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small_giftsTitle: Let Nothing You Dismay
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cevennes
Recipient:youcantseeus
Rating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Sex, language, some discussion of homophobia*
Word count: 19,000
Summary: There are a few things Sirius really didn't count on for Christmas of 1979. The extreme sexual confusion is one of them; Remus Lupin is approximately seventy-eight of the rest.
Notes: This got long, then it got longer, and there's really no excuse; a thousand I'm-sorrys would not be apology enough! Nonetheless, happy holidays,youcantseeus! May 2015 be filled with all of these two your heart could desire.
Also, a huge thanks to the mods for being so understanding!
Back down at headquarters, waiting for Dumbledore to show up and say something Ageless and Mysterious, Sirius bounces his leg up and down and chews his nails to ragged, frazzled stumps, checking the clock automatically every twenty seconds and glaring acidly when it refuses to quicken its sluggish pulse. He’s going through his mental list of things he’d like to do with Remus for the fourth time and trying to figure out 1.) how to articulate them, and 2.) how to even go about half of them, when James Potter, half-human, half-Niffler, slides in beside him, sniffing his neck and cheek with unnatural and vaguely frightening interest.
“Yum,” says James. “Have you been eating apples?”
For some reason, probably the same reason Emmeline Vance’s cheese toasty makes him go wobbly in the legs, nothing has ever been more hilarious than this. After he recovers somewhat, still shaking with a few repressed laughs, he clears his throat and meets James’ judging eyes, drilling brown bullet holes into him, and promptly dissolves into another fit that leaves his stomach wonderfully, impossibly fluttery.
“I’ve been eating something,” he mutters, low and wild.
“Mate, if I didn’t know any better right now I’d swear you were high,” says James, sniffing his shirt again. “Where the hell did you go for lunch?”
“Home,” he grins.
“And what did you do, drink one of Moony’s potions?” James’ eyes narrow, traveling down Sirius’ well-bred nose to his lips, which are still rather red and a little puffy, and then down farther to his rumpled collar where a tiny bruise is blooming on the sensitive skin there; at that, they fly immediately fly back up to meet Sirius’, looking amazed and mildly scandalized. “Oh my God,” he says wonderingly, “oh my God, you deflowered Moony over your lunch break, I figured you’d wait till at least Christmas, you slag! How is he? How’s—oh my God, what was that like?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, you little—would you stop sniffing me, I don’t have any food on me today, thanks for that! Honestly, you’d think you were the pregnant one,” he grumbles, leaning away. “Anyway, we didn’t—you know. That.” He runs a hand through his hair, checks the clock again; five minutes have counted themselves out while James sniffed his face. “And where’s this concern for me, I’d like to know? You never ask after me or Pete, you inconsiderate knob.”
“I’ve seen you almost every bloody day of my life since we were eleven and I still haven’t forgiven Wormtail for being sick in my hair,” says James, still watching him with something like happiness lighting up the shadows on his face. “I haven’t seen Moony in more than a week and you know I pine if he’s away from me for too long.”
“Remus is just fine, and I would know. Don’t you worry about it.”
“I don’t trust you. You’ve scrambled his poor brilliant mind, haven’t you? Haven’t you? I hope you at least made him some tea after your little afternoon hit-and-run.”
“Begging for details will get you absolutely nowhere,” says Sirius, throwing one more venomous glance at the clock. “You’re a sad, sad man, Potter, you’ll just have to get your vicarious little thrills elsewhere because I am not feeding you. Some of us,” he says, drawing himself up to full ramrod-backed, lazy-mouthed aristocratic splendor, “have a sense of honor.”
“I’ll remember that the next time Padfoot rolls on something dead,” James mutters, turning towards him again and smiling his widest smile, crooked, exultant. “I’m just—I’m really happy you’re getting there, you know,” he says. “I love you, mate.”
“Love you too. God knows why.”
“It’s because of my perfect, ripe, chiseled—”
“Flaccid—”
“Fuck you.” James grins at him. “And you better treat him like a damn princess or I’ll hurt you badly,” James says cheerfully, stretching an arm across Sirius’ shoulders. “You can tell him I said the same goes for him, too.”
“Jealousy makes you look bloated and hideous, Prongs,” he says, happier, by far, than he’s been for months, immune even to the ticking of the clock on the wall and the thousand different darknesses seeping into the creases of their floor-length maps with James’ arm around him. The impatient hurry-up hurry-up hurry-up of his heart knocking against his chest, the way he misses Remus like fire—even that is bearable, if only just.
—
Five o’clock and forty-seven seconds, right on the dot. The sun fallen below the inky horizon with the stars glimmering through a veil of clouds, the slush frozen over into ice on the streets, and Sirius bangs through the front door like a human hurricane, like lives and pumpkin pie are on the line. If Moody could see this, he’d start paying Remus to hide in various rooms of the Auror training headquarters every morning; Sirius would show up with half an hour at least to spare, and possibly breakfast for everyone.
“Hello,” says Remus, slightly breathless on the sofa. He’s got his knees folded beside him and a book in his lap he isn’t looking at; the only thing he seems to see at all is Sirius, his hand flexing slightly on his thigh, light catching the ends of his hair. “How was the rest of your day?”
“Disgusting,” he says. He still hasn’t managed to get his boots off, because that would mean looking away from Remus. “It felt like a month, Moony, I haven’t had food or drink or—or anything.”
“And last I heard, two-thirds of your organ systems were already failing,” says Remus, setting his book down absently and crossing the room, watching Sirius watching him on their worn-out shoe mat. “We’d better do something about that.”
“It’s getting pretty dire,” says Sirius, his belly trembling as Remus comes closer, and closer, taking the ends of his scarf between his fingertips. “In fact, I think the length of my recovery is directly proportional to the time I spend snogging you.”
“Is that so,” murmurs Remus, pulling gently on his scarf until his nose brushes Sirius’ ear. “This is me warning you,” he whispers, tight and frantic. Sirius kisses him before Remus can beat him to it this time, slower, softer than the first few, his heart swelling up against Remus’ hands sliding up his chest. It is, he thinks distantly, the best kiss he’s ever had in his life.
Remus pulls away after a few moments, and Sirius leans forward with him, clutching him around the ribs. He can feel him breathing, can feel the warm muted lines of his waist down to his hips, straight rather than curved inward like a woman’s. He likes both—the sloping curls, the flow of edges, soft bulges too—but there’s something about this, the feel of another man’s muscles and bones moving under his hands, that Sirius loves.
“There’s leftover soup,” says Remus, his voice gone a little rough. Sirius kisses him again, quickly, just for the thrill of it—just because he can. “Are you feeling better?”
“You saved my life, Doctor Professor Lupin. Saved it with your wanton slaggish ways,” he says. “Here, let me help you—”
“Get your shoes off. We can eat in the sitting room, it’s warmer in there anyway.”
“And there is a sofa,” says Sirius, not losing sight of what’s important.
Dinner is much the same as it always is, but brilliant somehow, tilted just right, like a crooked still life hanging over the mantel that he’s straightened and finally, finally fallen into. Sirius revels in every laugh and every smile Remus pulls out of him, loves even the angular stretch of tension that catches in their throats over vegetable soup, all of it so new and raw and beautiful; Remus gets pepper up his nose and sneezes violently, and Sirius starts laughing because it’s the funniest thing, ever, because nothing is more perfect than his knee next to Remus’ knee, his voice twining around Remus’ voice, their soup bowls stacked together. He wants to set himself against Remus; he wants to move with Remus, wants to feel both of them alive in their own skin, wants to learn all the different ways they fit together. He wants.
F-A-M-I-N-E. Twenty-three down on today’s crossword, two blood-dark, voracious syllables howling with an ancient hunger. Beside him, Remus swallows, runs a hand along his thigh; Sirius wants to touch him.
“Oh, those,” says Sirius, coming back from the washing up just as the Muggle news comes back on. “Muggles and their sky trollies,” he mutters when he sits back down, just for the way it makes Remus clench his teeth. “Look at them! It downright incredible, I mean, they can launch hundreds of tons of metal and human life into the sky and it’s fucking amazing and no one talks about it except to complain about the seats or whatever, but the second you mention flying broomsticks it’s off to therapy for the next two years.”
“Muggles are a bit obtuse about these things, but, y’know, not being magical, they’ve got their reasons.”
“I know all about that, too.”
“Oh?” Remus lifts one eyebrow. Sirius’ elbows tingle briefly for some reason, and he wonders if that’s another factor that comes with being attracted to boys or if it’s just Remus playing havoc with various parts of his body again.
“They’ve got to compensate,” he says, “for not having dishwashing spells and the like. They think Merlin is a myth, so they invent men who stomp down chimneys at Christmas in carriages drawn by flying centaurs instead. They think baby teeth are a delicacy for fairies and they don’t believe in mopping their movie theaters but no, oh no, straddling a broom for a living is weird. It’s right bizarre is what it is, Moony.”
Remus makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh, leaning back against the couch. “I don’t really have it in me to explain everything that’s wrong with what you just said.”
“Because you can’t refute it, that’s why,” says Sirius, leaning back with him and turning his head sideways to meet his eyes. “You’re disqualified! I win.”
“And what do you think you ought to win for that shameful display, hmm?”
“How about,” he starts, licking his lips, his blood heating in his chest, “how about I kiss your face and we call it even, since you’re such a graceless loser?”
“Speaking of certain things,” says Remus, “there are people out there who think we’re going to hell for this, and worse. In case you spent that hour of Muggle Studies behind the greenhouses, too.”
Sirius, unconcerned with going to hell, leans in and drags his lips across the tiny scar on Remus’ cheek and down to the corner of his mouth, feeling Remus smile against him, warm as sunrise. “I actually find that extremely attractive,” he says, pushing off the couch to straddle Remus’ hips tentatively, or as tentatively as you can do this at all—it’s sort of an all-or-nothing kind of deal. He’s never done this before. He’s had girls do it to him and he’s liked it plenty, but he’s never tried it on anyone else; miraculously, he doesn’t feel anything like lumpy or awkward, and Remus is running his hands up his forearms to his elbows, eyes brighter than the flat-edged moon filling up in the sky, so he reckons he’s doing something right.
“Is this—” Remus curls his hands around Sirius’ elbows, shy and shaky, a sudden tensing of his shoulders like birdflight under Sirius’ fingers. “Is this all right?”
“Is this all right,” Sirius growls at his jaw, feeling his breath hitch. “This is fucking perfect, Remus,” he says, and kisses him breathless, wonderingly, thrillingly hard as Remus, fluid as tide beneath their crumpled winter stars.
The rest of the evening is a flood of kissing and touching and bad television-watching until bed, which makes Sirius’ stomach bottom out for entirely different reasons than it did this afternoon, his head swimming with threads of all the things they could do, and whether they should do them, and whether he even knows exactly how to do them. Flipping through Remus’ books to distract himself is only marginally helpful; he can’t find anything dirty, though he knows there must be some lying about, probably shoved inconspicuously between one of his huge history books. Maybe there are pictures. Maybe there are step-by-step guides.
Maybe there are diagrams.
In the end, though, all he can find is some exceedingly nasty French poetry that Remus would probably still try to argue has lots of inherent artistic value in its lurid, loving detail of male genitalia.
He’s sitting on the edge of Remus’ bed, feet slightly sweaty, debating whether or not to light a cigarette and lounge back on the pillows when Remus comes in and say something delicate and subtle like, Hey, Remus, want to have sex? when the door squeaks shut on its hinges, and there he is, all mismatched socks and damp, uncombed hair, shirt buttoned up all the way, rubbing lavender-smelling lotion into his dry knuckles and sneezing over it for the seventeenth time tonight.
This is the man you have chosen, Sirius Black, he thinks, a heavy, clear happiness suddenly fighting it out with the nervousness twinging in his belly. Remus smiles at him, surprised and exultant and trying so hard to fold it away in his mouth and keep it from showing too much, like Sirius isn’t going to pull him down and find it there, anyway.
“I seem to have an unreasonably attractive man on my bed,” says Remus, coming closer until Sirius wraps his hands around his hips, pulling him down. “Did—have you been going through my books?”
“What makes you think that?” he mumbles into the fabric of Remus’ shirt. His chest swells and deflates under Sirius’ mouth.
“You’re—oh Christ,” he says, looking down and finding the filthy, dog-eared evidence. “You know, that poem’s an allegory for—”
“The only thing that’s an allegory for is how much he wanted an illicit blowjob.”
“Yeah, okay,” Remus admits, leaning over to put it on the nightstand. When he turns back, delightfully pink, he bites his lip and runs his thumb over the bump of bone on Sirius’ wrist, pressing his forehead against Sirius’, their hair all tangled up. “We don’t—we don’t have to. You know.”
“Sex, Remus,” he says, hearing Remus’ hard swallow. “Sex! Sex sex SEX. Can you even say it?”
“Yes,” he snaps. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to.”
“What, like you have?”
“No, you stupid berk, it’s only—I want you to be—I want it to be right. Is all.”
Sirius kisses the tired places underneath his eyes and pulls him down on top of him, heavy and flannel-warm when he kisses him. “You’re fucking lovely,” he tells Remus, slipping his fingers beneath his shirt and feeling him shiver over him, mouth parted and wet, eyes on Sirius, only Sirius. It makes him feel wanted—makes him feel braver, reckless. When he shifts his thigh underneath Remus and presses it between his legs, Remus gasps into his mouth, drags their hips together slowly, both of them hissing at the electric friction surging through their skin.
“God, I’m—I’ve got no idea what I’m doing,” Remus breathes, gripping Sirius’ hip hard, his knuckles yellow-white in the shadows of the bed.
“Neither do I,” says Sirius. He bends his knees around Remus and thrusts upward against Remus’, his belly trembling hotly when groans into his neck and grazes his teeth along the pulse there, frantic-fast, beating for him. “So don’t stop, oh, don’t.”
Ragged-rough and slow, the rhythm they fall into, heat and pressure and the sweet, intimate push-and-pull of their bodies moving together until Sirius comes suddenly like a surprise: He gasps, kissing Remus irregularly and saying something stupid and possibly important, and then Remus follows, tensing, biting his mouth, groaning Sirius’ name like a charm—like a poem knitted from memory, long-held, reverent.
In the muzzy afterwards, once they’ve shut off the lights again and taken care of the mess that comes from not bothering to remove clothes, Remus presses close to him under the quilt just as Sirius reaches for him, burying his face in his hair, shaken loose with pleasure and newness and wide awake with the strange immense joy of themselves, unfurling.
“That was nice,” says Remus, smiling into his shoulder.
“My God, is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?” asks Sirius. “I’ll tell you what it was, since I obviously completely blew your mind: It was absolutely bloody amazing. Is what.”
“You liked it, then?”
He loved it. Whatever he was expecting—something similar to what he’d done with Mary Macdonald, which was soft and slick and enjoyable enough, if underwhelming—wasn’t quite this, the jumbled closeness and the heavy warmth of it. He never wants to get up from this bed.
Which is the sort of thing that’s probably important to say, so he does. “I loved it,” he says, and kisses Remus on the bridge of his nose; he figures he’s allowed to do that now. Remus smiles with all his teeth on the pillow they’re sharing, watching him happily, wonderingly.
“Me, too,” says Remus, an arm around his ribs, his ankles wedged under one of Sirius’ legs.
“You realize we could have been doing this for ages now, if you’d just said you wanted to be my—” he pauses, unsure.
“Boyfriend,” Remus finishes for him, looking surprised and thrilled, secretly, with how easily it comes to him. “Please, please don’t call me your partner, it makes me feel like I’m an eighty-year-old retired man herding sheep in Shropshire.”
“You want to be my boyfriend,” Sirius trills, kissing him again. “You and Lily will meet up for coffee and do whatever ponce-y things the two of you do and sigh over the horrible men in your lives, drinking the milk straight out of the carton and leaving the seat up.”
“I’ve been doing that for two years, I just wasn’t having sex with you,” says Remus. “You haven’t been drinking it straight from the carton, have you?”
“Believe me, cupcake, I learned my lesson with the peanut butter.” He closes his eyes, smoothing Remus’ hair out with his fingers, sleep finally beginning to sink into him; at his chest, Remus breathes, long and even. “I think I’m getting places,” he says quietly, shifting when Remus peers up at him from the frizzy fringe of his hair.
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” he answers. “I’m not sure, I mean, not yet, but—closer.”
“I think,” says Remus, brushing his fingers along Sirius’ collarbone, “it’s a matter of what you find yourself attracted to—what you question, and how often. The answer is a lot different for a lot of people.”
“Both,” says Sirius, “about equally. I think. But it’s different for—oh, bugger, I don’t fucking know,” he says, gliding his bare foot against Remus’ fuzzy sock-covered foot. “I just know I’ll always be here when you wake up.”
Remus’ lips are warm against his own, filling in their spaces. Outside, the moon claws against the frosted window with serrated fingers, violent-pale; Sirius holds his hand over Remus’ heart.
—
A whole week, then, of little but snow and settling in, both of them falling into their tiny house and into each other like a warm front. They kiss over breakfast, in the bathroom, in the doorway, pile on more blankets and sleep without their pyjamas, learn the art of tying themselves together. Sirius brings home dark chocolate truffles and takeout Remus warns him is too hot and endures both tears and Remus’ poorly disguised laughter as he eats; Remus reads him the best stories from the newspaper and leaves the bag in Sirius’ tea every time he makes it. They string up tacky garland and hang a juniper wreath on the door, and Sirius, never one to let the holiday go without, presses sprigs of mistletoe between the pages of the books Remus is reading, waits for him to find them. He’s repaid in full (and sometimes more) at the most inopportune times: brushing his teeth, his hands full of grocery bags, having a crisis while cleaning out the fireplace and up to his elbows in ashes.
They sink down into their own territory where only they know the footing. Outside this house, there’s work and the Order and the treacherous, bloodstained battleground of adulthood, but here, when it’s them and them alone, Sirius can be as young as he really is. He can be happy for newsprint miracles and teabags left in, for the way the two of them grow between the cracks in the concrete. He can breathe.
On Sunday, the air holding blue in the midafternoon chill, they go off in search of the biggest Christmas tree in the village, wandering between rows of pine needles and snow drifts in their boots while Remus makes quietly disapproving noises at the logistics of getting one through the front door. It’s when they cross paths with another couple, and then another, that Sirius realizes: Wow, there are a lot of straight people here.
He amends: Probably not all of them are straight. But it’s jarring, in a way, to know that no one would ever doubt for a moment that they’ve both got their names on the house title and they share the same bed, the same Gringotts account, the same history. They’ll never have to worry about a Pureblood telling them to stop screwing around; they’ll never have all the things they’ve grown and shaped and bled for and nourished with all the love there is inside them invalidated, diminished.
People will look at them and see True Love and The Spirit of the Season, or something. They’ll look at him and Remus and see two good friends or roommates until they’re told otherwise.
They don’t have to wonder where all their happy endings are.
“You’re awfully quiet,” says Remus. His nose is very red. “How about this one?”
“It’s missing half its stuffing in the middle, Moony.”
“I think it’s sweet,” he sniffs. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that—have you noticed,” he says, dropping his voice, “we are the only couple here who don’t look like we belong on the cover of Witch Weekly?”
“Does that bother you?”
“No. I just forget sometimes, I guess.” He reaches for Remus’ hand, only to find Remus already reaching for his; he wraps his fingers around the coarse mittens, pulls him close. “This one.”
A smile, a sigh. “Sirius, that’s bigger than our ceiling.” He falls gently into Sirius’ side like a bolster. “Could you see yourself doing that? Being all, y’know—married to a woman, babies, Christmas photos every year, matching bathroom towels?”
“No, because too much of that and you end up on a greeting card and then you’re an empty husk of a man before the age of thirty,” he says, steering Remus to the next row of trees. “But—yeah. Without the husky emptiness, and all. I could see that.” He thinks of Remus, thinks of Kingsley Shacklebolt’s slow smiles, his sculpted abdominals, his strong, capable, knee-weakening voice. “I could see it just as easily with a man. So—I guess that means bisexual, after all. I am four whole syllables, Moony.”
It surprises him, how fast the realization crashes into him. It’s like tripwire: snagged around the ankles, the snap, the fall, and then the click—detonation. He’s got no real preference, but he’s got Remus, and Sirius aims to keep him.
“I can see it with you,” he says. He leans over and kisses him, soft and sweet, their own happy conclusion. Remus doesn’t let go of his hand. “It was always going to happen,” he murmurs when he pulls back. “I’ve dipped my toes in the lake of Remus Lupin and there’s no going back now, honey muffin. We were on a collision course.”
“A three-year collision course with a lot of near-misses and a lot of debris smacking into us,” says Remus, running a mitten along his elbow. “There—this is a good one, look, it’ll fit right in front of the window and it won’t scrape the ceiling.”
“And it’s weak. Look at that flimsy trunk, it won’t even survive its first night of eggnog and pudding.”
“It will if you don’t get sloshed beyond all reason this year.”
“You’ve got no spirit,” he scoffs, “none at all. Honestly! Asking a man not to get sloshed at Christmas is like asking Jesus not to die or Muggles not to worship electricity.”
“It’s like asking Sirius Black not to forget he’s already spiked the eggnog.”
Halfway down another row, a young couple passes by them, two women with a small baby wrapped up in enough wintery cloaking to clothe a family of seven; Sirius smiles at them, and his thoughts, same as they’ve always done, circle around to Remus, and Remus with a baby, and Remus reading bedtime stories, the two of them taking turns rocking a crying bundle back to sleep during long December midnights. He’s a little distressed—pleasantly so—to find that it’s not an unappealing thought, and then gives himself a few firm mental slaps because who the hell is he, James? He hasn’t cultivated this crusty rebellious exterior just for Remus Lupin to crack it like a coconut and gush all over his shoes, and yet.
He imagines getting older with Remus, and older. Imagines coming back here every year, taking an inordinate amount of time to find a perfect Christmas tree, just like this. Imagines them in an old brick house with loads of ivy and a garden and maybe a pond full of overgrowth, room enough for all their cluttered dreams and their jagged parts and all the bright, beautiful things they can build between them. The sun washes Remus’ hair red and gold and copper, pools under his eyes; Sirius squeezes his hand.
“This,” he says suddenly, “this is it, Remus, this is my final answer and if you don’t like this one, you’ve got no soul and there’s no hope for you. I’m going to roll it up and take it home.”
“Hmm.” Remus drops his hand and walks around the tree, surveying the height, the quality of its deep pine-green. It’s tall and wide and full at the bottom, sturdy enough to endure a night of heinous overindulgence. “Oh, what, you’ve got that look about the mouth again. What are you thinking about?”
“You,” he says.
“Oh.” Then, “Am I naked yet?”
“You’re wearing those underwear with the holly right now. I’m working on it but you’re being a real tricky slag about the whole thing,” says Sirius.
“Ask me if I’d like some cocoa and biscuits. Don’t give up, old boy, you’re a Gryffindor.”
“Actually, I’m thinking about you washing nappies and heating bottles.”
Remus peeks out at him from behind the tree, eyes and mouth alike wide and shocked and, he thinks, touched for reasons that are obviously causing him some nasty stomach turmoil. “I can’t even deal with flobberworms,” he sputters, voice breaking slightly. Sirius takes the high road and doesn’t mention it.
“A baby is basically one enormous flobberworm, only they cry and they look nicer,” says Sirius. Remus grabs onto the tree; yes, definitely sturdy enough. “I mean, I just—I don’t know. Can you even imagine me with a baby? It’s probably like imagining me in tweed or something.”
Regaining some of his composure, Remus takes a deep breath to temper the hysteria and lets go of the tree, still watching him with his eyes full of something like wonder, and uncertainty, and a lot like yearning. “Actually, I can,” he says quietly after a moment, coming around the front of the tree again. “I think you’d be good with them. Dora never wants to leave when Andromeda brings her over and that’s even when we don’t have cheesecake.”
“That’s because Dora lives in Shropshire and Shropshire’s full of naught but dry grass and soggy toast.”
“But you’re good with her,” Remus presses, biting his lower lip. “Maybe—maybe we can get a goldfish and work our way up.”
“Or a toad, though that might be overachieving a bit,” says Sirius, pushing Remus’ hair out of his eyes with gloved fingers. “So. Are we taking it home? Pleeeease, Moony, please don’t crush my poor fragile heart under your heels.”
“Check for small animals, please.”
Sirius bends down to look up the tree branches and shakes it gently by the trunk to make sure there are no surprises hiding in the lower branches until Remus is satisfied, smiling at him when he comes out and winding his long fingers around his scarf, plucking pine needles off his coat. “Look at you, you damn lovely thing,” he says into Sirius’ ear, and then kisses him as the wind rumbles in through the trees, as he falls into Sirius’ arms.
How perfect it would be, he thinks, to always have this, just the way he wants—to be able to put his arms around Remus and feel him breathing here against him, to come home to him, wait up for him, fall asleep and wake up with him for the rest of his life. To have his whole head and his heart full, and all his mismatched parts fastened together as tightly as he knows how; to maybe someday be able to lie in bed and ask Remus if he remembers their first kiss, their first Christmas, their first New Year. To have everything that’s worth having—a gust of wind to push them into each other’s arms, their stars fixed in the sky.
—
Two days after the full moon, the sky cloudless and agony-emptied, he wakes from an early afternoon nap with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and the other half of the bed cold, Remus finally up and gone to shower without nudging him awake. Glancing at the clock on the nightstand and swearing fluently, he hurls himself out of the bed he’s starting to think of as theirs rather than just Remus’ and tries desperately to make his hair stop sticking up for all of eight seconds before he gives up, tugging on a pair of socks from the dresser that used to sit in his bedroom and now stands opposite Remus’, right where it belongs among the teetering piles of books and parchment and the disassembled components of Muggle electronics he likes to take apart and learn, sometimes charm back together again. He’s stripped his bed of the quilt and pillows, shoved his robes and Oxfords beside Remus’ in the closet; they’ve made a nest of it here, grown their own borders to protect.
At the bathroom door, he knocks loud enough that Remus can hear over the shower and walks in, searching the drawers for the single neglected hairbrush between them Sirius has had since roughly 1973. “I’m going to the pharmacy for more pain-reducing things no one trusts me to make, and also Weetabix because you need your fiber,” he says, immediately getting the brush snagged in his hair. “Bugger fuck. Do you want—”
The curtain rattles on the rod; when he turns around, Remus is staring out from behind one of the giraffes on the plastic, holding it strategically and very deliberately in front of half his body, looking daft and disheveled and absolutely fucking gorgeous. Sirius’ whole body goes still as summer heat.
“Well. Hello there,” he says, grinning smooth as a knife, messy hair and pharmacy trips and Wizarding wars pushed to the very back of his brain with all the other unimportant things in the face of the far more critical situation: Remus, naked. “Look at you, all… naked and wet.”
“I’m very damp,” says Remus. “Were you even going to disconnect the Floo before you left? Anyone could walk in here and see my bits.”
“Pete would just turn magenta and make fun of the curtain and come back later. Prongs would light a cigarette and ask to watch, and probably so would Lily. They’re sad, pitiful people but they’re harmless.”
“Sounds about right.” Remus bunches the curtain up lower, lower; Sirius can see the water dripping off his hair and onto his shoulders, rolling down his arms. “It’s a little cold in here, Padfoot, I’m think I’m still a bit shaky from the other night. It’s so… quiet.”
“Bet it’s lonely,” says Sirius, leaning against the wall, “all by yourself, all soapy around the thighs.”
“Horrible,” Remus nods, smiling shyly and lowering his eyes for a moment, making Sirius’ belly clench, his heart jolting into a new rhythm in his chest. “I’ve been reading the backs of the shampoo bottles.”
A single stray drop of water flies from the shower and onto Sirius’ shirt, darkening the fabric. He stares at it. “Oh no,” he says, his eyes locking onto Remus’ again, unblinking.
“Oh no.”
“Now I’ve got to burn it,” he says.
“You’re unclean,” Remus cautions, reaching a wet hand out to fist around his shoulder. “You’d better get in. Right now.”
Amazing, he thinks, how the thought of this would have ruptured something catastrophic just a year ago; how it would have frightened him as much as it pulled at his limbs even as he desperately, endlessly craved this sort of closeness with Remus, the solidity of his arms around him, his body with Remus’ body like it belongs there. Sirius slots their hips and shoulders together like puzzle pieces and kisses him, kisses him, kisses him.
Later—far, far later than he’d intended—he’s standing in line at the pharmacy with Weetabix and pain potions and some Muggle chocolate, sliding a London newspaper across the counter mostly for the crossword when he thinks, strangely, that it’s a little warmer than he remembers it being when he left. He breathes in, dittany and cinnamon and vanilla; everything is smoother, softer, like a bright watercolor blurring sweetly at the edges, connected with slim silver threads.
“Sick girlfriend?” the man at the counter asks him, smiling sympathetically over the potions.
And this is part of it too, part of the wrinkles in the equation Remus isn’t here to help him iron out. He’s bought potions and magazines and bandages and plastic Muggle trinkets he swears are for Dora from this same man for years now: He can’t gauge whether he’ll get a patented Pureblood eye-roll, and thus risk arrest for putting him through the wall, which Sirius really doesn’t want to do because he likes the guy; or, possibly he’ll ring him up and say nothing else, and Sirius will walk away with a small sting between the eyes, and go out of his way to the other pharmacy for a while.
The nervous mind is truly a marvel, its neurons firing chaotically in a split second to take you—in great detail—through all the different ways things can go wrong, and all the winding, thorny paths you sometimes tread to avoid confrontation.
“Boyfriend, actually,” says Sirius. It makes something well up inside him, velvet-dark and brilliant, just to say it.
There’s another smile then, blue eyes scrunched up cheerfully behind his glasses. “Lucky man,” says the cashier, “he gets the seventy percent dark. That’s devotion.”
On the way out, one hand on the doorknob and a paper bag for Remus in the other, he realizes just how often he’s done this, newspapers and chocolate and healing spells murmured in the shrill glass shards of countless dawns, how many times his feet have taken him, automatically, through these same streets, the same doors, led him, always, to Remus. Outside, in the yellow sweep of the sun, Sirius can feel his heart beating with something almost tangible, flooding him like knowledge: a word, a word, a word.
Oh, he thinks, a mouth like thunder. Oh. There are names for this.
There are names for this.
—
Possibly his favorite Christmas tradition—though he’s not sure it’s quite right to call two years a tradition just yet—is dinner with Marlene and Dorcas, where it’s not so much a proper Christmas dinner as it is an entire spread of appetizers and biscuits and foods that are absolutely horrible for you, where they don’t eat at the table like civilized human beings, but in the sitting room like a picnic, and where they all drink cheap champagne the whole night through like it’s a sin. It’s the antithesis of his childhood, a sort of perverse potluck featuring everything from Muggle crisps to treacle tart and Dorcas’ weird port-wine cheeseballs; they bring mashed potatoes and Honeydukes chocolate and eat in front of the fire, and Remus is just getting all flappy and overexcited the way Sirius loves as he explains Muggle literature to Dorcas when Marlene tugs him outside for a cigarette, lighting her own before she’s even out of the sitting room.
“You’re so soppy I don’t know how you’re not leaking all over the carpet,” she tells him, flicking ash and grinning. On anyone else, it would be insufferable; on Marlene, it makes him smile. “I told you, didn’t I? Let’s hear it, Black—out with it.”
“Fuck off,” he says brightly, taking a drag and watching the tip catch. The sun’s already gone down between the cramped houses, the stars flickering like candles; Sirius glances at Marlene and swallows. “How did you know?”
“You’ve been sleeping with him and mooning over him and probably crying into your pillow over him for God knows how long and you’re seriously—”
“How did you know you were in love with her?”
All the white-hot incredulity fades from her face, softened, quietly, into understanding, into happiness; Marlene McKinnon, she of the gale-force voice and solid steel ovaries, wraps an arm around his waist and hugs him tightly. “That’s really a much easier question,” she says. Her eyes are bluer and brighter than a summertime sea, gone midnight-rich with memory. “If you’re asking it, you’re already up to your eyeballs.”
Smoking his cigarette down to the filter while the stars glimmer gold, while he knows there’s someone waiting on him inside, someone who has been waiting on him for the better part of their lives now, he thinks she’s right; he thinks, probably, that the moment you let yourselves think it, the moment you let yourselves want it, you are probably just as truly and deeply in love as two people have ever been or will ever be.
And Sirius Black has always been at least a little in love with Remus Lupin.
—
Christmas Eve, the fire built up high in the hearth, and Sirius comes in from one last cigarette to the smell of cinnamon and thick, spicy-sweet pudding on the kitchen counter, assuming Remus has already gone to bed only to find him still sitting on the sofa, an enormous and doubtlessly boring book balanced on the arm, absorbed and oblivious.
This means, in the dialect of Remus Lupin, one of two things:
1. He is waiting for Sirius, or
2. He is actually interested in what he’s reading.
Sirius likes Option Number One.
Sliding in beside him, Sirius presses his nose—cold—into the crook of his neck and trails a hand—also cold—underneath his jumper, feeling him tense and jump at the touch as he spins around, yelping, to glare at him.
“What the hell have you been doing, sitting in the cold cupboard?” he stammers. “I’m trying to read. I think I was trying to read the last time you flopped all over me, too.”
“You were. It was the same book,” says Sirius, his hands warming with Remus’ skin, feeling him relax into it, just slightly. “Which ought to tell you it’s not that interesting and you’re just not as into Dumas as, y’know, me.”
“Or maybe it’s because I’ve been interrupted every time I’ve tried to get through it.”
In the fathomless, tangled cords of their shared history, Sirius has learned to play this game and he’s learned to play it like a professional sport: Remus will only really choose a book or work or other sundry responsibilities over his friends if the promises of uncharted territory or something horribly illegal or food or, recently, sex, are immediately presented as inherently superior options, and he as a soggy blanket for not jumping at the chance. They have to be dangled in front of him like bait, a glimpse of chocolate held in outstretched fingers, before he’ll leap—and galvanize. Over the years, Sirius has taught himself to read Remus like a weathervane, all his wavering, all his faltering, all his nail-chewing indecision.
Remus taps his index finger against the spine of the book; he is faltering.
“That’s a whole lot of pages,” says Sirius, leaning just a little closer; his hair brushes Remus’ cheek. “More than even the sturdiest of Prefects could reasonably expect to get through in a single night, determined though he may be.”
“It’s a very good book,” Remus answers. His heartbeat has stuttered and fallen into a new meter, just a tiny, silent misstep imperceptible to anyone but Sirius. “I can’t sleep until I know what happens.”
“Enthralling, is it,” mutters Sirius, grazing his knuckles along the waistband of his pyjamas and making him shiver. “Just makes your heart pound.”
Letting out a shaky breath, Remus tightens his grip on the arm of the sofa, staring determinedly down at the letters, unseeing. “There’s a lot of incredible symbolism in this one. I think you might like it.”
“You haven’t turned a page in three minutes,” says Sirius, dragging his lips across Remus’ ear, one hand splayed across his belly, fingers stroking up his ribs. It’s a head-rush, this shared breath, the way he’s learned to touch Remus, the way it feels to want and be wanted. To always want the world to be beautiful for someone.
“I’m savoring every word,” says Remus. Sirius can feel his iron resolve crumbling up like aluminum foil.
“No you’re not.”
“I’m going to read it all night.”
“I’m not wearing any underwear,” he hisses, and then the book slams shut like a benediction, shoved violently aside on the end table, and he’s being dragged down the hallway by his shirt, laughing and laughing.
His pyjamas are still on by the time they get to the bed, which trips Remus up; he falls hard, and Sirius pulls his trousers off and runs his palms up his thighs to his hips, pressing his mouth to his belly and feeling it flutter under his lips, soft and salty-warm like the rest of him. He kisses his ribs, grinning against his hip at the gasp that rips out of Remus’ throat when he wraps a hand around his cock and strokes slowly, teeth scraping across his hipbone.
“Are you sure you don’t want to finish your book?” he whispers, sitting back on his heels and kissing the inside of Remus’ knee. “I won’t mind too much, you know. We can just—put this off.”
“I’ve already finished it twice,” Remus laughs, naked yearning stark in the light of his eyes, breaking off the moment Sirius’ mouth slides over his cock, one hand scrabbling for his hair as Sirius moves up and down along the length of it. There’s something about this he loves, the way Remus watches him, how he grates out his name, breathless and dream-sharp, when he flattens his tongue underneath and curls it around the very tip; he’d thought about this a lot before he ever did it, but the fact of it—the soft taste of him, his breathing changing for Sirius, the intense thrill of it, sparking always between them both—is something his Highly Educational Reading Material didn’t mention.
In fact, his Highly Educational Reading Material didn’t cover a lot of things beyond the bare mechanics. Like how squishy and awkward and terrifying it can be at first; how it’s a language like any other with a syntax and structure, how much better it is if you’re doing it with someone who can make you laugh. How much better it’s going to get, in general.
Nothing tells you all the ways it will transform, all the ways you’ll learn to navigate yourself and someone else: Remus’ hands pulling him up, touching him as if he’s starved for his skin and his heart, wide-open, leaving heavy heat-strokes across the jut of his shoulders, his ribs, the curve of his spine. He drags Sirius between his legs and gasps, and Sirius, looking down at him with his eyes half-closed and his heart in his mouth, kisses him hard and hopes he can taste the things that are singing in his blood, all the things that begin and end with Remus, stacked like verse on his tongue.
“Take your fucking socks off,” he half-groans, teeth at Remus’ jaw.
“No,” laughs Remus, grinding their hips together, making him hiss, “my feet are cold.”
“You look like the world’s biggest plonker,” says Sirius. “I’ll warm you up.”
“Such confidence.”
“Says the man wearing whimsical snowman socks.”
“This man,” says Remus, sly and deliberate, “will have warm feet if the other man fails to deliver.”
Sirius presses his mouth over Remus’ pulse and sucks gently the way he’s learned he likes best, one hand clasped around his hip and the other at his shoulder, feeling him moan low in his throat. “Moony, Moony, you are about take the mood and back over it with an eighteen-wheeler.”
“Take them off,” he gasps, and Sirius, laughing, does.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever have enough of this, the way he falls so easily into Remus and moves with him, their bodies tangled tight, taking each other into a rhythm that’s becoming familiar, building hard-fast in their blood. Remus wraps his legs around his waist and takes him in deeper, pressing a hand to his cheek and turning his head to look at him, flushed and gasping suddenly when he meets his eyes.
“Sirius,” he chokes out hoarsely. His eyes tear open the dark. “Sirius.”
“Are you warm enough yet,” he murmurs, rubbing a hand up from the smooth dip in Remus’ hip to his chest and resting his forehead against Remus’, breathing with him, feeling the red swell of his pulse in his own skin; he can’t look away.
“Yes,” he moans, “God, yes.”
“I can get you some shoes.”
“Shut up,” he laughs, and kisses him—wonderingly, perfectly slow.
“Remus.” He smiles at the way his name feels on his tongue, half-gasped and low like a secret as their hips move, rhythm building faster, roughness and softness and heat; he presses it to Remus’ mouth and feels him swallow it, watches his face shifting when he wraps a hand around his cock, his mouth opening, his eyes brightening while says it again and again until Remus comes: fingers clutching his shoulders, a heel digging into the bed, Sirius’ name on the bare thread of his breath as if it’s the only thing that’s ever mattered.
All it takes to get him there is Remus’ smile pressed to the hollow of his throat and his hands running up his biceps, and he comes, gasping into his hair, the slick rush burning high and melting wildly through his body; Remus holds onto him through the aftershocks, lips pressed to his neck, every inch of them entwined as inextricably and irrevocably as anything could ever be.
Later, Remus’ feet tucked under his leg and the quilt that smells like both of them pulled up around their chests, Sirius kisses his cheek, his temple, the scar on his chin, the place where his jaw meets his ear, feeling out the newest shape they’ve shifted into, skin on skin and both of them wound around each other like a nautilus on the bed. “You know,” he says, “I am really glad you like shagging boys.”
“I’m really glad I do, too,” says Remus, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Sirius loves to hear his voice like this, as if it begins in his body instead of his throat, speaking through his blood and bones and into him, moving him in a way only Remus can. “I’m really glad you got all your marbles in order.”
“My marbles have a thing for you,” he says, stretching. He always feels so open and raw and beautiful after, tangled with Remus in the middle of the night.
“I’ve been told,” says Remus. There’s such an off-kilter beauty to him, Sirius thinks, his big nose, his slight overbite, the blunt sweetness of his jaw. His eyes are brighter than anything has ever been, even in the December dark. “It makes me happy. You make me happy.”
“How do you do that? Just—I need to say something,” he mutters, running a hand through his hair and holding Remus tighter, squeezing him around the ribs. “You’re trying to outdo me because you’re still hacked off about the socks, aren’t you.”
“Oh yes, exactly,” Remus says dreamily, yawning as he settles himself against Sirius. “It couldn’t have anything to do with you. Couldn’t be that I need you here. Couldn’t be that I don’t ever want to wake up without you. Not at all.”
His heart constricts with Remus’ voice, with all of it—Remus hands and his hands, all the spaces they’ve filled. “Moony,” he whispers, wonder clutching him by the throat, and closes his eyes.
The splash of light in the room illuminates the shadows of their presence, colors painted like rippling ink: the desk, the books piled high, the extra blankets, the clothes strung out on the floor. Sometimes, he feels like these echoes, all the things he is and all the different boys he’s been shimmering like torn silk, each one part of a whole he’s only just beginning to see; he imagines what he’ll look like in five years, what shape he and Remus will make on their bed, the man time will weave him. He imagines them like this room, like the scarves hung together on the back of the chair, the glass of water on the nightstand, the Muggle radio taken apart on his dresser. The ticking of a clock. Two hands, clasped together. A pack of cigarettes, half-empty. An open door.
—
In the morning, in the kitchen, he finds Remus at the stove, a cup of tea on the counter and an oven mitt on one hand, shoving a turkey into the oven and looking mildly dubious about the whole thing, though Sirius can hardly blame him; last time they tried something like this, they forgot to take out the bag of gooey turkey-insides before they put it in the oven. It ended in severe nausea.
“Happy Christmas,” Remus says when he sees him, smiling into his tea. “Where’s my pony?”
“Right here,” says Sirius, draping his arms over his shoulders and kissing his nose, grinning wicked-sharp. “Want to ride me?”
Remus, in spite of himself, laughs and drops his hands onto his chest, shaking his head fondly. “That’s, well, it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever said,” he says, “but it’s right up there.”
“I can say worse.”
He smiles and smiles. “I know.”
“Anyway,” says Sirius, stirring an obscene amount of cream into his own tea, bag still in, “happy Christmas. I love you.”
Remus very carefully puts his tea back on the counter and turns to him, eyes shot wide, and says, “Sirius, did you just. I—what. Did you say.”
“I said, happy Christmas. I love you.” He takes a drink and takes Remus by the wrist, tugging him over and into him again. “Figured that one out all on my own, too.”
“You love me,” Remus whispers, swallowing hard, pulling back to look at him, as if Sirius is the only thing he can see. “You just said—”
“I know what I said,” he says, tilting Remus head back up when he drops it. “I love you. I want to get old and grey and arthritic with you. I want to get sick on pie with you.”
Something settles into Remus’ skin, filling his scars, his eyes, his tired bones; Sirius has never actually seen him cry—he’s been close a few times—but he thinks for a moment he might have done it, until Remus clenches his jaw and takes a deep breath, folding himself up against Sirius, who catches him—just the same as he’s always done.
“I got you pyjamas,” he mumbles, slightly sniffly, into Sirius’ shirt.
He lets out a breath, bones gone unexpectedly to jelly. It fits his mouth so easily, like a charm, like the swift blossom of magic in his fingers, and he supposes that’s what love is all about, anyway. It’s insidious. It lurks, dark as burnt twilight, in the hollows of your own shadow and then springs on you, brilliant and transformative, while you’re holding chocolate and pain potions in the pharmacy, when you’ve found your body wrapped around someone else’s, just for them and them alone.
It’s the bravest thing he’s ever done, love.
“I love pyjamas,” he whispers to Remus, shaky and exultant as he finds his lips. “I’ll never fucking take them off.”
In the white light of morning, both of them so raw and together and in love, Remus presses his face into Sirius’ neck, right over his pulse. “I love you,” he says, right into his skin where Sirius can feel it, tangled in his blood.
No matter where they go, he thinks, no matter how he grows or how he fits his pieces into place in the end, his compass will always point him here—to the pulse in his ears, to the arms that hold him up. To all these places they keep themselves, and all the shapes they shift into, together.
Author:
cevennesRecipient:
youcantseeusRating: R
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *Sex, language, some discussion of homophobia*
Word count: 19,000
Summary: There are a few things Sirius really didn't count on for Christmas of 1979. The extreme sexual confusion is one of them; Remus Lupin is approximately seventy-eight of the rest.
Notes: This got long, then it got longer, and there's really no excuse; a thousand I'm-sorrys would not be apology enough! Nonetheless, happy holidays,
youcantseeus! May 2015 be filled with all of these two your heart could desire.Also, a huge thanks to the mods for being so understanding!
Back down at headquarters, waiting for Dumbledore to show up and say something Ageless and Mysterious, Sirius bounces his leg up and down and chews his nails to ragged, frazzled stumps, checking the clock automatically every twenty seconds and glaring acidly when it refuses to quicken its sluggish pulse. He’s going through his mental list of things he’d like to do with Remus for the fourth time and trying to figure out 1.) how to articulate them, and 2.) how to even go about half of them, when James Potter, half-human, half-Niffler, slides in beside him, sniffing his neck and cheek with unnatural and vaguely frightening interest.
“Yum,” says James. “Have you been eating apples?”
For some reason, probably the same reason Emmeline Vance’s cheese toasty makes him go wobbly in the legs, nothing has ever been more hilarious than this. After he recovers somewhat, still shaking with a few repressed laughs, he clears his throat and meets James’ judging eyes, drilling brown bullet holes into him, and promptly dissolves into another fit that leaves his stomach wonderfully, impossibly fluttery.
“I’ve been eating something,” he mutters, low and wild.
“Mate, if I didn’t know any better right now I’d swear you were high,” says James, sniffing his shirt again. “Where the hell did you go for lunch?”
“Home,” he grins.
“And what did you do, drink one of Moony’s potions?” James’ eyes narrow, traveling down Sirius’ well-bred nose to his lips, which are still rather red and a little puffy, and then down farther to his rumpled collar where a tiny bruise is blooming on the sensitive skin there; at that, they fly immediately fly back up to meet Sirius’, looking amazed and mildly scandalized. “Oh my God,” he says wonderingly, “oh my God, you deflowered Moony over your lunch break, I figured you’d wait till at least Christmas, you slag! How is he? How’s—oh my God, what was that like?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, you little—would you stop sniffing me, I don’t have any food on me today, thanks for that! Honestly, you’d think you were the pregnant one,” he grumbles, leaning away. “Anyway, we didn’t—you know. That.” He runs a hand through his hair, checks the clock again; five minutes have counted themselves out while James sniffed his face. “And where’s this concern for me, I’d like to know? You never ask after me or Pete, you inconsiderate knob.”
“I’ve seen you almost every bloody day of my life since we were eleven and I still haven’t forgiven Wormtail for being sick in my hair,” says James, still watching him with something like happiness lighting up the shadows on his face. “I haven’t seen Moony in more than a week and you know I pine if he’s away from me for too long.”
“Remus is just fine, and I would know. Don’t you worry about it.”
“I don’t trust you. You’ve scrambled his poor brilliant mind, haven’t you? Haven’t you? I hope you at least made him some tea after your little afternoon hit-and-run.”
“Begging for details will get you absolutely nowhere,” says Sirius, throwing one more venomous glance at the clock. “You’re a sad, sad man, Potter, you’ll just have to get your vicarious little thrills elsewhere because I am not feeding you. Some of us,” he says, drawing himself up to full ramrod-backed, lazy-mouthed aristocratic splendor, “have a sense of honor.”
“I’ll remember that the next time Padfoot rolls on something dead,” James mutters, turning towards him again and smiling his widest smile, crooked, exultant. “I’m just—I’m really happy you’re getting there, you know,” he says. “I love you, mate.”
“Love you too. God knows why.”
“It’s because of my perfect, ripe, chiseled—”
“Flaccid—”
“Fuck you.” James grins at him. “And you better treat him like a damn princess or I’ll hurt you badly,” James says cheerfully, stretching an arm across Sirius’ shoulders. “You can tell him I said the same goes for him, too.”
“Jealousy makes you look bloated and hideous, Prongs,” he says, happier, by far, than he’s been for months, immune even to the ticking of the clock on the wall and the thousand different darknesses seeping into the creases of their floor-length maps with James’ arm around him. The impatient hurry-up hurry-up hurry-up of his heart knocking against his chest, the way he misses Remus like fire—even that is bearable, if only just.
—
Five o’clock and forty-seven seconds, right on the dot. The sun fallen below the inky horizon with the stars glimmering through a veil of clouds, the slush frozen over into ice on the streets, and Sirius bangs through the front door like a human hurricane, like lives and pumpkin pie are on the line. If Moody could see this, he’d start paying Remus to hide in various rooms of the Auror training headquarters every morning; Sirius would show up with half an hour at least to spare, and possibly breakfast for everyone.
“Hello,” says Remus, slightly breathless on the sofa. He’s got his knees folded beside him and a book in his lap he isn’t looking at; the only thing he seems to see at all is Sirius, his hand flexing slightly on his thigh, light catching the ends of his hair. “How was the rest of your day?”
“Disgusting,” he says. He still hasn’t managed to get his boots off, because that would mean looking away from Remus. “It felt like a month, Moony, I haven’t had food or drink or—or anything.”
“And last I heard, two-thirds of your organ systems were already failing,” says Remus, setting his book down absently and crossing the room, watching Sirius watching him on their worn-out shoe mat. “We’d better do something about that.”
“It’s getting pretty dire,” says Sirius, his belly trembling as Remus comes closer, and closer, taking the ends of his scarf between his fingertips. “In fact, I think the length of my recovery is directly proportional to the time I spend snogging you.”
“Is that so,” murmurs Remus, pulling gently on his scarf until his nose brushes Sirius’ ear. “This is me warning you,” he whispers, tight and frantic. Sirius kisses him before Remus can beat him to it this time, slower, softer than the first few, his heart swelling up against Remus’ hands sliding up his chest. It is, he thinks distantly, the best kiss he’s ever had in his life.
Remus pulls away after a few moments, and Sirius leans forward with him, clutching him around the ribs. He can feel him breathing, can feel the warm muted lines of his waist down to his hips, straight rather than curved inward like a woman’s. He likes both—the sloping curls, the flow of edges, soft bulges too—but there’s something about this, the feel of another man’s muscles and bones moving under his hands, that Sirius loves.
“There’s leftover soup,” says Remus, his voice gone a little rough. Sirius kisses him again, quickly, just for the thrill of it—just because he can. “Are you feeling better?”
“You saved my life, Doctor Professor Lupin. Saved it with your wanton slaggish ways,” he says. “Here, let me help you—”
“Get your shoes off. We can eat in the sitting room, it’s warmer in there anyway.”
“And there is a sofa,” says Sirius, not losing sight of what’s important.
Dinner is much the same as it always is, but brilliant somehow, tilted just right, like a crooked still life hanging over the mantel that he’s straightened and finally, finally fallen into. Sirius revels in every laugh and every smile Remus pulls out of him, loves even the angular stretch of tension that catches in their throats over vegetable soup, all of it so new and raw and beautiful; Remus gets pepper up his nose and sneezes violently, and Sirius starts laughing because it’s the funniest thing, ever, because nothing is more perfect than his knee next to Remus’ knee, his voice twining around Remus’ voice, their soup bowls stacked together. He wants to set himself against Remus; he wants to move with Remus, wants to feel both of them alive in their own skin, wants to learn all the different ways they fit together. He wants.
F-A-M-I-N-E. Twenty-three down on today’s crossword, two blood-dark, voracious syllables howling with an ancient hunger. Beside him, Remus swallows, runs a hand along his thigh; Sirius wants to touch him.
“Oh, those,” says Sirius, coming back from the washing up just as the Muggle news comes back on. “Muggles and their sky trollies,” he mutters when he sits back down, just for the way it makes Remus clench his teeth. “Look at them! It downright incredible, I mean, they can launch hundreds of tons of metal and human life into the sky and it’s fucking amazing and no one talks about it except to complain about the seats or whatever, but the second you mention flying broomsticks it’s off to therapy for the next two years.”
“Muggles are a bit obtuse about these things, but, y’know, not being magical, they’ve got their reasons.”
“I know all about that, too.”
“Oh?” Remus lifts one eyebrow. Sirius’ elbows tingle briefly for some reason, and he wonders if that’s another factor that comes with being attracted to boys or if it’s just Remus playing havoc with various parts of his body again.
“They’ve got to compensate,” he says, “for not having dishwashing spells and the like. They think Merlin is a myth, so they invent men who stomp down chimneys at Christmas in carriages drawn by flying centaurs instead. They think baby teeth are a delicacy for fairies and they don’t believe in mopping their movie theaters but no, oh no, straddling a broom for a living is weird. It’s right bizarre is what it is, Moony.”
Remus makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh, leaning back against the couch. “I don’t really have it in me to explain everything that’s wrong with what you just said.”
“Because you can’t refute it, that’s why,” says Sirius, leaning back with him and turning his head sideways to meet his eyes. “You’re disqualified! I win.”
“And what do you think you ought to win for that shameful display, hmm?”
“How about,” he starts, licking his lips, his blood heating in his chest, “how about I kiss your face and we call it even, since you’re such a graceless loser?”
“Speaking of certain things,” says Remus, “there are people out there who think we’re going to hell for this, and worse. In case you spent that hour of Muggle Studies behind the greenhouses, too.”
Sirius, unconcerned with going to hell, leans in and drags his lips across the tiny scar on Remus’ cheek and down to the corner of his mouth, feeling Remus smile against him, warm as sunrise. “I actually find that extremely attractive,” he says, pushing off the couch to straddle Remus’ hips tentatively, or as tentatively as you can do this at all—it’s sort of an all-or-nothing kind of deal. He’s never done this before. He’s had girls do it to him and he’s liked it plenty, but he’s never tried it on anyone else; miraculously, he doesn’t feel anything like lumpy or awkward, and Remus is running his hands up his forearms to his elbows, eyes brighter than the flat-edged moon filling up in the sky, so he reckons he’s doing something right.
“Is this—” Remus curls his hands around Sirius’ elbows, shy and shaky, a sudden tensing of his shoulders like birdflight under Sirius’ fingers. “Is this all right?”
“Is this all right,” Sirius growls at his jaw, feeling his breath hitch. “This is fucking perfect, Remus,” he says, and kisses him breathless, wonderingly, thrillingly hard as Remus, fluid as tide beneath their crumpled winter stars.
The rest of the evening is a flood of kissing and touching and bad television-watching until bed, which makes Sirius’ stomach bottom out for entirely different reasons than it did this afternoon, his head swimming with threads of all the things they could do, and whether they should do them, and whether he even knows exactly how to do them. Flipping through Remus’ books to distract himself is only marginally helpful; he can’t find anything dirty, though he knows there must be some lying about, probably shoved inconspicuously between one of his huge history books. Maybe there are pictures. Maybe there are step-by-step guides.
Maybe there are diagrams.
In the end, though, all he can find is some exceedingly nasty French poetry that Remus would probably still try to argue has lots of inherent artistic value in its lurid, loving detail of male genitalia.
He’s sitting on the edge of Remus’ bed, feet slightly sweaty, debating whether or not to light a cigarette and lounge back on the pillows when Remus comes in and say something delicate and subtle like, Hey, Remus, want to have sex? when the door squeaks shut on its hinges, and there he is, all mismatched socks and damp, uncombed hair, shirt buttoned up all the way, rubbing lavender-smelling lotion into his dry knuckles and sneezing over it for the seventeenth time tonight.
This is the man you have chosen, Sirius Black, he thinks, a heavy, clear happiness suddenly fighting it out with the nervousness twinging in his belly. Remus smiles at him, surprised and exultant and trying so hard to fold it away in his mouth and keep it from showing too much, like Sirius isn’t going to pull him down and find it there, anyway.
“I seem to have an unreasonably attractive man on my bed,” says Remus, coming closer until Sirius wraps his hands around his hips, pulling him down. “Did—have you been going through my books?”
“What makes you think that?” he mumbles into the fabric of Remus’ shirt. His chest swells and deflates under Sirius’ mouth.
“You’re—oh Christ,” he says, looking down and finding the filthy, dog-eared evidence. “You know, that poem’s an allegory for—”
“The only thing that’s an allegory for is how much he wanted an illicit blowjob.”
“Yeah, okay,” Remus admits, leaning over to put it on the nightstand. When he turns back, delightfully pink, he bites his lip and runs his thumb over the bump of bone on Sirius’ wrist, pressing his forehead against Sirius’, their hair all tangled up. “We don’t—we don’t have to. You know.”
“Sex, Remus,” he says, hearing Remus’ hard swallow. “Sex! Sex sex SEX. Can you even say it?”
“Yes,” he snaps. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to.”
“What, like you have?”
“No, you stupid berk, it’s only—I want you to be—I want it to be right. Is all.”
Sirius kisses the tired places underneath his eyes and pulls him down on top of him, heavy and flannel-warm when he kisses him. “You’re fucking lovely,” he tells Remus, slipping his fingers beneath his shirt and feeling him shiver over him, mouth parted and wet, eyes on Sirius, only Sirius. It makes him feel wanted—makes him feel braver, reckless. When he shifts his thigh underneath Remus and presses it between his legs, Remus gasps into his mouth, drags their hips together slowly, both of them hissing at the electric friction surging through their skin.
“God, I’m—I’ve got no idea what I’m doing,” Remus breathes, gripping Sirius’ hip hard, his knuckles yellow-white in the shadows of the bed.
“Neither do I,” says Sirius. He bends his knees around Remus and thrusts upward against Remus’, his belly trembling hotly when groans into his neck and grazes his teeth along the pulse there, frantic-fast, beating for him. “So don’t stop, oh, don’t.”
Ragged-rough and slow, the rhythm they fall into, heat and pressure and the sweet, intimate push-and-pull of their bodies moving together until Sirius comes suddenly like a surprise: He gasps, kissing Remus irregularly and saying something stupid and possibly important, and then Remus follows, tensing, biting his mouth, groaning Sirius’ name like a charm—like a poem knitted from memory, long-held, reverent.
In the muzzy afterwards, once they’ve shut off the lights again and taken care of the mess that comes from not bothering to remove clothes, Remus presses close to him under the quilt just as Sirius reaches for him, burying his face in his hair, shaken loose with pleasure and newness and wide awake with the strange immense joy of themselves, unfurling.
“That was nice,” says Remus, smiling into his shoulder.
“My God, is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?” asks Sirius. “I’ll tell you what it was, since I obviously completely blew your mind: It was absolutely bloody amazing. Is what.”
“You liked it, then?”
He loved it. Whatever he was expecting—something similar to what he’d done with Mary Macdonald, which was soft and slick and enjoyable enough, if underwhelming—wasn’t quite this, the jumbled closeness and the heavy warmth of it. He never wants to get up from this bed.
Which is the sort of thing that’s probably important to say, so he does. “I loved it,” he says, and kisses Remus on the bridge of his nose; he figures he’s allowed to do that now. Remus smiles with all his teeth on the pillow they’re sharing, watching him happily, wonderingly.
“Me, too,” says Remus, an arm around his ribs, his ankles wedged under one of Sirius’ legs.
“You realize we could have been doing this for ages now, if you’d just said you wanted to be my—” he pauses, unsure.
“Boyfriend,” Remus finishes for him, looking surprised and thrilled, secretly, with how easily it comes to him. “Please, please don’t call me your partner, it makes me feel like I’m an eighty-year-old retired man herding sheep in Shropshire.”
“You want to be my boyfriend,” Sirius trills, kissing him again. “You and Lily will meet up for coffee and do whatever ponce-y things the two of you do and sigh over the horrible men in your lives, drinking the milk straight out of the carton and leaving the seat up.”
“I’ve been doing that for two years, I just wasn’t having sex with you,” says Remus. “You haven’t been drinking it straight from the carton, have you?”
“Believe me, cupcake, I learned my lesson with the peanut butter.” He closes his eyes, smoothing Remus’ hair out with his fingers, sleep finally beginning to sink into him; at his chest, Remus breathes, long and even. “I think I’m getting places,” he says quietly, shifting when Remus peers up at him from the frizzy fringe of his hair.
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” he answers. “I’m not sure, I mean, not yet, but—closer.”
“I think,” says Remus, brushing his fingers along Sirius’ collarbone, “it’s a matter of what you find yourself attracted to—what you question, and how often. The answer is a lot different for a lot of people.”
“Both,” says Sirius, “about equally. I think. But it’s different for—oh, bugger, I don’t fucking know,” he says, gliding his bare foot against Remus’ fuzzy sock-covered foot. “I just know I’ll always be here when you wake up.”
Remus’ lips are warm against his own, filling in their spaces. Outside, the moon claws against the frosted window with serrated fingers, violent-pale; Sirius holds his hand over Remus’ heart.
—
A whole week, then, of little but snow and settling in, both of them falling into their tiny house and into each other like a warm front. They kiss over breakfast, in the bathroom, in the doorway, pile on more blankets and sleep without their pyjamas, learn the art of tying themselves together. Sirius brings home dark chocolate truffles and takeout Remus warns him is too hot and endures both tears and Remus’ poorly disguised laughter as he eats; Remus reads him the best stories from the newspaper and leaves the bag in Sirius’ tea every time he makes it. They string up tacky garland and hang a juniper wreath on the door, and Sirius, never one to let the holiday go without, presses sprigs of mistletoe between the pages of the books Remus is reading, waits for him to find them. He’s repaid in full (and sometimes more) at the most inopportune times: brushing his teeth, his hands full of grocery bags, having a crisis while cleaning out the fireplace and up to his elbows in ashes.
They sink down into their own territory where only they know the footing. Outside this house, there’s work and the Order and the treacherous, bloodstained battleground of adulthood, but here, when it’s them and them alone, Sirius can be as young as he really is. He can be happy for newsprint miracles and teabags left in, for the way the two of them grow between the cracks in the concrete. He can breathe.
On Sunday, the air holding blue in the midafternoon chill, they go off in search of the biggest Christmas tree in the village, wandering between rows of pine needles and snow drifts in their boots while Remus makes quietly disapproving noises at the logistics of getting one through the front door. It’s when they cross paths with another couple, and then another, that Sirius realizes: Wow, there are a lot of straight people here.
He amends: Probably not all of them are straight. But it’s jarring, in a way, to know that no one would ever doubt for a moment that they’ve both got their names on the house title and they share the same bed, the same Gringotts account, the same history. They’ll never have to worry about a Pureblood telling them to stop screwing around; they’ll never have all the things they’ve grown and shaped and bled for and nourished with all the love there is inside them invalidated, diminished.
People will look at them and see True Love and The Spirit of the Season, or something. They’ll look at him and Remus and see two good friends or roommates until they’re told otherwise.
They don’t have to wonder where all their happy endings are.
“You’re awfully quiet,” says Remus. His nose is very red. “How about this one?”
“It’s missing half its stuffing in the middle, Moony.”
“I think it’s sweet,” he sniffs. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that—have you noticed,” he says, dropping his voice, “we are the only couple here who don’t look like we belong on the cover of Witch Weekly?”
“Does that bother you?”
“No. I just forget sometimes, I guess.” He reaches for Remus’ hand, only to find Remus already reaching for his; he wraps his fingers around the coarse mittens, pulls him close. “This one.”
A smile, a sigh. “Sirius, that’s bigger than our ceiling.” He falls gently into Sirius’ side like a bolster. “Could you see yourself doing that? Being all, y’know—married to a woman, babies, Christmas photos every year, matching bathroom towels?”
“No, because too much of that and you end up on a greeting card and then you’re an empty husk of a man before the age of thirty,” he says, steering Remus to the next row of trees. “But—yeah. Without the husky emptiness, and all. I could see that.” He thinks of Remus, thinks of Kingsley Shacklebolt’s slow smiles, his sculpted abdominals, his strong, capable, knee-weakening voice. “I could see it just as easily with a man. So—I guess that means bisexual, after all. I am four whole syllables, Moony.”
It surprises him, how fast the realization crashes into him. It’s like tripwire: snagged around the ankles, the snap, the fall, and then the click—detonation. He’s got no real preference, but he’s got Remus, and Sirius aims to keep him.
“I can see it with you,” he says. He leans over and kisses him, soft and sweet, their own happy conclusion. Remus doesn’t let go of his hand. “It was always going to happen,” he murmurs when he pulls back. “I’ve dipped my toes in the lake of Remus Lupin and there’s no going back now, honey muffin. We were on a collision course.”
“A three-year collision course with a lot of near-misses and a lot of debris smacking into us,” says Remus, running a mitten along his elbow. “There—this is a good one, look, it’ll fit right in front of the window and it won’t scrape the ceiling.”
“And it’s weak. Look at that flimsy trunk, it won’t even survive its first night of eggnog and pudding.”
“It will if you don’t get sloshed beyond all reason this year.”
“You’ve got no spirit,” he scoffs, “none at all. Honestly! Asking a man not to get sloshed at Christmas is like asking Jesus not to die or Muggles not to worship electricity.”
“It’s like asking Sirius Black not to forget he’s already spiked the eggnog.”
Halfway down another row, a young couple passes by them, two women with a small baby wrapped up in enough wintery cloaking to clothe a family of seven; Sirius smiles at them, and his thoughts, same as they’ve always done, circle around to Remus, and Remus with a baby, and Remus reading bedtime stories, the two of them taking turns rocking a crying bundle back to sleep during long December midnights. He’s a little distressed—pleasantly so—to find that it’s not an unappealing thought, and then gives himself a few firm mental slaps because who the hell is he, James? He hasn’t cultivated this crusty rebellious exterior just for Remus Lupin to crack it like a coconut and gush all over his shoes, and yet.
He imagines getting older with Remus, and older. Imagines coming back here every year, taking an inordinate amount of time to find a perfect Christmas tree, just like this. Imagines them in an old brick house with loads of ivy and a garden and maybe a pond full of overgrowth, room enough for all their cluttered dreams and their jagged parts and all the bright, beautiful things they can build between them. The sun washes Remus’ hair red and gold and copper, pools under his eyes; Sirius squeezes his hand.
“This,” he says suddenly, “this is it, Remus, this is my final answer and if you don’t like this one, you’ve got no soul and there’s no hope for you. I’m going to roll it up and take it home.”
“Hmm.” Remus drops his hand and walks around the tree, surveying the height, the quality of its deep pine-green. It’s tall and wide and full at the bottom, sturdy enough to endure a night of heinous overindulgence. “Oh, what, you’ve got that look about the mouth again. What are you thinking about?”
“You,” he says.
“Oh.” Then, “Am I naked yet?”
“You’re wearing those underwear with the holly right now. I’m working on it but you’re being a real tricky slag about the whole thing,” says Sirius.
“Ask me if I’d like some cocoa and biscuits. Don’t give up, old boy, you’re a Gryffindor.”
“Actually, I’m thinking about you washing nappies and heating bottles.”
Remus peeks out at him from behind the tree, eyes and mouth alike wide and shocked and, he thinks, touched for reasons that are obviously causing him some nasty stomach turmoil. “I can’t even deal with flobberworms,” he sputters, voice breaking slightly. Sirius takes the high road and doesn’t mention it.
“A baby is basically one enormous flobberworm, only they cry and they look nicer,” says Sirius. Remus grabs onto the tree; yes, definitely sturdy enough. “I mean, I just—I don’t know. Can you even imagine me with a baby? It’s probably like imagining me in tweed or something.”
Regaining some of his composure, Remus takes a deep breath to temper the hysteria and lets go of the tree, still watching him with his eyes full of something like wonder, and uncertainty, and a lot like yearning. “Actually, I can,” he says quietly after a moment, coming around the front of the tree again. “I think you’d be good with them. Dora never wants to leave when Andromeda brings her over and that’s even when we don’t have cheesecake.”
“That’s because Dora lives in Shropshire and Shropshire’s full of naught but dry grass and soggy toast.”
“But you’re good with her,” Remus presses, biting his lower lip. “Maybe—maybe we can get a goldfish and work our way up.”
“Or a toad, though that might be overachieving a bit,” says Sirius, pushing Remus’ hair out of his eyes with gloved fingers. “So. Are we taking it home? Pleeeease, Moony, please don’t crush my poor fragile heart under your heels.”
“Check for small animals, please.”
Sirius bends down to look up the tree branches and shakes it gently by the trunk to make sure there are no surprises hiding in the lower branches until Remus is satisfied, smiling at him when he comes out and winding his long fingers around his scarf, plucking pine needles off his coat. “Look at you, you damn lovely thing,” he says into Sirius’ ear, and then kisses him as the wind rumbles in through the trees, as he falls into Sirius’ arms.
How perfect it would be, he thinks, to always have this, just the way he wants—to be able to put his arms around Remus and feel him breathing here against him, to come home to him, wait up for him, fall asleep and wake up with him for the rest of his life. To have his whole head and his heart full, and all his mismatched parts fastened together as tightly as he knows how; to maybe someday be able to lie in bed and ask Remus if he remembers their first kiss, their first Christmas, their first New Year. To have everything that’s worth having—a gust of wind to push them into each other’s arms, their stars fixed in the sky.
—
Two days after the full moon, the sky cloudless and agony-emptied, he wakes from an early afternoon nap with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and the other half of the bed cold, Remus finally up and gone to shower without nudging him awake. Glancing at the clock on the nightstand and swearing fluently, he hurls himself out of the bed he’s starting to think of as theirs rather than just Remus’ and tries desperately to make his hair stop sticking up for all of eight seconds before he gives up, tugging on a pair of socks from the dresser that used to sit in his bedroom and now stands opposite Remus’, right where it belongs among the teetering piles of books and parchment and the disassembled components of Muggle electronics he likes to take apart and learn, sometimes charm back together again. He’s stripped his bed of the quilt and pillows, shoved his robes and Oxfords beside Remus’ in the closet; they’ve made a nest of it here, grown their own borders to protect.
At the bathroom door, he knocks loud enough that Remus can hear over the shower and walks in, searching the drawers for the single neglected hairbrush between them Sirius has had since roughly 1973. “I’m going to the pharmacy for more pain-reducing things no one trusts me to make, and also Weetabix because you need your fiber,” he says, immediately getting the brush snagged in his hair. “Bugger fuck. Do you want—”
The curtain rattles on the rod; when he turns around, Remus is staring out from behind one of the giraffes on the plastic, holding it strategically and very deliberately in front of half his body, looking daft and disheveled and absolutely fucking gorgeous. Sirius’ whole body goes still as summer heat.
“Well. Hello there,” he says, grinning smooth as a knife, messy hair and pharmacy trips and Wizarding wars pushed to the very back of his brain with all the other unimportant things in the face of the far more critical situation: Remus, naked. “Look at you, all… naked and wet.”
“I’m very damp,” says Remus. “Were you even going to disconnect the Floo before you left? Anyone could walk in here and see my bits.”
“Pete would just turn magenta and make fun of the curtain and come back later. Prongs would light a cigarette and ask to watch, and probably so would Lily. They’re sad, pitiful people but they’re harmless.”
“Sounds about right.” Remus bunches the curtain up lower, lower; Sirius can see the water dripping off his hair and onto his shoulders, rolling down his arms. “It’s a little cold in here, Padfoot, I’m think I’m still a bit shaky from the other night. It’s so… quiet.”
“Bet it’s lonely,” says Sirius, leaning against the wall, “all by yourself, all soapy around the thighs.”
“Horrible,” Remus nods, smiling shyly and lowering his eyes for a moment, making Sirius’ belly clench, his heart jolting into a new rhythm in his chest. “I’ve been reading the backs of the shampoo bottles.”
A single stray drop of water flies from the shower and onto Sirius’ shirt, darkening the fabric. He stares at it. “Oh no,” he says, his eyes locking onto Remus’ again, unblinking.
“Oh no.”
“Now I’ve got to burn it,” he says.
“You’re unclean,” Remus cautions, reaching a wet hand out to fist around his shoulder. “You’d better get in. Right now.”
Amazing, he thinks, how the thought of this would have ruptured something catastrophic just a year ago; how it would have frightened him as much as it pulled at his limbs even as he desperately, endlessly craved this sort of closeness with Remus, the solidity of his arms around him, his body with Remus’ body like it belongs there. Sirius slots their hips and shoulders together like puzzle pieces and kisses him, kisses him, kisses him.
Later—far, far later than he’d intended—he’s standing in line at the pharmacy with Weetabix and pain potions and some Muggle chocolate, sliding a London newspaper across the counter mostly for the crossword when he thinks, strangely, that it’s a little warmer than he remembers it being when he left. He breathes in, dittany and cinnamon and vanilla; everything is smoother, softer, like a bright watercolor blurring sweetly at the edges, connected with slim silver threads.
“Sick girlfriend?” the man at the counter asks him, smiling sympathetically over the potions.
And this is part of it too, part of the wrinkles in the equation Remus isn’t here to help him iron out. He’s bought potions and magazines and bandages and plastic Muggle trinkets he swears are for Dora from this same man for years now: He can’t gauge whether he’ll get a patented Pureblood eye-roll, and thus risk arrest for putting him through the wall, which Sirius really doesn’t want to do because he likes the guy; or, possibly he’ll ring him up and say nothing else, and Sirius will walk away with a small sting between the eyes, and go out of his way to the other pharmacy for a while.
The nervous mind is truly a marvel, its neurons firing chaotically in a split second to take you—in great detail—through all the different ways things can go wrong, and all the winding, thorny paths you sometimes tread to avoid confrontation.
“Boyfriend, actually,” says Sirius. It makes something well up inside him, velvet-dark and brilliant, just to say it.
There’s another smile then, blue eyes scrunched up cheerfully behind his glasses. “Lucky man,” says the cashier, “he gets the seventy percent dark. That’s devotion.”
On the way out, one hand on the doorknob and a paper bag for Remus in the other, he realizes just how often he’s done this, newspapers and chocolate and healing spells murmured in the shrill glass shards of countless dawns, how many times his feet have taken him, automatically, through these same streets, the same doors, led him, always, to Remus. Outside, in the yellow sweep of the sun, Sirius can feel his heart beating with something almost tangible, flooding him like knowledge: a word, a word, a word.
Oh, he thinks, a mouth like thunder. Oh. There are names for this.
There are names for this.
—
Possibly his favorite Christmas tradition—though he’s not sure it’s quite right to call two years a tradition just yet—is dinner with Marlene and Dorcas, where it’s not so much a proper Christmas dinner as it is an entire spread of appetizers and biscuits and foods that are absolutely horrible for you, where they don’t eat at the table like civilized human beings, but in the sitting room like a picnic, and where they all drink cheap champagne the whole night through like it’s a sin. It’s the antithesis of his childhood, a sort of perverse potluck featuring everything from Muggle crisps to treacle tart and Dorcas’ weird port-wine cheeseballs; they bring mashed potatoes and Honeydukes chocolate and eat in front of the fire, and Remus is just getting all flappy and overexcited the way Sirius loves as he explains Muggle literature to Dorcas when Marlene tugs him outside for a cigarette, lighting her own before she’s even out of the sitting room.
“You’re so soppy I don’t know how you’re not leaking all over the carpet,” she tells him, flicking ash and grinning. On anyone else, it would be insufferable; on Marlene, it makes him smile. “I told you, didn’t I? Let’s hear it, Black—out with it.”
“Fuck off,” he says brightly, taking a drag and watching the tip catch. The sun’s already gone down between the cramped houses, the stars flickering like candles; Sirius glances at Marlene and swallows. “How did you know?”
“You’ve been sleeping with him and mooning over him and probably crying into your pillow over him for God knows how long and you’re seriously—”
“How did you know you were in love with her?”
All the white-hot incredulity fades from her face, softened, quietly, into understanding, into happiness; Marlene McKinnon, she of the gale-force voice and solid steel ovaries, wraps an arm around his waist and hugs him tightly. “That’s really a much easier question,” she says. Her eyes are bluer and brighter than a summertime sea, gone midnight-rich with memory. “If you’re asking it, you’re already up to your eyeballs.”
Smoking his cigarette down to the filter while the stars glimmer gold, while he knows there’s someone waiting on him inside, someone who has been waiting on him for the better part of their lives now, he thinks she’s right; he thinks, probably, that the moment you let yourselves think it, the moment you let yourselves want it, you are probably just as truly and deeply in love as two people have ever been or will ever be.
And Sirius Black has always been at least a little in love with Remus Lupin.
—
Christmas Eve, the fire built up high in the hearth, and Sirius comes in from one last cigarette to the smell of cinnamon and thick, spicy-sweet pudding on the kitchen counter, assuming Remus has already gone to bed only to find him still sitting on the sofa, an enormous and doubtlessly boring book balanced on the arm, absorbed and oblivious.
This means, in the dialect of Remus Lupin, one of two things:
1. He is waiting for Sirius, or
2. He is actually interested in what he’s reading.
Sirius likes Option Number One.
Sliding in beside him, Sirius presses his nose—cold—into the crook of his neck and trails a hand—also cold—underneath his jumper, feeling him tense and jump at the touch as he spins around, yelping, to glare at him.
“What the hell have you been doing, sitting in the cold cupboard?” he stammers. “I’m trying to read. I think I was trying to read the last time you flopped all over me, too.”
“You were. It was the same book,” says Sirius, his hands warming with Remus’ skin, feeling him relax into it, just slightly. “Which ought to tell you it’s not that interesting and you’re just not as into Dumas as, y’know, me.”
“Or maybe it’s because I’ve been interrupted every time I’ve tried to get through it.”
In the fathomless, tangled cords of their shared history, Sirius has learned to play this game and he’s learned to play it like a professional sport: Remus will only really choose a book or work or other sundry responsibilities over his friends if the promises of uncharted territory or something horribly illegal or food or, recently, sex, are immediately presented as inherently superior options, and he as a soggy blanket for not jumping at the chance. They have to be dangled in front of him like bait, a glimpse of chocolate held in outstretched fingers, before he’ll leap—and galvanize. Over the years, Sirius has taught himself to read Remus like a weathervane, all his wavering, all his faltering, all his nail-chewing indecision.
Remus taps his index finger against the spine of the book; he is faltering.
“That’s a whole lot of pages,” says Sirius, leaning just a little closer; his hair brushes Remus’ cheek. “More than even the sturdiest of Prefects could reasonably expect to get through in a single night, determined though he may be.”
“It’s a very good book,” Remus answers. His heartbeat has stuttered and fallen into a new meter, just a tiny, silent misstep imperceptible to anyone but Sirius. “I can’t sleep until I know what happens.”
“Enthralling, is it,” mutters Sirius, grazing his knuckles along the waistband of his pyjamas and making him shiver. “Just makes your heart pound.”
Letting out a shaky breath, Remus tightens his grip on the arm of the sofa, staring determinedly down at the letters, unseeing. “There’s a lot of incredible symbolism in this one. I think you might like it.”
“You haven’t turned a page in three minutes,” says Sirius, dragging his lips across Remus’ ear, one hand splayed across his belly, fingers stroking up his ribs. It’s a head-rush, this shared breath, the way he’s learned to touch Remus, the way it feels to want and be wanted. To always want the world to be beautiful for someone.
“I’m savoring every word,” says Remus. Sirius can feel his iron resolve crumbling up like aluminum foil.
“No you’re not.”
“I’m going to read it all night.”
“I’m not wearing any underwear,” he hisses, and then the book slams shut like a benediction, shoved violently aside on the end table, and he’s being dragged down the hallway by his shirt, laughing and laughing.
His pyjamas are still on by the time they get to the bed, which trips Remus up; he falls hard, and Sirius pulls his trousers off and runs his palms up his thighs to his hips, pressing his mouth to his belly and feeling it flutter under his lips, soft and salty-warm like the rest of him. He kisses his ribs, grinning against his hip at the gasp that rips out of Remus’ throat when he wraps a hand around his cock and strokes slowly, teeth scraping across his hipbone.
“Are you sure you don’t want to finish your book?” he whispers, sitting back on his heels and kissing the inside of Remus’ knee. “I won’t mind too much, you know. We can just—put this off.”
“I’ve already finished it twice,” Remus laughs, naked yearning stark in the light of his eyes, breaking off the moment Sirius’ mouth slides over his cock, one hand scrabbling for his hair as Sirius moves up and down along the length of it. There’s something about this he loves, the way Remus watches him, how he grates out his name, breathless and dream-sharp, when he flattens his tongue underneath and curls it around the very tip; he’d thought about this a lot before he ever did it, but the fact of it—the soft taste of him, his breathing changing for Sirius, the intense thrill of it, sparking always between them both—is something his Highly Educational Reading Material didn’t mention.
In fact, his Highly Educational Reading Material didn’t cover a lot of things beyond the bare mechanics. Like how squishy and awkward and terrifying it can be at first; how it’s a language like any other with a syntax and structure, how much better it is if you’re doing it with someone who can make you laugh. How much better it’s going to get, in general.
Nothing tells you all the ways it will transform, all the ways you’ll learn to navigate yourself and someone else: Remus’ hands pulling him up, touching him as if he’s starved for his skin and his heart, wide-open, leaving heavy heat-strokes across the jut of his shoulders, his ribs, the curve of his spine. He drags Sirius between his legs and gasps, and Sirius, looking down at him with his eyes half-closed and his heart in his mouth, kisses him hard and hopes he can taste the things that are singing in his blood, all the things that begin and end with Remus, stacked like verse on his tongue.
“Take your fucking socks off,” he half-groans, teeth at Remus’ jaw.
“No,” laughs Remus, grinding their hips together, making him hiss, “my feet are cold.”
“You look like the world’s biggest plonker,” says Sirius. “I’ll warm you up.”
“Such confidence.”
“Says the man wearing whimsical snowman socks.”
“This man,” says Remus, sly and deliberate, “will have warm feet if the other man fails to deliver.”
Sirius presses his mouth over Remus’ pulse and sucks gently the way he’s learned he likes best, one hand clasped around his hip and the other at his shoulder, feeling him moan low in his throat. “Moony, Moony, you are about take the mood and back over it with an eighteen-wheeler.”
“Take them off,” he gasps, and Sirius, laughing, does.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever have enough of this, the way he falls so easily into Remus and moves with him, their bodies tangled tight, taking each other into a rhythm that’s becoming familiar, building hard-fast in their blood. Remus wraps his legs around his waist and takes him in deeper, pressing a hand to his cheek and turning his head to look at him, flushed and gasping suddenly when he meets his eyes.
“Sirius,” he chokes out hoarsely. His eyes tear open the dark. “Sirius.”
“Are you warm enough yet,” he murmurs, rubbing a hand up from the smooth dip in Remus’ hip to his chest and resting his forehead against Remus’, breathing with him, feeling the red swell of his pulse in his own skin; he can’t look away.
“Yes,” he moans, “God, yes.”
“I can get you some shoes.”
“Shut up,” he laughs, and kisses him—wonderingly, perfectly slow.
“Remus.” He smiles at the way his name feels on his tongue, half-gasped and low like a secret as their hips move, rhythm building faster, roughness and softness and heat; he presses it to Remus’ mouth and feels him swallow it, watches his face shifting when he wraps a hand around his cock, his mouth opening, his eyes brightening while says it again and again until Remus comes: fingers clutching his shoulders, a heel digging into the bed, Sirius’ name on the bare thread of his breath as if it’s the only thing that’s ever mattered.
All it takes to get him there is Remus’ smile pressed to the hollow of his throat and his hands running up his biceps, and he comes, gasping into his hair, the slick rush burning high and melting wildly through his body; Remus holds onto him through the aftershocks, lips pressed to his neck, every inch of them entwined as inextricably and irrevocably as anything could ever be.
Later, Remus’ feet tucked under his leg and the quilt that smells like both of them pulled up around their chests, Sirius kisses his cheek, his temple, the scar on his chin, the place where his jaw meets his ear, feeling out the newest shape they’ve shifted into, skin on skin and both of them wound around each other like a nautilus on the bed. “You know,” he says, “I am really glad you like shagging boys.”
“I’m really glad I do, too,” says Remus, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Sirius loves to hear his voice like this, as if it begins in his body instead of his throat, speaking through his blood and bones and into him, moving him in a way only Remus can. “I’m really glad you got all your marbles in order.”
“My marbles have a thing for you,” he says, stretching. He always feels so open and raw and beautiful after, tangled with Remus in the middle of the night.
“I’ve been told,” says Remus. There’s such an off-kilter beauty to him, Sirius thinks, his big nose, his slight overbite, the blunt sweetness of his jaw. His eyes are brighter than anything has ever been, even in the December dark. “It makes me happy. You make me happy.”
“How do you do that? Just—I need to say something,” he mutters, running a hand through his hair and holding Remus tighter, squeezing him around the ribs. “You’re trying to outdo me because you’re still hacked off about the socks, aren’t you.”
“Oh yes, exactly,” Remus says dreamily, yawning as he settles himself against Sirius. “It couldn’t have anything to do with you. Couldn’t be that I need you here. Couldn’t be that I don’t ever want to wake up without you. Not at all.”
His heart constricts with Remus’ voice, with all of it—Remus hands and his hands, all the spaces they’ve filled. “Moony,” he whispers, wonder clutching him by the throat, and closes his eyes.
The splash of light in the room illuminates the shadows of their presence, colors painted like rippling ink: the desk, the books piled high, the extra blankets, the clothes strung out on the floor. Sometimes, he feels like these echoes, all the things he is and all the different boys he’s been shimmering like torn silk, each one part of a whole he’s only just beginning to see; he imagines what he’ll look like in five years, what shape he and Remus will make on their bed, the man time will weave him. He imagines them like this room, like the scarves hung together on the back of the chair, the glass of water on the nightstand, the Muggle radio taken apart on his dresser. The ticking of a clock. Two hands, clasped together. A pack of cigarettes, half-empty. An open door.
—
In the morning, in the kitchen, he finds Remus at the stove, a cup of tea on the counter and an oven mitt on one hand, shoving a turkey into the oven and looking mildly dubious about the whole thing, though Sirius can hardly blame him; last time they tried something like this, they forgot to take out the bag of gooey turkey-insides before they put it in the oven. It ended in severe nausea.
“Happy Christmas,” Remus says when he sees him, smiling into his tea. “Where’s my pony?”
“Right here,” says Sirius, draping his arms over his shoulders and kissing his nose, grinning wicked-sharp. “Want to ride me?”
Remus, in spite of himself, laughs and drops his hands onto his chest, shaking his head fondly. “That’s, well, it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever said,” he says, “but it’s right up there.”
“I can say worse.”
He smiles and smiles. “I know.”
“Anyway,” says Sirius, stirring an obscene amount of cream into his own tea, bag still in, “happy Christmas. I love you.”
Remus very carefully puts his tea back on the counter and turns to him, eyes shot wide, and says, “Sirius, did you just. I—what. Did you say.”
“I said, happy Christmas. I love you.” He takes a drink and takes Remus by the wrist, tugging him over and into him again. “Figured that one out all on my own, too.”
“You love me,” Remus whispers, swallowing hard, pulling back to look at him, as if Sirius is the only thing he can see. “You just said—”
“I know what I said,” he says, tilting Remus head back up when he drops it. “I love you. I want to get old and grey and arthritic with you. I want to get sick on pie with you.”
Something settles into Remus’ skin, filling his scars, his eyes, his tired bones; Sirius has never actually seen him cry—he’s been close a few times—but he thinks for a moment he might have done it, until Remus clenches his jaw and takes a deep breath, folding himself up against Sirius, who catches him—just the same as he’s always done.
“I got you pyjamas,” he mumbles, slightly sniffly, into Sirius’ shirt.
He lets out a breath, bones gone unexpectedly to jelly. It fits his mouth so easily, like a charm, like the swift blossom of magic in his fingers, and he supposes that’s what love is all about, anyway. It’s insidious. It lurks, dark as burnt twilight, in the hollows of your own shadow and then springs on you, brilliant and transformative, while you’re holding chocolate and pain potions in the pharmacy, when you’ve found your body wrapped around someone else’s, just for them and them alone.
It’s the bravest thing he’s ever done, love.
“I love pyjamas,” he whispers to Remus, shaky and exultant as he finds his lips. “I’ll never fucking take them off.”
In the white light of morning, both of them so raw and together and in love, Remus presses his face into Sirius’ neck, right over his pulse. “I love you,” he says, right into his skin where Sirius can feel it, tangled in his blood.
No matter where they go, he thinks, no matter how he grows or how he fits his pieces into place in the end, his compass will always point him here—to the pulse in his ears, to the arms that hold him up. To all these places they keep themselves, and all the shapes they shift into, together.
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