The Pink is Obligatory
Title: The Pink is Obligatory
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: PG
A meandering, utterly pointless Valentine's Day ficlet. 2,487 words.
:::
Valentine's Day meant perfume-coated lungs and misanthropy.
It meant sugar and glitter and intricate cards with frills and little bits that exploded, and flowers so pungent you could taste them (and they tasted faintly magenta and tropical). It was the mercurial shift between winter and spring, which manifested itself in shy looks, which became shy declarations, which became bad poetry on the aforementioned cards. It meant tremulous affection and ammunition for the people who looked on, and sniffed, and spat, and generally felt vicious.
"Whatever happened to Saint Valentine?"
Remus shrugged. "Dunno. Three of them, I think, actually. Three Valentines. And I expect they all died."
"I know that, that's the point. I'm asking how."
"I'm not sure." Remus looked up from eggs that were supposed to be, he thought, some sort of pink, but were really sickly, watery lavender. But there were more pressing concerns than the kitchen's attempts at festivity. "I'm not sure," he repeated, "if it's as good as you've worked up in your mind. They're not always gruesome. Saints' deaths."
"They are, though," Sirius countered, "they're disgusting and vile and all sorts of lovely things. I've read about it." Read being the operative word and read meaning books and a book couldn't be wrong, could it?
"Well, let's see." Remus finally pushed his plate away and folded his arms neatly. "There was the man all shot through with arrows in his neck, no, that can't be nice." ("No it can't," came a happy murmur across the table.) "And the man who carried his head around with him, Dennis or Dionysius or both, I'm not sure which. There was the poor girl who lost her eyes and carried those 'round on a platter. And, er." He searched his brain for memories. (Patron saints and holy water and heathens, oh my.) What, oh what ministrations of medieval torture would impress Sirius?
He took a deep breath and explained the finer points of the rack, and how human flesh must look when it’s been scraped off with an iron brush.
"Oh!" Sirius sighed sharply, happily, and everyone in the immediate area was looking either at Remus or their breakfasts in dismay, realizing just how closely the latter resembled saintly remains, and then it was excuse me excuse me, I've got to be - I'm off, now. But Sirius looked as close to revelation as he came. He said, "Moony, I fucking love you," and for a moment Remus's heart began to pound so hard his throat felt thick and there was a sudden dampness in the creases of his hands, clutching the table.
:::
Sirius hated Valentine's Day on principle (what that principle was, he never told anyone). If the uninitiated asked, he said the 14th was the anniversary of the horrid accident in the mountains, you know the one with all those poor orphans, you know the one Sirius himself just barely escaped - such a tragedy, it was. Then he'd show them the scar on his arm (a souvenir), the one he'd actually got in a strange incident involving Peter's coaxing, the railing of a spiral staircase, and gravity gone horribly, horribly wrong.
People often remembered him as crying while he told his story. He never was. But he was that good.
The fact that Remus sort of liked Valentine's Day was a closely-guarded secret, somewhere in the vicinity of Let's Leave Slytherin Alone Today, and the Other Thing, of course. It wasn't that he was romantic, or he liked pink, or he had anyone to crawl into a nice cupboard with. It was that people were different today. They were fake. They bared themselves completely and told the truth for the first time. They scrubbed their faces pink and tangled comb teeth in their hair from the force of brushing and they drowned themselves in scents sharp but sweet and they were like players on a stage, they said lines and Remus liked it, all right, just liked it.
He found it charming.
He played his own part masterfully.
He and Sirius would lounge on separate couches in the all but abandoned common room and say witty, jaded things they always tried to remember later but couldn't. They stole leftover sweets foolishly scattered. They taped a nasty limerick to the notice board ("What rhymes with 'wanker'?"). One year Sirius convinced him to give some fourth-years a talking-to on public indecency.
Remus was that good.
:::
Peter had accidentally learned how to draw during the tedious hours of History of Magic, and now he was paying the price. James had fashioned himself a plain card, the wording of which he'd labored over for weeks (it lingered between parody and stream of conscious rambling and heartfelt, saccharine sentiment, and it was such a syrupy mess it almost pained you to even touch it). Now he had Peter hunched over the paper, drawing in the margins. Peter looked up every now and then. "There?" he said warily, and slid the card to James so he could inspect the latest burgeoning flower and curlicue.
"Brilliant," James said fiendishly. "She'll love it, oh they eat this rubbish up, don't they. Now do the other side."
By now Peter had been drawing frilly, delicate borders for a grueling forty-six minutes. That was why, when James told him that he wasn't done, Peter made a small, strangled noise and half leapt up like he was going to jam his quill straight into James's eye.
It was sort of like watching a nature documentary. (Remus rather enjoyed those.)
But disaster was averted through the promise of gold, and sweets, and the first try on James's new broom as soon as all the snow had gone, and when you do the other side, Pete, try not to drip. It's supposed to look lacy here. Lace doesn't blot, thanks.
And Peter was left muttering, but no one died, at least.
James didn't actually have a date that night. Or a girlfriend. He and Lily had had a very cordial, sterile study session the other week, though, and when he asked if she'd go for another sometime (he had addressed this question to her rosy knees, poking over the tops of her socks), she didn't exactly say no. You had to read between the lines - it was what Lily didn't say. James seemed to figure they were pretty much exclusive by now.
Peter did have a date that night, Janie-from-Ravenclaw. This probably explained the nervous tic he'd developed in the last hour. Also, Sirius insisted on clinging to his shoulder, following every stroke of the quill and making unhelpful comments. "Ohhh, are you sure about that?" he breathed as one of Peter's little spiraling stars grew an ink tumor. Peter's hand jerked a bit.
"That won't do," James scowled. "I said no blots, Peter."
Peter told him what he could with his blots and his quill, too, and then, with tremendous dignity, he left the room.
James sighed, saying something about sweets, some limited edition candy hearts from Honeydukes that really beat and thumped and pumped and all that, and were quite frankly the most disgusting things Remus had ever seen in his life. Then James retreated to the dorm, and Sirius left too, saying he had to go throw up for a while, sweet Merlin he couldn't stand Valentine's.
Remus wasn't sure why, but he felt a tremendous, ridiculous surge of love for all of them.
:::
All around him people were exchanging cut jewelry on fine chains; flowers ranging from somewhat drooping to brilliant, in a hundred hues; expensive-looking chocolates in frosted gold foils. Remus watched them, feeling wholly separate, and not particularly envious.
He wasn't too surprised when he found a handful of weeds in the head indentation of his pillow. (In fact he'd expected something like it, given the magnificence of the exchanges all around them.) There was a card, too, with rough edges. It had a horrid pun. The pun involved the word "bee" and there were a lot of exclamation marks. He held the card in his palm for entirely too long, the paper opened like spread wings. Its tips were unraveling into layers.
Finally Remus wrote a reply on a scrap of parchment (someone'd stepped on it; you could see a dust-brown footprint and everything). He included an equally horrible pun in the form of an equally horrible poem. He wrote Sirius's name in large, bubbly letters on the other side, and later, at the Gryffindor table, he presented it with a flourish.
It was a joke and even sitting down, Remus's knees felt insubstantial.
Sirius called it the anti-tradition. Remus wasn't quite sure what he meant by this; tradition was still tradition if you did it every year, never mind the anti- bit. He supposed Sirius was only trying to save face, though, so he never said anything.
"See this, " Sirius crowed, mostly for James’s benefit. He was waving Remus's card like a testament, like a wild-eyed prophet in the street. “This is how you do it. This here's sentiment. Never mind the card you made, Prongs." And he slung an arm around Remus, and they were cheek to cheek, and Sirius read it again. "Moony, you poet. "
"I get it," James said. "Really. You think this is stupid. You can stop any time you like."
"Could learn a thing or two from him, James."
"Uh huh."
"I mean it."
James sighed. "Piss off."
Sirius did.
Later, in the near-dark, they were walking across the grounds, carefully avoiding pools in the remaining stubborn patches of snow. It smelled fresh and promising. Remus could smell future buds and wildflowers and rain, and he couldn't say how fantastic the prospect of rain was by that point.
Sirius was in the middle of a tirade about James when he slipped on a dirty drift of ice, and then he was in the middle of a tirade about such a ridiculous fucking in-between month like February; couldn't the ground be one thing or the other, snow or grass. It didn't much matter. Christ.
"I fucking hate today," he summed up miserably. Everything was circular, and Sirius was always quite sour when he couldn’t decide whether to laugh at people or firebomb them.
"Don't let it get you down," Remus said. "Look, I've even got something for you," and he dug around in his pockets until he came up with a button. "Here," he said, and he tried to remember what he'd overheard earlier, when one trembling Hufflepuff presented another trembling Hufflepuff with a sparkly, icy-blue necklace. He reproduced the speech almost perfectly, and Sirius laughed so hard he fell down again.
He gave Remus a damp twig in return, promising eternal devotion while keeping an almost straight face, and Remus gave him a bit of red thread, promising fidelity and lots of other words ending in -ity. This went on for some time, until Sirius gave him a dust particle (so he said, anyway, so he said) and how could you top that. Really.
See, it's all right, Remus wanted to tell him, but didn't.
:::
"I know what they think," Sirius said, waving the bottle of something just barely stronger than butterbeer. "They think, oh, you'd feel different if you had someone nice to spend it with. I mean if I had a special someone or something."
Remus nodded uncertainly.
"But they're wrong. Swear to Christ, Moony, if I had someone I wouldn't buy 'em anything for Valentine’s, I wouldn't say anything for Valentine’s. I wouldn't even fucking look at them today. Out of protest, right?"
"Right," Remus said, and didn't doubt him for a minute.
Then he felt the sudden horrible urge to tell the truth, the strange virus that infected a number of softhearted youth in mid-February. He said, "Actually, I don't mind it so much. Today."
Sirius shrugged and said he figured; he just knew his Moony was a pal and would stick through with him this whole time, and he was right, wasn't he? And then he gave Remus what had to have been the most brilliant smile in the whole history of life.
Remus felt like he’d lived this day five times already, practically, in every previous Valentine's Day at Hogwarts. He slid back into it comfortably: he and Sirius lounged on their separate couches, Remus squished into the corner, and they made witty and jaded comments that Remus didn't really mean and Sirius sort of did. Then Sirius left for a moment, going up to the dormitory and taking the stairs two at a time.
When he reappeared, Remus was smiling. "I've just remembered," he said. "One of the Valentines - I mean one of the saints - he was clubbed to death. And that's what happened to him."
"Good," Sirius said, and laughed.
He'd brought back with him a sack of chocolates, all sent by anonymous admirers. Remus squirmed pleasantly when Sirius's finger brushed over the glossy teal pack he'd sent (he allowed himself one Ridiculous Nancy Extravagance per year). Sirius said he was very determined not to care who’d sent them, and he tossed aside the cards with identifying clues and handwriting.
(Remus didn’t really care, and he never sent a note anyway.)
They got drunk enough that Sirius started tossing chocolates into Remus's mouth.
They got drunk enough that, when Remus nearly lost a tooth, Sirius patted the couch cushion beside him and started feeding the chocolates straight into Remus's mouth. He looked deadly serious except for the occasional huff of laughter and, well, yes, there was a maniacal glint in his eye. But it was a deadly serious one. The boy unwrapped candy after candy, dark and milk and cream-filled and each and every one caught in Remus's throat. Sirius's thumb was so soft, just tipping the chocolate past his lip, and he could never quite look at Sirius so his eyes darted to the growing stack of foils on the cushion between them.
Remus pretended to be drunk enough that he could just catch the pads of Sirius's fingers with his tongue and not notice.
Sirius was asleep in the far corner of the couch by the time people started filtering back in. He slept oddly, curling his arms around his waist with his head on his chest. He became so small, and he talked out loud in his sleep. Remus always thought this was horribly disturbing, but Sirius said things like, "Ah, no, that's enough," and, "Green'd do. Definitely green." And that wasn't so bad.
They woke up just when grey began to peek through the night sky.
"It's over, isn't it?" Sirius said groggily. "Oh please say it's over. Valentine's."
"Yeah," Remus said, "it's over."
"Fabulous," Sirius said, which he almost never said, and he went back to sleep.
Remus felt on the verge of something. It felt rather nice.
He went to sleep as well.
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: PG
A meandering, utterly pointless Valentine's Day ficlet. 2,487 words.
:::
Valentine's Day meant perfume-coated lungs and misanthropy.
It meant sugar and glitter and intricate cards with frills and little bits that exploded, and flowers so pungent you could taste them (and they tasted faintly magenta and tropical). It was the mercurial shift between winter and spring, which manifested itself in shy looks, which became shy declarations, which became bad poetry on the aforementioned cards. It meant tremulous affection and ammunition for the people who looked on, and sniffed, and spat, and generally felt vicious.
"Whatever happened to Saint Valentine?"
Remus shrugged. "Dunno. Three of them, I think, actually. Three Valentines. And I expect they all died."
"I know that, that's the point. I'm asking how."
"I'm not sure." Remus looked up from eggs that were supposed to be, he thought, some sort of pink, but were really sickly, watery lavender. But there were more pressing concerns than the kitchen's attempts at festivity. "I'm not sure," he repeated, "if it's as good as you've worked up in your mind. They're not always gruesome. Saints' deaths."
"They are, though," Sirius countered, "they're disgusting and vile and all sorts of lovely things. I've read about it." Read being the operative word and read meaning books and a book couldn't be wrong, could it?
"Well, let's see." Remus finally pushed his plate away and folded his arms neatly. "There was the man all shot through with arrows in his neck, no, that can't be nice." ("No it can't," came a happy murmur across the table.) "And the man who carried his head around with him, Dennis or Dionysius or both, I'm not sure which. There was the poor girl who lost her eyes and carried those 'round on a platter. And, er." He searched his brain for memories. (Patron saints and holy water and heathens, oh my.) What, oh what ministrations of medieval torture would impress Sirius?
He took a deep breath and explained the finer points of the rack, and how human flesh must look when it’s been scraped off with an iron brush.
"Oh!" Sirius sighed sharply, happily, and everyone in the immediate area was looking either at Remus or their breakfasts in dismay, realizing just how closely the latter resembled saintly remains, and then it was excuse me excuse me, I've got to be - I'm off, now. But Sirius looked as close to revelation as he came. He said, "Moony, I fucking love you," and for a moment Remus's heart began to pound so hard his throat felt thick and there was a sudden dampness in the creases of his hands, clutching the table.
:::
Sirius hated Valentine's Day on principle (what that principle was, he never told anyone). If the uninitiated asked, he said the 14th was the anniversary of the horrid accident in the mountains, you know the one with all those poor orphans, you know the one Sirius himself just barely escaped - such a tragedy, it was. Then he'd show them the scar on his arm (a souvenir), the one he'd actually got in a strange incident involving Peter's coaxing, the railing of a spiral staircase, and gravity gone horribly, horribly wrong.
People often remembered him as crying while he told his story. He never was. But he was that good.
The fact that Remus sort of liked Valentine's Day was a closely-guarded secret, somewhere in the vicinity of Let's Leave Slytherin Alone Today, and the Other Thing, of course. It wasn't that he was romantic, or he liked pink, or he had anyone to crawl into a nice cupboard with. It was that people were different today. They were fake. They bared themselves completely and told the truth for the first time. They scrubbed their faces pink and tangled comb teeth in their hair from the force of brushing and they drowned themselves in scents sharp but sweet and they were like players on a stage, they said lines and Remus liked it, all right, just liked it.
He found it charming.
He played his own part masterfully.
He and Sirius would lounge on separate couches in the all but abandoned common room and say witty, jaded things they always tried to remember later but couldn't. They stole leftover sweets foolishly scattered. They taped a nasty limerick to the notice board ("What rhymes with 'wanker'?"). One year Sirius convinced him to give some fourth-years a talking-to on public indecency.
Remus was that good.
:::
Peter had accidentally learned how to draw during the tedious hours of History of Magic, and now he was paying the price. James had fashioned himself a plain card, the wording of which he'd labored over for weeks (it lingered between parody and stream of conscious rambling and heartfelt, saccharine sentiment, and it was such a syrupy mess it almost pained you to even touch it). Now he had Peter hunched over the paper, drawing in the margins. Peter looked up every now and then. "There?" he said warily, and slid the card to James so he could inspect the latest burgeoning flower and curlicue.
"Brilliant," James said fiendishly. "She'll love it, oh they eat this rubbish up, don't they. Now do the other side."
By now Peter had been drawing frilly, delicate borders for a grueling forty-six minutes. That was why, when James told him that he wasn't done, Peter made a small, strangled noise and half leapt up like he was going to jam his quill straight into James's eye.
It was sort of like watching a nature documentary. (Remus rather enjoyed those.)
But disaster was averted through the promise of gold, and sweets, and the first try on James's new broom as soon as all the snow had gone, and when you do the other side, Pete, try not to drip. It's supposed to look lacy here. Lace doesn't blot, thanks.
And Peter was left muttering, but no one died, at least.
James didn't actually have a date that night. Or a girlfriend. He and Lily had had a very cordial, sterile study session the other week, though, and when he asked if she'd go for another sometime (he had addressed this question to her rosy knees, poking over the tops of her socks), she didn't exactly say no. You had to read between the lines - it was what Lily didn't say. James seemed to figure they were pretty much exclusive by now.
Peter did have a date that night, Janie-from-Ravenclaw. This probably explained the nervous tic he'd developed in the last hour. Also, Sirius insisted on clinging to his shoulder, following every stroke of the quill and making unhelpful comments. "Ohhh, are you sure about that?" he breathed as one of Peter's little spiraling stars grew an ink tumor. Peter's hand jerked a bit.
"That won't do," James scowled. "I said no blots, Peter."
Peter told him what he could with his blots and his quill, too, and then, with tremendous dignity, he left the room.
James sighed, saying something about sweets, some limited edition candy hearts from Honeydukes that really beat and thumped and pumped and all that, and were quite frankly the most disgusting things Remus had ever seen in his life. Then James retreated to the dorm, and Sirius left too, saying he had to go throw up for a while, sweet Merlin he couldn't stand Valentine's.
Remus wasn't sure why, but he felt a tremendous, ridiculous surge of love for all of them.
:::
All around him people were exchanging cut jewelry on fine chains; flowers ranging from somewhat drooping to brilliant, in a hundred hues; expensive-looking chocolates in frosted gold foils. Remus watched them, feeling wholly separate, and not particularly envious.
He wasn't too surprised when he found a handful of weeds in the head indentation of his pillow. (In fact he'd expected something like it, given the magnificence of the exchanges all around them.) There was a card, too, with rough edges. It had a horrid pun. The pun involved the word "bee" and there were a lot of exclamation marks. He held the card in his palm for entirely too long, the paper opened like spread wings. Its tips were unraveling into layers.
Finally Remus wrote a reply on a scrap of parchment (someone'd stepped on it; you could see a dust-brown footprint and everything). He included an equally horrible pun in the form of an equally horrible poem. He wrote Sirius's name in large, bubbly letters on the other side, and later, at the Gryffindor table, he presented it with a flourish.
It was a joke and even sitting down, Remus's knees felt insubstantial.
Sirius called it the anti-tradition. Remus wasn't quite sure what he meant by this; tradition was still tradition if you did it every year, never mind the anti- bit. He supposed Sirius was only trying to save face, though, so he never said anything.
"See this, " Sirius crowed, mostly for James’s benefit. He was waving Remus's card like a testament, like a wild-eyed prophet in the street. “This is how you do it. This here's sentiment. Never mind the card you made, Prongs." And he slung an arm around Remus, and they were cheek to cheek, and Sirius read it again. "Moony, you poet. "
"I get it," James said. "Really. You think this is stupid. You can stop any time you like."
"Could learn a thing or two from him, James."
"Uh huh."
"I mean it."
James sighed. "Piss off."
Sirius did.
Later, in the near-dark, they were walking across the grounds, carefully avoiding pools in the remaining stubborn patches of snow. It smelled fresh and promising. Remus could smell future buds and wildflowers and rain, and he couldn't say how fantastic the prospect of rain was by that point.
Sirius was in the middle of a tirade about James when he slipped on a dirty drift of ice, and then he was in the middle of a tirade about such a ridiculous fucking in-between month like February; couldn't the ground be one thing or the other, snow or grass. It didn't much matter. Christ.
"I fucking hate today," he summed up miserably. Everything was circular, and Sirius was always quite sour when he couldn’t decide whether to laugh at people or firebomb them.
"Don't let it get you down," Remus said. "Look, I've even got something for you," and he dug around in his pockets until he came up with a button. "Here," he said, and he tried to remember what he'd overheard earlier, when one trembling Hufflepuff presented another trembling Hufflepuff with a sparkly, icy-blue necklace. He reproduced the speech almost perfectly, and Sirius laughed so hard he fell down again.
He gave Remus a damp twig in return, promising eternal devotion while keeping an almost straight face, and Remus gave him a bit of red thread, promising fidelity and lots of other words ending in -ity. This went on for some time, until Sirius gave him a dust particle (so he said, anyway, so he said) and how could you top that. Really.
See, it's all right, Remus wanted to tell him, but didn't.
:::
"I know what they think," Sirius said, waving the bottle of something just barely stronger than butterbeer. "They think, oh, you'd feel different if you had someone nice to spend it with. I mean if I had a special someone or something."
Remus nodded uncertainly.
"But they're wrong. Swear to Christ, Moony, if I had someone I wouldn't buy 'em anything for Valentine’s, I wouldn't say anything for Valentine’s. I wouldn't even fucking look at them today. Out of protest, right?"
"Right," Remus said, and didn't doubt him for a minute.
Then he felt the sudden horrible urge to tell the truth, the strange virus that infected a number of softhearted youth in mid-February. He said, "Actually, I don't mind it so much. Today."
Sirius shrugged and said he figured; he just knew his Moony was a pal and would stick through with him this whole time, and he was right, wasn't he? And then he gave Remus what had to have been the most brilliant smile in the whole history of life.
Remus felt like he’d lived this day five times already, practically, in every previous Valentine's Day at Hogwarts. He slid back into it comfortably: he and Sirius lounged on their separate couches, Remus squished into the corner, and they made witty and jaded comments that Remus didn't really mean and Sirius sort of did. Then Sirius left for a moment, going up to the dormitory and taking the stairs two at a time.
When he reappeared, Remus was smiling. "I've just remembered," he said. "One of the Valentines - I mean one of the saints - he was clubbed to death. And that's what happened to him."
"Good," Sirius said, and laughed.
He'd brought back with him a sack of chocolates, all sent by anonymous admirers. Remus squirmed pleasantly when Sirius's finger brushed over the glossy teal pack he'd sent (he allowed himself one Ridiculous Nancy Extravagance per year). Sirius said he was very determined not to care who’d sent them, and he tossed aside the cards with identifying clues and handwriting.
(Remus didn’t really care, and he never sent a note anyway.)
They got drunk enough that Sirius started tossing chocolates into Remus's mouth.
They got drunk enough that, when Remus nearly lost a tooth, Sirius patted the couch cushion beside him and started feeding the chocolates straight into Remus's mouth. He looked deadly serious except for the occasional huff of laughter and, well, yes, there was a maniacal glint in his eye. But it was a deadly serious one. The boy unwrapped candy after candy, dark and milk and cream-filled and each and every one caught in Remus's throat. Sirius's thumb was so soft, just tipping the chocolate past his lip, and he could never quite look at Sirius so his eyes darted to the growing stack of foils on the cushion between them.
Remus pretended to be drunk enough that he could just catch the pads of Sirius's fingers with his tongue and not notice.
Sirius was asleep in the far corner of the couch by the time people started filtering back in. He slept oddly, curling his arms around his waist with his head on his chest. He became so small, and he talked out loud in his sleep. Remus always thought this was horribly disturbing, but Sirius said things like, "Ah, no, that's enough," and, "Green'd do. Definitely green." And that wasn't so bad.
They woke up just when grey began to peek through the night sky.
"It's over, isn't it?" Sirius said groggily. "Oh please say it's over. Valentine's."
"Yeah," Remus said, "it's over."
"Fabulous," Sirius said, which he almost never said, and he went back to sleep.
Remus felt on the verge of something. It felt rather nice.
He went to sleep as well.