james/sirius, for leoninedragon
Title: How Sirius Black Came to Stay
Author: riddlemesphinx
For:leoninedragon -- I really hope you like it!
Who requested James/Sirius -- awkward boys, fun not sappy or fluffy
Rating: PG-13-ish
Pairing James/Sirius
Warnings: Slash (m/m)
Author's Notes: Some thank yous are definitely in order. To infinitejoys , who is the Grammar Queen of my heart and whose enthusiastic "HEE"s brought me endless amounts of joy. And to cluelesschase , who provided me with the most thorough beta work I've ever seen and fixed all of my incorrect "Britishness". Thank you.
Summary: "And so it is that Sirius Black comes to live with them. There are lots of little things that James finds himself having to adjust to, like the idea that he can’t simply shove his chores off on Sirius like he’s always imagined he could do if he had a brother. In fact, James is learning that if he tries to do this, Sirius just punches him in the chest and runs off, leaving him wheezing in the garden while all the gnomes come to have a good laugh at him."
James is just dozing off around one in the morning, one arm flung over his face to block out the moonlight streaming in from his uncovered window. When the tapping at said window begins, he is inexplicably dreaming of a pack of wild dogs who are teaching him to ice-skate.
"But I don't want to do a pirouette, that's pathetic…let me try the triple axle again, I promise I won't nick any tails this time…"
The tapping grows louder and James groans incoherently, pulling the duvet cover over his head.
"Right, here goes… you lot watching?"
The next thing he knows, there is a great loud crash and an equally fantastic thud at the foot of his bed.
"Bloody buggering hell!" he yelps, with no small amount of alarm, and promptly falls out of his bed. He leaps to his feet, grabs for his wand, and looks about wildly.
As his wild, astigmatic eyes scan the room, he can see a figure rising to its feet in front of the window. The light of the moon (never mind his lamentable lack of glasses) makes it impossible to discern any distinguishing features. James draws his duvet cover closer around himself like a shield and declares bravely:
"Who's there? Don't make any sudden moves, I'm armed and dangerous!"
The figure pauses, snorts, and replies, "Going to kill me with a tea spoon then, are you?"
James looks down at the object in his hand and casts it aside in disgust. He fumbles quickly to turn on his bedside lamp and put on his glasses. At this point, woken by the considerable noise, his parents rush into the room with wands drawn.
"Sirius?" Three voices, raised together in confusion, say the name together. The windswept young man in front of the broken window flushes, but replies,
"Er…hello then, Mr. and Mrs. Potter."
He looks even more embarrassed as Mrs. Potter's eyes flick from him to the broken window.
"Sorry about that, Mrs. Potter. I…well, I was on my broom, and I leaned in to tap the window, and sort of lost my balance and-"
"Say no more, dear," she replies with a tired sort of amusement. Sirius knows James has broken his fair share of windows, but that doesn't keep him from feeling guilty. She smiles kindly at him and points her wand at the window.
"Reparo."
Sirius steps back as the many shards of broken glass rise from the floor and return to their proper places in the frame. His eyes flick to James and his duvet cover, which now bears a vague resemblance to a toga, and bites his lip to keep from laughing aloud. James catches this- he always does- and quickly disposes of the duvet, color rising high on his cheeks. Sirius merely smirks in way of a response and then Mr. Potter lets out an alarmingly loud yawn.
"Right, well, it's quite late, boys. Sirius, you're more than welcome to stay of course. Er-" he trails off, having noticed the inordinate amount of luggage that Sirius has brought with him. "Right. We'll…we'll talk in the morning, shall we?"
Sirius nods sheepishly and James's parents shuffle out, bidding the boys a good night. Sirius lets out a long, relieved sigh and flops down on the bed. James clears his throat, and when Sirius scratches his nose in response, James socks him in the face with his pillow.
"Fuck you, Potter!" comes the indignant reply and James hits him again.
Sirius sits up, murder in his eyes and in the furrow in his brow. James rolls his eyes but keeps a firm grip on the pillow. He has known Sirius for far too long to be ignorant of the tricky ways of the Black Fighting Technique.
"Look, you may be able to get away with talking to my dad tomorrow, but unless you want a certain greasy-haired, hook-nosed Slytherin to receive great, long, flowery love sonnets with your name at the bottom, I think you ought to explain why you've crashed through my poor window, woken me from a very excellent dream, and mocked my duvet all in one night."
Sirius makes a very foul gesture at him and turns to flop back down on the bed. James takes offense and a deep breath. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day at Hogwarts?" he all but bellows, "Thou art more smelly and more temperate!"
But during this charming recitation, Sirius has managed to yank the pillow out of his grasp and this time it is James who receives a faceful of pillow. Spitting out a few down feathers, he gives Sirius his best Death Look.
"Padfoot."
Bugger. He wishes that the authoritative way that had sounded in his head had actually come across, but he knows it hasn't.
"Been chucked out," Sirius says suddenly, his tone bizarrely light and false. "The old hag finally gave up, I guess. And over the smallest thing too, I mean, you'd've thought that if she was going to snap at all, it would have been over what happened at Granny Melania's birthday last year, but-"
"You mean… actually thrown out, thrown out?" James asks softly. He knows that Sirius's home life isn't exactly a Bonfire Night celebration at the best of times, but he cannot possibly fathom being kicked out of his own house.
"Told me to never darken the doorstep again," Sirius replies, giving him a rueful smile. “Good thing I was planning on leaving anyway, eh?”
James's eyes meet his and volumes are spoken and unspoken in a brief moment of quiet. Then Sirius shoves James off the bed.
"Right," announces James, his voice muffled around his mouthful of carpet. He sits up, trying to decipher the strange taste in his mouth. The most recognizable flavor is, of course, feet, but other than that they are indistinguishable. "You can kip down here on the floor tonight and in the morning we'll have Dad build a dog house for you in the back yard. Also, while you're down here, see if you can figure out what my carpet tastes like. You dogs are better at separating tastes anyway."
"See, it's the funniest thing," Sirius says, lazy and yet full of some source of mischievous energy that James has never fully figured out how to tap into. "You seem to be suffering under the delusion that house guests sleep on the floor. If I didn't know your mum- intimately, I might add- I'd think you were raised by wolves."
James waits for a few more seconds than he would with anyone else, because he knows that Sirius is expecting the tackle to come within a certain time frame. So he waits for the right moment and then launches himself into the air and onto the bed. He wishes he could freeze this moment in time, this moment of boyhood and the surge of affection he feels for Sirius when his face twists into that horrified ‘I should have expected this’ look he always gets whenever James manages to best him. Then he lands on top of Sirius, his bony knees plowing into Sirius’s solar plexus, and Sirius howls with pain and outrage, and the two scuffle until they fall out of the bed and James’s father yells with surprising volume,
“GO TO BED, NOW!”
And the two of them can do nothing but lie there, sprawled on top of one another and shaking with silent laughter. It is James who is the first to still, though he doesn’t move.
Sirius says, “You’re crushing my lungs," but does not make an attempt to dislodge him. James wills himself to be heavier, just to be obnoxious and Sirius groans and laughs.
It is the groan that does James in, however innocent it may have been. Hazel eyes catch gray out of instinct, but this is one moment in which James does not want Sirius to be able to read his mind. He rolls off of Sirius with an agility that no one should have at this hour of the morning and springs for the bed at the same moment that Sirius grabs his leg and attempts to pull him backward.
There is a brief scuffle for the bed until they are both sprawled out across it, tangled in the duvet cover, each too exhausted to shove the other onto the floor.
“Give me your spare pillow, there’s a good lad,” Sirius demands.
“Get your disgusting feet out of my face,” James retorts.
Sirius manages to flip about, wriggling as much as humanly possible until his back is to James, and James tosses the pillow at him grudgingly. Sirius accepts it and suddenly turns to face James. James barely manages to keep his breath from hitching in his throat- there is an unspoken request on Sirius’s part, and an equally unspoken agreement on his own. An oddly uncharacteristic look of gratitude flashes across Sirius’s face along with something else, which he manages to hide away before James can decipher it. Instead he just says simply, “If you kick me in your sleep, so help you, Potter.”
James grins at him and reaches over to flick out the light. Once the darkness has filled the room, James has to force himself to breathe normally. After what seems like hours, he hears Sirius’s own breathing steady and deepen, and finally he allows his muscles to relax and uncoil. No sooner has he done this than he feels the tips of Sirius’s fingers brush, feather-light, over his arm and come to rest against the tips of his own.
“Padfoot?” he whispers, and the silence is deafening. “Sirius?”
By way of response, James leaves his own fingers where they are and falls asleep to the distant beat of Sirius’s pulse.
---
And so it is that Sirius Black comes to live with them. There are lots of little things that James finds himself having to adjust to, like the idea that he can’t simply shove his chores off on Sirius like he’s always imagined he could do if he had a brother. In fact, James is learning that if he tries to do this, Sirius just punches him in the chest and runs off, leaving him wheezing in the garden while all the gnomes come to have a good laugh at him. He doesn’t even bother to try getting used to Sirius’s annoying tendency to use up all the hot water during his daily hour-long showers. He strolls past the bathroom that he now has to share, past Sirius’s hearty renditions of old wizarding drinking songs, down the stairs and into the guest bathroom where he proceeds to flush the toilet exactly eleven times, until he hears Sirius’s angry shout and the sound of the water shutting off.
But the thing that he has been having the most trouble with is adjusting to Sirius’s constant closeness. He is used to dealing with it during the school year, when he can wake up and not hear Sirius's snore from the bunk below his (Mr. Potter, in his infinite wisdom, thought it would be fun to Transfigure his old bed rather than buy a new one). But it is summer and he can't escape to Arithmancy (which Sirius outright refuses to acknowledge as a real subject) or off to the library to sneak glances at Lily Evans as she studies by the window. It is summer and Sirius is forever popping up around every corner with some funny cartoon he's clipped from the Prophet or to ask if he wants to go to the lake or sometimes if Sirius is in a particularly feisty mood, he tries to see just how many times he can tackle and pin James down in one day.
There are days when it gets to be too much and James has to lock himself in the bathroom just to breathe, counting first the black tiles and then the white, until the roar that has been growing in his chest has subdued to a dull murmur. Then, just when he thinks he may be able to resurface, Sirius's voice reverberates through the door, asking him if he's fallen in and drowned, and he has to start counting again. There are days when he has to struggle to pretend that Sirius's cheerful whistling in the morning really bothers him as much as he's always said it has. There are days when they are splashing about in the lake when James has to constantly remind himself to look away from the coil-and-flex of Sirius's arms before it is permanently burned into his retinas. Sirius actually catches him at this once, and James has to rush to make up something about seeing a leech, which sends Sirius screeching out of the lake like a bat out of hell.
There are days, when Sirius is in one of his feisty moods, that James doesn't mind being tackled so very much at all. It is on one of those very days when he doesn't resist at all and Sirius falls back to crouch on his heels with a concerned look on his face.
"What's up?" he asks, scrutinizing James as he sits up to dust himself off. "Usually you scream like a wee firstie girl when I come at you from behind the couch like that. At the very least," he muses, "you throw some really choice swears out. But nothing!"
And then something like realization dawns across his face and James watches as Sirius's face pales with doubt. It is an expression he has never seen on him before and if he could hear his own thoughts over the roaring in his chest, he might try and put some of them into words.
"Right, I thought this might happen," Sirius says with the same strange lightness in his voice that he gets any time his family comes up in conversation. "You've gotten sick of me, eh Jamie? Should've thought of that before, shouldn't you? 'Cause I hate to say it, but you're stuck with me, so come on then, let's have it. Give me a couple good belts around the ear and we'll move on, all right?"
James's head feels a little light.
"What?" he asks, stupidly. "What are you on about?"
"You can punch me in the stomach!" Sirius adds helpfully. "You love punching me in the stomach!"
"I do at that," James thoughtfully agrees. He still feels a bit dazed.
"Well then!" Sirius says brightly, as if it's all settled, and opens his arms wide. "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
James blinks. "I don't want to punch you in the stomach. I mean, you did call me Jamie, which you haven't done since we were nine 'cause you know I hate it, and that face you make when I do punch you is rather spectacular, but…"
As he trails off, James wonders what can possibly be done to silence the infernal roaring so that he can just think for two seconds, that's all he wants, two seconds to put his thoughts together, and then suddenly, his next move is clear.
He mimics Sirius's stance and pauses, chewing on his lower lip almost thoughtfully. Sirius eyes him warily, arms still flung wide to present an acceptable target. Then James looks up, hazel eyes boring into gray, and leaps. What results is that Sirius lets out a fantastic noise, like that of a balloon that loses all its air at once, and James smells oranges and cocoa and the vaguest hint of an illicit cigarette on his breath as they tumble to a halt at the foot of the stairs.
"That's it?" Sirius asks incredulously, once he finds oxygen again. "Really? Because-"
James, who can sense one of Sirius's inane run-on sentences better than his own mother can sense a lie, says something like, "Shut up, Sirius," and kisses him.
It's odd, and nothing like it probably should be- there's the strange scrape of teeth and the fact that their faces don't quite fit together like with the girls he's kissed- but it's astonishingly not terrible and the kiss goes on and on as James tries to figure out why this is true until finally Sirius moves under him and he forces himself to pull away with a probably-less-than-alluring smacking noise. He can't help but notice the resemblance Sirius currently bears to a beached whale.
"You look like a beached whale," he tells him, trying to be helpful.
"That's not what your mum said last night," Sirius replies, his voice low and dangerous, and before James knows what's happening, Sirius has him pinned to the stairs with a kiss so fierce that James accidentally bites his lip.
His hand is halfway up Sirius’s shirt, moving over the tense muscles under the skin that feels soft beneath his calloused fingers and it all feels so familiar and yet so unfamiliar that he has to make himself stop.
Sirius stops at the exact same instant, breathless and flushed, and stares down at James intently. His gray eyes are a storm, fierce and powerful, and his lower lip is red and swollen slightly from where James bit it.
“You bit my lip,” he informs James, point-blank.
“Sorry,” says James, and he means it. “Sorry. Sirius, what- I-”
He stumbles around for words and Sirius lets him, an amused smirk playing across his features. James wonders helplessly how Sirius can be so calm, if perhaps Sirius has done this before, and a flood of panic washes over him until he sees Sirius surreptitiously raise a hand to his mouth and gnaw at a hangnail.
Tentative, light: “I’m not-”
“And I am, I suppose?” Sirius says, his voice somewhat sharp around the edges. By way of apology he adds, “Look, it’s what it is, right? It’s James and Sirius like always, just...plus.”
His words are uncertain, confused, and- for James, who sometimes laughs at how well he knows Sirius- for James alone, it is comforting.
“Right,” he agrees. “Plus.” And he grabs hold of Sirius’s shirt and yanks him forward. Sirius’s hands scrabble for purchase in James’s hair, on his shoulders, down to his hips where they find a resting place. Without really knowing why he’s doing it, James shoves his hips upward, against Sirius’s, and instinctively swallows the noise that Sirius makes in response.
There is friction; sweet, amazing friction that James can hardly believe is real, and his hand is gliding under the thin fabric of Sirius’s shirt, slipping across the sweat-slick skin over his shoulder blades and spine. Sirius is doing something marvelous to his neck, maybe biting it, but James isn’t sure because his vision has gone a bit blurred and his mind is quite preoccupied with thanking whatever Powers That Be for sending his parents over to the neighbors’ for tea. He briefly wonders how far this is going to go but then Sirius’s lips are back over his and he can’t force himself to think anymore. He just wants to feel the slide of Sirius’s tongue against his, just wants to taste the cocoa and oranges and cigarettes and Sirius for as long as he can before he spontaneously combusts.
Then he considers his brain’s word choice and how inappropriate and ironic it is, and he can’t help but laugh. He laughs and the noise hangs, foreign, in the air. Sirius pulls away from his neck, flushed and slightly irritated at being interrupted.
“What’s so funny then?” he growls, and the sound is almost enough to distract James- but not quite. He chokes on his own laughter and doubles over on top of Sirius, shaking and gasping. He can feel Sirius’s annoyance crumbling and falling away, and before he knows it, Sirius is laughing too-great, roars of laughter to compliment his gasping chuckles. The thought registers that he is basically curled up in Sirius’s lap and that sets him off yet again, tears now pricking the corner of his eyes.
“Why are you laughing?” Sirius demands when he is able to catch his breath.
“I don’t know,” wheezes James helplessly. “I’m sorry!”
“You bloody better be sorry, James Potter,” he retorts. He adopts a slightly imperious tone and continues. “I mean, some of my best moves and you’re giggling like girl? It’s just not on. You’re lucky I’m not thrashing all sense out of you right now.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” James chuckles, moving his glasses aside to wipe the corners of his eyes. “But- your best moves? Are you mental?” He pokes Sirius’s ribs. “A first year Hufflepuff could do better.”
Sirius’s eyebrows shoot up so far that James feels the immediate need to backtrack. “Sorry, second year Huff, then.”
“I’ll give you ‘second year Huff’,” Sirius growls again and moves forward.
Before James is able to experience the supposed technique of a second year Hufflepuff, however, there is an alarmingly loud screech and a barn owl of considerable girth swoops in through the open window. James yelps and topples backward while Sirius grumbles something like, “Bugger all!”
The barn owl gazes down at them from the kitchen table.
And what have we here? James swears he can hear it think, and the fact that the voice he has imagined bears an alarming resemblance to Dumbledore’s own gets him to his feet quite quickly.
“What’ve you got for me then?” he snaps at the owl, who hoots balefully back at him and takes indignant flight.
“Get out of here, you!” Sirius hollers after it as James picks up the letter bearing the familiar Hogwarts crest.
“Brilliant, school letters!” says Sirius cheerfully as James tears open the heavy parchment envelope. “Wonder where mine is, bet old Dumbles doesn’t know my address has changed.”
At first he doesn’t notice that James has gone entirely white; he is too busy thinking of a plan to get his school letter away from his parents, mumbling out loud about sending an owl in after it or of writing to Dumbledore personally to notify him of the address change. Finally, he takes in James’s face, mouth open in a perfectly comic ‘O’, his eyebrows up near his hairline.
“What is it, then Jamie? Old Sluggie assign some particularly awful summer reading or what?”
“It’s…it’s not our school letters,” James chokes out. Before he can shield the letter from Sirius’s long arms and grabby hands, the parchment is snatched away from him and quickly pored over with curious gray eyes.
It doesn’t take long, and Sirius’s howl of disbelief and indignation sounds exactly like the noise James had wanted to make had his vocal cords been working properly.
“HEAD BOY?” Sirius grabs for the torn envelope and roots around in it, producing the gleaming badge and holding it up to the light. Both gray and hazel eyes stare, transfixed and disbelieving.
“I don’t believe this!” Sirius says at last, shattering the silence into a million pieces with the words. “I thought for sure Moony’d get it! What’s Dumbledore playing at, I’d like to know! He must have it in for you, mate- who got Head Girl?”
James licks his lips and swallows, his throat dry and scratchy. “Lily…Lily Evans.”
There is a clattering noise as Sirius drops the letter and badge. The silence threatens to swallow them both again until Sirius manages a feeble, “Brilliant, then.”
James wheels around on him, his eyes wide and voice unnaturally high. “‘Brilliant, then’?! That’s all you’ve got to say? This is- this is- do you know what this is, Sirius? This is a DEATH TOLL, that’s what it is. For me, for you, for Marauding as we know it!”
He begins pacing, gesticulating wildly as he rants. “This is because of the thing with Snivellus last term, I know it! I never should have saved that slimy- that greasy- that foul little neck of his. We’d never be in this position otherwise!”
“Yes, you should have,” Sirius replies quietly. “Of course you should have, you great git. I make an idiot of myself and you put it right, that’s what you do.”
James stares at him, gaping like a fish. “What?”
Something deep in Sirius’s chest clenches almost painfully, and he gives James his best stern look (which he knows isn’t very good at all). “You’re Head Boy, all right? And it’s weird and completely against everything we stand for as pranksters. But have you ever heard of somebody passing off a thing like that? ‘Cause I haven’t, not ever, and you’re not going to change that, you stupid prat.”
James still looks a bit shell-shocked, though more and more like he is coming to terms with an inconvenient truth.
“I cannot believe that you even thought of passing on the chance to take points from whomever you want,” Sirius continues, adopting an admonishing tone that doesn’t fit him in the slightest.
James’s eyes light up. “I can take points, can’t I?”
“Absolutely,” Sirius agrees. “Twenty points from Slytherin for every greasy hair on Sniv’s head.”
James looks entranced now. “For his hair?” he asks incredulously. Sirius nods.
“And besides,” he adds wickedly. “It’ll be a great way for you to get to Evans. She can’t exactly run from you when Dumbledore’ll have you two leading prefect meetings or whatever it is you’ll be doing.”
James feels as if he’s on the Quidditch Pitch and has just been thoroughly walloped by a speeding Bludger. The feeling in the pit of his stomach is amazingly similar.
“Sirius-”
“I’m going to go write to Moons- let him know that he’d better start planning pranks in advance because Merlin knows he can’t come up with anything decent off the top of his head like we can. You ought to write to Evans straightaway, give her the good news yourself.”
And with a wink and an unnaturally bright smile, he is gone. James falls back into a kitchen chair, bewildered.
---
Sirius sprints up the stairs, his heart pounding hard against his chest, and for one inexplicable moment, he wonders if anyone’s heart has just popped out of their chest for lack of proper breathing before. He shakes the thought out of his mind as he falls into the room he and James share, a roar growing and squirming in his gut. He sits hard on the floor, not having the energy or the brain capacity for anything else.
And he sits. And he thinks. And he is ineffably grateful for James being considerate enough to not come after him. And he thinks some more.
The sun is lowering in the sky, streaking it with purples and oranges and pinks, and he can hear the Potters preparing dinner downstairs before he finally comes to an acceptable conclusion.
Of course, he realizes, he can’t expect James to stop chasing after Lily during the year. He’s been chasing her for over six years now and she is a Red Head With Great Legs, so Sirius supposes that he really can’t blame James for that. The school year is for Lily, whether she wants it or not.
But the summer- the summer is for pretending he cares when James flushes him out of the shower. The summer is for tackling tallies and wrestling matches in the freshly mown lawn and water fights at the lake. Summer is for stealing kisses before breakfast and bed and as often as possible in between and it is for feeling the strength in James’s arms as he pulls Sirius unceremoniously closer to him.
The summer is for them.
Author: riddlemesphinx
For:leoninedragon -- I really hope you like it!
Who requested James/Sirius -- awkward boys, fun not sappy or fluffy
Rating: PG-13-ish
Pairing James/Sirius
Warnings: Slash (m/m)
Author's Notes: Some thank yous are definitely in order. To infinitejoys , who is the Grammar Queen of my heart and whose enthusiastic "HEE"s brought me endless amounts of joy. And to cluelesschase , who provided me with the most thorough beta work I've ever seen and fixed all of my incorrect "Britishness". Thank you.
Summary: "And so it is that Sirius Black comes to live with them. There are lots of little things that James finds himself having to adjust to, like the idea that he can’t simply shove his chores off on Sirius like he’s always imagined he could do if he had a brother. In fact, James is learning that if he tries to do this, Sirius just punches him in the chest and runs off, leaving him wheezing in the garden while all the gnomes come to have a good laugh at him."
James is just dozing off around one in the morning, one arm flung over his face to block out the moonlight streaming in from his uncovered window. When the tapping at said window begins, he is inexplicably dreaming of a pack of wild dogs who are teaching him to ice-skate.
"But I don't want to do a pirouette, that's pathetic…let me try the triple axle again, I promise I won't nick any tails this time…"
The tapping grows louder and James groans incoherently, pulling the duvet cover over his head.
"Right, here goes… you lot watching?"
The next thing he knows, there is a great loud crash and an equally fantastic thud at the foot of his bed.
"Bloody buggering hell!" he yelps, with no small amount of alarm, and promptly falls out of his bed. He leaps to his feet, grabs for his wand, and looks about wildly.
As his wild, astigmatic eyes scan the room, he can see a figure rising to its feet in front of the window. The light of the moon (never mind his lamentable lack of glasses) makes it impossible to discern any distinguishing features. James draws his duvet cover closer around himself like a shield and declares bravely:
"Who's there? Don't make any sudden moves, I'm armed and dangerous!"
The figure pauses, snorts, and replies, "Going to kill me with a tea spoon then, are you?"
James looks down at the object in his hand and casts it aside in disgust. He fumbles quickly to turn on his bedside lamp and put on his glasses. At this point, woken by the considerable noise, his parents rush into the room with wands drawn.
"Sirius?" Three voices, raised together in confusion, say the name together. The windswept young man in front of the broken window flushes, but replies,
"Er…hello then, Mr. and Mrs. Potter."
He looks even more embarrassed as Mrs. Potter's eyes flick from him to the broken window.
"Sorry about that, Mrs. Potter. I…well, I was on my broom, and I leaned in to tap the window, and sort of lost my balance and-"
"Say no more, dear," she replies with a tired sort of amusement. Sirius knows James has broken his fair share of windows, but that doesn't keep him from feeling guilty. She smiles kindly at him and points her wand at the window.
"Reparo."
Sirius steps back as the many shards of broken glass rise from the floor and return to their proper places in the frame. His eyes flick to James and his duvet cover, which now bears a vague resemblance to a toga, and bites his lip to keep from laughing aloud. James catches this- he always does- and quickly disposes of the duvet, color rising high on his cheeks. Sirius merely smirks in way of a response and then Mr. Potter lets out an alarmingly loud yawn.
"Right, well, it's quite late, boys. Sirius, you're more than welcome to stay of course. Er-" he trails off, having noticed the inordinate amount of luggage that Sirius has brought with him. "Right. We'll…we'll talk in the morning, shall we?"
Sirius nods sheepishly and James's parents shuffle out, bidding the boys a good night. Sirius lets out a long, relieved sigh and flops down on the bed. James clears his throat, and when Sirius scratches his nose in response, James socks him in the face with his pillow.
"Fuck you, Potter!" comes the indignant reply and James hits him again.
Sirius sits up, murder in his eyes and in the furrow in his brow. James rolls his eyes but keeps a firm grip on the pillow. He has known Sirius for far too long to be ignorant of the tricky ways of the Black Fighting Technique.
"Look, you may be able to get away with talking to my dad tomorrow, but unless you want a certain greasy-haired, hook-nosed Slytherin to receive great, long, flowery love sonnets with your name at the bottom, I think you ought to explain why you've crashed through my poor window, woken me from a very excellent dream, and mocked my duvet all in one night."
Sirius makes a very foul gesture at him and turns to flop back down on the bed. James takes offense and a deep breath. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day at Hogwarts?" he all but bellows, "Thou art more smelly and more temperate!"
But during this charming recitation, Sirius has managed to yank the pillow out of his grasp and this time it is James who receives a faceful of pillow. Spitting out a few down feathers, he gives Sirius his best Death Look.
"Padfoot."
Bugger. He wishes that the authoritative way that had sounded in his head had actually come across, but he knows it hasn't.
"Been chucked out," Sirius says suddenly, his tone bizarrely light and false. "The old hag finally gave up, I guess. And over the smallest thing too, I mean, you'd've thought that if she was going to snap at all, it would have been over what happened at Granny Melania's birthday last year, but-"
"You mean… actually thrown out, thrown out?" James asks softly. He knows that Sirius's home life isn't exactly a Bonfire Night celebration at the best of times, but he cannot possibly fathom being kicked out of his own house.
"Told me to never darken the doorstep again," Sirius replies, giving him a rueful smile. “Good thing I was planning on leaving anyway, eh?”
James's eyes meet his and volumes are spoken and unspoken in a brief moment of quiet. Then Sirius shoves James off the bed.
"Right," announces James, his voice muffled around his mouthful of carpet. He sits up, trying to decipher the strange taste in his mouth. The most recognizable flavor is, of course, feet, but other than that they are indistinguishable. "You can kip down here on the floor tonight and in the morning we'll have Dad build a dog house for you in the back yard. Also, while you're down here, see if you can figure out what my carpet tastes like. You dogs are better at separating tastes anyway."
"See, it's the funniest thing," Sirius says, lazy and yet full of some source of mischievous energy that James has never fully figured out how to tap into. "You seem to be suffering under the delusion that house guests sleep on the floor. If I didn't know your mum- intimately, I might add- I'd think you were raised by wolves."
James waits for a few more seconds than he would with anyone else, because he knows that Sirius is expecting the tackle to come within a certain time frame. So he waits for the right moment and then launches himself into the air and onto the bed. He wishes he could freeze this moment in time, this moment of boyhood and the surge of affection he feels for Sirius when his face twists into that horrified ‘I should have expected this’ look he always gets whenever James manages to best him. Then he lands on top of Sirius, his bony knees plowing into Sirius’s solar plexus, and Sirius howls with pain and outrage, and the two scuffle until they fall out of the bed and James’s father yells with surprising volume,
“GO TO BED, NOW!”
And the two of them can do nothing but lie there, sprawled on top of one another and shaking with silent laughter. It is James who is the first to still, though he doesn’t move.
Sirius says, “You’re crushing my lungs," but does not make an attempt to dislodge him. James wills himself to be heavier, just to be obnoxious and Sirius groans and laughs.
It is the groan that does James in, however innocent it may have been. Hazel eyes catch gray out of instinct, but this is one moment in which James does not want Sirius to be able to read his mind. He rolls off of Sirius with an agility that no one should have at this hour of the morning and springs for the bed at the same moment that Sirius grabs his leg and attempts to pull him backward.
There is a brief scuffle for the bed until they are both sprawled out across it, tangled in the duvet cover, each too exhausted to shove the other onto the floor.
“Give me your spare pillow, there’s a good lad,” Sirius demands.
“Get your disgusting feet out of my face,” James retorts.
Sirius manages to flip about, wriggling as much as humanly possible until his back is to James, and James tosses the pillow at him grudgingly. Sirius accepts it and suddenly turns to face James. James barely manages to keep his breath from hitching in his throat- there is an unspoken request on Sirius’s part, and an equally unspoken agreement on his own. An oddly uncharacteristic look of gratitude flashes across Sirius’s face along with something else, which he manages to hide away before James can decipher it. Instead he just says simply, “If you kick me in your sleep, so help you, Potter.”
James grins at him and reaches over to flick out the light. Once the darkness has filled the room, James has to force himself to breathe normally. After what seems like hours, he hears Sirius’s own breathing steady and deepen, and finally he allows his muscles to relax and uncoil. No sooner has he done this than he feels the tips of Sirius’s fingers brush, feather-light, over his arm and come to rest against the tips of his own.
“Padfoot?” he whispers, and the silence is deafening. “Sirius?”
By way of response, James leaves his own fingers where they are and falls asleep to the distant beat of Sirius’s pulse.
---
And so it is that Sirius Black comes to live with them. There are lots of little things that James finds himself having to adjust to, like the idea that he can’t simply shove his chores off on Sirius like he’s always imagined he could do if he had a brother. In fact, James is learning that if he tries to do this, Sirius just punches him in the chest and runs off, leaving him wheezing in the garden while all the gnomes come to have a good laugh at him. He doesn’t even bother to try getting used to Sirius’s annoying tendency to use up all the hot water during his daily hour-long showers. He strolls past the bathroom that he now has to share, past Sirius’s hearty renditions of old wizarding drinking songs, down the stairs and into the guest bathroom where he proceeds to flush the toilet exactly eleven times, until he hears Sirius’s angry shout and the sound of the water shutting off.
But the thing that he has been having the most trouble with is adjusting to Sirius’s constant closeness. He is used to dealing with it during the school year, when he can wake up and not hear Sirius's snore from the bunk below his (Mr. Potter, in his infinite wisdom, thought it would be fun to Transfigure his old bed rather than buy a new one). But it is summer and he can't escape to Arithmancy (which Sirius outright refuses to acknowledge as a real subject) or off to the library to sneak glances at Lily Evans as she studies by the window. It is summer and Sirius is forever popping up around every corner with some funny cartoon he's clipped from the Prophet or to ask if he wants to go to the lake or sometimes if Sirius is in a particularly feisty mood, he tries to see just how many times he can tackle and pin James down in one day.
There are days when it gets to be too much and James has to lock himself in the bathroom just to breathe, counting first the black tiles and then the white, until the roar that has been growing in his chest has subdued to a dull murmur. Then, just when he thinks he may be able to resurface, Sirius's voice reverberates through the door, asking him if he's fallen in and drowned, and he has to start counting again. There are days when he has to struggle to pretend that Sirius's cheerful whistling in the morning really bothers him as much as he's always said it has. There are days when they are splashing about in the lake when James has to constantly remind himself to look away from the coil-and-flex of Sirius's arms before it is permanently burned into his retinas. Sirius actually catches him at this once, and James has to rush to make up something about seeing a leech, which sends Sirius screeching out of the lake like a bat out of hell.
There are days, when Sirius is in one of his feisty moods, that James doesn't mind being tackled so very much at all. It is on one of those very days when he doesn't resist at all and Sirius falls back to crouch on his heels with a concerned look on his face.
"What's up?" he asks, scrutinizing James as he sits up to dust himself off. "Usually you scream like a wee firstie girl when I come at you from behind the couch like that. At the very least," he muses, "you throw some really choice swears out. But nothing!"
And then something like realization dawns across his face and James watches as Sirius's face pales with doubt. It is an expression he has never seen on him before and if he could hear his own thoughts over the roaring in his chest, he might try and put some of them into words.
"Right, I thought this might happen," Sirius says with the same strange lightness in his voice that he gets any time his family comes up in conversation. "You've gotten sick of me, eh Jamie? Should've thought of that before, shouldn't you? 'Cause I hate to say it, but you're stuck with me, so come on then, let's have it. Give me a couple good belts around the ear and we'll move on, all right?"
James's head feels a little light.
"What?" he asks, stupidly. "What are you on about?"
"You can punch me in the stomach!" Sirius adds helpfully. "You love punching me in the stomach!"
"I do at that," James thoughtfully agrees. He still feels a bit dazed.
"Well then!" Sirius says brightly, as if it's all settled, and opens his arms wide. "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
James blinks. "I don't want to punch you in the stomach. I mean, you did call me Jamie, which you haven't done since we were nine 'cause you know I hate it, and that face you make when I do punch you is rather spectacular, but…"
As he trails off, James wonders what can possibly be done to silence the infernal roaring so that he can just think for two seconds, that's all he wants, two seconds to put his thoughts together, and then suddenly, his next move is clear.
He mimics Sirius's stance and pauses, chewing on his lower lip almost thoughtfully. Sirius eyes him warily, arms still flung wide to present an acceptable target. Then James looks up, hazel eyes boring into gray, and leaps. What results is that Sirius lets out a fantastic noise, like that of a balloon that loses all its air at once, and James smells oranges and cocoa and the vaguest hint of an illicit cigarette on his breath as they tumble to a halt at the foot of the stairs.
"That's it?" Sirius asks incredulously, once he finds oxygen again. "Really? Because-"
James, who can sense one of Sirius's inane run-on sentences better than his own mother can sense a lie, says something like, "Shut up, Sirius," and kisses him.
It's odd, and nothing like it probably should be- there's the strange scrape of teeth and the fact that their faces don't quite fit together like with the girls he's kissed- but it's astonishingly not terrible and the kiss goes on and on as James tries to figure out why this is true until finally Sirius moves under him and he forces himself to pull away with a probably-less-than-alluring smacking noise. He can't help but notice the resemblance Sirius currently bears to a beached whale.
"You look like a beached whale," he tells him, trying to be helpful.
"That's not what your mum said last night," Sirius replies, his voice low and dangerous, and before James knows what's happening, Sirius has him pinned to the stairs with a kiss so fierce that James accidentally bites his lip.
His hand is halfway up Sirius’s shirt, moving over the tense muscles under the skin that feels soft beneath his calloused fingers and it all feels so familiar and yet so unfamiliar that he has to make himself stop.
Sirius stops at the exact same instant, breathless and flushed, and stares down at James intently. His gray eyes are a storm, fierce and powerful, and his lower lip is red and swollen slightly from where James bit it.
“You bit my lip,” he informs James, point-blank.
“Sorry,” says James, and he means it. “Sorry. Sirius, what- I-”
He stumbles around for words and Sirius lets him, an amused smirk playing across his features. James wonders helplessly how Sirius can be so calm, if perhaps Sirius has done this before, and a flood of panic washes over him until he sees Sirius surreptitiously raise a hand to his mouth and gnaw at a hangnail.
Tentative, light: “I’m not-”
“And I am, I suppose?” Sirius says, his voice somewhat sharp around the edges. By way of apology he adds, “Look, it’s what it is, right? It’s James and Sirius like always, just...plus.”
His words are uncertain, confused, and- for James, who sometimes laughs at how well he knows Sirius- for James alone, it is comforting.
“Right,” he agrees. “Plus.” And he grabs hold of Sirius’s shirt and yanks him forward. Sirius’s hands scrabble for purchase in James’s hair, on his shoulders, down to his hips where they find a resting place. Without really knowing why he’s doing it, James shoves his hips upward, against Sirius’s, and instinctively swallows the noise that Sirius makes in response.
There is friction; sweet, amazing friction that James can hardly believe is real, and his hand is gliding under the thin fabric of Sirius’s shirt, slipping across the sweat-slick skin over his shoulder blades and spine. Sirius is doing something marvelous to his neck, maybe biting it, but James isn’t sure because his vision has gone a bit blurred and his mind is quite preoccupied with thanking whatever Powers That Be for sending his parents over to the neighbors’ for tea. He briefly wonders how far this is going to go but then Sirius’s lips are back over his and he can’t force himself to think anymore. He just wants to feel the slide of Sirius’s tongue against his, just wants to taste the cocoa and oranges and cigarettes and Sirius for as long as he can before he spontaneously combusts.
Then he considers his brain’s word choice and how inappropriate and ironic it is, and he can’t help but laugh. He laughs and the noise hangs, foreign, in the air. Sirius pulls away from his neck, flushed and slightly irritated at being interrupted.
“What’s so funny then?” he growls, and the sound is almost enough to distract James- but not quite. He chokes on his own laughter and doubles over on top of Sirius, shaking and gasping. He can feel Sirius’s annoyance crumbling and falling away, and before he knows it, Sirius is laughing too-great, roars of laughter to compliment his gasping chuckles. The thought registers that he is basically curled up in Sirius’s lap and that sets him off yet again, tears now pricking the corner of his eyes.
“Why are you laughing?” Sirius demands when he is able to catch his breath.
“I don’t know,” wheezes James helplessly. “I’m sorry!”
“You bloody better be sorry, James Potter,” he retorts. He adopts a slightly imperious tone and continues. “I mean, some of my best moves and you’re giggling like girl? It’s just not on. You’re lucky I’m not thrashing all sense out of you right now.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” James chuckles, moving his glasses aside to wipe the corners of his eyes. “But- your best moves? Are you mental?” He pokes Sirius’s ribs. “A first year Hufflepuff could do better.”
Sirius’s eyebrows shoot up so far that James feels the immediate need to backtrack. “Sorry, second year Huff, then.”
“I’ll give you ‘second year Huff’,” Sirius growls again and moves forward.
Before James is able to experience the supposed technique of a second year Hufflepuff, however, there is an alarmingly loud screech and a barn owl of considerable girth swoops in through the open window. James yelps and topples backward while Sirius grumbles something like, “Bugger all!”
The barn owl gazes down at them from the kitchen table.
And what have we here? James swears he can hear it think, and the fact that the voice he has imagined bears an alarming resemblance to Dumbledore’s own gets him to his feet quite quickly.
“What’ve you got for me then?” he snaps at the owl, who hoots balefully back at him and takes indignant flight.
“Get out of here, you!” Sirius hollers after it as James picks up the letter bearing the familiar Hogwarts crest.
“Brilliant, school letters!” says Sirius cheerfully as James tears open the heavy parchment envelope. “Wonder where mine is, bet old Dumbles doesn’t know my address has changed.”
At first he doesn’t notice that James has gone entirely white; he is too busy thinking of a plan to get his school letter away from his parents, mumbling out loud about sending an owl in after it or of writing to Dumbledore personally to notify him of the address change. Finally, he takes in James’s face, mouth open in a perfectly comic ‘O’, his eyebrows up near his hairline.
“What is it, then Jamie? Old Sluggie assign some particularly awful summer reading or what?”
“It’s…it’s not our school letters,” James chokes out. Before he can shield the letter from Sirius’s long arms and grabby hands, the parchment is snatched away from him and quickly pored over with curious gray eyes.
It doesn’t take long, and Sirius’s howl of disbelief and indignation sounds exactly like the noise James had wanted to make had his vocal cords been working properly.
“HEAD BOY?” Sirius grabs for the torn envelope and roots around in it, producing the gleaming badge and holding it up to the light. Both gray and hazel eyes stare, transfixed and disbelieving.
“I don’t believe this!” Sirius says at last, shattering the silence into a million pieces with the words. “I thought for sure Moony’d get it! What’s Dumbledore playing at, I’d like to know! He must have it in for you, mate- who got Head Girl?”
James licks his lips and swallows, his throat dry and scratchy. “Lily…Lily Evans.”
There is a clattering noise as Sirius drops the letter and badge. The silence threatens to swallow them both again until Sirius manages a feeble, “Brilliant, then.”
James wheels around on him, his eyes wide and voice unnaturally high. “‘Brilliant, then’?! That’s all you’ve got to say? This is- this is- do you know what this is, Sirius? This is a DEATH TOLL, that’s what it is. For me, for you, for Marauding as we know it!”
He begins pacing, gesticulating wildly as he rants. “This is because of the thing with Snivellus last term, I know it! I never should have saved that slimy- that greasy- that foul little neck of his. We’d never be in this position otherwise!”
“Yes, you should have,” Sirius replies quietly. “Of course you should have, you great git. I make an idiot of myself and you put it right, that’s what you do.”
James stares at him, gaping like a fish. “What?”
Something deep in Sirius’s chest clenches almost painfully, and he gives James his best stern look (which he knows isn’t very good at all). “You’re Head Boy, all right? And it’s weird and completely against everything we stand for as pranksters. But have you ever heard of somebody passing off a thing like that? ‘Cause I haven’t, not ever, and you’re not going to change that, you stupid prat.”
James still looks a bit shell-shocked, though more and more like he is coming to terms with an inconvenient truth.
“I cannot believe that you even thought of passing on the chance to take points from whomever you want,” Sirius continues, adopting an admonishing tone that doesn’t fit him in the slightest.
James’s eyes light up. “I can take points, can’t I?”
“Absolutely,” Sirius agrees. “Twenty points from Slytherin for every greasy hair on Sniv’s head.”
James looks entranced now. “For his hair?” he asks incredulously. Sirius nods.
“And besides,” he adds wickedly. “It’ll be a great way for you to get to Evans. She can’t exactly run from you when Dumbledore’ll have you two leading prefect meetings or whatever it is you’ll be doing.”
James feels as if he’s on the Quidditch Pitch and has just been thoroughly walloped by a speeding Bludger. The feeling in the pit of his stomach is amazingly similar.
“Sirius-”
“I’m going to go write to Moons- let him know that he’d better start planning pranks in advance because Merlin knows he can’t come up with anything decent off the top of his head like we can. You ought to write to Evans straightaway, give her the good news yourself.”
And with a wink and an unnaturally bright smile, he is gone. James falls back into a kitchen chair, bewildered.
---
Sirius sprints up the stairs, his heart pounding hard against his chest, and for one inexplicable moment, he wonders if anyone’s heart has just popped out of their chest for lack of proper breathing before. He shakes the thought out of his mind as he falls into the room he and James share, a roar growing and squirming in his gut. He sits hard on the floor, not having the energy or the brain capacity for anything else.
And he sits. And he thinks. And he is ineffably grateful for James being considerate enough to not come after him. And he thinks some more.
The sun is lowering in the sky, streaking it with purples and oranges and pinks, and he can hear the Potters preparing dinner downstairs before he finally comes to an acceptable conclusion.
Of course, he realizes, he can’t expect James to stop chasing after Lily during the year. He’s been chasing her for over six years now and she is a Red Head With Great Legs, so Sirius supposes that he really can’t blame James for that. The school year is for Lily, whether she wants it or not.
But the summer- the summer is for pretending he cares when James flushes him out of the shower. The summer is for tackling tallies and wrestling matches in the freshly mown lawn and water fights at the lake. Summer is for stealing kisses before breakfast and bed and as often as possible in between and it is for feeling the strength in James’s arms as he pulls Sirius unceremoniously closer to him.
The summer is for them.