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Sirius lays over a bench, arm draped tragically across his eyes.
The bench itself is not so bad; it’s wood has been worn smooth by years of criminals in repose. What surrounds it, however, is bad enough to make up for the bench ten times over.
Muggle lighting is always harsh—but in the drunk tank? Punishment in itself. Wretched, stabbing light that Sirius takes personally. Unloving. Uncool. Uncalled for.
He is wildly pissed, nigh unto blackout, and can’t seem to recall what he did to deserve this. He hates it here, yet he keeps coming back. Did this make twice this month? Three times? Horrible stuff, even for him.
A fight has broken out over the cheese sandwiches.
Sirius turns toward the wall in attempts to ignore, but then he gets mad too; shouting and lifting his torso up with monumental, drunken effort.
For his trouble, he gets half-sandwich in the face—cheese first, but of course.
Someone dressed as Santa punches someone else dressed as Santa in the gut, causing the bells on both costumes to jingle.
“Fuck me,” Sirius mutters, peeling cheese from his eyelids.
He is meant to be the scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.
He is meant to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
He is meant to be a friend, a fighter, a head of family.
Wobbling on the bench, he draws his knees imperceptibly up to his chest.
The lights overhead buzz as if aggravated, on and on, and Sirius, well...Sirius is not who he is meant to be.
(-)
There comes a rapping on the bars.
Some metal weight runs over them, producing sounds like purring dragons. Sirius heaves open an eye, finding a dark figure with pale hands, hair, and a wholly ornamental cane.
Sirius groans deeply, so fucking deeply—right from the bone-dry depths of his soul.
“G’fuck yourself,” he slurs.
Like he does everything, Lucius Malfoy laughs richly.
(-)
“I’m not coming home!” Sirius roars, getting flecks of spit on Lucius’s cheek. “I hate you all! I hate everything you stand for! I hate everything you do!”
Snowflakes catch and shine on Lucius’s lashes. Sirius ignores it and begins yelling again: “You broke my fucking heart! All of you! Don’t you get it? I can’t come home! You took that from me! I can’t!”
(-)
Lucius sneaks him into Malfoy Manor.
He doesn’t want to disturb sleeping Cissa, or Rabastan, Rodolphus, Avery and Rosier all gloating beside a fire in a western wing. Sirius can’t deal and Lucius doesn’t want him to try; he drags them resolutely in the opposite direction.
It’s slow going.
Sirius is barely bipedal but staunchly refuses assistance. He practically rolls along the wall, face-palming portraits who endure for the sake of superiority immemorial.
“Send me back to James,” Sirius whispers.
“Traitor,” spits an ancient blonde bitch in a sapphire-encrusted frame. “Sad, lost little boy.”
(-)
The armchair releases a sharp puff of air when Lucius flings Sirius into it. Arranging himself carefully, Lucius takes the one opposite—pissed-off, inconvenienced, cold and pink-cheeked. Sirius smiles.
“You’re a piece of shit, Black,” Lucius drawls, making the insult extra lush, extra lofty.
“You married my cousin,” Sirius rejoins.
For a split second Lucius falters, though he hides it just as fast and as simply as one might put an item away in a drawer.
“I was always going to marry your cousin.” The Malfoy heir loosens his collar with a sharper tug than strictly necessary. “Do you ever get sick of being a disgrace?”
“Do you ever get sick of fucking my cousin?”
People say Lucius is ice. They say, still waters run deep. But Sirius knows better. Beneath ice is more ice, blacker and colder and pierced straight through his heart.
His eyes on Sirius are dark, frozen.
There it is, Sirius thinks. There you are.
The ice never melts, but sometimes it breaks.
(-)
The hearth is lit and whiskey brought. They drink in regal, miserable silence until the clocks toll midnight.
Lucius, when he finally speaks, is hoarse: “You could’ve told me not to do it.”
His bearing remains perfectly blank, looking for all the world as if he hadn’t said anything at all.
Sirius wishes he could be mad at the arrogance, but nothing inside him works as it ought.
“Are you really going to sit there and tell me it would’ve made a difference?”
“No,” Lucius runs his thumb along the thick ridges of a glass tumbler. “But, you could’ve asked.”
Sap and green wood hiss as they burn.
(-)
“Get out of my fucking house!” Lucius snarls.
How are they fighting? Sirius doesn’t recall.
They’re in yet another hallway, unfamiliar to Sirius, but all he can look at anyway is the perfect ribbon collecting Lucius’s hair. Did Cissa tie it? Did Lucius? Which would Sirius hate more?
He reaches forward and jerks the ribbon loose, sending it fluttering to the floor between them. Distinctly anticlimactic.
Lucius’s hair descends a slow, sleek curtain all around him, framing his fury. He reaches out, pinching the hoop in Sirius’s earlobe.
“I hate your hair,” growls Sirius.
“I hate these cheap fucking things,” Lucius spits, ripping the earring from Sirius’s flesh and hurling it to the ground with a sound too tiny to echo.
Sirius doesn’t flinch. His pure, proud blood falls to the floor one drop at a time.
“I miss you,” he doesn’t mean to say.
For a second, nothing changes. For a second, the world is moved only by drifting snow.
Then, Lucius takes a sharp sip of air, and Sirius meets his eyes.
(-)
The room is less ornate than the rest of the Manor, with no canopy on the bed or portraits on the walls.
There is a single, modest window to let the night in.
Immediately, Lucius gets Sirius in a corner, sinking his hands into dirty, drunk hair. “I can’t do this.” His voice is clenched, hollow—as far away as his body is close. “I can’t do this again.”
“Then don’t,” Sirius snarls, bleeding over the mark of the Dark Lord.
When their lips crush together, they both make a sound—Sirius a whine, Lucius a sob. They are the sounds they speak only into each other’s mouths, hide only in each other’s throats.
Sirius rips Lucius’s robes, clings to the back of his neck, paws at his chest and rubs his hard prick into the crease of Lucius’s hip to show him how he never forgets.
They were happy, once. They were young—stealing roses from the garden and giggling when introduced as Masters Malfoy and Black.
Lucius’s thumb digs into Sirius’s cheek. He holds Sirius’s mouth open as he licks, takes. Whines escape Sirius as Lucius calls him a sham of a pureblood, a Black dog. Sirius bites color into Lucius’s lips, sucks blood up to the skin—hoping he’ll bruise dark like night, like violets.
Whirling around, Sirius slams Lucius so hard against the wood paneling that sawdust plumes into the air. His tongue pleads flat over Lucius’s throat and up both sides of his neck—begrudgingly, Lucius lets his head fall back, hair fanning over the dark wall like a wing.
“You taste…” Sirius whispers. He forgets what he means to say but can’t shut up. “You taste, you taste, you taste.”
Lucius eyelids grow heavy. Sirius kisses his strong, marble chest, scrapes his teeth over Lucius’s nipples until he arches for Sirius, groaning so thick and masculine that Sirius could die, or come, or both.
“Please,” Sirius breathes. Lucius knows what he wants. Does he know everything else too?
He’ll survive, Sirius thinks sometimes, while slinging his arm around Peter or pretending to listen to Dumbledore. Lucius will find a way.
Lucius fists Sirius’s hair and pulls him lower, looking down on him while they stumble back toward the bed.
Does he know that when he looks down on me, it is the only time I ever look up?
Lucius twists Sirius around with bruising hands, pushing him roughly onto his stomach. Tiny white feathers fly from the mattress.
They are naked—though neither knows which one of them did this or when.
Scrambling to look behind himself, Sirius sees the pale flag of Lucius’s hair streaming down his neck and chest. Sirius is fitful, torn.
“I need—“
“I know.”
Lucius brings their bodies together, sealing his chest over Sirius’s back. He whispers a lubrication charm because neither wants to linger—Lucius likes to own and Sirius likes to be owned and they both like to pretend that’s all there is between them.
Holding Sirius still, Lucius presses inside. Their bodies shake with storm and heat expanding beneath skin. Sirius’s thoughts go silent and slow as snowfall; he groans as Lucius bottoms out, tangles his fingers in sheets and lifts his hips an offering, an ask. More.
“You smell like muggles and plastic,” Lucius says softly—fucking down slow and landing heavy on the last inch. He draws out a half-length, then coming back like Sirius is home, like they are each other’s.
They aren't, but they'll play at it.
“Be nice on Christmas,” Sirius pants.
“What’s Christmas?”
“Shut up you fucking-oh fuck, like that, please—“
Lucius turns Sirius’s head to the side to kiss him soft, unhurried, tangling together. Sirius’s eyes roll back as Lucius fucks him sweeter—short, deep thrusts of never wanting to leave.
“You shouldn’t have married her,” Sirius says on broken breaths.
“You should have told me not to.”
“You wouldn’t have—“
“I WOULD HAVE!” Lucius roars, his lips crashed on Sirius’s cheek. “I would have done anything!”
Sirius grinds back into Lucius’s hips while strands of ashen hair fall all around them, sticking to damp skin.
“I would have done anything, Sirius! I would have done anything for you! I would have done anything, I would have done anything, I would have done anything.”
“You lie.” Sirius means to growl, but he doesn't. His voice breaks open, spills everywhere.
“You left.”
“Stop wearing her ribbons!”
“Stop making me find you like this!” Lucius fucks desperately, ice cracking deep and loud. “Stop hurting yourself. Stop making me watch. Stop…stop-fuck, I-I can’t see you like that-I can’t—“
Trading helplessness, Sirius starts to sob: “Stop going where I can’t follow!”
Lucius hauls them up, settling back on his knees with Sirius draped over his chest. He splays his hand over Sirius’s stomach and, with each slow, obliterating thrust, kisses all the skin he can reach.
Sirius overflows; comes hot and thick and punishing over his own stomach and shoulder and neck. Lucius smears it beneath a shaking palm. He turns Sirius’s head with frantic, adoring hands to lick come from his jaw, brush the night-black hair from his brow, and press Sirius's starry eyelids with the gentle pad of his thumb.
He tips their bodies forward and sinks them deeper into one another, well past return.
Sirius turns to meet him, lips stained by the promises they’d made each other and the ones they’d made to others. His eyes flutter back as Lucius rolls in, deep and inevitable and full of the love he cannot truly give.
“I’m sorry,” Lucius confesses, so afraid. “I’m sorry.”
Sirius begs for harder, begs for more. He's impatient, bright with hunger of stars.
(-)
Just before dawn, Sirius wakes alone.
He tiptoes through the manor to find Lucius waiting in the kitchen beside the most overlooked door to his grounds.
He sits on a countertop sucking pointedly on a candy cane. His pale hair is loose and messy, like after quidditch on yule. When Sirius enters, Lucius pops the candy cane from his mouth and inclines it toward the door as if to say shall we?
Sirius snorts at this absurd version of the man—well-fucked and languid—which, in turn, makes Lucius smile for real. Suddenly, they both are laughing. At nothing; at a dumb night and heartbreaking life that no one will ever find funny but them.
Lingering out of character, Lucius kisses Sirius on corner of his mouth.
“Won’t be another like you,” he whispers.
Sirius scrunches his nose.
“That was god awful.”
“Come now.” Lucius’s mouth curves sweet on one side. “Bad poetry is poetry still.”
Sirius blushes, calling him a poetic fucker, because he is, he is, he is.
(-)
As the sun rises grey over sparkling drifts of snow, Sirius regales Lucius with the tale of the fighting Santas. Lucius takes the piss out of him for it, even though Sirius is already taking the piss out of himself. They keep a careful distance between them.
At the end of the drive, the manor’s shadowy gates creak open on the same breeze that teases the bright ends of Lucius’s hair.
“Fuck Christmas,” Sirius declares, not looking back.
“What’s Christmas?” Lucius says, tall behind him.
(-)
Sirius is half-way home before he understands it was goodbye.
He sits in the snow, covering his tears with his hands.
Sirius can’t stop laughing.
Once, he would’ve done anything for the man, had there been anything to do.
(-)
Late that night, Lucius slips out through the door Black left him by.
He walks past his wife’s winter-stripped roses to a bed of earth they'll raise into violets, come the spring.
He thinks of Sirius, all of sixteen, at his doorstep; scared, brave, and alone.
He thinks of Sirius, bloodied, drunk out of his mind.
He thinks of Sirius under the night sky.
He thinks of Sirius, dying young.
He thinks of Sirius, laughing.
He thinks of Sirius.
He thinks of Sirius.
Lucius thinks of Sirius.
He looks to the ground, layered in ice.
He looks to the sky, burning with stars.
Beneath them both go Narcissa’s ribbons, buried past the reach of roots.
Lucius says his first prayer ever: for Sirius Black, to the gods who do not exist.
He's awkward and doesn't know how, but bad poetry is poetry still:
Grant him happiness. Grant him freedom.
Watch over him. Keep him safe.
May he never lose himself. May I never forget him.
Please, may I never, never forget.
(-)
Late late that night, Sirius returns to make a snow angel outside the manor gate.
Lucius finds him. His apparition is silent.
“Don’t marry her,” Sirius says, a drunken starfish in the snow.
"I love you," Lucius replies, opening the gate.
"Make an angel with me."
Lucius does not even pretend to not know what Sirius means; he lays down and his hair becomes a river, his arms become his wings.
Together, Sirius and Lucius make snow angels, a host of them, until the brink of dawn.