Fic: Each Slow Dusk for a_shadow_there

[i-claudia.livejournal.com]

Title: Each Slow Dusk
Author: i_claudia
Recipient: a_shadow_there
Rating: PG/PG-13
Highlight for Warnings: *smoking, light angst*
Word Count: 1,244
Summary: Sirius is smoking again.
Author's notes: For a_shadow_there’s wish for gin in teacups, flavoured with melancholy and kissing. Happy small gifts! Thanks to ignatia for the lightning-fast beta. &hearts

The title is from the poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfrid Owen, which ends:
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.




Sirius is smoking again. Remus watches him: the angles of his fingers as he takes a drag from his cigarette, the grey-blue smoke curling around his head, fading out into the cool air. They’re sitting close to each other, knees not quite touching. Sirius is slouched in his seat, his legs sprawled carelessly in front of him, but Remus can see his hunched shoulders, can read the tension in the lines of his neck.

He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to smooth the worry away from the new lines in Sirius’s face, so he lifts his cup and takes another long drink. The gin burns his throat, gives him something other than the distance between them to think about. It is cheap and singularly terrible gin, and he wonders distantly if it will dissolve a hole through the thin china of the tea cup. They haven’t bought any proper glasses yet, so they’ve taken out the fine porcelain tea set Sirius stole when he left home: a beautiful blue and white set, one of the few things in Grimmauld Place that wasn’t spelled to bite or poison anyone who wasn’t a pureblood.

Sirius stubs out his cigarette on the ground and reaches over for the gin bottle, snagging it from where it’s half-concealed by tall weeds. They’ve just moved into this house, small and shabby, a little ragged around the edges, and they haven’t even unpacked, let alone started waging war on the wildly overgrown garden in the back. Remus keeps jumping when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye – a rabbit darting behind the purple colt’s foot becomes an intruder, a killer – he knows it’s a danger to leave it so densely overrun, but he likes the rowdiness of it all, the riot of green and colour all tangled together, so tightly interwoven it’s probably impossible to separate the plants without pulling them all out. He likes that it hasn’t been tamed, likes that it hides a dozen tiny families, birds and mice as well as the rabbits. It helps him remember that the whole world has not yet gone dark.

Sirius hands him the gin silently. He accepts it but doesn’t move to fill his tea cup, just balances the bottle on his knee and tilts it, watching as the liquid swirls inside. He doesn’t know how they arrived here, can’t quite remember when they started drifting, started building walls across the paths they’d always sworn they’d keep clear and free.

Sirius says: “It’s going to rain,” and drains his tea cup again.

Remus can hear the words behind Sirius’s bland tone, knows if he presses they could have another argument right here, in August’s gathering twilight, clouds hanging low and bruised from the last dim rays of the setting sun. It won’t be loud. They probably won’t even disturb the neighbors; the last shouting match they had was years ago, a lifetime past, before Remus knew how Sirius’s skin felt, pressed hot and close against his own, before Sirius knew the stories behind each of Remus’s scars. Remus can’t remember what that fight was about, now – it seems too far distant, like he’s watching scenes out of someone else’s life.

Their arguments are made up of long silences and jagged implications now, neither of them able to wrap their mouths around the right words. Remus can taste the syllables in his mouth, can roll fear and anger and uncertainty around on his tongue, but whenever he tries to let them out they get tangled somewhere behind his teeth, and before either of them can explain themselves Sirius has taken off for James and Lily’s hidden house, his face gone still and shuttered, and Remus is roaming the city streets, shivering with the unfairness of it all and running through speeches in his head, trying to make them sound right and failing every time.

Sirius always goes home first. Remus can’t stand the house empty, can’t pace the halls without his mind filling with horror, with the overwhelming, oppressive feeling that Sirius won’t come back, that he’s disappeared like James or is lying somewhere, lost, his eyes gone dull and his dark hair matted with blood against the pavement.

So Remus stays out until dawn starts streaking the sky, until he knows Sirius will be back in their kitchen, staring at the boxes scattered on the counters and kicking moodily at a table leg. He knows it’s selfish, feels the guilt in his chest tighten a little bit more when he walks in and sees the careful stiffness in Sirius’s back, the lines pulling at the corners of his mouth, but it’s the only way he knows to keep from screaming, from flying apart into a thousand sharp-cornered pieces. Sirius never says anything, just brushes his fingers against the nape of Remus’s neck and sometimes sighs, and Remus lets himself press his forehead into Sirius’s shoulder for a moment before stepping back again.

“It’s not your fault,” Remus tells Sirius now, because neither of them will believe it if he says James will be fine and he’s not brave enough yet to say Don’t go or I don’t know what I’ll do, doesn’t want to think about what shape life would be without Sirius even if Sirius does pretend too often that nothing is wrong, that if they just close their eyes they’ll be back in Hogwarts with nothing more than the next Transfiguration essay to worry about.

Sirius rolls his head back, reaches out, and for a moment Remus thinks he’s reaching for the gin before Sirius tentatively wraps their pinkies together.

Remus’s breath shudders a little in his chest at the easy familiarity of it, at the reminder that despite everything Sirius is still warm and lovely and next to him. He knows this can only end in tragedy, knows that every night might be their last, at least like this, but he allows Sirius to run his fingers along the palm of his hand anyway, lets Sirius stroke his wrist and slide their fingers together, all their angles wrong but somehow fitting together anyway.

He turns to say something, hesitant, and is struck once more by Sirius, by the way he looks at Remus with a single-minded kind of focus, and something is squeezing in his throat, leaving him breathless, a deep sort of ache that would still somehow be worse if Sirius left, if he wasn’t playing absently with the button on Remus’s cuff.

Remus leans over, presses them together, focuses on breathing Sirius in, on memorizing the smell of him. He wants to fill his lungs with nothing but Sirius, as if that will stop them from stinging, as if he can make these moments stretch longer. The kiss is small at first, all soft lips and hesitance, but it grows; grows until neither of them can give it up, until it consumes all of Remus’s attention and he leaves aside thinking about all the ways they’re falling apart, unable to concentrate on anything but how they come together: the brush of Sirius’s knuckles against his side and the bitter slide of his teeth against Remus’s mouth, the scrape of his stubble against Remus’s palm as he cups a hand around Sirius’s jaw.

We’ll be alright, Remus thinks, because they will, they have to; because if they aren’t he doesn’t know how he’ll keep breathing without Sirius to fill his lungs.

fin

Comments

[westwardlee.livejournal.com]

I loved this - that last line was simply beautiful.

[i-claudia.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! I'm fond of that line myself -- I'm glad you liked it!