Fic: The Parachuter for lady_luthienne
Title: The Parachuter
Author: lollyphants
Recipient: lady_luthienne
Rating: PG-13
Highlight for Warnings: *No sex, but it does get a little sexy. *
Word Count: 1, 855
Summary: Sirius’ interest in muggle Christmas traditions dwindles until Remus tells blatant lies about pink plastic men.
Author's notes: lady_luthienne, I’m sorry if this didn’t turn out anything like you wanted. Thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon, whoever wrote that MST so I didn’t have to go searching for my HP books and Ellie, just because. If you’re unsure what I’m referring to when I’m talking about the aforementioned pink plastic man, I mean this.
Sirius was under whelmed.
As much as he absolutely adored his lover, he couldn’t help but think Remus had really let the ball drop on this one.
“Muggle crackers are boring,” Sirius moaned as he idly pulled apart a spent cracker snap with long fingers.
Remus looked up from the collection of screwdrivers, that were small to the point of being useless, he was arranging by size on the table. “If they’re so boring why have we pulled nearly all the ones we bought fifteen days before Christmas?”
Sirius narrowed his eyes. “I was misinformed; some evil misleading man told me they were just as good at normal ones.”
“No, I said I didn’t have a preference and I don’t. Both leave you with a nagging sense of disappointment and an absolutely useless gift.”
“No, normal ones have good gifts, unlike these ones. I mean, what’s this?” Sirius picked up a small, plastic, green frog between his forefinger and thumb.
“It’s a jumping frog! Here.” Remus held his palm out and Sirius dropped the frog on to it. Remus placed the frog on the kitchen table they were sat around and then put his thumb on the frog’s back causing it to jump up and land upside-down.
“Ah, so it’s like a chocolate frog, but less realistic, less sprightly and not edible.”
“Must you find fault with everything?” Without waiting for answer Remus grabbed the last cracker in the box and thrust it at Sirius, “C’mon let’s use this last one up and we can get wizarding crackers for Christmas day.”
“Ooo, I hope it’s another screwdriver set or a nimble, y’know for all that sewing we do.”
“Thimble,” Remus corrected.
“Oh, same difference,” Sirius said irritably and grabbed the other end of the cracker. He pulled as Remus pulled, until the cracker ripped apart.
“Hurray.” Sirius said sarcastically, as he investigated the spoils of his win, “I’ve got another terrible joke and--”
“Let’s hear it,” Remus interrupted Sirius’ list.
“When is a door not a door?” Sirius asked, unexcitedly.
“When it’s a jar,” Remus replied cheerfully.
“Yeah, right.” Sirius frowned as he tipped the rest of the cracker’s content onto the table, “I’ve got another paper hat, blue this time, and a tiny, pink, plastic man, with what looks like a mini version of those bags we get from Tesco with some brown plastic ribbon attached.”
“Brown plastic ribbon? Hang on, I’m certain we have elastic bands in the wizarding world.”
“Elastic band? Is that what you call this thing?” Sirius asked, pulling at the elastic band that surrounded the tiny parachutist’s parachute. “What’s the point of this man? Is he important at Christmas?”
Suppressing a grin Remus replied, “Oh, yes, terribly important.”
“How? Why? What does he do?” Sirius asked, more interested in muggle Christmas than he’d ever been.
Remus paused for second, before answering quickly, “He helps you decide things at Christmas time.”
“What? How?”
“You ask him a question and then you untie his parachute, that’s the thing like the Tesco bag, and then you drop him from a height. If he lands on his feet it’s a good idea, if he falls over it’s a bad one.”
“Wow. Is that why he was in the last cracker, because he was the most important?”
Sometimes Remus wondered how someone so intelligent could be so dim and then he remembered it was Sirius, “Yes, that’s how it works.”
“Okay, I suppose some things from muggle Christmas aren’t completely boring,” Sirius conceded, looking at the parachutist in slight awe.
“You’re the one who wanted to learn about it.”
“Yes, well, I wanted to see what kind of stuff you used to get up to at Christmas with your parents. I was expecting something less boring.”
“You do nothing but complain.”
“You give me a lot to complain about.”
“Oh, really?” Remus stood up and circled around to Sirius who had moved from his seat and was now edging away from Remus, grinning.
“Yes, really,” Sirius replied. He kept edging back until he startled himself by backing into the sofa. Remus pushed Sirius back onto it and straddled him in one fluid movement.
“Oh, I’ll give you something to complain about,” he threatened before his hand dived for Sirius’ armpit and started to tickle.
“Oh you-” Sirius began to say, but didn’t get to finish his sentence as he was turning into a dog. The transformation pushed Remus from the sofa into an undignified heap on the floor, which was then jumped on by a large black dog. Remus let out a long ‘Ooof’ of air and the dog licked his face. Once he’d recovered his breath, Remus looked up at the big black eyes that were staring down at him and shook his head, “I’m pretty sure this is cheating, Padfoot.” The dog began to whine pitifully, and Remus sighed, “Oh, I suppose I’ll let you off this once if you get off me.”
The dog jumped off and Remus scrambled from the floor. Padfoot was wagging his tail and Remus bent down to scratch behind his ears. “Despite all your griping and moaning you’re a good dog really, aren’t you?”
Padfoot barked back, happily.
*
Remus waited patiently in the living room as Sirius searched the house for another pair of gloves. Why he couldn’t just use magic was beyond Remus, but he’d known Sirius long enough to know that it was best to just go along with his oddities.
“Victory!” Sirius said as he walked into the living room, raising glove-covered hands in celebration.
“Well done. Can we leave now?”
“Yeah, one second I just need to comb my hair,” Sirius said, failing miserably to pick up the comb with gloved hands. Remus didn’t know whether to shake his head or to laugh. He chose both. He then got his wand out and charmed the comb to start brushing.
“Was your hair always this long?” Remus asked as the comb went through Sirius’ long black hair.
Sirius looked out of the corner of his eye at the comb and looked at Remus, “Yes. Do you have a problem with it?”
“No, I just don’t remember it being quite this long. I rather like it,” Remus replied with a mischievous grin. He stopped the charm and moved over to Sirius. He ran one hand through the black strands and placed the other on Sirius’ hip and used it to push the other man’s groin to his. He moved to kiss Sirius when the grandfather clock chimed. Startled, Remus stepped back. Once he’d recovered, he looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and sighed. “We’d better get going.”
“We’ve got weeks until Christmas,” Sirius said and started biting Remus’ ear wetly before saying, “Let’s go another day.”
“Sirius, we said we’d go another day a week ago. This is the ‘another day’.”
“I hate Christmas,” Sirius said petulantly.
“No you don’t.
“You’re right; I really, really don’t.”
*
Hogsmeade was heaving. Remus had lost Sirius in the crowd no less than three times before he had latched onto him with the tightest grip he could, and even then a group of school kids nearly separated them.
“Oh, I miss Hogwarts,” Remus said wistfully as another group of school children walked past in their black Hogwarts’ cloaks.
“I don’t all the sneaking around and Prongs making really unfunny jokes about gays.”
“Prongs still makes inappropriate jokes.”
“Yeah, but now we can just throw him out of the flat.”
“Fair enough,” Remus replied and pulled Sirius with him into Screenshot’s Quill Shop which was, thankfully, a lot quieter than the high street.
“Are you sure we should be getting Lily quills? It seems so boring.” Sirius picked up a gold feathered quill, which looked terribly expensive, and started playing with it.
“No, it’s practical, Lily likes practical. We’ll leave the big special things to her fiancé, eh?”
“Are you -hang on! Guess what I remembered to bring with me,” Sirius said, dropping the quill down and dipping his hand into his coat, which looked suspiciously like one of Remus’.
“It’s the plastic man! Sirius exclaimed, pulling it out of his pocket. It’s times like this Remus is glad he’s been a Marauder for so long, it means he’s very good at keeping a straight face.
“What do you even call this?” Sirius asked, holding the plastic man by his parachute.
“He’s a parachuter… no wait, that’s not right…parachutist, he’s a parachutist.”
“A para -choo -tist? Muggles are weird.”
“You were impressed when you first learned what he did.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sirius said and swung around, “Where do you think it’d be best to drop him from?”
“I do-”
“Do you think it’s okay to drop it with magic, does that void it working?”
”No, it doesn’t,” Remus replied, and he consoled himself with the fact that he wasn’t actually lying.
“It’s still heaving outside.” Sirius turned around again and asked the owner of the shop, a dark-haired giant of a man called Mr Green, “Do you mind if we use this in here?”
Remus could feel his lips twitching and he seriously thought he was going to lose it but he took a deep breath and managed to keep his composure.
“What is it?” asked Mr Green, coming out from behind his counter to get a better look.
“It’s a muggle thing, a parachootist,” Sirius explained proudly and Remus melted a little at the sight.
“What’s it for?” Mr Green seemed terribly intrigued. All Remus could think was that he loved Pure Bloods.
“Right, first you untie his parachute and then you drop him. Actually, no, first you ask a question and then you drop him and if he lands on his feet it means you should do it and if he doesn’t then it’s probably a bad idea.”
“This is a muggle thing?” A tall woman with masses of blonde hair asked, and as Remus looked around he noticed they had gathered quite a crowd. He hoped none of the Half Bloods or Muggle Borns would speak up and ruin it.
“Yeah, they have their own version of crackers which are not half as good as normal ones, but one of the gifts is this man.”
“That really is clever,” the blonde woman said, sounding impressed.
“Well, go on then!” A ginger school child urged, “Ask it something.”
Sirius untied the parachute and, after a few seconds distracted by the elastic band, he unfolded it. With a silent ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ he raised the parachutist up and asked solemnly, “Should we get Lily quills for Christmas?” He then promptly dropped the parachutist down again. It landed with a tiny thud on the stone floor and, rather disappointingly for Sirius, on its side.
“Ask it something else,” said a Black woman who was stood next to the blonde.
“Like?” Sirius asked.
“You’re getting gifts for a girl? Get the woman some jewellery,” the blonde replied.
“Okay then.” Sirius levitated the parachutist again and asked it whether they should buy Lily jewellery. It once again landed on its side.
Despite the muggle world having an influence on his childhood, Remus’ grasp on science was average at best, in spite of this he could still say with quite some conviction that the scientific likelihood of it actually landing on its feet is slim to none.
“Is she a smart girl? Does she like books?” The Black woman asked and before Sirius could reply Mr Green cut in, “I don’t think we should completely disregard quills. I mean it’s only a silly muggle thing.”
“Woman don’t want quills, or books, they want lingerie,” said the ginger school child. Remus wondered how on earth this fifth year, maybe sixth year, knew anything about women.
Sirius laughed, “Trust me, the girl we’re buying for doesn’t want lingerie.”
”How do you know if you don’t try?”
“Fine,” Sirius said and carelessly lifted the parachutist up and let him fall down again.
This time it landed on its feet.
*
20th of December 1979
Lily,
About your Christmas present - silly joke gone terribly wrong, long story. Sirius is very hard to dissuade of anything… DON’T LET PRONGS SEE IT.
Remus
Author: lollyphants
Recipient: lady_luthienne
Rating: PG-13
Highlight for Warnings: *No sex, but it does get a little sexy. *
Word Count: 1, 855
Summary: Sirius’ interest in muggle Christmas traditions dwindles until Remus tells blatant lies about pink plastic men.
Author's notes: lady_luthienne, I’m sorry if this didn’t turn out anything like you wanted. Thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon, whoever wrote that MST so I didn’t have to go searching for my HP books and Ellie, just because. If you’re unsure what I’m referring to when I’m talking about the aforementioned pink plastic man, I mean this.
Sirius was under whelmed.
As much as he absolutely adored his lover, he couldn’t help but think Remus had really let the ball drop on this one.
“Muggle crackers are boring,” Sirius moaned as he idly pulled apart a spent cracker snap with long fingers.
Remus looked up from the collection of screwdrivers, that were small to the point of being useless, he was arranging by size on the table. “If they’re so boring why have we pulled nearly all the ones we bought fifteen days before Christmas?”
Sirius narrowed his eyes. “I was misinformed; some evil misleading man told me they were just as good at normal ones.”
“No, I said I didn’t have a preference and I don’t. Both leave you with a nagging sense of disappointment and an absolutely useless gift.”
“No, normal ones have good gifts, unlike these ones. I mean, what’s this?” Sirius picked up a small, plastic, green frog between his forefinger and thumb.
“It’s a jumping frog! Here.” Remus held his palm out and Sirius dropped the frog on to it. Remus placed the frog on the kitchen table they were sat around and then put his thumb on the frog’s back causing it to jump up and land upside-down.
“Ah, so it’s like a chocolate frog, but less realistic, less sprightly and not edible.”
“Must you find fault with everything?” Without waiting for answer Remus grabbed the last cracker in the box and thrust it at Sirius, “C’mon let’s use this last one up and we can get wizarding crackers for Christmas day.”
“Ooo, I hope it’s another screwdriver set or a nimble, y’know for all that sewing we do.”
“Thimble,” Remus corrected.
“Oh, same difference,” Sirius said irritably and grabbed the other end of the cracker. He pulled as Remus pulled, until the cracker ripped apart.
“Hurray.” Sirius said sarcastically, as he investigated the spoils of his win, “I’ve got another terrible joke and--”
“Let’s hear it,” Remus interrupted Sirius’ list.
“When is a door not a door?” Sirius asked, unexcitedly.
“When it’s a jar,” Remus replied cheerfully.
“Yeah, right.” Sirius frowned as he tipped the rest of the cracker’s content onto the table, “I’ve got another paper hat, blue this time, and a tiny, pink, plastic man, with what looks like a mini version of those bags we get from Tesco with some brown plastic ribbon attached.”
“Brown plastic ribbon? Hang on, I’m certain we have elastic bands in the wizarding world.”
“Elastic band? Is that what you call this thing?” Sirius asked, pulling at the elastic band that surrounded the tiny parachutist’s parachute. “What’s the point of this man? Is he important at Christmas?”
Suppressing a grin Remus replied, “Oh, yes, terribly important.”
“How? Why? What does he do?” Sirius asked, more interested in muggle Christmas than he’d ever been.
Remus paused for second, before answering quickly, “He helps you decide things at Christmas time.”
“What? How?”
“You ask him a question and then you untie his parachute, that’s the thing like the Tesco bag, and then you drop him from a height. If he lands on his feet it’s a good idea, if he falls over it’s a bad one.”
“Wow. Is that why he was in the last cracker, because he was the most important?”
Sometimes Remus wondered how someone so intelligent could be so dim and then he remembered it was Sirius, “Yes, that’s how it works.”
“Okay, I suppose some things from muggle Christmas aren’t completely boring,” Sirius conceded, looking at the parachutist in slight awe.
“You’re the one who wanted to learn about it.”
“Yes, well, I wanted to see what kind of stuff you used to get up to at Christmas with your parents. I was expecting something less boring.”
“You do nothing but complain.”
“You give me a lot to complain about.”
“Oh, really?” Remus stood up and circled around to Sirius who had moved from his seat and was now edging away from Remus, grinning.
“Yes, really,” Sirius replied. He kept edging back until he startled himself by backing into the sofa. Remus pushed Sirius back onto it and straddled him in one fluid movement.
“Oh, I’ll give you something to complain about,” he threatened before his hand dived for Sirius’ armpit and started to tickle.
“Oh you-” Sirius began to say, but didn’t get to finish his sentence as he was turning into a dog. The transformation pushed Remus from the sofa into an undignified heap on the floor, which was then jumped on by a large black dog. Remus let out a long ‘Ooof’ of air and the dog licked his face. Once he’d recovered his breath, Remus looked up at the big black eyes that were staring down at him and shook his head, “I’m pretty sure this is cheating, Padfoot.” The dog began to whine pitifully, and Remus sighed, “Oh, I suppose I’ll let you off this once if you get off me.”
The dog jumped off and Remus scrambled from the floor. Padfoot was wagging his tail and Remus bent down to scratch behind his ears. “Despite all your griping and moaning you’re a good dog really, aren’t you?”
Padfoot barked back, happily.
*
Remus waited patiently in the living room as Sirius searched the house for another pair of gloves. Why he couldn’t just use magic was beyond Remus, but he’d known Sirius long enough to know that it was best to just go along with his oddities.
“Victory!” Sirius said as he walked into the living room, raising glove-covered hands in celebration.
“Well done. Can we leave now?”
“Yeah, one second I just need to comb my hair,” Sirius said, failing miserably to pick up the comb with gloved hands. Remus didn’t know whether to shake his head or to laugh. He chose both. He then got his wand out and charmed the comb to start brushing.
“Was your hair always this long?” Remus asked as the comb went through Sirius’ long black hair.
Sirius looked out of the corner of his eye at the comb and looked at Remus, “Yes. Do you have a problem with it?”
“No, I just don’t remember it being quite this long. I rather like it,” Remus replied with a mischievous grin. He stopped the charm and moved over to Sirius. He ran one hand through the black strands and placed the other on Sirius’ hip and used it to push the other man’s groin to his. He moved to kiss Sirius when the grandfather clock chimed. Startled, Remus stepped back. Once he’d recovered, he looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and sighed. “We’d better get going.”
“We’ve got weeks until Christmas,” Sirius said and started biting Remus’ ear wetly before saying, “Let’s go another day.”
“Sirius, we said we’d go another day a week ago. This is the ‘another day’.”
“I hate Christmas,” Sirius said petulantly.
“No you don’t.
“You’re right; I really, really don’t.”
*
Hogsmeade was heaving. Remus had lost Sirius in the crowd no less than three times before he had latched onto him with the tightest grip he could, and even then a group of school kids nearly separated them.
“Oh, I miss Hogwarts,” Remus said wistfully as another group of school children walked past in their black Hogwarts’ cloaks.
“I don’t all the sneaking around and Prongs making really unfunny jokes about gays.”
“Prongs still makes inappropriate jokes.”
“Yeah, but now we can just throw him out of the flat.”
“Fair enough,” Remus replied and pulled Sirius with him into Screenshot’s Quill Shop which was, thankfully, a lot quieter than the high street.
“Are you sure we should be getting Lily quills? It seems so boring.” Sirius picked up a gold feathered quill, which looked terribly expensive, and started playing with it.
“No, it’s practical, Lily likes practical. We’ll leave the big special things to her fiancé, eh?”
“Are you -hang on! Guess what I remembered to bring with me,” Sirius said, dropping the quill down and dipping his hand into his coat, which looked suspiciously like one of Remus’.
“It’s the plastic man! Sirius exclaimed, pulling it out of his pocket. It’s times like this Remus is glad he’s been a Marauder for so long, it means he’s very good at keeping a straight face.
“What do you even call this?” Sirius asked, holding the plastic man by his parachute.
“He’s a parachuter… no wait, that’s not right…parachutist, he’s a parachutist.”
“A para -choo -tist? Muggles are weird.”
“You were impressed when you first learned what he did.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sirius said and swung around, “Where do you think it’d be best to drop him from?”
“I do-”
“Do you think it’s okay to drop it with magic, does that void it working?”
”No, it doesn’t,” Remus replied, and he consoled himself with the fact that he wasn’t actually lying.
“It’s still heaving outside.” Sirius turned around again and asked the owner of the shop, a dark-haired giant of a man called Mr Green, “Do you mind if we use this in here?”
Remus could feel his lips twitching and he seriously thought he was going to lose it but he took a deep breath and managed to keep his composure.
“What is it?” asked Mr Green, coming out from behind his counter to get a better look.
“It’s a muggle thing, a parachootist,” Sirius explained proudly and Remus melted a little at the sight.
“What’s it for?” Mr Green seemed terribly intrigued. All Remus could think was that he loved Pure Bloods.
“Right, first you untie his parachute and then you drop him. Actually, no, first you ask a question and then you drop him and if he lands on his feet it means you should do it and if he doesn’t then it’s probably a bad idea.”
“This is a muggle thing?” A tall woman with masses of blonde hair asked, and as Remus looked around he noticed they had gathered quite a crowd. He hoped none of the Half Bloods or Muggle Borns would speak up and ruin it.
“Yeah, they have their own version of crackers which are not half as good as normal ones, but one of the gifts is this man.”
“That really is clever,” the blonde woman said, sounding impressed.
“Well, go on then!” A ginger school child urged, “Ask it something.”
Sirius untied the parachute and, after a few seconds distracted by the elastic band, he unfolded it. With a silent ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ he raised the parachutist up and asked solemnly, “Should we get Lily quills for Christmas?” He then promptly dropped the parachutist down again. It landed with a tiny thud on the stone floor and, rather disappointingly for Sirius, on its side.
“Ask it something else,” said a Black woman who was stood next to the blonde.
“Like?” Sirius asked.
“You’re getting gifts for a girl? Get the woman some jewellery,” the blonde replied.
“Okay then.” Sirius levitated the parachutist again and asked it whether they should buy Lily jewellery. It once again landed on its side.
Despite the muggle world having an influence on his childhood, Remus’ grasp on science was average at best, in spite of this he could still say with quite some conviction that the scientific likelihood of it actually landing on its feet is slim to none.
“Is she a smart girl? Does she like books?” The Black woman asked and before Sirius could reply Mr Green cut in, “I don’t think we should completely disregard quills. I mean it’s only a silly muggle thing.”
“Woman don’t want quills, or books, they want lingerie,” said the ginger school child. Remus wondered how on earth this fifth year, maybe sixth year, knew anything about women.
Sirius laughed, “Trust me, the girl we’re buying for doesn’t want lingerie.”
”How do you know if you don’t try?”
“Fine,” Sirius said and carelessly lifted the parachutist up and let him fall down again.
This time it landed on its feet.
*
20th of December 1979
Lily,
About your Christmas present - silly joke gone terribly wrong, long story. Sirius is very hard to dissuade of anything… DON’T LET PRONGS SEE IT.
Remus