Fic: Lethe and Mnemosyne (part 2/4)
Jan. 2nd, 2017 08:36 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
cevennes.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
small_giftsTitle: Lethe and Mnemosyne
Author/Artist:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cevennes
Recipient:grandilloquism
Rating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes:grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥
A brief history of the collision:
Just after the full moon in November ’78 they went to a pub to see Wire in the freezing autumn rain. The show was good: loud and tearing-raw in places, cold and crisp and unsweet as champagne. During “Used To” someone jostled Sirius sideways into Remus—Does the pain remain when the head is turned and the body walks away—who pressed back into him in the fluorescent haze, and then again, hip to hip, like he was trying to sniff something out; he was wearing an ink-stained flannel shirt over a t-shirt that had been washed so many times it was nearly translucent, wiry wheaty-red hair catching the gauzy light. He was staring dead ahead and he looked strangely ageless and handsome, but then Sirius thought Remus looked handsome when he was lying in front of the toilet at three a.m. making doom prophesies with dirty hair and cigarette ash smeared on his crooked nose. A shiver like a heartbeat murmured through the wires of his body, searing drumbeat red unfurling, spreading into Remus or maybe spreading from Remus into himself, making both of them sway; if they turned towards each other they could almost pretend they were dancing.
When it was over, they got a table near the back and Remus brought them a bottle of whiskey with two tumblers, his foot knocking into Sirius’s boot underneath the table when he sat back down. His mouth was parted just slightly showing the very knifeblade edges of his incisors over the place where he’d bitten through his bottom lip in the moon-bursting a few days previous, his face unusually open, unfogging. “Wish I could change the song,” he said, jerking his head towards where the speakers were playing Jefferson Starship and then closing his mouth, as if it wasn’t at all what he really wanted to say.
The problem with love was that it had so many monstrous ways to blind you. In the beginning, desperate and devouring, it rips away your safety net and forces you into the vast wilderness of the unknown and the unmapped, arms outstretched as you stumble into the endless static anything, strung along on a tightrope compulsion by the ineluctable heartbeat-pulse in your ears: I-love, I-love, I-love-you. The feeling itself—the finger’s-grip on the cliffside, the holy yearning haunting your body like a ghost—was such that Sirius would have worshipped the thunder-crush totality of his obsession whether Remus ever loved him or not, would have made himself a living sacrifice to the divine theremin thrum of his own heartbeat, his very soul crucifix and wafer and wine to the hallowed thrall of the pleasure and the pain to which he would give himself over like a self-made martyr, blinded by the entirety of his surrender.
But if you are lucky—if you are very very very truly indescribably unspeakably lucky—you are both reaching out in the dark for the very same thing, drawn indelibly towards each other like magnetic north, like blood spilled, like the song of a second heartbeat calling you anywhere. Later Remus would also liken it to a fork shoved into an electrical outlet, and that was true too if far less romantic, but for better or for worse, in sickness and in death and in life, they were headed in the same direction: no past without each other, no future that was not together. In the dark, blind and off-footed but in love with the feeling of it like music or magic or blood, Sirius stretched out a hand.
“You know, if you wanted to pull now would be a good time to do it,” he said, “given all the excess sexual energy, I mean. It’d take about thirty seconds given that it feels like the heat-collapse of a galaxy or something in here.”
Remus just blinked his green eyes a few times. “Is that really what you’re thinking about. Fucking?”
“One of us has to.”
“Good one,” said Remus, not laughing. He started picking at the old black blood underneath his fingernails. “Keep them out of the fridge this time, the last one ate my curry.”
“Hypothetically I mean,” said Sirius, powering through despite Remus’s sneering best efforts, “if you wanted to pull. If you—hypothetical you—were going to pick someone up you could have them flat on their backs in the eight seconds it took to Apparate back home, or bent over something, however it is you do it. Why don’t you roll that up in your fucking cigarette and smoke it.”
Remus just kept rolling his cigarette on the table and mumbled something that sounded distinctly like asshole but with enough breathy deniability to have also been a covert warming charm. Sirius pretended extremely magnanimously not to hear.
“So,” he said, “good show.”
“Probably the best I’ve seen all year.”
“A while back a friend of mine saw this band Swell Maps—he said it was one of the most revelatory musical experiences of his life thus far, like hearing some kind of apocalyptic version of what the future’s going to sound like in about fifteen years, it was all very poetic but he was also stoned out of his mind at the time.”
At that Remus looked up, frowning almost audibly, licking along the side of his paper and pressing it in place with his thumb. “I saw them,” he said slowly. “And it wasn’t the pot, it was like a fist in my gut the whole time sort of wringing me out with this scorched inevitability, or something. This was better but I know you’d like them too if you saw them.”
“Yeah? Sounds like the kind of thing we’d both like,” said Sirius, leaning slightly towards Remus, who by then was staring at him with the unlit cigarette between his lips and his face straddling some no man’s land between concerned irritation and bewildered disbelief. “Here—”across the table he reached up and cupped a hand around Remus’s cheek, summoning flint and tinder into his fingers like a match-light born of pure intrinsic desire as shattering as any magic. In the lightning-shock of it he held Remus’s eyes, a wide stunned cloudburst breaking across his face; Sirius thought he could almost see himself in them, the murmur of the flame, the bite of his own stare. When he took his hand away Remus tried to say “Thank you” which came out terribly mangled with the cigarette still in his mouth, apparently forgotten altogether in the heat of it and nearly landing in his lap.
“Thanks,” said Remus, again, after helpfully taking it out from between his lips.
“I never tried to roll my own. Seemed like too much trouble.”
“It’s not hard.”
“Maybe you can show me,” he said. “You here by yourself?”
Remus was still staring at him with his mouth open again as if his jaw had come slightly unglued, unblinking as Sirius fixed him with his eyes from across the table like his heart wasn’t squeezing like a hangman’s noose in his throat. A brittle moment later Remus seemed to decide that reality, for whatever it was worth, had been suspended, or else he was having a stroke; something was unwinding on his face that made Sirius think of sunlight lancing through the curtains in his bedroom, waiting to be split wide open. He had never wanted anything in all his life with such suffocating conviction. “Yeah,” said Remus, finally, “I live just over in Kentish Town.”
“So do I,” said Sirius, “right above a shitty bar. Let me get you another drink.”
“Alright,” said Remus. Sirius could feel his eyes following him to the bar and back like a spell unscrolling in the night air, catching on the light with the smoke and the rainwater trailing down the windows. When he got back Remus still hadn’t looked away and he had the impression of nakedness, or more than nakedness, his organs showing through his skin and the starved yearning thing separating from his blood like black oil from water, but still he sat back down and slid Remus’s whiskey across the table to him and held his eyes when Remus, again, caught them and pinned him there, like a moth to a cork board.
“You said you live in Kentish Town?” Sirius asked.
“Right above a shitty bar, incidentally. I’m not actually from here. London, I mean.”
“I’d guess West Country? Your accent,” said Sirius, smiling, feeling the edges of his incisors pull over his bottom lip, “you’re definitely a country boy. I’d have remembered you.”
“Liar. How many people have you said that to? Probably at least half of everyone you’re trying to pull.”
In fact Sirius had said it to a few people he’d tried to pull and it was possible Remus had even heard him do it on one of their spontaneous trips to see terrible bands at cheap Camden pubs. “I’ve never meant it before,” he said, which was true enough. “But I am absolutely trying to pull you so you’re half-right.”
“Going by that logic I’m at least seventy-five percent right.”
“There’s a war on, you know, so while you go on and on about your missed calling as an accountant of all my grievous sexual sins or whatever we could be dead in ten minutes flat. Theoretically.”
“So I’m just supposed to lie back and make it easy for you,” said Remus. There was something on his face that wanted to be a smile, an icepick-tremble of longing caught between the idea and the fact; Sirius watched the tight thread of it ripple across his mouth, wanting, wanting. “Am I running behind schedule in your head or what?”
“I’m trying to make it easy for you. But for the record—for what it’s worth, I could do this forever,” he said, leaning closer, “I could obsess over it for fucking years if you play it just right, and I’ll keep coming back to this pub and the rain in your hair and the way you keep looking at me like you’re starving to death every single time I get myself off. Really I think I’ve gotten off to you for a long time now, or the idea of you, like a kind of premonition before I ever even saw you in here. I knew what you looked like. I could hear you, almost, in the music, like hearing my own heartbeat.”
By now Remus was breathing a little fast and rolling another cigarette immediately after snuffing out his other in the filthy ashtray. “You’re a little bit crazy,” he said.
“I could’ve just told you I was getting shipped to the frontlines of fuck-off nowhere tomorrow morning and it would mean so much.”
“Are you sure I’ve never met you before? I feel like I’ve known you—”
“Forever,” said Sirius.
“Yes. Yes, it’s, I don’t know, this elemental apotheosis. Cosmic inevitability vis-à-vis two bodies in motion. Or possession—maybe that, above anything else. Possession of some otherwise unconquerable part of my soul, like a living ghost. It’s always been you. I can feel you in my rib-rungs. I swear to you my heart picked up when it heard your voice. My spine-rungs knew you, they missed you, I can feel it—your voice shaking up the back of my neck like a song I heard a long time ago.”
“You’re a little bit crazy,” said Sirius. “It’s sexy. You are.”
A little too suddenly the song changed to “I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms,” which prompted Remus to turn around and stare at the corner of the ceiling where the speakers were, seemingly to sniff out any leftover spell wisps hanging in the rafters. “That’s unexpected but at least it’s not ‘Wild Horses.’”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe it’s that cosmic inevitability you were talking about. Don’t you feel like we’ve known each other forever?”
“How’s that song go? We’ve known each other in past lives and so on.”
“If there are parallel universes out there I’d want you in every single one,” said Sirius, and finally Remus’s smile broke across his face, a slow rose-bloom spread of his mouth and his eyes like a warm sepia photograph; Sirius leaned even closer, moth to flame, north to south, yearning to yearning. In the honeyed glare of the smoke and the streetlights outside he knew he probably looked like some black-sheep bastard son in the back pages of the Prophet, lean and hungry with a taste for orgies and too much coke. He could feel more than hear Remus’s breath sharpening over the rim of his tumbler. “You’ve always been here, just out of reach. I’d be trying to pull you on Mars or on the Tube or the Arctic tundra or the wasteland at the end of the world. I’d put on the Doors for you then, though. If we were friends before this—say we lived together maybe—I’d probably leave my door open some nights and think of you at the other end of the hallway. You’d be the first thing I thought of before I went to sleep, I’d just lie there thinking of you in bed with every last sexual impulse I’ll ever have—it’ll all run screaming back into you like it always has.”
“I have the new Kate Bush at my flat,” said Remus, in a dream. “If you want to come. My roommate has some good gin.”
Kiss me, Sirius was thinking, come on, come on, do it, kiss me kiss me kiss me. With his knuckles he brushed the very edge of Remus’s wrist underneath the hem of his flannel where he knew the exact shape of the dog’s-tooth scar that crowned his wrist in a vicious wreath of tearing white. “Every one of these,” he said, close close close, everything else faded out, like they were the only two people in the world, pressed inextricably together between the closed pages of a book, “every one you’ve got. I want to put my mouth on every one of these.”
“Do you want to walk home with me or should I Apparate us or,” said Remus. God, his eyes. He looked unreal, his mouth red where he’d been biting it, green-gold of his wild stare like some infernal angel offering up his soul for vivisection. Sirius swallowed something rabid with his whiskey that tasted vaguely of blood and may have been his heart, burning searingly all the way down.
“I think you’d better,” he said. Then he got up and headed for the door remembering jarringly that there were other people in the world entirely unaware of the new electrifying earthquake-tremor in the fabric of the universe; they were drinking and laughing or staring into space and picking at old cherished wounds and someone had started playing XTC like nothing had happened at all. Outside in the greenblack pea-soup fog Sirius felt Remus dig his fingernails into his wrist and the ground dropped out beneath him until the night resolved itself seconds later in the unlit, enchanted dark of their flat, his knees buckling as they both stumbled against the kitchen counter and kind of ricocheted off each other ungracefully, rattling the dishes drying in the rack when they peeled apart.
They had brought the cold in with them as well as whatever golden unearthly magic they had summoned together in the pub, the heartbeat of it spider-veined around them, miraculous and smothering with might. This is the part where, Sirius thought, and found he couldn’t finish it for the way Remus was looking at him, his cheeks pink and his mouth open again and his hands held out slightly feeling keenly their own emptiness, hunger in the hollow of his throat and his cheeks for what he could never ask for, for what Sirius could never take, and he felt himself tremble slightly before the enormity of it in the darkness like a thief come to a holy place, almost, almost reverent. At some point his mouth had gone dry.
“The gin’s on top of the fridge in case you forgot,” he said. Everywhere they weren’t touching he could feel the cold getting in, winter in his mouth, midnight in his empty hands. In the thrumming static spell of it Remus took an uncertain step forward.
“Sirius,” he said, all breath. “Am I, is this—do you even really—”
“I just spent probably an hour telling you I want to get you off and you’re still doing sexual calculus in your head. If you don’t really want to then just fucking say so, alright? We’ll never talk about it again and you can pretend it never happened like you do with everything else and in six months we probably won’t speak to each other anymore because one of us is a coward and it’s not me. Sound good?”
“Fuck you,” said Remus, having obviously wanted to say it for a while, which Sirius probably deserved, “just, shut the fuck up, you have no idea about anything that isn’t you and what you want in this very moment and I don’t know if you even,” he made a noise that sounded almost painful and yanked a hand through his hair, “if you want this. If you are really, truly—in this, beyond right now.”
“Either you’ve been too busy doing your martyr thing to notice anything at all or you’ve got a hugely lower opinion of me than I realized.”
Part of that hypothetical opinion was valid and he knew it, at least on a molecular building-block level where the sometimes-obliviousness intersected with the sometimes-horrific and costly carelessness, but at least he reckoned (uncharitably) that he had the self-awareness to recognize it where Remus could never see the same of himself. “I don’t know what you want,” said Remus, raw-hearted, and reached out as if blinded and took Sirius’s wrist in his fist where the blue skip of the pulse reverberated against his thin fingers, like a flame cupped in his hand.
“I wish you’d stop worrying,” he said, “I just want you to stop worrying about every little thing or whether it’s perfect or it’s ever going to be perfect or if the world’s going to fall off its fucking hinges. I don’t care if it does. Moony.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Moony, look. You’ve got me right where I want me. What are you going to do about it.”
Remus backed him into the stove and threw every ounce of his height and weight and not-inconsiderable strength—he was maybe an inch shorter than Sirius at most and Sirius was tall—into a kiss that would likely have bent Sirius backwards if it hadn’t been for the stovetop behind him. Their arms tangled thrillingly until Remus unwound them and threaded his fingers through Sirius’s hair, pulling gently, his teeth biting a crenelated bruise into Sirius’s bottom lip; Sirius’s palms spread flat-out across the fact of him, his belly and his skinny hips, the swelling of the breath in his lungs, the pulse running red like something just lit, door opening, dam bursting. When they pulled apart he was stroking his thumbs over Remus’s cheekbones, watching Remus watching him, their bitten-bruised lips, their yearning hands. There was blood in his mouth, his own or Remus’s.
“What,” he said, and they both startled with the heat kicked on, laughing. He kissed Remus again, dizzy-deep, tasting whiskey and the ginger tea he’d been drinking earlier, lavender in his hair, dust and clean cottony sweat on his clothes, every part of them soldered together like a single continuous line sketch. His heartbeat-blood was drumming so hellishly loud in his chest against Remus’s he could hardly tell them apart anymore. “Aren’t you gonna take me to bed?”
“Yours. I want to be in your bed,” said Remus, showing his throat like he wanted Sirius to bite down, so he did, thin moon-pale skin bruising rosebud-dark underneath his tongue where he could feel the voice and the heart and the breath, “oh God—you have no idea. You think you do but you don’t,” he said, trailing off with his mouth open, his breath stuttering staccato.
Just outside Sirius’s bedroom he shoved Remus against the wall after they went stumbling against the hallway table where they kept an overflow of records and books strewn with shopping lists and old mail and incoherent notes for illegal research and/or each other that usually continued like a breadcrumb trail on the kitchen table; in the deepening dark Sirius ran his hands down Remus’s sides and squeezed his ass, making him gasp and feeling altogether insanely proud of himself until Remus slotted their hips together and dug his fingers into Sirius’s lower back and then down to his ass, orchestrating their movement. Kinetic-electric, wave upon wave. Remus sucked the join of his neck and jawline as Sirius undid his fly, sliding his palm up the thin warm skin of his belly and down again into the slim trail of corkscrew-hair leading into his underwear where he could feel the outline of Remus’s cock pressing against his own, hard in his jeans.
“Remember when we shared the bed when we moved in,” he said, hips moving, pleasure tightening tidal and foggy; Remus’s hands were up his shirt, settling like birds in the spaces between his ribs. “I used to wake up in the night and think about fucking you stupid while you were six inches away from me. Just—just touching you. Just once.”
“Should’ve woken me up,” said Remus. His eyelids were fluttering because Sirius was working his jeans down his thighs, very slowly, and brushed his knuckles one-two-three-four against his cock in his underwear. “I’d have let you do anything. Every weird thing I know you want to do. All of it.”
On the bed Remus pulled him down like some priceless relic as if he was afraid of going too fast and getting the bends, searching, both of them naked, Sirius feeling split open and connected to Remus like his own soul in every part of his body from his mouth to his groin to Remus’s ankle hooked around the backs of his knees. Hours seemed to pass by in every languid underwater movement—his throat, the secret nautilus-curl of Remus’s spine, the streetlight from the window where he hadn’t closed the curtains—though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes before he looked at Remus poured out beneath him, the ancient tearing scar around his left side grown over him like ivy, the scattered freckles across his nose and shoulders, the bruises Sirius had sucked on his belly and thighs and rising on the inside of his bent knee, and pulled him up into his lap, straddling his hips. Again Remus’s breath stuttered and he stared down with a feral hunger, reaching for Sirius’s cock until Sirius drug his tongue across the silver-thin scar running through a nipple and pushed it away when Remus’s whole body jumped like a live-wire.
“Wait,” he said into Remus’s chest, his hands on the backs of Remus’s thighs and his ass slick with sweat. “Just wait, wait—not yet.”
“Did you think I was joking,” said Remus, fingernails digging dark stinging weals into his shoulders, “I really have wanted this in some part of me forever in past lives and the infernal unconsummation of my soul screaming until I get it et cetera and I swear I’ll set your bed on fire if you don’t do it.”
Sirius had his thumbs in the soft shadowed divots above Remus’s hips and wasn’t sure he would have noticed or cared if the bed was on fire; in fact he was certain the world could fall off its axis, vexed to nightmare and then some, and it wouldn’t have mattered because he could not see anything beyond Remus, the only other living person in the world, a vein of sheer gold above and around him, the magic they’d spun of their own unraveling smothering desire. He crept his hand down and wrapped it around Remus’s cock, stroking him slowly, a long molten drag along the length of it, blood-warm and heavy in his palm. Remus pressed his face into the junction of his neck and shoulder and bit down in a rough open-mouthed kiss when Sirius twisted his wrist hard, thumb pressing up underneath the head, making the marvelous machinery of him shake like an autumn leaf down deep.
“Sirius,” Remus was saying—pleading maybe, except Sirius had never heard him beg for a thing in his life, not forgiveness or love or pleasure or belonging. He’d wrapped his hand around Sirius’s, moving in time but trying to urge him faster every time Sirius’s thumb stroked a thrilling arc over the slick head of his cock, and Sirius could feel all the wires of him honed to a fine crescendo as he brushed over his slit, Remus’s heartbeat between his teeth where he’d pressed his mouth to his chest again, sucking something bright. “Come on, come on—”
Some part of him folded away deep in a submarinean layer of his brain still could not quite believe his luck—that Remus wanted him, that he wanted Sirius to see him like this—and as such he recalled a bare thread of the embarrassingly impotent and obsessive longing that kept him up nights, feeling stoned and possessed in some unalterable piece of his soul dreaming voraciously of what he would give Remus if he could, what he would feed him, all the things he would do if if if like a turntable skipping infinitely on all the most torturously sexual riffs. He surged up and shoved Remus back onto the bed, which lasted about three seconds as Remus rose up on an elbow and grabbed Sirius’s shoulders, trying to hold him there; he did not stick where he was pushed, a new development that Sirius found almost indescribably sexy as he tugged his arm out of Remus’s hand to run his palms up the backs of his thighs and down again, watching the rubber-band vibrations of his belly sharpening in a desperate tuneless chord.
“You’re so,” he said, Remus’s long rack-stretched limbs and his skin lit underneath him, looking like he was in thrall, “Remus.” Fine quiver of his muscles when Sirius hooked his hands under his bent knees and pulled him closer down the bed, lifting up on his elbows to watch Sirius settle between his legs.
With his eyes still watching Remus’s he leaned down and flicked his tongue over the tip of Remus’s cock, again, again, thumb stroking slowly underneath as he took just the head into his mouth, pulling off until it slid off his bottom lip. Remus made a sound like he’d just been punched and Sirius sank down deeper, swallowing around him while Remus grabbed a sweaty fistful of his hair and slid a shaky thumb over Sirius’s eyebrow. Again he pulled back slowly, feeling the warm wet-silk weight of his cock on his tongue and sliding against the inside of his cheek, dragging only his lips around the tip and pressing his tongue over the slit before he sucked it deeper, one hand stroking Remus into his mouth; it was almost like ritual in the swallowing oneness of it, like worship, like becoming. Blood and sex and history, summoning the spell; holiest desire, driving out everything else.
“Oh—fuck, Sirius, I’m,” Remus said, thighs squeezing, “Sirius,” tight and hoarse, thought it was more an incantation than a warning, knuckles and nails, teeth teeth teeth.
Around his cock Sirius hummed, feeling the pulse of it hard against his lips; with his tongue he darted underneath the tip of it over and over and Remus came, a hot wet spread he swallowed until he pulled off entirely, his hand stroking slowly until he felt Remus soften, a drop of come trailing a snow-melt down to his fist. He had about six seconds to feel smug before Remus shoved him down by the shoulders and touched him, kneeling between his legs; it took five strokes of Remus’s hand around his cock before he came so suddenly and so thunderously hard it almost hurt, undertow breaking, the sweet sonic melt spilling through his belly and his cock and pulsing to his toes. When he finished Remus was breathing heavily over him, trying to say something but instead pressed them together by the mouths, and Sirius felt it settle like a living thing down his throat and into the indestructible meat of his soul like a dream-memory on the bed, which with the sheets and the blankets kicked down and spun around looked like an open door to something from which they could never—would never—come back.
Once they’d cleaned up and started to feel their skin prickle with the chill Sirius lit a candle and they ate cheese and crackers and salami in bed with the blanket and the afghan pulled up close, feeling wide open and peeled raw, new to the world and to each other in all the places of themselves where they’d been. It was actually physically difficult to stop kissing Remus; Sirius would be halfway through a sentence or thinking about getting up to piss and would lose the thought completely to the compelling bone-ridge of his shoulder, or the hollow of his throat, or the open press of his mouth which was very soft and red in the coffeestain of the candlelight like blood on new snow. His heart was only just slowing in his chest, as if it had been slammed back into him after an out-of-body experience and more than once he put a hand out to brace himself on the edge of the bed to hang on as tightly to the slim golden thread of it as he could, Remus’s fingers splayed over his ribs like a wraith after lost souls, which Sirius would’ve gladly forfeited to him for the feeling alone.
“I never slept well in this bed,” Remus said into his shoulder, his nose and his mouth and all his wiry hair pressed into Sirius. He didn’t think they could ever be uncoupled.
“Too much stress on the system?”
“God, you’re a dog. But yes. You were right there and I was having these intense sex dreams about you like I was a goddamn thirteen-year-old kid.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Basically forever,” said Remus, laughing brittly. Way up high on his neck Sirius had left a mark which he kissed again when Remus arched his neck like he was asking for it. “It was torture with you right there though. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if I could will you to wake up and kiss me with magic or otherwise but it never worked.”
“And ‘forever’ means…?”
“Christ, Padfoot. Since I was probably twelve. I wanted you to be my consuming sexual awakening in the forest and the empty classrooms and the dorm and the shack and happily ever after, you know how it goes. I used to lay awake nights thinking about it and all that entails if you want to go there with your one-track mind, it was all very screamingly homoerotic really, like a Waugh novel but with explicit jerking off behind the bedcurtains. Sometimes I worried you could tell.”
“Too absorbed in your own tragedy to wonder if I was thinking the same thing.”
“Maybe so,” said Remus. He pressed a soft smiling kiss to Sirius’s temple. “Make me a mixtape about it.”
“It’d have to be an anthology. Like at least one whole tape with just ‘Black Dog’ for an hour somewhere in the middle.”
“‘Search and Destroy’ at least once. Possibly ‘Gloria’ as a closer on Volume Two, right.” They laughed whisperingly and then stretched together like taffy, shifting tectonically in an irresistible arc painted in a conjoined landscape shadow on the far wall. “I want to hear every detail.”
“Have you ever known me to withhold anything once I know I can say it?”
“Fair enough,” said Remus. “In that case you must know I used to wear your clothes to see Dearborn on purpose. I thought about you eating yourself alive with jealousy kind of like a collapsed star fueled on its own sexual spite.” They laughed, kissing again, and settled back into each other as Sirius reckoned they had been trying to do for a very long time.
“You know I’ve had to pee for twenty minutes,” said Sirius, not moving at all.
“Me too.”
That was love, he supposed: going outside in the driving rain and finding that it was a bit warmer than he expected. Waking up and thinking Remus Remus Remus like a wish, hearing his name in every song, seeing it discreetly in the architecture of the whole waking world. Having to piss for twenty minutes and not caring for anything but the hypnotic solidity of another breathing body in his arms.
For the rest of the weekend they hardly bothered with clothes and didn’t leave the flat, engaged in the kind of hedonistic fucking Sirius had only fantasized about from a great distance and had questioned the possibility thereof until that Friday night with Remus and the midnight hush and the thousand ways they had fit together, the newborn feeling of it manifesting as a kind of ecstatic invasion of each other, as though they had been overtaken and sunk together to the bottom of themselves and would never again come out. Remus made grilled cheeses wearing only his plaid boxers and Sirius’s sweater and seemed to take extreme if veiled pleasure in the knowledge that Sirius was watching him with a keen starvation from across the room; they listened to Magazine and Suicide and Squeeze and more Wire and the new Kate Bush album, dancing around the living room stoned in the afternoons to “Roadrunner” and “Moonage Daydream.” They watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and filled in the crosswords in the Prophet with obscenities, ignored the Floo, tried hilariously to perk up the marijuana plants they were attempting to grow in the hallway closet, read each other choice excerpts from the Quibbler regarding the proper steps to take if one suddenly laid an egg (Immaculate Egg-ception: It Happened to Me!!!), made rich potato-leek soup and curry and drank honey-thick hot chocolate with chili in bed and stayed up half the night talking and making love, full of each other.
In the end, Remus’s sexual wheelhouse galvanized them to new highs first: on Sunday evening he drug the blue afghan from the couch onto the kitchen floor (the tile was freezing) and put his hands up Sirius’s shirt, and as such they fucked so loudly on the unyielding cold-iron of it that Sirius was sure they would get suspicious looks from the neighbors on the stairs when at last they ventured outside, fingerprint-bruised and sore. They made love for what felt like days; he felt bound to Remus by body and spirit and spell in their flat, where the universe became their bed or the couch or whatever space contained their own beating hearts and any moment not spent there seemed a miserable waste.
Early Monday morning, when they finally left—Sirius to work in Southwark, Remus to meet with Dumbledore concerning what was likely a perilously dangerous but hopefully paid undercover endeavor—they were both shocked upon stumbling together into the gloomy-grey London rainlight that the world outside their bodies and their flat still existed, turning and turning, unaware and uncaring that they were the only shipwrecked survivors left on earth, and they had fallen in love. At least have the decency to fucking get the gales up, Sirius thought before he ducked into an alley to Apparate, and then proceeded to spend all day thinking of nothing but Remus and their unmade bed and the difference between Friday morning and Monday—the distance between one thing and another—which he had realized suddenly was barely a fingernail’s breadth.
At the end of the day they came back to each other. The deathless mantra: they came back to each other. Again and again and again they found each other anywhere, had always, would always, smothered or lost or beaten bloody or wounded or unforgiven or hated or loved, they came back to each other, stretched umbilical beneath the years and the miles in a unbreakable centrifugal ley line leading them always to each other like the magic from which everything else was born. They came back to each other. They came back to each other.
Part 3
Author/Artist:
cevennesRecipient:
grandilloquismRating: NC-17
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drinking, smoking, close encounters of the ghostly kind*
Word count: 26,000 (forgive me)
Summary: Winter ’79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.
Notes:
grandilloquism, your prompts were all amazing and I hope this works for you! Thank-yous bigger than will fit in this header to the saintly mods, to whom I literally owe my soul, and to Claudia, for my head in one piece. Happy holidays! ♥A brief history of the collision:
Just after the full moon in November ’78 they went to a pub to see Wire in the freezing autumn rain. The show was good: loud and tearing-raw in places, cold and crisp and unsweet as champagne. During “Used To” someone jostled Sirius sideways into Remus—Does the pain remain when the head is turned and the body walks away—who pressed back into him in the fluorescent haze, and then again, hip to hip, like he was trying to sniff something out; he was wearing an ink-stained flannel shirt over a t-shirt that had been washed so many times it was nearly translucent, wiry wheaty-red hair catching the gauzy light. He was staring dead ahead and he looked strangely ageless and handsome, but then Sirius thought Remus looked handsome when he was lying in front of the toilet at three a.m. making doom prophesies with dirty hair and cigarette ash smeared on his crooked nose. A shiver like a heartbeat murmured through the wires of his body, searing drumbeat red unfurling, spreading into Remus or maybe spreading from Remus into himself, making both of them sway; if they turned towards each other they could almost pretend they were dancing.
When it was over, they got a table near the back and Remus brought them a bottle of whiskey with two tumblers, his foot knocking into Sirius’s boot underneath the table when he sat back down. His mouth was parted just slightly showing the very knifeblade edges of his incisors over the place where he’d bitten through his bottom lip in the moon-bursting a few days previous, his face unusually open, unfogging. “Wish I could change the song,” he said, jerking his head towards where the speakers were playing Jefferson Starship and then closing his mouth, as if it wasn’t at all what he really wanted to say.
The problem with love was that it had so many monstrous ways to blind you. In the beginning, desperate and devouring, it rips away your safety net and forces you into the vast wilderness of the unknown and the unmapped, arms outstretched as you stumble into the endless static anything, strung along on a tightrope compulsion by the ineluctable heartbeat-pulse in your ears: I-love, I-love, I-love-you. The feeling itself—the finger’s-grip on the cliffside, the holy yearning haunting your body like a ghost—was such that Sirius would have worshipped the thunder-crush totality of his obsession whether Remus ever loved him or not, would have made himself a living sacrifice to the divine theremin thrum of his own heartbeat, his very soul crucifix and wafer and wine to the hallowed thrall of the pleasure and the pain to which he would give himself over like a self-made martyr, blinded by the entirety of his surrender.
But if you are lucky—if you are very very very truly indescribably unspeakably lucky—you are both reaching out in the dark for the very same thing, drawn indelibly towards each other like magnetic north, like blood spilled, like the song of a second heartbeat calling you anywhere. Later Remus would also liken it to a fork shoved into an electrical outlet, and that was true too if far less romantic, but for better or for worse, in sickness and in death and in life, they were headed in the same direction: no past without each other, no future that was not together. In the dark, blind and off-footed but in love with the feeling of it like music or magic or blood, Sirius stretched out a hand.
“You know, if you wanted to pull now would be a good time to do it,” he said, “given all the excess sexual energy, I mean. It’d take about thirty seconds given that it feels like the heat-collapse of a galaxy or something in here.”
Remus just blinked his green eyes a few times. “Is that really what you’re thinking about. Fucking?”
“One of us has to.”
“Good one,” said Remus, not laughing. He started picking at the old black blood underneath his fingernails. “Keep them out of the fridge this time, the last one ate my curry.”
“Hypothetically I mean,” said Sirius, powering through despite Remus’s sneering best efforts, “if you wanted to pull. If you—hypothetical you—were going to pick someone up you could have them flat on their backs in the eight seconds it took to Apparate back home, or bent over something, however it is you do it. Why don’t you roll that up in your fucking cigarette and smoke it.”
Remus just kept rolling his cigarette on the table and mumbled something that sounded distinctly like asshole but with enough breathy deniability to have also been a covert warming charm. Sirius pretended extremely magnanimously not to hear.
“So,” he said, “good show.”
“Probably the best I’ve seen all year.”
“A while back a friend of mine saw this band Swell Maps—he said it was one of the most revelatory musical experiences of his life thus far, like hearing some kind of apocalyptic version of what the future’s going to sound like in about fifteen years, it was all very poetic but he was also stoned out of his mind at the time.”
At that Remus looked up, frowning almost audibly, licking along the side of his paper and pressing it in place with his thumb. “I saw them,” he said slowly. “And it wasn’t the pot, it was like a fist in my gut the whole time sort of wringing me out with this scorched inevitability, or something. This was better but I know you’d like them too if you saw them.”
“Yeah? Sounds like the kind of thing we’d both like,” said Sirius, leaning slightly towards Remus, who by then was staring at him with the unlit cigarette between his lips and his face straddling some no man’s land between concerned irritation and bewildered disbelief. “Here—”across the table he reached up and cupped a hand around Remus’s cheek, summoning flint and tinder into his fingers like a match-light born of pure intrinsic desire as shattering as any magic. In the lightning-shock of it he held Remus’s eyes, a wide stunned cloudburst breaking across his face; Sirius thought he could almost see himself in them, the murmur of the flame, the bite of his own stare. When he took his hand away Remus tried to say “Thank you” which came out terribly mangled with the cigarette still in his mouth, apparently forgotten altogether in the heat of it and nearly landing in his lap.
“Thanks,” said Remus, again, after helpfully taking it out from between his lips.
“I never tried to roll my own. Seemed like too much trouble.”
“It’s not hard.”
“Maybe you can show me,” he said. “You here by yourself?”
Remus was still staring at him with his mouth open again as if his jaw had come slightly unglued, unblinking as Sirius fixed him with his eyes from across the table like his heart wasn’t squeezing like a hangman’s noose in his throat. A brittle moment later Remus seemed to decide that reality, for whatever it was worth, had been suspended, or else he was having a stroke; something was unwinding on his face that made Sirius think of sunlight lancing through the curtains in his bedroom, waiting to be split wide open. He had never wanted anything in all his life with such suffocating conviction. “Yeah,” said Remus, finally, “I live just over in Kentish Town.”
“So do I,” said Sirius, “right above a shitty bar. Let me get you another drink.”
“Alright,” said Remus. Sirius could feel his eyes following him to the bar and back like a spell unscrolling in the night air, catching on the light with the smoke and the rainwater trailing down the windows. When he got back Remus still hadn’t looked away and he had the impression of nakedness, or more than nakedness, his organs showing through his skin and the starved yearning thing separating from his blood like black oil from water, but still he sat back down and slid Remus’s whiskey across the table to him and held his eyes when Remus, again, caught them and pinned him there, like a moth to a cork board.
“You said you live in Kentish Town?” Sirius asked.
“Right above a shitty bar, incidentally. I’m not actually from here. London, I mean.”
“I’d guess West Country? Your accent,” said Sirius, smiling, feeling the edges of his incisors pull over his bottom lip, “you’re definitely a country boy. I’d have remembered you.”
“Liar. How many people have you said that to? Probably at least half of everyone you’re trying to pull.”
In fact Sirius had said it to a few people he’d tried to pull and it was possible Remus had even heard him do it on one of their spontaneous trips to see terrible bands at cheap Camden pubs. “I’ve never meant it before,” he said, which was true enough. “But I am absolutely trying to pull you so you’re half-right.”
“Going by that logic I’m at least seventy-five percent right.”
“There’s a war on, you know, so while you go on and on about your missed calling as an accountant of all my grievous sexual sins or whatever we could be dead in ten minutes flat. Theoretically.”
“So I’m just supposed to lie back and make it easy for you,” said Remus. There was something on his face that wanted to be a smile, an icepick-tremble of longing caught between the idea and the fact; Sirius watched the tight thread of it ripple across his mouth, wanting, wanting. “Am I running behind schedule in your head or what?”
“I’m trying to make it easy for you. But for the record—for what it’s worth, I could do this forever,” he said, leaning closer, “I could obsess over it for fucking years if you play it just right, and I’ll keep coming back to this pub and the rain in your hair and the way you keep looking at me like you’re starving to death every single time I get myself off. Really I think I’ve gotten off to you for a long time now, or the idea of you, like a kind of premonition before I ever even saw you in here. I knew what you looked like. I could hear you, almost, in the music, like hearing my own heartbeat.”
By now Remus was breathing a little fast and rolling another cigarette immediately after snuffing out his other in the filthy ashtray. “You’re a little bit crazy,” he said.
“I could’ve just told you I was getting shipped to the frontlines of fuck-off nowhere tomorrow morning and it would mean so much.”
“Are you sure I’ve never met you before? I feel like I’ve known you—”
“Forever,” said Sirius.
“Yes. Yes, it’s, I don’t know, this elemental apotheosis. Cosmic inevitability vis-à-vis two bodies in motion. Or possession—maybe that, above anything else. Possession of some otherwise unconquerable part of my soul, like a living ghost. It’s always been you. I can feel you in my rib-rungs. I swear to you my heart picked up when it heard your voice. My spine-rungs knew you, they missed you, I can feel it—your voice shaking up the back of my neck like a song I heard a long time ago.”
“You’re a little bit crazy,” said Sirius. “It’s sexy. You are.”
A little too suddenly the song changed to “I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms,” which prompted Remus to turn around and stare at the corner of the ceiling where the speakers were, seemingly to sniff out any leftover spell wisps hanging in the rafters. “That’s unexpected but at least it’s not ‘Wild Horses.’”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe it’s that cosmic inevitability you were talking about. Don’t you feel like we’ve known each other forever?”
“How’s that song go? We’ve known each other in past lives and so on.”
“If there are parallel universes out there I’d want you in every single one,” said Sirius, and finally Remus’s smile broke across his face, a slow rose-bloom spread of his mouth and his eyes like a warm sepia photograph; Sirius leaned even closer, moth to flame, north to south, yearning to yearning. In the honeyed glare of the smoke and the streetlights outside he knew he probably looked like some black-sheep bastard son in the back pages of the Prophet, lean and hungry with a taste for orgies and too much coke. He could feel more than hear Remus’s breath sharpening over the rim of his tumbler. “You’ve always been here, just out of reach. I’d be trying to pull you on Mars or on the Tube or the Arctic tundra or the wasteland at the end of the world. I’d put on the Doors for you then, though. If we were friends before this—say we lived together maybe—I’d probably leave my door open some nights and think of you at the other end of the hallway. You’d be the first thing I thought of before I went to sleep, I’d just lie there thinking of you in bed with every last sexual impulse I’ll ever have—it’ll all run screaming back into you like it always has.”
“I have the new Kate Bush at my flat,” said Remus, in a dream. “If you want to come. My roommate has some good gin.”
Kiss me, Sirius was thinking, come on, come on, do it, kiss me kiss me kiss me. With his knuckles he brushed the very edge of Remus’s wrist underneath the hem of his flannel where he knew the exact shape of the dog’s-tooth scar that crowned his wrist in a vicious wreath of tearing white. “Every one of these,” he said, close close close, everything else faded out, like they were the only two people in the world, pressed inextricably together between the closed pages of a book, “every one you’ve got. I want to put my mouth on every one of these.”
“Do you want to walk home with me or should I Apparate us or,” said Remus. God, his eyes. He looked unreal, his mouth red where he’d been biting it, green-gold of his wild stare like some infernal angel offering up his soul for vivisection. Sirius swallowed something rabid with his whiskey that tasted vaguely of blood and may have been his heart, burning searingly all the way down.
“I think you’d better,” he said. Then he got up and headed for the door remembering jarringly that there were other people in the world entirely unaware of the new electrifying earthquake-tremor in the fabric of the universe; they were drinking and laughing or staring into space and picking at old cherished wounds and someone had started playing XTC like nothing had happened at all. Outside in the greenblack pea-soup fog Sirius felt Remus dig his fingernails into his wrist and the ground dropped out beneath him until the night resolved itself seconds later in the unlit, enchanted dark of their flat, his knees buckling as they both stumbled against the kitchen counter and kind of ricocheted off each other ungracefully, rattling the dishes drying in the rack when they peeled apart.
They had brought the cold in with them as well as whatever golden unearthly magic they had summoned together in the pub, the heartbeat of it spider-veined around them, miraculous and smothering with might. This is the part where, Sirius thought, and found he couldn’t finish it for the way Remus was looking at him, his cheeks pink and his mouth open again and his hands held out slightly feeling keenly their own emptiness, hunger in the hollow of his throat and his cheeks for what he could never ask for, for what Sirius could never take, and he felt himself tremble slightly before the enormity of it in the darkness like a thief come to a holy place, almost, almost reverent. At some point his mouth had gone dry.
“The gin’s on top of the fridge in case you forgot,” he said. Everywhere they weren’t touching he could feel the cold getting in, winter in his mouth, midnight in his empty hands. In the thrumming static spell of it Remus took an uncertain step forward.
“Sirius,” he said, all breath. “Am I, is this—do you even really—”
“I just spent probably an hour telling you I want to get you off and you’re still doing sexual calculus in your head. If you don’t really want to then just fucking say so, alright? We’ll never talk about it again and you can pretend it never happened like you do with everything else and in six months we probably won’t speak to each other anymore because one of us is a coward and it’s not me. Sound good?”
“Fuck you,” said Remus, having obviously wanted to say it for a while, which Sirius probably deserved, “just, shut the fuck up, you have no idea about anything that isn’t you and what you want in this very moment and I don’t know if you even,” he made a noise that sounded almost painful and yanked a hand through his hair, “if you want this. If you are really, truly—in this, beyond right now.”
“Either you’ve been too busy doing your martyr thing to notice anything at all or you’ve got a hugely lower opinion of me than I realized.”
Part of that hypothetical opinion was valid and he knew it, at least on a molecular building-block level where the sometimes-obliviousness intersected with the sometimes-horrific and costly carelessness, but at least he reckoned (uncharitably) that he had the self-awareness to recognize it where Remus could never see the same of himself. “I don’t know what you want,” said Remus, raw-hearted, and reached out as if blinded and took Sirius’s wrist in his fist where the blue skip of the pulse reverberated against his thin fingers, like a flame cupped in his hand.
“I wish you’d stop worrying,” he said, “I just want you to stop worrying about every little thing or whether it’s perfect or it’s ever going to be perfect or if the world’s going to fall off its fucking hinges. I don’t care if it does. Moony.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Moony, look. You’ve got me right where I want me. What are you going to do about it.”
Remus backed him into the stove and threw every ounce of his height and weight and not-inconsiderable strength—he was maybe an inch shorter than Sirius at most and Sirius was tall—into a kiss that would likely have bent Sirius backwards if it hadn’t been for the stovetop behind him. Their arms tangled thrillingly until Remus unwound them and threaded his fingers through Sirius’s hair, pulling gently, his teeth biting a crenelated bruise into Sirius’s bottom lip; Sirius’s palms spread flat-out across the fact of him, his belly and his skinny hips, the swelling of the breath in his lungs, the pulse running red like something just lit, door opening, dam bursting. When they pulled apart he was stroking his thumbs over Remus’s cheekbones, watching Remus watching him, their bitten-bruised lips, their yearning hands. There was blood in his mouth, his own or Remus’s.
“What,” he said, and they both startled with the heat kicked on, laughing. He kissed Remus again, dizzy-deep, tasting whiskey and the ginger tea he’d been drinking earlier, lavender in his hair, dust and clean cottony sweat on his clothes, every part of them soldered together like a single continuous line sketch. His heartbeat-blood was drumming so hellishly loud in his chest against Remus’s he could hardly tell them apart anymore. “Aren’t you gonna take me to bed?”
“Yours. I want to be in your bed,” said Remus, showing his throat like he wanted Sirius to bite down, so he did, thin moon-pale skin bruising rosebud-dark underneath his tongue where he could feel the voice and the heart and the breath, “oh God—you have no idea. You think you do but you don’t,” he said, trailing off with his mouth open, his breath stuttering staccato.
Just outside Sirius’s bedroom he shoved Remus against the wall after they went stumbling against the hallway table where they kept an overflow of records and books strewn with shopping lists and old mail and incoherent notes for illegal research and/or each other that usually continued like a breadcrumb trail on the kitchen table; in the deepening dark Sirius ran his hands down Remus’s sides and squeezed his ass, making him gasp and feeling altogether insanely proud of himself until Remus slotted their hips together and dug his fingers into Sirius’s lower back and then down to his ass, orchestrating their movement. Kinetic-electric, wave upon wave. Remus sucked the join of his neck and jawline as Sirius undid his fly, sliding his palm up the thin warm skin of his belly and down again into the slim trail of corkscrew-hair leading into his underwear where he could feel the outline of Remus’s cock pressing against his own, hard in his jeans.
“Remember when we shared the bed when we moved in,” he said, hips moving, pleasure tightening tidal and foggy; Remus’s hands were up his shirt, settling like birds in the spaces between his ribs. “I used to wake up in the night and think about fucking you stupid while you were six inches away from me. Just—just touching you. Just once.”
“Should’ve woken me up,” said Remus. His eyelids were fluttering because Sirius was working his jeans down his thighs, very slowly, and brushed his knuckles one-two-three-four against his cock in his underwear. “I’d have let you do anything. Every weird thing I know you want to do. All of it.”
On the bed Remus pulled him down like some priceless relic as if he was afraid of going too fast and getting the bends, searching, both of them naked, Sirius feeling split open and connected to Remus like his own soul in every part of his body from his mouth to his groin to Remus’s ankle hooked around the backs of his knees. Hours seemed to pass by in every languid underwater movement—his throat, the secret nautilus-curl of Remus’s spine, the streetlight from the window where he hadn’t closed the curtains—though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes before he looked at Remus poured out beneath him, the ancient tearing scar around his left side grown over him like ivy, the scattered freckles across his nose and shoulders, the bruises Sirius had sucked on his belly and thighs and rising on the inside of his bent knee, and pulled him up into his lap, straddling his hips. Again Remus’s breath stuttered and he stared down with a feral hunger, reaching for Sirius’s cock until Sirius drug his tongue across the silver-thin scar running through a nipple and pushed it away when Remus’s whole body jumped like a live-wire.
“Wait,” he said into Remus’s chest, his hands on the backs of Remus’s thighs and his ass slick with sweat. “Just wait, wait—not yet.”
“Did you think I was joking,” said Remus, fingernails digging dark stinging weals into his shoulders, “I really have wanted this in some part of me forever in past lives and the infernal unconsummation of my soul screaming until I get it et cetera and I swear I’ll set your bed on fire if you don’t do it.”
Sirius had his thumbs in the soft shadowed divots above Remus’s hips and wasn’t sure he would have noticed or cared if the bed was on fire; in fact he was certain the world could fall off its axis, vexed to nightmare and then some, and it wouldn’t have mattered because he could not see anything beyond Remus, the only other living person in the world, a vein of sheer gold above and around him, the magic they’d spun of their own unraveling smothering desire. He crept his hand down and wrapped it around Remus’s cock, stroking him slowly, a long molten drag along the length of it, blood-warm and heavy in his palm. Remus pressed his face into the junction of his neck and shoulder and bit down in a rough open-mouthed kiss when Sirius twisted his wrist hard, thumb pressing up underneath the head, making the marvelous machinery of him shake like an autumn leaf down deep.
“Sirius,” Remus was saying—pleading maybe, except Sirius had never heard him beg for a thing in his life, not forgiveness or love or pleasure or belonging. He’d wrapped his hand around Sirius’s, moving in time but trying to urge him faster every time Sirius’s thumb stroked a thrilling arc over the slick head of his cock, and Sirius could feel all the wires of him honed to a fine crescendo as he brushed over his slit, Remus’s heartbeat between his teeth where he’d pressed his mouth to his chest again, sucking something bright. “Come on, come on—”
Some part of him folded away deep in a submarinean layer of his brain still could not quite believe his luck—that Remus wanted him, that he wanted Sirius to see him like this—and as such he recalled a bare thread of the embarrassingly impotent and obsessive longing that kept him up nights, feeling stoned and possessed in some unalterable piece of his soul dreaming voraciously of what he would give Remus if he could, what he would feed him, all the things he would do if if if like a turntable skipping infinitely on all the most torturously sexual riffs. He surged up and shoved Remus back onto the bed, which lasted about three seconds as Remus rose up on an elbow and grabbed Sirius’s shoulders, trying to hold him there; he did not stick where he was pushed, a new development that Sirius found almost indescribably sexy as he tugged his arm out of Remus’s hand to run his palms up the backs of his thighs and down again, watching the rubber-band vibrations of his belly sharpening in a desperate tuneless chord.
“You’re so,” he said, Remus’s long rack-stretched limbs and his skin lit underneath him, looking like he was in thrall, “Remus.” Fine quiver of his muscles when Sirius hooked his hands under his bent knees and pulled him closer down the bed, lifting up on his elbows to watch Sirius settle between his legs.
With his eyes still watching Remus’s he leaned down and flicked his tongue over the tip of Remus’s cock, again, again, thumb stroking slowly underneath as he took just the head into his mouth, pulling off until it slid off his bottom lip. Remus made a sound like he’d just been punched and Sirius sank down deeper, swallowing around him while Remus grabbed a sweaty fistful of his hair and slid a shaky thumb over Sirius’s eyebrow. Again he pulled back slowly, feeling the warm wet-silk weight of his cock on his tongue and sliding against the inside of his cheek, dragging only his lips around the tip and pressing his tongue over the slit before he sucked it deeper, one hand stroking Remus into his mouth; it was almost like ritual in the swallowing oneness of it, like worship, like becoming. Blood and sex and history, summoning the spell; holiest desire, driving out everything else.
“Oh—fuck, Sirius, I’m,” Remus said, thighs squeezing, “Sirius,” tight and hoarse, thought it was more an incantation than a warning, knuckles and nails, teeth teeth teeth.
Around his cock Sirius hummed, feeling the pulse of it hard against his lips; with his tongue he darted underneath the tip of it over and over and Remus came, a hot wet spread he swallowed until he pulled off entirely, his hand stroking slowly until he felt Remus soften, a drop of come trailing a snow-melt down to his fist. He had about six seconds to feel smug before Remus shoved him down by the shoulders and touched him, kneeling between his legs; it took five strokes of Remus’s hand around his cock before he came so suddenly and so thunderously hard it almost hurt, undertow breaking, the sweet sonic melt spilling through his belly and his cock and pulsing to his toes. When he finished Remus was breathing heavily over him, trying to say something but instead pressed them together by the mouths, and Sirius felt it settle like a living thing down his throat and into the indestructible meat of his soul like a dream-memory on the bed, which with the sheets and the blankets kicked down and spun around looked like an open door to something from which they could never—would never—come back.
Once they’d cleaned up and started to feel their skin prickle with the chill Sirius lit a candle and they ate cheese and crackers and salami in bed with the blanket and the afghan pulled up close, feeling wide open and peeled raw, new to the world and to each other in all the places of themselves where they’d been. It was actually physically difficult to stop kissing Remus; Sirius would be halfway through a sentence or thinking about getting up to piss and would lose the thought completely to the compelling bone-ridge of his shoulder, or the hollow of his throat, or the open press of his mouth which was very soft and red in the coffeestain of the candlelight like blood on new snow. His heart was only just slowing in his chest, as if it had been slammed back into him after an out-of-body experience and more than once he put a hand out to brace himself on the edge of the bed to hang on as tightly to the slim golden thread of it as he could, Remus’s fingers splayed over his ribs like a wraith after lost souls, which Sirius would’ve gladly forfeited to him for the feeling alone.
“I never slept well in this bed,” Remus said into his shoulder, his nose and his mouth and all his wiry hair pressed into Sirius. He didn’t think they could ever be uncoupled.
“Too much stress on the system?”
“God, you’re a dog. But yes. You were right there and I was having these intense sex dreams about you like I was a goddamn thirteen-year-old kid.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Basically forever,” said Remus, laughing brittly. Way up high on his neck Sirius had left a mark which he kissed again when Remus arched his neck like he was asking for it. “It was torture with you right there though. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if I could will you to wake up and kiss me with magic or otherwise but it never worked.”
“And ‘forever’ means…?”
“Christ, Padfoot. Since I was probably twelve. I wanted you to be my consuming sexual awakening in the forest and the empty classrooms and the dorm and the shack and happily ever after, you know how it goes. I used to lay awake nights thinking about it and all that entails if you want to go there with your one-track mind, it was all very screamingly homoerotic really, like a Waugh novel but with explicit jerking off behind the bedcurtains. Sometimes I worried you could tell.”
“Too absorbed in your own tragedy to wonder if I was thinking the same thing.”
“Maybe so,” said Remus. He pressed a soft smiling kiss to Sirius’s temple. “Make me a mixtape about it.”
“It’d have to be an anthology. Like at least one whole tape with just ‘Black Dog’ for an hour somewhere in the middle.”
“‘Search and Destroy’ at least once. Possibly ‘Gloria’ as a closer on Volume Two, right.” They laughed whisperingly and then stretched together like taffy, shifting tectonically in an irresistible arc painted in a conjoined landscape shadow on the far wall. “I want to hear every detail.”
“Have you ever known me to withhold anything once I know I can say it?”
“Fair enough,” said Remus. “In that case you must know I used to wear your clothes to see Dearborn on purpose. I thought about you eating yourself alive with jealousy kind of like a collapsed star fueled on its own sexual spite.” They laughed, kissing again, and settled back into each other as Sirius reckoned they had been trying to do for a very long time.
“You know I’ve had to pee for twenty minutes,” said Sirius, not moving at all.
“Me too.”
That was love, he supposed: going outside in the driving rain and finding that it was a bit warmer than he expected. Waking up and thinking Remus Remus Remus like a wish, hearing his name in every song, seeing it discreetly in the architecture of the whole waking world. Having to piss for twenty minutes and not caring for anything but the hypnotic solidity of another breathing body in his arms.
For the rest of the weekend they hardly bothered with clothes and didn’t leave the flat, engaged in the kind of hedonistic fucking Sirius had only fantasized about from a great distance and had questioned the possibility thereof until that Friday night with Remus and the midnight hush and the thousand ways they had fit together, the newborn feeling of it manifesting as a kind of ecstatic invasion of each other, as though they had been overtaken and sunk together to the bottom of themselves and would never again come out. Remus made grilled cheeses wearing only his plaid boxers and Sirius’s sweater and seemed to take extreme if veiled pleasure in the knowledge that Sirius was watching him with a keen starvation from across the room; they listened to Magazine and Suicide and Squeeze and more Wire and the new Kate Bush album, dancing around the living room stoned in the afternoons to “Roadrunner” and “Moonage Daydream.” They watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and filled in the crosswords in the Prophet with obscenities, ignored the Floo, tried hilariously to perk up the marijuana plants they were attempting to grow in the hallway closet, read each other choice excerpts from the Quibbler regarding the proper steps to take if one suddenly laid an egg (Immaculate Egg-ception: It Happened to Me!!!), made rich potato-leek soup and curry and drank honey-thick hot chocolate with chili in bed and stayed up half the night talking and making love, full of each other.
In the end, Remus’s sexual wheelhouse galvanized them to new highs first: on Sunday evening he drug the blue afghan from the couch onto the kitchen floor (the tile was freezing) and put his hands up Sirius’s shirt, and as such they fucked so loudly on the unyielding cold-iron of it that Sirius was sure they would get suspicious looks from the neighbors on the stairs when at last they ventured outside, fingerprint-bruised and sore. They made love for what felt like days; he felt bound to Remus by body and spirit and spell in their flat, where the universe became their bed or the couch or whatever space contained their own beating hearts and any moment not spent there seemed a miserable waste.
Early Monday morning, when they finally left—Sirius to work in Southwark, Remus to meet with Dumbledore concerning what was likely a perilously dangerous but hopefully paid undercover endeavor—they were both shocked upon stumbling together into the gloomy-grey London rainlight that the world outside their bodies and their flat still existed, turning and turning, unaware and uncaring that they were the only shipwrecked survivors left on earth, and they had fallen in love. At least have the decency to fucking get the gales up, Sirius thought before he ducked into an alley to Apparate, and then proceeded to spend all day thinking of nothing but Remus and their unmade bed and the difference between Friday morning and Monday—the distance between one thing and another—which he had realized suddenly was barely a fingernail’s breadth.
At the end of the day they came back to each other. The deathless mantra: they came back to each other. Again and again and again they found each other anywhere, had always, would always, smothered or lost or beaten bloody or wounded or unforgiven or hated or loved, they came back to each other, stretched umbilical beneath the years and the miles in a unbreakable centrifugal ley line leading them always to each other like the magic from which everything else was born. They came back to each other. They came back to each other.
Part 3
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-01-08 02:13 pm (UTC)Oh Sirius, finally giving in and trying to pull Remus, breaking the tension into little brittle pieces easily cleared away so they can move through it into something better. And Remus, wearing Sirius' clothes just to make him jealous. This was all my favorite things about these two getting together. What a lovely interlude. Can't wait till I can get to the next part.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-19 04:54 pm (UTC)I just loved your descriptions. The ending paragraph gave me chills. Lovely! Off to read the next part! <3