huge distance,” said Remus.
“You know how to motivate a girl,” said Lily. “But by the time I have this baby I’m not sharing any of my alcohol or my drugs or my food for a good month. Get your own.”
When they walked her down the end of the lane to the Apparition point she was looking out towards the lake with her brow furrowed when the wind picked up and the moaning started. They’d first heard it a few days ago when they’d come back from the store, thinking it was at first just the wind and realizing with a sickening fever-sweeping dread that it was not: a low, unbroken keening that called to mind a tree falling, seeping up from the frozen ground and spreading through the tree-branch fingers into the cracks in the cottage’s plaster walls. Wherever it was coming from it seemed to be getting louder, and both of them thought it had taken on an angry tenor in the night. Happy fucking Christmas.
“When did that start,” said Lily, looking truly frightened for one of the few times in Sirius’s memory, as if she’d only just realized what was happening. He could tell now as he suspected from the start that she had not been taking any of this seriously.
“Since Sunday afternoon,” said Remus. “There’s no pattern to it, just-all day, all night. Probably while we’re gone during the day too.”
Lily looked at both of them, incredulous and awestruck with fear as the hellish death-wail faded to a guttural subterranean muttering. “How the fuck do you sleep.”
“We don’t,” said Sirius.
Indeed they had hardly slept since the day they felt the walls breathing, and they didn’t sleep after Lily left either. They’d tried taking turns in the night, which fell apart two days and a spectacular fight later when they both fell asleep having forgotten whose turn it was and were late to work and a meeting with Dumbledore, respectively; even in sleep they’d taken to keeping their wands close in the bed with them which was likely to kill them before any Death Eater or murderous unworldly hellbeast did, and although the cottage was small-five steps from the couch to the kitchen, eight to the bottom of the ladder to their bedroom-they’d become increasingly uneasy when they were not in the same room, which led to a certain claustrophobic friction and at least four unslept arguments per day, their elbows and hands knocking like sandpaper into shoulders and ribs while they snapped at each other’s heels like dogs with their teeth bared in a snarl. Mornings and nights when they wanted they’d started showering together. After a week of being glued almost literally by the hip Sirius began to feel like he really was living in a Brontë novel: they could not be with each other and they could not be without each other.
Little things had been making both of them angry in a noxious amalgamation of their shitty haunting-by-magic and orders from Dumbledore and work and Christmas and worry worry worry, which he knew they’d both been trying to drown out when they felt it spark before it all exploded in a volcanic Molotov detonation; results so far had been mixed. The sexual frustration was also reaching a lofty summit, and the view from the peak was dearly fucking painful. It had been more than two weeks since they’d had sex, which was what Sirius was thinking of the night before when they were making dinner, watching the narrow strength of Remus’s fingers chop peppers for an easy stir-fry, the artful hollow of his throat, the way the night got in his oldyoung eyes and his mouth from the kitchen window. Their bodies had begun to feel like ghostly mechanical extensions of each other: if he got up to make tea it was because Remus had wanted it, and if Remus put on a record it was because Sirius had willed it, and the thread of thought became theirs. When he looked into the mirror he discovered it had become more and more difficult to hold on to himself; his grey stormglass eyes with their thick lashes became Remus’s, Remus’s mouth became his. It had been so long since they had touched each other with intent.
Just throw it out, he was planning on saying when Remus came back down the ladder from changing his shirt in their bedroom, throw it out or put it in the fridge and let’s rent a room in London, I’ll call in sick tomorrow and we can sleep all day and I’ll fuck you so hard you can’t walk straight and I’ll buy your weight in fish and chips. We can go see a cheap show and walk in Regent’s Park in the snow and we’ll take everything important and if we’re lucky this place will’ve burnt down by the time we get back.
While he was planning how best to seduce Remus body and soul the food had burnt and Remus yelled at him when he came back down and he yelled at Remus and they had depressing cold turkey sandwiches instead while the mantel began to rattle in the living room, where they discovered yet another blocky note with the strange oily ink still wet: BLOOD FOR BLOOD FOR MAGIC FOR BLOOD FOR DEATH FOR LIFE. Remus kicked the coffee table so hard the leg came loose and threw it into the woodstove without showing Dumbledore while Sirius torched their copy of the lease with wandless magic and watched it burn with a singular manic satisfaction on the hearth.
Friday after work he was bringing in some wood while Remus tried to focus enough to eviscerate a noise band whose cassette had come with packaging featuring a woman’s naked ass on stark white bathroom tile and lyrics in a similar vein; they’d spent a rare few dreamlike hours last night laughing about it. He was sitting on the couch and didn’t seem to want to get up, but when Sirius came in with the last of it and directed the logs with a spell into the lopsided pile beside the fireplace he had put on Discreet Music and stretched out across half the couch, staring into the fireplace, his notebook abandoned. Walking through the living room to the funeral dirge of it Sirius pretended he was haunting the house himself after having been murdered a decade previous but after a few minutes the stretching spectral echo of it in the house started to saw on his nerves, and he set about making tea very loudly in the kitchen.
“Bit dark for the holidays, don’t you think,” he said from the stove.
“We’re being terrorized by some unseen vengeful hellbeast entity that wants us dead. Does it really matter?”
“That doesn’t mean you need to give it fucking mood music,” said Sirius. He went back to the living room and took the needle off the record and on a vicious, spiteful impulse considered smashing it against the windowpane. Remus was staring at him with his face set into frozen vexation, nests of words in his mouth and his head he wouldn’t say, a burst blood vessel in his eye.
“I was thinking,” said Remus, still looking intently at him as he sat down in the chair to wait for the water to boil, “whatever it is, you know, it probably doesn’t even mean you. If it really is something dark it’d be after my filthy creature blood, right, it’s probably seen me out there on the moors at the full and decided, well, that’s it, time to water the unholy dark breeding ground with his blood.”
Sirius’s head had started to ache deep in his left eye socket; outside he could hear an owl calling from a snow-dusted branch in the blue dark. “And why would you think that.”
“The last note it left. Seems clear to me.”
“That was vague enough it could’ve meant anything.”
Remus blinked at him and sort of smiled in the corner of his mouth, showing teeth. “Of course you would think so because you don’t get it and you never will. You’re like, practically pureblood royalty so you think everything is all about you. But you’ll be just fine.”
“Yes Remus, I’m a hair’s breadth away from joining up with the Death Eaters and their merry marauding blood purist gang. Brilliant deduction Sherlock, that’s just genius, you ripped a hole in the charade and fucked me right through it,” he said, standing, feeling the shards of the dam-burst shatter tearing in his throat, his heartbeat swelling uneven. “Reckon I could do dear old mum proud a few years late? Last time I saw her she said she should’ve had the midwife drown me in the bath but I’m sure she’ll get over it once I complete my first pureblood rite by way of Muggle hunting and show her the new tattoo. Better late than never.”
“In theory you could just walk away from all of this right now. It doesn’t even concern you, it doesn’t affect you, nothing will change for you no matter what else happens,” which was true enough and perhaps he even deserved to hear it. Remus had sat up completely and had the couch cushion in a death grip, the vicious cornered-animal rancor seething in all the live-wires of his body; he was pale and he looked miserable and hunted and Sirius thought he had lost some weight. “Sometimes I think this is just a big fucking joke for you. Like you’ve got nothing at stake so you’ve got to go looking for it, at least until you get tired of it. You’ve got no idea what it’s like.”
“And what do you think this is-” he swept his arm around the matchbox-sized living room where they had strung themselves from corner to corner- “if not something at stake?”
What is everything I love in this scorched hellscape world if not something at stake, he thought furiously, rabid tearing bloody red-raw like a weapon. He didn’t say it.
Remus turned his head back to the fireplace and Sirius followed his stare, watching the flames unblinking until they left burnt-out spots behind his eyes; when he blinked they seemed to move closer. “Something else for you to fuck around with until you get sick of it. Something you wanted and had to have until it breaks because you couldn’t be bothered fixing it. Something familiar and lived-in because everything else is too much.”
He could feel in his gut and in his unquiet heart the tension reeled tight, the fuse lit and hissing away in the spreading shock of it, as if he’d just been slapped. “So do you have an existential crisis every time you fuck me or what.”
“That wasn’t what I meant-”
“You’re saying a fucking lot without meaning anything,” said Sirius, feeling his voice shudder in the walls as he took a heavy step towards Remus on the couch and watched him falter and recoil like a gun; his Black blood, his poison, evil pure and cauterizing as a curse. “Leave if that’s what you want so badly. Take your shit and go find someone who understands every fractured recess of your soul in all the ways I never will because deep down I’m too innately fucked spiritually or whatever to get it. What the hell are you even doing here.”
“You don’t understand-”
“Shut up, Remus, I know you love to hear yourself being vindicated and eternally correct but you’ve made your point like eight times. No one else in the whole wide world has ever suffered or been hurt, and no one understands pain or fear like you do, and no one ever will, and I am incapable by virtue of sheer evil-bloodedness of ever truly loving you. Poor you. Does that cover it?”
On the couch Remus sucked in a breath and let it out but said nothing, and in the festering serrated silence the kettle was whistling; when Sirius took it off the stove and poured he could feel the house contract and breathe the way it sometimes did, the plaster whispering in the wind like blood moving through veins, and then the death-wail rattling reaching clawlike through the earth in a hellish chant sung from exhausted lungs. Insanely Sirius threw open the kitchen window to the split red vein of sunset and launched his teacup into the yard, feeling the wind clasp needle-teeth around his wrist and tug. “Fuck you too,” he yelled as he rolled it shut again and went in huge loping strides back into the living room where he yanked on his Doc Martens and his coat while Remus, his face wide and overflowing in increments, finally got up but did not take a step towards him when he wrenched the front door open. Probably the house’s greatest drawback was its lack of doors to slam after a fight, which Sirius hadn’t considered when they signed the lease, though he felt the lack so keenly now that he was sure he’d have seen about getting one put in between the kitchen and the living room had he noticed.
“Where are you going?” asked Remus, his bottom lip raw where he had bitten it; in the bloody rime of sundown his eyes looked like June, Sirius thought, green-gold and yearning. Remus and his emotional solipsism, Remus who never had to nurse anyone’s wounds but his own, Remus who never really apologized or owned up. Sirius loved him like a seething open wound.
“Offering myself up for ritual sacrifice,” said Sirius, and slammed the door with deafening force behind him.
He made it to the end of the lane before the guilt started to wring him out, teeth chattering in the gathering nighttime gloaming; it would snow in the night, he could tell, the air tinny and thick around his neck where he’d left without a scarf. Things got like this sometimes when they cut themselves on each other, a ruinous bleeding thread that once unraveled they could not stop picking at like sutures that had begun to itch; his blood was not Remus’s blood but his possession was perhaps an inexorable twin of Remus’s possession, blood for blood indeed, a ruthless mirror where he knew Remus’s image and all the different men he’d been like he knew the reflection of his very soul. They sank into each other, the eternal echo, the only dream, the sometimes-fever and the always-desire. But sometimes they looked too close and saw too much.
Without thinking he’d walked all the way down to the lakeshore with the ceaseless breath of the wind muttering in the ink-spill of the trees stretched overhead against the bruised sky, his breath unwinding in the glacial-blue wandlight in front of him and his heart beating and beating in the hush of the winter air. He had half-expected Remus to follow him but he never did; it occurred to him belatedly that if Remus decided to wreck anything in the house (which he did sometimes after a fight, and although he almost always had things back in order by the time Sirius came home the blistering violence was obvious in the scuff mark on the wall or the new vinyl to replace the one he’d broken) he’d left all the gifts he’d bought for him a few days ago unwrapped under his side of the bed. Knowing Remus he’d still pretend to be surprised by the weird occult books he’d found at the magic store in the village and the records and the sweater Sirius looked forward to seeing him in and nothing else, even if he knew Sirius knew. At least he’d put the scarf in his sock drawer.
Across the lake the eye of the boathouse watched as ever through the sparse trees like something peeled raw, undimmed by the low fog curling over the cut-glass surface of the water. In the wandlight he found a few flat stones and tried to skip them across the water, which he’d never been very good at; Remus had taught him to do it when they were twelve or thirteen and walking along the river just beyond the Lupin property while James and Peter swam in the pond, and at first Sirius had thought he must be using magic to do it but he wasn’t. He’d waded in with Remus and they held hands against the gentle current with no one there to see, looking for good stones in the silt, and he could remember feeling in the clasp of their sweaty fingers a kind of static sweetness thrumming up against his pulse, beckoning, as if he could reach into the pocket of it and do magic he’d never done before. With the years he’d come to understand that he had loved Remus even then. Sometimes he thought he had loved the idea of Remus years before he ever knew him-the thought of loving his longing for an unmappable someone, like loving all the music he had never heard or all the life he had not yet lived.
Already he was thinking about walking home again as he threw his last stone and watched it skip only twice before it sank; maybe everything would be better if he made them grilled cheeses for dinner. He was looking for one more stone when something caught his eye across the water, more the suggestion of movement than movement itself, and for a moment he thought it was a nightbird flitting through the trees. But when he looked through the gauzy fog towards the boathouse again something was looking back.
At the window was the splatter of a shadow, human-shaped though he couldn’t be sure from the distance and the fog; he watched it, feeling pinned by the back of his neck, his heart hammering down his rib-rungs until he felt like he would be sick, too frightened and too throttlingly shell-shocked to even blink. When he took an unconscious step backwards it jerked harshly towards the glass, as if it was beating its head against the window.
Jesus living fuck. He turned and ran all the way home tripping over his own feet in about twelve seconds flat never once looking over his shoulder, gulping cold air into his straining lungs. When he got to the house he saw Remus was waiting outside with his wand held out at arm’s length, cutting into the fog; when he saw Sirius he threw open the gate and reeled him in, heartbeat to heartbeat, as if he’d been waiting the entire time to feel his arms around him when they found each other again.
“What happened,” Remus asked as Sirius finally dared to look back across the lake and found the windows glowing empty. His whole body felt like jelly. “Are you alright?”
“Shhh,” he said, pressing his face into the crook of Remus’s shoulder and feeling his long fingers fan out and splay spidery across the back of his neck. Like this he thought maybe they could melt into each other or do blood magic. It was the same feeling he often got when they were cradled in the womb of the moon-mornings, the sky emptied of darkness, the pale newborn light and the smell of their sweat and blood and the loam of the earth jangling down his senses while he looked at Remus beside him, wanting with a wild rabid compulsion to lick him clean and carry him home. He wanted Remus to swallow him whole.
Inside they locked the door and pressed together on the couch with tea and some of the Xeroxed papers Remus had brought home from the Prophet archives in London which told them altogether very little of use (the previous tenants had been a Squib man and a witch who had dropped out of Hogwarts early in her sixth year and had seemingly been living mostly as a Muggle; the Aurors had found the front door open, as if they’d let someone inside), listening to the bite of the wind and the Muggle news on the television. Eventually Sirius did get up and made them grilled cheeses on thick wheat bread with avocado and tomato slices, and afterwards they peeled oranges with their fingers in front of the woodstove and ate good dark chocolate while the snow began to fall outside, making a soft kissing sound against the kitchen window. The fear and the exhaustion and the anger all felt very far away suddenly, and they could almost pretend they were as happy as they had wanted to be, talking about what they’d make for Christmas dinner with the snow catching the lights from the tree and the candles lit on the kitchen counter, their bodies entwined in shadow on the far wall.
After a while Remus poured them some whiskey and slid his hand around the inside of Sirius’s knee, stroking his middle finger over and over into the warm curve underneath. Given that it had been well over two weeks by now Sirius felt something alight in his belly almost at the mere suggestion of the touch, like he’d been holding his breath for it without knowing, thinking yes yes yes, fever in it, touch me, why don’t you touch me, heedless of anything else. When would they even get another moment like this with the breaking of the vast fragmenting world? Chances were meant to be taken and when could they be reckless and laughing in the face of death and horror et cetera if not now.
Together they blew out the candles and went one by one up the ladder to their bedroom, where they left the strands of Muggle lights on as they undressed each other slowly. Sirius ran his hands up Remus’s chest, thumbs in his neck feeling for the song of his pulse in the familiar topography of his body; when they kissed it was unhurried, Remus’s mouth chasing him every time Sirius pulled back and let himself be caught again, his lips opening under Remus’s until the pattern shifted and there were hands on either side of his face and his tongue was about halfway down Remus’s throat, feeling him moan in his own mouth. He could feel Remus’s cock half-hard against his thigh and ran his fingers down the waistband of his underwear to stroke him, feeling Remus’s teeth graze his pulse where he was sucking a hot runic imprint against Sirius’s neck; his hips jerked electrically when Sirius rubbed his thumb over his slit, feeling the blood-heavy weight of his cock hardening against his palm. It hadn’t even been three weeks and still the pure match-strike of anticipation spreading in his gut through his chest and his cock and between his thighs made his mouth go dry, as did Remus, naked on the bed with all the pieces of him spilled out on the sheets, compulsion in his eyes and the heartbeat running wild wild wild in his throat.
Remus reached for him and bent his knees up, one of his hands taking Sirius’s hair out of its tie and the other around his hip, composing the pieces of their movement in unflowing tidal rhythm like two pieces of the same instrument, thrusting his cock against Sirius’s and then stroking them together in his big hand, eyelids fluttering. Bending his neck Sirius let his hair fall against Remus’s chest, flitting in vivid slow motion across the landmarks of his body: he could feel Remus’s heart between his teeth as he flicked his tongue across a nipple, his knuckles whispering over his ticklish sides, the slopes of his thighs trembling very tightly under his palms, the violin-vibrations of his belly when Sirius held him down by the hips and thrust his tongue into Remus’s navel-rhythmic-pulsebeat and breath like a fine trigger, timbre rising, vibration all through the wires of their bodies. When he murmured the spell against the inside of Remus’s thigh he felt him jolt, sudden wildfire in the arch of his spine.
“Do you think it’s watching,” asked Remus, breath in it, and fever. Sirius stroked a finger inside him, crooking it, just up to the first knuckle, taking just the head of Remus’s cock into his mouth and drawing lazy curlicue-ribbons underneath with his tongue dragging along the heavy silk of it; above him he could hear Remus’s breath tightening, his bent knees and his dark mouth spooling.
“Obviously it’s been dying to see me get you off,” said Sirius, low, at the join of Remus’s hip and thigh. “It’s probably been gagging for it for weeks and we’ve just left it high and dry the whole time. Maybe the cosmic void itself wants to fuck both of us into literal oblivion.”
“You think you’re so funny,” said Remus, flushed all through and laughing, his fingers in Sirius’s hair. Sirius pressed another finger inside him and watched his mouth fall open, thrusting in and then circling his fingertips around the rim where he could feel him wet and open, hips moving in time with Sirius’s fingers, seeking.
“So do you.”
“Yes,” said Remus. He took Sirius’s wrist and thrust his hips, pressing him deeper. When he took Remus’s cock in his mouth again Sirius let the bare white-sharp edges of his teeth graze against him as he pulled off, sucking hard, feeling the catch in Remus’s breath and the moan deep down in his chest. “God, Sirius-I was trying to-it was one of the first things I ever liked about you,” he said, “way back to day one, on the train. No one-no one can make me laugh like you do.”
As with all the other things it ran down the drain back to the train compartment when they were eleven years old, or maybe earlier, back a hundred years, a million things unsaid and undone and unknown, their souls sculpted from the same magnificent clay, yearning always through displaced time to find each other again. Sirius kissed his belly and then Remus was pushing him back by the shoulders, groaning when Sirius’s fingers slipped out of him; he was about to say something when Remus straddled his hips and all rational thought shriveled up in his dry mouth like leaves in the heat, his hands sliding along Remus’s thighs to his waist and back down again, squeezing his ass, Remus’s hands moving on his shoulders like he was the only thing in the world that could keep him still, the only thing that could make him move.
“Where’s my cock on that list,” Sirius asked him, feeling Remus sway against him like a willow tree and laugh wildly, the tremble of it reverberating in Sirius’s chest with his blood and his breath. Their bodies flowed together: wherever Remus went Sirius went, a two-headed creature made of wanting, made of loving, made of years and years and years.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Remus, and to make a point he wrapped his hand around Sirius’s cock and stroked him slowly, the callouses on his fingers dragging torturously along the entire length until he felt like a smoldering fuse, embers burning against Remus’s hand. After a few moments Remus took his fingers from where his thumb was pressing inside Sirius’s mouth and flicked it over his nipple until Sirius felt like he might actually combust, all the pieces of him straining for Remus as he had always, compelled and enthralled, overtaken.
“Remus,” he was saying, right against his lips, “please, please-”
“I thought we were,” said Remus even as he took Sirius inside himself, slow like ritual, “I thought we were talking about how funny you think you are.” The muscles in his belly torqued slightly and he hissed lithely, pressing down around him so slowly Sirius could feel his teeth clenching, watching the slide of his body into Remus’s body with an intoxicated starvation lighting up everything from his heart to his head to his gut and between his legs, lightning in it, a thick strike of pleasure welling up. “It drives me insane,” he said. “I love it and you know it.”
He shoved his hips up gently and moaned, thumbs smoothing over Remus’s hipbones while he canted his hips forward and then back in Sirius’s lap, searching. “Literally half of all the stupid shit I’ve ever said or done is just to make you laugh,” he said. In the middle of it Remus found the pure electric-current strike inside him and rode the flint-and-tinder of it, urging Sirius faster; he snapped his hips up into the heat of it, his cock thrusting deep into the oneness of it while Remus gripped his arms and ran his heavy palms up his biceps to his shoulders, gasping.
“Tell me-” Remus started, pushing him deeper and then going still where Sirius could feel his cock pressed into the gold thread he wanted, “tell me about it later.” Sirius moved his hips slowly into it, a long dragging curl of pleasure, the rush of it spreading through them in a molten wave.
“Always,” said Sirius, “you fucking know I will.” Sometimes it was like this when they had sex, conversation like chords plucked thrillingly at odd angles, and sometimes they never shut up; occasionally they didn’t talk at all, undressing in sheer silence and speaking only in the slideshow tangle of their bodies, their open mouths, their shifting faces in the sheets. With the strings of dusty-dim lights on Remus’s skin he looked like something wild and holy born of the moors and come as if conjured into Sirius’s bed in the night, where he had been waiting far beyond this lifetime to feel his breathing body, his heart.
Remus was driving him deeper and Sirius could feel the timbre of him wound tight, their rhythm like famine, an irresistible tidal pulse burgeoning; he watched at the join of their bodies, inside and around each other, one into one, and leaned forward to lick nonsense patterns against Remus’s nipple. “I almost wouldn’t mind,” said Sirius, hardly any breath, “getting killed, God, like this-just like this,” laughing, thinking perhaps they had already let the monster inside.
Against his palm he felt Remus’s cock pulse, his thumb rubbing over the slick head and smoothing down again, stroking him deliberately out of time with the thrust of their hips. After not so much longer Remus rode him harder, the angle the same, relentless, relentless, his chest thrumming with his blood and his breath in a crescendo under Sirius’s mouth as he pressed a sweaty hand around Sirius’s on his cock, his back arching like an ocean ripple. Sirius squeezed gently and twisted his wrist around the head of Remus’s cock and felt him come after two strokes, his teeth sunk into the heartbeat at Sirius’s neck, all of him clenching in a tight spool around his cock as he pulsed wet over their threaded fingers and both their bellies, his chest swelling and deflating wonderingly against Sirius’s.
He fucked Remus through it, trying to stave off coming himself, but then Remus reached down and touched the join of them where Sirius was stretched tight all around and over him as they moved, pulse and icefloe-tremble deep inside him when he rocked his hips into Sirius as if their bodies were the same, fingers around the base of Sirius’s cock where it was slick and heavy inside him. The spreading jolt when he snapped his hips into the swallowing heat of him, the drag of his cock-timbre splitting, rhythm breaking-he came, the tip and the wild overflow-spill melting through his belly through his thighs and all the uncoiling threads of him, going still inside Remus with a choked-off groan, an open-mouthed kiss pressed against his neck. Remus rocked his hips into him, gasping at the wet spread of it inside him, Sirius’s hand splayed out over the base of his spine to hold them together like two pieces of something broken soldered together with gold.
For a few long minutes Remus wouldn’t let him pull out, kissing him slowly with his sweaty fingers tracing the slowing blue staccato of his pulse up the vein-lines of his hips and chest, and when he did at last move the loss of it made him feel cold all over as if they’d just been severed, bereft in the dark. They cleaned up and laid down together, pulling the blanket back up with the tangled afghans and the enormous scarves they kept on the bed, not bothering to put on clothes, which in the current state of their nightmare hunting-by-malicious-magic-and/or ghosts seemed almost scintillatingly reckless. Under the blankets he ran a palm up the ivory-key ridges of Remus’s ribs to his shoulderblades where he was using Sirius as a pillow, stretching fluid against him with his back cracking in places; with his fingers Sirius lit a cigarette while Remus watched him take a drag and then another, his chest expanding under Remus’s head until he braced himself on his elbows and grabbed Sirius by the hair, kissing him hard, sucking down smoke.
“You know I started smoking because of you,” said Remus, the vibration of his voice blurring into Sirius’s heartbeat. The room smelled like sex and snowfall and pinewood and now menthol smoke; in Remus’s hair Sirius could still smell Earl Grey and clean sweat, stroking his fingers through the wiry last-leaf red of it. “I mean because of all of you, and because I liked it, but you especially. You look kind of unfairly good with a cigarette, like that boy you get warned about in public service announcements.”
“So now I’ve got your lungs on my conscience forever,” said Sirius. “Maybe we could quit, when this is all over.” They both laughed, though Sirius couldn’t have said which prospect was more hilarious.
“Too late, Pads.”
“If it’s any consolation you’re sexy even when you’re lying in repose after the full making me listen to your soothing folksy shit. Between you and me it gets me hot.”
“I always suspected as much. You’re so fucking weird,” said Remus, smiling like a cloudburst, looking at Sirius like he wanted to be devoured; around his throat and his chest where Sirius could see in the loamy shadow above the blanket he had purpling hickeys like small tokens, same as he’d left on Sirius. Often the next day he’d wear his scarf adjusted just so in a way that made it obvious what he was not-trying to hide. “Between you and me it gets me hot.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re both crazy because it gets me laid.”
“Haven’t we always known that from like minute one,” said Remus, laughing. “I think it was always going to head here, you know? Less immovable object and irresistible force and more irresistible force and irresistible force, like magnets maybe, or a bug on a windshield. But speaking of the full,” he grabbed Sirius’s wrist and took a drag of the cigarette between his fingers, “and the death by nicotine. Sometimes I felt like-I don’t know, like I do it to get back at myself, I suppose. And there’s the head-rush of course.”
“Like it’s the only thing you can do to hurt what you can’t reach. As miserable as that sounds,” said Sirius. He had given it some thought before and guessed it was why both of them threw themselves into the Order and went blind into jobs that odds were would land them in St. Mungo’s or a cheap coffin before twenty-two, aside from the obvious reasons.
“Yes. And the blaring kind of high that comes with it.” In the rafters Sirius could hear a rapid birdwing flutter drumming like a heart, echoing and fanning out across the wood from one end to the other, though by now they were so used to this at night they both recoiled slightly like components of the same spring-trap and then relaxed, breathing, just breathing. “Maybe we should take up embroidery instead.”
“I’ll make you a novelty t-shirt for the motorbike. ‘My Other Ride Is His Cock.’”
“God, you’re vile,” said Remus, shaking like a brittle tree branch with quiet laughter. “For Christmas I saw this coffee mug at the thrift store, it said ‘Like My Men: Cheap, Bitter, and From the Corner Store.’ I was gonna, y’know, magic over that last part and put ‘With a Bite’ instead. Thought it might be too obvious.”
Sirius laughed. “Well why the hell didn’t you,” he asked. He felt shaken out and new, his limbs slung lazily back together with golden honey, warm in all the places of himself where they had been together; the resonance of it shivered ecstatically down his body and Remus’s until everything was themselves and everything was each other, feeling echoes, feeling words and words and words.
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” said Remus, and he pressed up on his elbows with his handsome off-kilter face and his bony shoulders and his green copper-mirror eyes and kissed the laugh out of Sirius’s mouth. “Even if,” he said when he pulled back, “I mean, overlooking everything else in the whole of this bullshit world and the untold horrors I’m sure are waiting for us in the morning like a Christmas present. I’m really very happy.”
“Not to be a soppy fuck but you do make me very happy, you know,” said Sirius, stretching out beside him, Remus’s jaw brushing thrillingly against his shoulder where Sirius could feel the places he’d missed shaving, soft thistle. “No one I’d rather descend into hell with or jump off the edge of the world with, the only co-pilot I want when the plane’s going down, all that. It feels like the plug’s been pulled out of my brain, which is hilarious because that should’ve happened years ago.”
“I think it did happen years ago and that’s just our default state of being nowadays,” said Remus, “unplugged and held together with shoestring and Spello-tape, questions of sanity being what they are at the best of times. It’s almost romantic when you think about it.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to write Dumbledore a thank-you card. This has been the team-building exercise we needed all along, it’s not like we came out here for the scenery or anything. Who the hell does that.”
“‘Thanks ever so much for the opportunity to experience a malevolent haunting first-hand in the gaping mouth of the beast itself. This was a deep and invaluable learning experience for both of us, especially the part where Sirius hexed me when I snuck up on him with sexual intent. I owe the blistering rash on my ass to you.’”
“You’re never going to stop bitching about that,” said Sirius. He’d spent the entire evening afterwards alternating between apologizing and arguing and groveling with macaroni and cheese and planning to eat Remus out for half an hour when they went to bed, which was completely ruined when their treasured unearthly guest started hammering on the back door after dinner with extreme bloodlust. “I mean it hardly seems fair given that I basically lost the lottery there.”
“Not getting fucked is a few magnitudes worse than a screaming rash on your ass that feels like someone flayed it open. Definitely.”
“I’m gonna make it up to you if and when we get through this and you know it. For a few magnitudes.”
“That’s what I was counting on. But I guess it is a little bit funny, almost, and the sleep loss and bludgeoning paranoia and no sex for weeks, of course,” said Remus, smiling. “You know what I mean.”
“I know,” said Sirius, “Black and Lupin against the world. I know.” They settled into each other, skin to skin until they drifted apart in sleep, listening to the underground hum of their voices moving through their bodies like blood, or song.
For a while he dreamed he was trapped in his old bedroom at Grimmauld Place in the summer, the door locked and the window stuck shut, his wand nowhere he could find; on the empty street below someone he didn’t recognize stared up at him, unmoved by his banging on the window, unrelenting even when he closed the curtains and peeked through the gap to see if they were still there. They looked like they were waiting for something, and although he’d had very similar dreams before and he couldn’t have said why-the general cosmic terror of their current situation leaking into the funhouse of his subconscious, probably-he thought they looked angry, as if they were waiting to see him bleed and had in fact been waiting for it for a very long time. Once or twice these dreams had turned darkly erotic when Remus was involved and he’d been meaning to learn oneiromancy for years solely for the purposes of sharing acid-trip visions and sexual somnambulism, not necessarily in that order, but in the dream he began to panic: the doorknob broke off in his hand, starless nighttime dark slipped down outside while he wasn’t looking, and something began to move in the thinning walls, murmuring in the pipes and the rafters and knocking the dust from the corners, and outside something was waiting, stitched to the shadows with its mouth wide open and grinning like a knife.
He hadn’t been asleep for an hour when he woke up with his heart in his mouth, pounding so hard in his ribs he swore he could see the swill of blood skittering through his veins in the distant frost of the Muggle lights. Yet the feeling-something watching, something waiting, someone walking on his grave-did not dissipate on waking; Remus was still asleep beside him, so unfairly exhausted Sirius would not wake him for anything as he had not woken him that first night with the same deathly shadow burning at the back of his neck, watching at the nearness of their bodies, the unorchestrated togetherness of their movement. Very quietly, so softly that later he couldn’t be sure whether it had happened at all, the curtains rustled. Breathing erratically into the deafening tightrope hush it seemed to Sirius that certain things in the room were illuminated: the book on his nightstand, his ancient Television t-shirt hanging out of Remus’s dresser drawer, the dark chocolate on the tiny bookshelf they sometimes ate in bed, both chairs at the table where Sirius could just see down into the kitchen, the note he’d left in Remus’s pocket yesterday with its smeared ink, the jumble sale watch Remus had given him last Christmas, Remus’s bare shoulder beside him on the bed, his chest rising and falling with dreams. If he threw back the curtains to tear open the velvet night he was sure he would find eyes staring back at him through the driving snow, watching them, all of them, every touch and every slight, every shoe and every thread.
I fucking dare you, he was thinking rabidly, his wand held tight in a sweaty hand, I fucking dare you. I dare you to try and take this from me. I’ll put a match to this whole world. I’ll peel your skin off and eat you raw and screaming.
Whether it was rage or lust or castigation or something else, he couldn’t know. After a while the feeling of it receded somewhere deep inside with the other shadows, and darkness lapped at the room tidal and rich as burnt midnight. The rest of the night he could not remember his dreams; he woke from darkness to darkness, listening to the sound of Remus breathing on the pillow beside him, softly, softly.
Part 4