RSKink Part 2

[veeagainst]

Sirius prides himself on having learned patience in Azkaban, but by the time that Remus calls next, his metaphorical fingernails are worn to nubs from all the wall-clawing he’s been doing. He’s been dwelling on this call and when Remus’s face appears on the screen he feels a sense of relief that is almost palpable.

Except then, Remus doesn’t seem to have been dwelling at all. He passes on some intelligence - mostly back-den werewolf talk, gossip even, about Voldemort’s next moves - and then they make some inane conversation that mostly consists of quoting Charm the Week from last night’s WWW broadcast - and then Remus seems like he’s just going to go to bed. Sirius does have a backup plan on the bizarre off chance that Remus isn’t going to bring up the fact that they should definitely try some sexual experimentation together based on the strength of one drunken evening snog session nearly seventeen years ago, one half-drunken morning grope also nearly seventeen years ago, and the fact that they had recently seen each other without shirts on from hundreds of miles apart via the medium of Muggle electricity.

‘So,’ he opens, ‘it’s Friday night.’

‘What?’ says Remus. ‘It’s Thursday.’

‘Huh.’ Sirius looks at the calendar on the wall. ‘So it is. But, it’s not like we have nine to five jobs at the Ministry or something.’

‘That’s true…’

‘And you have been working really hard.’

Remus’s face, even at this screen resolution, is clearly confused. ‘I suppose.’

‘I think you have,’ Sirius says loyally. ‘Seven days a week, it seems like.’

‘Well, I think it’s important…’

‘But,’ Sirius cuts in, ‘you should also take care of yourself.’

‘Oh,’ Remus says. He looks startled. ‘That’s… nice of you to say.’ He frowns at Sirius. ‘Why would it matter if it were Friday night?’

Trump card, Sirius thinks, and he pulls out a bottle of firewhisky and places it in view of the camera. ‘I thought we might have a little party.’

Remus starts laughing. It doesn’t sound like a rejection, but then, Sirius hasn’t gotten to the sexy part yet. ‘I don’t have anything to drink,’ he says.

‘Well go out and get something,’ Sirius replies. ‘I’ll wait here.’

Remus purses his lips, and Sirius can tell he’s going to do it. ‘All right. Give me a minute.’ He stands and Sirius has a glimpse of the middle of his body, heavily pixelated, before he bends down and his face reappears. ‘Do not,’ he says sternly, ‘start without me.’

While Sirius waits, he thinks about how Remus had given him a kind-hearted but firm talking to about drinking alone at Grimmauld Place. In fact, Remus’s exact words had been, ‘If you want to drink, you let me know, and we’ll do it together.’

At the time, he’d snarled, ‘I’m a grown man and I’ll decide to drink when I want.’

Remus, forever unimpressed by Sirius’s anger, had rolled his eyes. ‘Great, why don’t you go slam your door and yell about how you don’t have to listen to me because I’m not your real dad.’

Sirius had snarled some more at that, but, as much as he hates to admit it, Remus had been right. He shouldn’t drink alone; it had only been harming himself to imagine that drinking would in any way take away the empty space that he can sometimes feel at the centre of himself.
So when things get to be too much - which has been getting less all the time since then - they have gotten drunk together, and it has been much better. Remus, for example, almost always remembers to drink water alongside the whisky, and to remind Sirius to do it too, which is good, because Sirius hates to be hungover. And although that empty space seems permanent, he’s learned to build a fence around it with the two people that make him feel not so alone: Harry and Remus. Sometimes he thinks he could even conjure a Patronus again, if he had to, although it’s not something that he’s attempted since Azkaban. The other Order members dance around asking him to do it and he’s let them assume he can’t rather than have yet another awkward conversation about the time he was in prison.

Remus returns from the shop with a bottle of tequila which he shows to the camera as he seats himself before the computer again.

‘Wow, aren’t you the poshest,’ Sirius says, staring.

‘It was the best thing they had going down there,’ Remus says. ‘I mean, it was a Muggle shop, so no firewhisky.’As Sirius watches, he twists the cap, which pops as he breaks the seal. He takes a whiff and winces. ‘Smells like paint thinner. So, let’s get this party started.’ He lifts the bottle to his lips and takes a sip. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, I have made bad choices in life.’

‘If choosing tequila was one of those choices,’ Sirius says, conjuring a tumbler and pouring himself a slug of the firewhisky, ‘then it doesn’t surprise me that the others were bad too.’

‘The shopkeeper tried to sell me Jaeger, but this was cheaper, and I’m not a nineteen year old uni student.’ Remus takes another sip, wincing all the while. ‘Oh my god, why didn’t I buy a chaser?’

Sirius, having just swallowed the whisky and still feeling it burn down his throat, finds himself fascinated by the way that Remus’s lips are now red and shiny from the liquid on them. He remembers his primary objective, sees his opening, pauses to think that he’s very good at playing the game even after all these years, and says, ‘You don’t need a chaser if you’re going to do a shot.’

Remus gives Sirius a look of pure alarm. ‘Shots?’

‘Shots.’

Remus takes another sip, winces again, and says, ‘What the fuck, it’ll dull the taste buds faster.’

They each take a shot, and then another. The whisky really starts to hit Sirius, and he can tell that the drink is hitting Remus too from the way that his friend starts leaning forward, chin resting on his hands, relaxed and laughing a little too much.

‘I don’t actually like firewhisky that much anymore,’ Remus confesses. ‘Too many rough nights with it when we were younger.’

Sirius laughs. ‘Like James with butterbeer after the Yule Ball in seventh year?’

Remus starts to giggle. Sirius catches himself thinking that it’s absurdly cute and, in his tipsy state, decides to let the thought slide. ‘Oh god, I know that we don’t like Peter anymore, but that night produced one of his greatest one liners.’

‘What did he say? I think I was too busy trying to contain the… situation.’

Remus giggles harder. ‘I remember he was off trying to pull that girl Lisa…’

Sirius reaches back into memory, summons up a hazy image of a young witch in Ravenclaw robes. ‘The one with the crazy eyes?’

‘That’s the one,’ Remus confirms. ‘But Peter thought he had a shot with her.’

Sirius squints, still trying to remember her. ‘He did, didn’t he? Wasn’t she the one who let him go under the shirt but not under the bra?’

Remus’s giggles turn into full on laughter. ‘I cannot believe some of the stupid things that teenagers do.’

‘Or the stupid things people will do in pursuit of sex,’ Sirius suggests, gripping his tumbler and struggling against irony.

Remus nods. ‘So Peter came back into the room just as James was in the middle of his… eruption…’

Sirius starts to giggle now too. ‘And it smelled like butterbeer too, that was the worst part!’

‘… And Peter was kind of swaying in the doorway, and he put both his hands on top of his head like he was going to tear his hair out, and I just remember he had this crazed look - like seeing what was happening was literally driving him insane-‘

Sirius is giggling even harder at the recollection: he can picture Peter’s face perfectly, the horror written all over it, ‘And James’s face…’ he gasps, ‘he was just so… bewildered. Like he was thinking, “How can this be happening? Who is doing this awful thing and why is it happening in front of me?”’

Remus has to put his head down on the table. ‘And Peter, Peter says in this tone of just complete and utter dismay, “How does a human body lose that much liquid and not die?”’

They both lose it then and sit giggling and gasping and wiping tears of laughter out of their eyes, until Sirius, now thoroughly engrossed in Remus, decides to try his last, best gambit. He puts his hands on the table to steady himself and says, ‘Let’s play a drinking game.’

‘Is the game called “take shots until you get fucked up?”’ Remus asks, massaging his ribs. ‘Because I think we’re winning.’

‘Let’s do a broom race,’ Sirius says. He conjures up two more shot glasses in a row in front of the computer.

‘What happens to the loser?’ Remus asks. ‘Also, for the love of god, can we please use half shots? Remember what I’m drinking here.’

‘We’ve all got to make the bed we lie in,’ Sirius says sagely. ‘Or something like that, anyway. But sure, half shots is a good idea.’ He doesn’t want anyone to get too drunk too early.

Remus conjures and lines up his own shot glasses. ‘So? Penalty?’

‘Loser,’ Sirius says, and his tongue is thick in his mouth, so that he has to pronounce each word precisely, ‘loses an article of clothing.’

‘You’re a bastard,’ Remus informs him, and for a second Sirius is worried that Remus is really mad. Then he starts pouring out his shots and when Sirius gapes at him, he says, ‘Looks like you’re going to be first to lose then, hm?’

Sirius does indeed lose the first round. He tries to get through it by taking off one sock, but Remus - jabbing a finger at the screen so hard that it temporarily knocks the camera askew and he has to fix it - informs him that two socks together count as a single item of clothing. Sirius can’t fault him; his logic is impeccable. After all, if the point of the game is to get naked, the fewer articles of clothing there are, the faster that can happen.

Unfortunately for Sirius, what he’s forgotten is that Remus is very, very good at drinking. He’s not sure how he’s forgotten it; he doesn’t have enough fingers to count the number of times that Remus had cleaned up after the other three Marauders as a result of a drinking game.

Three races later and Sirius is wearing nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs. Then Remus loses one, and his socks; another, and he unbuttons his shirt, all the self-consciousness from the night before gone as he throws it backwards over his shoulder. The light on his nightstand falls over as the shirt lands atop it.

‘Moony,’ Sirius snaps, ‘are you losing on purpose?’

‘Damn,’ Remus snaps his fingers in front of the screen, ‘caught out.’

‘How are you not drunk?’ Sirius demands. ‘Oh right, something something werewolf metabolism.’

‘I’m drunk,’ Remus says, indignant. ‘Just not as drunk as you.’

Sirius pours out his new shots, sloshing whisky everywhere - including onto the keyboard, and that’s probably not good for it - and slams them back while Remus watches. ‘You. Lose.’

‘Fine,’ Remus says. ‘Fine.’ He stands up and then all the camera shows is his midsection, his muscular stomach and the scars there and the hair that leads down, down to places Sirius is suddenly thinking about in the way that African explorers must have thought of dark jungles before there were any maps, and Remus’s hands unbutton his trousers, and Sirius thinks they might be shaking a little, and suddenly he’s more turned on that he’s been in, well, fifteen years. Remus’s hands tug down the trousers and then he kicks them off. Sirius sees the long muscles of his thighs and the tight bulge in his navy blue briefs and without thinking he puts a hand out to touch the screen as Remus sits back down in front of the computer.

For a long moment, Remus looks at Sirius’s hand, and Sirius looks at Remus, and his heart beats like the wings of a bird trapped against a window pane.

Then Remus looks directly into Sirius’s eyes, and says, ‘Piqued your interest the other day, did I?’

That directness is sexy as hell. ‘Fuck yes,’ he slurs.

Remus’s eyes gleam. ‘Last shot,’ he says.

Sirius cannot believe that that is Remus’s response. ‘Really?’

‘Finish the game,’ Remus says, the very picture of patience, but there’s something else underneath that, a thrill, a tremor, and Sirius can sense it even across the gulf of distance that separates them, and he suddenly realises that he’s had an erection - a proper, hang-your-flag-on-it, hammer-in-some-nails-with-it, cut-through-diamonds-with-it erection - for the last few minutes. He wonders if Remus can see it.
Hands shaking, he pours out his whisky as Remus pours out his tequila. Sirius drops the second one onto the carpet and Remus waits, his first shot pressed to his lips, while Sirius fumbles and recovers and pours and redoes, and only then does Remus do his shot.

‘You’re trying to get me drunk,’ Sirius accuses him, and Remus raises his eyebrows.

‘Are you fucking taking the piss?’ he demands. ‘You set up an ambush to get me naked. If that’s not “trying to get me drunk”, then I don’t know what is.’ He sets down the glass and says, ‘Turnabout’s a bitch, Padfoot. So, you’re getting naked now, right?’

Sirius would be annoyed if he could think about anything except Remus touching his cock, but luckily he can’t, because he doesn’t really want to be annoyed. Mostly he wants his cock to get touched. By Remus. Right now. He stands up unsteadily, leans against the chair, and then turns around to pull off the briefs. He bends over and tosses them to the side, hoping he’s giving some kind of show, and also hoping that it isn’t the kind of show where the grotesquery of the situation leads to vomiting or upset.

When he turns back, his erection now in full view, he sees that he need not have worried. Remus is staring at him, his eyes wider than Sirius has ever seen them. Slowly, knowing that he’s drunk, and would never ever do this sober, but also completely unable to stop himself, Sirius puts a hand to his collarbone and then trails it down the front of his body to his cock. On the screen, he can see Remus take a visible breath in, and that spurs him on to wrap his fingers around his shaft and give it a lazy tug.

Remus licks his lips.

The gesture is so off hand sexy that Sirius’s knees feel like they’ll buckle beneath him. He sits back on the chair and Remus says, very quietly, ‘Can you tilt the camera?’

‘Sure,’ Sirius says. His voice shakes. He pauses, adjusts the camera and then wraps his fingers around himself again. ‘Oh,’ he breathes. He can’t stop himself from making noise. ‘Oh, oh, fuck.’

‘How long has it been?’ Remus asks, breathless.

‘Fifteen years.’

Remus takes in another sharp breath. Sirius strokes again, trying to savour it. Then Remus says, ‘I’m going to take off my pants.’

Sirius watches him. He’s struck by the sudden and intense desire to bury his face into Remus’s neck and smell him. Remus takes off his briefs and leans back in his chair. Sirius sees, very clearly, that Remus is aroused too. Sirius isn’t exactly an expert but he’s pretty sure that what Remus has lying against his thigh is a Big Cock. It makes his mouth go dry; it makes a ringing noise start in his head. He doesn’t remember sex being quite so alarming or quite so urgent before. This is a need, not a want, and it feels like drowning to be so far apart.

‘If you were here,’ he says, and trails off, distracted as Remus takes a sip of the tequila and then runs his hand from the shining head of his erect cock down to his balls.

‘What would you want me to do to you?’ Remus asks, and his voice is octaves lower, and Sirius can barely handle it, it’s so fucking sexy.

‘What would you do?’ he counters, because he suspects that if Remus were here, now, he’d be overwhelmed and would fall back onto the couch in a swoon.

Remus’s eyes flash again, and Sirius sees something predatory there that he’s never seen before. It makes him even harder, makes the atmosphere in the room heavier and hotter and sweatier. He wants Remus to hunt him, to pin him to the ground and have his way with him.
‘I’d suck your cock,’ says Remus neatly.

Sirius thinks his head might actually implode. Up until this moment, he could never ever have imagined Remus saying those words to anyone, least of all him; now he feels like he can’t live without hearing it again. Apparently Remus talking dirty is his fetish. He takes a deep, shaky breath, looks at Remus’s red, wet mouth. ‘I bet you’d be good at it.’

‘Mm,’ Remus says. ‘I’d love to run my tongue around your tip before I swallowed you whole.’

Sirius is unconsciously clenching his free hand into a fist. A passing thought - how embarrassing would it be to actually pass out from lust - floats through his mind like a cloud. ‘I want to feel your mouth,’ he manages, and he puts his free hand onto the screen and runs it across where Remus’s lips are. ‘I want…’

‘Do you want to fuck my mouth?’ Remus asks. He slides his other hand - and the fingers are so long, just looking at them is doing things to Sirius’s imagination - down the length of his body and into the nest of curls around his cock.

‘I want that to be my hand,’ Sirius says, and Remus smiles then, but it’s not your standard Remus-Lupin-is-a-nice-man smile. It’s a hungry one. It makes Sirius’s heart stutter in his chest. He wants to make him smile like that more. ‘I want to make you come,’ he says, and Remus says, still in that low voice, ‘If you come, I’ll come.’

Sirius grips himself and says, ‘This is going to either take an hour or a second, I’m warning you, it’s been a long time.’

‘Just imagine me kneeling in front of you,’ Remus says, and his voice vibrates down Sirius’s body. ‘Imagine me kneeling in between your thighs.’

Sirius comes all over his hand like he’s thirteen again. The sensation is too much. He slumps over so that his head is resting on the desk and looks sideways at the screen to watch Remus stroke himself to climax. Nearly a minute passes as they both catch their breath - they’re both breathing hard, like they’ve run a race - and then Remus puts his hand - presumably not the one most recently involved in the spill on aisle three - against the camera, as if to touch him. Sirius puts his own hand up against Remus’s and promptly passes the fuck out.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________Sirius wakes up with his hair stuck to the keyboard and the stench of firewhisky in his nose. For several bleary seconds, he has absolutely no idea what is going on; then he has a sudden flash of memory, of the shots and the whisky spilling and of Remus -

He sits bolt upright and that’s a huge mistake, so he slithers out of the chair where he’s been sleeping doubled over for god knows how long - it’s fully light out now, so it’s been many hours - and lies down on the floor, trying not to vomit from the hangover but also trying not to hyperventilate because things last night had certainly escalated and fuck, he wants it to escalate some more.

Somehow, he falls asleep again on the floor, and when he wakes up, he can tell that a few more hours have passed and his hangover has abated somewhat. He sits up and takes stock. One half of his head is completely sticky and smells of firewhisky; he’s not wearing any clothes; another part of his body is also very sticky but firewhisky is not the culprit; and the laptop is still humming. And, oh, right, he and Remus had wanked off together last night via the internet and the thought of it makes him feel hot, sweaty, and sick - then again, that might just be the hangover coming back. He pushes himself up and looks at the screen. Remus is not online and there are no messages.

‘Are you joking?’ he demands of the computer. This is classic Moony. He’s probably decided the situation is too awkward, and now Sirius has to wait three more days and get him drunk once again if he wants to try to resolve any of this. He’s a patient man, he reminds himself, but it’s been a whole night and part of a day now, and that’s more than enough time for Remus to have thought of whatever objections he is sure to bring up, and Sirius wants to get that out of the way so they can continue wanking off together.

He clicks onto Remus’s name - grey because he’s offline - and Remus’s information pops up on screen. He has a grey generic outline as a profile picture, but it does say that he is in GMT and then provides an eleven-digit number starting with zero-seven. Sirius stares at it for a minute, trying to think what it might be - a unique identifier? An amount of time? He hovers the mouse over it, and Skype asks him, ‘Call this phone?’

‘Oooh,’ Sirius says, and he remembers now that Remus has a mobile phone. It hadn’t worked in Grimmauld Place - something about magic and a lack of signal, he hadn’t listened too closely to the explanation - but the phone is a relic from when Remus worked with Muggles anyway, back before he came to Hogwarts to be a professor. Sirius has no idea if it still works, but he desperately wants to know. He clicks on the ‘call’ button but receives an error: his account balance is zero pounds and he cannot make calls to phones.

He gets up and takes a hot shower, scrubbing the whisky out of his hair and the sticky out of his unmentionables and pondering this development. He does not know how to increase his account balance, but he knows that mobile phones can be called from other mobile phones - and he also knows that they are kind of like rapid fire owls, so any messages he sends on one will reach Remus quite quickly. He gets out of the shower, towels off, and checks on his stash of Muggle money. There’s a Muggle credit card in Remus’s name, but he pays the bills - it’s just in Remus’s name due to his being a formerly wanted prisoner and the lack of enthusiasm that the Lloyd’s employee had displayed upon learning that he was thirty-seven years old and had never had a bank account (well, not a Muggle one anyhow). He picks up the credit card and, as he dresses, stuffs it into his pocket.

He walks into Oxford city centre via the marshy area known as Mesopotamia so deep in thought that he nearly gets run over by three cyclists. He is starting - after reviewing last night’s events with a level of detail that makes him keep his eyes downcast in case anyone in the vicinity is a practising Occlumens - to think that this isn’t just about sex.

Before he’d gone to Azkaban, Sirius had, in his immature, twenty year old way, envied James and Lily’s love. He’d wanted to be in love like that, but he’d never felt more than a brief spark with any of the women he’d dated. The most important relationships in his life had been his friendships. He had been loyal to those to a degree that many people would have found absurd. He’d loved his friends so much; maybe it’s not such a terrible stretch to think that he’s a little bit in love with the last of those friends.

Then again, he thinks as he finds himself at the head of the street that divides Oxford’s shopping district, maybe he’s just been very, very lonely for a very long time.

Stalling, he goes to get a tea. It’s a lovely day and he sits outside a café, watching students and shoppers bustle past and listening to the strains of a busker doing a bad job of covering a Radiohead song.

Remus had moved into his flat after James had moved out to get married to Lily. The summer before, Remus had finished a degree from the magical college at Oxford, St Anselm’s, but academic work was scarce, particularly for a werewolf, and, as the war became more serious, being in the Order had become a full time job. Remus made rent somehow - a combination of odd jobs - but frankly Sirius wouldn’t have cared if Remus had freeloaded and eaten all his food too, because he’d liked the company. Remus was a very different kind of flatmate from James: both more serious and more clean, but also a wonderful person to sit and talk with through the late hours over a cup of tea.

And then Remus had been almost impossibly good as a friend after Azkaban; he’d been there for Sirius when Sirius had thought he would go crazy with grief and depression; he’d helped Sirius to be a good godfather; he’d given Sirius a place to live when he was a wanted man at great personal risk and, when Sirius had realised that Grimmauld Place was the best place to go, Remus had seen the look on his face and had volunteered to move in with him without hesitation. He’d endured Kreacher’s veiled - and not so veiled - insults, the various dark enchanted objects in the house, and the screamed slurs of the portrait of Sirius’s mother in the entryway. When Sirius had thought he’d go crazy again, there Remus had been, always stepping in, diffusing any situation with his calm voice and presence, the mediating presence between Sirius and the world. Somewhere along the way, Sirius realises, Remus has become indispensable to him.

What makes up his mind is a recent memory. After the battle in the Ministry, he’d been in the hospital unconscious for two weeks. The last thing he remembers of the battle is the jet of red coming out of Bellatrix’s wand and knocking him backwards, and then he had woken up, in a quiet, white room, and the first thing he’d seen was Remus. His friend had been asleep, slumped in a chair, dark circles under his eyes and his hair mussed. One hand had rested on the bed against Sirius’s own hand. Sirius had said - well, more croaked - his name, and Remus, previously known for his ability to sleep through the noise generated by a World Cup Quidditch match, had flown awake and grabbed Sirius’s hand.

‘I thought you would die,’ he’d kept saying, blinking back tears and squeezing Sirius’s hand to the point of pain. Sirius had squeezed his hand back despite, so incredibly grateful, and had said, ‘Thanks for being here,’ because he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to wake up in that situation alone. Remus had stayed by Sirius’s side as Healers came and explained things, as Kingsley Shacklebolt came in with an official pardon from the Ministry, as Dumbledore and McGonagall had come in to congratulate him - a calming presence in a sea of swirling changes. He’d only left when Harry had come, and Sirius had gotten the impression that Remus had waited outside the entire time that he and Harry had talked.

‘Remus has been looking after you,’ Harry had said.

Yes, Sirius thinks now, and I want him to keep doing that. I think I need him to keep doing that. He finishes his tea and heads into the shopping mall where they’d bought the laptop. There’s a desk near the entrance labelled “Information”, so he approaches it. A bored-looking woman is varnishing her nails bright pink behind it.

‘Excuse me,’ he says, and she looks up and sighs.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I was wondering where I could buy a mobile phone.’

She gives him a hard look and twists in her seat, pointing. ‘There’s a Three store, a Vodafone, a T-Mobile, a Carphone Warehouse, an O2 store, and I think there’s another Three store around the corner.’

‘Wonderful,’ Sirius says. He looks around at his plethora of choices and heads to Three, it being the closest. Once inside, a saleswoman approaches him with a smile and asks, ‘Can I help?’

‘Yes,’ he says, pulling out the sheet of paper on which he’s written Remus’s number. ‘I need a mobile phone that will let me reach this number.’

She squints at the paper, and then at him. ‘It’s a UK mobile number,’ she says.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Sirius agrees.

‘So… any one of our phones will call it.’

‘Oh,’ Sirius says, pleasantly surprised. ‘Wonderful. Which one do you think I should buy?’

She blinks. ‘Do you want texting and internet?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sirius says, smiling at her. ‘Mostly I want to be able to call this number, but I can see those things coming in handy, I suppose. Well, I’m not sure what texting is. Is it taking notes?’

She blinks again. ‘Is this a joke?’ she asks.

‘Pardon?’ Sirius asks, not understanding.

‘Am I about to be on telly?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Sirius says, now thoroughly confused. Admittedly he doesn’t know much about Muggle telly aside from the IT Crowd, but he doesn’t quite see how her question follows.

‘You don’t know what texting is?’

‘No…’

‘How is that possible?’

Remus had once told him that the key to being a successful liar is to only lie when necessary; always tell the truth when you can. ‘I was in prison for twelve years,’ he says now, and when her eyebrows shoot up he adds, ‘Also I’m a wizard.’

She bursts into laughter. ‘Oh my god,’ she says, ‘you’re too good looking to be crazy.’

Some small part of Sirius thinks, I’ve still got it. Another part of him thinks, I hope Remus knows that. ‘I didn’t realise the two were mutually exclusive.’

‘So tell me about this number you want to call,’ she says. ‘Are you in the mafia? Do you want a throw away phone for some criminal purpose?’
‘No,’ Sirius says, and then he hesitates. ‘It belongs to a… a man.’

Her eyes go wide. ‘A man who you fancy?’ she suggests.

Sirius actually feels himself blushing and isn’t that embarrassing - he’s going through some kind of appalling midlife crisis and this is all Remus’s fault, and he hates him, except the worst part is that he doesn’t at all - and he says, ‘Yes, you could say that.’

‘Crazy and gay,’ she says, and sighs. ‘I guess that means you’re off the market.’

‘Probably,’ Sirius admits, both to himself and her. ‘Here’s hoping.’

Thirty minutes later he walks out the door with a new mobile phone that she has kindly activated for him. He walks back to the University Parks and sits on a bench by the duck pond. She had shown him how to send a text message, so he types one out to Remus rather than calling him - he doesn’t want to interrupt anything that Remus might be doing, and he’s also feeling increasingly nervous. He’s been thinking about what to text since he left the shop.

Now, he types out his magnum opus. ‘You wanking bastard, are you playing hard to get? - Pad.’

A few seconds later, the phone buzzes, and he reads: ‘Since when did you get a phone? Not playing hard to get, promise.’

Painstakingly, he types, ‘Got it just now so I could talk to you. - Pad.’

The phone buzzes almost instantly. ‘You don’t have to sign your name you know, I can see who you are from the number.’

He grins. ‘Clever clogs.’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Can we talk?’

There’s a longer pause this time. Then, ‘I have something I have to do tonight. Will call after. Probably very late. Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Sirius says aloud. He texts back, ‘Very much looking forward to it. Yours, Padfoot.’

Hours later, as he’s eating his takeaway korma and sitting in the garden, the phone buzzes again. He looks down at it and smiles.
‘Sweet of you to have gotten phone. Call you in a few hours.’

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Remus doesn’t call until after two in the morning. Sirius has fallen asleep on the chair again and the tinny Skype ringing sound wakes him with a start. He puts on the headphones so he can hear Remus’s voice better and answers. Remus’s face appears, and even across the internet, Sirius can tell that he is exhausted.

‘Rough day?’ he asks, instantly worried.

Remus is gazing off to his left, but he nods. ‘Long, long day,’ he says. He glances at Sirius and smiles quickly. ‘Didn’t help that I was feeling so rough after last night.’

Sirius winces sympathetically. ‘I know the feeling, but I wasn’t doing anything too important.’

‘It’s ok,’ Remus says, and he goes back to gazing to the left.

They sit in silence for a moment, and then Sirius says, ‘So tell me about today.’

‘Remember the werewolf who I said hexed me?’

‘David?’

Remus nods. ‘He decided to join Voldemort’s side today. I tried to talk him out of it this evening and it didn’t go particularly well.’

Sirius hesitates, and then goes on a hunch. ‘So when you said you were friends…’

Remus looks back at Sirius and narrows his eyes. ‘Not for a long time, Sirius.’

‘Not for a long time what?’ Sirius asks, unable to stop himself, even though he thinks he knows the answer.

Remus sighs. ‘We haven’t been lovers in a long time.’

Sirius feels like Remus has just plunged a hot knife into his stomach. Something must show on his face, because Remus says, ‘I really do mean a long time, Padfoot. Not since before James and Lily were married.’

That doesn’t make Sirius feel better. ‘You never told me,’ he starts, but he doesn’t know where he’s going with it. Never told him that he was gay? Never told him that he’d had a lover?

‘No,’ Remus says. He sighs and runs a hand down his face. ‘Maybe I should have. Peter knew. He even tried to imply it to you once, I think to cast suspicion on me - I mean, I think that in retrospect, of course. At the time I just thought that he was telling you about something he thought you already knew.’

‘What did he say? How did he know?’

‘Peter knew because he’s more observant than we ever gave him credit for,’ Remus says. ‘I’m sure that wherever he is now, he’s holed up just watching.’

‘Like a little rat in a cubby hole,’ Sirius snarls.

‘Exactly. So I remember him saying something to you about me spending time with other werewolves, but you didn’t really respond to him, so I think he dropped it.’

Sirius remembers now, a long conversation he and Peter had had about why Remus should not be James and Lily’s secret keeper. ‘Well, that’s all water under the bridge now,’ he says, pushing it aside with an effort. ‘Was everything all right tonight?’

Remus smiles at him, a small but clearly genuine smile. ‘I can’t believe that you just let that go,’ he says. ‘I feel like you’ve come so far as a person.’

‘I’m trying to be better,’ Sirius replies, feeling a bit sulky that Remus is making fun of him but also secretly appreciating the smile. ‘You told me to stop dwelling on things.’

Remus is still smiling. ‘I had no idea you listened to me.’

‘I do,’ Sirius pouts, and Remus says, ‘Oh, Padfoot, I’m sorry.’

Something about the way he says it makes the ache in Sirius’s stomach ease, just a little. ‘Tell me about tonight.’

Remus looks to the side again. ‘I was speaking with some other werewolves. It’s the midpoint between full moons so they’re particularly active. We were at this club where lots of dark creatures congregate and David showed up and said he wanted to talk to me.’ Sirius watches him speak, fascinated by this insight into an underground world he knows nothing of, and sees him pause now, and purse his lips. ‘He was quite nervous. He wanted me to go somewhere private with him.’ Remus stops talking again.

‘Did you sense danger?’ Sirius asks quietly, and Remus nods.

‘I knew something was off based on how nervous he was. I went with him, though. I feel - felt - quite confident that I could take care of myself.’
‘Oh Moony,’ Sirius breathes without meaning to, ‘please be careful.’

Remus looks at him then, and Sirius sees the dark circles under his eyes and aches to wrap his arms around him. ‘I’m not very good at being careful,’ Remus confesses. ‘I’ve never felt that anyone… well, anyway, he wanted me to join him.’ Remus looks down at his hands, resting on the desk, and adds, ‘Apparently he’d been thinking about our past and wanted to give it another go.’

‘But you turned him down,’ Sirius says, too quickly. Remus’s mouth quirks and he looks up at Sirius with a strange look that Sirius can’t read.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘I told him I wasn’t going to become the pet of some Death Eater, and that he should respect himself more than to do that as well. And I told him that I wasn’t interested in him, either. We had another argument and he left.’ He hesitates and seems to steel himself. ‘I… I want you to add his name to the list of known Death Eaters.’

Sirius is barely paying attention to that. He asks the question that feels like it’s suffocating him. ‘Did you mean it? That you weren’t interested in him?’

‘Yes,’ Remus says, and Sirius feels like a hand unwraps from around his throat. ‘It’s been such a long time. Of course I feel kind of that old melancholy that goes with a past lover but…’

Sirius doesn’t really know that feeling, although he suspects that it’s similar to how he’s been feeling all day, but he nods. ‘But you’re ok? Now, I mean?’

‘Urgh,’Remus says, and puts his head down on the desk. ‘I don’t know. Everything is a mess here. This mission was hard fifteen years ago and it’s hard now.’ He looks up, resting his chin on his fist, and says, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that Albus thinks that dark creatures are salvageable and should be included in our side of the war, but you’d be hard pressed to find one of them aside from me that feels inclined to do anything associated with the Ministry, and there doesn’t seem to be any way of getting around that.’

‘I wish I knew some way to help,’ Sirius says, and he’s not just being polite - he means it, desperately. He’s prepared to do anything to take that tired, hopeless look off of Remus’s face.

‘Talking to you is nice,’ Remus says with a little smile.

Sirius smiles back. ‘Now you know how I feel.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sirius tries to articulate one of the many things he’s been thinking all day. ‘Sometimes I feel like there’s no one else on earth who I can just… share a joke with. I feel like everyone else walks on eggshells around me.’

Remus laughs. ‘Story of my life.’

‘But Moony,’ Sirius says, ‘I mean it. There’s no one like you.’ He puts his own head down on the table. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Are we about to have a Conversation?’ Remus asks. ‘Should I retrieve the tequila?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sirius mumbles, miserable. ‘I’m shit at this.’

‘What’s this?’ Remus asks, and Sirius sits upright and glares.

‘You know what I mean,’ he snaps. ‘You told me earlier today you weren’t playing hard to get.’

To his intense annoyance, Remus laughs. ‘If you want to have more cyber sex or whatever the Muggles are calling it these days, I promise you I won’t play hard to get.’

Sirius opens his mouth, shuts it, and then opens it again and says, ‘Cyber sex? What?’

Remus makes a rude gesture. ‘Over the internet, you know.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Sirius says, exasperated. ‘You don’t think that’s weird?’

Remus is clearly trying to suppress a smile. ‘I think our friendship went beyond weird a very long time ago.’

‘Stop humouring me,’ Sirius snarls. He wants to lift his lip and growl, but Remus has always been immune to that kind of threat. He knows Sirius is all bark when it comes to him. ‘I’m going through a real crisis here,’ he adds, and it comes out so pathetically that Remus stops looking amused.

‘What is the crisis?’ he asks. ‘I already said, if you want to wank off together, I’m up for it.’

Sirius feels absurd as he says, ‘What about our friendship? I don’t want to ruin our friendship.’

To his intense annoyance, Remus actually laughs at him. ‘I promise you, Sirius, that us wanking off together via Skype is not even in the top… I don’t even know, top one hundred of ways that our friendship could have been ruined.’

Sirius frowns. ‘What else is on that list?’ he demands.

Remus gives him an incredulous look. ‘Well, let’s see. How about the time that we each suspected the other of being a spy, all of our friends wound up dead or at least we believed they were dead, and you went to prison while I left the UK and wandered around the world for twelve years, trying and mostly failing to outrun my grief? That’s probably number one for me. That or the time that you lit my favourite Clash t-shirt on fire when I wouldn’t let you borrow it.’

‘Oh, fuck you. I bought you a new fucking t-shirt when I saw how upset you were about it.’

‘You bought me a t-shirt from the wrong fucking band, you twat.’

Sirius feels a burning in the back of his throat like he’s about to start crying. He’s suddenly breathing in short bursts. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and he tries and fails to keep it together, ‘I’m sorry for everything,’ and suddenly he’s crying, his chest heaving, struggling to breathe.

Remus’s smile vanishes. He presses his hand against the screen. ‘Padfoot, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t joke about that.’

Sirius gasps and puts his hand up against the screen and says, ‘I really do hate you sometimes.’

‘You should,’ Remus says. ‘I’m really crap at emotions.’

‘No fucking shit.’ Sirius swallows hard and rubs his eyes angrily. He hates that he’s crying right now, hates that he’s crying in front of someone, but sometimes he can’t stop himself. Remus ought to be used to it by now, he’s such a fucking shitshow all the time and Remus is always the one who is there to pick up the pieces. ‘I hate this. I hate being sad and I hate how easy it is to be sad and I hate being sad in front of you.’

‘Don’t,’ Remus says quietly. ‘Don’t hate the last one.’

Sirius looks up at him, mouth squeezed shut in an effort to pull himself together. Remus looks back at him, and there’s no trace of humour on his face. Sirius counts to ten and thinks he can speak again.

‘The thing is,’ he says, trying to keep his voice from wavering, ‘I think that it’s more than just sex.’

Remus’s face gets a closed off look and his eyes focus on the middle distance. ‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’

‘But I’m worried,’ Sirius admits, ‘that I’m just lonely and reaching out to the person who is kindest to me.’

Remus looks back at him. There’s something intense in his eyes now. ‘I think that’s how a lot of these kinds of things get started.’

They look at each other some more. Sirius is trying to reconcile the friendship they’ve always had, the face before him, more familiar than any other, the worried lines around his eyes and the greying hair and the kindest set to a mouth that he’s ever known, with the immense and helpless feeling of love that is crowding out everything else.

‘You know what I love about you?’ he asks, and Remus inhales sharply. ‘I mean,’ he adds, ‘besides everything. But what I love about you right now?’

Remus’s face is still closed off as he asks, ‘What’s that?’

‘You never act like I’m crazy.’

‘I don’t think you are.’

Sirius hesitates. ‘I didn’t… I’m not all…’

‘Not all right?’ Remus asks softly. ‘I know that. How could you be? But that doesn’t mean that your feelings are somehow invalid.’

‘Oh Moony,’ Sirius whispers. He’s suddenly overwhelmed by a longing whose tug feels deeper than a riptide at the shore. Fuck caution, he thinks, and so he says, ‘I wish I could kiss you.’

Remus hesitates for only a second, and then he says, ‘I wish that too.’

They press their hands together against the screen and Sirius says, ‘I bet you’d be wonderful to kiss.’

‘I haven’t shaved,’ Remus says, and he runs his other hand along his jaw. ‘Do you want to kiss stubble?’

‘It sounds sexy,’ Sirius says, and he means it. He’s suddenly aching with need. ‘Last night was incredible, you know.’

‘It was,’ Remus agrees. ‘It…’he hesitates, and then speaks quickly. ‘It felt like two decades of sexual tension coming out.’ He looks down and then up at Sirius through his eyelashes. ‘You have such nice hands,’ he whispers, tracing along the screen. ‘I wish I could suck on your fingers.’

‘I wish you would,’ Sirius whispers back. ‘I wish I could take your clothes off.’

Remus shivers. ‘It would be hard,’ he says, hand still caressing the screen, ‘with your fingers in my mouth.’

‘A lot more than the undressing would be hard,’ Sirius says, and Remus laughs and says, ‘You can never let a penis joke go, can you?’

‘I just wanted to remind you,’ Sirius says innocently, ‘that you’re making my cock incredibly hard.’

Remus laughs again and says, ‘Trust me, I didn’t forget. I wish you could undress me. And I’d undress you.’

Sirius puts a hand up and slowly undoes the buttons on his shirt. Remus watches him, a hungry, breathless expression on his face. When Sirius is halfway down, Remus raises one of those perfect hands to his lips. Staring directly into Sirius’s eyes, he bites down on his index finger and then sucks it into his mouth. His cheeks hollow and there’s a flash of red tongue as he inserts his middle finger and sucks on that too. Any blood that might have been lingering in Sirius’s extremities migrates straight to his groin and he wonders if this is ever going to stop making him lightheaded or if that’s just how sex with Remus is. He lets his shirt fall to the ground and presses his hand down onto the cloth that covers his erection.

‘Oh,’ Remus breathes, taking his fingers out of his mouth for a second, ‘do remove those, would you?’

‘Only if you’ll remove yours.’ Sirius’s voice suddenly sounds like he’s been a lifelong smoker.

‘Do you want me to stop this?’ Remus asks, the picture of innocence as he takes his wet fingers and sucks them in again. Sirius wants to take them and rub them all over his body.

‘Only for a second,’ he breathes. ‘Only long enough to be naked for me.’

Remus takes his fingers out of his mouth and laughs. ‘Ok, quick, get naked break!’ he says, and Sirius laughs too and stands, yanking down his trousers and pants. He sits down again and finds that Remus has not moved; his fingers are still hovering near his mouth and his eyes are wide and he’s breathing so hard that Sirius can see his shoulders rising and falling.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘I fucking love your cock,’ Remus says in a rush. ‘God, I want to be touching it.’ Sirius makes a strangled noise that seems to encourage him. ‘I want to rub my face into it and then rub it all over my body. I want to suck on it until you come in my mouth.’

Sirius can’t hold in his moan. He leans back against the chair, shoving the palm of his hand down against his cock and pressing it into his thigh in an effort to stop himself from coming right there. ‘Fuck, fuck, I want you to, oh fuck I do.’ He takes several deep breaths and tries not to focus on the hungry look on Remus’s face because it’s going to make him come right now if he thinks too much about it. ‘Let me see you touch yourself,’ he says instead. ‘Show me how you like it.’

Remus removes his clothing with painstaking slowness. Even though Sirius knows what is coming now, his eyes follow every twitch of cloth and twist of button down the length of Remus’s body. ‘Wow,’ Remus says, breathless.

‘What?’ Sirius asks, chest heaving.

‘I have never,’ Remus bends down and tugs off his trousers and pants in one fluid motion, ‘understood the term “fuck me with your eyes” before now.’

‘I would if I could,’ Sirius says and Remus sits down hard and runs his hands over his body, starting from his shoulders and sliding down over his nipples - pausing there to give them a twist and moan aloud, the sound carrying through Sirius’s headphones and straight to his cock - and then moving them down further, stuttering across his skin, until he reaches his cock and wraps a hand around it.

‘What should I do to myself?’ he asks Sirius quietly.

Sirius has no idea where the idea comes from, but it’s suddenly imperative that he see it in action. ‘Put your fingers in your mouth,’ he commands.

Remus does it immediately. His entire body is a strained line, his muscles tense and flexed as he sucks two and then three fingers in and out until Sirius can see them gleam with wetness. Sirius wants to climb through the screen and press their bodies together; his mouth tastes metallic and empty as he says, ‘Now touch yourself.’

Remus promptly removes the fingers from his mouth and wraps them around his cock. Sirius can see the wetness there, and he rubs the head of his own cock urgently, swirling the wetness leaking from the tip, somehow caught up in the feeling that it is Remus’s mouth that has made him wet.

‘I wish I could suck on your cock until it was dripping,’ Remus says to him, watching him through heavy lidded eyes as he strokes up and down.

Sirius shudders. ‘I can’t think when you say things like that.’

‘Do you need to think right now?’

‘I’ve never in my life heard you advocate against thinking.’

Remus half-laughs, half-gasps, and then moans, ‘God, I wish you could be touching me.’

‘Yes,’ Sirius says, and he thinks of it, and then he says, ‘Oh, Moony, I can’t…’

‘Come for me, then,’ Remus says, and the command in his voice is so sexy that, with a single stroke, Sirius does. Remus watches him, still gasping, and then a few strokes later, he comes himself. After a few moments to catch their breath, they simultaneously lift their wands and say a cleaning charm.

Remus starts giggling. ‘Learned that charm in third year,’ he says.

‘Same,’ Sirius confesses. ‘James told it to me.’

Remus laughs harder. ‘Me too!’

‘I guess that’s what friends are for,’ Sirius says, and Remus giggles again and then shivers.

‘Hope the walls are thick in this bed and breakfast,’ he says, and they both dissolve into giggles again.

After a few minutes, though, the punch drunk atmosphere wears off.

‘So, what do you think?’ Sirius asks, suddenly very conscious that they’re both naked.

‘I…’ Remus hesitates. He stands to pull up his trousers and winces. ‘I think you should think some more about this.’

Sirius feels like a lead weight has sunk into his stomach. ‘Honestly?’

‘You said it yourself,’ Remus says, now putting his shirt back on. ‘You’re lonely.’

‘And you said that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t!’ Sirius scrambles to grab his clothing and pull it on, not wanting to be vulnerable.

‘I said that doesn’t mean that people don’t get together for that reason. What if someone better came along?’

Sirius snorts. ‘Like whom?’ he demands. ‘Who could be better for me than you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Remus snaps, and Sirius thinks there’s real pain behind his words, ‘a woman?’

‘I don’t care about that,’ he scoffs. ‘Does it seem like I do?’

‘There’s a big difference between seeing something five hundred miles away and… you know.’

‘Fucking?’ Sirius suggests, annoyed at Remus’s sudden prudishness. ‘Says the man who was just going on about sucking my cock?’

‘I’ve had sex with men,’ Remus says coldly. ‘You haven’t. And I didn’t hear you offering to suck mine.’

‘Well, at least give me a fucking chance,’ Sirius says, ‘and don’t mention the fucking pun either. Fuck!’ But Remus doesn’t look likely to bring that up. He looks somewhere between furious and very, very sad.

Sirius can never stop pushing, even when he’s long past the point where he should, so he asks. ‘Why don’t you just say that you aren’t interested and be done with it?’ When Remus doesn’t answer, Sirius is suddenly desperate, so he says, ‘I don’t even care if you want to have a, a, I don’t know, a relationship, Remus, I’ll do whatever you want, you can fuck me, anytime, I will suck your cock, I promise, just don’t, fucking, don’t…’

‘Padfoot,’ Remus interrupts, and he sounds very weary. ‘It’s not that. If you think about it, and decide that this is truly what you want, then I’ll consider it.’

‘Well, that’s very romantic,’ Sirius snaps.

Remus sighs, looks down, and says quietly, ‘Honestly? No, it’s not. But I’m thirty-seven years old, Sirius. I’ve been around the block a few more times than I wish I had been. I’ve been burned and had my heart broken and I’m cautious now. I’m sorry, that’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but…’

‘No,’ Sirius says, and now he feels terrible. ‘I just…’

‘The thing is,’ Remus says, looking up to meet his eyes and speaking over him, ‘there was a time when I thought that you and I might have something.’

‘Back when we were at school?’

‘After that,’ Remus says. ‘Mostly when I was living on your couch for a year.’ He pauses. ‘And especially after you tried to pull me at James’s stag do.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Sirius says, ‘I didn’t… know what to do. I felt awkward bringing it up in the sober light of day.’

‘Mm,’ Remus hums, ‘so you seem to have gotten over that, at any rate.’

‘Oh fuck you,’ Sirius says, but there’s no energy behind it. ‘Or rather,’ he adds, ‘I suppose, I wish I had.’

There’s a moment of silence, and then Remus says, ‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know if you remember, but James was kind of in need.’

‘I do remember. I’m the one who bleached his shirt in the kitchen sink.’

‘Well, I was a bit busy trying to get him to shower!’

Remus looks away and laughs, but when he looks back, he’s serious. ‘Do you really think two people who can start arguing about something that happened that long ago should be together?’

‘Sounds like we have a good foundation for a relationship,’ Sirius replies, and his heart speeds up as he says it.

‘Yes, arguing, the best basis.’

‘We’re not afraid to say what we want to each other. We’re always going to talk to each other.’

Remus smiles at him. His fingers, as they rest by the screen, uncurl and he touches what Sirius guesses must be where his own hand rests. He opens his hand and presses it there. Remus looks up at him and says, ‘So why didn’t you?’

‘It just felt… awkward. I don’t know. I’m an idiot, that’s why. I didn’t know what I wanted.’ Not meeting Remus’s eyes, he strokes his finger along the screen representation of Remus’s. ‘I do now. So why didn’t you?’

‘I…’ Remus hesitates. ‘A few things. One, I wasn’t keen on being weird in some new way. I’d never been with a man at that point. And two, I just thought that it was something that would happen over time. After I moved in with you, I felt like there was no way I would ever be moving out. I just couldn’t imagine either of us…’ He trails off, swallows, and Sirius has a sudden realisation about how awful things must have been for Remus, too.

‘Being apart?’ he asks into the silence that Remus has left.

‘Exactly,’ Remus says. He looks at Sirius and says, ‘I missed you most of all, you know. And that was the worst part, when I thought you were guilty, that I couldn’t stop missing you more than James or Lily or Peter.’ He suddenly looks like he’s going to cry. ‘Sirius, it’s four in the fucking morning. I need to sleep.’

‘Remus,’ Sirius says.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want you to hang up.’

Remus looks away and says, ‘Well, I’m too tired to keep talking. Sorry.’ He’s set his mouth into a tight line.

‘Can I text you tomorrow?’ Sirius asks, and Remus nods.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Goodnight.’

He disconnects before Sirius can say another word.

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