HP fic: The Secret On Page Twelve
Title: The Secret On Page Twelve
Fandom: Harry Potter
Wordcount: 2400 words
Beta: millari, thank you :)
Summary: Kingsley has learned to expect the stuff of gay nightmares whenever his boyfriend talks about his past. So when Sirius shows him his old room at Grimmauld Place, he braces himself for the worst. Missing Scene from "To Thine Own Self Be True."
Author's Note: For roguedemon.
Occasionally, Kingsley found dating a Black a bit… difficult. He wouldn’t go as far as to openly call it disturbing but, well. No matter if the topic of the day was pureblood mistreatment of house elves or the assumption that corporal punishment would still be common practice, Kingsley had started automatically expecting horror movie material the moment his boyfriend got started on the childhood memories.
“Come on up,” Sirius said, offering his hand. “I want to show you something.”
Kingsley had just worked a shift at the Ministry. He hadn’t been planning to rise from his chair in the parlor any time soon. There wasn’t much else they could do anyway; Lupin was downstairs having tea with Emmeline Vance, and that loud woman could materialize at any time to offer them cake. However, Sirius’ expression said he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so Kingsley accepted his hand and let himself be dragged out of the room.
Of course, he had assumed that Sirius would take him to the spare room he inhabited (to show him something Kingsley would absolutely refuse to be shown while there were other people in the house). But Sirius passed the door by without a glance, aiming for the upstairs stairway and climbing it without a word. Kingsley blinked. He’d never entered the second floor of Grimmauld Place; the Order wasn’t using it for anything. He was getting curious, though.
When he caught up with Sirius at the top of the stairs, poised to ask questions, Sirius had already opened a door and waved at him to follow him in. Expectantly, Kingsley set foot over the threshold. And froze.
“That’s your old room,” he stated.
“Yeah,” Sirius said. “Thank Merlin for Sticking Charms. It’s all unchanged.”
That, Kingsley decided, you could say again. It was as if he had entered another universe, because this room screamed “pureblood” as loudly as it screamed “teenager” and all the while it also very much had “Sirius” smeared all over it. Every inch of the room was rebelliously decorated in Gryffindor colors, covering antique dressers and dark oak shelves. Kingsley’s eyes came to rest on the various Muggle pin-ups on the walls, dressed comparatively modestly, Seventies’ style, in bikinis.
“This is the most heterosexual room I’ve ever been in,” he said dryly.
So was this gearing up into Sirius’ variation on a homophobia attack? By rediscovering his childhood? Last ditch attempt to prove to himself that there was still testosterone running through his veins? Kingsley had been waiting for that for a while, if we were honest. Just… from the way Sirius was handling their relationship and what it meant, what it meant about him as a person … Something was still missing. A backlash of some sort. He was a pureblood wizard and a Black, and now he’d turned out to be gay, and it changed everything.
Sirius snorted at him. “Sit down.” Kingsley flopped down onto the bed. “Here.”
While Kingsley had looked around, Sirius had been rummaging through a drawer. It apparently was charmed to conceal itself, because all he saw in its place now was a bare wall.
Sitting down next to him, Sirius handed him a magazine. On first sight of the cover, Kingsley learned two things about it: Firstly, it was a Muggle magazine published in the year of 1976, and secondly it was exactly the kind of magazine you would expect to find in the secret drawer of a fifteen-year-old straight boy. After a quick skim, it turned out to display various couples in a rather diverse set of sexual poses. It was BDSM-themed.
Remembering his own Hogwarts days, Kingsley couldn’t help feeling a tad of admiration. Getting your hands on a publication like that was hard for a pureblood minor without much exposure to the Muggle world. And probably involved shoplifting.
Dubiously he paused at the sight of two copulating women with a leather fetish and crooked his head, but that didn’t make them more alluring, either.
In the corner of his eye, Sirius was smirking. “Page twelve,” he said without even looking at the magazine.
Kingsley wasn’t certain that he wanted to see more, but he still turned to page twelve as a show of good will.
His mood took a sharp turn. “Well. That one is more to my taste.”
Sirius dropped to sprawl out on his back on the mattress with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Figured it would be.”
In conservative Muggle England twenty years ago, the point of this rare magazine had to have been that the kink overruled matters of sexual orientation, catering to all who cared to look on the sly. The picture on page twelve was showing an athletic young man who lasciviously kneeled on the ground, his hairy and very much also male biker top pressing up against him from behind with obvious intent. Kingsley immediately saw that the picture was posed; you just couldn’t do that angle with an erection. But that was absolutely beside the point.
Abruptly he felt a bit guilty. He’d suspected Sirius of thinking of their relationship as some kind of prison homosexuality adventure for too long.
He turned with a sigh, propping himself up on his elbow to face his boyfriend on the bed.
“You kept this for that picture,” he said.
Sirius shrugged, as far as was possible lying down, as if it was all very obvious. “Of course, I wouldn’t have admitted it, not even to myself. But James and I had gone to that sex shop during the holidays… we were feeling so very mature and quite the dog’s bollocks.” He barked a laugh. “And I just couldn’t resist. I told James that I fancied the pin-up in the middle, but I couldn’t even have told him her hair color.”
Kingsley himself couldn’t resist thumbing to the middle page. “She’s wearing a latex mask.”
“Ah. That’d explain it.”
Kingsley shook his head. “So what? What did you do? Open page twelve and tell yourself that you were really tossing off to…” He’d turned to that page again, skimming the caption of the picture next to it. “…Claudette being spanked?”
“Something like that.” Sirius shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe himself anymore. “I swear my head is the oddest place in the universe.”
Kingsley snorted. “I’d had you pegged wrong at first, you know. You’re actually the biggest Kinsey 6 I’ve ever met.”
Sirius turned his head to glance at him. “The biggest what?”
Kingsley smirked evilly. “That’s the Muggle science word for when you’re an irrevocable queen.” The words had barely left his mouth when he regretted them, seeing a dark expression crossing Sirius’ face. “Hey, I didn’t mean to…”
“No, it’s not that.” Sirius waved it off. His eyes were on the ceiling, and he produced a sigh that suddenly made him seem old. His mind appeared to be far away. “I’d completely forgotten about it,” he said quietly. “I spent so much time not even thinking about it. I just knew that there was something off about me but I’d… I didn’t know the right words, you know?” Kingsley felt his face grow softer. He just nodded. He too had worked through that stage before he’d rediscovered his Muggle roots. “But I dated all those women and I told myself that I just have to keep trying… or that I’m a hopeless romantic really and that I’ve got to find the right one… Lily kept telling me that, that I’ll find the right one at some point.” Kingsley raised his eyebrows skeptically, and when Sirius noticed, he shrugged again. “I just… I spent so much time not thinking about it that that just made it even more present, you know? But then when I broke out of Azkaban… It just wasn’t there; it was gone.”
“But now you’ve remembered that magazine,” Kingsley said.
Sirius nodded. Sharp lines had appeared on his face, as they always did when they started talking of Azkaban Prison. That topic still filled Kingsley with that desperate sense of helplessness. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just reached out to take Sirius’ hand in his, squeezing it softly.
Eventually, he picked his words with a lot of care. “You know, you weren’t exactly looking for a new relationship in the last two years. When you were on the run, there were so many other things going on that were much more important; there was no time. You were… you were in Azkaban for twelve years. After twelve years… you just forget some things after that long.”
As an Auror, of course, Kingsley knew just as much about the Dementors as Sirius, albeit from a different point of view. He knew that Dementors didn’t steal memories. Not the way Oblivate did, anyway. But if you avoided thinking of something for twelve years because it attracted Dementors, you just trained yourself to forget how to access that memory; or you developed an aversion to even trying. Or if you didn’t think about something for twelve years because it had just ceased to be relevant, the same thing happened. There were worse problems in Azakaban than doubts about your sexual orientation. You’d never feel joy again anyway; you’d lost any right to intimacy.
Kingsley shuddered thinking about it, he couldn’t help it. The idea of Sirius in that… in that hole filled him with a terrible fury the likes of which he had never felt about anything else.
“When did you remember the magazine?” he asked. Sirius shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. Kingsley continued, stroking the back of his hand with his thumb. “You did remember that you’re attracted to men before that, though, right?”
“I’m attracted to men? The fuck are you saying, you fairy.” Sirius gave Kingsley a halfhearted shoulder thump and rolled his eyes. “Keen-witted, Shacklebolt, seriously. But yes.” He became serious again, hesitating. “That night when you woke me up on the couch, and you… well. That night. When you gave me that blowjob. Suddenly it was all back.” He shook his head. “I had myself convinced that you’d be spitting in my face and tell me what kind of a failure I was any second.”
That word choice made Kingsley raise his eyebrows. He glanced around the room, wondering who in this house had been responsible for making his boyfriend equate oral sex with defeat.
“But I’d already told you that I’m gay. And what with my sucking you off.”
“Yes. But I was very drunk.”
“And very gay.”
Kingsley smirked at Sirius’ snort. As often was the case with him, his moment of melancholy had abruptly come to an end. Sirius got up, reaching for the magazine to put it back into the secret drawer. This time, Kingsley caught him muttering an incantation before it materialized.
He hauled himself into an upright position as well; magically, the mattress didn’t raise dust at the motion. There was always magic sizzling everywhere in Grimmauld Place. It was a dark and disconcerting kind of magic, but it also spoke to a side of Kingsley that he rarely could access due to his strong connections with the Muggle world. He was a wizard, and he belonged into a world like this one; he should have a right to lose himself in it. But being gay, and hiding it from the other wizards and witches, his situation had always prevented him from claiming that privilege.
Thoughtfully he studied Sirius, who was moving something aside in the drawer to make space for the magazine. Kingsley might not have been able to spend all of his time in the Wizarding world, but the alternative would have been even more unthinkable. If Sirius hadn’t been betrayed by his friend and ended up in Azkaban, ended up with Kingsley afterwards, he’d have continued living a completely closeted life. He’d never have been able to just have the kind of sex he enjoyed. He might have gotten married one day and shut away a desire he considered wrong and dark. Sirius was an instinctual being; deep contemplation made him uneasy. Maybe he’d never have drawn the right conclusions about what was going on with him. But he was also one of the smartest men Kingsley knew, and he’d never have been able to fully convince himself that he was happy.
Maybe Sirius had been lucky to have grown up at times of war. There was little more useful than war if you needed to distract yourself from your personal problems - another thing Kingsley had learned at sixteen.
Dating a Black, Kingsley thought, could be a lot more disquieting than dating a Muggle. Being with a wizard, having nothing to hide, might have been what he’d always dreamt of - unifying those two parts of his life like that, finally being honest and including all aspects of himself in a relationship. That was probably the most relieving thing that had ever happened to him in his life. At the same time, however, he’d never get used to being with a man who underwent a little internal struggle at every step in their relationship. Their first conversation about anal sex had been… interesting; it had made Kingsley decide to not bring up rimming for a long time.
As they were leaving the room, he had one last look over his shoulder: at that intense attempt to be “normal:” those Muggle pin-ups, those Gryffindor decorations; at the Dark Arts lurking in the corners of the room; and, most importantly maybe, at the magic drawer melting into the wall. It wasn’t easy dating a Black, but it wasn’t as hard as actually being one.
Returning to the first floor, they caught Emmeline’s words of goodbye to Remus downstairs, the front door falling shut behind her.
“So,” Kingsley said innocently when he followed Sirius into his spare room. “Sadomaso themes it is, huh? I should have known from how you always nail me to the bed.”
Sirius looked back at him with a smirk. “Whoever said that I wanted to top?”
It tended to take him a while to adjust to new information, yes, but ultimately he always did. And then he often ended up absorbing them with passion.
Kingsley chuckled. Whether Blacks were easy relationship material or not, he was growing rather certain that this one would be worth the effort.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Wordcount: 2400 words
Beta: millari, thank you :)
Summary: Kingsley has learned to expect the stuff of gay nightmares whenever his boyfriend talks about his past. So when Sirius shows him his old room at Grimmauld Place, he braces himself for the worst. Missing Scene from "To Thine Own Self Be True."
Author's Note: For roguedemon.
Occasionally, Kingsley found dating a Black a bit… difficult. He wouldn’t go as far as to openly call it disturbing but, well. No matter if the topic of the day was pureblood mistreatment of house elves or the assumption that corporal punishment would still be common practice, Kingsley had started automatically expecting horror movie material the moment his boyfriend got started on the childhood memories.
“Come on up,” Sirius said, offering his hand. “I want to show you something.”
Kingsley had just worked a shift at the Ministry. He hadn’t been planning to rise from his chair in the parlor any time soon. There wasn’t much else they could do anyway; Lupin was downstairs having tea with Emmeline Vance, and that loud woman could materialize at any time to offer them cake. However, Sirius’ expression said he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so Kingsley accepted his hand and let himself be dragged out of the room.
Of course, he had assumed that Sirius would take him to the spare room he inhabited (to show him something Kingsley would absolutely refuse to be shown while there were other people in the house). But Sirius passed the door by without a glance, aiming for the upstairs stairway and climbing it without a word. Kingsley blinked. He’d never entered the second floor of Grimmauld Place; the Order wasn’t using it for anything. He was getting curious, though.
When he caught up with Sirius at the top of the stairs, poised to ask questions, Sirius had already opened a door and waved at him to follow him in. Expectantly, Kingsley set foot over the threshold. And froze.
“That’s your old room,” he stated.
“Yeah,” Sirius said. “Thank Merlin for Sticking Charms. It’s all unchanged.”
That, Kingsley decided, you could say again. It was as if he had entered another universe, because this room screamed “pureblood” as loudly as it screamed “teenager” and all the while it also very much had “Sirius” smeared all over it. Every inch of the room was rebelliously decorated in Gryffindor colors, covering antique dressers and dark oak shelves. Kingsley’s eyes came to rest on the various Muggle pin-ups on the walls, dressed comparatively modestly, Seventies’ style, in bikinis.
“This is the most heterosexual room I’ve ever been in,” he said dryly.
So was this gearing up into Sirius’ variation on a homophobia attack? By rediscovering his childhood? Last ditch attempt to prove to himself that there was still testosterone running through his veins? Kingsley had been waiting for that for a while, if we were honest. Just… from the way Sirius was handling their relationship and what it meant, what it meant about him as a person … Something was still missing. A backlash of some sort. He was a pureblood wizard and a Black, and now he’d turned out to be gay, and it changed everything.
Sirius snorted at him. “Sit down.” Kingsley flopped down onto the bed. “Here.”
While Kingsley had looked around, Sirius had been rummaging through a drawer. It apparently was charmed to conceal itself, because all he saw in its place now was a bare wall.
Sitting down next to him, Sirius handed him a magazine. On first sight of the cover, Kingsley learned two things about it: Firstly, it was a Muggle magazine published in the year of 1976, and secondly it was exactly the kind of magazine you would expect to find in the secret drawer of a fifteen-year-old straight boy. After a quick skim, it turned out to display various couples in a rather diverse set of sexual poses. It was BDSM-themed.
Remembering his own Hogwarts days, Kingsley couldn’t help feeling a tad of admiration. Getting your hands on a publication like that was hard for a pureblood minor without much exposure to the Muggle world. And probably involved shoplifting.
Dubiously he paused at the sight of two copulating women with a leather fetish and crooked his head, but that didn’t make them more alluring, either.
In the corner of his eye, Sirius was smirking. “Page twelve,” he said without even looking at the magazine.
Kingsley wasn’t certain that he wanted to see more, but he still turned to page twelve as a show of good will.
His mood took a sharp turn. “Well. That one is more to my taste.”
Sirius dropped to sprawl out on his back on the mattress with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Figured it would be.”
In conservative Muggle England twenty years ago, the point of this rare magazine had to have been that the kink overruled matters of sexual orientation, catering to all who cared to look on the sly. The picture on page twelve was showing an athletic young man who lasciviously kneeled on the ground, his hairy and very much also male biker top pressing up against him from behind with obvious intent. Kingsley immediately saw that the picture was posed; you just couldn’t do that angle with an erection. But that was absolutely beside the point.
Abruptly he felt a bit guilty. He’d suspected Sirius of thinking of their relationship as some kind of prison homosexuality adventure for too long.
He turned with a sigh, propping himself up on his elbow to face his boyfriend on the bed.
“You kept this for that picture,” he said.
Sirius shrugged, as far as was possible lying down, as if it was all very obvious. “Of course, I wouldn’t have admitted it, not even to myself. But James and I had gone to that sex shop during the holidays… we were feeling so very mature and quite the dog’s bollocks.” He barked a laugh. “And I just couldn’t resist. I told James that I fancied the pin-up in the middle, but I couldn’t even have told him her hair color.”
Kingsley himself couldn’t resist thumbing to the middle page. “She’s wearing a latex mask.”
“Ah. That’d explain it.”
Kingsley shook his head. “So what? What did you do? Open page twelve and tell yourself that you were really tossing off to…” He’d turned to that page again, skimming the caption of the picture next to it. “…Claudette being spanked?”
“Something like that.” Sirius shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe himself anymore. “I swear my head is the oddest place in the universe.”
Kingsley snorted. “I’d had you pegged wrong at first, you know. You’re actually the biggest Kinsey 6 I’ve ever met.”
Sirius turned his head to glance at him. “The biggest what?”
Kingsley smirked evilly. “That’s the Muggle science word for when you’re an irrevocable queen.” The words had barely left his mouth when he regretted them, seeing a dark expression crossing Sirius’ face. “Hey, I didn’t mean to…”
“No, it’s not that.” Sirius waved it off. His eyes were on the ceiling, and he produced a sigh that suddenly made him seem old. His mind appeared to be far away. “I’d completely forgotten about it,” he said quietly. “I spent so much time not even thinking about it. I just knew that there was something off about me but I’d… I didn’t know the right words, you know?” Kingsley felt his face grow softer. He just nodded. He too had worked through that stage before he’d rediscovered his Muggle roots. “But I dated all those women and I told myself that I just have to keep trying… or that I’m a hopeless romantic really and that I’ve got to find the right one… Lily kept telling me that, that I’ll find the right one at some point.” Kingsley raised his eyebrows skeptically, and when Sirius noticed, he shrugged again. “I just… I spent so much time not thinking about it that that just made it even more present, you know? But then when I broke out of Azkaban… It just wasn’t there; it was gone.”
“But now you’ve remembered that magazine,” Kingsley said.
Sirius nodded. Sharp lines had appeared on his face, as they always did when they started talking of Azkaban Prison. That topic still filled Kingsley with that desperate sense of helplessness. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just reached out to take Sirius’ hand in his, squeezing it softly.
Eventually, he picked his words with a lot of care. “You know, you weren’t exactly looking for a new relationship in the last two years. When you were on the run, there were so many other things going on that were much more important; there was no time. You were… you were in Azkaban for twelve years. After twelve years… you just forget some things after that long.”
As an Auror, of course, Kingsley knew just as much about the Dementors as Sirius, albeit from a different point of view. He knew that Dementors didn’t steal memories. Not the way Oblivate did, anyway. But if you avoided thinking of something for twelve years because it attracted Dementors, you just trained yourself to forget how to access that memory; or you developed an aversion to even trying. Or if you didn’t think about something for twelve years because it had just ceased to be relevant, the same thing happened. There were worse problems in Azakaban than doubts about your sexual orientation. You’d never feel joy again anyway; you’d lost any right to intimacy.
Kingsley shuddered thinking about it, he couldn’t help it. The idea of Sirius in that… in that hole filled him with a terrible fury the likes of which he had never felt about anything else.
“When did you remember the magazine?” he asked. Sirius shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. Kingsley continued, stroking the back of his hand with his thumb. “You did remember that you’re attracted to men before that, though, right?”
“I’m attracted to men? The fuck are you saying, you fairy.” Sirius gave Kingsley a halfhearted shoulder thump and rolled his eyes. “Keen-witted, Shacklebolt, seriously. But yes.” He became serious again, hesitating. “That night when you woke me up on the couch, and you… well. That night. When you gave me that blowjob. Suddenly it was all back.” He shook his head. “I had myself convinced that you’d be spitting in my face and tell me what kind of a failure I was any second.”
That word choice made Kingsley raise his eyebrows. He glanced around the room, wondering who in this house had been responsible for making his boyfriend equate oral sex with defeat.
“But I’d already told you that I’m gay. And what with my sucking you off.”
“Yes. But I was very drunk.”
“And very gay.”
Kingsley smirked at Sirius’ snort. As often was the case with him, his moment of melancholy had abruptly come to an end. Sirius got up, reaching for the magazine to put it back into the secret drawer. This time, Kingsley caught him muttering an incantation before it materialized.
He hauled himself into an upright position as well; magically, the mattress didn’t raise dust at the motion. There was always magic sizzling everywhere in Grimmauld Place. It was a dark and disconcerting kind of magic, but it also spoke to a side of Kingsley that he rarely could access due to his strong connections with the Muggle world. He was a wizard, and he belonged into a world like this one; he should have a right to lose himself in it. But being gay, and hiding it from the other wizards and witches, his situation had always prevented him from claiming that privilege.
Thoughtfully he studied Sirius, who was moving something aside in the drawer to make space for the magazine. Kingsley might not have been able to spend all of his time in the Wizarding world, but the alternative would have been even more unthinkable. If Sirius hadn’t been betrayed by his friend and ended up in Azkaban, ended up with Kingsley afterwards, he’d have continued living a completely closeted life. He’d never have been able to just have the kind of sex he enjoyed. He might have gotten married one day and shut away a desire he considered wrong and dark. Sirius was an instinctual being; deep contemplation made him uneasy. Maybe he’d never have drawn the right conclusions about what was going on with him. But he was also one of the smartest men Kingsley knew, and he’d never have been able to fully convince himself that he was happy.
Maybe Sirius had been lucky to have grown up at times of war. There was little more useful than war if you needed to distract yourself from your personal problems - another thing Kingsley had learned at sixteen.
Dating a Black, Kingsley thought, could be a lot more disquieting than dating a Muggle. Being with a wizard, having nothing to hide, might have been what he’d always dreamt of - unifying those two parts of his life like that, finally being honest and including all aspects of himself in a relationship. That was probably the most relieving thing that had ever happened to him in his life. At the same time, however, he’d never get used to being with a man who underwent a little internal struggle at every step in their relationship. Their first conversation about anal sex had been… interesting; it had made Kingsley decide to not bring up rimming for a long time.
As they were leaving the room, he had one last look over his shoulder: at that intense attempt to be “normal:” those Muggle pin-ups, those Gryffindor decorations; at the Dark Arts lurking in the corners of the room; and, most importantly maybe, at the magic drawer melting into the wall. It wasn’t easy dating a Black, but it wasn’t as hard as actually being one.
Returning to the first floor, they caught Emmeline’s words of goodbye to Remus downstairs, the front door falling shut behind her.
“So,” Kingsley said innocently when he followed Sirius into his spare room. “Sadomaso themes it is, huh? I should have known from how you always nail me to the bed.”
Sirius looked back at him with a smirk. “Whoever said that I wanted to top?”
It tended to take him a while to adjust to new information, yes, but ultimately he always did. And then he often ended up absorbing them with passion.
Kingsley chuckled. Whether Blacks were easy relationship material or not, he was growing rather certain that this one would be worth the effort.