F: A Few Mornings in January (PG-13, R/S)
(Lame) Title: A Few Mornings in January
Author: omgsubtext, now last_radio
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6666, exactly. And it was an accident.
Disclaimer: I'm JKR. This is all mine. ... Am I fooling anyone? No? Good. Have a cookie and don't sue me.
Notes: Written mostly for blanketforts. Pure fluff. Like, what little plot there is was spun from sugar. You've been warned.
1/1
The first thing Sirius wonders upon waking is if he brought a girl back with him. It would explain the fresh glass of water and packet of Hubert's Hangover Helper powder laid out so thoughtfully on his bedside table. The nakedness, also, because he is very naked beneath his blankets, and he's almost certain he didn't go to the party that way.
The thought -- of having brought a girl back, not of going to a party naked -- is vaguely alarming. Sirius doesn't even like girls, or had assumed he didn't; if getting drunk was all it took to become straight, he should have found out sooner and avoided that whole awful fidgety discussion with James.
The second thing he wonders is how an entire Savannah of wild animals has managed to get into his skull, and where they are finding the room to have a stampede. He spills half of the powder in his fumbling rush to get it into the water, and half of the water getting it into his mouth. It does help, though, as much as any discovered hangover cure does at all -- which is not very much, but his eyes do uncross.
He stands up. He does not fall over. This is a good sign. Now he just needs to find out if a bird has been in his flat in the last 24 hours, and politely dispose of her if she is still there. Sirius thuds into his living room, apologetic puppy eyes at the ready, and sees a shoe sticking over the arm of his couch.
A man's shoe. With an inch of hairy leg poking out between the sock and bunched-up trousers. He ventures closer, and does not know whether to be relieved or terrified that Remus Lupin is sleeping on his couch, wearing his winter coat and scarf and disgusting green gloves with a hole at the tip of one finger.
"Remus?" Sirius reaches down to prod his shoulder, then his chest when that doesn't seem to work. His head is still thudding, albeit with less force than earlier, and he can't for the life of him remember seeing Remus last night. He was supposed to have been in Glasgow, with his grandmother, or something.
Sirius prods again, and Remus opens one eye. "I am trying to sleep," he says roughly.
Despite the documented dangers of bothering a Moony that has been woken before it would like, Sirius leans down to rest his arms and head on the back of the couch, and keeps talking. "When did you get back?"
"About the time you -- " Remus yawns, quite impressively. It makes the rest of his face scrunch up, and Sirius is gripped with the now-familiar urge to shove his tongue into Remus's gapingly open mouth. Just to see what he would do. " -- nygh. You were lying on top of the bar when I got there. Chattering on about Ancient Runes to the bartender. You don't remember?"
Sirius does not remember, but he has much greater worries than what inane babble he managed last night. "I'm naked," he says. "Did we have sex?"
Remus snuffles derisively -- he is probably the only person on the planet who could make a snuffle derisive -- and rolls to press his face into the couch cushions. "I would be naked, too," he says, or Sirius thinks he says, "and you wouldn't have to ask."
The backs of Remus's ears, Sirius notes, are very red. It seems as if licking them would cure it, but it is too far down to lean, especially since the pulse in his head starts beating heavy, drum-like, and reminds him that sudden movements may cause pain. "Just wondering. I am, you know, naked. And all of that."
"Pajamas," Remus says.
"What?"
He turns his head slightly, freeing his mouth. Sirius can see the petulant furrow between his brows and knows he has approximately two sentences left before Remus starts getting grouchy. "Pajamas. You said you wanted them and I -- helped -- but then I couldn't find them."
"I don't have any pajamas," Sirius says, with remarkable calm, considering his head is pulsating at painful double-speed and he has just come to the conclusion that Remus undressed him last night. And he doesn't remember a thing. And he's still naked.
"Yes, well, I believe you were trying to seduce me," Remus mumbles. "Groped me, you know. Or tried. Horrible aim."
"Slander," Sirius mumbles back. He's trying not to turn red -- Blacks, no matter how disowned, do not blush! -- but doubts Remus would notice if he did, considering he has reburied his head in the cushions. All the better. Sirius is less likely to dissolve into an aching, throbbing puddle of embarrassment if Remus doesn't look at him.
"People do all sorts of ridiculous things when they're drunk," Remus says, again muffled by cloth and stuffing. Sirius begins to calm down. Remus can think it was ridiculous, so long as he doesn't think it was revolting. "You just -- sweet gods, I am so tired. Go drink some more water. Let me sleep."
His two sentences, though short, have been used. Sirius reluctantly removes his head from the back of the couch and presses his palm to his temple, and takes three steps toward the kitchen before reconsidering. Slander is a fragment, not a sentence -- and if he's trying to be polite and gracious and all of those other things Remus loves, perhaps he won't have his head removed. Or if he does, perhaps it will be an improvement.
"It's great of you, Moony, always taking care of, of everyone," he says.
Remus might have said, "Fuck everyone," or he might have said, "Not everyone." Sirius takes a wild guess and shambles into the kitchen smiling.
1/3
When Sirius emerges from his bedroom on January 3 -- clothed, this time, and not hungover in the least -- Remus is sitting at his kitchen table and doing the crossword. Nothing about the situation is spectacularly odd. His friends are in his flat all the time, seldom with any warning, and Remus more than the others. But something wiggles in the back of his brain nonetheless, just beyond his left ear.
This is the same spot where something used to wiggle whenever his friends talked about girls. Eventually, he named the wiggling thing I Fancy Boys and set it free to take over other parts of his brain with its loyal sidekick, I Really Would Like To Snog Remus. As liberating as the first revelation was, Sirius is not sure he would like another. He cocks his head to the side and presses his shoulder up against his skull, and squints at Remus. "Is that my paper?"
"Yes," Remus says. He doesn't look up, busy filling in the last few letters of a word, but he does hold out the pages he isn't using. Sirius takes them and slides them between his shoulder and head, pressing so hard his teeth grit. He suspects he has gone rather red in the face by the time Remus glances at him. "Crick?"
"Brain," Sirius grunts.
"Insane," Remus suggests. He is the sort of person who rhymes on purpose, and the sort to be amused at Sirius's misfortune. His mouth twitches at the corners and Sirius wants to ask how he would like it if he could feel his epiphanies in advance, if they wiggled behind his ears and drove him mad, but he is afraid that would make the twitching blossom into a laugh.
So he says, "Yes, obviously. Have you eaten breakfast?"
Remus shakes his head; of course he hasn't. That would require him to go through Sirius's cabinets and, horror of horrors, eat his food without permission. Had Sirius stayed in bed all day yesterday as he wanted instead of stumbling out to fix lunch, Remus would never have eaten. Remus probably wouldn't have even told Sirius he was visiting.
Sirius tries to look exasperated, but Remus's mouth twitches again and he has to take the paper off his shoulder and straighten his neck in order to do it properly. He tries to ignore the wiggling. "Eggs?"
"I suppose, if you're making some anyway," Remus says, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes Sirius want to punch in him the neck. And kiss him.
"I am." He drops the paper on the table and heads for the counter, making sure to knock Remus on the back of the head for laughing at him (internally) and trying so hard not to bother him even though Sirius wants to be bothered. Not that way. Well, not only that way. He has offered a hundred times to add a bunk to his bed so Remus could get out of his house. Which, of course, reminds him. "How are your parents?" he asks, pulling out his eggs and a pan.
"They're," Remus says. "You know. My parents."
Sirius pitches his voice high. "Oh, Remus, don't play rough, and here's your scarf, and make sure you eat your apple, and --"
"Yes," Remus cuts in. "Like that."
That's his mum, at least. And she isn't really so bad, though Sirius sometimes wishes she were, and then feels awful for wanting his friends to know how he feels.
"And my dad wants me to get a job," Remus adds. There is something in his voice that is almost serious; Sirius could push a bit, and they could have a real discussion instead of their usual... thing.
He wonders if this is what Remus wants him to do -- it is certainly what the wiggling thing wants him to do, as it is now practically leaping -- and opens his mouth to give him a little prod, but something beside the sink catches his eye and makes him drop his egg, shell and all. "Flower," he says, and rounds on Remus, pointing toward the brown pot and the single (pathetic) bloom planted in it. "Moony, you brought in a flower."
Remus blinks owlishly. "Yesterday, yes," he says. "It was growing up out of a crack in the road. In the snow, Sirius. I couldn't just leave it there."
"It's pink," Sirius says. He has never really had anything against the color, but since his sixth year at Hogwarts has also never wanted to give James and Peter any extra fodder for jokes about his masculinity. Having a pink flower potted in his kitchen is counteractive to years of obliterating stereotypes about poofs.
Remus gives the flower a fond smile, though, and Sirius knows he has lost the argument, lost before they even really start. This, too, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Sirius want to punch him in the neck and then kiss him, except not so much with the punching. "It's light red," Remus says, "with a hint of purple."
"It's a very intense light red, then. Sort of, you know, girly." Remus's eyebrows bunch together. Sirius thinks, Oh dear, and backtracks hurridly. "Except I suppose it would have to be very tough, to grow in the snow and -- and stuff."
"Exactly," Remus says, and goes back to his crossword. Sirius's crossword. Their crossword, Sirius decides, and begins picking the broken pieces of eggshell out of the pan. The wiggling thing gives him a swift kick and then settles down a bit; he imagines it is probably sulking.
1/4
When Sirius puts his feet on the floor on the morning of January 4, he almost, almost decides not to get out of bed. However, the nameless wiggling thing in his brain is beginning to take a recognizable shape, so he hobbles through his morning routine on the thick-skinned balls of his feet, gives his malfunctioning muggle heater a swift kick, and ventures toward his kitchen.
Remus is on his couch again, huddled and sleeping beneath his coat. He's taken his shoes off this time, at least, though the single toe poking out of his sock must be freezing. Sirius stoops over and tugs at the fabric until it's covered.
"Whaya," Remus says. His eyes don't open. Sirius chews on his lip for a moment, trying to decide what 'whaya' means in awake-person speak, but Remus's breathing evens out again and it no longer really matters.
"I am going to make tea," Sirius announces quietly -- just in case -- and slips into the kitchen.
The flower by the stove watches him expectantly while he puts the kettle on, and after a few minutes he gives in an sprinkles some water into the pot. "You," he says, "are pink." The flower doesn't seem bothered. Sirius huffs at it, then nearly knocks his head against the cabinets when the kettle whistles.
Apparently the noise was enough to wake Remus. Sirius can only hope it was a pleasant awakening as he pads over to the couch, since all he can see is the back of his head and, although his hair is amusingly tousled, it hardly spells out his mood. "Tea," he announces, this time not quietly, and Remus turns to look at him. Smiling, thankfully, but his eyes dart away too quickly and Sirius frowns.
"I," Remus says as Sirius sits beside him. His shoes are back on, which is disappointing. "Didn't, ah. I."
"Tea," Sirius says again, and holds out a cup until Remus reaches out and takes it with reluctant hands. "Now..." He leans over and presses his nose into Remus's neck. He inhales, purposefully loud, and lets out a contemplative hmm.
When he pulls back, Remus is pink-cheeked, probably from the mixture of cold and hot steam rising into his face. Remus is also giving him his 'are you quite off in the head?' look. If Sirius has ever wanted to kiss him quite so much, he doesn't remember the time, and it disturbs him that he finds condescension attractive. Surely that's considered masochism. "I was just checking," he says.
"Checking...?" Remus prods.
"Well," Sirius says breezily, "I already knew you weren't a fish."
"Er," Remus says, floundering. It takes all of Sirius's willpower to avoid the obvious puns.
Instead he nudges Remus's shoulder with his own, grinning and ignoring the tea that sloshes over onto his trousers. "But it's been three days, and you don't smell, so obviously you're not a guest, either. Where have you been keeping your clothes?" He wishes this were James or Peter, or anyone else, so that he could properly enjoy the embarrassed expression on Remus's face as he pulls his battered satchel from beneath the couch.
"My dad," Remus says.
"Throw you out?" Sirius asks, and damn it, he is not hopeful. At least he manages not to sound that way, and he's not really disappointed when Remus shakes his head.
"Spent all of that money on Hogwarts, he said, and I should start thinking about earning something for it," he says. His cheeks have gone from pink to red, though Sirius doesn't know if it's because he's ashamed of not working, ashamed of letting his father down or ashamed of being caught living on Sirius's couch. Probably, knowing Remus, all three. "And I told him -- well, I didn't tell him, but I let him think I'd found something. Here."
"Good," Sirius says. "Closer to us. And you can stretch your little Moony wings." He flaps his free hand to illustrate.
"Yes, well, I --"
"And you'll be moving in with me, of course. Really moving in. None of this overstuffed bag rubbish."
Remus smiles, hesitant but genuine, and Sirius feels as if he has just won everything, ever. "If you don't mind."
"Mind, he says!" Sirius says to his tea. "Sleeps on my couch uninvited for four nights and then asks if I mind!" He turns to Remus and grins stupidly. "I don't mind, tosser." Remus takes an embarrassed but (he thinks) grateful gulp of his tea. "No one else has answered my ads for a manslave," he adds, and spends the rest of the morning swearing up and down that it wasn't timed to make tea come out of Remus's nose.
1/5
On January 5, Sirius doesn't wake up. He hasn't died or slipped into a coma, though he's halfheartedly wishing he had. He's actually spent seven hours wide awake, wondering what demon possessed him to insist the spare mattress go on his cramped bedroom floor when he knows perfectly well that Remus Lupin breathes in his sleep.
He can't even breathe like a normal person, or snore like Peter. Snoring is monotonous; snoring fades into the background after 15 minutes. With snoring, Sirius could cope. But Remus has to sigh every five minutes (Sirius has timed it) and murmur unintelligible things at random intervals. He has to rustle around in his blankets just often enough to be a nuisance, and every time Sirius is almost able to drift off in spite of it all, Remus has to whimper. Whimper.
Sirius doesn't know why he ever thought sleeping with Remus would be a good thing. The sex could hardly be worth all of the noise. He is just about to give up on rest altogether, to surrender to the sunlight and renounce his attraction to the sniffling sleep-spoiler, when he learns something new.
Remus Lupin also moans.
Sirius scoots to the edge of his bed and peers down, miraculously alert. "Moony?" he whispers. Remus's only response is to shudder and roll toward the sound of his voice, so that he's pressed up against the side of Sirius's bed. His mouth is open. Sirius's mimics it. "Moony," he whispers again, urgently, because this can lead nowhere good -- of course, he could always leave the room, but... But. Yes. But but.
"P'fut," Remus coughs. Cruelly, it almost sounds like 'Padfoot.' He has his sheet gripped in both fists and is pulling it loose of the mattress, and though the blanket is too thick (damn the cold) to tell, Sirius is fairly certain his hips twitch. Sirius's own breath flutters on its way down his throat, and he is suddenly aware of two things: the pressure of the bed beneath his hips and how incriminating it would be if Remus were to wake up and find Sirius gaping down at him.
Remus moans again, though with slightly more restraint. All the same, Sirius throws off his blanket and carefully extends his feet over Remus's body, stretching his legs out to put his feet on the other side of the narrow mattress. He pushes his torso up, throws his weight forward to stand, and imagines all of the gods and half of his dead relatives laughing at him as his feet catch in something wet and slide out from beneath him. Sirius catches himself with his elbows on his bed, legs outstretched and arse dangling over Remus's chest.
"Damn your boots, Lupin!" he hisses, and of course that would be the exact moment Remus shudders with especial force and pitches awake, gasping and grasping for anything. He gets hold of Sirius's thigh before his eyes stop their bleary, panicked darting and focus on Sirius.
"Oh my god," he says, in an entirely different kind of moan.
"Yes," Sirius agrees; then, “No. Don’t -- it’s not anything to be -- we’re all men here, and -- “ These are not his words. These are phrases from speeches James has given him in his chronic fits of maturity. Sirius will Floo him, perhaps, once he has managed to extract himself, and let him explain to Moony why it is okay while Sirius has a long, long shower. He walks his feet backwards in an attempt to stand and slips again. “ -- oomph, mate, I’m going to sit on you for a second, is that okay?”
Remus continues to look horrified, but no more horrified than he was at first, so Sirius takes it as consent and stops holding himself up. Some of the air is forced out of Remus’s lungs when Sirius lands on them, but he doesn’t appear to notice, just gasps it right back in and keeps staring. “You, um.”
“I am going to go water your light red flower, which you have neglected so since bringing it here,” Sirius says decisively, “and make some tea, and you can... get dressed. Or whatever.” Remus’s nails dig into his pants. “And you can let go of me whenever you’d like, too.”
Remus releases him like silver and occupies his hands with covering his face. “Oh my god,” he says again. Sirius isn’t sure if he believes in one or not, and realizes that it is a horrible blank spot on his knowledge of all things Moony, but now doesn’t seem like a good time to ask. Now seems like a good time to remove his arse from Remus’s chest, not least of all because he can feel him breathe and it is not helping.
Sirius scoots off of him and clambers to his feet, carefully avoiding the puddle of melted snow around Remus's boots, and keeps his back turned to Remus until he has pulled on yesterday’s trousers, which are not so thick as Remus’s blanket but do the job anyway. Thus insured, Sirius is able to grin. “It’s not that bad, Moony, honest. Once Peter walked in on m -- “
“Do we have to talk about this?” Remus asks. He is closer to panicking than Sirius has ever seen him. It’s actually sort of awfully cute, until he continues, “I don’t want to talk about this. Not with you.”
Sirius’s grin fades to a faint twist of his mouth. “Then we won’t,” he says, and scratches his bare shoulder. “As long as you don’t try to pick up and move out because of it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Remus says hurriedly.
Sirius wonders what else he might agree to do if he pressed, and the thought broadens his smile, but he isn’t stupid enough to try. “Wonderful,” he says, clapping his hands together. “And, actually, you just won me some money, because I have a bet going with Peter as to whether --”
“Padfoot,” Remus says (he is back to whimpering, but sounds rather pained this time), so Sirius leaves him to clean his trousers.
1/7
On Saturday morning, Sirius realizes Remus has been avoiding him for the last 48 hours. (Considering how long it took him to realize Remus had been living with him, he is not very disappointed in himself, although the absence of a Moony has always been much more obvious than the presence of one.)
He also burns the last few bits of bread trying to make toast. Neither bodes well for the day ahead, so he decides to do something about the problem that doesn't require going to the store. Conservation of energy, or something like that.
Therefore, it is perfectly logical that he be sitting on the kitchen table and holding his bright red leash in his mouth when Remus lurches into the room. He just doesn't know if Remus realizes this. "You f'got t’ change int’ Pa’foot," he says groggily, rubbing one eye with his fist and stumbling over to the counter.
Sirius spits the leash out and does his best to sound patient. "I didn't forget, stupid." (His best isn’t very good.) Remus ignores him and, to his horror, picks up one of the blackened slabs of bread and moves it toward his mouth. “Remus!” he says frantically.
“Were you goin’ t’ eat it?” Remus asks, lowering it and rubbing at his eyes again. Hopefully he is blind, Sirius thinks, and would not normally consider eating something so disgusting. This is Remus, after all, who not only knows he is supposed to keep his elbows off the table, but actually does so.
“No,” Sirius says. “It’s burnt. Concrete. Honestly.” He swings his legs once beneath the table, then climbs down. “I’ll find you something more edible.”
Remus furrows his eyebrows and holds fast to his piece of toast. “This is fine,” he says, and grabs the knife Sirius used to cut the bread off of the counter. “This is...” He begins sawing at the blackened sides of the bread. Sirius’s countertops have never been spectacularly clean, but the mound of charred grain forming under Remus’s hands is definitely not making them any cleaner.
“Moony,” Sirius says.
“I’ll clean it up.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Sirius says crossly. It is not quite a lie -- he might have asked Remus to clean it up eventually, but not right away. But considering he was probably going to say ‘Everyone has wet dreams; stop avoiding me,’ he is glad Remus is not a mind-reader and has given him time to rethink. “Let me find you something else.”
“Don’t have time.”
Sirius’s inner puppy whines. Sirius’s outer puppy pouts. He imagines the latter is slightly more dignified. “It’s Saturday. Where the hell are you going on a Saturday?”
Remus puts the half-salvaged toast down and fumbles about the waist of his pajamas. “Job -- interview -- damn it, my wand is --.” He sweeps the pile of crumbs into his palm before Sirius can get his own out and drops them into the wastebasket.
“Maybe you should try a Muggle place,” Sirius offers, earning himself a glare.
“I don’t have a Muggle education, do I? And I need them to understand if Dumbledore needs me to -- “ Remus’s eyes dart to the clock, and he shoves the toast into his mouth whole and walks out of the kitchen without another word. Sirius stands where he is for a few minutes and feels like a bastard, which is strange, because between the two of them he is fairly sure that Remus was more of one. Then he gets the remaining piece of toast and bangs it against the edge of the counter until it breaks in two.
He is zapping the crumbs on the floor with his wand when Remus wanders back in, dressed and bundled, toying with the fringe of his scarf and looking very sorry. “Not a morning person,” he mumbles.
“I’ll alert the Daily Prophet,” Sirius says dryly. Remus can, in fact, be a morning person, but only when he's gotten enough sleep, which doesn't seem to be happening much recently. He puts his wand away and picks the leash up from the table, winding it pointedly around his arm. “Got any job interviews tomorrow?”
Remus shakes his head. Sirius dares to think the look he gives the leash is a wistful one.
“Then go to bed early tonight,” Sirius says, “‘cause I’m waking you up for a walk, and if you growl at me the whole time, I’ll bite you.” And there’s a smile, small and Moonyish and enough to get him through the day. Sirius walks around the table to tighten his scarf and pull his hat down around his ears. In the movies, this would be the part where they kissed good-bye; but in the movies, Sirius would also be wearing an apron, so all in all he is not upset.
1/8
One of the good things about being a dog is that Sirius can leap with all fours onto Remus's at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and lick behind his ears and in his mouth, and Remus will not kill him. Remus will make snuffling half-laugh noises instead, his only struggle one to get Padfoot to curl up beside him and let him sleep a few more minutes.
Not that Sirius ever uses being a dog to his advantage, of course. He’s above that. And if he stoops down a few levels every once in a while, it's only for Remus's own good. No one could ever claim that a walk was bad, at least.
The park near the flat is foggy, as far as Sirius can tell. He can't see well to begin with, and his vision is already in muted grays and blues and yellows, but everything is especially hazy today, and Remus is staring down the lane with a very moony (or just Moony) sort of smile. Sirius wants to say, 'You are composing poetry in your head. Stop it. What even rhymes with fog?'
But Remus would inevitably reply, 'Bog, cog, clog, catalog, demagogue, dialogue, monologue, dog, hedgehog, frog, flog, log, slog, jog,' and so on until Sirius had to bite him, so it is probably for the best that Sirius can’t say anything. He tugs on his sleeve instead, whines, and paws at his leash until Remus crouches to unfasten it.
“Don’t go too far,” he says, though Sirius had no intention of leaving him behind; “It’d be a right mess if someone tried to take you.”
Sirius snorts at him, licks his nose, and then dashes off the path and into the trees. He sniffs at a tree for a moment, chases the faded scent-trail of a rat, gets his paws muddy, and then remembers that he is a canine on a mission. It is Operation: Make Moony Have Fun; as much as Remus might think wandering quiet and alone down a park path and composing second-rate (Sirius adores him, he really does, but it’s true) poetry in his head is fun, that’s only because he rarely has any real fun to compare it to.
He snuffles around in the slush for a moment until he finds a wet, half-rotten stick of the appropriate size, and sprints back to the path with his tail in the air.
They are going to play fetch. They are going to romp. He is going to get Moony muddy and make him enjoy it, and he -- he is going to bite the bespectacled bastard who has seduced Remus into sitting (sitting!) on a bench and talking.
Talking to someone who is not Sirius.
“This is the first time I’ve ever run across anyone here this early,” the bloke is saying, adjusting his ugly glasses, and Sirius can smell the pheremones even from this distance. He does not know what color his hair is, but it’s lank and too long, and he does know that anyone trying to pull Remus (a more innocent school-boy type there ne’er was) in a park at sunrise is obviously a creep. “Do you live nearby?”
Sirius reaches them before Remus can answer and sits at his feet, staring at him reproachfully. Remus, at least, does not seem embarrassed or bothered by Glasses’s interest -- poor, oblivious fellow. He smiles fondly at Sirius and skritches behind his ear.
“Sort of,” he says, distracted now, and Sirius wags his tail: Yes, yes, pay attention to me.
“Oh, I -- is this your dog?” The man reaches toward Sirius’s muzzle. “He’s so --” Sirius drops the stick and snaps at him.
“Padfoot!” Remus says, but the corners of his eyes are crinkling with hidden laughter while the man yanks his hand back, wide-eyed. “Sorry, he doesn’t usually -- you must have something on your fingers that bothers him.”
“Oh,” the man says, staring at Sirius.
Sirius licks his chops and does his best dog impression of a grin. “Right,” Remus says, standing up abruptly and hooking the leash back around Sirius’s collar. “I’d better take him home and get him clean. It was nice to meet you, ah...”
“Patrick,” the man says, holding out a hand.
Remus gives it a quick shake. “Right. Patrick. It was very nice, and, ah.” Sirius pulls on the leash to give him an excuse, and he turns away, following Sirius for a few feet before turning again and giving the man a wave good-bye.
“That was rude,” Remus says when they’re a good distance away.
Sirius tosses his head proudly and looks back to make sure they’re out of wosface’s view, then stretches and reforms into a man. “He was flirting with you,” Sirius says, glaring back down the path while he climbs up off of his hands and knees.
“I know,” Remus says. He’s really laughing now. “You could have just let him. He wasn’t hurting anything.”
Sirius looks back again, then turns his glare on Remus. “So you were just going to lead him on, is that it?” he asks. He has the vague feeling that he’s being irrational, but ignores it. “You couldn’t have taken five seconds to say, ‘Sorry, mate, but I don’t swing your way’? Poofs have feelings, too, you know.”
Remus’s laughter reduces to sniggering and the stray chuckle. “I didn’t want to embarrass him,” he explains through them, then tilts his head back to look at the gray sky. “Besides, I might swing -- not his way, quite, but that way, in general.”
And damn him if he doesn’t sound nonchalant about it. “What?” Sirius says, eyes wide, and then, “You do not. You would have said something while I was wriggling around on the edge of your bed like a bloody stuck beetle. You would have told me.”
“I didn’t know then, did I?” Remus asks, and looks back at Sirius as if they’re sharing a secret, except he’s apparently forgotten to let Sirius in on it. “I’m telling you now, though. And shut your mouth. It shouldn’t be so surprising.”
Sirius shuts his mouth, rubs his chin, and silently surveys Remus for a long moment. “Well,” he finally says when the violent churning of his stomach settles, “that does explain the flower.”
“Shut it,” Remus says, but he’s smiling.
“Yeah, yeah, you know, now that I think about it,” Sirius says, warming up to the subject, “you are a sort of gigantic queer, aren’t you? I should have known from the pink-and-blue jumper --”
“My mum gave that to me!”
“-- and now that I think about it, you’re a bit limp-wristed sometimes. By Merlin, why don’t we just give you wings? You’re going to ruin all of my hard work, Remus. Peter and James are never going to shut up. No, this isn’t going to do at all. We’ll have to buy you some leather and teach you how to drive the bike, we will --”
He might have gone on forever, except Remus scoops up a handful of muddy slush and slings it into his face, which makes it Sirius’s most solemn duty to make sure he gets at least two handfuls of dirt and decomposing leaves down the back of his shirt.
1/9
Monday means getting up early for no good reason. Reasons, yes: Remus has to go out again, and Sirius has to make sure he eats first and might as well try to do something semi-useful to society today if he’s going to be awake anyway. But not good reasons.
At least there will be eggs.
“The thing is,” Sirius tells the flower while he does his best to scrambles them without burning, “is that -- is that he’s Moony. So it’s really not my fault, is it? You should know as well as anyone, I mean, he dug you up out of the sidewalk -- probably with his bare hands -- and how am I supposed to not...” He stabs his spatula rather viciously into the pan of eggs. “Too skinny,” he mutters. It doesn’t matter if he changes subjects like that, because what’s the flower going to do about it? “And just watch, he’s going to act like he’s not hungry. I’ll have to force feed him.”
“Going to fatten me up, then?” Remus asks, and Sirius manages to fling the spatula into the opposite wall when he flails. Remus picks it up for him, smiling sleepily and dripping warm water from his shower. “Should I have left bread crumbs to lead me back to Galloway?”
Sirius hopes that he is not, in fact, blushing, even though it feels like he is. “No,” he says quickly, then grins. “I have absolutely no intentions of cooking you. I’ll just --”
“Eat me raw, right,” Remus finishes, and swats him with the non-eggy side of the spatula before letting him take it back. “Were you talking to the plant?”
“Absolutely not,” Sirius says. He cleans off his utensil and goes back to turning the eggs, which have burnt a bit, but not too badly. Someday he will get around to learning cooking charms; in the meantime, he feels rather charmingly Muggle. “That would be stupid. Do you want some sausage? It’s already cooked, I’ll just have to heat it again.”
“No, thank you,” Remus says politely, perching himself on the edge of the table.
“Ha!” Sirius says to the flower. “I told you.” Then he sticks his tongue out at Remus, so the other boy will know he wasn’t serious (at least not very) and begins doling the eggs out onto plates. By now they are more than a little burnt, but they aren’t at all wet or runny, which is the important part. “Really, though, Moony, if I were to heat the sausage anyway, would you want some?”
“This is really fine,” he says, sticking a fork into a chuck of egg. “You know, I was thinking.”
“Will you ever just stop that?” Sirius asks.
“Be quiet,” Remus orders, and Sirius obliges him, pulls the left-over sausage out of the ice box and plops it into the now-empty pan. “I was thinking -- you’re really domesticated, now, aren’t you?”
Sirius rounds on him, brandishing the spatula. “I am not. Even motorcycle-riding hooligans need to know how to cook, unless they’re intent on starving themselves to death like some of their more ridiculous mates.”
Obviously on the verge of laughing at him (again), Remus nods complacently and eats a bite of egg. “Whatever you say, Padfoot,” he says. “But really, I was thinking. I know you don’t approve of New Year’s Resolutions --”
Sirius snorts.
“-- but I sort of like them, and I made one, and I think I need your help.”
“Shoot,” Sirius says, pushing the sausage around in the pan.
“I want a date,” Remus says, and Sirius doesn’t flail this time, but he does drop the spatula.
“Like the fruit?” he asks hopefully, because he is not setting Remus up with someone else and he is not helping him pick a good restaurant and he is definitely not going to lend him clothes and tell him yes, he looks fine, a hundred million times beforehand. It is just not going to happen. It is at the top of the whole list of things that are not going to happen, even above admitting Snape was Just Misunderstood.
“No,” Remus says. “Like with you.”
“Like...” Sirius turns to frown at him, to examine his face for any trace of a trick. There is none. He turns back around and lifts the pan off of the stove, mostly to hide his huge, face-cracking grin. “Me?”
“The thing is,” Remus says, and there is something teasing and knowing and a little superior in his voice that would usually drive Sirius insane but is now somehow okay, “is that -- that you’re Padfoot. So it’s really not my fault, is it?”
some other morning, or perhaps any number of other mornings
When Remus still hasn’t opened his eyes at 11 a.m., Sirius gives up on letting him sleep as late as he’d like and gives in to the hour-lasting urge to lick him from navel to chin. When he gets to the top Remus has one eye open and a sleepy smile on his face.
“Moony,” Sirius says into the soft spot at his temple. “Moony, I’m naked. Did we have sex?”
Remus shoves him off the bed.
Author: omgsubtext, now last_radio
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6666, exactly. And it was an accident.
Disclaimer: I'm JKR. This is all mine. ... Am I fooling anyone? No? Good. Have a cookie and don't sue me.
Notes: Written mostly for blanketforts. Pure fluff. Like, what little plot there is was spun from sugar. You've been warned.
1/1
The first thing Sirius wonders upon waking is if he brought a girl back with him. It would explain the fresh glass of water and packet of Hubert's Hangover Helper powder laid out so thoughtfully on his bedside table. The nakedness, also, because he is very naked beneath his blankets, and he's almost certain he didn't go to the party that way.
The thought -- of having brought a girl back, not of going to a party naked -- is vaguely alarming. Sirius doesn't even like girls, or had assumed he didn't; if getting drunk was all it took to become straight, he should have found out sooner and avoided that whole awful fidgety discussion with James.
The second thing he wonders is how an entire Savannah of wild animals has managed to get into his skull, and where they are finding the room to have a stampede. He spills half of the powder in his fumbling rush to get it into the water, and half of the water getting it into his mouth. It does help, though, as much as any discovered hangover cure does at all -- which is not very much, but his eyes do uncross.
He stands up. He does not fall over. This is a good sign. Now he just needs to find out if a bird has been in his flat in the last 24 hours, and politely dispose of her if she is still there. Sirius thuds into his living room, apologetic puppy eyes at the ready, and sees a shoe sticking over the arm of his couch.
A man's shoe. With an inch of hairy leg poking out between the sock and bunched-up trousers. He ventures closer, and does not know whether to be relieved or terrified that Remus Lupin is sleeping on his couch, wearing his winter coat and scarf and disgusting green gloves with a hole at the tip of one finger.
"Remus?" Sirius reaches down to prod his shoulder, then his chest when that doesn't seem to work. His head is still thudding, albeit with less force than earlier, and he can't for the life of him remember seeing Remus last night. He was supposed to have been in Glasgow, with his grandmother, or something.
Sirius prods again, and Remus opens one eye. "I am trying to sleep," he says roughly.
Despite the documented dangers of bothering a Moony that has been woken before it would like, Sirius leans down to rest his arms and head on the back of the couch, and keeps talking. "When did you get back?"
"About the time you -- " Remus yawns, quite impressively. It makes the rest of his face scrunch up, and Sirius is gripped with the now-familiar urge to shove his tongue into Remus's gapingly open mouth. Just to see what he would do. " -- nygh. You were lying on top of the bar when I got there. Chattering on about Ancient Runes to the bartender. You don't remember?"
Sirius does not remember, but he has much greater worries than what inane babble he managed last night. "I'm naked," he says. "Did we have sex?"
Remus snuffles derisively -- he is probably the only person on the planet who could make a snuffle derisive -- and rolls to press his face into the couch cushions. "I would be naked, too," he says, or Sirius thinks he says, "and you wouldn't have to ask."
The backs of Remus's ears, Sirius notes, are very red. It seems as if licking them would cure it, but it is too far down to lean, especially since the pulse in his head starts beating heavy, drum-like, and reminds him that sudden movements may cause pain. "Just wondering. I am, you know, naked. And all of that."
"Pajamas," Remus says.
"What?"
He turns his head slightly, freeing his mouth. Sirius can see the petulant furrow between his brows and knows he has approximately two sentences left before Remus starts getting grouchy. "Pajamas. You said you wanted them and I -- helped -- but then I couldn't find them."
"I don't have any pajamas," Sirius says, with remarkable calm, considering his head is pulsating at painful double-speed and he has just come to the conclusion that Remus undressed him last night. And he doesn't remember a thing. And he's still naked.
"Yes, well, I believe you were trying to seduce me," Remus mumbles. "Groped me, you know. Or tried. Horrible aim."
"Slander," Sirius mumbles back. He's trying not to turn red -- Blacks, no matter how disowned, do not blush! -- but doubts Remus would notice if he did, considering he has reburied his head in the cushions. All the better. Sirius is less likely to dissolve into an aching, throbbing puddle of embarrassment if Remus doesn't look at him.
"People do all sorts of ridiculous things when they're drunk," Remus says, again muffled by cloth and stuffing. Sirius begins to calm down. Remus can think it was ridiculous, so long as he doesn't think it was revolting. "You just -- sweet gods, I am so tired. Go drink some more water. Let me sleep."
His two sentences, though short, have been used. Sirius reluctantly removes his head from the back of the couch and presses his palm to his temple, and takes three steps toward the kitchen before reconsidering. Slander is a fragment, not a sentence -- and if he's trying to be polite and gracious and all of those other things Remus loves, perhaps he won't have his head removed. Or if he does, perhaps it will be an improvement.
"It's great of you, Moony, always taking care of, of everyone," he says.
Remus might have said, "Fuck everyone," or he might have said, "Not everyone." Sirius takes a wild guess and shambles into the kitchen smiling.
1/3
When Sirius emerges from his bedroom on January 3 -- clothed, this time, and not hungover in the least -- Remus is sitting at his kitchen table and doing the crossword. Nothing about the situation is spectacularly odd. His friends are in his flat all the time, seldom with any warning, and Remus more than the others. But something wiggles in the back of his brain nonetheless, just beyond his left ear.
This is the same spot where something used to wiggle whenever his friends talked about girls. Eventually, he named the wiggling thing I Fancy Boys and set it free to take over other parts of his brain with its loyal sidekick, I Really Would Like To Snog Remus. As liberating as the first revelation was, Sirius is not sure he would like another. He cocks his head to the side and presses his shoulder up against his skull, and squints at Remus. "Is that my paper?"
"Yes," Remus says. He doesn't look up, busy filling in the last few letters of a word, but he does hold out the pages he isn't using. Sirius takes them and slides them between his shoulder and head, pressing so hard his teeth grit. He suspects he has gone rather red in the face by the time Remus glances at him. "Crick?"
"Brain," Sirius grunts.
"Insane," Remus suggests. He is the sort of person who rhymes on purpose, and the sort to be amused at Sirius's misfortune. His mouth twitches at the corners and Sirius wants to ask how he would like it if he could feel his epiphanies in advance, if they wiggled behind his ears and drove him mad, but he is afraid that would make the twitching blossom into a laugh.
So he says, "Yes, obviously. Have you eaten breakfast?"
Remus shakes his head; of course he hasn't. That would require him to go through Sirius's cabinets and, horror of horrors, eat his food without permission. Had Sirius stayed in bed all day yesterday as he wanted instead of stumbling out to fix lunch, Remus would never have eaten. Remus probably wouldn't have even told Sirius he was visiting.
Sirius tries to look exasperated, but Remus's mouth twitches again and he has to take the paper off his shoulder and straighten his neck in order to do it properly. He tries to ignore the wiggling. "Eggs?"
"I suppose, if you're making some anyway," Remus says, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes Sirius want to punch in him the neck. And kiss him.
"I am." He drops the paper on the table and heads for the counter, making sure to knock Remus on the back of the head for laughing at him (internally) and trying so hard not to bother him even though Sirius wants to be bothered. Not that way. Well, not only that way. He has offered a hundred times to add a bunk to his bed so Remus could get out of his house. Which, of course, reminds him. "How are your parents?" he asks, pulling out his eggs and a pan.
"They're," Remus says. "You know. My parents."
Sirius pitches his voice high. "Oh, Remus, don't play rough, and here's your scarf, and make sure you eat your apple, and --"
"Yes," Remus cuts in. "Like that."
That's his mum, at least. And she isn't really so bad, though Sirius sometimes wishes she were, and then feels awful for wanting his friends to know how he feels.
"And my dad wants me to get a job," Remus adds. There is something in his voice that is almost serious; Sirius could push a bit, and they could have a real discussion instead of their usual... thing.
He wonders if this is what Remus wants him to do -- it is certainly what the wiggling thing wants him to do, as it is now practically leaping -- and opens his mouth to give him a little prod, but something beside the sink catches his eye and makes him drop his egg, shell and all. "Flower," he says, and rounds on Remus, pointing toward the brown pot and the single (pathetic) bloom planted in it. "Moony, you brought in a flower."
Remus blinks owlishly. "Yesterday, yes," he says. "It was growing up out of a crack in the road. In the snow, Sirius. I couldn't just leave it there."
"It's pink," Sirius says. He has never really had anything against the color, but since his sixth year at Hogwarts has also never wanted to give James and Peter any extra fodder for jokes about his masculinity. Having a pink flower potted in his kitchen is counteractive to years of obliterating stereotypes about poofs.
Remus gives the flower a fond smile, though, and Sirius knows he has lost the argument, lost before they even really start. This, too, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Sirius want to punch him in the neck and then kiss him, except not so much with the punching. "It's light red," Remus says, "with a hint of purple."
"It's a very intense light red, then. Sort of, you know, girly." Remus's eyebrows bunch together. Sirius thinks, Oh dear, and backtracks hurridly. "Except I suppose it would have to be very tough, to grow in the snow and -- and stuff."
"Exactly," Remus says, and goes back to his crossword. Sirius's crossword. Their crossword, Sirius decides, and begins picking the broken pieces of eggshell out of the pan. The wiggling thing gives him a swift kick and then settles down a bit; he imagines it is probably sulking.
1/4
When Sirius puts his feet on the floor on the morning of January 4, he almost, almost decides not to get out of bed. However, the nameless wiggling thing in his brain is beginning to take a recognizable shape, so he hobbles through his morning routine on the thick-skinned balls of his feet, gives his malfunctioning muggle heater a swift kick, and ventures toward his kitchen.
Remus is on his couch again, huddled and sleeping beneath his coat. He's taken his shoes off this time, at least, though the single toe poking out of his sock must be freezing. Sirius stoops over and tugs at the fabric until it's covered.
"Whaya," Remus says. His eyes don't open. Sirius chews on his lip for a moment, trying to decide what 'whaya' means in awake-person speak, but Remus's breathing evens out again and it no longer really matters.
"I am going to make tea," Sirius announces quietly -- just in case -- and slips into the kitchen.
The flower by the stove watches him expectantly while he puts the kettle on, and after a few minutes he gives in an sprinkles some water into the pot. "You," he says, "are pink." The flower doesn't seem bothered. Sirius huffs at it, then nearly knocks his head against the cabinets when the kettle whistles.
Apparently the noise was enough to wake Remus. Sirius can only hope it was a pleasant awakening as he pads over to the couch, since all he can see is the back of his head and, although his hair is amusingly tousled, it hardly spells out his mood. "Tea," he announces, this time not quietly, and Remus turns to look at him. Smiling, thankfully, but his eyes dart away too quickly and Sirius frowns.
"I," Remus says as Sirius sits beside him. His shoes are back on, which is disappointing. "Didn't, ah. I."
"Tea," Sirius says again, and holds out a cup until Remus reaches out and takes it with reluctant hands. "Now..." He leans over and presses his nose into Remus's neck. He inhales, purposefully loud, and lets out a contemplative hmm.
When he pulls back, Remus is pink-cheeked, probably from the mixture of cold and hot steam rising into his face. Remus is also giving him his 'are you quite off in the head?' look. If Sirius has ever wanted to kiss him quite so much, he doesn't remember the time, and it disturbs him that he finds condescension attractive. Surely that's considered masochism. "I was just checking," he says.
"Checking...?" Remus prods.
"Well," Sirius says breezily, "I already knew you weren't a fish."
"Er," Remus says, floundering. It takes all of Sirius's willpower to avoid the obvious puns.
Instead he nudges Remus's shoulder with his own, grinning and ignoring the tea that sloshes over onto his trousers. "But it's been three days, and you don't smell, so obviously you're not a guest, either. Where have you been keeping your clothes?" He wishes this were James or Peter, or anyone else, so that he could properly enjoy the embarrassed expression on Remus's face as he pulls his battered satchel from beneath the couch.
"My dad," Remus says.
"Throw you out?" Sirius asks, and damn it, he is not hopeful. At least he manages not to sound that way, and he's not really disappointed when Remus shakes his head.
"Spent all of that money on Hogwarts, he said, and I should start thinking about earning something for it," he says. His cheeks have gone from pink to red, though Sirius doesn't know if it's because he's ashamed of not working, ashamed of letting his father down or ashamed of being caught living on Sirius's couch. Probably, knowing Remus, all three. "And I told him -- well, I didn't tell him, but I let him think I'd found something. Here."
"Good," Sirius says. "Closer to us. And you can stretch your little Moony wings." He flaps his free hand to illustrate.
"Yes, well, I --"
"And you'll be moving in with me, of course. Really moving in. None of this overstuffed bag rubbish."
Remus smiles, hesitant but genuine, and Sirius feels as if he has just won everything, ever. "If you don't mind."
"Mind, he says!" Sirius says to his tea. "Sleeps on my couch uninvited for four nights and then asks if I mind!" He turns to Remus and grins stupidly. "I don't mind, tosser." Remus takes an embarrassed but (he thinks) grateful gulp of his tea. "No one else has answered my ads for a manslave," he adds, and spends the rest of the morning swearing up and down that it wasn't timed to make tea come out of Remus's nose.
1/5
On January 5, Sirius doesn't wake up. He hasn't died or slipped into a coma, though he's halfheartedly wishing he had. He's actually spent seven hours wide awake, wondering what demon possessed him to insist the spare mattress go on his cramped bedroom floor when he knows perfectly well that Remus Lupin breathes in his sleep.
He can't even breathe like a normal person, or snore like Peter. Snoring is monotonous; snoring fades into the background after 15 minutes. With snoring, Sirius could cope. But Remus has to sigh every five minutes (Sirius has timed it) and murmur unintelligible things at random intervals. He has to rustle around in his blankets just often enough to be a nuisance, and every time Sirius is almost able to drift off in spite of it all, Remus has to whimper. Whimper.
Sirius doesn't know why he ever thought sleeping with Remus would be a good thing. The sex could hardly be worth all of the noise. He is just about to give up on rest altogether, to surrender to the sunlight and renounce his attraction to the sniffling sleep-spoiler, when he learns something new.
Remus Lupin also moans.
Sirius scoots to the edge of his bed and peers down, miraculously alert. "Moony?" he whispers. Remus's only response is to shudder and roll toward the sound of his voice, so that he's pressed up against the side of Sirius's bed. His mouth is open. Sirius's mimics it. "Moony," he whispers again, urgently, because this can lead nowhere good -- of course, he could always leave the room, but... But. Yes. But but.
"P'fut," Remus coughs. Cruelly, it almost sounds like 'Padfoot.' He has his sheet gripped in both fists and is pulling it loose of the mattress, and though the blanket is too thick (damn the cold) to tell, Sirius is fairly certain his hips twitch. Sirius's own breath flutters on its way down his throat, and he is suddenly aware of two things: the pressure of the bed beneath his hips and how incriminating it would be if Remus were to wake up and find Sirius gaping down at him.
Remus moans again, though with slightly more restraint. All the same, Sirius throws off his blanket and carefully extends his feet over Remus's body, stretching his legs out to put his feet on the other side of the narrow mattress. He pushes his torso up, throws his weight forward to stand, and imagines all of the gods and half of his dead relatives laughing at him as his feet catch in something wet and slide out from beneath him. Sirius catches himself with his elbows on his bed, legs outstretched and arse dangling over Remus's chest.
"Damn your boots, Lupin!" he hisses, and of course that would be the exact moment Remus shudders with especial force and pitches awake, gasping and grasping for anything. He gets hold of Sirius's thigh before his eyes stop their bleary, panicked darting and focus on Sirius.
"Oh my god," he says, in an entirely different kind of moan.
"Yes," Sirius agrees; then, “No. Don’t -- it’s not anything to be -- we’re all men here, and -- “ These are not his words. These are phrases from speeches James has given him in his chronic fits of maturity. Sirius will Floo him, perhaps, once he has managed to extract himself, and let him explain to Moony why it is okay while Sirius has a long, long shower. He walks his feet backwards in an attempt to stand and slips again. “ -- oomph, mate, I’m going to sit on you for a second, is that okay?”
Remus continues to look horrified, but no more horrified than he was at first, so Sirius takes it as consent and stops holding himself up. Some of the air is forced out of Remus’s lungs when Sirius lands on them, but he doesn’t appear to notice, just gasps it right back in and keeps staring. “You, um.”
“I am going to go water your light red flower, which you have neglected so since bringing it here,” Sirius says decisively, “and make some tea, and you can... get dressed. Or whatever.” Remus’s nails dig into his pants. “And you can let go of me whenever you’d like, too.”
Remus releases him like silver and occupies his hands with covering his face. “Oh my god,” he says again. Sirius isn’t sure if he believes in one or not, and realizes that it is a horrible blank spot on his knowledge of all things Moony, but now doesn’t seem like a good time to ask. Now seems like a good time to remove his arse from Remus’s chest, not least of all because he can feel him breathe and it is not helping.
Sirius scoots off of him and clambers to his feet, carefully avoiding the puddle of melted snow around Remus's boots, and keeps his back turned to Remus until he has pulled on yesterday’s trousers, which are not so thick as Remus’s blanket but do the job anyway. Thus insured, Sirius is able to grin. “It’s not that bad, Moony, honest. Once Peter walked in on m -- “
“Do we have to talk about this?” Remus asks. He is closer to panicking than Sirius has ever seen him. It’s actually sort of awfully cute, until he continues, “I don’t want to talk about this. Not with you.”
Sirius’s grin fades to a faint twist of his mouth. “Then we won’t,” he says, and scratches his bare shoulder. “As long as you don’t try to pick up and move out because of it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Remus says hurriedly.
Sirius wonders what else he might agree to do if he pressed, and the thought broadens his smile, but he isn’t stupid enough to try. “Wonderful,” he says, clapping his hands together. “And, actually, you just won me some money, because I have a bet going with Peter as to whether --”
“Padfoot,” Remus says (he is back to whimpering, but sounds rather pained this time), so Sirius leaves him to clean his trousers.
1/7
On Saturday morning, Sirius realizes Remus has been avoiding him for the last 48 hours. (Considering how long it took him to realize Remus had been living with him, he is not very disappointed in himself, although the absence of a Moony has always been much more obvious than the presence of one.)
He also burns the last few bits of bread trying to make toast. Neither bodes well for the day ahead, so he decides to do something about the problem that doesn't require going to the store. Conservation of energy, or something like that.
Therefore, it is perfectly logical that he be sitting on the kitchen table and holding his bright red leash in his mouth when Remus lurches into the room. He just doesn't know if Remus realizes this. "You f'got t’ change int’ Pa’foot," he says groggily, rubbing one eye with his fist and stumbling over to the counter.
Sirius spits the leash out and does his best to sound patient. "I didn't forget, stupid." (His best isn’t very good.) Remus ignores him and, to his horror, picks up one of the blackened slabs of bread and moves it toward his mouth. “Remus!” he says frantically.
“Were you goin’ t’ eat it?” Remus asks, lowering it and rubbing at his eyes again. Hopefully he is blind, Sirius thinks, and would not normally consider eating something so disgusting. This is Remus, after all, who not only knows he is supposed to keep his elbows off the table, but actually does so.
“No,” Sirius says. “It’s burnt. Concrete. Honestly.” He swings his legs once beneath the table, then climbs down. “I’ll find you something more edible.”
Remus furrows his eyebrows and holds fast to his piece of toast. “This is fine,” he says, and grabs the knife Sirius used to cut the bread off of the counter. “This is...” He begins sawing at the blackened sides of the bread. Sirius’s countertops have never been spectacularly clean, but the mound of charred grain forming under Remus’s hands is definitely not making them any cleaner.
“Moony,” Sirius says.
“I’ll clean it up.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Sirius says crossly. It is not quite a lie -- he might have asked Remus to clean it up eventually, but not right away. But considering he was probably going to say ‘Everyone has wet dreams; stop avoiding me,’ he is glad Remus is not a mind-reader and has given him time to rethink. “Let me find you something else.”
“Don’t have time.”
Sirius’s inner puppy whines. Sirius’s outer puppy pouts. He imagines the latter is slightly more dignified. “It’s Saturday. Where the hell are you going on a Saturday?”
Remus puts the half-salvaged toast down and fumbles about the waist of his pajamas. “Job -- interview -- damn it, my wand is --.” He sweeps the pile of crumbs into his palm before Sirius can get his own out and drops them into the wastebasket.
“Maybe you should try a Muggle place,” Sirius offers, earning himself a glare.
“I don’t have a Muggle education, do I? And I need them to understand if Dumbledore needs me to -- “ Remus’s eyes dart to the clock, and he shoves the toast into his mouth whole and walks out of the kitchen without another word. Sirius stands where he is for a few minutes and feels like a bastard, which is strange, because between the two of them he is fairly sure that Remus was more of one. Then he gets the remaining piece of toast and bangs it against the edge of the counter until it breaks in two.
He is zapping the crumbs on the floor with his wand when Remus wanders back in, dressed and bundled, toying with the fringe of his scarf and looking very sorry. “Not a morning person,” he mumbles.
“I’ll alert the Daily Prophet,” Sirius says dryly. Remus can, in fact, be a morning person, but only when he's gotten enough sleep, which doesn't seem to be happening much recently. He puts his wand away and picks the leash up from the table, winding it pointedly around his arm. “Got any job interviews tomorrow?”
Remus shakes his head. Sirius dares to think the look he gives the leash is a wistful one.
“Then go to bed early tonight,” Sirius says, “‘cause I’m waking you up for a walk, and if you growl at me the whole time, I’ll bite you.” And there’s a smile, small and Moonyish and enough to get him through the day. Sirius walks around the table to tighten his scarf and pull his hat down around his ears. In the movies, this would be the part where they kissed good-bye; but in the movies, Sirius would also be wearing an apron, so all in all he is not upset.
1/8
One of the good things about being a dog is that Sirius can leap with all fours onto Remus's at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and lick behind his ears and in his mouth, and Remus will not kill him. Remus will make snuffling half-laugh noises instead, his only struggle one to get Padfoot to curl up beside him and let him sleep a few more minutes.
Not that Sirius ever uses being a dog to his advantage, of course. He’s above that. And if he stoops down a few levels every once in a while, it's only for Remus's own good. No one could ever claim that a walk was bad, at least.
The park near the flat is foggy, as far as Sirius can tell. He can't see well to begin with, and his vision is already in muted grays and blues and yellows, but everything is especially hazy today, and Remus is staring down the lane with a very moony (or just Moony) sort of smile. Sirius wants to say, 'You are composing poetry in your head. Stop it. What even rhymes with fog?'
But Remus would inevitably reply, 'Bog, cog, clog, catalog, demagogue, dialogue, monologue, dog, hedgehog, frog, flog, log, slog, jog,' and so on until Sirius had to bite him, so it is probably for the best that Sirius can’t say anything. He tugs on his sleeve instead, whines, and paws at his leash until Remus crouches to unfasten it.
“Don’t go too far,” he says, though Sirius had no intention of leaving him behind; “It’d be a right mess if someone tried to take you.”
Sirius snorts at him, licks his nose, and then dashes off the path and into the trees. He sniffs at a tree for a moment, chases the faded scent-trail of a rat, gets his paws muddy, and then remembers that he is a canine on a mission. It is Operation: Make Moony Have Fun; as much as Remus might think wandering quiet and alone down a park path and composing second-rate (Sirius adores him, he really does, but it’s true) poetry in his head is fun, that’s only because he rarely has any real fun to compare it to.
He snuffles around in the slush for a moment until he finds a wet, half-rotten stick of the appropriate size, and sprints back to the path with his tail in the air.
They are going to play fetch. They are going to romp. He is going to get Moony muddy and make him enjoy it, and he -- he is going to bite the bespectacled bastard who has seduced Remus into sitting (sitting!) on a bench and talking.
Talking to someone who is not Sirius.
“This is the first time I’ve ever run across anyone here this early,” the bloke is saying, adjusting his ugly glasses, and Sirius can smell the pheremones even from this distance. He does not know what color his hair is, but it’s lank and too long, and he does know that anyone trying to pull Remus (a more innocent school-boy type there ne’er was) in a park at sunrise is obviously a creep. “Do you live nearby?”
Sirius reaches them before Remus can answer and sits at his feet, staring at him reproachfully. Remus, at least, does not seem embarrassed or bothered by Glasses’s interest -- poor, oblivious fellow. He smiles fondly at Sirius and skritches behind his ear.
“Sort of,” he says, distracted now, and Sirius wags his tail: Yes, yes, pay attention to me.
“Oh, I -- is this your dog?” The man reaches toward Sirius’s muzzle. “He’s so --” Sirius drops the stick and snaps at him.
“Padfoot!” Remus says, but the corners of his eyes are crinkling with hidden laughter while the man yanks his hand back, wide-eyed. “Sorry, he doesn’t usually -- you must have something on your fingers that bothers him.”
“Oh,” the man says, staring at Sirius.
Sirius licks his chops and does his best dog impression of a grin. “Right,” Remus says, standing up abruptly and hooking the leash back around Sirius’s collar. “I’d better take him home and get him clean. It was nice to meet you, ah...”
“Patrick,” the man says, holding out a hand.
Remus gives it a quick shake. “Right. Patrick. It was very nice, and, ah.” Sirius pulls on the leash to give him an excuse, and he turns away, following Sirius for a few feet before turning again and giving the man a wave good-bye.
“That was rude,” Remus says when they’re a good distance away.
Sirius tosses his head proudly and looks back to make sure they’re out of wosface’s view, then stretches and reforms into a man. “He was flirting with you,” Sirius says, glaring back down the path while he climbs up off of his hands and knees.
“I know,” Remus says. He’s really laughing now. “You could have just let him. He wasn’t hurting anything.”
Sirius looks back again, then turns his glare on Remus. “So you were just going to lead him on, is that it?” he asks. He has the vague feeling that he’s being irrational, but ignores it. “You couldn’t have taken five seconds to say, ‘Sorry, mate, but I don’t swing your way’? Poofs have feelings, too, you know.”
Remus’s laughter reduces to sniggering and the stray chuckle. “I didn’t want to embarrass him,” he explains through them, then tilts his head back to look at the gray sky. “Besides, I might swing -- not his way, quite, but that way, in general.”
And damn him if he doesn’t sound nonchalant about it. “What?” Sirius says, eyes wide, and then, “You do not. You would have said something while I was wriggling around on the edge of your bed like a bloody stuck beetle. You would have told me.”
“I didn’t know then, did I?” Remus asks, and looks back at Sirius as if they’re sharing a secret, except he’s apparently forgotten to let Sirius in on it. “I’m telling you now, though. And shut your mouth. It shouldn’t be so surprising.”
Sirius shuts his mouth, rubs his chin, and silently surveys Remus for a long moment. “Well,” he finally says when the violent churning of his stomach settles, “that does explain the flower.”
“Shut it,” Remus says, but he’s smiling.
“Yeah, yeah, you know, now that I think about it,” Sirius says, warming up to the subject, “you are a sort of gigantic queer, aren’t you? I should have known from the pink-and-blue jumper --”
“My mum gave that to me!”
“-- and now that I think about it, you’re a bit limp-wristed sometimes. By Merlin, why don’t we just give you wings? You’re going to ruin all of my hard work, Remus. Peter and James are never going to shut up. No, this isn’t going to do at all. We’ll have to buy you some leather and teach you how to drive the bike, we will --”
He might have gone on forever, except Remus scoops up a handful of muddy slush and slings it into his face, which makes it Sirius’s most solemn duty to make sure he gets at least two handfuls of dirt and decomposing leaves down the back of his shirt.
1/9
Monday means getting up early for no good reason. Reasons, yes: Remus has to go out again, and Sirius has to make sure he eats first and might as well try to do something semi-useful to society today if he’s going to be awake anyway. But not good reasons.
At least there will be eggs.
“The thing is,” Sirius tells the flower while he does his best to scrambles them without burning, “is that -- is that he’s Moony. So it’s really not my fault, is it? You should know as well as anyone, I mean, he dug you up out of the sidewalk -- probably with his bare hands -- and how am I supposed to not...” He stabs his spatula rather viciously into the pan of eggs. “Too skinny,” he mutters. It doesn’t matter if he changes subjects like that, because what’s the flower going to do about it? “And just watch, he’s going to act like he’s not hungry. I’ll have to force feed him.”
“Going to fatten me up, then?” Remus asks, and Sirius manages to fling the spatula into the opposite wall when he flails. Remus picks it up for him, smiling sleepily and dripping warm water from his shower. “Should I have left bread crumbs to lead me back to Galloway?”
Sirius hopes that he is not, in fact, blushing, even though it feels like he is. “No,” he says quickly, then grins. “I have absolutely no intentions of cooking you. I’ll just --”
“Eat me raw, right,” Remus finishes, and swats him with the non-eggy side of the spatula before letting him take it back. “Were you talking to the plant?”
“Absolutely not,” Sirius says. He cleans off his utensil and goes back to turning the eggs, which have burnt a bit, but not too badly. Someday he will get around to learning cooking charms; in the meantime, he feels rather charmingly Muggle. “That would be stupid. Do you want some sausage? It’s already cooked, I’ll just have to heat it again.”
“No, thank you,” Remus says politely, perching himself on the edge of the table.
“Ha!” Sirius says to the flower. “I told you.” Then he sticks his tongue out at Remus, so the other boy will know he wasn’t serious (at least not very) and begins doling the eggs out onto plates. By now they are more than a little burnt, but they aren’t at all wet or runny, which is the important part. “Really, though, Moony, if I were to heat the sausage anyway, would you want some?”
“This is really fine,” he says, sticking a fork into a chuck of egg. “You know, I was thinking.”
“Will you ever just stop that?” Sirius asks.
“Be quiet,” Remus orders, and Sirius obliges him, pulls the left-over sausage out of the ice box and plops it into the now-empty pan. “I was thinking -- you’re really domesticated, now, aren’t you?”
Sirius rounds on him, brandishing the spatula. “I am not. Even motorcycle-riding hooligans need to know how to cook, unless they’re intent on starving themselves to death like some of their more ridiculous mates.”
Obviously on the verge of laughing at him (again), Remus nods complacently and eats a bite of egg. “Whatever you say, Padfoot,” he says. “But really, I was thinking. I know you don’t approve of New Year’s Resolutions --”
Sirius snorts.
“-- but I sort of like them, and I made one, and I think I need your help.”
“Shoot,” Sirius says, pushing the sausage around in the pan.
“I want a date,” Remus says, and Sirius doesn’t flail this time, but he does drop the spatula.
“Like the fruit?” he asks hopefully, because he is not setting Remus up with someone else and he is not helping him pick a good restaurant and he is definitely not going to lend him clothes and tell him yes, he looks fine, a hundred million times beforehand. It is just not going to happen. It is at the top of the whole list of things that are not going to happen, even above admitting Snape was Just Misunderstood.
“No,” Remus says. “Like with you.”
“Like...” Sirius turns to frown at him, to examine his face for any trace of a trick. There is none. He turns back around and lifts the pan off of the stove, mostly to hide his huge, face-cracking grin. “Me?”
“The thing is,” Remus says, and there is something teasing and knowing and a little superior in his voice that would usually drive Sirius insane but is now somehow okay, “is that -- that you’re Padfoot. So it’s really not my fault, is it?”
some other morning, or perhaps any number of other mornings
When Remus still hasn’t opened his eyes at 11 a.m., Sirius gives up on letting him sleep as late as he’d like and gives in to the hour-lasting urge to lick him from navel to chin. When he gets to the top Remus has one eye open and a sleepy smile on his face.
“Moony,” Sirius says into the soft spot at his temple. “Moony, I’m naked. Did we have sex?”
Remus shoves him off the bed.