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It starts a week after graduation in Sirius’s sparsely-furnished flat, with Sirius himself too drunk to stand or perform most complex motor functions on his own, so he ends up with his head in Remus’s lap on the sofa, sniffing the thin fabric of his cardigan indiscreetly and declaring sometime around midnight that they should fucking well do something to commemorate the onset of adulthood and the great blind thrust into the unpleasantly damp meat grinder that is The Rest Of Our Lives. Remus congratulates him on his choice of metaphor and lifts his head up gently so he can stretch his long legs out beside him to sleep.
In the muzzy yellow haze of morning-after nausea and throbbing, Remus—after pretending to be asleep for a lot longer than he was so as not to disturb Sirius, but mostly just to prolong the contact of knees and hair and gangly, febrile limbs—forages for tealeaves and Weetabix and folds the singular joy of Sirius’s rainwater eyes and the beginnings of the fine shadows on his brittle, unshaven jawline safely into his belly, feeling, in general, perfectly content to get on with the sweet, secret ache in his back and crossword clue number twenty-four until Sirius reaches for the cream and says, “You know what we should do, Moony?”
“What?”
“Have some fun.”
“Fun” turns out to mean “let’s go to Brighton next week and strip under the pier and walk around imposingly,” to which Remus replies there is nothing imposing about his noodly arms or his pale belly so it would just end up looking pathetic in a middle-aged sort of way, to which Sirius answers around a mouthful of sugary cereal that seeing as he went through puberty sometime shortly before he was born, there’s certainly enough to go around for both of them and maybe Remus can catch a few stray sunrays glinting off his rippling abdominals, right?
Remus, scalding his tongue and his tidy routine on the Darjeeling Sirius always keeps—the day always knots up at the edges, a bit, when he doesn’t start it with Earl Grey—bites his thumbnail only to find that there’s nothing left of it to bite, and flushes like mid-June. “I can’t exactly afford fun right now,” he says quietly, feeling the teeth of the strange, hungry vacancy left in his chest from wishing and wanting.
To which Sirius says, “Oh, pish-posh, you miserable, self-sacrificing little shit,” and shows up on Remus’s kitchen doorstep at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning with a bag of Honeydukes toffee for his mother and charm enough to plug all the cracks in their draughty fenland house. “Go with him, Remus,” says his mother, sliding Sirius an extra piece of bacon after he’s just finished begging Mrs. Lupin to let him spend his hard-earned Galleons on her elderly son for a week. “It’s not as if there’s anything to do here but collect dust. You’re always staying with him, anyway—” at this, Remus takes a moment to choke on a toast crumb while Sirius unhelpfully—cruelly—rubs rather than pats his back— “and it’ll do you good to get some sunshine in you.”
So, here’s Remus: a September sort of boy teetering on the pebble-warm shores of June with a waterlogged book (thanks, Sirius) and a pasty stripe of unblended zinc smeared across his nose, adjusting the brim of his floppy sunhat and hoping no one notices the old scars (“The lawnmower never saw him coming,” Sirius told the last person to express concern, wrapping an arm around Remus’s shoulders and staring mournfully off into the distance) or the way his eyes keep flickering to the water droplets sliding down Sirius Black’s anatomically perfect body like a moth drawn to a flame, like a fork lovingly shoved into an electrical socket, shielding himself against the glare of Brighton at balmy-bright noon and generating enough of his own furious sexual tension to fuel an oil refinery.
He lies there like that on the very first day, sand in his bits, sunburn on his shoulders and thighs, flapping his soggy book uselessly in front of his face until something—someone—starts dripping saltwater on his forehead, sated blood-warm with summer skin: Sirius, grinning like the edge of a very sharp knife, watching him with an imperial arch of his spine and manic, depraved intent unfurling high on his brow.
“Oh, darling,” says Sirius, in an exaggerated, if impressive, imitation of the couple lying a few towel-lengths ahead of them in the sand, “it’s getting so late, and I’m so cold and wet and emotionally fragile and going completely blue in the face over these tight, flimsy swim trunks—I think I’m going to go back to the room and take them off,” and rolls half over Remus to stick his tongue in his ear with canine imprecision.
“It’s twelve-thirty in the afternoon and the only thing you’ve ever gone blue in the face over is your own hair and my mum’s cranberry muffins.”
“And your nose, let’s not forget the biggest of them all,” says Sirius, leaning close. Remus wonders what he would do if Sirius bit it. Remus very much wants him to.
“I’m hungry,” he says suddenly, turning away and slamming his book shut with rather too much force; it makes an awkward, squishy sort of noise, and he winces. “We should go get lunch. Unless you’re planning on feeding me that funny fish, from earlier.”
“It went all clammy on me so I let it go. Reckon you find that all noble and invigorating and incredibly arousing.” Sirius stands and then reaches down to pull Remus to his feet, stretching out beneath the iron-burn of the sun with his head tipped back and the silver-fine cords of muscle in his shoulders and his back and his belly straining beneath his skin like poetry while Remus’s eyes wander downward—what’s a man to do?—to the dark coarse hair trailing into the shadows of his trunks. It causes a small but uncomfortable detonation somewhere in his chest, distressingly close to his heart; by the time Sirius snaps his head back down, Remus has his book crossed over his sternum like a shield, as if that’s ever kept Sirius from twisting his nerves in a frantic, joy-addled rush.
They stop for cigarettes on the way back, and Remus, fumbling one to his mouth with one hand and rifling through his pocket for a lighter with the other, stops suddenly when Sirius, still disconcertingly shirtless, steps in front of him and murmurs firelight into the tip until it catches orange-sharp in his eyes; Remus’s heart takes a moment to stutter violently against his ribs and he inhales all wrong, puffing out smoke between his teeth as his eyes water around Sirius’s laughter.
“First the coughing, then the arthritis sets in, and then your tolerance for anything other than pre-digested foods takes a trip to the loo and never comes back,” says Sirius, still laughing, grinning white-slow like the finger’s-breadth beauty of the moon on the wane. “Fortunately I don’t mind chewing your cheesecake for you.”
“I’m too nice to you,” says Remus, hoarsely, shoving his cigarette back in his mouth and taking a long, shaky drag. “Entirely.”
“You weren’t even going to come with me until I went down on my knees and promised your mum I’d be gentle.”
“I told you I’d be boring. I don’t have James’s tolerance for firewhisky and I don’t drink Darjeeling.”
“Look, Remus, light of my life, fire of my only-too-willing loins—”
“There are children—”
Sirius considers this for three seconds and makes an oh-well movement of his bare shoulders. “This’ll go a lot easier on you if you just let me buy you lunch. We can even sit on the shore and read some Yeats and listen to our arteries harden afterwards the way you like.”
“Are you threatening me, Black?”
“Of course I am,” says Sirius, preferring always to tug Remus from the depths of his fatalism; he takes hold of both Remus’s hands and pulls him forward until he’s smiling again—again—again—and then lets go, settling back into the rhythm that is theirs and theirs alone, walking on while Remus chances a few sideways glances at him from time to time, watching him finish his cigarette around the smile Remus talked into his lips, a joy almost indistinguishable from fear clutching him by the belly.
It’s in this same way that they rub along together for the first few days, Remus matching his quick strides across the sand and concrete and trying to memorize the shape of Sirius’s mouth when the corners lift up and the teeth show, and Sirius pulling him along like an undertow, shoving seashells in his pockets and answering Remus’s repeated offers to pay his own way home with more cheap, greasy food every night, sitting on the shoreline while the waves shiver in skittish young blood. For hours at a time, Remus forgets to worry about his job prospects outside of part-time research or research subject and the fact that London—and Sirius—are so very far away from him some days; he stretches out beside him in the evenings, loose and open with the love folded into the join of his ribs, talking about nothing in that sea-green summer way he supposes everyone does when they’re eighteen and the whole world is theirs to lose.
And Remus swallows down and hoards it all, greedy for the sulky heat and the freckles painting pictures on his skin and the blur of Sirius’s fingers brushing against his spine and his elbows, I want and I need melting like hoarfrost in his throat, the spark and the sweet dissolve in his belly when he makes Sirius laugh, peeking at him through the water-warped pages of his book where he keeps the scraps of Sirius’s early-morning notes: Gone for coffee cake & a run through the gulls, be back with your tea. Love, Earl Grey xo and Did I ever tell you that you talk in your sleep? Because you do and it isn’t even FUN, you could at least tell me how much you want to eat my liver at the full moon or where you’re keeping James’s old Bludgers (filthy boy) but no, it’s all “Sirius” -something and “the goblin peace treaty of 1243” -whatever and “Oh no, that’s quite all right,” and this funny, bed-spring-creaky laugh. Weird bloke, that Sirius—he probably finds it hideously attractive, I’d watch out for him. You’ve drool on your chin, by the way.
Most nights they walk back to their room slowly, meandering through the dusty-soft streets with unhurried feet, nothing to rush for on these hazy, starlit nothing-nights. They go to the cinema in the afternoons and whisper in the dark, and in the evenings Sirius buys them chips hot enough to leave first-degree burns and feeds them to him under the lamplights, leaving shadow-sensations where his fingers touch Remus’s lips; one night, when they’re both well and truly pissed and Sirius has gotten extremely, blissfully handsy while he mentions Apparating and tries to perform Accio on his motorbike with vague but increasingly alarming hot-steel-sounding crunches, Remus has to grab him by the waist and recite the entirety of “Three Splinched Bits: A Cautionary Tale” and then sing him half of “Moonage Daydream” before he finally stops and laughs brightly against him, watching Remus from under the short fringe of his hair with cut-glass eyes that always remind him of January ice and August nights, exalted, nests of words in his head overgrown with three years of things he’s wanted to say. Their wrists rasp together every time they round a corner too sharply on the way back.
Of course, he falls prey to his own heart more often than not, spinning elaborate fantasies over breakfast or in the shower or beneath the duvet of a bed that’s too big and too downy-puffy for him, just before he sleeps: he imagines opening the door of a vine-covered cottage and kissing promises into Sirius’s mouth in the shape of hellos and good mornings and goodnights and I-missed-yous, arms around his waist at the kitchen counter, a bed where they fit into each other, Christmases and birthdays new years and Brighton summers all stacked up in the same place like some sickly, high-flown fever dream he can’t bring himself to wish away—possibly the result of too much Brontë at the beach. All that romanticism, and where does it get you? Wandering the moors in a consumptive stupor with splinters in your heart and nothing to show for it but an abortive attempt at marriage and the clothes on your betrayed, pitiful back.
Remus doesn’t even know how to kiss anyone, really.
Not that it stops him from entertaining voracious sexual fantasies of a nature that would have made even James Potter, at the height of his depravity, feel lacking in initiative. He is, as Sirius reminds him fondly and often, something of a late-blooming flower, which is probably why his sixteen-year-old delusions of domesticity and holidaymaking have, over the past few months, sprouted new blossoms of eighteen-year-old perversions that feature Sirius bending him over the desk in their room and shoving his fist in Remus’s mouth and fucking him so hard he screams. Oh, oh, and stolen autumn afternoons kneeling between Sirius’s legs in his sitting room with a hand on Remus’s head, watching him lean in with his mouth. Sometimes—eight times daily, eleven on Saturdays—he imagines what it would be like on Sirius’s bed in his flat, the liquid London night-lights slicing into the places where their skin touches, fingers riding over his ribs and hips, Sirius’s lips pressed to the crook of his chin and his neck where he murmurs Remus’s name against his pulse, sound like April rain and hours passing by, all of it too big and too precious to hold. Remus dreams of leading him shyly up the stairs to the Shack and lying down with him on the unmade bed, letting all his senses blur into one until they tremble up and down his whole body.
It’s such a peculiar thing, he thinks, having those thoughts when Sirius is in the room, right there, taking apart the Muggle radio that came with the place and not wearing much in the way of a shirt while Remus thinks of unbuckling his belt or kissing the join of his jaw and his neck. How does anyone ever deal with this and still manage to look other people in the eye? The whole thing makes his mouth itch, the nearness of Sirius, the strain of his hands and his eyes, wondering if Sirius ever has the same stupid, woolly thoughts about him, too.
“Moony. Moony. Remus J. Lupin—Lupini—Lupinus perennis—”
Ah, apparently not.
“Sorry,” says Remus, turning from the Prophet to Sirius, who is sitting on the edge of his bed with the radio antenna in one hand and a cigarette held to his mouth with the other, watching Remus over the sharp V of his fingers. “I like my last name with two syllables, by the way. Feel free to stop besmirching it anytime.”
“Nah,” says Sirius. He grins wide around his fingers; it goes directly to a region of Remus’s lower belly referred to by professionals and hormone-rattled gentlefolk the world over as “Down There” and then spreads in a shudder up to his heart, which never behaves any better. “I was saying we could take off our clothes and have a nice healthy bout of gratuitous nudity in the rain, y’know, for the benefit of everyone. You can even bring the soap and take care of your evening shower while we’re out.”
“I think I’ll just stay in. You’ve got enough gratuitous nudity for both of us.”
“Is that right,” says Sirius, taking a long drag. Remus feels like the air is being sucked out of his own lungs. “Still. Awfully hot to be so buttoned-up and prefectly, isn’t it.”
“These are my summer socks,” he mutters, suddenly very aware of the heat streaking down his cheeks and neck and his hair floofing up slightly in the humidity. “We could fill the tub with cold water, if you like. I’ll even splash you.”
“Can we eat the rest of the curry?”
“You know how I feel about eating in the bath.”
“And you’d probably wear your industrial swim trunks that double as a chastity belt the whole time.”
“Probably,” agrees Remus. “We could wait until it lets up and have a swim.”
Sirius stands up, drawing in one long, final drag and leaning out the window into the rain to crush it on the sill before littering shamelessly. “Or, we could stay in like you said and have a long, revealing sleepover,” he says, smiling like he’s holding something wicked between his teeth. “Lots of girly fun.”
“Um,” says Remus.
After a silent, narrow moment spent watching Remus from the edge of his bed, Sirius leaves and then comes back with an oversized blue coffee mug, the lamp between the beds getting into the hollow of his throat and the knife’s-edge dip of his hipbones as he sits on Remus’s bed. He settles on his knees beside him and looks down at him in the strange metallic silence while the rain pours off the roof, all wonder, all tight-throat anticipation. Remus’s breath catches, like choking on summertime dusk.
“Take off your shirt,” says Sirius.
Remus’s heart flies into his mouth and his stomach lands somewhere around his ankles; he blinks wildly and trembles, but not, he realizes dimly, not as if with fear.
“What—”
“Just take it off, I know you’re hot and it’s fucking miserable in here and you’re going to start panting and probably combust any minute now, so. Just take it off.”
“If anyone’s going to start panting it’s you, you, you dog,” he says idiotically, sitting up and fiddling with the hem of his shirt. Sirius doesn’t take his eyes off him.
“Come on,” Sirius says, as softly as Remus thinks he’s ever said anything, “it’s only me, Moony.”
Which is rather the problem, isn’t it, but Remus lifts it over his head anyway, succumbing to the pounding of his own heart as much as Sirius’s hand curled around the coffee mug like an offering and the June-drenched hum of the sea, cloudy confessions thick in his throat. Sirius reaches for his hands and—oh fuck, oh fuck—pulls his shirt off his arms, everything gone quiet but the rain and the tick-tick-tick of Remus’s old wristwatch, a pale brass heartbeat keeping time; Sirius covers its face with his hand and then takes it off, sets it on the nightstand.
He lets Sirius push him down against the white sheets, and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, Sirius is looking at him quietly, time and light stretching out into the gaps between them, wanting to be filled; they both laugh whisperingly, the backs of their hands brushing together in a , and Remus is struck by all the new ways they could move against each other.
Then, Sirius swings one leg around Remus’s belly and then the other, his thighs locked loosely around Remus’s hips where he stares down at him with his trousers low on his hips and his mouth half-open and red, plucking an ice cube from the coffee mug and holding it precariously over Remus’s ribs as something in his frontal lobe snaps and sizzles like a live wire, never to function correctly again.
“Oh my God,” Remus sputters. What else does one say in this sort of situation? “What are you—we—I. Sirius.”
“I’m cooling you off,” Sirius explains, adjusting his thighs over Remus in a way that is absolutely deliberate. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“I—oh my God—I’m, you don’t have to, you know,” he says, and laughs shakily, torn between frantic-heart desperation and a feverish, knifepoint want, wringing out his nerves like twisted metal wires.
Sirius smiles crookedly at him, letting the ice drip between his fingers and onto Remus’s chest, right between his ribs. He gasps and puts a hand to it, reflexively, drags his forefinger through the white-cold. “I know I don’t have to, fucking tosser. I want to.”
Remus also very much wants to.
“I should turn around,” he says, swallowing hard and trying to assuage the situation between his legs that’s about to become catastrophic in roughly twelve seconds.
“Why?”
“My back is very hot.”
“Must be dire if it’s worse than the rest of you. Your face is turning magenta.”
“You really aren’t as funny as you think you are,” says Remus, turning around and taking a deep, steadying breath as he feels Sirius settle over his back.
“No, I’m better,” says Sirius. Remus doesn’t have to see him to know the smile widening his lips: crooked, beautiful, lit up like a sunburnt forever.
The first touch makes him gasp loudly, startling at the very tip of the ice drawing December lines into his ribs. He can feel it dulled by the heat of his skin, melting with the rain and trailing in a thin stream down his sides and onto the bed; Sirius does it again on the other side and then pulls back, adjusting his knees against Remus’s back. The mattress creaks slowly as he reaches for another.
Blue like lake water and mirrors and evening light comes the next one, dipping into every laddered notch of his spine and arching outward into jagged points: a rune, he realizes, just as Sirius bends down to the skin so that Remus feels every inhale and every exhale, illumination, breathing into him like ripples until Remus is lit with it. “Berkanan,” he says, feeling the way the word reverberates in him and then into Sirius from the join of their hips and his mouth open at his shoulderblades, where Remus hears him swallow harshly.
“See. You’ve always been such a smart boy, Moony. Not just a pretty face.”
“I, well. I don’t think I’m—”
“Shh,” says Sirius. “We are what we are, Moony, and I rather think I know what adjectives to use for your delicate visage.” His fingers tap out a staccato pattern against the basin of Remus’s lower back, soft like the turning of pages; his hips strain for it, for Sirius’s hands. “A gift, you know.”
Remus would answer but his heart is hammering so hard his throat actually feels tight; he waits for Sirius to paint another, sloping down the hallow-curve of his waist until he feels wild and breathless with it, his hand clenching around the cotton sheets uselessly. “That’s—Ansuz,” he says. He can feel Sirius’s hand braced beside his hip when he moves, caging him in. “Laguz.” Another, thawing along the base of his spine, gooseflesh shivering across his shoulders: “Algiz.” It comes out choked, half-moaned as Sirius runs his knuckles down-down-down heartbeat-heavy against each bump of vertebra, twinging in his belly like an out-of-tune arpeggio.
“Full marks,” Sirius murmurs, oh, God, right over the back of his neck. “Very impressive, young Lupin, very inspirational. They’ll make a commemorative plaque out of you someday,” he says, and carves an ice-bright stretch of bars into the ticklish skin at the back of his left hip, making Remus’s fingers twitch until the droplets heat with the warmth Sirius pulls from his body and slip in a snow-melt down his sides, onto the bed. He lies still, shivering under Sirius, feeling as if they only need one tiny jolt to fall right off their axis.
“Hagalaz,” he says, smiling tremulously—insanely—into the cotton. There’s another long ice-stroke between his shoulderblades, his skin cooling and heating again at the whisper of Sirius’s breath above him; he can feel himself pressed against the mattress, uncomfortably tight, and he realizes that at this point Sirius would have to know all about that, too. He feels the familiar surge of his heart against his ribs, against Sirius, and opens his mouth to try and talk it down with the first stupid thought he grasps. “This reminds me, you know, of sixth year, when I found you with no trousers by the lake in February and it started storming, and you said ‘We’re fucked anyway when we get back, let’s jump in’ and I don’t know why but I did, and you could hear the rain and the thunder under the water, sort of like being suspended somewhere else, and then you pulled me back up with you and I started laughing so hard I swallowed some weird plant and coughed half the night. That was the last detention I ever got,” he says, and, “oh—Sowilo.”
“It was a social experiment. One that, might I add, made a few other students delirious with happiness,” says Sirius, palming his ribs and making him gasp, “if you know what I mean.”
“More like you wanted the excuse to drip all over the trophy room. Filch hated you, d’you know, he once went on for nearly an hour about how he wanted to feed you to vampires? That’s—oh, you, um. Othila.” He sucks in a sharp breath beneath the fingers dawdling at the hem of his trousers. “I like it when it rains all night like this, it sort of puts you to sleep. And you can smell the wet sand and the pebbles through the window, and I always worry a little about the seabirds. They must get so wet. And the worms. And I’m, oh God, I don’t even know why I’m saying any of this, it’s just—my brain feels hard-boiled,” he says, high and wild, a taut coil of youth and yearning and electricity, waiting to spark.
Sirius bows his head to the place where Remus’s hairline blurs into the skin of his neck, pressing his nose there, breathing warmth into him. “I love all your odd thoughts, Moony,” he says, and kisses the back of his neck quietly. “You should keep talking.”
“Oh,” he says. Again, helplessly: “Oh. Was I talking about worms?”
Sirius passes a cold-calloused hand over his shoulder, his ribs, his spine. It’s like being caressed by water. “Remus,” he says, “turn over.”
Very slowly, Remus turns to him, his eyes wide, his mouth open.
For a while, the entire world seems to condense to the four walls of their room and their sunlit skin, Sirius’s legs straddling Remus’s hips, the stormy summer wetness of the air, as if they are the only two breathing bodies in all of Brighton. He tries to swallow the moment in small doses instead of gulping it down the way he wants: his heartbeat slowing, the broad slope of Sirius’s shoulders and the shadows beneath his cheekbones, the sweet green sound of the rain on the roof. He thrums with the enormity of it, licking his lips while Sirius looks down at him, and Remus thinks—bizarrely—of all the miraculous things that hold them together, blood and birthdays and 3 a.m. letters and amateur cartography; his skin has never felt so achingly bare against anything before. He wants Sirius to touch him.
At the edge of the bed, Remus curls his fist around the sheets just as Sirius bends over him and drags a piece of ice in a slow sickle arc across the sun-warm skin of his belly, making him groan, making his knees jerk; Sirius presses his hips down against Remus’s, hard, and his mouth falls open in a broken moan, his back an arch, water pooling in his navel. “Dagaz,” he chokes out, and then Sirius’s hands are holding his hips down, adjusting himself between Remus’s legs. He holds his eyes—and leans in.
Remus gasps, fumbling for the hands at his hips. “Oh God, Padfoot—Sirius—fuck, fuck,” he half-chants, over and over, Sirius’s tongue tracing the four points shivering on his belly and thrusting slick-hot into the cross at his navel, tasting the freckles scattered there, tasting his red heart and the little tight-rope vibrations quivering through his skin. He does it again at his ribs and his chest, the hot rush and dissolve pulsing to his toes, Remus biting his lip around the answers: “Teiwaz,” he whimpers, not even caring if it’s wrong, and, next: “Fehu,” pulled out with languor across his chest, connecting all the freckles across his collarbone and heart, making him giggle breathlessly. Sirius drags his bottom lip across the hollow of Remus’s throat and leans over his face, panting slightly with the fervor of a diver about to plunge into deep waters. He sucks at his neck while Remus gasps, thick cords of tendons and muscle twinging and contracting permissively beneath his mouth, their bodies moving together like nighttime waves.
“Such long, hard work surely deserves to be rewarded,” says Sirius, his eyes sly-soft, sloe-bright. Remus can smell him, smoke and salt and June indulgence like a million memories. Sirius slides their jaws together tenderly, stubble catching against his own when he leaves the wet imprint of a kiss at his ear, shining rosy-pale in the haze of the lamp. “Whatever could I do for you?”
“You’re vile.”
“You love it.” A short lock of hair falls over his forehead; Remus brushes it back, and holds his eyes.
“Yes,” he answers, almost reverently, because there’s really no point in keeping up pretenses when someone has just gone at you like it’s Christmas and you’re the last bit of pudding. Sirius’s smile quirks; very gently, he bites Remus’s nose, and Remus makes a small noise that probably belongs on a nature documentary.
“Merlin on a fucking unicorn, Remus,” Sirius mutters, running a palm wildly up Remus’s belly to his chest, thrillingly heavy. “I could do body shots off you.”
“Later,” he says, lifting a hand damp with sweat and ice to Sirius’s shoulder, walking his fingertips in a loose thread across his collarbone, feeling his heartbeat, the solidity of him, leaning into it. “I think it’s going to rain all night.”
“Into the morning,” Sirius whispers. There’s a laugh hiding in his throat, strings of words behind his teeth; Remus wants to kiss him where they come out and swallow them whole. “Very late morning, from the look of it. We might even have to have… a lie-in.”
“A very long one,” Remus breathes.
Somehow, even three years of florid fantasy can’t compare to the reality of Sirius braced above him, his mouth on Remus’s skin, the smell of his hair and his breath like sweetness and shadelit dusk, feeling like they’re about to fall off the end of the world together. Whoever said that having is never as good as wanting was clearly a sad, bitter bastard who never deserved what he got and wanted more than he ought; they never had Sirius Black’s eyes on them on a rain-blue night in June or their name in Sirius Black’s mouth like it means something beautiful. They never had this.
He slides his hands up Sirius’s biceps to his shoulders, opening himself to the invasion of him—both of them—in his thoughts and his hands, in his heart and lungs and bed. Sirius’s head bends towards his, slowly, just breathing, his eyes falling closed; he opens them again when Remus’s hand clenches on his shoulder, a rosebud-soft laugh unfurling against his cheek. “Hi,” he says, and then Remus grabs him by both sides of his head and kisses him feverishly, yielding and then unyielding, heart beating, one of Sirius’s hand groping at the fly of his trousers.
“Fuck,” Sirius pants, right into his lips. It’s terribly apt. “I hope your mother didn’t tell you to keep both feet on the ground. She does think you’re a good boy, you know.”
“Just to remember sunblock and have fun.”
“Moony,” says Sirius, grinning wickedly. Remus feels it all over. “You’re going to have some very educational fun. For your benefit and enlightenment.”
“Oh,” he says, and startles when Sirius tugs his trousers down his hips. “Oh.”
“Oh,” Sirius repeats, teasing. There’s a pale but distinct blush on his cheeks as he slides back up to look down at Remus. His face seems to emit light, or maybe absorb it; Remus reaches out and touches him, just because he wants to and he can. “Fucking—I thought I’d have to kidnap you, or strap you to my back on the motorbike and blindfold you till I got you, well, here.” He gestures to Remus’s wet, flushed skin and his bitten-red lips to his extremely (achingly) obvious erection. “See. Now aren’t you glad you came?”
Remus looks up at him with a dazed sort of wonder, tracing his thumb over the arch of Sirius’s brow until he closes his eyes and catches Remus’s fingers between his, palm to palm in a dream. “Sirius,” he whispers, trying to tell him something—everything—but then Sirius bends down to his lips and kisses him where the words are blooming out, and understands.