Fic: Abed, After Moonset for abradystrix
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small_giftsTitle: Abed, After Moonset
Author/Artist:mustntgetmy
Recipient:abradystrix
Rating: PG-13
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): Mention of post-moon injuries, cursing, ~innuendo.
Word count: 1864
Summary: A warm bed, some light bickering, and the best of all post-moon revelations.
Notes: So I leaned really hard into the first three lines of “i like my body” for this fic, as well as your third prompt, abradystrix. I hope you enjoy it, and have a very happy holiday!
They’re side by side on the bed, wrinkled sheets and soft silence between them. If Remus tries, tilting his head to the side, he can just make out the sound of Sirius’s breathing: slow, barely a rasp, made deep by dreaming. He looks at him, sees his hair falling over his eyes and his hand lying outstretched, palm up, an offering. He watches his fingers, long, delicate, ink-stained at the tips, twitch and grasp some object he’s dreaming, and then he looks at his own hand, freshly scarred, red streaking across his knuckle like a comet’s tail. He smells murtlap, and something else, something chemical and Muggle, and suddenly he remembers the break of dawn, Sirius’s arm around his waist, his voice in his ear, telling him to walk, not much farther now, just keep going. Scent of honeysuckle, scent of ozone, crushed grass beneath his heels, a cottage peering out from a veil of magic, the door creaking open: it’s always like this, after the moon. Scattershot memories of the morning, a gaping hole where the night had been, and a vivid impression, too bright and too painful to look at directly, at where the night had begun, with the moon rising and the first cracking of bone. He breathes around the knot in his throat that always comes when his thoughts turn to the moonrise, and then lets himself remember the morning again: steady, sure pressure on his knuckles, a cloth soaking up red, Sirius’s voice, very near again and shaking, saying, Merlin, you’ve a knack for destruction, I can see the fucking tendon. His own voice, snapping back, oh, dry your eyes, it’s not like it’s your hand, and his unbloodied hand holding onto Sirius as tightly as he could, his breath coming in gasps. Why are you here? he thought or he said, the pain unmooring him, sending his mind further back than the moon, to the afternoon before, when low clouds were rolling in and a buzz of voices surrounded them in the Leaky Cauldron as he leaned across the table and told Sirius he didn’t have to come.
He’d gotten into the habit of it, since school ended: making it easy for the others to miss the moons. He’d chose places that were difficult to Apparate in and out of: wild glens, and half-sunken marshes, places with no proper names. Fine for the likes of him, who had no steady job to wake up early for, no partner who’d miss him, no boss who’d comment on the shadows under his eyes; not so great for them, with their full lives, their schedules stuffed to overflowing. It’s fine, he’d tell them. I understand. Next moon, next time. It was enough for him that they remembered, month after month; it set him aglow inside each time they asked where he’d be going, said they wanted to run with him, be a pack again. But he couldn’t stand the thought of what came after, the moments they had always been spared at school because they’d have to rush off before classes began. He’d think of the tremors that always overtook his hands, the clumsy jerks of his legs as he tried to stand, the inevitable careening when he found his feet, some deep down part of him still expecting paws and the balancing strength of a tail. He’d think of the raw-edged groan that always, always escaped him at the first step, the all too visible pain of learning to move in his own body again. And all this done while streaming blood, his old scars luridly red, all the skin in between them puckered pink, his whole body a wound.
No, it was better that they didn’t come. Better for him, and certainly better for them. “You don’t have to, it’s fine,” he’d said, again and again, and then, more insistently, to Sirius when he’d cornered him in the back of the Leaky Cauldron yesterday to ask him where he’d be. “Oh, for Merlin’s sake, don’t bother.”
In hindsight, he really ought to have known that telling Sirius not to do something was the same as handing him an engraved invitation. But the thing was, it had been Sirius, more than James and far more than Peter, who he hadn’t wanted to see at moonset. Bad enough, he’d thought, to fancy one of your mates; worse to have them see you as crumpled up and useless as a blood-soaked tissue. And to see pity in those cool gray eyes – no, he didn’t think he could bear it.
Now, in the bed, he waits for that memory to come to him, but he can recall nothing of Sirius’s eyes. Instead, he remembers the gentleness, startling as a butterfly swooping to land on his outstretched palm, of Sirius’s hand on his, closing his wound.
He looks down again at his hand, the streak of red now thinner than it was a moment ago, the skin around it itching like mad but the pain as dulled as if it were days old. “How the fuck,” he says in a soft exclamation; even Pomfrey had never healed him this fast.
“Touching, it is, how much faith you have in me,” Sirius grumbles without opening his eyes, and Remus starts, his hand flinching and the wound contracting further. “Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.” He cracks open an eye, and though Remus waits for it there’s no pity. Sirius looks down at him, at the raw meat color of his arms, his chest, and there’s nothing like a flinch or a grimace in his expression. He must be tired, Remus thinks, but there’s wide awake sharpness in his voice when he says, “You’re a goddamn git, you know that?”
Remus blinks. “This is the first I’m hearing of it,” he says, in that special mild tone he uses whenever he thinks Sirius is gearing up for a rant.
But to his surprise Sirius only blinks his eyes and huffs out a sigh, turning to face Remus, his hand sliding closer across the sheets, an inch away from Remus’s own. “I was worried about you,” he grumbles, widening his eyes to indicate just how far gone something has to be for him to be worried. “Thought you were going for some sort of dangerous experimental treatment or something and that’s why you were keeping us away. Should’ve known it was just your complete and utter inability to accept help.”
Remus fiddles with a wrinkle in the sheets and avoids Sirius’s eyes. “I wouldn’t call it an inability,” he mumbles at last. “A tendency, more like.”
“You know something, Moony? Your insistence on nitpicky semantics is one of the worst things about you.”
Remus has a self-deprecating remark locked and loaded – he tends to, always – but then he feels the softest breath of pressure against his little finger, and he looks down to see Sirius’s hand brushing up against his. And he feels it, down to the quick of him, that it’s not an accident, not a friendly, matey touch. It’s something else, something he can’t read in the steadiness of Sirius’s gaze, something that makes him say, haltingly, “What…what are the other worst things about me?”
“You never wear matching socks.”
Remus is instantly conscious of his ankles and feet – not their boniness, their fish belly paleness, but how the sheets have been tucked around them, how warm they are. He remembers, wonderfully vividly: Sirius’s fingers, brushing the dirt off the soles, wiping them clean.
“Which, you know,” Sirius goes on, “seems like it’d be outside the laws of probability, and yet, Moony. Always. Without fail. Your socks don’t match.”
“Well,” Remus says, needing to clear his throat as Sirius’s hand draws fully flush with his, their little fingers now overlapping. “You know me. I aim to defy all statistical analysis.”
“Oh, if only,” Sirius says, with a roll of his eyes and a stroke of his little finger, so softly across Remus’s knuckle.
Remus swallows. “Is that it?” he asks, just above a whisper.
“What, you think there are only two worst things about you? Please.” He leans forward, two of his fingers on Remus’s now, and says, with the air of delivering a mortal insult, “You squeak when you sneeze. Like a mouse.”
Remus can’t help but laugh, wrinkling his nose, considering, for an instant, the spray of freckles across it, how Sirius has leant in – not once, but twice – in the last few weeks, when they were out and stone drunk, to count them. He flushes; how had he not recognized that look in his eyes as it was happening, how had he not known?
“And,” Sirius says, fingers now splayed all across Remus’s, his thumb so gentle along the closed, petal pink line of the wound. “You snore.”
His gaze jumps then, to the column of Remus’s throat and to his lips, and for a swaying instant Remus can’t recall what they look like, what imperfections they carry, what scars, what blemishes. All he knows is that they’re warm – that all of him is warm – with blushing eagerness, with fizzing over certainty that if he lifts his other hand from the sheets and reaches out to touch his fingertips to the base of Sirius’s throat, just so, Sirius’s skin will ignite as brightly as his own.
Sirius’s breath catches, his hand tightens convulsively around Remus’s, and there, the blush, fanning across his cheeks like wings spreading for flight. Remus says, in a rasping whisper, “You too.”
Sirius blinks, trying and failing to follow what Remus is saying; his eyes are at once glazed and over bright: the eyes of someone waking up from an impossibly good dream. “What?” he finally says, unable to recapture the thread, and Remus smiles and begins to trail his fingertips slowly, so slowly, up the line of Sirius’s throat. He has never felt himself so powerful – not in any dream-memory of the full moon, one swipe of his paw enough to crush a boar’s skull – and he has never been so thankful for the curve of his own fingertips and all the nerve endings they contain as this moment, when he watches Sirius’s lips part, a low gasp escaping him.
“You too,” he whispers again, breathlessly, accusingly, with love he is only just starting to fully feel, his thumb a hairsbreadth from Sirius’s lower lip. “You snore too.”
It is, perhaps, the unlikeliest phrase to precipitate a first kiss ever spoken, but nevertheless Remus no sooner finishes saying it than Sirius darts forward across the bed – Remus’s hand sliding across the stubble on his cheek, landing in the thick of his hair – to press his lips against Remus’s own.
It’s a crooked, clumsy kiss, their noses smashed into each other, one corner of Remus’s mouth hardly involved, but it is the sweetest, steadying feeling; it sets Remus more firmly back into himself than any moonset ever has.
The sheets tangle around them, the clumsiness becomes carefulness becomes yes becomes there becomes please. And for an instant there are no wounds, scarred over or just healing, there is only warm skin, Sirius’s, and wonderfully, beautifully, his.
Author/Artist:
mustntgetmyRecipient:
abradystrixRating: PG-13
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): Mention of post-moon injuries, cursing, ~innuendo.
Word count: 1864
Summary: A warm bed, some light bickering, and the best of all post-moon revelations.
Notes: So I leaned really hard into the first three lines of “i like my body” for this fic, as well as your third prompt, abradystrix. I hope you enjoy it, and have a very happy holiday!
They’re side by side on the bed, wrinkled sheets and soft silence between them. If Remus tries, tilting his head to the side, he can just make out the sound of Sirius’s breathing: slow, barely a rasp, made deep by dreaming. He looks at him, sees his hair falling over his eyes and his hand lying outstretched, palm up, an offering. He watches his fingers, long, delicate, ink-stained at the tips, twitch and grasp some object he’s dreaming, and then he looks at his own hand, freshly scarred, red streaking across his knuckle like a comet’s tail. He smells murtlap, and something else, something chemical and Muggle, and suddenly he remembers the break of dawn, Sirius’s arm around his waist, his voice in his ear, telling him to walk, not much farther now, just keep going. Scent of honeysuckle, scent of ozone, crushed grass beneath his heels, a cottage peering out from a veil of magic, the door creaking open: it’s always like this, after the moon. Scattershot memories of the morning, a gaping hole where the night had been, and a vivid impression, too bright and too painful to look at directly, at where the night had begun, with the moon rising and the first cracking of bone. He breathes around the knot in his throat that always comes when his thoughts turn to the moonrise, and then lets himself remember the morning again: steady, sure pressure on his knuckles, a cloth soaking up red, Sirius’s voice, very near again and shaking, saying, Merlin, you’ve a knack for destruction, I can see the fucking tendon. His own voice, snapping back, oh, dry your eyes, it’s not like it’s your hand, and his unbloodied hand holding onto Sirius as tightly as he could, his breath coming in gasps. Why are you here? he thought or he said, the pain unmooring him, sending his mind further back than the moon, to the afternoon before, when low clouds were rolling in and a buzz of voices surrounded them in the Leaky Cauldron as he leaned across the table and told Sirius he didn’t have to come.
He’d gotten into the habit of it, since school ended: making it easy for the others to miss the moons. He’d chose places that were difficult to Apparate in and out of: wild glens, and half-sunken marshes, places with no proper names. Fine for the likes of him, who had no steady job to wake up early for, no partner who’d miss him, no boss who’d comment on the shadows under his eyes; not so great for them, with their full lives, their schedules stuffed to overflowing. It’s fine, he’d tell them. I understand. Next moon, next time. It was enough for him that they remembered, month after month; it set him aglow inside each time they asked where he’d be going, said they wanted to run with him, be a pack again. But he couldn’t stand the thought of what came after, the moments they had always been spared at school because they’d have to rush off before classes began. He’d think of the tremors that always overtook his hands, the clumsy jerks of his legs as he tried to stand, the inevitable careening when he found his feet, some deep down part of him still expecting paws and the balancing strength of a tail. He’d think of the raw-edged groan that always, always escaped him at the first step, the all too visible pain of learning to move in his own body again. And all this done while streaming blood, his old scars luridly red, all the skin in between them puckered pink, his whole body a wound.
No, it was better that they didn’t come. Better for him, and certainly better for them. “You don’t have to, it’s fine,” he’d said, again and again, and then, more insistently, to Sirius when he’d cornered him in the back of the Leaky Cauldron yesterday to ask him where he’d be. “Oh, for Merlin’s sake, don’t bother.”
In hindsight, he really ought to have known that telling Sirius not to do something was the same as handing him an engraved invitation. But the thing was, it had been Sirius, more than James and far more than Peter, who he hadn’t wanted to see at moonset. Bad enough, he’d thought, to fancy one of your mates; worse to have them see you as crumpled up and useless as a blood-soaked tissue. And to see pity in those cool gray eyes – no, he didn’t think he could bear it.
Now, in the bed, he waits for that memory to come to him, but he can recall nothing of Sirius’s eyes. Instead, he remembers the gentleness, startling as a butterfly swooping to land on his outstretched palm, of Sirius’s hand on his, closing his wound.
He looks down again at his hand, the streak of red now thinner than it was a moment ago, the skin around it itching like mad but the pain as dulled as if it were days old. “How the fuck,” he says in a soft exclamation; even Pomfrey had never healed him this fast.
“Touching, it is, how much faith you have in me,” Sirius grumbles without opening his eyes, and Remus starts, his hand flinching and the wound contracting further. “Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.” He cracks open an eye, and though Remus waits for it there’s no pity. Sirius looks down at him, at the raw meat color of his arms, his chest, and there’s nothing like a flinch or a grimace in his expression. He must be tired, Remus thinks, but there’s wide awake sharpness in his voice when he says, “You’re a goddamn git, you know that?”
Remus blinks. “This is the first I’m hearing of it,” he says, in that special mild tone he uses whenever he thinks Sirius is gearing up for a rant.
But to his surprise Sirius only blinks his eyes and huffs out a sigh, turning to face Remus, his hand sliding closer across the sheets, an inch away from Remus’s own. “I was worried about you,” he grumbles, widening his eyes to indicate just how far gone something has to be for him to be worried. “Thought you were going for some sort of dangerous experimental treatment or something and that’s why you were keeping us away. Should’ve known it was just your complete and utter inability to accept help.”
Remus fiddles with a wrinkle in the sheets and avoids Sirius’s eyes. “I wouldn’t call it an inability,” he mumbles at last. “A tendency, more like.”
“You know something, Moony? Your insistence on nitpicky semantics is one of the worst things about you.”
Remus has a self-deprecating remark locked and loaded – he tends to, always – but then he feels the softest breath of pressure against his little finger, and he looks down to see Sirius’s hand brushing up against his. And he feels it, down to the quick of him, that it’s not an accident, not a friendly, matey touch. It’s something else, something he can’t read in the steadiness of Sirius’s gaze, something that makes him say, haltingly, “What…what are the other worst things about me?”
“You never wear matching socks.”
Remus is instantly conscious of his ankles and feet – not their boniness, their fish belly paleness, but how the sheets have been tucked around them, how warm they are. He remembers, wonderfully vividly: Sirius’s fingers, brushing the dirt off the soles, wiping them clean.
“Which, you know,” Sirius goes on, “seems like it’d be outside the laws of probability, and yet, Moony. Always. Without fail. Your socks don’t match.”
“Well,” Remus says, needing to clear his throat as Sirius’s hand draws fully flush with his, their little fingers now overlapping. “You know me. I aim to defy all statistical analysis.”
“Oh, if only,” Sirius says, with a roll of his eyes and a stroke of his little finger, so softly across Remus’s knuckle.
Remus swallows. “Is that it?” he asks, just above a whisper.
“What, you think there are only two worst things about you? Please.” He leans forward, two of his fingers on Remus’s now, and says, with the air of delivering a mortal insult, “You squeak when you sneeze. Like a mouse.”
Remus can’t help but laugh, wrinkling his nose, considering, for an instant, the spray of freckles across it, how Sirius has leant in – not once, but twice – in the last few weeks, when they were out and stone drunk, to count them. He flushes; how had he not recognized that look in his eyes as it was happening, how had he not known?
“And,” Sirius says, fingers now splayed all across Remus’s, his thumb so gentle along the closed, petal pink line of the wound. “You snore.”
His gaze jumps then, to the column of Remus’s throat and to his lips, and for a swaying instant Remus can’t recall what they look like, what imperfections they carry, what scars, what blemishes. All he knows is that they’re warm – that all of him is warm – with blushing eagerness, with fizzing over certainty that if he lifts his other hand from the sheets and reaches out to touch his fingertips to the base of Sirius’s throat, just so, Sirius’s skin will ignite as brightly as his own.
Sirius’s breath catches, his hand tightens convulsively around Remus’s, and there, the blush, fanning across his cheeks like wings spreading for flight. Remus says, in a rasping whisper, “You too.”
Sirius blinks, trying and failing to follow what Remus is saying; his eyes are at once glazed and over bright: the eyes of someone waking up from an impossibly good dream. “What?” he finally says, unable to recapture the thread, and Remus smiles and begins to trail his fingertips slowly, so slowly, up the line of Sirius’s throat. He has never felt himself so powerful – not in any dream-memory of the full moon, one swipe of his paw enough to crush a boar’s skull – and he has never been so thankful for the curve of his own fingertips and all the nerve endings they contain as this moment, when he watches Sirius’s lips part, a low gasp escaping him.
“You too,” he whispers again, breathlessly, accusingly, with love he is only just starting to fully feel, his thumb a hairsbreadth from Sirius’s lower lip. “You snore too.”
It is, perhaps, the unlikeliest phrase to precipitate a first kiss ever spoken, but nevertheless Remus no sooner finishes saying it than Sirius darts forward across the bed – Remus’s hand sliding across the stubble on his cheek, landing in the thick of his hair – to press his lips against Remus’s own.
It’s a crooked, clumsy kiss, their noses smashed into each other, one corner of Remus’s mouth hardly involved, but it is the sweetest, steadying feeling; it sets Remus more firmly back into himself than any moonset ever has.
The sheets tangle around them, the clumsiness becomes carefulness becomes yes becomes there becomes please. And for an instant there are no wounds, scarred over or just healing, there is only warm skin, Sirius’s, and wonderfully, beautifully, his.
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Date: 2019-12-06 03:26 am (UTC)Also, seeing your name reminds me I got a notif a loooong time ago that you subscribed to this journal, so now I'm subscribed to yours as well :)
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Date: 2019-12-08 10:47 pm (UTC)This week has been a busy hellscape and I wanted to properly absorb how amazing this was and reply in a thoughtful way because OMG I loved it so very much and here is why...
This first paragraph is a sensual, synaesthetic joy of a narrative. I feel overwhelmed with the warmth and intimacy of every word, the beautiful smudging of time and space and memory. Your descriptive writing is PHENOMENAL. Like, really really. And the line 'Merlin you've a knack for destruction' is just the most Wolfstar line in the world and I want it embossed on everything ever, thanks.
The idea of Remus not wanting to be a burden and to relieve others of their obligation is just perfect. It's so utterly in character and Sirius' response is the perfect tonic, trampling in that Sirius way over the prospect of vulnerability or shame with a ferocious love. 'In hindsight, he really ought to have known that telling Sirius not to do something was the same as handing him an engraved invitation.' <3
'Remus is instantly conscious of his ankles and feet – not their boniness, their fish belly paleness, but how the sheets have been tucked around them, how warm they are. He remembers, wonderfully vividly: Sirius’s fingers, brushing the dirt off the soles, wiping them clean.' This made my heart beat fast and my soul warm with the love and care this shows so perfectly.
The tension of not 'will they won't they' but 'are they or aren't they' is just wonderful. It's like the 'will' has been crossed mentally but the 'are' of what they are to each other is the last big hurdle and you capture that so well with the utterly fucking devastating. Snoring is intimacy and accepting foibles and flaws and I love it so so much.
[Also the title? WONDERFUL. If I saw this title on AO3 I would click instantly. It's gorgeous.]
That last paragraph blew. My. Mind. Yes. Poetic, visual, sensual, to be blunt, sexy as fuck.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for such a thoughtful and intricate piece. It's a wonderful gift to have received and I am so touched and honoured by your talent and words. I'll treasure it xxx
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Date: 2019-12-10 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 01:21 pm (UTC)