Shipwreck Against Your Eyes
SHIPWRECK AGAINST YOUR EYES
Summary: Remus was the most beautiful puzzle Sirius could ever hope to meet, a solid cliff rising out of the chaos of Sirius’ life, his smile a beacon against which Sirius would gladly shipwreck his heart a thousand times and more.
Written for the 2014 Remus/Sirius Games.
Characters/Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG
Words: ~2,000
Notes: For Team Muggle; this year's theme: the five senses.
Because apparently I can’t do anything without also making it into a challenge for myself, I wrote this for not one but three prompts:
#3 - audio/visual prompt - “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys
#33 - picture prompt - a black dog shaking off water
#56 - word prompt - “Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.” ~ Mary Renault
Title from Rufus Wainwright’s “Tiergarten.”
Thank you to brighty18 and cackling_madly for beta-reading!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“I don’t like it here,” Sirius said, before he’d had a chance to run his mouth through the filter of his brain. “There’s too much grey.”
Beside him, Remus chuckled quietly. But Remus’ laugh these days, too, was a greyish sort of sound. “I suppose it would be superfluous to point out that you were the one who wanted to come to Brighton in the autumn,” Remus said.
It was true, Sirius had. He’d all but dragged Remus out of the flat (work, Remus had protested, documents, Order business, so much to do, I’m drowning in it, Padfoot - all the things he always said when Sirius tried to have more than a superficial conversation with him) and insisted they take a day away somewhere, together, the way they never did anymore.
Now Sirius wondered if Remus had been right after all. Maybe the smokescreen of their work for the Order, the duties that left them too occupied to be more than ships passing in the night, was all that kept them even tenuously talking to each other.
Sirius watched Remus’ profile as they made their uneven way along the pebble beach. The pier hulked stark and silent behind them, Sirius knew without having to turn and look; the concession booths that in summer sold candy floss and boiled sweets now squatted shut-tight and melancholic along the boardwalk, their colours muted under the low, slate sky.
Wind gusted around them, lifting Remus’ sandy hair from his forehead and sifting it back down, obscuring his eyes. Remus was the only thing here with life or colour, and even he had precious little of either these days. That he showed to Sirius, at least.
Sirius shivered and tugged his collar up higher. It was not yet quite October, but there was a chill in the air all the same.
“Remember summer after seventh year?” Remus asked. He didn’t look over at Sirius, but gazed straight ahead, as if the expanse of stones that stretched ahead of them were fascinating rather than bleak. To their left, waves lapped the shore, a susurrous slap-slap that Sirius once might have found soothing. Now it only served to mark each successive silence that stretched between them, secretive and unspoken.
“‘Course I do,” Sirius said. Why did Remus think he’d wanted to come to Brighton, anyway?
They’d been here, all of them together, shortly after finishing Hogwarts. It had been high summer, sun shimmering off the sea, Lily laughing and whispering things in James’ ear that made him blush like a third-year sitting through the awkward but obligatory birds-and-bees talk from Madam Hooch. Peter had doled out Every Flavour Beans and dared the rest of them to try an entire handful at once. Sirius had got tar, champagne, sprouts, fermented shark, baking soda, mango chutney, habanero pepper and halibut all in one go, and once he’d finished coughing so hard his eyes watered, he’d tackled Peter to the ground and got him in a headlock against the hard stones, until Peter had begged for mercy, interspersed with his convulsive laughter and exclamations of “But your face, Sirius, if you could have seen…”
Remus had given Sirius a hand up from the ground, once Sirius had reluctantly released Peter, and pulled Sirius up to his feet with that surprising, hidden strength of his, then held onto his hand just a beat longer than necessary. And Sirius had thought, Oh, and a suspicion - a hope - had begun to unfurl tentative, new, green shoots in the back of his mind, that maybe he hadn’t been imagining it, the way Remus sometimes looked at him with the same reverent fascination Sirius felt when he looked at Remus.
Then the moment had passed, for that day at least, but Sirius hadn’t forgotten it, and that new, green hope had continued to grow all through that heady summer, when the world lay at their feet and Remus was the most beautiful puzzle Sirius could ever hope to meet, a solid cliff rising out of the chaos of Sirius’ life, his smile a beacon against which Sirius would gladly shipwreck his heart a thousand times and more.
Brighton, to Sirius, was Lily laughing, James pink-cheeked with love requited at last, Peter generous and unafraid, and the intoxicating warmth of Remus’ eyes when he forgot to guard his secret heart.
Now Brighton was like everywhere else in the world - blustering and cold and leached of the magic it had once held. Sirius itched to pull out his wand and Conjure up a shower of prismatic sparks, just to be sure he still could. But somehow the effort felt like too much, and anyway, you never knew when there might be Muggles around. How daft was he, anyway, to have thought Brighton could be the same, when James and Lily were in hiding with Harry, Peter gone permanently anxious and afraid as the years of the war dragged on, and Remus was - Sirius didn’t want to think about what Remus probably was. Maybe. Probably.
Remus lifted his face towards the sky and breathed deeply. “I never get tired of the smell of the sea,” he said. “It might be grey this time of year, Sirius, but at least it smells fresh. Like something clean and new.”
“Mm,” Sirius agreed, closing his eyes and sucking in a lungful. The air was sharp with the tang of salt, and Sirius pictured it as a physical substance, seeing every molecule - Remus, clever even when it came to Muggle things, had explained once about molecules - filling his lungs, offering up life to his alveoli. Maybe some self-same molecule Remus had just breathed out was inside him even now. It made Sirius want to clamp his nose and hold the air inside his lungs forever.
Eyes still closed, Sirius stumbled as the toe of his boot caught on a rock. His eyes flew open as he felt himself pitch forward, but Remus’ hand shot out and caught him, his grip a reassuring certainty around Sirius’ upper arm. Remus’ mind might have learned to protect its every vagary of thought and mood, but Remus’ body never forgot to respond to Sirius’ with an immediacy that didn’t allow for hesitation or conscious thought.
“Thanks,” Sirius said, his voice sounding gruff to his ears. “Look at me, walking along like an idiot with my eyes shut.”
Remus glanced down at his hand on Sirius’ arm, then dropped it to his side again, expression carefully neutral. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.
Ahead of them, a flurry of black birds exploded up from the stones of the shore, startled by their approach. The birds’ shrieks tore at the sky, and with a sudden, hard convulsion of his heart, Sirius thought, Remus.
He wanted to say, I don’t care what secrets you keep. Merlin help me, I don’t even care who you keep those secrets for. Just talk to me like we’re both still here.
The birds wailed as they wheeled away, tattered flags of black against the washed-out sky, and Sirius watched Remus watch them go.
For the space of a breath, Sirius thought his heart might actually burst with the effort of holding it all in.
Remus dropped his eyes from the sky and, perhaps by accident, met Sirius’ gaze. For a second, there was something there, some deeper honesty that hadn’t changed about Remus despite the absent nights and alibis. Then he shuttered closed again.
“I’m going in,” Sirius declared. He thought he would combust like a Self-Igniting Cauldron if he stayed in his skin any longer. Maybe Padfoot’s skin would fit better.
“Sirius, what-” Remus started, but Sirius had already transformed, the world kaleidoscoping down to a black and white canvas in which Remus, to Padfoot’s immense and simpleminded relief, smelled only of affection, not deceit.
The pebbles were smooth and cool against the pads of his paws as Sirius galloped the last few feet to the lip of an incoming wave and plunged bodily into its heart, a yip escaping his muzzle as the shock of it hit, icy despite the insulation of his fur.
Sirius ploughed his whole head in, the noise of the world whiting out to nothing but the slosh of water in his ears, and he howled with gladness, getting a muzzle full of saltwater as he did. Salt, sea, stone, sky, these were elemental things, their sensations solid and unchanging.
He dove again, scooped up a mouthful of pebbles and revelled in their hard, cold taste against his tongue, then spit them out and bounded from the water, shaking himself so vigorously that the water plumed off of him in great outward-climbing spirals, the only sound in his world the flapping of his own shaggy ears against his skull.
“You were saying something,” Sirius said, when he’d transformed back to human form and surreptitiously used his wand to dry himself. “I saw your mouth moving, when I was in the water, but I couldn’t hear you.”
The scents of the world were often still heightened, in those first few minutes after Sirius had returned to his own shape, and still Remus smelled clean and free of deception. But Sirius knew better to trust the wishfulness of loyal Padfoot over the rationality of his human mind. The oddities of Remus’ behaviour these last months couldn’t be explained away with a single sense impression and the desire of Sirius’ heart for everything to stay the same.
“Oh, just humming something,” Remus muttered, looking faintly embarrassed.
Sirius turned to stare at the outline of Remus’ face, beautiful and hard against the waning light of the overcast afternoon. He knew Remus could feel him looking. Remus didn’t meet his eyes, but he hummed a little, half-singing the lyrics. Remus’ voice was hoarse and unlovely, but that only made Sirius love it more, for how real it was, how Remus.
Sirius thought of the sirens of Greek legend, of the Lorelei atop her rock, combing her golden hair in the sunlight, and of the sailors who rowed knowingly to their doom, desperate for one more melody before they went down in a froth of bubbles and foolhardy desire.
I may not always love you, Remus sang, his gaze distant, his expression lost inside itself,
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it
Sirius’ heart was a hard, desperate fist inside his chest, clinging to those words even as his reality shattered around him into shards of helpless, misplaced love, an affection he could never rescind, no matter how he might try.
God only knows what I'd be without you, Remus whispered, and Sirius’ throat seared with the effort of not babbling aloud all his suspicions and all his love.
Sirius took a deep breath, letting the sea air fill him with its clean scent, its indifference to their petty human concerns. The sea didn’t care if Sirius kept loving this man walking next to him, no matter how murky his actions. The sea didn’t care whose side Remus was ultimately on or whether Sirius’ heart burst in the end with the strain of holding two impossible things within its walls. This lapping, grey sea would outlive them all.
“It’s getting colder,” Remus observed, his eyes on the horizon, a slim, pale line where sky divided almost imperceptibly from sea. “Maybe we should head back.”
“Yeah,” Sirius agreed.
In silent accord, not needing to exchange even a glance in order to fall into step, they turned and started back the way they’d come.
“Thanks for coming here,” Sirius said, after they’d walked for half a dozen breaths in silence. “I know you’ve got work you ought to be doing, instead of chasing around after my whims.”
“That’s all right,” Remus said, his voice even, his eyes on the stones beneath their feet. “Maybe you were right. It’s good to get out, even if it’s just for an afternoon.”
Not looking at him, Sirius reached out and slipped his hand into Remus’. Just for a moment. Just for now.
Summary: Remus was the most beautiful puzzle Sirius could ever hope to meet, a solid cliff rising out of the chaos of Sirius’ life, his smile a beacon against which Sirius would gladly shipwreck his heart a thousand times and more.
Written for the 2014 Remus/Sirius Games.
Characters/Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: PG
Words: ~2,000
Notes: For Team Muggle; this year's theme: the five senses.
Because apparently I can’t do anything without also making it into a challenge for myself, I wrote this for not one but three prompts:
#3 - audio/visual prompt - “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys
#33 - picture prompt - a black dog shaking off water
#56 - word prompt - “Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.” ~ Mary Renault
Title from Rufus Wainwright’s “Tiergarten.”
Thank you to brighty18 and cackling_madly for beta-reading!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“I don’t like it here,” Sirius said, before he’d had a chance to run his mouth through the filter of his brain. “There’s too much grey.”
Beside him, Remus chuckled quietly. But Remus’ laugh these days, too, was a greyish sort of sound. “I suppose it would be superfluous to point out that you were the one who wanted to come to Brighton in the autumn,” Remus said.
It was true, Sirius had. He’d all but dragged Remus out of the flat (work, Remus had protested, documents, Order business, so much to do, I’m drowning in it, Padfoot - all the things he always said when Sirius tried to have more than a superficial conversation with him) and insisted they take a day away somewhere, together, the way they never did anymore.
Now Sirius wondered if Remus had been right after all. Maybe the smokescreen of their work for the Order, the duties that left them too occupied to be more than ships passing in the night, was all that kept them even tenuously talking to each other.
Sirius watched Remus’ profile as they made their uneven way along the pebble beach. The pier hulked stark and silent behind them, Sirius knew without having to turn and look; the concession booths that in summer sold candy floss and boiled sweets now squatted shut-tight and melancholic along the boardwalk, their colours muted under the low, slate sky.
Wind gusted around them, lifting Remus’ sandy hair from his forehead and sifting it back down, obscuring his eyes. Remus was the only thing here with life or colour, and even he had precious little of either these days. That he showed to Sirius, at least.
Sirius shivered and tugged his collar up higher. It was not yet quite October, but there was a chill in the air all the same.
“Remember summer after seventh year?” Remus asked. He didn’t look over at Sirius, but gazed straight ahead, as if the expanse of stones that stretched ahead of them were fascinating rather than bleak. To their left, waves lapped the shore, a susurrous slap-slap that Sirius once might have found soothing. Now it only served to mark each successive silence that stretched between them, secretive and unspoken.
“‘Course I do,” Sirius said. Why did Remus think he’d wanted to come to Brighton, anyway?
They’d been here, all of them together, shortly after finishing Hogwarts. It had been high summer, sun shimmering off the sea, Lily laughing and whispering things in James’ ear that made him blush like a third-year sitting through the awkward but obligatory birds-and-bees talk from Madam Hooch. Peter had doled out Every Flavour Beans and dared the rest of them to try an entire handful at once. Sirius had got tar, champagne, sprouts, fermented shark, baking soda, mango chutney, habanero pepper and halibut all in one go, and once he’d finished coughing so hard his eyes watered, he’d tackled Peter to the ground and got him in a headlock against the hard stones, until Peter had begged for mercy, interspersed with his convulsive laughter and exclamations of “But your face, Sirius, if you could have seen…”
Remus had given Sirius a hand up from the ground, once Sirius had reluctantly released Peter, and pulled Sirius up to his feet with that surprising, hidden strength of his, then held onto his hand just a beat longer than necessary. And Sirius had thought, Oh, and a suspicion - a hope - had begun to unfurl tentative, new, green shoots in the back of his mind, that maybe he hadn’t been imagining it, the way Remus sometimes looked at him with the same reverent fascination Sirius felt when he looked at Remus.
Then the moment had passed, for that day at least, but Sirius hadn’t forgotten it, and that new, green hope had continued to grow all through that heady summer, when the world lay at their feet and Remus was the most beautiful puzzle Sirius could ever hope to meet, a solid cliff rising out of the chaos of Sirius’ life, his smile a beacon against which Sirius would gladly shipwreck his heart a thousand times and more.
Brighton, to Sirius, was Lily laughing, James pink-cheeked with love requited at last, Peter generous and unafraid, and the intoxicating warmth of Remus’ eyes when he forgot to guard his secret heart.
Now Brighton was like everywhere else in the world - blustering and cold and leached of the magic it had once held. Sirius itched to pull out his wand and Conjure up a shower of prismatic sparks, just to be sure he still could. But somehow the effort felt like too much, and anyway, you never knew when there might be Muggles around. How daft was he, anyway, to have thought Brighton could be the same, when James and Lily were in hiding with Harry, Peter gone permanently anxious and afraid as the years of the war dragged on, and Remus was - Sirius didn’t want to think about what Remus probably was. Maybe. Probably.
Remus lifted his face towards the sky and breathed deeply. “I never get tired of the smell of the sea,” he said. “It might be grey this time of year, Sirius, but at least it smells fresh. Like something clean and new.”
“Mm,” Sirius agreed, closing his eyes and sucking in a lungful. The air was sharp with the tang of salt, and Sirius pictured it as a physical substance, seeing every molecule - Remus, clever even when it came to Muggle things, had explained once about molecules - filling his lungs, offering up life to his alveoli. Maybe some self-same molecule Remus had just breathed out was inside him even now. It made Sirius want to clamp his nose and hold the air inside his lungs forever.
Eyes still closed, Sirius stumbled as the toe of his boot caught on a rock. His eyes flew open as he felt himself pitch forward, but Remus’ hand shot out and caught him, his grip a reassuring certainty around Sirius’ upper arm. Remus’ mind might have learned to protect its every vagary of thought and mood, but Remus’ body never forgot to respond to Sirius’ with an immediacy that didn’t allow for hesitation or conscious thought.
“Thanks,” Sirius said, his voice sounding gruff to his ears. “Look at me, walking along like an idiot with my eyes shut.”
Remus glanced down at his hand on Sirius’ arm, then dropped it to his side again, expression carefully neutral. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.
Ahead of them, a flurry of black birds exploded up from the stones of the shore, startled by their approach. The birds’ shrieks tore at the sky, and with a sudden, hard convulsion of his heart, Sirius thought, Remus.
He wanted to say, I don’t care what secrets you keep. Merlin help me, I don’t even care who you keep those secrets for. Just talk to me like we’re both still here.
The birds wailed as they wheeled away, tattered flags of black against the washed-out sky, and Sirius watched Remus watch them go.
For the space of a breath, Sirius thought his heart might actually burst with the effort of holding it all in.
Remus dropped his eyes from the sky and, perhaps by accident, met Sirius’ gaze. For a second, there was something there, some deeper honesty that hadn’t changed about Remus despite the absent nights and alibis. Then he shuttered closed again.
“I’m going in,” Sirius declared. He thought he would combust like a Self-Igniting Cauldron if he stayed in his skin any longer. Maybe Padfoot’s skin would fit better.
“Sirius, what-” Remus started, but Sirius had already transformed, the world kaleidoscoping down to a black and white canvas in which Remus, to Padfoot’s immense and simpleminded relief, smelled only of affection, not deceit.
The pebbles were smooth and cool against the pads of his paws as Sirius galloped the last few feet to the lip of an incoming wave and plunged bodily into its heart, a yip escaping his muzzle as the shock of it hit, icy despite the insulation of his fur.
Sirius ploughed his whole head in, the noise of the world whiting out to nothing but the slosh of water in his ears, and he howled with gladness, getting a muzzle full of saltwater as he did. Salt, sea, stone, sky, these were elemental things, their sensations solid and unchanging.
He dove again, scooped up a mouthful of pebbles and revelled in their hard, cold taste against his tongue, then spit them out and bounded from the water, shaking himself so vigorously that the water plumed off of him in great outward-climbing spirals, the only sound in his world the flapping of his own shaggy ears against his skull.
“You were saying something,” Sirius said, when he’d transformed back to human form and surreptitiously used his wand to dry himself. “I saw your mouth moving, when I was in the water, but I couldn’t hear you.”
The scents of the world were often still heightened, in those first few minutes after Sirius had returned to his own shape, and still Remus smelled clean and free of deception. But Sirius knew better to trust the wishfulness of loyal Padfoot over the rationality of his human mind. The oddities of Remus’ behaviour these last months couldn’t be explained away with a single sense impression and the desire of Sirius’ heart for everything to stay the same.
“Oh, just humming something,” Remus muttered, looking faintly embarrassed.
Sirius turned to stare at the outline of Remus’ face, beautiful and hard against the waning light of the overcast afternoon. He knew Remus could feel him looking. Remus didn’t meet his eyes, but he hummed a little, half-singing the lyrics. Remus’ voice was hoarse and unlovely, but that only made Sirius love it more, for how real it was, how Remus.
Sirius thought of the sirens of Greek legend, of the Lorelei atop her rock, combing her golden hair in the sunlight, and of the sailors who rowed knowingly to their doom, desperate for one more melody before they went down in a froth of bubbles and foolhardy desire.
I may not always love you, Remus sang, his gaze distant, his expression lost inside itself,
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it
Sirius’ heart was a hard, desperate fist inside his chest, clinging to those words even as his reality shattered around him into shards of helpless, misplaced love, an affection he could never rescind, no matter how he might try.
God only knows what I'd be without you, Remus whispered, and Sirius’ throat seared with the effort of not babbling aloud all his suspicions and all his love.
Sirius took a deep breath, letting the sea air fill him with its clean scent, its indifference to their petty human concerns. The sea didn’t care if Sirius kept loving this man walking next to him, no matter how murky his actions. The sea didn’t care whose side Remus was ultimately on or whether Sirius’ heart burst in the end with the strain of holding two impossible things within its walls. This lapping, grey sea would outlive them all.
“It’s getting colder,” Remus observed, his eyes on the horizon, a slim, pale line where sky divided almost imperceptibly from sea. “Maybe we should head back.”
“Yeah,” Sirius agreed.
In silent accord, not needing to exchange even a glance in order to fall into step, they turned and started back the way they’d come.
“Thanks for coming here,” Sirius said, after they’d walked for half a dozen breaths in silence. “I know you’ve got work you ought to be doing, instead of chasing around after my whims.”
“That’s all right,” Remus said, his voice even, his eyes on the stones beneath their feet. “Maybe you were right. It’s good to get out, even if it’s just for an afternoon.”
Not looking at him, Sirius reached out and slipped his hand into Remus’. Just for a moment. Just for now.