Fic: A Little Sincerity Is a Dangerous Thing - for chrliii
Title: A Little Sincerity Is a Dangerous Thing
Author: daphnaea
Written for: chrliii
Rating: PG-13, for language, slight sexual content, and implied violence.
Prompt: School years or before Azkaban, and Awkwardness
Summary: Remus Lupin’s guide to what not to do when one of your best mates might fancy you.
It was all James’s fault, as usual. Or at least that was what Remus told himself.
It had begun at their little holiday get-together, that first Christmas after leaving school, around half one, in the hazy golden hour between total inebriation and unconsciousness.
Sirius had stumbled in from the kitchen with a glass of firewhiskey-enhanced eggnog in each hand and held one of them out to Remus before sinking onto the sofa beside him.
“Oi, why didn’t you bring any for me?” Peter demanded from the wobbly mauve armchair.
“Because you haven’t got him on a short leash like our darling Moony,” James told him, laughing. “Couldn’t have him neglecting the missus.”
Remus tossed a crisp at James. “Beg pardon,” he said, “but I am not the pretty one here. I am what I think you would call the big bad wolf.”
“Point,” James conceded. “Clearly Sirius is powerless to resist your animal magnetism. Poor thing, so sad, such a hopeless crush.”
At this point, Remus glanced over at his flatmate, but the expected annoyance was absent from his face. Instead it was a picture of anguish. And somewhere in the back of his mind, it briefly occurred to him that James had been inexplicably and horribly correct.
He took a swallow of eggnog that burned all the way down, and when he looked back, Sirius was laughing. The moment was over. Remus finished that drink, and then another. But the next day, he still remembered.
* * *
Two mornings later, wrestling over the sports section of the Prophet at their kitchen table, the jabbing elbows and shoulder shoves abruptly felt like something else entirely. Sirius was grinning, and there was a certain gleam in his eyes, and when he leaned in, trying to crowd Remus off his chair, Remus was suddenly and viscerally aware of the friction between their bodies, the pressure of arm and hip that had been innocent (at least in that one sense) for as long as he could remember, but which now had an odd anticipatory weight.
“Keep the bloody thing, you tosser,” he said, abdicating both chair and paper and stalking over to the counter to freshen his cup of tea, all too aware of Sirius’s gaze on his back.
As he stirred in the sugar, he remembered the dream he’d had, not so long ago, about holding Sirius as they slept. At the time he’d shrugged it off as a byproduct of the breakup with that pretty Muggle waiter, and the fact that he crashed out in Sirius’s bed whenever his was too cluttered or too cold or just too empty. The sheer proximity of another body was bound to work its way into his unconscious one way or another, no matter how platonic the situation might be.
Or so he had thought.
At that point he realized that in his panic, he’d forgotten the very pertinent fact of Sirius’s well known and wide-ranging interest in women. Relief engulfed him, as well as some other, less identifiable emotion, until it occurred to him that there had been a distinct lack of birds brought back to the flat in recent months.
“You gone out on the pull much lately?” Remus’s voice sounded high in his own ears.
“Not so much,” Sirius said, as if it had been a reasonable question, without looking up from his article.
Remus swallowed. “Why not? Can’t have already run through London’s supply of attractive young women with very poor judgment, can you?”
Sirius looked up. “They’re boring. Thought I’d try something different.”
“What, like sheep?”
He put the paper down at that, pushed his chair back, and took the two paces between the table and Remus, crowding him for a second before reaching around him for the teapot. Remus’s throat felt hot and tight.
“No, like men,” he said.
Remus gaped at him.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Bit hypocritical of you, isn’t it?”
“But-”
“What, you thought I didn’t know?” Sirius was in his space again, their faces just inches apart. “You think a dog can’t smell the difference when you come home from a date? You want to know about my life? For fuck’s sake, you didn’t even tell me his name.” With that, Sirius slammed the teapot back down on the table and retreated to his room, the door crashing shut behind him.
“It was Tom,” Remus said, quietly, to the empty room.
* * *
Sirius worked late that night, and left the next morning before Remus had crawled out of bed. The only evidence that Sirius had come home at all was a new mug in the sink and the fact that Remus’s good umbrella, the one from the British Museum gift shop, had disappeared from hall closet. Remus was forced to dash down to the corner store in the dubious shelter of Sirius’s umbrella, which had a broken rib and consequently flopped limply on one side, dripping onto his sleeve as he walked.
Sirius came home that evening, but after hanging up his coat, putting down Remus’s umbrella, and toeing off his boots, he disappeared into his room, emerging a few minutes later as Padfoot, who lay moodily by the fire while Remus read his book.
He hadn’t previously known it was possible to share an intensely awkward silence with a dog. He retreated to the sanctuary of his room before ten. There would be no more casual sharing of beds, that much was clear. Was possibly the only thing Remus had any clarity about at all, after Sirius’s abrupt outing of them both. He felt cheated - knowing that they both knew should have settled things somehow. But instead he was profoundly unsettled.
Preferring men wasn’t meant to have anything to do with his friends. It was meant to be his private business - his few tentative fumblings with girls at Hogwarts had been kept strictly under wraps, and when over time he began to admit to himself that his longstanding appreciation of Edwin Bones, the Ravenclaw Chaser, was not purely aesthetic, well, that didn’t concern anyone but himself. And occasionally Prescott Clabberworth, who looked a bit like a scrawnier Edwin, and was willing to snog and swap handjobs in storage cupboards. But only when Remus was in personal possession of the Map, and knew his friends were too busy to come searching for him.
Except now Sirius had declared himself interested in men. Perhaps, Remus consoled himself, as he lay in his too small, oddly lumpy bed, it was just another one of his friend’s phases, like the obsession with haiku, or those ridiculous trousers he’d worn in sixth year. Though none of those things had made Sirius stop speaking to him.
And if Sirius meant it, what then? Then nothing, Remus told himself firmly. Then he could introduce him to a couple of bars he knew and that would be that.
Remus stared at the shadowed ceiling for a long time before sleep came.
* * *
The next morning Remus was almost surprised to find Sirius sitting at the kitchen table, doing the Prophet crossword.
“Morning,” he said.
“Tea’s in the pot,” Sirius told him.
“Ta.” Done with your strop, then? Remus did not ask as he fixed his cup.
Sirius went back to the paper.
Remus sipped his tea at the counter for a few minutes before the silence got to him, and he put himself to work frying bacon just to have something to do with his hands.
By the time he was finished, Sirius had left for work.
* * *
On Thursday, Sirius was out late again. Remus spent the evening translating an obscure runic spellbook for Dumbledore, neither waiting up for his flatmate nor wondering where he was.
Sirius came home at midnight, white-faced and rigid. He paused just inside the door, rain-soaked coat still on, not seeming to know what to do next.
“Bad date?” Remus asked.
Sirius blinked. “Order,” he said. “We got there too late.”
Remus swallowed back the instinctive resentment at this: Sirius and James on the front lines, while he was nose deep in bloody textbooks. Dumbledore said it was because of his highly valuable research skills. Peter had told him, confidentially, that some of the senior members had a problem with his lycanthropy. But it wasn’t the time for that.
He poured Sirius a glass of brandy, placing it into his friend’s hand and pulling him to the couch. All at once Sirius’s eyes snapped into focus, and his hand clenched around Remus’s wrist.
“What happened?” he asked.
Sirius just shook his head, the brandy glass jittering against his knee.
“Tell me. You can’t just sit there like a maniacal statue all night. You’ll frighten the sofa.”
This surprised a terse chuckle out of Sirius. He took a gulp of brandy, then coughed. “It was - bodies, and they were so bloody, and Prongs went to the little girl and they - it - like a bomb. They’d rigged her up with a curse. Bones fragments shooting like - Prongs got some in his shoulder, would’ve lost an eye but his stupid spectacles - we took him to Mungo’s, got him patched up, but I don’t know - I don’t know how to -” he took another swallow of his drink, emptying the glass.
Then Remus realized Sirius’s black coat wasn’t wet with rain. It was blood, and the jumper he wore underneath was more red than gray.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. “You’ll stain the furniture.” He pulled Sirius up and helped him take off the coat, then tugged him into the loo and turned on the shower. “Rinse off, get warmed up,” he said encouragingly, and ducked out once Sirius began to undress himself. He cast a few cleaning charms on the coat. A few months ago they would have binned it. But there were only a certain number of new coats one could buy in a year.
Sirius spent twenty-five minutes in the shower, emerging just as Remus was trying to decide whether to go in and check on him. Remus trailed after him as he wandered into his bedroom. Sirius pulled on pants and an undershirt, leaving the wet towel in a heap on the floor, and then seemed to loose momentum, sitting down heavily on the edge of his bed. Remus sat down beside him.
Silence engulfed the room, swallowing up the unmade bedding, the ugly plastic lamp on the nightstand, the two of them, Sirius slouching with his head in his hands, Remus wishing uselessly to have been there, to have been part of it. He gave Sirius’s shoulder a friendly nudge, and Sirius shoved back a little and looked up, and Remus leaned into him, and then they were kissing, and Sirius’s hand curled around the back of his neck, and his fingers caught at the hem of Sirius’s shirt, and a voice in the back of his head was wondering how exactly that had happened and whether it was in fact not a terribly bad idea, but for once in his life, Remus found he couldn’t bring himself to care.
* * *
The next morning, Sirius was subdued but mostly himself, and life in their flat went back to how it had been before the holidays, except with more snogging. Remus was wholly unable to explain the fascination of Sirius’s mouth, the way it seemed to demand to be kissed while just going about its ordinary business - shaping words or eating a biscuit. And once the kissing had begun, it was difficult to stop. It led to other things as well, to unzipped denims and someone being shoved up against a wall, and stickiness.
But other than that they were just two blokes sharing a flat. It would be absurd to think anything else. To the best of Remus’s knowledge, Sirius’s longest running romantic entanglement had been three weeks with Melinda Butler, at the end of which Sirius had still believed the poor cow’s name was Melanie. Clearly he was a completely ridiculous person to have any sort of thing with - Sirius was fickle, thoughtless, hugely demanding, prone to mood disorders, and had taken great pride in being voted Hogwarts’ Most Likely to Be Dead by Thirty - but none of this seemed like a particular impediment to snogging him.
Until, one particularly sticky morning in bed, Sirius looked up from where he was collapsed on Remus’s chest and said, “Think we should tell Prongs?”
“Tell Prongs what?”
He gestured toward their current situation.
Remus frowned. “You send him an owl every time you get off?”
“Yeah, never mind.” There was something stiff about Sirius’s shoulders. He got up a moment later, and there was no more kissing that day.
At night, alone in his bed, Remus wondered if he’d misunderstood entirely. If he and Sirius were meant to be having some sort of actual thing. The thought filled him with a kind of dread, and made his heart pound. If that were the case - if that were really the case, he would need to do quite a bit of thinking.
* * *
Sirius was still in a mood the next day. He disappeared somewhere with Prongs after lunch, and Remus took himself out to one of those bars he knew. But when a blond bloke offered to buy him a pint, he turned it down, having at least enough sense not to make a bad thing worse.
The four of them were getting together for Sunday evening pub night, and Remus arrived to find Peter nowhere in evidence and Sirius and James already halfway pissed. Sirius spent the first round glaring curses at him, and when Prongs went back to the bar, Remus attempted to make amends.
“Look, I’m sorry for whatever I said, before.”
“Didn’t say anything, did you?” Sirius said, uncooperative.
James glanced back at them curiously, and Remus had a moment of sudden panic. “Did you - did you talk to Prongs about -”
“How could I?” he demanded. “Nothing to talk about, is there?”
“Look, how am I to know if there is?” Remus said, losing patience. “It’s not like you ever said.”
“Didn’t know I had to.”
“Well, how else was I to know? It is you we’re talking about.”
Sirius’s face closed. “Thanks ever so. But my mistake. I thought it was us.”
“Oh, come off it. You know perfectly well what you’re like.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Why don’t you remind me.”
Remus raised an eyebrow. “Melinda Butler.”
“What does that Hufflepuff bint have to do with anything?”
“I’m just suggesting you have a certain track record.”
“Fuck off,” Sirius said.
And then there was a rush of cold air as Peter came in, and James was back with the foam from three pints of ale spilling over his knuckles, and that was the end of that.
* * *
The walk home was silent. Sirius wouldn’t even look at him. Remus was beginning to realize that some of the things he’d said, in a certain context, might have been somewhat inadvisable. Even if true.
“Look, if you didn’t -” Sirius began as they rounded the corner of their building. “You could have just said.”
“Said what?”
“That you don’t trust me,” he said, unlocking the door to the lobby. “It’s all right. I get it. I know what you’re like.”
“What am I like?” Remus parroted, a cold hard feeling in his stomach.
“You’re like a secret. All of you, not just your furry little problem. You don’t want anyone to know.”
The two of them tramped wordlessly up the stairs to the third floor.
“That’s not it,” he protested weakly as Sirius unlocked their door.
“Then what is it?”
Remus shucked off his coat and dropped it on the arm of the sofa before collapsing onto the thing himself. He didn’t have an answer, he realized. This was simply how it worked: Sirius had absurd ideas, and Remus attempted to defuse them, or at least reduce the probability of severe bodily harm, through the judicious application of common sense. Saying “no” to virtually anything Sirius suggested was more or less instinctive by this stage. It occurred to him that constant nay-saying was not a highly endearing character trait, on top of a whole heap of other neuroses, with lycanthropy like the bloodthirsty cherry on top of a hideously revolting sundae. Yet Sirius seemed to want - it tested the limits of believability. But there Sirius was, hands in his trouser pockets and the stubborn wounded look on his face that his family used to put there, the kind of hurt that only comes from being rejected by the people who were meant to have no choice but to care for you. And Remus had caused it.
“It’s nothing,” he said. Sirius turned away. “I mean - I honestly hadn’t thought about it, one way or the other. I didn’t think you meant anything by it.”
Sirius turned back in order to glare at him properly. “That is because you are a complete and unmitigated imbecile.”
“Er…” Remus said.
“So fucking think about it,” he demanded, at once the arrogant princeling and the lost boy, messy strands of dark hair brushing his cheekbones.
And Remus found himself completely incapable of logic, empty of everything but the urge to bury his face in the warm human smell of Sirius’s neck and not stop touching him until all the questions went away. Maybe that was its own sort of answer, he thought.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he cautioned Sirius as he stood up and approached him.
He nodded.
“But I do -” he insinuated a cold hand beneath Sirius’s coat and into the gap where his shirt wasn’t tucked properly into his trousers, the skin of his side hot and the angle of his hipbone rising beneath the smooth flesh, “I do want…” He applied his mouth to his neck, then, the scent exactly as he remembered, and Sirius tilted his head obligingly, digging his fingers into Remus’s shoulders.
“Shut up,” Sirius said, voice rough, “just - fucking -”
Their mouths collided then, hard and awkwardly aligned, all scraping teeth and misplaced elbows and Sirius gripping his arms hard enough to bruise as desire blurred the two of them into perfect symmetry.
For that moment and the next, at least, it was enough.
Author: daphnaea
Written for: chrliii
Rating: PG-13, for language, slight sexual content, and implied violence.
Prompt: School years or before Azkaban, and Awkwardness
Summary: Remus Lupin’s guide to what not to do when one of your best mates might fancy you.
It was all James’s fault, as usual. Or at least that was what Remus told himself.
It had begun at their little holiday get-together, that first Christmas after leaving school, around half one, in the hazy golden hour between total inebriation and unconsciousness.
Sirius had stumbled in from the kitchen with a glass of firewhiskey-enhanced eggnog in each hand and held one of them out to Remus before sinking onto the sofa beside him.
“Oi, why didn’t you bring any for me?” Peter demanded from the wobbly mauve armchair.
“Because you haven’t got him on a short leash like our darling Moony,” James told him, laughing. “Couldn’t have him neglecting the missus.”
Remus tossed a crisp at James. “Beg pardon,” he said, “but I am not the pretty one here. I am what I think you would call the big bad wolf.”
“Point,” James conceded. “Clearly Sirius is powerless to resist your animal magnetism. Poor thing, so sad, such a hopeless crush.”
At this point, Remus glanced over at his flatmate, but the expected annoyance was absent from his face. Instead it was a picture of anguish. And somewhere in the back of his mind, it briefly occurred to him that James had been inexplicably and horribly correct.
He took a swallow of eggnog that burned all the way down, and when he looked back, Sirius was laughing. The moment was over. Remus finished that drink, and then another. But the next day, he still remembered.
* * *
Two mornings later, wrestling over the sports section of the Prophet at their kitchen table, the jabbing elbows and shoulder shoves abruptly felt like something else entirely. Sirius was grinning, and there was a certain gleam in his eyes, and when he leaned in, trying to crowd Remus off his chair, Remus was suddenly and viscerally aware of the friction between their bodies, the pressure of arm and hip that had been innocent (at least in that one sense) for as long as he could remember, but which now had an odd anticipatory weight.
“Keep the bloody thing, you tosser,” he said, abdicating both chair and paper and stalking over to the counter to freshen his cup of tea, all too aware of Sirius’s gaze on his back.
As he stirred in the sugar, he remembered the dream he’d had, not so long ago, about holding Sirius as they slept. At the time he’d shrugged it off as a byproduct of the breakup with that pretty Muggle waiter, and the fact that he crashed out in Sirius’s bed whenever his was too cluttered or too cold or just too empty. The sheer proximity of another body was bound to work its way into his unconscious one way or another, no matter how platonic the situation might be.
Or so he had thought.
At that point he realized that in his panic, he’d forgotten the very pertinent fact of Sirius’s well known and wide-ranging interest in women. Relief engulfed him, as well as some other, less identifiable emotion, until it occurred to him that there had been a distinct lack of birds brought back to the flat in recent months.
“You gone out on the pull much lately?” Remus’s voice sounded high in his own ears.
“Not so much,” Sirius said, as if it had been a reasonable question, without looking up from his article.
Remus swallowed. “Why not? Can’t have already run through London’s supply of attractive young women with very poor judgment, can you?”
Sirius looked up. “They’re boring. Thought I’d try something different.”
“What, like sheep?”
He put the paper down at that, pushed his chair back, and took the two paces between the table and Remus, crowding him for a second before reaching around him for the teapot. Remus’s throat felt hot and tight.
“No, like men,” he said.
Remus gaped at him.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Bit hypocritical of you, isn’t it?”
“But-”
“What, you thought I didn’t know?” Sirius was in his space again, their faces just inches apart. “You think a dog can’t smell the difference when you come home from a date? You want to know about my life? For fuck’s sake, you didn’t even tell me his name.” With that, Sirius slammed the teapot back down on the table and retreated to his room, the door crashing shut behind him.
“It was Tom,” Remus said, quietly, to the empty room.
* * *
Sirius worked late that night, and left the next morning before Remus had crawled out of bed. The only evidence that Sirius had come home at all was a new mug in the sink and the fact that Remus’s good umbrella, the one from the British Museum gift shop, had disappeared from hall closet. Remus was forced to dash down to the corner store in the dubious shelter of Sirius’s umbrella, which had a broken rib and consequently flopped limply on one side, dripping onto his sleeve as he walked.
Sirius came home that evening, but after hanging up his coat, putting down Remus’s umbrella, and toeing off his boots, he disappeared into his room, emerging a few minutes later as Padfoot, who lay moodily by the fire while Remus read his book.
He hadn’t previously known it was possible to share an intensely awkward silence with a dog. He retreated to the sanctuary of his room before ten. There would be no more casual sharing of beds, that much was clear. Was possibly the only thing Remus had any clarity about at all, after Sirius’s abrupt outing of them both. He felt cheated - knowing that they both knew should have settled things somehow. But instead he was profoundly unsettled.
Preferring men wasn’t meant to have anything to do with his friends. It was meant to be his private business - his few tentative fumblings with girls at Hogwarts had been kept strictly under wraps, and when over time he began to admit to himself that his longstanding appreciation of Edwin Bones, the Ravenclaw Chaser, was not purely aesthetic, well, that didn’t concern anyone but himself. And occasionally Prescott Clabberworth, who looked a bit like a scrawnier Edwin, and was willing to snog and swap handjobs in storage cupboards. But only when Remus was in personal possession of the Map, and knew his friends were too busy to come searching for him.
Except now Sirius had declared himself interested in men. Perhaps, Remus consoled himself, as he lay in his too small, oddly lumpy bed, it was just another one of his friend’s phases, like the obsession with haiku, or those ridiculous trousers he’d worn in sixth year. Though none of those things had made Sirius stop speaking to him.
And if Sirius meant it, what then? Then nothing, Remus told himself firmly. Then he could introduce him to a couple of bars he knew and that would be that.
Remus stared at the shadowed ceiling for a long time before sleep came.
* * *
The next morning Remus was almost surprised to find Sirius sitting at the kitchen table, doing the Prophet crossword.
“Morning,” he said.
“Tea’s in the pot,” Sirius told him.
“Ta.” Done with your strop, then? Remus did not ask as he fixed his cup.
Sirius went back to the paper.
Remus sipped his tea at the counter for a few minutes before the silence got to him, and he put himself to work frying bacon just to have something to do with his hands.
By the time he was finished, Sirius had left for work.
* * *
On Thursday, Sirius was out late again. Remus spent the evening translating an obscure runic spellbook for Dumbledore, neither waiting up for his flatmate nor wondering where he was.
Sirius came home at midnight, white-faced and rigid. He paused just inside the door, rain-soaked coat still on, not seeming to know what to do next.
“Bad date?” Remus asked.
Sirius blinked. “Order,” he said. “We got there too late.”
Remus swallowed back the instinctive resentment at this: Sirius and James on the front lines, while he was nose deep in bloody textbooks. Dumbledore said it was because of his highly valuable research skills. Peter had told him, confidentially, that some of the senior members had a problem with his lycanthropy. But it wasn’t the time for that.
He poured Sirius a glass of brandy, placing it into his friend’s hand and pulling him to the couch. All at once Sirius’s eyes snapped into focus, and his hand clenched around Remus’s wrist.
“What happened?” he asked.
Sirius just shook his head, the brandy glass jittering against his knee.
“Tell me. You can’t just sit there like a maniacal statue all night. You’ll frighten the sofa.”
This surprised a terse chuckle out of Sirius. He took a gulp of brandy, then coughed. “It was - bodies, and they were so bloody, and Prongs went to the little girl and they - it - like a bomb. They’d rigged her up with a curse. Bones fragments shooting like - Prongs got some in his shoulder, would’ve lost an eye but his stupid spectacles - we took him to Mungo’s, got him patched up, but I don’t know - I don’t know how to -” he took another swallow of his drink, emptying the glass.
Then Remus realized Sirius’s black coat wasn’t wet with rain. It was blood, and the jumper he wore underneath was more red than gray.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. “You’ll stain the furniture.” He pulled Sirius up and helped him take off the coat, then tugged him into the loo and turned on the shower. “Rinse off, get warmed up,” he said encouragingly, and ducked out once Sirius began to undress himself. He cast a few cleaning charms on the coat. A few months ago they would have binned it. But there were only a certain number of new coats one could buy in a year.
Sirius spent twenty-five minutes in the shower, emerging just as Remus was trying to decide whether to go in and check on him. Remus trailed after him as he wandered into his bedroom. Sirius pulled on pants and an undershirt, leaving the wet towel in a heap on the floor, and then seemed to loose momentum, sitting down heavily on the edge of his bed. Remus sat down beside him.
Silence engulfed the room, swallowing up the unmade bedding, the ugly plastic lamp on the nightstand, the two of them, Sirius slouching with his head in his hands, Remus wishing uselessly to have been there, to have been part of it. He gave Sirius’s shoulder a friendly nudge, and Sirius shoved back a little and looked up, and Remus leaned into him, and then they were kissing, and Sirius’s hand curled around the back of his neck, and his fingers caught at the hem of Sirius’s shirt, and a voice in the back of his head was wondering how exactly that had happened and whether it was in fact not a terribly bad idea, but for once in his life, Remus found he couldn’t bring himself to care.
* * *
The next morning, Sirius was subdued but mostly himself, and life in their flat went back to how it had been before the holidays, except with more snogging. Remus was wholly unable to explain the fascination of Sirius’s mouth, the way it seemed to demand to be kissed while just going about its ordinary business - shaping words or eating a biscuit. And once the kissing had begun, it was difficult to stop. It led to other things as well, to unzipped denims and someone being shoved up against a wall, and stickiness.
But other than that they were just two blokes sharing a flat. It would be absurd to think anything else. To the best of Remus’s knowledge, Sirius’s longest running romantic entanglement had been three weeks with Melinda Butler, at the end of which Sirius had still believed the poor cow’s name was Melanie. Clearly he was a completely ridiculous person to have any sort of thing with - Sirius was fickle, thoughtless, hugely demanding, prone to mood disorders, and had taken great pride in being voted Hogwarts’ Most Likely to Be Dead by Thirty - but none of this seemed like a particular impediment to snogging him.
Until, one particularly sticky morning in bed, Sirius looked up from where he was collapsed on Remus’s chest and said, “Think we should tell Prongs?”
“Tell Prongs what?”
He gestured toward their current situation.
Remus frowned. “You send him an owl every time you get off?”
“Yeah, never mind.” There was something stiff about Sirius’s shoulders. He got up a moment later, and there was no more kissing that day.
At night, alone in his bed, Remus wondered if he’d misunderstood entirely. If he and Sirius were meant to be having some sort of actual thing. The thought filled him with a kind of dread, and made his heart pound. If that were the case - if that were really the case, he would need to do quite a bit of thinking.
* * *
Sirius was still in a mood the next day. He disappeared somewhere with Prongs after lunch, and Remus took himself out to one of those bars he knew. But when a blond bloke offered to buy him a pint, he turned it down, having at least enough sense not to make a bad thing worse.
The four of them were getting together for Sunday evening pub night, and Remus arrived to find Peter nowhere in evidence and Sirius and James already halfway pissed. Sirius spent the first round glaring curses at him, and when Prongs went back to the bar, Remus attempted to make amends.
“Look, I’m sorry for whatever I said, before.”
“Didn’t say anything, did you?” Sirius said, uncooperative.
James glanced back at them curiously, and Remus had a moment of sudden panic. “Did you - did you talk to Prongs about -”
“How could I?” he demanded. “Nothing to talk about, is there?”
“Look, how am I to know if there is?” Remus said, losing patience. “It’s not like you ever said.”
“Didn’t know I had to.”
“Well, how else was I to know? It is you we’re talking about.”
Sirius’s face closed. “Thanks ever so. But my mistake. I thought it was us.”
“Oh, come off it. You know perfectly well what you’re like.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Why don’t you remind me.”
Remus raised an eyebrow. “Melinda Butler.”
“What does that Hufflepuff bint have to do with anything?”
“I’m just suggesting you have a certain track record.”
“Fuck off,” Sirius said.
And then there was a rush of cold air as Peter came in, and James was back with the foam from three pints of ale spilling over his knuckles, and that was the end of that.
* * *
The walk home was silent. Sirius wouldn’t even look at him. Remus was beginning to realize that some of the things he’d said, in a certain context, might have been somewhat inadvisable. Even if true.
“Look, if you didn’t -” Sirius began as they rounded the corner of their building. “You could have just said.”
“Said what?”
“That you don’t trust me,” he said, unlocking the door to the lobby. “It’s all right. I get it. I know what you’re like.”
“What am I like?” Remus parroted, a cold hard feeling in his stomach.
“You’re like a secret. All of you, not just your furry little problem. You don’t want anyone to know.”
The two of them tramped wordlessly up the stairs to the third floor.
“That’s not it,” he protested weakly as Sirius unlocked their door.
“Then what is it?”
Remus shucked off his coat and dropped it on the arm of the sofa before collapsing onto the thing himself. He didn’t have an answer, he realized. This was simply how it worked: Sirius had absurd ideas, and Remus attempted to defuse them, or at least reduce the probability of severe bodily harm, through the judicious application of common sense. Saying “no” to virtually anything Sirius suggested was more or less instinctive by this stage. It occurred to him that constant nay-saying was not a highly endearing character trait, on top of a whole heap of other neuroses, with lycanthropy like the bloodthirsty cherry on top of a hideously revolting sundae. Yet Sirius seemed to want - it tested the limits of believability. But there Sirius was, hands in his trouser pockets and the stubborn wounded look on his face that his family used to put there, the kind of hurt that only comes from being rejected by the people who were meant to have no choice but to care for you. And Remus had caused it.
“It’s nothing,” he said. Sirius turned away. “I mean - I honestly hadn’t thought about it, one way or the other. I didn’t think you meant anything by it.”
Sirius turned back in order to glare at him properly. “That is because you are a complete and unmitigated imbecile.”
“Er…” Remus said.
“So fucking think about it,” he demanded, at once the arrogant princeling and the lost boy, messy strands of dark hair brushing his cheekbones.
And Remus found himself completely incapable of logic, empty of everything but the urge to bury his face in the warm human smell of Sirius’s neck and not stop touching him until all the questions went away. Maybe that was its own sort of answer, he thought.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he cautioned Sirius as he stood up and approached him.
He nodded.
“But I do -” he insinuated a cold hand beneath Sirius’s coat and into the gap where his shirt wasn’t tucked properly into his trousers, the skin of his side hot and the angle of his hipbone rising beneath the smooth flesh, “I do want…” He applied his mouth to his neck, then, the scent exactly as he remembered, and Sirius tilted his head obligingly, digging his fingers into Remus’s shoulders.
“Shut up,” Sirius said, voice rough, “just - fucking -”
Their mouths collided then, hard and awkwardly aligned, all scraping teeth and misplaced elbows and Sirius gripping his arms hard enough to bruise as desire blurred the two of them into perfect symmetry.
For that moment and the next, at least, it was enough.